Guild Wars 2

Happens when the people responsible for it don’t tell anyone. There’s no possible way for any of them to know it’s down without walking around to the other side (and why would they?) and seeing it’s down.

Poor communication is the worst enemy in WvW.

The rare case of when actually winning a head to head fight as a team actually matters. They really need to get rid of those waypoints.

Even if the IDs aren’t good enough for you (what’s wrong with your eyesssss?), then you could at least just give players auras or a colored disc below their feet. Any solution that allows people to actually enjoy their own color scheme is better than what we have now.

Although the amusing side to that is if it’s turned off, I’m sure people will give themselves full red or blue color schemes just to confuse the people that can’t recognize IDs.

You can make other kinds of builds, but as it’s been stated, they’re nowhere as effective as another class. Guardians can destroy any support/tank build you could even think of making.

Conditions aren’t really a Warrior’s thing. You can apply bleeds, burning and such, but they’re easily removed and more difficult to apply than on other professions, which can quickly hit 25 stacks with some builds – your best will probably only hit around 15 at most, without going overboard and making something ineffective just for the sake of saying “I got 25”.

You can make builds that focus on applying area effects, like the shout+combustive spam bow build, or a warhorn build, but they’re extremely ineffective in most cases.

You can stack signets for precision, but honestly that’s… a terrible idea. You can hit more than enough precision with equipment and your secondary slots are basically limited to whatever gives you stability and whatever can close gaps, because if you don’t have those, you will die immediately, because your traits and weapons don’t make up for those deficiencies very well, if at all.

I’d say the most effective kind of build you can make other than a generic burst Warrior is probably a disruption (or CC as the new people want to call it) Warrior, which is either going to be a hammer warrior or a mace warrior. Your job there isn’t to do damage necessarily, but to just be a nuisance and stop the enemy from being able to use their skills or control your group. It’s more of a tPvP build, honestly. I’d say the hammer build is more effective in sPvP. Mace offhand is nice but isn’t going to solve all your problems. You may have to drop a couple of physical skills, although like I said before, you don’t want to lose stability, and dropping Endure Pain is usually a no-no as well.

So, yeah, there sort of are, but none of them are very good just because of the innate limitations of the class. Most of your time is spent FIXING how the Warrior plays, not necessarily changing how it plays.

Sweeet.8127:

Dallas.2536:

well phantaram from paradigm made my warrior look embarrassing last night on his ele lol

As damage, I think they are too gimmicky and thus too easily countered at high level competition, and if when they get real matchmaking implemented you won’t see many at high tier games, except maybe in a support or point holding role.

If they can make warrior less viable to faceroll baddies and average players, but more viable in higher tier games, that would be an improvement. It really shines right now versus average to bad players because it can kill them really fast, but any skilled player using any other class would attain the same results. It would just be less obvious because its over a longer period of time.

Plague made a good point about dps warriors not ‘doing’ as much as other classes. Traitwise its mostly getting things like 10% damage vs bleeding, 10% damage with a certain weapon, etc, which leads to a very stat-driven gimmicky build. And then to effectively deliver damage, the utility skills pretty much always need bulls rush and frenzy and stability, and if you swap any of those out you are asking for trouble.

If anyone played HoN, I would say warriors in a damage role are kind of like Deadwood. You can destroy everything up until 1650 or so, then the dropoff is dramatic and you never see him in competitive games.

So, it all makes sense now, you actually feel that the only way to be an effective damage dealing warrior is to run a frenzy build… No wonder you get so antsy when people request it be removed or toned down.

I’m not saying Warriors are fine without it, just that you have a major conflict of interest going on there buddy. Warriors definitely need a tweak, but Quickness is NOT the answer to their current situation, I’m sure even you can see that.

The very fact a build has to rely on an ability like Quickness, not only shows how broken Warriors are, but how powerful Quickness is. Both could do with a reasonable tweak.

You can run a Warrior build without Frenzy, although a Warrior’s main advantage is its ability to burst damage and disrupt constantly. Not bringing it is tantamount to forgoing that advantage, and not optimizing appropriately. I actually tend to run without it, because unlike GW1, there is no cancel stance to use it. I instead just use Endure Pain along with the mandatory Balanced Stance (which has been acting weird since the last patch). Usually either Bull’s or Bolas if I’m feeling like being a pest, to fill in the third.

When you run a melee build of any kind you’re generally locked to those skills because of how the class operates. Balanced, Dolyak’s maybe, Endure Pain on a good portion of them and Frenzy. The others are often novelties because they don’t orient themselves directly to what the Warrior is supposed to do. Since you can’t trait effectively to change playstyle (5%, 10%, etc), this makes it hard to get those skills off your secondaries. Ranged builds don’t necessarily require those skills but they often find their way onto your skillbar anyway. A lot of the Warrior secondary skills also tend to just apply a boon or up your defense, offense, etc rather than actively doing something that changes your playstyle. No clones or smoke bombs or teleports or making impassable walls, etc. Just +stat.

You’d be amazed at how effective that little commander icon is at coordinating people who don’t even know one another.

In real life, if you own a keep, you live in it and sleep in it. If the enemy attacks, you wake up and defend your life.

In WvW, if you own a keep, you let a couple of NPCs guard it and let you know when it’s attacked, so you can run back to it to defend it, if you feel like it. If you aren’t online, it’s just a free keep for the taking.

There’s no real solution other than turning WvW off, which obviously no one wants. You could dramatically increase gate and wall health as player numbers decline, although that can get very wonky when people suddenly join en mass.

A small group of 10 people can get things done, but many are very uncoordinated during the night. Also, a lot of Oceanic guilds participate during THEIR primetime, making it basically impossible to hold anything or make quick strikes at targets because the map is saturated with enemies.

It’d be nice if keep NPC numbers scaled to the population to fill in the gaps when there’s literally no one on, or similar.

Maybe making it so that the timer scores faster as more people are logged in (also accounting for population disparity) would resolve most of the problems.

The major guilds in ET aren’t even really playing at the moment. They’re either running people to Orr or doing zerg bombs on keeps to power level characters to 80 in preparation for the new week long rounds. I wouldn’t get too used to thumping your chest about beating the lowest population server in the game when their primary force isn’t even participating.

Apathy.6430:

And you can do that with an 8v8 as well, not sure how that is relevant to the thread.

Don’t be stupid.

milo.6942:

Plague.5329:

We got bykittengood with RAs in GW1 for nearly a decade. We didn’t need any sissy Svanirs nor glowing circles. We just straight up killed each other. And life was good.

Until you faced a team with a monk.

Wouldn’t be a problem in this game, though. Mainly because we complained about it in GW1 for years. I like to imagine that at some point in the history between 1 and 2, everyone got together after one too many monk strikes and agreed to just kill them all off on both sides, so no one would have to deal with them ever again. The Great Monk Purge.

It always felt good to make it far on a team without a Monk or Rit, though, just overpowering “real” teams. Rare, but amusing when it happened. Shows you how important damage mitigation is.

I wish there was a PvP mode that was more forgiving for anyone that’s new to it. Which is what I think you mean. Lowering the people involved would help a LOT. Nothing makes you want to stop playing like evaporating as five other players with glass cannon builds race through you while you’re trying to claim a point.

GW2 sPvP is extremely unforgiving. And unfortunately a lot of that is that many builds are not viable, and there’s no real way to know that without getting creamed a few dozen games. Something as simple as a little 3v3 mode of some kind, even if it was just a little sparring mode on the tutorial grounds, would go a LONG way. You could actually duel people and ask them what happened when you lose, and others could watch and give advice. As it is, an 8v8 with objectives where people rarely talk to one another is NOT conductive to introducing players to your game’s PvP.

Random Arena. Guild Wars 1. Problem solved.

“People will still zerg!” That’s what an arena is. Remove objectives. 5v5. No resurrections. Small maps. Open the gates, rush the other team. Whoever has the last man standing wins.

We got bykittengood with RAs in GW1 for nearly a decade. We didn’t need any sissy Svanirs nor glowing circles. We just straight up killed each other. And life was good.

What has gotten on my nerves with my Warrior is that I will enter the downed state and all of my skills will have massive cooldowns. With my stupid hammer and three people on me (and probably a dozen or so bears they’re hiding behind), there is no possible way I will ever get up, even if they choose to forgo stomping me. Sometimes my 2 skill will have an obscenely high recharge, which I don’t understand (I guess it carries over from the last time you were downed?), meaning I won’t get to use it for about 10-15 seconds, or I’ll have it up but Vengeance is on a HUGE cooldown. Meaning after my one little hammer throw, affecting a single enemy, even if timed perfectly to waste as much time as possible, I’m still nowhere close to being able to use my #3.

In sPvP, this = huge waste of my time. So when I see a thief or mesmer teleporting all over the place, crapping huge clouds of clones in all directions, it especially annoys me knowing if the roles were reversed, it’d just be a free kill.

HS at least finally got nerfed. In the middle of fighting three other people today, a thief ran in and somewhere in the midst of so much fX I couldn’t see the screen, I died. Heartseeker was at the top, of course, but unlike the usual “10,000 damage, 2 attacks” it now said 3 attacks. Later something similar happened and it only listed 4 attacks. It was heart warming.

As someone else said, the main problem is that the game itself has no tanking or healing mechanism to act as a buffer for spikes, so the most irritating things in the game become giant spike moves, because there’s no counter to them other than five second skills with one minute cooldowns (so you are encouraged to never use them) or evasions you may again be discouraged from using because, hey, someone may try to HS you or Immobilize+HB you, etc.

It does surprise me that health is so low and damage so high in a game like this. Some fights DO last a good minute, as they should, but others can literally be over in two seconds if someone gets lucky with your cooldowns and has a build designed to do that and only that. You’d think even with the most extreme glass cannon build attacking the same kind of build, a single spike would still never be able to kill someone from full health, in a game without mitigations.

Apathy.6430:

Plague.5329:

I just want them to get rid of hills and give us 4v4 or 5v5 Random Arena and Team Arena from Guild Wars, which was far superior. I’ve actually had fights take place just out of reach, and had to watch teammates die because we were struggling to gain points from these imaginary places of importance. (In this case getting up the level to participate would have taken far too much time.) It’s also annoying having to pass up a fight because of them, or clashing in the middle, winning a good fight but then discovering we’re vastly behind on points because someone early on had captured an extra point. It’s a game mode I never play in other games and I have no interest in playing now.

You as well as most people playing.

Most people just play it as a deathmatch and it is infuriating just watching them suicide into the zerg in the middle over and over.

Not that I don’t think deathmatch has it’s place. I’d love to be able to just join a game and kill people. That isn’t what we have though.

I have both reactions. I get irritated with people doing nothing but rushing into the middle to fight, but at the same time, I don’t want to mess around with the glowing circles. I want to fight. I usually end up being the one who sees the big cluster of violence and has to ignore it so I can go neutralize points to give us a fighting chance.

The people doing the zerging usually end up with more points as a result, even if the only reason we won is because I ran behind it and decapped everything. I loved PvP in GW1. It’s a bore or an irritation most of the time in GW2.

There needs to be an incentive for switching. A point bonus would more than make up for it. Punishing people for leaving a match that obviously isn’t worth staying for will accomplish nothing other than making people hate unorganized sPvP. Usually when this happens it’s because one side is getting demolished, after all.

Just give us a little glory or a small multiplier to our existing points. Maybe even buff losing sides when the point disparity becomes too great. Most points come from personal kills, etc, after all. Actually winning doesn’t do a whole lot.

I just don’t like the map, period. I detest underwater combat, so strike one. I understand WHY the sharks are there. Having control of the water makes it easy to cut across. They’re also there to defend the point while you focus on carrying cannonballs (I guesss.) and controlling the points. Unfortunately that one point usually dictates the outcome of the match, because one person can indeed hold it easily against almost the entire enemy team.

Putting more importance on the ship can easily result in people camping out on it, spamming cannons to the beach. You don’t want any one element to dominate gameplay. The trebuchets on Khyolo work because they can’t really hit anybody on the run and the points are awkward targets at such extreme ranges and high windup on the treb itself. As such it is basically only really useful targeting center, and as such becomes situational. A cannon that’s too easy to use in the center of Cap just becomes a deadly focal point with no real drawbacks.

I think it’d be interesting if some behaviors of these maps (if we MUST have them be objective-based, which I detest) had some WvW-like behaviors. For instance, a NPC you can control on the pirate ship that runs cannonballs to your own base. Or one you escort TO the ship with a limited supply of them to use there. Etc.

I really just want them to bring back arenas from GW1 and stop mucking around with this objective-based gameplay. Large numbers of people and complicated objectives do not belong in pick up games. That’s what Guild vs Guild is supposed to be. If it actually existed in a game called Guild Wars.

Anyway. The real solution is to stop making maps like these that encourage you to stray AWAY from combat and focus on making ones that draw people into it. Objectives defeat this, but they already made that mistake, so design around it, I guess. The map would work better if the sharks were a resource you gained to attack something, not a defensive measure.

I just want them to get rid of hills and give us 4v4 or 5v5 Random Arena and Team Arena from Guild Wars, which was far superior. I’ve actually had fights take place just out of reach, and had to watch teammates die because we were struggling to gain points from these imaginary places of importance. (In this case getting up the level to participate would have taken far too much time.) It’s also annoying having to pass up a fight because of them, or clashing in the middle, winning a good fight but then discovering we’re vastly behind on points because someone early on had captured an extra point. It’s a game mode I never play in other games and I have no interest in playing now.

aleiro.8521:

Kentra.8625:

Why don’t you people take a look at Team Paradigm’s Moldran and his videos? I bet you could learn a thing or two that would help you feel a little less useless Google is your friend here..

his videos are pre-launch aren’t they….not that the build is not useful now but it’s not as effective

They’re also mostly HB builds against other Warriors or people that don’t know what they’re doing.

I feel like if it had a similar affect to freeze but made you regain your health and replaced your skills with more useful abilities to the ones we have in the current downed state, it’d flow better in combat. You’d never fall down. It’d just look like you had broken the enemy’s composure and they were now stumbling around, trying to regain it. The whole mechanic of lying on the ground chucking rocks is just silly.

An example, albeit a weird one, might be wrestling video games. It can be hard to win over someone in those games because they can fight through pain, shrug it off and come back stronger than ever. It should function sort of like that. Just with less spandex.

Made a similar topic a while back, but actually detailing why it’s a limited class. Take a look at their traits and it should sum up why, nicely. They’re almost all +5% if using a hammer, +10% if using greatsword, +toughness when using a shield, etc. They aren’t a profession that does things. They rely on stats way too much, which doesn’t work in a game that’s all about active utility.

It’s a broken profession in its very design, and will probably remain the worst or next to worst in sPvP for a long time. You can’t fix it without completing altering most of the skills and traits to actually have utility. Fixing the numbers will not do anything other than potentially overpower them, if you go far enough to make them able to overcome the hurdle of their utility limitations. That said, they’re one of the best PvE classes and possibly the best dungeon running class. In sPvP, though, they’re pretty terrible. It’s very easy to root them, get them to burn off the mandatory Balanced Stance they MUST bring (9.5s), then just immobilize them again, if they aren’t dead already. Their extra health and armor is VERY easy to burn through in one or two hits.

“You just don’t know the counter to the class.”

Thieves aren’t dungeon bosses. When was the last time you heard someone say “Oh man, I can’t beat this Elementalist. It’s so fast and deadly. I wish I knew the counter for it.” Same for almost any other class. The only other time I heard this was with the old HB+Frenzy trick in the betas, back when most players were incompetent. And that got nerfed straight into hell. Even if Frenzy still worked the same way and the damage was just as high, the combo would now be considered a joke because people know how limited it is. It freezes you in place, and it’s just one attack with a long cooldown. Heartseeker (and the class in general) has a much worse problem, in that it’s not going to take +50% damage, the skills don’t lock you in place, the damage is just as high if not worse, and there’s no cooldown whatsoever, so if you DO mess up the first try, just keep spamming it.

Make no mistake. The Thief will be nerfed into oblivion, as it should be. You people defending an obviously broken mechanic while complaining about something as ludicrously easy to counter as HB really just need to stop posting, or just do us a favor and stop playing. Just because you CAN counter something doesn’t mean it’s balanced. Again, you are not Lieutenant Kholer. The rest of the game should not be designed around your one move that you MUST watch for like a hawk, or else you die in two seconds. That is not how the game works, nor is it how it should work. For anyone that played GW1, you know what happened to the original Sin builds. Falling Spider indeed. The game isn’t fun when you have a class or build that can kill you in a few seconds if you aren’t treating the other player like a dungeon boss. It WILL be fixed. If you don’t like it, stop playing the game. You obviously don’t belong in it.

Not too effectively. Guardians can do it far, far better than you can. Survivability is more about skill utility than health and armor, although you’ll need those too. Warriors don’t really have skill utility.

What you’re doing now is about as good as it gets. Bring a shield for 5 seconds of invulnerability and a little more armor (which won’t mean a whole lot but may buy you another three or so seconds), and bring your shouts, and maybe save a slot for endure pain, if you’re doing absolutely nothing but just trying to waste peoples’ time as they pound on you. Although, again, a Guardian can do that, far, far better.

Warrior builds tend to gravitate either to the middle ground, or as cute little novelty glass cannon builds you run in team games, where one person will stunlock someone so that you can burst them down in a couple of seconds.

Either way, on their own, Warriors are almost completely worthless. Which is weird. You’d think Warriors would have the opposite problem. But either way, in sPvP I suggest you focus on some sort of support build, find people, and follow them around while trying to avoid being targeted by enemies. Surviving as a Warrior is more about helping the people around you (the better professions) survive.

I made the choice of orders before I realized that one of them has one of the few heavy helms in the game I don’t think looks asinine. Unfortunately, I’m in another order, because at the time I chose it based on what I thought my character would do.

Or would I have to reroll my entire character just because of this, to get the exact look I want?

My impression of the videos is that they worked because it was organized play against somewhat poor opponents. He rarely actually got targeted. Coincidentally, what he’s running on that longbow build is almost just like what I run… in PvE.

Rewards in GW2 are like that. It’s a lesson ANet learned in GW1. Allowing high rewards to enter the system made balancing things very problematic, so they’re very gun shy about giving people anything. Hence getting a single common Pistol from a reward chest in PvE, and similar. Yes, it’s very irritating and leaves you feeling like you wasted your time, but it’s not like you can spend your glory on anything productive.

I ask this because my main is a Warrior. In Guild Wars 1, I didn’t have a “main” exactly, but I usually RA’d, TA’d and HA’d as one. Obviously being good in one (and I indeed was a good Warrior in GW1) won’t translate to the other, but so far my experience with the class in 8v8s has not been a favorable one. I’m not interested ranking professions, but more in your overall impression of playing Wars and fighting them. Do you ever find them threatening? What do you think of their utility? Build variety? Traits?

I’ll give you my general impression:

Warriors are a melee class, foremost. The Warrior has two ranged options: rifle and bow. Rifles have low base damage and some rather poor utility. The #1 slot is a basic attack that does nothing but damage+bleed, #2 is a cripple, #3 is another basic attack with no utility, although it’s the rifle’s primary source of damage but easy to dodge when it starts, #4 is low damage and adds some vulnerability (5), which may get you 10-15 more damage a hit on average, and #5 is a short range knockback. So, its main utility is a cripple and a knockback. It’s mainly a distance weapon, but not a particularly good one. Its F1 attack is 95% worthless, as it has an obvious animation anyone will avoid. Use it only when your target cannot see you. The bow has its own problems. Its main attack again has no utility, although it does hit twice, meaning it can act as a carrier for runes. #2 is very low damage and inflicts burning for about 1s, #3 is Arcing Arrow, a very slow, obvious attack that is very easy to avoid at long ranges. #4 blinds, buying you one hit, and #5 is a cripple. Again, low damage for the most part, slow, obvious attacks. You have to use the longbow as a melee weapon almost. Its F1 is the Warrior’s only option to create a combo field in the game, so you may find yourself walking into enemies, laying it at your feet and firing an arcing shot directly into the ground. Good in PvE and in WvW at times, not so much in PvP. Your worst weapon choice in sPvP.

So, most Warriors you will ever see will be running melee builds. Melee is easy to avoid. Evasions, cripples, freezing, stuns, dazes, immobilizes, blinds, knockbacks, knockdowns, turning people into moas and so on. Stability will allow you to avoid some of this, although the Warrior’s only stability options are Balance Stance and Dolyak Signet. Both do the same thing: grant 10 1/2s of stability. You basically have to have one of these on your bar in every single build, or you will never begin dealing damage to anyone, regardless of whether your target is crippled, etc, themselves. I feel like this starts off being the primary problem with Warriors, as they lack a lot of innate utility that other professions are built around, meaning they have a very low amount of build variety that ends up revolving completely around countering CC. GW1 was the same way, although mending touch made it tolerable.

People usually mention the HB+Frenzy build, which was nerfed prior to release and is easy to counter. Hundred Blades locks you in place, necessitating a lengthy stun prior to using the move, in addition to needing to isolate targets to begin with, unless you want his buddy to melt you while you Frenzy. It’s not a very good build, but on a class with few options, it’s one of the few unique things it can do.

The main “advantage” a Warrior has is its high health pool – a few thousand more than other professions, on average. Of course, many classes can deal well over that amount in a single hit, meaning this is mostly worthless. Survival in sPvP is all about utility, not health or armor. This is why a mediocre Guardian can outtank a perfectly specced Warrior with ease. Similarly, the Warrior’s strength is not DPS, which many other classes can exceed with ease (and more importantly, at range. )The main advantage Warriors have, or used to, is burst damage. This has gone down a lot since betas, and most weapons don’t do it particularly well to begin with. Axe and GS are your only real options here, and both rely heavily on a single attack that, again, has no innate utility and require a lot of awkward weapon switching or skill chaining to work, with a lot of drawbacks and not much payoff. So far I’ve found hammer to be the most useful in 8v8s just because it offers the most disruption, and hence, is the only real utility option in the game for a Warrior.

Again, I’m not asking if other professions are overpowered, or if another is worse off. I’m just asking your opinion on the Warrior. I’m not heavily experience in sPvP like I was in GW1, so I’m open to ideas, but my impression is that the Warrior does not do anything better than another profession and is hampered by its weapons’ terrible innate utility, meaning you have to waste secondary skill slots on mitigating that – not to accessorize your build, but to make it viable.

I might agree if there was a 10 match limit like in RA, or if when you lose you get booted out, like in RA, or if leaving the match was a little easier. Best solution is, do not do 8v8. It’s currently a bit of a mess.

Well, it’s definitely no GW1 PvP. That was very fun. Even if you were bad at it, it had a lot of mechanics that forgave mistakes and helped you learn. In GW2, not having a perfect build and knowing tiny variations in animation, etc, will result in almost instant death.

IMO it still needs a lot of work. I feel like the hotjoin games are actually more difficult and unforgiving than organized play, which is… silly.

That sounds like a very large amount of information to execute and plan for, just to counter a single skill.

All I know is that upon death, usually Heartseeker is always on the top of the list. I often see two Thieves running alongside one another using the same build, obviously working together in TS or similar. It’s laughably overpowered. For those of you saying “dodge,” yeah, I’ll dodge. Twice. That buys me about two seconds. Do you really think most other classes can output that same damage in two seconds to gain an advantage? Especially against two Thieves running the same build. There is no counter to it, only things that may buy you a couple of seconds.

We have those. They’re called speed buffs. The thing about mounts is that once they’re introduced, eventually everyone has them. Even if you make them incredibly hard to get (which makes no sense anyway), people still end up with them. And that looks positively stupid when you enter a game and no one ever walks anywhere.

I imagine they’re scared to make Eles too on par with other classes because they can switch roles so easily, whereas most professions can’t, or outright can’t perform certain roles whatsoever without completing speccing for them. Healer, for instance, on a Warrior. You will never do that unless you have 30 points in Tactics. An Ele can just switch attunements or weapons out of battle.

All classes can solo bosses, given you play them correctly.

Elementalists are indeed the weakest class in sPvP. This does not mean they are 100% incapable, however. Warriors are considered fairly easy to kill in sPvP in most cases, for example, yet are notorious for their one or two burst damage builds that can kill you in a couple of seconds.

All things with context.

Well, yeah. You use the basic t-stone, and it brings up a window and you have to select first the appearance between the two, then which of the two stats you want to use, then which of the two runes you want.

It doesn’t. Not sure about things like sPvP zones/maps. I wouldn’t think so. I don’t think dungeons ever have them.

If it’s anything like basketball or hockey, etc, I imagine it involves passing the keg to a teammate who then scores. My experience with kegbrawl is that it’s a cluster(word) of people spamming KDs and interrupts on one another, so the odds of being able to actually throw a pass, much less make it, are incredibly low. Unlike basketball, fouls are encouraged. Which subsequently makes it harder to do things like this.