Guild Wars 2

Most of that was legit. He could have been using the windowed mode screen width manipulation to hit inside the tower.

I have yet to CTF work in an MMORPG. It always results in specialized roles where certain classes are required and stalemates as two immortal tanks hold their teams’ flag. We’ve already seen some of the issues on Spirit Watch that resulted in all its special and inconsistent rules for orb carriers (you can leap but not teleport forward). And people complain non-stop about bunkers. Yet if you do CTF, each team now has a bunker with a flag, except now they don’t have to stay in a small circle. If you add a “takes extra damage” debuff, then you’re just hurting the non-takes even more and giving preference to tanks that avoid damage rather than reduce it.

The reason CTF works in an FPS is because the flag carrier, no matter how tanky, is always vulnerable, almost everyone is ranged, and even if there are different classes and weapons, the differences are minor compared to an RPG. If you look at the Wintersday PvP game, it worked pretty well because you were limited to three possible roles that balanced survivability, damage, control, and mobility.

61 changes, but maybe 10 that are actually any good and most of those are quality of life improvements. Nothing would significantly improve WvW gameplay and a few actually hurt it.

First, just leave off commander changes (other than adding guild tag to map UI). Few people use squads because there’s little reason to do it. PUGs just group up on a single commander into a giant ball and follow the pin. It’s the most efficient way to do things because numbers are the biggest increase to power. Fix that and then you can improve the commander UI.

The PvE aspect, including rallying is fine. They just need to clean up places in borderlands that have too many or out of place mobs (Griffins at SW supply) or ones with annoying abilities. They talked about removing the borderlands lake in the future, so I’d just leave that alone for now.

WvW rewards are great, but shouldn’t necessarily be for placement. In most matchups, placement is decided in the first couple days, so there’s little incentive to come back. You want to encourage keeping the game active, so the rewards should be based on score accumulated by your server like the current bonuses (which few people notice).

The WvW players have realized all of these problems for a long time, so it’s not enlightening to us. The real question we would like to see answered is “How will you fix it?”

The only big change that we’ve seen recently to influence the playstyle of WvW was the short period between the arrow cart buff and its nerf against siege. During that time, a handful of players could defend against that large, uncoordinated zerg and slow the coordinated zergs.

Maguuma likes to complain. They all show up on reset, play into the morning and then retreat to the forums for the rest of the week complaining about coverage, “zergs” (which is anything more than 5 people to them), etc.

Dragonbrand’s SEA coverage is our strongest asset, but our NA forces aren’t anything to laugh at either.

Is the problem the total amount or the rate?

I find the rate is more of an issue, especially because it stacks duration. It just doesn’t fit well in the current spike damage environment.

Almost every warrior around plays a full DPS build. I’m not surprised they die so quickly. But having high damage and low survivability is balanced. What’s broken about warriors is that there’s nothing else going for them. ANet is trying to make other trait lines and skills viable so that builds can be more balanced between damage and survivability. They’re not going to make a full-on damage build also one of the best survivability builds.

“Playing developer” refers to listing specific changes that should be made. Identifying something that doesn’t work is the easy part. Figuring out why it doesn’t work and fixing it without making it too good or breaking something else is the hard part. When most people list these changes, they do it in a vacuum. They don’t consider uses outside of a narrow scope, or they don’t do a good job with the “why” process. Pointing out these errors is a normal part of a peer review.

Well, in comparison to other professions, guardians are pretty good. Guardians have many builds that work, are desirable in PvE, PvP, and WvW, and for people that like the concept of the class, it’s generally fun to play. It’s not surprising that people are hesitant to make significant changes considering the possible outcome of ending up like other professions are currently.

But I would wager that the reason you see a lot of those comments is because people on the forums try to play developers and are bad at it. Most lack a deep understanding of many aspects of the game and why things work the way they do, or they disregard the concept of the class and want it to be able to do everything brainlessly. When posting these suggestions, the negative aspects are often ignored, so those are often the first to be brought to light.

Perhaps the reason you don’t see it on other profession forums is that they have so many more things that aren’t working and it’s easy for everyone to point those out, compared to more minor aspects with Guardians. For guardians, we pretty much all agree that the Zeal trait line needs improvement. But outside of that, everything is debatable, like the role and effectiveness of the scepter. So we have debates (or yelling contests).

Danicco.3568:

Exedore.6320:

Compared to other professions which are good in tPvP (ranger, mesmer, elementalist, engineer), guardian is even or at a slight disadvantage.

I play Ele and Mesmer as well, and I disagree with you… I find my Guardian easily the best for PvP, it’s much easier holding points and require much less from me than when I play something else.

I could be biased though, if I play better with my Guardian than my Ele/Mesmer, but I don’t think that’s the case.

It’s your personal bias. However, guardian does have the benefit of being more forgiving of mistakes than any other profession. If you goof up a dodge, Aegis covers for you. You have lots of stability so you don’t need to deal with CC as much. It doesn’t mean it’s better.

You’re complaining about re-doing traits, runes, weapons, sigils, and amulet? That stuff takes a couple minutes to change and there are multiple websites that can help you archive it. The real issue is what Laserbolt said. Anyone can pull a build from a web posting, but being able to play it well takes time, even if you’ve played it in the past.

The real reasons you don’t see build variety are:
1. Most players don’t like to experiment and just copy what top players are doing. The line of thinking is “if top players are doing it, it must be the best!” and “if you’re not playing that, you’re bad.”
2. This is a team game. Your build needs to fit into a team build where there is a balance of mobility, burst damage, defenses, bunker, etc. Most builds can’t be substituted 1-for-1. So if I had a DPS guardian, how would I fit that into the team? They have better group support than some DPS, but they can’t get around the map quickly. So they don’t pair up well with an offensive thief that can zip across the map.
3. Teams with coordination can beat uncoordinated teams using sub-par builds. It’s hard to tell if a build is good or bad unless you’re facing an equally skilled team.

Caedmon.6798:

How you can say that weakness is useless….. ?

In PvE, it’s fine. In PvP, it’s of marginal benefit because anyone going for damage is going to have a high crit chance and high crit damage or is a condition build. That means the average damage reduction of weakness drops to under 10% from 20-25% in PvE.

Sil.4560:

How about the classes like warrior, which are at an inherent disadvantage compared to guardian due to poor balancing?

This is a warrior problem, not a guardian problem. Warrior loses to practically everything and people that play tPvP know it. ANet has already said they’re going to be buffing warrior in future patches. Compared to other professions which are good in tPvP (ranger, mesmer, elementalist, engineer), guardian is even or at a slight disadvantage.

I wouldn’t take that tone just yet. Casters need to manage a lot more than justand are still learning what to cast and camera management. When they have to do so much, it’s possible they’d overlook some things. Also, Blu was doing double-duty as an administrator for the tournament.

However, they could pick up a thing or two from other sports (not just e-sports). Usually when you cast in a group, you have one person to catch all the depth and explain all the nuances. The other person provides a broader view and color commentary.

Guardians have seen a few nerfs which have done a decent job of balancing them. They’re still good and a part of most teams, but players have learned how to combat them. What the OP is seeing is the fact that guardian is easy to pick up and perform well in a bunker role, whereas their counters require a bit more skill or teamwork to execute.

1. More amulet stat choices and stat customization. Currently most builds are forced into full DPS or full bunker.
2. Build diversity. Fix awful trait lines to give compelling choices. Most professions have cookie cutter builds because there’s no good alternative, not because one build is so good.
3. Improve spectator interface. There are too many flashy graphics. You can’t tell which team a ground effects or other abilities belong to or even players. For example, only khylo, make treb fire colored based on the team. Boons and conditions are really important, but the icons are small.

A lot of people want more game modes, but I’m going to side with ANet and say that Conquest is clearly the best game mode for GW2. Deathmatch/Arena limits variety because of the simplicity, and capture the flag quickly becomes stale when you have a bunker flag carrier on each team holding their opponent’s flag and can’t be killed. If there was more build variety, you’d see a lot more gameplay variety in conquest.

I would say that lack of a middle of the road solution for power builds is the problem. Right now, all offensive power builds are forced into glass cannon stats. If they could drop some offensive stats from the berserker’s amulet (or even the vitality) and pick up 300-400 toughness (10-20% damage reduction depending on base armor), they would be in a much better spot.

The strength of bunkers isn’t the stats; it’s the traits and abilities. Guardian traits give them lots of extra healing sources, cleansing and stability. This is similar for bunker elementalists and rangers. If necromancers were better, bunker guardians would have a lot of trouble.

The big problem I’m seeing is that you rely on greatsword or crits to build up your adrenaline initially. That means your initial damage output is low and you can’t fire off a long combustive shot to start or take advantage of increased damage based on adrenaline level.

I agree with BurrTheKing about conditions. In an offensive build, you’re better off removing them completely. I would include the movement effects with that as well. You can take the 10 out of the Defense line and pick up Mobile Strikes and Restorative Strength.

• You shouldn’t dismiss “Shake It Off!” so quickly. While balanced stance is good against multiple stuns in quick succession, I found that my problem was stuns which were spread out. For that reason, the shorter cooldown stun break was preferable.
• Healing Surge heals for more than mending when you use it at full adrenaline and you already have condition removal with warhorn. It can also be used to give you adrenaline if you don’t need the extra healing.
• The main reason to use axe in this build is Eviscerate. An extra 250-300 damage (if I did the math correctly) in one burst is significant. Warhorn #4 does a good enough job of removing movement impairing effects.
• Good point on the sigils sharing cooldowns. It may seem bad on dummies, but I’ll have to pay attention to it in actual gameplay.

I think you’re approaching this from playing it with soldier stats and not berserker stats. Running with a defensive stat set means you kill slower, so you need more ways to sustain yourself. However, warriors are pretty bad when it comes to sustaining themselves in combat unless they’re full traited for it. In comparison when you run with a very offensive stat set, you put out a lot more pressure. That causes opponents to play defensively, and it makes your defenses go much further with less.

I tried longbow builds with soldier stats before and it just doesn’t work well. Eventually your cooldowns run out and your opponent isn’t dead or his allies come to help. Using berserker stats, I can get the kill and leave or have time to out-of-combat regen and wait for cooldowns.

I have a slight variant to the OP’s build that I’ve been playing around with, but I’ve yet to try it out in tournaments:
http://gw2skills.net/editor/?fIAQNBjODbkzp1NFy5hJOAYUUUQqHthXcJFlxGA-TsAg0CtISSlkLJTSyksJNsYZxWEA

I don’t find frenzy useful for the build because other than the two longbow skills, nothing has a long channel. And the longbow attacks are done at range where you’re safer from interruption. I use Berserker Stance because you want to always have adrenaline handy, and unlike Signet of Fury, if you time it right, you can split the adrenaline gain over multiple burst abilities. “Shake It Off!” serves the same purpose as Balanced Stance, but I found “Shake It Off!” to be more useful with the shorter cooldown and alternate use as a condition removal. And I use Axe Mastery because I never found that I was healing to break movement effects – I would always use warhorn.

For rune set, I still need to look into that further. Pack gave raw stats for damage and an increase in swiftness duration. Staying mobile with swiftness is extremely important for this playstyle.

I also played around with mace instead of axe for extra CC, but the damage is more valuable currently because offensive warriors can’t sustain a fight very well.

Throw Bola has an advantage over Bull’s Charge in that it’s half the cooldown and Immobilize works on players that have stability, like bunker guardians. In addition, you don’t want to go into melee too often, so staying at range with bolas is preferable. Constant swiftness as well as dodges from Vigor and Building Momentum help with escaping. You can shoot Combustive Shot behind you and when it lands, it gives you 50% endurance.

You only want one “on weapon swap” sigil. Most have a cooldown of 10 seconds, and you’ll be swapping faster than that because of Fast Hands.

The bigger difference is that the longer PvP daily took a lot more time and active play to complete. It was no longer an easy alternative to the PvE daily for a laurel, so the people looking for an easy laurel didn’t hop into sPvP. With the easy daily back, they’re doing that again instead of the PvE one.

It’s in the patch notes:
- Reverted a change to PvP dailies that increased their difficulty.

My guess is that a lot of people complained about it. The only problem I had with the new daily was the capture points portion, which encouraged bad play.

Warhorn is already a good weapon, especially with the Quick Breathing trait.

The orb on Spirit Watch is often not spawning. I wouldn’t be surprised if they removed it from the tournament rotation until that is fixed.

A big problem with Zeal is that for all the focus it has on symbols, it’s missing the “Larger Symbols” trait, which is key to making them useful offensively. That should replace the 5pt minor trait.

Then, instead of something with CC like cripple, which doesn’t fit the guardian theme, you can have a major trait to create a Symbol of Swiftness when you get CC’ed.

Harrier.9380:

This could work if there were stat limits placed on how much atribute types (offensive/defensive) you could use. Say if you get vitality and toughness, you’re unable to also pick healing power. Also a limit on stats itself, so you can’t go something like 1200 power + 700 precision…

I can see that working, though the rules might grow complicated. You need a total point cap for what can be spent among toughness, vitality, and healing power. You’d also need a maxium for a primary stat and secondary stats. However, you then have a weird ruleset for two “half-primary” stats where you found two combos where two of the three stats are the same and the primary of them is switched. You would also have to ditch the celestial stat because the ruleset for that is way too complicated or it would be a special rule.

Shawnbuell.8407:

Do you like playing the game? Do you like watching people play at a high level? Those are the only two things necessary to make a potential esport.

This.

Patches and bug fixes help this along. How often they arrive and in what quantity doesn’t matter as long as the gameplay remains exciting.

On the spectator end, the major problem I’m seeing is that it’s just too chaotic right now. In part, I think this is due to shoutcaster inexperience (observer mode has only been out for a couple weeks). The camera bounces around a lot, some of the action is skipped, the casters can’t tell what’s going on immediately at times. Another part may be due to the meta game, though with more media, it can innovate faster.

On the player end, I think the player-base needs to be pushed toward tournament or tournament format games more. 8v8 hinders as much as it helps and allowing so many rule combinations with custom arenas makes the problem worse, not better. The zerg style player seems to drive away many potential players.

slingblade.1437:

Just give us an amulet that works like the trait lines: you have a certain number of points to spend, and you can spend them any way you like.

No. Then you’ll have bunkers with Toughness, Vitality, and Healing Power as their stats. Even in the PvE stat combos, you still have one offensive stat.

Ya, you over-think things. The sPvP mechanic is pretty good as-is.

- Many heals (not necessarily heal skills) are already group or position based. Anything with a water field is huge for team-play and comb-based play.

- Combo fields are already a very important part of gameplay. Fire fields for might stacking, light for condition removal and retaliation, and water for healing. The system doesn’t need as big of a change as you think. Some of the weaker field types just need improved and the relative power of blast finishers vs. other kinds may need tweaking.

- The conquest concept is fine as-is, but some of the maps need fixed. Ideally, all nodes should be viable to hold for either team. However, some maps are too linear, allowing the center node to easily defend the close node. As a result, the fight stagnates and becomes lop-sided. Legacy of the Foefire shows this a lot, whereas Temple of the Silent Storm has all the points constantly being flipped.

- The downed state mechanic is going to stay. It makes bursting down a player more than just stacking damage while at the same time lending some support to squishier builds that get CC locked. It promotes build diversity. However, the downed state may be tweaked and has been in the past. Things like what percent of health you start with when downed, how fast allies revive (currently it’s faster than a stomp), the duration of the downed penalty, and the relative power of downed state #2 skills (vapor form is really good compared to others).

- I agree that certain boons need some changes. Protection is extremely powerful already. If anything, I would reduce the amount of damage reduction. Stability is good and somewhat balanced on its own, but when it can be stacked, it causes problems. However, straight capping boons is not helpful to casual group play; it adds an additional timing aspect that’s too much of a burden. A more targeted approach at offending skills or runes would be better. What exactly is wrong with a player able to have permanent swiftness? They do have to give up something for the mobility increase.

- The condition system is good enough as-is, even with full stack removal. If you use a skill with a longer cooldown that puts up a long condition or lots of stacks, it’s a risk being taken versus condition removal. Abilities that put up conditions often but in small quantities can counter that, but aren’t as easy to spike. That’s balance. What needs adjusted is the amount of condition removal, including group condition removal, and how the quantity allows it to be used carelessly yet still be remain effective. Guardians are your big offender here.

- The weakness condition does need re-evaluated though. It seems to be intended as an offensive version of protection (reduce incoming damage). However, the fact that it only applies to non-criticals really hurts its use in PvP. With 0% chance to crit, it would reduce damage by an average of 25%. In PvE, NPCs usually don’t have a high crit chance, so this works. However, any player that is going to be putting out high direct damage will have a significant amount of critical chance, which is heavily negating the weakness condition.

- Stuns, etc aren’t a big problem from what I’ve seen. There are stun breaks in the game, you can dodge most of the stun skills, and stability negates them. ANet said they’ll be doing a pass over professions to re-evaluate stun breaks on skills. Launch (formerly called blowout) is a bit problematic because you can’t stun break it until you stop moving. Immobilize is far more powerful than most stuns because it prevents dodging and generally lasts longer.

- ANet is already re-balancing thieves. They stated that thieves have too much burst and too little survivability. They want to reduce the former and increase the latter. However, they will always be somewhat bursty.

As an aside, it’s funny how you constantly refer to 100blades as being such a great ability. It’s mediocre if anything. It’s a joke to anyone that knows how to avoid it. The problem is that new or bad players don’t know that and get chewed apart from a relatively easy to use combo. If you watch good warriors, they rarely use 100blades initially and save it for when their opponents have no anti-CC or dodges.

XGhoul.7426:

Fixing class trait lines => Build diversity, not new amulets

Not true at all. A toughness/power/precision amulet would go a long way towards helping many builds which are currently too squishy, but then lack enough offense when using a defensive stat combo like power/toughness/vitality. New stat combos are also relatively simple to add.

In the future, I’d also like to see the amulet stats split so that they’re not so lop-sided. Perhaps 2 rings instead of one amulet to allow greater stat customization.

From playing around with longbow on my warrior, you really want to have at least one trait to increase adrenaline generation. I find Burst Mastery in Discipline is the best at that. Berserker’s Might in Strength is too hard to manage. Furious in Arms is extremely good against multiple targets (it can fill adrenaline in 3-4 seconds), but against single targets doesn’t seem that great.

For runes, Scholar is pretty popular (+10% damage while health is over 90%) and fits with a build like this designed to put out high damage quickly because it will fall over if targeted. You could play around with Pack to get the swiftness duration increase. Staying mobile is extremely important.

I used sword for a while and didn’t like it. Leap is great for mobility, but the sword offers little else. You want to use longbow as much as possible in this build and your swap should be either very defensive or have the power to finish someone off.

It varies by mob. Some mob AI goes for tanky players, some goes for squishy players, some goes for the closest player, etc.

Dhampyr.2104:

Was it actually built? There’s a 2min despawn timer on blueprints before they’re built now – not sure if that means the blueprint has to be built in 2min, or each time you add supply, it resets the timer. We (KH) forgot about that last night, had a few siege blueprints ahem despawn on us while we weren’t paying attention. lol

ANet posted on this, but i’m too lazy to find it.

- When you first drop the build site, it’s a 2 minute despawn timer.
- As soon as supply is used on the build site, it’s a 5 minute despawn timer, refreshed whenever supply is added.
- Once completed, it’s a 30 minute despawn timer, refreshed when used.

If you play well as an individual (knowing when to sidestep, dodge, blind, block, etc) and have a good group (use combo fields, stack boons, CC, rally each other quickly) then you can get away with full berserker stats. For most of us, you want some survivability stats.

It’s awful. For condition damage to be good, you want at least two types of damaging conditions, and usually one of which stacks intensity (Bleed or Confusion).

Shield and focus ability sets are fine as they are. They also fit thematically as guardians are more magic-based whereas warriors are more physical based. In terms of ability effectiveness, Shield of Judgement could use a slight buff in some form, even as little as increasing its damage.

Sword is okay, but could use a little buff to make it more versatile.

I find that the 10 captures takes the longest if I’m playing properly. You only get credit if you’re in the point when it finishes capping, so you often see 3-4 people (in hot join) sitting on a point until it caps when they could spread out and do other things. I’ll instinctively leave points to scout or help another if someone else is capping it and miss credit many times.

20 kills is five kills in each hot join game, and you get credit if you do just a little damage, so it’s not that outlandish.

uberkingkong.8041:

Warriors are fine, if not they are OP right now. Hence why people win tournaments 4 games out of 5 in all warrior team.

Take a look at this video http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lbgVQ7LTYL0

You don’t see any all thief teams or all ranger teams, but you see a lot all warrior teams… I wonder why… Oh yeah they OP that’s why.

No. Just No.

This is an example of organized team of good players beats PUG team. If you watch their last match against an organized team, they get crushed. Sitting on a Couch Gaming also did an all necromancer team for laughs.

Really good listen. Definitely worth it for any guardians interested in sPvP.

The warrior trait “Destruction of the Empowered” is a non-factor currently. They get just as much damage from their other damage-oriented trait lines that works against all targets. The original concern and still the main one is the unblockable CCs coming from Signet of Might’s activation.

If you’re doing hot-join, the daily should only take 33% longer than it did before. Honestly, I think that’s fine given how long on average it takes to do the PvE daily.

The main problem I have with the PvP daily is that it promotes bad playstyles. That’s also a reason why it’s hard to complete in tournaments. In particular, the “Nodes Captured” objective means multiple people sit on a point until it caps in order to get credit, especially at the start of a game, instead of moving to other parts of the map to be useful.

I would add the following that focus on better playstyles:
- Teammate revivals
- Nodes neutralized
- Nodes defended

Adding more damage won’t work because it makes some skills, particularly eviscerate, extremely powerful.

- Reduce cooldown of Burst skills.
- Attacks generate adrenaline faster.

While we’re on the topic, it would be nice if burst skills that are interrupted follow the same cooldown rule as other skills rather than their full cooldown.

The trait itself is fine; it’s the trait line that’s the problem. The stats provided by the trait line and the 25 point minor trait are vastly inferior to other trait lines.

Don’t many GS builds already do 20 in Discipline for Fast Hands (15) and Mobile Strikes (20)? So really, the trade-off isn’t that bad. The main problem with Discipline is that Brawn is so terrible.

Tried out Signet of Might on my warrior. The “Unblockable” is 3 hits, not 3 attacks. So if a warrior uses it and does Earthshaker (leap with overhead swing that does AoE stun) into a group, all 3 stacks will be used.

That means it’s pretty balanced in group play, such as WvW. I’m still a bit worried about sPvP, but at least in small numbers, it will be noticeable.

Well, form what I can tell, Sigil of Energy did not get nerfed and Sigil of Battle is not listed. I recall them being mentioned in the April State of the Game, though. The problem with those two sigils is that they’re just so much better than any others. In particular, Energy makes some hard to kill builds even harder to kill. It it was nerfed, it would probably be a reduction in the amount of endurance returned or make it give Vigor instead.

They’re nerfing Sigil of Energy, so the dodge heal may slide by.

Power is generally equal or better than precision or crit damage when stat budget is equal. You’ll want a certain level of precision is good for maintaining on-crit effects like vigor. However, it’s important to note that some items in PvE are over-budget for crit damage. In particular, jewels like Exquisite Ruby Jewel are the biggest offenders. Ascended rings and back pieces also give a good return. The best way to go about gearing is to fill in those over-budget slots with Berserker stats and use stat combos without crit damage elsewhere.

I don’t particularly like the unblockable change. One attack is okay since it requires the warrior to time it properly. Three attacks just means all hammer warriors mindlessly pop it before doing their CC chain. The result is that warriors can CC without paying attention to anything, but blocking the attacks before required at least some knowledge and proper timing.

The change also makes the block mechanic inconsistent. When you use a block, you know it will always happen. Now you can’t depend on it anymore. The mechanic was already balanced by long cooldowns or other trade-offs.

Also, it’s near impossible to notice the animation when you’re fighting in a sizable group.

I realize custom arenas won’t be enabled for all players until some testing has been done. However, does that transition require a major patch, or can you just flip a switch at any time?