Guild Wars 2

We need a visible MMR leaderboard based on Glicko2, not some horrible system the devs just randomly came up with.

Arenanet keeps trying to reinvent to wheel, just give us back the old leaderboards with permanent decay. It’s so stupid that they can mess up such simple stuff like this so badly.

Also remove hotjoin (leave custom arenas as selectable from the list) and have Casual queue, ranked solo queue, and ranked team queue.

One elementalist weapon is already 12 skills as opposed to 3 for a normal mainhand…quit whining

Seriously, this kitten is getting old. And it’s even sadder that Arenanet is probably happy with their new ladder seeing as all the PvE turret engi heroes are farming it for presumed prestige (LOL). So by their metrics, they think it’s a success. If you don’t like this new ladder, stop playing on it… it’s really the only way they are going to take the ladder seriously it seems.

When you have people with a 45% win rate sitting next to people with a 100% winrate on a leaderboard, you know it’s utter garbage.

The game really has 5 types of builds:

Bunker: A support role, but defined as extremely hard to kill and something which is intended to stand on the node

Bruiser: A tanky DPS build that can teamfight and has good 1v1 capabilities. Examples would be Celestial Engineer, Hambow Warrior, D/D Ele

Support: A build focused not around dueling or node holding but which brings valuable healing, boons or ressurection abilities. Examples: Staff Elementalist, Spirit Ranger

Duelist: A primarily duel focused build, intended to fight 1v1 on a node to win it. It’s not currently seeing a lot of play, but it did exist in previous metas. Examples: Condi Ranger, Beast Master Ranger, Condi Mesmer

Burst: A build intended to win fights quickly with overwhelming damage. Examples: D/P Thief, Shatter Mesmer, Fresh Air Elementalist, Power Necro

By the way, these archetypes could be used to create a very fun Solo Queue matchmaking system. Class stacking has almost nothing to do with whether a match is good or not.

Yep. The only thing Anet had to change about the old leaderboard was the silly non-permanent decay. Instead, the leaderboards are worse than ever. It’s ridiculous.

Lopez.7369:

They basically changed nothing, at least from what I’m seeing on the leaderboards. Now it’ll be about who spams the most wins, regardless of the quality of opponents they’re facing.

This is all very sad. There have been functioning leaderboard systems for decades, which much more serious competitive games like chess, League of Legends, and Dota 2 use. I don’t see why ArenaNet has to try to be a special unicorn.

My thoughts exactly. There goes my motivation to come back to the game, really.

Healer/Support: Bunker Guardian, Staff Elementalist

Illusive/nimble non-magic DPS dealers: Ranger/Thief/certain Warrior builds

Conaywea.5062:

Not op? Explain then why WvW and PvP got full in 1 sec after the buff.

Arenanet balances their game around the top tier of gameplay.

Sure, it’s easy to gun down noobs with Rapid Fire in PvP and WvW. It’s even easy to apply substantial pressure to more experienced players as a power ranger. However, given the fact that we’ve seen essentially 1 competitive power ranger in the top tier of PvP, its pretty easy to see that the build is not truly overpowered at that level. For example, when Hambow and Dhuumfire Necromancer were OP, the entire community saw a great increase in people playing those builds (both in lower and the absolute top tier of gameplay). It’s hard to say the same about Ranger.

In fact, until we see a team succeeding with double power rangers, like teams did with double hambow or double ele or double spirit ranger, its pretty hard to say the build is overpowered. Sure, it’s kitteng annoying to fight against, especially if you just get randomly bursted in the middle of a teamfight. However, the annoyance factor of a build doesn’t honestly play into how it is balanced.

Overall, the emergence of Berserker specs like Fresh Air, Power Ranger, Medi Guard, and perhaps even Power Necro shows the game is becoming better balanced and far less Thief/Mesmer centered.

I’d trade the extra 300 range longbow gets if I can have a traitable 1200 range Shortbow with Eagle Eye :P

Also, even as a longtime Ranger main, I find both power rangers and the new entangle rather obnoxious to fight against.

Flyphish.6398:

Pro troll has everyone baited.

Honestly, he seems like a troll, yes. But if he is, it’s so well executed that he deserves a medal of some sort.

Lordrosicky.5813:

I can answer these question for you:

1, It will still be a grindfest just SLIGHTLY less than before…but still yeh…a total grindfest.
2, The announcement basically said “we aren’t fixing leaderboard for at least another 3 months”
3, All they did was slightly change the leaderboards point system. Nothing else changed. It isn’t based on MMR. It is still the same.

Harvest.2506:

zxstanyxz.8769:

Harvest.2506:

zxstanyxz.8769:

Harvest.2506:

zxstanyxz.8769:

and you couldn’t have read the news whilst queued up? or the forums? just like I am currently…. yeah i don’t buy it…

I can do it NOW Obviously since its over. You try running the “amount of games played” marathon with 4-6 minutes ques and see how well you do. Missing a que is brutal especially since ladder positions were neck and neck with the points towards the end in top 10.

how do you miss a queue by browsing the forums? it makes a noise and flashes in your task bar when the queue pops

what are you doing whilst queued for 6-8 minutes every 15 minutes… staring intently at the screen hoping for it to pop?

yes. My life has been a living Hell starting intently at the screen hoping for it to pop.

well if you had even glanced at the news section whilst waiting for a queue you would have known not to exert so much effort wouldnt you…. also if you paid any attention you would have realised there was a message up in the top right of your screen about season 1 when it was going… and nothing after, and there will probably be a message about season 2 tomorrow when it goes live… that didnt trigger something in you to think “oh hey i should read one of those news articles that i see when logging in about the pvp system”

I’m focused person man, I have to be in ranked, I take my games seriously, I’m playing on nividia surround for crying out loud. all three monitors are being used. I turn off my news section at the top right so i won’t get distracted. For the times that I do Alt tab out I work on my cameras for recording. I’ve put alot of effort to getting the word out on this game. a shame I can’t be rewarded in turn.

Lol. Rewarded for what? Grinding the most games? This leaderboard deserves absolutely nothing.

It’s good to hear the leaderboard might have changed.

It’s also bad to hear that you continue to give out the most lazy prizing for the leaderboards ever. Seriously, most of us already have a llama, if not multiple llama minipets. Make a new minipet or a new set of armor or something different please.

SobeSoul.6910:

I disagree with your analysis. The way to build competition is having automated tournaments that only full parties can enter. Maybe 4 to 8 teams that run all the time provided enough teams are on to fill up spots. Make them reward gems or a quantity of gold worth players’ time.

You want bigger and better tournaments then it has to start with providing players in game with an incentive and actual experience.

The MMR system does nothing particularly for building tougher competition in actual tournaments.

Lol, that’s funny since the game had this at the beginning and it failed miserably.

Wilco.1458:

As much as ANet is putting money into tournaments and stuff, all of their game changes seem to have no intention of forming a competitive community.

I definitely agree. The increased tournament schedule with ESL support and the WTS series is great. But it would be even better if it felt like the actual community was going somewhere in terms of competitiveness. Right now the game still feels stagnant, even if we’ve seen a increase in twitch viewership

Hi everyone,

Recent changes have made me wonder about Arenanet’s overall goals for PvP. We saw the introduction of the map vote system and the ready check system, both of which have been great for the game. Queue times are also a bit shorter. However, we also saw the removal of solo queue and the addition of a leaderboard which by any normal standard made the old leaderboard look good. In addition, matchmaking is now frequently pairing teams of solo players against full premades. Class stacking and imbalanced compositions seem to not have changed much either as was initially promised.

I would contend that from a competitive viewpoint, the state of PvP is actually worse off now than it was before the infrastructure patch which made these changes. Unranked queue is definitely great for beginners and people from other areas of the game who want to hop into PvP with friends. Yet, a lot of these people never intend to take the game seriously, gain leaderboard standing, or even watch tournaments. In my opinion, most of the viewership of esports games like LoL or CS:GO comes from solo players who enjoy laddering but who simply don’t have enough time or commitment to join an actual team. They have a very strong understanding of whatever game they play, but don’t belong to a competitive team or organization. Their primary means of competition and improvement for the average player comes from solo queue.

That said, I believe that the same also stands for Guild Wars 2. Sure, the ideal scenario for becoming competitive in this game would be finding a group of 4 great friends and all improving together every day in Team Queue. This just isn’t a reality for the large majority of players. If you look at current teams right now, the top teams have basically been playing together since the game came out. The newer/second tier teams have quite a few players from solo queue in them. I’d be willing to bet that the majority of tournament viewership for this game over the course of its existence was players with some amount of investment in solo queue as well.

In addition to solo queue being a practical necessity for a competitive game, a functioning leaderboard system is also pretty much mandatory. Most people aren’t going to want to take a game seriously if they have literally nothing to show for it in the end. This has always been a big problem for GW2 PvP: how to tell if you’ve actually improved, how to tell who is better/worse than you are, and finding a reason to continue to play hundreds and thousands of games with hardly any rewards or prestige tied to it. The fact is that the current leaderboard system is not a leaderboard. It’s entirely dictated by how much you player (as seen by the 40%-80% win ratio spread in the top 100 players). The only people this is an incentive for are either people who don’t realize the leaderboard is not skill based, or the people hoping to trick people into thinking they are skilled based on a phony leaderboard ranking. Then there are people who just play tons of games and don’t care about the leaderboard at all, which is fine.

Not having a working leaderboard or visible MMR system also incredibly hampers the ability of players to find similarly skilled/like-minded players to form actual teams with. It creates an atmosphere of ambiguity as well which leads to more trash talking and toxicity in general. It is almost a certainty that if the game had visible MMR, you’d see people in HotM using solo q rating/ranking to create pick up groups of similarly skilled players. This in turn would eventually benefit the top echelon of PvP teams when some highly skilled groups of solo players converted to tournament teams.

You should read my post, but tl;dr:

1. Ranked Solo queue is necessary for building a tournament viewership and fostering competition among newer players.

2. A working leaderboard is a must have incentive if the game aims to become competitive.

3. Visible MMR would lead to an increase in the number of actual teams. It would also lead to a less toxic community.

Arenanet’s attempt at a leaderboard is really quite embarrassing. That said, I agree with your post but the devs don’t seem to care about this.

In fact, one of them even told me they don’t want visible MMR because of “rating shaming” when in reality it would probably lead to a better community with people more evenly divided based on skill and experience. It’s quite silly logic they employ.

Arenanet removed the LfT forum as well as creating a totally worthless new leaderboard because they don’t want this game to be competitive.

They want the game to be purely casual so that no one gets picked on for being bad or having a low rating and feels sad.

Also, without the Looking for Team forum, it makes it even harder for players to find people to compete with, so look forward to at least a year more of the exact same people winning all the tournaments before the game dies or whatnot.

Hi guys, this thread is basically a conglomeration of a bunch of thoughts I’ve had about PvP since I stopped playing a few months ago. I basically want to address what I feel like are the biggest problems with PvP currently.

Infrastructure:

-There needs to be a reason for PvP guilds to exist and to play with one another. The community has long been fractured into very small groups of people, or just solo players. Giving players incentives to join guilds for things such as exclusive guild PvP gear, bonuses to rank points, and faster rewards when queueing with a guild group would really help out the community aspect of PvP imo.

Leaderboards and matchmaking:

-The current leaderboards are an absolute disaster from any sane person’s perspective. Leaderboards are about skill. Not about games played. Simple. Literally copy WoW’s 5v5 leaderboard if you can’t figure it out on your own. The fact is, without a competitive leaderboard, good luck creating a competitive community. Creating a respectable leaderboard is not rocket science, and I’ve never understood why arenanet has had such a problem getting this right.

-In addition to a working leaderboard, a visible MMR would help exponentially increase the competition and team forming ability of the community. It’s exceedingly hard to find people to make a team with, especially its a total shot in the dark trying to find out how skilled they are.

Balance:

-Balance is ‘good’ right now, if only for the silly reason that there is so much passive offense in the game that it all balances out. On-crit sigils are literally RNG on top of RNG. Passive damage like Fire, Air, Incendiary Powder, and massive AoE fields that are pretty much unavoidable in a conquest setting utterly dominate the game at present.

-Ranged damage and AoE is too powerful compared to single target and melee damage. Sigils have only made this worse. Why run a melee weapon when you can sit at 1200 range and get twice as many procs of your fire and air sigils? Why would you not take Grenades and be able to stop a team res from 1500 range simply through aoe vulnerability, poison and chill?

-Dodging is still too prevalent.

-Some meta specs are extremely poorly designed. The biggest offender of this is S/D thief: dodge everything while passively damaging with fire/air. Steal with no counterplay, etc, etc. Sure, S/D thief isn’t particularly OP anymore, it’s just horribly designed. Ele has been problematic since launch and the amount of team support it gives is totally out of line with how much 1v1 potential it has.

Arenanet’s balance philosophy:

-Since the game launched, Arenanet has ignored whole sets of useless utilities (ex: thief traps, ranger shouts) and balanced around meta specs. They balance extremely slowly, and this creates an absurdly stale metagame which bores players to death. Most players would much prefer a less balanced meta, if it changed every 1-2 months! It creates excitement and makes it much more fun to theorycraft and experiment. This is one of the largest mistakes they have made in my personal opinion.

-Internal class balance for PvP is non-existent and the best example of this is Warrior:

1. Arenanet decides warrior is weak
2. Give it crazy OP must take trait Cleansing Ire.
3. Decide its too OP, nerf hammer skills
4. Warrior pidgeonholed into cleansing ire and longbow on EVERY COMPETITIVE BUILD EVER FOR 2 YEARS.

ellesee.8297:

Bran.7425:

Seems this thread is no where near on topic might be time for it to take a dirt nap.

-Completely Offtopic note: How is booty allow through the filter but a word for excrement that rhymes with curd is not?

Why is there even a swear filter for the forum of a video game where primary objectives include poaching wildlife to near extinction and mercilessly and brutally killing other players for sport and monetary gains!

Sure you can drink this Elonian moonshine if you’re underage and brutally destroy this WvW newb and then throw 8 ballistas on his corpse BUT GOSHDARN IT IF YOU SO MUCH AS THINK ABOUT SWEARING YOU’RE BANNED!

Wahoo! Bye frands!

Here in America there are only two evil things: naked people and swear words.

Benjamin.7893:

I don’t usually like Jebro’s casts. But today he and the other guy are doing a good job.

I absolutely agree, this is the best I’ve seen Jebro cast. He and Kaelaris make a good team.

sinject.4607:

infantrydiv.1620:

It’s probably already been decided, but who would you guys most like to see cast WTS NA? What casters would bring the most hype?

http://strawpoll.me/3758839

Personally I feel like Grouch/Blu know the NA scene best, and definitely are the most popular to see cast NA tournaments.

grouch and blu are the worst casters. sorry, but there’s nothing about them that makes watching competitive events enjoyable. they’ve never played high-level pvp so they don’t bring experience or insight, they’re not really funny or have strong personalities; their voices aren’t even nice to listen to at least.

literally every other caster this game has brings at least one of those qualities mentioned above to the table. i’m guessing the only people that do enjoy grouch/blu are the same people who like their boring recycled twitch.tv humor or bland commentary that is literally just them repeating what they see on the screen.

please anet, just make it so competitive games can be spectated by everyone in game. i am so tired of being forced to watch games through erratic perspective changes accompanied by commentary i have no interest in hearing.

Uh, Jebro, Chronick and Kaelaris have not played PvP at the highest level. In fact, Grouch probably has the most high level pvp experience out of all of them. Maybe you think their voices are special, but they really just have accents. Jebro probably does have the most distinctive voice, but that could be a positive or a negative depending on personal preference. I don’t find Jebro or Chronick particularly funny either. I think Blu/Grouch know the NA community and the conquest meta better than Jebro/Chronick, and I also think they hype close ends of games a bit better than Jebro/Chronick do. For example, I’ve seen Jebro completely oblivious to the fact that a game is coming down to timer, or not notice a lord rush until the lord is almost entirely dead. I’m sure Blu has done the same kinds of things, but I noticed it more often from Jebro.

Shoutbow is incredibly easy to be effective with in this meta. In my opinion it’s the easiest build to multiclass and be a ‘top tier’ player with.

That said, the build was made in response to just how much sustain ele/engineer have. Shoutbows are actually relatively easy to focus down with double power burst comps (thief/mes, thief/ranger mes/ranger, s/f ele as well). They shine in long, drawn out fights where cele tanks are just smashing into each other without any heavy focus a well as condi heavy fights where they can remove tons of condis off themselves and off their teammates.

LOL FAT CHANCE CANDIS. enjoy getting rolled by premades as a solo queuer from now on.

Teutos.8620:

I’d love to see Helseth commenting. I know, not all viewers will share his sense of humor, but he has insight at the top level of pvp and big knowledge of the game what most of your mentioned shoutcasters are just lacking.

butch.8136:

An analyst desk so we can actually talk about some plays. As the game goes on most of the things that are called are stomps/portal etc. Almost never in depth rotational play nor mechanical plays. Would require the POV of every player though.

I think it would be cool to have say, two top players one from EU one from NA as an analysis panel between games. Helseth and then maybe Caed or someone else would be cool. I’ve heard Helseth analyze before and when he’s out of character and being serious he has some very good analysis to share.

tichorum.2415:

Why am I not on this list. QQ. Shame on you infantry!

It’s true I did forget about you and the DPS casters when I made the list. Since you competed in the qualifiers for WTS NA, I assumed you weren’t in the running for a potential caster. And then I don’t even know if the DPS guys are still active in the game. I was mainly thinking of the people I’ve seen casting the ESL cups recently. That said, you are pretty much the most qualified caster I’ve seen from a player expertise standpoint (since you’ve played on a real team/have much more competitive experience than Blu/Jebro/Chronick).

There was a time when it was pretty much only Blu casting every single tournament. He basically kept the competitive scene going before Anet was doing a single thing to support it (this was before Tournament of Legends and after the Dhuumfire patch).

It’s kind of disturbing that Arenanet wouldn’t have him casting WTS NA, especially since the stream in China was cut short and he didn’t really get to cast it. I was actually shocked when I heard he wouldn’t be casting.

If you go and look at the other thread I made about who should cast WTS NA, its pretty obvious that Blu and Grouch are the favorites, at least on this forum.

Jebro, Chronick, Kaelaris do a good job, but I pretty much guarantee that Blu/Grouch are far more familiar with Abjured, and The Dankening given that they play on NA servers and are familiar both with the playstyle and the color commentary of both those teams.

IMO, it would make sense to have Blu + Grouch (or another caster like a DPS guy or Mila) cast NA, and Chronick/Jebro/Kaelaris cast EU.

It’s probably already been decided, but who would you guys most like to see cast WTS NA? What casters would bring the most hype?

http://strawpoll.me/3758839

Personally I feel like Grouch/Blu know the NA scene best, and definitely are the most popular to see cast NA tournaments.

This isn’t WoW. You can’t say something like “Holy Paladin is terrible in PvP, so I’ll play that to challenge myself.” All commonly seen PvP builds are seen for the reason that they generally work well in PvP. If you want to “challenge” yourself by playing a useless build that doesn’t help your team, then just play without traits and without armor and prepare yourself for your team telling you to stop playing the game.

So is dueling a recognized mode now? Is there actual organized competition and a valid MMR system for it?

I see two groups on this thread, one just naming top Conquest players and then the other saying that actual “duelists” (people running troll builds) are the real best duelists. Both look kinda silly imo.

For brand new players (listed in order of easiest to hardest):

1. Turret Engineer
2. Ranger/Warrior
3. Necro
4. DPS Guardian
5. Other Engineer specs
6. Elementalist
7. Mesmer
8. Thief

For players who already know the game decently well mechanically/rotationally (easiest to multiclass and be effective high tier):

1. Warrior
2. Engineer
3. Elementalist
4. DPS Guardian
5. Ranger
6. Necro
7. Thief
8. Mesmer

Get used to it. People hate Rangers in general. It doesn’t matter what build you use, even.

Solstice.1097:

masteries are for maguuma and account bound

specializations are completely separate things.

Yeah I think this is correct. Although I think that they might also make certain masteries that work outside of maguuma. Both these systems are very vague at the moment, but they both seem like they would have lots of room the expand upon the concept. IE: I expect new specializations and masteries added after HoT either through Living Story or more expansions in the future.

Maxwell.7843:

I’m still not sure Specializations work outside of the Heart of Maguma, to be honest.

When Colin was discussing them I think he said something along the lines of “in the jungle, the Ranger becomes the Druid”, which can be interpreted two ways: either the Ranger learns how to be a Druid in the jungle, or the Ranger can be a Druid only inside the jungle.

I seem to be the only one with this doubt though, so maybe I misunderstood or misheard…

I think the reason no one believes this is because it would be incredibly dumb and anti-hype for Arenanet to finally add new weapons and skills to each class and only make them usable within a certain PvE zone. People would legitimately be angry about this if it was the case. I’m 95-99% sure the new weapons and specializations will be usable in all game modes.

Raesin.2908:

Nope, absolutely not.
My reaction when watching the stream was ‘This is it?’
How long have they been working on this and this is what they have to show for it?

Now comparing to another, well known MMO’s first expansion;

Guild Wars 2:

3 New maps/tiers of unknown size
1 New class
‘Mastery’
More crafting
The class upgrade thingy
Cheap precursors
‘’More challenging group content’’
Guild Hall
GvG
WvW map no one cares about.

Burning Crusade:

1 New continent made up of 7 zones
2 New races
Faction class swap (Classes no longer exclusive to faction)
4 New smaller zones, including cities for both new races
5 Raids that I can remember
15 New dungeons
1 New PvP map
1 New crafting profession and updated other professions
New skills, flight etc.
And that’s not including the ‘Living World’ patches that included 1 new raid and 1 dungeon in just 1 patch.

Before you dogpile me with ‘’b-but we’ve had Living Story!‘’ the teams developing LS and that develop the XPac will be different.
The LS itself gives you a whole 2 hours of content including achievements(each patch), half of it is bugged that they either never fix, or stealth-fix a WHOLE MONTH LATER while denying any bug existed (Looking at you Annihilator).
While again, WoW has decimated 2 city HuBs (and fixed/redesigned them) and revamped it’s entire base world in one expansion and they don’t even claim this ‘revolutionary living story’.

And don’t even get me started on the fact that it is ALL TEMPORARY. Sure the maps like Southsun, Drytop and Silverwastes are permanent and the Breach is a mechanic that can always trigger. But it’s still time gated because of the playerbase.
Those that join in another year aren’t going to be able to see that content or get those items because everyone else has moved on.
The only thing that keeps the content padded out is the RNG grind.

This ‘expansion’ is nothing more than Living Story 3 and a Feature Pack rolled into a neat little package that they’re going to ask people to pay for. And a disgusting amount of people are only too happy to do so.
I don’t hold anything against people enjoying the game, but no one seems to care if the content is of good quality and so what incentive do ANet have to make anything good? You’ll pay for it anyway.

As someone else said, this only has the ‘expansion’ sticker slapped on it because it’s what people wanted to hear.
It was however hilarious watching Colin wait for applause and got nothing but the occasional pity-clap.

I like GW2 and I really hope I’m wrong, but I don’t think I will be, so now is the time for me to uninstall and go elsewhere.

It always makes me laugh when someone tries to compare Guild Wars 2 to WoW.

First, WoW is a subscription based game. Pay for the base game, then pay for the expansion, and then pay to access the expansion. One year of WoW + 1 expansion is $240. Three years of Guild Wars 2 permanent access for $20-$60. In fact, most reasonable people would think that for a B2P game, getting 100-200 hours of gameplay out of it is fantastic value.

Second of all, you can’t really compare map and dungeon design from 2004 to today. I’d much rather have a few new GW2 dungeons and a raid than 15 TBC WoW Raids/Dungeons. Also, just look at the skills of classes in GW2 compared to WoW class/racial skills and take a gander at which would take longer to make.

Thirdly, I like WoW. I have an active WoW subscription. But I don’t for a minute think that WoW gives more content per dollar than Guild Wars 2.

Fourthly, have you personally experienced the new content yet? Have you seen how big the maps are, or what “masteries” include? Do you know the price of the expansion? If not, I don’t think you can comment on whether it’s ‘good content’ or not.

ArrDee.2573:

Acrisor.8097:

I will no longer play Elementalist because it will be totally nerfed.
But now, I am curious, what will be the most overpowered profession and build?

Lol my frand DD Elementalists will still be strong! Might is still a valuable boon and Elementalists will still be able to stack up an amazing amount for themselves and their team! They will still be able to heal and cleanse silly amounts of condis off themselves and their team! They will still be very durable with permanent vigor and crazy sustain and protection uptime! Their offense was toned down which is good because no bunker should be able to output the damage that current DD Elementalists can do! Totally nerfed is a gross exaggeration since they will still have loads of burning, damage, and sustain!

Wahoo! Bye frands!

Let’s be real here Vee Wee, do you actually think that anyone will still be playing Elementalist or Engineer after these harsh and totally uncalled for nerfs? Look at how they gutted the damage on Engineer’s Shrapnel grenade and the 12 second burn on Drake’s Breath is now ONLY 8 SECONDS. It’s already been confirmed that Five Gauge, Wakkey, and Phantaram have been kicked off the Abjured due to how useless Ele/Engi will be after this patch.

Ithilwen.1529:

Looking at the balance patch made me sick to my stomach.. You are going to BUFF Ranger? that’s so ridiculous I can’t even express it accurately.

Yes, because Condi Rangers with Torch and Power Rangers with Warhorn have been terrorizing everyone in the top tier meta for 8 months similar to Elementalist and Engineer, right?

leman.7682:

Locust Swarm: The casting time of this skill has been reduced from 1 second to 0.5 seconds.

• Dev note: This change will give necromancers a bit more mobility.

Whoever wrote this deserves a troll bonus.

+1 lol’d

I think most of us are just sitting here wondering how Arenanet manages to ignore balance issues with Engineer so well. cough cough Cele Rifle cough cough

I’m still wondering how they managed to ignore Incendiary Powder after calling Dhuumfire bad design and changing it to something with good design.

It’s also funny that they are apparently ignoring air/fire/doom.

Justin is the new PvP forum Most Valuable Dev

Is this series still going?

I assume we haven’t had one in a while because of the holidays. I’m wondering when the next one will be.

Also now that the expansion is confirmed it would be awesome if there were new skills/classes to talk about in the upcoming ones.

Justin ODell.9517:

infantrydiv.1620:

Don’t think I’m following your train of thought, but:

Shouldn’t matter, if 4 players win vs 5, they always deserve a win, and in addition, the people on the 5 team deserve -3 leaderboard points for managing to lose 5v4.

Sorry, I should have elaborated. Having multiple accounts is the bane of the dishonor system. Anyone can create multiple accounts to easily avoid dishonor.

Much like imaclown.1628 aka NeXeD (that’s against the code of conduct, by the way) uses multiple accounts to manage forum infractions.

The thought is that cheezers and exploiters aren’t going to care if they break one rule or two, if they want to do it they will do it. So we have to design around them.

I might just be dumb, but I still have absolutely no clue how people on the 4 side of a 4v5 have anything to gain from that, or how it could possibly abused. Clearly in a 4v5, the 4 team is at a huge disadvantage, and giving them an automatic loss or loss of leaderboard points for winning the game seems ridiculous.

I have won 4v5 games before, and to be given a loss or lose leaderboard standing after winning from a disadvantage like that would be a real slap in the face.

I believe you guys have already fixed the main cause of 4v5s, with people who would queue and then forget about the pop. Your new notification and queue accept system has fixed that.

I don’t think whether someone DCs or not should have any impact whatsoever on leaderboard ranking or MMR of the other people in the game. It makes it too complicated, and probably unfair in some situations. IMO, if people are going to DC, just let the dishonor system handle it and leave MMR/leaderboard ranking out of the equation. Giving the person who DCs -3 LB points and dishonor is enough.

For example, I could already exploit your new system like this: Say there is someone I really dislike on the other team, who is trying to climb the ladder. I simply DC and they don’t gain any ladder points from the game. I could see people doing this if they get put against top team, or just against people they don’t like. Sure, the DCer would get penalized with a -3 leaderboard, but it then prevents everyone else in the game from gaining leaderboard ranking.

Justin ODell.9517:

Lux.7169:

But according to your theory, dishonor will deter this sort of behavior in and of itself, so then why implement a double punishment? Dishonor on a team-mate + a loss even though you won 4v5?

Multiple. Accounts.

Don’t think I’m following your train of thought, but:

Shouldn’t matter, if 4 players win vs 5, they always deserve a win, and in addition, the people on the 5 team deserve -3 leaderboard points for managing to lose 5v4.

Justin ODell.9517:

infantrydiv.1620:

Wait…ranks as in “I’m a Dragon rank.”? I don’t think anyone wants those factored into any match making system if that’s the case.

Yes. Read the forums, this is important to quite a few people. :P

Meh, put a rank 10 on turret engi and he will be more effective than the majority of dragon ranks currently. Only very slightly exaggerating, tbh.

I think rather than factoring rank into team selection, which = purely time played, it might be more effective to make it so that people < rank 30 can’t Ranked Queue, but still have full access to Unranked. It even fits with Arenanet’s current position of level gating parts of the game for new players.

Justin ODell.9517:

style.6173:

You really need to stop using ranks. Use only actual gameplay results. If someone has no gameplay results, then let them start at the bottom and work their way up.

Personally, I ignore ranks, but include the information because more than some feel it’s relevant.

Wait…ranks as in “I’m a Dragon rank.”? I don’t think anyone wants those factored into any match making system if that’s the case.

Justin ODell.9517:

Lux.7169:

style.6173:

Justin ODell.9517:

If you DC and do not reconnect within the grace period, yes.

This is to discourage groups from leaving the match early to invalidate a win for the other team.

I really hope that you aren’t saying that the winning team does not get a win if someone on the losing team deserts. That makes no sense.

I’m hoping the actual implementation is like this:

1. If you win the game and played until the end, you get a win
2. If you win the game, and deserted, you get nothing
3. If you lose the game and had a deserter, the remaining team members do not get a loss or negative mmr
4. If you lose the game and WERE the deserter, you get a loss and negative MMR. Ideally, I’d even make it so they get a double loss.

It doesn’t need to be a net sum zero of wins and losses.

+1

To clarify, I am not using party and team interchangeably.

If you play solo, you will never lose ladder standing because someone else on your team deserted.

If you play with a party, you will never lose ladder standing because someone else on your team, but not in your party, deserted.

If you are the deserter, no matter who wins, you will take a full loss worth of ladder standing.

If you play with a party, and someone on your team deserts then everyone in the party will take a full loss worth of ladder standing.

You will only earn ladder standing if the losing team did not have deserters, with the assumption that the game wasn’t a valid challenge between teams.

If both teams have deserters, the game does not count for ladder standing at all.

The point in emphasis is probably controversial to some, but we feel it is necessary to prevent exploits, and permissible because of the grace period.

What if someone on my team, in my party, DCs for longer than the grace period, but I win the game 4v5 regardless?

Mrbig.8019:

They’re passive.

Unpredictable.

Unbalanced.

Pls explain.

The only one that is really passive is Sigil of Battle and also to some degree Energy

Geo/Hydro are “unpredictable” but definitely not passive.

Leeching and Doom and Intelligence are decently balanced imo. Doom is really not that fantastic, it’s just we are in a meta where there is so much ridiculous healing going out that poison becomes essential.

My vote for most unbalanced is Battle, which should literally just be entirely changed. It’s either going to be required on 3 classes, or totally underpowered.

I think that if Fire/Air were changed, then Geo could also be looked at and given a ‘tell’ where the spike effect gradually comes out of the ground over 1/2 second after swapping and is then dodgeable. Right now though, good luck killing a s/d thief without instant on-swap sigils lol

S = Celestial D/D Ele, Celestial Rifle Engineer
A = Shoutbow, PoC Necro, S/D Thief, Panic Strike D/P Thief, Condi Engineer
B = Shatter Mesmer, Virtues Meditation Guard, Cele Staff Ele, Condi Ranger, Power Ranger, Hambow Warrior
B- = Bunker Guardian, Crit Strikes D/P

1. The top people would actually be on top wow

2. You could look for a team based on an accurate MMR wow cool

3. You couldn’t abuse months of decay and instantly go back (or higher than you were before) or no life and get top placement with an abysmal record stunning :O

4. People might actually take the leaderboards seriously incredible

5. Maybe there would be more competition if the leaderboard was accurate hmm i don’t know?! :ooo

Lux.7169:

Don’t hide MMR’s so the people with bad MMR’s have less room to argue with the higher MMR players =\

…I’m being serious

^