Can I give his Majesty O the great Lord Helseth my gaming password (with Anet closely watching any suspicious transactions that might be going on while he plays on my account) and film how he manage to “carry” the teammate I’m given?
I will either learn a lot or laugh a lot… either way is fine by me… But I’m game if he is.
That would actually be a great watch if you did that. I don’t know how good you are, but I have seen games on his stream where he carries a lot, so it’s not impossible he would get you further than you think. Make sure to post on this forum if you do something like this one day.
Player experience in structured PvP can be quantified by statistical metrics. For example, the average experience is a balanced, neutral mood if
- losing streaks are short,
- win-rate of most players are close to 50%, and
- the variance of win-rate is small.
Conversely, if win-rate fluctuates a lot and most losing streaks are long, then people perceive match-making to be unfair.
Unfortunately, even this simple allegation is not true. I tend to prefer the type of match making you describe, and I’m sure all the complains you see on the pvp subforum these days prefer it as well, but history has showed us that the player base is split on the issue.
In season 2, the match-maker tries to give you team mates based on your MMR, and foes based on your division. Which means if your MMR is higher than the average in your division, you’ll be on a winning streak. Conversely, if your MMR is lower than average, you’ll be on a losing streak.
Last season, Anet used the Glicko 2 algorithm in order to give fair matches to everyone. And, to a certain point, it worked. But since the league is a progression system, you can’t have fair games from the beginning: how could you reach higher divisions then? That’s when people start abusing. You had dozens of players complaining in these very forums about being stuck with a 50% ratio.
Other games with league ladders use an unfair match-making algorithm to have better players win a lot more than 50% of their games and climb faster, like Hearthstone for example. Both systems have merit, but you will always find people to complain.
One possible way to improve the current system would be to not have everyone starting from amber again in the next season, but rather drop only a division. This way, it would reduce the “traffic jam” effect of early season.
The Mac client is going wild again, nice.
u are right thief is trash. many reasons but main is that thief class lost its identity. Thief is no longer stealth master, or dps master, or teleport master. its weak. all daredevil does is 7% dmg increase and 1 extra dodge which is nothing compered to scrapper or dh traps. Thief simply does not have iconic moves no more.
It’s funny you would say that. In my opinion thief is one of the last profession (along with maybe necro) to have a strong identity. With Unhindered Combatant, we are even more reinforced in our decap/+1 role, which feels really unique. I enjoy my thief better than any other profession since HoT, personally.
I Change your runes. I personally like vampire.
Wouldn’t the 6th bonus break stealth? In which case that would be a big no-go.
I’ve been stuck in ruby t1 and t2 for four days now. Every time I’m starting to have a killstreak and things are going nicely, MMR throws a team of 4 reapers against me, and my team consists of people who seem to have no clue what they are doing. With this it feels like it’s impossible to progress anymore, and I’ve never been so frustrated at this game before
Maybe you are where you belong. Four necros in a team is incredibly easy to beat. Just focus them one by one, and make sure you play something like a shout ele.
You don’t need Executioner unless you’re playing an executioner build, meaning a build where you need to kill fast. Proof is, Improv works in staff builds for example. Same goes for Mug: you’re trying to burst, that’s why you take an insta-cast damage-dealing trait.
With the dagger AA buff, thief’s single target damage is not bad. But if you want to play a burst build, I don’t see why you shouldn’t take burst traits.
11) Nerf everything else. There. Thief is viable.
Thief is one of the best designed porfession at the moment. No bullkitten sustain, no passive invulns (except the one we got in Acro, but I hate it), high risk high reward: perfect. If overperforming professions get nerfed, we’re fine
On the contrary. It looks too much like “Chill to the Bone”. Venoms share a cool mechanic, and Basi Venom has basically no animation, so in a way I find it better. You want to use it for single-target elimination anyway, so it works as intended.
The thing is, staff is not really the best +1 set. That would be d/p. Staff is a good weapon because you can team fight more (since you’re constantly evading), but it kills slower than d/p, because you can get kited more easily. So if the playstyle you enjoy is +1ing fights, I would advise you to give d/p a try.
That being said, I would like you to share your build with a build constructor such as http://en.gw2skills.net/editor/ , so that we can help you better.
even after a bit of buffing, the class is still bottom of the barrel in PvE and PvP.[/quote]
That’s not completely true. I don’t know about PvE, but thief is perfectly playable in pvp if you don’t intend to participate in tournaments. Mesmer and warrior are worse off if you ask me. It’s still the best profession for decapping, and with the Mirror Blade nerf and Fist Flurry or Impact Strike, it’s now the best profession for insta-killing people, which makes thief strong in a team where your allies are mostly scrappers, necros and druids (not to much team fight)
It depends on what your team has, and what you are facing. In some cases, if the opposite team seems to have a lot of sustain, and that your team is full of roamers (druids, scrappers, tanky necros), you’re better off with thief: it will be more effective to end fights quickly on the side nodes.
Naturally, if the opposite team is full of condi mesmers, condi necros or dragonhunters, or just thief hardcounters (scrappers, revs) playing something like ele will be better.
The difficulty lies in finding two or three other players with exactly your skill level, because only the best MMR in the premade is taken into account by the match-maker.
Except MMR isn’t taken into account at all in matchmaking. It’s only used for finding team mates, in which case having a high MMR player in your 3-man premade is highly beneficial.
You’re absolutely right. MMR is not the deciding factor, it’s the division and tier you’re in, sorry. I edited my previous post in consequence. Thanks a lot.
edit: Source: https://www.guildwars2.com/news/pvp-league-season-two-changes/
Frankly, how is it possible to lose against a comp like that. Take a lot of CC in your team, a shout ele, a thief, target one necro after another and snowball the map.
Hell, the main damage output from a necro comes from chill, and chill does not stack. So really, you lose a lot of dps by bringing two necros into a team fight.
One necro on a team is very strong, if his allies know how to peel for it. Two is harder to manage. Three is a guaranteed loss providing the other team know how to multiclass and plays seriously.
Have you tried playing in a 3-man premade yourself? Chances are, you will lose most of your games. The difficulty lies in finding two or three other players with exactly your skill level, because only the best division tier in the premade is taken into account by the match-maker.
Even if you manage that, the 3-4 man still has a disadvantage MMR-wise, that can be somewhat compensated by superior communication via TS for example. But most rotations in GW2 can be deduced by carefully looking at life bars and the mini-map. So typically, premades are only better in team fights. You should win against most of them, and actually I think you already do. But when you do win, you think that’s because of your superior skill, and when you lose you blame the match-maker. It’s a cognitive bias.
edit: Changed incorrect information
(edited by Sorel.4870)
My tin foil hat say’s that balancing is more about what’s more entertaining for the Streaming Audience than fun for the player base.
In my experience, they are the same people.
Nerf every other elite specs but chrono and tempest.
There. Fixed.
you must be knew if you think i’m alone, or even in the minority when it comes down to opinion/viceral hatred of this abomination.
because for a year and a half thousands of us were voicing our hatred for suckhammer, but everyone gave up when it became clear that Anet didn’t care what we thought.
The first skyhammer thread
I’m well-aware of the history of this map. And just to get that out of the way, as Orwell has written “sanity is not statistical”: intelligence is an intensive variable, it doesn’t stack up with numbers.
But that’s besides the point. It doesn’t matter if you belong to the majority or not. When the die rolls, your choice counts for one tenth. One player, one voice. Do you think you that your opinion is worth more than the one of the other players in your game? Or can you accept the fact that, once in a while, the minority will gets what it wants, in the exact proportion of its size?
Oh, and “hatred” is a big word to throw at a video game map, don’t you think?
Aggreed. “DH traps & true shot op, Druids bristleback op, thiefs op , necro corrupts & chill op, Scrapper damage & sustain op, … . " Half the classes are OP -_-.
Lol learn to play all classes you named are easely counterable
Yes, you can counter OP classes by using other OP classes.
The reason people complain is because there has been a serious power creep with HoT. Remember the “OP” D/D elementalist pre-HoT? How could this become a weak spec post-HoT (even before celestial removal)???
I have it for you:
- Tempest is probably fine now (which means dead in the OP meta)
- chrono is also getting closer to balance, but continuum shift is still too strong
- reaper has OP condi damage
- daredevil has OP damage
- Druid has OP pet burst and too much (long) CC
- Scrapper has over-OP sustain
- Berserker is not too OP
- DH has too much CC
- Rev has still a bit too much sustain
so here we are: 6 out of 9 are OP. What this also means is that instead of bringing additional diversity in PvP, elite specs have just removed what was before and actually reduced diversity.
And now people want to buff the core specs to be able to reach the OP level of the elite specs… Yes, you could balance things like this, but this is a terrible idea. Power creep has made the game much less fun. You can now spend a huge amount of time stun locked or get all conditions in the game on you in less than 2s. The only proper fix is a massive nerf to most elite specs. Some people won’t be happy at first, but this will make the game much healthier.
I couldn’t agree more. Maybe it’s because I’m multiclassing, but I’m under the impression that I see too much “my class is bad, the others are OP threads” on these forums, while the only real issue is the power creep. What the game needs now is a big nerf to the elite specs. Some of them are really fun in design, but Anet certainly didn’t need to make them so strong.
It has no meaning: this entire game is based around skill spamming.
Guys, I think the next WTS winner is among us tonight!
They are a bit spammy in nature. But I don’t think we should change the way they work just because bad necros spam too much. Eventually, they learn how to wait for the right moment to use them. The issue of lot of necro duels is decided by the correct use of Putrid Mark.
Incoming engineers comments about how awesome sky hammer is
This thread is so old school, I swear! How often do you see engineers using rifle, or the turret knockback trait nowadays? This engineer joke was invented before the turret KB nerf, back in 2014 if I’m not mistaken.
@Sorel: he clearly stated “the map selection should choose the map with the majority vote.” He never implied that his opinion was more valuable than another’s, but that the majority opinion should always take precedent over the minority.
But then it’s not the exact measure of the popularity of the map, is it?
or atleast make it so when 9 people vote for a decent map and one troll votes for suckhammer, suckhammer doesn’t get picked.
There is no objective appreciation of value. You can’t objectively say that Skyhammer is worse, because we’re just playing a game here. With the weighted roll, Skyhammer’s chances of being played is exactly proportional to its value, since value is only the measure of the number of players wanting to play it compared to those who don’t. Maybe you think your opinion is more valuable somehow? Well it’s not, sorry. Get over yourself.
It really depends on what build you are running. If you are running a corruption build, good: save Poison Cloud for when he enters berserker. It’s roughly the same CD.
However, since you mentioned endure pain, you’re probably playing a power build. Which means you can either run wells, signets, minions or shouts. If you are playing wells, well don’t: they are bad and you should feel bad. Same for minions.
If you are playing signets, keep them for when they enter berserker: they usually have the stab trait, you can fear them. Also, Signet of the Locust works without LoS.
Finally, if you are playing shouts, remember that your shouts don’t need any line of sight, as do most of your shroud skills, and your staff skills. So try to kite around the point, line of sight, and cast everything through a wall or a small bump.
Thieves in WvW are bullies, always have been. Just run a good 1v1 build (scrapper, druid, condi warrior, your pick) and don’t pay attention to them. They’ll get bored when they realise they can’t kill you and will go away.
I never understood why it was fun to play thief unless you’re in conquest, or outnumbered.
My suspicion is that the best role Mesmer can bring to the coming meta (if anything at all) will be a home point defender. Keeping in mind that whatever this build looks like will need to
- run portal
- be able to ward off a thief
- offer something when rotating to mid (be it condis, utility, etc) before porting back to defend home.
Whatever this build is, it’ll only function in a greater team comp.
A Paladin bunker mesmer offers all this. The question is: is it worth taking in your team over a druid? But in soloq, definitely, it would work.
Long time till I didn’t see one of those! Skyhammer is a lot of fun if you actually dodge the big laser. I wish they would add gliders. With gliders, I would want it in ranked even. But Anet doesn’t think gliders are competitive so I’ll just stay sad.
Crat, as much as I love Niflhel and Foefire, it gets a bit boring when you ONLY play those maps in ranked. Play the map, try to have fun!
The thing is: in a way, snowballing is a strategy, and countering this strategy takes skill. Yes, thieves, DHs, and others are now valuable, because not only can you get kills easier, but you can now capitalize on them to snowball. During the bunker meta, even if you somehow completely kittened up and lost someone in a team fight, no problem: a mesmer could just portal in, hold the 2v3 for as long as it takes for the dead to return from respawn and continue indefinitely.
So, are rotations dead? Does the team with the more damage dealers win? Well, that’s somewhat true. After a patch, especially in unranked where you don’t compete for anything, people are playing bursty builds generally. But I can assure you point holders still exist. Scrappers, druids, bunker mesmers: you can have tanky builds even with the tanky amulets gone. I can’t wait for the pro league finals, where we’ll get to see if this “burst meta” really is one. Trust me, it won’t be: it will be an interesting meta, like we already had some, where you have definite roles and not everything is about damage, but where you get snowballed when you make a mistake.
The problem with warrior in conquest is that it doesn’t really fit into a definite role. It’s mobile, but can’t decap and +1 like thief, nor can it provide team mobility like mesmer can. It is not strong in team fights, and even if it was, its damage is not AoE, and it doesn’t provide a lot of support (old shoutbow did, that is why it was meta, but Soldier runes don’t cut it anymore after the powercreep). I guess it’s pretty strong as a side point holder: a friend of mine has a nice condi build that can take most 1v1s at equal skill level. Still, I think druid and maybe scrapper are better, since they are much, much better in a 2v2 scenario for the support they provide.
How would you see warrior play in Conquest? As a team fight damage dealer? As a lone roamer? As a support?
I like the idea of a damage-oriented support role for warrior. I don’t know if it would require too many changes, but there is something about the design of warrior about buffing damage for his team (Phalanx Strength is an example, or Empower Allies, even if these traits don’t work in pvp). That way, you could chose between a necro or a DH that deals a lot of damage but can be focused, or a warrior that helps the team do a lot of damage, but gets focused easily. Unfortunately, Berserker is selfish in nature, and I don’t understand what niche it’s supposed to fill in Conquest.
I play a Reaper build based around shouts, and while it’s still rather selfish, it’s really good in a team fight to cleanse your allies of all this nasty chill flying around these days. Just pick 4-5 shouts, Mercenary or Paladin amulet, and you’re good to go. Useful in soloq, where it’s not rare to go against 2-3 reapers.
Crusader ranger with MM, BM, druid also works very well, but it’s more useful in 2v2 scenarios.
A good balance goal would be to have a real choice between traitlines, weapons and utility skills. Necro for example is great design-wise, because even though in pvp you can hardly play anything else than Reaper and Soul Reaping (these names…) you can play Spite, Curses and whatever the minion line is called, and still be effective. You can play signets, you can play corruptions, and you can play shouts, and they are all good choices (even though signets have a slight advantage still). Mesmer is another good example: even chronomancer doesn’t stand out to much now.
So first of all, I think some of the elite weapons (particularly druid’s staff, scrapper’s hammer, DH’s LB, etc.) should be nerfed. What Anet did with shield for chrono and herald is a good example of good balance: it’s still strong in pvp, but not OP. Then, a lot of the elite traits should also be reworked. A lot of them are much, much better than what other lines offer, which is bad for build diverity, and condemn older builds to uselessness.
Decapping and +1 roles do not put the thief in a “good spot”.
Of course it does. If every profession was able to play the same role (say, side point fighter, like a druid or an engineer), then why would anyone play anything but the profession that performs the best?
This game is officially about “play how you want”, but really it’s a profession-based team game, like Team Fortress. If you want to have a comp that capitalises on fast bursts and snowballing through the map, you take a thief for the +1 and decaps, with a mesmer for the moa and Portal. If you want a more slow paced game, but still play three nodes, you take rangers, or engineers, or eles, or revenants. If you want to annihilate everything in teamfight at the cost of mobility, you go for necros and DHs. That’s how it should be. Bunker mesmer was ridiculous because mesmer was never meant to be a bunker: it’s too OP with Portal and all the invulns.
Dragonhunter doesn’t need more nerfs. It only needs to have some animations toned down a bit, and have others be more visible. They are definitely not OP, just annoying.
Prob it would be good for pvp, but for Maguuma\raids?
Raids are only hard in the first couple of weeks, when people are still figuring things out. If everything was nerfed to deal pre-HoT damage, the existing raid would still be easily doable. The best guilds are able to skip mechanics with the damage they deal now.
Now nerf everything else! Honestly, I feel like with last patch, chronomancer is still strong, but does not stand out to much compared to, say, Dueling. Which is good.
Anet, I feel like you’re taking it too slow. Every elite spec (except maybe Berzerker) deserves the mesmer/ele treatment. Nerf everything, starting with everything that is overperforming compare to the concurrence (HoT pets, most elite specs, most elite weapons, etc.). Only then can we achieve balance.
Congratulation on mesmer though.
Try to queue in GW1. Now come back and tell me GW2 is dead.
The Abjured are winning every game in every meta for a long, long time now. I don’t think this is about comp specifically (although it can not hurt them). They are simply better players who are used to play together. Sure, they can prefer some metas (as regular players), but in general they just adapt and still win.
You don’t watch good thieves if you rarely see them use head shot (pistol 4). On demand daze is incredibly strong.
but good thieves is a very small fraction of thief players and even without the player being particularly good d/p is a strong option
Compared to what? p/p thief? For a bad player, most viable builds are a better option than d/p thief. I’m thinking of condi necro, which is better when you know how to play it but is still very effective when you spam mindlessly (source: Leeto). Or of Scrapper, one of my mains, but that I only play marginally better than the terrible scrappers I see in game.
pretty sure some classes like warriors could never channel any movment skills while in mid air. And warriors are notorious for having lots of them. If your class could do this before it wasn’t a feature it was a bug.
Not only warriors: most movement skills work like this. It’s simply a bug fix, I don’t understand why people get so mad about it.
The alacrity change was a good one, as it did too much for the duration you could get. It is honestly MUCH easier to balance around alacrity that isn’t as powerful (although I don’t know if 50% reduction was right). The problem is that they didn’t also then change the balance of everything with alacrity to compensate.
Even more, they probably should have nerfed alacrity by 50%, and then nerfed EVERY elite spec by about as much to reverse the stupid amounts of power-creep ruining the game.
Agree 100%.
Well said. Having seen the model change from immersive and hardcore to an uber casual setting
You are comparing two different games, targeted at two different audiences. So I don’t think the “model” has changed at all. GW1 still has all these features you call hardcore, and you can still play it. GW2 does not, apparently, but why should it? When I play Mario Galaxy, I don’t complain that it’s casual compared to Super Mario Bros, even if they come from the same company, in the same franchise.
I would love to see more pvp maps, but Anet didn’t really have great experiences with that. Spirit Watch is not popular (and still has huge imbalance in orb transportation, like Superspeed working while carrying the orb), and Skyhammer was hated for a long long time. Most of the issues with Skyhammer were dealt with (after a painfully long time, and without adding gliders sadly), but the damage was done. That’s probably why we don’t see new maps. It’s a shame really.
It would work great on a Blighter’s Boon build, but there is already a lot of boon spamming. Maybe a sigil with vigor on a 3s CD would be ok though, and a great pick for a necro.
Also, there is a sigil that grants quickness, but I don’t remember if it’s on crit or on damage dealt.
Warrior is in a good spot, I think, but the much needed nerf hammer never came… and warriors still have to deal with ridiculously powercrept professions.
That’s true anything other than Necros and Thief can basically take a back seat. I hope I can choose games with no Necros and Thief.
Anet really sucks at balancing.
Thief was overbuffed for sure, but:
1) More than one necro on your team is a sure loss against a decent team
2) More than one thief on your team is a sure loss agaisnt a decent team
You still have three more spots to fill.
I just started PvP in GW2, and was wondering how many players have recently started the game and are really enjoying the PvP component?
There are real problems with class imbalance, but that’s definitely not what you’re experiencing at your level. Rather, you started playing unranked at the worst possible time. The league just ended, so every serious player who was competing in ranked has just come back to unranked, and so everyone’s unranked MMR is very volatile, which causes these unbalanced games. If you keep playing a couple more games, your rating will go down rapidly and you’ll most likely face other new players (or new-ish players, I know a lot of pve heroes started enjoying pvp with leagues).
What I would advise you to do now is to practice in hot join, and focus more on your mechanical gameplay: when do I use my skills, how do I disengage when I’m outnumbered or just losing my 1v1, what animations do I have to watch, etc. You can also ask a friend who plays pvp to duel you and give you some tips. Rotations you’ll learn in time, don’t worry.
Also, make sure you run a good build. It does not need to be a super pro build you know nothing about, but just something based around what you like to play that actually works in a pvp setting. You can ask for advice here, or in-game, or in the profession-specific subforum. Good luck, and see you in the Mists!
Resistance, unlike other powerful boons like might or protection, has actually very few sources. The most common source of Resistance (Rune of Durability) was even removed today. I don’t think that’s a problem.
Tell me if I’m wrong, but reading you I have the feeling that you don’t really like Conquest. The thing is, you can’t enjoy GW2 pvp without enjoying Conquest (Stronghold is not balanced). So… this might not be the game for you. Have you tried Smash Bros 4? It’s a 1v1 fighting game, with a mix of offense and defense, and I don’t see why it’s so inferior to Melee, you bigots!
edit: also your character name is a bit lazy <3