Guild Wars 2

The game is balanced around tpvp, so that’s what you should always be thinking about. Teams generally need a bunker or two, a roaming burster or two, and some midline balanced builds for larger fights. Engineers can also spec bunker, and they often do, so make sure you’re clear to your team what you’re playing as. Just depends what the team needs as to whether they’d want you to switch to bunker.

Edit: engineer has great mobility with speedy kits. You may want to try a kind of roamer that responds to your bunkers in distress.

Thief can be a challenge. Mesmer is easy…

Man, whatever else you do in the future, just make sure you don’t hide your skillbar/healthbar. So frustrating. Can’t see anything.

Hey I think the reason you don’t see many discussions about balanced builds is because they are more difficult to make. With burst, you just max damage, with bunker, you max survivability, but what ratio of damage vs tankiness is appropriate for balanced? It’s a question that will have different answers as the meta changes.

Also Vaerah is misrepresenting the developers comments. It was only said that bunkers have too much retaliation and it was upsetting game balance.

My personal opinion of how the 3 kinds of builds play out is as follows (others may disagree):

burst beats bunker – burst has advantage because bunker can’t kill him.
balanced beats burst – balanced uses stunbreak, then has dmg to kill the burst
bunker beats balanced – bunker can’t kill him, but wastes his time

I think balanced is also an excellent team fighter, whereas burst characters will simply get focused and die before they have much chance to do anything, and people will avoid attacking bunkers if there are easier targets around.

Yes, that’s the correct thought process. Everything is tradeoffs. Just depends which you find more valuable.

This is a very intelligent post with many facts and a strong understanding of the game (and English). One such example is the fact that guild wars 2 has no unique weapons and nothing to strive for, which is true because it certainly doesn’t have Legendary Weapons.

I just shake my head slowly and sigh when these threads come up. It’s like people have no idea what teamplay is or how to achieve it. Or better yet, they don’t like the idea of team play.

These 2v1 scenarios people cry about are just “I’ve bursted 1 person with my glass cannon why doesn’t he die, now his teammate res him this is crap!” Which is ironic, because that’s one of the reasons we have downed state.

I especially like this one: “Can’t remember how often I died because I took tons of dmg just while casting the animation” as if the long activation time had nothing whatever to do with giving the enemy team a chance to stop you.

edit: that doesn’t take away from more nuanced criticism such as how long it’s appropriate to keep an enemy in downed state, which is in my opinion a much better discussion to be having.

Well if we want to talk about differences in skill, you should be skillful enough to realize the importance of bringing a stomp aid skill, or using a similar mechanic from skills you may already have to give you a stomping advantage.

Edit: are you a thief?

I am trying to tell you it is not a 100% chance — however I will grant it is very very (very) rare.
Like I said, I’ve personally stopped a mist form stomp with my engineer by tossing a stealth field on a downed ally and myself, ressing him and killing the ele (who had used his only stun break). Maybe there are other ways to stop an invulnerable stomp that we’re not quite aware of yet. Stability can also be countered by stealthing your ally.

But I also want to stress that at some point, there is nothing else that can be done. For example staying with mist form — it’s a 75 second recharge skill. If he wants to use that for a stomp, that is a choice that he is going to have to live with for the next minute. It’s a tradeoff. “you can take my bishop with your knight, but my pawn with get you next turn” In this case, pawn is actually any burst class that now doesn’t have to worry about that ele’s stun break.

Stability is a more manageable beast. It is again a question of level of play and what you expect your opponent to do and your team knowing how to handle it. Your player goes down and you expect a stability (being a necro or mesmer or engineer or whatever else that can remove boons, which probably every class has an appropriate skill) and you know your downed ally will try to interrupt him at the last second so you have 2 seconds to get your strip off on the stomper and it removes stab and your ally uses his rupt and you dive in to res him and you get him up just as the enemy is halfway through his 2nd stomp attempt.

The question remains, do you prepare for these situations? Does someone in your team prepare for them, if your class/role can’t handle it? Is it worth it to fit in that extra skill just for preventing stomps? If the enemies are bringing stability and mist form for stomps, the answer is “yes”.

Maybe you are confusing the end of the condition queue with the front?

nldixon, they don’t have a 100% chance to get their stomp off, even if they are invulnerable or stabilitied. For instance, you can aoe stealth an area (can think of 2.5 professions that can do this off the top of my head). Stability can be stripped etc etc, I’m sure you’re aware of all this. What all of this is, is the next level of pvp. Downed state is a central, and complicated, component of pvp. What I mean to say is, it’s up to you to decide how you want to approach this issue. There exist tools to prevent even the most seemingly unstoppable of stomps, the question is whether you build your character to that level of play. It is not a simple matter of invulnerable stompers always winning and it being OP and this needs to be changed and how can this be fair, etc. It’s simply a game mechanic that each side can take more and more drastic steps to enable or deny stomps. These are all advantages with tradeoffs, the question is how much is it worth to you?

This was a pretty good post op!

Yezhik.2071:

It takes LAST priority on condition removal…. even if immobilize was applied last, it still gets taken off last.

Yezhik.2071:

Also the fact that immobilize is last priority in any situation means that the target can have 3 conditions on him, i can pop immobilize, and 100% he’ll just sit the and we’ll whack on him…granted he doesn’t dodge at the time of my cast.

I’m sure you’re mistaken. There is no “priority” to conditions. Can you cite any sources stating otherwise?

Hey guys I think some of you are not quite understanding the purpose of downed state.

Just to be clear, if you are 1v1 and downed, you are dead 97% of the time. It’s irrelevant if the enemy stealths or whatever they do. In fact, if they stealth to stomp you and they weren’t really low on health, they’ve wasted a stealth.

If you are downed and have no allies nearby there’s nothing you can do — you will die. Stealth or not stealth, doesn’t matter.

So, stealth stomping is only really a thing you need to think about in group fights, where you have allies nearby. That’s what the long skill list that was posted was about: they’re aoe interrupts that can easily disrupt a stealth stomp if an ally has them and has sufficient awareness to know what’s going on and use it.

Thanks for reading, the end.

Is it an intended design choice that different regions cannot tourney together? In other words can we expect it to be changed in the future?

I’ve no idea what the official explanation is, but I heard it said that it was to avoid having some stat combinations that were considered OP.

Kimbald.2697:

Those are other options.
but they say nothing about game balance.

If, for the sake of argument, a thief can kill 3 players, than when a thief comes you can also run and get another point.

For the record: you are very very right, but this doesn’t solve the issue in any way.

Game balance kicks in when the used scenario is: what happens if you fight?

I don’t understand your thief argument.
Anyway, it’s kind of useless to talk about game balance in fights. Even if we assume their profession, we know nothing about their weapons, utilities, traits, skill level, and that’s for just a simple 1v1 situation. If you want to say a guardian + 1 other random player vs 2 random players, it means almost nothing. It’s not even possible to have a coherent discussion about that. You see what I’m saying?

What happens if you fight? Well, if you are more prepared and/or more skilled and/or have good counters to the enemy you will probably win. How else could anyone answer your guardian + ally scenario if you wanted to insist that they fought?

edit:
tl;dr: discussing game balance using scenarios with unspecified builds is fruitless

Kimbald, the correct answer is: leave and cap another point, leave 1 burst to keep their attention but not engage directly. People are getting so focused on “how do i kill guardian????” they forget their other options.

The enemy you downed was probably a warrior, they have a downed skill that lets them temporarily rally. A rally happens normally when the enemy is killed, not downed.

I agree, I’d like to see more people to be able to form parties easily. I suppose the solution would be to make/find a cross-server tpvp guild. When you want to tourny up, swap to that guild and ask for party. If any1 has one of these I’d like to get in on it btw.

Angry Flying Squirrel.3041:

I would agree if the glass cannons damage was on longer CD. But when they are on very short or no CD like the current game is than we have a problem.

Speaking only from personal experience using a 100b warrior sometimes,
100b has like 8 second recharge, but it’s useless without kd + frenzy. It roots me and they can just walk out of it, so the “recharge” for my spike is closer to 45 seconds for a traited frenzy. This is about the same recharge of anti-spike skills (such as elixer s on my engineer). I’m not saying your complaint doesn’t have any merit, just that it seems the devs have considered these kinds of situations. We’ll see what kind of balance changes they make in the future.

Angry Flying Squirrel.3041:

If burst can take down a bunker than whats going to happen to all other other Spec? Burst>sustain.
Burst>bunker
Every one plays Burst.

Currently
Burst>sustain
sustain>bunker But takes way way too long to kill. So the Bunker ends up winning.

Just try taking down a Bunker with a necro. Ya you can do it but not before the other team shows up to kills you. And so the bunker wins.

Well, glass cannon’s enemy is their own squishiness. If you can avoid their damage for a few seconds, make them waste their skills, a balanced should have enough damage to kill them. A bunker should not have enough damage to easily kill one, however. I’m only speaking about where I think the developers are trying to take the game’s meta, maybe not precisely where it is right now.

Edit: in anticipation of any possible “how do you avoid the burst” questions I had the thought: bunkers are all defensive skills; bursts are all damage skills; sustain/balanced is… balanced. some damage, some cc, some self defence. Too many people run without any anti-burst skills and then cry when they get killed and they can do nothing. Prepare for it.

Just a couple thoughts

Bunker purpose is to “waste time” not necessarily “win” a 1v1 fight. Hold the point until reinforcements come, or simply until they die on the point having bought as much time as possible while denying the enemy the cap points.

Sustain/balanced is not supposed to counter a bunker, because by its very name you can see that it is playing into the bunker’s favor by wasting time. It’s largely irrelevant if the sustain can eventually win, the bunker has prevented the enemy from easily overtaking the point and gained his team time+points. Not to mention there is plenty of time for the guardian to signal to his team’s roamer to come and assist him.

Glass cannons are supposed to be counters to bunkers because they kill quickly, thereby not wasting time and not playing in favor of the bunker’s strategy. I can see what Jon is saying with the retaliation. A bursty glass cannon has minimal hp and would simply blow up against retaliation, when normally a bunker should not have sufficient damage to threaten a squikittenarget. I think the dynamic that they possibly want to encourage is the cannon would fake a burst of some sort to make the bunker trigger their retal, so then they back off and wait for it to end, then kill the bunker quickly. I suppose then it would be an obvious problem if the guardian could just keep retal up most of the time, making a clear opening for the burst difficult to gain.

And then of course balanced/sustain is encouraged to bring some sort of “o kitten” burst defense so they can get out of the glass cannon’s burst and turn around to make him explode like a wet paper bag.

Again, these are only a few thoughts I had after reading everyone’s posts.

It’s probably the last one you have on. LIFO: last in, first off. This is the way gw1 worked and the way that makes most sense.

GankSinatra.2653:

Hi i paid 60 bucks for this game, is it really too much to ask to read a puppy textfile blog post without a two week delay after giving them 60 bucks? Many of us most likely feel that they didnt get their money’s worth as far as pvp goes.

You’ve not bought permission to demand Jon to schedule communications around your whims. It’s done when it’s ready; not when you demand it because you feel it’s owed to you.

You guys are all raving mad. It’s a video game people, chill out. They have always delivered good content. The second someone from anet breathes a single word about an update that wasn’t delivered “on time” everyone loses their kitten like 4 year olds. Hopefully they won’t make the mistake of informing us of any further potential updates.

alcopaul.2156:

everybody could do it so it is not an issue or exploit. if everybody can do it then no one is getting unfair advantage.

That’s completely irrelevant. The issue is not that it’s an unfair advantage — it’s not, you’re right — it’s that it removes any reason to plan anything in advance at all.

I would strongly suspect that this is a carry over effect from the pve side, and that they will lock these things down soon. I can’t imagine why they would allow this. I seem to recall a similar issue in early gw1 that was fixed after people started taking heavy advantage of it. It’s hard to believe they didn’t learn their lesson the first time…

Josher.9612:

I have no interest in playing against people who LIVE for PvP. I just want to PvP with a couple of friends on the SAME team against other “normal” people, not some pre-made group of teens who eat/live/sleep this game.

Not too much to ask.

The obvious question here is, how do you distinguish the hardcore from the casuals? Your demands are reasonable from your perspective, but they are much more complicated from a “game design” perspective that affects everyone. Once they implement some type of player rating system, it’s likely you will be able to do tourneys with your friends vs other people that are equally as “casual”. It would be unreasonable, however, to demand that you play with your friends in random pug spvp, because the very nature of the system would encourage hardcore players to form mini teams that farm glory all day long stomping casuals. Then you would have only shot yourself in the foot by asking for it. Which is why they haven’t done it. Which is why all questions like yours are unreasonable and self-defeating.

Probably a combination of factors:

• some bad players
• most weps have several “situational” skills and 1-2 steady damage skills
• it probably works well enough for some, since most other players are not giving enough challenge

That patch notes list was a mile long, fixing important pve problems. If we want to be crybabies, we can say that they are “ignoring us” and that gw2 will fail because yadda yadda and some more crying mixed in with sarcastic remarks. I don’t know about you guys, but I play pve as well as pvp. I’m glad they are focusing the majority of their efforts where the majority of the playerbase will feel it. It does suck that we’ve not had an update for pvp, but there’s no reason to cry. It will come. Really. And a month after it’s released you’ll all have completely forgotten all this.

It keeps track of wins, not losses. And anyway as Streaks said it’s not visible to other players.

Downed state’s not going anywhere. Learn to play with it I guess.

Duukar, regarding stealth stomp, as I’ve already mentioned you can still hit the thief. If you know where he is, aim there and use your #2 downed skill to try and interrupt him. All classes have some form of this “next level” stomp and each has counters. Except Engineer Elixer S and Ele mistform, which I’m not sure how to counter those yet. If it really bothers you, try to coordinate with someone on your team that has some kind of aoe interrupt (warriors are good for this, especially hammer) so when you go down to a thief the warrior can come and easy mode save you. These types of downed fights are like escalating arms races: the team that is most coordinated and prepared for these situations usually wins. As a side note, yesterday I prevented a stealth stomp on my ally by stealthing the both of us and ressing him.

I think the targeting issue (at least for me) stems from accidentally clicking on something as you’re swinging your camera around with right click. Pretty absurd that this is not changed or an option added to disable this.

Every class has access to stomp-aids. Stealth is not a 100% guaranteed finisher. It is how you are supposed to play the game. You can still interrupt a stealth stomp.

If you think a class is OP then play it.

• maybe it really is op
• maybe it’s not, but you learn how to counter it

This game is not completely balanced, but:

• no game ever is
• balance patches will certainly come, keep your panties on
• the majority of complainers could stand to L2P
• people may have unrealistic expectations of their class/build
  • judging from gw1, game is unlikely to be balanced around 1v1 combat

The game mechanic is fine, and won’t be likely to change imo. The only people that complain about this are people who can’t wrap their minds around how to play with it. It is simple: the enemy team will always send someone to ninja your boss (and so should you to theirs). You need to have someone able to keep them occupied for a short bit, while other people work your boss. Bring a stun or launch or something, and just before your boss is going down, stun the ninja. Of course it’s not always this easy, but if you choose to do nothing you will always fail.

Seether, I can only imagine they are busy. I doubt they are ignoring us. They are working on the game as we speak (type?).

Arcane, you only have 13k health?

Stealth stomp is not 100% chance of getting through because stealth does not make you immaterial, just invisible. Aoe rupts from an ally would be the easiest, but you can still aim most other rupts where the thief is hidden and get them.

First they said downed state cc abilities were OP, and the reply was “use stomp aids”
Now you say stealth stomping is OP, and the reply is “you can still hit them”
Next we will see “nerf necro boon strips, I can’t get my stability stomp off”
Then we will see “buff necro please because we always mysteriously get targeted just before a stomp”

Yea Pinder’s suggestion to use the class npcs in the mists is a really good one. I test professions out there when I’m just getting started.

Yea, guardian. I think ranger wouldn’t be half bad, but use a bow so you stay out of the fight and can give you time to see what’s going on and react.

they should be called rpvp and tpvp

All people do these days is cry about bullkitten

You have no idea what the downed warrior 3 skill does.

Elevated.9752:

Milo, I also main an engineer and I won’t kitten my character with elixir s just so I can finish a player.

You didn’t seem to be aware of any skills that could help. If you don’t want to take them that’s entirely up to you.

Elevated.9752:

Downed skill 2, Yes I use it every time, (it delays for about 1 second) and then we are dead unless its a 3v3 + fight, then we might get lucky.

Which is the same exact situation every other class is in when downed. Eles are the only class that have a right to complain.

Elevated.9752:

Looking at the the thief and mesmer downed skills, they are much ‘better’ at being downed.

I agree, they have a bit of an advantage. I think they are disadvantaged when it comes to getting ressed by their teammates, however. Their only “interrupt” as it were teleports them and cancels their teammate’s res.

Elevated.9752:

How about a warrior that pops up and is alive again for no apparent reason? ?

Yea! How does that work?!?! /hysteria
Look it up. How can you type these things man, I just don’t know.

Elevated I main as engineer, so let me give you a few counterpoints.

Engineer’s downed #2 skills is an interrupt. Time it at the last possible millisecond to buy yourself time. If the enemy hesitates in restarting his finisher you may have a chance to use your #3 skill and buy even more time for your team to come rescue you. This is largely identical to other classes.

Engineer can use Elixer S to finish downed players, and as far as I am aware it is the only way to 100% guarantee a stomp in the game. The toolbelt from this skill can also help you or your teammates stomp. You can also swap to your flamethrower and use the blind skill in the middle of your finisher. Those are just 2 off the top of my head, but there are more.

17k health is pretty low, unless you have toughness to compensate, which doesn’t seem to be the case.

If you’re complaining that stomps are hard to get off because of cc, then stability is what you need. If you’re complaining about something else, it’s not clear what you’re talking about.

You could try getting more health.
See also: Toughness, And How To Not Explode When People Barely Bump Into You.