Guild Wars 2

Ludus Rex.1562:

Somebody’s not a poker player.

Here’s the deal with Solo Q:

You are the only X factor. Any discrepancies you experience in terms of quality of teammates (luck of the draw) should balance out over time (enough games played), because those same bad players or AFKs can land on the other team just as often (actually more often, since you take up a spot on your own team).

Had a bad run of luck? That can happen, and it can be frustrating, but if you play a ton of games you still should have more wins than losses. If you don’t have more wins than losses, guess what the X factor was?

Don’t want ANY variance in the quality of your team because any luck, one way or the other, makes you flip the table over? Team Q is the answer.

You now have 100% of the responsibility for your long term sPvP success in Solo Q and a viable option if you want to eliminate luck over short term period (like single games).

The power is yours!

Your post is completely wrong in pretty much every way.

In short: this is not poker. It is a team game. If you put together football teams with a random mix of offensive, defensive and special teams players, not Even Tom Brady would be able to influence the outcome.

Note to self: create WvW post titled, “why edge of the Mists is bad”

OlrunTheBlade.1486:

@Thedenofsin Why is it okay for guardians to have their position locked into every team, but not warriors?

The answer is: there are 8 professions and 5 slots on a team.
Your build shows just how overpowered warriors are.

Because Stability and knock backs were designed around moving players in and out of cap points.

/discuss

Pyroatheist.9031:

Mesmers have the easiest access to the best stunbreakers of any class. Stability is not even close to necessary.

Skyhammer says hi.

Not with that build. The hardest counter to that would be a 30/20/10/10 (my hurpa durpa durp build) with disenchanter and feedback.
Send the zerker after the turrets and whack away at the engie

1. scepter
2. Long cast times on defensive phantasms
3. arcane thievery

kito.1827:

Sirendor.1394:

Justin ODell.9517:

Thedenofsin.7340:

snip

I’m sorry you’ve gotten matches you don’t enjoy. We’re working on addressing the skill gap on multiple fronts.

In the mean time, have you tried Team Arena? You may find it more your speed.

I have tried TPvP with some friends from guild. We’re ranging from rank 5-20. We got matched up with 5 guys rank 30-40. If that’s what you call balance… , you need a new system for SPvP.

rank
does
NOT
count

it just indicates time invested, no match grouping around rank, no skill indication

/facepalm

this may be to blame the ‘entry-mmr’, but srsly neither matchmaking nor balance nor is it anets fault if people play some classes.

why does everybody seem to be too narrow minded to figure that out?

Probably because you don’t realize that you are wrong. Rank correlates to skill. How well it correlates is dependent on several factors, including the player’s innate skill.

If you were to draw plots of skills versus rank for many different people, you would see that the curves started out similarly and then would greatly diversmge after some rank.

Using that information, you could establish the cut off point where players below a certain rank could be logically grouped together and have comparable levels of skill.

Carighan.6758:

Not sure I agree on Mender’s Purity. We have quite a bit of condition removal actually, especially because SotE resets pDisenchanter.

pDisenchanter only has 2khp. He dies pretty easily, and I don’t think it’s a fair trade-off to have a handicapped Heal that requires a full utility slot to work as effectively as one of the other heals.

Nah, necromancers are fine. This thread isn’t about necros; it’s about warriors.

I think most of the warrior abilities are fine. Healing Signet is waay over the top and scales entirely too well.

I hopped on a full glass cannon Phantasm Mesmer with Beserker gear and hit a warrior tank with a full Phantasmal Beserker. He face tanked it and completely, passively healed from the damage before the Phantasm’s next attack.

Qaelyn.7612:

Thedenofsin.7340:

It requires keeping 3 illusions up at all times and only heals for about 300hp/s.

I’d suggest you up it to 400 hp/s and remove the illusion requirement. It should also passively provide 600 armor.

As a mesmer main I can only say that I hope this was intended as satire. What you describe would be so overpowered that it’s hard to contemplate.

It’s not hard to contemplate.

I’d rather play the same people over and over again and have the new players face each other until they get 20+ hours of game time in.

Just solo in team Q

I think that’s a good idea as well.

Lupanic.6502:

yes, all engis, all necros and all ranger are always bunker. Yes Sir.

Did you play that match? No, you didn’t. I did. They were all bunkers. Spirit ranger, mm necro and bunker engies.

It requires keeping 3 illusions up at all times and only heals for about 300hp/s.

I’d suggest you up it to 400 hp/s and remove the illusion requirement. It should also passively provide 600 armor.

and this was the very next match

not only was it a 5v4, but the other team had 5 bunkers. 5!

Justin ODell.9517:

Thedenofsin.7340:

snip

I’m sorry you’ve gotten matches you don’t enjoy. We’re working on addressing the skill gap on multiple fronts.

In the mean time, have you tried Team Arena? You may find it more your speed.

Tried that, and this is what I got. Triple thief team.

Any other suggestions?

ArenaNet has been completely silent on warriors.

This either means they think warriors are fine, in which case we all need to go find some other game to play, or they simply don’t care, in which case we all need to go find some other game.

Leaderboard rank is absolutely meaningless – just ignore it. It doesn’t say anything about how good or bad you are – it just tells you how lucky you are with team compositions.

If team composition is important, but profession selection is random, then position in the leaderboard is largely influenced by RNG, which means the leaderboards aren’t an accurate measure of player skill.

I’ve tried Signet of the Ether quite a bit in PvP, and I can’t find a single build where I would prefer it over Ether Feast or Mantra of Recovery.

Even in PVE, I don’t find it better than Ether Feast.

The real problem is Healing Signet. It is 100% passive, so there is no counterplay to it. If the warrior stands there, he gets healed; if he hits you, he gets healed; if he runs away, he gets healed.

The Mesmer analog, Signet of the Ether, heals for less than Healing Signet and requires the Mesmer keep 3 illusions up. The Mesmer actually has to do something to get those heals, and that something can be impeded or stopped. That introduces counterplay. Counterplay is good.

You mean Durped!

OlrunTheBlade.1486:

@Thedenofsin There’s a guardian on pretty much every team. OP. Pls nerf.

…except for the teams where the warrior has pushed even the guardian out from the role of mid-point bunker, as highlighted by your build.

Thanks for reminding me about how warriors are taking over that role as well. -)

Sensotix.4106:

I really tried to stay as objective as possible but then again this post gets ruined by pve and wvw people.. :/ it’s sad
some actually provided nice feedback and suggestions but they also got destroyed by pve and wvw guys

Nature of the beast, I’m afraid.

I think most of your points are valid. However, I don’t think defensive mechanisms should be viewed as risk vs reward. They should be viewed as reward vs opportunity lost. If you activate a defensive skill, there should be an opportunity lost, but low risk. Shield blocks are a great example of this: you sacrifice damage output for self-preservation: the opportunity to do damage is lost.

Beserker Stance and Endure Pain are presumably balanced around the opportunity lost from slotting the utility. The long cooldown and loss of utility is the lost opportunity. You are stacking self-preservation utilities at the cost of group buffs (and other things). The problem, however, is this is not a balanced trade-off. Beserker Stance, in particular, with an 8 second duration, is extremely powerful.

Edit: and where’s that video of your new PvP build in action?? :-)

The Herpa Durpa Durp Build (type-o intentional)

Link to Build

Since everyone and their poodle is making some cool and neat build and naming it, I decided to create the most generic and brain-dead build and give it an appropriate name.

This build is actually fairly decent in solo queue simply because of its ranged burst potential. It does well supporting team fights from range.

Here’s how to play it:

1. cast Phantasms
2. herpa-durpa-durp
3. stomp.

That’s all there is to it.

Basically you’ll do some team support from ranged by running around and launching your phantasms on someone who is fighting someone else.

If you want to try to set up some kind of combo, you do this:
Sword5->Sword3->dodge->swap->Sword2+Diversion->Swap->GS5+Power Lock->GS4

If the crit stars align and you catch a squishy with their pants down, this can do somewhere between 10 and 18k damage. Half of this combo will put most thieves on the turf, and Swordsman is nasty spike damage.

Usually I’ll sneak in late to a fight, Sword5+Sword4 (for 5% more damage), then swap to GS and spam.

This build takes Deceptive Evasion because you basically treat your images as disposable handy wipes. I know this is taboo for phantasm builds, but…well, screw it, it just works.

Between 3xMoRvy, Lyssa and 3xPower Lock, you have plenty of opportunities to get out of lockdowns or stop incoming damage.

Power Lock synergizes really well with IoL too.

Pros:
– durpa-durp
– 6x condition cleanse (and OPlyssa)
– durp
– 6x interrupts
– boon strip
– 3xHealing Mantra (3x heals better than Ether Feast)

Cons:
– squish, Daniel-san, just like grape
– can’t bunker (or can it?)
– crappy in 1v1 against tanky builds or builds with AoE
– blinds totally screw this build

Bunker-in-a-Pinch
– If you find your team lacking a bunker, then swap your sword/sword for staff, toss on a soldier’s amulet drop IoL for iDefender and this build is a halfway decent side bunker. It still won’t hold up to a MM Necro or a Bunker warrior, but the Phantasms will hit just as hard and still will have a 45% crit chance thanks to Phantasmal Haste.

OlrunTheBlade.1486:

I don’t see the problem with there being a warrior on most teams and two on some. <snip>

I stopped reading right there.

Aereniel.7356:

More importantly, how did blue team score 341 points with that comp? Thief clearly OP, nerf plis.

We basically zerged between 2 points most of the time. Not much you can do – can’t actually hold a point.

The problem is the Healing Signet. It’s too strong. It needs counterplay.
400hp/s is fine if you are actively working to keeping that 400hp/s rolling. However, just getting it passively, regardless of what you are doing (i.e. disengage == 1200hp, skullcracker = 800hp), makes it overpowered.

Healing Signet should be reworked to provide 400hp/s healing, normalized, for hitting opponents with adrenaline-gaining attacks. Increase the active heal and the cooldown, and you’d balance warriors.

Gallrvaghn.4921:

4 thieves on a 4v5. It couldn’t be worse than that.

But yeah, lately, SoloQ matches are almost always unfun because of either AFK, 4v5, or very lopsided matchups (total noobs or clueless PVE farmers being eaten alive by clearly better players). And this is regardless of being on the pwning team or the being-pwned team.

It was a 5v5, one left as soon as the match ended.

Ran another solo queue. What did I get? 4x thieves…

How can anyone take the game seriously with queuing so bad?

I took the screenie just after the first thief left.

This is sad.

Edit: updated post to clean up and remove names.

That’s not going to help the developers, sadly. It’s pretty though

Elementalists by design are a very versatile class, and they aren’t in the meta. Mesmers are a very versatile class, and they aren’t in the meta.

Secondly, there are no professional teams.

Third, you play a warrior and are heavily biased toward the profession. Double/triple warrior is the meta, which means they are insanely out of proportion. Downplaying the broken state doesn’t make the problem any less real.

Last, you believe that a profession is only overpowered when it’s a quint team?!? That’s ridiculous.

Josh Davis.6015:

I can confirm that Olrun’s build is one of the best bunker builds for warrior. Thanks for the guide, Olrun!

Gee that’s great. More reasons to run double/triple warrior teams.

Can you guys maybe let some other professions in your meta? Or should we all just reroll warrior?

The build is fine. It does nothing for group fights and the stealth means you can’t really bunker well.

Will Scarlet be killed?

style.6173:

You guys really don’t understand this. There is no such thing as balance patches. Think about it this way… the game has been our for a year and 4 months. Should we really still need this many balance patches? If the goal was a balance patch, then the whole ANET methodology is a complete fail.

Instead, I think these are changes to change up the meta, get new skill usage, and to keep the game dynamic. That’s more of the goal regardless of whether it is called a balance patch.

I believe that is an astute observation. The core problem with these ‘meta shake up’ patches are that they wind up creating a profession or meta that prevents many other builds from being viable.

In my experience, most MMO’s make a lot of poor decisions regarding their PvP design, then follow it up with more poor decisions. They provide a lot of ‘fixes’ which don’t necessarily address the core problem.

ArenaNet makes very few poor decisions, but their problem is that you’re more likely to see a new ring on a tree before you see the fixes implemented in game.

^^Agree with this guy. Rank does not directly translate to skill.
Rank reflects experience.
There is a correlation between experience and skill.

Players with lots of experience are more likely to be good than players with little to no experience.

Romek.4201:

make this in wvw or pve thread than they maby care about

Perhaps you are right. I’d like to believe they care about sPvP. :-/

Silv.9207:

If you focus a Warrior whit that signet and all the build up, you take the same or lesser time to kill it like if you try to kill a Guardian. No more.
If you don’t kill a warrior whit healing signet is because your dps is so low that you can’t kill anithing. Or because you’re not a dps, then you don’t need to kill it, youst survive, because you’re a bunker too.
If you play a condition class (like the 80% of the players) you can yust spam poison and kill it easy.
It take time aniway, because your enemy is a bunker!
If a warrior play that signet is because it’s a full defensive build, and half of it’s traits was spent on only one trait to increase the defence.
If you see a berserker or a hybrid warrior play it… you notice it because it’s death after… 3 seconds?

Whit that signet the warrior has low healt regen than a Guardian.

-Guardian regen:
Passive Virtue+Regen+heal at every buffs+healing Sigils+Rune. And if you active your healing skill you gain 4.5/8.5k of hp.
-Warrior rege:
Passive signet+Regen+Rune. And if you active your healing skill you gain 2k hp and lose a lot of your healing strategy.

That’s the 2 main bunker build of the game. If you pretend to kill them quickly… it’s better that your dps is very very high and full of poisoning skills.

The guardian’s heal can be interrupted.

It’s definitely broken beyond all recognition. Be careful that the thread doesn’t get deleted! ArenaNet moderators are deleting threads where people say they don’t like the healing signet.

This one will likely survive because they OP likes it so much he wants every class to have it! :-)

It’s sad that I’m seeing a lot of responses that amount to, “good idea, but it won’t amount to anything”.

That says a lot about the playerbase’s satisfaction rate… :-/

The game has been out for over a year now and we’ve seen many changes to the gameplay and the meta game: burst meta, condi meta, hambow meta, etc.

Along with these changes we’ve seen a number of buffs that push certain professions into the meta due to their OP nature: elementalists, necromancers and most recently warriors.

In retrospect, it is clear these changes created an imbalanced profession. While these changes did typically result in some kind of shift in the meta-game, it is questionable if those changes were for the overall betterment of GW2.

What is unfortunate, however, is that these changes remained effectively unchanged in the game for 4 months at a time. It is clear that the persistence of these imbalanced classes had a negative side-effect on the game: stagnation and players feeling they need to play the FOT4M build to be competitive.

I believe players have many questions about the current PvP balance and the game would benefit from a living thread on the current state of PvP balance.

I personally have many questions about the balance in this game, ranging from rather broad to rather specific. For example:

• Why does it take 4 months to implement fixes to classes the community quickly (i.e. in a week or two) recognizes are imbalanced?
• Why did the team decide to implement changes such as gold-for-PvP before implementing fixes to the queuing system?
• The community at large has expressed disdain for passive traits and passive play (i.e. Healing Signet, Spirit pets, Automated Response, Diamond Skin, etc). Knowing this, why did ArenaNet decide to implement more passive play in the form of passive heals?
  Why has pretty much every class been pushed in and out of the meta except for Guardians?
• Why does the Moa/Necro minion bug persist for over a year? I don’t believe this same bug exists for Spirit Ranger pets.
• Why does ArenaNet believe the warriors are balanced when double warrior is still the current meta? It’s this kind of dominance which heavily limits profession and build variety in the game.
• Why is there no beta test server for PvP changes?
• It seems that there are an increasing number of skills and builds in the game where there is no risk/reward decision: that is, there is no risk associated with using ability “x”, or attacking, etc., which results in a lack of counterplay and interesting mechanics. Why is this so?

In short, I feel the community needs an open, living thread to discuss PvP balance, or perhaps two: one to discuss general mechanics and one to discuss specific issues about a certain class.

Sensotix.4106:

Thedenofsin.7340:

I’d really like to see how you use this build, because I tried it last night for a couple of hours and have nothing good to say about it. I felt I didn’t have the healing to survive burst DPS or the condi damage to drop a player. I felt any class with aoe burst damage was dropping the clones too fast, any class with condition damage was burning me down and any class with good sustain was winning the attrition war. This was in soloQ

I will record some gameplays for sure I changed some tiny things and it really is very powerful You will see

Excellent! I’m really looking forward to seeing this build in action. The only build I’ve found to be useful so far for bunkering is a 10/20/10/20/10 build with Defender (or Disenchanter), so I’d like to see how a more bursty build holds up.
I’m particularly interested to see if it can actually burn down a warrior tank build.

Did you dump Signet of the Ether?

I’ve seen this first-hand. Only a warrior bunker can face-tank a full Beserker Phantasm and fully heal in from it in between attacks. It’s insane.

I’d really like to see how you use this build, because I tried it last night for a couple of hours and have nothing good to say about it. I felt I didn’t have the healing to survive burst DPS or the condi damage to drop a player. I felt any class with aoe burst damage was dropping the clones too fast, any class with condition damage was burning me down and any class with good sustain was winning the attrition war. This was in soloQ

upgrade to Windows 64 – that’s the only sure-fire method to fix the problem. I did this a while back for a different game and it fixed the crashes completely.

Watched your most recent video. Neat looking build. Curious about your choices on the following:

1) Why did you choose Null Field instead of Disenchanter, given that you are not constantly shattering? The Disenchanter only has a 20 second cooldown and strips 2 condis+2boons every ~3 or so seconds. Plus he gives regen.

2) I won’t argue the x/20/20/20/x, but I’m curious why you chose 30 Dueling vs
– 30 in Chaos (9% damage reduction)
– 30 Insp (Shattered Conditions)
– 10 Dom (empowered Illusions)
– 10 Illusions (Master of Misdirection)

I ran something similar: 0/20/20/30/0 with full settler’s and disenchanter|defender and mirror images, and staff/GS. I found it very survivable and gave great zone defense, but the killing power was lacking (I wasn’t using undead runes – I’ll try that).