Guild Wars 2

I think MM might be more viable if they did something like the elite, blind, and immob minion, while using better utilities that help the team more. Well of Darkness is a relatively safe stomp utility, Spectral Walk to get between points faster, and Consume Conditions > heal minion 100% of the time.

In the same vein, if you have the elite, Sun Spirit and Stone Spirit, the Ranger could bring the Sharpening Stone utility and put out more pressure with Condis and bring Settler’s to be much tankier than the Carrion build that is a lot more susceptible to burst.

Going all AI is kinda stupid imo

Please Valentin,

Play a thief or ele in tpvp for a week. You will never call spirit ranger difficult again I promise you.

The point is there are quite a few builds that can solo the guild lord and bringing that up as an example to why they’re OP is kinda silly.

Some builds are very, very strong 1v1 and there are hierarchies among those builds, with the big variable being whether or not the player is any good at the game.

Sensotix has some SoloQ vids he’s doing where he tries to take an MM Necro on and gets him to like 50 HP left when the MM’s teammate shows up, on a much riskier build on a much squishier class than… spirit ranger.

I guess Engineers need to be nerfed too…

I was gonna hold back on the pics, but…

MM Necro OP guys.

small # of people? O.O

No most of the responses are people who already despise AI builds pondering the irony of someone who admittedly plays an AI build complaining about another AI build.

I can’t even…

It should be pointed out that we really don’t know for sure what Anet does when they make these decisions besides what they’re “allowed” to tell us and what we speculate is the reasoning behind it.

I would imagine they try to take into account multiple perspectives with their decisions and favor the approach that will get them in the least trouble with the vast majority of players though.

I’ll do Bunker Guardian breakdown to show why it’s so important for teams

• Point Defense – it’s pretty difficult to get a good bunker guard off a point, as they can use stability and plenty of endurance to dodge/absorb knockbacks and launches
• Point Control – hammer, shield, and immobilizes from multiple sources can be used to kick people off of points to decap while fighting
• Boon Creation – you’re spreading a minimum of Protection, Stability, Retaliation, and Regeneration to all your allies on point, plus any other shouts/staff buffs/etc.
• Team Utility – shouts and Virtues help your allies throughout a team fight
• Stomp Securing – stability makes for safe stomps, as well as Aegis if well timed
• Stomp Prevention – CC can prevent an unsafe stomp
• Res securing – the “bubble res” can kick out anyone trying to cleave/unsafe stomp
• Res prevention – CC also helps with this
• Peeler – You can blind, immobilize, launch, knockback, and other means of control on opponents focusing teammates

See how a well played Bunker Guard is so important to a team? Look at all you can do with it if you play it right!

Whats up Hrarr! This is pretty cool and helpful for people.

Those categories would make a good team composition checklist for answering the important question of do we have our bases covered? Of course, everyone would have to examine their builds more, but isn’t that extra 10 or 15 minutes of discussion with your team worth filling in those gaps?

Hopefully people read this as a way to see the game as a bigger overall strategy.

Example of applying this:

Warrior LB/Hammer build

Roles:

• Lockdown – the CC from Hammer disrupts the enemy’s actions if they land
• Point Assault – Combustive Shot and Arcing Arrow make standing on the point painful
• Direct Damage Pressure – you don’t 1 shot people with this as much as take off chunks of HP
• Stomp Securing – you get a stability cooldown, so you have safe stomps vs. 5 classes upon downed state
• Stomp Prevention – your variety of CC can disrupt opponents from stomping
• Res Prevention – same as above
• Body Cleave – Both Hammer and LB can do a lot of PBAoE and AoE damage on opponents in downed state
• Peeler – you can help punish people attacking teammates with Immobs, Weakness, CC, and Cripple
• Roaming – Signet Elite gives 30s of swiftness to facilitate travel between points

Uh have you guys checked how much you get from the 15 point minor in Defense?

Healing Signet is fine without healing power and even with it isn’t all that great, but when you get two of them for the price of 15 points into Defense, plus Cleansing Ire, Zerker Stance, etc. that’s where the goofy stuff starts happening.

A glass cannon build with Healing Signet isn’t going to be very durable at all

The player makes the build more than the build makes the player tho.

If conventional meta “wisdom” held up, google’s 4 signet Thief build would have been complete trash and they would have been eliminated in the first round 500-100 in both matches since it would be a 4v5 right?

Teamwork > Build

I think on the NA side it’s more about how socially dysfunctional the players are than the game mechanics.

To be honest I’ve seen much more balance in this patch than the summer Necro Spirit Ranger condifest.

AFAIK, Helseth runs 20/20/0/0/30 with Halting Strike and Illusionary Elasticity instead of whatever else was there in the old build and Staff instead of Sword/x.

After research into average damage, I found that at 1839 Power your damage actually gets better with Precision and Crit Damage, but Guardian has the unique benefit of high retal uptime so you can go either way with what you emphasize.

Retal scales with power, and is easy to get on Guard so that option is really good. I like having massive crits and higher average damage, but AoE and personal retal makes a big difference too

I’d replace Smite Condition with Stand your Ground because stability is one of the biggest strengths of Guardian. Condi clear is nice, but what happens when they fear you?

I posted about putting out a 6.5k Zealot’s Defense and I’ll share that build with you guys. It’s the most dmg I’ve seen on Guardian so far playing around with it.

http://intothemists.com/calc/?build=-7Fcg;1NFk30G3RG-90;9;49TT;01;049A49B;4LJV4;2JF04JF0D5Be

lilz shorty.1879:

jmatb.6307:

I was referring mainly to the other ppl talking about “sustained DPS” like it’s viable haha. Condition damage on other classes is the only viable way to extend a fight while still being aggressive. If you’re doing direct damage at all, you have to be a glass cannon if you don’t want to be totally useless.

Berserker’s is pretty much the best amulet a DPS guard can have, like any other class that wants to do burst. I was just illustrating how pointless it is to run shout sustained DPS if your job on your team is to take people down quickly.

You’d have to put points into Honor, which doesn’t help DPS at all, to get improved shouts, and you’d be denying 6.5k Zealot’s Defense vs. Heavy Armor targets (something I tested last night with DPS Guard) that you get from Radiance. 15% extra crit chance with 60% crit damage (210% Total) ftw.

I see but yes I figured you were and I completely agree. Thats why I was just trying to mention the things they can improve for us rather just being ok with a little fury. I mean that is literally all they did when that was not even our biggest issue to begin with. Makes me wanna slap a baby.

Ya I can see what you mean. Hammer and Scepter have immobilizes but the weapon sets are too slow to be useful in PvP and in a role where you are trying to blow someone up. The chill trait is a nice try, but it doesn’t make Hammer good enough, especially with Warriors around that can laugh and walk out of the Ring of Warding.

Signet of Wrath could help set up burst, but that would make you a lot less viable 1v1. It could work if you fight dirty and wait for opportunities to immob burst a target already being attacked, but is it worth it?

Sticking to a target is an issue for DPS guard for sure.

I reported that post. Someone did that on one of my threads too it’s completely inappropriate

This is a pattern you’ll notice with these guys – until they “know you” or you’re on the list of players they routinely criticize as a “terrible leaderboard” your opinions don’t matter as much as theirs.

It’s funny but there you go

Yeah I almost don’t want to know that about the devs offering direct line of discussion and these “top players” refusing to.

That’s just stupid on their part to not participate in the most effective way to actually talk about that stuff… especially when, at least on the NA side, you see guilds calling out devs by name and people talking kitten all day

It’s also map related. You’re going to see a lot more leavers on Skyhammer and Spirit Watch than other maps. There are also lag issues, especially on and following patch day for a few days.

Good:

- Paralyzation sigil fix. This was actually buffing dazes too, which made certain classes much stronger than others, especially Warrior. Hard CC being that strong was too effective.

- The targeting and casting changes are fantastic.

- Immob stacking is something I think is going to prove to be more inclusive for the 8 classes than exclusive. I know people don’t like the change and see doom and gloom on the horizon, but I think this was actually a much smarter change than the community is perceiving.

- Tooltips are a great first step. They’re still not entirely accurate and missing some things but the amount of work that must have taken is staggering.

Bad

- The pink nuclear bomb was hilarious, but those kinds of things are the kind of things don’t help an already negative community be more positive.

- I would have liked to see the damage condition stacking cap for burning and poison. Sun Spirit, Poison Grenade, and Virtue of Justice in team fights make it easy to put half a minute of those conditions’ duration with pretty short cooldowns.

Missing

- Templates: i’m sure that’s a big project so I’m not too worried about when it comes out but it will be sooo nice when it does.

- PvE and WvW incentives from sPvP. If those players are compensated for their time, and PvP players get big benefits to leveling from glory, the community would be a lot less divisive in my opinion.

Based on those responses, Allie, it looks like this 10% are too wrapped up in their emotions to think objectively and actually talk to you guys.

That’s pretty funny / sad / surprising actually…

I was referring mainly to the other ppl talking about “sustained DPS” like it’s viable haha. Condition damage on other classes is the only viable way to extend a fight while still being aggressive. If you’re doing direct damage at all, you have to be a glass cannon if you don’t want to be totally useless.

Berserker’s is pretty much the best amulet a DPS guard can have, like any other class that wants to do burst. I was just illustrating how pointless it is to run shout sustained DPS if your job on your team is to take people down quickly.

You’d have to put points into Honor, which doesn’t help DPS at all, to get improved shouts, and you’d be denying 6.5k Zealot’s Defense vs. Heavy Armor targets (something I tested last night with DPS Guard) that you get from Radiance. 15% extra crit chance with 60% crit damage (210% Total) ftw.

Ya Sun Spirit is huge. If that thing is up during a teamfight you can stack about 25 seconds of burning on a focused target.

Add that with Virtue of Justice for even more burning afterward for lolz

I’m kind of disappointed they didn’t bring the condi stacks cap into the patch but it’s w/e.

1. Player Education for Effective Individual and Team Strategy

2. Incentives for PvE and WvW players to play sPvP

3. Spectator Mode for tPvP

Actually you’re going to see more bomb Engis than before because of the buff they made to the radii. They are useful to both Burst and Condi builds so expect that trend to continue.

Condition builds on Necro, Engi, and Ranger usually forgo stability in favor of more pressure, so you’re going to want to bring a variety of CC to deal with them. This is what created the Warrior meta and if you apply that to your team comp vs. them you’ll be more successful.

Ex. Halting Strike Mesmers, Hammer/LB Warriors, Rifle Bomb Engis, Mace/Shield Hammer Warriors, etc.

Burst in all classes is pretty much all or nothing, because of how Power, Precision, and Crit Damage work. If you don’t have the huge crits in addition to the base attack, your damage is going to be terrible.

Once your opponent has a certain amount of toughness they will reduce your damage by a pretty large percentage. Add protection to that, weakness, etc. and low amounts of the three or picking only Power will make you pretty much irrelevant to fights vs. most of the stronger builds out there.

Ex. if you’re using Soldier’s amulet, you need to stack as much Crit Damage and Precision as possible if you want to make that tankiness worth it for damage. If not, then it takes very little to minimize the amount of damage you’re doing, and without pressure the other team is going to be as aggressive as possible without feeling like it’s costing them.

Lilz shorty is talking about an objective truth with how you do direct damage, although without enough specifics to make what he’s saying clear.

Hope that helps.

If I was trolling this thread would have been shut down lol

Ya I was thinking Hammer could be a good off-set weapon for small scale engagements.

Have you tried running hammer?

That and they want the devs to translate all their demands into one single solution that really doesn’t exist.

High survival and damage builds are the most difficult to deal with 1v1, but isn’t the point of a team-based game to get numbers advantages and then systematically wipe out the team by superior deployment?

I was doing team queues yesterday and while my Clerics Warrior build was pretty much impossible for a very good Ranger to kill, it can’t stand up to 3 people that can afford to push the point I was on because they had two points already.

I find that the most fun matchups are the ones where people are running 4 DPS 1 Hybrid on each side and they’re good at it.

It has more of a moba anxiety feel to it, like if you don’t start the fight off really well you’re gonna wipe, instead of a marathon slog that takes forever.

It’s smarter to be heavy sustain and damage, but when people play really aggressively it’s fun as hell

I’ve never had a problem running a DPS guard because while you can’t chase someone all over the map your strength as a Guardian is in teamfights. I just played against FML yesterday and you can see the strength of Stunning Styles’ GS/Staff build in any teamfight situation.

They beat burst builds 1v1 pretty effectively b/c they have an armor advantage + protection, stability, and Renewed Focus too. If you have someone attacking far with that kind of build looking for backcaps or something, and you have a DPS guard at home they’re not going to win that 1v1 unless you’re not good at it.

Nobody is 100% correct in everything they say. If that were true, then League of Legends, Dota 2, and Starcraft 2 would not be competitive games… see how that argument falls apart?

Mammoth you’re nailing it on the head. People need perspective when they feel something is overpowered, not dev “support” with nerfs to stuff they never really understood to begin with.

Ya the fact that people still “run what they want to run” gives a much less clear picture of what is unbalanced or balanced.

The MLG graph some people think is somehow objective truth about the metagame shows that every class was brought to the last tournament except one. 7 out of 8 is almost perfect representation…

The zerg rush example is exactly what ppl in this game ought to do if they want to get something nerfed. Just run what’s the best!

We don’t know exactly who they have working where so how can we make that assumption?

Also, keep in mind what happens in a for profit company. They are always going to put their priority on low cost means to raise revenue. The PvE system was, as the dev posts hint at, much further along than the PvP one. There are more people who play PvE than PvP.

If you were in charge of Anet where would you put the resources of more people on teams, programmers, etc.?

Objective and logical decision making would lead you to the PvE side because you don’t want to alienate the majority of your playerbase or deny yourself the means to make money off of their specific desires.

If they do have a few people working on PvP as opposed to a full team, then it makes sense: slow and steady improvement to a less popular game system makes more sense than throwing everything at it and hoping for the flood of new players that would have to justify that decision.

If anything your QQ makes for bad press when they do these events, and makes it harder to get the players not easier, and if there aren’t a lot of players then there is no economic reason to justify spending more time on it than the lowest you can get away with.

If people leave, then it’s fine – you lose a few of the players, but over time you know you’re going to make steady improvements to the game mode and potentially bring them back or bring in new players that don’t flood your forums with QQ. In the meantime, you’re making pure economic profits from your strongest playerbase and continuing to grow where it matters the most.

Don’t take this like I’m an economist or something – I actually despise them and think they’re sociopaths. But this is the world we live in folks – quality only matters if it’s profitable.

You don’t live in a world where businesses try to make the highest quality product as the only priority…

I wasn’t really paying attention to it, until right before the hotfix came out.

I did get one pink nuke on a teamfight in Khylo though it was funny as hell lol

How was your post productive any way, shape or form?

The forum needs constructive posts not this self-pitying knee jerk reaction to the patch when you haven’t tried anything or worked with people on a team to take advantage of the immob stacking that lets you land guaranteed bursts

This isn’t WvW we’re talking about though…

Oh the leaderboard argument holds up when the person you’re looking up just came back to the game.

So you complain about the leaderboards and then use them to complain about someone calling out complainers…

You’re addicted to it man gotta drop the habit. As good as you guys are at the top of the leaderboards, you sure do kitten and moan a lot.

It’s one day after the patch and you guys are too busy QQing to actually try to figure something out.

GG

Even if you only have a slight immob on a thief that’s using Withdraw or Roll for Initiative(LOL if they do) they’re made out of tissue paper…

Well that limits their options to just their weapon skills instead of permavigor 4 straight dodges with Feline Grace or 50% endurance regen right?

Hard CC locking was bad because only a few classes had practical stability cooldowns, so it promoted more exclusion. Everyone has condi clear and can dodge the skills they use for immob though, so it’s more possible to defend against that with more classes than Stun locking.

The Engi rifle immob is a giant net flying at you.. Throw bolas is a flying string thing… If a Warrior has LB out you know they want to hit you with Pin Down, etc.

People whine about evade spam, and immob stacking addresses that. People whine about not being able to run burst vs. condis and immob stacking, again, addresses that.

Immobs can be cleansed, and while they are lower in priority to cleanse there are a lot more factors that go into cleansing, such as the support you get from being on a point with a shout guardian/warrior, whether or not you’re bringing Melandru runes, taking advantage of diff trait options, etc.

O Eggs,
I know exactly what Immobilization is and the only reason I am not going to go further than that in my response to you is because you are doing this game a big service by streaming on GW2PVPTV along with Cmc that frankly I think you two ought to be paid for, given the time you’re putting in.

hackks.3687:

jmatb.6307:

People are living up to the silliness and completely nonsensical knee jerk QQ I sadly anticipated.

Tip for the angry and self pitying: take a big drink of water, think about something else for a couple hours, then take a look at immobs and warriors objectively and develop strategies.

Examples:

Do I need to bring condition cleansing instead of a second DPS utility slot?

Do I need to bring my own immob(s) to take advantage of this new situation?

Can I 1v1 a mega-sustain warrior? If not, then would it make more sense to just abandon the point he’s on and fight his other teammates?

What are the most likely builds the other team is running? Does my build help my team tilt the balance of the fight in our favor or hurt it?

the ire and anger that has been raised since the patch has more to do with the direction of the game itself than the actual balance changes made.

before you can “play to win”, you have to have a game worth playing

the changes to immob stacking was a dumbing down of the game – reflected by the lead class-balance Dev’s explanation of the change in the patch preview: “… it just kinda felt awkward by not stacking…” as he spammed an immob skill…

ANet’s stance of balancing around acknowledged “bugs” is a disreputable approach to game development.

Add to that the lack of rewards, lack of functioning leader boards, the ability to farm ranks rather than earn them, and it’s pretty clear to any PvPer this game is not moving is a positive direction, made doubly frustrating because at one point it had a lot of positive momentum.

So what you’re chalking up as “Scrub QQ” is in fact warranted concern for a game that has lost almost all it’s potential as well as any worthwhile reason for a player to be concerned about “playing to win”.

tl;dr – wrong argument for the wrong conversation.

Okay let’s say all that is true and there is little incentive to play, etc. etc.

If people drop the game, leave, and there is no competitive scene at all, then Anet will see that there are consequences for not putting the appropriate time and effort into the game mode.

It’s just like an OP build: if everyone is running it, people can’t counter it, and it’s on every competitive team on the higher MMR side they will nerf it so that the # of options are freed up.

Whining doesn’t help anybody. It’s a waste of time to read, and a waste of time to do. Either play as competitively as you can, or just find something else to play.

I really enjoy SWTOR’s PvE and leveling, much more so than GW2’s. There is full voice acting, it’s Star Wars, and the game system is fun. I also enjoy Dota 2, even though the games take way too long to complete for my tastes. I’m a student, so I don’t have all the time in the world to play that game with.

When I log into GW2, I play PvP and I play to win. It’s fun to me and all the whining on the forum and in the community will not change that. I want to share that experience with people by giving them some tough love

Master of Timespace.2548:

You wouldn’t intentionally screw your team over in a competitive sport, so why would you do it in a competitive video game?

Because in sports there are good rewards for winning and because I care and respect my team. In gw2 soloq however, there are no rewards for winning and one plays with complete strangers.
Also, it’s common for pro hockey players to jepordise victory simply because the can’t stand an opposing player.

But the goal of PvP is to win, not lose or “play with honor and lose knowing you didn’t cheese” or whatever other crap scrubs think of

If you truly think that way, then you should use all the hacks and cheats avaible. The point of pvp is to win, not to “play with honor and lose knowing you didn’t cheat”, right? Well, DDOSing the voice coms of the opposing team has been a viable strategy since dawn of online gaming.

Your example of hacking people’s communications and using extreme exploits is a silly one because winning by violating an End User Agreement is stupid. They’ll catch you and you’ll get banned pretty much every time, especially if the stakes are high.

All burst got buffed with immob stacking.

Eventually people will see that once they stop whining about stupid crap