Guild Wars 2

Voice comms are very bandwidth intensive. It would cost ANet a bomb and I don’t think it’s fair to expect them to provide something like that in a subs-free game.

Besides, you can use Curse Voice even with randoms: once you install it, you can start your own voice server with literally the click of a button, and the program will give you a URL you can send to other people so they can join you. It’s surprisingly fast and easy! Just paste the URL in team chat and anyone who also has Curse Voice will be able to join your server.

I know not many people have it installed or even know about it, but I guarantee that, if everyone who solo queues a lot pastes a Curse Voice url in team chat before every game, A LOT of people will have downloaded it within a week.

Jekkt.6045:

if you nerf fire blast finishers all you do is nerf eles and warriors. engis will stay the same as they dont rely on fire fields but are equally or even stronger than warriors end eles when played well.

Chaith.8256:

I’m not sure if you realize, but meta Cele engineer builds only run with 10 might stack, from battle sigil and a rune proc. They generally have no fire fields or blast finishers, with exceptions.

I repeat… Cele Engineers don’t generally have blasts, or fire fields. There is no might stacking going on outside of battle sigil, and the one might stack that Hoelbrak/Strength runes proc.

The real problem isn’t a SINGLE engineer or a SINGLE warrior, but what happens when you get multiple warriors, engis, and elementalists on the same point. When that happens, and they all start blasting each other’s fire fields multiple times, they all get to 25 stacks of might very very quickly.

Which is why I’ll repeat: you don’t need to nerf the various +Might duration runes; you don’t need to nerf celestial amulet; you don’t need to nerf the duration or amount of Might stacks fire blasting gives. All you need to do is nerf some of the elementalist and warrior skills that give blast finishers and fire fields:

a. nerf combustive shot by making it a single-target skill rather than a ground targeted aoe (fire field is not left behind if the skill misses or target dodges), increasing its recharge to 15", and decreasing its duration to 3" (adrenaline level will then affect only aoe size and physical damage dealt)
b. reduce the duration of the fire fields left behind by burning speed and burning retreat to 3 and 4" respectively
c. reduce the duration of Lava Font to 3" and increasing the damage per pulse by 25% to compensate
d. increase recharge of Earthshaker to 12".

sinject.4607:

people who romanticize gw1’s pvp are terribly misguided. take your nostalgia goggles off and stop pretending that gw1 didn’t have a ton of issues with it’s pvp as well, just as much if not more than gw2’s.

Like what? FOTM builds? In GW1 they were niche: they only worked against unskilled opponents, and the kinds of gimmicky builds you saw were often hilarious. I’d rather have build variety and get rolled by an occasional crazy Ray of Judgement spike team with 7 monks, than always come up against the same engi/warrior/ele-heavy teams. In GW2 niche builds have become the norm, and build variety is nonexistent.

I agree with Sunshine, celestial’s damage is pretty meh without might stacks. I would personally nerf the duration of engi, ele, and (especially) warrior fire fields, and the recharge of their blast finishers, rather than nerf fire blasting itself.

Too many smilies: I can’t tell if OP is being sarcastic or not!

leman.7682:

Let me repeat myself once again so maybe another batch of pve heroes learns the truth – necro design is non-universal making necro either fare amazingly or fail miserably depending on number of factors that are by and large out of the necro’s control. This is why some people think necro sucks and others think it’s OP. No one’s right, most of you are painfully short-sighted.

Yes, this is true. The thing is though, although those factors are out of the necro’s control, they’re not random: good opponents will know when a necro is a sitting duck and it’s safe to engage them, and when they’ve got the ability to ruin them and it’s better to run from them. That’s why few top-tier teams run necro: they’re very situational, and their efficacy doesn’t always depend on the player’s skill. (Well it always depends on the player’s skill, but it’s subject to a large extent on factors the player can’t control.)

I don’t want Necro to get more damage, or better escapes, or more protection, or more life force generation. All I want is for Death Shroud to be reworked into something that is available on a more consistent basis, whose efficacy depends on how well I judge the timing of using it, rather than random stuff like how many ranger spirits happened to die within range of my life force generation. I want a baseline effectiveness based on cooldowns like most other professions have (or, if it’s gonna be a build up thing, make it more like warrior’s which is fast to generate and fast to burn down). If we’re not consistently effective in different situations, you can’t establish a baseline so you can figure out if we need a buff or a nerf.

Evan Lesh.3295:

Team ratings are absolutely more accurate than individual ratings. Seems like the best implementation of your suggestion would be actual teams with ratings.

Which is yet another reason why you should introduced team-based ratings and leaderboards, associated with a guild tag. In the current system, a team’s rating can be artificially skewed by what the individual players get up to when they’re not playing in the team. Imagine that a team of 5 people play together, and do well and have a high win ratio. Four of those people only play solo queue when they’re not able to get a full team together, but the fifth plays in team queue even when his teammates are not online, joining solo. As a result of the fact that he plays with a lot of randoms, the fifth player’s win ratio and position in the team queue leaderboards are much lower than his teammates, even though he’s the same skill level as them, skewing the team’s average MMR and causing them to be matched with opponents of lower skill.

If there were team-based MMRs and leaderboards, these problems would be less exacerbated.

Josh Davis.6015:

A lot of what you described above is already done for the finals that happen next weekend.

That’s great news, and long overdue! Good job, Grouch!

Hopefully as the number of good teams grows we’ll start seeing fewer one-sided matches in the qualifiers as well,so you’ll be able to advertise those as well.

I’ve also received that email, I was pretty sure it was a phishing attempt but glad to see it confirmed.

Bhawb.7408:

The reason they changed it was because it made no sense that you’d have different CDs depending on how it was used. And no, removing the CD is absolutely awful. It allows you to only be barred from DS according to how quickly you can build LF, meaning if you can build enough LF you can be in DS effectively 100% of the time.

But to achieve 100% DS uptime you need to play skillfully, build especially for it through traits and utilities, and carefully manage your cooldowns. It was not easy, not commonly seen, and, even amongst the people who built for it and know how to do it, not always possible to pull off. By removing that option they’re just hurting skilled play and build diversity (cause you need both to have built for it and to be good at managing your cooldowns to pull it off!), not nerfing something that was widely exploited and hideously OP! I mean, the kind of builds that used that aren’t even all that powerful, it was mostly zerker builds who sacrificed damage through wells for more life force through spectrals. Even after the SA buff those are pretty niche, so why hit them with the nerfbat? It just feels vindictive for no reason sometimes man!

The backend of the two games isn’t that different, apart from the addition of a Z-axis and a more advanced graphics engine. But if it’s possible to spectate in realtime, then it should be possible to spectate with a delay.

Ynna.8769:

Well, I can’t speak for everyone, but my time exclusively doing hotjoin gave me a lot of skills that transferred when starting tPvP. (Anecdotal evidence, I know.)

And I stand by what I said: The maps we have are unsuited for 8v8. Points like the Graveyard are alright in size, but the smaller points became a cluster of particle effects that makes it near impossible to play at melee range. It heavily favors ranged builds.

I’d love to see 8v8 and I’m okay with it being an option. But with the current selections of maps I probably won’t play it often.

No, you’re not alone, hotjoin might not teach you much about conquest and map mechanics but it does let you practice your build just enough to get the basics.

And I agree that our current maps aren’t suited for 16 players, but I would rather see 8v8 imperfectly implemented (the way it was for over a year before it was axed, which still had more people playing and enjoying it than the 5v5 hotjoin servers did), than not have it at all.

That’s a tantalizing little morsel you dropped on us Justin… Could we have a few more hints? When can we expect a proper preview of the patch?

I agree with the OP: sure they were mindless zergfests, but so what? There are plenty of reasons to bring them back:
1. harder to unbalance and manipulate through team swapping than 5v5
2. mindless zergfest can be fun in its own right
3. can in some circumstances be easier for beginners to get into, as they’re less likely to get focussed and die straightaway.

It may turn out to be a pretty major nerf for some builds, like the new berserker necro with lots of spectral skills that people have been running. Usually powermancers I meet in pvp melt instantly, but I’ve seen a couple of surprisingly durable ones lately and I was impressed. I don’t think they were that OP though, to warrant a nerf 2 weeks after they first appeared!

Besides, the point is they did it because a buff that nobody had asked for (Spectral Armour recharge) turned out to be better than they anticipated, so instead they nerf something that affects everyone, whether they use Spectral Armour/Last Gasp or not! It’s a terrible approach to balancing! It’s like the nerfs to our bleed stacks after Dhuumfire was introduced all over again! Undeserved nerfs to counterbalance unneeded and unasked for buffs, hurting build variety and lowering the skill ceiling of the class!

Some very good points by Brujeria.7536. Not gonna quote the post cause I basically agree with the whole of it, but I’d like to emphasize how much I HATE the inconsistencies in this game about how similar skills work in entirely different ways! It’s not just the transform skills, like Brujeria.7536 mentions. It’s how some skills with no cast time can be cast during other skills, while others (eg ele’s Magnetic Leap, or Corrupt Boon before the tooltip fix) can’t, how some skills require facing while other’s don’t, and neither fact is documented, how different skills have different aftercasts (also undocumented), it’s all very messy and sloppily designed. I get that some of these differences are for balance reasons, but I ask: wouldn’t it be better to change the core functionality of the skill if it’s overpowered or underpowered, rather than fiddle with its undocumented features?

Bhawb.7408:

Its not a nerf, and who actually routinely sat in DS so long that it fully ran out of LF and then had enough LF in the next few seconds that it would make a difference? It was a bug fix to something that was obviously a bug. Death Shroud was always supposed to have a 10s CD between uses, this was simply a special case because it has some coding from transforms that gave it this functionality.

Is it a small nerf? Sure. But stop acting like ANet has it out for you personally. It was not an intended function, so it was removed.

Sorry Bhawb, you’re wrong. If it was a bug, then, like Brujeria said, the fact that the cooldown doesn’t begin when we ENTER DS should also be a bug. The timing makes it obvious: they overbuffed Spectral Armour (even though it was already good and nobody asked them to buff it), and now they’re messing around with random things to compensate. It’s a kittening mess.

I think it might be interesting to hear what other classes have to say about necros. Get people who main guardians or elementalists or whatever for highly-ranked teams to come on and talk about necromancers, how they react to seeing one on the enemy team, what they find OP about the class, what they think its weaknesses are, etc. The hosts of the other SOAC podcasts will probably be able to help you get in touch with people.

The timing (mere weeks after the Spectral Armour and Last Gasp buffs, which let zerker necros run around with higher Protection uptime and lots of life force) makes me pretty certain that this WAS a nerf, not a bug fix. Patch notes certainly don’t imply that this was a bug fix.

Regardless, whether or not it was a bug, it was totally uncalled for. Not having the recharge when running out of life force allowed us to manage our cooldowns more effectively (eg. activating DS to soak up incoming damage, then when it ran out using Spectral Armour or Locust Swarm to build it back up and going back into DS again, rather than potentially wasting life force by activating SA before going into DS), use DS as a clutch mechanism to avoid big bursts, and preventing us from being locked out of DS skills for more time than necessary.

It needed thought and good timing to use the lack of cooldown to good effect without dying, and didn’t really give you that much of an advantage. This nerf was totally uncalled for.

Well I intended my post as a joke, but after seeing this I’m starting to think they really do love us enough to kill us:

Death Shroud
Leaving Death Shroud by running out of life force now engages the same cooldown as manually ending Death Shroud by using the End Death Shroud skill.

It turns out their approach to necromancer balancing is perfectly thematically consistent with the class: http://oglaf.com/chirpnmutter/

Just a joke, thought that strip would find an audience here.

Note: link is SFW, but if you start clicking next/previous you might come across some very NSFW comics indeed!

What builds was everyone using?

Sorry I couldn’t join tonight, if you do it again Wednesday I’ll definitely be online!

ArrDee.2573:

Hello frands! Vee Wee here, #1 Engi NA and world first rank 80!

They probably don’t do it because then people will see the disconnects and the lack of pause feature and realize this game isn’t esports at all!

Wahoo! Bye frands!

Err… since the topic is about notifying people IN-GAME about tournaments being streamed live, you have to assume they’re already playing and therefore have noticed the disconnects and lack of pause feature. And yet they’re still playing, so maybe they still enjoy the game anyway and would like to watch some matches! :p

For months, PvPers got to see in big yellow text on their screens “SCARLET’S MINIONS ARE ATTACKING X”. Why isn’t that an option? Why isn’t “The Tournament of Glory has begun, watch at: http:/twitch.tv/guildwars2” Why doesn’t it say “Team X has defeated Team Y and moved on” (similar to GW1).

Yeah, something as simple as that!

And it wasn’t just during the big world tournaments in GW1, it was EVERY 15’, whenever someone won a game in HoH:

jebro.6370:

One thing that is important as we move on into the area of cash tournies and being more visible is respect.

That is to respect opinions of our players and the communities within spvp.

Personally I am not about to stream/cast on a game where I do not have permission from the players to stream it. It isn’t a rule, its a courtesy and isn’t just there to provide the stream but to give us insight for future official streams and tournies.

That’s not an issue Blu: if ANet were to build such a technology in-game, they would surely update the EULA to note that, if you’re high-ranked and on the leaderboard, by joining a match you’re consenting to being broadcast, whether on Twitch or in-game. You guys might need to ask, but Anet don’t, cause it’s their game

As to teams being worried about their strats and builds: there was the exact same argument back in 06 when GW1 observer mode launched, but it came to nothing. Being able to see a team’s tactics and builds doesn’t mean you can execute them as well. (And this was even though GW1 required less mechanical skill than GW2 does!) It did, of course, demonstrate the viability of different sorts of builds than the ones people were using generally. There were a lot fewer spike builds after observer mode launched, though you still had some around. But the top teams weren’t overtaken by upstarts copying their builds.

Regarding how an in-game observer mode would affect the ASP: all games ranked high enough to go on observer mode would only be broadcast in-game with a delay, so shoutcasters would still get a period of exclusivity for ladder games you stream live. And since big tournaments are held in custom arenas rather than on the ladder, shoutcasters would have complete exclusivity for those. And even if those games were viewable from an in-game mode as well, ANet could give ASPs a period of exclusivity before make them accessible for viewing in-game, or they could even do what DOTA2 does, and allow viewers to listen to the audio from the relevant Twitch or Youtube stream overlaid on the match! That way you guys get hits to your channel even if players choose to watch a match in-game rather than on Twitch.

jebro.6370:

2, Teams may want to keep builds, rotations & tactics secret from other players for tournies. We are now involved in tournies with 50k up for grabs, not sure Id want my opponents watching us daily knowing everything about our comp.

3, Teams may consist of a super pug or some well known players that don’t feel the team represents them truly in a stream. They could just be having fun and want to chill without that extra pressure.

Point 2 I answered above. As for point 3: this is why we need a TEAM-based leaderboard rather than an individual one! We’re already allowed to be in multiple guilds, so if your rank was associated with your guild rather than your character, you could just swap to a different, lower-ranked guild tag to play around in a relaxed, non-competitive atmosphere. Remember “smurf guilds”?

If you could spectate the games and see everything, would you also watch the twitch stream?

All due respect Jebro, but if people had the option and didn’t choose Twitch, maybe the shoutcaster isn’t adding enough to the experience to make up for the inconvenience of watching it on Twitch! It’s up to you guys to up your game rather than to ask the devs not to add features that will encourage MORE players to watch pvp! That’s called protectionism and any economist will tell you that it’s not a good way to run things.

Archaon.9524:

Actually in gw1 matches are aviable to spectate after they ended….so also teams who were in can analize what they did and what went wrong..and all of this YEARS ago without twitch and stuff…

But ofc devs there had brains…not just caring bout pve heroes and gems..

Yeah, it really is INCREDIBLE what ANet managed to do back then! Especially when yolu remember that, in 2005 when GW1 launched, Youtube was JUST getting started, the resolution and streaming quality was so low that watching games footage made your eyes bleed, and live streaming was not available AT ALL! Not that anyone would’ve had the bandwidth to watch live streams even if they existed: even on a relatively fast cable connection, I normally had to let most youtube videos buffer for a while before I could watch. :p

And yet GW1 managed to launch not just an esports scene, with a pretty high prize pool by 2006 standards, but basically its own 24/7 tv channel as well! Think about it: back then all you had was Starcraft (big in Korea, not so much elsewhere, and broadcast on tv so no technical limitaitons of the same sort), and a couple of big FPSs (Painkiller, Quake 3, Counterstrike – most of them not broadcast at all, though people could record their games and post the replay file up on a forum for people to download).

It was a hugely ballsy move on ANet’s part. I don’t know if the people responsible for observer mode are still in the company, but props to them whoever they were!

Love the idea, please give us this ANet! An in-game observer mode for tournament games by the top-ranked teams would educate players and bind the community closer together! Observer mode in GW1 was an awesome tool: you learned about new builds and tactics, you made new friends in chat, and you got to see some awesome matchups from the absolute best players in the game!

Not saying that commentated matches via Twitch aren’t also good, but, well, first of all they’re only on a couple times a week, secondly you don’t get to observe the players you want, only the players the shoutcaster follows (and with GW2 being a very fast-paced game, and conquest being a game mode which forces teams to split, you’re hardly ever going to see the point of view you’re most interested in), and thirdly, with only a small number of teams competing at a high level (and rolling the competition) you’re always seeing the same people at finals and semifinals, popularising the builds favoured by a handful of players due to people copycatting the successful players, and skewing the meta artificially. So a broader observer mode pool would be good for the game as well as the playerbase.

ghaleon.2861:

I know that, but that’s not the point. Ele is forced to play d/d, because s/d or s/f has no sustain and a thief will eat the ele alive if he plays anything else than d/d or staff bunker.

The reason ele scepter has no sustain is because they run it with berserker amulet, to take advantage of fresh air/lightning strike procs for maximum burst. Nothing inherently glassier about scepter as a weapon!

Yeah, 3 was too easy, which I think is why they removed it (same with dailies – it was too fast to do it in pvp)

You have some really cool jumps there, good job!

Feel free to add me as well on the EU side, sounds like fun! (That would make 10 of us on EU, would be funny if we made 2 teams and got matched against each other)

style.6173:

2. 50 player kills

That would work.

Alternatively, “10 tournament wins”? (Team or solo queue)

Yeah, I just don’t know what it is! Maybe there’s something… something that’s not in team queue… something people in solo queue have to put up with but don’t want…

Nope, can’t think of anything.

Trevor Boyer.6524:

Celestial isn’t OP unless fire blasting is being abused
One has to ask themselves: Is it Celestial that is OP or is it fire field might stacking?

Celestial has sub-par damage without might stacks, so yes, I agree with you. However, is it the measly 3 stacks of might you get from a single blast that’s OP? Or is it the fact that, between them, a hambow warrior, ele, and engi have enough fire fields and blast finishers to get everyone of their teammates up to 25 stacks in seconds?

I think it’s the latter. So, while maybe might stacking has some problems. Maybe blast finishers are hideously overpowered (literally the only element of the combo system that people try to build for, what with the massive heal from water fields, the zerg-wide might in wvw, and the stealth from smoke fields), and ANet should do what they did with projectile finishers and turn some of them into “small” finishers (ie. only having 20% chance to proc, or maybe proccing at a reduced effect, like only a third the healing or only 1 might stack). Perhaps we even need a complete overhaul of the combo system in some way. I’m a fan of the idea of reducing the number of different kinds of fields and finishers, increasing the efficacy of the sub-par interactions, and make fields expire after 1 finisher.

However, those are long-term projects. In the meantime, ANet could do A LOT to slightly bring down the power of celestial comps by simply:
a. nerfing combustive shot by either making it a single-target skill rather than a ground targeted aoe (fire field is not left behind if the skill misses or target dodges), or by increasing its recharge to 15" and decreasing its duration to 3", making only its aoe size scale with adrenaline level)
b. reducing the duration of the fire fields left behind by burning speed and burning retreat to 3 and 4" respectively
c. reducing the duration of Lava Font to 3" and increasing the damage per pulse by 25% to compensate
d. removing the blast finisher from detonate flame blast (it’s just too low a cooldown to be on a weapon kit that also gives you a 10" fire field)
e. reduce durations of THrow Napalm and Fire Bomb to 2", and increase the damage per pulse (and the burning duration per pulse) by 33% to compensate
h. increase recharge of Earthshaker to 12".

I really hope someone sees these suggestions, as, on their own, they don’t seriously impact the effectiveness of each profession. They do, however, impact their ability to exploit each other’s fire fields to quickly build up to 25 might stacks and thereby steamroll the competition, which, as myself and others have often argued, is the real problem with the current meta celestial builds, not the celestial amulet itself, or the professions that use it.

I also find that people are nicer in team queue. Maybe the OP just got unlucky.

Agreed, stuff like siphons and Transfusion should heal you in DS. I’m fine with us not receiving outgoing healing from teammates while in DS, but at least give us something better than US to heal ourselves with.

I’#d just be happy if they made all those useless ascended mats that drop from them tradeable, so I could sell them to someone who actually gives a kitten about crafting.

TBH I have so many that at this point I’d pay someone to take them out of my inventory.

I also agree. It can be a message flashing across the screen, a message in the chat window, or even an in-game mail with the stream link, but definitely do SOMETHING to remind people to watch – a lot more would if they knew it was on: only a TINY proportion of players read the forums and follow the social media feeds!

Championship matches being viewable from inside the game was a huge factor in bringing the community togehter in GW1. I know we have to put up with Twitch instead now, but at least guide people to it from inside the game!

Long-standing bug, I also get knocked out of the queue a lot. I think it’s because when someone on your team quits, the game can’t assign another one and knocks the whole team out of the queue. The matchmaking system is absolutely awful.

I wasn’t aware of this change, if so it’s a TERRIBLE decision! The entire basic premise of Guild Wars, ever since 2005, has been “pvp with no grind!” I can’t believe they would break a promise that was so foundational to the franchise and their entire company!

Furthermore, it fails to take into account experienced players who simply create a new character that they only want to pvp with. What if someone needs to play a different profession than their main in pvp, but has no interest in levelling it, or who creates a duplicate of a profession they already have because he wants to conform to a naming or dress theme of his pvp team’s?

And what’s worse is, they do this, yet after 2 years of the entire community begging them to, they still haven’t put a rank requirement in tournaments so complete beginners don’t accidentally join Team Arena without knowing what it is.

DiogoSilva.7089:

Quite the contrary, this game is so needlessly complicated, that it dumbs down itself. By simplifying and clearing the excess of details, there’ll be a lot more room for learning, for skillful playing and for spectators to even understand what is happening around.

This concept might be hard to grasp, but let’s say that more complexity does not always leads to more depth. UI infodumping, condition spamming, pet zoo, passive proc spamming, aoe spamming and the like make the whole combat more “complicated” due to how messy it becomes, but that does not translates exactly to adding more depth to it – it actually dumbs down the enjoyment and the depth behind it, tremendously.

I agree with you but I don’t think you expressed it in a way people can understand, so I’m just gonna use some examples to illustrate your point:
1. When every single removal skill (whether for condis or boons) has its own, unpublished priority list, so you can never be sure if you’re about to cleanse those 20 bleeds or that useless blind, that’s needless complexity.
2. When high-powered offensive skills have 0.25" cast time and no distinctive casting animation, so you’re better off knowing the standard rotations of every enemy build so you can guess when the opponent is going to use them and dodge rather than see them coming and dodge reactively, that’s needless complexity.
3. When you can’t see what your opponent is doing because they’re surrounded by blinding spell effects and a zoo of spirits the size of a gigantic shrub, so you don’t know what’s happenning next, that’s needless complexity.
4. When half of all elementalist skills have an attunement-dependent effect based on what attunement you were when you STARTED casting them, and half based on what attunement you were in when you finished casting them, that’s needless complexity.

I could go on all night. Basically, needless complexity is anything which you can’t react to on the fly, any skill you have to learn which can’t be transferred to playing a different profession, anything that requires you to learn to do something that relates specifically to narrow and arbitrary mechanics specific to either a particular build or a particular gamemode rather than to mmorpg combat in general.

Nobody’s saying there weren’t good guilds with skilled players who used IWAY: clearly there were. The reason people despised IWAY was because it could be played effectively even by unskilled pugs with no co-ordination whatsoever, and they could beat better teams on voice comms with it. Not MUCH better teams obviously, there’s only so far your build can carry you, but the point is that IWAY was very, ahem, “forgiving” ;p

I don’t have a problem with IWAY itself, in fact niche, original builds like that were what I loved most about GW1. But let’s not pretend that you needed a physics degree to play it, that’s all I’m saying!

Yeah, sacrifice the point, call for help, and run. And remember they can still get knocked down by golem, if you’re using that rather than plague.

That’s not really the way it works though because not all classes make equal use of all the stats. Very few professions have decent physical damage scaling AND conditions on the same weapon (warrior’s longbow and sword, most elementalist weapons, some of the engi kits, and that’s it), and few can make as good and constant use of the extra healing power as elementalist and warrior (case in point: necromancer, who can’t get healed at all in death shroud). Scaling in this game might be linear, but it’s not the same for most skills.

Here’s an alternative suggestion: you get a chest each time you rank up, right? Well, put a 2-week bank access golem. Even at rank 80 you can easily rank up once every 2 weeks if that’s your main playmode.

It’s not ideal though, since you’ll only get the 1 and your characters will have to share it, I know.

I agree that might stacking is the problem. Get any 2 of engi, warrior, or ele on the same point and they can blast each other’s fire fields and get to 25 might stacks in seconds. Get 3 and they’ll do it instantly. That#s 875 power AND 875 condition damage extra they’re getting, it basically TRIPLES the values the celestial amulet gives them!

1. Does the lag only happen while you’re in a PvP map? Does it also occur in the PvP lobby? Other maps? Have experienced lag and disconnects in pvp maps. Have experienced frequent lagspikes (game appears to freeze for seconds, as if I’m about to disconnect, but recovers) but no disconnects in wvw. Have experienced skill activation lag, and very few lagspikes in pve maps in Dry Top.
2. How long does the lag spike last? Does it ever clear up? I’ve had disconnects where I couldn’t even log back into the match (the game would disconnect me again while loading up the pvp map after I had logged back in). Lagspikes, where the game appears to freeze, last normally between 4-10 seconds. Skill activation lag can last 2-3" after I have attempted to activate a skill
3. Of your last 5 GW2 play sessions, in how many of them did you experience lag? I experienced 3 instances of skill activation lag in pvp yesterday, while a guildmate I was playing with experienced skill activation lag and several lagspikes (his character appeared to be running into a wall for several seconds from my perspective) in both pvp and wvw. I haven’t played over the weekend, but I experienced several long lagspikes last week. The last disconnect I experienced was middle of last week.
4. Are there specific times of day when do or you don’t experience lag? Has happened both at peak and off-peak hours
5. When do you remember first experiencing lag of this severity in GW2? PvP has been much laggier after the April feature patch, with more frequent instances of skill activation lag and slightly more frequent lagspikes, but the frequent disconnects have only started happening since the recent DDOS attacks on your servers
6. Do you also experience lag playing other games? NCsoft games like Wildstar? Not currently playing other NCsoft games, no lag in other games like Quake Live
7. Do you live in NA or EU? EU
8. Are you playing on NA or EU servers? EU
9. Was your account ORIGINALLY created on NA or EU? EU

Thanks. I’ll traceroute next time I get one.

Is this what we’ve come to? IWAY being extolled as a complex build requiring sophisticated play?

http://www.desktopwallpaper2.com/desktop-wallpaper-home/I-don----t-want-to-live-on-this-planet-anymore-desktop-wallpaper-hd-wallpaper-1920x1080-6-53fb6d58bbfad-4630.jpg

I emphatically disagree about the majority of conditions being applied through autoattacks. A berserker thief’s autoattack can crit a clothie for 2k , more if you get a fire/air proc, and does so instantly, and with various secondary effects depending on the weapon. By comparison, a scepter necro’s autoattack will apply 1 stack of bleeding, which, EVEN IF ALLOWED TO RUN ITS FULL DURATION, will barely do 500 damage! Even if you crit and get a 2nd bleed proc from barbed precision that’ll add less than 200 more damage, and the physical damage of the attack itself is frankly pitiful (in rabid gear you might get a 300 crit).

So, honestly, that part of the OP’s argument doesn’t hold water: sure, the damaging conditions add up, but any condi player who does nothing but use their autoattack can be taken down by a direct damage class before they’ve even gotten you to half health. Yes, even if you’re a thief and they have a full death shroud. Rather, the truth is that even condition classes rely on burst damage – which the OP himselkittennowledges through the thread title! As someone who mains a necro I rely on Terror damage, opportunistic use of Corrupt Boon, or, in extremis, Signet of Spite to actually down people – my weapon skill cooldowns won’t cut it. Now, I agree that Reaper’s Mark (and the other marks) needs better telegraphing. Corrupt Boon too, even though it’s had its cast time increased, also needs better telegraphing. A guy waving their arm across their chest is NOT sufficient telegraphing, especially if you have to spot it at 1200 range across a capture point with a billion glowing spell effects on it. Signet of Spite would also be better if the decal appearing over the necros head did so at the start of the cast time rather htan just before the end. But my point is, while they could be better signalled, delivery of these skills can be blocked, dodged, evaded, or blinded, and THOSE are the things that kill you, not autoattacks.

Moreover, I also disagree that condition builds are something you specifically have to build against, whereas power builds aren’t. Not only for the reason discussed above (that condition burst skills can be mitigated against by anything that mitigates physical burst – with the exception of Protection), but also because, more and more, physical burst professions rely on crowd control effects to help them deliver their burst. Among these, the so-called “soft” CCs are ALL conditions, whether they’re snares like cripple and chill or Weakness to reduce their target’s dodging capacity. And while the hard CCs include conditions (immobilise and fear) as well as non-condition effects like knockdowns and stuns, you’ll find that most “break stun” skills in the game also remove conditions or can be traited to do so. My point being, if you genuinely make a point of going into a fight without any condition cleanses, you’ll be just as vulnerable to physical damage dealers as to condition builds!

That said, I completely agree about passive procs (Sun Spirit, Reaper’s Protection, Incendiary Powder, pre-April Dhuumfire etc). They’re just lazy and bad design. You can’t dodge every autoattack, so if the majority of someone’s damage comes through passive procs it basically devalues the dodge. That in turn forces devs to give other classes ridiculously long-duration invulnerabilities (Berserker Stance, Elixir S etc), many of them proccing automatically (I’m looking at you, pre-April Automated Response…) to allow people to deal with the passive procs! Eventually it just ends up in an arms-race of who has the biggest and baddest passively-proccing trait and can play with his hands off the keyboard the longest! ALL passively-proccing traits need a redesign. I was the first to cheer when Dhuumfire died, and I hope Karl realises he’s balanced himself into a corner here and just takes a sledgehammer to all similar ones. TBH I don’t think Reaper’s Protection is even the worst of the lot these days, because at least that one has counterplay: just proc stability before CC’ing a necro. (I know that suggestion isn’t much use to the OP since he mains a thief, but I’ve had so many warriors get caught out by this when they could’ve activated Berserker Stance or Balanced stance before jumping me with their hammers it’s not even funny!)

Honestly, balancing around a single, very niche game mode with very arbitrary mechanics is ridiculous. It reminds me of when Mythic were scratching their heads about how to make classes that had half a bar of Taunt skills useful in pvp. If we had 3-4 different game modes ( or maps with substantially different mechanics) then the ability of two classes to sit on a point and decap it no matter how many people are wailing on them wouldn’t be such an unbalancing problem.

BlackBeard.2873:

Learn to actively react to their passives, man, that is the problem…Kappa

Your sarcasm is unintentionally accurate though: if it’s a reasonable assumption that the necro has reaper’s protection and Nightmare runes, pop your stability before you open on him. Yes I know that not all professions have easy access to stability (although the only one that has less access to stability than a necro is thief), but in a 2v2 you can build so 1 team member provides stability for both (and 2v2s were basically what the OP was complaining about – we all know that necros are dead as soon as they’re focussed on in bigger fights). Both the runes and the trait have massive cooldowns, as do both the escapes the OP was complaining about, so all you really need to do is use your brains and not blow all your massive offensive skills until you know the necro’s defences are on cooldown. You can’t just use the same 3-skill rotation to burst down EVERY class, you need to adapt to your opposition!