Guild Wars 2

Duo queue needs to stay. Having someone to play with and talk to between games just makes the experience so much more fun for me. Duo q this season has allowed me to make a lot of new friends in legendary division such as the guys from bowscoped/PaX who I never really played with before this season.

Yes, it does harm quality of games slightly, I accept that. But just because of the improvement to my enjoyment of pvp, duo q should be left as it is. Being sure of having one good person on your team helps your win rate too, but the main thing is that duo encourages new people to queue together and even make teams to compete with. If it was pure solo, there would be none of this.

The thing is, if you are stuck in bronze 1 and can’t get out, then you are not a good player at all, or even average. I am not being mean or anything but I am just stating the facts. Insisting that you are better than your team will get you nowhere, in bronze or in legendary. This isn’t a problem though, because if you really focus on trying to improve, you can become a good player pretty quickly. In maybe 1000 games on your class you can go from useless to pretty good if you focus on improving from mistakes.

First of all, you need to run the meta build. They are meta for a reason- they are far better than any alternatives. If you think you do better with another build, that is fine but you shouldn’t be running it because when you reach a point where you are very good, you will be less effective than people of equal skill.

As others have said, as a thief you need to decap as much as you can and make sure you get kills. You can’t teamfight, so focus on the side caps and smaller fights. You need to rotate well to carry a game and know where to be all the time. Holding a 1v2 is helpful but it is not your job as a thief, so focus on trying to finish off as many kills as you can.

Most importantly of all, DO NOT DIE. This is the most important thing for any player in any division. If you think you could die, then disengage. You are only harming your team if you die. On thief you have many tools to disengage so never overcommit to a fight and leave when you get pressured. Dying on point in a 1v2 is much, much worse than disengaging, even if it means you hold the cap for another 15 seconds.

I hope this helped.

I really don’t want pve rewards removing. I am pvp main but I also like pve and getting rewards for pve by doing what I enjoy is great. I earned over 1000 gold in rewards from pvp this season and that feels great. It doesn’t feel like grinding when you earn so much by doing what you enjoy and to be forced to pve to earn rewards would be a really bad decision.

There is always going to be awful players even if there is no pve rewards. Some players are just useless, and not just because they pve mainly. so removing rewards will not keep bad players out of your matches and instead it will only harm yourself and the rest of the pvp population.

XxsdgxX.8109:

You can’t keep balancing around ESL either or the game will be forever infamous because of the frustrations, DH is still unpopular in Tournaments but in solo/duo que it is kitten spammed class along with warrior.

Think I’m wrong? Ok yeah then have fun with your perpetual low population numbers in PvP.

Regardless of what many people say, the thing is there is NOTHING wrong with balancing for ESL/top level. That is the level people aim to be at and if the game was balanced for bad players, then legendary division and organised tournaments would be much less interesting. Back when I was a bad player, I didn’t want the game balanced around me. I was bad and good people will deal with things differently to how I did. Balancing around top level play really helps people improve, like it has for me.

Guard is fine (still needs buffs to be honest but better than before), every other class is fine and class stacking is fine. The only situation where I think class stacking gives you an advantage is when a team plays double necro with an ele. This gives them the best teamfight in the game but even that is only a minor advantage which can be worked around with outrotations and choosing matchups correctly.

Stacked DH is pretty bad, stacked thief is trash, stacked ele is trash, stacked Rev is trash, stacked engi or Druid is not too bad but it does not give you an advantage, same with stacked warr and Mesmer. As I said, the only stacked class that gives you a minor advantage is necro and that is ONLY if you have a good support ele and any more than 2 necros is very bad. I am saying this having played over 800 games this season at legendary/plat 3 so I believe I have a good idea of what I am talking about for this season.

As for allowing class stacking in ESL, I agree that, with the current state of balance, there is no problem with allowing it. However, not for balance reason but purely for more variety and interesting comps, the rules should stay as they are. Yes, if a team wants to run 3 mesmers they do not gain an advantage- quite the opposite infact- but seeing teams do this would just make it a bit less interesting for people like me to watch.

I agree totally. After a certain point, mechanical skill means very little and the real skill comes from your rotational knowledge. Rotations are by far the hardest thing to learn in this game and they have such a big impact on your ability to win. They take a very long time to learn and you will have mastered your class long before you can rotate perfectly with it. Being in the right place 100% of the time will carry games very hard.

The example I can think of in EU is when I play against sindrener/zan/misha. Mechanically, I am pretty much as good as them (maybe 10% off) and I can do great in duels against them all. BUT what makes them so much better than me and almost all others is that their rotational knowledge is exceptional. They know exactly where to be every second of the game. Even if we win fights we still get outrotated and lose games. This is the secret to their unbelievable win rates.

So yeah, rotations do have a much larger impact than actual skill so if you think you are a good player stuck in gold/silver, work on your rotations more than anything else. All the mechanical skill in the world can only get you so far.

Spoichiche.1290:

“Tell me what’s the point of playing?

1. It clearly isn’t fun".

The post should just end here. There’s no point in playing if you don’t enjoy it.
I don’t believe anyone with half a brain would play a game that they don’t find fun, or enjoy in some way.

If you truly think this then you are not a competitive or really an ambitious player. I have played over 650 games this season already and, trying to be as accurate as possible, I would say 70% of those I really, REALLY did not want to play. I have spent over half this season absolutely hating pvp and feeling like quitting the game after many of my losses. But I don’t just stop playing because I don’t enjoy it. I don’t play this game for fun. If I did I would not even have half of the 5.2k hours I have invested in this game. No matter if it is pve or pvp, I play to achieve a target and I will not stop playing, however much I hate what I am doing, until I have done what I want to. To be honest, I WISH I could think in the way you do, it would make me a lot happier, but me and many other simply can’t.

And it is not just me who thinks like this, I know that many people would keep playing when they hate this game like I sometimes do just so they can achieve what they want. When you see a thread like this with someone saying how much they hate the game yet they continue to play, it means that they are a person who thinks like me and will keep going even if they don’t like what they are doing. Pvp, especially this season, does encourage people to think in this way more than ever.

That, or they have literally nothing else to do with their life. Or both.

1) D/D condi thief.
If anyone has anything else for number 1 then they are just wrong. The other places are down to opinion but there is no way there is any other possible build for number 1 when looking at this objectively. It is an absolutely ridiculous build.

2) Full trapper guard (spam all skills and win when against bad players)
3) S/D Druid (spam dodges, spam more dodges, spam stealth when the dodges run out).
4) Condi necro (spam aoe, spam some more aoe)
5) Meta engi (huge sustain, loads of stealth, too easy to survive)

I don’t think any of these builds are OP or anything but I am just basing my list on how low the skill cap of each build is.

Tanglewood.7523:

alemfi.5107:

Honestly community events like this should be stickied somewhere. really hoping this does well, just concerned if enough players will form teams for this since the pool is restricted to non pro players

What would be nice is if a new post was made at the top there.
Or if at least the one that is there listing events was updated.

I’m sure there are many teams not yet signed up but already sorted out.

We just formed a team yesterday and scrimmed two other teams today, all three of which are yet to sign up. Probably more teams in this position at the moment.

I can confirm there are many teams still yet to sign up. I know of at least 3 different teams that people in my guild are making that haven’t signed up which are all made of the top-tier players. I even was a sub for one of them in scrims yesterday so this shows that there are more teams who are taking this event seriously who still haven’t signed up and to think the three you know of and the 3 I know of are the only ones who haven’t signed up yet would be ridiculous.

So yeah, there is no need to worry about the number of teams.

Apologies in advance if I upset any low division people with this, lol!

Legendary- Mostly very good players who are experienced and know their roles and what to do pretty well. If a player is here, you can safely assume they are very good and be correct 90% of the time. Also includes people who got lucky with placement matches and now only play once every 3 days to stop decay.

Platinum- Reasonablly good players. Most people here have some sort of an idea what to do and generally play at an acceptable level. Players here do usually care about winning and will put in a lot of effort to do so. Platinum players are the sort of people who start to care about the leaderboard. A decent amount of useless players but less than in lower divisions.

Gold- Average players. Unfortunately, ‘average’ in this game usually means a pretty low standard of play. Players I would never want to have on my team. The kind of people that would regularly make simple mistakes or those just learning their class. I know that a lot of people here would have somewhat of an interest in pvp and would try to improve, but they are not there yet or even close.

Silver- Now we enter the territory of the truly useless players. The kind I would rather have a 4v5 than have them on my team. These people usually don’t make any effort to get better and just call things that beat them OP. This division can also include average players who don’t know what meta builds are and run trash builds like zerker ranger, shatter Mesmer or burn guard.

Bronze- I struggle to find words for how bad you must be to land yourself in bronze. This is the domain of people who don’t care, don’t try, only care about rewards or are just so bad I am surprised they even play pvp. People here, if they have had the game for a long time, can’t have done any challenging content or pvp of any kind before. I could win 1v2s in bronze with 1 hand tied behind my back. They are the kind of players you will encounter here.

Again, I am sorry for my slightly harsh words but I am just speaking my mind of what I think when I see each division badge next to someone’s name.

Lordrosicky.5813:

suffish.4150:

Lordrosicky.5813:

nothelseth.4621:

Lordrosicky.5813:

From a pure competitive perspective it should be solo queue only. It is a shame that a lot of the top players on eu will only duo queue usually with mesmer thief and then moa far and just snowball the whole game from there.

This hurts the game. People just quit queuing when unbalanced match ups come up.

However, alot of people like to play with friends. The solution is that the matchmaker need to have a hard lock on the difference between teams. 1800 players should never be placed against these try hard 2100 duo queues. What i am saying is that if these try hards want to duo queue and stomp at 2100 rating they should have queue times of around 15 minutes.

Both sides are accurately represented here. I for one fully support solo duo because I know the insane positive effect it has to the people who want to q but don’t want to do it solo. I find it very boring on my level of play though because if I want to stay in the top 5 I’m pretty much forced to duo. Playing soloq and landing vs 2x players from rank55 makes it impossible. Meanwhile, if I duo and those guys arent playing then it’s just my side freestomping everything.

I didnt know of this solution before but league of legends have perfectly solved it IMO. Once you hit a certain rating level you can no longer duoq in ranked. This means that if me and frae want to q at 23 then we are most definitely going to face eachother every single game which makes it x100 more interesting than if we are premading and nobody else is online.

Going to push hard for this change because I think it’d do wonders for the community.

Thats an AMAZING idea. Once you hit 1950 you cannot duo queue. That is literally perfect. It would solve all the issues and at the same time it would mean that casual players can still play with friends.

Wow i hope they do this.

I do not think this is a good idea at all. As someone who is legendary division, I would hate it to just not be able to play with my friends. Being forced to solo is a BAD idea, and no, I don’t duo just to stomp noobs. Having the ability to duo with someone allows you to have more fun, have conversations between games and discuss what has been happening in our games. Ranked would feel like a pretty lonely place if I wasn’t able to play with friends.

I accept that duo can give an unfair advantage, but it really is something that has to be endured to keep ranked as fun as it can be.

No because highish level ranked is basically dead now as its a bunch of try hard duo queues farming low plat players as everyone is dodge queuing each other/not queuing unless they are duo.

But my experience of ranked at legend/plat 3 is that most games are very close and competitive. Yes, there are blowouts (I won a 500-0 today) but they are few and far between. Nobody I duo with queue dodges (or at least not when they are with me) and I only duo with the people at the top parts of the leaderboard so I don’t think this is a problem.

As for not queuing unless in a duo, I do accept that this is a problem, but as I said, we MUST put up with this so ranked can be fun for all. It is not right to punish people for being good at the game by taking the option to duo away from legendary players.

Lordrosicky.5813:

nothelseth.4621:

Lordrosicky.5813:

From a pure competitive perspective it should be solo queue only. It is a shame that a lot of the top players on eu will only duo queue usually with mesmer thief and then moa far and just snowball the whole game from there.

This hurts the game. People just quit queuing when unbalanced match ups come up.

However, alot of people like to play with friends. The solution is that the matchmaker need to have a hard lock on the difference between teams. 1800 players should never be placed against these try hard 2100 duo queues. What i am saying is that if these try hards want to duo queue and stomp at 2100 rating they should have queue times of around 15 minutes.

Both sides are accurately represented here. I for one fully support solo duo because I know the insane positive effect it has to the people who want to q but don’t want to do it solo. I find it very boring on my level of play though because if I want to stay in the top 5 I’m pretty much forced to duo. Playing soloq and landing vs 2x players from rank55 makes it impossible. Meanwhile, if I duo and those guys arent playing then it’s just my side freestomping everything.

I didnt know of this solution before but league of legends have perfectly solved it IMO. Once you hit a certain rating level you can no longer duoq in ranked. This means that if me and frae want to q at 23 then we are most definitely going to face eachother every single game which makes it x100 more interesting than if we are premading and nobody else is online.

Going to push hard for this change because I think it’d do wonders for the community.

Thats an AMAZING idea. Once you hit 1950 you cannot duo queue. That is literally perfect. It would solve all the issues and at the same time it would mean that casual players can still play with friends.

Wow i hope they do this.

I do not think this is a good idea at all. As someone who is legendary division, I would hate it to just not be able to play with my friends. Being forced to solo is a BAD idea, and no, I don’t duo just to stomp noobs. Having the ability to duo with someone allows you to have more fun, have conversations between games and discuss what has been happening in our games. Ranked would feel like a pretty lonely place if I wasn’t able to play with friends.

I accept that duo can give an unfair advantage, but it really is something that has to be endured to keep ranked as fun as it can be.

Decay starts after 3 days and you lose 100 each day after that up to a maximum of 700 I believe.

Congrats on legend! I know we have seen each other in games a lot and you do really well on core necro. You are just as useful as most reapers I see even though the spec itself isn’t as strong. Going against you forced me to learn what all the core skills do again because I had no idea what they even were before I started seeing you, lol.

Hopefully you can stay in legend!

Hi everyone, I made this thread because my experience in ranked this season has been massive win streaks taking me to about 2k rating immediately followed by huge loss streaks taking me to about 1800 rating. When it is really bad I go from 1800 to 2000 and all the way back in 2 days. It upsets and annoys me more than anything else I have ever experienced in this game. It feels like there is nothing I can do about it. yes of course if I play better I can win but even though I COULD win if I played better, it just doesn’t make sense. Easy wins for about 20 games followed by endless losses is really annoying me and is making me hate pvp more than I ever have. Even when I am on a win streak, i know I am just gonna drop down the leaderboard soon.

I want to know if any other people are having a similar experience because most of my friends, who are all top 250, are all staying at the same kind of rating or climbing very slowly. Unlike many people who are complaining, I WANT to be stuck. It will make me less angry than this is doing. I already played nearly 600 games this season. I really, really don’t want to play another 300-400 to get to top 25 which is my target. But if I have to, I will.

Yes, as you can all tell by the very fact I am making this post, I am on a loss streak right now. That shouldn’t change anything though, because I want to know if anyone else is having the same experience as me. This is making me hate my time playing this game even though I know I have to keep going to achieve what I want.

Loop.8106:

suffish.4150:

There is nothing wrong with warr at all. It has awful mobility, it’s burst is extremely easy to dodge (skull grinder, pin down, all its cc and even axe f1 if they are running power should all be dodged 100% of the time) and if you don’t have cooldowns to dodge/block the burst, then it is easy to kite on most classes. You can even stay on point while kiting mace attacks if you are careful with your positioning.

Of course, if you get hit by headbutt with no stun breaks, you are almost certainly gonna lose the 1v1, but that is YOUR fault, not the fault of the balance team.

Okay, I have too. Most warriors nowadays run Power, GS/Mace-Shield.
I do agree that Skull Grinder should be dodged most of the times if you’re a decent player.
Arc Divider on the other hand is an instant 900 radius aoe cleave that hits just about as hard as Decapitate. Dodging that is pretty difficult.

It is absolutely not true that most warriors run GS/mace shield. Maybe in lower tiers/on NA they do but in plat 3/legendary on EU most run mace shield/longbow and for good reason. It is more dps, is harder to dodge some skills (longbow 2 is hard to dodge) and has a lot of aoe. Greatsword on the other hand is just not as good against most classes. It is easy to dodge burst (whirl is easy to dodge, so is skill 5 and arc divider is very easy to predict even though it can’t be dodged on reaction). Maybe you do see more warriors running power, but I don’t and from my experience it’s just not as good a build.

Yes, Warriors can force a decap, but they have little ability to follow up on a target who leaves the point to kite for a bit. This means it is very easy to not die against and hold a point contested even in a losing matchup which is one of the weaknesses that warrior has that things like Rev, Mesmer or guard do not have.

I think that is a bug. The bottom of the leaderboard has been like that since the start of the season. Absolutely no way that is intentional.

Should be fixed by the end of the season.

There is nothing wrong with warr at all. It has awful mobility, it’s burst is extremely easy to dodge (skull grinder, pin down, all its cc and even axe f1 if they are running power should all be dodged 100% of the time) and if you don’t have cooldowns to dodge/block the burst, then it is easy to kite on most classes. You can even stay on point while kiting mace attacks if you are careful with your positioning.

Of course, if you get hit by headbutt with no stun breaks, you are almost certainly gonna lose the 1v1, but that is YOUR fault, not the fault of the balance team.

Against players who will continue to 2v1 a player they will take forever to kill or cap the point against, druid is by far the best carry because it survives 1v2 better than any other class. And against truly bad players, it has the dps to win 1v2s as well.

Against good players I think Mesmer would be the best carry because it has great rotation potential with portal and can win teamfights with correctly timed moas. It is also very strong 1v1 against most classes.

To be honest though, a good player can carry on any class. I see most people here say that ele is not a good carry at all, but this season I have seen Lord Asura carry games on ele extremely hard. It was literally impossible to win unless you forced him into a 1v1. This really shows any class can carry with enough skill.

To answer the OP:
– Considering games played is an good idea as long as it does not go too far. Like, you must have played 100 games to be eligible for rewards would be great to keep people playing all season, but if this goes too far it would make season 5 a grind which is a bad idea.

- Having pure solo queue would be a really bad idea. I like playing with my friends in ranked and taking that opportunity to play in a duo away would make me enjoy pvp much less.

- The is absolutely nothing wrong with class stacking. People need to accept that 3 DH is a terrible comp and if you lose it it you played not well enough. Class stacking gives no advantage over an actual good comp using 5 different classes.

- DH is fine and needs no nerfs at all. If you can’t play against it then you need to learn how. DH is not OP in the slightest and I really think people need to understand this so they can learn to play against them.

I agree with this so much. Yes, I did get to legend with pure solo queue but after that I dropped to 1750 rating and then got all the way back to legend only to drop out of the top 250 again. This shows that solo is just down to luck. I just go up and down the leaderboard constantly when I solo and that is so frustrating.

From now on I am not going to solo at all this season. You are putting yourself at a disadvantage when you do. When I duo I have a 70-80% win rate, sometimes more and when I solo that win rate is about 60% which is not high enough to stay in legendary. It just helps so much.

Ele is not OP at all. The only reason that it will be taken by all pro teams is that it is the only true support class which is something you need to be successful.

It can’t kill anything 1v1, it has bad mobility, it dies fairly easily when focused. Yes, it can survive 1v2 pretty well, but Druid does that MUCH better. It is a good class to take in ranked and can help in teamfights pretty well but it is not too strong when compared to other classes.

I am in 2 minds about this change. I had been top 10 for almost a week and then in 3 days I dropped to outside the top 250 (solo q…) which is SOOOOOO annoying. That made me understand why people complain about matchmaking so much. And after a huge amount of games grinding back my rating, I am only at 1900 rating. I know I will get back eventually but it is annoying when it takes so long. In this case, it would be good to win/lose less rating and would be a nice change.

However, I think a problem with this would be that games would feel less important. I know that even if I lose, I am only going to lose 3 rating and if I win, I am hardly going to gain anything. It would just feel like no games really matter a huge amount. Right now when I win a close game, it is just an amazing feeling but if you knew you wouldn’t win or lose much rating, i wouldn’t really care about a single win or loss.

Another issue is that it would take AGES to get from top 50 to top 10 for example. It could make climbing the leaderboard more of a grind which is not good.

Wait until you are in legendary division where you win 5 and lose 20. LOL! I need 70% win rate just to stay where I am.

But yeah I agree with what you are saying, seeing how many rating you won/lost can only be helpful. I support this change.

I disagree. The system how it is has been giving me great games all the way through the season and to be matched with many bad players at the start would just not be enjoyable at all for me. People who are better than the division they are in will climb, people who are worse will drop down. It is great as it is.

I understand, getting put in a low division and being put in games with awful players (if you belong in a higher division) can be annoying, but that is what some people are bound to experience at the start of the season. It would just be unnecessary in my opinion for EVERYONE to have to deal with that.

There is nothing at all wrong with the Lord being solo-able. You will never kill it solo unless the other team makes zero effort to stop you, and if they have so little awareness of the map that they just ignore a player killing their lord, they deserve to lose. No class can kill it solo fast enough that the other team doesn’t have time to react and when there is someone supporting, no class can kill it solo at all. This is how it should be in my opinion.

In addition, the Lord being kill-able solo can allow for some great distraction plays. When my team is losing the fights and will not win if nobody changes how they play, I will just go for a Lord solo and either manage to kill it (very, very rarely will the other team let me) or hold back 1-2 players and allow my team to outnumber the rest of the map and win the game. Making the Lord too strong to be killed solo will take away strategy like this.

I wouldn’t mind losing less rating for a close game. maybe if your team reaches 400 points, you lose half what you normally would. I lost 3 games in a row today. 2 of them were 478-500 and the other was 493-500. I am not exaggerating at all when I say I just wanted to lay down and cry after those games. If I lost less rating it would be much less annoying to lose a very close game

But then again, maybe not. I do not want it to become possible to grind out legendary division and this would be one thing making it more possible to do so. If you belong in a higher division than you are in, with the current system you will get there eventually. I guess what I am saying is it would make losing a close game a less unpleasant experience which is good, but on the other had it would make the league a bit less competitive, which should be avoided.

All things considered, my opinion is that the system for close games should stay as it is. I would not be too disappointed if it was changed though.

How is this a problem? The system is putting you where you belong. Just because you are losing rating does not mean the system is bad at all. It is trying to put you at the level where you get your best possible matches. I am not saying you are bad or anything, OP, but maybe you are just not as good as you think you are. That isn’t a problem though, because when you stop losing rating, you will get better games and improve more quickly, possibly climbing back up the divisions.

I started the season with a rating of 1911 and have been as high as 2032 and as low as 1850 (2010 right now) so this shows that your rating can change a lot (by 150 or more) throughout the season and you will be able to get back to where you started eventually with enough effort.

I actually really enjoy skyhammer. It is a lot of fun and there is absolutely nothing that makes it not competitive. The jump pads are great for escaping bad situation and holding a point contested 1v2. Jump pads are the thing I really like about the map and are what makes it interesting to me. The skyhammer cannon itself is a great mechanic in my opinion because it turns fights into your favour and breaks enemy control of the map. It is not something you can ignore like bosses, lord or trebuchet.

It feels unique unlike many of the other maps and I like that. It should stay in ranked. Right now it is my third favourite map after temple and forest and ahead of kyhlo and foefire.

Losing to a Lord rush angers me more than anything else in the entire game. It is the only thing that makes me shout at my screen for a very significant time. I have to say though, winning a game you didn’t deserve with Lord feels awesome though so the mechanic is fine in itself. I lost a game 390-320 (bunker wars 2 lol) to a Lord rush a couple of days ago and it took me a lot of wins before I got over it.

After that, the thing that frustrates me second most is losing because nobody went tranquility. It is just so easy for someone, anyone, to go down and when I am in a position where I can’t, and my team doesn’t go down, I get very angry.

After that, one thing that really annoys me is when it is truly my fault that I lose. In maybe 1 in 40 games I play at a level that isn’t even 25% of my best and I just don’t understand why. When I lose like this I always apologise to my team because I know I could have done so much better. It really frustrates me because I would know that if I played like I can, I would have won.

Losing to a boss kill doesn’t really annoy me because whenever a game goes to bosses, I expect to lose so it doesn’t bother me when I do.

Moonsinn.5382:

I believe, but haven’t seen any confirmation, that the higher your MMR, the less you gain relative to how much you lose. This would make it so you would need a higher and higher win ratio to maintain a higher MMR. This also means you can’t grind to 2000 rating with a mediocre w/l ratio (like 1.05).

This is correct. My current rating is 2029 and I win between 3 and 10 for a win and lose between 11-25 for a loss. This is on average though as I have lost over 35 in one game. I can sometimes go 4-1 and lose rating. I think this is a good thing though because it means you need at least about a 65% win rate or maybe more to get 2000 rating.

I have yet to see any really significant differences in skill this season. Matchmaking is fantastic. Yes, I have an extremely good win rate so that does make me happy, but almost all of the games were very close.

Yesterday I won 12 in a row, which would normally suggest bad matchmaking , but over half of those I could have lost if I made 1 bad decision. It was so much fun and winning all of those out in the end made me feel great.

I can’t speak from the perspective of divisions other than legendary, but from what I have seen, matchmaking is the best it has ever been. The amount of bad players is very low which also tells me the skill rating system is working well.

Maybe it is a lot worse in lower divisions, but I do not believe that there would be any significant amount of games that would be uncarryable if you truly belong in a higher division based on what I have seen so far.

If this is a brag thread then…

I have a skill rating of over 2000, was number 12 on the leaderboard. Never been outside the top 100 the entire season, win rate is 54-25 or something like that. Lol, OP come back when you are as good as me (joking about that of course, top 100 is very good still).

I think the nerf that should be made to CA is to remove the super speed from the celestial shadows trait. That trait I believe is the most OP thing about CA and if a nerf is going to be made to it, that trait should be the target. Removing the stealth from that trait though would destroy Druid and would massively limit both its sustain and res power. However, stealth when combined with the super speed is a bit too much so if the super speed was removed I think it would bring druid’s ability to escape from bad situations into line.

The condi remove aspect of CA is not too bad in my opinion. I used to think it was but I have changed my mind. It is the only condi clear Druids run outside of signet of renewal and if it was nerfed, Druid would have a hard time against condi classes. Also, remember, Druid is a bunker class so should have high sustain. A nerf to pet dmg would be more useful than a nerf to CA in my opinion.

7 rating is about average for me at 1900-1950. I rarely get above 10 and rarely lose less than 20 when it is early. My worst one so far is a gain of 3 and that has happened 4 times so far. This morning I was duo queueing with my friend and we went 4-1 and LOST rating overall. Does this need to change? I think so. This is not quite as much of an issue at prime time but when it is early is is literally impossible to make significant progress even with an 80% win rate.

I wouldn’t say it is mandatory, but it does give a huge advantage, especially at higher tier. I have only played about 20 games solo this season, and while I do have a 60% win rate, still, it feels like much more of a coin flip if the game is winnable or not. Of course almost anything can be carried with enough skill but solo gives you much less chance of a good team.

The rest of my games I have been duo queueing with my friends that, like me, are in the top 50-100 and it does show that having just one players that you are sure is good helps a huge amount. Getting to legendary of course is very possible solo, but duo makes it so much easier.

I have to agree with the OP. There is no reason to blame teammates for a loss- there is nothing you can do about how they play. What you can change though is the way YOU play and if you play well enough, you will win more often than not. Do you ever see pro league players like Helseth and sindrener going on huge loss streaks? No, because they play their classes to the very highest level. It just shows that with enough skill, almost any game can be carried.

Every time I lose I only look for mistakes I made and only blame myself for it. If my teammates die instantly, it is MY fault for not supporting them. I believe if everyone thought this way, pvp would be a much more pleasant environment for all to play in because there would never be people angry at each other.

It will get better eventually if you truly are better than the people you are talking about. Try extra hard to carry games, make good decisions and you WILL climb eventually. Unless of course you are where you belong, because it is easy to not recognise your own mistakes (not saying this is the case for you, just a possibility). The bad people will keep losing and stop being matched with you and if you start playing well and winning, you will meet people on your level.

If you have the patience to wait for this or not is another thing.

2-0-3 is not a good strategy in my opinion. Playing sides isn’t bad in itself, but if you are going to ignore mid, go 1-0-4. There is no need to have 2 people sat on close if you are looking for an early kill at far. A better side point-focused strategy in my opinion is 1-1-3 where you send a Druid, engi or ele to mid to hold back 3-4 players while one is being killed at far. If the player at mid is good, they will be able to hold mid contested (especially on foefire) until the rest of the team comes to help after capping close and getting a kill on far.

However, I would not recommend this strategy for regular use. It would be good if you have a comp with multiple theives and 0-1 bunkers but if you have a normal kind of comp, a 1-3-1 is the best way to go.

I have to agree. I have played 50 games so far with a rating that has always been 1900-2000 and the match quality is incredible. It is helping me improve and play well SOOOOO much more than the other seasons did. I am consistantly getting matched with and against extremely good/ pro players and I love it so much. It is true that duo queue really helps at legendary tier where I am. It does give a huge advantage but if, like me, you have friends who are extremely skilled, it makes season 5 so much fun. I have only had maybe 5 total blowouts so far which can’t be avoided and the average losing score I have seen is about 300. Huge success in my opinion, congrats Anet on this season. Can’t wait to see where I end up on the leaderboard (hoping for top 25).

Vitali.5039:

Evan Lesh.3295:

I like the idea of giving a bonus pip or 2 to the losing team if scores are super close. Just have to be careful about organized farming.

Why not 2 extra pips to the team that take advantage of the maps freatures (and split for a draw)?
Like fire more Skyhammer’s cannon, killing more forest creature, kill the lord, the more trebuch hits and trebuch destroyed..

That is not a good idea. This would just encourage players who are only playing for rewards to do even more things that are not helping in the slightest. There is a a correct situation to go for each secondary mechanic and they should only be used if that situation arises, not for rewards.

To be honest, I think the pip system should just be left alone right now. Just think of it as a reward track (which it basically is) so getting high score shouldn’t matter. However, getting to 400 points should make you lose less rating, because if you reach 400, it is quite obvious that you could have won if you made just a few different decisions and that should be recognised in skill rating rather than pips in my opinion.

Kuya.6495:

Helseth will definitely want that rank 1 title.

Haha! That was my very first thought as soon as I saw there was a title for rank 1. I actually hope someone else does get it though just because I want to see how he reacts on his streams to someone else being the ‘God of pvp’, lol.

To be honest, I would absolutely love to get at least top 25 since I got number 5 on the non skill based leaderboard last season. Exclusive titles are a fantastic thing and are FAR better than the season 1-4 system where all you got was a badge that anyone of any skill can get and a place on a leaderboard nobody sees unless you are top 5.

I really can’t wait to see how high I can get. Looking forward to playing season 5.

I expect 8 episodes in this season of living world which will take us until about September and then probably a few months wait until we get expansion 2 in early 2018 (probably January or February ). But yeah I do not expect any information at all before the end of season 3 just because of spoilers. The content drought after expansion 2 will likely be nowhere near as long as it was after HoT which is also good.

I love jumping to spots where nobody else knows how to get to so I can get away from a bad situation. A few examples are on top of the rocks where chieftain is, on top of the wooden structure between keep and mine, on top of the pillars at henge point, on top of the fires at mid on temple and on top of the little hut next to windmill that can only be reached by leaps. It’s so funny, especially when they are full melee so they can’t reach me at all. A few times I jumped to one of these places just 1 second before going down and had my pet res me while the others are still trying to get to my downed body. Using spots like that for kiting is one thing that helps your survivability hugely, especially if you play without teleports.

Crinn.7864:

I wish they’d change half the shadowsteps in this game into leaps.

Kiting is basically impossible with all the instant teleports, and most maps don’t have jumping puzzles in convenient locations.

This is not true, there are plenty of jumping puzzles to kite away in every map (to a lesser extent on temple but there are still more than enough). What you need to do is find which spots cannot be reached by teleports (there’s quite a lot) and try to use those ones if you need to get away from a class that has a teleport available. Probably the best point for this is mine on forest because you have the big rock to jump to a variety of places on, you have the rock that is next to the base and can be used as a shortcut to the point, you have the wood logs that are hanging from the crane and maybe another I forgot. Other points have more than one of these spots too. It REALLY helps your surviving if you learn them all.

As for the OP, I have to disagree with it all. There is absolutely nothing wrong with certain classes being able to take shortcuts with teleports. That is just one of the advantages of the class, just like there will be many disadvantages too. Halving the range on teleports would absolutely destroy a lot of classes ability to get away from bad situations and would probably just put classes like druid that have the tools to get away without teleports at a huge advantage. There is no issue with the amount of teleports in the game right now in my opinion.

I actually like the quaggan in this patch. The thing I really love in the new map is having the kodan sanctuary anchored on top of the quaggan village so they effectively form one village. It looks awesome in my opinion. The times they came into the story were good too. I actually think it would be a good idea to have a couple more quaggan villages as we explore more of the shiverpeaks, I actually like the look of their villages.

I heard he is near BfF too, but I don’t know exactly what makes people say that, can anyone tell me exactly where this has been said?

As for the thread, I agree, I was looking forward to seeing maps go to the very top of the current world map where we would fight Jormag, but it doesn’t look like we are getting that. I agree that mechanics such as in the bitter cold would be fantastic in maps in the very far north of the world, getting increasingly more extreme the closer to Jormag we get.

However, I am quite optimistic about this since it looks like we’re getting primordus as well and also a possibility of a fight between the 2 dragons in an area that could be anywhere. Maybe having fewer shiver peak maps is not so bad if we are going to multiple regions at the same time.

I think that anything that demonstrates any kind of skill cannot be called an exploit. For example, using an obscure jump place in pvp that the devs clearly did not intend to exist is not an exploit in my opinion, because although it is unintended, anyone can do it and it is difficult to pull off.

Then there are things that are just exploits that clearly shouldn’t exist, such as breaking out of the map to get past a difficult boss or finding a way to earn a huge amount of gold at no risk as a result of a mistake by the devs. These demonstrate no skill and are just exploiting, plain and simple.

Really, I believe that any ‘exploit’ that shows mechanical skill is fine and is not really exploiting, but the ones such as easy money making and getting to unintended areas are not a show of skill at all.

There is nothing at all wrong with stacking in ranked and unranked. Never has been, never will be (unless balance devs truly mess up). If you are not playing at the very highest level, and by that I mean pro tournaments, then teams with any composition are equally strong. If you get stomped by 2 guards, 2 eles and a warr, you would still get stomped if there was no stacked classes on that team. It is all about skill, it is not about comp. balance is good right now.

Warr counters Druid, but I can still beat most warriors 1v1. Why? Because of a skill gap. Druid counters Rev, though I can still lose to ESL level revs. Why? Skill gap.

I have seen teams with 3 thieves beat teams with 3 guards due to the difference in skill and outrotations. Remember, combat is not the only way you can win. Look at the enemy composition, look at your composition and then come up with a strategy of how you can play to best counter the other team and carry out that strategy. Of course, sometimes you will still lose, but again, that is because the other team played better than you.

I would suggest that anyone who still has complaints about class stacking or even individual classes actually takes time to learn how to play against them and what to do when facing certain comps. That’s what I have always tried to do and I have gone in about a year from being totally useless to actually getting compliments from people I don’t even know about my skill, which feels great. It is the same for everyone else too.

Prince Vingador.8067:

suffish.4150:

I do support giving harsher punishments to afk/leavers. They just ruin the fun of the games for everyone else. I suggest that if you leave a game or are inactive for a certain amount of time, then you cannot play ranked for the rest of the day. After you get say 5 of these bans in a month, then you are banned for a week from ranked. It would really help with only having serious players in ranked. Keep people who like to quit in unranked.

I understand that this would also punish genuine disconnects, but they happen so rarely that I do not think Anet should even consider them for punishments (I get maybe 1 DC per month and I play 10+ games per day as long as there is no new pve content). I certainly wouldn’t mind missing out on just a single day of ranked play once a month or less for a real disconnect if it eliminates all leavers and afkers from my games.

All this said, I do not think leavers are an absolutely massive problem. I get maybe 1 every 10 games on average (yes I do have runs where I get one in 5 games in a row, but 1/10 is an accurate average) but even with the fairly small amount of these people, it can’t hurt to give harsher punishments to them.

If they would implement such penalty, then 2 things would happen:

1 – players insted of afk, then they would just go feed over and over

2- it would be just a matter of time untill there would be no players to play with, because maybe u got a legit dc, or problem with server, or MM was so bad that u just left or akitten, or some emergency happened and u had to leave.

Again i say, there is a huge problem with MM, we played several game with and vs each other and u know what im talking about 500- 60 and such games, not because some akitten , but because of the bad MM.
and ofc some players dont want to keep feeding and afk.
Some times games even start 4vs5 .
So its not so easy to deal with such problems, the only thing that i suggest is to improve macth making, even if that means longer que times.

Of course there would have to be more to it that just an immediate ban even if the game starts 4v5.

I would say that if the game starts 4v5, then all the other people can afk without punishment, because unless they are 4 amazing players against total noobs, they have no chance.

As for games that are like 500-50, a surrender button would be useful BUT if there is even 1 person on the team who does not want to surrender, people who give up anyway should still be punished in my opinion. People join a queue to play a game of ranked, not to leave halfway through. I know that some games are truly unwinnable, but still, afking or leaving when there is someone on your team who still wants to try should be punished. I only ever afk when my entire team has given up, which is why a surrender button would be good, but it must need the vote of the entire team.

I see so many of these threads and I have no idea why. DH is not, never has been and because of the amount of complaints, never will be very strong at the highest level. Say what you want about that being 1% of players, that tier is what the game should be balanced around. If you want to get better, it is best to stop saying that things are OP and learn to play against them.

I always struggled against warriors, but did I just think it was an unwinnable matchup and not even try to take it? Did I complain about it is OP? No, I took as many 1v1s against warriors as I could and if I lost, I asked the players to duel me in private arena until I had that matchup. Right now, I am still learning to duel warriors from the very top tier. I get absolutely destroyed when I face Drazeh’s warrior 1v1 (other very good wars too, but to a lesser extent). Do I say it is too strong because of this? No, whenever I get him in my games (which is quite a bit), I take as many duels as I can until I will eventually have that matchup, which with enough practice, I eventually will.

This applies to people complaining about any class. If you want to improve, you need to have the mindset that nothing is OP (even more so when it actually is not OP like it is now) and instead think that you just need more practice to win. Learn to play against guards. Learn what to dodge. Learn how to manage your cooldowns correctly in that matchup.

OP, I am not raging at you or anything, because you are of course entitled to your own opinion, but all I am saying is that the way you see guard at the moment will not help you learn to beat it. If you do struggle against it, follow my advice and duel in private arenas, it really helps.