I feel like complaining because you weren’t allowed to exploit is going to get you ridiculed, as has happened, but it does sound like you ran into a toxic MM squad. Sorry for your experience. Hope you get a better one next time, most aren’t like that.
S2 meta. Plenty of power necros. Then chill got buffed to ungodly heights (especially with scepter), and now that we’re back in the same spot everyone’s acting like it’s the end of the world.
Slightly more on topic, the increasing amount of invuln (and block) spam, especially from passives, really needs to be addressed.
(edited by SolarDragon.7063)
VInetooth Prime needs better downscaling.
in Guild Wars 2: Heart of Thorns
Posted by: SolarDragon.7063
It’s impossible to get done if you play in Oceanic timezones as both the health and break bar refuse to scale down past the point for about 20 people.
All I can say is wow. Just wow. That player is insane. In the amazing way.
I disagree. The new trait system is much more elegant and effective.
Between the different amulets and the runesets available you can choose which breed of glass you want to be, since Anet hates bunkers despite forcing bunkers.
The other thing to note is you may not get results that show linkages-for instance, heavy armour tends to look best on the large characters like charr and norn, whereas light armour still looks great on asura. There’s also linkages like charr engineers in Iron Legion, and there may even be some odd edge cases where certain PvE racial skills go best with certain classes!
The level down system is working as intended.
I can’t do thousands of burn damage and onehit champs in a level 10 zone, but I can do more damage than a beginner. Otherwise, what was the point of me levelling up?
The current system is one of the best systems in any game I have seen for keeping low-level content relevant without “punishing” the player for playing down.
Just got my hope a few weeks ago and love it. Well worth the time and some frusteration. Really the only things I hated were finding an arrowhead (the one I needed turns out usually spawns right before or during the tarir invasion so that helped), vinewrath legendary ( felt like the invasion always started while I was finishing up the pre-events) and the legendary wizard in orr b/c I would just always miss him (after almost a week of trying to jump around getting different bosses finally I just camped orr and waited) The COE pre-event boss you have to fight to unlock coe was annoying too b/c we always had control of coe and took forever to get a map that didn’t.
Once you get the few hard ones though its really not that bad from there. Hang in there and good luck.
Ugh, I’d forgotten the CoE idiocy too… thanks for bringing up represed memories! cries
Sure, PvP sucks right now. But that’s no reason to create a toxic environment for those still playing. On playing ranked today, I was surprised when my series of games had even more toxicity and flaming than the depths of ruby in the middle of the season. PvP needs some love from the dev end, but we shouldn’t contribute to its death. Be excellent to each other and respect those who put up with Anets balancing.
Find a busy server and do stuff on that server? Prosper.
Part of the problem right how is probably timing since everyone and their brother are in the new zone, but that’ll end soon enough anyway.
The problem is that from experience, even a full server (which is very unlikely pre meta leading) is likely to be split between multiple lanes, and at least one of the events needs well over 20 people to scale to champion levels.
So, in an attempt to lighten up my GW life, I’ve been doing the HOPE collection while I wait for other things to happen. But I’m getting really irritated at all the event-gated mob spawns. Champ arrowheads, mushroom emperors and the like. Was this really neccessary to “create a sense of achievement?” Yay, I waited round for hours doing nothing over several days so that the one event I need would spawn and then not scale up properly so I need to wait even longer.
I think at this point ALL classes simply need QoL changes. Trickle up small buffs to under-performing (or non-performing) skills/traits to get them inline with the more useful but not over-powered or ‘mandatory’ skills/traits. By taking it slow we can evaluate the state of these changes and test any new build options they may present.
Other than that I think the PvP team should look into creating ‘build specific’ amulets for each class. This would gate potentially unbalancing amulets from being abused by certain classes. Its not a perfect solution to build variety, but it is something the PvP devs could possibly do on their own.
There is a thread started by Dr Patrik.3642 that presents the concept in more depth.
Honestly, I’d rather see the opposite. Gradual toning down of most of the overused traits and weapons. Power creep has happened, I’d rather see it reversed (seriously, when you have warriors dishing out 4 hard CC"s in as many seconds, and classes that can basically take it on passive, something is wrong).
Not everyone wants to complete achievements just because of MP’s. Some people also would like their achievements all done. kittening Haywire and Scrap rifle…
I’m not THAT masochistic. I only enjoy being flayed, not flayed and cooked in lemon juice.
@Kageseigi.2150
Cant you just knock/pull guardian out of its traps????
For sure he will panic….
Assuming he doesn’t have stability up (I know they have very limited access to it, but they still do have access to it), yes.
Then he just drops more, because they have ridiculously short cooldowns for how powerful they are.
*cough*Headbutt*cough*
Why I hated HoT and the mastery system.
in Guild Wars 2: Heart of Thorns
Posted by: SolarDragon.7063
You’re all acting like levelling masteries in the wrong order is easy to avoid. For gliding and mushrooms, sure. But for the later mastery gates (like investing in Wallows for TD), you can already be in a position of being low on MP’s, especially if you don’t use dulfy for the achievements. THIS IS NOT MY PERSONAL POSITION. But I have seen it happen to guildies and pubs.
STOP TELLING ME I DON’T LIKE RAIDS. Seriously, being told what I’m thinking (when it’s obviously wrong) is getting really irritating. What I don’t like is having to grind for gear to fit a specific metabuild (that will probably change once Anet gets sick of it) to even be considered to PARTICIPATE in a raid. And then probably promptly fail because of something that I didn’t know, but at least that could be entertaining. Whether or not the raids are ACTUALLY gated behind ascended gear, everyone thinks they are. (I’ve seen proof of well-oiled groups pulling off exotic raids, but outside that level of practice and skill they probably are dependent on asc gear).
Unranked PvP is going to be a kittenshow. Just because I’m on the winning side of the kittenshow doesn’t make it any more fun.
WvW roaming is a good idea for when your server is on par. Which means that I probably should try it since I hear I’m actually on a top server until they change matchups. However, to do roaming, I need to outfit a new toon with new gear. So once again, more grinding to possibly have fun later.
They didn’t like players using positioning to counter certain builds
It was honestly stupid how heavily you could kite with the right builds. Warrior and Ele were the worst offenders by a long way in S3. I’ve been on both sides of this one, I think I once pulled a 1v3 continually contested on my ele for about 2-3 minutes by abusing the pool-side edges to break pressure, and plenty where I was the one getting frustrated as another “Obstructed” comes up. This just simply wasn’t possible to the same extent on forge point.
Why do I see complaints like this still? Do a bit of calculating. You can get every single mastery point in the game, without doing most of the adventures to gold. It’s simply not necessary.
People say my masteries are gated behind shooting gallery or sanctum scramble, but this is factually wrong.
There are enough easy adventures you can get silver on, or even gold, get get all your mastery points.
I don’t have gold on most of my adventures, yet somehow I’m walking around with 170 mastery points.
Okay, tell me where to get my MP’s. I have every VB adventure to at least silver. SS is the only AB I don’t have silver on. TD I’m in a similar position.
Shooting gallery at least is entertaining, although I have no idea how to upgrade my silver to a gold.
Sanctum scramble is just endless restarts because the game decided you clipped a corner or you bounced off an overhang or it refused to register your keypress or your foot wasn’t where the graphics said it was or…
(edited by SolarDragon.7063)
If you’re not interested in doing raids why are you doing them? Or collecting gear for them?
One of the nice things about GW2 is you don’t have to play a game mode you don’t want to. I’ve not even entered the raid yet and I’ve not encountered anything else I’m prevented from doing because of that.
(I will at some point have to do it to get the mini pets, but that’s a goal I’ve set for myself, not something the game is forcing me to do.)
Admittedly I’ve also not played the new storyline yet, so it’s possible I’ve missed something there – but I’m sure a lot more people would be complaining if you had to raid to play the new open-world PvE aspects.
You don’t have to play a game mode you don’t want to… except for all the item collections, and the relative profit levels, and the fact that if you want to play in a community everyone does them…
But raids themselves are honestly the least of my concerns. The gear lockout to get in to raids is more of an issue.
Put it this way. My current overarching project is HOPE. Why? Because my PvE main is an engineer and has been since they were my one and only character. Pistol playstyle has always been something I’ve enjoyed, and ha been my weapon of choice, at least for mainhand, for a long time, and it’s now more viable than ever. So legendary pistol seems a logical step, given the tendency of ANet to create meta’s with new statsets. I absolutely loathe the sound of Quip, and the look is… average, at best. Which leaves me chasing HOPE. I’d love to just play what I want to. But that’s not possible. I need to grind mastery points doing minigames that I hate and sequential achievements that make me feel like a trained seal because they’ve locked some of the requirements of HOPE behind achieving maximum mastery in all four map-related trees. (By the way, Dragon’s stand is a great example of how Mastery points should be given out, in my opinion).
Normally I’d like to take breaks by doing PvP, something I’ve loved for much of my time in the game. Except PvP this year has been going steadily downhill. Between stacked teams and power creep, it’s hard to find fun in HotM. So perhaps I should take a break in WvW? My experience with WvW is as I said before, spending just about all the time locked behind enemy zergs, being lucky if you can flip a camp before you get overrun.
Perhaps I should find something different to do in PvE? I’ve already mapcompleted on my main, and there’s no map that sticks out as being particularly worth hanging out in. I could spam AB multi-maps all day, but why?
As to raids, I never said I wasn’t interested in them. But with the gear lockout and meta-mania, I’m not in a position to do them. Which brings me back to the point of grinding to potentially have fun later. Guild Wars has always been a “journey” game for me, except right now no matter what path I choose, the journey seems to suck now.
(edited by SolarDragon.7063)
You didn’t specify what you find fun. Everyone goes through phases with many games. Take a break for a coul weeks? It’s worked for me on multiple occasions.
The thing is, this is me on coming BACK after several weeks off.
The thing that I notice the most is that sure, you have 20 skills… but there’s maybe 3 or 4 that actually matter, the rest are just filler to make you feel like you’re doing something/to catch you up to the utility of chain skills from other classes.
Transferring servers is only neccessary if you want to fight on a different WvW server. Otherwise, everyone is on the same set of servers, either the NA set or the European set.
(Would love some oceanic servers at some point)
I think your idea is sensible, but your spelling and lack of grammar or formatting will put people off reading it.
To tl;dr, The player can choose if XP goes into Mastery tracks or into Spirit Shards.
HoT has enemies that when they scale up during larger fights get ridiculous. Champion Snipers are a great example of this, as are Champ Itzel Shadowwalkers (w/e they’re called)
Also all the boss OHKO’s in VB can be frustrating when people aren’t doing good CC.
But yes, HoT fights are not 1337 skillz required, but they do require coherent builds and actual skill usage.
This adventure is just… awful. It’s frustratingly long, extremely lag sensitive, and has the glitchiest and most frustratingly designed terrain I’ve encountered in the whole game. While I can see gold being more possible than say, gold in rifle range, it’s also considerably less fun.
Before the chorus of “git gud”, I’d like to point out that the exploits used in every walkthrough available have been fixed, making the overall adventure considerably harder.
I’d love to bypass it. However, content that I want is gated behind masteries that force me to do adventures.
Well, the quest can be finished at any time of year. The only requirement is to log-on once during the Wintersday period, to receive the Orphan Laine’s Letter. Everything else can be completed at any time, Wintersday or no.
You do need to actually do the first step or two during Wintersday as well, as I have the letter but can’t progress anything.
Personally, the time requirement isn’t bad, but if you end up spending family time or are otherwise occupied over the holidays, having to wait 11 months before you can next have the opportunity to (again be too busy too) obtain a resource sink item seems… a little punitive.
At the release of HoT I was very, very happy. It brought me back to a game that I had left on the shelf for a while. After a month or two the shiny newness wore off, but the game was still good.
Fastforward to the point I’m at now. PvP is rapidly going downhill from both the matchmaking end and the builds end. PvE is becoming more and more locked behind grindwalls-masteries, fractals, raids. It’s starting to hit the point where you have to grind to grind. WvW is well, WvW-for every day you get good fights, there’s a week you spend completely outpopped and getting wiped every time you try to do more than take a camp.
I understand raids were added to satisfy the challenge-hungry portion of the playerbase… but I feel like the main reason was because other game had them. GW2 was never a game about raiding, and the push towards it has taken away from the great open-world feel that drew me in when I began.
PvP is suffering from… something. Whether it’s the logical conclusion of combining skills, a tiny dev team hampered by management, or just the wrong people in charge, it’s suffering.
WvW has made some good changes lately, with reward tracks providing more reliable rewards, and map changes to flow better (although arid BL’s are honestly too big), but nothing to really solve the frustration when your team is the underpop and you can’t do anything.
I came back today to play with friends. But what were we doing? Achievement hunting for rewards so that we could outfit our raid characters. Now, I have to admit the achievements were not bad (Living story S2e8), but when I went to play the rest of the game, I just ended up hating the game and myself more and more. I miss actually having fun playing Guild Wars. Please, put some fun back in the game instead of endless numbers games.
Doubly so on sensitive adventures like Sanctum Scramble, which has rapidly become my most hated thing in the game. I’d rather do aetherblade jumping puzzle if I didn’t need the mastery.
Why I hated HoT and the mastery system.
in Guild Wars 2: Heart of Thorns
Posted by: SolarDragon.7063
While HoT is theoretically possible to easily do without adventure HPs (I need to make some rageposts on that subject, however), if you don’t do the “ideal” progression of mastery points (and look up guides for strongboxes) you can easily find yourself in a position where traversing maps to get further mastery points becomes a nightmare. Tangled depths is the best example of this-if someone takes gliding heavily to help them with VB, then works on anything that isn’t Nuhoch, they can hit TD with no mastery points and no reliable way of getting round the map.
Perhaps allowing respec of mastery points should be allowed?
Meditrappers have always been reliable but not able to compete at the top due to projectile hate and lack of real sustain.
However, their two best counters (tempest and scrapper) have been nerfed, probably not unduly, but the nerfs have undoubtedly allowed DH to actually compete at the top level again.
Also combined meditrap bursts are probably scarier than any other class if they duo you and you don’t have access to invulns (many classes don’t).
However, DH still has lower brawling power than most classes. Don’t try and facetank their alpha burst skills and you can normally get the kill, sometimes even force THEM off point.
The main (only) cause for the bug is when Immobilise gets cleared passively. Movement skills or emotes break the bug, but sometimes not in time to save you.
Matchmaking that balanced…. I call photoshop :P
But seriously, the situation you are showing is basically what balanced matchmaking should how. Now, how you got that I have no idea, given that S3 ranked matchmaking clearly stacks teams to create blowout victories, and I think the worst game you had was 250 and I saw multiple 400’s. My experience through ruby had multiple sub 100 games (both ways).
The new trait build did not kill build diversity. It’s been 1 class 1 build at the top end for a long time before HoT.
Thief is the second most frustrating class to play against right now, because of the continual stunbreaks and immob clears.
It’s balanced if not actually underpowered, but it basically negates absolutely everything you can throw at it (until you hit a certain point and it dies instantly, but most builds can’t hit that point)
Season 3 has been the most interesting when matchmaking failed to stack teams correctly.
Season 2 had the best matchmaking assuming everyone played the extremely limited meta.
I’ll admit it’s hilarious how fast I can drop the entire pack of mobs in Foefire with my Condi Warrior. Though I hate how slow he is as I don’t have any speed traits…. Any bros know a way around this?
Don’t meta condi warrios get +25% when they’re sitting in mace?
(Spoiler, they do)
Scrapper is definitely the biggest problem to come out of S3. Not that it’s anywhere near as overtuned as previous star performers, but both against and as one I notice how easy it is to play badly, and how amazing it is when I actually get timing right. It completely neuters both 1v1 and teamfight potential of projectile classes, and has the blocks and clears to handle anything outside truly massive condition bombs
Condi chronomancer I’m very doubtful as to whether it is a problem at all. It can do great 1v1 bursts if allowed to, but these can be evaded, and it does not have great defense if you can engage it. Destroying clones helps against this build significantly.
Condi Warr is slightly too strong but it’s a strength from synergy for the most part, which means that nerfs could run the build from meta to trash very quickly.
(edited by SolarDragon.7063)
Long story short, ANet needs to give up on promoting PvP for F2P, given the release of elite specs.
I’ve discussed it before, but there is always going to be an advantage to having HoT. In a sensible situation where about half the classes used elite builds in their good builds (3 traitlines out of 6 used, random distribution), that still means that free players will be limited to half the classes/builds. Right now Elites are overtuned in comparison to their own core specs, but F2P will never be competitive unless Elite specs are nerfed PAST the point of equality (a bad result).
Or, they’re playing the long game.
Future elite specs are supposed to be balanced alongside the current ones, as that is the entire point of the elite spec system.
Using an elite spec was always going to be a mandatory option simply because mechanically, it wouldn’t make sense to be able to pair an individually good trait line with a limited elite specialization. The fact that core specs cna stack with Elite specs means that core specs simply can’t be on par with elite specs.
However, the entire design of elite specs is that thy’re build choices relative to one another. You can’t equip more than one at a time. once Anet releases a second spec for every class, HoT will also have moved to free to play, and the circle will be complete.
I’ve said this before, but Anet made a mistake releasing the elite spec system with only one option to choose, as the entire point of the system is that it has multiple, wildly different options that can only be so wildly different because they can’t stack with one another. That made elite specs a straight upgrade rather than a build choice, since all future balance is based on the assumption that everyone will be using one of multiple avaliable elite specs.
In stead, the should have released HoT with two specs to choose from, and perhaps the intent of the system would have been more clear. This will be the state of the game after the next expansion is released, and if they design the next specs to serve the purpose they set out to acheive with them, this will cease to be a problem for their F2P marketing.
The problem is their long game is failing right now.
Personally, my solution would be to allow HoT classes to be used by F2P’s in PvP ONLY.
Gets more people into competitive levels of PvP, and allows them to try before they buy-given how much my PvP play influences my PvE choices and preferences, I can see people experimenting with elite specs and then realising they really really want them.
Basically you want buffs to everything non-meta and nerfs to everything meta…
Mesmer suffers from a high skill cap issue, it either ends up with the top players nuking everything or 95% of players not being able to use it. I’m one of the latter >.>
I’d go through in order but I don’t think it’s worth it here.
Because distortion/heal/stealth cheese is annoying as hell?
Which is why trap guard is such a heavily played spec… wait a moment.
Medihunter is the only significant trap build in the PvP game, and even that is only a second-tier build.
That said, I’m not sure the idea of being able to retrieve them would really help trap specs. The reaon traps aren’t used is because there’ too many ways to avoid them- Physically don’t go in them, invuln through them, dodge through them… and most traps require an enemy player to stay in them for some time (or in ToF’s case, bounce back and forth). There’s simply too many factors at play at once.
Reasons people AFK;
1) The opening of the match goes completely wrong
Solution: Better rewards for participation (Are these sufficient already?)
2) A player on their team that they have clashed with before
Solution: Allow blacklisting
3) They get called away in reality.
Solution: ?
4) They’re trying to lose
Solution: Harsher penalties
Most of the reasons I can think of that people AFK aren’t solved by harsher penalties.
Anything I’ve missed?
Long story short, ANet needs to give up on promoting PvP for F2P, given the release of elite specs.
I’ve discussed it before, but there is always going to be an advantage to having HoT. In a sensible situation where about half the classes used elite builds in their good builds (3 traitlines out of 6 used, random distribution), that still means that free players will be limited to half the classes/builds. Right now Elites are overtuned in comparison to their own core specs, but F2P will never be competitive unless Elite specs are nerfed PAST the point of equality (a bad result).
One positive is that class balance is the best it’s been for well over a year in PvP, although there are still some significant problems remaining.
When people say “class balance” what they mean is “class representation”. “Balance” straight up is a mess (power creep, elite specs, bla bla). People are just happy that all classes are present and accounted for (first time ever). People are unhappy with the messed up way in which classes perform in the game, however.
Representation = good
Balance of represented classes = bad
generally speaking.
Balance within classes is bad, agreed, but there are 8 classes with top-tier builds, that have counterplay against each other to greater or lesser extent, and the one that isn’t (guard) is just waiting on some needed nerfs :P So class balance is the best it’s been since well before HoT.
Someone said it before but you’re looking at the wrong culprit for lack of build diversity.
Strong passives and trap traits have far more impact on pushing things in and out of meta than stats. Celestial was an exception because it provided enough of everything which really benefited the bruiser classes.
The amulet system is actually brilliant, in that it allows customisation to a degree without the gear minmaxing that you can see with raid metabuilds.
The trait system is good, but the problem is some traits have good synergy and some don’t. The ones that synergise with other traits or skills are almost always going to see more usage.
Yeah, please don’t go back to the power meta that lasted up until post HoT release. The mix of condi and power in current meta is fine, it’s the details that need to be worked out (Scrapper CD’s, condi burst vs defence, passives and why they existed)
Awesome to hear that at least they’ve noticed the main topics that annoy people, however hearing that it’s not going to be in S4 is really disappointing. If Season 4 isn’t at least an improvement in matchmaking over S3 it’s probably going to be the deathblow for PvP in this game.
Right now there’s enough of the community left that a good season should trigger a resurgence, but I feel if S4 is as disappointing kitten then the mass exodus is going to be too big to recover from.
One positive is that class balance is the best it’s been for well over a year in PvP, although there are still some significant problems remaining.
I see all these people complaining about Auramancer stability…. have you ever looked at the build to realise how little it actually has?
Also, anyone saying auramancer has 80% of the damage of a DPS class is just… idiotic.
Druid has significant DPS from the pet (with sensible boonsharing) but brings much less to a teamfight in comparison.
Scrapper (paladin scrapper) is the only imbalanced bunker in the current meta, part of which is because as well as having good sustain with high damage over time it has projectile reflection, which negates portions of DPS. Also the CD’s it has are just too low.
My biggest experience with problems with bunkers is when the counter-bunker classes (reaper, warrior, current scrapper) don’t know how to play against bunkers. Necros that never use their boon corruption, warriors that CC into Obsidian skin (done this myself more than I’d prefer to admit), scrapper that does the same and misses their pressure DPS…
Passive abilities are a problem though but reducing passives without also reducing burst and CC is just going to send us back to the old berserker meta that sat in place for about 2 years. CC is out of control right now for any class that doesn’t have a long list of breaks and passive breaks.
(edited by SolarDragon.7063)
Pretty much. The problem isn’t that you lose the 1v1, it’s that you need to rotate something onto the point that should be helping a teammate elsewhere, which means that chances are you’ll lose a fight elsewhere and then get +1’d. Or the thief will come +1 because they know they can get there and the fight will be going with you damaged.
Can this be a thing? This would be amazing.