3) I’ve pitched the idea internally of having two MMRs, one account bound and the other per profession. Does any one have an opinion on this?
That would be great, but some kind of class based queue should be needed prior to that.
Right now, if lets say 3 bunker guards are matched in the same team, someone will swap to a different character. With a class based MMR that swap should be forbidden, so the system itself should somehow avoid placing those players in the same team.make it so that once a character has entered the sPvP map, they cannot change professions.
That’s absolutely needed for having a class based MMR.
The problem arise when multiple instances of some classes are matched together, which can put a team in serious disadvantage.
Currently that’s easily solved by swapping characters. Once this option is gone, you want the matchmaking to avoid this team compositions.
3) I’ve pitched the idea internally of having two MMRs, one account bound and the other per profession. Does any one have an opinion on this?
That would be great, but some kind of class based queue should be needed prior to that.
Right now, if lets say 3 bunker guards are matched in the same team, someone will swap to a different character. With a class based MMR that swap should be forbidden, so the system itself should somehow avoid placing those players in the same team.
the main problem is that glory is going to be removed.
and to be replaced with gold.previously, players still earn some glory and rank points as long as they tried their best, the amount of glory and rank points depends on their personal score, this was before they changed it into a lump sum amount.
now that glory is to be removed, it is simply not fair for the losing team to not receive any gold at all.
the losing team must receive some gold for participation, as long as they tried their best.
Not really. If you look at one single match, it can feel pretty unfair, but a proper matchmaking should approach to a 50% win rate for almost everyone as long as you increase the number of samples.
A system that gives the whole reward to the winning team can neat the same profit to every player in the long run while being way stronger against potential abuses.
There’s only one situation where I can understand some gold being rewarded to the losig team, and that’s when the matchmaking system is forced to create an unfair matchup.
I’m not at the office so I can’t look it up, but if I remember correctly, you get more gold for LOSING Team Arena than you’d get for WINNING a CA/hotjoin match.
Rewarding losses is probably a bad idea.
With enough population and a proper matchmaking, long run win rate should be around 50% for almost everyone, so it should be easy to achieve a system that neats the same average profit without exposing it to multiple forms of manipulation.
Skill level is relative. Ten equally skilled players in the lower end of matchmaking are playing just as hard as the top ten players. Their game experiences are identical for their skill level.
This isn’t about rewarding people for being better at the game – that’s what the ladders are for.
Taking a look at PvE, any dungeon run will equally reward both PUGs and organized groups. There’s, however, a huge difference between the completion times (and gold/time ratios) each group can achieve.
There’s nothing like this in tPvP. In fact, I would expect faster incomes for the first ones, whose matches are likely to pop (because of higher population) and end (because of higher amounts of deaths and less long teamfights over uncontested nodes) faster.
I thought the main reason for this rewards being added was about encouraging players to PvP and achieving a higher overall population.
In the sytem you describe, every hotjoiner could potentially soloqueue on TeamQ and keep playing the same for higher rewards. In fact, it could be even better, since they would face other hotjoiners on their same skill level in the long run, resulting on a probably better game experience.
On the other hand, this doesn’t achieve a real population increase at all even if it sounds like that. TeamQ will be merged with part of hotjoin, but there’ll be such a MMR gap in the long run that both groups will hardly face each other.
The frustration on facing premades will be probably enough for soloQers to avoid teamQ even if rewards are better. I can see myself joining teamQ instead of hotjoin when trying classes I’m not experienced with, but now again, those are hardly good news for the current teamQ population.
Normalizes rewards also need to be lackluster by design. Otherwise, in-game economy would become (even more) completely broken.
You may attract some random average player tired of champtrains with it, but you’re hardly going to seduce dungeon/fractal guild/groups, those with the right mindset and skill level to be fairly succesful on teamQ, who can farm craploads of gold in a really short time.
To put it briefly, TeamQ is going to experience a huge population increase, but since it’s not going to be composed by organized teams at all, comptetitive scene is hardly going to notice a big change.
The existence of that new soloQ merged into teamQ will also prevent the actual soloQ, which could benefit from those players, from improving.
The last Zenith weapon skin will be unlocked at 28k achievement points and, taking into account how small the target playerbase would be and how they could place it on the gemstore (or even better, in BL chests :P) for greater profit, I don’t really expect a new set after that mark.
I don’t know either if there’s any plan on releasing the remaining pieces of Radiant/Hellfire. Taking a look at some other incomplete sets, like the Toxic one on the BLTC, I wouldn’t be surprised if not.
If we reach a point were achievement rewards are about some minor amounts of gold and account boosts, then it might be healthy to just place a daily hard cap at some point (I guess 10k could work) and let the “competition” to revolve around really grindy regular achievements or some LS tricky ones, like “Light up the darkness”, that could be missed.
PvP Match Rewards
Reworked Glory/Rank rewards, favoring mostly the wining team, were great. Greater rewards for more competitive formats sounds also good (In practice, queues usually prevent this from happening).
The system still lacks, however, any correlation between rewards themselves and player skill level.
While a single PvE dungeon run grants the same reward to everyone, there are HUGE differences between casual PUG and organized speedrun completion times (directly related to reward/time ratio).
In PvP however, a proper matchmaking system would set winning chances at about 50% for everyone excluding the top of TeamQ, and without the skill disparity being adressed, both an even match between experienced teams and some random game full of baddies soloqueueing for achievements would be equally rewarded. In fact, there are high chances on the second match popping and ending faster for a better reward/time ratio.
If rewards are balanced around the skill level of pressing a “Join” button for a 50% win chance, then we shouldn’t expect PvP to be an interesting income alternative for any decent player.
Gold and Experience in PvP
Both, any kind of reward and a way to level up characters through PvP, are welcomed.
From an economy perspective, however, there’s already an insane amount of gold introduced in the system every day, far away from the quantities in-game sinks can handle.
Gold-to-Gem exchange is keeping the inflation at bay up to some degree, but that’s at the cost of having gem price on an unstoppable rise which I’m not sure is a good idea in the long run.
IMHO the game needs less direct gold rewards if anything.
Back to the previous point, without PvP rewards being related to MMR, we should expect low earnings at average, so it seems like efficient PvE farming is going to be the best choice for PvP related rewards, which doesn’t make any sense to me.
The adittion of skill unlocking not only somehow destroys the idea of PvP-maxed characters on creation (which is one of the main selling points of GW2 PvP) but also seem to take back some of the rewards that are being added.
I’m not even close to understand this design choice.
Achievements
Daily achievements are OK for soloQ. They would increase overall population without serious downcomes in the long run (It’s going to be quite annoying, on the other hand, until MMRs are adjusted).
I’m not really sure about teamQ. For most of those attracted, it’s going to be like a second soloQ with them standing at really low MMR ratings. Real team population is going to be almost unaffected.
New achievements should be common to both soloQ and teamQ, with better game experience and rewards being the carrot to create a roster and jump into teamQ.
Gear
Not bad at all. I really think, however, that having distinct skins attached to different game modes and skill/challenge levels would be much more interesting and welcomed.
Updated Reward System
As I have stated many times, normalized rewards will prevent PvP earnings to compete with PvE ones, where a skillful and organized team can easily speedrun content and farm craploads of gold.
With proper glory/gold prices, there was a still a chance for PvP goods to be more affordable for PvP players. Without glory, PvP players will be the poor guys of Tyria, even in PvP :P
Ladders and Seasons
These are really good news, something that finally seems to favour good players on what it’s supposed to be a competitive game mode.
I completely understand there’s a need to increase the overall population before this improvements are made, but I somehow feel they are too far away in the schedule.
It’s also great to have rank gone. It’s a completely broken system which has always favoured non-competitive grinding over intended gameplay.
On the other hand, allowing players to retain their old finishers while making them exclusive seems quite an awful move.
20 points in virtues can be really good situationally for AoE multiple condition removal, and once you get them, Virtues 25 is also good, specially for organized groups.
In my opinion:
AC
P1 —> 75s
P2 —> 1.25g
P3 —> 75s
+ 25s at Kholer chest
CM
P1 —> 1g
P2 —> 1.5g
P3 —> 1g
TA
Up —> 1.25g
Forward —> 1.25g
Aetherpath —> 2g
SE
P1 —> 1g
P2 —> 2g
P3 —> 1.25g
CF
P1 —> 50s
P2 —> 75s
P3 —> 1.5g
HoTW
P1 —> 1g
P2 —> 1g
P3 —> 1g
CE
P1 —> 1g
P2 —> 1.25g
P3 —> 1.25g
Arah
P1 —> 2g + 50s from Korga
P2 —> 2g
P3 —> 1.5g
P4 —> 3g
Maybe some of the better players can chime in and correct me but guardians have
more burst heal, more blocks, invuln., blind and group support and group heal. The only thing a warrior has going for him is the battle standart with 192 sec cooldown when traited iirc but that thing is utterly useless if you plan on solobunking a node like most guards do.
Honestly, Guardian is not the best option for solo bunkering a point.
I’m not saying Warrior is better (even if I think so :P), but other classes like ranger or engineer are far superior.
Where Guardian excels is at teamfight bunkering, staying on point so it’s not capped/decapped while supporting the team.
He said virtue of resolve… How are you still comparing all these classes heals to guardian’s SECOND heal? o.O Virtue of resolve is the F2 button…
I’m comparing them to show how guardian heal skills are arguably worse than those with similar functionalities from other classes, so passive virtue of resolve is not as powerful as it may seem at first glance.
It doesn’t matter at all if it’s a second heal or not. Exaggerating, if a class has access to a couple of 2k heals while others have just a 4k single one, the healing output is the same.So you are trying to say that guardian should get way better regen or what. make a point
Just that the referenced statement from the wiki is completely false and missleading.
It presents resolve as a tradeoff for the low health pool and leads to think on guardian as the class to go for some kind of “sustained warrior”.
Guardian sustain comes really from other sources, many of them being fairly expensive, so you either fully spec for (awesome) bunker/support with no damage at all, or you build for something closer to burst.
Without heavy investment in healing power, Virtue of Resolve is a minor effect that barely compensates the low HPS on healing skills. Guardian balanced specs rely much more heavily on active defenses and currently are completely outshined by warrios.
I don’t think more regeneration is needed. It could be for those middle ground specs, but would be hard, if not impossible, to allow that without touching the extremes, which are both viable (even maybe OP in bunker case).
The class is in a really good spot right now, it probably needs some kind of soft CC (giving up some damage for it) if anything. The 180º turn needed to build something outside mid bunkering is, however, completely weird.
He said virtue of resolve… How are you still comparing all these classes heals to guardian’s SECOND heal? o.O Virtue of resolve is the F2 button…
I’m comparing them to show how guardian heal skills are arguably worse than those with similar functionalities from other classes, so passive virtue of resolve is not as powerful as it may seem at first glance.
It doesn’t matter at all if it’s a second heal or not. Exaggerating, if a class has access to a couple of 2k heals while others have just a 4k single one, the healing output is the same.
Without high investment in Healing Power (or traits for additional functionalities), passive resolve is quite underwhelming.
With zero healing power:
Guardian —> Signet of Resolve : 203.8 HPS (254.7 if traited)
Warrior —> Mending (arguably better at condtion management) : 262 HPS
Necromancer —> Consume Conditions : 209.6 + 29/condition HPS
Guardian —> Shelter : 151.83 HPS
Thief —> Withdraw : 289.6 HPS
So even if we get an extra 84 HPS from resolve, which may feel great at first glance, our healing skills seem to have a somewhat low HPS to compensate it.
It can be soloed, at least on a Guardian.
For subject 6, trying to kill the small oozes before they reach the boss is the priority. Even if you can’t kill every ooze in time, the boss will eventually go down if some of them are stopped.
Any kind of CC/immob is really helpful if you don’t have enough damage (I switched to hammer for this part).
After that, you can pick the cooling bar and complete the heated room.
There’s a decrease on heat damage ticks for every activated cooling device, so it’s about doing them one by one (there’s a second bar somewhere in the repulsor lab).
Once two cooling bars have been set, you should be able to reach the end with little healing. In order to activate the consoles, just use a condition removal for the immob.
Couldn’t figure how to complete the repulsor lab (I don’t even lnow how it’s done with a full group). It might be possible too.
The final boss is fairly easy to solo.
You can do it better ANet
1- Scarlett needs to be louder, angrier and have access to a time machine (I see you’re working on this).
2- Whenever Scarlett is not on screen, all the other charcaters should be asking “Where’s Scarlett?”
Give us a kitten break and stop the qq.Time to learn to play already.There are mesmers untoucheable and can oneshot my war in a blink of an eyeThere are plenty if builds out there that can faceroll a warrior from meditation guards to zerk eles’ rangers or mesmers.Did i even mention pet or terror necro?Try a power necro, try a s/d thief all you need is jalf a brain ans 2 fingers , 1 for spamming 3 and another for 2You can bind steal to mouse if you are that terrribe..And im not even that bad i can kill 2 fotm warriors easily on my zerker .Just start equiping damage if you wanna kill tanky builds.Oh wait, takes skill to play a zerker toon my bad.Anet plz nerf cuz i can only play lame bunker or condi/ai spam.Well if you play tanky plz kitten about failing at killing something.Heck even in pve you get kicked from parties if you dont bring the necesary dps.
Kitten ridiculous
The point is not if there are or not specs that beat warriors, but how well rounded those specs are.
A Meditation guard has some advantage against a HamBow warrior (still depends on some weapon/trait/utility choices, not every medi guard runs the same), but how does that medi guard behave against other classes, like engineers for example?
Warriors are not unbeatable, but some specs, like HamBow, are extremely solid AND versatile. They can handle a 1on1 on close/far against pretty much every spec (sometimes they’ll be at slight disdvantage, but it’s not like their are going to be demolished) while still being awesome on teamfights.
That kind of versatility should have a tradeoff, otherwise is just OP level.
I remember they said something like they expected 5% of the playerbase to beat Liadri, but the actual number was closer to like 60%.
If anything, Anet has shown a discouraging incompetence in gauging how “difficult” the player base finds content.
Now this doesn’t mean it can’t happen. They could totally be difficult content which takes groups weeks to figure out. But given their track record, I doubt it.
I’m fairly sure on Liadri success rate being closer to 5% than 60%.
A forum poll would have attracted mainly two kinds of players (and that’s among forum users, which usually aren’t the most casual ones out there), those who beated her and the ones who tried it hard and still failed.
There was A LOT of people that quit after really few tries or didn’t even try at all.
So no, I don’t think ANet is failing on gauging what the playerbase can handle. You’re the one overstimating it, which is depressing btw.
I mean, you just need to log onNightmare Within section and take a look at those countless topics about how insanely hard, even impossible, is to climb the tower for a single player.
I thought that the Ascended mats came from:
1. Bloodstone – Champ bags (found everywhere)
2. Empyreal – JP’s, dungeons, Fractals
3. Dragonite – World Bosses, WvW(?)Or am I wrong about WvW? (Don’t really do WvW, so don’t know for sure.)
All of them can be obtained in WvW.
Camps/Towers reward fragments, while Keeps/Stonemist reward dragonite. Champ bags (tower/keep lords) contain bloodstone, as usual.
I would say that ascended materials sources are close to:
- Bloodstone —> Everywhere., nobody is worried about them.
- Empyreal —> Small group content
- Dragonite —> Zerg content
Which IMHO is an horrible design that forces people to play a lot of content they don’t like at all. Both, massive and solo/group content, should offer ways to get each material.
Wouldn’t the gold to gems ratio be a somewhat separate issue from ingame gold inflation? The cure for one is not the cure for the other. ANet, theoretically could put more gems in the pool, but I can’t see them doing that. It decreases because more people want to buy gems with gold than want to sell gems for gold.
My guess is ANet is going to sit and watch it unfold. In theory, eventually it will become tempting enough for people to trade gems for gold and the rate of exchange to flatten. But this may take years. People who are starting out can get a starting infusion of gold by buying gems and selling them, but bank tabs and other items may become only for real money or ingame rich players.
It’s not a separate issue because we don’t have inflation at all.
An excess of gold is introduced in the system every day, that’s for sure, but it doesn’t make prices to rise besides maybe for a few vanity items.
The release of ascended weapons has “forced” anyone interested to craft about (probably more) 15 exotic weapons, flooding the market and making prices to go as low as reciclable goods (same will probably happen with armor and trinkets).
With standard gear losing even more value than gold, and regular sinks (waypoints, repairs, respecs, holding runes, trait books) being laughable for the amounts we earn, gems are almost the only real use for gold unless we’re aiming for something really exclusive, and has become the main gold sink on the whole game.
For a paying customer (excluding the weird people who buy precursors with real money), which is obviously going to get his BL goods directly with cash, there aren’t many reasons to exchange gems for gold.
There’s a limit in theory for this to change, that’s true, but if gold is only meaningful for vanity, and vanity is the only thing that suffers inflation, then that limit can be really far away.
It doesn’t really matter if a BL exclusive armor reaches insane prices (T3 culturals are over 100 gold, so still plenty of room for gem price to rise), the problem is with the basic/QoL stuff in the gem store (I refuse to think this game is expected to be played with a single bank tab) which, gold wise, is already more than in the game itself.
A boost in the gold value, be it by nerfing gold sources or introducing new sinks, would not only fight the inflation but also make more interesting the gem to gold exchange.
A lot of good could be done just alternating the selling point for new armor/weapon skins between the BLTC (gems) and some ingame NPC (gold). It probably would produce less earnings for ANet, so it’s highly unlikely to happen, but the damage for the game could be worse in the long run without some changes.
Talking about gold, the game actually needs either more sinks or less sources.
There’s something quite dangerous going on with gems atm.
If ascended armor/jewelry is introduced on a similar fashion to weapons, and exotic counterpart prices devaluate as much as exotic weapons did, we are going to find ourselves on a point were, gold wise, fully gearing a character with exotics is cheaper than a single bank tab.
When just QoL upgrades cost far more gold on gems (storage through bank tabs and bag slots, character slots) than on TP / through regular sinks (storage through bags, fairly decent gear), the gold to gem exchange is going to be much more used than the opposite, and exchange rate is going to keep rising.
At some point, that rate may get so high that alienates A LOT of no real cash users (the cost of a bank tab is probably already depressing for newcomers).
I don’t really know if this is desirable for ANet. If not, gold needs to at least recover some value (some real value outside exclusive skins) for a stable situation. Is that or a complete overhaul of gem economy.
I disagree. The mechanic of condition application isn’t really an issue. In fact, it’s basically the same in every MMO.
Conditions in GW2 suffer from 2 fundamental problems:
- everything is a condition
- conditions are easily accessible for all builds
In GW2 is that movement impairing abilities, DoTs, healing reduction and some lockdown/counterattack abilities all fall under the singular blanket of ‘Condition’.
These conditions are all different and have varying impact upon a particular profession/spec. However, many condition removal abilities do not differentiate between conditions.Secondly, there are many, many abilities and traits in the game which have a secondary mechanic of applying a condition a side-effect. These conditions are usually somewhat short-lived. However, the cumulative effect can be substantial.
Exactly this.
A damage condition, like bleeding or burning, has no mechanical issues. It’s like a regular power attack, with the damage done over time instead of directly.
It goes through protection and weakness, also through armor (usually but no necessarily and advantage). On the other hand, it can be cleansed and “can’t burst”.
Same goes for chill, cripple, immobilize, weakness … they are distinct debuffs applied by concrete skills, with no problem at all on their own.
The real issue is about everything being labeled as condition.
If a condition user covers some specific condition he wants to stay, that’s perfect. Sometimes (specially in teamfights), however, you find your conditon bar being filled and constantly refilled by different sources, many of the them being minor effects and/or not necessarily intended.
Lets take a look at Precise Strikes (Warrior Arms 5). It seems a keystone trait for sword condition builds, but it’s also present in any build using, for example, Unsuspected Foe, and it’s more than a slight damage boost. It can be an annoying bleed covering some other effect, like a cripple or immob, you could want to cleanse, and this happens without the attacker actually trying to do so.
The game probably needs:
a) Less condition on hit/crit traits and less side condition effects in some skills.
Fair examples could be Warrior GS autoattack or Guardian passive VoJ. Those are not the kind effects that you would want to cleanse. However, they exist and can make cleansing unnecessarily messy and random.
This happens a lot with vulnerability, which is an OK effect IMHO for a skill that delivers high stacks on a moderate/long CD, but unhealthy for condition management in most situations.
b) More cleanses like thief heals or Warrior warhorn, which cleanse a concrete kind of conditions you could situationally want to get rid of.
Something similar happens with boons. There are too many minor boost (like a single might stack) sources, sometimes even AoE, which make boon stripping completely chaotic on teamfights (where there’s also a good amount of spam).
Single condition removal / boon strips just can’t work properly in this scenario. They’re useful, because you will always cleanse or strip something (for cleanses, it will usually remove any high bleed stack, which is awesome), but they lose a lot of tactical use that would be much better for the game.
A second problem with conditions are amulets.
While direct damage is boosted by power, precision and critical damage, condtions only use condition damage (and condition duration, but this is absent from amulets) and precision to a minor extent in order to proc some traits/runes.
This allow condtion builds to run Rabid and get a high amount of toughness, or even worse, to use Settler and become really tanky while still dealing moderate counter pressure.
Some defense is not bad at all since condition users are somehow attrition builds, but they should probably get vitality instead of thoughness.
(edited by Vargamonth.2047)
That’s not exactly what is happening, in fact it’s not even close.
The difficulty of fractal level 50 is now level 30, rewards from level 30-50 will now be rewards from level 10-30, and a new mechanic, new rewards, and new difficulty level is all being placed in level 31-50 with a reward and difficulty curve leaning more heavily towards the end of the scale, rewarding topped out players much more than they were previously.
Not exactly
We fixed a number of bugs and made lots of balance changes to existing fractals. Also the difficulty scaling has been tweaked overall to create a slightly less difficult curve up to 50.
This means that the new lvl50 fractals will be easier than the current ones.
If anything can make the content challenging, that’s Mistlock Instability not being part of the statement (We don’t know if this is true, I just hope it is. No reason at all for Leadeboards when something easier than the current 49 is the cap).
I would say EU SoloQ leaderboard starts somewhere about 95%-96%.
I don’t think it exists to be honest.
Ranger is in a really bad shape (even if effective in sPvP, it still relies on a lot of undesirable mechanics) and I think it’s caused by how casual appealing the bow & pet thing is. It could have been a great class with active, multitasking pet control, but I guess that would have alienated A LOT of players.
Out of that, Necros and Engineers are just unfavored by how PvE, and specifically dungeons, have been designed. They’re perfectly fine, for example, for running the tower of nightmares solo or on a small group.
Development of PvE-only skills or a dungeon redesign, with more emphasis on elite packs instead of champions, could solve a lot of issues with them.
Eles only need a bit of sPvP shaving for other classes.
Thieves are probably the only ones who need a bit of love here and there.
The imbalances on WvW are mostly caused by the AoE limit, a tecnical issue which currently seems to have no solution.
gems dont really represent inflation though, they represent non paying player interest in black lion items. new armors, new skins. This is what is driving gem cost up. Perhaps there is also less people selling gems for gold.
the gem exchange is more about how people value real world time versus in game time. If people feel they can earn money by actually playing the game, less people will trade real money for gems. That doesnt mean people wont buy gems, just that they wont trade them for gold.
comparing inflation to gems, i dont think that is a good idea, too many other factors involved
Of course there’s not solely related to inflation. Nothing is.
Gems are going up mostly because there are new gem store items every 2 weeks, which hugely increases the demand of gems through gold.
However, this should also increase the amount of gold a paying customer gets for his gems, and even with that, the system is out of balance, mostly because that gold is not appealing at all. That’s IMHO the best indication of the inflation we are suffering.
There’s a lot of gold introduced in the system, mostly from dungeons. Different tasks, like champ trains or gathering, provide a lot of the items dungeons lack (t5/t6 materials, tradeable skins, …) and redistribute that gold through the trading post.
TP taxes are far from enough to eliminate the gold introduced in the system.
Unless investment, most goods will change hands just once, twice at best, which means that most of the remaining 70% of their value should be taken away by other gold sinks, and there aren’t really a lot of NPC services that demand those quantities.
Those cultural t3 armor sets for over 100 gold, they felt expensive some months ago … not so much anymore with the current income ratios.
So, where does all the gold go? I would say that most of the gold that doesn’t just stay, filling someones wallet up to ridiculous levels, is converted to gems.
I probably invest more than 70% of the gold I get on gems and, even without active farming (champtrains, easy and fast dungeons, …) and without selling any single material, my savings still grew up.
For a paying customer, who obviously buy his gems directly with cash, this growth should be far more obvious. Unless interested on some kind of legendary weapon, there’s just no reason at all for those players exchanging gems for gold.
Gold-Gem exchange ratio should be stable in the long run. Higher or lower, it doesn’t matter, just stable.
The current situation indicates that, while gems are more interesting than ever, gold is handgiven in such high amounts that has no value unless you are aiming for something really (and I mean, REALLY) “exclusive”.
That’s the eternal debate between nerfing whatever is on the top or boosting everything else to the same level. I usually prefer the first, and specifically for GW2 I think inflation is somewhat out of control.
people can actually afford things now. The question is how much buying power per hour of average play does the average player get. I think now, its more. Therefore i think its better for the economy as a whole. what exactly has gone up in cost much? hw much more does the average player earn now?
That depends A LOT on the item you’re seeking.
Sometimes there’s a market manipulation, an over supply/demand caused by a LS loot/recipe or just core changes that modify that supply/demand or just player priorities.
I bought 1k t6 claws during Queen Jubilee and sold them about 3 weeks ago at double price. Player incomes didn’t double in this time, they just were so cheap during QJ because of destroyer farming.
If you look at exotic weapons, for example, they’re far cheaper, but that’s closely related to tons of them being crafted and sold in order to cap professions.
If you look at gems, in the other hand, they’re more expensive than before champ bags and dungeon reward rework, even when factoring an income increase.
Because the event is rewarding you with far more than it actually does.
After DE completion, you should get some (varying) silver/karma AND some event related reward (10 heavy moldy bags, for example). The change just prevents events being more profitable if they’re zerged (so much more enemies, maybe even champions, spawn), which forces population to concentrate and creates “farming spots”.you want people to work harder for less reward though. The addition of champs to the old farming DEs made people stop running them, and try to guest to lower populated servers so less Champs spawned. Until the made champs worthwhile to kill. You will primarily create a situation where people dont like seeing other players, because it makes them work harder for the same reward.
It kind of already happened in Orr to a lesser extent, and it killed most of those events.
the key here is to make more facets of the world offer something different or equivalent to champ farms.
That’s the eternal debate between nerfing whatever is on the top or boosting everything else to the same level. I usually prefer the first, and specifically for GW2 I think inflation is somewhat out of control.
The game just needs to equalize rewards as much as possible, favoring, if anything, harder content.
Mobs spawned by a DE shouldn’t drop any loot at all and DEs themselves should grant some kind of bonus reward (some amount of ore on a Dredge related one, for example) based on their length, trigger rate, proximity from other DEs, …
For world spawned champions, they probably should, as proposed, have a % rate to be an elite instead of a champion. T6 minerals/wood should probably be gotten as a t5 mining proc instead of having their own nodes, which allows alt farming.It can be a hard work, for sure, but after some time and metric based changes, it should be possible to make almost every open world content equally rewarding.
Dungeon rewards should probably need a revision too, balancing the rewards around the completion time for an average group and the level of difficulty above regular open world content. The effectiveness of speedruns should also be factored.
your plans seem to be to make everything equally not rewarding.
Why should i do an event that has me kill 100 monsters if im getting no drops? good plan to make people avoid events even more
Because the event is rewarding you with far more than it actually does.
After DE completion, you should get some (varying) silver/karma AND some event related reward (10 heavy moldy bags, for example). The change just prevents events being more profitable if they’re zerged (so much more enemies, maybe even champions, spawn), which forces population to concentrate and creates “farming spots”.
The game just needs to equalize rewards as much as possible, favoring, if anything, harder content.
Mobs spawned by a DE shouldn’t drop any loot at all and DEs themselves should grant some kind of bonus reward (some amount of ore on a Dredge related one, for example) based on their length, trigger rate, proximity from other DEs, …
For world spawned champions, they probably should, as proposed, have a % rate to be an elite instead of a champion. T6 minerals/wood should probably be gotten as a t5 mining proc instead of having their own nodes, which allows alt farming.
It can be a hard work, for sure, but after some time and metric based changes, it should be possible to make almost every open world content equally rewarding.
Dungeon rewards should probably need a revision too, balancing the rewards around the completion time for an average group and the level of difficulty above regular open world content. The effectiveness of speedruns should also be factored.
@clint oh god O__O
Btw, today I got a game with 3 guardians : We’ve lost … Dun ask me how and why …
It depends on many things (build/specs, the other 2 players’ class, …), but is not weird at all. If you get 3 mace/staff bunker guardians in the same team, you should expect to lose.
I find the current mathcmaking much better.
Yes, there’s always some randomness with the low rated team members. Sometimes they have no clue at all about how to play conquest and the match becomes quite desperating. The previous system, however, was far worse because those low rated players used to be all of them on the same team.
As someone who is at about 900 on the leaderboards, the previous system was like flipping a coin. If not enough players around my rating were available (which happened a lot because of the low population we have), I could be grouped either with high rated players or against them on a clearly inferior team.
There’s no game at all in that (fairly common) situation. The outcome was pretty much decided before the match started.
No more one-hit KO’s, doubling amount of death-sentence red circles one the ground, less dodging everything, rather saving your dodge for specific attacks. We shouldn’t be able to evade everything, make us take a hit or two and best of, make bosses more tactical. Interrupting, more fight mechanics to just make it more fun. They don’t have to be über-one-hit KO to be enjoyable and hard. More understanding the encounter, preparing for fight. That’s what would be a perfect game mode. Mode with actual fight mechanics
I’m up for more complex mechanics and CC being useful. I completely disagree, however, on pretty much everything else.
The active combat system tries to encourage players to read animations and react to them, mitigating any damage source before it connects, over passive tanking and healing, which requires way less player skill involved.
If you design enemies to land unavoidable damage, you might actually be promoting (even forcing) the use of defensive stats and/or healing specs, which IMHO should work only as mistake covering. If you remove one-shots (or really huge spikes, kind of 10k-15k on 3k armor), you even open the door for defensive setups to succeed by playing the game in a way completely opposite to the intended one
I don’t like the current state of the game at all; I think enemies die way too fast using full offensive setups. The way these setup survive when they are forced to longer fights (take a look at some solo lupicus video), however, is IMHO the perfect example of how defense is meant to be played, and should be absolutely encouraged in any kind of hard mode (which is not for everyone anymore and should allow next to zero mistakes).
The fights you designed have some interesting points, I won’t deny that, but right now I can see a team of 5 shoutheal + soldier rune braindead specs being easily succesful.
Without investing in healing power at all, this group can easily achieve a 1.5k healing per second. Looking at your idea of big hit (about 3000 base+small % of target’s hp damage on 2600 armor target with no protection), seems like they could outheal the whole first bossight without even touching the evade key.
With a single warrior chosing Fear Me over, lets say, On My Mark, you could probably displace the boss to a safe, clean of toxin, area and then stack on melee for the whole fight.
Even with that, if a fear happens for some reason, any of your shouts remove acondition, so you can get rid off it in AoE once every about 1.5 seconds.
The second encounter might be a little trickier. You can hardly avoid any disarm or impale. Disarm only affects your ability to deal damage, so without enrage timers, it’s not really something to worry about.
Impale, on the other hand, is %HP based heavy unavoidable (as long as evading/blocking an attack doesn’t end stealth, which is how it actually works) damage and you have a lot of HP, so it might be dangerous. Hopefully, since there is no condition to deal with here, you can freely use part of your over 20k AoE healing burst every 20 seconds to cover your 10k healing surge.
The rest of the fight looks like you could, now again, move the boss to a safe location and melee it to death. Mist form won’t be triggered and focused shot won’t deal AoE damage (since it’s probably a projectile, a focused player could probably back off a little and let a teamate take some damage for him). Split shot would probably do laughable damage if it hits 5 targets and most of your healing is AoE.
For any of those encounters, if safe zones change over time, you just need some kind of CC in the alternative weapon set (which you haven’t needed for anything else).
If areas are small, you’re probably fine just with 5 Rifle Buts; if they are larger, it woud need a little more work. 4 warriors with, lets say, mace/shield, which are great offsets to counter marked shots or other dangerous telegraphed skill without evading at all (if an offhand sword with your main axe is not enough), and the last one with rifle and kick, should be more than enough.
Of course, you still have 2 chambers to design and this setup could be hard countered at some point, but up to now, 5 braindead specs not using active defenses at all seem enough to beat the dungeon with little comunication (in order to avoid shout overlaping and call CCs) and with still quite enough room for survivability improvement (I haven’t talked about stats at all because even zeker seems to be fine, neither about the remaining 40 trait points nor a possible AoE combat res every 48 seconds).
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The best:
- The enemies. Nice models and fairly good move variety for trash mobs. The hybrid looks awesome (it just lacks the ability to deal damage :P)
- Climbing the tower. It has an interesting difficulty level for solo, with players still being able to adjust it through grouping.
Soloing could require waiting a couple of days more though, otherwise you might find yourself “grouped” without wanting it, or even worse, surrounded by mobs thrown at you by some nice skipper.
Con: Loot, even if not incredibly great, still favors zerging.
- Fighting Logan. I’m really excited on finding Traeharne too.
The worst:
- The instances (chambers/endboss), they’re just TOO easy. If this kind of content must be designed for being doable by almost every player, I strongly suggest adding difficulty levels the next time.
- The story. What story? you may ask. Well, there’s your answer.
If you wait for a few seconds, you’ll see a small spider going through one of the portals.
I will never understand the desire of some “players” to solo every single content of massively multiplayer role playing game. And not just the desire but entitlement as well. If you wanna play entire game solo w/o anyone bothering you just go play Skyrim (or any sp game, I believe there are many of those on market).
Most times it’s not the desire to solo, but the desire to get some kind of challenge that is not provided by the game if played as intended (with a group).
I faced Logan, and surprisingly he didn’t run !!
The difficulty here kind of reminds me of the Underworld or Fissure of Woe in GW1, which anyone who looks through my old comments will know that I absolutely loved. So, good job Anet!
Actually, gotta agree with that.
People scream for “more challenging content”, then it comes in the form of Tower Third Floor and it’s all: “Too hard, just rush”. Typical dungeon mentality.
The third floor would be a fairly acceptable solo content. It’s not really challenging, but at least it’s not the faceroll we are used to.
The problem with the tower (and specially the third floor) is the “open world” nature.
You advance carefully, making sure you don’t train too much and you’ll handle the fight at the next spore cleanser and then, midfight, some random players reach your position pulling half a dozen more enemies.
The content looks great, the experience however is a bit … disappointing.
The most exciting part is probably climbing the tower alone while killing enemies. However, since it’s still “open world” content, you can’t avoid people running and pulling additional enemies to you (specially disgusting on the third level).
The chambers (I’ve only done about 4 of them iirc) look all the same and are really unchallenging for a single player (I mean, they are way easier than just going through the tower)
Same goes for the end boss. It looks amazing but is a complete cakewalk when soloing.
Speaking of tomes actually, I think it would be nice if we still had access to our virtues while using them.
That would allow using Indomitable Courage (or even a well timed regular aegis or traited VoJ) for a Tome of Courage full heal cast. Not sure if we are crossing the OP line here (we lost the ability to benefit twice from Indomitable Courage and Absolute Resolution by slotting a tome, that’s quite a tradeoff, but a full heal, well, is serious stuff). Sounds interesting, that’s for sure.
In any case, I completely agree on moving Elite Focus to adept.
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In the interest of balance (the bigger picture) I think VP needs a nerf, but not without getting something in return for it. It’s just too good and frequent for it’s trait cost.
I don’t think reverting to it’s original is an option. I think it’s more appropriately swapped trait position with Selfless Daring. The original option has too many unintended benefits (increase AH effectiveness, less boon stripping)
There are few reasons why most offensive guardians go 30 in Radiance and 30 in Valor.
- There’s a huge sinergy (crit rate and crit damage) between this lines.
- Without proper ways to keep enemies at close range, guardian damage needs to be bursty. Meditation like Smite Condition and specially Judge’s Intervention are awesome for this.
- Meditations are our most viable selfish utilities. You can’t really expect to build a real threat slotting tons of support through shouts and/or consecrations.
Spirit Weapons are UP (and should remain that way for any kind o PvP format, we have had more than enough petting zoos) and signets, while interesting as CC sources, are pretty weak/unconsistent trait wise.
- Guardian base sustain isn’t that great, not even close, when you are next to zero healing power (it seems that our healing skills are intentionally at low HPS because we have VoR, which is like not having VoR at all :P). Monk Focus is extremely strong here, giving us a much more reasonable effective health pool.
If we had to go 15 in honor for vigorous precision (with Selfless Daring being quite useless and not having anything really interesting for 10 points in Honor besides maybe greater symbols if running a GS), then there’s no option for us to take both 30 in Radiance and Valor.
We should drop 5 points in Radiance (no way we give up Monk Focus when we are going to use Meditation anyways), making one handers far less interesting and probably building around GS.
This change alone is not really that bad. It would provide, in fact, a different flavour between the current 10/30/30/0/0 and 0/30/30/5/5 builds, which might be good for the game. However, we would also lose Inspired Virtue unless we drop another 5 points (which provide a quite important 10% raw damage increase), and that’s quite a nerf.
Without meaningful changes on different traitlines (I’m looking at you Zeal), your suggestion would only destroy even more any middle ground between 10/30/30/0/0 full burst and bunker/support builds (Ironically, bunker/supports, the arguably most OP guardian spec, engraved in the meta since launch, won’t notice the change).
Not even looking at PvE, where it would be also a serious nerf (we are quite strong in this format and we might deserve it).
(edited by Vargamonth.2047)
My suggestion would be to give more importance to the Player Vs Player/s aspect instead of the Player Vs circle on the ground.
The circles are there to force conflict, allow for build/role variety, and promote large-scale strategy. Chess is player vs. player even though the object is only to checkmate the opposing king. It would be silly to say that chess is player vs. 64 squares.
I get the 3 points are to Force some sort of a fight there but the actual fight (on and off points) should be more rewarding than taking the point.
That might be true if the game mode weren’t called “Conquest” where map control is the objective, and killing opponents is only a means to that end.
So no, it shouldn’t be more rewarding in Conquest to kill a player than to capture a point.
This whole thing can be solved by introducing TDM and then revamping the scoring system of Conquest to better reward for controlling points and less so for killing off point. Then everybody wins. The two modes simply have to have different scoring priorities.
It’s not that easy.
Classes are balanced around Conquest mode; you can’t just throw TDM in and expect things to work properly.
I don’t get it. The actual fight is as important as getting the point because the winning team is going to be the one controlling it.
If bases weren’t granting points at all and everything will be about killing and not being killed, teams would be filled, as someone stated before, with PU mesmers, stealthy sustained condi thieves and other out of balance kitten.
There’s no such a thing like “player vs circle on the ground”. It can happen, but if it happens too often, then there’s at least a team whose players don’t have a clue about map control.
Healing-turrets initial heal isn’t really amazing either, but the skill in general is good. HGH has other weaknesses.
Healing turret is arguably the best heal in the game tbh (also the hardest to properly use).
Dropping the turret, using the cleansing burst and then either exploding it for a water blast or picking it up for lower recharge, nets 350 or 379 HPS respectively.
It’s not too far from what healing signet does (392), with over half of the total healing being AoE and also including a short (probably hard to blast for anyone but the engineer) water field for potentially greater healing and a 2 condition removal (also AoE).
Healing Signet takes the place of the active healing skill. The complaints are there because it has a far better HPS than most of them while being passive (no interruptable among other things).
A Warrior can still trait for regeneration on banners and not only get but provide perma AoE regeneration uptime on top of that heal. It also has other traits like Furious Speed which provides 10 seconds of swiftness every 10 seconds, so the chance of perma swiftness is there too.Most classes have this kind of perma-something tools tbh; it’s players choice to decide if they are or not the best choices for the build they’re trying to play.
Thank-you for the info. I am aware of everything you have said, but this thread is kinda specific to engi. As stated the warrior healing signet has no real heal pop if it is fired, unlike the engi. The warrior also have to achieve critical hit with the stated trait to gain swiftness, the engi doesn’t need this, it merely pops a combo field or uses F1 abilities. The warrior banner skills are fairly placed. They are in vital/boon tree at master level which as a warrior is helpful, but also secondary to their main purpose of being a damage dealer. The warrior also has the distinct disadvantage of having to be in melee range, whereas the engi has ranged and ground targeting. Ground targeting may sound more difficult, but with a high quality mouse the task is made a lot simpler. I truly don’t think we can compare the two. It would be like comparing apples with road kill.
The easy to get perma-boons on engineer are swiftness on tool kit swap and vigor through swiftness (which is going to be indirectly nerfed in the next balance patch afaik).
Most regeneration sources are tied to healing skills, which should mean that it has been accounted on balancing CDs, direct heal amounts and so.
Out of those, there’s only one on Elixir Gun (which is somewhat a bunker weapon, and still only 10 seconds every 40) and the one provided by the healing turret dropped with the elite.
It’s possible to achieve perma regen (10 sec every 10) trait wise, but it requires you to be hit under 25% health which is a quite risky playstyle.
IDK, they can indeed be quite strong if built for bunkering, but I don’t think there’s a real issue with regeneration on regular builds.
Healing Signet takes the place of the active healing skill. The complaints are there because it has a far better HPS than most of them while being passive (no interruptable among other things).
A Warrior can still trait for regeneration on banners and not only get but provide perma AoE regeneration uptime on top of that heal. It also has other traits like Furious Speed which provides 10 seconds of swiftness every 10 seconds, so the chance of perma swiftness is there too.
Most classes have this kind of perma-something tools tbh; it’s players choice to decide if they are or not the best choices for the build they’re trying to play.
It is 5 second protection, and we never said that it needed more protection duration. It does however need either a secondary boon or a condition on foes. And the skill number 5 is not that good against a good players since they will beat you to a pulp while channeling it, that is why we give it as a suggestion to allow yourself to block while channeling it.
Maybe in PvE and WvW. In sPvP it grants the amazing amount of 3s protection.
2. Forced into builds. Sure guards have a lot going for them but the problem is most guards are forced into running Pure of Voice with soldiers runes and shouts. It’s difficult to surmise everything in a short post but I would be glad to discuss. In short, Pure of Voice, Alturistic Healing and Absolute Resolution are necessary in most guard builds and create a pick two and you get 30 points to actually play with.
3. DPS will always trump defense. The way the game is designed trying to out heal or out tank a DPS build is nearly impossible. I’m glad Anet is trying to define the class as a “defensive support” role however at the current rate guard will fall behind. I’ll wait to see how this next patch turns out but my hope for this game is wearing thin.
Not sure about what you’re trying to say here.
The thing about AH / PoV / Absolute Resolution is completely true for a mid point bunker/support in sPvP, but there’s nothing wrong with it. It’s, in fact, an awesome build for that role.
It can also be similar for zerg support in WvW, and I still don’t see any problem with that; you have a role to fullfill, and you do it extremely well.
On a different scenario, like solo roaming in WvW or playing offensive in sPvP, you don’t use those traits. You simply can’t expect to win a 1v1 running them.
Shouts + PoV + Soldier Runes is clearly a support thing and support becomes more powerful the more allies around you, so it obviously can’t be competitive for killing things by yourself. Otherwise, it would be insanely OP.
AH heals you when you grant boons to yourself or allies, so now again it really shines on teamfights, and specially when you’re supportish and run a staff. It needs to be a poor choice for a 1 on 1 fights.
Finally you have absolute resolution, which is a completely different story. Even if it’s AoE and by definition weaker than similar selfish functionalities like Cleansing Ire, it’s still a handy on demand multiple condition removal, usable twice if you run renewed focus, and improves your passive regeneration. The traits you have to pick to get there aren’t also bad; 5 point minor is amazing and the retaliation improvements on 10 and 15 aren’t bad either.
I absolutely disagree with your last point.
With a bunker spec you can definitely hold almost forever against a single enemy in sPvP.
In WvW, the most DPS oriented builds are usually the ones I have an easier time beating, and that’s thanks to healing and defense.
When I’m defeated, it’s usually by attrition against a more resilient spec than mine, which needs to be fairly offensive in order to land some serious damage (in those few seconds I can stay in melee) and not being kited to death (which still happens sometimes). If I could stick better to my enemies and run higher amounts of defense, my win rate would be quite higher.
In this game, balanced/defensive specs usually win against burst ones (as long as you actually deal damage, don’t expect to kill people on a full healway build). The real issue is that we are SO melee oriented and our mobility/CC is SO crappy, that we are pretty much forced into high offense (like meditation burst) to be a threat, which makes us suffer against sustained enemies.
don’t you think that newbies should have a strong build to start with? i want to see more pve players to get involved in pvp.
Solid builds with some passive things going on are fine, they are indeed awesome as entry level. They allow new/casual players to enjoy the game, learn the basics, get knowledge about other classes, and hopefully, get more involved and keep improving.
The problem arises when this kind of builds have a place at competitive level, when they’re arguably the best a class has to offer.
I think there’s a problem (which I don’t know easy solution for) as a whole with the ranger class with so many passive procs, something that even gets agravated when spirits are added to the equation.
Anf then there’s the clutter thing which, as a no competitive and fairly average player, is what I found more annoying and obviously unhealthy for the game.
Spirit Ranger (and Ranger in general) is emblematic of a lot of this game’s casual/MMO-courting design philosophy and while I hold out hope, I honestly can’t see a drastic change in direction this far in.
The truth is that Ranger could have been an amazing class, with high skill floor/ceiling, by allowing (probably forcing) multitasking through full pet control and making all those pet related passive procs additional active skills on pet bar (which would have been something like an engi kit).
It’s probably a casual friendly PvE focus (which I don’t blame ANet for, it’s were the money is for sure), with the pet class being SO casual appealing, what has condemned the ranger to be the horrible class that arguably is (this, and the horrible pathing the game engine has).
I don’t expect changes too btw :P