Guild Wars 2

Agreed with flow, Healing Power doesn’t scale nearly as well as Vitality, which has a 10:1 scaling on the amount of HP it gives you whereas healing scales 1:1 at the best case and doesn’t heal while in DS. I’d only consider rank healing above vitality if you were running well of power.

Zietlogik.6208:

Having the ability to zoom the camera out farther would reduce the overall amount of space (on screen) needed to be moved by each mouse turn…meaning less motion sickness, and better area awareness at the same time. win-win

Yes, please do this! I logged into GW1 and observed a gvg battle last night and it really struck me how much easier it was to follow the game when I zoomed out!

It’s an attractive concept but you have to remember 2 things:
1. However much power and precision you stack, scepter direct damage will still be abysmal – it just doesn’t scale very well at all. No, not even scepter 3 which is supposed to be direct damage (and which btw I was testing with a steady weapon and signet of spite yesterday and I’m still not sure if the extra damage per condition works properly…). Staff scales better, but it’s nearly impossible to hit anything with its autoattack.
2. The most dangerous thing about conditions in this game isn’t the damage they do: it’s their secondary effects. Poison is great for the healing reduction, vital against guardians and warriors with near-infinite healing-over-time effects. Weakness and immobilise will stop them dodging, fear will shut them down completely, and you have access to plenty of all of those no matter which weapon sets you bring if you take the right traits and utilities. So if you want to play a condition build don’t necessarily feel obliged to go for maximum bleeds.

Bweaty.9187:

The new CD on ‘Exit DS’ really needs to go. It would make things like ‘Deathly Invigoration’ viable. It would allow a skilled player to ‘drop’ out of DS as things died, to get the life force. It’s just f’in stupid the skilled player waits for life force to drain rather than exits DS (As this doesn’t get the +10sec)

Hasn’t that always been there? I’m pretty sure I only ever got the “on activation” cooldown if my LF ran out while I was in it.

Woah, that’s a lot of detail Allie, thanks!

Allie Murdock.8152:

• We’re adding PvP specific back pieces to the reward glory vendor (guild tabards)

This is pretty cool, I know a lot of people who would love that (myself included) Unfortunately a lot of those people have already spent all of their glory in anticipation of it being “removed” (you didn’t really specify that the glory vendors would be staying – people just assumed glory would be completely removed from the game!), so I really hope there’ll be an alternative way to get these for their sake!

Allie Murdock.8152:

• This means no more bounce chests.

kitten it, I was really hoping this game would become the new Age of Conan! :p

Vuh.1328:

the guild tabards.. they are not going to be the fugly savage/elegant guild back banners are they?

nvm they apparently are.. of course

You sure? They’re called “back banners”. Tabards are a different thing.

Oh, and obligatory GIB CLAOKS KTHKSBYE

garethh.3518:

Why?
So if the answer is ‘they are dragging us down’.. well… what?

They’re part of a company… you can’t fire your boss and you can’t pick up a company product and walk to another and say “hey will you treat us better, oh and do not worry about potential lawsuits, NCSoft is cool, they care more about happy people than money”…

???

I don’t really want an answer, and even if I did I’m sure he’s smart enough not to slag off his employer to his customers. I just hope that they’ll confront the question and talk about it internally.

Absinth.6917:

Sir – although your questions are quite valid I, for one, would regrettably look to your sig for the answer.

Thanks for that, I lol’ed!

I have to admit, when I watched your duels video I also dismissed it, like many others on here. I think it’s because the x1.5 speed (why did you do that anyway?) made it hard to follow and both your moves and your opponents’ looked pretty random. Also, in part, because many of your duels were in wvw, where ascended gear and consumables make different builds viable, and a lot of us who focus on pvp and aren’t familiar with these builds assumed that these were crap players using scrub builds

However, when i watched your tutorial video and saw the amount of precision and micromanagement your play requires, it became pretty clear that you know what you’re doing. I think your build is pretty strong, though definitely not optimal in the current meta, especially with the lack of condition cleanses. I don’t think that’s an issue with your build, simply with how weak elementalists are atm – the amount of attunement dancing and the precision and speed required in laying down your aoes makes most of the currently popular builds look like easymode (including the builds I play), and it’s kitten ed unfair that this class needs so much skill to play and still performs so badly!

BTW, it wasn’t clear from your post: are you using the build you linked to in the OP, or the build you describe in your “tutorial” video?

Or just use power in wvw as well? Plenty do.

Yeah it used to be absolutely godly – although I still didn’t use it back then, because I played condi and already had easy access to both poison and weakness.

But if I were playing a dagger/warhorn power build I imagine it could be very useful.

Rennoko.5731:

My personal preference would be to see this and the “0” tick of DS to be traited in SR for taking no damage for that one second the DS is timing out. I don’t think it would be overpowered as long as it was a master level trait. To be honest… this was sort of how it used to work anyhow with no traits. (no oveflow)

Heaven forbid someone might have to time a skill carefully against a necro because he would have some limited immunity.

So 1" invulnerability every 10"? Sounds overpowered, considering even guardians get 1 Aegis every 40" rather than 10! Though I guess it’d actually be less often than once per 10" since you’ll be generating LF, so you’d need to run it down to get that 1" invulnerability. Or did you mean on EVERY exit from DS, not just when you’ve run out? I see it being a problem as it would make generating too much life force a hassle if what you wanted instead was to get a brief window to activate your heal. How ridiculous would it be if people did their best to NOT generate life force! Especially since we can’t actually heal while in DS, so you’d be forced to stay in it (with no access to your stun breaks or other

But frankly all this stuff is trying to fix a broken wheel axle by sticking a broomstick through it. They should instead change LF into an energy bar that enables F1-F4 abilities, and give us some proper escapes rather than this broken second health bar mechanic that’s impossible to balance around! When you consider that the amount of LF present is MOSTLY a factor of how long a fight has been going on for rather than the necromancer’s skill, it is ridiculous that when we’re full it takes a whole bar of cooldowns to kill us, while when we’re empty we’re a frail meatshield with no escapes or damage mitigation at all!

Nova Stiker.8396:

Nope. Dervishes had 505 HP. Yes, it was on an armor but it was NOT an armor bonus.

Yeah, fair enough – they still had 480 naked though! :p

I realise you can’t answer these or you might lose your job, but I’m gonna put it here for your and your colleagues to simply read and think about, and possibly discuss amongst yourselves in private:

1. Do you believe that ANet management are giving the PvP team sufficient resources to enable them to develop the kind of new features that would keep the playerbase engaged and playing within a reasonable time scale?

2. Do you believe that ANet’s patch certification and deployment procedures allow for a sufficiently rapid and regular stream of patches to keep the game bug-free and the pvp environment balanced and fun?

Liewec.2896:

Sunshine.5014:

TL;DR: The customizable zone is too large. Other games allow only 10-15% difference between builds, while GW2 allows a big range between bunker and zerker builds; that makes balancing very hard.

GW1 allowed you to choose 2 classes, put your attribute points anywhere you liked and then allowed you to pick 8 of any of the skills that those 2 classes have…

You’ve missed what the OP meant by “customisation”. Yes, you’re right, GW1 had a vastly larger variety of viable builds (and an exponentially larger number of possible builds), but EVERY lvl 20 character of EVERY class had 480HP! Yeah, you had bonuses (and minuses) from gear, but even the most extreme health differentials you would get in any kind of pvp would range from kitten -550 – which is a less than 25% differential! Even later, when Vitae runes and Survivor gear were introduced, the theoretical maximum you could get was 670 (which no-one went for anyway), so only +50% differential from the minimum!

Compare that to GW2, where the health differential between, say, a thief and a necromancer is A STAGGERING 80% even without any gear whatsoever! (base health at lvl 80 10.8k vs 18.3k) And that difference becomes even more extreme once you start adding gear into the question – if I play my ele and my necro in spvp I’ll be going from 12k to 22k HP from one match to the next, and the tankiest builds can have even more health, leading to an absurdly large range!

And that’s just health – if you look at the kind of range you can get from damage you’ll find the range to be even greater, with a crit from a full glass cannon zerker scoring up to 10x as much damage as the same skill from someone in tanky gear – that’s a 1000% differential and that’s comparing the same exact skill from two characters in the same profession in different kinds of gear, let alone once you start comparing different professions!

I fully agree with the OP that attribute extremes must be toned down for the game to be more easily balanced. Reducing the base health differentials would only be a start though. Damage numbers must similarly be adjusted, obviously, but, most importantly, a system of diminishing returns has to be instituted to discourage people from going all-out in a single direction, like they had in GW1: while most GW1 skills had linear scaling with their attribute, each rank in an attribute cost more points than the last, so if you wanted a flexible, balanced build you couldn’t go all-out in just 2 attributes. In GW2, ANet kept the linear scaling in everything (which is good for the theorycrafter in a sense, as it makes it easier for you to tell how tweaking your attributes will affect the effectiveness of each skill), but made every attribute point effectively cost the same, with the one exception of Celestial gear, which gives you more attribute points than any other combination, but spreads them across so many attribute lines that it’s only used in niche builds.

Rather than go out and redesign every single skill in the game to give its scaling diminishing returns though, a lot can be accomplished by simply changing the types of gear available in pvp to adhere to 2 simple rules:
1. All gear must include at least 1 offensive and 1 defensive attribute, and
2. All gear must include at least 1 primary and 1 secondary attitude.
Under this system, something like Berserker (Power, Precision, CritDmg) would be out: it includes 2 primary and 1 secondary attribute, but all 3 are offensive attributes. OTOH, Valkyrie would be ok: it has 2 primary and 1 secondary attributes, and 2 offensive and 1 defensive attributes. This would rule out the most extreme builds – tone down the burstiest damage and soften the toughest bunkers, and thereby hopefully increase the skill required in the game and the number of viable builds.

Nah that’s not really fair dude, ANet’s netcode is probably the most efficient in the industry! You probably just had a bad connection. One of our monks in GW1 played from Australia and he was a god with an Infuse! (Which is the twitchiest monk build you can play for anyone not familiar with GW1, cause you’ve got to land that infuse during the enemy’s spike to save someone, you can’t precast stuff on who you think is going to get focussed like a prot monk)

Anywya, my ping in the UK was between 50-200 in gw1, much better than any other MMO I’ve played!

Yep, mine was sorted pretty quickly as well

@Grimm that gave me something to think about, think I’m gonna change all my passwords just in case then. (though I also have 2fv on my GMail, and if anyone managed to bypass that for both gmail and gw2 that’s pretty worrying!)

@Gaile thanks for passing it along!

Interesting, so you pop SW before getting into the fight just so you can teleport out of it and reset if things go sour? I tried doing that a few times but I always felt the teleport window wasn’t long enough for me to figure out if the fight was going my way.

Flesh Wurm should obviously be much better since it lasts till the minion is killed, but I still haven’t got the hang of its restrictions. It seems to be pretty inconsistent as to how much it’ll let you teleport through walls or on different levels. Some places you can put it on top of a ledge (like the ones around graveyard on Legacy) and when you activate it it’ll teleport you riught there, but other places it’ll just teleport you to the bottom of the ledge. I haven’t figured out its rules, if it has any.

Runes of speed is interesting! Do you miss the extra condition removal from Lyssa 6?

Also, have you thought about swapping out spectral walk for spectral armour, or even grasp for another snare? I don’t think you really need the swiftness with those runes.

Cleaving isn’t the main trouble with dagger, its problem is that there’s no combos you can pull off for burst damage – it’s extremely high, steady damage. I suppose it’s consistent with the necro’s “attrition” paradigm, but the thing is if you’re in damage gear like zerker you gotta go all out and deliver your damage and then run off before you get squelched.
Good thing we’ve at least got Deathly Perception,s o people can go into DS and deliver those last 5k damage or so in a single blast – it’s the closest you can get to “burst”.

Support got back to me, disabled 2sv on my account, and I’m able to log in, so it’s safe to say I haven’t been hacked!

I don’t know if this is the place for suggestions, but it’d be nice if ANet could implement backup codes for 2-step verification, like Google has: https://support.google.com/accounts/answer/1187538?hl=en
In my case it was a case of my own stupidity not disabling 2step before reflashing my phone, but in cases where someone’s phone breaks or is stolen they’ll be locked out of their account. Backup codes are already built into Google’s system so they should be an easy backup to implement!

I’ve contacted support as well, but I’d appreciate opinions on whether my problem is a hacked account or 2-step verification based on other people’s experiences as it might help my interactions with support.

When I tried to log in today I was asked to verify my account using 2-factor verification. I found this alarming, as I haven’t needed to use the authenticator since installing the game and I logged in just fine yesterday without needing to use it.

Unfortunately, it’s been so long since I used 2-factor verification that I have since had to wipe my phone and install a new ROM on it. I did this without first disabling two-factor verification in my GW2 account, because I didn’t realise I needed to. So today, when the game asked me for it, I had to re-download the Google Authenticator from the Play store, set it up and link it with my Google account as if this was the first time I was using it.

Then, when I finally entered the verification code in the game client, I got

The account name or password you entered is invalid. Please check your information and try again.

I assumed I had been hacked, so I went through to account recovery. However, after several hours of trying to find my original serial code, I can’t find a single trace of it – I don’t even remember if it came in a box or an email (though I’ve asked a few friends who bought the game from the same e-tailer as I did so I’ll hopefully have an answer to that soon).

After a bit of calm reflection though, I realised it’s unlikely that I have been hacked, for the following reasons:
1. if a hacker had accessed my account and changed my password, I would have received an email notifying me of this at the email addressed associated with my GW2 account. You know, the type of emails with “if you did not change your password click here” links. I’ve combed through my account and there’s no such email.
2. Additionally, during log in, I’m first asked for my username and password, and then for the verification code, and only after that am I told that my login details are invalid. I believe if my password had been changed by a hacker and I was entering the wrong one, the client would have stopped me before reaching the 2-factor verification stage, not afterwards. So the invalid info must be the authentication code I entered.
3. if my account had been hacked, surely the first thing a hacker would have done is disable 2-factor verification so they could log in from anywhere?

I’ve therefore concluded that it’s more likely an authenticator issue: I did not unlink the authenticator from my account before I went and wiped my phone. The Google Authenticator needed setting up and associating with my account all over again (scanned the barcode off google’s website and everything), so it counts as a new instance of the authenticator, one which my GW2 account is not associated with!

Since I can’t log into my account without a linked authenticator app, I can’t disable two-factor verification. And since I can’t find my serial code,, I can’t use the “recover your account” option either. So I’m kinda stuck!

My questions for support:
1. Based on the information I provided above, do you believe I have been hacked, or is this a 2-factor verification issue
2. can you disable 2-factor verification from my account for me?
3. can I recover access to my account without my serial code?

Thanks!

Thedenofsin.7340:

Kline.9561:

the penn is mightier you just need to be heard and the loudest.

The dollar is mightier than the pen.

But the swordpen is mightier than either! (Though now as mighty as the hambowpen)

I don’t have any feedback but I’d like to thank Allie for starting this thread, we appreciate it when the balance team is open to feedback.

NA is LESS populated??? I thought EU was bad! :o

Allie Murdock.8152:

FYI, we don’t think it’s balanced. That’s why we’re still balancing it.

The OP actually makes a good point, though. For this particular feature build, we have not shared much about what’s going on, we get that. Don’t mistake that with we’re not doing much, though.

Thanks for the feedback

Allie, we know the next patch is going to be a major one, with a complete overhaul of the gear system as well as all the regular balancing.

However, you ARE still doing regular skill balancing alongside the bigger changes, so I’m wondering: have you really considered the wisdom of bundling a skill balance patch alongside such a drastic overhaul of the game? Won’t it be extremely difficult to see the effects of your skill balance when it comes alongside something as major and gamechanging as that?

I know your internal testing and certification process for new updates must be onerous, and that the twice-monthly schedule of the LW content has put a huge strain on it (especially with the last few massive chunks of content you’ve released). However, considering most of the more, ahem, “controversial” skills and traits have already been split into pvp versions, and you’ve expressed your willingness to do more splitting, I don’t see why minor regular skill balances have to be such a major undertaking that they can’t be integrated into your existing 2-week release schedule! After all, you used to have major bug fixing and polish releases every single week for months after release, so I assume you have the processes and the manpower in place to run such a schedule.

Bottom line, I don’t think a new balance patch every 4 months (last one was December 13, next one is in April!) justifies you using the present continuous tense when you speak of “balancing”: a lot of us feel abandoned, and it’s about more than just skill balancing – there are major bugs that haven’t been fixed in nearly a year! If releasing minor pvp patches is so much work that it’s impossible to do on a more frequent schedule, then maybe you guys should have a serious word with management and ask that the patch testing and certification process be redesigned before the last few pvpers finally quit.

Swagg.9236:

In any case, the nodes need to be larger. Larger nodes means more room to move. More room to move makes repositioning easier. Easier repositioning means that aiming and timing will become bigger factors in point-taking instead of simply how many AoE buttons one can spam. Aiming and timing supplanting spam as a means to kill players on a point means a more skill-based conquest game-mode overall for GW2.

I don’t agree with EVERYTHING you said but this I’d happily sign my name under! All the most fun and intense fights I’ve had in GW2 spvp have been on Graveyard in Foefire. I’m not saying it’s JUST because it’s the largest capture point on any map, but I’m sure it’s a big part of why.

I don’t like Conquest as a game mode because it makes splitting the team the only available strategy. Contrast with GW1 gvg where you had the option to either split and do a sneaky backdoor gank, or to keep and try to faceroll the other team quickly.

I also hate that it encourages selfish builds: people tweak their character to be either as durable as they can possibly be, or to do as much damage as they possibly can. They give very little thought to bringing skills that’ll synergise with their teammates, and support builds are hugely underepresented. You see far too many bunkers whose job is to stand on a point as long as possible, or decappers whose job is to knock you off it so they can neutralise it – both builds whose usefulness in a straight fight would be extremely marginal. Oh, yes, and thieves with very high mobility, whose job is to just run to anywhere where there’s a 1v1 and turn it into a 2v1 – not that that’s not a sound tactical choice, movement is the cornerstone of every game unless the playing field is a tiny cubical room, but some matches it seems every fight goes that way, and it’d be nice to have the OCCASIONAL even fight!

However, despite all these flaws, Conquest could still be a lot more fun if all the points WEREN’T SO TINY! If they redesigned each map and make it so all the central points were as big as Graveyard and the side points were just a little bigger htan they are now, it would increase the fun factor five-fold!

I played with one of you on solo queue yesterday – I hope you’ll still occasionally pop your heads in even if you stop competing as a team! Who knows, things might get better… :p

Paragon.5479:

servers are in Texas so u can play on europe doesnt matter

Oh, I didn’t know this! So in theory an NA player should have the same ping whether he’s play on EU or NA servers? For some reason I thought they had local servers in the EU (Paris or someplace, I remember reading somewhere…)

If what you say is true though, that’s good news for the pvp community: it means that, some time down the line, they could decide to make pvp global, like it was in GW1, and it wouldn’t seriously affect anyone’s ping! That’d be a nice shot in the arm for the community – much bigger player pool, leading to shorter queues and fewer instances of top-100s being matched against rank 1 newbies!
Sadly it’d probably need a lot of backend changes and I understand there’s only 1 network programmer working on pvp so it would probably take 6-12 months even if they did agree to do it…

DanyK.3842:

Depends on your connection. From the UK I can play EU and NA no problem but both can have random spikes and ping over 100. If I play from Central EU I get around 20-60 ms ping on EU and 600+ on NA. I’m sure this is also ISP and location specific and VPNs can help.

Yeah that IS pretty weird! You reckon it’s just a matter of your ISP on the continent having a worse transatlantic pipe than your ISP in the UK? If it weren’t for what Paragon said above I’d have just guessed the EU servers are located somewhere in Europe, which would explain it…

Phaeton.9582:

If you’re making the swap to EU though, PM Perdix.8641 your details.

A guild is being started specifically for competitive NA players jumping ship.

Thanks, but I was actually thinking of going the other way – I live in the same city as you actually! And I wasn’t thinking of switching for competitive reasons, but simply because most of my gaming time is really late at night and the EU pvp scene is pretty dead around then.
Plus I might be competitive in my attitude but I’m not competitive in my results… :p

If you don’t mind me asking, how come you switched to NA? Is the population better or is that just where your guildies are?

This is addressed to people who are playing spvp on a server not on the continent they live on. North Americans playing on European servers and vice versa, Australians or South Americans playing on North America, etc.

Is pvp playable, or is it too laggy? Can you still pull off clutch moves like dodging big damage skills etc?

If you used to play on your local server and then switched (eg you’re EU and used to play on EU, but then transferred to an NA server), was there a noticeable degradation in your ping and the game’s responsiveness after you transferred?

I know there are (or used to be) a few high-rated NA teams that played on EU servers, so I’m hoping someone will be able to help me! And if you’re in one of those teams, I’m curious: what made your guilds decide to join an EU server?

Thanks in advance!

Dee Jay.2460:

But the thing is the “we balance around team dynamics” approach NEVER works.

This gives me an excuse to once again bring up my favourite moment in Guild Wars 1: watching LUM vs WM game 2 on observer mode during the first tournament!
LUM got an early lead by bringing a build that was designed to fight as a team. They had a very strong backline, with a bonder monk (rarely seen in pvp!), who could reduce incoming damage for all his teammates as long as he was within range of them, and an elementalist spamming Heal Party as well as a dedicated healer and a protection monk.
By contrast, WM had 4 warriors, 2 rangers, and only a 2-monk backline. The warriors and rangers each carried their own healing skills, which was unusual in GW at the time, as monks were much better healers than any other profession so bringing a heal if you were an offensive class was seen as a wasted slot.
In the opening minutes of the game, WM got clobbered and suffer several deaths, as LUM was much stronger, having perfect counters to WM’s build (their mesmer was designed to punish WM’s warriors for using their healing signets) and a build that was much stronger together than the sum of its parts. However, WM took advantage of the self-sufficiency of their warriors to split and go round the back of LUM’s base, sneak in and kill their NPCs. This forced LUM to send people back to deal with them, and, with their team being so interdependent and reliant on the synergy between their various skills, they could not hold WM back when they weren’t all together. They started suffering deaths, until WM slowly clawed their way back into the lead. Eventually LUM suffered a wipe, and WM was able to kill their guild lord before they respawned. It was the most exciting half hour of gaming I’ve ever watched!

So yes, balancing around team fights rather than 1v1 can work. GW1 is proof of that. If that match was a simple team deathmatch with no secondary objectives, LUM would have won by having hte better 8v8 build. But because the secondary objectives gave WM more tactical options, they were able to turn things around.

The main point of this is that GW2 shouldn’t be balanced either for 1v1 or around 5v5 or 20v20 or any other number: it should give the players the flexibility to come up with the builds they want. Currently, team support builds are very underplayed – practically non-existent in tpvp. Even guardian bunkers tend to be selfish bunkers (they provide some team support but they’re mainly there for their own personal survivability and their ability to stay alive and contesting a point). The game’s mechanics allow for team support builds (although they are arguably underpowered), but the conquest game mode makes them impractical, and rewards selfish gameplay. If we ever actually get TDM, we’ll probably see support builds flourish more.

silvermember.8941:

Diamond skin is a terrible trait. But Diamond skin isn’t the reason why you probably lost to an elementalist. This screams like a learn to play issue.

Getting the ele down to 90% is easier than blinking.

Dude it definitely is not. I play a necro too, and DS eles aren’t much of a problem for me because I use carrion gear and flesh golem. But for a necro using rabid and plague, DS is pretty much a hard counter. I know I’m not nearly as good as the OP, cause I fought him about 12 hours ago (god knows why since I’m nowhere near him in the rankings!) and his team wiped the floor with us, so I can tell you firsthand it’s not a l2p or skill issue.

I absolutely agree that eles need some serious loving, but a blunt hard counter tool like DS is not the way to do it – it’s crap balancing (makes them invulnerable to a small subset of builds and just as easy to kill for everyone else), and terrible game design.

Mrbig.8019:

Solo q is totally random, the system puts high ranked people with total noobs in order to even teams ( sad part this is a team game so a top 100 guy with 4 scrubs won’t be able to carry them all, and this happens TONS of times, one of the biggest reasons why people afk on their high positions).

I’ve been top 100 eu for months till people kept on playing, now you see always the same people in the queues and only quite late at night ( sizer, collero, skoa,lisey and very few other ones ) while the rest are totally random nabs that became even more nabs thanks to this skill-less meta.

That’s due to low population, not bad matchmaking. The fact that you keep running into the same people should’ve given you a hint.

Is it bad that when I read the thread title the first thing that went through my head was “so THAT’S how they’re integrating spvp into the rest of the game”? (anyone who’s been in Lion’s Arch in the past 2 weeks will get what I mean) :p

Phaeton.9582:

Action: Players want to think a game is constantly being balanced. Conversely many of us sit around thinking of ways to unbalance your game, hence the constant need for adjustment. We enjoy doing this.

Yes, thank you Phaeton, you’ve explained perfectly why regular balance patches are so important! Quoting you to say this is also a large part of what made GW1’s pvp so exciting: every time there was a balance patch, the theorycrafters would go all a-buzz, all the top players would jump into their smurf guilds, and observer mode would be awash in new, strange, gimmicky builds as people tried this out. We weren’t just playing against each other: we were playing against the developers!

I know Izzy didn’t think so back then: his theory of game balancing (at least as he expressed it publicly) was to try and reach an ideal state where the metagame would balance itself without regular patching by the developers. ie. if one build became too popular, a counterbuild would arise. When that became too popular a counter to that would arise.

In reality, however, the game never reached that state. There were a few brief periods where this was the case, and they were fun, no build was predominant and there was lots of diversity,but they’d never last: either some blatantly overpowered skill would get nerfed, and this would have knock-on effects, or one class that had been underpowered for a long time would receive a radical re-design, an expansion would get released and throw literally hundreds of new skills and 2 new professions into the mix, or even the game modes would be redesigned! I don’t think we ever made it more than 3 months without a MAJOR balance upset, and I don’t think we made it three weeks without any skill balancing at all! It was constantly engaging because the game was always subtly changing, and it kept people interested as they were constantly being given new toys to play with (even if it was jsut the old toys with different scaling), and new ways to outsmart the balancing team and find some new and broken build.
So to reiterate Phaeton’s point: the most satisfying win isn’t against other players, it’s against the devs! If you’re not up for this fight, bring Izzy back to the balancing team – I didn’t like his rather extreme approach to nerfing some overly-popular builds, but at least he had the right playfully adversarial attitude.

Much of this can be solved by regular tweaks to the % damage/healing on skills in spvp. We’re talking in the order of 4-12%. Many of us see such changes as sPvP maintenance.

Pretty much this: issue a balance patch tomorrow, I guarantee the active pvp population will increase 50% for the following 3-4 days. If it’s actually a good patch that upsets the metagame the increase will persist for a month. If you do this every 2 weeks, you’re golden.

Evan Lesh.3295:

I like this question. As you said, our focus right now is to better integrate sPvP with the rest of the game. This will hopefully do one major thing: Bring more people into sPvP that are already playing Gw2. This will mean more competition, and better matchmaking. The new ladders (which I hope you’re giving feedback for in the CDI thread) should be a good way to gain prestige for being the best.

I think that’s an excellent plan to draw more people into spvp, but I have one caveat: the game’s balance is so bad at the moment that new players that come into pvp will get chewed up, spat out, and abused by their teammates for being “nubs” and told to “go back to pve” (it always kills part of my soul when someone in map chat is being abusive to a player who’s blatantly just new, but there’s not much I can do to stop it). Only a small number of builds are viable, and some among those are massively head and shoulders above all the rest, to the point where a new player, not playing a meta build and coming across a meta thief, warrior, or necro, will be practically instagibbed.

Being destroyed and then verbally abused is not fun for anyone, so these new people will quit in short order and never touch pvp again. If you’re plan is going to work, you have to make with the balance patches BEFORE all those supposed new pvpers show up!

New ladders are good, new rewards are good, new game modes would be EXCELLENT, but what the pvp community want most of all is more frequent balance patches! Frequent, small-scale skill balances every couple of weeks, tweaking a few numbers here and there, and seeing how things go. That’s the only way to fix the balance in this game and make it ACTUALLY ENJOYABLE.

The notion that we have to wait SEVERAL MORE WEEKS for a balance patch that will only take a small, incremental step to moving us out of this atrocious meta that we’ve had to endure since summer is extremely frustrating. And the knowledge that that balance patch will come as part of a larger release in which sigils will be completely overhauled and armour runes rebalanced is absolutely flabergasting! How on earth will you be able to tell what the effects of your skill balances were if you throw the entire game in flux like that? Seriously, it’s a terrible idea!

Justin,

Justin ODell.9517:

I completely get that, and while I have no idea how/why sPvP got off-track around launch, I’m determined to keep moving sPvP forward to be what many of us hope it can be. I’m very proud of the work the team has been doing, and I think we’re heading the right direction.

You have no idea how gratified and hopeful the above paragraph made me. This was the first time I’ve seen anyone from ANet acknowledge that spvp is indeed “off-track”! It gives me confidence that there really are some people among you who realise that there are some fundamental problems that need fixing and you’re trying to work things out.

Frankly, I can tell you exactly where things went off-track. I know I’m nobody in the community and you have no reason to pay attention, but I think my answer is simple and undeniable, and it’s this:

I generally try to be very understanding, and put myself in the shoes of our players, which is usually very easy because we often share the same concerns. Occasionally it just gets on my nerves how myopic some people in the community can be at times.

This. With your very next sentence you revealed the problem perfectly: the problem is that the players have no idea what the problem is! You’re sitting in the office all day, reading abuse and whining on the forums, and you’re resentfully thinking to yourselves “these plebs have no idea what kind of problems we have to overcome here! Ingrates!”

And you’re absolutely right, we don’t, and when someone who has no clue what hurdles you’re trying to overcome is telling you you’re not doing your job right, it’s understandably annoying! So here’s the thing Justin: why won’t you tell us???

What’s wrong? Is there not enough manpower in the pvp team? Is the process of testing and certifying a patch internally too onerous? Are you getting conflicting feedback from different sections of the playerbase and you’re not sure what we actually want? Are there technical problems preventing you from implementing certain things? WHAT’S WRONG? Months and months after the CDI thread on this forum, why have we not had new game modes? Why are we still waiting on the new reward system? Why have we had THE SAME HATEFUL METAGAME SINCE SUMMER? When you started the collaborative development initiative, you certainly did offer greater transparency, and things like “feature X has to be pushed back 6 months because of such and such a problem” is a part of that. If you don’t do that, people will take your words as simply smoke and empty promises and you’ll lose all goodwill you gained by starting that initiative in the first place.

When the community is kept in the dark, and a developer lets slip something like this:

we’re just waiting for the LW season to come to an end.

Then people read it and wonder “Why??? Why do you have to wait for the LW season to be over? What in all the living hells does the LW content have to do with pvp?”

If, otoh, you explained that, for instance, there’s too many devs working on LW content and you don’t have enough hands on deck to work on pvp stuff. Or that pvp patches needing to be bundled in with other content to keep the number of patches at a minimum. Or whatever other reason you can possibly have for linking spvp development to LW, I don’t know, but that’s the whole problem: I DON’T KNOW JUSTIN, I JUST DON’T KNOW!! If I knew I would accept it – hell, I might even understand, and agree that the plan is sensible! But being told simply “wait for living story to finish and THEN we might tell you what’s happening and when” seems arbitrary and dismissive.

I’m glad you opened up. I know you guys have problems too and we don’t understand. But when people are unhappy with your game, you need to make them understand why you’re not making it better yesterday already! So if you want to win back the goodwill of the community and reduce the number of hateful invective and moaning on this forum, you better open up about more than just your personal frustration and start sharing some of the problems that are holding things up!

And if that’s not an option, if Mike O’Brian would sack you for sharing your internal development processes, then do the following, in this order, and you’ll at least mollify the community if not outright win them back:
1. More frequent, incremental balance patches, decoupled from feature patches and other releases.
2. New game modes. Just a single team deathmatch map sometime within the next 3 months is a good start!
3. Simpler rewards structure. Hell, if you simply introduced skins that are transferrable between pvp and pve, and increased gold rewards and achievement points a bit, I’d personally be happy.

Thanks again for posting and I hope you’ll take my advice to heart.

Putting confusion instead of direct damage on Terror would negate its potential as burst damage. Confusion in particular over all other conditions because you need to be activating actions for it to hurt you. I know it sounds counterintuitive that a condition build would need a source of “burst”. I refer you to that video Nemesis made yonks ago as to why this is the case, which most people think gave the devs the idea for Terror in the first place actually.

Now, if it were Torment instead of direct damage that could work, as it’s doing damage simply because you’re running away, so it’s both burst damage (assuming enough stacks), and a good cover condi (assuming enough duration), and thematically appropriate “attrition” damage.

Confusion could easily stand in for burning in Dhuumfire though. Frankly its random proc makes it not worth much as burst, so while the extra damage is nice there’s no way you can make it proc right when you need it. A longer lasting “attrition” condition like confusion would be preferable to a short burn to me. Helps cover all your bleed stacks. When Dhuumfire gets moved to Life Blast it’ll get infinitely better as a source of on-demand burst damage of course, but I think seeing as we’ll still have Terror to do that I’d still prefer confusion to burning.

Mesmer is much closer in spirit to the original!

It was the “of course it’s intentional cause it’s one of the best skills in the game” tone that angered me.

Yeah damage reduction on weakness is random, that’s why Plague 2 is better. In wvw, full zerker with food and consumable buffs and 25 stacks of bloodlust/perception, that sortn of damage is attainable.

Agree with Drarnor, better autoattack (at the very least faster projectile speed!) and merging the 5 (FIVE!!!!!) traits associated with marks into 2 would be a good place to start.

However, I would add one thing: RESTORE THE AREA CLEANSE ON PUTRID MARK! This was one of the very few sources of team support the necromancer had and it was not merely nerfed but entirely eradicated! I know it was too powerful in its original form but I’ve listed a large number of ways in which the area cleanse could be restored in a balanced way over here: https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/professions/necromancer/Putrid-Mark-and-teamplay-suggestions/first#post3382145
The fact that insult was added to injury by the fact that ANet refused to even acknowledge the stealth-nerf for months, letting us think it was a bug, and when it addressed the issue they had the nerve to say that the full cooldown on interrupt bug was also by design was something I found personally very hurtful, and destroyed a lot of the goodwill I felt towards the company.

krippler.9826:

Immobilized from behind, I can still fire the skill and turn towards my attacker:
http://youtube.com/watch?v=Sqjrr2MFWsI

We tried a lot of different combinations and could not find anything that put the skill on an interrupted cooldown. Also, my auto-attack DOES let me turn and attack while immobilized as well.

Does this only work if the target is 180 degrees behind you? Or do you also turn when he’s off to the side?

Although I don’t think necro condi builds need a damage boost, I also agree that confusion and torment feel much more appropriate fluff-wise than bleeding. Yes I also preferred Curses builds in GW1 and I really miss watching over-eager wammos kill themselves by attacking through my hexes!

Very enjoyable video Nemesis! That last fight in particular was so tense and entertaining I actually cheered when you feared that dude off the map! Good to see you’re still around and keep up the good work!

Re: the Golem vs Plague discussion, I also prefer the golem by far, as it’s far more versatile than the stability offered by Plague. Not only can you use it to secure stomps (in combination with the stability from Lyssa), you can also use it to prevent enemy stomps even if your fears are on cooldown. The most amusing use is to interrupt revives by knocking the downed player back – works even if the charge doesn’t hit the player reviving!
And yes, Lyssa runes are arguably overpowered, but far less so on necromancer: it’s not like I need the full condi cleanse, which is the most powerful aspect of it (most necros have 2 transfers on their weapon skills, 1 full cleanse from CC, and some also run Plague Signet!), so the main use I get out of it is the 5" of stability. 5" stability, once every 60" (assuming the golem is alive and the summons is not on cooldown, which is a BIG conditional!), is hardly overpowered, is it?

I also have problems getting that skill to work – it’s the main reason I still rely on staff! I don’t know why but it seems to go on interrupt cd much more often than other skills. Even Epidemic with its long cast time, which makes it easy for targets to leave your front arc during its cast!

However, in this occasion Redball might be right: I rewatched the video frame-by-frame, and the moment you get immobilised you’re facing the warrior who’s standing right next to the tip of the A on the floor. Then he moves off to the corner (or gets launched there by your teammate?) and immeidately after that you cast Deathly Swarm. Since you should still be facing the tip of the A the warrior should be just out of your LOS there.

I know, it’s annoying, and particularly since some skills don’t even need LOS…

Agreed, grab Focussed Rituals and chuck your Wells and Marks into the enemy blob from the back of your own group. At lvl 33 if you get close enough for them to sneeze at you you’re dead so stick with a zerg and stay near the back. You’ll find the levelling speed isn’t that bad though, getting keeps and towers gets you lots of XP and a big group goes through them pretty quick

@Rym NT poisons people around the wurm, but doesn’t leave a poison field or do damage.

@Bhawb I agree the poison field is excellent in team fights – with finishers from teammates and your bone fiend you can keep reapplying poison aoe for the whole fight, but since minionmancers in pvp mostly bunker and 1v1 its utility is limited: now that I know it doesn’t proc on intentional sacrifices, it’s no longer a no-brainer choice when compared to either Close to Death in Spite or Fetid Consumption in blood.

Overkillengine.6084:

The DS bar is also anti-team play in that if you are forced to turtle in it due to pressure, no one else can help heal you; which also means the enemy knows that and will just keep focusing on you….because enough aegis, blind, and non healing support to save you from that is also enough to pretty much ensure immortality for any other class not as hampered by their class mechanic, so even then you still remain the best focus target.

It just needs to go. Its current incarnation is too incompatible with the current state of the game. The trick is both getting the devs to admit that and actually invest the resources to make the needed changes.

Fully agree, and may I add it’s not just that your team can’t support you: being locked out of your utilities means you can’t effectively support them either. (The only exception possibly being fearing someone about to stomp your teammate, or underwater DS4 which I don’t think I’ve EVER clicked except by accident since I don’t pvp underwater and I mostly pve on my own.)
And yet a necro with a full life bar is at a TREMENDOUS advantage 1v1, as you can pop it instantly whenever you feel their burst coming and let them blow their cooldown skills burning through your life force. You come out of it healthy and rosy-cheeked and they’re on full cd, and it’s goodnight nurse. OTOH in a team fight even a full DS bar makes hardly any difference, because no amount of extra health is gonna be enough if you’re chain-CCed and being wailed on by 3 people.

I remember when I was reading pre-beta interviews DS was originally meant to be the necro’s downed state. Not sure how that would have worked, but it’s clear that the “extra health” idea originated from that and you can just tell it was a hurried and not well thought out change. At this stage, inertia, fear of a backlash from players, and the daunting complexity of how any substantial change will affect the overall game balance means it’s unlikely to be changed, particularly with balance patches being SO FAR APART!

I did love the variety of RA.
What I did NOT like was:
a. getting a 3v4 because someone on your team left because you don’t have a monk (bonus irony points if your ritualist subsequently said “but I’M a healer!” right after the leaver left)
b. finally getting a monk and then finding out he’s a smiter.
c. rerolling as a monk yourself to prevent this from happening again, and then IMMEDIATELY getting teamed up with 3 other monks on your first match.

With GW2’s class system those sorts of situations shouldn’t occur, and balancing will be far less of a problem. I was really looking forward to getting RAs without the frustrations, and was really surprised when all we got instead was Conquest.

Let me be clear, I don’t mind the “shaving” approach. I much prefer that to what balancing looked like in GW1, where if a skill was deemed too strong it was nerfed utterly to the ground. Ask anyone who played elementalists in GW1 about Ether Renewal and I guarantee they’ll start spewing invective about Izzy! :p
My problem is wiht the huge time lag between patches. I mean if you’re gonna do some MAJOR rebalancing/reworking that’s gonna throw the metagame on its head then fine, but minor 5% tweaks in effectiveness? They don’t need 2 months gap between them!