Guild Wars 2

Doggie.3184:

I can’t even finish a track cuz progression completely froze. :o dunno if I’m doing something wrong or if it broke~

You can only do 2 major steps in all tracks per day in hot join. Solo queue and team queue is not capped.

This thread

It’s almost impossible to make a power build that can deal acceptable damage and doesn’t blow up when targeted.

Hambow warriors are managing to do enough damage with a Soldier’s amulet and stacked damage increases (Mericless Hammer, Destruction of the Empowered, 10% Toughness -> Power). Celestial d/d ele with Sigil of Battle and Strength runes are also doing okay with all their might and fury. But that’s about it.

Instead of a single amulet selection, allow us to select an amulet (50% of current stats) and two rings (25% of current stats each). Keep the existing combos. That’s no more comlicated than having to realize there’s now a “PvP Build” button where you set your stats, runes, and sigils and that you need to equip PvE weapons to get the weapon type.

Until that can be coded and tested, make two new amulets: One that’s half Berserker and half Knight and another that’s half Berserker and half Celestial.

Custom arenas can increase respawn time up to 2 minutes. Do that or use the honor system for not respawning (turn off force respawn) and you’ll see that it’s still a bad format.

redslion.9675:

The fact is that Diversity isn’t granted by the game mechanics, but is forced by devs.

Let’s use WoW as an example: in theory, it had a high build diversity pre WotLK thanks to 71 talent points. In thruth, balance FORCED you into investing heavily in one out of 5 trees, thus narrowing down the builds to 3, with very few variatons, for build defining talents were deep in the tree. Take paladins as an example: Before Wrath of the Lich King, you could build paladin as a tank, a healer or a melee dps. But there was also a very odd burst focused hybrid (shockadin) whe acted more like a caster/healer pvp hybrid. Blizzard decided they didn’t want such a build in the game and made sure the build could not be achieved.

Morale of the story: as a dev, you have to predict which build types can be achieved, and then decide which should be effective and which shouldn’t.

If the devs know what they’re doing, it’s in the game mechanics.

Balance in WoW, especially paladins, was always a joke. Shockadin died not because they didn’t like it but because they didn’t know how to balance any hybrid at all and decided on modal “choose your role” hybrids instead of true hybrids.

As a moral of that story, what happened was that offense and defense from gear stats started outpacing base offense and defense. The classes that needed more types of stats to do well started failing miserably. The ones that needed only a few continued to prosper.

Locuz.2651:

The ladder isnt broken. Its based on MMR and its works….with 2 exceptions.

- Matchmaking that prefers short q times over good matchmaking. So as top 100 player youll be teamed with or matched against a lot of ppl who have never been top 1000 even.
- New players skyrocketing to the absolute top of the ladder (and therefor obtaining top MMR) during their first games. And its not just one example, there are hundreds.

Your two exceptions are key to a proper leaderboard. Hence why it’s “broken”. Perhaps “poorly tuned” would be a better way to say it.

I would also add that MMR change for wins and losses is too great and that initial decay is too steep (when it actually kicks in). Dropping hundreds of ranks for not playing for a day is a bit silly.

Are we talking diversity as to what kinda works, or diversity in the competitive environment? If you’re talking the latter, then MMORPGs and MOBAs both lack it.

WoW has very little diversity. The only diversity you see is because specializations of some classes are basically new classes.

MOBAs have lots of characters, each with their own style, but there are only 10-15 at any time that are worth playing competitively.

GW2’s build diversity is hampered by poor balanced and locked stat pairings. They try to fix it by making new or fully changed and completely over-the-top traits and runes that they then scale back to uselessness before they even launch or in the next round of changes when it makes a build too powerful.

Milferd.3780, I think you’re a part of a tiny minority that actually enjoyed underwater PvP.

Ostricheggs.3742:

So you’re suggesting nerfing IP to compensate for balthazar runes…

Incendiary Powder was always a problem. It should have been nerfed months ago, not just moved up a tier. Balthazar runes just make IP’s strength abundantly clear. What you’re asking with a gutting of the Balthazar rune set is for a return to the status quo, which wasn’t that much better.

Though I will agree that rune sets are part of the problem with balancing conditions. But it’s a small part of the bigger picture. Dramatically extending condition durations and giving access to new damaging condition types (via traits, runes, etc) is what takes a condition build from mediocre to overpowered very quickly. And these additions often have little counter-play.

And yes, I realize that dramatically reducing the effectiveness of IP would break condi engi builds. But with that trait in place, it’s impossible to buff many other traits and abilities without making the build too good. Instead of keeping so much power in a single trait, spread it around a little, or give it a drawback or choice vs. another aspect like survival.

Cogbyrn.7283:

My biggest problem with conditions is their presence all over runes/sigils with regard to proccing/applying conditions that you otherwise can’t with skills. Proccing AoE torment on crit, bleed on crit, confusion on being hit, confusion on interrupt. I don’t think the overall condition system is bad, really. I just think the excessive availability of additional conditions via sigils/runes is what is helping contribute even more to the issue.

Exactly. But don’t tell that to the condi spammers; they’ll vehemently deny it and say they need all that to compete with power.

I’d gladly pay 100g if I could take 50% of one amulet and 50% of another.

The gold cost is supposed to gate new people from “advanced” features and make them less prone to bad builds. But the new amulet are both terrible when used at full stats.

I’m really frustrated as a guardian too. Or as any power damage build for that matter. I can’t play offensive support because I’m either way too squishy or too tanky with not enough damage due to the amulet limitations.

Power necro is fun in a team fight against mediocre players, but any good team will train you down and then you can’t do much.

I played condi engi as an alt for a while back when the game was new, but it got boring pretty fast. It was too easy to do good enough, but you had to play it religiously to know what abilities to use against which combinations of opponents in which sequence. With the latest patch, it’s even easier to be good enough.

Keyce.8137:

But I was wondering. What if we could assign our traits into any level slot (Adept, Master, Grandmaster), so long as it stayed within the same line it was found in? Would that open up more build diversity, or would it make some classes completely overpowered?

It was like this in the first beta weekend. There was next to no build diversity because all anyone did was pick the 7 most powerful major traits in your profession.

Rejerh.1784:

Isn’t it cause the overall stats of the characters are down??
Is it me or the amulets cannot have extra buffs like they used to?

Character stat totals didn’t change. The jewel was added into the amulet totals. You just can’t mix and match anymore.

Caedmon.6798:

The crit nerf was needed,the dmg some classes could do was just too much at times,espec on thieves.Fights last a bit longer now,im really liking it eventhough ive been hit with the nerf bat aswell,no complaints here at all since you can pretty much still compensate for the lost dmg.

Crit damage only really changed for PvE/WvW. In PvP, you should have about the same amount unless you were using Divinity runes.

@OP can you try again? That pet bug may have been affecting the training dummies.

Is this part of the pet scaling bug that was supposed to be fixed in the latest patch?

The fact that the previous “non-PvP” dailies now work in sPvP was not communicated well.

As others have point out, the first new daily was doable solely in sPvP. Just monitor the set of possible dailies each day and let ANet know if there’s some combo that you can’t do in sPvP.

It’s mostly like that lots of people trying it out tPvP again who are probably at the base MMR.

The trait line will now give 50 ferocity per point, with a maximum of 300 ferocity. That equates to 20% crit damage.

The berserker amulet now has 447 ferocity, which is 30% crit damage. If you had a berserker amulet and jewel pre-patch, you only got 20% crit damage from that.

If you had runes with critical damage as a sole set bonus, such as Scholar, they now have ferocity and slightly lower crit damage. If you had Divinity, you lost a lot of critical damage.

So your crit damage in sPvP should have stayed about the same or possibly even gone up slightly unless you were using a lot of Divinity runes.

The root of the problem is that the unlock costs seem to be based on mostly PvE players that have a built up a lot of gold and skill points over many months. So the costs to unlock are high to try and reduce this stockpile. But that inadvertently punishes people who don’t PvE often and don’t have that stockpile of gold and skill points.

Even in WvW, I don’t earn 20 skillpoints in a few hours of play like I can in PvE doing map completion or PvP through ranks and tracks.

But the problem isn’t your main character – it’s alts where you’ve spent most of your skill points to unlock other skills or didn’t PvE with them much and have no desire to PvE with that alt.

Seabreeze.8437:

Yeah. They’re still there. I know. But there’s NO WAY to obtain sets like the Tribal armor. That’s where the problem lies.

I’m not sure yet. I thought they might be in the region unlock tracks, but that doesn’t appear to be the case. It’s just champion bags, crafting materials, and a weapon unlock (not an armor one). Though maybe they drop in champion bags now?

Some of the Commando armor was available through personal story, but not all of it. Same with Stalwart.

Like others have noted, a lot of the sets got renamed. They’re still there.

ANet’s original logic behind 8v8 hot join went like this: 5v5 hot join didn’t work well because hot join was so volatile with people leaving/joining. So they wanted slightly larger teams. ANet didn’t think players would do a good job of distributing themselves around the map in 6v6 or 7v7, so they went with 8v8.

However, 8v8 hot join was too overcrowded. It didn’t teach anyone how to play conquest well. It also made it harder for players to learn; they would win or lose based on multiple allies showing up, not on the the strength or weakness of their skill or build. In comparison, 5v5 has a slower enough pace that you have some time to think and analyze what happened and you’re less likely to be carried by your team in fights.

Since launch, ANet also added observer slots, so you can now overflow rooms by a few people, making rooms less prone to 4v5 from volatility.

If there was a way to unlock skills through doing PvP tutorials so that you didn’t overwhelm totally new people, it would be okay. But the current system where you have to grind them out in PvP to use them in PvP is bad.

Hopefully this is only a partial implementation and they’ll use those unlock tracks to unlock skills/traits in the future.

I usually did both, so I don’t really mind. Though I do see how it can be frustrating for people who only do PvP.

Originally they kept the bank and TP out of the mists so that you didn’t jump to it all the time from the world. But ever since they made crafting stations work as banks, most servers can just hop to their home world in WvW and use the bank. So that original restriction doesn’t hold merit any longer.

With the way leaderboards currently work, half the population of sPvPers would have this title. During one of the free trial weekends, someone kept making accounts with variations of “Fix the leaderboards ANET” and got at least 5 into the top 20. The leaderboard mechanics haven’t change since as far as I’m aware.

The Celestial change is a nerf compared to its pre-patch version, but compared to post-patch berserker, the damage difference is smaller.

It’s the daily captures achievement in addition to bonus rank points from most nodes capped.

dancingmonkey.4902:

No, you were not unclear, you were simply factually incorrect. As condition duration adds 100% damage from any condition damage tic, it is a certain to suggest it is not as important if not certainly more important for damage then condition damage stat.

Condition duration isn’t a stat on gear like power or condition damage. You can’t really compare in that sense. That’s what I was referring to.

The condition duration slots on runes are taking the place of things like boon duration or other special abilities, not raw stats. The major form of condition duration is from traits, which has to be addressed on a case-by-case basis because it’s in different lines on different professions and may or may not be extremely useful. So yes, it’s extremely important, but it’s also rolled into a few small niches; you don’t have to spend 500+ stat points on it and the returns for it are pretty big when you can stack enough of it.

By making it lower duration but more often, it gets around the problem of it being a very powerful proc that you only need to land once in ten seconds. By spreading the damage, it means that the damage can be avoided in increments and that you don’t get a lot of bonus damage when you aren’t attacking your target.

Keep in mind, it’s a suggestion. Someone may have a better idea.

Tim.6450:

[snip]

Your standard engineer grenade/bomb build and Dhuumfire terrormancer builds are the biggest offenders. Both have traits that proc bleeding and burning from other attacks. Both have access to poison, burning, and bleeding. Engineer also has confusion baseline. Necromancer has torment baseline and Fear also does damage. In WvW, engineer can get confusion and torment from runes and sigils. Necromancer can’t get good access to confusion yet, but will after the April 15 patch when Fear is considered an interrupt for Perplexity runes.

If you don’t think condition damage deals a lot of damage in a short period, then watch an engineer CC you then load up grenades and bombs on top of you. That gets burning, confusion, bleeding, and poison at least. Counting the CC, that can be done in 4 attacks. Let’s say 5 for the glue bomb. If you try to do anything to stop them, you’re taking over 1000 damage per second. Most of that lasts for well over 5 seconds.

You say that you need precision to power these procs, but that’s not really true. Because many of those traits and sigils have internal cooldowns, a relatively low crit chance is enough to get high uptime from them. If precision was so important, then you wouldn’t see these builds running heavy Dire stats in WvW.

Skills that lower direct damage examples: Signet of Judgment, Stabilized Armor (when stunned). I’m sure I could find more if I spent longer looking.

dancingmonkey.4902:

Exedore, Your total analysis is factually inaccurate. A single player will not stack more condition damage then a direct damage user will do. They will do equivalent damage. Only the direct damage user will get their damage applied instantly.

I must not have been clear. I meant that for the three stats a direct damage user needs, a condition damage user needs one. That means more stat points for a condition damage user can be allocated to defensive stats while maintaining similar damage.

dancingmonkey.4902:

The problem is that there is no problem with conditions and some of you keep claiming there is a problem, while offering absolutely no argument …..

Here’s the problem: when you can stack multiple types of conditions with high condition damage, the damage per tick becomes overwhelming. Instead of being attrition-based or supplementary, condition damage is doing more than power-based damage in short time periods. Further, condition damage is driven by one stat, compared to three for power damage. Power damage is further affected by toughness, the protection boon, and other direct damage reduction skills and traits. All combined, certain builds are doing more damage with conditions while spending a lot of their remaining stat budget on defensive stats. You have someone doing significant damage that is difficult to avoid and hard to kill.

Acandis.3250:

What LIFO rules? condi cleanse doesn’t work like that. never has, [probably] never will.

From my experience, the condition(s) removed are the ones that most recently had a stack applied. That’s why bleeding is removed so reliably. It doesn’t seem to work properly with immobilize some of the time.

I’ll grab sometime to test it later today.

No.

This does nothing to fix condition play and counter play. The problem with condition damage is traits, runes, and sigils giving access to multiple types of conditions that all do damage concurrently. In WvW, condition duration food makes it worse.

The proper solution is to strictly control what conditions a build has access to and the durations of each.

Even as a master trait, Incendiary Powder is too powerful.

Keep trying to rationalize its power, but the fact is that it’s too good. It’s effectively 5 seconds of burning every 10 seconds. In a condition damage build, that’s over 550 damage per second for a total of over 2750 damage. Engineers do have other access to burning, but in current engineer builds, burning comes predominately from bomb kit #2 and incendiary powder. Any significant application of burning at range is coming from Incendiary Powder. Compare that to a typical physical damage master level trait, which adds 10% damage. To add the same bonus damage that Incendiary Powder is adding, they would have to be doing 27,500 damage in 10 seconds after armor. That’s not going to happen in a realistic scenario. Even half of that is hard to achieve when you consider your opponent is avoiding the big attacks.

So how do you balance it without destroying it. Making it a grandmaster trait is not a good solution. It needs to be an adept or master level trait, but weaker. I would suggest that it does 1 second of burning every n attacks/hits. Keep in mind that many abilities attack multiple times or count each target they hit as an attack. I would pick n to be about 10. The end result is that the ability is weaker against a single target, but still strong in a group scenario, though it spreads the damage. And by knowing multiple hit attacks are more likely to stack it, it now has some counter-play.

Immobilize stacking is fine in concept.

First, fix the bug with removing immobilize sometimes not following the LIFO rules. Possibly make it last to apply for abilities that apply multiple conditions.

Then look at skills that apply immobilize and balance the duration and cooldown with how easy it is to avoid: how long or obvious is the telegraph, are youable to move out of projectile patch, etc. In WvW, address +condi duration food.

You don’t even need un-ranked queues for solo queue. Just get rid of all rewards from hot join and everyone will shift to solo queue and the match-making system should sort out skill level.

Hot join will still be around for custom arenas and testing.

@OP

Your idea is bad and based on false premise. The difference between Berserker and non-Berserker gear is far less than what you claim it is. For example, Berserker (with the ferocity change) is only about a 50% increase in damage over Soldier.

Your idea also wouldn’t fix any problems in the game. In PvE, the reason players use full berserker is because there is little need for toughness or vitality. Most damage can be avoided with dodges, blinds, blocks, evades, CC’ing enemies, and just killing them quickly. NPCs need to have quicker moderate damage attacks in addition to telegraphed high damage attacks. They also need to have abilities which make them harder to kill quickly like stability and protection for a few seconds, or even just dodging attacks or moving out of damage.

In PvP, bunkers aren’t anywhere near invincible. They just take a while to kill, which means their teammates can show up and help them before they die. Guardian is so prevalent because of all the group support it provides in addition to being a bunker. All good players, not just bunkers, stay alive because they use defensive cooldowns properly and position themselves properly to avoid damage when possible.

Soinetwa.5193:

doesnt the reward trakcs go faster with solo and team tournaments as well?!?

The rewards for solo and team queue are higher. However, you spend time sitting in queue for those, they’re often longer games than hot join, and winning in solo queue is the same reward as a loss in team queue and more than a loss in solo queue. So if you stack hot join teams in an 8v8, you can get far more rank points per hour than solo queue.

They should just turn off all rewards for hot join after a certain rank.

Guardian is great for a team, but does it make PvP boring and stale? And is it required? I’d say “no” to both.

You don’t need a guardian on a PvP team. A strong player in a bunker role of another professions does better than a mediocre bunker guardian. And before things fell apart last summer with the condi meta, guardian-less teams were doing well in tournaments because they didn’t tie down a player to a specific point.

If you wanted to weaken guardian support, increasing the cooldown on shouts slightly would do a lot.

I was excited for the April 15th patch until I found out that they were forcing us to play with full amulets (even less stat customization when we needed more). There will be few builds that can make full berserker work, few builds where full soldiers works, so don’t expect any change to a condition heavy metagame. Rabid still works perfectly fine for them.

Bad idea.

When you make one node worth as much as the rest of the other nodes, it promotes static defensive play (bunkers) around that one node. The team that is ahead can easily hold that lead by holding that one point, which will mean they always have equal players at that node and will often have a player advantage. Basically, if you lose the middle node, you may as well quit.

Having an odd number of points where all are equal leads to far more dynamic play and varied playstyles. You can focus on holding nodes, but that also makes it hard to take nodes if you lose one. You can focus on being mobile and trading nodes a lot. And mobility and small fight power becomes a factor.

Conditions are not impossible to balance, but the current system does make it difficult. I agree with a few things the OP said, but overall I think a workable system can be achieved without a total overhaul.

To keep it short, I have two main points:
1. Damaging conditions and CC conditions (cripple, chill, immobilize, weakness) need to be treated differently by a good chunk of abilities and modifiers, especially in regards to duration.
2. The types of damaging conditions to which each profession has access need to be tightly controlled. Giving a high condition damage build access to a new condition dramatically increases their DPS because the damage is concurrent and not added at the end, and makes it harder to counter their condition damage. This is why traits like Incendiary Powder and Dhuumfire, and Runes of Perplexity are so powerful and game-breaking.

Do you want to add a “Bronze Rabbit” up to “Diamond Dragon” like in WvW that would only attach bragging rights and where each successive one requires more rank ups to achieve?

Critical damage was too high in WvW roaming. The amount of burst some power specs put out, especially thieves which could reset fights, was just too high. The Ferocity change will do well to reign that in. Players that weren’t running heavy damage builds will need to adjust gear a little, but they won’t see as big of a change because they never relied on huge burst.

The Ferocity change also won’t significantly impact the performance of 20-25 vs 40+, as ggroups didn’t rely on heavy crit chance and damage to the extent that a damage-heavy roamer would. They have other means like might stacking, etc to increase damage.

The condition damage roaming problem in WvW has little to do with how powerful or weak power damage is. It exists because of powerful condition damage runes and sigils, +40% condition duration food, and overall class balance. Instead of saying “Don’t nerf Ferocity because condi damage is strong”, what should be said is “If you’re nerfing ferocity, also nerf condi damage builds in WvW”.

Here’s the condition damage problem in a nutshell: Each type of condition does significant damage. But when the number of types of conditions is restricted, the overall DPS is capped and only slowly increasing with condition damage. Adding a new type of condition to a profession, which can tick at the same time as its current ones, significantly increasing their DPS over just adding more condition damage stats. Perplexity Runes are the biggest offender, but so are traits like Dhuumfire and Incendiary Powder that grant condition types that are applied fairly frequently.

40% increase in condition duration is also roughly a 40% increase in damage (not exactly because of tick rounding, but close). Other foods don’t come close for power damage. Combined with many condition types, if a condi player can land a good volley and you don’t have condition removal, you’ll take a huge chunk of damage. It also makes their CC conditions last far longer, giving them another advantage.

It’s a little bit of both, but they feast on each other making the problem worse.

Ratings are too volatile, so you end up paired with much weaker or stronger players. Losing/winning because of that is not fun. So you stop playing or don’t play as much. Less players means the chances of having that skill mismatch increases. Cycle repeats.

In addition, the reward return for hot join is lacking, so quite a few people that may do solo join actually solo in team queue.

Bugs
- Often the orb carrier icon disappears or never appears on the map.

Map Architecture
- Guarding the middle point, Raven, is difficult because there isn’t a good line of sight for incoming players unless you’re far off point.
- The various ramps and stairs cause numerous pathing issues for teleports and charges.

Orb Mechanics
- As long as the orb doesn’t normalize stats and disable all profession-specific abilities, there will always be a best profession for carrying the orb. Currently it’s warriors.
- When you have a tanky person carrying the orb and are ahead, it’s very hard to lose. The orb carrier is hard to delay and even harder to kill, and defending the orb and point while running it quickly is better than trying to hold two points, especially with the spawn being closer to the orb than the middle point.

I would suggest that the orb change to a decap-oriented mechanic, rather than giving extra points for returning it to one of your own nodes. That allows it to be a boost primarily for the team that’s losing the node control fight. It would aid them in turning the tide. Close matches with point swings are the most fun to watch and play.

In PvE, Nothing.

By taking some time and selecting from existing combinations in the right ratios, I can get pretty much any overall stat combination that I want. I would like to see some existing stat combinations expanded to trinkets or made easier to obtain (i.e. Zealot ascended items).

In PvP, I’d like to be able to mix and match existing combos for a balance stat combination.

Zinwrath.2049:

Truth is these are all healthier. It doesn’t matter if you have 10 options for a character or 3000. As things go “pro” it will be narrowed down to 1-3 “optimal” options that if you don’t pick your a fing scrub. Its a bit above an average persons head, so I expect a lot of people to rage on it.

Yes, there will always be a few optimal builds per profession with some minor customization. But by limiting stat customization, it reduces the number of possible optimal builds.

The biggest non-theoretical argument for more stat customization is the elementalist. As an elementalist, If you run a berserker’s amulet, you can drop people quickly, but there’s no way you can live against focus fire, even with active defense. The best you can hope is to run away until all your cooldowns reset. If you run a valkyrie or soldier amulet, even with a berserker jewel, you have more than enough survivability, but not enough damage to be a significant threat. The new celestial amulet has a balance of stats, but you end up lacking significiantly in power. So you’re still lacking damage. What they’re really looking for is something like 70% berserker / 30% soldier or 50% valkyrie / 50% barbarian or some similar combination. The current Amulet/Jewel is 86/14%.

Similarly, players using a Berserker amulet may want to trade some stats for a few hundred toughness so that they don’t fall over so fast in combat.

If you don’t allow stat customization to add a little defense to offensive builds, you end up with the current warrior or thief scenario. They have so much defense from traits and abilities that they can ignore defensive stats and focus everything else on damage and CC. In order to balance with only extremes in amulets, other professions will gain similar defenses. Do you really want more of that?