Also, change the color of the loot bags to something more noticeable. I can’t count how many bags I’ve left lying on the bright snow of the borderlands because they are hard to see.
Anet should just close t7 and t8 servers and have them transfer (For free) to any other server they like.
Well are those servers actually dying in PVE too? Most may not want to leave their guilds and friends for that reason.
The bigger problem is the alert system change. Anywhere T3 and down there are too many periods with not enough manpower to keep scouts and defenders at every tower. A 20 person zerg (yes that is a zerg at lower tiers) can rampage around pretty easily taking whatever locations are suitably unmanned, which will always be some just due to numbers.
The old 5+ orange sword system helped immensely for these tiers, as if you only had 15-20 people on a map, they could all see where they needed to defend, and people actually fought each other, instead of playing musical keep trading.
If 25+ works at the top, great, then keep it for there, but they need to make it so on less populated maps, it detects the lower numbers and sets the bar lower at what triggers orange swords.
It’s silly to pretend that organizing defenses is the same with 20 players as with 60 or 80, or whatever the cap is now on a full server.
(edited by Pendragon.8735)
SoS has a empty period that must be like 12 hours long, they just aren’t on the maps. YB is holding out as best we can vs the endless DB hordes, but you really need 3 teams for the mechanics to work right.
I thought Anet talked about options for reduced spell effects a long time ago, we just never got it. But would definitely rather see more full characters vs nameplates, by having simpler spell effects instead.
. You’d also know that anytime we actually damage someone we come out of stealth for a few seconds, .
Until culling is fixed this is always going to be a disconnect. Players playing thieves see themselves come out of stealth on their screen and they feel like they are vulnerable, and should be easy to counter, not realizing they actually are not visible to other players in many instants on the opponents screen, and that all the opponent sees is the thief blink into existence for like one second, then is gone again.
Where does the fault lie with this, in the bug yes, but until the bug can be fixed – and so far its proving a very difficult one – they may have to consider balancing around it. Like making the Revealed debuff be 4 seconds, and then you are still going to get 3 as intended due to culling.
(edited by Pendragon.8735)
The best boon we could use really is more might. Since it ups our conditions and normal damage both. Splitting between power and condition damage, which is like 60/40 inherent in a lot of our abilities, is really what hurts the Necros vs other more specializing clasess, that can just go all power or all crit and own.
And I think they did a good thing with Blood is Power, and I’ve seen a lot of people try to make might builds around that, and with runes and sigils and such, but it takes a lot of work and sacrificing other things. The main problem with a Might build right now is that it requires very specific rotations that are not fight reactive, so that if you get in a situation where you can’t say go into DS to load up on Might via Life Blast, there goes your DPS.
Upping the bleed coefficient would be one way to go. But Necro bleeds should already be doing the most damage, as we are probably stacking the most condition damage.
Offloading some on to poison would hurt for PVE though, because it only stacks in duration, meaning if 20 people are fighting a boss, all the necros are going to be adding on to the same poison timer. But the bleed cap isn’t any more helpful in that regard. Burning would be better in that regard as its so short, you’re not going to see the cap hit much.
See my above post about spreading the damage around more. Also we do have ‘Target the Weak’ that gives us 2% more damage per condition, the funny thing is that only affects direct damage, while if you have a build triggering it with many conditions, often means you have gimpy direct damage, so it doesn’t do that much.
But that is also a trait that would become better if we had access to confusion or burning, as it would be one more condition not just for another 2%, but one more condition to hide our stronger damage debuffs behind.
I use to use the Skale Venom consumable in WvW for that purpose, not because it was so great on its own, but kept 2 more conditions around to hide my bleeds as well as for target the weak. Now they nerfed using that in WvW, but still helpful in PVE for the same purposes.
(edited by Pendragon.8735)
What I would like to see is some spreading out of our condition damage, to alleviate so much of it being bleeds. When almost all your DPS is in one stack of a condition and someone wipes a 20 bleed stack, you just lost a massive truckload of damage, likely lost the fight.
If they did more of a balance with poison (or one of the other dmg conditions I mentioned, burning & confusion) it would really help our reliability of damage as well as attrition playstyle.
Something like upping our poison durations for a few seconds, and reducing some of our bleed durations. Right now we have bleeds that last base 10 and 30 seconds. It’s easy to get those near 20 seconds and 60 seconds with bleed duration, but its just overkill. Only the most moronic player is going to let a bleed sit on them for 20 seconds, let alone 30 or 60.
Terror was a good step in this direction, but has to be built heavily for to be truly effective.
Conditions as stated. The duration runes being bugged is really annoying me, because when you have so many conditions, its a multiplier to make them last longer.
The real question though concerning conditions being our strength, is are they too easy to counter in PVP, are there too many cleanses readily available, especially as groups get larger and share them.
In PVE mobs have no defenses and conditions can wreck stuff, but PVP we are totally at the mercy of the other guys build.
Wish we had something like the ability to ‘blow up’ our conditions or a trait that put some kind of debuff on an enemy for cleansing, just to give us some small control over our conditions being totally neutralized.
Would really love to have even one application means of Burning or Confusion too. Of course its nasty to spread it via epidemic with teammates, but they aren’t always around. It’s clear they didn’t want our conditions to reach too much DPS levels, but then again, with the lack of availability of positive buffs we have, I think it would be fair for us to have those two conditions minimally.
(edited by Pendragon.8735)
“most successful post mass exodus server”, the most coveted title by all servers in gw2
I prefer ours tbh. Never been bandwagoned on to, never been bandwagoned off of.
I forgot about Jon’s post there. He said UI change was a ‘first step’ for DS, that was over 2 months ago… Yeah.
The problem with Soul reaping is that crit damage is a unique stat in that it is completely useless without another stat, specifically precision.
But also Power, it needs Power as well to make the criticals scale better.
The necromancer (or at least condition one) is probably stretched too thin on multiple stat dependency, tying precision in to their bleed procs, seems an odd choice, as it kind of temps you to think crit damage goes with your high crit rate, but the payoff isn’t really there because of how you can’t afford power.
Death Shroud only complicates matters, because if you want to think about a build where you use Death Shroud a lot more, you can make your ‘second life bar’ be bigger and fill faster yes, but the skills that go with it do not align stat wise with your normal form skills, and this is the biggest incoherency. When I’m in DS, my DPS falls through the floor as well as my ability to keep pressuring an opponent via conditions. It’s too severe. That DS degenerates on its own if you just sit it in, should be plenty of trade-off itself that it doesn’t also need to make you a very very weak threat without power.
Stepping back and looking at this makeup, one might logically assume the Necro’s ultimate answer is hybrid. But in practice most all games far more heavily reward specializing in terms of min/maxing. And you see that in GW2 here with bunker, or alternately glass cannons, which are squishy but still very viable for certain professions due to very specific abilities that alleviate squishiness (mobility and stealth primarily).
(edited by Pendragon.8735)
I think most people understand at this point that “winning” in World vs World, has less to do how “skilled” your server is, and more to do with how “Many” are on that server.
This isn’t DAOC, The most populated server has the advantage pretty much 100% of the time in World vs World.
Maybe the game needs like an efficiency score, in addition to overall scoreboard. How many points you are earning per player, per hour, per population. Or just do the point scaling to population many have advised for so long.
Probably too competitive for Anet’s view of the mode though.
Also, it’s too bad Mag and Yaks can not easily meet in Tier 4 or 3. Because you guys are both very similar in numbers and your overall scoring. You’d probably make perfect opponents for each other.
Ewww, icky comparison. YB is good and Mag is evil, clearly.
But yeah, it seems like lots of servers are now falling into middle grounds of being too strong for one bracket, too weak for another. Worse, not even getting matched up with those most even with them.
Somehow it must be figured out how to gain much more parity across all servers. So that when teams move up or down, the competition jump is much smaller between tiers.
Adding 2x the direct damage isn’t that valuable when direct damage is only accounting for like 30% of my damage vs condition damage. I also don’t think you are appreciating the damage that being able to use food in PVE and WvW confers to precision vs crit damage, via duration.
As for the balancing stuff (viability of power), I don’t want to derail too much further, suffice to say it sounds to me like you are more of a sPVP player and I play WvW, the game modes are just so entirely different the class cannot be compared the same way across them. 600 range vs 900 or 1200 range playstyle is massively different in WvW, and changes the risk factors when choosing a power style even if you try to stay out of direct melee.
At 900 – 1200 you can always manage to be on the far edges of a fight even just to temporarily disengage. When you suddenly go in front of half the people to get to 600 you become a much bigger priority target, and at that point having more life force or LF regen is not close to as good as having something like Mist Form or Endure Pain to disengage.
As the number of opponents in a battle increase, the value of abilities that get you out of dodge extremely quickly (blink, RTL, stealth, etc), or in fact make you invulnerable altogether, rises massively against something like LF which is just a sponge where you have to stick in there and still eat all that damage.
This is why I think DS and Soul Reaping need more viability to a condi spec in an offensive manner. And seeing that DS is only 60% of your health, not 100% or more as once presumed, is as I said, disappointing and only further reinforcing of this point.
(edited by Pendragon.8735)
If you make your build in such a way that completely avoids leveraging the strength of your class mechanic, whose fault is that exactly.
Sorry, but Anet’s. Because ‘leveraging the strength of my class mechanic’ actually makes a condi build weaker, and the traits and abilities to make it (DS) better are not competitive to what I would be giving up to gain more LF regen. And they should be competitive, it should be a hard choice, but its not, I just don’t want them. There isn’t much strength to leverage there once you don’t go power.
And it’s not like DS is useless. It will always be a defensive tool regardless of the build.
Of course it’s not useless but it not being useless is not the litmus test for if it is versatile or good enough either. I.e. Some people like Dark Path, and I find uses for it, but for an attrition class, they should have left it the way it was in beta, as a port.
re: Symbolic on BoC: He was speaking strictly from a tPvP perspective, and his comments regarding mobility were in relation to Necro’s role in tPvP, and how they were not effective outside of a team-fight environment (e.g. they are poor at assaulting the enemy’s close point due to lack of a way to escape from the fight), and I agree with him.
Lack of mobility is even more punishing in WvW, where the mode is not won by fights on a small circle and where getting someone else to run away does little for your overall objective. It is even more punishing for power builds with high LF regen, because needing to escape sudden bad situations with 100s of players on a map happens all the time.
I assure you he did not mean that DS should never be used in an offensive manner.
I didn’t take him to mean that at all.
re: crit dmg – I think you may be overrating how much damage precision adds to condition damage builds via crit procs.
Well in comparison to crit damage it’s a lot. 100 precision will give me another crit about every 20 attacks. The crit alone might be worth 150-200 damage on average. It will then be worth another ~140 from Barbed Precision on a 2 second bleed (66% proc). It will be worth ~480 damage considering my Earth Sigils will proc 84% of the time on that extra crit. So about 750 damage in total. Likely 500 at minimum even if the Sigil proc is cleaned after a few seconds.
By comparison 10% more crit damage over 20 attacks, again for condi build, might add between 100-200 damage, depending which abilities crit, but which can be averaged.
Getting back to DS and its trait line, Soul Reaping, how Anet designed is to usually split up the attributes that a trait line will give you, often forcing a good/bad attribute in each, so as to avoid cookie cutter builds. Yet in Soul Reaping from a Conditionmancer perspective, both crit damage and more LF are both bad attributes.
(edited by Pendragon.8735)
Why the Krait now have buffs that you can’t remove I don’t understand and reported as a possible bug. 15 stacks of might all the time, then also get fury on top, lol.
Well you also have to factor in that the equivalent EHP gain in LF is much easier to build up than healing for an equivalent amount.
That really depends on build, its certainly not inherent to build it up fast, other than stuff dying. In my current build, my only real good source of LF gain is getting hit in spectral walk.
And while crit dmg isn’t great on a conditionmancer it is far from useless since you would have a high crit % anyway. I have a DPS spreadsheet that I look at for stat optimization and the higher your crit is, the close crit dmg approaches power in terms of added DPS. At high levels of crit chance, crit dmg is starts to get fairly close to power (but power is still superior).
It’s still helping you the least of all offensive stats. You would far rather just have a higher crit chance than more crit damage, since crit chance is giving condi builds more bleeds, and thus more DPS.
Also the problem is, as you say as a conditionmancer you have high crit (and high condition damage) but you have no power, so your base hits are so weak that even when they get upgraded into crits its not doing much. I think I figured that on my average rotation of all abilities on both weapon sets, that 10% crit damage is giving me like 10 more damage per crit or something. Considering you might only get 10 crits in a short combat, that’s really bad compared up against 100 power, precision, or cond damage.
Looking over the LF skills it definitely shows a design principle of the longer range/safer skills and weapon sets provide less LF than the shorter range/difficult skills do. I think this is what that ANet dev was implying when he was saying Necros generally weren’t utilizing DS to it’s maximum potential, in that high LF generating skills, and thus LF itself as anything other than a defensive-mechanic, is underused.
I just don’t think that with Death Shroud being our class mechanic it should be so heavily bent toward synergizing with power builds only. It needs to function well for all our builds and really doesn’t. True there are amazing LF regen builds out there, but they involve melee, and Necro does not have the mobility, escape, stability, or useful utilities of some other classes to really compete on even footing in melee imo. And even if you are there at point black range generating LF real fast, I think a great point was made in the necro BoC podcast, in that you still need DS as a defensive tool, and if you are using it offensively, good chance it might not be there when you need it to soak damage.
(edited by Pendragon.8735)
At the very least 30 points into Soul Reaping should get you to Life Force equaling 100% of health. Thus 70% should be base if they want to make it lower than 100% off the bat.
This is disappointing (LF 60% of HP) and I think continues to make the Soul Reaping tree less desirable, especially as a conditionmancer.
If I put 10 points in Blood Magic I’ll get 1000 real health and 600 LF health. 1600 EHP. While if I put 10 points in SR, I’ll get just 1200 more LF (at 20K HP) and of course it degens.
Whereas if LF was 120% of health or even 100%, then at 20,000 HP you would get 2000 LF health for 10% into SR.
Also think the other attribute in SR, crit damage isn’t too helpful since most necro abilities have low direct damage that doesn’t scale well with crit, and near useless for condition builds. All that on top of the LF abilities just in general not synching up well with non power builds.
What really galls is a lot of condi necros are going to want 20 into SR for that 50% terror trait, since terror gels with high condition damage. Yet Death Shroud and its trait tree offer little else for you. Thus, our trait trees remain very jumbled and messy.
The DS mechanic needs some work, and by that, I mean improvement.
(edited by Pendragon.8735)
I do think we need a middle ground tag, a squad leader that a commander can assign per play session, but doesn’t last beyond that.
Then he can delineate smaller tasks and still have a leader for that group. Assign Bob a squad leader to go take a camp and bring back supply to build some trebs, or whatever. These smaller groups can then be integrated in and out of a larger force as necessary, without the confusion of another full commander on the map, pulling randoms away from a principal objective.
Do people just not want to ever fight each other in this game? A ninja cap is doable right now, heck can be done with 20 people with the swords change, but it often takes the enemy zerg being distracted elsewhere, or being very fast about it. As it should be.
If there were no swords for small teams, having even one scout in a location wouldn’t be enough for keeps, garrison and SM, you’d need multiple people to watch every single gate 24/7. That’s more into the realm of a job than a fun game.
They already upgraded the drops in wvw. I got a precurser the other day. Granted it was for the trident, but I did get a precurser drop in wvw. Not sure if it came from killing another player or from one of the guild claimers in a keep. I didn’t notice it until I went to empty my bags because I ran out of space.
They need more upgrading. I spend 90% of my time in WvW and yet have only ever gotten I think 1 exotic, maybe 1 rare per week. I have gotten maybe 10 exotics in far less PVE time and a good chance at a rare any time you do any event with lots of mobs.
A player is harder to kill than a level 80 mob, should drop better too. Maybe when they get the rewards system in, players with some of the higher achievements, passives, whatever, can drop better loot.
How many commanders on your server have burnt out completely? I’ve lost count of the ones on mine except I can say authoritatively at this point that I am one of them.
No commander should think they have to win the whole week or else. Excepting very rare close matches, it is out of their control. They should just focus on winning the map, or even lone fights they are in, while they are on, and building the trust of the people that follow them so everyone can have an enjoyable time while they are playing, and not worry so much about catching up for what happens when then are off.
I think far too often commanders feel they have to keep playing till everything is perfect. Too often it never gets perfect and then they’ll just quit the map after a particularly bad defeat, or when they feel no one is listening, which actually leaves things in an even worse place. Not least for the commander, who has now left with a bitter feeling, instead of just knowing they did what they could while on, and passed things on at the first sign they felt fatigue.
You mean because Garrison and Stonemist are not important enough or rewarding enough to take in their own right?
Gameplay wise, playing for the fun of WvW, yes they are rewarding, but money wise, which yes you need in WvW, no they are not rewarding enough.
I barely break even in WvW, sometimes lose, due to actually spending coin on siege to contribute to my team and not leech like many players. I would rather spend more time in WvW and not have to build up a nest egg in PVE for each week ahead of time.
I don’t think any sane WvW player would ever do that…
I agree totally. Come on, most of us are WvW players first and foremost, we simply want some rewards on the level that you get in the rest of the game, to not have to farm PVE so much to not be broke. Who is going throw SM away for one chest. I can just go look on the event tracker site and find any PVE boss that is nearly up and kill it in 5 minutes for a chest if I want one bad enough.
However the opposite, positive affect can come out of this, we can introduce more PVE players to WvW, and who cares if they are in for it the shiny chest, they will not be calling the shots and you just herd them to your advantage. Maybe they will even develop into fulltime WvW players.
I don’t think so, not everyone wants the hassle.
Why not, PVE people get their dragons and bosses for loot and money, these seem like reasonably difficult targets to reward large chests for WvW players.
Of course you keep the 1 chest per event per day in effect so there is no keep trading. But you have a possible 4 chests total over the BLs and EB.
A game needs to have some level of casual play, but it doesn’t have to include every class and role. It’s fine if some classes just aren’t accessible to worse players. That kind of diversity in challenge is good for the game.
GW2 is primarily a casual play game right now though, and that’s why they need to be concerned with the gameplay at that level. It’s where their revenue is at. Comparing it to LoL and SC2 is a little lofty because right now all it has is aspirations to become a competitive game like that. That likely will never be met unless they can draw a lot more interest in. And in this case bottom up looks more likely to succeed at that than top down. Of course you balance for the top first, but you just don’t stop there.
(edited by Pendragon.8735)
At this moment SoS is running around EB capping everything with a zerg of 40 maybe? DB is done, YB has 2 (read: “two”) defenders. Competition at it’s finest. Normally we’d have more at this time even on a Sunday night, but nobody wants to play against this. I can’t believe that this setup is fun for anybody, including the mighty night zerg which has nobody to fight besides guards.
I think it would be fun for them if they were in a higher tier like they used to be where they had the complimenting coverage for all time zones. But when one time zone largely evacuates a server like happened on SoS, it really leaves them in a terrible place to ever find a good tier to hang in.
It’s not their fault other people left their server, but at the same time does create this odd situation, where they win or lose depending if they dominate in their times more than they get dominated in the opposite. Looked like DB could hang with them Sat night, but now its back to near 600 PPT tonight.
I really don’t know the solution other than a server like that has to recruit more, or if they can’t move back up, just get bored with so much PvDoor that they disperse some to find more challenge.
The original HoD of course got so bored of winning or bored enough that drama started, they broke up and spread out, which ended up to the benefit of the game in increasing competition. As long as Anet refuses to make mechanics to alleviate this, it will be on the playerbase to solve it, by stop dog piling so much on a couple servers at certain time zones, but they have to want to.
After the recent patch that strengthened Krait mobs, they frequently now give themselves buffs such as Might and Fury, but for some reason these buffs have a black border around them (like a Boss’s ‘defiant’ ability) and cannot be removed with skills like Spinal Shivers or Corrupt Boon, unlike any other normal buffs on players or mobs in the game.
This makes them very hard to deal with in numbers as they stack these buffs in quite large quantities, and it also makes the skills designed to deal with those buffs nigh useless against them. Don’t see why this would be intended.
For us Yak’s Benders, what is the story here with SoS and DB. I’m not asking for any drama creation either, but rather just the very basics, did like half of SoS go to DB at some point.
Generally cultivating some rivalries can be a very good thing for a game like this, as long as people can be good natured about it, or at least here on the official forums.
People actually play PvE other than to casual farm? (Fractals not included, I’m level 2 there). I haven’t found a dungeon hard enough to warrant a real armor set, or in the case of CoE, that armor would actually make a big difference.
Right that’s because the mechanics in dungeons are more about defensive measure independent of gear, dodging or positioning, or simply knowing the mechanics of a fight.
I think in PVE any profession can be good and it really doesn’t matter that much if someone can beat an event 10 seconds faster, as they aren’t directly competing. I really don’t care much for dungeons myself, though I have heard some groups don’t want necros, so that could be a problem if true.
WvW is balanced enough except in the very top tier servers. If you are not in the top 1-2 tiers, you will not regularly run into highly coordinated groups, and you can pretty much do what you want. I often WvW on my alts, which are all level 2-20, and do fine just sitting in the back and spamming ranged abilities. I am significantly weaker than what I could be, obviously, but I can still mess around and enjoy it.
I play almost entirely WvW, and while the Necro’s most effective place might be in a big group or siege warfare, it gets boring doing that all the time. And when I roam alone I do pretty well, but still can’t shake the feeling that if I were to come up against my own self on most other professions, having dedicated the same amount of learning and skill to those professions that I have to my Necro, my Necro would lose more matchups than win, and lose certain ones very decisively.
In other words you can be very good on this profession at an individual skill level, but still very much feels like it takes more effort put in to get less out compared to several others. What a lot of people don’t understand, as very few spread their time evenly across all of GW2, each mode is entirely different and independent of each other, and not all experiences or strategies remain truisms across the different modes.
Anet has a real pickle on their hands trying to sort that out as far as balancing, but not trying is not a good solution. I don’t know the hard numbers, but if I had to hazard a guess, right now I bet the WvW scene is far more active than the sPVP one playerbase wise. The relative forum activity would certainly suggest that as well. So any idea that Anet should only care about sPVP and let the rest of the game tilt in the wind as far as caring about balance, as is somewhat implied by some of the posts here (not yours), would be extremely short-sighted by the developers.
(edited by Pendragon.8735)
Balancing the game at lower levels is impossible. Way too many of the perceived imbalances are people just being terrible at the game. For example, look at how many people still complain about warriors and Hundred Blades, which is extremely easy to prevent and avoid. If ArenaNet nerfed this ability, warriors would be gutted at high-end play, where balance actually matters due to tournament play, because a few people at low-level play have no idea how to move or position.
Besides, low-level players will always find something else to complain about. Bad players have a tendency to blame the game before themselves, which is why they stay bad. The best players are always analyzing how they did and how teammates performed, which is why they consistently improve.
Balancing for bad players is impossible yes, but I’m pretty sure its not the case that more bad players randomly roll up Necromancers than other professions. Because it seems clear that more people struggle with this class (and maybe 1 or 2 others), up until or unless they stick with it long enough to get very good, vs certain other profs.
If enough people are ever going to care about this game to be interested in high level tourneys, you first are going to need a flourishing casual game to cultivate that interest. Which is harder to do when any Joe Shmoe can easily jump on a warrior or thief and do well off the bat, but not so much with Necro or other professions. In fact, I think it hurts a profession like the warrior to be so built or dependent on such simple good/bad mechanics like 100B, where there the dividing line of its effectiveness is so much in the hands of the opponent.
(edited by Pendragon.8735)
Follow a commander to start, you need good knowledge of the mode and of the terrain to have a successful small group.
By following the zerg you will not only learn your way around the maps, and basic WvW knowledge, but perhaps even better you can learn even faster what not to do, by seeing some of the common poor decisions always being made in the herd.
what about servers that dont get queues but still suffer from opponents outnumbering them?
The idea there was to encourage low population servers to actually congregate to one map, instead of being spread out outnumbered everywhere. By filling out one map they would not only be more successful together, but they would be fighting on the map worth the most points, since it would be the only one with an orb in it.
Too often outnumbered servers have a few people in every map, and can’t get anything really accomplished in any of them.
I don’t know how bad the situation is in the bottom couple tiers, but I would hope that even there, most servers can hit 75% of the player limit in at least 1 out of the 4 maps, certainly during the main 6-8 prime hours on their server.
Bhawb it will be important as long as the majority of Anet’s revenue is coming from players occupying levels far below that of the elite. Until or unless GW2 blows up into a massively successful E-Sport with sponsored tourneys and such, those lowly level 30 Necro’s struggling in hot join or WvW are among the players making up the bulk of Anet’s paying customer base.
It’s not good for the game if these players are not having a good play experience getting gibbed over and over by easy play warriors or thieves, because they will quit the class and maybe the game in cases. These are not only your pool of future pro and hardcore players, but also a group that will always remain the majority, most of which will never advance to master status.
Now I agree that inherently you can never make every single profession equally easy to play, and I think its probably on purpose that a couple profs like the warrior are intentionally easy to learn, but I still think the Necro needs some work at lower and mid-levels to be more accessible to most, while right now it is at its most balanced at the top.
The rest of the conversation was interesting, particularly how most low-rated or new players tend to underestimate necromancers and overestimate how imbalanced the game really is. The latter in particular happens in every MMO I’ve ever played.
Balance needs to occur at all levels though, not just the top of the food chain.
If we say 30% of the players at any one time are more newer or inexperienced ones, and another 30% are rather average, if even a couple classes are very poor or imbalanced at this play level, then balance is failing in the game, same as if it was failing at the top level.
The reality with the necro is something like this, it has a high skill ceiling which is almost necessary to be very good with it. And a lot of new players that try the class can’t be successful with it, get frustrated and drop it. We can see many of those type of posts in this very forum. This is a problem, that often high rated players, so called, have too much hubris and don’t consider. It is also a problem if the devs think only like that, in their lust for GW2 to be an E-Sport and only considering balance where sPVP is concerned.
Assuming Anet could work the technical hurdles of bringing orbs back without hacking and cheating being involved, I think they could work as a simple and effective mechanic for helping balance scores against population imbalances that too often decide matches.
The idea of how it would work is an orb would be worth a set amount of points per tick, like a tower or keep, and it would be a lot, at least 25 points or more. But an Orb would not appear on any map until the population of all three teams in the match filled at least 75% of their player slots on that map.
This way when matches were at there most contested, with all three maps fully queued, you would have the potential for maybe 100 more points on the scoreboard, to represent how the fighting has reached its most meaningful fevered pitch, and most rewarding too.
Once a population dropped below this number on a map, the orb would go into a fade period, but it would last a while, maybe an hour (4 point ticks) so as to prevent a team from just purposely evacuating a map to make the orb team lose their points right away.
It would really add some excitement and dynamic change on to a map to see that an Orb has appeared, a new objective that every teams is going to want. Right now, especially on the Borderlands, it can get very stale and tired fighting the same strategies and cyclical fight flows that happen in a match, when there is no wild card to mix things up.
(edited by Pendragon.8735)
Oh, you’re entirely right, I’ve been on that end as well, and found it utterly boring and lame. Why people interested in WvW would not want a system that creates more challenge though, I don’t know. But unless Anet continues to hear its flaws then no it won’t change.
A good WvW system really shouldn’t match based on total points servers can gain in a week, but rather on which matchups would provide the best player experience. Which means getting the most players to actually PVP each other and not so much PVE, which is what mostly happens at 600+ PPT, which happened the other night.
But yes, you can (have to) ignore the scoreboard often at T3 or below, but its just a shame, because there are solutions. I’ll let it go there because we’ve beaten it a good bit, but every time a new match like this happens, you see one of the flaws holding this game mode back.
I think it’s time that everyone realised that THERE IS NO OFF-PEAK.
For 6 out of 8 tiers there is, which can make for a pretty broken system. No, it shouldn’t be belabored ideally, but some refuse to accept it for some reason.
The servers in tier 1 and 2 have realised this and dominate because of it.
They didn’t realize jack. That is just the few servers that enough people bandwagoned on to that already had the precious off peak coverage. But when those servers get evacuated, indeed like happened to SoS, they kind of bob up and down in a no man’s land where they are dominate half the time, either winning due to utter off peak dominance, or not being able to compete with the servers that can somewhat match them, due to not enough NA support.
No point complaining, just recruit guilds in other time zones, move your guild to a different server or wait until you are in a tier which suits your server’s coverage.
It’s not really based on tier past T2. If as I alluded to TC falls int this tier, or Mag comes up, though TC is stronger overall, their strong point coverage is much more compatible to that of a lower tier server, as you can see in their income chart, they have similar dip when its primetime in oceanic.
I applaud people that stick with their server though, its not the fault of where people started, but more Anet not finding adequate solutions. But the ones saying its not a big deal are usually the people on the free zerg karma train that rarely have to be on the other end of it.
It will be interesting to see if the March update has any new ideas for this. Or maybe best hope it brings out enough casuals to where more servers can compete 24/7.
Judging your na coverage to be better than a new opponent after reset night is foolish. SOS na wooped your backside tonight, so maybe you should rethink the wording of you next excuse.
Our reset coverage has always been much better than our weekend coverage, which has always been much better than our weekday. Even so, to what do you refer? The score was very close all NA shift, in fact YB held the lead for most of it.
Oh truly? My mistake. I guess the 3-4 hours I was online for wasn’t indicative of the entire night. My point still stands however.
He’s right though, YB was ticking around 300 (1st place) for most of reset night up till about midnight NA central time. This can easily be viewed on the income graph at the matchup site.
But what happens is once an off peak crew runs over a map and tears everything down with little resistance, and then also is able to set up their own NA team with a completely fortified BL, its a huge advantage each following day, and then even if you have the stronger NA team, its very hard to ever get back to that first night PPT because of the rebuilding you must do to start each day. Therefore past the 1st night each period becomes inordinately affected by the previous periods, not necessarily reflecting true strength within any given time.
Anyhow, we are actually looking at the same matchup next week so far, as YB is gaining more rating than DB with the score where it is. But if SoS can leverage their strong time more and more each day they might be able to get back into T2, where there is better coverage competition for them (kain), and we will finally get to play TC again. Woot!
(edited by Pendragon.8735)
How think DB oceanic feels when they lose everything to NA time slots. It is not their choice to play on NA it is only choice other than picking a EU server that is 3x distance away than NA ones. But I rarely see oceanic/SEA people whining on forums about all their owning when during their prime time is for nothing.
It sucks for both sides of course. At least for those who enjoy actual fighting, and not just rampaging over doors for +600 PPT, which of course Yaks never reaches in NA primetime, because even the oceanic heavy servers have some decent NA coverage, if not totally competitive.
But to be honest they should just go ahead and make a 3rd server set, to join NA and Europe, and it would be the Asia/Oceanic set. I don’t care if it could only support 3 teams, or maybe 6 would work, but it would create much better all around matches that are decided primarily when all servers have the bulk of their forces on a map.
Because the worst weeks or matches really are when you have these big timezone disparities. Even if the end week scores end up close, doesn’t mean you had as great and contested battles as if zergs were matched up with zergs.
T1 and T2 might not be an issue, but the game doesn’t have enough players to support that coverage through the tiers and in T3-T8, its a huge, if not overwhelming, factor.
(edited by Pendragon.8735)
But just to note, if you’re looking to beat up the bandwagoners, I’d suspect the majority of them to be in Blackgate. Once a bandwagoner, always a bandwagoner I’d guess.
Every server that has been to T1 was pretty much bandwagoned at some point or another, maybe excepting the original HoD.
Odd perspective, the original HoD was the biggest of all band wagons. A literal horde of people spamming the gw2guild website before release, all watching for whatever server the alliances were going to, so they knew where to get their free ride.
Well yeah that was kind of a rigged game, but I was talking in terms of people’s home, or first server.
Necro is a bit shy of being a perfectly balanced class imo. They have some builds pretty effective against d/d ele if played properly though, yes.
But just to note, if you’re looking to beat up the bandwagoners, I’d suspect the majority of them to be in Blackgate. Once a bandwagoner, always a bandwagoner I’d guess.
Every server that has been to T1 was pretty much bandwagoned at some point or another, maybe excepting the original HoD.
Another one of these weeks. All the off hour servers should be put in a bracket and just play each other over and over. Be better for them and better for everyone else too, as far as competition and fun fights.
Especially the ones that have hemorrhaged players from prime times and are now extremely bottom heavy. How many servers has this happened to now, about 4 or 5. It’s a vicious cycle.