So basically OP is surprised that refusing to play optimally is less effective than playing effectively. Truely staggering.
The only thing “truely staggering” is how you miss the point of his post…
So let me get this. Now some want a change to how melee and ranged combat works in the game, affecting the entire balance of the game on all game modes, just because someone wants to “role play” their ranger with a bow?
We’ve seen more unreasonable requests in the past, but this sure is one of them.
Reminds me of that person I had in my group when I run Crucible of Eternity that refused to come in melee range because “Subject Alpha is too ugly, I won’t come close to him”
The irony…
PvE in this game isn’t balanced, that is the point, in a well balanced game people can actually go ranged…
As you are apparently ignorant of it, the combat and classes in this game were designed around their “e-sport” and fighting over a conquest node, hence why PvE is the poorly designed joke that it is.
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Thief has been the king of solo roaming since the dawn of times and won’t change, as a trade-off they’re essentially pigeonholed into a sub-optimal staff build for zerging.
There is no “trade-off”, because that would imply some sort of intent from Anet when there is none, the laughably termed “class balance” in WvW is simply whatever the result is of them designing & balancing around PvP (and since HoT PvE raids).
Listen up care-bears…
I hate to break it to you, but you are a “carebear”, if you weren’t you’d playing EVE Online or something, rather then the most “carebear” MMORPG out there and talking about WvW which as a PvP mode is about as skilled, hardcore and “PvP” as My Little Pony, still thanks for the laugh.
As for the OP, the devs don’t need to see anything, whether scourge is broken OP or not doesn’t really matter, as you seem to have missed it, there is no class balance in WvW and never has been, because they virtually ignore WvW when it comes to balance, it is unlikely that is going to change 5 years into the game.
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GW2 classes are better balanced than any RvR game I have played. I think a lot of people are forgetting just how unbalanced ESO, DAoC and WAR were. There is no class in GW2 that isn’t viable. Sure some dominate the landscape (cough… Guardians/DH… cough…) but they aren’t so OP that a player feels like they cannot win regardless of the skill gap.
GW2 has terrible class balance in WvW, because basically they don’t even take WvW into consideration on any meaningful level (no the odd very rare WvW centered change is not “meaningful”).
Which is why for the entire game if you look at large scale then half the classes have been either completely and utterly surplus to requirements (engy/ranger for most of the game) or had some niche role (mesmers as “veilbots” in zergs or mes/thief in focus party when they were a thing) that were dwarfed in numbers by other classes like Guards who have been perma-meta the entire game and required in vast numbers, or necros for large parts of the game, etc.
If I go play ESO for example all classes have decent builds for large scale (templar best healer/support, sorcs can put out the damage and offer support with probably the single most important “zerg-busting” skill in the game – negate, nightblades are the best AOE bombers in the game, and so on…), GW2 balance on the other hand you have three classes that frankly could do the job by themselves, three classes that really are not needed at all, you have one that is useful as a niche, and then you have warrior & ele that have dropped down the pecking order.
And it is not like the typical ‘bad balance’ you get in other games, where it is cyclical, in WvW it is largely permanent, where the same classes stay OP the entire game and the same classes stay UP the entire game (for the most part), never played a game with balance as bad as GW2 WvW in that respect.
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How do you stack rank all current RvR options? Eg:
there is no ranking because there is no other game with rvr worth mentioning.
thats why people keep playing the half completed gw2 wvw
Actually most WvW players/guilds have left the game, most of the big alliances / guilds that came to the game didn’t even stay around long enough for HoT to land, WvW is that flawed.
Which is why the game has had what are in effect server merges, and even with that (at least on EU) you have T1/T2 matches made up of 7 or 8 linked servers that have way less activity than you used to have with just 3 servers in a gold tier matchup, and that is with incomparable levels of rewards that have dragged PvE players into WvW to boost numbers.
Pretty much every MMO I see the same delusional nonsense about “this game has the best combat system, best PvP, etc, if only the devs did a proper a job”, reality is much of what is considered “good” in an MMORPG is down to subjective taste and that beyond that the genre is in decline, so as a whole is doing a pretty poor job anyway.
But anyway, not sure it counts strictly as RvR, but the best mass scale PvP system in an MMORPG I’ve ever played, is EVE Online by a mile, sure the combat or whatever may not be to everyone’s taste (including mine), but as a well designed, well thought out game of mass PvP it makes things like WvW look like the poorly thought out PvE joke it is.
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There will be no balancing issues, since everyone can choose the class they want to duel.
There would be massive balancing issues, ignoring them by only playing classes that are strong and avoiding weak classes doesn’t change that.
You don’t get it I see. Nobody would force you to duel classes you find “counterish”, therefore the balancing issue is ‘fixed’
No dear, you apparently don’t understand what balance means, balance would in terms of your “counters” would mean every class having a similar number of counters, that won’t happen, because the game is not balanced or designed for 1v1 duelling, you will simply have certain classes that are way stronger at it than others, being able to choose those stronger classes does not constitute balance.
There will be no balancing issues, since everyone can choose the class they want to duel.
There would be massive balancing issues, ignoring them by only playing classes that are strong and avoiding weak classes doesn’t change that.
I don’t even need to address the rest of your drivel.
Those were facts dear, the things you are woefully short on, so you don’t have an answer for, only your usual empty rhetoric, still at least you gave me a chuckle when you claimed rangers always had worse stab than engies.
Calling trash Toss Elixir B whereas it’s a very good source of Stab (considering its duration and the cooldown of the skill) that you can share or even give to an another mate in team fight is a joke when you compare it with the old SotW.
Maybe read things properly before you jump in, the claim was that “we (rangers) always had the worst stab in the game”, I mean I just completely ignored how ludicrous that statement was in relation to thief, and focused on that he specifically mentioned engies, so that is not simply about SotW that is about all stab available to a class.
Rangers had SotW, (plus enlargement that triggered at 50% hp), plus most importantly Strength of the Pack which was a pulsating stab (so much better against boon removal / CC strip) and one of the strongest stab skills in the game. (so strong they nerfed the pulsing aspect and the cooldown)
Where as Toss Elixir B is lacking outside of sPvP/roaming (and even in those situations Strength of the Pack was often vastly superior), because firstly it is very easy to get inadvertently interrupted if you are in large scale, secondly it does not have the long duration that ranger stabs had so there is much less benefit casting it somewhere safe and then having a nice long duration left to make use of it like with the ranger ones and thirdly as a group stab utility in most situations it was a joke because it had a pathetic 180 radius (stand your ground for reference has 600) and was reflectable, hence nowhere in the history of GW2 WvW did you hear the phrase, “We are short on guards, can we have some engies to provide some group stab for the zerg/guild”.
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I don’t even need to address the rest of your drivel.
Those were facts dear, the things you are woefully short on, so you don’t have an answer for, only your usual empty rhetoric, still at least you gave me a chuckle when you claimed rangers always had worse stab than engies.
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you’re the one saying really outlandish things, not me. i guess i’ll take my 3k hours in wvw and pvp, half of it on my ranger, and go sit over there. and you just keep thinking RANGERS had some of the best stability in the game. hint: with the exception of thieves and necros, we always had the worst stab in the game because of our cast-times. warriors, guards, eles, even engies all had insta-stab, i.e. the only kind that counts.
There are people with 10k+ hours in the game who are still, well, not very good, have poor knowledge of the game, etc.
And talking of poor knowledge let’s look at your statement of:
we always had the worst stab in the game because of our cast-times. warriors, guards, eles, even engies all had insta-stab, i.e. the only kind that counts.
Firstly engies had trash stab up until HoT way worse than rangers options (their stab was basically toss elixir B ), they only got the gyro / evade stab with HoT.
Secondly instacast is not only the useful type, pulsing stab even with a cast times was really strong, and for much of the game until the pulsing was nerfed Strength of the pack was really, really strong.
Thirdly SotW was used in small scale and PvP, there were times it was even meta for PvP, roamers in WvW also used it – PotatoVeg for example https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7330t17IL9A (only Ranger streamer I can remember who roamed pre-HoT).
But anyway back to the OP, it is pretty obvious if you look at a lot of the nerfs across many classes that they are setting up the powercreep for PoF to “encourage” people to buy it, because their product isn’t apparently good enough to stand on things like quality content, features, etc.
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Guards are the core and the backbone of any organized medium- to large-scale battle. What world do you live in that you think core players don’t deserve lootbags?
I think those with objectivity live in the world where for the entire game in large scale WvW guard has been so broken OP that it had been perma-meta, completely irreplaceable and required in vast numbers, whilst at the same time at least half the classes have been basically surplus to requirements, so the idea that the nerf to braindead 1 spammers lootstick is a major issue, is laughable.
hmm
cc isnt supposed to counter stability. stability is supposed to counter cc. cc is supposed to create offensive and defensive opportunities to gain advantage in a fight. i think op needs to think more about this subject.
Except stability was (and is again since they changed the CC cooldown strip to be largely worthless) so broken it had nothing to do with creating some window of opportunity to gain advantage in a fight, because it was up (in large scale) pretty much permanently.
Stability is broken as hell in WvW, because it is brainlessly easy to use. makes the game very forgiving and simplifies positioning/movement, which is why the bads that make up the WvW playerbase love it.
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Fixing Lag: shrink the number of players on a map or simplify the combat. There isn’t a game out there that has complex combat with 100+ players that doesn’t lag. GW2 is actually doing more than almost any other game while delivering complex combat.
Threading has limits and the more complex the combat, the more targets involved in combat the more this limit is pushed. Gut AoE, remove triggers from traits and such, set server player limit to 25 per map; those changes will likely help/fix lag. “Faster” servers or “better” programming, neither will likely fix it and at best will have a marginal effect. As a note, I specialize in large scale multithreading, high availability middle tier in a VLDB architecture.
Except they’ve made decisions that have increased the skill lag – new boons, new condies, upping the limit on condies, upping the durations/spam on boons & condies, etc all mean more calculations in a game that already struggled with skill lag.
I’d also add that sure all mass PvP games have lag issues in some regard, but plenty have bigger numbers on a map, and it is also not uncommon to have much bigger AOE caps (or no cap at all).
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Well, I’ve played WvW back when there were still tournaments, maybe you’ve heard of them. I actively play sPvP. I actively play raids. As such, I consider myself qualified enough to comment.
Haha. The skill level on WvW has increased a lot since then, and with it the difficulty. Comparing what WvW was like back then to what it’s now it’s like comparing dungeons and raids and say they are the same thing.
If anybody doesn’t believe me they just need to watch videos from back then and compare with what’s it like nowadays.
Not really, the standard in WvW these days is the lowest it has ever been, most of the good players/guilds have left the game, and the combat with HoT became laughably forgiving.
why is everyone going invisible these days. use to be thief, then thief and mesmer, then thief, mesmer, ranger, engineer now…
It wasn’t like that at all, those 4 classes have had access to invisibility since launch, invisibility has never been unique to thief.
I don’t think people are going to 100% abandon GW2 after all the time they’ve invested in it. This game has a HUGE fan based going all the way back to GW1. But diverting from the original model to something entirely different will definitely alienate some of the WvW player base.
The funny thing is most of the big guilds and alliances who came to GW2 specifically for WvW who had played similar “RvR” type content with games like DAoC, Warhammer, etc, left in the first 9 -18 months, because as a mass scale “RvR” type game mode WvW isn’t actually very well designed, what it did have going for it, and what kept a lot of players/guilds playing was the large scale combat, then HoT happened, and that changed, and now you have matchups made up of 8 linked servers with way less activity than you used to get with 3 servers, which says it all.
The lack of server identity is the issue with eotm-like approach.
Server identity is something a minority of players shout about, meanwhile most of the rest don’t seem to place much importance on it, especially now, and really the notion of “identity” or “community” requiring a server is a misnomer, factions can have those as well, in fact if you take the corporations/alliances in EVE Online for example you have a far stronger, deeper identity/community than the rather shallow and superficial counterparts you have in GW2.
We look at timezone participation but timezone participation is hard to balance because people who play at certain times tend to all gravitate towards the same worlds so they can play with a lot of people. There are not enough off-hour worlds that we could link to create 24-hour coverage for every world. It just is not possible with our current world populations.
Which shows the fundamental deficiencies of a world based system, that the units you can try and balance with (worlds) are far too large, inflexible and unwieldy to get anything evenly vaguely balanced.
And that is without even going into that 5 mins after a new link up is announced you get entire guilds switching server, then in the next couple of weeks hundreds of players following, making the notion of considered balance over what worlds to link, utterly laughable.
Or how silly it is for the mass PvP part of the game to still be based on ‘worlds’ when in the rest of the game (PvE/PvP) ‘worlds’ have basically become an irrelevance.
But I guess that overhaul to actually really address one of the big issues with WvW since day 1 required too many resources, so the papering over the cracks option was the Anet choice as usual.
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What are you all thinking?
That I’m glad I barely play this game anymore and that whilst it was always only a slim chance that I’d buy the new expansion, it seems after seeing the preview today Slim just left town.
Though why people in this thread are talking about balance is a mystery, you can’t all be new, are people really oblivious to the fact they basically don’t balance for WvW and never have.
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If the Abjured are not in the tournament then i guess its a semi pro tournament.
I don’t think you understand what a pro tournament is, Wimbledon is a pro tennis tournament, because it is made up of players who earn their living from being a pro tennis player, it is their ‘profession’ this is where ‘pro’ comes from.
GW2 on the other hand, even when Anet had tournaments the money was so limited it could basically only support one dominant team financially (and even then that was a stretch given most of them didn’t have real costs because they lived at home with mummy & daddy or had an actual job), and that was basically 1 team, the rest of the laughably termed “pros” earned peanuts from the game, so there was no Pro scene, just a few deluded kids, and that was the official Anet tournies, if you think the amount people earn from this tournie constitutes a “professional GW2 player”, then well…
Oh and to put it in perspective no one other than handful of sad cases who have such empty lives they place value in the laughable GW2 PvP “scene” gives a toss whether these guys are in it or not, because competitively GW2 is a total joke.
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Typical response by a person not able to rebut the facts. They alwys fall into the “well the only reason you defend conditions is because you play one and want to faceroll” It rather lame. It reminds me of all of those people claiming Saddam did not have WMDS with those short on the facts claiming "you must have drank his koolaid or are on his payroll’.
You’ve got that the wrong way round, the notion that you could prove the negative in that situation is an illogical proposition, after all you can’t have people in every possible location in Iraq at once.
So the only people short on facts were those wanting to push their agenda claiming he had WMD programmes without the evidence to support that, which is why I guess some people may make comments about “koolaid” given that even after they invaded the country the inspection teams didn’t find these active WMD programmes.
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I hate to bring facts and objectivity into your GW2 lovefest, but older games already had patchers like this, Rift for example.
PvP isn’t “dead”. Dead would be 0 people in HotM, and eternal Ranked queues.
Dying yes, but it could be a cycle. Season 5 had an influx of players, but with the deletion of PvE rewards in S6 all those players decided to leave.
The next xpac could be interesting for the PvP scene, since there’s more potential synergy between the HoT and papaya elite specs.
At this point and time. I personally do not and can never see. sPvP being more entertaining then roaming in WvW with the huge influx of people now playing WvW.
Roaming in WvW has highly increased my fun status far as PvP is concerned in this game. If I truly want small scale structured PvP, there are other games which will fully entertain me even in Bronze tier.
Sorry guys I just think sPvP in GW2 is a train that has long sense left the station. And is not coming back ever. However I hope I am completely wrong. However I will not hold my breath for that train to come back.
You realise WvW is basically in the same situation as PvP, that most of the actual WvW players/guilds left the game, and that they are now bribing PvE players in with shiny things in the same way they did with PvP.
WvW is basically a pale shadow of what it was, the train left the station long ago.
An actual arena.
Yawn….
But guilds move servers every time since the beginnin of the game to have good fights. I dont see any problem in that
Good fights 2017, you are a funny guy.
The meta is way more complex with introduction of extra boonrip, boonshare and condibombs compared to 3 years ago.
Not at all, the meta required more thought when you had focus parties, a backline, etc, since HoT the meta has been various versions of braindead “toilet bowl” where everyone runs in a ball, then on top of that you have that the game has become massively more forgiving with the amount of boon spam/duration, healing, damage reduction, etc, that came with HoT.
Which is why guilds / players that would once get blown apart because their positioning was bad, have suddenly become “good” because the game has been much more forgiving since HoT, that and of course that the majority of good players / guilds have quit in large part because of the brainless, forgiving joke the combat has become.
EU did not need linking to balance out the population.
EU populations were not balanced in the slightest, when FSP was stacked 2 years ago there were week nights (let alone reset) where you had queues on EB 150+ and 20-30 on every single borderland, despite the fact there would often be nothing to fight on 2 borderlands because non-stacked servers simply didn’t have the numbers to fight on all maps.
And the same thing happened the entire game, back when SFR was validating at one point 100 people a day, back when Vizunah had queues on multiple maps outside prime when the other T1 servers could barely fill one map, etc.
The populations have never been remotely balanced on EU, which is why so few over the matchups of the course of this game have ended with three servers having even remotely close scores by the end of the week.
A server/world based system where you can easily transfer and where “worlds” only apply to one small aspect of the game, whether it is standalone or linked servers is simply fundamentally flawed in regard to getting even vaguely balanced populations.
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This is so hilariously wrong.
That it scales evenly is irrelevant, it still becomes less effective if damage powercreeps because at the same toughness you will take more damage even though it gets reduced at the same ratio.
Yes, and it also prevents more damage because that’s how division works. You can also argue that vitality became less effective due to a power creep. Toughness, math wise and against power builds, is basically worse vitality that allows you to heal faster.
I cannot see how your statement wouldn’t apply to vitality as well if you understand how damage calculation works.
If you have any doubts see the math in one of the replies above.
Well the main doubt would be why are you banging about vitality as if I made some comment about it…
(and no, powercreep actually makes things like toughness and vitality more relevant, they both increase your effective HP and prevent you from being “instakilled”, vitality just does it better for every class except necro)
Wrong, when the thing that powercreeps is damage, then evades, blocks, blinds, aegis, invurns, etc become more relevant, because they become even stronger relatively to things like toughness and vit which lose effectiveness against increased damage.
The actual powercreep made toughness not so useful. more toughness you have higher is your Power damage reduction, but you can’t reduce it enough to be able to survive to a burst only with your statistic. it was more useful back in the bunker meta, where the overall damage was lower and a damage reduction statistic granted something.
This is so hilariously wrong. Toughness is divided off the power of the attack, and as such scales evenly as incoming damage changes.
As incoming DPS increases toughness actually becomes more and more valuable compared to non-scaling defenses like vitality. (the reason necros are considered squishy, is because necros have no scaling defenses)
Against any power class Toughness is the best defensive stat to be using, however you’ll still want to be dodging and blocking things.
This is so hilariously wrong.
That it scales evenly is irrelevant, it still becomes less effective if damage powercreeps because at the same toughness you will take more damage even though it gets reduced at the same ratio.
When zerk was meta, you could at least still kill them. It was a high risk, high reward meta. If you didnt have skill, you’d die quick.
Not really, the zerk builds that actually got played 95% of the time in this game (both PvP & WvW) were not high risk at all, because they either had a silly level of engage/disengage or were actually relatively tanky for being able to put obscene amounts of damage, the things that actually had some meaningful level of risk for example zerk static discharge engy were barely played.
Give me all 95% of this zerk builds examples? Tyvm. Don’t make bold claims when you can’t back it up.
What? Are you new from PvE? Do you really need it explained to you why roaming on say a zerk thief wasn’t really high risk?
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Because cheese classes are fun despite the fact they don’t really do anything worthwhile.
This game has nothing but cheese classes and cheese mechanics.
When zerk was meta, you could at least still kill them. It was a high risk, high reward meta. If you didnt have skill, you’d die quick.
Not really, the zerk builds that actually got played 95% of the time in this game (both PvP & WvW) were not high risk at all, because they either had a silly level of engage/disengage, along with binary defenses that negated the lack of HP/toughness with zerk or were actually relatively tanky for being able to put obscene amounts of damage, the things that actually had some meaningful level of risk for example zerk static discharge engy were barely played.
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Well-designed professions.
WvW has never had well designed professions, it had whatever the result was of professions designed around 5 man PvP conquest.
People will have to get over the “i need to be on top” mentality if there will ever be server balance again.
There has never been server balance in this game, it is simply a system that is so flawed it can’t produce balance outside of the rare occurrence of 3 servers being absolutely stacked 24/7, which I believe happened for a while on NA T1, but I could be wrong about that as I play EU where the idea of server balance has been laughable since day 1.
It’s really a shame, because Guild Wars 2 could still be that dominant PvP MMO they originally envisioned it as if they just dedicated the resources to it. ArcheAge, BDO, ESO, WoW … they all have terrible PvP by comparison, gated either behind an arduous grind/vertical progression or suffering from old/floaty/awkward gameplay mechanics.
You know there are people in every single one of those games that say the same thing about the “wonderful” PvP combat system in their game, being the best in any MMORPG.
I mean take your “old” criticism for example, I’d say GW2 combat is ‘old’ because it is still just tab-targeted combat, with cooldowns and then an active dodge tacked on to give the illusion of “action” combat, some of those other games have real action combat, some are also much faster paced, require more mechanical ability because you have to actually aim, do bucketloads of animation cancelling, etc, by comparison GW2 combat is old school, slow and relatively low skilled.
Which is why I guess they went with conquest and their particular implementation, the way it is designed is very “e-sports” and raises the mediocre skill cap provided by the combat in a way more simplistic PvP modes wouldn’t.
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Acctuly, mesmer is one of best classes(i would prioritize it over revenant) for any group, it has huge boonshare(every single boon in game, with everything but quickness and resistance being 100% uptime for first minute or so of the fight), while providing stability and cleanses and healing along with some of best CC in game.
People are just too stubrn to understand it and most mesmers are not good enough to play it(and lack 1000g to get the equipment).
It is also one of the most boring builds to play in the game (which is saying a lot post HoT), most decent mesmers (in fact most decent players & guilds) have quit / barely play the game rather than play tedious crap like that.
Just form a focus party with mes, thief, rangers, engi, etc, focus the enemy comm, then laugh when your blobtard comm cries like the true PvE hero most “WvW” blobbers are, because he isn’t getting as many bags cos the enemy comm dies early / rage quits.
For extra giggles whisper the enemy comm and tell them your comm told you to focus them.
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They should be rewarded in a continuous way. Requiring years of playing a single mode on a modern MMo to get a skin is really not an incentive to newer players. I’m not saying that they should be gifted, but that they should be accessible.
Most of the stuff in the game is pretty accessible, not every single thing has to cater to the sort of Skinner box victims who have to be given “incentives” to actually bother to play the game.
If you want a mode to prosper, you should give incentive and getting a really long grind spanning to even the year scale is not selling the mode to anyone.
The mode won’t prosper from the sort who are only there for shiny things, the only tiny benefit to the mode would be a small percentage of those who haven’t tried it properly may find they quite enjoy it and stay, but really that pales into insignificance compared to the damage done to the mode by them neglecting the actual issues with it, and number of players who have left because of that.
These Rewards should be used to make WvW prosper and interesting to players, not to create further distance between Veterans and Newcomers.
Rewards only make a game mode interesting to a certain niche of player, gameplay is what actually makes a game prosper.
Frankly the people who play games primarily for “rewards” are a tumour on gaming and one of the reasons the MMORPG genre is in the state it is.
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Don’t worry, once team Barbie have got their back piece your queue issues will disappear.
I am sure the hordes who have left WvW will come flooding back with this change, oh wait, the lag is still is worse than ever, the meta is still worse than ever, the combat still more tedious than ever, the population balance is still non-existent, match-ups are still competitively a completely worthless joke, class balance is still non-existent, the guild arenas are still too small/uses PvE rules,the game mode still so poorly designed that PvDoor and avoiding fights in a mass scale PvP mode is the thing for PPT, etc, so maybe not…
Really it is just the PvP rewards all over again, rather than addressing the actual issues, all it will largely achieve is a temporary boost in numbers from “players” after shiny things not really interested in the game mode, that will end once those shiny things have been acquired.
Just another Anet band-aid.
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Most MMO’s are going the same route.
Not that in all probability it makes any difference to me given the state of WvW that I am extremely unlikely to buy the next GW2 expansion, but the MMO I am currently playing (ESO) bundles the core game with their expansion for new players, but also gives an upgrade option at a lower price for existing players who have already paid for the core game.
I will make it simple for people:
Dead game – Servers shut down.
Dying game – Devs announce the servers are shutting down on XX Date.Now let’s look at GW1 even – do any of these 2 things apply? No, so as you can see even that game is still alive…
I just don’t get some people lol.
That you don’t get it is your issue that you can’t cope with subtleties of language, take a bar or nightclub, people will use “this place is dead” not to mean there is literally no one there, but merely that there are relatively few people there, there is no “buzz”, etc.
Same goes for games, so to take WvW as an example in GW2, on EU say 2+ years ago if you were in the T1 matchup you would normally have good activity 12-16 hours a day. If I logged on in say the afternoon in say the FSP/Deso/SFR matchup, commonly all three servers would have blobs (Ravya on FSP, Oblivious on SFR, etc), there were way more guilds, roaming was much more alive, etc.
Fast forward to today, T1/T2 matchups in EU, despite normally being comprised of 5-8 actual servers as opposed to just 3, can be dead most of the time outside prime, even if your server gets a commander and a group going often there is nothing to fight, even in prime one server can be totally absent, the number of guilds has dropped drastically, GvG is well… and roaming has largely been reduced to either duels or ganking people in zerg builds, the amount of actual roaming is laughable.
Hence for many people WvW is “dead”, there may still be players there, but it is basically a shadow of its former self and the level activity has dropped to the point where it is no longer fun to play much of the time, just like a nightclub can be “dead” even if it has a few people in it and the music is still playing.
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Thieves are fine in e-sports. Fighting on nodes is of no consequence to Thieves with access to stealth. You can still milk CDs on nodes. The only difference is when you get the kill, it’s a game changer. And when you do, if you see the other team coming to the node to support the dead teammate, you can back-cap and hop 1/2 way across the map in no time.
Erm, I know thieves are fine in “e-sports”, I never said they were not, they are however not a good 1v1 class in it as you claimed, so I have no idea what you are babbling on about.
And as for fighting on points and access to stealth, what are you on about, that is one of the reasons thief in PvP isn’t good for 1v1 in stealth builds.
There are still skill cap levels easily seen by how difficult certain classes are vs others.
No class in this game is difficult to play, and they all got even more faceroll with HoT, and even by the low standards of this game, the actual builds that have some meaningful risk vs reward to them, virtually no one plays (zerker static discharge engi, zerk s/d ele, etc), because the game is packed full of ezmode cheese builds on every class,
Nothing is balanced around 1v1? Thieves are. All stealth classes are balanced around being the superior 1v1 class. This is the only class balanced for 1v1 superiority. Explain to me why they can counter any class in 1v1 then?
There is no 1v1 balancing, because there is no 1v1 game mode, they balanced for 5v5 conquest (of which there is very little 1v1 even in that), then when PvE raids came out they balanced for 10 man raids.
The state of any 1v1 is simply the fallout of them balancing for conquest/raids, and again for the most part thief has not been a 1v1 class in PvP, because it simply isn’t that good at them in that context of fighting over points, it is only good in WvW but again like pretty much every other class in WvW the “balance” is merely what ever mess is left after they take descions for PvP and since HoT, PvE raids, your notion that they consider roaming 1v1’s in WvW when it comes to balance is laughable.
If they balanced Thieves around e-sports, they would have to lose what makes them great in 1v1 and back capping, and gain somewhere else.
For the most part over this game thieves backcap and +1 in “e-sports”, they don’t 1v1, and frankly 1v1 is not a common thing in PvP anyway for any class, you are meant to rotate…
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So you are trying to push an argument forward they balanced for “e-sports”
There is no argument, the combat/skills in this game were designed around PvP and what Teldo & Co wanted, go ask a player in Alpha (or go find Sacrx’s video on it), or go find the old streams that Jon Peters, Jonathan Sharp, etc (if they still exist?) did earlier in the game explaining the balance changes they made, virtually everything was in relation to PvP conquest. (apparently this is coming as news to you, but back at the start of the game the “vision” was PvP was the serious hardcore bit and PvE/WvW were for casual fun.)
maybe you play o and wish to also make an argument for how they never balanced for 1v1 or WvW, yet you want Thief balanced around one or the other?
I don’t “want” anything, WvW is a dying game mode, and 5 years in is little late to start balancing thief or anything else, I’m just pointing out that the idea that thief or any other class is designed or balanced with WvW in mind in any meaningful sense is nonsense.
I hate to break the news to you, but in MMOs, stealth classes are designed to be balanced around 1v1 combat and to be the superior 1v1 class, only achievable at higher skill caps. This is how they balanced Thief for “e-sports”. The e-sports as seen in tourneys Thieves goals is to +1 fights and back cap, just like WvW.
LOL, thief is a crappy class at 1v1 in “e-sports” because it takes too long to kill most other classes 1v1, and you have to do it whilst fighting over a capture point and that combined with the score ticking away punishes a class like thief for resetting like thief can in WvW to eventually win a 1v1, which is exactly why it is a +1 class not a 1v1 class.
Also for your “claims” about “skill”, go back to WoW if you want macros, and add-ons to do all your work for you. Because GW2 has none of this nonsense and they are limited to 1 keystroke 1 action besides WoW being able to macro the whole class and auto targeting via keybinds with CC and cross DPS built into the same macro.
I hate to break it to you, but in the grand scheme of what is skilled in video games MMORPGs are regarded as a joke, go see CS, SC2, etc for games that have high skill caps.
The combat in GW2 is a joke, it is full of passives, the game aims for you (tab targeted), there is barely any resource management, it is not particularly fast paced (even by the low standards of MMORPGs), there is very little animation or skill cancelling needed, the cooldowns are generally shortish so easy to manage and so on.
The only thing in this game that moves the skill cap out of the gutter is teams playing PvP and having to split their concentration between fighting, making decisions on things like rotations, keeping up map awareness, etc, the actual combat alone is well…
P.S – Absolutely nothing in this game is balanced around 1v1, because there is no specific 1v1 content.
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This is by sheer design due to their inability to battle zergs but only in Shortbow.
There is no ‘design’ in regard to WvW, the classes were designed and balanced around “e-sports” in this game, WvW (and PvE at that time) was barely considered.
So thief being surplus to requirements in zergs is no more relevant than engy, ranger, etc also being surplus to requirements, how a class performs in zergs has never been a consideration, which goes for WvW fullstop, which is why so much in that game mode is a broken imbalanced, unskilled joke and as much as guards have been an irreplaceable broken OP class for large scale, equally thief has been just as broken ez-mode for small scale, because they simply have never considered WvW in any meaningful way when it comes to class design/balance.
Oh and as for the “skill-cap” of combat in this game, newsflash the combat in this game is relatively low skilled and designed for casual/bad players to give the feeling of action combat without having to do anything difficult like aim, meaningfully manage resources, require any real mechanical ability or twitch, etc.
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This is a PvE game and the game gets PvE patches, more PvE patches doesnt fix the game.
For the first 3 years & pre-launch it was a PvP game (at least in regard to balance).
An MMO is 90% PvE, most stick to whatever works.
You’ve obviously never played EVE Online, beyond that even with more standard MMOs there is a good sized playerbase wanting PvP, which is why at launch a lot of MMOs have as many PvP servers as PvE (e.g – Rift), just most MMOs get PvP completely wrong / neglect it with the obvious consequences for their PvP playerbase.
As for what works, really MMOs aren’t “working” that is the problem, they are supposed to be games that excel at long term play, yet MOBAs, FPS, Minecraft, etc all do a better job on that front, whilst 99% of MMOs can’t even grow their playerbase.
The genre is a stagnant unimaginative mess, look how few AAA MMOs have been released in recent years, the two big ones even got cancelled (Everquest Next & Titan), which says it all.
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…amazing leap for both running away and chasing
Rocket Charge is pretty crappy for running away/chasing, it is one of the slowest movement skills in the game, compare it to druid staff 3 for example (let alone any of the blinks in the game), it is just clunky, you can’t even use it take advantage of terrain jumping from high point to another like you can with most leaps (warrior sword 2, f2 on DH, even rifle 5 on engy is much better in that respect and so on).
If you cancel last hit with kit equip-> weapon swap, rocket charge is better by all means.
Erm, I know to animation cancel the end of rocket charge (really who doesn’t?), everything I stated was including animation cancelling the end of it, it is one of the slowest movement skills in the game so is weak for chasing/running away, you still can’t use it to leap from point to another like you can with many movement skills or Z axis like you can with the blinks.
Rocket charge is an excellent skill when your opponent is bringing the fight to you or you are fighting in some sort of confined space like a point in PvP, but as a movement skill for chasing down or running away in WvW it is pretty weak, which is why most classes roaming builds don’t have much trouble disengaging a hammer scrapper when roaming and one of the reasons why you don’t see many scrappers roam.
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…amazing leap for both running away and chasing
Rocket Charge is pretty crappy for running away/chasing, it is one of the slowest movement skills in the game, compare it to druid staff 3 for example (let alone any of the blinks in the game), it is just clunky, you can’t even use it take advantage of terrain jumping from high point to another like you can with most leaps (warrior sword 2, f2 on DH, even rifle 5 on engy is much better in that respect and so on).