Guild Wars 2

alcopaul.2156:

Errant Venture.9371:

alcopaul.2156:

the petting zoo is not op guys. it has hard counters. moreover bad players running the petting zoo loses. and only bad players lose to the petting zoo.

signed,

petting zoo zookeeper

MATH….aka the guild full of bad players who run cheese bars to make up for their bad play? You guys have had a reputation for being clueless since 2009.

were since 2005 noob. probably you were just a noob then.

Nah it was just fun to watch you kids load into ID3 over and over after losing on UW.

alcopaul.2156:

the petting zoo is not op guys. it has hard counters. moreover bad players running the petting zoo loses. and only bad players lose to the petting zoo.

signed,

petting zoo zookeeper

MATH….aka the guild full of bad players who run cheese bars to make up for their bad play? You guys have had a reputation for being clueless since 2009.

alcopaul.2156:

GvG has to level up from the outdated and ancient gvg that is of gw1. WvWvW GvG 20-20 could work if they get their own instance and side objectives.

How is going from a complicated arena 8v8 system with multiple objectives (borrowing elements from deathmatch, ctf, base defense, conquest, etc) on large maps to a 20v20 deathmatch in a circle “leveling up”?

You can call it what you want but Gw1 GvG and the zergmatchs in WvW are two completely beasts that do not share any elements in common. Comparing the two modes is absolutely ridiculous (which is why it’s ridiculous to name the format in GW2 “GvG”)

Daecollo.9578:

Don’t change anything you’ve added already, if something is OP, add new skills to other classes that are on-par, then add new skills to those classes beyond that.

Don’t play Whack-A-Mole and ruin current abilities please..

Obviously you didn’t play GW1.

The massive power creep caused by the addition and buffing of new skills over the years majorly damaged balance and produced a really dysfunctional meta.

Flameseeker.1563:

Since it didn’t specify if it was close 5 in 15min or close 5 in the 1st 15min i went with the later.
Just do enough in each event to grant bronze/silver and move to the next, you should get it that way easily.

I did it on an overflow on my 1st time without any trouble.

I’ve done this several times and no achievement

We RELALY need a vote kick feature. There are so many players
(and bots) who are simply entering the queue and going afk or actively torlling teams by standing still for the majority of matches. It’s absolutely infuriating.

I still haven’t been able to complete the achievements because I never even get the buff >.>

Players are often spending LARGE portions of the match Akitten solo queue while returning to the keyboard for a few minutes to circumvent the 3 min kick timer.

Either the timer for an AFK kick needs to be decreased to 30 seconds or ANET needs to implement a vote kick feature.

Luvboard.3567:

Krayiss.4926:

Allie Murdock.8152:

What I’m trying to do is help you guys to understand how things work here, and why things are done the way they are done, and how you can help if you really want to.

Please tell us how the things work there in the balance team. !!! ?
June 25 necromancers received 2 new conditions; Dhuumfire + Torment + a load of other things, OP spectral wall, spectral armors in DS what a great idea!
Also if you know or not how they thought this was a good idea or be honest and tell us whether or not it was tested.

Allie Murdock.8152:

Time is needed to balance, it can’t be done at the snap of a finger.

Give us some examples of the time frame needed to balance something like this? because its been months. /winky face

@Allie
Bumped for answer

Anyways Devs prolly gone

Also I want to second the fact that these big patches from the devs suck.
And we need them to focus on small balances every 1-2 weeks so we don’t get the game broken this bad for so long.

Agreed. Ally mentioned that there isn’t a PvP Balance Team, only a Balance Team. WHY? PvP is a completely separate game aspect of the game with different paradigms and strategies. You NEED different teams to operate independently and create different balances for areas of the game. Playing against an AI isn’t nearly the same as fighting another player, why should the skill balance for these two aspects of the game resemble each other at all?

Players are smart, they can figure out that skills need to operate differently in PvP and PvE. You’re not going to confuse and alienate players by balancing PvE and PvP separately, in fact you’ll almost certainly spur growth in both areas as you create a more desirable balance in each.

Derps.7421:

Removing skyhammer would stop leavers.

Or at least a fairly significant number of them

zone.1073:

Step 1: Make five+ engi, mesmer, necro, etc characters.

Step 2: Pop elite in team fight. Swap chars. Pop elite in every team fight. Repeat.

Elite recharges carried over when you swapped toons

JonathanSharp.7094:

@ MMR: We’re working on a fix for the grouping issue you point out in picture 1. This fix should also help to alleviate some of the queue issue as well.

@ Class diversity: I’ve also seen games (referring to your pics) with a ton of Rangers, or a ton of Thieves, or too many Warriors, or a ton of bunker Guardians. In your pic of the top players, you see 6 of the 8 classes. The community also seems to feel that Warriors are in a good place right now in PvP. That’s 7 classes. You could make a case that Mesmers have a hard time in a hard condition meta, and I think a lot of people would agree with you. They have counters to conditions, but a lot of players don’t like to run those in standard Mesmer setups.

@ Balance: Perception of balance is always changing, so we’ll continue to try to make sure all classes have good options!

Any comment on Asura size and whether or not the design team is considering normalizing Asuran height to match human/sylvari in PvP to balance animation tells across species?

So with the release of the new champion weapons I’d like everyone to not the huge resemblance between the new Razah’s Nightmare torch and the Fate of Menzies torch from the mystic forge.

This seems like it indicates a connection between Razah and Menzies wither dealing with Razah’s creation in the Mists or Menzies defeat (which potentially occurred during the interlude between GW1 & GW2?)

/speculation

LilMcGinley.3890:

DevonCarver.5370:

Courier speed is a 50% movement speed increase and doesn’t stack with Swiftness.

Does that mean if I’m carrying supply I run with 50% movement increase? No matter what? Whereas swiftness is 33%? Does this apply in and out of combat as well?

It sounds as if Courier Swiftness is a short-term, temporary buff that is applied when you grab supply out of a camp/tower/keep. I highly doubt that they’d give a 50% permanent speed boost increase just for HOLDING supply.

Thedenofsin.7340:

How about making the characters look like humans / sylvari / norn just to the spectators?

It’s not about the spectators. It’s about the players. Good players can counter enemy plays by identifying the animations of their skills. If you can’t read the animations because the character model is too small, then good play is punished.

Allie Murdock.8152:

Ok guys, since you are all only focusing on tiny portions of my posts, I am just going to stop posting to prevent further confusion.

I will say again though; I don’t want anyone to be confused that I think hit boxes or skill effects are the only things that matter. This is very much NOT what I was saying. Not at all.

That’s FINE Allie, but could we get an acknowledgement that Asuras confer the advantage of smaller + more difficult to see weapon sets + animations?

This could very easily be solved by using EXISTING ingame technology to scale up Asura models ONLY WHILE IN PVP

Gandarel.5091:

Allie, the problem with asuras aren’t the particle effects, but the moves. You often have to read spells from the way characters lift their hands or how they swing their sword – nearly impossible to read on an asura.

Not to mention that it’s often extremely difficult to even identify the weapon set used on an asura b/c the weapons themselves are so much smaller than on all the other races.

Again the simplest solution is to just normalize (scale up) the size of Asurans to medium height human/sylvair. The technology to do this is already ingame!

Allie Murdock.8152:

Please refer to the snip I took of our release page (attached). Here’s the link for the full page: https://www.guildwars2.com/en/the-game/releases/august-06-2013/

This should help address the concerns about effects covering animations.

Also, note that when I mentioned the hit box, it was in response to the post before mine. I didn’t have time to quote and make it fancy. I’m fully aware that it’s not completely to do with the hit box.

Allie the problem isn’t screen pollution from particle effects (although that’s a great thing to fix). The problem is that animations on Asura are MUCH smaller and MUCH less pronounced than on the larger, humanoid races. For instance, larcenous strike on an Asura is MUCH harder to see than on a Human/Sylvari because of the size difference.

The BEST solution would be to normalize all asurans to medium/small human + sylvari heights. This technology is already feasible (SAB + caledon forest mushrooms use this effect). Thanks.

Grackleflint.4956:

Step 1. Get on voice chat and then agree who will use all of their knockdowns and stuns first.
Step 2. ???
Step 3. Profit.

How is this skill (how does this make them decent players), Darek? Eight full seconds of knockdown. Also, what game is everyone else playing where—at the beginning of every fight—endurance bars are always full and your stun breakers area always off cooldown? Everyone likes to assume that every fight starts with 2 dodges and 1-2 stun breakers available because it supports their L2P “arguments.” That’s simply not the case in actual game play.

It’s a 2v1
Against two classes spec’d to CC
and you didn’t manage to counter any of their CC via blind/cripple/chill/kite/weakness/DODGE

Why do you think you deserve to win that fight? Or even have a chance? They spec’d for a playstyle, created a 2v1, and faced a player completely unprepared to deal with it. I don’t see anything wrong here, besides an angry player ranting on the forums because he can’t win every 1v2 by buttonmashing.

Marduh.4603:

shimmerless.4560:

yeah i don’t really see how this affects d/d to be honest

But so it is. d / d thieves practically disappeared after that pointless nerf.

D/D disappeared because dancing dagger got nerfed into the ground and Cloak and Dagger is a very expensive stealth with no utility. The pistol offhand is a much more useful weaponset sinc eit provides stealth at a range, pusling blind field, and 1/4s interrupt (at low cost). Until/unless Dancing dagger gets a complete rework or is restored to it’s original damage/cripple duration, dagger offhand is trash for dagger mainhand.

It’s much simpler (in terms of modifying the client and passing it through QA) to reduce the duration of an effect than it is to completely change the condition applied by a trait.

This is a temporary “hotfix” before the PAX tourney and Allie Murdock has said that the trait will be completely reworked following the tourney. Calm your panites OP ^__^

@Konig: what do you think of the implication that 10,000 years ago WAS in fact the time that Giganticus Lupicus died out, AND that that era was in fact the last time the Elder Dragons appeared?

Source:

GuildMag (Draxynnic): Back in Guild Wars 1, we had that mention of the last appearance of the Giganticus Lupicus ten thousand years ago. And then the first people to get to the explorable dungeons in Arah were probably rather surprised to find the Giganticus Lupicus corpse sitting there waiting for them. Is there a story behind how one got to be there?

ArenaNet (Jeff Grubb) : How one got to be there… I think brought from its original resting place by Zhaitans minions for that big arena, central cathedral area as a watchdog, as a guardian. The whole… In many ways, the whole tale of the Elder Dragons begins with that one line – that was the first line of the timeline. During the Cantha project I said ‘what does this mean’ – well, we have some big skulls out in the wilderness and we didn’t know what they were so that’s what they are. But when we started telling the story of the Elder Dragons it just fit in so neatly that well, if they’ve come before, when did they come? Hey, we have the Giganticus Lupicus being wiped out in this era! Oh, okay, THAT must have been the last time the Elder Dragons showed up, and the story evolved from there. It’s one thing we’re very good at moving forwards – we leave a lot of hooks so future designers, future storytellers, ourselves in the future have a lot of potential that we can build off.

GuildMag (Thalador): I was personally wondering that in the Crystal Desert back in Guild Wars 1 we saw lots of skeletons lying around and we considered them to be the skeletons of the Giganticus Lupicus.

ArenaNet (Jeff Grubb) : Some of them are, yes.

GuildMag (Thalador) : When we see him – the recent specimen in the centre of Arah, he’s sort of a jackal-like, Anubis sort of thing, and yet the skeletons back in Guild Wars 1 were sort of draconic or with large tusks or larger…

GuildMag (Draxynnic) : Sea monsters.

ArenaNet (Jeff Grubb) : I think the look of the Giganticus Lupicus evolved over time – in the fact that we started off with “okay, here’s the skull, build us a creature that looks like this.” Giganticus Lupicus also – Lupicus has a wolf origin to it, so we were thinking in terms of wolves at the time, and from there we basically got to that jackal-headed, Anubis type of figure. So they basically… I could see the older, larger versions of the Giganticus giganticus would be the huge skulls, because of course, with limitations within the game we could only put the figure so large and still have you be able to fight it in any reasonable sense.

ArenaNet (Ree Soesbee) : And I think that much like the centaurs, you’re gonna have this ancient creature that has some distinction according to territory, according to how it has evolved. So you can have a couple of different skulls that have similarities but aren’t.

The above almost implies that there may be different races or possibly breeds of Lupicus and that the one in Arah may be a different breed from the ones whose skeletons we see in the Crystal Desert?

So is there confirmation that this is fixed and fall deaths are granting achievement progress now?

Currently fall death while holding a crystal in Aspect Arena is not granting achievement progression to enemy players who’ve damaged the crystal holders. This is making it EXTRAORDINARILY difficult to complete the Crystal Breaker achievement since players are intentionally suiciding off ledges when they get low while holding the crystal in order to troll other players.

PLEASE fix it so that if you damage a crystal holder and they die to fall damage you get achievement progression

Empathetic Fighter.2065:

As he played for MATH he must be a troll.

Lots of over-exaggeration in this thread, but I think most players can agree that there is a LOT of screen pollution from adds in PvP and that it’s pretty detrimental to skilled play

Mad Queen Malafide.7512:

There is one thing I’m wondering about, and I’m not sure it’s just a random quote, or if there is some deeper hidden meaning to it.

When you arrive at the Categorized Fractal, Dessa says:
“You’ve landed….I…Need to go. I’m sorry.”

Why does Dessa say this? Could she perhaps have been involved with what happened in this Fractal? Does she perhaps know the crazed Asura personally?

That’s what no one is really sure about. The speculation (among most people) is that the similarities between the fractal & Rata Sum along with some bit of Asuran history we’re not aware of yet caused this reaction in Dessa.

Tobbygnome.6793:

Stuwy.9352:

My problem is only that zerging (not focusing on objectives) give you more glory

Arenanet gives a bad exemple
and twist the purpose of winning a match

Hmm, i actually never cared enough to notice how much Glory you got from winning/losing against the amount from the leaderboard. Do you really get more from zerging+losing than capping+winning?

It can go either way, you usually get the most amount of points if you run around in a group of 3-4 focusing on just capping as many points as possible (whether you win or lose doesn’t really matter, as long as you get to the cap of 300 score points per match)

The basic conclusion is that hotjoin is meant to be a cluster kitten and that no one (serious players + Anet) really cares about what happens in hotjoin. The entire purpose of hotjoin is to teach people how to play against other players and to farm glory/rank. If you want a (semi) competetive scene queue up for tPvP

BrunoBRS.5178:

ArcTheFallen.7682:

Not sure how skilled picking up a guard and spamming stability is. Also not sure how skilled chain fearing someone to death is (making necros have to do less work to win? sweet).

boon rip. or have someone boon rip for you. or, you know, wait.

and if you’re getting chain feared out of the map, you shouldn’t have had your back against the bottomless pit to begin with. can’t chain fear someone off the arena if they got their backs against the wall.

Right, makes way more sense to stand next to a wall and eat all that big spam AoE from the staff necros and bomb engis.

Here are my recommendations for how to improve Skyhammer in order to make it more acceptable in the competitive environment of tPvP

The biggest thing I would recommend would be adding a map to hotjoin for AT LEAST two weeks (more preferably a month) before it goes into the tPvP rotation. That will give the community time to discuss whether or not it’s appropriate for a competitive environment and will allow the designers to tweak the map as necessary to make it competitive.

Specifically for skyhammer: the two main issues are CC effectiveness and the cannon effectiveness. Currently CCs are too effective on this map in that they can result in a one-shot kill. In general the availability of CC has always vastly outweighed the availability of CC-counter, but this has been acceptable because proper team play could compensate for CCs that sneak through and it would be rare for enemy to force a kill through in the period of a single CC (though they still made excellent tools for causing pressure and pushing kills). Once a single CC can result in an instant death, this dynamic becomes a problem though, as one-shot kills are very bad for a competitive game in which a player’s skill and coordination with his team should determine the outcome of a fight. In order to fix this on Skyhammer I would recommend increasing the length of time it takes a platform to shatter and decreasing the number of platforms around the A & C nodes. This way the map will still carry the characteristic that CC is more effective here (in order to spur build diversity) but CC will not be the deciding factor in a match.

Currently the hammer is a fun mechanic but it plays too large a role in deciding the outcome of a match. It has very large damage and is very easy to quickly target multiple capture points in a very short period of time. Combined with the fact that it is undodgeable, and the weapon becomes TOO important. In order to fix this I would recommend increase the amount of time it takes for the cannon to rotate to a new position by 150-200%. This will prevent the owner of the cannon from being able to completely lock down 2+ locations (as is currently possible) and will force the owner to focus on supporting a single capture point. Additionally the AoE blast should be dodgeable and the ability to capture the cannon while invulnerable should be disabled. This will help bring the cannon in line with other secondary mechanics (like treb on Khylo) while still remaining an important tool for supporting team fights.

Until these changes can be made the map MUST be removed from the tournament rotation, as it is VERY noncompetitive at the moment and promotes a style of gameplay that is bad for the longterm health of the game (i.e. CC-button mashing in order to win the race between knockbacks + knockback prevention).

Allie Murdock.8152:

Ok, that’s fair! Do you have any suggestions then, to maybe change the map a little to make up for classes that might not be as good at CC?

Someone mentioned making it harder, but not impossible, to knock people off the edge. Would something like that make you feel better about sticking to your class?

This is great feedback, btw. We really appreciate the constructive nature of these threads.

The biggest thing I would recommend would be adding a map to hotjoin for AT LEAST two weeks before it goes into the tPvP rotation. That will give the community time to discuss whether or not it’s appropriate for a competitive environment and will allow the designers to tweak the map as necessary to make it competitive.

Specifically for skyhammer: the two main issues are CC effectiveness and the cannon effectiveness. Currently CCs are too effective on this map in that they can result in a one-shot kill. In general the availability of CC has always vastly outweighed the availability of CC-counter, but this has been acceptable because proper team play could compensate for CCs that sneak through and it would be rare for enemy to force a kill through in the period of a single CC (though they still made excellent tools for causing pressure and pushing kills). Once a single CC can result in an instant death, this dynamic becomes a problem though, as one-shot kills are very bad for a competitive game in which a player’s skill and coordination with his team should determine the outcome of a fight. In order to fix this on Skyhammer I would recommend increasing the length of time it takes a platform to shatter and decreasing the number of platforms around the A & C nodes. This way the map will still carry the characteristic that CC is more effective here (in order to spur build diversity) but CC will not be the deciding factor in a match.

Currently the hammer is a fun mechanic but it plays too large a role in deciding the outcome of a match. It has very large damae and is very easy to quickly target multiple capture points in a very short period of time. Combined with the fact that it is undodgeable, and the weapon becomes TOO important. In order to fix this I would recommend increase the amount of time it takes for the cannon to rotate to a new position by 150-200%. This will prevent the owner of the cannon from being able to completely lock down 2+ locations (as is currently possible) and will force the owner to focus on supporting a single capture point. Additionally the AoE blast should be dodgeable and the ability to capture the cannon while invulnerable should be disabled. This will help bring the cannon in line with other secondary mechanics (like treb on Khylo) while still remaining an important tool for supporting team fights.

Until these changes can be made the map MUST be removed from the tournament rotation, as it is VERY noncompetitive at the moment and promotes a style of gameplay that is bad for the longterm health of the game (i.e. CC-button mashing in order to win the race between knockbacks + knockback prevention).

You won’t be able to match the skill cap of GW1 simply due to the lack of complex prot skills and targeted healing. Team fights are pretty fun in GW2 but the pace of combat is so much quicker than GW1 that you won’t get any of those amazing 20 minute fights at stand with splits and counter splits.

Littlefeather.8623:

Adapt?, or yall mean make a troll CC build specifically for this map…

That’s exactly what they mean. It’s perfectly okay to be forced to MODIFY your build for particular strategy or mechanic. But to be forced into playing a massive CC/anti-CC spec to compete? That’s bogus.

Benji.9203:

Errant Venture.9371:

Benji.9203:

Errant Venture.9371:

The cannon is already absurdly easy to defend. It’s basically impossible to push a necro or engi off of it 1v1 currently, and it’s a tough fight for 2v1.

Both have a very limited access to stability.

You don’t need stability, just run to the portal and put your back to it…then you can’t get knocked while you spam bomb kit or staff necro AoEs until the enemy is dead. Le sigh.

Send a stealth thief up there to screw with them. Let them aoe as much as they want go in stealthed. Step on a platform, get off of platform, scorpion wire and profit. A caltrops p/d stealth thief could also be viable in preventing cannon use. Blinds are also a powerful tool against cc. The more time spent fighting in the cannon room the less the enemy is actually using the cannon.

P/D thief are you serious? They’ll do minimal damage while the staff necro spams AoE that the thief won’t be able to dodge (and will nullify his condition damage with Dagger 4 + consume conditions). Guardian or toolkit engi accomplish virtually the same thing by spamming knockbacks and AoE until the thief is toast. P/D thieves have never been viable for ANYTHING besides ganking in hotjoin + WvW O.o

Isaac.6041:

Errant Venture.9371:

butch.8136:

So, what everyone wants:

A plain open field with 3 nodes. Nothing else otherwise you get small nodes/positioning advantages, etc.

Nothing but damage skills. Otherwise you get knockbacks and thats cheesy. You get all sorts of CC but thats cheesy.

But actually no, everyone hates conquest, don’t we? And we all want ‘actual’ pvp. Player versus player. So we want deathmatch, I assume.

5 v 5 with only damage skills on a flat playing field.

Ye, sounds fun…

Secondary mechanics are good. But controlling the secondary mechanics shouldn’t be a game-breaking thing. You shouldn’t HAVE to cap the cannon to have a decent chance of winning skyhammer. Forest and Khylo do this well: they have secondary mechanics that can be important but they won’t DECIDE the match and they can be COUNTERED and effectively removed from play. That can’t happen on skyhammer

CC’s are good. They’re vitally important to team and solo fights, and skillfully used CC is a great tactic. The problem with skyhammer is that CC doesn’t help you gain an advantage over enemies through skillful and timely usage: CC gives you an instant kill. This makes everyone bring TONS of CC at the cost of damage, and the counters to CC aren’t nearly as available as the CC itself is. People are able to bring so much CC they can spam it without attempting to time things well and it will be extremely effective because you only need to land one lucky hit to get a ONE SHOT KILL.

Those are the problems with skyhammer. It’s a fun map and i enjoy goofing around with it on custom servers. But it doesn’t deserve a place in competitive rotations

Secondary mechanics are there for a reason. On some maps using them offers a slight advantage (Nifhel). Battle of Kyhlo and Foefire give you even bigger advantages. And similarly Skyhammer’s cannon is a big advantage. There’s nothing game-breaking about controlling the cannon room and you don’t need to divert your entire team to controlling it. Normally 1 is enough with 1 or 2 as backup. Other 2 players should still be capping points. But someone should be rotating into the cannon room immediately if the main guy holding it goes down.

It’s a mechanic that can’t be countered (unblockable/undestroyable/unddodgeable) except by rushing the (EXTREMELY cramped) room. And it fires on a 6s recharge. It’s an okay mechanic but it needs to be toned down (reduce AoE size, allow it to be dodge, and increase fire recharge to 10s)

Heizero.9183:

All i can say is if you are getting run off edges by a single fear then you were HORRIBLY out of position and earned your long way down.

How so? My options are to position myself against a wall (to guard against CC) but leave myself open to get reamed by massive AoE spam from staff necro/toolkit+bomb engi or move into open space and get knocked off ledgge/CCd on panel. Have you even played an offpoint? They’re MASSIVELY cramped compared to other maps.

Gaiyeerishima Cat.1082:

I would love to see this map regularly in the tournament rotation… Definitely keeps things fresh, forces people to rethink their builds and strategies, which is what I think a new map should do.

How does it force people to rethink their builds? Every profession is forced into the one spec that maximizes CC while avoiding as many CCs as possible. This map KILLS build diversity by having a single mechanic that allows you to dominate the other team: oneshot kills via knockback/fear/immob

Lue.6538:

Finally a map those engis and warriors can shine on, they still won’t stand a chance on other maps but by golly they will dominate this one! I say bring on the 4 engi/1warrior teams!

People are way ahead of you with the full necro + engi teams

sorrow.2364:

ArcTheFallen.7682:

Circumstances shouldn’t be related to maps however. If a balance patch comes, sure, it makes sense to adjust instead of qqing. But having to totally change your playstyle due to a gimmicky map mechanic, that’s kind of ridiculous.

So it all goes down to the fact that you don’t want to adjust your playstyle…
Well, enough said.

There’s a difference between adjusting your build/playstyle to suit a mechanic or strategy and having to spec for massive CC/CC counters to oneshot others/avoid being oneshotted by spammable CC.

People are destroying balanced teams with 3 necro + 2 engi setups. Doesn’t that suggest that there’s a mechanics issue and not a build adjustment issue?

Benji.9203:

Errant Venture.9371:

The cannon is already absurdly easy to defend. It’s basically impossible to push a necro or engi off of it 1v1 currently, and it’s a tough fight for 2v1.

Both have a very limited access to stability.

You don’t need stability, just run to the portal and put your back to it…then you can’t get knocked while you spam bomb kit or staff necro AoEs until the enemy is dead. Le sigh.

somsom.5201:

Julius.1094:

somsom.5201:

@ OP: because it’s filled with cheese. The cannon is OP, and with a partly intelligent cheese build you can lock it down easily. The points are VERY easy for specific cheese builds to hold…solo. On top of that, you’ve got all the cheese blue glass spots that just further increase the cheese. Oh and the cannon AOE radius is HUGE…plus the time between shots is WAY WAY WAY too short.

tl;dr: Chuck E Cheese

Is there anything about spvp that isn’t cheese to you? lolz

?

We are discussing a map that largely rewards cheese. Going against those builds on any other map is no issue, but when you’ve got a cannon with huge aoe, holes to fall through right next to a point, and plenty of other ways to get knocked off the map…tell me how it isn’t exactly a cheese map? Can you do it without cheese? Sure, but it takes zero effort to run a warrior, guardian, ranger or necro on it with a simple cheese setup, so why do anything else?

Heizero.9183:

You people act like you are fighting on a tightrope. There is plenty of room for maneuverability.

Because you pretty much are.

Take the cannon point: the sides are obviously a knockoff dream, the glass itself is an issue, and the “platform” part is incredibly narrow that a few necro marks can completely lock it down.

Take point B: the cannon AOE covers the ENTIRE point except for a small single character amount on the very corners(next to the jump pads on the lower level). That means if the enemy has the cannon they can lockdown mid, as you either eat the dmg(lol no) or you have to fight in that small corner which means you don’t re-cap it(or you get knocked off the map/locked down in that small corner).

Take the other two points A/C: both of these have glass surrounding them AND the cannon AOE covers MORE than the point(it actually goes up the walls and touches the top ledges), meaning there is ZERO safe spot within the point itself(not even like with point B ).

The only places where you WON’T fall to your death are spawns.

Exactly, is there any other place in game where screwing up once and getting hit by a single CC will result in death? If a necro screws up and doesn’t manage to dodge my firegrabv is that an INSTANT KILL? No? So why does he have access to spammable fear, any one of which is an instant kill? The map discourages build diversity and forces us into using CC skills that are one shot kills.

butch.8136:

So, what everyone wants:

A plain open field with 3 nodes. Nothing else otherwise you get small nodes/positioning advantages, etc.

Nothing but damage skills. Otherwise you get knockbacks and thats cheesy. You get all sorts of CC but thats cheesy.

But actually no, everyone hates conquest, don’t we? And we all want ‘actual’ pvp. Player versus player. So we want deathmatch, I assume.

5 v 5 with only damage skills on a flat playing field.

Ye, sounds fun…

Secondary mechanics are good. But controlling the secondary mechanics shouldn’t be a game-breaking thing. You shouldn’t HAVE to cap the cannon to have a decent chance of winning skyhammer. Forest and Khylo do this well: they have secondary mechanics that can be important but they won’t DECIDE the match and they can be COUNTERED and effectively removed from play. That can’t happen on skyhammer

CC’s are good. They’re vitally important to team and solo fights, and skillfully used CC is a great tactic. The problem with skyhammer is that CC doesn’t help you gain an advantage over enemies through skillful and timely usage: CC gives you an instant kill. This makes everyone bring TONS of CC at the cost of damage, and the counters to CC aren’t nearly as available as the CC itself is. People are able to bring so much CC they can spam it without attempting to time things well and it will be extremely effective because you only need to land one lucky hit to get a ONE SHOT KILL.

Those are the problems with skyhammer. It’s a fun map and i enjoy goofing around with it on custom servers. But it doesn’t deserve a place in competitive rotations

Heizero.9183:

You people act like you are fighting on a tightrope. There is plenty of room for maneuverability.

Not with combination AoE spam (engi, staff necro, guardian), cannon fire, floor panels, buggy jump nodes, and ledges.

You have to choose between stick to a wall and eating damage, or risking eating a CC (so many of which are being brought now that they’re unavoidable) and getting tossed over the ledge or stuck over a panel. There’s very little space to maneuver on side points and cannon.

Gandarel.5091:

This bring build diversity. Nobody could make all the skills useful for all the situations. Would people use mesmer port and bunkers for deathmatch?

This makes some unused skills useful. And that’s great.

…
It decreases build diversity. Every class is pigeon-holed into the single spec that is most effective at spamming pulls/CC/knockbacks to get cheese one-shot kills. That’s not build diversity.

jportell.2197:

This map doesn’t fit the condition spam Meta so its bad? Please. Its the first map where you have to build for the map and not the opposing team. People are actually afraid of knockbacks instead of mildly annoyed. This alone is a good thing it adds importance to skills in all classes I even hear thieves are finding use for spike trap and trip wire. This map IS GOOD AND SHOULD BE IN TOURNAMENTS

That’s a BAD thing. Are we playing Guild Wars or Build Wars? You should play to beat the other team, by being better PLAYERS than them. You shouldn’t be able to win because your build/profession is better at spamming CCs to get a oneshot kill.

The cannon is already absurdly easy to defend. It’s basically impossible to push a necro or engi off of it 1v1 currently, and it’s a tough fight for 2v1.

Pandabro.8743:

I think it’s funny that people say this is not PVP.

Okay well basically you are defining PVP as standing in a circle spamming your skills to try and gain control of a point. That’s a very limited view of PVP.

This IS PVP it’s just not the PVP you are used to. Had this map been the first one to be implemented there would have been an outrage if Forest had been implemented afterwards because it’s playstyle is so drastically different and would have essentially made “CC useless”.

It is PvP but it shouldn’t be part of the competitive tournament rotation. It’s a fun map for goofing around and trolling which makes it great for hotjoin. But any map that lets you one shot someone with fear or a knockback is inherently imbalanced for competitive, skill-based play.

Isaac.6041:

You got knocked off a cliff? Well, guess what, you’re in a PVP zone. Learn to deal with it.

If fear was a one-shot kill on Khylo or Foefire would you call it a L2P issue or a balance issue?

That’s the problem here…positioning or not you SHOULDN’T be able to one-shot someone with a CC skill when the counters for CC are DRAMATICALLY less available than the CC skills. It’s MUCH harder to avoid being CC-killed than it is to spec for CCs and spam them as fast as possible.

Game should be about player skill, not Build Wars.

papaganoosh.7908:

I don’t understand how people can hate on this map. Many levels to move along, new builds needed (stability and knockback heavy) a really crazily overpowered secondary mechanic that can change the game, I love it.

The problem is that new builds are needed because only a few specs work. Every class is clocked into the spec that has the MOST possible CC. Warriors are better off going full tank spec with hammer + rifle with cheese one shot knockbacks than they are playing a balanced build designed to DEFEAT the opponent.

That’s the main problem with this map…it rewards players for spamming knockback + fear + immob as fast as they possibly can. It’s MUCH harder to position to counter knockbacks or try to play a traditional build in which you DEFEAT the opponent than it is to run a cheese build that uses massed CC to one-shot the opponent.