Guild Wars 2

Allie Murdock.8152:

Is anybody else seeing a high percentage of Skyhammer like the OP? If so, how many games have you played and how many of them were Skyhammer?

Yesterday I did 23 Solo Q matches, over half were skyhammer and about 5 were temple.

Today I’ve done 5 and 3 were skyhammer, 1 kyhlo, 1 temple.

I streamed all 23 matches yesterday, it would take some time but I can go through and give you exact numbers if you want.

Littlefeather.8623:

Careful guys. This man is a pro:

Littlefeather.8623 Personal best rank 970 (0 hour ago)

Hype.8032:

Thanks for the video Lux, it is nice to see the style of other d/p thieves. Interesting use of smoke field but I can’t see giving up inf signet for it.

Yeah smoke field is the biggest change from traditional D/P thieves. I’ve been running it for a while now so it’s benefits are second-nature to me and changes up my game-play from a traditional D/P (since they can’t typically fight range vs range). I do sacrifice several options for it though, like inf/assassin’s signet, or shadow trap. All of those are amazing utilities.

A lot of my burst depends on me -actually- hitting them and not dodge-rolling, so that’s a bonus that smoke screen offers since I open in my shortbow I can blast the field after I weaken them ranged and then surpise shot (2.5s immob) to land the mug, wep swap (for hydro), BP HS BS. I still toss on a signet once in a while for old-time’s sake. Shadowtrap is too fickle for me right now since it doesn’t always work with the pathing bugs.

Thanks for watching!

Master of Timespace.2548:

I’ve been clicking half of my skills since gw1 and I’m not gonna quit. We clickers should unite!

I clicked in gw1 but since I got my naga I keybound a lot of skills. I’d say 90% of that is without clicking any skills, but honestly I don’t see the big issue in gw2 because you don’t need everything keybound to be good. For example, stunningstyles, an AMAZING well-rounded player clicks.

It all comes down to what you’re most comfortable with. Hybrid works for me.

Elxdark.9702:

Nice video, good gameplay.
I like to see good thieves playing and sharing their videos.
I hope to see more stream

Also if you are clicking or not, it’s up to you, maybe is easy to you click instead of use the keyboard so it doesn’t matter at all guys.

Thanks for the feedback. I wish all matches went this smoothly for me ^^

Walker.3056:

Mathias.9657:

Can’t stand the clicks!

+1 you will perform better without clicking

Could you point out where I would have improved my gameplay having my heal on my mouse instead of clicking it, or my BPowder, or TG? I would love to see how I was performing slower or how it interrupted my gameplay at all.

Also, do either of you pvp? I would love to see a video or stream of you Maybe I’ll learn a thing or two.

Mathias.9657:

Can’t stand the clicks!

I multi-class depending on the map so my keybinds are for different comps on different classes. My burst and evasives are keybound for thief. The rest is cheese, easy to click and obviously doesn’t effect my gameplay.

Sorry it bothered you, though.

Just thought I’d post this vid of my D/P in Solo Q.

All comments and discussion are welcome.

http://www.twitch.tv/lux_fortuna/c/3028562

My issues with the meta stun war are this:

-Stuns+Berserker Stance means wars can hard-counter classes like fear necro and and D/P thieves extremely well without much risk.

-Over-abundant access to stuns is far too forgiving. In gw1 if a ham-bash war missed even 1 of his KD’s then he was punished hard for it. In gw2 that’s not the case.

Honestly, though, I like seeing warriors in the meta since they’re pushing necros out and even spirit ranger to an extent. I’d much rather fight a warrrior skilled at interrupting and chain-stunning than mindless 78903451111111111111

FirstBlood.7359:

Most players seem to forget that the petting zoo has an impressive history in the GuildWars series. Starting with IWAY, over the introduction of the Ritualist, Natural Renewal builds to the popularity of beastmaster rangers with RaO.

Ironically, I haven’t heard a single complaint about AI during my GW days.

Except no one is complaining about bringing 1 pet… aka iWay and RaO. They’re complaining about the ridiculous pull-out-4-spirits and spam evades on cd builds.

No one said iWay took skill. Some were better at it than others but the whole thing was laughable and people got hated on for running that cheese.

RaO was never complained about (much) because while it was an easy class to run, it wasn’t based on spamming CD’s but rather timing interrupts and training appropriately.

Bringing 1 pet is a lot different than using all 3 utilities and your elite to bring aoe passives that steam-roll most every non-AI build.

For what it’s worth there was a group of us all watching one stream. I realize you’re asking for literal “viewers on the stream” because situations like mine apply to other games such as LoL, but a group of 7 of us watched most of the matches on a big screen in our apartment. We had a lot of fun placing bets on the matches and rushing to make twitch accounts to vote XD.

Divinity.8041:

I know caed, but I can’t watch his twitch. Any good youtubers out there where I could watch some d/p/sb or even d/d /sb action?

I like the thief, and am alright on one, but I feel like I am playing it wrong. I watched countless on his mesmer, and learned a lot from him, any other cool thieves out here I could learn from?

Look up some of Jumper’s old D/P videos. Still very good.

Also if you’re NA you could spectate me. I am one of the best high-ranked and competitive D/P on NA.

ahuba.6430:

uberkingkong.8041:

They went to LoL because they realized GW2 wasn’t esports.

like they have a chance at LoL esports lol

Jumper is rank 1 diamond or whatever the absolute top tier is. I don’t know my LoL terminology because I never played it.

Not to be nit-picky but the graph has a typo or two. Combo Blast and Leap in Smoke fields = stealth not blind.

More on topic, some combos are extremely powerful while others are very lackluster.

Except I’m not talking strat or tactics. This is assuming it’s logical to fight the point 1v1, meaning I’m not rushing to a capped point. Perhaps I decapped it and don’t want them to instantly recap it, or we own the point and I am the only closest person to defend it.

I’m looking for practice, not reasons why I shouldn’t be there.

Best way to get people into sPvP is to make it profitable.

If regular tourney wins gave 100g per win per player, 1 million people would be in spvp within the next 5 minutes.

It just depends on how much Anet is willing to reward pvpers. At the moment we get crap for rewards so only the players who genuinely ENJOY pvp are here. As the rewards increase the more -other- players will stop farming dungeons for gold and start pvping.

Jono M.8519:

Gandarel.5091:

Erwin.5603:

Not sure about rank 50 in 2 weeks statement

10k glory / hour. Calculate.

wtf 10k/hr?!? That just takes a huge steamy kitten on the whole system. I hope ANet can track where people have been earning rank and remove this kitten. Rank/glory may mean nothing right now (or even -0 thanks to this), but when the reward update comes these guys better not get a leg up thanks to all this abused glory.

This.

I hope they make tourney win chests more important than glory =\

Certain classes are typically better at it than others. If you’re home point you don’t want to get decapped long enough for help to arrive. This usually means a solid access to stability or the ability to evade most CC that is telegraphed.

Most of the time people don’t assault far while the home pt bunker is there if they already have it capped. If they don’t it’s usually a class that can stay on point and not let the home pt bunker get the cap early on. Sometimes there will be ballsy far point assaulters who can not only decap but solo the far point bunker. Caed, Cruuk and Jumper, for example.

not exactly sure where this post belongs so feel free to move it to the relevant forum

I am looking to improve my far-point assault gameplay 1v1 on point. I play thief and want to practive my 1v1’s on far-point with experienced players who can point out where I need to improve or punish the enemy for their mistakes. Any help would be much appreciated.

Looking for matches against all classes and all specs. I will offer advice if you request it and I can give you insight.

NA

Sounds like the only things really getting shaved are maybe 1 bleed from necros… 1 boon from s/d thieves, and a ‘modification’ to the ranger waterfield heal…

4 months for this ‘long awaited’ patch and it seems extraordinarily lackluster =\

I would rather the patch undo all the changes it made in the last major one so we’re back to the melee meta we had before. I guess we’ll see what they really have in store… I’d rather any huge patch that changes the meta from condi instawin.

Mrbig.8019:

Fortus.6175:

Mrbig.8019:

Quickness sucks balls.

If you really think so then I recommend you to watch this thief dude (forgot his name, but just look it up on youtube as thief PvP quickness), as if people didnt drop fast enough with thieves, pop a quickness and he was dropping them in a go, and it wasnt vs bad players…

Quickness is ok, only that we are in a conditionmeta, once it shifts towards bursting again, you will realize how strong quickness really is.

No thief in EU uses quickness.

If there’s some fool doing it, well i guess i’ve already said he’s a fool.

No good NA thieves are using it either. While we may not be up to par with the EU meta we’re honestly not that bad. Disregard anyone who says differently, we’re not using quickness.

Mrbig.8019:

stop playing hotjoin.

Best idea ever

#swag

This.

Plus 99.99% of hotjoin thieves are awful. The only ones who are decent can literally be named off from memory and they’re all Queue’ing in tourneys.

Lordrosicky.5813:

Seen as shad have maybe the two best players in the game (along with xerrex) and weren’t invited I am confused? Or do they have another team name.

And blackjack is right, his team are easily one of the best.

Completely agreed.

90% sure in the most recent SOTG or somewher this past month in the forums one of the devs specifically said they were definitely looking into implementing it. That’s not to say that they said they WOULD implement it, but they’re at least considering it.

to my knowledge there’s been no mention of scaling asuras.

As for the meta I believe EU still has lots of S/D thieves from what I hear. Over in NA it’s actually extremely rare. I saw one for the first time in weeks today, but other than that they’re very scarce even though the build really hasn’t been nerfed for a few months (even though it was still very viable, and still is).

The meta is pretty awful right now. It’s basically bunkerwars and condiwars. Basically necroes applying every condition in the game faster than you can take them off and bunker warriors/guardians on every point. The “patch” to fix this (excuse me, shave down by 1 bleed) is expected to come out on Oct. 15th, but even the leaked patch notes had nothing interesting. I don’t even think they nerfed/shaved any of necro down according to the leaked patch notes. They buffed pretty much all bunker classes, making shout heals more viable for warrior and consecration more viable for guards etc. Nothing big is happening if the leaked notes are accurate.

Kline.9561:

@lux I’m not saying that you can’t have an opinion I just simply disagree Withe the way you convay it. so it seems like a team got randomly invited seriously ask yourself is it really is worth getting upset about, I mean look at the bigger picture PvP is a mess and arena net is seriously trying to push esports when it’s not even ready. and claiming you are more qualified then that team also kinda sounds lame of you

You’re harassing me for having an opinion. I don’t feel that they deserve to go and I explicitly stated why. Why is this grounds for you to verbally abuse and insult me? Just because you don’t agree with me you resort to verbally abusing me in the forums? I specifically stated why I feel they’re not qualified to be in the tournament with the pro teams and I would appreciate it if you didn’t harass me for voicing my opinion by insulting me. If you’d like to explain why they are suitable for this then I’d love to hear it.

If you’re so intent on defending them then please explain to me why they deserve to go over actual top ranked teams.

This isn’t a discussion about all of the other problems in pvp, this is a discussion about the tournament. So please, let’s hear what constitutes them being invited into a league of players far superior to their skill levels.

Is it a big deal that they’re in the tournament? Yes and no. I don’t think anyone is seriously expecting them to win a match. Regardless of their performance, they’re taking a spot that could have been offered to one of many top NA teams. I listed the ones off the top of my head earlier. Now THOSE teams could have a legit chance at actually winning. More-so than a team that hasn’t scratched the top 100, let alone 200… and is currently sitting at an average of ~600… My pve guildies and I played and hit 500-600 today just for fun.

The 20% faster recharge is funny because, you know, thieves have 100% faster recharge aka no cd so long as they have ini.

You should try sigil of demon summoning, it’s a ton stronger.

Devs: What was the most exciting and competitive pvp in gw1..?

HA? nah
GvG? nah

ALLIANCE BATTLEZZZZZZZ! !!!! ! !11!q

Heroes Ascent. GvG. Rewards and prestige to incentivize these two modes.

That is all we want.

Seraphs of Fortuna [SoF] has a team, but since solo Q has been out we’ve mostly been doing that. We’re more known for individual players than actually being known as a team but we would love to scrim.

if you de-select the checkbox for the password it just erases it altogether and you can either leave it without a new one or put a new one on it.

Ryld.1340:

Necro
Ranger
Thief
Warrior

Honestly it’s whatever works for you. Re-learning may cause more problems than it helps.

movement on keyboard and key skills on mouse.

Wow, so what does this mean for those of us less familiar with MLG?

Michael.7382:

I love that “we are looking into it”

Guess what Kuma – recently i opened like 700 tourney chests. So if something needed for legendary would be in tourney chests I’d get very angry. They should reward us alrdy for plaiying pvp – 1 do it since 1yr. By this time I’d have 3-6 legends in PvE. When they finally make legends for pvp – I should be able to do it almost instantly for all my effort ALREADY put in. If I will have to start from 0, liek guy who bought game week ago – sry but I’m done.

Your fingers. They must hurt.

Michael.7382:

Im suprised they didnt take good ideas from gw1 – for example template saving – it was so gr8, 2 clicks and u got build, here refund and do it from 0… >.<

After watching the recent state of the game I do recall a dev specifically saying that they’re looking into implementing templates in the future. I don’t know how distant in the future but hey, it’s a start… albeit a delayed one.

Exactly. Point in case.

While it -did- take them a few years to get to this point I would have thought they’d have learned and implemented this system in the game from release. Now we’re all just praying that this upcoming reward change will be somewhat like that old system. At least us gw1 vets.

I appreciate how they treated PvP players. The link between pve and pvp was amazing, you could farm cool armors in pve to wear in pvp and after years they finally started rewarding pvp players generously. The special chest after winning halls, Zaishen Keys for a special chest that you could trade glory (faction) for, the chest for consecutive wins in RA. It was great . The chest was actually GOOD and had a chance for extremely rare skins, some only available in those pvp chests. The cool thing was that you could sell those keys for gold to go buy whatever else you felt like.

I’m sorry I spammed 2, you were at 5% hp and I wanted to close the gap and finish the job.

Finally someone understands how to balance this game.

Thank you.

Michael.7382:

EoNxBoNx.9213:

But, at the same time, the people that have legendaries already and have earned them in PvE, why should they not be able to convert them in PvP? I see no harm there. It’s not like they should have to earn them in PvP, when they just did as much work.

Than I want to convert my PvP one to PvE one how many times i want or NO.
Hm…why I would need legend in pve anyways? I don’t pve…

But many of us do.

Some people are content to pay $60 to enjoy 1% of the game, but me and many others prefer to enjoy as many aspects of the game as possible, even if we favor one mode over another.

Yeah they’ve been confirmed several times, but whenever I talked to gandarel he acts like it’s up in the air and debatable in spite of what the devs have told us.

Gandarel.5091:

Just give me an option to turn off legendary projectile effects. If pony bows take over another aspect of GW2 I srsly leave.

You specifically said if they ever release legendaries in pvp you’re quitting for good.

Yes, I agree, one big concern several people have voiced is the animations being over the top in matches. Adding an option to disable particle effects from weapons is a simple solution for players who don’t want to see these animations during the games.

Nezia.8154:

Lux.7169:

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edit: my theory is that your suggestion will greatly amplify the worsening of pvp. Players will go out of their way to constantly do as many “skirmishes” off node to farm their rank up on that LB.

yeah. I’ve also thought about that actually, but Winning for the team should still be the utmost priority, that is what the current leaderboards is all about(albeit its flaws). The best “roles, etc.” are just extras just like best “scorer/assists/steals” in sports. Or that’s just me. :p

There’s been talk of increasing the amount of stats shown at the end of matches (a dev has even said they’ve been looking into possibly incorporating this) such as: damage dealt, amount healed, nodes taken, nodes defended, etc.

Perhaps that would be a better place for those stats. As much as we don’t want players abusing matches to manipulate their personal ranking in a leaderboard category it’s inevitably tempting.

What I personally wouldn’t mind seeing a leaderboard of would be by professions played: guard, mes, engie etc.

Having those tiered would be extremely interesting and probably isn’t hard to incorporate since they already have the technology implemented which distinguishes our win/loss based on professions.

Personally I’d love to see a list of the top 100 thieves in solo q.

Bhawb.7408:

I never said that ANet had to make it off leaderboards or anything specific, I’m saying that they should be skill based, not based on who does nothing else but play this game all day.

Why shouldn’t prestigious weapons be legendaries? They aren’t in PvP yet, so if you log into HotM and see a guy with a legendary, you know he did something cool, instead of just playing the game a lot.

Of course you didn’t say they had to. You implied that they should. Why are you making it sound like I said you were saying they HAD to?

So I looked up your info on the LB’s and at some point in history 180ish days ago you hit like rank 900 on team q from playing a few games with about 50/50 WL, and you’ve not been top 1,000 on Solo Q.

Does this mean you are a pve’r who just wants to come in and rain on our upcoming reward system?

You obviously don’t pvp much (unless you’re an un-known hotjoin hero I’ve never heard of), and have never done so competitively in this game. Why do you care who gets pvp legendaries unless you have some ulterior motive. It doesn’t look like you’d have a chance under the system you’re advocating so it sounds like you just want to grief us and make your pve legendaries that much rarer. If that’s the case I think that’s pretty low.

That’s so odd because… lo and behold the best players are in the top 100, the great players are in the top 500 and the really good players are in the top 1,000.

Seriously though, I’d love for you to point out an amazingly good player who deserves to be top 100 but isn’t even in the top 1,000 due to the “flawed” leaderboards.

Of course there are deficiencies that they need to fix but I have yet to see a really good player struggle to hit top 500, the equivalent of top 5% of players who have plated 11+ matches.

The current solo q leaderboards are a reflection of how you and a group of 4 randoms perform together. You control 20% of your team ALWAYS, you are the ONLY common denominator you can rely on. Eventually your 20% will speak for itself on the leaderboards.

I agree with dejay: the main problems are lack of decay (or slow decay), the match-making which seems to have actually gotten better (mixing some high and low ranked players on each team), and then the low population which I attribute to lack of incentive to actually pvp. Farming Skyhammer is 20x more efficient for glory and rank than actually doing a rated tournament.

edit: my theory is that your suggestion will greatly amplify the worsening of pvp. Players will go out of their way to constantly do as many “skirmishes” off node to farm their rank up on that LB. Plus LB becomes meaningless when you incorporate many different ones.

Bhawb.7408:

Because we get skins the same way as in PvE right? We also level up the same way, get quests, and have a ton of different things we can do that actually make the grind to legendary seem more meaningful because it shows a completion of the game right? Current ‘legendaries’ are seen as a grindfest and have 0 prestige.

Oh wait, no. Because PvE and PvP aren’t the same game mode.

You act like legendary weapons should be prestigious. Why not then create -ACTUAL- prestigious weapons for PvP? What’s wrong with that?

Yes, let Caed and Jumper win 100 legendary weapons but not let other EXTREMELY PRO players win them because they can’t break the top 5 on LB or beat the elite teams.

Pretty sure they’d like money prizes or elitist titles rather than 100 legendaries from weekly AT’s.

I wasn’t being sarcastic. It’s ridiculous to limit legendaries to an elite few when it’s a grindable item to any dedicated pve player. As such it should be a grindable item for any pvp player.

If players want special, unique, rewards in pvp they should be money prizes or special titles. Not some leftovers that came from pve.