Guild Wars 2

Nobody was saying that there are no counters, though. It’s that the combination of effects it can give are too strong in comparison to other elites. Strong enough that it’s suppressing other team comps from being as viable as ones containing a Ranger.

I mostly agree with you, even after the incoming December 10th nerfs, I don’t think Ranger will stop being mandatory on teams, and this elite has a lot to do it.

LegendaryLukeee.1462:

1. Cast Time

I disagree here; I think team res utilities should have their cast times normalized to 2 seconds. In order to be more useful in solo queue, the cast time needs to beat the stomp animation, since successfully precasting the res is much more difficult without voice comms.

LegendaryLukeee.1462:

2. The Rez Targets

Personally, I dislike all muti-target res utils. I’m also a proponent of the 1 stomp, 1 rally idea. All these multi rallies make team fights super swingy, which is not great for competitive play. Nature’s Vengeance should go as well.

LegendaryLukeee.1462:

3. Passive Heal

I think your nerf to the passive heal is a little too harsh, I’d say cut it in half first and see how that goes. It is pretty OP especially in small-scale fights as it stands, I definitely agree on that.

LegendaryLukeee.1462:

4. The Condi Cleanse

I agree, the full condi wipe on top of the other effects is over the top. I could see it toned down or even removed entirely.

Mini Ken! He just came back from Barnes & Noble.

Hugh Norfolk.2798:

Great idea! Thanks for putting this together for our community Ken. /bow

Thanks!

All invite requests I got were sent. My in-game mail was full but is now cleared out if anyone wants to contact me that way.

added, thanks Jax

I’ve invited you, kirito my son.

Cool, just drop one of your guilds when you get a sec.

Mash Hog.5672:

What kinds of things are you planning for your guild?
I am very interested.

• Open Q&A: Ask a question in-guild, and hopefully a Mentor will see it and give you a good answer.
• Mentor Initiatives: This is going to be up to the individual Mentors, since this is completely volunteer. Some things I’d love to see happen include: livestreamed workshops, mentor-student hotjoins/queues, 5v5 guild scrimmages.

John Corpening.9847:

This is a great idea! Thanks a ton for putting it together.

No problem, I’m looking forward to what you guys have planned in future releases and I’m hoping to ramp up the community in preparation for that.

Hey guys, I wanted to announce it here since a lot of PvPers probably never check the Guild Recruitment forum. I made a new sPvP-only guild that is hopefully going to be able to bridge that information gap that a lot of new PvPers are experiencing. I’m hoping that this guild will become the major community-wide resource for teaching and learning about sPvP. If you’re an experienced player and would like to teach, or a newer player that wants to learn, check it out!

https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/guilds/recruitment/NA-sPvP-MotM-Mentors-of-the-Mists

PM me on the forums or write me an in-game mail to join — all levels of experience are welcome (including none)!

I started a new guild called Mentors of the Mists. This guild will be for teaching and learning about sPvP. I hope to get some of the more experienced NA players into the guild to help newer players learn about:

• Classes & Builds
• Tournament Strategy
• Team Composition
• Rotations & Map Awareness

You can ask questions in guild chat, but please don’t repeatedly bother a Mentor privately if they are busy. I would also like Mentors to hold occasional workshops to teach on various subjects, and any events like that will be posted in the guild MotD.

If you would like to Mentor, or just want to join as a Student, you are welcome! Just PM me here on the forums, or whisper/mail me in-game and I will get you added to the guild. Just please let me know if you’re joining as a Mentor so I can give you the proper rank within the guild. Hopefully this will eventually become a huge guild and an excellent resource for new sPvPers!

Keep in mind, repping isn’t necessary, this guild is intended as a resource – rep when you feel like and ask/answer any questions that you want. It might also be useful for forming PUG teams for Team Arena.

Seriously, though, lots of great communication and timely responses coming from this guy. Glad to see such care to put into the server-side work these days and keeping a close eye on the PvP community. We can be an unruly bunch sometimes, so kudos!

Tyler Chapman.1832:

It’s not my place to be giving design reasoning behind changes so I can try to get one of the guys to give a statement on this but the way I see it is that this change helps lessen the gap we have in player skill level. It’s an awesome quality of life improvement to team coordination and it’s going to help matches remain more competitive across the board. Team’s using voice comms will still have an upper advantage but I think that reducing the amount mal-rotations happening is a positive change.

Here’s my simple suggestion: Put a single Mesmer marker at the average position among all visible copies of the Mesmer. So, if the real Mesmer was at (1, 5), and there were 2 clones, one at (2, 7) and another at (3, 3), it would show the Mesmer marker at ([1+2+3]/3, [5+7+3]/3) = (2, 5).

The channel bar is the time you have to choose between popping the bubble and getting the heal, or leaving the bubble and blocking projectiles. If you cancel the channel, you’re choosing early that you just want the bubble.

That’s not a bug, though. Just read what the skill says on the tooltip. It’s a visual bug that it doesn’t show the Shield of Absorption anymore after you stop channeling it, but the skill is having the exact effect that it says it does.

Shield’s awesome in PvP/WvW in a defensive/support build… make it any stronger and it would be overpowered.

The way a lot of people talk about the shield makes me think that y’all don’t know about the invisible bubble trick.

Go to the Engineer NPC in Heart of the Mists and have him start attacking you.

Press Shield 5 once, and then press a movement direction to interrupt yourself before the channel ends.

Watch what happens to the Engi’s rifle attacks for the next 4 seconds.

felivear.1536:

why were they even allowed to queue for RATED Solo Q.

True, I’m guessing with the changes to hotjoin and leaderboards, they are preparing for a change like you’re suggesting. Solo Queue at rank 20+ and Team Queue at rank 30+ seems logical.

Justin ODell.9517:

We’re going to be changing this, but you’ll have to wait for the details. :/

That’s fine. This is better than it was before, so I’m happy, especially if the system is getting overhauled soon anyway.

Wow, yeah, Incubating Baby.3279 just gained 4802 ranks to become rank 1 after winning 1 game. LOL

Seconded, thanks for putting time into the PvP community, I know it will pay off for you guys in the long run.

Justin ODell.9517:

Yes, after two hours it will start to decay but the decay is so low that you shouldn’t see any changes in such a short amount of time. It also ramps up the longer it’s been since the last time you played.

Fair enough, cool system! That’s exactly what I’ve been wanting. Problems with the leaderboard decay turned off a lot of players, and fixing it will be a HUGE help to the people that were disappointed with it. Awesome work, Justin!

Setting an alarm clock to go off every 2 hours will be troublesome, but hey, you do what you gotta do Sleep is for the weak!

Josh Davis.6015:

We have increased the rate at which someone decays on the leaderboard. We were hoping to observe the change for a few days before making any sort of announcement, but you guys are too clever for that.

Justin has also changed the decay to update every hour, rather than one a day, so you should see movement happen a bit more often.

Let us know what you think!

Wait… every hour? So like if I don’t play for an hour, I’ll start decaying? Or you mean like if I don’t play for a week (or whatever the real minimum interval for decay to start is), the exact hour that 1 week since I last played hits, the decay will start?

kirito.4138:

In off peak hours there won’t be enough people near your MMR so you will likely get stuck with odd ball players.

True, but so will the other team if the new matchmaking is working properly.

For solo queue, assuming the new matchmaking is working properly (haven’t been able to play yet to see), I don’t think much waiting is needed. Maximum of 5 minutes I’d say, after that just throw together whatever 10 players you can get and split them up as fairly as you can.

For team queue, I don’t mind a bit of a wait since I’d rather have a competitive match against another highly rated team rather than discourage a brand new or lower rated team by playing against them. I’d say a good 10 minute wait is fine before you start getting desperate with the matchmaking.

Oh, and class mix doesn’t matter, really. I’ve been on effective solo queue teams with 3 Guardians, 2 Necros, 4 Engineers, etc.

Gooooooo 5v5! Hotjoin should teach players using tournament settings.

Agree, if they do have PvP legendaries, they need to also add a “Turn off Legendary effects” checkbox to the Options menu.

Wow, if people start around the rank 400-500 area, that’s definitely too high. I’d think in an ideal world, people would start around 50th percentile.

oh holy crap, it is @@ wow, some big changes there

Can’t wait to give it a try later, I hadn’t really enjoyed solo queue that much since the quality of the matchups was generally pretty low (especially during off-peak hours). I expect that I will enjoy playing solo queue a lot more after this change, thanks for the hard work on it.

I don’t necessarily see the need for 8v8 anymore. I guess the original idea was that people would be coming in and out all the time, and so to lessen the impact of a single player leaving, you just have a higher maximum number of players (ex: 7v8 is less of a disadvantage than 4v5 percentage-wise). While this is true, I’ve found that the addition of spectators makes it less likely that a 5v5 hotjoin will stay unbalanced for a very long period of time, since usually there is a spectator waiting to join anyway. As a downside to 8v8, I think it can be discouraging to newer players when they get jumped by 6+ players at once and they haven’t gotten proficient enough at map awareness yet to avoid the zerg.

Bear and Bry will be shoutcasting a just-for-fun upcoming event on the 20th, so if you want to see more like this, check it out in the Events subforum.

Zenith.7301:

Says the bunker guardian. Play something that isn’t bunker like a power spec ranger or engi and see how “balanced” D/P thieves are then.

True, in 64 ranks of pvp I’ve never played any other classes or builds than bunker guardian. Voted most boring player NA 9 months in a row.

In sPvP, D/X Thief balance is fine. In fact, I think it could use a slight buff with the amount of risk you take and skill required to compete at the top level. It is getting said slight buff in the next patch (more initiative regen), so we’ll see where it’s at then. As it stands, backstab is fine and balance as a whole is fine for that build.

My favorite quote:

“He ate those clusterbombs like a bowl of Wheaties in the morning, folks!”

at its finest.

http://www.twitch.tv/doyourbestbear/c/3216039

Featuring two titans of the NA PvP scene, Caed and Backpack. Enjoy.

Might want to consider picking up Backpack, he is a top notch professional at all classes. Check out this very close set of duels between him and Caed.

http://www.twitch.tv/doyourbestbear/c/3216039

I support the idea of titles being given out on Nov 26th similar to the QP rewards! Let’s welcome a new generation of sweet Arena title-holders!

Please don’t leave the Symbol of Swiftness change for Guardian as-is, it will be a sizable nerf in sPvP. I won’t realistically be able to give myself more than 4s of Swiftness on the move, which is going to hurt Guardian rotation speed quite a bit and pigeon-hole them even more than they already are as an immobile rock that sits on mid all game. :\

My suggestion: Have it also give an extra 4s of Swiftness upon cast if the target does not already have Swiftness.

BTW, thanks a lot for the additional communication lately, especially regarding balance changes. I’m sure it’s a lot for the team to read through, but it’s definitely the way to go. Go Grouch!

Thing is, Heartseeker doesn’t actually hurt until you’re below 50% compared to what you could hit them for, so if they’re literally heartseekering from 100% health, just counterattack. If you have some form of CC, even better. Thieves that do a lot of damage also die more or less instantly, so any form of CC + damage will instagib bad thieves.

Regarding Symbol of Swiftness, can you make it so it also gives you 4 seconds of Swiftness if you have none upon cast (before the first symbol tick)? This would preserve the old functionality of giving 8s if you are only standing inside for 1 tick. As it stands, I really dislike this change for sPvP since rarely will anyone be inside the symbol for multiple ticks. It makes the symbol awkward and clunky.

JonPeters.5630:

Diamond Skin

Actually, I think a major concern regarding this ability stems from its possible use in a scepter fresh air burst build as an anti-condi counter. In a 0/30/30/10/0 build (fresh air, diamond skin, vital striking, scholar runes, zerker amulet), you could theoretically keep from range and deal very high damage while making it difficult for necros, engis, and other condi builds from returning fire with their own poke damage, giving you the upper hand over them in choosing if or when to close range to burst your target of choice. In general, the PvP community doesn’t like these full immunity skills/traits, and is looking for traits with more counterplay to them rather than these 100% counters that lead more to Build Wars than interesting gameplay situations.

JonPeters.5630:

Aquamancer’s Alacrity
Cleansing Wave

I think the biggest issue with these two changes is that it leaves very little that is appealing at the Adept tier in Water. I do like the idea you propose, leaving Cleasing Wave at Adept and redesigning the Master tier trait.

JonPeters.5630:

Soothing Disruption vs Cantrip Mastery

I love the change you just proposed.

JonPeters.5630:

Arcana

Yes, you could do that. I could even see giving Renewing Stamina the Engi treatment and increasing the icd to 10 seconds. Either way, moving the two best Adept Arcana traits up to Master is a bit too harsh IMO.

Sol,

Fair enough, you have much more experience playing it, I only fight with and against it. Thanks for your input, hopefully a dev will read our suggestions.

Peow peow.2189:

take a guess at which class OP plays. Im guna take a stab at mesmer

good guess

Sol.4310:

Smarter update for Ranger’s, the problem isn’t the icd on the passive proc’s just go test spirit ranger and you will see what I mean it doesn’t always proc every 10 seconds, only in a perfect world it does. Most of the time it takes 15-20 seconds to proc the effect.

Ranger
- Elite: Spirit of Nature: Summon a spirit that gives nearby allies a 35% chance to gain regeneration on hit. Command the spirit to revive and cure conditions on nearby allies.
Regeneration: 10 seconds.
Duration: 60 seconds.

- Storm Spirit: Active skill, Call Lightning reduced to 2000 base damage.

They nerf Spirit Elite so doesn’t carry these ranger’s who only started playing the class when Spirit’s came out.

Also Storm Spirit is hole reason some builds (Ele) can’t fight a Spirit ranger.

Maybe, I do agree that Storm Spirit does more damage than it should. Though, the amount of protection and burning procs are sort of an unseen menance in teamfights: hard to calculate the effect but when you don’t have a Spirit Ranger you notice a sizable difference in team sustain. The effects have a 70% chance of proccing traited, so like 2 hits, or about a second or two on average. Turning the healing into a regen proc is an interesting idea, I hadn’t thought of that. The elite is quite a lot of healing as it stands right now, so that could be better. Doesn’t work well with other regen sources, though, so that’d be a pretty big nerf in some cases. Not sure if that heavy of a nerf is warranted, but maybe it is.

ronpierce.2760:

I think stun times need lowered or CDs raised, you don’t want to prevent CC overlapping because that does something awful to skill usage and unpredictability. If CC chains are too long, lower the time they last before you make them work clucky with one another.

Well, be specific: what exactly are you worried about happening? I think it’s good – you should use CC in coordination with allies, and if you mess up and overlap them, you get punished by an Immune message.

Larynx.2453:

The active was increased from 3275(0.5) to 4275(0.4).

What is the point of this? The only usage of the active is when you’re <1000 health and have condition stacks on you.

Anyways, I do like the change, especially the warrior ones because they’re actually reasonable. Though, I think Unsuspecting Foe should have been included. I think if you replaced the Skullcrack nerf with moving Unsuspecting Foe to master it would be better, and it would also address the real issue which is hammer.

The only ones I really disagree with are the double nerfs to sword thief and the Stand Your Ground nerf.

Increasing the Healing Signet active attempts to add some extra play to the heal, considering that currently, it would only be activated in a very small number of circumstances. If the passive is lower and active is higher, it becomes more of a decision as to whether you want the long-term or short-term benefits. More decisions for the player = more chance for skill to get involved.

Unsuspecting Foe and Hammer are both addressed by the change regarding chained CCs. With that change, UF becomes quite a bit weaker of a trait, and Hammer can no longer chain with other weapons/utils to 100-0 opponents.

Many still believe that s/d Thief holds down a number of builds, including many Mesmer and Ele builds. Those two changes are meant to address the surpression of that part of the metagame.

SYG is the most powerful utility in the game for PvP, partly because of its very short CD for the effect given. It’s only a 5 second increase, bunker Guard would still be easily viable after that change.

Actually, I think this is awesome. Give PvE players some PvP-related rewards (just not an insane amount). This way, they’ll get some cool PvP skins and maybe want to see what else they can do in the Mists. Also, PvP players can check out the PvE event and still get some PvP rewards while doing so. A little bit of cross-rewarding isn’t a terrible thing.

JonathanSharp.7094:

The current thinking is that a tournament could be decided by something like (using your examples):

1st game: Capture the Flag (not saying we’d do that, but it’s an example).
2nd game: One of the Conquest maps.
3rd game: King of the Hill (not saying we’d do that, but …you know the drill).

That way there’s variety, which means teams need to be strong in multiple game types.

@SinDen: Yep, we have a lot of cool features that are being worked on right now for PvP. A lot of them are really big, and take a lot of time to develop. That’s just how things are unfortunately when it comes to those new systems. I do think that new game types, in addition to the new features, would be good though, and that’s what we’re aiming at!

Personally, I wouldn’t implement it that way. Two main reasons:

1. Time. Sometimes people just want to queue up for a single match, and won’t necessarily still be wanting to play 45 minutes later when the 3rd match will end. The current system allows you to play for 15 minute blocks of time in a competitive setting, and removing that option shouldn’t be done lightly.
2. Preference. Some people love playing all the game types, but many others have their favorite and don’t want to be forced to play the others that they don’t like as much. You can see that already with maps — some people hate Skyhammer, and others want to play nothing but Skyhammer. More choice is always better, especially for the less hardcore players that simply don’t want to put themselves through the trouble of playing and mastering a game mode that they don’t enjoy.

If you can add new game types, provide options, but keep queue times reasonable, I think that’s the best possible outcome and should be your goal in development, in my opinion. If it’s just not possible or too difficult to implement right away, that’s understandable, but I think that your proposal of just having a single queue that forces the players to play all the game types is a suboptimal solution and certainly a compromise at best.

Good job reviving the channel, guys. Also, it now comes with 100% more Five Gauge!