Guild Wars 2

Quickness wouldn’t be a problem if all three downsides were combined and applied on every form of it.

That is to say, no healing, no endurance, AND +50% received damage. DONE. It is now balanced. Nobody will ever use it because it’s pure suicide – as it should be considering how ridiculously borked +100% DPS is.

Alternatively, cut the speed boost in half and give everyone the same downside warriors have (no endurance and no healing can’t even compare to +50% received damage).

Giving different classes’ quickness different downsides just stinks of trying to be different for the sake of being different, no matter how badly it screws over balance.

This is a known problem.

The reason is simply because the game doesn’t reward defending. At all. No, the “objective defender” bonus doesn’t count, it’s the exact same bonus you get for attacking an objective and killing anyone ANYWHERE (skirmisher bonus, wtf?!).

They have to add a point defense point bonus and a martyr bonus (for dying while trying to take/defend a point) so that players who actually work to win a game get rewarded properly instead of running around zerging the hell out of everything.

Female Asura gets completely different lines.

For example, their “might” line is “THERE’S the power!”

Venthus.6137:

No idea about progeny though… female Asura have a distinct lack of breasts, and I believe the only nipples encountered so far are on male Asura, so there might be a kind of seahorse deal going on here…

I have two theories:

1. AN removed the nipples from female Asura to avoid a political correctness backlash (lol).
2. The removal was intentional and indicates that male Asura breastfeed rather than females.

Personally, I like #2 better. It’s just a more humorous image.

The way Arenanet handled this is hilariously disappointing. The worst part of it is that it’s probably asymptomatic of the way AN is handling balance in general – that is, making adjustments that are way too far in one or the other direction just to appease people.

If they can never get downed states balanced (which are considerably simpler than the rest of the game since every class gets the same set), how can they manage to balance everything else?

Paranoid.9542:

Warmage Timeraider.5861:

look at other esport observer mode games… seriously.. NONE of them has team colours!

Starcraft 2

Starcraft 2 is 1v1, and even in 1v1 you still have the choice of 8 different team colors (instead of the same two every time).

Smackjack.5071:

Seriously who cares?

Are you there to run a fashion show or to play and win?
Waiting for your opponents to give you compliments on your color compositions?

Considering the ONLY rewards for sPvP are cosmetic items, your point isn’t going to get you very far.

Yes, separating randoms and pugs in tPvP is a must. In fact, it should have been done two months ago.

Too late now, though. Too many people have just outright quit because of such heavily unbalanced matches. Such a shame.

It IS extremely annoying. There’s no need for it, especially with how incredibly obvious the red names are (seriously, it’s the first thing you see).

Please kill the forced dyes, thanks!

I’m getting really tired of people using WvW as some kind of measure of warrior success.

Newsflash! You don’t know the gear of your opponents and many of them are also below level 80. Your position is automatically flawed because you and your opponents were never guaranteed to be on even ground.

If I used WvW as a barometer of success, yeah, I’d say warrior is OP, too… except I know better than that. I’m running around in full exotics in every slot, but I know full well many players are not so well-geared, and still others just run around in PvE builds not knowing the first thing about building for PvP. It’s a terrible environment to make any sort of analysis from, no matter how you slice it.

Tell that to Arenanet, see what they think of that.

I don’t think you’ll get very far with that line of reasoning.

Like I said in other threads, they need to give points for defense (x number of points every 10 seconds on a point, for example) and martyrdom (y number of points for dying while defending or attacking a point). This would incentivize players to actually fight for points instead of skirmishing on the field (seriously, the skirmisher point bonus is wtfhuge).

Also, to prevent the situation where players just sit on a point because there’s absolutely no chance of making a comeback, they should stop making kills count towards team score at around the 375-point mark. In the current implementation, once the winning team’s score passes a certain threshold (say, 125 points over the losing team), it basically becomes impossible to win without a massive 3-cap upset. This would nip that problem in the bud, allowing for more tense and dynamic play near the end of rounds.

Well, if I had to highlight our problems, it would be these:

- Adrenaline skills kinda suck all-around. This is a particularly big problem because it means there’s no incentive at all to take the skills that boost our adrenaline or traits that boost adrenaline gain. Making the adrenaline skills worthwhile would automatically boost up those skills and traits to be, if nothing else, at least worth consideration.

- We lack ways to stick to our targets. It’s far too easy for anyone to just stick a snare on us, apply a KB or immobilize to create distance, and then kite us to death. Shake It Off is practically mandatory on any melee warrior, and it’s just not good enough – it only removes one condition, is on a fairly long-ish cooldown, and does absolutely nothing to prevent further condition stacking. We need some kind of passive snare/immobilize reduction in order to actually be useful as a melee class. Of course, it would probably also help if we didn’t have so many self-rooting attacks (seriously, what’s up with this?).

- We lack ways to either mitigate or recover from damage, making us one of the squishiest and most vulnerable classes in the game. With the way toughness and vitality work in this game, you cannot rely on them to allow you to absorb damage – you must rely on abilities. We are horribly lacking in this area. Our heals are sub-par at best, which wouldn’t be as much of a problem if we just had ways to prevent that damage in the first place.

- We’re too predictable. You know what a warrior is going to do when you see one running at you with a hammer. You know what they’re going to do when you see one with a greatsword. Even worse, we’re slow enough that even mid-level players can dodge our attacks on reaction. That’s a recipe for bottom-tier performance if I’ve ever seen one! At the very least, speeding up our attacks would make a world of difference.

- A lot of our skills are just plain useless or redundant (stances and signets, I’m lookin’ at you!). Our physical skills in particular… stomp and kick both seem geared to ranged builds, which is unintuitive considering the popular image of the warrior as melee specialist. Why would you ever want to create distance between you and your target as a melee warrior? And balanced stance just makes me laugh. EIGHT WHOLE SECONDS of stability! On a 40s cd! …Right…

I’ll be honest, though – fixing any one of these would have a massive effect on our viability in tPvP. If I had to choose the two most important things, it’d be our ability to stick to a target and our lack of damage mitigation/recovery. Either of those and I’d be a happy camper… at least for awhile.

Yes, a fix is incoming.

Ljiona.9142:

I love these threads. According to some of you, I am playing a totally under-powered class, yet I win just about every one on one encounter I have quite easily. I must be some sort of video game god. Talk about an kitten boost.

If you’re talking about anything other than tPvP, your opinion is invalid.

Warriors are great noob-stompers in hot-join and are strong in WvW because of the higher stat spread, but suffer terribly in the current tPvP meta, especially against bunker builds.

Guanglai Kangyi.4318:

Okay, yeah, sorry, the burst is like 20k on thieves and 30k+ on warriors in WvW, and 10k on thieves vs. 15k on warriors for sPvP. 10k is not enough to even kill another a thief, while a 15k burst on a warrior will kill anything that isn’t specced to tank or is a warrior or necro.

I wish the ignore function worked on these forums, then I wouldn’t have to read junk like this.

It’s actually much closer to 20k on thieves if you’re going to compare like-for-like. A thief can hit poison → AS → steal → CnD → backstab → heartseeker → heartseeker in the same amount of time it takes for a warrior to hit bull rush → frenzy → 100b.

Of course, 20k damage is enough to down most players outright.

Orrrr it could be that some players have the right idea and that some ideas are just not made equal (i.e. “nerf 100b pl0x!”, the quintessential “l2p” problem, vs. bunker builds just being straight-up boring to play and play against).

Noctred.6732:

What? Ele’s won’t ever kill a solid bunker player 1v1 either regardless of build, but they’re extremely strong otherwise (both as bunkers and balanced roamers/team fighters) and most teams run one.

Actually, elementalists will rarely die to a bunker 1v1, while warriors can and will.

The same healing that makes elementalists such great bunkers is obviously what makes them better in a balanced role. Warriors have no such advantage (in any area).

Noctred.6732:

As for warriors – I guess you can tell that to teams like TP EU, PZ, and ALFA (who are as close to top tier as you can get with the current ladder-less infrastructure), who afaik all run warriors in their main lineups. Win used to run a warrior as well, I dunno if they still do.

That’s three, maybe four, teams out of how many?

Even a cursory glance at ALFA’s matches shows me they run other classes more frequently. Just running the class, for that matter, doesn’t tell me whether or not they think very highly of it (especially since we only have free tournaments atm).

Also, I had to lol at the highlight of a warrior bull rushing an unaware player to frenzy+100b them. High-level play, indeed!

Noctred.6732:

Sprinkles.6748:

Zyrusticae is resorting to saying “I can’t do everything as a warrior” because everyone in this thread is telling him to do everything as a warrior!

Not sure if you’ve actually read the thread. Nobody is telling him that he should do everything as a warrior. Quite the opposite – people are telling him to avoid 1v1 fights with bunkers as a warrior because warriors lack the sustain and the condition pressure to win those fights solo.

Some other classes are in the same boat.

If he really wants to play warrior, then instead of crying about it he can realize that all classes are not built to be able to counter every single situation (true in every single non-sandbox MMO to date, including this one) and get somebody else on his team to run an appropriate bunker busting class/build. Then he, as a warrior, can fill a role that’s more appropriate to his class.

I know ArenaNet hyped this game with “every profession can fill every role” and blah blah blah, but the fact is that it was little more than exaggerated marketing. Even with build diversity, some professions are still going to suck at certain things more than others and warriors just happen to suck at 1v1’ing bunkers.

I honestly don’t see the problem.

Man, it’s like you didn’t even read my posts.

Again, the fact that warriors can’t 1v1 bunkers is just a symptom of other issues with the class. By the very nature of balance in a game like this, a class that can’t 1v1 bunkers is unlikely to be able to fill any other role with any level of efficiency. (And it’s true – for every role in a tPvP team, some other class fills it better, hence our bottom-tier tPvP status.)

And for the record, I support boosting those other classes, too! Either that or making the obviously out-of-whack bunker builds (come on, only two classes are really out there in terms of bunkeriness) more in-line with everyone else’s bunker builds. Just think about that for a second – what’s better, buffing everyone else to compensate, or just nerfing the obvious problem areas?

Parakeet.6083:

You do know that warriors are not just dps machines right? They bring huge amounts of cc to the table. Sounds like you are not making full use of the warriors repertoire.

Oh, hahahahahahaahahahahaa!

I’m sorry, really? Really, really?

Your counter… is to deflect the subject by suggesting that the solution to a class being horribly sub-par in a role is to look at roles they might not be horribly sub-par in?

Oh, of course the solution to a weapon or set of weapons being insufficient is to use one that isn’t insufficient! Except it didn’t actually solve anything at all and you still have useless weapons to contend with.

Look, the whole point of my argument is that the game should have a reasonably decent build variety, that all weapons should have some use, and that all classes should be able to fill each role with some level of decency – otherwise, what the hell is the point of giving us free reign to create our own builds? What is the point of, say, having power/precision/crit damage as a possible trait path on a necro if they’re so terrible at direct damage? What is the point of having condition damage as a possible trait path on a warrior if they can’t apply conditions with any level of frequency? They become traps, something no high-level player would ever, ever want to even so much as touch with a ten-foot pole because they’re so obviously bad and sub-par.

They represent wasted development resources. No one uses them, why should they exist in the first place? Either buff them or take them out! It’s that simple. I don’t see what’s so difficult about this.

By the way, warriors are already considered one of the worst tPvP classes in the game, so you’re fighting an uphill battle there.

As for bunker builds, yes, I do think they should be unable to win 1v1s. They are already better at holding points than any other build. That is the whole point of point control. That is the whole point of the one and only game mode in the game. As long as they can hold points almost indefinitely AND win in 1v1 situations they are overpowered, period, end of story.

Not only are they overpowered, they represent an extreme in game design that should never have existed in the first place. They create incredibly stale and boring gameplay, the kind of gameplay that people would NOT want to watch in a stream over and over again. This is supposed to be an e-sport. E-sports HAVE to be fun to watch. The current meta is anything but fun to watch. IT MUST BE FIXED.

Zurkian.1276:

Even in their broken state warriors are an excellent 1v1 class which is fine and dandy if 1v1 was actually a common situation.

It’s not that they’re a terrible class and I don’t even think they necessarily need a damage buff. The problem lies within their crap utility skills, all over the place traits, poor design, and lack of attention (or care) by Anet.

What? No, warriors are a terrible 1v1 class. Absolutely no ability to sustain and mitigate incoming damage makes us complete crap in any match-up against anything other than a thief, and even then thieves have better getaway abilities!

We’re also completely useless for cracking bunker builds, which is a HUGE problem as they become more and more ubiquitous.

Guanglai Kangyi.4318:

Someone explain to me how a 10k, 3-skill burst on 45s cd is somehow more broken than a 25k 1-skill burst on 8s recharge?

The fact that there’s even a skill that deals 25k at all is ridiculous. Maybe if it was an elite or had like 45s CD.

Actually, 45s CD for HB sounds like a pretty good way to balance it. Reorder the skillbar to match while they’re at it.

Wow, this is so wrong I don’t even know where or how it came about.

HB does not deal 25k damage. It never deals 25k damage. That’s hyperbole if I’ve ever seen it. Even if you spec full, complete glass cannon and stack as much might as you possibly can it will only hit that high in WvW because crit damage is higher there, you’ll NEVER see numbers that high in sPvP.

Secondly, HB has no CC attached to it AND it is a channeled ability that is basically impossible to fully land on any opponent that isn’t sleeping.

Seriously, how do these complaints even come about? I don’t get it.

Wow, some people seriously think that skill matters more in GW2 than class and build?

Are we even playing the same game?

2 months and the game is still chock-full of bugs and balance issues, feature-incomplete, lacking a large number of basic features, and is otherwise a not-great experience for… well, just about anyone?

I think the complaints are well-justified, myself.

Let me consider for a moment that ludicrous argument.

The problem is that warrior doesn’t have the tools to actually kill a bunker build with any sort of efficiency or even regularity. Supposedly, the idea is that they should make up for it in other areas to cover for the slack.

I say this is nonsense. This is just a symptom of greater issues with the class.

Consider, for example, WHY a warrior can’t deal with bunker builds. The problem is three-fold:

1. Warriors lack the ability to stack conditions (particularly poison) on a target, and
2. Warriors lack the ability to recover from even the tiniest amounts of sustained DPS (which is what bunker builds are bringing)
3. Warriors lack the raw damage to bring down a hard target

Consider these three flaws, and think about how this affects them in every other role in the game. If you have even the slightest capacity for thought, you should already have realized that this means they are sub-par everywhere. I find it utterly hilarious that people say warriors should be roamers, when just about every other class is a better pick for this (especially mesmer). We are considered bottom-tier in tPvP for a reason.

That doesn’t even touch the fact that bunker builds are still ludicrously hard to unseat in any 1v1 situation with any class, even the ones best suited towards it.

So yeah. It’s “hilarious”. Hilarious that I put up with this crap. Hilarious that it’s like this in the first place (after how many months of testing?). Hilarious that I’m still posting here when I should be doing something infinitely more productive.

I just came here to mention how utterly hilarious it is that people keep repeating the same arguments ad nauseum no matter how often they’re countered or shot down.

Also funny is how some folks completely invalidate their opinion by resorting to outrageous hyperbole (’don’t like it, go play an FPS or a single-player game!‘, because there’s no such thing as a middle ground).

Zunhar, you completely missed the point.

The point is not to flatten skill curves.

The point is to fix things that ruin lower-level play so less-skilled players can enjoy the game without feeling like some gimmick is ruining the fun.

You’re all wrong.

The game should be balanced at all ranges.

It’s possible to, for example, make a problematic ability at low skill levels less problematic by increasing the amount of setup or timing required to pull it off (ex: backstab combo). In some cases some abilities might have to be retuned entirely, but at any rate, it would be really bad to ignore ability combinations that are highly problematic at lower skill levels just because higher-level players don’t have issues with them.

Wow, so much crap in this thread. And no, I am not sanitizing my “tone” for the benefit of sensitive individuals, as I am pretty bloody angry and thus unlikely to give a toss about your feelings or your impression of me.

For starters, every weapon should have a use, and all sorts of builds should be viable for every class. Having to toss in a hammer or mace because nothing else works is a problem (and let’s be honest here – if it’s effective against a bunker, it’s effective against everything).

Secondly, have you actually tried to melee a kiting elementalist build? Are you seriously suggesting that melee is the only way to deal with them when they have so many ways to counter enemies that are attempting to engage them in such distances?

Thirdly, if a class can’t deal with bunker spec while others can something is wrong with that class. I don’t even care how you justify this, if warrior as a whole sucks at dueling then they suck, period.

Fourthly, you can point at any special build you want, all it proves is that that particular build is effective, not that the game as a whole is in any way balanced. That engineer build in particular is extremely effective simply because it’s so heavy on CC… heavier on CC than just about any other build out there.

Finally, I’m too tired and kitten to think straight, so I’m GTFO. The game thus far has been such a friggin’ disappointment to me I don’t even want to deal with it right now, just, ugh, kitten #8230;

Strand, you are absolutely, 100%, COMPLETELY wrong.

Again, look at LoL’s Dominion. You don’t see people just sitting at points doing nothing all game, both because it’s not worth it and because it’s boring.

That’s not my experience at all.

As an example, fighting a bunker elementalist as a ranged glass warrior is basically impossible as they simply out-heal everything I can throw at them. And that’s with the absolute highest damage possible with a ranged warrior.

Plus no poison (none at all, across the entire class), so that’s obviously not an option.

So… what’s the issue here? Does the elementalist simply have too much regen, does my warrior not have enough damage, does the warrior need an overhaul to get more anti-healing conditions, am I just not playing well enough (lol, gimme a break, there’s one interrupt/kb on rifle and that’s it)? Don’t even try to suggest I switch to a melee build, that is just hilariously bad against any kiting build.

At this point, it doesn’t really matter. I hate the way the PvP plays right now and I will not go back to it unless something changes dramatically. I try so hard to enjoy it and I just can’t, not with the current pace and certainly not with the current balance of power between classes and builds.

Parakeet.6083:

Well if a player sacrifices all his damage to be a defencive build, aka a bunker, what would be the point if his defencive build can’t even survive vs 1 person? The game would turn into nothing but glass cannons. Logicaly in order for defencive builds to be balanced it should take more than 1 person to kill them. Either that or it should take a very long time for the bunker to go down in a 1vs1.

Do you see the problem with your post here?

For the last time, bunkers only need to be able to hold a point longer than anyone else. They do NOT need to be able to hold it indefinitely until help arrives and they do NOT have to be able to win every 1v1 they get into (that would be the very definition of unbalanced).

Noctred.6732:

Zyrusticae.7245:

Stop that.

There is no justification for any build that requires two people to counter.

There is no justification. Please stop trying.

I can’t even imagine what goes on in your heads to justify “oh, hey, two people have to fight ONE GUY to counter him, that’s fair and balanced!”

It’s not really that simple.

Bunkers are ultimately killable 1v1, especially if you have steady access to poison. The reason you typically need 2+ people is because you want to take them down before they get support.

There’s a difference.

No, not really. They’re still too strong to take down in a reasonable amount of time 1v1, and any situation that demands a second player just to offset one is obviously far from fair or balanced in any way.

I don’t understand why AN didn’t just take the point system from LoL’s Dominion – 5 points every 10 seconds for sitting on a point defending it, 10 points for dying on a point to defend it (martyr bonus) would help tremendously in justifying point defense to players as opposed to the current method which really feels kitten.

Stop that.

There is no justification for any build that requires two people to counter.

There is no justification. Please stop trying.

I can’t even imagine what goes on in your heads to justify “oh, hey, two people have to fight ONE GUY to counter him, that’s fair and balanced!”

Colton.9460:

@ Fenixz “Anet have stated over and over again that it is intended for dps/brust oriented builds to destroy full all in tanking builds so the game can be DYNAMIC and interesting from the 1-st to the last secound.”

Yes they have said it repeatedly, each time they do it is dumb. It has been brought up several times if full on burst counters full on bunker then by proxy burst counters condition( it can kill them before they stack conditions), if the glass cannon burst can then counter other burst because of their low defenses and health then all that is left in the meta is burst.

If a bunker cannot stalemate a dps 1v1 then they are pointless, why would you have one if a thief can come burst them down in a few seconds?

No, every time THIS is repeated it is dumb.

This is how it’s SUPPOSED to work:

- Burst/glass cannon builds counter bunker builds by forcing them to either retreat from the point or die faster than any other build can manage
- Bunker builds can hold points longer than any other build, but sacrifice killing power to do so – they should be unable to kill even glass cannon builds (in fact, they shouldn’t be able to kill anybody)
- Balanced builds counter burst builds by having the damage mitigation to survive their burst while dishing out enough damage to defeat their squishy butts
- Condition builds are supposed to support any of the above by dramatically reducing the combat efficiency of the enemy while dealing decent sustained DPS, they are NOT supposed to be 1v1

Right now, thief mobility + burst effectively counters every other glass cannon build and thus makes them irrelevant, while bunker builds are so tough that even the highest DPS builds in the entire game can’t unseat them in a reasonable amount of time. This has resulted in the incredibly stale and boring meta we are now stuck with until AN does something drastic.

And that’s how it is.

Sigh.

This sort of rhetoric helps nothing.

While every class can be said to have OP elements (as in, elements that are complained about with some regularity), they are just that – elements, PARTS of a class.

No, not “everything is OP”. Just because every class gets complained about at some point does not mean that every class has several builds that people think are worth complaining about – rather, it’s usually one or two very specific builds that are complained about, while everything else is completely useless because of those particular builds. THAT IS A PROBLEM.

(Also, this is thread is already debunked because necromancers are never complained about.)

Again, there are a LOT of underpowered builds because of a huge number of lackluster skills in this game. By extension, those few builds that don’t fall into that range look very, very good in comparison, while some are just completely out of whack (BS thief, regen elementalist, bunker guardian). To deny this is to be a reductionist sleaseball. Please don’t be a sleaseball.

Actually, Starcraft is a good example in that 1v1 match-ups across all three races are fairly balanced, as in you have very close to a 50/50 chance of winning regardless of what race you’re playing and what race you’re facing if you’re equal in skill level to your opponent. Using units as the basis of comparison, however, is completely disingenuous as that’s just not the type of game it is (units in Starcraft being much closer to the various abilities you get in LoL or GW2). Remember, we’re talking 1v1 between players, not units.

Characters in LoL are reasonably balanced in 1v1 situations, assuming a similar gold level between opponents. The nature of the game, however, means that there are some character types that simply counter others very hard (for example, sending a melee character mid against a caster can backfire tremendously). The difference is that there are very few characters in LoL that are outright unviable, as opposed to GW2 where there are many builds across most classes that are completely useless in any situation. That needs to be fixed.

shaolin.9716:

Great video with solid arguments from Destiny.

People won’t follow a game they can’t enjoy or feel is unbalanced. I suspect 1v1 balance in an MMO is what MANY MMO players have been waiting for years. Duels are extremely popular in primarily PvE based games like WoW, so imagine in a game targeted to PvPers. When I played WoW there were constant requests for 1v1 arena. MMO doesn’t have to mean being forced to play in teams. It should mean that you can have good and balanced solo gameplay against a variety of other players in a virtual world, and be able to get recognized for the improvement of your skills in that virtual world. This alone would draw massive interest from casuals.

Yes please.

I don’t understand the aversion against 1v1 balance. Even in tPvP games, 1v1 happens a lot, and when one class soundly trumps another in those situations, that feels bad. Yes, you do want to keep team fights reasonably balanced, avoiding a situation where a class that’s decent in 1v1 is godlike in team fights because of AoE buffs, heals, and attacks and what-not, but it’s much easier to avoid those situations by starting off from a decent 1v1 balance and moving up from there.

For example, shouts could give a larger bonus to the casting character and a lesser bonus to allies, increasing their 1v1 viability while leaving their team fight potential unaffected. Same thing with auras. There shouldn’t be too many such interactions anyway – it gets very messy and very confusing when everyone on the team is casting some kind of AoE buff or debuff.

As it is, the game just feels bad in those 1v1 situations, where some classes are just soundly trounced by others, even regardless of what build they’re running (cough guardians cough thieves hackwheeze). That’s never fun, and it really calls into question the viability of certain classes when they can’t function on their own properly.

Anyways, this is kind of off-topic, so I’ll say that I support this thread wholeheartedly. The casual players must be engaged or there is no viewership, and without a viewership there is no e-sport. I mean, really, it’s bloody obvious, so why is this so hard for AN to grasp?

Most condition removal abilities are on 30s cooldowns.

It is completely unreasonable to expect people to “counter” condition damage builds with such abilities.

Braxxus.2904:

phaeris.7604:

Spvp is bs though, bunkers kill the game for everyone else.

Without those bunkers though everyone would downs-smash their keyboard to victory with thieves.

Seriously. Is there any other class in GW2 where people can and HAVE made videos of them literally downy-smashing their keyboard to victory? Bunkers put an end to this, which is much better than letting the most simple minded skill-less gameplay to have ever graced an MMO to be successful in tourneys.

TLDR: Bunkers are the necessary and lesser of two evils.

This is really bad and poor logic.

Kill both birds. Problem solved!

This is something I’m wondering about as well.

They really need to add it to reduce the instances of 500-100 matches. Obviously, it won’t get rid of them (and it likely won’t do anything for hot-join matches), but anything is better than nothing at all!

Fallacies. FALLACIES EVERYWHERE.

Let’s get one thing straight. Glass cannon is NOT > everything else. They’re supposed to be countered by balanced builds that can mitigate their damage while dishing out considerably more than the bunker builds. Unfortunately, the bunker builds are just so OP that they can kill glass cannons while being completely impervious to damage. That is indisputably wrong. Most glass cannons are so squishy that the advantage of greater damage is completely offset.

Secondly, thieves are just better at the glass cannon role than everyone else. This is a fact. That will undoubtedly change.

Thirdly, there IS such a thing as a middle ground. Everyone’s jumping to the ridiculous extreme that some kind of nerf means nerfing into the ground, which makes NO SENSE AT ALL. They can be brought down to a level where they are useful but NOT ridiculously OP like they are now.

Finally, EVERYONE SHOULD DIE 1v1. EVERYONE. NO EXCEPTIONS. In a capture point-style game, any class that can win 1v1s even 10% more often than not is absolutely unbalanced. The points are supposed to MOVE. They are NOT supposed to be STATIC. I shouldn’t even have to explain why it makes for terrible capture point gameplay if one player is able to hold a point almost indefinitely even when there are two players attempting to capture it!

You play bunker to hold points longer. That’s IT. You do NOT play bunker to win 1v1s more often, and certainly not to be able to hold off 1v2 situations with such ridiculous ease. I can’t even believe this argument is being made. You’re just proving how utterly OP you are with such assertions that you should be able to maintain such an advantage. Please, continue, if you really, really want to make yourself look completely out of touch with reality.

Most classes have some kind of “OP build”, but that doesn’t make the class itself OP, it’s just that particular build.

This thread in particular is specifically about bunker builds which are extremely boring, both to play as and to fight against. Also boring to watch, and if you want this game to be an e-sport, it HAS to be fun to watch!

They’re getting nerfed, make no mistake, but they’ll always have a place in the game regardless simply because they can hold a point longer than anyone else. Even if it’s just 5 seconds longer, that can make a huge difference, but right now it’s more like a minute longer than any balanced build. That’s wrong and bad and should never, ever happen.

The game needs build diversity. I shouldn’t even have to explain why, really.. The reasons are self-evident. And leaving things the way they are now is going to result in further build homogenization more than anything else. That’s bad. Fix, please!

Cogbyrn.7283:

a reliable way to damage high toughness builds in while using power

This is paradoxical. High toughness is specifically designed to counter power, and conditions are designed to counter toughness.

If you create a situation where Warriors can counter toughness stacking with just power, what happens in that situation where you sub out someone toughness stacking and sub in someone with a more balanced build or naturally low toughness?

Right. So we now have a situation where our condition damage is utter crap relative to many other classes and so we have no real counter to the problem of high-toughness builds.

Teulux.6732:

How about 15k 100 blades?

Funny how people think the thief is the only class to have high burst

Stop running kitten gear/builds and you will live longer vs glass cannons. Simple as that.

Almost EVERYTHING has a counter in this game. Learn them or quit crying. Simple as that

In other words….

L2P

LOL NO.

Every time someone says something like this I immediately know they’re talking out of their hindquarters.

Hundred Blades isn’t even REMOTELY comparable to this. It’s self-rooting, channeled, requires you put in some actual CC to land it (backstab is basically instantaneous), and doesn’t even work if you don’t use Frenzy first. Should I mention every form of warrior CC is predictable? You can see the bola coming. You can see the warrior charging at you. Can you see a thief shadow stepping on top of you and then hitting C&D anywhere near as easily as you can see a warrior coming at you? Not to mention they can apply CC instantaneously just by hitting the steal button!

No other class can match thief burst.

No other class can match thief burst.

This is a problem because it invalidates all other glass cannon builds by putting them down instantly, not to mention does its job better than all of them. It also makes the game not fun when you are instantly put into a disadvantage unless you’re specifically building a bunker spec character (in which case the thief was an idiot to target you and not one of your squishier teammates). The counter window is also too narrow to the point where it may as well not exist.

There are too many problems with this build and all the people defending it clearly have not the slightest clue how to build a fun PvP game. It needs to be fixed. Hell, if anything, Thief as a whole needs to be fixed… they can never really be balanced as long as stealth works the way it does.

Sucks to be you guys. My head looks just fine!

(Even the smallest Asura head looks enormous next to any human anyways…)

This wouldn’t be a problem if the helmets were actually modeled with spaces for our ears to poke out through.

Instead, they just clip through… and clipping ALWAYS looks bad! Fix, please!

Galdethriel.7524:

Personally, I really like that the Asura have male armours. I get sick of playing every game, with few exceptions, where because I want to play a female character I’ll get forced to wear armour that’s skimpy to the point of impossibility. Even some armour sets in GW2 suffers from it, but playing an Asura has given a real breath of fresh air. It just feels so much fairer – I don’t have to put up with the game constantly reminding me that a character being female means it’s a sex object to oogle at.

That being said, I wouldn’t be against giving people the choice of having more girly-looking gear. In an ideal world, I’d have all the female armour available for male characters and all the male armour available for female characters, which would at least double the number of armours available. And it would be true equality between the genders, too. Why shouldn’t a woman be allowed to be clad from head to toe? Why shouldn’t a man be allowed to run around in a miniskirt? Like I said, GW2 is definitely better than most for making nice looking gear for both genders, but there’s still a few areas where it could be worked on.

Also, as for the Asura females showing their chests – chests aren’t bad. We’ve just all been conditioned to view them as being unacceptable… at least, when it’s a woman. Asura don’t have that distinction, so there’s no reason for them to have become similarly conditioned. And just personally, and not to sound arrogant but I find the notion of forcing them to cover their chests when it makes zero difference offencive; it’s kind of reinforcing that no matter how illogical it is, no matter how little difference it makes, society’s views must be adhered to. ‘Cause it’s a woman.

I’m in no way saying that I’d like all female characters to go topless; it’d bother me as much as the next player. But there’s little point in forcing our own gender biases onto a fictional species for which it makes absolutely no sense, and so serves only to reinforce messages we’re already getting drilled into our heads on a day to day basis in our normal lives.

So overall: more girly armours, yes! Armour free of gender requirements, yes! Switching out/changing armours to be more girly, hell no!

I am quoting this entire post because I agree with all of it.

More variety would be nice, but not at the expense of what we already have. And I, for one, am VERY happy that female Asura aren’t held to the same (absurd) standards that other races’ females are. The heavy armors that expose her chest are my favorite pieces by far specifically for that reason.

Angry Flying Squirrel.3041:

I don’t think you understand what your saying.

By definition a bunker build will be the most tanky build in the game. If a burst Spec can take one down fast, what is going to happen to all other spec? Any other non bunker build is going to have less defense than an bunker build so a Burst Spec is going to kill them even faster. The meta will end up everyone running a burst spec.

No, that’s not how it works at all.

The point is bunker builds should not have the damage to kill anyone if they’re going to be nearly unkillable. Their entire purpose is to hold a point and keep people from claiming it as long as possible, not to actually defeat anyone who arrives (that would be OP, and it is why retaliation was so heavily nerfed for that particular trait – note that they STILL have plenty of other sources of retaliation in the game).

Sustained damage builds are going to have something to counter quickness (i.e. “endure pain” for warriors, “Elixir S” for engineers, “mist form” for elementalists, and so on) and then dish out the pain. Glass cannon builds simply cannot take much damage before going down, whereas sustained damage builds can. The difference is they can actually deal the damage where bunker builds cannot (they’re not supposed to).

Burst builds are simply not viable in the game as it is, because they only counter other burst builds. If everyone where to roll a sustained damage build with at least one “oh snap!” button, these burst builds would be completely nonviable. That’s kind of a problem.

The only reason people roll so many burst builds today is because, well, so many people roll so many burst builds. If the meta changed, these builds would serve no purpose at all. That is a problem.

Get the drift?

HAhahahahahahaaa! Oh, man, that is HILARIOUS! There are people seriously arguing that there’s no point to balancing around COMBAT, which is at least 80% of the game in control point matches? OH MY GOODNESS!

Okay, seriously, if you’re seriously going to argue like that, just please do us all a favor and leave. There is absolutely no point to arguing from a position of “balance is impossible!” when the goal is absolutely to balance things to the point where the game can legitimately be considered an “e-sport”.

Thedenofsin.7340:

Because it’s not that way. A properly specc’ed conditionmancer will drop a bunker guardian 1v1. It will just may take a very long time, and will definitely give the opposing team enough time to supply reinforcements.

In other words… there is no real counter?

Because that’s what it sounds like to me.

I still fail to see how a situation that necessitates two players in order to counter one player is in any way fair or balanced.