Look at all the “big” teams with streams and channels. Every single one of them is using the kitten build , and everyone is doing the SAME EXACT THING.
Checking Phantaram’s stream occasionally – they’re running two guardians (one bunker, one meditation), a balanced roamer ele, condi engi, and thief.
No mesmers, no support ele’s, and only one real bunker in general. They’re winning paids.
/shrug
usually its just 1 utility for pretty much all of theirs.
…
A backstab thief doesn’t have any means of preventing CC in their utilities most of the time.
A common variant of the build uses signet of shadows, shadowstep, and either blinding powder or shadow refuge. There are several ways to prevent or mitigate CC in there, and none of those utilities are required for their initial burst.
Just FYI.
While I agree that backstab thieves are pretty difficult to play well against serious competition and there are various things you can do to avoid or otherwise mitigate the post-steal burst, I also think the TTK on that build and its variants is kinda over the top even on non-glassy targets – toughness doesn’t do much against this, you absolutely need active mitigation.
So idk, it’s not really about the fact that it can be avoided – it’s more that I don’t think the potential for this sort of thing is healthy for the game in general. And yeah, I know some people think that the downed state counteracts the insane TTK that some builds have – I just don’t agree.
Actually, elementalists will rarely die to a bunker 1v1, while warriors can and will.
That’s true but completely beside the point. If you go 1v1 a bunker, you better be able to pressure him hard enough to force support. Neither an ele nor a warrior are likely to make that happen, so they’re both effectively and equally useless at 1v1’ing bunkers – but that hardly makes either class useless in other roles.
That’s three, maybe four, teams out of how many?
Same argument can go both ways. I obviously haven’t seen every single team within the GW2 community, but neither have you. So, neither of us has access to that kind of global data.
However, we do have access to streams and there is a loose community of teams that regularly sync queue tourneys together so as to get some real competition instead of rolling pugs all day. We know that at least some portion of these teams (with players generally recognized by the tourney community) run warriors, so warriors probably aren’t completely useless.
Idk. Thieves used to be useless too before some guy named Lowell came around, then all of a sudden thieves were… no longer useless. According to forums, non-bunker elementalists have been useless for a fairly long time, when in fact they’ve always been pretty strong.
Ultimately, all professions are viable and useful when placed in an appropriate comp.
By the very nature of balance in a game like this, a class that can’t 1v1 bunkers is unlikely to be able to fill any other role with any level of efficiency. (And it’s true – for every role in a tPvP team, some other class fills it better, hence our bottom-tier tPvP status.)
What? Ele’s won’t ever kill a solid bunker player 1v1 either regardless of build, but they’re extremely strong otherwise (both as bunkers and balanced roamers/team fighters) and most teams run one.
As for warriors – I guess you can tell that to teams like TP EU, PZ, and ALFA (who are as close to top tier as you can get with the current ladder-less infrastructure), who afaik all run warriors in their main lineups. Win used to run a warrior as well, I dunno if they still do.
If so, sorry to say but your playing the wrong game and might be sorely disappointed in the future.
I’m sorry, I can’t get over the absurdity of this comment considering the road map of this thread.
You realize that the person you’re defending said this -
ZyrusticaeGee, great.
Then I quit.
At least until warrior is either buffed or the meta changes, I don’t care which.
Right? That is the prime example of a person who’s probably playing the wrong game and is likely to be disappointed the instant a change is made that doesn’t fit with his/her vision of the way things should be.
Me? I’m playing the right game. I have my own complaints regarding bunkers, formats, ladders, downed state, map and mode variety, map sizes, portals and what they do to roamers, excessive visual noise, TTK, and other things. I believe some things need tweaks and others could use complete reworks. However, ultimately, I enjoy the game and I’ve dealt with all changes made to all classes since beta weekend #1.
Furthermore, I never made any arguments for bunkers. “Warriors aren’t good at 1v1’ing bunkers” isn’t a pro-bunker argument. Neither is “heavy bunker comps can still be taken down by more balanced comps”. Those are really the two main points I’ve made in this thread, just with a greater word count.
As for why we have the freedom to make builds if certain classes aren’t effective at certain things? Idk. You’ll have to ask ANet. I don’t work for them and I’m not a game designer. Warrior isn’t the only class that will never kill a bunker 1v1, but I guess it’s a good thing that killing bunkers isn’t necessary to neutralize the nodes they’re sitting on.
Also, there’s a reason why you can make a new character of any class and pvp with it instantly. There’s also a reason why most serious tourney teams will want you to be proficient with several classes. The answer to both is pretty simple – no matter what kind of build diversity is in the game, some classes will always be better at certain things than others. If they weren’t, you’d have a purely homogenized system which would be utterly unfun for everybody. I seriously doubt that this is ever going to change.
Zyrusticae is resorting to saying “I can’t do everything as a warrior” because everyone in this thread is telling him to do everything as a warrior!
Not sure if you’ve actually read the thread. Nobody is telling him that he should do everything as a warrior. Quite the opposite – people are telling him to avoid 1v1 fights with bunkers as a warrior because warriors lack the sustain and the condition pressure to win those fights solo.
Some other classes are in the same boat.
If he really wants to play warrior, then instead of crying about it he can realize that all classes are not built to be able to counter every single situation (true in every single non-sandbox MMO to date, including this one) and get somebody else on his team to run an appropriate bunker busting class/build. Then he, as a warrior, can fill a role that’s more appropriate to his class.
I know ArenaNet hyped this game with “every profession can fill every role” and blah blah blah, but the fact is that it was little more than exaggerated marketing. Even with build diversity, some professions are still going to suck at certain things more than others and warriors just happen to suck at 1v1’ing bunkers.
I honestly don’t see the problem.
This is also coming from a Thief that doesn’t play 100% trash cannon that runs 0 survival traits and instead 100% DPS traits. I play 30 into Shadow Arts, 20 into Acrobatics and Trickery with condition build for added survival, and I sit at nearly 20,000 health too. Even so, the added toughness really doesn’t do anything as you can explode almost instantaneously to one combo from a Glass Cannon Ele.
Have you actually played this encounter through from the other side?
The kind of glass cannon d/d build that can put out even close to the sort of damage you’re talking about is going to melt to your bleed stacks fairly quickly. They can’t cleanse the bleeds without switching to water, and if they switch to water then they won’t be updrafting anything for 9-10~ seconds.
If they do updraft, they’ll probably knock themselves out of your caltrops radius and you should be able stun break it and evade the incoming burning speed before shocking aura can proc again (if it’s even still up by the time they re-enter caltrops radius).
At this point, he’s going to be focused on recovering health and you should be free to continue spamming caltrops or whatever since shocking aura is down for 20 seconds or so.
The point is – no sane glass cannon d/d ele is going to sit in caltrops for 5 seconds and then try to kill you instead of cleansing the bleeds off and reseting the fight. They will get destroyed. All it takes is one stun break and they’re severely behind.
I mean I get what you’re saying, but there’s some heavy hyperbole going around.
I think that’s one of the larger challenges in any game like this.
There’s always going to be a disparity between low level and high level play and buffing/nerfing things based on low level play has the potential to make things either severely overpowered or underpowered at the higher tiers.
From a technical standpoint, I don’t really know what the solution is. However, from the perspective of marketing and finance, it’s pretty obvious – you balance around your casuals because esport status is never, ever going to happen without a massive player and viewer base.
So… what’s the issue here?
The issue is that warriors are currently among the worst duelists in the game for a variety of reasons and don’t perform well against bunkers regardless of build.
The solution is simple – don’t send a warrior to 1v1 a bunker.
No, not really. They’re still too strong to take down in a reasonable amount of time 1v1, and any situation that demands a second player just to offset one is obviously far from fair or balanced in any way.
So run a bunker buster like a nade/bomb engi or whatever and send him to deal with the enemy bunker. While he’s doing that, send people to contest other nodes. Killing the bunker quickly isn’t absolutely necessary tbh – applying enough pressure so that the enemy has to choose between a bad outcome or a worse one is enough.
Everything has a counter.
edit:
Or like aydenunited said just wait out their stabilities and then knock them off the point for a few seconds. Once the node is neutralized, they can’t do kitten.
Stop that.
There is no justification for any build that requires two people to counter.
There is no justification. Please stop trying.
I can’t even imagine what goes on in your heads to justify “oh, hey, two people have to fight ONE GUY to counter him, that’s fair and balanced!”
It’s not really that simple.
Bunkers are ultimately killable 1v1, especially if you have steady access to poison. The reason you typically need 2+ people is because you want to take them down before they get support.
There’s a difference.
Because taking damage out of your rotation / play is obviously the best way to fight any class!
You can say the same thing about frost aura, warriors with missile deflection, guardians with wall of reflection, high confusion stacks, etc. There are a variety of situations where it’s beneficial to briefly stop attacking your opponent and it’s not really that big of a deal imo.
Also, I seriously doubt that any decent d/d ele is actually going to sit in your caltrops for a full 5 seconds. Most glassy and balanced d/d builds don’t really have the ability to repeatedly cleanse that many bleed stacks while simultaneously putting out heavy burst.
So, if you’re dying to ele’s who flail around in caltrops… dunno what to say. Different story if it’s 1v2+ I guess.
Nope Creslin, when there are no enemies around i start churning earth just for the blast finisher, and cancel so i can keep doing other things. The explosion at the end doesn’t do any finisher.
If you cancel churning earth you won’t get the might stacks. You have to finish the cast.
I’m not trying to discredit anything, I’m just not sure what your point is.
Yeah, if you want to drop a bunker quickly before he gets support, you’re going to need more than one player. That’s a given. So what? Send a bunker buster +1 to deal with him and then hit another point simultaneously. Put your roamers to work. Pressure the other team in multiple areas so they’re forced to make choices.
Quote from you -
“I have seen great bunkers survive 3 v 1’s, but I put that blame on myself and my 2 other team mates (who are usually pugs) because we don’t really coordinate our attacks; we still treat it as 1 v 1.”
I don’t understand what you expect if this is how you play. Your teammates are usually pugs and you don’t really coordinate? I think you should take a hard look at improving your own play (both individual and team) before calling out external factors – you’d be surprised at what you can overcome and things that seemed over the top before will suddenly be… not so much.
Have you ever seen 2 Bunkers on a mid point? I have. A lot. Down 1, the other rezzes him while having Stability on. Back to square 1. So now it becomes a matter of 4 v 2.
If you’re smashing your head against a point being held by two bunkers then you and your team should probably rethink your strats and come up with better mid-game splits.
Maybe go watch some streams or something? idk. Many teams do what you claim is impossible (or next to impossible) to do.
I made an entire topic about how pairing up one themed balanced class with one high burst class takes out bunkers, often in less than 10 seconds (like pairing your balanced CC spec guy with your thief, or warrior, or ranger) but that post gets no responses, because it’s easier to say bunkers are unbeatable
I think 10 seconds is pretty heavy hyperbole tbh – less than 10 seconds even more so.
Before you can actually control a bunker long enough to drop him, you need him to blow all his stun breaks, stabilities, and other immunities of which most decent bunkers will have several (more or less depending on class). I mean, when fighting a triple cantrip ele you’re gonna have to burn through mist form, cleansing fire, armor of earth, and the earth’s embrace proc before you can really even think about any kind of serious control (not to mention vigor and sigil of energy) – and that’s gonna take a little while usually.
I’m not disagreeing with you in general – bunkers go down under focused assault fast enough, but any decent player with a proper build will tend to last longer than that. Exceptions apply from class to class.
(edited by Noctred.6732)
It’s not an immediate descent so it really depends on the distance you’re trying to travel.
Like on Khylo if you try to RTL from either of the treb platforms to the rooftops you’ll get sucked down to the ground now, whereas before you could clear the gaps – but you can still RTL from the clocktower platform through either of the windows and w/e.
It sucks but oh well.
That’s kinda hilarious.
Which of the two is the bigger responsibility, roaming or point holding?
in PvP
Posted by: Noctred.6732
Roaming is probably the bigger responsibility because -
1. If you fail to reinforce quickly enough, your bunkers are gonna get owned.
2. If you fail to backcap correctly or you make the wrong decision regarding where to go, your bunkers will get owned for nothing.
3. If you fail to keep track of what enemy players are where at any given time, you won’t be able to capitalize on gaps in enemy strats.
Roaming in general just requires a lot more map sense.
Warriors make poor bunkers because they have no consistent access to regen or protection, very lackluster healing even with triple shout cleric’s builds, and poor condi removal compared to other bunkers even with soldier runes.
High health pool and high toughness really doesn’t mean much when you’re trying to bunker – real damage mitigation comes from other sources.
WoW was less zergy than this game for primarily one reason – there was no point system akin to glory. You got extra honor from kb’s and whatever but it was NOWHERE near the amount of honor you got from actually winning your matches, which [usually] forced people to… like… try and do whatever was required to actually win the match. Especially in AB, you’d often see people try and lay out strats prior to the gates opening. It wasn’t uncommon to see communication between players throughout any given match.
In this game, glory pulls people towards selfish play which just results in mass zergs rolling around circle capping free points and tagging stragglers along the way. Why? Cause that’s the path to max glory, plain and simple. Conquest being the only game mode actually exaggerates the problem because it fully supports that style of play. Communication between players is almost non-existent because it isn’t necessary because it makes zero difference whether you win or lose, so long as your personal glory count is high.
This is the single biggest problem with non-tournament PvP at the moment, IMO.
Variety is another problem – currently, there is none. You can add all the secondary mechanics you want, but at the end of the day people will get over the novelties and the gimmicks and realize that they’re still essentially playing the exact same thing over and over again. This can work if that thing people are playing repeatedly is super fun. Unfortunately, conquest just isn’t that interesting, especially when the maps are too small to support the number of players involved and all strategic value/desire to win goes out the window thanks to the glory system.
Most of my 6~ years in WoW were spent in WSG. Why? Cause the format was intense. Chasing down flag carriers, feeling the excitement of returning flags while surrounded by enemies, pulling off crazy maneuvers and pass-offs to cap flags while being chased by the entire enemy team, getting clutch last second returns to win games, and so on – that kitten was so fun for me that I could spend literally all day in WSG and rewards didn’t even matter. It was just fun. Period. Rated WSG was literally a dream come true for me and it was more or less everything I thought it would be.
This game? Nothing like that. Nothing that elicits the same feelings. Even tourneys are approaching the same state cause of no ladders or any sort of matchmaking to speak of. You either stomp or get stomped, learning nothing in the process and getting absolutely nothing out of it. Sometimes, rarely, you get a good game. You can sync queue but tbh that shouldn’t be necessary in this day and age of video games.
So yeah, all in all I’d say GW2’s pvp in its current form is kinda lackluster.
Agree with aydenunited – 5 bunkers might seem annoying to play against, but IMO it’s really not a very strong comp.
For one, all the “run around for minutes in a 1v4” comments are beyond exaggerated. Most bunkers will either be forced off the point or will flat drop to two coordinated players after 20-30 seconds of focused assault, with some exceptions depending on what classes are doing the attacking and how well the bunker plays. Ele’s get hit very hard by immobilize and spammable poison (even triple cantrip ones w/ cleansing fire), engineers are lacking in stability, necros are pretty fragile “bunkers” once their 60 sec cd wells are gone (in addition to lacking stability), and guardians are more or less in the same boat as ele’s.
The mobility with the comp described in the OP is kinda bad as well. Outside of the ele (assuming he constantly swaps between staff and scepter), rotation speed is going to be pretty slow and decent teams will capitalize on that.
Boss killing ability is really bad with that comp and treb will hit that comp hard as well. If one of the bunkers camps your treb all game, it should be even easier to take points so long as your treb operator is mobile and knows how to play cat & mouse w/ whoever the assaulter is.
All in all, I think bunkers can be problematic in a general sense, but definitely NOT with this comp.
(edited by Noctred.6732)
Click an empty space on your screen – this game doesn’t have sticky targeting (unfortunately).
This has been happening for a long while and tbh it’s not really worth it.
You get more glory over time by just playing regular games faster instead of node trading until matches time out.
This is one of my bigger issues with the game’s pvp at the moment – way too many pets resulting in way too much field clutter which gets even worse when dealing with abilities that intermittently drop target.
It’s pretty much a mess.
Why can’t direct damage simply interrupt friendly rezzing for a few seconds, similar to what it does with the self-rezz?.
Because then, with the amount of AoE splash damage in the game, it would be literally impossible to ever revive anyone in a team fight with the sole exception being mist form and maybe one or two other abilities.
A lot of people complain about mesmers but I think though they are challenging to deal with, they are fine as they are. But there’s nothing more annoying than watching a thief spamming heartseeker or cloak and daggering me to my death in 2 hits before I can even react…and I roll as a tough/heal support Ele.
Shatter mesmers are a much bigger threat to bunker ele’s than any kind of thief build IMO.
I agree about the colors though – I wish they’d find some other way to differentiate teams and let people use custom dyes.
The biggest problem with the assist function is that, due to the way assisting is currently implemented, only one target can be marked at any given time across the ENTIRETY of a team. It’s a serious drawback when you have fights happening on opposite sides of a map and it’s especially problematic when you take into consideration the number of pets that can exist on-screen at any given time and the amount of intermittent stealth mechanics that repeatedly drop target.
There really needs to be a way to mark multiple targets simultaneously and assist on each separately. Either that, or make it so that assisting happens off of friendly players rather than directly off of targets – although that might demand either an in-client scripting engine or a modular UI to facilitate quicker access to friendly player frames.
Either way, the current implementation is very limited and one-dimensional.
(edited by Noctred.6732)
Warriors are poor duelists for a variety of reasons, poor bunkers cause they lack protection/regen/condi removal, and slightly above average team fighters at best depending on build.
Overall, it’s a mediocre class.
Between quickness stomps, stability stomps, and stealth stomps – stealth stomps are the easiest to counter by a mile.
IMO most of the “problems” shown in the OP’s video are displays of poor team play rather than broken mechanics.
Yeah, needs a fix.
It probably wouldn’t be much of an exaggeration to say that the one thing which gets me killed the most while playing s/d is RTL bugging out.
My warrior is boring because mistaks dont matter.
I doubt this comment could be any more wrong.
Against players who know how to capitalize on mistakes, making a mistake on a warrior can be far more damaging than making one on an ele. Warriors usually have very small windows in which they can do any kind of significant damage, lackluster healing, [relatively] poor condi removal, very limited access to defensive boons, and no reliable way to disengage from fights because all leaps and charges are impacted by roots and snares (mobile strikes being the sole exception). If you make a mistake, you’re stuck face tanking whatever you got yourself into with a very limited set of tools.
That’s not to say that making mistakes on ele isn’t deadly as well – it can be (I play both classes extensively); but saying that mistakes on a warrior don’t matter is beyond laughable.
Ascendant is also available as a HoM title.
Warriors aren’t that strong.
They’re among the worst duelists in the game at the moment for a variety of reasons, poor bunkers because they lack protection and regen, and average/slightly above-average team fighters depending on build.
The math has been done, it is not arguable.
You might want to personally double check the numbers before making statements like this.
With 20 in water -
Glyph of Elemental Harmony -
w/ zerker’s (260 healing) – 5089
w/ valk’s (544 healing) – 5302
Cleansing Wave and water swap -
w/ zerker’s – 1562
w/ valk’s – 1846
Water Trident -
w/ zerker’s – 1708
w/ valk’s – 1992
Geyser -
w/ zerker’s – 873/tick
w/ valk’s – 944/tick
Regen -
w/ zerker’s – 162/tick
w/ valk’s – 198/tick
The evasive arcana proc and blast finisher scale similarly to GoEH/CW/WT. All of the above continue to scale at the same rate if you max out water and use cleric’s for full bunker builds.
All in all, the returns on some skills are 1:1 while others give slightly less (213 extra healing with 284 healing power on GoEH). Geyser might seem somewhat underwhelming because it’s close to 1:1 across the entire duration rather than per tick, but tbh its real power comes w/ evasive arcana anyway. Healing rain might also seem a little underwhelming, but then again you’re also getting pulsing condi removal.
Anyways, your non-arguable numbers are wrong (20:1 for “many” skills lol?) and there’s a reason why people cry about the 0/0/10/30/30 triple cantrip/cleric’s/earth rune builds – and it’s not cause healing sucks.
(edited by Noctred.6732)
IMO, warriors have (and need) a larger health pool for a number of reasons -
1. Actual health vs. effective health.
In this game, real damage mitigation doesn’t come from toughness or vitality. Rather, it comes from evasion, active shielding, offensive condition application, and so forth. This means that access to vigor, regen, and protection on the defensive side translates into a higher effective health pool; while access to blind and chill on the offensive side translates into the same thing. Warriors have very little access to these boons and conditions, if any, while elementalists have good access to all of the above even in glass builds.
It’s one of the reasons why warriors don’t make very good bunkers.
2. Healing and condi removal.
I play both ele and warrior, among other classes. With a typical s/d valk’s build and evasive arcana over elemental surge, you lose very little damage while gaining a lot of healing potential tied in with condition removal. Warriors cannot hope to match this without a 30 tactics/soldier runes/cleric’s build, which brings their damage to basically 0 – and even then it doesn’t match up.
There isn’t even a question as to which class has more sustain.
3. Ranged vs. melee.
This is obviously a flawed argument because warriors have ranged builds and ele’s usually need to be in melee for at least some portion of a fight – I understand that. However, you should understand that elementalists have ways to consistently avoid or absorb damage when they need to be in melee and have the tools to instantly get out of melee as necessary – and if they do take damage, they have enough regen to recover. Warriors pretty much face tank everyone with nothing but shield block and (maybe) endure pain with no reliable way to disengage from the fight. There are exceptions, of course – GS + mobile strikes allows for quick escapes and many warriors carry shake it off or w/e, but the point is that elementalists have way, way more consistent and reliable access to these tools.
In the end, all of the above plays into EHP (effective HP). That’s really all there is to it. Flat vitality doesn’t mean much.
I primarily main warrior and ele. I also play engi and necro often. A few comments -
1. Elementalist is definitely not the most difficult class in the game. In my experience, that’s probably gonna go to engineers using multi-kit builds. Staff is absurdly simple to play well, especially the 0/0/10/30/30 triple cantrip variant w/ cleansing fire and sigil of energy. S/d glass and hybrid valk builds also aren’t very difficult to play so long as you are accustomed to high APM playstyles and have the capacity to understand and execute basic multi-attunement combos while maintaining some level of situational awareness – something that any serious gamer is going to be able to do.
2. I’ll agree that there is definitely a strange divergence between the amount of effort required to get something done on an ele compared to, I dunno, a warrior. With the build I typically run (axe/mace + sword/shield w/ opportunist and leg specialist), killing people is usually a matter of smartly rotating cripples and stuns while spamming axe 1 and otherwise not getting kited. Killing people as a rifle engi w/ rifle turret and static discharge is probably even easier so long as I can bait dodges. Playing s/d ele tends to be more involved with results that are sometimes (but not always) less profound. However, I wouldn’t say that this makes ele inherently weaker – it’s partly a difference in playstyle and partly skewed damage distribution across weapon skills for some classes (looking at chop and hip shot, among others). Ultimately, all three classes are very similarly capable with each having their advantages in different situations – i.e. warriors are among the worst duelists in the game atm for a variety of reasons, while eles are probably among the best with the only true hard counters being shatter mesmers and some engi builds thanks to high confusion uptime and other condi spam.
3. The worst thing about ele’s right now is the bugs. Hands down, the one thing that gets me killed the MOST when I’m playing s/d is RTL bugging out and sending me nowhere. Fix RTL and general consistency of the class will see a noticeable increase.
Anyways, I dunno. I have perspective from a variety of other classes in and out of tourneys, and elementalists are fairly strong. Yeah, you need to push more buttons faster than some other classes/builds to get results, but this doesn’t make the class weaker – it only means that you have to push more buttons to get to the same place. There’s a difference.
Personally, playing s/d is way more fun to me than anything else I’ve played with the exception of probably full glass rifle engi which is just lol.
None of this is to say that adjustments aren’t needed. I think some things could use changing. However, there’s a lot of over-exaggerated drama about ele’s being ineffective which is, for the most part, completely wrong.
(edited by Noctred.6732)
Actually, it matters a lot. Toughness makes each hit do less damage.
It actually doesn’t matter too much. I occasionally play staff ele with roughly 1800 toughness and c&d/backstab will still drop me in seconds if I don’t avoid it in some way.
This isn’t to say that there’s no way to counter it, there definitely is – toughness just isn’t really one of the counters and I wish people would stop claiming that it is. You have to -
1. Dodge the steal.
2. If you get hit by steal, instantly break basilisk venom.
3. If you get hit by steal and have no stun break, you better hope you have some kinda of insta-cast damage absorb.
If you can’t do any of the above, chances are you’re dead regardless of toughness UNLESS you have a very high health pool as well – which is uncommon for the typical bunker classes.
Two things I’ve had problems with since the betas -
Visual noise
They want us to play the game instead of playing the UI. Fine. Unfortunately, in their efforts the only thing they’ve really managed to do was clutter the screen with a crazy amount of particle diarrhea. Once fights escalate beyond 2v2 or so, the playing field becomes an utter mess of grenade blasts, bomb explosions, flashy fields, and otherwise obnoxious AoE effects. Identifying key abilities becomes next to impossible (especially against asura) and precision dodging becomes an exercise in futility.
I understand that it looks cool or whatever, but there are times when I can’t even verify the position of my mouse cursor on screen for accurate targeting because it gets completely lost within the on-screen noise. Personally, I’d much rather play the UI if it means a cleaner playing field so that I can actually discern WTF is going on in large team fights.
Pets
Between mesmer illusion spam, thieves guild and ambush trap, MM necros, ranger spirits, and spirit weapons, there are times when it becomes literally impossible to target an actual player.
There are just way, way too many pets in this game at the moment and, in extreme situations, the resulting screen clutter is beyond absurd.
There are some other things, but those two items really bother me. The interface in a competitive game needs to be clean (this includes the UI itself and the playing field) – at the moment, GW2 is anything but.
I generally agree that passive damage reflect in a MMO setting is an overall detriment to gameplay. MOBA’s are different for a variety of reasons, so there’s little use comparing them.
The easiest justification I can come up with is Tera which, at one point, allowed people to get flat 30% damage reflect through armor stats (and it might still be that way, I haven’t played in a few months). It was among the single greatest detriments to competitive PvP in the entire game. Burst classes got trashed on for bursting, AoE classes annihilated themselves in large fights, and healers ran around in circles doing jack kitten while their opponents slowly killed themselves.
Retal isn’t quite as bad, but 100% uptime is getting there and all in all I just don’t believe passive reflect should exist in competitive environments – or if it has to exist, then make sure it’s only available for a very limited time so that people are forced to blow it smartly.
As a few others have mentioned, I’m not sure why there has to be a loading screen at all when you respawn.
There are a lot of problems with the downed state, but this isn’t one of them.
Quickness is flat out unreliable against players that know what they are doing.
Kinda true, kinda not. It’s very situational.
Quickness can be unreliable in 1v1’s unless you go out of your way to make yourself unpredictable, but reliability scales upward quickly once more players join the fight -
1. Visual noise. This is a more overarching problem within the game as a whole, but it directly enhances the usefulness of quickness and any other ability that needs to be identified immediately… mostly because these abilities become nigh impossible to identify with the amount of particle diarrhea that the game spews at you unless you have the source player targeted 100% of the time.
2. Endurance is limited and most solid players will try to make you dump your bar on other things prior to using quickness. In 2v2+, this is very feasible. Even in 1v1’s it’s feasible depending on the specific match-up if your build includes more than typical frenzy burst, which newer frenzy builds do.
3. Immobilize is the new stun, many players have realized it, and builds are steadily changing to take advantage of it.
The glass frenzy builds of the betas have long been out of flavor, honestly. Axe frenzy builds are better, flurry/frenzy builds are better, and they’re both way more reliable and sustainable than what most people associate with “frenzy warriors”. Even hammer frenzy builds can be incredibly powerful and outclass the classic GS builds.
Warriors are among the worst 1v1 classes right now for a variety of reasons, but put them in a coordinated environment where your target has to worry about more than just you and the game changes a lot. Quickness has its place, and it’s a very strong place, so long as you don’t use it haphazardly.
That said, I do think quickness in general needs some changes. For starters, give haste and QZ drawbacks that actually mean something significant.
(edited by Noctred.6732)
Chain stuns aren’t really that big of a problem, but chain immobilizes kinda are IMO. I wouldn’t mind seeing DR’s for those.
Or at least give me the ability to spin around in place while rooted.
In WoW, the left mouse button behaves like “free camera”. Noone needs a camera that snaps back. The right mouse button will turn your head around how far it can go (90 degrees), further movement will turn your character.
So, left button = camera, right button = character. There is a lot of connection lost with your character in gw2 compared to wow for that reason alone, that your mouse doesn’ control your character, just the camera facing. The fact that your character realigns himself with the camera facing when pressing forward is just a side-effect.
I don’t really understand what you’re trying to say.
Camera functionality in terms of LMB and RMB is identical in GW2 and WoW. If your character is standing still in either game, both LMB and RMB will only pan the camera. If your character is moving, LMB will pan the camera and RMB will turn your character.
This is the same in both games.
WoW also has options for smart camera. You can enable it, thereby causing the snap back effect that occurs whenever you release LMB while panning. Or you can disable it, which allows you to pan freely without the game auto-resetting the angle for you. This isn’t a side effect of anything. It’s an explicit and intentional camera option that can be toggled on or off.
This is also the same in both games.
So, I guess I just don’t see where the disconnect is. The behavior of LMB and RMB in the context of camera and character movement is 100% identical in both games. The only differences are in responsiveness (inertia, accel), FoV, zoom, and some of the other items you mentioned originally.
I played WoW for a long, long time and it took me all of no time at all to get accustomed to camera and character control in GW2 simply because it’s the exact same thing (albeit less responsive).
Both cameras turn around your character, both when using LMB and RMB, not directly turning your own character. Both have the “free camera” and “turn 180” keybinds which are an unneccesary leftovers in this day.
Just a couple of things -
1. LMB and RMB both pan the camera only if your character is not moving. If you are moving, in any direction, RMB will turn your character while LMB will continue to pan your camera. This is the way it should be and the way it is in most MMORPG’s, including World of Warcraft, which easily has the best camera implementation in the genre.
If, for whatever reason, you really want to turn your character while standing still, you can just press A or D while holding LMB. However, I can’t really think of any functional reason to spin your character around in circles while standing in one spot.
2. Free camera is completely necessary. Without free camera, panning the camera to the rear while running forward in order to target/attack things behind you becomes nearly impossible because the camera will instantly snap back to its default position the moment you let go of LMB.
A lot of games today still use smart camera with no way to disable it. It’s very bad and infinitely inferior to free camera. However, some people like it, so the option is (IMO) necessary.
Basic sequence of events -
1. Got disconnected in the middle of doing Arah.
2. Logged back in dead outside of the instance.
3. The Arah waypoint was contested, so I rez’d nearby and ran back.
4. Giant gate blocking the entrance. Can’t get back into the instance until the Gates of Arah event starts and finishes.
5. The event started a few mins later and finished before the rest of my group finished the clear, so I was like cool I’ll be able to get back in and finish.
6. Nope. Every time I try to zone in I get the “The game client is unable to access the log-in server at this time.” Not really sure what the log-in server has to do with zoning into a dungeon.
Anyways, figured it’s probably a bug.
Agreed on all counts.
The inertia and maccel are especially problematic; the other issues less so (for me) – though still problematic.