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The Elephant in the balance room: How Cheese has evolved to hurt GW2 PvP more than balance.


Master Ketsu.4569

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What if I told you that one simple change in balance philosophy could save this game? ( TL;DR version at the bottom )

Many of us may have noticed through the years that half the time when people complain about balance, they are actually complaining more about cheese than what is seriously overpowered in an organized team. This happens in a lot of games when it comes to PvP. And you know what? When it comes to GW2, these people are right. Cheese in GW2 seems to reach increasing heights every balance patch, with classes being nerfed around the cheese rather than just...nerfing the cheese. When you nerf everything except the cheese, that just makes it so pretty soon all that is left is cheese. And when the game is cheese, the game dies.

For instance, here is a demonstration of how a build can be "balanced" but still very bad for the game: Think of a hypothetical elite specialization in the future, for humors sake we will call this specialization "Cheeselord". Upon selecting cheeselord as your spec, you lose access to all abilities except for a new skill called "Cheesedoken" and cannot move from your spawn, effectively turning the match into a 4v5 for your team. Cheesedoken has a 45 second cooldown, and upon activation randomly kills a player on the enemy team. Cheesedoken has no animation, infinite range, no cast time, and cannot be countered or avoided in any way- it just instantly places one player on the other team into a defeated state regardless of what they are doing.

Technically, Cheeselord would likely sit as a mid tier build at best. But I guarantee players would complain up a storm if something like this was unironically implemented into the game. Why? Because people play GW2 to enjoy its combat system and mechanics. A braindead build that does nothing but get kills from a safezone is not actually playing the game, it is just farming and being bad. Pretty much the only people playing Cheeselord would be trolls, bots, or people looking to farm without investment. But the biggest reason for the complaints would be that dying to it would feel like losing to a cheater. The players who randomly dies to Cheesedoken did not make any mistake in order to receive the death, and there would be effectively zero difference between a legendary ranked Cheeselord vs a Bronze ranked one other than pure dumb luck.

Before I go any further, it's important to define cheese. Lots of people out there believe that cheese is subjective, or ask what cheese even is. It's very simple: Cheese is any game mechanic which allows players to ignore active counterplay. Furthermore, when it comes to GW2 cheese can be broken into 6 categories:

1. GodmodeThe first and most easily identifiable type of cheese is godmode - or being immune to most damage while still having full access to the rest of your kit and often called out as "attacking and defending at the same time". This is an inherently busted game mechanic in that it completely removes all interactivity for the other player for the duration of the godmode granting ability. The only viable counterplay to a build that is centered around chaining godmode skills together is to either out sustain with your own cheese or run away, neither of which are true counters. Path of Fire added a ton of this to the game: almost every class gets a barrier or block that can be used while casting other skills, and we even got a spec that turns every dodge into a godmode activation. It has gotten out of hand.2. UnavoidableThis is when a skill cannot be reasonably avoided. Having too many abilities that are instant cast and have no animation completely negates a game designed around dodging and blocking animations. It instead forces the game into prediction, which is bad because it only works if people are playing predictably AKA spamming. Counterplay that is dependent on a player being bad is not true counterplay. Unblockable oneshot from stealth builds also fall under this problem. When builds have too much unavoidable damage, it takes away the entire watching for animations and intelligently dodging part of the game- replacing it with randomly dodging and randomly spamming skills until one lands.3. Excessive Passive reliancePassives by themselves aren't a huge problem, but when combined with any of the other problems on this list it creates a scenario where counterplay cannot reasonably occur because too much is hidden from the player. Example: Passive godmode/get out of jail free is notoriously hated by all both top and casual players alike. There are also a few passive unavoidable conditions where all your abilities randomly add cover conditions on the next attack that hits... not your next attack, the next one that hits meaning that even if avoided the passive will simply proc on the next hit. Such interactivity. Very skill based gameplay. Much wow.
4. Ridiculous CC immunity uptime.Having some CC immunity is good to allow people to anticipate an incoming stun, especially from a zerg since without stunbreaks and anti-CC any large fight quickly degenerates into "Everyone poop on the stunned guy". The problem comes when you have skills that instantly give absurd amount of stability on demand, and on a very low cooldown to the point where a person can upkeep stability with 50%+ uptime. This enables a very uninteractive and mindless playstyle of "Pop stab, spam 12345 without fear of being interrupted". When a build can dump its entire skillbar while CC immune, that's not good for the game. Interrupts should be a viable counterplay to mindless spam, and being able to dump everything while CC immune negates this entirely while actively encouraging spammy gameplay.5. Too much sustain / resetsHaving so much sustain that you can just ignore what your opponent is doing creates a similar problem to Godmode. This is why bunker metas are so universally hated and was arguably the straw that broke the camels back for GW esports. When you have to 1v2 a build to kill it, it's way too easy to just infinitely cheese a point and holy hell does that amount to the most boring GG ever. Having a lot of stealth access creates a similar problem - there are many builds that can just stealth forever and never die. This actually is more of an issue in WvW than conquest, but it's important to mention as it has the similar problem in that it's impossible to kill 1v1 unless a serious mistake is made.6. Win buttonsThis is when a skill is able to just do everything at once. A good example for this would be Mirage sword ambush: Dodge, Mobility, damage, CC, leap finisher. Counterplay and decision making means very little in the face of abilities that just do everything. Why think about counterplay when you can just press a button that does it all?

It's also important to point out that a small amount of cheese is not necessarily bad. Some cheese is actually essential as it gives classes a niche to fill and also allows for new players to have easier access to PvP, as cheese builds tend to usually require less skill to play. The problems start to occur when a class has access to a spec that is centered around 3 or more of the above issues. You end up with a "Build Wars" scenario where spec matters in certain matchups 100x more than player competency.

Looking at all that makes up cheese, it can start to paint a picture that justifies certain balance changes that have been long overdue:

-Skills like Elixer U and Dolyak Stance should see a nerf. Holos and Soulbeast both are extremely spam happy specs to play due to their absurd CC immunity uptime. Every Holosmith and their mom and their moms mom and their moms moms mom does the same thing: Elixer U, Rifle CC, Spam forge skills, maybe add a photon wall if you care enough, did you win the fight? Yes- gg! No- Elixer S reset fight with healing turret. Every soulbeast uses Dolyak stance with passives to increase the stability to absurd duration +12 stacks or more and then just freecast. This is not skillful gameplay.-Stop nerfing Mirage. Instead, slate it for a rework. The current design of condi mirage hits all 6 issues. Deals passive unavoidable damage from clones while spamming instant cast skills, rotating godmodes, ignoring CC due to being able to still use half their kit while CCed, sustaining for days, and riding the infinite horizon crutch to turn every dodge into combined godmode+win button, gaining free passive sustain for days. It's like the spec was intentionally designed to be as braindead to fight against as possible. Mirage doesn't need any more random nerfs it needs to be sent back to the drawing board.-give better ways to deal with the PoF condi powercreep Since Path of fire release condis have seen a sort of passive-cover creep where nearly all skills automatically get 2-3 cover conditions added to it. A lot of these could see a nerf, but honestly it isn't too bad at least in WvW due to one simple change: Sigil of cleansing removing 3 condis. Consider bringing this version to PvP as PvP still has the problem of PoF powercreep without the counter. It's also the fairest way to fix the problem since every class has access to it.-Firebrand has absurd amounts of sustain and has been almost mandatory in any organized team that wants to win because of it. Tons of passive blocks. Tons of stability. Boonspam for days. A good firebrand is unkillable and a pro firebrand makes himself +1 team member unkillable.-Stealth works in GW2 in such a way that seriously bugs out depending on latency and often desyncs animations for 1/2 a second after revealing. You can even precast a ton of skills while stealthed and they will all hit before your model even renders on other players screens. Anets current model of fixing this problem is to add revealed on cast to certain skills - while this is a good fix that should be added to more heavy hitters, a better way would be to just add better counters to stealth. There are a lot of underpowered abilities in the game that are due for a buff, and just adding "Reveals nearby enemies 600 range" to a few utilities for every class would go a long way.-Big skills with no telegraph Animations and telegraphs have needed a serious balance pass for a very long time. The list of powerful abilities that have virtually no tell is too big to list. One example among many would be the "terrormancer" build, which is centered around spamming low cast no animation fear corrupts over and over again. It's not a very strong build, but it's annoying to fight simply because it's main engine has zero animation to it.

And these suggestions are just a small handful of what could be done. The cheese-creep in GW2 has gone on for long enough that it is pervasive throughout the game and exists in some form in every spec.

On a final note: Scourge is a good example of how removing cheese but leaving the skills strong can lead to the build remaining viable with fewer complaints. Release scourge was maximum cheese when shade skills had no animation and no windup time, people hated its guts as you would just randomly get instantly hit with 6+ condis. Now that shades and scourge F1s have warning symbols on them, they can be realistically twitch-dodged as players can actually see what the heck is hitting them. The result is that Scourge is still meta, but doesn't receive anywhere near 1/4th the hate it used to get. If this same logic was applied to other busted specs, the game would be in a much better state.

TL;DR: Anet please start considering counterplay and interactive gameplay into your balance decisions more often. The current trend of not doing so is putting the excellent combat system GW2 has to waste and making people quit the game.

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Ya. People say this all the time then the counter complaint is : “but there’s no mirages in top 25”

It’s a terrible counter argument because not everyone is Sindrener. Cheese builds are designed to do one thing, which is to win an encounter with minimal effort or skill. Most of these cheese builds also happen to be unfun to play against and players lower than top 25 suffer.

You might be a player that has no problem with these cheese builds, but everyone else on your team does...so you end up losing a match because the enemy exploits their lack of counter play to the cheese. It’s not your fault but you’ll always be on the receiving end of the consequences.

Bunker DH traps were pretty cheese thing. long time ago during HOT. Players would just chain blocks, heals and damage negation while piling traps into a node to force people off of it...even if you won the fight you could not stand on the node, and the DH would win through node attrition...by constantly forcing you off node even if they are out on res pawn. It took close to a year before they did something about it and it plagued low tier games so long people started quitting. It was just the beginning of node cheese...followed by ventari knockback bunker, scourge condi aids followed by the current mirage aids.

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Wait, stealth is supposed to desync and render you after you are revealed? Why doesnt that ever happen to the Mesmers I face. Jokes aside, the problem with stealth isnt its use in combat, which is the only time the reveal skills are useful (you cant use them to reveal an enemy you dont know is even there). The problem with stealth is its use out of combat. I.E., oneshotting an enemy who isnt even aware of your presence, or running away from an enemy who is. In-combat stealth is already weak. Less so for Mesmers who combines with clones that give just that split second of disorientation you need to utilize it, but there is a reason why the only thief build that actively uses stealth in fights sucks.

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@"Master Ketsu.4569" said:-Stop nerfing Mirage. Instead, slate it for a rework. The current design of condi mirage hits all 6 issues. Deals passive unavoidable damage from clones while spamming instant cast skills, rotating godmodes, ignoring CC due to being able to still use half their kit while CCed, sustaining for days, and riding the infinite horizon crutch to turn every dodge into combined godmode+win button, gaining free passive sustain for days. It's like the spec was intentionally designed to be as braindead to fight against as possible. Mirage doesn't need any more random nerfs it needs to be sent back to the drawing board."omg if u still die to mirage playing core engi u need to l2p"

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@"Master Ketsu.4569" said:What if I told you that one simple change in balance philosophy could save this game? ( TL;DR version at the bottom )

Many of us may have noticed through the years that half the time when people complain about balance, they are actually complaining more about cheese than what is seriously overpowered in an organized team. This happens in a lot of games when it comes to PvP. And you know what? When it comes to GW2, these people are right. Cheese in GW2 seems to reach increasing heights every balance patch, with classes being nerfed around the cheese rather than just...nerfing the cheese. When you nerf everything except the cheese, that just makes it so pretty soon all that is left is cheese. And when the game is cheese, the game dies.

For instance, here is a demonstration of how a build can be "balanced" but still very bad for the game: Think of a hypothetical elite specialization in the future, for humors sake we will call this specialization "Cheeselord". Upon selecting cheeselord as your spec, you lose access to all abilities except for a new skill called "Cheesedoken" and cannot move from your spawn, effectively turning the match into a 4v5 for your team. Cheesedoken has a 45 second cooldown, and upon activation randomly kills a player on the enemy team. Cheesedoken has no animation, infinite range, no cast time, and cannot be countered or avoided in any way- it just instantly places one player on the other team into a defeated state regardless of what they are doing.

Technically, Cheeselord would likely sit as a mid tier build at best. But I guarantee players would complain up a storm if something like this was unironically implemented into the game. Why? Because people play GW2 to enjoy its combat system and mechanics. A braindead build that does nothing but get kills from a safezone is not actually playing the game, it is just farming and being bad. Pretty much the only people playing Cheeselord would be trolls, bots, or people looking to farm without investment. But the biggest reason for the complaints would be that dying to it would feel like losing to a cheater. The players who randomly dies to Cheesedoken did not make any mistake in order to receive the death, and there would be effectively zero difference between a legendary ranked Cheeselord vs a Bronze ranked one other than pure dumb luck.

Before I go any further, it's important to define cheese. Lots of people out there believe that cheese is subjective, or ask what cheese even is. It's very simple: Cheese is any game mechanic which allows players to ignore active counterplay. Furthermore, when it comes to GW2 cheese can be broken into 6 categories:

1. GodmodeThe first and most easily identifiable type of cheese is godmode - or being immune to most damage while still having full access to the rest of you kit. This an inherently busted game mechanic in that it completely removes all interactivity for the other player for the duration of the godmode granting ability. The only viable counterplay to a build that is centered around chaining godmode skills together is to either out sustain with your own cheese or run away, neither of which are true counters. Path of Fire added a ton of this to the game: almost every class gets a barrier or block that can be used while casting other skills, and we even got a spec that turns every dodge into a godmode activation. It has gotten out of hand.2. UnavoidableThis is when a skill cannot be reasonably avoided. Having too many abilities that are instant cast and have no animation completely negates a game designed around dodging and blocking animations. It instead forces the game into prediction, which is bad because it only works if people are playing predictably AKA spamming. Counterplay that is dependent on a player being bad is not true counterplay. Unblockable oneshot from stealth builds also fall under this problem. When builds have too much unavoidable damage, it takes away the entire watching for animations and intelligently dodging part of the game- replacing it with randomly dodging and randomly spamming skills until one lands.3. Excessive Passive reliancePassives by themselves aren't a huge problem, but when combined with any of the other problems on this list it creates a scenario where counterplay cannot reasonably occur because too much is hidden from the player. Example: Passive godmode/get out of jail free is notoriously hated by all both top and casual players alike. There are also a few passive unavoidable conditions where all your abilities randomly add cover conditions on the next attack that hits... not your next attack, the next one that hits meaning that even if avoided the passive will simply proc on the next hit. Such interactivity. Very skill based gameplay. Much wow.

4. Ridiculous CC immunity uptime.Having some CC immunity is good to allow people to anticipate an incoming stun, especially from a zerg since without stunbreaks and anti-CC any large fight quickly degenerates into "Everyone poop on the stunned guy". The problem comes when you have skills that instantly give absurd amount of stability on demand, and on a very low cooldown to the point where a person can upkeep stability with 50%+ uptime. This enables a very uninteractive and mindless playstyle of "Pop stab, spam 12345 without fear of being interrupted". When a build can dump its entire skillbar while CC immune, that's not good for the game. Interrupts should be a viable counterplay to mindless spam, and being able to dump everything while CC immune negates this entirely while actively encouraging spammy gameplay.5. Too much sustain / resetsHaving so much sustain that you can just ignore what your opponent is doing creates a similar problem to Godmode. This is why bunker metas are so universally hated and was arguably the straw that broke the camels back for GW esports. When you have to 1v2 a build to kill it, it's way too easy to just infinitely cheese a point and holy hell does that amount to the most boring GG ever. Having a lot of stealth access creates a similar problem - there are many builds that can just stealth forever and never die. This actually is more of an issue in WvW than conquest, but it's important to mention as it has the similar problem in that it's impossible to kill 1v1 unless a serious mistake is made.6. Win buttonsThis is when a skill is able to just do everything at once. A good example for this would be Mirage sword ambush: Dodge, Mobility, damage, CC, leap finisher. Counterplay and decision making means very little in the face of abilities that just do everything. Why think about counterplay when you can just press a button that does it all?

It's also important to point out that a small amount of cheese is not necessarily bad. Some cheese is actually essential as it gives classes a niche to fill and also allows for new players to have easier access to PvP, as cheese builds tend to usually require less skill to play. The problems start to occur when a class has access to a spec that is centered around 3 or more of the above issues. You end up with a "Build Wars" scenario where spec matters in certain matchups 100x more than player competency.

Looking at all that makes up cheese, it can start to paint a picture that justifies certain balance changes that have been long overdue:

-Skills like Elixer U and Dolyak Stance should see a nerf. Holos and Soulbeast both are extremely spam happy specs to play due to their absurd CC immunity uptime. Every Holosmith and their mom and their moms mom and their moms moms mom does the same thing: Elixer U, Rifle CC, Spam forge skills, maybe add a photon wall if you care enough, did you win the fight? Yes- gg! No- Elixer S reset fight with healing turret. Every soulbeast uses Dolyak stance with passives to increase the stability to absurd duration +12 stacks or more and then just freecast. This is not skillful gameplay.-Stop nerfing Mirage. Instead, slate it for a rework. The current design of condi mirage hits all 6 issues. Deals passive unavoidable damage from clones while spamming instant cast skills, rotating godmodes, ignoring CC due to being able to still use half their kit while CCed, sustaining for days, and riding the infinite horizon crutch to turn every dodge into combined godmode+win button, gaining free passive sustain for days. It's like the spec was intentionally designed to be as braindead to fight against as possible. Mirage doesn't need any more random nerfs it needs to be sent back to the drawing board.-give better ways to deal with the PoF condi powercreep Since Path of fire release condis have seen a sort of passive-cover creep where nearly all skills automatically get 2-3 cover conditions added to it. A lot of these could see a nerf, but honestly it isn't too bad at least in WvW due to one simple change: Sigil of cleansing removing 3 condis. Consider bringing this version to PvP as PvP still has the problem of PoF powercreep without the counter. It's also the fairest way to fix the problem since every class has access to it.-Firebrand has absurd amounts of sustain and has been almost mandatory in any organized team that wants to win because of it. Tons of passive blocks. Tons of stability. Boonspam for days. A good firebrand is unkillable and a pro firebrand makes himself +1 team member unkillable.-Stealth works in GW2 in such a way that seriously bugs out depending on latency and often desyncs animations for 1/2 a second after revealing. You can even precast a ton of skills while stealthed and they will all hit before your model even renders on other players screens. Anets current model of fixing this problem is to add revealed on cast to certain skills - while this is a good fix that should be added to more heavy hitters, a better way would be to just add better counters to stealth. There are a lot of underpowered abilities in the game that are due for a buff, and just adding "Reveals nearby enemies 600 range" to a few utilities for every class would go a long way.

And these suggestions are just a small handful of what could be done. The cheese-creep in GW2 has gone on for long enough that it is pervasive throughout the game and exists in some form in every spec.

On a final note: Scourge is a good example of how removing cheese but leaving the skills strong can lead to the build remaining viable with fewer complaints. Release scourge was maximum cheese when shade skills had no animation and no windup time, people hated its guts as you would just randomly get instantly hit with 6+ condis. Now that shades and scourge F1s have warning symbols on them, they can be realistically twitch-dodged as players can actually see what the heck is hitting them. The result is that Scourge is still meta, but doesn't receive anywhere near 1/4th the hate it used to get. If this same logic was applied to other busted specs, the game would be in a much better state.

TL;DR: Anet please start considering counterplay and interactive gameplay into your balance decisions more often. The current trend of not doing so is putting the excellent combat system GW2 has to waste and making people quit the game.

I'm sry but u state the current state of slb to be in the same league as holo as far as being OP for dueling etc? Only complaints about slb since the days after boonbeast got its nerfs are and were regarding sic em and other dps multipliers on slb and slb alone as well as the range said dps can be done. There's very few people destroying people with slb these days inside of melee range and usually even at range their pretty easy to deal with these days. U bring up how scourge had changed to successfully balance it? Seriously? U think scourge is balanced in wvw but fb isnt ok? Their both busted. I agree with ur initial assessment tho this game has become far more about building the cheesiest build on the cheesiest specs regardless of whether it takes skill to play or not as in the end people want the satisfaction of kills. Look at DE permastealth for example,the old sic em build, etc etc people care little about using a class that takes skill, build diversity and or skill variety as the majority have shown. So it's not all on arenet as players find and seek out these builds to utilize as more of a priority than how diverse a class Is or how fun a class is, majority picks the easiest cheesiest way to get kills. Just the way it is and way it probably will always be lol. People want kills more than anything else. Yes anet should defenitly not have added so many skills that could be potentially exploited or with little counterplay but at the same time do people not run to those skills and builds?

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We can make this very simple. Go into unranked PvP and you'll see the definition of cheese. Soulbeast still running one shot builds, two holosmith autos slicing off almost all of my health, mirage/mesmer still IMMUNE to most range damage, thief aoes throwing five condis if they aren't cleansed, Weaver stacking 13 burns now, Spellbreaker running through a multitude of people and being non-CCable, immbolized, Reaper running at the speeds of trucks, scourges standing their stupid barrier circles while glueing their one button down because hey LOOKIT me barrier.

EVERY class has somehow disgustingly became cheesey. Which is pretty appalling because yesterday, for me and my duos and trios, have been people cheesing good players with minimal effort because some classes just have better get out of jail cards compared to be others. It's sad. I really do want to love PvP, but dear god how it's gotten so toxic now that I find no love in ANY of the classes.

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@"Psycoprophet.8107" said:

I'm sry but u state the current state of slb to be in the same league as holo as far as being OP for dueling etc?

I'm not saying slb and holo are in the same league, but that they have similar cheese strats. The difference right now as far as balance is concerned is that SLB received major damage nerfs last patch while Holo got a free pass. But in terms of having access to low skill gameplay via uninterrupted spam, they are still the same.

Again, if you are having trouble getting the difference between "OP" and "Cheese", try rereading this part of my post:

For instance, here is a demonstration of how a build can be "balanced" but still very bad for the game: Think of a hypothetical elite specialization in the future, for humors sake we will call this specialization "Cheeselord". Upon selecting cheeselord as your spec, you lose access to all abilities except for a new skill called "Cheesedoken" and cannot move from your spawn, effectively turning the match into a 4v5 for your team. Cheesedoken has a 45 second cooldown, and upon activation randomly kills a player on the enemy team. Cheesedoken has no animation, infinite range, no cast time, and cannot be countered or avoided in any way- it just instantly places one player on the other team into a defeated state regardless of what they are doing.

Technically, Cheeselord would likely sit as a mid tier build at best. But I guarantee players would complain up a storm if something like this was unironically implemented into the game. Why? Because people play GW2 to enjoy its combat system and mechanics. A braindead build that does nothing but get kills from a safezone is not actually playing the game, it is just farming and being bad. Pretty much the only people playing Cheeselord would be trolls, bots, or people looking to farm without investment. But the biggest reason for the complaints would be that dying to it would feel like losing to a cheater. The players who randomly dies to Cheesedoken did not make any mistake in order to receive the death, and there would be effectively zero difference between a legendary ranked Cheeselord vs a Bronze ranked one other than pure dumb luck.

This build would arguuably not be OP at all, but it would be completely mind numbing both to play as and to play against. That's the kind of issue this thread is trying to tackle.

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For those who still don't get it:

Consider a build with a skill that has a 50% chance of instantly killing the nearest enemy (regardless of evades, invulns, etc), and 50% chance of instantly killing the user.

Such a build would not actually be able to get above Gold tier, because it wouldn't be able to achieve more than 50% win-rate.

BUT

Such a build would also allow a total beginner to have a 50% chance of beating a top-10 legendary player.

It's not over-powered, but it's still cheese.

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^That's also a good one. Although it's not just about "Skill to play" but about Anet ignoring issues that effectively remove the combat system from the game.

There's no point in designing a game engine and PvP system around dodging and blocking animations, only to keep adding things that make doing so irrelevant.

Take the recent buff to fire weaver with Sunspot and Burning Rage. There were many ways they could buff weaver, such as adding more damage to its telegraphed attacks or making dual attacks while attuned to fire inflict burning. But out of all the ways, they did it with a passive that inflicts an instant cast AoE burn with zero animation on it. As far as balance goes, technically what they did does indeed check the balance checkbox. But as far as gameplay and class design is concerned, It's like counterplay and interaction aren't even a factor in their decisions.

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Arenanet is casual, incopetent or just ineffective, and always trying to reinvent the wheel.

Blizzard sticks to holy-3-nity. They even FORCED a tank+heal+dps role lock in overwatch just now, AFTER 3 years of saying AND MARKETING the game as YOU CAN PLAY ANY HERO ANYTIME. they listened, watched the toxic reality, and they changed their minds to try fixing the problems.

Arenanet..... lul.Even in PVP Esport dream times, it was clear that casual PVE has priority over PVP.Risk / reward , counterplay and top-down balance, those are principles of competitive games.Guildwars is a game "for fun".Think about, in 7 years of every communication, they use guidelines like "are you having fun" "does this feel thematic for class" "that would upset the casual or PVE side of game" when discussing with us. Their priority is not to make something balanced with hightier gameplay, theyre making a wow factor movie experience.

Their balance meetings is a group of silver rated PVEers, all brainstorming on what would be cool. Then they spin teapots mystic build generator to create the most non meta build that never sees playtime, then they those 2 silver devs go duel on keep midpoint to see what needs buffs. Oh and theyre skillclickers ofc.THAT is the gw2 balance team, and theyre trying to keep 3 different gamemodes balanced as 1.

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@"Master Ketsu.4569" said:-Stealth works in GW2 in such a way that seriously bugs out depending on latency and often desyncs animations for 1/2 a second after revealing. You can even precast a ton of skills while stealthed and they will all hit before your model even renders on other players screens. Anets current model of fixing this problem is to add revealed on cast to certain skills - while this is a good fix that should be added to more heavy hitters, a better way would be to just add better counters to stealth. There are a lot of underpowered abilities in the game that are due for a buff, and just adding "Reveals nearby enemies 600 range" to a few utilities for every class would go a long way.

Please... no more Revealed skills unless Thieves are given some form of immunity to them. Stealth Thieves are too squishy to survive without the ability to hide, and most don't hit that hard (relatively speaking) even from Stealth. Not only is a Thief in Stealth giving up control of a point in Conquest, but being locked out of Stealth negates an entire traitline.

Not only can Thieves not contest a point in Stealth, but they cannot counter Stealth either... they have no Revealing skills. So they are just as at risk of other Stealthed foes as anyone else, perhaps even more so. And seeing that almost all of their defenses are active, they cannot mitigate the damage coming from an invisible attack. This is especially troublesome for non-Dagger/Pistol/Rifle Thieves who cannot enter Stealth on demand simply to avoid getting hit.

Now, it would be a different matter if "Reveal" skills only removed a Thief from Stealth instead of locking it out completely. But until given a trait or some other method of countering Revealed, Thieves have enough trouble already. Stealth is just as much a defensive tool for the Thief than it is an offensive one.

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A simple, yet as far as I can see impossible solution, would be to rebalance skills so they can benefit allies more than oneself, or, say, earn additional benefits for hitting more than just oneself or more than one enemy. As an example, perhaps a piercing bullet bleeds when it hits more than 1 enemy. Some of this is already in place, but I think it could use more emphasis to improve the PvP scene. I've seen this design principle implemented in some MOBA games, and the gameplay was really fun and teamplay oriented.

Unfortunately, I think as a design principle this fundamentally conflicts with the idea of being able to PvE by oneself effectively. Since the same game exists in PvE singleplayer as well as many multiplayer formats, it would be difficult to take away from those who enjoy playing alone.

Yes, there is the possibility of adjusting skills to have PvP-only text; however, the level of change I'm imagining would create too big a difference between PvP and PvE to be even recognizable. This would drastically affect those who wish to transition from scene to scene, like myself.

My conclusion: we have to make the best out of a game that is fundamentally designed to be able to enjoy alone... and in PvE (thus encouraging outrageously selfish abilities and talents)! I will still play PvP and enjoy it as long as the imbalances are not too influential on game outcomes at my mediocre play level.

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Balanced PVP gameplay is impossible with 27 professions and multiple builds designed for a pve world. Something drastic is called for. But no need to reinvent the wheel, just take the best of what’s out there. Limit the build options to something like Overwatch’s numbers. Allow toon swap at respawn. Create different pvp modes like eso has, for example 3 teams in a match. Get different size battles. 8 man teams can be very fun for objective based games. But for heavens sake do something to shake it up!

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@Kageseigi.2150 said:

Not only can Thieves not contest a point in Stealth, but they cannot counter Stealth either... they have no Revealing skills. So they are just as at risk of other Stealthed foes as anyone else, perhaps even more so. And seeing that almost all of their defenses are active, they cannot mitigate the damage coming from an invisible attack. This is especially troublesome for non-Dagger/Pistol/Rifle Thieves who cannot enter Stealth on demand simply to avoid getting hit.

This could easily be prevented by the game not having stealth AT ALL.Thieves are the last who should complain about it.

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@Fueki.4753 said:This could easily be prevented by the game not having stealth AT ALL.Thieves are the last who should complain about it.

I'm not complaining. Just stating that Thieves are among the most vulnerable targets to Stealthed enemies. So we adapt and survive. It's part of the game... along with every other problematic function that causes Thieves grief.

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@Kageseigi.2150 said:I'm not complaining. Just stating that Thieves are among the most vulnerable targets to Stealthed enemies. So we adapt and survive. It's part of the game... along with every other problematic function that causes Thieves grief.

How are Thieves more vulnerable than other professions to stealth instant kills?Even a Warrior with marauder Amulet and Wurm runes is down to 1/4 or less health when a medium-skilled thief decides to eat them from stealth.Stealth attacks deal way too much damage to ANY class and can NOT be anticipated. If it somehow was negated, it's pure, lucky coincidence.Stealth is straight-up anti-pvp.

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@Kageseigi.2150 said:

@"Master Ketsu.4569" said:
-Stealth
works in GW2 in such a way that seriously bugs out depending on latency and often desyncs animations for 1/2 a second after revealing. You can even precast a ton of skills while stealthed and they will all hit before your model even renders on other players screens. Anets current model of fixing this problem is to add revealed on cast to certain skills - while this is a good fix that should be added to more heavy hitters, a better way would be to just add better counters to stealth. There are a lot of underpowered abilities in the game that are due for a buff, and just adding "Reveals nearby enemies 600 range" to a few utilities for every class would go a long way.

Please... no more Revealed skills unless Thieves are given some form of immunity to them. Stealth Thieves are too squishy to survive without the ability to hide, and most don't hit that hard (relatively speaking) even from Stealth. Not only is a Thief in Stealth giving up control of a point in Conquest, but being locked out of Stealth negates an entire traitline.

Not only can Thieves not contest a point in Stealth, but they cannot counter Stealth either... they have no Revealing skills. So they are just as at risk of other Stealthed foes as anyone else, perhaps even more so. And seeing that almost all of their defenses are active, they cannot mitigate the damage coming from an invisible attack. This is especially troublesome for non-Dagger/Pistol/Rifle Thieves who cannot enter Stealth on demand simply to avoid getting hit.

Now, it would be a different matter if "Reveal" skills only removed a Thief from Stealth instead of locking it out completely. But until given a trait or some other method of countering Revealed, Thieves have enough trouble already. Stealth is just as much a defensive tool for the Thief than it is an offensive one.

There is already a still to counter reveal. DE elite.

Also, the reason for reveal in the first place was the fact that so many classes could stealth reset and burst. We don't need a counter to a counter.The only reveal skill that see play is gaze of madness on rev.Engineer has it on traits, so does warrior. DH has it on class mechanic on a spec no one plays outside of silver.Running actual reveal skills on your bar is just not worth it.

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