Guild Wars 2

In my opinion, GvG is not competitive PvP. Competitive PvP is just FIVE guys that decided to play as a team, practising, fighting for a prize in a tournament, like the Go4Gw2 tourneys. I find in this game that any team size that is superior to five players might become a little too zerg-y (because the combat style Gw2 has) and not enjoyable to watch, neither play alone; that is, just for Guilds.

I didn’t play GvG from Gw1, but from a friend that played Gw1 more than 2.000 hours and enjoyed the Gw1 GvG, Stronghold is different, but still retains the essence of your beloved GvG. You don’t like it, don’t take it. They are adding there Guild Ladder. You don’t want Guild Ladders there, don’t mind it.

Just to clarify that in my opinion GvG is not “competitive” PvP, as I understand it.

On the image you have all the options you can enable/disable to read on your chat. So I guess you can disable /say chat too. Remember to create another chat with everything active, so you don’t have to switch back ’n forth things when going out of sPvP.

It must suck to have people constantly whispering you. I’d advice you to turn the whisper chat off when you PvP if this abuse occurs every match.

Everyone knows Ladder is still meaningless because it’s a grind/farm whatever people wants to call it and I bet ANet is totally aware about this. Maybe things will change until the expansion, but it’s just something I feel.

So ignore them through blocking or turning off whisper chat and keep enjoying the PvP of this game, hope you like it a lot!

I would tell you to consider and use D/P instead of D/D, to make fully use of the Shadow Arts trait you picked and “somewhat” to make up for the lost daze on steal. I guess you know it already but using Heart Seeker (Leap Finisher) in the Pistol 5 (Smoke Field) grants you free stealth.

In case you love only D/D playstyle maybe you could switch the two points from Shadow Arts to the Acrobatic line.

Just random thoughts, anyways. Hope I helped

dday.9532:

Maybe your right, I never played PvE so i wouldn’t really know. I just remember in GW1 there were always tons of people looking for groups and wondered why it was not the same here.

I actually noticed that there was a section for sPvP in the LFG Tool like 4 months ago (well, it took me 3 months since I came back to the game to notice that – I wasn’t playing when it was added) but, to my disappointment, nobody never ever use it. It feels like it’s a waste of a Tool.

In my opinion, most players seem to be condescending over other players. I think it would increase the health of the sPvP community itself, but that’s just an unfounded supposition I make. I’d like that the Tool got used, but players keep wanting to play solo on a game mode that is PUG unfriendly. (If you make a team before going into queue via the LFG Tool you could be able to know a little your teammates and set up any kind of team comp or, at least, a strategy to use in the next games).

Just my thoughts on this.

R.I.P. OP
As said already, only 5 turret engies can win vs 4 turret engies.

Thief is not a problem itself. Thief is a “problem” within Conquest. So Conquest is the real problem.

Zero Day.2594:

TEEF MASTER RACE!!!!!

95% of my time played in Guild Wars 2 has been on a thief. First char created, leveled to 80 and the one I have 93% of games played in sPvP with.

So I can say I have joined the Teef Master Race since the very beginning!!!!

Will they? It’d be a really good thing if we could have the WTS NA matches on youtube than only on Twitch

I’ll be even more positive @Iason Evan :

3.) Stronghold isn’t part of the x-pac and everyone gets it and they split the queues.

As OP said + the templates not coming on HoT as you said, it becomes clear that the better option will be to give Stronghold for everyone (as they have said already in one of the latest interviews with youtubers iirc) and split the queues: really different gameplay + Stronghold will strongly appeal to non PvP “hardcore” players.

They don’t affect at all. If you are stuck in a 4vs5 (being in the 4 man team) it doesn’t count as a lost game as far as I know. You play the match but it won’t take away any point from leaderboards (if you are on Ranked queue).

And yeah, 4vs5 is still an “issue” because people want to

I didn’t read the whole 8 pages so I don’t know if this have been stated already:

In my opinion, Celestial is a pretty balanced Amulet and the problem doesn’t lie in the amulet, runes, sigils, but in the Conquest game mode itself, where it’s crucial to be able to hold points and decaping (via winning a 1vs1 at far, for example).

So within this game mode Celestial is really good because, when put with certain classes like ele or warrior, they acquire the capacity to soak and sustain “large” amount of damage (high sustain) to stay on point while also being able to stack a good amount of might (via Blast Finishers and easy access to Fire Fields) which gives them a nice damage output. Add to the mix that they are supporting his team while doing so (might stacks and some healings are for the whole team if they are near).

Therefore in the game mode itself is essential to have this kind of role that can support, tank and bring a good amount of DPS to the table. I’m not forgetting about the amount of CC these classes can bring, but that has nothing to do with Celestial, just with the classes (generally every class has some CCs, some more than others, but they all have).

It’s not the Celestial Amulet that isn’t balanced, but the Conquest game mode itself that makes the Amulet feel like it’s much powerful. To be honest, the January balance patch seems to me to have done some work against Cele and it’s not as “braindead” as people like to make it seem. And I am by no means afraid to say I’m totally okay with the “so called Celestial meta”.

I’d say I really noticed that change. Maybe I was the one playing bad or had some bad matches (1W/7L).
In some matches I felt like I could not do anything more, but it could have been my teammates were having a bad day and MMR-wise they were better than me. I can just say it was a feeling, not certain of course.

Minute 27:45

If I understood correctly, Hugh says it will be added to Unranked and Ranked.

I think the custom arena thing was said because the game mode will be 5vs5 and some people may try more people in each team (8vs8 or so) and give feedback to the devs.

silvermember.8941:

Poliator.7021:

Assuming that Stronghold is Expansion-exclusive…

That is a pretty kittenumption.

We don’t know if it will be a HOT exclusive, just like the new WvW map. We don’t know much about the xpaction.

https://heartofthorns.guildwars2.com/en

Yeah, I know it, I’m wondering that because it was showed on Pax South were they talked about HoT, so it leads us to think it’s HoT exclusive.
But then HoT will only come with the new PvE thinguies? Then it would have poor content I guess :/

It’d be nice to know if the new mode is going to be expansion exclusive

Last Ready Up stated that Stronghold will share the same queues as Conquest, then the Stronghold map will enter on the rotation. Did I understand it well? If it is so I’ll ask the question:

Assuming that Stronghold is Expansion-exclusive…

How are queues going to work for people who don’t have Heart of Thorns?

I can edit explaining myself more, thanks for reading.

Very nice video!
You should try going 00446 though, in my opinion Trickery XII (Sleight of Hand) or XIII (Bewildering Ambush, maybe this is more apropiate because you are a condi thief). You get a little bit more of condi, ~3 seconds cooldown reduction to Steal and if you choose XII trait you can interrupt some crucial skills of the enemy, that can save you more than once a game.
Anyways, good job, good video and keep ’em coming

First of all, I seem the might/mightstacking slight nerf a change in a good direction (Might is an issue in both PvP and “somewhat in PvE” because it leads us to the Berserker PvE meta, but the slight might nerf doesn’t affect that much on PvE, really).

It’s true that a Celestial can stack 25 might easily, but that’s not likely to happen, they tend not to Blast on the Fire Fields because they’re moving, so it’s true that a great amount of the “constant” 15-20 might stacks comes from the Battle Sigil and in my opinion, just that slight nerf will make Celestials to take more time to stack might (and to ramp up their damage), even if it’s just a little.

If there’s more frequent Balance Patches, they can track how the nerf did and adjust it (nerf it more or buffing it). With that I mean that they may have done a little nerf now, but if they plan to balance frequently it’s a nice way to start off, watching how that little change affects the overall gameplay.

It’s just my opinion, I liked the changes… and I gotta try that Invigorating Precision buff on S/P Thief ;P

I totally agree, everytime I see a Red Post about PvP it brings me some joy, I’d say.

It’s awesome to have Justin constantly on the forums, but a thank you too for all the PvP team who works along Justin.

Thank you!

As long as I’m concerned (not 100% sure), it’s based in personal score. If the 5 players in a team scores, let’s say a total of 500 score points and the other one 400, in case of a tie the one with more score points wins.

Once it happened to me and when I asked someone answered me that, not sure but I hope it helped.

Edit: uh, someone posted a wiki article, I didn’t see it sorry o.o

First of all I don’t think any of the new system changes were “gamebreakingly serious”:

Lordrosicky.5813:

1, Not being able to queue from anywhere

It’s obviously an issue if you are having quite a high queue times, but not gamebreaking (plus it was done in order to prevent even more the “DCs” and “4vs5” stuff).

Lordrosicky.5813:

So even if the scores are close it DOES NOT MEAN that matchmaking is working well.

I do agree that matchmaking still needs improvements and it’s not fair at all sometimes (but it SOMETIMES works well, it pairs equally skilled players. I’m sure you’ve had one balanced match).

Lordrosicky.5813:

3, No solo queue option again – surely their metrics showed massive amounts of people solo queued previously? Well they removed the most popular form of gw2 for a large portion of the population (solo queue) and replaced it with a terrible experience.

It seems that I’m the only player in gw2 that didn’t have a good time playing Solo Arena and enjoyed more Team Arena, even playing solo. Solo Arena gave me bad matches, totals crush (500-0 and stuff like that, what supossedly was rare before) and, to be fair, longer queue times than Team Arena. It’s true that I’m not a huge MMR skilled professional player, but I really do enjoyed more Team Arena than Solo Arena.
I’d assume by my experience that Team Arena had equal population playing than Solo Arena, but maybe it’s just everyone’s perception, who knows. Lastly, while it’s true that the experience is a little bit worse than before, it’s not because of the Solo Arena removal, but to the Matchmaking state (they’re still tweaking it).

Lordrosicky.5813:

Many bugs in the leave queue system.

These are really some weird bugs lol.

It was just my opinion, these problems with the new system, while they are odd, they don’t seem to be “gamebreaking” or something like that, they’ll likely get fixed in a (I hope) near future.

You’re right kdaddy, that’s maybe why I said in OP that people needs to change their mindset but you explain it perfectly I think

I totally agree with the OP. It’d be enjoyable to have a high-end objective to play at a profesional level PvP (aside from weekly Tournaments, that obviously are huge) and something like categories based on MMR (I think Anet PvP Devs already said that they are going to add leagues or some sort of thing) or using the actual Leaderboard in some way, are ways to make that thing possible.

As OP said too, more rewards (based on whatever category you are) means more incentive to play PvP and therefore more people will try out PvP making the PvP community grow (logically, MMR based categories would make new players face new players, making everything equal to everyone).

IMO, we’ll eventually get this, either way, nice post Blackstar!

Androlan.9487:

since I see fewer players even playing pvp anymore

Oh man, I’d rather say that there is even more people playing PvP, because maybe, and only maybe (clearly I don’t have any kind of statistic), this “decrease” in MM quality happened due to a rise in population, new to the PvP game-mode, who doesn’t know how to play maps properly and doesn’t know good builds (let’s say they played 300 games, nothing comparable to 2.000 games for example). It’s just a guessing: more newcomers, different quality we could say.

Edit: by the way, I don’t want this post to become another “SoloQ should’ve never disappeared” post. I’d rather like to see people sharing what they feel nowadays about PvP Matchmaking, either it’s a good feel or a bad feel.

Hello, I’m making this post to express how the “new” PvP Matchmaking feels to me now that Devs apparently stopped touching the system (algorythms, etc…). This is just my little piece of feedback (TL;DR at the end).

At first, when the new system launched it was awkward to everyone cause Match Making needed to settle (or something like this?) and I think devs added Profession MMR so it was even worse. I don’t know if they got rid of that metric or not, but eventually Matchmaking felt good, I could mantain 50% win ratio going SoloQ. Sometimes it returned to feel bad but I guess it was time frame issues (like playing at 1am or, let’s call it “bad hours” where not many players are logged and playing PvP).

Lately, I guess the last one week or so, when I queued Solo, I’ve been having losing streaks (i.e. 3 lose- 1 win, I think I even arrived at a 7 loses in a row). I’m not saying the same thing everyone says (“Omg team of total PUGs facing full premade team GG MM”), no, I’m not saying that (even though I had some matches like that, but I don’t care, these are a minority). What I want to express is that MatchMaking seems to work improperly, at least lately (Or maybe I just have a really low MMR or a really high MMR and I’m the baddie, I don’t know).

Everyone has stated this several weeks ago, that it felt odd, but I’m saying this now because it’s now when I’m facing this “problem”: the “drop” in quality of games. I just feel like I’m the only one who knows how to move on the map (but clearly in those losing streaks not every game was bad and, as well, I mess up games sometimes, I’m not the best player in the world). Everything said until now happens when I’m queueing Solo.

When I TeamQ (I’m not refering to a full 5 premade, but to 2 or 3 premade) I tend to win more games, obviously because it gives you an advantage (even if we are not in TeamSpeak and other voice-chat services) and with this large Solo losing streak I tend to win way more games when I’m playing with some friends. I know too, as some Devs have stated already, they want players to queue up together and form teams, because it’s a team game (and I’m totally fine about that).

TL;DR: lately PvP Matchmaking started to feel odd when I queue Solo and generally it feels the same when I TeamQ. These are just feels and perceptions of my games: when I SoloQ I feel that sometimes in the games I play, my team is at a lower level than me (and therefore we get crushed). No complains about TeamQ. As said before, MatchMaking still needs to be tweaked (and maybe more important, a part of the players needs to change their mindset in the games).

I think that I’ve said everything I wanted to say, sorry for the long post and the surely bad english. If you haven’t understood something I wanted to express, feel free to ask and I’ll try to explain it better. One more time, the post is about my feelings about PvP Matchmaking, to give my little piece of feedback for Devs so they can improve this and continue doing their awesome job. Thanks.

Roses are red,
Violets are blue,
I am a thief,
Two, two, two.

By someone!

Thief’s love <3

I think it might be the error 7:11:3:191:101 (or at least that’s the error I’ve been experiencing lately since friday)
I tried things seen on forums but it does not work and at this point I’m too afraid of joining PvP.

I’ll just talk about a little part of what this can be in the future: rewards.
Let’s say we get hypotetical leagues:

Quaggan 1,2,3
Bear 1,2,3
Phoenix 1,2,3
Dragon 1 (only one because it would be the last one? I’m not getting into that :P)

Then, based on that these leagues are in order (quaggan is the “newbie” league; dragon the “pro” league) it should have different rewards at the end of the season. I don’t find “fair” that only top 150 players will get season rewards, because:

1. Solo Arena is not a thing anymore and I’m OK with that, but for people who like to play Solo or Duo will have a really rough time to reach top 150.

2. Experienced teams (and future new teams of course) will have an “advantage” at getting to these ranks (Coordination and Teamwork OP).

Yeah, sure it will encourage players to don’t play solo and form teams with other PvPers, but sometimes people don’t have the time to do that or simply they don’t want to play on a Team. So if you had these leagues (they should be based on MMR to make everyone start “at the right spot” on every season) you could make special rewards for it. For example you could say:

“Quaggans get 5g, 2 unidentified dyes and 5 champ boxes”
…
“Dragons get 100g, 5 unidentified dyes, one minillama (it has to be there!), … and one original – PvP exlusive – piece of armor”.

These are simple examples. The point I’m trying to make is that structuring PvP in Leagues like that, it would make everyone get rewards (even if they are few) but still rewarding top players with something unique, something that makes people recognise them like finishers, armor (or even weapon!) skins.

So that’s everything I wanted to tell. Leagues to make everyone get some rewards (because they play PvP) and make the top PvPers get unique rewards (because they play PvP at a “professional” level).

Keep these changes going Justin (and Anet Team), I like them very much, you (Anet Team) almost got that MM problems and good luck everyone with the experimental season, cheers ^^.

supa suop.8026:

My idea is basically move crippling slash down to the second AA slot and remove the weakness from it.

Then the new third AA skill would be Weakening strike: Target gets weakness for 2s and their endurance is reduce by 5%-10%

I main thief, but in my opinion Sword AA is ok as it is… but what you suggest is interesting. Maybe the third attack would be too strong and I would either remove the weakness on third strike or the reduced endurance.
And cripple duration on second strike would need some duration decrease because the second hit is “fast” compared to the third one which is really slow in comparison.

Overall I think it does not need any buff, but the endurance reduce would be interesting to see how it would impact :P

Edit: I meant that the third strike feels more telegraphed and, personally, it feels slower.