Guild Wars 2

Yeah the skill is quite strong.
I would agree it is OP if it were instant cast. Fortunately it has a 3/4 sec cast time. So I think it’s generally fine.
However, I do think 2 consecutive dodges should completely evade the skill. Currently it feels like even if you double dodge you still get hit by the last hit.

Continuum shift:
I think it gets a bit boring in that its best use is to cast elite skill twice.
Why not disable elite use during its duration but increase its overall duration a bit.
It should have some more strategic use rather than trying to spam every cool down within its duration

Current gravity well is in a very good place. Not good idea to ask for adding back float and make it complicated. I like its current form, simple and effective. The pull effect also fits the theme pretty well-strong gravity that sucks you in.

T2 is currently in a very imbalanced state because we have 4 T1 sized server and SoS and FA will get matched up to one of them each week.

It is certainly not the most healthy state for the game but don’t get too discouraged. If it is really frustrating, take a break and come back later.

I am also on SoS. I believe we still have plenty that are willing to take the uphill battle and also working on improve the server organization and population. Also feel free to join us on community website sosgw2.com.

Things will change soon as the expansion gets close to release. Try your best to enjoy the game and good luck on the battle field.

Saiyan.1704:

I disagree with Carrion and Rabid.

Raw damage / Condition / Sustains
This is the game’s build types. It is all mixed matched within amulets.

Carrion Amulet is (finally) equivalent to Marauders so why exclude it when there’s a power equivalent amulet?

Overall, condie builds always hold a clear advantage over zerker builds in 1v1’s. It’s much easier to have a balanced tournament with only zerker builds.

Infrequent balance is hardly the big problem here.

The biggest issue are the incompetent matchup system and a bad hotjoin mode.

The matchup system tends to match players of very different skill levels together and ignores profession composition. As a result, player MMR can also be very erratic and make it even worse for future match making.

As for hot join, I think everyone agrees it is way too chaotic and unbalanced. It is likely what new players choose to play in the first place. The experience however is usually very bad. Players only learn to win by manipulating observer system.

Current iteration of gravity well is pretty good. It is very strong CC but only has small radius and long cast time. It is definitely not as strong as time warp however it is at only half of the cool down so it balances out nicely.

There is really no need to be obsessed with float just because it looks cool. The previous iteration of gravity well is simply useless.

I think those are very good suggestions and I have been suggesting almost the same things after BWE 1.

Wells of precognition can be simply reversing blur and unblockable application order. It would be pretty good that way. Reliable 3 sec of blur application to your party is going to be very strong.

I also like the condie removal idea to well of eternity. Vigor is certainly nice but ONE option of condie removal should be provided from the chronomancer trait line. And condie removal is way more important to mesmer than vigor.

It’s just a skin ultimately…Wait until you see if you like its look.
Stats changing on the fly is nice. However, you still can’t change those expensive runes easily. So not much regret there either.

Ausfer.1853:

—
Simply put, there is a multitude of situations where you can dodge an attack but the game doesn’t register it as a successful evade. Dodge out of an AoE that’s just going down? You don’t get rewarded. Dodge early because you anticipated your opponent’s moves, rather than reacting to the attack? You don’t get rewarded. Dodge early because your opponent has telegraphed an attack with a large windup time? You don’t get rewarded.
—

I am not buying this.
Dodge out of AOE circle prematurely? Why don’t you just walk out?

Dodge because you anticipate? That’s exactly what random dodge is. If you indeed anticipated correctly(which means opponent indeed used a skill), then you should still get the evade bonus.

Dodge early because opponent have a long casting attack? Oh please, that’s exactly unskillful play. You dodge too early and risk being hit!

Robert Gee.9246:

Silverkey.2078:

It just seems they don’t want this trait to work

https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/info/updates/Game-Update-Notes-August-25-2015

There are a lot of bugs in the game and often times there are enough that we can’t get to all of them as fast as we would like. Duelist Discipline not applying to Pistol 4 didn’t get into my queue until after the cutoff date for changes to the 8/25 build. I’ve got it fixed for a future release though.

I am actually glad that you guys are prioritizing bug fixes over balance changes. Overall bug number should be reduced to a much more tolerable rate before balance tweaks can happen.

both condie duration increase and decrease food should receive a nerf. They are way too strong and become mandatory.

You might want to check out Prescribed[Rx]
http://www.prescribedrx.com/

Another one I know recruiting is [EG]
http://etherealguardians.com/

Also you are welcome to join Sea of Sorrows community website
sosgw2.com
It’s mostly for WvW but also has other fun stuff.

WvW roaming is all about theory crafting OP builds.
You can certainly still play build that is slightly suboptimal. But you have to extremely good to achieve half the result of playing OP builds.

Basically DD ele is just too good at everything. You just need to nerf One of the areas it is good at.

Let’s break it down:
1. sustain
You can’t nerf this because dagger is a close range combat weapon and ele is low health/low armor so it needs sustain to be able to do anything.
2. mobility
If you nerf this one, then it will hurt other more bursty ele spec even more.
3. damage
So the only thing left is damage. And many already suggested that they way dd ele applies burning is just plain stupidly strong. One burning stack is like 5 bleeding stack. So 3 burning stack is essentially 15 bleed stack. The pressure is ridiculously high.

The result of such ele condie pressure is that ele can not only hold a point 1v1 but can also decap a point 1v1. If you put such ability on a class that has close-to-top mobility as well, it automaticaly becomes OP and trivializes any rotation effort.

So as I suggested in second thread. Focus on nerfing the damage, especially from burns. I also think the passive defence soothing ice is a bit too strong as adept. So some shaving there as well.

I agree PU is a bit too strong.

But all those long/perma stealth builds people cry about are actually trash. Its only function is to troll people.

Regarding build counter, you guys need to take the mobility/rotation into account.
There are always builds that counters you in a straight-on engage. But the question is can you work around it?

trait
burning fire: cantrip grant might stack reduce to 1 stack
soothing ice: frost aura duration reduced to 2 sec

skill
ring of fire burn stack reduce to 1 stack.
cleansing fire burn stack reduce to 1 stack.

Well, if you play OCX, I think you’d better stay on SoS. We have a pretty good OCX presence here and can compete without any problem with YB.

Just ignore the weekly PPT war. It is mostly NA that is suffering from this ridiculous overstacking.

It has always been the case over and over at least for WvW NA side for a long time. Players just stack onto one server for easy wins. Somehow majority found it more fun to beat down doors or stuck in queues staring at their high PPT score.

Anet did implement the new population calculation for transfer to count in only WvW population and also prevent overstacking by marking some servers full. Unfortunately it just happened a bit too late. YB already got into the overstacked state before it was implemented.

For now, you can only hope for the slow adjustment of population flow to make things right. Or you just transfer yourself into more balanced tiers.

Thief shouldn’t counter any meta build.

Reason: Thief has the best mobility and with stealth is hard to catch. That means if the thief counters any class, he can basically hunt the victim down anytime he wants.

Other so-called hard counter won’t achieve even close to what thief can do to their prey. E.g. medi guard is super hard matchup for other squishy. However, you can almost always disengage against them. Or even better, you just don’t engage them at all. They won’t be able to catch you easily.

If your build gets countered by thief, then I am sorry, you will struggle to do anything as long as the enemy thief prioritize taking you out of the game. It can be easily done and will give their team a great advantage. The only way to deal with that, is to have thief on your own team babysit you. And we all know how hard that is.

So in the end. No one will ever bring a build into the game that struggles against thief.

You better not try to 1v1 ele as a thief or mesmer. It’s a complete waste of your time. Even 2v1 may not be worth it. Because a good ele will be able to disengage and outrotate you.

Try to find better fights somewhere else. Leave the more tanky bruiser build to 1v1 ele, e.g. soldier engi, cele/soldier necro, shoutbow warrior etc.

Their power decreases in teamfight and they won’t be able to survive a team focus fire. So basically for dd ele into two situations: 1. Leave them in duel with other tanky spec 2. fight them in a teamfight and chain cc+focus fire to down them quickly.

It’s certainly viable and still meta in competitive scene. But I’d say it’s also the hardest to play for casuals currently. You need to have a very good sense of team play to be successful with it.

No. F5 is conceptually too different from distortion to be a replacement. All elite mechanics are evolution to the originals. Some are additions to the originals(mesmer, ele, warrior). Some are replacement of the originals(guard, necro). Wether it is former or latter depends on how the new mechanics function.

The way F5 is designed, simply has to be an addition. F4 is a pure defensive mechanics while F5 is about trading clones and short cooldowns for long cooldowns, also at the expense of possibly being wrecked by having your rift destroyed. It by no means replace F4 in any sense.

Deimos Tel Arin.7391:

cele amulet is balanced.
ele is not.

nerf ele, not cele.

But don’t you think ele is only op with cele? Removing cele will put ele in a rightful place.

Chorazin.4107:

I still see the XIII bads around, we blew some of them and Obey up the other day. Seems XIII are good at sending salty whispers and bad at doing anything else.

The main problem is probably [TF] when you have all of SoS in WvW on 1 tag in OCX it is kind of boring. Outside the weekend no server can come close to competing with the numbers so people just sit behind siege in keeps, or map to a different BL and let TF PvD.

We are willing to give 15-20 a shot with our 5man, maybe get a few bags here and there on the way out. But dat TF blob just too phatz, (i dont blame them btw, thats just how they play the game which is their right).

Stop accusing [TF] as they always have to take the responsibility to make the server PPT stable. SoS has been suffering from having zero OCX guilds for a long time until TF started being built up.

If there were more spread of guilds onto different servers in T2 in the beginning, it could have been better. However, most guilds decided to stack on one server and create the situation you can’t recover from.

Thuggernaut.1250:

cele ele performs so well because ele can take advantage of all the cele stats in the same build, whereas most other professions can only benefit from certain stats in a build. thus ele can take advantage of the stat bonus of cele more effectively.

it has become more obvious, now that cele builds for other professions have died out (warrior and engi, perfect examples), yet ele can still leverage cele stats for maximum effectiveness.

the solution involves increasing build diversity so that other professions can take better advantage of cele stats, rather than nerfing ele.

A big No!
The builds that historically utilizes cele stats well are all painful to fight and are borderline OP.

What we should aim at is that certain build can only do limited amount of things, not everything.

Current meta: PU mesmer against SA thief = both go into stealth and not knowing where your opponent goes…

There is about combined 20% of chance of obtaining ascended chest or fractal weapon skin. So 20g a run means you spend on average 100g to obtain one of those rewards. I would say it’s just about right price.

However, fractal 50 is really easy now even with pugs. Why not just run it yourself. It’s also somewhat fun content left in PvE.

PU is definitely an annoying sustain feature that mesmer has now.

However, beyond-next-level sustain is not just mesmer’s problem. Almost all meta builds have ridiculously high sustain. Zerker engi has invul into block into invul, and then stealth + vampirism runes. Warrior has double endure pain + great mobility. Thief has always been easy to survive, now boosted by SA, it’s even easier.

I would be all for PU getting shaved but at the same time, it should be applies across the board to reduce the overall high sustain.

Orng would be doing much better if they have a good mesmer on the team.

Their main weakness is that both guardians have low mobility and they need to create chance of teamfight to gain advantage.

In small scale fights, the extra elementalist Abjured has is too hard to handle. Orng’s best option is to have their burn guard and thief 2v1 the ele. However, as Abjured’s two eles getting adapted to the burn guard. They were able to survive that 2v1 pretty well. In addition, ele has the mobility to easily outrotate a burn guard.

A mesmer/thief combo would be much better. It has better mobility to keep up with elementalist and can use portal to get the bunker guard to better position.

nomdeplums.5780:

Elementalist doesn’t need to be nerfed. Celestial amulet needs to be removed.

This may actually be the best option: remove celestial amulet.

Ele is basically designed as a class that can do pretty much everything. However, the celestial amulet boosted it to the level that ele can do everything too well.

It would be better to have everyone in sPvP to fit into a role that does limited amount of things. Then you focus on rotation and team coordination to achieve the maximum synergy. Builds like cele DD ele really trivializes rotation and coordination. Being able to do everything well makes the whole game mode feel shallow.

Bond.4602:

From my experience this wasn’t quiet as told. Yaks bend pushed to win a couple of weeks and just at that time fa got greedy amd imploded losing a few large guilds. Yb gathered a bit of momentum and started steam rolling at which point some t1 guilds bandwagoned in hope of pushing the glicko and opening t1.

This isn’t the t1 guilds fault, the glicko is broken and t1 fixed by guilds within it. How yb would fare when and if they get there idk.

As for hunt, probably worth not just running round ganking roamers 6v1 then people would be more interested in fighting you.

The glicko is never broken. What creates glicko gap in first place, is people stacking to one server and matchfixing to manipulate the score

I think most agree that all the proposed changes are at least reasonable to test out for next BWE.

However, I really hope Robert and the design team can pay more attention to Well of Recall and Well of Precognition.

At their current forms, well of recall will never see any use especially with the new well trait update. With the new well trait, it really has nothing unique any more. It needs both functionality and QoL updates. Well of precognition has its niche but is still incredibly hard to utilize. Some improvement is better to be made there as well.

mesmer is best at reflect and boon removal. Then we have access to key utility called portal.

Other things we don’t really do as well as some other professions.

I don’t understand the preference of float on gravity well from some players. I think pull fits the theme much better and pull is a very useful effect in PvE.

Shockwave.1230:

It’s not really a tank meta except for maybe necro. There’s just loads of weakness, protection, and passive invulns in the game, which results in rediculously high damage reduction. There’s also lots of AoE healing to deal with the damage that does get through.

I would put less weakness in the game personally, or add more condi removal to deal with it.

I call it sustain meta.
Even the viable zerker needs sustain, so you get SA thief and PU mesmer as meta builds. Also vampirism rune is so widely utilized to negate coordinated burst.

Come and check Sea of Sorrows out. Our community website is
http://www.sosgw2.com/

The OCX/SEA action might be a bit low in silver league but it’s ultimately to your preference.

As far as I know, SoS has a guild called [PAIN] that mainly consists players from Perth.

Very good change to well of eternity!
But can we get some similar cast time reduction to other wells as well?
For example, well of recall has 1 second of cast time just to give allies 3 seconds of alacrity. It would be too weak at its current form especially considering the well trait change.

BlazeQ.1095:

BOA smid.1783:

Congrats on finally figuring out what T2 wanted from the beginning, how many months later? None of us wanted anything to do with that “silly siege stuff.” Too bad YB had to destroy the tier before figuring it out. And golem week was only fun for you because YB had what….like 3 bank tabs full of golems to use? I barely played because it was pointless. Most of us didn’t want to see another golem for weeks after that one ended. My guild spent more time training in PvP and GvGing than raiding. Course that’s gone now since the GvGs have been driven from the tier too. Thanks for that one as well YB.

No siege will only be “fun” for the server winning. FA might come out to play more since they won’t get pelted with ACs from every angle. SoS right now can barely hang on to any territory at all against the kittened YB blobs thanks to months of being locked out of recruiting. Take away the siege and you might as well waypoint our entire BL. You try to anyway.

hahahahahahah, now you know how NSP felt when FA and SoS kept rolling T3. Demoralizing isn’kitten

Blame DB for starting that bullkitten. They first started the recruiting war to stomp T3. FA, SoS and YB can do nothing but to follow up.

A few tips:
Taking PU will give you very strong sustain and easy engage and disengage.

Portal is mesmer’s strongest skill but it is very hard to utilize in solo queue.

W/O inspiration line, mantra of resolve is your most reliable condie cleanse. Without it, you better not head on engage a condie spec(say burn guardian, condie engi, condie ranger).

Lockdown build is super fun and can wreck people fast. But it is also very risky to play.

You are super squishy and can’t stand on point for long. So solo engaging a tanky/sustain class on point is usually a bad idea. If you focus on winning the game, try not to solo engaging likes of DD ele, necromancer on point.

It’s always hard in those situations. Especially so with pugs. Ideally you just need one player who has invul/stability etc to go for the stomp. Other players should do cleave damage as much as possible. If everyone goes up to stomp, it also gets bad as you waste cool downs and time to do damage. A shadow refuge can completely nullify your effort and turn tides of the battle. It gets even trickier if you have downed teammate as well. You don’t know how he is gonna react. He doesn’t know what you are thinking either.

The server community definitely provides a good foundation to build on.
Great place for both commanders and WvW hardcores to show your talent.

Current server transfer locking is a good thing in that it prevents bandwagon server like YB to get overstacked completely out of control. However, this is only a starting step.

I am waiting for Anet to come up more improvement to attract players to the WvW game. The new maps will only temporarily attract players. There needs to be more solid and stable environment for players to stay.

Knox.8462:

Throwing a Tides of Time into a zerg has the potential to be pretty devastating.

It’s decent but far from devastating. It has short range(600) and small field size. You have to be close to the melee train to maximize its potential. It also moves too slow to catch any of the backliners w/o stability.

Depends on zerg size. If it under 20, it is viable to play a PU power gank mesmer and pick off the enemy backline.

However, if it is like a large zerg, 30+ or even 40+. It gets increasingly hard to get anything done. Most of your skill needs targeting while in that blob fight, it’s all about cleave and ground targeting. The best you can do is throwing down glamours, veil, null field, feedback, timewarp etc. But you won’t be able to do too much damage. Mantra of pain can also work. But again, you need a target for that skill.

fishball.7204:

SoS ticks like 400 every OCX and FA ticks at like 30. YB is somewhere in between but they just hump siege to defend since they’re severely outnumbered vs TF’s map blob.

Gr8 fights during OCX m8888 /s

I don’t play OCX but that amazing coveragewars2 says otherwise to what you claim.
It shows OCX prime. YB average ticks 277, FA 140, SoS 278. At least you have two servers have close ppt to each other, while the other is probably no-show. This already seems better than all other timezones in T2 where it is all YB.

Engi AOE moa is a tool belt skill. They have a trait that can reset its cool down if they successfully evade an attack. The moa skill itself should have relatively long cool down around 100 sec.

The engi you face is probably a condie one that can dish out a lot of conditions+stacks of burn in short time. It is not wise to fight him if your build, like many of memsers’, is weak in condition cleanse.

SpellOfIniquity.1780:

While it’s stealthed it’s not doing damage. So I don’t care.

I just want their access to invulnerability and blocks to be shaved. Was fighting a Mesmer today who was using Vamp runes, was traited for reflects and was Distorting multiple times while I was fighting him. On top of Blinds and Blurred Frenzy… Either he was invuln or I was blinded like 80% of the time I was fighting him. That sh_t needs to not be a thing. Guardians can do the same but at least they can’t stealth and run away if they fail.

All these existed before, and mesmer still was one of the most vulnerable class because of 0 condie cleanse. The only reason mesmer is surviving well now is due to PU. PU makes mesmer cool down management very easy now. Vampirism rune certainly adds to that as well. But everyone is taking vampirism in this meta.

Also sustain is just super strong over the board now if you watch WTS and ESL. It’s not just mesmer. Players don’t die if they don’t overextend. Certain class can have less disengage, like you said guardian, but they have way more sustain and condie cleanse and have on-point presence at the same time.

If mesmer is nerf’ed to a state that he can’t stay alive relatively easily(ironically), it will be completely abandoned. Because it has no power to contest a point. Its only power is to use portal for team mobility and he needs to stay alive to do that. Mesmer’s current situation is just very similar to thief in the meta. It’s easy to engage and disengage. Have high burst. But it is to their disadvantage to engage in any 1v1 against other meta class.

Don’t forget that the team that runs mesmers only get 3rd and 4th place in WTS final.
TCG, the team that has arguably the best mesmer, struggles agains a team(Orng) that stacks guardians. I think this speaks volume because the whole TCG team revolves around mesmer, it represents the best mesmer can do in PvP. They even took a shoutbow warrior just to take some pressure off mesmer because the spec brings banner and can instantly rezz the mesmer.

ronpierce.2760:

Also, while it’s not always 100% viable to kill people with decent sustain, you can shatter (As long as IP doesn’t hit them) and spawn tons and tons of Phantasms with Chronomancer without ever exiting stealth, similarly, condition builds. You can very easily kill people without leaving stealth, especially if they’re marauder’s/zerker and distracted. It’s not optimal, damage wise, but it’s a very safe way to shatter-spike some squishies in a team fight and them have no way to really retaliate.

Please stop talking if you don’t even know the basics of mesmer.

Stealth breaks the moment any of your clones hits a foe. The only thing that doesn’t break stealth is phantasm attacking on their own. Shattering phantasm will break stealth as well.

If you can just show me 2-3 clips of your killing people w/o leaving stealth, even the most squishy kind, I would be quite amazed.