Guild Wars 2

Myrmidian Eudoros.4671:

“Drastic” is a bit of an overstatement, but a buff is certainly still in order.

What if:

Warrior’s Sprint -> Incraese to 25% IMS when wielding Melee Weapon in MH (increase from 10%), Possibly even do it like necro and make it 15% MH 10% OH melee weapon.

Mending -> Removes 3 conditions (increase from 2) and grants regeneration for 4s

“Shake it Off” -> Cures 2 conditions (increase from 1)

All of these together might be a bit too much of a buff for Warrior, but basically it would allow Warrior to chase down kiters more effectively, and improve their condition cleansing ability which is currently abysmal, while making some traits and skills that are currently kind of “meh” and make them really solid options.

Well the actual healskills of warrior are kinda underpowered. Same goes for the necro. It doesn’t make sense, to have healskills on 25s cooldown, on a class with 18k health, which, which heals less then other classes 20s heals.

Healthpools are kinda irrelevant if you cannot maintain said health in a fight.
In my opinion healskills should be streamlined in a way, that a certain cooldown equals a certain percentage of the base healthpool of that class.
Example:
A 30s cooldown heal ability equals 50% of the base healthpool.
In case of a warrior this is ~9k health. In case of a mesmer this would be ~7.5k health. In case of an ele this would be ~5k health.
So every class would gain 100% base-health back via #6 once per minute.

Edit:

Varonth.5830:

Varonth.5830:

I’ll take a wild guess here and say, it is about a build consisting of greatsword + axe/shield.
Traits for maximum greatsword damage.
Most likely zerger amulet.

The elementalist equivalent is a staff ele running 20 or even 30 fire, 30 air and whatever is left in arcana with zerger amulet.
Guess what, that build will just explode.
Can it work? Yes, it can. Will it survive against competent enemies who will attack them? Most likely not.
Warriors can go a route, where they rival eles group support, if you go for shouts and warhorn, while they can maintain a good sustained damage and movement speed, yet warriors refuse to go this for no reason whatsoever.
Every class can run a zerger build to some degree, but not all classes are equally good at this. You need alot of survivability from your class mechanics, which warriors just don’t have. But warriors can go other routes. People just have to try different approaches.

No, warriors have been trying shout and banner builds since beta, and it’s simply inferior to similar builds from other classes. Yes, you can supply good offensive boons and condi removal, but you have nowhere near the healing and escape moves of an ele. That’s why it works in pve, but not pvp.

With the recent nerf to eles RtL and Cleansing Water, this changed a bit.
Warhorn also got some buffs, with the no longer existant aftercast delay on Call to Arms. Charge is probably one of the best condi removals ingame right now, especially when traited. Name any other condi remove which can AoE cleanse on everyone on a point immobilize, even if said immobilize is covert by 7 other conditions. It on the same time also cleanse crippled and chilled, and if traited, then converts another condition into a boon, and then grant to swiftness on top of this.
Every 12s if traited. There is no condition cleanse ingame which comes close to this.

Call to Arms, if traited with warhorn convert trait, adds atleast 12s of vigor every 16s. Again for every ally on a point. It also converts another condition into a boon and throws out weakness to all enemies. Oh and with the last patch, this skill also became a blast finisher.

This weapon with just one trait rivals the eles condi cleanse + buffing. It also allows you to have a 100% uptime on swiftness, giving you a really good movement speed bonus, even without GS or Sword.

And if you want to play damage, well, tactic traitline comes with a adept trait which adds additional damage per boon on you (and as far as my tests go, it is 2% as the ele 25 water minor). Given that warhorn will atleast give you 2 boons, but very likely 4, and some boons from other sources, like fire blast finishers or boons from allies, this traitline easily adds 10% to your damage. Of every weapon.
Oh, and tactics minors aren’t bad either. Getting 400 toughness and ressing 10% faster can really turn the tide on a pointfight.
And then, if you are already 20 points in this traitline, you can just add 10 if you want more support, and get shout heals (which in return will give you more buffs, which will then add more damage via Empowered).

I’ll take a wild guess here and say, it is about a build consisting of greatsword + axe/shield.
Traits for maximum greatsword damage.
Most likely zerger amulet.

The elementalist equivalent is a staff ele running 20 or even 30 fire, 30 air and whatever is left in arcana with zerger amulet.
Guess what, that build will just explode.
Can it work? Yes, it can. Will it survive against competent enemies who will attack them? Most likely not.
Warriors can go a route, where they rival eles group support, if you go for shouts and warhorn, while they can maintain a good sustained damage and movement speed, yet warriors refuse to go this for no reason whatsoever.
Every class can run a zerger build to some degree, but not all classes are equally good at this. You need alot of survivability from your class mechanics, which warriors just don’t have. But warriors can go other routes. People just have to try different approaches.

HGH is so powerful with grenades for multiple reasons, which all add together.
They can use Rabid amulet for condition damage and critrate. This should leave them at low direct damage levels. But with HGH they can maintain 20 stacks of might, which will not only add 700 condition damage, but also 700 power.
Suddenly they don’t sit on 2100 attack power, but 2800, which is close the level most powerbuild are, which is ~3000 without might.
With their critrate of 35%, which will then get buffed to 55% by Elixir B fury they suddenly become a quite good direct damage dealer aswell.
But it doesn’t stop here. They also add alot of vul stacks, which not only cover their damaging conditions, but it will also add another 20%+ damage to their direct attacks.

So, while they are wearing rabid, they are dealing alot of direct damage, and even more condition damage thanks to their mightstacking abilities.

TheGuy.3568:

balance is nonexistent. So far what I have read is testimonials that each class has one or 2 OP builds except warrior thus things are balanced. Just because engineer has HGH doesn’t mean the class is balanced. Just because thief has DP does not mean the class is balanced. Just because ranger has BM bunker does not mean it is balanced. In the vast number of builds only a few get to shine.

One OP build per class does not equal balance. Give it another 5 months and maybe we might have something remotely close.

Pretty much this, except for the timeframe part. When I remember what changed during the last 5 months, and how team compositions changed…

Balance means that every class can take a spot in a 5v5 team. There shouldn’t be one class which is needed for high level play. Currently there are such classes/builds. Most spots in an organized team are basically used by either guardians, eles or mesmers.
If balance should look like that there are needed spots to be filled by specific classes with specific builds, then these class/build should be chosen on matchstart. Like a small selection screen, where you choose to be bunker guardian etc.
You then fill that particular teamslot with that players, and others cannot choose the bunker guardian.

A second way the concept of fairness comes into play is the notion of gameplay balance. This is the sense that your circumstances or your chosen means of playing the game are roughly equivalent to everyone else’s, in terms of giving you a fair shot at winning. Going back to chess, it’s generally accepted that white has a slight edge for having the first move, but only at advanced levels of play does that fact even become relevant. In most board games the first player does have a miniscule edge that evens out over the course of the game, but players aren’t typically placed in radically asymmetric or dissimilar positions. There’s really no reason to squabble over who gets the top hat or the dog in Monopoly. Not so in video games.

In many first-person shooters, your choice of team determines your weapons. In a real-time strategy game, it is your set of units and abilities that may depend on your faction. Fighting (“beat ’em up”) games lend themselves well to having numerous characters with different movesets. Diverse modes of gameplay are all well and good until you sense that your mode, which you picked just for the fun of it, is appallingly weak in comparison to what someone else chose. Regardless of how well you play, you’ll always be at a disadvantage. The game is unbalanced. Someone else already worked out what the most effective tactic is, and all the other options are just glitz and glitter to draw in the suckers. Without looking back, you discard your ill-deserved emotional attachment to your initial pick and go where the action is. Before too long, the winning strategy begins to spread virally, and everyone playing the game ends up using the same characters and options all the time, or gets decried as a newbie and soundly beaten. And the vast majority of the game’s content goes unused.

This scenario is neither ideal nor rare; even a polished gem of the gaming world like Starcraft, which did a remarkable job of balancing its factions, didn’t manage to get it right on the first try. It took years of patches and player feedback to tweak the rules to the point where everyone felt they had a fair chance with any of the widely varying options. And that’s where the notion of fairness comes in—not feeling like the option you initially picked and tried to master was just a dead end, and feeling secure that everything in the game is worth trying out and isn’t just a trap to sucker newbies.

http://www.strangehorizons.com/2009/20090309/newheiser-a.kittenml

Bunkering on a point with this build? Sounds hard, if not impossible. Guardian can do that thanks to their rediculous uptime on stability via Stand Your Ground. It’s so hard to CC them, and even harder to CC them of a point.

Guess that is the biggest drawback.

Dest.7410:

Med.6150:

What’s the reasoning for buffing something else, if the skill is being adjusted, because it is overperforming?

The reasoning is that it is not overperforming. But you refuse to see that, just because it has become, like another user said, the whine of the month.

No the whine of the month currently is the mesmers who refuse to see when their class is horribly overpowered, and always was.
Like seriously, you say, they got nerfed every single patch. Yet they are considered, according to the long running thread in this forum, the second best class at the moment, and always have been in the Top3.
If all these nerfs were unnecessary, how can it be that they are still more powerfull then 75% of the classes? If these nerfs were so uncalled for, and all of them are class destroying nerfs, then mesmer should be in an unplayable state, with damage numbers like other classes using steady weapons, and incoming damage of naked necros.

Guess, it is because those few still playing mesmer have godlike skills at playing GW2. Every single mesmer player is just so much better then everyone else, that they make this class, which got constantly nerfed and is the absolute bottom tier of every MMO in existance or ever made, working.

Dest.7410:

Med.6150:

Take another class and use your burst out of range of the target. See how that goes.

Sigh… just in case you haven’t noticed, these ‘homing burst’ clones/phantasms can be destroyed with 1 (maybe 2) hits

Try hitting another class while they’re using their burst ability and see how that goes.

In all fairness, you are hiding behind a reasonable facade while all you want is mesmer to be ‘easier to deal with’

Med.6150:

No, Blurred Frenzy is a crutch you’ve come to rely upon.

No, Blurred Frenzy is 100% the reason you don’t see mesmers and go ‘Yum, lunch’ (pretty much as everyone views warriors now)

Please do inform me for mesmer sources of perma prot? Oh right, whiners got that nerfed, even if the mesmer needed 2+phantasm in 100% uptime to achieve that.

Oh, and please, oh please, do tell me how iLeap works reliably. Or how every other class has damaging abilities that might do the damage stated.

Oh, and of course, disregard the implications a nerf might have to any and all other aspects of the game…..

To use your own words

Med.6150:

That’s kind distorted, don’t you think?

No class can oneshot a clone with autoattack.
Most classes cannot twoshot them, even with zerger.

Are you talking about weaponskills other then #1? If so, think about what the clone just accomplished. He put a cooldown on an enemies ability. That is still a gain for the mesmer.

Even if they die in AoE, for example when you send them on a point, there is a high chance, that they tanked some AoE damage that could have harmed a player or damaging AI, like pets, or Elementals, because they count as one Entity towards the limit of 5 entities hit with AoE. Perhaps they even got AoE retaliation from blast finishers etc. Then they also deal back damage as they die.

Mesmers defense is that they can stay out of the fight better than other classes.
Stuff like phase retreat, and blink, clones absorbing projectiles etc. are enough defense.
It probably is still too much defense after a potentional Blurred Frenzy nerf. They should have to take defensive utilities for themself like any other class does if they want to survive, and so should zerger amulett hit them just as hard as other classes in terms of survivability.

The reason people see warrior as cannonfodder is because like 90% of the warriors run the same build which isn’t working. When they die they complain about this build not working. I mean, why do they believe, that a warrior should be allowed to bring just their heal, dodgerolls and shieldblock as defensive, and go full offensive on the rest. Of course they are going to die fast.
Warrior have to get defensive just as much as other classes.
Yes it can work, if you are good, and/or the enemy is bad, but it shouldn’t be easymode.
Basically that is where Mesmer, and every other class going full offensive should be in terms of suvivability. Mesmer isn’t close to this. They can still take quite a while to take down.

And saying that Med wants Mesmers to be easier to deal with. I guess he doesn’t have alot of problems with them, as he is #34 on the european leaderboards.

Dest.7410:

Going to say this again, the nerfs never stop.

This month Blurred Frenzy is ‘the’ ‘OP’ ability just because people have nothing else to complain about?

Stop and I mean STOP crying for nerfs, cry for bufs instead to make a difference!

That mesmer is killing you because of Blurred Frenzy? What would you need in your class to make you be on par with that?

But, please, by all means, avoid creative thinking. Carry on destroying skills one by one until your favourite skill is hit next. And then you’ll be a miserable player amongst miserable players….

Don’t like that? Maybe use constructive criticism.

Don’t destroy, create and improve! Is that too much to ask?

Buffing isn’t always a good way to balance stuff, for the simple reason, that if you just keep on buffing, you will soon face a powercreep which isn’t fun.
Also buffing can potentionally harm balance much more than it benefits. Especially with the really slow update cycle. If you buff something too much, you can end up in a situation were one class got something which becomes so strong, that this class basically becomes the only viable choice.
Nerfing is a valid, and much better strategy. Nobody is asking for a Smiters Boon kind of nerf (in case you don’t know what this means: http://wiki.guildwars.com/wiki/Smiter%27s_Boon_%28PvP%29), but to bring it down to reasonable levels.

And I still believe, that putting Blurred Frenzy on Offhand-Sword would solve alot of problems.

Currently mainhand sword + focus or pistol allows for everything.
Invul, CC, a good phantasm, one of the longest immobilize uptimes on a weaponskill.

Putting it on offhand-sword basically gives you the choice, of:

1. Getting a pull
2. Getting a ranged stun
3. Getting melee invul

It isn’t like the block is bad. Hell, against bad players the actual burst can become even better. I blocked a Ele once for 6k damage.

Zenith.7301:

It’s a 2 second self-cc, in case you didn’t notice. You can do nothing else besides shatter while using it, and are rooted in place as a low mobility class.

The only way to land it offensively is by landing Swap, which is as obvious as an Eviscerate or Bull’s Charge. You either dodge or cleanse the root and move.

Hundred Blades and Pistol Whip might want to have a word with you.
Pistol Whip actually has the exact same animation in the second part. The first part is ~1s long, and does not grant you evade, therefore you can actually interrupt that skill, or move out of it, before it starts swinging.
Oh, Thief Sword also has Immobilize. 1s instead of 2s, so you don’t even have to cleanse it, because it runs out before you start attacking.
And please don’t forget, conditions get cleansed last in first out. So thankfully, your sword and staff clones, will immediatly cover that Immobilize, without the players input.
Should I add another thing to the list?
How about autoturning.
If you are getting attacked by Hundred Blades or Pistol Whip, all you have to do is, move behind your target, so just move 2 steps forward. In case of Hundred Blades, you can then actually start attacking the warrior.
Blurred Frenzy? Well how about autoturn. If you move behind or to the side of the mesmer, he will autoturn and still hit you.

• Slight cooldown increase (12-15s)
• Move to Offhand-Sword #4
• Move Offhand-Sword #4 to Mainhand-Sword #2

After that, move on to phase retreat and give it a freaking casttime, so that it doesn’t act as a half-stunbreak.

Arganthium.5638:

Vanthian.9267:

Arganthium.5638:

First, define to me what “OP” is. Overpowered relative to what? How is your idea of OP better than anybody else’s idea of what is OP? Tell me that, and then perhaps we can talk.

The definition is in the word… over powered. As in, greatly more powerful than other things available to others. A skill/ability that is truly above and beyond that of which most other professions have access too. No other profession can come close to blurred frenzy in terms of defense and offense.

“Overpowered” is a relative term. Overpowered relative to what?

There are 2 other melee, rooted channels ingame:

• Hundred Baldes
• Pistol Whip

Pistol Whip comes closer to Blurred Frenzy, but even that one can be interrupted, as it has almost 1s of casttime before you start to channel and get the evade.

What does blurred frenzy have over both them?
For no apparent reason it autoturns towards the target while channeling. Running to the side/back of a thief or warrior, means that you don’t have any damage.
Blurred Frenzy will turn with your target.

Want another example of lol-balancing?
http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Magic_Bullet vs. http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Backbreaker

Mesmer is full of stuff like this.
Mesmer was my first class, and is still my most played class, followed by Ele.
Yet I will admit, that mesmer is overpowered. Not a bit, but really overpowered. Ele is overpowered aswell, but because of other reasons.

That is a general problem, not a sPvP specific one. Any UI element counts as GT set directly on your character.

Oh, just wanted to add another thing to the list, after watching a GW1 match.

Visual noise
Yes, GW2 looks nice, but for the gameplay the amount of effects is just too much. In Guild Wars 1, my last PvP match in Guild Wars 1 is about half a year ago. Just watching a GvG with 7v7 (2 flagrunners aren’t really contributing to the fight in that match), I can easily recognize key skills used by any of those 14 players attacking each other.

Try to recognize any skill in a 4vs4 on a point in GW2 as Spectator. Good luck with that.

Kasama.8941:

I don’t see how anyone can honestly think there’s no skill involved in the game. I mean sure, the game has it’s RNG, but there’s a counter to the majority of skills in the game. Healing skills can be interrupted, boons can be removed or stolen, and if you waste all your endurance too quickly, you won’t be able to dodge the damage that matters. The problem is generally just a lack of focused balance.

Interrupting in this game is a shadow of its former self.
Interrupts in GW1 used to put that skill on full cooldown, the skill still cost energy (we a resource which would be good in GW2 aswell, ontop of cooldowns), and most of the time had a bonus effect on interrupts, like additional cooldown, damage, energy drain, perhaps even putting cooldowns on other skills of the same type.

Boons can be removed or stolen. Actually there are 2 viable methods of really countering boon spam:

• Thief with S/D
• Shatter Mesmer

Since shatter mesmers brings more to the team, more burst (lol) and teamsizes are extremly limited (6v6 or 7v7 would in my opinion be a much better format, as there are builds, that become potentionally better in larger scenarios), it basically comes down to shatter mesmer.

Randomness. Jep too much. Things like the latest change to engineers incendary powder are showing a good direction in that regard. Still there is far too much randomness in it.

Energy is heavily missing as a balancing tool, and I just can’t get it, why it got removed. Energy is a perfect way, to balance certain combos, by making it too expensive to pull off, but having not much impact on the skill itself.
On top of that, it would open up a complete new branch of control and support, by energy manipulating skills.

Sprawl.3891:

i agree with the skill issue. people claim easy to learn hard to master, but it’s just not. Pros separate themselves with team strategy/movement/builds not skill. You see some of these “pros” on their private servers and they get smacked around in small skirmishes without their team mates to come 3v2 on a node.

These soll called pros are like 20 players. You cannot call yourself pro, if the complete ‘competive’ scene is about the same size as one GW1 GvG match fields as players (which is 16).

Artaz.3819:

TheGuy.3568:

Olba.5376:

BurrTheKing.8571:

The minor traits in the tactics line should all be revamped to deal specifically with reducing condition duration.

5. Reduce duration of Bleeding by 33%
15. Reduced duration of poison by 33%
25. Immune to one blind on a 10 second cooldown.

Combine this with a bug fixed Quick Breathing perk so that if you have cripple and bleed it removes both correctly even investing just 5 points would make conditions much less of a instant loss. I came up with the blind immunity because while that effects every class negatively, warriors tend to get hit the hardest. I feel this would still keep condition builds effective against warriors, they just wouldn’t roll over them.

That will never happen, simply because then a Warrior could pop Superior Runes of Melandru and Lemongrass Poultry Soup and have -98% bleed and poison duration, effectively making them immune to those conditions.

I agree that would be overkill and then some. However, I still feel a passive trait should be there at the adept level or a minor trait at the master level. It just seems to me that condition removal should not be tied to simply warhorn.

Shrug it Off (the talent) could just be made baseline at 15-points and do the same thing.

The current 5-pt and 15-pt Determined Revival and Fast Healer could easily be combined since the only one that really matters is Determined Revival (Fast Healer doesn’t even matter with NPCs and is minimally beneficial elsewhere – maybe saves 1s on reviving players).

In GW2 1s can be like 10k damage which you don’t take, because you got revived. Thankfully warrior is heavy armor. These 400 additional armor really add up, because otherwise you would get like 11k damage instead of 10k.

Defensive stats are near worthless
Some might think, is he crazy. Maybe :P but if you take a look at bunker classes, while they run defensive stats, it is just something that they add ontop of their real defenses, which are:

• CC, especially launch and knockbacks
• Boons
• Lots of stunbreaks with small cooldowns
• Lots and lots of small passive heals
• High or even unlimited vigor uptime
• High stability uptime
• Lots of condi remove

They get all of this in one package. That’s why there are just 2 (1/2) real bunkering classes.
Amulets like clerics, shaman etc which add alot of defensive stats, are useless on classes without the things mentioned above. Easy to test: Use a defensive Amulet on a Thief for example. It will reduce the damage you take, but also the damage you deal. And the damage you take isn’t offsetted by the damage you lost, because it is often just in the 500-1k area, so that you will get like 3-4k instead of 4-5k per ability.

Extreme condition application
Yeah, people are saying, that condition remove is too strong. Actually it is needed. Try playing without alot (and I mean ALOT) of condi removal. You often won’t even get one hit on your enemy, because you are constant crippled, chilled, immobilized, feared, blinded, all while taking 2~3k damage per second via bleeding, poison and burning. Also alot of conditions can get too high condition durations. 30s of burning is not Ok. 6-8s of immobilize isn’t either. Since you encounter such things on a regular basis, you will not be able to really compete against these without some sort of mass condi remove, which becomes worse, with short lived vul stacks from many sources, which will constantly cover the stuff you want to remove.

Too many AI entities
Well, that there are some classes that have targetable minions, ok. But in this game, like almost any class can summon stuff. Add an AoE limit, and watch you AoE or projectile getting eaten by stuff you don’t want to hit.
And on a special note on this problem:
Rockdog summons on the highest damage runeset… seriously?
Thankfully it has a downside aswell. It is like really cool to use a shout like For Greater Justice, and buff might and fury on some clones instead of players…

Not enough teamsupport
More abilities should be really strong, like Stand Your Ground level, but should not affect the player himself, but just allies. Stand Your Ground could be the first ability to get that threatment:
5s of stability and retaliation, on a 25s cooldown. Does not affect the Guardian himself.

The other mentioned points, I mostly agree with.

Arheundel.6451:

Blackjack.5621:

hello, my name is ele and i would really like to give up my burning speed tickling dmg after the initial burst because it attacks multiple times per seconds for 100 dmg only, that is less than retal and kills me against hgh engis.

why are there any skills in the game doing less dmg than retal? what is the benefit of it? in fire attunement i can manage to lose 60% of my hp in 3 seconds to retal by attacking 1 person. because of burning speed ticks and triple projectile autoattack.

Burning speed is fine as it is, after all, we do get a fire field with its use and the burst damage can be pretty amazing , regarding retaliation, it is advisable to recognize retaliation boon on guardian before attacking, save the multi hit skills for the time where the guardian has gone through all his utilities and skills that grant retaliation( symbol of wrath, dodge that chain pull)

Punitive mechanics are here to wise us up, ele also got really punitive mechanic:
scepter/focus condition ele against ranged/mele opponents for example or shocking/frost aura

On a guardian, you don’t have to recognize the retaliation boon. Chances are that they have retaliation running.
Retaliation uptime on Guardians, or guardian-powered teams is… well insane. Lots of light fields, which get lots of blast/leap finishers.

Puandro.3245:

Varonth.5830:

A phantasm mesmer often has at least 25 in inspiration. You can easily go 30 and get condi remove on shatter. While shattering lowers your sustained damage for a while, it allows you to cleanse 3 conditions per shatter.
Combined with some clone generation with dodge rolls and weaponskills, you can easily double shatter as phantasm mesmer.
Double shatter will remove 6 conditions.
And it’s not like Mind Wrack doesn’t do damage on a phantasm spec. It’s less then a pure shatter build, but it’s still easily within the 3-5k damage range.

Oh and engi actually has some problems. The grenades will often hit 2, retaliation buffed, phantasms, for like 1k damage (~3 times 300), which in return will reflect like 1.5-2k damage back.

You never shatter as a phantasm mesmer or have deceptive evasion, it kills your phantasms when you summon 3.

I wrote that in my post. Yet, if you have to decide between having 10+ bleeding, poison and 10s of burning + phantasms, or shattering phantasms and resummon them (and in the offtime, spawn some clones if needed and just shatter again), well I go for the shatter, as surviving has priority.
Also, you will almost never be able to summon 3 weapon phantasm. They will die at some point. Then you just replace it with the same again. If you are actually having 3 phantasms out, your aren’t getting in trouble anyway, as you enemy is either afk, or not attacking you in any way.

If he is attacking you, he is going to kill phantasms at some point, by random AoE. But that is ok, as you know that a dead phantasm dealt quite some damage back to the enemy with retaliation.

A phantasm mesmer often has at least 25 in inspiration. You can easily go 30 and get condi remove on shatter. While shattering lowers your sustained damage for a while, it allows you to cleanse 3 conditions per shatter.
Combined with some clone generation with dodge rolls and weaponskills, you can easily double shatter as phantasm mesmer.
Double shatter will remove 6 conditions.
And it’s not like Mind Wrack doesn’t do damage on a phantasm spec. It’s less then a pure shatter build, but it’s still easily within the 3-5k damage range.

Oh and engi actually has some problems. The grenades will often hit 2, retaliation buffed, phantasms, for like 1k damage (~3 times 300), which in return will reflect like 1.5-2k damage back.

Scoobaniec.9561:

Mace #2..that had to hurt badly. So close to evi (61% crit dmg, 3190atk)

So now, wanna hear something funny about another channel block + counter attack?

Scepter 2 of Mesmer:
2844 attack power → 1349 damage
Sword 4 of Mesmer:
Same as above

Mace 2 of warrior:
2800 attack power → 674 damage

Perfect balance

Use a warhorn instead of a shield in your other set. Works wonder.
One might think, why would someone give up shield block for a Warhorn. Well it’s mostly because of vigor. Especially if you also go for the trait in tactics which converts conditions into boons, and reduces the cooldown you have perm vigor (well you AND your team), because stuff like bleeding gets converted to vigor aswell. If you are crippled, chilled and immobilized you can cleanse 4 conditions with charge alone. Did I mention that you cleanse that on yourself AND allies?
The most important thing about this is, that you will remove immobilize, as charge directly targets crippled, chilled and immobilize conditions. It cannot be covered. And therefore charge will allow you to dodge. Vigor will make sure you will have the endurance to do so.
Not to mention, that Call to Arms got changed to be a blast finisher.
And it got rid of the annoying half second aftercast.
Btw, with the trait, you have a 100% uptime on swiftness with charge (12s cooldown, 12s swiftness).

Warhorn is often overlooked, but this weapon, especially when traited, has more condion removal then 3 shouts with soldier rune + mending.

The #1 Attackspeed isn’t exactly slow.
Here are some frame numbers. I measured how many frames past between the start of the attack chain, until the damage floater of the first attack of the second chain appeared, at 60 FPS.

Greatsword: 190 frames
Hammer: 201 frames
Sword: 174 frames
While technically it is slower then greatsword, it is just ~5% difference.
190 / 201 = 0.945 → ~95% → this is the time greatsword need in relation to hammer for a full chain.
The damage difference between both weapons on the other hand is enourmous.
Damage greatsword chain: 519+519+668 = 1706
Damage hammer chain: 668+668+891 = 2227
1706/2227 = 0.766 → ~77% → this is the damage greatsword does in relation to hammer in a full chain.

Just for the sake of numbers, here is the amount of frame from Hundred Blades start to damage floater of autoattack:
Hundred Blades: 257 frames.

The root on #4 is annoying.
And it seems that unsuspecting foe from the Arms traitline really just works against stunned enemies, and Backbreaker is a knockdown.
Backbreaker casttime could really use a slight cooldown and casttime reduction. Somewhere around 0.75s casttime and 25s cooldown.

Earthshaker on the other hand is the by far best burst skill the warrior has.

The problem is, which T2 server should go up.
They won’t stand a chance against VZ either.

I am on Kodash, T2 EU and we have the same matchup for 8 weeks now.
I don’t know how VZ is, but I can assume that no T2 server would stand a chance.

Why would anyone want to fight in T1, when you know you cannot win.
Megaservers are a huge problem. Huge enough for drastic actions like forced server splitting.
If a server is becoming so huge and dominant, that the lower tiers, like we in T2 actually try to lose a week, if winning would mean that they will go up a tier, then you cannot fix this by tweaking the ranking system.

For sustained teamfights you need strong group support capabilities (not just talking about heal).
Guardian, Ele and Warrior are pretty close to this, although they could need less self support and more group support.

If you really believe thats the problem, then you should perhaps try playing a bit more sPvP :P

The game has some serious problems when it comes to balance.
If you allow people to have like 3 different loadouts out of these 5~8 viable builds that are ingame, does not magically make the game more fun to watch.
Games like LoL and Dota live because there so many possible starting combination of champions. When you watch something like this, you want to know how each side uses the strength and compensates for the weaknesses, and how well they do this.
In GW2 there is just a handfull of combinations which are viable.

What we need is that there is basically no useless trait ingame, and alot of these traits must be gameplay defining.
Like Grenadier defines a complete opposite playstyle from a juggernaut engi.
And all them should be viable.

From this. we are years away in my opinion, unless they completely reword every class once the expansions arrive. (which don’t seem to arrive anytime soon either)

Because why not.
Using crossfire + pet is probably better then anything the best warrior in the game could do.
Sad state of the game

JonathanSharp.7094:

We did test, but internal servers and external servers are not the same. Our internal tests were fine. This is why we beta!

That, in my opinion as computer science student, is a good reason.
The live servers are most likely running on a cluster, not just one single machine. Now you have a bunch of servers running there, each doing it’s stuff. A few for dungeons, a few for pvp… etc.
This makes sense as the system has to handle thousands of concurrent users. When you are playing, you are basically playing on on machine in the cluster. For your computer it looks like one server (perhaps not even that), but you are constantly switching machines.
Now according to Wikipedia ArenaNet has >300 employees: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ArenaNet

From an economical point of view, you wouldn’t run a servercluster for this number. One machine can probably run this.

So when they test it, it might work, but once it goes on live, something unexpected happens when the client goes from one server to another, preventing you from joining a dungeon, a pvp match etc. etc.

Is condition application out of control?
Probably yes.

Even if specced fully on condition removal, even Ele’s, Guardians or Engis cannot keep themself clear of conditions. And they have tons of removals.
So if they cannot, how should for example a warrior deal with conditions?
It seems that warrior should just outlast them with his healthpool, but these 8k bonus health they got does not last long against stacked conditions, which deal like 2k dps to you (which without any doubt is the average of an engi). On top of that they deal with cripple and immobilize, and in case of an engi, confusion and lots and lots of vul stacks, which then in return increase the direct damage they take.

There is a reason why alot of good builds focus atleast one traitline into condition removal and why these builds are considered stronger then others. Nerfing these builds won’t do the game a favor, so instead, in my opinion more classes should come up in condition removal.

Randomly joined a tournament once as a mesmer.
Ended up in a team with 3 mesmers (including me) and a minion master necro. I was counting 13 AI controlled entities in our team with 5 players.
Targeting was probably a pain for our enemies.

Best part:
One of the mesmers names was ‘Happy Clone Wars’ xD

Well halve damage still is up to ~3.5k damage on my mesmer.
I cannot find an argument which justified my 7k damage ticks on players trying to dodge something. Yes it was fun, but nowhere near balanced.

There is stuff which seems to trigger confusion without you being able to do something against it. I have no idea how many thief died because their auto procc of Smoke Bomb at 25% triggered confusion, which instantly killed them. There is a good amount of these traits, which just autouse a skill when certain conditions are met.

Thanks to my pizza in WvW I can maintain more confusion stacks in WvW then in sPvP. I also have way higher condi damage then in sPvP, which squeezes out more damage per confusion stack.

So will it hurt my build? Yes.
Will I still play glamour confusion in WvW? Yes.
Will it still be viable, even with half damage? It probably will.

garethh.3518:

Super Riceman.8702:

I think the number of bad build options to be fixed should take priority over the working or the Op builds. There are certainly some OP aspects about them like the healing on the ele, but i think the warrior, thief and necro should be brought up to their level rather than the other way around.

I’d prefer the other way around, so many broad counters to not really be a thing.
I like more finesse in combat than just…
‘whatever important stuff you threw at me I counter with mistform/elixer U/distortion/teleport without any repercussions short of a CD’
‘I will remove whatever conditions you are throwing at me threw ’some easy action’’
‘I will dodge twice every ten seconds, so pray you have more important attacks than that’

I guess in terms of how, a start would be for CC to be shorter in duration (more interupt based) and conditions to be not such a general category. CC breaks and stability shouldn’t be ‘have or die’ for next to everyone in a game where you have to sacrifice some of your spec for them. Conditions such as vulnerability/weakness/cripple shouldn’t be eaten up in the general mass cleansing classes take, letting melee be able to more reliably stay in range with cripples and mitigate dmg/endurance-regen with weakness would be cool.

Vigor to not be so dominant would be nice too…

Oh and asuras should die as a species.
The game is entirely animation based yet they have the worst set of ‘tells’ out there.
It is stupid.

Well, we cannot bring down condition removal TBH. Think about HGH condition engis, and what sort of amok running machines they would with less condition removal.

Certain classes like warrior already struggle against condition spam (even if they are not targeted, they just get them via AoE). I don’t like the idea of having more classes struggle as much as warrior.

The future of PvP is far away in my opinion. The updates just come in way too slow, and aren’t that big either.

It isn’t like GW1 where they added tons of stuff in the first months.
One year in, they actually got their first expansion out. Before that, they released updates like battle isle as a main hub for each of the different PvP modes, or 4 months after release, when they added observer mode.

They also seemed to add way more balancing changes, which were probably really hard to test, as there are millions of possible builds that might get changed by a single skill change in GW1.

Not only that, but they also patched way more often, with a nice list of update.
http://wiki.guildwars.com/wiki/Category:Updates

They also made multiple, class changing adjustments further down the line.

Warrior, Thief and Necro are probably the most balanced classes. But people don’t want balance. They want Pew Pew Pew.
Nerfing them doesn’t make them feel good, so they rather ask for buffs. What we will end up with is something like Call of Duty. Just 3rd person, with some MMO elements attached to it.

See thread title.

Getting reported too often should result in a perma ban.

Best matches are always those with a rank 1 who tells the team that this is his first sPvP match (and tPvP), vs. a full premade consisting of players ranked 40~50.

That this doesn’t work should be clear.
At the moment, I am under the impression like the system is bugged, and is activily trying to put premades vs. pugs instead of the other way around.

But I assume, once they make solo and group queues, they will (and actually must) reset the leaderboards anyway, as the current ones won’t be accurate.

Toughness does almost nothing.
Don’t bother with it, unless you have:

• Alot of condition removal
• Alot of passive regen
• Alot of small burst healths

For a thief that means, don’t bother with toughness unless you are speccing into shadow arts. Then it can become good, by using stealth traits which remove conditions while in stealth and gives you passive regen while in stealth (not the boon regen).

On your screenshot, with that toughness and healthpool, even a ranger pet can kill you in just 3 skills (sad isn’t it).

Nunganok.4590:

Evan Lesh.3295:

12) You cannot have bank access in the mists because anyone can port there for free.

17) This will not happen as it affects way to many things in the game. Why do you have that many things stacked at once as to need a stack size of 1000? The problem is not the stack size.

12) And yet people can port to the mists, walk through the portal into Lions Arch and get to the best bank, trading post and crafting stations for FREE

17) You’re right, the problem is not the stack size. Its the fact theres NOTHING to use our mats on. Theres SO LITTLE crafting/cosmetic content in spvp that you end up with multiples max stacks of PvP crafting items. Ugh, how do you guys not get this…

12) And when you want to go back to your previous location you either run or pay the waypoint cost. The Mist → Lion’s Arch seems as it is for free, but it isn’t. It comes at the cost of giving up your position in the world.

There was something about this some time ago on reddit:
http://www.reddit.com/r/Guildwars2/comments/16gelr/ascalon_through_the_ages_album/

Quite some nice screenshots. I think Ascalon is full of this stuff.

muscarine.5136:

Another one > Allow us to target through the UI, i can’t tell you how many times i needed to shadowstep on top of my screen but couldn’t and died because there’s UI there.

Oh please yes.
I will clarify this:
Whenever you use a GT spell, and you move your cursor over any UI element, it doesn’t use the world position data of where the cursor would be without the UI. It defaults back to your character (don’t know if that is [0,0] for the client), meaning whatever AoE you place, when you placed it while hovering over a part of the UI you place the AoE directly beneath your character. While this has it’s uses (like throwing AoE directly under you, even while moving), it comes at a high price. Whenever you want to target something on top, behind the chat etc, you will automatically target it below you instead.

garethh.3518:

Varonth.5830:

How do you grant access to the GW2 database. Direct to certain tables, or over a really restricted API. Something inbetween?
How does the server get your new maps? And upload site? How safe does this be, since you are dealing with random strangers uploading stuff to your server.
How would this kit look anyway? Just allowing certain script languages, which limit the amount of possible mods? Allowing self-made builds of the game? How does the server then recognize which build is used, and how does this interact with the game itself, like PvE.
This is just a really few numbers of near, if not completely unresolvable issues. While I would like to see something like this happening, I am 100% sure that this will never happen. Like never ever.

Its only instanced PvP.
You don’t edit the actual games database, the construction kit on your computer has a list of all the abilities/traits and whatnot with certain editable values. I think of it like a chart of abilities saying something like…
-Utility 1
name ‘this’
does ‘Y’ dmg in ‘YY’ aoe
‘effect’ for ‘X’ duration, in ‘XX’ aoe over ‘XXX’ distance, exc.
‘effect’ ….
exc.
Where you can edit the ‘instances’, if its a number by an in bound number, if its an effect, by calling out one of the already in game effects (stun/bleed/poison/teleport/cleanse condition)
As a rough idea, when people load into the server’s lobby it shows the changes and lets you spec your toon, then if you actually enter the instance it creates a quick patch ensuring everyone is using the same values for abilities.
I have never coded a game, but I don’t really see all that much impossibility/virus-machine in that.

When it comes to custom maps, I don’t know enough about making a game to really comment on whether it is possible or not. Tragically that has to be left to more knowledgeable minds :/

But yeah, the only reason I kind of thow this out there is because the game has a few crippling issues that it needs resolved as soon as possible for a healthy came to really come out of this thing.

The ability thing probably isn’t that simple. You also still have to tell the server these modifications, as the server does all (I assume and hope xD) of the calculations, like who got hit, how much damage did this do, was this a critical, did certain proccs procc etc. This is all stuff the server does. If the server doesn’t know your changed numbers. Also you would be extremly limited in the amount of actual possible changes to a few variables. What if you want to tweak the mechanic itself, or completely replace that skills. What if the devs decide to replace a skill on their side. How would your costum game react to this.

Building a game with mod support is something you have to at least consider at the beginning of development (at the very first day), and build it around this. Even if you later don’t use it. Adding modsupport to a game, which was never developed around this in the first place, is a task which is literally rewriting the game from the absolute core of the game.

So adding even such simple things as written above would probably be an equivalent or even more work than starting to develop GW3 with Modsupport.

garethh.3518:

Apolo.5942:

I think its high time they aborted this failed experiment and moved back to something closer to GW1.

Resorting to what has worked is always a nifty fallback, but GW2 is vastly different from GW1, they would have to overhaul so much to make them even comparable… With just tweaking and working with the current game, at the devs current pace, the PvP will need about a year worth of fixes to be viewed as decent, IN THE BEST CASE SCENARIO, like if every patch they do is well made and extremely on point.

They have literally no notable income from PvP to change that situation with.
The devs have more than they can handle.

It’s an utterly terrible place to be in for an MMO.
Pretty much the worst in all honesty.

The only way I see the game not failing is for Anet to just release a GW2 construction kit that lets people tweak balance all they want and create maps. Charge for it and possibly a few cents a day to set up a custom server, a charge that can be waved by so many people ‘liking’ the instance (it would stop everyone from trying to ‘be the hero that save GW2 by redoing it alone from scratch’ and make the majority of the player base just people playing/criticizing/suggesting tweaks) The devs can then simply sit back for a few months, relax and regroup while, of course, making cool looking gear… it’d give them something to sell somewhat cheaply to the PvP crowd beside of course a number of dyes they lock in PvP and charge a lil money for.
BAM

Income and progress.
They can then afford a real dev team and have a the foundation for a real PvP game at their feet.

I don’t think you really know the implications, responsibilities and amount of work needed to realise this so called Construction kit.

How do you grant access to the GW2 database. Direct to certain tables, or over a really restricted API. Something inbetween?
How does the server get your new maps? And upload site? How safe does this be, since you are dealing with random strangers uploading stuff to your server.
How would this kit look anyway? Just allowing certain script languages, which limit the amount of possible mods? Allowing self-made builds of the game? How does the server then recognize which build is used, and how does this interact with the game itself, like PvE.
This is just a really few numbers of near, if not completely unresolvable issues. While I would like to see something like this happening, I am 100% sure that this will never happen. Like never ever.

Evan Lesh.3295:

Varonth.5830:

Goorman.7916:

Evan Lesh.3295:

Collections can clearly support more than 1 item per slot, as seen elsewhere in the game. The problem is that it takes 8 times the amount of space to support more than 1, and PvP has a ton of items. In this case, “technical limitation” means size constraints.

To make collection store 2 items instead of 1 is only twice amount of space.(2bits instead of 1), and you also don’t need 2 slots for all the items, only for specific weapon types(e.g. daggers), so i suppose it is maybe 10% larger at max.Such small fix would definitely help untill fully featured unlock-system will come in place.

Well while this is true, it also requires quite a bit of programming time.

I cannot recall a database type which stores 2 bit. I can just recall BIT storing just 1 physical bit. Even standard mySQL BOOLEAN stores 1 byte.
So if you want to have 1 or 2 bit varying you probably should take some sort of selfmade data type, using CHAR.
There are currently 1901 items, so you need that many bits atleast. That is 237.625 bytes or 238 bytes/chars which is needed at the moment. At the moment they could instead use 1901 fields of the BIT type instead, and easily query each on seperately.
If you want to have certain weapons twice, you would have to start thinking about some sort of bitmask used for each type. Basically you have to make a decision whether you give that item 2 bit or not, and then ‘track’ which item is associated with the n’th bit in your char(x).
So lets assume you give those weapons, that can be dual whielded 2 bits.
Dagger, Pistols, Swords, Axe, Mace.
This would increase the amount of bits to 2174 or 271.75 bytes rounded to 272 bytes.
So we need a field for each account which stores 272 bytes. Within these 272 bytes we define that bit n or the bits n+(n+1) are used for the weapon x.
Now, when you query the database for the items within your PvP locker, you would query that 272 byte string which contains unreadable data, because you are interested in the bitstring. You would then have to run through each byte of this 272 byte array, and apply several bit masks with a & operator, at minimum 4 and up to 8 (one for each bit, if each bit represents one weapon/armor piece, or a bitmask which actually has 2 bits set to 1, if the item allows storage of more then 1). After that you have to compare if the result is true (>0) or false (0).
Ultimately not ultra hard to program, but unnecessary if you are going the scrap the system later on anyway.

Of course you also have to get a logic running which will convert the old database to the new schemata (also not that hard, as you are adding stuff, not trying to compress it further).

The other possibility, which is far easier from a programming standpoint is to use a byte/char for each field.
But as Evan said, that would require 8 times the amount of space per account for the PvP locker.

Going from bits->bytes is a trivial change, but takes 8 times the space. Going from 1 bit to 2 bits is a much more complicated change. In any case, people shouldn’t focus on why collections only store 1 of something. People should be thinking of why we don’t have something entirely better than collections.

Thanks Evan for writing a TL;DR of my post xD

Goorman.7916:

Evan Lesh.3295:

Collections can clearly support more than 1 item per slot, as seen elsewhere in the game. The problem is that it takes 8 times the amount of space to support more than 1, and PvP has a ton of items. In this case, “technical limitation” means size constraints.

To make collection store 2 items instead of 1 is only twice amount of space.(2bits instead of 1), and you also don’t need 2 slots for all the items, only for specific weapon types(e.g. daggers), so i suppose it is maybe 10% larger at max.Such small fix would definitely help untill fully featured unlock-system will come in place.

Well while this is true, it also requires quite a bit of programming time.

I cannot recall a database type which stores 2 bit. I can just recall BIT storing just 1 physical bit. Even standard mySQL BOOLEAN stores 1 byte.
So if you want to have 1 or 2 bit varying you probably should take some sort of selfmade data type, using CHAR.
There are currently 1901 items, so you need that many bits atleast. That is 237.625 bytes or 238 bytes/chars which is needed at the moment. At the moment they could instead use 1901 fields of the BIT type instead, and easily query each on seperately.
If you want to have certain weapons twice, you would have to start thinking about some sort of bitmask used for each type. Basically you have to make a decision whether you give that item 2 bit or not, and then ‘track’ which item is associated with the n’th bit in your char(x).
So lets assume you give those weapons, that can be dual whielded 2 bits.
Dagger, Pistols, Swords, Axe, Mace.
This would increase the amount of bits to 2174 or 271.75 bytes rounded to 272 bytes.
So we need a field for each account which stores 272 bytes. Within these 272 bytes we define that bit n or the bits n+(n+1) are used for the weapon x.
Now, when you query the database for the items within your PvP locker, you would query that 272 byte string which contains unreadable data, because you are interested in the bitstring. You would then have to run through each byte of this 272 byte array, and apply several bit masks with a & operator, at minimum 4 and up to 8 (one for each bit, if each bit represents one weapon/armor piece, or a bitmask which actually has 2 bits set to 1, if the item allows storage of more then 1). After that you have to compare if the result is true (>0) or false (0).
Ultimately not ultra hard to program, but unnecessary if you are going the scrap the system later on anyway.

Of course you also have to get a logic running which will convert the old database to the new schemata (also not that hard, as you are adding stuff, not trying to compress it further).

The other possibility, which is far easier from a programming standpoint is to use a byte/char for each field.
But as Evan said, that would require 8 times the amount of space per account for the PvP locker.

Apolo.5942:

reedju.5786:

Alot of the reason that PvP is empty is the lack of venues for casual players to feel any sense of competition or progress.

PvP is empty because people did not like the weapons switching mechanic, the lack of support and the massive advantage of kiting vs melee. This game tried to break away with conventional model and it failed, plain and simple. And it also happens to be a massive let down for GW1 players, to make matters worst.

PvE is the only thing keeping this game alive, and it is a disgrace. GW1 now has a bigger pvp base than GW2, that should tell them something.

You forgot that alot of matches end up being more like Player vs. AI, with Ele having an Elemental, ranger pet, tons of clones, if you are unlucky, some necro minions, and lot and lots of rock dogs.

Seriously sometimes matches have more AI controlled entities than players xD

Let us aquire less quantity of skins, but make them work like runes and sigils. Once unlocked, you can take an unlimited amount of them out of the locker.

wookie.8934:

Varonth.5830:

RapidSausage.4620:

mesmer is not OP, if you ask me it has lots of UP skills, mantras being the major sucky utility skills.

the trick about mesmers (especially in sPvP) is knowing how to distinguish between the mesmer and it’s clones, once you’ve figured that you basically have just another caster on your hands.

Clones are a good defense, which most people don’t recognize. You really don’t want to know, how many projectiles and AoE (hint, AoE limit is 5) ticks these absorb just because they are there.

It doesn’t matter if you know who is the right mesmer.

Take a pistol thief for example. If there are 3 clones around the mesmer, it doesn’t really matter if he knows who the mesmer is. Chances are, he is going to hit a clone, although he is targeting the mesmer.

This is stuff which get ignored almost all the time, as it is far easier to say ‘Oh you just have to learn to distinguish the mesmer from his clones.’

Sorry. Any thief that hits clones instead of the real mesmer is terrible. This hasn’t been ignored — Most just realize that if you can’t hit the real mesmer than you shouldn’t be fighting a mesmer.

They are not overpowered. People just don’t know how to fight them properly. Plenty do however, including a D/P thief I played earlier who NEVER lost target on me when I was using my phantasm build and basically blinded me whenever I went to spawn them. This thief knew exactly how to counter my build and I’m sure there are plenty of thieves out there who don’t hit clones.

Learn 2 Play issue.

It was an example.
There are tons of projectiles.

There are also clones, which just run inbetween you are your target (even if you are not attacking the mesmer).
Saying that you can always avoid hitting clones is something I would like to see a proof of.

Of course it is far easier to just say L2P without any real substance.

I would btw never play P/P thief in s/tPvP. A ranger would be enough to block all of your projectiles.
Seriously those pets seem annoyingly good at just standing directly between you and your target.

Edit:
Oh btw, awesome how you ignored the AoE thing I also wrote about

RapidSausage.4620:

mesmer is not OP, if you ask me it has lots of UP skills, mantras being the major sucky utility skills.

the trick about mesmers (especially in sPvP) is knowing how to distinguish between the mesmer and it’s clones, once you’ve figured that you basically have just another caster on your hands.

Clones are a good defense, which most people don’t recognize. You really don’t want to know, how many projectiles and AoE (hint, AoE limit is 5) ticks these absorb just because they are there.

It doesn’t matter if you know who is the right mesmer.

Take a pistol thief for example. If there are 3 clones around the mesmer, it doesn’t really matter if he knows who the mesmer is. Chances are, he is going to hit a clone, although he is targeting the mesmer.

This is stuff which get ignored almost all the time, as it is far easier to say ‘Oh you just have to learn to distinguish the mesmer from his clones.’

In my point of view it is the demand. There are just too many recipes requiring charged lodestones, compared to the other lodestones.

Their supply is quite normal, hell even better than some other lodestones, like Crystal. Crystal are probably the hardest to farm by yourself. Yet they are the cheapest one, because at the moment, there is just one known weapon needing 20 of these. Reaver of the Mist.

Take a look at how many weapons require gift of light, gift of lightning or direct charged lodestones (or even both).
Also how many legendaries require charged lodestones for one of their gifts.