Nah, they didn’t win. I’m generally not on Abj’s side, but the other guys didn’t win.
Olympics are a bad comparison because at the end of the day, in a game of skill, Abj won.
The July monthly tournament first place winnings are null and void. They should not be passed on to the losers, and they do not belong to the winners.
Ahh, so you’re only after the Certificate things! You should be fine if you can still get enough league tickets this year.
There’s definitely going to be one more season for this year’s cycle. Like I said though, it’s still relatively ambiguous whether or not you will be able to get it in the same way. Anet’s original plan seemed like it was to have a new precursor every year, but the statement has seemingly been revised to “how you get the precursor may change”, and less consistently, “it may be more expensive”.
My point is there’s basically no way to know for sure if we can get it/progress will hold. I feel like they won’t change it this year, personally, but Anet’s poor transparency on things like this makes it hard for me to be confident in that assessment.
(Also in hindsight, you were somewhat clear in your original post what was going on, but my brain kicked into “this english seems slightly off” mode so I jumped to some false conclusions over what you were saying. My bad!)
I’m thinking the gimmick will be ‘agility’ – normal leaps and retreats. No other (non-Burst) axe does that, and if it’s true that we’ll lose dodge roll but gain blur we’ll need a proper evade option. (And it fits the standard mesmer “weapon that doesn’t really work in classical way” trend; when’s the last time you’ve heard of an axerobat?) ((I am not sorry))
Ranger already did ranged axes, anyway.
I just hope we get both MH and OH, it’s not right that other professions are getting five new weapon skills, some getting them after getting five last time. Having an extra option for both slots would be a nice way of shaking things up… Though I am still sad that we’ll be losing shield for it.
We actually talked about that today. I’m always hesitant to put invuln buffs in, on the off chance that people will find a glitch that lets them keep it during the match.
Out of curiosity, how confident are you/anet as a whole with whatever code changes all skills to “locked” temporarily? Or bundles? I don’t know what kind of challenges would be involved here, but I feel like it would be a much simpler, more fair thing if you just applied that to any player who reaches an enemy team’s spawn area. If that gets stuck on someone, as long as there’s fallback code to undo it on death I feel like it would cause much fewer problems than perma-invulnerability.
You can also just pulse 1s invulnerability to the spawn if that doesn’t strain the server; I actually feel like 3s would be better, and would be a small relief to the occasional spawn-camping problem.
I feel like this would be a little better to start off-season, but I like this idea. I hope you keep up with it and it works out.
Each of the four achievement categories you need to acquire to obtain the legendary requires you to play 3 matches daily for 15 days, each achievement unlocking in sequence. I don’t think it worked like this in season 1 – I feel like you needed to actually unlock the meta-acheievement for the category first? (I could be wrong here.)
I think you might have possibly misunderstood what step you’re on; acquiring all four of the vendor back items and throwing them in the Mystic Forge creates the precursor, which happens to be of Ascended rarity. That backpeice is called Wings of Ascension.
The Legendary however is called The Ascension(of, obviously, legendary rarity). To acquire it you need the aforementioned precusor, a gift of fortune, a gift of skirmishing, and most relevantly the Gift of the Competitor; that part is made from the four items obtained via the four Year of the Ascension meta-achievements.
Given that your original post said you were going after the Legendary backpack, I was focusing on that point. I don’t know what state your achievements are in, but if you haven’t completed all four “Daily League Participator” achievement sets, you may be unable to acquire it by the end of this season.
BUT if you are in fact just after the precursor(or the precursor is your only missing component to the legendary), Wings of Ascension, then yes, you can easily acquire it.
The four Year of the Ascension categories are found under the Competitive achievement section, if you weren’t aware.
Hope that helps!
It was implied to be an exclusive for one year, but they still went back on that plan, yeah. I got mine last week, and my progress from s2 was still saved.
You might not have enough time as of right now, however, thanks to the daily matches requirements… Season is ending very soon, and there’s still this looming possibility they could change their mind for next season. I’d consider it unlikely, but just prepare yourself for that possibility.
EMBRACE THE SALT.
This mindset is why pvp was dead right out the gate. Anet did exactly that, and created and reinforced a toxic community with every single pvp-affecting patch. Why? Because a handful of other esports games like LoL did at the time.
It’s irreparable at this point, but good sportsmanship and respect makes for a much healthier competitive environment. The only reason there is to embrace salt at this point is that you’re not gonna be seeing any moves from Anet to deal with it at this point…
Let’s be clear here, in order for people to even want to consider something other than chrono outside of solo or pvp/wvw content, the new spec will have to have enough DPS that it outpaces the boost we provide to an entire party, OR chrono will have to be nerfed to an even worse state that it may as well be made baseline. Or else, it also provides good alacrity/quickness access. Party speed boosts destroy games.
They’ll never substantially boost core traitlines again because that’s how they’ve chosen to deal with power creep.
correction you should not gain if opposing team DC’s No one should get anything. The DC’er should lose 3 x the normal amount. problem solved.
This may come as a surprise, but there are people who don’t care about rating, or worse, are interested in deliberately tanking their rating in order to fall down to a more exploitable meta level on their main account.
“We’re losing, and I don’t care about rating. I guess I’ll pull my ethernet cord out so nobody gets anything for this!”
Nah. We know enough about the dishonor system that this idea would be abused by the more toxic players in order to make pvp an even more foul experience.
The real thing that bothers me is nobody else got paid to play the monthly, and it was not a reward. And if it was $400, that’s a lot of money! Putting aside the TOS violation for a moment, nobody cares that it was a fair fight, or a good match, or whatever. I don’t even particularly care that the seeding was altered by this because of QP because the eventual matchup should have happened anyway and if this were a healthy pvp scene nobody should have been playing differently just because there were new faces. No, Abj got to profit off of the game in a way that nobody else had available to them, and because it’s an external transaction, there is no rolling back. That’s done, they have profited off of a game meant to be a complete money sink, and if drastic measures are not taken, they’ll do it again because ironically, the equal-chance concept of gw2 pvp is the most exploitable aspect to it. You don’t even need to verify as human to play the game, much less grind for gear; you get the the game + expansion, you’re on even footing.
All it takes is one proxy to mask your trail, and that’s downright trivial with $400 in your pocket.
So when I say drastic, I mean if someone’s playing from a suspicious new location/ip/computer? They don’t get to participate.
bracket 1: skilled team 1 – skilled team 2 → victory skilled team 2
bracket 2: unskilled team 1 – unskilled team 2 → victory unskilled team 1
bracket final: unskilled team 1 – skilled team 2 → victory skilled team 2
bracket 1: skilled team 1 – unskilled team 2 → victory skilled team 1
bracket 2: unskilled team 1 – skilled team 2 → victory skilled team 2
bracket final: skilled team 1 – skilled team 2 → victory skilled team 2
The only mechanical difference between the two is whether unskilled team 1 takes second place prize or not, which I’m not entirely convinced should be happening. Objectively, the only other difference is the arc of tension through the game. If the early games are skill-matched, then the finals are just disappointing blowouts, when the opposite should be true.
We’ve given them dishonor for the remaining season for now. Our investigation is still underway, so additional action may be taken later, should we determine it appropriate.
Those of you acting like dishonor will be the only punishment are quite ridiculous. This is basically saying “there’s enough evidence to take action, but not yet enough evidence to take drastic action. we’re working on that.”
I’m not entirely sure what additional evidence they’d need or be able to get beyond a suddenly identical IP address(I don’t think anything legally has been done wrong so there’s no way to legally access bank accounts) and completely random players suddenly becoming friends and sweeping the tournament, but I can imagine them needing to form an internal committee to decide what the punishment should be for both sides of each transaction – and, if everyone is banned, what to do about the fact that nobody technically won the tournament.
Matchmaking has an issue. I don’t know what it is exactly, but it’s there, we can sit here and pretend this is all a “git gud” issue all we want but this kind of thing points to a larger issue whether you want to admit it or not. It’s extremely streaky in my experience, and seems to go on a kittening crusade every now and then trying to “balance” your rating and bring your win rate down closer to the magical 50% mark after a lot of wins.
I am not an Extreme PvPer, but in the pursuit of my legendary wings, I’m sitting at about 200 games with a 50% winrate this season. My worst loss streaks were when I switched from Mes/Thf to Engineer, and then to Guardian when I figured I didn’t understand Engineer enough to win. (Oh, and a loss streak in my placements.)
Any other time, if I’ve had ~3 games lost in a row, I took a break for a day, and queue at a different time the following day. I might get one or two losses to start the next day, but then a strong winning streak.
My theory, if there is something amiss at all, is it has to do quite directly with time of day; this affects who is getting off of work/out of school(summer classes, yes!), and the way I figure, there’s a subtly different meta and mindset attached to people based on who happens to be pvping together. Noonish to 2 EST? Quieter crowd, generally smarter and less prone to zergs, ragequits, and pettiness. Around 3-6 pm? Little iffy, you’ll probably see more people who are getting off of work and having some microaggressions to work out on their team. Might be smart, but not pleasant. 7p-2a? Kids. Point feeders, pettiness, ragequits, idlers… Map chat, in other words.
Basically the worst thing you can do is keep queuing up during a losing streak. The mindset of your team won’t be any different, even if they’re different people. It’s irrelevant which set of people they happen to be; the point is that you’re incompatible with the mind-meta.
Remember, if you’re regularly losing, any complaints you have will be ignored by Anet on the basis of “just being salty”!
I’m inclined to agree with the above post though. Balancing all your professions like that is an honorable goal, but in general, top players only play other professions long enough to understand them, then switch back to their mains. When you’re switching professions as much as you are, you’re not building strong muscle or twitch memory, you’re not learning from your mistakes, and you’re definitely not building a strong understanding of your profession’s traits and how those are supposed to be played with the various team comps you’ll be stuck with.
And I don’t like to say git gud, but if you’re losing more than 50% of your matches regularly, then that is much more likely approaching a personal skill issue. I’ve had losing streaks here and there, but they’re balanced out by a strong win:lose ratio the rest of the time.
Don’t necessarily pick engineer; pick a profession you enjoy, play the meta build. (seriously, if you’re losing that much, IF you’re not playing at least 90% meta build, ranked is no place for personal builds)
Also, try to find some videos of higher level play with your chosen profession, preferably with useful, meaningful commentary. I’ve found that high level play doesn’t completely translate to solo queue at lower rating tiers, but you can still learn a lot you might not have understood if there’s strong commentary. (Failing all else, go watch Sindrener’s videos. He mains thief, but I think if there’s no other videos you can probably learn a lot about the logic behind pvp from him if you’re observant.)
Always run into Dragonhunters trying to pull me into the walls on the side nodes. It’s incredibly annoying since I have to either leave the cap to avoid getting pulled in the wall or blow resources for stability.
See, this is why it’s not getting fixed, it’s counterplay for line of sight…!
You already have the kills achievements and the “survival” one promotes idle play…..
I think the OP means the lobby free-for-all arena.
I don’t really see any value in such an achievement though, it just doesn’t seem entertaining.
Besides, from what we can see of the AT winners’ crafting area, it looks like there are consoles that players can use to screw everyone in the arena over anyway.
I am no programmer but I bet that it is possible to see on which end a DC happened.
It’s technically possible, but can create more problems, and the problem can lie anywhere from anet’s servers to your computer – and there’s a lot of inbetween steps. It basically would involve pinging each of those steps until something doesn’t come back, and if you have a LOT of people disconnecting at once, an unnecessary number of pings are sent to those inbetween steps, where ddos protection might kick in and get Anet’s servers blocked. And then everyone is locked out of the game, which reads as a disconnect, which sends out even more pings…
At a minimum, what Anet needs is a server status page/better status reporting. As it is, we’re lucky if their twitter even mentions ongoing problems.
I think the color is just too washed out, there’s nowhere really cool to stand and look out over the lobby’s occupants, you can’t watch people fight the trainer NPCs, and it’s all compressed and claustrophobic. Most of the cool areas deny gliders on top of everything to justify a jumping puzzle, which everyone circumvents anyway because of all the free portals. And a jumping puzzle in the pvp lobby is a dumb concept anyway because it almost entirely lacks the navmesh or whatever the game’s logic dictates, which means getting a queue pop will generally reset your progress in the puzzle.
Basically it lacks everything that the old lobby had to stay somewhat interesting between games, in exchange for some elitist section that everyone keeps asking about how to reach, a dumb one-time llama collection questchievement(because LLAMAS ARE SO IMPORTANT…..), and the dubious ability for the devs to say “of course we care about PvPers, look at this huge update!”
The old lobby needed an overhaul to make all the blank space a little more interesting and main area to be more central rather than a little section in the south, but it didn’t need a total overwrite.
Things I’d like to see:
-everything listed above
-some simple (SIMPLE) activities just to kill time, maybe from other areas of the game (golem chess? some simplified adventures like the shooting gallery? access to the Four Winds movement crystals? sanctum sprint but around the lobby? plenty of options available…)
-and heck, maybe spruce the place up just a bit to look like more than the run down ruins we have (which comes off as an apt metaphor most of the time). Keep some ruins for jumping puzzles – I rather liked the old walls that used to have the glory vendors -, but… we’ve been playing pvp for five years, I feel like someone should have built a better structure by now.
The nuclear option never should have felt like the right way to do things.
in the good old gunbound, a pure match based game, leave are punished in gold. leave, automatically lost gold, and with a some stack system, more leaves, more gold lost. is more effective than a timer-block.
Anet gets ddos’d, people disconnect, system cannot tell difference between anet’s fault and player’s fault, player gets punished. First few times at least should be free IF this system is implemented, but I don’t like the concept overall.
On the other hand, if you locked out achievement progress, and reduced pip and rating gains for (x) matches for a few infractions, you might have something…
Most thieves are just extremely bad. It’s an easy thing to say, but seriously just play thief and challenge ones you see in ranked to a 1v1 and watch what happens. That’s discounting the obvious stuff like them fullcapping 90% of the time
If you mean thieves aren’t supposed to fullcap 90% of the time, I just want to stress:
If we don’t fullcap, people start angrily pinging the map and “asking” why we aren’t fullcapping. Even if there’s 2+ enemies on the point. In fact there could literally be a pure trap guardian sitting on the point with traps loaded and people will demand we somehow 1v1 a direct hard counter and cap it since nobody else knows how to exit mid/kill a revenant/disengage/whatever excuse is being used for needing the thief to carry harder.
I’m not saying all bad thieves are caused by the community, but if I’m playing wrong, then it’s directly a symptom of the greater community’s idiocy for misleading me and I’m sure I’m not the only thief dealing with this.
Thieves are always wrong, after all.
(As an aside, I’ve watched top tier videos, but top tier strategies really do not seem apply in solo ranked queue, especially not in low gold, where I am…)
Yeah last thing we need is bronzes brute forcing their way up into gold. It’s bad enough that the matchmaker can and occasionally does stretch that far to address the queue.
If you’re low ranking, what does it even matter? You aren’t getting into the top 250 if you’re terrible, which means you aren’t going to be getting any reward from this particular subsystem…
I started thief out a few weeks ago on condi(s/d). It was alright! I think it had a measurable impact on games for how I used it. I almost never saw condi thieves at that time, oddly enough.
But then I switched to power d/p, and found myself simply contributing much better.
I finally encountered one enemy condi thief earlier today. Might not be the best example, but despite all his movement tools he was easy to pin down and destroy. He didn’t pressure us enough to put us on the defensive.
There’s basically only one way to run condi. Get in, dodge around, escape. No burst, no practical condi weapon skills, and you’re sure as heck not going to be staying in combat with no dodges. The moment everything gets cleansed off, you have to bolt and forfiet anything you were trying to accomplish. I can see this being good in a coordinated duo, but not solo queue.
Power D/P is just… better and more fun, allows you to pressure people out of a teamfight without needing to stick around long, and lets you still do a little damage while kiting.
Toxic idea, I don’t like it.
I’d rather see rewards for good sportsmanship and gameplay(voting system that adds 1 pip per “like”?) than exile people perceived as “weak”.
The last thing we need is a system where you’re able to punish people for any purpose such as, for example:
-Running a class not favored in the meta
-Making a single poor combat/tactical call
-Making a call only you, specifically, didn’t like based on an incorrect perception of what was happening
-Being [lower rating than you]
-Lag
-Disconnect
-Playing the hard counter to your class
And so on.
Plus, the pvp community is really kitten small. The most likely case of the game respecting this kind of idea is queue times will immediately triple as the game attempts to tiptoe around a few people blocking a few others.
Focus on uplifting good people, not allowing bad people to control the game. Even League of Legends picked up on this concept eventually.
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I have encountered one definite bot, but I’ve been on the upper end of Silver/low Gold so I might have run into only one of the outliers who’s getting more wins.
Pretending that there are no bots in this game is bizarre considering that they’ve long been a problem in PvE. They are only new to pvp because the pvp rewards are finally somewhat meaningful even if you’re extremely unsuccessful.
I’ve honestly found it a little weird that a loss is an entire 1/3rd a win; I’m all for participation rewards, but I feel like this discourages taking an active role in trying to win. I feel like 1 pip should be baseline for losing, and it should scale upwards for close wins up to 7 pips for a 450-500. This would mean that anyone playing pvp for the rewards won’t feel discouraged if the enemy has a 200 point lead, because there’s still an incentive to get as many points as possible. There’s no point in struggling hard once it feels like you’ve lost because it’s faster to just lose and queue for the next match than delay the end of the match longer.
When in a losing streak, I’ve found that just setting the game down early in your binge sometimes mends whatever is wrong.
It seems like which day you queue on greatly determines people’s level of intelligence, and it makes a sort of sense; MMR skill ratings greatly rely on balancing each other appropriately, so a weekend queuer’s 1100 is going to be much weaker than weekday/regular queuer’s 1100, since more+younger people are going to be more available to queue.
This is purely an outlier case, but so far the best game I’ve ever had was 2 thieves and a mesmer – I was the mesmer. Somehow, all three of us were keen on communicating movements and targets. It wasn’t a perfectly clean sweep, but we won with a strong lead.
All other things being equal, 2x thief might be a death sentence, but playing better at the grand strategy level will still beat other teams. (Just… you need good thieves for that.)
I think if anything, if it is true that stacking DHs and Necros etc are a guaranteed win, then that is the issue, not thief being worse when stacked. Professions should be covering each other’s weaknesses(or countering the enemy’s strengths), not stacking their own strengths.
Stabbility on thief or ranger? you are forced to stake speacial skills because they are the only ones that deliver stability..its a shame that anet doesnt se that..
In fairness, I think CC is supposed to be the counter to thieves since they can go into stealth, burst you without starting with line of sight, and in general be a pretty unbalanced nuisance. The concept breaks down since they have a really good stunbreak and you can’t actually halt their weapon skills with a stun cooldown of course, but, you know, it’s a nice thought.
I don’t know enough about Ranger to make any arguments for them though.
Press accept and then hit “Dismiss” to hide the first one, at least. It doesn’t change your decision, you’re still proceeding to the match. You can’t do anything similar for the second screen, but you can at least wrap anything you’re doing up(move to safe area, finish any banking/selling, etc).
I will definitely say, as a player, I have little motivation to pvp past getting my legendary back knowing that the top 10 is virtually unbreakable, thanks to this matchmaking behavior. I understand Anet’s intent behind it, but it’s flawed to place individual responsibility on an entire (blind) team with regards to increasing score.
Once you’re at the top, you will only be fighting lower-scored people, so it’s a little discouraging to know that there is a system-enforced voting bloc that unintentionally mimics match manipulation.
On one hand, you might try to say “hey, you’ll only improve if you fight stronger people!” But… Those stronger people won’t be giving you advice, either. You won’t be watching them alongside you, seeing their movements on the map, you’re expected to magically get better and break the bloc with a blind team.
It’s entirely feasible that the top 5-10 could get a voice server and queue together, creating a premade in a system that denies premades to everyone else, and gain an insane(and profitable) advantage while being actually unable to fight each other and create, gasp, a competitive leaderboard.
No, actually its nothing like that. That stuff is gained from simply being active in a map, and is a cumulative crafting reward (I presume were talking about BONUS map rewards?). Something used to get ascended gear vs something thats just a fun reward for being active on a map are completely different?
Just because they’re different point for point does not change the fact that they are rewards for participation.
Last I checked, too, crafting materials can still be sold on the trading post, and therefore converted into ascended crafting materials.
I get what your TRYING to say but your wrong in what you are trying to use as examples.
Your entire argument ignored my point completely.
Why should people who did pvp before the ascended armor vendor came out be allowed to have the best armor in the game for free? You realize ascended armor is intended to be worked towards, yes?
In this case, this gear was also not intended to be acquired during [X patch] meta. You steamrolled during the height of the hambow meta? Scrapper? Cele Ele? Cool… But so what. You’ll have to tough it out during the current meta if you want to bypass the gear grind.
It’s not even hard. You can literally lose games eternally and still win ascended shards because there is no pip loss, and you still gain a sizable number of pips for participating + bonuses for near-wins and top stats.
But you weren’t playing pvp for ascended shards before. They did not exist. You played for some other reason, and are jealous because other people have better rewards now. That does not earn you a free ride.
They have not always been in league chests – this is a recent season thing.
That said, no, it shouldn’t be retroactive. You were not playing pvp before to get shards, you were playing pvp for its own sake/whatever awards were available at the time.
Asking this is like asking that PvE players be given map rewards for the years of gameplay before they made map rewards. It’s an asinine expectation that gives the middle finger to everyone currently playing for modern rewards.
-I asked team to target the necro first because that necro would shred us. They did not target the necro. They did not target anyone. I (mesmer, absolutely roaming ofc) had to target the necro. That necro stayed alive and remained targetted the entire match.
-Niflhel. 2 guardian premade who stayed on temple most of the game (odd, but it worked to a point) finally collapsed. 400-300, favoring us. I (mes again) was on mine, 1v1 against necro became 2v2 involving an enemy thief and one of the respawned guardians.
I went down. Necro went down. Other guardian runs in. First guardian goes down. …Other guardian revives his friend with no pressure(thief was worthless) stopping stomp. I die. Necro rallies, destroys both of them before I respawn. 499-499… then 500-501. All because a dude prioritized his friend over a stomp.
-Thief somehow getting backcapped by a guardian for the entire game.
-Thief: “keep that thief off of me, i can’t fight them”
-“Your thief carried you” says the guy from the group of 3 i kited around colosseum (on mesmer) for half the match
-Not me, but I saw an unknown youtuber/streamer who was running pure wells on mesmer in ranked complain about being “forever silver”. He stuck to teamfights and never rotated independently.
-In my favor: Any time I switch to staff against a pure trap DH who runs out of ideas when I stay at range and let clones trigger everything.
-Exiting home with an engie with lethal bleed ticks. I go down. Engie proceeds to mid without even a gyro res as a courtesy…
-2 people rush lord at 0-0.
Me: “Lord rush is not a win condition”
Them: “Shut up”
(they do not succeed and all points fall to enemy for the entire game)
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Also, this might not be obvious if you haven’t played them, but Rev’s most substantial heal comes during Glint form. They gain a blue icon that indicates that incoming damage is completely converted into healing. In solo/duo queue you probably won’t be able to stop your team from attacking if in teamfight, but in a duel, just don’t attack, focus on defense(? I forget if they can attack during the heal or not) and save your burst. Always have that “sheathe weapon” key somewhere convenient.
Okay seriously nobody cares about your petition. GW1 is dead, anet probably doesn’t have dev tools for GW1 anymore, and the game is honestly awful by modern standards anyway. There is no logical business sense behind bringing it back.
Please please PLEASE contribute to threads in a constructive manner.
I for one would like to see larger fights. This continues to be a game called Guild Wars that involves no actual guilds going to war.
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not to mention gravity well cannot be traited to reduce its CD, but plaguelands can
I’m not really taking the opposing side here, but just to point out, chronos can fire two Grav Wells off every 90 seconds via CS.
Which really just again cements how incomparable the two are…
Also, most chronos will still pick something other than Gravity Well. The biggest thing GW really has going for it is that it is the lowest cooldown for elites that mesmer has that doesn’t potentially screw over allies. It’s a good CC, but only if enemies have exhausted ALL forms of counters to it. Stun Break, Stability, free shadowsteps… It’s not even a terribly large radius.
Also, Mesmer’s primary role isn’t to be in the team fight for more than a few seconds.
So you gonna tell us Signet of Humility is more OP than Plaguelands…?
Sword 2 also doesn’t require line of sight, and provides a reverse teleport option as well. Basically, you might want to pick up a thief and play with all these tricks before you call hacking. Here is a strong candidate for the build you’re running into. Sword, Shadowstep, Steal, and potential for a few slot skill changes to gain trap.
I’m not sure I’ve run into any hackers myself. Stay aware of your surroundings and watch that minimap.
Your league progress – the method by which you acquire tickets – will reset next season. The ascended legendary backpack is fundamentally designed not to be acquired in one season. That is, if you have no tickets from seasons 1-4, you couldn’t have acquired it yet anyway. (EDIT: You CAN get the ascended one in one season, but ascended is just a step to the legendary, which follows what I just said.)
There’s always this subtle chance that Anet will follow through with the idea of making it more expensive/harder to get next season, but I’m hoping they have the integrity to give us a full season of warning, or at least wait for 2018 to roll that out.
So yeah, just get to the end of Byzantine, and next season you’ll have the backpeice within a couple games. Not ideal, but not a complete waste of time.
(edited by Kadj.6725)
Only thing I see wrong here is that you all are accepting that 1 shot kill is ok.
No, is wrong. We are not playing Counter Strike where some users can use sniper.
(yeah mesmer, thief, whatever, been there done that)
Don’t stand on the grenade.
Counterplay against power:
1. dodge, block, blind etc
2. protection
3. high toughness
4. high vitalityCounterplay against condi:
1. dodge, block, blind etc
2. resistance
3. high vitality
4. condi cleanse
5. condi transfer or boon conversion
6. heals
So the thing you’re missing out on is that Blocks, Protection and Blind are the only three under Power counterplay that require skills, and when it comes down to it those tend to be found on viable weapons anyway.
Meanwhile, almost all of the listed condi counterplay requires slot skills and traits that are not found on terribly ideal traitlines. With typically only three slot skills available, sacrificing even one can severely cut down on your ability to respond to other major parts of the meta.
That’s also putting aside that there’s very few condi clears etc that remove more than three. I know of only one or two professions that inflict less than three damaging conditions, and they still have access to other conditions. So what happens if you have Vulnerability, Chill, 1 stack Burning, and 15 stacks of Bleeding? Fire off your – at best – three-cleanse… And depending on what order things happened in, there’s a good chance you’ll walk away with 15 stacks of bleeding and your cleanse on cooldown.
Then you factor in every class with a condition on an auto-attack… You’ll probably have all three of the useless things you just cleansed back on you right away.
Oh yeah, and then you have to heal up too. So you’re punished three times to a mechanic that is, just for the salt on wounds, backed up by a single stat.
In short: Sure, there’s more options to counter condi than power has, but it’s not easier to counter, and it’s definitely not as convenient in any way.
If anet’s listening, I feel like at the very least, conditions should be converted into a temporary “immunity” effect to each condition cleansed. Something short and sweet, just a couple seconds to make {insert condi build} back off for a second. It’s the barest minimum that can be done towards toning back the condi meta.
GS shatter meta built mesmers have too much burst. those kinds of builds should never exist. one shot means from 100 to 0 in a second or less. you don’t even have to be low armor or low health to be one shotted from stealth by gs shatter mesmer. First of all, it’s not fun. Second of all, there’s very little counterplay for a build like that. They one shot you. If they fail to one shot you, they stealth, and run away until they can try again, probably from stealth. It’s not a matter of learn to play or not. These builds just shouldn’t exist. Anet has no idea how to balance mesmers cause of the clones. And they have no idea how to balance condition builds against power builds.
So what you’re saying is the problem isn’t that mesmers can oneshot you if they build glass cannon and you don’t fire a defensive skill within a quarter second of seeing a damage packet… The problem is stealth has no realistic counterplay.
They used to have something in place to teach new PvP players, in fact they had an arena in HotM behind the main gate that looked just like a tutorial place. So at one time they had thought about it.
See, this is the funny thing, they didn’t think about it – that was in fact its entire purpose! There was a tutorial you got dropped in the first time you entered HotM. It demonstrated capture points, reviving, and finishers. At some point they decomissioned it – possibly due to complaints about having to go through it before playing pvp? So it just became a useless island for a while.
That being said, it wasn’t a great tutorial, in part because it was just a checklist that piggybacked on the renown hearts system. Capture point, objective complete. The explanation for what was going on was very weak.
What anet really needs is a tutorial with competent AIs akin to For Honor(and surely other games). Enemies just strong enough to require some understanding of skills (that you’re forced to use; a condi clear, a stun break, etc), with predetermined directives such as “charge mid” or “occupy uncapped point”, and a scripted points ticker so that players understand what purpose capturing points has. A rudimentary demonstration of map gimmicks would be nice, but if it’s literally just Foefire and it ends with a scripted lord kill at 350 points, that’s better than what we got.
OR……. Solo/party instance that allows you to set up an enemy in the same manner as the raid and fractal test golems, with added options for multiple targets. Prerferably with options for new specializations, too. Double preferably if they can be set up to use single skills repeatedly while bypassing cooldowns and such.
Having played a lot more since my previous post, I’m also just gonna add here that automatically-changing tabs in the stats UI? HORRIBLE. There’s nowhere near enough time to get the information I want. It’s information overload; you’re trying to convey so much information in a short time over five tabs in two different sections that my eyes can’t focus on anything at all.
If I click into a tab, the tab shifts should stop, period.
I think the victory screen is just… poorly designed. It clashes with almost everything else in the game except for cutscene transitions; it’s unrefined.
All that happens is a teleport, camera lock, skillbar change, and then a huge, ugly UI pops up covering absolutely all of that.
ANet obviously is trying to go for the Overwatch aesthetic(maybe this is in other games too, I don’t… really play pvp games much), but they missed out on the value of properly ending gameplay when the match is called, fading to black, and then showing the victors + match details – with the details not actually obscuring the fancy win screen.
Plus, since the victory pedestals show actual characters, half the time most of the party has already left the match so it’s just your own character standing there looking stupid with four vacant pedestals.
I hesitate to call it a step back, but at this point there’s so many other unaddressed issues that between this and the new but almost entirely functionally identical HotM map that a lot of this just feels like wasted dev time.
I also feel like having the losing team be “dead” during the victory screen is just unnecessarily rude. I already have to look at these other guys after they’ve won; there’s no need to just rub it in further. (And if I’ve won? I’d rather have dealt the killing blow than see a bunch of script-inflicted corpses…)
(edited by Kadj.6725)
The pvp ladder developer team is probably different from the balance team.
You can’t expect a “perfect meta”, and expecting one before they do test ladders – reward or no – is a bit too hopeful. There will always be a weakest class; that’s just how competitive metagames work.
Not at all, re-read my first reply.
Admittedly I may have been a bit over-sweeping with my response; I felt a little attacked with the “weak GM trait” part though. I am not good at receiving critique yet, my apologies. (I also had to run before I could give my post one last look over, perhaps I should have just thrown it in notepad rather than #yolo and post it.)
It doesn’t target a weakness in the meta that standard shatter already has covered. There may be extra boon removal (vs standard shatter) via diversion/imbued diversion/shattered concentration but like I said it needs tested.
Okay, this I can work with! It is true that it’s pretty much “slightly more aoe and less damaging shatter” I suppose, except for the fact that it does a good job of knocking stability stacks down if the rip doesn’t get it.
Put in that context, I can see why it comes off as a little weak.
I wish I could say I’m a valid tester, but again, the placebo; it could be that I just play more carefully and intelligently with this build than the other two (major) options being pushed here.
I wasn’t suggesting you play CI, but you do lose the immob pressure from interrupts that this build won’t provide. In addition, you take a GM trait that is for the most part useless in 1v1’s versus CI, which is amazing in 1v1’s. Your impact with this build is felt almost entirely in team fights.
However… I disagree with this point about 1v1. Most, yes, but “1v1” doesn’t take pets/illusions into account, nor the effects a general AoE daze has on stealth. Stealth is another case where I may be grasping for straws, but a couple illusions with an AoE daze -may- get a freak interrupt.
I guess the question I really need to ask myself is whether or not Halting Strike is really pulling its own weight in the pet situations given a lack of BD/CI, and whether I really believe the stealth thing makes a difference at all. (For the second point, probably not…)
4/4/6/0/0 will likely handle those better than this build, again because you have a GM trait that works against multiple targets, not 1v1.
If I swap for IP, I get a free illusion on each shatter, along with the damage bestowed by the extra bounce and the less-certain crit rate on mind wrack. (OR a free reflect if I change one out for Masterful Reflection…)
If I swap the entire line for BD/CI, I immobilize people for two seconds on a successful interrupt, deal damage, and gain might, with a couple other less-certain RNG bonuses. The might is definitely substantial, but in the version of the build I was using( here ), it’s almost the only boon I have most of the time in 1v1; a nice juicy boon removal target.
…I think there’s more to this, though. Sustained damage, maybe? CI is good for bursting, but in a 1v1… maybe that extra bounce is more valuable; it’s potentially an extra 1000-2000 damage per weapon cycle(two throws) with a bit of its own Might. I also wonder if giving the enemy the choice to dodge actually results in more wasted endurance.
If that’s what’s happening, it might be a no-brainer to just drop Imbued and try Confounding Suggestions, in a bizarre 6/4/0/0/4 setup. It’s no CI, but that one second stun would matter in 1v1 more than AoE daze, as you say.