Warrior – Their combined durability and ability to constantly AoE stun is overpowered.
Necromancer – Again insane survivability combined with constant fear and a ridiculous amount of conditions being applied AoE.
A+
S/D Thief is pretty decent but the only Thief build that is remotely competitive. All other Thief builds are significantly worse.
Guardians – The only thing fundamentally broken about Guardians is their insane survivability, much of which is based on their constant boon-spaming. No class should be able to tank 2-3 enemy players for an extended period of time. Conquests exasperates this issue to an extent.
A
Ranger – Their Evade spam build is pretty strong and probably closer to A+ levels, but in general the class is roughly where it’s supposed to be.
Engineer – This has always felt like something of a wildcard to me. Some Engineer-builds are really powerful, others are not. Seems to depend a lot on the player too.
Mesmer – The rate at which they spawn Illusions is a bit excessive at times but other than that they seem to be ok. Given their utility and class design Mesmers will never really be “weak”.
Elementalist – The past weeks have been a little rough for Eles and you don’t see many in sPvP. I still have a hard time calling them underpowered however given how strong they are in WvW. I think Eles would be fine once Necros and Warriors are brought in line.
B: Most other Thief builds
First of all, many classes have weak builds and strong builds. Some people are putting Guardians as superior and that because of one role/build bunker. The problem with judging thieves accuarately is that stealth classes always attract a bunch of newbs. When you actually face a skilled thief they are without a doubt superior right now. They do tons of damage, can avoid a lot of damage, and can disengage from fights basically at will. How cant that not be op. To me a thief should be a class that has the advantage initially like the first 10 seconds and then become extremely vulnerable in short order. Right now unless they get stuck in a team fight with loads of aoe flying around or get stuck in uneven fight and people get lucky and cc them long enough to kill them you can’t kill them if they don’t want to die.
I agree with just about everything you said. People have been asking for these types of rewards for months. A-net says they are going to be adding more rewards. If they are not most of the things listed here I will probably stop playing the game. Special pvp skins viewable everywhere, gold, karma, and exp. Those sorts of things should be put in and if they were pvp would be way more popular.
The current matchmaking makes me not want to play. Its like Russian Roulette. The quality of the matches are generally awful as well. When I win or lose its 500-200 or worse at least half the time. I am willing to wait longer for matches if they will be better quality.
let us change the stats per item to fully be able to modify our builds how we see fit. Just like in Pve/WvW
the amulet system will never allow for any build diversity since you will be very limited on your choices.
That limit is absolutely voluntary to prevent some stat combinations. Example: Knight in SPvP gives Vitality instead of Toughness.
I am not saying they didn’t do this intentionally (disallow some stat combinations) but at the end of the day I think its still giving them too much credit to think they actually knew what stat combinations are op and what are not based on how they have balanced this game for pvp which imo, and a lot of people’s opinion, is quite poorly. Something tells me they did some very quick and dirty reasoning why x, y, z might be op in some situations were very little actually testing to back it up decided not to include those combinations for spvp. Also, we are getting new stat amulets at some point soon so obviously they feel some other combinations of stats are permissable.
Thieves needto be nerfed. Certain builds played by people with a pulse have extremely high damage, high damage avoidance, and escapability and are basically unbeatable 1 v1.
The weakest classes are elementalist then mesmer in that order. Elementalist weakness goes beyong the condition meta. What happened is they got “shaved” repeatedly. The changes were all small independently but they added up to a pretty substantial nerf in total. Then you have the current condition meta and you have a class that is almost laughably weak against the current fotm rolling around. Mesmers are pretty much only really good at 1 v 1. Mesmers also another class that was “shaved” repeatedly with small nerfs that added up to mean quite a bit. Rangers are limited but they have a few builds that work. Only having a couple good builds is something almost every class faces. A-net failed miserably at providing the build diverisity for each class they promised.
Lots of cool aid drinking here that I don’t really have time to rebutt. I will say to say that elementalist and mesmers are in a good place right now is pretty ludicrous. Elementalist is general are probably the weakest class over-all in spvp regardless of build pretty much. Mesmers are very situational and if you pull them out of those situations are also very weak. It really doesn’t matter why those classes are weak either those things making them weak exist and until A-net fixes those things the actual reason why doesn’t matter. Oh its just that x exists! Well until A-net tells me they are fixing x who cares?
Or instead of that, ur boss could hire more dudes and do it (honestly, if i were ur boss i would do the same, no point in wasting too much resources in spvp).
What i think is bad for the game and avoidable is that balance is done 80% of the time with spvp in mind, when it’s the least played and the balance of pve or wvw is way way worst.
There is little to no evidence of this really. When you think about it logically almost anything that is a problem in spvp is a problem at the very least in WvWvW because of things like ludicrous buff durations and super inflated stats that exist in WvWvW.
Don’t see this as a big deal really. I never seen protections stack 5+ times in a spvp. Aegis durations tacking 5 times+ not sure when this ever happened. Don’t think I’ve ever seen swiftness stack five times +. It may be a nerf to regeneration but most regenerations are quite weak probably wont be noticeable and will be fairly rare. More then 5 times really is a lot for the smaller quicker fights in spvp that rarely are greater then 3v3. This seems more of a WvWvW nerf where you have extreme buff durations.
Lyssa runes are really not that powerful they have a 60 second ICD and conditions in this game are just re-applied over and over again in seconds. I don’t know why people think they are so great. Dont get me wrong I run them but only because of how lamely powerful conditions are. If conditions were nerfed I would drop them.
My personal experience is that very few games start 4 v5 like under 10%. What does happen though fairly often is people leave if they get in an early 100 point+ hole or are basically just afk for most of the match.
These Meta discussions are some of the most boring ever. This game was supposed to be run something reasonable and be competitve. Classes were supposed to be versatile and capable of fulfilling many different roles. So the fact that we have these lame narrow metas to be begin with shows you how fail a lot of this game is.
What class/build would you claim requires a lot of skill to play?
Compared to the current warrior, everything.
Not directing this at you specifically Burr, but I reckon a lot of people really ought to play a variety of classes before suggesting how to balance the game. If you did, you might see that the warrior is among one of the easiest to play right now.
Anyway, I think that having one specific class to counter an entire build type isn’t a good way to balance a game. Rock paper scissors is also especially bad for the game when considering solo que.
Of course its a horrible way to balance a game. There are 8 classes so how can it be good game design to ever have something that is only countered by one class when the group size if five. There should be enough counters to everything that unless you are very unlucky a counter should randomly be expected to be in any match the large majority of the time. Its just common sense. Unforutnately common sense is severely lacking on these forums.
I noticed something while watching a dps guard streaming the other day. His staff auto was doing 1-2k aoe damage (600 range), and the whole time he was doing it he was complaining about stuff like necro scepter auto, which does ~750 single target (900 range) when you include the bleed.
The biggest ‘hit’ on a necros s/d set is now enfeebling blood, which does ~3.4k aoe damage on a 25s recharge if the bleeds somehow tick for fifteen seconds without being removed and has a glaringly obvious, painfully slow animation. Big damage right there, probably break the game if it wasn’t so easy to avoid.
That in turn reminds me, I keep seeing these posts about condi damage being the only stat condis need. With the same amount of condi damage but no condi duration, the same attack does ~2.3k, and scepter autos do ~550. With maxed out condi damage and no duration, it’s 2.6k/600.
If an autoattack doing 600 damage is gamebreaking, I can see nerfs inc everywhere. Once again, all these numbers are against targets with absolutely no condition removal or being spammed with condis so hard that their removal never hits the bleed stack.
Two things that could actually use looking at are signet of spite, either make the animation extremely obvious or just straight up nerf it back to 5-6s duration on the condis, and a much clearer animation on mark of blood. As far as other condi professions, they’re all fine imo.
You have to be kidding me if he was doing 1-2k with staff he was some kind of glass cannon build and those were crits and you are still exaggertating. Necros still need plenty of “shaving” to use A-nets ludicrous lexicon. Conditions are op.
I don’t glory farm, but DO explain how it doesn’t take time.
It takes a lot less time to do what the op is describing then to do it the legit way. Surely you understand that is a problem? Where did anyone say it doesn’t take time even cheating.
Thief counter warriors atm, just kite berserker stance and spam blind, if the war runs the teef prob wont be able to kill them, but it’ll prob be the counter meta backpoint defender
people are saying they will be gettin toned down tho, at least stun durations so they might not be as big or harmful as the spirit ranger/necro meta .
So one class out of seven counters Warriors? I thought the idea with this game was you basically could play any class you wanted because every class could do most anything decently if specced that way. Not to be rude but its awful game design to have something that is basically countered by only one thing out of a bunch of things. What if I solo q and have no thieves on my team. What if I get a group together and I don’t have a thief in it because one I trust is not on. I am sol I guess. Every build/class should have multiple counters and at least one of these counters should be expected to be present in any match randomly unless you are very unlucky imo. Just being able to say well this one thing can counter X, if its actually present, does not excuse op builds.
Rift, Warhammer, and DAOC all games with better testing/communication then a-net and all much smaller budgets. Those happen to be the games I played for the last 10 years before GW2. I have gotten used to devs taking ideas to the community first and getting feedback then just inviting a few select people to test and then sprining changes on everyone. It is the best way period. Patchnotes made available beforehand for all to discuss. We don’t even need to get into a dedicated testing server although that is needed first. What the hell is wrong with saying here is what we are thinking of doing? I’m sure Vena will have some kitten answer to that.
The large majority of players do not even read these forums regularly. So how do you propose some kind of gamewide cooperation of all players? Never mind the fact that it is not our job to make the devs life easier.
In your average situation where everyone in a group is not optimized out the wazoo for optimal performance ultra specific roles staff is very strong. Thats the situation your average player plays under the most.
I have zero problems with some specs being easier to play then others outside of specs that are very reliant on AI/pets which in my opinion are pure cheese. That being said these sorts of specs need to be weaker then harder ones that are played correctly. That is what we call balance. And its not always the case.
This is one of the best posts ever. Anybody that does a lot of solo q knows how broken all this stuff is and how random a lot of stuff feels. The match quality is so bad too it seems like I win by 500-200 or lose by 500-200 the majority of the time. I don’t even look at my leaderboard rating because one minute im ranked and then another I’m not over and over again. I play a good bit and then I look at the top 100 and see all these people with less then 30 games. All you have to do is keep the searchable leaderboard open and do some quick searches after a match to see how bad and random match making is sometimes.
We are definitely aware of the issues surrounding PvP. We’ve been generating data since we released these features and I think it’s fair to say that each will be visited by us as soon as we can get around to it. (matchmaking, decay, dishonored, ratings, rewards)
We have a lot on our plate but what you can expect to see soon is:
Random map rotation should be working appropriately for Team Arena
New amulets for PvP
Temple of the Silent Storm map layout re-work (took out the water)
We started a query today for the Random Map Rotation bug on Team Arenas as this bug should currently be fixed on live. Please let us know if you are still experiencing playing one specific map much more often then the others though if the issue arises again.
Thanks,
-Powerr
So basically nothing important just secondary fluff. More we know these things are problems and we are working on them but we don’t know when they will be ready. New Amulets and map fixes whoopee. How about making your leaderboards and game enjoyment worth something by fixing match making and decay. You put in your first pass at a decay months ago and its been a fail for months. Your game punishes people for playing. Your matchmaking system frequently has people ranked in the top 500 versus people not in the top 1,000. These things should be your priorities!
You’ll never get anyone to agree to this you still have people that think an ability (retaliation) that hits for 140-160 kills them in 10 seconds by itself.
There are a lot of great guardians just being on the best team doesn’t make you all the best at your classes necessarily. That would make Mario Chalmers the best pg in the NBA since he played on the Miami Heat. My personal opinion is that Stunningstyles is the best pvp guardian I’ve ever seen watching videos although he does not run a classic cookie cutter spec. Its also hard to believe anyone being more then marginally better then DaVinci as well. I am sure there are many others. Put to downplay all the experience Team Paradigm has playing together and how valuable it is and just act like everyone is the best at there classes thats tripe.
I say sad to say it because the queues times already suck but I cant take it anymore. Solo q is a joke when there are a small amount of people in the queue. The game waits like 10 minutes and then throws out random garbage half the time. I would rather wait as long as it take to get 10 players within some sort of reasonable rating spread then the current system which might throw in a couple of guys that could be thousands of ranks worse then everyone else in the match eventually. Its like Russian roulette to see who gets them and then cant win. You get one of these potted plants or inexperienced players and you cant win.
For you to just ignore dodge on weapon abilities as not a problem is ludicrous imo. Its one of the biggest problems with too many evades. Remove weapon evades, remove energy sigils, and remove vigor regeneration procs. Dodges should be limited and very important to manage correctly.
I have also gotten rank 1 people in team arena when I run less then full groups occassionally. As a matter of fact I have noticed tons of solo players in team arena which leads me to believe there are tons of players that are confused about the difference between solo arena and team arena. This game does a horrible job explaining everything. I really think there may be people out there that think solo arena is some kind of 1v1 thing or something lol. Why else would queue solo for a game mode where you could be facing other full teams when you could play against other randoms instead. There is lots of confusion here.
I admit this is coming out for frustration, but that’s it.
Today i lost around 400 positions in the ladder.
My win ratio is around 70%, yet when i went around 400 , my rank would simply never go up.
I literally had a 12 win streak and gained, what, 70 positions, and went up to 330 ( for 12 wins). With a single match lost, i dropped about 100 positions.
What does this mean ?
I was playing with much worse ranked players, all along.
What does this mean ?
That people on my “same” rank were not playing, so i couldn’t go up more than i did ( there would be a point where i would likely gain 1 position per win, if not staying on the same spot).
What does this mean ?
People are rewarded for not playing, and after all this time leaderboards are up, it’s getting really, REALLY annoying.
Shame on me for playing, i should have stood at 300 and not play like everyone else.
We all know its a joke. The ball is in A-net’s court. This game punishes you for playing and rewards you for playing as little as possible or not at all. The decay needs to be tweaked seriously and I believe you should get a boost to your rating for being very active and winning a lot. Some guy who is 20-2 should not be ranked in front of someone that is 100-50 for example. 20-2 is some bs small sample of games.
I believe he is referring to the abyssmal numbers that watched GW2 PAX
Which I keep trying to remind you people is a silly metric because the highest GW2 viewer count has been at 9~10k (Ascended Crafting). (Pre-launch it only ever reached 20k.)
5.5k (on only the English stream since everyone likes to ignore other languages) is apparently more than 50% of the population base that even bothers to watch Twitch.
In context of relative reality, the word “abysmal” has no place.
Don’t try to peddle this tripe. I wasn’t aware people watched streams of pve content in large numbers in any game ever. So its not bad because other aspects of GW2 doesn’t have people watching it in large numbers. When you compare GW2 pvp streams to other E-SPORTS steams you will see it is pretty abysmal. Its GW2 fault for trying to peddle this pvp as an E-Sport so it should be compare to other E-Sports! Is this hard to understand?
No way a nerf to stability unless we have some kind of CC immunity or diminshing returns. I could care less if they added something more visual most people still would just spam there cc and watch it fail.
They can’t be serious about pvp population growing? The queues stink. They are almost always 5-10 min long. For a game that sold millions of copies that is good? Must be a lot of people in custom arenas then. The rating decay is a joke and needs to be worked on because otherwise you have meaningless leaderboards no one cares about.
I personally don’t think many players actually believe the pvp devs don’t have the game’s best interest at heart but it really doesn’t matter if they are not given the resources to make the changes and additions the game needs in a timely manner. Its ludicrous for some of the fan boys here to tell people to have patience when there are tons of other games to play. You would think we were talking about weeks for some of these things instead of the months we have been waiting. In the end all the good intentions in the world don’t add up to a hill of beans in the real world. People want results eventually and sooner rather then late. I still mostly enjoy this game’s pvp but I am way more stubborn then most.
A rather small percentage of players actually visit game forums regularly or at all so any negativity here really has very little effect on pvps popularity. The fact of the matter is most people do not find this games pvp compelling and that’s why we have a tiny pvp player base for a game that sold millions of copies. Don’t believe its tiny well the 5 to 10 minute queues I get during what are supposed to be active times tells me otherwise.
For some crazy reason there are a bunch of Euro’s that actually think this game is worth taking seriously. Most of us here in the states realize its not worth it at all.
Since fairies and pixie dust. Don’t pay attention to A-net house slaves. Hopefully it was sarcasm but something tells me its some kitten thing that is not in the least what we are asking for/talking about.
The decay needs to be ramped up. I think 15 rated games every two weeks or you are off the leaderboard. That’s a whopping one game per day average. Then if you complete a two week period where you complete 15 games if your rating is high enough you get back on the leaderboard. Something like that.
The top 20 solo q is littered with people with less then 20 rated games. Solo q has been around for over three weeks. If you can’t average a rated game a day you should not be on leaderboard. A-net how about rewarding the people that actually play your game.
The rating decay system is a joke. This game should reward playing in rated matches often which it does not unless your idea of often is a couple of games to 0 a week.
Solo queue is rife with cheats (synch queue and match droppers) toward the very top so don’t even think about trying to win at those percentages. If you are a decent player you should be able to win more then half your games eventually. 15 games is nothing just keep playing and you will hit what your true skills merits.
The best pvp MMORPGs have almost always been developed by Americans and certainly none by anybody from Asia. Asian companies do grind and unbalanced pvp where gear allows you to one shot your opponent.
It is supposed to count as a loss but something tells me it doesnt or at least not all the time. The top of the solo q leaderboard is filled with some extreme cheese records and ive heard reports of as you get higher and start playing against higher ranked people there is a lot of quitting toward the end of losses.
(honestly, if i were ur boss i would do the same, no point in wasting too much resources in spvp).