Guild Wars 2

kostbabis.8791:

You want to reduce rng and then go and suggest making the most active and situational condition ,blind, to an rng nightmate.

I’m not saying no RNG, I’m saying a more ‘measured’ RNG. For example, If I really wanted to get rid of RNG then I’d get rid of critical chance completely, which I’m completely against. What I mean is, if there is a chance for something to happen, it is generally high. Essentially, there shouldn’t be a situation where there is some 5% chance of some stupidly advantageous conversion of a condition to a boon (let’s say Fear > Stability). For an example, see: http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Transmute

Now, the above is a trait, not a sigil or rune and I’ll clarify in the original post when I get time, but this is what I mean.

Also, am I really alone in feeling like having a SINGLE attack prevented is kinda weak for taking up an entire skill (Blinding Flash etc)?

kostbabis.8791:

Also this
“Modified all classes in order to bring each class to the same level of overall battle effectiveness.”
could never be a patch note :P

Yeah, probably. This is the dream patch though. We can dream.

kostbabis.8791:

Lastly aoe is good.This isnt pick a target and spike him to zero.Position matters, melee should cleave,you should be punished for being out of position and you should be able to punish people that carelessly jump on you
Of course some toning down especially to the ranged aoe wouldnt hurt but whatever!

Like I said to one of the guys above, I’m not even advocating nerfing AoE. It baffles me that people think this. What I mean is skills that have such an insanely small radius that they might as well be single player targeted will no longer be AoE. For an example of what I consider ‘small radius’, look up ‘Water Trident’. The only other thing I said about AoE was decreasing the amount of particle clutter, which I hardly believe people can disagree with.

Silferas.3841:

Your dream sounds like a nightmare to me…

How, exactly? Leaving a one sentence reply won’t exactly help me improve the change list.

Inculpatus cedo.9234:

I am sorry, Paradoxine, I must have missed the part where the OP specified sPvP combat.
My apologies. Though, as a human, like you, I have my opinion…and you have yours. Have a nice day. =)

I must have missed the part where he specifically said PvE only. I would expect that an appraisal of combat in GW2 would involve both PvE and PvP. Am I wrong?

If you voice your opinion then expect it to be challenged, don’t try to pull this “oh well we all have our own opinions and that’s it” bull.

uberkingkong.8041:

All I got from this is you hate necros, and you probably play a thief because you get eaten up by AE, and you want your conditions to last longer. Lemme tell ya, whatever poison thieves are putting on me that lasts 20 seconds or so, pretty much needs a nerf.

No. I play a guardian, necromancer, elementalist and warrior.

uberkingkong.8041:

There should be something called, out of combat condition removal, haven’t been in combat or attacked in 10 seconds you start healing up, none of this poison that lasts until you remove it bullkitten.

No. Watch your conditions, you shouldn’t expect to be able to completely ignore game mechanics. This is very much a ‘L2P’ problem.

uberkingkong.8041:

You want to nerf everyones AoE

No. Where did I say this? Do you have problems with reading comprehension?

uberkingkong.8041:

Class balance looks good too me

No. Both the developers and the best players in the game both feel like class balance is not finished. Are you delusional?

Inculpatus cedo.9234:

I come from GW1, and yes, I am happy with combat and gameplay in GW2. =)

You don’t play sPvP do you? If you played GW1 PvP at a high level and can still tell me with a straight face that the PvP in GW2 is satisfactory then I don’t know what to say.

Bug Fixes

• Found and dealt with the cause of the dodge queue bug.

• Fixed a case where the downed state HP of the necromancer would be less than intended.

Rewards
[Work in progress]

Design

• Changed all elite skills to be more similar to build defining skills rather than add-ons. Elite skills from this patch onwards will generally have much lower recharge rates (less than sixty seconds) and will greatly impact the focus of a players build. For example, ‘Epidemic’ is now an elite skill and many of the previous elite skills have been changed to heavily modified utilities. In addition, the use of an elite skill is now optional and players may use a utility within the elite slot if they so wish. We feel this will allow players to make more practical use of elite skills and make more varied builds.

• Changed a few previously AoE type skills to single player targeted skills.

• Reduced the pervasiveness of AoE particle effects greatly.

• Started a general move towards reducing the number of evades, teleports, immunes and gap closers. This is intended to make gameplay less chaotic, but will be done over the course of the next few patches in order to both gauge community reactions and ensure that combat does not become too slow-paced.

• Greatly increased the effectiveness of conditions across the board and also greatly increased the downtime for condition application. Multiple auto attacks that previously applied conditions have had their condition application removed and their damage changed to reflect this. Greatly reduced passive as well as active condition removal to complement this change.

• ‘Passive’ condition removal has been changed to be both more active and give more control to the player. Traits that remove a condition every 10 seconds have been changed so that an extra ‘F’ skill(e.g F5) is added upon selection, which will have a cooldown of ten seconds. The UI for certain classes has been changed to accommodate this. The condition removal skill will appear at the end of your other class specific skills(Virtues, etc).

• Modified all classes in order to bring each class to the same level of overall battle effectiveness.

• Effected changes intended to make each class more unique and varied, as well as increase the number of viable builds therein.

• Increased the selection of non-RNG sigils and runes.

Quality of life improvements

• Added multiple banks, trading posts and merchants to the heart of the mists.

• Added a build save/load system which allows players to keep track of previously used builds via template codes. When loading a build template, the game will attempt to adorn each piece of saved armour and skill, leaving the slot empty if the player does not possess the armour piece or skill.

• Added basic voice commands to help with team communication. These voice commands will be added to at a later date, subject to community desires.

• Added a new hotkey that will cancel skills that are currently being used (casted).

• Added a ‘dishonor’ system to sPvP wherein players who leave during a ranked game or fail to participate will be first forced to wait for a variable time period before being able to enter another game and at worst, prevented from entering a game at all. The more that a player fails to participate in ranked games, the more severe the consequence.

Balance changes

• Changed the blind condition so that it increases the chance of missing an attack by 50% during its duration. Changed smoke fields to have generally longer cool downs but stack the duration of blinds each tick. It should be noted that durations will generally be short to begin with, with the duration increasing as necessary in future patches. We feel that this will make the use of blind more effective as a support condition.

New Game modes

• Added King of the Hill, Deathmatch, Capture the flag and Relic Run. More information about these new game modes will be outlined in an upcoming blog post.

Queue System Revamp

• Separated the solo and team queues. To complement this change, the leaderboards will be changed so that there is both a solo ladder and a team ladder. The current rankings will be lost, though your personal statistics will remain as they were before and will be viewable in game. No personal progress will be lost.

Tell me If I missed anything, I’ll edit this post and add it in. I don’t want to detail every change for every class which is why I won’t elaborate on the ‘bring in line’ stuff.

Edits(28/05/2013):

• Clarified AoE changes
• Changed reward system changes to “work in progress”
• Clarified the sigil and rune changes

Edits(29/05/2013):

• Added a skill cancelling hotkey
• Changed the elite system completely
• Added a build save/load system
• Added basic voice commands

Diage.6451:

I can tell you why GW1 players spend decent time here. We all spent 3-6 years playing a monumental pvp game to have it die by its predecessors and having no game to replace it with.

Instead we get some copy and paste of other pvp gamemodes from other games I could play if i were interested in that game mode.. But I am not. So alas, I am here.

This is the saddest thing. I keep seeing this devs talking about LoL and Dota and I just find myself in a state of disbelief. They seriously don’t seem to understand that GW1 PvP was and is above and beyond them. Take inspiration from your EARLIER GAMES maybe? To abandon everything because of ESPORTS!!!!111ELEVEN is kittened, even more so when you consider that GW1 could have become an esport.

I think the people in sPvP are just incompetent at this point.

How hard is it to realise that for one thing, the amount of evades, immunes, teleports, condi spam needs to be decreased?

How hard is it to communicate properly with your players?

How hard is it to reply to threads other than some bullkitten “Yeah this is really constructive, I don’t actually have to have a dialogue this way”.

Haphazardly made skills, traits, classes, everything really. They could fix this all in one month if they put their mind to it. We’re not talking about programming entirely new modules and systems here. We’re talking about changing values and skill types. Problem is they don’t seem to know what to do themselves. I’d rather have some skills that bug out 1/100th of the time but are balanced then have skills that are both unbalanced and buggy. We’re nowhere near esport level right now so I think balance and design should take priority at this point.

The SOTG just makes it worse. It becomes really apparent there just how far from reality these guys are. What we need is a no bullkitten sit down discussion where the hosts flat out tell ANET the problems of the game. Then we need the developers to actually defend themselves and tell us what they are actually doing to fix things.

Just want to add this gem (Regarding the warrior):

Krilce.7864:

TBH, I doubt they’ll do anything to make warriors viable. There are so many fundamental design flaws in this game that they do not know how to fix it, If they haven’t done anything in 9 months, even though a warrior was subpar pretty much since release, and that JP said that they’ll be focusing on bug fixing this patch(I’m not even sure of why aren’t they making balance changes along with bug fixing concurrently), there goes another month of hell for warriors.

We are very weak against conditions, and if traited for their removal, we lose too much of pretty much everything. With traited condition removal, we cannot fill the role of spiker, which is already done better by a thief, we wouldn’t be able to bunker because of lack of access to defensive boons, the worst healing in game, and whatnot. If we go for team utility, we are again doing everything worse than other professions, so we are pretty much pigeonholed in damage specs. Hell, we can’t even spec for condi, because we don’t have access to enough conditions to cover damaging ones, so, there you go.

Our gap closers in our only viable spec are greatly affected by cripples and chills, which no other profession has problem with, because of good condition removal even when they aren’t built specifically for it. We are very easily kited, very poor in 1v1 against most professions, and quite bad in team fights too, due to lack of survivability, where we have to rely on 30 sec cd shield block, where a lot of attacks can’t even be blocked, our very limited amount of dodging, unless we are using warhorn, where you lose even that block and mega short range interrupt/burst starter.

We are the only profession, well, maybe along with necro, that needs to be babysitted, where ANet’s design philosophy was to make evey profession self reliable, by making everyone having their own heals, which for a warrior, as I’ve already said, are the worst heals in game.

Now, why are there so many problems with a warrior? First of, many of the problems aren’t really “our problems”, but rather combat/game design problems that we are greatly affected by.

First of all, there are too many evades, teleports, immunities, particle effects, AoE and condi spam. Since all of our important skills are easily telepgraphed, thus easy to dodge, which is perfectly fine, it’s insanely hard to land them on anyone that has been playing this game for a longer period of time. If they don’t have anymore dodges left, they can use short cd teleports, pretty much spammable evades, immunity, spammable blind, so they can shut us down without many problems. Meanwhile, we have no evades(well, except from ww, which is easily our greatest skill), no instant teleports, either for gap closing or running away, so we have to use our easily telepgraphed physical gap closers, which are affected by chills and cripples, though I’m repeating myself here, where ALL of the conditions are spammable, require zero brain to use in most cases. Tell me when you’ve seen someone applying poison at the moment of his opponent’s healing. No one. Or when someone uses weakness to lower his opponent energy regeneration, so he can burst/let others burst the opponent more easily, and so on. However, conditions that are affecting physical movement, aren’t lowering range of teleports, so teleports are so much batter than physical gap closers, where warrior can only rely on later, since they do not have teleports. Not to mention poor pathfinding…

Most of our traits are boring, or plain bad. I know other professions have those kinds of problems too, but you see, 9 months after release, our class specific trait, brawn, is still horrible, so warriors are underpowered in that field two. 3% burst damage increase for 30 pints in a tree, which is pretty much build defining, is really, really horrible, and I’m sorry to say this, but I really have to question intelligence of people that came up with that. I agree that 30% burst damage increase was way too powerful, but for god’s sake, couldn’t you completely revamp this kittenty trait for 9 months? Come on…

What does this game need? Less instant skills, less evade, less teleports, reduced density and intensity of particle effects, reduced aoe and condi spam, and condis, and skills in general more situational, reduced number of npcs, because, I swear it, half of the time I can’t see myself in a teamfight, and imagine a viewer of a tourney, or a shoutcaster which doesn’t know what the hell is currently happening, better telegraphed skills, just like warrior’s, or even an introduction of cast bars, because of all the kitten happening on your screen.

MaXi.3642:

another option is to add more strong single target support like longer duration protection, stability etc, just like some people already said, antispike, i think that monks did something like this in GW1, not sure, havent played it

Excellent point.

I’ll clarify in my earlier posts in a second, but yeah I should say that I don’t only advocate single player targeted heals, some strong protection skills would be great. I envision, for example, a single targeted utility skills that gives any ally (you can target yourself) 10 seconds of protection and has say a 30-35 second cooldown.

Shame on you for not playing GW1 (I’m just joking btw)

Here is a video of two top 10 guilds in old style GvG: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EFWvkitten1Uo

It involves the old spike metagame, basically where you’d have your entire team on vent / teamspeak and you’d countdown from 3 and on 1 simultaneously activate skills for really strong spikes that only specific skills could prevent. Just saying that in case the video doesn’t really make sense. When you see it slowdown and stuff, bear in mind most spikes happened in less than 0.5s, sometimes even < 0.25s for really good teams.

So yeah, the ‘spikes’ in GW2 aren’t really comparable to in GW1 (for better or worse). Also, notice the lack of particle clutter ( we don’t need to go back as far as in the video, but definitely less than now ).

milo.6942:

i want to jump in and remind everyone that what gw2 doesn’t have atm (and needs for team fights) is not really more heals, but protection from spike damage.

I don’t agree. Most of the time there is no need to spike because people only ever hang on by a thread anyway, even in the top teams. Generally the only time people spike is just to take out bunkers at the start of the game and get a lead.

Empathetic Fighter.2065:

Kolly.9872:

in the current state of the game, support builds are under rated cos why having a support build when I can win easily with 3 bunkers\ 2 roamers dps?
At the moment the only support builds around are focused on stomping or preventing stomp\ressing ppl, because the downed state plays a very important part during a team fight.

A little sidenote for you: Shout-Guard = Support-Bunker, BM-Ranger= only Bunker. Everything that provides heal, boons, condition cleanse for grp or knockbacks etc. is classified as support.
Ressing and stomping is a part of playing bunker, but definitely not everything. It’s like saying a mesmers job is to press his shatters.

So no, support builds are the most important in the current meta and definitely not underrated.

If by ‘support’ you mean spamming shouts that the bunker would have had anyway in order to remove their own conditions, etc, then yes. It remains true that builds that are primarily concerned with the rest of the team are not viable.

I think you and I have a very different vision of ‘support’. They are not the most important part of the current meta either. Mesmers are far, far more valuable, period. If you said bunkers I might have agreed with you. I just don’t agree that bunkers who coincidentally use some ‘support’ boons that were in the first place meant for themselves are ‘support’ to any great degree. I don’t think it should be impossible for a ‘support’ build to outright prevent a burst death in GW2 without protection.

Given that the devs have recently replied to other threads, I seriously hope that they will reply to this one and acknowledge each frustration point by point. They said they wanted support to be viable. It isn’t. Best thing of all is it will be easy to fix.

Currently the damage output by any class is enough to kill any other class no problem. This is due to the move towards self heals, where each individual player is not totally dependent on a healer to survive, but yet still does not have enough sustain to play indefinitely unless you spec as a bunker as far as possible.

Generally, if people are playing well, then we can already see situations where 1v1 occurs and the battle lasts more than a few minutes and not necessarily just with bunkers. This is what should be the case. I know the devs want ‘fast paced’ play, believe me, the play is already too fast paced, a point I believe would be agreed upon by many people. Disregarding the problem of AoE spam and the particle effect spam, battles are over too quickly. The difference between living and dying is one backstab, or one auto attack and telegraphed attacks, the thing that should be battle finishing moves, are almost nowhere to be found.

I am not proposing that we systematically change damage. All I’m proposing is that we improve the sustain of each class (apart from the already adequate bunker builds) by say 20%. In addition, now here’s the important point, is making some support spells ally targeted.

Now, I don’t know what the line of thinking was when the devs decided to have no ally targeted skills in the game, but this is unacceptable for PvP. In PvE its fine because most of the time people will be balled up anyway and using AoE is the most convenient approach to support, even though support is rarely used even in PvE.
In PvP AoE heals are not only inefficient in terms of when you want to heal a particular person, but it is impractical when you have such a mobile combat system as GW2.

Getting to the point:

What we need is a measured, careful move towards changing some skills that are currently very small radius AoE heals towards targeted heals. In addition, the healing power scaling for such spells should be carefully looked at to ensure that it is indeed viable for skilled support play, rather than simply spamming boons on a guardian.

We need more sustain in general, except where it would turn already strong bunkers into unstoppable builds. We need more telegraphed moves, similar to the elementalists ‘Churning Earth’, where there are both primary effects on skill activation and secondary effects upon cast completion.

The goal here is to decrease the frequency of what are otherwise bad teams destroying teams that by all accounts shouldn’t lose, but did due to the low skill ceiling (I am not referring to the last tourny, I wanted to see TP lose ).

I’ve been running warrior much of the time lately and honestly my only gripe is that we need more condition removal. Like a guy above me said, we need:

Mending to remove 3 conditions
Shake it off to remove 2 conditions

In addition I think that all signets should be fixed so that the active effects do NOT cancel the passive effects. Sure, people could spam them up to their CD but there is a reason people don’t just spam their evades even though they ‘could’. If necessary just make them highly situational rather than a straight up buff (the unblockable effect was a step in the right direction)

I honestly feel like If condition removal is fixed then If you play well then you can fight anyone, including mesmer. One thing I will say though, is that the warrior class is not very forgiving of mistakes.

Myrmidian Eudoros.4671:

“Drastic” is a bit of an overstatement, but a buff is certainly still in order.

What if:

Warrior’s Sprint -> Incraese to 25% IMS when wielding Melee Weapon in MH (increase from 10%), Possibly even do it like necro and make it 15% MH 10% OH melee weapon.

Mending -> Removes 3 conditions (increase from 2) and grants regeneration for 4s

“Shake it Off” -> Cures 2 conditions (increase from 1)

All of these together might be a bit too much of a buff for Warrior, but basically it would allow Warrior to chase down kiters more effectively, and improve their condition cleansing ability which is currently abysmal, while making some traits and skills that are currently kind of “meh” and make them really solid options.

I honestly think this in itself would go a long way towards balance.

It’ll be interesting to see what changes (if any) we get from the upcoming patch. I’m not expecting much but we shall see.

mbh.8301:

garethh.3518:

KarlaGrey.5903:

If Anet spent as much time contemplating Gw2, we’d have a completely different game.

Hindsight is 20/20, but yeah I would have killed to get into the game’s alpha testing.

I like you, but here’s a reality check.

In alpha there was a guy, Ensign, who has unparalleled insight into this game / everything. At minimum, he is at least as smart / insightful as you – though I would consider this to be an insultingly conservative estimate. He was a huge pvp figure in gw1, it was often joked that one of the top guilds was just him on 8 computers.

Ensign was in the alpha, well respected by all the players, and gave anet buckets upon buckets of great suggestions and analysis. Ensign was later kicked out of the alpha for being a negative influence since everyone agreed with what he wrote (you know, because it made sense). It wouldn’t matter if you were in alpha because the devs would never tell you anything more than “Yeah we’ll take that into consideration, cya”

As a player you have no influence over design, the best thing you can hope for is whatever our boy Grouch is doing behind the scenes to try and make things better.

I’ll be honest, I don’t know who this guy is, but it doesn’t surpise me to hear the ANET chose this path on their own. Sad thing is its working, GW2 is making them piles and piles of cash.

Baldric.6781:

What happened ? An easy one. They tried new innovative stuff everywhere.
So, mmo’s use a lot of instances because it’s easy to balance a fixed number of players. Arena.net tries to be cool and puts a lot into open world, obvious result, some stuff is extremely easy and some is imposible, because u don’t have enough players at the moment.
Mmo’s use trinity because it makes sense (guy takes damage, guy heals the others, guy deals damage, pretty straightforward and simple) and u can balance around that. Arena.net tries to be cool and only allows for a guy deals damage, with some a guy heal other guys, obvious result, all becomes a dps festival (ask pve guys about the warrior). Funny enough they allow some tankyness but only in pvp, it seems to be not allowed in pve.
When u die in a mmo u die, arena.net wanted to be cool, so when u die u don’t really die, and worse, any player can revive you pretty fast, obvious result, imbalances appear because of the downed state abilities and 2 vs 1 became much harder for the one.
Mmo’s use stealth, but they only allow it for certain characters and moments, because they understand that fighting against air is not really engaging. Arena.net tries to be cool, so they allow stealth spam, obvious result, duels against thiefs become air battles, where u fight against air most of the time, and worst, win, sometimes u win and u don’t even now. And thiefs become stealth dependent.
Mmo’s use some kind of resource for skills, mana, energy, whatever, arena.net tries to be cool and uses 90% CD’s, obvious result, battles become a CD battle where if u used the CD already u lose.
Mmo’s use armor and vitality to know the tankyness of a character, so u have huge dude with freaking steel plate everywhere, u know that dude can survive a lot (it makes sense). Arena.net tries to be cool, and give minor significance to armor and vitality (dps does 8 ks of damage really fast and armor doesn’t defend against condis) and give a lot more importance to boons and condi removal, obvious result, u have a robe dude with the lowest health-pool of the game being one of the best tanks (thank god not the best) and the dude with the best hp and armor becomes a squishy glass canon that can’t survive any decent focus. So in gw2, if u want to be a tanky dude hard to kill and dealing some damage, u should create a wa… mage guy!! nice.

It seems when they where designing the game, they said, u know what will be cool ? Let’s put a lot of new stuff everywhere (not tested stuff of course), so say everything cool u can think.
When u do that, some ideas will be not bad, a lot will be bad and some will produce comic results (like the tank-mage). As a test MMO gw2 is good, as a strong MMO with good foundation, gw2 is terrible.

Sigh, all true.

GW2 is literally a text book example of how to alienate your most loyal players, remove all the mechanics people loved, make every part of the game (including ‘competitive play’) casual and just cash in.

Problems (Tier 1)

Energy management? loltoohard
Ally targeted skills? loltoohard
Targeted rez skills? loltoohard

Problems (Tier 2)

Stealth spam
AoE spam
Doge spam
Teleport spam
Evade spam
Traits are all over the place, ANET themselves don’t seem to know what role they want traits to serve

Problems (Tier 3)

support is practically useless, no way to focus on helping individual players, only AoE.

conditions are both applied and removed too easily. Last for a few seconds on average instead of 20s+.

boons are far, far too generic

D/D ele and BM ranger are some of the tankiest builds in the game. They said you shouldn’t be able to tank and yet these builds do it to a ridiculous extent.

Communication(None)

Honestly It blows my mind when I consider that they could still fix this, but don’t even feel like they want to open a dialogue. I think the only explanation is they are utterly incompetent or they are making GW2 for themselves only.

kobi.5236:

Install Gw1 And join HA tomorrow , We try to get as many people as we can and the even offcial starts 17:00 . Ask your old friends or meet new people to reinstall and fight for the fame in the hall of heros. We dont care about lame , catch your 8 ele and rock or play balanced but HAVE FUN .. Try to play the whole evening .

Show Anet that gw1 pvp was great and that they maybe could learn from their first game .. I want to see at least 5 id districts tomorrow so come and join and have fun

Sounds like a good idea but I’ll never work. ANET reject everything great about GW1. Everything. The name and ancient lore is the only thing connecting them.

That said, I’ll still play, will be a pleasure to infuse again after all this time.

Chukree.1756:

Consider hgh engi damage in team fight. Anet talked about nerfing aoe.. Same with Shatter mesmer.. Isn’t it too high?.. Buff single target classes or nerf aoe…Hgh is too high dmg 25 stack aoe 24/7 and high survivability…!!!!1 infraction points pls!!! anet.. u so good at it.. L—::!!! :——-)

I don’t think anyone is meant to be able to have decent sustain. ANET’s vision of great pvp is a game where all fights are over within 2 minutes and anything longer than that is because both are playing completely OP builds.

Travlane.5948:

PearlGore.7419:

Oh for god sake we dodge to much now? Just remove us from the game and be done with it, next month it will be that we get medium armor, month after that we do damage! Nerf it…

Worst PvP gamers I have ever seen.

the real problem is a L2 kitten ue …..but even deeper is that anet caves to them on this and nerfs waaaaaaaay too much. try buff other classes.

anet dumbed this game down to allow a more broad range of players to play it. simple marketing ploys due to economic interests.

They went too far.

We can’t even use targeted ally skills now because loltoohard.

Mausser.7530:

NEVER SOLO QUE if you care about your rating. If you do solo que, don’t expect to win.

They essentially reward people for getting carried or basically just using pre mades. If you seriously expect me to believe that there is a guy who is so good he can win literally 90% of his games solo, well, you have another thing coming. The ‘best’ according to the leaderboard is the guy who uses the pre made team who can stomp the most pugs.

mjharrison.3209:

XII.9401:

The spvp current state is simple..they removed healing classes and replaced them by self heals and revivals of fallen allies.

The self heals resulted in OP classes that are just impossible to beat with other classes given the same skill level on either side. It also resulted in lack of team synergy and boring bunker or stealth fights. Don’t believe me? Go into the dueling arenas and see players who know how to face roll through the abilities play..boring as hell.

Even the top teams you don’t hear them focusing on a target by doing cc combos or chains or purposely burning their counter boons and removing them. All you hear is :hes going down hes going down! Im down im down! revive me!

They Fallen state simply rewards bad players and casuals. Any player here who played his class has run into the situation where he downs one or two out of 3 players and still ends up losing because of the downed state.

The problem is, even after they remove the downed state it won’t help because some builds and classes will go down insanely fast and this will result in people playing bunker/tanky builds and resulting in even more fighting. The downed state was introduced to compensate for lack of healers and removing it at this state of the game will only force people to go down the tankier even more boring path.

I think removing healers was an original idea which was:

Great for PVE since you are not at the mercy of a healer’s whim or gotta wait for one (anyone remembers wow dungeons/raids?)

And which overall was a bad idea resulting in:

-In people who loved playing the healer class avoid the game
Team based competitive pvpers avoid/leave the game since arenas are just 1v1 or 1v2 in competitive tourneys given the node capturing mode. Even if deathmatch is introduced eventually, you will feel a lack of synergy between group member as everyone is doing his own thing.
boring pvp
-OP classes
-Rewarding bad players via downed state
-Turning a potentially great pvp experience in wvw like DAOC into a pve zerg fest instead and alienating the open world pvp/DAOC crowd.

I just hope future games learn to avoid these mistakes.

I also agree the problems with GW2 PVP are systemic, and not fixable with minuscule balance patches once per month. There have been massive threads since beta on how detrimental downed state is to the whole PVP experience, and yet they didn’t even bother to include an option to turn it off in custom arenas. Then there was the arrogant assertion that everything was balanced despite again, massive threads complaining about instagibbing and bunkering. And now instead of measured tweaks every month we have huge sledgehammer nerfs/buffs.

In the end the spectacular failure of GW2 sPVP derives from IMO the unwillingness of the dev team to listen to players. About everything. The removal of a resource system, the inclusion of downed state, emphasis on DPS over all were all things that were heavily criticised in betas and in previous design disclosures, but none of these concerns were ever taken on board.

Arrogance, stubbornness, no pressure to change. I’ve said it before, but the developers get paid and that’s it.

They don’t care because there is likely no one telling them “hey maybe we should open a discussion with the player base about this, after all, they do play the game we’re making”.

It’s quite one thing to have a situation where the developers know the game better than the players do and can see everything in clarity while the minds of the players are clouded. It’s quite another to have a situation where the developers won’t listen to the players in the first place to actually get some opposing viewpoints.

They’re probably thinking “don’t like it don’t play” reading this thread right now, while laughing uncontrollably. To be fair, I have no evidence to support that they actually visit this forum at all.

mjharrison.3209:

Downed state is another example of a mechanic that was introduced for casuals/baddies but has had a dramatic, negative effect on the quality of the game’s PVP.

I think downed state would be alright, or at least, less painful if they removed rallying.

The fact that you can down four people, have them kill the one squishy thief on your team and have all four lolrally at 25% health each, pop stability, self heal and then proceed to murder you even though you played better? A joke.

Honestly too much of the time I delay my kills just so that either my allies or me can lolrally, because if you don’t then you are just disadvantaging yourself.

Again, the point is that in PvE, rallying is fine, mainly because the trash mobs and bosses won’t cry about ‘fairness’.

Targeting Allies
I’m honestly surprised that they didn’t disallow targeting completely and force you to use AoE for everything. At what point did ANET sit down and say:

You know what guys, instead of being able to both use individual spells and AoE skills, you can only ever use AoE skills to help your allies.

At some point, I realised that simply complaining about the lack of targeted healing skills was wrong. The issue was that there are no ally targeted skills in existence in GW2 AFAIK. Everything is AoE, the best you’ll get is a closest ally skill which is of course incredibly impractical.

Take an example:

Your support guardian (lol support) just died, along with your ranger. Without your support guardian what remains of your party will die and the situation isn’t convenient enough for you to manually slowrez. So you decide to use your 240s recharge rez signet. Only problem is it will only rez the closest ally – you have no choice, the developers decided to give you less control because too much control is bad for casual play. You aren’t in the right position to rez your guard and moreover, you can’t get close enough to his position because there is a ton of AoE everywhere and you are already low on health. So you resolve to rez your ranger and unfortunately, you wipe.

There is a major difference between saying “you may only rez X player within Y range” and saying “you may only rez X player if he is closest to you”. Did the developers seriously not consider this?

What point is there in teamplay if everything you do is coincidental? No, there is no point trying to be careful about who you support, who you let die and who you rez first. Not within AoE range? Too bad then. Team composition? Get whoever is best at 1v1. I’d also like to point out that team position =/= lolbringbacktrinity.

What happened in that above example? Because less control was given to the players, the amount of tactical potential was decreased and a team lost where they might otherwise not have merely because control was taken away unnecessarily.

Direction of sPvP
This kind of thing doesn’t need to happen. Apart from the flawed queuing system and lack of GvG and other game modes like Heroes Ascent, GW2 PvP has the potential for more.

I haven’t mentioned how I think boons should generally last longer and I haven’t mentioned how I think the condition system is flawed.

This issue, unlike the other issues simply does not need to exist. The only ‘arguments’ I’ve seen against the implementation of targeted skills is ‘balance’. That’s it.

I get that the developers wanted to make GW2 PvE ultra casual. What I don’t understand is why they force this casual play on everyone playing PvP. I thought the entire point of splitting PvP and PvE was that you could change skills and theoretically have the game play completely differently? This isn’t GW1 anymore where there are a billion skills and a trillion combinations and a main and sub class per player. There is no excuse for not being able to balance such a limited set of skills.

I would love to see a thorough, reasoned dev response to this, but of course I’ll be disappointed. Seriously, If a dev is reading this right now, are you going to do a stream where you answer real questions and thoroughly explain your direction and vision for sPvP? As of right now, no one has a clue.

We don’t even know what it is the developers are working on. We’ve seen some leaked pictures of PvP maps, but apart from that? Nothing. Don’t say you can’t afford to have someone interact with the community.

butch.8136:

Well I think splitting queues are being worked on. I don’t think it’s as easy as it sounds.

I think we all appreciate that but to still not have it so long after release…well there are no words really. If they really had that much work to do then they should have delayed release. Honestly, all the updates we’re getting in 2013 are things that should have been in from release, like the removal of culling.

Onshidesigns.1069:

Paradoxine.8192:

I’d kill for getting capes back. The only race where there would be any difficulty would be charr and I’m sure they could have thought of a solution for it. Too bad though, they said something to the effect of “No, we will never bring capes back because of the charr”.

Back banners are ugly as hell and no one has time to look at that in the middle of a fight.

Capes clearly showed the guild emblem in all its glory and what’s more, the bronze/silver/gold trim that you had on them in GW1 could show the prowess of the particular guild.

Like someone above said though, ANET want to distance themselves as much as possible from GW1 and they reject absolutely everything about it, apart from the lore it seems, which conveniently they can also put behind them as happening 250+ years ago.

Who’s going to see it but the your team or PvE players? The enemy can’t move their camera to see you leaving their dead body.

Back banners may be ugly to some. But that doesn’t mean Anet won’t make new styles.

Also capes are for comic superheros.

Are you baiting me or was that a serious argument against capes?

zone.1073:

rmBossa.4621:

Why bother asking for split ques now? This would just make it even worse.

So solo queue pugs need to be fed to premades to satiate their rating diet. Is that your ultimatum?

The developers must be laughing their heads off at this point. How many months has it been since release? These are basic features.

GW2 as a whole should have taken another year to bunker down for development. We still have terrible PvE culling for one thing and at best we will get it fixed next month.

dECA.2370:

Not mad really, just lost all hope i had left.

You pretty much are mad, but that doesn’t matter. Your grievances are correct.

The communication with the sPvP community is non existent, its a joke. For a long time I thought the communication with the WvW playerbase was the worst. I was mistaken.

I’d kill for getting capes back. The only race where there would be any difficulty would be charr and I’m sure they could have thought of a solution for it. Too bad though, they said something to the effect of “No, we will never bring capes back because of the charr”.

Back banners are ugly as hell and no one has time to look at that in the middle of a fight.

Capes clearly showed the guild emblem in all its glory and what’s more, the bronze/silver/gold trim that you had on them in GW1 could show the prowess of the particular guild.

Like someone above said though, ANET want to distance themselves as much as possible from GW1 and they reject absolutely everything about it, apart from the lore it seems, which conveniently they can also put behind them as happening 250+ years ago.

I honestly never anticipated this thread getting this huge. I will make sure to bring this back from the dead when the developers come up with a ‘solution’ so we can discuss it. Unfortunately in all likelihood there will be yet another ‘progression system’ that isn’t needed or wanted.

Sovta.4719:

shimzor.6057:

Farry.8259:

1. A friend of mine (who is one of the? few) played like 3000 hours PvP (im not even joking). And now what? I cant even inspect him to see what he was achieved.
2. GW2’s pvp has no progression at all… you play 1 match and your friend plays 1000 matches. What is the difference now between you and your friend? He has now some other animal rank.. Woah great! And you cant even inspect him to see his progression… if there was any…
3. Oh and really REMOVE THE DOWNSTATE FROM sPVP! This has to happen for sure!

Go back to WoW, why did you bother to install GW2 at first place??? This skill based game, there is no pay to win (you dont need to pay at all you dont need money and you dont need to grind gear). Ppl here play for fun, we love PvP we dont play just for gear.

Farry.8259:

I stopped playing GW2 becuase of the lack of these things. People who are still playing GW2 come from GW1, they have never experienced a good and polished e-sports game. I dont want to insult anyone, I think its true.

And this is joke for sure?? GW1 and GW2 players never experienced a good and polished e-sports game, but you (a wow player) gona teach us about competitive e-sports…..

ROFL

Where did he said he played wow? Fanboys see wow everywhere. And compare LoL (more then descent e-sport) to this system (hotjoin=noob/points farming, no need to win cause you don’t get almost anything from it, tournaments=hahahahahahaha, solo join has million issues and serious pvp teams already left game) and cry.

I’m not alone in that I don’t give two kittens about whether ‘serious pvp teams’ have left. The top guilds of GW1 would completely stomp any team that has played this game, period. If they fixed all the issues with PvP tomorrow, then I guarantee you the PvP scene would be absolutely massive by years end.

Problem is they won’t fix the problems, not only because they don’t know what they are, but because the developers themselves don’t care enough.

Farry.8259:

Just think by yourself: Is it possible to make a Top 5 Plays of the Week series of GW2?
Answer: No
Becuase the combat is just a chaos, unresponsive, unballanced.

I honestly wish I could just go back to the glory days of GW1, with my old guild and play some GvG. HA was a more annoying affair, what with the amount of faffing around trying to get a team, but still.

In this game, the team with the best 1v1 builds win, simple as. There is no room for tactics or clever strategies, mainly because the ‘teams’ have laughable sustain with no backline and no support. Even a scrub r1 can destroy a team if he gets lucky, whereas in GW1 you could literally have a monk and a war afk on a good team and still stomp pugs.

Dried Donkey.8504:

so basically you’re saying gw2 pvp is for kitten because its casual friendly?

Yes, that’s exactly what we’re saying.

/s

2 years. Oh and they won’t respond to this thread because they’re too busy. Better luck next time.

KarlaGrey.5903:

If Anet spent as much time contemplating Gw2, we’d have a completely different game.

Sadly true. I seriously don’t know what they do with all their time. There are so many changes needed in gameplay, let alone infrastructure, even though so much time has passed since release, that to have any hope at this point would make you a fool.

XII.9401:

Someone had to break it down for him, I guess.

The spvp current state is simple..they removed healing classes and replaced them by self heals and revivals of fallen allies.

The self heals resulted in OP classes that are just impossible to beat with other classes given the same skill level on either side. It also resulted in lack of team synergy and boring bunker or stealth fights. Don’t believe me? Go into the dueling arenas and see players who know how to face roll through the abilities play..boring as hell.

Even the top teams you don’t hear them focusing on a target by doing cc combos or chains or purposely burning their counter boons and removing them. All you hear is :hes going down hes going down! Im down im down! revive me!

They Fallen state simply rewards bad players and casuals. Any player here who played his class has run into the situation where he downs one or two out of 3 players and still ends up losing because of the downed state.

The problem is, even after they remove the downed state it won’t help because some builds and classes will go down insanely fast and this will result in people playing bunker/tanky builds and resulting in even more fighting. The downed state was introduced to compensate for lack of healers and removing it at this state of the game will only force people to go down the tankier even more boring path.

I think removing healers was an original idea which was:

Great for PVE since you are not at the mercy of a healer’s whim or gotta wait for one (anyone remembers wow dungeons/raids?)

And which overall was a bad idea resulting in:

-In people who loved playing the healer class avoid the game
Team based competitive pvpers avoid/leave the game since arenas are just 1v1 or 1v2 in competitive tourneys given the node capturing mode. Even if deathmatch is introduced eventually, you will feel a lack of synergy between group member as everyone is doing his own thing.
boring pvp
-OP classes
-Rewarding bad players via downed state
-Turning a potentially great pvp experience in wvw like DAOC into a pve zerg fest instead and alienating the open world pvp/DAOC crowd.

I just hope future games learn to avoid these mistakes.

Unfortunately, I agree with everything you said. No set healers is great for PvE, but for PvP it is absolutely terrible.

The idea was supposedly that ‘support’ could replace healers and any class would be able to contribute. What ended up happening was a casual as hell system that indeed even a kid could master, not just use. There is no depth to combat whatsoever, get the FOTM build and you’ll already be in the 90th percentile of players.

It wouldn’t even be so much of an issue if you could actually target your allies and apply buffs and heals directly, regardless of whether multiple classes can do it effectively. Literally the only thing you can do is kittenty AoE spam, every man for himself play, where the highest level of skill you can display is using a mesmer portal or a well placed timewarp for ‘team play’. Funny both skills come from one class. No other class could claim to be able to influence a battle as much as a mesmer and why should that be?

PvP in this game is a joke, though, the funny thing is they could still save it if they were willing to actually put forth some major changes, like targeted heals and buffs, for one thing, removal of rally system in sPvP for another.

The people who are supposed to be taking care of sPvP (who are they? I’ve never seen any talk at length on here) only throw in their little 2c in the ‘torunament threads’ where everyone has a huge circlejerk about how the scene is growing and they never, ever try to discuss the problems players have with sPvP outside of threads, again, pertaining to eSports!!!!!!11eleven.

Guild Wars 1 got away with minor changes (except to fix particularly bad FOTM builds) because it was on the whole, very balanced, at least, at certain times. The developers think they can do the same here, even though the situation is completely different, which would be frustrating enough without having to deal with the fact that when they do introduce changes, they are usually half baked.

• Terrible communication with the player base
• Ineffectual changes to issues that have been discussed at length by both good and bad players, which agree on a solution
• No clear direction stated or implied by their actions
• No pressure to do a better job of it

The simple fact is, the developers running sPvP care less about it than the players who still play it every day. They show a lack of understanding of their own system in talk after talk, but attempt reassure us by saying “we’re working on it”.

It’s time to realise that they get paid and that’s it. Excellence is not required.

Farry.8259:

People who are still playing GW2 come from GW1, they have never experienced a good and polished e-sports game. I dont want to insult anyone, I think its true.

GW1 PvP was miles, leagues, light years ahead of where GW2 PvP is right now. That’s not to say that GW2 cannot reach and surpass what GW1 PvP was, but its not there yet. GW1 PvP was and remains some of the best PvP i’ve experienced in gaming period and I can assure you, I’ve played many PvP games.

Talking generally, we have more than enough threads like this and If you wish to constructively voice your frustrations then please do so in a pre-existing thread.

Rez speed has been a problem lately for me also. It’s at the point where Whirling Wrath + Virtue #1 (with +10% damage when target is burning trait) can barely halt the progress when two people are rezzing. In practical terms, that much dps should cause them to leave fairly quickly, but if, they manage to get the guy up, all of a sudden he has plenty of health back and you find yourself getting bursted down by the guy you should have killed.

I don’t know If I want to change the speed or not, though. Maybe there should be some diminishing returns on multiple rezzers or something, but I haven’t given this issue that much thought. I’d be interested to hear more ideas.

General thoughts on downed state
I’m not sure what needs to be done on this issue, if at all.

On the one hand, the downed state skills of certain classes are annoying as hell (I think ele is the worst offender), not to mention it’s ridiculous how you can completely dominate a team fight, down all but one and then they just lolrally all at once because your thief died. It cheapens fights in my opinion. I won’t lie, I’ve benefited from the system too, but I never feel particularly accomplished after the fact.

In all honesty I think it might be better to remove rallying from sPvP. In WvW and PvE its a great system, as ANET has stated that WvW isn’t meant to be balanced for 1v1 and PvE is PvE.

piffdaddy.8014:

And targeted heals are a bad idea. There are quite a few ways to heal already they would just mess up class balance

ZilentNight.5089:

Targetted heals is not a good idea and healing powere is fine where it is, dont try to fix what is not broken

Elaborate. Please do tell me how you can heal someone at 1200 range without a water field, reliably.

Besides that, tell me why targeted heals are inherently bad. Just saying “they would mess up class balance” is not an argument. Balance is bad as it is, at the absolute worst they can introduce clearly underpowered skills and buff them as needed.

If your ultimate goal of using some AoE heal is to help a single player, why, pray tell, can’t you just target the player themselves and apply the support directly?

Getting sick of people just blindly accepting status quo. Give me a convincing argument or don’t bother please.

AntiGw.9367:

Paradoxine.8192:

AntiGw.9367:

gimmethegepgun.1284:

AntiGw.9367:

gimmethegepgun.1284:

Except when someone else decides to use worse stats for their own benefit, they are deciding how much loot everyone ELSE gets and in what timeframe as well. They are deciding to make everyone else get less loot for their time, and are ENCOURAGED by the game to do so as it is in their own benefit.

So answer me this: why should there be a mechanic that ENCOURAGES people to screw their party for their own benefit?

You keep making the same stupid assumption that MF is screwing a party.

It doesn’t screw anything. Get off your high horse.

People clear dungeons just fine with or without mf. There’s no reason to make a big deal out of it. Nobody is supposed to always use stats that always benefit the party.

Except, mathematically, it is screwing the party. If you fail to understand that a number plus another positive number is a greater number then there’s no hope for you at all.
So no one is supposed to use stats that always benefit the party, when every single trait point, every single selectable trait, every single piece of gear (even MF, though it has less) has stats that benefit the party. For some reason I find that hard to believe.

Even if MF doesn’t screw a party over, my question remains. Why should a mechanic exist that encourages people to screw their party for their own benefit?

Mathematically, everyone plays the game differently.

What screws the party for you, doesn’t screw it for a whole bunch of people. It’s up to them to decide what is screwing their party.

Stop pretending that everyone is following your elitist mathematical gameplay.

Stop assuming that the majority does not care whether someone uses magic find or not.

You are in an even shakier position than the guy you’re quoting, because all you advocate is maintaining the status quo, without trying to start a real discussion about the current state of MF.

The developers themselves have now stated that they are not happy with MF.

Will you continue to protest in futility, or will you realistically consider modifications?

Who died and made YOU the spokesman for the majority of players?

I never assumed that the majority does not care about something. I’m saying that there is a large amount of people that don’t play the game like elitist pricks.

I also don’t advocate maintaining any status quo. I suggest that you should learn how to read.

Stop reading what you want to hear and trying to further your sad narrative.

I specifically said stop assuming that the majority does not care. Yes, you haven’t said it outright, but you imply it with every breath, which is more than enough.

You completely dismiss the idea that there is a problem with MF in almost every post. Is this not true, with your attitude of everyone can play how they want and there is no arguing that point? Seems like a complete dismissal of the issues to me.

What we need to do is have a discussion, one you seem to be incapable of participating in civilly at any rate.

Did anyone remember Cantha when they did the Jade Maw fractal for the first time? With the graphics of GW2, Cantha would like absolutely amazing. Elona after that please.

AntiGw.9367:

gimmethegepgun.1284:

AntiGw.9367:

gimmethegepgun.1284:

Except when someone else decides to use worse stats for their own benefit, they are deciding how much loot everyone ELSE gets and in what timeframe as well. They are deciding to make everyone else get less loot for their time, and are ENCOURAGED by the game to do so as it is in their own benefit.

So answer me this: why should there be a mechanic that ENCOURAGES people to screw their party for their own benefit?

You keep making the same stupid assumption that MF is screwing a party.

It doesn’t screw anything. Get off your high horse.

People clear dungeons just fine with or without mf. There’s no reason to make a big deal out of it. Nobody is supposed to always use stats that always benefit the party.

Except, mathematically, it is screwing the party. If you fail to understand that a number plus another positive number is a greater number then there’s no hope for you at all.
So no one is supposed to use stats that always benefit the party, when every single trait point, every single selectable trait, every single piece of gear (even MF, though it has less) has stats that benefit the party. For some reason I find that hard to believe.

Even if MF doesn’t screw a party over, my question remains. Why should a mechanic exist that encourages people to screw their party for their own benefit?

Mathematically, everyone plays the game differently.

What screws the party for you, doesn’t screw it for a whole bunch of people. It’s up to them to decide what is screwing their party.

Stop pretending that everyone is following your elitist mathematical gameplay.

Stop assuming that the majority does not care whether someone uses magic find or not.

You are in an even shakier position than the guy you’re quoting, because all you advocate is maintaining the status quo, without trying to start a real discussion about the current state of MF.

The developers themselves have now stated that they are not happy with MF.

Will you continue to protest in futility, or will you realistically consider modifications?

The Gates Assassin.9827:

So, guys. This kitten already exists as 25 v 25. The “Targeted Heal” is when you stack up and blast finish.

When the pressure is on in intense on point gameplay or when you’re fighting down to the last man to keep the Lord up, are you really going to be able to conveniently ball up for some poor mans targeted heal? Consider the following:

Example of where targeted heals are required
Your warrior, after just using his dodges to escape some AoE, blocking shots from a ranger and then using the environment to avoid damage from other enemies, has his self heal on recharge still.

A particularly perceptive thief notices the amount of damage mitigation the warrior just did and decides to jump in, immobilize and burst him down. Now, the warrior sees this coming as he receives the first backstab, instantly yelling on comms for some support.

There is at a maximum, three or four seconds before this warrior gets downed. The other members of his team aren’t immediately at hands reach and besides, they have their hands full with other players. Moving carelessly to his position would draw even more general AoE damage and perhaps attention.

With a single targeted heal skill that heals for say 3500 health, the warrior’s self heal has enough time to recharge and continue play.

On the other hand, with the blast finisher deal, not only must you traverse such that you are almost directly on top of the warrior, you could be crippled and immobilized yourself.

Sure, there are limits to what you can do (lets say every team mate is dazed), but I don’t think that helping a teammate out when he needs it without having to change positions is a huge ask.

Further, staying in one position is next to impossible in GW2 and even organising where you want to set up your blast finish real time over voice comms will be immensely difficult, considering by the time you need it(run out of evades, self heal) , you probably won’t have time to set up something like that.

This is what I mean by the ‘pathetic’ AoE heals in this game, with the exception of water fields and such. The absolute best you’re going to get at the moment is those terrible ‘orb’ heals where they bounce between enemy/ally and surprise surprise, they aren’t just AoE spam.

Well why don’t you just use the waterfields you say you like?
Because using a powerful water field (like the engineer one, I forget the skill name), for the sake of one person, is a waste, except when you are fighting 1v1 on a point away from the team, or something like that. Powerful water fields like that can mean the difference between a total team wipe during an enemy time warp and the ability to soldier on, maybe winning the game as a result.

In closing
There is no good reason not to have targeted heals. Again, I’m not saying we need a skill that heals 10,000 per activation, with a recharge time of 0 seconds, but something sensible would be nice.

Hugs.1856:

Great post.

I’m going to add my thoughts to your points not because I want a GW1 v1.5, but because to this day I don’t know why ArenaNet threw away what made GW1’s GvG the greatest non-FPS PvP, instead of correcting its flaws and blending it into GW2’s design and architecture.

The strengths of GW1’s GvG were its strategical depth and its deep combat system that emphasized team coordination.

It was strategic because you had up to 8 points you could fight over at any given time and you had the choice on when and where to fight:
- 2 flag spawn
- 2 bases
- 1 flagstand
- 2 paths from the flag spawn to the flagstand
- 1 secondary mechanic

The combat’s system was amazing because it was built upon 3 pillars:

- Damage/protection/shutdown trinity.
An absolute jewel. The equation was something like shutdown>protection>damage>healing. Meaning you needed perfect coordination between your team to achieve anything – killing or keeping someone alive.

- damage driven by melee, protection by the backline and support – whether offensive or defensive- from the midline made positionning and mind games so important.

- Skills designed on trade-offs : high risk / high reward. Frenzy and infuse to name the most emblematic skills. You had to think before using any skill. You had to anticipate and observe the field to maximize your efficiency.

All of this combined gave birth to an amazing team PvP. It had some core issues, like the inability to play or even to train without a guild, a complexity that could lead to stale fights and made it hard to understand for the casual players, a general advantage for defensive play and zillions of skill combinations that made the game impossible to balance.

However I don’t understand why Anet had to throw everything away for gw2

Gw2’s combat is more exciting in 1v1 or 2v2 situations and requires heavier micro management, but it’s such an overall step backward compared to its predecessor…

Just one example among many how can you step down from a skill like spirit bond that required field awareness, mana management, reflexes and a perfect timing to those invulnerability panic-button skills

It’s not too late to improve on gw2’s mechanics really : you could slow down the pace of the game and rework the range/melee damage so that positionning, protection and shutdown were more important than brute focus in teamfights.

You have a dynamic game. Add some finesse to it now:p

If you think ANET will ever change the direction of their PvP (that is whichever way is required to maintain status quo) then unfortunately, you’ll be disappointed.

Any real changes now would require a ton of work and balancing, whereas they’d rather push out a few ineffectual changes every so often.

NevirSayDie.6235:

Paradoxine.8192:

Currently you need multiple stacks of bleed to pose a threat to anyone. In the system I envision, having just one stack of bleed would be a cause for worry, let alone 25.

I’m sure the system you envision would be fantastic, but understand that it would be a completely different game than GW2. Sweeping changes that affect every build of every profession are usually made pre-alpha.

I know and I think about this problem often. I don’t imagine rolling this out to PvE, it would be an entirely unnecessary change. The focus on PvE at the moment should be fixing rewards, loot tables and making boss encounters more nuanced. Anyway, I’m getting off topic.

Unfortunately, any change like this would require literally dozens upon dozens of skills to be systematically changed, rebalanced and delivered in one mammoth patch – you can’t just buff condition durations, nerf recharge etc and then not nerf cleansing.

Not to mention the fact that players can’t be reasonably expected to go into PvP and find that the condition system works literally completely differently at a basic level. One could pass it off as a learning curve but I don’t think its that easy really. If things like this had been fixed in beta then we could all be sitting back right now and enjoying things, but obviously we would still ask for thief nerfs every other thread

It’ll probably never happen.

I do, however still long for a system like this. Futile, maybe, but I can see so much potential in GW2 PvP that I can’t help myself. I do still enjoy PvP regularly though, If only the recent lag I’ve been getting in tournaments would give it a rest.

TheMightyAltroll.3485:

From the point of view of a Necromancer: Yes, conditions are cleansed way too often, and it makes sustaining damage incredibly difficult in group fights.

From the point of view of a Trap Ranger: Eh, it’s fine.

From the point of view of a HGH Engineer: LOL, what cleanses?

From the point of view of a Soldiers rune Guard: They come and they go, no big deal.

On my guard I cleanse one condition every 10 seconds minimum, then one more every-time I activate a shout, of which I have three with relatively low cool downs. In harder fights where each skill activation is crucial (so ‘wasting’ Hold the Line on one stack of bleed would be a no no), I may have a harder time, but generally unless you are literally the condition spam king then you won’t touch me.

If I really wanted to make an anti-condition build (I’m not even trying at this point), I can go even further with minimal losses to combat effectiveness.

Atherakhia.4086:

Paradoxine.8192:

Atherakhia.4086:

Nope.

They’re easily removed because they’re easily applied.

I agree, but I think the point is that conditions need to:

1. Last longer
2. Be applied less easily
3. Be removed less easily
4. Do more damage per stack – alleviating the problem of the 25 stack limit

Currently you need multiple stacks of bleed to pose a threat to anyone. In the system I envision, having just one stack of bleed would be a cause for worry, let alone 25.

No you don’t..

Bleeds tick for 150 a stack. A ranger can maintain an 8 stack on 3 targets with relative ease. That’s 1200 dps per target. That’s a lot of damage considering you’ve completely ignored the pet, the base damage of the shot, any additional conditions, etc.

I’d sooner reduce condition damage by 30% across the board for all classes and then allow them to crit. That change alone would probably resolve the majority of bunker problems as well since the majority of bunker builds are all condition based.

Don’t tell me what I do and don’t think please, thanks there champ.

What part of “Be applied less easily” do you not understand? Do you have difficulty with reading comprehension or do you just like to be a contrarian?

When I say applied less easily, I mean that less stacks are generated in the first place. So a necro wouldn’t apply a bleed every other spell and skill and guardians wouldn’t be able to keep up burning pseudo-indefinitely.

It’s replies like this that make me wonder whether the people who play PvP actually understand game balance at this point.

Atherakhia.4086:

Nope.

They’re easily removed because they’re easily applied.

I agree, but I think the point is that conditions need to:

1. Last longer
2. Be applied less easily
3. Be removed less easily
4. Do more damage per stack – alleviating the problem of the 25 stack limit

Currently you need multiple stacks of bleed to pose a threat to anyone. In the system I envision, having just one stack of bleed would be a cause for worry, let alone 25.

Salamol.7963:

Never really noticed a problem before… or when I did it was isolated incidents. Played a few games this afternoon (tpvp) and kept seeing insults flying around coupled with refusals to play if they saw it was a guild group. Figured I’d screenshot a few:

http://i.imgur.com/joc0Q27.png

I don’t do a whole lot of tpvp, though I try to get a few games in a day, so maybe I’ve just avoided the attitudes previously. It was just a little disconcerting to have 4 separate incidents in a 2 hour period (6-8 games in that time). Is anyone else seeing a rise in people being kittens? I don’t want this turning into LoL

I have to admit, I laughed at the “GB2 tetris online” bit. Ahhh man, you’ve got to learn to take PvP less seriously.

Rezz.8019:

Won’t work. You could just rush the enemy lord. Not being able to actually heal makes it impossible to keep the lord alive.
Also, if it’s just a couple “splitters” on lord, you can’t really do much about it except send the equal number back to defend and hope you can kill them. You can’t really send a healer to defend and save the lord.
It won’t work.

I agree unfortunately. Until at least a few targeted healing spells are added to each class, decent organised PvP, let alone GvG is impossible.

I am absolutely not saying we need the trinity, but we do need decent support classes. Currently, healing power is underpowered for just about every class and even if it wasn’t, all healing basically boils down to AoE, which is kind of pathetic.

Tanking with support should remain impossible, but, using your support spells wisely in order to help specific team mates should become more feasible

I’ll be honest, the PvP in GW2 has the potential to be better than GW1 PvP, by quite a large margin.

All they need to do is:

1. Cut down severely on AoE spam – More targeted spells, less AoE and PbAoE

2. Change the condition system such that conditions generally last much longer, are applied less often, are cleansed less often and do more damage per stack.

Coincidentally this would help with lag and would also make the technical problem of having more than 25 stacks of a condition rather moot.

Having 25 stacks of bleed with no cleanse would become an utter death sentence, even more than it is right now. In fact, it should be flat out impossible to stack that many on a target by yourself, no matter your class.

3. Change many passive trait bonuses to active ones (i.e instead of auto cleansing one condition every 10 seconds, you gain a virtue type skill that has the same effect which has a recharge of 10 sec, etc) – We want more control, not less in gameplay.