Guild Wars 2

https://www.reddit.com/r/Guildwars2/comments/4mhm2q/pvp_easter_eggs_with_free_spectator_mode/

Burn.5401:

Sadly MMR doesn’t connect to divisions/pips in any way.

Hence the thread.

@Druss

There is a system in place it’s called MMR.

There is is no difference betweeen a rank 1 legendary and a rank 24 legendary as long as they are matched up against each other.(only the amount of grind). As someone already mentioned the amount of players reached legendary could make many different divisions with different skill levels.
A limit of 500 might be a bit too much(edited to 300), but there should be a limitation of x legends for sure. The dev knows the exact statstical number so they should know how much.

Problem: PvP reward tracks and ladders both have the same role.

If you want to appeal to all the people, simply bind the acquisition of the PvP Wing backpacks to (a series of) reward tracks. But the ladders should have a different goal.
If someone plays enough he can get to legend even if he is not very good at PvP(just like reward tracks). Ladder should be more focused on skill so I would prefer a system similar to Hearthstone’s where you can lose your Legend ranking and only a limited amount of people can get have it at a time.

A solo queue would be also important to have which could be rotating if you really worry that the people will spread out too much. During off-season, or rotating with stronghold gamemode.

Blood works. It was never bugged it just doesn’t show up in combat log but you can see the number over your target’s head.
Leeching does not deal dmg, it only heals. same for vamp runes 2nd and 4th bonus and scavemnger runes

Josh Davis.6015:

UmbraNoctis.1907:

When will anet realize, that amulets are not the (main) issue?

As mentioned in the OP, there will be a few balance changes coming next week as well, but runes/sigils/amulets are one of the things the PvP team can change on our own without impacting the rest of the game. To be clear: the PvP team, just like fractals/raids/wvw/etc, does not handle profession balance – there is a separate team for that.

And is there absolutely zero communication between the PvP team and the balance team?

Removing Mercenary is better than nothing but if it gets removed a (power/condition main stat, precision/vitality secondary stat) amulet should be implemented to make up for it.
You could try a lot more stat types, for example:
main: power/ferocity 2ndary: precision/vitality

I don’t know what you are talking about. :P This skill always had infinite range as it has now.
Afaik, if a rev sends the projectiles out, and a mesmer portals away to 5000 range(or any range) they still follow the mesmer and eventually hit him. I wonder if these projectiles can wander around a whole wvw map chasing someone going through a chain of portals. Someone should do a video about it. Anyone?

@Furajir They were probably glad they could come up with something unique for a skill type. New is not always Better.
@emkelly
Your arguments are next level. I can’t even come close.

Flaming Flurry
No

You are right actually. A lot of people started using Kick since last patch… oh wait nobody uses that. Aaand obviously CCs are not for landing burst, how could I be this stupid to say that? I’m sorry it is clearly used to let your opponent take a rest on the floor until you get to him.
Yes, Adrenal Health must be nerfed TO DUST! No, that’s not what I’m saying. Read again.

Crushing Blow: movement skill. That would be great! I’m serious.

@Routa +1 that’s probably the most annoying thing about thief right now.
@Blaque Yeah S/D was really not meant for 12 initiative :/ The thread was bugged and disappeared coz I edited the OP and it was too long for 1 page. As soon as I commented it went back to normal.
@Creed the idea itself is good, however, that would raise some problems:

• too much like shadow shot
• doesn’t solve the problem of Death Blossom spam.
• Dancing Dagger would still be bad on S/D and P/D so those would have to be addressed separately.

First 2 guys: thank you for your feedback, it was very helpful and constructive.

Cerby: +1 about stances.

Utilities:

• Kick: change knockback to knockdown. Pushing them away doesn’t help you land a burst on them(or your allies’ burst).
• Wild Blow: Launch distance increased from 600 to 900. More satisfying and useful this way.
• Sundering Leap: Leap distance increased from 600 to 900. Maybe add some extra dmg. Range feels very short and it is one of the least used utilities.

Weapons:
Greatsword:

• Autoattack: increase the 3rd attack’s dmg. Barely hits more than the first 2.
• Hundred Blades: outdated. Other skills that don’t root you deal more dmg. Increase dmg.
• Rush: often hits in the complete opposite direction or the wrong direction against moving targets. The hitting part should work like Shield Bash which keeps tracking your target during cast.

Longbow:

• Scorched Earth: very weak skill. Weird AoE figure(hard to keep foes in it) and low damage. Initial hit should be increased in dmg: burn by +100% and physical dmg by +200%. The skill should no longer fail and go on cooldown if your target is behind you but cast the skill in front of you instead, or at least don’t put it on cooldown.

Rifle:

• Gun Flame: should pierce again but disable double-hitting ppl by adding an ICD.
• Brutal shot: jumping should cancel the evade part again.(You could opt not to dodge roll away from your target. Good for chasing/staying in close range) It meant more control over your character.

Axe:

• Decapitate: should trigger the mini-shockwave even if you miss the initial hit. This would help you land it which is super important for Adrenal Health and Cleansing Ire.

Sword:

• Flaming Flurry: increase power damage by +150%. Decrease burn duration by 0.5s. This way if you are a power warrior it won’t deal way below autoattack dmg anymore. Mercenary warriors would deal about the same dmg or a bit more.

Off-hand Mace:

• Crushing Blow(#4): should have something extra like daze weakened foes / transform it into a movement skill / make it give bonus adrenaline or might stacks.

Traits: Defense, Berserker and Discipline are obligatory in this order(which is never good). Some prefer the more yolo but less consistent Strength over Discipline.
Defense: Adrenal Health: has more healing than your heal skills. The extra sustain is what warrior sought after but it’s too good to be a trait. Perhaps make it baseline or swap places with healing signet’s passive.
Last Stand: no longer increases stance duration but reduces cooldown instead by 20%.
Cooldowns are very long on stances as well as their duration.
I guess a lot more trait improvements could be done but I leave that to others.

Pulmonary is too good not to interrupt every autoattack with headshot. Used to be better when u had to time your headshot to key moments.
Has to be nerfed in some way. I’d accept any of these: much lower dmg / internal CD /rework.

Resurrecting this thread because people keep re-discussing topics I’ve already covered here.

+1, I’ve already shared my ideas on S/D and more in my footnote link below. I’d appreciate comments there.
“One big problem is that the sword line – Acrobatics – is still inferior to the Daredevil line, even with recent buffs.” – it shouldn’t be better than Daredevil but it should be used in combination with it. Acro should get it’s own character and move away from copying daredevil traits.

If they insist on no Default Models for unranked so much can we just please, enlarge asuras to a visible level?
Asuras would be happy too because ppl could actually see their armor and weapons as well as their animations(even if they slightly differ).

+1
This way they can’t say they split the community up to too many fractions and 2v2 would be a great and refreshing gamemode and everything is there for it.

No, they don’t need to balance around 2v2s separately, the players will adapt. In 5v5 conquest there are a lot of 2v2s and 1v1s already.

Sigil of Leeching, Vampirism and Scavenger runes all have Leeching effects. The ones that apply on your next hit are all bugged and only heal but deal no dmg. I’ve reported this already in bugs section, and I thought it’s just gonna get a hotfix. Almost 2 weeks passed and there has been no fix yet.
(I’ve only tested this in PvP)

Saeco.7196:

Kicker.8203:

This support build seems pretty good with a team that focuses a target.
In unranked this isn’t good because people don’t listen.
Has anyone tried something like this?
http://gw2skills.net/editor/?vJAQRBMdlG2JPHQnHYlHgZIARpY5KwSWBZtSASAIBUAeHtp2VLA-TZBCwAR3f4bZgLHEAKnAAAPBAA

Condi clear, heal, and tons of CC.

That build would be okay 3 years ago
I can tell warrior is not your main hehe.

Lol shut up you played rifle without berserker before the nerf and centar runes. GG

This support build seems pretty good with a team that focuses a target.
In unranked this isn’t good because people don’t listen.
Has anyone tried something like this?
http://gw2skills.net/editor/?vJAQRBMdlG2JPHQnHYlHgZIARpY5KwSWBZtSASAIBUAeHtp2VLA-TZBCwAR3f4bZgLHEAKnAAAPBAA

Condi clear, heal, and tons of CC.

Current rule is u can have only one of each class afaik.
Mesmer, Rev, Ele gonna be mandatory, druid will be almost obligatory and then what we have left: warrior, necromancer, engineer, thief, guardian. The first 2 will use mercenary if they are ran and thieves will be D/P with headshotspam. I’ve seen some condi engis streaming albeit Idk how good they are.

The amulet system is flawed in that it supposes you have enough health on all classes to chose an amulet without vitality. All low hp classes need to be boosted to medium or ppl must be allowed to better spread out their stats more like in wvw.

This would be a a nice fix but low priority on my list. I’d like to see some S/D and Acro improvements first. What u can do is replace fire with blood so you have a lower chance to waste the venom.

There are those skills that say in the description that they have no cast time but in reality they have 0.1s cast time like Headshot, Shadow Shot, Dust Devil, The Prestige, etc.
Infiltrator’s Return should be one of these. This way you still can’t use it while CC’d but you can teleport back much safer.

nicknamenick.2437:

brannigan.9831:

LB is a must imo because you are guaranteed the adrenal health procs.

No its not a must.

Its not 2014 here, we have berserker now and we also have allot more adrenaline gain these days.

Well if you want to be able duel a Revenant, a Scrapper, a Thief or DH, a LB or a sword mainhand is a must. In teamfighting/certain 1v1 matchups you are fine without using these weapons if you have GS or maybe Hammer.

nicknamenick.2437:

I can spam a burst every 3 sec in berserkmode and between that you have headbutt to go try again.. Adrenal health is 15sec active so thats MORE then enough time to land a burst skill NOmather what weapon.

Who cares if you would eventually land your primal burst? You miss it 2 times and you are dead because you get no healing or condi cleanse. Let’s not forget you don’t start a fight with full adrenaline you also have to build it up to enter berserker mode while having no regen from this trait. This ~500hp per sec is what defines warrior sustain.

Dahkeus.8243:

Yea, that’s really not all that different from what I posted, but looks solid for the most part (tip: forget Sigil of Energy exists. It’s crap now). I still prefer A/S with S/M since I think the strong access to stuns/CC is what makes a warrior worth playing, but if you do run sword as power, you definitely need cleave on your second weapon set, which leaves axe or GS.

Well there are multiple differences. I’d never use mace offhand for example. GS >>>> axe/mace (tip: if read my first post in this thread you’d know that Energy sigil gives 25 endurance instead of vigor now.)

Well mesmer is the most broken class for sure but that’s what they will nerf next. Even if they postpone that in tourneys we might see warriors now as only 1 of each class is allowed. It would require more testing to find out how good warrior is ATM so I can’t say anything for certain.

Dahkeus.8243:

Flaming Flurry also hits hard without any condi damage, even if it’s still not what you’ll usually want to be spending your adrenal on.

Well maybe it is still worth to take sword as a power warrior. The physical dmg Flaming Flurry deals is negligible and the burning is much less as if u were running condi but still has the highest base dmg among the condis. Bow doesn’t have the best primal burst either so there’s that too.
If I used F. Flurry as power I’d definitely cancel the skill out as soon as i get my trait procs and start using other skills(even autoattack is better)

I’d try this with Demolisher’s Amulet, maybe Marauder’s. Strong sustain and damage, great mobility.
http://gw2skills.net/editor/?vJAQNAR8enMdAlhgVhA2dAElilqADpA0ACAK9gGXO4d02aftA-TZBCwAYuAAAOIAB3f4yRAgxDAAA

Variants: dolyak signet, blood reaction trait, sigils like intelligence. If the opponents have a lot of stability it might be worth to replace elite with signet of rage, and take a different rune like Scrapper.
Paralyzation sigil: 30% stun duration applies to taunt too!
Instead of fire sigil I like taking blood on most classes but on warrior you are capable of gaining up to 5 additional adrenaline on hit. So with both sigils proccig technically you can gain 7 adrenaline instead of 1. Blood gives 0 adren cause it is lifesteal.

Edit: Updated the build. Actually all kind of power warrior is way under the meta builds so this isn’t too good either.

Sorel.4870:

Kicker.8203:

https://www.twitch.tv/thelordhelseth/v/62626340

In short he can’t grow his channel in GW2 because:

• People have no incentive to watch streams. Everyone can get to legendary(but why would they even want to? it holds no prestige) without being good at the game so they don’t have to learn from streams.
• There is no soloque.

That’s not exactly what he said. I don’t even know where you get the “no soloq” part. To be a little more precise, he gives the following explanations for his lack of viewership:

The league system does not provide balanced matches. As a result, most games are complete blow-outs, and they are not fun to watch on stream. He said that for him scrims are fun, pro league matches are fun, duels against competent players are fun, but he can’t stream those for obvious reason, forcing him to play soloq, which is lame because unbalanced and full of terrible players.

Now, more realistically, what frustrates Helseth is that even as the most popular GW2 streamer, he rarely goes above 800 viewers at a time. He also said that the number of his followers increases too slowly. Naturally, that’s because GW2 is a low-population game. It’s not rocket science that if you want to be a successful streamer, you need to play a game that people are willing to watch.

GW2 pvp community likes to watch pvp streams. The pro-league viewership numbers are important when compared to the number of active pvp players (around 25k in EU in January 2015, probably more now). The problem is not that not enough people want to watch Helseth stream, it’s that not enough people play pvp in GW2.

IDK what you were listening to but about half the things you said, he told the complete opposite.

The leech effect itself is bugged and only heals but deals no dmg. also affects vamp runes and scavenger runes.

velvetblanc.9140:

At the very least, give us the option to turn on standard models for unranked queues too, fighting asuras is a nightmare.

That’s the main reason.
Then there are also those weapons like legendaries and marjory’s dagger that make all the different projectiles look the same, unless you have default character models.
+1

MaxRage.5072:

mmm… many games are adopting this stupid pvp system lately, its a way to make all players feel like they are Pro. Sick of this modern system.

Yeah it took like 3 losses to get to legend(from amber) over 2.5 days on thief. (there was also this 1 loss where we lost to a DC: the teammate came bk in during the grace period so it was considered a loss. It was a close game so we would have won.)(Thief is not meta but against bad people it is the best. Can really carry your team especially on staff.)

I agree with this personally. Matching up 1x legends against 20x legends is plain wrong. Getting 1x Legend is pretty easy and I don’t mind that because all the pve ppl can get their rewards but what’s there for people who actually want to show off their PvP skills?

If there was more incentive to advance on the ladder after u get to legendary surely you would start to face only premades and that’s why soloque should be also added.

https://www.twitch.tv/thelordhelseth/v/62626340

In short he can’t grow his channel in GW2 because:

• People have no incentive to watch streams. Everyone can get to legendary(but why would they even want to? it holds no prestige) without being good at the game so they don’t have to learn from streams.
• There is no soloque. No motivation to get good unless you have a team.

In sPvP after I tested a ton of builds, power based warrior still appears to be outclassed by revenant.
But condi has a chance to be good. What is for sure you have to take defense because it is broken as hell. If you are condi, discipline and berserker are also obligatory.
(Arms would be good for a mercenary build if you had more power damage on your condi sets but it is too low to be worth investing in crits.
Strength is good for a power gs build, but I still prefer disc and berserker.
Tactics is good for support only.)
Then if you want to be good at duels you also have to take Longbow or Sword mainhand(only take sword if you are condi) because LB always procs your Adrenal Health and Cleansing Ire, and Sword has a much greater chance to do so than all the other weapons out there because it consist of multiple attacks and only landing 1 will suffice at proccing these traits. If you miss your f1 that often means you die because you miss out on 7.5k heal over 15s (heals more than healing signet every sec) and the condi cleanse. Signet of Might: if you have a ranged weapon it is a must have as literally everyone has blocks/projectile hate since HoT. I like it on melee build as well, you wouldn’t be able to touch a DH without this.

What I found best is this condi build(condi war > power war):
http://gw2skills.net/editor/?vJAQRApe8fnMdAlhgVhA2dAElilqATpHE7yBvj2VbsFpA0ACAA-TpBHABB8AAsvMAAHEAL2fQgTAwAHBAA

Variants: Dead or Alive, smoldering sigil, leeching(it is bugged atm so Energy is better(gives 25 endurance now)), dolyak signet

Spirit Watch: the orb mechanic is a lot better now, here is what i think could be improved:

• Add 1 more skill to the orb that allows you to defend yourself(evade/block) at the right moment.
• Hugh said on stream the orb’s gonna disable people’s trait, like the daredevil +50%max endurance trait. Thief has already the lowest hp pool, very low armor and is not worth taking tanky amulets so if you do that you also have to set people to a certain armor and health value and remove utility skills.
  I’d suggest removing only utility skills and elites while leaving traits as they are. With dash you can capture the orb very fast but if you remove utility skills(agility signet) it would be about fine because you are also squishy and teleports/stealth make you drop the orb.

@Asrat
Buffing just the already meta traits is the worst way to lessen the gap between professions as it kills build diversity if it isn’t already dead for the profession. They should have just buffed all thief weapon skills by a bit or stolen skills if they wanted to buff thief. I don’t think thief is in a bad spot (well S/D and Acro is) but there are those certain broken classes that are simply better.

Skyhammer:
The map improved a lot but there are still 12 clunky jump pads that are super annoying and buggy. Why?

• They interrupt your skills as if you got CCd.
• You can’t use skills while airborne so it can be abused for kiting(especially melee classes) and stall out fights
• You take fall damage at certain jump pads when you fall back to the pad.
• If you walk too it fast you don’t get launched(cause you already passed the jump pad and it activates behind you), but
• if you walk too slow(in combat/crippled) you can’t coordinate yourself to the platform in the air.
• If you don’t manage to make it to the platform, you have to wait for the jump pad to reset.
• If it resets while you already stand on it you may not have enough momentum to make it to the platform.

The skyhammer shouldn’t be evadable because it only shoots once per activation and is easy to dodge or it should shoot twice(but then mabye lower the dmg a bit). This time-gated skyhammer mechanic and the fact that it decaps is really good!

The old(when it got first implemented) skyhammer map without any barriers and with all the breaking glasses would make an awesome minigame. Don’t believe me? Watch this old skyhammer video. (sry for terrible quality)
Everyone would get transformed to an engineer with push and pull skills like in the vid, and a bit of stealth. (or mesmer with focus pull and gs push, maybe fear necro)

Rifle 4 was better back when you could chose whether to roll back or not by jumping. Maybe in some PvE situations it is annoying but it was way better for PvP: it increased the already low skill cap and was useful for chasing people. Across the game more skills should behave differently when jumping IMO.

The dmg nerf is absolutely justifiable but the piercing effect should be restored. The biggest weakness of rifle is that you have little cleave, even if gunflame pierced.

What I’d emphasise:
Acrobatics has only got redundant or underpowered traits and doesn’t have more defense than Deadly Arts but at the same time Acro has way less damage and utlity.
S/D was still not made meta despite most people like this set the most.
P/P still has no utility/defense.
Still too much powercreep on the elite specs.

high socks.7628:

2. Separate players who have paid for Heart of Thorns and people who have not.

If they did so I’d downgrade to the regular game from HoT.

“What about Ranked do you enjoy more than Unranked during off-season?”

• Default Character Models.
• Unranked has very low quality matches. People go there to test builds, learn classes, play fun builds or if they feel like they are bad at PvP(not hotjoin because that’s more of a zerg-deathmatch). Even if Ranked came back without a ladder/rewards the quality would increase. Bad opponenets make it harder for the meta to settle down.
• If rewards were back too it would only cause burnout for those who are racing for the top 5 or so places on the leaderboards.(This could be better because people would be more focused on finding the absolute best builds and to take games a bit more seriously)

Honestly, this guy made thief viable. If it weren’t for his awesome rotation that you can barely believe was made with a human hand, thief could not haven placed 2nd among all the classes.
Also shoutouts to Arenanet for making it rewarding to be a truly good thief player.

Yes there should be a dueling area in the lobby if we don’t get to queue from outside of it.
Or a minigame.

This isn’t too hard of a change and it would really up the pvp experience.

MadVisions.4529:

It is utter clear that these are destroying the game experience but it seems that there is no intrest in actually making the product enjoyable. Marketing->Hype->Sell->GG mentality I’m beyond sad.

Exactly, they ruin their game for even those who bought the expac just to sell the game to more free-to-play players. Anet greatly disappointed me. Even half a year after the expansion has launched and they’ve sold the majority of copies they keep up this greedy attitude. For a bit after expac launch, making elite specs powercreepy is even somewhat understandable but keeping them so forever?!

MadVisions.4529:

boonspam, skillspam, mass instants, mass autoproc

Great summary. People start to forget that counting dodges or fakecasting ever was a thing. You can just spam all your CDs because by the time you missed all of them you can use them again. A-net is going over the top with CD decreases and the number of skills available to classes as well as the aforementioned things.

Why would you even think this patch changed anything regarding the situation of acro? +2% dmg with half uptime(doesn’t help bow), and 4s cd reduction on random proc condi removal that does not remove anything if it procs when u have no condis.

Deadly arts and trickery are both twice as good as acro even for S/D. S/D still isn’t good enough and the larcenous buff doesn’t help vs other thieves either who continue to counter and outshine s/d.

@OP: If you play s/d anyway, you should try impacting disruption, bandit’s def, (basi venom if enemy team has thieves or maybe DHs). Leeching sigil and vampirism runes would be good but they don’t work ATM. So you should change that sigil to Air/Fire. You have a lot of boonsteals, thrill of the crime and dash so Pack is a overlapping with these. I’d suggest: http://gw2skills.net/editor/?vZAQNAsYVn8lCFmiFOBmOB8PhFYCTLBEAyAzhwTYL0LNcGaDA-TZBFABCcIACe/BAeCAiXGggTAAA
Impacting Strike and Improvisation are better for certain matchups. Lyssa runes and escapist’s absolution maybe if they have a ton of condi / if you are not good at evading condis. Bloodlust sigil is also ok.

Agree, mesmer needs the change the most. Then revenant and ele.

It was one of the most broken builds last season. And it got BUFFS. -.-"