Guild Wars 2

BlackhawkSOM.6401:

Geff.1930:

BlackhawkSOM.6401:

Seems kind of pointless showing off your armor when everyone has the same things….

Your mom is pointless.

Josh Davis.6015:

My engineer.

Confirmed, devs play engi, therefore it must follow that engi OP.

Here is my engi:
Thumper turret I choose you!

ey go somewhere else with your corny jokes little boy you must have no friends with your weird kitten self.

Your mom has no friends with her weird kitten self.

Pinder.5261:

The sad thing is, despite this being my favorite looking character, I’ve learned that Ele just isn’t my gig, so I never play her anymore.

No devs have posted their ele character screenshots, therefore it must follow that devs don’t play ele, therefore it must follow that ele underpowered.

Swagg.9236:

Geff.1930:

There is no point arguing with you because you have never played a balanced game. There is no mmorpg in existence that is balanced and competitive and has weekly tournaments with large prize pools and a slew of professional sponsored teams.

I have repeated over and over again in the past the things that keep this game from gaining recognition by serious competitive gamers. There is no point in me repeating it again.

Once again, you’ve failed to argue anything with regards to my main points. Thanks for the bump.

I won’t argue with your main points because your suggestions are exactly the same as what the devs have been doing in the past. Making small insignificant changes rather than looking at the big picture.

Look at any competitive game (ofcourse, you have to use your imagination because you haven’t played any):

1) Players know exactly what each other player on their team and their opponent’s team is capable of even before the match starts. This is because even though there might be a ton of characters each individual character has a homogenized skillset to work with. There is little to no diversity within a certain character. The only diversity comes from itemization which results in differences in the numbers rather than the skills themselves (each player also knows what items the opponent and their own temmates have). The key in competitive games is relying on prediction and the skill based aspect of it comes when a player is able to appropriately use prediction and know which skill is going to be used even before your opponent thinks about using it. By contrast in this game you can know only a small pool of the skills that are available to your opponent from the weapon they are carrying. The system falls apart because of utility skill options, healing skill options, weapon swap, toolbelt skills, toolkit skills, traits.

2) Players know exactly what cooldowns are available to their teammates and the opponents team at all times because there are so few skills available to each character, at the same time each cooldown is much more impactful than in this game (part of the reason why is explained in the next point). In those games skilled players adjust their strategy, their aggressiveness and their defensiveness based on what cooldowns have already been used by the enemy team. Visual and auditory cues with the skills certainly play a part in it, but that’s only the tip of the iceberg. Even in this game you can tell when certain skills have been used, but it bears little to no significance because: a) there are so many skills that are coming off cooldown at a rapid rate, b) you don’t know what utility skills are available to them, c) certain traits can refresh cooldowns or auto-cast active skills, and d) fights have the potential to drag on infinitely making people be able to use the same skill immediately as they come off cooldown multiple times throughout a single fight. This brings me to my next point, why do fights have the potential to last an infinite amount of time.

3) Health is actually a precious resource in competitive games. The level of sustain possible in GW2 is unmatched by any game I’ve played. The obvious reason is that each character has heals, but the more important and less obvious reason is that there is no secondary more difficult to regain resource pool such as mana. Further facilitating this problem is an insurmountably large number of skills that give you immunity to damage for X seconds, and even more on top of that we have dodges. If that weren’t enough, we also have downed state from which you can come back with some HP. The culmination of all of these factors makes GW2’s health pool a easily refreshable resource. This ability to have a high level of sustain goes hand in hand with the skill spammy nature of the game because your damage has much less potential than if health were a precious resource, and on top of that a lot of the damage can be avoided due to the large number of immunity sources. The two factors work together in a cyclical fashion, you need skill spam to counter the high level of sustain and you need a high level of sustain to counter skill spam.

There is no point arguing with you because you have never played a balanced game. There is no mmorpg in existence that is balanced and competitive and has weekly tournaments with large prize pools and a slew of professional sponsored teams.

I have repeated over and over again in the past the things that keep this game from gaining recognition by serious competitive gamers. There is no point in me repeating it again.

BlackhawkSOM.6401:

Seems kind of pointless showing off your armor when everyone has the same things….

Your mom is pointless.

Josh Davis.6015:

My engineer.

Confirmed, devs play engi, therefore it must follow that engi OP.

Here is my engi:
Thumper turret I choose you!

Swagg.9236:

Geff.1930:

Have you played for any professional teams in any other games besides GW2?

You’re complaining to a McDonald’s frycook that he’s not making your burger like the guy at Burger King makes it. We’re talking about GW2 here. Other games (aside from maybe GW1) have little relevance.

If someone makes a suggestion or a critique it is important for that person to have some credibility. Continuing with your terrible analogy, which kind complaint is more credible? A complaint from a person who has never eaten a burger outside of McDonalds or a complaint from burger connoisseur who has traveled across the planet eating a variety of burgers and has gained an expertise on what a good burger should taste like?

I’m not saying GW2 should copy some other game. I’m just saying that if a person has played a balanced e-sport game on a competitive level he naturally picks up an understanding on what “balanced” is supposed to be and what qualities cause or inhibit balance.

If your resume consists of only GW2 or other mmorpgs you do not have a frame of reference in regards to balance because you have never played a game that is balanced enough to foster a competitive e-sport audience.

How do you figure that LoL is a casual game and this game is not? I guess LoL perpetuates the illusion that it’s a casual game because of its matchmaking. There is no such thing as hotjoin where there is an amalgam of players with different skill levels. The so called “casual” low-skilled players get matched with other casual low skilled players.

There is matchmaking in solo queue in this game as well. But, the illusion of casual-ness falls apart when those casual players join a hotjoin with perhaps a high skilled player and gets annihilated, followed ofcourse by them coming to forums and saying X and Y class are OP (granted, sometimes they may be correct; but oftentimes not).

LoL is and will always be a more competitive hardcore game than GW2 because the game is more objectively balanced. Furthermore, it is easy to balance the game because each champion’s can be tweaked individually. There is little to no diversity WITHIN a certain champion so their kit skills can be tweaked accordingly. Runes, Masteries and Items provide very little customization the champion’s base kit remains intact and is open to counterplay. Furthermore, every champion has access to every item/mastery etc. Summoner spells provide an added level of customization, but every player is made aware of each other player’s chosen summoner spell, again open to counterplay.

By contrast, in GW2 you have multitudes of traits, utilities, healing skills, elites, weapon swaps. This provides too much customization for the devs to balance the game effectively. Every single tweak they make make has an expansive reach. It’s not like in LoL where a certain skill of a champion can be adjusted to balance that particular champion. From a gameplay perspective, characters don’t have predictable kits like in LoL, no counterplay, more random spam.

Everyone and their mother things that they have the miracle suggestion that will balance the game. What makes your suggestions worthwhile or credible. Have you played for any professional teams in any other games besides GW2? What makes your expertise better than every other self-proclaimed know-it-all.

Engineer.

It’s probably fotm right now.

Did you use an wooden plank to record that video?

Don’t forget Mesmers. Just sit back and let confusion and Phantasms do all the work.

Qaelyn.7612:

Sometimes I’m capping a point and someone else comes and stands next to me.

I’ve found a foolproof solution to this problem however.

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It’s a really great solution.

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Wait for it..

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I leave.

Great solution. I do that as well. But, your teammate is wasting time approaching that node because clearly he can see on the map that you are capping it and no enemies are there to contest it.

If you cap a point and someone was already there capping it before you got there you should get -1000000000 rank points and -10000000 glory and all your PvP achievements should be nullified and restarted.

Seriously, how long has the game been out? Why the kitten are people still stacking onto a single point in order to cap it.

There are other traits like this. Engi can’t get conditions when below a certain threshold. Warrior auto-cast balanced stance when hit by a CC. Just to name a few.

Lol esport…

If you don’t wear any armor and get hit by a 13k eviscerate then frankly it’s your fault. How hard is it to put on some armor? You don’t even have to put any runes in it. Just put it on…

This question only gets asked by mmorpg players. I’ve never heard a MOBA player ask why play?

I ask this: why play PvE? Mindlessly killing trivial AI mobs so that you get some gear and some fictional impression of progress so that you can kill more AI mobs.

PvP is like playing a sport not unlike soccer or chess. Your testing your wits against other players, not against AI mobs. This game does not offer the same scene where professional players play casted tournaments each weekend (this is due to game imbalance), but there are other games that do. Watching the pros make amazing plays encourages you to practice and get better at the game. Again, not so true in this game because there is too great of an element of luck and randomness built into the game mechanics and therefore less of an element of skill.

Warriors are OP and don’t think Mesmers are OP.

I will grant that in the right hands warriors can be good, I’d say even on par with engis, guardians and rangers. But, when I do get defeated by one I know it’s because of a skillfully played warrior. I’ve played against too many sub-par warriors to know that they suck if not played correctly and with the correct build.

Engi, the trait that gives you swiftness every time you equip a kit. Perma swiftness.

Mesmer, the trait that gives you vigor every time you crit. Perma vigor.

Guardian, the trait that heals you every time you use a meditation.
—-
Any trait that auto-casts an active skill such as Warrior auto-cast balanced stance when you get CC. Lol esport…

I got one from a lvl 40 silver chest. It’s probably a crit result from crafting with tiger tokens, because the regular results are tribal, summit and tusked respectively for orb crystal and sliver.

Now I want to know how to get ash bulwark…

This is a PvE game. Devs don’t care about feedback from PvPers.

On a related note, nerf mesmer.

When will Mesmers get nerfed?

Silentsins.3726:

I feel that while it’s perfectly possible for the devs to create fun and competitively interesting PvP in GW2, it’s specifically the watchability for spectators that’s at odds with the “MMO nature” of the game. Closest example that I can think of is Smite, a MOBA with an MMO style hotbar and 3rd person view. Despite every character being limited to 4 skills, an auto-attack, and 2 actives (all of them have to be aimed, including the autos. No tab-targeting.), it STILL gets somewhat hard to follow as a spectator during the team fights. Since each character in GW2 has 15+ skills, runes and sigils that occasionally have their own animations/attacks, ect. There’s a hard upper limit on how visually uncluttered the devs can make the game without removing vital tells that players need just to know what skill is being used against them.

I disagree completely about spectator-ing in SMITE. If you are completely new to the game some level of confusion is to be expected, but if you have played for about a month you will know exactly what each God’s kit is and have an implicit idea about what cooldowns have been used and what cooldowns are available to the players. As a player you know when a Neith’s backflip is available for instance, or when an Ares or a Poseidon’s Ulti is available so that you realize the risks and benefits of engaging at particular moments. This knowledge gets transferred over as a viewer or a shoutcaster, you know that if someone has used his beads CD and the enemy has an Ares on their team that the person will try to play defensively to avoid getting caught by Ares. Or you know that if a Neith has used her backflip it is the perfect time to focus her if she is in a bad spot.

The same level of forethought and strategy simply does not exist in this game. The balance devs come from mmorpg mindset where you macro spam spam spam your abilities until one of you dies. Furthermore, the element of prediction is diminished by weapon swap and utilities. If you see a Warrior with a GS for instance, you know his kit right off the bat, this is good, this is how it should be, but then you add to the mix weapon swap, a variety of heals to choose from and a large number of utilities and elites and you are now faced with limitless permutations.

Note again, I feel like I’m repeating myself here: Because there are so many skills each skill’s impact has to be marginalized to compensate. This is done with a high level of damage immunity sources and heals. Heals and damage immunities in turn have to be marginalized by a high level of skill spam.

Deimos Tel Arin.7391:

Geff.1930:

Being able to do so much damage while you are downed is not okay.

really? sorry. i am not aware of that. what profession is able to do that?

Any, if the victim is specced glass cannon.

Being able to do so much damage while you are downed is not okay.

PVStar.3658:

Wintel.4873:

The fact that GW2 is an MMO automatically killed any chances it had to become E-sports worthy. I have no idea why anyone thought it had potential with 8 different classes, 40 different trait-lines, countless skills, etc. It is literally impossible to balance such a thing, you’re always going to have at a list of different things that are crazy overpowered or underpowered.

LoL has 117 champions each with 4 unique skills, hundreds of items, dozens of runes/masteries, and is the most successful esport out. Balance isn’t the issue GW2 has with becoming an esport, the issue is pretty much everything else about GW2 PvP.

Read what I wrote above. LoL has many champions but each champion has a unique and predictable kit. Each champion is easy to balance individually. In GW2 you have weapon swap, utility skills, toolkits, and traits. 1) It’s difficult to balance, 2) there is a non-stop stream of (low-impact) cooldowns available whereas in LoL you have to carefully consider where and when to use your few cooldowns.

Serdoc.7261:

ANet just needs to keep focusing on:
-balance
-new game modes

FTFY

If it is balanced it is fun, competitive and interesting to watch. Those two go hand in hand. Ingame rewards mean nothing to professional gamers. If they get good viewership on their twitch they are able to pad their income, but again viewership comes from having a competitive game that is interesting to watch.

As a MOBA player I can tell you that this game will not be as balanced and as competitive as esport games unless the devs redesign the game’s systems from the ground up with a focus on balance. That will not happen because a large portion of GW2’s players are mmorpg players not moba players, they are accustomed to a high level of customization and a low level of balance. By contrast moba players are accustomed to a low level of customization and a high level of balance.

Balance and customization cannot co-exist, they have an inverse relationship with eachother. Moba games have many heroes/champions/gods but each individual hero has a limited pool of capabilities. Itemization provides low customizability, but the base capabilities remain intact. Furthermore, each hero has a access to much fewer active skill CDs at any given time. This encourages strategic use of CDs and not “wasting” CDs and making yourself vulnerable. But, at same the time each CD is much more impactful and can change the team fight dynamics extensively if used properly.

Health is a much more valueable resource in mobas because of the lack of access to heals, lack of a downed state and low access to damage immunity from dodges/invul/block. This encourages very strategic play and heavy consideration about positioning.

By contrast you have GW2 where a majority of skills are macro spammed when they come off cooldown. You get hurt, but you heal back up reducing the impact of any damage you have taken.

The two factors of spamminess and high sustain feed off eachother. You have high sustain, therefore players have to throw a slew of non-stop CDs at you. You have a slew of non-stop CDs therefore players have to have high sustain.

Mmo players should be familiar with this setup, but by no means is this e-sport material. Again, given that a large portion of GW2 playerbase is made up of mmorpg players this makes sense.

gesho.9468:

this isnt moba. pls keep gw2 combat the way it is.
dont slow it down. and not everything is always tractable, do in real fight you always know what and when hits you? sometimes you rely on overall intuition, play blind and lose or win.

Granted, a lot of people might like macro spamming skills off CD. But, the downside of this is that the PvP games themselves won’t be as engaging, fun and competitive as e-sport games and will always rely on tertiary rewards for player motivation rather than the fun of gameplay (hence why we are getting a rewards patch).

Are there any plans to reduce the number of skill cooldowns available to a player at any given time?

If any of you have ever played a MOBA game you will know that each Champion/Hero/God/Character has only 5 skills (~+2) available to them at any given time. The fun in those games comes from knowing each character’s kit and using proper strategic planning, positioning, counterplay. That’s why those games are best as e-sports.

By contrast, in this game you have spam spam spamming of skills to no end. Each individual skill is much less impactful than in MOBAs. The primary reason for the dampening of impact is because of the high access to dodges and healing.

Just look at casted tournaments in smite for example and compare it to casted tournaments in GW2. The shoutcasters in GW2 merely state how one player is “getting low” or “there is a lot of damage going out” or something in a similar vein. This is because there is no way they can follow the sheer amount of skills being spammed at any given team fight. By contrast shoutcasters in MOBAs can say how each skill being used in a team fight is impacting the overall flow of the team fight because each skill is much more impactful and due to the fewer available skills there is much less random spam and much more strategic play and counterplay.

I no longer play this game. But, you can see from my long post that I still have a keen interest in this game and want its PvP to succeed. I believe this is one of the most visually complex games on the market. The map designs , character animations and character designs are spectacular and well beyond their time. The gameplay and balance, from a strictly PvP perspective, is substandard. My advice to devs would be to not look at competing mmorpgs for PvP balance ideas, instead look at competing mobas.

I will continue to observe this game’s progress in patch notes.

Alissah.9281:

the reason no one really cares about pvp, is because people care about getting “rewards” in pve.

about 90% of the gaming population nowadyas seem so focussed on rewards that nothing else matters anymore >__<

http://i.imgur.com/urPRvEh.jpg

You can either have a solid PvP game with good balance and fun skill-based PvP, or you can have a good PvE game with regular updates to keep people interested in their PvE characters. You cannot have both.

GW2 PvP popularity has had an inverse relationship with the popularity of SMITE as a competitive e-sport game, because the two games are somewhat similar in design on the grand scale, 3rd person PvP.

Unlike GW2, Moba games can expend all of their resources on creating new characters. They also have a great emphasis on balance and have a systematic and large balance team.
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Now let’s look at the specific gameplay subjects that hinder GW2 competitive PvP.

Most importantly there is too much unrestricted variability in the characters in the game. Mobas have many different characters but each character has a restricted kit, a skillful player knows each character’s kit and can predict/counterplay. The only other sources of variability in mobas are itemization and usually two skills that all characters can choose. The itemization differences are fairly limited, they just change the numbers, but the kits for each character remains intact and predictable. The two optional skills that all characters can choose come from a very limited pool and have very large cooldowns, furthermore each player in the game is made aware of what optional skills each other player has chosen. I have the emphasize that a certain amount of predictability is required for a skill based game.

In GW2 you can think of the weapon a character is holding as their kit as each weapon has a limited set of skills to choose from. This would be fine, but you diminish predictability by adding weapon swap.

Traits are 50/50 in my opinion. There are certain traits that just change the numbers, similar to itemization in mobas, this is fine. But, then you have crazy unpredictable traits that auto-remove CC etc.

Now, on to the greatest source of volatility and randomness in gameplay, utility skills. You can choose not 1, not 2, but 3 customizable utility skills, there is a large pool of highly varied utility skills to choose from and each have a fairly low cooldown. Basically this extends a characters kit, without actually being part of their kit. Remember, kits are supposed to be homogenized and predictable to encourage skillful awareness of your opponents cooldowns and to encourage counterplay.

Utility skills are very different from the optional 2 skills in mobas because those two skills are very limited due to their incredibly long cooldowns and limited usage criteria. Ignoring the two opitional skills, a typical moba character has four low CD skills at their disposal and a high CD ultimate. A typical GW2 character has 5 low CD skills in their actual kit (these are predictable by class and what weapon they are holding). Ofcourse there are variations, eles for instance have 20 low CD skills in their kit because they cannot weapon swap and their weapon predicts the skills available in all their attuments. I repeat the key to a kit is predictability. Now, a typical GW2 has a total of 5 + 3 = 8 unpredictable, non-kit skills at their disposal from their alternative weapon set and utility skills. I’m ignoring heals and elites for the moment because elites have a long cooldown situational use, and heals have limited variability in their options. The optional heals and elites certainly increase the randomness, but not as much as utility skills.

All these unpredictable skills and the plethora of low cooldown skills available to any character at any given moment introduces an element of randomness to the gameplay. Your success in a fight is certainly dependent to a certain extent on your skill level, but there are too many random factors involved as well. Because of so many low CD skills the game becomes incredibly skill spammy and there is no such thing as punishing a wasted CD or taking advantage of an opportunity where a player is vulnerable due to losing his CDs.

Low CD temporary invulnerabilities through dodges and the high access to heals and regen effects in the the game creates an artificial necessity for the skill spammy nature of this game.

I’m not saying any of this cannot be changed to make the game more competitive and skillful. But, I believe there is a great reluctance on the part of the devs to make big overhauling changes. Part of the reason is the lack of resources and the lack of emphasis on PvP.

ensoriki.5789:

I think healing is being overestimated. In many areas healing can be quite weak and certain heals have situations where they just fall off in effectivity.

I’ll be blunt in that while I appreciate attrition,pressure and stall teams,
I don’t think those styles translate well to Conquest. Respawn times are relatively short for that play and conquest is about quick flipping nodes and holding them. If you take too long to flip nodes you let points accumulate, and you allow more time for help to arrive. Sure if you can get the nodes and hold them no problem, but pressure specs aren’t fast node assaulters which goes against the scoring system of the game which ticks every second.
I think naturally unless conquest scoring system changed and maybe even the respawn time, attrition specs wont be favored. That and with the flexibility many professions have you don’t need to spec “attrition” because you already have damage and sustainability.

If I can condi nuke or Power spike why would I go attrition and take 2 or 4x as long to kill and maybe give them 15+ points as a result of taking that long to flip when I can do it faster and with less points given while having a Bunker sit on what we take. Like you said you need to shoot gaps between defenses/heals or just straight over-power them but if that weren’t the case the game would probably be slowed so that the person who flips a node gets 40+ points off it because no one can take it back quick enough.

You misunderstood completely. Attrition is not a spec. Attrition based gameplay means targets can be whittled down. This doesn’t have to mean that the whittling process has to be slow. It can mean that health lost is more difficult to get back, which is at the core of this discussion.

In this sustain heavy meta you see players’ health pools ping ponging between low and high. Many of the aspects of the meta that people are upset with such as skill spam are a result of the devs trying to counterbalance against a high level of sustain.

Fourth is correct in pointing out that the lack of a low regen resource pool such as mana further increases the sustain in this game. Smite, for instance, does have some high sustain gods such as Aprodite, Hel and Chang’e, but 1) their heals are not nearly as strong as the heals in GW2 (health pool does not ping pong) 2) they have to take mana into consideration. In our sustain heavy meta a 1v1 fight, where both characters have high heals and low damage, can draw out potentially infinitely because of the lack of a slow regen resource.

The problem is that the current sustain heavy meta is a core part of the game. If they were to want to change it to a more attrition based game it would change the game on a fundamental level. I don’t know if the devs would have philosophical disputes with that. But, I encourage the devs to be open minded about this as I’m sure the devs want the game to head in the direction of a serious and fun esport.

Becoming an popular esport game is not without its merits ofcourse, look at LoL as an example. But, much more importantly look at smite. The devs should see smite as serious competition in the esport market because unlike other MOBAs it is a third-person MOBA and will draw the attraction of competitive PvP players. I’m not here to promote smite, both GW2 and smite have their own merits. I’m simply trying to encourage the devs pay attention to this competing game and do some research on what aspects of its gameplay is making it a skyrocketing success (specifically in the realm of esports). Don’t necessarily copy them, but learn from some of their gameplay mechanics. Recently, the asian publisher Tencent (who were early backers of LoL) have given their financial backing to smite.

I encourage the devs to not be afraid to upset the community with changes. If big sweeping changes are made ofcourse it will make many people upset. But, you will be surprised at how open minded gaming communities can be if they feel like the game is headed in the right direction.

Suggestions
All this being said, here are some suggestions about how to take the game in a more attrition based direction:
- Reduce the fundamental importance of healing in PvP. This can be done in a variety of ways. Healing could be made less accessible via long cooldowns. Healing effectiveness could be reduced greatly. Out of combat health regen rate could be reduced greatly.
- Dramatically reduce the access to regen effects. Regens should have high cooldown and low duration. (See Hercules’ regen from smite)
- Increase health pools. Rather than reducing all damage, increasing health pools seems like an easier change.
- Remove RNG from damage. Make it such that damage works on a fixed formula and it always does a specific amount of regular and crit damage based on your stats.

The idea behind the above suggestions is to make people not always approach a fight with full health, but rather pick and choose their engagements. With reduced high CD healing, players will be much more prone to attrition and damage taken will feel much more impactful. Furthermore, increased attrition gameplay would open the door for new game modes.

Gw2 innovated in a variety of ways. One of these innovations was eliminating roles and giving everyone access to heals and removing resource pools such as mana. In doing so certain limitations were revealed.

Game Modes
The ease of access to low cooldown powerful heals have certainly led to a limitation in game modes. This game cannot have a conquest game mode specifically because conquest is heavily attrition based and would not work with a sustain heavy meta. Capture the flag would not work for similar reasons. The way that domination varies from those other game modes is that in domination you are forced to stay at a point. Running away is very easy in GW2’s sustain heavy meta.

High Damage
Recently there has been an outpour of support for lowering damage, part of it motivated by Helseth’s rant. The reason damage is the way it is is because there is a fairly short window between a target’s heal attempts in which one can attempt to burst down the target. Heals are on a 15~30 second cooldown. So damage has to be high in order to prevent an infinite fight. Again, slowly whittling down works in attrition based games, but does not work in a sustain heavy game. The fact that we have healing power as a stat brings more volatility into the mix. If a character has low healing power and bad class heals, they are more prone to attrition in an extended fight. On the other hand, Gurdians, for instance, can experience incredible burst and comfortably heal back to full while at the same time mitigating a large portion of damage.

Conditions
Conditions and the heavy damage they deal is the answer to a sustain heavy meta. Conditions, if not removed (i.e after active condition removals have been used), have to outpressure heals.

Skill Spam
With the current sustain heavy meta time is your enemy if you want to kill a target. If you miss a skill through one of many possible ways dodges/invul/block/out of range/LoS/intercepted by AI, you give the target precious seconds lowered on their heal cooldown. Missing a skill as a result is much more heavily taxed than in attrition based games. Not only are misses more taxed but misses are also much more common than in other games in which damage is prevented primarily by juking. Skill spam is the answer to this.

Rewards? Come on! If you want PvE stuff go do PvE. PvE loot doesn’t matter to hardcore PvPers.

1.) Changes in the some skill fundamentals.
-All skills should require LoS.
-Find ways to reward personal skill level in an appropriate manner such that personal skill is the primary determinant of success. i.e. in a 1v1 duel the more skilled player should win, not the one who has more luck/ more button spam build.
-Remove skill activation passively through traits. These include Warrior Last Stand, Defy pain and Engi Self-Regulating Defenses among others.
-Reduce amount of Utility skill options. Perhaps even reduce non-heal/elite utility slots from 3 to 2. Less variability = more balance.

2.) Reduce sources of Weakness and reduce ease of application.

3.) Improve post game analysis table with more stats such as damage done, healing done, damage received etc. Make Tables visible my all players and spectators.

4.) (This suggestion should be subject to through testing) Globally increase health pools, but at the same time dramatically increase the cooldowns of all Heal skills and reduce their effectiveness.

Ranger pets are not nearly as strong as Mesmer Phantasms and both follow similar pathing.

I suspect that this is a way to weed out low toughness glass cannon builds which are reliant in strategic LoSing as a large part of their survivability. It effectively succeeds at this task if that is indeed the motive. However, it also punishes skillful play.

If they change the pathing structure of AI such that they will no longer follow if you LoS the AI owner then I suspect that they would also need to reduce the burst potential of low toughness glass cannon builds to balance it out.

I would take Helseth’s criticisms with a grain of salt. From all appearances he has not played any other esport game on a competitive level. If this is indeed the case then he has no frame of reference by which to judge.

I have a Ranger built for bleed duration with pet condition duration, pet condition damage and pet bleed on crits traits. I just run in use sharpening stone and stack up some bleeds and run behind a wall and wait for targets to die from bleeds I applied and bleeds constantly being applied by my pet.

It’s absolutely hilarious that this works.

My pet has even downed full health glass cannon thieves alone while I was downed. GG.

Quickfoot Katana.8642:

Letting an AI passively do the job for you is BAD DESIGN, unless the goal is to promote passive play, which I sincerely doubt that’s the direction ArenaNet wants to take.

What makes you say this? For god’s sake look how many traits there are that automatically cast abilities at certain HP thresholds or when certain criteria are met. Warriors get an auto stunbreak and stability when hit by a CC.

Take a hint.

Pets don’t aggro, they only attack players if the ranger attacked them first or told the pet to attack them. This is no different from Mesmer phantasms. They will follow you till kingdom come they don’t care if you strategically LoS the owner.

Is it rewarding non-skilled play. Yes. But, this is a softcore PvP game designed for newer PvPers and mmorpg players.

You can even say that this game has a smaller skill cap than most mmorpgs because in almost all mmorpgs I have played all skills require you to LoS the target (i.e the target cannot be behind you), this game does not have that restriction, a majority of skills will make you auto-turn even if the target is behind you.

Compare the skill level of an average player in a Hotjoin and an average player in a hardcore PvP game like LoL or SMITE. If you think this is a high skill cap game you are sorely mistaken.

transtemporal.2158:

Yes I agree, low ranking players are bottom feeding scum who make up for their lack of skill by leeching off better players.

High ranking players on the other hand are goodly saints who only want to help everyone be better players.

Is that pretty much the narrative you’re trying to sell?

No, that is not what I’m trying to sell at all. Both parties are acting out of self interest to do whatever is most fun taking into consideration their own skill level. I did not make any value judgements.

I would have suggested they use unique sound effects for each skill, like in Smite. In Smite the sound says more about what skills people are using and what course of action to take under the circumstances than animations alone.

Ofcourse I quickly realized that this feature would not work in this game because there are just too many skills all on a fairly low cooldown and each skill has a lot less impact than a skill use in Smite. The amount of skill spam would just lead to a cacophony of skill noises. I’d estimate that the devs already explored this option early in development and deemed it unfit.

High Rank players tend to intentionally go on the opposite team from people whom they know are good.

1) This provides better practice.
2) Facerolling noobs who are not in your league is not fun as it isn’t challenging.

Low rank players will tend to do the opposite thing. They will tend to go on the teams with good players because they are not confident enough in their skills and know that they need to be carried to win a match.

If he or she wanted to do this, why would he stop at 11 wins and not 10 or 12 wins? Everyone knows that even numbers are better than odd numbers because they can be divided to yield a whole number. Odd numbers be divided to only yield fractions. Nobody likes fractions.

I think it is fairly clear from this evidence that he will not stop at 11 wins.

Authority.6145:

1+1=2.

No! 1+1 = “whatever the %$&@ I want”

Don’t tell me how to do math, or how to live my life you fascist!

Oh man, so much stress… Imagine all the hemorrhoids that will be flaring.

Fenrir.5493:

Yeah i never understanded the only pvp damage buff, no one uses it in pvp anyway…

1.) understanded isn’t a word.
2.) Atleast one person uses Whirling Axe in PvP. I know that for a fact. Your statement is a lie.

I wish they would make spectator mode have free camera like in Smite. The Smite tournaments are sooo fun to watch because of this. Furthermore, the weekly top 5 plays are amazing because you can see the same play from several different angles, in close up or even in slow motion.

There are a plethora of threads clamoring for fewer on screen spell/skill effects and now people want more on-screen effects.

This must be an exercise in frustration for the devs.