Guild Wars 2

Jana.6831:

ETA: And D/D condi is probably not the playstyle you were looking for.

what does ETA stand for in this case btw? I usually associate it with “Estimated time of arrival”. Also, I can agree that the majority of the play style is probably not what he/she is going to be looking for, which is why I didn’t bring it up initially. There is finesse to it, and a few key moments where switching to “conventional” d/d power style attacks will be what you need to do to secure the kill/victory, so I decided to put it out there for him/her to judge for themselves.

What is this? Good/Constructive content in the gw2 pvp forums? Never!

In all seriousness, good job on this, as Yannir mentioned though, you may want to look at upping your production quality a bit.

Pifil.5193:

It would explain the huge win streaks some high MMR players get, the huge lose streaks low MMR players get and also the almost as frustrating win a pip, lose a pip, win a pip, lose a pip, win a pip, lose a pip pattern that average MMR players get. Slowly bobbing your way to Ruby like flotsam bobbing towards the beach.

And from the conclusions that you’ve laid out (accurately, from my own observations), the match making is doing its job: getting good players out of the beginning leagues faster…. for a time. I think the flaw in the current system is that it doesn’t really have a concept of “early season volatility” where it should have a formula to separate the better players quicker, but after it has done so, it needs to start prioritizing fair matchups. As it stands now, it seems as though it’s just a constant snowball effect for players on the extreme sides of mmr.

MintyRequiem.4958:

Edit: Are there any condi d/d builds that are still viable perhaps? Thinking about it based on what you said, alemfi. Trying to keep my dream alive haha

I have been climbing the ranked league primarily on a condition (it’s more of a hybrid with a focus on condition. I started pvping this season maybe…. 2 weeks ago? Current “credentials” to its viability are 65%+ winrate over 81 games right now, from amber to mid ruby. So I can’t claim that it’s a god build that will allow you to win 90% of your games like I’ve seen some people’s win streaks (although to be fair, I started off with a 6 game lose streak before changing my build to one that focused more on killing because I noticed how bad both my team and allies were).

The build was (re)inspired by the knowledge that they reverted back energy sigil from granting vigor back to 25% which is (imo) balanced compared to what it was at 50% endurance regen. The idea is to keep up the 10% condition damage bonus from the daredevil trait, and the 15% power/condition damage bonus through constant ability use (your dodges are basically attack abilities now). And the kicker is…. you are constantly evading. There is downtime between evade skills, particularly with d/d 3 where you can be vulnerable to burst, but I figure if I’m fighting opponents that are consistently good enough to pull off burst between the evade frames, there skill was probably higher than mine anyways and I’d lose with a different build regardless. Otherwise it’s all about buildwars2. Necros are particularly easy to wreck but you should basically be able to win against anything that doesn’t spec high for retaliation uptime and power. If you are on NA ping me and I can show you the build and tell you more about how it works. If I have time, I might be able to make a recording.

If you are planning to make a d/d power is just going to be a strictly worse d/p build.
Looking at the difference between the weapons, you have:
3: D/D, a condi applying low damage + evade skill vs. D/P engage/blind+relatively high dps skill on . d/p wins here for power, only real advantage is the evade frames.
4: D/D, is basically a waste of initiative. D/P: interrupt key skills (heals long channesl etc.)
5: D/D: the only real “advantage” that D/D offers, cheaper and more damage form of stealth (but can be blocked/evaded etc.) compared to D/P which grants a smoke field + blinds.

You CAN play with d/d as a power build, but you are simply going to be gimping yourself.

If you want to play d/d you should really try to think about what the kit offers, and how to maximize it. (hint: the 3 skill can be really good. Just not in a power build)

Septentriones.2319:

I win I get one pip, win 3 matches I one more pip for the victory as win streak. If I lose I lose pips and if I’m on a losing streak I get 2 pips on my next win.
….. It’s annoying when the whole system is a giant grind to get pips and you can lose them as fast (often faster) than you win them due to poor matchmaking

Assuming you aim for ~50% win rate, that’s not how math work. You are given bonus pips for win streaks, so over a large sample size of games, even if you have the same amount of wins as losses, you’ll have a net gain of pips. You won’t lose them faster unless you tilt and lose games you should have won.

That’s different. losing the mid fight, might put you back by 50 points, but with this system in place, the side that lost is now “incentivized” to just give up immediately.

terrible idea. People will start throwing matches after the first mid-fight.

I’m really curious as to why they don’t at least reextend queing to custom arenas…

They’ve explained their new match making algorithm.

I would need to track down the source, but the summary is:

- They first find players around your mmr, and create a group.
- They then find another group that is close enough to your groups mmr and put them together.

This leads to the situation above. From my personal experience, it’s also led to the frequent grouping up of the same player/same team.

I recall they used to have a more shuffled approach when match making, which works well for soloq, but alas.

Supposedly they will be adding other elite specializations that should in theory alleviate this issue you are seeing with the elite specialization power creep. The base class may be “weaker”, but with a slottable elite specialization it will give a bit of diversification and choice. I would not agree with the idea of trying to shoe horn gw1’s duo class system into gw2. They are simply two different games, built on different foundations. For example, Anything/Thief could basically become broken, being able to take advantage of stealth/mobility without the limitations built into the thief class that the stealth mechanic is balanced around. Necros being able to actually get out of a fight for example.

The video was nice though. Beats a lot of the senseless commentary and critique on these forums.

shion.2084:

Are you sure Yasi, I had thought I recalled someone saying that if you team with someone you all are given the highest MMR of the best player (everyone in the group that queued together).

What you stated was indeed the approach they announced to have taken post season 1. I have been away since the middle of season 1 though so I do not know if anything has changed from their stance. IMO, it sounded like a sloppy way of handling the problem, and they should just normalize and remove lower end outliers in a queued group that lie outside of an expected standard deviation.

Lexander.4579:

and there are more examples now and in the past, for example when dagger 4 was actually a real skill you could simply bounce it between zerk-geared gankers and drop them like flies punishing them for poor positioning, what then? thief is spammer

I apparently never played thief when dagger 4 was a real skill. Please tell me more. Did it actually used to do damage? I pretty much assume the skill isn’t actually there. (I’ll use it to slow down someone approaching a point I am in the process of capturing, but that’s basically it.)

PS. I really think competitive gw2 could use a daily skill/trait discussion thread where the community can give feedback on a skill or trait (synergies, use cases, etc.). A lot of abilities are “vestigial” ( I just really wanted to use that word ), and are often just straight up not very good. Thief Dagger 4 is one of many.

What division are you? If you are soloq-ing in a low division where your team/opposing team are observed to be just really below your skill level, but you can’t win despite this, try to play a build that you can snowball/steamroll with. These builds might not actually be GOOD, they might be more gimmicks if anything, but if you can say take out 3 of the enemy team yourself, than HOPEFULLY your allies can win their fights.

(My experience after losing my first 6 games and determining I needed to just get out of amber division after not playing since the first half of season 1.)

Your post reminded me of another aspect that made thieves redundant, which was that decapping has become less than viable when under the current meta, nearly all the points are constantly contested/under watch by builds who’s time to kill is way too long. Each Mesmer can basically have coverage over two points for 60/72 seconds with portal, as long as one is not currently contested. It’s how I was often able to win playing bunker mesmer prior to HoT, now it’s just full blown ridiculous/way too powerful team utility.

Just thought I’d solicit people’s perspectives on what is currently happening in their sphere of PvP, and why?

My personal experiences are fairly inline with the “meta”, although I am simply in Emerald Division, playing only the daily 3 games per day (getting 2 pips per win for the last 3+ wins has been nice though), where teams are often composed of primarily of MallyxHeralds, ChronoBunkers, Tempests (~60+%), and a splashing of Reapers and Scrappers (~25%), a few DragonHunters and Druids (~10%), and barely and Thieves or Warriors (~5%).

As to what caused this particular distribution; while I do think that Chronomancer Bunkers make the game not fun to watch, and warp the meta in their own way (3 point playstyle is very possible with them due to portals and stall potential), they are not the primary offender in terms of what is limiting class diversity.

This honor goes to the MallyxHerald. It’s mace auto attack alone is near broken enough to limit build diversity. Remember when Anet FIRST announced torment on auto attack for Mesmer? Well, there was a HUGE outcry because people knew how strong torment could be. Turns out Mesmer’s auto attack speed was simply too slow to actually be a problem. This is NOT the case for Revenant Mace, which can apply those high torment stacks from auto attack alone.

MallyxHerald ALONE makes it so that builds that can not handle the reapplication of all these conditions are forced out of the meta. Tempest: DiamondSKin. MallyxHerald: Readily Accessible Resistance. ChronoBunker: Condition Removal on Shatter, as well as evading a ridiculous amount.

This post came out a lot harsher against the MallyxHerald than I wanted it to be… Was intending to just analyze what I’m seeing in the meta, and give my insights onto why it’s occurring. Regardless, I’d like to see what other people are experiencing and hear about why they think it’s occurring.

Deimos Tel Arin.7391:

its called annihilation mode.

you wipe the enemy team or get wiped, then move on.

Prior to people complaining about Courtyard not being what they wanted, I was unfamiliar with the term Annihilation referencing a PVP mode. Not sure if people just got caught up in the idea of Team Death Match, that it was just parroted around without people actually knowing what they were asking for.

Personally I do think that an Annihilation mode (probably best of 3 or 5) would have been a preferable mode to Team Death Match (Where it often becomes a snowball fest in unorganized play, in organized play, I found the one round that I got that was organized vs organized, it became a game of securing one more kill than your opponent, and then running away until time out, fun times).

I imagine he might be taking a hiatus if he’s not playing anymore. He was motivated enough to make this post before leagues. Now that leagues are making the lack of this feature a bigger problem, I wouldn’t be surprised that people just quit. I’m fortunate enough to be a casual solo/duo-queuer, so my bad queue times are generally 4+ minutes, don’t think I’ve actually seen more than 8 minutes, but I still am a strong advocate of the return of the ability to queue outside of the mists.

Honestly, I just don’t understand why anet leaves these issues hanging; they are basically just multiplying their problems for the player base. By adding leagues without this we are seeing 1-2 hour queues, when queues around 20 minutes were already considered ridiculously long before leagues.

Sure, they gave us a dismiss button. They still force us to hit that button. Like, What? Why would I ever want to leave that window up anyways? To look at how many people haven’t accepted yet?

Felt like this needed a bump.

With Chronomancer Bunker being scrutinized a lot more, I’ve been curious about Anet’s balance philosophy. Something that had come up as a topic in another popular competitive game, Hearthstone, is that there is actually a game balance design philosophy on how having “Bad Cards” exist is actually a good thing for the game, the gist of the idea is it serves as a learning tool for players to judge what cards are better than others.

I’m wondering if that is a philosophy that is applied to the various skills/traits available in gw2. This thought primarily occurred to me when analyzing jus how ridiculously “over-statted” Well of Precognition is. On a base 45 second cooldown, you get 3 sec aoe evade, stunbreak, ethereal field, 30 endurance gain, and 1sec stability. While you can’t strictly compare skills across classes, as their are many more factors to account for, the differences in power between this skill, and any parallel skills is so huge that I think the comparison can highlight a few issues.

One such skill that serves a similar purpose is the Necromancer’s Well of Darkness

This skill comes with a base 50 second cd, applies pulsing blind to foes that are in it, provides a dark field, and has a duration of 5 seconds.

So, for an INCREASE of 5 seconds of cooldown, you get a whopping 2 seconds of well duration, and you get conditional safety from attacks where counterplay includes, multihitting attacks that proc damage more than once per second, or simply WALKING OUT of the well, and attacking from range. In my personal opinion you Ethereal field > Dark Field, but let’s just say they are equal. In addition, you get all the other benefits well of precog gives.

My other skill I used as comparison was an invulnerabilty safety skill. I’ll quote/paraphrase myself here from another post:

Compare this to Guardians Renewed Focus (http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Renewed_Focus) for example, which is a personal invulnerability (not group), prevents capture point(lose point capture if no one else is on your team), channeled (can’t attack), and 90 sec cd (x2 of 45 secs). For those costs, you can get some trait benefits, and you replenish your virtues.

Renewed Focus is still an OKAY skill, and is still used in some builds along with the shout and trap. In comparison, the necromancer’s well of darkness is straight up NOT used… at all. This is because it is clearly a bad skill.

This isn’t a thread about nerfing Well of Precognition (although it does need a nerf). This is a thread wondering about what Anet’s design philosophy is in regards to skills that are considered bad/useless. We already see from the class vs racial skills, that racial skills are heavily understatted, and are simply there for flavor. What about class skills that are performing extremely poorly?

While I am mostly interested in Anet’s stance, I am also interested in the pvp communities opinion regarding this aspect of balance.

lol, I think I remember bringing up a similar idea/post, but it was stylized more in a 1v1 style matchup (think hearthstone matches, where you could bring 5 decks, 2 of which would get knocked out by bans, so you’d bring 5 classes, 2 getting knocked out by bans, best of 5 in such a scenario) about demonstrating how classes interacted against each other, fights that stalemate over 5+ minutes potentially leading into a knockout of both players class.

Anyways, regarding the description of the build phase: Have you looked at the Mystic Builds Tournments/Posts: I actually have only watched one of their tournaments, but it sounds like something close to what they do. (From what I recall, their setup is also a 1v1 format).

I would like it to return just for the sake of queuing with my friends who have lost all interest in conquest after it was the only game mode for 3 years, and are only willing to do stronghold…

Mogar.9216:

alemfi.5107:

Hmm… I feel like I need to work on presenting controversial information to stir up conversation.

So (in my opinion), core bunker mesmer was strong prior to HOT due to the following traits:
Restorative Illusions : Condition removal on shatter, and heals.

Bountiful Disillusionment : Easy Access to stability for stomps among other boons.

Deceptive Evasion : Additional Shatter Fuel, adds to visual noise, additional condi pressure, fueled by endurance replenishment sigils and runes. This is not needed in Chronomancer, as variations of the chronomancer bunker allow you to keep illusion count up through other means, as well as illusion count not being completely necessary for the survivability of this build.

Bountiful Disillusionment and Restorative Illusions are two VERY powerful traits shared among the two builds. Was I being selfish by pointing out only stuff exclusive to the chronomancer setup? Possibly. Probably.

Perhaps Restorative Illusions needs to be weaker when shattering without a single clone up. Like no condi removal, or the heal should be significantly weaker.

Bountiful Disillusionment also does not seem to have any scaling based on illusion presence. Is this something that should be adjusted?

At the end of the day, the entire package of Chronomancer Bunker is “too much”, but I hope it can be adjusted without gutting the core mesmer.

you want to nerf 3 abilities that was there pre hot and not touch any of the chrono stuff ..

Read the entire post. I never said I wanted to nerf those. Those were just things I threw up there in addition for consideration (stir up controversy). Read the original post on what I thought made Chrono too strong.

rchu.8945:

Why is mesmer community so self-defeating? This is like the post trait revamp patch back in June when Mesmers openly suggested nerfs to themselves and guess what happened? Anet nerfed traits that didnt need nerfs and over nerf on others.

I’m not actually a mesmer main, and I’d actually like for anet to NOT touch any of the core stuff, but stating what chronomancer stuff was OP apparently does not bring any discussion about whether or not those aspects are actually op. I personally think well of precog is WAY too powerful (see Renewed focus comparison). Just trying to promote active discussion on what we think makes chrono bunker so powerful so that the community as a whole comes to a conclusion on what parts are broken and HOPEFULLY anet can take note and balance accordingly.

Hmm… I feel like I need to work on presenting controversial information to stir up conversation.

So (in my opinion), core bunker mesmer was strong prior to HOT due to the following traits:
Restorative Illusions : Condition removal on shatter, and heals.

Bountiful Disillusionment : Easy Access to stability for stomps among other boons.

Deceptive Evasion : Additional Shatter Fuel, adds to visual noise, additional condi pressure, fueled by endurance replenishment sigils and runes. This is not needed in Chronomancer, as variations of the chronomancer bunker allow you to keep illusion count up through other means, as well as illusion count not being completely necessary for the survivability of this build.

Bountiful Disillusionment and Restorative Illusions are two VERY powerful traits shared among the two builds. Was I being selfish by pointing out only stuff exclusive to the chronomancer setup? Possibly. Probably.

Perhaps Restorative Illusions needs to be weaker when shattering without a single clone up. Like no condi removal, or the heal should be significantly weaker.

Bountiful Disillusionment also does not seem to have any scaling based on illusion presence. Is this something that should be adjusted?

At the end of the day, the entire package of Chronomancer Bunker is “too much”, but I hope it can be adjusted without gutting the core mesmer.

Proof: http://intothemists.com/guides/6201-cant_catch_me_gingerbread_mesmer
(I replaced decoy with Blink shortly after making the post/guide)

This was a build that I averaged a 55+% win rate, both pre and post heart-of-thorns, basically making use (/abusing) the evades provided by the dodge action to contest a point. With blink and portal, it provided you insane mobility, allowing you to basically contest any point of your choosing, easily sustaining against an average of two to three people depending on the enemies build.

The intent of this post is to highlight the difference between this core mesmer bunker, which never particularly took off into meta, and remained a personal homebrew favorite, versus the Chronobunker that we are seeing so prevalently.

Chronomancer::
+ Well of Precognition: 3 sec aoe evade, stunbreak, ethereal field, 30 endurance gain, 1s stability, 45 sec cd – alacrity benefits. (https://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Well_of_Precognition)

This skill is, quite frankly, overstatted* (overpowered). Compare this to Guardians Renewed Focus (http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Renewed_Focus) for example, which is a personal invulnerability, prevents capture point, channeled, and 90 sec cd. For those benefits, you can get some trait benefits, and you replenish your virtues. It’s not a 1:1 comparison, as you can’t do that across classes, but just look at the huge difference those two skills provide

+ Echo of Memory -> Deja vu: I still need to play with chronomancer more to fully understand how this works, since I’ve still primarily been playing my core spec, but the amount of block uptime this skill seems to provide from the description is insane; 4.5 seconds of CHANNELED block (vs. block one attack and counter) from one skill alone with a 30 second internal cd, summon a phantasm after fully channeling.

+ Continuum Split: Let’s give you an option to double cast any skills you want every 90 (- aclacrity benefits) seconds.

What Chrono “Loses”:
- Some Mobility: No real slots for Blink AND Portal. This is slightly alleviated by perma +25% movespeed.

- Glamour AoE Resistance/Superspeed: Runes of resistance alleviates resistance loss. And you don’t really need resistance when you can condi cleanse out the wazoo with shatters.

- Personal evades: Alleviated by AOE Evade with cd reduction.

Just wanted to post my insight into just WHY Chronomancer is so powerful, as someone who played bunker mesmer pre HOT

Mostly a psa since now can’t do custom arenas unless the stat sites I use filter out those matches, since I don’t care at all about those stats.

TheGuy.3568:

Until i find an elite spec that really challenges my core Mesmer or Engineer I do not see a point in comparison. The elites are shiny and new but as you learn the mechanics they are essentially not much stronger or weaker than all the builds in the ether. In fact pvp (for me at least) has gotten more face roll and so many players play the same exact builds. too easy to counter. Not saying their aren’t balance issues it just seems over blown to me at this point.

Just wanted to say “Yay, another core mesmer practitioner!”.

There are core builds that are competitive with elite specs. The elite specs are mostly flashy and new. There are a few powerful outliers.

gricks.1897:

In some cases, yes, this is true.

Necro/Reaper – Both are still viable.
DH/Guardian – Bunker guard is still valid, MediBurst is still valid
Scrapper/Engie – I still love running my Condi Engi over Scrapper in PvP
Chrono/Mesmer – This is debatable, I think it mostly is determined on playstyle. Chrono can make it easier, but standard Mesmer can still work just fine.
Daredevil/Theif – I honestly have not noticed a difference between these two. The only way I know the difference is the third dodge. Which is just a third dodge…
Berzerker/Warrior – This is the biggest one I see the Elite Spec being better than the base warrior, as it really seems to be, both from facing and playing.
Tempest/Ele- Both are still glass cannons, Tempest is just more flashy. I really think Tempest shines the most in PvE.

Honestly, for the most part, the Elites really just do add a different play style over power. I have been doing PvP nightly and now that I am used to what the Elites do, its just like playing any other classes. Just know the signature thing that those elites do and your fine.

I ALMOST agree with your sentiment. ALMOST. My personal observations: Core Ele never really shined as Fresh Air, Tempest allows it to, Core Ele still probably better with D/D Cele, but that role is replaced by a lot of the other more sustain builds brought by HoT. Warrior viability had been low in the last meta, Berserker wasn’t going to change that THAT much, with a small nudge, they can both be viable though. For me Berserker fills out kitten in my CC oriented Warrior, and I’ve replaced Discipline, and found reasonable success with it after a few iterations, there are good and bad matchups, the problem is the bad matchups include Reapers and, oddly, Dragon Hunters (in theory this one should be a good matchup, I might just be bad).

Daredevil, once the community realizes that to play daredevil well, they need to throw away what they knew about core thief, and embrace broken mechanics, it will distinguish itself as a class.

The rest is relatively agreeable. My own personal core mesmer build is greatly different from Chronomancer and standard core.

MithranArkanere.8957:

And I though I was paranoid for thinking red won more often.

You should also check the code that determines who gets the NPC kill in Forest, or make it so the NPC gets downed and you actually have to finish it, because I swear I see red taking the kill most of the time when players of both teams are fighting by them.

If I was right about the first thing, I could also be right about the second.

Actually you were incorrect. It was blue team that has the higher chance of winning. And that was because of how mmr distributed the teams.

mikey.5380:

Itsa a cute pet theory(nice Source), but Saiyan’s comment does not accord with axiomatic probability or formal statistical methods.

Saiyan.1704:

…the Strong Law of Large Numbers…

Almost, but actually totally irrelevant. Better luck next guess. This is a (kinda) rare case where statistical inference can be performed by EXACT testing…no approximation required, so behavior at the limit (dealt with by the LLN) is irrelevant.

The FORMAL result supports the OP’s claim; it is significant at a p value < 0.00001… in other words, there is less than a 1 in 100,000 chance the test has yielded a false positive
(wanna verify? H-naught: categorical variables are independent).

But this takes the terms of data descriptions to be appropriate…hint: they are not and there’s nothing surprising in this data……… garbage in garbage out, OP is abusing statistics

Rants at OP that he is wrong. Looks Below.

Evan Lesh.3295:

It’s cool the community has the tools to find things like this. We saw the same thing and updated the matchmaking to remove the color bias so metrics were prettier. There will always be a best and worst player in the match and we can never make perfectly even teams, but we can at least make sure the best player doesn’t always end up on the same team color

Dev comes in, follows up with investigation, fixes Issue. Thanks Evan for looking into this!

Brief Anecdote, I activated gw2pvp for myself when it popped up and then immediately proceeded to go on a ten game losing streak. Most recently I’ve gotten back into my normal trend of games, but my Blue team win ratio is definitely better than my Red teams, by a small margin of 5%. Still working on bringing my gw2pvp win ratio to match my overall winratio.

The tech was indeed in place for a good amount of time, and from my recollection, only removed when they added the map voting system. Speculation from the community was that queuing outside of the mists was removed because players might miss the accept/voting prompts in between loading screens. This was not an official statement from Anet, but in regards to that concern, the easy “bandaid” fix is to do what they are essentially doing now, un-queuing the group when they switch out of a zone. Currently, While remaining in the mists, going to either character select screen or joining the rest of your group in their shard will unqueue you. Just make it so that if you pve in a map, then queue up, unqueue the group. While this may get annoying, this is MUCH less annoying than not being to queue up outside of the mists at all.

Pizz.3698:

Oh come on, Warrior has been part of every meta since the game came out. For the first month in 3 years its not overpowered and you complain. It’s still early, a lot of the builds haven’t been discovered yet and the meta isnt solidified.

Not a warrior main, but there was DEFINITELY a distinct period where warriors were bottom of the barrel before this time, so saying it is the first time in 3 years is bull kitten. Before the Berserker stance changes and after nerfs to some warrior pvp dps, warriors were basically walking focus targets. Then Anet overcompensated buffing them (Healing Signet, Berserker stance, etc.) and warriors were on top, slowly riding the nerf wave down.

problem with 1v1 is bunker vs bunker. It is possible that people can impose rules/formats to alleviate the process. A community event that I’d like to do is a round robin style tournament, where each match between two players is a best of 3 class elimination style, if a match takes longer than some time between 5-10 minutes, that match is considered a tie between the 2, neither side gets points. After the matches are done, you are paired with the next opponent. Since point acquisition is now a thing, it could discourage bunker builds in a prisoners dilemma style scenario.

At the end of the day though, MMO’s in general are not balanced around 1v1, nor should they be. It would be a nice way to highlight good/bad matchups for popular builds though.

Turai Ossa is arguably the best one. Nikka dies WAY too easily, Svaard is okay.

CondiDevil is definitely the way to go now. While on paper, Bound is stronger than impaling dagger, the implementation just doesn’t work. The reason is Lotus training allows you to dodge INTO your opponent to gain the benefit, while Bound requires you to dodge and land ON your opponent. In addition, the evade attack skill for the weaponset Dagger/Dagger allows you to Evade while Engaging your opponent, as opposed to disengaging, and is not a 2 part clunky evade like s/d, or a root like s/p. Staff Vault just costs a lot, and suffers similar issues to bound.

I’ve seen a lot of variations on CondiDevil, yours is definitely more offense focused, and less focused on the sustainability of your resources. If you were to fight a similar build focused more on the replenishment of initiative and energy, your build would probably lose. However, as an example, my personal variation has effectively zero mobility, giving up one of the strongest aspects of thief.

Refuge is definitely one of the things you could replace for either the replinishment of initiative or endurance. There is a lot of cleave floating around so rezzes are a LOT more situational, and stealth engage does nothing for condi.

It’s been a while since I looked at the UI for it, as I was stuck on how to unlock it as well. Is it somewhere in the UI? NPC interaction?

babazhook.6805:

alemfi.5107:

Shhhhh… trying to keep this type of build as a sleeper build!

Regardless, welcome to the Condi-Daredevil club! This is a club for those thieves who have discovered the beauty of the Condi-Evade daredevils, as opposed holding on to their sinking power-based spike builds of old.

/EndRolePlayToDiscussWhyThisBuildWorks

The strength of this build is its ridiculous Defense/Offense up time. You are able to attack while evading.

You were able to appreciate that Lotus Training is Superior to Bounding Dodger, because of its ease of use. Lotus training allows you to dodge into the opponent to inflict damage, while Bounding Dodger requires to land on your target.

Deadly Blossom is also a better evade-attack as opposed to its power based builds for similar reasons. Vault doesn’t provide enough evade coverage and costs too much. Pistol Whip roots you. Flanking/Larcenous Strike is clunky because of its 2-chain nature. Shadow Shot is fine, but is not for daredevil since it is a blind and not evades, and thus loses synergy.

/ResumeRolePlay

As with other clubs, the first rule of Condi-Daredevil Club is… Don’t talk about Condi-Daredevil Club!

Have fun build Testing!

yeah I got qq’ed for “spamming 3”. Those that die to it do not seem to understand in a d/d build thats how you get your bleeds on. Added to the that this notion that hitting 2 different buttons is somehow more skilful then hitting one is rather asinine. It takes no more skill to hit a 1 five times on my keyboard or a 1 2 and 3 in sequence.

Haha, the verbal qq while playing this type of build… since California is going through a drought so I find it really helpful; I make sure to separate the salt from the tears into neat little mailable packets.

This build takes a different type of skill set than what other people may be used to. It’s more about resource management (endurance and initiative), rather than “timing” abilities for use at the right time. It will definitely appear to be super cheesy though… because it is. And it’s delicious.

Shhhhh… trying to keep this type of build as a sleeper build!

Regardless, welcome to the Condi-Daredevil club! This is a club for those thieves who have discovered the beauty of the Condi-Evade daredevils, as opposed holding on to their sinking power-based spike builds of old.

/EndRolePlayToDiscussWhyThisBuildWorks

The strength of this build is its ridiculous Defense/Offense up time. You are able to attack while evading.

You were able to appreciate that Lotus Training is Superior to Bounding Dodger, because of its ease of use. Lotus training allows you to dodge into the opponent to inflict damage, while Bounding Dodger requires to land on your target.

Deadly Blossom is also a better evade-attack as opposed to its power based builds for similar reasons. Vault doesn’t provide enough evade coverage and costs too much. Pistol Whip roots you. Flanking/Larcenous Strike is clunky because of its 2-chain nature. Shadow Shot is fine, but is not for daredevil since it is a blind and not evades, and thus loses synergy.

/ResumeRolePlay

As with other clubs, the first rule of Condi-Daredevil Club is… Don’t talk about Condi-Daredevil Club!

Have fun build Testing!

So unless my sense of time is completely out of whack…. I feel like the sigil isn’t properly giving the full 2 stacks of quickness….. maybe I’m wrong though.

Tricare.2946:

Synosius.9876:

Tricare.2946:

They should go away.

You shouldn’t be able to instantly finish a new reward track, that other people have to work for.

because we some how got them without playing spvp?

Because I got all my WvW boosters without playing?

Login, buy WvW experience potion for daily with laurels. It’s basically what I do.

Going by what is specifically outlined in the blogpost, most likely not. The concern appears to be that people who have stockpiled wvw liquid experience will be able to progress their masteries instantly giving them a wvw advantage over other players who have not stockpiled these rewards.

With pvp, where everything is normalized/balanced competitively, the only thing you can do with the pvp reward potions is get your rewards quicker. You could have spent them now to get OTHER rewards quicker. IMO, not particularly any benefit over other players, likely no need for them to convert these potions into boosters.

where did they talk about a build-saving feature? o_o

nearlight.3064:

I’ve been tempted to try it before many times, but I don’t want to kitten people off with my crazy off-meta builds.

Maybe after the expansion hits I’ll give it a go.

Don’t be afraid! I was playing a home brew mesmer build this past weekend (can be found at: http://intothemists.com/guides/6201-cant_catch_me_gingerbread_mesmer replace decoy with blink), and our team managed to take second place. Last map was courtyard and I think if I remembered to swap leeching sigils for doom sigils, we would have had a good chance at winning it (sooooo many missed stomps because of easy rezzes).

As long as you coordinate with your pug group about what you plan to do and what makes your build work, and if your group is receptive, you should be able to make something work out and have a good time!

Funny enough that you are posting about this. I was actually wondering about this prior to this past week(end), where I registered and participated in the last one, after Olrun posted in these forums soliciting ideas and suggestions about Disconnect Rules. It was quite a lot of fun, but only 11 teams participated leaving five byes for a 16 team tournament. Minimum team limit according to the rules suggests 8; so I am not actually sure if 11 is considered high or low for PugQuest.

Either way though, I endorse the idea of bringing more attention to these tournaments, as well as increased participation.

Everyone gets losing streaks sometimes. Just had one yesterday 5 losses in a row, then proceeded to win 3/4 of the following matches with the loss being 474-500. Don’t have a recording, but from what it looked like, our team rushed lord “too early” (perhaps it was the best/only window), killed it without the necessary 350+, with me attempting to hold our caps.

During Beta, it’s probably due to a lot more people playing during that “special” weekend window. Larger pool of players = better matches.

So these tournaments are still happening? I was gone for quite a while and couldn’t really find too much information on this tournament. Disconnect rules seem reasonable.

Aguri.2896:

Sounds less broken than what I am experiencing.. my pets are perma stowed all of the sudden after the recent patch.

Just happened to me. A friend of mine had his disappear the day before.

Stuck in Temple of the Silent Storm.

Nike.2631:

Evan Lesh.3295:

Your MMR is still volatile since you haven’t played many matches. The more you play, the better matchmaking will become for you. Also remember that ranked and unranked have separate MMRs so if you decide to jump into Ranked when you hit 20, you will have a similar experience until you adjust for that new pool of players.

Question about MMR and that volatility — is MMR tracked per account, per profession, or per character? Because while I have a fair bit of play time in sPvP and map awareness is a transferable skill, I’m much more comfortable and practiced with some professions over others… I think it’d be a courtesy to the people playing with me while I’m flailing around like a newbie on my Elementalist if I was being matched with a more sedate grade of players than when I’m rocking one of my Guardians.

It has been answered before, however characters keep track of their own MMR, as well as having an account based MMR. Exactly how these two are weighted has not been disclosed. Hearing that there is MMR for ranked and unranked is news to me now though.