Guild Wars 2

Far more than efficiency is needed for some approach to become the norm: it needs to consist on easy enough tactics to be reproduced up to a high degree by evarage-ish skilled PUGs.
When this doesn’t happen, several metas usually appear, with dedicated guilds taking the optimal approach while PUGs resort on some suboptimal but easy to perform tactics.

For this kind of encounter it’s actually quite difficult to develop a fixed strategy. The fight is quite lengthy and the enemies we’re going to fight against are randomly selected, so there’s no way to tell how many of each defensive tool (condi clears, reflects, …) would be desirable and when should they be used.
On top of that, the fight involves several damage sources, making far more difficult to be aware of every threat we should avoid.

Control, something mordrem enemies are specially weak against, is probably the key to handle this fight confortably.
Control doesn’t depend on raw stats and most offensive specs can slot some amount of it without giving up too much damage. A group of experinced players on some kind of voice comm could beat this encounter by efficiently rotating their distributed control while on quite offensive specs.
When players are unable to play coordinatedly, however, controling tools can be wasted and damage spikes against piority targets can be lackluster. In this situation, more enemies can land their attacks, player active defenses might get exhausted and eventually damage happens.

I’ve no idea on how the playerbase would adapt to this fight.
Losing a player at the very beginning of the fight can easily snowball against the group so maybe being extremely squishy is not a good idea. On the other hand, being able to dispatch some enemies as fast as possible can be highly desirable (and finsihing the event faster always award a better reward/time ratio), so a high damage output is still a good thing. Maybe mixing some sturdy body that can pick up allies under heavy pressure isn’t a bad idea at all (as long as he can do something more, obviously, just being sturdy is not a great deal for a group).
A character heavily specced into control might also not be a bad idea, even if he gives up a good amount of damage for that. It would be clearly unefficient when compared to a good usage of distributed control, but it would lessen the need of coordination and that can be enough to make it worth.
Same goes for healing. If you expect things to get out of hand at some point, a bit of extra healing, even if it’s at the costs of damage, might not be a necessarily bad choice.

This could become even more true with the risk vs reward idea being properly handled, which in this case should AT LEAST force the group to restart the whole event on a wipe.

In short words, the fight is much more prone to mistakes and snowballing than most the current ones, and definitely much more about real time combat than about tactic execution.
We could move away from the current situation, where we know that some well executed tactic flawlessly works and including too much room for mistakes not only is uneeded but often goes against the tactic itself, to a completely different one where mistakes are much more likely to happen but far less punishing individually, so a larger amount of specs can be truly helpful on their own way.

Note: there would still be A LOT of plain BAD specs, doesn’t matter how much their users loves them, and a lot of complaints over the forums. There’s just no fix for the lack of common sense.

I’ve always defended that there’s no problem with offensive specs themselves and that the real problem is on how heavily scripted the content is, allowing extremely effective and not specially difficult to execute tactics to be developed and easily reproduced.
Since it seems quite obvious that we can’t have new content at the pace we can learn it and we also have the burden of the gold standard economy, the fix needs to come through a rework of how encounters are designed.
I will give an example of what I think could be an improved encounter:

Let’s imagine our group is advancing through some mordrem hive dungeon and we reach a point where the only way is downwards, jumping through a hole in the ground so there’s no way to go back.
We find ourselves on a medium sized room (smaller than those on vinewrath fights but larger than the breach ones) without LOS spots (2-3 destroyable columns could be interesting tough if properly developed). The only way out seems to be blocked by vines that might take a while to destroy.
An event indication which reads “repel the mordrem ambush” appears in our screen along with a progress bar and mordrem creatures strat coming out of the ground.

The fight would start with 3 mordrem waves, each mob of each wave spawning on a random location.
Some wave composition examples could be:

- Elite leeching thrasher (key monster) + Veteran tendril
- Elite teragriff (With an slightly improved AI that alternates between melee and ranged variants) + 2 regular menders
- Veteran ranged teragriff (key monster) + Veteran Melee teragriff
- Elite alpha wolf (with the AoE retaliation back, key monster) + Veteran troll
- Elite vile thrasher (key monster) + 2 regular wolves

Whenever the key monster from some wave is defeated, the progess bar is slightly filled and the next wave spawn is set on a 10 seconds timer.
Players succeed once they defeat 15 waves, with the 4th, 8th and 12th consisting on a single champion enemy (randomly selected from a pool of maybe 6-7 possibilities).

Is it possible to beat this fight with a usual offensive setup? Absolutely
Would that setup still be among the fastest ones on completing the event? Probably
Would that setup still be the meta setup for the content? Not necessarily

(Continues …)

Walhalla.5473:

Like some People said it. Zerker Meta by itself isn’t the Problem, it is more of a Symptom than the Cause of a Problem. Mobs have terrible AI, attack slowly but hard, so you have no Problem to avoid almost all of the damage and just bash the Mobs down. Or, the Mob Design is the Problem.

Well at least Anet is experimenting with the Mob Mechanics and the Mordrem are a big Step in the right Direction. Positioning, Target Priorities and CC are more important than ever. Don’t want that nasty Teragrif to knock you down over and over? Cripple it and watch it trip. Don’t want to be eaten by that Wolf,? Show him your face. Also, not doing enough Damage on these Husks? Use Condition Damage.

It also seems that these kitteners have some Priorities. Everytime I man some of the Siege Weapon, the Wolves and Teragriffs decide to pay me a Visit.

To the Condi Damage, this sort of Damage has some Issues. Long built up to make some Damage ( which isn’t a Problem by itself ), Damage not comparable to Direct Damage, only 25 Stacks, your Stacks being removed by someone who is weaker at Condition Damage and Most Enemies with a Big HP Pool and low Armor..

Mob AI and design is clearly a problem, but the biggest issue is probably more about the encounter design than about the mobs themselves.

Most of the relevant fights in the current dungeon content are big legendary bosses, single threats to pay attention and use all the active defenses.
Small groups of enemies, the kind of fight that suits far better the current combat system, are relegated to be the dungeon thrash, often skipped or just pulled together (by either LOS or a few skills) and obliterated with AOE while some utilities like blindfields and reflects do the defensive work.
In the few cases where bosses involve adds, either they appear pretty much on top of the boss, being almost instantly cleaved down, or the boss is LOSed to some spot where those adds will run to suffer a similar fate.

As long as we don’t have a far better AI, which seems unlikely to happen, somewhat prolonged fights against several enemies (and without a clear terrain advantage) are the only thing I can imagine to weaken the meta without falling on a clear unfairness towards damage specs.

muckshifter.9731:

can I have a link to the wiki page, please … I’m stuck on this excruciating fight!

a video would be nice too … or maybe I could spend 200 gems and just skip to the end.

http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/The_Mystery_Cave

PaxTheGreatOne.9472:

PROBLEM WITH THIS CHANGE IS THE FOLLOWING FACT:
BUILDS WITH A LOWER BASE POWER OR CONDITION DAMAGE WILL BE HIT HARDER COMPARED TO HIGH POWER/HIGH CONDITION BUILDS.

Which is exactly what they’re looking for.
The change is completely focused on sPvP and tries to nerf bunkerish builds that achieve quite decent damage potential through might stacking, spècially celestial ones that use both direct and condition damage.

Why does the change hit PvE too? Because outside of some unexpected mechanics that had shown to be extremely powerful, they’ve never cared about PvE balance at all. When the content is designed for almost any build / team composition to easily succeed, it’s not like some minor changes are going to bring any serious problem.

Stark.1350:

Let me guess. You’re one of those people that feel precursors should be obtained this way as well. Where everyone in the game can have everything. I’ve always supported the fact that “Life’s tough, not everyone is going to get everything” in an MMO.

On a side note, people do the Tequatl fight because he does give quite a bit of loot and he was nerfed enough that he’s easy enough to do now with a random group in your instance.

I’m one of those people who thinks that sheer luck is a terrible way of rewarding hundreds of gold worth items.

By the way, I don’t understand what you mean with everyone being able to have anything.
If the rate of getting some item by pure RNG is 1/X, and you modify the system so you can now get that item either from a 1/2X RNG or 2X tokens (each one obtained every attempt), the amount of items across the game doesn’t change at all. There’ll be the same amount of people without the item than before; you just have ensured that those that “deserve” it are among those that have it.

Black Frog.9274:

In all the back and forth, I haven’t seen anyone who explained or experienced the same issue I did with trying to light a fire—being continually interrupted (as many as 6 times in a row), which doesn’t seem to fit the pattern mentioned above.

If you start channeling right before the first claw, it would interrupt you and so would do the second one. Since you’re knocked down, your third channeling might start too late to finish before the dragon bites you (the window for channeling during a regular rock attack is quite small: the best way to do it is to dodge out from the second claw orange circle towards the fire spot and start channeling asap).
If there were no bombs spawning or naturally exploding during that bite, then the cycle would restart again, interrupting you three more times.
After that, a bonus rock attack (which provides a far bigger window) should happen and the channel should be doable without any issue so, technically, you could be interrupted up to 6 times in a row but never more than that.

The problem you’re pointing at has nothing to do with RNG. Players ignoring Tequatl once they’ve got the weapon(s) they wanted would actually mean that the event is not competitive on the game wide market.

Most items/materials in the game are tradeable, so any player can sell the outcome of performing some activity A and then use the profit to buy some unbound items that are rewarded on another activity B.
If A happens to be much more profitable (and not specially more difficult or prone to failure) than B, then we might be looking at some serious design failure.
If B is the only source of some desirable but marketeable item, then there’ll be some hope for that content. On the other hand, if the profit comes from rares, crafting materials and other common and widespread items (which is the most common case), then there are serious chances on B being abandoned by most of the playerbase and only those who really like it to remain.

In the current state, Tequatl caters only to players that satisfy at least one of the following:
- They want some Tequatl exclusive skin(s).
- They enjoy the bossfight enough to give up loot for it.
However, with a proper bump on the loot, the event can easily become interesting for a much wider population, even if they’re not interested in Tequatl hoards at all.
If the activity is competitive profit wise AND has a chance on exclusive skins on top of it, then we just shift the problem from some piece of content to another. Fortunately, this is something which a token system has an easy solution for. Lets go into specifics:

Lets say that Tequatl RNG loot is set to 1/50 chance of a Tequatl hoard and another 1/50 chance of a random ascended weapon box.

First of all, that random weapon box is terrible loot.
Ascended weapons can be obtained by crafting through a process that can be reduced to gold for the most part and which doesn’t rely on RNG, so any player looking for a specific weapon would be better performing any other high rewarding activity.
Since developers seem to want some alternative way of obtaining ascended gear, we would introduce it later but, for now, we will merge those droprates so there’s a 1/25 chance of getting a hoard.

We can split this 1/25 chance into two smaller ones. 1/35 and 1/88 could work.
1/88 would be the new chance on getting a Tequatl Hoard by pure RNG. We keep it just because receving some unexpected loot is always welcomed.
The 1/35, on the other hand, will be converted on tokens for a guaranteed Tequatls Hoard. That is, players will receive a token each time they succesfully take the dragon down and there’ll be a merchant somewhere who will exchange 35 of them for a weapon box.

This is the place where we will reintroduce the alternative method of getting ascended weapons. The same merchant could, for example, offer each specific weapon box for a higher amount of tokens, lets say 50-60.
This means that, even if the player is not interested on Sunless weapons/skins, they would still have some nice use for the tokens, which adds to the overall profitability of the content for those not interested on its exclusive rewards.
On top of this, for those interested on fast profit, each token could be also exchanged for lets say a bag of t6 crafting materials.

As we can see, a token system can not only coexist with the RNG but also allows to balance rewards so an activity remains competitive for every single player, no matter if they’re interested or not on the exclusive goods it offers.

The pattern is definitely there. I even made a crappy video of it :P

Zaklex.6308:

Vargamonth.2047:

~Snip~

- This is probably the most important part: dragon attacks follow a FIXED PATTERN, which consists on CLAW-CLAW-ROCKS-BITE.
~Snip~

Cutting out everything else because this statement is categorically incorrect, you might have thought you saw a fixed pattern during your run, but I can guarantee you it’s not in a fixed patter such as you have described. I personally have tried twice, and have seen the dragon attacks go right from a SINGLE CLAW attack to a BITE or even completely IGNORE the claw and rock attack and go straight to a BITE. The entire setup is RNG, I have had up to 8 sets of bushes in an instance, that’s 16 bush bombs crammed into that little circle…to go along with the Dragon attacks and having the Divine Fire right on top of a Bush bomb. So I’m calling completely random on all of the attacks, as in they set it up to place and do what ever the RNG comes up with.

I replayed the mission before posting to check if the pattern was correct and worked for me the whole time.
Where you in a group or maybe doing something that many classes do not have acces to like using stealth?

Organized group content, like raids, that’s challenging, fun and competitive reward wise

AND/OR

Solo content that’s challenging, fun and competitive reward wise

There’s a large straight line dust animation that crosses the room during the rock attack. It can probably be spotted slightly before the first rock hits, but you might not have enough time to react if the attack starts on top of you.
If you’re going for the achievent, try to not channel when a rock attack is about to happen.

Dragon attacks follow a fixed pattern: CLAW-CLAW-ROCKS-BITE-(ROCKS)
The second rock attack will happen only if bombs spawned or naturally exploded during the cycle.

If you have access to a long enough stability, try to channel during claw attacks.
Stay near (but not too close) to the channeling spot right before the bite attack. If bombs didn’t spawn/explode, dodge out of it towards the spot, use stability (unless it’s instant, in which case you can pop it during the first claw attack), channel and move out towards the center of the ring so you can see the rocks coming.
If, on the other hand, bombs spawned or exploded, then a second rock attack will be coming. Dodge the bite towards the center of the room and watch for the dust animation. Once you’re sure that it won’t affect your targeted channeling spot, run to it, pop stability and start to channel.

If you’ve no stability or other viable tricks, you would need to rely on braham bubbles or channel after the claws and pray for the rocks to not spawn at you :P

Copy-paste from the other thread (delete if merged :P)

- Dragon attacks don’t need to be dodged, they can be easily outrun, not wasting dodges or other defensive resources. A 25% movespeed signet/trait is more than enough to feel confortable.
With a 25% speed increase you can easily get out of claw attack AoEs (they have some dust animation floating over them) even if you were standing still before the orange circle appeared. Bite attacks (no dust animation) are a bit faster, so if you were standing still your reaction time might not be enough to avoid them just by running and a dodge roll could be useful.

- Each pair of bombs is connected by plant wires at ground level. Passing over those wires detonate the bombs, which have not enough range to reach the middle part of the wire.
If bombs are bothering you, consider getting rid of some (or all) of them, forcing detonation by crossing the wire at its middle part.

- In order to kill the shadow things you just need to have the flame buff on yourself. (they’ll be oneshoted by any of your attacks and you’ll lost the buff). Bring some ranged attack and kill them while you’re on top or close to the buff source so you can recharge it asap.

- This is probably the most important part: dragon attacks follow a FIXED PATTERN, which consists on CLAW-CLAW-ROCKS-BITE.
The rock attack is slow enough to allow a full charge of a flamewall and doesn’t cc if it happens to hit you (just deals a bit of damage and inflicts a small cripple). If you don’t have stability and don’t want to rely on Braham bubbles, all you need to do is start channeling right after the second claw attack.
Position yourself near a channeling spot (but far enough so it doesn’t get covered by the AoE) right before the second claw attacks and move/dodge out of the orange circle (towards the spot, obviously) when it appears. You might want a dodge roll to easily avoid any bite damage when the channel ends.
IF bombs spawned or naturally exploded during the pattern, then there will be an additional rock attack right after the bite which can also be used for safe channeling.

- If you’re going solo for the rock-dodger achievement, the previous tactic might not be the best since you’ll channeling right before the rock attack, which could randomly (afaik) start right on top on you.
Stability channel during claw attacks is probably the best approach if you have access to the boon.
Remember that claws will happen after the bite (which goes through stability) only if bombs have not spawned or naturally exploded during the previous pattern cycle. Otherwise, there will be an additional rock attack right after the bite that might trigger on top of you, so watch for it before you start the channel.

A few tips:

- Dragon attacks don’t need to be dodged, they can be easily outrun, not wasting dodges or other defensive resources. A 25% movespeed signet/trait is more than enough to feel confortable.
With a 25% speed increase you can easily get out of claw attack AoEs (they have some dust animation floating over them) even if you were standing still before the orange circle appeared. Bite attacks (no dust animation) are a bit faster, so if you were standing still your reaction time might not be enough to avoid them just by running and a dodge roll could be useful.

- Each pair of bombs is connected by plant wires at ground level. Passing over those wires detonate the bombs, which have not enough range to reach the middle part of the wire.
If bombs are bothering you, consider getting rid of some (or all) of them, forcing detonation by crossing the wire at its middle part.

- In order to kill the shadow things you just need to have the flame buff on yourself. (they’ll be oneshoted by any of your attacks and you’ll lost the buff). Bring some ranged attack and kill them while you’re on top or close to the buff source so you can recharge it asap.

- This is probably the most important part: dragon attacks follow a FIXED PATTERN, which consists on CLAW-CLAW-ROCKS-BITE.
The rock attack is slow enough to allow a full charge of a flamewall and doesn’t cc if it happens to hit you (just deals a bit of damage and inflicts a small cripple). If you don’t have stability and don’t want to rely on Braham bubbles, all you need to do is start channeling right after the second claw attack.
Position yourself near a channeling spot (but far enough so it doesn’t get covered by the AoE) right before the second claw attacks and move/dodge out of the orange circle (towards the spot, obviously) when it appears. You might want a dodge roll to easily avoid any bite damage when the channel ends.
IF bombs spawned or naturally exploded during the pattern, then there will be an additional rock attack right after the bite which can also be used for safe channeling.

- If you’re going solo for the rock-dodger achievement, the previous tactic might not be the best since you’ll channeling right before the rock attack, which could randomly (afaik) start right on top on you.
Stability channel during claw attacks is probably the best approach if you have access to the boon.
Remember that claws will happen after the bite (which goes through stability) only if bombs have not spawned or naturally exploded during the previous pattern cycle. Otherwise, there will be an additional rock attack right after the bite that might trigger on top of you, so watch for it before you start the channel.

It could also be nice to have “quickening screech” instead of “lacerating slash” as the activable skill for either hawk or eagle pets.

Well, the old leaderbaords weren’t exactly fine. They were a much more accurate measure of skill, that’s for sure, but they also had some serious flaws.

For example, there was a problem with the high base MMR and deviation for new accounts. A new account could get a win streak, end up with a really high MMR and then never play again.
This could have been solved just by demanding a minimum but reasonable amount of games in order to qualify for the leaderboards. For a 2 month season, for example, a minimum of 5-10 games per week could be required to be officially ranked.

Another big flaw with the old leaderboards, specially in SoloQ, was caused by “mid-season” changes.
If I’m not mistaken, the original matchmaking used to create rosters before finding a suitable opponent team. In this scenario, the lack of population was causing the best players to end up stacked in the same team, making most games incredibly one sided and producing overall inflated MMR scores.
Once the changes on roster creation were made, games became more balanced and MMRs probably went down to reasonable values. People that had stopeed playing, however, retained their inflated MMR scores so, by the end of the system, a single match (even a lost one) was enough to catapult them into the top.
This is the only way I can explain my own experience and obviously has a really easy solution for season play: don’t make changes during a season.

A decent MMR leaderboard could work perfectly fine just with these small considerations.
Obviously, it would be completelly filled with organized teams and premade players so, with the removal of soloQ, we might need another considerations like different MMR scores and leaderboards based on premade size, which shouldn’t be hard at all to accomplish.

The only thing im fairly sure of is that almost anything would be better than the current leaderboards.
Having a MMR value to produce fair and decent matches skill wise and then using something completely different and mostly grind based for the leaderboards just doesn’t make any sense.
I guess there’s too much coming from ANet I can’t get even close to understand…

butch.8136:

^ Well, not rly. Top MMR players will have odds of winning at 99% all the time. Thus they’ll only be able to gain 1 LB point for each win. While other players, especially those in the sweet spot of MMR, will often get +1, +2 and sometimes +3 LB points.

That MMR sweetspot can’t exist in the long run.
It might exist for a while for some people with their MMR tanked for whatever reason, but if you’re consistently winning matches you were expected to lose, it’s just a matter of time for your MMR to grow and your predicted odds of winning to suffer a complete shift.

They don’t even need to queue at strange hours. The way the system is designed, you’ll keep getting points as long as you perform by the expectations of the matchmaking system.
If you’re at 90%+ MMR wise and keep an average of around a 50% win rate (which means your MMR is right, so it won’t move a lot), you’ll still get points in the long run thanks to those close matches you lose that don’t bring any penalty to your leaderboard score.

The system clearly benefits top MMR players queueing with a full premade because their win rate will be huge and will need a lot less total games to achieve the same score than any random soloqueuer, but even with that it’s extremely easy to see how strong the correlation between points and games played is just by a quick look at the leaderboards.

We’ve always had issues with the MMR.
A probably too high starting MMR coupled with a high deviation has always produced new (and mostly clueless) players appearing at any bracket.
Since it looks like they’re using different MMR scores for different classes (which is something good IMHO) and taking into consideration both new dailies and a specially interesting reward track, we should expect a good amount of chaos with the matchmaking system, specially for players close to that starting MMR.

It’s the falling damage bug.
As soon as I jump into the candy cane, I stop moving forward for a brief second and then perform a couple of leaps to cross it. There’s probably a easier way to do it, but this method seems 100% free of bug.

A joke. That’s exactly what the current leadearboard is.

Lets imagine a couple of players A and B, with player A being far more skilled than B.
For simplicity, lets say we have enough population and both players are consistently matched in games where they have a 40-60% odds of winning.
If MMrs are correctly settled, results should be fairly simetric and each player would get +1 point from each one of the about 50% of games he should won. They won’t get, however, a -1 from the other half of the matches; sometimes the end score will be close and the losing player won’t get any ladder score decrease.
This not only results on an slow but steady gain of points for those who play a lot, but does it without any change on the MMR values. A and B would be confined each one on their own bracket but, even if the system is actually recognizing A as a far better player by doing so, the one with the largest amount of games would likely achieve a higher score on the leaderboards.

We know from the blog post that ladder position is taken into consideration by the matchmaking system, but we lack any information about how it’s weighted or how it interacts with the MMR.

Lets think the real MMR is slightly modified based on the leaderboard score for matchmaking purposes, which would bring the player into a different “bracket” were his odds of winning are smaller.
It would be necessary for the system to use the virtual MMR as the real one in order to calculate the odds of winning. Otherwise, the player would benefit from a less punishing reward structure and we would achieve nothing but a worse matchmaking behaviour.
What happens, however, with the other randomly assigned players in the match? For them, the system should assign odds of winning based on the real MMR value. Otherwise, a high leaderboard rated player would unfarily penalize his randomly assigned teammates and benefit the opposing team.
In the end, the system should create a match based on virtual MMR values, then assign differents odds of winning to each player based on their own virtual MMR value and the real MMR of the other ones and finally adjust real MMRs based only on real MMRs.

On top of that, ladder position is far from the only thing modifying a natural matchmaking.
For example, it makes sense to assign another virtual MMR increase for players that join grouped up. However, unlike the ladder related one, not only this increase should be taken into consideration when calculating the odds of winning for everybody (because it actually matters a lot) but probably should also be somehow used for adjusting the real MMRs after the match.

Unfortunately, not even with this can we address the skill gap between players A and B.
It only puts a limit on the score a player can get by sheer grind, providing an indirect and terrible flawed advantage to another subset of players: those who start the season with their MMR tanked.
In fact, since it looks like the ladder rating can’t go below zero, any player could purposely tank down his MMR at the very beginning of the season and then start farming points from scratch.
Maybe this is the solution … maybe MMRs should be reset at the start of a season so every player can keep gaining ladder points until they reach their natural MMR score. Does a decent leaderboard system justify, however, having absolutely terrible matches for the first days of every new season? I don’t think so.

Honestly, the old leaderboards had some serious flaws, but at least they were based on MMR, which is the core value the system itself uses for measuring player skill.
This new one … it just doesn’t make sense for anyone except maybe players/teams at the very top (the ones that actually have other means of serious competition), and even for them the exact final position is going to be nothing but a measure of grind.

Skoigoth.9238:

Threads like this one really amaze and annoy me. They pop up every week, rapidly explode, with a big portion of people talking past each other, throwing around the same old arguments again and again, and yet I still don´t understand why exactly some people think the established meta is supposedly bad for the game.

So, if any of those people could concisely and in a structured manner explain to me why purely offensive, high-risk/high-reward stat combinations being the core of optimized builds is wrong, it would be greatly appreciated.

I don’t think there’s any problem with that kind of builds achieving the best runs.
The problem is more in the line with having a meta stablished so close to the optimal, which means that a quite high amount of people can run those builds, follow some not so hard to pull off tactics and achieve better results than with most other compositions.
If the whole spectrum of defensive / balanced builds is there to allow different approaches with different degrees of difficulty, but any half decent player with a bit of knowledge and experience can perform close to an extreme, well, I might think there could be a problem with that.

perilisk.1874:

Active defenses are good gameplay, but they’re unrelated to stats, which is a lost opportunity for build diversity. Condition damage mechanics are also part of the problem.

As long as we accept this game was meant to have an action combat system, the problem is with the stats, not the active defenses. Current gear stats are just too MMO generic and barely add anything to an action oriented gameplay.

Shorter fights would improve the effectiveness of active defenses and promote offensive builds. It’s actually when the fights take longer than usual and characters run out of CDs when things get harder (that’s the reason why berserker players perform better with other berserker players or why soloing some content is usually harder than doing it with a full group).

It’s even worse tbh. You do not even need to get a winstreak.

About a year ago I was happily playing on the #100 – #200 bracket. At some point I had to stop playing for about a month, and for my first game after that I was matched on a game far beyond my level.
Not only did I COMPLETELY ruin the match but, for some strange reason, I got bumped to somewhere close to rank #30. Since I didn’t want to climb down positions by farming loses, I stopped playing SoloQ and moved to TeamQ.

Today, after several months without playing there, I’ve decided to test the system again and the result has been pretty much the same.
I’ve been matched with and against far better players than me, I’ve lost (probably contributing a lot to it) and atm I’m #9 EU.

I’m fairly sure that most people in my situation will play their matches tomorrow, as close to the patch as possible, so I won’t be in that top 20.
But, if by any chance I’m still there, I officially request ANet to keep the armor and to think it twice in the future before delivering the arguably most prestigious item of the game based on a completely broken tool.

I don’t think defensive tools like CoP or Renewed Focus are meant to be counterplayed, just like you don’t counterplay a ranger Signet of Stone or a mesmer distortion.
Judges Intervention is nothing but an instant teleport, not specially different from an offensive Lightning Flash, Blink or Shadowstep. The effectiveness is all about the skills you can combine with it and, in this case, every big move is either multiattack or has an incredibly obvious tell, so the biggest part of the damage can be actively avoided.
Mace would be the exception to this rule, but the weapon also introduces some other drawbacks.

Smite Condition is the only truly non-countereable skill.
It’s an instant cast dealing a good amount of damage on a fairly short cooldown. Mechanic wise I find this skill terrible but, if I have to be honest, I don’t think medi guard would be barely viable without it.
Lacking any form of soft CC (and hard cc being limited enough too) and having quite unreliable ranged attacks, medi guards can be easily kited, even inside of a small conquest point. In this situations, terrible designs like SC or a high retaliation uptime become crucial if fighting against any decent players.
Should these things be toned down? For the shake of a skill based gameplay, they totally deserve it. For the spec to remain somewhat viable, however, something alleviating the many drawbacks of the class should be granted in exchange, and balancing completely unrelated aspects of a class in never an easy task to do.

They could change these achievements to just showing off the minis (which matches the concept of temporary having them) and keep track of each mini on a similar fashion to collections.
Since the old version of the achievements tracked only the quantity of minis slotted on the bank tab, current progress on these should be imported to the reworked one, even if no miniatures are tracked as already shown. Further progress on incomplete achievements should require going beyond the previous mark.
Then, they could make different titles for the new wardrobe related achievements, like “miniature hoarder” for example.
Even if this is probably the most elegant fix, the biggest issue with this sytem is that it would require additional memory for achievement tracking, something that is not needed for the new ones since all the information is already in the wardrobe.

The easiest solution would be about linking the old achievements to the wardrobe, exactly like the new ones. The current score should be kept so noone loses AP and further progress should require going beyond the old mark.
The biggest flaw with this one is that it creates two exactly identical achievements, which doesn’t look good.

Orpheals solution is actually really good in this regard. Noone loses AP and doesn’t create duplicated achievements.
The only possible issue is about the engine not being able to grant a title unless the achievement is fully completed. This should require to split each achievement into two: The basic one would go up to 40 AP (it would grant the old title and import the score form the old achievments) and, on completion, would unlock a new one (pretty much like SPvP rank achievements) granting the next 40 and maybe providing a different title.

It’s an interesting idea, but might produce some dangerous results.

For example, players could use the buffs for an easier/faster solo, which would reduce their own individual rewards, and then sell the path. Since buyers would obviously not get the buffs, the biggest part of the final reward would remain untouched.

Zaxares.5419:

I think Dusk has the right idea. Shorten the duration and randomize the burrow spawn locations.

Not sure about shortening and randomizing at the same time. Even if most people play it with 80s, it’s a level 35 dungeon after all.
Only randomizing it could be enough (maybe randomizing the spawn times too so a couple of burrows can spawn closer in time while keeping the average spawn rate untouched).
If we want the dungeon to be balanced for 80s, then a lot more changes should be needed.

I would want to share my opinion about some of the most controversial changes the patch has introduced (relating to the acquisition of luminiscent skins) and about the future of Silverwastes as a replayable map.

Adding RNG to mordrem organ extraction might provide some increased lifetime to the content, but does it in a very limited and arguably quite annoying way (incredibly annoying if we have to roll for one over more than six parts at some point in the future :P)

It’s pretty much the same issue we can find on story missions. It’s nice to have them permanent, to be able to play them with an alt at some point or just to have them ingame for new players, but they lack replay value.
Most players will repeat them for the achievements or run them on an alt for some specific reward (like the carapace shoulder box from the previous chapter, or the black lion key at this one), but all this is incredibly limited.
In the end, persistent replay value is closely related to rewards, specifically marketeable ones, and story missions offer none.

The RNG extraction will obviously increase the map activity for the next days or weeks, but it doesn’t achieve nothing in the long run. A year from now, when almost everyone will have unlocked the luminiscent armor, this won’t matter on if the playerbase finds the map interesting and worthy of playing on it.

Another controversial change from the previous release is not being able to get carapace armor boxes from replaying the story on alts anymore, which forces players to grind bandit crests or pray for a lucky RNG roll on some bandit/labyrinth chest.
The most annoying part of this is that the probably best way to farm these crests is to tag as many succesful events as possible, which leads to lots of players roaming across the map.
On unorganized maps, this results on a complete chaos where keeps are randomly taken and lost over the course of the metaevent and where some breach boss can easily be let completely unattended without anyone noticing it until it’s too late.
On organized maps it’s probably even worse, since the dedicated players who hold keeps and works towards a faster meta are rewarded for less than roaming event taggers.

Considering that both mechanics, the RNG organ extraction and the crest grind, achieve exactly the same goal and force players to spend some time on the map, I wonder wether if would not have interesting for some item to have been tradeable.
This would have, at least, slightly increased the profitability of the map.

We obviously don’t know what the final shape of Silverwastes will be. We don’t even know if all the remaining carapace pieces will be awarded here or if another new map is coming in the close future.
Even with the absence of specific account bound rewards to aim for, the final shape of the map might be worthy of coming back from time to time or even on a daily basis.

If that’s the case, if we won’t see the true potential of the map until the last content patch, then I guess I can understand having some artifical way to keep people playing and getting familiar with the map for much longer than it currently deserves.
But if it’s not … is it really worth the resources and the effort to make a map doomed to oblivion? is it worth to increase its anyways short lifetime with mechanics that most players will find incredibly annoying?

Toughness might look worse than vitality in most cases if we look just at the effective health you get, but there’s an important difference: toughness increases sustainability while vitality doesn’t (unless you’re using guardian tomes).
If you have 15k HP and 2k Armor and you receive 1k direct damage each second, adding 1k toughness will make you last for 7.5s longer, while 1k vitality would provide 10s.
However, if we have a 400hps on top of that, 1k toughness will provide 31,25s of additional survival, which is more than the 16,67s you would get from vitality.

I’m not against farming itself.

What I find unfair, however, is the way zerging contributes to farming profit. The main purpose of scaling was to adjust events for different amounts of players, not to generate additional loot.
The way the system works atm, the guy that’s nor zerging events is being hit twice:
a) Because his events generate far less lootable enemies.
b) Because his events are probably less profitable by design (with megaservers, we can expect really profitable events to be somewhat crowded at any time).
the profit gap between zerg farmers and people just completing events on some not specially crowded map is just too big for the small difference in effort and challenge.

Ultimately, event rewards should depend on average completion times, difficulty (somewhat related to the map level) and other factors like the proximity of many other events or a potential big prize at the end of a chain, never on the amount of people playing them.

Looking at some answers, I’m not sure if everybody has grasped the purpose of the thread.
OP is not trying to nerf farming at all, just put an end to the unfair mechanic where the scaling system, trying to balance the event for a large amount of people, ends up generating more loot sources and makes the event more profitable than if a lower amount of players would be taking part on it.

The game could have worked with a different stat structure, offering some interesting options (endurance regeneration, cooldown reduction, …) instead (or on top) of those passive defenses which are reduced to “training wheels” in almost every PvE action combat system. The game could have even worked without stats at all.
Designers opted, however, for a much more classic approach (both in stats and encounter design) that doesn’t match the combat system, probably in order to appeal to the masses.

At this point, if developers want to make extremely offensive setups less prevalent without causing a big mess, pushing a higher skill cap through AI improvements and encounter design is probably the best solution.

Making the effectiveness of some boons and core mechanics to depend on raw stats would not only bring back PvP development to alfa status (devs want PvE and PvP mechanics to be as similar as possible and the proposed change is just too big to be applied only to one of them) but has also a very important issue with “forced training wheels” (while I might need the extra dodges provided by vitality to succeed on a fight, the vitality itself will also increase my HP and allow me to survive some mistakes).

This is, for example, the main reason why I can’t withstand Diablo 3.
The way itemization works, when enemies deal enough damage for the gameplay to be interesting, my own damage is so ridiculously low that many fights (specially against some skill combinations on rares) become just impossible. On the other hand, when I reach the damage output I desire, my survivability has also increased and I can take too many hits before dying for the gameplay to be enjoyable.

While I agree on the sympton, I don’t agree on the cure.

If ANet wants event rewards to not be so dependant on upscaling events with a massive amount of players, the solution is probably on the scaling itself; more precisely, on making additional units generated by the scaling system to drop no loot so there’s always a fixed amount of lootable enemies.
Then, the scaling system should focus on freely achieving similar “difficulties” and completion times for differents amounts of players.

Two important notes need still to be made:

- On upscaled events, the highest ranked foes should be the lootable ones, so the huge amount of players doesn’t make tagging the right mobs unnecessarily difficult (this doesn’t mean that additional champions should be rewarding champion bags, just the loot associated to some regular enemy on the base, non-scaled, version of the event).

- Base mob loot on every involved event should be adjusted (probably increased by a lot in most cases) in order to make them interesting reward wise. If many players find some rewards lackluster even in massively upscaled scenarios, giving them the current base reward (which is probably ridiculous) won’t be specially welcomed.
The potential profit of any event should be based on things like average completion times, difficulty and important details like if the event is isolated or surrounded with many other ones or belongs to chain with a big potential prize at the end.

The event reward chest that has been used lately is not only another good solution for the “issue” but also offers many other interesting advantages like:
- Allow players to focus more on the background goal of the event and less on tagging as many foes as possible.
- Balance rewards for not so slaughter intensive events (which would probably be completely ignored under the classic mob loot system).
- Provide bonus rewards when some special conditions, not necessarily related to killing, are met (keeping the walls of a fortress up, preventing some NPCs from dying, …).
- Offer players a choice between different rewards.

The floating chest system, however, still has some important flaws that should be addressed and fixed as soon as possible:

- The most important one is probably, as several people had already pointed, event tagging.
Nothing prevent players from running from one event to another making just enough contribution to earn those chests. Currently, even if he has passed the majority of the time running across the map and contributing zero to overall success, it’s fairly easy for this player to get a much better reward than those focused on succesfully completing single long events.

- With floating chest rewards, there’s no use for Magic Find.
Even if not as pernicious as the first flaw gameplay wise, this is definitively a problem, so either reward chests should use magic fid to some degree, or the classic mob loot system should be used (alone or in combination with a chest reward) as often as possible.

Corvette.5687:

Just explaination, guy…. Now i am trying to run carrion gear but two or three ascended accessory have to be obtained by my worrior in FOTM. I guess it will took me 2-3 day to complete my carrion guardian.

Honestly, I wouldn’t do that.
Conditions do not work fine in most PvE content. Either enemies die too fast for conditions to make a difference, or the condition cap is covered by other players and you’re unable to land yours.
For Guardians it’s even worse: Since burning (the only daaging condition we can apply naturally) stacks in time, another burning user is enough to seriously cut your damage.
If you want to give it a try for fun, do it, but you probably shouldn’t be investing on ascended gear.

Obtena.7952:

Fun doesn’t necessarily have much to do with how fast you kill stuff so throwing meta builds at him is not a well-thought out approach.

Frankly, I think he might not find his build fun because there is alot of passive stuff going on.

But that’s pretty much how this kind of guardian spec (and most bunkerish builds on any class I would say) works in PvE. You mitigate incoming damage through things like high toughness, protection and even the signet and then you heal it up through a lot of small healing sources, many of them working on a quite passive way. It’s passive and rotationary gameplay by nature.
If a player is looking for a more active gameplay in order to have fun, the answer is going to be about active defenses (which OP build has a good amount by the way), and once you start using them properly one of the first thing you’ll notice is that you don’t need to pack so much healing and sturdiness.
You can still have them, of course, but if you’re looking for a more active gameplay and you barely notice the mistakes you made, well, I don’t find that gameplay especially engaging.

In the end, if the player is looking for a more active approach, shifting towards offense is pretty much the only answer. Going from his build to a meta one might be quite an extreme change to be made in asingle go, but the answer itself isn’t that missleading.

I don’t think it’s a L2P issue. Seems more in the line of wanting a PvP completely based on killing enemy players, while in the current conquest mode killing is just one thing among many others.

Something like a “flawless defense” (defending a fort without losing any door or wall) would be interesting. It could:
- Provide additional progress towards the breach event (I’m not sure if this currently happens).
- Provide some interesting bonus loot, like a rare
- Increase (cumulatively) the chances of a Legendary spawn in the next attack.

Anyways, I think there are more serious issues with the map, starting with event tagging (something they should look a fix for ASAP if they want to keep up with floating chest event rewards) and further reward balance.

About the current champion/legendary mechanics:

Defiance is a tricky mechanic.
A small group of organized people can get rid of the charges and then land a long hard CC like Deep Freeze for extremely good results. For large amounts of people (where there are too many stacks for a single player to disable) or in unorganzied small groups, the mechanic pretty much make bosses immune to CC.
As a rework, I would make defiant stacks to naturally go away over time. If enemies would lose 1 stack every 4-5 seconds without being hit by a CC skill (this is important to prevent timing issues between active removal and natural decay), it would be way easier for large or uncoordinated groups to deal with those last stacks.
In exchange, since effectively landing a CC becomes far easier, I would introduce a 50% natural resistance to hard CC (stun, knockdown, …). This would negatively affect coordinated dungeon groups, but If Ì’ve to be honest, I don’t think it’s ok to achieve those permastuns on single bosses.
For the “lesser beings” I suggest, natural decay could be faster (lets say 3 seconds) and CC could work at full potential.

Natural blind resistance is another thing that, as a main Guardian player, annoys me A LOT.
It’s obvious that champions and legendaries shouldn’t be affected by blinds like regular mobs. Having to deal with several players (so probably a lot of blind sources) and having a usually quite slow attack rate, they could be permablinded to death otherwise.
In the current state, however, blinding some of these enemies is pretty much useless. I’m just not going to save a dodge or a block because the enemy has a 10% chance of missing the hit (so a 90% chance of losing maybe more than half of my HP, or even being oneshoted).
As a possible change, I would reduce blind duration by a quite high percent (so better timing is required) but I would let it work as normal (next attack misses). Once the attack misses, the boss would receive a buff protecting him from being blinded again for a fixed amount of seconds (15-20 could do the work I guess).
“Small beings” could have lesser duration reductions and immunity upkeep times.

I would add a similar timer working with Immobilize (which works at full effect atm if I’m not mistaken). Even if most dungeon speedrun groups go full melee, being able to permaimmobilize a boss sounds quite ridiculous to me.
It’s either this or make immob count as a CC towards the defiance mechanic.
I don’t think any duration reduction should be needed here.

The rest of resistances provided by Unshakable (50% reduction to Weakness and Vulnerability) should be tweaked and made dependant on the amount of players (like current defiant stacks).
25 stacks of vulnerablity (over a somewhat long time) can require some build adjustment for 5 man groups. For a 20+ player group, onthe other hand, they are pretty much guaranteed.
For the same reason as Immob, I would also introduce Cripple and Chill (this one on a smaller degree of resistance) on the list of natural resistances. The fact that optimized groups fight at melee range doesn’t mean bosses should be so easy to kite if desired.
Ths natural resistances would be, again, reduced for the “small beings”.

Nova Stiker.8396:

So how do you make conditions and skills with CC be effective against bosses to reward group play without ruining bosses with a flood?

Here is my answer: I don’t know a good way.

…

What would you guys do if you added new boss mechanics?

I’ve an idea: stop focusing on boss encounters.
Instead of that, challenge the players with several not-so-powerful beings. If the big guy is needed for epicness or lore reasons, just make sure it’s aided by an adequate number of these lesser champions.
As long as they can use some decent AI, fighting against several enemies will always be more challenging and provide more room for control and support than facing a single foe.
They could use a slightly higher amount of moves (well, current bosses could also make use of this to be honest) and, instead of spaming skills on recharge, they could hold them for a few seconds so they can be used instantly if some special situation is met (for example, a big hit like eviscerate could be hold for 3-4 seconds to be used against an stunned or immobilized player).
Another important, and probably quite hard to achieve, part of a decent AI would be positioning (unless the enemy group is designed to work a lot with fields and boons, it doesn’t make any sense for, lets say two fire staff elementalists, to stay stacked and being cleaved).
At least, the AI should try to avoid being tricked by LoS. It might be an acceptable tactic for trash mobs but, if the designer, trying to achieve a better encounter, introduces adds or directly replaces a boss with 3-4 pseudochampions, and then allows them to directly run into a corner, over a blind field, against a reflect wall, … and explode … well, if that’s the case it might be better to not change anything :P

Drarnor Kunoram.5180:

Conncept.7638:

Considering that four of the game’s classes have absolutely no boon removal and one has only one such skill, these units having retaliation wasn’t a case of encouraging people to adapt their build but discouraging them from playing at all.

Three. Guardians have it via trait (whenever they burn),

With 10 seconds ICD and on a single target if I’m not mistaken. Couple it with Shield 5 (a 40 seconds base CD skill) being maybe the only reliable AoE interrupt (since wolves usually open with the howl, I’m not sure if it would have been possible to execute the 2 moves of binding blades in time), low HP pool and most damaging skills being multihit.
I can’t imagine how annoying would have been to complete “Not Thanks to Canach” with retal on the wolves (btw, I think this is a good opportunity to thank ANet again for ruining Renewed Justice, among several other things, on every single LS mission :P).

Mad Queen Malafide.7512:

Retaliation should be redesigned. If I were to redesign it, I would make it a boon that is instantly removed when you are not receiving damage, and lasts very short by default. That way you actually have to time it against heavy-hitting attacks. It should also have far clearer tells when it is hitting you.

Since the introduction of Light Aura, there’s no real need of redesigning Retaliation, not at least in PvE.
If Mordrem wolves would apply lets say 4 seconds of AoE Light Aura (maybe 4s to themselves and 2s to allies to prevent a pack from keeping it up for too long) and would be granted with a 100% boon duration increase, we would have a lot more options of counterplay.
We could interrupt the scream to negate the aura, we could stop attacking for a few seconds and let the aura go away without stacking retaliation or we could keep fighting and strip the retal once the aura fades off.

harrison fang.1874:

vagamonth what prevents it from completeing then?

For example, I play Guardian and my virtue of courage, if not on cd, triggers Aegis automatically from time to time. The first time I tried, one of those Aegis popped just when i was transfering fragility to a vortex and that negated the achievement (it disappeared from the screen).
As long as you do not use any regular boon (might, swiftness, …), you’re ok.

One Note Chord.5031:

Odin of Ark.4860:

Simple, just don’t use ANY boons.

Hmm, the way you’ve written it makes it sound like you think we can have fragility stolen, so long as no boons are stolen. I didn’t even try this, because I didn’t want to have to rerun the whole thing if it turned out fragility couldn’t be stolen either. Have you actually tested it? Have you gotten the achievement after having fragility stolen?

Having fragility stolen doesn’t prevent the achievement fro completing.

kitten .9460:

I skipped this entirely because most minigames in GW2 are terrible, the only one I consider half decent is keg brawl but I never play that anymore either cuz minigames are on rotation now and I never even check to see what it is anymore.

Keg Brawl is always (and only) on Sundays.

The game can be fun if everyone plays as intended.
I would still make a few tweaks here and there (specially around mad king says) and the issue with participation counting towards the achievement absolutely should be looked at.
The biggest flaw, however, is on the rewards, which don’t promote the intended playstyle. This is my proposal:

- The initial courtier gets 2 bags for every conversion achieved + 20 bags if courtiers win.
- Villagers converted into courtiers get 1 bag for every minute survived as villagers + 10 bags if courtiers win (this includes new players that join an already started match and spawn as villagers)
- New players spawning as courtiers get 1 bag for every conversion achieved + 10 bags if courtiers win
- Villagers get 25 bags if they win.
- If the inquisition wins and the last villager alive has the highest count on minutes survived, he gest +10 bags. If he’s not at the top, he gets +5 bags.

Current bag rewards are so lackluster (3/5 bags for courtiers/villagers if they win iirc) that APs seem to be the only meaningful thing reward wise, and since those depend only on the number of played matches, almost every single match get a few (or even a lot) completionist that don’t really care about the game itself and just want to end it as soon as possible and move on.
With a decent amount of bags (still less than what a player would get from any decent labyrinth farm, which also has regular loot on top of it) and a reward system encouraging players to do their best the whole time, I truly think that it would be possible to have a much more pleasant time with this minigame.

The Crossing, the Mad Moon and Arachnophobia crafting I guess.
Glacial is probably the cheapest one to craft sigils of the night and Crystals are used for the Gift of Souls, the Crossing being probably the most popular skin among those three (Best Tiryas Nougat Center is much more expensive than its counterparts).

This kind of might stacking builds usually have 3 main sources of might: Blast finishers over fire fields, sigil of battle and rune of strength (which doesn’t provide a lot of might by itself but increases the duration a lot, allowing a much better stacking).

One of these sources requires active usage of skills in the right sequence, which make the specs somewhat predictable and allows some kind of counterplay. Some of these specs can also bring more than a single combo field type to blast. It’s a powerful effect, but one that requires some decision making during the fight.
The other two are passives naturally working and proccing in background without any thoughtful player input.

If I had to nerf might stacking, runes and/or sigils would be my first target 100% sure. I don’t know, maybe there’s something broken in my head.

Honestly, I can’t see the point on 10 man dungeons.
The combat system is designed around 5 man groups playing on an enviroment where they also need to split to be effective, so the usual 5 man dungeon teams, which go together most of the way, are probably a bit too much already.

Since most supportive skills only affect up to 5 players, 10 man teams would end up being close to 2 duplicated 5 man teams playing quite independently. On top of that, it would create several issues with different types of skills:
- Anti-projectile wards do not have a target cap, they’re just an enviromental effect that lasts for a given time. If you have twice the number of players, you can have, at least, twice the amount of reflects and make things like perma reflects much more easier to achieve. This makes the game easier.
- Even if the skill itself will only affect up to 5 players, combo fields can be triggered by any amount of players, so combo field management becomes easier.
- Vulnerability caps at 25, so it becomes way easier to achieve.
- You can easily bring twice the amount of instant rez skills and it’s easier to manually rez downed people too.
- Perma immobilizing or chilling enemies becomes far easier too.
And a lot more …

A10 man dungeon doesn’t create a team oriented experience. It creates pretty much the same experience we have now and makes it even easier for the most part.
In the end, AI and encounter design improvements are the key for creating more interesting and teamwork intensitive content, no matter the size of the player group (it would still work better with 5 man groups, because that’s how the whole comabt system has been designed).