Guild Wars 2

Hello ^^.

This is Zoose (the ele in the video). A friend told me there was a thread about me in the Necro forum, so I decided I’d drop by! I appreciate you sharing my video. I just thought I’d chime in on your discussion.

This is my perspective from tournament PvP. It is probably vastly different than WvW.

I play competitive tournament PvP, and in that sense the fights are much smaller as it is 5vs5. Necromancers in tpvp actually perform quite well. In tpvp our necromancers normally run support type builds that assist in damage and the Resurrection signet to get people up instantly once they are downed. This alone is normally game changing enough to win or lose a fight.

In terms of necros, they normally lack a lot of stability with their support builds or any type of invulnerabilities, so our teams normally assign a “peeler” for our necros. When people jump onto our necros, that peeler or whoever is nearby, will help pressure the attacker, so that the necro can go back to freely pressuring the other team through condition damage/boon stripping/corrupting boons/etc. In doing so, the necro is able to safely apply tons of pressure through condition damage, and if he is in trouble he has an “oh %*#! button” through Plague form.

In WvW I will agree with you when you say the necro feels much more useless as it is not always a small scale fight, but in smaller scale fights in conquest mode for nodes like in tpvp. Necros can destroy teams if played well. Although in the current meta, I believe engineers are better at condition pressure than necros because of the ridiculous HGH engineers, but Necros are not as horrible as you make them out to be here in the Heart of the Mists. ^^

Cheers!

Alilinke.7690:

Zoose.1640:

Hey bros I’m manmoding by myself because the rest of AoN got off before I got on

Feel free to join me any time. I’m even streaming :P

FA btw

Which bl are you running on?

I am on EB running around and killing things (and dying) haha

Hey bros I’m manmoding by myself because the rest of AoN got off before I got on

Feel free to join me any time. I’m even streaming :P

FA btw

Stream’s online :]

Stream’s up brahszzz

This was news in August 2012 brah.

TC zergs are really big. You guys huddle up in death balls. It’s so bromantic. :O

God tier ode

+1

FA will be my home for quite a while now that I am a part of AoN. ^^

Thank you for all the comments both good and bad. I"ll look to improve video quality and such in the future. This is the first night in a month’s time I’ve touched gw2 wvw. Not bad. I’ll do better next time ; )

See you all on the battlefield!

I’d like to clear something up that’s always been prevalent in any of my videos.

My group and myself don’t ever go around searching for “weak” people to fight or “bad, dumb zergs”. We want to fight people that are challenging for us. Unfortunately, half the zergs either get completely annihilated like this one in the video, or they will run away from us or bring 50 people (sometimes even seige) to zerg down an 8 man group (which is big for us since we normally run 3-5).

I could put up videos of us dying vs 50 man zergs, but how entertaining would that be?

I’ve also always received an influx of “this would never fly in T1 or T2 play, etc.” Well, I’ve played on about 4 different servers now from T5 to T1 and now I’m in T2. The zergs and players are all the same to me because of how much I invested into learning how to play the game and playing tournament PvP. The only difference is the zergs get bigger the more you go up.

Cake.4920:

you still cant count but still impressive

1…2…7…okay I think that’s like 30. It’s TOTALLY a zerg.

Hello friends.

Tonight was my first night out in the borderlands with AoN. Needless to say, we ended up with this:

We are on T2 Fort Aspenwood. It was quite fun seeing a zerg fall. ^^

Sorry my mic is a little low. I didn’t change the settings prior

Sup friends.

Zoose here. You may or may not know me, but I’m a fairly popular GW2 streamer (or at least I used to be) for spvp. I’ve now moved onto more WvW and will be streaming that with the AoN (All or Nothing) on T2 Fort Aspenwood!

Watch us destroy zergs, and sometimes get wiped ourselves!

http://twitch.tv/ThundercatsHOOOO

I’m online about to destroy some zergs tonight in WvW actually. 1 month hiatus

Azaruil.3406:

Join one of the lower tier servers. The zergs are smaller and there is more small group action to be had as opposed to the constant zergballs in the higher tiers.

Also, if you’re a cute east asian girl then come play with us on HoD. We only run small man groups. (3p-6p) If you’re not a cute east asian girl then… well I guess you can come play with us too, but I wont flirt with you nor take you on romantic walks on the beaches of the Cursed Shore. Well I most likely wont, but sometimes I like to have a drink and weird things happen. :|

This post is so epic I might wanna join lmao

Hello friends!

I’m Zoose, and I was one of the most popular GW2 streamers for spvp about a month ago. Some of you fine people may know me from playing Elementalist and showing a lot of neat little tricks about how to play one. I even made a nice little guide for D/D ^^.

Unfortunately, I don’t have faith in the spvp for this game any longer, and just wish to play GW2 in my off time for fun. Some of you may know me, but if you don’t, I also streamed a lot of WvW on the side with a small group (3-5 people) and we would go around wrecking zergs of 20, 30 sometimes 40 or more by ourselves.

I am looking for a guild that’s laid back, and fun to talk to, but doesn’t zerg around like a huge unit because IMO that’s boring and I don’t want to stream 20 FPS fights that show little to no individual play as it’s just a clusterbomb of people.

I’m down to play whatever, we can do fractals too, but I’m a PvE noob, be warned. I do have a lvl 80 Ele though. ^^

TL;DR I’m looking for a guild that wants to do this:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-919RMwyfnk
and having fun.

Just run throw bolas. : ]

felivear.1536:

This post was just weird. Truly, this game has the best PvP ever and that’s why it is a thriving SPVP community where 1000s of active players fight nightly and 3 round tournaments pop without waiting.

The only problem is the community and the naysayers and we need to do more. I’m not sure what more we need to do, maybe QT wants us to do some programming code for ladders, visible ranks, custom servers, spectator mode, etc. and then send our lines of code in a submission in a private message to the DEVs. Clearly, the game is in a great shape and we’re just whiny brats. 7 Months is not enough time to get features in to support the game mode. I don’t care that other games have them in during beta. THIS IS THE BEST GAME EVA!!

This post was a either a joke and I don’t get it, or you are delusional since you haven’t’ been playing the game and you’re missing it like a girl you dumped, forgetting that she was crazy and only remembering the great love making.

Either way, enjoy Korea.

Rofl QFT

With the direction of how this game is going it won’t be anywhere near e-sports for another 6 months or so. To think it’ll happen next month or anything like that is just delirious (to the people thinking next patch is “the one”). Plus, with nobody really playing spvp you need to market it or bring back old players, so until that happens as well you won’t have a base for it. Plus it needs viewership. Tons of things need to be in line for it to work and it won’t be overnight at all.

Either play casually for 6 months or just don’t play at all at this point. Those are pretty much everyone’s options at this point since every other option has been flushed already. Not to mention there’s no incentive to play.

Awww yeeeeeeeeeee. ^^
GJ Vyn

oh this is god tier

Wait whaaa? Who’s on your roster?

If you’re talking about putting one class as control to have precedence over the other classes namely the DPS then what’s going to have to happen is your team as a whole has to be on the exact same page every single step of the way. It takes a lot of synergy and teamwork to get to that level, but I believe in due time, the game’s meta may or may not change to that depending on how heavily team fight oriented the meta will be.

Nier.2478:

@pot
Warrior is an L2P issue, as is and as implied in SOTG. If Warrior is not cutting it for you you have 2 things that you can do:

1.) Play an easy class and just admit that you’re not a good Warrior. If the only argument that you have is “HB is hard to land” or HB is the only viable build (Learn to play issues), then sorry you are not the authority on this class and you are not good enough to say anything. So stop talking about Warriors if you’re not good with Warriors.

2.) Stop hesitating to ask players who are BETTER than you for advice. People have made Warrior work. HB isn’t the only viable build for Warriors competitive play. Need proof?

http://www.twitch.tv/blacktruth009/c/1910550

Learn. To. Play. Stop talking when you didn’t even put effort or work.

If you haven’t done any of these, then sorry you are stupid and deserve to be shunned

Ouch. Schwahrheit going hard in the paint on people about warriors. Teach me how to Longbow!

kostbabis.8791:

Apparently anet think esports start from the hardcore side of things when in reality its the other way around…

Hmm…I partially agree with this because you’re going to need people to watch your game, and the largest part of your player base will be sitting around the mid-tier/casual side.

Dante must die! Your characters in-game look hella cool.

felivear.1536:

Zoose.1640:

I want a solo queue.

Hello, Hairseth.

Can I +1 Helseth’s head-suit?

Only if you +1 my fabulous head-suit as well.
hair flip

Your link is broken, friend. ;o

Saeco.7196:

Great post Zoose, thx for that!
Now where’s your staff guide?! <3

Well, now that I’ve finished all my papers for this week and sotg is over I can go back to working on it XD. It should be edited and finished by Monday. ^^

Phantaram.1265:

Great posts by everyone, especially lowell! Solo queue is great for everyone, especially people who don’t have the time to form a team that still want to be a part of the competitive community. You’ve all nailed it on the head that without a way for players to prove themselves it becomes an elitist community with no one at fault because you’d be foolish to try to take on a new name and hope to get lucky that he is a really good player when you could take one of the many known names that you know are good.

Phantaram sucks. ^_~

I want a solo queue.

Hello, Hairseth.

felivear.1536:

JonathanSharp.7094:

Great post, some great points in here.

We know a lot of this, but a lot of times we can’t speak to specific plans to fix things. We also know full well what’s good in the meta (or OP). We sometimes just can’t reveal what we’re thinking about balance until our lists go final.

A lot of people assume that silence = ignorance, and often times, that’s not the case.

Great read! Enjoyed it.

Clearly it’s your company philosophy and I know it’s probably not going to change, but I think it a terrible philosophy. You don’t say anything in fear of causing a stir on the forums, but your silence (at least on the SPVP boards) causes one of the biggest stirs.

Here is the best way I can describe it:
Let’s say that you had decided to come to the forums and tell the players “We finally have our PvP system in place and it’s going to be an 8 team tournament system where you need 40 people to start and it will be 3 rounds.”

I can assure you if that was discussed during the initial implementation, it would have never made it in and then had to be changed 6 months later because it clearly was a bad idea.

My fear is, you guys are being so secretive about stuff because it may or may not be fully ready, but what if it’s a terrible idea? It doesn’t matter how good of DEVS you guys are, there are few of you and exponentially more of us. We can quickly pick out flaws and give positive constructive feedback….for free.

I am in no way saying we are better at developing a game than you guys, we most assuredly are not; however, we play the game non-stop, and we have very good ideas about what would be great for the game, and what would be terrible. Just go look at SWTOR to see examples where DEVS were completely silent on features and when they were rolled out, they sucked…bad.

Case in Point

• WoW, for all its flaws, is actually pretty open about what they are planning. The perfect example: Blizzard was going to implement a feature where your real ID along with your real name would be displayed on the forums with things you posted: a terrible terrible idea. They were dead set on it and people voiced concerns about how our privacy would be at risk and how we could be attacked in real life by players that didn’t like what we posted. Bashiok kept stating that we shouldn’t have any concerns and were being paranoid and your real name can accomplish nothing from someone trying to find out who we are. Someone challenged him to say his real name if he didn’t care. He did. Next, they found his address, his salary, a picture of his front door via street view of Google maps and even facebook pages of his parents.
• That feature never saw the light of day. Had they secretly implemented it, someone could have been killed by some crazy forums stalker.

Food for thought

This is probably one of the best responses in this entire thread.

I wholeheartedly agree with this idea 100%.

Minoru.1237:

They will need to increase ele base damage if they nerf ele healing.

I would be down with that cause.

Arheundel.6451:

If they nerf the healing..your 0/10/0/30/30 build with valkyrie can as well be trashed just saying, the only thing that keeps you alive while running with 14k HP are the small heals all around, once that is gone you’ll be totalized by a single mind wrack.

You make it sound like I want ele’s healing power to be nerfed from the 11k to like 2k. It doesn’t have to be as substantial as that. I’m suggesting healing power ratio to be lowered through healing spells since eles already have good base #s on their heals.

And if you get hit by a full mind wrack setup you should be punished for it.

And besides, there is more than just one viable build for an ele. The 0/10/0/30/30 build is not the end all be all of ele builds. It is what is effective in the meta right now, and at the moment it needs to be tweaked. I understand this because I play an ele I can SEE what it does. Even players who are not the best ele players can heal themselves from 10% to full by pressing a few buttons. That should not happen. 10% – 70% maybe, but not full.

Arheundel.6451:

The ele from strong 1vs1 profession has become the support/control only profession and once the heals are nerfed , they will nerf the controls as soon as some more thread pop out on the forums, so what next? ele best free kill profession?

The ele is still one of the strongest 1v1 professions in the game if not the strongest.

Arheundel.6451:

They designed this profession in an horrible way, this whole versatility concept has been working more against us than anything, I really wonder if you’ll still talk like this once the ele become so gimped that your team will kick you out or ask you to change profession, guess you never played GW1 if not you’d know that once a profession get overnerfed…it won’t be used in PvP teams anylonger and kicked out of teams even in PvE…this happened to the ele in GW1 and it’ll be the same for the ele in GW2

I don’t believe they designed the profession poorly because versatility = more options. You don’t want to be pigeon-holed into doing one build.

I will still play Ele almost regardless of what happens. It’s my class of choice, and I’ll probably still find a way to make them useful. That’s a very bold statement for you to say that I’m not going to be useful in any teams.

I’m going to give you an example of myself:

When the game was first released I made an open challenge for ANYONE to 1v1 me.

I played Ele at the start of the game when it was so bugged that Ride the Lightning would probably immobilize you for 3 seconds instead of actually doing its job. Fire grab felt like it had an angle of 10 degrees because if I didn’t pan my camera upwards and directly faced the enemies I would miss. Magnetic grasp would immobilize you potentially, and half the signets were unresponsive.

I dueled almost 100 people in best 2 out of 3 scenarios and probably only lost 6 or 7. I’m not saying this to be arrogant. I’m saying this to show you how even when the class was kitten poor bugged I was still able to do well. This is before the influx of 0/10/0/30/30 builds.

And no, I did not play Guild Wars 1, but that’s an entirely different game.

Arheundel.6451:

P.S also pls there is no comparison between top tier players from GW1 and QP collectors of GW2, go read on GW1 guru forum to have an idea they don’t spend half time QQ about the profession they can’t counter with their single build but rather discuss about team compositions and strategies, and that was with real PvP( Guild vs Guild, Heroes Ascent) no with a glorified Alliance battle system, where you people have accumulated QP pts by running 2-3 bunker teams over and over again

The people that “QQ” about professions in this game are mostly hot join players. I don’t need to read the guru forums because I too take time to think about strategies and ways to beat things instead of “QQing” over a profession. I PLAY the class. I’ve seen a trend in both the casual and high tier level of play where this class would be a little too dominant (especially on the EU server).

And you proved my point by saying this game is “full of bunkers” when it’s not really…and that bunker meta was busted a while back at least here on NA.

Everything that I would want to say has already been said by Helseth and Teldo.

You are going to increase the game’s popularity in the mists by attracting a solo queue. The game will have a much better chance at succeeding than the infrastructure that is present now.

I will add that there needs to be an unranked and ranked solo queue because like Nazral has already said: there are casual people who play alone in this game as well. There are people who do not have the time to dedicate to a fully committed team, and if it weren’t for having teams to play with I wouldn’t be playing this game this long either.

The current system basically forces:
- Players to find a team or get matched vs premades
- Players to find a team and dedicate time to get good or get stomped
- Everyone else who is deemed inferior to be on a team is ignored
- Players then leave because there is no incentive to continue playing because you will a) pug and get matched up vs a premade because of lack of matchmaking or b) pug and win, but it will amount to nothing as there is nothing to show for it besides a chest and some glory which amounts to almost nothing at this point.

Having a solo queue promotes more players to play because they understand they will be guaranteed to be matched vs other solo players. Having a ranked system allows you to see who the best solo queue players are (albeit it’s a little flawed). Having the unranked system allows the game to flow through “normals”. You are now able to cater to the casual scene. Now add in some really nice rewards or things like “pats on the back” such as having your name shown if you’re on a hot win streak throughout the mists or whatnot and we have something here. I have made a long-winded post about this in my other thread already, but yeah.

Solo queue ranked+unranked gogogo!

Lowellollipop.5817:

I would usually answer with a long and beautiful post to try and match yours, but I’m lacking some serious sleep… so I’ll keep it short:

Extremly good read! I for one agree on every point you brought up and admire the well written posts. I take my hat off to you good sir!

Oh Lowell thank you. You are beautiful enough already, friend.

Arheundel.6451:

Unless you play against the most glassy thief out there, your firegrab will never go over 4k dmg and we’re talking about glass cannon ele, a glass cannon warrior does that damage with the axe auto-attack…..

The first picture that I have posted links a 6.8k fire grab on an ele that has 2.8k toughness. The second picture is him typing out his stats. He is attuned into Earth.

Arheundel.6451:

My second argument imply that you’re not playing against some random guy who installed the game yesterday, listen I 1vs1 Phantaram while he was playing s/d burst, he’s better than me as he’s considered the best ele in GW2 no?!…still his burst didn’t land a single time because these “set up” are super easy to negate that you can’t do nothing but ask yourself if higher skill ceiling equals to efficiency in this game…to me definetely not.

I have 1v1’d Phantaram as well, and I have landed many a fire grabs on him as well as him on myself. If you think landing fire grab is the only type of burst an ele has then you are wrong. There is more than just fire grab. I just wanted to show you that you are able to do more than what you claim eles do on pure damage.

Arheundel.6451:

Basically considering burst ele is : High risk=Low reward, hence people go the sustain damage way, and I’ve got a build with less sustain then yours and the damage is still pathetic compared to other professions that you start to wonder if going the more damage way on eles is even worth the time as most profession can deal 3/4 of your dmg with a single auto-homing skill for half the CD, because of this it seems that playing an ele is more because you like the elementalist concept rather than efficiency.

I would argue with the damage shown in those screenshots that it’s high risk, high reward. The reason you don’t see people go deep into the DPS specs is because why should you when there is a class (thief) that can instagib better? Eles are far better at supporting their team through sustained heals than dealing damage. They also provide great aoe support through damage and sustain.

And yes, I do like the ele concept rather than the efficiency, but to say eles are not efficient is blasphemy. Ask about ele damage to other top tier players. They will tell you.

Arheundel.6451:

At this point I’d prefer to play a “low skill” profession where I know 90% of my attacks will land rather than a “high skill” profession where I know 90% of your attacks won’t land

If this is what you wish then you are free to do it. Ele might not be for you, but it is for me.

Arheundel.6451:

While you talk about ele sustain and healing power scaling being too good, you don’t say anything about attack power scaling very bad on the opposite side.

The devs have admitted that ele got many weak elements opposed to the good ones, I really hope they do take a look at staff/scepter skills and how hard is to actually land them, to have skills which take 3s to land(dragon’s tooth-phoenix-eruption-ice spike)…is wrong.

If going glass cannon, you’ve got skills like flame grab with a 80% miss chance despite being at 45s CD, long CDs and unreasonable casting animations are what force eles into try and win a battle of attrition, other professions can land huge burst skills much more easily while still having 3/4 of our CDs, furthermore having the lowest power coefficients for the auto-attacks doesn’t help either, luckily this is another problem that Jon Peter promised to solve a couple of months ago

The ele’s base skill damage and aoe damage makes up for a lot of power scaling in my opinion. I’m not entirely sure how you can claim that going full glass cannon has a poor power scaling because I have hit fire grabs on 30 fire/30 air builds for over 10k. If you want to play a full glass cannon build and favor to not go in the direction of a more balanced build that’s up to you.

Your second argument with having an “80% miss chance” on fire grab is false. Just because you can’t specifically land it doesn’t mean other plays can’t. The spells are difficult to land because they require set-ups. Ele’s have a higher skill of entry than other classes…maybe? But you can’t go around pressing dragon’s tooth and expect it to land without setting it up in the first place. The same goes for phoenix. This is now a skill of the player argument rather than the class because the spells do a substantial amount of damage when they do land.

Evo.9180:

Sure the system will try to match you against a similar team, but it won’t always be able to and it will have to compromise. Which means that you will eventually be put in an unfair match up against a more organized team. Losing that will be frustrating and will hit your rating, too. There just needs to be a separate solo queue. There is no way around it.

Agreed, especially since the ratings are mixed in. Also, since the pvp community isn’t THAT large you will have more of a chance to have the premade vs solo queue players fiasco happen.

Why not just take the easier route and separate the two completely? Or have Solo + Duo together and Pre-made completely separate?

Caffynated.5713:

Do you feel ele healing is OP across the board (from 0 healing power up to max) or is it just imbalanced when it’s stacked with 30 water, healing runes and a cleric amulet?

If the latter, wouldn’t a diminishing returns system be a better fix than directly tinkering with the skills?

It is because of the latter, yes. And diminishing returns is what I suggested. That’s healing power scaling specifically.

TwoBit.5903:

Good read.

I have a few things to add:

If they made an incredibly accessible and popular mode in 1v1, they should capitalize off their discovery, refine it and make it mainstream. There’s no use funneling players into the old paid tournament system. I really wish they would talk more about this.

If by “hand holding” I assume they’re going to look at making a better tutorial? The current one is so basic and doesn’t explain the intricacies of the game’s PvP. Think of how effective LoL’s tutorial would be if all it did was teach players how to press the four skill buttons.

I agree with making the tutorial more intricate. I really, really want to see it happen, and for ANet to announce it like it’s some sort of new prophecy as well. YOU WILL LEARN ALL THE PVP THINGS YOU NEVER KNEW BEFOREEEEE!!!

Would be sweet, yo.

continued…

I really, really want to know when and what ANet plans to do on bringing in these new players or bringing back the old ones, both would be great, man. Because we need more people playing in the mists. This game’s pvp is great, but with the concerns of no solo queue, and the lack of players to make the features work, I wonder where ANet will go to market their mists.

Maybe ESL will pick up the mists? I heard that on Guru sometime ago. Maybe there will be prize pools dropped weekly for weekly tournaments? I don’t know, but the faster features like this get implemented the quicker the game can head into the direction of esports.

- The devs were unaware of Elementalists being really good, borderline “OP”

I sort of was afk at this part, but I heard JP and JS were not really aware that Elementalists were THIS good. That concerns me because almost everyone who pvps in the mists knows that Eles are exceptional. The fact that I play one and was offered “we don’t want to whack a mole things” as an answer is fine, but then again what are the plans to buff all these other classes onto the level of Eles? You’re right. Elementalists have a higher skill cap that can be taken advantage of by good players, but that doesn’t mean that I don’t feel the easier alternative is to nerf the sustain by a little bit.

Haha…this one will be up for debate, but tell me what you guys think of this:

Nerf the sustain of classes that have pre-set heals. You can do this by lowering either the base heal of their skills like water scepter #3 and #5 for eles or by lowering the healing power scaling of these skills. Because the truth of the matter is the ele sustain is so good because the base level of these heals are so good. Couple it with a cleric’s amulet it will let you heal to full from 10% AND it will heal your teammates AROUND you as well.

Now, eles have a low HP pool, true, which makes it look like it heals for a ton! But I’ve done the math for scepter heals and with #3 and #5 alone with a cleric’s amulet you are going to heal for over 5k HP with two buttons. With Arcana Elemental attunement trait (V) switching into water heals you for almost 3k. That’s 8k total now. Dodge rolling will also heal for another 3k. That’s now up to 11k total. You can see where this is getting ridiculous. 11k without pressing the actual heal button just yet?!? Come on, guys. I play an Ele. I know this is silly. Triple cantrips with the regen per cantrip trait will also heal eles over time for a huge amount through all 3 cantrips which all act as stun breakers or protection procs. That’s going to be well over 15k over a span of 20 seconds, and 11k heals in a span of about 4 seconds with the best eles being able to cast cancel INTO other things while they’re healing.

With a conquest style game the EU meta is seeing many, many s/d bunker eles. And I am taking one for you EU guys, but sustain for s/d eles need to be looked at. Period.

Hearts all around!

To close, thanks a lot for reading this if you read it all the way through. I would just like to know when the key features will be implemented, and hopefully I want to know if ANet would be ready to implement them to test even if they don’t believe it’s 100%. Because like I said, I believe something is better than nothing. I do like that they said they are testing MMR secretly and the system that is implemented where they can “boop boop boop. OK got it.” It makes testing things much easier I assume for devs of the game.
I would also like to have a separate solo queue and team queue. One that is ranked and another that is unranked.

Let me know what you guys think!

continued…

- There will be no solo queue plans.

I’m afraid to say that there has not been very many, if any, games that are team oriented that have succeeded e-Sports wise without a solo queue. I understand that they do not want to split the player base because it is already small, but the player base is only this small because of how little incentive there existed to play tournies and how because of not having MMR you could be queued against top teams and get beat down, and for what? QPs? A system/ladder that did not matter to hardly anybody because they gave no reward and was a poor measure of skill in this game. No offense to people who are at the top of the QP list. It’s just the truth.

Having a solo queue allows players to see where they are on an individual level and teams can form easier when x person sees y person and z person on a level that is equal to their own.

This also leads into my next concern

- How does ANet plan on bringing back players that quit the game already? Also, equally important, WHEN will ANet implement the features such as spectator, private servers, MMR, and a proper ladder?

Listen. I understand this is A LOT to push down the tube. And I agree, it is. But THESE are the features that will give incentive to a lot of people to play this game more hardcore! There has been no ETA which is understandable, but the faster these features get implemented the better the game will be. Period.

There are a few problems with this though which leads BACK to my other concerns. If ANet is concerned about not understanding how a system will work, they will not implement it until they believe it is COMPLETELY ready.

Now, we have seen game breaking bugs come into the game even when they would do big patches per month or two months for pvp. Load screen bug (several times), Block bug, Mist form revive bug, Vengeance not reviving people, and now the Necro not reviving bug. I’m sure there were some that I missed, but you get the point. Every game is going to have bugs that are unforeseen, but it worries me that if ANet is afraid to implement something because they don’t think it will work and want to keep waiting and waiting for it tagging a “soon” title on these big updates then at the same time you are having your pvp population dwindle down slowly.

This then brings in the issue that if you HAVE MMR, you HAVE a ladder, and you HAVE private servers, spectator etc, how many people do we have to make this thing work? You can’t have these beautiful things without having enough players to make it work. Which is why I am concerned on what their plan is for bringing players back into this game.

This then brings in, well Zoose, okay you can replace these players. Well, unfortunately with the tough barrier of entry that these tournies have without MMR and things of that nature, these new teams will form and disband because they lose to teams that are so much better than them.

Sure, you can replace the players that leave with new ones, but what is the plan on making the game have more incentive for these new players to play? At the moment there is not that much. There are titles that take a very, very long time to get to (seemingly impossible) and gear that can be attained through pretty much your first week of playing through spvp. There is no direct correlation between spvp rewards translating into PvE or WvW rewards, so you have players playing in these separate realms basically.

If these realms are going to be kept separate I believe there should be things like if you win this many tournaments then you are allowed to attain this type of gear. Or if you win this many tournaments in a row your team’s name is announced throughout all of the mists through every server. (Team X of Anvil Rock is on a 5 game winning streak!) Little things like that make a world of difference to some people, man. Titles that seem almost impossible to get and pvp gear that is easily attainable makes the game mundane over time.

A lot of us in the PvP community play this game because we believe it is fun and we believe the game can get somewhere because the gameplay is fantastic. But I don’t want this game to just be swept under the esport carpet because of a time issue or because of a skill barrier.

I felt that this SotG was presented much better than the other two. Props to Grouch & the GW2 Guru guys for making it happen in the first place.

I want to start off by saying I didn’t walk away from this SotG knowing much more than I did when I first entered it besides a lot of “soon” features to be implemented sometime in the future. This is going to be my take on SotG and how I feel about it as a player and as someone who WANTS this game to take off in the eSports realm because for 6 months now I have been an advocate of being positive about it because I felt if they put in a little something here and marketed the pvp a little bit here it would start to take off. I am also a player that receives numerous whispers and mail everyday, so I try my best to help all the new players at this game improve.

I’ll start with positive things I saw from SotG:
- How passionate JP and JS were talking about the game (shows they care)
- The fact that once something was said that they were unaware of the devs let the players know they would “look into it now because we have notes” (at least they are planning to take action on things they were unaware of such as certain builds deemed to be “OP” i.e. eles)
- The fact that the devs had a plan for bringing PvE/WvW players into the mists, but first they want to “hold their hand” a little because they understand that there are a lot of players that have been playing in the mists for quite some time and will have an edge up on these new players. They don’t want them to be demoralized as soon as they step into the mists or be clueless on what is going on.
- They will look at keybind changes per class or per character (I feel the default ones are clunky and difficult to use) I believe players should be able to keep keybinds specific for each class they play or each character.

These positive things don’t have as much detail description in them because there’s not much more to be said.

Negative things I felt from SotG (with detailed explanations):
- ANet is afraid to implement a rating system because they do not understand how it will work.

I see this as having something would be better than nothing. I understand they want it perfect, but as we can see as a good example the 8 team queue system has been moaned about since after the first month the game came out.

This was because when the game first came out there was a substantial amount of people playing in the mists. Queues would pop frequently and free tournies were more competitive due to the fact that many teams were formed and ready to take this game to another level.

Unfortunately, the incentive to play the game at the time was almost non-existent because there were very few features implemented that made you give a care about pvping the mists.

The first week of 1v1 teams on Temple gave positive feedback immediately and negative feedback immediately. If only ANet would implement features, so that they can be given feedback on it then I think it would speed their process up much more easily. I understand the betas were made for testing things, but even if the game is out already…you can still test things with players that care about your game and you will receive your feedback, so you guys (the devs) can work easier around your problems.

Another example of this is paid tournaments. Paid tournies would pop at x time – y time. The very first queue of the night in NA would take a good 30 minutes sometimes more. This should have been seen as a problem in the first place because of the amount of time having to wait for a queue to pop.

I believe the 8-team queue system is an “end-game” feature where if you had the pvp community of let’s say WoW for example then this system would work, but as small as the community is now it is very difficult for this system to work because now we are stuck at a point where “Hey guys, queue for paids, X team is queueing now, and Y team will queue soon!” More or less it isn’t the system that is making players want to play it’s the players themselves wanting to play. But having a system that is difficult for a larger amount of players to access it immediately (such as 1v1 teams) is essentially “pigeon-holing” the players into ONE set way of doing something which is to queue only at x times and y times because at any other time, no other queues will be popping.

MarzAttakz.9608:

Interesting to compare the differences in trait and gear choices between a tournament and wvw bunker.

I’m sorry the majority of structured pvp players see wvw as inferior and the domain of the zerg but if you take tournament principles and apply them to organised guild groups it takes things to a whole new level.

It’s nice to see more tournament teams exploring the potential and hopefully acknowledging that the end game meta does get influenced in wvw.

I enjoyed the video and must say I’m extremely envious of your latency, pity those of us trying to play competitively (in whatever game mode of choice) with latencies upwards of 150ms. Fast combos just don’t work since it takes two or more keypresses to get your skill to fire.

Well, Im sorry to hear about your latency issue. That sucks.

On another note, there are bunker eles in spvp. In the EU scene they are very prevalent. This was just a certain guide that I did with a specific build. There are many viable builds that you could probably take from wvw eles to spvp. Its mostly just a matter of what your team comp is trying to accomplish and figuring out how your ele build fits into the scheme of things.

The whole idea of expecting 8 teams to queue throughout the day at all times of the day is a bad system to implement in the first place as it requires many teams to work. The fact that top, middle, and casual tier players saw that there existed very little incentive to play the game basically hurt this game’s community from the get-go. I did NOT play any of the betas for this game, but all I can say is this game had an excellent chance to retain its good pvp player base FROM THE START if only there was a better pvp system involved that rewarded you in a way that would matter and did not force 8 teams to queue at once. Ranking/ladder is definitely one way to give people incentive to play competitively. Simply having things like more attainable titles per tourney win or win % is another idea. Better gear only accesible after x amount of tournies played/won…things like that. They sure dont matter that much to me, but to another person it might. Now…sadly the competitive side of the game is too small to successfully implement MMR imo. In order for it to work properly anet has to market the pvp side well enough to attract a larger base of players from lets say PvE or WvW to come sPvP. Then you’ll seen these new teams starting to form and when people see incentive to play the game as hardcore as you wantto see it then they will. Until then the game has pretty much put itself on hold because of the way the pvp system works. QPs are almost meaningless.

It’s 4am and im typing on my phone. Excuse the grammatical errors bros!

Elementalist

Attunement swap: F1-F4
Utilities: Q, E, R
Heal: G
Elite: C
Call Target: CAPTAIN CAPS LOCK
Take Target: T
Look behind: Z

^^ I am glad you enjoyed it!

Schwahrheit.4203:

Could’ve been “Million Stab” if they knew how to Renzokuken. Too bad you’re the only one whose close to understanding “Renzokuken” though in that group

Maybe it’ll be a million stab one day :O

A couple of friends and myself having some fun in paid tournies! ^^

Mance.5640:

Small mans ftw!!! Good job, zerg farming is the best thing about Gw2.

Destroying zergs is indeed very, very satisfying. THERE CAN ONLY BE ONE HIGHLANDER!