BeLZedaR.4790

Dishonored for playing gw2 in current patch.

Matchmaking is not affected by decay. Only your badge is.

What you said is because population is higher than ever with such an enjoyable meta as we have now.

Some Cc durations might be looked at aswell.

Highly agree with this.

Damage needs a look as well.

There are too many skills that do massive amounts of damage on every single build, and the only thing that balanced it out so far is the increase in skills that grant evasion, which just leads to evasion spamming to avoid the abundance of hard hitting skills.

> @"Blackdagger.9670" said:

> Well, the solution is easy.

>

> First of all, stop playing rev(you are not really good with it anyway) and create a character with mesmer profession.

>

> Problem solved. case closed.

>

Oh noes. Blackdagger called me bad. Better quit :|

I honestly don’t see the point in trying anymore, can’t care less about rank anymore.

And then the “hotfix” is a nerf to 1 skill that is a part of 1 build and is still strong.

Ik probably everyone is fed up with mesmer threads but honestly I’m not gonna touch this game again untill this is addressed, and properly.

Another 5 man que post ResidentSleeper

A pretty well made post I saw by mentioned player about rotations I thought people might find useful not burried in a reply to an OP.

In higher tiers, 1/3/1 is still the "preferable" split, but if often can't be done optimally due to a number of reasons. Players who insist on repeatedly pushing 1/3/1 will top out at hovering around gold 3ish high plat 1ish. What brings you past that hump is being able to see the game differently and it's a simple matter of:

Fully understanding the current meta and patching.

Being able to size up the capabilities of your team comp vs. the other team comp.

Interpreting where enemies will go on the initial split and adjusting your team's initial split to counter their split or at least engage them on equal grounds.

So let me toss a couple case examples. Let's consider all of the players are of the exact same skill level or MMR.

A winning 1/3/1 for your team - You have on your team a Firebrand/Scourge/Scourge/Chrono/Your Spellbreaker. The other team has Bunker Druid/Scourge/Scourge/Chrono/Spellbreaker. The comps are relatively mirrored aside from the fact that your team will have more team fight presence but less side node bunker/peel power, due to your Firebrand vs. the Bunker Druid. Let's say your team splits as: Chrono home, FB Scourge Scourge mid, your Spellbreaker to far. If the enemy team tries to engage 1/3/1 vs. your 1/3/1, they're going to be behind after the initial split. Their only options to engage you optimally, do not include any 3 man configurations to win the mid fight vs. your Firebrand/Scourge/Scourge and they don't have any options to easily/quickly kill in 1v1s and win side nodes either. So as long as your team can at least stall the side node fights while the mid fight is won, your team will be ahead after the initial split and be in control of the next rotation.

A losing 1/3/1 for your team vs. those same enemies - Let's say that enemy team chooses to not engage you 1/3/1 vs. 1/3/1, but rather they pull a 1/1/3 split where their Spellbreaker caps home, the Bunker Druid goes mid to engage your Firebrand/Scourge/Scourge to stop them up and delay mid cap, and the Chrono/Scourge/Scourge push far to kill or run off the guy capping your home. They can rotate on an initial split like this very quickly due to blink and portal entre, both Scourges get there fast. They did this because they knew the probability of your Firebrand/Scourge/Scourge/Chrono/Spellbreaker trying to play 1/3/1 was high. Now they have created a difficult situation for your team to adapt its rotation to. You'll be in a Spellbreaker vs. Spellbreaker on their home node, god knows how long that will go on, the node is still neutral. There is a single annoying Bunker Druid stalling the mid cap and drawing numbers to his 1, who at worst, can fallback to home and assist the SBer vs. SBer if he has to, which will do a couple things: It will allow an easy finishing of capping their own home node and if your team wants to stop that from happening, they have to send players from mid to the enemy home, which is removing numbers from mid, allowing those 3 guys at far who have already ran someone off if not killed him, to start creating a snowball rotation. They are definitely in control of the next rotation. Now your team has to make a choice of how to handle that situation and no matter what you chose to do, it won't involve keeping that Firebrand/Scourge/Scourge in the same place if you want to keep up in point ticks. The enemy team has effectively launched a rotation around the 1/3/1 power play and separated the Firebrand/Scourge/Scourge center of power. if they can keep up those type of rotations, they will maintain control of the match and every rotation there-in. <- That is the kind of stuff that happens in higher tier play, that makes the difference between good players and good players who really know how to work rotations.

So in my opinion, what holds most players back, is that they view that initial split rotation and all rotations in general as: What should I be doing? Where should I go next? I am doing rotations right on MY class, why are we losing? This is a limiting mentality because they have developed tunnel vision on how their class must always function or rotate. This is a symptom of the early advice new players receive, AKA: "Your Thief should be worried about harassing far all game" or "Your Firebrand should always stay in the team fight." ect.. ect.. This will bring them to a gold 2ish gold 3ish level in time because for the most part, what they are doing is -usually- optimal, but they will never beat the better players they are trying to outplay to achieve plat 1/2+ levels. They need to develop the ability to identify when those mundane usual tactics are not going to work in a given match, be able to see around it, and form counter rotations with the team, not alone.

The last important thing to mention in my opinion, is that rotations regardless of solo que or 5 man que, are something that was meant as a term for team plays, not individual actions. This is something that has confused an enormous amount of the player base and it is largely responsible for players not understanding how important it is to rotate with your team, not individually. In a single short example:

You still are on that team of Firebrand/Scourge/Scourge/Chrono/Your Spellbreaker. Your team decides to 1/3/1 split again and declares it safe. Then when the gate opens, for some reason one of the Scourges decides he is going to rush the far node instead of letting the Spellbreaker do it. You have to make a decision: (A) Let him go far and get chewed up by the obvious Chrono that is currently capping it. Do you think that your team can pull ahead while allowing him to die like that? When the snowball happens, the Scourge dies and the Chrono comes mid, do you have realistic chances of winning this initial split? Can your team maintain control while allowing him to die or will it hurt you? Sometimes you have to (B) Acknowledge that the only way to possibly maintain control of the current rotation and the next, is actually follow the kitten to the far node and make sure he does not die. Will doing this allow your team to pull ahead in the current play? If it seems as such, this is the correct thing to do. Just bail on the initial idea of 1/3/1 and adapt to cover whatever weakness is exposing your team at the time. Point being: The team must rotate as one, even with mistakes. If they do not, you're going to be 4v5 the entire match and at an incredible disadvantage, despite the 4 players who aren't messing up at all.

To answer your question very directly: There is no "best split", there are only splits and rotations that counter other splits and rotations

My list (based on personal experience / watching and participating in ATs and ranked, last UGO)

Maybe the upcoming EU UGO will prove me wrong though.

I might miss a thing here and there or misplace a thing but generally is:

S+: (game breaking)

- Condition mirage

- Bunker chronomancer

S: (meta defining)

- Core thief

- Spellbreaker rampage

- Holosmith

A: (top tier)

- Scourge curses

- Firebrand support

- Druid

B: (shy of top tier)

- Revenant power shiro

- Scourge blood

- D/p daredevil

- shatter mirage

C: (good builds)

- Deadeye rifle

- Core guard burst

- daredevil condition (s/d)

- scrapper bunker

- Power reaper

- Core axe warrior

- Soulbeast

- Weaver bunker

D : (nieche builds)

- Deadeye pistols

- weaver freshair

- Dragonhunter

- Revenant condition herald

- Support tempest

F (extreme nieche and normally not viable)

- Everything not mentioned above.

It’s the population as @"Meteor.3720" nicely explained. And for the population to increase here are a few things that can help:

1. The on demand torunaments so people feel they have a place to competitive 5v5 all the time (ranked staying solo/duo is important aswell).

2. New gamemodes, for unranked only, and let people have fun with em in costums aswell. Keeping the competitive stuff as conquest only with special ATs for alternative modes.

3. Most importantly, we can’t have things like scourge and mesmer being as broken for so long. We need good balance and for the good classes to not be an extreme pain to play against (scourge, mesmer, even the p/p conplaints have some merit in this regard).

This is SO IMPORTANT. The reason is, that once the game is genuinely fun to play and doesn’t have these frustrating factors, people can actually go talk to their friends and say something like “Dude I’m playing this game its called gw2 and it has one of the most fun pvps to play”.

Also this brings more PvErs to maybe like the game mode.

This is achieved via more frequent balance to avoid leaving things that are broken for long, and also looking at some skills design to make them less oppressive and frustrating (elusive mind, full counter, all of scourge)

4. As a side note on 3 (balance related) reducing the power level gap between the meta builds and suboptimal builds will go a long way to make people want to stick to the game.

I feel this got worse with hot then especially pof. If you try to take a niche build now and stack it vs a current meta build its just uncomparable.

Not everythibg needs to be viable but more for sure, and things that ARE viable need to not be miles from meta in power but just versatility.

Objectiely better? Explain the fact then I placed silver/gold in a few seasons and climbed to plat with ease every single time? Then from plat to legend (harder).

You are not “hard stuck” and thhe system isn’t rigging you as much as you’d like to think.

As usual, it’s people over estimating their own skill. And once again asking to get carried by comp and communication advantage (5 man) vs unorganized and random comps.

It’s always the bandwagon of current season (sb, mirage, scourge, chrono...) and thief.

This class pushes out any idea of a low defense glass cannon by simply existing. Staff ele is probably the prime example.

Thief is fun and high skill cap (excluding condi s/d) but incredibly cancerous by nature.

ATs UI needs an improvement in general to sit better on the eye. A list of participants while readable who is vs who after you see it a few times isn’t a very good production solution imo.

Hopefully they haven’t upgraded it yet because they make their new ui for swiss already, which is understandable.

> @"Chilli.2976" said:

> > @"BeLZedaR.4790" said:

> > The idea of a hotfix has been lacking since forever in anet. The entire mesmer needs a hotifx like asap.

>

> I believe they used to do them a few years back - looks like that balance team moved on?

Idk man. I only got really interested (and got r80) in pvp at season 1, at which point the hotfix of condi rev being op only arrived 1 week before season ended.

As far as I’m concerned, they never really did hotfixes.

> @"rank eleven monk.9502" said:

> Did Zan play on his own account this time, or boosted someone again? Because the owner might have logged in during the tournament :)

The account doesn’t get anything either way. The prize is cash.

But that would be funny.

So if a core guard pops his f3 to block your CC that’s not ok?

Aegis isn’t a problem. Firebrand powercreeping into aegis spamfest (nerfed now but still) is the problem you’re having.

And cc skills ripping stability is basically saying “let’s remove stability from the game, I don’t like it.”

Then again you have things like steal which are very well designed, are not broken, have plenty of counterplay and encourage to not random dodge.

Well, while commendable yes, there is no pause system for tournaments and that isn’t acceptable imo.

This has been an issue since forever and ruined a few tournaments.

> @"MarshallLaw.9260" said:

> > @"Abelisk.4527" said:

> > Make F2P require rank 80 maybe?

>

> I think this makes more sense actually.

> Last year I created a F2P account on EU servers to see if the ping was better for me(main acc is on NA). As many of you who have an alt F2P acc already know, there are certain restrictions placed on characters and where they can/cannot go.

> Characters below level 10 cannot enter a major city; characters cannot enter LA until they reach level 35; and finally, characters cannot play in WvW until they have reached level 60 at least.

> If we use a similar approach - but using rank, it would probably help the situation.

>

> selfquote from an earlier thread:

> https://en-forum.guildwars2.com/discussion/comment/470529

> > Having checked the numbers on ranks ( https://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/PvP_Rank) I think Dragon might be a little too high.

> > Shark rank seems a bit more reasonable to me - it requires 891500 points to reach.

> > So if we do some rather rough maths - 1500 points for a win 500 for a loss; let's say people average out to 50/50 win:loss so we are saying 1000 points (average) per match - at that rate it takes ~891 games to reach there.

> > Maybe even Bear rank since that's about 692 matches. It's a reasonable enough number to deter some people from going into the "alt game" but not so high that dedicated new players see it as huge mountain to scale.

>

> > Also, this may positively impact the quality of players in ranked.

I’d say maybe rank 20 is too low, but rank 50 is way too high for an entry level barrier.

At the very most rank 40, but rank 30 is probably best.

People are mostly looking for ridiculously high restrictions because then “people will know how to play and I won’t have bot teams” but no.

Keep in mind the environment of unranked is not competitive, and sticking people that seek to play comp in unranked for too long will:

1) not improve them

2) get them bored.

Man those renegades. I can’t fight them. I feel too bad for them.

We really need this. These matchmaking complaints are getting out of hand and it’d be nice for the good and the bad to actually know what is going on.

Agree.

Let’s address the opposing argument though. “New players that come into the game and want to play PvP see they have to pay to compete might discourage them from trying the game at all.”

So why is this not the case?

——————

Assume you’re F2P and play untill you’re rank 20. For most bew players I believe this is among the lines of 60 games. At this point you kinda got a feel for the game and know if you want to buy it or not.

With the current unrestricted ranked new f2p players just hit level 20 and jump into ranked, will likely get rekt by people running elite spec meta builds, get discouraged from “p2w” (not really, as it is b2p game in nature; but you get it) and not want to buy it in the end.

Now if instead you restrict ranked, after level 20 the player will already know if the game is worth their money or not.

If not, the discussion is irrelevant anyway, right? They’ll quit the game anyway probably sooner rather than later.

If yes however, they’re gonna buy the game and start ranked on equal footing to everyone else, and are less likely to feel they’re under unfair advantage.

Who am I kidding, they’ll come here to complain about broken matchmaking xD.

But this is an additional benefit to all of those the OP mentioned of reducing match manipulation with alts by a slight amount. (Most manipulation alts have xpacs to help them win if they need to)

> @"apharma.3741" said:

> Agreed OP, the worst part is that might used to be stronger at 35 power and condition damage, imagine that now.

>

> Another part of the creep is overloaded traits, they didn’t want to delete anyone’s build so they brought over as many traits as possible even if it meant packing a load into 1 trait. What we have ended up with is minor and major traits offering several things all at once rather than 1 trait doing 1 thing and 1 thing only but with clear synergy throughout. A case can be made for GM traits doing a few different things in order to be build defining but that’s about as far as it should go.

Pretty much this. Every trait is a gm trait in powerlevel and the variety of things it can do, I almost don’t see the difference. It seems almost random now at which slot the defining traits are gonna be.

This also comes to skills though. Just compare warrior weapons before reworks most of them did 1 thing only. Every weapon now no matter what it does it will also do some damage. Random boons and condis slapped everywhere. Eventually you have to dodge everything, like now.

The idea of a hotfix has been lacking since forever in anet. The entire mesmer needs a hotifx like asap.

Meh, some people don’t realize they are better off without discord if they’re gonna trigger and rage freely on it. Only puts more stress on team and makes it harder to focus.

More mesmer mains posts asking to keep getting carried by class.

I still occasionally have people conviniently afk/dc when we lead by 150 pts then we end up losing.

Makes you think doesn’t it.