Guild Wars 2

Shelter is fine. I’d rather it stay uncategorized than kill a good skill to create two mediocre niche skills.

I’m not sure why everyone is saying engineer. Engineer did received a lot of new, interesting traits. However you can no longer pick up all the cele rifle engi traits in one build. I think it’s more of a side-grade than an outright buff.

I would say warriors made out best. Shoutbow is even better than it is currently.

Argilla.8340:

And WTS is also just around the corner and changing all of this before it.. just what are you thinking

They can play it on private servers using an old build of the game if they want. Playing it with this new system would be a bad choice. Not that the new trait system concept is bad; the traits and numbers are just too unrefined.

Fluff Kamisama.3417:

Did…did they remove blasting staff from the eles? O.o

Yes. It’s baseline now.

Xhyros.1340:

Burning stacks in intensity. Sounds like a huge buff to Guardians to me.

Except that each stack does about one-third to one-half of what it does on live, depending on condition damage.

No. Vulnerability caps at 25. Only damaging conditions which stack intensity have a cap of 1500.

blakdoxa.7520:

Also note the nerf to the virtue range which also hits all virtue traits with a sledgehammer.

That’s what irked me the most. It’s like they just decided it should be 600 because most other AoE boon abilities are 600. Nothing is broken with it on live, why change it?

Arnath.2319:

finalhero.4028:

I honestly think that dragonhunter is why we we’re nerfed.

Why? DragonHunter traits are terrible.

If the other traits are bad, Dragonhunter doesn’t look as bad in comparison. </tinfoil hat>

Basandra Skye.4031:

Fear never inflicted damage. Terror is what allowed it to inflict damage, specifically. The damage acquired from the trait was a flat per second amount, so it had no formula.

Fear with Terror at level 80 on live is 302 + 0.25*CondiDmg. Source

I appreciate the effort taken to list all the changes, but…

This is just a complete mess at best. Very little has changed from the first preview despite a massive amount of player feedback. Weak traits which will never be used still remain. Many triplets still have obvious choices. Traits which should be competing against each other aren’t, specifically ones which boost damage. A lot of traits are still proc-based and more were added, overshadowing the active gameplay style which was originally promoted at release. Despite weaker skills receiving changes, core flaws in the skills weren’t addressed.

And now these are being forced onto us in an obviously incomplete state in a week? I guess we all get to be beta testers now for the rest of summer. Of course, it’s unlikely that our feedback will matter then, either.

SlimChance.6593:

What I don’t understand is with the proposed changes, how do you “define” a build? We’ll be able to max out 3 trait lines. 3 trait lines out of 6. We’ll pick 3 GM traits.. how does that narrow down or make someone a “specialist”?

Each trait line should have a more narrow focus than it does on live, but contain most, if not all, of the current traits related to that focus.

For example, if you want a condition damage build, then there’s a trait line that caters to that and most of the condition damage-related traits are gone from other lines. Each profession has a trait line that works well with their profession mechanic. There’s typically a support line, and a self-survival line as well.

Elementalist was the most complete from the first preview. The others should be further along with the preview tomorrow.

nearlight.3064:

The fall damage traits are still there though.

Yes, but they now activate on events in addition to fall damage, such as being CC’ed. They were incomplete in the original preview.

Saying the current system has more choice is subscribing to an illusion; at least half the trait selections are never worth taking, and others are overshadowed. The “low-hanging fruit” problem with powerful adept and master traits also hinders balance and variety.

The new system has a few goals:

• Give each trait line a cohesive playstyle improvement and theme. They tend to be along the lines of a class mechanic, power damage, condi damage, self-survival, group support. When you choose a trait line, you’ll have a good idea of what it should be doing.
• Provide meaningful choices at each level. Currently, there are very few true choices at any trait level. You always have the clear best choice or one of two. By making traits which do similar things compete against each other, ANet can add more variety; players can’t just take every damage trait.
• Improve balance. In the current system, each trait doesn’t just compete with its peers; it competes with every trait in the line and every other trait for that profession. That’s too much to balance and you’ll always have bad traits if you’re trying to keep things interesting.

I’m still undecided whether this is good or bad.

The swiftness part makes all movement skills (directional leaps, teleports, ground-targeted leaps) more equal. It prevents some skills from being overly powerful get-away tools when the opponent doesn’t have easy access to movement impairing conditions.

The condition damage part makes skills more reliable as escapes or gap closers for the user, but lessens the ability to kite for the condition applier. Just like the swiftness part, the skills which were previously affected are now more in-line with unaffected gap closers and escapes. Should a warrior whirlwind or guardian leap be less effective at getting away than an elementalist or mesmer teleport? And it’s not like the movement impairing condition ends after the leap; kiting is still effective.

To me, the biggest impact is that these changes make some skills lose a unique subtlety they used to have.

They’re not trying to make a MOBA in GW2. They took elements from other PvP modes like GW1’s Fort Aspenwood and GvG, maybe a little bit of MOBA, and threw them all into one mode. People see “lanes” and automatically think it has to be a full-blown MOBA mode.

Stronghold’s current problem is that most of the time, you can just drop your initial supply on a set of NPCs, push forward with most of your group, and get to the lord. That has nothing to do with how powerful players are. The Doorbreaker NPCs are just too effective and guards mostly ineffective.

Ugh, thread necro…

Don’t need 6. Splitting the amulet stats across 3 or 4 items would be more than enough customization. I’m a proponent of a 50/25/25% split.

Shelter is fine. Yes, most skills don’t go through the block, so the counter-play is low. However, it punishes mistakes and poor use by the guardian. If you use Shelter, but aren’t blocking anything, you would have been better off with a higher HP/sec heal.

Saiyan.1704:

The leaderboard is inactive because the Test Season is over.

If that was the case, wouldn’t the PvP Gameplay Programmer posting in this thread know about it and respond as such?

@ Teutos.8620

What you’re saying is how the system should be working. In practice there are problems and I suspect it’s not just a population problem.

I’ve partial queued with friends and we get matched with full teams around our skill level. But then we get people with no clue what they’re doing to round out the team. That happens more often than you’d think and it’s incredibly frustrating. Something is definitely broken.

I’ve looked at the matchmaking pseudo code on the wiki and there are a few issues with it which I’ve pointed out on the forums. We still don’t know how ANet applied Glicko2 to individuals on a team.

There’s confusion between “no counter-play” with “passive”. Instant cast has just as little counter-player as passive things like Healing Signet. So what if you have to hit a button? It’s still impossible to dodge or interrupt except for sheer luck.

That’s not to say all instant cast is bad; there’s just a point where it becomes too much. It’s the same reason people are frustrated by multiple procs.

Arken.3725:

It’s very balanced.

Haha, no.

Medi guard is high performance regardless of skill, but with a medium skill ceiling. Being able to use a zerker amulet but survive like you had a soldier amulet should scream “broken”. Most of the healing and a good chunk of the damage is instant (most of it through procs), which provides little counter-play and leaves lots of room for forgiving mistakes.

The problem with Litany of Wrath is that it’s balanced around PvE. But no one will use it in PvE because Shelter is still better.

Meditation cooldowns are fine. The problem is the amount of healing Monk’s Focus provides with no investment into healing power. Also problematic is the amount of damage from Smite Condition. It could be lowered (or at least the condi clear bonus), since it is instant-cast.

To compensate, adding some utility to help guardian offense would be nice. Guardians desperately need some soft CC (cripple, slow, chill) in order to stay on-target.

AGGabriel.9230:

Think after the expansion what will happen in pvp wvw and pve, a organize team witch will chose ? a guardian with crappy traps and slow LB or a ‘’super support,, rev that can easily change from support/defense to dps. I’m pretty sure they will survive better that a guardian in wvw pvp pve (i bet the guardian will become like the warr personal support, because the revenant will take that team support from them)

Dragonhunter is not a team-oriented specialization. You won’t see it being used in WvW zerg play. Trying to compare it to Revenant is pointless. Guardians will still use similar builds to what they run now, which all have considerable support.

Some general comments on suggestions:

Starting Supply
Players starting with supply is better than if they did not. If players didn’t have supply, the only option for teams would be to rush the supply depot. You’d have a teamfight and whoever loses would likely lose the game. The other team could spawn a large wave of NPCs and then deny supply.

Defending Guards vs. Doorbreakers
A big reason for the PvE feel in Stronghold is that your first goal when attacking is to stop enemy NPCs – not players – from killing your Doorbreakers. As long as the “NPCs to counter NPCs” design remains, the game will have a PvE feel. Defending NPCs should contribute to overall damage by supplementing players. Ultimately, players should be responsible for focusing key offensive NPCs.

Interrupting a Channel with Damage
I can see arguments for both CC-only interrupts and any damage interrupting. I think any damage interrupting channels, but using shorter channels, would be best. It means players can’t ignore other players; they must fight or give up the objective. This applies to both supply and mist essence. Supply is essential to the game, but with a quick channel, you would have to be focusing on a player to stop them. Mist essence isn’t essential to winning; it’s intended to be a momentum shifter which has a risk in going for it.

Timer End Condition
Instead of focusing on ways to resolve a game which lasts for 15 minutes, focus on things that make the game stalemate or run for that amount of time and ways to address them. When most games must be resolved by some end-game condition, it seems like the time spent getting there is a waste. For reference, conquest matches usually last around 10 minutes once they start.

I wouldn’t be surprised if Elemental Attunement was toned down in the process. They’ve made a lot of updates to trait lines for all the professions, so it’s too early to react like this.

Areas to Improve

• Doorbreakers are always best DBs put out far more damage before they die compared to anything else, even the Mist Hero, and the defending guards aren’t a factor. In order to stop DBs, defender players have to kill all of them. The pace is so fast that it doesn’t allow a team to react.
• Defending guards promote too much PvE. The DB one-shot mechanic of guards and the ease with which they can be distracted puts too much emphasis on PvE, while providing no benefit. Defending NPCs from players is one thing; defending NPCs from NPCs is too far. Making the guards more powerful would only increase the PvE feeling.
• Full Defense is too rewarding Planning for timer victory from the start should not be a valid strategy. Score should predominately reflect offensive progress.
• Offensive NPCs chase players pointlessly Applies to Archers and Mist Hero. The purpose of the offensive NPCs is to break the gate and kill the lord. They should prioritize that.
• NPC Stacking A staggered offensive lane is much easier to stop than a large clump of NPCs. At a PUG level, there’s no easy way to coordinate spawning multiple NPCs at once outside of the initial push. However, stacking NPCs is often necessary to break heavy defense.
• Mist Hero is ineffective for come-backs In all the games I played, my team summoning a Mist Hero was either inconsequential or detrimental compared to other choices. The Mist Hero is too easy to kill as it lumbers down the lane and if there’s still a gate present, doesn’t do meaningful damage before dying. The time spent to go out of your way, channel it, and come back, puts the team in a 4v5 for too long with too little of a future benefit to realize.
• Trebuchet is too easy to disable It takes one person to just CC the operator off the trebuchet and render it useless. And the offensive player can just hop down and help his offensive lane, so there’s nothing lost for attackers. It also puts more things on the map for casual players to worry about.
• No reason to split up Both of the strategies I described put 4 or 5 players together. There’s not enough reason to split up and perform different tasks at any given time. If you’re losing in one area, you can’t abandon it and recover in another like in Conquest.
• Snowball effect If you’re behind, the best you can do is lose slower. Succeeding on defense doesn’t give enough time or map advantage to swing momentum. By the time you grab supply and summon new NPCs, there are already enemy NPCs bearing down your gate or players at your lord.

Suggestions

• Suicide Doorbreakers DBs do more damage per attack, but only last for one attack (die or run away). The initial supply wave won’t be enough to break both gates, which puts the supply depot into play. Killing a single DB is more meaningful; failing to kill them all isn’t an automatic loss. Focus fire becomes important, and so does coordinating supply use. DBs will have a more clear trade-off with Archers.
• Offensive NPCs should not target players Applies to Archers and Mist Heroes. Offensive NPCs are the only way to break gates; they should do that first and let players handle players.
• Change the defending guards Remove the DB one-shot mechanic from guards; make guards similar to lord room guards (more damage and HP). Their purpose should be to help players defend, not defend for players or be defended by players. While a defending player is attacking an offensive NPC, the guard can hurt or hamper an attacking player from killing the defending player. This makes the PvE aspect feel less imperative.
• Mist Hero elite skill death-touches gates Provides a real comeback mechanic for a team that’s behind. Since the elite has a cooldown, the Mist Hero isn’t a walking “I win” button. And the cast-time on the elite skill provides a counter besides killing the hero outright.

I played in both Stronghold open betas (total ~12 hours). I played on partial or full teams and participated in the NA tournament. The game mode needs significant work if it’s going to last more than a few weeks.

Bugs

• Sometimes you cannot see supply icons on allies. Seems to happen to the same players across games.
• Above the blue NPC doors, there’s kitten in the corner of the roof which you can fall into.
• Despite the patch notes, I saw a lord who was stomped be revived after the match ended. I think it was by a banner.

Annoyances

• NPCs are too chatty sometimes e.g. “Our gate is under attack” looping constantly.
• NPC ping on the minimap when Mist Essence spawns looks the same as a player ping. Pulse the Mist Essence icon instead.
• Offensive NPCs can be inside each other and it’s hard to tell how many are there.

Strategy
The optimal strategies for Stronghold have been figured out. There’s still refinement in the details, but the general idea won’t change much. If you weren’t with an organized team, you may not have seen it; the information hasn’t had time to disseminate and PUG teams always seem indifferent toward coordinating. Both strategies are shallow and not is very fun.

1. PvE Rush Use initial supply for a large wave of Doorbreakers (Dbs) and escort them down the lane with 4 or 5 players (optional one defender to delay). A couple players go ahead to disable the treb user and distract/kill the guards. You’ll need some players who can counter CC and heal DBs. Once the outer gate is down, pull the guard groups off the path and kill them while the DBs pass. The DBs will quickly finish off the inner gate and you can graveyard rush the lord until it dies.
   The key to its success is that it’s simple to execute but defending against it requires a much higher level of skill and coordination. If your enemies kill your NPCs, there’s a good chance you’ve killed many enemy players in the process. Your team just needs to re-supply and repeat. The defending team is already behind and if they don’t immediately return to stop you, they’ll end up even more behind. This strategy only loses to better executed PvE rushes and against a well-organized, skilled team doing the Full Defense strategy.
   This will be the predominant strategy; it works most of the time, is easy to do, and it’s quick. Even when it fails, you’re rarely behind. And because it’s quick, you get more games in over time.
2. Full Defense Everyone defends at the start. Focus on killing DBs over players so that the gate will take minimal damage. Retreat inside the gate if you’re in danger. Once the NPCs are dead, if you killed enough players, summon some DBs yourself and have one person kill the enemy guards. Everyone else goes back to defend and repeat. If you have some breathing room, push down the lane and kill enemy NPCs sooner. The goal is not lose until the 15min elapses while racking up team score from NPC kills.
   The shortcoming for this strategy is that it requires players who can focus fire the NPCs and not die too easily. If you can’t stalemate or win a teamfight, this strategy won’t work. It tends to work better with sturdier builds and movement impairing effects.

HoT will come out within a few months of the tournament ending. They’ll probably wait until things settle before they proceed.

What makes it feel too much like PvE is that you’re focusing on killing other NPCs so they don’t kill your NPCs. Defending NPCs from players isn’t that bad. Defending NPCs from NPCs is kinda silly.

Ventari Revenant won’t be anything other than a delusion for people who want an MMO trinity healer (it won’t be). The strength of bunker guard has always been the boon support and condi clear. Revenant can’t lay a finger on that.

From what I can surmise, there really isn’t a competitive gameplay (i.e. balance) team. The PvP team works on PvP systems like rewards, matchmaking, etc. There is a class design team which updates abilities and traits, but they’re more involved with PvE stuff and split duties with other teams. I think the dungeon team was dissolved over a year ago.

I could take bad games like this if I didn’t have to wait 7+ minutes for them. If the matchmaking is going to be crap anyway, just match me right away.

Even with the changes to make losing more impactful, the leaderboards still don’t reflect player skill at all. Since players are matched against similarly skilled opponents, an average player can climb the leaderboard at the same rate as a top player. Except that once you realize that a top player has longer queue times, they actually end up behind an average player. Skill needs to factor in somehow.

An older thread suggested a hybrid scoring matrix where the amount of points awarded [using the existing matrix] for a win was scaled with the average rating of the teams involved. Winning a game between high-rated players would provide more points. So you can climb by playing more often or by being a better player.

However, the leaderboard should not reflect win ratios. If matchmaking is working, everyone should have a win ratio near 50% except for the ends of the spectrum. The outliers are people who aren’t rated or matched correctly or are at an extreme e.g. the average rating of the opponents for top players will be significantly less than that top player’s rating because there aren’t higher players for them to lose against more often.

Revenant is similar to other professions, but only while in that particular legend. It’s a different mechanic when they can have some aspect of one profession for a bit and some aspect of another profession for a bit.

I wouldn’t worry too much.

Don’t let a few bad apples ruin your day. For each toxic player, there are multiple helpful or just silent players. And if you haven’t noticed it yet, anything competitive will have some toxic players.

Coulter.2315:

I don’t uderstand all this PvE stuff.

There are PvE aspects in conquest too, but no one complains there. A healthy balance is okay. The PvE complaints about stronghold are because its PvE aspects are overwhelming its PvP aspects.

It would promote classes with leaps and teleports to get ahead and grab it first. While team fights are nice, ANet wants to avoid single 5v5 fights with no alternative.

Teutos.8620:

Or the players haven’t figured out a good way to counter the DB rush strategy due to a lack of time. ‘The Absurd’ f.e. tried to counter it in the tournament due to sending 5 players at the start into the def lane (but they lost the 5v5 teamfight).

There’s a huge difference between a match with some of the best players in the game on organized teams and general play. Good players on organized teams can hold off the initial rush to varying degrees.

The general population won’t have the skill or coordination to counter the DB rush; it takes a lot less coordination to execute it. Not only is it simple to pull off, it ends games quickly when it works. Players will take the quick and easy approach that works most of the time over anything else.

OlrunTheBlade.1486:

It’s harder to balance the game with more possible stat combinations.

This is a fallacy. More permutations does not always imply more difficult balance. In fact, more stat customization will actually make balance easier.

To preface, an improved system would keep stat combinations, but allow you to combine them in more granular, fixed quantities, similar to PvE/WvW. This isn’t a blank slate for stats.

Now you can look at the current amulet selection as extremes in multiple dimensions (physical damage, condition damage, defense, and a little of everything). No combination of parts of those amulets will ever exceed the bounds of the extremes; the balance trade-space is limited to what we currently have. More stat customization cannot directly make balancing more difficult.

More stat customization makes balancing easier from two angles. The first advantage is that it allows finer tuning of abilities. Right now, skills or traits have to perform a certain role to be viable. They’re making up for the inability to get that function from stats. If a skill is tuned just a little too much and ends up under that boundary, it’s not longer useful at all. Some builds revolve around a handful of key traits or skills and a small tweak to one destroys the build. Second, it provides players a way to adjust against more damaging or more defensive builds without completely undermining their build. An extra 10% or 15% damage reduction against damage-heavy teams makes a big difference and it may be worth trading off some of your damage. You won’t see a trade of glass cannons.

Stat customization can indirectly hurt balance because it allows many more viable builds. Inevitably some combinations which didn’t work in the current system, typically due to poor defense or poor crit chance, will be a little too strong. But now that you can more easily tweak, it’s not as big of a problem to tone down what’s too good. And you’ve enable many more viable builds in the process, which is more than worth the trade-off.

A week of Stronghold in its current state and no one would want to play it anymore. A month and it will be as detested as Courtyard.

It requires coordination to succeed and most PUGs aren’t willing to put in any effort towards teamwork. Any moderately organized group will steamroll 90% of their matches in under 5 minutes through almost exclusively PvE. Once players learn how to play a bit, it will be PvE race and blaming each other for failure.

Teutos.8620:

And every one of those 9 posts complains about a different problem and suggest a different solution, that is not compatible with the other 8.

F.e. Do the door breakers die too easy, not easy enough, are they just fine? The community is too divided. Maybe we just haven’t spent enough time with Stronghold yet.

It’s not a lack of play-time. The reason for such varied feedback is the varied skill levels and organization of the posters. A skilled PvP’er has a different experience from someone who plays a few hours a week. An organized team can accomplish a lot more than a collection of players who don’t communicate at all.

For example, the “DB rush”/“PvE race” strategy complaints are coming from or by playing against organized or semi-organized players who are matched with all but the most organized and moderate or higher skilled players. It has nothing to do with lack of time spent playing.

When ANet re-did the PvP gearing system, they removed the customizable jewel from amulets (about 13% of the current amulet stats). The reason given by Justin O’Dell was that the jewel was too confusing for new players.

The game needed MORE stat customization in PvP, not less. With the removal of stats from traits, having this added customization is even more imperative. You can’t hope to have a good PvP design when you make decision based on the lowest level of players. If players can figure out stats in PvE, they can do it in PvP.

Just saw the red lord be alive after killing it and winning the game. I think it was a banner.

No.

It would just make matches snowball harder. The team which gains an initial advantage would now have an advantage in every further fight. Stronghold already snowballs harder than any conquest match ever could.

If you’re talking incentive, the problem is that there’s no incentive to keep trying once you’ve lost a couple battles. There’s no incentive to get better either on an individual or team level. The rewards for losing are the same whether you score 50 points or 499 points. And with Stronghold having more “all or noting” victory conditions, the problem gets worse.

Yes, NPCs are allies and receive boons from allies.

Not sure on priority for targeting if the total of players and friendly NPCs is over the target cap for the ability.

The best thieves hit a few times and back off, repeating as cooldowns are available. It reduces most of the damage they take from guardians. As thief, you need to bait out guardian cooldowns and then kill the guardian when his cooldowns are used up.

If you’re trying to face-tank a guardian on thief and hoping to kill them before they can land significant damage on you, you’re doing it wrong.

Quadox.7834:

Did anyone who is defending this topic play the game before the sigil changes?

Yes

How come noone complained this much about fire / air sigil back then?

Before the changes, sigil internal cooldowns (ICD) were shared. When one sigil proc’ed, it would put all other sigils on cooldown for the proc’ing sigil’s ICD. Air + Fire wasn’t a thing. Also, the on-crit sigils only had a 30% chance to trigger on crit, so it was less likely that they would go off in one or two attacks.

Jesiah.2457:

I honestly find it amusing that sigil of geomancy was put on scale of being incredibly powerful like crit sigils which have zero counter play, where as swap sigils, especially one like geomancy do have counterplay.

Haha, NO. So you know exactly when an elementalist is going to swap an attunement or an engi will equip a kit and you’re tracking when it’s been 9 seconds since they last triggered the sigil?

If you go bow, you’re locked into one trait line your virtues change. Something very important to consider.