Guild Wars 2

Johje Holan.4607:

fishball.7204:

They should just change the deviation to slightly lower the values. SoS should not be fighting SBI, it’s not remotely fair to SBI who has a 400+ rating lower than us. A bracket of - 200 rating, maybe yes ok but 400? No thanks.

1 up 1 down sucks because every week JQ would stomp a T3 server into oblivion. A lower threshold of deviation would both allow for ‘fresh matchups’ without too much roflstomping.

But I like playing you all. Just not every week. Only once and awhile.

Plus, we are closer to you all than you are to TC, despite what the “ratings” say.

How about what the score says?

The interesting thing about the SoS/CD/SBI blowout is that it’s the exact same matchup that the old system had running for months.

SoS has been posting about the new system ‘creating’ unfair matchups all over the forum when they were already in one of the biggest blowout matchups we’ve seen under either system. It took them less than a day to start posting about how unfair it all is when they had to fight outnumbered for a change.

If you subtract the complaints from SoS players and the responses to them from this thread, it’s a whole lot shorter. Props to Fishball btw, one of the few SoS posters who hasn’t complained about having to play up, but down. He may even be the first. The rest just wanted to get back to zerging down 2 smaller servers every week.

Dirame.8521:

Mammoth.1975:

The buff to weakness is one of the biggest reasons DD builds are suffering tbh. The new weakness doesn’t turn crits into half damage crits, it turns them into glancing blows, half damage hits. A little basic math:

I thought they brought the damage reduction down to 25%?

Nope. I heard before the patch that they were going to, but it didn’t happen.

I know it is, that’s why I used ‘increasing’ instead of ‘placing’ in the post you’re quoting.

Dirame.8521:

Mammoth.1975:

I’m not too sure that making the gameplay revolve more around conditions and condition counterplay is the best way to approach things.

I liked this at first but would have gone further, amplifying the effect of weakness from what you have suggested, and changing regen to remove a condition, if you have no conditions, gain regen. After thinking about it a bit more though, there’s a real chance the game then becomes about stacking conditions even harder, while also stacking the counters.

But isn’t the game all about counterplay? Aren’t games generally about counterplay scenarios? If you don’t give people the opportunity to counterplay, then you’re not really balancing the game. The game just becomes one-sided without counterplay.

I don’t think I expressed myself properly, you seem to have misunderstood what I was saying. There is condition counterplay in the game already, what I’m saying is that if you address this issue by making it revolve even more around conditions and their counters, you’re actually just increasing the focus on conditions.

Omg new matchup system sucks, why do we have to fight servers that are so much bigger, I’m not even gonna bother playing!

Haha sorry I just can’t help myself.

The buff to weakness is one of the biggest reasons DD builds are suffering tbh. The new weakness doesn’t turn crits into half damage crits, it turns them into glancing blows, half damage hits. A little basic math:

50% crit chance.
+50% crit damage.

Half your swings crit and do 200% damage. Half of 200% is 100%.
The other half do 100%. Half of 100% is 50%.
100 + 50 =150.
Total expected damage from any given attack is 150%.

Add weakness.

50% of your swings glance and do 50% damage. Half of 50% is 25%.
25% of your swings crit and do 200% damage. A quarter of 200% is 50%.
25% of your swings hit and do 100% damage. A quarter of 100% is 25%.
50+25+25 = 100.
Total expected damage from any given swing is 100%, down from 150%.

It’s only a 25% damage reduction on builds with zero crit, which don’t exist. The more crit oriented your build, the more it hurts you.

If it remains as is, condition damage will remain stronger than direct damage. One solution would be to nerf condition damage to the level of direct damage, which would have the effect of slowing the whole game down. The other would be to nerf weakness.

Personally I found weakness to be a very strong condition when all you could really count on it for was reducing endurance regen. Now that it affects DD so significantly as well, it’s pretty crazy.

Fair enough, but it’s still the same story. Why are you on the point in the first place? Why are your opponents bunched up? These are player issues, not game issues.

I’m not too sure that making the gameplay revolve more around conditions and condition counterplay is the best way to approach things.

I liked this at first but would have gone further, amplifying the effect of weakness from what you have suggested, and changing regen to remove a condition, if you have no conditions, gain regen. After thinking about it a bit more though, there’s a real chance the game then becomes about stacking conditions even harder, while also stacking the counters.

I don’t know if you’re aware, but 100b is already aoe.

600 radius aoe doesn’t even hit anyone who is positioned properly unless the aoe user is overextended themselves, because the few (2?) abilities with that radius are pbaoe and 600 is just barely more than the distance from one side of a small node to the other.

Put an end to all your aoe problems: stop charging headlong at the closest red name.

Ok, not all. It’s still an issue in downed contests.

If you’re having a problem with the damage from 600 radius aoe, I have unfortunate news for you too.

Like I said, player issue.

Don’t stand in the bad is pretty fundamental. Devs have said that they understand it is a potential problem on revives. Other than that it’s pretty much player error. Sure, you need a guy on the node, but if they’re aoeing one guy, well, it’s not really the aoe effect that is the problem, is it?

It’s funny how obvious they can make the very basics of positioning and people still can’t get the hang of it. The only people who really have a valid complaint here are those who want to play melee condition builds. Power builds are for blowing up glass, not bunkers, so once again, have no need to be on the node, unless your own team has no aoe to prevent the enemy from stacking their glass guys next to the bunker of course. In that case you have other problems though.

I’m constantly surprised by how bad this forum can get. Now we’re at the point where we expect the game to change because ’there’s no reason to stand in the big red circles, don’t do it’ is too hard to understand.

I don’t know, I don’t think there’s a team that can cover for ‘not enough time to do everything’.

I mean as far as ‘weaknesses’ go, that’s it. We can take less direct damage, remove more conditions, heal for just as much, and control the point better. The problem is that we have to do them actively.

Guard condition removal: 1 per 10s passively, plus 4 more every ~30s instantly.
Necro condition removal: 1 per 7s instantly, plus dozens more, but with cast times.
Guard gets a 2 second pause button when he heals, necro often needs to use stability to heal.
Guard can save his stability for reactive use, necro needs to flash DS every 7s to get the other benefits it provides, and has to use every second one just to channel one skill.
Guard dodge roll heals him and evades, necro has to both dodge and flash for the same effect.

Everything guards do passively, we have to use active effects for. Things that guards do instantly, we have cast times on. To get the same amount of healing, we have to give up a third of our time to channel dagger 2.

We have to manage our cooldowns so that we are in the right weaponsets to maintain regen while having dagger 2 ready as soon as we flash ds, and that often conflicts with which condition removal we have available, which is another one of the big problems.

The tools are all there, but they clash with each other too often. If foot in the grave worked on dodge roll instead of DS, all these problems would be solved btw, but it would be too op with sigils of energy and/or someone giving you vigor, and wouldn’t solve anything if it had a cooldown, because then the conflict would be ‘spend my endurance to dodge this or wait for stability cooldown?’

Something else that would help significantly would be swapping the trigger effects on mark of evasion and deathly invigoration, so that you heal on dodge and drop a mark when leaving DS, but the cooldown on mark of evasion would need to go. That would make maintaining regen much cleaner, so you’re less likely to get caught in staff when deathly swarm is your only ‘available’ condition removal, or in d/d when putrid mark is what you have, while also reducing the amount of deathshroud flashing required, allowing you to save your stability for when it’s needed. I’m just brainstorming though, I haven’t thought through all the impacts something like that would have.

Don’t get me wrong, I love the idea that necro can bunker better than a guard in the right hands. I have no problem with having to work harder for higher payoff, but I’m questioning whether anyone can make it work with things as they currently stand.

The next step for me is to figure out a build that doesn’t need to flash DS constantly, but I seriously doubt we have one that could stand up to a guard.

Been testing some more and I don’t think it’s viable right now, despite being better at first glance than a guard. The issue is the lack of passive defenses. Guard dodge roll is a third of his healing, his condition removal is passive, and his active heals have much shorter channels. By comparison, necro bunker is like trying to play piano written for an octopus. Your cooldowns conflict with each other too often, and there’s just too much to do spread over both weapon sets. It’s a lot more work for not enough gain.

Dagger 2 is the biggest culprit. It’s easy to get the channel off, flash death shroud gives enough stability for the whole channel, but having to decide between finishing your channel and say, dodging a shatter or clearing 8 bleeds is no fun, and finishing the channel is rarely the right choice. 3.5 out of every 12 seconds is just too much. With double the cooldown and double the healing it would work fine.

There are definitely players around who could make it work better than I can, but I suspect they’ll still run into too many cooldown issues when faced with a few CC chains and a pile of conditions that need clearing.

Aside from sotg, they regularly chat with top players in hotm about the game, and I’ve seen them guest people too.

So I went through and figured out the absolute peak healing each of those two comparison builds can do and the guard is ahead. The necro can heal about 850 per second, the guard 920. I only used the base heal for consume conditions btw, the numbers are about even with an average of 2 conditions consumed each time, necro pulls ahead with anything more than that. Neither will even approach those numbers in actual play however, and I think the necro will get closer.

The reason is that they assume things like the guard having 100% vigor uptime and never having to activate virtue of resolve, the necro never having dagger 2 evaded, or the guard never having staff 4 interrupted, plus both having perfect rotations so that no two healing abilities are ever available at the same time, which is more than likely impossible.

Here’s an example build that mostly works by flashing DS, only sitting in it if you need to wait for cooldowns to come up, and a guardian build to compare to:

http://gw2skills.net/editor/?fQAQNAoYWjMaZ7daeb87JAJFPb9kiv3m6B8ofOA-TsAgzCmI2RtjbHzOyds7M+Y9xsBA

http://gw2skills.net/editor/?fUAQNAW7dlUgqCnFSPEf4ES2jRCBTQsHYEH1RXFcIA-TsAgzCmIySllLLTWyssZN+Y9xmAA

The necro has better condition removal, more protection, more stability, weakness, more ehp, more and better control effects, and has a better elite for emergencies.

The guardian has 76 more armour, passive condition removal giving them more time to do other things, 2s block on heal, shield of wrath, sanctuary, plus provides allies with better condition removal, protection, and stability.

So far, the necro bunker is a long way ahead in terms of personal survivability. Where it gets difficult is comparing the healing numbers and the class mechanics.

I’m not saying this is the best necro bunker build since the patch either, but for now it’s something to compare to a guard.

Questions I’m still not sure of: Should you just run 3 wells and a wall? Are deathly invigoration and shrouded removal better than weakening shroud, reaper’s protection, and the retaliation traits? If you swap one for reaper’s, is near to death still better than soul marks and master of terror? Is it in the first place? It’s made more complex by the death and blood attributes being so significant too. Does deathly invigoration and 100 healing power give more sustain than 10% more protection uptime and 100 toughness? Where does 10 seconds of pbaoe weakness every 15-21 seconds fit on that scale? These are very different questions to ‘do I need 3300 attack or can I get by with 3200?’

It used to be much easier when wells were the only way to build a necro bunker. Still, I think in the current condi heavy meta, necro bunker is probably better than guard. One thing is for sure, they better be very careful about how they improve our sustain if they do decide to do that. We’re already competitive bunkers, give us too much more and we will be way over the top.

The reason a necro would spec into party healing is because we do it better than a guardian, not the other way round. Anyway, I’m done with you, you talk about standing in a well of blood for longer than 2 seconds like it’s christmasland then compare it to CC with a dozen conditions. You compare transfusion to well of blood as though someone with party healing traits and skills would have no healing power, and a bunch of other worthless crap. What a waste of time.

Like I told you already, I ran well of blood in competitive games. In fact, there were not many other necros in the top 100 at the time, and 2 of us were running well of blood. If necro bunker becomes played, which looks like a reasonable possibility, expect to see more well of blood.

Targuil.3741:

Spectrals working in DS means you pretty much can’t lose DS while in DS for the duration of spectral walk/armor if you have tanky enough gear. How good this works for spvp? Probably doesn’t as it doesn’t protect you from conditions which will get piled up pretty badly.

That’s the main problem I have been running into actually. To get stability and a bunker level of toughness in light armour, you give up most of your healing traits and skills, but you can’t count on deathshroud to make up for it because you can’t use any of your condition control in deathshroud. There’s some kind of balance to be reached but it’s difficult to figure out.

BTW we have more stability than anyone. Significantly more. The trade off is that it has to be traited for of course, which is, as mentioned, half the reason I’m running into this problem.

I have been trying out a few things. We got a buff to stability uptime, a buff to weakness, a ward (actually a one-way ward, which is even better), a buff to well cooldowns, more stunbreaks on lower cooldowns, several buffs to LF generation, and a much needed buff to our decapping ability.

With our already superior condition control and rumored further buffs to our sustain, I’d say that it won’t just be viable, it could soon be the right choice. In fact it may be already, but I haven’t done any real testing to be able to say that for sure. The only difficulty I’ve been having is working out which build works best.

Actually, I beat plenty of good teams with well of blood, although I wouldn’t run it in this meta. Transfusion heals for much less than a well of blood too. You should stop pretending as though someone who intends to bring party heals is going to bring zero healing power.

Oh hey sos is playing down 440 rating instead of up 125, so much better! Right?

I’m using this atm:

http://gw2skills.net/editor/?fQAQNArYWjMaV7dbKb87JEpCPD0j3DXAxoHETwoMA-jEyA4MioRaBIVZIapwioxWfLiGrmBTbSEV7QKiWtQALmDA-w

sorrow.2364:

Mammoth.1975:

So I thought I’d find out how much you can get well of blood to heal for, just from the initial heal and ticks, not counting runes that activate on heal or siphon traits etc.

The answer is 61,383.

http://gw2skills.net/editor/?fQAQNAoYWjQad6haaa87JAJFAAw0DAAAAIFAAAA-jEyAoNioRqBYWsIasV3ioxqmJiqVNYWcioaXCmQAfHDA-w

The self heal is 18,131.

You need 25 might stacks for that, without it the numbers are 60,404/17,900.

I’m sure there are other buffs you could use, and you could raise it a bit by dropping 5 spite for 5 death magic, or ditching your 6th rune for a 25 healing power one. Still, that’s kind of good. Your damage would suck, but 3k attack and 2750 armor isn’t terrible, and dagger has high base damage.

It isn’t by putting up exaggerate examples that you can prove a point.
Most the cases, your teammate is getting just two ticks before he needs to move out of the well due to AoEs.

I don’t know about wvw, but that’s definitely not the case in tourneys. The effect is usually the opposite in tournaments, as your team starts getting healed for a thousand per second, you tend to push the other team off the point. Nonetheless, even if everyone can only stand in it for two seconds in wvw, that’s still ~22k healing.

So I thought I’d find out how much you can get well of blood to heal for, just from the initial heal and ticks, not counting runes that activate on heal or siphon traits etc.

The answer is 61,383.

http://gw2skills.net/editor/?fQAQNAoYWjQad6haaa87JAJFAAw0DAAAAIFAAAA-jEyAoNioRqBYWsIasV3ioxqmJiqVNYWcioaXCmQAfHDA-w

The self heal is 18,131.

You need 25 might stacks for that, without it the numbers are 60,404/17,900.

I’m sure there are other buffs you could use, and you could raise it a bit by dropping 5 spite for 5 death magic, or ditching your 6th rune for a 25 healing power one. Still, that’s kind of good. Your damage would suck, but 3k attack and 2750 armor isn’t terrible, and dagger has high base damage.

Swapping out the offhand dagger would probably not be ideal atm. With CC, putrid, and deathly you can clear/transfer at least 3 conditions every 7~8s, and more often than not it’s a full cleanse. That’s obviously very strong in a condition heavy meta, and likely the main reason why necros aren’t seeing what all the fuss is about necros right now. With the new weakness, dagger 5 doesn’t only pressure the other team, it now alleviates a ton of pressure on your team too.

A little bit off topic but stuff like this is probably at the heart of necro complaints about a lack of stability. We have so many active defenses that disabling us is one of the only ways to kill us quickly, so most of the time when we die, it’s due to being disabled. That’s not actually a balance problem. It certainly isn’t now that we can have twice as much stability as the next closest competitor if we spec for it.

Both offhand dagger skills are also the only 2 offhand skills that add a significant amount of damage to a condi build, although there’s an argument to be made for wail of doom. The other offhands are strong, but dagger is a little ridiculous at this point.

Bhawb.7408:

I don’t think they should lower the Blood Fiend skill cap, but make it more realistic. It’d be an easy change, but not ideal in my mind.

WoB being a water field is scary, honestly. I see why WvW wants it, but the amount of healing could easily go over 10k to your allies with just bone minions and healing power. That means a single healing skill could heal for over 50k in a team scenario (obviously rare). Not saying its OP, but that sounds a bit over the top to me.

I actually added this up. You can get it just over 10k already. If it was a 10s water field as well, it would be ridiculous.

sorrow.2364:

Enferian.2705:

You said its useless in a group fight… the ability for allies to cleanse conditions with their finishers makes it pretty good for group fights, but not as good for solo play. Still its good for what it is meant to do… group support.

In case it is still unclear… “group” is the key word.

Assuming people have a projectile finisher.
Still fail to see any real use of that skill. Give me any real situation, a real example, in which it would be more useful than CC. Group fight means everything and nothing.

You say ‘dropping blood’, you cast it, your guardian whirls, everyone in the area gets cleansed and everyone in the well gets healed for 7k. Or just over 10k in WvW.

If anything, well of blood is too strong. Nothing in the game scales like it.

CC is the best heal for a general dps necro in a pvp or dungeon environment, but if you’re playing a different role, the other two are strong. I wouldn’t use fiend in pvp, but it’s easily the best heal for general pve, simply because it does damage and you don’t need an actual heal there.

You’re going to get a whole lot of mouth breathers in here disagreeing with your first point, and it’s going to make me angry that they’re allowed to breed, but I really can’t be kittened explaining it for the 30 gazillionth time. I hate you.

As Andele said. Well of blood heals for far more and also heals your team. CC is the only cleanse we have that doesn’t require a target. I’ll add that blood fiend will also heal for more in 25 seconds, and it’s a 6 skill that deals damage.

If you’re not getting hit, there’s no dps loss when your deathshroud naturally drops and you have to axe2 anyway, so it actually kind of does nothing in that circumstance. Also, a full life force bar doesn’t get you 100 lifeblasts, it’s more like 25 or less, so it’s actually every twelfth crit lifeblast gets you one free lifeblast.

0.2, not 2.0, I should have put the zero in sorry, those decimals are hard to see.

If someone with 20k health needed to take 120k damage to be knocked from 100 LF out of DS, it would be 400.

Thrumdi.9216:

The level of skill on SoS and Mag is high, both individually, and in terms of their WvW guilds.

I actually did a little involuntary kind of laugh/choke thing.

With 100% crit it’s still pretty sketchy. If 1% DS is worth .6% of your hp pool, that means it’s healing .2% of your hp pool every hit. If your hp pool is 20k, it’s ‘healing’ you for 40hp each attack. Less of a lifeswing than vampiric precision, so I guess if you think vampiric precision is too OP (without bloodthirst), you could use this instead.

If you don’t have 100% crit, multiply that 40 hp by your crit rate, i.e 58% crit = 40 * 0.58 = 23 ‘healing’ per attack.

So like, no guard on the other team in most of your games? Half? A quarter? One in ten? Do you usually beat them or lose to them?

Yeah, definitely haven’t run into it yet. How often do you see them? Would you call it a strong meta choice?

Yeah I always hear about it but never run into it. What I’m saying though is that I can’t quite figure out what kind of comps would be good if you didn’t already know that they were going to have a guard on mid or lose. I’ve never had to before I guess.

I’m having trouble imagining what the meta would look like if there wasn’t a guard on every team. The whole concept is kind of alien.

Do eeet, I want! I never get your tells

Ugh. We’re talking about Xoms 30/30/10 Mr Context. It’s not a bunker, and if you expect one to fight on point in a tourney you’re even worse than I already thought, which is hard to believe possible.

Could you please stop noobing out SO hard with every post?

TheMightyAltroll.3485:

Mammoth, you do realize that Blind Cold and Afraid is also glassy, right? Again, 100% Life force vs 0% life force. Learn to read context for the billionth time. Because if you continue to fail reading context, I’m going to ignore the rest of your posts like I should have done in all of your posts on every thread ever.

Spoj, he didn’t want me to duel on my Necro. He told me to duel on a different class, and actually wanted to fight my Warrior in a 1v1 for deletion of an 80. Which I still could have probably beaten him on. Then when I accepted and suggested for a point-fight simulating a tourney environment, he backed out. Besides, duels don’t matter.

Point fights don’t even simulate a tourney environment. If you’re a necro and you have to stand on point, something has already gone very wrong. For the billionth time, this is stuff you should know before you start trying to help.

All I’m getting is that your ‘team build’ dies in 24 seconds to a single player, so 6-8 seconds to focus fire, and does no damage. Lucky it has all that control, or I guess it would die in four seconds flat?

TheMightyAltroll.3485:

Mammoth.1975:

My favourite part right now is how you’re arguing that 30/30/10 is a better 1v1 build than your ‘team’ build. 30/30/10 is a team build. It’s crap 1v1, but it’s very very good at filling a couple of key roles on teams.

You still fail to understand context. 30/30/10/0/0 has alot of damage behind it. My Blind Cold and Afraid build has virtually no strong damage behind it, it is purely based on control conditions. You’re just as bad as Xom, atleast most of these other players are reasonable in this thread. You and he are simply pathetic.

Because glass wins 1v1s. You really should have listened when you were told to quit while you’re way behind.

My favourite part right now is how you’re arguing that 30/30/10 is a better 1v1 build than your ‘team’ build. 30/30/10 is a team build. It’s crap 1v1, but it’s very very good at filling a couple of key roles on teams.

Blaine Tog.8304:

Ok, but a “team build” that melts in 15 seconds to a player you claim is terrible and using a terrible build doesn’t really help your argument. Team builds still need to survive more than 15 seconds against terrible players. Am I wrong?

You’re not. No one is asking any of these builds to win at anything, but if they could last for 2 heals vs apparently bad players playing bad builds, that might be a plus. Especially if they’re a ‘control’ build.

So the blind cold and afraid build gets melted in 15s by the ubercrap 30/30/10 played by one of the worst players you have ever seen. GG owning yourself repeatedly in the face.

Either your build is crap, the 30/30/10 is not, or Xom is a better necro than you give him credit for. I’m gonna go ahead and say it’s all 3.

Awe.1096:

emon.1863:

Awe.1096:

Shar.3402:

matchmaking is working as intended: you get matched either with soloQers of your same rating, or against a premade of much lower rating

Could someone confirm that? Or point to a source? I was not aware of this if thats true.

Nope, there is no source on this information!
I can give you only one tip – find yourself a team.

Some people just dont fit. It is also why I dont raid (nor play as a matter of fact) in WoW since a long time. I play GW2 a lot but not on a fixed schedule. Sometimes I play in a morning, sometimes at evening, sometimes at 2AM. Sometimes I PvP just for 30m to do dailies, sometimes I queue for 2-3 hours straight. What kind of team could accommodate that? Teamplay should be rewarded. With higher ratings, better vanity rewards etc. Not with ability to stomp-farm PUG-s. WoW splits premades and PUG-s, SWTOR implemented that split 2 months after release. LoL, DotA2 etc. do the same. Why not GW2?

My playtime is the same, and I never had trouble finding pug teams. There’s maybe 50 people NA who have regular teams, everyone else just has a friends list. You should look into it.

http://www.barbie.com/activities/fun_games/#whats-hot

I’ll need your mailing address.

Seriously, if you want to play dress ups, I’ll buy you a barbie. If PvP isn’t enough incentive for you to PvP, do something else.