I agree with the OP. I recently went to Domination, Dueling with Chrono using zerk amulet because otherwise fights drag out too long, or it is impossible to down a scrapper, druid or ele. Only problem with the build is I can only remove a total 4 condi with a mantra. That’s it 4 condis in PvP where you are getting hit with multiple conditions every few secs. I would be happy if they spread some of the cleansing into other trait lines. Personally I think that is single thing that would drastically improve mes play.
I don’t really understand the hammering Mes is in for. The nerfs go beyond meta bunker control (note druid was left untouched) to the point where I’m not sure what their agenda for Mes is. If you want to look at unholy sustain go no further than Scrapper, for ridiculous I win buttons go to DH, Reaper and Revs, but really what does mes excel at now.
Personally I never played full bunker because it is boring compared to active engagement. Another nerf to alacrity wasn’t necessary in my view (for PvP) and also effects shatterers. A simple solution is half alacrity but double the duration for alacrity on illusion shatter so it stays the same. Also I do find it funny that chill doesn’t get the same treatment despite being the counterpart of alacrity.
Whenever they nerf Mesmers it is always a total overkill, no other class gets this sort of treatment consistently. Fact.
Like many others you seem to have forgot that they tactically nuked elementalists into the ground after launch, so much that they were COMPLETELY unplayable in pvp for a whole year. Like, people would harrass and flame you if you even had the guts to show up with an ele in unranked.
I said consistently, meaning not just one occasion. Ele has been in a good place for a very long time now. Chron was the best thing that has happened to Mes for a long time, but it has been progressively nerfed since it’s arrival along with some core traits.
Whenever they nerf Mesmers it is always a total overkill, no other class gets this sort of treatment consistently. Fact.
People must have money to throw away if they are spending 700 gems for a 1 item slot. Even in a virtual world that can not be considered value for money.
please take a look a dragonhunter longbow skill trueshot too, that skill does so much dmg while on ranger the only dmg skill is on a long channel so it is much more easy to avoid its dmg
at the moment the dragonhunter is the much better ranger
not only are its traps much strong the bow is also stronger as on ranger
oh and of course improving some AA on ranger would be nice too as it does not even do as much dmg as current thief autoattacksyes and Anet while you’re looking at True Shot please take a long hard look at how hard Ranger Pets hit…..
If you make guard LB weaker than Ranger LB can guards also get some kind of Pet that does mega DPS in pvp. thanks
Unfortunately Anet doesn’t understand the principle of balance. If you make a class stronger in one area they should be weakened in another otherwise you get what we have to today. I agree about the ranger pets. If rangers are getting buffed up then their pets should be weakened, but maybe most rangers would prefer their pets get buffed as they usually play better than those guys who still only use rapid shot and point blank.
The dragonhunter elite specialization has proven to have a very solid impact in many areas of the game……
WUT ????
Are you serious ?
Which areas ? Puzzle jump ? Trading ?
Actually in PvP. Esport teams might not be choosing them because they like their boring bunkers, but in street PvP DH is a pain in the butt. Their traps do way too much damage, classes without stability end up downed very easily and their bow does far too much damage. They totally dominate points in 1v1s and 2v2s and if 2 DH are present also in big team fights as well. Thieves and mes (non-bunker) get chewed up the most from what I’ve seen.
(edited by Vague Memory.2817)
There is so much wrong with PvP at the mo is hard to know where to start as more bad game elements have been piled onto existing issues. But one of the fundamental issues that have become increasingly problematic are skill and skill combos where there is little or no counterplay. Earlier PvP constructs were on the right track, with counterplay and tell signs for powerful skills, but now you know you will die to certain skills if you don’t have enough condi cleanse, stun breakers, stability etc.
Unfortunately all the damage buffing to elites and condis has not been matched with buffs to counterplay skills. If you keep adding damage to PvP, but don’t balance this by adding ways to counter it you just end up with a mess. Example, a lot more CC has been added to the game, but old class philosophies still exist were some classes have hardly any stability, or worse hardly any condi removal that can be put in a decent build because it can only be found in one unless trait line.
I also think it is time to promote player skill over mindless spamming. AoE field radius needs to be reduced, very hard hitting burst skills need to go back to lower ranges (bursting someone down out of their FoV is just daft) or the camera FoV has to be improved, and may have to introduce stun immunity to stop stun locks.
In general, our goal for PvP is to be faster-paced with a higher-level of lethality than what we’re seeing in S1.
I think this has been the problem with the buffed conditions and the elites. It is getting pretty hard to follow what is going in combat with stealth, fast evade, swiftness and superspeed. At the moment lethality is already very high for some classes. This just sounds like more imbalance will be created if these are the end goals: faster-pace and lethality. This seems to balance around esports rather than the PvP 99.9% rest of us play.
I think what would help PvP a lot is revising condition damage and stacking, as well reducing the radius AoE condition fields. Way too much mindless spamming of passive condition fields at the moment. Introduce some skill back into the game like actually having to strategically place fields rather than covering whole or large portions of a point. Also bring condition cleansing back in line with conditions for classes that have too little.
What the hell has happened to the PVP in this game? I’m an old player who has just returned and the introduction of the elite specs has completely messed up my beloved pvp… the hell…
Guardians are insta killing with TRAPS! Now I’ve seen everything… And Necromancers are just some devil spawn of pure aggravation to fight now.
I remember when warriors with a hundred blades was bad… this is a whole new category!
Can someone explain to me how current PVP is balanced?
I don’t think a sane person can explain why they have created such a mess. DH traps are a pain, every match I see instant downing of 1-3 players from these. If you don’t have much access to stability you are toast. Reaper is an I-win button for melee combat. There is much more you have yet to discover about the current madness.
You can definitely blame some of that on league meta achievement which encourages people to play professions they have no or little skill in.
Warriors are still very good. But if people complain enough Anet will buff them and warrs will be number 1 profession again in OPness. Hurray.
If you ever wondered why your pug team has lost with a score that is the same as if you had a 4v5 this is one of the reasons why. Having multi-professions in the league meta achievements is a bad thing. Sure some people have a high skill level in multiple professions, but a lot don’t. I’m pretty sure people are creating new professions they have no skill in whatsoever to get the meta.
When you get to league year of the ascension part II you are require to win 5 games with 3 professions. Part I requires 2 professions. So to get the meta I have to use a profession I have little skill with in ranked matches to get the achievement. Basically people doing this are severely gimping their team, I know because I’ve experienced this and heard people in chat say they are just going for the meta on their character.
Not sure why they added this for ranked matches as it adds another unbalancing factor to match making. The simplest solution is to replace these achievements.
Conditions and the size of some of their fields is pretty over the top at the moment. Getting a necro (for instance) dumping multiple conditions on you from off screen is unavoidable. But maybe that is also the fault of the pretty awful camera, even after its improvement people are still killing others out of FoV with rapid shot and other cheap ranged skills. Condi clearing is pretty bad in some classes and unfortunately didn’t get a reciprocal buff like condi damage/stacking.
I don’t have high hopes, because this is the direction Anet want the game to go in. Balance will be around esport observations, those were also the last balances added. In their eyes everything else is fine, maybe they will bow to pressure about warrs and thieves but that’s it.
It’s because hitting ruby requires no skill. All you need to do is grind and you will hit it. And by this time, all the pve heroes have had more than enough time to hit it so..
None of the league requires skill. Ruby and after just requires more grind than previously. The league tests your grind endurance and how much time you have on your hands before you burn out.
Pretty much every mmr based game is a grind by that logic then. Dota 2 is a grind, LoL is a grind, CSGO is a grind. None of those games need skill. Everyone can hit competitive tier if they play enough right?
You are deluding yourself if you think that at ruby level the game magically starts testing your skill just because you can lose tiers as well, because that is the only difference.
It’s because hitting ruby requires no skill. All you need to do is grind and you will hit it. And by this time, all the pve heroes have had more than enough time to hit it so..
None of the league requires skill. Ruby and after just requires more grind than previously. The league tests your grind endurance and how much time you have on your hands before you burn out.
I been playing thief for the league meta achievement. I don’t have much experience with thief, but the problems that thieves face in the current meta is a symptom of the bad state of PvP at the moment. Anet’s solution to class imbalance was to add more AoE, buff conditions and direct damage, i.e. just add more damage. Thief got the shortest end of the stick out of all of the classes. The biggest problem I faced is the out of control spamable AoE fields. DH traps are instant death.There used to be a healthy philosophy (skill needed, counterplay, tell signs etc) behind PvP, and and that got usurped by bad philosophy requiring less of these things.
However the worst thing affecting thieves is the dev concept of thieves’ role in PvP. They have state previously that they believe thief is in a good place because they are fulfilling their intended role in PvP, which is to finish off other players that have already taken damage. Personally I think is daft to design a class for the purpose of being a battlefield vulture. Thief was designed around the tradition glass cannon concept, but because of the overall large PVP damage buffs they are super glass at the moment. The sad thing is devs may try and balance thieves by giving them more damage, which just compounds the already terrible PvP philosophy.
Actually I totally understand what the OP is talking about. I was going to leave the meta achievements alone as I had very little experience playing anything other than my main. I had a thief that I have barely played and decided to use it for the year one meta. Got the 5 ranked wins in Ruby league which was actually a very painful process as thief which requires a lot of skill to play properly and gets eaten by DH traps too easily. By the time I got to my 5th win (many matches later) I was starting to get the hang of it. However you do realise you are gimping your team because you aren’t used to your new class, and are instrumental in losing some matches.
My advice to the OP is give it a try on another class, which may take a little while to achieve 5 wins but it is absolutely doable.
On a side note, whoever decided to put profession achievements in the league and even dailies should remove them. These types of achievements encourages people who main 1 class to use a class they are unfamiliar with in ranked PvP and no doubt is one of the reasons why matchmaking sucks and pug teams end up not being even close to each others skill level.
Thieves have more than have a place PvP. Anyone saying otherwise is talking nonsense. The amount of times a thief has won the match for us is countless. Decapping, killing creatures and lords. Now if I have 2 longbow rangers that don’t melee on my team I know our odds of winning have just taken a dip.
I don’t understand why there isn’t stun/daze immunity. Other MMOs do this because it is common sense not to allow a players to stun or daze lock another player to the extent that they can’t do a thing before they die. This is just another example of encouraging lazy game play, the same as other game elements like huge radius aoe fields, and per sec interrupt fields like tempest air overload and engie thunderclap.
I fought a warr using old spec, and he kicked my kitten , his attacks were well timed and faster than my cast times for most of my skills. Warrs are deadly in the right hands.
Any competitive PvP system that relies on the good nature of players not to abuse it, is a bad system. The league system is supposed to determine the best PvPers, but how is that remotely possible when the system is riddled with huge exploit holes. Either they knew this would be possible but no one would do it, or they didn’t know. I’m not sure which is worse.
-delete- Forum hiccup. Double post
Personally I think Skyhammer is a really interesting and nicely made map, but the problem with it is it gives certain class builds a strong advantage over others. Likely the people who really like Skyhammer have ample supply of pull/push/condi cleansing skills (for fear, immobilise etc.) and easy access to stability, and those that don’t like it probably don’t.
Also, persistent traps/wells are also very strong in preventing access to the Mega-laser platform. A DH, ranger, necro can just leave all traps/wells right at the entrance for someone to trigger. In the case of DH that can mean instant death. So in essence I think it is a really nicely structured map, but it is a bad PvP map because it favours certain classes.
I think it just shows how badly MMR and the league works. Whenever I’ve lost 2 pips our team got absolutely hammered by the other team, and that is without any dcs or AFKs. Losing 2 pips means the system considered the culminate rating of your team (MMR and division composition) compared to the other team meant you should have been the ones who destroyed the other team.
In my experience it often get the skill comparison of opposing teams totally wrong, and makes me think the system cannot accurately determine an individual’s skill level ,and hence team matching is likely almost equal to a non-MMR random match-up. Of course a big variable is a person doesn’t usually always play at the same skill level all of the time. Playing with chronic fatigue definitely doesn’t help.
Matching pure pugs against premades is illogical. So there must be a reason why Anet have decided to implement and keep this system. The only reasonable explanation I can think of is that there are many more people who pug than those in teams. So pugs are fodder for teams so that they don’t have long queue times, and no doubt to encourage people to form teams so their esport grows bigger. It’s a way to try and force people to play PvP in a particular way to help achieve their agenda of making GW2 an esport brand by making the pug experience frustrating.
Chrono bunker and it’s variants is in response to the new high condi and direct damage meta. Personally I would rather all classes received a proper balance pass to bring them more in line with each other with counterplay in mind. One extreme has generated another, the chrono bunker.
I think it is disingenuous for Anet to say they can police this. AFKing maybe, but how can you tell if someone playing has thrown a match deliberately, by the number of losses in a row. Well could be just MMR.
Can’t remember now, but I thought he was emerald.
Does this happen, I thought everyone got the same pip loss/gain if on same team. A guy on my pug team said he had 0 pip loss from the match we lost, but I got -1 pip.
Playing a mes I have to say that in the new meta of very high passive condi pressure damage (e.g. burning never was re-adjusted) and direct damage I adjusted my build to survive. I kept tweaking it to add survivability, because at the beginning I was dying in secs on an old build+ chrono. Before I knew it I was running a variant bunker build before I even knew it was a chrono bunker build.
This is a build I developed independently in response to the new meta. I’m sure other people run some variant of it for their own reasons, but in my eyes (for pugs anyway) it is the natural conclusion to the overall increase in damage, condis, and introduced interrupt engi and tempest fields (air overload). The lack of good condi removal unless you spec a whole trait line and stability (there is only one good trait for this) means chrono bunker is not going away soon with the current state of things. On an additional note chrono isn’t the only bunker type that is a pain. I’ve found fights as a chron with Rev, engi, tempest and druid can be quite a drawn out fight 1v1, with one unable to kill the other depending on build.
Personally I don’t understand why the MMR wasn’t reset for the league. Because of the way MMR works I could create a new account and recreate my best class and get where I am now in the league in less than half the time, and get further more easily. Currently the league does not reward player skill because it doesn’t measure that, it measures how lucky you are to get a 5 win streak, or if you tanked your MMR to get streaks. I don’t understand in what sense that is suppose to be a competitive league.
I’m getting this bug quite frequently recent. Unable to move unless /dance or someone is close to port to. This has been around for a while now, when is it going to get fixed?
A dev blog from August 6, 2013.
I wish people would stop with referring to top esport teams when they are trying to make a point, most people are not playing at that level even if they think they are.
Maybe for you it does not make a difference between playing ranked at your level or playing on hot-join level. I (from my personal experience) between playing vs and against the top esl players, and against Hot-join players.
I also experience multiple multiple mmr resets, where you could just farm up your mmr again vs bad players.
So yes, there is a way to determine your mmr. And yes, it is working.
Yes it works, badly. What you are saying is the system works for some people but not for others, means is not a good system, and I can’t possibly see how it can measure a player’s skill from a pug team of 5 based on wins alone. An opposing team that you are heavily favoured to beat is 3 capping during a match and wins with no afks or leavers says it all. It gives the illusion that it is measuring skill, but in reality it can’t actually do that. The system is likely slightly better than a total random matchup with class balancing. Being able to tank your MMR (i.e. making your whole team lose, also affecting their MMR) to gain tiers in a division is a symptom of its flawed mechanics and how it doesn’t particularly play nice with the league.
I really don’t understand your problem. Maybe you just can’t read or you don’t want to understand the information I provided in the discussion, because it does not suit your point.
I’ll rephrase it for you again:
GW2 had multiple ladder system in the past.
The ladder AFTER Dec 2014 is the ladder you can see under https://leaderboards.guildwars2.com/en/eu/pvp?page=2 It was a purely farm based ladder yes.BEFORE Dec 2014 we had a purely MMR based ladder. The ladder looked like this: http://www.gw2score.com/PvP/history This purely MMR based ladder got reset BEFORE Dec 2014 multiple times. The players who mad it in this PRE Dec MMR based ladder into the top 100 before every reset, also bad it back there after every reset.
=> CONCLUSION: Your initial statement, that we can’t determine skill in a five player game is proven wrong. Your own suggestion to “just reset the mmr” happened multiples times in the past and it showed that the same players who got a high mmr also got a high mmr after every reset.
What’s so hard to understand here?
What don’t you comprehend you are comparing a ladder system from 1 year ago with the current system which is completely different. The MMR then is not the same MMR of 1 year ago. It has changed considerably, read the dev posts to educate yourself. You are comparing an old terrible system with a much improved system, that is why it was changed. But the current system is still not great as you can read on the forums or from my own experience. The old scoreboard you posted doesn’t even make sense to me if someone can play 13-100 matches and end up in the top 10 rankings. If that scoreboard is accurate it is no wonder they radically changed the way it worked.
My original premise is base on the current MMR current system and not a previous worse system. The scoreboard I posted if anything is a better reflection of player skill than 1 year ago, even though you talk of it as if it were inferior, which it obviously isn’t.
In my OP I have already described a typical match making situation which uses MMR. As an idea I said if MMR was removed would we even notice the difference, and said to test the idea by resetting MMR. By doing so you could see if the difference between no MMR to full MMR over time. But in essence I don’t think it is possible to accurately determine a individual player’s skill level that always plays in a pug team of 5, especially through win/losses. To be fair it is an attempt to determine player skill, but I don’t think it is possible unless other in-match personal stats are used. I think the most important aspect of MMR is to provide balanced teams, i.e different classes + armour divisions. Losing 2 to 3 pips in the league against a team that wipes the floor with you shows something is wrong with MMR.
You are ignoring or not taking into account that previously player ranking was more about how many games you played, rather than it being based on skill level at all.
The Pre Dec 2014 ladder was not about games played. It was a purely MMR based ladder with the inclusion of decay. It got reset multiple times (more than two times).
Your statistic was on the ladder AFTER the mmr ladder which was a purely farm ladder.
On the pure MMR ladder (pre dec 2014) you were not even listed in the top 1.000.
If you want to check out the old mmr ladder, you can still find the data on http://www.gw2score.com/PvP/history
Why are you checking some ancient non-official board. How about checking the official GW2 one that is still up:
https://leaderboards.guildwars2.com/en/eu/pvp?page=2
You can clearly see the trend that people at the top have played many more games compared to people to who are lower ranked (go through pages 1-4). The ancient scoring was silly if you look at that site you posted someone had rank 4 from playing 13 games. That isn’t skill. You could rank up high by playing a small amount of games. You are trying to muddy the water (very poorly I might add) of what I was saying which is the MMR doesn’t measure skill, whether you are talking about the old or new MMR. But the old system was particularly bad which is why they changed it.
Tried BD and it really does help with DHs and it is really nice not to be pulled and pushed around each match, but you give up a lot of dps.
Where is all this stability coming from. Personally I can’t stand the mantra mechanics, and that only gives 2 secs stab a pop. Other than that you have to roll with Bountiful Disillusionment for 5sec stability on shatter. But is there anyone who is not using staff rolling with chaos these days, the line doesn’t offer much except PU but that is a GM in competition with BD.
harsh but true reality of traps/DH:
they literally only farm bads.
There is an empty point that no one is guarding or you are leaving the exit of your base and bang after some badly done flashy graphics you are downed in about a 1 sec. Those situations do not distinguish between a good or bad player.
You have a lot of time to react between the trap triggering and you getting trapped by dragon’s maw and eating the full procession of blades damage. Dodging sideways will get you out of most of the damage and isn’t even hard to do because this is an empty point and you should have full endurance. A good player shouldn’t ever get trapped.
In any case, any DH running such a build will have sacrificed all his defensive utilities and should be an extremely easy farm everywhere else for the rest of the game. Train him down and focus him in fights until he learns his lesson and stops playing such a terrible build.
Define lots of time. Fraction of a sec?
Half a second before maw gets you, which is an eternity in gw2 combat. If you can’t react within that time, you gotta train up those reflexes.
Surely you jest? In the scenarios I painted is that really feasible or even acceptable gameplay.
harsh but true reality of traps/DH:
they literally only farm bads.
There is an empty point that no one is guarding or you are leaving the exit of your base and bang after some badly done flashy graphics you are downed in about a 1 sec. Those situations do not distinguish between a good or bad player.
You have a lot of time to react between the trap triggering and you getting trapped by dragon’s maw and eating the full procession of blades damage. Dodging sideways will get you out of most of the damage and isn’t even hard to do because this is an empty point and you should have full endurance. A good player shouldn’t ever get trapped.
In any case, any DH running such a build will have sacrificed all his defensive utilities and should be an extremely easy farm everywhere else for the rest of the game. Train him down and focus him in fights until he learns his lesson and stops playing such a terrible build.
Define lots of time. Fraction of a sec?
harsh but true reality of traps/DH:
they literally only farm bads.
There is an empty point that no one is guarding or you are leaving the exit of your base and bang after some badly done flashy graphics you are downed in about a 1 sec. Those situations do not distinguish between a good or bad player.
The league has nothing to do with skill. If you have a high MMR you get pitched into teams that are likely to lose the match, giving you a losing streak. After you’ve lost enough matches and your MMR is lowered you get rewarded with a winning streak to fill out a tier. There is no point in tanking games to lower your MMR, because the MMR system does this for you.
From my experience in general a DH seems to be the deciding factor. I think the difference between DHs are people who mained or played Guard before HoT and know the class, and people who are jumping on the band wagon thinking they can get some OPness. It is pretty easy to tell the difference. A decent DH in a bad team will still lose, but even in an average team they make a big difference.
All of this avoids the inescapable truth: Matchmaking does not and cannot work.
You cannot determine an individual’s skill level in a random team of 5, in addition to an individual’s skill being variable dependent on that individual. A simple test will verify this. Reset everyone’s MMR to new for the league season.
Maybe you are new to gw2, but once upon a time, we had a purely mmr based ladder. (It had problems with win streaks of new players and non permanent decay, but let’s leave that appart.) Back in the day the mmr got reset on multiple occasions, but guess what… the top 100 players got back to being the top 100 players within days/weeks.
So yeah, it seems the system can detect individual skill.
No I’m not new at all, I’m close to 6K ranked matches. You are ignoring or not taking into account that previously player ranking was more about how many games you played, rather than it being based on skill level at all. If you looked at the old rankings you would see on average win rates of around 35%-51%. I know because I managed to reach rank 19 (48-52% win rate) through playing lots of games alone. If I kept playing at the same rate I would have made the top 10, but I burnt out and stopped playing.
Was my rank reached through skill, I would like to think so, but that is not the reality. There were people much higher ranking than me who had 45% win rate or less but played many more games. Think about it logically how can a system determine your skill level when you always play in a PUG team of 5, it can’t.
(edited by Vague Memory.2817)
In a lot of matches I’m been playing the one thing that stands out are DH pretty much the deciding factor in winning whether they are on my team or not. In mid fights I’m seeing their traps and true shot downing 2 and sometimes 3 players on the opposing team. They are tanky as hell and dish out obscene damage. Some of their utility traps do more damage than the chrono elite gravity well which they are able to rotate at a good frequency. Why is this acceptable?
(edited by Vague Memory.2817)