Guild Wars 2

Terrahero.9358:

It has a smaller aoe then melee range, its tiny. You can litterally melee the turret and still not get hit by the knockback from it being destroyed.

10 range less. If they have the turret range and damage increase trait, it’s not. Also, consider that often you’re trying to stay on a node as well.

Ross Biddle.2367:

Vigor was nerfed. Clone spam was reduced. Even then, necros have wells, engies have landmine spam, eles aoe. Exploding clones are hardly “AI” when looking at their function compared to similar effects by other classes.

And sigil of energy was buffed by removing the shared cooldown and now practically everyone uses it. Just because PU mesmer has trouble vs. a handful of builds doesn’t mean it’s a problem in general. Though in this case, it’s rune and sigil power creep that’s keeping it frustrating for mid-level players, not anything extremely broken about the profession.

The problem with PU isn’t AI; it’s clone spam, mostly from lots of dodges, and defensive boon spam. Cut down on the dodges, which cuts down on the clones and also decreases defense and they won’t be so bad.

The problem with the OP’s list is that it goes too far or doesn’t do a good job explaining the problems. Fresh Air elementalist burst is only a problem against full glass players and requires set up by the elementalist or allies. That build also dies quickly. I’m fine with that. Bunker guardian is in a good spot, though stability is a little too easy to access. The counterplay is to neutralize the objective; you don’t have to kill them outright.

Drarnor Kunoram.5180:

Actually, given the recent Ready Up where they went over design philosophies for the classes, weakness to CC is apparently NOT one of ANet’s designed weaknesses for necros.

Not explicitly, but implicitly. Necromancers are designed to stay in fights for a while and soak up damage, not escape from fights and avoid it. Part of that is not having a lot of CC avoidance. If you can escape from CC, you can avoid a lot of the damage.

Increasing the stability duration too much limits counter-play. Death Shroud on a power necro can be very powerful; if you toss on near full immunity to most CC, they start to become broken because they have fewer viable counters. I’ve seen decent builds that have very high life force generation, so using life force as a balancing factor is not the best solution.

At first glance, the stun break idea is nice, but a stun break on a 10second cooldown is a bit much. It also takes away from the design of necro being more vulnerable to CC but also being able to tank damage better, i.e. ride through the CC.

I would recommend a different change:

• Gain Stability for 3 seconds on entering Death Shroud (current effect)
• If you are stunned, knocked back, dazed, etc. and under 10% life force, your life force is immediately set to 10% (enough to enter death shroud). 30sec cooldown.

This addresses the problem of necros being extremely weak when they have no life force, which is one of their big weaknesses. At the same time, it maintains one of the design aspects of the class: vulnerable to CC, but able to soak damage. Numbers could be tweaked slightly.

Prince.7198:

Well that is exactly the problem in tpvp, moving away from the turrets and thus the point = losing

What’s wrong with having a strong, but largely static area defense? I don’t see a problem with that.

The problem with turret engineer is that they can also gain that area control easily. Balance would be strong at decap or defense or mediocre at both, but not strong at both.

Engineer turrets are actually a decent form of AI. They don’t move and the effect comes from the turret itself, so it can be readily avoided, and if the turret is destroyed or the battle moves, the engineer is now at a disadvantage. The more they build around the turrets and rely on them for damage, the weaker they are without them.

I would say that the problems lie in two places:

1. Accelerant-Packed Turrets (turrets explode and knock back when killed). This is an adept level trait and adds so much CC to the turret engineer. Either explode on-demand for CC and damage or punish you for trying to destroy the forest of turrets while staying on the point. This is in addition to all the CC the engineer already has. With this trait, Supply Crate becomes a box of CC, more than it already is.
2. Supply Crate’s Net Turret. Lots of extra CC in addition to the initial stun, healing, and damage. A good suggestion from a while ago was to replace it with a rifle turret and make the net turret a bonus to the Elite Supplies trait, which currently adds a rifle turret.

It’s just as bad to watch a PvP match full of Asura on a stream as it is to play it. All it looks like is particle effects and ability spam.

Just because a vocal subset of players hate it and posts on the forums continually doesn’t mean that the general population dislikes it.

CntrlAltDefeat.1465:

I do feel though some of your suggestion could better be accomplished via intra-trait balancing/redesign.

Two problems with that:
1. It’s not realistic.
ANet recently rolled out 40 new grandmaster traits. Only a few are actually worth using and probably about half are awful. Before that, it was 8 new heal skills; how many of those are used competitively (in any part of the game)?
Revamping even just half the master and grandmaster traits in the game (that would be 140 traits) is a daunting task. And then you have to now look at all the possible combinations of traits for things that might be too good.
2. It hurts build diversity.
If you want to make traits powerful enough to overcome lack of stats from gear, then once more than a handful of traits are good enough to do that, you can start combining them in ways that are extremely powerful. This leads to locked builds where you have to take specific combinations of the really good traits or you aren’t viable, since everyone else took their really good traits.

Traits should add new dimensions to each profession’s playstyle (i.e. burst, sustained damage, CC, a key boon, etc), but shouldn’t supplant stats. An offensive build should still need to invest heavily in power and precision. A defensive one should be taking toughness, vitality, and healing power. When you have offensive builds using soldier and celestial amulets like they do currently, balance falls apart.

The other issue is that currently with only game mode type there is only certain build archetypes that have purpose and intent, namely roaming/node defense.

I would argue that part of that may be a natural end, but part of it is also the lack of any middle ground being possible, in addition to power creep in the April 15th patch with the rune and sigil changes.

Thieves keep a lot of other DPS possibilities out of the picture because those builds can’t survive being caught by a good thief. Scepter elementalist would be a prime example of a build that still works well with slightly less damage and more survival and is kept out of gameplay because it can’t obtain that stat balance.

When there isn’t a counter to a thief back-cap that isn’t another thief or sitting a bunker on that point, of course the meta will stagnate between bunkers and a few builds in full glass that can actually survive as full glass because of profession mechanics. If you use a full bunker, they can’t help push offensively. But if you don’t use a full bunker, the thief will often win the 1v1.

Does it hurt to whip up a new item and let players try it out?

SaintSnow.6593:

Just bring back old amulet mix an match.

The old amulet mix & match wasn’t good enough. The amulet was about 14% of stats with the base amulet being 86%. You were still heavily locked into one side or the other. If ANet does decide to allow more customization, I would recommend amulet, ring, ring at 50%, 25%, 25% of current amulet stats.

The Sigil changes also contributed to the current state of gameplay. When all sigils shared cooldowns, there was a trade-off between various types of offense (Air, Fire, Battle, Doom, etc) as well as sigil of Energy. Now you can just get everything. So many of ANets balance changes over the past year were completely nullified. All the changes to Vigor on crit are meaningless when everyone uses Sigil of Energy. Reductions in thief spike damage are negated by Air+Fire. Sigil of Battle doesn’t have a big trade-off anymore. The list goes on.

Key points in bold

The rigid amulet selection is really hampering some potential builds and locks us into a handful of viable builds. If you don’t have a lot of escapes, going with Berserker is a death sentence. If you stack might and fury, then soldier and celestial can’t put enough damage. There needs to be something in between near full offense and heavy defense for power builds that has a good balance of toughness and vitality while not sacrificing too much power or precision.

Since ANet currently seems against broad stat customization in sPvP, and that would take time to implement, here’s a proposal: Make a 50% Soldier / 50% Berseker Amulet. Adding a single item to the game shouldn’t be hard. The stats would be as follows:
922 Power
322 Precision
238 Ferocity
322 Toughness
485 Vitality

Berserker (for comparison)
922 Power
643 Precision
477 Ferocity
328 Vitality

Using simplified math, it’s a 12% damage reduction for a 30% increase in effective health compared to pure Berserker. Soldier vs Berserker is a 21% drop in damage and 48% increase in effective health. Note that Soldier is the third highest power damage amulet, just slightly behind Valkyrie.

What does this accomplish?

1. With this amulet, players in offensive builds can still apply pressure while not being torn apart in seconds. In particular, the Vitality benefits low base HP professions like Guardian, Elementalist, and Thief.
2. Improves the PvP experience for new players. Drawing from the previous point, new players now have an option where they won’t die horribly in seconds while not hitting like a wet noodle.
3. Players can now create builds similar to those used in WvW. The inability to play a PvP build that closely resembles their WvW/PvE build has long been a significant detractor for many people. If they can now do that, they’re more likely to spend time in PvP.
4. Improves balance by allowing fine tuning without eviscerating builds. When the choices between offense and defense are so disparate, nerfing a key offensive or defensive skill or trait even slightly may ruin an entire build because it can’t compensate for that loss with a slight shift in stats.
5. Demonstrates why stat customization is important and usher in future changes toward that end, or validate the current system of rigid amulets.

What are the potential problems?

1. About the only problem would be warriors. They already deal exceptional damage with a Soldier amulet. Giving them most of that defense with more offense, particularly an extra 15% crit chance, would make them even more powerful. However, ANet can now reign in some of the powerful aspects of the profession without completely gutting it. So it’s a temporary pain for gains in the future.

There could be many other combinations, however this combination would see the broadest range of use, making it the best starting point.

From a PvP perspective for the profession I play often:

General

• Rune of Strength is too good. You effectively have a permanent 7% damage boost and the best might durations in the game.
• Some sigils are too good now that they don’t share cooldowns. Energy, Battle, Air+Fire are the big offenders. Energy in particular because not only does it allow for increased survival, it triggers on-dodge effects more often (extra healing, extra clone, extra damage, extra boons, etc).
• Lack of stat customization on PvP amulets weakens many potential builds too much to warrant play. For power damage, it’s either almost full glass or not enough damage.
• There’s an arms race between condition damage and removal. The condition damage builds can apply more conditions and certain abilities which remove or counter conditions are buffed. It forces players to take the few powerful condition removal abilities that can be re-used often and that limits builds.

Guardian (my main)

• Full support role is in a good spot. Has a trade-off between more stability and condition removal or personal healing. “Stand Your Ground!” is a little too good.
• Offensive guardian play is a little one-dimensional, which limits the skill cap. However, a selfish guardian doesn’t seem right, so I’m okay with that.
• I would like to see a hybrid support/damage guardian be more viable. This suffers largely from being unable to get a nice balance of power, precision, toughness, vitality, and healing.
• My main issues in a support or support/damage role are skills which are unblockable, which really screw with timing defenses, and condition damage engineers where the cleansing quickly falls behind.

Engineer

• Overall, I like the CC heavy engineer role with lots of combo potential. The general feel is in a good spot.
• Incendiary Powder is too strong and in conjunction with the variety of conditions that are applied, seems to hold back more well-rounded improvements.
• Stun breaks are distributed seemingly at random and often have longer cooldowns. Stability is lacking and awkward to use. This makes engineer extremely susceptible to stun-lock and quick death.
• Condition removal and other condition counters are scattered all over. Outside of Healing Turret, none of them are strong against condition damage builds that can quickly re-stack conditions.
• You’re essentially forced to use at least one kit. I would be okay with this, but kits tend to lack extreme power in a narrow role or are generalized and lackluster Many kits have a mix of abilities that only excel in power builds or only in condition builds or just aren’t good. Grenades almost require the Grenadier trait and aren’t very good in power builds (ironic because that trait is in the power line). Bomb kit’s #1 sucks for condition builds but #2 and #3 are amazing for condis. Bomb Kit is pretty powerful in a condition build for area denial though; it excels at a narrow role. Flamethrower lacks a clear purpose or role, same with Elixir Gun. Tool Kit is decent overall, but the #1 doesn’t really have a point when used for damage.
• Gadgets and Elixirs are weak overall. The two abilities in each (normal and tool belt) need to compete with 6 from a kit and often fall short.

Warrior

• Cleansing Ire is too good. Warriors can laugh off all but the heaviest condition spam and its power, in addition to Adrenal Health makes it mandatory and limits builds.
• Fast Hands seems mandatory for warriors in PvP. For offensive rolls, warriors need the mobility and access to different roles of different weapon sets more readily than other professions. This limits build variety.
• I would expect warriors to be weak to kiting, but Dogged March and Cleansing Ire nullify that. In WvW, food that reduces condition duration makes them impossible to soft CC.
• Heals besides Healing Signet feel too weak or you have to work too much to get a decent benefit from them. Healing Surge max heal isn’t bad, but it punishes you for using the class mechanic. Defiant Stance tends to hit either the low or high extreme and never in the middle.

Rangerdeity.5847:

while this is for the most part correct these changes would give these classes that fail during skirmishes in the open field a huge advantage when the fight comes to tower/keep walls because those fights rage on the same spot for 10 minutes and range is your best friend in those fights. This gives skirmish fights to GWEN and Standoffs to TREM so that all 8 classes have something usefull to bring to WvW

So basically, they’re still useless? Elementalists and Necros already have the wall suppression covered and they work in open field too. Wall sieges are a very small part. A lot of the fighting is defending offensive siege or trying to push into a keep against another force.

Ranged in WvW groups is rarely at max range. They’re within 600 range of their frontline so they can get boons. Increasing range on anything and improving things that deploy and are static won’t help.

Condi engineer is extremely powerful in 1v1 except for a few matchups where the opponent can transfer back the conditions or stop the engi from kiting. But in group play, it’s too easy to focus an engineer down unless the engineer plays very well.

Here’s the real explanation of why GWEN is used and why other professions aren’t as common.

Guardians bring group boons and group condition removal. The most important boons are Stability, Protection, Might, and Swiftness. Stability renders most of that warrior and guardian CC useless. No other profession can bring as much group Stability. That’s why guardians will always have a major role in WvW groups.

Warriors don’t really do much anymore. They were really popular with hammer trains, but once players started running more stability and damage shifted to backline, their usefullness greatly decreased. Also, in a WvW group, warriors rarely need Cleansing Ire. The condi cleanse is coming from guardians, elementalists, and warrior warhorn as well as the -40% condition duration food.

Elementalists are almost always staff. You sometimes see d/d for boons with the frontline. Elementalists provide water fields, lots of utility through CC, boons, and condition cleanse, and area damage. Most run a balance between offense and defense and rely on cantrip utility skills to live.

Necromancers have become a huge damage source. In WvW groups, they’re running power because condition damage is near useless due to all the condition removal. Necros can project heavy damage at range and can pile on AoE damage bursts as well. They can also spec and gear for some utility to help the frontline.

And the others?

A thief or two are found 10-30 player groups. They pick off enemy necromancers and elementalists and anyone that’s out of place. But they have to know when to stop chasing. Most thief players just keep attacking until their target dies or they die and then complain about their profession being weak.

WvW groups have a token mesmer for portal, veil, and sometimes null field. The problem with mesmers is that they’re heavily reliant on clones or phantasms, and both of those are ripped apart by all the cleave that goes out.

Engineers just can’t compete with others. They’re a little like warriors and a little like necromancers or elementalists in their role. They have CC like the warrior, but a lot of it is negated by stability. But their self-survival isn’t as good. They have good medium ranged damage like necromancer or elmentalist, but their AoE damage isn’t as good. They have water fields with Healing Turret like an elementalist, but the elmentalist also provides boons. And Engineer a bit more vulnerable to thieves than elementalists and necromancers. Healing bomb engineers don’t have the boon output of a guardian.

Ranger just doesn’t work well in large groups. The pet has the same problem as mesmer illusions where it dies too easily and takes away utility and damage. Ranger melee is focused more on small fights and jousting, not just constant attacking. Longbow just isn’t as good for damage as elementalists or necros. And rangers have little group utility that can survive the cleave damage in a large group.

Would anyone disagree with changing the +40% and -40% condition foods to only affect baseline damaging conditions (bleeding, burning, confusion, poison, torment)?

That at least address the soft CC issue that makes warriors near immune to soft CC and makes condition damage builds have very strong soft CC. And it doesn’t affect PvE.

I’m not too concerned about Healing Turret. It has high theoretical HP/second, but it also requires you to devote some time and concentration to drop it, overcharge it, pick it up, and repeat in 15 seconds to get that high HP/second. It takes a lot of practice to achieve that high HP/second while maintaining pressure.

Shelter is fine, as it adds some skill-based play. The tradeoff is that the heal amount is relatively low. If the guardian doesn’t block a significant amount of damage, then it’s much worse than Signet of Restoration.

One other key aspect is the importance of Cleric amulet compared to Soldier. Combined with Selfless Daring, Vigor, and Energy Sigils, Cleric’s produces quite a bit of group healing. It also boosts regeneration, virtue of resolve, and other assorting healing sources. Remember that you can weapon swap to get a free dodge, and that’s a large part of your survival.

Tough call. Pack gives occasional group Fury and about 6% crit chance from precision. Flame Legion gives you a 7% damage bonus. At higher base crit chance, the raw damage increase is worth a lot more. Group Fury is tough to weigh. If you’re in a melee group with lower Fury uptime, it’s good. If you have more ranged or the group has high Fury uptime, it’s mostly a wash.

If you run Purging Flames, you can have decent burning uptime from assorted projectile and whirl finishers. But it still won’t reach close to 100%.

You could also consider Rune of the Ogre, which has a flat 4% bonus and some extra Ferocity.

I would probably go with Pack or Ogre. Those are more universally useful.

If you’re running with a somewhat competent WvW group, then I would recommend some Celestial with maybe a little Soldier. Maybe some Knight depending on the spec. The rest use Berserker or Zealot.

Celestial gives you more total stats, but it cuts into your maximum power. Power will yield the most damage gains per stat point until it’s really high, so you don’t want to go overboard with Celestial. Soldier increases your defenses quickly, but your damage suffers a bit.

I would recommend about 2900 armor (make sure to count Strength in Numbers if you have that trait, since it’s only active during combat) and 17,000HP. If you’re not very good with avoiding damage, you can go a bit higher on HP.

I would say around 500 healing power if you run with a group because Selfless Daring (heal on dodge) scales very well. Rest goes into power and precision with a little ferocity.

Condition and Boon removal use a last-in first-out (LIFO) order. The last one applies is the first one removed, etc. This is often called a stack where you add and remove only from one side.

Where this gets confusing is duration vs. intensity stacking. When a new intensity stacking application is added, the boon goes to the top of the stack. When duration is added, it maintains its position. This is why you consistently see bleeds removed by condition removal and why burning and immobilize are a pain to remove at times. It’s also why Might is usually the first boon stripped.

I’d like to do a little more testing, but this appears to be the rule.

Medi guard has a low barrier to entry, but also a low skill cap. Anyone who is familiar with how a medi guard works can avoid most of the burst with a single dodge or avoidance cooldown and then kiting the guardian. So it works well in hot join and maybe solo queue, but in tournaments, many players just avoid the damage spike. Because that spike is a fairly long cooldown and medi guard has little else going for it, it then becomes useless.

If you do that, then make stances mutually exclusive like in GW1. If you activate a new stance, it cancels the current one.

There definitely should be a fractal track. However, it can’t reward everything that can drop in fractals.

Suggested Fractals PvP Track Item List
Fractal Relic currency: yes
Pristine Fractal Relic (used for normal rings): yes in limited number
+1 Agony Resist Infusion: yes
Vial of Condensed Mist Essence: yes
Glob of Coagulated Mist Essence: maybe
Shard of Crystalized Mist Essence: no (can be crafted from the previous two)
Chance at Ascended Ring: maybe
Chance at Infused Ring: no
Fractal Weapon Skin: no
Chance at Ascended Armor or Weapon Box: yes (just like champion loot has a small chance)

Basically, make the track reward things from 1 to 19 fractals, but not anything from higher fractals. If you want extra rewards or really good stuff, you have to actually do the dungeon.

The only problem I have with warrior is Hambow with soldier amulet. The damage and CC is strong with a ton of condition removal and CC immunity.

I think the problem with that build, and hammer builds in general, is the amount of adrenaline they generate from Cleansing Ire, allowing them to CC more, regen more health, and cleanse more often.

Guardians are not broken. They’re powerful, but not overpowered.

Before the rise of the condi meta last summer, alternatives to team bunker guardians were starting to appear. With more changes, you’ll probably see that develop again. What makes guardian so beneficial for team fights is all the support they bring through healing, might stacks, protection, and the all important team condition cleanse and team stability. Other builds can actually bunker better, but they don’t have the team support.

Support guardians could use a small trim, but you have to very careful about doing it and not completely breaking the profession.

“Contention” not “Contestation”. It’s driving me crazy. Otherwise, games have been good and seeing Temple of the Silent Storm in the rotation is a nice change. Surprised there aren’t more engineers though.

dancingmonkey.4902:

Of course you also seem to think we are all the blind meta following band wagoners. That may work for you, but some of us find other builds we enjoy or that work more for our group/team composition. Other wise, I am sure the thread thanks you for the meta lesson.

It’s the “meta” because it’s the most powerful and most effective. Even if you choose not to adhere to it, you can’t ignore it when you look at the power of traits, skills, etc.

Change it so that it doesn’t route to custom arenas, only the ANet ones. I don’t use it because I don’t want to play deathmatch in Courtyard and that’s where I get sent.

Necro
All that stuff is good enough. Just remove the fear proc on Nightmare runes altogether. Change it to something else that’s not a CC. Otherwise, a good fear chain from a necro is smart play on their part. They held skills and waited for the right time to use them. Remove Nightmare runes giving them a free initial CC and they’ll have to play a lot more defensive, making the fear chain harder to pull off.

Elementalist
I haven’t run into any that have caused trouble.

Warrior
Not sure if healing signet needs nerfed or other warrior heals need a buff. Four points the Defense trait line for Cleansing Ire needs to be less mandatory. Removing the adrenaline gain when hit from Cleansing Ire would dramatically reduce Hambow’s condition removal ability and cut out some healing from Adrenal Health.

Engineer
Incendiary Powder needs a big nerf. Even without Balthazar runes, it’s a huge chunk of damage that can’t be avoided at all and requires no extra work on the part of the engineer.

Incendiary Ammo is okay. Yes, it’s a lot of burning. However, it’s also on a long cooldown and all at once, making a cleanse more effective against it, and if not used properly, can be entirely wasted. It also requires use of Flamethrower, which is currently not a very condition damage friendly weapon.

@ dancingmonkey.4902

Okay, I’ll try to explain one last time. In sPvP, standard condi engi build is 6/2/0/4/2 with some variants not taking the 2 points of the Firearms line. Rabid amulet is used with Balthazar runes (sometimes Nightmare). That gives them 1197 condition damage and +75% burning duration. In total, each IP proc last 7 seconds, for a total of 4390 damage. Prior to the patch, it was only 5 or 6 seconds in sPvP. That build also has 39% crit chance and with a Hidden Flask proc, it goes up to 59%.

Your damage comparison has many fallacies, in part ignoring ranged vs. melee as well as the use of special attacks, armor, etc. If the warrior is meleeing the engineer, the engineer will use bombs, which have far more damage. Grenades can be used to kite while applying more condition damage and there’s pistol #2 and #3.

And engineers won’t use full dire stats in WvW, but they’ll substitute a good chunk of rabid for dire. The use of +40% condition duration food makes bleeds, poison, and confusion last longer, not just burning, and allows them to use Perplexity runes, which apply even more confusion. Not to mention higher overall stat numbers.

Conquest isn’t without its flaws, but they’re more about player sentiment than game balance. Here’s the big ones:
1. Some players want to “be a hero” and fight the other players. Having to guard nodes, especially side nodes, runs counter to that. The three node conquest system with secondary objectives minimizes that “inactive” time. Trying to consider the map as a whole and play the map rather than players runs counter to that idea well. However, players often forget that in high-level arena play, there is often a “staring contest” period while one side waits for the other to make a move and terrain matters for LoS defense.
2. Defensive play (bunkers) seem insurmountable. The “bad thief” mentality of expecting to burst anything down quickly by continually attacking it becomes frustrated when they can’t do that. However, bunker play can be countered most of the time by forcing a de-cap or attacking an alternate point. Secondary objectives are also aimed at lessening their impact.
3. Conquest doesn’t lend itself to easy presentation to an audience, or at least no one has figured out a good way to present it. There are often multiple fights going on simultaneously as well as the bigger picture of map strategy. It’s difficult to convey all that in a fast-paced game.

@dancingmonkey.4902

Okay, here’s a simple example for you. Warrior uses Eviscerate. You dodge, avoiding thousands of damage. Eviscerate goes on at least a 7 second cooldown. No other attack with an axe will do that much damage in such a short time, so you can breathe easy for a bit.

Engineer uses bomb kit #2 and #3. You dodge them, avoiding a good chunk of burning and confusion. Engineer auto-attacks with pistol. You now have 7 seconds of burning from Incendiary Powder (4200+ damage if you don’t remove it) and bleeding. There is no reliable way to avoid the heavy damage condition. Unless you have multiple condition cleanse that gets used immediately, the burning gets buried in a stack of conditions. In a team battle, without hovering over the UI timer, how can you tell that you just had 7s of powerful burning added to you?

Every good condition engineer uses Incendiary Powder. It’s just too good.

Attack = Power + Average_Weapon_Damage

However, that was misleading, as every attack in game has a hidden power coefficient. So the Attack stat was never actually used and varied slightly by weapon type.

Give it a few weeks and you’ll get used to looking at Power values instead.

Why conquest is so good and where many other formats fall short is that conquest doesn’t require you to win a specific fight. There’s a strategic level of setting up fights at multiple locations to give your team an advantage. You aren’t forced to engage in a full team vs team battle and aren’t required to consistently win it, as long as you can win elsewhere. The secondary mechanics are intended to aid in that.

Martyr (hold an item for points, which deals increasing damage to you over time) and Capture the Flag both quickly devolve into boring play. Push the Flag is essentially the same as Capture the Flag. There will be a specialized build, often with one best profession, that carries the item. They’ll have maybe one person to support them. In other games, it’s a healer, but in GW2, it would be a support role with CC and CC removal. The rest is damage trying to kill the object holder. The spirit watch orb-carrying warrior build archetype is an example of the problem these modes cause.

Assault style maps (one attacking team, one defending team with a series of chained objectives) are always interesting and fun, but hard to balance universally while remaining interesting. Each map will favor specialized builds and compositions. And they often require two rounds where attacker/defender swaps.

Anything with a reinforcement/respawn counter is problematic in an MMORPG. Unlike most FPS games where everyone is the same or mostly the same, some classes in MMOs have a higher mortality rate than others. They may be squishier for a reason, or just not have ways to run away. It hurts “fight until you win or die” classes.

Terrahero.9358:

Supposedly everyone is playing a condition builds, and they are all running this “overpowered” 40% duration food. Then why is it so much cheaper? Its not like it isnt a pain to make rare veggie pizza, and it contains fairly rare ingredients.

Rare Veggie Pizza is less expensive because of Koi Cakes, which are much cheaper and do the same thing.

The problem isn’t the idea of condition damage, but how its current implementation lacks counter-play and requires less of a trade-off in stats, as well as how it scales.

With power damage builds, if you miss an attack, it goes on cooldown and a good chunk of damage wasn’t dealt. For the most part, there’s little forgiveness. And in most situations, CC and damage are balanced against each other in that a CC attack or a build heavy in CC will give up damage or requires good execution of an attack chain of CC and damage.

Condition damage engineers get a good chunk of their damage from Incendiary Powder. The problem with this trait is that no matter what an opponent dodges, it only delays its application. It essentially can’t be avoided unless you can avoid every attack. Further, condition damage engineers have so many different types of conditions and so many attacks that can be spammed, it’s relatively easy for them to apply many conditions at once, making it harder to counter all the damage.

With the change to Dhuumfire, Necromancer doesn’t the same issue as Incendiary Powder. Condition damage necros become problematic because of CC chains and many small and hard to avoid attacks which add up.

In comparison, a condition damage warrior (with the new Impale) has predictable or avoidable condition application. You can stay out of the Combustive Shot area to reduce burning application, and if you tactically avoid Impale, you suffer a lot less damage.

Condition Duration only adds to the problem. When you look at the condition damage additions as a whole, it’s increasing condition damage by that percentage. In sPvP, that’s 40% or more for all conditions. With WvW foods, it goes up to 70-80%. You don’t see that kind of damage scaling from power users in such a concentrated form. And condition duration also affects CC conditions (immobilize, cripple, chill, fear), giving condition users stronger CC at the same time as stronger damage.

With the damage sources concentrated so much in condition duration (which usually takes the place of procs or boon duration on runes, not raw stats), it allows condition damage builds to focus a larger portion of stats on defense compared to power users.

So as a whole, the popular condition damage builds, namely condi engi and necro, have great damage scaling, better defensive stats, less penalty for poor skill usage, and improved CC. At the highest levels of play, any poor usage of skills matters, but for the general player base, few people have excellent skill usage, so the degree of the penalty for poor usage matters.

If I were to nerf condition damage, I would reduce the power of no-penalty procs, including those on runes/sigils, and reduce the amount of increases to all condition duration bonuses in favor of adding duration bonuses to specific conditions. Condition damage weapons would then need to scale better with power.

scerevisiae.1972:

Judging by the number and size of the threads that have been posted about the downsides (pun!) of downed state/rallying, I would say it’s in the top 3 of most disliked combat mechanics in this game. I personally know (pvp/competitive) friends who won’t touch this game because of it, and others who moved on because of it. I’ve been playing since beta, and I still hate it.

I’d even go so far to suggest it’s one of the core reasons why GW2 PVP has unequivocally bombed.

Forums are a haven for people who are unhappy. When people are happy, they generally don’t visit the forums or post as much.

And GW2 PvP definitely did not suffer because of the downed state mechanic. If you understand its purpose, it actually adds to gameplay depth.

The Conquest portion of it means almost nothing because playing a man down initially is almost impossible to overcome in a teamfight. The only time it would come into play is when you have a potential tie scenario. But if you break off the big fight first for nodes, your team starts wiping.

I don’t see the allure of team deathmatch or any variation of it (respawns or not), other than it’s simplistic. But that also makes it shallow and boring. TDM leads to build or group comp often determining the winner, with the battles revolving around the damage dealers constantly chasing around a player to force them to play defensive. To prevent that, conquest with respawns allows grouping and splitting to overcome that group comp disadvantage in a large team fight.

Adjust the number of people that rally off a stomp and some small tweaks to individual professions’ down state skills and it’s fine.

There are a million topics about this. It’s been explained why it’s a good thing. Search for them.

Jelzouki.4128:

I’m pretty sure power builds are better now; not worse.

They’re worse in large part because of the amulet change.

Rune of the Pirate? Is the parrot thing more than a joke?

Wouldn’t Rune of the Pack be a better choice (group fury, swiftness, 1x might for 10 seconds on 20sec ICD) with 6pc as 125 precision?

I wouldn’t mind a Fractals of the Mist track that rewards tokens and fractals of the mist crafting materials with a final box as a choice of backpiece.

Even if Rune of Strength’s Boon duration bonus was reduced, people would still use it and it would still be powerful. Common users of Rune of Strength will have had at least one might stack up at all times even without the boon duration bonus. That gives them the 7% damage bonus with 100% uptime. And that constant bonus is the true problem.

Sigil of Battle was always powerful, but because it used to shared a cooldown with other sigils, it was overshadowed by slightly better choices – fire and energy being big ones. Without the shared cooldown, it’s become a great second sigil choice.

D/D elementalist provides decent group support and has okay damage and survivability. It’s still a bit too early to tell if they’ll see play at high levels. But they’re clearly a support role, not a damage role.

I’ve yet to see a meditation DPS guardian be effective in a tPvP match. Their damage is too easy to avoid, they lack CC so it’s easy to get away, they provide little or no group support, they lack defenses and melt in a team fight, and they have no escape mechanism or mobility outside of fights.

Support-DPS hybrids with shouts have the same damage and CC issues of meditation guardian, but they at least provide group support. However, with the currently available stat combinations, either their damage is laughable and you may as well go bunker, or they still die easily.

a t s e.9614:

Stop saying that dungeon armor is good, most of people already got them all. Why they can’t give currency instead of useless stuff.

Are you just here to whine? I doubt “most people” have every dungeon armor and weapon unlocked. In fact, I doubt many people have more than one dungeon set unlocked. If you do the story mode, it unlocks the dungeon track to do any time, repeatable.

I must have opened over a thousand myster coffers + match reward chests and I was still missing the Orrian Hammer and Heavy Orrian Boots. So there’s still people that PvP’ed a lot and don’t have a full set.

And even if you have the full set, you can use the exotic item stats for an alt or just salvage it.

The dungeon reward tracks seem fine.

Based on what I’ve completed so far and read about the Arah dungeon track, here are the rewards (some extrapolation):
- 1 armor piece selection (180 to 330 dungeon tokens each)
- 3 weapon selections (290 to 390 dungeon tokens each)
- 240 dungeon tokens
- 4 tomes of knowledge
- 4 transmute charges
- 4 champion loot boxes
- 8 veteran loot boxes (masterwork and rare mostly)
- 20 basic loot boxes (basic, fine, masterwork)

20 tPvP wins is enough to finish a dungeon track. If you have around a 50% win rate, I believe that’s about 30 games. Let’s say a game lasts10-15 minutes each. A dungeon path with an average group takes 10-15 minutes; the same amount of time. Let’s ignore PvE token diminishing returns. 30 runs is 1800 tokens. In PvP, you’ve earned on average around 1400 tokens (buying 2h weapons and chest piece would put you at 1740 tokens). That’s not too far off and totally ignores diminishing returns for repeating the same dungeon path. PvP players would have also received at least one large rank-up chest and all the coin from win/loss rewards. And those 4 transmute charges are worth about 10g.

I haven’t done the Balthazar track or the Kryta track. But I think the Balthazar backpiece is supposed to be equivalent to Light of Dwayna or Shadow Grenth, both of which cost easily over 250g and other assorted materials to craft in addition to 500 crafting. So the intermediate rewards are less.