Guild Wars 2

Its not too many options for stats…
It’s just that power/crit/critdmg scale so well together in a game mode that promotes burst builds…

If you want to do viable physical dmg you have to have high power/%-bonus-dmg to create extremely high crits… that basically leads to berserker or valkyrie builds for next to every phys dmg setups, short of bunker.
That in a game of conquest where, by leaps and bounds, the best kind of roamer is someone who can jump in with a massive spike… having the map promote burst dps, in a speccing system already promoting burst dps… it just thrashes diversity and puts all the hope of ‘having a spec be viable’ into the hands of the utterly incompetent Anet devs.
Kind of kittened.

Anyways, more realisticly… the devs won’t do anything notable to stats so everything I said is kind of irrelevant and no core issue with this game will ever be fixed… even if they wanted to drop/tweak crit damage and made more procs for precision (unbuffable dmg amounts, leaches, exc. so prec/power isnt the only way to spec for viable dmg) with survivability being as high as it can be though… toning down power/crit/critdmg scaling would just make all fights take ages… it’d require tons more rebalancing to really help the game…
Imo GW2 is just in a kittenty situation every way you look at it.

Meh casual game, just pick up the FoTM specs (condi necro, CC war, s/p thief) and roflestomp most pug groups.
Not really notable for anything else.

Anet really doesn’t know what they are doing.
Still so much useless stuff and a few TOP TIER SPECS that are jokingly easy to play…
Anyways I find it hilarious that they make changes, they completely remake traits, that end up being kitten useless…
like they don’t even know their own game well enough to do anything but nerf based on QQ…
If they were so bad at conceptualizing and needed to ‘see how something plays out’ for a few months just to know if they are actually helping balance…
You would have thought the devs, devs who have done this all before, would have given GW2 a simple class/specing setup, to, you know, allow easy balancing, so they could get their heads out of their kitten over trying to make a balanced game and actually focus on making a better game to play…
But nope…
Not even that bright…

Dirame.8521:

Beserker stance – Immune to conditions for 8 secs
Cleansing Ire – Removes 1 condition per bar of adrenaline when you land a burst skill
Mending – Removes 3 conditions when you heal.
Healing Signet – Passive Can heal for up to 400 per second
Longbow 5 now applies 6 stacks of bleed as well as immob
And stuns are the new thing for Warriors.

Healing surge heals for 10~k if you use it with 3 adrenaline.
Brawn now reduces the CD of F2 skills.
The 5-15% more dmg trait in strength was moved to tier 3.

Basically 4s stunning with mace mainhand every 7.5s is the new deal.
That or you can stack eviscerate up to 8-12k if you really go for it, adrenalane doesn’t really deplete if you pop something like signet of fury while out of combat, so you can eviscerate into a fight pretty easily and regularly.

Osi.3504:

pmnt.4067:

Maybe some mechanic to discourage spamming the same skill. Each subsequent skill use costs additional 1/2/3/ initiative. Or, it could scale with the base cost: + 50%/+ 100%/+ 150%/…

That would give thieves the option to burn the initiative for a burst (or using multiple evades in an emergency), but bringing down an opponent to “burstable” health would require a “rotation” of at least 2 skills.

That’s a great idea but the problem people seem to have is the fact theives are burning it for burst anyways so wouldn’t make anyone happy unless we’re not allowed to use HS or CB more than once in a short period of time. TBH it’s balanced or theives would be super overpowered, it’s just the annoying factor people have a problem with it.

That’s actually the same reason I like the teleport idea, except the teleport deal seems like a more elegant solution.
It allows spamming, situationally with increased initiative cost, but adds a whole nother layer of depth to the class, skyrocketing the skillcap without remaking every ability… kinda seemed pretty solid of a way to shore up the main problems and let the class get less gimmicky yet stay viable.

knyy.6427:

And the viewers know the outcome? That would be very boring. I enjoyed the matches. They could be improved in a way so that viewers can decide for themselfs what to watch in whos point of view.

The official stream of the match would be on delay, meaning that the only people who know the outcome beforehand are those who are actually watching at the tourny live…

What other games do is delay the necessary few minute~ to stop cheating, yet it also gives that chance to do replays and whatnot since the game isn’t being casting completely live.
GW2 might need a lil more of a delay since understanding what is happening seems a much tougher.

kito.1827:

garethh.3518:

GW2 has to compete with MOBAs and I’ve watched MOBA streams of games I haven’t even played and sat at the edge of my seat , OMFG-beaming at all the clutch plays scattered across the battlefield… the difference between that and GW2 is just outrageous. In GW2 the casters seem lucky to even notice a single ‘OMFG’ play in an entire match…

oh yeah, i watched a lot of MOBAs recently because there are so many players like you stating the fantastic side of how fascinating it is to watch on stream.
so i found my self every other day watching MOBAs for 15mins and suddenly snoring away into my dreamland.
i say to myself: “concentrate!! watch it!! if they say, there has to be some truth in it!!” and i go on watching people doing last hits on minions, [aaahhhh….]and snoring away again.

on the otherhand, yesterday was an amazing to watch tournament. even my cousin who is not a single bit into gw2 has enjoyed watching this tourney and was amazed especially about the 5 last matches

…but… just my 2 cents…

Not every match in every MOBA is entertaining, and MOBAs aren’t for everyone.
I fell in love with SMITE after watching a few matches (hadn’t even played it before watching, yet I still got really into the matches), LoL is up and down more a game to watch if your really into it, DOTA is actually a pretty cool game to watch, would rather play LoL or SMITE, but its a good game to watch.

@Thesilentflute
Alls fair in perspective.

First of brother there is allot more timing to a thief burst dps than any other class…

The core of any burst dps is timing.

CDs involve a massive opportunity cost on use… you lose the ability to do it again for 10+ seconds, initiative is much more relaxed of a mechanic…. that combined with the thief abilities having no more depth than any other classess…

I’m not saying thieves are utter jokes to play with a skillcap as high as the skillfloor.
I am saying that the class ends up having a relatively low skillcap in a great many situations, not for the average player, but for anyone who wants to take the game seriously.
That leaves a massive area for improvement if this game ever wants a shot at attracting legitimate esports teams.

Gameplay, for an entire class, can’t fall out like that, it kind of has to… ESPECIALLY in a game based around skirmish instead of group v group fighting…. have very deep and well conceived class mechanics/weapons.

Cyhann.2609:

Idea of the decade, please make this happen A-Net!

It’s actually what other games do…
They start streaming the tournament at a delay and jump back for replays where need be…

Honestly these guys should stream it at an hour~ delay so they have time to watch the match beforehand and get a good grasp on everything that happens, and THEN cast it…

ensoriki.5789:

The class will never create good gameplay in its current state, within a years time it has only gotten cheese-ier than ever..
[As a sidenote, I’m not saying thieves are OP, because they aren’t… I’m saying thieves create kittenty gameplay for the player and opponent (constant evade spam, infinite stealth, backstab in a game built around active defense)]

Did you even play thief brah?

Yes the thief went from one gimmick spec to another.
Yes some thief specs are a spam and suck.
Yes there is a skill cap higher than the skill floor in most any spec.
Yes there is ‘oppurtunity cost’ when it comes to initiative.

No that doesn’t really reference my point.
The closest thing was opportunity cost, and the opportunity cost of initiative is one dimensional, you have no effect from using ini costing abilities short of the loss of initiative… that may seem blatantly obvious… but the thing is that it just leads to situations, rather commonly, where you run through the exact same rotation or spam (as a counter or initiation) since the weapon abilities themselves add little extra to the equation…
Heartseaker to gain distance or kill if weak, infiltrators strike to stay out of CC, flanking strike to evade and get out larcenists strike, blackpowder to spam heartseaker in for stealth…
Depth isn’t in the class.

As I said a bit ago, if all the ini costing abilities had another factor, like the CD/teleport or also buffed the next auto attack in some way, that would give the weapons a second dimension and really drive in an opportunity cost for using an ability at a certain time, or one ability over another… you know… instead of cluster bomb spamming any corpse or heartseaker spamming any weak enemy… the class might actually involve taking in the situation and future a bit more…

Thesilentflute.8761:

Those crying about stealth if you have enough exp with or against thieves they are easy to kill. In my view the issue is more about the evasion not that they should not be evasive but it makes these nobs that are QQ feel stupid for what ever reason. The evasion of s/d is over the top, but it does poopoo dmg and the longer a thief is in a fight the higher his loss % goes. Even stealth makes them feel dumb, but its just lack of exp.

The balance issues I see are sword skills are a lil too cheap to cast, pistols do to little dmg (it could be a cast time bug as stated in another thread), and cluster bomb does to much dmg.
I think daggers are in a good place if you were to change something though you could change the 5 skill from a 3s stealth to a 3s daze this would take away a backstab and the health/energy regain of the skill and you could rename it liver shot. Like a boxer knocking someone out with a body shot.

Thieves need to spam their abilities to be viable… if you just cut at their ability to spam, they will jbe in a worse spot than ever.
The only way to make them less spammy, yet stay viable is to do a decent change to how the class operates.

That can be anything from having each of the abilities give a buff that isn’t conducive of spamming. Like all abilities give buffs to your next few auto attacks (heartseaker->weakness, LDB-> bleed, headshot->auto crit, exc.)
Or the teleport thing.

Batlav.6318:

10 sec reveal and problem solved

That doesn’t help the class in the slightest.
It only destroy stealth forcing every thief to play S/D evade spam… it actually forces stealth back into kinda beta regions where it was mainly used for an intense basilisk venom spike…. which would have to have its dmg buffed back to beta times to make a viable spec…

Nothing good comes from a longer reavealed.
The problem is with how spammably the thief can actually get stealth… most notably blackpowder…

Prysin.8542:

garethh.3518:

The Boz.2038:

Revolutionary new idea: Stealth becomes a boon.

??
Making stealth a boon… does literally nothing but buff its duration from +boon duration… you are in stealth when you have stealth up… so are untargetable by boon removal…

but not by AOE with a nice sigil ontop

Ugh…
You can’t time the sigil.
It hitting another enemy, eats the proc, the aoe not critting or not being 60% of the time.. eats the proc, it proccing before the theif goes in stealth… eats the proc… it eating the regen or might from going into stealth… eats the proc.

Countering stealth with a guessing game just doesn’t seem like an at all worthwhile way to handle AN ENTIRELY DIFFERENT PROBLEM

The Boz.2038:

There are boon removal AoEs available to necromancers, mesmers and engineers. This would make at least some classes capable of countering stealth.
Yes, I admit, this isn’t the best idea, I just wanted to throw it out there, see what other players could make of it…

Null field… and a mine? being the only counters to stealth is kinda absurd.
Stealth needing to be this counterable thing seems more the area to be addressed.

The Boz.2038:

Revolutionary new idea: Stealth becomes a boon.

??
Making stealth a boon… does literally nothing but buff its duration from +boon duration… you are in stealth when you have stealth up… so are untargetable by boon removal…

Aza.2105:

I have a idea that is simple. Initiative is similar to energy in gw1. My solution? Give classes initiative degeneration skills. Or have skills like weakness apply initiave degeneration. Energy denial and degeneration prevented spamming. This would end thieves spamming very quickly.

That’d just create another ‘boon like’ niche counter… not really sure if that would help the game.
The problem atm isn’t that they are OP. Because they aren’t.

The problem is that they are a mindless spam based class that has extremely cheesy tactics (constant evade spam/infinite stealth, backstab in a game built around active defense) that disrupt the flow and enjoyment in combat. And it will never become anything else because of a terrible design. Even with your fix, thieves would still stay just as broken… except now they will be bad when fighting anyone who can degen ini, and OP when not (weakness isn’t common and it isn’t easy to apply).

Schlieffen.2054:

I actually think gw2 is almost ahead of its time in how fast and intense the combat is. Kind of like football, it would be amazing for the casters to be able to show slow motion replays of key parts of the previous match in between matches. GW2 is going to have to figure out a way to train up its potential esports viewers to the point they can follow what’s happening (casters need to be trained up too).

Great post, nicely written and whatnot

A lil critique on this part though…
Having swarms of passive procs, only burst/bunker/condi and badly telegraphed skills is not really innovative…
The whole dodge rolling, chaosy intertwined team (like everyone is scattered everywhere in a teamfight) combat are definitely new concepts, not really sure if the chaos part is good or not, but its definitely new.

PREFACE
I’m not saying thieves are OP, because they aren’t… I’m saying thieves create kittenty gameplay for the player and opponent (constant evade spam, infinite stealth, backstab in a game built around active defense)
I’m not saying thieves are utter jokes to play with a skillcap as high as the skillfloor.
I am saying that the class ends up having a relatively low skillcap in a great many situations, not for the average player, but for anyone who wants to take the game seriously.
That leaves a massive area for improvement if this game ever wants a shot at attracting legitimate esports teams.

THE IDEA
Add a shadowstep onto each and every weapon attack.
Before you say ‘but wait, thats OP, like having every weapon, every attack be S/D shenanigans’… hear me out.
A LOS shadowstep back to where you started casting the ability, it stays up for 5-7s and costs initiative to active… the teleport only has a 400 unit range. Possibly ‘porting back has a cast time (1/2s) or can’t be used while CC’d.

That creates a close range tricky class (not kittening teleporting across the map class) that still has the option to spam an ability, although situationally and for more ini since you have to pay the ‘port back’ ini to avoid the 5-7s CD. That gives thieves some innate, in combat survivability, less mindlessness to the class and lets things like… massive evade spamming… ‘shadowstep’ the utility… ‘shadow trap’… infiltrators strike… flanking strike… to be toned down…

IMO it’d actually make the class balance-able without creating cheese…
It’d even allow for things (over time of course) like…
-adding ‘apply weakness for 3s to target, and protection for 1.5~s to any nearby allies’ to the heartseaker or shadow shot ability so the thief has some ‘spike hate’.
-making ‘leaping death blossom’ apply vulnerability or cripple along with light bleeding and put up a poison type buff on you that makes your next attack or two do a bonus condition (spammable->bleed, #2->confuse, #4->poison, #5->torment)
-make s/d attacks give a fair amount of buffs to auto attack dmg (maybe even let an ability give quickness for 1~s and the auto attack 3rd hit give it for 1~s so you can chain allot of spammable dmg given the opportunity).

Anyways, just some random thoughts I had.

http://www.twitch.tv/mistleague/b/436734274

As kind of a response to watching the PAX qualifiers and whatnot:
It’s my opinion so take it for what it is…

The general strats and whatnot were nifty, the casters talked a fair deal about who was going where and why, which was cool.

But the combat was extremely convoluted to follow.
The casters generally couldn’t even keep up with what was happening in combat!!! That’s an outright TERRIBLE situation for a game to be in…

Half the time in an encounter all I see is the casters getting into a good cams trying to get a decent viewpoint… just to realize that the action passed or some unknown abilities went off killing someone else, leaving all they can say is ‘so someone died..’ not how… not because of what abilities or what spec or how they screwed up or got taken advantage of… just ‘so someone died’… maybe a blanket statement like ‘they killed him quickly’ or ‘the one team did not have enough dmg’ to cover the fallowing awkward silence…

I can’t even get close to into watching the tournies.. I’m a rank 45 player so its not like anything they do is news to me… but the shear amount of badly telegraphed, passive and chaotic skills, azuras, bad camera angles and the inability to at-a-glance tell classes apart… it just bogs the game down to the point it really isn’t enjoyable to watch…

GW2 has to compete with MOBAs and I’ve watched MOBA streams of games I haven’t even played and sat at the edge of my seat , OMFG-beaming at all the clutch plays scattered across the battlefield… the difference between that and GW2 is just outrageous. In GW2 the casters seem lucky to even notice a single ‘OMFG’ play in an entire match…

Velron.3729:

You took the previous posters 1-2-3 options on ways to counter and tried to make it sound like 1-2 were not viable options. I corrected, nothing more.

I’m not angry.

Velron.3729:

garethh.3518:

Chrispytoast.3698:

How to counter Warrior CC…

1) Watch for Warriors and keep a safe distance from them
2) If they get close, don’t get caught by a Warrior. Use blinds, chills, immobilizes etc.
3) If you think you will get caught bring something to get out. Stunbreak, invisibility etc.

-The game’s TPvP revolves around capture points, so keeping a safe distance is next to impossible most of the time.
-Next to every warrior runs berserker stance
-That just leaves option 3… which is kind of like what I was saying. Either keep out of his CC and his entire class is useless… or get CC locked and kitten d. It just really annoys me that one boon (stability) can entirely negate an entire spec…. it leaves said CC spec needing to be balanced above par against anyone without stability… which just creates a ‘run the right spec/premade’ deal or get kitten kitten d.

-You complaining you can’t run away from a melee Warrior inside a point? How you think we feel having to melee inside it with Necro marks the size of the point, Engi bombs the size of the point, etc? kitten almost forgot now Guardian symbols the size of the point.

-Berserker Stance is 8 seconds. If you can’t make it 8 seconds you probably deserve to die. You have stun breaks and dodges for this time, after this – now its time to control the Warrior with conditions or your own counter pressure.

-This point has been refuted by the previous two.

Please don’t talk when your angry, it really doesn’t get anything anywhere :/
So calm down… and lets talk…

Warriors are not OP. On the same page as me so far?
Warrior CC/stunlocking is not OP. We’re still on the same page, right?

My point is and always has been that CC-locking is a gimmick build in a relatively team-supportless game, a game with few things going for it… if you run the wrong spec you pretty much auto lose, if you get ambushed without a CC break up, you lose, if you pop your CC break while being knocked back… You. Lose.

Otherwise you pretty much, jokingly win.
That isn’t engaging gameplay.
In the slightest.

Engaging gameplay is something Anet has never strived for in any tweak or any patch, I mean short of the nerf to frenzy (which ended up with a spec as gimmicky as 100-blades)… tweaking, ignoring gameplay, focusing on balance, has killed the game for so many and imo will be the death of GW2.
That’s meh point, if you fallow me….

Lordrosicky.5813:

I doubt people will run dhummfire now

Same here

I really wish this game had new devs.

I DO NOT mean to say “hey devs, you obviously do not care about this game”

Because that is obviously not true in the slightest, all I mean is that “there comes a point in time where, if you TRULY do care about something, you would realize when the best option for its future is to put your passion and yourself aside…”

Chrispytoast.3698:

How to counter Warrior CC…

1) Watch for Warriors and keep a safe distance from them
2) If they get close, don’t get caught by a Warrior. Use blinds, chills, immobilizes etc.
3) If you think you will get caught bring something to get out. Stunbreak, invisibility etc.

-The game’s TPvP revolves around capture points, so keeping a safe distance is next to impossible most of the time.
-Next to every warrior runs berserker stance
-That just leaves option 3… which is kind of like what I was saying. Either keep out of his CC and his entire class is useless… or get CC locked and kitten d. It just really annoys me that one boon (stability) can entirely negate an entire spec…. it leaves said CC spec needing to be balanced above par against anyone without stability… which just creates a ‘run the right spec/premade’ deal or get kitten kitten d.

:/

RANT—-
Don’t get me wrong, that problem is in many games, its just that those game have redeeming features to make up for the gimmicky downsides… GW2 really doesn’t have anything going for itself… the basis for the combat, with the ability to body block and dodge roll is cool, but all the abilities are setup like kitten and there is no team dynamic or real ability to use the body blocking short of from hord minions…

Conquest isn’t innately a bad map, but the thing is, it puts in focus all the glaring issues of GW2 combat.
—Making combat based on skirmishing puts the depth and complexity of the class/weapons/utilities (and their ability to work with other classes), in the spotlight.
The game is really lackluster there.
—Making it based on bunker/roamer further aggravates the pre-existing problem where power/crit/critdmg scale so well… so well that anything but high power/crit/critdmg is bad, bad physical dmg*… I mean, you can see, a burst based roamer is the best kind of roamer, that combined with high power/crit/critdmg dps being the only way to do notable physcial dmg… just makes the game unavoidable into burst/bunker shenanigans, with of course condi’s on the side, wherever they happen to fall this month…
*-short of cheese like bonus/auto crit and retal.

Anyways… I’m done ranting for now.

RockSteady.7123:

They’ll always cry for nerf against builds they don’t want to adapt to or builds they don’t know how to counter.

When ‘adapting’ and ‘countering’ is entirely revolving around ‘having stability/stunbreaks’ and in the end only grossly limiting what specs you can actually play…

Yeah, no.
Having a class near entirely dedicated to CC locking players, in this game, is not a good thing.

You seem to think ‘change’ is a linear term, that the only thing Anet can do to the warrior is just nerf the class, or make an ability hit harder (I’m honestly not sure if your right)
BUT
If the devs have a lick of sense it quite obviously isn’t…
because right next to ‘nerfing’ something is ‘fixing’ it…
its a crazy concept where the class stays at the same power but ‘adapting’ to the warrior is more about playing well against it, than googling the right spec…
If that makes sense.

Anyways.
With all the tragedy I can muster: the devs seem pretty bad at ‘tweaking’ thing, so all the logic I can through out there is useless in the face of incompetence. The highest expectations I have from them is that they don’t strangle their own game within the year.

Best of luck at keeping the warrior viable.

Vena.8436:

What a pointless statement. “There is no team support… except there is when people play as a coordinated team.” There was no team support in GW1 as well if you played with completely random people where a single gimmick build could instagib a teammate because everyone was playing for themselves unless, by chance, you had a monk on your team. I don’t know what planet you live on, but positioning matters in this game too for the same and other reasons it mattered in GW1.

GvG/HoH/TA were all about “hardcore premades”, if you were just some randoms who formed a team that wasn’t extremely gimmick heavy, you were farmed.

You seem to want to rant, I hope its out of your system, so we can actually get down to sense…
Yes if you pug and get selfish players, there will be no team support.
Yes if you pug and fight a coordinated team you will get stomped.
That is entirely irrelevant and different from ‘non-existant teamwork short of hardcore premades’.
On one hand, you still have coordination and teamwork in a number of the random instances, the potential for positioning and social gameplay, while on the other hand… you really don’t…

Sitting at a back point defending is not social engaging gameplay.
Having little->no effective team support, short of sitting down with players and preplanning specs… does not create social engaging gameplay.
GW2 doesn’t have a group dynamic, at all, without being a hardcore premade.
From what I hear, GW1 wasn’t near so far lost.

Alkaholic.3875:

What do you consider “good gameplay”? Cause I’m no expert but I’m pretty sure stability, blinks/ports, blinds kills this build.

Ugh, its kind of a rut allot of people are in, where they think ‘balance’ and ‘able to be countered’ is good gameplay.

Yes those are elements of it, no they aren’t they main feature, no they do not in and of themselves make a game engaging to play. ESPECIALLY when the ‘able to be countered’ is near entirely based on what you do before the game even started.

Back to the original question, good gameplay is where ‘beating a spec is not near entirely determined by having the right CDs, but how you actually play the game.’

If you have blinks/blinds/teleports, you wreck a CC warrior, no question asked.
If you don’t, you get slaughtered…
That is un-engaging gameplay.

swiftpaw.6397:

I feel the devs are quite passionate about their game, the reasons for all the screw ups may be derived from somewhere else.

They are passionate, there doesn’t seem to be much of a doubt about it.
Sorry if you thought I seriously meant otherwise.

BUT I have to say, tragically, passion doesn’t give prowess.
To make a good game the developers have to have a mind for it, and that is what is… debatable…

Anyways.
I’m sure there were also funding or time scale issues through alpha-beta since the game was released so unfinished, with so many core concepts still begetting leaps and bounds more testing/revision.

The more I think about it, the more I think the game could really use tweaks to power/crit/crit dmg to kind of avoid the spike/burst meta that is forming.

It was one of Anets main design principles back in beta to avoid something like that, to not be a terribly reflex based game just to be able to play, yet it has completely and utterly strayed in the other direction.

Debois Guilbert.6413:

Even this system can be gamed by players wishing to violate the intent of a single queue system: A group of three players wishing to end up on the same team has a 12.5% chance of landing on the same side if they target a single match. If they immediately quit a game where they don’t end up on the same side, they can retry with a new match. On average, once every eight times they should hit a combo they like. I would hope that people who were so inclined could stick to something like hot join, but it is human nature to look for ways of gaining an advantage.

The thing is, that will cut out the vast, vast, vast majority of people who are willing to sync ques.
Most people aren’t willing to jump around instances for 10 minutes just to get around the group que kitten.

havoc.6814:

My suggestion would be to give it a pull

Noooo.
This game doesn’t need more CC lock cheese.

What could be cool is if the F skill added an effect to your next weapon ability use.
Like if you used ‘new near instant arcing slice’ it would prot/retal during 100-b or imob on bladetrail or clear 2~ condi’s on rush or apply weakness to enemies and might to self on whirlwind.
That’s the kind of strategic play a game should edge towards… not CC lock cheese…

Vena.8436:

This is pretty much verbatim what hammer warriors were in GW1. Do you know how you shut them down to avoid them stun-locking you into oblivion? You blinded them.

Yet the game isn’t GW1.
Just because something was a well done part of the not-at-all-similiar predecessor, doesn’t mean flopping it over to GW2 will lead to the same thing… GW1 was a team based game with plenty of team support, positioning mattered allowing ally focus fire/support to catch anyone out of positioning and pressuring you. GW2 is a solo-skirmishy game with little to no team support outside of hardcore premades.

Warriors can stunlock consistently and constantly, having a class in this game entirely based around forcing the opponent to lose control of their charector for prolonged lengths of time (5+ seconds) IS BAD DESIGN. Nothing better than the frenzy-100b they scrapped before.
That’s my point, if you care to actually address it this time… I’m all ears.

As a sidenote.
Yes warrior CC is counterable.
No one thinks its OP, just like 100-b warriors.
But is it good gameplay?
Not in the slightest…. just like 100-b warriors.

samo.1054:

People will always find a class to cry about. But are you seriously crying about warriors now?

The whole point of nerfing frenzy was to make the class play better and be more new player friendly.

Laughably, all the devs succeeded in doing was making ‘the warrior’ entirely unplayable for 3~ months… before falling right back into the exact same sort of cheese as before.

Balance is one thing, bad gameplay is another.
Warriors still have allot of bad gameplay.

This is such a badly made game…
I sware, the devs don’t really know what they are doing, just fallowing whatever pushes all the classes they blindly created towards viables (as if the game’s biggest issue is balance… not entertainment, yes they can overlap, but they are leaps and bounds from one and the same, ‘flipping a coin’ is the most balanced thing out there, but it isn’t a sport)

I still can’t believe that in beta they said they wanted the thief to be called a thief to pointedly differentiate it from the ‘assassin’ every other MMO has, they wanted GW2 to be a latency friendly game without the insta-gibs…

HAHAHAHAHAHAHA
HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA
The kittening ENTIRE META is based around conditions, cheese and insta-gibbing… How the kitten do you make a game stray that far from your founding principles…

Your trying to polish up a kittenty map.
Best of luck.

I’d just boo-hoo all day about how bad conquest was if I wanted the game to get better.
Sure people might find it to be decent from time to time, but conquest is the reason the vast majority of people left this game.

It kills teamwork.
Fights are skirmishes, meaning, self sufficiency is the goal… cutting out allot of the innate skill from stuff like positioning… and of course teamwork. To boot its impossible to rate a player with points (everyone knows glory means kitten as a means of saying ‘that guy played well, that one did badly’).
The game has a terrible teamwork setup, when it comes to abilities, which gets cut to negligible through this kittenty conquest, it just puts teamwork (short of in hardcore premades) down the toilet.

THIS IS AN MMO, PEOPLE PLAY IT TO PLAY WITH PEOPLE.
SURPRISE ANET.

Honestly, conquest is probably one of the worst sorts of map they could have come up with for this game. If the weapons and classes were far deeper and more elegantly made, they easily would have been able to make up for the lack of team play… but nope, the gameplay can’t carry the map choice.

Badly designed classes with a subpar map.
GW2 is a bunker or spike game (with no middle ground for power short of cheese) because of how well passive speccing for power/crit/crit-dmg scales with burst skills…
To boot conquest grossly promotes bunker/roamers…

Anyways
That leaves specs with a need to be able to cope with CC, conditions and bursts while either having massive offense or defense…

Every single one of those things needs to be pointedly specced for, since no class has them innately… which makes 90% of traits not playable with a specific weapon set and forces specific utilities for certain weapon sets… I mean in essence it tosses the trait/utility system for a god awefully convoluted template-spec setup…

The thief class is a broken concept, surprise what having no limiting factor on ability spamming will do to a class… specs will be based around the spam of a few abilities…
The ranger class is a broken concept, surprise what having entirely AI pet (leaving only high dmg pets as viable) will do to a class… the better the ranger, the more survivable he is…
Conditions is a broken concept. The amulets are a broken concept. GW2 teamwork is a broken concept. Conquest is a broken concept.

Close but no forseight, the game needs sooo kittening many changes just to have a shot at being popular.

Since you seemed to move off of rush to F-skills…

IMO classes should be slowly built up to the point where they get an innate toolkit of abilities that will let any spec in the class be playable… there are so many percs in that for the player base, from top down if you think about it. That’d leave weapons/traits to exist for what they were supposed to… flavor and min/maxing…
It’d entail some barebones cleansing based off foresight, along with a 20~s CD, 2~s, stability proc or some sort of bonus phys defense.

When it comes to specifics….
A lil off topic but, bursty attacks could not scale as well with power, but have better base dmg. It’d give all warriors somewhat decent situational dmg, but to compensate, power could really bump up spammable attack dmg so ‘high dps’ warrior bring good constant/pressure in addition to the decent situational ‘spikes’ attacks. That’d shift the game away from ‘spike dmg is king’ hopefully, as long as the base dmgs for the spike attacks isn’t made really high.

Ways to give situational defense…
Give a trait for ‘1/2s of protection (or retaliation) when you use a weapon ability.’
or
Make adrenaline like frenzy.
If you have 0 bar , have protection and? retal.
If you have 1 bar of adrenaline, +10% attack speed, gain retal.
If you have 2 bars of adrenaline +15% attack speed, +15% healing, take 15% more dmg (condi duration too?).
If you have 3 bars of adrenaline +35% attack speed, +25% healing, take 30% more dmg (condi duration too?).
And/or
Make an F skill on no CD only usable if you are under 2 or 3 bars of adrenaline ‘you evade while using your next ability, gain 10 strikes of adrenaline’

Bam, a very interesting setup.
You blow adrenaline with the burst skills (lose 1/3~ of your adrenaline if you miss) but are in the danger zone (yes I watch too much Archer) if you let extra adrenaline sit around.
Also throwing Berserker stance (maybe cut the duration to 3~s and CD to 20~) on the F keys could be cool, since it’s not as powerful as currently. Building adrenaline hurts survivability, so you are forced to have tons of adrenaline to deal with to mitigate conditions for a short time.

I’ll just leave this here.

Anyways, its a stagnated game, GW2 is beyond getting the numerous if not massive changes it needs to just be good… completely tragic because of the potential the game had, but whatever….
GW2 never had the AAA dev team it needed, people who could work through one change after another MAKING THE GAME BETTER continuously and in a timely manner….

They do care about GW2 PvP…
But are incapable of actually helping it…
Which tragically, for all intensive purposes, is the same thing as just not caring.

Evan Lesh.3295:

Solo queue is definitely on the horizon. What everyone has been playing now will become ‘Team Arena’ (group queue), and we will additionally add a ‘Solo Arena’ (solo queue). The ratings will be split, and each will have their own leaderboard. We’re also planning on shipping a couple other long-standing requests with Solo Arena that many have been waiting for. A blog post will go into details about everything.

Rewards are high on our list. We’ve been coordinating with other teams, as it has a game-wide impact. They will certainly take some time to complete and you should expect to see Solo Arena much sooner.

That’s why this game flopped.
It takes A YEAR to say ‘on the horizon’ for things that are not only terribly easy to implement, but more importantly base line features that are always thrown in BEFORE LAUNCH….

:’(

I’m sure you guys are working your hardest with the resources at hand, the tragic part is just that it is waaaay too little/inefficient.

now just the issue of no one playing this game…

It typically has taken 10+ mins to get a pop, with the ques linked through all NA?…
Worse than most dead games I’ve played… ones that didn’t even cross servers for ques…

Diage.6451:

JonathanSharp.7094:

Solo que revisions are on the horizon guys, hang tight. I can’t give an exact date (that gets me in trouble), but it’s is on its way.

At some point in time I think the developers need to up their game and give themselves a deadline. Especially in pvp. Sure, if you don’t give a deadline you have more time to work on your stuff, but the opposite of that is true that of that time it tends to be less productive if you aren’t working towards a publicly accepted deadline. It just seems like this constant hiding behind dates is an excuse to slack off and give one pvp change per 2 months and keep everyone on the edge by saying, o soon, don’t worry!

They need to either open up all the way with what/when or just shutup entirely.
This middle ground they have where everything is extremely censored and vague only annoys people and hurts the player population willing to stick around until that ‘horizon’…

Saying nothing leaves unspoken hope.
Saying everything gives rationel, and so lets people cope as progress is being made. Even by just setting deadlines and updating if/why they get set back.

If the devs can convince the other developers as to why certain things should be tackled first and how they should be tackled… rationalizing it to forum goers should be cake.
Anyways… idc… its kinda late for this game as it is anyways.

Nik Rane.6431:

They’re human, and like to see good feedback every once in a while. The overwhelming negativity provided by all “gaming” cultures eats at you after a few years, regardless of how thick your skin is.

The easiest solution would be to have the developers ignore feedback from the community, and have a cycle of QA testers forward what they believe to be the most important issues, but they’re not doing so. You get to flame the head developers directly instead of a low-level QA guy. Good on them. It’s difficult to see everyone saying your game is kitten without having it loom over your head.

Anyways, I know the devs and whatnot are trying their best, and working on an MMO is a very arduous and complicated process that has harsh repercutions for error… I’m surprised and proud of anyone that is able to find passion in that task, BUT that doesn’t mean, as a player, because I see they love what they do, I will toss aside all my expectations for the game… especially from a group that made a game of GW1’s quality…
(I have never played GW1, only talked to people about it)

I mean, balance between classes (not specs) is done well, better than most games. There are (seemingly unintentionally) a few very entertaining specs to play…. and that is almost enough to get me hooked on an MMO… almost…

BO based conquest is a terrible map style to forge the entire game around. Seriously, something as simple as ‘20+k health NPC flag carrier(s) spawning every min or 2 and making run through the map, giving points if it reaches the enemy spawn’ would be a billion times better.
Weapons are very lacking, the GW2 weapons needed allot of the depth of MOBA style weapons because of how small-scale-fight/skirmishy conquest is.
Conditions/cleansing and boons were very badly made.

I mean short of that, they seemingly have a golden game… dodge rolling was brilliance on their part.

DingDongDooleeDum.4987:

And the point of this thread is…
#brownnose

It’s odd that Anet eats stuff like this up, but the dozens of extremely well constructed and thought out posts pointing out why everybody left the game’s instanced PvP…. are entirely ignored…

Anyways… we all know Anet tries their best.
Everyone likes to try their best… it makes you feel all nice knowing you gave it ‘your best shot’ with the comfort of, ‘well at least I tried’ to fall back on…
But trying is fighting yourself not the problem at hand.
Do it or don’t do it. Sorry to say it, but sitting in a limbo of ego and incompetence, even with the best of intentions, will never get a great game made.

I’ve gotten knocked down to 0 health two or three times back when I used to play allot.
Oh and I was still alive.
:)

There used? to be a bug where 0 health wasn’t dead, only below 0…
I know for sure it worked like that half a year after launch.

google.3709:

these players want to continue running (example) the same shatter build they have been runnimg from launch, the same DD ele build from 7 months ago, same cheesy BM Ranger, etc on the same team comp they run for every map, every month… completely ignoring the unique mechanics of every map.

That’s because the only people still TPvP’ing in this game tend to be diehard fans who are clinging on to one aspect or another they feel Anet did greatly.
Throwing the game through a few loops, whether good or not, tends to jeopardize that.

It’s a terrible place for a game to be, one that easily could have been solved by not trying to entirely reinvent a genre with very restricted/quality time to work out the major kinks in the base game dynamics… before release…

butch.8136:

If they would implement another queuing system there wouldn’t be that much QQ. I’ve said it before but we need to be able to chose our own map pool when queuing for tournies.

This game’s matchmaking is the most unpolished i have ever seen.
If the game’s gameplay ever had a shot at being popular the whole ‘how to get into a match’ aspect, gave it a terrible shot at it.

Achilles.2197:

A lot of rebalancing would need to be implemented to have anything close to it, as much as I miss it.

Oh and, I will continue to bump this thread until Anet responds.

You must be new here.
A thread like this has been popping up at least a few times a month since beta.

Anet has yet to respond.

If you don’t like how the game is progressing, sorry to say it, but find a new game.
Anet has already chosen their path and made GW2, at this point pouting over it won’t change anything.

prozon.3561:

tested, warrior the game still suck as hell the hole class mechanik game is still broken, need complete rework

FTFY

Conditions are in a terrible spot with anything and everything cleansing any and any condition, with no control over even which kind (control/dmg/debuff)…

Boons involve extremely niche speccing to have the opportunity to counter, but boy do you counter them… or if you don’t, your left at a large disadvantage…

Positioning means kitten in comparison with any other MMO.

The majority of weapons just seem like a mound of nifty ideas tossed in, where to balance is decided by which set of completely unthought out abilities ends up being the best…

F1-4 skills are pretty much universally badly made. The only one I like is the the necro one. Pets come close but the kittenty AI they force on us turns it into utter trash.

The game is based on speccing to be as independently functional as possible!!! that is exactly what an MMO isn’t… the whole genre is based around having innate synergy between players, the simplest way was with tank-dps-heals so people didn’t have to sit in vent talking about specs just to be able to play as a team… but tossing that for nothing good (sitting at a back point AFK’ing is not fun team work)… I mean, but hardcore premade speccing to have the opportunity to work with an ally… GDI.

A few decent ideas, the points you adress are pretty spot on where the issues are, the fixes, ehh, could be better, but anyways, there have been many, many threads that talk about the same sort of deal… just the devs ignore them and do things like…
-Nerf frenzy with no idea what will happen, so need 3~ months of after patch testing to realize that it makes warriors underpowered…

I seriously have and always do want to love this game… there are no good MMOs out at the moment and MOBAs are wearing at me… gdi why is this game such a dissapointment?!?!
Oh devs…

It’s the Anet ‘fix’ to not entirely splitting premade and not.

You get a large bump to your match ranking if you que with as a group, that makes groups of friends rank 1-12 get matched against ranks 20s-40…

I feel terrible for the 3-4 ‘guild premades’ I have faught like that, they got so utterly thrashed it wasn’t even funny… and that is unbelievably kittened, like I have never seen a dev team unintentionally hit casual play so hard… anyways, best of luck!!
:)

Empathetic Fighter.2065:

But you know that not the mode is the problem why this game can’t succeed? Sure other modes would get a wider spectrum of players into it, but that’s not the main problem. Incentive is the big word that has to be there first.

Incentive… that the game is enjoyable to play??
A new, better, primary game mode would obviously help that.

It’s a dead game.
It seems like Anet forgot what good gameplay is, if they ever knew.