Guild Wars 2

Unfortunately not, you can play variations and have some luck but they’re not quite as good as the meta builds. Condition builds are even worse off, they’re considerably worse than every other class at applying conditions.

I’d hate to be the guy in charge of describing this situation to higher ups:

“We have countless thousands of build varieties available for each class in the game.” – Dev

“Oh? That’s amazing, we can market around that. How many variations are being used regularly by the playerbase?) – Head Honcho

“…Like…20?” – Dev

+1 to the letdown crew.

I went from playing 5 hours each day to 1-2 hours a day post HoT when my condi ranger build became almost completely useless.

I haven’t played in 10 days just waiting for this balance patch to hit hoping that rangers would get a bit of love. Sorely disappointed.

I wont say I’m quitting, but I’m only really going to be on to play the story for a while.
Got another bit of the sPvP achievements to do but I really wont have any fun playing through that mess.

Still nothing noteworthy?

Pathetic. I’m tired of being pigeonholed into using the same 2 builds per class to remain viable in the game.

“With that said, there are definitely more pet changes that we’re looking forward to implementing in the future.”

All the needed changes are always “in the future”. Hopeless.

Yup, a rage post. But it’s so kitten frustrating.

I wouldn’t be so bothered by the auras if my guild that I had happily applied buffs to keeps etc for years no longer can because I don’t have 1000s of gold and hours of playtime to pour into that gold sink.

My small roaming guild that always felt like it was contributing now can’t even can’t apply the much desired +5 supplies that we used so much in the past.

It’s pretty sad.

What nonsense. Anets vision for WvW differed to the vision the players had and it led to the slow demise of the game mode and very few updates.

They’re now reaching out and letting us have some input via the polls and beta testing and so far it’s been going well.

The polls are slowly but surely leading us towards a WvW that the majority of players want, if you or others feel like your preferred choices aren’t being picked then actively vote.

It’s worth noting that it shouldn’t just be WvW only players voting, the game mode is for everyone and if someone feels like voting may make the game mode playable for them then they should be able to do so. Although I’d imagine it’s still WvW players that are making up the majority of votes on the polls.

DoogySnowStalker.2069:

Tragic Positive.9356:

Signet of the Wild has way too weak passive. I don’t remember it making a difference.

Would personally like to see the active and passive switched; Passive being 25% damage boost, and active being the Stability and a small burst of pulsing healing similar to Troll Ungeunt.

I feel like the passive is fine as is, swapping it around would make it too strong. The game needs less powerful passives as a whole.

What it needs is to be instacast, 1s activation is a killer when you desperately need that stability.

Xaylin.1860:

I could agree to this when we’re talking about a melee condition weapon. However, Axe performs pretty well as condition mainhand especially so when running Traps so you can combo off the fields.

I’d love a mainhand condition weapon.

Axe performs alright as a condition weapon but without conditions on the autoattack it’s a bit lackluster, you end up spending a great deal of time plinking weak power based shots at the enemy until your condition skills are off cooldown. Combo fields are a nice addition but a 20% situational chance shouldn’t be considered a replacement for standard condition application.

I think pet traitlines could be nice but they should only have one traitline, perhaps with the Grandmaster traits being family specific. If we give them too many traits, it could potentially overpower them.

It should maybe be limited to only be accessible if the Ranger runs the Beastmastery trait line, so that if you want more control over your pet you have to invest in it.

Chokolata.1870:

While pets are always the number 1 issue with ranger, there are also some synergy problems that do not allow lean builds to prosper.

Take condition builds for instance:

To add to this, another issue with condition builds is the lack of a proper mainhand condition weapon. We have nothing to apply condition pressure with in terms of autoattacks which is a waste considering we have Torch and Dagger offhands applying conditions.

I still think they should convert one traitline on each class into an Elite spec and make that the “What class mechanic do I want?” line. Converting would give each class 2 choices currently.

Ranger would be the easiest to convert, make Beastmastery an Elite, moving pet specific traits there and people can choose between useful(please) pets with extra damage and utility and a defensive/supportive spec (Druid).

But this idea comes with quite a few hurdles. Some classes would be difficult to adjust, Ranger damage would need to be buffed since the pet would be optional, potentially less build diversity to begin with, lots of developer time required to implement and probably more.

Either way, I hope they start pumping out Elite specs soon since we need a little more variety in the game. I definitely like the idea of a spirit weapon spec.

+1 to the post and thanks for reposting, the locking was totally uncalled for.

Swagger.1459:

psizone.8437:

I reckon spiders should have their F2s become ground targeted attacks that the player can aim to give them more versatility, perhaps even doing the same with the Wyverns would make their F2s more appealing..

How about we greatly speed up all f2 attacks so they actually hit instead?

Why not both? I agree though, the F2s in general are quite unreliable at times.

I reckon spiders should have their F2s become ground targeted attacks that the player can aim to give them more versatility, perhaps even doing the same with the Wyverns would make their F2s more appealing..

We’ll probably get one if/when we head towards Elona since that’s where you could get them in the first game.

OGDeadHead.8326:

LionChain.7694:

I don’t know if the answer is in nerfing these two pets

That’s not the solution. Don’t repeat the shortbow/longbow logic – “in order to make core pets more attractive, we felt the need to nerf HoT pets even more” – yeah, that’s typical Anet logic, and I’m sick of it.

+1 to this. Bring the core pets up to a competitive level, don’t nerf the pets that are actually viable.

*Merge ‘Poison Master’ with ‘Refined Toxins’ since they’re rather similar traits and neither screams “GM” to me.

*Move ‘Honed Axes’ to the Wilderness Survival line to replace ‘Poison Master’ and maybe give it a 5-10% damage bonus to Axe to buff its damage a bit. (moved since the trait didn’t have much synergy with the BM traitline)

*In the Beastmastery line, add a GM trait that provides a few seconds of Resistance on pet swap or pet F2, whichever seems more balanced. This would let us choose between condition defense, buffing you and your pets damage or a CC trait in that traitline.

*Make the damage bonus from ‘Two-handed Training’ baseline and add a modifier that gives your pet a small damage increase on a target you hit with a greatsword critical hit or the ‘Maul’ skill, whichever seems fairer.

*Make ’Pet’s Prowess’ baseline and replace it with ‘Fortifying Bond’. Make a new trait to replace the now empty Minor in Nature Magic

They moved the spawn location to make it easier for players to get to.

You’ll find them here: https://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Wyvern_Nest

If Shortbow gets a bounce effect, I’d like for them to redesign mainhand Axe with it preferably becoming a condition based melee weapon.

Hell, I’d like for them to add a proper main hand condition based weapon regardless of other changes.

This is from a WvW point of view. My favourite build was a variation of the old BM bunker build Xsorus posted but over time and especially with the release of HoT the build is massively underperforming.

My main issues are the lack of condition pressure compared to most other condition based classes and the fact that since HoTs release, having a high armour rating doesn’t seem to mitigate as much damage as it used to. Pets damage is poor unless you run the 2 main HoT pets and run ‘We Heal as One!’ leaving the other heals lacking in incentive and the large list of pets in the game being somewhat useless in comparison to Bristleback and Smokescale.

Thief is the fastest with Unhindered Combatant, Shortbow 5 and Shadowstep. There’s no catching a Thief running these.

Druid is second with perma-swiftness and Staff 3 with Warrior coming third using Greatsword 3 and Sword 2 with 25% movement speed bonus.

Please refrain from posting insults (even veiled ones) instead of posting a constructive argument.

This build, regardless of its use is needing toned down. This is a PvP game mode where holding or contesting points wins the match and a build that can do that whilst remaining mostly harm free is bad for the game.

The build I posted shows how bad it is, a passive 30s stunbreak that fill your endurance bar makes it so you need multiple CC skills on hand to break them and the CC needs to be instacast or the timing could be off because of the plethora of evades and dodges on hand for them. The build has multiple ways of regenerating initiative and endurance, making the “let them waste their cooldowns” argument quite invalid.

And can people stop posting that Scrappers are OP, I don’t disagree but that doesn’t excuse this build and should be reserved for its own post.

FrownyClown.8402:

I think this is what they use. Basically they spam dagger 3 and evades, while maintaining endurance from the heal and signet.

Pretty close. http://gw2skills.net/editor/?vZAQJAoYn0MBFOh9OBGmC8PhFqiaO77+wvLBCgDw7C+gBA provides more upkeep on initiative, evades and endurance and is likely the build being used.

This needs looked at by Anet. It not being widespread until just now and other classes having potentially overpowered builds does not excuse this.

Fluffball.8307:

The fact that this even needs to be brought up is enough to call for a nerf. No build should have that high of invulnerability to damage. Imagine if obsidian flesh had even 75% uptime and also held cap points.

Pretty much, I didn’t think there’d be this much opposition to a nerf on it.

Anyway I’m off to bed for now. I’ll leave the ball rolling on this thread and hope there’s less “l2p” posts in the morning.

Azukas.1426:

If you are talking about the D/D build it doesn’t have burst damage.

This is the build the anet balance team (Karl McClain) wants thieves to use. In fact they recently buffed the evade time of DB to a higher time frame. Nerf the evade of DB time frame to bring in line imho.

Yup, the burst damage comment I made earlier was meant for Thieves in general. This build is definitely just about spamming the Evades to hold points indefinitely.

That nerf would probably make the build much more bearable to fight against without drastically affecting Thieves as a whole.

Cynz.9437:

SO, how do you expect thieves to survive this madness of condi/aoe/CC spam that was introduced with HoT?

Dodging and kiting, but to a point. This build is almost 100% upkeep on evade frames, are you saying that’s what a Thief should be?

Thief also has very high burst damage potential, which is worth keeping in mind.

Not usually one to complain about these things but can you look into fixing the perma-evade Thief build that is making the rounds recently?

There is no break in their evade frames so no room to attack at all, let alone stun them.

It doesn’t help that they can also outpace you if you try to rotate around them.

Either way, it’s not a very fun build to fight… It’s pretty boring watching that evade notice pop up constantly.

Silberfederling.9302:

So they get even more trash along the lines of: nerf \buff op\kitten Tier XYZ?
I hope not.

I’d imagine they’d be professional enough to sift through the trash posts. I meant that they could get a general feel about what players feel is underused in the class, what feels broken and how they could improve and perhaps get an idea of what the class is lacking in or excel at and work from there instead of buffing or nerfing things based on complaints.

With the recent polls and interaction that have accompanied them in the WvW forum, I was wondering if it would be possible that the team in charge of profession balance and changes could either set up some new CDI post or create polls asking players what they feel their classes are currently lacking in and what mechanics or features of their class needs worked on.

I understand that it could be quite a lot of work to do it this way but the end results should make the classes more enjoyable for the players and perhaps improve build variety through the reworking of generally unused traits and utilities etc.

Paddywar.5820:

Hey, are there any updates on this? Cause I have the same problem, and I’m not sure how to check what pieces I have. All I know is that it says “Enchanted Map Scrap (4/4)” and in the description: “Double-click to combine all four pieces of the Enchanted Map.” But when I do I get “Item not found in your inventory.” Sorry for the crappy picture btw.

This’ll probably be closed since you resurrected a year old post but the post above yours tells you what you need to know.

Go find pieces 1/4, 2/4 and 3/4 and you can merge the 4 together.

Clownmug.8357:

Sounds like you guys are suggesting to create “mercenary” servers.

This seems like a good way to put it. Very small population servers that can (and should) be linked to different servers depending on where they’re needed on a weekly basis.

Give them mercenary group styled names instead of world names and it could be quite enticing. [Shining Blade, White Mantle, Am Fah etc]

Edit: This should help servers that are struggling against Bandwagoned servers that are too bloated to fight normally.

Poison on Axe 1 might be nicer now that poison stacks and would give a little more incentive to use the trait ‘Poison Master’

InsaneQR.7412:

Actually the pet nerfs are the only nerfs that are understandable, i mean SS and BB still outdamage vanilla pets.

Tje nerf on astral seed was totally unnecessary and why they nerfed moonböast is understandable but the douböe nerf was just an oberreaction.

The pet nerf felt like a kneejerk reaction to a bigger issue and just further nerfed any builds not using ‘We Heal as One!’ and ‘Bountiful Hunter’ which many builds currently use to buff player and pet damage (stupid Nature Magic line buffing the pet better than the Beastmastery one).

Even with nerfing those two pets they still haven’t fixed or buffed the vanilla pets to a usable state. I want to use more than 2 pets but they all need to be able to hit reliably to be remotely competitive.

S&R nerf sucked and make it pretty much useless. You can’t teleport your team mate out of a Meteor Storm and 600 range is practically nothing when it comes to WvW. Another useless cry for them to start separating sPvP and the rest of the game for balancing.

Nerfing one of our condition removals at the same time as one of the more powerful condition builds in the game gets a survival buff just seems stupid to me.

Bit of a pathetic excuse for a balance patch.

“Hey, lets nerf the things that we think is too strong without buffing the weaker stuff, that sounds like the right thing to do.”

Tyler Bearce.3427:

For instance, nothing is really stopping us from having a combination of ABL and DBL maps running simultaneously. 2 of one and 1 of the other. If we polled that, and players approved it, then there’d be no need for the rotation, and players on both sides of the issue could play on their preferred map. The downside of course, would be any perception of imbalance that may arise from one map being considered the stronger “Home” map, but we could always give the more defensible map to Red/Blue and leave the less defensible map to Green.

This would be quite nice!

As a modification of this, in the future is it possible you could allow servers to vote just prior to reset which map they’d use that matchup for their home borderland? The way I see it, different server communities prefer different maps and this could be a good compromise, though I’d imagine it wouldn’t be as simple to implement as it sounds!

Liston.9708:

Those tomes need a Nerf already (or more uses)

+1

I’d love to be able to use Tomes to progress PvE Mastery tracks. I quite fancy having a bash at Legendary crafting but I have little to no desire to play PvE enough to progress through the Masteries.

mrauls.6519:

Where’s guardian’s?

Or Rangers mainhand melee.

+1 OP, it’d be nice.

Razor.9872:

What would you imagine a solar/celestial shooting staff to sound like? Just curious.

Pew pew.

NEAUXLA.1527:

You must be an engineer main. :P

Not a great way to give yourself any credibility.

I only play my Engineers occasionally and have found from both playing them and fighting them that they aren’t any more or less powerful than the majority of roaming classes in WvW.

The issue I’ve found is that some classes are just slightly underpowered in comparison to Engie and most other classes. Necro and Ranger are currently lacking in the power department, they work, but they don’t pack as much of a punch as the rest.

+1 to these changes.

joneirikb.7506:

To those of you that like the “build diversity” in WvW, what if they added the sPvP builds for the auto level to 80, set exotic stats, selectable sigils and runes etc. And selectable stats on all items ?

So you can go through a list and selec stats for: weapon, helm, shoulders, chest, hands, legs, feet, backpack, amulet, ring x2, accessory x2 ?

Would you still hate it ? You’d gain the ability to swap sigils, runes, stats etc on the fly. You wouldn’t need to level or buy gear to get to 80, the only thing is that it would limit you to Exotic level.

I’d still hate it.

We have Legendary weapons, a backpiece and soon Armour that we can swap stats on currently and changing sigils and runes isn’t too much of a hastle. Getting the gear is part of the fun, especially if I don’t have to farm PvE for it. Once we get WvW specific Legendary gear, it’ll be even better.

All we actually need is the ability to purchase ALL stat choices in the WvW vendor (make the HoT stuff cost more if need be) and update the laurel merchants Ascended trinkets. Maybe allow us to purchase or earn Runes and Sigils without having to farm for them in PvE. This way we don’t need a new system built that many would dislike and all Anet would need to do is update some vendors.

You may be better off just going with Dire armour and weapons and Apothecarys trinkets and swap your sigils and oils since your main damage source is condition based.

You won’t lose much in terms of survivability and the lower power damage is negated by the much more powerful conditions.

Bigsexy.8302:

Didn’t say runes are the issue for the limited builds, but if WvW gearing works like in sPvP then certain overpowered runes will be removed. People who get carried obviously don’t like the idea and bring ridiculous statements like “it will hurt the build diversity”. There’s no diversity. The number of viable builds halved when they reworked the traits. And halved one more time with HoT. Only sigils vary.
And the thing is, with flexible skill system like in GW2 that allows build variety(on theory) it’s really hard to balance. It’s much easier for Anet to keep lots of trash traits and few goods ones.
I’d prefer to have pre-defined classes and some kind of balance that what is it atm.

If gearing worked like sPvP then WvW would lose its “endgame” charm.

“People who get carried…” Makes you sound very bitter and ruins your argument, not everyone runs “overpowered runes” will disagree with the change, and vice versa. What people run has absolutely no effect on how they view this issue.

The fact is, the game HAS a lot of trash traits and utilities and if Anet didn’t want to make an attempt to balance them then they’re in the wrong market for game development. They have been and will continue to make changes and eventually it will get to a more balanced state, swapping to an sPvP style build system will not change that.

Bigsexy.8302:

ITT: people with durability runes and other unbalanced crap crying about how it would cause 1-meta build only like in sPvP. As if we don’t have 1, max 2 cheeese cookei cutter builds per class already. The only thing that will come out is a better balance and skill will matter more. There’s no need to be exactly 1:1 with sPvP. Having some customization over trinkets is fine.
If this can’t happen I’d b e happy if they disable certain runes and foods.

Runes aren’t the issue main issue, the lack of traitline viability and underpowered utilities is.

Until weak traitlines and utilities are brought in line with the commonly used ones we’ll continue having one to two “meta” builds running rampant in WvW (and other game modes).

That said, there are a lot of trash Runes in the game that could do with an update, but they’re not the main reason the build diversity sucks right now.

anduriell.6280:

For pets:
Boon duration is in nature magic, a minor
Condition duration is in wilderness survival.

Pets needs a rework, but writhing their basic mechanics. Traits needs some adjustment too.

Those traits about condi and boon duration I would move them to a pet Especificar trait line that is dependent on the pet family.
So you shouldn’t have to sacrifice your traits to improve exclusively the pet.

Exactly, why the hell does my pet hit like a wet noodle when I’m using the Beastmastery line unless I also run Nature Magic and (to a lesser extent) one specific heal?

We also need pets to hit moving targets reliably still, but fixing the traits would help immensely.

No thanks.

/15 characters.

Electric Wyvern isn’t too bad when it comes to holding points since it’s pretty tanky and comes with an on demand launch and a 25s cooldown random knockback.

Oolune.4357:

Spirits got really strong at one point in time. I’ve been out of the scene for a bit, so I don’t know what state they’re in now, but I’d guess that the reason they aren’t optimal right now is how passively strong they used to be.

You hit the nail on the head there with “used to be”. With the release of HoT and the elite specialisations I think we could afford to revert spirits back to their strongest without having too much of a negative impact on the meta.

If nothing else, it would give us another build to use in WvW other than having to run Shouts, or Traps.

Can you add Clerics to the list of removed Amulets?

Certain builds that overuse the healing power were just plain boring to fight last season.

testpig.5018:

The alpine maps need work. They are stale. WvW is only popping now because the servers have been combined. You still find empty BLs maps.

On your server, maybe. Mine still has bigger queues on the Alpine maps than on EB. Also, considering the two servers we’re fighting also have huge numbers on the Alpine maps, it seems the same for those servers, too.

The map could maybe do with an aesthetic overhaul but I wouldn’t want them to change the fundamentals of the map.

Don’t forget to add some physical damage to Thief traps so it actually pops them out of stealth when running Trapper runes… That perma-invis condispam build is why we can’t have nice things.