Guild Wars 2

The ruins and the buff were a good idea to address zerg balling. It breaks up the terrain and gives incentive to break into smaller groups. It also works as something besides a fort to trade. One serve has more PPT and defends while another has stronger players from the stat boost, giving them more potential to take a PPT lead, but then also forfiet the buff by not defending it.

It does not address the problem of coverage being far more important than anything else. It just makes that problem worse. But it was already pretty bad. However, complaining that a change doesn’t fix something it wasn’t intended to fix is a bit silly.

Where’s the incentive to try against the odds in WvW when you know you can’t win due to coverage? I can go do PvE to make money or sPvP if I want an even competition.

Obtena, you’re doing it wrong. Berserker’s is better for any realistically achievable stat numbers. What you’re forgetting to do is factor in the loss of power when you have the higher crit chance + crit damage. With more precision, you crit more often, but the loss of powers means less damage per crit.

In the berserker’s set, you have +4% damage from power, so we’ll call that a 1.04 multiplier from power. To calculate the effective bonus from criticals, it’s 1.04 * 1.622 = 1.687

In the assassin’s set, you don’t have the +4% damage from power, so that’s only a 1.00 multiplier from power. To calculate the effective bonus from criticals it’s 1.00 * 1.677 = 1.677

Berserker’s wins.

If your crit chance is terrible and you need to increase it, Assassin may be worthwhile. Otherwise, Berserker is clearly the better choice.

On-crit effects are not enough to justify Assassin’s gear. Practically all on-crit effects have an internal cooldown. Their uptime will approach the maximum asymptotically; in other words, the return on uptime per crit chance quickly gets less and less after a large initial growth.

Deified.7520:

I try to watch the twitch views, but I just get bored while watching. It’s just that its boring to watch. There isn’t a TON of strategy involved with the game mode.

Actually, there’s a good deal of strategy with conquest. The problem is that it’s mostly at the map level, not the node level. It includes exploiting open nodes, moving people around for offense/defense, scouting, etc. The top teams understand this and their team comps and playstyle reflect that. The others just fight on nodes.

However, what you see most often in casts are the node fights, which are largely unintelligible – just a mass of particle effects and you’d hardly ever notice if someone went down if the casters didn’t call it out. Not to mention, constant switching between fights and viewpoints just increases the confusion for viewers.

The fast pace and lack of downtime in conquest also prevents casters from switching to the higher level view or analyzing why a move was good or bad or what a team is going to be doing at a high level.

The largest peak viewer number I’ve seen for a GW2 tPvP stream was 5000.

GW2 won’t make it as an e-sport in the near future, and maybe not ever even with a lot of work. Like pretty much every MMO before it that tried, the character combat is just too confusing and fast-paced for the average viewer.

However, it can be a great PvP game with some work. In particular, timing of skills having more impact and improving telegraphing.

Sunday was also some League of Legends championship and Dreamhack (Starcraft2).

Daecollo.9578:

I’ve noticed a pattern lately…

Everyone uses the same Traits.

Everyone uses the same Runes.

Everyone uses the same Sigils.

Everyone uses the same Skills.

I partly blame the amulets and rigid stat selection. You can’t make an offensive power build with toughness, so you have to have defensive cooldowns. If you don’t have strong ones, that blocks the build from ever working.

The condition-heavy meta is also partly to blame. Anti-condition traits and abilities are limited compared to counters to power builds, which limits what you can run.

What limits a lot of runes is their 6-piece bonus being awful or their 4-piece bonus being an unreliable or useless proc (5% chance to get 1 stack of might when hit, really?). Or in the case of Rune of Strength, the 6-piece bonus doesn’t work. If the numbers were tweaked slightly, you could probably make another 5 rune sets instantly viable.

Yes, but you watch TV or eat a sandwich while in melee dodging? Those ranged campers can!

Still a bad idea. You need to be able to spike with condition damage. That’s fine. It’s just way too easy to do it now. For non-damaging conditions, the ones that a build has are key to that build. If you all of a sudden say “you can’t apply your condition” it really breaks some builds. So teams will have to build around a fixed number of conditions, limiting compositions.

showatt.9413:

Does it really? By capping I’m not saying we should have no more than 4 condition or something. I’m saying having 15+ conditions on you at any given time is a bit too much, and there needs to be a cap.

What are you even talking about? There’s only 12 conditions in the game, 4 of which stack intensity (Bleed, Vulnerability, Confusion, Torment).

You can’t type the number of condition types. That’s just silly. If you significantly limit the number of stacks for intensity-stacking conditions, then that does limit team compositions. You can’t have significant bleed or vulnerability stacking compositions because you’ll hit a cap.

And really, even a necro isn’t going to have an average of more than 10 stacks of bleed on you and many of their other conditions don’t last long. Only bleed, burning, and poison persist and account for most of their damage. Yet they still kill you.

The problem is the rate of condition application, in particular burning and how long some last. This is on a profession by profession basis.

I like Dirame.8521’s idea. Make pet-centric utility skills. It gets around the balance issue of adding an extra ability and makes the risk/reward component optional.

Even then, there are better things to address. A lot of abilities across all professions lack depth, particularly weapon abilities. It’s a better use of developer time to address those first.

I thought this was a pretty good stream, other than players re-asking questions multiple times. A lot posters here are not understanding the developer side or taking things out of context. And I agree with Lordrosicky.5813, the players provided next to no benefit.

On the topic of skill ceiling vs complexity, the developers have a better point. First, you can’t just balance for the top. Balance has to be reasonable for the average and slightly above average players too. If you want to add skill complexity that requires good execution with good reward, then you often have to bring down the rest in order for there to be a penalty for poor execution. With the ranger pet question, if they made a second pet ability, it either has to be bland in order to not break balance or they have to tone down other aspects such that the new ability doesn’t overpower them at high levels of play. Right now, there are other things that can be tweaked first.

However, I will disagree with the devs and say that their testers are somewhat lacking in skill and mechanical ability. Or that ANet is intentionally low-balling. Maybe instead of adding lots of people to test servers, release early balance notes so that players can point out things to test.

If you cap boons or conditions significantly lower than they are currently, it limits team composition.

Conditions and condition damage are fine for most of the game. There are a few specs of certain professions that are too good with condition damage. It’s not the fault of condition damage, it’s because those specs apply burning and other damaging conditions at too high a rate. Tone down the rate of condition application and it’s fine.

Outside of condition damage, you need to address power damage bursts. This issue is mostly because power builds have no stat option for survivability and damage. It’s either full glass or too much defense and not enough damage. Amulet stats are just too rigid.

Some people just don’t understand how “high level” PvE is played in this game. It’s a total joke when executed well. Everyone runs full damage gear and builds and it just shreds everything because mobs don’t ever avoid damage. When everyone is coordinated and running full damage in a dungeon group, mobs die so fast that survivability barely matters. When you do need survivability, you just time dodges/evades/blocks properly (something most people still can’t do) or cheese the content.

However, in relatively difficult dungeons (ones you can’t do asleep like CoF path1), that method falls apart quickly if people don’t know how to avoid damage, don’t all run heavy damage builds, or don’t use CC well on trash. The longer it takes to kill things, the more survivability stats and traits matter, and the group as a whole shifts that way. Yes, it does make the dungeon longer, but for the average player, it also makes it less frustrating because they’re not constantly dying when they miss dodges or don’t cheese an encounter.

For WvW, it really depends on what you’re doing. Are you roaming by yourself or in a small group looking to gank, looking to do outnumbered fights, are part of a zerg, etc?

In a larger group when you’re front-lining, you want the survivability of AH and honor traits as well as the condition clear. Let the full DPS players in the back such as staff elementalist pump out the damage. But you don’t need full survivability stats since a properly coordinated zerg has lots of group healing and CC.

If you’re roaming looking to gank, you’re in a full damage setup and you pick only fights you know you can win and survive. This is somewhat difficult for guardian because the professions doesn’t have many ways to run from a fight.

In you’re looking for outnumbered fights, as a small or medium sized group, you need survivability and group support. You could go heavy damage, but guardians have few abilities to let them temporarily disengage in a longer fight (things like stealth).

1. Can we get more stat customization. The amulets feel very restrictive, pulling you toward extreme glass cannon or sponge with no damage output. In addition, many of my casual PvP friends are frustrated that they can’t carry their PvE/WvW build into sPvP because of rigid stat selection and they end up not playing sPvP. Maybe split it into two rings? And change the Knight’s stat to be the same as in PvE.

2. Will we see newer PvE runes and sigils added to sPvP? In particular, the ones from Queen’s Gauntlet (obviously balance perplexity first) and the former magic find runes.

3. Can you give any additional details about the reward system revamp that was hinted at? Will it make playing rated matches worthwhile compared to hot join, including the downtime between rated matches?

4. Will reward revamp include a revamp of the scoreboard? It doesn’t really reflect team contribution and encourages behavior contrary to playing conquest well. For example, multiple people sitting on an uncontested point until it caps.

Hahaha, no.

Guardian is the premier bunker because of unparalleled group support and multiple sources of group stability. Not because of a healing skill that actually takes skill and timing to be effective.

By your logic, we should also remove Endure Pain because OMG warriors can 100blades while not taking direct damage!

If you’re having trouble vs. Shelter, it’s a “learn to play” issue. Don’t have everyone unload everything into the guardian at once. They WILL block it. When you see the highly telegraphed shelter animation, just stop attacking for a couple seconds and do something else like reset or get a better position. It’s not hard.

djaddi.2780:

The important part is the rest: What Jon is essentially saying is that it is pointless to list all those problems (like Xeph did) over and over again. ArenaNet knows about these problems already. What ArenaNet actually needs are not lists of existing problems, they need solutions – or, in Jon’s words, details.

Sorry. The job of the developers is to come up with the solutions to the problems.

Players are notoriously bad at identifying what to change to fix a problem, nor do they have the tools and most don’t have the skill to adequately test it. In addition to that, developers often have a design philosophy that players may not follow or agree with.

Using spirit rangers as an example, players hate them. They’ve listed the survivability (particularly evades), NPC clutter, damage procs, the Rabid stat combo and other things as the problem. The developer needs to figure out which, if any, are the true cause and address it properly. One of the developers said that spirit ranger does require skill, which is true to an extent. But on the other hand, it’s too easy for someone to set up the spec, know next to nothing about how to play it, and do well at most levels of play.

Here’s one thing:

If you want to have successful competitive PvP, you need to have staff dedicated to PvP balance. They need to be pretty good at PvP and be able to look through complaints to figure out which abilities to tweak. But also, have the insight into whether to react or wait for the community to adjust. Poor balance is what kills competitive PvP faster than anything else.

The problem isn’t really the damage of conditions; it’s how quickly they can be applied or re-applied. This is mostly due to procs, especially burning procs, which allow you to stack a lot of damaging conditions within a few actions. I’m guessing there were added a nice bonus for power damage builds, so the dilema is how do you balance for procs on condi damage users vs. non-condi damage users. Do you make condition damage setups non-viable unless they take these proc traits by removing conditions from base spells and weapons? Do you completely gut the traits?

It stops new conditions from being applied for its duration, but doesn’t stop existing conditions from dealing damage.

It doesn’t matter how many builds people say are viable. What makes a meta-game good or bad is whether it’s fun to play and has depth of skill. The current meta has neither.

One of the things in favor of Pure of Voice is that it’s currently bugged and removes two conditions per shout plus one more with soldier runes (for a total of 3). No other build can reach that level of condition removal.

Vulnerability is fine. It’s just that most abilities which apply it suck at stacking it or last for a very short duration.

1. Rough Balance Get rid of builds that have an unhealthy effect on the meta-game. Abilities that make some builds or professions slightly better than others can be addressed later, as long as it doesn’t dumb down the game.
2. Better Rewards While the current reward system is fine for people that PvP just to PvP, there needs to be something to draw in other players or to keep casual PvPers around longer. Dangling a carrot in front of people is a great way to bolster the numbers for solo and team queues.
3. Better Stat Customization The lack of mix-and-match with the amulet really hurts build potential. You can’t pick up a little toughness in a power damage build, which could go a long way. In order to get precision in a power damage build, you have to be fully spec’ed into your precision line or go with a berserker amulet.
4. Fine Balance Reduce abilities or combinations that are a little too good, improve abilities that are weak, and hopefully open up more build variety.

Buy a bunch of chests, open them, salvage the gear, make dyes in the PvP mystic forge, hope you get lucky.

Guardian bunker brings team support, which is why they’re usually a center bunker. In particular, multiple sources of group stability are something no other bunker brings.

For side bunkers, they’re often builds that can survive until help arrives and win 1v1.

I just hopped on my necro, auto-attacked with scepter, and got the achievement without thinking.

I noticed with guardian scepter that #2 would make oozes pop out next to Subject 7, which made finishing it impossible. Try circle-strafing a little bit closer so that the oozes don’t hop too far. At the end, you have to switch to something with some burst like greatsword and hope there aren’t oozes in the way. You probably also want to change up your spec for this fight to pick up right-handed strength and possibly scepter mastery in Zeal.

TGSlasher.1458:

I can complete all parts of the daily apart from play 3 games within 1 game without standing on the point with 3 other people.

I’m also usually the highest Neutraliser, Defender, Assaulter, Reviver and all the other tops that I miss. But I usually have the least points, because playing the gametype equals less points then playing team death match in the middle

Scoreboard needs fixed to reflect actual gameplay. In particular, the defender bonus should be way higher.

Honestly, necromancers don’t bug me nearly as much as spirit rangers and sword/dagger thieves. Necros can pump out a lot of damage, but very few know how to survive well, so they can be focused down quickly. Spirit ranger is near impossible to kill 1v1, can kill most other players quickly, and makes allies stronger. Sword/dagger thief just doesn’t die and will constantly boon strip and forces you to guard points or risk losing them to their trap recall.

Bunker guardian doesn’t do too well in solo queue. Bunker guardian can last a while, but it can’t kill anything and will eventually lose. It’s set up to hold out until help arrives and then give support to allies. However, you rarely get help quickly in solo queue and just die from attrition. It’s usually better to run a dueling build or OP spirit ranger.

It’s a legal issue and nothing else. I’m guessing it has to do with laws about internet gambling, which vary from country to country. The laws are often so broad that they can be read to include video game tournaments. ANet doesn’t want to be involved in a legal dispute with that, so they had to restrict participation to countries where they can’t be sued.

When a team is disqualified, it’s standard practice to replace them with the next highest ranked team from their bracket, which would be Car Crash.

Here’s a couple things to consider:
1. Abilities that don’t proc often are annoying for players. It’s part of “bad randomness”. You don’t want to reduce the proc chance too much.
2. Spirits seem weak as a base and Spiritual Knowledge seems very strong as it doubles the proc chance. Should the base chance increase and the trait bonus decrease?
3. Should the effects of each spirit be toned down but the proc chance remain high? For example, 1 or 2 seconds of burning on the Sun Spirit proc instead of 3?
4. Would it be interesting or useful to have a trait split where you can get stronger stationary spirits maybe with a lower cooldown (bunker) or weaker mobile spirits maybe with slightly better effects (damage)?
5. Are spirits the sole problem? Or is the problem partly due to the ranger’s multitude of evades and dodges?

Disqualified because one of the members didn’t meet the eligibility requirements for residency.

There’s another thread on the forums that was started when the near gear came out:
https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/professions/guardian/Celestial-armor-what-to-use-with-them/

They’re good for an all-around build, but you lack enough power to be very offensive. They can be used to supplement a balanced build, but save about half your stat points to bulk up key stats like power, precision, toughness. Though with 30 in valor, you rarely need extra toughness.

Allowing conditions to crit fixes anything how? Most conditions builds are running Rabid amulet already, so they have a decently high crit chance. It just further hurts hybrids or power builds that pick up a little extra damage from conditions.

The WoW arena team system had a lot of problems in 5v5. For most, it was impossible to get the same five people online and able to play at any time week after week. Even with extra slots on the team roster, there was still a lot of team-hopping. That’s partly why they switched 3v3 to the primary format. Sure, fixed 5v5 team rosters are great for the very top, but for the majority of players, the current system is more inviting. If it’s possible to have both the current system and fixed rosters, that would be ideal.

If you want to add PvP-only rewards, then the scoring system and the dailies need changed. Both encourage bad play, in particular the “Capture 3 points” Daily. Multiple people sit on a point until it caps so they get credit, which is the complete opposite of what you want to do in a competitive setting. Defending a point has poor rewards compared to zerging around or just fighting other players in the middle of nowhere.

No, it’s about viewing players as terrible if they don’t do every single thing possible to shave a few seconds off a dungeon run.

Bash.7291:

Exedore.6320:

Vulnerability on symbols in Zeal is a perfectly fine mechanic, but the vulnerability applied needs to last considerably longer. I would say 3-4 seconds per application instead of the 1 second now.

Currently each application of vulnerability does last for 3 seconds, however that means at any given time only 3 stacks of vulnerability can exist on something per symbol. (even if the symbol is a longer duration, the stacks will slowly fall off just like with the might stacks from EM.) at most, you can have 3 symbols up at a time leading to 9 stacks of vulnerability, but even that would require perfect execution of a casting symbol, switching to GS to use wrath, and then getting knocked below 25% health for Zealot’s speed to activate. Even though symbols are AoE and you could hit 5 people with vulnerability, the amount is almost completely moot due to the low duration and the fact that only 2 weapons can “spam” symbols.

Like Brutaly said, if it was like necro staff where one was up every few seconds, but every other skill on the staff was a symbol too, the traits could make more sense, but right now it is just a weak trait.

It never seemed to last 3 seconds in practice. But my point was that it needs to last much longer than it does. So lets say it lasted 6 seconds instead of 3. For Symbol of Wrath with 4 ticks, that’s 4% damage for the entire group for 6 seconds every 20 seconds. Averaged out, it’s 1.2% damage per player (6% for a dungeon group), and it doesn’t count condition duration from the zeal line. That wouldn’t be too bad for a 15 point minor trait, at least in PvE. The issue that you run into is group vs. personal benefit and movement in PvP. It’s a big increase for a dungeon group, but it’s not that great for yourself or for a small PvP group. Perhaps it’s better to buff it but make it a major trait so that PvE’ers can take it, but PvP’ers can take something else.

I’d also like to note that we shouldn’t make things like necro staff. Necro staff is in a tough spot to balance because it’s very spammy, but leaves you nothing to do once you spam your marks.

On the other hand, you’re talking about slotting one skill to do two packs of mobs 20 seconds faster. The V-shaped attack is incredibly easy to avoid and if the 100blades warriors stand behind the elemental, it will never hit them. From a PUG perspective, seeing who can avoid attacks will tell you how smoothly the run will go.

If it was something like the end boss of the volcano fractal or the harpies in the crazed asura fractal, then I’d agree.

You have to be careful about over-specializing trait lines toward two-handed and one-handed weapons. If you go too far, it limits weapon combinations, which limits variety.

Two-handed weapon specialization does make sense in Honor. Staff and hammer both have many support-oriented abilities and Honor is the group support line. Valor is more for personal survival.

Vulnerability on symbols in Zeal is a perfectly fine mechanic, but the vulnerability applied needs to last considerably longer. I would say 3-4 seconds per application instead of the 1 second now.

I don’t believe it’s the same. Unless you’re on a very good team, it’s hard to do that. And again, decay takes care of people with low numbers of games with a high win:loss ratio.

What exactly do you want for it to not be a joke? Do you want a minimum number of games played?

Solo queue started two days ago. The ratings are very unstable at the moment, so what you posted is expected. Give it a few weeks and it will be more reasonable. The rating decay will take care of the 11-0 people. Either they play and risk falling or fall because of decay.

I’ve been doing solo queue all evening and I only saw one game with less than 10 people.

It takes more effort to organize a team and there’s much more coordination involved. Solo queue right now is partly luck of the draw.

Actually, the traits lines are pretty well thought-out. The guardian focuses on group-based play, so some lines are for more group with some self-benefit and others are self with some group. They also all cater to different playstyles. Some traits just aren’t good though (most of Zeal).

Scepter is pretty good as-is. If you use it long range, expect #1 to miss, just like other projectile weapons. Short range it works fine. It’s DPS is pretty high.

Sword #1 chain part 3 goes up in damage. It’s 3 attacks and each attack hits multiple enemies. However, it’s a very narrow cone with longer range compared to a wide cone at short range. I would complain about #3 on the sword not being useful except to block projectiles.

Guardian HP is pretty good even though it’s low. We have a lot of passive damage reduction and healing over time to compensate.

Guardian mobility could use a boost, I’ll agree there. But doing things other than support is very possible. It’s just not as common and the builds aren’t as obvious as support/survivability.

You’re supposed to use squad chat!

Ya, WvW players have been complaining about this for months. Maybe they’ll finally fix it.

Daecollo.9578 #1 forum troll.

The June 25th patch invalidates your points as much as it supports them. Traits and weapon and skill changes gave professions new abilities. It made a few of them too powerful. That seems like it’s the opposite of watering stuff down. You’re just upset about leg specialist.

Knox.8962:

Virtues has a lot of good ideas, but it kinda stumbles on itself. It’s also too support oriented. Permeating Wrath is a strong trait, but it basically keeps you from using the virtue that you’ve invested in. Shielded mind is certainly a useful trait, but the long cooldown on VoC keeps it from being the kind of trait that you really spec to get.

The support-oriented theme isn’t that bad. The problem with the Virtues trait line is that it tries to do two things that run counter to each other:
1. Improve passive virtues.
2. Effects for activating virtues, including cooldown reduction.

It would be so much better if it focused only on effects for activating virtues. The passive-only ones could be moved to a different line.

Forums ate my reply earlier.

I’ve seen quite a few full DPS guardian builds that use 10 or 20 in Zeal and 25 or 30 in Radiance. That gets them 20-25% increased damage pretty much all the time. And there are still some trait points to spare for vigor on crit and +250 toughness from 10 points into Valor. Many dungeon paths, in particular CoF path1, can be done without much survivability or group utility other than damage buffs.

Nothing is wrong with having toughness and crit damage in the same trait line. It’s just that Altruistic Healing is just that good compared to survivability from alternate trait lines, especially in dungeons.