Ryan.9387

Anet hasn't done anything about wintraders in years. In fact they talk balance with wintraders and mat sellers. A player with permanent dishonor from selling mat is still an anet partner.

Literally the only way to get banned playing pvp now is by personal threat or racist comment. Nothing else results in anet action.

Not saying this as an excuse either. Just don't get your hopes up on anet devs acquiring a backbone.

To hazard a guess:

Virtues Honor Zeal. Trait for symbols and spirit weapons. Run sword of justice contamination of purity and one other optional utility. Staff scepter focus. Probably smoldering energy x2. Pre patch I would have said speed runes. Now not as sure. Balthazar for low effort rune choice. Sage amulet.

Drop symbols and swords at range. Don't facetank damage. This will work well until you reach the mmr where people realize that red circles are bad.

In case you were sleeping renegade might just got deleted.

Also speed runes nerfed.

You should be complaining that minion necro and herald escaped this.

The best players often only do ATs because thats the only chance of getting a good game. Ranked isn't fun anymore.

Most of the time those teams are just pugs of friends. Usually no voice comms or coordination.

You're seeing half the people playing meta specs and the others random stuff (mesmer/thief) for fun.

For what its worth this is the meta (in my opinion). This maybe can explain some od what you see.

Renegade

Power herald or renegade

Healbreaker or core guardian

Weaver or scraper or minion necro or (off meta 1v1/decap spec)

Another 1v1er or teamfight necro (reaper/core necro not minions)

Send 1v1 far. Other 1v1 close (or renegade if you have the reaper for mid). Support mid. Stall mid and +1 all the side node matchups. That will quickly lead to a 500-0 stomp vs a team that can't rotate or survive the side node pressure.

Its a bug. I heard about it a couple days ago and how its reproduced.

Minion necro. It does better the worse you play.

A long time ago anet polled players whether they wanted class swapping or profession mmr.

They close class swapping.

> @"Majy.6792" said:

> Also at least on NA the skill difference between p1 and p3 is pretty minimal.

Not even close to true. The p3 playerbase are the ones who are 500-0ing p1 teams in ats every day. The reality of the situation here is that the top tier players have so little fun playing ranked that they have dropped the mode entirely and just play ats.

To them every ranked game is just a test of "can I farm enemy players faster than my team throws?" You can't practice rotations because nobody knows where to go and 1v1s aren't interesting because the opponents are just bad.

As others have said, they already do balance "discussions" in a private discord with some gizmo winners.

I'm sure they are extremely biased and not very helpful, since somehow they convinced cmc that nades holo wasn't a problem for a full year.

> @"Widmo.3186" said:

> > @"MysteryMen.3791" said:

> > Also no one above gold 3 has ever wanted downstate removed, definitely not the old gw2 pros and the current top tier players. I have never once tilted because downstate existed but clearly you do a lot.

>

> Aaand thats not quite truth. Except for balance and lack of...interest from ANet side in PvP scene, downed state was one of the reasons why MMO PvP pros/players/etc didnt like GW2 PvP. Myself included, as a guy that came to GW2 from WoW and GW1 and played both of them on high PvP level. Over the years, many streamers that have multiple thousands of viewers in WoW (either playing pve, arenas or other things) or other MMOs wanted to try gw2 and in PvP almost all of them said that downed state is just...weird and not needed.

>

> Now hear me out, I dont say that downed state is pure evil. It makes game flow much slower, but you can get used to it and take advantage in conquest mode making other players useless for longer amount of time. Problem starts when we come across few things, such as ressbots. There shouldnt exist any, again, ANY skills, traits, whatsoever that makes ressing players faster than it is implemented by default. You use multiple CDs to burst some1 down, then comes 1 guy with one CD and just picks him up. No, if you wanna pick some1 up, you gotta go to that body, spend few seconds ressing him, popping your defensive CDs so you wont die either. Let me compare it to WoW where ress skill is 10 (!) second cast. Also there are hillarious downed state skills, such as rev slow, condi teef spamming 1 etc. Tbh I have no idea who designed them, but since the very beginning those are a joke (back in the vanilla days there were necro builds with downed +damage trait that allowed to deal same damage as if you were up, hillarious Karthus gameplay).

>

> The other thing is kinda more complicated, and its conquest mode as a whole. GW2 wanted to be a special kiddo where in most MMOs in ranked games you just have arenas or sth like that, 2v2, 3v3 etc. Its good, it works. But ANet made sth called 'cap and hold 3 circles for X minutes, have fun'. Over the years more and more ppl started leaving this mode because they just want to fight, they dont care about circles. They moved to other games, or to dueling zones, or WvW. Existing bunker and healbots aint helping either. So what ANet made? Hmmm, how about we admit our mistakes and make 2v2, 3v3 off-meta arenas? Yeah, right in time. But oh boi, what a clownfiesta those modes became. And again, while in conquest mode downed state can be either your advantage and disadvantage, in 2s and 3s there should be no such thing. If you die, you die, period. But thats just some offmeta gamemode that no1 cares about because there are no PvP devs in this company that can properly balance it and make arenas viable in gw2.

>

> tl;dr

> You see, GW2 was this one special kid in class that wanted to make things on its own. No arenas, conquest mode (arenas added later on), no raids, fractals and dungeons (raids added later on), no instant death mode in pvp modes, downed state (wvw 'no downed state' week events later on) and so on and so on. Ofc you can be succesful as special kid, bah, gw2 started as really succesful one! But lack of any interest from the company made this game what we have now, kinda dead, more and more with each day. Copy-pasting is easy way to make money, starting new meta is hard and lack of any commitment from devs side is just a proof that they shouldnt start anything new and just copy-paste and learn from big brothers because they have no idea what to do with their cake.

>

>

Non gw2 streamers (and most of those too tbh) aren't going to be a good way to get gw2 feedback. Watching those kinds of players like summit, its immediately clear they're just tilted at being bad and don't have any interest in actually learning how to pvp. Its somewhat understandable given they're walking into an 8 year old pvp scene.

Speaking of conquest. Forum posters begged for deathmatch and we got it. Anet put out courtyard and people hated it. Same with stronghold.

Pvp's issues are deeper than downstate. Its a mess of slow balance tempo, unwillingness to balance classes to clear roles, removal of skill expression, power creep, and lack of dev support on the personal side. Downstate has nothing to do with it.

The exact bug from my experience is that a stunbreak while dodging does not clear daze. The bug has been in the game for years.

1) Who are you listening to regarding balance? How are you avoiding bias with your balance discussion?

2) Do you any plans to address the structural abuse of your pvp system?

- Rampant afking

- Queuing away from prime time to dodge competition

- Queuing on bad classes and swapping to gain comp advantage

- Hacking

https://en-forum.guildwars2.com/discussion/96429/matchmaking-may-be-bugged-if-wiki-is-accurate

They say it is pseudocode but its python code. Its probably been copy pasted and its absolutely bugged as written.

This would mean matchmaking is bugged and isn't creating teams properly. The rating algorithm would sort of smooth over the bad matchmaking and put people generally in the correct bracket, just after any number of wildly imbalanced matches.

Permeating wrath, decap druid with immob spam. Some builds can fight well on point for a long time: crev, LR ele.

Preface: LR is a masochistic build. You're almost guaranteed to die playing it for no reason other than bad matchups.

Preface 2: I'm going to ignore rotation because tbh its incredibly straightforward.

How to get good:

Practice core mechanics and focus your mental energy improving on one aspect of your play at a time. This is best done in duels.

For example:

I'm going to not random dodge. I will dodge (big skill) instead.

I'm going to count every dodge the opponent makes, then use (big skill) after.

Before I use a CC skill, I'll check whether the opponent has stability.

I'll make a mental note of enemy weapon swaps, and adjust my playstyle to account for its strengths/weaknesses.

I don't know how to deal damage with my build vs (some other build). I'll view every trait/skill on both builds and assess best times to attack or evade.

Etc

Etc

Pick an aspect of your play, work on it until it becomes habit, then move to another task. You will quickly find most people are completely clueless and make no effort to play, they're just full muscle memory and button mashing. Just a couple of points drilled down will put you so far ahead of the average player that ranked will start to feel like a waste of time.

> @"Shiyo.3578" said:

> If you stand on the cart you can't be knocked back so if your strategy relies on knocking the enemy off the node to decap(which was their strategy) your strategy is invalidated just because someone is exploiting terrain.

>

> It's essentially perma-stab for free vs knockbacks.

Its also been in the game for 8 years...

Its also only viable vs a build that does so little damage you can survive against it by standing still...

Only good players play rev.

My one small suggestion:

Move the swiftness from harmonious conduit to a minor trait and maybe give the trait a small buff.

Tempest has a nasty trap where you can't effectively get both decent condi clear and decent swiftness uptime.

Restoring the swiftness to the minor trait gives ele the freedom to run a cleansing water build without being incredibly slow.

> @"DEATHsCLAW.1978" said:

> > @"Aktium.9506" said:

> > > @"DEATHsCLAW.1978" said:

> > >I'd say it deals twice to three times as much damage as terror.

> > Only if it crits. The base coefficients end up being more or less more the same.

> >

> > 0.95 with 1050 power vs 0.4 + 444 on 1200 condi dmg

> >

> > And while anecdotal, if you fight a core terror nec and a LR ele in a duel and lose you're generally going to see the same amount of damage from terror and LR in the death report. Which is somewhere in the ballpark of 5k-10k damage if you hit it often.

> >

>

> LR is easier to proc and has far less counterplay. If you eat 10k fear from a necro you got seriously outplayed while 10k LR from an ele it is not so much you can do about on a low stability class.

>

> that even ignoring the weakness

LR is a melee focused build while fear necro can apply almost all of its damage at long ranges. LR should do more damage and has more counterplay. Notably you can distance yourself from an LR ele and avoid most damage, while the same isn't really an option vs necro.

Move some trait behavior to core traits. The elite spec build will be the exact same, but the core build gets benefit.

Decay 100 points per day after 3 days.

Symbol guard isn't even op anymore. It doesn't even 1v1 well.

LR can hit top 25 and higher solo queue, so all I see is a l2p issue.

Removing amulet after amulet is not doing anything to fix pvp. Knights amulet was pretty much run on two builds, core ranger and prot holo.

These builds were on their own op. And provided no nerfs, they will remain op on the next tankiest amulet until berseker and sinister are all thats left.

We've already been through this with cleric, settler, etc.

Symbol fb is kind of bad right now. Its basically a worse renegade and for pure support a worse tempest.

Its weakness is hidden by potato ranked players, but it pretty handily gets beaten by pretty much any 1v1er and the fights it does win 1v1 are usually down to the wire, which is really bad if a second player shows up.