(edited by Xillllix.3485)
The problem right now is the imbalances on numbers, objects and map size.
WvW weekly points should be removed. It is not necessary.
I would argue that the lack of proper balance done on skills (which has ruined the team gameplay mechanics) is more problematic than the population balance. Fights are simply not fun anymore and even when maps are full on reset it doesn’t magically makes the gameplay better.
There is a lack of vision across the board. It’s really apparent when they think deployable canons is an improvement while there is no build variety at all and auto-attacks / passive skills dominate the gameplay.
they are useful. i watched an ele that couldn’t do any damage but couldn’t die. know what she did for the full match? she held far permanently. she freed up her other team mates to focus on other 2 points and parts of my team spent the full match trying to just kill the ele. giving her team even more of an advantage
That ele would play something else if something else was viable.
Even through the boring/broken meta and balance is the main reason I mention when explaining why I left the game, crashing every 15 minutes in WvW on Mac didn’t help keeping me interested in the game.
If anyone think people play less because of scoring, linking, or maps, then you really are out of touch with the people who quit.
It’s because game balance went to hell with HoT leading to REALLY dumb and boring roaming, GvG, and zerg metas. People that still play propose even dumber ideas like nerfing condies which are only going to make this issue worse, because then we get even more tanky and sustain, yay!!
WvW lived on the basis of the game being fun to play, not score. Maybe an expansion that drastically changes balance can change direction, but small changes are worthless for regaining a playerbase.
100% right. The boring meta made almost all the GvG guilds leave within a few months following HoT’s release. When you have your most hardcore dedicated players leaving the game in a mass exodus because of how kittening terrible the gameplay has become your game has serious problems.
You can well add deployable canons and reward tracks, these are just gimmicks; it won’t make me or my friends reinstall the game. The gameplay itself is worse than ever, not even a server merge will fix that.
Part of me doesn’t think Anet management plays as much Ranked PvP as us players, so they’re probably oblivious as to why a lot of people are unhappy. So here’s my list of possible reasons why PvP players are not happy with the new Ranked season.
- 1) What Anet thinks works doesn’t actually work. Meaning, allowing a game mode that’s supposed to be competitive shouldn’t reward losing. You effectively have two different types of players being combined into the same game mode: Those who don’t care about the competition, and those that do. Rewarding losses keeps the players who don’t care about competition around, and that causes problems.
- 2) Matchmaking algorithm still doesn’t work well. There should be no reason why 3 or 4 of the same class should be randomly spawned on the same team. A proper team made of random Solo queuers should have some type of balance. No more than 2 heavy/medium/light classes, no more than 2 of the same class. Things like that.
- 3) Players are punished for things out of their control. You win as a team, and lose as a team. This motto would be true, if Ranked PvP were an actual team game. As it stands, being on a team with up to 4 random strangers of various skill level truly makes winning more of a coin flip than based on skill and strategy. Case in point, my last match had 3 Eles, so I swapped to my Ele, and fooled around. We won. But not because of my skill. I was just mashing buttons since I don’t know how to play Ele well. We won because the other team had players who aren’t experienced in PvP. Matchmaking punished someone on the other team who really tried hard to win, but couldn’t because his teammates couldn’t keep up. MMR should be based on individual skill, not the win/loss record.
- 4) No barriers to entry for Ranked. A lot of people will attest that there are players who don’t understand strategy of PvP maps. You can’t take what you learn from PvE or WvW, and expect to play out the same. Unless you can create a learning simulation for players new to PvP to practice on before entering Ranked queues, there needs to be stricter qualifications for entry.
- 5) PvP needs more reporting functions for AFKers and trolls. If someone is intentionally throwing Ranked matches, they shouldn’t be allowed to play anymore.
- 6) High rated players treated differently than mid/low tier players. This is unintentional on Anet’s part, but their matchmaking system protects the higher rated players. They never have to worry about their teammates not understanding strategy, rotations, etc. Mid to low tier players are grouped together with new players, and they’re trapped on these tiers because getting out depends on the luck of the draw for teammates. Anet should be fair to all players, and have a hard reset of MMR.
- 7) Can’t play ranked with 4 friends . That makes me really unhappy.
I’m not participating in this season unless I can play with a full team of people I like to play with.
I don’t know how it went downhill so fast with HoT considering how much fun it was at launch and the following year. The only skill that could hit more than 10k back then was Backstab, and it was justified being on a light class and single target. Now heavy class do 10-15k+ aoe burst and you spend half the time cleansing an insane amount of condi spam.
The dev team need to take a look at what they’ve done and be self-critical. They’ve literally ruined their own game by breaking stability, balance, condi-cap, gear, trait system, and the simple concepts of reward/learning curve or light/medium/heavy class advantages. They’ve even destroyed their main idea of having no trinity.
It’s as if a new team of developers having no clue what the previous team did took over.
I don’t think you can have a discussion with the devs about the state of the useless elementalist skills.
We tried for years until the moment Karl was developing Tempest. They refused to listen to 99% of the complaints about useless skills, every positive improvement has been a half-measure that wasn’t enough to make the skills useful.
The class is too complicated and only the original designers and best players really understand how it was meant to work. To put it short: The elementalist class depends on the stats points being linked to the trait lines and it’s a celestial class by nature. Without a celestial amulet and the ability to gain condi duration from fire or healing from water its simply a class with a huge handicap. The only viable build left, full bunker, is only working as a symptom of a broken class.
Left the game because of it, for 6 months, came back 1 months, left for 4 months again. It’s the only way I found to protest until they make the class fun to play again.
I said earlier that removing the option to play in an organized group made everything their eSport community worked toward meaningless.
You get a class balance that is completely terrible in 1v1 and are told that it’s intended that way because pvp is a team game… Yet we can’t even team up and work on team synergy!
Clearly I’m in the minority of complainers here, so I apologize about complaining again.
I guess that’s what a free to play game comes down to: pleasing the majority by making them believe they are legendary material, even if they can’t play in an organized team.I’m not going to argue about the validity of that if it brings Anet the fund to improve create a GvG mode for the next expansion. It would have been worth it.
But what is the message sent to your eSport community? Are your past tournament participants happy not to be able to play together as a group? I can’t believe so.
Anet reaps what it sows.
They listened to the whiners that thought 5-man teams were the boogeyman that was keeping them from reaching lofty heights in ranked PvP.
I say this as someone who never had a group of 5 for playing and was 99% of the time soloq. I very rarely ran into 5 man groups on the other side, and even if I did it didn’t stop me from at least trying.
You miss the point. The problem with 5 man teams is it makes any in game ladder or competition pointless. With solo queue there is in game competition. People care now. Before, nobody cared because it meant nothing
But it’s how it’s supposed to be. You can’t remove organized teams from a competitive game wanting to be an eSport and keep calling it competitive.
Imagine if the Rocket League developers would prevent organized teams from playing! Nobody is complaining about facing organized teams there, if they want to go up the ladder they team up to get better. It’s the same with Overwatch, and pretty much every other competitive games.
What Anet has done with this new season is lower the skill floor across the board to make everyone feel better than they are.
Well it’s a 5v5 game so it’s not your fault, just get 4 other friends that you know are good and team up with…. oh wait, forget it.
I said earlier that removing the option to play in an organized group made everything their eSport community worked toward meaningless.
You get a class balance that is completely terrible in 1v1 and are told that it’s intended that way because pvp is a team game… Yet we can’t even team up and work on team synergy!
Clearly I’m in the minority of complainers here, so I apologize about complaining again.
I guess that’s what a free to play game comes down to: pleasing the majority by making them believe they are legendary material, even if they can’t play in an organized team.
I’m not going to argue about the validity of that if it brings Anet the fund to improve create a GvG mode for the next expansion. It would have been worth it.
But what is the message sent to your eSport community? Are your past tournament participants happy not to be able to play together as a group? I can’t believe so.
It’s the worse elite skill in any game… It won the award for the worse skill design in a MMO. Thankfully we have a FGS that we can use to travel or run away from fights in WvW…
EToM is actually a brilliant map design. It’s much better than Desert bl in terms of usage of space, it’s beautiful, and has interesting mechanics. It could have been the best map for roaming.
The problem with it is how it was implemented.
It should have been added on the regular maps above EBG.
Having a score impact on the rest of WvW would definitely help.
Now the game has a linking system for WvW, and another linking system for EotM. Shows the lack of vision…
Could you change more than 2 elementalist skills at the time? There is like 25+ useless skills including our elites.
The irony is that Stronghold was initially well received during Alpha/Beta tests until three weeks after release. If there was a public test realm that held Stronghold for a month or two before releasing it, they would have seen its flaws sooner. Players appreciated Conquest more lol.
I liked stronghold even if it’s far less interesting than a real GvG mode, but it’s just 10% of a game mode. Where are the other maps and improvements?
I mean you can’t make less than 1 map for a game mode…
Stronghold was announced with HoT as a GvG game mode brought back from GW1 with more than 5 players per team… They never made it what they initially advertised it to be.
This change was implemented only to sell more gems to the mass of casual players crafting the new pvp stuff.
Everyone is pvp legends material now, just gotta farm. No more good teams to fight on the way up, they all left the game anyway since they can’t play together anymore.
Completely lame, but it’s what the mass of casual players wanted apparently.
Esport! lol
I love GW2 pvp, I really do. That is why I find it so incredibly depressing that I’m probably going to have to leave pvp entirely. I play on a team you see, a guild 5 man team.
I have wanted a solo-duo queue for a long time in this game, because I don’t find it fair nor enjoyable to come up against players that prove to be little challenge basically because of their inability to communicate. It’s not fair to throw teams against solo players and I’ve agreed totally with this. I want these players to be able to play the way they want to. Many of these players however don’t seem to give a crap about me and my friends.
They keep talking about how more people will enjoy the game when they can only play by themselves. The problem is that people with someone to play with don’t feel this way. Many players that only play solo seem ok with screwing everyone else over for something that seems entirely petty to me. Screw the fact that a multiplayer game should encourage playing with friends. Who gives a crap about being social right? Why shouldn’t you and your friends who all play the same game play separately at the same time. That makes a lot of sense right?
Why can’t there be a full premade queue? Because of long wait times? I’d wait an hour for a 5v5 match, and that’s not a joke. I wouldn’t wait 30 seconds for a solo queue game. Why? Because it’s not fun to be thrown into a game where the team composition is whack, strategy is wonky, and where people are not cooperative and often openly hostile.
I know I sound upset, it’s because I am. I care about this game, but apparently Anet has chosen to abandon players like me and my friends. This is my first topic on this forum and probably my last as I’ve been enjoying myself in-game before this newest development and never had much to comment here about.
I’m out, I’ll be back if I can play with my friends again. Even if I have to queue for an hour to do so. If not, then I’ll look for a game in which I can do so instead.
Best Regards
Xebioz
Ever since the game has gone free to play it’s been simplified for casual players. We have the proof today that they don’t care about good organized gameplay, to a point where they consider their elite players a nuisance to their game.
Shame on them really, but that’s what you get when you sacrifices your initial vision to appeal for a mass of new whinny players. Everyone thinks that they are legends material even if all they do is use the metabattle condi-spam builds. Even the post old-trait-system meta was created just to make it easy for those with no reflexes or skill.
This is not the Guild Wars you are looking for.
(edited by Xillllix.3485)
Being able to play competitively with only 1 friend in a MMO just screams design failure. Why are you afraid full party of friends play together competitively? It’s downright insulting to say you have a “competitive” season and then prevent people that are the most competitive from playing together because they have more chance to win… You should have gone the other way around instead and make it so that a party of 5 is required for participating, if team balance was such a worry.
Then you could also just remove class stacking and 75% of the balance problems will go away. Or maybe you don’t have enough players left playing the game to do this? I really wonder why.
Your competitive mode is at a point where build variety is barely existent, balance is seriously questionable with 75% of the skills and traits being useless, and people can’t even group up together to be competitive… but you’re the developers that reinvented what good pvp should be in a MMO with the GvG mode in Guild Wars 1.
You must be aware enough about how much better GvG was in GW1 and how it’s what the players want: when Colin presented Stronghold it was presented as GvG in order to sell HoT…
Instead of making more 5v5 maps that play and feel exactly the same as the other maps why not make just one single 10v10 GvG map to interest that part of the competitive community that has been leaving the game?
They should know by now, about 10,000 posts about it.
Remember how the game was about 3 months after launch?
WvW fights were so engaging. There was literally no skill spam at all.
I voted for DBL because I love the design of the map and I thought that Anet wouldn’t just lazily put it there, that they would continue to improve it.
Unfortunately they left it there with all its problems and then moved on to making polls about stuff that should have been fixed 2 years ago. They couldn’t even add more waypoints to make traveling faster and the middle area is all useless wasted space.
I wish Anet wouldn’t take years just to fix simple stuff.
I manifested my disapproval of the elementalist class gameplay destruction by moving on to play other games. ESO, RL and Ow were all really cheap last week and they’ll keep you busy for at least a few months.
After seeing it work rather splendidly in ESO it’s really puzzling to see Anet so far behind in their features.
I guess they’ve been focusing on the real stuff that defined their brand, like GvG.
Some of the people designing and balancing the classes do not even know how to play them. Everyone remembers the epic Tempest demonstration when Karl couldn’t even beat Swanir with a spec he just designed himself.
No wonder the entire Tempest spec goes completely against the initial concept of playing elementalist and swapping attunements with haste.
Personally I felt I became really good at playing my class but now anyone can just use a meta tempest bunker build and randomly press keys to be useful. When they get bored of that they can switch to guard and do the same with 10x better results, it’s just insulting to those who have invested themselves seriously.
The problem remains about the gameplay primarily: It has become boring and doesn’t reward skillful play.
You can’t have good balance if you don’t promote good gameplay!
Therefore the concept of GW2 being an esport game will be absurd in my opinion until you have to calculate your moves, blasts, cleanses and counter better. Now it’s just “spam everything you got the build will carry you”.
The best meta that rewarded the most skillful play was at the time of the turret-engi. What they needed to do back then was to balance the game very carefully with small incremental adjustments. Instead they went overkill with a total turret nerf, celestial nerf, might nerf, condi buff, damage spike buff, dual shatter, etc. and made a new and worse trait system, reduced variety and promoted passive gameplay. Just wow, way to kitten up your own game.
(edited by Xillllix.3485)
When they made the HoT classes I don’t think they spent a minute to think about WvW.
If they did they would have made new and interesting combo fields that would have redefined the WvW experience. Instead they just increased the amount of condi, ccs, healing and damage spikes for Raids and let the kittenstorm fall on WvW.
There is no hope for WvW until the next expansion is release. Even the whole 2016 year that was supposed to be focused around WvW post HoT’s launch has barely has been a huge disappointment. Barely anything got done at all, they just made bunch of polls to distract the community and delay everything until the next xpac.
Open world dueling would open this game up and force Anet to improve their balance.
But since this is GW they should also add open world GvG.
https://www.guildwars2.com/en/news/state-of-the-game-update-q1-2016/
“WvW’s Big Update
As our competitive game director John Corpening discussed, we’re currently working on a large-scale overhaul to WvW that helps deal with core issues like population balance, scoring, rewards, and the need for 24-hour coverage.
We’ve focused a heavy amount of developer resources on this overhaul for WvW, and the team has been working hard for over a year now to solve these complicated issues. We may not be ready to reveal more in early 2016, but you’ll have an opportunity to get all the details and give feedback when we go into the beta phase of this massive project later this year. And as a brief reminder: WvW tournaments are currently on hold, but they’ll return once we’ve released this new format for WvW."
Since then they have given up on the WvW big overhaul apparently and said that it would be released in “small chunks”. The irony being that 2016 is coming to an end and barely anything was done besides adding skirmishes. So at this pace you won’t see any Tournament before Half Life 3 is out.
How am I not surprised that the bottom of the list is filled with elementalist skills that are so bad nobody is even using them.
No blood lust
Super hard to get around
No one goes to them but ppters
The server that has the red BL is put at a disadvantage
every keep can be glitched into
Do us all a favor and get rid of them. thx
Dbl was voted in and not getting removed. There is also a possibility of another unique bl map to be added because it was voted in.
I could care less if the dbl was voted in. the same people voted for cannons. Can’t wait till people vote cannons in to stay. Another 10 guilds will quit this game.
Real WvW died for me when the GvG guilds left and my friends all got scattered on different servers. People votes have been influenced by one main question: What will make Anet work the most?
We’ve pretty much all been disappointing by the small size of the “WvW Overhaul”, we all have the impression that their WvW team is minuscule. What most people want is for Anet to just do something that is substantial without having to wait years for it.
It seems like it takes them months just to do the smallest of change, as if their WvW team consist of only 1 developer working part-time.
We have dueling. It’s called 1v1 hotjoin arenas.
You cant compare that. It’s with set gear and the environment is very limited.
Open world dueling is really something on another level. In ESO you can duel on a bridge, or in a tavern, on a ship, in a house, in the middle of a crowded city, on the roof of a building, in the forest, in a waterfall ledge, on a mountain top, in a dungeon, etc.
If they want to sell the next expansion they need to make a third borderland map, so DBL is there to stay.
In STO, another NCsoft family game, there is a specific “Ushan” (dueling) area. ( It’s a national park on Andoria ) It’s limited open world dueling, people who want it go there, if they don’t, not.
This seems to work fairly well.
In ESO you can now duel anywhere and it works perfectly. You can disable the feature if you do not like it. I had a blast just dueling others in the new players area. The game has a level scaling system that balances the gameplay to a certain extent.
Considering that the battle system is what Guild Wars 2 does best, it’s a real shame that they aren’t promoting it with duels, open world team fights and GvG.
I don’t think dueling should be restricted to zones like guild halls. I think we saw how little success that has had.
They should implement open world dueling. If it works well in other games I don’t see why GW2 can’t do it.
Anet is afraid of trying new things, I think they are relying on the gem store too much as a measure of success.
Just got ESO for ps4 for 10$ and people are having a blast dueling in the new-character zones and stealing loot from npcs. Simple things done right go a long way to bring new life into a mmo.
Hey guys, the poll on Scoring has closed. I’ll repost my response on that thread here, for continued discussion:
https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/wuv/WvW-Poll-13-May-Scoring/page/2#post6161438The poll has ended! The finals votes were:
- 38.4% – Adjust scoring to be relative to current activity and population (Large)
- 19.0% – Provide features that increase a team’s ability to recover from large point disparities (Medium)
- 13.7% – Modify objective scoring to be relative to upgrade level (Medium)
- 10.0% – Change WvW Tick timer to 5 Minutes (Small)
- 8.3% – No preference
- 6.2% – Rebalance scoring for actions that are not included in Points-Per-Tick (Small)
- 4.3% – Implement scoring for objective capture (Small)
So what are our next steps? The team is going to prioritize work on the Skrimish (time-slice scoring) system that was outlined in the Let’s Talk Scoring… forum thread. This system will be a big step to resolving the community’s top voted priorities: Adjusting scoring to be relative to current activity, as well as increasing a team’s ability to recover from large point disparities. It’s also a prerequisite to work on the outlined Action Level system, which would multiply score during periods of high activity, further addressing the top voted concern. Also, we’ll likely be able to periodically deliver the small features, like reducing the tick timer, while we continue work on Skirmishes.
This is a living process, and we plan to continue polling players to determine our priorities, doing live beta testing of features, and then polling again to determine if players are happy with those features once they’ve had a chance to actually play with them. [..]Thank you to everyone who voted and left feedback!
Bumping for An Update: Late November 2016. Implementation Autopsy.
- Skirmishing was implemented. Consensus seems to be that Skirmishes are okay, but not a game-changer.
Skirmishes do not fulfil the above remit of adjusting scoring relative to population size.
Skirmishes do not fulfil the above remit of facilitating recovery from large point disparities.
Why implement this?- Only 13.7% thought that the new “more PPT for holding objectives” would be a good idea.
Why implement this?
The result is that it makes strong sides stronger. As was always going to be the case.Conclusion:
- Arenanet have repeatedly implemented new systems, under the guise of solving problems, that don’t address the problems.
I propose that the problems identified must be tackled head on instead. It’s long past time that we had a metric for simply monitoring who is leading at any one time. Making scoring more awkward for the leading side would go a long way towards keeping the scores level and making reset day a dramatic conclusion rather than a welcome relief.
Interesting that they would go that way, ignore the poll results and implement a “solution” that will ultimately not work at all and create more unbalance.
“38.4% – Adjust scoring to be relative to current activity and population”
Seems pretty clear they had to take that path. However I think it would be easier to adjust scoring by giving the winning/losing servers a % modifier that changes dynamically according to the gap between total points.
If their objective is to help losing servers catch up then they have completely missed the mark and have done just the opposite. It’s a complete failure.
They need a scoring system that modulates according to the positions of the servers, in order to keep the matches as close as possible until the end of the week.
PPK:
Winning server: 1 PPK
Middle server: 2 PPK
Losing server: 3PPK
Capture:
Main server: Normal points
Middle server: 25% bonus
Losing server: 50% bonus
PPT:
Main server: Normal points
Middle server: 20% bonus
Losing server: 33% bonus
As the scores get closer together these percentage decrease proportionally.
This can work as a fallback system in situations where servers are seriously outnumbered, until Anet actually balance the game.
(edited by Xillllix.3485)
1- Expansions come out with their fair share of bugs and crashes, some of which will never get fixed and will slow down your frame rate forever after.
2- Trust your instinct when you feel it may not have as much content as advertised
(Don’t pay for promises, but for what is there)
3- Anet can make arenas for GvG, but doesn’t inquired GvG guilds about the arena size required for actual GvG gameplay. Or maybe they just made it super small to make sure people wouldn’t GvG in it. Missed opportunity.
4- Stronghold isn’t GvG, but they said it would be when they announced it… confusing
5- Anet still got really good artists
6- WvW: If your new map is too large for the amount of players your servers can handle you got a problem.
7- Even if something is beautiful (new WvW map) if it’s not implemented properly people wont like it.
It can’t work, bad idea. We argued against this back in the CDI 3+ years ago and explained how it just made the winning server stronger.
What they should have done is give more PPK, capture and tick points to the losing servers, in proportion to the gap between their score and the top score.
The winning server doesn’t need a bonus at all.
The meta was good when you could play zerk d/d ele in the middle of a blob and get out alive if you were skilled.
Now even if you’re the best player in the world only blob size matter, skills that are too easily spammable while making too much damage, overabundance of ccs and condi fest all have ruined the gameplay.
There is no more balance between risk/reward.
You did a great job with that.
I played in it once, was great fun.
Taking a break until the next xpac, we’ll see if it’s any good for competitive gametypes.
Where have you been? They have already said they scrapped it all (relatively speaking, we dont know if anything was even being worked on) and decided to drop lots of small changes instead. Which they technically have done.
OK so it was just a big lie then. They hadn’t done anything for a whole year with that large “bulk of programmers”, and WvW has never been their focus at all. They just have the same minimal team barely getting anything done.
Thanks.
ArenaColin posted, in early November 2015:
“… But the reality is we need the bulk of our own internal engineers (coders!) to continue to focus on stuff like our major WvW overhaul right now we’ve been working on for over a year that’s much higher priority for the game over-all.”
Source:
https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/wuv/Major-WvW-overhaul-incoming/first
https://www.reddit.com/r/Guildwars2/comments/3u7bo1/no_hope_for_legendary_effect_on_engineer/cxcqyvo/
So, there is a large amount of coders working on a major WvW overhaul and over 2 years down the line they only have: (1) the server linking system and (2) an import of the PvP reward track ? Is that even possible? Just how large is this overhaul?
Remember the CDI thread with dozens of amazing suggestions that were never implemented?
2 years+ and we’re getting polls about population balance as if it is still in the conceptual stage. Was the WvW overhaul cancelled? Is WvW no longer the “higher priority”? To me it looks like it.
I’m just posting this so that the community remembers and Anet understands why we have high expectations.
Please Anet tease us a little: Show us what’s being worked on for WvW !
I have an idea, how about a condi cap,? Let’s say something like 25.
This cap is proly only realistically achieved rn in a nec vs nec environtment(and even then only sometimes), in which the one that gets 25+ bleeds dies, be it 25 or 40, so not sure its going to make any difference
It will make a difference in outnumbered fights.
The biggest difference would be in WvW: Bringing the condi cap back there would “make WvW great again”.
I have an idea, how about a condi cap,? Let’s say something like 25.
Having outlined some of the thinking behind this proposal, we’d like your feedback on these three topics.
1. How do you feel about this proposal?
2. What, if anything, would you change about this current proposal?
3. Would you be interested in transferring to a new free world?
Again, in case you didn’t read my feedback properly:
1- It’s bad but it doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t do anything to fix population balance
2- Explore something else more meaningful, this proposal won’t bring players back
3- Hell NO, I want to play with all my friends, adding worlds and transfers will just split the community apart furthermore.
It was a fine trait before Anet ruined it.
WvW on a Mac:
1- Get in a fight
2- Crash
3- Repeat
So i guess that’s it for population balance in 2016:
1- Anet links server so that a handful of players on empty servers have someone to play against.
2- Anet makes a poll about a pretty bad idea and gives up
That’s the long list of EVERYTHING that has been done for WvW balance in 2016.
Will 2017 be the year where Anet starts doing more than the strict minimum?
gg
If you played the game since launch you know there are way less build possibilities now than before the new trait system, specially on some classes like the elementalist that has become brain dead boring to play.
I don’t play elementalist enough to be qualified to discuss about their builds, but our of curiosity what builds did they have pre HoT vs now and where are you getting it from?
I was playing a custom power/celestial elementalist build that used condi-duration from the fire trait line, water and arcane.
It was amazing fun, it was a build made to maximize damage burst on an immobilized foe by controlling the quickness and intelligence sigil. It only used 1 specific combo for opening fights. At the same time it was really situational and needed personal investment to succeed.
Not all 3 lines were maxed but points 4 lines were possible in some variations.
The opening combo had a great burst potential.
Passive in air:
At 900 distance: Opening using Signet of Earth, started 4 sec immob – Triggered intelligence sigil
Switched to fire once in combat.
Under the intelligence sigil:
Burning Speed 100% Crit – Triggers rage sigil quickness
With quickness:
Ring of Fire
Fire Grab 100% Crit
Earthquake 100% crit (interrupt synchronized with the end of the first immob)
Magnetic Grasp (second immob)
Churning Earth+Lightning flash (still with quickness if pulled off perfectly)
While channeling churning earth:
Frost Aura
(There is no time for anything else in that chain if you wish to get your churning earth under quickness, I’ve tested it thoroughly.)
Then if somehow he’s still up the typical:
Frozen Burst
Updraft
Ride the Lightning
Lightning Whip
The extra condi duration really gave an edge to the elementalist class for a condi/power hybrid, since condi damage on the elementalist is mostly bad.
The meta just doesn’t support that type of gameplay anymore, and the trait system doesn’t either. Too many passive dazes and interrupts, too many condis, everyone is equipping stun breaks because of the damage creep, too many boons and immunities. Everything has cheesed up.