Guild Wars 2

Evan Lesh.3295:

Pixelpumpkin.4608:

I thought in this regard the old system worked fine. There was a 2 minute countdown before the match started, which, it seemed to me, was enough time for everyone to get into the game.

Would it be frustrating if AFK players caused you to wait 2 minutes at a time when the match is ready only to place you back into queue?

Thing is though, we already have to wait 2 minutes after we log into the match. And that pre-match time isn’t used for anything now that we can’t character-hop to change professions. Could the pre-match time not be reduced to 1 minute and increase the ready window to 60 seconds up from 20?

Teutos.8620:

Evan Lesh.3295:

We also can’t just give dishonor to people who miss the queue because they are loading, or watching a personal story cut scene as that seems unfair. These problems led us to the compromise we have now, but we are open to other options!

Isn’t there the option to deny the specific actions which may cause problem?
-> map change
-> relog
-> start of personal story
-> viewing vistas
-> viewing scout
-> not getting ported form your current custom arena match after it ended into the next map
-> ?

OR

- design a “Ready” pop-up window that overrides these special states, and pops up even over a loading screen, cutscene, vista, scout cutscene or whatever? I don’t know if there are any technical obstacles to this, but the old queue pop-ups could override map screens, and I don’t see why scouts would be any different?

OR

- increase the ready-up window to 60" so you could finish your load screen, vista, or whatever? I personally wouldn’t mind the extra waiting time since I’d be able to occupy myself with other things anyway.

Jak Shadow.2864:

Do you think so? Bit of an over generalisation perhaps? Personally I made quite a few friends in the SoloQ. And I can tell you that I have never met as many abusive, smack-talking, body jumping players as I have in the last few days. Much, much worse than SoloQ.

Perhaps you’re right, I also met SOME nice people there, but on the whole my experience of solo queue was always horrible. Sure there were always a few afkers and smack-talkers in team queue too, but solo queue was always worse.

You don’t like it fine. You don’t have to play it. Those of us who did now have less choice than previously. And I don’t see that “Unranked” offers the same choice at all – still able to get pre-made teams but added to that the potential for lots of people who just don’t care – so even more afk’ing in game or spoofing around generally.

I meant that unranked allows you to test new builds without jeopardising your rating, which is what a lot of team arena players who never played solo arena otherwise used it for.
Clearly if you preferred solo arena there is no real substitute for it in the current system. However, since Justin quintupled the max roster size penalty today, you should be getting matched against other solo players most of the time. If there are enough solo players in the queue (and they’ve said that they far outnumber the teams), you should effectively be playing “solo arena substitute” in most matches. That is, unless all the former solo queue players throw their toys out of the pram and ragequit. Then the player pool of solo queuers will decrease and the matchmaking won’t work as well.

Still don’t see the logic for the merger at all except perhaps there were not enough pre-made teams around to sustain the TeamQ.

That’s not the case at all. Queue times for solo arena were much longer than team arena in recent months, at least on the EU servers. Solo arena was dead! They killed it off BECAUSE it was dead, because it was only populated by a small dedicated hardcore who would flame their teammates if they lost and flame their opponents if they won.

I’m ambivalent about it.

On the one hand, we NEED a TDM mode. OTOH, with the amount of damage in this game, I think a party size of 2 or 3 would be best for it, with 4 as the absolute max. 5 is overkill, you can focus someone down in 0.5" flat, and once one team is a man down it’s an utter blowout, they get rolled and it’s very hard to come back from it. So, in that sense, I don’t think Courtyard’s inclusion in the 5v5 queue works.

But on the positive side, it means that people with cheesy builds like bunker engis that are just designed to sit on a point and not do anything else are automatically at a disadvantage at Courtyard, so maybe the mere possibility that it might come up is a positive effect on the meta?

I think it’s AWESOME that you’re able to make changes on the fly like this! Thanks for still tinkering with it!

The only thing is, now that you’re increasing minimum filter setting to 20, queues will be longer. Isn’t it time to start thinking about an alternative to having us wait around in HOTM while we’re queued, for when queue times become annoyingly long?
My suggestion, as I’ve said in other threads, would be: increase ready button window from 20" to 60" (which should be enough for even the slowest load screens); decrease the pre-match countdown from 2 minutes to 60" to compensate.

Lexiceta.4156:

idk I thought the idea was to lessen duplicates, maybe I am misunderstanding
the new info.

I like how people think that the one match they play is indicative of EVERY RANKED QUEUE MATCH EVER. The changes decrease THE LIKELIHOOD of duplicate professions. If there’s nobody else queuing within a reasonable timeframe you’ll get whoever’s there. How the hell are people posting within 35’ of Justin’s post and saying “oh this is worse than before!” You really think the one game you’ve played in that time has any statistical significance whatsoever?

And for everyone reading and thinking that Justin’s changes didn’t work: bear in mind nobody is motivated to post complaining unless their match was a statistical outlier with 3 rangers or 5 engis. For every 1 person moaning about an unbalanced match there’s probably hundreds who just had an evenly matched one.

Backpack.8517:

… this game…. please add our old Team q mmr… im tired of playing with and vs bad players… im honestly just gonna have to super pug ever game?? i dont mind steamrolling everyone// but i would prefer if i could just solo q

It’s ok dude, we’ve all seen you play, if you want to brag about how much better than everyone else you are you don’t need to disguise it as a diss against the matchmaking… :p If there’s a specific team you want to play against, maybe your time is better spent in scrims with them instead of queueing in ranked arena?

Justin ODell.9517:

FOX.3582:

100% Agree…. 10 matches today vs 9 pre-mades… Lost 9 (ofcourse) -.-

This is why I asked the question. Player perception doesn’t always match the empirical evidence. I pulled up your match history since we launched the new servers.

5 vs 4+1
2 1+1+1 vs 2+1+1+1
1+1+1+1+1 vs 2+2+1
5 vs 4+1
5 vs 1
2+1+1+1 vs 1+1+1+1+1
5 vs 3+1+1
1+1+1+1+1 vs 4+1
5 vs 2+1+1+1
3+1+1 vs 2+1+1+1
1+1+1+1+1 vs 2+1+1+1
1+1+1+1+1 vs 1+1+1+1+1
2+1+1+1+1 vs 1+1+1+1+1
2+1+1+1 vs 1+1+1+1+1

Only 3 of those were matches that were stacked against you.
5 vs 1
1+1+1+1+1 vs 4+1
5 vs 2+1+1+1

I’m want to improve things so even those don’t happen, but sometimes things just don’t happen the way we perceive them to have happened.

This is brilliant, shows exactly how players will assume the odds are stacked against them when they lose! It’s only human, my brain does it too, but you guys have to remember it’s just a fallacy.

Justin, it’s great that you guys are monitoring and responding to people’s concerns, but I hope you won’t make any radical changes for at least a few weeks, because it won’t be obvious if the new system works until you’ve had enough data. If you need to make any adjustments, maybe increase the rating weight of party size slightly.

At all costs please don’t bring back solo queue. It was a toxic environment, and its existence was completely illogical in a game mode where teamwork was such a huge part of the game. Its population was tiny, and composed only of ill-tempered, kitten-talking people who only cared about their leaderboard ranking, plus a few people trying out builds they weren’t ready to bring into team queue. It was 3 parts playing, 7 parts smack-talk. And now that we have an unranked queue, it’s not necessary .

PS. To everyone trying the “invite to party” think: it’s not a fullproof indicator. The invitee might be in a full party WHO ALL DECLINED THE TOURNAMENT SIGNUP. So they could be in a full party but still playing on their own.

SPESHAL.9106:

While it’s a nerf and will make Necros a big liability at the start of the match, this pre-match ritual was just a band-aid on the bigger issue.

The delta in survivability for a necro with zero LF versus full LF is far too great for any developer to reasonably balance.

I completely agree. I’ve been saying that life force should be reworked since this game launched. Giving necros up to 120% more HP and then trying to make them “balanced” is an impossible task – whatever you do, necros will just be a liability at the start of fights when they have 0% LF, and an absolute megatank once they’ve managed to build a full bar.

I realise that, in a sense, this sort of mechanic IS “balanced”: the enemy just has to pressure the necro before they’ve had time to build up LF. If they fail to do so they will get punished. But oscillating between extremes of imbalance isn’t really good game design, and it’s extremely frustrating both for the necromancer and their opponents.

It would be a great idea if the devs are willing to do it! The test season isn’t very long, so it wouldn’t be a massive time commitment. Sadly, I don’t think any of them joining EU would be practical simply because the lag would give them a distorted idea of the game, but maybe if only a couple of them came over so they got an idea of the differences in the metagame it would be good.

The real question would be how to match devs up to teams appropriate to their skill. I would suggest that teams volunteer to adopt someone, and then the dev team check out the team’s average MMR and its comp, and match it up against an appropriate dev.

VeeWee strikes again! I agree with almost all of these with only minor notes:

• Immobilize stack cap removed. Immobilize duration capped at 4 seconds!

Everyone’s been shouting that immobilise is too powerful ever duration-stacking was introduced, but nobody listens. I think even 4" is excessive tbh. Rather, I would prefer to see no duration-stacking at all: if you apply immobilise to someone who’s already immobilised, the new application’s duration will just replace the old duration. (Optionally “unless the remaining duration on the old application is longer”. So no duration-stacking at all: longest duration applies.) I would go even further and say that the same should be done for Fear. Knockbacks/pulls/launches/etc all work like that (latest application overrides previous duration), so why should fear and immobilise be different? They’re all hard CC.

ellesee.8297:

Miscellaneous:

• Blast finishers in fire fields now grant 3 stacks of might for 15 seconds (down from 20)!
  …
  Sigil of Battle: This sigil now grants 3 stacks of might for 15 seconds (down from 20)!
  …
  Elementalist:
• Removed blast finisher from Frozen Burst!
• Ring of Fire duration now four seconds (down from six)!

These will help a lot, but tbh the problem with might stacking classes is when you have 3 of them on the same point and they get each other up to 25 stacks within seconds by blasting each other’s fire fields. These changes will help a bit, but you can’t really hurt that without nerfing the durations of ALL fire fields – especially the warrior’s Combustive Shot, which basically has 100% uptime. If you have a warrior on the point your elementalists and engis will be at 25 might stacks permanently. Removing the blast finisher from Frozen Burst hurts the elementalist most when they’re on their own, and they’re not that bad 1v1.

• Marks now take 0.25 seconds to activate after being placed!

I think this is too harsh, as it puts the overall activation time of marks to 1", which is too much. If you’re trying to prevent a stomp with Reaper’s Mark, an extra 0.25" makes a huge difference, and if you’ve got a condition stack on you and you’re trying to cleanse yourself with Putrid Mark it can make the difference between life and death. 0.75" is already pretty long between skills that need to be quite twitchy to use effectively.
I do agree that marks should be more dodgeable though, so what I think should be done instead is keep cast time the same at 0.75", but, instead of the mark ground effect appearing after the cast time is complete, have it start to appear on the ground with a fade-in effect during the casting animation. For instance the mark’s ground effect could start to fade in at 25% opacity at 0.25" into the cast, rise to 75% opacity 0.5" into the cast, and reach 100% opacity at the 0.75" mark, when the animation is complete. So you see the ground effect about 0.5" before it hits you, plenty of time to dodge.

• Hide in Plain Sight now displays a buff icon when off cooldown that can be seen by opponents!

What I want to know about Hide in Plain Sight is why it works even if I fear a ranger: camouflage is supposed to only work if you stand still, so why do they stay invisible?

• When Empathic Bond removes conditions, a transfer effect can be seen from the Ranger to the pet!

If the problem is making Empathic Bond more obvious so you can count down when it’s about to come off cooldown, I have a better idea for that: rework Empathic Bond so that when it comes off cooldown, it applies a visible buff to the ranger. The next time the ranger’s pet hits you, 3 conditions are transferred to the pet. That way you know it’s coming, and it even gives the trait some counterplay by letting you kite/dodge the pet.

Justin ODell.9517:

The alternative is to let people be anywhere, and risk them having a queue pop they can’t do anything about because they’re loading into another map. Which means not only would they no longer be queued (with possibly no notification), but they would also get a timeout and dishonor for queue dodging.

Justin, can’t you just make the time people get to respond to the match ready prompt longer so they’ll be able to click it after their cutscene or load screen finishes? 30" should do it for loading screens. As for cutscenes and cinematics, tbh you should be able to make a pop-up dialog that overrides them…

+1, it’s ridiculous that you sometimes see CONDITIONMANCERS be forced to carry Doom sigils so they can apply poison to downed enemies faster just because their Chilblains doesn’t work on them!

KrisHQ.4719:

Last comment: Obviously the MMR-Profession thingy wouldn’t work with this feature.
And to the people who don’t think you can play multiple classes on the same level, well, I am simply not agreeing. If pro Dota players can play a lot of heroes well, GW2 players can also master more than one class. I know for a fact, since I can easily play multiple classes at the same level.

That’s the problem really. GW2 is much more mechanically intensive than MOBAs and most other MMOs, so changing your build, and even more so changing to a whole new profession, is a much bigger deal. That’s why there’s so few multiclassers at top level. So, from that perspective, the new profession-specific MMR is a good thing. But, otoh, it doesn’t completely solve the problem: most professions have multiple viable builds, many of whom play completely differently to each other, and the MMR won’t be able to tell if you’re playing the one you’re actually familiar with. So it’s an imperfect feature at best, and not really a necessary one now that we’ll have an unranked arena to practice new builds in. Is it really worth sacrificing pre-match profession swapping to get a feature that won’t really work that well anyway?

Justin ODell.9517:

You may be right, but we’ll wait until we have actual data to look at. If the cost of having the feature out-weight the benefits we’d definitely be willing to change it. The new systems make this sort of thing much easier to do.

That’s great to hear! And running a test season is a great way to get the feedback you need for this kind of stuff.

That said, I think character swapping mid game should be discouraged. Does anyone have an opinion on that?

I absolutely agree. I would say anything goes during the 2 minute pre-match sequence (which tbh you should be able to cut down to 1’ since now you have a “ready” button when the queue pops), but once the match actually starts you should be locked into your current character slot. If you got disconnected during a GvG in GW1 the game would bypass the character selection screen when you logged back in, loading you straight back into the match on your last-played character. Is that something you can do in GW2? Is your new system able to differentiate between the pre-match period and the actual match?

Evan Lesh.3295:

Dwaynas Avatar.1562:

Evan Lesh.3295:

Your current timeout is now inside the PvP panel, and players are warned with exactly how long their timeout will be when they try to decline or leave a match.

Is dishonored now changed in any sense, so for example that you don’t need 3 stacks of it that it really punishes you?
So how exactly would it play out if we say you get a dc, and in the game after that you get another one and so on. How is the scala?

There is no ‘3 strikes and you’re out’ anymore. The timeouts all happen immediately, they just get longer each time. Your first match disconnect is about a 15 minute timeout. If you disconnect immediately a second time, the timeout is about 45 minutes. However the more time between disconnects, the less harsh the timeout will be because the dishonor is slowly wearing off in the background. If you consistently leave back to back at every opportunity, the timeouts can get very extreme.

Evan, this seems a little on the harsh side. If you disconnect in the middle of a match, that means that, after the match is over, you won’t be able to queue for another match immediately. Think about who this is punishing: it’s not just the player who disconnected, but his 4 teammates, who’ll have to queue up without him or wait around for his dishonour to expire!

Let’s face it, in the past few months the connectivity quality of this game has gone down. It’s not as bad as it was in September, when it was practically unplayable for several weeks, but it’s still worse than it was last year or 2 years ago. Making the punishments for disconnecting harsher when your servers have become less reliable seems like a very ill-advised move!

Why not have a short grace period like you do now? If you rejoin within, say, 2 minutes, no dishonour is applied. Surely that will sift out most of the accidental disconnects, while ensuring that the ragequitters are still punished?

I’m with the people who posted above on this. There is no reason to disallow profession swapping. It’s a perfectly valid tactical choice to punish an enemy team which has invested too heavily in an easily-countered profession. It seems that you’ve only chosen to disable it so you could enable your MMR-by-profession feature. Well, MMR-by-profession a neat idea, but I don’t think it’s necessary. The other improvements you’ve made to matchmaking should be enough to make matchmaking better. I confess, as someone who gets slaughtered every time I try a new build (because I get matched against people who are as skilled as I’ve gotten on my main), it would be nice to be able to slum it at a lower rank when playing something new, but since you’re introducing an unranked arena, that should be enough for people like me who have only started playing a warrior last week. I don’t want this enough to want to disable profession-swapping, and I doubt many other people do either – I don’t remember anyone raising this issue on the forums, so it’s not like this is a feature that many people think is necessary.

Evan Lesh.3295:

Joining a queue will redirect you to the lobby. If you leave the lobby you will also leave the queue, but not get dishonor. You only get dishonor if you decline the match-ready prompt.

OK, thanks for clarifying. I’m sorry to say that I hate this change. It might be alright if there’s a surge of returning players during the test season and our queue times are mere seconds, but I’m sure the number of players will go down again eventually, as is natural since people tend to leave this game and come back to it a few months later, and then we’ll be forced to sit around in the lobby doing NOTHING for several minutes at a time! That alone might be enough to drive people out of pvp tbh!

Could you at the very least implement a loud audible prompt when the queue pops? One which overrides the “mute when GW2 is in background” setting so you can hear it even when task-switched? Cause if we’re going to be forced to be idling while queued, I’m personally going to be task switched.

Gw2 is a huge game and players could be doing any number of things that would prevent them from accepting a match. Players could be watching a cinematic, talking to a scout, or the biggest problem: stuck on a load screen. We can’t let people on load screens get dishonor because they can’t accept the match.

Wouldn’t it make more sense to the time window that players have in which to accept the match longer? Load screens aren’t that long – why not give players a 30" window in which to click OK to the match? Much better than forcing us to sit around twiddling our thumbs? You could potentially make that window 60" even, and shorten the 2’ pre-match waiting time to 1’ to compensate. After all, since we can’t relog on different characters there’s not very much you can do during the pre-match window – not enough to justify 2’ in spawn.

I’m a little disappointed by this:

To ensure players are ready to accept, they will now be asked to be in the Heart of the Mists and ready to play when they queue

Will this also kick you out of the queue if you leave HotM? I’m hoping queue times will be shorter after the update, but it would still be nice to be able to pop into some hotjoin or go cap a camp in wvw while waiting for your match.

Justin ODell.9517:

Iason Evan.3806:

What I mean is, I enter the match on my garbage Thief. We are waiting for the match to begin. I then swap to my really good Ranger. How is that handled?

You’ll receive dishonor if you leave a match and take a full loss on the leaderboard.

Justin, I’m not sure you and the OP are on the same page here. He wasn’t talking about leaving the match after it starts, or about logging out while still in the queue. What he’s saying is: you queue up on a profession on which you have a bad record. The game matches you up, you enter the match, and DURING THE 2 MINUTE PRE-GAME COUNTDOWN you log to the character selection screen and choose another profession, which you’re better on.

If you’re saying that logging and relogging during the pre-match period gives you dishonour, even if you log right back in (whether on the same or another character), I seriously think you should reconsider this feature. Swapping characters pre-game is something a lot of people do for legitimate reasons. Say you’re queueing solo as a mesmer for example, you enter a match and see that your teammates include 2 more mesmers. It’s not in any way cheating or dishonourable to swap to a guardian, is it? Why should you be awarded dishonour for that?

If, instead, you’re saying that logging and relogging after the match has actually started awards dishonour, then I’d like to ask: how does this system deal with disconnects?

flow.6043:

manveruppd.7601:

it really doesn’t make up for your greater vulnerability against CC, especially in 1v1 situations.

Any 1v1 you can win with RP will be won with any other trait more easily.

Maybe more quickly, more efficiently, but come on, more EASILY than a completely passive fear that would proc even if you’re afk? :p

manveruppd.7601:

If DS (F1) was actually a stunbreak (or you had a trait that turned it into one), FitG would actually be better than RP, because it could get you out of trouble rather than just prevent you from getting into it.

You make it look like RP has a similar effect to stability. But it doesn’t, you’re still getting stunned. At best it protects you from follow up damage. And by “at best” I mean almost never. So in that sense FitG is a million times better.

I agree that, in theory, FITG should be better, it can give you up to 50% stability uptime if you also get Close to death. The problem, like I said, is that you can’t always see the CC coming, especially in a team fight where a shadowstepping thief or a mesmer can switch their focus to you from all the way across the point without telegraphing it in advance. So jumping into DS does nothing except soak up the follow-up damage, which, as you said, RP completely negates because it also CCs the opponent (plus does a little damage as a bonus). It’s almost as good as having an extra stunbreak, and, with our stunbreaks having such long cooldowns, that’s a big deal. Plus it’s an aoe fear, meaning it can save you even if you get focussed by more than one enemy.

I honestly don’t like that it’s SUCH a good trait. I hate passive procs from a design perspective (don’t mind it for minor effects, but this is too powerful) and I wish it wasn’t the best option in a condi build. But they’ve been buffing other professions’ CC and stunbreaks so much that our two standard fears from Doom and Reaper’#s Mark just don’t cut it anymore, and the passive boon procs from the new runes are so ridonculous that, even with Path of Corruption, we can almost never remove Stability to get a third fear with Corrupt Boon. When you’re playing something that kills as slowly as a condi necro, you need to stop your enemy delivering their damage multiple times to be able to kill them before they kill you, and, the way soft CC like cripples and Weakness has been rendered useless in this game, hard CC like fear is the only way to do this. Ergo people taking RP and Nightmare runes, for multiple fear procs. If our Weakening Shroud didn’t only do 2 measly seconds of weakness, if thieves weren’t effectively immune to chilled and crippled, and if everyone except mesmers and engis didn’t have condition removal coming out the wazoo, then maybe we could stay alive long enough to kill something using just our soft CC rather than need cheesy, zero-skill things like passive fear procs.

Oh don’t get me wrong, I’m really hyped you’re working on it, I was just hoping it’d be more highly prioritised, because I think core gameplay elements should be in place before competitive features like ladders and seasons (important as they are) are established.

I’m also very concerned about how a new game mode would even fit into the competitive infrastructure. Say you’re introducing team deathmatch: will it have its own separate leaderboards and a separate join queue, or will TDM maps be put in the same rotation as the Conquest maps and its wins or losses affect the same leaderboard? Or would it be completely unranked and only available in custom arenas? And if you’re joining TDM from a queue like you currently join team arenas, how will you be grouped? Will the TDM queue use the same MMR as Conquest, even though a player might play only bunker guardian or decap engi or something else completely unsuitable for deathmatch in Conquest, and therefore their MMR is completely unrepresentative?

I realise you’re probably not ready to answer these questions, because you haven’t even finished working on whatever new game mode you’re working on, but that’s exactly my point: it would be a lot easier for you guys to figure these things out if the game was feature-complete in terms of game modes BEFORE the competitive features were put in place! It would help you a lot if you already knew which game mode was most popular, how many players played in each mode, whether players who play Conquest also play the new game mode interchangeably, or if most players prefer one to the other strongly and spend most of their time in only one of the two. That would let you know whether you need new leaderboards, whether to have separate ladders and seasons for each mode, etc. A lot of the work you’ve put into these features coming up in December will have to be redone if a new game mode is released and proves to be popular!

These are all good changes, but I think a lot of us have been most looking forward to a new game mode. It was a lot of people’s #1 priority in the CDI that was run last year, and we’ve been waiting a lot time for it.

Actually the mesmer and elementalist NPCs are better to test stuff like that with, cause they have channeled skills that cause the same amount of damage per hit

I love Greater Marks but I would never pick it over RP in the current meta. It does help you kill those bunker guardians faster, and you spread more conditions in team fights, but it really doesn’t make up for your greater vulnerability against CC, especially in 1v1 situations. I don’t see it, unless your role in your team is to mostly stay in team fights, and in the fringes of team fights at that, so you can flesh wurm out of there quickly if opened on by a thief/mesmer combo. Or you’re just constantly sitting on top of your own bunker guardian so he can heal you. I dunno, I confess I don’t like the passive fear procs from RP (and especially not from Nightmare runes, since in team fights they can proc from some useless little damage from aoe and get wasted instead of hitting someone who’s focussing you), but in 1v1 and 2v2s they give you so much more flexibility to play aggressively. I’d say that if you were going to drop RP for something it would be FitG. I don’t think it’s as good, but at least it fulfils the same role, which is making sure you’re not flat on your back with your hands off the keyboard while the enemy is bursting you down. The trouble is a lot of the time you can’t see the stuns coming, especially from stealthed thieves. If DS (F1) was actually a stunbreak (or you had a trait that turned it into one), FitG would actually be better than RP, because it could get you out of trouble rather than just prevent you from getting into it.

OMNIBUS.2913:

Well the first counter that comes to mind is mesmer, ranger or mm necro that can completely bypass the fear procs(lets just hav pet take the proc). The other counter is just begin the fight with stability and get the proc while your immune to them.

Yep, open with stability or keep a stunbreak handy. The number of warriors that open with an Earthshaker on me WITHOUT having popped Berserker’s Stance beforehand is silly. I get not knowing what the other person’s build does, but they seem to not even know what their own skills do!

Re: the OP’s question, since the most effective Dhuumfire build takes Terror anyway, the choice isn’t between Terror/Dhuumfire but between Dhuumfire on one hand and Reaper’s Protection+Path of Corruption on the other. Personally I think Dhuumfire is still viable if you have Close to Death, so you can proc itmore frequently (the extra condition duration from Spite almost makes up for losing the extra fear duration). I don’t like it as much though, cause you don’t have as much condition pressure inside DS. If we could at least still swap weapons and proc Geomancy sigils that’d be something, but bottom line is the constant application of bleeds outweighs the once/10" burning. The PoC/RP build might not be as bursty but it can still down people 1v1 and it’s a lot tougher.

I think it’s great on Legacy, you can teleport back up the stairs and onto the ledge from anywhere on the middle node.

I wish I knew why it lets you teleport to the path behind keep on forest though. Isn’t it breaking its own rules about max range and obstacles there?

In general though, while I still carry it myself, I’d say that with the Spectral Armour buff it’s no longer a must-have.

Control is a crucial part of the game, but I think as it currently is soft CC (cripples, chill, weakness, blind) is very underpowered compared to hard CC (knockbacks/knockdowns, immobilise, fear, stun, daze).

I personally prefer that there was more soft CC and less hard CC in the game, for two reasons:
1. it’s less frustrating to play against, because even when you’re chilled, blinded, and out of endurance, you still have control of your character and can do something to save yourself. When you are locked down by fears or knockbacks continuously, you lose control of your character for extended periods of time, you have two choices: disengage (and only a very few skills in the game let you break stun and safely get out of combat), or take your hands off the keyboard and wait till you die. It’s not a tactically interesting choice, and it’s frustrating to be at the receiving end of it.
2. Soft CC usually only shuts down part of your abilities. The only exception is weakness which slightly debuffs both your offence and your defence. It’s therefore more important that you choose when to use it, giving the player more tactical choice and decisions to make. Conversely, because it doesn’t shut you down completely, the player on the receiving end has a choice between blowing a cleanse, or just sucking up the debuff and using a different part of their toolset. It’s more interesting to play both with and against soft CC, and, unlike being stunlocked, doesn’t “take your hands off the keyboard” for extended periods of time.

Brigg.6189:

I do like cancel casting when it allows interesting combos or the ability to fake cast, but just as a pure dps/hps increase, meh.

+1

Wow, I’m actually HITTING things now! And I can stand at 1200 range from the point and quickly build some life force before getting stuck in! It’s actually enough that it made me switch back to carrion so I can enjoy seeing those nice big numbers with my staff!

Now if only they revert allied cleansing for Putrid Mark I’ll consider staff the best weapon in the game! :p

flow.6043:

manveruppd.7601:

Don’t see it working for necro, as we don’t have the sustain or means of escape to survive in it

But this is not a gear issue. If you can’t survive without escaping you probably wouldn’t have suvived with carrion/rabid/dire either.

Well I’m talking pvp, where you do have to last a bit. Particularly if you’re playing a condi class that takes awhile to whittle down their opponent’s health.

Don’t see it working for necro, as we don’t have the sustain or means of escape to survive in it, but scepter/pistol mesmers will be insane with that gear!

I think this is the first time they’ve fixed a necro bug so quickly after introduction, or even acknowledged its existence! :p How long were we waiting for them to fix Putrid Mark going on full cd when interrupted? I’m encouraged by this, hope they’ll deal with some of the other issues with our class before too long!

I really like all of these, it’s really a shame devs don’t come into this forum at all… Your Spiteful Vigor idea is especially good!

A couple of minor criticisms:
a. I like the Spiteful Marks change, but tbh the first thing that needs to happen is for the FOUR staff traits to be merged into two at most. No other weapon of no other profession has so many traits associated with it, and it’s not like any of them fundamentally change what its skills do, they just improve them in (minor) incremental ways. We all know that this is only a relic from pre-beta development, when all or aoe skills on every weapon were marks, and they just never got round to fixing it.
b. Your suggestion for Unholy Martyr is a great improvement, but still too weak for a grandmaster. It should simultaneously transfer a condition from allies to yourself and copy from yourself to allies with each pulse.
c. Speed of Shadows: yes, please, but 3" too little (I know most other “on DS entry” boons are 3", but boons like protection or retaliation are generally much more powerful than swiftness)

Otherwise love em!

The tracking on Dark Path works, the problem you’ve encountered could be 1 of 3 things:
a. a little bump or intervening obstacle in the terrain blocked the projectile – it doesn’t take much: if I cast it on someone standing on quarry or waterfall in Foefire, the bend of the little hillock the node is on is enough to give me an “obstructed” message.
b. Your opponent blinded you as soon as they saw you enter DS (probably to avoid your fear)
c. Your opponent simply walked out of Dark Path’s range, and because the projectile speed is so slow players can LITERALLY outrun that stupid thing.

runeblade.7514:

If this doesn’t get implemented, I will just simply afk.

It is equal to one player missing, except I get rewarded for it.

I can’t wait till they implement proper punishments for afkers like you.

Something like what DOTA2 does, where teammates you report get put on a lower priority for matchmaking, ideally. Enjoy your half hour queues.

There’s arguments on both sides. Personally I don’t think the problem is fire+blast combos, but the fact that 3 professions have amazing access to fire fields and blast finishers while other classes don’t at all. I know the idea was to keep each profession’s access to fields and finishers thematically appropriate to its fluff, but it ended up being an imbalance. Either reduce access to fire+blast combos for warriors, eles, and engis, or buff the other kinds of combos so they’re as meaningful as blasting fire and water fields.

Well, our MH weapons usually have enough offence, so you usually need some defensive abilities from your offhand. Which focus isn’t great at. It might not have been if melee classes weren’t basically immune to chill (warriors can get Dogged March to cleanse it, thieves can shadowstep without it affecting their range and aren’t affected by the cooldown reduction, and eles have infinite cleansing).

I love the downstate mechanics, they promote real teamwork and coordination during fights, whether to secure or prevent a stomp. Plus they encourage real build variation, because every class has something unique to offer in that field.

I think the OP would be surprised how few people share his “loathing” for the downed state. I’ve never heard anyone complain about it (except in terms of how OP rangers’ downed state is :p ), and I think most people recognise that it’s an inextricable part of the game.

What I do agree with is that most people who are new to pvp are completely turned off by it, because nothing in pve has prepared them for it. Probably nothing in wvw either, since downed corpses die in milliseconds in big zerg fights. You learn how to revive people in pve, but not how to prevent stomps, secure stomps, and to know when to try and revive your teammate or stomp the opponent to give them a rally. The tutorial on the island is pathetic. ANet would do well to add more mobs that can stomp players and revive each other in pve, at least that would give people an inkling ofthe basics.

Chris Whiteside.6102:

DiogoSilva.7089:

Will it be wrong/ off-topic to discuss how the battle system functions in large-scale content once we start discussing raids?

I ask this not only because it’s important for the quality of raiding, but also because GW2, as a whole, seems to be moving (or desires to move) into a larger-scale direction, with fans asking for (and devs showing interest on) raids and GvG (aka, large-scale organized pvp), on top of the already existing WvW and open-world boss events.

Yet, the combat system was clearly designed with small-scale pvp combat as a priority, with some stand-out clarity and design issues on anything bigger than 5-party content (and even so, some of those issues are already present on small scale content).

Perhaps, discussing one topic can directly affect the other, and vice-versa?

hi Diogo,

This is an absolute necessity to discuss in the CDI. I am looking forward to this particular subject the most.

Chris

May I suggest that, if do discuss the combat mechanics in those subjects, that you extend the discussion beyond the confines of this subforum? If it comes out in the CDI that the combat system will need alterations for large scale fights, you should invite the input of high-end spvp players, and the leaders of wvw/gvg guilds, most of whom don’t regularly look at this forum.

Chris Whiteside.6102:

Serophous.9085:

Guys, while the whole design aspect is sounding fun for a guild hall, I think we are forgetting one thing:

In GW1, the guild halls were relatively the same design for GvG. So while developing and building a guild to look how you want, how would this effect the GvG aspect, where there could be some annoyance in trying to find a guild lord to kill?

Hi,

GvG will be discussed after we discuss raiding.

Thanks,

Chris

I assume that if they’re planning GW1-style GvG (ie. that takes place in the guild hall of one of the two teams) then it should be easy for them to remove any upgrades like extra buildings, expansions, or cosmetic features and revert the look of the guild hall to “stock” for the purpose of the match. The matches would be instanced anyway so it wouldn’t affect the look of the guild hall for anyone that wasn’t in the actual match at the time.

Even in GW1, although you couldn’t build extra buildings or erect massive statues of your favourite developer, you could buy all sorts of extra NPCs for your guild hall, all of whom disappeared when you were in a match, presumably scurrying to the kitchens in terror.

Chicago Jack.5647:

I think one of the biggest problems with the map is the confined space around the side nodes. It is way too easy to jump someone through teleports on that map – there is very little you can do to position yourself so that you don’t get jumped easily. Every other map there are ways to position yourself around the point so that you can prevent, as much as possible, easy +1’s. Skyhammer is the only map where this really isn’t the case. Unfortunately, I don’t think this will ever change as it would require a serious change.

Agreed, those side nodes are so tiny, and the surrounding walls mean that, alone of all the points in all the maps, you can’t see incoming enemies until they’re right on top of you. In fact, if they climb on the ledges above the points, you can’t see them at all due to the camera issues with this game! Not only that, but the exits to the node area are extremely narrow, so if you need to back off the point to avoid aoe it’s the ideal place to get hit by a knockback and get knocked off the map. It’s where knockback engis are at their most powerful.

I actually take back what I said about Dark Pact. There’s no reason they couldn’t increase its range. People would still be able to use it to keep people in dagger range, or inside their wells, but if it was 900-1200 range they’d also be able to use it with ranged wells, or to stop someone from getting to a point and decapping it before they can catch u9p with them.

I still think fixing Dark Path is the biggest priority though. Not that it’s “broken”, it’s a powerful skill that works well within a narrow framework, but, because the projectile speed is so slow, you can’t really use it at its maximum range, as people can just outrun it. Its usable range is probably around 600 max if enemies are walking away from you and have swiftness. If they turned it back to a targeted teleport I’d happily take a cooldown increase to 20"!

style.6173:

Belze Intilie.8436:

It´s time to buff the Lord and the Guards on Legacy of the Foefire. With all the power-creep i think this poor guys need some help. 150 Points for a lord-kill… it´s just to easy atm.

Power creep? DPS is lower today than when the game first came out.

Off topic, but where do you get that?

If it really was due to targeted DDOS attacks then there’s not much ANet could’ve done to prevent it. They still should have had firm rules in place to deal with what happens in the event of a player getting targeted.

Also, reconnecting and not being able to rejoin the arena the match is in because it was full… well, that’s got nothing to do with DDOS, someone screwed up there.

I had the exact same thing yesterday, was about to submit a support ticket. Queued up for a game, the popup window appeared, I click go now, Battle of Kyhlo was loading, I get disconnected with the 5:11:3:159:101 error. Game restarts from launcher, I log back in, get to the character selection screen, if I load the same character I get the Battle of Kyhlo loading screen and after a few seconds a “The game client is unable to gain access to the login server at this time” error with code 19:9:19:1718:101 and restarts from launcher again. If I tried to load up a different character, the game would load me at that character’s last location, the pop-up window for the pvp match would appear with “starting in 50 seconds”, and if I clicked “go now” I would get a loading screen and “Network error” 5:11:3:159:101 again.

I kept trying to log back in, but this behaviour persisted for upwards of 20’ – ie. long after that Kyhlo match should have finished! At that point I gave up trying. When In tried to log in again 2 hours later, I STILL got a pop-up window for Battle of Kyhlo (with “game starting in 50 seconds”, amusingly) every time I loaded up any character! Finally, it cleared up by itself, more than 4 hours later.

I really don’t understand how these issues have been going on for so long without them doing anything about it, or even any official acknowledgement of the problem. I don’t know if this is beyond ANet’s control for some reason (eg. they’ve changed server providers, or NCSoft severely cut their hosting budget), or if it’s something with the game’s netcode that broke sometime in the past few months, but the tournaments shouldn’t have gone ahead until some kind of fix (even a temporary one) was in place.

I know the whole forum has been clamouring for the ability to pause matches and stuff, but I think it’s more important to fix whatever it is that broke in the April patch instead: there weren’t anywhere near as many disconnects or lag before that.

If they increased dark pact to 1000 then the immobilise would expire by the time you walked up to them. It’s not meant as something that gets you close to your opponent, it’s meant as something that keeps them there while you deliver your damage. What we need instead is a Dark Path that WORKS. Either by substantially increasing projectile speed or by turning it into a targeted teleport.

I love the idea of being able to teleport back to your marks! I would absolutely take such a trait! I think though it should only be possible BEFORE they’re triggered. Being able to hit your enemies with the mark AND teleport back to it would be too much.

Yeah the population is low enough already, there’s no point in having a RANKED SOLO QUEUE in a TEAM GAME. It doesn’t make sense and fragments the population. It only serves to puff up the ego of those players who are too sociopathic to play as part of a regular team, so they want a way to attain a high rank without having to be nice to people and make friends.

I’m not saying solo queue should be removed though. It serves a useful purpose. I often see high-ranked team queue players there, cause they want a chance to play casually, without their team, without tanking their team queue rank, or they need a place to practice a new build without consequence. So there’s a point to it.

What there is NO POINT TO is the fact that it’s ranked. Make it unranked. You’d still get matched up according to MMR of course, it won’t be random, but there’ll be no leaderboard. Then, REMOVE HOTJOIN! Except for custom arenas of course.

This way, casual players get a new place to play that’s not played by 4v5 autobalance exploits, and high-ranked players keep an unranked place to practice in. 2 in 1! And you won’t get too much of the two mixing, because you’ll keep the MMR-based matchmaking.

GW1 has been saying hi since launch with all sorts of great ideas, but nobody’s paying attention cause it doesn’t have a z-axis and is therefore not cool… :p

infantrydiv.1620:

I think a good, practical start would be to make sigil of fire only hit stuff around your actual target (instead of the target itself), and increase the healing from blood, making it no longer do damage. With that change fire, air, and blood each have a unique purpose.

If those changes went through, then maybe they could change Air sigil to be similar to Doom, where it procs on first hit after weapon damage (thinking like 2.5-3k damage, once per swap). Although, I could see this being a problem with classes frontloading damage from stealth…aka mesmer/thief.

Those are actually really good suggestions. That way it completely eliminates double procs, while maintaining Air’s utility for single target burst and Fire’s aoe pressure (not that anyone used Fire for aoe pressure – they just used it to get even more single-target burst, which is supposedly what Air is for).

Agreed, what power necro needs is either decent long-ranged options (and no, 600 range on axe isn’t enough, and the improved staff auto won’t cut it either…) or a decent gap-closer.

Spectral traits would be very OP if they were combined, but I agree that Spectral Attunement is competing with too much other good stuff in the Curses line… It’s annoying that some traitlines have almost no good options and others are overstuffed!