Guild Wars 2

You probably want this thread. Quite a bit of discussion on why we should have more stat customization and some ideas on how it could be done.
https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/pvp/pvp/No-more-jewels-in-amulets-on-the-15th/

Evan Lesh.3295:

I’m excited to see how it holds up for the power builders.

You may want to address this thread then:
https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/pvp/pvp/No-more-jewels-in-amulets-on-the-15th/

Other than that, I don’t mind the new PvP UI, and makes it does make it less annoying to switch rune sets.

Chaith.8256:

I’m not quite sure if that’s it. I’d say it’s probably the annoyance of having to constantly be checking enemy numbers and figuring out if you’re where you need to be, or are the reason for an outnumbered fight, causing your team to lose nodes. Lots of people are true deathmatch players, and that has a comforting simplicity to it – you’re already where you need to be, just focus on surviving.

Pretty much this. It’s not a problem with the Conquest mode, it’s that some players just don’t want that much depth.

They’re adding team deathmatch with the patch, but here’s the dilema: which do you balance around? Do you balance around conquest, which can provide deeper play where small imbalances are overshadowed by better map-level play? Or do you balance around team deathmatch which lacks that depth and where small imbalances matter? The one that you don’t choose just gets worse.

Evan’s post is spot-on. You have people that play a few hours a week and those or play a few hours a day. A time-gated reward feels different to each.

I don’t think many people disliked lowering the requirement for Dragon – just that the new requirement seemed a little too low, especially with how rank point income has increased so much since the removal of glory. It’s disheartening when something that you spent a lot of time that distinguishes yourself and your investment on is now available to many people who put in a lot less effort.

Which brings up another important aspect in competitive play: reward or recognition for skill, not time. Players want a way to show other players that they are better.

ensoriki.5789:

Its hardly a big deal. Go on worrying about your stupid jewels and how “deep” gw2 is for having them. kittening ridiculous. If this were a PvP game instead of a theme park MMO the amulets probably wouldn’t exist in the first place. 14 trait slots, 6 armor slots and soon to be 2-4 sigil slots is significantly more customization “slots” than hell any moba out there. The game already has a significant amount of meaningful customization available before stats even come into play.

GW2 is not a MOBA or a fighting game. You can’t apply the same balance philosophy to both.

In a MOBA or fighting game, the role and style of each character is predetermined and balanced already. Any customization on top of that is limited and rarely changes the original design of the character.

An MMORPG like GW2 is the opposite. It gives you a wealth of choices, sometimes too many, that need to be assembled into a working character. The balance of stats that you choose has a huge impact on how well or poorly your character does. Not allowing a balance of stats to complement other choices destroys the entire idea of broad customization. When you limit stat customization, you may as well only offer a few fixed trait choices as well because there’s no point in choosing any other possible combinations; none of them can be complemented by the few viable amulets for each profession.

Yes, it’s only one customization slot that’s being lost, but it’s an important one for professions that work best with a mix of stats. If we lost some trait and rune choices, there wouldn’t be such a reaction.

There is nothing wrong with conquest. Out of every MMORPG PvP mode I’ve seen, it’s the best for small-scale competitive PvP. It forces you to consider different factors like mobility, power in a group, power while solo, choosing what target to attack, etc. There’s always play and counter-play going on not just within combat, but at the map level.

The downside to Conquest is that it’s hard to show to a spectator the map-level action at the same time as the node-level combat. Watching only the map is boring, but trying to home in on a battle and missing a side node change hands feels like you’re missing part of the game.

Here’s where GW2 sPvP missed the mark for e-sports, and it has little to do with the Conquest game mode.

• Too much focus on promoting the game through a few teams rather than growing the base within the game. If there aren’t enough people interested to watch it or play it, it doesn’t matter how good it is. sPvP was too isolated from the rest of the game initially (this has been fixed at least). There was little incentive to stay in sPvP compared to PvE or WvW and become a fan of that part of the game or even gain more understanding of its depth.
• Slow to address game balance. I would say this is what caused the game to shrink on the e-sport scene more than anything. When there is little variety and it’s hard to showcase skill, competitive players get bored, and casual players feel that it’s futile to try something that isn’t the most overpowered build. And when the most powerful build is more about the build than how well it’s played, there’s no point in being competitive.
• Weak ranking system. All too often, especially for solo players, there’s little close competition. You’re almost always pulled down by a weak player on your team rather than how the team works as a whole. The wild swings in the leaderboards, once they were implemented, make a leaderboard rank almost meaningless and it can’t be used to match players of relatively close skill and knowledge.
• Combat is too “spammy”. At some moments, you can tell who’s the better player and who’s just mashing abilities that are off cooldown. But most of the time, especially in larger fights, there’s little penalty for spamming, especially dodges/evades and is too often the only way to avoid dangerous enemy attacks that have minimal tells.

How can you fix it? Adding more game modes isn’t the answer. Sure, there will be a “new toy” appeal when they come out, but it will quickly fade when players realize the flaws of that mode and how the balance issues are as bad as or worse than conquest. But it consumes developer time that could be used in other areas for greater benefit.

• Improve balance. Major problems need addressed quickly, within a month of them becoming issues. Smaller changes should come every two to three months.
• Improve depth. Make more traits and skills viable. This opens up new potential counter-play options. It’s a daunting task, so many pick a focus on a certain profession(s) each cycle rather than trying to do an across-the-board change. Add more stat customization to sPvP to support potential and future potential builds.
• Polish offensive abilities so that their visibility increases as their power increases. I should be able to see every hard CC ability coming with enough time to dodge/evade/block/blind/sidestep/etc it. The same is true for high damage attacks and single attacks that apply conditions that add a lot of damage in a short time.
• Stop the arms race. Only add new abilities or mechanics which negate other mechanics (unblockable, condition immunity, crit immunity) when absolutely necessary. Not just because it seems interesting. Adding one extremely powerful ability doesn’t fix all the weaker abilities of the profession; it just leads to overpowered builds that use this new, powerful ability to ignore mechanics that used to counter the profession.

Justin ODell.9517:

I think the big reason we need to streamline things and make it easy to pickup is NOT because newbies are dumb or incapable of figuring it out, but rather because PvP is very, very intimidating. Reduction in apparent complexity helps PvP be more approachable and less intimidating.

Reducing stat customization in order to reduce the intimidation factor makes no sense. Stats are a relatively simple concept to grasp and relatively unintimidating. If anything, limited stat combinations can be frustrating for new players, who often tend toward some balance of stats rather than an extreme. Not allowing them to do that can result in them goofing up the rest of their build as they try to suit a rigid set of three stats.

The intimidation factor and potential for failure in builds comes from choosing weapon pairings, utility skills, traits, runes, and sigils, most of which have effects that can’t be easily quantified. If you wanted to reduce the potential for bad builds, you would reduce these hard-to-quantify factors; remove half the traits, some of the trait lines, half the runes, half the sigils. No experienced player uses a good chunk of them anyway.

The other part of intimidation occurs because everyone is grouped together regardless of skill level or experience. When something goes wrong, the new people are the easiest target for blame. The best way around that is to get rid of hot join and push everyone toward solo and team queue with proper matchmaking.

Also, I can’t undersell the benefits of reducing conceptual complexity for assisting designers achieve balance. We are finite creatures, us humans, and can only hold so many things in our mind at one time. We can create tools to help work around this, but anything that helps make balance easier gets my vote.

But reducing stat customization makes balance worse! The rigid amulet combinations favor professions that can ignore half the stats in the game. If your profession can’t do that, it’s doomed to failure. With rigid amulets, the only way to balance in that situation is to make traits so ridiculously powerful that they compensate for the 200-400 stat points of a fourth or fifth stats that can’t be combined. That starts an arms race in each balance iteration where the only way to counter this now more powerful profession is to have more powerful traits or abilities of your own. “Flavor of the Month” balance like that kills PvP.

The difficulty in balance is not how many knobs you can turn – more is usually better – it’s to what extremes can they turn.

Justin ODell.9517:

It isn’t just about jewels, it’s about stats in general. I can totally see why our designers would want the most influential thing (stats) to be locked down.

There are two things wrong with that statement.

First, stats are important, but are not the most influential part of a build. You can’t slap on a Berserker amulet and be great at damage. Nor can you wear a Soldier or Cleric or Settler’s amulet and be a good bunker. Traits, utilities, and weapons define whether you can succeed at a role more than stats. Stats are used to boost your main role while shoring up weaknesses or to just drive you so far to an extreme that you can ignore a lot of threats. A full damage build without CC or evasion is a free kill, as is a bunker that can’t adequately remove conditions or negate incoming damage. However, a good build can use a more offensive or more defensive set of stats and fulfill their role in an average setting.

Second, locking down such an important part of character customization defeats the purpose of having character customization at all. When you can only customize half and can’t change the other half to complement it, thereby restricting viable options, why bother allowing customization? At that point, you may as well only allow fixed builds for each profession like heroes in a MOBA. But then you’d still have a problem like in MOBAs where half of those “heroes” aren’t viable. Through locking down customization, improved balance has not been achieved.

Brigg.6189:

correct me if I’m wrong, is that the simplicity actually adds depth because you know what to expect/avoid. Too many permutations and the opponents can’t react/preact to eachother. It’s something to think about I guess, ty.

It’s about finding a balance. Too few options and things get stale quickly. Too many options and it becomes a nightmare to balance and leads too a lot of rock/paper/scissors where no matter what, you’ll win because your builds beats your opponents’ builds. GW2 is on the side of too many options.

Archon.6480:

I would like to point out that the pre-set amulet stat combinations are designed specifically for traited builds in each class. The developers design the traits around the amulet stat combinations for certain roles each class can fill. I suspect this change is because many players are accidentally weakening themselves by switching out the jewel. It is very enticing, but a pitfall I believe. ANet can see this by analyzing match results.

Please explain how you arrive at that conclusion. In competitive play, Who uses the Barbarian amulet? Rampager? Celestial (though this was because the stats were too low)? So what if players come up with a combination of traits that wasn’t blessed by the amulets that currently exist; is it not allowed? Designing a system with so much customization in skills and traits but then disallowing stat customization to back it up is part of kills build diversity. Not to mention, the amulet combinations aren’t that great for half the roles with which they could conceivably be matched.

It is also a mistake to assume the developers are clueless about the game mechanics they designed. A careful analysis of the balance added to PvP can help you make incredibly powerful WvW/PvE builds. Knights and Celestial* combinations are excluded from PvP because they are unbalanced. I won’t tell you in which direction, but if you experiment you will see.

I like to give developers the benefit of the doubt when it comes to knowing what they’re doing, but their track record leaves much to be desired. What’s really frustrating players is that there’s little discussion between developers and players ahead of time for big changes. When there’s a problem with changes that are made, they often aren’t addressed for 3 to 6 months with the next mechanics update.

Agree with OEggs. We can wait 4 months for some minor tweaks, but the major issues need to be sorted out faster.

Alasteir.7031

You literally just suggested that ArenaNet should listen to testimony and anecdotes over actual data, which in any problem solving environment, is just stupid. Data > Player feedback. That being said, Anet should take into account player feedback, because if what players say is true, then Anet’s data should confirm that.

The problem with trusting only data is that statistics are often constructed to tell you what you want them to tell you. Further, the root cause of problems can’t be identified or fixed with data alone. And data can’t tell you about things for which you can’t generate data.

If you would increase the scope of this thread slightly, it would be about build diversity and how stats influence it. In doing so, you will quickly see an incomplete data set. Yes, we can provide examples, such as bunker guardian with cleric/barbarian to increase HP and get some crit to power the vigor on crit trait. Elementalists using Valkyrie/Berserker to survive yet maintain offensie. And you’d see many barbarian amulets with soldier jewels for a little bit of armor. But maybe that only happens at top tiers of play. Maybe the majority of PvP players use full cleric or full berserker. If you looked only at the whole data set, it would say only a fraction uses different jewels. What that analysis misses is that the people using the jewels are the people that know the most about the game and are the most skilled. Should that small group be discounted? I would hope not.

Further, what about things for which we have no data? Myself and others have asked for more stat customization than what the jewel provided. But because you can’t do that in-game right now, how do we make a case for it with data? We could make some trait combinations and say “it should work if you had these stats” but how do we prove it?

The point is that you can’t always trust your data. Player feedback needs to be considered, but it also needs to be filtered, which is a difficult task.

sonic.7592:

But to encounter some problems, what do you think about raising the trait points from 14 to 20 (70-100) and add a tier4 trait line? So anet can add more trait slots on the one hand (more build diversity) and people can better choose to allocate their trait points.
With this solution, it is simplified by removing one “dimension” but it opens a lot of new ways to play around with builds.

No. A large chunk of balance problems are the result of so many traits and how they can be combined. Currently, more than half the traits are never used, including supposedly powerful grandmaster traits. Already at least half of the new grandmaster traits will never be used. How do you change or buff all these traits to be appealing without creating a horde of new imbalances? What do you do when two seemingly balanced traits combine to be far too powerful? Unlike stats, the effects of traits are hard to quantify. Limiting the number of choices in effects that change how a profession works is a better route to balance. But at the same time, you need to have enough viable choices.

@DiogoSilva.7089

Increasing stats from traits is the wrong move. If anything, they should be separated. Traits are chosen because the effect they provide is good and works with other traits, weapons, and skills to fill a role. In most cases, traits are not chosen for the stats. By shifting more stats to traits, it would make the current problem of not being able to round out the stats on a build even worse. Shifting stats to runes has the same issue because the effects on runes matter just as much or more than the stats.

Creating a hybrid amulet with power, precision and about 400 toughness and 400 vitality could address the problem in the near-term, but it doesn’t address it in the long-term. Elementalists and Guardians may want to add healing power to that. Warriors don’t really want the vitality. It also leaves off ferocity. What about builds that want to mix power and condition damage? The long-term solution is to allow more customization. That way, each build can come up with combinations that get close to the stat distributions that they want after they’ve chosen traits and runes.

Recommendations

• Create three stat slots either of equal weight (33/33/33%) or one has double weight (50/25/25%).
• Add the PvE Knight’s prefix.
  That should allow enough customization to make any build with “close enough” stat points, while still preventing overly tanky builds. Adding the Dire prefix would help customization, but that would be too powerful for some builds right now. By making them separate slots, rather than an upgrade to an item, it’s not as “hidden”.

TLDR
*Current system is too rigid. Traits are used for abilities over stats. Resulting customization range leaves no middle ground, particularly with precision and toughness.
*Stat extremes like full damage aren’t good for everyone. Each profession and builds within a profession value stats at different weights and may want 4 or 5, not 3.
*Players understand what stats do, but are bad at choosing “correct” ones. Restricting stat customization doesn’t fix that. Good players suffer from loss of depth/diversity.
*The balance issue is overblown. The extremes of offense and defense won’t change. Many additional builds become viable. Abilities can be tuned without destroying builds completely.
*Split the amulet into three items using current combos at either 33/33/33% or 50/25/25%.

But it’s Too Hard for Little Timmy to Understand!
What’s so hard to understand about stats? Character stats are at the core of all RPGs with a fairly universal subset. What each does is pretty simple and can be described in a simple sentence, i.e. power increases damage, toughness increases armor and armor makes you take less damage, vitality increases your HP. Even a new player can identify which are for damage and which are for defense.

Choosing two to four stat items that add together is not complicated. Players do it all the time, not just in PvE, but in other games they play or have played.

Yes, players will always make bad choices. But the current rigid system is contributing to bad choices, not preventing them. For power damage builds, which are usually more newbie-friendly, the two predominant choices are Berserker and Soldier. Berserker usually leads to quick and frustrating death; you can’t learn because you die so fast. At best, they stick with an easy combo like 100blades warrior and don’t learn much else. Soldier means their damge is weak, but at least they have time to learn before dying. Unfortunately, that causes many to build around it and not be an effective team member. If the amulets were split, new players could find a happy medium between survival and damage or wein themselves off the tanky amulet. More flexibility allows more room for error in learning weapons, traits, and utilities.

In addition, many of us have friends who tell us that they want to try sPvP, but they can’t make their PvE/WvW build there (no matter how good or bad it is), because they can’t get the stats they want. The current and new system are actually creating a barrier to entry, not making it easier.

Restricting stat combinations doesn’t stop players from making bad builds. But it does penalize and restrict knowledgeable players.

It makes it more difficult to balance!
To be clear, what is being requested is dividing up the single amulet into multiple items that use the current stat cominbations with a better division between them (the current in 86/14% amulet/jewel). This isn’t a request for total control over stats. You wouldn’t be able to reach an extreme further than what’s currently possible, and you won’t have extra stat points.

At face value, allowing more customization of stats introduces additional permutations which means many more balance possiblities. But when the extremes are immobile, you can’t look at stat balance that way. Unlike new skills or traits, stats don’t fundamentally change what a build does; they just strengthen or weaken particular aspects of it. If a mix of stats makes something too powerful, it’s only unmasking an ability or combination of abilities that was already broken but not as easily exploitable.

I would go as far to say that more stat customization within the current bounds would actually make balance easier. With the current system, a small tweak to a trait or ability can render it useless and destroy an entire build or create a new overly powerful build. This occurs because there is no way to augment offense by trading some for additional defense. Either the trait or ability is good enough to keep you alive when you have a Berserker’s amulet, or it’s not worth using. When such a trait or skill gives so much defense, it allows for excessive damage. Now you now have to change other traits as well to reign in the damage. You end up nerfing a perfectly balanced trait because another trait in the build is making the sum too good. Instead, if you could tweak a trait to a lesser degree, which would increase or reduce the need for defense slightly, there’s less dramatic shifts in builds and no need to touch traits that work well in other builds.

And if anything, allowing for a larger variety of builds is a good thing for the game, even if some are initially too powerful.

Justin ODell.9517:

What are your arguments for the fine-tuning approach that jewels give? What exactly did it open up? What is now going to disappear? I’m genuinely interested in both sides of this one.

Removing the jewel isn’t a huge loss. But that’s because the jewel didn’t offer enough fine tuning. Players have been asking for more fine tuning in sPvP for a while and we’re baffled by ANet going in the completely opposite direction.

TLDR at end.

Rigidity of the Current & New System
Stats come from three sources in sPvP: traits, runes, and amulet/jewel. Traits provide 800-1400 stat points (depending on which lines you choose). Most runes provide 165 to a single stat. However, traits and runes are chosen for their effects over their stats. Some trait lines and runes just aren’t as good as others, cater to certain weapons or utilities better, or just pair nicely. This will always be true, though the disparity will lessen over time.

That leaves amulets(with jewels) that provide 2211 stat points. That’s a lot of points, but most or all of it is in a fixed combination of stats. In the current system and discounting stats from traits (still counting runes), a heavy character can have either 2127-2367 armor or 2696-2936 armor but nothing in between. The new system increases the gap to 468 from 329. If there’s no decent effect on a toughness rune for my build, the gap just grows. I can’t fill in the holes! The same happens with other stats.

Further, I can’t pick and choose what stats are combined. If I want power and higher armor, then I can’t get precision. I can’t get high power and condition damage. Celestial is nice, but then power is low.

Not every profession is the same / the hybrid problem
The need for fine tuning stats varies by profession. A thief can evade damage or escape combat often; if they play well, they can survive without defensive stats. So the current system isn’t so bad for them. A warrior will usually need to spend more time in combat, so more defenses are good for them (current balance issues aside). But they already have high HP, so they’d want a bit of toughness, but not a lot of vitality. In comparison, a guardian in a similar role would want a bit more vitality than the warrior due to their lower base HP, and maybe some healing power because some builds scale well with it. An elementalist has low base HP, but being a light armor class, also has low armor. They may want a bit more toughness compared to a guardian, but they still need offensive stats too.

Ideally for any power damage build that can’t avoid the majority of damage through dodges, evades, etc, you power, precision, and maybe some ferocity, but you also want enough vitality to survive burst, and some toughness to handle sustained damage and help with burst damage. It may also want some healing power if it scales well. The toughness, vitlity, and healing power numbers desired are around 200-400 each. Not 75 (jewel secondary) or 569 (amulet secondary). On the topic of ferocity, the returns on damage pale in comparison with precision at lower critical chances. But ferocity is tied to many of the offensive power amulets.

Many potential and promising hybrid builds are not viable simply because these hybrid builds either die too quickly or survive more than adequately but lack damage. Elementalist example.

<continued>

Allie Murdock.8152:

Just wanted to call some attention to this thread.

It is confusing for me to see this kind of mixed messaging. A ton of people agreed in that thread that there are too many moving parts in this game to balance it well enough. Now you guys are in here saying that removing jewels equates to dumbing the game down.

Can you guys do me a favor and try the game out after the features are in the game before assuming removing this is going to ruin everything?

They’re different messages.

The thread you linked is describing “power creep” where stats get outside the range for the game was originally designed and overshadow basic mechanics. It’s usually in the form of going to an extreme with a narrow focus. For example, in games with vertical scaling, tanks could stack enough avoidance so that they could never be hit for full damage. In GW2, players can stack so much damage and active defense to kill a mob before they even need to worry about taking damage, rendering partial damage reduction meaningless. What that thread suggests is that the game design needs to have a significant percentage of abilities or stats that can’t be changed – make the extremes not so extreme.

In sPvP, the amulets allow only the extremes out of the portion that we can customize. We want to be able to customize more within the already established bounds.

For example, as a heavy profession in sPvP, discounting trait selection, I can make my armor 2100-2300 or 2800-3000. I can’t make it anywhere in between.

MarkPhilips.5169:

Yeah, for sure many things will change with this patch, and this is one of them, but we don’t need to forget that combinations like soldier + zerk or valkyrie + zerk are one of the components of “monster” builds like “idoeverythingwell” warrior (now) and the old “idideverythingwell” elementalist (in the past).

It wasn’t the stat combinations that made them too good. They would be powerful no matter how much stat diversity was in the game.

Further, adding stat diversity in PvP should be the top priority for the PvP team.

Adding more stat combinations will not make balance more difficult to achieve. If anything, it will make it easier to achieve.

More combinations means “not so glass cannon” DPS builds that can live longer, but also don’t completely destroy you in two hits because presumably you’re no longer full glass, and because they can not longer insta-gib, need to live after their burst combo, so they aren’t full glass either.

Further, more stat combos would open up trait line combinations that currently aren’t viable. An offensive build that can sustain itself in combat or support allies can’t exist currently because it can’t mix survival stats and offensive stats at a proper ratio. When you bring new trait lines into play, they may be able to counter-play current builds that are overpowered because they don’t have a counter.

And if the reason is that “it’s too complicated for players” I don’t know what to think. We already have to mix and match stats on 13-14 items in PvE.

I would argue for 3 or 4 slots of roughly equal stat value for PvP, as well as the addition of the Knight’s combo. That should give enough room for diversity without getting too complicated.

League/Ladder Structure
Team queue should be heavily emphasized. Although seasons could exist for solo queue, it would just be a ladder reset. Solo queue in a team game is too prone to luck of the draw on teammates. It’s not deserving of special rewards, but still could be a way to show you’re an above average player.

I would keep the rating system on an account basis, rather than a team basis. Team rosters were frustrating because you always felt bound to the same team and would worry about tanking the rating to invite a new person just to play. The very competitive teams will stick together and keep a tight roster anyway. Perhaps show each player’s guild on the leaderboard so that it’s more obvious who the teams are.

I would also keep rating per account, rather than per character. Casual players often switch characters to fill a role that their team is missing. That hurts their overall rating if their teams perform well.

The rating system needs to be more visible and be a true ladder. In order to go higher, you need to keep playing. None of this play 15 games and be in the top 20. Although the exact formula can remain hidden, players want to see how closely matched they were and how much they stand to lose or gain in rating.

Season Length
Two to three months. It should coincide with the cycle for the big mechanics and balance change patches.

Rewards & Motivation
Rewards need to reflect both time and skill, including an incentive for players who only devote a few hours to the game a week.

Rewards need to be competitive with other areas of the game per time spent. Winning a team match (15-20 minutes if you count queue time) should give rewards equivalent to a dungeon speed run, and losing is roughly half that to represent a slower dungeon run. The rewards need to cross over between PvE and PvP. Maybe you can only get dragonite for winning, but you get currency win or lose (more for winning) that lets you buy ectos, etc. And of course give some of it in coin.

Bonus rewards could also be offered for the first few games per day, similar to dungeon path bonuses. The psychological factor of getting extra stuff for a little bit of time invested will attract more casual players and boost the base, even if they only play for an hour. When the monthly achievement was bugged and gave laurels for both PvE and PvP for that month, the team queue exploded (you needed team queue wins for the PvP monthly at the time).

In order to reward skill, there needs to be something that only the best players can obtain. It should be symbolic like a title or name tag symbol and something cosmetic. There rewards could also be tiered, applying decreasing rewards to top 1%, top 2%, etc.

Solo queue should also give decent rewards to be worth playing, but still keep the focus on team queue.

Issues
- The balancing process needs to be improved to avoid professions being overly dominant or not worth bringing as well as add more variety.
- Finding teammates for team queue can be frustrating. Slanting rewards too heavily toward team queue compared to solo queue may deter people from playing tPvP at all. If it’s too even between solo and team queue, there’s less incentive to play team queue, and you really want to boost the population there over solo queue.
- For somewhat competitive people that also want to play with friends, it’s a tough choice between maintaining rating and having fun. The system needs to buffer them against tanking rating too hard when teammates are much lower rated.

I’d also like to point out that the necro build is probably using the Close to Death trait (+20% damage against targets under 50% HP), which occupies the same grandmaster slot that Dhuumfire goes in. You can’t have both, and the power necro would rather have Close to Death.

garethh.3518:

It worked in Rift.
It was really fun in rift after a few nerfs so orb running specs weren’t utterly broken.
Flag running just emphasizes the issues in GW2 so yeah, it won’t work here. The abilities and maps were just made soooooo terribly.

Played RIFT for the first 5 months or so. PvP still had tons of balance issues. Don’t know what they’ve done since.

Other food offers a 5-7% damage increase based on stats. +40% condition duration is roughly a 20-40% damage increase (depending on the cutoff on the ticks).

I’d like to see that math you mention that compares power to condition damage.

The problem with solo queue leaderboards is a problem with solo queue in general. Players in solo queue rarely coordinate or help each other. It’s all about being able to win fights (or stalemate) 1v1. As a result, “selfish” builds geared toward 1v1 succeed. Due to trait and skill balance and available stat combinations, certain professions are better at it.

This is why capture the flag PvP never works in MMORPGs. Certain builds and certain professions always have abilities that break the intended gameplay. The only way to deal with it is to disable everything unique about each profession – the core of an RPG. And people hate it when you don’t let them play their profession.

Spirit Watch was an experiment to see if it could be done with some modified rules. It failed. The map is worse than Skyhammer.

Is this in the frame of sPvP or WvW?

In sPvP, I don’t see a huge problem with the current system. Condition removal requires specialization or giving up defenses against physical damage or dealing more damage yourself. Players often spread out enough that team condition removal isn’t incredibly powerful. A targeted approach that addresses specific abilities would be best.

If you’re talking WvW, severely nerfing the +40% and -40% condition duration food would be a good start. Both are incredibly powerful and the -40% condition duration foods really hurt CC condition use. On top of that, group condition removal may need to be re-examined. Large WvW groups tend to ball up, easily ensuring that team condition removal hits the maximum number of targets. In comparison, many conditions are single target application.

NO.

WoW did this with resilience, as did other MMOs, and it was an utter failure in all of them. So much so that it’s no longer a stat and is inherent in PvP combat. It’s also not needed in GW2 because ANet was smarter about this and made critical hits only 150% base instead of 200% base, and you can’t easily get high critical chances without conditions or susceptible to dying in two hits. In addition, an anti-critical stat would severely hinder the GW2 mantra that gear you get in one aspect of the game can be used in all of the game. You aren’t required to have PvP gear in order to PvP, etc.

Your argument of condition duration reduction isn’t a good one. Outside of overly powerful food in WvW, it’s limited to small reductions in specific rune sets and traits which usually are targeted toward specific conditions.

If this is a complaint about ferocity changes incoming to WvW, oh well. Crit Damage being overbudget in PvE/WvW has been a problem since people realized it in the first month of the game. You can’t do a good job of balancing around out of control gear scaling.

I believe the base is so high with a lower coefficient because Virtue of Resolve is to make up for guardian’s lower base HP compared to other professions. Also, the base is 84HP/sec with 0 healing power and 144HP/sec with 1000 healing power. Get your math right please.

Yes, the trait is weak. But the OP’s changes would make it ridiculously strong. Keep in mind that healing signet now heals for ~400HP/sec in most current warrior builds with 0 healing power from gear (200-300 from traits).

There are three issues to consider when buffing or changing this trait.
1. Don’t want it to be easy to roll into an unkillable bunker guardian build.
2. Don’t want to make it extremely powerful for full DPS PvE builds.
3. The majority of the Zeal trait line still sucks.

To fix #1, it would make sense to make it grandmaster, but that warrants buffing it further to compensate for it being harder to get and #3. That makes #2 a bigger problem. If you made it scale with power instead of healing power, that also fixes #1, but it breaks #2.

Here’s my suggestion:
Increases damage with greatsword by 10% and attacks with greatsword heal for 60-70 (0.04-0.05)

First, all master level major traits that give a damage bonus to a single weapon offer a 10% damage increase and an extra bonus, often as a cooldown reduction. Second, the healing amount scaling with number of opponents is fine, and preferable to a static amount. By scaling it with number of opponents, you gain more healing as you, in theory, take more damage. If it were a static number, you’d have to make it too weak to prevent it from being too good in a 1v1. For the healing number and coefficient, I looked at a probable number of hits in PvE and PvP, both with a weapon swap and compared to Altruistic Healing and Monk’s Focus (Grandmaster) and Pure of Heart (Adept). Since this is a dual trait, I would expect the healing to be closer to the adept level, and definitely should not exceed the grandmaster. Scaling is kept with healing power as a way for it be improved in PvP/WvW – an environment where defensive stats are more useful – while not making it more powerful in PvE. Basically, I just doubled the numbers from what they currently are.

Fixing the Zeal trait line and fixing sPvP stats is another topic.

They never said they were fake. They said they were not the real notes (as in the release notes). That doesn’t rule them out as internal development build notes.

I wouldn’t dismiss them just yet. I would guess it was an internal testing build. Some things will make it, some won’t.

Unlike minion master necro or spirit ranger, spirit weapons aren’t an all-or-nothing build. They all have specific roles, compared to just various forms of damage or stacking tons of boons and conditions.

I still wouldn’t go 30 points in zeal. All the minor traits are lackluster, especially in PvP, and all the major traits besides Fiery Wrath and the new focus trait are too weak to be useful.

The important spirit weapon change is that the spirit weapons don’t die on command trait is now adept level. Without that trait, spirit weapons were pretty terrible overall (some had good niche uses like shield). It makes it more likely that they can be incorporated into a build full-time.

Big changes are in the Honor line with the Vigor change, partial un-nerf to Selfless Daring in PvP, and Empowering Might not having a cooldown.

While they may add rank boosters, they won’t convert glory boosters.

Consider that glory boosters were so common, you could always have one active. In that sense, it may as well have been baked in to normal glory gains. If that had existed since the beginning, no one would be complaining.

You could argue that they took up a slot in which you would normally receive an item. That at least has some merit. But then they would only be worth the same as a low-end PvP crafting materials once the change goes in, which will probably be a few copper.

The stats on the amulet and jewel are mostly correct based on the similar design of ANet’s PvE formula. The PvP amulet base is similar to armor and jewelry stats, which value 1% crit damage as 15 stat points. The jewel is similar to orbs from the overbudget exotic orbs in PvE which value 1% crit damage kitten stat points. For whatever reason, the conversion is a bit more harsh on the PvP items, but the general idea remains. When you combine the amulet and jewel, you get a value of 1% crit damage = 15.75 stat points. I would have expected it to be 15 even, but I’ll give that loss up to rounding down on each individual item. So yes, the amulet+jewel combo is under budget, but not by a lot. The “missing” stats would get you about 1% more crit chance if it was allocated to precision.

With the upcoming ferocity change, I would expect something closer to 12-13 stat points per 1% crit damage. If it followed the PvE rule, that would yield 24%-26% crit damage for the amulet+jewel. Or ANet may dump the excess stats into the healing or vitality stat on the PvP amulets.

But Phantaram’s second point is what should really be the focus. In order for a power-based damage hybrid build to succeed it needs precision far more than critical damage. However, most builds need to handicap themselves in order to get precision.

The precision line is very narrow in scope for many professions. That cuts out 300 possible precision (~14.3% crit chance). The only amulets with high power and precision are Berserker’s and Barbarian’s. The former makes you a glass cannon and practically all the toughness runes suck, so there’s no supplement. The latter is mediocre all-around. For precision runes the only good choice is Lyssa, which isn’t that good for long cooldown elites. Eagle is okay, but not spectacular. Both rune sets only add 165 precision (~7.9 % crit chance).

If players were able to customize stats in order to pick up power, precision, toughness, and vitality in the right quantities for their build, it would open a up a lot more options. Obviously full customization would be difficult (since you want to prevent healing power, toughness, vitality only combinations), but spreading the stats in the existing combinations over more items would definitely help, as well as adding a few missing combinations (PvE Knight prefix being a key one).

Would this cause balance issues? Yes, undoubtedly you’d see a few overpowered builds appear. But it also opens up many more builds overall. I would say that trade-off is worth it in the short term. In addition, with more stat customization, making tweaks to a handful of traits and skills won’t drive a build to extinction; the build could simply switch supplemental trait lines and end up with near with the same total stats. I would also expect the decline of insta-gib play if changes like these came along. If no one on the team drops in seconds to damage from one player, full glass cannon builds become a greater liability and more niche, leading to a slight decline in the pace of combat and the need for better cooldown use and coordination for kills.

The reason intelligent people don’t care is that you’ve always received more glory boosters than you could ever use. And most people had more glory than they could ever use (unless they converted it all with wintersday gifts).

I’d support a refund for people that bought Glory Boosters directly through the gem shop. Black Lion Chests refunds aren’t worth their time to track down and were only a small part of the chest contents.

I actually like the fall to death mechanic. What makes it seem cheesy is that the side points and the control room are cramped, making it hard to avoid potential knockbacks while also avoid damage.

I’d rather see the glass at the side points moved away from the point a little and the area around the side points enlarged slightly. For the control room, extend it a bit further back by the portal.

Agree. Discussing the changing on the “Ready Up!” program yielded good feedback, and I’d like to see that kind of collaboration continue.

All weapons have good and bad points and fill different roles. The OP is exaggerating the bad in a role where the greatsword doesn’t excel.

For solo roaming, you usually want a heavy damage build so that you can drop someone quick and get out until your cooldowns are back up. Hammer is not the best choice for that playstyle because its DPS isn’t that great.

The alternative is to go heavy bunker (cleric with some soldier) and basically laugh at people who attack and don’t run away when they realize they won’t win. Anyone smart will break combat and you’ll have no way to catch them.

I don’t think anyone really understands the problem. Removing Immobilize stacking only fixes venom share thief and makes mediocre players not as good.

Good players will still be able to chain stagger immobilize on a target (assuming the new one overwrites). And loading up a target with stacked immobilize all at once has the disadvantage that all those applications of immobilized can be cleansed all at once.

Before trying to nerf immobilize across the board, fix the cleanse order bug and address abilities that apply too long of an immobilize. Once that’s done, then re-evaluate immobilize stacking.

Just change the third in the Hammer #1 to note take forever and a day to cast and I think that will address a lot of the issues. The other 4 hammer abilities are pretty good. They require proper setup – you can’t just spam them and win. Once you learn the setups, those are really effective.

Personally, the slow third ability in the auto-attack chain just frustrates me too much to use the rest of the weapon.

John Lightning, that looks like the kind of artifacting I would expect from a GPU overheating.

My GPU uses a centrifugal fan design and an enclosed case for the card, which makes it relatively difficult to notice how dirty it is. I pulled it out and blew through the vent and fan areas and a lot of melted dust flew out. It’s now running about 10°C cooler under load and seems to have no issues (have to play for more than 30min to be sure).

I guess something with the latest update is stressing the GPU a bit more and was sending it over the edge.

I have to run GPUz with another application to compare. Just before the restart, there is a spike in processing load accompanied by a small increase in temperature, fan speed, and current draw. It may be this combination is just overwhelming it.

I highly doubt it’s an overheating issue, seeing as it was fine all summer long and is only having trouble now, in the dead of winter. In fact, the troubles only started this week. And it happens when the PC has been running for hours, or minutes. Other games that should stress it just as much have no issues.

I had it limited to 30 FPS (using the GW2 graphics menu option) since last year when it would do the same thing. However, capping it at 30, 60, or unlimited seems to do nothing now.

I cleaned the PC tonight, specifically GPU fan and vents and it had been cleaned about a month earlier. No change.

I went through all the graphics settings over a year ago when the game came out and I got stuck on the one story mission that kept crashing like this. Running windowed fullscreen at a cap of 30FPS made it only happen once a month if that. And I don’t recall it happening at all for the past few. None of the other graphics settings did anything, and they’re already just a step up from low.

I’ll try to get a monitor on it, but I doubt that’s the cause. Usually when I’ve seen graphics cards overheat, they start to artifact and not just completely crash.

All of a sudden while playing GW2, my screen will turn all one color. I can still talk on VOIP and my music keeps going, though eventually dies in another minute or so. I have to hard reboot my PC to fix it. So it seems like it’s a GPU lockup on GW2.

I’m running Windows XP sp3 with a GeForce GTX 260, 332.21 drivers (latest drivers as of last night). Running 1920×1200 resolution.

I’ve been having this issue off-and-on since beta. Switching to Fullscreen windowed mode and using a 30 FPS limiter made the crash extremely rare. At some point when the video settings were reset by a patch, I changed to just Fullscreen, but still with the 30FPS limiter. Since the latest major patch on Tuesday, it cropped up again, about once every other day. But it’s gotten so bad today that the game is borderline unplayable. I’ve mostly been doing sPvP hot join and it happens every other game. I was running around WvW for about an hour beforehand (just small group stuff) and I had no problems. I can sit in Heart of the Mists and not have problems. I checked the AA mode setting on the sticky and it’s application controlled.

Things I’ve tried that haven’t worked:
- Repair Utility
- FullScreen Windowed.
- Rate Limiter at 60 FPS.
- Rate Limiter at unlimited.
- Disable second display.
- 310.90 drivers – same issue
- 306.23 drivers – lasts about twice as long before crashing.

Things to try:
- Windowed mode in a smaller window

If it helps, when I had the problem a year ago, the story mission “A Light in the Darkness” would cause it a lot.

Solved? Taking the GPU out of the case and blowing air through the ventilation system seems to have solved it. It’s relatively difficult to do that when it’s installed because of the enclosed GPU case and centrifugal fan design. I had previously only cleaned the fan area and blades.

Sunshine.5014:

they don’t ask players what the players want; they assume they know what the players want. When they started asking, it was late, and they wasted a year of development.

Except that players usually don’t know what they want either. Players often think they want something, but when it comes along, it turns out they didn’t want it. They just thought they did. Or maybe only a vocal minority wanted it. You can’t just take player feedback at face value; developers have to think on their own too.

While I agree with the OP that the balance cycles are too long, the proposal of one week is far too rapid.

First, balance isn’t black and white. You have to analyze and re-analyze lots of data and viewpoints at multiple skill levels to even determine if an ability needs changed. Then you have to figure out how and to what extent it needs changed, while trying to not break or overpower other builds. And the initial change that was designed and coded may not accomplish the desired result, so the process repeats. And this needs done for many abilities of many professions.

Second, one week is reacting far too soon for proper balance in most cases. You need to give players time to adjust to a change. When a new character build comes along or a previous one is weakened, players don’t immediately adjust. They need to have time to find counters or alternatives or simply adjust how they play against it. That process can take weeks for top players and even longer for more casual players. Until those options have been exhausted, you can’t really comment on whether a particular build is truly imbalanced or to what extent.

Third, players dislike rapid change as much as they hate overly sluggish change. When various abilities on one’s character do something different each week, it’s extremely frustrating. There needs to be time for them to remain in a comfort zone.

A 1-2 month time frame is best. 3-4 weeks is enough time to have a reasonably good idea if a build is too strong a decent idea of what the particular strengths are. Another month is a reasonable time to formulate changes, share them with the community for feedback, and test them.

WoW balance was always an issue that contributed to the lukewarm reception of RBGs, partly because they tried to balance too many skills and specs across too many formats (PvE dungeons, PvE raids, 2v2 team deathmatch, 3v3 team deathmatch, CTF, conquest), and also because they had to deal with gear scaling.

In order to balance an MMORPG, you usually have to do the following, most of which ANet has done:
- Use small-scale formats where one mistake or tiny delay won’t decide a match.
- Focus on one format to start, preferably where not all character skills can be easily quantified (map mobility, etc).
- Do not allow stats on gear to change over time.
- Don’t overreact to something becoming popular. Give the community time to find counters and see how bad it actually is and where the true problem lies.
- At the same time, don’t wait too long to react or under-react to a problem. Not doing enough is almost as bad as constant knee-jerk changes.
- Don’t let key roles for certain classes be too weak for too long. This is more for games with very rigid character specializations or roles.