Guild Wars 2

Interestingly, both Death Nova and Putrid Explosion seem to do roughly the same amount of damage whatever your own stats are. Tried it with berserker gear as well as with no amulet on the golems hundreds of times and both are always doing between 1200-1600 damage.

I have also seen them crit for ~2400 dam,age, but the crit rate is EXTREMELY low, even in berserker gear, so I guess it’s unaffected by your own precision and critical damage.

OK I repeated my tests with bone minions, and you’re right, they don’t proc the damage when exploded either! Earlier today I thought I was seeing 2 sets of numbers (one for Death Nova and one for Putrid Explosion), but I repeated the tests while recording them and played them back in slow motion, and there’s only 1 set (which I assume is Putrid). However, the poison field DOES proc, both for Flesh Wurm and for Bone Minions.

So it’s conclusive: when deliberately sacrificed, minions proc the Death Nova poison field but not the damage. Makes me wonder whether there’s any point to death nova in pvp tbh, very disappointing,…. And the fact that the poison field procs anyway makes me wonder whether this might be a bug!

What do you mean “as intended”? Does Necrotic Traversal trigger Death Nova or not?

I just tested this in the Mists against the golems, got video of it too. The Flesh Wurm doesn’t trigger Death Nova when it’s sacrificed with Necrotic Traversal!

I’d say maybe this is a feature, but the Bone Minions DEFINITELY trigger Death Nova when exploded so I doubtthis is the case.

Can anyone confirm that this is the case for them as well?

Tim.6450:

Make it optional for every transformation skill.

that might be a good idea

/Signed, please fix this bug! It’s been forever and it’s a pain in pvp especially!

Overkillengine.6084:

Edit: or condense DS to F1-F4 skills that consume life-force as fuel without a transformation.

Amen brother, the sooner the “second health bar” mechanic goes out the window the better! It’s been a nightmare to balance since BWE1! Just make life force an energy bar that powers F1-F4 abities.
And yes, I know that having to BUILD UP life force in order to start using your class mechanics will also be a challenge to balance, but, hell, they managed it for warriors just fine – between disposable and easily resummonable minions, spectral skills, and traits that increase life force gain it shouldn’t be anywhere near as hard to balance as giving us an extra 12-20k HP to play with depending on build, a buggy transformation mechanic that stops us from healing our REAL health bar and locks us out of our healing and utility, and skills that only work during the transformation!

You should also note that going into DS removes the passive effect of signets from you. Or at least appears to: the signet icon doesn’t appear in your status area, so I assume it’s not applied. This might be by design, but since other effects that have been activated before entering DS (Locust Swarm, Spectral Walk, Spectral Armour) persist through the transformation, I have to assume that this is rather a bug that arises due to the utility lock-out.

Of course, they’ll never admit it and insist it’s by design, like the 40" lockout if Putrid Mark is interrupted. Since it’s “the best skill in the game” apparently.

It’;s not actually a UI delay though is it: you’re ACTUALLY locked out of your utilities, right? It’s not that they simply don’t show on your skillbar, they’re unuseable!

Another weird thing that happened to me today, activating a stunbreak (wurm) while casting my healing skill interrupted it. I’m pretty sure it wasn’t an enemy player that did it, because there was no stun/dazed icon on my status bar. Plus, the wurm teleported me away from wherever any enemy could have reached me with an interrupt, and the healing skill wasn’t interrupted till after the stunbreak.
I wasn’t able to reproduce this in the mists. Has it happened to anyone else?

That’s a great idea actually. You could even have people from thge other profession podcasts do it too, and then get the hosts of all the podcasts together to discuss balance progression in the game. Possibly invite a dev to participate.

BTW you asked for sound feedback: the laptop fan is definitely audible, but it’s not that bad. It’s an improvement over older episodes when there was a lot more background noise, though definitely not as good as in the last episode, when there was no background noise at your end at all.

Bear in mind though, what makes things difficult for the listener isn’t just the audio quality on its own but the discrepancy in volume and clarity when different people are talking. If Tenderly is a lot louder than you are, for example, people are going to adjust their volume so that either your voice is too soft, or Tenderly’s is sounding distorted coming out of their speakers, and either way they can’t hear one of you. That’s where a quick pass over with software like Audacity can really work wonders, though obviously if you insist on doing it live over Twitch you can’t do that.

Sunshine.5014:

TL;DR: The current balance approach is broken because the interval is too long. I suggest decoupling number tweaks from big changes, and that comes with many benefits.

Completely agree, thank you for posting this! I argued the same thing in https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/pvp/pvp/Please-decouple-Balance-from-Feature-patches/first#post3569290 but you said it much more coherently.

I have to say though, 1 week might be too brief a time for the dust to settle, so to speak. I think minor balance patches every 2 weeks (on weeks alternating with living story patches).

Oh it IS more fun, I’m not denying it! If you’re playing a build I’m familiar with so I can tell what you’re doing just by watching then I can just enjoy the amusing commentary and take tips on your tactical decisions about where to move to etc.
It’s just that when I see you playing a profession I’m unfamiliar with I’m more interested in hearing why you use each ability when you use it, which obviously is incredibly hard for someonbe to explain while actually playing.

yLoon.5289:

manveruppd.7601:

This has GOT to be a joke right? Is the OP mocking all the “matchmaking fail!” threads started by people complaining about rank 1s in their top-500 tournament games or something?

Which part of “Noobs ruined Hot-join Game-play Experience” have failed to make you understand the discussion was about Hotjoin and not about tournament?

Yeah that’s why I thought you MUST be joking: IT’S HOTJOIN!

Emapudapus.1307:

As for power necro, in my opinion and experience, you must be prety lucky and outplay decap engi to kill it, not so easy. + he might cap point for them before you kill it.

I’m pretty sure he was joking, not really suggesting that the build with THE LEAST stability is good for pushing off the build with THE MOST knockbacks :p

On topic though, I don’;t think decap engis are that bad. They don’t do that much damage, their cc (except rifle 4) are telegraphed, and they’re not that tough. Anyone with ranged damage can cede the point to them for 10" and kill them from a distance, and anyone with stability can just ignore them.

TheBlackLeech.9360:

Remove the teamswap/choose team feature (except from custom arenas.)
Force new/joining players to spectate until there are 2 waiting so 1 can join each team simultaneously.
Punish players for leaving a team abruptly
Don’t let a match begin if there are uneven teams
If a player does leave, increase the respawn timer on the team with an extra player to help balance the match until another player joins

From reading your list it seems you mostly play hotjoin – have you thought about switching to tournament? You get the occasional 4v5 there when someone leaves, and you occasionally get people of mismatched skill levels in the same match, but it;’s not anywhere near as often as hotjoin!

The thing is, hotjoin is designed to be casual, jump-in/jump-out fun. You want to play for a few minutes while your tournament queue pops? Go hotjoin! You expecting guests and know you’ll need to leave suddenly when the doorbell rings? Go hotjoin! The consequences of you leaving are minimal because another player is bound to take your place soon, and games are unranked so even if your team loses unfairly by being outnumbered most of the game it doesn’t really matter.

Your suggestions (except for the last one, which I think is pretty good and might work!) would really put a dent on how casual the game mode is. They’d stop you from being able to jump in instantly (cause you’d have to wait for someone else to join the other team too), and they’d penalise you for leaving. It would turn hotjoin into something more fair and formalised. But that sort of gametype is already available in tournaments, so there really is no need to do so – you would only penalise the people who NEED the more casual gamemode cause they don’t have the time or a reliable enough connection to play seriously.

This has GOT to be a joke right? Is the OP mocking all the “matchmaking fail!” threads started by people complaining about rank 1s in their top-500 tournament games or something?

These are a lot of fun to watch but you’re not really doing much “explaining”, you’re too busy playing to really comment on your or your opponents’ actions. You do a decent job of explaining your decision on the macro level (I’ll go to this point, I’ll go cap the buff now etc), but not as much on the actual details of combat, because, understandably, you’re too focussed on the fighting to be able to comment on it! Have you considered recording your commentary as a voiceover AFTER the match, so you can explain things at your leisure?

Bumping because after a few games I played just now the thought of waiting till March for a balance patch SICKENS ME TO THE STOMACH!

Justin ODell.9517:

Dahkeus.8243:

So many people in this community bash newbies…

With good reason. They aren’t very good.

One of several reasons I’m glad we’re going to keep ranks. (Thanks, community!) Ranks should act as a decent proxy for game-knowledge, allowing us to place people better.

Newbies can learn with people that won’t dominate them, which is good because that isn’t very fun. Trolls, err… veterans won’t have to worry as much about picking up the slack. Win/Win.

1. That’s a terrible attitude: newbies are never going to get good if they keep getting screamed at and abused by their more experienced teammates just for being new – they’ll just quit.

2. When they get thrown into matches with r50s who instagib them before they even realise they were in a fight they’ll, again, just quit.

3. I’m glad you’re tweaking matchmaking – although any system that ranks complete newbies at tthe 50% mark and lets them work their way up should probably be thrown out and replaced by somehting completely new rather than tweaked imho.

4. If you recognise that a player’s rank can be a more accurate indicator of their raw experience (not necessarilly skill, but experience, which also counts for somethign), then why not restrict people under rank X to hotjoins only? This would be the simplest way to stop this kind of thing from happening COMPLETELY! It wouldn’t require you to tweak the complex maths of a broken system, it would let newbies LEARN THE GAME in a friendlier environment, and it would reduce frustration for high-ranked players who just made the mistake of joining a tournament at a time when nobody else around the same MMR was online. (Which, frankly, is MOST OF THE TIME right now since pvp population has collapsed lately, and matchmaking snafus like this one are part of the reason why!)

If it were up to me I’d make it 1-19 hotjoin only, 20 unlocks solo arenas, 25 unlocks team arenas.

Good luck with your move dude!

garethh.3518:

Dahkeus.8243:

Idk…I think it’s pretty unfair to the teams who lost because of 4 v 5.

If your internet is unstable, you should probably stick to hotjoins.

4v5s aren’t good.
Sure.
We all know that.
We all know that in GW2 ranks mean literally nothing so ‘ranked queue’ is the normals queue of any other game.
We all know that no other game punishes players as heavily as GW2.

Internet issues are a part of every online game.
No other game is as quick to punish leavers with day+ bans as GW2.
Yet other game’s normals queues aren’t drowning in 4v5s…

Lo and behold… these people aren’t your issue. This isn’t the issue.
Punishing these internet hicups is only hurting part of the legitimate playerbase.

The issue with GW2, the reason why there are so many 4v5s and you guys are so torn up is elsewhere.
Fix what’s broken, QQ about the queue setup.

Setting aside the fact that your post was barely comprehensible, I disagree: ANet’s network code is pretty good, and I don’t experience any more lag or connectivity problems than with any other MMO. The reason why more people APPEAR to have disconnection problems in GW2 than in other MMOs is that few MMOs have 10-player pvp modes that are as popular with the playerbase. To use just the example of WoW, pvp was a far less popular activity there, and of the pvpers a lot of them preferred 1v1, 2v2 or 3v3 anyway, where because of the lower number of players it’s less likely that one will disconnect.

The fact is, there are a lot of players who have unstable connections, whetehr it’s because of where they live, because they share a connection with lots of other people in their house and it’s overloaded, because they’re too lazy to hook up a wire to their computer room and they use wifi from 2 floors up and with 7 walls between them and their router, because they choose to play GW2 on a server 6000km away from them instead of choosing their home district, or for whatever other reason. This is an issue in other games as well, but

In a lot of cases there are simple, inexpensive things you can do to improve your connection. You can ask your housemates not to torrent anything for the 1 hour a day you’re playing, if you suspect that’s what’s making your connection flakey. You can buy long network cables so you doin’t need to rely on wifi for not much money. You can log on to play when it’s not peak time for your area. If you’re not doing these simple things, and just sign up for tournaments on a flakey connection, I have no sympathy for you at all, you deserve the dishonourable debuffs, and in fact I wish they were branded onto your foreheads irl rather than simply on your status bar in-game.

However, I realise that for some people it’s simply because they live 2,000 miles off the edge of the middle of nowhere, where broadband is still powered by steam engines that keep running out of coal and cogs that keep breaking, and there’s nothing they can personally do to make their connection more reliable. And yeah, for those people it is kinda unfair, and I feel for them. But on balance, I would have to say it’s a lot more unfair for their teammates than it is for them, simply because there’s FOUR of them! So rather than making 5 people sad by playing and disconnecting, there’s less unfairness all-round if you just make yourself sad by not playing.

Alternatively, there is one thing you can do: play GW1 instead, which used a lot less bandwidth and had the most robust network code of any online game ever! :p

This is a cool idea! It’s not too different than what this guy here: https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/pvp/pvp/Defeat-the-Meta-Tournament is trying to do. (Though I like your idea of also having standardised appearances for characters better, as it would mean perfectly even ground)

I like this idea, it’s interesting
The problem I foresee is there might be issues with the banned builds, in terms of “what constitutes a fullbunker engi”, or a MM necro? I think it’s better if you simply banned specific skills, traits, or combinations thereof, like you did with ranger where you just say “no spirits”. For necro you could say “no terror, no dhuumfire” for instance. I realise you might not know enough about all the classes to do this, but you can ask people who main them.
Incidentally,. I also suggest you ban Lyssa runes, as certain builds hinge on them.

Thanks Diogo, my point exactly.
@Shockwave, the fact that the skill balance team is separate from the feature team is exactly why balance patches COULD be decoupled from feature patches with little effect.

Having listened to the last Ready Up, I agree with your decision to separate feature patches from living story patches. New living story additions always draw players away from pvp, making the effects of new features and patches become impossible to discern for days, until after everyone who’s keen to try out the new pve content has done so and decided to go back to pvp.

In the same vein, I believe that balance patches should also be decoupled from feature patches. The next patch in particular will radically overhaul the game with the rebalancing of rune sets and the changes to sigils. This means that the effect of skill balances will be completely impossible to see, as the metagame will be in flux for days if not weeks simply while people figure out the new optimal rune and sigil combos for their existing builds, let alone figuring out new builds enabled by the changes.

Meanwhile the skill balancing you seem to have planned seems quite minor, mildly shaving the power of a few skils and traits. Such minor changes will be completely overwhelmed by the sigil changes, and it will be impossible to tell whether the patch will have improved profession balance or not!

Moreover, in the past week I’ve personally seen the pvp population crash (presumably the effect of Wintersday rewards for pvp going away and people having cashed out most of their glory – I’m sure your live tracking of the game will corroborate my completely subjective impressions), and the metagame sink back into its warrior/warrior/guardian/necro/thief rut. Everyone’s tired and bored of the current meta, and I don’t see why we should all wait until the major new features are complete for a minor skill balance patch to try and shake things up a bit. Bearing in mind the scale of the rune and sigil changes you have planned, the skill balances seem to be trivial by comparison: I’m sure they’re the easiest to implement and I’d be surprised if they’re not mostly complete already. I’m sure it would therefore be easy for you to to implement the balance patch at least a couple of weeks before the feature patch. From a skill balancing point of view, this would allow you to more easily be able to see the effect of those changes, before the more radical overhaul of the new runes and sigils comes in to upset the metagame, and it would also cause the entire pvp playerbase (who are overwhelmingly tired of the current meta) to thank you for any patch that has a chance of changing it!

Dalanor.5387:

Sorry queen for the last post. Constructive mode ON:

- Proir the spectral nerf necro was fine against focus fire as you can see in the twitch link above. Currently the SArmor and SWalk has an ICD and makes them pointless against multiple opponents. Sometimes i feel it weak against fast hitting too.

I thionk they’re actually stronger in 1v1 now than they were before. But yeah, I agree, weaker vs multiple opponents. Like Nemesis said many times, DS acting like a bonus health pool makes it very powerful for 1v1 and useless in group fights, and introducing an ICD on spectral walk/armour just reinforces this. Now, if they made the ICD work PER OPPONENT rather than on the armour (like ele auras do), so you’re getting more LF the more people you’re getting hit by instead of a flat 8%/second, that would make it better for group fights.

- Theoretically we have an awesome uptime on stability, but in reality its bad. Only available if you spend 30 points in a trait line where you wouldnt heavily invest and for that you need to choose two mandatory traits for that. Mind you, DS isnt a stunbreaker.

That indeed is a problem, stability doesn’t remove CC if you’re already under it, so flashing into DS won’t break stun: so even with foot in the grave it remains just an extra health pool with which to facetank damage.

- After the insane nerf of putrid mark (cough bug cough fix it cough), necro loss a huge condi removal potencial, especially in group enviroment so its an issue in all game modes.

Ahem! https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/professions/necromancer/Putrid-Mark-and-teamplay-suggestions/first#post3382145

ps: fix the skill lockout asap!

THIS!

Anyone who’s been at the wrong end of a zerker ele or a shatter mesmer will disagree with you, nekretaal.: necro is definitely not a burst class. Even our glassiest power builds focus on delivering steady parcels of damage (even if it is huge 3k-damage parcels), rather than on pulling off combos that eat up half the enemy’s health pool in one go. We can’t do stuff like burning speed+rtl+arcane wave, or mesmer’s mind wrack+mantra of distraction+GS auto. The closest we’ve got on power builds is dropping wells and then going into Lich Form for the increased power (or DS if it’s a DP build), which might be immense damage but it’s delivered over time rather than in a burst. Both Life Blast and the Lich auto have fairly slow casting times and we have no quickness. And as condi the closest thing you have to burst is stack bleeds, wait for dhuumfire, then double fear. That’;s not burst.

And while I agree that we do need more defensive mechanisms and especially stability, it’s not really fair to compare ours to the ele’s and say our defences suck: eles have about 60% of our base health (and about 40% if you have a full DS bar!), so without COMPLETE invulnerabilities they wouldn’t even survive being blinked at! If we ever got a complete invulnerability similar to the ele’s Mist Form, it would have to be FAR weaker (less duration and longer recharge) to balance our massively higher health pool. I would much rather get better access to stability and improved disables and debuffs than something like that, frankly, and I think in the long run what’s going to happen is they’ll rework DS to be an energy pool which we can spend to activate snares, debuffs, and fears (similar to the ones we’ve got but better), rather than an extra life bar which we’ll be expected to use to facetank damage while stunned or being ping-ponged cause we have no stability.

It was the first build in the video I found most interesting: scepter/dagger+axe/warhorn. Are you using condition damage gear there or do you focus more on power? Also curious, you using close to death or dhuumfire in spite 30?

A number of people (including me) in the patch preview thread suggested that a way to nerf this trait without moving it into master would be to make it just inflict weakness. The devs actually liked the suggestion at the time, but it seems they decided to implement it very differently.

Personally I don’t take it anymore, I’ve replaced it with chilling darkness.

Frankly with the amount of aoe we have thieves are rarely a problem. With a bit of thinking you can guess where they’re going when they go into stealth and drop your marks in their path – you can see them triggering so you can keep following them around! If you run out of marks use DS4: they have so little health that by the time the channel finishes they’ll have unstealthed straight into downed state.

Thanks dude, I can’t remember the last time a post on this subforum made me smile so much!

I like your hybrid build, also curious to see your stats!

Justin ODell.9517:

It would not be a simple change for the existing systems unfortunately. We also can’t just slip things in to random updates like that for many good reasons which I agree with but can’t get into on the forums.

There’s actually one very simple thing you can do to improve things: new players are limited to hotjoin, solo arenas unlock at rank 20, team arenas at rank 30 (ballpark of course).

Use something like Forsaker’s build and you’ll do fine, try practising in hotjoin till you get the hang of it.

How on earth do you stay alive with zerker everything? :o I can see that 1v1 with full LF you could kill them before they could kill you, but for small group fights as soon as more than one person looks at you it’s over!

@Pendragon, that’s exactly what I like about it: since the devs seem determined to keep DS as our only source of survivability rather than give us the kind of real mitigation mechanics that other classes have, letting us use life force as a bonus endurance pool is basically doing exactly that! :p

Plus it’s the kind of mechanic that forces a tactical decision on the player: do I go into DS to absorb incoming damage, or do I use LF to dodge it? It forces you to think about how big the incoming attack will be, and whether you’ll waste less life force by dodging it or by facetaking it in DS.

To be fair, Nemesis, a lot of your older videos are out of date now. I doubt it was a grudge-related thing.

I’ve been running a conditionmancer in WvW but now I feel like trying something different. I’ve settled on a Deathly Perception build, but since I spend 90% of my time in spvp I don’t have a clue what gear and food to go for, so I’d appreciate some advice!

I’ve come up with this:
http://gw2skills.net/editor/?fQAQNBHhZakRLbPczbjePhA949qFnJqAyQ9wdMnPE-j0BBYLCiECgpmYZPERslUFRjVVjIqWlETKAWFGB-w

10 in Curses is so I can swap in Focussed Rituals and quickly switch my utilities to wells when I’m running with a zerg. Current utility setup is obviously for roaming/small group fights, so please bear that in mind when suggesting different gear.

Chose Celestial jewellery cause I reckon they’re flexible enough I can keep using them if I change to a different build, but if you think celestial sucks I’m open to suggestions. Having chosen celestial I tried to hit 40% crit chance with the rest of my gear so I can have as close to 100% as possible with deathly perception. With zerker weapons and soldier’s armour, I found I couldn’t hit that threshold without food and runes. I’d have gone for Lyssa runes but they’re stupidly overpriced atm. Maybe once I’ve cashed in all my pvp glory I’ll be able to afford them.

tl;dr: zerker weapons, soldier armour, celestial trinkets, sound good for a roaming DP build?

This is actually a really promising idea. Not sure if the LF cost is right, would probably need a lot of testing, but I like it!

They did? I can still see it!

During the past several months Anet have been trying to promote team play by buffing skills that affect allies as well as creating new ones, as changes to guardians, mesmers (esp. mantras), and even necros with the Transfusion buff and the reduced well cooldowns have shown. And yet recently, they finally formalised a very severe stealth-nerf to one of the necro’s best party support skills: Putrid Mark.

Nobody disagrees that the original form of Putrid Mark was overpowered: complete condi cleanse 5 allies within a large radius and transfer to some hapless enemy, plus complete cleanse and transfer off the caster at 1200 range. And easy access to Greater Marks making it unblockable to make it even safer to hit.

Conversely, I think most people on these forums at least agree that the nerf is far too severe: at 3 conditions removed from the caster only, it now lags far behind comparative condi transfers/removals like Deathly Swarm which has half the cooldown, even accounting for its high damage, large radius, and double (possibly due to a bug) blast finisher.

But tbh, for me the worst part of the nerf wasn’t the reduction of the conditions it transfers to 3 only rather than all, or the fact that moving Greater Marks to master tier made it harder to make it unblockable. For me, it was the fact that it no longer cleanses allies! This flies in the face of what ANet have been trying to do, which is to encourage team plays and support builds, and for most condition builds, who don’t normally carry wells or invest in Transfusion, it was their only available means of team support. Selfish builds are boring and take less skill and coordination to play, whereas team support options make the game more interesting and sophisticated.

With that in mind, I’d like to suggest a few different ways in which the ally cleanse could be restored without making Putrid Mark as powerful as it used to be pre-nerf:

- Option 1. Restore the ally transfer, at 3 condis each rather than unlimited, but remove the ranged cleanse: the necromancer has to be standing in the mark to be cleansed, same as any other ally. This is my favourite option. I don’t know if it’s possible – I suspect the devs wanted to ensure that the caster was always one of the allies being cleansed, so they made the caster’s cleanse 1200 range rather than aoe to keep the necro outside the 5-target limit. I agree the necro should always be the first one to be cleansed, but I’m not sure how easy it’d be to code the skill to do that.

- Option 2. Restore aoe ally cleanse/transfer, but limit it to 1 ally per enemy hit. Basically change functionality to “for every enemy hit by mark, one ally within the mark’s radius has up to three conditions removed and transferred to that enemy.” This would serve 2 purposes: firstly it would stop the mark from transferring all cleansed conditions on the same enemy, which could be an instant (and unblockable) death sentence if it hit lots of allies. Secondly it would give the target(s) a chance for counterplay: since the functionality of AoE skills has been changed so that targets who block, dodge, or evade now COUNT AS PART OF THE 5-TARGET LIMIT, this change would make it possible to hit an entire enemy team and still get NO CLEANSES, not even from the necro, if all 5 of them dodge at the right time.

- Option 3. Restore aoe cleanse/transfer, but limit it to 3 allies max (plus the caster at range).

- Option 4. Restore aoe cleanse (3 conditions), but only transfer conditions from the caster, not allies hit.

- Option 5. Restore aoe cleanse/transfer, but limit it to 1 condition for allies, 3 for the caster. Not my favourite option this, as it gives the least team support.

-Option 6. Restore aoe cleanse/transfer (3 conditions), but increase recharge to 60". That would still be powerful but not excessively.

So there you go, 6 good ways to balance that skill while restoring team support. In my opinion, the best thing to do would be to combine options 1&2. Condition transfer at 1200 range is very powerful with a mark (at least Deathly Swarm is only 900 and has a slow projectile that can miss and is easier to dodge), and is inconsistent with how all other marks work – the caster doesn’t get regen if he’s not standing on the mark of blood after all! And limiting the transfer to 1 ally within the mark’s radius cleansed only for each enemy hit maintains its original functionality while toning it down and giving opportunities for coutnerplay.

If you like any of these ideas for balancing the skill please upvote this post so the devs see it. And if you have any better ones I haven’t thought of post them below – let’s make some noise to have our best team support skill brought back, fellow necros!

It’s true, I played with a necro, ranger, and mesmer before taking my ele into pvp and to play at the same standard my fingers had to develop new ways to move that human knuckles weren’t designed for! High-ranked ele players have clearly missed their vocation as concert pianists – it’s just a shame ANet is making you play an out-of-tune salloon pianola these days… :p

You hit the nail on the head Nemesis, with all the nerfs to Terror and Grasping Dead and now Weakening Shroud, our damage output is worse than before Dhuumfire, and our survivability much worse. since we have to invest 30 trait points to get the only trait that keeps our damage competitive.

I don’t understand why they don’t see how much harm this one trait has done to build diversity and the class as a whole! People have been saying this for months and theyu’ve been completely ignoring us, even though they’ve been receptive on (a few) other things! Is Dhuumfire some dev’s secret lovechild and they don’t want it harmed or something?

Tenderly.7019:

EDIT – Ok it seems if you have 20% boon duration increase from runes, like from Water and Monk, no other different type of specific boon duration will add anything more. I.E fury duration, so until this gets fixed, I guess 2 Lyssa would be fine, or even two Vampirism.

Is this a bug or intentional?

Absolutely agree with the OP: it is disappointing that they nerf one of our best team support skills, even while they’re buffing team support skills on every other class (see mesmer mantras etc). I was under the impression that their recent efforts had been to encourage team plays and I thought it was a great idea – it makes no sense that they would go in the exact opposite direction with the necro! I do agree that complete condition transfer at 1200 range (unblockable with Greater Marks), plus complete transfer from all allies was hideously overpowered, but I don’t like the way they balanced it.

The suggested fix sounds good: restore cleanse/transfer from up to 5 allies in the mark area, but DO NOT cleanse from the caster unless they are also in the area. It would still be pretty powerful, but if it’s limited to 3 conditions per ally at such a long cooldown I think it would be ok. If necessary, I would prefer that the blast finisher be removed from the skill completely, or even that the cooldown be slightly increased, in order to maintain the group support aspect of it. I do think that staff needs a blast finisher, but it can be moved to Reaper’s Mark.

Oh, like you can view all enemies as Sarge in Q3A, I like the idea! But yeah, you’re right that the huge variety of animations is a barrier to entry, but that can be solved in a way simpler manner: CASTING BARS!

The reason I think normalising character height is necessary is completely different though: it’s the LOS system. Currently, to make things “fair” for characters of all heights, LOS is calculated from your character’s feet to your target’s feet. This is extremely annoying and unintuitive, as it means that if your target is standing on a ledge you can’t hit each other, as the corner of the ledge blocks LOS unless your target is standing right at the edge of it! ANet have worked hard to make this game more intuitive and let people play it just by looking at the screen, and this system flies completely in the face of that philosophy, as you see someone whom you SHOULD be able to hit, whom common says tells you you WOULD hit in real life (if you had a stick that shot magical projectiles :p ), but you still get the “obscured” message like an obstinate and illogical “computer says no” error.

Pollution.8703:

Another pvp improvement I think you guys could make would be to normalize character sizes in pvp.

I think this would be a great idea actually but I’m guessing a lot of people would hate it. It wouldn’t be very hard – they did it for Super Adventure Box.

runeblade.7514:

DO NOT SHUT DOWN 8v8 SERVERS! There is a silent majority that loves 8v8.

Do absolutely NOTHING to 8v8 servers. 8v8 is fun for me much more than 5v5.

If anything, just clearly label for newer players which servers are 8v8 and which one is 5v5. The players that extremely hates 8v8 can play 5v5.

Oh yeah, that’s the other issue: when you list servers by maximum spots (players+spectators) instead of simply by maximum players, people have no idea which is which except by hovering over. It’s a terrible interface and you could probably double the pvp population just by getting someone with good UI experience to redesign the pvp window!

The issue with 5v5 hotjoin is that it breaks down incredibly easily when players start to leave. Numerical imbalances are far more punishing for the outnumbered team, and it’s a lot easier for a game to break down completely because too many people ahve left and the remaining don’t feel like just running around capping empty points without ever meeting an enemy. I agree that 8v8 is a chaotic, pointless flustercluck, but if 3 players get bored and simultaneously leave the match is still playable and fun.

I do believe that 5v5 is “better”, and there should be more 5v5 servers. Maybe a 3:1 ratio in favour of 5v5.

I also agree that matchmaking should prioritise 5v5. In fact, I suggest you try out the following parameters for placing players who click “play now”
1. matches with <9 current players (this will prioritise non-full 5v5 servers before starting to fill 8v8 ones)
2. ongoing matches (this will help correct population imbalances faster)
3. matches with an odd number of players (cause autobalance can’t fix those)
If the placement algorithm prioritise servers that fulfil these 3 criteria games will be much more fun.

However, you should look into how many players actually USE the “play now” button. My suspicion is that players just pick a server from the list instead! I’m sure you can track this. If I’m right, then you can “encourage” players to pick more non-full 5v5 servers to join by doing a mild redesign of the pvp window:

a. hotjoin tab should be the topmost tab in the window! I can’t begin to describe how many rank 1 players I see in team arena games! If you place the hotjoin tab 3rd a lot of new players won’t even see it! If you’re dead-set on keeping the personal stats window first, at least put a big shiny “play now” button in there as well!

b change default server listing in the hotjoin tab to hide full servers (and by “full” I mean full team spots, not servers that can still fit more observers!) You could have a checkbox to enable showing full servers, or even make a dropdown menu with “show games with available team spots”, “show games with available observer spots”, and “show all games (inc full)”, but BY DEFAULT the server should hide games with no team spots.

c. change the default listing on on the hotjoin tab to list games that have already started but which are not full first: currently, servers are listed by population descending, meaning full games are shown first! On a busy day you have to scroll down a couple pages to even FIND any 5v5 games with room to join, because the topmost games are all full 8v8 servers, or 10v10 custom arenas, followed by full 5v5 games with a shedload of observers, followed by non-full 8v8 games! Players will still have the ability to sort games by population/name/map/whatever, but make the default listing something more sensible than population descending!

d. have separate tabs/filters for 5v5, 8v8, custom arenas, and “all”, with 5v5 being the default one. Currently, “all” is the default one, and because of the previous point (default listing is by population descending), new players think 8v8 is the “standard” game mode, cause that’s all they see.

e. make the serverlist refresh automatically more frequently, to stop people joining a match they think has room that turns out to be full by the time they load.

f. Just make the “play now” button more prominent!

JonathanSharp.7094:

@ 2on2/3on3: A lot of you guys really seem to like this idea. So do we. We’re looking at game types which encourage this style of play. Another thing we’re looking at it combining the size of fights with larger tactical/strategic implications, so that there is something fun going on the micro level (the actual fight) and the macro level (the map overall).

The latter (macro level) is exactly what Conquest lacks. The game is incredibly fun at the micro level, but above 3v3 the fighting starts to become too fast-paced and chaotic to be really fun and comprehensible, not just for audiences but for players themselves. (And not just crap players like me, even people in the top-100 have admitted that in 4v4 fights there are just too many particle effects to see what’s going on, and that the damage is coming in so fast that you can’t react meaningfully to the fight.) I’m not saying you should build game modes that discourage fights over 2v2, I’m saying that you should make bigger fights better.

@ GvG/castle sieges: I think these can be combined in some pretty cool ways. You guys had some great points/ideas on these, so thanks for those.

I don’t think employing strong siege mechanics into a GVG-style format would be a good idea. We have WvW for that after all, and anything that slows down the pace of the game and turns it to player vs door should be avoided.

@ Lords and protecting them/not protecting them: Players seem to be pretty split down the middle on this one. Some players want the “play” of protecting their Lord and keeping it alive, while other want it to be more like a MOBA nexxus – something you can’t actively heal/protect. We’ll have to try that one both ways to see what has better play to it. I suspect it’s the former.

It worked well in GW1 because it opened up more tactical play: it allowed you to leave 1-2 team members behind to heal and protect the lord while the rest went for a desperate last-minute gank. If you made it MOBA-style then both teams would just build for maximum spike damage and go straight for each other’s lords.