Guild Wars 2

If the game ends in a 500-500 score, then the victory goes to the team with the highest scoring player.

Position on this leaderboard doesn’t mean much other than you play a lot.

My Replies to OP
1. Profession daily is bad, but not necessarily because of how it influence ranked games (see response #6). Suggest grouping them into Soldier, Adventurer, and Scholar win dailies and adding a “ranked winner” daily.

2. Celestial amulet is fine. A few builds which use it are the problem. Removing the amulet would do nothing to promote build diversity. You would just see a new meta emerge.

3. Build Templates are nice and would be extremely beneficial. The problem is limited human resources with other tasks taking priority (even PvP ones).

4. The 1.5 minute wait time is provided to allow players to change builds, etc. Reducing that time to ~30sec would be ideal, but you need to address build/character swapping before the match starts (should it be allowed?).

5. Another question of human resources. As a counter to your story, WoW delayed a patch(es) for months to implement in-game VoIP and even after years of being available is still almost never used.

6. No need. If rating and matchmaking are working properly, then inexperienced players will be matched with/against players of similar skill.

7. See response to #6

8. This idea is of questionable merit. If you’ve learned anything in the game industry, especially MMORPGs, it’s that players will find the fastest path to a reward that has the least effort. Put in a precursor track and watch the bots materialize en masse.

9. There is a penalty for leaving the match (assuming it’s not turned off because it’s bugged again). There’s also a grace period for players who do DC, as there should be. You could argue that the grace period needs adjusted, but not removed.

My Suggestions
1. Leaderboards must reflect skill (rating) over amount of games played. A hybrid system (more points for matches at higher rating) is also acceptable. A good decay algorithm would also be nice.

2. Balance updates need to happen more often. Recommend every two months; enough time to kitten if something is actually too strong, or if it was player overreaction and then develop and test a solution.

3. Reduce power of instant-cast effects which occur on top of base skills/attacks. Things like sigil procs, damage procs, instant healing, etc. Being hit with a few thousand damage for being hit with an auto-attack after avoiding the big attacks is silly.

4. Change the stat system to allow more build variety. Your choices are extreme damage, overly tanky, and celestial. Seriously, who needs 900 toughness with 0 vitality? Suggest splitting stats into Amulet/Ring/Ring at 50/25/25% of current amulet stats. I’ve seen quite a few players, especially WvW players, list the inability to use their PvE/WvW build in PvP as a reason they don’t like to play PvP. Even if their build is bad, still allow them to use it and find out that it’s bad.

5. Consider revising the rating and matchmaking system. The perception is that neither works as well as it should. From personal experience, I tend to get more bad games (blowouts or one player pulling you down) than competitive games.

6. Address the cesspool of hotjoin (practice). First, limit hot join rewards once you achieve a certain rank (moreso than current limits). This keeps more experienced players out of hotjoin unless they’re truly practicing and also curbs the appeal of reward farm servers. Second, cut down on auto-balance abuse. The auto-balance abuse and losing because you’re outnumbered is a huge turn-off for players. Possibly restrict players from joining the winning team unless the winning team is short players.

7. Consider combining Unranked and Ranked. A combined player pool would allow for improved matchmaking and reduce queue times. The downside is players being apprehensive about competing.

8. Build Templates. Even if it has to start with trait templates, it’s still helpful.

I think the best solution in between what we have now and pure intensity stacking is to give mobs multiple burning slots, depending on their difficulty. A champion may have 2, a world boss would have maybe 5. When you apply burning, it picks whichever of those slots has the least burning time.

sigh Win ratio is not an indication of skill or lack thereof.

The intent of the matching system is to pair teams of equal strength based on individual skill and organization. The effect on leaderboard points from a loss is based on the expected outcome vs. the actual outcome. If you lost, but achieved the expected outcome, you don’t lose points.

All this record shows is that this person is performing as expected in losing games.

1. MMR-based leaderboard.
2. More stat customization to allow more build diversity.
3. Reign in the power of on-proc and on-swap sigils and on-proc damage.

For being a stress test, it went pretty well overall. Since it’s a beta, I’ll just touch on some things that didn’t feel right or were confusing.

Revenant Hammer
The weapon is geared toward being at ranged most of the time. So the #3 (camera moves forward, chills, and moves back) didn’t really fit. Seemed like a complete waste of time. The #1 felt inconsequential and I’d rather just use #2 all the time. Neither of the two available legends really synergized with hammer; both were melee to short range, whereas to use the power of hammer #2, I wanted to stay at max range.

Mallyx
I get the general feel of the legend: put condis on yourself so that when you use abilities, you get the bonus. However, the bonus is usually double or more stacks from the base. From a PvP background, this is looking overly powerful.

Mastery UI
Very confusing. It’s not clear that you need to gain experience to complete the mastery after unlocking it with mastery points. It also seems like a lot of wasted space spanning the entire screen. Making it a new UI window with an easy-access reassignment pop-up from the XP bar might work better.

Adventures
The idea seems good. I like the challenging of doing something really well which wasn’t easy. The vine burning one, however, felt un-polished. The flamethrower was hard to control and you couldn’t stop the #1 to use other abilities like the engineer flamethrower kit. Also, it wasn’t clear how the shells were going off my first few times through. It seemed like other players were walking by them and setting them off on me.

Wyvern
Mechanics seemed too trivial. Maybe it was just dumbed down for the demo? All the previews said it was an area control fight where beating the break bar was important. I just stood on top of it or next to it where there wasn’t fire and attacked it. With all the revenants using their road ability, and being on a guardian, it was hard to even notice the chain knockback.

Revenant Abilities and Traits
Some of them can be abused with cancel-cast (stow weapon or dodge during the cast), allowing the effect to be triggered constantly which wasn’t the intent. Rite of the Great Dwarf was the main one I saw that could be abused like this. From what I was told, you could use it to break stun then cancel it and you could immediately use it again to break another stun.

Saiyan.1704:

Population issue shouldn’t be an argument. Parameters can be set so that these same players are impossible to play with or against. A “team shuffle” for example; intead of that player being on your team twice in a row, you’re on opposite teams instead. That can be governed by whether or not you lost (or won) with that person. Thresholds like score differences can be set. It’s really quite simple.

If you wanted to enforce that, some people would sit in queue for 30+ minutes, especially at off-hours.

The reality is that there are times of the night where the PvP poulation is low. Under completely ideal conditions of a 10min game and grouping all within ±50 rating from 700 to 2300 rating and 10 minute average games, you would need 340 players minimum (best rating distributions) in order to maintain 5min queue times. And since that reality doesn’t happen, you’d probably need double that pool.

That’s not happening at off hours, especially once you escape the middle of the distribution. So above average players who play at off hours will always have better odds of winning and will win more matches. It goes up even more if they form partial groups.

There are quite a few “incorrect” nerfs still sitting around which should be rolled back.

Sorel.4870:

Ranked or unranked? If it’s the latter, please let people play the game the way they want.

Why do people think that unranked = hot join?

It shouldn’t matter if it’s ranked or unranked. Players who don’t understand profession/build mechanics should be rated and matched with other people who don’t understand profession/build mechanics. Let players fail; just fix the matchmaking so they don’t bring others down with them.

This particular instance is really the OP’s fault since it was a pre-made group. But his point that “Meta builds exist for a reason” is valid, though harsh. If you’re new to PvP, then looking at what others have done already is a highly recommended starting point.

Zodian.6597:

Everyone has just been asking for a ratings ladder from the begining, idk why they don’t just do that

Up until December 2014, leaderboards were based on rating, with a decay filter applied. They had problems, notably:

1. There was (maybe still is) a flaw in the rating calculation or the parameters, as evidenced by someone that was 2-11 being rank1 for a few days. Similarly, you had people who were 11-0 or 10-1 making it to the top of the leaderboards, often with troll names like “fix leaderboard”.
2. The decay was too extreme on the leaderboards and did not affect actual rating. As a result, players who went inactive for a couple days would drop hundreds of spots on the boards. But when they would play one game, they would suddenly jump up a few hundred. Ironically, the decay was intended to filter the 11 game troll accounts off the top of the leaderboard.

The perceived problem with that system was that you could get to the top of the boards with only a handful of games and a handful of wins, so quantity should matter more. ANet took that too far to the extreme and came up with a leaderboard system where rating doesn’t matter; in fact, high rating is now a detriment (see Chaith’s thread).

The original leaderboard could have been improved by better tuning the Glicko2 rating algirthm and implementing a better decay algorithm.

But going forward, the main question that needs to be answered is whether time played should matter at all, after some initial amount, or if skill (rating) should be the only factor. Obviously skill should be the primary factor. The argument for putting some weight on time played is that it gives good (but not excellent) players a route to obtain end-of-season rewards. Having a small group of players monopolize the end-of-season rewards isn’t a good way to grow the PvP playerbase.

I applaud the effort, Acandis, but at this stage all you’ve done is ordered players by win rate. That’s no better than the current system – arguably worse, as it still fails to account for skill.

First, I’m assuming that the current leaderboard is using a similar algorithm to what’s posted on the wiki, where points awarded are based on predicted outcome vs. actual outcome. Further, a finish near where you’re expected to finish will always result in 0 points.

If you look at an ideal system where players have mostly correct ratings and are predominately placed in matches with ~50% chance to win, then the “quality rating” you’re proposing for any player would be 0.50, i.e. a 50% win rate. Even if you expand this to look at players getting a distribution of matches such the total magnitude of expected win and expected loss is the same, you still have a 50% win rate.

So who achieves a higher win rate than 50%? The immediately response may be “better players” but that’s not directly true. The people with higher win rates are:

1. Players who have a proper rating, but are matched such that their win rate is higher than 50% i.e. they’re put in matches they should win more than matches they should lose.
2. Players with a rating below their proper rating. Because their rating is lower than it should be, the prediction on win-loss will be off, and they’ll perform better than expected until their actual rating nears their true rating.

The reason top players tend to have a win rate which is larger than 50% by a statistically significant amount is due to #1. Because there are few people above them and many more below them in the potential match pool, the top players will be in more matches where they have a favorable chance to win compared to matches where they have a favorable chance to lose.

But with a smaller player pool from which to match, it’s hard to achieve an average chance to win of 50% across any portion of the leaderboard. In addition, if an element of the prediction algorithm isn’t accurate, then players who take that element to an extreme will skew their win rate. So what win rate or “Quality Index” really shows is which players have played more games which are in their favor or were incorrectly predicted.

Compared to the current leaderboard, which is based predominately on time spent, the “Quality Index” proposal takes control away from the player completely and turns ranking into luck of the draw.

TLDR: “Quality Index” is roughly equivalent to win ratio. Win ratio indicates imbalance in matchmaking (and prediction in this case) more than skill. Time spent (current leaderboards) is at least something players can control.

Zodian.6597 said it best: There isn’t a whole lot Acandis can do [..] he’s fundamentally working with bad data.

Queues
Combining ranked and unranked has its merits. It creates a larger player pool, which would improve matchmaking and lower queue times. That would bring more players into PvP and keep them around more often. The downside is the psychological effect, which is hard to quantify. When ranking is at risk, a lot of people become apprehensive about competing if they don’t feel that they can give it their best.

To answer your question about top players doing unranked: the leaderboards are meaningless to them unless they queue as a full team and unranked has slightly faster queues. You get crappy maps from time to time, but that’s not a big enough detractor. And since a lot of top players are solo or partial queuing, the matchmaking isn’t too horrible; no worse than ranked at least.

I don’t see why you suggest combining queues and then splitting them again. That’s defeating the purpose. Splitting by game mode just fragments the community and creates animosity. Stronghold is really popular right now mainly because it’s not released yet. Wouldn’t it be better to keep both modes together, maybe giving a preference to Stronghold for the first month or so, and then see where the community goes?

Balance
There’s a lot more at play, but what you mentioned is a part of why the “cele meta” is around. Other professions and builds are kept out because of the rigid amulet system and thieves dominating other zerker professions.

Birthday Booster
100% magic find doesn’t dramatically increase the amount of items you earn. If you doubled PvP rewards, you would get double the items in the same time. 10% may be a little low, but it’s not completely out of whack.

Revenant as a whole
With two missing trait lines, 3 or more missing legends, and missing weapons, it’s really hard to tell how good or bad it will be overall. Some traits are pretty silly, but they have a few months to tweak them still.

General theme is a lot of Torment with a few other conditions spread around. Seems like the Fury boon will be a big theme too.

Hammer
The hammer feels disjoint as a weapon and doesn’t pair well with any of the currently available legends or traits nor do its abilities fit as a package. You’re best off using #2 on cooldown at max range (more damage the further the target is); if it hits, it does a lot of damage. You can easily counter hammer revenant by staying in melee. I doubt it will see much use in PvP, though will probably see use in WvW.

Mace/Axe
Pretty good weapon set for condi or maybe hybrid builds. Low cooldown blast finisher on mace #3 is nice. Axe off-hand has a pull and a teleport, so it will probably see a lot of use in PvP.

Jalis
Very defensive with one big CC which costs a ton of energy. Abilities are best in melee or short range. I see this mostly being used for high stability uptime with Inspiring Reinforcement (the road). Rite of the Great Dwarf (reduces damage to affected allies) is powerful, but the cast time is prohibitive. It might become a staple legend for self-survival.

Mallyx
Stupidly overpowered right now and if it goes live as-is, it will force every condi build out of PvP. If you have 3 or more conditions on yourself (and your abilities put conditions on yourself), the Mallyx abilities apply bonus conditions. Its boon strip (2 boons) will apply 5 stacks of confusion per cast if you have 3 or more condis on yourself. And you can chain it, so with cover conditions, you’re pretty much giving someone a death sentence in a few casts. It also can give itself resistance in order to ignore conditions on itself for a short time.

Traits
Seems like the Invocation trait line will be pretty important for PvP. Too hard to say anything about the others.

Once you pass around 7 minutes in queue, the matching system has reached the point where you’ll be matched with/against a good chunk of the people in queue.

chibbi.3706:

Not really sure why they wouldn’t just use the elo system, like every single esport does. It’s so simple…

GW2 uses Glicko2 for match-making and for the leaderboards prior to December 2014. Glicko2 is an evolution of Elo.

Decay is not necessary, although it helps against high ranked people not playing games to not risk getting their elo lower.

I would argue that you do need a decay mechanic (though better than the old one). The problem with Elo-based systems is that when people at the top stop playing, it’s very hard for anyone to overtake them. Top players can play a lot in the first few weeks and then sit on their rank for the remainder of the season.

The amount of on-proc (usually on-crit) extra damage in this game is getting to ridiculous levels, especially when used by zerker builds. Most of the time there’s no penalty for failing because the cooldown isn’t activated. Also, there’s no way to predict it.

The list includes, but is not limited to:

• Sigil of Air, Sigil of Fire, Sigil of Blood
• Halting Strike
• Glacial Heart
• Chill of Death
• Incendiary Powder

Losing half your HP in an instant because of stacked procs does not make for an enjoyable PvP experience.

Edit Fixed grammar and typos

Random Weird Guy.3528:

The wiki articles aren’t written by ANet, they’re either written by players or copied by players from official posts.

Some are written by developers. If you look at the history for the Matchmaking page, most of the updates are made by Justin O’Dell. His blog post for the current matching system stated that he would post the pseudo code on the wiki.

It depends what your rating is.

If you’re one of the higher rated players, then queue times are pretty awful – about 7 minutes and then it matches you with almost anyone. Since the leaderboard is based on time and not skill, there’s no reason to play a lot, which makes the higher skill landscape even more barren.

If you’re in the middle, queue times are pretty quick, matches aren’t too lopsided and leaderboard means something to you (probably because you haven’t stopped to think about its mechanics).

Chaith.8256:

Engineers (every profession?) are 100% unviable without a Stunbreak. No meta PvP build in the history of GW2 to my knowledge has endured the test of time without Stunbreaks. Slick Shoes could not exist where a Stunbreak should be, just as it was if we examine Engi builds of the past.

In the Engineer build creation process, your change would simply put Slick Shoes out of the ‘Stunbreak’ slot

Spot on. Remove the stun break and the skill is dead.

In light of the Stability boon changes especially, a more practical way to nerf Slick Shoes would be to change how the utility spawns oil slicks. Perhaps reduce the number of puddles spawned, in perhaps a way that makes more Stunbreaks save the user from repeatedly getting knocked down.

Agree. Cut the duration of the ability from 3 seconds to 2 seconds. That eliminates multi-knockdown from all but the very best engis.

You could look at possibly increasing the cooldown on the stun break a little bit, but removing it cripples the skill as Chaith said.

I’m fine with how stability works on elites now. However, the number of stacks may need some tuning and possibly the strength of the elite.

As a general rule, I think offensive elites should be 1, maybe 2 stacks every 3 sec whereas defensive ones can be 3. Lich is probably the best example of how the stability change improved the elite for the user while adding more counter-play at the same time.

1. Solo queue is not needed
Before the change to practice/play/compete, solo queue had a long queue time and matches came down to which team had the least bad players. The leaderboard for it was laughable (team was somewhat respectable). Why would bringing it back be any different?

The complaints about fighting premades are very exaggerated. A lot of times it’s partial teams with solo players mixed in. Matchmaking could still use some tweaks, but is it bad for solo players and small groups play a lesser rated pre-made? If you’re trying to be a lone wolf while pulling a out a win for your team, then the mentality is misplaced. It’s a team game and working as a team is part of the game.

Solo queue also isn’t needed to encourage casual PvPers to play. The game just needs a system which can match casual players against similarly skilled opponents. A close match will keep people coming back, and that can be accomplished without a solo queue.

2. Leaderboards which reflect skill are vital
We need a leaderboard which reflects skill. The current system favors time played and only the people who have lots of free time care about it. There’s no incentive to become a better player. If you want to value time and skill, that’s fine, but skill should be the dominate factor.

3. A visible indication of rating is needed
Players should have a general idea of how good or bad another player is in-game. It doesn’t have to be raw rating. It could be some division of players into buckets. For example, top 1% is platinum, next 5% gold, etc. Like a skill-based leaderboard, it allows players to gauge their skill against others and give them a goal outside of a few more champion bags or a piece of armor.

My Additions

• Change the amulet system. Stat rigidity is a roadblock to increasing the PvP population. Casual PvPers want to run the same or similar build that they use in PvE or WvW. Sure, it may be terrible for PvP, but let them find that out for themselves. If they can’t try what they’re comfortable with, they just don’t try it.
• More frequent balance updates. The idea of shaving was nice, but shaving once every 5 months doesn’t work. Aim for a two month cycle. It’s enough time for players to overcome the initial reaction and look for counters or alternatives while preventing the environment from languishing for months.
• Address the matchmaking and idle time. I’m not sure what it’s like for most players, but I tend to sit in queue for ~7 minutes and get terrible matches. The global average is always ~2 minutes, so it must be working for some people. Sitting around in HotM doing nothing and then have a terrible match are big turn-offs. Consider merging unranked and ranked if it would improve queue times. Cutting down on the “ready up” time would also reduce dead time.
• Build Templates. These would be helpful for allowing players to adjust to their team’s composition and also useful to educate newer players. Even if it has to start as a partial implementation like trait templates, it would be very helpful.

Selfless Daring should not be nerfed by 50%. It’s hampers the trait and the trait line. You could argue against moving it back to 100%, but it does need boosted from its current level.

“Save Yourselves!” isn’t all that bad at 50%. At 10 second duration, it was pretty cheesy when used for burst instead of the intended team support role.

And bunker guardian isn’t top tier mostly because of the amulet system. The build can’t increase its damage without being too weak in another aspect.

Turtle Dragon.9241:

Previously, I tried posting a thread asking for which skills/traits behave differently in sPvP on every profession, and got very few answers. On the other hand, it seems other classes have some skills that even do extra damage in sPvP such as Warrior’s Whirling Axe.

Guardian:
Save Yourselves only works for 1/2 the duration
Selfless Daring only heals for 1/2 the amount
Retaliation does 33% less damage

Is Guardian the only class that gets heavily nerfed in sPvP?

Retaliation and Confusion are reduced in PvP because players attack faster than NPCs. That’s perfectly reasonable.

Selfless Daring was one of the first nerfs in the live game when players were still learning and couldn’t figure out how to beat bunker guardians. Elementalist’s Signet of Restoration was cut by 50% around the same time, but that was later rolled back. Selfless Daring needs un-nerfed or at least have the PvP penalty reduced.

“Save Yourselves!” was nerfed in PvP around the same time because it provided a lot of offense and survivability in a small window. It wasn’t filling its role as support and was instead being used in damage builds.

SobeSoul.6910:

Wat?

I have done the math on Litany and Shelter. It doesn’t even matter if you kite whether Litany is effective or not.

Judging from your rationale I am guessing you copypasta builds without critically thinking out the builds.

Yeah, personal insults because you can’t provide your math. I listed mine before. I took 75% of signet of resolve’s healing (to compensate for CD difference), subtracted the base amount, then divided that difference by 0.25. I ended up with a little over 17,000 damage needed to reach the same HP/sec as un-traited signet of Resolve. Other than bunkers, your PvP will have between 16k and 20k HP, so you’d pretty much have to kill them outright in that 6 seconds. So it only works against the same people who face-tank a full 100blades.

Simple fact of the matter is that Litany of Wrath was balanced for PvE where mobs rarely kite and where you have damage bonuses galore as well as might and vuln stacking. But PvEers don’t use Litany of Wrath there either because shelter mitigating a 10k+ damage attack is still better.

And yes, kiting matters. A lot. If the guardian can’t land the damage, the healing bonus is pointless and you’re left with a piddly heal.

Edit
Btw, if you considered base Signet of Resolve against full traited Litany of Wrath, it needs ~5k damage to reach the same HP/sec. That’s reasonable, at least. However, Shelter does almost as much base HP/sec but the block is invaluable. Block one 5k damage attack with Shelter and in order for Litany of Wrath to compare, you would need to 20k damage.

SobeSoul.6910:

I have played games with it before. Considering it auto heals for 3.6k on top of 25% dmg dealt returns vs. Shelter’s 4.6k, and a 6s shorter CD, it’s pretty obvious none of you are even bothering with the math of the heal.

No, you’re the one that can’t do math. When you use shelter properly, it heals + prevents more than Signet of Resolve. Litany of Wrath requires you to do an absurd amount of damage to come close to the healing of Signet of Resolve (without the signet cooldown reduction trait).

You know what happens when I see a guardian use Litany of Wrath? Kite and laugh because I know they’re terrible.

Answer: Don’t use it. It’s beyond useless in every aspect of the game.

In order for Litany of Wrath to beat the HP/sec of Signet of Resolve, you’d have to do over 17k damage. If you’re doing that much damage in 6 seconds, your target is already dead anyway.

Besides, Shelter >> everything else.

3 of a profession that’s relatively popular isn’t uncommon. I’ve seen games with 3 necromancers when it’s not necro day and necros suck.

When you don’t have a target, all attacks follow your movement camera path. Since most people play with a camera angled down, projectiles shoot into the ground. You can adjust the movement camera path using right-click and moving the mouse. Problem is, since a lot of people use that to turn or both mouse buttons to move forward, it screws up the angle constantly.

Only downstate I have a problem with is thief because they have a good chance at avoiding two stomp attempts.

Other than that, I’m satisfied with all the current forms of stomping and how profession stomp avoidance balances out.

If you’re not aware of downstate and its consequences going in, it can be frustrating. However, once you know to account for it when you play, you’ll see that downstate adds a lot more depth to the gameplay.

They mentioned some kind of priority map voting system and they were still thinking about how to handle PvP map selection. As usual, no details.

Henrik.7560:

If you use your brain, Valkyrie has the same damage as berserker. That’s why we have fury buffs and Intelligence sigil.

Not always. Not everyone has good access to Fury and Sigil of Intelligence only works well with high damage singular attacks; not multi-hit attacks. Valkyrie also has no vitality, so it’s a dangerous choice for Elementalist, Guardian, or Thief.

Rieselle.5079:

There’s so much more gameplay with an NPC, compared to a circle on the ground, or a static Trebuchet/Wall, Flag, etc.

Compared to players, NPCs have the intelligence of a gnat. Players can abuse the hell out of them. NPCs run into Line of Warding over and over, can be kited endlessly, etc. Throwing them in to fight players just makes a mockery of PvP.

runeblade.7514:

I don’t see whats wrong by adding Nomad and Dire.

They’re both overly defensive. At higher skill levels, they wouldn’t be that powerful or useful. High skill players know to not prioritize tanky targets or to focus fire them. At mid to low skill levels, very tanky amulets are a big problem due to lack of player skills and teamwork. So in order to keep the mid to low skill games from becoming toxic, those stat combinations should be omitted.

Condi necro needs a buff. It is very bad.

There was a condi necro in the WTS grand finals.

Don’t need to buff the amulets; that leads to power creep. Just need to allow more stat customization.

Celestial stats are only better than other 3-stat items if you can make good use of 6 or more of the 7 stats. If you can only use 5 stats from celestial well, then you’d be better off with a combination of 3-stat items. This is true for total stat points but also because celestial has a relatively low power value, and power gives the strongest returns on damage compared to other stats.

Note the word combination from above. We can’t do that in PvP and it’s a huge problem with the PvP stat system. Celestial is the only amulet anywhere close to a proper allocation of survival stats and offensive stats. Most builds for PvP need a lot of power and would prefer a healthy amount of precision, ferocity, toughness, and vitality with the amounts differing by build and profession. We don’t need choices with over 900 toughness or vitality or 0 precision.

I’d suggest the following:

1. In the short-term, create a 50% berserker / 50% soldier amulet. This is about where most builds would want to end up and can be done within the constraints of the current amulet system. It shows the merits of more stat customization.
2. As a final solution, split the current amulet choice into multiple items. I suggest amulet/ring/ring at 50/25/25% of the current amulet stats.

The reason given by ANet for the current system is that older systems (amulet+jewel at launch and 5 accessories early in beta) were too confusing for players. But at the same time, those players get frustrated when they can’t kill anything (too tanky) or die instantly (too squishy) and can’t get anything in between.

Conquest all the way.

Stronghold will be interesting for a little bit, mostly because it’s new. But once people figure out how to play the format well, it’ll turn into a PvE race with maybe a single 5v5 fight which decides who wins.

http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Damage#Direct_damage

Damage reduction from armor has diminishing returns. At low armor values, adding toughness gets you a significant increase in damage reduction. At higher armor values, you’re better off investing in other stats (vitality and sometimes healing power) in order to boost effective HP.

Even then, passive defensive stats aren’t going to keep you alive forever. Improving your positioning and use of active defenses (dodges, etc) will allow you to live much longer.

Trevor Boyer.6524:

• Nomad would make bunking viable again.

No it wouldn’t. Nomad would be useless except at low skill levels. Bunkers fell out of favor because they didn’t do damage and Nomad doesn’t help that.

Reikou.7068:

However from a competitive point of view, diversity at the cost of balance is definitely not worth it as these should be games of skill, not who plays the most broken builds.

Diversity does NOT mean that balance is ignored. Proper diversity means that a given build or composition is not the best each and every time.

Nikkinella.8254:

That’s the exact reason why they SHOULD be added to spvp. So it can finally get the nerfs it deserves in wvw.

That’s a WvW problem, not a PvP problem.

Dire seems so bad in WvW because you have +40% condition duration food, higher total stats, and access to more conditions than you do in PvP (perplexity runes, necro abilities have more bleeds).

Reikou.7068:

Diversity is nice, but it should never take priority over balance in a competitive game.

When diversity is low, it’s hard to achieve Perfect Imbalance. If a small group of “balanced” options is always best, the game gets stale quickly. You need a large enough pool of options such that none is always the best.

Adding stat diversity is often confused with adding a considerable permutations to the balance space. This is a bad way to analyze it. Instead, you need to look at stats as a multidimensional tradespace. Because the total amount of stats is fixed, the extremes are known, and are pretty much what we have now. If an extreme is not overly powerful at any one aspect, then something between the extremes is unlikely to be as well. You can also consider perfect balance (celestial) as another test point in the trade space.

The only negative impact which an increase on stat diversity would have on balance is that it creates many more viable builds. This isn’t necessarily a bad problem to have. Some might be overpowered, but how is that any worse than the current state with a few exceptionally strong builds and less build diversity?

A good example of the shortcomings of the current system is with offensive power builds. In order for a power damage build to work, it needs a lot of power, since this gives the biggest return per point, a decent amount of precision (crit chance) and some ferocity (crit damage). That’s what berserker has. However, few builds have a lot of escapes (e.g. thief) or heavy damage reduction. This makes them fall victim to berserker builds which have ample survivability from the profession skills. So most professions would also want some survivability. The best increase per point at low armor levels would be Toughness. On a light armor profession, a few hundred points can get you 15% damage reduction.

The other amulet choices provide excessive amounts of survivability, often in a poor balance, and lack damage. Soldier, Valkyrie, Knight, Barbarian, Cavalier. With no precision or no ferocity and lower power, the build just doesn’t have the damage to pressure a target.

Using runes is not a good solution either. Runes provide +175 to the primary stat, which usually isn’t enough. Additionally, the effects on runes are valuable to many builds, so they lose that benefit. And lastly, using a non-power rune significantly decreases damage output, especially for builds which don’t go into their power trait line.

A experiment which could “easily” be done in the interim is to add a 50% Berserker 50% Soldier amulet. In theory, that would enable more offensive builds which are currently too weak against thieves.

Bertrand.3057:

I bet you’ll be very disappointed to hear that Warriors can Kill Shot/Eviscerate through blocks using Signet of Might.

Well aware. It’s also a 6sec duration on a 25sec cooldown. The duration aspect is key because it gives the opposing player a clear window in which he/she has to react differently. Once the duration ends, it won’t be back for a while. And this is one whole utility skill, not an innate bonus to a skill.

Saturn.6591:

Hold on; since when are grenades reflectable (as claimed by like, everyone in this thread)? o.o

Since beta.

Since grenades hit the ground with a small random variation and not a player directly, it’s hard to see them be reflected/absorbed unless you have an area reflect/absorb. Guardian Shield #5 is a good example to test against.

Bertrand.3057:

Yeah, let’s complain about 1 of 2 active unblockable Mesmer skills, never mind that the class meant to be about distracting opponents isn’t one of the 6 that have unblockable interrupts.

This is more about unblockable damage vs. unblockable utility. There are a lot of unblockable utilities which are fine because they aren’t doing significant instant damage.

Simonoly.4352:

Mirror Blade is probably unblockable to prevent reflect clone generation.

Then why isn’t scepter #1.3 unblockable? There have been numerous videos of the reflect in use.

jportell.2197:

Mirror blade has a very obvious cast, is very slow, and very easy to dodge. Not to mention in big team fights it is the only way mesmers get away with doing any AOE damage at all.

Like most projectile skills, it’s only easy to dodge if you’re at range with it. If you’re in melee, the time to dodge is a lot less. Oh, and if they do it out of stealth or a clone split, good luck.

Further, it’s really counter-intuitive that you can block other damaging skills they throw at you, but not this one. You can blind it, evade it, and dodge it – why not block too?

Those two are the only skills which are heavy up-front damage and unblockable. Maybe three if you counter greater marks being used by a power necro. Everything else is some kind of utility with minimal damage or an over-time effect that can be further countered.

The reflect mechanic is consistent. What’s changing is the size of the target. In order to reflect a projectile, the projectile has to hit the object that is reflecting. If it hits the ground first, it won’t get reflected. You can easily see this with Wall of Reflection and warrior longbow #3 or #F1. When you target the ground in front of the wall, the projectile can hit stuff behind it which is still in the radius; target behind the wall and it gets reflected. Warrior reflect skills have a small reflect area, so projectiles which hit around the target, like grenades, often don’t get reflected.

Agree on Mirror Blade. A high damage skill which can hit multiple times being unblockable is silly. Elementalist’s Phoenix shouldn’t be unblockable either.

Shiyo.3578:

We need power main stat, a bit of crit damage, a bit of crit, a bit of toughness, and a bit of VIT as well. The amulet system currently makes there be less viable builds and really holds the game back.

This 100×.

Great games. I really enjoyed watching. The comebacks between oRNG and Abjured were nail-biters. Dankening looked really improved since the WTS qualifiers and China had a good showing too.

butch.8136:

like wtf get a LAN client pls.

It was a private server.

Acandis.3250:

This is roughly how it worked: snip

Other than tiered rewards, this is how the previous leaderboards and rating system worked implicitly.

Glicko2 has rating deviation and volatility factors besides just the rating in ELO. These additional factors affect how much a person can move up or down after a match. New players have bigger rating deviation and volatility values because the system is unfamiliar with them. The old leaderboards required 11 games for a player to be displayed.

I wouldn’t jump to that conclusion yet. There was hardly any supply being used, which is key to winning the game via a lord kill.

It was pretty boring to watch though. Oh boy, this team is killing NPCs. Now this team is summoning an NPC. Let’s watch the other team kill it!