1. Define a meta., then matchmake to the meta. Player’s can’t control their build mid-match with an iffy exception for Elementalist weapons, so teams are going to be hodgepodge nonsense unless they are premade or lucky.
2. Bring base specs in line with Elites for power and intuitiveness (not the other way). Elites are cooler, more powerful, and easier to understand than most base specs. As far as I can tell F2P can’t pvp effectively now, and that hurts the PvP experience for everyone.
3. Do balance metrics. You don’t need to tell us what they are, but do record them and use them. They’re good for putting numbers in perspective, determining how effective a spec/weaponset/skillset is, and for backing up a design decision when doing a balance patch.
4. Talk more! We like talking with you! Its cool. We’re also kind of salty, but its only because we care!
5. Good luck and have fun!
Thanks Deedrick, will do!
Thanks. This isn’t what I meant though. I KNOW they have a matchmaking system. What I meant is do they for class-balance purposes track say, the average winrate of all paladin amulet players, or the average win rate of all Revanents? What’s the damage over a game of the average Engineer? What’s the most popular tree combinations for a given class?
They don’t need to tell us what they are (though its probably good to do that when balancing things), but I’d like to know if they HAVE that info if they wanted to give it.
1. Shards need more usage. Probably just one mystic forge gamble recipe with a miniscule chance for something awesome and some mediocre low end loot tables would be fine, or a mawdrey/princess equivalent. Just so if you feel like Tradingpost prices are crap, you can gamble on something cool.
2. Put more focus on the reward tracks. A lot of the stuff the OP poster said was great for that. Currently the only outlet people have to spend pvp currencies is a backpack made to say “you’re super elite”. Dedicated players that aren’t super elite (not everyone can be) should have other ways to spend them that support other things they like. The more people playing pvp the healthier it is.
Honestly, my favorite part is fully loaded-Eternal Battlegrounds conflicts. The only area I really liked in Borderlands was the Aquatic fortress on the left. That had some pretty cool fights because of the giant lake between the outer wall and the keep.
Having all three sides engaging multiple offense and defense objectives in EB though, those are the coolest. You actually use and defend the towers for longer periods of time, creative application of siege equipment shines, and most importantly, Armies can’t avoid each other. They choose when and where to fight, but they will fight sooner rather than never and its epic.
Rev’s play a lot different than other classes. It takes some getting used to, but its solid. They also have wierd flavor. drawing on the power of legendary heroes isn’t usually the sort of fantasy-class people pick off the top of their head. That said. Gameplay is cool, style is cool, and once you figure it out the flavor is pretty cool too. More people should play them.
Oh also they’re HoT only, so the F2P crowd won’t comment, care, or theorize about them.
take away the evade on engi hammer leap, or the massive aoe stun, or lower cd block than warriors, THEN we can talk about buffing hammer autoattack.
Stolen skills are mostly fine. Every other steal item I can make good use of against its class. Gunk is definitely the worst. Stealing the powder keg toolbelt skill from the bomb kit would be fun. Or the knockback gun skill.
1. Bring back seasons
2. Remove Server based teaming
3. Deployable/Destroyable Waypoints
4. Gliding
5. Mist heroes I guess?
I’ve got some friends that like competitive games and want to do ranked pvp in GW2 without HoT. Does anybody know good thief or warrior builds they could try in PvP without HoT?
The point of “No consideration for meta builds in the matchmaking” is wrong: i mean there’s no reason this should be even considered a thing in a matchmaking, IFFFF the game was well balanced. So for this point, is not the matchmaking working bad, but the balance team. IFFF a skilled player would be able to make the difference even against a meta build, then you wouldnt have to bother about this problem. But the fact some class have better chance to counter let’s say for example to condi pressure, cuz have more access to condi removal, create imbalance. If the game was balanced around 1v1 and every class would have same chance to win a duel by performing better their rotation or theyr class mechanics, instead of balance the game based on team synergy (wich i have always considered to be a lie covering the fact they CANT BALANCE THE GAME) , then the matchmaking would work properly.
There’s two extremes for thinking about games. One is that you build a meta and expect your players to conform to the meta. There’s a tank, there’s a healer, there’s a dps (not for this game but you know what I mean). You use that meta to codify the experience. If that’s what Anet is aiming for here, they DO need to look at builds. This isn’t a moba, where you build your skills and stats over the course of the game as you watch your opponents specialize.
All build decisions are made before the match. That means if the teams are to be balanced, the matchmaking tool needs to look at the builds. Either have players declare their meta role before the match or have the tool check it dynamically from stats and talents, but it does need to know to create balanced teams.
Premades are of course an exception, you dig your own graves with those =).
OK, flawed logic aside, 18 loss streaks are the opposite of what this matchmaking system is supposed to create.
I’ve got some friends that don’t have Heart of Thorns that would like to play PvP with me, but I don’t know any good specs they can run except as Necro. Anybody still run non-elites as thief or warrior?
I don’t want to know exactly the metric methods they use. They shouldn’t tell us for important reasons, but is it known if they mine data on builds from matches throughout the season?
I’d certainly trust their balance decisions more if we knew for sure they did.
I’d honestly rather see most non-elite builds brought up to par with elite specs, rather than nerfing the Elites. Most of them have rather cool internal synergies and fun combat flow.
Watch the reflect and block timings and they become much easier to deal with.
Scrapper is fine and elegant. I’d rather see less used builds buffed on other classes.
None. Just give Engie’s weaponswap so pistol and shield ever see the light of day.
WvW is a great game-mode, but it was built around a now obsolete server system, and they need a new, guild-centered method of picking teams.
Cut WvW into seasons like pvp. During off season players can sign up for 1 and only one server during a season. Guilds can opt to collectively sign up for a server, and if it doesn’t fit the whole guild, it will deny registration. and suggest a server that will fit it.
Unregistered players could be thrown in with priority toward friends, but otherwise wherever they fit.
All the classes have little bugs like this at the moment, and its good to talk about them! But, just a reminder, there’s a stickied thread at the top of the forum that says: “Submit Profession bugs to the Game Bugs forum”. It’ll probably get more relevant eyes over there.
I certainly feel like all is not as appears with the DH F3, but as one of the stickied threads points out: “Submit profession bugs to the game bugs forum”. It will probably get more relevant eyes over there. =)
Minor flavor point: Remember, Alchemy and Science work because they ARE a part of nature. The randomness comes because people don’t understand the underlying principles as much as they think they do. Its fun because at least the people doing science are OK with that. =)
Also, the cast time being long can always be rewarded with higher numbers. I just feel like in a game where people get to wave around huge swords that feel like they’re made of paper, an auto attack feeling heavy is important. If they do any changes to it I still want it to feel heavy.
I’m a huge fan of the hammer’s feel. Hammer auto #3 really feels like you’re swinging something heavy and unstoppable. What if it gave a short stability during the third swing?
Well, Shield of Courage IS also a STRICT upgrade over virtue of courage, so I guess its ok that it has some weakness somewhere.
Heh, look at whirl gyro, then look at Precession of Blades trap on DH. Feel good about life. =)
Engineer is not bad. Engineer is quite good. The number of valid engineer builds is REALLY low compared to other classes. Most of this comes from two places.
Many engineer abilities are redundant. Battering ram is in most situations inferior to flamethrower. Gadgets in general are often weaker than something that can be gained through a kit. (notable exception slick shoes). Even in weapon abilities, shield is now mostly inferior to hammer. Pistols v rifle I’ll get to in a sec.
Engineers weapons have little synergy. The Hammer spec for Guardian has two combo fields, an aoe cc effect, a launch, and a mobile blast finisher and a ranged root. Each ability combos either technically or mechanically with at least two other abilities in the weapon set alone. Pistol/shield and pistol/pistol have zero built in synergy. No ability combos with any other. No combo fields, no cute cc combos worth using given the high cooldown costs. They don’t have weapon swap to increase combo potential, and even with kits, the coolest thing they can do is drop a combo field and hope the 20% physical finisher from pistol procs.
That’s honestly just focusing on the bad though. Most of the kits are great, most of the turrets are great. Elixers are slightly better build-rounders than gadgets, and they’ve got a cool top-end with Elixer X’s throw. Gyros feel slightly better than elixers so far, if not quite as good as turrets, and Hammer is a joy to use, Rifle is great. Combos everywhere. Fun times all around. The only frustration is that there’s a lot of abilities that look really cool, and either don’t add up numbers wise, or don’t play right with other engineer abilities.
I do like this, but it DOES seem mostly like you wanted an elementalist with engineer flavor. One of the cool things about the armor customizations available is that it WOULD allow you to have an elementalist that has the appearance of an engi.
Mechanics wise, I feel like engineer has a lot of underused abilities right now that should be polished before they add new things.
as a thief you can hardly ever backcap either they have some 1 at their home who thieves cant beat or there is some1 close by enough to prevent the decap in the 50+ games i played during this season i haven’t seen a single thief decap.
in fact when i am protecting home i can usually just tank their dmg even in 2v1’s with only 175 toughness
I see thieves decap all the time. Heck I decap as a thief all the time. I’ll often just decap, bolt immediately after, then grab the point they just left undefended, join the fight they just left. Very occasionally, I need to wait for them to dodge off the point to get the last tick of decap, THEN I run away, but sometimes I just kill them and get a full cap. Capping takes 10 ticks, decapping even if you choose not to fight, you’ve basically locked that player in place for 10 ticks.
Huh, Gadgeteers don’t have enough utility for my taste, but I’m glad someone is having fun. =)
Hmm…most notable thing I’ve found here is that Static shield goes through pistolwhip/blurred frenzy. For stripping Stab, Shield 5 might strip two, but remember that hammer5+hammer2 strips 2-4 as well and has a shorter cd. It might require timing the two together, but its an easier trick than getting a full channel on shield5 and throwing it. Its also nice to be able to reflect a full rapid fire. The knockback is nice on shield4, but these days there’s so much stab it feels more like a hail mary than an actual control tool. How many water fields does engie have? Healing Turret, Supply Crate overcharge, Healing Turret Toolbelt, and elixer gun toolbelt? I suppose it certainly enough to reliably heal off shield 4.
Hmm… ascended has no bearing on pvp, but that aside, PvE thief is about as good as its always been. Daredevil is basically an upgrade to Acrobatics if you’ve got access to it, but there are differences if you feel like thoroughly examining.
PvP, you REALLY need interrupts these days. Breaking through stability is incredibly important to actually getting a kill. If you can get through it and blow your damage combo, you’ll be good. Otherwise it will probably feel like you did nothing. Similarly, the enemy team will have a lot of interrupts, so keep stun breaks ready and remember that thieves are great at strategic counters.
People always want more things =P. I certainly wouldn’t QUIT. I can definitely see the flavor. I personally feel that ranger is a better fit for rifle, but hey, why not both?
One of the things I really enjoy about gw2 pvp is that every build has a beat, and if you can find the right timing their build falls apart. Seems like decap engi might have the tools to do that. Its not easy, but it IS fun. My only concern is that engi’s do have lackluster out of combat mobility no matter how you look at it. Beyond that, I think its a cool idea.
Play lots of matches. During the match be aware of each fight you’re in, how it starts and how it ends. Look at what decisions you made that caused you to lose when you do. Even if its just “there were more of them than me”, remember that you could have been with teammates, or maybe saved an ability that would have let you escape.
If you have enough slots, I find it also helps to have one of each class to play around with. If you actually play a class, you’ll understand its weaknesses much better. play common meta builds in unranked just to see how they work.
Thief is one of my favorite classes because it makes you work JUST hard enough to do things that you need to understand the game to play it well, but you don’t need to be perfect to be effective once you get that understanding.
Warriors and guardians get to walk mindlessly into combat going “lololol Ima staba you face”. As a thief, you need to be clever. When they go to stab you in the face, you move out of the way. When they try to blow their combo you dodge. Are they gonna heal? you interrupt them. Did they just start casting their ult? stealth and wait for it to end, then kill them when they don’t have their crutch.
Can’t beat them in a fight? That’s fine, you’ve got the best mobility in the game and can backcap like a boss. Even if all the points have fights on them, you have enough mobility that you can pick which fight to join and where to turn the tide.
As a thief, the battlefield is a puzzle, and if you can solve it you can win.
If you use racials, charr have many engineering themed racials that are fun and even somewhat useful.
I mostly just wish pistol gameplay were more interesting. I ran shield pistol before HoT came out, but hammer is just so fun comparitively. As far as I can tell shield pistol doesn’t even get more utility.
Hey, let me first say, that I love hammer-scrapper. Its got a lot of combat flow, intuitive combos, and generally fun gameplay.
Now here’s the thing. Shield and Hammer each have two defensive abilities. Hammer has Electrowhirl and Shock Shield, which do reflect and block respectively. Shield has Magnet Shield/Inversion and Static/Throw Shield.
Electrowhirl gives 1 second of reflect while damaging with a 6 second cooldown. Magnet shield gives 3 seconds and has a 30 second cooldown.
Shock shield gives 2 seconds of block and has a 20 second cooldown, and Static shield gives 1.5 seconds of block and has a 40 second cooldown.
At the end of the day, I mostly like my weapon choices to actually be choices. I suppose Static shield can give you an insane interrupt on specific bosses, but so does the thunderclap rocketcharge combo. Any ideas on when to use shield over hammer?
Thanks Sirrealist. The fact that the achievement stays up throughout the year makes this much more doable.
Ah one more thing, it WOULD have been cool for anet to add some drink-crafting recipes for chef this release, but alas that economic outlet isn’t a thing. Also, it does depend on if you can continue earning pieces throughout the year as well because there is a very small inflow of gifts throughout the year. I wouldn’t rely on that though as historically you can’t get achievements for holidays when the festival is over.
Lets do some math. 10,000 is a big number, but there’s ways to chop into it. Now lets assume that you can only get 10 wintersday gifts a day. it would take you almost three years of wintersday to be able to complete this achievement. Yikes!
Fortunately the game gives you plenty of options for getting well over 10 wintersday gifts per day. Its conceivable that you could get say 100 gifts a day, without much issue(even if only by dumping Karma on it). Now instead of three years, we’re down to 3 months and some change.
Now at that rate anyone could very realistically do it in (roughly) three months without purchasing a single drink from the auction house. Historically, wintersday CAN stick around for quite a while, but we don’t know it will do that this year.
Now I’ve got one good thing and one bad thing to point out here. The bad thing is that drinks drop from presents at a slightly lower rate than 1-per. The good thing is that if you’re focused, you can get pretty easily 2-300 gifts a day and you probably will grinding all the other achievments for the shoulders aside from Claw of Jormag. That means you can get it down to about a month and a half of grinding (admittedly every day), again before touching the auction house to get drinks.
If we’re safe and assume wintersday lasts about a month, you’ve still got about 1/3 of the 10,000 you’ll need to buy on the AH. at current rates of about 8 silver a drink, that will still be a steep price, roughly 270 gold. Though on the other hand I sometimes look at prices and go “that’s a ton” then I look at my bank full of crafting mats I rarely use and go “hm….”.
Its all intimidating, but it is a challenge to overcome. Ask yourself these questions if you’re going for the shoulders:
How frequently and at what rate can you grind gifts?
How much gold are you willing to spend?
How much are you willing to grind/spend to help a friend doing this?
Do the answers to these work out to 10,000 gifts? If so, go for it! If not, there’s a lot of cool stuff to do in gw2, and hey, maybe you’ll get a precourser drop doing other stuff.
Once you know these things, its just a question of when does wintersday end?
Why are there still spore events out there?
in Battle for Lion’s Arch - Aftermath
Posted by: Gatvin.6510
Clearly they are Toxic Dandelions. Even if you cut off their heads, they will always return. They might seem more alive though if they rotated through different zones instead of being always present.
Lists are great! This thread is for things you liked about the first round of living story. In no particular order.
1. Fun plot – Overall, the plot was a fun trip around the world, and better than many games I’ve played. Cut scenes were nice, and a clear effort was made to keep people who missed pieces connected to the story. Characters grew and changed over time. Not bad!
2. Worldwide events – The events had a great scale to them that demanded attention the world over, pushing people to different corners and highlighting different zones to drive exploration. You really got the feeling the world was under attack.
3. Quick Updates – For the most part, responses to problems with a fight were addressed in a timely fashion with some forum communication and patches. I hope such communications continue even outside living world.
Thanks ANet!
50 man limit per boon on Assault Knight
in Battle for Lion’s Arch - Aftermath
Posted by: Gatvin.6510
Complaining is a subset of feedback. It is negative feedback, and usually poorly or incorrectly targeted, but it is feedback.
When possible its best to take blame on yourself and improve, but as mentioned, there are a lot of design decisions that cause taking blame yourself just sounds insane. “Well, its really my fault everyone wanted to find Peter instead of Knights.”, “Its my fault I was chain-stunned by the unmarked, untelegraphed slash attack”, “Its my fault I chose to play a condition-based character and was useless half the fight.”
Commander tags are nice, but real communication comes from teamspeak, and also raid warnings which this game doesn’t have. Would be nice to have some more in-game coordination tools.
This can be circumvented by adding more condition types, which they have done at all.
Do you want them to have a hundred condition types which all do essentially the same? Srsly? That’s absolute nonsense. Without a total system overhaul, condis will never be viable in PvE, but I agree that creating that condition reflection was just plain stupid. It even annoys me as a dedicated direct damage player since it makes me miss out on 40-50 % worth of damage modifiers.
Nono, I was actually complementing them on their condition system. Confusion is conceptually fantastic, as is torment. There’s lots of ways to play around with it too.
My main point was that if we’re blaming the caps, which are a limitation of the engine, then the fight is putting focus on engine limitations, which is bad design.
I get that people complain about the caps all the time, but this fight causes more of that than normal.
Thay have remade a whole map, added tons of events for all sorts of game-play (champ-farmers, World-boss-farmers, the strategics, the casual event doers, the searcher and collector, tons of rewards – where many are really good….) This one is in fact wery well thought about and there is something for everyone!
This patch is in fact very good!!
The patch your talking about Frostfang was Escape from LA, which was awesome a 9/10 patch.
The patch we are talking about is Battle for LA which was bad, very bad, 3/10 patch at the best and very disappointing after 16 months of Living Story to end on this bug ridden sour note with no rewards at of any worth, except for the helmet skin and a new title.
Unfortunately its the end of things that people remember. Fortunately, they can still revert it to Zerg Knights. Extending the event after fixing Knights wouldn’t hurt either. Its the end of things that people remember.
I like this event as well. Or liked it. Hologram Prime is a really cool fight, but uh, now I can only get crap-loot and event fail experience for fighting damage sponges.
The other events are cool, but end up being a consolation prize for failing Knights.