Guild Wars 2

Idk how WvWvW is looking like, but you can try solo roaming.

28 games in a row of getting carried huh. I must be lucky eh. Could be I got carried. I still stand by my point that I have seen SEVERAL displays of terrible plays and rotations constantly over the course of the last few days and I said previously, I can only speak for what I’ve seen.

Maybe its the children. If you find the game not working for you at certain times, go do something else. If you still wanna play GW2, there are enough things for someone to do if you want to break from PvP.

Such is soloQ. Always random. Always unfair….to the losing side. Work to increase your influence on every match so you can tip the scales in your favour every time.

Ranked is actually restricted to solo/duo. Maybe git gud?

Because specs not outfitted to heal and lack the required stability to repeatedly stomp/res are meant to get ALL the stats.

As far as my spec is concerned, I get the top stat I’m meant to get in almost every game I play. 36 games (ik it isnt a lot) with a 77% winrate. I’m not good, but I’m nothing like the kids who literally waffle about home and mid as they’re being contested and then die to the thief 1v1 off point while they struggle to make a decision.

Not sure if this was mentioned, but having some semblance of an idea on what youre supposed to do in a team fight is also key. I dont know how many times I see rangers and DHs attempting to rapid fire/true shot a warrior in melee range and then complain that the warrior takes no damage and does too much in return, doing almost 0 to CC and kite away. Understand your role and how youre meant to conduct yourself. If you want to play thief, then by all means, play thief, but please know how to rotate and outnumber fights.

After many iterations over the course of a few hours, I’ve ended up piecing together a build I’m comfortable with that is very far from what you would find from meta battle, but I will admit that I started there.

Your problem is that you insist that it is the build that carries the player. My point when I stated that I plucked my build off of meta battle (and I apologize if I wasn’t clear) was that simple, proper decision making is something that you will simply not find in NA. While the build youre playing will impact your performance, if youre still a stupid player, you won’t go anywhere. The top 250 and the bronzelords might, in many cases, be using the same builds, but the difference between the two in terms of play is practically night and day.

Also, I had no idea as to what has changed since I left and have no interest in jumping on the wiki and reading changelog after changelog. Simply jumping on metabattle to get a taste of what is currently happening is far better.

And that is all good and well, but you always have to ask yourself the following things when deciding to build and run whatever it is you intend to run.

What is the meta and why is it this way?

Where does my build fit in the meta?

If you can come up with concrete answers that are close to the reality of the situation for the first question, youll be able to come up with a proper answer for the second.

Synergy between traits and stats is obviously the best way to go when creating a build, but synergy in your traits, runes, weapon choices, and amulets isnt enough sometimes.

What I’m basically trying to say is that anybody who wants to win never really “goes out of the meta”. The builds on metabattle dont define the meta. Those builds are a byproduct of the meta.

Crinn.7864:

SlayerSixx.5763:

Unless literally NOTHING changed between point A and point B, I’m certain the meta won’t shift unless the devs drop changes to make it happen. Very rarely do metas in ANY game shift without change from the devs.

There where no changes made to necro or warriors when the meta change happened.

The only thing that changed was player’s perceptions.

I will also point out that condi warrior existed on day 1 of HoT, but it didn’t become meta until well into s2. Same for condi Chrono.

Some classes are stagnant. (like engi) But other classes like Necro have changed constantly often without any dev input.

If I’m not mistaken, the release of HoT brought about unkillable bunkers. Condi warr existed, yea, but it was nowhere near optimal in the face of the bigger picture.

Sometimes a class itself doesn’t need to change. Sometimes the classes keeping THEM back hit a series of changes that allow for these non-meta specs to obtain some semblance of relevance.

Crinn.7864:

SlayerSixx.5763:

If youre insistent on playing your class but want to fill another role, then by all means go ahead. Just know that swapping to an entirely different class who does the role you want to accomplish would be more effective.

And then you realize that every one of those meta builds where considered “non-meta” once upon a time.

It wasn’t too long ago that axe necro was considered unplayable. And it wasn’t too long ago that condi warrior was considered better than power.

Believe it or not some people break meta because they have real reasons to believe the meta is wrong. Not because of vanity.

Unless literally NOTHING changed between point A and point B, I’m certain the meta won’t shift unless the devs drop changes to make it happen. Very rarely do metas in ANY game shift without change from the devs.

ANet has done an interesting job with the system. Now I’m not entirely sure if this is the actual MMR value used by the system, but it works similarly.

What happens is that the game knows what your actual rank is based off of your history or a trend of in game performances you’ve had and then adjusts your point gain according to that.

For example (if GW2s system works similarly to other ranking systems) if you have a previous record of legendary and haven’t played for a while, what happens is that the system will take that into account and place you lower and lower on the ladder depending on how long you haven’t played and the system will then watch. If you are performing similarly or better than the current bar set at the rank the system expects you to achieve, you get more and more points than usual so it propels you to your actual rank.

And you still missed the point. Condition, bunker, and hybrid builds have always dominated conquest because of conquest, not because they’re objectively stronger. If you kill condi builds, everyone will end up running as much CC and sustain as they can possibly pack which will still leave power builds in their relatively poor spot. If power builds can, by large, cut through bunker specs, youll end up with an insta kill meta where only the fastest classes (thief, mes, maybe warrior, guard and rev) will be viable and you’ll end up with the same lopsided mess that we have now.

People simply have to accept that conquest will always remain like this and either get with the program or move on.

Me bringing tranquility up was just an example. I know tranquility is a more powerful objective than skyhammer and only appears once per match.

Unless you’re a thief (we can maybe allow mesmer in this case as well), the time it takes for you to go between home/far or home/mid or mid/far (and dont be funny telling me youll cap all 3) is seldom worth the effort and time taken to cross that much distance. Youre much better off actually scrapping it out since (especially the higher you climb), an outnumbered fight can and usually will end in favour of the side with more players and quickly, might I add. Ive had several instances where I’m 2v1 or 3v2 etc and I’m left to free fire from off point while my team contests and we end up winning the fight VERY quickly since (if left uninterrupted) I end up doing an incredible amount of damage.

Youre all gambling on the hope that your team can contest tranquility long enough for you to rotate around however many points you hope to capture and still be able to either join the fight or quickly recapture whatever points were taken by the enemy. (Almost as if kills dont add points to the scoreboard either :P).

As for skyhammer, if there happens to be a team fight that you can join at little cost to your team (no risk of losing a captured point like what seemed to be OP’s case) then, for the love of god, do it.

Zenith.7301:

SlayerSixx.5763:

megilandil.7506:

Justine.6351:

megilandil.7506:

choovanski.5462:

warrior can’t heal any of your teammates. saying warrior is too strong because it’s 1v1 potential is higher than a support build is like saying ele is OP because it heals more than a theif.

false, warrior can heal teammates, not the actual meta thing , but warrior can heal via traited shouts
when talking about a determined build dont generalize to the complete class, sayimg war cant heal teamies is false, actual meta builds dont do is true

Lols I should take my healing Shout regen banner build into spvp and see what it can do.

its only an observation, people complaining they cant do things that class can do, if you copy paste metabattle builds and never tweak them you can´t.
but there are options out metabatle and classes can do a lot of things out of current meta.

But theres a reason WHY they’re out of the meta.

Because there are more overpowered builds, not because they’re bad.

It’s sort of like saying power shatter mesmer build is bad because condi PU was broken.

Not saying that. Overpowered is relative BTW. Power shatter can be good, but in the context of conquest where your chances of winning increase the longer youre alive and the longer you can pressure, condi shatter (or condi in general) will always be better.

megilandil.7506:

SlayerSixx.5763:

If youre insistent on playing your class but want to fill another role, then by all means go ahead. Just know that swapping to an entirely different class who does the role you want to accomplish would be more effective.

you dont understand.
other class probably i play much worse than the on that i q, and with a few tweaks i can adjust the current one that i play at 100% of my skill to acomplish the role that its needed, the said above, adjust the main class or go to the speciallist that i run worse?

and example i mainly q with symbolic dh i get a full heavy class stacked comp whith no roamers should i go to thief that i played in very rare ocasions or tweak a little the class whith speed runes to go to roaming/decap role that no one fills in that comp, in dh i play at 100% of my skill and in thief i will suck

No, I understood you fully and if you read what I wrote, you’d see that I didn’t disagree with you.

Also, learn to play other stuff if your main isnt the flexible lol.

If youre insistent on playing your class but want to fill another role, then by all means go ahead. Just know that swapping to an entirely different class who does the role you want to accomplish would be more effective.

^ pretty much what was said above. Players here to actually PvP dont mind that our rewards are locked behind winning. The people who DO care about the dailies aren’t here for for actual competitive PvP and simply want to farm.

If I recall, ANet has always been opposed to toughness and healing power simply because they wanted your survival to be based off of active application of dodges, blocks, and other such abilities.

Ofc, this sounds hilarious considering so many classes now get passive defenses in varying forms, but at least they aren’t persistent defenses like stats. Also, if I’m not mistaken, toughness reduces damage by a % that scales multiplicatively with other damage reduction sources. Toughness itself hits a soft cap at a certain amount and then is likely hard capped past another. I’m sure they meant for you to want to stack toughness with other sources of damage mitigation and HP.

Crinn.7864:

SlayerSixx.5763:

But theres a reason WHY they’re out of the meta.

Because the metabattle curators decided it was so?

Nooooooot exactly. Here’s the deal. Every class in this game can, more or less, do the same things another class can do, but to varying degrees and with varying styles. This means that there will be classes that do certain things VERY WELL and things very poorly in any given scenario.

Thing is, this game (like any other) has a certain set of key objectives. These objectives are primarily either controlling a point through team fight supremacy or side point dueling.

You can probably custom engineer a bunker warrior build similar to the current ele or druid and actually have it work well, but I’m willing to bet that it won’t outpace these two for support which then leaves you with the things that warrior DOES do better than everyone else which, in this case, is this build which is why it is meta. By supporting this nerf, youre killing off their most OPTIMAL function currently and relegating them to a role that will leave them in the shadow of two other specs who, by all counts, are DESIGNED to do whatever it is they’re doing.

Being opposed to the current state of the meta because it reflects an overall state of the game that is not fun is one thing, but simply being against the meta because it feels like youre being told what to do and are deciding to rebel is, frankly, stupid.

And I dont disagree with you, but there are players who enjoy this banter tool thoroughly, especially in any game amongst the top few % of players who will run into each other repeatedly and tease each other (or outright flame). I believe its enough that ANet has given players the block and report functions (as effective as the report function is). The other day, I saw two toxic players back to back. Immediate blocks and went on my way.

Thing is, the game gives you ample information to use in the middle of the match.

Like for instance:

No action has shown up on the kill/death list, no points are being captured, and your team sees nobody while an alternate map objective has opened up. Where could everyone possibly be :P? The biggest place youll notice this on is in temple at the notorious 8:30 mark. Ive seen several players just run around thinking that the point isnt being contested, meanwhile a full scale team fight happening at tranquility that this player’s team will be losing because they chose to try to run around and cap points that will be immediately lost once his team gets downed.

You have no excuse to sit there and idly defend when you’ve been given enough information to use to guide your rotations.

megilandil.7506:

Justine.6351:

megilandil.7506:

choovanski.5462:

warrior can’t heal any of your teammates. saying warrior is too strong because it’s 1v1 potential is higher than a support build is like saying ele is OP because it heals more than a theif.

false, warrior can heal teammates, not the actual meta thing , but warrior can heal via traited shouts
when talking about a determined build dont generalize to the complete class, sayimg war cant heal teamies is false, actual meta builds dont do is true

Lols I should take my healing Shout regen banner build into spvp and see what it can do.

its only an observation, people complaining they cant do things that class can do, if you copy paste metabattle builds and never tweak them you can´t.
but there are options out metabatle and classes can do a lot of things out of current meta.

But theres a reason WHY they’re out of the meta.

If you’re in an outnumbered situation, down one guy and force the other to blow CDs to pick their friend up, get the hell out of there.

You have now stalled 2 people at the cost of stalling yourself and have now given your team a 4v3 situation. As long as you dont die and can either continue to pressure the two or are capable of quickly rotating to the nearest objective to create a 5v3 scenario, you’ve done your job. Not everything in PvP revolves around outright killing your opponents.

I started playing 2 days ago after a year and a half hiatus and just hit plat last night. I honestly didn’t know the skyhammer decapped points lol. Duly noted.

Well, if I’m any proof, you dont need much game knowledge to climb in this game (or at least in NA lol).

Ehhhh, idk man. It FEELS fine. Warriors do a lot of damage and are hella tanky, yes, but I rarely feel like I could’ve done nothing to fight them.

I play LoL on the occasion and I have all chat muted. Map chat is the exact same thing, a banter tool. Don’t like it, mute it. If you see a teammate getting caught up in it, tell em to mute it.

Vicariuz.1605:

If ur talking about NA, quite literally, only the pro league players are good, EVERY other person is bad.

Idk about EU, but I can attest to how bad players are in NA.

I quit the game over a year and a half ago more or less and literally came back two days ago. Sat down with my main class and metabattle open, looked up the meta builds took one, added a few touches I thought would be better, played a few unrankeds to at least get back up to speed with the basics (dodging, targeting, reading the map better) and then went straight into ranked. Climbed from bronze straight into plat with a 77% winrate over around 40 games and have literally not noticed a single difference in the quality of the players aside from a few warrior mains insta gibbing me (my kitten still burns kek).

Reality is no, but you’d expect the plats at least to be something decent considering they’re literally 100 or so points away from being top 250 in their region.

My biggest guess (aside from those two guys actually sounding like idiots) is that in the old skyhammer, a lot of people rarely gave two craps about the hammer and only went to contest when someone was actively making a nuisance of himself (like the treb on khylo).

OK, first things first. Stop mentioning riot. Riot has been absolutely nuts over champion “identity” since the latest season began. They’ve been so enthralled to the point where they’ve created some monstrosities T.T (man-with-shotgun-who-shall-not-be-named).

I’m not advocating for out-of-stealth 15k backstab insta-gibs or warriors being able to kill you in a single combo while being unable to be bursted. I’m saying that they have a fantasy or “niche” they MUST fill otherwise you may as well delete the class. If every class is overpowered, none are as long as everyone can compete.

The way I see it, we’re both on the same side but wanting to take drastically different approaches to the problem.

A well thought out post (with some gaps, IMO, but we’ll leave that for later).

Sadly, this isn’t the truth. The real problem with the balance in this game is akin to trying to shove a square in a circle slot or asking a fish to climb and then calling it stupid for not being able to do so.

What I mean is that, in general (or at least the last time I checked), the classes were balanced to fit their fantasy. They all had an “identity” or a “feel”. Warriors were powerful juggernauts that could really put on the pressure quickly, but had to work quickly before they tired out. Thieves were speedsters who could, with enough fine control, overcome almost every challenge.
None of these classes look outrageous. The real issue is when you look at the setting all of these classes are placed in.

You’ve placed them in conquest.

What does conquest promote? Rotations and point control. At every point of the meta, the classes that were at top did one or both verrrrry well. When a class, due to changes, cannot do that very well anymore….then they simply fall off.

Class balance (well, I haven’t played since about Jan, so I’m not too sure what the current landscape is looking like) is actually a lot better than most games. The issue is just this terrible game mode.

Supreme.3164:

Dragon Hunter is not fine at all! Especially Monk’s Focus

Monks focus is the only thing that keeps DPS guard relevant. A heavy armored class with the lowest base HP relying on small bursts of healing and the cycling of defenses for survival vs being the ball of stats that is warrior (not calling warrior OP, keep your panties on).

I get it man, you don’t like how ele was gutted, but do we have to bring every class down to that level?

The illuminaty doesn’t want you to win, obviously. Also, what does your guard experience have to do with your performance on thief? Its obvious you’re nowhere near as proficient on thief as you are on your guardian.

Its an ode to the legend. Much respect for the providing us with a laugh amidst the salt.

Vieux P.1238:

I guess the point that op’s is trying to make is that if a game mode dont work, dont be afraid to pull it out. Spending money to fix something that’s never gonna work is just wasteful.

Exactly this.

People play conquest because its basically the only sPvP mode that partially makes sense. Stronghold is just terrible, at least in my opinion. A lot of the balance gripes that people have, a lot of the complaints of excessive aoes, complaints about necros, etc, wouldn’t apply or at least be taken as seriously if people were NOT forced to sit on a small node or lose the game. The meta over the past few years even enforces my belief. Bunkers and bruisers have dominated sPvP for the longest time. Now, people are complaining about necro and the like since one of necros biggest counters (mobility) doesn’t apply when you’re playing on that small circle. People want a game that rewards mechanical skill, but are OK with a game that punishes kiting and repositioning (foefire mid being the exception). I’m certain D/D cele ele wouldn’t have been gutted if people weren’t forced to stay on point or lose (you can see that ele is not that big of an issue in WvWvW). There’s a reason why ANet can’t buff or nerf in a timely (or sometimes effective) fashion and that is because, for the most part, the classes are (or were) relatively balanced.

Idk, the article just seemed to strike me as interesting.

http://na.leagueoflegends.com/en/news/game-updates/features/retiring-dominion

I get it. Some of you might not like league. Some of you are going to point out that league is not, in fact guild wars 2. That being said, give the article a quick read.

Now, I get that league has its own slew of problems that, for the most part, differ greatly from GW2’s, but I feel that if we draw a few parallels, we can find that GW2 needs a proper game mode and fast. People being matched with people far above their skill tier (or top tier players getting to enjoy hour long queues in the past) would be indicative of a dying game, but I won’t jump to conclusions. The new elites with incredible AoE potential of all kinds makes game modes like conquest incredibly frustrating and simply not to fun to play (or watch). If a game as large as league (being the single most played game in the world currently) is having issues with drawing a sizeable portion of their CURRENT players into an alternate game mode similar to our conquest, its only fair to assume that while people DO enjoy conquest, not enough players do.

Thoughts?

Izanagi.9830:

SlayerSixx.5763:

@Izanagi

The amount of time you’ve spent and you still don’t understand the system? You speak as if ANet debuffs your toon just to force you to lose. We’re speaking of fact and you’re bringing up speculation. OK.

the one who dont understand the system and have no clue about is you……there also were plenty of other threads about the bad designed matchmaking from high level players.

you are just a random who think he know something. the truth is , you know nothing.

https://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/PvP_Matchmaking_Algorithm

This just tells you everything you wanna know. If you want to stay deluded, its on you.

You’re relying entirely on your ability to one shot your target at the start of the fight with conditions…? What happens if they pop resistance, a condi cleanse, or simply dodge some of your burst…? Now you’re left with no healing from your heal skill (again, no ferocity meaning your crits won’t be anywhere near enough to capitalize on its effect). For comparison, guardians have had litany and even with their ridiculously high burn combo damage, they STILL chose shelter AND litany simply heals off a % of all damage dealt, not a % of crits which may or may not happen. The on top of that, you have no damage mitigation from anywhere (not even going to count mace at this point) and no mobility for a reliable escape. This isn’t a good build by any means and isn’t even situational because even if the enemy team left you alone to free cast, you’d still need time to gather adrenaline (unless you want to start burning through utilities, which gimps you even further).

If this build works even in spite of all of its flaws, congratulations, you gotta get out of whatever MMR you’re at lol.

@Izanagi

The amount of time you’ve spent and you still don’t understand the system? You speak as if ANet debuffs your toon just to force you to lose. We’re speaking of fact and you’re bringing up speculation. OK.

@SoPP

I know its nearly impossible. He claims that the system is holding back from his 70% win rate.

online.1278:

anothr way to have more than 50% winrate is getting premade with good skilled friends.

This is all you had to say lol.

Serious Thought.5394:

Fun things: this build looks crappy right? Try it (flee from reapers. good lord those guys are op with all the condi transfers).
http://gw2skills.net/editor/?vJAQNApeTnckCtki1kCmkCEliFjAzIAsBzZJ5ggwH8d4mcfuA-TpxFABH/AAO/QAQeZADOCAns/AAnAAA

This is cancer.

No damage mitigation aside from shield and mace block (double endure pain isn’t enough, idk what convinced you this was), no condition cleanse (no wonder you cant handle reapers), no healing (you might have a decent crit rate, but nowhere near enough ferocity to match the healing done by the other healing skills), poor mobility, and a completely wasted trait.

This build IS cancerous. To the user, that is.

Stopped reading at scrapper takes skill. You’re fine with scrapper, which is basically D/D ele 2.0, but are not OK with DH. Does DH do a lot of damage? Yes, since most go for DPS amulets. Does true shot need to be tweaked? Yes. I’m thinking something along the lines of a 50% CD increase and about 20-25% more damage to make it so that it isn’t weaker than autos. They fixed shield of courage so you can actually damage them if you attack from behind iirc. Purification is only barely better than shelter (there’s a reason why people took shelter over signet of resolve which also cleansed conditions).

Honestly, DH is strong, but not OP. A few tweaks here and there and it’ll be solid (its still in a good spot at the moment).

Izanagi.9830:

gw2 is focused on casual players , thats the reason for the 50% winrate element.
so the noobs also can win.

some time ago (2 years ago) we had a different matchmaking system and a different leaderboard system (limited to 1000 people) where noobs were complaining that they cant climb the leaderboards. the real good players had a winrate 70%+ and were shown on the leaderboards while all the noobs couldn’t climb the leaderboards and stayed out of the leaderboards.

now go figure…..

Please don’t post if you’re ignorant of how the system works.

The players at the top of the leaderboards were some of the best around. Now? The players that would’ve been at the top of the leaderboards are now legendary. Same stuff, different system. The system pushes for 50% in EVERY game. If you’re at 70%, it means you’re far better than the players you play with and the system knows to keep pitting you against tougher opponents. If you can beat EVERYONE in the game and maintain a 70% win rate minimum, go and try out for a competitive team. Ranked, contrary to popular belief, is actually meant to foster fun matches by making the two teams as equal as possible (I doubt it would be fun for a newbie to face someone on helseth’s level). 50% is an indicator that you’re playing with people equal to you and should be having fun (or looking for ways to improve).

Conquest isn’t about holding the point? Then explain why cele bruisers have been dominating the meta for the last two years. Can you honestly tell me that the new meta won’t involve the tankiest build possible? Rotating is literally the only concept you have to master as a player to be good at conquest. After that comes individual skill with your class, but it comes second to rotating. If you look at mobas, which you think are lame, they’ve got several mechanics you have to master to operate at a high level ASIDE from your mastery over your champion.

Simply put, conquest is a terrible game mode that promotes only the most cancerous metas and needs to see major changes or a new mode needs to be made.

Hunter.4783:

-snip-

>calls people out for being ambers

>says chrono is one of the best duelists.

We playing the same game, m8?

GW2 is a great game, but the state of PvP just saddens me x.×. I’ll also agree that BnS isn’t all that its cracked up to be, but to call it terrible? I wouldn’t go that far.

The point of 50% is to show that you’re winning as much as you lose, as in the deciding factor between the two teams winning isn’t a huuuuge gap in skill. This is important for a multitude of reasons, but primarily is meant to foster growth at the particular player’s pace which is vital for any game looking to create a competitive scene.

NeXeD.3042:

-snip-

The issue here is that you don’t understand that the criteria for maintaining that 51% is the difficult part. That’s like saying an amber can keep playing like an amber and hit legendary if their win rate is over 50%. You have to keep improving to maintain that 51% (or make a premade with the previous meta cheese).

Coulter.2315:

SlayerSixx.5763:

That’d be an OK analogy if you could differentiate which part of the circle is the original part and which is the expanded section.

Well lets use your analogy, once the house has the extra rooms can you go buy it without them? Nope, just like HoT they are part of the game from now on and cannot be bought without.

The game is HoT+Core now, you cannot get Core alone any more. There is only the big circle and those who have yet to buy or upgrade.

Fair enough. I suppose I simply mixed the power creep for pay2win.

That’d be an OK analogy if you could differentiate which part of the circle is the original part and which is the expanded section.

reikken.4961:

by remapping all of my keybinds to things that can be reached more easily while moving freely,

This.

Every friend I introduce to the game asks the same thing and I laugh at them for a while as they imagine me rapidly contorting my fingers to mix elites and utilities into my combos. I don’t think any high level player plays with the default keys (how do they expect us to reach 5-0 is beyond me).