Guild Wars 2

Early Pushes to Far can totally work. In Forest, I some times (out of boredm) convince my fellow solo q ers. to send 2 to home and 3 to far, with one running over to beast. You let all those slow necros on their team trundle their way to mid.

Yasi.9065:

Now what I REALLY HATE are those noobs that… after capping mid… run far to try to cap far and leave mid and close empty.

THATS stupid, and THOSE people should just NEVER be allowed to play pvp again.

Depends how fast you are… I can do this, cap far and get back to mid in Foe Fire.

ronpierce.2760:

I think you misunderstand why people tell others to get good. We realize better players beat weaker players. The new match making puts like skilled players on a team, and the major opponent decider is the Division.

The reason people say “get good” is because if you expect to dig your way out of a division you need to be better than the other people in the division. If you’re not, you will lose over and over until you happen to get enough pips (lower divisions) or enough of the better players work their way out of the division you’re on.

“Getting good” implies you’re improving yourself and taking charge of your growth. It’s kind of just a rude way of saying what players should be doing anyways, improving themselves to work on higher goals.

d(‘-’d)

The flaw in your logic is the assumption that to dig your way out of a division “you need to be better than the other people in your division”. It is actually more accurate to say that your team needs to be better than some other possibly constructed teams in the division AND your team has to play that other team.

Technically you don’t have to be better you could be worse but still win a game but I digress as that’s not really the key error in your logic

THERE IS A VERY HUGE DIFFERENCE between what you have said and what the actual case implies. I can put someone who is better than the average person in their division in a set of matches, with a certain team, which will see them never get out of their division. (where-in divisions are ones you can loose pips). The algorithm is not starvation free as it is currently running.

Hello Dev’s,
I’m worried that my perceptions of this season are impacted by a confirmation bias. I would like some hard facts by which to make some meaningful observations which are not limited to my insufficient sample size.

Could you pretty please tell us
1) By division, the frequency of played (not queued) classes.
2) The win ration break down of pre-made groupings vs. solo queue’ers (ie. on average if a team has 2 folks who queued together they are not statistically more likely to beat 5 randomly pulled people who queued individually against them, but 3 people are 60% more likely to beat 5 solos etc.)
3) The streakiness of win losses via a standard deviation confidence level for each of the tiers.
4) the distribution of conquest mode end game scores as broken down by tier.

Is there anything else easily data mineable that anyone else would like to see?

Cynz.9437:

shion.2084:

Cynz.9437:

I think tempest are ok actually. You need to run supporty amy and lose a lot of dmg for it.

Now scrapper on the other hand is really broken: you run marauder and still being way too tanky while dishing out more dmg than thief.

Saying things like this is so generic as to be pointless because no-one can address your issue or validate your hand waving.

For instance when you say “more damage than a thief”, is this on an opponent who is standing still like a training golem? What period of time are you talking over? When you say scrappers are “way too tanky” how do you define tanky? Is being able to stealth and run-away tanky for instance? When you write the way you do it’s hard to have any meaningful discussion with you because you’re providing no context by which to evaluate your seeming arbitrary statements.

Hammer has backstab multipliers while providing better utility than shield even. Inb4 oh you need to stand in aoe or not dodge the whirl. Well great i need to dodge every single hammer spell scrapper throws at me while i can’t even touch him most of the time due absurd amount of utility hammer offers. That not to mention alchemy and scrapper traits.

You know what anet logic was behind sb (and other weapons tbh) either dealing basically 0 dmg on some spells? UTILITY! But when they designed hammer they simply threw any common sense out of window.

Ah so your definition of doing more damage is based on a single hit, and not how often you can perform it? You are simply looking at the multiplier and saying that there is an attack that an engi can do under some set of circumstances which would in isolation do more than a single attack a theif could do? What is the highest thief multilier vs the highest engi one?

though I’m not sure that the response out of context would make a heck of a lot of difference. For instance if I have a 0.5 lower multiplier but I can do it 8 times in a second, then how is simply looking at the multiplier relevant, right?

Cynz.9437:

I think tempest are ok actually. You need to run supporty amy and lose a lot of dmg for it.

Now scrapper on the other hand is really broken: you run marauder and still being way too tanky while dishing out more dmg than thief.

Saying things like this is so generic as to be pointless because no-one can address your issue or validate your hand waving.

For instance when you say “more damage than a thief”, is this on an opponent who is standing still like a training golem? What period of time are you talking over? When you say scrappers are “way too tanky” how do you define tanky? Is being able to stealth and run-away tanky for instance? When you write the way you do it’s hard to have any meaningful discussion with you because you’re providing no context by which to evaluate your seeming arbitrary statements.

Demandred.7930:

The system is currently in disequilibrium, this will resolve itself over time. After X games, our final division placement should be an accurate reflection of our MMR. That is, most people will get lots of even matches eventually.

I suppose it depends on how you define equilibrium. Would noone playing be an equilibrium to you?

In fact this is a very difficult statement to make with certainty, if your not using totalisms, or making a trivial semantec argument. You have an open system not a closed one, in which there could be many new players entering the PvP competition while you’re supposedly arriving at this equlibrium, and you could have folks leaving the system from frustration, or having gotten the rank they need for their legendary or whatever.

Please demonstrate how you are sure that an equilibrium must necessarily be reached, and by what standard you are measuring the thing which is being equilibri-ized

I was looking at another thread and it occurred to me that certain classes seem to have much better synergy with their own classes than others. And this makes it hard to understand if a class is overpowered or not because it’s very dependent on whether you look at the class in isolation or as a 2 man unit for instance.

For instance, I think I can kind of out play a DH that’s roughly my skill and avoid the fricken traps, say 50% of the time. But when there are two of them and I have a companion there’s nothing I’m going to do to stop them from getting me while still trying to contest point.

A double fight against necros is me running away for like 90% of the match…. and being frozen whiled doing it. Where my condi clears are just a little insufficient against 1, because they both hit the exact same vulnerability and can hit serveral with this duplicate effect, thus overwhelming 2 simultaneously, it becomes insane to try to stand on point and contest.

Now I thought about what 2 engis do for each other, and I generally don’t see two engis trying to hold a point against commers, because they rely a lot on mobility and running off for a bit. At this point in time they are not really able to help each other. A standard engi can probably keep up a fairly high level of might, so having another to add might is not particularly useful AND you’d have to be standing in the same place to make use of it. If your facing to AOE folks that’s instant death. What you could do is use your lighting fields in succession or alternate hammer leaps I guess. But just doesn’t seem to have the same devastating combo goodness.

So I guess I’m interested in understanding

1) what factors make for the best synergy for a class to pair most synergistically with itself.

2) If we had those class wars like they did very early on (teams of one class only competing), which class would currently win Capture.

3) Ideas for how you’d even go about balancing for intra class synergy, or do you insist on hetrogeneous teams where there are no duplicates and that’s the only solution.

Nekster.2657:

yep bunker tempest needs to die fast.. I have some games where we were 3 guys and we cant take 1 tempest down at all
So anet pls

Wait are these three guys all bunker tempests as well Seriously, noone can 1 v 3 and hold the point with equal skilled opponents in the current meta. Even if the 3 are also all bunker builds, they’ll cc you off it long enough to capture.

Against DH’s the problem isn’t staying on point, it’s not getting on it Made extra hard by the magnet pull equivalent the DH’s have.

Against Necros the trouble with staying on point is not getting feared off of it continuously (while suffering from associated conditions). And when you do get to stand on it your in a well.

Against a DD sure you can do your hammer leap… but they’re definitely better leapers can leap a hell of a lot more. You end up having to AOE yourself just to get them to give you some breathing room.

And some unknown build of warriors I’ve faced, cut through my defences like swiss cheese. Pretty much instant spike down.

Ele’s can make the contest a total draw, its always a super long drawn out affair with a good one of those.

Druids…. well good luck 1 v 1 ing a druid that’s built to last and has bristle back or some dog thing of annoyance in tow.

Honestly whatever ultimate power it is that the engis supposedly have, I don’t quite get it. What they do have is the ability to escape if they build for it. Is that what the real complaint is, that they can run away fairly effectively when things go south?

Ario.8964:

Yes the game play is boring. But compared to last season there have been great improvements to the gameplay and hopefully they continue to take the right steps towards finding the ideal balance of bunker, bruiser, and dps.

If I had to place blame on where it went wrong, I’d blame it on the creation of heal focused specializations. Originally the game was designed with the intent of every class being self reliant, having their own heals and utilities to provide whatever they needed. The game wasn’t designed to have healers and boon bots. If they reduce base heals drastically (increase scaling as a result) they force people to invest stats to get heals and such.

There’s also the issue that comes with scrapper having a full evade 3 leap on hammer that lets them heal to full without heal power. Things like that need to go away then they can actually balance the game.

Don’t you have to somehow manage to land all your leaps in a water field? And anyone can heal to full in a water field if you just have a leap or blast finisher. It just requires a vague definition of how much damage you were at to start with.

But to my point, when someone pops water, you can CC them then…. or move out of the area of the water field denying them the leap finish right?

Hmmm, my attempts at carrying entire teams in ranked as a scrapper haven’t worked out so well. In fact my team is much better served by Necros, Druids and DH’s, we settled on only one scrapper who does support like provide swiftness to afforementioned druids.

By the way here’s the algorithm-ish….

https://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/PvP_Matchmaking_Algorithm

That’s just because noone can figure it out with the lopsided matches, Lol.

It was setting you fights you had roughly a 50% chance of winning before. So if you were of any particular skill level you could reach diamond because you’d mostly be fighting against people of that skill level and with, ie. on your team, people of that skill level.

Now it only ensures you fight with people it thinks are at your skill level, not against people who are of your skill level. So you can end up in matches it’s pretty kitten sure you are going to lose.

And if you lose, it re-adjusts its estimation of your skill level down and will team you with worse people. So you will just lose more.

I’d really like a dev to tell us the actual numbers broken down by Division. That would be interesting to see.

Ive been doing competitive ranked matches lately and I’m only in sapphire but my confirmation biased view tell me that the classes seem to fall into these groupings

Most Common (at least 2 of one of these classes on a team): Necro, DH
Common (1 on almost every team): Druid
Likely (at least one of these present per team): Scrap, DD, Mesmer, Rev
Less common: Warrior

I was surprised by my own Scrapper class, since everyone had been talking about how OP aand nerf needing they were. Usually folks gravitate to those “easy win” classes. Which made me feel a bit bad since I haven’t exactly found things easy.

I think its the crowd control and big area damage that make the DH and Necro so appealing. The ability to relatively easily get farm some kills while people are either helplessly running or stuttering in some trap, and to be able to do this to several people at once in group skirmishes.

The Druid’s effectiveness tanking and group support probably make it rewarding to play. The other classes are a bit more +1’ers. So that’s my guess as to popularity, it basically factors in the mass kill appeal of a class, skill required to pull it off, Point domination, AOE, survivability.

Incidentally I’ve run into a premade team of like 4 warriors, they were brutal. There are some really good ones out there. I think its an underestimated class.

Well actually, if I understand this, …. if you are in the bottom 5, you will be matched with the other bottom 5 available at the time. You will then be playing against teams with players who’s MMR’s rank above all of yours. So if you get really lucky those people just joined PvP for the first time and have artifiically high MMRs and you can maybe beat them…. but if you are really the bottom 5 you will basically be likely to lose every match. At that point beg a good team to let you group with them… gain some MMR and get added to a group that is better than the now bottom 5.

Most frustrating thing is when I tied up 3 of them for 30 seconds or so and look over to see…. they still also have all the other points…. and then I know I’m not going to be winning the game no matter what.

To be fair, I will LoL on 3v1’s … but it’s just because I had fun entertaining 3 of them on a point for that long while hopefully my team was taking the other two. Plus if they need a third to finish you off, you’ve probably done well. Of course I don’t write it when 3 come by, immediately kill me and I accomplished nothing. So you may be misinterpretting comments as complaints.

Buffalo Bruiser.3567:

if its “random”, then how is it possible that i have not been “randomly” placed on a team that wins? How is it that every game has been a destruction?

The reason you might be on a winning team is that your MMR is high. So you are matched with other high MMR’s. Since your team will have a high MMR it is statistically more likely you will be competing against lower MMR’s so your MMR will increase and you will in general stomp. So success will be rewarded by being placed in higher and higher MMR teams.

Now lets say you just create your PvP account an dyou are an excellent player. And lets say many others do as well and the majority of those haven’t PvP’d before. Your MMR’s will all be at the same level I assume. Right?

So excellent you will be likely to be teamed with suck teammates. Now you loose and your MMR goes down. So you will be teamed with other people who lost. And most of them were folks who’ve never PvP’d … so you’ll loose again and your MMR will go down, now you will be teamed with folks with even lower MMRs.

So basically unless I’m missing something, if you randomly draw people whom can actually play in your first few games your MMR will go up and it will continue to be easier for you in your division. If you randomly get some new players your MMR will go down and things will only be harder from there.

Varezenem.2813:

shion.2084:

Varezenem.2813:

shion.2084:

I was just having fun since the opponent seemed really tanky and had shrugged off a lot in earlier play. So when I had a chance at him one on one I figured I’d see how well he held up. Now our team was winning, and this guy was not on point , so I was willing to tie up the opposing teams bunker with some time wasting since his other team mates were not very effective.

Perhaps I am a miserable player in not being able to beat an ele, but I just could not down the fellow. To be fair since he wasn’t guarding point , he was moving a lot and we had a very wide open area. This likely changes dynamics from a battle where you kinda want one foot on point.

So what would you suggest was the horrible mistake.

Any other questions?

So is your belief is that if you can stalemate a fight, but the fight area is double your typically sized cap point then you are not a tank?

I would say the area we used was not larger than foefire mid. So if it had taken place there then would it have made a difference to you?

Ofc fighting on point would have made a difference if he had it capped in his favor and you were fighting him there it would have been your mistake.

But the mistake would be irrelevant with respect to him being a tank or not. Which was the issues originally being discussed.

You see if there were no tanks then I couldn’t possibly have made a mistake challenging one for point

Varezenem.2813:

shion.2084:

I was just having fun since the opponent seemed really tanky and had shrugged off a lot in earlier play. So when I had a chance at him one on one I figured I’d see how well he held up. Now our team was winning, and this guy was not on point , so I was willing to tie up the opposing teams bunker with some time wasting since his other team mates were not very effective.

Perhaps I am a miserable player in not being able to beat an ele, but I just could not down the fellow. To be fair since he wasn’t guarding point , he was moving a lot and we had a very wide open area. This likely changes dynamics from a battle where you kinda want one foot on point.

So what would you suggest was the horrible mistake.

Any other questions?

So is your belief is that if you can stalemate a fight, but the fight area is double your typically sized cap point then you are not a tank?

I would say the area we used was not larger than foefire mid. So if it had taken place there then would it have made a difference to you?

I was just having fun since the opponent seemed really tanky and had shrugged off a lot in earlier play. So when I had a chance at him one on one I figured I’d see how well he held up. Now our team was winning, and this guy was not on point, so I was willing to tie up the opposing teams bunker with some time wasting since his other team mates were not very effective.

Perhaps I am a miserable player in not being able to beat an ele, but I just could not down the fellow. To be fair since he wasn’t guarding point, he was moving a lot and we had a very wide open area. This likely changes dynamics from a battle where you kinda want one foot on point.

So what would you suggest was the horrible mistake.

Anomaly.7612:

Keira Ferland.5619:

Anomaly.7612:

This post just drools with arrogance. 10/10.

He does bring up a good point with subpar players being able to reach legendary by playing only against other subpar players.

Yeah, I agree with that, but as it stands now, it seems like the only way to get out of amber is to either be in a premade on TS, or just be a soloQ hero who can magically carry the team on their winged steeds. No thanks.

I’ve solo Q won the only four games I’ve played in Amber so far…. I’m just saying that there are likely some whom this is working out for that you don’t see responses from, and that could be a very large number.

I’ve actually had an ele fight that we both just walked away from because clearly neither of us was going to die as I did lots of damage, but he could take tons, and he did no damage and I could take a bit. It was litterally a circle each other for 7 min affair.

Slim.3024:

shagwell.1349:

wonder when they hit revenants with a big nerf bat

Scrapper should have been the first profession to nerf actually, yet it seems like they do not agree with me on that.

I’m seeing a lot more guardians / necros/ rev’s / druids in my matches then scrappers. I wonder what the actual stats show for number of participants by class.

Initially you’ll be competing with diamond players who belong in upper tiers. It will average out when the folks who belong in division 2 are the ones remaining there. The other problem with division 2 is it’s really division 1 since anyone who plays long enough will get carried there since they can’t lose pips.

well philia is love… so literally it is necro love. So its kinda clever I thought and entirely appropriate.

http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/-philia

Took the dare last night. Had fun but it was a learning curve to get back into thinking like a non bruiser. Found that rangers wrecked my rifle power build without the refelcts and that I am bad at using toolkit. Would say I was more situationally effective, but less all rounded.

EthanLightheart.9168:

That’s all I see in pvp and it’s just tiring and so boring. Cheap ridicolous high hp, perma cc, self sustain, condi spam, permaevade.
You really made pvp boring with this update, and noone seems to bother.

So you didn’t see a druid at all? None of those Ele’s running about? Certainly none of those revenants… nope definitely not. Your kidding right?

PowerBottom.5796:

shion.2084:

PowerBottom.5796:

Booms.2594:

Once again people qq that dh is the 6th best class! Wow! Way too good right, pls nerf. Warrior too

haha, so true… really shows the amount of knowledge/skill floating around on this forum….

Sometimes its more than strict class meta ranking in the pro tournaments that matter. I will argue that for the bulk of players (within a standard deviation or two of talent from the median) the DH is far more effective than the pro’s find it.

Consider the whole engi turret debacle. I suspect if you take an objective look you were probably happy to see turrets get nerfed, and those turret engi builds weren’t by any means used in pro league at all. The reason the nerf was needed was not because of relative strength of the build, but because of the play style and game flow it engendered. And there were some eggs broken with that omlette because it made supply crate suck, which is something that all engi builds were relying on at the time, not just the turret ones. So it might help you to understand the complaints if you frame them in the same light as the engi turret hate that was on before.

Incidentally thanks to that turrets are absolutely useless now (aside from healing), and so their nerf wasn’t to adjust to make it more competitive or skill based but to remove the things all together from use…. which was a very lazy fix in my opinion. I’m hoping that doesn’t happen here.

I don’t think DH is as dumb as turret engi or minion mancer, traps actually offer a few unique strategic opportunities; the build isn’t the hardest to play, but it’s not the easiest either.

The reason why it’s better in lower levels of play is pretty simple: The hardest counters like D/F-clerics Ele and Scrapper and builds that do decent against it like rev’s, are IMHO played way less than Necro, which is not really strong against DH at all.

Also, most hardcounters actually require skill to hardcounter the DH, so on top of the counters being played less often, they are also played less effectively.

Those counters really are IMHO the downfall of the DH and why it’s strength is so closely tied to the meta: it gets countered extremely hard by projectile absorbs/reflects and decent amounts of stability/invulnerability. Also, the decent amount of block/evades on for example rev and scrapper do very well against the DH’s very bursty dmg. But if those counters aren’t being played, the build suddenly get pretty strong. That’s IMHO not how a well balanced game should turn out.

Oh I wasn’t saying it was as dumb as turret engi, which in itself when played well wasn’t necessarily dumb either. I would say the skill floor is a bit lower and it whacks noobs, and they pair well when there are two of them. I think it needs a tweak to make it more challenging to play, not necessarily less powerful when played very well.

Booms.2594:

shion.2084:

PowerBottom.5796:

Booms.2594:

Once again people qq that dh is the 6th best class! Wow! Way too good right, pls nerf. Warrior too

haha, so true… really shows the amount of knowledge/skill floating around on this forum….

Sometimes its more than strict class meta ranking in the pro tournaments that matter. I will argue that for the bulk of players (within a standard deviation or two of talent from the median) the DH is far more effective than the pro’s find it.

Consider the whole engi turret debacle. I suspect if you take an objective look you were probably happy to see turrets get nerfed, and those turret engi builds weren’t by any means used in pro league at all. The reason the nerf was needed was not because of relative strength of the build, but because of the play style and game flow it engendered. And there were some eggs broken with that omlette because it made supply crate suck, which is something that all engi builds were relying on at the time, not just the turret ones. So it might help you to understand the complaints if you frame them in the same light as the engi turret hate that was on before.

Incidentally thanks to that turrets are absolutely useless now (aside from healing), and so their nerf wasn’t to adjust to make it more competitive or skill based but to remove the things all together from use…. which was a very lazy fix in my opinion. I’m hoping that doesn’t happen here.

engi was still viable though you guys just want guardian to be completely unviable where it already barely is

Actually I find you guys an enjoyable challenge. What I’m pointing out is that the argument that something doesn’t need adjusted because it’s not used by the 0.1% of folks in the pro leauges is not a sufficient one. I think you missed my point.

I will say that I’d like to see maybe more counter play to traps and more kind of active skill involved in playing them effectively. I’m not sure what form that should take. There seems to be a fairly low skill floor and a moderate skill ceiling and I’d like to see that shifted up.

In general I think these should make for positive changes. I appreciate action being taken on the feedback given.

PowerBottom.5796:

Booms.2594:

Once again people qq that dh is the 6th best class! Wow! Way too good right, pls nerf. Warrior too

haha, so true… really shows the amount of knowledge/skill floating around on this forum….

Sometimes its more than strict class meta ranking in the pro tournaments that matter. I will argue that for the bulk of players (within a standard deviation or two of talent from the median) the DH is far more effective than the pro’s find it.

Consider the whole engi turret debacle. I suspect if you take an objective look you were probably happy to see turrets get nerfed, and those turret engi builds weren’t by any means used in pro league at all. The reason the nerf was needed was not because of relative strength of the build, but because of the play style and game flow it engendered. And there were some eggs broken with that omlette because it made supply crate suck, which is something that all engi builds were relying on at the time, not just the turret ones. So it might help you to understand the complaints if you frame them in the same light as the engi turret hate that was on before.

Incidentally thanks to that turrets are absolutely useless now (aside from healing), and so their nerf wasn’t to adjust to make it more competitive or skill based but to remove the things all together from use…. which was a very lazy fix in my opinion. I’m hoping that doesn’t happen here.

It is if you didn’t by HOT

Once you go engi it’s hard to go back It’s just a lot of reckless fun. It is a bit hard to play but you can ease your way into it. The current meta uses only 1 kit so it makes it a lot simpler. Take something with stealth I guess at first and when things aren’t going well, run

Bombs are effective against mele, they are a detriment when someone is chasing you, they provide condis and damage, BOB is awesomely fun, and hey fire field for group might. The problem is that you kind of want explosives… you have to take alchemy…. an you probably wanted scrapper if you hope to survive mele. They’re crippled in their effectiveness by not allowing your build to take firearms. At least in PvP… WvW maybe you can compensate.

Wait when you say without meta OR without elite, do you mean either without one or without the other, or do you mean with neither? My build above uses scrapper for survival. My Rifle ranged trainging build that doesn’t use scrapper has a hard counter that makes it less enjoyable in certain matches where I’ll just be plastered. The scrapper build is a good all round PUG build.

So with rifle I do something CC nasty like this….

http://gw2skills.net/editor/?vdAQFAUlcTh2tYJXw6KQ7FL3F14VciJh4Bth5A4C+gBAA-TJBFABEcBAA4BAE8+D/XGAA

I’m totally non-meta…. still have fun. I even play rifle engi some times to train and not rely on my hammer defences. This is my current build.

http://gw2skills.net/editor/?vdAQFASlcTh2tYtWw6KQ7FL3FF9qH7zu4Bth5A4C+gBAA-TJBFABA8AA+Z/BxLDQwFAAA

What I find frustrating is two DH’s when I need to cap. I’m just not good enough to permutate for both sets of traps if they focus me.

shion.2084:

A question for the knowledgable, for those runes that proc when an elite skill is used, how do they interact with the mortar kit? Is it when orbital strike is used?

For theif runes, where it says extra damage if hitting from side or behind, how do AOE attacks like bombs play with them?

Finally will sigil of air and sigil of fire both potentially proc on the same hit?

Oh and finally, for runes that say they apply some effect to allies within a radius, this always includes oneself right? Perhaps aside from the ones that explicitly mention out going healing.

A question for the knowledgable, for those runes that proc when an elite skill is used, how do they interact with the mortar kit? Is it when orbital strike is used?

For theif runes, where it says extra damage if hitting from side or behind, how do AOE attacks like bombs play with them?

Finally will sigil of air and sigil of fire both potentially proc on the same hit?

How does the mortar work with sigils that talk about when the elite skill is used?

SlayerSixx.5763:

The point of 50% is to show that you’re winning as much as you lose, as in the deciding factor between the two teams winning isn’t a huuuuge gap in skill. This is important for a multitude of reasons, but primarily is meant to foster growth at the particular player’s pace which is vital for any game looking to create a competitive scene.

Um, not sure I follow. Can’t I guarantee a 50% win rate and have huge gaps in skill? For instance if I put anyone with all noobs against a competition level team, and then put them with a competition level team against all noobs. I will guarantee a 50% win rate. … And I will also make all players subjected to this hate it.

My point being that the 50% goal in and of itself could be ensured and yet have entirely undesirable results.

NICENIKESHOE.7128:

Changing core class mechanics will hurt all other specs and only further push core engineer out of the picture. Scrapper simply needs balance on hammer weapon skills and maybe a little on adaptive armor, hammer has too much to offer in each weapon skill.

I think the reason for this being that you have only one weapon, so it must be versatile. I’d be fine with removing some hammer effectiveness if I could switch to rifle. I shouldn’t be forced to take a kit.

I actually find warriors can burst me down quite well. I’m not very familiar with what the zerker does now, but my health decreases dramatically when I stand toe to toe with one. Are you sure you want us going down faster?

I use SDF (like you’d normally rest your hand on a keyboard when typing) for left right and forward. Since you should use backpedal rarely I put that on C. This leaves the whole QWERTY line of characters free to do my atacks with. And I have a logitech G502 which lets me weapon swap by pusing the mouse wheel left, and closest target by pusing it right, plus all the function keys an engineer needs are bound to it.

http://www.tomsguide.com/us/logitech-g502-proteus-core,review-2138.html

By different builds you mean take Scrapper line (fixed traits), alchemy line (fixed traits), and one other?

Have you looked at the meta builds? they both have EG, slick shoes, Healing Turret, and elixr B, plus hammer.

Anyone can run different builds, but our two previous choices for meta looked pretty darn similar wouldn’t you say?

As a scrapper, I am pretty much at the mercy of a DH which has his CD’s up and teleports in with the super nuke and trap attack. It is very hard to not get decapped / dead against one who pulls that.

A good Herald can also draw me to a stand still. Well played elementalists will also draw to stand still of silliness.

Necros can cause me such pain its not funny with boon corruption and conditions…. the problem being that my condition cleansing in all active cases comes with a boon… which can then be corrupted to put conditions right back on me.

Mesmers will take me out if I stand point, though if I run from point and then range it with mortar I can escape the clones and contest.

Rangers I generally don’t fear too much.

Theives, my particular build can draw to stand off AND I can keep point (mostly).

So for just my personal experience against evenly skilled opponents.

Scrapper > theives (if build tanky and give up damage, but then lose to other classes below)
Scrapper == guardians, depending on who gets the drop (but cannot hold point against).
Scrapper ~< good necro (but its close enough I don’t whine. )
Scrapper ~> mes (Scrapper can escape mes, tipping it a bit in our favour)
Scrapper > ranger
Scrapper == Ele (this is always a tough one and I see 50/50 on it)