Guild Wars 2

Lord Hammer makes a good point. When I’m on druid, I generally take home if my team already has a support class. You should have better 1v1/hold potential than your typical thief, too, so your situation at both home and mid likely would’ve been more favorable (assuming the thief doesn’t kitten the bed at mid too). Also, your mobility with Staff/GS is great.

As for getting feared from boon corrupt, at least in the first mid fight in the first video, IIRC you were facing warrior engi ele, so corrupt would be a non-issue. (Generally CC/GS cleave is ideal, though.)

The win you see is the one that elevated me to Diamond. Ain’t even mad, it’s just amusing at this point.

I only watched a few minutes of the first video (stopped watching after mid fight), but I saw a number of things worth addressing.

Use Protect Me as the gate opens to stack more swiftness. (Had lots of swiftness already, but a little more couldn’t hurt.)

Only reason to bring Wolf is for f2 skill. You didn’t use it once (but had several good openings for it), and you stuck with wolf a LOT. Swap Wolf for Bristleback for way better pet damage, and swap pets often, assuming you’re traited to benefit from that, opening strike, etc.

Utilize your Staff 5 + 3 / water field + blast finisher.

Don’t be afraid to use your skills. Elite and GS 4 went mostly unused, didn’t see you use Staff 4 once, nor (again) wolf’s howl. Use “Lunar Impact” more. AOE daze+heal, very useful and with very short CD.

You had ele support and could’ve spent a lot more time on point attacking melee instead of standing back with Staff hitting 1111111111111. You seem to prefer range, so maybe consider swapping GS for LB.

When you received a bit of burst damage, you used Signet of Renewal, which was a waste on two fronts. You had Avatar available (which I believe you have traited to clear all conditions), and didn’t really need condi clear anyway, since you were taking mostly direct damage. Signet of Stone was all you needed to stop the spike. Personally I don’t really like Renewal Sig in most cases, I’d swap it out.

Later you retreated and waited for heal recharge when you could’ve swapped to Staff, hit 5, blast heal with 3, rejoin the fight faster at range.

At one point you used heal with basically full health. Luckily you didn’t end up needing it before recharge.

Remember leaving Avatar stealths you and nearby teammates. This can be used effectively for stomping, rezzing, retreating, whatever.

On my phone, so I’m sure I’ve missed some things.

R O C.6574:

kin korn karn.9023:

R O C.6574:

So i’m stuck in sapphire and I consider myself a mostly competent player, why exactly do you think I could be getting carried to Legendary? So if what you say is true, I could get an alt account and take my pristine MMR and go straight to Legendary. Sorry, not buying it. I do think if I figured out how to play through CC chains, condi melt, and hard focus, I would then be Legendary.

What I meant was… Say you have two players with similar skill, general competence, who end up on opposite sides of MMR. One of them could shine being matched with skilled players and ride a couple healthy streaks all the way to Legendary. While the other gets stuck with inexperienced players he/she can’t carry for most of the season.

As for alt accounts, if you’ve been reading this forum, you know that there are examples of people experiencing both extremes on separate accounts. But I wouldn’t recommend hopping on your alt acct until you feel comfortable playing in this meta. (No offense, but in your last sentence you clearly stated that you do not.)

I play condi trap druid. Most of the time i do pretty well. But there are just some matches were i get killed. It seems to be teams with good condi pressure and clense for their teams. So just to keep this on point, i don’t blame mmr or matchmaking. I blame my own experience and knowledge of the game.

And very well you should. There are a lot of delusional players who think they’re better than they are. (I’m probably one of them, to a degree.) For the ones on losing streaks they DO deserve, they get angry and refuse to look inward. For the ones who end up with win steaks they DON’T deserve, the poor matchmaking reinforces their delusions.

Anyway, you might feel confident that matchmaking is working fine for you, but don’t assume that everyone is having the same experience. It’s very clearly failing many players. A lot of the evidence is based on a player’s self-assessment, which is typically very skewed, to be sure. But there’s way more to it than that.

Personally I don’t think they’ll find a way to make matchmaking fair for everyone while also pandering to both new and elite PvPers, which seems to be the priority. Everyone between be kitten ed (or perhaps exalted, depending on your luck).

Btw, I’d strongly recommend ditching your trap druid.

I do think profession dailies should be replaced. Perhaps keep one, but open it up to three or four choices.

R O C.6574:

So i’m stuck in sapphire and I consider myself a mostly competent player, why exactly do you think I could be getting carried to Legendary? So if what you say is true, I could get an alt account and take my pristine MMR and go straight to Legendary. Sorry, not buying it. I do think if I figured out how to play through CC chains, condi melt, and hard focus, I would then be Legendary.

What I meant was… Say you have two players with similar skill, general competence, who end up on opposite sides of MMR. One of them could shine being matched with skilled players and ride a couple healthy streaks all the way to Legendary. While the other gets stuck with inexperienced players he/she can’t carry for most of the season.

As for alt accounts, if you’ve been reading this forum, you know that there are examples of people experiencing both extremes on separate accounts. But I wouldn’t recommend hopping on your alt acct until you feel comfortable playing in this meta. (No offense, but in your last sentence you clearly stated that you do not.)

People probably want to believe they earned their 20+ game win streak just as much as people want to believe they didn’t deserve their 20+ losing streak. In both cases, they likely didn’t deserve it. Of course there are a lot of excellent and terrible players, but any system that rewards and punishes them to this extreme is broken. Then you have the decent, mostly competent players caught in the middle getting stuck in Sapphire or carried to Legendary, depending on which end of MMR they find themselves on. It’s absurd.

Of course this is overly simplified, but it seems to be more or less what’s happening.

That’s odd. Seems around 80% of my matches result in blowouts.

Bossun.2046:

Hey, I wanted to make The Ascension this weekend, but there are kittening time-gates in the achievements. No idea why they would add time-gates to a pvp based legendary. Really, That’s all I need.

Cos the actual achievements aren’t really that rough for competent players who don’t end up on the business end of the farcical MMR system. Could be farmed in a week or less under the right conditions.

Terrible idea. Classes aren’t balanced for core, they’re balanced for the full game.

/thread

Jumpin Lumpix.6108:

same was legend last season and I blew through Sapphire this season on a 16 game win streak, then got to ruby tier 2 and now am stuck back and forth between tier 1 and tier 2 ruby. I seem to win 3 games and then lose 3 games, or win 2, lose 2, and when I win they’re blowout games and when I lose they’re blowout games.

I’m literally going from matches where ppl are telling me to l2p and git gud when we lose (usually from enemy team), to Wow your good player on the very next match (from my teammates and enemy team), w/diff team mates.

This system is really stupid

I feel you man, but hey. At least you got to experience the OTHER end of this farcical matchmaking system, even if only for a bit. Some of us aren’t so lucky.

ixon.2496:

Flumek.9043:

a) everyone who was d5/6 last time has already moved out of d3 10x times over. d3 is even last one with safety nets.

Nope, im sitting on tier 3 sapphire and not progressing at all, “Need one pip to move up? It would be a shame if the next match was a complete blowout~” “Oh, you just had a blowout? Here are two more to put you back to the start.” - If matchmaking had a voice

I’m seriously done at this point, its not fun. and it sure as hell isn’t competitively fair.

Edit: Just to add, i made it to sapphire in season 1 due to limited play time, I made it to diamond season 2 with some effort. and now, literally 2 steps forward 3 steps back, i switch classes, i rotate, i play pretty sensibly. But i solo queue and will forever be at the mercy of Matchmaking and MMR deciding if i should be winning or losing the next match i play, a system stacking the odds in one teams favor through matchmaking is a bullkitten thing to do.

This is my experience. I got to Legendary division last season solo queuing, and atm I’m stuck in Sapphire tier 3. Around 100 games so far, I’ve had two 3-game win streaks, other than that, just constant yoyoing.

Solo queuing is terrible. I don’t claim to be elite, but I’m experienced and more than competent. I certainly don’t deserve these teams I’m getting, there’s no carrying them. Just about every match’s result is predetermined. As for teaming up, due to my time zone, my contacts are sleeping when I’m playing, and I’m working when they’re playing.. Excluding weekends of course, but god forbid I wanna leave the house on the weekend.

If I can manage to get out of Sapphire this season and get my fugly wings, here’s yet another experienced pvper checking out.

I have a million stories like this. Start match with tempest and 2 hammer scrapper, not one field to burst pre-match. Thieves who don’t blast field when it’s there. Support ele going straight to treb on Kyhlo. Support ele attempting beast solo on Forest. Warrior going straight to Lord at the start of the match and going back to die nonstop for the remainder. Losing teams that refuse to attempt lord when it’s the only chance at winning. Thieves who join a team fight at the tail end of a wipe instead of going to decap an open point. Every match is a blowout, no fun win or lose. This is season 3.

I didn’t spend any gold. Cost me about 600 laurels to get a full stack of all the t6 mats, but one was seriously lagging behind the others, and I could’ve gotten by with probably 300 laurels (maybe less) if I’d just sold the mats I didn’t need to buy the ones I did.

Yeah, leagues are a mess. As soon as I get my wings, I’m done with ranked, and I’ll just play for fun again. Wish I hadn’t skipped season 1 cos I’d already have the kitten things.

It is a hassle. I don’t even open my chests without Call of the Mists (or SW quest MF bonus), so I keep an entire bank pane reserved for PvP loot; and even then I usually have to transfer chests over to a mule, unless I just repeat the same reward stack over and over to make sure the chests stack.

(Side note: I wouldn’t call them useless drops. Nearly all my ascended chest drops have come from PvP loot, which is why I now save them for when I can open with ~600% MF.)

I do like the idea of rewarding a currency to be used later rather than being spammed with various chests that rarely stack with each other.

If you’ve been spending any time in unranked the past couple days, you should’ve noticed a lot of players are dusting off their old GS power shatter. Still strong as hell. As others mentioned before, I suspect Carrion should be a fairly decent alternative to Merc for those who wish to continue with Chronophantasma or some variant.

I agree, it’s poo as it is. Fortunately, it appears they’re planning on doubling reward chests for a while after the Halloween event to make up for the mistake of replacing the reward chest with ToT bags instead of adding to the usual reward (as was the intention).