Guild Wars 2

This is true. I have a thief, but my main is a Ranger, and it’s the same thing with people complaining about the shortbow #1. The truth is, Rangers use it so much because it’s the only damaging skill on the weapon.

I think that, for all intentions to make the game more skill based by limiting abilities to situational ones, they’ve actually created combat which is somewhat boring and repetitive. I’ve found this true most of all on my thief, where it really is mainly about spamming that one damaging ability. At least on the ranger there is some level of moving around and positioning to try to keep it interesting.

On the flip side, there are classes like Engineers and Elementalists with an insane amount of options and which just feel more interesting to play.

It does seem to work for a very specific time window after the harpy event there. I’d say about 3 – 5 minutes after the event completed, the catapault became selectable for me. Given that it didn’t work before the event or otherwise until that time, I’d have to assume it stops working at some point until the event comes round again.

displacedTitan.6897:

Skolops.2604:

Arcane.4950:

lol “the game is dying”

No, its not.

It’s less healthy in terms of player activity than a certain other heavily hyped game was at 3 weeks in, and that didn’t turn out to well. There are already a lot of zones without enough people in them to complete the events, even during peak hours. It certainly doesn’t look good, which as much as I have issue with the game’s PvP I am still disappointed by, because I do think its a fun game that just needs some tweaking.

I just rerolled and the newbie zones are still full of people as are the high level zones. So unless there is a gap of people playing around 40-70 then you are just talking out of yourkitten

I spent about 10 hours yesterday in Diessa Plateau, Wayfarer Foothills, and Snowden Drifts, and I may have seen 6 people.

I’d also like to see damage totals at the end up the game. This was always something fun for me to look forward to, so as to see how well I did in that aspect of the game. I already know how well I did in the objective aspect of the game, because that’s easy to recognize just by doing it – and measurement systems are notoriously bad at tracking how well a player fared in terms of objectives (this game is a perfect example) while tracking something basic like damage numbers works fine.

Honestly, it also helps people to evaluate themselves and see where they need improvement. Once again, evaluating objective play is doable without some kind of help from the game, but part of playing even an objective based map is putting out damage/support, and if I could see these numbers at the end I could evaluate whether or not I’m doing well in these areas so as to improve my game.

So far the consensus seems to be, nothing.

Arcane.4950:

lol “the game is dying”

No, its not.

It’s less healthy in terms of player activity than a certain other heavily hyped game was at 3 weeks in, and that didn’t turn out to well. There are already a lot of zones without enough people in them to complete the events, even during peak hours. It certainly doesn’t look good, which as much as I have issue with the game’s PvP I am still disappointed by, because I do think its a fun game that just needs some tweaking.

Hmm, the player launching feature just randomly kicked in so its possible, at least for that one shot. Still can’t talk to the NPC, however.

Still unable to complete the vista with the cow launcher after the update.

Archadian.5024:

A nicer looking UI would be nice… but it’s less than a month after launch, let’s let them do their thing for a bit…

I will never understand how it came to be that “it’s only just launched” became an acceptable reason for not having features. If it’s launched, then it should be ready. That doesn’t mean tweaks can’t be made, balancing, new features added, etc… but it should be a finished product.

It’s like buying Super Mario Brothers and finding out there was no Luigi, but “the game just came out so it’s ok.”

This game needs MORE objective based play and LESS things to encourage deathmatching, short of a deathmatch specific map.

Silly question, but where do these kinds of things get posted when they are put up anyways?

Leeto.1570:

if anet listens to forum community. The thing is that all competent players are actually in game and enjoying it, but only bad players come to forums and whine instead of learning to play.
Anet gotta be politcorrect so they cant say this, but i can: “If something seems totally OP to you then your bad, and you should feel bad”
Im pvping for years and i play with mentality that everything is my fault. Dont blame classes, dont blame mechanics, blame yourself and improve instead of sitting on your phat * and trying to find excuse why you lost.
And btw even tho anet says that they read all your opinions etc. etc. actually they dont because if they would listen to players who have no idea what their doing then this game would get more unbalanced and result in even more whining.

//Leeto – Asura Necromancer

This is what every “no, the PvP is fine, you’re just bad” player said in TOR, and yet when all of these “bad” players were not listened to, the PvP in that game slowly but surely started to die.

… and here’s the thing: I was one of the people telling them this stuff. I thought the PvP was good, and that they just had no idea what they were talking about half the time. In the end, whether I was right or wrong, the PvP in that game took a serious hit.

The fact of the matter is that from the example of that game and countless, countless others, we know what it’s just not true that “most people are playing the game having fun and only some come to the forums to complain.” Rather, the forums show a reasonably good sample of the overall community, and if that reasonably good sample says they’re not enjoying something, then we see people in the greater community bit by bit move on to other things.

I think the PvP in this game has great potential but needs to be fixed here and there. You might think its fine. In the end, it doesn’t really matter what we think. What matters is that there are a lot of people not having fun with it, and in the end that will kill the game’s PvP if those people are just ignored – even if they are wrong.

I can at least live with this. It’s all the medium armor clipping on female characters which is just flat out irritating.

Rasstavad.5684:

Keltic.9526:

I have never had this zergfest issue. If you play smart and get good you don’t need to stick with the group. It is actually possible to win 2v1’s and easily win 1v1’s. Just because you are repetively dying is not the games fault because I can assure you that there are people on the same server as you who are doing well.

Get good, start carrying, have some patience and you will start to realise that it is actually a lot of fun.

People zerg because it’s the fastest way to get points… and the more people play the more they realize that in 8v8 there is really no reason to do anything else. Going solo is great fun… when the other team is zerging you get to back cap nodes and never see any combat (what fun! oh my!) or you run into the zerg and get either insta-ganked or have to run away with your tail between your legs.

Yes, every few games you can run around solo and find some good fights. But more often than not, in 8v8 (especially past rank 10), all you see are big balls of red roving the maps.

They simply need to make sPvP 5v5 like tourneys. Give people are reason to practice real strats and a reason other than glory to do randoms.

I’ve only ever seen zergging in all of the 5v5s I’ve played, either. I think there may have been one game out of all those I’ve played in either format where I actually saw someone playing point defense, and ironically enough I think it was an 8v8.

Tallman.5193

Please give me an example in a 5v5 tournament scenario in which you were legitimately stunlocked from 100% to death. I’m actually very curious.
If the enemy team is focusing so hard on CCing you, why hasn’t your team burned the hell out of one of them? Getting chain CC’d til death doesn’t mean your out of the fight – you get downed. Any team that’s worthwhile will ensure that you get back up.
Honestly, chain stuns aren’t that big of a part in GW2. Spiking and focus firing? Absolutely. A knockdown followed up by a stun? Sure. But chain stunning from 100 to 0? Not really, no. Easily mitigated by stunbreaker+dodge and some competent team support.
If this has legitimately happened to you on several occasions please explain to me how it was done. I’m very curious to see how they did this without running a horribly gimmicky setup in tournament play.
The only way I can see this being done legitimately is via Moa Morph, which is absurdly OP.

I’m not going to try to explain a situation to you. What would I say that goes beyond what I’ve already said? Fine, here’s an example.

I was on my Ranger. I had about 1900 – 2000 toughness and 18/19kish HP. I had several condition removers and a stunbreak and everything was going fine. I was at 85 – 90% HP and not taking any fire. All of a sudden a thief immobilized me. Given that as a Ranger I have no immobilize break and my condition removal was on cooldown from wiping some huge amount of bleeds or something, I couldn’t do anything as the thief and two other players killed me over the course of at most 1.5 seconds.

This is just one example of something I’ve seen countless times and been on both sides of, and it’s honestly not even necessary to give an example. I mean, what more is there to it then, “2 people stunned me, my defense was on cooldown?” It’s not a hard scenario to envision.

This is the general issue… its not that hard to stunlock a single person in a team fight because, if their defensive skills are on cooldown, there’s nothing they can do, and with 2 or 3 people on you, even if you have every defensive cooldown up they can probably still chain you because 2 or 3 people have more stuns/control effects than one person can have escapes. This is why, as I said, other games have had DR or other systems.

The only real solution is team support, but in its current state the most supportive of builds can’t really do much to protect a person through this kind of thing and people just die too quickly to spike damage for “getting them off you” to be all that effective.

robbiebp.9475

There’s no issue with the stunlocks. They’re prettykittenmandatory in tournament pvp, where people build survivable.

Having a survivable build doesn’t mean a darn when you’re stunlocked. I’ve been stunlocked in survivable builds and I last only marginally longer, and I’ve killed people in tanky builds through stunlock without having to put in all that many more shots.

Of course I’m just one person and I’m neither the best nor the worst player out there. I’m just using my experience as an example.

Yes, this needs to be fixed. It seems pretty random when the forum tools disappear, but it makes replying, quoting, etc. very difficult.

If you want the game to have a future, you’d better hope ANet DOES listen to the majority. I can understand not wanting the game dumbed down – I wouldn’t want that either. At the same time, when a large number of your users are not having fun or have big problems with the way the game is working, you will eventually lose them.

It’s easy to brush the posts off as a “forum minority,” but experience shows that its really not. In other games with this kind of complaining on the forums, I and others did the same thing and figured there was nothing to worry about because it was only a select group who were overrepresented on the forums because, as we’d say, “all the masses who like the game are off actually playing it, so we don’t see them on the forums as much.” When game populations started dropping, we realized that it wasn’t just some small forum crowd.

I really see a huge core of goodness in the game, which is why I play it. The PvE experience is essentially second to none, and its keeping me playing – and this is coming from a guy who isn’t a big fan of PvE in MMOs. If that core can be brought out and the much culled off from PvP, it will be great. Right now, there’s a reason a lot of folks are unhappy and it does need to get some attention sooner rather than later.

Agreed. I’ve complained about CC and burst damage a lot on these forums, but I’m willing to put that aside for the time being and I recognize that not everybody agrees.

What it seems that most everyone does agree on is that the overall “clarity” or organization, for lack of better terms, in PvP is really setting this game back by leaps and bounds, and the two biggest culprits seem to be

1) Pets and pets everywhere

2) Flashy animations – especially for AoEs – which make it hard to see what’s going on

Far from making this game more about skill, these items get in the way of skill based play because they actually make it, at times, impossible to see what’s going on. Please understand – I don’t mean here that they can make it difficult to see what’s going on and that those of us with greater awareness and skill in visual recognition will be better at reading it. Rather, I mean that at times they actually make it *impossible * to know what’s going on because the pets/particle animations actually get in the way of what we would need to see to actually read and react to the battlefield.

Anguloke.2706:

Skolops.2604:

I hope the devs are also aware of the similar problems with ambient audio, sound/weapon effects, and character status dialouge (“I can outrun a centaur,” etc.)!

Yeah I noticed this with the ambient also when loading into new zones. The ambient sound problem has been occurring since release. I wrote that of as a loading problem.

The cut scene issue is new starting just this last week for me.

My ambient audio/effects were working fine until the 9/14 patch. I know others have reported the same.

keroksi.3076:

I hate to grind for gear and i love this idea of being able to just jump in and start playing.

BUT i find it hardly any fun to play this game cause of the following reasons:

1. the game has more pets/minions/illusions etc. than players.

2. roll a 5man team of asuras and name them alike. You cant tell the class by looking at one of them.

3. handful of builds that kill you in 2 seconds no matter what you are playing.

4. the fact that your camera is trying to peak into your @%# 50% of the time,
cause of the small areas you are forced to fight in.

5. the list would be endless but i think there is enough already to make my point.

Now picture a typical fight scene, say 3v3 on a point where 2 are mesmers with those lovely illusions
and phantasms and a thief with thiefs guild + ambush and lets also throw in some random rockdogs.
There you are standing trying to keep the camera well positioned and keep
a track what class stands and where and what is the real mesmer while trying to do something
constructive yourself too.
Your whole screen is full of rainbow colors flying everywhere and then it happens, the thief jumps on you
with haste and all other possible cd’s he got and your dead 1sek later.

I believe that there is that 3% of the community who can actually see that little asura emotion
where he loads that haste or bullscharge and knows its coming to him.
But that really doesnt comfort me that much.

So my opinion is that the PVP at its current state is really far from “FUN”.

You’re quite correct, but what you’ll very likely get is a series of responses telling you that this is all a matter of skill and that you just need to improve, when they cannot even do it themselves and are talking, not from experience, but rather from a place of wanting to try to find a way to defend the game in its current state.

The irony is that they’re doing the game a huge disservice. This game right now is not all that it could be, and I think all that it could be is really pretty good. If it’s ever going to get there, though, we need people to start looking honestly at its weaknesses and start working towards/pushing for/hoping for improvements.

Hammerheart.1426:

If you have the attitude that there is nothing to gain, you are already starting this game off on the wrong foot.

Go do tournament pvp matches with your guild, win, and then come back and tell me you aren’t having any fun.

The point of pvp in this game is not about “how can I impress people as an individual?”

It’s, “how can I best serve my team so we win?”

If you just log in and hit PLAY NOW of course you are going to get bored and see no inherent value (although the pure aesthetic armor appeals to me a great deal).

There is no silly arena rating here, no item values, no big banner that says “IM GREAT”, its all about your team.

Here’s the HUGE problem that you (and many – I don’t want to pick on you alone) are missing:

some people don’t want to have to play the game “hardcore” to have fun. Look, in the past I was in high end PvP guilds who were consistently near the top of our server. I enjoyed it, and I would like to eventually find and get involved with such a thing in this game, if the PvP reaches a point where I think it’s balanced/good/fun/etc.

At the same time, I also liked just joining a match solo or with a guildmate or friend, and I also reached a point where I wanted to take a break from the stress involved in doing high level matches all the time and play more casually. This was always an option.

It’s really not in this game, and the fact that every time someone complains about PvP balance, mechanics, or anything else about PvP the response from folks is “go play some organized tournaments it isn’t like that in there” is as good a proof as any.

It’s great to have this option available, but if a more balanced, fun, and workable option for casual PvP isn’t brought into this game, it’s not going to survive, because a few high end guilds doing tournaments is only going to provide so much activity. This game, like any, needs to thrive on the masses.

So again, I’m not saying its bad that such high end play is rewarded or has its own place, but if the only thing that we can tell people who don’t like the state of PvP is that they should go play some super organized tournaments games, then we have a problem.

metaphorm.6904:

this is one of the hardest parts of the learning curve in my opinion. some builds really do make alot of summoned minions and being able to target the player in the middle of all that mess requires practice.

That’s all true, but it really does go beyond skill and learning curve. It’s just not enjoyable to look at or play either against or with all of these NPCs running around, even if its not hard for someone to do it. For example, I don’t really have problems with necro minions, but I still hate playing in games with minion specced necros because it just looks stupid and I know there’s AI playing a role in what is supposed to be a PvP match.

Gigawatt.5217:

There are a wide variety of stun breakers, some are better for team fights and self peeling then others.

Necro Ghost Walk give you swiftness and the ability to juke with the optional return component, Engi Rocket Boots fires you a great distance behind yourself, Mesmer Decoy gives you instant stealth and yet another clone to throw off your opponents.

You shouldn’t have any trouble escaping focus if you’re running the proper defensive abilities on your bar.

And no DR is not needed or wanted in this game, it’s far to “gamey” as a mechanic that goes on completely behind the scenes and takes away from the focus on what is happening on the screen. And also makes abilities preform less than there tooltip states under certain conditions which is less straight forward for spectators and just makes less sense in general.

There are tons of stun breakers, which is why in 1 v 1s everything works out (most of the time. Some professions are still a bit lacking in the stun break and especially in the immobilize break department, while still others have vastly more than most).

In team fights, its a different story because any two people by the very nature of game balance can outstun any one person’s stun removals. That’s why other games have had DR or other systems to manage this problem. Please note something very important: its not that every other game has had these because they all just decided to, but because they’ve proven necessary to maintain a sound balance. What it comes down to is that when you don’t have these mechanics or when they’re not deemed to be implemented well, players become frustrated and quit. It will happen here if something isn’t done.

Candiru.5279:

I would love to see a answer/statement of Anet on this topic…because many ppl complain about this lately

It’s true… I think its the biggest problem with the PvP in this game right now. Of course, that’s an opinion. What’s not really an opinion is that of all the discussion on the various forums for this game right now, its the one item which is usually agreed on by the vast majority of respondents.

Just mentioning it in case its still under the radar.

Many of the armors which seemed to work fine on launch started clipping about a week in. Most often, its in the hip area on female human/norn characters which shows through the chestpiece. Some do it in the chest area as well.

I’ve seen this with multiple body types. The only real workaround at this point is to transmute the basic rawhide pants onto whatever higher level pants you’d like to use, as this particular set generally doesn’t present problems, though it does on occasion. That said, I’ve also found that removing the pants causes the bare hips to clip through on many of these medium chestpieces.

I hope the devs are also aware of the similar problems with ambient audio, sound/weapon effects, and character status dialouge (“I can outrun a centaur,” etc.)!

Krilce.7864:

That is why you should use call target function, by pressing ctrl+T. Then just press T, and voila, you are on the target you previously marked. All PvP teams are using this, as it is the easiest way to focus on someone, and burst hell out of him, without the need of mouse clicking all over your screen. Unfortunately, when stealthed, mark is removed, but you can place it again, once your target gets out of stealth mode, or, you could just change your target to next defenseless guy, and so on. That’s how it works in tPvP. On the other hand, most people don’t even know about this function, so there should be some kind of tutorial implemented, which covers this thing, as it is crucial in team fights.

I know about and use this function, but it only helps to some small degree. You’ve already pointed out the problem with stealth. There is also the fact that in a giant 15v15 or 20v18 or 25v25 (which was originally a 5v5), it can be – not just difficult as a matter of skill, but – impossible to target a given player without a few seconds delay with all of the mess going on around him, and those few seconds make all the difference in the world. It’s also a huge problem for your team to assist on him, because the melee players are stuck wading through all of the NPCs to get to your target, and ranged players are constantly having their projectiles blocked by them.

That said, the issue is once again not whether its easy or hard to deal with these situations, but that it just looks stupid, looks chaotic, and involves a bunch of AIs factoring into what is supposed to be about the guys behind the keyboards.

rom.9726:

I’m sorry, but if you wouldn’t stun the NPCs then I don’t know what to tell you. Anytime I’ve ever tried, those NPCs die pretty much instantly. As a thief, moreover, you should have had them immobilized the entire time.

read the edits. I know what I’m doing. Obviously I can immobilize them the whole time cause they are just dumb NPCS, but to handicap myself I am setting up a controlled experiment. People ITT are complaining they have no way of stopping burst. These NPCS proved them wrong.

Ortiz: You often see PW and Heartseeker hate in the same sentence.

You’re missing the point, though. If you’re not immobilizing them, then you’re not doing the very thing which is what’s causing people to be unable to stop their – and anyone elses’ – burst.

Heck, I can dodge a heartseeker, a pistol whip, 100 blades, or anything else. The problem is when the thief comes up and pops his venom to basically immobilize me for the duration of the attack. Even if I bring 2 things which can break immobilize (something that’s very hard to do for several classes), I still can’t escape.

For the record, I really don’t tend to have problems with thieves and typically beat them 1 v 1. It’s in team fights where these kinds of things happen.

rom.9726:

I just went into the mists to play with my thief a bit. I practiced against the NPC classes in the mists. All of them except the elementalist and the engineer DODGED ROLLED to evade or blocked/countered my pistolwhip combo on several occasions. Do I need to make a video to prove it? NPCs were able to do this, that means you folks can to.

What you don’t like is the QUICKNESS ability. Haste grants me quickness, it also procs off of a trait when I crit, and a sigil on my MH weapon. It means I attack twice as fast. Warriors, Mesmers (10sec quickness AOE Elite HELLO??), Rangers, Engineers all have this, maybe more not sure, all are able to access it via sigils. What happens with pistol whip is my first attack in the combo is a daze when i’m stealthed, then pistol whips first chain attack is also a daze, leading to multiple stuns. HOWEVER, the wind up in PW is extreme. I mean, you can see it coming from a mile away.

Heartseeker is still a bit broken. The fact it is a gap closer is what really makes it extremely strong, and easy to use. Thieves just have to target you and bam spam 2 and they do extreme dmg. It’s not a broken skill, and the adjustment was a good step. Damage over 50% might still need to be looked at and the gap closer frankly needs to go.

Hundred blades CD is a lil low, but honestly this one is really easy to avoid.

Sorry guys, I really feel this is a combination of a L2P issue and the fact that some classes are still very unbalanced/broken and HAVE NO BUILD DIVERSITY. Combine that with 8v8 pubstomp zerg mentality and you have a lot of frustrating situations. I advise you to play more 5v5 tournies and you will see less burst and more sustain. The current meta is still very Condi heavy so take removal.

edit: maybe after 2 heartseekers the initiative cost goes up? after 4 it increases again?

I’m sorry, but if you wouldn’t stun the NPCs then I don’t know what to tell you. Anytime I’ve ever tried, those NPCs die pretty much instantly. As a thief, moreover, you should have had them immobilized the entire time.

Shukran.4851:

i have seen a stream of an ele with 14 (or 16?) thousand hp roaming and destroying every single opponent all around the map. maybe 2.5k armor. and he could tank even in 2v1. am i mad? maybe. but if you are skilled there is nothing you can’t do with your class.

If he’s 1v2ing it’s almost certainly more a matter of how awful his opponents were than how effective his class could be.

Babypuke.2907:

^IDK if that’s really the attitude we should be approaching this with (“oh if you can’t handle it stick to lower brackets”). Because even in a LARGE WoW battleground I can easily read the fights.

Sure part of that is based on my long-standing experience, but a lot of it has to do with good, easily recognizable animation and spell design (which it has always done a good job with). Abilities in GW2 are simply more dynamic for the most part than the ones in WoW, but that shouldn’t have to mean that the battlefield has to be so “dirty”. In GW2 I only have like a third of the amount of active keybind/abilities (at a time) that I’d have in WoW, so while the abilities may be more complex, there are still less of them… so I would assume that this issue would sort of cancel itself out a little better. But so far it hasn’t.

I have to say though that much of this could be remedied by simply having a better way to separate pets/pet bars and pet targeting from player bars and player targeting. I expect that WvWvW is going to be chaotic, but shouldn’t structured PvP feel just a little more… structured?

No question. 5v5s in this game are incredibly more hectic and messy than 8v8s or even larger group events in other games. Now that I think about it, I remember some very large scale open world PvP in another game with 50+ players on the field, and it looked a heck of a lot cleaner and allowed for a heck of a lot more solid decision making than many 5v5s here.

It’s the pets and effects.

Pete.6037:

Agreed with one of the posters above… you need to learn to play.

Someone said 15 “ridiculous” things to kill.

Firstly, memser clones. They do crap damage, and have crap health. Any class who’s traited for burst can kill it in 1-3 hits.

Secondly, Necro Pets. Half the time they don’t attack, and easily get killed by AoE. A minion traited necro without the minions is almost useless.

Thief Elite – Yeah, I don’t like this either, but seeing as how it says “thief” above their head, it’s easy to spot who the real thief is.

The issue isn’t about how easy or difficult it is to defeat players using these builds.

The issue is how the clutter up the battlefield, make it chaotic, make tab targeting worthless and click targeting hit or miss, cause so much of what’s going on in a PvP match to be dependent on AI, etc. etc. etc.

Otiz.3259:

I don’t know if this is only a Elementalist problem (could be, we seem squishy) but I seriously think that the burst damage atm. is too much at least for my class.

You could argue that ‘’well im a glass cannon’’ but I cant dish out that much damage. As a condition spec you are pretty strong over time, but you’ll be dead long before you see that happen (in many cases).

I don’t wanna sound like a whine, I have a lot of pvp experience, and the 1st thing I did was to spend a lot of hours on trying different builds and so on and so forth, but even if I went highly defensive I could still be bursted quite fast, and I’d be lacking any real offensive abilities to compete.

There’s no question you’re correct. People with 2000 toughness and 25k HP are getting bursted only slightly less quickly than glass cannons right now.

Heck, I’ve played builds that had great survivability, 2 or 3 defensive utility skills, etc., and found that not only could I be bursted down just as fast as in a glass cannon version, but I could also burst other people down in silly amounts of time despite focusing so heavily on defense in my build.

Babypuke.2907:

Well in regards to the whole getting countered and being helpless thing, the only way around that right now is to have VERY good teamwork. Which is good in a way but also sucks because it’s nice to be able to at least somewhat deal with the problem on the fly by yourself if you have to by outplaying your counter, there may be a lot of really short duration long cooldown stuns and ccs going around, and they may be annoying or too powerful, but I still want longer duration CCs with less RNG involved, because without that reliability you cannot guarantee that you’re going to even be able to hold your own against a soft counter when the time comes, and hard counters just need to go. More on the fly options and more flexible builds = the death of hard counters, works every time in any MMO that has ever taken the time to figure that out (even if it’s short-lived).

It’s generally unlikely that people are going to be able to accurately chain a lot of these short CCs together atm (espeically with some of the bugginess and server lag / slight instability issues), but since that is still possible and since GW2 does have high burst I would hope that if they DID shift crowd control to a more efficient style that they would then also cause most CCs to break after a reasonable damage threshold.

I was commenting on this in another topic: yes the only way to play well at this stage in the game is with very high levels of team coordination. That’s all well and good and it’s good that such kinds of play has a place, but its very bad for the life of the game, which needs to be enjoyable for folks – from baddies to top skilled players – to solo que or go with a friend and be able to enjoy the experience. Tournaments of top guilds is great, but it won’t keep the PvP going alone.

Gelrod.1295:

Skolops.2604:

Gelrod, even if I grant you that team play can mitigate CCs, there are a few problems with that. I think the biggest practical one is that, right now, its vastly more efficient for teammates to spend their efforts bursting down the enemy rather than saving you while you’re CCed. A tweak to burst damage, time-to-kill, or something would make a big difference.

That said, I think that you’re correct: the game works much better with very organized team play, and I think this is actually a problem. Now don’t get me wrong: I don’t think its a problem because organized team play is bad – its not, and I’m glad that the game does reward it. At the same time, a game which can only really be enjoyed while at such a high level of team play isn’t going to survive very long. A lot of people play organized tournaments, its true, but the vast majority of people just want to be able to hop into a game either solo or with a friend and be able to have fun. That’s not really possible currently.

A game like StarCraft 2 is balanced around the highest level play, and this is good for the most part, because its those best of the best players who can really do with each race everything that’s possible. At the same time, there is also that huge majority of players who want to play the game and aren’t at that skill level. Now, there was a pretty lengthy period when the Terran race was faring very poorly against the other two at all but the highest levels – where it was doing alright, for the most part. When you’re the among the best in the world with 200 or 300 APM, Terran could be played effectively, but for the average Joe with 50 – 100 APM, it couldn’t be. What we saw, ultimately, was that the number of Terran players below the highest levels dropped dramatically during this period. Nobody wanted to play the race at those lower and middle levels because it was just not fun, even though it was ok at higher levels.

The same is going to be true of the PvP in this game if nothing is done. While I certainly think rewarding high level team play is good, it needs to be (and CAN be) done in such a way that it doesn’t make anyone without a super organized and skilled team have a hard time finding any enjoyment in it. Look, you or someone else may say, “oh the PvP in that game doesn’t take skill like in this one,” but I know for sure that in TOR, very organized high level team play was rewarded greatly and was almost a whole other game, but it was also possible to just jump into a game with a random 7 other people and have fun.

If the PvP in this game is going to survive, then that kind of dynamic really needs to be brought in somehow.

Of course you are right about that. The game should both have a high skill cap but still be playable for a casual player without resulting in frustration.
But I don’t see, that Chain-CC is a huge problem for that: If a “random casual group” fights another “random casual group” both teams will have problem countering chain-cc, thats right… but both teams will have problems setting up chain cc at the same time, as that usually needs some coordination to be effective. That means, the more coordination a team has, the better it uses cc and at the same time counters cc.
That being said I think, the cc-system works pretty good, when it comes to “high skill cap but still playable for casual player without resulting in frustration”.

I disagree completely. Two monkeys with labotamies can chain stun a guy. It’s happened in every game that’s ever had CC, and it’s no different here. In fact, in other games with their diminishing returns/resolve/whatever system, the joke was on the two baddies who chain stunned the guy back to back and gave him CC immunity. In this game, there’s nothing but suffering for the CCed player while even the most terrible of players can feel (and be!) successful mashing their buttons.

It’s ultimately a problem of offense being too accessible, and defense not being accessible enough.

Milo,

I don’t think its that simple… its not an issue of players’ skill level exactly. The problem is that high level team play isn’t required by any means to put out strong offense. It is required for even moderate defense, though.

It’s easy for two random, uncoordinated players to chain-CC some poor fellow into death, but the kinds of coordination it takes to counter that is pretty up there. This means that introducing a ranking system will do nothing to limit or eliminate all of the things from low and mid level play that make the game less fun or even outright infuriating. In fact, it can only make things worse by taking any players good enough to even begin to improve defense at these levels and putting them in some other bracket.

rom.9726:

quick add, I will say I think eles are one of the weakest classes in the game right now if you don’t build in a particular way and they need some more love. But should a thief/war be able to kill a clothie like that if they catch them? My answer is yes.

No profession should be able to kill any other in 5 seconds. It’s just silly and goes against not only the spirit of PvP in general, but also so many of the kinds of things that ANet claimed they held dear when designing this game’s PvP.

kittenon.8572:

Problem is the more i play the most obvious it becomes that the game was designed with mostly pve in mind.

It certainly seems that way, which is really amazing given how much this was hyped by the PvP community as being designed almost entirely for PvP.

It’s not that hard to be chain stunned, and its not that hard to chain stun someone else. I’ve been on both ends. In fact, because of the way that some controlling effects stack in duration, its incredibly easy to keep someone CCed for a long time.

Yes, there is stability, but anyone who is worth his salt is going to wait until he sees a stability boon expire before using a CC on his enemy, knowing that he can’t have stability again for a long time. Stun breaks work great one on one, but in a 3v3 or a 5v5 when you have multiple persons using CC on a single person, they run out very quickly, and contrary to what some may claim, you can still as a team have more than enough left over to do it to other players after the first one.

Gelrod, even if I grant you that team play can mitigate CCs, there are a few problems with that. I think the biggest practical one is that, right now, its vastly more efficient for teammates to spend their efforts bursting down the enemy rather than saving you while you’re CCed. A tweak to burst damage, time-to-kill, or something would make a big difference.

That said, I think that you’re correct: the game works much better with very organized team play, and I think this is actually a problem. Now don’t get me wrong: I don’t think its a problem because organized team play is bad – its not, and I’m glad that the game does reward it. At the same time, a game which can only really be enjoyed while at such a high level of team play isn’t going to survive very long. A lot of people play organized tournaments, its true, but the vast majority of people just want to be able to hop into a game either solo or with a friend and be able to have fun. That’s not really possible currently.

A game like StarCraft 2 is balanced around the highest level play, and this is good for the most part, because its those best of the best players who can really do with each race everything that’s possible. At the same time, there is also that huge majority of players who want to play the game and aren’t at that skill level. Now, there was a pretty lengthy period when the Terran race was faring very poorly against the other two at all but the highest levels – where it was doing alright, for the most part. When you’re the among the best in the world with 200 or 300 APM, Terran could be played effectively, but for the average Joe with 50 – 100 APM, it couldn’t be. What we saw, ultimately, was that the number of Terran players below the highest levels dropped dramatically during this period. Nobody wanted to play the race at those lower and middle levels because it was just not fun, even though it was ok at higher levels.

The same is going to be true of the PvP in this game if nothing is done. While I certainly think rewarding high level team play is good, it needs to be (and CAN be) done in such a way that it doesn’t make anyone without a super organized and skilled team have a hard time finding any enjoyment in it. Look, you or someone else may say, “oh the PvP in that game doesn’t take skill like in this one,” but I know for sure that in TOR, very organized high level team play was rewarded greatly and was almost a whole other game, but it was also possible to just jump into a game with a random 7 other people and have fun.

If the PvP in this game is going to survive, then that kind of dynamic really needs to be brought in somehow.

Babypuke.2907:

Okay a lot of what you’re saying is pretty true, thieves have too much in general, guardians need to die easier (maybe shift some of their self-healing to group healing utility so they aren’t one-man armies but rather a support class) , they tried too hard on water combat (plus it’s buggy) and mesmers are ridiculous.

And may I add as someone who LOVES many of the mesmer abilities I HATE the fact that in order to be as competitive as possible I have to build for almost complete reliance on phantasms and clones. I don’t like pet classes (and I hate hunting for enemy mesmers in a crowd of NEVER ENDING CLONES too), but I love a lot of the mesmers offensive and group utility, major dilemma for me here… not allowing for much in the way of balanced playstyle customization.

But if you think GW2 has the most CC of any game you’ve ever played IDK what to tell you. For the most part all of the ACTUAL full control abilities that are powerful enough to be compared to something along the lines of WoW are incredibly short duration for quite long cooldowns. I mean the mesmer’s only spvp utility stun that I can think of is a 2 second stun which does NO damage and has a 45 second cooldown. That’s nothing compared to most MMO’s.

You’re mistaken on the CC, and here’s why.

1. The damage you can take while in one of the short CCs in this game is insanely more than what you an take while under a longer CC in other games

1. Because there’s no diminishing returns or other mitigation system (TOR had resolve, etc.), you can have all of those short little CCs chained, even if not perfectly consecutively, like you can in no other game.

My experience has been similar to the OPs. As I’ve said before, I might be the only person who thought the CC in TOR was perfectly fine, and I’m also not one to scream “broken” whenever something is challenging or irritating. The CC in that game is one example: instead of being upset, I learned how it worked and, having done so, had no issue with it. I’ve taken the same approach in this game, but in the end I just have to conclude that it really truly is something in need of attention.

Vlaid.5790:

Thief burst+mobility+elusiveness
Warrior knockdown+burst
Mesmers general power and Moa
Guardians that take a minute to kill with 4~ people wailing on them
Sometimes I feel like this game has the most CC of any game I’ve ever played. Seriously needs some kind of diminishing returns or much stronger/more frequent CC breakers/immunity utilities.
Autobalancing onto the losing team
A lot of abilities plain functioning in really poor ways (for example: rifle butt having a tiny hit box that doesn’t work a lot of the time with even a fraction of lag while they are moving).
Only having one gametype for PVP
Downed state delays and the way only the person who mashed F up in melee gets the kill credit.
The way you can just hop in the water at near death to delay death for a ridiculous amount of time because there’s no finisher under water and people keep regenerating health very quickly when they are at the surface of the water (I’ve abused this mechanic countless times but it feels cheap).

I could go on, but you get the idea. There just seems to be an endless stream of things that almost seem purposely designed to annoy. I hope they do something to make PVP a more ENJOYABLE experience. Right now it just feels like a battle of who can annoy each other more with more annoying mechanics.

I want to enjoy PVP so badly, I love PVP in most games….but the PVP in this game has so many annoying mechanics that need to be adressed before PVP can be really enjoyable. (at least for me).

Second

Yeah, its a problem. Most PvPers are used to diminishing returns systems or other ways that its mitigated, but this has been left out of GW2. I think stability is intended to serve this role, but it ultimately doesn’t, and here’s why.

The real problem with CCs is not 1v1s. In 1v1s (as long as the classes are balanced) each player has access to equal amounts of CC and CC mitigation. In 2v2s, 3v3s, 5v5s, etc., any 2 or more players can by the very nature of class balance put more CCs on any one player than that one player can mitigate or escape. This is what diminishing returns systems have always been for: making sure CC wasn’t too strong in team fights.

Now the difference between stability (as well as dodging) and these DR systems is that the DR systems are always in effect and consistently apply their effects to all players. Stability, on the other hand, is a short duration boon with a long cooldown which is not easily accessible to every profession and which is easily recognized in a player’s boons, allowing opposing players to use their CCs on another player or wait until the boon expires, knowing that the player will then not have access to it for a long period of time. Dodging has a similar problem in that one only has so much endurance.

What this all means is that the huge downside that having CC in any game can bring to that game – a profoundly negative impact on the overall enjoyability of the PvP experience – rears its ugly head. It should definitely be looked at.

Shukran.4851:

no.
anet wants spvp fights last at max 20-40 secs. reducing damage is not the right way. learning to play is better instead

I can see this for 1 v 1 fights, and I think it makes sense. For team fights, on the other hand, this is woefully, woefully low.

Maybe it’s just my opinion, but by a wide margin the most fun I’ve had in other MMOs’ capture point battles (or any PvP battles, for that matter) have been those long drawn out battles lasting minutes at a time or even the entire length of the match. I’ve also found that by an equally wide margin, it is these battles that have had the most strategy and tactics to them. The way damage multiplies exponentially in the game right now with each additional player, it’s 1 v 1s which can last a minute or more and team fights which are typically over before they start.

Aza.2105:

Larynx is smart, he is looking at things objectively.

To address the OP concern, toughness and defensive utility skills counter burst damage. However, most people do not take them because they have the mindset that they must deal tons of damage. Thus negating defense.

The problem with this thought is that toughness doesn’t help all that much against the amount of burst that’s in the game right now. I refuse to run a build for any profession without at least 1500 toughness, and in all honesty normally won’t run one that isn’t upwards of 1800. I believe toughness is the most important stat in the game right now precisely because of all the insane amount of damage that can be put out.

Despite this, I can still be killed almost instantly if someone does manage to land his burst on me. On the other side of the coin – just so we don’t have people claiming I’m simply bad – I can down people who have lots of toughness at an incredibly rapid pace as well.

The thing is, I’ve never seen a game where someone’s burst could be 50% of a player’s total health pool – and in this game, some bursts can be in excess of 100% of players’ health pools! The damage as a whole is just too high across the board, and its compounded by CCs (making dodging impossible) and by focus firing. Both of these are of course perfectly legitimate and indeed correct tactics for opposing teams to be using. The problem is that the damage is so high overall that these legitimate tactics become far too powerful and virtually uncounterable.

I couldn’t agree more with the OP. Some folks are quick to jump in, say its all rubbish, and defend the game, but read around and there are more than enough people saying the same things to know its a problem.

I’ve seen this in other games, TOR being a recent example. Lots of folks complaining about the PvP in the forums, folks try to diminish their POV and brush them off as the “forum minority,” but in the end the game – starting with its PvP – started to die off.

I really hope something is done, because I don’t want to see what could be a really great game lost to some of these silly imperfections.

Sneakier.9460:

Skolops.2604:

None of this changes the fact that with all of these on the field at once, its virtually impossible to have any clue what’s going on – and this is coming from a StarCraft player who is perfectly capable of taking in a lot of information with a quick look.

Nor does it change the fact that, however small, these items introduce computer AI into the outcomes of PvP battles – something which is so contrary to what PvPers want that it’s shocking that they even considered this stuff for the game, let alone actually implemented it.

SC2 player here

I dont know wich race you played more, but myself player protoss, the ilussion of a army to scare my enemy and confuse is valid tactic

That’s why i used sentrys to summon mass colossus while going for pure blink stalker with couple sentry to throw some fear

The same logic applys here in GW2

If a tourney team decides to make the battle 25 vs 5, it a legit tactic if they can pull it off

I never said it wasn’t a legitimate tactic, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t one which makes the game less fun. I’m not complaining that its overpowered or anything – it should theoretically be balanced, although it certainly takes an immensely higher skill level just from the sheer aspect of APM, visual recognition, decision making, and team coordination to fight a team with 20 pets out than one without. I’d also say that it’s simply nonsense to talk about it as something which needs to be “pulled off.” There is very little kill required to summon your pets and then go about your business.

My real complain is just that it makes for crummy PvP. I don’t care if my team has 25, their’s does, or both do. The fact that the battlefield is cluttered up with such a mass of bodies is just… it’s not fun. It’s irritating, its visually unappealing, its all kinds of things. It’s 20 AIs having a large impact in what is supposed to be player versus player.

Kryank.8069:

Skolops.2604:

Being in the worst gear and facing someone in the best gear never felt as bad as some of the stuff I’ve experienced in this game (in the tankiest of builds, at that!) The potential is there, but some tweaks definitely need to be made.

I have seen way worse in rift and aion to name but a few, and it is far worse than anything I have seen here. Out geared is a far more demoralising gaming issue than build difference, twinks are a prime example of gear ruining a pvp bracket. If you think what we have here is worst then I am sorry we will have to agree to disagree. At least we do not have to level a character up max level to experience equal PvP, if you are unhappy that you can’t compete with a certain class you can change to that class and be playing in the same pvp matches within 10 mins.

I don’t think its a class thing; I think its a problem with the overall game design, so switching classes doesn’t make a difference. I’ve played a few classes in PvP, and found it all to essentially be the same.

kittenon.8572:

I was just chasing an Engi and i’ve got to say they have to be the most intense kiting class i have ever fought against in any MMO.I agree with most of what you wrote,but you are either seeing it from the wrong (right for you) position or you must be talking about another game.

Yeah, they’re crazy good at kiting and controlling the opposing players’ movement. It’s amazing what you can do as an Engineer.