Guild Wars 2

Moa trumps transformation.

If you are downed and still have enough energy to doge roll…. you probably should have dodge rolled.

Multiple teammates standing on an uncontested point don’t cause it to cap any faster.

If you are going to down and your opponent hasn’t capped a point, ususally you want to down on point as it will constest it for the duration of your down state.

Additionally if you hold someone in the flame/gas cloud, there are numerous hits counted against the opponent. This can be quite useful when trying to proc crits for effects like rune of air etc. Or for passive adds like the firearms bleed chance on crits.

Now the great thing for PVP is that these attacks are not “reflected” or absorbed by anti projectile skills. And I believe they go through pesky things like solid walls, line of sight blocking pillars etc.

Hmmm, how is it worse than S1, since its much the same?

I’m seeing more and more fights at the start of matches that look like ping pong matches, where both players are meters back from the actual table.

Essentially everyone unloads their AOE onto point, no-one stands on it, and both sides glare at each other over the bone noone can have.

Simply put, the point you poke yourself with most gets the cursing.

To be a thorn in the side as a DH requires a far lower skill floor and so consequently there are far more out there.

Plus I think people just hate losing control of their toons, its quie frustrating and DH’s have a lot of daze, yank, CC, knockback potential. This gets exponentially harder to deal with when there are two of them. And there will be because see point 1 about skill floor.

I once beat 4 people on mid with foe fire. It was unranked. And then their dead bodies all started blaming each other when the last went down. That has happened exactly once but MAN if I had a video and the chat log after.

There isn’t “a” reason for toxicity. There are many. Much of it stemming from the magical power of keyboard anonymity. Human nature. The fact the game is about direct confrontation and conflict. The fact that the performance of others impacts your results.

I’d start with those. The basic ingredients for toxicity.

I think a 1 V 2 is easier if you have AOE effects. For instance, when a theif tries to +1 me, I will sometimes accidentally kill it because I was just in the middle of dropping my thudnerclap, napalm, acid bomb, flame blast combo. It just so happened that the unfortunate stealthed thief chose that time to creep up on me.

So there’s basically a better chance to win them against glass opponents if you have high hitting AOE and CC effects. Most of the time of course…. I lose

as a scrapper I stand in the middle of my mortar fields, my wall o fire and my thunderclap. Then I put on electro whirl and shock shield, an acid bomb, with a few doge rolls. Problem solved

Incidentally spam them with the FT auto when they are close to landing… you’ll hit the frame.

Now you want real fun take bomb kit

Hugh Norfolk.2798:

Hey everyone,
This has come up before and I thought I would give some insight as to why the capture points are the way they are.

When we look at the data we have for capture points, we notice that fights on bigger capture points tend to run much longer than capture points that are smaller. It makes sense, when players are able to use skills to guarantee hits on players that are on point, instead of the missing players that are on point but running around the outskirts of the point. This means on smaller cap points players will need to weigh the risk of being on the point and know when you need to rotate out.

Question time:
How do we like smaller capture points knowing that they reinforce fights coming to an end?
Would you change the mid point to be larger?
Would you change the side points to be larger?

I choose both! When a point is contested for a prolonged period of time it slowly shrinks then grows radius repeating this over and over

Fights will come to an end because folks eventually will get into a shrinking phase where to contest they get pulled closer and closer to the center. This gives rotating advantage to whole point classes for periods of the fight, but not the whole fight.

Xillllix.3485:

If the Meta was balanced there would be some build variety.
It’s far from balanced in my opinion, it’s the contrary, the worse meta in a long time.

The game was balanced for a few weeks when they nerfed turrets engi, before they came up with the new trait system and ruined everything.

Back them I had 4-5 builds that were unique and completely viable. None of these builds are possible today.

Turret engi was not playable against anything other than scrubs. It did not unbalance the meta, if by meta you mean the actual high level play meta. It was easy to play but capped out once opponent skill level got to a certain point.

I actually don’t necessarily find the meta to be meta anymore. Quite happy with an alternative hammer plus kits build and no gyros. Do quite well against gyro engis and can do better at 1 v 1’s. Sacrifice some surviveability. I think the meta remains the meta though because it is easier to play, not necessarily because it is the best choice for all play styles anymore.

You have to click on the target (so select the downed guy) then use your gyro key (it usually prompts you saying click this to stomp).

I totally don’t know anything about non-pvp high tier stuff. I run fractals in tons of configs for engi and never seem to have a problem for instance.

So who does the most damage for condi against a boss (I assume this is desired at some point) and how far off is an engi for condi damage?

An engineer has tons of access to burn, and burn stacks…. so an engi should be competitive in condi damage should they not? I mean if I don’t need to PVP and can run signets without toughness and what not then you could do disgustingly evil things with an engis condis i’d have thought. How are we that out classed?

Incidentally with the above build I, for serious play, would usually take Elix B for the extra stabi and the instant might/fury + condi cleanse. But when I do take FT with throw napalm, it is really quite amusing.

DGraves.3720:

shion.2084:

What about duration extending Sigil? IN the case that it gets you an extra burn tick or something?

It’s Very rare that An extended duration will outpace a new application.

Take FTs burn.

2s base + 33% base from firearms grandmaster trait, + 37% duration from vipers.

3.6443s so, 3.75 iirc.

Adding 20% to that only adds .5319s or in damage at base 69.94485.

Even at base sigil of Earth does 110.

With 2000 condition damage:

.5319s of burning is worth 234.8339

The 5s bleed is worth 710.

Oh I like earth too… so in my burn baby burn build I run earth and smoldering.

I suppose it might sorta depend on the build. Let me see my condi build for burn looks something like this….

http://gw2skills.net/editor/?vdAQFASlcThatY7WwqKQ7FLsFFYIWiBgYHVFPBdzP8JPA-TJhAwAkLDM5CAAb/BAPAAA

I do PvP and can survive with this one because of hammer active defence.

So if I compare with earth….

With Smoldering I get… Each tick worth 374, can be applied to an area, and rotating through little cooldown.

I get an extra 2 ticks on IA,
I get an extra 2 ticks on IP,
an extra tick on throw napalm to area, an extra tick on the pulse.
an extra tick on flame thrower,
An extra tick on napalm
An extra tick on flame jet.

I can generate excellent might on myself through fire field and blasts, plus alchemy. So not sure how adding all my might in changes things but even against earth migth it hold its value ? Obviously PvP your not maxed out for condition duration.

I will also accept thoughts or clairification to my understandings from anyone else. Is everyone else under the impression that the above is how the current season match making works?

Actually if your showing good skills, feel free to play whatever music you like.

lose a bunch of matches till your put with players whom have much higher MMR than you. When you win that match by a landslide, offer to team with them. Streak your way to diamond baby!

So on a different thread Josh had asked for thoughts on improving personal score.

I guess in essence the score should reflect your overall meaningful contribution to winning the match.

A given action is contextually relatively good or bad, so I would argue for things like situational bonuses.

So some thoughts on situational rewards:

1) Capping a point with no enemies having died in the vicinity within the last 12 seconds divides the reward by the number of players capping. (a penalty is a touch harsh).

2) Each second beyond 10 you hold a point from being capped, or neutralized, and have more enemies in the vicinity than allies, you are rewarded.

3) Each second beyond 10 a player is on an enemy capped point, with no allies in range and 2 or more enemies, they player is rewarded some points (for keeping them tied up).

4) Enemy Beast kills when your team has killed their beast (ie. stealing a beast when you didn’t have yours stolen) and you either have 2 caps, or are tied for caps, gets a reward.

5) Killing an enemy and capping point with no allies in range, when you own at least one other point, or noone owns either of the other two.

Q1) Do I have this Right?

1) So I get this season that we are trying have roughly even matches each game.
2) So the players to be allocated on teams are ideally within some “close” pip range of myself.

If So…

Q2)

How does the game decide what a even match is? For a game of Solo Qers, I assume you take the MMR’s of each team, average them, and voila fair match if they are roughly equal?

Q3)

How does the algorithm deal with the fact that 4 theives on a team together have a much lower chance of winning then the average of their MMRs would indicate?

Q4)

How does the match making handle the fact that Team 1: 2 Super high MMR + 3 suck MMR, will do far poorer then Team 2: 5 average MMR folks?

Q5)

Now assuming I do very well in my games and am rewarded with a higher MMR, I will be teamed with folks whom will have lower MMR’s. Right?

My reasoning is cause I’d move up in terms of Pip’s giving me a pool of players to pick from, and by then my MMR will have been far better than many of those in the range. So if I’m above average (ok median) for the pip range’s players. Hence any team with me on it, is likely aiming to have an average team MMR less than mine, so I get poorer and poorer quality players to play with.

Q6)
I thought the thing learned from season 1 is players don’t like games with large spreads of player skill in the same game. And using pip range, doesn’t guarantee player skill, if any metric you have would it would be MMR. So its not sufficient to prevent this skill spread from happening.

Games are better when your playing with like skilled folks for fairly obvious reasons. So why suddenly unaddress something that had been figured out before?

Suggestion
S1) Consider classes when creating match-ups.
S2) If you want 50/50 matches, grab 10 people with consecutive MMRs in the pool of people you have. So for ascending MMR’s (P1 lowest P10 highest) make your team like so:
Team1 : P1, P9, P8, P4, P6
Team 2: P2, P3, P10, P7, P5

In this way you meld the ideas of having rougly equally skilled people in the game and somewhat averaged chances of winning. Use MMR only to give the overall relative ranking and assign players.

In my opinion the problem with guards is the synergy. I can 1 v 1 and reasonably expect it to be a skill game of who wins. When you fight three on a point they can insta down you, I get two dodges and after that I get ping pong push/pulled to death. Its a fair game against one.

What about duration extending Sigil? IN the case that it gets you an extra burn tick or something?

Since I don’t do raids… how is vuln stacking not a thing in raids? Are the bosses vuln immune?

I thought maybe an engi could have a meta effect of making others near them better at what they do. Maybe shorten refresh times, or extend durations, or allow two uses of a skill before needing to pay the cooldown, that sort of thing. Maybe something even that doesn’t actually help an engi on its own (since the engi is normally oriented around that specifically) but only helps the group this way.

“eah that’s what I meant, vuln stacking used to be our way to boost the overall dps of a group, but since it’s gone from raids, we need something else. "

Wouldn’t Sigil of earth (the one that causes bleeding on crit) be a better synergy with the 10% crit chance bonus when target bleeding, and the 33% greater bleed duration? It’s not areas abut maybe give you more damage in 1v1’s…. Your sigil of earth will give you 10 second duration at 108 damage a tick for a single stack…. you reapply ever two seconds. So …. you could have 5 stacks sustained if your 1 v 1’ing. plus crit increase… so how much damage does the Torment give you … looks like you can last for 9.5 seconds… and you can reapply after 5 seconds… If they are moving then you get 160 best case… so much less damage on an individual target and much less apply frequency.

There’s a wee bit of a difference between an invuln where you can’t cleanse any conditions and can’t do any damage, and an invuln where you can pummel the crud out of someone and have access to your skills. …. Just saying

So the guy with infinite stealth wins?

Svarty.8019:

From my experience the Apex classes in GW2 seem to be ones with;

• self water+blast finisher combo OR
• lots of stealth (to escape and heal/recover)

The other classes seem to have to depend upon one another for support.

My questions are

1. Am I missing something?
2. Shouldn’t all classes have access to the above Apex abilities?

Lol, better yet is not needing stealth or healing… AKA invuln Now that’s APEX

Since you have so much condition, Maybe you could consider mortar? It also provides a heal field… which you can blast. I’d ditch pistol and go with hammer for protection. So you then take Heavy Armor exploit, and the hammer trait that gives you stability when you dodge roll.

Swap out tool kit for EG, since you have the hammer defence now. Instead of elixr S, have you considered rocket boots? It could give you some escape, but also has a great synergy with burning tool belt. Course then no stun breaker, so if you do Hammer you’ll want to throw in a heal gyro for it?

I think I actually have a burn build listed here in a past post… but for PvP.

I can imagine the trolling as someone, instead of decding to say I’m done and staying at base, hacks people on thier own team on purpose.

I feared last seasons eles much more for their AOE CC abilities.

good thing they made bomb kit totally viable….. Now I’ll take the explosions trait for sure cause they made all those trait changes to make it worth while…

Does your MMR get reset when the real ranked season starts? Or is this good for giving the game a way to guage skill prior to ranked season?

gah… but it says ranked….

what’s going on, none of my ranked game wins were counted? Mad. Wanted good start since I solo q

Also where is the reflect and block when using pistol pistol… They increased the skills a bit but it has no defence. Pointless really.

OriOri.8724:

shion.2084:

OriOri.8724:

shion.2084:

Josh Davis.6015:

Hey folks,

-Grouch

I think last season was philosophically a step in the right direction. The idea being teams of rougly equally MMR’d folks faced off against an immediately higher or lower MMR group of folks.

The advantages of this being

1) Playing with the equally skilled – You are paired with folks at your skill level. (vs. season 1 where they’d throw bad folks on your team to make it a more “fair” 50/50 win probability.)

2) Closer Matches – While one team is slightly advantaged, they are playing against the next closest 6, so in a large enough pool this difference is relatively negligible. (vs. Season 2, where you’d be on a team with equal skill level, but possibly facing a team of equally skilled people who were nowhere near your level, entirely random games).

3) Scaling with performance over time – Those who are on teams that tend to do better face tougher opponents, if you do worse you’ll face worse opponents. So it scales with performance.

So I’m interested to know two things Josh, is the above what you thought the strengths of season 3 were? And where do you think the opportunities for improvement are with this philosophy and where things fell through the cracks. I have my own opinions about the flaws in logic, but I’d like to see where you come at it from. What are the crunchy bits that are wrong with your setup?

(all in all I thought it was a good philosophical effort and have more or less argued that its an improvement over previous seasons).

Except the teams weren’t balanced in any way last season. Not at all. Out of 10 people picked for matchmaking, the 5 with the best MMR would be matched against the 5 with the lowest MMR. How else can you explain the ridiculous blowouts that happened on such a regular basis last season?

I think you are still thinking of season 2 where this could sometimes happen. In season 3 you were meant to play the next higher 5 MMR group or the next lower 5 MMR if all the eligible players were ordered by MMR.

The only time you would have the top 5 eligible players in a pip range would play the bottom 5 eligible players would be if there were only 10 players. If you had 100 players eligible to play in a pip range, the top 5 players would play the 5 immediately below them (their closest competition).

I think their is a misconception about how season 3 was meant to have work, and it might be mine but I’m pretty sure I understood the gist of the algorithm correctly.

How are you sure that the algorithm always puts the top 5 in a pip range against the worst 5? That would be…. hard to see from a programming perspective, and yet many people have this concept that this is how they are losing all the time. As I said if you play when lots of elligible players are waiting for a match, this should never happen. So I find this insistence on the idea…odd and entirely unsubstantiated. Do you have proof?

I didn’t play in season 2 or in season 1. So when I talk about matchmaking I am always talking about s3. I’m not getting confused.

Well then, if you have a hundread eligible players and players 50 through 55 face 56 through 60, it shouldn’t be a blow out. Also it would turn out that roughly half the time someone would be facing the 5 players immediaely better than them and half the time roughly the immediate lower. Since the game only requires a less than 50% win ratio to progress, you should in this environment grind your way up.

Now you ask me how I explain ridiculous blow outs… well if you have low player population and it had to expand pip ranges to make matches then you could have a blow out. Did you play a lot when their were a low amount of players in your pip range? But I’m giving away what I wanted Josh to answer to. What the flaws to his algorithm were. So you can tell me though, what else can account for it?

OriOri.8724:

shion.2084:

Josh Davis.6015:

Hey folks,

-Grouch

I think last season was philosophically a step in the right direction. The idea being teams of rougly equally MMR’d folks faced off against an immediately higher or lower MMR group of folks.

The advantages of this being

1) Playing with the equally skilled – You are paired with folks at your skill level. (vs. season 1 where they’d throw bad folks on your team to make it a more “fair” 50/50 win probability.)

2) Closer Matches – While one team is slightly advantaged, they are playing against the next closest 6, so in a large enough pool this difference is relatively negligible. (vs. Season 2, where you’d be on a team with equal skill level, but possibly facing a team of equally skilled people who were nowhere near your level, entirely random games).

3) Scaling with performance over time – Those who are on teams that tend to do better face tougher opponents, if you do worse you’ll face worse opponents. So it scales with performance.

So I’m interested to know two things Josh, is the above what you thought the strengths of season 3 were? And where do you think the opportunities for improvement are with this philosophy and where things fell through the cracks. I have my own opinions about the flaws in logic, but I’d like to see where you come at it from. What are the crunchy bits that are wrong with your setup?

(all in all I thought it was a good philosophical effort and have more or less argued that its an improvement over previous seasons).

Except the teams weren’t balanced in any way last season. Not at all. Out of 10 people picked for matchmaking, the 5 with the best MMR would be matched against the 5 with the lowest MMR. How else can you explain the ridiculous blowouts that happened on such a regular basis last season?

I think you are still thinking of season 2 where this could sometimes happen. In season 3 you were meant to play the next higher 5 MMR group or the next lower 5 MMR if all the eligible players were ordered by MMR.

The only time you would have the top 5 eligible players in a pip range would play the bottom 5 eligible players would be if there were only 10 players. If you had 100 players eligible to play in a pip range, the top 5 players would play the 5 immediately below them (their closest competition).

I think their is a misconception about how season 3 was meant to have work, and it might be mine but I’m pretty sure I understood the gist of the algorithm correctly.

How are you sure that the algorithm always puts the top 5 in a pip range against the worst 5? That would be…. hard to see from a programming perspective, and yet many people have this concept that this is how they are losing all the time. As I said if you play when lots of elligible players are waiting for a match, this should never happen. So I find this insistence on the idea…odd and entirely unsubstantiated. Do you have proof?

Josh Davis.6015:

Hey folks,

It’s been a while since we’ve commented on leagues, so here’s a brief update.

There’s definitely room for improvement in the league system, and it’s safe to say that it’s the team’s highest priority now that we’ve signed off on everything going in for the July release. It’s still a bit early to talk about specifics, but I do think we can talk about some of the goals we have for the changes:

• Improve match quality
• Make divisions more reflective of player skill
• Make leagues feel more rewarding after you’ve placed in your appropriate division

We’re still determining the scope of the project, but I do want to be clear that it’s unlikely that these changes will be in for S4. Once we get a bit further in the dev process I’ll see if I can give an update on our thoughts/direction.

-Grouch

I think last season was philosophically a step in the right direction. The idea being teams of rougly equally MMR’d folks faced off against an immediately higher or lower MMR group of folks.

The advantages of this being

1) Playing with the equally skilled – You are paired with folks at your skill level. (vs. season 1 where they’d throw bad folks on your team to make it a more “fair” 50/50 win probability.)

2) Closer Matches – While one team is slightly advantaged, they are playing against the next closest 6, so in a large enough pool this difference is relatively negligible. (vs. Season 2, where you’d be on a team with equal skill level, but possibly facing a team of equally skilled people who were nowhere near your level, entirely random games).

3) Scaling with performance over time – Those who are on teams that tend to do better face tougher opponents, if you do worse you’ll face worse opponents. So it scales with performance.

So I’m interested to know two things Josh, is the above what you thought the strengths of season 3 were? And where do you think the opportunities for improvement are with this philosophy and where things fell through the cracks. I have my own opinions about the flaws in logic, but I’d like to see where you come at it from. What are the crunchy bits that are wrong with your setup?

(all in all I thought it was a good philosophical effort and have more or less argued that its an improvement over previous seasons).

I think S3 would actually have worked out much better if their were larger pools of players in each of the pip ranges. I think the problems came about when the algorithm is applied to too small a pool of players thus making the spread in skill too large. The idea was in the right direction, but it can’t be executed in certain conditions.

S1 was “best” in that you could game the system easily to get to diamond I suppose.

I guess for some the focus is on getting the little diamond label and less on what it actually implies you did to get there.

I don’t often have troubles with theif. My usual response is to dodge the first spike hit then open up with AOE, when they back off distance you don’t chase, you pew pew them. You’ll heal up faster than they do. I have mortar and FT so I put down the wall o fire, some mortar fields and hammer 5. Just don’t go wasting your time trying to chase them down, make them come to you. or range them when they don’t.

For warrior the trick is patience and kiting. Don’t try to toe to toe them. run like a chicken… but run in your fields. The shock sheild on hammer is terrific for them because warriors typically love to just open up with the sword on you into it, and will actually just be taking vuln and decent damage. Then after your shields down you use hammer 5, then hammer 3. I usually switch to flame thrower and blow them off point, then let them walk through my fire wall and into a poison spray from EG. But you have to survive the inital insanity to do this. So this tactic is used when they’re spent.

Engineer on Engineer is tough, and since my build is different then meta I couldn’t be much help explaining what I try to do and how I die if it doesn’t work

Goosekilla.2796:

I guess I’m not sure why you like elixir H so much? I’d say heal gyro in the first, turret with the second build. Seems to me like you would want one pretty much meta build for bunker – maybe even two of those. Then have 1-2 decap engineer(s) with disgusting cc (I made a rifle/bombs/gyro build a little while back that would be perfect). Then a dps roamer – so zerker nades scrapper. Then a wildcard, maybe condi dps to “diversify yo bonds, kitten” in the words of Wu Tang Financial . Condi could also cover a bit of a healing role probably, just in terms of available stat combos.

That’s how it’s set up, at least.

Pretty much exactly my thoughts. 2 metas, a healer, a CCer, and a condi doer. What would a heavy CC build look like, do you have your build link? I was thinking that even something like throw mine with the ability to remove a boon would be fun for the CC build. But I don’t think the remove boon would be enough to make a difference. I like the idea though of someone who can continuously strip boons.

ah cool, that’s kinda what I was looking for.

messiah.1908:

the current meta build pretty much balance . maybe small very small changes

the buff should be to create diversity

power mesmer with GS
thief with pistols with untireflect ability
DH – higher cd on traps
scrapper – reduce sustain passive trait
ele – reduce sustain passive trait like condi and healing. and bring back the power ele with more sustain to handle the fight
rev- buff ventari and dwarf abilities and energy management
necro – buff power and GS like faster hit rate
warrior – reduce sustain and healing abilities
ranger – reduce pets dmg and bring more pets diversity with buff

Out of interest which sustain passive trait would you like to reduce next for the engi? Which is the concern?

So no condi and no bunker…. I’m guessing you currently play a frustrated burst class? Wouldn’t it be fun if the first person to land their combo won every time… oh wait we’ve been there done that. I’ll take even this meta over that.