Master Ketsu.4569

They just did a small update and I can get in game for exactly 1 second then it crashes.

Same problem. Repair/reboot/lowering graphics settings has no positive effect. Game 100% borked for me.

Same problem. Patch borked the game.

I give it a "B" on the "A~F" scale

Good ideas:

-The change to Writ of Persistence is the best change to guardian and exactly what needed to be done, as it reduces the braindead stand-on-point-press-symbols playstyle, but doesn't actually reduce the classes numbers in any way. Doing nothing else to Guardian was also wise, as this change effects pretty much every single Guardian build in a positive light. So high marks for this.

-Severely toning down the CC and barrier Gain of decap engie is also a good idea. The build was degenerate and bad for the game.

-"Just increase the cooldown" changes generally miss the mark, but Tornado was too spammable.

Questionable:

-Nerfing damage on Holosmith and Revenant too much can potentially have disastrous consequences. We are already on the verge of bunker/support meta enough as it is.

-Stealth really just needs to be reworked. There have been several suggestions on how to make it better. Nerfing the duration this much is more of a feels-bad change that just makes thief feel less fun to play. SSA thief did need a nerf, but this doesn't seem like the right nerf.

-Warrior ignored

-WvW? A lot of these issues also exist in WvW.

Bad:

-Nerfing everything on engineer EXCEPT explosive entrance is not the way to go. EE is a badly designed cheese-trait, and once again Anet is making the self-destructive mistake of nerfing around the cheese instead of actually addressing problems at their core. When EE finally does get a proper nerf, engie will likely come out drastically underpowered.

-Necromancer got a free pass, and will likely now be overpowered.

-A lot of what makes support Tempest strong, mainly the shock-aura spam, got a free pass. Since damage was nerfed this patch, and Tempest was already an S-tier pick, Tempest will now be broken.

The layout gives too big of an advantage to classes with targeted teleports.

It isn't. The feb damage rework patch simply forced people who were using demolishers/marauders amulet to now run berserkers. If you play something that uses toughness, like any build using rabid, you will see that damage is much lower.

Especially when there aren't even that many skills in the game that are truly broken, with Deathly Claws being the only thing that feels somewhat out of place.

Most things that are broken either lie in passives/traits and other busted mechanics. Fixing or reworking many of them would even lead to situations that could use buffs instead of all the nerfs.

> @"dtox.8397" said:

> If we had a proper (or ANY, for that matter) balance patch, we would have more players and matchmaking wouldnt be ~~such~~ a problem. It baffles me till this day that there are grand traits with 300 ICD.

To be fair, those traits are at 300 ICD for a good reason. They are generally on get-out-of-jail free passives, which promote the toxic and unskillful gameplay of people just rushing in and recklessly spamming DPS abilities knowing that their passive will save them if they screw up. That type of passive makes sense in casual PvE land, but have proven themselves time and time again to be stupidly broken in PvP.

The thing people need to understand is that it's both mathematically and logically impossible to make a perfect matchmaking system due to the reality of player population. No matter how good the system is, if population dips below a certain threshold at any given time, there isn't a lot that can be done. For instance, say you have only 10 people in Queue. 3 platinum-II players, and 7 Gold-I players. In this case, there is no way to split the teams evenly. One of the platinum players is going to get stuck with a barrel of four monkeys.

However, when it comes to duo queue in GW2 there is some serious room for improvement. Currently there is no real ratings downside to duo Q, to my knowledge it just takes the highest rating between the two players, which is both inefficient and exploitable. For instance, the higher rated player can simply switch to an alt as a form of "soft match manipulation" .

Rather than banning duo Q outright ( A terrible idea ) a more sensible solution would just give a rating penalty to duo Q past 1500 rating. It would basically treat them as anywhere between 50~150 points higher rated than they actually are for the purpose of matchmaking. So for instance:

( Player# - rating )

Team A

p1- 1550 ( duo with p2 )

p2- 1600 ( duo with p1 )

p3- 1500

p4- 1300

p5- 1400

Total-7350

Team B

p6- 1600

p7- 1500

p8- 1400

p9- 1450

p10- 1400

Total- 7350

At first, the above may seem fair, until you realize that p1 is Helio on one of his 1000000000000000000000000000000000000000000 billion alts.

If the matchmaking is adjusted to assume that platinum Duo Q's are generally more tryhard than other rankings and gives them an extra 100 for matching purposes, we can see that it would actually create a better match to swap p3 with p8. This may seem like a small change, but over the course of many games it should add up to a noticeable difference that would be overall more accurate, and make Duo Q less of an exploitable system and more of a tradeoff for getting to play with a friend.

> @"Tayga.3192" said:

> Bad Tempests die to any pressure

Fixed that for you.

What a lot of people who claim to be advocating for "casuals" here don't seem to understand is that asking the game be dumbed down to meet the lowest common denominator of skill, with the rationale that "casuals are paying customers too!!1111oneone!!!", is that this kind of demand is actually extremely selfish.

To understand why this is selfish, simply employ some basic logic and reasoning:

Lets say a game is too hard for the bottom skill floor , we will just say -10% of the playerbase. These bottom players essentially have two main options that will allow them to progress through and enjoy the game:

1. Stop being lazy and put in the time to actually learn their class.

2. Find another game that meets their skill level

Now, lets say the Devs decide to pander to the bottom 10% of the playerbase, and dumb the game down so that it is now entirely playable for everyone regardless of skill level. **But as a result the game is now mind numbingly and disgustingly boring for the top 10% of the playerbase.** These top players essentially have one option:

1. Find another game that meets their skill level

Notice the problem here? Good players cant make themselves "forget" how to play and become bad just so they can enjoy content that has gone through the diaper-and-binky treatment. Unlike lesser skilled players, who absolutely can become better if they just put in a little effort. There are many reasons behind why pandering to the lesser skilled crowd is often bad, but this is the most crucial. When a casual cries that the game is too hard, what they are effectively asking for is for the devs to ruin the game for everyone else.

And in the case of GW2 and HoT especially, this is wholly unfounded. HoT despite being the hardest of OW maps is still very easily soloable by just about anyone who has perfected their class and gone through endgame. If it was any easier, it would be just be pandering.

Blind is not powerful. Blind spam is the issue.

The occasional blind works like an interrupt that can be outplayed by stowing your skill and then removing the blind with an auto to avoid skill cooldown / energy wastage. It's actually a pretty fair mechanic.

The problem happens when you have builds that can spam it every second or so via AoEs or passive traits that auto-proc blindness on any old random skill for no apparent good reason. Then players end up constantly facing an uphill battle of removing the blind by getting to do nothing but auto while their blindspamming opponent freecasts.

> @"JusticeRetroHunter.7684" said:

>

> The problem is that Anet does not have a sound balance philosophy...It was flawed to the very core from the beginning of this games inception, and it has culminated into taking the most drastic measures, measures in which are built and still based on something that is still fundamentally flawed.

>

This is basically the problem. It's something I have been trying to convey with my occasional TL;DR threads ( https://en-forum.guildwars2.com/discussion/106433/7-examples-and-fixes-showing-most-remaining-balance-issues-are-due-to-busted-design-mechanics ) ( https://en-forum.guildwars2.com/discussion/97262/why-increasing-cooldowns-does-not-reduce-spam-and-can-even-make-spam-worse ) ( https://en-forum.guildwars2.com/discussion/86519/the-elephant-in-the-balance-room-how-cheese-has-evolved-to-hurt-gw2-pvp-more-than-balance )

The TL;DR of it is that GW2 is overall a good game that is hampered by a small handful of very badly designed mechanics. Rather than try to acknowledge or fix these mechanics, they opt instead for "numbers nerfs". Increasing cooldowns. Reducing damage modifiers. etc. The problem is that this type of balance style of nerfing around problems instead of fixing problems only gives the illusion of balance, and in the long run can even make things worse.

"making things worse" is absolutely the case with thief. If the way stealth worked in this game wasn't so uninteractive and hand-holding, thief could easily justify having a decent damage buff. If they finally took a look at sword 2, this buff could be even more. But they don't. Instead, they nerf everything about the class _except_ the monkey sh*t. The result is that in order to play the class, you are actually forced to run a build that ironically ends up taking even greater advantage of the bad mechanics that were causing problems in the first place. Shadow arts thus becomes the meta. This is what nerfing around cheese ultimately results in. When you nerf everything except cheese, the only thing that is left is cheese.

PvP will continue to bleed players until Anet finally realizes this. End of Dragons is IMO pretty much going to be their final shot.

The stat prefixes worthy of note for Revenant are:

**-Diviners-** Meta for playing "Alacrigade" Boon support+ Power DPS. Highly in demand in end game PvE content so if you want easy invites to raid groups go for this and learn to use the build associated with it ( TL;DR You spam F4 for alacrity while doing a DPS rotation ).

**-Berserkers-** Best for solo power DPS builds and Open world. New players going through the OW content are generally best with this for their first set.

**-Vipers-** Meta for Condi DPS in Raids/Fractals. Alternative to Berserker if you prefer running Mallyx.

**-Marauders-** Best PvP gear set for use in WvW. If you like WvW getting a set of this and putting WvW infusions on it should be a goal.

**-Harrier-** Meta for Ventari healer / Boon support. Not used as often but if you want to be a healbot go ahead.

Pick whichever one matches your goal in the endgame. Everything else is for more fringe utility or meme builds.

> @"Grimjack.8130" said:

> S : Thief Ele Engi

> A : Necro Rev

> B : Ranger Guardian

> C : Mesmer

> D : Warrior

> in no particular order in the tiers for competitive gameplay

This is the most accurate list.

> @"kharmin.7683" said:

> > @"Laila Lightness.8742" said:

> >Also most casual players dont want hardcore content tp exist or atleast not have rewards they cant get

> Please cite your source for "most casual players". I'm not convinced that this is true. Sounds a lot like hyperbole to me.

>

>

>

He's confusing casuals with bad players.

Casuals are aware of what they are doing and know that playing casually shouldn't really need to achieve the same thing as high level raids or top leaderboard PvP content. Casuals are playing the game at their own pace for fun.

Bad players on the other hand, lack this self awareness and thus demand that all content be brought down to their level. "waaah prestiguous PvP titles shouldn't exist because they make me feel insecure, waaaaaaah I shouldn't have to learn how to play my class to get into top tier raids, waaaaaaah I got oneshot in WvW so unfair, waaaaaah!"

Learning to tell the difference quickly shows you which players to ignore.

> @"uberkingkong.8041" said:

> > @"Tharan.9085" said:

> > > @"uberkingkong.8041" said:

> > > > @"Tharan.9085" said:

> > > > > @"uberkingkong.8041" said:

> > > > >

> > > > > You'll know they found the right balance when every profession is on Metabattle as a Meta build.

> > > > > Right now, no version of Warrior is Meta.

> > > > > Right now, no version of Warrior is Great.

> > > >

> > > > Metabattle is quite an unreliable source on what is good and bad

> > >

> > > What are the reliable sources then? Do they have Warrior in Meta or Great?

> > > Does it include Berserker?

> > > Does it include core Warrior?

> >

> > Warrior is in a bad state right now, but using metabattle as a reference doesnt work because it'd unreliable and doesnt reflect the meta.

>

> What is unreliable about Metabattle? Are the builds they post a joke? Are the feedbacks a joke?

>

> What are some reliable PvP or WvW sources for GW2 builds then?

The problem with metabattle is that it's a very clunky site for content creation which results in it being extremely slow to pick up on things that have been well known in Plat+ games sometimes for months. Sometimes metabattle up to snuff until a new balance patch comes out and so the Conquest builds end up being horrendously outdated.

For instance, Renegade bow is actually a well known roamer right now, but metabattle still has it listed as "test" ( Wrong, it's already being used in ATs ) and the build they have for it has multiple inaccuracies.

I remember back in the 90's when devs just told people to gitgud.

Those were better days.

Pandering to casuals just ruins the game for everyone else. Open world PvE is already mind numbingly easy enough as it is.

You went from playing the class with the highest skill floor to the class with the lowest, so yes at first glance it will seem to the average player that Guardian completely outclasses thief by a hilariously massive margin. But the truth is that guardian in general is just very easy to play. Nearly all guardian builds in sPvP atm amount to _"Me stand on point! Me spam symbols!"_

This doesn't make guardian better than thief, just at low skill levels. Thief requires rotating and timing interrupts/evades to play well, which requires you to know most tells from all other classes. Guardian requires the ability to walk to the point, and push buttons. _Me push buttons!_

But thief has a lot of things that actually make it arguably better in the current meta than guardian.

This thread is an example of blaming the wrong thing in a build, and asking for the wrong solution.

Daggerstorm is already viable, why buff it? Tempest is overperforming because of the double shock aura that lets the entire team just run at people for free.

Asking for a buff to an already good skill, because of another skill that isn't even the reason why the spec that uses it is meta. Omegalul.

> @"Bazsi.2734" said:

> The suggestion is to make stealth attacks reveal, so I guess stealthing the party before the first midfight would mean the thief, the master of stealth eats reveal on the first attack(hit or miss doesn't matter),

>

This is not what the OP is saying at all. He said reveal on evade/block, not reveal on whiff. Massive difference.

> > The only people who want the system to remain as is are the people who don't understand why the lack of counterplay in the mechanic is currently bad for the game.

>

> Oh. You are one of those people... make sure to scroll past this list REAL FAST, do not read what these skills are and in no circumstance click on any of the links if you want to keep beliveing in what you just said:

>

> https://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Tainted_Shackles

> https://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Spear_of_Justice

> https://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Light%27s_Judgment

> https://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Detection_Pulse

> https://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Lock_On - this basicly counts as two

> https://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Gaze_of_Darkness

> https://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/%22Sic_%27Em!%22

> https://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Sight_beyond_Sight

> https://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/%22On_My_Mark!%22

> https://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Magebane_Tether

>

Except that NONE of those skills actually counter the main problem of stealth, which is that reveal-on-hit promotes brainless and uninteractive gameplay. All those skills do is cause revealed, and many of them aren't even good for that. You don't seem to understand what this thread is truly about and are just defending a badly designed mechhanic because you personally like using it and don't want to take a step back and examine it objectively.

> @"Bazsi.2734" said:

> > @"Master Ketsu.4569" said:

> > People who think they would have trouble landing abilities from stealth if missing them caused the revealed debuff are just lol.

> >

> >

>

> Play deadeye for a while... and reveal yourself every time you miss a stealth attack(use a weaponskill that does basicly no damage, or cast DJ into nothingness, you have multiple options). Then post an unedited video about how useful you were, just to prove us all wrong.

Bruh, I have. I used to main thief before rev came out. Landing abilities from stealth from this game is massively easy. Just don't be a predictable monkey by always waiting the full 3s duration of your stealth and you will land abilities no problem. This is the key difference between people who can play stealth centric builds in higher tier games and those who can't.

The only people who want the system to remain as is are the people who don't understand why the lack of counterplay in the mechanic is currently bad for the game.

The main problem is ever since the Feb-20 Overhaul they have exclusively focused on mostly numbers nerfs ( Increase cooldown here, reduce duration there, etc ), when the problems have their root causes in broken mechanics and/or poor design.

For instance, look at the nerfs to explosives holo for a good example of how not to balance a problem spec. Instead of reworking Explosive Entrance, they just randomly slapped some numbers on nades. The result is one of the silliest non-nerfs we have seen in a long time ( REDOOSE DUH BLYND DUHRAYTION BHY WAN SEKOND DUuOOhoHOhOOO )

> @"Teb.6980" said:

> I just second this guy pls do the "condi-creep reset", "CC-creep reset" and a "bunker-creep rest"

>

> That way combat can be lengthy enough to actually be able to press most buttons xD with modifiers to defense, too, for specs that are too bunker e.g.


> @"Zephoid.4263" said:

> Same problem as always. IL is the best healing ability in the game, not even close.

Person who doesn't have stow weapons keybound spotted.

I've been playing meme renegade builds for the past few months and dumpster on every rev I come across that is using the standard Shiro/Glint old IL meta build. Ever since sustain on Devestation got nerfed and damage on CC got removed, Shiro/Glint has some of the worst sustain in the game.

How to nullify IL:

1. Bind stow weapons to a easily accessible key and learn to use it regularly.

2. -optional- As soon as the Herald pops IL, CC them ( Herald has zero stab )

3. stow weapons

4. You have won the fight