Guild Wars 2

Zzyzx.8906:

I would like to point out PZ did not change the meta. Jajja of JBUO changed the meta when everyone and their mother was saying “Necro was useless” months ago. He came up with a strong anti bunker build since every team was running 2 or even 3 bunkers and he and his team beat PZ with that necro build and then they asked him for his build and PZ started running it and incorporated it into their comp.

That is all, let the drama continue!

Lol what? I was going against PZ daily in paids with them running a necro about 2 months ago and while my team was active playing paids 4 days a week during that time period we never ran into JBUO……so I dunno how you are coming up with that.

daydream.2938:

If you think thieves are OP then your nuts.
Seriously a thief should never be able to beat a good elemanatlist in 1on1.

The problem with thieves isn’t that their results are “OP” its that it is way too easy to get close to their maximum results with little effort. Myself and others have drawn attention to heartseeker, it isn’t the damage that is the issue with the ability, or even that it is spammable, the problem is you don’t even have to be paying attention to land it. You just mash 2 which gives you a high damage auto targeting gap closer.

As Vain said in the SotG, there needs to be more skillshots across all classes.

Danto.6748:

NA making a good show of themselves^^ Clearly they win over EU in the Drama Wars <3

The losers are both the EU and NA players that still take this game seriously and think their results at this point in time mean anything.

What is the motivation behind creating such a kitten post?

The standard necro builds put out a lot of damage but they are very glassy. You want to make sure you are making use of your long engagement range and try not to attract immediate attention in a group fight if possible.

Positioning is more important for necros than many other classes as it is one of the least mobile professions. Make use of advantageous terrain, such as going to the back side of keep on Forest or being on one of the platforms in foefire with objects to block line of sight.

Putting wells on top of someone in the downstate as their teammates go to rez = win. While it might be necessary to use your wells to help get someone into downstate initially, if you can save your wells until someone is downstate you can turn 1 enemy down into a team wipe.

Putrid mark is an amazingly strong ability and can be a game changer when used correctly against a heavy condi team. Using it effectively can turn a tough fight into an easy win. In fights between teams with 2 necros, he who putrid marks last, putrid marks best so try to be aware of their usage of it and then send those condis right back.

Your death shroud fear and fear mark can be used to save your kitten but if you can save them, they are more effectively used for downstate situations.

A picture is worth a thousand words, and I think this picture can sum of the state of the game.

I’m not really a fan of the video and its contrived measurements of skill and power. Nor do I agree with the video that it is a sign of good design. You don’t need to have characters/weapons/etc that are out of whack in a risk vs reward sense to make casual players feel like they can compete. You simply use a system which matches them with equally skilled (or as close as you can get) and let them learn to play the game in that way.

The video pretty much makes the case that the high power/low skill abilities are a crutch to make up for the lack of a decent match making system.

Lorienda.1349:

there is a huge gap between eu and na atm
a good eu pug can probably take down the best team on na its not because u are bad
u just dont have any decent players to play against so u naturally not as good as us.
so ye u should not have a spot in the state of the game atm till na evolves to be decent.
u can just break the game.
the meta on na is so broken you guys think it works cuz you are playing against kitten teams
so ye.
and i agree about the rest with spades.

These comments are funny. So a lot of these arguments about who should be in this discussion are taking the “no true scotsman” approach and saying that only those currently playing at the highest levels can have any meaningful input on the subject. Currently, the EU scene is most likely more competitive than the NA scene but that is because a large number of competitive NA teams have left the game. These players saw the massive problems with the game over a month ago and left.

The meta might have shifted a bit over the month they have been gone but the fundamental issues with the game haven’t changed. The meta shifts to what works and has no regard for what is broken or the game flaws which cause the meta to be the way it is. Knowledge of the meta does not necessarily make these flaws clearer to a player nor does a slightly outdated idea of the meta make these flaws impossible to ascertain.

Being good at the playing the game and being able to speak objectively and intelligently about balance are two entirely different things and many people could do one or the other but not both. To be honest I think the previous State of the Game showed that many players fall in the first category and not the second. We had a collection of “top” EU players and they didn’t delve into any of the major balance issues which creates the lynchpin of the current meta.

Maze.5283:

Still, a few ego’s have flared because of Master’s opinion. No need for it, agree or disagree, nothing to do with SS.

When you are part of an organization and you are using your association with that organization as a reason your opinions have merit, then your words will reflect on that organization as well.

I know many video game players might have limited experience with the real world and how things work but it is same reason that players on sports teams can receive large fines for running their mouths in a similar fashion, because it reflects poorly on the organization.

Ace of Spades.6325:

It’s just my 2 cents, but i think that doing this kind of thing is pretty arrogant, at least win a lan event and prove that you’ve a deep knowledge of the meta before talking.

Yeah there are so many super competitive LAN events going right?

I think its hilarious you speak of arrogance after making this whole post. The game and the competitive community is currently a joke. The people on the US side have at least come to the realization of these things and many competitive teams have put things on hold. It looks like you guys in Europe are a little slower on the uptake and think your results in this game are reason enough to have an ego.

Congrats you are good at a game which has a boring design, stale meta, lack of competitive features and about 100 viewers on twitch and a dwindling competitive scene.

Liewec.2896:

i did’nt think Vit was massively attractive for guardians since their HP scaling is so laughably poor anyway, stick a truck load of vitality in and you’ll get what, 2k more hp?

1 vitality gives the same amount of hit points regardless of your profession.

andyj.5809:

Bunker staff ele is unkillable.
Me and some people I play with were messing around one day, one of them plays staff bunker ele on one of his alts, he decided to see if me (burst power necro) and a friend (GS warrior) could take down his ele. We were fighting for 2 or 3 minutes before we finally got him down, all 3 of us are good players and it just wouldnt be feasable to waste that much time in a game or to kill it solo.

The reason you dont see it much anymore though is because its awkward to defend points with as it has to move around a lot.

Nice so you brought two people with limited/no poison application and limited hard ccs to take down a class the relies on healing and evasion to stay alive and you wonder why you had problems?

With your necro/warrior combo you will either correctly land your cc/burst and instantly drop the ele or he will seem unkillable if you are unable to coordinate your burst and ccs.

You can have a ranking system without having a seeding system like this…. But I agree that the tournament system should be scrapped in favor of a traditional matchmaking system.

Israel.7056:

So I guess the idea here is to reward people regardless of how they perform.

I like that. It’s certainly more forgiving and inviting than the current setup.

It isn’t about rewarding people so much as giving them a worthwhile experience for their tournament tickets. The rewards from paid tournaments aren’t very motivating for most people, most people are playing paids because they want to experience a higher level of competition than free tournaments but it is currently very discouraging for new teams when they face one of the top teams in their region in the first round after spending 30-45mins putting a group together and sitting in the queue. This system lets everyone get at minimum 2 matches from a paid tournament and gives middling teams a greater opportunity to face one another.

Does anyone else think that the issue with stealth isn’t so much how long the stealth can last but how quickly stealth can be used again?

I feel like a thief would have to plan their attacks much more carefully if they couldn’t re enter stealth for 10s instead of the current 3/4s it is now?

This is something that has been brought up several times and I agree that there should be a greater emphasis on skill shot abilities providing the big damage rather than abilities which have huge results and require no skill to use (i.e heartseeker).

Walorx.5129:

I can see what you’re saying, but I still disagree with one thing you said Seether. You claim that engineers bring nothing to a team fight and all/most of our abilities are geared towards our own self survival. I believe you are forgetting all of the delicious combo fields that we can get with kits. For example, when I am in a team fight at graveyard, I know that my elixir gun aoe heal also can give aoe retaliation from the big bomb. Engineers excel at keeping people in place and ccing dangerous enemies so that your team can get their dps out before they can hit you. I like to think of myself as a silent angel of death sometimes because of all my knockbacks and immobilizes that my team can utilize so well to take down dps in an instant haha

I really didn’t say they brought nothing to a team fight, but I stated they brought less than other bunkers and they are lacking specifically with condi removal which is very noticeable in fights with 3-4 people on each side taking part. Engi’s have great CC, however, most good players save stability abilities for key moments (i.e downstate phase) which drastically reduces the value of Engi CC. The vast majority of the Engi cc comes in the form of KBs which can just as easily knock someone out of an allies burst as set them up for burst. The immobilize on the rifle is very strong given its short cd but it is fairly easy to evade.

The combo fields can be nice but a blast finisher on your light field only gives like 4s of ae retaliation which doesn’t have that large of an impact. The bunker engi is most effective in relatively close range to both their opponents and allies but in larger engagements this just makes you and your team an easier target for ae damage.

aydenunited.5729:

That…. sounds like how to counter any bunker?

Which is why teams only run 1 true bunker instead of 1 for each point.

Walorx.5129:

I completely disagree Seether, I excel at holding my point in frees/paid tourneys. Many people haven’t played against a decent engineer, so the general consensus is that they are bad. They just take practice and patience to get viable with. But right now I’m running a triple kit bunker which works wonders in tournaments on side points and graveyard on the second map. I run tool kit and elixir gun for the great healing and blocks, so I’m just deciding on my third kit to use right now. Thanks for the insight! I appreciate it guys

I think you missed the point of my post. Yes you are great at holding a point and do ok in teamfights but you will be worse than other bunkers in teamfights because you have less condi removal and worse access to stability compared to other bunkers. Many of your defensive abilities only provide benefits to yourself while other bunkers provide team oriented benefits.

Lets examine a couple hypothetical situations. You face a team at the beginning of a match, you grab your point uncontested and the enemy team lets you sit there while their comp of a bunker + mesmer proceeds to fight your team in a 5v4 at the mid point. Good teams have great vision of the map and when an engi leaves the point you will often be leaving the point too late to help win the 5v4 and leave yourself exposed to an easy neutralize.

For hypothetical #2, let us assume your team has managed to secure your home point and mid and the enemy team only has their home point. If they send 4 people to your home point they will have the advantage of having a more team fight oriented bunker (99% of the time a guardian) as well having the opportunity to bring their 5th with little risk of your guardian making a play to neutralize their point. They can also have their mesmer run to mid, drop the first part of the portal and then go to the team fight at your home point and portal their team back to mid for a 5v1 attack on a bunker guardian.

I’m a huge fan of the engineer class and I’m glad to see people experimenting with builds but there are many builds which may look viable but is extremely exploitable at higher levels of play.

For node control, bomb kit and flame thrower kit should both be used imo. Elixir gun is pretty worthless imo.

But Engi bunkers are pretty lacking compared to other bunkers. Against a team that is smart they will just leave you sitting at your side point and out number you at the other points.

Yeah I’ve posted before that they should copy the system Smite uses. There are numerous keyboard activated shortcuts that send an audible and typed message to your teammates.

Khalifahaze.6045:

Why is rating so important for your team other than bragging rights? Am I the only person that actually enjoys pvp for the sake that it is pvp?

There are more factors at work than merely just ratings being released which lead to my teams hiatus. My team formed with the expectation that ArenaNet was going to make GW2 an E-Sport and that PvP was going to be a high priority for the development team. We put in many hours in beta and playing live in a game that often had many glaring bugs. We sat in paid queues often lasting over an hour to then face multiple teams using block bugs and Svanir rune exploits. We refused to use these bugs and beat many of the teams who made it part of their core strategies, we reported the bugs and had to wait over a month for a fix to something destroying the integrity of the game.

After seeing notes for the November Patch and hearing the State of the Game interview we knew that this game is still essentially in a beta state and will remain so for some time. There is a glaring lack of viable builds for each class, team compositions are extremely rigid as well and the progress since release on both of these issues has been minimal to non-existent. Based on the time line which was alluded to in the State of the Game interview, when ratings are released is when they will finally announce the monthly tournaments and yearly tournament which is expected to have a monetary payout. At this point my team will evaluate the state of the game and most likely begin playing competitively once again.

While I enjoy PvPing in this game, I find the current meta really boring and stale and I hope they make the changes necessary to make more team compositions viable. (Remove mesmer portal plz)

SAtaarcoeny.8476:

@seether so do you think if they bring this in your team would come off break and start playing again bro?

To be honest it, it won’t bring my team back. We are a developed team and at this point we are wanting to play for more than just practice or QPs. I think your idea is a great system for letting new teams get more practice but at the end of the day they are playing still playing for QPs and not ratings. This is why I think your system is a great temporary solution while everyone waits on the rating system debut.

My team is on break from the game until ratings come out, but I still like to mess around with build ideas I get so I will log on and solo/duo queue free tournaments. Leavers are extremely abundant in pug groups in free tournaments and I think having this system for free tournaments would create a frustrating experience for pug groups. In paid tournaments you need to have a full team to queue and you shouldn’t have any people rage quitting after a loss so I think it is a great idea there.

I’m fairly certain the way it works is the most recently applied is the first removed. I don’t know how it works in the case of when two different conditions are applied at the same time though.

I’m a fan of the idea.

I think that you are doing a great thing for the community by setting up teams like this and I send the people who ask me about finding a team to you. You should tone down your overinflated ego though….

While I think the horrible idea of tournaments should be scrapped entirely, if they want to keep this piece of sh system they should definitely make this adjustment.

The problem with heartseeker is that it is way to easy to use for the damage that it puts out. I think if it had130-300 range with no gap closer it would be balanced.

Someone has to be the red-headed stepchild with a lump of coal in the stocking.

I think an issue might be that the defensive skills provide largely binary outcomes. You are either taking full damage or no damage at all. Blinds, blocks, invulns, dodges all completely negate damage. Weakness and Protection are the only defensive effects that don’t result in all or nothing damage distributions.

I believe these binary outcomes is why we see most builds being nearly pure glass or nearly pure bunker with limited numbers of viable hybrid builds. Since power/precision/crit builds scale exponentially while defense scales linearly in order to hybridize many builds you have to give up a lot of damage to get a small increase in survivability. Since the vast majority of your avoided/mitigated damage comes through using dodges/other abilities that mitigate all incoming damage, having a small decrease in the unavoided damage isn’t worth the loss of damage to hybridize a build.

I imagine that people would be going for more survivability if dodge only negated say 75% of the damage and stopped ccs from affecting you while dodging.

Darkfall 2 might be fun to check out until GW gets its kitten together. Its FPS style and full loot with destroyable cities, so it isn’t the same cup of tea as instanced PvP but PvP with repercussions is fun.

Also I disagree with any suggestions for playing Rift for PvP. Besides the gear grind its a game where the Devs do not care at all about PvP or balance for PvP and has large fluctuations in what is strong pretty much every patch. While the balance progress hasn’t been amazing with GW2 at least they are working towards PvP balance.

I think the risk vs reward of all abilities need to be re-examined. I typed a long post but it got erased when my browser decided to close so I will try to keep it shorter.

There are 2 thief skills that I think are worth examining for this discussion, cloak and dagger and heartseeker.

I think cloak and dagger is a well designed skill, it is melee (130) range and has a .5s cast time. If you aren’t using steal or some other gap closer to insure its hit, it actually takes some skill to land.

Now compare that to heartseeker. It is a 300 range gap closer, leap finisher and a huge source of damage which is spammable. Instead of asking for a straight nerf to what it does, I would rather see a change in its difficulty of execution. Even making it so that it was 300 range but not a gap closer would allow it to remain strong but not a total crutch for a thief who can’t stick close to a target.

Here are a bunch of ideas for allowing abilities with higher risk vs reward:

Ground targeted
Rooted in place
Long cast times
A cast time period
Provides negative effects to the user: i.e engi’s overcharged shot, or one which would snare you after use or something similar.

However, I think that if you were to look at the abilities which do have negative effects attached to them, they pale in comparison to abilities available to others which have just as much of an impact but no negative side effects.

I know these changes would take a bit of an overhaul of some skills but lets be realistic here, this game is in a beta state and it needs some bold decisions to be made to right its course.

Manijin.3428:

>_> I play a Dagger/Focus Hybrid Ele, a heckler blindness-spam Guardian, a hammer/physical CC warrior, and a support/roamer thief. Truth be told, I would probably play an Engineer if I liked the playstyle…

What are all these cookie-cutter builds people are talking about? And why do I not feel any weaker when I play my builds?

On a more serious note, you can’t judge class balance based on new players. You simply cannot. http://penny-arcade.com/patv/episode/balancing-for-skill

Maybe you outclass your opponents enough that it doesn’t matter if you are running sub-optimal builds. You could take any successful paid team and put them on some whack builds and they would still probably wreck in free tournaments. It doesn’t mean that those builds are viable at a high level of competition against equally skilled opponents though.

While this is all conjecture, the QPs are going to function as a currency to enter daily/monthly tournaments. So being low on the list shouldn’t matter as long as you are able to earn enough QPs for the tournament entry in a reasonable period of time. But as you pointed out there are many ways that the system could end up being designed in a horrible way, and unfortunately based on everything since release I wouldn’t be too surprised if they deliver a horrible system.

The whole tournament system for normal play should be written off as a sunk cost. Stop tying the game to a horrible system and bad monetization plan. Give us matchmaking, remove free and paid tournaments, have single/duo queue and group queue with ratings and come up with creative ideas for monetization instead of trying to force people to grind or buy tournament tickets for competitive play.

Trying to have a rating system and still using the current free and paid tournaments system is a mind numbingly bad decision and I really hope that isn’t what plan to release.

I personally hope they scrap the qp system when the rating system comes out while figuring out a way to not make the previous qps earned meaningless. The QP leaderboard I suppose is better than no sort of ranking at all, but not by much.

Ostricheggs.3742:

I was VERY happy with the engineer back before they nerfed smoke bomb and grenades into the ground. I had 22 QPs before they changed the formula for how it works.

All in all I’d say it’s probably the hardest class in the game to play right. It’s too damn punishing. If you whiff ONE shrapnel grenade you’re probably gonna lose a fight. The lack of reliable targeted damage at a range kills it in foefire GY fights where people have insane room to kite.

It can work and I’m sure it can STILL work, it’s just an absurdly hard class to just pick up and play with how kits work and all.

We need more nerfs IMO.

Grenade Engis are dead right now. Yeah they have huge “potential” damage with some RNG luck and hitting multiple people with 3 grenades each but the damage is largely back loaded and can be negated with condi removal.

I’ve been using http://gw2skills.net/editor/?fcEQJAqelsp6Zn1ShF1LJxoCdGki8qXRKeMl/ogtyF;ToAAzCoogxUkoIrPOYk+MqYuA
its similar to Teldo’s build but has condi removal with 3s bleeds on #1 pistol and 3second procs of burning.

The issue is that blast finishers are really the only useful and reliable use of combo fields. Most abilities that are projectile finishers have only a 20% chance of activation making it not really a skill to use them with projectiles but something that you just hope you get lucky with when fields are down. Also, since fields are often place in the middle of the battle area to act partly as area denial, moving into the fields to use a combo will often expose you to a lot of damage.

Leap and blast finishers have the strongest effects but leap and blast finishers are often found on strong abilities which are often not worth using for the short lived effect of a combo field. Water fields have the largest effect and are obviously worth blasting in and I think its worthwhile blasting in fire fields for 3 long stacks of might but I think the other fields are a bit lackluster in comparison.

I wish after 5 shots/hits that you would get a guaranteed projectile finisher rather than leaving things completely random.

Btw you can still change utilities.

I do not consider it skill to swap to a weapon to use swiftness and making your decision to avoid mobility in your build a non factor. I agree that you should be able to swap utilities though!

I feel like you should be able to swap utilities while out of combat since you can’t swap to another one unless it’s of cooldown, unlike a weapon where you can swap in make use of an ability and then swap to another weapon and have no abilities on cooldown. I think you should still be able to swap weapons while in the base area as well.

I don’t think swapping your weapon to another one to use a swiftness ability and swap back is “skill” in any form and it makes it so that many weapons which actually have swiftness are totally trash because you can get a huge amount of value from the weapon by just swapping to it while out of combat and using the swiftness.

Kylex.5962:

i hope this isnt intended due to the ammount of skill this brings into games, changing stuff depending on certain situations. first rez timer, now no switching? you trying to make this game designed for……

If anything I think you should still be able to swap while in the spawn area. I think strategic changes should be allowed but I don’t think you should be able to use weapons purely for movement abilities, that does not bring skill into the game.

CoachBay.4586:

This begs the question, is this intended or not? There is already a mechanic to keep people from swapping gear while in combat, so why make it apply to the entire match? I think that it may be unintended.

So that people aren’t able to switch to weapons for swiftness/movement abilities and thus devalue the attractiveness of builds that use that weapon primarily.
I’m pretty much certain is intended and I think it’s a good change.

BLU.8961:

@Seether

I understand but I am referring to a lot more than just the lack of interest for the tournament. Very little streaming and almost no youtube content is also a factor in this argument as well

There’s no youtube content because ArenaNet decided at release to not allow people to monetize gw2 videos unless they were for an established video game site. While I don’t know how much of an incentive the money aspect was for some to create videos I would expect there would be more video guides being published on youtube if monetization was allowed.

As for the streaming, I know you are on EU so its different but on I was spending the vast majority of my time streaming sitting in the mists waiting for queues or just waiting in between matches. This is boring for people like myself who have only 1 monitor and don’t want to bother streamers with random web surfing and boring for viewers who are spending most of their time watching someone stand around and wait.

BLU.8961:

The point I was trying to make through the linked quote was that the teams complain about there not being any support of an esport (like tournaments), but when one comes along people (like the one linked) pass it off essentially contradicting their own priorities for this game

Look, I think its cool you tried to put together a tournament but lets not act like your tournament was “serious”. The teams practice playing 5v5 conquest and have focused their builds and play style around that, you created a 2v2 death match tournament. While I think its a fun idea I don’t think you can expect all players to have an interest in it when it is such a different game mode than conquest and then judge the community based on their interest in your tournament.

Yeah well if you are using 3 kits the kits will give you counters depending on the kit, such as ae blind, ae frontal kb, a block etc which all are counters to shatters.

I like the ideas in the thread, if I am available I would be happy to be part of or help run one of the teams for the evening.

One thing I was thinking that would be cool would be to get a big group of players together and then pick captains to choose teams pick-up basketball style and either do match ups in a 5v5 server or a tournament if you had enough people and then mix up the teams after some matches.

I think a moba type mode without the leveling and gear buying process would be cool but they would need to do something to add more flavor to make up for those lost aspects and not just have zerging with your team being the most effective strategy the whole time.

I’m not interested in a mode where the first 15minutes or whatever is focused on just farming npcs though.

While I don’t agree with all of his proposed changes, drastic changes are needed to many abilities to make them viable and the same can be said for many classes.
The fact is, outside of kits and elixir r/s almost all of the engineer utilities remain untouched and that what the OP is trying to address.