Guild Wars 2

You forgot to factor in defense from armor. That makes a huuuge difference considering no extra toughness from amulets. Unless your thief is wearing no armor for some reason?

There is no balance team, only a ‘skills’ team. The team responsible for introducing massive power creep with HoT especs is now in charge of balance, presumably while they also work on developing the next set of power creeped specs for the next expansion. And people wonder why balance in this game is so bad.

The real joke is that the ‘balance’ team is actually a skills team that spends 99% of their time working on making power creeped skills & traits for the next expansion. The ‘balance’ changes are just an afterthought, put through to keep up the pretense of caring about balance.

IMO the only amulets that should ever have been removed were Minstrel’s and to a lesser extent Sentinel’s, because they promote playstyles that have a very negative impact on conquest style PvP. All the other amulets removed could have been balanced by changing the small number of builds that were too strong with that amulet, or by nerfing the amulet itself in other cases (either a flat stat reduction or a stat redistribution until it is no longer a problem). The biggest issue has always been that HoT introduced too much additional defenses and sustain that could be used in tandem with all the old sustain traits, leading to some builds that had pre-HoT clerics level defense/sustain while using a marauder or similar amulet.

Inb4 the proc is instant, unblockable, unevadeable, not stopped by invulnerability, and can be spammed every 4s by stow casting most elites.

Agreed. We need 2 modes running concurrently to separate the competitive and noncompetitive players. Tryhards don’t want to play with casuals running YOLO builds and barely trying to win, and casuals don’t want to play with tryhards yelling at them in map chat for not playing seriously. Forcing them together is just a good way to kitten everyone off. No idea why ANet thinks this is acceptable.

At the very least I’d like to see the duration of weakness from corrupting might cut down. 10s of weakness is overkill for corrupting a stack or 2 of might, which pretty much everything gives you these days, even before adding in condition duration changes or additional weakness sources. There’s just no reason for it to be that long with the current amount of corrupt skills available.

Can we please get the old map pings back? The new version is much smaller and harder to get others’ attentions with. Not really sure why this was changed in the first place.

Started sapphire, solo queue only. Stopped playing HoT builds after hitting lege because scrapper is boring as kitten, moved to unranked not long after due to queue times. Second half of it or so was done later in the season because I started replaying Fire Emblem Awakening not long after the season started and lost a couple weeks to that.

Leagues are still a joke and need to be scrapped and replaced with a real MMR based system that’ll give decent matches unlike this trash, and rewards need to be decoupled from progression as well. Build diversity is still non-existent thanks to elite specs being power creeped to hell and back, and ANet still shows no signs of addressing that. I’ll probably quit completely when the next expac comes out inevitably with even more power creep that make the current e-specs look tame. Gotta sell them boxes, apparently.

There were plenty of AFKers before leagues were introduced, though. They just didn’t kitten people off quite so much as you didn’t lose progress because of them, and queues were rarely 15+ minutes back then. We’ve been asking for an AFK/leecher report option for over 3 years now, not just since the introduction of leagues.

Just had a ranked game (legendary) where an ele and a war who queued up together Akitten the entire match from start. Literally no idea why this kind of behavior is allowed to continue.

Conquest is just not fun to watch tbh. Streams miss most of the really good plays a lot of the time because they only show one fight at a time, with no real highlighting, and the bigger teamfights are a huge mess anyway with all the particle effects and clones/minions/gyros/etc crammed in. Most of the time I watch the ESL streams its just to see whether anyone is running any interesting team comps or builds.

On the other hand, if I could spectate the matches myself I think I would enjoy it a lot more. Watching top players fight 1v1s/1v2s/2v2s with the classes I play is a lot more entertaining than the constant skipping around the official streams do. If there was ever a system added to replay matches with full spectator control I think the ‘esports’ scene would be in a much better place. There are still a lot of gameplay issues that make the game a pain to watch for most players that need attention, though.

Might be from a Blast Gyro. Those things usually crit around that range. Not sure what they show up in log as though, as I’m not usually the one on the receiving end.

Switch them, but work on updating them to better fit with the race & set in the future.

Bulwark Gyro’s Defense Field is poorly designed. It’s instant cast, follows the player, and is higher radius than nearly every other PBAoE reflect, on a relatively low cooldown. It’s also attached to a skill that is already very strong when traited, meaning there’s no real tradeoff in choosing to take the reflect, as you’re going to be taking the skill anyway, but that’s a separate issue. Compare it to pre-HoT personal reflect skills, the majority of which come with downsides like long channels or self roots, and it should be obvious that the skill is over the top. It either needs a cast time added or the field needs to be stationary to allow for counterplay, or both.

The main issue I see with med kit is that it’s next to impossible to get the #2-5 skills to an ally that needs them when they’re not just standing there AFK. The travel time is too slow and the pickup radius is waaay too small for the reactive usage they seem to be designed for. I’d suggest a 50% projectile speed increase as a start, and the pickup radius increased to 90. It would be nice if they provided their effects in an AoE (max 180 radius-ish) as well to ensure the effect gets to the right target.

I’m not really a fan of the #1 skill though, or of anything that’s designed to just heal/support and nothing else. I’d rather see it changed into something that isn’t an autoattack, or at the very least something that also does some form of damage or debuffing. I’d also like to see the med kit trait changed into something that doesn’t promote sitting in med kit as much as possible.

If you have any of the more expensive dungeon recipes from PvE you can make a bit of money off of them from tokens from the dungeon track, plus salvaging the dungeon exotics for exotic insignias/inscriptions if they have salvageable stat combos (or forging if they don’t). I usually run the arah one because I enjoy throwing kitten in the forge.

The biggest hit to condi engi with the explosives/firearms split was the loss of accelerent-packed turrets imo. With offhand pistol being mandatory for damage you no longer have a good way to keep people off of you, at best you’ll have air blast’s glitchy conal knockback for defensive CC and that’s it. Not that APT would help all that much now anyways, seeing as they nerfed healing turret’s cast time (which of course hurt core engi a lot more than scrapper, which has consistent stability uptime).

I’ve always wanted to see Flamethrower as more of a hybrid oriented option, preferably with some cover conditions like torment or cripple added to detonate flame blast, air blast, and smoke vent. The #1 is still preventing it from being good at damaging condi application on its own though, and I kind of want to see the cast time and number of hits scaled down, and the burning application scaled down to a lesser extent to make it more reliable.

Weirdly enough bomb kit can actually work in a power role right now, thanks to scrapper’s broken defenses giving you enough staying power in teamfights to see the damage actually make a difference. It’s probably still not optimal though, seeing as it competes directly with blast gyro, which provides more sustain & stability as well as a stunbreak and better decap potential. Big ol’ bomb into glue bomb is still hilariously fun in teamfights on small points though.

Explosions definitely does need an overhaul. The adept tier is a joke, the ICD on explosive powder keg/thermobaric is a joke, and siege rounds feels almost as kitten mandatory for mortar use as the old grenadier did for nades. Not that the new grenadier is all that much better anyway. Ditching the falling damage trait and glass cannon, or merging them into minor traits, and then giving us 2 proper adept choices would be a good start, as well as getting rid of the ridiculous ICDs on dodge bombs.

Something definitely needs to be done with our offhand options as well. The new blowtorch when traited is 100% mandatory for condi builds, and the vast majority of the damage on pistol/pistol is in that one single skill, and that needs to change. That combined with hammer being the superior defensive option means shield never sees use, which is pretty sad (I really want to use my flameseeker prophecies). They still haven’t fixed the shield trait to apply its protection after the skill finishes either, which is where it’s needed, not during the kitten block. If that gets changed, pistol damage distribution gets fixed, and hammer gets the nerfs it deserves, shield might see the light of day again. Or I might just be dreaming.

I vote we bring back Minstrel’s amulet and triple all healing values. Oh, and bring back Elixir-infused Bombs. I really want to sit on a point with autoattack on and never die while I watch anime. It would still be more entertaining than watching ESL games, at least.

Idk man, I really hate the new layout.

If this happened we’d still be left with 1 useless offhand in PvP. No one’s going to take OH pistol if it doesn’t provide significant damage pressure. The immob is decent for landing skills and the cover condi are alright, but shield’s defenses are infinitely more useful as they mean you’re not deadweight as soon as you get focused.

I’d still like to see static discharge remove a boon on hit. It would help a little bit against the massive boon spam stuff puts out nowadays, at least.

How long until we get a proper multi-item stat system in PvP? I’m getting pretty tired of this “shuffle the best stat combination around every 3 months” game.

I’d like to see a track with 3-4 black lion claim ticket scraps at the end. Would be a nice way of letting PvPers get skins or at least a bit of gold to get the skins we want. A track with mystic coins in it would also be an interesting way of letting PvPers make gold and balancing out that particular market.

Just keep the same ranked MMR and maybe set the volatility a little higher than normal to start with. Definitely needs to be pre-league matchmaking rules though.

The cast increase really screws up the anti-melee uses of the skill with accelerant packed turrets, which really sucks.

I would very much prefer if matchmaking rules reverted to the pre-league configuration during offseason, with the same MMR kept. If anything it would give people who think their MMR was skewed unfairly by the previous league system a chance to get it back near its true value. Even if that’s not done, having ranked queue open is still 100% preferable to only having a single queue, and it means people who prefer competitive matches don’t have to quit the game for a month and go play something else.

Evan Lesh.3295:

What about Ranked do you enjoy more than Unranked during off-season?

Is it that you prefer climbing a ladder all the time? Or are there other particular reasons.

People in ranked have a completely different mindset than unranked. People go to unranked to test builds and learn new classes, or just to play casually or do daily or whatever. People go to ranked for serious matches, where people are actually trying to win and playing classes/builds they know well. When you get rid of one queue everyone gets forced into the other, and casuals get mad because there are tryhards in their games, and tryhards get mad because there are cleric venomshare bunker thieves on their team trying to 1v1 in roads. It’s just not fun.

no ranked/10

Alekt.5803:

No one noticed that yet?

Revenants would have to actually get downed for people to notice this.

People will probably move from slick shoes to blast gyro when the new gyro bugs get fixed. Toolkit loses a lot of its usefulness when you’re not running enough damaging stats, and gear shield unfortunately isn’t nearly as reliable as it once was thanks to all the unblockable stuff in the meta.

I would have preferred a cooldown increase on Healing Turret instead of a cast time increase. It feels really sluggish now. Rocket Charge nerf wasn’t enough imo, it really needs to go down to 1 leap finisher, and something needs to be done about shock shield and/or thunderclap. As is there’s no point in running any weapon other than hammer, still.

Merendel.7128:

Fermi.2409:

As they explained in their post, reddit’s format is better suited to Q+A sessions then a forum.

The thing I wonder is if reddit’s format is so superior(not an opinion I hold personly) why dont they adopt that format here?

From what I understand, the forum layout/software wasn’t developed by ANet; they decided to purchase a license for existing forum code instead of dedicating dev time to creating their own. Thus they don’t actually have the rights to make changes to the forum architecture. Apparently this is also the reason the search function has been broken for well over a year. Probably a bad decision in hindsight.

Put it on static discharge please ;)

Engi also has toss elixir r which resses in pulses and can be put down prior to being downed, but if it had been that you would have been able to see the AoE indicator and would have noticed the healing immediately. The only other thing I can think of is maybe a teammate using a ranged res skill like illusion of life or glyph of renewal from somewhere you couldn’t see, but pretty much no one runs res skills that aren’t search and rescue in this meta.

They can’t self res with gyro. What probably happened is that he rallied off transferred conditions when a teammate died. There’s been a bug around for ages that allows you to rally off of teammates if you have dealt enough damage to them through conditions you put on an enemy that get transferred. It’s an issue with how damage sources are handled that’s been around for ages.

Either that or someone stealth ressed him, but I think the condi transfer bug is the more likely thing here, since reapers are so popular right now and usually bring 3+ condi transfers.

If they were going to address HoT power creep, they would have done it already. It’s been half a year now and they’ve shown no signs of moving to fix it, or even acknowledging the problem. It’s time to accept that it isn’t going to happen, and move on to other games. It really does suck to see so much potential wasted though.

Inb4 stab revert is WvW-only

Reworking skyhammer, probably. Maybe spirit watch as well.

I still think it’s hilarious how ANet made quickness not affect resses to cut down on ressing cheese, only to turn right around and add the cheesiest res skill yet.

Didn’t GW1 have this like 8 years ago?

This festival nature is a huge turnoff for me. I don’t want to get too into a game mode that’s going to disappear after a few days anyway. I’d be much more inclined to play it if I could do so at my own pace.

The period just before the trait system rework was my favorite. Most classes had multiple builds that were viable in high-tier, which was fun.

mods have hidden threads with devposts in them before, so I can’t say I did notsee this coming tbh

Please leave it in so we can play it at our own paces…

You really need to do something about your camera control. It’s really jerky, especially vertical movement, and you seem to be spending more time looking at the grass growing than at the enemies you should be looking at because of it. I don’t know if it’s the rotational speed or your mouse acceleration or what, but changing some settings could definitely help. You could really benefit from having a key bound to ‘look behind’, as well as one for ‘about face’ which really helps with phase retreat.

You should probably look into rearranging your keybinds and maybe changing many of them to use modifier keys like shift. More keybinds and less clicking means your hand has more time for accurate camera control as well. I also noticed you weren’t making good use of tab targeting— rebind that if necessary, targeting is critical in this game for most professions, and being able to change targets immediately can make a huge difference in a teamfight.

Rotations: Multiple times that game you went to back up teammates that already outnumbered the enemy. Don’t do that. Seriously. 3v1s and 4v2s are a complete waste of your time. Instead you can either decap or pressure the third point (be wary of respawns and ready to get out though), or move into a better position to watch the movements of enemy respawns. By +2ing the enemy you’re only giving them free decaps on points you worked hard to get. Your build also seemed fairly slow outside of blink/phase retreat, so you should leave the +1s to faster builds when possible. You spent way too much time outside the points when you fought, when you could have been more effective closer in, taking more pressure off the rest of your team.

Consider bringing portal. It is a godsend in conquest, letting you effectively check multiple points at once, and giving you and your team an out if you need one. Check mesmer guides on it to learn how to use it properly in conquest if necessary.

I don’t play mesmer, so I can’t speak too much for profession-specific things. Your shatters did seem a little lackluster though. I think one of the big strengths of the current condi chrono is the auto resummon on phantasms after the first shatter, which can bring huge burst pressure if used correctly. You were also rarely near enough to hit anything with the PBAoE portion. Consider watching videos on burst rotation from top players and practice that.

Being able to play on both regions is nice as well.

My vote goes to “Salt Mining Legend”.

Balance won’t be taken seriously until they find a way to put it in the gemstore.

I remember a time when I used to look at the weapons and any signets or other utilities that showed up on the bars of my teammates to guess what they were running before the match started. Nowadays you just look at the professions on the scoreboard…

Many people feel disheartened when issues they feel strongly about go without any sort okittennowledgement from developers. Whether or not the issue gets fixed or changed 6 months down the road, not getting any response on major issue is a huge turnoff. Especially when those issues get large threads with hundreds of responses which stay on the front page of the forums for months. Many amazing suggestions are also seemingly ignored. This makes players feel that their feedback isn’t getting read, and that there’s no point to posting on the official forums.

It would be great to hear a developer’s stance on an important issue or popular suggestion for once, even if it’s to say why certain changes can’t happen. Some communication is definitely preferable to no communication. Right now it feels like the only real communication out of ANet comes in short bursts every 2-3 months, like the reddit AMA, after which dev responses will only be found sparingly on fluff threads that are hardly related to GW2.