Guild Wars 2

^ If your argument is that they don’t see it coming, so it’s irrelevant, then there’s no point in even saying the wind-up is a good balance to the skill’s design, since your enemy won’t see it anyway.

You also run into the problem of, “Well, Kill Shot isn’t meant to be used in 1v1s, so when you’re in a 1v1, you just can’t use it.”

Bad design. Terrible, in fact.

Thrym.9436:

Nearly every other class in the game begs to differ on the “basically worthless” kill shot. This thing hits, and hits big. If your opponent doesn’t burn something to mitigate or avoid this damage, you win the fight, hands down.

Kill Shot, in my opinion, is a good example of what a high damage burst ability should be.

I can agree to disagree on Eviscerate, as Axe is basically just a damage weapon anyway, and at least one burst skill should probably just be damage, as that’s its personality. But nooooooooo on Kill Shot being what you say it is, by any stretch of the imagination.

Just dodge. Seriously. You don’t need a hold your breath HERE IT COMES moment where you frantically look for your one counter skill. Just move a little. It’s the easiest skill to dodge in the entire game. Well, maybe other than a couple of basic Ele skills. The Warrior can’t control when it fires. They can only cancel it. Just wait about three seconds, then dodge roll. He’ll never hit you. This isn’t Backstab we’re talking about here, which in that move set combination actually does more damage than Kill Shot and is far more difficult to dodge in addition to not being a primary class mechanic. It’s three whole seconds. There is no excuse at all for being hit with Kill Shot, other than you didn’t know the Warrior was there. That’s it. It’s only good for picking at people in WvW or as a rare lead-in attack in sPvP.

Kill Shot is an example of everything a Burst Ability should not be. Focuses only on damage, no utility, no depth to its execution, massive windup, incredibly easy to negate, completely pointless. I know it’s easy to get infatuated with a poorly designed skill because it deals a lot of damage, but really now.

While I certainly don’t mind “super moves” that can deal massive damage but have high wind up animations, you aren’t going to catch anyone in PvP with it unless they’re stupid or unaware you exist. And certainly not when the easiest counter for it is just moving out of the way.

I imagine they don’t want PvP items translating into PvE because they want you to burn your gold off buying overpriced items directly from PvE, for PvE. The reverse, of course, is irrelevant since PvP has no true currency for items. In GW1, you could bring PvE gear into PvP. You could not take PvP gear into PvE.

Again… learn from GW1. Whoever made that game? Smart people. Learn from your betters.

Payneful.7934:

WhysoSully.4652:

yepo, they are adding a new map and nerfing the sharks instead of listening to the players and fixing the balancing issues.

there are so many threads about how imbalanced the game is yet nothing is being done. they arent even saying they are working on anything lmao.

so many people have left or stopped spvping that it obviously does not make money for them, so they probably dont care about the spvp players anymore.

Supposedly, there are 5 pages of profession changes/fixes in the next update.

“5 Pages”

Font size: 24

Content: bug fixes.

Official standpoint on meta changes: wait half a year for things to “settle.”

It’s generally expected/feared they will mainly be bug fixes, and they will otherwise not address the meta or even build viability in any way.

Yeah, the system doesn’t work well because it seems to think everyone will PvE primarily, and then sPvP when they feel like it. I’m all for separation of PvP and PvE, but GW2 just takes it too far. They’re so disconnected that they may as well just be two different games, since nothing you do in one affects the other at all, with one exception: dyes. Which… you can’t even see in PvP.

Honestly, I’d prefer there be a “weakened state” instead of a downed state, exactly. Rather than just completely failing and resorting to chucking rocks at people, you instead are permanently crippled and weakened. Your health resets, recharges get worse, and so on. Can’t remove cripple or weakness. When you die that way, you just die. No downing.

Discuss. How do you improve these abilities? Should some be dropped entirely, changed in some way? Is it bad to encourage players to build adrenaline and then sit on it? Is adrenaline under-utilized as a profession-specific resource by limiting it exclusively to a single skill?

What about the currently worthless Discipline line? 0.1% burst damage per point for a laughably poor 3% increase to burst ability damage. Especially considering how rarely you use burst abilities, even if they happen to be useful. What should this passive bonus do, if not raise damage? (And I believe making it just raise damage is a stupid bonus to begin with, especially on a utility-deprived class that is currently obsessed about min-maxing damage values.)

Personally? It should have decreased the recharge time on burst abilities. Unfortunately they made that a trait. Quick Bursts, which basically does the same exact thing that Adrenal Reserves does, and they both compete with one another as Grandmaster traits. How poorly thought out was that? It doesn’t matter which of the two you take. One makes them cost less, which effectively means you can use them faster, and the other reduces the recharge time, which… is the same thing. I guess for a minor difference between people who use adrenaline gain abilities and people who don’t? I have no idea what they were smoking here. Not that you’d want to ever waste 30 points investing in Discipline to begin with.

How about this for a Grandmaster Discipline trait? One makes burst abilities grant you stability. The other makes using a burst ability remove all your conditions. How about that for a trait? Put me on the design team, coach! I’m ready!

Burst abilities are, for the most part, mediocre. Some aren’t even worth using if you’re using a full adrenaline bar to supply that lauded 12% damage boost. (Remember, kids! Don’t use your abilities! That’s bad game design! Just use auto attack! Go, Team Warrior!)

Let’s talk, shall we? This will concentrate on PvP, as it’s easy enough to imagine these in PvE, where just about anything will work somewhere.

Axe (Eviscerate) – Deals damage. No utility other than a bonus combo finisher. No way to balance this other than adjusting damage. It currently deals mediocre damage because very specific glass cannon builds in beta abused it. As such, it’s just sort of there.

Greatsword (Arcing Slice) – Grants Fury. That’s all. As most Warrior builds already have perma-Fury, this is worthless in every way. The burst ability should instead be Hundred Blades, with Arcing Slice being the #2, but unfortunately sane people aren’t in control of this sort of thing. Sometimes I like to imagine Arcing Slice cutting a big gash in the earth that then explodes, dealing damage in a line (and making a combo field) and setting people on fire. That’d be cool, wouldn’t it? Oh well.

Hammer (Earthshaker) – Deals damage, performs a leap attack and stuns enemies in an area. An excellent burst ability, and something all other young burst abilities should look to as a model for success. Currently is not overpowered, as its function is tied to utility and not to just being a high damage move. Very useful. I love you, hammer, even with your many shortcomings.

Longbow (Combustive Shot) – AoE fire field that causes burning. More importantly, it is the only combo field in the entire game that Warriors can create. It’s otherwise fairly mediocre, being outperformed by normal field abilities across other classes. But on a Warrior, it’s rare enough to be invaluable. Almost exclusively a PvE skill, as a result.

Mace (Skull Crack) – Single-target stun. Mainly useful when adrenaline is maxed out. Can be useful on more specialized builds that focus on using disruption as a means of mitigating damage or outright shutting enemies down. On more balanced builds, this is mainly a cute trick. Definitely worth using, but not basing any builds around.

Rifle (Kill Shot) – Similar to Eviscerate in that it only deals damage. Very obvious, long wind up animation (probably the longest in the game). Self-roots. The damage it performs, again like Evis, used to be higher until it was nerfed. Its damage is now mediocre, for the most part. People lauding its damage are usually only seeing the unfixed penetration damage multiplier bug in action. Has no utility at all, other than being a projectile finisher. Basically worthless.

Sword (Flurry) – Multi-hit bleeding attack that roots enemies with immobilize. Mildly useful for the immobilization effect. Sword and condition builds on Warriors in general currently have problems, though, so once you have the enemy in place, there’s not a lot to do with him. Can be used as a secondary set, then immediately ignored in favor of switching to a better weapon set. The bleeding it applies is somewhat mediocre. Good utility, good burst ability idea. However, the weapon it is tied to is not very good due to Warrior problems with laying condition stacks into people and the abundance of condition removal abilities on other classes. Could be useful in the future, as Sword is meant to be a chaser and pressure weapon, in a game currently dominated exclusively by spike damage.

Water burst skills – lol. Forceful Shot is just the rifle burst underwater. It’s terrible. Whirling Strike is an AoE stun. Works all right. But you’re still underwater.

(tbc)…

It’s definitely more frantic and difficult to track than GW1 was. But GW1 was a more methodical game, and mainly about pressure, sustained DPS followed by highly coordinated spikes. GW2, without a healing system in place, is more about just piling DPS on as fast as you can. Combined with all the overelaborate spell effects, this makes the gameplay feel more “spammy” and more difficult to watch.

Dervy.7901:

Plague.5329:

You also must understand this subforum gets a thread like this once a week. A somewhat new player comes in, got hit by another new player using a HB build, and uses that to rationalize that the entire class is therefore overpowered or just fine.

Give yourself some time, learn the game, play the class itself. The underpowered claims are coming from a lot of sources that have nothing to do with that one HB build. (Which is an awful build and used exclusively by new players or as a dual-player “bully” spec, btw.)

I’ve been playing Thief since the first minute pre-release and I still have. There’s not much for me to learn about the thief, I don’t even play Glass Cannon backstab c/d. Quite frankly, it’s an appalling build and there’s so much better.

If someone bullrushes you from behind you, there’s only so much you can actually do. The fact of a matter is, people complain that a thief can output 20k damage in 1-2 seconds, were as warriors can do the exact same.

I’m just hoping this massive “5 page” class patch proposed on the 15th really fixes a whole lot about the classes.

Latinkuro.9420:

It’s been a long time since I’ve seen people dying/complaining about frenzy 100B combo. even than look at the dmg you only took 16K dmg and you died !

Yes, I ONLY took 16k damage in 1 1/2 second right? That’s nothing! Let’s move on from here!

You know, I actually agree. I don’t like Hundred Blades. I don’t like how the greatsword is designed to do nothing but use Hundred Blades. Auto attack, HB, then three closing abilities to help you use HB, and a worthless burst skill.

Spike skills as they are, in the game right now, should not exist. It is fine to rationalize things like Backstab and HB as “well, you have one chance to avoid them and you didn’t use it,” but if you’re designing a game, you should allow for multiple errors for both users, because that not only allows people to learn, but it makes the combat fun for everyone, not just the guy making the kitten glass build. Like you said, you can’t always see the Thief or the Warrior. And your stunbreaker may be on cooldown from something a little earlier. You just never know. True 1v1s aren’t exactly common.

But for the time being, HB isn’t that big a deal, compared to the myriad number of other broken, game breaking builds that exist at the moment. I do agree though, that HB is going to stay a problem so long as it’s designed the way that it is.

Personally, I think the GS burst skill and HB should be switched. The #2 would just give you Fury, which is fairly worthless considering how easy it is for most Warriors to upkeep Fury. The burst would be HB as it is (probably with some minor damage decrease), except for each level of adrenaline, the animation gets a native speed increase (while still locking you in place). Basically, using HB at three adrenaline levels would be like using HB with Frenzy, except with no +50% damage to yourself. The damage would need to be lowered, to keep people from being surprised spiked by it.

Either way, HB honestly does way too much damage as it is, from a design point of view. That’s the source of most of the problem. Spike abilities in GW2 should never go over 10k damage, no matter what they are. The ability to one-shot someone with a minor combo like a stun and one or two moves is something that I hope, and should, be removed completely from the game.

I honestly hate the whole idea of legendary items. Most don’t look any better than a normal item. Yet people are obsessed with them because they want to have one, because no one else does. They want attention. This negative reaction is from people who don’t care about the skin; they just want to make sure no one else has one. Whatever happened to your appearance being a choice in taste and customization, and not a race to get the single best thing?

Legendaries were a terrible idea to start with, especially in a sequel to Guild Wars, of all games. Tying them mainly to gold was also an incredibly shameful and disrespectful thing to do. You have people with legendaries now who don’t even understand some the basic mechanics of the game, because GW2 sometimes plays more like Trading Post 2, with the actual content only existing to support the monster that is the game economy.

Tie the items to accomplishments only, make them account bound, and be done with it. Remove RNG entirely, remove gold entirely, make them something that’s hard to get, not something for the rich 0.5% of the population. Not everyone wants to keep excel documents tracking the market. ANet, kick the economists out of your board meetings. They’re ruining the game.

Of course, regen-focused builds are awful, as regen itself is rather mediocre. It’s just there to supplement either direct self heals or protection style builds. Trying to heal back anything with regen is like bringing healing signet in sPvP. Sounds like a good idea, maybe. But then, it wasn’t.

Furbs.9054:

rather than engage the community and outline steps of improvement, devs/mods are moving to cover-up mode. They’ve begun to merge all the angry and well-thought out posts regarding bad tPvP into one main post with an innocuous “GW2 PvP Feedback” subject line…

sigh.

I guess that means if you have anything to say about GW2 PvP? Don’t post about it in the subforum. Find the subforum, then this thread, then make your unique thread topic in this thread as a new post. There should be no topics in the PvP subforums. Only this one thread.

Pure genius.

As it is? Not even close.

It will require a lot of attention to problems and some humbling of the PvP devs to get them off their pedestal, and recognize they’ve made a lot of minor and a few major mistakes. It’s not about new features, although that’s part of it. Core mechanics simply are not working, and even worse, actively drive people away.

No. Other than a single underwater skill, that is. Harpoon can do that, but it has a very short range.

http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Pull

Warriors can’t pull enemies to them at all. Which is actually very strange, considering they are a melee heavy class. You’d think they’d have several. Instead, Warriors have several kinds of gap closers, although most have plenty of problems associated with them.

Bugged tooltip. You don’t notice the effect because it’s worthless, like many Warrior traits. The actual increase is so small you literally don’t notice it at all.

We know. Give it time. Warrior is more or less where it should be, aside from some build viability problems. It’s some of the other classes that are extremely overpowered, at the moment.

You can make an awkward “tank” that can survive two hits instead of just one, and accompany that with Shield Block and Endure Pain. That’s about it, though.

Seriously. Don’t try to tank on a Warrior. We can’t do it. A Guardian will have far more luck. Hell, most other classes “tank” better with mitigation. I can resist damage pretty well, running 3k armor with 3k power, but I’d never try to “tank” in a traditional sense. Tanking as a Warrior is just short term longevity, and something you use for odd situations, like the path 2 graveling rush.

Eh, healing shouts with soldier runes (and SoR, which should be on your elite slot anyway) can do anything and more a Warhorn can. It’s not like a Warhorn does anything very useful. AoE swiftness? Vigor? You can trait it to remove a condition (2 every twenty seconds, I guess), but a healing shout build can remove twice that many and heal you in the process, and in the process grant might, fury and have a little utility to boot. The weakness it can apply is more like a sneeze, it lasts such a short amount of time. Using it as a switch weapon to remove conditions like cripple is so time consuming and awkward, it’s laughable.

Warhorn just isn’t a good weapon to begin with. At all. But if you must use it, and I assume you’re using it either in PvE or WvW, then I guess Sword, since you’re just using it for the mobility, and that’s it.

Personally, I think it has a use just in that you can open your inventory, switch it out of combat as you’re running from place to place, use Charge, then just switch it back out again. That’s all it’s really good for. You give up a LOT bringing a Warhorn into a fight, especially as a primary weapon. Even as a secondary set, you’re losing a lot of utility just so you can toot your horn and feel special every 20 seconds.

As I said in a couple other threads, part of the reason many people don’t try PvP is because they spend hundreds of hours crafting this appearance in PvE, then go to PvP and it’s all taken away. Their concept of the character they’ve created and carefully crafted and managed for so long is now just gone forever. The character no longer feels like it belongs to them, and they just lose interest.

Personally, I think there should be one set of armor for PvP – a base armor. And when you bring a set of armor into PvP from PvE, you can show it to a NPC (sort of like the GW1 hat vendor) and he will ‘learn’ that skin. You can then pick up a transmutation item from the PvP locker that will make your armor look the same, except as a PvP item. Basically it would work the same as the Hall of Monuments items do right now.

If you wanted to be a hard-kitten about it, you could even make them vendored items that cost PvP tokens to “buy” each time you want to transmute something.

How does that sound?

“- “Some” balance changes.”

Oh, lord. I get the impression a lot of people are going to be very mad at this supposedly “big PvP patch.” As I feared, it’s shaping up to be nothing more than bug fixes, with no attempt whatsoever to fix any of the major problems with some of the classes right now.

Healing Signet is worthless in PvP, obviously. Since Warriors can’t tank in a traditional sense, and can’t really stealth out or have clones up or what have you to mitigate long enough for the sustained healing to do anything. The active heal then is so pathetic that the obvious point of the build is to never use your heal at all, as the passive healing actually beats the active healing over time. It has to be a dire emergency to actually use it (which there are plenty of in hotjoins), and even then it heals for so little that a single attack will render it worthless. A terrible, worthless skill in PvP. Absolutely awful. In PvE, though? Pretty kitten good, since you can avoid most hits there.

Mending is basically just a build for people who aren’t running healing shouts with solider runes. (By the way, the main point of healing shouts isn’t the healing, it’s the constant condition removal, which can’t be eclipsed by any other Warrior build in the game, by any stretch.) The actual two condition removal is fairly pointless, since the main problem with Warriors is the necessity of constant passive condition removal due to the abundance of immobilizes, freezes, cripples, blah blah blah. You aren’t going to burn your heal to get rid of a three second immobilize or freeze. So it’s basically just there as a counter to big condition stacks, which of course a healing shouts build destroys without even worrying about it.

Healing Surge is basically your only real choice. As Warriors don’t shrug damage very well, don’t mitigate very well, don’t evade very well and so on, you need to be able to heal back quite an amount in addition to having high toughness, if you aren’t running a glass build.

So I’d basically say Healing Surge is always better, on most sane builds. For trick glass cannons (read: HB Warriors), Mending, since you won’t be doing much real fighting anyway, just trying to spike people that aren’t paying much attention to you.

Heh. Guild Wars 2 is the young, overdemanding princess who wants everything but is too young to know what that is. Then one day she’ll wake up and realize she lost out on a lot of opportunities when she was younger, due to her own arrogance and self-assuredness.

^ GW1 had its own problems. Point being, GW2 should be an evolution of GW1. Not a step backwards and an attempt to reinvent it completely.

For any problems HA or RA or TA or so on had, they were still intensely popular during the height of the game. Those popular builds like IWAY were frowned upon but helped strangers coordinate with one another, because there an instant understanding of what their role was and how to run it, that allowed them to compete with more organized teams. But anyway. Point being, it was not a broken mess by any stretch of the imagination, and it was very successful for a very long time. The only exception may be TA, simply because most people went RA because it required less time, and if you wanted an organized fight, you would probably just go to HA, where you could actually get real rewards. TA offered the same rewards as RA did, but with more difficulty associated with it, both in and outside the game. Players asked ANet to improve this by making the rewards better, and the system easier to use. ANet responded (modern ANet that is, when the game started going downhill) by just removing it from the game. And that’s how ANet works now. They really just don’t know what they’re doing anymore.

They just need to improve on the old systems instead of mucking around with these new unpopular game modes that obviously are not bringing in people the way they wanted. If they want to be an e-sport in GW2 like they were in GW1, they need to understand what made GW1 PvP so great. Hint: it wasn’t paid tournament, ladder systems and so on. It was the core behavior of the game and the ease of entering PvP.

You also must understand this subforum gets a thread like this once a week. A somewhat new player comes in, got hit by another new player using a HB build, and uses that to rationalize that the entire class is therefore overpowered or just fine.

Give yourself some time, learn the game, play the class itself. The underpowered claims are coming from a lot of sources that have nothing to do with that one HB build. (Which is an awful build and used exclusively by new players or as a dual-player “bully” spec, btw.)

EchenSketch.9142:

Project Shrine Maiden.9623:

that would make caltrop and dagdag 3 spamming thieves unbeatable……. same with rangers who can stack like 20 bleeds in 4 seconds. loll i do think rangers need a buff but not like that. as for warriors, unless you’re running the same glass cannon gs axe/shield build that everyone else runs… you will probably only find some success with healing shouts… two builds…. real.

I’ve tried healing shouts, and it’s a support build. Using shouts for all your utilities is a waste. The Warrior is supposed to be a jack of all trades, but ranged weapons, sword, mace, etc are not viable options in sPvP

It is if your primary weapons have no utility. Which means no Greatsword, no Axe, maybe Sword, but who honestly cares about Sword? It’s a condition-based weapon on a class that deals almost no condition damage, so it’s limited to its features as a mobility and immobilizing weapon.

This of course rules out the ever popular glass cannon builds of any Warrior spec. Why would you be using healing shouts for minor sustained healing on a build specced to deliver a single burst of damage, after all? So I imagine many players who don’t value anything but glass builds won’t ever find a use for healing shouts.

Of course, Fear Me I’ll point out is one of the best secondary utility skills in the game. The others? Not so much. They’re just generic skills that do what they say, and that’s all they do.

Lukin.4061:

Then I misunderstood him. Well he can still get the same appearance, that he has since all the armor sets are still available – just needs to get some rank or play tpvp and get items that way.

I know. But many players – not just him – don’t want to do that. It takes a very, very long time to get that CoF or AC armor skin (or whatever) that you’re already wearing and have already earned in PvE. When people walk around in LA in their tier 3 cultural armor, they can feel a sense of accomplishment, that this is their character and they’ve earned the right to look good, and feel good about themselves. Then they enter the mists and are told they wasted all their time, and they have to start over.

Now, you can easily make the argument that earning rewards in PvE doesn’t make you a good PvP player, and as such, you don’t get to wear something that only a big time tournament player should be wearing. And that’s a fine opinion. But you also have to understand that many players don’t care. They just won’t play at all, because you’re serving them up an ultimatum, in terms of the progression of their in-game avatar.

This is a complex design decision, you have to understand. Honestly, the way I see it, halving off the aesthetic side of thing serves only to harm the game, and offers no real benefit. The only good side of keeping the two separate is that it makes the high end players feel better about being in a sea of chainmail avatars. But that’s a rather dramatic design swing, just to appeal to a very tiny handful of the population in a part of the game that is already waning immensely in interest and popularity.

This is a thread that needs to be locked. Upset but still constructive feedback is one thing, but elitist calls for the minority to be silenced so only your voice is heard? Yeah. No.

Payneful.7934:

Sanis.1096:

Regrets of Sini.6083:

I am long-time PvPer. My resume includes multiple 2K+ WoW Arena teams, SB, DF and dueling record in UO. I almost exclusively WvW in GW2.

I do not participate in tPvP and do not plan to. I am not alone, in my medium-sized ultra-competitive WvW guild there are no organized tPvP teams and no interest to start one.

Here are my reasons:

1. I can’t take my character into tPvP
2. There are no tPvP rewards that would help me advance my character (that I know of)
3. Whole zerg control points tPvP does not appeal to me.

If Anet were to implement 5v5 elimination-style ranked tPvP that awarded PvP tokens I would likely participate.

From where I stand tPvP problem is question of appeal. If you can’t sell your tPvP to PvPers then you ether selling wrong thing or not delivering message in a way it can be understood.

Just my 2c.

if you think you need gear to boost you just in tPvP then gw2 tPvP is not for you and you dont like zergs, but you play WvWvW… WAT?

This is exactly what I was thinking when I read his post lol. Good call.

The problem with both of your reactions is that “if you want to retain your character’s appearance in PvP then leave” does just that. The player leaves. “I sure showed him.” Yeah, you did. Good work. If you want players to actually use your PvP system, like it, and continue to use it, you have to examine reactions like this rather than screaming at them that they’re not spending their time correctly.

Lukin.4061:

If you want to have a gear that gives you an advantage, go play wow – gw2 is truly not for you. It IS one of the best part in spvp, that there is no gear grinding, all are equal and only skill in controlling your charachter shows who is better. But you can get your spec still, since you have all utilities and trait points to spend.

He’s talking about his character’s appearance, not stats. When he enters PvP he feels a separation from the character he has developed for five hundred hours and the character he’s now using that is wearing chainmail or guild cloth gear.

It’s something catered more towards hardcore tournament players, of which there aren’t many. There aren’t many because the PvP side of the game isn’t easy to get into, it’s not balanced, and there’s a lot of basic functionality problems associated with the only game mode and the lack of a proper ranking system and even problems with the score reports.

In GW1, for example, the beginning level would probably be Random Arenas. Click on join and you fight other people who did the same thing, at random. Win enough and the game puts you into Team Arenas, which is the same thing but with organized teams. There were a couple of objective-based maps in these rotations, but most just involved killing the other players, so this system eased new players into game concepts and gave them the ability to make mistakes. More importantly, there were only four players per side, so getting zerged or just spiked immediately was not a possibility. The only problem was the monk system, which obviously is no longer the case. After Team Arenas you could look at Heroes’ Ascent as the next step. 8v8s, organized, on very large maps, with a PvE-style chest reward with incredibly rare skins as the big draw. After this, of course, was Guild vs Guild.

In GW2, there is no such transition. You join hotjoins, get stomped by thief zergs in a demanding conquest gametype, and hear about some sort of tournament system that requires you to spend tokens. To new players, this is rather obtuse and intimidating. Hotjoins are already a pain, after all. And an organized format can potentially be even more daunting? No thanks, say most players.

In addition, PvE accomplishments don’t carry over into PvP, at all. Many players want to know why they should bother with PvP when the game removes all their skins, and the accomplishments you earn in PvP can’t be shown off in Lion’s Arch, and so on. In GW1, you could have PvP skins, but you could also wear PvE gear, so long as it was maxed out. This sort of system meant to keep the two separate just actively discourages people from bothering, when there’s WvW as an alternative.

I personally don’t think the game is going to recover, because it’s obvious that the minds behind making GW1 the best MMO PvP ever made are now gone, and people who don’t understand these problems (or that they are the source of the problems) are now in charge.

ilr.9675:

samo.1054:

-Remove the hotjoin 8v8 altogether.
-Make free tournaments function the way Random Arena functioned in GW1. -(No premades)

RA was a cesspool where, as soon as the countdown started , the whole match was decided as soon as it was evident your team didn’t have enough Monks/Assassins. And most of that was due to the team sizes being so small. Even costume brawl had this same dynamic and it was the most balanced 4-man ever.

You can’t balance those matches with Even Quantity-vs-Quantity. You have to specifically measure every individual player’s strengths and weaknesses and then pit them against eachother based on that. Even if it means stacking up 9 amatuers against a 5 man premade

The monk problem doesn’t even exist anymore. And since gameplay is no longer about spiking through sustained group healing, the Sin problem isn’t there either.

If you do have a RA system in GW2, it can’t be Conquest, though. Imagine getting four bunker Guardians as your randoms. It’d be like getting multiple monks. You can’t force a coordination-based gametype into a random format, because that encourages people to bring specializations and hope they get the right combination of specialists.

EchenSketch.9142:

BurrTheKing.8571:

As a 100% warrior, I can say that besides our condition removal problems, unless you are running shouts, we are balanced. It’s things like super bunker ele, engi, and guards along with super spike thief and mes that give the game the appearance of lack of balance.

If these builds were toned down, notice I say toned down, not nerfed into uselessness, the game would be better as a whole balance wise.

Still, Warrior burst skills were over-nerfed. The only viable burst skills are Hammer and Sword, but bleeding isn’t an option in sPvP because 1 condition removal removes all the bleeds. Personally I think bleeds should stack to 3 and count as additional conditions.

I think it’s more an issue that ranged and especially evasive classes have far too much condition removal. Melee obviously require them in order to actually be a threat to anyone. A part of that is also how incredibly powerful some condition based builds would be if condition removal was less common.

Any way you try rebalance it, it’s a very pervasive problem that has its roots in every part of the game.

I personally think the best solution to have would be that some conditional removal abilities remove everything, some remove only one full stack of a single condition (up to 25), and some remove up to five stacks, possibly across multiple condition types, and so on. The functionality of condition removal probably needs a little more depth than just getting rid of whole stacks some classes have to accumulate over a long period of time, while others can literally pile up to 25 in a couple of seconds.

Oh, don’t worry! Custom tournaments will be here soon!!!!

I’m being sarcastic, if that wasn’t clear. I imagine we’ll see several months of “new content” features for the very tiny handful of hardcore organized tournament players before they even think about addressing the core problems with things like hotjoins or even the random tournaments.

The problem now is that they don’t even see these things as being a problem. They aren’t being worked on, and they don’t take complaints about them seriously.

JonathanSharp.7094:

Sorry, I totally misread that. As many of you have stated, I thought you were asking for the ability to PUG in free paid tourneys, which is what I responded to. Sorry for that. I was coming from one meeting, going to another, and tried to quickly get on the forums to at least read/post something. I apologize.

It’s not that we don’t care, is that’s we’re really busy adding things to the game. Custom Arenas are the current focus for my team. A fully 100% random tourney system (where all teams are random and no teams are an organized 5-person team) is something we can look at down the road, but I think there are many other things that are more important to get finished first (which I spoke about in my blog).

Again, sorry for the misunderstanding, and I’m heading out to another meeting.

More cheers,

J

There aren’t. Stop adding new features to make yourselves more money and start fixing what you have. Your current system is broken. This is not a new feature we’re asking for. We want you to fix what you already added, because it doesn’t work. Your customers don’t particularly appreciate the fact that you keep ignoring these problems to release more content when you’re not even handling what you’ve already released correctly. I don’t care about custom tournaments. Fix what you’ve got, because I can’t even use that, much less something so incredibly specific as a custom tournament.

This strikes me as being the Necro version of a HB Warrior. In GW1, you also had builds that loaded up on performing a single chain or some cute stun move designed to try to trap you into AoE. Those usually were on such long recharges and were so specific that, while they worked, were considered bad builds. The HB Warrior is also considered a bad build for somewhat similar reasons – that it’s crippled by its focus on a single element of itself.

This build however could easily become a “real” build with some work. I’m no expert on Necros by any stretch of the imagination, but I feel like focusing on where the utility of the build is, would help. Most of your damage is coming from your wells. Yet, they’re on a high recharge. Also, you don’t necessarily need the Golem. It’s a cute trick to KD someone, but a stun is a stun. You only need the Warhorn and the mesmer runes. The minions also are part of that one spike attack that, while useful for accessorizing that spike, don’t really play a part in your build as far as utility goes. You’re also burning points to take traits that don’t necessarily do anything other than try to eek out a little more damage. Again, that’s getting very “Hundred Blades-like.” In GW1 I may have called it a Shadow Prison problem.

My personal take on it, then (with my next to no real experience with the class competitively) is a 0/20/0/20/30 build. Same basic traits, except you’d be dropping Withering Precision (which wasn’t actually doing you a whole lot to begin with) and Spiteful Talisman, which was just improving the recharge on your secondary set offhand, which you don’t seem to be using a lot anyway. Those points instead go to Ritual Mastery to ensure you can actually use your secondaries (and the primary focus of your build) consistently across multiple encounters, and Dagger Mastery. Why Dagger Mastery? My logic comes from being a lock-Warrior, but being able to immobilize your enemy as well as stun them in those wells more often will be invaluable.

Minions are fine, I suppose, and they have high base damage as well as a fairly good recharge. I’d consider possibly bringing Spectral Grasp, to pull runaways into your wells, or to simply isolate targets. Whereas with the minions, they’re just sort of there, waiting to explode, if they even make it that far. I guess Spectral Walk could go here too, but… you know. I honestly think the minions may end up being the best bet, just because of the low recharge and good damage. The golem I think actually should stay, but you shouldn’t just be using it as a leadoff, every time. The golem also makes for a good chaser or interrupt if you’ve been KDed, plus your primary stun is your warhorn, or even your immobilize. The golem’s charge is more valuable as a trump card, imo.

Again, I don’t know the Necro very well, so feel free to discount all that. I’m basing most of that on lessons learned from almost a decade of making GW1 builds and seeing spike builds of all kinds. They always have the same general problems, which come down to predictability. The only thing I don’t like about my changes is that you’re still limited by a 36 second cooldown of your wells. It’d be nice if they were just five seconds shorter, but oh well.

Noctred.6732:

JonathanSharp.7094:

You can already do this.

Cheers.

He was referring to a system wherein, if you queue solo or duo, you’ll get matched up against other players who also queued solo or duo. Therefore, partial premades (or solo players) would not get matched up against full premades.

Currently, you can’t do this.

I believe this is known as a “Random Arena.”

A novel concept. Maybe some aspiring game developer should get to work on it. You know, I’m not sure if it’s ever been done.

How disappointed are you that your color scheme doesn’t work in-game?

Sprawl.3891:

JonathanSharp.7094:

felivear.1536:

Pray.9751:

In my humble opinion the best quick-fix for the whole problem would be to introduce single/duo queue free tournaments (or just single games) with a strong matchmaking mechanic.

Best regards Pray

Great post and this part is a great idea. Simple, quick solution while they iron out a good ladder system. This way, queues will still be somewhat quick since many many people queue solo or with 1 other friend, and you won’t have to get throat punched in Khylo anymore!

You can already do this.

Cheers.

um, how?

and that’s your only response to this whole thread?

I think he misunderstood what he was asking for. Which is kind of funny…

I imagine they’re just going to offer some new tournament feature and maybe increase the recharge on a couple skills. I imagine almost all of the patch will be dedicated to PvE content, as that’s what drives their cash shop sales.

Guardian hammer is more of a control weapon, whereas Warrior hammer is disruption. As a GW1 Warrior that specialized in hammer for pvp (which wasn’t easy), I’m glad to see it’s still a disruption weapon. Couple it with Mace/Mace or Mace/Shield or even Axe/Shield, Axe/Mace and you’re going to have a good time.

It’s one of our very few builds you can run in sPvP. In tPvP, it’s… a kind of build that is overshadowed by spike mechanics because of how dominant bunkering is. It can still work, but you have to go whole-hog on disruption mechanics and concentrate on chaining them. Plus you’re still a Warrior, the weakest tPvP class in the game.

As a War you’ll probably have more fun with a hammer, but you’ll still be a War. Guardian will have the reverse problem. And you probably won’t even be using a hammer. In PvE? Neither will be using a hammer, as damage is more effective there than control or disruption, except on bosses, which ignore them for almost the entire fight anyway.

Warrior primary. 600+ hours, or however many I have now.

Yes and no. Obviously newbies will rant about HB, or complain about how a Warrior used Vengeance one time. Experienced players may even look at our most min-maxed builds and decide, based on those one or two kinds of players, that the whole class is fine.

I’ll tell you now, most of the problem with the class isn’t that we’re underpowered. It’s a problem with the concept of melee in the entire game. It’s an issue both with ANet trying to remove tanking from the game and an issue with CCs dominating gameplay without a dedicated healer to remove conditions on a regular basis.

I think ANet is basing too much of their ideas off GW1, yet not understanding how some of them worked. Every team had more than one monk, and usually one was a Restore Condition monk in PvP. That monk could essentially get rid of all your conditions every other cast, which enabled you, a melee player, to weave in and out of the front lines, trying to disrupt and spike backline players.

Now look to GW2. There is no direct healing. There’s certainly not any direct condition removal. As a result, the Warrior (or any melee-centric build) has to support itself. The Warrior doesn’t have any native condition removal. Just a 45 recharge signet that doesn’t understand that you need sustained minor condition removal, not spike condition removal. And Shake It Off, which obviously everyone uses. This is also why everyone runs healing shouts. It’s not necessarily for the healing, but just because it synergizes well with the point of the build – soldier runes. These alone enable a Warrior to do his job, as there’s not enough native condition negation for you to be a threat to anyone.

If – and only if – Warriors had far more innate condition removal, and not just from one or two sources for one or two builds, but all melee builds, then I imagine you’d find that Warriors are very balanced right now, and not too weak.

Obviously some secondary skills are worthless, because they either focus on adrenaline gain we neither need nor want (burst is worthless) or they’re just worse options for better skills. It’s a class that needs a lot of work, but don’t they all?

So short answer: yeah, Warriors are weak. But because of one flaw in the whole game design, which is a relic of early alphas.

phaeris.7604:

In fact even better…

The warrior somehow has activate his vengeance (after being left alone for a whole 20 seconds apparently). He manages to get up and starts fighting.

He has to get to you, kill you and then stomp you in the space of 15 seconds or he falls over.

Even if he kills you somehow, and he can’t get the stomp off, you will revive from him falling over at the end of vengeance.

Warriors have hands down the worst downed state abilities in the game.

That’s my favorite part of people complaining about Vengeance.

Even if the planets align correctly and you fail the first spike from being hammer-struck, which you can easily block, blind, etc… and then you fail the second spike somehow (which is only possible if you wasted time getting to him AND the Warrior timed the first hammer throw at the very last millisecond of your first spike)… and then the Warrior gets up and somehow manages to down you in the space of fifteen seconds (I guess those five seconds of invulnerability to prevent exploits = god mode, HURRRR)… THEN….

The Warrior then tries to spike you, but dies, because time ran out. It actually takes more time to finish a downed enemy than Vengeance gives you to try. Your opponent will then rally. Or even if he could spike you with his first try, you just hit mist form, fear him, stealth out, and so on for your second spike, which there is no way he will ever, ever be able to have the time to pull off in any situation.

That. That is hilariously stupid. Not only do Warriors have the worst downed #2, and not only will Warriors probably never even get to use #3, but it also kills them if they try to use it, and in PvP, there’s not even enough time to down people and spike them to have the chance to rally, because everyone’s downed states are already superior. Sweet Vengeance doesn’t even factor into the situation because they need to actually get the kill for it to even come into play. The actual odds of a downed Warrior getting back up are so tiny I’d expect them to be less than 1% in almost any situation in PvP. The opponent would have to have no clue what he was doing, and all his teammates would have to be off doing something else, against a Warrior who had gotten the opponent down to a few hundred health – just enough that throwing rocks isn’t viable but Vengeancing is a possibility, and then survived one spike by throwing a perfectly timed hammer, and then survived a second from sheer luck, Vengeance at the last second, land a couple of blows to finish what the rocks couldn’t, then immediately spike with stability against an opponent that can’t fear or stealth. Wow. If you’re afraid of that… you are a bad player.

A Warrior on his back is staying on his back. It’s actually more beneficial to just throw rocks than it is to bother even trying to use your hammer. At least then you get in a little damage before you die.

deherch.3158:

I really don’t understand why so many ppl think Greatsword is the only viable option :S
There are so many good weapons too choose from depending on the situation!

Most of the weapons don’t do a lot that’s important other than damage, so most people just pick the one that deals the most damage. The exceptions would be Mace and Hammer, I guess, and even they have problems in PvP, not to mention being almost completely pointless in PvE since ANet feels like they need to make sure you can only interrupt a boss once every minute and a half.

As bad as it is in Orr, in GW1 it was much worse. You had to kill every single thing you saw, in most zones, because they all had an insatiable blood lust for you, specifically, and were loaded with freezes, cripples and so on that you couldn’t dodge or avoid in any way.

As many things as GW1 did better than 2, and GW2 screwed up by simplifying too much or just outright abandoning, I do not miss GW1 mob aggro. It was insane. Orr has nothing. NOTHING. On GW1 aggro.

I think it’s because so many of the traits don’t change how you play, and are just generic stat buffs. Especially ones that shoe-horn you into certain builds, as the effects of the trait are 100% exclusive to a single weapon type or a certain secondary skill type.

The traits that aren’t generic +10% damage skills are overly concerned with forcing you into using a very specific kind of build ANet has carefully planned for. You could honestly just get rid of everyone’s traits entirely and you wouldn’t see too much of a difference in normal gameplay. Just one or two traits that actually do something, that everyone uses.

I usually only do up to almost 10k damage on even the most fragile of enemies in the game, but I primary toughness. I still have 3k damage, though, and usually stack bloodlust along with switching off to my damage armor set at times, to get near 3500. I don’t see how people hit such high numbers. I guess they’re traited and geared with every min-maxed thing they can get a hold of, to become a wet tissue paper with a gun.

It’s a combination of problems.

Some leave obviously bad WvW servers because either they don’t have enough coverage on all time zones or the main head of the guild leadership is incompetent.

Also, the fact that there’s no rewards associated with returning to old zones, and in general bad rewards throughout the entire game keeps people from playing old content. I have several new characters I refuse to play because the leveling process is so unforgiving, requiring you to 100% multiple starter areas just to hit level 20 (especially since DE frequency is so low due to the low populations). I’ve already 100%‘ed the whole game world on my Warrior. Like GW1, the thought of having to wander around for three weeks on a new character is just too irritating, as it’s something I want to have done in a couple of days. Couple this with the fact that the only endgame items to shoot for are exotics from dungeons (which is good, kind of, although locking them only to dungeons is annoying) and legendaries, which are so incredibly expensive they aren’t viable as an endgame goal for most players.

The whole game is just overly concerned about the trading post, which affects real, actual rewards as you play, which in turn affects every zone across the entire world, as they have nothing unique to offer at all. The way they designed the game and combat system (limited skill selections, lackluster traits, an overall stale system) also means for a profession that isn’t your favorite, you’re probably going to be bored trying to level them up to a point where they feel worth the time.

The whole game just needs a lot of work, in a lot of areas. Too many problems are affecting too many people. Most of the sources of these problems are the mere existence of the trading post (and ANet’s love affair with it over the individual player), the existence of the mystic forge at all, and Isiah Cartwright’s initial laziness in watering down old GW1 gameplay into the simple-minded mockery we have today. It’s going to be a few months before we see these things ironed out a little, especially since ANet is more concerned with releasing events that are designed to funnel people to the in-game store than they are about fixing the game as a whole.

He’s not talking about mobility, he’s talking about the ability to escape. They’re not the same thing. There’s a difference between being able to sprint across open ground and being wailed on by three guys, and trying to escape. He’s saying a Thief and Mesmer can get out of that situation pretty easily, whereas other classes are almost certainly locked into death. 100% certain? No, but it’s certainly very difficult, for some classes more than others, whereas a Thief and Mesmer obviously have a lot more options. It’s more of a 20% certainty of death for a Thief, compared to a 90% certainty of death for a Warrior.

I don’t need to go into an in-depth analysis since everyone knows it already, but Warriors easily have the worst downed state in the game right now.What you’re complaining about may be the only situation in the entire game (1v1 vs a near dead opponent) in which the Warrior has a chance of actually getting back up. And of course I’ll point out, Vengeance in PvE is a “I’ll pay 1.5 silver” button unless you’re surrounded by tons of tiny adds, and in PvP it’s just an “I lost” button. You WILL die if you use it. Oh, unless you take a major trait in the most worthless attribute line of any class across all professions. All this predicated on using that 3 skill, which if your enemy jumps on you as soon as you go down, even if you time your hammer throw perfectly and he’s stupid enough not to hide behind his bear, use a blind, use invisibility, use stability, use a block, dodge, or so on, you STILL won’t have it off recharge in time to use it.

Totally overpowered. We should nerf it some more so you can rest assured that Warriors are 100% a free kill when downed, rather than the old 90%. They’re practically a free kill 1v1 as it is. May as well make it official.