Guild Wars 2

Turk.5460:

shagwell.1349:

Easy answer:
Thief in general. Best mobility in the game (with stun break), condition cleanse, self buffs, high damage and permanent access to stealth. In pvp only half as powerful because the stats are capped. Needs to happen in wvw too.

Doesn’t every other profession have (more) stun breaks, condi cleanse, (more) self boons, but can also survive being hit by 2 skills?

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The answer is yes, please pick something actually broken.

Is that the reason 90% of the roaming population are thieves these days? I mean, if every other class can do that better, why is everyone and their mother a thief?

Right, all the classes don’t have that all at once and high mobility. They sacrifice either mobility, or condi cleanse, or tankiness, or dodge/evade or stealth.

Easy answer:
Thief in general. Best mobility in the game (with stun break), condition cleanse, self buffs, high damage and permanent access to stealth. In pvp only half as powerful because the stats are capped. Needs to happen in wvw too.

It’s a bad idea as long as you don’t ban people for wintrading, afk or other kittenty behaviour.
And it wouldn’t work, because you need 250 people that actively pvp. Won’t happen anymore.

Sure, allow 5 man queue – but only vs 5 man queues.

Ruru.1302:

I don’t see how that’s relevant to the conversation. If it even happened, that is.

As a side note, I’d like to know what server you are on.

It’s relevant because you Mags still boast about your kdr and how great roamers you have. After playing against your server I know at least where that kdr comes from and it has nothing to do with unbelievable skilled gameplay. (fighting your three mada guys was at least fun and nobody interrupted it. props to your guild for that)

To answer your question. I transfered to JQ some weeks ago and back to EU last week.

NA is a really terrible environment for roaming or even zerg fights. I wonder how you normal people can exist there.

Ruru.1302:

I don’t recall spawn camping. Unless you mean the 15 VR that kept wiping the HOD group.

I recall fighting 2v3 against you mada guys. You lost. So, please calm down a bit. All your shiny talking doesn’t impress anyone who saw you fight.

fishball.7204:

Not saying people don’t cheat/smurf but HALF of the top 25 paid for their spots? That’s pretty funny and false lol.

I see at most maybe 5 people that could’ve cheated out of 25 and that’s a maybe.

It really doesn’t matter how many do that. The box is open and if Anet doesn’t ban that behaviour now you will have a lot more people doing this even on lower rankings which destroys pvp even more.
I really don’t understand why competitive games always draw scum like these people out of their holes and the game designers tolerate it.

This kind of behaviour destroyed any game I played in the last 30 years.

Stupid idea. Every time something like this gets introduced a lot of players feel they need to use any possible way to achieve those things.
It will just make the bad community in spvp worse. Make it available over dedication, not over something you can exploit with friends or with hacks.

Nickzor.2453:

You’re actually correct I wasn’t aware blizzard had started hyping Arena esports in the last 2-3 years. I always found arena to be incredibly dull so I didn’t pay attention to it a whole lot. But by your own example esports does in no way negatively impact MMO PVP after all 30 seconds on google makes it clear that WoW PVP activity is at an all time high ( in the last 4-5 years that is.

Balancing wise it has. It gave Blizzard a reason to say “We balance pvp on 3v3 Arena”. In fact they tried that but it made pvp so much worse than it was before.
You mostly had a “rock, paper, scissors” balancing in WoW before esports was a thing. You killed rogues on your warrior and got countered by mages while mages were countered by rogues, etc.
With esports and focus on balancing 3v3 there were some classes on top which had gread synergies in teams and all the others classes had no place in arena – so even a player with high skill couldn’t end up in the top 50 when he played a “bad class”.
This balancing went up and down over the years but it is still worse than anything Anet has thrown at us – even after WoW started balancing stuff differently in pve and pvp and normalized stats and got rid of pvp gear.

It’s a pure kittenfest now.

And as I said before: To make an mmorpg a good esports title you have to total separate the two parts of the game. Anet did it right at least on this part. My guess is that they don’t have enough people to follow that plan to the end.

Nickzor.2453:

What MMO had esports besides this? Blade and Soul? Only one i can think of with a proper espoprts scene and it single handedly held it up in korea for 3 years with no new content.

World of Warcraft.

Based on twitch numbers – people watching arena tournaments – it is still the #1 esport mmorpg. It sucks, yes. And it shouldn’t be called esport but they tried that back in 2010 or something and Blizzard still thinks it’s an esports title.

Esports kills every MMORPGs pvp. MMORPG aren’t good for esports. It won’t ever work until you completely build a new game inside your game.
If you want to go that way you need a big development team that focuses on the esports part, a separate balancing, separate skill design, etc. You don’t want an esports with “rock, paper, scissor”, you want equal chances for any class participating so player skill (not armor, class or weapons) matters.

That’s not how pvp in this game works. That’s the same idiotic problem we had some seasons ago with real bunker builds. “Just don’t go there” doesn’t help in a game where a point that constantly generates points for a team isn’t a viable option.
It could be in a real 5v5 with 5 people on both sides in an organised team with voice chat.
But GW2 never had this kind of pvp, so a build like this favors stupid behaviour like “sitting on a point and bunkering”. If a team has more than one DH which happened this season on a regular basis you may have two bases like this.

They should get rid of seasons. Just put the achievements into unranked so you can grind your Legendary backpack and give back the option to farm Ascended gear too – without having to pve.

The glicko kitten never really worked. Most of the unranked games are far more balanced than 90% in season.

End this “competitive” experiment. It failed. If you want to follow this path you need an actual balancing team that balances on a daily or weekly basis not patches things every three month based on the raid situation in pve.

This game shouldn’t focus on ESL, because it failed in that category. And sorry, but DH is strong enough that you have at least 30% DH per game.
So, why is this? Because it’s kittening easy to secure a base with a guardian. You place your traps and have a safe play vs. many melee classes. Based on the experience in any pvp game and on the fact that people mostly queue solo the class has a big advantage – just because it promotes bad gameplay – sitting there and waiting while having 1200 yard range with good damage.
Yes, you may die, but to die your opponents have to coordinate and that often fails even on gold rank.

You don’t have to coordinate anything as DH. You place your traps and auto-attack with your longbow That’s terrible balancing.

I prefer waiting 20 minutes or longer for a match over having to carry silver or “not yet ranked people” in gold 2 in 2/3 of my matches.
“Yeah, I won all my 1v2 and 1v3 and still -14”.

The EU pvp is on a higher level of play than NA. I played most of the seasons on both and play solo queue only. EU is by far more enjoyable because a lot more players seem to know what to do in this game. Same goes for wvw. EU is much better organised and guilds try to break the meta and are often successful.
Don’t really know why this is the case, but NA seems to adapt more slowly to changes in the game.

I am not from Asia, but I have the same ping spike (500ms+) problems when logging into NA servers. On EU server my ping is higher than normal, but not that bad.

Sure you can. What is the difference between pips and getting +12 for a win and -12 for a loss. It’s basically the same problem, it’s just dropping you down to a lower tier until you get up again and drop again.

Are you American? That would make much sense. In that case I try to help you out.
Playing vs. a full team is most likely a loss as playing vs. a 3 or 4 man group. That’s the intended thought behind this:

Back in S4 I got matched up pretty often vs full groups with no group on my team. 5 random players vs. a group of 5 (or 5 random players vs. group of 3 or 4)

And sorry, that I don’t keep all of the old screenshots and for your educational system.

edit: and you really played 7300 hours in pvp? That’s about 1/5 of the existence of guildwars. Go read a book !

sephiroth.4217:

Not to poke holes in your vent, but your pic shows a 3 man premade….

Yeah, haven’t found a screenshot of any of those teams except one from amber in s3 where the 5 man team lost, but I think you get the idea.

So, NA is much harder to play? Wait.. that’s completely different to what I hear everyday!

Been there, seen it.
After this season and with experiences in season 3 and 4 I’m pretty sure there is a “state of mmr” which can be called “ruby hell”, “mmr hell” or “bronze hell”.

To be more specific. Here are the numbers of my two accounts from this season (with some statistics from my last seasons)

1. Account (North America servers)
   Started in “Platinum 1”
   Games played: 297
   Games won: 127
   League Rating: 984
   Most games played on: Warrior (switched between GS/M+Sh and LB/M+Sh depending on opposing teams setup)

Old seasons: Season 2 Ruby, Season 3 Ruby, Season 4 Ruby, Season 5 Sapphire – all seasons I played around 300 game, except for season 5 where I played around 10-15 games.

1. Account (European servers)
   #Started in “Silver 1”
   Games played: 116
   Games won: 68
   League Rating: 1349
   Most games played on: Warrior (switched between GS/M+Sh and LB/M+Sh depending on opposing teams setup)

Old seasons: Season 4 Ruby – only played season 4 with around 80 games.

As the statistics show I’m at below 50% win rate at NA and dropped from Platinum into Bronze where I worked my way up to Silver, back to Bronze, back to Silver, back to Bronze.
On EU i started in Silver, dropped to Bronze, worked my way up into Gold and my winrate is positive.

NA last 10 games:
351:500 L
500:230 W
500:435 W
390:500 L
500:310 W
210:500 L
457:501 L
159:501 L
482:501 L
501:273 W

EU last 10 games:
500:465 W
501:438 W
501:394 W
500:406 W
501:396 W
369:500 L
398:507 L
500:485 W
500:215 W
515:465 W

As you see, the NA matches are more likely to be strongly lopsided, while the EU matches are mostly close.

So, what’s the difference between NA and EU pvp? I play the same classes with the same builds and still my “skill” is very much different in the pvp environments.
Obviously it is much harder to carry people on NA and – that’s even more important – you often get teams you can’t carry at all and create a downward spiral in the matchmaking.
What does that mean? There has to be an algorithm that puts the teams together based on variables like “mmr”, “class”, “in a group” and “games played” (or something like this)
With the experiences from season 3 and 4 where I couldn’t ever get out of ruby (after being in diamond some times) I’d say this algorithm is broken somehow.
Back in S4 I got matched up pretty often vs full groups with no group on my team (see picture below). 5 random players vs. a group of 5 (or 5 random players vs. group of 3 or 4). After maybe 50-70 games reaching the end of ruby, and losing 3-5 games in a row again, I got into a horrible losing streak. I think I lost 32 games in row back then.

So, how can this happen? Yes, you sometimes play bad, everyone makes mistakes in a game, less or more, really grave mistakes or light ones, but it’s not about errors it’s about the sum of errors your team makes. The team that makes less errors most likely wins the game.

So, back to the question how you end up on gold and bronze on two different accounts?
The only unknown factor is the matchmaking and I guess that’s the problem which leads to a “ruby hell” or just a point where you can’t work yourself out.
The matchmaking seems to still put players on losing streaks into teams vs. people on winning streaks and this carries a “tainted” mmr over the seasons into every season you play.
Let’s say there are 20 people in your mmr range in queue.
If you are on a tainted mmr it will most likely put you into the team with same bad mmr while you have to face a group with a normal one. The same goes for groups.

So if you end up on a losing streak and often fail to carry your team because there is no way these guys win a 4v2 at mid, you are basically kittened.
The only way out of this bad matchmaking is to find a friend to queue (and who is at least on your skill level). Otherwise you will carry that “tainted mmr” into the next season and you most likely end up in a downward spiral like many people do – and that’s why my “clean” EU account has the far better games and I can make it into gold on my own.

What does this mean for you? You maybe a mediocre player. As many mediocre player your place is in the mid of the ranking system. If you are newbie or just unexperienced you don’t belong in the mid of the ranking system. To end up where you belong you need to play.

Disclaimer:
If you are pvp player your number one goal is to get better and try to minimize your errors while playing.
Everyone makes errors while playing – even the top 5 players – but you can work on that and get better.

tldr: Bronze Hell exists, but not everyone is in Bronze Hell

Best thing Anet could do is announcing a wvw season for march. And without further announcement lower the map cap on every server to 30 people. And open all them at the same time.
- they will earn a kittenton of money
- server population has to transfer or end up in hour long queues

After that close every server at the same time and check numbers again.

To bad it was the same time a real esports tournament was on twitch.

Don’t stand near the npc then? Or don’t stack siege like an idiot.

With “This release will also include a new, challenging group-farming spot for leather.” you mean it is available in wvw zerg combat only and you get leather based on stomps, right?

Lukas.7159:

Decent ideas nothelseth.

How about you react to his topic instead of derailing and making fun of it? Oh, right, you can’t. You are one of those “Thief is only viable because of my high skill level – players” – I get it.

The point is that with some classes you can’t decap, when the DH left their traps there. I had a much where I instantly died as I reached the ring because two or three DH left their traps on spot. And it takes by far to long sometimes to fight off point before you can decap.

Rating should be based on the class and build you play.

Switching only makes sense if you have another class you can play as good as the first one. Why should a thief player who is good switch to a class where he is mediocre?

Ok, everybody can play guardian – like everyone can operate a microwave.

fumcheg.1936:

Bad news OP but SS does not clean any condies. It just breaks stun and port you away. Same as necro’s Necrotic Traversal you know? Except it does not poison anyone and does not recharge anything as Necrotic Traversal does.

So, you compare the most mobile class in the game with the less mobile, because they both have skill which can teleport? You could easily take away shadowstep from thieves and they would still be the most mobile class in the game.

As long as the statistic isn’t accounting to the number of games played it’s worth nothing. You can’t take rating out of the context. I’m at 1300 rating with ~20 games. How is this accurate? Right, it isn’t at all

I’m a pvp’er all of my online time which is by now over 20 years. And GW2 pvp is the only kind of pvp in a game where I end up being frustrated as never before.
I got outnumbered or ganked up on in so many games, i got graveyard camped and i had terrible arena moments in other games but GW2 is different.

I so often have the feeling that I can’t help my team mates because they don’t want help and even if I can help them they find a way to totally fail on another place of the map.
It’s easier to carry a bad 10 man random battleground group in WoW or a really bad team in CS:GO then to carry 2 bad players in GW2.
There is something not going as planned in the matchmaking, when I get teams every 2 games that seem to never have played pvp before. A single player in your team that is terrible? Your team can deal with that. But it seems like after you won a match the system puts all the losers from the match before into your team.

I’m by far not a perfect player, but I see most of the errors I make and I try to improve. I can’t improve in this game when every kittening match is one-sided.
Why do I win a match with 500:20 and lose the next one 502:100. In one match I solo 2-3 of the enemy team at far and another of my team kills the other two. In the next match I win a 1v2 and my team completely wipes 4v3 and loses two bases.

I don’t really know what’s wrong with the matchmaking or if this is what Anet wants, but I’ll afk most of the time for now just to farm gold and frustrate those players that frustrate me.

Fun part is that this topic is about Trailblazer and Viper but not mentioning Marauder/Commander.

Easiest classes are still druid and dh

Is it that kind of 500g like your stream giveaways?

apharma.3741:

shagwell.1349:

I win 2 matches for 22 points and lose 3 matches for 41 points. I win 2 matches and get back to silver, I lose 1 match and go back to bronze.
Is it my fault? Nope. Yes, I make mistakes every game, but I can’t win a game when we have a staff ele, two thieves and a bunker guardian that wipe 4v2 on mid and decide to chat in /t instead of playing.

Why do i get teams like that three to four games in a row?

Total of last games:
500:405
500:296
190:501
219:500
152:502

Trash your matchmaking, Anet.

Were you the staff ele, two thieves or guardian?

Oh wait you neglected to mention what you did to change the outcome of the match and believe me, as useless as your team is the other team isn’t much better.

So what did you do to change the outcome of the match if you honestly don’t think you should be in that division?

I won my 1v2 at their home base for 75% of the fights and died once in the whole match and we kept this point until they decided to 4v1 me because my team decided to 4v0 our home.

I win 2 matches for 22 points and lose 3 matches for 41 points. I win 2 matches and get back to silver, I lose 1 match and go back to bronze.
Is it my fault? Nope. Yes, I make mistakes every game, but I can’t win a game when we have a staff ele, two thieves and a bunker guardian that wipe 4v2 on mid and decide to chat in /t instead of playing.

Why do i get teams like that three to four games in a row?

Total of last games:
500:405
500:296
190:501
219:500
152:502

Trash your matchmaking, Anet.

I’m in an elevator.

One of the problems of this whole fully scientific project of Helseth is that everyone thinks the majority of players plays ranked to win. And this isn’t the case – at least on NA.

You will find a huge number of players that don’t even care if they win a match or their team wins a match. They want to gain three pips per match and that’s their big goal.

They don’t read teamchat, they don’t win a 3v1 mid and they afk because the ice cream truck is coming. Many of them don’t even speak English.

So, there is a nice project for Helseth.

How about you play a guardian to legend on NA next?

NA: trash
EU: half trash

StickerHappy.8052:

So you did try to get better right? Out of the negative there came a positive. I am glad you did try to get better.

It’s their loss if they can’t handle criticism. It’s up to you to filter the kill yourself comments. I know you are an adult and you are able to see that this is nothing more than an internet linggo, not be taken literally.

So much what..

You shouldn’t need to filter such comments. Such comments are fully idiotic and players saying those things should get their accounts banned and face a beating from their parents or if they are no longer dwell in their parents basements they should made responsible for behaviour like that.
Telling someone to kill him/herself because he/she is bad at a game is one of the most stupid things the internet has brought on us.
And if a streamer supports such behaviour there is report button on twitch to make him stop that.

The problem is that even Helseth can’t carry bad teams. We saw that on stream in bronze and silver. There was a pretty funny match where Helseth almost rage-quit the match because he won a 1v3 at far and his team lost mid and home and tranquility.

Based upon the fact that a platin, gold, silver and bronze player isn’t anywhere near Helseths skill level a normal player will more often end up in matches where he can’t carry his team even if he plays good for his skill level.

What does this mean for a player.
If you are a gold player and you end up in silver, you will most likely need a lot of times more games to reach your “real” tier.
It took Helseth 141 games to climb from bronze to legend. Which means it will take a normal player easily 300-400 games to reach his normal placing.

As stated somewhere in this forums I get 10-14 points for a victory at the moment (just out of bronze) and lose by the same amount.
If I win 100% of my games in silver I need 29 games to reach gold. If I have a normal rate of around 55-60% it will take ~ double the time.
And to be honest after the experiences this seasons it’s most unlikely to get winstreaks.

They won’t get punished.

Supreme.3164:

It’s easy to say eli hell doesn’t exist…maybe I should record my matches and show people my matches…most times no matter what you do, you get players that actively will try to lose matches and you just need a single player to screw everybody else

Elo hell exists as once your MMR is established, any form of self-improvement is pointless because the system will shot you down

New accounts start at mid MMR so an ESL level player with his knowledged can easily farm newbs at mid range with his new account, easily reach 80% win rate and reach legendary

If on other hand you try to improve your MMR with your old account, the system will simply shot you down the second you go over 50/50.

Nobody denies that esl players are better but the game will punish you once you reach 50/50 mmr on one account..no matter what…you will start losing the second you go over it.

Also this condescending attitude is getting old, people here talking have no way to see what matches are like for people claiming elo hell exist

People on this forum are the same “kind” you meet in every online community, game, stream or forums. Most don’t think, just troll or just want to stirr kitten up.
Just ignore those.

Yep, that’s how it is. Helseth proved nothing, but that a top 10 player world won’t end up where normal gold, silver or bronze players end up.

I can carry teams when they at least are able to win 4v3, 3v2 or 2v1 fights and can hold bases or recap. I can’t when they lose bases 3v1 and that’s happening to me in silver and bronze.
Good thing I only play 1 match in gold per day it would totally frustrate me to have another ruby hell season.

Best part is that I climbed out of bronze yesterday with my bad account and lost two matches. -11 and -15 (both with over 200 points difference) where I hold far or home vs. two and 3-4 of my team come to help me, because they can’t even win another fight on the map.

I don’t know how this matchmaking works, but it is really kittenty.

Yeah, that’s the main problem. We don’t know how the mmr really works and “how are teams created”.
And I guess that may lead – under some circumstances – to terrible matchups and losing streaks.
My guess is that this problem is somehow related to the number of games, the matchmaking trying to create “fair” games and the lack of players in a certain mmr range.

7:3 on account 1.

So, what you are saying is that the sheer number of games makes players legendary not their skill?
Sorry, I’m a mediocre gold player and my winrate is where it should be at around 50%.

Still that doesn’t answer the question. Why is one account worse then the two others. I will surely make it into gold with account 3 if I put some effort into it and it will take a lot games less.
Something in the matchmaking does not function properly and that’s what I would call an “mmr hell”.

My stats from yesterday on the “kittened up – account”.
10 games played, 6 wins, 4 losses.
6 wins with a total of 72 points
4 losses with a total of – 48 points

So, i basically made 24 in 10 games by getting 10-14 points per game (on my other accounts the lowest score was 12 points for a win and I sometimes got 20)

Matches I lose mostly look like this:

StickerHappy.8052:

You will not drop to bronze (except for decay) if you are really skilled. We have gone through this multiple times in all seasons. If you are really good enough, you will not be in bronze (atleast)

Mashing your skills off cooldown? <———————- This is your problem right here.

Yes, it’s possible. I posted it in Helseth’s thread already. I’m gold 3 on my main and dropped into bronze on my 2nd account and I can’t get out any more.

Stats:
account 1 (gold 2-3)
253 games, 139 wins
account 2 (bronze 3)
222 games, 100 wins

With account 2 I started in gold 3 after 8:2 in placement and started with a 10 or 11 loss streak – I didn’t play good, but also had teams throwing matches, disconnecting players and lost games were i fought 1v3 while my team still lost one or both of our bases or couldnt take one.
After around 80 games with around 30% win rate I was stuck at bronze. My win rate got better, I got some win streaks where I was able to carry teams or where my teams were just good and players could win 1v1 at least. Still I can’t get my 2nd account out of bronze. I win 2-3 games and get around 30-35 points, lose 1-2 games for 24-28 and basically start anew. At this rate it will take me another 200 games to get into silver 3 or even gold.

So there is a huge difference between my first and my second account. I play the same class and build on both accounts and do some games on a third (about 40 games now) that got into silver recently.

So why is my skill on account 1 and 3 higher and I totally suck on account 2?
The only difference between my accounts is the history of old seasons.

account 1 was ruby or diamond and I almost didn’t play but had a 50+% win rate
account 2 was ruby forever and I lost a huge amount of games in season 3 (many loss streaks), didn’t play in season 4
Account 3 is new and has no pvp history

So, the only reason I see for getting really bad matchups on account 2 is the match history from previous seasons.