Guild Wars 2

Orpheal.8263:

The balance system in general is out of hand.. in this game people can deal in general way too much damage compared to the maximum pool of health points a character can have…
…

here you have like 14k to 30k Hp, with the difference the huge balancing problem of classes having double as much health
…

here you can easily deal to players damage up to 15k+ being able to instakill people wth some absoliute OP glass cannon builds..even if your not going for the imba glass cannons, even with more balanced builds you can easily deal high damage, but without any preparations!!

Excellent post and I agree with it. GW1 also had trinity: dedicated healers. Healing and protection skills often had much shorter activation than the equivalent skills in GW2 (3-8 s cooldown, compared to 20-60 s cd in GW2). This allowed a good monk with fast reflexes to counter a burst of many enemy players shooting at a single target e.g. using skills like infuse health (mere 1/4 s casting time, usually healing over half the health bar).

It almost feels like Anet is not playing their own game. They call the new culling “improved”, despite a lot of people are complaining about it in forums. The culling got also worse for pve! Now you sometimes cannot see your own team mates or the huge enemy zerg just pops at your feet. Nothing to be done, except see your character downed and then dead. People are feeling very frustrated. And Anet could at least quickly revert to the original culling, which had serious issues as well, but was more logical.

In GW2, the big problems are the total imbalance between the professions. Just notice how some professions are much more common in WvWvW and pvp to see why profession are easy and overpowered and:

1. Burst damage is out of control. No fast attack (like autoattack from any weapon, e.g. backstab) should do more than 3k damage. No slow attack, which is telegraphed (such as warrior’s kill shot or elementalist’s churning earth should do more than 5k damage. The latter are easier to avoid, because they give the player more reaction time and the attacking player’s animation warns about it.
2. The defensive skills are too few and have too long cool downs. Stun breaks are very important in pvp and also pretty essential in WvWvW. Currently many stunbreak skills have 60 second cooldown, which is too long time Mesmers and thieves have access to 6 stunbreak skills, while ranger has only 2 stunbreaks (but can transfer stun to her pet using trait).
3. The healing skills scale extremely badly with healing power. For most professions it makes no sense to invest to healing power as it gives so little in return (I made a thread about it. Healing skills often have long cooldown (25-40 s) and slow activation time (1.25 second)

Fixes for the above issues:
1. Hard limit the burst from a single enemy to 3k for fast attacks and 5k for slow attacks.
2. Since there is no dedicated healers give each profession more even tools to avoid damage and have stunbreaks. I play all 8 professions. Now 4 professions feel a bit overpowered: thief (massive burst, ability to enter stealth too often and teleport to safety with shadowstep), mesmer (ability to avoid enemy damage with clones, also has stealth and teleports), D/D bunker elementalist (constant stack of boons and big regeneration in water to mitigate damage, combined with high mobility e.g. ride the lightning), bunker guardian. Needless to say these 4 are very common in WvWvW and spvp. People always flock to easy overpowered choices and then defend them in forums with posts like “learn 2 play”.
3. Main healing skills should have faster activation time e.g. 1/4 to 1/2 seconds. This would have almost unnoticable effect in pve. Make healing skills and healing related traits e.g. warrior’s adrenal health, scale with healing power. Slightly reduce the base heal amount, but make it heal clearly more if the person has invested many hundreds points to healing power.

Continued in the next message:

Ilesyt.7084:

Tone down damage > Guardian = OP and practically unkillable

So wrong. I have never had problems against guardians or D/D bunker eles in WvWvW. They cannot kill anything unless you stand still in their path! And trust me, enough condition damage, knock down/back etc. will get even the best bunker downed.

The insane burst is the problem and making some people want to run the bunkers. If the burst would be limited there would be less reasons to run a bunker. Then a more balanced build would be the choice of elite players, like it was in GW1. Balanced builds and teams were usually the best in GvG.

The overall continuous damage is fine, just limit the burst to reasonable levels, let’s say max 3k/hit. Ballistas, catapults and other siege are an exception and should do the same damage they do currently.

Now if you have read other forums, you can see screen shots of sturdy warrior with 3500 armor+toughness and 25k+ health, getting 13000 points damage from a backstab. Steal and C&D doing many k dmg. Only such skills, which are telegraphed and slow to activate e.g. elementalist’s churning earth should be able to do more damage, let’s say max 5k per hit. After getting rid of excessive burst, which smart player would want to run a bunker?

Do you remember how bunkers did in GW1? I mean builds like the healing hands W/Mo (a bad bunker). They were the last left of their losing team. Bunkers never won matches. Smart players always chose damage over being too much of a tank. GW1 had problems with balance, but had much better and more varied pvp than GW2. The current insane burst leads to static boring meta with only few builds.

It doesn’t help if your bunker can stay up if the guild lord near it still dies. Conditions are the key to win those NPCs, not a burst.

I have said this already before in these forums and my patience is running thin:
Arenanet, please revert back to the original culling immediately!

The new “improved” culling makes the gaming experience much worse.

Bren.9320:

That keep lord went straight back up from killed SIX times in a row, dont even try to blame it on random players, that was 100% organized effort. Because of anets rules I cant even state what guild tag players that used those abilities had, but it was no randoms, same as it is no randoms building siege in invulnerable spots. I dont understand how your commanders have no sense of fairness about these clearly game-breaking exploits.

Fairness?
Have you ever seen Visunah Square initiate a fair fight? Maybe it happened, but I didn’t see that. Based on my observations, their idea of a fair fight is zerg at you with 2-3 times more people or better yet: use synced mass invisibility to make a zerg sneak attack. VS is #1, because they do everything and anything what it takes to win and have the coverage and greater numbers of people. And they are great at utilizing siege weapons!

It is obvious some people have no honor nor morale, so I suggest that the badges of honor would be renamed: badges of dishonor, but you could still use them to purchase same stuff.

In order to have honor, you must have some set of rules. If you break the code of honor, you lose your honor. A code of honor usually puts very high standards of behavior for the group. Hmm, maybe we should start a new guild: True Honor?

1. No abuse of game exploits
2. No cowardly tactics
3. No name calling or elitism

You can continue the code of honor…

I agree with the original poster. This is especially an issue in large scale fights in WvWvW, where lag can make things even more difficult (yes, try to move at same time and ground target 1500 range away when there is 5-30 second lag with skill activation).

The ground targeting should work so that if the player accidentically clicks a range which is with 20% too far from the range, the skill would still trigger, but limited to the max range in that direction.

Deniara

I think the thief profession needs a complete redesign. Currently thieves have the highest single target damage in the game and superior tools of engagement and disengagement (shadowstep and stealth). Thieves are easy pownage in WvWvW and pvp, but don’t fare that well in pve, because:
1. Most thieves build themselves only for damage. This brings very little to the team. Dungeons are about teamplay. Not about selfish “I made the most kills”
2. Thief profession attracts players with low levels of skill
3. Thieves don’t have that many party-wide utility skills as some other professions do

A great thief can be an asset in a dungeon, providing stacks of vulnerability, group stealth and stealth reviving (shadow refuge), keep the enemy blinded and dishing tons of damage and do I need to mention caltrops, scorpion wire and cluster bomb (= biggest damage ranged spammable AoE skill in the game). However I have also seen very bad thieves in dungeon. I was playing my warrior & using rifle most of the time. The group’s thief decided to face tank the boss. I was telling in party chat “use ranged weapons, dodge away”. But the thief just insisted to use his dual daggers and kept dying next to the boss. This happened with every encounter. Even as a warrior, I do not facetank forever. More like hit & run.

I have been scoring a lot more kills with my warrior than dying myself, despite using a sub-optimal build and not full exotic gear. I usually use dual swords + rifle + lots of group utility (shouts), but when situation changes I can swap to other weapons: longbow, hammer, greatsword, axes, mace, shield, warhorn. You should carry them all with you! My current kill rate is 1:10 in euro tier #1 as a warrior and I can be an asset to nearby allies (give them might, fury, remove their conditions etc). Warrior is also very good reviving downed allies (very common activity in WvWvW, you get your daily 10 revived allies fast).

But I feel that warrior lacks tools of disengagement compared to thief, mesmer and D/D elementalist, who are masters of getting away. Warrior is not that great for roaming alone.

Also don’t expect your warrior to be a tank. Dodge a lot, kite, hit and run. Using some blocking won’t hurt you either. Take some stunbreak skill and extra condition removal to your build. If you see an overwhelming enemy, run away!

BUT if you want easy kills in WvWvW: switch to thief, elementalist or mesmer, like everybody does. I see much more thieves than warriors in euro tier #1, despite many of them being invisible, not to mention that mesmers and elementalists are also extremely popular. Warrior can do well in WvWvW, but in my opinion it requires more skill than the aforementioned professions.

Welcome to Thief Wars 2, Greatsword Wars 2 and Lag Wars 2 (culling broken since 2012)

Ayna Merciful

Exactly same happened in euro tier #1 Deso vs VS vs ER, inside SM castle on Saturday. 5-30 second delay when activating skills.

I haven’t seen any Anet comment about this, even though it is obvious that it needs attention. I also haven’t seen Anet comment about people’s complaints about the new “improved” culling.

I agree with Conncept that guardian should be added to my list. I edited my post to correct few typos and reflect that change.

Anet developers should take their heads out of the clouds immediately. The E-sport thing is not going to happen with current state of things. Even adding the missing things, like observation mode, are not going to fix this thing.

I am not claiming that D/D elementalist or bunker guardian are not powerful, but the thief and mesmer profession are the most problematic. Imagine a new comer, who has never tried pvp, enters hot join pvp as a warrior thinking that “oh gee, warrior must be such a sturdy profession like it is in pve”. What will be his first experience? Getting downed in 1.5-3 seconds by a stealthed enemy, doing 3-13k dmg/hit, who can even stomp him down during stealth! Or to slash his weapon through exploding clones and never hitting the actual mesmer. Now two things will probably happen:
1. the player never visits spvp again (we lost a potential player for good)
2. the player rerolls as a thief or mesmer

Both of these options are extremely bad for the future of the game. The meta is boring, because the game is broken for pvp. Some minor buffs to the least popular professions are not going to solve the problem. Nor giving some otherwise useless new utility skill to some professions which reveals stealth for 3 seconds once per 60 seconds (the thief can enter stealth much more often). These won’t be enough to fix the issue.

Anet developers must come forward and admit: yes, we made a mistake. Small fixes are not enough to fix these two broken game mechanisms.

Another thing: stealth and teleportation are broken in pve, but to a lesser degree, allowing players to skip considerable amount of game content. E.g. have you ever seen two thieves in a party use shadow refuge to give their team mates and themselves long lasting stealth to run past the enemy mobs?

But for pve side teleportation and stealth are still sort of okay, so they could be kept there as they are. In pvp they are game changing features. Thieves are anycase usually not that welcome to high-level dungeons, because many gamers have noticed that many thief players are bad and thus more of a risk than an asset to the team. A really good thief is great in dungeons, but really good thieves are a rarity.

I would love to see some thief or mesmer player prove me wrong: select a warrior and show it is as easy and good as a mesmer or thief in spvp.

The amount of buffing to the other professions won’t fix the actual problem:

Neither stealth or teleport have any hard counters. Even table-top RPGs like Dungeons & Dragons and Pathfinder RPG offer hard counters to them: see invisibility, true seeing, invisibility purge, teleport anchor, anti-magic field. For some crazy reason Anet designed both mesmers and thieves have the superb ways avoid getting by enemy (stealth, teleporting, short range teleports away, replaced by clones etc). In most other MMORPGs you cannot enter stealth during combat and any damage during stealth or damage over time (bleeding, burning, poison) reveals you from stealth. This is the only sensible way.

Stunbreaks are very important pvp. Both thief and mesmer have the highest amount of stunbreak skills in the game (6 total for both profession, vs just 2 stun break skills for ranger). And some of those stubreaks have almost no cooldown e.g. shadow return from thief sword skill #2.

Thief and mesmer have the best down states in the game, together with the elementalist. Able to move considerably during downed state and enter stealth during downed state are big NO-NOs, unless all professions would have equal ability. Stomping someone during stealth should not be possible as the downed opponent cannot even attack against such stomper.

Dual dagger elementalists are also very common in both pvp and WvWvW. Superb mobility and survivability is very powerful combination. The 4th most popular profession seems to be the bunker guardian, an obvious counter to extreme burst damage (bunkers wouldn’t make so much sense without so overpowered burst, it would make more sense to play a balanced build).

So the overpowered and easy top 3 is: 1. thief, 2. mesmer and 3. D/D elementalist

The Anet developers seriously underestimated the importance of mobility. Classes with extreme mobility and free “get away” cards (stealth and teleportation) should NOT have very fast deadly burst. Having such combination leads to static boring meta: glass cannons vs bunkers. No profession should have the ability for extremely fast and easy burst to death. The problem is exemplified in WvWvW where a huge map makes the escape way too easily and allows these problem professions to run a glass cannon without much risks compared to the reward. A good thief, mesmer or D/D elementalist can always get away, unless the enemy is able to predict all its actions.

The reason why tournament plays have other professions as well is that people playing those other professions don’t like to play cheap simple professions and have higher skill to compensate the unfair advantage (and take advantage of the naivety of the simplistic play of the overpowered professions). The reason why thieves don’t completely dominate the top pvp is because most thief players have low skill (some thief players are really good, but let’s be honest: this profession screaming attention for young kids to do “ownage”). Also points cannot be captured during stealth and thieves have very little utility to offer to their team.

People who want fast and easy points flock to the overpowered choices.

Please see very educational videos:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u55vHURPQSw
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B-KMOc_y7xo
Illustrating that the same problem also exists in WoW, with lots of example fights, underlining how broken the game mechanisms and builds are. WoW finally nerfed the things.

I know I am going to be flamed for this message, but just watch the videos first. And I hope somebody would make similar “naked thief” in pvp and WvWvW videos.

The WvWvW titles should have some progression. E.g.
- 1000 kills the 1st title, which you can display (realm avenger, basically a sign "I am not a total newbie)
- 10000 kills for the 2nd title (realm dominator, “a WWW veteran”)
- 100000 kills for the 3rd title (ultimate dominator, “enemies, run away”)

I am sure the 100000 kills title would still be rare. Currently the system is a bad joke compared to the pvp titles: 200 kills in tournaments gives you a champion slayer title and you get a gladiator title with mere 8500 pvp points.

Quoting the thief players of these forums: It is a just a learn to play issue. ;-)

Honestly this lag and the new “improved” culling has been horrible. It can take even >15 seconds to activate the skill (this happened with two huge enemy zergs attacking Desolation controlled Stonemist castle). Sometimes my character was frozen still despite I wasn’t stunned nor immobilized. A lot of people are complaining in map and private chat about the same issue. So I am sure I am not alone.

Deniara / Ayna

The lag has been totally horrible this weekend. Perhaps it is because there is too many players? During morning to noon (GMT time) in Eternal Battlegrounds, when both Visunah Square (VS) and Elona Reach (ER) were trying to capture the Stonemist castle held by Desolation. Both had constant zerg waves attacing Deso at same time. ER finally won the castle after many failed raids. I had 5-30 seconds delay in activating skills, frame rate dropped to 1 frame per 2-3 seconds. Despite the lack I scored over 100 kills so I guess the lag was horrible for the enemy as well.

The culling has been worse after the update. Now it is very common that you cannot even see your own team mates if there is more than 20 people in the area. And if you are roaming alone enemy zergs can pop out of nowhere. Then the super lag kicks in. You hit your escape skill(s) button, but it takes like >5 seconds to activate even if you are not stunned. Then you see your character dying.

Arenanet please revert back to the original culling! The culling hasn’t been fixed nor improved, it got much worse.

*Logically big enemy teams cannot move silently. Introduce a visual cue or text warning on screen: Big enemy team coming/nearby. * Now even with the current broken culling one would have some indicator that

Make the outmanned buff do useful stuff:
- improved health based how badly you are outnumbered by enemy e.g. 10/25/50% total health increase (outmanned 2x, 3x, 4x or more)
- improved thoughness based how badly you are outnumbered, toughness 100/250/+500
- same bonuses for NPCs, siege weapons and structures on the outmanned side (this would make nightcapping a bit more difficult, but still very easy)

The current outmanned buff is pretty much useless and isn’t helping to outnumbered world to gain balance. Most people like even fights. Those even fights are the ones cherished afterwards even when you were the losing side. Almost all my WvWvW experience has been with outmanned buff visible on my screen. Sometimes it seems buffed as my team mates have the buff, but I don’t.

Last night I was killing lots of enemies with my warrior in ER Borderlands. I died myself 5 times and the breakdown of my death:
- 4 times super lag prevented me to activate skills
- 1 time I was alone against 5

Any sort of fair duel between enemy was a win. And yes, I was many times running away. I am not stupid to fight alone against much larger numbers (as long as I can see them).

Ayna Merciful / warrior 80

I agree that the sword off-hand could use a boost, but I am impartial to talk about as I am actually using off-hand sword almost all the time. Still I haven’t seen any other warrior use off-hand sword in WvWvW, spvp or high level pve. So it seems the other weapon choices are better. My main argument to stick to two swords is totally illogical: they look cool. Yes, appearance matters to good-looking sylvari warrior girls like me.

Riposte counter-attack is actually pretty strong, but the problem is that that bleed can last so long time enemy has usually cured it off. *The cooldown of both offhand sword skills could be reduced to 15 and 12 seconds respectively and the bleeding could occur a bit faster (33% faster), without any fear of breaking the game balance. Mesmer’s blurred frenzy would still be way superior to riposte and mace #2 has a block with much faster cooldown.

Ayna Merciful

Introducing new weapons at this point doesn’t make sense. Engineers are limited when it comes to weapon selection, because they have the kits. But this is also a strong counter argument against Anet’s design: engineer should be the king of versatility. Hmm, how can be so versatile, if you need to sacrifice your utility skill slots for the kits?

Please first fix the bugged weapons, traits and speed up the animations e.g. rifle #2 and #5 and elixir gun #2 should be animated twice as path, the animation itself is fine. And make the weapon damage up to the same level other professions can do.

Engineers are also lacking viable stun breaks (elixir S has 60 s recharge, compare that with thief sword skill #2, shadow return with mere 2 initiative cost for a stun break). Engineers lack condition removal. If you take medkit, you can use antidote every 15 seconds to cure just one condition (the skill description says it removes conditions, but it removes just one condition). And to make matters worse the antidote is not auto consumed, but it is in front of your nose, utterly useless condition removal if you get immobilized.

I simply cannot understand why Anet developers are thinking that engineers are overpowered. If they would be as overpowered as developers think, then engineer would not be the least popular profession. Most people always flock towards the easiest choices: easiest for wins and points. I am not claiming you cannot get good results with engineer, but currently engineer seems to be the “only for elites” profession and “work twice as hard to get the results of another class” profession.

Deniara / Ayna

Time Glitch.2460:

I just had the worst run of my life.

Granted, this was the first time I was doing the dungeon, but CM Path 1 just ate my group alive. We didn’t even finish.

Firstly, we wiped repeatedly on Sure Shot. He just juggled us all individually until we all died. No way we could do that, so we skipped him. We kill the bomber and the stealthy lady. We wipe repeatedly on the room where you pull a thousand bandits. I don’t understand how you’re supposed to beat that part… None of us could AoE enough to take them out before they just beat us all down immediately. So we looked up the exploit, went up around the rocks, and to the final boss.

Frost kicked our kitten

I don’t get how you’re supposed to mitigate the damage he does with his frost. I could barely keep up CONSTANTLY using Super Elixir’s and Elixir R for cond removal and stamina regen. We tried everything we could think of from bursting him and ignoring his damage to kiting to… You name it. We just could not get him down even past half health.

What’s the trick? Is this boss impossible now that you can’t just waypoint back and zerg him to death?

We spent THREE HOURS trying to beat this run and just gave up.

I did all paths of CM yesterday as an engineer. For the first time in my life. I am a newbie in dungeons.

I think you have misunderstood how elixir gun works. Elixir gun #5 (super elixir) provides a rather weak area healing over time, but it has very low chance to remove any conditions (light field combo effect). But elixir gun #3 (furnigate) removes conditions with each tick. To win Frost you just gotta hit hard, preferably from distance.. I was mostly using grenades.

I assume you got a level 80 team with good gear. Try to dodge when you fight against Sure Shot as he can hit hard. Put perma weakness and blind on him.

I hope this helps

Deniara / Ayna

I love that most of the players of Visunah Square and Elona Reach are running glass cannons. They hit hard, but even a strong fart can kill them. Almost 150 kills in 2 hours today. Only 3 deaths for me. And I am not even fully geared up and I wasn’t in any team. And I don’t play cheap builds

Today it seems that VS and ER were both attacking Deso two hours in a row, without attacking each other. From our view point it seems VR and ER are teaming up against Desolation. Congrats for ER finally getting the Stonemist castle.

I agree that Moorta is doing a great job and deserves a credit for that. Desolation is sometimes without any commanders on the map. We need more active commanders. Not too many, because I wouldn’t also like to see the map full of commanders.

If Desolation can now pull the effort together during the week as well, we can dominate tier #1.

Good players are welcome to join Desolation server. We have very active pve, so getting into dungeons or doing group events at Orr won’t be a problem. Forget the rumors of tier #1 being more difficult. Getting experience, kills and treasure in WvWvW has never been this easy. You just attack any enemy and they drop like babies, sometimes giving rare or exotic loot.

Deniara / Ayna

I often play a grenadier and I can say that despite the lack of autotargeting in grenade kit landbased combat can give sore fingers for excessive typing of mouse click #1 and key #1 together, I definitely do NOT want auto-targeting for grenade kit. It would utterly ruin it for pvp and WvWvW.

What the grenade kit needs is more damage to attack #1. Considering the slow fly time of the grenades at long range and how easy it is dodge them and how difficult it is to land them against any moving target or moving yourself at same time, the damage is just… pathetic.

Yes, it is true that trying to move, kite, dodge and ground target at same time is difficult. But wasn’t engineer supposed to be the most difficult profession to play? Only for elite players. Do 2-3x more to achieve almost the same, which other professions can do more easily.

Deniara / Ayna

Most warrior weapons are fine, but could use some tweaking and utility. I wouldn’t for example advice to add overall damage to hammer, because otherwise knockdowns could easily dominate the meta. Some professions lack reliable access to stability. I would do a few minor changes, which should be technically very easy to program:

Greatsword
100 blades – Has overpowered burst for so short cooldown skill, should do 30% less damage
greatsword burst, arcing slice, is too weak, should do 10% more damage and remove one boon
OR swap arcing slice with 100 blades (would make sense), making 100 blades the burst skill instead. Currently almost nobody uses GS burst skill as it is so underpowered compared to 100 blades and full adrenaline gives nice regeneration (adrenal health) and 12% extra damage (berserker’s power)
Forceful greatsword trait is overpowered and the real reason why many choose GS over other warrior weapons. Either tone it down or give similar buffing trait for other melee weapons as well

Main-hand Sword
final thrust – do 10% less damage normally and additional 20% damage if the target is under 50% health
Hamstring – Make the crippling time scale with condition damage and currently it seems that the condition duration % doesn’t affect it (bugged?)

Off-hand sword
impale/rip – reduce cooldown to 15 s OR (like another person suggested), make rip actually pull the target to you instead of just ripping

General changes to one handed sword: slightly decrease the bleeding damage, but make it occur faster. Currently even 19 seconds bleeds are not uncommon and very impractical in pvp or WvWvW (the condition gets removed before it takes full effect). Slightly increase the direct damage. Sword is extremely weak against objects (immune to bleed) and targets, which can cure/remove condition fast. Currently offhand sword does only condition damage. It could do a little less condition damage, but more direct damage

Rifle
killshot * reduce damage by 20%, reduce skill activation time to 1.25 s. Currently kill shot can do huge damage, but it is extremely easy to dodge due so long activation time

Shield
Shield stance – reduce cooldown to 25 seconds

Longbow
arcing arrow – increase range to 1200 (without trait), currently flies so slowly, so it is easy to dodge

Deniara / Ayna

I like underwater combat. But I have noticed I am in minority. Most people hate underwater combat in all forms, also pve. For some reason underwater combat seems to be a major tackle for many (in less nice words I would say most GW2 players suck in underwater combat). I like the full 3D movement, to be able to dodge in all 3 directions, move freely.

The only issue is that you cannot stomp underwater, but I can live with that. Also many elites and skills don’t work underwater, but there is usually a logical reason why they don’t function underwater.

Deniara

Build and use the siege machines.
Repair walls, upgrade the towers.
Help to capture supply mines.
Kill enemy dolyaks and protect your dolyaks.
Kill enemy sentry guards.
Win the Hyleks, Ogres and Quaggans for your side.
By running after the zerg, you won’t learn as much.

Deniara

Good decision!

Static tiers are no fun, but resetting the ladder and having then lowest tier servers going to tier #1 in EU and some top tier worlds dropping to middle or low tiers would have lead to many weeks of very uneven matches.

I would recommend Anet developers openly discuss ideas about possible changes to the ranking system, before implementing them, with the community.

Now it seems it is one more week of Visu vs Deso vs Elona in euro tier #1. Fight goes on!

Deniara / Ayna

Auesis.7301:

Oh sure, I wasn’t claiming that Thieves are the best at single-target weakness. They are the best, however, at multi-target weakness. That method I outlined above can weaken entire groups at a moment’s notice, as one poison field will pulse multiple times and auto-attacks through it are just icing on the cake. It’s not even taking away from ranged DPS, as it is pretty much instant cast and can fit in to a Cluster Bomb rotation with absolutely no problem.

D/D auto-attack also applies weakness with the same trait, so if the Thief knows how to play well, they can deal much higher DPS than at range while keeping up useful conditions, and they have sacrifice absolutely nothing to do so (the poison/weakness trait is in a power tree). The main concern is the player’s ability (the skill floor is a lot higher for Thieves to meet equal performance of other professions). I acknowledge that many people find this a problem, but the Thieves I’ve got to know and play with regularly are easily some of the most reliable players I’ve met due to this elevation in input requirement.

Thief’s cluster bomb is amazing. I think it is the biggest damage spammable 1200 range AoE skill in the game.

I have all 8 professions. I would say engineer is the most difficult to play effectively due lack of damage, lots of quirks and just broken down implementation and design. Thief is among the easier to professions to play effectively in any game mode. I mean what is difficult about playing a thief?

I have been playing a lot of warrior lately, which is my other main besides engineer, simply to give rest to my hands. Warrior is the easy mode in pve, guardian and thief come close. Grenadier engineer with 2 other kits requires so much key and mouse button presses that it is crazy. In order to solo group events at Orr or be effective in WvWvW you need to be able to move, kite, dodge and do ground targeting at same time. Yet, thief can do more damage just pressing few buttons in similar repeated patterns. And if anything goes wrong just hit shadow refuge, hide in shadows or shadow step to safety and back again to remove 3 conditions. I wouldn’t call that difficult. I am sure my 4-year-old son could soon learn to play a thief if I would let him use computer instead of Nintendo.

Thief is Anet’s easy points for anybody profession in WvWvW or pvp. Mesmer comes 2nd. By they way both of those professions can also solo group events. Stealth + short range teleportation combined with high damage output is extremely powerful combination.

Deniara

I fight for Desolation. Let me tell you one thing. I have never seen a guild team in our side during the hours I play. I see max 3-5 guys from one guild. Most of are just pugs and we have lots of underleveled and undergeared guys (including me, I got full exotic armor, but not yet exotic jewelry, fixed soon though). On many occasions there aren’t even any Deso commanders in EB. But I am mostly a roamer. I am rarely in any team. So the player experience might be different for others.

I am sure every server has good and bad players. This is true for all tiers.

I don’t even consider myself a good player.

Last night I had a blast at Borderlands, doing solo roaming with my engineer. I killed several enemy teams from VS and Elona underwater alone. Yes, even 1 vs 3. It seems most people really fail at underwater combat, which I think it is really cool as I love full 3D movement without limits. I captured all three Quaggan tribes from enemy to us and I did the central island group event many times in a row. Plus killed tons of Krait (they give crap loot, so not worth it). I also had a 1-vs-1 against Elona engineer. Finally a 1-vs-1 against same profession. First time! Pity all the enemy engineers are so squishy and die freaking easily.

I finally died when I was reading wiki trying to find out the BL central island storm generator thing operators and asking help from map chat. I still have no clue how it works. So while my keyboard input was away, 5 man enemy team comes to central islands and gibs me dead. No hard feelings. I have also several times died when visiting the bathroom or answering phone. Kinda difficult to play well while your ex calls you and asks questions.

But I agree with one thing. Desolation should spend less time trying to stomp Elona and just running around in zergs. Both Desolation and Elona should team up to gimp VS.

And you should fear us in open combat. We hit like a train. Hehe :-P

Deniara / Ayna

PS. I have no issues with either Elona or VS. It is true that VS is master of siege and defending keeps, and running back into safety fast. Amazing coverage, almost always huge 15-20 men VS zergs roaming on the map where you least expect and with the new “improved” culling that means I see just 1-2 enemies, until suddenly I see 15 more, which just ran over my dying corpse. But please don’t bad mouth other worlds. Even the lowest tier worlds surely have some amazing players, I know this for sure as I used to fight for Blacktide, which is now heading to the bottom tier. The tier doesn’t tell much about the player quality. It is all about coverage and time invested. The bigger numbers and better coverage wins, not skill.

Auesis.7301:

stof.9341:

- AoE Weakness up 100% of the time but I’m not sure it works that well on bosses anyway

This is pretty much THE defining benefit of having a Thief aside from Shadow Refuge. It definitely does work on bosses, because shooting through the poison field (weakness on poison) applies weakness at such a fast rate that the boss will never be able to shake it off.

Hmm, if only want to apply weakness on the boss, isn’t an engineer a better option?
See http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Elixir_gun
And http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Tranquilizer_Dart
It has both weakness and bleed on its auto attack. You get 1200 range with rifled barrels trait.
The weakness actually lasts much longer time than the wiki page says. Easily 4 seconds. I can confirm that you can easily keep permanent weakness on a boss with it. In fact you can even swap weapons to e.g. grenade kit, rifle, pistols and then back fast back to elixir gun and still have the weakness applied on the boss if you have fast fingers. I use it to solo bosses alone.

Today I was soloing Southsun Cove. Yes, I know it is freaking empty void and has crappy drop. I just wanted to see if those big veteran karkas, which lay those tiny karkas all over, can be soloed. They can.
Funnily I saw a greatsword warrior + dual dagger thief there. They died.

I know engineers suck, but…

BACK to the main topic. I think thieves could be very viable in dungeon if played well. Even a glass cannon could be great assuming the player knows how to time his/her dodges and knows how and when to retreat from danger. Thief and mesmer have the best tools of disengangement in the game. They decide when they leave the combat. Shadow refuge is super useful group utility. And thieves can actually do comparable dps to warriors, just spec them differently.

Deniara / Ayna

Shanos.2459:

Leadfoot.9071:

3) Penalize players who quit matches early

This is just a bad idea. In GW1 I played Alot of Random Areana.
Some days I spent more time not playing due to deserter penalty, cause every matchup we didnt have a monk and the oposing team did. and in that game having the monk was a free win.
So after awile of being denied the ability to play I lost interest and only played when I had absolutly nothing better to do.

dont punish players like there children standing in the corner for 15 min cause they were bad. If the player wants to leave let them, someone else might join to take there place or auto balance.
.

Well, what do you suggest instead?

Ragequitting rarely does good to team based game modes.

I didn’t mind the GW1 punishing for early quit feature as it did have the /resign feature You could try to convince your team to /resign or just commit suicide against enemy if you had a hopeless combination e.g. 4 healers… well, once I got fast 10 wins with me as Rt/P hybrid heal + 3 monks, so it seems 4 healers can sort of semi-work, far from my preference.

In GW1 RA monks were overrated. I got lots of 25 wins (theoretical max) without any monk in my team. I was usually playing Rt/P, a hybrid ritualist healer damage dealer using my own build. I was often the only healer in team, while scoring most of the kills for the team with spread pressure and devious life steal + spear attack spike. If you think I only got lucky and very weak opponents you are wrong. We often faced high ranking sync teams with balanced team or abusing the most overpowered builds of the month. I know some of those sync teams also use voice chat and farm the gladiator points all days. I consider syncing as cheating.

I think having no monk in team is not a good reason to quit, but I also wanted to leave the team I saw some people usually disfunctional builds e.g. healing hands W/Mo or really not contributing to the team e.g. an attacker doing way too little damage or rushing into his own death. I liked to have teams with good pressure damage and denial (interrupt, hexes etc), because that is fast wins. Still a good monk, me as Rt/P + good damage was the 25 wins in an easy mode. Very hard to counter two healers and having do much pressure damage. Even the best enemy monks (and 2 monk) team lost their energy in the long run.

But in RA really anything was possible. You could get 3-4 mesmers against you. You could e.g. get a Mo/W to your team and it first looked “wow, now I finally got some good monk to my team” and then it turns out that the monk is waving his hammer, smiting and attacking the enemies first and dying in <10 seconds. Or W/E spamming flare and using meteor shower until they energy run out, which was really fast. LOL

Oh those days, back then pvp was fun!

Deniara Devious

Great video and very clear commentary.

I hope the Arenanet game designers watch this video as well

Deniara

Zerbo.5381:

If you’re having problems getting one-shotted by thieves than maybe you’re not dodging properly (dodging when unnecessary and having nothing left when you really need it for example) or don’t have a stun breaker on your utility bar (I realize you can’t always dodge it). I used to hate fighting burst builds on my thief until I discovered how to use shadowstep properly.

(part of message deleted) If you don’t believe me, than go duel someone while you’re in a party together (they can see you in stealth). You will see how worthless the class becomes then.

If you think a thief is worthless without stealth, well what can I say: Learn to Play

That was just a joke. I am sure most of the players in these forums are better players than me. I never claimed to be a super player in GW2. I have small kids, not all days and nights time to play. And I play all 8 professions to know the core mechanisms of each profession and avoid boredom of just doing the same.

While it is true that under the right circumstances and during the correct phase of the moon any profession can kill anybody, it still doesn’t change the facts: neither stealth or teleportation have any counter at all. And this game is far from being balanced.

The Anet game designers seriously underestimated the importance of the ability to engage and disengage combat, aka mobility. In competitive death match style pvp those professions which have access to superior mobility are better off, even if their health pool is lower or they would do slightly less damage. Warriors look great on paper, high health, great dps, and warriors do very well in pve, but I think most people agree warriors lack in pvp. Why? Because warriors lack in ability to engage and disengage compared to the top #3 professions: thief, mesmer and D/D elementalist.

There is a very easy way to get a good overall idea if some professions, weapons, skills, traits and builds are over powered and which are underpowered. Simply look at the usage statistics. Arenanet hasn’t provided any such statistics, but a quick glance at spvp seems to be that a majority of players are playing mesmer, thief and D/D elementalist. And guardians are wanted everywhere. While some other professions, like the engineer, are pretty rare. Same logic could be used to analyze which traits, weapons, utility skills etc. are underpowered. You can disagree as I cannot know what are the statistics at all the different servers at different hours. But the general rule of thumb is: most players flock to easy wins, easy points. And then they defend their profession/weapon of choice here in forums, posting messages like “learn 2 play”.

I usually carry a stun break in my builds, but the problem is that the stun break skills often have a very long cooldown (e.g. 60 seconds). It often happens that I die when my stunbreak is on cooldown. Have you noticed that thieves and mesmers have the highest amount of stunbreak skills in the game? 6 in total.
thief stunbreak skills: haste, infiltrator’s signet, roll for initiative, shadow return #1 and #2, shadowstep
mesmer stunbreak skills: blink, decoy, mirror images, power break, signet of midnight and swap

While ranger has just 2 stunbreak skills: lighting reflexes and signet of renewal. This is pretty much forcing the ranger to take the trait to transfer stun to his/her pet.

Many stunbreak skills have adverse effect e.g. warrior’s frenzy has 60 s recharge and while in frenzy you take double damage. So they are left very vulnerable right after the stunbreak. In the meanwhile thieves can spend mere 2 initiative with shadow return to get a stunbreak. Fair, eh?

Interesting side note: the three most popular professions also have the best downed state in the game:
thieves have shadow escape (teleport), smoke bomb (stealth, even while downed)
mesmers have deception (brief stealthing, teleporting the mesmer to a random location and creating a clone where he used to be)
elementalists have vapor form (able to move 3 seconds where you want and being able to interact with objects while being downed)
For comparison the least popular profession engineer has the biggest joke of downed skill #2: grappling line (pull enemy to you, duh!)

I assume that there is a reason why Anet didn’t implement deathmatch in the 1st place. Maybe during their internal play testing it didn’t function well? I used to work as a game programmer. Implementing deathmatch would have actually been slightly easier than a conquest mode. I think the reasons for the lack of this game mode lie in the core mechanisms of the game.

Deniara / Ayna

Audio visually GW2 is the best MMORPG out there. Even GW1 still looks good. It was so ahead of its competition when it came out in 2005. Now GW2 just makes things look even more pretty. The backgrounds, the character models, the textures, the lights, the particle effects, monsters, music all are glorious.

Deniara

Zerbo.5381:

Maybe this should be moved to the thief section…

Counters to a thief in stealth: Conditions (especially if they don’t have removal on stealth, which many don’t), Chill, AOE in general, dodging after a given amount of time the thief was in stealth, Knockback/Push, Knockdown, Pull, Aegis, Block, Invincible, Stuns, Invulnerable, Blowout, traps/Immobilize/Entangle, Teleport/Stunbreaker, Cripple, Blinds, Daze, channeled attacks as thief is going into stealth and most importantly- anticipation of what the thief will do next (backstab? tactical strike? sneak attack? run?) and have a plan for each possible outcome. This can only be learned with experience.

Any profession has the capability of 1-shotting you in a “team fight”, not just the thief.

By the way- I use shadow refuge about 70% of the time offensively in pvp.

The bottom line is: stealth shouldn’t be the reason to not implement other pvp modes.

This discussion belongs here. It is NOT about thieves, but about the things I mentioned in my first post: mainly burst damage, lack of counters and it hurting the pvp game and leading to a boring glass cannon vs bunker meta.

NONE of the things you mentioned is a counter to stealth. They are generic mechanism to hurt any profession (chill, blind, knockback etc. you mentioned will hurt any attacker even not in stealth). None of them actually reveal the target from stealth. Why are you so afraid if Anet would actually give each profession some optional trait or skill to see stealthed opponents or temporarily create an area where stealth doesn’t function. Nobody is forcing any character to equip such skill or trait.

You are misleading people if you are telling that all professions have the ability to 1-shot a target. Well, tell me how e.g. a guardian can instantly 1-shot a target in full health? It would actually be interesting to see such guardian build, now all guardians I see are bunkers.

NO profession should have an easy option to 1-shot a target. Too much burst is too much. Warrior’s 100 blades and kill shot do tons of damage, probably the highest single skill damage in the game, but at least you see them coming (kill shot takes a long time, very easy to avoid, same for 100 blades, unless you are stunned, immobilized etc). Currently 100nades engineer has probably the highest burst in the game (~18k instant if you get lucky), but that engineer burst is extremely difficult to pull in real life. You need to be inside the enemy character model.

Teleportation is another issue, which needs to be addressed. And this is mostly the problem of the mesmer profession as mesmer can portal in an entire team, yet there are no antiteleportation skills, no antiteleportation aura.

Guild Wars 1 had totally superior pvp compared to GW2. GW1 had gvg, HA, RA, TA, just to mention few. GW1 didn’t have any stealth mechanism. Even the teleportation of assassins was very limited to its user only and Anet later introduced (wisely) a delay right after the teleportation to avoid insta gibbing (teleporting near enemy and spiking him to death). Now this same delay mechanism could very well be used also in GW2. Keep the teleportation, but e.g. introduce 1 second delay of no action (disoriented) right after the teleport.

If you think, I am a thief hater, you are totally wrong. I also have a thief character. And Deniara Devious happens to be that thief. I feel that thieves lack utility and support (shadow refuge is super useful as a support skill, but I mean that is the only really good support skill thieves have). I think this would make thieves also more welcome to dungeons and add variety to the play. But enough of thieves. Let’s stick to topic.

Deniara Devious

xiv.7136:

Removing one boon is rather weak for a F1 skill that is considered the worst ability in the game, unless some other changes are made, for example turning immunities, mistform, stealth etc into boons that could be shattered, then the skill would have an important tactical place in the meta.

I really would want to see more variety in the game. And currently huge majority of Warriors are using greatsword almost all the time. Same for mesmers and greatsword is also the weapon of choice of many guardians and rangers. If we keep buffing the greatsword even tiny bit more, we might as well rename the entire game into Greatsword Wars 2 as other weapons become more and more irrelevant.

100 Blades has an incredibly short cooldown for a skill, which does so massive burst damage, just 8 seconds cooldown. E.g. hammer skill #2, fierce blow, does significantly less damage and has 12 seconds cooldown.

You can use a burst skill every 15 seconds as it is easy to get full adrenaline. Being able to remove one boon every 15 seconds, while doing nice damage is a powerful game mechanism. Tell which other profession can strips boons from enemies so easily without allocating any skill slot nor trait for that?

Deniara / Ayna

xiv.7136:

Warriors are fairly balanced and even a little on the underpowered side in PVP.

They are however overpowered in PVE, due to mightstacking GS, the rest of their weapons are fine.

Nerf the damage of 100b and make it mobile and 360 degrees, remove the GS might stacking or give it an internal cooldown, and give warriors more condition removal, access to protection, and give GS 100b a boon removal effect.

That might be a more balanced way of doing it.

Excellent suggestions, except 100 blades shouldn’t remove the boons or be mobile. It is already overpowered as it is. It should keep the player rooted, just like the sword burst skill (flurry) does. Great sword’s burst ability is at the moment underpowered and few players use it (while everything else about the weapon is pretty overpowered due the might stacking trait etc). E.g. keep the greatsword burst F1 damage as it, but that it removes one boon from enemy. Now there would be a reason to use the burst.

I also agree that warrior is perhaps the most balanced profession in the game, together with guardian. So I wouldn’t suggest drastic changes to either. Just minor tweaks, like small reduction to the current cooldown, to make some of the least used utility skills and weapons a bit more attractive.

Warriors are really good in pve, basically the easy mode in many areas like Orr, but in pvp and WvWvW, I feel that they are among the weakest professions. I think Arenanet is aware of this.

Deniara / Ayna

daydream.2938:

Deathmatch basically =a team fight.

Team fights typically last 30 seconds to a minute. Idk how great that would be to Q up for.
Lack of healers make death match unlikely, unless it was structured as a best of format.

And @ the above poster, i cant disagree with what uve said enough. Stealth is core to the thief, it has counters like dodging backstab, or aoe into it. Portal is strong ill give you that.
Limit burst? are you kidding bunkers would nearly never die.

Eliminating burst/stealth, might as well delete thief. Tbh this sounds like you want to make it a more forgiving game. I prefer the make a mistake and you die aspect myself, makes it a higher skill curve game.

What you wrote doesn’t make sense. Since there is no way to see invisible / stealthed opponents or deny stealth from opponents, how are you going to dodge a stealthed opponent backstabbing you? Many thieves use haste with their burst, making the entire burst happen incredibly fast. With team death match a smart enemy team would utilize many fast bursts on a single target. Target would be dead in less than half a second. Very short matches indeed. The team which manages to make the 1st kill has an upper hand to win the entire match. And I don’t see that being much of a fun.

Killing bunkers has never been a problem. If you spend all your traits and upgrades into making a bunker, you are likely doing little damage. Since it would be a team match, the bunker would be the last surviving member of the losing team. Thus with the lack insane burst, no smart player would play a full bunker. Same as those healing hands W/Mos or toucher R/N in Guild Wars 1. They were the last to die in their losing team.

Let’s make this straight: I really want to have team deathmatch pvp in Guild Wars 2. But with the current game mechanism I don’t see it as a viable game form.

I would want team matches in the style of Guild Wars 1 Random Arenas and Team Arenas, but I would like those matches to last from 1 minute to 12 minutes, like they did in RA. Typical match length there was about 2-3 minutes (counting the time from the very start).

Deniara / Ayna

It depends. I can imagine most players would say: go for vitality, but I have myself been doing very well having “just” slightly over 20k health at level 80 on my warrior. But I use dual swords and life steal consumables most of the time. I have tried of course greatsword, hammer, axe etc. Just not my style. Dual swords looks aesthetically better.

My build allows me to solo big mobs or do group events alone at ruins of Orr alone.
I have invested a lot into precision and such to get the critical hit chance to around 70% (more with For Great Justice shout). With omnomberry ghost you have a 66% of life stealing at critical hit, meaning roughly half of the hits of blade are causing life steal. Critical hits are causing extra bleeding. Yes, I have invested a lot into condition damage as well (most players would say this is insane investment) to cause 7000 bleeding damage per hit. The bleed damage seems to be very nice in WvWvW which is my main arena as the bleeding damage really owns the Guild Lords. So there you, my recipe to solo the guild lord NPCs

My experience from the dungeons are pretty limited, so your mileage may vary..

Deniara

My advice is:
Do not spend karma to buy regular gear. You can buy harvesting tools, salvage kits from normal vendors for gold. You can either craft similar / better weapons, armor, jewelry yourself or buy them at very reasonable cheap prices from the Black Lion Trading.

I use karma to buy:
1. Breathing masks (you cannot craft these yourself)
2. Food ingredients (if you are into cooking, this is a must, crafting special foods and eating them gives you more experience points and very useful bonuses, you should never play without any consumables, they just make the game much more easier)
3. Level 80 exotic armor with superior runes. One piece of level 80 exotic armor costs 42k karma and is sold at the different temples of Ruins of Orr, when those temples are are not contested. In my opinion some of the runes and armors sold there are the best in the game, so it is worth saving your karma to get those armors when you reach level 80.

Deniara

I loved the Random Arena and Team Area in Guild Wars 2. Both were basically team deathmatch. I did tens of thousands of kills and victories without any sync farming. However…

Deathmatch mode in GW2 would be bad idea at its current state. The burst damage is simply way too high and there are no dedicated healers to counter the spike damage. Imagine if 3 enemy players attack on target and all of them have fast burst. They are using voice chat. The character is dead in less than 0.5 seconds. That is faster than human reaction time. Not even time to dodge roll!

To make matters worse some professions have the ability to stealth and enter stealth even during combat. Imagine 3 stealthed opponents using a voice chat to synchronize things and release their deadly combo: dead in < 0.5 seconds without even seeing the enemy. And even if the assassination attempt would fail, this profession would still be able to stealth themselves again and flee to safety.

Guild Wars 2 is simplistic game, best for casual gamers. Yes, I think the esport thing will never happen. Pvp is pretty much dead. Max 50 servers active, compare that with WvWvW for example. One top tier in WvWvW has more players in Borderlands + Eternal Battlegrounds than the spvp combined.

The only way team deathmatch would work in GW2, is:
1. Limit the burst damage e.g. max 3000 dmg/hit and give diminishing returns e.g. if several enemy players attack the same target within 1 second, the second one does 1/2 damage, the third does 1/4 damage and so on. Deaths could still occur fast from full health in about 2-4 seconds, but now this would give at least give some reaction time to players.
2. Reduce the cooldown of some (but not all) defensive skills. Currently many of them are 60 second recharge, meaning that after using the skill, you need to wait one full minute (long time in pvp) to use it again
3. Remove or fix stealth and teleportation. In a good game every game mechanism has a counter, but for some weird reason stealth and teleportation currently lack counters. Either rework the skills and traits to do something else and remove stealth and teleportation entirely. Or give each profession tools to see invisible (stealthed), prevent entering stealth (deny stealth skills), deny the use of teleportation (anti-teleportation area should be large or single enemy target skill preventing that character from teleporting for certain amount of time). Also stealthed person should come visible if he/she is target of any damage, bleeding, burning etc.

In general these suggestions would significantly make Guild Wars 2 a better game. I mean the existing pvp would also be better.

Deniara / Ayna

Nothing wrong with your build.

Actually if you look at the other forums threads here you can see screen shots of tanky warriors dying to thieves in less than 3 seconds as well. It seems that 25000-28000 hit points and 2500-3500 armor+thoughness isn’t enough. A lucky critical hit with backstab can still hit 13000. Ouch!

It doesn’t make sense to make your character so tanky that it can sustain 13k hits. Just accept the fact that while the game is as it is, thieves can insta gib anything if your defense skills are in cooldown or you got surprised. The good news is: thieves like that usually die easily. I have killed several thieves on my own. I usually happens so that their skills are in cooldown and I sort of surprise them. In WvWvW I saw a thief attacking somebody in my team from a distance. I wasn’t in any party, just free roaming. I quickly charged in and dropped supply crate over that thief and then I used every grenade skill I had. The thief became stealthed and teleported away. Even during downed state thieves can do that. So I kept spamming AoE randomly all over the neighborhood. End result: I saw two dead thief corpses. More badges of honor for me.

In my honest opinion the burst damage is out of control. No profession should be able to do over 3k damage per hit in pvp or WvWvW, unless it is a big siege weapon. But the biggest reason why people complain about thieves that they can so easily get away or do it from surprise, because of stealth. Stealth is a broken game mechanism, but I haven’t seen any of the developers comment about it. ANY game mechanism which has no counter is broken and should be either immediately removed from the game or every profession should get a viable counter against. So far no profession has “see invisible” or “deny stealth” skill. Teleportation is another broken game mechanism, especially in WvWvW. There is no anti-teleportation skill / mechanism. I simply cannot understand why experienced game developers implemented stealth and teleportation into GW2, because we have already seen from other MMORPGs that these cause big problems. In most other MMORPGs characters cannot enter stealth in combat and any damage during stealth, bleeding etc. makes a stealthed person visible. Also movement during stealth is limited (in GW2 thieves can move 50% faster during stealth using a trait). It is a common belief among the player base that Anet developers are themselves playing thieves and having their “fun”.

Deniara / Ayna

Arenanet probably intentionally set the Pvp Montly so low, because the number of players in pvp is also so low. The number of pve and WvWvW players greatly outnumber the number of pvp players, probably 1:50.

The reasons for the unpopularity of pvp have been discussed in other threads e.g.
only one game mode (conquest) which most people don’t like, overly high burst vs. tank boring meta, broken game mechanisms (stealth, teleportation, both which should have never been in the game in the 1st place), few classes and builds totally dominating the meta (Heart of Mists is full of thieves, mesmers and D/D elementalists, plus people yelling looking for a guardian). As long as this issues are not fixed, I don’t think pvp will become popular.

I also think the pvp ranks and titles are too easy to obtain. E.g. you get the slayer Title with 2000 kills in spvp and Champion Slayer title with 200 kills in tournaments. For comparison the WvWvW title for killing, Ultimate Dominator, requires 250000 kills in WvWvW. I think the numbers should be adjusted that they are more even. Many have achieved the Champion slayer title or the Slayer title, but I still haven’t seen anybody in the game with the Ultimate Dominator title.

Deniara

I fully agree.

Arenanet should very quickly:
1. Add WvWvW queue indicator (estimated time, how many people in queue). Waiting for several hours and still not getting into WvWvW is no fun and having no idea how long time you need to wait just blows.
2. WvWvW player quota / cap needs to be increased. WvWvW is currently the *only thing, which keeps many people playing this game.* PvP in GW2 is pretty much dead, allocate more resources to the WvWvW please.
3. Fix the rating system. The ladder point reset was a bad idea.

The next matchup looks very hilarious. Basically a lot of top tier servers dropping to low tiers and lowest tier servers going to tier #1:
http://mos.millenium.org/matchups#EU

Currently the situation in many of the lower servers is that there are just few players against a server, which completely dominates the map. Should they go to tier #1 just because they have a big point advantage? Once you get a hold of a biggest portion of the map it is easy to defend it if you just have enough coverage, so I am afraid this Saturday’s situation might already be a good indicator what is to come.

Anet could still fix this or we are going to have a lot of outraged players after a week.

Deniara

Thief Wars 2
Greatsword Wars 2

Vilkata.4725:

Grenade engineer is good for standing in the back and launching AoEs. If you’re traited for it you can get 1900 range on all grenades. Also each skill could throw 3 grenades, each one being it’s own AoE, so it’s almost like bending the 5-target AoE limit a little.

Facts:
1. Grenades have 1200 range. With the grandmaster, grenadier, trait the range increases to 1500 and 2 grenades become 3, but the toolbelt grenade barrage still has 1200 range.
2. Grenade skill #1 still does really low damage compared to any ranged attack from other professions
3. Grenades at long range are extremely easy to dodge, because they travel so slow and enemy gets the red circles as a warning sign well before the grenades are even close by
4. All the grenades rarely hit the same target unless enemy is closer than melee range (basically inside your character model)

Grenades can be used effectively in the WvWvW, but requires a lot of skill. You need to be running and doing ground targeting at same time. There is no auto attack under the grenade kit when you are on dry land. Most people hate to constantly need to click both button #1 and mouse button to do ground targeting and then see it doing only about 200 dmg/grenade with circa 2000 points in power and about 50% crit chance.

And don’t expect to have any spiking power. Throwing grenades is more like throwing soap bubbles at your enemy and hoping they will be scared of them. The 100nades spike is only possible with preparation and less than melee range.

Deniara / Ayna

HUH!? I had completely opposite experience with both my engineer and warrior at the maps of Orr. It felt like tons easier than before. Like somebody had seriously turned on the easy mode. Note: I have been doing some of the temple group events ALONE in the past.

Now there are more people in the Orr and actually doing group events. Big improvements. Thumbs up to Anet for achieving this!!

Visuals and the loot also seem a bit improved. I saw more chests than I noticed before. Anycase Orr really is now fun. *Anet developers really got Orr much better now and two added waypoints were positioned well Orr seems now the perfect place to farm for those of us who don’t like dungeons and like to roam alone.

I also saw other players just running, gathering materials and doing their best to avoid the Risen. I guess they were farming crafting materials?

I just steamrolled over the Risen. Killing the Risen seems to give good drop, often useful materials or level 80 greens, which you can gamble at the mystic forge to get level 80 rares. I just one rare out of 4 level 76-80 green items, which made me happy. I don’t yet have full exotic gear on any of characters as I am busy playing 8 different professions. I don’t even have full level 80 gear, so rare is still good for me. Despite being a bit undergeared even the bigger Risen mobs are not a threat. And most of the group events seem easier to solo than before. Basically you won’t die there, unless you go afk (e.g. phone call, bathroom break) or do something stupid. Dang in most fights, even when completely surrounded by enemies, my mere 20k health didn’t dip under 19k at any point. I have invested more in defense than most players though.

The veterans seem to have more health, but the damage seems to be roughly the same. So they just take longer time to kill. The giant abominations can do some damage, but you can either use ranged weapons or quick hit & run + dodge to kill them fast without them ever hitting you at all. So funny to see so huge abomination drop down like a baby. I recommend to do the champion bosses with a group, but most of them are possible to solo as well.

Tip: bring a blocking skill to Orr and see what it does!

And if you need help traveling in Orr, feel free to message. I will be quite busy in following days, but then I should have some time if you want to guest roam the area.

Deniara / Ayna

I agree mostly with Vöz.

The 100nades burst is very difficult to pull against a mobile target, who knows how to play. Engineer immobilize skills like the net shot miss very easily and in order to do that 18k damage you need to spec yourself into a full glass cannon and stand right inside the other person’s character model (closer than melee range). I would say the thief’s cloak & dagger -> steal+mug -> backstab + heartseeker combo is much more easier to execute. But: No profession should be able to do so much spike damage.

The grenade damage is not the problem, but the kit refinement trait. I think the kit refinement rate additional damage should be nerfed quite seriously by 40%.
I would also be happy if the grenade barrage would do less damage (20% reduction) if the grenade auto attack would do more damage. Now grenades fly slow and are very easy to dodge from long distance (see the red circles, eh?). Even with 30 points in explosive traits and the grandmaster grenadier trait and Superior Sigil of Force on weapon, the grenade attack #1 does less damage compared to ranged options of the other classes. So improve the grenade kit #1 damage by maybe 30% to make it more viable and slightly tone down the grenade barrage + kit refinement.

Much less burst damage, slight more sustained dps in the long long run

Grenades flying at very long distance are rarely a problem as they are A) easy to dodge B ) all those grenades rarely hit the same target C) there is max 5 characters affected by single AoE Damage D) the AoE area of most grenade skills is pretty small

Deniara / Ayna

Haha! The funniest engineer video ever! I hope Anet developers also watch it with a good sense of humor. Everything in it is so true!

Deniara

DreamOfACure.4382:

Healing is a good stat when you’re making a support build. And it doesn’t have to be a Guardian Support either.

Full-on Support builds are rare. That’s why Healing seems useless, because people who use it are far and few between.

It’s got nothing to do with healing strength.

I didn’t write that healing power is useless. I wrote that it is less useful to most than other options. Let’s give some numbers. I assume level 80 characters:

Warrior’s Healing signet heals 3320 + Healing Power. Assume 200 points put to healing power. That is 6% increase in total amount of healing.

Mesmer’s Ether Feast heals 5560+healing power (+ 640 per illusion and 10% of healing power per illusion). Assume 200 points put to healing power. That is mere 3.5% increase in total amount of healing.

As you can see even 200 points spent in healing power barely affects the total healing at all. And to make things worse some healing traits, like warrior’s adrenal health, are not affected by healing power at all!

Assuming that level 80 character has roughly 2000 points in power. Adding 200 more points to power would lead to 10% total increase in damage. As you can see investing in power gives better returns.

Investing in life steal (e.g. omnomberry food) is almost always better than investing in healing power. The life steal foods should have an internal 10 second cooldown on use and healing power should scale the heals better.

Deniara

roostapro.9827:

Engineer and Grenades…..oh wait
You can never find an engineer anymore, they are myths.

Granted my WvWvW experience isn’t that big, only 1k+ enemy invader kills, but engineer really seems the rarest profession. Last night I saw two enemy engineers and I was like “Whoa!? What has happened?”. Among the 1000+ enemies I have encountered, I have seen 4 engineers in total. That makes engineers less than 1% of total population. Pity I killed both of those enemy engineers really fast. One of them was using Elixir S, just like I often do, little did it help. It seems most people really don’t know how to play against the engineers or how to play engineers. I am often running a build with 4 different snares, which can be really annoying to the enemy. I am generally not in any team. I just roam & kill, cap small points or attack keeps / towers. I think any profession could do that. Many people say that e.g. ranger and necromancer are weak professions, but I am sure both of them would make great solo roamers. Just play what you like playing. Skill matters more than profession. And sadly numbers and coverage matter more than skill.

I am still playing engineer as my main in WvWvW and I get pretty solid 1:15 kill rate, despite our side (Blacktide) has been hugely outnumbered in past weeks. As anybody knows it is more difficult to score kills if there is 20-40 enemy zerg against just 3 of you. Not to mention culling issues combined with lag. Big enemy teams suddenly popping just few feet of your character (it could be a portal / mass invisibility bomb or culling). You might able to down an enemy if you are fast, but the enemy zerg can quickly revive their own. Still I think there is one big disadvange in those big zerg: if you are always with a huge zerg, you don’t necessarily learn how to play. Now the deck is getting shuffled as many of the top WvWvW moved to lower tiers at least here in EU.

I finally got bored of not even seeing any commander on our side. Winning is really difficult if there is total lack of numbers, coverage and leadership. Blacktide, once mighty in WvWvW, has sadly deteriorated into a pve dungeon farming server at the moment, so I today switched to a new server.

I wish to see many fair, evenly matched, honorable fights!

Deniara / Ayna

I just clicked one of the threads of where developer had dared to comment. It was about P/P pistol and the Anet developer said that it offered great utility, but was low on damage. Compared to what? Other thief weapons? If P/P is low on damage, what are the engineer weapon damage or kits? Pathetic in damage? I seriously start to get an impression the developers are all themselves running thieves. I have never seen a developer post an intelligent message on such topic e.g. comparison with actual numbers. I will give you numbers: thief’s vital shot, range 900, 1/2 second attack speed, base damage 134 + bleed 170. Engineer’s hip shot, range 1000, 3/4 second attack speed, base damage 251. Notice that the thief’s attack speed is greater, able to do more auto attacks in same amount of time. Things get more interesting with stealth. Under stealth Pistol attack #1 becomes sneak attack, doing 5×405+850 bleed damage. And with a very common setup e.g. P/D, abusing Cloak & Dagger, you get nice stack of vulnerability, stealth + damage using mere 4 initiative cost with infusion of shadow adept trait, making it pretty much spammable. So much for low damage. Yes, I know engineers have static discharge, but I am afraid it will be nerfed in the next skill balance update, along with 100nades etc. Leaving engineers with… ?

I understand the reasons why the developers are not commenting on these threads, but the way Arenanet currently communicates is not good. Their way of communication is giving a loud clear message to the community: We don’t care about you.

I know the pressures related to public profession. I am myself working in such field where my work is constantly evaluated and I get tons of anonymous and non-anonymous feedback, some of it being negative, most being positive or neutral. Still I ask for more feedback, trying to improve my work. You need to have a thick skin to handle comments like: What is wrong about XXX? – Everything What is good about XXX? – Nothing How to improve XXX? – (left empty)

Deniara

Currently Healing Power is more or less useless, except for professions like the Guardian. Omnomberry ghost/pie gives so crazy life steal without cooldown that it is superior food compared to foods which give healing power (Sigil of Blood has a cooldown, making it far inferior. huh!). Almost everybody in the game runs armor, which gives power, precision, critical, vitality, thoughness or magic find, as the other stats are less useful.

Examples: according to my tests both the warrior’s healing signet and the engineer’s medkit seem to have a base heal + healing power. Mesmer’s ether feast seems to heal base heal + healing power + healing per illusion + 0.1*healingpower*healing per illusion. Meaning that even a serious investment of hundreds of points in healing power is only going to heal you a few hundreds points more at level 80. This isn’t good. We already have a static meta, where a significant number of players are running the same builds with berserker gear + omnomberry life steal consumables. Offering players real choices how to customize their characters would be better and we would then see more variety in gear and use of consumables.

Suggestion: Decrease the base heal amount slightly e.g. 10%. And make it scale much better with healing power.
New healing amount = 0.9*old healing base amount + 5*healing power.
Even better would be = 0.8*old healing base amount + 10*healing power

Since most heals are personal use only and there is a max 5 target limit which also applies to area heals, this shouldn’t have a big effect on game balance.

Healing power should also affect the heals by weapon skills e.g. elementalist’s water skills and warrior’s adrenal health.

If something is so good that almost everybody wants to use it, then it is broken.

Deniara

Goth. I agree with you. Orr maps are pretty much empty. I rarely see other players there, maybe just 1-2 farmers. I have soloed the 3 Orr maps with two different characters. If you want I can help you to get the missing skill point. I guess you mean that labyrinth?

It is a difficult skill point to do alone. The temple events are much more difficult to do alone (I don’t want to repeat that experience, I failed more often than I succeeded)

I really recommend to run there fast, dodge as much as you can. The boss near the skill point is not that hard to kill.

Deniara
(I play on Blacktide, but guesting should come soon)

Flaunz.5273:

Ring of Fire is low tier but we still face some pretty organized guilds that can give this build a harder time than shown in the video. (It was mostly PUGs against PUGs for now)
Too much CC can definitely become a problem. Not so much in stationary fights but when kiting. But like you said, even if u die at some point, u kept them busy for much longer than u should be able too

Protection Injection (Protection on CC) is probably a better trait choice in fights against CC heavy classes.

I believe you that the lower tiers also have organized guilds. Blacktide and Ring of Fire might soon be in the same tier, so I might soon see you on the enemy side. I just hope our server would get the players to WvWvW. We are always outmanned, which makes winning very difficult. Make no doubt, Blacktide is still a very high population server. We got a lot of skilled, experienced players. Just our guild alone has over 330 members, at least 5 commanders in our guild (maybe more?), a lot of people many level 80 characters and with ascended / full exotic gear. I am myself poor with level 80 green + some mixed exotics.

I would love to fight against some enemy engineers. Now with circa 1000 kills in WvWvW, I have only 3 times seen an enemy engineer. And usually the enemy engineer was so squishy it just died in seconds! Thief seems by far the most common profession, elementalists, guardians, mesmers and rangers coming after that. Yes, I think warriors are no longer that common in WvWvW, probably because thief does the burst damage better and has an easy escape (stealth). But I don’t have the statistics, just my own observations, so please correct if I am wrong.

I usually have a 1:15 kill rate with engineer. Meaning 15 enemy invader kills per own death. Tier #1, #2… #4, doesn’t matter. I don’t run on a power crit (berserker) gear, so I do pretty lousy damage, around 200 points with grenades. But the fact is, most enemy players (especially the French servers) run full glass cannons with paper armor and low health. So they die fast, especially using 2-3 snares (immobilize, cripple + freeze) on them first. I am not claiming they are all bad players. The French players are often very good at organizing big zergs, quickly bringing defense to help their towers which are under attack and they are the masters of using siege weapons. Combine that with 24h/7 coverage, you can see why Visunah Square keeps winning euro tier #1. They might be weak on 1-vs-1 or any fair open fight, but that doesn’t matter.

Last night 10 men enemy group was chasing me down for over a minute (I was just dodging, running with speedy kits, using Elixir S, also tossing it over myself for few seconds of stability and blindly throwing freezing grenade after myself). Finally they got me down. I hope each of them got a bonus Badge of Honor as otherwise it wasn’t very effective fight.

Deniara
Ayna Micro is my engineer