Guild Wars 2

Lopez.7369:

It sounds like you’re stuck in ruby because that’s where your skill level is. You didn’t notice this last season because the leagues weren’t skill-based like they are now.

Leagues aren’t skill-based now either. It just takes longer for lesser skilled players to advance.

AegisFLCL.7623:

Sounds to me like the system is appropriately spreading players the more time progresses.

It will. But that may take most of the season. Meanwhile it frustrates many players along the way.

This is what players want:

1. Teammates close to their skill level
2. Competitive matches (not blow-outs)
3. League to reflect their skill more immediately, not over time
4. Rewards which are gated by skill (though eventually obtainable for everyone)

The current system doesn’t really do any of that well. It’s set up to try and do #4, but league progress is as much a time gate as a skill gate. Meanwhile, matchmaking both within teams and between teams is no better (though it’s no worse, which is a pretty kitten ing assessment of the MMR calculation).

Ragnar the Rock.3174:

Another simpler option would be to do the following

1: Take a pulse off of the symbol
2: Reduce the cast time to 1/2 second and remove the after cast.
3: Reduce the damage the symbol does per pulse.
4: Increase the damage of the hammer auto attacks to compensate.

This reduces the effect of that trait on hammer so it effects it more evenly across weapons.

Reducing the symbol of protection pulses and making 1.c faster solves the hammer clunkiness issue and the damage scaling. But you still have extremely high protection up-time. And if you leave in the symbol duration increase, you have permanent group protection from auto-attacking, which isn’t healthy for PvE, even if you lowered hammer damage across the board.

You’ve pointed out why it’s hard to move Symbol of Protection. So I think the best choice is to just scrap Writ of Persistence and move the symbol size increase to Zeal, which could better benefit from it in PvP and WvW.

AegisFLCL.7623:

So lemme get this straight.

According to some threads Emerald is cursed.

According to others Sapphire is cursed.

Now Ruby is cursed?

Yup! As players break out of the “curse” they move up to the next division and it starts again. You’ll see the same complaint for Diamond in a week or so too.

This is my guess at what is happening, especially in Ruby:
The mediocre players who get boosted or get lucky move up a division. However, they’ll lose more than win and end up at the bottom. When other players who are progressing enter that division, the player pool within a few pips of them has a disproportionate number of these mediocre players. They end up being chosen for as teammates and drag you down, making it hard to get out of that first division. Once you get through the second division or so, it’s smooth sailing until you go up a tier and the process begins again.

This is way over-simplifying the problem. Part of the problem is that you scale can’t weigh things accurately.

On hammer and Symbol duration:
The symbol duration increase in traits needs to be removed from the game, or symbol of protection needs changed to have a cooldown like other symbols. The duration increase on symbols disproportionately buffs hammer to the point where it’s still rather weak on every other weapon but makes hammer damage ridiculous (over a 20% increase to auto-attack damage from the trait alone).

@OP

You had a few good ideas, but I feel you strayed from improving balance to “neat ideas”. A lot of traits which were useless before are still useless now. Weapon skills didn’t need touched to the degree that you did (especially focus), the Purify mechanic wasn’t really needed, and you didn’t really make trait lines that much better or more focused, which is what they need.

Overall, you need to reduce the changes to the true problems. Don’t break what works already, especially on the weapons. Here’s my input (obviously not comprehensive).

Weapons
Most of the changes weren’t needed. Specifically:

• Staff #2 is pretty good as-is other than getting stuck on its 2.b. No need to completely change it other than to add timeout on 2.b based on its max range. #3 and #4 have the same problem in that the boons they provide just don’t last long enough. The boon duration from the trait needs baked in. #5’s problem is that you can run into the line, be knocked down, but traverse it at the same time. It ends up being a crappy knockdown instead of a ward.
• Hammer #1.c needs to change. In PvE it’s brain-dead spammy and in PvP/WvW, it’s too clunky to use. Suggest reducing the symbol to 1sec (2 ticks) and lowering cast time on 1.c slightly. #3 doesn’t need a teleport; its effect just needs to be wider so that you can stutter step and avoid it. #5 has the same issue as staff #5 where people can get through it when they shouldn’t. Otherwise, the size and the fact you have to not move while casting is part of its counter-play.
• Scepter Weapon is fine as-is. It has high sustained damage and a strong single-target CC. It was never intended to hit targets accurately at long ranges.
• Focus Fine as-is, why change it?
• Shield #4 needs to have some kind of offensive debuff (a soft CC or weakness) rather than more defensive boons.
• Sword Needs to differentiate itself from greatsword more. The #3 is supposed to do that, but fails. I like your idea and it meshes nicely with the other skills; I just really hate the taunt mechanic in general (supper annoying and buggy when used on players).
• Mace Needs its attacks sped up a bit, which you did on #2. #3 should be left alone mostly. Suggest giving it the same treatment was warrior weapon blocks where ranged attacks don’t end it. With sword #3 being changed to something which isn’t anti-projectile, I think this is reasonable.

Traits
The biggest problem with guardian traits is that they’re too scattered. The lines need to have stronger themes, which leads to better interaction and choices.

Zeal
I think this would work better as the constant aggressor offensive line, favoring 2h weapons. Retaliation would help fit that theme.

• Symbol Traits Need to remove and consolidate the current minors and make the master and GM slot ones into a major trait. Add more options to produce symbols on effect. Larger symbols desperately needs to be in this line.

Radiance
Focus on burning and skirmishing rather than heavy pressure. 1h weapons fit better here.

• Retaliation Traits Swap Fiery Wrath and Retaliation. Move/change other retaliation heavy traits.
• 1h/OH specific traits Make them more generalized i.e. no need for Zealous Scepter (moved from zeal) and Right-hand strength shouldn’t restrict to weapon type.
• Minor Traits Re-work to provide small reduction to VoJ cooldown when certain things happen in combat (i.e. hit a player with 3+ burning) instead of on a kill.

Valor
Self-sustain tree, with some group support. It has some awful traits, but they can be left for later.

• Monk’s Focus This needs toned down a little (less base but increase scaling or spread out the healing over a few seconds).

Honor
Honor is the group support line. It needs a lot of help though. Many traits are awful or require a heavy healing power investment to even be viable.

• Selfless Daring Increase base and lower scaling.
• Minor GM Replace with something else. Maybe a trait which helps with healing power scaling (e.g. percent of healing power to power or power to healing power) or just a straight bonus to healing as a minor. Probably replace the GM minor.
• Adept Major Get rid of the fall damage trait (move to Zeal?) and add another competitive option.
• Master Major Make this an offensive support slot. Pure of Heart can move to a minor or adept major.
• GM Major Symbol trait needs scrapped and replaced. The size increase goes to zeal. The healing wasn’t that much and didn’t work well with the static nature of symbols.

Virtues
Absolute Resolution and Indomitable Courage have too much going for them. At the same time, this line should support active use of virtues as well as saving them.

• Passive vs. Active Remove the overall virtue cooldown reduction from the GM minor. Group cooldown reductions with traits which benefit the passive.
• Absolute Resolution Only does condi removal. Other effects move to other traits. For example, the increase to the passive should be paired with a cooldown reduction.
• Indomitable Courage Only does stability + stun break. Other effects are moved to other traits.

Skills

• Spirit weapons These will never be amazing, like almost all AI skills. They can be buffed a little, but they’ll likely never be mainstream. Don’t waste too much time on them.
• Consecrations These need a lot of help. Their benefits aren’t good enough to justify making you a sitting duck. They need to be powerful enough to want to stay in them. Purge Flames should tick resistance (maybe reduce the up-front removal). Hallowed Ground should give some kind of physical damage reduction in addition to stability and have a lower CD. Shelter needs a lower CD and maybe a bit more healing.
• Signets Signets are just hard to balance. Consider swapping Mercy’s active to Courage and Mercy’s active becomes an area heal (lower CD obviously). Change Wrath to precision from condition damage to make it less niche.

Virtue Skills
Agree with reducing the cooldowns. Justice Active needs to provide multiple stacks and Resolve active needs a bit more healing baseline.

Dragonhunter
This elite spec is a mess. It needs better harmony with baseline and more depth to skills. I agree with removing boons from traps and increasing arming time – though 3s is too much. Spec design should focus more on mid-range power, though has long-range capability. This helps it synergize with its traps better.

• True Shot Increase cooldown slightly.
• Purification The healing amount is absurd. Instead, make the trigger effect fragments of faith (and remove that trap).
• Spear of Justice / Hunter’s Verdict This works really well with traps, but needs better counterplay and to be less clunky. Suggest reducing CD on Verdict but you have to wait a few seconds after Spear of Justice before using it.
• Heavy Light This is a shining example of terrible design. Put the knockback on LB#3 and tie it to the longbow damage increase trait (currently a minor).

@OP

1. You seem to have fallen into the trap of thinking skill splits will magically solve everything balance issue; they won’t. The same devs doing balance now will just have to balance more skills. And many of the skills which are changed were too good in multiple formats to one degree or another and ended up being overnerfed. That’s not to say skill splits should be ignored, but they should be used sparingly.

2. Agree, but you have to consider the reason a profession or build is forced out. Right now, it’s a few OP builds forcing everything else out. Buffing builds which are no longer in the meta but were competitive pre-HoT just turns PvP into a mess of power creep.

3. Not sure why Proleague implemented this rule, but the anti-stacking rule is treating the symptom – a handful of OP builds – not the cause. Once balance is in a better state, build stacking won’t be an issue.

4. Agree about not reinventing the wheel. However, ANet should want to make more options viable. It just shouldn’t come at the cost of what is already acceptably balanced.

5. Disagree. You need to balance reasonably well for all skill levels. If low and mid tiers are dominated by brainless builds (e.g. turret engi), changes need to be made. Otherwise, the PvP playerbase evaporates. Top tier should be the focus for fine tuning, however.

6. Disagree to an extent. You need some way to attract players who otherwise wouldn’t play PvP. Plentiful rewards for long-term and skillful play also need to exist, though.

7. Agree about the downtime. The purpose of the one month wait was for balance to settle. But if nothing is done about awful balance at the end of that month (just before ranked play resumes), why bother waiting? Keep the gap between seasons to 1 or 2 weeks max. That’s enough to squash bugs and do some maintenance.

8. Agree. Mystic Forge please.

9. Not sure how often people use these anymore. But if there was any easy way to stop team swapping for wins or team stacking, it would help a lot. Maybe only allow players to join the losing side if team size is even.

10. Agree that better dialogue needs to happen surrounding balance. It seems that every three months, we get changes thrown at us, some of which makes little to no sense. Maybe give us a few weeks preview instead of a few days so that players can weigh in suggested changes? Also, acknowledging our complaints would help quell the constant anger.

A lot of my disagreement is because the OP is viewing PvP as only for PvPers. You can’t do that. A community which doesn’t grow and recruit new members will quickly wither and die. In order to keep an active, strong community, you need to embrace all skill levels and varieties (casual, hardcore, PvE, etc) of players.

But you lost. In the event of a tie in team scores, personal scores are used as a tie-breaker. I believe it’s the team with the highest personal score wins.

This would only serve to make players miserable and someone would have to play the “suck spec” to fulfill that requirement.

The problem is that balance is awful; a handful of builds are way too powerful. When have about 5 or 6 builds which are viable, you’re going to get a lot of overlap. Fix balance and the stacking issue will go away.

Welcome to Heart of Power Creep.

Rifle berserker can cheese just as hard as DH. However unlike DH, it can’t front-load its damage; it has to build adrenaline first.

I don’t see how DH can be viable in the current environment. It dies far too quickly to focus fire. All it has going for it is trueshot spam from off-point.

Thief, Druid, Condi Mes are all better choices.

• Thief has far great mobility and burst is huge. Has to stay out of team fights.
• Druid is great in small fights and can help out in team fights on the side with SnR
• Condi Mes is great at 1v1 and forcing decaps. The invuln sharing on team fights can be a game-changer when you need to stomp/res.

Dragonhunter’s only strength is spamming traps on a node in a small fight. It can’t handle ranged pressure well, not does it offer amazing support.

Gatvin.6510:

I’d honestly rather see most non-elite builds brought up to par with elite specs, rather than nerfing the Elites. Most of them have rather cool internal synergies and fun combat flow.

Please, no.

Elite specs have ruined PvP because they can do almost everything (no clear weakness, many strengths) and because many are so faceroll easy to play.

Ya, scepter boon corrupt on the auto is pretty silly too. But that’s base, not Reaper.

The only problem with Reaper is chill damage being ridiculously too high. Otherwise, it’s pretty balanced.

1 and 3 are caused by the same problem: Completely broken OP elite specs. When ANet learns that builds needs weaknesses as well as strengths, these problems will be solved.

A downrank system isn’t needed. Unless someone quits for a long period of time or changes to a profession which they’ve never played, their skill usually doesn’t decrease. And even if it does, it won’t decrease significantly. The problem is that leagues have no correlation with MMR at all.

Marthkus.4615:

Rev does a bit of everything, has more rotation options, higher skill ceiling, and stacks well with itself.

Too soon we forget 5 d/d ele meta. You know, the build that could do a bit of everything…

PvP was at its best when builds had clear strengths and weaknesses, which lead to loosely defined roles.

@OP

It’s pretty simple:

• Revenant takes some degree of skill in order to succeed; it’s not faceroll like the others you mentioned
• Not that many people play revenant compared to others. Proleague games had 3 or 4 revenants in game. You rarely see that day-to-day in PvP. Less exposure means people don’t see how strong it is.

At the end of every season, the lowest performing Proleague teams and the top teams from the guild challenger league are in a tournament and the top players from that tournament move up to the Proleague for the next season.

Also, if any Proleague teams disband, then they’re replaced through the same tournament.

How would arena PvP improve the viewer experience?

The biggest problem is that large fights are a mess of particle effects and it’s hard to tell where the key plays are. Arena PvP is limiting the game to just that part. Isn’t that making it worse, not better?

Yashuoa.9527:

Scrapper damage coefficients arent a problem.
That is a misunderstanding that they are.

If you try to balance scrapper hammer against a DPS weapon, they’re about right. However, scrapper hammer is more about defense and utility compared to most weapons. Slanting it so heavily in that direction brings into question whether its damage should be the same as a weapon which doesn’t offer that many extras over damage.

Reducing damage should be part of the trade-space just as much as reducing utility (increased cooldowns, etc) is.

Chokolata.1870:

I really do not think that mesmer is in a bad spot as because it lacks X Y or Z. Simply the some of the other classes are too strong at the moment. And it has been said time and time again that now we need shaves and not power creep.

So:
- nerf chill damage and/or application for Reaper
- reduce Bristle F2 damage
- shave Shiro a bit, perhaps the on dodge endurance gain from 50 to 25-30
- reduce scrapper hammer damage coefficients a bit and tone down survivability a bit

Take it from there and see what happens.

That’s what everyone with a brain has been saying. ANet has been quiet on the topic, which leads most of us to think it won’t happen. We all expect another failed PvP season.

Chokolata.1870:

PvP is a massive improvement from season 1.

That’s not hard to do.

Ya, unkillable mesmer cancer bunkers are gone, so at least conquest works like it should.

However, PvP is now dominated by about 5 or 6 builds, all of which use elite specs. And it’s not that these builds are slightly better; they better than everything else by such a huge margin that all other builds, including core specs, are trash in comparison. Worse yet, most of these builds require little thought or coordination in order to succeed.

Honestly, if ANet really wanted to balance PvP, they’d just go back to the state it was in the day before HoT until they can fix elite specs and other HoT content.

Temple of the Silent Storm = Best Map.

I’d like to add:
All elite specs. No 3x core.

Fivedawgs.4267:

1- I can’t believe you actually narrowed down hot sales on f2p accounts?? What about b2p player who upgraded?? The NCSOFT employee at th3 conference said the sales weren’t weak ( that is the amount of b2p + f2p player who upgraded to HOT was invigorating but they still want more f2p to upgrade.

No matter how anyone spins it, it’s clear that NCSoft wants more HoT sales. The OP’s point still remains valid: PvP balance being a mess doesn’t encourage people to spend money on the game.

2- Nope they aren’t. I can tell you chronometer underperformed compared to core mesmers, and core engi is (slightly) that amount to HoT engi and the list goes on… check @ithlewell post.

That makes me laugh and question what game you’re playing. Yes, chronomancer was heavily nerfed, but many of the elite specs are still incredibly strong to the point where playing something that isn’t one of those elite specs puts you at a clear disadvantage.

• Scrapper is beyond broken. Way too much damage and sustain.
• Druid offers too much defense and CC in one package and the HoT pets carry the damage. Something has to give.
• Reaper chill damage is ridiculous (though otherwise Reaper isn’t too bad). It should never be that high for how much they apply it.
• Dragonhunter is overbuffed with poor mechanics, causing it to destroy mediocre players.
• Herald gives revenant numerous “get out of jail free” cards.

3- ok you’re third point doesn’t even make sense. Idk what you are trying to get at, I clearly stated that Anet doesn’t make that much gold because you can convert gold to gems, a system which lol lacks.

Not everyone uses only gold for the gem shop. Many players spend actual money for gems. NCSoft stated that they’re happy with the gem shop revenues, so I don’t see what your point is. Further, ANet stated that people who PvP regularly stick around longer and spend more on the gem shop.

Back to the OP’s original point: Awful balance, particularly from elite specs, does not encourage more sales either through boxes or the gem shop. If making or keeping elite specs so strong was driven by marketing, that decision was extremely short-sighted.

The only way you’ve argued against is to spin words on finance and claim that elite specs aren’t overpowered when it’s clear that the only competitive builds (by a wide margin) use elite specs.

OP’s point is correct. If ANet is intentionally keeping elite specs blatantly overpowered, it’s hurting HoT sales and gem sales more than helping.

@Fivedawgs.4267
1. How do you convert from a free account to a full account? Buy HoT. Lower than expected F2P conversion and lower than expected HoT sales are one in the same.
2. In PvP they are. And part of enticing people to buy HoT could be making HoT-content like elite specs a power boost.
3. ANet makes money on gem store purchases in aggregate. Not everyone converts gold to gems exclusively, and gems to gold conversion does happen.

What the OP was asking for is elite specs to be balanced with core specs – something ANet has stated since elite specs were first revealed. Not for elite specs to made part of F2P.

It’s #2.

Balance was and still is terrible, which leads to profession stacking of the handful of ridiculously overpowered builds. We saw this in season1 and it was extremely boring to see the same comps over and over with little variation or chance for dynamic play. ESL is trying to stop that by forcing teams to use a few of the less powerful builds for variety.

If they really wanted to see interesting play, they should just ban all elite specs.

You can summarize the problem with two words: Power Creep

Instead of nerfing stuff which is too good, ANet is adding more things to already powerful specs and abilities. Elite specs are crapping out boons? Instead of scaling that back, they gave necro more boon strip. Arms races like that are the downfall of games – and not just for PvP.

Profession stacking isn’t the problem; Overpowered builds are.

The only reason you see profession stacking is because there’s a handful of builds which are leaps and bounds more powerful than anything else. It’s inexcusable that blatantly overpowered builds have been left alone for so long.

If you play heavy trap DH, ya it’s weak to conditions. But when you mix it with meditations and Valor traits, conditions aren’t any more of a problem for DH than any other spec.

Saiyan.1704:

You’re confusing concept design with balance design and TPvP viability… they are two completely different discussions.

Far from it. Concept and class design are interwoven. Balance has to be part of that. My comment about TPvP was an example to demonstrate the flaws in the design.

The concept for Dragonhunter was never fully there nor connected to abilities it received. It was poorly introduced and supplemental descriptions said it was a spec focused on hunting dragons… “like a witchhunter”. Okay, so why does it have a longbow or traps? What playstyle should it have? There was nothing to tie that idea to gameplay, so it was already off to a poor start.

Then you have major pieces: Longbow, Traps, and New Virtues. They have almost no synergy with each other and the synergy with the core is also lacking. Adding the pull to Spear of Justice in BWE3 at least helped tie the new virtues to traps. That’s another failure of the design before we even get to balance. And when players tested it during the BWEs, it was obvious there was no theme or playstyle to the spec; nothing tied it together and there still isn’t much to tie it together.

Where balance comes into play is masking the design failure. If the mechanics are poor, just overbuff the numbers until it’s viable no matter how clunky or mangled the design is. However, this tactic usually leads to a very shallow playstyle with overly high damage and sustain, as is the case with Dragonhunter. If you try to balance the numbers, it’s no longer fun or it’s just plain frustrating because you’re fighting the mechanics. If you leave the numbers high, it remains at the top for simple scenarios (mid level PvP, most of PvE), but when depth starts to matter, it falls apart.

How does that not describe Dragonhunter’s problems?

Saiyan.1704:

Woh, that’s definitely not true.

Keep living in fantasy land.

Chronomancer and Reaper were previewed on either side of Dragonhunter and both were well received. Yes, there were complaints about the “Dragonhunter” name and players who expected a ranged support spec were upset. But if the concept had worked, not many would have cared.

Yes, it was clunky initially because it was using mechanics based on existing abilities. They didn’t fit together (e.g. longbow wants to keep players at range, traps want them to be close) and still don’t. The only thing that saved it was overbuffed mechanics so that it didn’t matter how poor the design was; you just threw out a ton of damage, healing, and CC in quick succession so the design flaws are no longer noticeable.

Please rationalize how a 10k heal on a 30sec CD (less with traits) is not propping up the profession? Or maybe CC + stability for hitting anything in 600yd, no matter how many times it’s blocked or dodged before it lands? Utility slot traps have already been nerfed in damage because it was at ridiculous levels. Players still complain about how clunky the cast-time virtues are, especially when trying to use them with base traits.

And even with how overbuffed DH is, it will only see play in ESL because of the “one profession per team” rule. That’s because all its damage relies on gimmicks which skilled players can avoid. DH has a complete lack of depth because of it’s underlying poor design.

Dragonhunter isn’t a failed experiment; it’s a failed design.

It was mocked when first previewed and BWE1 showed that the idea didn’t hold water. In order to salvage it, Karl (the same guy now in charge of balance) buffed the crap out of the numbers while leaving the flawed underlying mechanics. That’s how we arrived at the current Dragonhunter. It’s a mess and needs re-designed.

We should probably have 1 or 2 less stats, not more.

bbennett.7463:

this is the best meta they have had for awhile.

Considering how bad PvP balance has been in this game for the past year, that’s not saying much.

Ya, balance is better than season1, but it still has a long way to go. There are still quite a few overbuffed professions and elite specs which are far too strong.

Valkyriez.6578:

Anyway, what changes would you like Anet to do?

Short Term
Stuff which can be done before season2 drives even more people way:
- Reaper: Deathly Chill damage reduced by 50% (PvP only)
- Druid: Reduce damage of HoT pets or outright disable them (PvP only)
- Scrapper: Reduce survivability. I don’t know enough for specifics since it’s many traits, even core ones, compounding.
- Thief: Scale back some of the damage buffs (PvP only if it affects PvE too much), especially on MH dagger.

Long Term
- Reaper: Re-work Deathly Chill. Needs to work in PvE for multiple reapers, but not make chill so powerful in PvP.
- Necro: Death Perception probably needs reduced to 25% crit or some other mechanic.
- Necro: Back off some of the boon strip changes. Boons should be less plentiful overall.
- Engineer: Alchemy traits related to elixirs need re-worked now that many abilities, especially elixir gun, count.
- Scrapper: Re-arrange traits to make survival or anti-CC more mutually exclusive. Weaken some survival abilities overall.
- Druid: Needs to have a bigger trade-off between CC and survival
- Dragonhunter: Change Heavy Light to be 100% on longbow#3 instead of proc off any longbow attack.
- Dragonhunter: Purification has less healing overall, but a larger portion is up-front.
- Dragonhunter: Virtue cooldowns match base guardian (either nerf to DH or buff to base).
- Dragonhunter: Spear of Justice is no longer unblockable and missile is slower (so have a chance to avoid it at range). Cooldown on pull is reduced to match virtue cooldown.
- Chronomancer: Needs a bit of a re-work before un-doing nerfs. Longer cooldowns aren’t a good solution since they’ll reset between fights and the chronomancer can just use them again twice in the next fight.
- Tempest: Need to adjust boon gains so that they’re less “permanent”, especially on defensive boons.
- General: Bring back soldier amulet and celestial amulet (with a slight reduction in total stats), split amulets into 3 items to allow mix & match. Sentinel is still out. Remove all the new amulets from season2 (power creep on total stats – mix & match does the same thing without power creep).

Valkyriez.6578:

Nova Stiker.8396:

There are a lot of things that are inexcusable and contributes to just bad design.

Like what?

At the core of the problem is power creep and removing weaknesses from builds while dumbing down skilled play. It used to be that every competitive build had one or two strengths and usually some minor weaknesses. It’s gotten to the point in HoT where there are a few dominant builds because they have multiple strengths and no weaknesses. And the amount of skill to achieve those strengths has greatly diminished. It used to be that you needed proper timing or set up in order to do well (not spamming skills into dodges/blocks, baiting out cooldowns, etc). Now your top builds can just spam and even if they screw up, they can keep spamming because the kitten nal is so deep.

Here’s a few examples of how the game used to be during its prime (over a year ago):

• Bunker Guardian Great at holding a point and in team fights. Not extremely mobile and can’t win 1v1 or de-cap, so useless on offense by itself. Staying alive, especially in a team fight, meant good use of positioning and cooldowns; burn through cooldowns too fast and you couldn’t help stomp or res allies.
• Shatter Mesmer Good burst, but required planning and setup with clones. Doesn’t live long when caught, especially if CC’ed. Positioning and good use of limited survival cooldowns was key. Team support with portal and Time Warp or Moa was great, but you couldn’t just spam them.
• Thief Good burst, moderate CC, but low sustain damage. If caught in CC or cleave damage in a team fight, would drop quickly. Not a build which could stay in a fight, even a prolonged 1v1; it had to hit and run. However, it had great mobility and decent escapes, so it could keep looking for a better fight.

And here’s what you have now:

• Druid Great mobility, CC, survival, and decent damage from pets. Only vulnerability is chain CC, but as long as you stick to small fights, you’re unbeatable even if you spam.
• Scrapper High survivability, high mobility, high damage. Hammer variants have lots of stability, so CC isn’t really a weakness, nor is kiting. Neither survival nor damage require good cooldown use or setup.
• Reaper Spam chill on someone to reduce incoming damage (directly due to trait and indirectly due to longer cooldowns), kite, and deal high damage. It’s not realistic to remove the chill, which would be fine if it didn’t provide so many strengths. Meanwhile reaper has improved mobility over base necro and isn’t as weak to CC. Death Perception + Decimate Defenses makes Reaper’s shroud very strong even in condition damage builds with low precision.
• Dragonhunter CC and stability just for attacking you when you’re close to them (no skill involved). Very high healing, most of which can’t be reasonably countered (little skill involved) combined with high damage, CC, and stability makes them hard to fight 1v1 or corral when they roll up to a team fight. Numerous stun breaks from skills and traits make CC more difficult.

Making Fast Hands baseline is a bit too hard to do before the start of the season. The rest is spot-on.

It’s either lazy or ignorant balance. Some elite specs are way too good, especially with defensive abilities. But instead of toning down these elite specs, they just removed the defensive amulets. The same elite specs are still too powerful (except chronomancer, which was gutted).

OP is 100% correct. The power creep is too high and the changes were lazy.

The only thing saving season2 is that ESL is restricting the number of professions on a team.

Your quote is Evan talking about the matchmaking algorithm score (who is picked for a match), not the in-game score or anything related to progression/rewards.

Guardian is mediocre to terrible both DH and base in PvE and PvP. DH is super gimmicky, akin to old 100blades warriors. Once people realized the tells, it’s easy to avoid and DH has nothing to follow up the “lol trap burst”. Base guardian didn’t get worse; just an extreme amount of power creep from other professions.

Spurrlock.3219:

Pvp is fine. This patch is a huge improvement from the utterly broken bunker meta of season 1.

Give it a week and see if you still think that.

It was clear from the preview that necros and thieves would be dominant. The additional notes were laughable as they made those two even more powerful. The only hope for season2 is that most of these unnecessary buffs are rolled back before the season actually starts.

Most balanced era was just before the Dhumbfire patch. Comps were pretty varied (stanard was main bunker, side bunker and 3 DPS, but 4 DPS was rising). Any build that was powerful in one role was usually mediocre to weak in others. Best of all, builds had somewhat defined roles, which made it easier to learn and watch.

It’d be pretty hard to be worse than season1. I’m sure Karl will manage somehow…

@OPs ideas:

1. Do not remove initial supply. The reason players start with supply is to prevent an initial 5v5 at the middle deciding the match. With no starting supply, everyone will head to the middle. Whichever team wins that fight will take full map dominance and you’ll be in a worse snowball situation.

2. Do not make guards more of a gimmick. The NPC guards are a main driver of the PvE feel. Making them highly resistant to player damage only encourages more abuse of the AI, further ignoring player combat.

Better Fixes

1. Doorbreakers die after one attack Damage would need to be increased. This makes killing a single DB more important. It also prevents an initial supply load of DBs from going all the way to the lord. Consider lowering DB HP slightly.

2. Archer damage and HP increased, AI changes Archers ignore players if any gates or guards are alive. Archer damage vs gates increased slightly, HP doubled. Archers become the slower (in terms of damage), but more durable and re-usable alternative to DBs.

3. Guard one-shot DB mechanic gone; guards buffed overall Right now, you can just cheese doorbreakers past guards or even outright kill the guards before they can hit DBs. But if your team isn’t built to do that, guards will cleave multiple DBs with a single slip-up. It’s too binary. Meanwhile, the guards also do nothing to impede players. Guard base damage and HP needs increased. They should be a threat to players, but not require attention over enemy players. AoE snares on the guards would be pretty useful.

4. Damage breaks channels Stability channel on mist essence is just plain silly and should never have gone live. It would be fine if channeling players couldn’t easily have more stability stacks than CC abilities of attackers.

Reaper Chill damage is way too high. Without the ridiculous damage, having high chill uptime is fine as long as it’s balanced by other aspects such as low mobility or highly telegraphed attacks.

Honestly, they should just change Deathly Chill to apply bleed when you apply chill. It fixes the stacking issue in PvE and lets it be more manageable for PvP.

I’m not really.

Will s2 be better than s1? Probably. Will the game still be horribly broken? Likely. Waiting for a competent balance team.