Guild Wars 2

Nova Striker just wants all Eles to run 5-glyph 0/4/4/2/4 builds with carrion amulets, so they can look like the best Ele of them all!

Liewec.2896:

cheese.4739:

The issue is not team swapping.

The issue is that entire matches are 4v5 the whole way through, because people don’t want to join the losing team for minimal rewards

if they fixed team swap then the matches would have far greater balance and closer scores, removing the need to sit out of a 4v5.
obviously a landslide will happen some times because one team simply outskills the other,
but generally it would be far more competitive so people would’nt feel as inclined to pass up a 4v5 which they are very capable of winning.

If they fixed team swap, unless both teams started out with 5 players it’d be pretty uncommon to see matches that were even remotely fair.

How hotjoin usually goes for me:
- match starts, with 2-4 players.
- one team gets upper hand early on, or is perceived to be better (higher skill/more experience) by spectating players.
- spectating players (including most of those who have just entered the map) will try to join this ‘winning’ or ‘better’ team, and ignore the other one. The team that got early lead ends up being 3v2 or 4v3 or 5v4, because those spectating don’t want to join the ‘losing’ team – even if they could balance things out or even bring it back.
- should it eventually become 5v5… the lead gained by the team that started well is usually too great to give losing team any chance of a comeback.

Removing the ability to swap teams just locks players who got the unlucky team into a near-certain 4v5; it doesn’t fix the problem of players trying to join the team more likely to win, and leaving the other team short on numbers.

Zietlogik: oh yes, this is a fair idea, too – and it’s easy to accidentally lock a server into 4v5s by being afk in spectator mode.
At the very least, the game needs to only consider players currently in the map (and not spectators) when bringing in players from ‘play now’.

juno.1840:

I like it but only with a scepter. It’s a bit of a finger workout though. My friend on the other hand thinks it is a cheese build… in some ways I agree as it promotes mindless attunement switching. I still find it fun.

It… sort of does, but a FAir ele who swaps mindlessly will tend to end up with 0 defensive options pretty fast.

darres.8203:

personally i dont really light arc lighting, it’s way too weak to be a sustained dmg
i was thinking to change fresh air for some other traits which allows me to deal more dmg to stunned targets or even air reductions

Arc Lighting does, however, regularly hit your target – meaning it will crit often and can recharge your FAir and let you cast skills that aren’t hitting foes in another attunement before swapping back for some burst.

The issue is *not* team swapping.

The issue is that entire matches are 4v5 the whole way through, because people don’t want to join the losing team for minimal rewards - particularly half way through a match, when the loss rewards are scaled down to almost nothing by time-in-match scaling.

Anyone who is stuck in a perma-4v5 game should always force autobalance and swap teams. What’s the point in playing a hotjoin game from the start, being outnumbered all the way through, and getting very little to show for it?

So, some possible ways to fix this?

1) Remove the difference between win and loss for hotjoin.
Slightly reduce the win rewards (to, say, 400 rank points/match?) and bring loss rewards up to the same as this.
Without a reward bonus for stacking on the same team, there will be much less incentive to do so. It still feels good to win, y’know, and it’s not like the losing team will be getting anything *more* than the winning team!
Time-based reward scaling should remain in effect, to stop folks from joining nearly-finished matches, decapping one point, and getting the same rewards as someone who played from start.

2) Don’t let players join the team with more points, when teams have equal numbers.
Say we’ve got a 3v3, that’s 70pts to red, 20pts to blue. New player joining will almost always go to red... and nobody will join blue to balance out, in the hopes that another spot will open up on red.
Now we have a 4v3, and the score gap widens. Should anyone for some reason join blue... someone else will almost immediately join red to unbalance things again.

3) Don’t let players choose teams after the match has started.
An alternative to 2) is to just remove the choice altogether. Let people choose teams at start, so they can play with friends if they want... but after that, if team numbers are equal, choice is removed.
This could still lead to permanently outnumbered games, should somebody leave the losing team and those spectating not wish to join it, but it would at least help stop folks from just showing up and immediately joining the winning team to further increase their advantage.

4) Introduce ’sitting out’.
This would be messy to implement, but replacing the current autobalance system with a sitting-out system could possibly work.
If one team has been down a player for several seconds, offer folks on the other team the chance to volunteer to sit-out - much as the current autobalance system works, with a small bonus as incentive and with someone randomly chosen if nobody volunteers.
A sitting-out player can spectate, and their time sitting-out counts towards their match participation time. Their ’spot’ on their team is reserved, so new players can only join the opposing team - and as soon as this happens, the sitting-out player gets brought back in.
Few other issues would need worked out, but it’s an idea.

So yeah, I’ll repeat that first part:

Team switching is not the problem.

That people feel they have to teamswitch to get fair rewards is the problem.

You’ll need to give us some more info, and to clarify some things:

- by ’solo q’ do you mean the rated solo arena (that you queue for) or hotjoin (join with the ’play now’ button or by selecting a server from the list)?
- did you get disconnected from multiple ranked matches?
- what was the message that told you your connection is bad?
- are you EU or NA? EU has... a few connection issues on GW2’s end, so it might not be your connection that’s the problem.

Some of your post sounds like you got the Dishonourable debuff (for leaving too many rated games) which stops you from joining more rated games (solo arena and team arena, usually called solo q and team q here). That you said "all I can join now is solo q" contradicts that, though - you may well mean hotjoin/custom arenas, where players can choose teams or spectate or leave the match at any time.

Unless there’s a sudden, massive change and we start getting regular, frequent balance tweaks... we’re stuck with whatever this meta develops into ’til 2015. At least we’re likely to see all classes appear at least once within 10 soloq games, which hasn’t been the case for... a while.

Absconditus.6804:

Battle is not something you may care that much for unless your purpose is to try get higher Might stacks on your own for a specific build. On their own, they can at most provide 6 stacks of Might, not that that’s bad, but.. that’s after 20 seconds if you’re able to squeeze out every skill on each weapon within practically seconds (not too smart). Energy gives you one dodge, every 10 seconds, if you swap your weapon at that time. I don’t see the reason for complaint here. Keep in mind that their ICD is 9 seconds, and weapon swaps take 10 seconds to be available in most cases. You may not want to swap then.

Elementalists and Kit Engineers will pretty much proc these on cooldown with their regular rotations – attunement swapping and equipping/de-equipping a kit proc weapon swap sigils. Warriors can get their weapon swap time reduced to 5s, so don’t get as ‘stuck’ in one weaponset as much as other classes.

Hiii!

We’ve had enough problems in PvP for, um, a while, with regular lagspikes or persistently high latency. PvE maps were occasionally bad but not getting skills off/reacting to a foe matters a little less there*.

WvW maps – they don’t change, do they? They’re created on Friday, last until next Friday.
206.127.146.67
^ Vizunah Square [FR] borderlands IP for this week.
I’m based on Gunnar’s Hold, and have tried joining the Viz borderlands several times since Friday. Each time, I’ve had horrible lagspikes – definitely not due to nearby zergs.

The lag issues are really not down to certain ISPs – I can load some maps (PvP/PvE/WvW) without issue, but others are reliably terrible.

It’s bad that such a gameplay-impairing problem has been present for at least a couple of months now (maybe more?) without any explanation – and PvP has a lower playerbase so I guess y’alls can sweep it under the carpet…?
WvW, though, is harder to ignore – it’s already required for PvE completion, and this particular map’s issues affect players’ chances in the current WvW tournament matchup.
Yes, GH are currently winning, I guess this shows that I’m not moaning because I’m a sore loser? I can enter other WvW maps and play smoothly but that this one borderland is unplayable is, um, unacceptable?

*though ugh getting a laggy dungeon or fracs instance is horrible. Dredge frac can be actually fun these days, but not when 3 of 5 party members are freezing up for several seconds at once and in constant fear of disco.

Waisenpai.6028:

Time it per 9seconds before swapping attuments or you’ll waste it.

No need to count this – it’s important not to rush through attunements when you don’t need to, so that you don’t get locked out of them when they actually are relevant, sure… but a regular rotation winding through attunements will pretty reliably proc swap sigils every time they come off cooldown.

With 30 Arcana investment, you get 9s attunement cooldowns… this means you can rotate through just 3 of your attunements for 3s each, proc sigils as they’re off cd, and still have a fourth attunement of unused skills!

Rusc.4978:

My only issue with Moa Form is that there’s no in-game way to learn what the skills do before you’re Moa’d in combat.

Trying to read all of the skill facts when you get moa’d?

What, you mean the moa form cast by the super-high-damage mesmer AI in HotM isn’t good enough for you?
(it actually would be pretty good to have a way to test moa morph skills for like a minute against dummies, though)

As of the feature patch, you don’t unlock map completion until level... 15, I think? You still gain progress (unlocking waypoints/PoIs/vistas etc.) but the % completion doesn’t show up until you get to the right level.

tanztante.6532:

but WHERE!?

i really don’t get the purpose of this build.

in wvw, healing comes from blasting waterfields and it’s a fixed amount of healing
in pvp, you can still be bursted too fast to be effective over longer durations, plus, you got a guardian for that job
in pve, nobody needs healing.

so ?

Small-scale WvW, roaming with a party, it can be useful to heal up allies with your own finishers as well as theirs. In zergs yeah you just want to give fields when they’re needed, and watch everyone else use their finishers.
In PvP… yeah Ele is too squishy to want to focus on proper healing. Celestial stats are usually preferable if you want survivability. You’ll never kill anything and not bunker very effectively compared to a Guard (or even Engi now) because you lack any decent blocks.
In PvE? Healing allies in PuGs can be dead useful. Playing with an organised group? Yeah just roll zerk and roll over everything.

Yeah the sigil doesn’t work with regular weapon swapping when out of combat, either - but Ele attunements and Engi kits proc them.

Zelyhn Lekovitch.2867:

Tom.8029:

Do we know if the conditions applied by Arcane Precision are on a separate cool-down for each attunement or if they’re all on the same cool-down?

Arcane Precision is the minor trait in the grandmaster section of the Arcana trait line, just to help you locate it more easily.

http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Arcane_Precision
Does not have a cooldown

Glyph of Elemental Power didn’t mention its internal cooldown previously though, and that was global I think? They’re still not done updating tooltips, and we could well see Arcane Precision get one in the next patch that adds a few more letters to tooltips in lieu of actual balance changes.

Ooh, not really considered this before - they have such a low proc chance, and high-precision builds are so unlikely to spec into Arcana, that most folks tend to consider the trait unworthy of consideration.

I’ll report back if I ever get round to testing this! Probably best to do it in PvP with a high-precision amulet, x/6/x/x/5 traits, Sigil of Accuracy, Signet of Fire, wielding Lightning Hammer?

This... won’t solve the autobalance/4v5 issue in hotjoin. People force AB when they’re outnumbered and losing because it’s not fun to be permanently outnumbered and get terrible rewards just for having been outnumbered (which usually happens because folks deliberately join the team already most likely to win anyway).

A couple of things that could help:

1) Stop perma-4v5 from happening altogether, by not letting team numbers ever bee imbalanced. This is rather difficult, since it involves locking people out of play when team numbers aren’t even.

2) Stop folks from getting to choose teams when scores aren’t even. If you wish to play with/against a friend, you can do this by joining teams at the start of the match when score is 0; if score is 150-50 and there are 4 players on each team, you don’t get to join the team with 50 score.

3) I really like this one, wish I could remember who I first saw suggest it - just remove the idea of win/lose rewards from hotjoin and make a single, base reward of something like 350 rank, 10 silver for each match played.
Would be good to keep autobalance volunteer bonus in, so that 5v3s that happen aren’t so bad - and scaling for time-in-match would definitely still need to be applied so folks can’t just join games that are nearly done, cap a point, then get full rewards.

Winning team would still ’win’, and get a non-ranked win on their tally... but people trying to get farm their track progress wouldn’t feel the need to rank-stack or force AB, so these issues would affect other players less too.

I think of these, I’d like to see 2) and 3) implemented. 3) is a particularly easy change to apply, since it only involves tweaking the numbers for rank/coin gain currently associated with win/loss.

So I was running 6/4/0/0/4 for a while, zerk staff. Great fun, big numbers, shiny burst.

I am not going back to that, now that I can do 6/6/0/0/2. Lightning Rod gives nice damage output with all the CC that I already rely on to land skills, has the weakness for a tiiiiny bit more sustain... and on top of that, gives an extra 100 prec/fero stats from the trait point allocation, buffing my general dps too.

I don’t see it being run with mainhand Scepter, since FAir is always going to be a better dps choice and there are much better options than the low weakness uptime for damage mitigation... but has anyone tried it on D/D since it got buffed? It sounds like it could be fun, with those offhand dagger rupts, but everyone still seems to be running 0/0/2/6/6 cele builds since they have such excellent versatility and sustain.

1) yeah please don’t be eejits, everyone

Steb.2571:

-Steb #1 Downstate NA

2) ^ totally stealing this.

FGS#4 is no longer affected by swiftness, no, but it’s also unaffected by chill or cripple now.

I’m not sure why this matters now, since chill/cripple no longer let you stack fields together as of this patch *anyway*... but I guess it’s sort of useful for low-cleanse builds who still want to move around?

It still sucks as a gap closer, what with none of the rest of the FGS skills making good use of melee range, and dropping the weapon destroying that copy permanently.

Ayrilana.1396:

cheese.4739:

With both Warriors and Rangers able to contest points while not taking power damage (which is the primary source of damage in a spike), it’s possible for *a team to contest a point with near-complete safety for extended periods* - without any effort or skill besides popping one skill and backing off when it runs out.

And they leave the other two points open to take and hold...

And and and they can soak up the damage from the entire enemy team, and run off to defend other points when their invulns are on cooldown?

Midpoint fights are the busy ones. Having a strong contesting rotation at midpoint, with steady damage output, is very powerful. Having eyes on one of the outer points is important, as is getting to them when they’re under attack... but such low-risk, high-reward contesting of any point - that works even while outnumbered - is pretty broken.

CntrlAltDefeat.1465:

cheese.4739:

With both Warriors and Rangers able to contest points while not taking power damage (which is the primary source of damage in a spike), it’s possible for a team to contest a point with near-complete safety for extended periods – without any effort or skill besides popping one skill and backing off when it runs out.

All ranger invuln skills disable capturing. It was clearly indicated in there tool tip. The signet of stone change now prevents physical damage and clearly states you are open to conditions and control effects, but can still node capture. If you wish for this to be a constructive conversation, lets stick to what utilities can, and can not do. Hunters shot creates stealth. All stealth denies capture progress for the stealthed person(s) on it.

Signet of Stone’s active always prevented power damage and nothing else – the change applied to all Ranger signets just removed the unreasonable 6-trait-point investment required to make actives affect the player.

As I’ve bolded in the quote: “contest points while not taking power damage” is the issue. Negating all power damage is crazy-good damage mitigation – I could maaaybe accept arguments saying that Berserker Stance should still contest points… but Endure Pain and Signet of Stone allow folks to tank through so much more than BS ever could.

Epidemix Revenge.4862:

OlrunTheBlade.1486:

Current LB rating isn’t, but I’ve found peak LB rating to be quite accurate.

I always wondered how you look up stats like that. I mean..I can look up current leaderboard ranks of course. But Peak rating and such. How would I check that for myself and others?

http://www.gw2score.com/PvP/player/cheese4739

^ gw2score is a good resource, that’s my page - swap out the username#### for your own or anyone else’s, or click the top-right "PvP leaderboards" link to get a searchable version of LB.
As you can see, I’ve done reasonably well in the past, not played all that many ranked games recently, and temporary LB decay is a joke.
GW2score: wooo, many useful! ^__^

Wheee!

So it’s no longer possible to just pop into WvW to get bank access.

Can we get a bank in the HotM, with some way to stop folks from just popping in-and-out to use it, please? Once again, my preferred solution is to stop players from leaving HotM apart from through the LA portal, but still allowing us to enter the map from anywhere.

While it sounds odd to start with, you’ll very rarely find autotargeting useful in PvP. Use your camera and tab key well and you can target plenty fine, without accidentally going for the wrong things whenever you’ve not got anything in focus.
(You may not have autotargeting on, but it’s certainly a big reason why targeting Ranger pets would be an issue)

Both autotargeting and tab-targeting prioritise players (or Mesmer clones) over non-clone AI.
It’s probably worth binding a key to "Lock Autotarget" - which actually functions as a useful "cancel target" button. Hitting this key with a pet or other AI unit targeted, then tabbing with the Ranger in view, will set the player as your target.

tichorum.2415:

evilapprentice.6379:

tichorum.2415:

Harbinger.8637:

tichorum.2415:

All invulnerability classified skills do not capture points. An invluln is taking no physical or condition damage with one ability. Name one that captures a point.

inb4 endure pain and zerker stance!

they pop both are once then that is a good thing for the enemy.

Yes, I commonly rejoice when my target becomes completely immune to all types of damage.

If you kite them for the remaining ticks, they are forced to sit on the node and do nothing or chase you around, ultimately not doing anything. Once they’re done with these two stances, they are extremely vulnerable.

No, they’ve held a point for several seconds and probably done some damage to you or gotten you to blow at least one defensive cooldown.

Holding a node is doing a lot.

6/4/0/0/4, zerk zerk zerk. Fun. Dooo iiiit.

With both Warriors and Rangers able to contest points while not taking power damage (which is the primary source of damage in a spike), it’s possible for a team to contest a point with near-complete safety for extended periods - without any effort or skill besides popping one skill and backing off when it runs out.

I very much approve of the suggestion to turn it into a Glyph trait - we all know that this skill type really lacks trait support, and Inscription isn’t even very useful apart from maybe as a Cleansing Water proc (that costs 10 trait points to get at).

Lingering Elements functionality would be cool, but I still see that being too powerful if it cast multiple skill effects at once.

How about one or two HP-barriers at which all Glyph skills recharged, with a 60s cooldown? Something like 40-50% health, so that it was possible to cast your GoEH heal before this recharge procced? Regaining access to things like the summons and Glyph of Renewal could be pretty useful and maybe worth the trait point investment.

EDIT: another idea would be to give Glyphs multiple "charges" with shorter cooldowns before their very long shared cooldown.

...oh! Or "Glyph skills now recharge independently in each attunement, but have had their recharges increased"? Most Glyphs have always felt like they were balanced around having access to 4 skills at all times, without taking into account that using one locks out the other four. This would turn them into basically some powerful bonus weaponskills - and the single-stunbreak issue of Glyph builds could be fixed by having GoEP on a 40-50s cooldown four times over. Obviously recharges couldn’t stay as they are (a Storm every 10s, and a Lesser Elemental every 15s?) but I don’t think they’d need bumped up much to be fair for the GM-trait investment required.

S/D is likely to still be Fresh Air burst, with the glyph elite largely used for Air Elemental.

Very little changed, with our builds - our new traits got made less *completely* useless, and our elites all got made worse:

- Tornado is still terribly situational and doesn’t even allow you to reliably pump out damage now.
- FGS is even more now just a mobility weapon, since its dps attacks tend to be less powerful on a point than weapon skills.
- Glyph of Elementals has an active and a new pretty icon, but the active isn’t at all reliable (adds it to end of the summoned elemental’s attack queue) and requires you to waste time casting it. If anything it’s been made *less* reliable since you have to stop controlling your foe for a moment while you activate it.

Underwhelming patch was underwhelming.

Josh Davis.6015:

I need a bit more information to help track this down.

a) Do you live in NA or EU?
b) Are you playing on NA or EU servers?
c) Was your account ORIGINALLY created on NA or EU?
d) Then of course get me the /ip while you’re lagging

a, b, c) EU

As far as I can tell, everyone else playing was the same.

d) Whole map (couple of players from both teams) freeze up for 2-4 seconds in two consecutive matches in teamq – I didn’t think to /ip for the first one (on Temple) but second (on Foefire) was 206.127.159.224:0

Don’t think I’ll be playing any more ranked PvP today.

Xillllix.3485:

cheese.4739:

Iriel.9048:

The delay on the elemental actually performing the skill after the elementalist’s command is indeed too much for an effective use in a competitive scenario – especially when the elemental is already attacking the target.

That they have to be in combat is especially important here – there is absolutely no way to get a reliable attack off from this thing because it’ll always be added behind something already in the queue.

It is totally unreliable. You have to wonder sometimes what they are thinking when making such changes that end up breaking a skill completely.

The worst thing is that this comes only a few months after they finally made Ranger pets more than just damage/pull bots, and made their active skills immediate rather than queued. Why could they not apply the same to other summons?
Not only do we have activation time that breaks the flow of our own combos, the summoned elementals usually have pretty long attack sequences and it’s almost impossible to tell when the cast is going to go off. Boo to that.

witcher.3197:

Or like making a football championship where every 4th match is basketball.

Why does this not exist already?

Clip.6845:

Why do you assume that people that dislike the map are bad at it?

The map doesn’t take a lot of skill to play, it’s just not enjoyable and quite buggy.

“quite” buggy. Yes.

We know how to roll for the map – I’m sure many of the people who’re told “you just suck” would have great success if they ran their troll engi builds – but a great many people just don’t find its mechanics fun or interesting.
Instant kills and such a stupid powerful shared secondary objective don’t feel fair in any way, aren’t satisfying to pull off, and really really don’t fit with the way combat flows in GW2.

Well, the original bandaid-y nerf was to stop people from teleporting to stack all the fields on top of each other.

They should’ve fixed it back then so that teleporting just moved your location and didn’t interrupt the speed or direction of movement.

They should fix that now.

Iriel.9048:

The delay on the elemental actually performing the skill after the elementalist’s command is indeed too much for an effective use in a competitive scenario – especially when the elemental is already attacking the target.

That they have to be in combat is especially important here – there is absolutely no way to get a reliable attack off from this thing because it’ll always be added behind something already in the queue.

From Tornado, what I really want is aimed attacks. Cast lightning bolts at a target or an area. Launch a cow at a location to CC.
The Dust Devil thing iunno... I guess probably just adding blinding pulses to the field? Just call it a dusty storm!

Gorani.7205:

1. The activation time of the special ability is 3/4 sec, which is no instant cast, but actually a full skill use. It feels much longer in-game (probably due to the AI figuring out priorities). This breaks your normal skill chains and makes you lose one or two auto-attacks at least.
2. Welcome to the world of Ranger pets BEFORE the fixes to pet AI. The execution of the skills takes a while, so the added time until the skill hits, is 2-3 seconds at best.

These two are the ones that really hurt.

They recognised that Ranger pets sucked. They fixed those.

They finally give us practical control over our summons, while nerfing both of our other elites… and mess it up in the same ways as they did with Rangers’ class mechanic for a year and a half.

They need to cancel current skill queues and cast immediately – this applies whether the player has to dedicate time to triggering it, or if the chain skill is instant cast.

See, Staff has all its combo finishers in Earth Attunement. I’d expect to see Fire/Earth up first, then I guess Water then Air, for gating them.

Is there a worthwhile combo field/finisher tutorial yet, actually?

They should add dire.

Note: no, no they should not.

scerevisiae.1972:

how to make both new players and the PVP community happy in one foul swoop? get rid of downed state.

Really? There’s no way we can lose the downed state mechanic now.

Current burst builds can pump out a lot of damage all at once, and don’t have a particularly high skill floor.
Not all classes have personal access to powerful prot/damage mitigation/anti-spike… and the team support in the game is either boons, projectile reflects, occasonal blocks or heals. A good team can help keep someone who’s getting focused alive – but the difficulty curve for effective prot/healing is rather steeper (or starts higher?) than that for (most) bursters.
Downed state means it’s not possible to pop into a group that outnumbers you, burst someone down, then retreat, rinse, repeat. Without it we’d be pushed even more towards “roll a heavy or a thief”.

From the game update notes:
"Skill unlock requirements for some professions, such as elementalists (attunements) and necromancers (death shroud), have moved. Elementalists in a moved attunement will remain in it until they change. That attunement will be reacquired upon reaching the new level requirement."

So your attunement is locked out until you reach.... whichever level it now unlocks at?

Wyrden.4713:

u-u-uu just messed it up

Are you stammering because your teeth are chattering due to the DEEP FREEZE?

I’ve not once said that it’s OP. I’ve said that it’s an exploit. How useful or pointless or whatever doesn’t matter - it’s using game mechanics in unintended ways to gain any kind of an advantage over someone not doing so.

It doesn’t have to be a game-breaking godmode amount of life force to be an exploit.

And the thing I have issue with is that you said it’s not an exploit.

Change really is needed. So many things have gone unfixed since launch.

I am totally okay with the use of unintentional interactions to deal with these problems, and if ANet takes note it might possibly even lead to bugfixes or class mechanic overhauls or other improvements.

It’s still deliberately doing things that are definitely not included by design - and doing these things gives an advantage compared to a player with an identical spec who isn’t doing them.

It’s an exploit.

Neko.9021:

This is the Staff Ele build used by the EU ToL 2 winning team:
http://en.gw2skills.net/editor/?fFAQFAWhMM6c24wwBd0AhAB5tmrRBlrLXB-TJRHwAAuAACeAAHLDoe/BA

Celestial Staff is so strong it’s pushed out Bunker Guardian for some team comps as the team’s main support in sPvP.

Gotta love that with all the effort put into making things other than cantrips and 0/x/x/6/6 viable…. ER-tripcantrip-0/x/x/6/6 is still taken in top teams. With flavour-of-the-month broken runes and the ever-necessary Energy sigil.

Hai everybody! Doctor Nick here! I’m just joining in with the mimicry! I don’t know where spleens come from!

Also the Frost Bow is far too clunky! The only way Deep Freeze is useful is for keeping fish fresh!

Bye everybody!

citizankane.5723:

So what if it’s kitten exploit. It’s just a way to bypass poor design. If your one of the sheeple that believe Anet understands how to balance their own game, then sure I could see how you would label it as an exploit.

See, this is something I can get behind.

As I said in my first post in this thread: I want necro life force exploits to be nerfed out of existence as long as they get some fair ’default level’ of life force to return to out of combat.
Exploiting this because not doing so gives an unfair disadvantage: sure, I agree with it. This method of life force generation is still an exploit that goes against the original design intentions.

In hotjoin, I actively encourage people to force autobalance in hotjoin whenever possible, because the current AB system is utterly terrible, and HJ is *not* a good introduction to PvP in any sense of the phrase. 8v8 was worse, sure, since it had even fewer similarities to the ranked arena setup than current HJ... but at least 7v8 wasn’t a guaranteed win in 97% (yes, I’ve pulled this percentage out of my meowbeast) of games for the team with higher numbers - in contrast to 4v5.
If we don’t draw attention to what’s wrong, it’s not going to get fixed - and exploiting poorly designed mechanics is a pretty good way to do this.

Toying with mechanics in such ways is still abuse of exploits and it’s silly to try to claim that it’s not.

citizankane.5723:

So your ancestors didn’t drop their nuts either and didn’t wanna take the boat ride?
Don’t hold it against them!

My ancestors were all very careful squirrels who made sure not to lose their carefully collected foodstuffs. Correct.

They were also prone to bouts of rather terrible seasickness.

I will judge them as much as I bleeding well want to for either of these things, thank you very much.

hackks.3687:

cheese.4739:

citizankane.5723:

It’s not an exploit. It’s just a way to bypass poor design. If your one of the sheeple that believe Anet understands how to balance their own game, then sure I could see how you would label it as an exploit.

Whether or not the design is poor isn’t relevant - that this is a way to "bypass" the design is what makes it an exploit.

how is it "bypassing" anything? you’re assuming that this isn’t by design that Necro’s can kill their own minions for Life Force after having it reset to zero prior to the match starting.

why else give players 10s prior to the gates opening and the match starting? hint: because it gives players the chance to buff up

Using skills while waiting for gates to open: puts those skills on cooldown, you can’t then swap those skills out again. I’m pretty sure this is the intended behaviour.

Using skills then equipping different weapons: you get to ignore the (possibly pretty long) cooldowns from the weapon skills you just cast, since you’re no longer using those weapons. You get to gain the effects of skills you don’t have equipped for the match... for at least some of the match.

Spawning minions then swapping the skills out again: doesn’t put the newly equipped skills on cooldown - so you have utility skills that are ready to use immediately - and generates life force that you’d otherwise have no way to get.

Honestly I’d like to see players locked into their class/build as of when they queued - particularly in soloq. There’s pretty much a second game of Reroll Wars 2 going on at the start of most matches, as well as the weapon/utility skillswap exploits used by many Eles and Necromancers (and others? Can’t quickly think of any others that really benefit apart from maybe one blast finisher).