Guild Wars 2

Idk about other game modes, but in NA sPvP it’s gotta be either Jumper or Caed. You know that annoying evade spamming s/d build everyone started playing this summer? You can thank jumper for that, he was the first thief to run s/d successfully in the NA competitive scene, his build got popular and became standard meta for awhile (unfortunately). He’s always coming up with the next meta builds for thief. Caeds just very good mechanically.

I think thieves use different builds in PvE and WvW and the game modes are just different as a whole. You’d be hard pressed to find any wvw player that could 1v1 caed or jumper, but that’s just my opinion. If you stuck them in a random Fractals groupe it might be a mess.

Okay here we go, complete guide to modern meta thief.

1. Go D/P backstab build (10/30/0/0/30)

5. Be mobile; SB5 for vert mobility.

6. NEVER play evade spamming cheese builds. If you touch these s/d or d/d builds you will be dead to me. Good luck!

I’m around 1000 games on thief in spvp, I bounce around the top 400-1000 of NA ladders and I’ve played with or interviewed pretty much every competitive d/p thief in the NA scene. I’m not throwing this in to brag, it’s just so you know I’m not some random troll.

Prefix: I’m writing this with the idea of progression in mind -meaning you aren’t already in the top 300 on the solo queue ladder, rather you are working up from the bottom. If you ARE at the top of the ladder, this advice probably won’t help you a whole lot.

The trick to carrying games is being able to 1v1/1v2 everyone else on the other team. I base my picks off of the enemy comp. Here’s how I decide what to play each game:
Engi > Thief, Necro, Ranger
Mesmer > Warrior, Thief, Ele (almost always play this on khylo -just for treb control)
Thief > Necro, Ele, Warrior, bad Guardians (evaluate pre-game)
Necro > Guardian, Mesmer, Ranger
Ranger = not great imo, cas you take a long time to kill ppl and have low mobility (which makes carrying a sluggish team a total pain in the kitten ). However, you could run some trap build and totally catch ppl off guard -just get far then trap it up, one person will come and proc your 1st traps, then u throw out your second set (so 6 traps). You can burst ppl down pretty quickly with this and it will work atleast one time against each of the enemy roamers (once they realize you’re trap you’ll have to get a bit sneaky). It’s pretty kitten funny to play, but I’ll probably get flamed for even suggesting it haha.
Guardian = Be a bro and play if your team has none

Ele:
I don’t usually play ele in solo queue unless i’m just trying to have fun because the only time I think it would directly counter a team comp is if they had more than 2 condi necros, and with my luck they would all be running some stupid mm power build . If you can poke before game and see that they have 2-4 condi necros or bunker engis, then take diamond skin and go for 1v1s @ far the entire game. Ele does good in lower mmr, but it’s really hard to carry with it.

Of course this isn’t going to hold true for 100% of all games you play; you’re going to run into really good players that will be able to win against these counters, and you’re also going to run into wacky builds that get around them as well, like condi warrior (which destroys thief and mesmer) or MM necro (which isn’t exactly countered by engineer’s automated response trait). It’s really all about how comfortable you are 1v1ing against each build of each class. If you feel really comfortable 1v1ing anything matchmaking throws at you on Ele, then you should definitely play Ele!

Asomal.6453:

It would be a bad idea for pvp, in general. However, a game mode where every profession could pick the infamous 30/30/30/30/30/30 builds seems interresting. Nothing competitive, just for fun…

Agreed!

Your question is subjective to the trait choices of each player and the classes themselves. But in terms of optimal play, some classes would just become stronger or weaker. I don’t think skill cap would really change; like shatter mesmer would be much stronger because you could take dodge-roll clones, shatter on self, AND daze = chance to stun (30/20/0/0/30) -this might push some builds out of the meta because 4 dazes + 4 stuns + 2k damage per interupt on top of 4 mind wrack bust would be too much to handle. Since most traits are just passive effects that augment different playstyles; it wouldn’t necessarily raise the skill cap of most classes. It would just shake up the meta.

Honestly though, the trait system is probably what drove away most new players on launch day. There are so many choices and build possibilities that most people didn’t want to spend the 1-2 hours that it took to read through all of them and actually put the thought that was required into creating a successful build. They just winged it and got 1 shot then quit when 100b warrior didn’t get nerfed. It would be really cool if they could revamp traits in a way that made the system less complex without forfeiting the depth that’s currently there. -Right before releasing an expansion or something that would actually bring back the 2 million or so people that quit after the first 2 months of playing. They could market it as like “Look, we totally redid traits -everyone’s a noob again!”.

Kiriakulos.1690:

New bleeding applications restores the duration of all ongoing stacks.

Oh god, I can already see lowel’s unicorn thief build making its comeback. Ok, I like this concept, but how about a DR on application damage? Like you realize that d/d condi thief has an infinitely spamable aoe bleed with d/d 3, they could easily get 100+ stacks with this mechanic. This wouldn’t be a problem if the new stacks did 1/2 as much dps as the previous ones applied by the same skill, however.

Junkpile.7439:

What happen my rabid ascended gear when you full berserker one hit heroes try to ruin whole game?

If you’re playing a condi class (eg; necro, ranger, engi), then you have more than enough defensives to deal with burst damage. It’s a l2p issue.

As long as they don’t replace it with skyhammer…

Arganthium.5638:

Zodian.6597:

Stability op bro

Omg that’s it! I just need to have constant uptime of stability on my thief!

No, but you should have constant blind up-time against a melee. Just drop a black powder and auto attack that mofo until he wastes pet skills, then just keep blind up with shadowshot (easy to do since the init regen changes -just be patient with timing). If you aren’t playing d/p, then you’re probably playing s/d, and if you’re playing s/d you deserve to die. glhf
ps: Thief can easily win vs most ranger builds (traps hurt, torch hurts) simply through attrition. You have the blind uptime to make them do little enough damage to where you can heal it all back with their steal skill +leap finisher off cd. If they’re just playing some bunker s/d build it will take you forever to kill though and you should probs just ditch the fight.

Stability op bro

RoyHarmon.5398:

I don’t understand…

How can so many people complain that Diamond Skin is broken and elementalists are missing? If they’re missing, how do we know that Diamond Skin is bad? Is it because Diamond Skin has failed to yield an abundance of elementalists in PvP?

Diamond skin is just a bad trait by design. Taking it on ele is bad because you have so little hp anywase, 1 auto attack will remove the buff. However, 1v1ing against it + signet heal as a necro can be annoying since they have such little direct damage and have a lot of trouble getting the ele below 90%.
Thing is; this trait makes you a sitting duck in any scenario aside from a 1v1 with a condi necro (using carion amulet over rabid, of course). And in that scenario it promotes the dreaded passive play that everyone hates in pvp.

The Good (what I liked about the patch):

• Decent short term PvP reward changes.
• Small hammer warrior nerfs.
• Mesmers are back baby!
• lots of new pvpers; from pve and old ppl coming back.
• Some cool trait changes to shake up the meta a bit.
• Brainless s/d thief cheese build nerfs. -d/p now funner than ever as a result!
• New/improved rewards aimed specifically at ranked queues, rather than hotjoins and ranked (basically more rank points for playing in solo/team queue, more AP, gold cap, ect…).

The Bad (things about the patch I disliked):

• Skullcrack change on warrior is annoying. I wish signet would have just gotten nerfed rather than the fluidity of that playstyle.
• Torment is broken.
• Maybe it’s just me, but engi feels really strong now.
• I think ele changes didn’t do much for traditional s/d playstyle.

The Ugly

• Even the most dedicated players have moved on from the game by now. Without an expansion, it’s likely that gw2 will get completely phased out after the release of all these upcoming mmos; eq next, wildstar, eso, ect…

The Missing (things you expected from the patch that weren’t there):

• Ladder changes.
• Game modes (I don’t really care about either of these, but I thought they might ship with this patch, guess not).
• skyhammer glory farmer banns.
• Skyhammer removed from solo queue.
• SKyhammer removed from game.
• Skyhammer erased from existence.
• Time machine so we can go back and never let skyhammer make it out of the concept art stage.
  lol jk, it’s a fun map to play in hotjoins. But it has no business in ranked games. All in all I actually have enjoyed this patch quiet a bit. Especially since we now know that ranked ladders are getting axed soon. My RL friends rarely PvP’d before because the rewards were so irrelevant, but now we’ve just been chilling in the team queues together and we’re having a lot of fun.
  PS: a veto system for solo queue maps would be ideal.

Phoenixfudge.5290:

Team of default female asuran mesmers named “IIIIIIII” and “IIIIIIIII” anyone?

i lol’d

I’ve played nearly every build of every class in spvp for the most part, i’ve bounced around the team ladders top 1000-300 since QP was around (although I never really took that stuff seriously; my involvement in the esports scene is not as a competitive player). I’d say the highest sill caps i’ve ran into are:

• 3 kit engi builds. It’s kinda like playing ele, but imagine some atunements are melee, some are ranged, and some are timed totems you drop on the ground. 3 kit engi feels a lot more… decision orientated? than ele. You really have to adapt to whats going on and there are loads of different rotations for every situation.
• helseth’s gs/staff mesmer; maybe I’m just bad at this wep combo, I’m very used to having sword/focus in my mesmer rotations. But when you see what a skillcapped mesmer can do with this set, it’s pretty amazing.
• d/d power necro (no longer viable post quickness nerf imo). The old khalifa build was a gloriously rewarding playstyle back when the build was in its prime. Very few teams ever ran it because it was such an unorthodox way of playing necro.
• zerker staff ele: staff ele got a decent buff this patch, and there have been some people running dps staff in spvp pretty effectively (no troll). All of your meaningful spells are skillshots however, which makes it a pretty tough playstyle. -oh and you take frost bow and fiery gs elite for the op aoe dmg and ice stun (basically if you get a thief or ele into a frostbow deep, then drop 4 on top of them; they’re gonna die. Its awesome.), but taking 2 more wep sets gives the class a total of 33 skills including heal -good luck remembering whats on cooldown!

I think a lot of people will argue that d/d ele or s/d ele require tons of skill, but they really don’t imo. You have 2 basic rotations with both those sets and the bulk of your play revolves around getting those rotations off then just spamming you eath/water skills in between (depending on what your hp bar looks like). Ele is having a hard time as a class right now, they’ve been nerfed hard since their triple cantrip glory days, and you’re probably going to die a lot if you try picking one up, but that doesn’t change the general skill level required to play the class correctly; it just makes the result less effective across the board.

How to counter backstab: dodge/block/blind/leap away whenever thief goes stealth. You can even just spin your character around in circles to counter BS (if they don’t hit your back it does like no dmg). Honestly; it used to crit for 15k-20k, and it was like that for around half the game’s release. Just be glad that it doesn’t 1 shot you anymore (I complained more than anyone on the forums to get that kitten changed back in the day).
PS; it’s a glass build, you should be able to 2 shot them anywase. If you can’t connect, you’re getting outplayed.

best post on this subforum in months

Man I remember threads like this popping up back in the closed beta. It was determined that the hardest aspect for gw2 to conquer in terms of esports was watchability. In any sport, you need a “center of gravity” that the viewer can follow. In rl sports its usually a ball, in LoL it’s the 3 lanes, in sc2 it’s bases. Anets answer to this dilema was conquest. Unfortunately, conquest isn’t all that fun to watch as a whole because of its linear nature.
Idk, for me it was always the art style. It’s funner to watch games that are more colorful like LoL or WoW, the skill animations and effects are much more unique and identifiable. It makes the experience much more relatable for the viewer. Much of the skill animations in gw2 are just reskins -even important heals and ultimates don’t have unique/awesome looking animations. Like thief’s heal and poison elite -they share the same skill animation. Without cast bars this makes watching the game a painful experience because the viewer is the one having to guess what spell is actually being used -rather than the player showing them.
Could the game be esports? sure, in fact many sponsors and media sites (like the one I work for) consider it an esport already. Will it ever be on the same level as sc2 or LoL? I highly doubt it. -I don’t think any game will grow to the level that LoL has over these past few years; at least not for awhile. LoL will die out eventually and esports may die out with it, if we’re lucky another game will come along with a hypercompetitive infrastructure and replace it (probably dota 2, if anything).

I think the solo/team queue share gold cap, not sure tho?
I know solo gives 25s per win, team gives 30s per win -and each give 1/2 as much for losses. 15g= around 50 wins per day. Each game takes around 10 mins, 500 minutes total = 8.3 hours (if you win 50 games in a row). I haven’t looked at the hotjoin rewards yet, but custom games are much less regulated and you can abues the team swap feature to farm out the cap easily im sure.

tl;dr: Yes, if you’ve got the dexterity to play 10 hours of pvp per day, and the luck to win most of your matchups. -if solo/team don’t share gold cap, then your probably not going to hit the total cap.

pretty sure the fire is only cas that new hunger games just came out ;p

EoNxBoNx.9213:

manvilrock.guildts.com That is one sPvP TS hub. There are a few others, but feel free to start your own.

This

runeblade.7514:

Professions that counters warriors:

• Mesmer

Professions that warrior counters:

• Engineer
• Thief
• Ranger
• Warrior
• Necromancer
• Elementalist
• Guardian

Fixed

CntrlAltDefeat.1465:

meditation guard. Reset traits to 30-1-30-0-0. Divinity runes
use greatsword-mace/focus
learn to animation skip mace 2 ward

Too many blocks. Too many blinds. Too much burning. They perish.

Passive ranger.
sword-axe
wolf/hound

Too many evades. Poison stays on top of healing sig
KD and fear their chains to upset their play with pets. They perish.

Mesmer-pretty much any build. They perish.

Wow, I’ve never seen mace used in meditations build. I do know Sw/F +S/T meditations used to absolutely wreck warriors. That was pre-buffs tho.

The only people who are saying warrior is balanced right now are mid tier warrior players, and mid tier teams with warriors in their comp. Everyone I’ve talked to that played the class competitively before buffs has agreed that they were overbuffed, and it’s pretty kitten obvious to see that anyways.
“you don’t know how to deal with it” -you’re right, I suppose I don’t know how to deal with 500hp regen/sec, 22k+ hp pool, perma stuns, zerker stance, high stability up time, and high dps. DPS (meditations) guard and /p thief used to be the hard counter, but thanks to zerkers stance and 500hp/sec, even those 2 get crushed by war. (zerkers > blinds, regen > guard dps and block up time). Ranger and engi can beat out some warrior builds (the fun/troll ones), but not hammer/lb or mace cc lock builds.
idk, I think anyone who says warrior is balance right now is insane, it’s the most overpowered we’ve seen any class be in a meta since the bunker ele far push days.
In fact, if the pro teams actually decided to play this terrible meta, we’d probably see alot of warrior far pushes in scrims.
No one wants warrior to go back to where it was at pre buffs, that’s why I think a lot of people are exaggerating how balanced the class is right now.

Hope the weekly cups are going well, we published a quick little article to esg the other day to help try and promote them!

The problem with warrior is that they do everything a little too well. They do comparable/more damage than other direct dmg classes (thief/ele/mesmer), they survive better than other direct dmg classes (thief/ele/mesmer), they cc better than thief/ele/mesmer, and they have comparable mobility. Blance becomes an issue when 1 class does EVERYTHING better than the other classes in their “role”.

You could argue that ele has more sustain than warrior, but ele actually has to manage cooldowns and atunement swaps to maintain this survivability, warrior doesn’t have to do anything really (except activiate zerker stance vs condi class/thiefs). Warrior can just kite for a few seconds if they get low, then jump back into the fight. Furthermore, ele does considerably less damage and has less access to CC, the mobility is comparable depending on the wep sets used -but warrior usually wins here too.

You could then argue that thief has more damage (d/p backstab burst), but thief has a 14k health pool, virtually no toughness, and a heal on a 30s cd (15s for withdraw, but I think that’s less popular in this build). Sure thief has more mobility with sb5, but thief has nearly 0 hard cc. The difference in damage and mobility between thief and warrior is pretty small to begin with.

I’m not even going to talk about mesmer in this meta.

Consider why this misinformation arises in the first place, warrior is incredibly overpowered right now, people playing against it get stunlocked for what seems like an eternity, any damage they do seems to be regened passively, and all at the same time they’re taking heaps of damage themselves. People exaggerate based on the experience they have playing as/against warriors. From my own personal experience, I used to have a tough time on warrior, but now it’s one of the easiest classes for me to play comfortably. -That’s not a coincidence lol.

Redenaz.8631:

Zodian.6597:

I’m kinda sad that they brought back the old skins, I mean they’re just town clothes so i guess it doesn’t really matter, but I like the idea of having something exclusive that says “hey I played during this holiday and here’s proof”

Something like the Devil Horns, Witch Hat, Phantom’s Hood, “Master Carver” and “Emissary of the Mad King” titles, or either level of the Mad Memoires?

There are more than enough ways to show you participated in Halloween 2012, so I don’t think the Witch and Mad King outfits need to be restricted to that list as well.

yeah, that’s kinda all pve stuff tho. Witches hat and horns are barely noticeable, i like the phantoms hood, but it’s town clothes. As someone who’s spent maybe 8 hours in pve since launch (I crafted a character up to lvl80 by selling laurels earned in pvp, explored main cities, played through super adventure box a few times, and did dragon bash minigame arena when it came out), there isn’t much. Like i said, I don’t really care about town clothes, no one sees them anyways, I just wish the combat skins were… well more, you know? It shouldn’t be hard to bake up 2 skins per weapon (1 set for pve and 1 for pvp), they’ve been able to do a skin for pretty much every weapon for the past few events. Like 5 meh weapon skins for the Halloween event… are you kidding? idk I was just expecting more.

I’m kinda sad that they brought back the old skins, I mean they’re just town clothes so i guess it doesn’t really matter, but I like the idea of having something exclusive that says “hey I played during this holiday and here’s proof” (pvp Halloween skins only thing left now). I wish they would have gone all out like they did last year with the wep skins, like separate skins obtained from pve/pvp that had SO much more detail and effort put into them than these new skins.. and you actually had to earn them in game, not just RNG with cash shop. :/
tbh i’ve never had so much fun in a mmorpg holiday event as i did in gw2’s 2012 Halloween one. Maybe it’s just nostalgia or something since everyone was still stoked to play pvp back then, idk.
They must have riffed their art team or something tho.

lol can’t tell if naive or hacked by devs.
I’m not going to say a whole lot (not a fan of creating pr nightmares like some wvw guild leaders who will not be named), but basically anet has heavily favored feedback from the top 1% since before the game even launched.
And that’s kinda what got us into this kittenstorm tbh. game balance is a lot easier when you have a public beta client. Then you can see how EVERYONE reacts to balance changes and tweak them accordingly. Rather than making the game fun for 1% of the playerbase and lame for 99%.

garethh.3518:

Zodian.6597:

that’s not even mentioning the adrenaline health trait (which is like another +400 hp/sec).

It’s per 3 seconds and 120 per tier of adrenaline (max = 360hp/3s).
So at best, if you sit on tier 3 adrenaline, you get a lil under an unbuffed regen tick…

You should at least google numbers before making crazy claims?

ope your right, that’s embarrassing! -still quiet a bit of additional hp though

zone.1073:

Zodian.6597:

Now i’m a based god on warrior. But hey, why should any class take skill right? Lets give mesmers perma invisability and guardians perma invuln, kitten it!

Really? May I ask what your rank is on the leaderboard?

idk I haven’t checked since they released soloqueue, like 400 i think? Anyways, all I know is before the buffs I died -like ALOT on warrior (i play every class, but warrior was by far my weakest). Now I can run around 1v3ing ppl while watching dexter on my second monitor. Get low, disengage for a few seconds, go back in get a kill, ect…

If you truly think warrior is in a good place right now you’re insane. They needed buffs, but they got overbuffed to the point where playing one successfully doesn’t even feel rewarding.

zone.1073:

Has anyone ever tried playing warrior pre-buffs? The answer would be so obvious then. The demands that a warrior must meet (in terms of functionality in team fights) requires that they have sustain, and before the healing signet buff, warriors lacked this tremendously.

For the longest time since launch, warriors were built super glass cannon because it was the only viable way to play warrior – kill things with frenzy faster than getting killed yourself. It was awful.

Now that warriors finally have an option for sustain, so many new viable builds have opened up. No more cheesy GS/axe frenzy warriors. Now we have condition damagers, stun lockers, team support through shouts, sustained damage off-tanks, etc. All tournament viable. Shouldn’t this be the golden standard that ArenaNet should follow for designing the other classes, in terms of variety?

Yeah i played warrior before the buffs and i kittening sucked at it. Now i’m a based god on warrior. But hey, why should any class take skill right? Lets give mesmers perma invisability and guardians perma invuln, kitten it!

Flamfloz.6732:

runeblade.7514:

Brando.1374:

silvermember.8941:

Brando.1374:

make this sig heal for 200 every 2 seconds instead of 400 each second.

With your suggestion, I am so glad you are not a developer.

why?
Warriors have some of the highest armor/hp in game even in zerkers, can deal tons of dmg, able to be immune to dmg for a decent amount of time.

they need to nerf this PASSIVE healing signet or at least make it like the ele or theif sig where you have to do something to heal.

Before Healing signet buff, healing signet healed for 200 seconds per second. No one ran healing signet except in PvE because it sucked.

Healing signet doesn’t need a nerf because it has a weakness. It’s weakness is that it’s active healing sucks.

If passive heal is really a problem, not sure how it would fit in the grand scheme of things, but perhaps the “passive healing” of signets could be activated?
For example: press healing signet, get 20s of 400HP/s, then goes on CD for 20s (and you get nothing during the CD period).
You could add a big burst of healing (e.g. +3000 HP) (or condi clear or whatever )at the end of the period of healing.
(signets still need a passive effect though)

This would make timing the “passive heal” an active player decision:
- Entering a big fight = activate heal,
- Getting low, and burst heal in 10s, run away and wait for your burst to happen,
- Enemy can “counter” you by waiting for your signet to expire once you have activated it before they start damaging on you, or could apply poison tactically

Okay, so you can kite for like 10 seconds and regen 8k hp AND then go back into combat with that same regen, or you can burst heal 8k hp every 30s an have no passive regen in combat. Makes sense..

that’s not even mentioning the adrenaline health trait (which is like another +120 hp/sec).
Basically, if you take heal signet and adrenaline health and have at least 1 disengage (like sword 2 or something), you are never going to die as warrior. If you do, then you’re kittening terrible.

BLUna.7928:

GW2 Should be released (officially) in China within a few months I believe. From what my friends in the beta there tell me there are A LOT of people interested in PvP there!

This!

tournaments were this weird gametype that got scrapped from sPvP awhile back. Basically you had “free” and “paid” tournies, all in a bo3 format. Placing 1st in a free tournament would grant you tickets that allowed you to enter paid tournaments, winning paids gave you gems and QP (a REALLY inaccurate leaderboard currency). QP was supposed to be used like tickets for teams to enter monthly tournaments, but they never got around to adding those in.

The “tournament” game achievements are achieved by playing any form of rated games (solo queue, team queue). They just haven’t gotten around to updating the achievement text.

Karl McLain.5604:

Hey, nice post(s)! Thanks for the feedback everyone.

Thanks for the trait tooltips man, they are perfect!

it’s also the aoe factor of most condi builds. You can put the effect on 1 person or 5 and still do just as much dps to the whole team, doesn’t make much sense. They were going to address this back about a year ago (according to what was said on like the 1st or 2nd SOTG).

1. Rewards -let us help you redesign the rewards system!
2. Balance of course (so we don’t end up in this mess again).
3. Spectator mode; improving the viewability of gw2 should be a huge priority.

I think opening forum threads to discuss this stuff isn’t going to be enough, you guys just need to open up the beta client to the public and collect feedback from the masses. The QA team lets SO many bugs through every patch that get caught by the community like hours after the patch goes live (mesmer fall damage trait doing 30k dps for example). Let us help you!

because anet took a stance on holy trinity a year ago, and value consistency over evolution.

EoNxBoNx.9213:

When I read “barrier of entry” I thought the OP was going to know what he was going to be talking about. Not 50$ to pay for a game, or sPvP being F2P. Yes 50$ does turn some people away from a game, but you are not making that big of an investment.

If they remove the financial barrier then where is their income, coming from? Gem store? Add incentives to buy things from the Gem Store? Give F2P accounts only 3 Characters slots? I really don’t see a F2P model working for this game. Sure it sounds like a good idea, but only because when you look at games like Dota 2 and LoL thriving as well as they are.

If they add F2P in a month (hypothetical) whats going to change? I paid for this game should I get benefits? Or, hey this guy is playing my game for free, take some stuff away from him. Entitlement will run rampant, as it slightly already is.

did you even read the post? Paying for the game unlocks pve and wvw, that’s all the benefits you need. Default character slot should not be reduced, this still prompts people to upgrade if they want to have all 8 classes on 1 account, but most people would just make multiple accounts for pvp anyways (and let them if they want). Gem shop thrives off of skins -mainly holiday skins, all they have to do is keep adding skins in during the holidays.
How do you figure that they are still making money from selling box copies? especially for spvp players. No one is buying gw2 just to pvp full time anymore.
Imagine GW2 without access to a bank or trading post or ANYTHING else outside the heart of the mists, you’d be much more inclined to spend money on gem shop skins, dyes, ect… If you’re not going to make money off of the PvP gamer demographic from selling box copies, why the hell wouldn’t you want to make money off them at least with a cash shop?

If they add F2P HotM accounts (access to sPvP ONLY), what will change is that we will actually have a casual spvp population, and anet will actually generate a monetary revenue from spvp players.
I tried to explain this so you’d understand. But if you didn’t bother reading my OP, then this is probably still too long for your attention span.

Bhawb.7408:

SC2 has a good pro scene, and has a good viewership, but it does so with way less players than LoL simply because it seems like the people who play are more willing and wanting to follow the competitive scene; whereas many LoL players have no idea what the pro scene is and are happy to keep building 6 warmogs on sona.

lol @ 6 warmog sona.
SC2 isn’t as popular in NA, mostly korea. They have like entire TV stations dedicated to SC2 in korea, it’s insane. But yeah, LoL is stealing some of SC2s thunder even over there. I don’t think LoL will stay on top for ever though, that’s an unreasonable expectation. Dota 2 is growing very fast, I think they gain like 100k players per day -with around 4mil active accounts in July, of course LoL has like 10mil active accounts, but still, if anyone’s going to top the MOBA giant I think it’s going to be DOTA.
We’ll see

Bhawb.7408:

Zodian.6597:

football high barrier of entry? all you need is an open field and a ball. Sure tackle football with pads and everything is high, but every highschool in north america has a team students can play on for a pretty reasonable fee.

Comparatively. Almost any sport can be played so long as you have the ball required and maybe one other tool (for example you can “play” hockey with a rubber ball and a hockey stick).

I also wanted to use it as a specific example because it is massively less popular in number of fans world-wide compared to say Soccer, but that doesn’t make it a bad sport, or lessen its impact to those who are fans. It has a thriving competitive scene, despite being way smaller. Not every eSports needs to be as big as LoL, and very few will ever be able to.

Oh hockey is an awesome sport! and it’s one of my favorites to watch -especially live farm league games where there’s hella fights haha. I’m just saying the gear is a lot less accessible -you need a stick for every player, soccer you just need 1 ball and you’re good to go, you see?
Now you might make the argument that every baseball player needs a bat, well the MLB has an even smaller following than pro gaming right now… so yeah.
Popularity doesn’t change the quality of something, but it changes the profitability of it. Throwing a million dollar gw2 tournament wouldn’t make sense right now because we’d only get like 5k viewers on twitch, which isn’t enough for any sponsor to justify a million dollar prize pool. Also, looking at the cash shop as the only real viable source of income derived from gw2 from this point on, it makes sense to have as many players exposed to it as possible.
Basically popularity = money = pro players being able to focus more on game = stronger competitive scene. You can’t realistically have a pro scene without a casual one, gw2’s casual pvp scene has been pretty much dead since as far back as January (let’s be honest). What they’re trying to do right now is buy views from wvw/pve players by putting pve incentives in the spvp dailies/monthlies. Good idea, didn’t work (skyhammer farming OP). And pve/wvw is NOT the spvp casual playerbase, those guys play a completely different game and they care more about completely different crap; their hardcore wvw guilds and hardcore whatever pve players do. Basically, the spvp casual playerbase has to be internal, and if we can beef it up by removing the $50 entrance fee then we should! -why would anyone pay $50 to join gw2 spvp at this point anyways? that’s like paying a 50 dollar entrance fee to get into an empty nightclub.

PS: dota 2 is probably going to pass LoL in popularity. Not saying we have to be as big as LoL, but we have to at least be as accessible as LoL if we want to maintain a healthy competitive scene.

tl;dr: hockey is awesome, popularity = money, money = stronger competitive scene, every game should have a shot at becoming as big as LoL, but the barrier of entry has to be low to even compete -team-based b2p games have a hard time making it as esports because of financial barrier of entry (rl friends can’t just jump in and form teams cas 1 might not have cash, so other 4 say screw that lets find a game we can all play, for example).

Darnis.4056:

No reason to make spvp free to play? That’s funny I can name 30 off the top of my head, If you’re really interested you can look through my post history cause Im tired of responding seriously to this thread every week.

Skimmed through the 1st page of your post history and didn’t see anything about free HotM, idk who you think I am, but I’m certainly not going to play find the needle in the haystack with multiple pages of your previous forum posts, sorry. If you want me to read something please post a link, don’t waste my time simply because you’re feeling lazy. I’m a busy man!

Bhawb.7408:

American Football makes plenty of money despite being a very high-entry sport with relatively little following (compared to world-wide sports). Not every eSports game needs to have LoL level of success, or players.

football high barrier of entry? all you need is an open field and a ball. Sure tackle football with pads and everything is high, but every highschool in north america has a team students can play on for a pretty reasonable fee -a lot of schools even offer to wave this fee for kids coming from low income families (at least mine did).

This is going to be another thread arguing for a free to play client that only grants players access to the Heart of the Mists.

rl sports
The barrier of entry to play a sport is buying some equipment (a ball, bat, gloves, ect…) and finding some dudes to play with.
Sports with lesser financial barriers of entry become more popular than sports with higher financial barriers of entry (eg: soccer > hockey in terms of global popularity because hockey requires pads, a stick, ice, skates, a puc, ect.. while soccer only requires a ball). Having a smaller financial barrier of entry yields a larger popularity, larger popularity yields larger following.

esports
The barrier of entry to play MOBA games (smite, dota, LoL) is buying a half decent computer, the graphics are very low req and all of these games are free to play.
The barrier of entry to play gw2 is to buy an above average computer, and pay $50. So with gw2, the group mentality is already hindered. If I want to form an spvp team in gw2 with a group of real life friends, I can’t because either their pc is too crappy to run it, or they are too broke to buy an account ($50 is a lot for most full time college students -aka your target demographic).

If you (arenanet) really care about developing this game as an esports title (and I know most of you guys on the pvp team do), you need to remove the unneeded financial barrier of entry to compete in spvp. Making spvp free to play isn’t even a bad business move at this point in time, if NCsoft doesn’t already realize that all you have to say is that it brings more people into the cash shop. You already sold 4mil copies, you’re done making real money from hard copy sales. Transitioning towards the cash shop is your next financially sound move here, and making at least spvp free to play gives you more players who will buy items from the cash shop (ESPECIALLY during holidays -no one’s going to buy a year old game as a Christmas gift, but tons of people who are still playing that game are going to shell out cash for limited edition holiday skins).

There is literally no reason to NOT make spvp free to play at this point in the game’s development, all you’re doing by keeping the $50 price point is lowering the profit margins of the cash shop. Just throw some big online tournament to kick it off, it will show people that PvP isn’t becoming free because it’s struggling, but because it’s super competitive and should have been free to begin with.

Business
Gw2 doesn’t make big money selling box copies to the PvP player demographic anymore (I don’t think most people buy gw2 because of it’s pvp at this point, rather the wvw/pve) -you could send out a survey to the accounts that have bought the game since like June and find out.
People without access to a trading post would be much more inclined to purchase skins and dyes through the gem shop.
No financial barrier of entry = more players = more viewers = more stream money (adds and sponsors).
Having more accounts registered makes the game look more active than it really is (LoL has like 30mil accounts, 5mil peak concurrent players).
People that fall in love with the game will upgrade their accounts. Think about it, you’re playing the game with friends for a few weeks, but get bored soloqueueing waiting for them to logg in, what do you do? upgrade and go try pve/wvw!

Gandarel.5091:

One word: NCSoft.

this, the game’s profits go to the publisher -NCsoft.
Publisher backs original project (they paid the $100-$150 million it took for gw2 to get made), then funds future ventures of the studio if studio can convince that those ventures will turn a profit.

incandescence.6784:

These theorycrafting threads get really old where someone says, “Oooh, it’s broken, look at my maths!”

If it’s so broken why don’t you make this character and go dominate PvP completely, then post video(s), then maybe someone will believe you are right. But don’t worry, I won’t hold my breath waiting to see you ranked number one on the charts….

Maybe because it’s already being done? you do realize there are multiple s/d thiefs at the top of both solo and team queue ladders right now right?
And as far as videos go, did you happen to watch the MLG invitational? no? how about the PAX invitational? both had pretty good clips of s/d thiefs abusing evade spam. Go watch 1st map of the PAX tourney, there’s a point when caed tries to finish off CC’s thief down in front of keep and he just spams evade like 10 times in a row until his heal comes up.

Stx.4857:

If you think S/D thieves are too strong in spvp you’re wrong. End of discussion.

Passive healing stun/longbow warriors, condition fear necros, spirit rangers, bomb/bunker engies are all more useful in a spvp match, and are easier to play than a thief.

A thief has to time his evades, use skills at right time, outdps the passive healing, and basically never get hit with a stun to beat a warrior. All the warrior has to do is spam attacks and stay alive, which with 500+ health per second, isnt hard.

Warriors and Condition bunkers are a big problem right now, so is AE damage in general. Thieves are barely even taken anymore. Yes, please nerf S/D.

Warriors and necros are both FOTM right now, this thread isn’t to compare current class balance, it’s to evaluate the accessibility of evade as a mechanic on s/d thief. Why should any class/build have surplus access to what is supposed to be an extremely finite game mechanic? Even if it’s not completely broken by your standards right now (imo it is, because it is, math doesn’t lie, sorry), what happens when warrior and necro get nerfed this month?
Furthermore, is it really fun just spaming the same 2 keys for 90% of a fight? Don’t you feel like you’re cheating or something? I do.

Okay people you’re missing the point here. You’re obviously not going to spam dodge the entire fight, you’re going to auto attack, ls, fs, steal, rip boons, you’re going to do significant enough damage to win by attrition in pretty much any matchup outside of maybe necro and ranger. The point is not that you’re going to dodge the entire fight, the point is that you CAN dodge the entire fight. There is no meaningful choice when it comes to the most “skill based” mechanic in the game.
Imagine playing without unlimited dodges, it’s like if your a full time college student; you’re broke and you have to really THINK about what you spend money on, where you eat, what you buy, ect..
Being a s/d thief is like being a university kid with a million dollar trust fund, you can do buy w/e the kitten you want and not have to worry about any immediate consequence (tried to use an analogy that is relatable to the general gw2 target market).
This is what I’m trying to get at here -thief is mathematically broken because they have access to more than 1 dodge in a 5 second window (which is the intended cap with vigor). Having that much access to a dodge mechanic defeats the purpose of even having the kittening mechanic in the first place.
Even if you don’t go into the acrobatics tree, being able to pull off as many dodges as s/d thief can is unreasonable, especially if you’re actually timing them properly. Dodges are meant to be your “get out of jail free card” that will negate the burst/cc that you’re about to take. If you can just dodge on demand, then you’re not making hard decisions, you’re just pushing a button whenever you feel threatened or vulnerable -which is mathematically and philosophically re*arded.
I realize this isn’t as much of an issue in wvw or pve, but in spvp it’s totally game breaking, there is no way to really counter out s/d thief consistently. There’s a joke on the spvp forums “An s/d thief walks in the the bar and asks ’where’s the counter’” There isn't one.

Walker.3056:

Only one thing plz explain this with Math
Why any decent team i mean any team close to pro DOESNT run 2 thieves or even 5 thieves cause they are so kittening OP

Because we are in a condi meta.