Guild Wars 2

For your information, Desolation still has had almost no queues any time to any BL or EB during this match up. We have been enjoying the outnumbered “buff” on EB at prime time. Gunnar’s Hold probably has at least as many WvWvW players if not more, but the thing is:

GH is guild-oriented. They are generally better in zerg vs zerg clashes, but does worse point wise and don’t fight that well as a server. Funnily GH pro guild zergs rather chase one enemy engineer even when I run into different direction than our zerg. I guess GH rather gets one loot bag instead of meeting our PuG zergs. ;-)

Desolation is mostly just PuGs, which play for the points, but many of our PuGs are much higher quality than the usual PuG. If another league comes and rewards are decent, Deso players will swarm back to WvWvW and it will totally different game. Lots of pve players and fair weather will come to play again.

At one point commander + 2 others (including me) were holding and capping big part of the EB map. And this wasn’t night time capping, nor even early morning. We got a bit more people and got the all the keeps, all towers except 1, all camps except 1 and of course we held the Stonemist castle.

Solo capping big objectives is still possible (given time and opportunity). I know several Deso players have been soloing towers even at prime time, but I am not sure if the Stonemist lord can be soloed right now. Has anybody any recent video of SM being soloed?

Stand The Wall.6987:

Increase burst cd to 15sec. Job done.

I disagree. Show me another AoE stun skill, which does all these on a 15 s cooldown:

2 second, 240 radius AoE stun
1.25 damage multiplier (decent damage)
600 leap
combo finisher blast

For comparison in WvWvW zerg fights Earth Shaker does roughly the same as Supply Crate, engi elite, which has 180 s cooldown. The turrets have huge hit boxes and very low health, so they are destroyed by AoE in a second.

http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Supply_Crate

Now if the engineers could spam supply crate in zerg fights every 7.5 seconds, oh that cry… (of course it would be broken).

I am sure this is an unintended feature / bug and should be fixed as soon as possible.

Excellent question. I really don’t know. Those who like the karma train / zerging will probably like the Eternal Battlegrounds more.

Roamers, like me, will surely hate this map. It really has all the worst elements for roaming, so many choke points, hazards and powerful NPCs with CC, that it is crazy (no, I haven’t died a single time in EotM, so I am not raging here, just stating facts).

With several changes and redesigns EotM could be made into a more beginner friendly introductory map:

1. Introduce railings or small elevations, so there is less chance for players to be knocked off the edge into infinity. The current design gives unfair advantage to those who have pull and launch skill and stability. We already over abundance of warriors and guardians in WvWvW and making the game easier for them just doesn’t make sense.

2. Tone down the amount of Crowd Control the NPCs are doing. Reduce their general amount by half.

3. Redesign some extremely clumped areas and choke points into open level fields. It can have some minor elevations like hills. This would be great for both small scale and large scale battles.

4. Add some water, lake + rivers, but place them so that the area is completely optional. Thus no player is forced to do underwater combat.

5. Remove all traps and hazards. The other WvWvW maps don’t have them and they are completely unneeded.

6. Remove or seriously tone down the effectiveness of cannons, turrets and similar Most WvWvW players want less siege, not more. Understand that Arenanet!!

7. Remove ALL the player specific buffs and special gimmicks (no immunities, no buffs)

Thank you!

I was only 1 hour at EotM, my head started to hurt. The level of the zergs and players there was far worse than in other WvWvW maps.

The map design feels too cramped with way too many choke points, way too little open landscapes and way too many edges where you can fall. This gives unfair advantage to those professions which have easy access to stability or have lots of skill which has push enemies off the edge.

Basically the idea of EotM is excellent, pity the execution is so bad. EotM could have been a great beginner map where one could train for the actual maps and share great WvWvW moments over different servers. It could have been completely void of those NPCs, traps, turrets, siege, completely overpowered buffs, more like just varied scenery, open fields, some river, lake, hills, patch of forest and few keeps and towers.

First Arenanet ruined the borderland maps by introducing ruins of power and deleting the lake. Now this…

Oh well, I can still roam in Eternal Battlegrounds.

The biggest problem is the following:

This game has no diminishing returns on hard crowd control. You can get chain stunned and knocked down etc. many times in a row. Especially all the medium armor professions have very limited access to stability. This is what makes the hammer melee trains so incredibly powerful. Yes, they are overpowered and have been the WvWvW meta since Autumn 2012. And easy way to make this more balanced would be give a all the players a short amount of time, let’s say 1 second, when her character is immune to hard CC skills (stun, knockback, launch, pull, daze, fear). I know 1 second immunity between stuns is not much, but at least it would give some escape window to dodge away from harm’s way. This suggested change would have minimal effect on small scale and 1 vs 1 situations.

Another thing: This game has some skills, which are doing too many things at same time, without having a very long cooldown. A well-designed skill should do just one powerful thing or two mediocre things, never two powerful things, unless it is has a very long cooldown. Area skills doing multiple powerful things with very low cooldown are even more broken than single target skills. If you look at Earth shaker using this fair skill balancing method, you see it is utterly broken:

http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Earthshaker

2 second, 240 radius AoE stun
1.25 damage multiplier (decent damage)
600 leap
combo finisher blast

Now already the 2 second area stun is extremely powerful on itself, especially on so low cooldown skill. The skill should NOT offer any additional effects: No leap, no combo finisher, no damage to keep it in line with all the stun skills with low cooldown.
Alternative way to balance the skill is to reduce the radius of the stun area to 120 s and stun duration to 1 second with full adrenaline, but I am sure most warrior’s would prefer the first method of balancing. I am also for reducing the duration or effectiveness of stun skills across all professions (this skills should be balanced with very long cooldowns). Static field has also been the essential part of the WvWvW meta since launch. I know it is used to swiftness stacking using the lightning field, but giving it also 1200 ranged AoE stun which is unblockable is problematic and gives yet another easy way to continuously stun the opponents. The unblockable effect should be removed from it.
http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Static_Field_

Following my logic above: engineer’s turrets attacking while him being stealthed and ranger’s pet attacking while he is stealthed should also result revealed, but since those two professions generally don’t rely on stealth, that isn’t much of an issue.

Any attack, blocked, dodged or missed, should result revealed. Spamming attacks from stealth and still not getting revealed unless the attack hits, just doesn’t make any sense. Even in ancient games like D&D, any attack (missing or not) caused the loss invisibility.

I think this should include attacks by mesmers’ phantasms and clones. The ability to make the illusions attack while self-remaining stealthed isn’t logical nor promoting skilled play. I do understand this would seriously nerf the overly popular PU mesmer build.

Following same logic: engineer’s turrets attacking while him being stealthed and ranger’s pet attacking while he is stealhted should also result revealed, but since those two professions generally don’t rely on stealth, that isn’t much of an issue.

aspirine.6852:

We are up against 2 “gold” league servers, jade sea and desolation. They roam camps with more than our zerg. Take supply and portal away without puting up a fight.

You must be from Gunnar’s Hold. I have high respect for some of your players, but now you are spreading false information. Desolation is now running low numbers in WvWvW. We haven’t had queue to any map. GH on the other hand seems to have a lot of large guild groups, sometimes combing several guild groups into a larger blob. We got just PuGs.. and you know what servers, which are mostly just PuGs do… they all blob. Our predicted ranking is now 11, so what makes you think we are a “gold” league server?

But back to topic: I was mostly solo roaming in EB tonight. As power rifle engi, no stealth, no shadowstepping, no easy escapes. 6 WXP ranks in 4.5 h. And yes, it is much harder now. And I run often into JS roaming teams. Got killed couple of times in those group vs me alone, but eventually was collecting loot bags from them. Yes, I can bring the whole zerg to kill ’em. ;-) I think this is a very good way to educate enemy teams: if you chase & kill enemy solo roamers, be prepared to die next.

The unwise borderland changes on September 17th made solo roaming also more difficult on the BL maps. I wish they would revert all the changes done in Sept 17th!
Bring back the lake and get rid of BL bloodlust buffs.

Like some of the other posters have commented engineer’s elixir R doesn’t revive the NPCs efficiently and it is not a viable option to revive a keep lord in battle. See:
http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Toss_Elixir_R

Warrior’s warbanner should behave in the same way. Its effect on the NPCs should be significantly reduced, for example not fully rezzing them, but reviving them to 50% health (two banners would still do the trick!). The current mechanism favors the side with larger numbers. They can banner rez the lord and then call in more and more troops and just win the battle with superior numbers.

Any of the TOP 17 servers from Visunah Square to Miller’s sound has some great gvg guilds. If you want a guild oriented server you should probably avoid:
Desolation (my server)
Jade Sea (French)
Vizunah Square (French)

These are the most pug / militia oriented servers.

But I think you wrongly attribute skill with just gvg or guilds. Pickup groups lead by a great commander can use solid tactics: use chained portals and veils, double dodging, killing enemy tail and flanks, do faint attacks, use traps, stack for buffs, wait patiently to lure in the enemy into the combat area where we choose them to be. All it needs is server wide TS and discipline.

For example, despite our server Desolation is mostly just PuGs (because almost all WvWvW oriented guilds have left), we can still do pretty well considering our current very low numbers and have our PuGs win against enemy guild groups, because we have some amazing PuG commanders. But it all about numbers. Last night, which was reset, we had no queues. Well, at some point there was a 1-5 minute queue to EB, but in general no queue to EB. Almost all the people in pve, you cannot expect miracles. We are of course #1 in pve in EU.

DeWolfe.2174:

Phantaram.4816:

1. Too much damage

I’ve been saying this since launch! Come to WvW and see how ridiculous Thieves scale with Ascended gear.

Exactly. Add in 25 stacks of bloodlust, consumables, the +30/40/50 stat bonus from Borderland’s bloodlust and guard leech. WvWvW has way too much power creep. This has been told to the developers for a long long time, yet nothing has happened.

The damage is at insane levels in WvWvW. Warrior’s killshot and eviscerate can of course deliver the highest hitting single attack in the game (>20k against medium armor on crit meaning one-shotting against many characters), but both of those are usually well telegraphed and easy to dodge. One rarely sees complains about these as a full berserker warrior doesn’t have the all the evades, shadowstepping and stealth the thief has.

Conjure elementalists (lighting hammer and fiery sword) can potentially do even more dps it seems (haven’t really done the tests), so if Arenanet rightfully increases the survivability of elementalists, they can be very easily pushed over the top as some elementalist builds can dish out both crazy burst and DPS. I think elementalists deserve some more survivability, but the top DPS and burst should also be toned down at same time.

Extremely overpowered suggestion.

Compare this with similar GM trait: “deal 20% more damage against foes <50% health”
http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Executioner

Right now Desolation is almost pure PuG / militia server and it is one of the most international servers as well. This combination makes it unique in EU. You can find all sorts of languages in the map chat and nobody is shunned based on the country of the origin.

We currently lack morning, day time and prime time coverage. We also lack big dedicated hard core WvWvW guilds. Still we often are able to win weekly match up, while having regular outnumbered “buff” on us. The positive thing is: There are no queues in general, except for the reset night.

Let’s be fair against our enemies: I know that some other servers have some really great guilds, probably better than our guilds, but do you want to play on a server, which plays together, perfect co-operation or on server, which consists of competing guilds. Desolation uses server wide TeamSpeak with very nice organization.

In 2013 Desolation lost lot of dedicated hard core guilds to “greener” pastures. More than half of those guilds are now just a pale comparison of what they used be when they still played on Desolation. I know some might even miss the old times. Those who stayed at Desolation are hard as nail. We know how to fight outnumbered and still carve out wins and wipe the enemy. We have one of the best PuG commanders in the game. Our typical PuG force can be 50% WvWvW veteran players, each having a commander tag (turned off) and lots of experience. We of course won the silver league.

Desolation is the #1 EU server in pve. Even our dear enemies from French and German language servers regularly come to guest pve on Desolation, simply because the pve experience is unparalleled.

The ruins should just be removed from the game. Rewarding players for capping the points could be abused way too easily.

The ruins look like some spvp map misplaced in the middle of the borderlands. Very few people are fighting there. If the ruins would be replaced with a flat open area, at least it would be used for epic open field battles.

When Arenanet first hinted the Quaggans & Ktrait would be gone, there was several good suggestions what to have there. I would have kept the lake, but replaced the middle island with a partially underwater coral castle for some epic fights (the castle would be mostly above water, but having underwater parts). This would have several advantages:
1) additional point to hold, capture and defend
2) underwater combat (which is now sorely missing in both spvp/tpvp and WvWvW… the tiny amount of water left in Raid on the Capricorn isn’t much)
3) completely new surroundings (now the ruins look dull & ugly and the Southern middle part of BL already had ruins)

Other choice is to revert the 17th September WvWvW changes (yes, all of them). The borderland bloodlust buffs were uncalled for and introduced yet another thing, which makes the fights more imbalanced for the winning side. We already got Power of the Mists, Guard leech, Applied Fortitude, consumables in addition to the stuff present in pvp. All of these provide addition bonuses to the primary stats, which is just crazy! Just way too much power creep.

Ranger needs more active condition removal, but making traps transfer 1 condition per pulse is NOT the solution. In fact it would be grossly overpowered considering the low cool down and 3-5 pulses of the traps.

I would say the easiest would be signets. Signet of removal already has 2 condition removals: 1 per 10 seconds on passive and transferring all the conditions from nearby allies to itself. The other signets could also remove a condition when activated. These would synchronize well with the signet related traits:
http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Signet#Ranger_2

fellyn.5083:

Warriors got a lot of buffs because they were literally 1 trick ponies in pve only. In wvw or any form of pvp they were all but considered free kills. The warrior representation was next to nil.

So, yes, I’m aware of the history. Still the whole “warrior has heavy armor so it shouldn’t be fast” argument is very tired. Since when has GW2 ever followed the typical mmo tropes?

Warriors were the backbone of WvWvW zerg meta from Autumn 2012. Telling anything else is either just a blatant lie or shows ignorance of this game mode. Warriors were never weak in pve or WvWvW and buffing them for this game mode has been overdone.

I haven’t used the heavy armor argument at all. I know that protection > armor in most cases. The base health pool size and mobility however matters.

I am not asking to have warrior’s nerfed to the ground since I am playing one, but there are few issues which need addressing:

1. mobility (GS #5 needs its CD increased and range brought down to 900, warhorn CDs and effects should be looked upon with quick breathing trait)
2. longbow #5 needs to be toned down (compare it with any other immobilize weapon skill e..g guardian hammer #3 and engi rifle #2 and you see it is overpowered and at the same time longbow #1 could do roughly 10% more damage)
3. Healing signet needs to have its passive effect reduced and its active effect buffed up (in general signets should more active use for all professions)

Great work Grouch!

Thanks for the word cloud. It is cool!

keoma.5210:

“The only logical solution is to nerf warrior mobility.”
I don’t see the logic here exactly.
Not the warrior, but another class would be the fastest, overpowered class. Do you consider it a solution?
Seems like you don’t want any balance, you just want to nerf warriors because you hate them, or one of them.

I do not hate warriors. I have spent many hundred hours playing one and lots of money gearing my warrior as well.

Maybe you didn’t notice, but Arenanet has been buffing warriors since Autumn 2012 all the way till summer 2013. Almost every single balance update was like Xmas to warrior. Healing signet’s passive effect was almost doubled. Condition removal and mitigation was significantly ramped up: cleansing ire, dogged march, berserker stance. This was all done because warrior was weak in tpvp. I do not think even the developers considered warrior ever to be a weak in pve or WvWvW. I still remember how warriors were in Autumn 2012 in WvWvW. If you think they were weak in WvWvW, you must have been playing them wrong.

Well warrior finally got to become strong in spvp and tpvp. And now warriors are very common there. But the buffing went too far. Warrior was never weak in mobility, but when warrior still lacked condition removal and sustainability, it wasn’t yet much of a problem. Now warrior has one of the best condition removals and mitigations, non-interruptible sustain, great melee damage, tons of control, area support, tied best profession for zerging with guardian, great for roaming, great in pvp, great in pve.

I honestly like warriors more than thieves (the implementation of stealth is still wrong in this game), but if you read Arenanet’s design manifesto for the professions, warrior should be the sturdy melee class and thief should be the mobile hit & run.

Every profession should have some strong and weak areas. If one profession is the best or second best in almost all the areas, why to ever play the other professions?

Godmoney.2048:

Because both foods are available it’s really a moot point. Also tons of classes have specs that already have tons of condi removal. The class that really benefits from the food is ENGINEER. Other condi specs have a hard time getting really long durations but not condi Engineer specs.

Add warrior to that list. I have been playing dual sword warrior since Autumn 2012, when it was still rare as hen’s teeth. It is now perfect for all the situations, but can solo quite difficult content alone.

Deep cuts (10 points trait) increases bleed duration by +50%. Nothing is stopping for warrior to invest in to strength trait line which increases condition duration and wearing +condition duration armor (6x Lyssa is pretty solid choice with great synergy with signet of rage). The warrior condition base durations are already long e.g. sword auto attack does 8 s base duration, easily 16 s with any decent condi warrior build. Sword #5 does four 12 s bleed stacks. Sword #4 does up to five 12 s torment stacks. Longbow #5 does 3 s immobilize and whopping 6x 12 s bleed on a piercing attack (clearly overpowered skill).

So even without any points in strength trait line you get 50+40+10% = 100% bleed duration with fooddeep cuts trait+6xLyssa set. +60% for other condition. A few points to strength trait line for even added condition duration and you can maintain cripple using just sword auto attack. Now some “geniuses” in this forums are suggesting cripple should prevent dodging…

PS. I agree with the OP. Condition duration should be max +20% and min -20% from consumables.

Elixir gun doesn’t need more damage. It is supposed to be a support weapon. But the following changes would make sense:

Currently EG #2, elixir F, has pathing issues. It often fails to hit the target, if the target even tiny bit moves sideways. The bouncing and swiftness seem to function only from very close range. It would be better if they would function from longer range and have slightly increased projectile speed.

Elixir gun #3, furnigate, offers amazing condition cleanse for allies, if the allies are within that narrow cone, but in real life situations its group condition cleansing is subpar compared to guardian shouts and warrior’s “shake it off”. EG #3 should have its cone widened a bit and it should also remove one condition from the engineer.

Engineers are currently lacking in condition removal, forcing most engineers to use healing turret + many blast finishers as their main heal. Medkit heals a lot, but really sucks in conditional removal (one immobilize, or knockback prevents the use of drop antidote, which removes just one condition). Thus limiting the build variety. Engineers need kits or static discharge build for damage, once again neither offer room to use elixir C (which has 40 s cooldown).

If EG #3 would cleanse up to 6 condition from the engineer it would be a too powerful, considering it has just 12 s cooldown. Either the number of conditions removed or cooldown should be adjusted. But I think the idea that EG would offer additional condition removal for engineer is good and would allow more build variety.

Rednik.3809:

You are talking about roaming or zergs? Because in zergs no one uses GS (except pugs, but pugs are nothing but bags anyway) and traited warhorn is only secondary source of condi cleanse, main cleansing are coming from shout guardians and warriors.
And I will tell this again – if someone manages to die from GS – it’s best for him to go to spvp and learn at least basics.

I am talking about both roaming and zerging. I know very well that hammer + sword/warhorn is the basic warrior weapon set for zerging.

The WvWvW meta has been stale for way too long time. Warriors, guardians, elementalists and necros are the backbone of any organized guild zerg. Have been and still are. Few mesmers needed for veiling and portals. Medium armor professions got the short end of the stick, besides thieves, who are still abundant in roaming, besides mesmers and warriors. I would argue that warriors and guardians are by far the most common professions in WvWvW and you can see a lot of them in pvp and pve as well. Please don’t tell me that warriors are popular in every game. I think think if you look at the characters created in Guild Wars 2, the professions are probably quite evenly distributed. So popular professions like warrior maybe attribute to 16-18% (max 20) and least popular professions like mesmer and engineer probably attribute to around 10%-12% of total characters. BUT if you look at characters which are actively played at level 80, I am quite sure warriors are >20%.

Game design wise I think the king of mobility should be thief. Medium armor, low health pool, lack of long distance weapons. Currently thief is the fastest profession underwater, but Arenanet has pretty much deleted underwater combat from this game, so it doesn’t matter. Yet, thief already has amazing access to stealth and tons of shadow stepping, so adding more mobility range for thief wouldn’t be good for general game balance. The only logical solution is to nerf warrior mobility.

By the way now when immobilize is stacking, somebody can die to greatsword and it is not about skill (immobilize gets covered by other conditions, so condition cleansing rarely works either). Immobilize shouldn’t stack or last very long time, but we already have threads about it.

Summary: Warrior has the best land speed and too much mobility.

Arguments “if he flees, you won” are moot for WvWvW. You don’t get any loot bags if the enemy managed to flee. Sending him/her back to the spawn area is the only counter, especially when you want to counter the enemy sniping your dolyaks or flipping your supply camps.

Warrior land speed comes mainly from these sources:
- permanent swiftness (warhorn + quick breathing trait +20% boon duration, signet of rage also gives swiftness)
- sword #2, 600 leap, 8 s cooldown
- greatsword #3, 450 whirl, 10 s cooldown
- greatsword #5, 1200, 20 s cooldown

Forceful greatsword, which is already a very powerful trait, granting might on critical hit with spear and greatsword, also reduces the cooldown by 20%. This means we have a 1200 range mobility skill on 16 second cooldown. And that is a problem.

Elementalist’s ride the lightning has 40 s cooldown if it is misses target. Thus is cannot used that well repeatedly for fleeing (unless you manage to his some rabbit in the forest ). Engineer’s rocket boots has 900 range, 20 s cooldown.

I know rush has pathing issues to hit a target, but as a mobility skill with mere 16 s (trained cooldown), that is way too good to remain as it is and to make matters more imbalanced warrior has 2 mobility skills on greatsword, mobile strikes trait (removes immobilize on movement skill), and fast weapon swapping with fast hands, allowing quick swaps between GS and S.

I have spent couple of hundreds hour more time playing on my warrior than on my thief. My warrior is better equipped than my thief, so I don’t think I am partial here. But I really think the mobility crown should belong to the medium armor professions, not to warrior. Warrior needs mobility to close in to targets, but to be like Usain Bolt.

Rush should have range should be changed to 900 and CD increased to 25 s. Sword #2 and GS #3 should also be looked upon.

Traited warhorn is very powerful in zergs, converting conditions to boons. And warhorn #4, charge, also removes immobilize, cripple and chill and grants switness up to 9 allies. I think that is too much. In solo roaming this is okay, but in zerg setting this is way too much happening for a skill with so low cooldown.

TOP 3 LIKES:
1) open field fights (just fights, no need for other objectives)
2) large scale battle
3) unpredictable stuff sometimes happens

Roaming used to be on this favorite list, but after September 17th roaming just hasn’t been so fun anymore. So my TOP3 DISLIKES:
1) stat buffs (power of mists, BL bloodlust, guard leech etc. = massive power creep, all of them are unneeded and should be removed)
2) it is all about numbers and coverage
3) borderland changes (deletion of the lake + underwater combat and placing spvp-lookalike map instead, very few people are there, just revert the ill-designed changes back to where it was)

Xerrex’s video is good and he is obviously a good player.

To call that build unkillable in 1 vs 1 is just not believable argument. Even the video shows Xerrex very close to death and dying many times. And Xerrex is playing the engi really well and some of the enemies are playing badly. This build is no simple press 1, 2 and win and it is mostly CC, not much any burst potential.

Together medkit + elixir gun provide a lot of healing, but very little condition cleansing. EG #5 light field removes 1 condition every 20 seconds. If you want most out of medkit you need to spend a lot of time healing, which means less time to dps enemy. Medkit drop antidote removes just one condition and requires to move over the antidote, so immobilize, knockback etc. prevent that. Perhaps the enemies don’t understand that because most engineer use healing turret in pvp?

Immobilize and target fire and the engi is dead. Toss elixir R removes just one condition on impact at 120 s cooldown.

Overall I am actually happy that there is now might be a valid pvp build for power-based rifle engineer. There has been way too many pistol/shield condi tank engi builds. This game needs more build variety instead of pigeon holing engis into condi spam tanks.

TheGuy.3568:

Simple.

Lowered poison duration from thief and engineer fields by 40%
Lowered burst by 10% (WvW)
Lowered Healing Signet by 8% and still getting the active buffed.

I don’t see where there is much to discuss here.

This ^^

I think think the idea of reducing burst by 10% for WvWvW is a good idea. I would go for even higher nerf, around 20%, but that is just me. But I would also want to nerf the condition burst.

Also the duration nerfs to poison are somewhat justified. Poison grenade has 25 s cooldown so it cannot be reapplied immediately and to combo blast the poison field you need to be in very close range, but choking gas has no cooldown and mere 4 initiative cost. Meaning with the right build one could easily keep stack of both poison, weakeness and lots of bleed, by alternating shortbow #3 and shortbow #2 (clusterbomb triggers poison combo field).

Healing signet’s and adrenal health’s passive heal together is way too high. With added investment in healing power my warrior has been able to literally stand in burning and the passive heal outheals the burning damage.

Two sources of passive heals which 99% of warriors are using and cannot interrupted. Their counter is massive burst damage or poison (which is getting nerfed).

I think the total amount of passive heal (from adrenal health and HS) need to come down at least 30%. Maybe make them scale a bit better with healing power attribute. At the same healing signet’s active needs buffing. Maybe the active should heal around 30% more and remove one condition. That is just an idea, but that would make HS activating useful (considering the passive would be 30% weaker than now).

There are some good ideas in the proposal, but I think it needs refining. I also seriously doubt Arenanet would completely rehaul the conditions. It still doesn’t solve many of the problems: which include spamming conditions (you can apply them way faster you can remove them) and the 25 stack bleed limits in pve.

Why would you make the condition duration only affect damaging conditions? Adding duration to blind wouldn’t affect it basically at all: 5 second or 9 second blind = pretty much the same.

Let’s say all condition duration foods would be limited to max +25% increased duration and -25% condition duration. It would be actually pretty unfair if the +25% condition duration food would only apply to damaging conditions. This together with the traits and armor would make some skills nearly completely ineffective. Let me illustrate:

Engineer rifle #2, net shot, is 1000 range skill with 10 s cooldown.
It causes 2 s immobilize, no damage, can hit only single target and it is very easy to strafe (no need to dodge) at long range.

Now with -25% duration food, 6x Melandru runes (another -25%) and traits like dogged march -33% (mere 10 point trait sitting in a very useful trait line). The duration would be reduced a total of -83% meaning that the 2 s immobilize would last mere 0.33 seconds. That is negligible! To add salt to the injury, the poor engineer would give the enemy warrior 3 second regeneration as a bonus.

Even without the food, just 6xMelandru rune set + dogged march, it would mean 0.8 second duration, not much and warrior got regen as a bonus.

I also think skills that can inflict conditions on several targets instead of just one target should perhaps be treated differently. I know warrior’s longbow #5, pin down, is gonna get an added animation, but it inflicts 3 s immobilize, 6x 12 s bleed stacks, damage and can pierce up to 5 targets. For example warrior’s rifle #1, bleeding shot, can be used to spam bleed upon bleed, but in reality it is far weaker skill a condition build than let’s say engineer’s grenade kit #2, shrapnel grenade, where each of the 2-3 grenades does 1 stack of 12 s bleed (major part of grenade kit dmg comes this skill).

I am against nerfing mesmers to the ground, but Arenanet needs to understand that stealth is extremely powerful in WvWvW roaming. Unlike in spvp/tpvp, where you need to contest points and you cannot contest them in stealth, there is no disadvantage of using stealth in WvWvW roaming. In WvWvW mobility and stealth are much more important than in spvp.

Mesmer hasn’t gotten any more stealth, but Prismatic Understanding (PU) gives them a good access to protection, regeneration and aegis. This allows the mesmer to have a lot of sustainability, while phantasm spam damage even while the mesmer is stealthed. Thieves have been broken in WvWvW roaming since the launch. Thousands of forum posts are proof of this. For some weird reason Arenane developers have never commented any of this threads!

Yet thieves cannot attack and remain stealthed, at least they get 3 sec revealed (which should be increased to 5 seconds or so). So right now mesmer is even more broken. Attacks from stealth, even if they from the phantasms, blocked or dodges should result revealed.

Don’t get me wrong. I have killed thieves and mesmers when I solo roam, but generally that requires them to do a mistake e.g. I play weak, let my health drop, because I know I can heal it back fast, to get them overconfident (extremely risky strategy from me). Of course I have also lost such fights.

Fighting against stealthed opponents and AI opponents is NOT fun at all.

Removing dhuumfire seems the best option. Adding it was a bad idea and now that is has been already changed once and it is going to changed again, is more of a proof that it was.

Burning synergizes too well with condition burst (this applies to other professions, – I am looking at you engineer).

Style-wise I think fear, chill, bleeding etc. suit the necromancer much better than burning. Burning sounds something more what elementalists and engineers would do.

Immobilize should not stack. Hard CCs, like knockdown, knockback + launch, should not stack either. Each hard CC should be followed by at least 0.5 sec immunity to hard CC.

They are currently way overpowered in WvWvW. It is typical to get chain CCed there. I am also using it against the enemies. When I manage to land a long-lasting immobilize on my target, he is pretty much dead if there are any allies around. Even his team mates are rarely able to save him.

I think the claims that no guardian is using the staff because it has so low DPS are ridiculous. The OP himself wrote the reasons, why people are using the staff: giant AoE and superb support.

Similarly the OP is saying warrior’s hammer is crap weapon, because it does lower DPS compared to axe/mace + greatsword. Hammer melee train has been the meta in WvWvW since Autumn 2012 and the recent nerfs to hammer damage basically didn’t affect it at all. One could also argue that hambow warrior is borderline overpowered in pvp.

You cannot have everything in just one weapon: great support, great CC, great mobility and great DPS. It makes sense that the weapon offers one out of these four choices and not all.

For example guardian’s staff is clearly a support weapon and so is engineer’s elixir gun. Nobody choose elixir gun because it would do great DPS, but I have been using it very happily and I do NOT think EG needs any added damage (EG #3 should remove one condition from the engineer though, right not it cleanses conditions only from allies who are inside the rather narrow burst).

Warrior’s hammer is crowd control and arguably the most powerful CC weapon in the game.

Warrior’s axe is an example of a DPS weapon.

Warrior’s greatsword is an example of a mobility weapon (two mobility skills, GS #5 being currently the best in the game. GS also happens to do massive damage using 100 blades as well).

Some other weapons do well in several categories and I find this problematic. This is what pushes some weapons into almost every build e.g.

Necromancer’s staff does damage, support (condition transfer from putrid mark is amazing) and CC (chill from chillblains). Thus almost every single necro build uses it.

Engineer’s bomb kit has the highest auto attack of any engineer kit / weapon. But it also does lots of CC: area launch from big’ol’bomb, blind from smoke bomb and area immobilize from glue bomb. Combine that with blast finishers (big ol’ bomb is one itself), you can also get area might and stealth. No wonder why it is so popular in tpvp.

One could easily make similar examples for other professions and their weapons.

Now if all the weapons would do almost the same DPS there would be even less reasons for most players to do weapon swaps. Just spam the equally powerful auto attack and use the other skills on cool down. Making weapons clearly different promotes more intelligent play and weapon swaps.

So instead of complaining why some weapons do much less damage per second, I think one should carefully analyze why some weapons and weapon skills are doing a bit too many things at same time. And why many weapon skills look fully identical or almost identical instead of being telegraphed, making smart counter play more or less a guessing game. This game already has too much power creep and damage.

Excellent post. I fully agree with the OP. In fact I was about to make a similar post.

Dungeons and bosses are full of one-shot mechanisms, which completely defeat the purpose of having a bit of extra toughness. You either time your dodge correctly and completely avoid the damage or you miss your dodge and get downed.

CC is useless against champions and legendary bosses.

Bosses and the enemies in general should attack at faster rate, but bosses should do considerably less damage per hit. Then toughness would matter at least somewhat (not counting those rare champions who do mostly condition damage).

Now it is all about DPS, which makes it very boring.

Added idea (but this requires significant programming efforts from Arenanet):

Improve the pve AI. Make the enemies dodge damage over time AoE attacks and chained attacks. Now you can just spam your attacks, wait for the slow attack, dodge it, rinse and repeat. This would make CC more more needed (immobilize, freeze, knockback, knockdown, launch, stun).

Guild Wars 1 had superb AI compared to this game.

I agree with most of the things with OP.

I have all characters in level 80, but I play my mesmer very rarely. The first 30 levels as mesmer were so much fun, but as I progressed in levels, it became more and more tedious. Summon illusions, shatter them, rinse and repeat. I find it really boring to be the “veil-bot” in zergs, so I rather play something else and let guildies do the job. It is true that mesmer has one of the most powerful utilities in the game (portal, time warp etc), but few people enjoy playing just support. Mesmer doesn’t have much AoE direct damage skills, thus it is suboptimal in the WvWvW zerg tagging game.

Mesmer is currently very strong in 1 vs 1 and even in small scale like 1 vs 2-3. PU mesmers are everywhere and I would argue that the typical PU builds do not require much skill to be very effective indeed. If the developers will start buffing mesmer in zergs, there is a risk it becomes way too overpowered in small scale settings.

The same problem exists for many other professions:
Medium armor professions are not part of the WvWvW zerging meta, but thief, ranger and engineer all have valid roaming builds. So I see mesmer is sort like a cousin to them.

Warriors are lucky, because they currently excel in all forms of the game (free world pve, dungeons, spvp, WvWvW zerging and roaming).

They key problems lies in this:
Mesmer is too AI dependent.

Most mesmer builds do large part of their damage via phantasms or shattering the illusions. In zergs the phantasms don’t work that well, because there is AoE damage flying everywhere and the phantasms get killed in a second or two. For comparison phantasm has about 4.5k health in pvp/WvWvW, while ranger ursine pet has 50k health (yet rangers rightfully complain that the pets are useless in zergs).

If one would increase the health pool of the phantasms or give them dodging, mesmer would easily be grossly overpowered in small scale.

There is no simple way to balance this. Either one needs to make mesmer less reliant on clones and phantasms for damage or one needs to accept the fact that mesmer’s own damage output is suboptimal in zerg situations. Some weapon skills could be altered to be AoE skills, but such changes require extensive testing before putting them live. Adding damage or area to weapon skills is problematic because mesmer can create additional damage with illusions and one needs to count all these together.

I personally feel that fighting against AI (phantom mesmer, spirit ranger, minion master necro) is not fun.

I use staff and hammer as my main weapons on my guardians. I don’t think they need any changes, except the changes to staff #3, symbol of swiftness, should be reverted. Now you need to pause down to get full effect of it, making it really clunky for solo roaming (previously it was much better). While the longer duration of swiftness with some boon duration runes and stuff can give around 30 seconds swiftness from single use, which makes it way too good for zerging situations.

Hammer auto attack can already give you more or less permanent protection duration if you just gear or trait your guardian properly. I use it all the time and having protection on almost all the times makes killing the pve mobs easy.

Hammer #2, mighty blow, is one of the best skills in the game. 300 leap, nice 180 radius, huge damage and a blast finisher on a really low cool down. Can also hit up to 5 targets. Tell me any other very low cool down blast finisher in this game which is as good? (thief’s clusterbomb comes close)

Hammer #3, zealot’s embrace, is already a bit too good in zerging situations. A skill should do either two weak or mediocre things at same time or one really powerful thing, but not more. Now it is slowly telegraphed skill, but can immobilize up to 5 targets in a line.

I feel the skills should be in line with skills from all professions:

Let’s compare two skills:
Hammer #3, zealot’s embrace:
1200 range
15 s cooldown
1 s activation
does decent damage + 2 second immobilize
can affect up to 5 targets in a line
easily telegraphed
http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Zealot%27s_Embrace

Engineer rifle #2, net shot
1000 range
10 s cooldown
no damage, 2 second
can affect just one target
fast activation, but slow projectile speed makes it easy to strafe or kite from a distance (even no need to dodge)
http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Net_Shot

Let’s also compare hammer #4, banish:
25 s cooldown
1x damage multiplier
130 range
750 launch (single target)
telegraphed
no penalty using it
http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Banish

Engineer rifle #4, overcharged shot:
15 s cooldown
1x damage multiplier
450 range
450 launch
not telegraphed
engineer knocks back itself (I would argue this is a big penalty, especially in zerging situations or maps like Skyhammer)
http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Overcharged_Shot

Launch is very powerful. Recovery from launch takes longer time than from knockback and it also serves as an interrupt. Making it affect multiple targets without any penalty would make it too powerful in my opinion. It would be effectively as good as warrior’s stomp (besides stomp being a stunbreak) and stomp has kitten cooldown and requires a utility skill slot.

http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Stomp

Staff #1 is really great (good damage, very wide cone, perfect for tagging the pve mobs and enemies in in WvWvW zergs), but max 600 range. I have always felt that guardian lacks in long range. Scepter auto attack is still pretty slow. I think making it a bit faster projectile speed while keeping the auto attack dps the same would make sense. Now the key to win bunker guardians 1 vs 1 is to use the range advantage against them and while there are some gap closers (judge’s intervention, hammer #2, sword #2, greatsword #3) guardian is easy to dodge at >600 range.

If these speculations prove correct celestial is going to become of one of the weakest sets in the game. It is the most difficult and time consuming to craft, so this will surely aggravate a lot of the players.

Adding +1 % boon duration to each celestial piece might be a good solution, but it might be on the border line of making it too strong. 5 trinkets (the is no celestial backpiece) + 6 armor + 1 weapon = +12% boon duration = not bad. And a lot of the builds, which use celestial gear would really benefit from boon duration. Yet +12% boon duration is significantly less than the armor rune sets allow at the moment.

Divinity runes seem also to be losers in the upcoming balance batch.

Well designed skill should do either two mediocre / weak things or one powerful thing, but not more. Skills which do many powerful things at same time are generally overpowered and broken. Pin down clearly violates this game design rule and has too much good things going on.

Right now pin down has 1000 range, 25 s cooldown and does:
minor amount direct damage
6 stacks of 12 s bleed (huge)
3 second immobilize
and it pierces!
http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Pin_Down

Compare this for example with engineer rifle #2, net shot:
1000 range, 10 s cooldown
no dmg, no bleed stacks
2 seconds immobilize
can affect only one target, easy to strafe from range (don’t even need to dodge it)
http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Net_Shot

Compare this also with the warrior rifle #2, aimed shot:
1200 range, 10 s cooldown
minor amount of direct damage
5 s cripple
affects only one target (unless traited)
http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Aimed_Shot

I would argue that 5 s cripple without bleed stacks is much weaker than 3 immobilize.
No wonder why almost all warriors select longbow instead of the rifle.

I think adding some delay to the animation will not solve the thing. 3 second piercing immobilize is already incredibly strong, especially in group situations, concerning that immobilizes are now stacking. Arenanet designers should decide, either reduce the immobilize duration of pin down or tone down the damage part (direct dmg + bleeds). Description wise it would be logical if pin down would only immobilize, but would not do anything else (just like engineer rifle #2).

Please NO!

What is the fun if players cannot do any damage at all? People would just leave and go back to pve. Hint: majority of players prefer to use their own skills instead of sitting on siege.

The complete lack of boons would fully destroy many valid builds and not everybody can immediately afford to equip themselves with new gear.

Doubling the skill range would make the lag issues even worse (double the distance for all those calculations).

I really hope Arenanet doesn’t implement any of those ideas.

Please give us more even match ups, instead of the troll fest just suggested.

I agree that stun lock and abundant stealth are also serious issues, which attention from Arenanet, but let’s stick to the topic:

Condition duration related foods are too powerful at the moment. I am using them everyday when I play my engineer, even though I am running a power / hybrid build. I don’t that much point invested in condition damage, but I need to use the foods to counter the Lemongrass poultry soup (-40 % condition duration) to make the immobilize, cripple it last reasonable amount of time.
http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Bowl_of_Lemongrass_Poultry_Soup

That food combined with Melandru armor set and traits like dogged march and reduce the duration of conditions to completely redundant amounts, thus I need to have at least +70% condition duration to counter that (I run +80% condition duration).

At the same time condition duration increase foods can create crazily long last bleeds, perma poison, perma weakness and so on at ease. A fully traited and geared condition necromancer just slapping Signet of Spite can almost kill a solo roamer, who doesn’t have lots of condition removal, using just one skill and 1+2 staff marks, from 1200 range:
http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Signet_of_spite

Condition spam is still very popular in the current meta and doesn’t require much any skill from the attacker. You can just reapply the conditions faster than they can be removed and many players use their skill on cooldown. The real problem is that you can have very high toughness, pretty tanky build, still lots of condition pressure in the same build. Power based builds need to select between survivability or damage. Thieves and mesmers are an exception, due easy access to shadowstepping/teleports and stealth. The problem is the amount of condition damage ticks, especially from burning, but also from sources like bleed and poison. I think the total duration of some conditions (e.g. constant uptime of poison) and the damage tick should be evaluated by the the developers of this game. Now a fully dire/rampager ascended geared condition based attacker can achieve around 7k dmg/second (theoretical amounts are even higher). That is a LOT of pressure. I would say too much pressure damage considering the same character can still enjoy very high toughness.

I think the condition duration foods should affect max. +20% more and max -20% less.

ukuni.8745:

Deniara Devious.3948:

If you argue that engineer has higher dps than an axe/mace + greatsword warrior, then please proof that using videos or show us the build.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8KPSp0_NlFk

this isnt mine and i dont run this build, but i can tell you that nothing beats this for sheer dps in WvW ive got a mate who runs this and he literally 1 shots anything even vets, is it more viable then a axe/mace + greatsword warrior, probly not since it lacks the great defensive options a warrior has but for sheer damage it hits harder

That is Static Discharge (SD) build. It has amazing burst and good dps, but I am having a hunch that axe/mace + greatsword pure dps build has better long term dps than SD (I should someday measure it, not just guess). Note that warrior’s kill shot can also one shot things with full bloodlust + ascended zerker gear it does around 20k crits against medium armor. Combine that with crack shot (now just 10 point trait) = epic fun against enemy zergs.

SD builds seem to be very rare in WvWvW. In all of my hundreds of WvWvW roaming hours I have run into just one SD engineer. He hit me and my allies hard like a brick, but his armor was also made out of paper. You kill fast, you die fast.

This applies to all professions. You want maximum burst and damage, your health and armor is going to be low (warrior has advantage here). Usually only main hand dagger thieves, shatter burst mesmers and non-roaming staff elementalists pure berserker set. Massive damage and burst, but dies fast. I would argue that all those 3 builds are better in WvWvW setting than SD, because elementalist can have mist/vapor form and staff eles are a vital part of the zerg, mesmers and thieves have teleport and stealth to get out of combats which go awry.

I am not an expert in spvp/tpvp, but I would guess that SD engineer would do okay in hot join / solo queue, but I am pretty sure that in top tournament level condition engineers > power engineers. Based on the current meta and recent balance changes I would guess engineer is good middle class in spvp, not bad, but in the super tier either.

Mind you that one exception doesn’t break the rule, it just wrecks the budget. ;-)

Let’s get fact straight.

I have played, not level crafted, all 8 professions to level 80 and done WvWvW with them. Engineer is the most difficult profession to master well. Try solo roaming with power rifle engineer using grenade kit and you will know.

If you want easy profession try comparing engineer with the heavy armor professions, like guardian and warrior. Guardian has tons of passive things going on (health regeneration, aegis, burning, condition removal etc) which do NOT require any interaction from the player. Warrior has always been the king of pve and now arguably very strong in spvp and the strongest profession in WvWvW as well. If you argue that engineer has higher dps than an axe/mace + greatsword warrior, then please proof that using videos or show us the build.

Bomb kit autoattack hits stronger than grenade kit auto attack. In fact the grenade kit auto attack is really weak auto attack considering it is just 120 radius (bomb kit #1 is 180 radius). If you want to compare the dps you really need to take in account the actual attack rate, which is always lower than the listed number (1/2 activation time). Even when traited with grenadier grandmaster trait bomb kit #1 is 25% stronger, larger radius = huge difference.
http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Grenade
http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Bomb
Just look at the damage multipliers and do the math. Bomb kit wins.

I don’t have much experience in spvp / tpvp, but I know WvWvW. Power engineers and rifle engineers in general seem to be rare as hen’s teeth. About 90% of the enemy engineers are running condition based builds and using either pistol/pistol or pistol/shield. Grenade kit #1 isn’t viable option for them as it would do so little damage in a condition build and just be semi-viable in a hybrid power + condi build (e.g. celestial gear) as you need to be in very close range to make all those grenades hit.

Bomb kit seems to be as common as the grenade kit. Flamethrower and elixir gun are also often used kits. Healing turret seems to be the most popular healing skill. Since they are also so often used, do you plan to nerf them as well?

I agree on one thing with the OP: condition spam semi-bunker / full bunker builds are a bit too strong at the moment. Most builds cannot squeeze in enough condition removal, conditions ignore the armor and the attacker needs to invest only in one stat (condition) instead of three stats (power, precision, critical damage). To fix this Arenanet could consider an overall nerf to some of the most problematic conditions e.g. shave off some dps from burning (the most damaging condition) and make poison last a shorter time. Or make it so that each dodge roll removes one condition. This would affect all professions.

If you want to change grenade kit somehow, then make it more into a smart control kit, instead of just spamming all the grenade skills on cool down:
flash grenade would do only blind, no damage (pure control)
reduce damage of freeze and poison grenade, BUT at the same time slightly increase the damage of grenade kit auto attack (#1) to keep it on par with the bomb kit.

Guardian is my last character to get to level 80. I just got 100% completion of Cursed Shore for my guardian, but I have done very little WvWvW with it (so far). I don’t claim to be an expert guardian player, but here are my two cents:

Warrior and guardian are the easiest professions to begin with and both seem to excel in all forms of the game: pve, spvp and WvWvW. Adding any power to these professions right now doesn’t make any sense. When I play guardian it almost like brain on vacation as there is too much passive goodies going on (passive healing, passive burning, passive condition removal e.g. from purity trait, aegis ). I consider such powerful game mechanisms to be a game design failure as it doesn’t promote skillful play, but just sitting on your passives and not counter play as there is no enemy skill to disable these passives. If I would be a game designer, I would rework these all to require active play (which would make guardian, healing signet warrior etc. more difficult to play). For comparison try to play a 3-4 kit engineer effectively or an roamer elementalist.

Most the top tpvp teams have used guardians since the launch. Guardian surely is among the 3 most popular professions in WvWvW. Last night I was solo roaming with my engineer, never in any party, but I surely even used map chat to inform my side about enemy movements. Unlike pretty much all the enemy engineers I run into I am not playing a condition build, but mainly power based rifle build. These type of engineers rare as hen’s teeth. I ran into several enemy guardians. One vs one was no problem, because the combination of good amount of direct damage, lots of control and conditions will slowly eat any bunker and most guardians are built to be semi-bunkers or full bunkers. But WvWvW really is rarely 1 vs 1 or fair fights like 2 vs 2. Situations like 1 vs 2-5 or 2-3 vs 5-6 are more common. Shino is correct about some of the weaknesses of the guardian:

While it is possible to build a mobile guardian using both greatsword and sword and using traveler’s runes (+25% speed boost) or just make perma swiftness (staff #3 + enough + boon duration), guardian is one of the least mobile professions in the game. I think this is intentional game design. If the fight gets wrong, guardian has trouble to get out of it, but the same applies to necromancers. Thieves have the best set of tools of reset any fight the way and warrior’s come second (if they are built for mobility e.g. greatsword + sword/warhorn warrior). But you cannot have it all. Guardian has probably the best set of group support tools in the game. Very good access to a lot of boons and great healing, meaning it is downright easy to build a guardian, which won’t be one shot, but lasts a bit longer.

Guardian has one of the best condition removals in the game. The problem isn’t here. The problem is that most guardians are not built to kill alone, rather they are built to buff, cleanse and keep their team alive and tag a lot of targets by spamming staff #1 (“brain on vacation” style of play). A build, which lacks the ability to kill fast is always a risk in solo roaming as sooner or later there will be more people (2-5 vs 1) and then you are screwed. Guardian can be build for dps and as a solo roamer I am actually most afraid of these rare zerker guardians.

If you run a bunker support build and gear (e.g. PVT + cleric etc), do NOT expect to excel in solo roaming.

Ayna

Big ol’ bomb (Bomb kit toolbelt skill) has considerably longer activation time than the tooltip says underwater. The activation times seems to be closer to 2 seconds, which really blows.

I wouldn’t be surprised if the bomb kit has some glitches underwater.

Forsaker is right about the power creep. Eventually any MMORPG will be hit by power creep. I was just surprised and very sad that this game was so hard with massive power creep, which pretty much got us into this horrible spam spam meta. The game is just 14 months from launch and we have a massive power creep. There has been way too much buffing (even +50% or double there and there), instead of nerfing. A game developer must have a very good self-discipline (or strict senior mentor) to avoid power creep as obviously the player base is always screaming for buffs, rarely for nerfs. Now the only way to fix this is actually lot of smartly targeted nerfs. Players will moan about it, some threatening to quit the game, but in the long run it will be better for the game.

Maybe people misunderstood my post about making very high attack skills telegraphed and slow. I do not want to greatly increase the total time to kill (TTK), but this would really benefit from having attacks more clearly telegraphed (yes, I also mean Asuras). I can sometimes see even the high ranked player dodge/evade spam, dodges which are probably random. Such more or less random hit or miss, isn’t what I would want from a game.

Isn’t it logical that the highest damage skills should be slow and easy to avoid? While very fast attacks should do low damage?

I have been telling this since Autumn 2012. The burst in this game (including condition) is way too high. The problem is at least twice as big in WvWvW, as it has all those buffs (Borderland bloodlust + guild buff etc), consumables and better gear (ascended). There you can theoretically have around 16k-20k backstab against that armor. And if you go full bunker, you won’t be able to burst down that thief before he stealths / shadowsteps away. In pvp this is less of a problem as you cannot anycase contest a point while stealthed. But Arenanet has informed they will be adding game modes (team deathmatch and king of the hill, plus guild-vs-guild comes to my mind). These problems need to be addressed before Team Death Match or anything becomes a reality.

I repeat this:
ALL very high damage skills should only inflict damage and do nothing else. Utility skills are for utility, not for damage (a good example is engi rifle #2, which does 2 s immobilize, but no damage). All very high damage skills should be well telegraphed (e.g. warrior’s killshot), slow animation and thus easy to dodge. The very fast, rapid, non-telegraphed attacks should do small damage. Now we have way too many skills which are doing too many things at same time and have unclear / rapid animations.

This would make the game more skill based.

Same here. My 5th daily was WvWvW camp capturer, so I guess that is bugged. I did two more dailies after that, but still after 7 dailies, I didn’t get any reward.

Of course it is way too much. WvWvW is still suffering from serious power creep. Count in the consumables as well.

Many people forget the Power of the Mists, which has been in the game since launch, giving up to +10% increase to vitality and healing power (that can alone be massive couple hundred points more).
http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Power_of_the_Mists

This is skewing the match ups and I really do not see that any of them add “fun” to this game. Game should be fun for all sides, not just the winning side with superior coverage. Even match ups are most fun and interesting. Thus all of the above should be just removed.

The WvWvW development priorities have been and totally skewed. We do not added siege traits or new stat buffs on top of the existing ones. We need:
1) better UI (for commanders, e.g. different colored tags, guild only tag etc. also ability to kick party members)
2) better match making and scoring (taking into consideration population/coverage differences and an outnumbered buff, which actually does something)
3) less lag (optimizing server code, more server capacity, more maps, slightly reducing players per map, offering less incentives for blobbing/zerging as this is known to lead to the worst lag)

Tynyss.8237:

Warriors can only remove Conditions through Shouts/Shake it off/Rune of the Soldier(which weakens their offense), Mending(In this case they won’t have healing signet), Cleansing Ire(Dodging and blindness) or prevent them for 8 sec with Berserkers stance which has quite a long cd.

You conveniently forgot:
Signet of stamina removes ALL conditions on 36 s. cooldown (traited)
6xLyssa runes gives all boons and removes all conditions, when you use elite. Signet of rage has 48 s cooldown (traited)

Those are one of the most powerful condition removal tools compared to any profession. You also didn’t mention warrior traits like dogged march and mobile strikes, which make the warrior shrug off movement impairing conditions with ease.

I love how people on these forums are trying to make their favorite profession to appear as bad as possible to avoid nerfing, which is indeed needed in this case.

Hammer + Sword/warhorn shout warrior has been the WvWvW meta since Autumn 2012 and devs still keep buffing it. Huh!?!

The Power of the Mists, the bloodlust stat buffs and points from stomping should all be removed immediately. All of them make the game more imbalanced and reduce the fun for the weaker side.

Adian.8756:

This patch was the last straw for me. I supported the game, I posted lengthy, friendly, constructive posts and I stuck around in the hopes that things would change for the better. It didn’t, and likely never will. As an avid PvP’er, I’m officially done with GW2 – There’s simply nothing left to enjoy.

- sPvP is completely broken, with a spammy, low-skilled meta, where passive traits and AI is superior to anything else.
- WvW is ruined with a massive power creep (Bloodlust buff, WXP Buffs and Ascended Equipment), and a meta where mindlessly zerging is king.

If this patch is any indication, ArenaNet will never change anything significant, because they actually enjoy the current state of GW2 themselves. Well, have fun playing alone ANet – I’m out.

I know exactly how you are feeling. I was also advocating this game to a lot of people. I managed to pull some people from other MMORPGs to Guild Wars 2, but now they are all back to their old MMORPGs, because they all got bored by this game and the massive power creep (game is just years of age, and we got crazy power creep in pve/WvWvW). I have been semi-prominent figure on my server as a PuG commander. Now I am using this game as an example in my game design lectures. A good example when it comes to making amazingly beautiful visuals, audio and world design and intro for pve (the 1st 30 levels of pve personal story are generally very well made) and very bad example of how to make pvp and perfect example how to ruin and destroy open world pvp (WvWvW).

I am nowadays only doing my daily in pve and then I just sign out. I completely stopped WvWvW after the September 17th patch and borderland changes. Words fail to describe how utterly I hate those BL changes, the BL bloodlust (it is nerfed now, but still exists) and spvp alike map in middle of map, which feels completely forced and unnatural and very few people are there. Almost everybody in the WvWvW map spends their time elsewhere than in that spvp map alike middle zone with the 5 capture points. It just tells how few people actually like to stand, cap and defend points. That type of game play appeals to a very tiny minority.

I know that new game modes are coming, but still the issues I pointed out in my earlier post about the spammy, low skill, low risk-high reward meta and profession imbalances are all there.

The skill balance of this game would actually be better if they would just revert stuff to Autumn 2012 situation (with bug fixes and UI improvements staying).

The patch was bad for pvp. Really not much things changed what many players were wishing, besides the UI changes e.g. the new condition tick visualization is better.

Warrior got even slightly stronger (the sigil nerf wasn’t warrior specific). Necromancer was also buffed. And obviously rangers were so rare in pvp that they also needed a buff.

Warrior has always been king of pve with guardian. Yet every single patch buffs them in all game modes. Hammer + sword/warhorn shout warrior has been the meta in WvWvW since Autumn 2012. In fact some commanders openly wish that they would have all their players running warriors to win easier. Now that got buffed.

That all makes so much “sense”.

It seems Arenanet doesn’t want this game to be skill based at all, rather more just a casual game, accessible for all. Like the WvWvW lead wrote in forums “WvWvW isn’t supposed to be balanced at all”. So I guess it applies to tpvp/spvp as well

The activation time of skills gets reduced, cooldowns get reduced, AoE radius get larger so that even a person with bad mouse aim and no anticipation skills has a good chance of landing them. Allowing more easier, beginner friendly spam.

In classic game design it should be “high risk and high reward vs. low risk and low reward”. Things really appear upside down in this game. If I spam my damage skills and miss, where is the risk? If stealthed person tries to hit an opponent true block, he doesn’t get revealed. Where is the risk?

Powerful game mechanisms should be made very scarce (rare) or have a hard counter easily accessible for all. Teleportation (shadowstepping) still has no hard counter. Even ancient pen & paper role-playing games like D&D have anti-magic field and dimensional anchor, anti-teleporation field. Stealth makes a character invisible to enemies, but not immune to damage. Thus is should be actually called invisibility, but also see invisibility and invisibility purge. Now it finally got one hard counter (Sic’ Em), but other professions don’t have access to it. Two very badly designed game mechanisms. Granted the small size of pvp maps and the nature of contesting the points, which doesn’t work stealthed, makes this too less powerful in pvp, but extremely powerful in WvWvW.

Classic MMORPGs have both energy/mana and skill cooldown for a good reason. 7 out of 8 professions in GW2 only have the skill cooldown. Thus you can spam your skills as soon as they are free from cooldown without any penalty at all. You don’t lose any energy/mana. Thief weapon skills have no cooldown, but have initiative, allowing potentially even more abuse, by enabling to spam the same powerful skill several times in a row until initiative runs out. Dodging + evading is also a form of spam.

In general a skill should do either:
1) one powerful thing
2) two semi powerful things

E.g. well designed skill does a lot of damage, but nothing else e.g. kill shot (warrior’s rifle burst skill) or net shot (engi rifle #2), which does only 2 second immobilize, but no damage at all. Both skills are easy to dodge and kite, thus allowing smart counter play.

Badly designed skills do 2 or more things at same time e.g.
body shot (damage, invulnerability stacks + now immobilize)
putrid mark (high damage ranged aoe, transfers all conditions from allies to foes, which itself is very powerful alone)

Very high damage skills should have slow activation time and clearly telegraphed animation to make avoiding them easier, while very quick attacks and most auto attacks should do low damage. A well designed skill in that sense is churning earth (ele dagger 5).

High damage output and powerful healing should require player to do lots of interaction. Now AI can do the damage for you (ranger spirits, mesmer phantasms, necromancer minions). But where is the skill? Several professions have very powerful passive heals (warrior, guardian) and even passive condition removal (guardian, ranger). Instead we should have more skills like engineer’s medkit, which really requires the engineer to spend most of time healing if he wants to take every ounce of the healing out of it.

Logically the professions with the highest armor and health should have the least mobility and then vice versa for low health and armor. Yet in GW2 warrior has highest mobility (rivaled only by thief, but thief needs to sacrifice all initiative to keep up with perma swiftness sword/warhorn + greatsword warrior).

Maybe I am a too demanding customer? Maybe I think things too much, but all this really hurts my logic and sense of fairness.