Guild Wars 2

Cogbyrn.7283:

If something is strong in the hands of a great player, then it’s strong. Period. That doesn’t mean it shouldn’t be tweaked, especially in an MMO’s case, but I don’t think it’s healthy to refuse to acknowledge that the potential is there.

Debatable… GW2 has an incredibly high skill threshold for an MMO, and being an MMO it has a high knowledge threshold too. It needs almost as much twitchiness as old school FPS games, except instead of 10 weapons and 5 powerups you have hundreds of different skills and casting animations. Sure, some of that knowledge carries over, but not all of it – and most of the muscle memory for executing new skill rotations and combos DEFINITELY doesn’t! So even an easy to play build like hambow warrior would be a pain to learn from scratch, obviously not to play at an “OK” level, because, let’s face it, you could roll your face across the keyboard and do ok with a hambow, but certainly to play at a top-100 level!

So yeah, if you’re a hammer-of-the-gobsmacking-gods-awesome-level necro, it’s not in your interest to give it up to become a merely “good” warrior. And if you’re talking about switching to a class that actually takes SKILL like elementalist, it would take you ages to get up to a similar level of play. But that doesn’t mean that, at the same level of competency, necro=hambow=mesmer=elementalist! And for sure it doesn’t mean that Helseth is AS POWERFUL as a mesmer as he was before the patch – it just means that his team couldn’t (or didn’t want to) find another player who’s as good at (insert meta build X) as Helseth is at mesmer.

Bhawb.7408:

If a build can be used by properly skilled players at a high level, it simply means that the build in question has some mechanic that isn’t being fully leveraged by other players, or a weakness that isn’t being covered for.

You’re right, and the mechanic in question is boon removal – we’ve become the go-to counter for boon-spam meta which the sigil and rune revamp (particularly Runes of Strength) have given rise to. But, as others have mentioned, mesmer can do it almost as well (arguably better if you just care about removing the boons rather than corrupting them). Additionally, the boon removal is only useful in team fights, because necros usually need a teammate to secure the kill. (Not saying we can’t 1v1 people anymore, but with all our damage nerfs it takes quite a bit longer to do now, and in the meantime you’re losing points from them holding the point!)

I admit the last one is more a problem of the game mode than of the profession balance in an abstract sense. In WvW it doesn’t matter as much how long you take to kill someone assuming you get the job done, so the damage nerfs are a bit less of a problem. Although as other people mentioned it also means that people’s cooldowns will come back up and they’ll be able to heal themselves back to 100%, which is a problem.

Mark Katzbach.9084:

manveruppd.7601:

I gotta wonder though… they had a RU on Friday, why not announce this???

Last Friday was Points of Interest, which is the Living World-focused livestream. Ready Up is this coming Friday.

Well, I’m looking forward to it then, hope there’ll be more info. In particular who’s getting invited, what will the format for the exhibition matches be, will normal Gamescon attendees be able to watch them on a nice big screen, etc.

Just thinking in public here: I wonder how it would change the game if kills in Conquest awarded 25 points instead of 5. Good? Bad? Is this an option you can set in custom arenas so we could try it out? Everything else the same, just increased points gain from kills.

My hunch is it would severely weaken both bunker and decapper builds. People would build for something that can actually kill the other guy, rather than something that can push you off the point quickly to decap, otherwise you risk giving up more points by dying than what they’d lose by your decapping. Nor would there be as much pressure for the bunker to sit on the point no matter what and eat all the aoe. It would be ok to give up the decap assuming you can kill the decapper quickly, as you’d make up any points you lost. Unless enough teams try it though we can’t know for sure how it would really work, whether it would be more fun or if it would just devolve into a gankfest because kills are more important than holding points.

I heard the finisher is going to be a kitten. (Yes I actually typed and meant kitten.)

I gotta wonder though… they had a RU on Friday, why not announce this???

OH KITTEN THAT’S AWESOME! I’ve always regretted not flying over to Leipzig when they had the GW1 Factions Championship there. Will try really hard to go to this one!

A lot of us have been asking for GvG since release, and it’s good to see high-ranked players like Cyn joining in with our request because it increases the chance that ANet will listen! It was a brilliant game mode: balanced, symmetrical, with multiple routes to victory to suit different kinds of team comps, just short enough to not be draining but just long enough to feel epic. And it had enough flexibility to allow brilliant plays to pull victory out of the jaws of defeat. I still maintain to this day that LUM vs WM game 2 (Burning Isle), from the first championship, was the most exciting half hour of competition I’ve ever watched.

However, I want to discuss one aspect of GW1 GvG which I don’t know how to implement in GW2: the flag stand.

(Note: experienced GW1 GvGers can skip the italicised part)
For those who didn’t play the original, holding the flag stand for 2 minutes got you a morale boost. This did 2 things: it recharged your res signet, and it removed 10% death penalty. Death Penalty was a big deal in GvG: if you got to -60%, you didn’t respawn automatically, you could only be brought back with a res signet – and res signets could only be used once, and didn’t recharge unless you got a morale boost! So if you forced the enemy to use up all their res signets then you could wipe them, cause they wouldn’t be able to bring their dead back up right away and they’d be fighting outnumbered, and then you can start getting them down to -60% so they don’t respawn at all and they’ll be outnumbered. And if you’ve taken deaths and are behind, you just need to steal a morale boost and you can turn the game around! I’ve seen a lot of GvGs turn around cause the lone survivor from your team managed to sneak a flag out, causing everyone to respawn simultaneously and wiping the enemy team while they were fighting the NPCs in your base.

This makes the flag stand a very big deal, and forces teams to fight there. That’s a genius bit of game design, because remember: the game is actually won and lost not in the middle, but in each other’s bases!, but the power of the morale boost FORCES both teams to contest the middle instead! Without it, the game would become a race to gank each other’s lord the fastest.

This wouldn’t work if directly translated in GW2: we don’t need a skill to bring back dead teammates: anyone can revive, not just from downed but from completely defeated. So you don’t need the morale boost. Sure, you can make it give powerful combat buffs instead, like Cyn’s idea of having it recharge all your skills. But a combat buff isn’t gonna turn a game around for the team that suffered the first wipe. What if, for instance, the team still hasn’t respawned when the morale boost comes around? The buff you get gets wasted then!

I don’t pretend to know the best way to implement morale boosts either, but I think they should be linked to the respawning mechanism, like they were in GW1. I don’t think the specifics should be the same as in GW1 of course (2’ respawn counter is MASSIVE for instance, and the morale boost doesn’t need to come from a flag stand – it could be a buff you commune with like in Temple, or a Conquest-style point you need to cap), but we should come up with something analogous that takes account of GW2’s faster-paced gameplay, greater self-sufficiency of each team member, and overall higher damage.

One idea could be to tweak the way Downed Penalty works, and to link it to respawn timer. Have Downed Penalty not expire after 60" like it normally does, but accumulate until you remove it, and make you respawn from defeated slower for each point of Downed Penalty (maybe 30" for 2, 60" for 3, and not respawning automatically for 3?). Each morale boost would remove 1 point, or give a buff to people with no DP. Possibly also allow killing enemy players to remove a point, though in that case you’d need to put a time limit on how credit is assigned, cause currently if you tag an enemy they’re tagged practically forever.

I really don’t know, this is just one idea that ensures we get back the fundamentals, and actually implementing it and balancing it just right won’t be trivial. The tl;dr is: YES to GvG, but with a morale boost system that is game-changing enough to force the teams to contest the centre, as in the original, or it won’t work.

OK it just occurred to me that this isn’t an issue exclusive to pvp so I made a mistake posting it here. Could a mod please move it to Suggestions or wherever else it would be more appropriate? Sorry!

As someone with red-green colourblindness I find it really hard to tell the icons for stages 3 and 4 of Downed Penalty apart. The stage 2 (grey) icon I can see just fine, but the red and orange ones (if that’s what they are) are pretty much impossible without squinting.

Score isn’t indicative anyway, a good close bunker could have been holding against 2 enemies all match, without letting them decap but without getting a kill either, thereby only earning the 10 points he got for initially capping it.

I agree, this should have been done a while ago. It’s not fun either for the newbies, who get slaughtered and learn nothing, nor for their teammates.

These people need to stack the odds by giving the opponent free kills in order to WIN AT HOTJOIN? How bad are they???

Also, you do realise that the win bonus in hotjoin is TINY, and that if you get autobalanced away from the winning team YOU STILL GET IT right?

Of all the problems this game has, I would rank the bushes not being comfortable enough for the outlaw mobs hiding in them in the Kryta starting zone higher than this.

Rin.1046:

Fair comment. I still think an FA mode could work and be relatively balance. I think the real issue with any kind of defend/attack style of game is that the map design (layout) and win/lose mechanics need to be spot on. I think part of the problem FA had was the imbalance with taking down gates and defeating the npc’s before the bar filled, but I’m sure things like that could be balanced.

I agree, there was nothing inherently unbalanced about FA, they just didn’t get it right. And it could definitely be fun in GW2, I’d certainly play it! Make no mistake though, it wouldn’t be easy to balance in GW2: a bunker guardian could keep the NPCs at the mines alive for a lot longer than a GW1 monk or ritualist could (because so many of the Guardian support effects are pbaoe), and a shortbow thief could carry a bunch of amber soooo much faster than anybody else! So if you had people randomly being assigned to each side, the comp could decide the winner before the match even begins. Cue people ragequitting the match cause their team didn’t get a [insert class A] or has too many [insert class B].

I’m still dead against stat and trait progression though, it would make it completely impossible to balance because so many builds are only viable because of their traits!

tl;dr: In a game that allows as much customisation and specialisation as GW2, serious competitive pvp gamemodes need to be symmetrical. That way, if there is a class/build that’s overpowered, at least both teams have the same opportunity to exploit it.

Anything works when you’re levelling, it’s really easy. Just slot in every skill as you buy it and try it out.

Rin.1046:

manveruppd.7601:

I liked Fort Aspenwood and JQ, they were good fun, as were alliance battles. But let’s not mistake what they were: they were the casualest of casual pvp!

You say that like it is a bad thing. What exactly is wrong with a more casual PvP experience? Besides, the only reason those maps may have felt a little more casual was because they were more fun for the casual pvp player, so there were more casual players playing them. You still had more dedicated pvp players there, having intense fights with each other. Maybe not as much as in other maps, but they were there.

There’s absolutely nothing wrong with having a casual pvp gamemode, but the way it was brought up here was by drawing comparisons with the big MOBAs like lol and dota2 which have big competitive esports scenes! So I’m not at all sure that Karsai made the suggestion because he was asking for an alternative casual-friendly pvp mode, or that Hugh took his suggestion in that vein!
If they tried to make a MOBA-style gamemode for pvp, it would be broken, unbalanced, and shambolic. It might be fun to mess around in, but it would be impossible to make it into a balanced, competitive game that you can base tournaments with cash prizes on!

And incidentally, the reason FA and JQ were “casual” WASN’T because they only had “casual” people playing in them: it was because the balance in them was broken, giving one faction a significant advantage. You’re mistaking the symptom for the disease by thinking otherwise.

Skyhammer is responsible for 340 heart attacks, 28 aneurysms, and 80 destroyed marriages worldwide. It should be removed and whoever designed it launched into space (possibly to Arrakis to hang out with sand wurms).

Hugh, I think you guys should be VERY careful about drawing inferences from the suggestion of a tiny handful of players. Just cause MOBAs have millions of players doesn’t mean GW2 can work by copying them.
First of all, consider the consequences of player progression, whether by gear or by skills:
a. if you consider that the main stat difference between a guardian and a thief in this game is 140 points of armour, you see what a dramatic difference gear makes in this game. It’s a complicated system already without accounting for the additional imbalances that would be introduced when one team level up and get better gear slightly before the other and the stat increase they’d gain gives them an insurmountable advantage.
b. the notion of unlocking skill slots as you progress also wouldn’;t work. characters in LOL or DOTA2 are designed from the ground up so they’re actually playable with their early skills. In GW2 though, many classes rely on their utility skills for survival, whether as stun breaks or condition cleanses, meaning many builds would simply not be viable at all until they unlocked those utility slots. And because some builds rely on those utility slots more than others, this has the potential to create even more imbalances that would leave entire professions completely unviable!
Secondly, consider what would happen if players had to fight through lots of mobs and turrets before the teams could face each other: pve in this game, as most people know, is simply NOT balanced! Entire CLASSES (not just builds, but classes!) are personae non gratae in most pugs, as you can see by taking off your ANET tag and trying to find a group in high level fractals, and most dungeon groups will curtly inform you to “max damage melee berserker or gtfo”. The gap between how opponents act in pvp and pve is RADICALLY different in this game, even more so than in GW1. Any mode that involves mobs/minions to fight through will therefore most likely mean the death of all condition builds at the very least and a degeneration of pvp into an all-zerker meta at worst.

I liked Fort Aspenwood and JQ, they were good fun, as were alliance battles. But let’s not mistake what they were: they were the casualest of casual pvp! They were pvp for when you wanted to have fun for 10’ but even Random Arenas felt like too much work. They were absolutely NOT balanced (Kurzicks were utterly hosed in FA), nor suitable for any serious competitive pvping. Moreover, the variety of builds available to each class was a factor of magnitude greater in GW1 than in GW2, so even in such lop-sided, unbalanced game modes as these, anyone could find a build that kinda sorta worked. In GW2, where most classesonly have a couple of viable builds, we’d be looking at larger portions of the playerbase being excluded.

OK, I’ve been on these forums for 2 years constantly bringing up ways in which GW1 was a superior game, and even I think the OP is mostly being unfair. I’m not gonna address his points one by one, but there’s a couple I want to bring up:

1. yeah I also miss energy management, but I do think that with the faster pace of combat it would be one thing too many to keep track of.

2. No, I don’t agree that combat is spammy. In general, if you’re spamming your skills on cooldown you’re gonna lose. Most skills have a meaningful effect which you have to use at the right time to turn a fight around. There are some notable exceptions: for instance, if you’re a ranged caster fighting against a melee class on a side point, the requirement to sit on the point, meaning you can’t kite very far, combined with the number of gap closers available to some classes, make most snares except full Immobilise pretty useless, so you can use them on cooldown for the tiny extra damage with impunity. And skills like Pistol Whip, with its built-in evade, genuinely do have no down side to using them (unless the opponent has stability). In general though, the OP is wrong, you have to choose when to use your skills carefully.

3. I will admit that, although it isn’t spammy, combat can FEEL spammy for the beginning pvper. Why is that? Well, for one thing, most skills don’t have a distinctive casting animation, and there’s no casting bar. Sure they have very colourful and distinctive visual effects post-cast, yes (group fights look like all of JJ Abrams’s VFX artists did something unspeakable all over the map), but nothing visually distinctive is happening DURING the cast. It’s very hard to see if the enemy is doing anything different than their autoattack. Even the ones that do normally have a very short casting time (1" or less), making them difficult to dodge or interrupt. Sure it’s doable, I’ve feared or dazed people while they were trying to heal too, but nobody can do it reliably and consistently, especially in group fights. (And before everyone jumps in to dispute this, I might not have the best reflexes anymore but I’m speaking as someone who played a bunch of interrupt ranger and mesmer builds in GW1 and could pretty much keep an enemy monk locked down.) So I can see why the OP feels the combat doesn’t allow for clutch plays like GW1 did, why he feels people are just spamming their skills and dodging as often as possible with seemingly no reference to what the opponent is doing: cause at lower levels they probably are, because the game’s visual design and casting times aren’t enabling them to react meaningfully.

4. One area where I do agree with him is the extreme difference in stats between the tankiest and burstiest builds. I feel it’s a problem that a zerker ele will have literally half the health and nearly half the armour of a soldier warrior. It creates a problem with balancing the professions, it means that someone like a thief will NEVER be bunkery even if they go for the gear with the most vitality and toughness because the base HP and armour difference is too huge, and it means that EVERYONE has to build for one of those extremes. If you go for a middle ground you won’t be tough enough to survive a burst from the zerker thieves, and you won’t have the DPS to take down the clerics and soldiers heavy armoured professions. I really feel that base HP stats should be brought closer together: thief, guardian and ele raised by 2k or so, warrior and necro lowered by 2k or so – and obviously all survivability skills and traits balanced accordingly.

Last night in solo queue I saw the weirdest thing: a teammate who would call a different target every 2 seconds, apparently at random. At first I thought he just didn’t know how to play, but I notice he wasn’t just making bad target calls, but completely RANDOM target calls, including pets, minions, and even our teammates!!!

It’s weirder and more random than the behaviour of even the most inept human, and the frequency of the target calls also makes me think it would be incredibly difficult to actually play while calling targets so rapidly. So my only other explanation is it mustve been a bot!

Has anyone seen anything else like this?

Debatable. Seems like the vigor has expired in clip2. Can’t be sure though. Needs testing, and in wvw. If anyone’s in Baruch Bay or Abbadons and has a guardian I’d be willing to meet up in BL this week to try it.

Great job with that vid OP. If someone can link to the bug forum thread so we can upvote it?

Bhawb.7408:

There is never a reason to not run a DPS build because the content is so easy that it will never punish you for it. This isn’t about not having a Trinity, or “skill” content, the game is literally so easy that it won’t punish you for running the absolute squishiest builds possible.

Quoting for emphasis, pve mobs need to have more CC (which they use to interrupt or prevent you from kiting, not just spam it on cooldown like Orr mobs and dredge), ways to debuff players when they come under pressure, ways to buff themselves, and ways to heal and revive their allies. Bosses need to have more adds (so aoe bleeds and weakness means something), the damage for their big attacks need to be lowered, so that healing through it becomes an option, and their effective immunity to interrupts needs to be toned down so their attacks can be interrupted. Also, mechanics like a boss being vulnerable only during brief periods need to go, as they severely protract the fight for non-zerker groups.

It’s really confusing with this company: they make so many obvious mistakes which they had solved beautifully in GW1! I understand that some of the people who built that game left, but surely they didn’t take their code with them! It’s not just pve, it’s things like guild-based ladders in pvp, the game modes, and a billion other little things. Did Jeff Strain wipe all the computers when he quit or something?

spoj.9672:

TL;DR
Necro needs to be changed to fit pve. PvE cannot be completely changed. Its not poorly designed, its just old. Changing a single class is more realistic than reworking an entire gametype.

They’ve done it before: just before GW: Factions was released they rewrote all the mob ai in GW1, making them get out of AOE. It completely changed pve in gw1. Later, with Nightfall, they put in mobs with res capabilities. There’s been no such AI improvements with GW2 even though it’s been 2 years since release.

Eurantien.4632:

People used to argue carrion was better because it was less likely to pull bleeds to the top of the condi clear list. Well, condi clear is random so it doesn’t matter when you apply the bleeds since covering them is pointless (making rabid a better choice in the current “meta”).

Sorry for hijacking, but the above comment highlights what I’ve been saying since release: boon and condition removal should be on a transparent and predictable last in/first out basis like it was in GW1, not this stupid arbitrary hidden priority list that’s different for every single skill!
The poster I’m quoting is factually wrong, as far as I’m aware: it’s not random. But with so many differnet skills, each with a different unpublished priority list, IT MIGHT AS WELL BE RANDOM from the player’s perspective! It’s a stupid system it makes anything short of a full cleanse liable to fail by not taking off the 1 condition you most need cleansed, and it discourages forms of skilled play such as covering your most important boons/condis so they don’t get pulled.

Actually I started seeing GS/LB rangers even before the patch. Since the patch, however, there’s this crazy new tweak to the old shortbow build that can stack 19-20 bleeds in no time on you, even if you’re facing them so you’re not getting the shortbow auto flank/rear bleed. I’m guessing sharpening stone+sigil of earth combo or something?
Not a massive problem as 1 cleanse/transfer can clear 1 bleed as easily as 20, but still impressive how fast they can stack them, and then restack them after you’ve cleansed!

Capes are indeed awesome! With special gold trim for tournament winners!

I’m all for the OP’s idea of team-based seasons. It’s a team game, so I have no idea why the leaderboards are based on individual rankings! There should ALREADY be a guild-based leaderboard, so high-ranked people can play casually and experiment with different builds without compromising their team’s average ranking.

Most in pvp take clerics or soldiers. Runes you have more latitude, I like Grove cause of the immobilise.

Well, they also tried to tell us the 25" interrupt cooldown was intentional too, which was a bald-faced lie and something I’m still upset about personally…

I’m not sure the big Putrid Nerf went through the proper channels and playtesting before it was implemented, hence its not appearing in the patch notes. I think either they were experimenting with various changes to the skill and accidentally left more changes in the final build than they intended, or someone snuck it in because it was their own private peeve.

Of course, after Dhuumfire, necro was doing so much damage this nerf didn’t hhurt their viability at all, so they didn’t see the need to reverse it. Now though, if a team wants a condition player there are better options.

It’s not worse than it was at launch tbh, but it’s definitely a lot worse than it was before the patch. I don’t know why either, I didn’t realise there were any AI changes in the feature patch.

jpersson.7368:

…and yes — I still run with dhuumfire from time to time. I’m not allowed to play with fire in real life, and it just too much fun to pass it up =)

Oh hey, that’s the same reason I run minions!

Gryph.8237:

that said, i would be down for a scythe that gives us some crowd control effects, though I am open if it should be for power builds or condition builds.

Well the best weapons in the game work for both, they just do different types of damage :-) look at mesmer staff for instance, shatter mesmers (power) carry it all the time. Even our staff would actually work for power builds if its autoattack was more reliable.

I’m confused about this too, Flow. I’m pretty sure it’s only ever transferred 3 conditions off me no matter how many enemies I hit. Are you sure about this? I’d jump in heart of the mists to test it but I can’t think of a way to inflict more than 3 conditions on myself to test! :-)

Anyway, I fully agree with flow that it was overpowered in its original form. However, I really miss the team support options it gave us! Considering the conditionmancer does best in team fights, it really was necessary for us to have one skill that can help people. Currently the only ally cleanses we get are plague signet, which always transfers the wrong condition, and well of power, which people usually leave at home in favour of other, better stun breaks. The only other thing worth a kitten is transfusion, which condi builds don’t have enough healing power to use optimally, and spectral wall, which some people do take but very rarely.
Considering the post-Dhuumfire nerfs to our bleeds have never been reversed, the condition Necro now needs some team support skills more than ever in order to stay relevant in pvp.

I’ve rambled on this before, but I would be happy to see further nerfs to the personal cleanse functionality of putrid mark to restore its ally cleanse functionality, cause as it stands Deathly Swarm is better.

I’ve made some suggestions here:https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/professions/necromancer/Putrid-Mark-and-teamplay-suggestions/first#post3382145
But the gist of that thread is:
1. Remove ranged cleanse aspects (caster must be on mark to get cleansed)
2. For each enemy hit, the mark transfers up to 3 conditions per ally standing in the mark’s aoe to that enemy (ie no enemy can have more than 3 condis transferred to them)
3. Caster is always the first cleansed, if eligible (ie. Is in the aoe and has conditions). Same ally can be affected more than once only if there are more enemy targets hit by the mark than there are eligible allies.
3. If this is still too strong, even with the ranged cleanse component removed, also specify maximum allies cleansed: 3.

I’m disappointed. I thought this was a thread about people making their minions race each other!

I’ve noticed most of the builds posted here have been celestial. Have any of you tried them with zerker, or valkyrie, or even rampager gear?
When I think of hybrid necros I’m mostly thinking ones that focus on disabling conditions to mitigate their target’s damage and stop them from getting away. In this setup the bulk of the damage would still come from direct attacks,and I’m not sure celestial provides enough power for that. After all you want the poison for the healing reduction, and chilled and immobilised doesn’t have care about your condition damage at all. I can see the point of celestial if you’re going for dhuumfure, even though fire does decent damage even without much condition damage.

I’ve noticed that what works is autoattacking. Doesn’t matter what else you do, they just stand there, but if you hit with 2 AAs they’ll move. That’s why I never got the hang of the dagger variants of the mm build.

Thematically, I would LOVE to see a scythe! I imagine it as a melee cleave weapon with pbaoe condition application and other debuffs. Then I realised that I just described a non-ranged staff… :-P
However, that needn’t be a bad thing, as, let’s face it, introducing a new weapon would be huge amounts of work as they’d have to design a couple dozen different skins for it and introduce them in drops and merchants through every zone in the game. It’s pretty daunting! So maybe they should just take the opportunity to fix staff since it’s already got the cool scythe animation on the very uncool auto attack. Buff every skill and make it melee ranged, merge the existing 5 traits to 2,and introduce a new trait to make staff 2-5 ranged (similar to how the Wells trait woeks).

Then use the remaining trait slot to give us a trait for our anti-torch, which is also a very cool idea! ;-) chills and blinds and possibly some condition cleansing or transfer? (I know the blind is already on mesmer torch but if it also fits necros why not?)

I would also like to see, whether on a new weapon or an existing one, weapon skills that spawn minions. Not strong ones like our utility minions, little weaksauce critters like jagged horrors and the like.

I’m not volunteering, just bumping this to promote Jebro’s good work. Keep it up dude! :-)

That’s nice actually, lets you LOS someone while staying on the point, and means that if you standd with your back to it they can’t knock you clean off the point! Those side points make the job of decap engis very easy because to get back on the point you have to go halfway round it, which is enough for them to decap. This makes it slighly harder so it should make for a good change!

Celtus.8456:

Also noticed people have grey names now when they are dead.

Awesome, this will make it so much easier to see what’s going on in big fights in WvW!

THANKS DEVS! <3

Evan Lesh.3295:

Could definitely happen that way. Do you think that’s more of a problem stemming from players not being able to easily switch builds on a per-map basis?

Yes, but not in the way you think: switching is very easy, you just log out and pick another character. PLAYING a completely new build just because this one match is on Skyhammer, on the other hand, that’s not so simple!

The issue is that people don’t want to switch up their build for the sake of one map, nor should they have to in a competitive pvp game! PvP games measure your skill in direct opposition to another player. Exploiting the terrain and map mechanics comes into it, of course, but when your skill at knowing where to launch your pull from to knock someone off becomes the main determinant to victory rather than just a factor, you’re no longer in pvp territory: you’re in “competitive pve”.

Sure, people might occasionally change up a single utility or adept trait to adapt to a map, but Skyhammer doesn’t want that: Skyhammer demands that you completely upend your build and focus completely and exclusively on crowd control. And not just any crowd control but specifically the forced movement kind: pulls, pushes/knockbacks, and to a much lesser extent fears.

People don’t want to do that. Not only does it feel cheesy and exploitative (because you’re playing against the map, not against you opponent), it also goes against the basic promise of this game, which was that it would let you choose your playstyle, and that each class would be able to fulfil multiple roles. Not ALL roles obviously (thieves can’t be bunkers, for instance), but most classes do have a reasonable variety of viable builds to choose from, and, because this is a very high skill-ceiling game with lots of nuance and hidden tricks you can learn, a lot of people have been playing more or less the same build (not just the same PROFESSION, but the same BUILD!) since launch! You can’t expect people who have found a build that perfectly suits their temperament and playstyle, and which they’ve been practicing to death, to suddenly go hop on their engi alt every time Skyhammer pops, especially when they’re playing at high levels. They will make dumb mistakes and get frustrated. They will feel like they’re fighting the map and not the enemy. When you’re playing a build you know well you get into a flow, and switching up because a single map demands it breaks that flow! Remember when Grouch interviewed TCG after the tournament? The one most emphatic piece of advice they had to give was PLAY YOUR MAIN CLASS.

Skyhammer completely breaks the game because builds that focus on pulls and knockbacks are so overwhelmingly superior to everything else! Professions do not have equal access to these specific kinds of CC, nor do they have equal access to stability, the only counter to CC. TBH even looking at it on a profession basis is wrong, because most professions have more than one viable build which in some cases play completely differently. Not all builds within the same profession have the scope to respec for pulls and knockbacks. If I’m playing condi necro I can go sure, take 2 trait points out of death, put them in SR for some stability, maybe swap in Spectral Wall for another fear, and we’re done, but if I’m playing minionmaster I don’t have the same latitude to swap stuff in and out.

It goes both ways: If someone is built for one map, there is no guarantee they get the map. They may do poorly on a map they didn’t vote for, or need to switch builds to adapt.

As I explained above, the high skill ceiling of this game and the vastly different playstyles of different builds make switching non-trivial. But say that’s not the case. Say that tweaking your build in between games to adapt to each map becomes a thing in GW2, and becomes an interesting metagame in itself. Well, look at how things stand: for every other map, most players do not need to change a single thing. They have the option to do so, but the advantage is marginal. For Skyhammer, otoh, the extent to which most players would need to change their builds to adapt to the map is so extreme they’d playing a whole different build, which puts them at a disadvantage even if they do switch. So the metagame you’re thinking about currently only applies for one map, and even if you play it you lose, because you’re forcing yourself to play something other than what you’ve practiced and are good at.

They gotta make money somehow dudes, don’t be petty.

By solo pvp do you mean solo arenas? Both do pretty well, though warriors are more powerful and are probably a bit easier to get into.

You want to be in the WvW forum, this is spvp

I’d say something bursty like thief or ele so your friend can keep you alive though.

Yeah they have stability in Lich Form but it can be stripped and they can’t get it back. If you have nobody in the fight who can strip it just use line of sight to avoid their autoattack, it only lasts 20" and then you can kill them easy as they have no escapes, no stability, and very little damage mitigation.

You will still get some 4v5s in tournaments (both solo and team queue), but it tends to happen most at the lower end of the rankings. Thing is, people who tend to leave matches themselves rarely rise above the lower end of the rankings. So if there’s 1 leaver in the match, then if you yourself never leave, you’re reducing the chance that the leaver will be on your team. So if you perservere and win a few matches you’ll rise above the afk-bracket and start getting balanced games most of the time.

Carpboy.7145:

DaShi.1368:

Unfortunately, soloQ remains a no go for those who can’t stand Skyhammer.

Queue solo in team queue. Bam! Mind blown

Listen to this guy. Team queue has friendlier people, less rage, fewer quitters/afkers, and no Skyhammer.

NevirSayDie.6235:

Remember that your own vote—100% skyhammer—will greatly increase your chances of getting in a skyhammer match. So even if 33% of people didn’t vote for skyhammer real often, and the general public only got skyhammer matches 1 in 15 times, your chances would be about double that, depending on how likely those 33% actually were to vote for skyhammer.

That was my fear too, that a minority of players would be able to enforce their preferences on their opponents. Like Evan said, people want to win, so if someone is running a build that allows them to exploit a map mechanic, you can be sure that player will ALWAYS vote for that map, sure as Grenth’s balls are cold.

Bhawb.7408:

manveruppd.7601:

Mine just stands there, doesn’t even cheerlead… it must be very unimpressed with me

You need to roll your face over the keyboard faster then, that’s my strategy and he loves it.

Finally! I’ll no longer suffer the crippling insecurity my golem’s disapproval causes me!

Mine just stands there, doesn’t even cheerlead… it must be very unimpressed with me

Thanks for replying.

I meant uneven as in the number of matches with less than 10 players.

Ah sorry, I misread that post, thought uneven in terms of win ratios!

You mention people picking maps they are built for, do you consider that a bad thing? Imagine a scenario where we have templates. Everyone would always switch to the most effective build for a given map to ensure a win. That’s what people like to do, win

Not at all, people already do that to an extent. They might swap out a trait or 2 during the pre-match waiting time, or even relog into a different character if necessary. But on every other map, they will do this thing in response to the enemy team’s composition. On Skyhammer, they will do it in response to Skyhammer! Are we supposed to be playing against each other or against the map here? 2 teams of 5 engis each knocking each other off ledges would be hilarious fun for about half an hour, but I wouldn’t want it to be every third game I played!

I realise I should’ve put a tl;dr for my post: As long as the maps are balanced (and most of your maps are balanced – Temple and Legacy in particular are SUPERB), voting would be a great idea. As long as unbalanced and exploitable maps are in the tournament rotation, voting should be restricted to hotjoin.

Evan Lesh.3295:

Also, please do not focus your feedback specifically on Skyhammer and why you don’t like it. There we always be a least popular map and we should take that into consideration.

Evan, I don’t think the issue is that people don’t LIKE Skyhammer, merely that its mechanics can be easily exploited by certain builds. I personally think pre-match voting is a cool idea, but won’t the ability to influence map choice make people specifically BUILD for certain maps, not because they like them but because they know they can get an easy win by exploiting their mechanics (eg. knockbacks on Skyhammer)?

I think that if voting should be introduced, it should be restricted to hotjoin, not tournaments. Possibly solo queue too, but I would say not even there. Abolutely not team queue! If it’s introduced in Team Queue, it would encourage teams speccing to win ONLY ONE MAP by choosing builds that exploit its mechanics, and then getting that map most of the time by all voting together to change it. I’m gonna use the example of a team made up of knockback engis, hammer guardians, hambows, and fear necros all voting Skyhammer on every single match, but insert your favourite cheesy team comp+map they can exploit combo here (though, honestly, you’d struggle to find another map that’s as exploitable…). They would easily win the vote in most games they play, as they would only need 1 opponent to abstain or just not load into the game in time to vote for them to have the majority.

As for the “special” hate some have against Skyhammer: the map’s fans might disagree with me saying such team comps would be “exploiting” the map mechanics. I agree that utilising the terrain and secondary mechanics IS A legit part of the game, and not an exploit. However, there’s a difference between someone swapping in an extra speed boost on Foefire because the map is so much bigger, or some extra aoe skill on Niflhel because Keep is so cramped, and building an entire team around a mechanic that basically allows them to instagib any opponent on any point on the map. It’s just too much. It’s ALREADY too much even with the random matchups in solo queue – if sync-joiners were able to build for it and force Skyhammer on people through voting, it would just be /ragequit for any team they faced!

Evan Lesh.3295:

Skyhammer does not have any more uneven matches than other maps last time we checked.

I’m curious what you mean by “uneven”. Are you checking per team? Per account? Per character? Are you telling me that a top-1000 player who mains a knockback engi does not have a higher win ratio on Skyhammer than on other maps? Remember, on a per character basis, not per account.

Brandon,

The OP’s work is amazing, but visual effects scaling bugs are not the only problem caused by the massive size disparities between characters. The bugs he found are pretty serious (and I bet they affect many more skills than the ones he tested as well!), but there are 2 other issues that affect the entire game in general:
1. Telegraphing: some skills telegraph themselves by having a decal appear over the character’s head in addition to the casting animation itself. Those aren’t hard to see, because the decal normally doesn’t scale with character size. However, MOST skills in the game are only telegraphed by the character raising their arm in the air, or pointing at their target’s direction, for 0.75" or so. In those cases smaller character sizes DO make it harder for the opponent to see it, and gives small characters a serious advantage!
2. Occlusion: This one mostly affects people like me who made the stupid mistake of rolling a melee class with a large character. The problem is that if you’re a big Norn or Charr and are in melee range, the over-the-shoulder perspective makes it harder to see your opponent AT ALL if they’re a small human or smaller! Your character just covers them up completely! I admit that can be funny sometimes (a friend with an Asura mesmer once hid inside an AFK Norn inside an enemy keep in WvW so he could portal us back in), but it’s pretty frustrating when I’m playing my d/d Charr ele! Fortunately, this is much easier to fix than the telegraphing problem or the bugs uncovered by the OP: just let us zoom out a tiny little bit more, and raise the angle of the camera in the most zoomed-out setting so it’s a semi-top-down perspective, like we have in big boss fights in PvE. Of course this would make casting animations even harder to see, particularly when they don’pt have a nice bright decal on them, which brings us back to the OP’s suggestion: CASTING BARS LIKE EVERY OTHER ONLINE GAME HAS!

Branden Gee.2150:

To quickly recap what you have all been saying, it looks like there are two significant groups that think they have the best solution to this issue.

The first being to scale all of the asuras up to be larger and scale down the charr and norn. The second is to turn everyone in the match into a human.

Personally I’d prefer scaling everyone’s size rather than turning them into humans. This is an RPG, I don’t want every single one of us to have the Sarge model from Quake :p Note: it doesn’t need to scale everyone to the EXACT same size. Currently the smallest character models only come up to the knee of the biggest ones. If you scale so that the smallest come up to the stomach or chest of the biggest it would be more than enough!

However, I don’t think it’ll be enough on its own. I reckon you folks should go back and play a bit of GW1 and see how easy it was to keep track of what was happening in fights there. The key features were:
1. Nametags UNDER the character models rather than over, so they don’t occlude the casting animations
2. Big shiny and VERY distinctive decals flashing over the character’s heads (or over their target’s heads for certain skills) that didn’t scale with character size and were at least as big as the largest character models – I can still remember the Protective Spirit decal by heart, we learned to switch targets on a dime when we saw that appear over a target’s head!
3. CASTING BARS on your target display, so you saw exactly what your window for interrupting someone was!
4. For when you don’t have someone targeted and therefore can’t see their casting bar, very dictinctive casting animations, by which I mean not just raising your hand in the air but RISING 3 FEET IN THE AIR WITH BOTH YOUR ARMS EXTENDED OUTWARDS during the cast! Hard to miss a dude doing that even if he’s 4 feet tall!
5. big spinning circle around your target’s feet instead of the puny red arrow (which as a colourblind person I find very hard to see, ditto for the hostile aoe red circles!) that we have now.

Thank you.