Guild Wars 2

Nice write-up, this is a very interesting issue. However, I don’t think the comparison between Moba games and GW2 is really helpful, because even a comparison with WoW pvp ignores the fact what GW2 spvp is all about: conquest.

If we’re talking about build variety and balance, I think it’s obvious the builds that will shine are the ones most capable of playing the conquest game type.
It’s why a lot of people have become jaded, because they want to play a certain build that is just weaker at node control and so they are forced into builds and even classes to compete.

The team dynamics in this game is very different from any other pvp system and to be honest, I don’t think even the top teams have reached anywhere near the skillcap when it comes to playing cohesively as a team. (This is hard to judge, because I do not play on that level and spectating is limited.)

If Anet wants to push the conquest game type as an e-sport, I think it’s fair they balance around it. Although, I don’t think they’ve been too successful in this area so far.

For example:

Currently, I choose to play a Venom Share thief. The amount of work I have to put in on an encounter with things such as well timed interrupts and evades is way more than that of a thief simply utilizing a burst rotation. Yet, my build’s performance capabilities does not exceed theirs.

However, in this team-oriented environment, I make my team-mates stronger and he does not. So my team’s power increases multiplicatively while his only increases additively.

I don’t know if I really agree Venomshare could match the added force a burst thief brings.
There are some game-breakingly good individual builds out there that hinder the progression towards reaching a skillcap as a team.

Took the survey, it would be interesting if the Dev’s took it upon themselves to answer these kinds of questions publically.

I’ve tried for one more day, but it’s just not worth it.

I can’t believe what you’ve done to this game… I haven’t won a single match today, because the so-called meta has shifted from strategy to zerging and I refuse to play hotjoin in the tournament tab.

All the kitten talking in chat, general refusal to communicate, unpunished leavers and afkers, lack of skill and knowledge, joining tournaments to “test builds”, … matched up against premades.

I’m not one to vent on the forums, because I played casually and enjoyed the game, but suddenly I don’t anymore.

Tonight, I played five matches in a row against the same premade +r40 team with no chance of winning. Because I joined solo and got matched with 4 -r10 players every game, who played with the typical ‘hotjoin’ attitude of zerging point without defending them.

At this point, I’m very dissappointed. These are simple facts. I did not have this experience before the removal of tickets.

I realise there is a need to attract a larger playerbase into spvp, but at what cost?

Noctis Assassin.4035:

no d/x thief would ever use sigil of rage. It relies on attacks with high attack frequencies. P/P, S/D, and S/P builds used it so they could be on par with d/x in terms of damage (P/P was still unviable with it). Even before the nerf, you’d probably be better off with sigil of fire since it is okittensec cooldown opposed to sigil of rage’s 45 second cooldown but now there is no point in using it.
edit: and the 2 sec of quickness from petswap was fairly obvious when it was going to occur. You see a ranger running towards a down body? what do you think he is going to do?

My point with those examples was to show how varied the source of quickness effectively was.
I don’t think any d/x thief would use quickness in tpvp, but it’s pretty devastating for new players to face, on top of everything else the thief throw at them.
And with the lack of hard cc in this game, quickness on stomp is broken. There are only a handful of abilities that will be able to interrupt fast enough if they happen to be off cd.

The fact that it was decided to nerf quickness was neither a good or a bad decision, imo, it’s how they nerfed it that was unthorough and shortsighted.

I just posted this in the poll thread about quickness:

I think it’s exactly the kind of balancing they should be extremely careful with because it globally affects classes in different ways: e.g. complaints about Warrior’s reliance on haste to be viable.
While high crit builds such as thieves that can run the sigil (+ trait) have RNG haste and that nerf was welcome.
The pet swapping/stomping Rangers use is another example of a positive nerf, because it was a cheap, unavoidable way to snowball of the already weak downed state of certain classes.

The best way to nerf quickness is tweaking the drawbacks already linked to the skills (no healing for Rangers) seperately for each class and taking away RNG elements that are impossible to counter with skill.

(Too bad, Relfhex high jacked this thread. This is the SPVP section, not the WvW section…)

No.

I think it’s exactly the kind of balancing they should be extremely careful with because it globally affects classes in different ways: e.g. complaints about Warrior’s reliance on haste to be viable.
While high crit builds such as thieves that can run the sigil (+ trait) have RNG haste and that nerf was welcome.
The pet swapping/stomping Rangers use is another example of a positive nerf, because it was a cheap, unavoidable way to snowball of the already weak downed state of certain classes.

The best way to nerf quickness is tweaking the drawbacks already linked to the skills (no healing for Rangers) seperately for each class and taking away RNG elements that are impossible to counter with skill.

The map feels like a funnel with the orb as a magnet for bad strategic decisions.

The orb is basically a noob magnet.

It shows how more difficult objectives ruin casual pvp, if you’ve played WoW battlegrounds you know what I mean… That’s why I like the conquest gametype GW2 has.

Like most secondary objectives, I think the orb should be tweaked.

I think the orb should debuff targets defenses, but not limit movement and a team should only be able to capture the orb at their own point. Similar to CTF, where you can’t cap if your flag is gone. Making it more important/strategic to hold on the orb before capturing.

It’s not clear to me why certainly abilities drop the orb and others don’t.

I figured orb running would be for highly mobile classes, with all the interesting movement abilities that are in the game. Yet, movement is limited to such an extent, only few specs can efficiently carry.

Also, I think the orb’s spawn is too close to the player’s spawn and Raven is too remote and uninteresting.
The map feels like a funnel with the orb as a magnet for bad strategic decisions.

There is a simple way to fix this, that has been suggested before:

Have the orb spawn later in the game or make “cast” time on taking the orb longer so it is more easily contested.

I agree, there should be new rewards for tournaments based on rank, since the paid/free system was abandoned (= massive amounts of chests were given out in exchange of tickets).

Realistically, though, entire new looks are very expensive for Anet to design.
Also, there are a large amount of sets no one has reached yet.

I’d suggest a cap-based system: x amount of points each day/month scaling with rating.

Instead of new sets, the currency could be exchanged for titles, icons (variety on commander), weapons, backitems and maybe even gems.

At least, there should be a way to access the recent PVE item looks in SPVP.

Necroes are balanced.

There are no misconceptions: if you’re bad Necro makes you play worse, but if you’re skilled Necro can be very strong.

Great idea! The Devs should take a look at this!

Although, it sounds like you have a number of personal issues messing up your QTness, I do agree that the community should be patient and respectful towards the developers, because GW2 has the promise to offer the best PVP of any MMO.

Then again, we’ll be quickly closing in on the end of the first year after release and it’s no lie that the SPVP department comes in last in terms of effectvie playerbase, which affects the balance and content issues you mentioned.

BTW saying you’re the best insert class makes you sound like Athene, besides you play on the NA servers and we all know EU has the best of any insert class…

Yes.

But there is room for experimentation: with secondary objectives, but also with smaller arena style matches and duelling, capture the flag, king of the hill, etc…

I don’t think people have played either a MOBA or GW2, if they think they’re compatible.

This thread is about Rallying, though and I don’t think it should be removed from Spvp. It happens only on rare occasions and there is no way to abuse it.

In general, I personally think downed state is an important part of Spvp. It adds depth and interesting dynamics to the conquest game.

However, I do think it needs rebalancing and a better tutorial for new players, because it is not intuitive whether to ress or stomp in certain situations.
Warrior’s temporary selfress, for example, is not fully understood by most new players.
Mainly, the cooldowns are not optimal. Ele’s downed state is broken and the Engineer’s downed state is too clunky, imo.

It also plays into the absence of Healers, because it gives an additional reason to play a support with healing stats in a team composition.
Then again, swiftness resses and the ress signets need to be looked at.

Overall, I’m kind of disappointed. The community and its representatives seemed way more prepared for this than the developers. (Except for Jon, maybe. Soon.)
I don’t mean to offend, but Karl didn’t seem self-confident about giving this talk and that reflected negatively on the more interesting things he said.
Time is limited, don’t fret explaining the basics of a class for the off chance one viewer has not read the discription in Character Creation.

The balance conversation seemed very random. I don’t think banners, necro summons, turrets, traps, … should be priority. They don’t have a solid place in PvP, because they rely too much on AI and even when buffed, players will prefer not to use them, because there is no related skillcap.

I think I’ll delete my Engineer now, waste of a character slot. The RNG is not fun.

I’m excited for the leaderboards and I like how it’s being handled in a way fit for GW2 and not just a copy of how it has been done in other MMOs in the past.
Even though, the matchmaking is still vague and I expect there will be unflattering exploits if they don’t get it exactly right.

It also seemed as if they had not given much thought to the player incentive issue and only see new rewards as a long term thing. There was no further discussion about carrying over PVE players to sPVP except for sharing an option of a daily Laurel.

edit: Oh yeah, great to hear the PVP gear will be displayable in the selection screen coming next patch! ^^

Assuming all the new features they have talked about (leaderboards, spectator mode, playerbase/incentive, etc.) will be implemented sooner or later, I’d like to ask:

How will rankings work: player, class, character or build based?
Since tournaments now feature character swapping, how will matchmaking take this into account? Locking class swapping may be required, but it might change how tpvp works. So a high ranked player is able to practice his fewer played classes without losing ranking and a low ranked player does not have to face high ranked who queue low and then class swap. Countering smurfing and rating exploits, etc: different rating points for beating higher teams / lesser rating points for beating lower teams?

With competitive play in place will you be more active in balancing the game, fixing bugs and punishing exploits? Will the passive, slow and minor changes we’ve seen in the past be sufficient when people actually get involved and competitive?
In other words: will there be more resources made available for the pvp developers, if more players enter spvp?

What are your plans in general for the tpvp (system rewards)? Because now we are seeing more players join no ticket 2 team play, but 8 team play seems abandoned and gives ‘lesser’ rewards. So will the rewards for the old Paid tournaments be switched to Free and vice versa?
Is this an opportunity to implement the day / week based larger tournaments with new tournament rewards? Since you gave paid chests away in such a large quantity everyone is fully tournament geared at this point.

Will measures be installed to counter leavers and afkers in tpvp now tickets have been removed? So as to avoid a mentality that there is no drawback for leaving a game you “cannot win”.

Thanks, Grouch, really enjoyed the last SotG. I trust the developers to continue to be involved in Spvp if they wish it to be succesful and competitive for the future.

Evan Lesh.3295:

I looked into this and have updated character select to work with PvP equipment and town clothes. Whether it goes into this month’s patch is questionable.

That’s so great, hopefully it’ll make the patch. Thanks a lot, Evan!

Limiting the choices of team compositions even more is definitely a bad idea, in my opinion.

How do you account for the different build strategies every class can run?

What if a team just play two of the same class, because they main those classes and it ups their chances of winning because they outplay you regardless of the opponent’s class?

Do you think it’s a good idea to fix the meta? Remember there are 8 classes and only 5 slots on a team.

I understand there’s little room for playing doubles and some classes see less playtime in tournaments, but those are balance issues…
If Anet thinks it should not be viable then they should rework the aspect that makes running double superior.

Now you’re getting closer.

Edit: Shouldn’t this be in the ranger forum?

By any means, be more vague… I made this thread to get feedback.

(It’s specifically aimed at a Ranger GS build in sPvp, but it could be moved there I’m uncertain about the customs.)

Lixion.8457:

http://www.twitch.tv/blu42 had a 2v1 pvp build

What do you mean? Is this just a plug for your stream? :/

Zinwrath.2049:

Stof.9584:

I agree that with the ranking system in place you get the teammates you deserve.

But my experience after they removed tickets has been radically different than before.
I don’t blame the removal of tickets, I think just more people without tournament experience are using the solo queue that has been recently implemented and other soloquers without proper teams suffer from it.

In the last two games I entered the other members of the team did not speak, use pings or communicate and they all had ranks below 20.
This is far from what I experienced before the change, just an observation.

And this was all in 8 team match making?

No, it was the ‘paid’ tournament, that is now 2 team matchmaking.

I agree that with the ranking system in place you get the teammates you deserve.

But my experience after they removed tickets has been radically different than before.
I don’t blame the removal of tickets, I think just more people without tournament experience are using the solo queue that has been recently implemented and other soloquers without proper teams suffer from it.

In the last two games I entered the other members of the team did not speak, use pings or communicate and they all had ranks below 20.
This is far from what I experienced before the change, just an observation.

(I don’t think tickets were a problem after you got one from the dailies…)

I saw it more as a roaming build, like the Hundred Blades Warriors. You used to be able to swap out running speed signet for quickness…

I’ve tried building more glass cannon and using the Long Bow as a second weapon set, so you could stay offpoint and use GS for mobility/burst with invulnerability.

But definitely agree, the GS lacks base damage and so does the LB.

Bored of BM or Trap ranger yet? I’m creating a build to bring back the greatsword ranger I enjoyed playing during the beta, but I could use some pointers and opinions.

This is what I’ve been running so far:
http://gw2skills.net/editor/?fMAQNBhODbEpKxOwywi1OAsesHhD2UkplOFo65Jb4KrA;TsAA1CnoMyYkwIrROjkGtMYUwWEA

Copy & paste into URL.

It works decently well, but suffers from high cds, weakness vs conditions and lack of sustain vs other tanky builds.

I’d appreciate some feedback about the amulet, runes & sigels, pets and possibly even axe as an alternative off-hand. (For instance, Runes of Strength give better sustain since you constantly have might, but you drop dead when your bear’s cleanse in on cd.)

Seeing as the pvp in this game revolves entirely around map presence and objective/node control, I’d suggest making two lists: one based on a class’ power to hold an objective and one for the offensive pressure on said objective.
Key factors for one would be boons, healing and general survivability. Two can be measured by mobility, power burst and conditions damage spread.

I think, this will be more suited to account for the “viable” builds each class currently adopts in the meta strategy.

1: Defense

S = Guardian, Elementalist
A = Engineer, Mesmer, Ranger
B = Necro, Thief
C = Warrior

2: Offense

S = Mesmer, Elementalist, Thief
A = Necro, Ranger, Warrior
B = Engineer, Guardian
C =

(You know the builds that are implied…)

You could, of course argue, both take place simultaneously in teamfights and that is certainly true, but I felt the previous lists were lackluster in their ability to accomodate both build variaties.

My opinion:
- Most balance issues come from sustain builds, permanent boons such as regeneration and protection break counters and make less classes viable, since the effects are not unique to each class.
- The map presence the Mesmer class provides ranks them highest and makes roaming strategies nearly obsolete: lack of Warriors and other melee roamers (besides thief).
- I think most people underestimate how strong Necroes are, they are largely abscent because of their lack of build strategies, which makes them easily countered.

I play GW2 mainly for the SPvP and rarely leave the Mists on most of my characters, yet when I log into the game they are displayed with their main world / PvE gear in the Character Selection screen.

Wouldn’t it be a great idea to have the option to display the PvP gear we identify our characters with?

There was a thread about this some two months ago, but I figured it might be interesting to see the replies now people have had more time to gear their characters.

It happens, but most of the time it doesn’t. And it doesn’t mean you can’t win or have fun… I just won a gold chest with random people 4v5!

Has a fix been reported yet? I’m having the same issues on my newly build pc.

Specs:
Windows 7 64bit Professional
7GB ram
AMD Phenom™ 9950 Quad-core processor – 2.60 GHz
ATI Radeon HD 5700 Series (latest drivers installed)