Guild Wars 2

joneb.5679:

Tibstrike.2974:

Laylie.5703:

Junkpile.7439:

You don’t even need these foods in www. Conditions doesn’t tic more than couple sec anyways.

WUT

I’m sure he is referencing the fact that in zerg battles, the condition clears are pretty constant and most conditions, besides immobilize, are cleared before they do significant damage.

This is not the case while roaming where the condition meta is still dominant, and seems to only be getting stronger as time passes on.

If folks are saying conditions are not effective in a zerg i think it hasnt be studied properly as many condition makers like guardians can near constantly reapply conditions as quickly as they are taken off. In a zerg battle the condition mentality must not be duration but speed of reapplication.

What you just blurted out tells me you have not fought against a properly built group comp that can pretty much nullify incoming condition applications.

Without using the -duration food or runes.

Hint: They commit the apparently unforgivable sin of trading in dps maximizing skills and traits for ones that help with condition management, being sure in the knowledge that staying up and cleansed is better effective dps than the builds people put together with no condition management tools included but all the shiny damage boosters that do zip while they are tasting dirt.

Everything in this game is spammy, not just conditions. DD is spammy, CC is spammy, Boons are spammy, and so is healing.

People just complain about conditions more because they can’t stack armor and ignore them as well as they can power damage.

Trying to kill anyone who refuses to stay and fight as a power spec necro against that combo is pretty futile as well thanks to how slow you are. You have one gap closer that often will not hit in broken terrain (Dark Path). Most of your tools to keep someone engaged are conditions.

Trying to fight as pure condi PU Mesmer against that is rather hellish too. I imagine any condi build will have issues against that.

Basically you end up being forced to run the +duration food just to deal any noticeable damage; speccing for hybrid damage does not work well since those that run Melandru + Lemongrass often maximize toughness as well.

Drarnor Kunoram.5180:

My advice for playing against condition builds is a bit strange. Unless you have a lot of vitality, play as though you were a Zerker build. Knights, Clerics, Berserkers, Rabid, Rampagers, etc. all go down equally fast to condition damage, but all of them (save Cleric, which stands the best chance of those I mentioned) can pump out damage faster than condition builds. Time is not your friend when facing condition damage, so you need to get in, do your thing, and get out, avoiding as much as you can in the process. In other words, typical Zerker playstyle.

This. Many people optimize for anti power damage defenses; then condition damage chews through them like a hot knife through butter because for some reason they decided to play the same versus both damage types.

It obviously does not go well for them based on the number of complaint threads.

Junkpile.7439:

Good tips. Run around, swing air like idiots and hope that thief is blind upscaled glass cannon who doesn’t yet know what dodge is.

Happens more often than you’d think. A lot of them also don’t get that they have buttons to spam with dagger other than 2, 2, 2, 2, 2…..they’ll even open with it out of stealth!

But seriously; tag them with conditions (save the good ones for after they unwisely burn what removal they have), realize that your attacks don’t require target lock to hit them, realize that invis is not invuln, and realize you can’t run glass nearly as much on non stealth classes in pvp unless you have really good reflexes or you’ll just end up attracting vultures, I mean, thieves from miles away for the free kill.

Carighan.6758:

Dee Jay.2460:

In PvP however, ease of application, availability of counters, telegraphs, being able to kite while still dealing damage, the fact that conditions help cover each other etc. are all far more problem

So basically, we’re lacking a conditions-toughness?
As long as the stat would be exclusive, that could work out. Could replace vitality’s +HP function with this, as +HP is rarely useful and just makes balancing PvE a pain.

….sneaky. That’s technically a nerf since +HP works globally against all damage types.

A: No. You are intended to use vitality to soak it instead and the plethora of heals and invulnerability skills that work just as well versus condition damage outside of poison as well as the multitude of condition removal options afforded to each class.

If you stacked toughness and ignored the tools at your disposal with which to handle condition damage, it is your fault you died to a damage type that has a lower peak obtainable dps thanks to the condition caps.

And hey, thanks to the ferocity change there will be a bit less obtainable peak power damage out there so less toughness is needed which means you can now use that new-found flexibility in your stat budget to add in some vitality.

Junkpile.7439:

This condi burst is so op. Enemy landed 8 skills combo and i forgot use dodge, stun breaker and condi removal.

OP HAX!!!11!!!!!!!111!!!

ManaCraft.5630:

Virtute.8251:

Population distribution doesn’t need to be mitigated.

Ehm … that’s exactly what your suggestion does. Rearrange population to mitigate poor distribution.

Bingo. And where strongly encouraging the higher population servers to disperse across the lower peon servers wins out over even more mega consolidation, like what has been suggested here, is that the engine this game uses does not handle anything over 50 or so players in one spot very well.

So this proposed method of population redistribution would very likely end up with a less satisfactory overall experience than other methods.

(WvW and sometimes spvp centric blurb)

Yeah; I think the amount of +toughness gear out there lends itself to the “let attacks hit me and then whine when the condi damage kills me” mindset.

People get used to stacking so much combined armor instead of vitality so that they can afford to tank hits from power builds but forget that condition damage is going to ignore all that armor and it is going to ramp up quickly if they neglect to do anything about it.

Which is kind of the point of condition damage.

Well, yes, there is no one magic bullet for the flaw of allowing players to team/server stack to the extent that was allowed, especially well over a year of letting it happen.

Either way; it would behoove the Devs to prioritize doing something about it since quite frankly WvW is effectively the endgame right now. Sure, you also get Living story releases that are gated by how fast they can be created at the minimum acceptable quality, or endlessly running dungeons/open world events that do not change in any meaningful fashion…..but WvW will always have shifts in tactics and builds and opponents often enough to keep it far fresher than the other content.

mango.9267:

As the title suggests, the idea is to lower the number people able to play on a map. I’m not sure how the algorithm works now, but the current system makes 50-60 man blobs possible without queueing the map. The proposal is to make the queue hit at, say, 40-50 players on the map.

I feel this could address many of the recurring problems that players bring up here.

1) It decreases blobbing. If the queue is 40-50 people, it becomes inefficient to stay in a 40-50 man blob. Zergs would probably naturally split up into 15-20, with smaller havoc and roaming groups.

2) It decreases the influence of coverage without being biased towards any time zone. If the player cap is decreased on all maps, it becomes a bit easier to defend structures. As it is now, some servers are able to run 60 man blobs over BL’s of 10-20 defenders.

3) It decreases the influence of population. Same reason as above.

4) It discourages server stacking. If the player cap is lowered to 40-50 people per map, some servers will easily see 250+ in queue for all maps, even post-Season. At some point, it becomes better for guilds to just transfer off to a lower populated server. This offers guilds some reason to look into dead servers.

5) It decreases the amount of lag players experience. Self-explanatory.

I realize this sounds viscerally unappealing at first, and I don’t pretend there are no cons to it. But after thinking about it, it would help with many of the recurring issues. Thought I’d open the thought for discussion here.

Add in scaled server transfer costs while you are at it to ease the pains of forcing the player population to self balance better instead of stack to win. Just make sure to update the ranks/cost scale as often as feasible to properly let it react to population migration.

And possibly a couple extra borderlands maps with similar limitations. A sky and underground version of the EB map might do the trick there. Spread people out across more maps; thus reducing the blob sizes.

You don’t have to go full one or the other. You can just take enough Knight’s to get to around 30% base crit chance; take traits that grant you fury (or just run with Warriors), and take the 50% crit chance in DS trait…or some oil/precision stack sigils

Then top off the rest with Cavalier gear.

If people spent any where as much energy learning to deal with conditions as they did crying on the forums about them they’d be far better players.

Drarnor Kunoram.5180:

@naphack: try using a sword. That gives you condition cleanse (initiative-based, too!). Alternatively, Shadowstep in utilities. Or trait into Shadow arts. Or don’t get hit with the conditions in the first place.

This.

Also; realize that there will be particular builds that will be your kryptonite in direct engagements. These will usually for a Thief include facing a lot of condi application and enough personal defenses to survive burst.

Many Thieves seem to have similar issues until they realize they technically have better sustain via repeated disengage→reset if they choose to use them.

Carighan.6758:

mrauls.6519:

To be honest if confusion was toned down I’d be happy. That’s the ONLY thing making condi spamming professions so ridiculous right now. If they didn’t have access to crazy amounts of confusion it’d be an even playing field

It was toned down by 50% not long ago. You didn’t notice? O.o

Well the swirly FX and the damage tooltips over yourself and the icon on the buff/condition bar combined aren’t enough to get people to stop killing themselves so I am not surprised many also did not notice the global reduction.

Yeah just run trident. Yes it sucks you can’t use certain elites and utilities underwater, but a well used trident makes up for that a lot.

I’d also like to steal underwater lifeblast for land.

Unless we hear otherwise in reference to the new Death trait, it will be the only healing Necro gets while in DS; all other healing sources will still be blocked.

Because that is the worst possible interpretation and this is the Necromancer class we are talking about after all.

So keep that in mind when theory crafting a new build.

Which is sad really because it gave Mesmer a purpose in zerg v zerg outside of portal and veil bot.

Cogbyrn.7283:

Drarnor Kunoram.5180:

Broscience.8412:

Because the targets are moving, dodging etc. I’m not saying PVT can’t outdamage a Dire warrior in a fight because that’s not the case, but it won’t do it all the time like on a static target. Do you understand or do I have to explain that in 10 more posts?

All right, you finally made a clear, concise statement. Now, what remains sounds pretty balanced to me: two different specs, both focused on durability, putting out similar levels of damage in different ways: one up front, one over time. Since either can out-damage the other, that variance comes down to play on both the damage dealer and the target.

That’s what I read. So what’s the problem?

In this specific case it appeared to be a typical case of goalpost moving before clarification was made.

But in a broader meta sense….

The people that think they should not have to have cleanses instead of precious DPS booster skills. Or trash vitality as a worthless stat then kvetch when the awful bad condis make their hp’s gone.

Or the abundance of people that try to frame only power damage as avoidable and balanced when a large number of condition attacks ride along with power damage so if one did not avoid one, by definition they did not bother to avoid the other and are as such complete hypocrites.

Or the people that try to say condi is uncounterable and evil when you often get less overall dps for your stat investment, more things that work to negate condi damage than power damage, and a hard dps cap that cannot be bypassed when it comes to group play.

What you get in return is the ability to bypass armor and protection; reduce enemy healing, damage, and mobility, some soft and hard CC, and the sweet tears of those that can’t see their own culpability in their defeat.

Alternate ideas:

Give the pets a gap closer in their rotation. Then they’ll hit far more often.

Lower the cool-down on pet summons. Then it won’t matter so much when one dies to AE spam.

Brando.1374:

hooma.9642:

Brando.1374:

hooma.9642:

1 guy mentioned it already. just implement a hard cap for maximal condi-dmg per second on a guy depending on life. then we have the same like in gw1. there it was not possible to get more then 10 degeneration ticks.

with that it should not be possible anymore to burst with condis. thats the only problem we have atm with condis. and thats not really a condi problem, its a game problem. the game or engine provides to much things that works additive without a cap or dimishing returns. so everything that overextend the border of being ok gets smelley cheese.

its every where.

evadespam, condisspam, certain boonspam,cc spam and so on. the game needs CAPS!

25 stack limit is a cap.

but its a wrong cap. its independed from the one it affects. it just count the number of stacks. 1 stack could do 1 dmg or 1000.. with a max dmg-cap and not amount of stacks it would not matter if the target has 1000000 health or 100. nor would the dmg per condi matter or the amount of different dmg-condis. it would always be real DAMAGE OVER TIME, like it should be. and not a CONDI-BURST like it can be very often in this game. attacking an ele or guardian with condis is different then attacking a necro or warrior. with that change different classes with less condis could also play a valid condi-build if they reach the dmg-cap fast enough just with less cover-condis. it would also prevent condi-bunker stacking as teamcomposition.

overstacking the dmg-cap would prevent healticks like it was in gw1.

1 stack of any condition (burning) will require around 2700 condition damage to go over 1k damage.
Use http://gw2.hazno.net/ to calculate how much damage you will deal or get.

condition builds are capped on damage due to the limit of stacks and how conditions override eachother.

Which is a huge portion of why you won’t see more than a few condi users in organized group compositions in higher tier WvW…..you take just enough to punch through the AE cleanse spam but more than that runs a risk of self nerfing your damage potential just to deal any damage that way.

Once you scale group combat size up past a certain point it is almost always unquestionably more effective to just run a pure power comp that does not have to deal with the condi drawbacks.

Meh.

The zerg meta will still continue to be dominated by power damage based builds. Roaming will still have a significant condition presence.

About the only meaningful change is now it will be slightly harder to burst someone to death before they can react or a CC wears off, as well as making it justifiably harder to retain defenses if you choose to maximize offense. Less unquestionably optimal choices in armor/trinket stat array choices.

This is not a bad thing.

Drarnor Kunoram.5180:

I play condition builds a lot, and I have to say, THIS IS A HORRID IDEA. The game is balanced around tradeoffs. Merging two stats (doesn’t even matter which two stats it is) causes massive problems in the game. In this case, it also would mean that Condition Damage becomes exponentially scaling: each point being worth more than every prior point. Again, a terrible design decision. It’s one thing to have multiplicative scaling as you do with Power/Precision/Ferocity, but exponential scaling is an absolute nightmare for attempting balance.

Pretty much this. The game already over rewarded specialization; altering the stat lines to exponentially scale internally would just be obscene.

It is something so obvious that we really should not have to type out a long thoughtful reply to such an absurd suggestion.

Thus….

/jranger

Cush.4063:

MiLkZz.4789:

Condis are broken and nobody can deny it. They are OP when roaming with less than 5 people and they are UP in zerg fights. It wont be easy to fix them. To be completely honest, I don’t know how to fix them either. Well atleast not for zerg fights as making them viable would make them immediately broken.

Why are condis OP?
1. The stats, as been said before only 2 stats are important. Condition damage and duration. Duration ain’t even so important tho, you just get it from the food anyway. Precision is only important for certain classes up to a certain point. But good that you can get it all on the rabid set. Dire is even worse for like necros. They don’t really need precision and can go rediculously tanky while still pumping out max damage.

2. Some conditions have too many effects. Poison deals damage AND cuts your healing, Chill increases cooldown on skills AND reduces your mobility with -66% (more than cripple…) AND often the skill has a dmg factor to it aswel. Weakness reduces your endurance regeneration by A LOT AND cuts your dmg almost in half.

3. Conditions are a passive form of defense, only making the armor stats of the condition spammer more valuable. Conditions like cripple and chill will cut the mobility and conditions are always spammed from range. Chill increases CD on skill so your condition clearing is less often available and your hard hitting skills will have insane CDs. And weakness which is almost a 50% dmg cut to power builds. Fear as form of CC to stop the damage on you aswel. Just combine all of these and you have a harmless sheep.

4. Not only do condition clearing have longer cooldowns than condition spam skills, they often have longer cast times aswel. So a full condi cleanse that takes you a few skills will interrupt the time you can apply pressure on the enemy. So he can heal back up or has an easier time spamming condis. Stunbreakers or stability is always instant, making regular CC much weaker than chill/cripple/immobilize.

5. The amount of conditions that deal damage is to high aswel. Poison/ confusion/ burn/ torment/ bleeds/ fear (only necro and that ain’t bad). Not only deal they damage, but a lot of dmg aswel. 10 bleeds alone deal 1.3-1.4k/s, burn 800/s, poison 350/s, 5 stacks of torment 1.2k/s (while running). That is way more damage per second than my power builds can do if I fight an opponent that dodges well. And don’t forget all of these are applied from a distance.

6. How easy conditions are applied is rediculous, a well played necro can burry the damaging ones too making sure they wont get removed. Some dangerous skills have pretty much no warning to when they are cast, barely a visual queue, instant and often are unblockable aswel. I mean how much easier do you want to make it? Necro marks for example, they are all the same. Which one do you have to dodge?

7. The amount of conditions is getting rediculous. There are 12! conditions in this game, who brings enough condi clearing for 12? Only a few skills do a full condition clearing and they have long cooldowns. And most classes relying on conditions can almost apply each and everyone of them. Definitely necros.

8. The duration is sometimes completely out of hand. 35s of chill? 1min+ of bleeds? kitten of poison? 1min on cripple? 20s of torment? I get that they have to have a decent duration or they are not worth it to be cleansed off, but conditions as dangerous as chill shouldn’t be able to be stacked for 30s+.

9. The speed at which conditions are applied, a condi burst necro/engi/thief can literally come close to the burst speed of a full zerker thief in damage. And the thief is done after 2s, conditions only get worse and tick harder. I have literally seen 20k health dissapear in under 4s by conditions. Conditions should take more time to apply.

Combine all of this and you’ll notice how bad conditions are for small scale combat. Conditions are the reason to why people join the zerg. They have too many advantages and not enough downsides

Beat me to it. I love how everyone is completely ignoring this post. Makes sense because the post is so true. Conditions are just way too easy to apply. It doesn’t matter if soldiers is better than dire or w/e. It’s the fact that it’s a lot more difficult to apply direct damage than conditions as well as the fact that you can spec defensively with it. 2 huge advantages. I mean how do you dodge a necro mark? Just guess? Which mark should you dodge and how do you know the difference? There are so many ways to apply conditions as well. I mean the post speaks for itself

Marks are the worst possible example you could have picked.

They have both a power and condition damage component and as such both damage types are equally hard to dodge.

/jranger

Ironically nerfing clone damage has resulted in traits like DE and other clone generation boosters becoming vitally important in increasing soft defense and damage out put….since the main remaining use is shattering/clone death for most clones, staff clones being a notable exception.

glaphen.5230:

Kravick.4906:

glaphen.5230:

Amazing how you get when I didn’t know one thing about a new sigil that still isn’t good enough to sacrifice using precision for on most builds and after the next patch all sigils will work like it anyways. The guy supporting you plays a condition build as well, how surprising! Also vitality offers no sustain so its a soft counter to everything for the first few seconds of a fight.

Clueless. Completely, and utterly clueless.

There is no point in debating with a person who wishes to remain ignorant.

Teach me please, what do I lack master.

Can’t teach those that refuse to learn.

The main thing is that the options presented totally strip any and all agency from the player on how they present their character.

Some of us see the dialogue as being in poor taste/asinine/etc and wish they had another set of choices.

One of the key points to immersion is maintaining player agency. The dialogue options presented failed that miserably. Would have been better with the silent protagonist treatment where we could fill in the blanks on our own.

phys.7689:

Overkillengine.6084:

It’s because they have no impulse control and think everything they want should be free and they should get it RIGHT NOW!

/Veruca Salt

its because i have impulse control, and anet is making it really easy for me not to defeat it at all.

new and old system solution to equation, that many of the defenders also admit is their plan.
use old stones to transmute high end items they already unlocked on multiple charachters
net result anet gets no more money, or perhaps one charge sale if the person in question ran out. And nobody hunts or uses more than one set

my system
anet gets more money as users begin to use transmutation stones on any gear they like, even if only for special occaisons, in game players begin to collect various gear sets just for options, and have new horizotal progression goals with cosmetics.

problem is the system is close to being a smash hit for everyone, instead after about a week everything will be the same as before, other than having a better window shopping app.

The new system is no matter how you try to goal post move a massive improvement over the old system and while Anet does give up some immediate profits in the form of 800 gem purchases of the same set of skins over and over by the same account for different characters; they get to make far more overall sales and thus profits from the smaller but much more frequent transmutation transactions.

Those of us without the obsessive need to swap clothing every five seconds will be doing just fine.

More than a few games that had free transmutes also had a sub fee at release. CoH did, and so did DCUO. GW2’s monetization model has always been different from the get go. And actually; even then it cost in game money in those games and/or was not account wide like the previewed system is. Regardless the point still stands, the game is not free, they have to make money to keep it running somehow. GW2 just happens to lean heavier on transactions for cosmetics than other games did. Either way you gotta cough up some dough or the game will go under eventually.

In the new system you only have to run specific content that otherwise bores you to tears enough to get one copy of a particular skin for all your characters; and then you can pay for the transmutation costs by doing whatever content you like instead in order to drum of the cash for transmutation charges.

Less player time wasted on boring content and Anet still gets a decent revenue flow.

Some classes don’t even feel right until certain critical traits are reached; so unless there is some very heavy re-balancing in the level structure and xp rate this part does worry me.

Plus not having those stat points you used to get from 10-29 via trait lines is a nasty hit on effectiveness when it comes to certain content.

I’d assume they will keep the racial requirement since it is supposed to be a set of armor skins unique to each race.

It’s because they have no impulse control and think everything they want should be free and they should get it RIGHT NOW!

/Veruca Salt

Volmarg.4310:

You won’t get rid of ppl like me
ANET!

What’s gonna happen with ppl like me who bought many abysses/celestials etc for each new chars we made!

You just gonna leave it like that, and so other ppl will get dyes account from now on?
HUH!?

Yes.

I have 8 characters. I only have Abyss and Celestial on one of them right now. That same character also has a ton of other dyes unlocked.

Once the new system hits, I get all those dyes across all 8 characters now; plus any unique dye unlocks on my other 7 slots.

Duplicate unlocks means I get an unidentified dye as compensation; and it can potentially be another unlock across all 8 of my characters or a possible chunk of cash since dyes will now be harder to obtain if it is something I already have account unlocked.

My only complaint is not seeing the blog post sooner; I got to watch the last 8s dye get flipped to 20s+ right as I got the search window sorted. :/

This system is an overall upgrade; don’t knock it.

It’s the cost of the new system not caring about the level of the items involved anymore.

Basically it does not alter the cost of changing skins out (stones) but it frees up inventory space used on aesthetic items; and ensures you only have to obtain a skin once to be able to use it multiple times via charges.

So it is freeing up inventory space and cheaper overall unless you have absolutely no impulse control when compared to the current system.

Granted it’s not the mythical land of milk and honey where you can swap everything freely like in games that started out with a sub fee but for feks sake, you can’t have everything for free. They got to make some money to keep the servers running somehow. Be glad it is off of cosmetics and not something worse.

I’d be happy just being able to salvage the kitten things for something useful.

Drarnor Kunoram.5180:

Cogbyrn.7283:

Regardless of the numbers involved, this trait represents a willingness by ANet to consider the possibility of granting HP regeneration mechanics while in DS.

Seems like a giant step forward to me, even if it seems mathematically lackluster at the moment.

Precisely. We’re pretty sure the trait will be quite underwhelming, but what the introduction of the trait means is important: ANet is considering letting the necro heal some in death shroud, which is by far the biggest weakness of the mechanic.

This. Consider it a test to show them that letting Necros heal at all in DS does not automatically make them unstoppable eaters of children and small cute woodland creatures.

Now if Necros were given Warrior level sustain, condi removal, and mobility while in DS they might have a case for their fears.

But there is a huge difference between that and what is basically a regen boon tied to a resource pool instead of spammed on recharge.

Swimsasa Stoon.8936:

that condi 5% healing trait seems soooo overpowered. 2k cond per second = 100 heal per second… actually…. nah its not that bad after all.

Yeah sounds more powerful than it probably is; I have a feeling the healing is not prorated to apply on initial application but rather applies per tic; which means an enemy with working braincells can just condi clear and deny that to you.

Still nice to see another sustain option though.

From personal experience; trying to level a Mesmer always felt a little off until around 30 or so which is when you can get deceptive Evasion. Call it a crutch to prop up that kitten all one wants, but the class just does not seem to gel as well without it since the base line clone generation isn’t quite enough to satisfy.

Alternate suggestion: Leave DE where it is; but do a review of all the other weapon and utility skill methods of clone generation and tweak them down where appropriate; then alter DE to do something else not directly clone related.

Which is an issue that will be shared by any class with semipermanent mobile pets; Ranger pets will still have pathing issues as well. Mesmer and Engis bypass that by having on demand summons.

Fixing the pet pathing for Ranger and Necro will likely mean fixing all mob AI pathing at the same time….which I won’t disagree with since it will raise the low skill cap in PvE a tad without any stat inflation needed since mobs would get better at getting into range to attack.

But Necro and Ranger aren’t exactly top dollar moneymaker classes right now so good luck with that.

/sigh.

To clarify, Fear will be an interrupt after the feature update patch, not right now.

Phrasing!

Substance E.4852:

Tobias Trueflight.8350:

Bran.7425:

Tobias Trueflight.8350:

And already there’s the conspiracy theories about Allie’s “sickness” again. Sigh. I shouldn’t be surprised or disheartened, but I still am.

I’ll note, approaching a CDI with the attitude of “well they won’t listen anyway” or “it doesn’t matter, just a publicity stunt” isn’t going to be of any use if they’re a legitimate attempt. All it’s going to do is be not-helpful, and if enough people do it I’m relatively sure ANet will just give up for real.

TL:DR? “This is why we can’t have nice things.”

From the CDI page 17
“Yes, like I said about the sustained vs burst, it’s not necessarily fully functional in the game. This is one of those things that we would have to balance with bringing other classes down a bit as far as damage output. Burst damage needs to have risk involved, and we know that right now many classes don’t have that associated risk.”

TLDR: “The other professions are why we can’t have anything.”

Is that what you read? What I read is “we need to figure out how to get their damage figures down without everyone quitting”, and “burst damage is generally broken anyway”.

Not that the second one is a surprise to me, there’s few games where throwing bursts around has much of a downside short of allowing friendly fire damage.

More like they want the Ranger to be like the Pyro from TF2 and burst classes to work like the Spy. High risk, but high lethality as well. Burst is powerful but countered by steady, flowing sustained damage.

Problem is that the current dynamic is so utterly different from TF2’s balance it’s like night and day. And, as I’ve said before, the sun will explode before their glacial balance pace ever makes this system a reality. I’m sure I’m not the only one who’s hopes dwindled dramatically when she posted that.

They’d need to realign their resource investment away from festival content and more towards features and balancing updates like they should have been the first 6 months to a year instead of faffing about with keeping the player base distracted before the stated vision would even begin to get close to the reality.

Since release the entire combat system has been heavily skewed towards maximum burst for the least risk and very little has actually been done to change that; which means the classes that lack the features that enable that optimal strategy get the short end of the stick until either they are changed to match the emergent game-play or the content is changed to better enable the short stick classes to be valid.

I’d pity the Devs more on this if they were not the ones making the decisions that led to this. Granted, they most likely had NCSoft breathing down their necks to maximize short term profits at the expense of the long term health of the game.

After seeing how the games under this publisher have been handled in the last 5 or so years I’m pretty much filing them along with EA in the future when it comes to my purchasing decisions….which pretty much falls under “nope”.

Seigfried.5938:

Slyfer.6478:

Inexperienced players should really stop with the “NERF THIS GUY’S PROFESSION BECAUSE I SUCK AT COUNTERING A ZERKER”. Don’t make a balance requesting thread unless you have a minimum of 8k AP or something.

Lol

I know, right? You get by far the most AP out of PvE carebear farming not pvp, so AP is actually a lousy indicator of skill and experience with pvp and balance.

I’d really still like to have a spore node for the personal instance; randomly running around maps hoping for an event spawn of these is too tedious for how many you get.

I view it as putting down a mad dog. You just do what is necessary then go on about your day, because celebrating like that just lessens yourself and makes you one step closer to them.

EXODUZ.5029:

Natsu Dragneel.1625:

Still as viable as ever, conditions are still pretty much the Meta in WvW when roaming, looses effectiveness in correlation with how many people you have with you/fighting.

So how about zerg fights? How would you modify your build? Frontal Support/DPS sort of thing, need to stay on commander at all times, etc.

Cheers in advance, Natsu.

Take something else. Most Mesmer damage options do not currently scale well past say a 10v10 at best; and you and your clones don’t have enough defenses to survive the AE/CC spam.

Basically you are reduced to veil/portal bot.

sirflamesword.3896:

Burnham.2613:

Kurr.4179:

Honestly the main issue is that there are too many dead servers…

It should be 18 servers, split in 2 leagues of 9 or 3 leagues of 6.

This wouldn’t just help WvW, it would help PvE. The bottom half servers are desolate places.

Bingo. The solution to the problem is to, unfortunately, close servers and give free transfers to people on the servers that are being closed. Right now there are too few people spread out amongst too many servers. Research would have to be done on what the ideal number of servers would actually be given ACTIVE players, and not just how many accounts are actually on a server. The reality is, most of the servers should not be at Very High population and I would say at least 6 servers if not more need to just be deleted. It’s a touchy subject because no one wants to see their beloved server get deleted but it is needed for the health of the game.

Yup THATS the problem…it’s not that 90% of the wvw population is on 3-4 servers. Totally not the problem AT ALL.

Allowing people to stack servers as badly as they did in the first place was the mistake. They should have been dynamically throttling transfers/new accounts per server to begin with at release to better ensure a more even population spread.

Of course they probably did not expect such a level of interest in WvW compared to the other game modes and thus did not devote resources to adequately prepare for human nature.

Quite frankly they should disallow transfers to the top 6 at all, along with lowering the queue cap in PPT earning WvW zones to force ether transferring down or just playing in EotM.

Substance E.4852:

Not sure what is better, the obvious hyperbolic sarcasm or the many folks whose heads it flew clean over.

This.

Reminds me of the EA/Mace thread in CoX. So pretty. So strong.