Guild Wars 2

Greetings everyone, just to start the things off, I am not a relative “newbie” to GW2 (used to be a PvP-er only at the start) and recently came back to the game to find it enjoyable once again.

However, I have been poised with a difficult task, namely, choosing my main.

Mind you, prior to my return, I have had a level 50ish Guardian and Warrior and I was playing as a Conditionmancer (paired with Condition Ranger) in our tPvP setup, with over 90% win rate over the course of 70 games.

I have recently leveled a Necromancer to 80 and bought the expansion due to Reaper, however, here is my actual problem:

When I want to create a class I want to create the following:
- I want the versatility of an Engineer
- I want to be able to have the PvE faceroll of a Warrior
- I want to have an option to be complex as Elementalist/Engineer
- I want to have the durability of a Necromancer
- I want to be ranged DPS like Longbow Ranger

I understand “your personal preference is… personal”, “fun is subjective” type if arguments and I completely understand them. But I have started so many characters in the past 3-4 weeks that I am known to spend my Sundays in Character creation screen while browsing all possible forums/websites/wikis to give me a better glimpse of what I want to play.

I would not create such a dreadful or rather “corny” topic if I truly did not need help regarding this, regardless of how “subjective” the outcome might be, I am currently not in a position to determine the fun factor of it all, especially in the playstyle department.

Thank you in advance for any response provided.

I’d advise not to play soloQ until this is over.

My final point, as I realize this is probably already a wall of text, is Asuras. There is just no freaking way GW2 will live to see the light of the day in esports scene if there are Asuras. No one wants to look at the little midget hamsters wabbling their tiny hands and not having visible animations. A simple fix to this is the following. Have player choose what models others will appear to him. The tournament casters can always run the human form for the clear presentation of the game and easier way to commentate as well, hell, even Norn. Here’s a good reason why you should do this. In League of Legends (currently the most dominant esports game), all champions have different skins, all of them. BUT, all of their spellcasts are the same animation (few added details to some skins, but the core of the animation is still there), and no one ever has a problem of determining what the other champion is doing. Starcraft 2, another major name in esports scene, is reluctant to add more skins to the game because they are afraid it might cause imbalance, since the slightest mistake can lead onto a lost fight in that game, and no one wants to see pink flying Zerglings with angel wings and Superman capes jumping all over the map. That’s the main problem that you produced when you introduced the Asura race. If I see a tournament and I want to watch it, as a Guild Wars 2 player, and I see a bunch of Asuras, I immediately turn it off. I do not want to watch that, it is not watchable. Please take this into consideration and make fast changes.

TL;DR:
- rework damaging conditions for them to be only complementary to the primary damaging skill
- rework models of races or give players the ability to see others in other models
- be faster with your patches as many players have left, and will leave the game because no one likes slow fixes and adjustments

Take care.

Greetings there, as the title states, I’d like to open up a discussion, basically theory-crafting about the conditions.

I want to retain the expectations that GW2, so far, haven’t fully met in this post and therefore, shall use them as an argument from a rather subjective point of view, but even though it is subjective, I feel that many people feel about the current state of Condition Wars 2.

To claim it off the bat, rework the damaging conditions. Removal would be too harsh and shouldn’t be like that. Here is my idea of rework. I come from Asheron’s Call, Dark Age of Camelot, WoW, Warhammer and many alike, and I have experienced what good combat system does and what bad combat system does. Currently, in GW2, combat system is just perfect, no RNG, but there are damaging conditions, namely bleeding, poison and the hated burning. With all of those games combined, I can tell you what is most pleasant thing to watch from a spectator point of view and how the game is more awesome.

The effects of the spells need to be toned down, that’s for sure. Now about reworking the damaging conditions.

When I (and my friends) were reading about the game, we figured that conditions would be like debuffs, and there is actually a class that is in charge of debuffs (namely Necromancers), while other classes can provide a lower amount of debuffs as well. The problem occurred when the debuffs became a primary damage source. Just today, I played with a couple of friends (new to the game due to 2-day free-trial) and they were just frustrated while playing it. They would check what did they die from, and it’s usually 17k ticks of bleeding/burning in a matter of seconds, they asked me how to prevent that, and quite frankly, there are very few ways to prevent that after you dodge a couple of things beforehand.

I shall take the perfect example of the combat system that worked in a game called Dark Age of Camelot. So-called debuffs, were what they are, debuffs. You could have conditions on you, bleeding, poison, namely DoTs (which is basically what conditions are) but their damage was so minor, it was often ignored (80-150-280, if you were really specced into dots, ticks every 2 seconds on a 2.5k health pool for 12 seconds), bleeding damage was maybe 40 per tick. What this meant was that the actual damage, the damaging ability was everyone’s main damage. That’s how Guild Wars 2 should have been. You could have avoided the entire “remove the conditions or be able to inflict more than your opponent” meta.

If ANet reworked condition damaging abilities to be just an addition to the primary damaging ability (like Backstab causing Bleeding for some minor damage, let’s just say 80 per tick over the course of 10 seconds with 1.5 seconds in between the ticks). That’s just complementary damage to your already main damaging ability. This does not cause confusion amongst the new players. If a player sees “oh, he killed me with Backstab? well I better avoid that next time”.

How would then this pair onto the pro scene? Where everyone should know what to dodge and when not to dodge. Most of the “high damage” skills have some sort of an animation beforehand (this also complements my next point) and players should react by dodging it. However, the player who is using the high damage skill can always interrupt his own spell-cast in other to juke out a dodge from the enemy player and he can use it again in 4-5 seconds (if I remember correctly).

This is a wrong view to take a look at an MMORPG. That’s how you look at FPS games. The far left and the far right are the perfect examples of that. For example, in FPS games, a sub-machine gunner has a higher chance of killing a Sniper if he gets close to him, and vice-versa. That’s how that system works.

In the current game, an MMORPG, balance is achieved through having unique set of tools that have been laid out through all different weapon sets, traits and skills that game has to offer. When people call imbalance, is usually when someone kills them in a very cheap fashion, for example current Spirit Rangers or early in GW2 Frenzy+HS spam.

No one should die in two seconds, and players usually do not achieve the fun factor when not being outplayed, but rather being decimated by the skillset of the other class.

Counters are perfectly acceptable in any game, and that’s how esports thrives, based on so-called “counters”. That’s why people yell at you in LoL when you pick Vladimir or Anivia against Fizz, or that’s why all units in Starcraft 2 are good against something and hence are picked based on other players’ unit composition. That’s what’s fun to watch, the thought-process and the reactions of the player in the game, mainly “the skill”.

Balance can be achieved, perfect balance does not exist, it never has and it never will. Currently, people are vocal about the current situation of the game, which is utmost horrible, and yell out imbalance. Because something is obviously too strong and too easy to pull off.

What you say with everyone running the same build and getting RNGed, that’s what GW2 wanted to eliminate and hence the dodge system. You no longer have Priests randomly parrying a Warrior’s attack, however, you do get “globalled” (excuse my WoW terms), and that’s what is currently imbalanced.

Balance is achieved with players being able to play their class and still be able to kill some other class, unless that class has the in-depth system (traits, skills, weaponsets) specifically designed to be able to defeat that class through their abilities while suffering in some other ways, whatever they may be, lower crowd control, lower burst, lower whatever. However, the golden rule of GW2 was “if he does a lot of damage, he takes a lot of damage”, and currently, everyone does a lot of damage and no one cares how much damage people take, when they all die from god knows what reasons.

Just the other day, I was watching some streams with GW2 and I found a tournament taking place and decided to watch it with my flatmate and have some beer along with it. We were going to watch LoL (since we both play it), but we miscalculated and ended up with beer and stream up 2 hours early. So, we decided to watch this GW2 hype about esports.

I have played GW2 from the very start and the first 3 or so months, we were top 5 or something guild on our server, as I was told, and we had a 85% win rate in tournaments (until 4 Mesmer and 3 Guardian teams showed up) with around 300 games.

As we watch GW2, my flatmate said “this is a huge clusterkitten of everything”. Mind to you, he played WoW for 3-4 years, so he knows what kind of a clusterkitten that game is.

I started explaining the combo fields and everything else, but he was just puzzled with the amount of Mesmer illusions and Ranger pets that are around that he couldn’t tell who’s a player a what’s an NPC. Of course, that’s what Mesmers do. Now, the abilities are too shiny and we are all aware of this. Too many effects for an esport. After the first game, the second game was all Asura team… Do I need to tell you how frustrating it is to watch the little hamsters run around and do flashy things? Even I couldn’t tell what the hell someone is doing. This is actually a problem in game as well, dodge system is there so that you can dodge something with your reactions, instead of relying on RNG to block/dodge/parry that attack. But if you cannot see the animations on the little buggers, what’s the point of having such a system in the first place? I’d go to lengths to say that an individual can set the models in game to appear as he wants them to appear, and give spectators to do the same, as right now. It’s just a mish-mash of random flashy things and someone just randomly gets downed, for god knows what reason. We couldn’t see!

Second of all, entire community shouldn’t suffer from bad balance because of a tournament, that’s why you should be able to make older versions for the tournament setting to make them be played in their rightful patch. I have no problem with this. ANet starts to remind me of Blizzard (I do not want to start the bashing war) in terms of poor balance, this is just not acceptable for a game that needs to have a playerbase in order to succeed as an esport, meaning, you need a lot of players if you intend to make this an esport, since the actual players are mainly your viewers, not a random person who happened to venture on twitch.

I am not sure if you have this, although I doubt you do, is that the actual “famous, good, whatever” players can be your class team leaders. Not leaders in its actual sense, but they can volunteer (you should be able to pick some names from the esport scene) who can actually make contributions as to report what each class needs. Sure, this can be biased, hence why it’s a nice job to have, plus, you promote certain players in community. You can have class leaders for every aspect of your game, but the main one should be focused on sPvP or tPvP, since that’s what Guild Wars 2 is about. You can reward them with in-game items and voila, you have a nice setting going.

There are many things to be done with this game, and many players (top PvPers from DAoC and WoW) still cannot forgive ANet for abandoning their game at the start and being super-slow with patches. Remember, it took you almost 2 months to fix Frenzy+Heartseeker or Frenzy+100b. I hope some ANet dev does read these posts, and as every poster here, I hope you do read my post and conduct massive changes needed for this game.

Thank you for reading

Greetings there, I’ve been an avid GW2 player at the start, then some RL issues came about, friends left in the meantime and unfortunately, I did not play it.

However, a friend and me recently picked up the game again and are about to play it with some other friends during this F2P period, and we are having troubles finding builds or guides regarding our classes.

I played Condition Necromancer back at the start, and they were just bad. However, we ran a condition-based team in tPvP and had around 85% win ratio (Ranger+Necromancer) and most of the times we lost was either triple Guardian or 4 Mesmer (with teleport) on second map composition.

However, from what I saw, Condition Necromancers are now the FOTM and I figured out a build, with consulting other players. However, my Engineer friend is not so sure about his build.

We looked all over the place, from this website, to guildwars2guru, to whatever next google offered us, and they were all outdated guides and builds. So, do you guys know any good websites that offer guidance?

Also, are CCking Warriors good now? I used to play with 2h Hammer / 1h mace/shield – and was just fun to play, but hitting for 2k tops was not fun at all. If they are, what builds are available for them?

Thank you in advance.