Guild Wars 2

Well you can’t just have the legendary back piece unless you’re pretty legendary with your PvP skills. Honestly if you’re playing the leagues because the backpiece is your only goal, you’re definitely going to have a terrible time. This isn’t a usual farm, and you actually gotta be skillful with how you approach it.

And by skillful, I mean either finding a good premade to carry you or being able to carry as a solo queuer.

Honestly it’s not that hard to keep one eye on the minimap at all times, and realize for yourself that home node is being 2v1’d by the enemy and you should back it up, or that you’re in a 1v2 going nowhere and you should really rotate elsewhere. Teammates SHOULDN’T have to point it out in chat and I find text communication a waste of time. Being map aware and not having tunnel vision instantly makes you a better player. The best pug teams I’ve played in have zero words said the entire game because everyone just knows what to do.

If your teammates can’t figure it out, you can always type out the info in team chat, but you don’t necessarily need to have it turned on It’s that or grow a really thick skin so you can laugh off insults and salty players.

Just turn off map chat or team chat and you won’t see any of it.

I’m pretty sure this guy is a troll lol.

I use sigil of intelligence to always get guaranteed true shot crits when it counts.

Cheese is pretty tasty, especially with a bit of salt.

I really don’t agree with trap damage getting nerfed since that’s the only thing keeping DH viable at higher levels of play. If traps were made so that cooldowns didn’t start counting down until the traps were triggered for example, that would be a better way to raise the skill floor and stop the trap spam nonsense on an empty point.

Bunker guard isn’t viable any more, you get melted too fast and easily by HoT builds it sounds good in theory but the power creep has been insane. Bunker mes and auramancer are both better bunkers and bring even more utility to the team.

Also, I’m not defending DH just because I play one. I play a lot of classes, and on all of them including DH, enemy DHs are the easiest kills for me. ESPECIALLY ones that run 4-5 traps and do dumb stuff like stick all their traps in one spot. I don’t want to see a nerf that makes the class completely unviable like warrior.

DH needs adjustments to raise the skill floor, but it doesn’t need nerfs that kill it at higher levels of play.

An empty point with no one guarding…yeah. Half a second is a really long time. My benchmark reaction speed is just above 220ms, and it can hardly be that different in game with a similar scenario like reacting to flashing lights with not much other distraction around.

And even if you’re trapped, pop some blocks or evades or invulns or whatever. Almost every class has access to some these days.

Vague Memory.2817:

Opc.4718:

Vague Memory.2817:

Darknicrofia.2604:

harsh but true reality of traps/DH:

they literally only farm bads.

There is an empty point that no one is guarding or you are leaving the exit of your base and bang after some badly done flashy graphics you are downed in about a 1 sec. Those situations do not distinguish between a good or bad player.

You have a lot of time to react between the trap triggering and you getting trapped by dragon’s maw and eating the full procession of blades damage. Dodging sideways will get you out of most of the damage and isn’t even hard to do because this is an empty point and you should have full endurance. A good player shouldn’t ever get trapped.

In any case, any DH running such a build will have sacrificed all his defensive utilities and should be an extremely easy farm everywhere else for the rest of the game. Train him down and focus him in fights until he learns his lesson and stops playing such a terrible build.

Define lots of time. Fraction of a sec?

Half a second before maw gets you, which is an eternity in gw2 combat. If you can’t react within that time, you gotta train up those reflexes. I mean you know there’s a possibility the traps are there, and those giant flashing lights are hard to miss. If I can do it on aussie internet with 350 ping, I’m sure the average player can as well.

It’s kinda like this:
http://www.humanbenchmark.com/tests/reactiontime

Let’s not forget the second part of my post. Even if you die once, you know the DH has terrible survivability, and it’s basically a 4v5 from there on.

It’s easy to beat with pretty much every current meta spec except thief. It IS stupid easy to play, but it’s equally easy to counter and punish. There is hardly anything unpredictable about traps unless you count the stupidity of the enemy. That’s why it sucks the higher up you go in MMR until you get to the ESL where it hardly sees any representation and is just barely viable.

Some skills should be toned down to raise the skill floor, but a straight nerf to traps would completely make the class unviable across the board. Anet needs to be careful with how they balance DH or it will be the next warrior.

I’ve written a couple paragraphs further up, actually read and discuss those points please.

Vague Memory.2817:

Darknicrofia.2604:

harsh but true reality of traps/DH:

they literally only farm bads.

There is an empty point that no one is guarding or you are leaving the exit of your base and bang after some badly done flashy graphics you are downed in about a 1 sec. Those situations do not distinguish between a good or bad player.

You have a lot of time to react between the trap triggering and you getting trapped by dragon’s maw and eating the full procession of blades damage. Dodging sideways will get you out of most of the damage and isn’t even hard to do because this is an empty point and you should have full endurance. A good player shouldn’t ever get trapped.

In any case, any DH running such a build will have sacrificed all his defensive utilities and should be an extremely easy farm everywhere else for the rest of the game. Train him down and focus him in fights until he learns his lesson and stops playing such a terrible build.

There’s actually quite a bit of time to react between the trap triggering and you getting locked into a potential dragon’s maw so you eat the full procession of blades damage. If you dodge sideways as soon as you see the traps trigger, you’ll get away with a small scratch.

In any case, if a guardian is running that kind of build, he should be an easy farm everywhere else in the game because he has sacrificed ALL his defensive utilities for traps. Train him down hard and focus him every fight until he learns his lesson.

Lurock Turoth.9085:

How easy DH’s are to beat on their own is not the issue. The problem is the ammunition of hate they can put down in a team fight. Power based traps were a bad idea…period.

DH 1v1s against most meta builds are an uphill battle, and sticking traps in the middle of a team fight leaves the DH extremely vulnerable. A bit of focus fire will mean the DH can’t combo his trap and that halves his damage. Popping stability when you see the trap come up is also a good idea to prevent stray ccs from shoving you through it.

The other traps like procession of blades and dragon maw which put out more oomph in a team fight means the DH is losing out on vital defensive utilities. A DH running such a build shouldn’t even be a factor in team fights because he will melt so fast, or have no JI to teleport and trap combo people.

If your team has a DH, he should probably concentrate on neutralizing the enemy DH in team fights. Otherwise, take the initiative yourself, don’t tunnel vision in team fights, and immediately pressure the DH if he shows his face. If he focuses on you, he can’t focus on the team fight, and he probably wont get far in a 1v1 if you can dodge the true shots.

I’m sure DH can be toned down a bit to raise the skill floor, but a straight damage nerf to traps is not the answer to the “1 shot trap” problem. The class is already barely viable at the top.

I’m already derailing this topic so I wont go into details here lol.

The only competitively viable DH build runs 2 traps – 1 heal 1 damage trap, so this is the build I’ll talk about. Any build that runs more than 2 traps sacrifices too much defensive ability to be anything other than gimmicky one trick ponies. This build takes a lot of setting up to max out the damage – tt involves cc-ing you through the trap, and stability is a straight up hard counter. The trap border can be dodged across.

DH is extremely squishy once the F3 (and renewed focus) is blown. It’s a pure glass build after all. DH has 1 consistent source of condi cleanse on a huge cooldown. Baiting the cleanse then condi bursting will down the DH very fast. DH F2 heal/cleanse is very obvious and easy to predict/interrupt, unless they chain the F3 beforehand, after which they better start running because they’re completely out of defenses. Reapers, mallyx revs and druids are all very disadvantageous matchups for the DH since they can easily bait, condi burst then cc.

DH is hard countered by auramancers and have no where near enough damage to 1v1 them. Stick an auramancer in the middle of the team fight and a bad DH is liable to kill himself on stray reflect auras. Scrappers can out sustain DH, have high stealth uptime to avoid getting targeted by the bow, short cd blocks and reflects on the hammer, and a ton of ccs. DH vs DH is all about the mind games and getting the opponent to waste his defenses first.

DH has one source of stability on their F3 which is also their primary defensive ability, after which they can be stunlocked quite easily. Slickshoes in particular are very effective.

If you focus down the DH at the start of the fight, he won’t have time to pause and throw true shots out at you and will soon have to bail out of the fight. DH doesn’t want to be in melee range for too long, but needs to do so in order to put down traps, which is when the team should be focusing him so he can’t concentrate on pulling off the cc combo.

ESL plays are the closest thing you will see to perfect mechanical interaction between classes, and guards are so hilariously outclassed by other meta builds except thief. Classes SHOULD be balanced around their perfect mechanical interactions because anything less is a player fault and l2p issue. Guards just happen to have a lower skill floor making it easy to pick up and be effective, but the effectiveness quickly drops off compared to other classes.

Taking a nerf hammer to it out of kneejerk reaction to inexperienced players complaining will make it the next warrior class, and we all see how much of a dive it took in the past couple months because the mob all got out their pitchforks. Getting one shotted because you walked into 5 traps then stood in all the damage makes it about as OP as a rifle warrior one shotting you. In other words, you got killed by a one trick pony, who should then be punished by the rest of the team for running a crappy build with no survivability.

Guard needs some fine tuning – nerf in certain areas and buffs in others, and hyperbolic language doesn’t contribute anything to the discussion.

tl;dr any sort of 1 shot trap guard build is completely worthless outside the one time you get baited into the traps and for some reason didnt just dodge out of it. It’s completely ineffective at higher levels of play and a straight nerf to traps would break the class at more than just the lower levels.

Yep guards 2 shot everyone, that’s why it’s been so effective in ESL /s

It just sounds like you want the prestigious PvP wings without putting any effort into the PvP part of it then.

Well if you want the PvP legendary wings, you gotta do a lot of PvP unfortunately. It sounds like sPvP isn’t your favorite mode, so maybe you might enjoy the game more if you aimed for content in other areas, like the fractal legendary.

Don’t bother with the achievements, and it’s avoided! Also you only need to win 5 matches on two classes to progress the meta achievement.

Reikou.7068:

Or perhaps the worst situation would be if the matchmaking system doesn’t even take League position into account and simply matches you based on another system (such as our current MMR-system.) in which case there will be a disjoint between player skill and their position in the Leagues, and the League system will once again be a completely meaningless grind like our last “points-based leaderboard,” and the lower MMR you are , the faster you rise in the leagues.

ayyyyyy lmao
;_____________;

Soa Cirri.6012:

If the argument is “DH virtues > base, with no trade-offs”, and your argument is “there are negligible trade-offs” you consider the entire argument ridiculous and utterly wrong? Because you’ve been using mighty condescending language about the OP, going so far as to call the entire thing factually wrong, which means declaring his DH>base virtues argument factually wrong as well.

The tradeoffs are not negligible…

The inability to instant cast the abilities is HUGE, along with the fact that F2 and F3 can now be interrupted (and easily too in the case of F2). The old F2 was a fire and forget condi clear free heal life saver, but now it takes ages to activate before the condis are cleared and during that timeframe, if you don’t F3 BEFORE you’ll more than likely be interrupted. If you get stacked with life threatening condis in the middle of casting, you can no longer instantly clear it – you either interrupt yourself or finish casting and take that extra few ticks of damage. I would take the old F2 over the new one any day.

F3 can no longer be cast in the middle of an action like stomp or rez, which means you can no longer have on-react stability available, which is a big game changer in many cases. ONE example, if an enemy shows up while you are in the middle of rezzing someone, you’re pretty much screwed. You’re unlikely to have wasted F3 if the coast looks clear, which means if the enemy gets the jump on you, you HAVE to break the rez.

And F1…is obvious and can be dodged or LoS’d. Or if it hooks on to you, you run far enough away so the tether breaks. Or you LoS so the pull shoves you up against a wall rather than a trap. The old F1 charged one of your attacks but the attack didn’t really look any different so it was more luck than anything else if you could dodge it.

Sure the virtues are an upgrade in SOME aspects, but there are significant drawbacks and new counters that open new windows of opportunity to counter a guardian that didn’t exist before. In other words, they aren’t “mechanically broken” like OP claims. OP didn’t do his research and should pick better examples if he wants to get his point across.

Soa Cirri.6012:

indignant bellicosity

What lugubrious drollery!

Yeah it triggers with a radius of 180, pulls in anyone standing 240 away, and locks you into space of 90 where you can’t move without bumping the sides. The new visual effects don’t really reflect the nature of the trap which might seem confusing – especially since it’s easy to cover it with other symbols and combo fields.

They “fixed” the visual noise so dragon’s maw is a tiny little circle on the ground. It’s not technically invisible or bugged.

Refer to the blue patch in the bottom right corner:

Thieves were taken more than engineers, guardians and warriors, and tied with ranger and necro in the NA pro leagues, so it’s not like “nobody plays it anymore”. EU has a weird bunker meta going on so we’ll ignore them.

There’s been several threads about this already, and as usual, the responses will be the same. Hotjoin was never meant to be balanced or fair – players could join any time they want and leave any time they want with no restrictions – it’s a live test environment for you to run your build through the grinder. Once you add balancing and restrictions, you’ve got yourself another unranked queue and there goes the entire point of hotjoin.

What anet should really do though, is remove the level 10 restriction on playing in unranked. And get on with leagues already so the esport types and premades can stop queuing in unranked.

Enemy DH traps are also hard to tell from friendly ones when everything is covered in combo fields from both teams – especially test of faith. A little red outline really isn’t enough, doubly so when DHs from both teams drop their traps close to each other. Maybe anet should color the entire test of faith trap red for enemy teams, so we don’t have to spend the entire time in combat squinting at the floor.

After the patch, dragon maw has been deliberately reduced to a tiny little glowing circle on the ground that gets easily covered by other fields. Running into the sides of the circle knocks you down. Why anet thought this was a good solution to the “visual noise” problem, I have no idea.

The traps aren’t technically invisible, just rather extremely difficult to tell apart from the mess of combo fields that get splashed around.

I suggest people roll a DH, try out some traps against NPCs or other players, and really observe how they actually work. DH players get pretty predictable, and even if you can’t see the ‘invisible’ dragon maw trap, you can easily tell when one might be placed down and how to counter it.

Also, I’ve never encountered an “invisible Procession of Blades”, but DH does have a bag full of other face melting tricks that you may have failed to avoid.

If you want to play the min max stat game, roaming in wvw is pretty good. sPvP is completely normalized though – everyone has access to the same gear tier immediately.

Well, nice 5v1 :P

There’s not a whole lot of difference between exotic and ascended gear, and there’s no stat difference between ascended and legendary gear. You don’t have to get them if you don’t feel like it.

There’s a ton of people out there who like the concept of challenging raids, and raids is what they paid for when they bought HoT. Overcoming these challenges is an awesome form of content. If you don’t like it, nothing is stopping you from ignoring it, and the best thing is, you’re not missing anything in terms of progression! If you’re not willing to put in the effort to get legendary armor and the QoL stat change it allows, you can farm yourself a set of ascended armor instead through other content.

Also, anet has already said that ascended tier stats is the last tier that will ever be added. It was not part of the original game because they didn’t polish it enough in time for release, but it was always intended to be part of the game at some point.

The raid DIDN’T in fact get beaten within 15 minutes. That was just pure BS. Check out this twitter post by DnT attempting some backpedaling damage control:

http://i.imgur.com/suxl7xf.png

When you’re in a team fight…the enemy should be ccing you into oblivion and then piling on some condis for good measure – not letting you free cast your pew pews.

The people who yap on in the most obnoxious way when you start losing a match are usually the bad players.

Terrorsquad.4802:

Drennon.7190:

This is cringeworthy.

Thank you :>
Tried my best <3

Out of character! OOC OOC OOC

Sounds like the elite trap, which requires stability to get out of. Think of it like the slickshoe oil put all around you.

It doesn’t sound like it’s an extremely rare drop, it’s just that hardly anyone bothers with DS champs like the Treasure Mushroom, which certainly explains the length of time it took before the boots appeared on the market. Pretty sure that as soon as this becomes common knowledge, the market will crash fast as people start seriously farming it.

If both teams are equally skilled, then it simply comes down to a matter of composition. If they hard counter you, there’s about bum all you can do except switch classes. When they take a lead on you like that, it tends to snowball into losses by large margins. It doesn’t mean they’re significantly better than you.

Lord Victor.2174:

You know it’s OP when you have 2-3 dragon hunters on each team. Just compare number of core specializations vs elites. On one side, Cogbyrn is right, it came out recently so everyone might be just trying it, but in time the numbers won’t change if there is no balance patch, that’s for sure. Just try to beat any decent player running elite specialization while you’re running core.

Everyone reads about how OP DH is, so I guess everyone bandwagons onto it, whether or not it has any merit. Anecdotally, I’m already seeing a lower proportional usage compared to classes like ele/tempest, scrapper and rev while doing a bunch of queues over the weekend.

That said, core medi guardian can beat DH fine. It is incredibly easy to blind the big attacks and bait the traps, and running full medi means you have a lot more sustain in a small scale skirmish compared to DH. DH of course, performs much better in a team fight due to the massive AoE damage, CC, and area control potential, along with the ability to dish out damage while sitting safely at range, none of which is particularly relevant once you’re no longer in a team fight.

There’s plenty of vanilla class counters of various elite specs, so the elite specs are by no means the end all and be all. It’s just a different play style for the most part, and have different weaknesses compared to the core spec.

I’ve just been vendoring them, so if they are required in the future I’m screwed

It’s equivalent would be invulnerability – you are immune to ALL physical damage but still take ticks from conditions applied before you went invuln. Ditto with stuff like blurred frenzy and other evades.

Have you seen that champion rabbit in uncategorized fractals? Bloody OP thing.

Asura is clearly the best and only choice.

Yes they’re a bit small, but good things come in small packages :P If you want to look eipc, get the t3 cultural armor.

Yeah it’s not particularly hard to avoid. To get the most use out of it at a higher level of play, you have to be actively trying to cc your enemies through it.

It’s an instant cast stun break if traited for it, but appears to have a cast time for the actual shield proportion that can be interrupted. It’s a very clunky setup.

Sounds like the revenant Herald specialization. The spec pulses out boons depending on which skill you’ve activated, and it produces a pinkish aura at the same time with symbols around it indicating the active skills.

Ragnar is unfortunately quite correct about it being easily countered if you know what you’re doing :P I queued with it for an afternoon against some higher end players and it wasn’t as groundbreaking as I hoped.

The cc was great for some clutch saves and team fights, but I struggled in 1v1s and got squished easily if I got focused. The build shined the most if I could teleport and +1 into the middle of a big team fight when everyone has blown most of their initial defenses. Anyone trapped inside the ward would get shredded. I’m convinced hammer can make a return into the meta though, the ccs are just so good. It’s just a matter of finding the right build :o