I wonder if it would work well with staff/lightning hammer. An extra static field and a knockback would be useful. The shield has a daze and pull too that could be useful.
Lay an unsteady ground > magnetic shield (pull) > magnetic surge > lightning field > lava font. Or something?
LH has 3 procs too, leap finisher through static field = dazing strike.
Its decent, probably viable if one were to learn to incorporate LH into regular “rotations” instead of hoping to camp/dps on it.
I’ve considered this, but last time I tried running hammer I found it far too clunky against all the quick-moving and doding foes that are already pretty threatening.
With a celestial setup rather than zerk, though… it could be pretty nice.
Shame that, if the whole purpose is to Lightning Rod, you only get to choose one other GM trait – Persisting Flames for sustained dps and more regular might blasts, or Cleansing Water so condi doesn’t insta-win, or Evasive Arcana for its utility.
I’d suggest Blinding Ashes… but with its ICD iunno if that’d be a bit of a waste, since the LH AA does that for you. Pretty sure that 30 fire should be used for Persisting Flames with its fury and field duration.
The thing that I find super annoying is people forcing autobalances by leaving the losing team just so they can proceed to join the winning team shortly after the forced autobalance. This just makes sure that the overstacked team stays overstacked, and defeats the purpose of the mechanism. In my opinion, this should be considered an exploit.
It *is* an exploit - it’s using game mechanics in an unintended way to gain something you otherwise couldn’t.
However... with the current state of hotjoin, in particular the rewards for it, there is *no point* in anyone joining the losing team partway through a match, if there’s even a small chance of getting on the winning team.
With no time-scaling (so you played for 8 minutes or whatever), winners get 500 rank points, 15s, and almost 1/5 of a track bar... while losers get 200 rank points, 10s, and a tiny sliver of track bar.
Play from the *start* of the match and you get 2/5 of 500 points.
Join partway through, and time-scaling (which is necessary to stop folks from farming by hopping to nearly-finished matches) reduces this to almost nothing - you maybe get 3-4 silver and no actual PvP progress to speak of.
It’s almost always a better strategy, if you ever want to rank up in PvP (which oddly enough some people do), to wait a minute and see if the 4v5 becomes a 3v5 and autobalance opens up a spot on the winning team. If this doesn’t happen quickly... roll to another server.
This means that 4v5s very frequently remain that way, for entire matches, dooming those people on the outnumbered team to barely any rewards for... having had quitters on their team? Having not realised that about 80% of winning hotjoin these days is making sure you join the team with the more skilled players?
Perma-4v5 is not fun to play, and people can’t really learn and improve if they’re outnumbered and getting ganked in every fight.
And in case anyone thinks that players are lucky to get *anything* from oh-so-casual hotjoin... I bet most of you are the same folks who believe (with some fair reasoning I’ll admit) that we should "ban newbies from ranked matches!"? So we should stop people without a certian rank from joining ranked play... and not let them rank up in the only area available to them. Yeah, that’s healthy for PvP.
Anyway, to the point: forcing autobalance is not the problem. It is a symptom of the problem, which is that entire matches can go by as 4v5s, and the longer they go on, the less likely another player is going to join... and the less chance there is of the team pulling it back. With 3-node 5v5 as the game mode, being outnumbered by 1 is incredibly damaging to your team’s chances.
We need to stop *this*, not punish people who don’t really enjoy getting stomped 2v1 repeatedly:
- make win/loss rewards equal, and slightly lower than current win rewards? Make it more about playing casually on a map than about which team wins - could go with like a 25 point bonus for winning or something iunno. Certainly make it better than 2/5 of win for a loss.
- stop people from choosing team. This could be done by not allowing people to join the match if they’ve spectated at all (and not letting folks see who was on which team before choosing). It could even just be done by instantly putting folks onto random teams when they clicked the ’play now’ button.
- implement some kind of autobalance or queueing system that didn’t allow teams to have uneven numbers. Game is a 5v4? Within 10s someone on the 5 gets made to sit out (probably with a volunteer option, and with all their time in this timeout counting towards rewards). They get brought back in as soon as there’s another player joining the other team. It could probably be gamed, but certainly not so much as the current mess.
Forcing autobalance feels unfair if you’ve worked hard to be winning, sure... but in most cases, you’ve kinda not. You’ve been outnumbering your foes for a significant period and their team’s not going to get anyone new to help out.
(edited by cheese.4739)
Okay, no, Tornado sucks. Period.
Situations it might be useful in: several foes fighting on a point with no boonstrip, no stability, no immobilise.
Situations that never realistically come up: see above.
It just... isn’t at all useful now.
EDIT2: Tornado procs it twice on each hit, assuming stone tornado. Damage is really great, I never managed to use it effectively for aoe burst/kamikaze tho, but its really nice once you learn to quickly cancel it after you interrupt/deal 10~12k damage once, and use it to prevent/secure stomps and generally troll the kitten out of people. Cancel cast mid cast for kitten spining animation, looks like dancing, ele master race indeed.
I’m really considering trying tornado again, since it should actually deal decent damage with LR… but I can go entire matches without touching the skill since it’s so very situational >_<
Yes, its not that great… You can still use it every match if you get trigger happy with it, sometimes I just use it to burst/interrupt a necro casting heal, for example, saves the real burst at worst…
Mostly… is a quick burst and possible decap/cap/save worthwhile compared to the mobility of FGS?
Guess I’ll run it for a few days and see how it feels – might have to get trigger happy, should at least deal with Engineers and their CC, if nothing else!
EDIT2: Tornado procs it twice on each hit, assuming stone tornado. Damage is really great, I never managed to use it effectively for aoe burst/kamikaze tho, but its really nice once you learn to quickly cancel it after you interrupt/deal 10~12k damage once, and use it to prevent/secure stomps and generally troll the kitten out of people. Cancel cast mid cast for kitten spining animation, looks like dancing, ele master race indeed.
I’m really considering trying tornado again, since it should actually deal decent damage with LR… but I can go entire matches without touching the skill since it’s so very situational >_<
I came up with a fix for this problem:
The thief will have no elite skill. But when a thief succesfully steals from you, he recieves your elite skill.
So no more being stuck in stone (unless you stunbreak of course), or taking a full burst while not being able to move for a dazzling 1.5 seconds.
Just facetank a unexpected Supply Crate instead! Or Moa, or Entangle! Much better right?
This would make them barely more effective against Eles ^__^
It’s not a buff, more like a correction of an epic fail change. I just hope it haven’t caused more bugs in my favourite proffesion (had no time to test it yesterday unfortunately…)
Yeah, now it’s close to being on par with other summons… though the ‘combat only’ thing rather annoys me. Why can I not initiate combat with it? Surely getting at least one active attack off exactly when I want it isn’t too much to ask?
Just gonna say this one time
Wheee, you said it twice. Sorry for being a bit of a troll here.
Did you read the rest of my post, by the way? I specifically said that it’s really easy to roll a build for the map, and that I’ve done it, and that most of the other people who’ve written lengthy posts about the map have certainly done it.
The problem isn’t that we die to such builds on the map and come here to QQ.
The problem isn’t that certain builds are more effective on the map.*
The problem *is* that CC is disproportionately powerful, and can get 0-damage kills. The falling-to-death mechanic does not belong in ranked PvP - if it does, why don’t we have the new-and-improved Skyhammer in teamq?
The map should either get its ridiculous instagib idea removed, and maybe thereby let us get another map in teamq, or get completely removed from sPvP to become an Activity that turns everyone into decap Engineers (or some other CC-crazy setup) with equal stats.
___
* If all maps played identically, things would obviously be pretty dull - but Skyhammer really does have plenty to distinguish it from other maps without the falling nonsense. Srsly, I love the layout, and have said so numerous times before!
(edited by cheese.4739)
Ah kitten, every other class got similarly OP buffs, too. Massive power creep. Ohno.
Any class that is not theif + initiative for skill usage.
Also all the perks thieves get with it ;3
I was thinking something like ‘Thieves getting AoE heals on a weapon’. Even better if they didn’t cause Revealed.
Just gonna say this one time. If you don’t have a quick setup Skyhammer build then you need to stop QQing. The stage is Skyhammer, learn to play it. almost every class can knock people off, fear them down, pull them down etc. Stability also stops this, u can los the knock offs and pull downs. Please get a Skyhammer build and start playing the map the way it should be played. A couple examples are, Guardian take gs or hammer, Thief can pull them down stealth, Mesmers can change to focus for the stage, engies can do alot, rangers can take a knock back. Its not hard to quickly change something to make you better at the stage. Play to your strengths, learn from your deaths and PLEASE get a Skyhammer build.
Yeah see the problem isn’t people not wanting to ’l2p and roll for skyhammer’.
It’s depressingly easy to roll a build that is effective on the map, and most people that complain about it regularly have certainly done this and racked up the kills at least a few times. It’s... eh. Maybe fun for the first few, then it gets boring, repetitive and frustrating.
The issue we all have is that this *shouldn’t be necessary*. Why does direct damage/condi damage/healing exist, if CC can get kills while dealing almost no damage?
Of course maps should be varied and require different playstyles and of course different builds are going to be more or less powerful on different maps. It still doesn’t make falling-to-death an interesting or fun mechanic in competitive GW2.
Skyhammer’s really *excellent* thing is the jump pads/varied elevations. *They* are what should be influencing the majority of builds, not the ground under the map. Ranged attacks become more powerful when a melee on a point can’t reach their attacker... but as things are, it’s always better to just bring stability/CC and drag people down holes anyway.
Even the hammer itself would probably be okay, now that it can be dodged, if it wasn’t on that tiny platform with the buggy gate as its only access point. As it is, it’s a very powerful secondary objective, that can be dominated by certain classes/builds, and has to be focused on all game.
Y’know how Spirit Watch comes after Skyhammer in maps-that-players-don’t-want-in-soloq? Y’know how neither of these maps are seen as fit for teamq? Yeah.
Also, um...
almost every class can knock people off, fear them down, pull them down etc.
almost every class
almost every class
Even your subconscious is aware that the map isn’t actually fair!
This is one of the reasons SoloQ is so frustrating, people raging and insulting their own team. This is not necessary and totally under your control, so stop it.
It works both ways – give me a fair match, so it doesn’t happen.
It’s harder to give fairer matches if the population is low.
Flaming other players isn’t going to encourage them to stick around and increase/maintain a reasonable population.
Yes, there is a lot that ANet should be doing to improve PvP, but don’t pretend for a moment that being a flangewrangler is okay. People can’t l2p – and so add to the pool of competent players to get matched against – if they leave because you whine like a child when you’re losing.
http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Lava_Font
http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Symbol_of_Faith
http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Symbol_of_Judgment
http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Symbol_of_Protection
http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Symbol_of_Swiftness
http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Symbol_of_Wrath
http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Glyph_of_Storms
http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Fire_Bomb
http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Smoke_Bomb_
http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Poison_Grenade
http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Choking_Gas
http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Caltrops
http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Uncatchable
http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Combustive_Shot
http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Impale_
http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Acid_Bomb
http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Napalm
http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Box_of_Nails
http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Purging_Flames
http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Entangle
http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Muddy_Terrain
http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Frozen_Ground
http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Ice_Spike
http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Static_Field_
http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Ring_of_Fire
http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Flamewall
http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Ice_Storm
http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Firestorm
http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Well_of_Corruption
http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Well_of_Darkness
http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Well_of_Power
http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Well_of_Suffering
http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Fetid_Ground
http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Chaos_StormWell kitten.. We are all exploiting. Good point OP. Nerf all these skills too.
(did I miss anything?)
/thread
Well someone did their homework :p
Well, they get half marks.
You know how projectiles continue to move, and can do damage or have other effects, after their cast-channel is completed?
We should remove those from the game too.
Hmmm, do you think this is confusing for new players? I definitely think this warrants some kind of nerf, what do you think?
+1, got a laugh from me
But yeah, Glyphs are really very inconsistent with their tooltips, and the elite is just ridiculous now - it’d be nice if, as suggested above, right-clicking while hovering over the icon cycled through the other available tooltips, though the only thing that needs to be visible while the elemental is active is probably its own individual active effect.
They’re also inconsistent with the attunement they take their cast from, by the way - for example:
- Glyph of Storms will cast Lightining Storm if you start the cast attuned to Air and switch to Earth during the channel
- Glyph of Elemental Harmony will grant Protection if you start attuned to Air and switch to Earth before the channel is complete
IIRC (am not logged in right now) the heal and summons take their effect from the ending attunement, but the storm and res take it from the starting one. Before GoEP became an instant-cast stunbreak, it took its effect from the starting one too I think?
True weapon swap on Ele?
Oh, or Warriors could have effectively infinite adrenaline and almost no penalty for missing with burst skills! That’d work!
What we could do, instead, is make any skill drop the orb.
Also set health and armour levels to some standard amount on pickin gup the orb.Also, um, not trying shared-secondary-objectives again. Not as a fourth permanent objective on maps with three capture points.
This would make guard kinda useless on that map. There are like no teamfights and the ways between the points are pretty big so it’s already limited to going bunker-orb-carry-bot.
Teamfights are uncommon because the orb exists, and folks have to constantly pay attention to it – which could possibly okay if it didn’t place such heavy emphasis on bringing heavies with their blocks/stability/non-dropping-invulns.
It might be nice to have some 4-cap-point maps to see how 5-player teams deal with them, but this messing about with shared secondary objectives that have more effect on the match than the cap points – and that are much stronger in the hands of certain classes/builds – is frustrating.
What we could do, instead, is make *any* skill drop the orb.
Also set health and armour levels to some standard amount on pickin gup the orb.
Also, um, not trying shared-secondary-objectives again. Not as a fourth permanent objective on maps with three capture points.
Hi there.
Um.
Y’know how any Staff Ele build needs to use CC to land any damage?
Lightning Rod’s buffs are incredible for these.
"oh hey you just put some effort into locking this foe down"
"yes, yes I did"
"well, here’s some bonus damage! And they’ll not hit you as hard for a few seconds!"
"eeeeeeeeeeee"
6/6/0/0/2 is *fun*.
195 trick or treat bags is 9.75g at 5 silver a bag. + 20 slotter if you’re into that.
The last 2-3 tiers give personalized ToT bags, you can’t sell those.
And as folks have said: high-rarity loot from other tracks. Can chuck 3 exotic weapons from a dungeon track, plus another exotic weapon you have (180 tokens from the track gets you close to this) to get an instant… something. At least 2g from the resulting drop, with a chance at rare skins/precursors. There’s some actual loot in there, too. And t5/6 mats. And generally… stuff that doesn’t suck.
It’s probably even better value to do other tracks and spend coin on cobs to get pails, than to do the halloween track for those ToT bags.
I dunno about maguuma wastes, but I assume the Halloween track is only for the duration of the event, and to be honest, isn’t worth doing at all. You get a lousy 20 slot bag that you can buy for 12 gold on the tp.
You can buy candy corn cobs for less than 3g each – buying the three you need to exchange for the pail will set you back 7.2g right now, for instant buys.
So if rewards are equal, people do enough to have non-zero scoreboard points and then AFK the entire game. There’s no incentive to try.
Couple of easy solutions to this:
- decrease grace period for inaction to 30s or something. People want to alt-tab back to gw2 twice a minute? Go ahead them, I’m sure it’ll be fun. People want to use scripts to fidget for them every now and then? Report for botting.
- some sPvP-specific reporting options, such as ‘not participating’. I’ve not given up hope for these yet!
There are probably… several others.
+1
Right now it’s not worth joining the losing team partway through, since you’ll almost certainly be playing outnumbered and the loss rewards are bad enough even without being scaled down for time.
We can’t stop 4v5 by punishing people trying to at least get loot from an imbalanced match. By making the rewards equal for joining either team, it’ll actually be *better* for players to join losing team as soon as they enter the map, than to lurk in spectate hoping for a spot on the winning one.
Prevention is better than cure, and all that. Especially as the cure you support is “punish them more” and doesn’t actually help anyone but those who were already winning and already getting winner rewards.
How is that? My suggested cure is ‘make spectating out not an attractive option’.
So you force people to stay in their losing team, which has been outnumbered all game, and get minimal rewards despite having been there all match?
A player who joins the winning team a couple of minutes in (after they’ve gotten their small lead) gains better rewards than someone who joined a random team at the start and ended up on the losing one.
You’re stopping people from dealing with the problem (sucky outnumbered matches and minimal rewards for them) without actually fixing the problem (that people join the winning team over the losing one, and so make it outnumbered in favour of the team that was already winning).
You shouldn’t be allowed to rejoin a game once you leave or go spectator, either. Not until the match is over.
Definitely agree.
This is possibly a solution… and it would have to include “nobody can spectate a match before choosing a team to join”.
Most of the problem is people rank-stacking on the same team, or spectating for a minute or two before choosing to join the team that’s performing better.
If you’re going to prevent folks from playing after spectating, this has to include the period before they join the match.
People switching teams when they’re outnumbered is a symptom, not the core problem. If you have chest pains, you don’t stab at your chest until it stops hurting – you find out what’s causing the pains and fix that problem instead. The stabbing will, at the very best, not help. It’ll probably make things worse.
Punishing people who are already getting steamrolled in a perma-4v5 won’t help at all. Whatever solution is used, it has to strongly discourage games from being 4v5 in the first place:
– make it less lucrative to join the winning team, or more worthwhile to join the losing team (such as by making the pretty minimal hotjoin-level rewards equal for both teams).
- prevent people from choosing teams altogether (random button), or at least stop them from joining the team with higher score when it’s even team numbers.
- anything that isn’t this knee-jerk “these people are forcing autobalance of course they’re the problem”. It really will just make losing teams lose harder.
Well the problem is more that players will gleefully suggest cheating on the forum :p
This really isn’t the problem. It’s a symptom.
The actual problem, as I keep saying, is that so many matches end up 4v5 and there is very little reason for players who just entered the map to join the losing team.
So they don’t.
People tend to try to join the team with the higher score, meaning that it’s often got an advantage when the second team is waiting for their next player to even things out.
After one team gains a few more points… who’s going to join the other one?
Sure, there’s the challenge of pulling back a potentially losing game, but there’s also the much higher chance of getting worthless loss rewards. Much more worthwhile to join the team that already has an advantage, since there’s a high chance of keeping that lead and winning outright.
It only gets worse as the match goes on, so that a 50 point lead at the start snowballs to 300 – and by this point, the poor losing team are probably just getting stomped outside their base.
We don’t want to punish people for being stuck in an unfair 4v5; this will only make things worse (and especially will discourage people from sticking around in PvP). Making unfair teams less likely to happen (with random team assignment or by making the loss rewards a lot better) is so much better than making players who are stuck on outnumbered teams lose out.
Prevention is better than cure, and all that. Especially as the cure you support is “punish them more” and doesn’t actually help anyone but those who were already winning and already getting winner rewards.
So, now that the Skyhammer changes have gone in (hammer now dodgable, floor break time increased, can’t break floors while in stealth), what are people’s opinions? Is it bearable, or even fun, now?
I’m interested in seeing these questions answered by those who have posted in this thread with a generally negative opinion, but have gone back and retried the map since yesterday’s changes.
In your opinion, are yesterday’s changes to Skyhammer generally positive? Are there other small tweaks like this (aside from removal of solo queue) that you feel would make the map a better experience for players - changes that wouldn’t drastically change the gameplay dynamic and aesthetic of the map?
Okay so the changes? All positive changes. Stealth spam has been relegated back to WvW, since it can’t secure quick kills any more, and the hammer is marginally less stupid.
The map is still atrocious.
I *love* the varied elevations, and the multiple paths, and the jump pads. They’re great - and they’re all the individuality it really needs.
Falling to death? Never going to be a fun or interesting mechanic. As long as it’s possible to kill people while running a high-sustain bunker build - as long as CC is disproportionately powerful in combat that’s meant to be balanced around damange, support *and* control - it will be a terrible map.
The panels take slightly longer to break... it’s still plenty possible to immobilise someone for the entire duration, chucking a stun in for good measure.
And then there’s the hammer. Not only is it a secondary objective shared by both teams, that is powerful enough to require constant attention... it’s also on one of the worst parts of the map for abuse of the falling-to-death mechanic.
You’re not ever going to make this map popular as long as it’s possible to CC someone to death while dealing 0 damage. The hit from the hammer I guess is bearable now, but as it’s on that ridiculous tiny platform it continues to be affected by the first, more serious problem.
Either remove all ways to fall to death, or remove it from ranked PvP, if you want to stop folks from complaining about it.
Or, of course, add it to teamq - if it’s fit for ranked soloq, it must belong in there too! I’d really like to see both the reactions it gets, and the super-broken team builds that people come up with for it will be fun to watch! ^____^
EDIT: overkitten kittenfilter strikes akitten!
(edited by cheese.4739)
The complete lack of discussion with the community really doesn’t help this terrible change - it looks entirely like an extortion exercise that wasn’t announced or discussed because, well, it was never going to be accepted.
The other thing is ‘although 1-10 sucks and is annoying don’t be Nektraal’. I actually call out people team jumping so everyone knows. It’s kind of obnoxious and starts some fights sometimes, but it also hopefully will discourage the behavior.
It’s a bit of ‘if Anet won’t police us, maybe we can police ourselves’.
I usually call out when I do it, and encourage everyone else to do it too.
Do you really think people ought to keep playing to the end of the match on a losing team, that is only losing because it’s outnumbered, with zero chance of pulling it back – or even of getting some fair skirmishes – since nobody else is going to join partway through for time-scaled loss rewards?
Do you really think that the people who skill-stack at the start of the match are playing fairly? Or those who camp in spectator mode until one team has a clear upper hand?
These are the folks who’re really playing unfairly, not the poor sods who entered the map and immediately joined the hilighted team that was 3v4… only to have someone immediately join the already winning lot who’s been camping spectate.
And a much simpler solution along the same lines would be to just not allow players to join the team with higher score, when numbers are even. It accomplishes... pretty much the same thing, but doesn’t create massive balance issues or be at risk of getting exploited.
edit: minor clarification
(edited by cheese.4739)
what about 3/3/3/3/3 :p
where do u get 15 traitpoints, i want them too
Simon was getting confused. They meant 14/14/14/14/14.
I love how they improvise skyham rather than delete this map, with this upcoming changes they shud feature skyham in tpvp map rotation.
i mean, finally i can play skyham competitively!.We still don’t want it in teamQ. TeamQ is the place that is skyhammer/spirit watch free. Please keep it that way.
It’s really not a serious request. The ridiculous idea that it’s okay to have in ranked soloq, but is unfit for ranked teamq, is what Chapell is getting at.
Yeah that’s just as bad, if not worse. The moment someone leaves the game, the other team is *screwed*.
If the match is 3v3, in a game designed for 5v5... who’s going to join the other team only to be hit with a huge debuff? It’ll just become a 4v3 until someone gives up and leaves, or the 3 is far enough ahead that people join that team, confident of a win.
It doesn’t solve the problem of people trying to choose teams, it just flips it on its head. And it actively discourages people from joining an even-numbers match.
There’s just no way that it can possibly be fair to modify stats of players... and it really doesn’t solve the problem.
We don’t want to discourage people from being on the team with more players, or incentivise being in the team that’s outnumbered.
We want to encourage people to play matches from the start, by making it not worthwhile to spectate then join the team that looks like they’re doing better. Also to make it worthwhile to join a team that’s behind on score partway through the game - making win and loss grant the same rewards, and making sure people know this, would likely deal with this.
Because there is no such thing called high risk high reward in this game, i might be mistaken. please prove me wrong.
S/x FAir burst Ele is a good example of it, I feel. One of few, though.
Full burst can’t be done regularly, the build has paper-thin armour and looong cooldowns on its defensive skills. Lethal when used well, but after their initial burst the Ele is really very vulnerable. Teamfight going on? Probably shouldn’t stick around; a random arrow might turn up and 1-shot you.
Bit too high reward for the risk, I feel, but there certainly is a lot of risk involved.
so what "fixes’
have they made?
turret engis dominate this map so hardi just want it out of rank ques…
In the November patch:
- hammer will be dodgeable. Will still be incredibly easy to fire-and-forget, and will still be on the tiny platform which is so open to abuse.
- glass panels will take longer to break, and stealthed players won’t cause them to break. Stealth-pulls should be less common in 1v1 fights… but oh no of course they couldn’t just remove the holes altogether, that would be uninteresting. And might make the map fun.
As the saying goes, “you can’t polish a kitten ”. In this case the kitten is definitely falling to death.
Making it slightly less harder to gank someone while using a bunker build is not good enough; the entire idea of map-with-falling has to go.
It’s almost certainly because you’re not playing the *real* game of hotjoin - making sure you’re on the right team.
A large number of hotjoin matches end up being 3v4 or 4v5 all the way through, since nobody wants to join the losing team halfway through the match (which hasn’t got much chance of pulling things back) and then get almost no loot in return for their efforts.
At the start of a match, try to join the team with the players you know are good (probably from their performance in the previous match). People who know how hotjoin goes will tend to join the team they think is most likely to win... and they are often the more experienced folks who will contribute to their team’s success more anyway.
<sarcasm> Hotjoin: It’s super newbie-friendly! </sarcasm>
It’s important to force autobalance if you notice your team is outnumbered:
1) go into spectator mode
2) wait for a few seconds for autobalance message to appear
3) count down from 10 when it appears, spamming your mouse button on the ’join <colour> team’ button for the team that’s currently got more players
4) ???
5) profit!
It’s an exploit, sure - it really is exploiting game mechanics for unintended purposes - but the other option is to keep losing purely by being outnumbered, or to not play hotjoin at all.
I really don’t see the point in anyone playing a 4v5, in which very few skirmishes will be fair on numbers, for the minimal rewards granted for a loss. Unless the 5 are all significantly worse players than the 4 (e.g. the 5 all zerg about chasing 3 foes, the fourth one backcaps everything uninterrupted) the 5 will win almost every time.
If bothering to implement something like this... why not just do any of the other suggestions made, that would actually fix the problem rather than serve as a band-aid? Buffing stats doesn’t add anything like the usefulness of another player, and the only way it might be useful is if it’s OP.
- make hotjoin rewards equal for win/loss, so that anyone joining after the start of the match can gain just the same rewards if they join the currently losing, outnumbered team, whether or not they win
once this exists and people know about it, it’ll be common knowledge that you get *less* loot if you camp in spectator mode waiting for a spot on the team with a higher score
- force random teams after the match has started
might help... but folks are still unlikely to join the team with fewer players, if they might instead get a chance at the other one by waiting
- reduce rewards, introduce a buff that doubles rewards for picking random team
someone suggested this in another thread, and it could work quite well. Similar to entirely removing the win/loss distinction between rewards, this makes choosing ’random’ guarantee maximum rewards, while picking a team to join may end up giving only loss rewards. Maximum rewards given would be capped at the win rewards for the amount of time spent in match.
- others?
Really, buffing stats will just make the already messy burst/bunker mess worse - and those celestials that are dominating right now will get crazy stronger, even with a percentage increase in stats rather than absolute values. It’s not a good solution, and it’s barely a practical sticking plaster solution.
tl;dr: post 2/2, also cheese is a bit daft
So yeah, that is hopefully nicer, but there are a few further changes I’d want to make to skills/traits to increase overall survivability and damage: two more points from Earth into Water (so swap Rock Solid for Cleansing Water), and swap out Burning Fire and Cleansing Fire for Pyromancer’s Puissance and Arcane Wave - you’ll lose a bit of stability (though you have two Armor of Earth procs already), and lose some of your burst cleanse... but gain a *lot* more cleanse flexibility (cantrips will now each cleanse a condition), a bit of damage from Bountiful Power, and a great deal of damage from more Lava Fonts. Oh, aye, and Arcane Wave is an instant-cast, 900-range blast finisher, so you can gain more might+fury, or heals, or other effects, along with damage provided by the skill itself..
This would leave the build like this:
http://gw2skills.net/editor/?fFUQFAWnMISLDW4AWOAfEGoAQIPt4zwLeEYUOA-TBCBAB8o+TtKBje/h+eQAAcBBgT5XK6Iaz8HpAkVYE-e
...which is a mash-up of popular dps Staff builds (those fire traits) and the survivabilty (vitality, healing power, and powerful cleanse) offered by the Water line/cantrip synergies.
Um. I may have gone on a bit. And barely considered your gear.
::looks at gear::
You really did go crazy for the anti-condi setup, didn’t you? You’ll hopefully be cleansing conditions enough that the Generosity sigil can be dropped - most of its procs are likely to be wasted if you bring a reasonable amount of other cleanse.
Popular sigil choices for Elementalists:
Battle - often a solid choice. Grants might to you on weapon swap, so grants might to you pretty much every 9 seconds (the sigil cooldown) if you’re rotating through attunements (which will be in most fights).
Energy - dodges! Restores endurance on swap, again very effective for Elementalists who tend to switch attunements constantly and so proc it on cooldown.
Renewal - a wee bit of healing! On weapon swap! Are you noticing a pattern here? This one’s not as popular as the other two, but is cheaper and provides regular heals to you and those next to you.
Right okay yeah now I am going to bed. Apologies for the wall of text. Gear stats, and runeset, and other possible variations? They can wait. G’night.
tl;dr: cheese uses too many words. cheese should have gone to bed ages ago. Hopefully some of this wall’o’text is useful! ^__^
A few things that I feel would really improve your build:
1) Staff doesn’t really cast as many spells as other weaponsets... and it has all those delicious fields. I recommend swapping out Signet of Restoration for Arcane Brilliance, which is altogether more versatile - might stacking from fire fields and bonus AoE healing when used in water fields, for example. Casting it while standing in a water field with several enemies next to you? Huge burst heal! \o/
2) Pyromancer’s Puissance isn’t very effective on other weapon sets; we can’t really camp in one element, instead needing to rotate through them regularly, so only about 1/4 of spells will proc the trait. It’s arguably worse on Staff than other sets.
It’s true that the maximum possible dps for Staff Ele comes from camping fire attunement and spamming 1 and 2 on a stationary foe... but while running Persisting Flames, not Pyromancer’s Puissance.
Persisting Flames adds 2 seconds duration to fire fields - the important thing for Staff is that this is 2 seconds more to Lava Font, so 2 more ticks of a high-damage AoE. Running both Pyromancer’s Alacrity and Persisting Flames gives *very* high uptime on Lava Fonts, and also gives fury every time you blast anyone’s fire fields... this is a much better dps increase than is gained from Pyromancer’s Puissance.
3) Diamond Skin is... rubbish, in most builds. You need to spec for high toughess and high healing power, and pretty much maintain the regeneration boon, for it to ever be helpful - and in doing this you’ll lose all hope of dealing decent damage.
In PvE: it does have a few niche uses (like Goemm’s Lab, a jumping puzzles that applies movement-impairing conditions, or the Grawl fractal’s boss with the burning floor). Conditions generally aren’t that much of a problem in PvE - and you have loooads of cleanse with Healing Rain and two copies of Cleansing Fire. Those two points would definitely serve you better in any of the other three lines.
In WvW: it will only be effective against 100% condition foes who have absolutely no power damage whatsoever. This is nobody. And that’s 1v1. Get into a teamfight, and you’ll never be above 90% health, not without speccing heavily into healing power and regen and sacrificing all damage-dealing capabilities. Again, the points will be better pretty much anywhere else - putting them into Arcana and picking up Blasting Staff will increase your damage by a reasonable amount against foes in large battles - and can let you hit things a bit farther inside towers with Meteor Shower!
Um... so that’s the three things that immediately stood out to me - there are a few other changes I’d make to skill/trait setup, but it quickly becomes "this is me making this my build" rather than "here are some minor changes that may make your build more effective". Assuming you meant to take Cantrip Mastery in the Water line, my suggestions would make your build look like this:
http://gw2skills.net/editor/?fFUQFAWnMISjDW4AWOAfEGoAQIOtY4FDCMMXPA-TBCBAB8o+TtKBje/h+eQAAcBBgT5XK6Iaz8HpAkVYE-e
Hah! Too many characters to post. Continued in next post.
I’d say you’re much better off going for condi duration in the Fire line - can pick up Fire’s Embrace or Cleansing Fire on the way up, maybe take Blinding Ashes and Burning Precision too. With plex runes, +40% food and the fire traitline, you’ll hit +100% duration (as in the build linked by sorrychief) - though of course you’re stuck with only a couple of trait points left for defense.
One idea would be to take Fire’s Embrace, Zephyr’s Boon, and swap out Strength of Stone for Elemental Shielding. You’ll be poor on heals and cleanse, but have a bit more mobility with swiftness, good protection uptime, and more crits with which to proc Burning Precision - along with the burning and might you get from Fire Auras.
Whatever you do, it’s pretty certain that maintaining your conditions is a much more reliable way to deal damage and lock down foes - you’ll have more condi on a foe at any given time, so they’ll have less chance of cleansing the more dangerous ones. No point in getting >200 poison damage per tick when it’s cleansed quickly and your foe can then heal effectively again!
Skyhammer is an interesting map. It has varied elevations, and lots of different paths between points, which makes a few build types more useful on it than other maps.
It also has some of the worst mechanics possible: falling-to-death, and a secondary objective that is both incredibly powerful (needing to be focused on for the entire match) and in an area that certain classes can fight on *much* more effectively than others.
As supvil says, abusing these mechanics is far too easy, and so the map frustrates many more people than anything used in ranked PvP should.
PvP with varied classes with balance taking into account all aspects of combat (damage, control and support) should never, ever include a map that makes one aspect (control) so much more effective.
Control skills are designed to lock foes down or move them about into more favourable positions - you get kills by dealing damage. That the map makes CC skills effective for securing 0-damage kills is not okay, and *can’t* be okay. Not in GW2 sPvP.
Problem: still has fall-to-death, still has very powerful hammer on a tiny platform that certain classes/builds dominate on, still full of bugs.
We use ’botting’ because we *still* don’t have proper report functions appropriate to PvP - something like ’not participating’ would be nice to have.
We’ve definitely been told by someone with a red tag over their name to just keep reporting intentional afk’ers as botting for now. It’s not the right label, but it fits better than the other options do.
(edited by cheese.4739)
Seriously though, even though I have a blast on this map I think it’s somewhat unfair. Completely removing the canon/holes in the ground would make the map boring but at least reduce the impact both have.
It really wouldn’t make the map boring – the layout, with varied elevations and many different routes to each point, is really interesting and already makes certain builds/setups more effective to run than on other maps.
It’s just that the broken secondary objective (hammer), and the really horrible fall-to-death mechanic, and all of those bugs that still haven’t been even officially acknowledged, and a bunch of other things… make the map really completely unfit for ranked play.
Glyph of Tornado
literally glyph of storms… but instead of a storm its a tornadoand yes its our current elite tornado
and instead of transforming into a tornado u summon one on the battlefield90sec cd
See, um… yeah. We lack any elite skills that are just useful as they are.
We have a summon – yey? Summons are a nuisance. They don’t last very long, have unreliable attacks, and don’t tend to survive well when focused.
We have the FGS: great mobility, can deal reasonable damage, but it locks us out of weapon skills. All 20 of them. Not great, for a profession expected to rotate through all their attunements very regularly.
We have Tornado. Yeah, Tornado that doesn’t even have the occasionally-useful damage buff bonus. Has anyone run this ridiculously bad transform since it was nerfed?
I’d really like to get an elite that we could just… cast. A powerful spell that does something (maybe creates a useful AoE? Glyph of Storms might be a good candidate, if shifted up to the elite slot and made more powerful on a longer cooldown). A signet that has a reasonable passive buff and grants us good boons or debuffs our opponents when activated. An arcane spell that is instant-cast and CC’s a foe – or maybe an arcane elite that gives us an easily accessible leap finisher and stun break, granting a bit of mobility and something else to combo with?
Actually, for an arcane elite, I do wonder about that – wouldn’t necessarily need to move the caster for the finisher; could unleash a pulse of arcane energy that arced across a gap, and granted the combo effect on caster. Mesmers’ Phantasmal Swordsman (sword #5) already grants leap effect on caster without their movement!
The only leap finishers we currently have are Magnetic Leap (which chains from another skill) and those on the conjured Flame Axe and Lightning Hammer. A standalone utility or elite skill granting this combo effect would allow all ele builds to make use of this uncommon combo type.
Yeah it’s pretty nice for adding to any burst (or instantly interrupting Bandage and other easily interruptible channels), along with being a blast finisher.
And it will always have 100% crit chance (though this can be nullified by things like Stone Heart) with which to proc on-crit effects.
Also, it’s very possible to get quite a few blast finishers on Staff, if you dedicate traits and utilities to it:
- Eruption (Earth 2)
- Arcane Brilliance (heal)
- Arcane Wave (utility)
- Evasive Arcana in Earth Attunement (Arcana XI trait)
- Explosive Lava Axe (skill #2 on the Conjured Flame Axe)
It’s even possible to bring all of these in one build - I’m rather a fan of 0/2/2/4/6 auramancy staff, with clerics or celestial gear (I’m sloooowly replacing my exotic cleric’s with ascended celestial. Slooooowly!). Can spread the finishers out between great burst heals, prot/fury/swiftness when wanted, and of course the all-important might stacking (Flame Axe is *great* for this). With celestial gear, it should have pretty reasonable damage output, too.
It’s not zerk, and in more organised groups zerk/dps is still king, but for PuGs and with less experienced allies it really does provide excellent support for the group.
Not tried it in PvP recently (as in, since it became possible to run Ele again without getting flamed), may need to just become dull-and-boring-and-effective 0/0/2/6/6 for access to Cleansing Water.
I read it as "KNEE-fl-hell".
How about Kyhlo, though? I was pronouncing it "KEE-lo" but a friend read it as "KIE-lo" (kie rhyming with pie), and now I seem to use both.
Servers named FARM active since more than a year without any kind of action on Anet side should give you a clue how much they care about hotjoin’s state.
Though there’s really no point in using a farming server, since the only bonuses you can really get are small ones for top stats and autobalance volunteering. Still gotta stay in match for 7 minutes or however long it is, if you want full rewards, so might as well fight and laugh at the eejits trying to farm in hotjoin.
“Exploit”. Lmao
Exploit: “to take advantage of (a person, situation, etc), esp unethically or unjustly for one’s own ends” – the dictionary.
congratulations, you’ve learnt something new!
Pretty much like pulling ppl down on skyhammer…
In the context of this game (and others), it tends to be used to mean “doing something that gives you an advantage that is not intended design”. Like FGS#4 spam, or doing the failtrain in Frostgorge Sound, or swapping teams in hotjoin when it’s not meant to be possible.
Anyway: Zaxares’ solution is another good one, and I can totally get behind it.
Basically, we need to remove any idea that choosing the ‘right’ team at the start gives better rewards – it’s hotjoin’s biggest problem.
If everyone who joins at the start is going to gain the same rewards anyway, there’s no need to choose the ‘better’ team and so people will be much more willing to join the ‘worse’ team when it’s down on numbers.
Was also present. Gunnar’s Hold regular community run, we spawn Teq manually, and run into map-closing issues nearly every week - though this is the first time it’s kicked off the entire map before we’ve managed to kill the boss.
When we have numbers enough to chain together burn phases, there is no way the map can be considered ’empty’.