I just don’t understand people complaining about traps. Nothing about traps changed from last season.
People keep saying this but how many guards were playing in PvP last season for people to complain about them? lol
There definitely weren’t 2-3 DH’s every ranked games. Now, it’s common to see 2-3 DH’s on just 1 team. Honestly people would probably stop complaining about it if Anet just stops class stacking like they did with pro tourneys.
Since I know they won’t do a good job because they don’t understand WvW nor do they play in it, no. You guys notice something about Anet’s twitch streams? All the devs talk about are them playing PvE & raids, with a couple of them talk about playing sPvP. There’s never, and I do mean never, any devs that talk about how much fun they had playing WvW.
If they don’t play the game mode and understand it, no sense throwing money at them because we won’t get better results. That’s the fundamental issues I see with Anet’s WvW team.
If we get another elite spec, I expect something like WoW’s warlocks with demon portals for mobility, demon form, hellfire aoe & burns, with options to spec into demon bolts for single target ranged damage as opposed to pbaoe based.
The OP isn’t too far off to be honest lol.
A lot of people voted to keep DBL and have it in rotation because they know Anet wasn’t going to develop a new map for WvW. They’d need to wait another 2 years for a new WvW map. Alpine is great but the thought of going another 2 years without any new maps is just dreadful.
It’s really a lesser of two evils thing. Yes many dislike DBL, it’s too large, the multi-level design makes it tedious to find fights, the pointless center area is dumb, the added PvE-centric elements & gimmicks are bothersome, it’s a difficult map for defenders, towers have no strategic values, etc etc etc.. But people are willing to swallow all that just for the sake of having something different to play for the next two years.
And by the way, this is exactly what causes burnouts and how people lose interest in the first place. People are forced to pick lesser of two evils, rather than joyfully pick something they really enjoy and like.
Anet has a lot of catch up to do in terms of fixing WvW issues and implementing things that people want/like. That’s the reality of the situation.
(edited by gavyne.6847)
Reaper’s Onslaught is awesome in any mid to large scale WvW fights, since deaths reset the cooldown on reaper shroud skills. You can do quite many death’s charges and soul spirals in very short amount of time. With increased attack speed, this makes it all very very fun.
I just wouldn’t recommend it for solo or small scale roaming.
Not to continue offtopic but just saying, the quote I responded to was “Revs should never kill a CONDI necro 1v1.”
+1, I welcome anybody to go 1v1 on a point vs Toker. A good power rev can work a necro without lifeforce before you can blink..
You shouldn’t be going 1v1 with no life force to begin with tho.
To be honest often you don’t have a choice, as a good rev would always hunt down a necro as target #1 in any solo or team fights. They have perm swiftness, and with Phase Traversal, you don’t get to choose that engagement.
This is actually a misconception. At high level, a rev can make very easy work of a Necro in certain situations.
+1, I welcome anybody to go 1v1 on a point vs Toker. A good power rev can work a necro without lifeforce before you can blink. You have a much better chance if you have lifeforce. You have to dodge Surge of the Mists, or it’s usually gg if it’s a good rev.
Make this into a wing please, for the love of Tyria.
I’ve slotted signet of the locust for the speed buff and use Strenght Runes at the moment. When i go into reaper form i slow down and get kited quite easily since signet of the locust doesn’t seem to work whilst in reaper form.
Just want to make sure this gets mentioned. No matter what you do, you are going to get kited fairly easy by most classes. You could trait shroud movement speed, you could go spectral mastery and have perm swiftness with spectral walk, you can take warhorn, etc.. But when it comes to fighting, you are going to get kited by most competent players.
This something you have to just work around and get used to. Anybody that knows how to fight a necro knows to kite when they see reaper shroud. While we have death’s charge, most classes have much further leaps. So keep that in mind and work around that weakness. It’s just part of being a necro because Anet.
Some general suggestions, opinions, and tips:
-I’m not a fan of signet of spite, the cd is too long and the actual condi damage you get from it is extremely weak.
-Deathly Chill is better than Reaper’s Onslaught. Even if you choose to go with a Dhuumfire build, reason being that competent players won’t let you reaper auto in their face. Anybody that knows how to fight a reaper would kite when reaper shroud is active. That’s what I do when I fight a fellow reaper. If you can’t reaper auto in someone’s face, then you’ve just wasted 2 grandmaster traits.
Reaper auto Dhuumfire build is generally fun against newbies and unsuspecting players. But next time when you fight someone competent, count the amount of swings you actually get at them while using reaper auto.
-I prefer warhorn over dagger because warhorn gives you that kill opportunity. A well timed daze is often the deciding factor in a tight fight. Also of course swiftness and swarm are always nice, swarm is a good way to gain lifeforce & rid yourself of blindness.
-While I like Lingering Curse, I prefer Weakening Shroud better. Weakness is key to beating power builds that can do ridiculous amount of damage these days. Not to mention on shroud boon corrupt + bleed. And yes it works better to take Death Perception so you can proc weakness better while in shroud due to the build’s low crit rate. But that’s not absolutely needed. Although if you know you’ll be fighting good players, you’ll want to take Death Perception over Dhuumfire because again, no good player will let you reaper auto. i.e. it’s a lot easier to hit someone with soul spiral, death’s charge, and exe scythe than it is with reaper auto.
Parasitic Contagion would be my choice #1 if it ever heals in shroud. Anet is ridiculous with their stance to not allow our own skills & traits to heal in shroud.
-If you can, work up a Trailblazer set, you won’t regret it.
I think people will be ok if you want to create an elite tier that’s hard to reach for notoriety. But when it comes to rewards and progressing your characters, those have to be things general players (95% of your PvP playerbase) can achieve. You need carrots & goals for everybody.
Generally the hardcore PvP enthusiasts care more about notoriety, they want to be special. While the rest of your playerbase want fun and a sense of accomplishment, a way for them to feel they’re advancing and be rewarded for getting better.
Might I suggest GW2 implement something like WoW’s PvP leaderboards or DAOC’s Camelotherald? Things like these drive competitive minded players to play PvP, no matter if they’re hardcore or casual. This game is really missing means to see stats, builds, and ways to compare themselves with others. Right now in GW2 PvP, for a competitive mode, there’s really no competition.
Doesn’t PvP have separate skill changes though? I believe they announce it in a recent patch.
Well they said it’s more “feasible”, still not a complete split and they still need to make global changes. But there’s still a separate skills team that have the final say on class balance and skills changes. Which is just strange because you would think the PvP devs would know what classes need for PvP best, and the WvW devs would know what classes need in WvW the best.
I did notice they didn’t mention WvW so I guess this game-mode is really just the redheaded step child.
The Lesh Prince recently developed some tech that makes skill-splitting more feasible than it was previously – you’ll see some PvP (and PvE) splits in the next balance update. It’s important to understand that changes will still need to be global, but we’ll definitely have a bit more flexibility moving forward.
Keeping parity between modes when possible is important to us – but when it’s not feasible we’ll look at splits.
Otherwise one balance fits it all would work perfectly fine.
If that was the case, we wouldn’t be having this discussion. Nor would there be players complaining about fotm & meta builds in PvP. Oh yeah and even for PvE raids, some classes & builds are preferred over others. So this one size fits all approach really doesn’t work well.
HoT expansion introduced some major power creep across the board. This worked out fine in PvE, but it wrecked balance in PvP & WvW.
It’s not whether they balance around PvE or PvP, it’s that they’re trying for this “one size fits all” approach. They’re trying to have a set of class balance that they think will work for PvE, PvP, and WvW. That just won’t work well as we know, since all 3 modes are completely different.
What they need is to separate balance between game-modes. Players have been asking for it. It’s just ridiculous devs that work on these game modes such as PvP & WvW don’t even have the powers to make class balance changes. Class balance is done separately by a different skills team.
The reason why balance is out of whack in WvW is because Anet has a separate skills balance team that tweak the overall class balance. Devs from individual game-modes don’t have the power to make these balance changes. That’s why balance changes come by so slow and infrequently for WvW & PvP. Boon sharing & boon stacking are the way they are likely because Anet is happy with how it functions in PvE & raids.
See quote from Josh Davis below. Sadly until we can get separate game-mode balance for each of the game-modes, I don’t expect a lot of changes.
Hey folks,
Just a quick reminder: the PvP team is not responsible for profession balance. The PvP team, along with all of the other major feature teams, provides feedback to the skills team, but the PvP team itself is not directly involved in making balance changes.
What we do have control over – however – is the build panel (sigils, amulets, runes). It’s one of the knobs we can use to push gameplay in whichever direction we feel it needs to go for that particular season. For this release, we wanted to take support down a notch and increase the pace of combat.
It’s not our intent to completely remove professions from the meta – but things do fluctuate and I think we need to give the change a bit more time to see how it plays out. Elemental Bastion being bugged since Tuesday certainly has not helped the Tempest situation, but that should be resolved fairly soon and we’ll be able to properly see how ele will fare.
I know many of you fundamentally disagree with the removal of build items – and that’s fine. I understand where you’re coming from, but I hope you understand why we use this as a tool for balancing PvP specifically.
-Grouch
I started a new alt account just to see what it would be like for a new soloq pvp player. https://drive.google.com/open?id=0BwsbsWZYg66jVng2Xy1ZMG9fX00
Speaking of 50/50 hell.. At the moment I’m going on 1 week being stuck in the same division, playing with & against terrible team comps, and every single game there are at least 1-2 people on my team that need carried or don’t know what they’re doing at all. We’re talking about people that run straight for beasts at start of a game, thieves that challenge DH and get insta wiped by traps, necros that run power builds, and people who don’t know what stillness & tranquility are.
Is “byproduct of your MMR settling” another way of saying “hey let’s give you crappy teammates and bad comps so you’ll struggle and get stuck until you hit a lucky win streak, that may or may not come”?
If Anet can’t figure out why this game mode isn’t growing, well how do you expect people to have fun & keep playing if they can’t progress & advance? No matter how much weight I’m pulling, how well I’m rotating, how many caps I’ve helped secure. Players who are doing what they’re supposed to do and play well enough to advance are having a very difficult time advancing. The system frustrates you enough so you eventually just stop playing.
I have my wings on my main acct, so I’m doing this for fun this season. I can tell you I’m not having fun at all. Just imagine how frustrating it would be for new pvp players, especially ones that play well enough and should progress forward but can’t.
Anybody in guilds and have friends ingame already know summer’s got little to do with people’s loss of interest in WvW. Yes people take more vacations, yes raid attendance usually falls a bit during the summer even for core members. But the general mood from guildies & friends I have ingame tells me people are just bored, burned out, and waiting for more from Anet.
When Alpine made its comeback, WvW saw a resurgence. But since then, WvW haven’t changed much. The same issues we had before such as server/class balance, population, and lack of long term goals/rewards are still there. WvW players are still dirt poor unless you also do PvE, heck I make more gold playing PvP because you don’t need to burn gold on gear/food in sPvP.
Guild are still struggling to recruit decent WvW players. Many of the new recruits show up for a few weeks and disappear completely. Guilds that roll healthy numbers are only doing so because they’ve absorbed 2-3 dead guilds within the past year. Anet does not seem to realize guilds are the backbones of this particular game-mode. Without healthy guilds, people simply don’t play as much nor are as interested. I bet some people within Anet are regretting their decision to not support GvG back when there was a healthy, vibrant GvG scene.
Too many things wrong with the game-mode, hard to say if Anet can recover from this. People won’t all of a sudden flood back into the game with small changes & tweaks like they’ve been doing. I’m rooting for them because there aren’t many good alternative choices out there for RvR/WvW enthusiasts. There also isn’t another game with smooth, fluid, action combat gameplay that GW2 offers. GW2’s combat & game’s engine is carrying the game right now, but that won’t last forever.
You’re gonna need to wait until the next expansion before we hear from any class balance devs again.
+1 for more stats on the score panel at end of matches, seeing how the scoring currently means nothing. It literally tells you nothing, except it’s bait for people to flame others who have lower scores as if lower scores meant they weren’t playing their roles properly.
I’d like to see kills, deaths, damage done, condi damage done, damage received, heals done, revives, etc.. all basic stats you would normally see from other MMO’s BG/arenas. Right now it’s kind of hard to judge how you are doing or how your build is working out when you can’t even compare with what others are doing.
There’s going to be toxicity either way, no reason to not show more stats to the team.
The area in the middle is actually the highlight of the desert borderland in terms of landscape & architectural design. It’s actually a nice place to fight in. Just too bad that back when laser event was enabled, the zone-wide skill lag ruined any fights that occurred there. And now that laser event is disabled, there’s no reason to ever go there to fight at all.
Remove the npc’s and place something of value there for players to fight over. I would play on DBL all night if Anet can make it fun. I like the Colosseum idea, but anything remotely caters to GvG, anything dueling related, anything that would be fun, or anything that does not fit Anet’s vision of a blob-fested, PvE-newbie friendly WvW will likely not make it into the game.
But if we’re just tossing ideas out there, do people remember the Gurubashi Arena in Stranglethorn? (http://wowwiki.wikia.com/wiki/Gurubashi_Arena) Something like that would be great fun, and it would likely make the desert BL the most popular BL out there. This is why I don’t think Anet will go for anything like this, because it’d be too fun.
Well for PvP you won’t be using your PvE gear so what you use for PvE won’t affect your PvP build. When you setup your PvP build, you simply select the specs, amulet, runes, sigils, and weapons you want to use. For PvP you’ll want to run some sort of condi reaper build, you can find some popular builds here: http://metabattle.com/wiki/Necromancer
Metabattle is a good place to start for new necros. As you gain experience with the class, you’ll tweak your builds to fine tune it to your liking.
Your PvE gear are not used in PvP. In PvP game-mode you have normalized gear, so you don’t need to worry about having a set of gear that works for both PvE & PvP.
Now I’m not sure if when you said PvP you really meant WvW, but WvW is different and it does use your gear. In which case the build you want for WvW will depend on what you intend on doing in WvW (solo roam, small group havoc, zerg v zerg, guild raids, etc)
Good to see improvements are coming. If I may suggest something, a lot of the complaints and issues would be fixed or greatly mitigated if you code in the no class stacking rule in your matchmaking algorithm. Most of the bad games I’ve had are against severely stacked teams, or being stuck on a team with 2-3 thieves that refuse to switch (which is 99% guaranteed loss as we all know). De-stacking the classes for ranked games would really give people a better PvP experience in my opinion.
Of course ideally in a perfect world you would fix these issues with perfect class balance instead of enforcing such rules, but we don’t live in a perfect world. 1 class per team works for pro tourney it may very well work & improve pvp gameplay for ranked games. You would certainly hear less complaints about whatever fotm class/builds if people can’t stack them and flood ranked games with them.
Also, a large majority of your PvP playerbase really hate playing premade teams. It sucks to be matched against a 5-player pre-made team just because there are 2 people grouped & queued together on my team. Reduce interaction between SoloQ & pre-mades will improve gameplay for most of your players, as overwhelming majority of your PvP players queue solo. As a result the PvP environment would be more healthy, people will have more fun, and as a result you should see increased PvP activities.
(edited by gavyne.6847)
Shroud is a sorry excuse for “defense” because due to the power creep with elite specs, our shroud can drop very very quickly. And that’s crazy if you think about it. Shrouds already mitigate damage by 50%, yet they drop so quickly, that should tell you something’s off.
We are the one class lacking mobility & escapes while at the same time lacking active defense. Getting some real active defense won’t be too much nor would it make us overpowered. And before someone or Anet comes and say “but but shroud!”, I’ll just point you to warriors. Look at their damage output, sustain, damage mitigation, and active/passive defense. They can stick to players and keep enemies close much better than we can, and keeping enemies close was supposed to be our specialty.
As have said before, shroud is what is holding this class back. It’s the excuse Anet uses to not balance us better.
Build templates needed to happen anyway, it’s one of the most commonly asked for feature in all game-modes, PvP, PvE, and WvW. This idea won’t work without a working build template feature in place. If you limit players to only switching via the pre-saved build templates during a match, then you can limit the amount of wasted time people spend at spawn. The game’s pace is too fast to allow players to just sit at spawn while slowly flipping through their specs & swapping utilities/runes/sigils.
No doubt pro players won’t like this, but I’d say vast majority of the PvP playerbase would enjoy this idea. While pro players roll out in perfectly balanced team compositions, min/maxed builds, and are all on the same page at the start of each games, this simply does not happen in ranked for majority of the players. Heck I think if they want to limit this build switching for ranked, they could simply disable this function for pro tournaments (like they have the no class stacking rule for pro tourney but not ranked play).
I have to agree this would be fun for a lot of people, and likely get more people to play PvP more regularly.
Boon corrupt is the only role a necro’s got in PvP at the moment. Without it or weaken it, there would be no reason at all for any PvP team to take a necro. And at the moment at higher level gameplay, most teams already don’t utilize a necro as-is.
On top of that, currently boon corrupt is one of the better ways at countering classes such as warriors, scrappers, druids, revs, and guardians…all classes with very high boon uptime (especially damage reduction boons such as protection & resistance). You have to think overall balance, what would happen if you reduce or weaken boon corrupt.
I mean if you really want an example, go watch the most recent pro tournament. I forgot which teams were playing but neither had a necro, they played power vs power for two rounds. Those rounds ran the duration of map’s time limit, they were some of the most boring, long drawn out fights. Twitch chat was filled with complaints and laughter about how badly that particular match was played. That, is what happens when you take boon corrupt & necros out of the equation… long, boring, drawn out fights where people don’t die. Like it or not, necros help break up fights. Well at the moment, necros go downstate very often due to Anet’s insistence that we get no active defense. But necros have the ability to end fights one way or the other. For most people that’s actually a good thing.
As someone who always preferred a power reaper’s style of gameplay, I would totally be ok if Anet nerfed corrupt boons but at the same time reined in the era of crazy boons & high mitigation that HoT expansion introduced. I would love to go back to playing more of a power necro playstyle, because at the moment power reaper is not viable in PvP against competent opponents. If you want to take some of that corrupt boons away, make sure you give some back and give us more viable builds again.
(edited by gavyne.6847)
Only thing I dislike about scrapper is their rez power. We got rid of mesmer’s safe rezzes but scrapper somehow retained theirs. Like another pro player said before, scrappers are rez bots. I don’t think anybody, scrappers included, really want them to play that role.
Give them viable bunker, support, and dps specs. But get rid of this pocket scrapper rez bot crap that’s plaguing this game and ruining the game’s balance. As a necro, I fear Anet will never give proper balance as long as they see scrappers are able to safe rez necros the way they do. Anet somehow may think that’s “acceptable” thus leaving necros completely utterly with kitten defense.
We’ve asked for the ability to see our utility/heal cooldowns and we can’t even get that. I’d seriously be happy just to know the cooldowns of my skills so I don’t pop out of shroud and be screwed because I have 4 seconds left on my heal.
I agree about the part on casting where camera jumps too much. I think this has been a complaint from viewers/players for quite some time now. It’s really hard to get into tournaments when you can’t enjoy fights, because you can’t see more than a few seconds of it before the casters jump to another point or another fight elsewhere. As a result, viewers can’t see the actual skills at work; the baits, dekes, good counter plays, etc.. They should focus on one player, one profession during a fight. Then rotate to another player/profession for another fight, making sure they cover a wide variety of players & classes.
The casting quality also needs to improve. The lag we saw during the Euro cast was terrible, that shouldn’t happen. The amount of delays & disconnects are still a big problem.
As for the other points, do note that it’s a bit hypocritical to be asking people to come together, hold hands, and bridge the divide…while telling Anet they should create an “elite” tier that only the select few could reach, with special rewards only the select few could obtain. You can’t have it both ways. If you create an environment for the elite few, you’ll always have a larger majority of your playerbase unhappy about not being able to reach that same point, or able to obtain the rewards from that tier. If you think players are segregated right now, wait until that happens, it’d be worse.
This is already happening on the PvE side of things ever since Anet launched raids. Now I come from long lines of games that do cater to the elite few, or the top 2%. I’m used to these types of games. But I don’t think GW2 was meant to be that kind of game. You see how things developed since HoT launched on the PvE side of things. People are not happy about raiders having access to things that the rest can’t access. PvP isn’t the only game mode dealing with player divide & losing players, it’s also happening in PvE (and WvW if you want to feel really bad about something).
The part I agree about is that the game needs more carrots, carrots for people to shoot for, both long term carrots and short term carrots. And the game mode as a whole needs to be more fun for everybody. If people are having fun, they’ll talk about it. Often in PvP the general mood is that people are just grinding for the wings, they aren’t really having fun, and they really hate the matching system or hate being blownout by pre-mades. The devs need to find a way to make PvP more fun for everybody.
Hope the following helps.
-The one thing you absolutely have to dodge is True Shot. This is the most obvious animation they have, they crouch down and you will have less than a second to react to that and dodge. It hurts like a mother and often if you are hit with one, you can’t recover due to the way our builds work.
-Don’t randomly dodge arrow shots, I know they look scary, but only True Shot really hurts. And I know it’s uncomfortable to get tethered by their F1 (spear of justice) skill. I find that it’s too hard to dodge spear of justice since it’s a 1/4 sec cast, so I wouldn’t waste a dodge on that because you have a high chance of not evading it. Often once you’ve wasted your dodge, you won’t be able to dodge out of their traps or another True Shot, where they really put a hurt on you.
Also once tethered, you can’t dodge out of it. I see people try to dodge when tethered, it doesn’t do anything, so don’t waste dodges. Only thing you can do is try to leap out of range because out of range is the only way you break from the tether.
-You need to fit some sort of damage mitigation into your build. Wurm is so last year. Count the number of times people follow after your port thinking you were safe… That thief, rev, guardian, and even mez teleport right on top of you and killing you anyways. Or that necro condi bombing you right after your port, happens too often when fighting decent players. You should take either Rise or Spectral Armor. I personally take both, but since you run a signet build, you only have room for 1 util swap.
Speaking of Guardians, Rise works great vs Guards because minions pop the traps. So instead of you eating the traps, your minions would do it for you. Spectral Armor is also good for quick 33% damage mitigation while gaining lifeforce, allowing you to pop right back into shroud after. Just remember, you can’t do damage while you’re dead. Damage mitigation skills will help you survive and not get rolled so quickly (except when you’re being focused in a brawl).
-You don’t have Soul Reaping, this is where you’re hurting mechanically. Unblockable staff marks really help against guardians due to the amount of blocks they have. I’m not sure the specifics of your build, but without unblockable marks, your attacks will be blocked very often. Your staff is part of the key to beating a guardian. Part of what you need to do is to keep corrupting their boons and stacking condi’s, but part of the strategy is waiting for them to make that leap (where they cleanse), then go to town with all your marks leading off with your fear mark, go through your rotations and bring out scepter and load them up.
-Not going to lie, if you have no lifeforce when you engage, you’re likely going to die. So pick your fights carefully. It’s part of PvP, knowing when to engage when fights are in your favor, while also knowing when you’ve lost and to disengage or rotate with others.
-You should be +1 in fights rather than try to solo classes. In the current meta we are nowhere near a good 1v1 class. Classes we can beat take too long to kill and decent players would’ve rotated a +1 to roll us over before fights end. Many classes have great mobility so they can +1 onto us in a 1v1 much quicker than we can take down most classes 1v1.
That floating downstate bug needs to be fixed. But for now, just know that they aren’t floating away. If you stay at exactly where they went downstate in the first place, you can continue to damage them, and stomp them. The mistake people make is assuming they should chase after floating downstate players.
Again it’s a very annoying issue that Anet should fix asap. But don’t chase after them, just stay where they went downstate and proceed to stomp or damage as usual.
I’m running a version of Corruptionmancer build to my liking, but I take both Rise & Spectral Armor. Pretty much you have to know that if you’re dead, you aren’t helping the team. So think defense, and think of all the ways you can do to help yourself survive the heat. I’m still sticking with chilled to the bones because I like the stab & stun you get from it. Plus with Augury of Death, your shouts have much lower cd so you can use them more often.
I like the signet condi reaper build, it is definitely better for 1v1 situations, especially when fighting against fellow necros. But currently I’m leaning towards the Corruptionmancer build better, as I can take both Rise & Spectral Armor for higher 33% reduction in damage uptime. Plus the weakness uptime is much higher with a Curses build, and that in itself helps a lot. I don’t take plague signet because I find I’m not dying to condi, I’m mostly dying to power damage from the resurgence of power builds this pvp season.
Bottom line is if your team sucks, you’re gonna have a terrible time. You can’t carry a team as a necro. We can be the key to making a difference however if you have at least 1 or 2 players that know how to support a necro. We’re extremely dangerous when we +1 a fight. And yeah, this season it can be rough for a necro due to the amount of power builds running, and power counters condi. Ironically our power reaper builds still suck lol.
No nerfs needed if Anet just do what they did for pro level play…code in no class stacking. 1 DH isn’t a problem, but 2-5 it starts to become hilarious. It’s so simple. But my guess is Anet will continue to nerf classes based on player complaints when people are playing against too many of x class.
They implemented no class stacking for pro level play because they couldn’t balance the classes for high level play. Meaning after many nerfs teams were still stacking classes. What makes them think ranked players are going to be ok with the same issues?
As stated before, against players, there are more damage mitigation in play, more defense both passive & active. There are also lots of on demand protection boons flying around. So your damage is pretty much going to be 33% reduced quite often. Then when players activate their blocks, invulns, evades, etc.. be it passively or actively, you’ll be hitting for 0. This is not to mention players are always smarter than npc’s, so a lot of your key big attacks are dodged.
Say we’re all necros, when fighting a fellow necro, we all know to dodge Executioner’s Scythe & Gravedigger for an example. Against npc’s these hits are almost always guaranteed.
They first tried to sell Stronghold as a GvG mode, but it turned out to be just another 5v5 “pvp” map plagued with PvE elements. Escort npc’s, trebs, guards, knocking down gates, running supplies, lord, etc.. are all PvE elements. Even the mist was about summoning a g’kitten npc.
It also came out at a time when players were abusing invincible builds that could keep the lord & bomber npc’s perma healed. Pre-made teams & even pro level players abused these things for fast ranks during the season, average joe’s all said “eff it” and pretty much unchecked the Stronghold box permanently since then.
Yeah Anet spent dev time, money, and resources building it. Just as they spent time, money, and resources building whole new Desert Borderlands for WvW as well. Problem for both Stronghold & Desert BL’s were that they were too PvE focused. There were way too many PvE elements in these maps where they were supposed to be built for player vs player combat. There were cheese & annoying features in them that really bugged players. Bottom line is these things represent how out of touch Anet is with their PvP-minded playerbase.
The PvP gamemode really could use a 3v3 DM map and a proper CTF map. I know there’s a ctf map already but you don’t put ctf + conquest in the same map for 5v5. It’d work better if you make it 10v10 if you want to combine gamemodes like that.
I thought the new Revenge of the Capricorn map was well made though, it was a step in the right direction. Yes it’s conquest still, but at least all elements in that map is truly players vs players based. Finally a real pvp map without npc’s and siege. One of my disappointments this pvp season is that Capricorn didn’t make it to ranked gameplay, so I’m not sure how much I’ll play this season because I’m seriously truly tired of these same ‘ol conquest maps. I’d play all season long if Capricorn gets enabled for ranked.
(edited by gavyne.6847)
If you don’t kill the thief & necro first, they’ll kill you. So target priority should always be thieves & necros first. The only time you would try to kill a bunker rez class like engi & guard would be if you’re with an organized team, and you guys are focusing the the rezzers so they can’t insta revive downies.
But by yourself you have no choice but to kill the easier to kill, but often more dangerous classes.
Nothing can save you is pretty much required as a power reaper now if you dare to run power in PvP (which I still think is a mistake). With the popularity of DH blocks are everywhere. Nothing worse when you think you can go on a gravedigger spam only to get your first digger attack blocked, then proceed to watch your supposed golden opportunity GS attack go on a long cooldown.
This is not a problem… but … when they pull you though two , three , four or more traps… lol
Yeah, people think only noobs get caught in traps. But as a necro I get pulled, tugged, and pushed all the time into traps. It’s like I really try to avoid them, but often I can’t help but get pulled or pushed into them. I lack stab as is, with so many DH this season it’s kind of lol.
Two seasons ago the season was ruined by having too many necros, we then promptly got nerfed. If DH players think they’ll get away with it…yeah good luck lol. The whole “but but DH isn’t viable at pro level” argument doesn’t work, because 2 seasons ago necros weren’t stacked at pro level either (this was before 1 class per team rule was in place). Many pro teams didn’t even use a necro then. But yet they plagued the ranked gameplay and players complained about not having a good time.
Anet could resolve these issues by making sure there’s no class stacking. I mean they couldn’t balance the game enough for high level play so they implemented no class stacking for pro tourneys. Only makes sense for them to do the same for 99% of the rest of the PvP playerbase.
(edited by gavyne.6847)
The way it is right now is dumb and random. You might as well install a dice and let players just roll for it. Kill credit doesn’t even match how kill credit works for npc’s in the rest of the game. I can see how people are frustrated and confused.
Those of us that do more than PvE have been seeing the downward trend for quite awhile now. WvW was pretty much destroyed by HoT because they introduced maps players didn’t like, mechanics that were overpowered, and features that have more to do with PvE than player vs player combat. Players that stuck around looking for the magic bullet patch gave up when they saw what Anet had to offer. WvW only feels active right now because of server linking. WvW also lack long term goals & its own legendary wings to strive for.
Then on the PvP front, the most recent pro tourney was only viewed by 1200 – 1400 people. HoT threw the balance out of whack with introduction of elite specs. The game mode has been hurt ever since HoT expansion, and viewership keeps getting lower and lower. The game mode is stale, but they did release a new map recently. Unfortunately the new map isn’t in the ranked rotation so people who have their wings, or have been playing pvp for awhile, really are not motivated to play yet another season. Again, lack of long term goals & rewards is an issue, and lack of new maps & alternate non-conquest modes keep PvP stale for many.
Now PvE is Anet’s bread & butter, you would hope PvE players would be able to shoulder the game and keep it funded. Seeing how much Anet puts PvE as its main focus. But those figures speak for themselves, not even PvE players are spending that much money right now. So argue, debate, reason all we want. The numbers & the charts don’t lie. It doesn’t matter if PvE feels alive and active, it doesn’t matter if your guild is hopping with players or if you are having fun personally. All it matters is whether people are spending money, because this game is f2p it needs people to spend money. And right now, people aren’t spending that much money.
You know how it is, when people are happy, they spend more money. People spend money when they feel the content is fun & worth it. People spend money when they’re addicted to the game and want more out of the game. Anet really needs to figure out what they’re doing and what they want to achieve. Because the bottom line is really just the bottom line, it doesn’t matter how any of us feel the game is doing, all that matters is whether people are spending money.
Oh I agree, with such low hp/lf pool using wanderers, you melt too fast to condi’s which is rampant in soloq still. Definitely don’t use that build unless you’re in organized gameplay and know your opponents.
Meta builds from the pro tourney necro players are:
-Carrion Amulet
-Rune of Scavenging
-Scepter/Wh + Staff
-Either Signet or Corruptionmancer build
Signet build uses Spite/SoulReaping/Reaper or Spite/BloodMagic/Reaper
Corruptionmancer build uses Curses/SoulReaping/Reaper
A variation of the build used by NoS to counter a team with a thief was:
-Wanderer Amulet
-Rune of Thorns
-Scepter/Wh + Staff
-For this build he took plague, corrosive poison cloud, etc.. to stack poison for rune’s condi stacks. He also took spectral wall. It helped him somewhat against the thief pick but honestly he was still going down a lot.
Note that every single necro during the pro tourney had a pocket engi that followed them for support & rezzing. It was pretty op, but you won’t have this when you soloq so you’ll have to hope you get into the game with competent players that’ll peel, support, and revive you. The good thing about soloq is that the opposing team sometimes aren’t good at focus targeting. But against premades or higher tier players, you’ll most likely go downstate a lot. There’s no build out there that protects you when getting focused by more than 1 competent player.
Pretty much anytime you have any of the following class on you 1v1, you should run:
-Warrior
-Thief
-Druid
-Good Power Revs (Yes we counter revs, but if you haven’t fought Toker, he’s on another level)
While we do counter engi & guards 1v1, they take too long to kill, so you’re very likely to get +1 on. And well, any +1 during a fight will get you killed guaranteed. We also counter eles but you won’t find many of them this season. Stick to team fights and +1 to assist your team mates, when we +1 a fight we can change the tides. But try not to get seen or you’ll get trained. Try to avoid being a yolo 1v1 player because necros aren’t the best at 1v1 in sPvP.
Brawls tend to last forever if there’s no necro around. We are the 1 class that break up fights and make sure fights end one way or the other. For that it’s good to have a necro on the team. But people need to know how to play with a necro, or we’re a huge liability. If you watched the pro tourney last weekend, you saw one round where it was power vs power, no necro on either teams. Those rounds lasted for the duration of the map, they were long, and they were very boring.
I hope Anet doesn’t expect us to have a pocket engi forever because 99% of the playerbase won’t have that in ranked play. We really need some sort of active defense. With that said, people hate us, and we do make a difference in +1 team fights.
As a necro I can tell you no necro asked for the scepter to be buffed when Anet did it. Anet has a fascination for auto attacks it seems, necro scepter auto, druid staff auto, etc.. Personally I hate having to auto attack on scepter, it’s one of the most boring and unimaginative things to do.
Nerf it for all I care, but please for the love of tyria give necros better active defense, or even better yet make power reapers viable. Because right now it’s simply way too easy to train a necro down. Just look at the dedicated babysitting they require by an engi during pro tourney, that crap is just ridiculous & shameful.
I just don’t see how GS is viable in pvp at all. Condi reapers are barely viable when you have a great team that’ll sustain, support, and peel for you, or have a babysitter engi like we saw from pro tourney to revive you. To achieve power reaping you’d need to be in middle of the crap, where us necros simply don’t have what it takes to sustain getting focused. You’ll be too busy getting cc’ed, condi stacked, and powered on that you won’t be swinging much of that GS.
Unless of course you’re roflstmoping a much worse team, in which case, heck you could be playing any whack build using any weapon and still win. But against any competent opponents or worse, pre-mades, you really won’t be able to do much before you watch your shroud disappear and you’ll be chain cc’ed while bombed down.
Like I said, condi reapers are barely doable right now against good players, this is while we’re condi bombing from range. To play a power reaper build using GS, you’d be need to stand in middle of all the fields and bombs, chase players around, or you’re completely useless to a team. Ever since last patch, every power reaper I’ve seen in games have gotten stomped bad. Only ones that did “ok” were ones where the team already 3 cap and dominated.
I’m counting all the classes that counter us or out-power us right now, I’m sorry, I just don’t see how GS or even power reaper is even viable in the current meta.
(edited by gavyne.6847)
There used to be a balance to boons via corrupt boons. But then Anet in its infinite wisdom introduced resistance. That threw everything off balance.
While boon share is definitely a culprit, if there was no resistance, corrupting boons would still hinder players even if they reapply the boons. The core of the balance issue here is resistance as it completely, utterly, negates the results of corrupt boons.
But you know how it is, these gaming companies got to introduce op things in expansions in order to force players to buy the expansions. The op elite specs and the rev class with its resistance are perfect examples. I’m not sure if it’ll ever get balanced.
I’m just afraid that for devs that watch the pro tournaments, and see how teams abuse the engi+necro fast rez mechanic, I hope they don’t find that acceptable. I don’t want them to balance us based on the notion we’re going to do die. That and the fact that overwhelming majority of the necro players will not have engi babysitters that revive & support them in pvp.
I don’t think necros are happy about being balanced to go downstate, just as I don’t think engies are happy they’re a rez bot.
I love how it’s players vs players, no npc’s, no siege, just players fighting it out. I wouldn’t want it to fire cannons on players. And I get the impression things are far apart and there are 4 points to fight over so it’s harder for a team to handle it all, as you’ll have to make sacrifices, hence the strategy part of the map.
The bell most definitely already give a losing team a chance at coming back, seen it happen many many times. But honestly if you get into a game with a bad team, you’re going to lose no matter how they tweak the map.
There’s no build that makes necros able to sustain being focused in team fight in PvP without support. If you watch the pro tourney you’ll see necros require babysitting by an engi for insta downstate rezzing. Unfortunately when you soloq you don’t get that kind of support 99% of the time so you just have to kite, juke, and use line of sight to stay alive more.
Also meta changed a bit. Those playing at pro level are using rune of scavenging and many necros are taking blood magic running a signet build. I’ve been testing this build in soloq, it’s interesting, does give you a bit more sustain. But like I said, without support you’re going to die a lot when opposing team outclass yours.