Guild Wars 2

I see good DH’s in legend provide a lot of value for their team.

They aren’t versatile all-around bruisers like rev and scrappers, but there are certain situations where they really shine. The good DH’s I’ve seen know how to rotate into those situations and/or help set those situations up.

Completely agree with OP. The elite specs offer too much of an upgrade over any of the core traitlines, which is killing a lot of build diversity. I suppose A.net’s long-term goal is to have multiple competing elite-specs, which would make sense when we reach that point.

If you didn’t like how well D/D ele was able to perform as a bruiser pre-specialization, then I’m not sure why you would like this meta with scrappers and revs doing everything better (except healing teammates I guess).

Also, a 58 point difference in Legend is nothing. If anything, comebacks can be a lot larger in legend because good players should know how to generate and maintain momentum. Just look at some of the proleague games with 150+ point comebacks.

Ithilwen.1529:

Well, I’ve completed 14 achievements on Season III. That includes 4 profession achievements. Three of those; Necromancer, Ranger and Elementalist I pretty much had to learn while playing as I don’t normally play those classes.

I’ve fought through 30+ loss streaks, seen my win percentage fall from 50% to something like 10% at one point. Full time work hours have gone into struggling to achieve over a period of weeks.

Now, I’m expected to cross 3 divisions and buy wings. I don’t have the tickets for wings and there is no way I’m going to cross 7 divisions in the two remaining seasons. It’s taken me from day 1 to today to get to Sapphire T3.

I’m not good enough? I’m in the division I should be in? Then why should I play and give the elites cannon fodder to pound on?

It’s very clear that I will never win the wings.

So all that work is for pretty much nothing. THE ACHIEVES DON’T CARRY TO NEXT YEAR, SO THIS IS A COMPLETE WASTE. I feel like I got led into trying an impossible task just to be another body in pvp for the elites to beat on.

Right now I feel I ought to give up on this game.

The wings are meant to be a skill-based legendary, not a 100% grindfest (although some grinding is obviously still part of it, as it is with all legendaries). And it’s not like the skill bar is set very high here: you need to be able to reach at least Ruby in 3 of the seasons, which is where most of the average and slightly-below-average players wind up by the end of each season.

And let’s clear one thing up: you’re not providing “cannon fodder” for the “elites” to pound on. You aren’t going up against any elites in Sapphire. You’re going up against (and with) other super-casual players like yourself.

I work an incredibly demanding full-time job that often involves international travel or going to trial, so I usually miss half of each season. Yet even I’ve been able to reach legendary each season. The only thing keeping me from my backpack is the “play 3 games a day” achievement because I’m away from my computer for much of the season.

I’d suggest learning 2-3 builds that can perform a variety of roles (e.g. reaper, tempest, mes), watching some good players stream those classes, and then practicing them in Unranked for a few days before you take them into Ranked. And since you clearly don’t understand the game that well yet, stick to the meta builds first (which have been tried and tested by much better players) rather than trying to come up with your own builds based on your limited playtime and experience.

This suggestion is so off-base.

(1) Few (possibly none?) top reapers run sigil of ice, so I’m not sure why you think this change would affect anything.

(2) Many top reapers run either death perception (50% crit chance in shroud). For spite builds, decimate defenses (2% crit chance per vuln stack on enemy) is also popular. I’ve seen Noscoc run both on his spite build, for example. So even if sigil of ice was popular, your “shave” wouldn’t do much.

Ravenmoon.5318:

Fay.2357:

Ravenmoon.5318:

ResJudicator.7916:

If you’re on druid, a lot of the matchup involves proper kiting (if using LB) or evading shatters (if S/D). Save celestial form (full condi wipe) for after the mesmer uses F1+F2. Make sure you’re managing the pet properly to keep up pressure. A well played druid can hold a point (or at least keep it neut) virtually forever.

The second you go into celestial form is the moment I’ll moa you. Same goes for rampaging warriors and shrouded necromancers

And if you’re that predictable, the only people you’ll be moaing are the noobs that don’t deserve to win. Moa is a flashy and long cast time. Anyone that doesn’t dodge it deserves it.

Will you really see that cast in stealth while I’m interrupting and worst case scenario stow my weapon and force you to dodge, I mean by that time my staff skills would’ve reloaded and I’ll be ready to give you some condi presents

And since condi damage is braindead I can just jump around keep on shattering, forcing you to dodge.

We can all count to 2 right? Right. So. Dodge 2 times and eat that moa.

P.S: Tides of time stun you (you can’t stunbreak while in that kittenty form) and increase my casting speed.

Do I need to teach you more lessons on how to land moa properly? Because it really isn’t that hard given those forms disable your utilities, give you pulsing stacks of stability and nothing much else.

P.P.S: I’ve never had issues doing moa to rangers xD Unless I eat a blind. I’ll admit, I don’t look for blinds since I focus on the enemy while casting moa. That’s the only viable play I guess to a player in my rank.

Which reminds me

ANet … could you pls add some shades to my screen when I’m blinded. Put up that black and white filter or something. Typically when I get 10+ condis from a nearby reaper it’s really hard to distinguish blind from the plethora of other nasty effects.

And since you blink and you die to a necro these days, I can’t really look at my condis to figure out what exactly I have. Something that works on ALL GRAPHIC SETTINGS too pls. I usually disable postprocessing because i don’t need a shaky cam in PvP (and other gimmicky effects).

A few things:

(1) If you’re running Decoy instead of SOI, then your follow-up pressure is going to be so low that the druid won’t care about being moa’d out of CA. The point is to use CA to wipe condis after the initial F1+F2 shatter condi dump. Getting moa’d after you’ve already countered the mesmer’s burst isn’t a gamechanger. At most you’ll get the decap.

(2) While mesmers can use their CDs to get strong setups for landing moa, using those CDs means you don’t have them available for locking down the moa itself to deal damage. It’s a balancing act.

(3) No decent druid will die to a mesmer that just spams shatters off CD. To kill a good druid, you really need to set up a strong condi burst followed by a moa BEFORE the druid is able to CA-cleanse. Then follow-up with another burst while the druid is in moa (which is why you need SOI rather than decoy).

(4) Not sure why you’re complaining about Reapers. They have the most obvious animations and are the easiest to read. What’s probably happening is that you’re mindlessly spamming your condis (your own words) and then eating a plague signet.

Eurantien.4632:

verskore.4312:

Ananeos.4587:

verskore.4312:

the answer is simple, you do not stand a single chance in a 1v1 against a condi mesmer, not a SINGLE chance. No matter what class you play (unless you play condi mesmer yourself), you will lose to one that is decent. the amount of survivability and constant conditions that they can apply is ridiculous and soon enough your condicleanse will be on cooldown and then you’ll melt. This isn’t even taking into account the ridiculous OP skill moamorph which is basically a 8 second daze (which he can cast twice in a row if he’d want to).

In other words, if you see a condi mesmer on a point, RUN FOR YOUR LIFE!

This is ignorance at its finest, do not listen to this person.

nono, it’s not ignorance, it’s having a sense of reality. Condi mesmer is by far best 1v1 out there right now and if you enter a 1v1 with an equally skilled mesmer (or even a little worse) then you will most likely lose and you’ll get your team outnumbered. Best to do is go back to the teamfight, wipe them and 2v1 the mesmer or get the other point and simply ignore him should he be so stupid to bunker a point. You’re the ignorant one for not seeing that.

They can lose 1 v 1. I’ve seen the best Mesmers in North America lose to necros, druids, and dragon hunters. As a conclusion your post must be none other than ignorance. This is a learn to play issue. Is Condi Mesmer very strong 1 v 1? Yes. Is it unbeatable? No.

What Eura said is right. But mesmer is one of those classes that you really need to understand to beat. You need to learn the tempo of the mesmer’s skills so that you can properly react to them. Knowing when the mesmer’s shatters are back up, when the block is back up, when the bursts are coming, etc. is 90% of the battle.

Also, learning to dodge moa is critical. It has a very obvious cast animation (a giant wavy purple mist swirls around the mesmer), and it’s almost always accompanied by a csplit beacon being dropped. So if you see either of those tells, use a dodge/block/invuln/blind/evade/LOS.

In my experience, DH probably has the strongest matchup vs Condi Mes because the tempo on the DH’s condi cleanses syncs nicely w/ the CD on the mesmer’s shatters. The DH’s AOE also tends to down clones.

If you’re on Reaper, 99% of the matchup boils down to making sure you land the plague signet. The plague sig is instacast, so failing to land it is entirely on you. Don’t cast it while the mesmer is dodging/blocking. Other tips involve interrupting shield block with WH4 and Staff5, and interrupting signet of illusion with whatever. But just landing the plague signet is usually enough to win. At that point, the mesmer’s main burst is gone and won’t be back up for awhile due to chill wreaking havoc on CDs. If you whiff the plague signet (which again, is instacast), then you will likely lose.

If you’re on druid, a lot of the matchup involves proper kiting (if using LB) or evading shatters (if S/D). Save celestial form (full condi wipe) for after the mesmer uses F1+F2. Make sure you’re managing the pet properly to keep up pressure. A well played druid can hold a point (or at least keep it neut) virtually forever.

I actually just wrote a suggestion for how to resolve this problem: https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/pvp/How-To-Increase-Proleague-Viewership/first#post6054605

There’s a lot of downtime between matches in the proleagues, which is currently being filled with super awkward conversation between the casters and weird camera shots of them staring soulfully into each other’s eyes.

Can we instead have the casters review the videos of the matches that just finished and focus on good plays (either rotational or mechanical)? There’s a lot that they (understandably) miss when doing the commentary live because there’s so many things going on. So this would be a good chance to go back and pick apart the key fights and rotations that turned each game. It also puts more attention on what the viewers are interested in, which is the matches.

Reviewing replays would also let the commentators go back through the big teamfights frame-by-frame to describe everything that’s going on. I think a common complaint I often see from viewers is that they can’t see wtf is happening in teamfights and instead have to rely on their own experience / knowledge of the game to deduce what’s happening. So you can imagine that newer players are completely lost and consequently bored when they just see a bunch of multicolored explosions and lightning bolts, and all the commentators can talk about is how each team’s health bars look. Having the commentators review these fights during the downtime would allow them to talk about how a team coordinated its burst, how the other team responded to provide support, etc.

The only time I find value in commentators talking about their feelings is when the commentators have some in-depth, non-obvious insight to share about the match. This tends to happen only when the commentators themselves are top-tier players, which isn’t really the case here.

My prediction is that each team’s going to have the following:

(1) Rev
(2) Reaper
(3) Tempest
(4) Scrapper
(5) Either Mesmer, Druid, DH (to counter mes), or Thief (in descending order of frequency)

Trevor Boyer.6524:

(A) We aren’t using S1 match making. We are using S2 match making.
(B) Did you not read my post? The entire post is about how you are not able to get ques full of team mates with your actual MMR. The post was about how late starting season 2 players who are not able to play often, become stuck in a world of gamble matches where the already listed factors have far more weight to decide a match outcome than your own personal skill level. Winning matches, becomes the luck of the draw.
© The idea of carrying matches is great and sometimes can work but is often impossible within middle tier matches. There isn’t anything you can do to carry: W, W, DH, Thief who make several detrimental errors vs. Rev, Rev, Tempest, Reaper, w/e else that don’t make any gross errors. Sometimes in middle tier, you just get the dung stacked team. It happens often.

You completely misread what I wrote. I’m not arguing against your concerns. I’ll try to explain more thoroughly this time:

I pointed out that you’ve actually described a separate problem from “MMR Hell.” “MMR Hell” refers to the fact that each match consists of a “favored team” (the team with higher MMR) and the “disfavored team” (the team with lower MMR), and if your MMR sucks you will usually be on the disfavored team.

The problem you’re describing in Situation A is valid, but it’s a completely separate problem. You’re saying that you started late in the season, so you’re stuck in games with bad players on both teams. This has nothing to do with your MMR, and you aren’t in “MMR Hell.”

The problem you described has to do with the fact that almost all of the good players have already made it to legendary. As a result, the game is trying to fill your team with people who have similar MMR and who are within your pip range. So even if your MMR was at the max, if you’re in Sapphire you’re going to get other Sapphire teammates. You’d still be on the “favored” team, but almost all the players in the match are probably going to be pretty bad. Which is exactly what you described happening.

It’s important to distinguish between the two different problems because they involve different solutions. And they also have different value judgments. For example, a person could believe that it’s fine for bad players to be stuck in Ruby (i.e. rejecting “MMR Hell”, but that good players who start late should not be stuck in Ruby for too long (i.e. accepting your problem). And one solution would be to start good players higher up (for example, starting you in Diamond if you made it to Legendary last season).

Trevor Boyer.6524:

It’s real easy to explain what is going on here.
This concerns solo ques:

Situation (A) "Good player gets stuck in MMR hell*

• Has always been a top 100 player, maybe he’s a won a couple AGs, Aspect GGs.
• Begins play late in season for whatever reason.
• Isn’t able to play more than a match or two a day for whatever reason
• Guy misses the benefits of the MMR reset on day one, where he would have been placed with the others of his actual MMR each match and would have been able to ride that MMR wave up and out of middle tiers pretty easily by maintaining about 10 matches played a day.
• After missing initial MMR wave, guy is now stuck in middle tiers being placed with people who actually should be in middle tiers. These are the types of players who often don’t communicate, make poor rotation decisions that instantly throw a match, don’t swap to form a better comp because they only play one class, they find it acceptable to run underpowered classes and often play for game achievements before winning where they would rather lose 10 matches and win 1 for a tick towards a warrior achievement than lose 1 and win 10 on a main that they already possess an achievement for.
• Due to the above point made, the good player’s match outcomes will majorly be decided by the gambits of: What builds are team mates bringing? Do they even main these builds or are they grinding achievements? Are they going to make a gross error in rotation and throw the match? His own personal skill is subsequential compared to the match altering weight of the above mentioned. No matter how good of a player he is, he only contributes to 20% of the manpower on a 5 man team.

Ultimately, if he is a season 2 late bloomer with less time to play than others, it will take him a hell of a lot longer to break out of middle tiers than if he would have signed in day one and rode his proper MMR placements directly out of that kitten. This is due to middle tier matches having little to do with skill and more to do with the gamble of “what are his team mates playing?”. This is not nearly as much of an issue in higher tier division where everyone swaps characters and only plays meta builds. Higher tier match outcomes are indeed more based on skill/experience as class imbalancing and achievement kitten is not an issue here.

So yes there are good players stuck within the MMR hell and from the players I’ve spoken with, the above reasons concerning starting season play late and not being able to play very often, is exactly why it happens. This is however only half of the problem. See bellow:

Now situation (B) “Bad player grinds and makes it far higher than he should be”

• Always has been a subpar player.
• Never has played with a team on a TS and even if he tries, he’ll be too dense to learn anything from the team anyway.
• Doesn’t really understand rotations and doesn’t care to learn meta.
• Guy signs in on day one, plays as long as he can humanly possibly stay awake. Makes it to Emerald.
• Guy signs in day two, grinds hard for as long as he can humanly possibly stay awake and makes it to Sapphire.
• Guy signs in during first week and plays manically grinding each and every day and eventually breaks in to Ruby through the fire and flame of his Sapphire experience.
• Guy continues to sign in each and every day for the entire season, playing for as long as he can humanly stay awake and with enough erratic match making lopsided luck, breaks in to Diamond.
• He only plays Warrior, refuses to swap when needed, is always the first to go down in a team fight, losses virtually every single 1v1 engaged and is a complete liability for his team to deal with, each and every game. But he rode that grind until a win streak happened and hey, now he’s there but really shouldn’t be at all.

Q: What is the real problem here?
A: Division pip progression dealing with match placement. Bad players grinding & climbing high while strong players with pressed time stay low. Division needs to represent actual MMR, not games grinded. Players should lose pips, tiers and even division for losses, in all divisions.

“Situation A” isn’t really MMR hell. It sounds more like a separate problem. Think about it: If you used S1 matchmaking, “Situation A” would be even worse for you because you’d get even worse teammates to make up for your better MMR. Even though you’re getting bad teammates, your teammates should still be better than the enemy players because your MMR should be relatively higher from your past experience.

The solution to “Situation A” is to start high-level players at a higher division. (A temporary workaround could be to just Q with your friends or play a class/build that’s more capable of carrying).

I doubt there’s anyone “good” in MMR hell. But I wouldn’t be surprised if some “average” or “slightly below average” players found themselves in MMR hell and end up in a lower tier than similarly skilled “average” or “slightly below average” players.

Scrapper at start was running bulwark gyro + mortar (no elixir C, no stealth gyro). Should be a quick win for mesmer — but you need to make sure you don’t waste shatters on Hammer3 or Hammer4. Then either interrupt the healing turret or csplit-moa when his heal is about to come back up. Landing either of those wins the fight.

Sirbeaumerdier.3740:

ResJudicator.7916:

Sirbeaumerdier.3740:

ResJudicator.7916:

Sirbeaumerdier.3740:

ResJudicator.7916:

Jourdelune.7456:

Ryan.9387:

Disclaimer – This is based on my understanding of the ranked matchmaking system.

Consider these two matchmaking points

1 – A match will be made between players within a similar pip range
2 – These 10 players will be grouped based on their MMR

Because of point 2, there will in effect be an “A Team” and a “B Team” in every match.

The official reasoning for this is so good players will advance through the ladder quickly.

However, if a player loses a large number of games such that his MMR declines below the average for his pip range, he will always be grouped with the “B Team”.

In most games losing matches results in that player facing weaker opponents so he has an even match up. In the current league system there are points where you cannot be matched with weaker opponents (division thresholds etc).

What happens at this point is the player in question always faces a stronger team with a weaker one because his lower MMR. If the range of player skill is significant in a specific pip zone, the gap between the A and B teams will be large on average and will result in constant losses due to the matchmaking system. Every loss will lower this player’s MMR, and the lower MMR will result in even worse matchups, up until they are essentially unwinnable. This is the MMR hole.

I feel this is a fundamental flaw in the system and is contributing the the consistent one sided match ups I see in my progression through the leagues.

Exactly Shadow Shooter.

The system make it so, that the top 30% will have it easier if they SOLOQ than TeamQ the League.

To counter this FLAW they need to help low MMR players to get a way to raise their MMR.

So, after a 3 streak lost, they should put 1 low MMR with 4 high MMR players, so they can carry his MMR a bit.

But it would not be fair.

MMR vs MMR is the only way to let players improve their MMR. Sometime they wins, sometime they loose and the MMR will adapt. Actually, they can’t because they are always put in the B team for that queue time.

The only way you’ll always be in the B team is if you’re MMR is at the bottom of the barrel for the division/tier/pip-range that you’re in. If your MMR is anywhere close to average for your division/tier/pip-range, then sometimes you’ll be on the B team, and sometimes you’ll be on the A team. If you win more than you lose, then over time your MMR will increase.

The MMR hole happens when you lose even the close matches and the matches you were expected to win. It could also happen if you started the season with terrible MMR, but this just means that you repeatedly lost evenly matched games in Season 1 (which tried to balance the MMRs of both teams for a ~50% winrate).

That is not true since new players are awarded average MMR from the get go. Average MMR is not meaning much in that context. I used to have a win/loose ratio of around 55-60% before season 2 while playing non-meta and now it’s more like 45% while playing meta. And the more I loose the more are the probability I will loose regardless of my skill. I too often get players that clearly do not have enough experience in the game mode but made it this far.

If I play unranked or in a team of people with my skill level my win ratio goes up immediately. It’s to the point it’s obvious and can’t reasonably be attributed to bad luck. And the deeper you go in the hole the harder it gets to climb out. And the opposite is also true, Why did they wanted to cheese the match making algorithm this way is beyond me.

I think you’re describing what I just explained. You’re currently in a division/tier/pip-range where the average player is better than you. As a result, whichever team you’re on is likely going to lose more often than win. This isn’t bad luck, it’s statistics.

Since you can’t drop divisions/tiers, you’re stuck waiting for the average skill level of your division/tier to drop. This will happen over time because the higher-skilled players will move out of your pip-range (so you won’t see them anymore), and the ones left behind will be similarly situated to you. Once that happens (if it hasn’t already), you should be getting “fair” matchups, which you will need to win to improve your MMR.

As to your experience in Unranked, I believe Unranked tries to match the teams so that both teams have similar MMR. This means that your bad MMR is being balanced out by having better players on your team, who are then able to carry you to victory. So it makes sense that your winrate in Unranked is going to be higher.

With all due respect, I must insist on my disagreeing with you and your reasoning. If I was sub average in my division I would most often describe the enemy as stronger than me as the reason we loose and I would not bother posting here since I’d have no problem with better players beating me.

It’s really obvious to anybody looking into several of the matches that the problem has more to do with our team than it has to do with the opponent. I even had opponents that would sometimes pm me after a match to tell me they felt sorry for me.

Your theory of good players eventually leaving is absurd to me since I’ll still be stuck with baddies till the season end anyway no matter what specifically BECAUSE they can’t loose pips before ruby and none of us who are stuck together eternally can get win streaks. And by the time the so called “better players” are gone, several of which I know and have played with, my MMR will have suffered a lot “proving” that I belong in the trash resulting in getting yet more garbage which will likely result in garbage results.

Look, I’m glad you didn’t had to live through this but I’m a bit tired of your kind of ppl that simply refuse to hear what is said to them and insist on overwriting stuff they have no idea of since they were not there and are obviously not on the receiving end of the phenomenon. I get it that you do not want ppl to cheapen your glory, and it’s not my goal, but…

EDIT: I also want to point out that I have proposed SEVERAL times in several threads for you geniuses loud mouths that I’m willing to let ppl supervised by ANET play on my account to see what I have to play with and what you have to carry. I mean, what more can I do?

Helseth actually asked A.net if he could play using your account. A.net said no.

The next best thing is for you to post several videos of your gameplay so people can see what you’re going through. The problem with simply stating that your team is holding you back is that we’ve all seen (and been teamed with) players who think they’re carrying their team when they’re not even fulfilling their roles.

He asked for MY account? I’m giving all legal go and agreement ANET need for this to happen.

As for me posting vid of my matches I’m not outright against even if I’m not rigged for it ATM. However, let’s be honest a second here, I trust your fairness on the matter as much as I would Donald Trump. If I post only one vid I’ll be accused of cherry picking, which is legit, and if I posts several at which point will it be enough to make you see that as imperfect as I can be my teammate are often the problem, while the enemy isn’t really stronger than me at all.

It is all good and fair to say you have heard many say they were carrying when they were not but it doesn’t make the facts and arguments posted as to what was problematic go away. Your attitude is just to dismiss all that you don’t like without proofs and put everything back on the players. It is all I see from your kind so far. And that despite players reaching higher level clearly admitting something was suspicious but on the other side of the same medal.

That’s the thing — you haven’t posted any facts. Facts would be videos that you post, which other people could then view and evaluate. Refusing to provide videos because you think they won’t convince the other side is like saying “I have super secret evidence proving I’m right but I won’t share it with anyone.”

Besides, you shouldn’t have to worry about whether I’m fair because my opinion on the matter is irrelevant. The point of posting the videos is (presumably) to show the Devs what you’re going through. What I think of the videos is not going to affect how the devs change things for Season 3.

Sirbeaumerdier.3740:

ResJudicator.7916:

Sirbeaumerdier.3740:

ResJudicator.7916:

Jourdelune.7456:

Ryan.9387:

Disclaimer – This is based on my understanding of the ranked matchmaking system.

Consider these two matchmaking points

1 – A match will be made between players within a similar pip range
2 – These 10 players will be grouped based on their MMR

Because of point 2, there will in effect be an “A Team” and a “B Team” in every match.

The official reasoning for this is so good players will advance through the ladder quickly.

However, if a player loses a large number of games such that his MMR declines below the average for his pip range, he will always be grouped with the “B Team”.

In most games losing matches results in that player facing weaker opponents so he has an even match up. In the current league system there are points where you cannot be matched with weaker opponents (division thresholds etc).

What happens at this point is the player in question always faces a stronger team with a weaker one because his lower MMR. If the range of player skill is significant in a specific pip zone, the gap between the A and B teams will be large on average and will result in constant losses due to the matchmaking system. Every loss will lower this player’s MMR, and the lower MMR will result in even worse matchups, up until they are essentially unwinnable. This is the MMR hole.

I feel this is a fundamental flaw in the system and is contributing the the consistent one sided match ups I see in my progression through the leagues.

Exactly Shadow Shooter.

The system make it so, that the top 30% will have it easier if they SOLOQ than TeamQ the League.

To counter this FLAW they need to help low MMR players to get a way to raise their MMR.

So, after a 3 streak lost, they should put 1 low MMR with 4 high MMR players, so they can carry his MMR a bit.

But it would not be fair.

MMR vs MMR is the only way to let players improve their MMR. Sometime they wins, sometime they loose and the MMR will adapt. Actually, they can’t because they are always put in the B team for that queue time.

The only way you’ll always be in the B team is if you’re MMR is at the bottom of the barrel for the division/tier/pip-range that you’re in. If your MMR is anywhere close to average for your division/tier/pip-range, then sometimes you’ll be on the B team, and sometimes you’ll be on the A team. If you win more than you lose, then over time your MMR will increase.

The MMR hole happens when you lose even the close matches and the matches you were expected to win. It could also happen if you started the season with terrible MMR, but this just means that you repeatedly lost evenly matched games in Season 1 (which tried to balance the MMRs of both teams for a ~50% winrate).

That is not true since new players are awarded average MMR from the get go. Average MMR is not meaning much in that context. I used to have a win/loose ratio of around 55-60% before season 2 while playing non-meta and now it’s more like 45% while playing meta. And the more I loose the more are the probability I will loose regardless of my skill. I too often get players that clearly do not have enough experience in the game mode but made it this far.

If I play unranked or in a team of people with my skill level my win ratio goes up immediately. It’s to the point it’s obvious and can’t reasonably be attributed to bad luck. And the deeper you go in the hole the harder it gets to climb out. And the opposite is also true, Why did they wanted to cheese the match making algorithm this way is beyond me.

I think you’re describing what I just explained. You’re currently in a division/tier/pip-range where the average player is better than you. As a result, whichever team you’re on is likely going to lose more often than win. This isn’t bad luck, it’s statistics.

Since you can’t drop divisions/tiers, you’re stuck waiting for the average skill level of your division/tier to drop. This will happen over time because the higher-skilled players will move out of your pip-range (so you won’t see them anymore), and the ones left behind will be similarly situated to you. Once that happens (if it hasn’t already), you should be getting “fair” matchups, which you will need to win to improve your MMR.

As to your experience in Unranked, I believe Unranked tries to match the teams so that both teams have similar MMR. This means that your bad MMR is being balanced out by having better players on your team, who are then able to carry you to victory. So it makes sense that your winrate in Unranked is going to be higher.

With all due respect, I must insist on my disagreeing with you and your reasoning. If I was sub average in my division I would most often describe the enemy as stronger than me as the reason we loose and I would not bother posting here since I’d have no problem with better players beating me.

It’s really obvious to anybody looking into several of the matches that the problem has more to do with our team than it has to do with the opponent. I even had opponents that would sometimes pm me after a match to tell me they felt sorry for me.

Your theory of good players eventually leaving is absurd to me since I’ll still be stuck with baddies till the season end anyway no matter what specifically BECAUSE they can’t loose pips before ruby and none of us who are stuck together eternally can get win streaks. And by the time the so called “better players” are gone, several of which I know and have played with, my MMR will have suffered a lot “proving” that I belong in the trash resulting in getting yet more garbage which will likely result in garbage results.

Look, I’m glad you didn’t had to live through this but I’m a bit tired of your kind of ppl that simply refuse to hear what is said to them and insist on overwriting stuff they have no idea of since they were not there and are obviously not on the receiving end of the phenomenon. I get it that you do not want ppl to cheapen your glory, and it’s not my goal, but…

EDIT: I also want to point out that I have proposed SEVERAL times in several threads for you geniuses loud mouths that I’m willing to let ppl supervised by ANET play on my account to see what I have to play with and what you have to carry. I mean, what more can I do?

Helseth actually asked A.net if he could play using your account. A.net said no.

The next best thing is for you to post several videos of your gameplay so people can see what you’re going through. The problem with simply stating that your team is holding you back is that we’ve all seen (and been teamed with) players who think they’re carrying their team when they’re not even fulfilling their roles.

Fivedawgs.4267:

ResJudicator.7916:

Fivedawgs.4267:

ResJudicator.7916:

Jourdelune.7456:

ResJudicator.7916:

Ithilwen.1529:

@ Evan Lesh

You are confusing elite with prestigious. The elite in this case being formed by pre made team groupies who are willing to stack specific classes and builds.

The majority of matches favor one side and most of those who have risen to high rank have done so by being on a team rather than by individual skill. This doesn’t result in prestige, it results in a caste of haves and a caste of have-nots.

Everything you wrote is demonstrably false.

There are plenty of players who reached legendary via solo-queue. Heck, some guy posted a thread where he solo-queued to legendary running core necro (NOT REAPER) on a brand new free-to-play account (so no MMR advantage). Some other dude posted a thread with screenshots of each of his solo-queue matches to legendary.

How did they accomplish that? By being more skilled than you. Don’t pretend otherwise.

Sorry… but a TOP player having a fresh new account will not have difficulties because the new player account is AVG MMR (or better).

If the MMR was fixed to 20% for new account, TOP players would find it more harder to SOLOQ in the last tier of the player base.

All this because they choose to put MMR for your team but not for the opponent

Either remove MMR or do MMR vs MMR. The actual system is a joke that let TOP player trying to let you think they are better than all because they win matches on second account, but it’s false since their many account are old and got MMR in the top 20%. (and if completely fresh 2016 account, they start at AVG MMR and have the skills to make it goes higher… starting in HELL (20% bottom) would be a different story.

This is bad because many TOP players are really the best of the WORLD but the League and is MAtch Making remove that value since the system give them EASY rides.

How does one go from average MMR to below-average MMR? By repeatedly losing to players who had lower MMR than you, or at least similar MMR. Your MMR barely changes if you lose to a team that had a much higher MMR, so it’s not your blow-out losses to the Abjured Premade that caused your MMR to tank. It’s losing all those games where you were actually favored to win.

And how does one go from average MMR to a high MMR? By repeatedly beating players who had higher MMR or similar MMR.

The real problem here may just be that there aren’t enough weak players to go around. If there’s only 5 weak players in late Sapphire / early Ruby queuing up at a particular time, then they’ll all go on one team and won’t be able to find an equally weak team to play against. None of their matches will be fun. Their MMR won’t change much from the resulting blowout losses, but they’ll continue to lose any vulnerable pips.

One solution would be to let the weak players drop down tiers so that they wind up in a bigger pool of weak players, but that would just lead to more frustration with respect to progress.

The better solution would be to attract more players, so that there are enough weak players to form a 5v5. To that end, letting us queue outside HOTM would go a really long way. Also, making the reward tracks more meaningful would also help.

Both of your bolded statements have to be backed up, or you are just spewing hot air. Here what Anet says ( I know the information is dated but there is nothing else out there for us to rely on). I’ll highlight the important variable for you.

<Ratings period=“3d” max-periods=“20”> <Rating default=“1500” min=“100” max=“5000” ( display the max,lowest and avearge MMR possible) max-change=“300” profession-ratio=“0.25”/>
(Now here is the deviation, that’s is how much it changes upon win/loss) <Deviation default=“350” min=“30” max=“350” /> <Volatility default=“0.06” min=“0.04” max=“0.08” system-constant=“0.5” /> </Ratings> <Ratings type=“Ranked” reset=“2013-11-26T08:00:00-08:00” partial-reset=“2015-01-27T16:30:00-08:00”/> <Ratings type=“Unranked” reset=“2013-11-26T08:00:00-08:00” partial-reset=“2015-01-27T16:30:00-08:00”/>

Based on this, it’s pretty clear that the other team MMR does matter, but to an extent, when it comes to your rating. You can lose/gain between 350 MMR point or 30 MMR point per games. Let’s say going up against the abjured resulted in a 30 MMR point loss; after 10 losses you be around 1200 MMR if you were around 1500. So, how are these numbers not significant?? I could be wrong though.

In Glicko2, the “Deviation Default,” “Deviation Min,” and “Deviation Max” values are multiplied by a function of your volatility to determine the actual change in your rating. (See http://www.glicko.net/glicko/glicko2.pdf, starting at page 4). I can’t copy/paste the actual formula so I’ve provided a link instead. (Note: It’s not a straight up multiplication, but the volatility factors into the final ratings change). So the actual ratings changes are going to be lower than what you provided.

Also, there’s nothing wrong with your MMR going down by a meaningful amount if you lose 10 times in a row (even if it’s to the Abjured). But if you lose to the Abjured twice, then win vs. a team that’s closely matched to yours, then you could have a net MMR increase (using the information you provided). So again, the primary impact on your MMR is going to be all of the games where your MMRs are relatively close. This goes back to my earlier point about how “MMR hell” is an issue only when there aren’t enough weak players to form a competitive 5v5 (see above for suggested solutions).

Also like someone stated below me, MMR is only taken into account to match you with similar folks. So losing 10 games in row, might be a thing depending on which side of the MMR you ended up in. Because there is no corralLatin between your team MMR and the opponent.

That’s a separate point, and I agree with it. If your MMR is below-average relative to other players in your pip-range, then you’re going to lose more often than win. Just like if I became an NBA player, whatever team I join is going to lose more often than win (assuming that they’re forced to field me, rather than keep me on the bench).

But let’s be real here: the people still stuck in emerald/sapphire/low-ruby are not going up against the Abjured in unwinnable matchups. Using your own logic, all of the high-MMR people should already be in diamond/legendary by now.

Sirbeaumerdier.3740:

ResJudicator.7916:

Jourdelune.7456:

Ryan.9387:

Disclaimer – This is based on my understanding of the ranked matchmaking system.

Consider these two matchmaking points

1 – A match will be made between players within a similar pip range
2 – These 10 players will be grouped based on their MMR

Because of point 2, there will in effect be an “A Team” and a “B Team” in every match.

The official reasoning for this is so good players will advance through the ladder quickly.

However, if a player loses a large number of games such that his MMR declines below the average for his pip range, he will always be grouped with the “B Team”.

In most games losing matches results in that player facing weaker opponents so he has an even match up. In the current league system there are points where you cannot be matched with weaker opponents (division thresholds etc).

What happens at this point is the player in question always faces a stronger team with a weaker one because his lower MMR. If the range of player skill is significant in a specific pip zone, the gap between the A and B teams will be large on average and will result in constant losses due to the matchmaking system. Every loss will lower this player’s MMR, and the lower MMR will result in even worse matchups, up until they are essentially unwinnable. This is the MMR hole.

I feel this is a fundamental flaw in the system and is contributing the the consistent one sided match ups I see in my progression through the leagues.

Exactly Shadow Shooter.

The system make it so, that the top 30% will have it easier if they SOLOQ than TeamQ the League.

To counter this FLAW they need to help low MMR players to get a way to raise their MMR.

So, after a 3 streak lost, they should put 1 low MMR with 4 high MMR players, so they can carry his MMR a bit.

But it would not be fair.

MMR vs MMR is the only way to let players improve their MMR. Sometime they wins, sometime they loose and the MMR will adapt. Actually, they can’t because they are always put in the B team for that queue time.

The only way you’ll always be in the B team is if you’re MMR is at the bottom of the barrel for the division/tier/pip-range that you’re in. If your MMR is anywhere close to average for your division/tier/pip-range, then sometimes you’ll be on the B team, and sometimes you’ll be on the A team. If you win more than you lose, then over time your MMR will increase.

The MMR hole happens when you lose even the close matches and the matches you were expected to win. It could also happen if you started the season with terrible MMR, but this just means that you repeatedly lost evenly matched games in Season 1 (which tried to balance the MMRs of both teams for a ~50% winrate).

That is not true since new players are awarded average MMR from the get go. Average MMR is not meaning much in that context. I used to have a win/loose ratio of around 55-60% before season 2 while playing non-meta and now it’s more like 45% while playing meta. And the more I loose the more are the probability I will loose regardless of my skill. I too often get players that clearly do not have enough experience in the game mode but made it this far.

If I play unranked or in a team of people with my skill level my win ratio goes up immediately. It’s to the point it’s obvious and can’t reasonably be attributed to bad luck. And the deeper you go in the hole the harder it gets to climb out. And the opposite is also true, Why did they wanted to cheese the match making algorithm this way is beyond me.

I think you’re describing what I just explained. You’re currently in a division/tier/pip-range where the average player is better than you. As a result, whichever team you’re on is likely going to lose more often than win. This isn’t bad luck, it’s statistics.

Since you can’t drop divisions/tiers, you’re stuck waiting for the average skill level of your division/tier to drop. This will happen over time because the higher-skilled players will move out of your pip-range (so you won’t see them anymore), and the ones left behind will be similarly situated to you. Once that happens (if it hasn’t already), you should be getting “fair” matchups, which you will need to win to improve your MMR.

As to your experience in Unranked, I believe Unranked tries to match the teams so that both teams have similar MMR. This means that your bad MMR is being balanced out by having better players on your team, who are then able to carry you to victory. So it makes sense that your winrate in Unranked is going to be higher.

Jourdelune.7456:

Ryan.9387:

Disclaimer – This is based on my understanding of the ranked matchmaking system.

Consider these two matchmaking points

1 – A match will be made between players within a similar pip range
2 – These 10 players will be grouped based on their MMR

Because of point 2, there will in effect be an “A Team” and a “B Team” in every match.

The official reasoning for this is so good players will advance through the ladder quickly.

However, if a player loses a large number of games such that his MMR declines below the average for his pip range, he will always be grouped with the “B Team”.

In most games losing matches results in that player facing weaker opponents so he has an even match up. In the current league system there are points where you cannot be matched with weaker opponents (division thresholds etc).

What happens at this point is the player in question always faces a stronger team with a weaker one because his lower MMR. If the range of player skill is significant in a specific pip zone, the gap between the A and B teams will be large on average and will result in constant losses due to the matchmaking system. Every loss will lower this player’s MMR, and the lower MMR will result in even worse matchups, up until they are essentially unwinnable. This is the MMR hole.

I feel this is a fundamental flaw in the system and is contributing the the consistent one sided match ups I see in my progression through the leagues.

Exactly Shadow Shooter.

The system make it so, that the top 30% will have it easier if they SOLOQ than TeamQ the League.

To counter this FLAW they need to help low MMR players to get a way to raise their MMR.

So, after a 3 streak lost, they should put 1 low MMR with 4 high MMR players, so they can carry his MMR a bit.

But it would not be fair.

MMR vs MMR is the only way to let players improve their MMR. Sometime they wins, sometime they loose and the MMR will adapt. Actually, they can’t because they are always put in the B team for that queue time.

The only way you’ll always be in the B team is if you’re MMR is at the bottom of the barrel for the division/tier/pip-range that you’re in. If your MMR is anywhere close to average for your division/tier/pip-range, then sometimes you’ll be on the B team, and sometimes you’ll be on the A team. If you win more than you lose, then over time your MMR will increase.

The MMR hole happens when you lose even the close matches and the matches you were expected to win. It could also happen if you started the season with terrible MMR, but this just means that you repeatedly lost evenly matched games in Season 1 (which tried to balance the MMRs of both teams for a ~50% winrate).

Fivedawgs.4267:

ResJudicator.7916:

Jourdelune.7456:

ResJudicator.7916:

Ithilwen.1529:

@ Evan Lesh

You are confusing elite with prestigious. The elite in this case being formed by pre made team groupies who are willing to stack specific classes and builds.

The majority of matches favor one side and most of those who have risen to high rank have done so by being on a team rather than by individual skill. This doesn’t result in prestige, it results in a caste of haves and a caste of have-nots.

Everything you wrote is demonstrably false.

There are plenty of players who reached legendary via solo-queue. Heck, some guy posted a thread where he solo-queued to legendary running core necro (NOT REAPER) on a brand new free-to-play account (so no MMR advantage). Some other dude posted a thread with screenshots of each of his solo-queue matches to legendary.

How did they accomplish that? By being more skilled than you. Don’t pretend otherwise.

Sorry… but a TOP player having a fresh new account will not have difficulties because the new player account is AVG MMR (or better).

If the MMR was fixed to 20% for new account, TOP players would find it more harder to SOLOQ in the last tier of the player base.

All this because they choose to put MMR for your team but not for the opponent

Either remove MMR or do MMR vs MMR. The actual system is a joke that let TOP player trying to let you think they are better than all because they win matches on second account, but it’s false since their many account are old and got MMR in the top 20%. (and if completely fresh 2016 account, they start at AVG MMR and have the skills to make it goes higher… starting in HELL (20% bottom) would be a different story.

This is bad because many TOP players are really the best of the WORLD but the League and is MAtch Making remove that value since the system give them EASY rides.

How does one go from average MMR to below-average MMR? By repeatedly losing to players who had lower MMR than you, or at least similar MMR. Your MMR barely changes if you lose to a team that had a much higher MMR, so it’s not your blow-out losses to the Abjured Premade that caused your MMR to tank. It’s losing all those games where you were actually favored to win.

And how does one go from average MMR to a high MMR? By repeatedly beating players who had higher MMR or similar MMR.

The real problem here may just be that there aren’t enough weak players to go around. If there’s only 5 weak players in late Sapphire / early Ruby queuing up at a particular time, then they’ll all go on one team and won’t be able to find an equally weak team to play against. None of their matches will be fun. Their MMR won’t change much from the resulting blowout losses, but they’ll continue to lose any vulnerable pips.

One solution would be to let the weak players drop down tiers so that they wind up in a bigger pool of weak players, but that would just lead to more frustration with respect to progress.

The better solution would be to attract more players, so that there are enough weak players to form a 5v5. To that end, letting us queue outside HOTM would go a really long way. Also, making the reward tracks more meaningful would also help.

Both of your bolded statements have to be backed up, or you are just spewing hot air. Here what Anet says ( I know the information is dated but there is nothing else out there for us to rely on). I’ll highlight the important variable for you.

<Ratings period=“3d” max-periods=“20”> <Rating default=“1500” min=“100” max=“5000” ( display the max,lowest and avearge MMR possible) max-change=“300” profession-ratio=“0.25”/>
(Now here is the deviation, that’s is how much it changes upon win/loss) <Deviation default=“350” min=“30” max=“350” /> <Volatility default=“0.06” min=“0.04” max=“0.08” system-constant=“0.5” /> </Ratings> <Ratings type=“Ranked” reset=“2013-11-26T08:00:00-08:00” partial-reset=“2015-01-27T16:30:00-08:00”/> <Ratings type=“Unranked” reset=“2013-11-26T08:00:00-08:00” partial-reset=“2015-01-27T16:30:00-08:00”/>

Based on this, it’s pretty clear that the other team MMR does matter, but to an extent, when it comes to your rating. You can lose/gain between 350 MMR point or 30 MMR point per games. Let’s say going up against the abjured resulted in a 30 MMR point loss; after 10 losses you be around 1200 MMR if you were around 1500. So, how are these numbers not significant?? I could be wrong though.

In Glicko2, the “Deviation Default,” “Deviation Min,” and “Deviation Max” values are multiplied by a function of your volatility to determine the actual change in your rating. (See http://www.glicko.net/glicko/glicko2.pdf, starting at page 4). I can’t copy/paste the actual formula so I’ve provided a link instead. (Note: It’s not a straight up multiplication, but the volatility factors into the final ratings change). So the actual ratings changes are going to be lower than what you provided.

Also, there’s nothing wrong with your MMR going down by a meaningful amount if you lose 10 times in a row (even if it’s to the Abjured). But if you lose to the Abjured twice, then win vs. a team that’s closely matched to yours, then you could have a net MMR increase (using the information you provided). So again, the primary impact on your MMR is going to be all of the games where your MMRs are relatively close. This goes back to my earlier point about how “MMR hell” is an issue only when there aren’t enough weak players to form a competitive 5v5 (see above for suggested solutions).

Weirdness Abounds.8924:

I don’t know why this isn’t a slam-dunk. Your personal ability is not at issue. Matchmaking is all about putting similar teams together. If someone, like the OP, has 45 losses to 5 wins, then matchmaking is clearly broken for him, meaning that it’s broken. Period. All this insulting Troll Advice is nonsense. Explain the 45:5 ratio. Cooldowns, classes, strategy, etc. doesn’t do it.

My own experience isn’t that of the OP but my matches are often wildly one way or the other. And when I do win, I get 2 pips about 50% of the time. As I understand it, that means I was paired with a better team (compared to mine.) Doesn’t that tell you outright that the matchmaking is not designed to match similar teams?

I wish they’d go back to the scheme used for the first part of last season. It was a lot more fun and reasonable. Once they switched, I never left my tier, even after 80 games.

If you actually watched the video, you’d see that the teams were evenly matched. OP was the weakest player on his team (followed closely by the P/P thief). There has been a lot of constructive advice to OP about how he could improve. See, e.g., this post.

If matchmaking is putting you into evenly matched games (which the video demonstrates), and if you’re consistently underperforming relative to the other players (which the video also demonstrates), then having a low win ratio makes perfect sense.

Matchmaking would be flawed if he was actually winning 50% of his matches, because it would mean that he was being carried by his teammates.

The real flaw here is that players can’t drop divisions/tiers, and that the OP would be better fitted to an amber-level game. Without the drops, it’s easy to progress your pips faster than your skill level (at least until Ruby), which results in some players competing in a league that’s above their skill-level.

Jourdelune.7456:

ResJudicator.7916:

Ithilwen.1529:

@ Evan Lesh

You are confusing elite with prestigious. The elite in this case being formed by pre made team groupies who are willing to stack specific classes and builds.

The majority of matches favor one side and most of those who have risen to high rank have done so by being on a team rather than by individual skill. This doesn’t result in prestige, it results in a caste of haves and a caste of have-nots.

Everything you wrote is demonstrably false.

There are plenty of players who reached legendary via solo-queue. Heck, some guy posted a thread where he solo-queued to legendary running core necro (NOT REAPER) on a brand new free-to-play account (so no MMR advantage). Some other dude posted a thread with screenshots of each of his solo-queue matches to legendary.

How did they accomplish that? By being more skilled than you. Don’t pretend otherwise.

Sorry… but a TOP player having a fresh new account will not have difficulties because the new player account is AVG MMR (or better).

If the MMR was fixed to 20% for new account, TOP players would find it more harder to SOLOQ in the last tier of the player base.

All this because they choose to put MMR for your team but not for the opponent

Either remove MMR or do MMR vs MMR. The actual system is a joke that let TOP player trying to let you think they are better than all because they win matches on second account, but it’s false since their many account are old and got MMR in the top 20%. (and if completely fresh 2016 account, they start at AVG MMR and have the skills to make it goes higher… starting in HELL (20% bottom) would be a different story.

This is bad because many TOP players are really the best of the WORLD but the League and is MAtch Making remove that value since the system give them EASY rides.

How does one go from average MMR to below-average MMR? By repeatedly losing to players who had lower MMR than you, or at least similar MMR. Your MMR barely changes if you lose to a team that had a much higher MMR, so it’s not your blow-out losses to the Abjured Premade that caused your MMR to tank. It’s losing all those games where you were actually favored to win.

And how does one go from average MMR to a high MMR? By repeatedly beating players who had higher MMR or similar MMR.

The real problem here may just be that there aren’t enough weak players to go around. If there’s only 5 weak players in late Sapphire / early Ruby queuing up at a particular time, then they’ll all go on one team and won’t be able to find an equally weak team to play against. None of their matches will be fun. Their MMR won’t change much from the resulting blowout losses, but they’ll continue to lose any vulnerable pips.

One solution would be to let the weak players drop down tiers so that they wind up in a bigger pool of weak players, but that would just lead to more frustration with respect to progress.

The better solution would be to attract more players, so that there are enough weak players to form a 5v5. To that end, letting us queue outside HOTM would go a really long way. Also, making the reward tracks more meaningful would also help.

style.6173:

Shylock.4653:

style.6173:

The sad thing is that this is still an issue so far into the league.

ANET, wake up! Your matchmaking guy is clueless. Hire someone. People were patient during season 1. Then between seasons the matchmaking was even worse and then somehow matchmaking guy made season 2 even more horrible

In some ways, that is impressive in a very incompetent way.

Have you even read the posts in this thread?

Most of the posts indicate that this has nothing to do with bad matchmaking. The OP plays heal/support but doesn’t provide any heal/support for his team therefore making it to a 4v5. The resulting losing streak isn’t anets fault.

Sigh and how do you think he got placed into those matches? From superior matchmaking?

He got placed into even matches (or matches where his team was favored to win). If you watch the video he posted, the enemy team didn’t even cap home at start. They went straight for beast+mid. His team wasn’t good either, so it looks like matchmaking performed well.

Here’s my earlier post going through OP’s video.

Ithilwen.1529:

@ Evan Lesh

You are confusing elite with prestigious. The elite in this case being formed by pre made team groupies who are willing to stack specific classes and builds.

The majority of matches favor one side and most of those who have risen to high rank have done so by being on a team rather than by individual skill. This doesn’t result in prestige, it results in a caste of haves and a caste of have-nots.

Everything you wrote is demonstrably false.

There are plenty of players who reached legendary via solo-queue. Heck, some guy posted a thread where he solo-queued to legendary running core necro (NOT REAPER) on a brand new free-to-play account (so no MMR advantage). Some other dude posted a thread with screenshots of each of his solo-queue matches to legendary.

How did they accomplish that? By being more skilled than you. Don’t pretend otherwise.

Also, in my experience getting to legendary, I think I had under 20 games against 4 or 5-man teams, and I won almost every one of them. Forming a “pre-made” is no guarantee of success.

Ithilwen.1529:

@ Evan Lesh
If it is your intention to test skills; The best method would be to require everyone to solo queue and implement anti sync coding.

This would just result in longer-queue times with no real upside. You’d still be here complaining about how MMR has conspired to put you on the “losing team.”

The current matchmaking system tests skills. A better player provides more overall value to his team and, as a result, will win more often than lose.

Ithilwen.1529:

@ Evan Lesh
In reality, showing diamond or legendary through dogged grinding is as worthy as getting those accolades through teaming and an easy win streak ride.

Again, a false premise. Most legendaries didn’t get there through “teaming and an easy win streak ride.” They did it by being good at the game (or getting good at it) and providing more value to the players who ended up being on their team. Since you enjoy playing mesmer, you can check out Helseth’s twitch stream for tips.

Ithilwen.1529:

@ Evan Lesh
The lack of prestige in the Diamond/Legendary titles is caused by the culture of exploitation. Many pvp regulars realize that those titles were gotten through smurfing in S1 and through prof stacking and pre-mades in s2. Why should I admire that? That’s why those titles are not prestigious.

Again, there are plenty of people who made it to legendary without forming pre-mades (see above).

And if you improved enough to get out of emerald (or sapphire, or wherever you are), you’d realize that profession stacking is almost always a detriment to your team, not an exploit.

If you’re so thoroughly convinced that “pre-mades” are some sort of magical easy-win exploit to legendary, you could easily test this theory by teaming up with other players. There’s plenty of people on this forum who’ve also been complaining about their solo-queue experience, so you could hit them up for some pre-made queues to see if your experience is any better. I’ll even let you use my TS server.

Having watched the video, I think it’s fair to say that you are responsible for your team’s loss — matchmaking was not against you.

Your teammates were better than, or at least equal to, the enemy players. The reason your team lost every teamfight was that you chose to play the role of a support/healer character, yet provided next to no meaningful healing for your team. That’s like having a thief on the team that can’t decap, or a reaper on the team that can’t put out damage.

A lot of people have criticized your build, but honestly that wasn’t a huge factor in this game because the enemy was also running suboptimal builds. The enemy team had a core power-shatter mes running mass invis, a greatsword-power reaper, and druids that didn’t seem to heal.

The fact that you didn’t perform your role, however, meant that your team was basically trying to carry you. If you play this way in every game, then that would explain your losing streak: in most games, your team is effectively 4v5’ing the enemy.

I’ve provided some thoughts/commentary on the video below that I hope are helpful.

I understand that this is solo-queue in Emerald, so I’m focusing purely on basic, simple things that you could personally have done to win the game. There’s going to be a lot of criticism, but that’s how we learn and keep in mind no one is perfect (especially not me). Also, it takes a lot of courage to post a gameplay video, so you have my respect for that.

Start of game: For some reason, the enemy team didn’t even cap their home. Instead, one of their guys rushed straight for beast. So I think you might actually have been on the higher MMR team. You decide to take the long way around to get to mid, which is bad because you want to be in the teamfight ASAP.

First fight (~2min mark): It’s an unfavorable 4v3 at mid. You arrive late (see above). The first dragonhunter on your team managed to almost down one necro and has the other at low health. Instead of focusing on healing (your job), you try to burst down the necro (not your job). If you had healed the dragonhunter instead, your team probably would have won the fight.

Note: The only heal you put out this fight was Water5. Water5 primarily cleanses condis and provides a water field for blasting. It provides very little direct healing. Your guardian only had a few bleed stacks on him, so you could have healed literally 1000x more health by doing any of the following: (1) Wash The Pain Away; (2) Attune to water w/ guardian in range; (3) Dodge while attuning to water w/ guardian in range (since you took EA); (4) Rebound; (5) Water 1/3 (worst choice, but still better than Water5). Using options 1-3 would have guaranteed the guardian’s survival and turned the fight into a winning fight.

First fight continued (~2:35): The mesmer’s pressure on you was almost non-existent, yet you run away (so your team gets even less healing). You run back after the enemy team has already won the fight and fullcapped the point. Your team realizes mid is lost and rotates away.

After this point, the rest of your team actually wins a decent position. Your necro goes far, joined by thief and DH, and they take out an enemy druid. So pretty soon your team will have a 2-cap and a +1 advantage. Your team also has a DH on each of the side points, which shuts down the power-shatter mesmer pretty hard. But you negate your team’s advantageous position by staying at mid for ~25 seconds doing absolutely nothing for your team. You burn through Armor of Earth, Mistform, and Rebound just so you can cast a water overload for no reason. The map could have been 5v4 in your favor, but instead you keep it at a 4v4 by staying at mid.

Second fight (~3:25): Your DH is forced to defend Home Point 1v2 because you stayed at mid for so long. He manages to survive until you arrive. Instead of healing the DH back to full, you stay in air for autoattacks on a druid that isn’t even close to down. This causes your DH to die because he received no healing from you.

Now it’s you holding the point 1v2. You survive for quite awhile, mostly because the enemy mesmer and druid are terrible at pressuring you. (The power mesmer starts off by casting mass invis for no reason and neither he nor the druid try to interrupt your heals). If you hadn’t burned your armor of earth + mistform + rebound earlier, you could easily have survived until your teammates respawned to help. Instead, you go down just as one teammate returns. You’re joined at home by the second dragonhunter. Together, the two DHs down the enemy druid and res you. So they convert your losing 2v2 to a winning 3v2, which the enemy mesmer abandons. The rest of your team joins to zerg home as well (which isn’t great, but at least they listened to the request you typed out).

Recall why your team ended up in this position. If you had gone home to 2v2 instead of sitting around above mid doing nothing, you could have won the home fight right off the bat and had a 2-man map advantage plus held the 2-cap. That’s more than enough to make up a 100-point difference.

Third fight (~5:15): Your team zergs mid at this point. You ask for a decap far (good communication, bad timing since the enemy druid will respawn by the time anyone on your team reaches it). You start off with a good decap on mid because the enemy necro never looks behind him. Your team also instagibs one of their druids. Strong start to the fight.

I don’t want to nitpick too much on mechanics (since this is emerald), but at ~5:17 you could have helped your team instagib the necro by putting down an Earth4 instead of a Water4. He would have double-dodged into the Earth4 wall, got knocked down, and then died to the dragonhunters. Instead, he rolls through the icefield and later swings the fight against your team.

The fight quickly goes downhill when the rest of the enemy team joins in. This time, you heal one of your DH’s up with WashThePainAway, but don’t provide any other healing to your team. When the DH goes down, you have a safe res available via mistform but decide not to use it. This causes you to take a ton of damage and you’re forced to abort the res. Your team disengages to side points and wins them.

Fourth Fight at Henge: This time you provide healing, but only because the enemy is targeting you. The enemy doesn’t even try to contest the point and you wind up fullcapping it. Your necro arrives, and together you guys kill the enemy necro. But you die to autoattacks from the enemy mesmer so the fight ends up being even. (If you were running the meta build, you probably would have survived).

Fifth fight (~8:50): Your DH beats an enemy Power Reaper at mid 1v1. You join as the reaper is just about to go down.

Sixth fight (~8:60): Enemy druid and mesmer jumps in after the enemy reaper dies. It looks like you and the DH are AFK for the first portion of the fight. Once the damage comes in, you panic + mistform and don’t even try to provide healing/support until you are almost dead. The dragonhunter ends up going down because of this and you go down shortly thereafter.

At this point, it looks like your team has pretty much given up.

Final Score: 382-501 (Loss).

General thoughts:
The game was close enough that winning just a handful of the fights above would have resulted in a win. And the fights were close enough that your team would have won them if they received support/heals from you.

Your build, while suboptimal, is “good enough” for Emerald, but you need to play it to its full potential — which you are not doing. For example, you took evasive arcana but never once took advantage of it to dodge-heal, dodge-blind an attack, or even dodge-blast a water field.

I think the best thing you could do to improve your odds of success is to focus on performing your role better. Look at all of your different healing options and count how many times you used them this game. (You used water attunement to heal teammates 0 times; you used EA to heal teammates 0 times; you blasted water fields to heal teammates 0 times). And think about all of the other ways you can support teammates: using Earth4 or Air5 to peel when they’re being chased, using overloads to provide auras, etc. Record your games and watch the replays with the above in mind.

It actually looks like you might enjoy DPS more, since your first instinct in every fight is to hang back and attack the enemy players, rather than to provide support. If that’s the case, then play a DPS-oriented build.

All the people in this thread who blame their team for losing and believe that they are actually pvpgods should add each other in game and form a party! Then you’ll have a team of amazing players that are each accustomed to “carrying.”

But seriously, the main problem that this season has revealed is that it’s apparently very hard for many players to judge their own skill level. Over ~80% of the players I meet in GW2 thinks they’re amazing at the game and are incapable of spotting their own misplays.

I’m enjoying it. I’ve found it faster to reach legendary than season 1 (which was a slog all the way through), and more often than not the games starting mid-Diamond were at least fairly competitive. There were still a fair share of landslide victories/defeats, but I those happened in Season 1 as well.

I think the only people who got screwed over by the current season are those stuck in “elohell,” or those who really wanted pvp to be a pure grindfest (where playtime = guaranteed progress).

There are a lot of people (myself included) who stop caring about progress once they hit legendary, so the pool of players willing to grind up the prestige ranks is incredibly small.

All A.net needs to do to resolve OP’s problem is to increase the rate at which matchmaking expands the pip-range when looking for an opponent. So, as an example, when OP (Prestige 2) queues up for a match, matchmaking first looks for opponents who are also Prestige 2. If 4-5 minutes goes by and there isn’t anyone in Prestige 2, then matchmaking should start looking for opponents who are higher up in Prestige 1. If another 4-5 minutes goes by without a match, then the system should look for opponents who are anywhere in Prestige 1. The problem seems to be that matchmaking apparently refuses to match Prestige 2’s against Prestige 1’s, or that it has to wait 45 minutes before making that jump.

(It may also be the case that there just aren’t enough legendaries in general, although I don’t think that’s a problem because my Q times in Prestige 1 are only about 5-8 minutes during primetime).

Was out of town for most of the season, but got to legendary using mostly shatter mes/thief.
I ended up spending some time with all of the different elite specs just to learn them, though. (Except for warrior, which I never felt comfortable taking out of unranked). And sometimes I’d go bunker tempest/mes when I got stuck with teammates who all played DPS classes.

Cecilia.5179:

Anet’s testing has a long history of not working in practice like they wanted it to on paper Honestly, I think the top tier PvPers should be invited to test out new stuff every once in a while, since those are usually the ones that make the innovative stuff the devs would never forsee.

A.net has invited the top players to test things out — that’s what proleagues is all about. What’s missing from the equation is A.net actually using the information from proleagues to make changes on a semi-frequent basis.

echo.2053:

Phantaram.4816:

So how is shatter mesmer currently balanced? By being weak outside of those things. Too weak to be used at the moment. The truth is it was too weak before the expansion too but not weak enough that you couldn’t take it and reap the benefits of moa and portal. If the enemy team had anything that could take advantage of the fragility of the mesmer (burn guard, thief, etc) and do it well then the mesmer would get shut down and the 2 powerful utilities it brought wouldn’t even be used.

It’s a tough thing to say but it would probably be healthier for the game if Portal and Moa were removed. If this happened there’d be no problems in bringing the mesmer back up to par with everyone cause it doesn’t have these 2 extremely powerful abilities.

Funny – portal and moa being powerful but number of times considered taking mesmer over other class in tournament ….. lacking.

Have you thought about that would look like for mesmer and teefs within the same role? Without those skills teefs would be preferred for its mobility while being able to preform same role. If mesmer were buffed to lower its fragility it would push the teef out by having better survivability. Where exactly would that balance be located at?

Sounds like you answered your own question: mesmer could be the less fragile roamer, while thief could be the more mobile roamer.

Crinn.7864:

Malediktus.9250:

I want biweekly balance changes. There is no reason to wait for meta settle.

If the meta hasn’t settled then they have no idea what actually needs to be nerfed. Remember that it took over a month after HoT launch for the bunker meta to even begin to appear.

It won’t take more than a week for the meta to settle if you’re only making a few targeted changes every week. The teams that compete in proleague scrim regularly, and most of the proleague players play more games in a single day than many of us play in an entire week. If one week is too much, then you can even go with two weeks, or even a month. Any of these options is better than what is currently happening.

On the other hand, if you make a bunch of large changes at once, then obviously it will take longer for the meta to settle. For example, when HOT first hit, it took a month for the meta to settle because there was a ton of information that players needed to absorb. And it may take awhile with this patch, as well. This is another reason why infrequent-but-large balance patches are bad. It takes too long to get useful feedback, people complain on the forums nonstop about the meta being unfun, and then A.net overreacts in the other direction.

A.net is effectively paying proleague players to balance-test the game, because the people who are playing for money are willing to put in the time and effort to explore all the strategies, test them against each other, and figure out the best comps. So A.net might as well take advantage of this process to make frequent, incremental balance adjustments, rather than drastic overhauls.

Crinn.7864:

Besides rapid class changes is hard on us the players. I’m willing to bet most players would be extremely annoyed at having their class kittened with every week.

Let’s be real here. People complain when their class gets nerfed — the timing doesn’t matter. What matters is when an overhaul shoves your class out of the meta (or pushed into a braindead role like bunker mesmer) and you’re stuck with it for the next 6 months.

A.net,

HOT balancing is obviously still in its infant stages. The proleagues are your greatest opportunity to make weekly balance patches and get immediate feedback. Since money is on the line, you can be confident that the proleague teams are all trying to discover the most optimal builds/comps to run in high-level play, and that they test these builds/comps extensively in scrims. Part of being a pro player is understanding the game well enough to quickly adapt to new balance patches.

There’s no need to wait for 80% of the proleague to finish before making substantive changes. For example, after nerfing shieldblock and precog, it was pretty clear by next game that bunker mesmers were still crazy effective. So the next step could have been getting rid of quickness/slow stomps/resses, or even getting rid of the bunker amulets.

Waiting until the proleagues are 80% over just resulted in a bunch of incredibly boring games that the viewers didn’t enjoy watching, and a lot of missed opportunities to playtest more incremental balance changes. Even the proleague players didn’t seem to be enjoying the experience (as evidenced by one team’s ragequit).

It’s too early to tell what the next meta will look like at this stage, which is part of the problem. The current balancing strategy is like throwing a bunch of paint at a wall, which the playerbase is then stuck with for the next 6 months.

You’re already paying over $200k in prize winnings to make the proleagues happen. You might as well get the most bang for your buck by using each week’s proleague game to make frequent targeted balancing patches. If one tweak doesn’t work out, you can just reverse it for next week’s game.

It’s more the power creep that killed chrono-shatter. The nerfs alone are not terrible — most chrono-shatter builds will see a few seconds extra on cooldowns due to alacrity going from -40% CDR to -25% CDR (which is how the 66% → 33% increased recharge speed works). The precog nerf won’t really affect anything since chrono-shatter can take decoy.

More importantly, the relative lethality of chrono-shatters will probably still be pretty good, mostly because all the bunkers are getting nerfs. So I think chrono-shatter will still be able to quickly generate downs in +1 fights.

The main problem is that chrono-shatter was already weak to thief, and thief is getting buffed even more. So you might as well take a thief, which is good at generating downs in +1s and will beat chrono-shatter in a fight. I.E. we’re going back to a meta where thief pushes the other roamers out.

The biggest buff that gave thief an edge over shatter is removing the aftercast on BP — there’s now next to nothing the mesmer can do to prevent the thief from BP+Bounding to stealth. The passive buffs to autoattack damage makes sense in a bunker meta, but will be absolutely crazy in the new meta.

Bunker mesmer absolutely needed to go. But removing quickness/slow res-stomps and removing the bunker amulets was enough to take bunker mesmer out. But nerfing bunkers alone is enough to put thieves back in the meta. We really don’t need the extra damage, too.

TLDR: I’m overall OK with the mesmer nerfs, and super happy that bunker mesmer is getting gutted. But based on the current list of changes, passive buffs to thief dmg is just going to give thief an even easier win against all of the other roaming classes.

I would have preferred to just see heavy nerfing to bunkers (including bunker mesmer), removal of celestial/soldier/sentinel amulets, some nerf to scrapper sustain, and then see how the meta shakes out before buffing thief damage.

Krysard.1364:

Shirlias.8104:

Show us proof ( like achievements. if you are locked to tier 1 i can trust you ).

Theres no way to prove it, he could have hit legen with cele staff and then screenshot whatever, you just have to trust him

I’ve been queued with and against OP quite a few times — he was playing marauder staff each time. And yes, the build has all the weaknesses you guys are pointing out — it’s highly reliant on teammates who can hold point (since he mostly stays back and bombs), and it also has a hard matchup vs. a lot of the meta specs 1v1. So in some matchups it just doesn’t work at all, and in other matchups it can wipe teamfights pretty quickly. But he makes the build work for him, just like the people who’ve hit legendary with warrior.

Most of the burst damage seemed to come from chain-dazing with lightning rod and from using air overload, but I’m sure OP can give more specific feedback.

Jana.6831:

Do me a favour and don’t compare your class (any other class) that is about to receive a nerf to thief. Mesmer has already been ridiculously strong since June as stuff already went wrong in June but anet obviously didn’t notice. No one at anet seems to know how thief works, so they nerfed the class for 3 years straight just to satisfy the ever whining people who cried about stealth or everything else. These random nerfs destroyed thief and it’s unlikely that the class will be back again anytime soon or that your class will be destroyed by a single nerf.

Your comment is misdirected, since I play all of the classes. Random nerfs didn’t destroy thief. Crazy power creep to all the meta elite specs did.

Chrono-shatter mesmer, daredevil, and dragonhunter are all crazy strong builds compared to the core specs. The reason they’re weak right now is that the current meta is so heavily sustain-based that the roaming role has become very limited and difficult to play well. As soon as we shift out of the sustain/bunker meta, then chronoshatter, thief, and DH will become strong picks again.

That said, it’s possible that the nerfs to bunker-mesmer will end up wrecking the chrono-shatter build, or at least making it less optimal than other roaming builds. But it’s too early to say without seeing the specific changes.

I’d personally prefer that they bring all the elite specs in line with the core specs. Or at least target their nerfs to specific builds – i.e. bunker mes and marauder scrapper.

Cynz.9437:

Ah what did mesmers players told thieves? Karma!

On more serious note: mes was really strong after june patch (and elites weren’t even out yet) but somehow we all forgot it?

Mesmer was over-the-top strong after the June patch primarily because A.net decided to buff PU through the roof and make mantras CDs recharge while you still had charges remaining (so heal and daze basically had no cooldown). A.net has since nerfed PU and fixed the mantra cooldown issue. They also reduced the damage on mirror blade by 33% and nerfed the damage on the mantra grandmaster trait.

Outside of that brief period, shatter mes has always been in the same boat (or worse off) than thief. Even in this meta, D/P DD has a fairly easy matchup vs chrono-shatter.

All you need is for Well of Precognition (the AOE 3s invulnerability skill) to block capture point progression. This creates counterplay to one of the most powerful defensive skills in the game, and also tones down the amount of evades/blocks the bunker mesmer can regularly cycle through without consequence. Any broader nerfs to bunker mes will probably just trash the power shatter build.

Precog alone pretty much ensures that your team will always be able to get resses off, which combines with the already tanky/sustain meta to make fights last forever.

dank.3680:

ResJudicator.7916:

dank.3680:

ResJudicator.7916:

The better change would be to make precog grant invuln so that it prevents those affected from contributing to cap point progression. The OP’s suggestions are poorly thought out because they will impact a lot of mesmer builds, like power shatter. They don’t actually target the unique problems that bunker mesmer presents.

All bunkers, including bunker mesmer, should be able to hold onto a point 1v1 or 1v2 long enough for backup to arrive (as every other bunker can). The problem with bunker mesmer right now is that it can hold the point solo nearly indefinitely against 1-2 players (depending on matchup and terrain).

Nerfing the bunker mesmer’s ability to contest a point while cycling through all of its defensive cooldowns is really the key to bringing the build down to a reasonable level. The build would still offer support to the team via timing boonshares and well drops, but would no longer be able to singlehandedly contest a point. This nerf would also be limited to bunker mesmer, which is the only chrono spec that really needs toning down in Conquest.

So the answer is to delete precog? Who would use an aoe cap giveaway utility…

Dank, it seems like you’ve only just started playing mesmer and are only familiar with the bunker build. Prior to just a few weeks ago, mesmers generally played a roaming role that did not revolve around contesting points. Precog would still be a very powerful defensive skill for that role.

Furthermore, even in the bunkering context, preventing precogged players from contesting a point just means that you’ll need to coordinate with your team to make sure someone else is still able to contest the point (which adds counterplay in that the other team can focus the players who are still contesting). This is no different from using shadow refuge, stealth gyro, or mass invis to save your teammates. They’re all powerful defensive skills that come with a tradeoff.

“You have played this character for 1,765 hours 30 minutes over the past 1,186 days. Across all characters, you have played for 6,752 hours 59 minutes over the past 1,201 days.”

I admit, I am pretty new to Mesmer. I happen to like that precog serves as a point -team bunkering tool. I find no issue with having bunkers in the game. However, I do think some things need toned down, including pre-cog, but I don’t want to see its base function change.

For the record, shatter mes is has and always will be my main <3 as well as burst thief.

Precog’s base function is to provide 3s of evade to those in its effect. That part wouldn’t change — it might even get slightly buffed if A.net changes it to grant invuln in order to prevent cap contribution.

Also, you’d still be able to use precog as a point-contesting tool, you’d just have to be more strategic about it. For example, if your teammate is getting focused, you can drop the precog so it lands on him but doesn’t affect you. That way, you protect him but are still contesting the point yourself. You and your teammate could then switch places if the enemy decides to focus you. People want more active play, this change would add that.

Most people here complain about getting “bads” on their team. Yet when a 3-4 man team of “pro” players queue up with “bads,” this is now considered to be some terrible abuse of the system?

There’s nothing wrong with lowering the MMR of your team by queuing with new players. Your team’s effective skill level actually is lower. Yes, you may still have 3 or 4 of the top players, but you’re basically doing a 3v5 or 4v5 at that point, which is not always an easy win. I’ve been on the receiving end of this and have won matches against teams that consisted of 3-4 proleaguers and 1-2 newbies.

The only thing I’d consider to be abusive is if you had one of the diamond players create a second, free account (which would start at low MMR) and then queue with his diamond friends in order to help them get pips.

dank.3680:

ResJudicator.7916:

The better change would be to make precog grant invuln so that it prevents those affected from contributing to cap point progression. The OP’s suggestions are poorly thought out because they will impact a lot of mesmer builds, like power shatter. They don’t actually target the unique problems that bunker mesmer presents.

All bunkers, including bunker mesmer, should be able to hold onto a point 1v1 or 1v2 long enough for backup to arrive (as every other bunker can). The problem with bunker mesmer right now is that it can hold the point solo nearly indefinitely against 1-2 players (depending on matchup and terrain).

Nerfing the bunker mesmer’s ability to contest a point while cycling through all of its defensive cooldowns is really the key to bringing the build down to a reasonable level. The build would still offer support to the team via timing boonshares and well drops, but would no longer be able to singlehandedly contest a point. This nerf would also be limited to bunker mesmer, which is the only chrono spec that really needs toning down in Conquest.

So the answer is to delete precog? Who would use an aoe cap giveaway utility…

Dank, it seems like you’ve only just started playing mesmer and are only familiar with the bunker build. Prior to just a few weeks ago, mesmers generally played a roaming role that did not revolve around contesting points. Precog would still be a very powerful defensive skill for that role.

Furthermore, even in the bunkering context, preventing precogged players from contesting a point just means that you’ll need to coordinate with your team to make sure someone else is still able to contest the point (which adds counterplay in that the other team can focus the players who are still contesting). This is no different from using shadow refuge, stealth gyro, or mass invis to save your teammates. They’re all powerful defensive skills that come with a tradeoff.

DirewolfX.5861:

Rising Dusk.2408:

The better solution is to just make it not contribute to capture point control. You don’t need to change the skill in any other way.

Since it affects other players, you could have a Mesmer inadvertently or intentionally cause his team to lose a cap by making his teammates not contribute to capture point control. I think that’s a bad experience when you’re vying for a point and your teammate causes you to no longer contribute.

Better to change it to have an effect similar to Endure Pain or Aegis so you can still use CC or unblockable attacks to knock the target off the point/out of the well.

Kind of like shadow refuge, or stealth gyro, or mass invis? There’s nothing wrong with a powerful team-wide defensive skill preventing your team from being able to contest a point. Using Precog well (no pun intended) will require more teamwork and coordination if it is changed to not contribute to point control. The skill will still be incredibly powerful, especially for non-bunker mesmers who aren’t meant to contest points in the first place.

The better change would be to make precog grant invuln so that it prevents those affected from contributing to cap point progression. The OP’s suggestions are poorly thought out because they will impact a lot of mesmer builds, like power shatter. They don’t actually target the unique problems that bunker mesmer presents.

All bunkers, including bunker mesmer, should be able to hold onto a point 1v1 or 1v2 long enough for backup to arrive (as every other bunker can). The problem with bunker mesmer right now is that it can hold the point solo nearly indefinitely against 1-2 players (depending on matchup and terrain).

Nerfing the bunker mesmer’s ability to contest a point while cycling through all of its defensive cooldowns is really the key to bringing the build down to a reasonable level. The build would still offer support to the team via timing boonshares and well drops, but would no longer be able to singlehandedly contest a point. This nerf would also be limited to bunker mesmer, which is the only chrono spec that really needs toning down in Conquest.

An easy hotfix would be to make some combination of Mesmer Shield4, Precog Well, and Csplit not have point contribution. (Not necessarily all 3).

Otherwise, a direct nerf to bunker mes survivability would unfortunately screw over the few remaining non-bunker mesmers. I think it’d be better to nerf the bunker mesmer’s ability to hold a point indefinitely via rotating evades and blocks.

Supreme.3164:

No…this is not a troll thread so don’t waste your time

It’s the first time that I find myself asking for huge buffs on other professions, but the situation requires it: conditions and one-shot builds are running rampant

So I find myself looking for solutions, factual solutions that would benefit the whole community on the long run and not only the classes I main; I will make this as concise as possible, but be ready for the wall of text, will give the reasons why warrior and thief are needed more than ever.

Warrior= The absence of shout warrior and the Hammer train is painful. Conditions builds that would otherwise be counterable with little coordination , become major obstacles for all but a small pool of players from the high end spectrum of PvP.
I don’t feel there is any build that offer a viable countermeasure to condi spam at teamplay levels; yes people will mention the tempest shout aura share but..I really don’t think the build is as survivable as old shoutwar.
What about the absence of hammer warrior?..Well many dominant builds like: condi reaper, mallyx/shiro rev, condi druid, scrapper are enjoying a real “no CC train paradise”; no current build comes close to the stunlock potential of the old hambow while being as hard to kill

Thief= The thief has always been a necessary evil to keep in check the real threat :mesmer as I always stated, months ago I made a thread explaining why necro and mesmer did not need sustain buffs…but I had fears this would happen in the end.
Now we have chronomancer and reaper which are basically the 2.0 version of mesmer and necro. With its natural enemy gone, the mesmer is now free to pray on the entirety of pvp. Another class that strongly benefit from the absence of zerk builds natural predator, it’s the revenant. Currently nothing can match this class in combat-mobility in pvp and bruiser like sustain; revenant is basically d/d ele 2.0.
My statement may appear too strong for many atm but..bare with me, when they will “nerf” herald and buff Jaris and Ventari..you will see the team potential of revs at full power, I mean already 1vs1 at high level only a reaper can match a mallyx/shiro rev, not much it’s missed to reach d/d ele 2.0

So these are my reasons why thief and warrior are needed and I have couple more observations to make, for the dev.

1) Why nerf thief boon strip, sustain and burst..then create a class that burst just as hard(if not harder ), strip more boons and faster ( mallyx rev) and can chain multiple blocks +insta heal that recover health based on damage received?

2) Why nerf warrior stunlock/adrenaline gain than create a class that can chain block/interrupts for days by pressing 2 buttons ( shield 5 and F5= chronomancer)?
Why nerf warrior damage on hammer ..when a reaper can deal 12k+ dmg with a spammable condition +stunlock? Why nerf warrior sustain ..when a scrapper is way harder to kill with tools shield, 2x elixir S, unblockable heal+water field, smoke field for stealth or walking shadow refuge drone?

Look…I’ll be blunt, you devs don’t balance the game at all, you simply buff/nerf things to shut down the forum

Just to give few more examples:

-You nerf might stacking on eles..then make scrappers that go around with perma 25 might
-You nerf traps on ranger..then make dragon hunter and unblockable damage, “invisible CC”, pull skills and more.

What did happen to the GW1 balance philosophy? Is there a philosophy at all?

Your suggestions ask for too much powercreep. The bunker mesmer build, for example, is strong because it has a high uptime of chaos armor (protection + random blind procs on enemy), chaos storm (dazes + aegis on mes), blocks, evasions, condi clear, and healing. If you buff warriors or thieves to be a “counter” to this build, then those two classes would be the new “one-shot” builds that you complained about earlier.

The better decision is to tone down the overperforming builds and make reasonable buffs to warriors/thieves so that they have a place in the meta. For example, by making it so trickery isn’t a required for steal to be worthwhile, and by giving thieves build options to survive on point at the cost of some mobility.

Keeping the overperforming builds as-is and then buffing thieves and warriors to hardcounter them would bring powercreep to a whole new level of craziness.

In order to get a quickness stomp, you need to:
(1) Have the quickness buff before you begin the stomp; and
(2) Maintain the quickness buff until the stomp finishes.

In practice, this means you need a little over 2s of quickness before you start the stomp (depending on lag). If the quickness buff expires before you finish your stomp, then you’ll continue playing the “fast stomp” animation but the actual stomp won’t trigger for another second or so (the time it would have taken for a regular stomp to complete).

There’s definitely some other bug with stomps not even registering (quickness or no quickness) — I have no idea what’s causing that. It used to be caused by lag or some server hiccup that caused the player’s corpse to appear in a location different from where the player actually went down.

Reaper has kind of the opposite problem of thief. It’s too slow to escape from anything, so it kind of has to be the alpha dog in a fight — otherwise there’s no point bringing one.

That said, any class with good kiting potential has a pretty easy time vs reaper. And I think D/D ele can still hold its own as long as you avoid Shroud5-4.

Jana.6831:

ResJudicator.7916:

A lesser but still noticeable issue behind a lot of thief complaints is that a lot of thief players relied too heavily on stealth and never developed their mechanical skills like timing interrupts, blinds, and dodges. Due to a number of reasons, the “stealth, burst, retreat & repeat” strategy doesn’t work anymore. This means the thief needs to be spot on with his interrupts, blinds, and dodges to survive. This means knowing what your opponent’s skills are so you know what to blind/dodge/interrupt, rather than just random-dodging until your reveal debuff is gone so you can restealth. A thief who knows how to do these things has an advantage over most mesmer builds (especially the portal-PU build used in conquest) while a thief who doesn’t will just get instagibbed.

That’s nice, but tell me what options a thief has got left to be without stealth and to interrupt and dodge?
It has all been nerfed with the June patch.
Only option would’ve been S/D – acrobatics nerfed = not viable anymore.
A decent amount of interrupts and blinds = D/P which needs stealth, SA nerfed + reveal skills = not really viable anymore.
D/D is a stealth build, the weapons alone have no utility, so all has to come from the traits which were heavily nerfed (especially for that weaponset).
P/D got a buff again, but it still relies on stealth and I’m not so sure how good it is without ricochet which was deleted with the June patch.
So it’s nice to hear what you think how thieves should play, the problem is; they can’t.

Maybe with daredevil some of these builds will become viable again and maybe staff will be viable but that would mean that GW2 is becoming a P2W game.

I was really just referring to D/P. The other weapon sets need some tweaking (which I referred to earlier in my post). But D/P has a lot of defensive options outside of stealth for 1v1s via shadowshot. And for offense you can completely lock certain classes (namely necros) out of their heals via interrupts.

Wasn’t aware that autobalance notifications appeared in ranked PvP… (at 1:30)

The OP’s combo is incredibly easy to avoid… If the mesmer pops Shatter5 w/o having blown any of his CDs, then you know he’s going to throw everything he has at you in the next 3s. Just pop your dodge/block or whatever and now his Shatter5 is on 90s cooldown.