Guild Wars 2

ITT: Payneful demonstrates limited reading comprehension abilities.

But Payneful, “don’t worry this isn’t personal. I’m just being logical.”

This thread was written about stealth culling issues and air runes. While you were in the video demonstrating Prince’s points you were not the topic, Prince was not even the topic, yet you decided to make the thread about yourself and him. Since you have decided to do this then I will talk a little about you and your thought process in this thread, and how assumptions make you look like an idiot.

Prince pointing out imbalanced things in the game is not a player desperately looking to “place the blame elsewhere” as you state, unless you believe that every single complaint on these forums have no merit and are merely people looking for easy mode?
After interjecting yourself as a subject in this thread you then tried to discredit another one of Prince’s claims. He posted a combat log with a large air rune hit, and because you saw 100 blades in the combat log you made the “logical” jump that he was using frenzy for a hit that big to occur. You jumped to this conclusion without having any evidence outside of what you see as a large hit, well I will reveal why you are an idiot. Thieves are able to take the 50% extra damage in downed state and air runes are effected by it.

You are pretty good at the game, you should try to reach the same level in reading comprehension and logic.

Before I get into the actual content of the post, I want to state that I don’t think it is necessary for the game for portal to be removed. This thread is merely a place for a discussion of the implications of the removal of portal and is based on a conversation I had with my team last night.

Before touching on how the game would be different without portal, lets look over the strengths of portal. In competitive play, portal is primarily used by a mesmer to place a portal on its team “natural” point so that the mesmer is able to engage elsewhere on the map with their team and quickly return (and with allies) if the point comes under attack. My team refers to the back point watcher leaving their point as “cheating” and I will be using that term throughout the rest of the post, and although we call it cheating we do not mean they are doing something that is not allowed.

Since a mesmer can bring back as many people as necessary, countering a cheating mesmer with extra numbers near his portal does not matter if he and his teammates are able to return together (often after winning the fight at the previous point due to the numbers advantage they would have while you are in transit to the point which has the portal on it).

There is only 1 other ability that is even somewhat similar to the mesmer portal, the thief ability shadow trap, which is not activated on demand (enemy must step on the trap) and only teleports the thief.

The use of portal to repair the trebuchet in khylo is one area where I think portal is clearly too strong and regardless of the long term future of portal I think it should no longer be possible to interact with the portal while carrying the kit.

The current strength of portal has resulted in nearly every competitive team running a mesmer in pretty much the same fashion. My team uses it because it so effective, but I think that it limits the number of effective strategies and team comps.

So finally onto that magical world where mesmer portal no longer exists….What would change?

Cheating off your home point to assist in a team fight will be a much higher risk activity rather than the standard play (like taking out the goalie in hockey in the 3rd period when down by 1 etc).

This would increase the value of mobility as well, since teams with more mobility will be able to cheat more effectively/neutralize the enemies point when they are cheating before their cheater can return to the point.

This would be an indirect nerf to guardian bunkers who are in general the least mobile of the bunker classes and are often shuttled to various points via portal in the current meta. Going with a double bunker comp would be less ideal because it would be easier to leave a bunker idle at a point or force them into a high risk cheating scenario. Bunkers tend to be pretty worthless from long range as well, so a long ranged dps watching over the home point that could cheat and help from a distance might outperform bunkers in the role of watching the home point.

I think this would lead to teams more often playing all 3 points leading to various 1v1, 2v2 and 3v3 situations to arise compared to the game currently which tends to revolve around a lot of 4v4s and in the case of foefire 5v5s.

Any other experienced players want to chime in with their opinions? Do you think the game would be better or worse without mesmer portal? Are there any other balance/gameplay implications that I didn’t consider?

So you are saying that different classes bring different things to the table? Interesting concept there.

There are also abilities in the game that take advantage of people that have lots of boons. If they are such an issue then maybe you can run one of those counters?

Also, while some classes may be able to keep up some boons for an extended period of time, there are very few classes that can keep up 100% uptime of a boon and they tend to be the weaker boons i.e swiftness/regen.

Gilgamesh, your assertion that premades currently farm pugs in free instead of playing paid because they do not want to face competition is laughable. There have been several threads demonstrating how the cost structure of paid tournaments results in 4 teams every paid tournament needing to either invest 3-4hrs per person winning free tournaments or purchasing more tournament entry tickets. There are 20 people between those teams, a total of 60-80 man hours must be expended to replenish the tickets from a tournament that could last less than 10mins if they face a top team off the start.

It is not a sustainable model for providing competitive PvP unless the teams losing in the 1st/2nd round either farm free tournaments or buy tickets with gems. Sure there may be some teams running free tournaments when they could “afford” to play paid ones because they don’t want strong competition but I would bet that most teams you see in the free tournies are there to replenish their ticket supply.

It isn’t a bugged mechanic. Every elite transform in the game provides a stability buff in addition to the transform. It doesn’t say stability 20seconds or until you exit the form, it simply says stability.

Gilgamesh.2561:

milo.6942:

it’s balanced since engineer has the most knockbacks
/hatersgonnahate

Guardian has as many knockbacks (and honestly more useful because many of them are AoE), and has more stability. Argument: void.

As an Engineer I actually agree with Milo’s stance. If you really want stability as an Engi you can use elixir x and cancel it after using it. Guardian KBs are on a much longer cd than the Engineer KBs as well.

Yeah and while blocking they can use any other ability they want, swap weapons etc.

From what I have noticed, it does work on these abilities somewhat, but you must wait until you are on the ground and no longer moving the direction you got knocked, using the stun break at this point will instantly get you up. If you are still moving and use your stunbreak it gets wasted every time.

There’s no actual proof of this info, but someone on reddit claims that Jon Peters stated they are working on a GLICKO based rating system.

http://www.reddit.com/r/gw2esports/comments/126sb8/jon_peters_confirms_that_glicko_will_be_the/

Hopefully this is true and is something that is very close to being done.

The problem Hackks is that the marginally competitive teams are extremely punished under the current system. 4 teams lose 5 tickets per member, 2 teams lose 1 ticker per member and 2 teams get a surplus via converting gems to tickets.

For those 4 teams that lost in the first round, that is a solid 3-4hrs of playing free tournaments and winning every round before they can return to a paid tournament match (excluding that they might consider purchasing tickets).

There are lots of teams out there with a strong competitive spirit and do not mind losing to better teams because it gives them an opportunity to learn and improve. While these teams may be pretty far behind the teams taking down #1 and #2 in paid tournies, they can provide some competition and good fights for the more dominant teams. Given the choice they would love to fighting against these teams that are better than them despite the fact that they lose every time, because they make adjustments and try to do better in each successive match.

However, when these teams are faced with a 3-4hr grind to then face one of the top teams in the first round and then have to go back to farming free tournaments it hurts all the parties involved. The top teams sit around waiting in the queue hopping for the teams to show up, the marginal teams are forced to farm free tournaments which doesn’t really improve their play and which angers lots of people trying to pug free tournaments for a “casual” experience.

I personally think the whole tournament system as is should be scrapped and standard matchmaking used with daily/weekly/monthly tournaments that involve a sizeable number of teams with several rounds rather than the 3 round 8 team tournaments which mean nothing.

Yep, matchmaking would have been much better than tournaments. I really don’t understand what their obsession was with going with a tournament system rather than standard matchmaking with rankings.

Yes, I am saying that in a team game it is possible that you will not have the tools to deal with every type of opponent with every build. Of all the bunkers, guardians tend to be the best counter to thieves due to their high inherent armor, active mitigation (aegis and blinds) which are strong counters to thief burst and high retaliation up-time which takes its toll on the low hp thief class.

Like I stated in my other post a condi Engi or Necro are the best counter for bunker guardians. Guardians are not the only bunker though, lets look at the case of a bunker Ele. Bunker ele in general have lower toughness and more condition removal than a guardian. Against a bunker ele, a thief is a much better counter than either a condi Engi or Necro. Different classes/builds have different strengths/weaknesses. It isn’t a pure rock-paper-scissor system as different builds allow for different performance against different classes and individual specs used by those classes.

Zenith.7301:

My mesmer has ONE viable build in PvE: Illusionary persona with either 20 dom/dueling, or 10 dom/dueling/chaos/inspiration.

When I tried a build that a) didn’t use mainhand swords and greatswords, b)didn’t invest points dom/dueling and gearing, and c) didn’t have Illusionary Persona

it was horrible; on a Chaos/Inspiration heavy build my mesmer was getting respawns before he could finish killing group of mobs. I see warriors and guardians go full glass cannon and still maintain similar survivability to any of my balanced specs just because of the innate armor advantages. It’s particularly egregious with warriors. My AoE even with sword/sword+greatsword and illusionary persona shattering is still deficient relative to the range and frequency of aoe available to other classes.

Some classes like the guardian trivialize PvE with high protection, aegis, regen uptime, while my mesmer even traiting with no damage can at best hope to give allies regen with phantasms, and that’s as far as group support goes besides vigorous revelation. Restorative Mantras is not good at all compared to elementalist and guardian group offhealing.

Supposedly mesmers and thieves offered support with stealth skills for rezzzing. Guess what? Bosses in explorable dungeons LOVE to drop AoE on downed players that will kill anyone before they even finish rezzing, so stealth does nothing in helping get players back up. Mass Invisibility can even reset an encounter. I’ve yet to use any elite as much as Time Warp.

All I do on my mesmer is damage, and that damage isn’t even up to the levels of what warriors and thieves can do anyways. In PvE my mesmer just feels awfully limited besides being a Time Warp elite provider. Anything else another class will provide in greater quantities and more efficiently.

You realize you are posting in the PvP forum? My god, get this whine out of here. You are complaining about PvE balance in one of the most casual PvE games ever created, lol.

Aether McLoud.1975:

ITT: People being angry that eles aren’t a free kill anymore when downed.

Yeah, except that isn’t the case at all from what people in the thread are saying. It was community consensus that Eles needed an improvement to their downstate and I think pretty much everyone was happy when they read about a change being implemented. However, the change they implemented seemed to go a bit overboard in the power of the #2 ability

Revelstoke.8924:

Exactly. I’m tired of fighting teams of 4 bunkers and a mesmer/dps. For giggles I ran a pure glass cannon spec last night (you know, the 12+k backstab burst spec yall complain about) and had little to no effect in tourney’s that were bunker heavy. Their ability to knock down, knock back, deflect, heal, invulnerable, or otherwise compliment their already insane survivability consistently negated my damage. At one point in a match I took the high ground and started to plink away at one of them with my short bow and he stood there and /waved at me as he was easily able to heal MORE than the bow was doing even with crits of around 1500.

There are not many teams running 4 bunkers, and they aren’t effective. Also, backstab thieves aren’t the counter to bunkers, condi Necros and Engis are the counter. Backstab thieves are horrible against bunkers since most bunkers have high toughness and a large protection uptime. Guardians have aegis as well which can stop thieves from pulling off their damage.

A bunker is pretty much the counter to the exact build you were running, and you wonder why you were struggling? lol

The reason no one is answering your questions is because you would just ignore any answers which aren’t the answer you are looking for (which is that in your opinion healing is useless and there is no valuable support).

The fact is you are wrong. I don’t feel like taking the time crafting a response to address all your points which will result in a post by you countering everything I stated with your opinion rather than facts.

Healing and support are very important in this game and using them effectively can change the outcome of a match.

Zsymon.8457:

Threads like this make me wish anet would use the playing experience of their own staff to balance professions, and not go by these kinds of threads. So what if an elementalist can avoid the first stomp? Just follow him and stomp him as his vapor form ends, nothing he can do against that. Elementalists are the weakest profession of the game, their only viable build is pure bunker, which not a lot of people enjoy playing, I can’t believe people are whining just because it gets a bit harder to finish them.

They are not the weakest class in the game and they are viable as more than just a bunker. You also don’t seem to understand the full implications of what this downstate change brings. I imagine you do not play a whole lot of TPvP or find success there when you do play TPvP.

To be honest I was pretty shocked when I found out they made the mistform the #2 because as others have stated, it was pretty much the strongest downstate ability available to anyone. I expected eles to get a single or multi target interrupt on #2 and then to have mistform either removed from #3 or put on a much longer cd than the original downstate.

Taking eles from the worse downstate to the best is a bit extreme though.

@Danto no it is not a case of mistaken identity. The block bug is not merely random as I have seen guardians who manage to do it several times throughout the course of a match.

I don’t even get why you thought the rest of your post helps your case. Why focus a guardian? Sometimes a guardian is the only person on the point you want to attack. The block bug gives time for backup to arrive and for other abilities to come off cool down. Unlike every other block ability in the game (not counting aegis boon) you are able to use other abilities to do damage while blocking via the bug.

I think that any guardian who cares about having clean competition should not use a mace, there are several viable guardian builds that do not use one and the bug is so extreme that even if it happens onces inadvertently during a match that can tarnish the outcome. I know the idea of honor in a video game is largely laughable but I think it would be good for the competitive community if the “top” teams were to not use the mace until the bug is patched.

Arken.3725:

I tend to use hammer and sword/shield for my bunker spec. If i’m in a more offensive role, i’ll utilize Hammer with GS. It’s all situational. I just started a stream so if you want to see how I utilize this, please take a look.

http://www.twitch.tv/arken2786

Cool, really relevant to the thread….

OP, you realize everyone has the same access to gear right?

Krustydog.1043:

Rifle engineer? THAT"S a huge load of crap.

Rifle Engi can actually be built to have some of the highest burst in the game.

One thing I’ve noticed in these continual thief whine threads is that there is a big “usual crew” of people crying about the thieves in every thread. However, as more and more of these threads have been created there have been less crying over thieves in general and a swelling population of players saying to make adjustments and you will beat thieves.

It seems like the community is moving forward but this crew of players doesn’t seem to want make the right adaptations and rather cry for nerfs.

Siric.3589:

They removed the easy and reliable to bug it over the last few patches. It can still happen, but I would venture to say most of the time it happens now it is not intentional.

I understand the frustration though, some teams got quite good at exploiting it every chance they got. Hopeful anet cleans up the rest of the bugs with the skill soon.

Siric, I respect you and your team, so please don’t say stuff like this when it is absolute BS. The bug has gotten easier to reproduce if anything, and due to its widespread attention at this point, more guardians are aware of it and taking advantage of it.

Even 1 block bug going off at the right time can completely change the outcome of an entire match let alone a player doing it intentionally and frequently throughout a match.

Well built bunker guardians, much like any well built bunker, pretty much eat thieves alive.

Well first of all, I would like to say I find it very honorable that your team does not use the block bug. I agree that way too many teams (especially those that are near the top with their skills anyway) are making use of the bug. However, not every team uses it, my team has played your team and we do not let our guardian use a mace either.

Also, like you, I think its a joke that teams say they aren’t using it “on purpose” when it happens non-stop during the match. For some winning must be done at any cost, but I think that a win based on a bug is not a win at all.

Moxrox.2496:

Good morning Seether, these are test builds to record toughness vs incomming dmg.

Yeah and its pretty meaningless data. I run with about 2200 armor on my engi, and I got hit by a kill shot for 9k the other day. Did I complain on the forums about how much damage it did? No, I got mad at myself for getting hit by an attack that has such a long wind up and vowed to not let it happen again.

Tank elementalist playing without a single stun break, pretty pro, lol. This game isn’t like other MMOs where attacks instantly hit, many of the big hitting abilities hit for as much as they do because they are so easy to evade.

Pointing out only the damage they do to a target who is sitting in their attacks is only evaluating half of the equation.

Yeah, other classes get punished when they miss their big attack by facing a CD, fortunately for thieves their big attack has no CD and they can spam it as many times as they need to until they hit while remaining in stealth.

BishopX.6453:

I get bursted down a LOT as a guardian, and i have been a decent player in too many former pvp games just to think , well perhaps im jus a scrub and need to l2p.

This game has no gear advantages in SPvP unlike many other games….

New Patch notes, hopefully the block bug is one that was fixed.

October 26, 2012

Kill Streak Boosts now work in the Mystic Forge when creating Mad King Chests.
Fixed several exploits and bugs.

Current Paid Meta:
2 Block bug guardians, who gives a kitten about the other 3.

It has been moved to one of the icons on the bar on the top left of your screen.

It is cross server, but it is not cross REGION which is what the OP wants. I am also a little dissapointed with the “depth” of the queue system. While I have really enjoyed the increased competition level of paid it seems that the queues are only reasonably quick from 4pst-10/11pst. You can get a queue maybe an hour or two outside of that window but I don’t think they run the vast majority of the time outside of that window.

Bump, please fix this ASAP.

It is very sad seeing teams that would be strong simply with their own play making use of this to the max.

Despite the patch notes stating that the bug is fixed it is still in the game and apparently very easy to reproduce as a player.

This is really hurting the game in paid tournaments where many teams will take any edge they can get. I personally feel that the bug is such a big deal that the mace should be disabled in paid tournaments for guardians until it is fixed.

In the course of many games with my team we have on several occasions noticed a rare bug where someone was on a point and was not counted as being present, resulting in a neutralized point.

Now, before the knee-jerk posts arrive, we are aware of the abilities that make it so you do not count on the point (mist form, endure pain, elixir s, renewed focus etc). These events occurred while none of these abilities were being used, and the players were completely in the point and not near one of the edges.

This bug is pretty rare and I think we notice it maybe once a week or something similar, have any other teams noticed this? I think the strangest occurrence is it once happened while both myself and another teammate were on the point and had it neutralized underneath us.

I’ve had this happen to me as well, I am not sure what the exact cause is either….

Try this out for PvE….
Use rifle, grenade kit and bomb kit and make sure you have the speedy kit trait.

Pull a pack of NPCs using either rifle or grenades. As they approach you, switch to bomb kit and use smoke bomb, concussion bomb, fire bomb, then switch to rifle and use jumpshot on what should be a stack of mobs on top of you. Then switch to grenades and use freeze grenades to chill them so you can open up room.

Then kite them around in a small circle and while throwing grenades slightly behind you so that they run into them.

Against hard single target mobs use your rifles CC (overcharged shot and net shot) to keep extra distance.

Using this method should provide pretty easy kills in PvE imo and using a combo similar to this I am able to solo supply camps in WvWvW which consists of 3 melee veteran mobs and 2 ranged veteran mobs.

Engineers are one of the strongest TPvP classes imo and can fulfill a variety of team roles effectively.

Evading treb shots while fighting is part of what separates the decent from the good. Do not change it please.

The difference vs Peak and Off-Peak hours for queues is probably going to be pretty large and I don’t know if it will ever really get better. There are no random groups and people are less likely to form pickup groups with tournament tickets at risk. This leaves the established 5 man teams as the man population of paid tournaments. Since most teams have people working jobs on “normal” schedules the teams tends to be active during prime time hours.

I would estimate that the queues are extremely short from 3pm pst (server time) to 12am pst, with queues probably being almost completely dead if you are 3 hours on either side of the primetime hours.

There are only 8 classes, when you name 4 of the classes off then yes there is a good chance that several end up in most comps. That doesn’t mean it is the only effective comp.

Also, just because a comp is popular does not mean it is optimal. I would say a lot of the comps are just copying of other people and a lot of teams don’t actually create their own comps from the ground up.

However, the teams at the edge of the competition are often the teams innovating new comps which others then try to emulate. Has there been an increase in the avg # of bunkers on a team? Yes I would agree that there has been a shift to more bunkers, however, instead of crying about OP bunkers my team changed our comp to take advantage of the strategy being used by other teams.

I am not going to simply give away the adjustments we made, but I think that any team that has a long chat together about how to deal with bunkers as a team will be able to find some decent options.

You are making it sound like there is only 1 effective comp, there isn’t. Stop blaming the enemy comp for your loss when it was your team not having equal skill and strategic/awareness.

It’s ok though, nothing I say will change your opinions, if it was a mirror comp match-up you would be conjuring up a new excuse for yourself anyway.

People cry about mesmers in the current system, but trying to fight mesmers when there is no point they need to hold or attack increases their strength ridiculously. If they don’t suck they will kite you through their phantasms long enough and its gg.

I think mesmers are pretty balanced (outside of portal repair) in TPvP, but after some experience fighting mesmers in WvWvW I realized how important having an objective is to balancing the fighting power of mesmers.

If you can’t win it surely has nothing to do with the skill of you and your team, it is obviously all based on the comp you bring (lol).

felivear.1536:

Posting in here because of players like Seether. They proclaimed on SWTOR forums that there was no Ability Delay saying we are all crazy, then Bioware posts they know it’s an issue but are working on it. They post in the Guardian forums saying “LEARN TO PLAY THERE IS NO BLOCK ISSUE” then Anet posts “it’s a known exploit and we’re going to hotfix it”, I could go on and on. Clearly, to the people with even a shred of objectivity can see that this specific move is crazy out of balance. Does that mean thieves are broken? I don’t think so, but this move definitely needs more tweaking (which will 100% come, not because of the forum cries, but because the developers play the game and also get hit for 80% of their health in 1 sec to thieves).

Seether, I’m not sure how uber leet you are at this game, but look at players like Xeph on Team Paradigm that clearly state theives are way out of balance at the moment. I’ll take my own common sense over yours, but if I had to lean on advice from others, I would take the advice of people actually playing the game on the uppermost skill level.

Overall, my opinion of this 1 sec combo is that sure it’s possible to 100% avoid… if you were a precog from Minority Report… No other move, in my opinion, is this ridiculously difficult to prepare for. They cast CnD at max steal range and as the animation barely starts, they steal in. There is no way to prevent that 80% of your health burst. Stop being asinine.

Nice strawman argument, I never denied any bugs existence. Also, just because someone is on a good team does not mean they can not hold opinions that are biased or incorrect. I am not a thief nor do I play a bunker build, which tear thieves to shreds. I play a fairly glassy engi but I manage to have a pretty good track record against thieves 1 on 1.

Like I have said before, the biggest reasons thieves are cried about so much is because of the 8v8 format that allows them more distracted targets to easily gank compared to a tournament setting.

@OP: As a rank 40 engineer, I’m going to say I disagree with the vast majority of your characterizations of the weapons.

The fact that you can’t even “imagine a single situation where it [bomb kit] performs better than any other weapons/kits” demonstrates that you aren’t aware of many of the ways to play engineer successfully.

Actually if you read it, that measurement was for the time to see a stimulus and use a finger reaction. But its ok man, keep blaming the game and ping etc on your struggles. Don’t ever look inward.

Killthehealersffs.8940:

Look again in the VIDEO !! i cant even react in like 0.3-0.4 sec !!!!!
How in hell should my human brain react , pressing the dodge , in such a short period of time

With warriors its pretty easy
The pop Frenzy > Wildwind > Bola > hunderad Blades
I know the drill
Its my problem if i die there

Not exactly a scholarly source, but http://wiki.answers.com/Q/What_is_the_average_human_reaction_time_is suggests most people should be able to react in that time period. Not everyone is the same though and some people will be outside the averages on both sides….