Guild Wars 2

P/D is awful.
Why? Because the only viable role condi thief can possibly fill is to force a 1v2 on far point to give your team a 4v3 advantage. (Much like bunker Ele)
Without the aoe and evasion of death blossom, you won’t last very long 1v2.

It would be fine, imo, if this rated queue were mixed given the hemorrhaging population.
Just make the ratings seperate. One ladder for when you queue solo. Another for premades. (Make anything 2-5 queue or maybe only 3-5 count for your “premade” ranking)
If it pushes through with mixed rating, I can almost guarantee a drop in population.

Cruuk is listed twice. (And above me! :| )

The point of a ranking system is to have a set standard to compare against other players.
How do you compare someone who is ranked#2 who soloes vs the rank#1 who only plays 5v5?
It’s impossible to compare and shouldn’t be on the same ladder.
+1 for Helseth and Lowell

Engies can’t stealth or have scorpion wire?
This is news to me.

Vgman.4019:

Lots of thieves in this thread defending this crazy amount of damage. No other glass cannons can kill someone in ~.5 seconds with three button presses. You say the op is full glass cannon so he deserves to be effectively one shot, how dose this line of thinking even begin to make sense? What your implying is that thieves should be virtually insta-win against any other glass cannon spec. This is GW2 not rock/paper/scissors 2.0.
As it stands, the ONLY way not to die to this is to simply not run glass cannon. Why should people be locked out of a play style they enjoy simply because thieves will ALWAYS beat that play style?

This particular combo simply needs to be nerfed.

Engie.
Except Engie burst is on a 10 second cooldown.
Not 45.

Talked with Grouch. Hopefully we can make the next SotG completely about class-balance. The balance discussion on SotG#3 was indeed lacking.

HappinessFactory.4910:

Tyler Bearce.3427:

Leaving counts as a loss for your rating.

Uh…. Idk how that’s punishment if no one can see elo. Hell it would make things even worse for the lower brackets because they’d have to be matched with these guys who might be a higher skill level than them.

Smurfing made easy.

Evo.9180:

JonPeters.5630:

I don’t really think it is a matter of right vs wrong. Separating the queues is technology we haven’t developed. Bracketing them so that when you queue you play as 5s,4s,3s,2s,solo you tend to queue vs those is something we are working towards because its part of a robust single system. It also is the version that solves everything except the edge cases without fragmenting the player base and creating long wait times in certain brackets. This is why this is the right system for the game RIGHT NOW.

It isn’t that the points Teldo, et al. make are invalid they are just more valid for a more mature game like LoL, a game which has been out 3 years longer than we have.

LoL wasn’t a mature game when they implemented a proper solo queue, though. It was still in the early stages. Before that they had a system similar to what you are trying to implement right now, and it was extremely frustrating.

This. Why take a step backwards and try something that League proved was unsuccessful?

Literally, the ONLY downside that I can possibly see is a lack of queue for teams of 3-4. (Easily solved by scrapping Hotjoin and replacing it with this “normal queue” that ANET intends on becoming the main gametype)

;/
https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/pvp/pvp/SotG-Stance-on-ranked-queues/first
Although that rant was mostly about solo team matches (1team vs 1team), solo queue is equally as important.

Population:
I know things look grim and the playerbase looks too small to split. But look at WvW. There’s still queue times on Fridays (300+per server per map?!). This game is alive and thriving. If you could even pull a fraction of the amount of WvW players into pvp via rated solo queue (which I’m sure is probably keeping alot of them away) it would do loads for the health of the game.

Premade (paid) Queues:
In fact, I don’t even care if premade queues don’t even pop anymore—and I’m sure most of the top teams (and especially the casuals) feel the same way. League’s premade queues didn’t even pop 1/hr past 1300 elo early season 2. But that didn’t stop it. Players made by. Custom matches, ESL weeklies/monthlies, Alienware Arena, etc.

There’s a reason why League split its ranked queues into “solo/duo” and “premade”. This system ANet proposes is similar to League’s “normal queue” option (you know, the option only players under lvl30 play nowadays?).

Idk, maybe I’m just dumb for having more faith in GW2’s potential to succeed than ANet does. Then again, so far things haven’t exactly worked out how ANet expects of the game (people hate hotjoin and 1-team vs 1-team queues are popular).

Originally, JSharp said in the first SotG that ANET was against implementing it.
But, obviously, as discussed in SotG#2, this game needs solo queue to thrive.

If you’re talking about condition thieves, they’re pretty useless and almost never played in competitive play.

It needs to be reworked. Make it deal a % dmg reflection. Not based on the # of hits.
The mere existence of it in it’s current form completely shuts out certain builds eg. S/P Thief.

An Ele should only rarely die 1v1 unless you get caught and bursted with no mist cooldown available.

I’ll just go over the standard builds for each profession.

Thief:
Pro- High Burst/45sec, Medium sustained aoe ranged dps, highest mobility, stealth
Con- Glassier than paper, cannot contribute to rezzing in a teamfight, YOLO—it’s suicidal to try rezzing a thief, even 2v1

Warrior:
Pro- Extremely high aoe burst/60sec, twice as much bulk as a Thief, high mobility
Con- Gets kited, weak rdps alternatives, extremely weak to condition damage

Ranger:
Pro- One of the best 1v1 prof, high hybrid dmg (condi+power), fairly bulky with evades, quickness on pet swap(2s), water combo field
Con- Can’t contribute much to a larger scale teamfight

Engineer:
Pro-Same as Ranger; a good node duelist with hybrid dmg, more CC rather than evades
Con- Same as Ranger+weaker ranged dps

Necro:
Pro- Highest aoe ranged condi dps in the game, signet rez, 2 fears and a chill
Con- Squishy w/ little mobility. Requires key positioning

Ele:
Pro- High mobility, Extremely bulky, insane amount of cleanse(some AOE), decent dps output to act as a ‘bruiser’ on top of that, combo fields
Con- Vulnerable to burst damage

Guardian:
Pro- Tankiest prof in the game, shield of abs, aoe stabilities
Con- Will drop to a necro/mesmer given 1-2min

Mesmer:
Pro- Portal, Timewarp, decent 1v1 duelist
Con- Little mobility outside of portal

Obviously, I didn’t cover everything but these are the main points I look at when looking at a teamcomp.

Raijinn.9065:

Why do you see fit for one profession to have a spammable gap closer, homes right to target, conditions, combo finishers, and huge damage to boot. Why? All in one SPAMMABLE move.

EU Meta too stronk.

The game usually comes down to 2v1/5v5/4v4 due to how roamers function.
Otherwise, everyone would be running nothing but Trap Rangers, Shout Warriors, and Bunker Eles.
Basically, the tankier you build, the better 1v1 potential you will have. But the glassier you can build and still outplay your opponents, the more useful you will be to your team overall, generally.

Dardamaniac.1295:

We can link all day random games…but the fact is that Engi dont have 14k burst in 2 secs,stealth bb qq.and in my games most class played is thieves by far

HAH!
It’s funny cause they [Engies] do.
Anyways, having 3k hotjoin games under my belt, I can say teams full of Thieves usually get 500-0XX’ed and spawnkilled. I don’t usually see more than 2-3 thieves per match. If I do, it’s free glory especially if I’m on my Necro or Warrior. The only time Thieves become a problem is when I’m on my own Thief. Then I actually have to pay attention to the game and stunbreak accordingly.

ilJumperMT.4871:

Why dont you give Thieves .25 GCD like mesmer?

Um… What?
.25s is the cast time for backstab…
I don’t know why you’re so mad, but stop spamming the forums with it. You’re embarrassing yourself.

possante.8310:

for me 0,25s is fine. dont see why people are complain a lot about it

Because .25s is enough time to be reacted to. Puts it on par with Thief/Warrior.

Eduardo.4675:

1-Seeing Jumper on his (probably) newly made necro getting brutally stomped, he is the highest ranked player by a huge margin there (rank 54);

-200 games on Necro.
-76% Win rate (6% higher than Thief). Mostly hotjoins. (43/52, 83% for Tournies)
-It’s pretty hard to get a decent score when you get put on the losing team with 1 minute left.
Don’t take things out of context.

0.25 seconds. What do you know? the same amount of time to react to the standard cloak-steal-stab combo.
Balanced.
Thank you ANet.

14.6k is actually the semi-“balanced” setup using that extra bit of hp and toughness from Div runes to survive a burst from another glass cannon (usually).
I changed my setup now (14.1k) so I could get cheese RNG procs like this with crit backstab+mug+air with sin signet.
It’s actually just as OP as Mesmers’ burst. Literally 2 hits, instantaneous. Full to 0. No window of reaction time.
The correct solution, imo, would be to increase every class’s base hp by 1-3k (whichever amount necessary for any instantaneous burst to deal 99.9% hp MAX)

Also, looking back now I misplayed that by not activating my signet to blind his clone cast, thinking he was going to distortion or blink.

Tl;dr
OP wins all but one 1v1 matchup. Has the tools to win but cba to learn or practice—just nerf it instead.
Oh man I’ll have a good laugh come next month when necros (and aoe in general) get the nerf bat.

MyFe.1398:

and NO as a necro you can not counter EVERY single thief stealth skill. it is impossible. 2 fears and 1 daze vs 3/4 stealths that can be spammed much quicker than my skills can recharge..

2 stealths. Unless he steals from another thief.
Shadow Refuge (fear him out of the area or just nuke it and laugh)
Or Hide In Shadows (the heal). Three seconds of that on cooldown is more than enough time for your bleeds to do the job. Especially if you reflected any of his own by tanking caltrops purposefully.
Now listen closely, I’m gonna tell you a little secret. There’s this skill on the offhand dagger not many new/casual players know about. It’s called Cloak and Dagger and eats HALF of the thief’s initiative bar regardless of if he hits or not. Dodge at least one and you win, pretty much.

You do realize you are playing a necro right?
And you can counter every single one of his stealth casts with fears/daze?
And yes, you can transfer your condi’s by skillshotting it if you do so happen to screw up and let him stealth.
Not only that, but that particular thief build can only clear 1 condi per 3 seconds in stealth outside of their heal and shadow return (easy interrupt and long cooldown, respectively). Necros should have 4+ condi’s running. He won’t even shake half of them off with a normal stealth.

Soryuju.8164:

Caffynated.5713:

So you weren’t being sarcastic in the last thread?

/faithinhumanity off

We have really different definitions of what 1 second is.

The first fight, you initiate at 0:12 and down your target at 0:16.
The second fight, you initiate at 0:42 and down your target at 0:47. You weren’t alone
The third fight, you initiate at 1:07 and down your target at 1:11.

The deeps is nice, but compared to thief, ele, warrior, and mesmer, 3-5 seconds is barely considered burst damage.

I’m pretty sure he’s just extending his satire about how people QQ on these forums. Replace the Guardian in these videos with burst Thieves and Mesmers, and you’d have dozens of people jumping in to complain about how OP those classes are, despite the fact that we’ve seen the same threads done to death since release. Posting another thread about it is, as I understand it, just mocking the abundance of threads about Thieves and Mesmers, and isn’t a serious complaint about burst Guardians. So you can hold on to your faith in humanity for a little while longer. =P

He knows too much…

Ezrael.6859:

Awesome button mashing, I think I heard you make 50 key presses in order to initiate 4 skills…….

Everyone knows the more you hit the keys the faster they come out.

Vid Proof:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Oq1sGqeMN4I
I don’t think its good for the health of the game for Guardians to be able to kill people 1v2 in ~1 second.
/Signed; Thief/Warrior Player

Making thieves ragequit with my OP deeps.

This dmg is so OP plz nerf.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Uxp_CTaZDD0

Sidenote: I think Engie nades need more nerfing.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T7r5aT8gHaU

But don’t touch thief; thief is fine.

Between 8PM-12AM CST.
Does EU really pop for 6+ hours?

#Heartseeker now deals 25% less dmg when casted in rapid succession (2 second debuff)
(Similar to Kassadin/KogMaw mechanics)

Old. Most people use CnD Steal Stab because, although it gives the target 0.25 seconds to react, it will do enough dmg (if air procs and everything crits) to kill most glass builds.
Stab steal is instant, however, the target will be left with an average of 3k hp which requires a heartseeker to execute. Heartseeker is a 0.75 second cast. This makes this opener far too unreliable.
However, it is my personal philosophy that no class should 100% another without giving at least a 0.15-0.2 sec window to react. 99% instant is fine. 500% with 0.25sec delay is fine. 100% instant is not.

+1
Although we’ve still been waiting 3 months for basic competitive features…
I wouldn’t want to hear “we pushed back ranked ladders by 2 months to implement a trait cooldown visual”.
Sad, but yeah…

Overpowered support profession? Ele.
As much mobility (non-vertically) as a thief, the survivability of a guardian, the CC of a hammer warrior, the condi clear and combo fields of…well,… a god.

Far too harsh of a nerf. They’ll be balanced once triple shatter gets fixed. That or add a 0.15sec GCD between shatters.

Kinda the opposite for me.
Why spend hours grinding PvE gear when it has no purpose in competitive (s/tPvP)?
I mean you can grind gold for gems forTourny Tickets and finishers I guess but that’s about it…

It takes thief 0.25-0.75 seconds at the very least to do that kind of damage. (Or, in a Warrior’s case, 1-2 seconds)
More than enough time to shadowstep/endurepain/deathshroud/distortion/mistform/etc…
When a Mesmer can burst for the same amount in 0.01 seconds, this is NOT balanced.

I would even go as far as to say if Mesmers could burst 50k dmg but it took them a quarter second or more to do it, it would be balanced.

Removed the link to vid as it provoked too many trolls.

condiments.8043:

quercus.9261:

95% of the people on this thread have no reading comprehension.

THIS IS A BUG

There is a bug with shatters that will cause big broken damage if you go in a certain order. People in the know are being hush-hush because they don’t want this widely known. Somebody posted what is going on a few times in this thread however.

Devs know about this and it will be fixed.

Is this a recent bug? Because mesmer still did pretty big damage even before the patch too.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EpE2k3ZN1vU

At least you can react to this, but its still pretty high on a 1700 toughness target.

He had all the time in the world to elixer S lol.. His fault for getting hit by the illusionary leap, immobilizing him.

The damage itself is not OP.
I’m not saying Mesmer is OP.
I’m not saying Thief is weak.
Just sitting here lol’ing at all the newbs who are saying “l2p”, etc…
I’d like to mention how many times I’ve played on equal(or higher) footing with the top Mesmers in the game (Enshadowed, Xee, Sataar, Zyzzyx, JSage, etc… ). Also you’re mad to think I wouldn’t swap to shortbow unless I were using my 45sec cd burst. FYI, I killed the mesmer and took his point twice before this fight.
I’m saying every single burst in this game EXCEPT MESMER can be countered. Warrior is a joke to stunbreak out of and everyone knows they are among the worst classes in the game. Thieves give you a 1/4 to 3/4 second window.
I would like to see at least a 0.2 second cooldown proc on shatter after summoning clones. Or maybe a 0.1 second global cooldown across each shatter. This way I have time to react to what my opponent is doing and counter accordingly. This puts it in line with every.other.class. I don’t even care if you increase the damage by 50%. Make it not instantaneous.

Why should it be possible for a Mesmer to hit 14.6k dmg instantaneously when a thief only does [that was a backstab-mug, so] 5.5k+3.5k. The only way I would have killed him afterwards were to heartseeker for the remaining 3k of his hp and that takes a 3/4 sec cast time. That is FAR more than enough time to stunbreak.
Mesmer is the only class that can 100-0% another glass build instantaneously without giving any room for reaction.

If there were just a quarter to half second delay between the clone summon and the shatter I’d be fine with that.

If I had 0.25 seconds to react to him summoning extra clones and shattering like inbetween Thief hits, then fine, I’d say its relatively balanced and it was my fault for not reacting and not shadowstepping away in time like I do to 90% of the thieves that try that combo on me.
But he shattered me with clones that didn’t even appear on my screen until I was down. (for 3k+ per hit, mind you. As much as your standard 50-25% heartseeker.)

I think Ele is far stronger than Guardian atm though.
Would be great if warriors had some way to survive more than ~3 seconds of Necro AoE.
And although I feel Necro is in a balanced spot (disregarding signet res), its the only viable glass ranged dps making having one almost necessary.
Rangers? Forced into using evasion tank/trap melee builds which are meh.
Engies? Just got their rdps toolkit nerfed by 30% LOL! Forced into bunker/bomb spec.
Thieves? A good hybrid melee+ranged, but P/P is still incredibly underpowered and shortbow can’t even put a dent on a good guardian(ever since the 15% nerf) unlike a Necro. You can forget about double bow or bow+p/p.
Warriors? Lol.