Guild Wars 2

look i took a break for a bit yeah ok but is spvp balanced yet? at least to the point where they dont allow pve skins in spvp and asurans in tpvp? please enlighten me. trying to figure out whether or not to come back to spvp.

class imbalances aside…. Lol

that’s odd. i run with ~2900 armor and am surviving chaiths burst if i have my cds np. i drop from ~13.5k to ~3.5-4k but… this is more of a reaction time thing rather than anything else. and unlike backstab, you can see the animations going off. Run from massive amounts of exploding things…………

and i highly doubt (meaning i don’t believe it, period.) that there’s another engi as good at 100nades as chaith. so if i can live through his with ~300 less armor than you, you’re doing something wrong. sorry pal.

Landing bursts on competent enemies who know what you’re capable of are significantly harder. Often in paids, enemy teams have the fear of God in them for what your burst can do to them, and this forces them to be ultra defensive.

Narcarsis.5739:

P.S. If you think I use basilisk to ensure a backstab you haven’t watched me play.

kid uses basilisk. caed 2stronk.

dude asura are kittening broken the difference between dodging a banish on an asuran versus dodging a banish from the largest norn. ………….. nuff said. not to mention letting pve skins into pvp? that candy cane skin is not only small and skinny as kitten on asuran, but it also shows very minimal glow on banish cast. gfg.

just my two cents.

>inb4 “JUST ZOOM IN”

yo this guy is solid. arken has been good on his guard since release. if you need a guard give him a shot he won’t disappoint.

thinking you know everything, winning what.. 80%+ of the tourny games you’ve played in… and only playing mesmer. your perspective is not nearly broad enough. you’ve been playing the one most powerful class in the game, for the entire game, with many of the best players in an environment where you rarely lose. no wonder you can’t understand why people are qq’ing about this and that. mesmers can beat every class. You said it yourself, against the top players in the game, you have the possibility of winning. not every class has that ability. and you simply refuse to acknowledge that.

so very close minded, sataarcoeny. for someone who calls themselves top na and eu, you play in such a privileged environment (teammates are very strong players) with the most powerful class. not even having tried any of the other classes but guardian lol. how you are even able to argue with these people is beyond me. you haven’t even tried to understand their perspective even though you claim otherwise. L2P L2P L2P? how about You L2P other classes.

Eurantien.4632:

Besides Ens has a good point. If you can’t roll with the punches you aren’t the best.

hard to roll with invisible punches; great way to get knocked out if you ask me.

this game can’t be competitive when you introduce random chance. to me engi elixirs are the most glaringly obvious issue.

1 up’ing skill with chance puts chance above skill. and you want this to be a pro game?

capricorn – downed and bled out = endless loading screen.

its pretty funny that this hasn’t been fixed yet.

temple of silent storm – thief stomped from stealth.

endless loading screen in temple of silent storm.

downed by a thief coming out of stealth, stomped by an ele.

how about instead of complaining about the bug, you just compile and report as much information as you can? the faster they get information about why/how, they can fix it.

happened to me yesterday in Kyhlo, mesmer stomp, first death of the match.

for you guys missing the point, thieves can stay permanently stealthed. its not an “L2P” issue, they can just do it. and roam around stomping people as long as they don’t swing their weapon. normally they would have zero combat potential, but with the downed system they’re an almost guaranteed stomp because you never know where they are….

just had the perma loading screen.

Kyhlo – stomped by a mes

dunno if this matters, but it was my first death that match (more info can’t hurt right?).

I like the idea of a full bar of stamina being able to break a stun/immobilize (like an unstoppable dodge – similar to the system in fighting games where you can sacrifice 1 bubble out of 5 to break a combo (bubbles are used to block and dash/special attack and regenerate at a set rate; broken = unusable until it fully regens at a slower rate).

Another fail safe might be something like, for instance, something to do with ability effectiveness reduction over several uses. A good example would be heartseeker; first use is full damage, second use is 50% damage, fourth is 25% damage, etc. Once again, fighting games use this to scale combo damage. When catching an enemy in a combo, two limiting factors occur: the first is that each subsequent hit does less damage. so a 40 hit combo will have the later hits doing a very low percentage of their normal damage – combos effectively lock the enemy into ‘unavoidable’ damage, as each hit of the combo is a mini-stun; the second is that combos are maxed at 100% of a said combo, and each move adds a certain percent. Sure abilities can be timed to add 40% to a combo already at 95% completion, but it will obviously suffer severely reduced damage (higher combo % is higher damage reduction as mentioned just before). After that 100% is reached, the victim will go through a ‘knockdown’ phase where the fight will effectively restart minus whatever energy bubbles etc they have yet to regenerate/repair.

While this will not apply directly to a game like gw2, in the case of something like heartseeker (low skill high reward offensive ability), perhaps a limiter or a debuff added to victim reducing further heartseeker hits by a scaling percentage as mentioned earlier may work as a fail-safe implementable by gw2.

The same goes for defensive abilities. Stealth is a great example with the ‘revealed’ debuff not allowing a player to restealth for 3 seconds. etc.

/duel is kind of necessary. all you can do right now to prove your individual skills is join an empty server and fight it out before people come and interrupt… the fact that there are plenty of empty servers to choose from is something else entirely, however.

mmm and possibly /rank on a shorter cooldown!

if the ele is in mist form while they rally from downed (aka when a player they’ve damage-tagged is executed or bleeds out), apparently it awards them full hp. frankly i don’t know if I’ve ever noticed this but…..

isnt this necro glass cannon? i don’t understand the point of the vid. it was kinda cool but……???

Yeah I tried a few runs with a tpvp pug (barely known friends and no organization) and i was pretty impressed by putting in gs axe/shield. I had to change my build up a bit to incorporate the difference in gear – or I guess I could say I was ‘able’ to change my build up because of the difference in gear. Either way, I really see the light I suppose is a good phrase to use here. I was trying to avoid it because it was so common and using lesser known builds to win is very satisfying (to me at least); I do find winning in itself satisfying, however. ;p

Really glad I got several intelligent responses to this question. Thanks a lot!

it’s also an easy bonus that is a free booster kit once a month. i don’t want to have to grind for these things, i want these things so i can grind.

EatThisShoe.5136:

I think one of the things which frustrates people is that most of the skill in this game is defensive. There’s a big divide between players who can reliably avoid burst combos and those who can’t. This means that almost anybody can pick up a burst build and kill you, and you have to struggle to get better just to stay alive. You can contrast this with FPS games, which often have lower time to kill, but bad players are not very dangerous because they can’t aim. In GW2 there are few skills which really reward high skill with greater damage. In fact some game mechanics really favor low skill attackers, such as blocked and blinded attacks not breaking stealth.

The second issue is that defense is limited. You only get a couple dodges, and whatever defensive skills your profession can add. This has two sub-issues, first even a good player can simply run out of defensive skills and endurance, leaving them an easy kill. Second some professions can retry failed bursts much more often than others, this is part of why shatter mesmers and backstab thieves stand out from 100blades warriors, because bursts come often enough that they can overwhelm defensive cooldowns. Of course the number of defensive skills you can viably pack into a build also varies with profession.

Wow I really hope Anet takes this post seriously because this is on point regarding gw2 pvp’s current situation.

of course, taking from this post, if Anet reduces the player-skill requirement on being efficiently ‘defensive’ and/or makes defense much more accessible, IMO there are variable outcomes. It may help in either reducing the appeal of straight burst builds because they can no longer overwhelm a regular (non-bunker) target so quickly (/efficiently), or make current bunker players nigh invincible thus making more extreme forms of burst damage necessary.

I personally think that burst damage and bunkers should be ignored for the time being, and instead test a version of points capping in favor of the team with more living players on it. Bunkers, the single players that they are, would lose their attractiveness as two attackers means the point will be lost regardless of how well said bunker stays alive. Also, burst builds (glass cannons) would lose their appeal in higher level play because of the downed mechanic – a downed player on point still counts as a capturing player. Bursting them to downed has two negative effects in this scenario – cooldowns are tanked (generally) and now they have a glass cannon’s inherent lack of staying power coupled with diminished damage output for the next 30ish seconds and the possibility of not achieving a permanent advantage while being disadvantaged themselves. Of course, shatter mesmers are somewhat outside of that disadvantage, but nevertheless.

im not going to tell you to l2p or anything like that, you’re obviously trying to learn how to play in each setting, but those problems do have solutions.

As for 8v8ing, you just need to learn how to avoid the zerg by understanding where it is. I can go through 5 8v8 hotjoin games without ever fighting more than one or two people at a time. of course, my glory gain rate is lower as a result, so I actively participate in the larger fights and etc. also, you need to keep in mind that hotjoin is not very nonburst glass build friendly. and clothies need extra toughness or experience/skill to stay alive. unless you’re bunker ele’ing and know how to keep your buffs rolling, you’re going to take a ton of damage, very quickly, from a lot of classes.

As for the 5v5’s…. i dunno if i want to 5v5 i just free tourny.

As for the free tourny’ing, you need to pvp more (spend more time pvp’ing) and meet the people that will be your team or possibly give/accept invites to tpvp parties. of course, its possible that they will ask you sooner rather than later, but you need a certain level of skill in order to pique their interest – without it you’ll simply be another one of the masses.

And lastly, be polite to the people you meet. if someone trash talks you or your build, just ignore it if you’re going to respond with something rude. There’s nothing more annoying than two subpar players complaining in /map about how bad the other is and how easy/cheese the others build is. as long as you’re likeable/polite, they won’t have a reason to not be interested in you – in other words you won’t end up on a potential future teammates block list because you blew your top at a computer game and inconvenienced/annoyed everyone else around you in the process.

Good luck though, I hope you stick with it.

So basically longbow for its fire combo field but not for real use until projectile tracking is fixed (i recognize this problem on other bow classes as well – its quite limiting at times) or axe/shield for increased survivability or to counterbalance an increased DPS/burst damage focused build.

I have to admit going axe/shield with shouts heal would definitely allow me to run frenzy more easily with a greatsword or axe/axe… But again, the mobility aspect of the greatsword is just too overwhelming both in advancing and retreating. if they made an axe skill that allowed for a leap (like swords leaping cripple) it would definitely make axe/axe much more attractive…

I did run axe/mace and rifle at one point… but it just felt too single target focused. And rifle was basically limited to rifle butt, and perhaps 3 and 4 skills but other than range and the AOE knockback, it didn’t feel like it added anything ‘necessary’ to my build.

Anyway, thank you both for your posts, and for your points of view – I feel like paid tournaments are a (future) goal for me as a player, so its good to have some of that perspective on builds I run, among other things.

I feel like this map was designed around 8v8 or possibly 10v10 play. vertical distance might be relatively short (to something like a shortbow thief) but for classes who can’t blink up to higher tiers, its huge. and the set lanes to enter each of the cap points feel a bit cramped compared to the other maps – probably because the corridors feel long. But yeah, this map is enormous. I can’t see how it could possibly be played 5v5 unless it went through some kind of serious redesign or it just straight up shrinks.

don’t get me wrong though, i love this map despite its size. Especially how it just turns into a straight up death match half of the time in hotjoin. super fun to brawl like that.

i’d have to say engineer… i see tons of thieves, mesmers, and guardians (kinda follows the stereotype pretty closely actually), recently a huge amount of warriors, and plenty of eles/rangers mixed in.

Hey I’ve been playing my warrior since the BWE’s and I’m seriously stuck.

Just can’t seem to decide on greatsword or axe/axe. I run shout heal, sometimes with frenzy sometimes without. The mobility on the greatsword is great – I think this is the reason I’m so attached to it. Hundred blades (even without rush or bolas as a setup) is nice situational/positional damage though quite limited in use. However the burst skill is trash.

Double Axes have less AOE than the greatsword, at least that’s how I look at it. However there are times when I just butcher people so quickly that I don’t even know what happened (I almost always run frenzy when using a/a so… yeah to be expected). Also the damage feels similar overall, if not better than the greatsword, when you take hundred blades out of the equation. On top of that, the burst skill is sick.

The reason I’m asking this is because I only see people running gs but there are times when I run into a good warrior and get merked by a/a… And I’ve run the typical bullsrush frenzy endure pain greatsword warrior build before, I just want to move away from that to something more skill intensive and rewarding – hence the shoutsheal build. Any thoughts?

lol i finished monthly pvp in what.. 4 games? great rewards and easy for serious casuals to complete. for more serious players its a free boost of necessary items. i mean who in the world is gonna complain about 5 free boosters 5 free tickets and 5 free salvage kits? talk about awesome.

that would be sickkkkkkkkk. im guessing the problem is what to do with excess glory, since you wouldn’t be able to burn it on getting multiples of the same item if that kind of change actually went into effect.

yeah and dont worry too much about hording glory. it builds up to the point where its just silly to try to spend it all. i think im sitting on like 80k? glory with every possible armor/weapon to this point unlocked or just about there.

Oneway.1453:

I have no idea why Anet did 8v8 for sPvP and 5v5 for tourneys. When you balance a game, it seems like you’d want to strongly weigh the number of players per team. By making them different Anet might have been asking for trouble. Anyone care to postulate?

there’s that and there’s also pve. i have a feeling there will be a lot more changes to abilities similar to how they changed “Save Yourselves!” for guardian. duration is halved in anything connected to heart of the mists, but in pve the skill stays unchanged.

and while i do enjoy hotjoin – its a nice way to goof around and not have to worry about anything while you kill things – i don’t think it can really be balanced in 8v8s…. 75% of the time people die its because they get downed by 2 – 3 people, or just get chased down by a zerg on the way to the next point.

that’s because people in tpvp don’t have to put up with stuff like this.

ive played all classes. mesmer is the last one out of eight. i started two days ago. incredibly op class. so op that i don’t even have any ideas on how to balance them. it seems like everything they have is powerful than most other classses.

quote=695201;Chris.7653:]

As someone who played mesmer and thief by far the most since beta.

They both needs nerfs. Survival/Dmg ratio is just completely fubar’d.

I 100% agree…

I played a Mesmer too and deleted him…it got to the point I felt dirty and cheap just playing it.

Same with Thief.

yeah it was something like this. like real. the reason i didn’t play one until now (my last class to play) is because i knew they’d feel this way.

i was asking you because they’re all fairly straightforward and this ‘majority of the damage’ idea you have is misled and frankly, incorrect. ill listen to aydenunited thought and stop feeding an accused troll.

[Edit]
I don’t care. I will pledge allegiance to ANet’s flag if they give us /rank. GGKTHX.

and for the record, balance changes better be taken piecemeal. if they get to feeling rushed by the mass amount of impatience teenagers on this forum have and mess things up, that will be much worse for the future of gw2. i think they have the right idea by taking things slowly and carefully. we all saw how fast pistol whip was fixed. that was an obvious balance issue and they nerfed it just enough (15%) to make it relatively balanced. ofc that means no thief will use it anymore because wtf would they use a balanced ability? bahahaha

ps. anet, give /rank plox thanks.

/rank command for pvp. Anet. will this be coming in the future? because seriously, forget gear cosmetics and everything else. if i can /rank spam people i will be eternally happy. and by eternally i mean as long as i play this game. so yeah, /rank is a good thing DO ITTTTTTTTTT

so basically you don’t know/understand the basic requirements for skirmisher, much less assaulter/defender.

it doesn’t matter whether you’re melee or ranged, it’s a matter of positioning (or locationing? if you will); its not even close to 100% dps focused lol.

edit: er yeah what godlike said. guess i shoulda refreshed before i responded lol.

just give us /rank command. ill play for that any day.

well, in their defense, every competitive game will attempt to minmax every bit that they can. if that means they can only use 25-50% of the currently available classes, and abuse the heck out of them, then that’s what they’ll do to win. if they don’t, they’ll sure as hell be playing someone else who does, so it will bite them in the kitten the problem is that the maxs are too high and the mins are too. the stuff in between just gets slashed.

sad. face.

bump, because it needs it.

lol watch anet only fix stealth and not touch anything else balance-wise. i think that might be the best and the worst decision for them. best to take changes slowly and not make them too extreme though.

the man has a point.

that said, /rank emotes would make this game 100x better. i’d still call it thief wars 2 until thieves got properly adjusted, but it’d be 100x better.

cheers op.

its been like this for the past 3 hours. never less than 5-6 thieves in the game. there were 7 thieves on one team at one point. like.. really? hotjoin isn’t a tourny. its just a random fluctuating sample of the player base online and active at a given time. this is what people are playing. i chose this screen over the others because this is approximately standard (average). tons of thieves, guards, a mes, an ele and a necro all sprinkled in.

Anet, what are you doing about it?

join project shrine maiden and spvp with me. loooooooooooool but real hope you guys find a team soon. you’re basically a birthday present to any team looking for good players bahahaha

the class mechanics lend themselves to being “overpowered.” being able to use abilities continuously without cds would make just about any class ‘op’. gl to Anet on trying to fix something fundamentally broken in the first place.

hey devs. for the first time in awhile (generally pvp 7500 glory in a day without boosters – have a full time job so i can’t do more) i was playing early morning. in 3 (or 4?) different servers, the teams were something like 4/5 thieves+etc(war/mes/ele/guardetc) vs 4/5 thieves+etc. every thief was dagger dagger with full glass cannon and 25% movement signet. I have to admit, i had a lot of fun. I’ve never been in so many lobbies where so many people were so easy to kill. Then I’d see the scoreboard/ranks – 80% of them were sub rank 15. still, to a one, all ran the same spec as the few rank 30+ thieves in the game. and still to a one could put up a good fight (make me try to hard to kill them 1v1) despite the fact that they opened with steal cloak n dagger, attempted (or succeeded) a backstab, and heartseeker spammed from then on.

This kind of design – without fix so far – is actually kind of shameful. they all build the same, and are all relatively difficult to kill without getting downed myself because they get the 50% extra damage in downstate talent and suddenly can do 10k damage during their regular downstate rotation (2 to dodge initial stomp, 3 to dodge second stomp). hilarious. you want to know whats wrong with structured pvp? that. i probably actually lost to one thief all day (i faced at least two dozen different ones). the fact that i had to put effort into beating such a mindless build. ridiculous, sad even.

then i go online later and watch streams. was watching EU’s Evelith (thief – sword dagger / shortbow)…. and here i thought sword dag was one of the more balanced builds. this guy wrecks people in under two seconds. it got me to thinking. drop steal damage by 3k (on crits) and cloak and dagger by 1k+ (on crits) and suddenly it might be almost balanced.

what everyone has been referring to but not necessarily saying is that normal characters have somewhere from a 17k to 20k life pool – regardless of toughness. (guards can get down to 14-15k comfortably… gg hp regen). thief combo is steal 6k cloak and dagger 4.5k backstab 5.5k – 9.5k (generally) and then you have heartseeker for an average of 4k each hit (from around 60 – 50% hp). granted these are all crits, what thief doesn’t have 50%+ crit……… just the intial combo is enough to bring someone to critical health and reduce anything they can do in a fight to running away and healing and running some more, though heartseeker will distance close and kill for sure.

you say zerging is a problem. you say paid tournys needing so many tickets is a problem. you say bunkers are a problem. you say lack of a ladder and a matchmaking mechanic is a problem. you say all these other things are a problem. playing in the same game as 8 – 10 thieves (out of 15 other people not including myself – haven’t been playing my thief due to over-saturation) and having to stay on your toes just to not die to a such a simple minded combo. has there ever been anything so crippling? i even have to pay attention to 1v1’s on my tankier classes… the only thing i play that can laugh at thieves is my necro. one class out of all eight classes that i play. really? we have to wait till nov 15th for you to fix this? the pw nerf came fast enough, but what about this? this has been around forever, and nothing? cmon.

don’t get me wrong, ive been seeing a ton of low rank (aka new) players in spvp. but the vast majority are playing thieves, and all using the same spec. i play all classes. I think gw2 is an extremely fun game with so many ways to pvp its almost funny. but everyone i see is only playing one spec. just this one. just what are you doing anet. real. before everything else, before the rest of your iceberg, how about you fix this. everyone i know who played this game has quit due to various reasons. im not about to quit but im starting to understand peoples frustration. less experienced players will get slaughtered by this (excuse me) noob spec. its not about going into paids and getting stomped. its going into pvp and seeing a thief, then getting dropped in 2 seconds because they don’t have the experience to retaliate properly. heaven forbid i actually run into a good thief – i dont even know what i’d do. the only reason i can fight back is because i know what to expect, but even then im hard pressed to keep up because 2 hits and im half hp. sure that pressure makes me play harder but really? i can’t find a member of the other team in hotjoin for god sakes (8v8s) that isnt a thief.

you wanna know why people are quitting? its because they don’t want to play a dd thief.

i love rolling pugs that have zero organization. go solo queue go. real life tho i hate being rolled by premades when i don’t have a premade. go solo queue go.

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 started watching just because i was curious but man you really hit every point on the head. by the end i found that i could completely agree with the entire video. currently spvp is in a sad state of affairs – i really hope it doesn’t get pushed to the back burner and the focus of the game shifted to pve only

plays a thief, a mesmer, and a guardian. /facepalm

i personally think the devs are doing a good job at eliminating bad topics and infracting poor posts. this thread is basically saying that you don’t want to hear from the masses and want to concentrate on the elitist few. What you need to keep in mind is that the elitist few are the ones figuring out work arounds for the problems that normal people just complain about. Thus, they wouldn’t be posting here anyways because they know Anet will get around to fixing it eventually.

so what, 1 bunker 4 roamers

only /rank maybe? but i want to /rank people i slay instead of /dance + rank finisher. dont get my hopes up like that.

wait… we’re getting all of that? in one patch?? and you’re still not satisfied? do you realize what a huge leap that is? and in just one patch? /rank command, ladder, and gvg?

this game has only been out for a couple of months and they’re implementing that much new content in a single patch. what do you have to complain about?