Guild Wars 2

Lol, in one thread you’ve got people saying this patch wasn’t enough.

Thieves still do too much damage, Ele / Guardian bunkers are still too tanky etc etc

Then in a bunch of other threads Thieves are complaining that they aren’t competitive anymore and are gonna re-roll as Warriors.

Guardian and Ele bunker say they were nerfed too harshly and they can’t play now.

Seriously guys, how would the devs possible balance this and satisfy all of you?
You can’t possibly be satisfied with such polar and selfish viewpoints.

You act like two squabbling children saying “He did it! No, he did it” A Parent wouldn’t take sides they would just tell you to shut up and frankly most people need to with these daft hyperbole thread titles like YOU KILLED PVP WITH THIS PATCH.

The devs collect HUGE amounts of data on what everyone is doing and how it impacts things, tiny changes can make a big impact when considered fully, hence the nature of their changes. (Thank god most of our loud forum posters are not in charge of balance).

Ele and Guardian bunker specs just lost 25% of their self healing with two heal ratio nerfs (and by extension, possibly up to 50% of group healing), that’s a significant change, and perhaps you should go and play and see the difference for yourself.

We could kill bunkers before and now it’s easier.
Perhaps some people need to try some different tactics, a little more than faceroll the damage buttons and complain that the bunker didn’t die all over the forums.

Guardian and Elementalist got a sizeable healing nerf in their bunker specs which is a very good thing.

General nerf to various bunker runes and exploits like the Mace bug, Svanir Rune bug, Elementalist stability from Elite bug.

Rune boon duration nerfs and a few Protection duration reductions, should see a good effect.

Seriously guys, small changes are good. If devs really implemented changes like you want with huge 50% reductions all over the place then you have a game like Rift where the balance of power and FOTM would massively change from one patch to the next and stay like that for ages completely dominating everything else.

GW2 has various viable specs for each profession and various counters for each.

You can’t make an omni build and be viable against everyone though, that’s the idea.

People need to accept some responsibility for their choices of build, their function, how they play and accept that sometimes they were outbuilt or outplayed.
But most PvPers seem to be from the expectation generation and feel they should win everything. This is not possible.

Pro-tip: For you to win, someone has to lose.
50% of the players are losers in every fight, every match etc.

deapee.7516:

“We can watch the servers to see which players use more.”

Then list them alternating, not 200 8v8 servers and then at the very bottom, 5 seconds of scrolling down the 5v5’s.

Furthermore, you didn’t TOUCH bunker guardians…which were probably the #1 thing (other than thieves) hurting pvp.

Their Protection runes got a nerf, boon duration builds got a nerf, a protection skill got a duration nerf.

Selfless Daring (The Dodge heal got a 50% heal value nerf) this is huge, they will go from healing 1300 every roll to 650 every roll in a Cleric’s spec. It will make a big difference as Selfless Daring doubled potential healing output compared to using a self heal only.

The Mace bug was hopefully fixed so the scrubs abusing it will die a lot easier now.

denyitbattle.2609:

I don’t think people yet realize how big of an effect these changes will have on mesmer.

Imagine if an enemy dodging, or blocking, or anything really can actually take away your weapon. I agree with line of sight and range mattering (and actually thought it was a bug that it didn’t), but actually landing the “attack” seems a bit ridiculous… It also doesn’t make sense; what am I “hitting” them with so that i can simply summon an illusion?

Because Illusions are your weapon skills, it’s just a visual for it.

A Fancy DoT. They aren’t pets.

If you dodge or use line of sight to avoid my abilities on another Profession I miss and they go on full cooldown, why shouldn’t yours too?

Mesmer being able to summon a hoard of illusions that fire instantly together + weilding normal weapons gave a crazy ability to still lay damage on someone that successfully avoided your initial summons but then punished them for running out of endurance, coming out of stealth, emerging from behind a wall or whatever.

It wasn’t cool that you could be approached on a point by someone that avoided all incoming ranged damage on the way by playing well but it all remained in play ready for them to come out and attack, too much of a front loaded damage advantage.

Now like the rest of us you actually have to consider when to use abilities and to watch the enemy instead of just spamming the Illusion skill on each weapon and letting the AI do it all regardless of what evasive measures your opponent has taken to avoid your first hits.

Exploit.

Not quite as bad as the Mace block exploit.

But still bad.

As we are able to join multiple guilds, one drawback is that you are only able to communicate with the one your are representing.

This means that you can miss a lot of messages, so for example if I’m adventuring with the PvE guild I will miss the chatter in my sPvP guild about forming a group for some tournaments later, or the chatter in my WvW guild about planning a big assault in 30 minutes.

We either need player chat channels to allow more communication between different groups of players. Or the ability to open at least one more guild chat tab for one of the guilds you aren’t currently representing.

So the devs have stated they don’t want us to have too much access to Retaliation, they don’t want it to be a 100% uptime buff that neutralises glassy burst opponents when tied with a full defensive spec.

That’s fine, and to try and change this they nerfed the duration of Retaliation across traits and skills by 50% or more since release.

However, it seems the right hand isn’t talking to the left.

The Guardian is currently built around Retaliation more than any other boon, it’s everywhere and that’s what makes the past changes and future Retaliation changes flawed.

Our class has been built to have massive access to Retaliation across weapon skills, utilities and traits.

Symbol of Wrath – 4s, available on the GS and at 25% HP from 5 Zeal.
Symbol + Leap of Faith grants Retaliation.
Symbol + Blast finisher available for Hammer and Mace Focus grants area Retaliation.

Stand Your Ground – 5s.
Save Yourselves – 5s.
Symbol of Judgement – 3s.
Tome of Wrath – 20s (only while active).

Radiance I – 3s when using Heal skill (multi ticks for healing Breeze giving 15s)

Honor I – Aegis gives 3s Retaliation when it ends. (Passive Aegis, Aegis at 50%, Aegis from Retreat, Activate Courage + Renewed Focus + Activate and 6 Runes of the Monk Aegis when healing).

Virtues II Retaliation lasts 25% longer.
Vitues IV Retaliatory Subconscious – 3s of Retaliation when CC’d.
Virtues 10 – Activating a Virtue gives – 3s. With Boon time from speccing this and 25% you gain 12s for activating all 3, pop Renewed Focus and you can do it again.

This brings me to some balance between Professions, specifically the trait that activates when CC’d.

Let’s compare with the picture I have attached.

Now some are better than others but that’s balanced by the trait level, Adept, Master and Grandmaster.

2 main points:
Compare our 3s of (Retaliation-Again!) on a 30s recharge to say the Engineer trait.
3s of Protection (best boon in the game) on a 5 second recharge!

Why do we get Retaliation again, it’s worse than everything else available to the other classes in terms of a boon or a special effect they trigger, especially with 3s duration once every 30s.

So, please can we get some other boons in our traits and some other effects.

Retaliation is a problem and all classes need to have their access to it limited, do NOT just do this by obliterating all of the Guardians Retaliation timers.

Stop giving us Retaliation, give us other boons, give us Fury, Swiftness, Protection, Regen. Or effects – Block, Burning, Immobilise, Weakness.

I would propose changing all of the Guardian Retaliation traits into other things, different boons or effects. Limit Retaliation to Weapon skills and Utilities.

Testing vs Golems on the same elevation, still has terrible accuracy.

About a 50% hit rate, which is frankly unacceptable.

If the leap can’t be made to hit reliably, just make it an instant teleport like Flashing Blade instead.

By PvP I would imagine he means Tournaments, not Zerg vs Door.

Meditations Healing is great there. Altruistic Healing is of course lackluster when alone.

Animus.6073:

@ Muricar

You are looking at it the wrong way. Whirling Wrath lasts for about 3.5 seconds.

It completes far quicker than that. More like 1.5 seconds.

Seen it too often all before.

You can add a Rune to the Water Filter but it doesn’t add any stats.

Even if you have no armour equipped.

So you’re really not missing out on much by not having it.

Viable specs.

As in what teams actually want you to play, or will let you play.

Right now everyone just wants the super defensive live as long as possible bunker Guardian spec.
The one that calls for assistance when people come so the rest of your team can come and kill them, in the meantime you just stay alive alone on your point, or stand alone all match because the enemy knows you’re bunker and ignores your point.

It’s so boring to play.

Can we get an option for something like this please.

It’s especially needed in Tournaments as I keep finding players that just sit at spawn and AFK after the first battle is lost.

Today there was a guy that did nothing the entire match and just chatted about how he didn’t want to be here.

These players are spoiling the tournaments but there is little recourse right now, I’ve reported some as botting as it’s the closest thing to AFK really, unless you want to count joining a tournament and then not playing as scamming….

Warrior’s take 50% increased damage while under the effects of their Quickness, since most of them pop Frenzy before any engagement as they won’t fight without it.

Most Warrior’s attacking you in sPvP are therefore going to take a decent amount of damage in return from Retaliation and burning when they use Hundred Blades.

It’s most likely he was receiving damage from other sources too (like your own autoattack) or someone else if he ‘blew up’ while attacking.

Building for defense should see a big trade-off in a loss of damage.

With 100% Retaliation uptime that balance was skewed and significantly benefited the defensive player that could draw out a long fight.

Retaliation works well 1v1 but also provides damage against multiple opponents, which is why it’s on a finer line to balance.

Tome’s make you a massive walking target with the only useful abilities on slow cast timers that are easily interrupted.

Having to use a utility slot in order to make 2/3 of our Elite skills actually function is completely unacceptable.

You should all be in massive anger over this.

Skill #5 on both tomes is broken, it’s too powerful as a single cast so it has been nerfed so much you basically need to use 2 Utility skills just to be able to cast it!

They should change the Skill 5’s to be over time abilities instead, Big burning DoT and a Big AoE regen that completes in about 10 seconds.
Instead of a slow cast Complete Heal / Low AoE damage knockdown.

There’s some sort of crash exploit going on too.

Just had a tournament where the entire enemy team got dropped as we arrived at Keep.

Pretty sure someone in our PUG was responsible, it was too dodgey for all of them to drop and us to be fine.

Retaliation needs to stack in intensity, it’s a horrible mechanic as a tiny amount of damage people try to keep on continuous duration.

Duration Retaliation promotes the unkillable bunker build that does 50% of their damage through Retaliation over a long fight that benefits the defensive build.

Intensity Retaliation would promote many other different options for doing damage and for spike possibilities either offensively or defensively.

If Retaliation stacked in intensity it would allow people a counter against front loaded burst specs that try to kill a player outright in the opening attack, however if they bluff you and fake out of your initial Retaliation stack then it’s useless (which is good). Right now the mechanic allows you to stack a long duration Retaliation to damage the initial burst and the rest of the fight (which is bad gameplay).

Just met a Spirit Ranger in a tournament that was unkillable running in circles while the spirits were up.

Permanent regeneration and protection.

This of course is ok, but us having an amount of Retaliation on a trait that might actually intercept a skill? No, proposterous.

The problem is that Retaliation is what we get as Guardians.

For all the traits and different options when we do something or have something done to us, it’s always Retaliation.

People whine about it, so it gets nerfed so much that all the traits become useless.

3 seconds is so pathetic, how many skills are really going to hit you within that time, wait another 40s for it to be up again.

I wish we could get some different options like others have, like Protection when being CCd.

Yeh it’s messy like that.

Plus sometimes it adds a very short duration Swiftness (like 2s)

And sometimes it doesn’t add Swiftness at all when you run through it with nothing.

Or how about the fact that some of our traits are utter rubbish.

Compare these two for example, their effectiveness in combat and the recharge rate.

More reliability with skills hitting.

Zealot’s Defense and Whirling Wrath being the main culprits.

Tests with Golems show that Zealot’s Defense often has a hit or two that doesn’t land even when standing right infront and letting autotarget make sure you’re facing perfectly (if it doesn’t land in these extreme carebear circustances, how can it hope to land well in real combat). You can hear when it doesn’t land properly by the amount of sounds.

Whirling Wrath is worse, in order for all the hits to land you have to stand inside your target, as in turning collision off and standing inside their body which is frankly ridiculous for a game.

Average damage standing next to the Golem 4.5k, when standing inside the Golem each time it spawns? 6k…

Clearly and by sound you can tell many more hits are landing which don’t land in normal use.

Also some massive issues with Smite on the Scepter. Testing it as the only damage skill vs Golems, there’s a huge range in damage as to be expected with 15 hits with a 50% crit rate.

But sometimes many many hits don’t even land.

In one test yesterday I had an entire duration Smite only land 2 hits, there was some lag at the time so either there is a massive error in GW2 not displaying damage done correctly under lag or there’s a massive issue with damage not being dealt correctly under lag.

There’s a growing problem recently of people leaving tournament matches very early on, usually after the first fight at the mid point is lost they give up and bail on the match (about 1 minute in).

This of course normally happens with people that are solo queueing and get put together randomly, a lot of the times the solo queue can be absolutely fine and you can have a great tournament together with the random 5 professions you get.

However certain players are ruining all of this by bailing after it’s clear they aren’t going to get carried by decent players against less decent teams.

They often leave with some kind of verbal abuse in chat as well (see the screenshot) We had 2 players bail after 1 minute into the game and losing Keep for the first fight, yet the 3 of us remaining managed to get 427 points still…

If someone drops from a tournament and doesn’t return there needs to be a decent penalty against them to not be allowed to play in tournaments for several hours after.

Some people occasionally get dropped by a bad connection or something so perhaps this feature would only be possible by
A) Player drops and then,
B) 2 Players need to report them as purposely dropped from a tournament for them to be given a timeout.

Hammer is a great PvE weapon.

But as an offensive weapon it is too slow for high level PvP.

Skill 1 Chain is far too slow, Skill 3, 4, 5 have slow cast times and obvious animations, making it too easy to predict and avoid.

It only works for point defenders because they already have all the advantages, sitting on the small point the attacking player needs to go to and try to hold by staying in a small location.

When the enemy needs to come to you the hammer works (like in PvE where enemies just let themselves get hit).

The chill trait was a nice idea for the PvP hammer, but it’s on such a long recharge it doesn’t realistically help.

Instead of orbs we could fire pulses from the Scepter, these could be much higher speed and therefore always hit a moving target at a range between point blank and 1200.

Or just make us conjure blue fire on our target like an Elementalist with a Scepter and Fire.

Change the damage or rate of fire to compensate.

Right now all a player needs to do is to run in circles to avoid Scepter orbs >.<

Anything to make Skill #1 actually hit players, right now it’s PvEtastic.

Not at all happy, especially 1v1. All the other classes have excellent 1v1 choices, ours comes down to Renewed Focus which is a bad Elite for most builds. Only mediocre if specialised in Virtues (which is terrible for 1v1).

Here’s my post from a thread I made about our Elites on Guru……..

Tome of Courage and Tome of Wrath.

AoE game changers when used well.

Tome of Courage especially powerful in turning the tide of the battle by essentially giving your surrounding teammates an extra life.

Because of the power of the complete heal we have seen several nerfs since beta, we have seen a couple of cast times increased, range has decreased and we have now seen stability removed.

Tome of Wrath an offensive game changer if used right, the combination of a 3.5k AoE knockdown and then giving all your teammates Haste and Fury could end the fight in seconds if used right.

Stability removed, long cast timers added since beta, Skill 5 used to fire off instantly originally.

Because they are so powerful they have needed so many nerfs, even before some people would spec their build to try and ensure the Tome of Courage heal by using Shelter etc.

Now people will need a Stability Shout + Shelter for the same usage, and when you do pop either Tome you instantly become enemy number 1, because it’s so obvious what you are doing and you naturally need to die fast.

I almost feel it’s a liability to bring either, normally if you aren’t jumped on the fight didn’t actually warrant the use of the Tome and if the fight does need it you can guarantee they will shut you down before you become effective now.

Essentially these 2 Elites are too good.

Then we have Renwed Focus which is terrible unless you spec deep into Virtues and if you do that you sacrifice so much, the Virtues line compared to say Arcane for Elementalists just does not compare.

However, due to the liability of the Tomes I find myself now taking Renewed Focus as the worst Elite with a 10-30-30-0-0 spec for a point defender just because it gives me a 3s invulnerability to avoid some of the Heartseeker spam from hasted Thieves or Hundred Blade Warriors.

I really wish we had an Elite skill that was more of a middle ground, no one particularly uses Tome of Wrath and I don’t like the Tome mechanics too much.

How about Tome of Wrath becoming more of a buff like Signet of Rage for Warriors.

It could be an Elite that gives us 5s Haste, 15s Fury, 15s Might, 15s Swiftness on a 90s cooldown like Renewed Focus.

I play a human and when I browse the PvP locker I cringe at 90% of what’s available.

The only types that look alright are – Priory, Gladius, Seraph, Arcing, Valley, Makeshift and Lionguard. 7/56, and of those, 3 are very dull designs.
(Valley is basically at the length limit and has a good width to it, some blades are as long but are 1 foot wide… which is stupid).

Look at stuff like the Forge Blade, it touches the floor when on the characters hip!

2H Greatsword size in 1 hand… Silly stuff like Vigil, Pact, Ogre, Obtuse, Norn, Fen, Krait, Kodan, Swordbreaker, Crystalline, Legionnaire, Tribal and the loltastic Dual Edge.

Most of them look like two handed greatswords, especially with the possible PvP unlocks.

Oversized anime style doesn’t appeal to everyone, so why are the majority of weapons insanely big?

Is it too much to ask for decent looking items to be realistically scaled too?
Or must we have the boring looks for a normal size.

Treetrunk in one hand if you want something that took longer than 5 minutes to model in 3dsMax?…

This has been bugged since Beta 2.

I bug reported this back in BWE2 and 3 and it’s still not fixed.

It adds no Strength, try it with multiple different Amulets, the Jewel adds only 75 Precision and 125 Vitality, missing the 75 Strength.

Judge’s Intervention sometimes bugs and will not teleport you to your target when they are on a different elevation and in range.

Occasionally Symbol of Swiftness does not add Swiftness when you run through it, or it adds a shorter 2-4s buff.

Support your team through blinds and reflecting projectiles.

Or just killing the enemy.

For the last 3 – 4 days I’ve had massive network lag. Delay of about 2 seconds on things happening.

Before I was fine and it was great as I connect via a VPN into the UK from Shanghai, the game was smooth as silk, especially in sPvP.

Now I have constant lag, hit weapon switch and nothing happens for 1-2 seconds, when chaining attacks together 50% of the time one of the skills will just flash its icon and never go off.