I think a better change to the wrench would be to make it a small AE cone like most melee attacks instead of a single target hit.
Turrets definitely need an overhaul. As do pretty much all the gadgets.
Please don’t change #2 downstate, ours is very good as is and provides utility in several ways.
Rangers are rangers, yet a rifle warrior can legit deal 3 times their DPS easily.
Well today is the day you learn that Ranger does not mean one who uses range weapons, but it is used to describe someone who roams/watches a large area.
The base word range in ranger is like that really old country song “Home on the Range” that you have probably heard some rendition of at some point in your life if you are from the US.
While range is most commonly used as a word for distance, here are the two definitions which form the base of the Ranger used in MMOs.
7. The geographic region in which a plant or animal normally lives or grows.
8. The act of wandering or roaming over a large area.I don’t mind arguments about balance, but when people try to justify their position in a fashion like this they deserve to get called out.
Yeah, that’s viable. Make a class that’s range attack does easily 3 times less DPS than a warrior and say rangers are viable. Don’t troll me. I don’t mind arguments about balance, but when people try to justify their position in a fashion like this, they deserve to be called out. Do you ever read the ranger threads? They are severely under-powered.
You need to think in terms of the macro of the game, not the micro. Rangers have no place at all right now in team fights period. They are only good for 1 vs 1 and a warrior is better because they have the same 1,200 range yet hit 3 times higher compared to a ranger with the same power/crit/crit damage.
You are thinking on a very low level that doesn’t look at all the factors, you are latching on to some obscure random definition of a ranger, and proclaiming you are “RIGHT” and I am “WRONG”. You are probably the only person I talked to on the forums so far that has no idea how under-powered rangers are. Do you even play this game still?
You just don’t get it. My post had nothing to do with ranger balance. I am saying that your argument that rangers should do more damage than a warrior because their name is ranger and that somehow implies using range weapons (and being the best at them) is the position to be balancing from is terribly misguided and based on false information.
Also, while Rangers could use some love, they are in nowhere near as bad of a state that many people on the forums make them out to be.
Rangers are rangers, yet a rifle warrior can legit deal 3 times their DPS easily.
Well today is the day you learn that Ranger does not mean one who uses range weapons, but it is used to describe someone who roams/watches a large area.
The base word range in ranger is like that really old country song “Home on the Range” that you have probably heard some rendition of at some point in your life if you are from the US.
While range is most commonly used as a word for distance, here are the two definitions which form the base of the Ranger used in MMOs.
7. The geographic region in which a plant or animal normally lives or grows.
8. The act of wandering or roaming over a large area.
I don’t mind arguments about balance, but when people try to justify their position in a fashion like this they deserve to get called out.
This thread is an unnecessary whine by people who aren’t looking at the big picture of the downstate phase, and in many cases the people supporting OP are people who aren’t even aware of all the abilities available to other classes.
No I posted in the right place, I think you are average at best and know if a true rated system was done you would be average ranked.
I know the type seen it happen in WoW when rated Arenas came out.
In a farm based system people with a ton of time climb and mistake it for skill, rated systems remove all doubt about what teams are good and what teams/players are not.
Well if you posted in the right place you should concern yourself less with attacking people and more on your comprehension of written material. Since you are talking about a group of people who don’t want a rated matches in a thread which contains only people in favor of a rated matches….
No one in this thread is advocating a farm based system and I think its apparent that everyone knows farm based systems are a joke and that’s why most people consider the QP leader board relatively meaningless.
My slot 2 has the same attack speed as you, yet deals a max of 7k, while you can easily to 19k-25k. I am specced with 60% crit damage, 2200 power, I should be able to hit you witha 19k-25k, yet you have probably very close to the same stats and hit so much higher.
Your ranged ability which can be used on the move should deal as much as the stuck-in-place melee attack? Please tell me more about game balance issues and your solutions for them.
Dont pick necro, go with mesmer thief guardian or war
lolololol
predictably bad poster making bad post, no way!
I think an even better question to ask would be, if players were playing a theoretically perfectly balanced, yet complex game, would they recognize that it was balanced or would there be just as many complaints about balance?
While my question is pretty much rhetorical, I would bet that there would still be a forum full of cries about balance, since the average players perspective on balance is based on what they experience which is influenced by their choice of class, their level of play and any biases they may have.
**I am not saying GW2 is a perfectly balanced game or anywhere close to it, but I think that many of the whine posts regarding balance on these forums are completely unjustified.
Yes, a ladder/rating system is nice for top tier players, but honestly I think the most important thing about it is helping lower tier players get into the game more by playing people around their own skill level.
imo it’s the lower tier players that are the most important if you want to see this game succeed. I think custom arenas are more important for top tier teams, anyway. But that won’t matter if there aren’t lots of lower tier teams out there trying that are having fun trying to get better.
This right here. No one wants to be top tier in a game no one cares about, and getting people to care about the game involves giving players at all levels an enjoyable experience,
I stopped playing pvp after the day they nerfed the thief to dust. I, unlike others, will not stand for crap like this.
Thief got nerfed into the dust? Please explain, lolololol
when ladder comes out I know at least our team will be back. Probably a lot of others too!
Yes, the NA PvP scene is not dead, they have simply returned to Valhalla to slumber and feed until ratings.
I think the best option is going with a semi bunker guard running soldier amulet, shouts w/ convert condi to boon trait and offensive weapons like 2hd sword/scepter focus. This type of spec decimates the glass cannon builds that run around in hotjoins. Since you can handle 2v1/3v1 for a decent period of time you can last long enough against unfavorable odds for your allies to hopefully come to assist you.
Another common one being ‘In a 2v2, if an enemy dies, take turns 1v1ing the survivor.’
Now all those martial arts movies where the hero slowly defeats huge sums of people that decided to not use their numbers advantage make so much more sense…..
I think we shouldn’t focus too much on DN as this is GW2 forum :/. Btw, it is 18 second cold down right now in the latest version. And that WCG means nothing to the game because every good players in China/Taiwan was play under some “unspoken rules” to maintain class balance and competitive. But that WCG didn’t adopt those “unspoken rules”. Therefore, champion of that WCG was regard as despicable instead of the most skilled player in the game.
A game so balanced that players have to apply their own rules to try to make it fair, sounds like a compelling game.
I watched the videos and it doesn’t look that impressive to watch but that’s probably attributable to having no idea how to play the game. And while this is a completely uninformed opinion, based on what I have observed I would bet that group combat is even sillier than the one on one which requires player enforced rules to keep the game “fair”.
Schwahrheit.4203… I was not talking to you, warrior.
Seether.7285 I am aware that 1v1 is not the only determination of skill. However, it is the only objective method I am aware of (unless the difference in skill is super obvious). Without objective criterion topic like this is meaningless…people will just post names of themselves or their teammates/friends.
Of course this topic is meaningless, this is especially true with no rating system and especially without any quality post game statistics. When both of those are implemented the skill level of players and the impact they have in their matches will become much easier to evaluate but even then determining who is “best” is still a very subjective and somewhat meaningless topic.
I think they should be made into versions like the Engi one which is strong but can be countered and have the cds adjusted down appropriately and maybe add other secondary effects.
Looks pretty whack to be honest. 1 person putting out all that chain cc (the attack knocking the person up and then repeating that over and over) looks like poor design. Other aspects look pretty clunky too.
“Balance for all players” is an impossibility if you are basing ideas of balance around people’s perceptions.
“Noobs” in any game always get smashed, and in pretty much any game with profession differentiation you will have new players calling things imbalanced which experienced players think is fine. This doesn’t mean that aspect is actually imbalanced, nor does balancing around experienced players guarantee that “noobs get smashed” as you put it.
There will always be balance complaints since it seems to be a part of human nature to whine when one isn’t being as successful as one would like , at least for a subset of people who like playing games and don’t like losing/learning.
Why do not you organize the ‘best in class’ tournament and let ppl 1v1. At least you will see who is the best among those who participated.
Someone could do that, but 1v1 isn’t the only determination or even the main determination of who is the best at their class. For some classes their 1v1 is a lot more important than others and pretty much any 1v1 you setup is going to be pretty contrived situations which wouldn’t really happen in game.
For example, for a back point mesmer to be a top tier player they must be extremely effective at 1on1s against roamers and be able to last long enough in 2v1 situations for help to arrive while trying to avoid letting their point be neutralized. When the mesmer’s point isn’t under fire they need to manage their portal CDs to provide help to the team in other areas while making sure they return to their point before it gets neutralized if someone tries to steal it.
If you were to contrast that with a necromancer you would find a much different skill set is required to be top tier. 1v1s for the standard team fight necro build will often not be in the favor of a necro and necros do not appear that impressive. But if you were to put that necro in a chaotic 4v4/5v5 teamfight its impact can be overwhelming on the other team. For necros, proper positioning relative to your teammates and enemies as how well you are able to avoid enemy burst is far more important than the results of any 1 on 1. Of course at the highest levels of play you would expect your necro to still do the best the class is able to in 1v1s but top players recognize that 1v1 isn’t what necros are designed for and if your necro is facing many 1 on1s your team should reevaluate its strategies.
If there is interest I could go over each class and define what I think are the most important factors of being a top tier player in each class but the main thing to take away is 1v1 is not the best way to evaluate the performance of many classes.
There are no exceptional players, only exceptional teams. Just watch a player from an exceptional team play in a PuG. They’ll win and die as much as the rest.
Was about to say this. You CAN NOT evaluate a player based on how they work with a team. There’s really a big difference on being the “best necro/thief/ranger” and being a godly “team player.”
In which case, the latter is what should be recognized. Though, I have to give it Hman and the rest of his team being godly in terms of team synchronization though.
This is bs. Yes it can be harder to evaluate a player when they only play with a good team, but to say these players are only good with a team is BS. While I agree determining a singular best player isn’t possible I think everyone on Tixe’s list can be game changing players. If you were to put 2-3 from his list on a pug team they would likely carry their team to the 3rd round/win the whole thing and I think the same thing could be said about making a team of 5 from his list and bringing it into paid tournies.
Team synergy and strategy definitely have an effect on the outcome of matches, but at the end of the day it comes down to winning your 1v1s and team fights. They definitely do not “win and die as much as the rest” as stated by Schwahrheit. And I’m sure anyone on the list would love to 1v1 or do any silly scenario he would propose to prove him wrong.
Not everyone runs elixir r and even if they did that’s still taking up a valuable skill slot just to make up for a luck-luster downstate. In team fights the only thing I can possibly help with is to fire my interrupt off at some random target hoping I can cause underwhelming cc and potentially stop one cast. Last but not least the 3rd skill is alright but has a horrible timer. Even if you perfectly interrupt someone’s stomp its still not ready to use for the 2nd incoming stomp when they get back up. So basically just a PvE skill for rallying on low hp monsters.
No classes #3 ability is available after just 1 interrupt, the person must always be a little slow with stomping to use it. That is completely fine and should not be a source of complaint.
As someone who plays mainly paid tournaments as an engineer, the engineer downstate is very good.
I run the game on pretty much max settings and while sitting in the mists I get about 60fps, however when I open up my contact list the FPS drops down to 30 and sometimes spiking even lower at 15fps with the game becoming unresponsive. I’m not sure if this was better placed in tech support or bugs, but hopefully there is a solution.
ITT: OP asks for advice and then decides to ignore it completely or brush it off as invalid.
what are you kidding me? i said thank you and that i will msg you when you are online didnt you see that?
I somehow never saw that post, so I’ll take that back, but it did seem like you were overall doing that to others comments.
ITT: OP asks for advice and then decides to ignore it completely or brush it off as invalid.
There is definitely something shady going on with eles and somehow ressing while in the downsed state mistform without someone actually dying to rally them. I just hope it isn’t something people are able to easily reproduce on their own.
You don’t need a shield to be a bunker build, but putting 30 points into the crit/cond dmg tree with a power based bunker build isn’t worth while. Your build needs tweaking, please post your whole build if you want some actual advice or you can keep saying your build is fine and everything else is broken when most engis are having a much different experience.
so the idea of the post is about (sorry to say this but) either making toughness more efficient or nerfing the burst damage of some classes..
So it had nothing to do with the title of your thread which seemed to be about the difficulty of playing an engineer?
lol
I think your build needs some tweaking. I don’t think that flamethrower trait is very viable in pvp since the flame thrower is only really used for utility (#3/4/5 abilities) and then switched back to another kit/weapon. The flame thrower auto attack is pretty much worthless in spvp outside of a very small number of situations.
If you wanna talk indepth engi builds you can send me a tell if you see me online. I won’t try to force you into “standard” builds but i could maybe help you make a more effective version of your current setup.
it makes perfect sense. i said this exact thing in my advanced post for a new playlist.
but can you explain to me how custom arena will be better then an advanced playlist(in terms of getting new teams ready to compete)? it seems that my idea that was backed by a lot of ppl was just overlooked or not replied to.
custom arena wont be good for new ppl to get better they wont put in the effort yes the great teams will maybe use it if they dont want to enter a tournament.
advanced is easy and with most ppl being lazy they want to just click it and play. new teams wont go through the effort unless they see there new team is good enough to put that much work into.
Your “advanced playlist” is really just patchwork over a bad system and it would be much better to axe the whole tournament system and go with single/duo queue and premade queues both with ratings rather than have something that slightly improves on a broken system.
Can’t have a ‘meta’ while you have such flaws with overall class and combat design.
I would love to hear you elaborate on these flaws.
It’s funny because it sounds like you think that gw2 PvP is balanced, even slightly.
What’s funny is that it is a lot more balanced than people give it credit.
Are you limited in selection of viable builds? Yes
Are the viable builds relatively equal and competitive? Yes
The biggest issue with the state of balance is that so many classes are pigeonholed into specific traits/utilities. Most balance complaints outside of that tend to be whines from inexperienced players.
do not let people tell you how to enjoy your character, play it the way you want.
I don’t even get how this line of reasoning comes into your mind. He came to the thread asking for advice, it wasn’t a flame thread started by someone telling him how to play his character.
Are you basing your judgements on 8v8 or 5v5? Look I won’t deny it, the burst in this game can be very unforgiving but the largest part of reducing burst is through dodging and other active defense moves. When you are new to the game, especially if you are playing 8v8, the amount of things you need to look for can be overwhelming but as you get better the burst will become much more manageable.
I recommend focusing on 1 class at a time, take the 5 mins to run through the tutorial and then go to the mists and use all their skills and focus on the animations and the amount of time it takes for the ability to execute. While it would probably give you a better understanding to take the character into some hotjoins I don’t feel it is completely necessary and I understand a lot of people have time constraints. If you take 15minutes out of each play session to review other classes I think you will soon find yourself having more success.
What class are you btw?
If you are dying that quickly you should probably consider changing your build.
Your problem is you think tournaments are only for the hardcore. Tournaments are for everyone but the newest and most casual players. Free tournaments are comprised of mainly inexperienced players, not hardcore teams. You don’t even need a full 5 to play with your friends, grab your friends that are on and press submit.
Allowing groups to play in the hotjoins together just allows for the face rolling of casual players.
I’m sorry for the minor insult but it is very frustrating when a poster is unable to conceive a viable system on their own they believe a viable system is not possible. It happens all the times on these forums and your post happened to be the one that I decided to call out. Nothing personal.
How would a solo ladder ranking work? It seems to me it would be mostly luck that wins the game for you or not. You have to hope that you not only get a good comp, but also good players. GW2 was designed so that one player couldn’t go be a hero and win games singlehandedly. So when you solo queue you have to rely on your team. How could solo ranking even mean much in this case? Wouldn’t it just show how lucky you are?
If the solo ladders are based on how many points you get in a game, that is even worse, because any idiot can just roam around dpsing already downed players and get full points for killing them. Players will begin to find every way possible to increase their ranking even if it screws over the rest of their team (like in hot join, lol@entire teams capping a point together). Basically the individual players on a team will be in competition with each other.
But again, I don’t even know if it would work either of these ways. Just a thought.
I’m kind of surprised a person as solid as you are in gameplay lacks the theorycraft capability to conceive an effective system. Yes in any one particular match the teammates you end up with will have a large effect on the outcome but over enough games the only constant is your presence on the team. Company issues might be an issue in the lower skill level brackets but most people interested at playing at a competitive level are capable of playing many classes.
Yes a system which rewarded you based on glory would be bad but I don’t think anyone would ever suggest such a ludicrous system. They are working on a new state system as well which will provide better measurements of play. The game smite uses an elope system where if you perform signicantly worse than your team you gain less elope in a win and lose more during a loss. Please don’t act like viable systems can’t be implemented only because you can not envision one on your own.
I typed this on my phone so there are some weird autocorrects but it should be reasonable to read
(edited by Seether.7285)
Hey all.
Just wanted to thank Grouch/Frozire and all the players for being involved in this. Sorry if some of the questions felt “soft” to you guys, but we’ll try to do more of these in the future. I thought the players asked great questions and voiced legitimate concerns. I know there are many other concerns out there, and we’ll just have to get to them in due time.
Thanks for listening, and thanks to everyone involved for getting it set up!
J
Thank you for taking the time to provide this information to everyone. While there is always going to be some criticism of any action you guys take it was a great improvement over the previous level of communication and I hope it becomes a more common occurrence.
While I was happy to hear about the overall direction the game is headed with matchmaking, the one part I think everyone would love to hear more about is about increasing the diversity of team comps. The players in the interview were all pretty happy with balance overall, but I think they were looking it through a very narrow context. There aren’t really any extreme powerhouse professions that can not be countered, but with that said I would say most professions have only a couple viable builds with vast numbers of traits and utility skills remaining completely untouched in tournament play.
I think it would be great to hear what arenanet has in mind for making other builds and team comps viable out of the Pt holder guardian + Portal mesmer + 2 roamer dps + 1 pick’em meta.
Good points jumper, here’s a long post I made on guru responding to a couple people who don’t think matchmaking and ratings would help the game:
I completely disagree with your guys opinion on the effects of adding ratings and matchmaking. Yes, if they simply added it to the current tournament system it wouldn’t do anything but create longer queues. However, if they were to implement a single match system for solo queuers and one for groups I think there would be a noticeable improvement in both the quality of matches being played and the number of matches being played.
Solo players have currently two options for SPvP, hot joins and joining free tournaments solo. Hotjoins do not play anything like a tournament match and does not help a player learn anything but the most basics features of combat. In the free tournaments the solo player is placed with random players and often faces a premade team which has a huge advantage simply due to the value of communication and cooridination in this game. This setting is also not very conducive to getting better at the game but at least the vast majority of the players in these pug groups are trying to play the game “correctly” compared to hotjoins. Even though solo queuers in free tournaments know they will lose in the first couple of rounds the vast majority of the time they still find it much more enjoyable than hotjoins.
I feel that if you segregated solo/duo players from teams you would provide a much better avenue for players to improve and hopefully make new friends which form into new teams. Solo players tend to play in more sporadic intervals and the single match system would accomodate their time constraints much better than the tournaments which can have such a wide variation in their duration.
I think ArenaNet should copy the system used by smite in which matches are launched in time intervals set to coincide with the length of matches in order to faciliate better matchmaking. For those unaware of the system, Smite, which is a MOBA style game has a normal match length of 30-45mins and they have ranked queues which occur on the hour. Since matches are much shorter in GW2 the interval would be lowered down, while I haven’t looked super closely at the average match length, I know the maximum is 15minutes, so an interval of around 10-15minutes might be ideal.
Teams emerge from players enjoying the game, striving to play better and wanting to play at a higher level, this becomes a natural evolution when you provide a solid pathway for players to progress and become interested in playing at a higher level, which I do not think the current system allows nor would it be alleviated by launching custom servers earlier. The current system has produced an extremely stratified system in which most players fall on the horrendously bad spectrum with a small group of players that are far far beyond most of their competition with very few middling teams.
The newly formed teams need to be playing one another, and not just one match out of a whole days worth of tournament queues in which they face countless pug teams and a few teams which are far beyond their level of play. This is something Jacobin and many others have touched on but there needs to be a sense of progression for players and I think individual skill progression would be much more meaningful and rewarding with a rating system and a segregated queueing system.
I feel like this whole thread is an elaborate ploy to get people infractions, and judging on a moderators post in the thread telling people to avoid personal attacks I think the OP has been quite successful.
tbh both their 2 and 5 are high priorities to dodge, if they start spinning dodge…
And “pull” break dodge…
They can’t pull you unless they have already landed the ability on you. Do you understand this? The guardian presses #5 which throws out a swords which if they hit you, you can then be pulled by the guardian pressing #5 once again. If you dodge the initial sword projectile you can’t be pulled! You can’t dodge the pull because the ability has already landed on you, better luck next time.
]
This is the problem. “Pull” break dodge roll.
Arena for example nerf “Basilisk venom” cheat against dodge.
What?
First of all it isn’t a problem, learn the animations. Your second sentence makes 0 sense.
Good video and I agree with the vast majority of its content. Another thing to point out about how meaningless it is for the current hardcore players, if the game has any hope of e-sport status there will need to be significant additions of viable builds meaning the game played for that first big tournament will be much different than what they had spent hundreds of hours practicing.
I feel like anything below $250,000 would be a bit of a joke considering their seed money is going to be a necessity to kick off the e-sport aspect. I think 1mill would attract a lot of interest but like you said that could be a large risk for how small the population currently is.
Also something that I think can not be said enough, the entire tournament system needs to be scrapped and tournaments reserved for the larger daily and monthly tournaments.
You don’t rally from putting someone into the downed state, you only rally from a finished kill (or random npcs if you are talking about WvWvW).
Downstate overall is fine, L2P
Charging people to spectate is really bad unless your content is extremely compelling, there is a reason why most video content is supported via adds rather than subscription fees.
If players are being placed in matches with players of their same rating they will be able to learn against a consistent difficulty level of opposition compared to the current system where you will face teams far above and below your skill level the vast majority of the time. Is that really difficult to understand?
So it looks like february/march is when ratings/matchmaking should be ready. Having these features will obviously be good for the game, but that’s still a long way away.
I’m puzzled why ArenaNet is choosing not to separate solo queues and group queues. Communication is so important in this game that even if your team is much better individually than an opposing team which is using voice communication they will still have the advantage.
I also don’t understand why ArenaNet is choosing to launch their rating system with the current tournament system structure. Although Jonathan hinted there will be some sort of queued single match-up matchmaking in the future it is clear that the tournament system will still be used initially. Since there is normally only 1 paid tournament running at a time there will be no “matchmaking” involved, and even if there was matchmaking to ensure the better teams were seeded into the same tournaments that means you would have paid tournaments running with “lesser” teams winning and taking home QPs because they got seeded into the weaker tournament.
I like the idea of the larger daily tournaments, and it looks like monthly tournament wins will get you entry into what sounds like will be a large yearly tournament, I would assume with something substantial for winning but Jonathan said the info would be revealed later.
I think the players overall held back tough questions too much. Although Aaron of Chieftain Ninjas asked a couple good ones and Xeph asked some of the community posed questions. Also I don’t understand the love for the current meta. I feel like there is very little diversity in team comps and build diversity for classes. Just by seeing the class of an opponent you know build they are running a vast majority of the time. It feels like a MOBA with a very limited number of hero’s instead of an MMO with complex classes.
I think its pretty bad that the Svanir rune and guardian block bug weren’t judged as game-breaking enough to warrant a hot-fix.
Overall I would say I’m at least happy to know that the important features are a fair amount of time out and it isn’t really worth putting time into the game currently. If this game has any chance of becoming an E-Sport there will a lot of class changes in the next few months and becoming masters of today’s meta will be meaningless for when it “matters”.
Any firm dates for needed feature releases or was it more of teasing everyone with the “tip” again?