Overpowered healing just reminds me of WoW and Rift which I both left because healing ruins PvP fun. Healing should always be minor for any build, and you tweak the balance of your build by choosing more toughness or more damage. Right now bunkers are tank + healer in one build, making it twice as bad as the other games.
As a warrior, I find that there’s a huge trade-off if you pick a rifle. You have much better burst and survivability with gs + axe/shield since you can load your adrenaline with gs and use axe finisher so they complement each other very well. If you run gs + rifle you lose a very good ability shield block so you will die very easily. If you run rifle + axe/shield, both require a full adrenaline bar to burst so they don’t complement each other well.
Thieves are a little over the top but don’t ruin games as much as bunkers do.
Most people just wanna log on and have a few good competitive games for the playstyle they choose to participate in i.e. fair games pug vs pug with good 1v1 balance. Not pug vs premade which on top of being a premade, has 3 overpowered FOTM bunkers in it.
Most premades are still too busy farming pugs in unfair free tournament games.
The game is fun to log on and smash some faces in sPvP but bad balance kills any possibility of competitive fun, especially for people who pug, which is most players.
There are some serious issues with balance and fixes are nowhere near fast enough. I love the game because of the fast action play, but the bad balance drives me away a little more every time I play.
Whatever the format of the game, people will complain when a 1v1 situation seems clearly unbalanced. Most players play solo with no voice communication. You get complaints on balance when the 1v1 balance is not a priority. “Balancing around teams” leaves the majority of players unsatisfied. WoW was way more popular when it had ranked 2v2 arenas, which were closer to 1v1. The popularity of duels should be a strong indication that most players want competitive 1v1 in a balanced 1v1 environment.
The problem is most premades are bad and could barely win 500 to 400 against pugs. These guys prefer to win unfair games rather than get a fair match they’ll probably lose.
Join now = empty games.
Useless feature at the moment.
I agree that pugs vs premades is one of the worst aspect of the current PvP game and would benefit a lot from getting improved as soon as possible. I haven’t done a free tournament in at least a week because, as you say, if you manage to win games with your pug you have increasingly more chances to be matched against a premade on the next round. It’s totally pointless to pug free tournaments in the current state.
Duels and good 1v1 balance would make a lot of players very very happy.
My biggest gripe with the downed system is the reviving aspect of it. When you get for example a bunker build who is already way too hard to down, and you manage to down his partner, he will be able to sustain the damage you dump on him while he’s reviving, then will full heal up. In some cases, I downed the same enemy 3 times and just couldn’t do anything to finish him off because of reviving. When you manage to down an enemy before they manage to down one of your team, you outplayed them. When their bunker revives everyone multiple times, this is not about being outplayed at all. Everyone should have a baseline “interrupt reviving” ability at the least, or else just don’t allow reviving in combat, except maybe by yourself if everyone is ignoring you. Some builds actually need their CC to land a burst and down someone in the first place, then are left with nothing to interrupt revival.
The PvP system needs a way to let puggers and solo players play competitive games. I don’t know what’s up with MMO developers who always seem to think all of their players want to have to voice communicate with a team to play their games. Team play should be built as an add-on over an already good 1v1 game play. Make a great 1v1 PvP game then scale it up so you capitalize on the massive amount of players who prefer to play solo. Duels are always extremely popular for a reason.
As a warrior playing a balanced build only made extremely long fights against bunkers that I would eventually lose simply because they keep healing to full while I can only heal a little amount, so over time I simply cannot outlast them in 1v1. You can’t expect to kill a bunker within a hammer CC chain in 1v1 even if you build for damage.
The only success I’ve had against bunkers as a warrior is a burst build. At least with a burst build I can kill bad bunkers 1v1 with lucky crits. No chance against a moderately good bunker though. Overall, bunker builds seem way too forgiving on player mistakes. They can use their heals or mitigation at the wrong time and might very well win anyway. And I don’t think it’s fair to say that these bunker builds should require 2v1 to be beaten.
I think elementalists should have been buffed for the viability of their damage builds, not their bunker builds.
Duels and 1v1 balance would be absolutely amazing for this game. 1v1 arenas with ranking even better. Actually, I’d probably only watch 1v1 as an esport. I do like playing PvP with objectives, but I certainly don’t like watching others play it.
You’ll get a bunch of bots or afkers in your game to leech glory if you allow people to passively earn glory from games.
Most thieves are killable. I kill plenty everyday. But, that’s because this profession attracts bad players more than the other professions. However, when the thief is played by any semi-decent player, you just don’t stand a chance. Thieves need more baseline health or toughness and less damage. They are just too far out into the extreme of the build spectrum.
Ranking system is not as important as simply not matching pugs against premades.
Anyone who has not seen the over-abundance of thieves in PvP must be playing with a blindfold. And I base my opinion on my own observations, and just find it nice that other people would observe the same pattern. If his stats put engineer as the most played I would definitely have discarded them, but I think his stats represent fairly well what I’ve observed in the thousand or so games that I played. You don’t even have to take the hard numbers he collected. The over-population of thieves is just too obvious when you play enough games.
@Colton.9460
I’m currently at wolf rank, so I played enough games to know that these numbers look legit. Also, theoretically speaking, proportionality exists between profession demographics and complaints:
1.) The statistical event of getting killed too easily by a thief is a random event with a probability proportional to thief population.
2.) The probability of writing a complaint about being killed too easily by any profession is a constant.
3.) Therefore, the probability of getting killed too easily by a thief AND writing a complaint about it is also proportional to thief population.
4.) Conclusion: Since thief population appears much higher than other professions, there is an over-abundance of complaints about thieves.
People tend to play with a profession they have most success with. Everything seems to indicate that it currently is too easy to be successful with a thief, which drives their population to abnormally high levels resulting in a lot of complaints.
Also, when it comes to PvP, people don’t tend to play the profession with the most fun mechanics but rather with the ones they kill other people more easily with.
@rickshaw.5279
Not when the numbers feel right to many people, and are actually pretty representative of the kind of complaints that keep showing up.
Community complaints are actually pretty representative when you have stats to compare with. Frizz.6704 did some very nice statistical sampling:
https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/pvp/pvp/sPvP-Class-Distribution-Stats/
From this, it’s quite clear that there is a big problem going on with thieves. I suspect players who can’t manage to kill others with their selected profession just end up migrating to thief to satisfy their ego by 2 shotting people.
Hammer is a very slow responding weapon. Good opponents dodge it easily all the time. All least when it hits, it hits pretty hard, if built for it.
in all honesty if you play a burst spec with no vit or toughness you cant really complain about thiefs damage because obviously you are trying to do the same thing to them..
its hypocrisy to its fullest.
if you think its so easy change class
False. Other professions’ burst attacks are visible and can be countered with reactive mitigation. Imagine if a warrior could stealth and dump hundred blade on anyone from stealth. That’s the equivalent of what thief is right now.
There’s already an overpopulation of thieves, so please don’t advise more people into the FOTM builds, it’s bad enough for the game as it is.
Great video with solid arguments from Destiny.
People won’t follow a game they can’t enjoy or feel is unbalanced. I suspect 1v1 balance in an MMO is what MANY MMO players have been waiting for years. Duels are extremely popular in primarily PvE based games like WoW, so imagine in a game targeted to PvPers. When I played WoW there were constant requests for 1v1 arena. MMO doesn’t have to mean being forced to play in teams. It should mean that you can have good and balanced solo gameplay against a variety of other players in a virtual world, and be able to get recognized for the improvement of your skills in that virtual world. This alone would draw massive interest from casuals.
On top of matching pugs vs premades, I’m starting to see more and more premades with 3 bunkers minimum. These FOTM builds need to go, the sooner the better.
The problem with bunkers is that the game isn’t mathematically balanced. Suppose any build has a combined output per second of total damage, healing and mitigation, well bunkers have a bigger total output than other builds putting them at a major advantage. Their healing and mitigation are already way too high, but they can also manage to damage me more than my heal can give me back, at least as a warrior. I’d rather see nerfs to bunkers than buffs to warriors.
Such bad reasoning. Can’t kill a bunker 1v1. Now can’t kill a thief 1v1 either. Tell me what fun is left for the other builds out there? As soon as you’re caught alone you’re dead meat unless you play a bunker or a thief? And then have to run back to your team with your tail between your legs like a beaten dog?
The problem with bunkers is that they make 2 out of 3 parts of the holy trinity of other games. A bunker is not only a tank but also a healer, so his life doesn’t just drop slowly while holding a point, it doesn’t drop at all since it gets fully restored every few seconds.
The gameplay options should be:
1. Tank: high toughness, low heals, low damage
2. Heal: low toughness, high heal, low damage
3. Damage: low toughness, low heal, high damage
Right now bunkers are both 1 and 2 in a single build leaving 3 at a major disadvantage, that’s the problem.
You know there’s a problem with balance when you have to talk about how 1v3 or maybe 1v2 (with good players) can take a build down. The moment you allow this to happen in a game is the moment that builds become more important than players and their skills.
It’s good that this thread is positive. However, it also justifies the complaints of the 3 players when they come asking for nerfs to bunker elementalists because holding a node 1v3 for a full minute just shouldn’t happen in a balanced game. Even more so that OP did this with only 1 hour experience playing the build.
People really don’t understand because they don’t play a thief. I played one just to see what it was like. If you want to get those high backstabs, then you got to use cooldowns. Those cooldowns take utility slots and also have hefty cooldown periods. Once they have done their burst, thats it, they are just sitting ducks.
They might as well make a big cooldown called “Instant Kill” and say that it’s legitimate by your logic.
You can’t really blame Anet. The game was fun on launch when people were still experimenting with builds and weren’t yet using the overpowered fotm builds. People will always look for some builds that exploit vulnerabilities in the balance system. When these builds get discovered by players, a balance patch is in order.
Defensive builds should make fights longer, not nearly impossible for the opponent to win that fight in 1v1.
People always say that necros counter bunkers. I believe the game should be 1v1 balanced, but if it’s not, then bunkers should at least be vulnerable to a lot more than just one out of the 8 professions.
I wonder why thieves wouldn’t want to be fixed. Right now it’s not like getting killed by one makes you think that you got outplayed by a skilled player. Glass cannon thieves cannot be allowed such burst damage in their opener since the fragility that they are accepting in exchange for their burst is never actually exposed to their opponent, making for very unfair fights.
Improve its damage, nerf its healing… a lot.
Bunkers need fixing, but so do thieves. You can’t allow these builds to ruin the gameplay of people not playing one of these 2 types of builds on the basis that they counter each other. Extremes of the build spectrum need some looking into. Balanced builds make fights much more interesting, fair, and fun.
Sounds like someone playing the fotm profession trying to keep it that way all in the name of “team balance”. 1v1 balance is important. It doesn’t have to be perfect but it must get as close to 50%/50% win/loss as possible.
I think reactive invulnerability mitigation abilities are already some of the best counters to quickness. Anyone would pick an invulnerability over a chill since with chill you’re still eating up some damage at a speed of 200% x 1/3 = 66.667% according to your suggestion.
@BishopX.6453
I haven’t seen a good guardian bunker lose to anything but a good necro so your point is pretty flawed since this build IS good against everything else even if it doesn’t hit hard it will outlast nearly anyone with its constant nearly full heals.
@anyone saying to just CC the guardian off the node
If the bunker is good he will push you out at least as much as you push him out. If you’re not a bunker yourself, you will be forced to give up at some point because you can’t drop him while he can drop you. Under these conditions, only a bunker can counter a bunker. The game shouldn’t be focused around bunkers with every other builds only serving as support to the bunkers.
@Sezu.8564
Yes, I only pug tPvP. So what? If anything, sharing my concerns can only show what puggers have to endure. This game will not have the success it deserves without making the gaming experience of casuals and puggers as enjoyable as for everyone else. The way you explain how the game works make it sound extremely dull, basically just running around until you encounter what your build counters. But then, where is the fun in winning that fight since it was obvious you were supposed to win from the start? Every build needs to stand a fair chance against any other build, period. I wouldn’t mind a little skewness in the expected outcome of a fight but this is far from what we have right now.
@aydenunited.5729
It’s funny that you would attack my logic. I haven’t brought up a single issue which wasn’t already a hot topic, with a general consensus to which I only added my own arguments. Glass cannon builds are just as bad as bunker builds and should be looked into. However, non-thief glass cannons are not as big of a problem because they have to fight in the open and actually expose their fragility to their opponent, making for much more fair fights, which is why you mostly see well deserved complaints against thief glass cannons. These things simply cannot exist in a game considered to be balanced. Hopefully, balance patches will keep rolling and improving the gameplay for everyone.
Between traits, weapon sigils, armor runes, and amulet/jewel, I find there is plenty of ways to customize. I do recall however wanting to try an obscure build at some point and not finding an amulet with the stats I wanted.
I love when I see a rock complaining why paper always wins.
Bad philosophy. If you keep balancing stuff and take 1v1 statistics you would eventually get closer and closer to 50% wins for both professions. If you reach for example 47% vs 53% then player skill more than accounts for the discrepancy in probabilities. If MMOs would finally understand that the majority of players want fair 1v1 fights, they could implement 1v1 arenas, collect statistics, balance scientifically, and profit from tremendous success.
Some good points, except maybe for the having to pay for a server. They need to generate revenue somehow because programmers working on improving the game have to be paid.
Sorry but people who pug tPvP paid for the game too and deserve some reasonable balance in the PvP they choose to participate in.
They just need to make it so that BALANCED builds are rewarded. Games become boring when healing output is as good or better as damage output. Your life and your opponent’s life should both be going DOWN over time, with only minimal healing until the fight is OVER. Skills should be about reactive mitigation to your opponent’s burst damage, or strategic condition removal against condition damage builds.
Elementalists just need their other builds fixed. It is not, however, a reason to allow these type of builds to dictate the gameplay and game outcomes. Anet didn’t want healers for a reason. Right now it’s just a different version of the same thing that happens in other games.