Guild Wars 2

chase the dragon..

LOL no one who plays solo q cares to be pro or win big money. We just want to have FUN. In my experience most solo qers are grown ups with real jobs who does not have time to make a team or play regular hrs.
This is a game, it is about fun, not a kittening job! Anet want to promote pro league , team play , sure, go for it! Make solo Q for the people like me who doesnèt give a flying F about all of that. If they bring back solo Q in unranked right now with NO REWARDS, NO PIPS, NO BACK PIECE. I would play that solo Q over ranked any time.

I was 10-1 entering emerald then went 3-15…

please just give us random matches, it will be better than whatever you guys have going right now, I am sure of it.

10 losses in a row.. I`m not even trying to lower my mmr. Great kittening match making you have there..

Locuz.2651:

Weird i have the direct opposite experience (while playing solo).

give it time. My last 2 days was 7 win in a row followed by 7 losses in a row ..

Anet hasn’t figured out that gw2 can only be esports as a GAME. As in something people spent a little time everyday or every other day on, not a JOB. The amount of people who can spend 4+hr a day on gw2 and have 4 friends who will do the same is very limited . Take care of the solo ques the premades will take care of themselves.

Morwath.9817:

I’ve nearly got Sapphire with casual soloQ.
Yet its annoying as hell with all those premades around…

hmm even if you win 70% of the matches that`s still close to 60 matches played in 3 days hardly casual is it…

Chase.8415:

It doesn’t matter, the system will eventually even you out to 50/50% win rate.

+1 play as many matches as you can

Interpretor.3091:

Mogar.9216:

because people have lives and can`t wait for team to show up. If you want esports you need to have a LARGE player base and like it or not solo casual players who will never play in the pro league ARE your player base.

Which is exactly why unranked queues and custom made servers exist. Thank you for proving my point.

if they made solo q unranked I`d be more than happy to play that. You know the reason they don`t is because if soloer all went solo q the premades would have 10 min que times like it was before they got rid of solo Q.

because people have lives and can`t wait for team to show up. If you want esports you need to have a LARGE player base and like it or not solo casual players who will never play in the pro league ARE your player base.

apharma.3741:

To add to what Silverkey said, condi usually wrecks Mesmer as most do not have condition clears on the build between running portal, blink and either well of precog or decoy.

I will literally run from any condi fight as a power shatter mesmer if they look like they have enough sense to dodge a mirror blade. It’s a fight I will not win.

not true anymore. The meta bunker build will cure pretty much anything you throw at it, but it won’t 100-0 anyone though. I play shatter power and takes insp. trait line I also pretty much cure everything.

unranked mmr is separate from ranked mmr. So your unranked mmr must have been rising the whole time . Now you are high enough to feel the pain of getting matched with bad players imo.

2x moa rules. pretty much 2x anything that has a long cool down is pretty cool. Also you can blow all your shatter and redo them again 3 seconds later .

Ross Biddle.2367:

Dueling is out, and only necessary on base Mesmer.

I played a lot with both duel,insp,chrono and dom,insp,chrono. The trade off of no blind no DE for more damage and boon strip was not one I found worth it. Mostly if I’m in trouble shatter 3 – 4 time in a row saved my beacon soo many times . By then my get out of jail free cards are back on line and I can reset the fight again.
I can see in a team dom pays off more but solo que I can’t imaging not taking duel.

I still use DE mostly because 1. blind on shatter is awesome. 2.More clone = more shatter
Shield is meh for me but everyone I see in pvp uses it. I just like the torch stealth too much.

Fluffball.8307:

Mogar.9216:

lol 8 teams . They should just pre split the prize money of what 400k? 50k per team 10k per player. Thank you very much for the free cash and go on to do real life stuff like attend classes.

It’s 16, and you sound pretty jealous you don’t get paid tens of thousands of dollars to play 30 minutes of video games for a few weeks.

lol not really, I’m not even on a team. just pretty laughable that pro league have so few teams. As for making money to play vid. game, I think your calculation is way off. It’s more like playing 8 hrs a day for a year to hopefully earn tens of thousands of dollars. If money is a motivation, pro-gaming is not the way to go. I don’t think I CAN put in that many hrs into this game even if they paid me 100k a year to do it.

lol 8 teams . They should just pre split the prize money of what 400k? 50k per team 10k per player. Thank you very much for the free cash and go on to do real life stuff like attend classes.

get inspiration and run the heal signet you should be just fine. I did the whole hot pve in zerker build gs/staff no problem at all.

play with no titles . ppl who has no title showing plays better in my experience. Also people who spend the whole match kittening about how others play are 9/10 times the weakest link themselves.

I don’t run a typical chrono build but I beat most I face. Seems most chronos does not handle sustained pressure well. They will pretty much eat the initial burst no problem but if you keep pressure at some pt their defense drops and they die quick. Bunker chronos are a different animal I mostly just try not let them take the pt or just leave.

ran my pvp build in raid (insp,duel,chrono). Got to phase 3 . I think we could have done it but gp quit. GS/Staff 2x shatter worked pretty good. 2x elite well works wonders on breaker bars. Didn’t have any problem with defense, the heal sig and heal on shatter was more than enough.

If they match making is working and all the solo Qers are just mistaken then Anet simply need to show ppl`s mmrs . Bang all qqing will vanish. I expect the reason they don`t show everyone`s mmr is because either match making is flawed or mmr itself is flawed and they fear the truth.

Ithilwen.1529:

I took a few days off for cool down. Perhaps it was just me. I’m back at the final personal story fight dealing with The Pale Tree.

ANET, why do you not get that repeated unavoidable death is not fun? There is a difference between “challenging content” and Sadism.

Why not take the course that your sister game (STO, Star Trek Online ) followed and allow players who want power video gamer content to choose hard mode?

you don’t have to fight her. just pick someone else other than Caith. I personally find her not too hard as a zerker mesmer.

What gets me is that during week days I have decent matches . on weekend it’s never close , played 10 matches maybe today. 7 losses 3 wins . 8 out of the 10 were total blowout matches include my 3 wins. The 2 close matches 1 was for real close the other I tried hard to carry but really winning was never in the cards.

well regardless how many casuals play shouldn’t any match making get BETTER as more ppl play? not the other way around? I mean everytime ppl post about how bad match making is the answer is always well the player base is too small.
It seems a larger player base actually makes the match making even WORSE!

Q says it all. For me at least weekend ques are horrid, what puzzles me is that there should be more players on the weekend, shouldn’t the match making be better on weekends than week days?

Hot Boy.7138:

The final fight is bugged for me in chapter 16 of the living story. He sometimes makes rifts in the middle of the abyss where there is no footing. I’ll include pics.

yep happened to me too. You just have to kill yourself to reset. Yes Caith will rez u but if you just keep jumping off the side after about 4 times you will die and the retry everything will be back to normal. At least it was for me.

uhh because I’m a mesmer and here is where I post mostly?

I wastesd 2 and 1/2 hrs on the hearts and minds quest because of a bug and dumb design so I figure I share it here so that others won’t have to go through the same BS as I did.

I most just pvp in GW2 never PVE , I did the whole HOT story line in my zerke gear and shatter build. Soloed everything and had no problem at all. When it came to the last quest it was more of the same, things were going well until I got to the final boss fight.

Spoiler:
At one point he does this massive aoe that cover the whole area. The only warning is your toon verbally tell you to “use shield or take to the sky”. Well on my first 2 times I ran to a shield bubble the friendly npc made and guess what it protects npcs but not ME!! lol. To make things worse after I failed and restart the game glitched and spawned a critical ‘rift’ off the fighting platform and unreachable. The third time and fourth I try to “take to the sky” by trying to jump off the platform and glide, well that didn’t work as I can’t jump off. Then 5’th time I realized when he does the aoe he spwans a bunch of mini updrafts on the platform you walk to them and they send you to the air then you can glide. These updraft doesn’t look anything like the ones you see in the world they look more like water jets.
Anyhow once I figured out the updraft thing I did the whole fight no problem.

lol I play a zerk mesmer and I can’t remember last time I one shot anyone or been one shotted by another mesmer. If you want to kitten about 1 shot I have been 1 shotted by DH trap twice since patch with the DH not even there lol.

my only problem is I only scored 300 solo once I think. Since I solo que I can’t get that reward :P to get 300 with 2 players should be easy.

show mmr to players would go a long way to solve match making problems. Right now we are all just guessing at how they make matches, if they showed us our mmr then at least we can offer some educated suggestions to make it better.

For example Anet has repeatedly stated that match making does not take into account the result of previous matches but I swear more than 80% of the time after I win a match the next match I get paired with total newbs.

never liked downed state .

Standard shatter interrupt works fine. Just make sure you are extremely careful and use range as much as possible as everyone will hit you very hard. Just imaging everyone have rampage on all the time.

no no no. Inspiring distortion wins fights on it’s own. It syncs extremely well with all the ways we can get distortion. Where I really could care less about WF or PP. They may be the best 3 traits for YOUR build but not for everyone.

Fay.2357:

Mogar.9216:

you fail to realize every time you shatter you are getting alacrity which get you to the next f1 faster and at the same time your gs2 and stealth skills are recharging faster not to mention your elite well. Just go chrono + duel and start spamming shatter in a match. It’ll become clear right away just how ridiculously crazy it can be.

Contrary to what you seem to have assumed, I’ve played pretty much all of these builds fairly extensively. I’m well aware of what alacrity does. That doesn’t change the fact that randomly spamming shatters that will miss due to zero setup is going to accomplish nothing.

Mogar.9216:

See my post above, I agree losing boon striping is big but in the new meta boon striping isn’t as important, as everyone is spaming their crazy high damage attack rather than taking time build up boons .

Wow uh. You clearly haven’t played much pvp since HoT. Tempests fart boons constantly, DHs get insane boons both from normal guardian stuff and their traps, heralds are essentially walking boon totems, scrappers have insane upkeep on a ton of boons, and fighting any thief means you’re gonna be dealing with tons of boons because of consume plasma.

Yeah, it’s pretty clear that you’re not fully apprised of the current situation in pvp, at all.

lol fine, you are right, I have no idea what’s going on, this is a terrible way to play mesmer so everyone just move along nothing to see here.

Curunen.8729:

Mogar.9216:

Curunen.8729:

The main thing for me if not taking Domination is losing boon strip which is a lot of utility in pvp.

Sure in wvw it’s not a necessity so more room to use the other trait lines

PB or MA is a toss up depending on choice of weapons/skills and utilities (ie double ranged or using Shield, or gravity well etc perhaps PB is more useful, using torch and fewer cc skills then MA is more useful). Then you’ve got all the vuln which helps with the damage.

I agree losing boon strip is a big deal. From what I experienced in matches the new meta has really made almost every class hit as hard as pre hot mesmer. There is no time to setup a giant burst anymore because you are just getting hammered so hard by everyone. To me at least the counter play is shatter as much and as often as possible. This has 2 advantages, 1 you are keeping everyone blinded all the time. 2 you are stacking alacrity like crazy. which make you shatter even more and the bonus of your stealth skill recharge super fast. So I guess what I’m saying is lots of shatters seem to play better in the new meta than setup 1 giant shatter.

Hmm, that is interesting – I’ll take your word for it and can certainly see why it may work in that way now.

I confess I ceased playing power shatter with the June 23rd patch – which seems funny because the day they supposedly “buffed” mesmer is the day I got totally turned off power shatter for several reasons since then (ease of use, PU, stun spam, stat boosts, bandwagoning, iElasticity loss from mirror blade, etc).

But I will try what you’re saying and see if a sustained power dps is possible with the current meta, compared to all in on one big burst in the past. So Duelling/Chrono and then which one out of Insp, Chaos or Illusions?

I like insp. Because I solo que so I really have to cure condis myself. Insp gives me heal and condi cure on shatter as well as condi cure on heal. The extra phantasm from dodge also works well to make more things to shatter. I tried a few matches with iullsions it works too but I really had to be careful not get condi bombed , I find 2x range shatter worked better with illusion since you can deal out more damage from range ad avoid the condi bombs.

Fay.2357:

Mogar.9216:

Fay.2357:

Mogar.9216:

I don’t think dom adds much to shatter build. You might want to try illusions for more damage or insp for more defense.

lol. Seriously?

http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Mental_Torment

Like, even if the rest of your post wasn’t exactly super sensible, it got blown away by those 2 sentences.

lol typical Fay post. living in a world of paper builds. Try playing a few matches before proclaiming you know everything.
20% damage vs massive condi cure and heal from insp or virtually endless shatter from iullsions and extra effect for every shatter. It’s not even close.
Unlike you I only give out advice after I have played a build for at least 10-20 matches instead of just memorizing every ability and draw your conclusion based on some spread sheet.

I never said that inspiration is bad for sustain, it’s quite strong in that way. I said that your statement of illusions being stronger than domination for damage is absolutely absurd. Domination has mental anguish, but it also has CS for landing the damage, boon strip for stripping stab/prot, more vuln, and more damage from that vuln. Everything about dom is geared towards dealing more and landing more damage.

Additionally, randomly spamming shatters will have the same result as it ever has: very little. Random low pressure attacks doesn’t do anything. If you’re running power burst, you’ve got to do the burst, or you’re doing nothing.

you fail to realize every time you shatter you are getting alacrity which get you to the next f1 faster and at the same time your gs2 and stealth skills are recharging faster not to mention your elite well. Just go chrono + duel and start spamming shatter in a match. It’ll become clear right away just how ridiculously crazy it can be.
See my post above, I agree losing boon striping is big but in the new meta boon striping isn’t as important, as everyone is spaming their crazy high damage attack rather than taking time build up boons . illusions sync well with shatter because it makes clone generation even faster as well as making your 2 stealth skill recharge like crazy . I haven’t timed it, but it seems even without pu you can have a stealth ready almost all the time when you shatter like mad. Now I just hope they don’t nerf this little gem I found.

Curunen.8729:

The main thing for me if not taking Domination is losing boon strip which is a lot of utility in pvp.

Sure in wvw it’s not a necessity so more room to use the other trait lines

PB or MA is a toss up depending on choice of weapons/skills and utilities (ie double ranged or using Shield, or gravity well etc perhaps PB is more useful, using torch and fewer cc skills then MA is more useful). Then you’ve got all the vuln which helps with the damage.

I agree losing boon strip is a big deal. From what I experienced in matches the new meta has really made almost every class hit as hard as pre hot mesmer. There is no time to setup a giant burst anymore because you are just getting hammered so hard by everyone. To me at least the counter play is shatter as much and as often as possible. This has 2 advantages, 1 you are keeping everyone blinded all the time. 2 you are stacking alacrity like crazy. which make you shatter even more and the bonus of your stealth skill recharge super fast. So I guess what I’m saying is lots of shatters seem to play better in the new meta than setup 1 giant shatter.

Fay.2357:

Mogar.9216:

I don’t think dom adds much to shatter build. You might want to try illusions for more damage or insp for more defense.

lol. Seriously?

http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Mental_Torment

Like, even if the rest of your post wasn’t exactly super sensible, it got blown away by those 2 sentences.

lol typical Fay post. living in a world of paper builds. Try playing a few matches before proclaiming you know everything.
20% damage vs massive condi cure and heal from insp or virtually endless shatter from iullsions and extra effect for every shatter. It’s not even close.
Unlike you I only give out advice after I have played a build for at least 10-20 matches instead of just memorizing every ability and draw your conclusion based on some spread sheet.

well with duel + chrono you can pretty much shatter none stop and don’t have to worry about running out of clones.
I mostly start with f5 then lunch into a f1-3 shatter. by then your f5 is up and you can do another f1-3 hatter. Pretty fun .
I don’t think dom adds much to shatter build. You might want to try illusions for more damage or insp for more defense.

Radiobiology.6185:

Its a really kittened system, the majority of people solo queue and yet they removed solo queue and introduced this failed hybrid system that cater to premades, probably to promote team queuing for Arenanets pursuit of their wet “making gw2 into a popular esport” dream.

Another game that i play, Heroes of the Storm had a similar system but they changed it (because its a bad system which the majority of players strongly dislike, and some devs actually listen to what their community wants) to where pugs and 2-man premades go into one queue and 5 man teams go into another queue. It may not be a perfect system but atleast it caters to the majority of players (people who queue solo or with one friend).

Just as a final display of how failed this system is i will attach a screenshot from when i was playing today, it shows my team which consist of one 2-man premade and 3 pugs, versus a full 5 man premade. I dont see how that match up is in any way fair, we did manage to win this one without any problem but if you face a 5 man premade (with the set up we had) who is even semi-good and semi-organized then there is no chance 90% of the time.

As a final note to any Arenanet dev who might be reading this: If you want GW2 to grow as an esport you need to cater to the majority of the players, the actual people who will be viewing the matches not the ones who will be playing them. Because there will always be top players competing to be the best, no matter how long the 5-man queues are, the people who compete to be the very best are the “hardcore crowd” and those are the people who care least about spending a lot of time in this game. Thanks for reading.

+10000

Shatter interrupt build in general replacing duel with chrono seem to work. Lost blind and DE but Chrono traits seem to make up for that . Not sure if I will ditch torch for shield though.

GS1 rocks. If you ue it in melee range ye sure it blows. Vs good players it’s almost 1/2 of my dps.

:) I find silent teams tends to do better . I don’t get how one can type out full sentences while pvping. When I’m in the zone I don’t even read the chat . A good player knows how to read the mini map and go where he is needed no need to chat really.

Thieves are way too soft to be effective in conquest atm. You can only effectively decap if you can win most 1 v 1 and win them fast. In this meta thieves will lose most 1 v 1 .

I have a hard time getting away from torch, the extra stealth is gold in pvp.

know these when you pvp:
1. Game is balanced more or less. i.e while there are classes that’s more wanted in top end teams no one class can outright cake walk through any other class if player skill are equal. So if you get insta melted there IS a way to avoid it.

2. You will at best get 60% win rate , most players no matter how good they are get 50% when they solo que.

3. Know that you are just 1 / 5 on a team and 1 /10 in a match so you are most likely only going to have 10-25% say in the outcome of the match. Some times when you are by far the best player or by far the worst player in the match you can win or loss the match for your team by yourself but that’s extremely rare.

They Fed up blink a while back. A LOT of places you used to be able to blink to in pvp are now off limits. This is especially annoy in foefire and khyhol .