Guild Wars 2

Agreed that we need more than one map. It’s kind of hard to call one map a new “game mode.”

Anyone try turret engi on defense yet? It’s hilarious. Set up your turrets in a spread out formation (to avoid AOE cleave) and sit near the gate with rifle. Put thumper turret right in the path of the npcs so it tanks/KDs/snares them. If you get low on hp, pop behind the gate to get your heal off safely.

You can safely hold off 2-3 players + npcs like this.

Sins.4782:

If meta builds were meta because of ease of use, turret engi and MM necro would be at the top of metabattle’s PvP section. They’re meta because they bring the most to the table when played properly. Whether or not they’re easy to play properly has nothing to do with it.

Define “easy of use”. MM necro suffers from broken AI that will literally sit there idle while you’re in a fight, making you effectively have 0 utility skills. MM necro might as well be called “locked utility skills necro”. Not sure why it is on metabattle, but it is: http://metabattle.com/wiki/Build:Necromancer_-_Minion_Master

Also, Turret engi is on metabattle: http://metabattle.com/wiki/Build:Engineer_-_Turret

Pretty much every meta build can be considered easy relative to the alternatives for each class. Meta builds tend to be optimal and forgiving, which is why they are so popular.

D/D celestial elementalist may be “hard” relative to other meta builds, but it’s still way easier than D/D berserker or staff, or even S/F since it lets you stay alive much longer while still dishing out high damage.

Why remove rewards when they can just be equalized so you get the same thing win or lose? No one will “practice” if they are wasting their time in there. People could easily be “practicing” in ranked arena, wrecking the queue for everyone else.

That’s Caudecus’s Manor dungeon armor. http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Council_Guard_armor

This is so appropriate: E-sports rocket turret:

Note how it changes trajectory and keeps following the player even after dodging/moving out of the way. No other projectile does this. That thing can’t miss.

Shoutbow is a support build. It’s pretty terrible in 1v1 and it can’t bunker against berserker builds. It really shines in group fights with all the aoe healing, but that’s about it.

Hambow beats it in 1v1 and delivers a bit more utility in group fights with the extra blast finisher and aoe knockdown/interrupt spam. I’m personally quite puzzled by people playing shoutbow since it’s the weaker of the two builds.

And dealing with the rocket turret first would have greatly helped. Something that you didn’t seem to do (and that turret would have been annihilated by that combo, by the way).
Instead, you rush into the point with a glass cannon build, inside the range of all the turrets, try to take down the tankiest turret (the only close range one of the lot, by the way)…and then complain that you died. Frankly speaking, you deserved it. That’s, like, the perfect example of what someone shouldn’t do in such a situation. You were playing completely onto the engineer’s hand. Even if he wasn’t there.

The most common turret placement is:
1) Thumper turret dead center on a point. The knockback can remove most players trying to cap the point.
2) Flame Turret on the side of the point (just within range of anyone trying to cap, but outside of aoe range).
3) Rocket turret off point, in a hard to reach place. On a cliff, in mid air, etc. It has 1000 range and an aoe knockback attack, so it can hit the entire point from quite a distance.

With this placement, you don’t even need the self-repairing and metal plating traits. I rarely use those traits since my turrets don’t get killed enough to warrant them. Players get a few choices:

1)Try to snipe rocket turret (which has 7.5k base hp, is immune to crits and condi damage), as you suggest, and waste quite a bit of time not decapping the point while I’m helping my team fight 5v4 on the rest of the map.

2) Try to decap the point, and get knocked back by thumper turret + rocket turret and eat a bunch of damage and get nice and softened for when me or my allies come to defend the point after we’ve crushed the team 5v4 on the rest of the map.

3) Go look for me somewhere on the map where I am assisting in the team fight, where I still have my supply crate, tanky build, and plenty of CC (immob + knockback) with rifle. If we’re not winning the team fight, I just blow up my off-site turrets and use the tool belt skills for the extra utility + dps (all of which are quite strong). Being without my turrets does not make me a “free kill” and if other engis are feeling that way, they need to L2P.

Full berserker warrior, 10 stacks of might, over 2500 power: Unattended turrets easily live through a full 100b + whirlwind + arcing slice + arcing arrow combo (tons of aoe damage) while doing over 10k damage to the warrior and interrupting/knocking him back (thumper + rocket turret ftw, right?). Don’t believe me? Go try it out vs a traited turret engi. The same applies to thieves and all condition specs (since turrets are immune to conditions). Anyone who thinks it makes sense for a passive build (you can literally afk) to counter 2/3 types of builds (condi & berserker). If you want to capture the point, you somehow have to live long enough or kill the turrets.

If you manage to blow up some turrets, they explode and knockback + damage you for quite a bit too. I used to run a build entirely around exploding turrets because the knockback + damage is quite significant (and the lovely blast finishers are great). The tool belt skills more than compensate for having your turrets on cooldown after blowing them up.

You can sit off point and plunk away at the turrets with a bow, wasting (literally) 2-3 minutes while your team is fighting 4v5 on the rest of the map. Doing this WILL make your team lose, so it’s not a viable strategy. The only real solution is to rush the point with 2-3 players, at which point you’re leaving the rest of the map undefended in a 2v5. Turrets allow engis to hold a point without being physically there. That is a serious problem.

To refresh people’s memory: The community was in a huge uproar over ranger pets being able to go to a nearby point (effectively allowing rangers to guard two points at once). Ranger pets can at least be killed rather quickly. This was promptly fixed with the leash range on pets getting reduced so they couldn’t do that anymore.

The main problems with “Practice” are:
1) It’s too easy to join an already winning/stacked team.
2) Joining a winning/stacked team is more rewarding than helping the losing team.
3) Joining the winning team gives you a “win” on your personal stats page, which many people seem to care about (e.g. those that leave right before a losing match ends to avoid a loss).

I don’t think 1) is a problem that should be fixed, since this allows a more dynamic jump in-jump out sort of build testing. The main problems are 2) and 3) which encourage bad behaviour.

“Practice” should give no track progression, or a flat “participation” score if you have played for at least 50% of the total match time, regardless if you win or lose. It also should not have any personal stats associated with it (e.g. “wins/losses” that go on your stats page). This would remove incentives 2) and 3) which are ruining the practice mode.

Engi:
Acid Bomb (Elixer Gun #4 ability) has no AOE ring and appears as a brown smear. Currently it is impossible to tell if it is from a friendly engi or enemy engi. It hits strongly on power builds (5-7k aoe damage).

The fact that it can be layered is really the main problem with it. It takes 0 skill to run back and forth over an opponent for chain KDs. If Anet fixes it so that you CAN’T stack multiple aoe rings from it on top of each other, it will be fine.

Teleport and speed hacks are definitely real. There are lots of vids out there, have a look. Keep reporting them in game, and maybe Anet will find a way to deal with it.

For those that don’t know: Teleporting hacks have been in the game since near release of the game. They were mostly used by auto farming/mining bots in PVE that were run by gold farmers. The bots would teleport between resource nodes to mine them then sell on TP for money. At some point, Anet found a way to ban them (I think?) and they mostly stopped appearing.

Confession #1:
My block list is so long that I may as well have turned off chat completely. 90% of my matches appear to be dead silent.

Confession #2:
I usually feel like I’ve done a good deed when someone proceeds to rage whisper + block me after I stomp their meta build with a totally troll/non-viable build.

Confession #3:
Every time my random soloQ team sees me with a 5 signet warrior/4 signet ele/guardian/necro/thief and 3 signet ranger, sporting my rabbit finisher, I know they’re secretly freaking out. We win anyway. It’s okay guys. We can do it.

Confession #4:
When I play thief, I often use Shadow Trap to guard home. Just because no one is visibly guarding it doesn’t mean that I am not behind you in stealth with 10 stacks of might + fury, despite just stomping your friend at mid.

The matchmaking is a joke. I just had a match in rated arena where my soloQ team of randoms barely scored 50 points. The teams weren’t anywhere close to evenly matched.

What’s funny is that this happened after losing several matches in a row with similar blowouts, so my MMR should have taken a dive.

Booms.2594:

Kharr.5746:

Did you dodge/fall/trip/etc or do something to cancel the skill mid cast? Stopping a skill mid-cast causes it to go on cooldown. If it’s not that and no one else interrupted it, you should be submitting a bug report. It’s possible that it’s just buggy sometimes and needs to be looked at.

even if it was interupted or canceled it shouldnt go on full cd

You’re right, but providing more details about the problem would help with reproducing it.

For example, can I go into Heart of the Mists and just repeatedly cast Ether Feast to reproduce this bug, or is it caused only under specific conditions — if so, what are they?

If it can be reproduced, it is much more likely to be fixed. Also, if we know when it may happen, we can avoid using it in those specific situations when pvping until it gets fixed.

Did you dodge/fall/trip/etc or do something to cancel the skill mid cast? Stopping a skill mid-cast causes it to go on cooldown. If it’s not that and no one else interrupted it, you should be submitting a bug report. It’s possible that it’s just buggy sometimes and needs to be looked at.

Just report them and hope Anet eventually figures out how to detect them better.

Sorel.4870:

Kharr.5746:

displacedTitan.6897:

I only play solo and the MM is actually pretty solid. I wish it would show you after the match who joined together like it does in DOTA2. It would shut the whiners up who blame “premades” for their personal failure to play properly or well.

At the start of the match, right click the players on the other team to see if they are in a party. If they are, it will say “join party” since they have a premade. If they’re not, it will say “invite to party”. You can do this from the scoreboard during the waiting period.

It’s not rocket science to see.

And how do you tell if they are a premade or a duo and a trio?

A premade of 2 or 3 or 4 is still a premade. There’s a difference between being with a bunch of randoms, and people you specifically grouped with to pvp together. Even if it’s a group of 2 and a group of 3, there’s a strategic advantage over the random soloQ chaos.

Maybe Anet would be so kind as to actually show us who is grouped together, rather than us having to resort to menu trickery to see if the people are in a group?

displacedTitan.6897:

I only play solo and the MM is actually pretty solid. I wish it would show you after the match who joined together like it does in DOTA2. It would shut the whiners up who blame “premades” for their personal failure to play properly or well.

At the start of the match, right click the players on the other team to see if they are in a party. If they are, it will say “join party” since they have a premade. If they’re not, it will say “invite to party”. You can do this from the scoreboard during the waiting period.

It’s not rocket science to see.

Edit: Grabbed a screenshot from hotjoin to show where the menu pops up when you right click on a player on the score board. Same thing happens in tpvp.

khani.4786:

I only solo queue and it is rare for me to be matched against a full premade team. Yeah it happens, and it sucks when it does, but for the most part I haven’t seen an issue myself.

Just because it doesn’t happen to you, doesn’t mean it’s not happening to other people. Most of the premades are at medium to high MMR since they win against the soloQ people most of the time. Once you get anywhere near their MMR, and the matchmaker starts putting you up against Abjured or other top pvp groups when you soloQ, it’s absolutely brutal.

Justin ODell.9517:

rainbow.4695:

Is as simple as that….for solo players like myself is very frustrating to go against premade teams , why you ever though that this would be fun or fair…..

I couldn’t find any game data for you in the last week. Do you play on another account?

I only solo queue in unranked/ranked arena. Feel free to browse my arena history and see what he/she is talking about. I had two complete blowouts yesterday and decided to just waste my time in hotjoin after that since the matches are much closer than the 100-500 nonsense against premades.

Anyone else find it funny that finishers have become such a joke that they’re mostly used to troll, rather than to show status as they were initially intended?

Anet hasn’t fed the hamsters that are powering the matchmaking servers. Expect more 500-10 blowout matches!

…you want to protect a point while you’re afk for 15 min cooking dinner.

I just want to point out that the trolling is a lot less effective if you’re wearing sparkly armor. You’ve got to put on that first level armor that’s totally mismatched and torn looking to really sell it.

Brigg.6189:

Also, watch Sizer or Magic Toker on twitch. Watch, emulate, repeat, and be patient. Thief is one of the hardest classes to acclimate to.

I’d also recommend looking up Cruuk’s twitch page. He solo Qs (or used to) quite a bit. I’m still a bit baffled by him playing Norn since all the animations are a bit off, and make it difficult to see where your attacks are going.

WuGzaGenius.5684:

Kharr.5746:

Jumping increases the distance between you and melee/physics projectiles. If attacking/casting worked while constantly jumping, it’d be super easy to macro turbo jump and just hop around avoiding a lot of potential hits/damage. It would also reduce the intended advantage people have when they are on higher ground.

The fact that you can start your attack then jump to hit higher ground seems like a bit of a bug, but I’m glad it’s there since it allows for skillful timing of attacks to hit opponents on higher ground.

Theres a very simple solution to this, make jumping not increase distance!

Easier said than done. GW2 uses a lot of physics and such a “simple” solution would require hundreds dev hours, if not more, since it would break the majority of the combat physics. What would be the point of being able to jump and attack if it had no impact on gameplay? As the poster above said, this would just allow silly looking bunny-hopping.

The majority of the player base would rather the devs keep working on balancing the game and giving us new game modes.

Edit: I just want to point out that I thought this thread was a troll/joke thread and only answered it seriously because I was bored =/. Bunny hopping silliness would be absolutely pointless in this game.

Jumping increases the distance between you and melee/physics projectiles. If attacking/casting worked while constantly jumping, it’d be super easy to macro turbo jump and just hop around avoiding a lot of potential hits/damage. It would also reduce the intended advantage people have when they are on higher ground.

The fact that you can start your attack then jump to hit higher ground seems like a bit of a bug, but I’m glad it’s there since it allows for skillful timing of attacks to hit opponents on higher ground.

All skills auto turn toward the opponent as long as you’re not holding down a movement key.

You can perma stealth, you just need to work for it and trait for it. Smoke field + heartseeker (e.g. dagger + pistol, use 5, then 2, 2, 2 through it).

It’s easier to mouse target opponents in a crowd of turrets/minions. You can see who you are targeting by the visible outline (must have post processing in graphics set to at least low).

Same problem on my thief. I had steal/shadowstep fail multiple times today and cause weird de-syncs where I couldn’t hit the opponent that was right in front of me on my screen (different from the known “downed de-sync bug”). Landing a backstab (or any melee attack) was impossible, even with the steal + backstab combo.

Xiahou Mao.9701:

I should note, you need to volunteer for the autobalance to get the free win. If you don’t volunteer for it and get autobalanced anyway, you won’t get the credit.

So always volunteer.

This is exactly what’s wrong with the current hotjoin system. It punishes you randomly, so it’s best to simply leave the match if you get auto-balanced. There is no incentive to stay and keep playing for the losing team knowing that ANET just took away your win.

Auto-balance also takes too long. By the time it kicks in, there’s usually a 200-300 point lead and a 3-cap, which cannot be recovered from by evenly balanced teams. So, if you get forced onto the losing team, it’s a guaranteed loss.

All of this simply perpetuates the problem of uneven teams and landslide wins/losses. This is not a good entry point for new PvP players.

style.6173:

Matchmaking is broken. Even worse, ANET is now using “rank” as part of he equation. Let me make it clear for ANET. “NO ONE CARES ABOUT RANK. WE ONLY CARE ABOUT ACTUAL SKILL IN THE GAME”

Match people of similar skill based on ACTUAL results. If a person has no actual results, start them at the bottom and let them work up. It isn’t that hard.

Rank is an indication of experience, and unless the person is a pro player that bought a new account to troll, a r80 will stomp a r20 much more than 50% of the time. The exceptions to this may be the people who are really r10 but exploited custom arena with birthday boosters back when it was bugged to get r80. Those are only a tiny portion of the population.

The system aims for “equal” matching based on Anet’s correlates of skill (described on the wiki in the link above), so as long as you are winning around 50%, it’s working fine. If you are going on long winning or losing streaks, then something is wrong.

Keksmuffin.1450:

You can set a keybind for the PvP build panel thingy and still open it during matches.

Thanks! I did not realize this was a thing. It’s still a bit silly that they removed the PvP build button from the top of the screen.

Dear ArenaNet: In the PvP patch before this one, you added the great ability to tweak and alter builds while in hotjoin via button at the top of the screen. Then, for some undocumented reason, you took it out in the current patch.

It was very convenient and helped with tweaking/refining builds while in hotjoin. Please bring it back.

Edit: Revised based on new info!

From the sound of it, you’re hovering around the entry MMR where someone who is new to the system goes.

I’m surprised there were no other opinions on this aside from the troll post. Guess players just don’t care anymore.

Coulter.2315:

I am for Celestial Ammy being nerf’d BUT at the same time Fire, Air, Leech all need to share a CD.

Why? Is this one of those “if you nerf what I use, I want someone else to also get nerfed too” posts? How are those sigils related to amulets or celestial?

Personally, I’d like to see self-might stacking get adjusted so it focuses more on team play (e.g., self-fire field finisher = 2 might, team fire field finisher = 3 might per fire blast finisher).

There are plenty of premade teams that will lose to a group of 5 skilled solo players. The problem is only with high-tier premades wiping the floor with solo Q players. But, in reality, they will wipe the floor with low-mid tier premades too.

I need to play more guardian, mesmer and ranger to even mine out

Would it be possible to bring back the separate leaderboards while keeping the queue merged as it is?

I know the system already keeps track whether you queue as a group or not from the dev posts. Why can’t you just keep track whether people queued as a group or solo, and add/subtract from the respective leaderboard points when they win/lose.

This will ensure that solo players are measured with respect to other solo players, while organized premades are measured vs other premades. In an ideal world, it will be premades vs premades, and solo players vs solo players, but we tried that and this game just doesn’t have the population for it, so this seems like a more sane solution.

How do you know you were up against premades? I just got accused of being in a premade even though everyone on my team was a solo Q.

On the score screen, you can right click on each name as a solo Q and see if you get the option to “join group” or “invite to party”. If it says join, that person is on a group.

I dislike that some people think they are up against premades and blame the system. It’s hard to keep track of how often this is really happening.

So, I just finished a ranked arena match (started ~ 5:00 pm EST) and it STARTED as 4v5. We did not have a 5th from the very beginning, and no one joined all game. I thought the new system was supposed to prevent these matches from starting? Why are we still starting with 4v5 matches??? Someone obviously didn’t click the queue to join, yet the match started anyway.

Keep playing and give the system a chance to figure out your matchmaking rating. You’re going to get random matches if the system doesn’t know your skill level. You can’t expect it to guess your skill accurately if you haven’t played for months.

There are definitely more blowouts today. It’s not fun winning 500-100, nor is it fun losing 100-500. I had both types of games today, and it’s an indication of very poor matchmaking. The weekend was great — what happened since then?

I’ve been playing a whole lot of unranked arena solo, and I have to say that the matches are way better. I normally play around server reset times, and the queue time is 20-30 seconds most times, while the matches never feel like a landslide.

If the problem with matchmaking is during off-peak hours, is it possible to dynamically adjust matchmaking based on server population? Or, maybe the player base from ranked and unranked could be merged, but player rank would only be affected from a win/loss if you entered the match via ranked queue.

I really don’t get why so many people are complaining about Courtyard. Every time it has come up for me in queue, the majority of the players have picked it.

Currently, it’s very popular and it’s the player’s choice. If it is a bad map that no one enjoys, people will stop picking it and it won’t be played. The problem will solve itself.

Edit: Also, when it comes up, you can simply not pick it. I voted for Kyhlo last night and got the map with a single vote even though every one else voted courtyard. RNG means you can get your wish to not play it!

I assure you that this has nothing to do with you playing a female character. The PvP community in this game is toxic, moreso than any other MMO on the market.

It only takes two clicks to block someone. Give it a try! After a while, every pvp match is dead silent.