At launch, engineers had permanent, unstrippable stability on flamethrower. Kit refinement was good for a double super elixir as well as a condi removal every ten seconds from flamethrower. Smoke bomb pulsed every second in a much larger AoE. Incendiary powder had no internal cooldown. Elixir R had 85 seconds base cooldown.
They got nerfed into the ground and then were basically unseen in tournaments for a month or two. Seriously, I would sometimes play an entire evening and only see 1-2 other engineers, total, in all my matches. Then they got a ton of bugfixes and buffs to unused skills, and now they’ve had a really large variety of good tournament builds for several months.
I like the idea a lot, but it would have to be done very carefully. Finishers already happen every couple of seconds in an average teamfight, and some engineer and ele builds finish their own fields constantly. Replacing passive traits with actives like these would likely be the way to go.
Creative builds are one of the best parts of the game. I’d like to see more of them, not less of them. We’ve all lost games because of bad luck with teammates; solo queue is like that in every game.
Since hotjoins/custom arenas/solo arenas/team arenas can all be accessed from anywhere now, there’s no reason to be in the mists unless you are changing your build. So the number of people in the mists is roughly equal to the number of people from your server who are currently changing their PvP build. Good try.
Wrong, many people are waiting there, some even are just chilling there and stuff.
Deepest apologies. I’ll rescind my statement and offer up this revised version: “The number of people in the mists is roughly equal to the number of people from your server who are currently changing their PvP build, or just chilling there.”
Since hotjoins/custom arenas/solo arenas/team arenas can all be accessed from anywhere now, there’s no reason to be in the mists unless you are changing your build. So the number of people in the mists is roughly equal to the number of people from your server who are currently changing their PvP build. Good try.
What would main-PvP players do in PvE with their lvl 2 characters? Lol. No point at leaving it.
I hear you. I don’t really play anything except PvP so I’m sometimes in the mists in between matches. Still, you can join a team/solo queue from a hotjoin or custom arena, so my point was basically that there’s no reason for anyone to be in the mists unless they’re away from keyboard or changing their build. Or I suppose if they just don’t want to do anything else.
Every time I go on these forums Its only to get even more depressed
This could be part of the problem. If you enjoy GW2, play it. If you don’t enjoy it, stop.
The only option that doesn’t make sense is kind of enjoying it, but then going to the forums to talk about how bad it is, then logging in and playing for a bit, then logging out and going back to the forums.
So you mean ppl that write stuff here, enjoying the game? The majority of us is still here because the game has potential and there is some little hope left, which have been completely shattered by the development for several times (that’s why ppl tend to write cynical and negative)
I’m being completely sincere. If you don’t enjoy playing the game, don’t force yourself to stick around just because it has “potential.” That’s a waste of your own time.
If it’s not fun for you without _ (better leaderboards, balance tweak X, etc) it won’t be fun for you with _, either.
That’s what keeps <50% of PvP people playing…, and your last sentence is completely bullkitten
It’s an observation, not an opinion. Fill in the blank with custom arenas, ele nerfs, 5v5 hotjoin servers, spectator mode, etc. and you’ve got a history of the first year of GW2.
Every time I go on these forums Its only to get even more depressed
This could be part of the problem. If you enjoy GW2, play it. If you don’t enjoy it, stop.
The only option that doesn’t make sense is kind of enjoying it, but then going to the forums to talk about how bad it is, then logging in and playing for a bit, then logging out and going back to the forums.
So you mean ppl that write stuff here, enjoying the game? The majority of us is still here because the game has potential and there is some little hope left, which have been completely shattered by the development for several times (that’s why ppl tend to write cynical and negative)
I’m being completely sincere. If you don’t enjoy playing the game, don’t force yourself to stick around just because it has “potential.” That’s a waste of your own time.
If it’s not fun for you without _ (better leaderboards, balance tweak X, etc) it won’t be fun for you with _, either.
Who said it’s a massive PvP saving patch?
It’s just a balancing pass, people. If you hype it beyond what it’s supposed to be, of course it’s going to seem underwhelming.
Exactly.
Every time I go on these forums Its only to get even more depressed
This could be part of the problem. If you enjoy GW2, play it. If you don’t enjoy it, stop.
The only option that doesn’t make sense is kind of enjoying it, but then going to the forums to talk about how bad it is, then logging in and playing for a bit, then logging out and going back to the forums.
Correct, AR does not remove any conditions but it also doesn’t have a cooldown. In other words, no new conditions will be applied to you while you are under 25% hp. It’s a good trait for a duel with a condition build.
It is very hard to beat a necro as a condition engineer. Rifle engineers do pretty well against them though.
3 million ppl bought game,how many of them play pvp,i thought more like you can chose by your self and ofc you can not enter if you are not appropriate rank!
3 million people bought the game. 17,000 have tried soloQ. This is all we know. That means 0.56% of people play pvp. Can you see why it gets little development now? PvP barely makes half a percent of people who purchased the game.
Well, we made an educated guess at that number like a month and a half ago, a few weeks after solo queue came out. Also, that’s only on NA servers.
The worldwide number of people with 11+ solo queue games is likely between 35k and 150k now.
Since hotjoins/custom arenas/solo arenas/team arenas can all be accessed from anywhere now, there’s no reason to be in the mists unless you are changing your build. So the number of people in the mists is roughly equal to the number of people from your server who are currently changing their PvP build. Good try.
It’s very easy to hotjoin with friends, probably too easy. Most times I join a hotjoin to practice a new build, I see two or three guildmates playing together on the same team. Even if you’re put on different teams at the start, you should be able to switch within 30 seconds or so. And of course at the start of each game it’s very easy to choose the same team.
Also, try solo and team arenas. Just because they’re “ranked” doesn’t automatically mean they’re not casual-friendly. You might have a few really uneven matches at the start until you get a matchmaking rating, but after that, you may find that you actually like it.
1) I don’t want to just jump in to a game and be the utterly clueless noob who has to learn the map on the fly. Is there a way to learn the maps beforehand?
2) What is “hotjoin” vs solo queue vs solo arena? (I know solo queue was added awhile back, and might be what I’m looking for, but there is nothing called “solo queue” on the PVP Browser. There is “solo arena”, but the wiki says “arenas” were previously called “tournaments”, which I assume means tpvp, which I thought was for more advanced pvpers.)
3) When I’m on the PVP Browser, as a noob what filter should I be using (All/Standard)?
1. You can find an empty hotjoin server to explore the maps with no enemies if you want.
2. “Solo arena” is solo queue. It is very different from hotjoin. In hotjoins, people can join and leave at any time. Teams will usually have to be “autobalanced,” which means the game puts some players from one team onto the other because people left the match.
Solo arenas (usually) start with exactly five people per team. No one joins or leaves mid-match. Solo arenas also use matchmaking based on leaderboard rating, as opposed to hotjoins, which have no matchmaking and only make a feeble attempt to find a room with some opponents of similar PvP level when you click “play now.” Of course, anyone can select your room manually and enter it, so it doesn’t do much good.
3. If you want to practice in hotjoin a bit, using “play now” theoretically has the best chance of being a “noob filter.” In reality, that doesn’t always work out.
As some others have suggested, solo arenas are the best way to learn to PvP. If you want to try to get really high on the leaderboard, you might want to wait until you’ve practiced a lot to join; but honestly you’ll get better faster by just jumping in to solo arenas.
If you’re waiting for GW2 to become a completely different game with completely different mechanics, you’ll be disappointed. If you like GW2 combat at its core and want it to be a little more refined, then you’ll be moderately pleased.
If you hate everything Anet does on principle, you’ll hate it.
I could see maybe adding tiers to the matchmaking. Gold tier = top 10%, silver = 50%-90%, bronze tier = 0%-50%. Then if you felt you were getting awful teammates, you’d at least know their general area on the leaderboards.
But not based on PvP level, no. Can you imagine what someone on a second account would do to the game?
You don’t see a problem in taking such risks to obtain a baseline level of defense that most other classes have passively?
I never said anything like that. All I’m trying to avoid is the situation with warriors and necros, where we said “small buffs won’t cut it, we need something massive” and Anet said “OK.” Ele already has some good defense/sustain built into the profession. Maybe not enough, but there is a significant amount there. Just the level of party protection uptime is way above what any other profession can do.
I’m not saying eles are in a great place right now (because if I said that, I’d get death threats again) but eles do have some defensive advantages. 10 in Arcana gets you a lot of protection and regen, just as one example.
The thing about defensive boons is that I need to stop doing damage and switch to Earth or Water to get them, and due to attunement cooldowns, that means I could very well not have access to a key CC, heal, or condition removal skill when I need it.
Simply swapping to Water to get Regeneration would mean burning a heal and a condition removal or two, which could easily mean death if my opponent has access to a skill that can immobilize me.
Right, it’s not like free benefits with zero downsides. I thought we wanted risk/reward gameplay?
I believe a dev mentioned testing TDM variants a while back. Spirit Watch was kind of the CTF experiment, but without normalizing skills, health, armor, and passives on the flag carrier, it will probably never feel all that balanced.
I’d mostly like to know why eles have such low health. Like, seriously, not even whining, I just wanna know.
Lowest base health, lowest base armor, no defensive mechanism aside from healing (the class’s low base armor makes doesn’t mesh well with healing, and investment in Healing Power is required for it to be effective, as well), and unremarkable base damage (most autoattacks have absymally low damage coefficients, as well).
I’m not saying eles are in a great place right now (because if I said that, I’d get death threats again) but eles do have some defensive advantages. 10 in Arcana gets you a lot of protection and regen, just as one example.
I think ele heals should have a higher base but lower scaling, since healing power often has to be traded for vitality unless you can afford 30 in water.
The rally mechanic appears to be broken/bugged. When I killed my enemy’s pet, I didn’t get a rally. Everywhere else in PvE Guild Wars this would rally me (off anything that’s not a critter).
It’s intentional. Rallying is designed to be very easy in PvE because why not? It’s fun and forgives players for biting off more mobs than they can chew.
In PvP, it would be very frustrating to down another player and then see him get up because your jagged horror (that got summoned automatically from a minor trait that you couldn’t avoid) just happened to get hit by AoE at the wrong time.
Don’t be offended by the people in the forum; they know how frustrating it would be if rallying worked the way you suggest it should. It’s better to ask if something is intentional or not than to just assume that it’s bugged.
A rank 3 player will be just as helpful in a solo queue tourney—or more—than a rank 30 who has never stepped out of hotjoin. Solo queues are the best place to learn the game atm.
Nope. A rank 3 doesn’t know anything unfortunately.
Knowing nothing is better than what you “learn” in hotjoin sometimes. I was being completely serious. The first few months or so after launch that wasn’t true, because <r10 players often hadn’t even played PvE or WvW to at least know what their skills do. But now, a rank 3 player could very well be a competent player, and one who may even ask his teammates where he’s supposed to be.
I was merely trying to say that it’s good for low-rank players to try solo arena, because it will be more fun for many of them and they’ll learn much quicker, with no significant disadvantage vs. a higher ranked player trying tournaments for the first time.
A rank 3 player will be just as helpful in a solo queue tourney—or more—than a rank 30 who has never stepped out of hotjoin. Solo queues are the best place to learn the game atm.
Ah I see negative posts are getting deleted.
Congrats on the MLG Esports win to team Denial. Can’t wait for the next one.
Any thoughts on tournaments which give small prizes to many players? Like all in the top 1000 solo q or so.
Boxes of energy drinks, mousemats etc. I’ve seen tournies like that go down well before.
And it’s good that some posts are getting deleted…
I think a tournament with a large prize pool is a really good idea, actually. I don’t think there would be a good way to do it with physical prizes though. Maybe a solo ladder season with in-game rewards, though.
Remember that PvP armor doesn’t give any stats besides armor rating and the rune, so it’s actually not a big deal. Difference in effectiveness would be something like full ascended vs. full exotic in WvW.
Hmm, that’s interesting. It’s not like conditions have exactly been weak in teamfights recently. I’m glad the bug’s getting fixed, but it will certainly affect balance.
Proof that software design is harder than people (who have never written a line of code in their life) think it is.
You can play, but you shouldn’t care about rankings since they tell you nothing useful. If there is still anyone who takes leaderboards seriously he is just hurting himself.
A lot of truth to that. It’s a random queue. You could get a top 200 player who has no idea what he’s doing, because it’s random.
I also hold to the fact that the higher you are on a leaderboard, the harder it is for a matchmaker to work properly. If you’re ranked #1, you will have a 100% chance that all four of your teammates have a much lower rank than you. If you are rank 10, you’ll still have a very high chance that all your teammates are lower; rank 100, slightly lower chance; etc. There is simply no one higher than rank 1, so…who do we expect to be ranked with?
1. A “blowout” means a match that’s not close at all. For example, if team Car Crash beats a pickup group of rank ~15 players, they’ll win something like 500-30. That’s a blowout, and they are very common when you put 8 random teams together.
2. I was just explaining the old system.
3. The best teams already compete in team arena.
4. Umm…how can GW2 lock a spectating player from speaking? I’m sorry but I have no idea what you’re talking about here.
Actually this is very similar to the way the game launched. It didn’t work too well because the first couple rounds were usually blowouts. There were also “paid” tournaments, which were supposed to have only high-tier teams in them, but it was too difficult to get 8 good teams in the same queue. So they usually just queued in the free tournaments and crushed everyone.
Spectating team arena would be very easy to exploit. Just have a sixth person in voip spectating the match; suddenly you know everything the other team is doing.
If you are rank 1, statistically, there are half as many players within a thousand ranks of you as if you are rank 1000. In other words, matchmaking will always get less good the higher you go, no matter what. There’s no way around it.
Also, you posted this around 10 am NA.
Again, not really true. Sure it won’t be as good as if every player was somehow available but they can do a much better job. All you can ask for is that A-net matches you with the 10 best players available rating wise at the time of your queue and then puts them on the 2 teams in a way that makes sense. They are not doing that currently. So it can be improved and it can be improved quite a lot. Saying nothing can be done again just lets a-net off the hook and makes excuses for them to leave solo q in the deplorable state it is now.
I’m not saying it couldn’t be improved, but it is definitely true that there is a smaller pool of players near your rank if you are high on the leaderboards. Think it through. If you are rank 1, there are 999 players within 1k ranks of you.
If you are rank 1000, there are 999 player within 1k ranks (above) you as well as another thousand directly below you. So in any game, playing at the top of the leaderboard will always feel like the matchmaking isn’t as good as playing in the middle of the leaderboard.
Just because there are other things that could be improved doesn’t mean that “that’s not true.”
If you are rank 1, statistically, there are half as many players within a thousand ranks of you as if you are rank 1000. In other words, matchmaking will always get less good the higher you go, no matter what. There’s no way around it.
Also, you posted this around 10 am NA.
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It’s good for large changes to take time to implement. One of my pet peeves is when people ask for some giant re-design to everything just to fix one thing that feels annoying to them, and figure Anet should be able to make it happen by next week without affecting balance negatively at all. People have literally suggested removing all conditions, making all PvE stats available, etc.
As for the farming issue, they’ve done several changes to discourage that. No, they haven’t brought the banhammer down. What do you feel they should do?
snip
Yup. Specifically, people asked for a brief condition immunity skill for warriors and cleansing ire.
snip
Right. I think the game launched quite a bit early for PvP, and there were some features that just didn’t make it in at launch.
You are also forgetting:
- Unbalanced & unfair new conquest maps
- Broken matchmaking
- Poor & broken leaderboards
- Class unbalance
- Broken leaver penaltyOnly worthy addition was custom arenas, because it gives money to them.
The question was about changes the devs made in response to community feedback, not just to list things I like/don’t like about PvP.
As for this list, the new maps haven’t been amazing; matchmaking and leaderboards are working well, just seem a bit volatile; balance is relatively good and should be great after the 15th; leaver penalty definitely still needs work.
You chose a bad time to ask—the forums have been a bit caustic lately.
Balance has had a couple of flaws recently, but it’s definitely way better than it was at launch.
Hotjoin and lower solo queue matches will always feel a kittenaotic and random, but of course, competitive matches are far from it. I feel hotjoin matches are one of the worst features of PvP right now—they don’t really have anything to do with how the game actually works, people tend to just blob around to get as much glory as possible. I can’t blame you for feeling like it was chaotic and random if you jumped into a hotjoin match.
Anet has confirmed they’re working on new game modes. Large-scale modes in general have not been as popular as smale-scale modes. With no trinity to force priority targets and focus most of the damage down to a couple of dps builds, matches larger than 5v5 generally feel a bit off. However, there’s a group of people that’s been doing 15v15 deathmatches in WvW and reporting great success, so you never know.
Nevir. Where do you think pvp is lacking and could improve? All I see is defense. I love GW2 pvp. But for it to improve we need to show some critique and have more open dialogue with the devs. They make changes as they see fit with out much back and forth. The current structure for changes keeps alot of things secret and private until it’s launched for the most part. Hence we ask for more transparency as the OP suggests.
There are plenty of ways that PvP can be better. I simply feel that the devs won’t really have reason to listen to the community if we continually say things that they know factually to be incorrect.
I have no problem asking for transparency. I think the preview of the Oct. 15th patch was a great step and needed. What else do you think the devs should be doing?
As for what I feel needs to be improved: I’d say rewards should be fairly high on the priority list; from what I’ve gathered we should see big improvements to that in the next couple months. I’d be in favor of switching to custom arenas and ranked matches only and removing “hotjoin,” except for custom arenas, although I have no idea what Anet’s data shows about that.
I think it generally works in other games, though, right? You have your ranked matches and you have your custom matches. Each one can be joined solo or as a team. My guess is that this system could work in GW2.
Was solo queue in response to the community, or in response to the fact that every other game in existence has it?
Ele nerfs? Ya, they nerfed eles alright. Sadly they completely ignored every suggestion given them for how to nerf eles while keeping them viable, and now they’re virtually nonexistent in high level play.
Necro/war buffs. Sure, they buffed them. But again, did they buff them in the ways the community was asking for? Nope. Instead we got torment, burning, and warriors turned into Irelia just so that there was at least something that could fight necros.
Custom arenas? So what? They left out the most important feature everyone was actually asking for. Until they let us turn off nodes, custom arenas are little different than old hotjoins, except that it gave them a plausible excuse to delay putting /duel into the game.
As for what you listed for wvw, are you serious, lol? Have you even read the wvw discussion board lately? No one wanted bloodlust. No one wants their kittenty league system. No one wants any of the crap Devon is shoving down our throats. The only potential one there is culling, and I don’t know if fixing a massively broken, hugely embarrassing problem that shouldn’t have made it out of beta really counts.
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Solo queue was highly demanded for several months last winter.
Ele nerf to RTL and condition cleanse and healing signet were all specifically asked for.
Buff to warrior condition resistance and healing signet were specifically asked for.
Necro burning was specifically asked for. Warrior buffs to condition resistance was not in response to necros—the complaint was that warriors were too easily kited via cripple and chill and needed a way to stay in melee.
Custom arenas are more or less what you would expect. I don’t remember people asking to be able to turn off nodes, but it could have happened, I’m not sure.
WvW changes were specifically asked for. You don’t remember the dozens of threads begging for new matchups, especially from bottom-tier servers? So Anet added RNG to matchmaking and suddenly everyone forgets. Roaming contribution and zerg breakup has also been one of the main topics, which bloodlust is an attempt to solve. I haven’t played much WvW since that patch so I don’t know how well it worked, but it was certainly in response to that. I never mentioned leagues and have no idea how they’ll work out, although they did change to 3 leagues instead of 2 in NA due to community feedback.
In the over a year this game has been out, how many things can you think of that anet has done in response to community feedback? How many changes have been made that were the complete opposite of what the community was asking for?
Sad but true.
See list above please.
Nevir can you just go work for free at anet? They need you. If they already pay you, can you focus on some real dialogue instead of kissing anets kitten ? Some back and forth maybe?
I love back and forth. Care to respond to any of my points?
In the over a year this game has been out, how many things can you think of that anet has done in response to community feedback? How many changes have been made that were the complete opposite of what the community was asking for?
Sad but true.
See list above please.
In the over a year this game has been out, how many things can you think of that anet has done in response to community feedback?
Paid/free tourney redesign, solo queue, random map generator, ele nerfs, necro/warrior buffs, 5v5 hotjoin, custom arenas, spectator mode, one-click salvaging, off the top of my head for PvP. Probably quite a few others I’m forgetting.
For WvW, more significant roamer/small group contributions through bloodlust buff, culling removal, more variety in matchups, and probably a million others I don’t know about. I don’t play a ton of WvW but enough to keep track of a few of the changes that have been suggested and implemented.
Oh and new hairstyles and endgame content for PvE. Haven’t really done any of that for a year though, so I don’t know what people have been asking for.
- Transparency- There is none. If you are going to patch something…how about giving us some patch notes? People will QQ no matter what you do so lets be real, we NEED to know what is coming out before you patch it so you can atleast get some community feedback before you implement it. It is ridiculous that we have no idea what is going on.
The preview of the October 15th balance patch has been in the general forum for a couple weeks now. The reason they rarely give specific dates (i.e. they originally slated the balance changes for Oct 1st) is because every time they’re off by a few days, people start flaming.
- Development- This one is going to take a little longer. Its not that I don’t think you guys care about this game (devs), because I know you do. But I cannot accept the fact that everytime you have patched something into pvp it is broken. We had no leaderboards (which I expected at release) for a large part of the game, but when they were patched in they were broken and also REMAIN broken to this day. Another example would be the random map generator. Patched in, broken. Not only once, but twice. First day of the game, anet recognized AOE was a problem, still not fixed. The fixes are coming in to slow which then causes people to quit. PLEASE ATLEAST GIVE US DATES!
Again, the community has shown them what we’ll do every time they give us dates. I agree that the game launched a bit too early for the PvP side, and that some key features hadn’t been made yet. I highly doubt that was their decision.
- Resources- It is pretty obvious that the resources are being funneled into other parts of the game besides PvP. I understand that you can’t have everyone working on PvP, but if you cant even get a random map generator ( which has been around since ATARI) to work correctly after 6 months of development, it is obvious your developers are being pushed by more pressing problems. The quality of your patches as of late, compared to other games, is VERY lacking. These bugs and glitches should not be happening in a AAA rated fastest selling MMO.
Compared to which other games? Because most RPG games that launched in the last three years that I can think of have been abysmal failures. Bugs happen.
…at the magnitude that we see today.
Most of your issues seem to be simple bugs that are already fixed. Could you be a bit more specific about issues that we are seeing today?
You don’t have to choose! The idea of a charr with a flamethrower is pretty hard to beat, though.
Really though, my best advice would be to do something different every time. You don’t really need a special “build” to play with friends the way you plan to. Flamethrower all the things one week, use static discharge and rifle the next, bombs the next. Your main hand weapons—pistol/pistol, pistol/shield or rifle—will stay the same, so no matter what other utilities you use you’ll never feel overwhelmed by playing with completely different skills.
Profession diversity was amazing in the MLG tournament. Eles will be back in the meta in no time; calling for kneejerk balance won’t help anything in the long run.
Also consider that nearly every player of each profession used a vastly different build (except for ranger and necro). Engineers, guardians, warriors—most of them were using builds with practically nothing in common. There were forty total players, and probably something like 25 significantly different builds. That’s incredible.
well… All thieves had the same build, the only one thieves have atm.
Nope. There were four thieves, and only three of them used SD initiative spam. Caed did quite well with his custom DP burst/mobility build.
Thanks for the replies. Is there any kind of obvious tell for when this is about to happen? I’m not the most observant person about details as they’re happening but if I know what I’m looking for I can probably do better about it next time.
The lightning is really slow so immediately you see it you know to dodge or block. If he knocks you back, make sure to wait till he attempts to burst you with static.D before you stun break and block. You don’t want to waste a block on nothing.
To add to that, because the lightning is so slow, a lot of static discharge engineers will try to get into melee or closer range before unleashing the burst. It’s classic bait and burst glass cannon gameplay. But yes, if he lands overcharged shot on you, wait until you see sparks coming before popping your defensive cooldowns.
4000 doesn’t sound like that much for BoB—it’s similar to churning earth in damage and how easy it is to avoid. It is possible to use elixir X after setting BoB and if you get brute form, it will do quite a bit more damage due to base stat increases—but I’d say that was just a crit from a zerker build.
Yes, static discharge will come up as “chain lightning” in the log. Any toolbelt skill will cause it, but the highest damage will come from skills that have a two-part toolbelt skill, such as turrets. For example, an engineer can place rifle turret before the fight, then approach you and detonate the turret and immediately use surprise shot, the rifle turret toolbelt skill, to get two static discharges. A non-crit from static discharge should hit for a little over a thousand damage. If he burst you down from 15000 hp, it probably took the BoB + about 4-5 static discharges, or essentially all of his damage cooldowns.
soon™
He could give an exact date and get crucified if he’s off by one patch, or he could give a rough estimate and get crucified for being too vague. Which would you do?
Put out updates in a reasonable time instead of making people wait half a year or more for features that should have been at release.
Mr. E didn’t decide the release date.
I agree the game launched a bit early and PvP was missing some features. I don’t really see how that changes the way devs should respond to stuff now, though.
soon™
He could give an exact date and get crucified if he’s off by one patch, or he could give a rough estimate and get crucified for being too vague. Which would you do?
It’s not meant to keep thieves from capping empty nodes, it’s meant to keep them from bunkering on nodes their team already has (or keeping a node neutral).
You can see this most easily at Graveyard or in WvW, where at launch a single thief could prevent zergs of 30+ from taking certain objectives for a significant period of time. It would be problematic to a lesser extent on all the other capture points.
tl;dr stealth bunkers are lame.
My favorite thing about the engineer profession is the asymmetrical relationship between melee and ranged. Nearly every single one of our mainhand weapon skills has a different range. Also, grenades get easier to land the closer you are to your opponent.
Engineers excel at “mid-range,” as the developers envisioned. Basically, most engineer builds will need to get closer to a ranged opponent than he wants you to, and will need to keep a melee opponent a little further away than he wants to be.
Yes, a better tutorial would be good. I’d like to see a series of instanced tutorials eventually, but that would take a lot of work to put in.
Also, this game is a lot harder to figure out than most people realize. Sure, there are some easy builds that are popular right now, but learning to manage conditions, memorizing safe stomp/res/counters, figuring out how mesmers and thieves work, understanding how bunkers work, understanding whom to attack in a teamfight without a trinity to make it easy…
And of course, someone playing hotjoin will never really understand most of that.
It’s time we admitted that this game is anything but easy, even though most builds only have ~18 skills.