Guild Wars 2

The wiki has been wrong about condition removal for years.

Shaogin.2679:

Exedore.6320:

You may not agree with the OP’s suggested ordering, but any known order is better than random.

It’s not random right now though iirc. Cleansing prioritizes last on – first off. The only random thing is converting condis/boons.

It hasn’t been LIFO (last in – first out) for years if it ever was.

Starting with the June 2015 patch, condition clear and boon strip became random.

Before then, each skill had its own priority groupings based on the condition/boon type (but not number of stacks). I know that for guardian, burning removal was in the second grouping, which made it hard to remove when you had multiple conditions. And I know that for necro boon strip, removing might was near the bottom of the list with retaliation at the top.

You may not agree with the OP’s suggested ordering, but any known order is better than random.

Saiyan.1704 the ANet fanboy spreading misinformation about things he doesn’t understand. He can’t even link the correct thread.

Yes OW ranked has some bugs – it’s been out for less than a week. The big one where KotH matches do not count enough is being fixed today. Player ratings are also very volatile right now. It takes time for any rating system to order millions of people when you know nothing about them at the start.

Outside of that, the rest is just ignorant people like you running their mouth.

• The leaver system in place is by design. The principle used is that one person leaving can’t be used to take advantage of the system. Continually leaving ranked matches has a huge penalty associated with it (unlike GW2), to the point of being automatically banned from ranked play for the remainder of the season.
• The outcome for coming back into a game during the grace period is likely a bug (haven’t seen a dev post yet).

In OW, your competitive rank is essentially percentile rank (1 to 100) based off your MMR vs. the MMR distribution of the population. My guess without having the data is that the initial distribution has most players in the 40-60 percentile range. Give it a few weeks for them to spread out – both up and down.

There is nothing in OW which forces a 50% win rate. That’s nonsense from idiots. Forums have a lot of those. Players do end up with a 50% win rate, but that’s because you’re they’ve reached their your proper rating and aren’t continually improving. The ones who are complaining likely think they’re better than they actually are.

GW2 ranked is a progression system, not a skill system. While better players are more likely to progress farther, worse players can still grind higher.

What also happens with Diamond, Ruby, and Legendary is that the people who got there through grinding or just don’t care anymore conglomerate at the bottom of the tier since they can’t go any lower. That’s why you often have a better chance of a crossing a tier when paired with people in the lower tier (they’re near the top of that tier and usually trying to progress) than people in the next higher tier.

It’s just too complicated and hard to control.

The easier solution is to:

1. Remove the 4-stat amulets.
2. Split the 3-stat amulets into multiple items. Let players mix and match them.

This solution is good enough for stat customization and still allows ANet some control over stat combinations.

Disagree with #1, Agree with #2

1. Reverting to Old Condition System
This isn’t needed. The new “everything stacks” system is fine. The problem was how abilities were converted to the new system. In many cases, ANet added extra stacks instead of increasing durations. By chaining those abilities, conditions could deal heavy damage in a short time – something an attrition playstyle should not be able to do without significant setup.
The easy fix is to re-balance the handful of abilities which apply many stacks quickly by making them apply fewer stacks which last longer. PvE should be mostly fine with this – only trash mobs clears would be heavily affected.

2. Remove +Duration Stats
Agree here. Limit duration increases to traits and runes/sigils. First, this allows ANet to target damage vs. control conditions separately. Second, it caps the amount of duration increase that can be obtained and allows for more balance through mutual exclusion.

If you get this under control, you can probably remove some of the excessive condition counters which came about because of the arms race.

Dirame.8521:

Exedore.6320:

No.
No.
Definitely.
No.

Why are you scared of having fun?

I like fun. I don’t like bad suggestions.

Elite spec trait separation
Elite spec abilities, weapons, and traits are tied to together because they’re supposed to create a coherent gameplay style which feels different enough from the core. The initial round of adding a weapon, new mechanic, new utilities, and traits was overboard. And some specs lack coherency. ANet should’ve done some new things, but maybe not all for every elite spec.
So while I agree some elite specs should be toned down through removal (ANet will never do it), splitting them apart doesn’t help anything. It ruins the coherency and creates a balance nightmare for future elite specs. Elite specs are mutually exclusive to limit balance permutations while keeping the style unique and interesting.

Psuedo-Old Trait System
Anyone who asks for the old trait system doesn’t understand balance or design. The new system is much better and allows expansion, i.e. elite specs.
There are two fundamental problems in the old trait system which made it a pain to design and balance:

1. Low-Hanging Fruit: There are always more powerful traits which are low in some trees. That causes forced choices and makes it so that going higher in a few trees is rarely viable. Each trait had to compete against every other trait, but had a penalty for weaker pre-requisites.
2. Mutual Exclusion: The only way to prevent a player from having any of two traits at the same time was to make them both grandmaster in the same line. If two traits had too strong of a synergy, the only way around it was to make them nearly out of reach (see previous problem) or to nerf them to the point where they were only viable together.

The new system addresses both of these. It limits breadth to a reasonable amount and depth no longer feels like a punishment. It also allows far more mutual exclusion within trait lines. This makes the developers lives a lot easier and should lead to better balance. However, ANet seemed to have stopped halfway:

• Lack of Focus/Synergy: In the old system, talents which would stack together nicely were scattered around in order to prevent players from having them all. In the new system, they should all be in the same line for a coherent feel, using the increased mutual exclusion to limit overly strong synergy. Each line should have a clear focus which goes hand-in-hand with gameplay style.
• Too Many Traits / Too Much Power: In the old system, you had 14 traits. In the new system, you have 18. Not only that, a lot of old lesser traits were combined. You probably have the equivalent of about 20 traits in the old system.

Stronghold Tournaments
Stronghold is a mess right now and widely regarded as a failure. Fix stronghold so that it’s more than a “protect the doorbreaker” PvE race before even talking about tournaments for it.
Further, few competitive players prefer stronghold to conquest for competition. Why have tournaments if your target audience for tournaments doesn’t want them?

No.
No.
Definitely.
No.

The variety really isn’t the problem. In your thief example, thieves can’t do all of that at once. They’re already specializing.

The problem plaguing GW2 PvP is that damage and sustain abilities on elite specs are just too strong. They’ve effectively eliminated the need to choose between survival, support, and damage. They just do it all.

Rednik.3809:

It’s interesting to see revenants in literally every team and even in almost same build, but forum pvp experts for some reason demanding to nerf warrior instead.

It’s not odd at all. It’s a skill floor difference.

Putting up a huge condi stack with a warrior is extremely easy. That causes it to dominate at low and medium skill levels. And it doesn’t need much team help to do that. So anyone can pick it up and melt most of the playerbase, which leads to calls for nerfs. The same thing happened with Dragonhunter.

In comparison, your potential as a revenant is more closely tied to your skill across all levels. It also needs team support to do exceptionally well. Given that most of the playerbase doesn’t have that level of skill depth and tends to not coordinate, revenants aren’t being seen as overly strong in most games.

Both warrior and revenant need nerfed – just in different ways.

See this thread:
https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/pvp/Collection-of-all-builds-used-in-S02-finals

CureForLiving.5360:

Personally I think ANet need to do more to measure individual perforce (instead of wins and loses) to be better able to match players.

Right now, rating (MMR) is calculated using Glicko2. However, ANet has not offered any insight into what ratings are used to calculate that. Is it personal vs. enemy team? Your team’s average vs. enemy team? etc.

One of the problems which is likely happening is that having a worse person on your team and losing will drag your rating down by a lot. Similarly, carrying a worse person to a win will boost their rating by a lot. Ratings will never stabilize properly outside of the extremes; it’s just a big muddy mess in the middle.

Ithilwen.1529:

I think that ANET is moving in the right direction by adding sustain and lengthening fights. Now you need strategy and cool down management. I remember when the main strategy was: “sneak up on somebody and burst them as fast as possible.”

ANet is moving in the wrong direction. This is power creep. If damage was too high before, the correct move would to be reign it in – not start an arms race.

The problem with HoT specs is that they have so much sustain, they can screw up multiple times by using it poorly, but still survive. When mistakes and poor decisions don’t matter, PvP loses almost all its appeal.

For a healthy PvP experience, there always needs to be the question of “Do I use it now or save it?” With HoT specs, the answer is to spam it because it’ll be back soon enough and you can spam other stuff in the meantime.

We’ve all seen the complaints about league not having meaning and that it’s just a grind. While I agree, that’s not why the system MUST be changed.

There are two huge problems with the current progression-based system which are ruining the experience for most players. Both are related to the tier/division system and how it divides the player pool poorly.

1. Lop-sided Matches
   In an ideal PvP system, both sides should have a roughly even chance of winning. Blowouts, especially on the losing side are frustrating and you can rarely learn from them. In order for the current system to allow progression, it relies on pitting teams of disparate skill against each other. Why use a system whose mechanics rely on making the game less enjoyable?
2. Longer Queue Times / Disparate Team Skill
   The current matchmaking system tries to group players of similar rating who are all close in progression. By limiting teammate selection to a progression (pip) range, the potential teammate pool is heavily restricted. This causes the system to take longer to find a match and as it takes longer, it expands skill differential. Neither outcome is healthy.

The theory behind the ranked progression system is that players will quickly separate based on skill. It also assumes that there are enough players throughout a broad range of progression (pip count) who are similar in skill. This is obviously not happening in reality and which is why we have the two problems above.

What can be done to fix it? The best and simplest solution is to not match based on progression, but instead match both teammates and opponents based on rating from a unified pool of all players in the region. By creating a larger player pool, you can match rating closer and faster. This solves both the above problems.

The ranking and reward system should then be built around this matching paradigm. It should encourage continued play throughout the season for all skill levels. There are a few ways to do it; I’ll leave that up to ANet and others.

e-sports promotion has NOTHING to do with the sorry state of GW2 PvP.

What doomed GW2 PvP was:

• Brain-dead OP HoT specs
• Progression based ranking system
• Inability or unwillingness to make necessary changes to either of those

I don’t think GW2 PvP will get better soon, if at all. It seems that HoT specs will stay at their current power levels, which means PvP will rarely be fun. The awful ranked system which produces lop-sided matches and longer waits certainly doesn’t help.

OP is correct.

The current balance is full of suck. If everyone could one-shot everyone, then it’s balanced – but not fun at all. Fun needs to happen before balance.

Myself and my friends used to play GW2 PvP every day at least for a few hours. We did the AG tournaments when we didn’t have schedule conflicts. I would watch the ESL Sunday tournaments most of the time.

Then HoT came and killed it all. The power creep was and still is ridiculous. HoT elites are far too forgiving of mistakes and spam, which allows them to carry most players. Picking the meta build has completely eclipsed skill, and even if everyone is meta, skill is barely noticeable or meaningful.

We mostly skipped season1. Got legendary in season2 after about a month, but quit again due to the terrible state of PvP (matchmaking is awful too). Now we’ve pretty much quit for good.

If ANet nerfs the elite specs to not be brain-dead OP, we’ll consider coming back. I still love the base mechanics of the game, and I’m sure my friends do too. But we have zero faith in ANet ever balancing elite specs.

@Saiyan.1704

The “end lose streak” pip was in for season 2.

Lol Population has a lot to do with matchmaking. If the population falls below a critical threshold, then it has to either wait longer to find matches or expand the skill difference when looking for matches.

And part of skill is being able to work as a team. Players who can work as a team expect to be matched with other players who can work as a team.

Overwatch doesn’t have ranked available yet (ETA end of June). Right now everyone is playing a rough equivalent of hot join (there’s some basic matching to keep newbies separate).

Saiyan.1704:

Elite specs don’t need a nerf, we just need another update on every non-elite trait that classes have. Just like how Anet updated every single trait prehot to match that of the Metabattle builds; the most utilized builds in pvp. Shave, buff, & combine traits.

Ever since we got that patch, followed with the Condi patch that was OP but then nerfed, build diversity was at an all time high. We need another one of those “trait specialization” updates.

Clearly you’re carried by elite specs and have a selective memory. Build diversity at practically any point before the June 2015 patch (trait re-work) was higher than at any time since.

Queue times are bad because the game sucks and people quit. What can you offer as a reward for doing more of something you don’t enjoy?

Fix the game and players might come back. It’s no surprise that player population issues coincide with the release of another popular PvP game.

alemfi.5107:

Supposedly they will be adding other elite specializations that should in theory alleviate this issue you are seeing with the elite specialization power creep. The base class may be “weaker”, but with a slottable elite specialization it will give a bit of diversification and choice.

Adding new elite specs at the power of current elite specs will not fix the balance problems or improve the game. The problem with current elite specs isn’t just that they’re more powerful. The problem is that they’re more powerful in a way which makes them far too forgiving and skill-less. Elite specs must be nerfed.

Acandis.3250:

Exedore.6320:

Ideally players should be distributed evenly among divisions with amber having a little less.

I don’t quite agree with this, if you have every division holding a roughly equal number of players, higher divisions lose prestige immediately. What’s the point of being a top 5% player if you’re being queued with the top 20% of the population.

Saying the divisions will be equally distributed was an over-simplification on my part. The populations will actually follow a bell curve (assuming player skill is a Gaussian distribution). The percent of players in each tier depends on its pip size, though you’d typically find less players on the extreme tiers (assuming equal pip creation rules across all tiers).

Here’s how I would expect the system to be tuned:

• Figure out the average number of ranked games played per day. From that metric, compute the total number of pips gained per season by all players. This is easier said than done, but you can get a rough number. The complexity stems from (at least in the current system) different divisions have different pip generation rates and players will change divisions over time. And if players become frustrated, overall pip creation falls off. A system like the current one generates significantly less pips as the season progresses.
• Assume player skill is a Gaussian distribution. You know the total population and the total pips. Get the mean and then distribute the total pips into the population using standard deviation.
• Cut the tier boundaries (pips per tier) based on the percentage of players you want in each tier. Fudge it a little to make pips divide into divisions nicely.
• If the pips are too few or too many, increase or decrease pip generation, but do it evenly across the population.

The difficulty in tuning this system is the calculation of total pips per season. If you undershoot, then too many people get into the higher tiers. Overshoot and almost no one makes it to the top.

And no matter what you do, someone who plays a lot of games will have an inflated number of pips due to luck (win streaks, etc).

Those are the problems with the tier system and trying to limit it by percent of the population. You can’t fix them unless you scrap the current ranked system.

This is a fair solution, though it doesn’t fix the main issue with the Legend division which is: there’s no prestige tied to it. What’s the point of grinding Legend x17 times when you don’t get anything out of it? I know many players that stopped queuing for Ranked once they hit Legend this season, the system holds no further allure past that point.

Did they stop solely because there’s no reward left to gain?
Was lack of enjoyment with the game a significant factor?
Would increased rewards compel them to play more?
Is some kind of numeric rank system needed?

My proposal addresses the lack of rewards by linking rewards to playing games instead of crossing tiers. Legendary players can continue to earn more exclusive rewards by continuing to play. It may not work for x17 legendary players, but that’s a fraction of a percent (and they’re probably in ProLeague or could be).

Personally, I gave up after reaching legendary in season2 because I wasn’t enjoying the game. The “carrot on a stick” approach only goes so far.

BlaqueFyre.5678:

Removing the Safety nets and allowing players to drop division will result in a better representation of the players level since thy no longer want to advertise player MMR or match make using MMR, regression in tiers does need to happen otherwise you get the bottleneck that is currently seen in Ruby where every one eventually ends up.

Regression in tiers is not needed. The “bottom of Ruby” problem occurs because the path leading there is too forgiving and comprises too many of the total pips created. It is not because players can’t fall out of it. By removing inter-division safeguards in Emerald and Sapphire, you’ll prevent most of those “bottom of Ruby” players from ever crossing into Ruby.

Granted that while tier safeguards do keep some people at the bottom of a tier. But with Emerald and Sapphire being meaningful, those “bottom of Ruby” players will be distributed at the bottom of many tiers, which much more accurately reflects their skill.

While you’ve identified some of the problems well, your fixes aren’t the best.

Pip Gain/Loss
Ideally players should be distributed evenly among divisions with amber having a little less. Removing division locking in Emerald and Sapphire partially fixes the problem, but doesn’t fix it all. Regression between tiers doesn’t really need to happen.

The lingering problems are these:

• Number of Divisions Ruby and Diamond have many more divisions than Amber, Emerald, and Sapphire. Once the player base distributes itself, the number of players in each tier will be roughly proportional to how many pips it has out of the whole.
• Pip Creation New pips must be generated at a healthy rate. By “new pip” I mean adding pips to the total pool – games where the pips gained and lost by all players does not sum to zero. The bonus win streak pip is a “new pip” because it adds a net +1 to the pool. Division and tier boundaries also add new pips because the net pip change for that game is positive. New pips are distributed to players over time and passed up divisions and tiers. If pip creation is too slow, players feel they can’t progress. Too fast and everyone gets to legendary. In the current system, the first 3 tiers generate a proportionally large number of new pips, which allows players to cruise to Ruby. But then pip creation drops off and players feel stuck. A smoother curve is needed.
• Ranking vs Reward Is the tier/division system supposed to show player skill or be a glorified reward track? Currently it’s more the latter. More on this soon.

Rewards
ANet clearly wants a system where everyone can obtain items, but it may take a long time for average players to get them. The current system fails on many levels. Getting the legendary backpack is an annoying time gate. It doesn’t matter how good you; it matters how many days a week you play a minimal amount. There’s no benefit for most people to push higher; they’ll typically cap out and stop playing because there’s no benefit unless you cross a boundary. This is particularly noticeable with legendary. The only reason to keep going is for the dailies for the legendary backpack.

I would recommend fixing it this way instead:

1. Remove the league currency from crossing tiers.
2. Reward league currency for ranked wins. Higher tiers get bonus currency. A reasonable cumulative daily cap would be needed to prevent bots from farming it in amber.
3. Add more stuff to the league currency vendor. Maybe some of that PvE or WvW exclusive stuff. Some things may need locked behind a minimum tier.
4. Include an item which can be converted to gold (probably indirectly through the TP) for players who routinely reach legendary and will have everything after several seasons. Maybe the ability to buy PvP reward potions (daily limit).

That way, everyone can get something; better players obtain it faster. Less skilled players need to pick and choose and save up. And there’s also no obligation to grind dailies. It also feels less frustrating to be stuck in a tier looking only at bigger goals.

By making the reward system less tied to tier progression, it allows the ranked tier system to be more skill based than a progression system.

In the time it takes to design, implement, and test a new system, the season will be over anyway.

How about we fix all the problems with stronghold first.

Shiyo.3578:

Trying to get pve players into pvp is never going to be a good idea. It always makes the pvp have a worse community and ruins it. Stop doing it. Let people who want to be there to pvp be there and let that be the end of it.

Not true at all. Getting more people into PvP makes for a healthier and more active PvP scene.

The problems occur when you just throw veterans and newbies together with awful matchmaking. Blowouts frustrate both and no one learns anything.

Balance and Diversity
If you define balance as every profession is played, then it’s close. But when you look deeper, it’s not a fun or enjoyable balance. Elite specs are way too powerful, which kills diversity. But not only that, the elite specs are more powerful in a way that makes them easier to play and far more forgiving of mistakes and poor play. That marginalizes player skill and leads to spam combat instead of the action-based combat with decisions that GW2 used to have.

Elite specs needs nerfed hard. Until that happens, players won’t come back to PvP.

League System, Matchmaking, and Rewards
The league system needs a major overhaul. It’s nothing but a glorified reward track. And with most people only after the backpack, there’s little incentive to keep going once you obtain it, aside from the terrible daily grind to get the ascended version.

First, the tiers and pip rewards are poorly laid-out. Practically everyone is guaranteed to climb to Ruby because Amber, Emerald, and Sapphire have fewer total pips and are more forgiving of losses. When players reach legendary, they have little incentive to keep going or even play more than the daily to get the backpack. That puts most players in ruby and diamond, which is a terrible way to show differences in skill. It also leads many players to believe they can grind to legendary because they quickly obtained ruby. The dramatic change in progression frustrates many people and turns them away from doing PvP aside from a reward.

The reward system has almost no thought put into it. A currency for crossing tiers will not keep people playing. It means they accomplish the goal and then stop until the next season. That caused the resulting boring achievement grind – not skill – which gates the highest reward.

The matchmaking system is also in shambles, due in large part to lack of forethought with the pip system. The pip system does a poor job of distributing players based on skill, so matching based on pips will lead to similarly poor matches. Season1 matching was much better for enjoyable and even matches, but ANet didn’t think about how to progress higher rated players faster.

There are a few ways to fix this mess, but it requires major changes. The easiest is probably this: smooth out pip generation across tiers: amber, emerald, and sapphire are slower; ruby and diamond are faster. Remove divisions from Ruby and Diamond, add to Amber and Emerald (all tiers should have the same amount). Remove the safeguards from Emerald and Sapphire and lessen them in Amber. Instead of ranked currency being rewarded solely on tier crossing, make tiers give reward track bonuses or unlock new reward tracks. Players would then need to complete reward tracks for currency (with some kind of seasonal cap for people who play all day long). Achievement points will be based on crossing tier boundary and doing commonplace things in that tier (such as winning games).

Balance by polls is the worst way to go about balance.

They just need someone in charge of the profession design team who’s active in all modes and somewhat good of a PvPer. That’s enough to be able to weed out genuine concerns from forum overreaction, think deeper about source of imbalance, and adjust appropriately.

Obviously their current profession design team has none of that.

The answer is #2 and #3. There’s already too much unblockable power creep in the game, so starting an “arms race” with #1 is not the way to go.

TLDR from OP: If you intentionally lose a bunch of matches in a row, it lowers your MMR. You can then in theory have an easier time getting win streaks to boost your total pip count . This yields higher pip counts than playing normally because win streaks give bonus pips.

Fortunately, this isn’t how matchmaking works. There is no forced 50% win rate metric.; you should simply settle to that ratio once you reach your proper placement (in a proper system at least). The matchmaker finds teammates within your pip range who are also near your MMR. Opponents need only to fall within your pip range. By tanking your MMR, you get worse allies, so unless you’re amazing at carrying teams, you won’t gain a huge advantage by tanking MMR.

The exception is if you have a team of 5 who tank their MMR. Because you’re all skilled players in reality, you should be able to get a win streak with less trouble. However, if you’re all that good from the start, there isn’t a huge need to tank MMR in the first place.

However, this doens’t mean the league system isn’t flawed in other ways.

I liked it when builds were good at 1 or 2 things, but weak to others. It made for a lot of variety and made knowing your role and where you needed to be more important.

For example:

• Bunker guard was hard to kill and was great team support, but you could still push it off the point long enough to decap if you had a build with the right CC and used it well.
• Thief had mobility and burst, but couldn’t stay in a fight
• Condi builds tended to have an advantage 1v1, but didn’t kill you in seconds and generally would want to avoid team fights because they couldn’t keep up with group cleanses.

OP is spot on. Power creep has killed any fun in GW2 PvP.

Fivedawgs.4267:

This could have been true during S1 or 2, we have one of the best balance ever , 8 out of 9 class are meta, according to everyone. And the power creep is getting tone down patch after patch.

That’s sarcasm, right? Balance is still a total joke in GW2.

Good balance in GW2 was 1-2 years ago. Every profession was viable, many with multiple builds. Skilled play of a non-meta build beat mediocre play of a non-meta build. Meta builds still had clear weaknesses.

Cynz.9437:

Exedore.6320:

Fivedawgs.4267:

WARRIOR 100b: getting randomly interupted.

I have a similar problem with guardian Whirling Wrath. I think it happens when you have a target selected and it enters stealth.

could there be correlation to precision strike change?

No, it’s done that for a while.

WoW PvP and GW2 PvP are both terrible right now. I played both for years.

Mechanically, GW2 is way better. But the balance is inexcusably bad. GW2 balance has fallen to the point where facerolling a meta build lets you compete in skill with almost everyone else.

WoW PvP has fallen victim to power creep (it usually does once the second raid set of the expansion comes out) and is too dependent on 1.5-3min cooldowns.

Fivedawgs.4267:

WARRIOR 100b: getting randomly interupted.

I have a similar problem with guardian Whirling Wrath. I think it happens when you have a target selected and it enters stealth.

Disagree with most of your suggestions.

Supply Depot as a Capture Point
This is a really bad idea. This mechanic would allow one team to completely snowball the match by denying the other any supply. And because it’s a capture point, you only need one person to contest it. Conquest has three capture points in order to prevent this problem. And players start with supply in stronghold so that the map didn’t turn into a big fight at the supply depot every match with the winner being able to snowball.

Grouped NPC Health Buff
This makes stronghold worse, not better. In your intro, you complain about cheese like invisible DBs, etc. Giving them more HP makes that “cheese” even easier to pull off. And by doing this, you’re also causing ripple effects which you’ve had to address.

Mist Champions
Giving them extra effects won’t do much unless they’re ridiculously powerful (like CC which you proposed) and that just makes it frustrating. The problem with mist champions is that they’re too easy to kill for the benefit that they provide. There’s no urgency in stopping them. And by buffing their group mechanics, they’re just helping a snowball rather than turning a game around.

Player Count
No compelling reason to increase it. First, keep it at 5 to allow teams to queue into both. They would if stronghold wasn’t so bad. Second, stronghold was designed with more things to do than there are players. The idea was that teams would have to prioritize and it allowed the opposition to take advantage of your weak areas. Teams being able to do everything at once really stagnates it.

The key problems with Stronghold are:

1. No reason to defeat players. It’s much better to do something with the objective (supply, hero channel, NPCs) and leave than sit in a drawn-out fight in order to win the objective.
2. Too easy to snowball. The team that gets ahead early usually maintains the lead easily.
3. Archers are totally useless

Here’s what I would change:

Doorbreakers are One-and-Done
As soon as the doorbreakers attack, they die (or run away). Damage per DB is increased. This gives a huge impact to killing a single DB. You can’t break through just by keeping one or two alive. It also stops a team from getting through both gates with the initial wave of DBs and a bit of cheese (stealth, immunity, etc.). That in turn makes the supply depot more important.

Buff Archer Damage and Fix AI
With DBs being one attack only, archer damage and HP can be safely increased. Archers are the slower, but also safer and reusable alternative to DBs. Change their AI to only attack NPCs and gates so that they can’t be distracted indefinitely. Reduce bonus damage against NPCs. As a whole, this should make it hard for a defender to kill the archers quickly and run when the archers are defended.

Damage Interrupts Channel
Stab channel allows players to completely ignore most efforts to top a channel. Only boon strip and trebuchet will stop it. This puts too much emphasis on counters which are so narrow. Speed up the supply channels to compensate. We have great fights at the channel points on TotSS, which are interrupted by damage. You have to actually kill or chase away players to take the objective.
Because of this change, remove the trebuchet stripping all stability stacks.

Mist Champions
Buff damage vs. gates slightly. Their ultimate attack now works on gates and takes 50% off of it (has a cooldown). This gives them more of a comeback mechanic. To differentiate them, maybe have their damage, ultimate damage, HP, and move speed vary.

Mysticjedi.6053:

They already have it for the “pro league”. Devs were on the forums during season 2 talking about it. It didn’t sound like it was that big of a deal. Something about changing the sensitivity of the system to take class type more into account.

Proleague is enforced by the ESL admins. That’s completely different from an automated system.

Yes, the current matchmaker can use profession uniqueness as a factor. However, that’s not what you’re asking for. That factor:

1. Would favor unique professions on a team, but didn’t guarantee it. A team with multiple of the same profession got a penalty in the matchmaker scoring. However, if enough other factors rated highly, you’d get a team with duplicates.
2. Didn’t really work and was set to either zero or something really low. Instead of creating unique teams, it was working against other factors, leading to longer queues and bigger skill differences.

Additionally, with players able to swap after the match is created, trying to use unique profession in the matchmaker would be ineffective. If players really wanted to abuse the system, they would queue as something random then switch to the OP profession once the match started.

Mysticjedi.6053:

There is truth to that, but we also have to live in the reality that there probably won’t be more than one viable competitive build per class anytime soon which does make class stacking either stupid OP or stupid weak.

And you think they’ll be able to implement a matchmaker which does well at combating class stacking any time soon?

The league system is flawed for a very simple reason:

win, loss, win, loss, win, loss = 0 pip change
win, win, win, loss, loss, loss = +1 pip change

Both scenarios have 50% win rate. Match-up order just favored the second.

How can a system where scoring is based partly on luck ever reflect skill?

Class stacking is a symptom of bad balance. Nothing to do with the matchmaker.

If there was more than one viable build per class, class stacking wouldn’t matter that much.

R O C.6574:

Like i said (as lame as it is) you won’t get more build diversity until they put out more elite specs.

No, you won’t. The game will just remain dead.

The problem with HoT specs is that not only are they immensely more powerful than core, they’re also way too forgiving of poor play. When build > skill, even if everyone has those “meta” builds, the game is dead. Despite changes to elite specs for 3 live cycles, the “meta” is still 6 builds – most of which have been the same each cycle. It would be even less if ESL hadn’t implemented a “one of each profession” rule.

There is only one answer: nerf HoT specs. Until that happens, PvP in GW2 will continue to circle the drain.

Buran.3796:

Any new specialization will always replace in terms of power the previous ones due the power creep: if Anet releases a new build that doesn’t outperform the older ones then the player will have very low interest in to buy the new content.

That’s a false statement. People will play new elite specs as long as they’re interesting, coherent, and work well mechanically. For example, Reaper was really popular even before the first beta weekend. It has a vision and its tools reflected that. And even though it was nerfed over the course of the BWE’s, it was still played a lot (even before Deathly Chill was made OP). But elite specs which didn’t flow well at all (Dragonhunter) or had poorly implemented mechanics (Tempest overloads, Daredevil dodge frame klunkiness) were panned.

Treb is fine; nerf OP HoT spec sustain.

DrDivine.5378:

I’ve mentioned this before, as I would like GW2 to be taken seriously for e sports and be enjoyable

Any hope GW2 had of becoming an eSport is long dead. It still can be a healthy, fun, and competitive environment, though.

R O C.6574:

Are you sure it’s not METABattle’s fault?

Positive that it has absolutely nothing to do with MetaBattle. MetaBattle has been around for a while. And before then, people found builds on other sides and from top player streams.

The difference between a year ago and now is that most builds a year ago actually required some level of thought and skill in order to live up to its full potential. Current “meta” builds are far too forgiving of mistakes and carry bad players.

The reason there is almost no build diversity is because HoT specs are too kitten strong. A good player using a non-HoT build has to play perfectly in order to beat an average player of a HoT meta build.

^

It’s not so bad now that it lasts about the same duration as a dodge. It used to be longer and was really broken then.

Disagree.

First, it’s not going to happen. The trait system will remain because is needs to support the elite specialization system.

Second, the old trait system actually had less room for diversity. The lack of diversity you’re seeing now is because elite specializations are so much better than everything else.

The old system had many problems:

• Hard to make traits mutually exclusive. The only way to stop two traits from being used together was to put them both in the same grandmaster slot.
• Always pick the “low hanging fruit”. Traits which were lower in the lines but more powerful were always chosen. This was especially true for adept slot.
• Too many throw-away traits. You had a lot of traits in all slot levels which would never be realistically used ever. The traits also didn’t feel like they were adding anything to your character.
• Some lines had good traits, but stats which weren’t useful, which hurt your character relative to other professions. Further, blanket boon and condi duration increases was a balance problem.

The new trait system should have fixed all that in theory, but ANet did a poor job implementing it.

• In the old system, similar traits were spread out into different lines. They should have been condensed into the same line, but were not.
• Each specialization should have had themes or roles in mind and the traits moved around and adjusted in order to reflect that. In most cases, traits were left where they had been previously
• Increased mutual exclusion wasn’t well exercised. Defensive traits weren’t put into the same slot, nor were straight damage increases. The result is that you could still have both, defeating the point of the new system. And they even caved to whining from elementalists when two powerful traits were mutually exclusive in the preview.
• It’s clear they ran out of time when re-doing the system and haven’t re-visited it. Some old traits are still around and still terrible or still too powerful relative to any other choice.

If you wanted to improve upon the current trait system, there’s still a lot of room:

• Make the core specializations more focused and coherent.
• Increase mutual exclusion on powerful offensive or defensive boosts.
• Consider reducing the number of major or minor traits per line. If you have a really powerful trait choice at one level, maybe remove the minor trait. Or make a very powerful minor and no major trait at that level.

Sirendor.1394:

Hey Aza.
I have thought about this a lot, and read many posts by other people. You are right in one way, the meta today shows that certain things in the game are too strong.

However, introducing more counters isn’t perfect either, because of the way GW2 combat works: there are 9 classes, on which you can just combine whatever you like, with some limits (weapon sets, trait lines). Adding counters on classes may not fix the original problem for some other classes, or might be overkill.

Say blocks are overpowered. There are too many people blocking stuff and are basically unkillable, which makes decapping points impossible or extremely hard. You add unblockables to several classes. Now the risk is there that instead of balancing block/unblockable, it tips the scale in the other direction: blocking isn’t worth kitten anymore. And even when that isn’t the case, by ‘countering’ one mechanic when it’s overused, you might cripple playstyles/builds that rely on this mechanic but do not overuse it.

Can’t agree more. The PvP arms race (creating counter abilities instead of nerfing the one or two which are too strong) never ends well.

Sykper.6583:

A year ago, I wager there probably would have been only two responses, bad or abysmal.

A year ago, I would have voted average. It wasn’t amazing, but still interesting to watch for people who played PvP.

Today it’s abysmal. HoT power creep is ridiculous and killed diversity. It’s the same 6 HoT builds over and over, and they practically play themselves. Why bother watching top players?