I have finally tried the d/d dodge spam thief. To my surprise, it can be quite effective.
It is extremely hard to mess up and good against quite a few classes in 1v1. At its worst, it can still stalement a point with ease. And it still has quite good mobility compared to most builds.
The big downside of this build is that it would be bad if teammates with mediocre dps decides to +1 you. You don’t have too much burst to quickly down someone and you don’t have very good chasing ability(unlike other thief build). You kinda have to make tough decision whether to continue fighting or leave your teammate 1v1.
PPK is not the answer.
PPK only encourages lopsided farming fight and running away from fights when there is no chance of winning.
Just imagine if in PvP, only killing awards points. All you would get is 5 ppl moving together and all dynamic playstyle will be lost.
What needs to happen is a focus on PPT or points earn on objective. But it is much easier to get fight around the objective instead of PvD.
It is due to portal and moa(with F5). These two skills are so strong that mesmer has to sacrifice a lot of its other personal power to balance out.
The end result is that you are heavily reliant on good usage of portal and moa to win games. Your teammates also have to some basic understanding of portal and moa(which is not true in a lot of the games).
This makes mesmer quite situational in solo queue play and can be really frustrating at times.
Medium armor viper would be your best bet.
Currently condition ranger, engi and daredevil are all pretty strong choices.
Another popular condition build is condition PS warrior.
If you want a build nerfed, do the following:
Advertise that spec to the public on forum and even give some tips on how to play it.
If it is indeed a low-effort high-return build, a lot players will play it and it will become a problem being complained about repeatedly. At that point, Anet will surely nerf it.
Build diversity died the day they forced everyone to commit to 3 full trait lines instead allowing players the options to mix and match their points into different ones.
That was not true. For example, I was playing mesmer back in the days when you chose for 14 traits. And there were three traits mandatory(shattered concentration, deceptive evasion, illusionary persona) that forced you to go in to a 4/4/6 build that everyone runs.
Yeah, you could still play PU mesmer or lockdown mesmer. But they were merely for-fun build just like today’s second tier builds.
Well when you gank 10v1 you get ten kills added to your KDR with no deaths.
Honestly, Mag’s players are no better than anyone else’s in all reality. Their small-scale is just more organized when it comes to tags and bags, and is a lot more persistent.
There is a clear difference. Mag players know how to survive. They normally won’t go hot-head and charge-in and suicide while many players from other servers just don’t give a kitten and play with no brain at all.
This is not fight. This is farming.
Exactly what will happen when most of the exp’ed NA players transfer to that one server. They don’t want fight and challenge. They just want to farm.
Do any of you srsly think 2.5k/d is legit fight? It is like plat pvp player playing against silver. Obviously you gonna end up spawn camping the other sides.
A solo-queue-only leaderboard.
Automated tournaments with special reward for 5-man premade.
Reduce passives, low-cd skill spam. They have a good first-step with the sigil update.
The game currently has too much skill spam and can get very confusing for new players.
Open up build diversity. They have been focusing on balancing the meta specs. But the meta has been similar for a year. Players are bored. Their balance patch has been too infrequent and too cautious in terms of opening up new options. They are too scared to break balance again because how long the patch cycle is.
You know OP, 3 years ago you complained about this:
Sad because so far its been 16 months and…
No instanced raids
Same bugs/exploits since day one
Same bad mob AI(mossman can still be exploited)
Lack of defined roles for classes(and diversity)
Constant imbalanceWell you got raids, they fixed mossman ai, they added much more defined builds and diversity, they balanced dps roles a lot better.
They did a lot of the stuff you wanted them to do.
/Thread
Nah. That was three years ago and my original post only talks about the redesign of the Swamp fractal and I had no problem with the previous one save a few bugs which could have been fixed without a redesign. Then I just asked should I even bother pugging without HoT skills because at 40+ it seems to become a toxic cesspool where I run the risk of getting booted. Doesn’t matter if I can do it or not and I have done many 40s including the swamp already thanks to some not throwing a fit but the problem still stands. If I can do it without HoT skills then why are some people acting like its a requirement.
Well, the reason they release an expansion is because most players want to play with new things.
It completely beats the point of having an expansion, if you just want to play the old content with old spec. MMORPG relies on having more and more new content to stay alive.
The reason that Druid is so popular (particularly in pubs) is that even when running full healer it brings a plethora of damage boosting buffs to the team that mitigates its substantially reduced DPS.
And this is why no other healer in the history of this game will ever be viable unless one of the following happens:
- A huge nerf to what druid brings for buffs
- All class specific buffs affect all 10 people
- All healers bring equal damage buffing effectsI personally would prefer both 2 and 3 as things that occur in order to increase raid diversity. It is pretty stupid that before you build a raid you already have 6 spots locked in for 2 each or 3 different classes.
Or just design more encounters like Matthias so that pugs and casual groups actually run safer options while hardcore groups run dps-centric composition.
You know it’s not there lol, time to accept reality!
well, having looked for it a while I know it’s not there, but there is one for plenty other weapons (all of them?) so I guessed I’ve missed it. It’s common to find a speedup in some specialization for every main weapon I’ve equipped on other characters, and it’s a matter of deciding if I can stand the specialization or do without the speedup.
You’re saying for a new 2H item brought on by the dragonhunter elite specialization, you can’t speed up the recharge, even if I give up something I really need/want?
I’d was looking at LB for a potential ranged swap to, but it doesn’t look to be able to displace what I currently used before it arrived on the scene.
Quite a few elite specialization weapons don’t have recharge trait.
Scrapper hammer, tempest warhorn, herald shield and dragonhunter longbow each have a trait that buff its effectiveness but not the recharge.
Chrono shield has no related trait at all.
I remember during beta testing, one of the devs mentioned they wanted druid to be good at burst healing while rev good at overall healing per second.
But to be honest, I like your idea better. I like the idea that druid stays in avatar for longer and actually use different skills to maintain healing and cleansing.
Current druid is all about entering and exiting avatar form repeatedly and abuse celestial shadow and druidic clarity.
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It was removed because Anet couldnt handle class balance properly
Bring the amulets back and balance the classes instead, how about nerfing power creep that made all these amulets prolematic in the first place
No, that amulet is OP and significantly limits class design.
Just want to remind you, cele engi/ele/warr has been ruling PvP for a long time before they introduced the new specialization system. Those specs are stronger and easier to play than all of today meta builds.
So a system like the one used in planetside 2.
I definitely like the idea but to completely rebuild wvw from ground requires too much resource that even transcends what an expansion can provide.
But I think it is worthwhile to consider implementing some basic ideas the OP suggested. For example, megaserver everyone into three factions is definitely the right way to go. Current server pairing system only slightly improve balance but over the 24/7 match, most of the timezones, you still have very imbalanced population across the servers that seemingly have equal strength determined by glicko.
Sounds like a great idea.
I was always annoyed when in a party with a dreamer user and have to tune down the volume.
What is the point?
People will spend the week discussing which servers they will stack onto. In the end, you will get the exact unbalanced situation as we have now.
PvP is hitting its all-time low. Many factors are contributing.
Worse rewards. Casual players lost a lot of incentive.
Stale meta. Overly cautious balance patch because it takes too long for them correct even something trivial.
Rock-paper-scissor balance. So many games are determined by profession/builds.
Obliged to duo-queue if you want to climb ladder. Once you get to platinum, it is almost impossible to progress unless you duo-queue.
Realistic buff should mean something completely different in pug fractal.
You can’t expect you always have druid/warrior/chrono support(no constant might fury quickness). Power reaper can self generate a lot of might which is a strong plus in fractals. You also get boosted crit-chance in shroud. On top of that, It also has great survivability. I don’t see how it is ‘bad’ in any way in a fractal run.
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I have been using durability rune all the time.
For me the reason is simple: durability is a viable rune for WvW as well. I can play both gamemodes effectively with one set of gear. This saves so much money and trouble.
Interesting build.
I too am a bit surprised that you can get 19-20k dps with just sharper image. Maybe some screenshots to show that?
Two options:
For condition, go shortbow + axe/x
For power, go longbow + staff
However, in raids/fractals, you usually can’t stay in range forever because you need to share and get buff to/from teammates.
It would be a fair change to make its cast time back to 1/4 sec.
It used to be 1/4 sec but was too strong when it gave evade/distortion effect so it was nerfed to 3/4 sec cast time. But now pulsing aegis, it is pretty underwhelming so it should at least get back its 1/4 sec cast time.
Six straight losses.
Guess I’ll do what the pros do; Take some days off to increase my decay. Is that really fair or ethical? No. Does it help with population issues? No. Is it responsible to the community? No.
I feel bad, but I had a goal of getting a 50% w/l this season and climbing out of Bronze. I was within sight of that goal.
Prior to my loss streak, I had just over 50% wins. I got punished heavily. so, I guess I game the system like everybody else. My perception is that ANET doesn’t care.
TLDR Here is the basic problem, ANET; The system punishes playing often. Therefore, smart players don’t play. This results in low population. That, in turn, leads to poor matches. The poor matches reduce population still further.
just want to inform you decay doesnt give any advantage to you anymore…
That may be true or not. Regardless, the system punishes playing. Every game risks rating. The leader boards is solely based on rating.
Hence, the best strategy is to play a minimum of games. By it’s very nature, that system discourages playing and minimizes population. Low population leads to kittened matches.
We should go back to the old system of number of wins on the season. That’s a measure of skill AND of diligence and it encourages people to play.
Now you need 15 games per week to be on the leaderboard. That means by the end of the season, you need close to 100 games to be on the leaderboard. That sounds like a reasonable sample size to measure individual skill.
people will only get better if they want to. if they don’t they wont. no matter how much “help” they are given.
Exactly. Players have very little motivation to become better. If the game mode is not inherently interesting enough for more players to join, then it won’t grow.
Not sure how Ranger is broke.. I come across plenty of roamers of all classes that seem to have a good number of counters for my Ranger/Druid. I don’t run condi though, I run a Marauder build. Lots of everything except condi. The EASIEST people I come across for me to take down is other rangers, though there are some that just seem to be built for survival more than anything and manage to run away.
To me, Thief is the one class that’s truly ridiculous. What they can to stealthed makes no sense to me and the amount of dps they can put out in a few seconds in stealth is worse. If I can hit them with a reveal shot at the right time then hit the right combination of skills they will fall, but that’s a stretch for me since my reaction time isn’t what it used to be. Most good rangers should be able to deal with thiefs though if they don’t get hit from behind of course..
The other classes, imo, are not that much different. Simply different skills and counters and if you see two people that know their classes super well having a duel it’s fun to watch. It’s more about “knowing” your class than it is about the imbalance, imo. (except for thief!)
Druid is actually pretty strong against most classes in WvW because of its sustain and mobility. But the biggest problem is that it is somewhat countered by thief and we all know thief is the most prominent roamer in WvW.
Check metabattle for our most effective build —- chronophantasm shatter(inspiration/illusion/chrono).
It is a hybrid damage build with focus on condition. The key concept is to keep a high number of illusions to repeatedly shatter and reset cooldowns. All the traits taken have great synergy with illusion generation and shatter.
The other less viable but still decent build(I think) are burst power shatter(domi/inspiration/chrono) and support boon share shatter(chaos/inspiration/chrono).
For the meta build, we are strong against most necro and revenant builds. It has decent sustain to stalemate bruiser builds at least for a reasonably long time. Good enough against D/P thief.
It struggles against Longbow trapper DH, power warrior, staff vault spam thief. These 3 builds have very high burst damage, good condition cleanse, and good clone cleaving.
For strong builds, just check metabattle. I personally think for solo players, power DH and warrior are really strong for their great damage sustain. But in coordinated environment, necro with ele and engi support are the best teamfight carry. Ranger(Druid) is the king in small skirmishes but a bit lacking in teamfight. Mesmer and thief are pretty good solo carry due to mobility but require a bit more skills(both 1v1 mechanical and map awareness).
Mostly the role for mesmer didn’t change compared to your time. You are still mostly a roamer and damage dealer. But compared to old burst power build, the new chronophantasm mesmer has much better 1v1s. However, your damage is lower so it is much harder to do well in small skirmishes. Your burst damage is not that high and because most of your damage is condition so they can be either cleansed or endured through. So there are many bad 2v2 matchups for you. The key to success is a good execution of moa and portal play.
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The time for WvW eSports was a few years ago and Anet missed that opportunity.
The GvG scene could have become big, but you really need a shoutcaster that knows what’s going on. Sometimes it’s tough to see through all the effects.
And to think what kind of skill balance changes would we see if there was a WvW eSports.
People already found it hard to follow actions in 5v5 PvP.
GvG is even worse. All you see is a cluster of name tags vs a cluster of name tags. Anyone believing it has potential being esports is deluding himself.
I think they will try to avoid the half-year-long content drought they had before HoT release. Back then, they announced the expansion at the start of the year and players waited until late June to get a specialization update. The actual expansion came in October, another 3 months later.
Hopefully this time they make sure the expansion launch can be within 3-4 months of the end of lliving world season 3.
I don’t know—there is something wrong with taking straight player hours. 1 person playing for 3 hours is not the same as 3 people playing for 1 hour each, not in terms of effectiveness.
And if there’s any overlap in play times on the 3-person server, the 1-person server could be outnumbered more often than they outnumber the other team, even by twice as much, even though the same number of hours are played.
It’s just not apples to apples.
I don’t know what other method could be used, but I don’t have confidence in this one.
Then you are considering timezone balance which will never be achieved with current system.
We all know how stacked Mag is for NA while being light in some othe timezones.
Mag is the No.1 killer of WvW.
Sorry Maguuma, no one down here has your numbers.
To be fair, Mag did have a 13.3 KDR on EBG after the first skirmish and EBG had a queue for every server so you can’t pull the numbers excuse for that, I’m pretty sure YB/ DB are also outgunned.
13.3?!!!
Must be fight guild vs full pug to create that kind of difference.
That is also why I find playing for K/D kinda detrimental to WvW as well. Veterans stack on one server so they have no chance to lose whatsoever.
1st t1 skirmish: sos 1st place.
And then……
BG will easily beat us outside of NA prime.
NA WvW guilds always like to stack.
Mag is a typical example. Veteran guilds stack on the server, saying they like to fight. But in reality, they stack to farm K/D for their ego. If they truly like to fight, they should spread out and fight each other.
The most important thing against chronomancer:
You can dodge shield 4 block to prevent its phantasm from spawning!
Also, you can daze/stun right after shield block ends to interrupt the phantasm spawning
So you prioritize dodge shield 4 than dodging shatters. Condition mesmer damage directly scales with the number of illusions they shatter. If you can prevent the illusion from spawning, they already lose most of its fire power. Even better, chrono has trait that reduces skill cool down by shattering its corresponding phantasm. So if shield 4 phantasm can’t spawn, chrono will not be able to get reduced cool down on the important block skill.
You never know. With their matchmaking system, they might have to reset completely if someone didn’t click accept. That means your inaction wasted other 9 people’s time.
Also if you only missed once, you will only be put on a 2minutes30sec hold. If you get hours of hold, you must have missed the queue pop like 3 or 4 times.
These two you are talking about?
NEW: Sigil of Ruthlessness: Gain 5 might (3 seconds) when interrupting a foe.
NEW: Sigil of Absorption: Steal a boon when interruption a foe.
Sigil of ruthlessness is only okayish. 5 might is like 7% damage increase if you use marauder/demolisher amulet. Considering you get might from GS2 as well, the actual benefit could be even smaller. 3 seconds is also a very short time for you to capitalize on the small bonus.
Sigil of absorption is interesting but I think mesmer is better at boon removal through shattering. You can remove stability and get easier interruption. Since you already try to remove boons first, it feels less useful to steal boon again afterwards. This sigil seems much better for D/P thief.
Just by looking at your build, I would be very worried about your self survivability with it.
A bit of focus fire will make it very difficult for you to survive and support.
You will probably need to switch to mental defense and signet of illusion for better sustain.
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If you play NA prime, SoS or FA are definitely good choices. T2 currently has a lot of fight-heavy guilds.
T3 and T4 are not bad either. There are fewer guilds but as many pugs though. You can face a bit easier and less organized fights. To be honest, they can sometimes be more fun than fighting guilds as they usually run super tanky/sustain composition.
If you want easier encounters than VG, you should look at
Wing 2 second encounter: Trio
Wing 3 first encounter: Escort
Wing 4 second encounter: Mursaat Overseer
These three are by far the easiest raid encounters.
VG is a boss of typical difficulty for raids. Most bosses you see will be of similar difficulty to VG. So if your group can kill VG, you should be able to do most bosses with practice as well. The only more challenging ones are the last bosses for all 4 wings.
Well, if everyone is forced to play vanilla, warrior is probably indeed the strongest right now.
I am struggling with mesmer this season. It just feels so much weaker or maybe players learned how to counter it. I can’t 1v1 DH, warrior, druid, staff thief at all. The only thing I brought to the table are moa and portal. If I didn’t make the most of it, I feel very underpowered. Had a 1700 rating last season, only had 1400+ this season after 20 games.
I think I am playing warrior/druid this season instead. Just feel so much more useful in warrior/druid now.
Only class that has condition build straight up better than power is mesmer. And condition mesmer’s biggest counters are zerker warrior, longbow DH and vault thief. All are power builds.
All other 8 classes have either equal or power-favored builds.
It is ridiculous to say condition is overpowered.
Don’t understand why they significantly raised the AR requirement to play fractals from 70 to 150 after the expansion. This pretty much goes against GW2 philosophy. We had not stats powercreep on gears. Why introduce such thing on an already overly complicated system.
Well they increased to 150 but everything can use the normal agony infusion, before you had to use 7 infusions with +11/12 agony infusions. So now its 150 but its easier to get to 150, and ascended itens are way easier to have then back there when you needed 70.
So yeah they increased to 150, but made a lot easier to get it, so no reason to complain.
They only made it easier recently when not requiring the +7 basic infusion.
Back when the expansion was launched, it was actually more difficult. They only gave 2 more slots on rings and gave a new +7 type compared to the old +5.
Now they realized the problem and made it easier but they didn’t have to do this to begin with. It is just a correction to the mistake made during expansion launch.
I don’t think PU Condition is worthless at all. It’s not quite as strong as meta maybe, but mainly it’s just that it’s less effective in team play. If you drop Inspiration for Chaos, you end up with a bit less sustain and certainly less Condi cleanses, but in exchange you get more Protection and Stealth.
In the end though, PU with Chaos just doesn’t synergize as well as the meta build does with Inspiration, especially for team play where Stealth is not nearly as strong as it is in 1v1s.
Torch actually brings a lot of AoE Burning now, but you can use it just as well with the meta build and not give up Inspiration.
The inherent weakness to Conditions for all builds without Inspiration has gotten somewhat better with the last patch: Null Field down to 25 second CD and Arcane Thievery down to 20 second CD (traited) and both have good synergy with Chaos.
You simply can not delude yourself into thinking that you can play a PU Condie build the same way that you play the meta Condie build. You just don’t have the on-point staying power and you’re much more reliant on Stealth for defense.
Just as you said, it is clear that PU condition brings nothing special to the table while sacrificing tons of sustain and utility in inspiration(no aoe condition cleanse, no distortion share, no 33% damage reduction and an extra phantasm). That is why I think it is worthless.
For power build, you can at least take domination and bring boon removal and more burst damage.
As for condition PU, you have to take stealth skills to make it worth. The only worthwhile one I can think of is torch stealth. If you take decoy, then you can’t condition cleanse because blink and portal and mandatory. Taking mass invis means you lose the strong utility in moa.
Don’t understand why they significantly raised the AR requirement to play fractals from 70 to 150 after the expansion. This pretty much goes against GW2 philosophy. We had not stats powercreep on gears. Why introduce such thing on an already overly complicated system.
543 point system is the culprit. They put in that thing without good reason and now they don’t pay attention anymore.
Before after relinking, we usually have glicko shifting quickly and shrinking server fell out of T1. Now with 543 point system, the tier gets essentially locked. Even if you performed the absolute worst possibly, you will still be regarded as 60% of the top server’s strength by glicko calculation.
They need to stop this 5:4:3 point system. No one thinks it brings any positives to the game to begin with. Now it is obvious it just doesn’t work well with glicko to reflect the true strength of a server
I do agree with you on the mastery system though. It gets pretty grindy and gates out content. Especially at the launch of the expansion, mastery system is absolutely something I hate.
However, they did realize the problem and reduced the grinding and made it less mandatory for most content.