Guild Wars 2

Power reaper, berserker and dragonhunters are all decent.

Revenant also works if you have support.

Boonstacking druid and scrapper are also very strong, both solo and group roaming.

But the best roaming choice is definitely thief. If you can’t play DP thief, you can always go for the easy tankier staff build.

epic.2476:

BeLZedaR.4790:

The whole purpose of automated tournaments is to provide an outlet for teams to compete in, against other 5 man teams, making it interesting and fun test of your team’s skill as a unit.
Considering the fact there are 3 ATs a day, I don’t see a reason to turn ranked into 5 man again, but instead let lower skilled teams play against lower skill teams as a means of practise for them, and also they can always scrim in private lobbies if they want to practise 5 man (which is what people have been doing for ages).

Removing the ability to test your individual skill at normal ranked play will not grow ATs but destroy them, because the solo-duo system offered in season 5 formed many teams (look at Tournament of Groucharoo) and the only reason they haven’t reappeared since is because they had no chance to. The solo-duo system lets you see who is actually good as an individual and then want to take them as a team member and integrate them into the team.

Assume you get what you want, ranked is 5 man. How is someone without a team already going to prove they’re any good? They’ll never make it to top 250 solo, forget about that, if you think otherwise you’re dellusional or lying to yourself. That means someone who is not already in a team and has a name will be faced with a barrier they can’t cross to enter the scene, thus no new names will ever appear and it will die slowly.

ATs + solo-duo is the best solution for both sides of this.

It’s not too difficult, indeed. Qeue system jsut may be able to match people in 5 party against people in 5 party too. And let solo people fight against solo people or 3 party people max. Just like overwatch or paladins shooter gaming queue does it.

That means more Q waiting time, but, i preffer that.

PD: Sorry bad english -.-

And automated tournament will provide the 5v5 you want. No waiting time. Everyone gets on at the same time and play a big tournament together.

Boogiepop Void.6473:

I think the point is being missed. Outnumbered is determined by MAP population. Not if you are alone or in a group. So by putting such a huge reward boost into Outnumbered, it encourages people to try to lower their own server’s TOTAL PLAYERS ON MAP so as to keep the bonus active. It’s meant to be a reward for fighting at a disadvantage, but it ends up being a reason for people to actively try to discourage others from playing on their map. Outnumbered gives the single biggest pip gain outside of extreme rank. Rank gain is auto, and it is more economical to encourage people to leave even if you drop to third place that to get more people in and try to win.

LOL what are you talking about. It is ridiculous when we finally get some good change to the game mode, we get players like you who complain about it.

How can you just lower your own server’s population on the map by yourself? Players choose to play wherever they want. The only thing you can do to get outnumber buff is to find a map that is empty for your server.

Playing outnumbered deserves the huge bonus. Every other reward favors blobbing greatly and that is not what the game mode needs. You earn waaaaay less WXP by playing outnumbered and you are way more likely to get killed.

+5 bonus is definitely not too much to serve as an incentive.

2k rank is definitely pretty high as it takes on average 2 years to obtain.

What does mean? It means Anet plans to give out no new shiny reward to WvW in 2 years….

So I don’t like the requirement.

You need to understand the game has a variety of audience.

At one end of the spectrum, you have casual players like you who can’t find time to consistently raid. While at the other end, you got hard-core players still complaining about raid being too easy and not prestigious enough.

It is hard to satisfy the two extremes. So the developers have to settle for a middle ground. Raid in gw2 takes time, but not as much as some other more grindy MMOs. However, if you have really busy real life, some achievement in the game has to be outside of your scope.

If you find it not realistic to set legendary armor as your goal, just forget about it. It is not like they look so amazing you have to obtain it. There are plenty other more realistic goals you can achieve in this game.

Calm down. This is patchday. What else do you expect? Don’t you remember what happend on the first day of world linking?

Wait until next week. I would be surprised if there are still long queues by then. If so, players will just transfer off which is actually good to balance out population among servers.

SloRules.3560:

And what is wrong with metabattle builds?

Nothing is wrong. Most of them are used by GvG guilds and proved to be effective there.

However, most WvWers don’t GvG so you may want to make adjustment to suit your playstyle better.

Sviel.7493:

I wonder if you were one of those terribad condi mesmers I’ve met this week? The build is certainly very strong, but, somehow, some people manage to be mind-blowingly awful with it. I’m not sure what they’re doing wrong.

You’re right about the burst, though a condi build isn’t about burst damage anyway. You should be stealthed, evading or blocking almost the entire time while your condis go to town.

Definitely not because we are on the same server.

I have been playing condition mesmer in PvP for quite a bit and knows the mechanics pretty well. All of you are welcome to duel me in PvP area if you question my understanding of this build.

Because the game uses megaserver system and maps are instanced with a populatio cap, you should expect to use LFG to map hop to a busy ones.

Second this. I have been on the same server for 3 years and been playing WvW on and off.
Getting no loyalty bonus.

Loyalty needs 2-3 pips to discourage bandwagoning.

I even tried viper chrono for the damage but it is so bad.

Your burst damage is worse than berserker chrono and you get 1 shot by thief. Not worth at all.

Artaz.3819:

Exciton.8942:

Tried condition chrono and found it pretty trash in WvW.

Any one with a brain can just run away from you and you have very little chasing potential. Don’t know how players find it to be strong.

Yeah, it can kill bad players easily but so can 1000 other builds.

Chrono mobility is extremely high honestly (+25% speed trait and teleports). Torment condition spam kills runners over and over (and confusion condi kills the skill spammers). You aren’t going to kill most thieves because they just perma-stealth/run too if that is what you are implying.

The other top tier roamer build is standard D/P daredevil thief (although condi thief version seems mighty close now) but you won’t be killing a chrono condi roamer that knows any type of rotation/knows when to run too.

25 passive speed and a blink at 30 sec won’t help you chase down any one.

Torment and confusion are probably the weakest damaging conditions. Everyone has some sort of condition cleanse to remove the first application. You have to reapply them to get the job done but if they run away you won’t have the chance.

Tried condition chrono and found it pretty trash in WvW.

Any one with a brain can just run away from you and you have very little chasing potential. Don’t know how players find it to be strong.

Yeah, it can kill bad players easily but so can 1000 other builds.

I much prefer power mesmer to condition in WvW(although in PvP condition mesmer is better). For power mesmer, you land a burst, you do massive damage and get the kill.
For condition mesmer, you land a burst, the opponent just cleanse everything and run away.

Abelisk.4527:

Thief isn’t broken at all. It has received lots of endurance nerfs, staff nerfs, and PI was nerfed in the recent patch too.

They have superior mobility, sure, but their dueling capability is constantly receiving nails.

Thief dueling is not bad at all. DP thief can duel reasonably well against most meta builds.

But with its superior mobility and high burst damage, it is just more effective to go for +1 and quick kills.

Shadow refuge was great for team rezzing before.

But now you have scrapper sneak gyro and function gyro power rezz. In addition, revenant and scrapper have aoe reveal which nullifies shadow refuge.

The problem with an easy story mode is always that whether it justifies development time.

The whole point of raid is to let dedicated players to sink in hours upon hours of play time, not only beating the boss but also improve their performance as well.

As for story mode with bad loot, players will just go through it once and never come back again. It is hard for developers to justify their time investment to such a game mode.

Click bait? Not a bad try.

There are a lot of ways to help your team win. You need to identify the best way and execute it perfectly to have the best result. It takes a lot of experience to make the best decision.

e.g. You might think you are helping your team great deal by 1v2 on a point for a long time. Normally it is the case. However, some of the enemy player can do the exact same thing somewhere else on the map and completely neutralize your effort. In that case, you might want to create other more impactful plays to take out the strongest enemy players instead of 1v2ing forever agaisnt 2 weak enemy players.

Trigr.6481:

Jaxom.7310:

custom arena map

This is a repeat of courtyard in a sense. Until this map is supported by its own que that’s specifically balanced with its own rule set then I could honestly care less. I don’t praise work that’s half finished.

Countless

I wouldn’t really consider this a new game mode. As you said, there is no queue and complete rules.

Anet doesn’t seem to have enough development power to support a new game mode. Just look at stronghold. They spent so little time advertising and supporting that game mode.

But it is still a good QoL update for PvPers who want to try out something different. 2v2 is meaningful even in a 5v5 conquest match mode. It also makes it easier for players who want to focus on practicing some mechanical skills to find a good place to do so.

SarahGobbi.2319:

Exciton.8942:

Learn to dodge.

Thanks Captain Obvious, but Im being CC’ed, while CC’ed already, so cant dodge

Not so obvious for you.

Every stun is applied by skill and here is the list.
https://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Stun

You can dodge every one of them and almost all of them are very well telegraphed.

Learn to dodge.

xp eke xp.6724:

At the maprotation there are only 2 classes that can check thief:
a other thief and ranger.
Mesmer can do it too but why waisting a portal for that, if you can controll the fights?

to counter a thief in 1v1:
thief

But thief got one thing that hardcounters him:

Teamfights, cause he is not very usefull at this, maybe finishing and ruppting some enermies but the teamdmg/ support is higher on teams without thiefes. So play at 2 points and force the teamfights, that outplay the thief completely as long your team is as good as the enermies team.

Oh and if the thief do a 1v1 instead to +1 (by decap or joining fights) he do crap, cause it needs too long time and the points ticking bether for enermie team (again just if we look same player-skills at both sides).

His first rolle at teams is to abuse the +1 situation, the second to create that and after that something else. So if you counter that you counter the thief ;D

Thats why Vornollo is right. But yea it´s a 5v5, if the one of your team do bad the thief will be the first punisher

It is not always good strategy to play 2 points against team with a thief.

If the team composition is 4 good teamfighters(sth like ele+engi+necro+dh) + 1 thief, then 2 point strategy is absolutely the worst.

If you go 5v4 team fight and try to team wipe them, it gets really risky. The thief will get the other 2 caps and it is not easy to win that teamfight AND get the kills in a timely manner. If some of the other team is smart, they will just play a sustain game against you.

If you go for 4v4 team fight and keep one player chasing the thief. With superior mobility, the thief will always make sure they have one of the other two caps. He will also have time window to +1 the teamfight when the chaser is capping or rotating.

In short, a team composition with 4 teamfighters + 1 thief is actually great against any 2 point safe strategy.

Not a good idea. Domination and dueling lines are as good as they are.

You don’t want power block and mantra builds to be mutually exclusive.

You can still go chaos/inspiration/chrono to be a support character in PvP. Paladin or mender amulet should both work fine. For rune, you can pick water or leadership.

However, without fast stomp/rezz capability and having poor self-survivability means it will no longer be a very effective build.

Complaining about condition damage is pretty ridiculous in my opinion. The application of conditions is through skills, same as power builds.

Just play with viper and compared it to play with berserker. You will see condition application is no easier than doing power damage.

The patch note didn’t say everything

The change is definitely a nerf overall. The skill cast time is increased from 0.75s to 1 due to the animation change and the effect is minimal(minimal damage+3 stacks of vulnerability).

You can roam solo or in small scale with most of the popular PvP mesmer builds. Both power and condition can work.

As for larger scale combat, you can mostly do 3 things(all about support):
1. Boon share
Mostly through signet of inspiration and bountiful disillusionment. To do this well, you want to invest in boon duration in your gear
2. Distortion share
You can share 1sec distortion with inspiration traitline with an icd of 5 sec.
3. Glamour support
Portal, veil, null field, time warp all good support skills to use depending on the need.

The weapon choice can really be anything. You can use GS and Sword/shield. You can also use staff or focus if you like.

Try go to the community website
http://www.sosgw2.net/

and see if you can find a suitable guild.

Also, never hurts to follow different tags in WvW and see if his style suits you.

Sea of Sorrows still has a good OCX population but lacks organization. You see ton of players coming out when there is a recognizable tag. However, that doesn’t happen every day.

I think overall OCX on SoS is just a bit too casual and fair-weather.

Anet does have split balance for 3 game modes WvW, PvE and PvP.

But they are extremely unclear when a skill change is affected in WvW or not.

Miyafuji.1340:

The problem is WvW is not making money. Its one of the reasons its neglected. As long as you get exotic gear you can go there and that’s it. WvW players are usually not interested in PVE, they do not care about buying gold, nothing. The only way WvW makes money are the paid transfers when greedy players want to get to the top server which is more expensive to transfer. I do not expect them to change this cause at that point WvW would make exactly 0 money.

This is completely untrue.

Cosmetics in gemstore entice WvW players the same way as they do on PvE or PvP players.

Gearwise, WvW requires quite a diverse stats combination to be successful. It is actually more likely for WvW players to get easy gem to gold as they don’t like PvE grinding.

There is no condition meta. Many classes are still better on power builds.

Condition builds have no advantage in PvP because of the limitation of stats composition.

Animism.9803:

Exciton.8942:

After all, it is 5v5. You only gotta choose 5 professions out of 9 and some composition will provide the best synergy that everyone tends to gravitate to.

So, in line with your StarCraft analogy, all the best players should just play one race because it’s optimal right?

This is not the correct comparison. SC2 is a 1v1 game while gw2 is 5v5.

The analogy in SC2 is that everyone will gravitate to the optimal strategy, unit composition needed for a certain matchup.

Crying about warrior can’t be played should be compared to crying about not being able to use your favorite units against something clearly counters you.

One last thing about competitive play.

There is nothing prevent you from running what you consider the best composition. You do not need diversity to achieve balance. Whether warrior is good enough or not does not prevent you from playing competitively.

After all, it is 5v5. You only gotta choose 5 professions out of 9 and some composition will provide the best synergy that everyone tends to gravitate to.

Animism.9803:

Exciton.8942:

There is currently NO top tier 5v5 play so you can’t say anything about profession viability there.

For top tier ranked queue, there is plenty of DH/warrior there and that is all I care about. What matters to players is there day-to-day gameplay not some non-existent high level 5v5 play.

Sorry, but this is just an ignorant statement.

There is plenty of top tier 5v5 play after the announcement of Jebro’s tournament.

You’re saying that what should matter is day-to-day gameplay, except that’s basically saying the game is catering casuals and not meant for competitive play.

Which game actually does that? Why even have competitive game modes if it’s not made to be competitive?

Like wat? There is no competitive tournament exposure at all. Behind-the-scene practise =/= competitve 5v5 gameplay. At least some players should stream it? Just like every other competitive pvp game out there?

I follow SC2 competitve scene very actively and I know what an active competitive scene looks like. I don’t see that in gw2.

Animism.9803:

Exciton.8942:

You clearly don’t understand. What players need is change. Doesn’t matter if you achieve better balance or not. Players have been tired of seeing warrior/DHs plaguing ranked queue and need a breath of fresh air.

Also analysis is vague. There is no such thing as competitive meta until the first real competitive tournament happens.

Change comes from players too, in that players should get better to understand that DH/warrior was not a problem at high levels of game play.

You don’t see any other game being balanced around the masses, they’re always balanced around the top. Just because Ryu is the most played Street Fighter character doesn’t mean that Capcom nerfs him every balance patch.

The reason why DH/warrior were so popular were because they tend to be fairly self-sufficient characters. But they have limited synergy in team play, which, last I checked, GW2 PvP was a 5v5 team game.

And because of that, people played them. Also I would argue that heavy melee classes tend to be the most popular anyway.

In top tier 5v5 play, DH was barely viable. Now it’s just straight up useless. What the patch needed to do was maybe tune down warrior a bit, and some light tweaking here and there.

Instead, the patch blew up the balance entirely, which took 2 years after HOT to achieve.

I don’t disagree that certain aspects of the patch were good — like making the game less reliant on passive skills, but overall this was an entire failure fabricated by designers who clearly either have no idea what they’re doing or clearly don’t care about the game.

With respect to your last tournament, there was a competitive tournament right around the corner and many teams had a variety of team compositions. And now we won’t know how it would have played out.

There is currently NO top tier 5v5 play so you can’t say anything about profession viability there.

For top tier ranked queue, there was plenty of DH/warrior there and that is all I care about. What matters to players is their day-to-day gameplay not some non-existent high level 5v5 play.

You clearly don’t understand. What players need is change. Doesn’t matter if you achieve better balance or not. Players have been tired of seeing warrior/DHs plaguing ranked queue and need a breath of fresh air.

Also analysis is vague. There is no such thing as competitive meta until the first real competitive tournament happens.

FGS is a very good conjured weapon. It works very similar to warrior GS but more flashy. All skills have some purpose.

Personally, I would like to see all conjured weapon skills being improved and have them being completely time based rather than charge based.

One interesting thing they can do is to make the shield only affect off-hand skill and axe only affect main-hand skill.

Headbutt and shield bash nerf might have been over done.

But eternal champion nerf is a good one and much needed one. Warrior was pretty ridiculous running around ignoring all kinds of CC effect.

If you want a good interrupt build, play thief.

OriOri.8724:

Yea that’s what I figured. Thieves were technically nerfed, but the sustain of other classes was nerfed substantially harder than the hits to thief damage.

Luckily, I think condition mesmer is still a pretty risky 1v1 for thief. They are much better off +1 us. It takes like less than 1 sec to kill a mesmer if thief does a successful ambush attack. If they 1v1 us, it will take them maybe a minute and requires tons more mechanical skills to win.

OriOri.8724:

Bigpapasmurf.5623:

As a teef, typically mesmer/chrono isn’t always easy (esp evady condi ones). Clones can/will get in our way and the reflects/chronophantasma bursts can really hurt. For condi mes: don’t stealth until we do…about a few seconds after we do (if you think we get the full 4 heartseekers off in our blinding powder, wait about 5sec before stealthing yourself.. Always expect us to start with steal/backstab once we are finally able to target you. Keep your clones up as often as possible and time the shatters. (actually this applies to both DPS and condi builds lol). Its also a good idea to stand in our blinding powder circles often, this limits us on how much stealth we get and possibly forces us to use more initiative as we will move away, BP again and stealth twice (wasting a lot of initiative).

If you are NA and want to practice, hit me up in game. Chrono/Mes is one class I want to learn to fight better.

As a thief, how do you think this patch changed the matchups between thieves and mesmers? Mesmer sustain took a decent hit without much being given back, but thief did lose some damage and some endurance regen.

You can just go watch sinderener stream. He beat misha(on condition chrono) several times in a row. He said he couldn’t do that before the patch.

We must not be playing the same game.

Necro takes down condition rev with ease. Once you corrupt resistance, the rev is dead.

Mesmer has no problem with condition rev either. It might take some time for mesmer to win but mesmer will eventually win.

Engineer should be able to sustain without any problem either as long as you take enough condition cleanse.

Ryou.2398:

Fay.2357:

Ryou.2398:

Tarasicodissa.7084:

Celestial gear doesn’t allow you to switch roles, it allows you to play all roles poorly. If you want to be able to switch roles, get legendary gear.

Uhhh celestial is all stats is it not? And I did not say it allows you to switch roles, but rev class can switch roles to an extent therefor I am asking about celestial gear.

It functions exactly like he said. If you get celestial you’ll just be bad at any role you try and play. Yeah, you’ll be able to “role switch”, but you’ll be switching from “being bad” to “also being bad”.

That is kind of a bad explanation, allot of people also have meta tunnel vision, I have known people to use celestial for other things in the past and did quite well with it.

One stats set only allows you to play one role. Even celestial gear won’t let you play multiple roles.

After training runs, if you feel confident enough to join the exp groups, go ahead and do so.

If things turn out to be bad for you, just say sorry and find another training group to get more exp.

The start is always the hardest. Once you get a few boss kills, things will be much easier.

Also, VG is not the easiest boss for pugs. You can always try trio and escort to get a few LIs. After those, I consider Gorseval and mursaat overseer easier encounters than VG.

Fighting against thief is definitely the biggest challenge for mesmer. It is just so easy to tunnel vision and get instagib by thief when you used most of your cool downs in middle of a fight.

The key is map awareness. Always keep an eye on where thief goes. If thief doesn’t show up, always assume you are in danger.

When you feel thief is probably chasing you, do random dodges to throw him off. Move to positions he can’t straight teleport on you. It usually comes down to mind games against thief, you need to guess when they gonna burst you rather than just play reactionary.

Itz Jay.8941:

OriOri.8724:

The cleanses haven’t been changed at all, its 1 cleanse per shatter, not per illusion.

Yeah, it’s actually the healing you’re losing when you cant upkeep illusionary reversion. Now you just have to shatter without illusions to remove condi pressure.

They’ve basically slowed the build down drastically. In a 1v1 it’s not so bad because you can combo to keep 3 illusions up but now in team fights or 1vX the aoe’s just destroy your sustain so you’re forced to rotate.

If anything if they were going to nerf illusionary reversion they should have decreased the CD on CS instead of increasing it.

The nerf to shield 5 was just a little cherry on top to add to destroying the build.

It is hard nerf combined with shield 5 and continuum split nerf. But we don’t get destroyed as much as warrior/DH/druid.

The compensation we get through mind wrack damage, cry of frustration damage and mind wrack crit chance actually gives the build more power burst than before. So what happens now is we need to rethink the way we burst and play smarter.

DP thief is over the top now and we can’t compete against them. But compared to other dps specs, chrono is still strong and unique.

DP thief will dominate now.

With the pulsing stability nerf, thief can take out warrior, necro and ranger very easily. They can already take out mesmer and ele quickly before the patch. DH also gets heavily nerfed. The only class that can resist dp thief well now is engi.

I don’t really mind DH and warrior being heavy nerfed as the meta has become a bit boring as we were seeing too many of them.

However, I don’t know if there is enough new interesting stuff introduced by the patch. Condition revenant can be interesting but I am not sure if it is good enough compared to necro or mesmer.

The old buidls of ele, engi and thief will remain top tier in both coordinated team and pugs.