It sounds like Michael might be in what other games call “elo hell”. There isn’t much I can do to help, but he has a chance to escape once everyone’s MMR is reset.
We’re talking about ways to better introduce players into solo and team arena, and how to better place them on the curve. Yes, this includes possibly blocking entry until X number of games have been played. Yes, this includes making hot-join better resemble competitive play. No, none of this is set in stone so please do continue giving us your ideas and opinions.
You implement a 16-player mode for a year that teaches kids to zerg, play poorly, neglect using their brains, and then now you wonder why arenas are filled with horribad players.
ArenaNet basically bred, hand-fed, and nurtured the elo heII pit themselves.
The only time I don’t have a real mesmer targeted is when they’re stealthed, or when I’m purposefully killing a phantasm. As soon as they pop out, I target the real mesmer in a fraction of a second.
It’s that easy. No, I don’t look at their boons. The one that’s running around like a headless chicken, dodge roll spamming, using skills — it can’t get anymore obvious, and it blows my mind how some people honestly mistake clones for the real player.
This game is not like League of Legends, where if you get behind in farm, you have less gold and exp and therefore less items and levels, so you mathematically have little chance of coming back.
No, in GW2, you start off at your maximum and stay that way. You have your complete a’rsenal at your disposal at any given time of the match, so there is no reason to afk when you have the potential to turn games around.
But, for me, 8v8 should not be removed completely. More options = more fun to more players.
This is not a matter of removing game modes. This is about the “Play Now” function. When you press Play Now in the PvP browser, what do you want to be automatically put into? The overwhelming majority currently says 5v5 is the answer, and for good reason.
This is not to say that 8v8 will be totally deleted from the game. Of course not. 8v8 should be maintained as an option for custom arenas.
League of Legends’ normal mode, solo queue mode, and team ranked mode..even their players vs A.I. mode are all the same format on summoner’s rift: 5v5. The reason is because consistency between modes facilitates learning. Players who do well in normal, un-ranked mode can carry those learned skills onto more competitive environments. It is an evolution of competition.
We could learn a thing or two from the largest and most successful e-sport game in all of the history of the world.
This game has some of the best small-scale skirmish mechanics. 1v1s and 2v2s are very well-balanced and actually entertaining to watch because all of the nuances of combat can be appreciated without confusion on the viewer’s part.
MOBAs tend to encourage players to disperse across the map, which facilitates the duels, small skirmishes, etc. A MOBA PvP mode would play to GW2’s strengths.
It isn’t a matter of how you feel. When games improve, they naturally grow in population and activity. When games are stagnant, they lose players. First case study: HoN vs LoL. Both games started off on even ground, right? But little did people know that one of those games would die, while the other would go on to become the world’s largest e-sports game in all of the history of the planet, passing SC and SC2. Same game genre. Similar mechanics. Two totally different outcomes.
You have every right to be concerned about the health of this game. Your own personal feelings have no effect on the bigger picture of things. However, being aware of the game’s situation may change your mind. Unlike HoN, this game is actually growing (both PvE and PvP populations) steadily. Player-run and corporate-sponsored tournaments have already been taking place. Things are a lot better than what you may think; progress is being made, and the game is moving in the right direction.
If the rest of the team is solid, with a good mixture of a bunker and killers, and you are aware that everyone is capable of supporting one another, then that is a good situation for 1 player to break off and contest a point solo.
If you are aware that you are babysitting your team, and that your teammates are inexperienced, that is the first big clue to stick with your team and not go on solo adventures. Shepherd the herd of cows. It’s up to you to keep everybody alive. Don’t break off solo. And if you notice a teammate is breaking off solo, you make a decision: 1) go with them and help them, if your team comp is incapable of winning in team fights, or 2) stay with your team and win that point before going anywhere else.
These decisions are made on the spot. There is no guide. Just need map awareness, and team/situational awareness to make those choices.
Devs were afraid that town clothes would obscure PvP by making classes unrecognizable.
When everybody and their mother plays an Asura, nothing is visually recognizable solely based on their character model. Weapon switches are virtually invisible to the eye until abilities are actually used. Same goes with everything else — the addition of town clothes would not change the amount of ambiguity that already exists.
The latest LoL patch notes just came out. Since it is, after all, the world’s largest e-sports game in all the history of existence, I feel like we can learn a thing or two from them.
These patch notes are specifically written by the game developers themselves. Notice how they pay a lot of attention to detail – each and every change is fleshed out with a summary section, a context section, and even the changes are detailed by juxtaposing the old mechanics/numbers with the new ones.
Remember, these are not player-written or fanbase written notes. These notes are written by the game developers to clearly communicate their intentions, thought process, and ultimate decision-making process with the players directly.
I feel like detailed patch notes like these help the community stay on track with the developers, which encourages and facilitates more constructive feedback and discussions on the forum. Thoughts?
16-player mode should be renamed Zerg Mode. If you don’t like Zerg Mode, then don’t play Zerg Mode. Queue up for 5 v 5 arenas like any other sane person.
In the most recent e-sport tournaments at PAX Prime, etc, the time to kill an opponent was dramatically different from what you see in hotjoin. The competitors did not die in a blink of an eye. No, they survived for a very long time because of good plays and good teamwork.
Gameplay at tournaments like Pax Prime showcase the potential of PvP. While casual hotjoin PvP may show the lowest skill floor, competitors in seasonal tournaments show off PvP’s highest skill ceiling. Should ArenaNet dumb down the entire game, or should they provide tools to encourage learning, growth, and competition so that even the average hotjoin player can be decently competitive?
And a squishy high APM ADC is just one small part of the game, not everything here should be that.
Glass cannons should not be the one and only kind of build that everyone runs in tournaments, yes, but the potential for a glass cannon to succeed and do its job should exist. The executioner role is necessary to prevent stagnation.
Slowing down combat by decreasing burst damage, condition burst damage, increasing health and making everyone naturally tankier, etc, means the glass cannon paradigm would be quashed. It would cease to exist. That would not be good for the overall health of the game from a competitive standpoint.
ArenaNet has expressed many times that they believe in resolution of fights rather than going the WoW approach of having long, drawn out fights just for the sake of it.
I personally do not agree on slowing down combat to make it more “strategic”. Because of the threat of a quick death, really good plays are required to stay alive – this is more rewarding, and also entertaining to see. It’s similar to League of Legends in this sense: you can die in a blink of an eye in LoL, or you can pull out some amazing plays and not die, whilst killing everyone. (Doublelift’s Vayne is a good example of this.)
GW2’s fast paced style of combat is what makes it unique from other MMO PvPs.
If you think Hammer/LB is destroying soloQ, you haven’t seen the new build that has been floating around. The other build is so broken you’d be lucky to get the warrior to even 90% hp before you’re downed. Once it gets more popular, Anet will really have to rethink their approach to balancing warriors.
Edit: I did not mention the details of the other build on purpose. Don’t want it spreading too much.
Stop your non-sense..you compare regeneration to the warrior healing signet?…Are you mad?
I should have like 2000 pts in healing power to match the passive healing of the signet.
Healing signet = 400 HP for sec
Regeneration = 130 +0.125 * Healing Power.
I stated that other classes are achieving the same sustain effect as in not dying in 2 seconds, but surviving for a long time. Engineers can clear conditions and burst heal every 15 seconds or so, on top of having 100% regeneration uptime. Thieves can full condition wipe and sustain heal every single time they stealth, and with good use of smoke fields, thieves can stealth almost permanently. Guardians can wall, aegis block, blind, heal block, elite invulnerability, then continue to throw out more walls, blocks, and blinds, on top of AoE healing throughout the process.
Many classes have a sustain mechanic and it’s not a new concept at all. EU has been practicing this meta way longer than NA.
And might I add, healing signet is not used by all warriors. It works well with tanky warriors, but high burst damage builds still require a burst healing skill like adrenaline surge. The fact that so many warriors are using healing signet now reflects the fact that so many people are choosing to build tanky and sacrificing burst damage, which is again, not a new concept. Many other classes have swayed into this tanky, lower damage spectrum. EU has been doing this for a long time in the competitive scene.
The reality about healing signet is that many other classes have had this same effect for a long time, through Regeneration. All the engineers and elementalists who have 100% regeneration uptime are achieving the same sustain effect within their own class. Thieves have a version of this through their healing and condition removal from stealth. Same goes with guardians and their constant AoE healing.
The concept of healing signet’s sustain is nothing new. It’s new to warriors, but it has been done already. Why the shock and awe about warriors having this mechanic now is silly.
Now i’m a based god on warrior. But hey, why should any class take skill right? Lets give mesmers perma invisability and guardians perma invuln, kitten it!
Really? May I ask what your rank is on the leaderboard?
Also, “best heal in GW2” is a bit of a stretch. Healing signet is a personal heal only. It does not benefit teammates. There are no tricks and gimmicks that come from the heal. It’s just a plain, straight up regen. It gets screwed by poison easily.
Rangers have a team condition-cleansing water field heal. Necros have a full condition wipe heal. Engineers can burst heal very frequently due to multiple short CD heals. “Best heal in GW2” is relative.
Has anyone ever tried playing warrior pre-buffs? The answer would be so obvious then. The demands that a warrior must meet (in terms of functionality in team fights) requires that they have sustain, and before the healing signet buff, warriors lacked this tremendously.
For the longest time since launch, warriors were built super glass cannon because it was the only viable way to play warrior – kill things with frenzy faster than getting killed yourself. It was awful.
Now that warriors finally have an option for sustain, so many new viable builds have opened up. No more cheesy GS/axe frenzy warriors. Now we have condition damagers, stun lockers, team support through shouts, sustained damage off-tanks, etc. All tournament viable. Shouldn’t this be the golden standard that ArenaNet should follow for designing the other classes, in terms of variety?
At least warriors are varied in terms of builds and play styles – unlike classes like Necros and other classes who are just clones of each other. Every Necro, Guardian, Mesmer, etc is the same in every match. This goes with many classes other than warriors.
With warriors, you never know how they’re going to play until you actually see them in action. They could be condition damage-heavy. They can be bursty. They can be stunlockers. Or tanky sustained damagers. They can be team support-heavy with shouts and banners.
Instead of complaining about warriors, shouldn’t this be the golden standard that all other classes should be brought up to, in terms of variability?
This is why games like DOTA and LoL are so popular. They are open to the WHOLE WORLD. GW2 is open to a few countries
Also: Free.
Make the Heart of the Mists section of GW2 free to play and accessible to everyone = win for PvP population growth = more revenue from gem store = win for ArenaNet + win for everyone.
I am perturbed that you have the gal to imply that I’d run rampant with a skilless and near immortal build if I wasn’t hard-countered by a stun warrior.
That’s exactly the point. You chose to use a build that has no easy-outs. It requires good twitch-reflexes to function properly, and the skill ceiling of the build is high and is capable of doing huge plays. The first video is a good example of that; again, the engineer dragged 60% of the enemy team into Henge and enabled the rest of his team to control the rest of the map.
The second video is an example of what happens when a high skill ceiling, high skill floor build is used inadequately. The engineer nonchalantly galloped up to the warrior within 130 range and gets himself skull cracked (which means the warrior had full adrenaline, implying that the warrior was fighting the engineer previously and was trying to disengage). Instead of letting the warrior go and doing the right thing of capping/holding the point, the engineer makes a very poor decision of going off the point, galloping into some random corner of the map, getting stunned when all cooldowns and dodges are available, and dies for no reason. That’s all.
That is not a good example of skill vs reward – that’s an example of poor decision making with a build that requires good decision making. The engineer tied that noose around his own neck for using that build.
PvP-specific Patch previews would be nice, too. It gets the community excited for the next patch when we can actually listen to the devs discuss their thoughts about the upcoming patch in a video format. The monthly State of the Game discussions featuring the devs have been a nice version of this, but I feel like a more succinct, streamlined video put out by ArenaNet themselves would be better.
The reason for having these patch previews is to communicate to the players the reasoning behind specific changes. It makes players feel like they’re on the same track as the devs. Notice how there is so much pessimistic speculation on these forums when the devs are silent and do not post for a long time; it’s because players are not understanding what’s going on in the devs’ brains.
Also, patches don’t have to be frequent, but communication DOES have to be frequent if you want the player-base to generate quality feedback and discussions. No one realistically expects devs to output patches every week, but majority of us do expect some form of communication…ANYTHING, on a relatively normal basis. Even just one post every few days is huge. The forum has gotten used to the devs not posting anything on the forum for months. MONTHS. This, in my opinion, is too long of a gap of non communication.
Do your patch notes like this here. Post a small summary of the reasoning or rationale as to why certain changes are made. It’s more tedious for you to write these kinds of notes, yes, but it saves you from dealing with the forum’s mass (accusatory) speculation for months to come. Good investment in time to write more detailed patch notes.
That warrior ran an unusual, full melee mace/mace/hammer build that normally would not work in a competitive match, but it just so happens to be the one counter to the engineer’s obnoxiously resilient, borderline-immortal build, and therefore it worked that match. Without that warrior’s awkward melee build, that engineer would have run rampant and dominate the entire match with no counters.
Is this a case of Build Wars? Maybe. Imbalance? No.
The engineer in the video defeats every single person on the enemy team except for the warrior which has a build that counters that engineer’s particular build. Is it to be expected for one player to be able to defeat every opponent in a match with no possible self-weaknesses?
And even so, the engineer, despite getting caught in a 1v1 with the warrior that supposedly counters the engineer, still manages to pull 60% of the enemy team into that capture point and allow for his own team to control the rest of the map.
In the second video, the engineer needlessly pursues the warrior off the cap point into 130 range EVEN THOUGH he is aware that the warrior has a build that counters the engineer’s particular build. It almost feels staged, just to get that moment on camera to show to the forum and say, “SEE, imba!”
All I see is poor decision making in the videos. I really see no issues of imbalance here.
^ I know it sounds tedious but it’s the most FOR-SURE way to confirm that all 10 players are active and present.
I would rather have a tedious method of queuing for tournaments and play a full 5 on 5, rather than have an easy and convenient way of queuing but running the risk of playing 4 v 5s. These are ranked tournaments. 4 v 5s should not be happening in this level of competition.
Less than 10 players clicked Yes within 1 minute = all players are removed from queue. Must manually rejoin the queue…do NOT automatically return to queue after a fail start.
^^^^ No war doesn’t suck. Every single person that has rerolled warrior is happy with it and I don’t know of anyone who actually said warrior sucked after trying it out. The common scenario is commenting on how easy it is to do well on a warrior and remarking that they’re better on the warrior than the main they spent hundred of hours on.
Warriors suddenly became really good when teams started rolling massive condition spam and began relying on condition burst as the primary damage source. Coincidentally, it was approx the same time when “suddenly” mesmers and eles became “weak”.
Do you know that the hammer AA is the strongest DPS source of warz along with Axe autos ( only if you land the third chop, otherwise Hammer is way better) ?
Just to inform you.
Fun Fact: During GW2 alpha testing, Merciless Hammer increased damage by a whopping +50%, double than today. Luckily I caught this and aided in shaving the trait down before it really caused imbalance in the game.
Do you know this was the exact same argument used to justify bunker eles in the bunker ele meta ?
I bet ya remember it, that double-triple ele meta where there was no way to kill the kitten ele.
Yeah, that one with trapperz and broken empa bond.
Balanced.
The biggest difference is that in comparison to the old Eles, warriors actually die still. The old ele was mathematically immune to death if played correctly (low CD ride the lightning plus no internal cooldown on chill aura = GG). 2 eles worked because everything they did was AoE – their healing is AoE, their condition removal is AoE, they can put down their own combo fields and blast it themselves multiple times for very good AoE effect. Among many other reasons.
except for the amount of coutnerpressure they can put on exceeds that which a large majority of classes can take. Only the few with stab can really deal with them effectively.
“Bursting” a warrior is extremely hard to do. I find it difficult to believe that people still believe this is a counter to a longbow hammer war.
Bursting a warrior with conditions is difficult compared to other classes. This is true.
However, focus-pressuring a warrior works, guaranteed. It’s the exact same concept as burning through a guardian’s cooldowns; like peeling an onion, first you force the guardian to use up their walls and shields, force out their block-heal, then they use up all of their aegis CDs, all virtues, then they invuln elite, all virtues again, and THEN…ONLY THEN, do they finally die.
It’s the exact same thing with warriors now. First you force out their stances, and then they die. Simple and balanced with a coordinated group.
I almost went crazy when I kept getting the “You Have a Piece of Equipment That Can Be Upgraded” message popping up on my screen mid-PvP. I kept X’ing that message out hoping it would go away forever but no, it just pops up again and again and again.
The real issue in PvP right now is how NON-intelligent gameplay is reigning supreme. Conditions as a main damage source takes zero skill – almost no precise timing necessary, and brain-dead easily spammable. Conditions from medium cooldown utility skills = good and healthy for the game. Bleeding + Burn + Weakness + Poison + etc from autoattacks = No.
Like I stated already, Eles (and even Mesmers) are fine the way they are designed now.
Less face-smashing, more kiting, more intelligent gameplay. That’s all.
If you expect to be able to run into brick walls face-first and win, you’re playing the wrong class. This is equivalent to face-checking bushes on League of Legends with Lux, and then wondering why you died.
Mesmer has the most powerful long range burst in the game. The damage is spread across multiple attacks that you can time so they all come together as one huge burst – much more reliable than the warrior’s rifle burst which is easily dodged.
You have many more tools as a Mesmer, too. A rifle Warrior must sacrifice all utilities and traits to get things that buff up the kill shot (which is easily dodged), while the Mesmer can still get useful team utilities and maintain high ranged burst damage.
Finally, a Mesmer can peel for himself – a warrior cannot do this. Once a warrior is focus-fired, he stays focused until dead because he has nothing to drop the focus. Rifle warriors are screwed even more-so in this department because they’re built completely glassy.
Please, no more god-mode Eles. Please do not bring that nightmare of a meta back.
Eles are fine right now. They just have the same complex as the mesmer – they are not strong against conditions, but they’re strong against everything else. When conditions get shaved, it will be much more obvious that eles are totally fine the way they are now.
thx for tips ppl. I switched movement to kbd, spells and targeting to naga. was bad, but its improving now. i guess this is more effective, at least for gw2. though pulling combos takes some finger wriggling.
I wish naga had 5×3 buttons (instead of 4×3)
That “finger wriggling” is the most efficient way to control your character with the highest precision.
