The quality of players has never been worse.

[freedomtolove.5476]

Extreme roles are bad because it becomes a counter vs counter battle. If somebody is running full zerker damage set then you need to either be zerker too or bunker up or condition them. The damage mitigation just isn’t enough to outlast the dps in this game. This means the fights don’t last very long unless you’re in a huge zerg (wvw) but even then pro guilds will wipe pugs every time.

Also base stats like toughness and health are different across professions. Stability, condition removal, healing, crowd control and dps is unevenly spread across them too. This means that some professions are more suited to “tank” roles. While others are more suited to “condition spam”. Then there are others suited to “zerker” burst dps.

This makes the game very difficult to balance because it is unbalanced to begin with. While yes it is true every profession can be any role some are more suited to it than others. The game can not be balanced except by numbers it seems.

There is many lessons to be taken from gw1 such as all professions having the same base health. Also healing being much more effective than it currently is. Then the pvp in this game might be more than just spamming of conditions and dps. There would be a true counter rather than just damage avoidance.

I think the biggest problem is balancing for different skill levels. Because some players have better reflexes or more experience playing a profession. This means that it is not even the professions that are unbalanced but the actual players themselves.

So what I have seen Arenanet do is make very easy builds like condition bunkers that everyone can use. Then there’s zerker thieves, elementalists, bunker guards, etc, that take a bit more skill. The main problem as discussed in Sirlin’s book is balancing for skill.

This is very difficult and he said that by giving easier options that can work, but don’t work as well as something which requires more skill. That is balance and I think Arenanet know this and what we have is a game balanced for different skill levels.

That seems to be the logical way of thinking about the metas of this game in pvp and wvw. And to me it does seem balanced and if people complain they simply need to “learn to play”. But that does not mean that builds that require much more skill should faceroll everybody either.

So in conclusion Balance is very subjective but if you balance for different skill levels it becomes much easier. And that is why a game can not ever be truly balanced. Because players and people have so many different skill levels.

The way we experience competition is by winning or losing. But also I understand that by being too subjective in our opinions of balance is bad feedback. By making the pvp combat challenging but also not too hard to learn creates a diverse pvp community.

The problem is when the game is objectively balanced completely without any player feedback then it becomes very unpopular quickly. This is why Balance is subjective because players who pvp want to have fun which is highly subjective. This is just my opinions of course because I’m sure that general balance is much harder than it seems.

Let's use the conquest meta as an example. We fight each other on small circles. And we have to hold these circles to win the game.

It’s not just the power creep that is the reason these 1-shot classes are the best. It’s simply the fact that everything else that could counter the Conquest Meta has been nerfed by Arenanet to make way for Esports.

Instead of a power based twitch reaction time meta we have an abundance of 1-shot DPS and passive gameplay. We have area of effect skills ticking away on a point. We have Bunker Specs putting out enough damage to kill players.

Why is this? Because Arenanet has removed tanky amulets and replaced active damage mitigation with passive invulnerabilities. Now instead of dodging power based attacks with well timed evades we have classes running max 1-shot DPS.

These 1-shot DPS classes are dominating because other classes cannot bring enough sustain to compete with them. They are kings of DPS and 1-shots at the same time with the best ability to stack boons.

You want to know why this game isn’t an ESport Arenanet? Because you catered too much to casuals and made this game too simple. If we had Monks they at least could heal the other classes without sustain directly instead of them slowly dying to AOE and conditions.

I call this game Gank Wars 2 and there’s a simple reason why. Immobilise stacking, Stun/Daze chaining and CC spam is neverending and only certain classes have enough Stability or condition removals to escape.

There is a general lack of sustain and too much dps (both conditions and power). What is the counter to DPS? Nothing…but in GuildWars 1 it was a Monk and that is why this game lacks depth. Dodge rolls aren’t a replacement for healing and protection that a monk class would offer.

I find it funny when people assume GW1 was only theorycrafting builds and counters. The combat was just as if not more active than GW2. The fact is it had interrupts and hexes (based around punishing enemy for spamming). Proper protection and healing spells (able to almost full heal from a spike of dps). Along with Conditions, Melee and kiting, Aoes, block skills/spells and teleports. Also I probably need to mention you couldn’t just spam skills either. They were reliant on energy which you had a supply of and when you ran out it had to regenerate.

^ There’s an example of what is possible with monks. Also here’s a list of monk spells in gw1: “Monks…with their unparalleled gift for keeping their allies alive” http://wiki.guildwars.com/wiki/List_of_monk_skills

Just some ideas and my opinion about the different builds. Since the meta seems to be either extreme conditions bunker or burst spike with not much room in the middle. I’m hoping healing support can be made more viable instead of people just seeing green numbers but not getting any loot.

Bunker and support do very little damage unless they’re a hybrid to do conditions but you generally need some healing power to be a good support player.

Arenanet are buffing support healing and I am glad for it. Problem is most of the full zerker burst spike damage just cannot be outhealed. There’s not much you can do to mitigate the damage either apart from your main heal, dodges, blocks, invulns and evades.

A full zerker amulet player will die in a couple of hits yet can 1-shot other players, while a full on bunker such as a guardian can tank hits from multiple players. Also the condition guys in the middle cant really be blamed either since he needs to tank and do some dps through the toughness of the bunkers.

Even Monks can die and be pressured from burst damage as seen in the video but most importantly it gives a real counter to spamming of dps (either conditions or power damage). Right now it’s just a race to see who can spam and avoid the most damage to win hence we have all these “passive” condition builds and burst spikes that rely on being invulnerable.

Boons run out and can be stripped not to mention if the player isn’t in bunker gear they won’t be enough usually unless they have a good amount of toughness. Healing and condition removal is what keeps you alive in an actual fight and it seems to only work in wvw with lots of players running support.

Evades/dodges, condition removal, block and invulnerable skills all have cooldowns meanwhile the damage just keeps coming from autoattacks and aoes. This is why I think this game would benefit from having a monk, to counter the insane burst damage.

What I want simply is a game with monks like gw1 had where fights can actually last longer than a couple of minutes. But apparently Arenanet decided that healers are boring and everyone should just kill each other with dps. Healing and Damage Mitigation needs a real buff if this game wants to have any chance at being competitive and balanced.

Fights lasting longer hones skills and teamwork with players. The best example I can use in gw2 is wvw where there is enough support and the aoe limit of 5 prevents players being bursted down instantly if they make a mistake. The stacking zerg meta is there for a reason and all zerker and condition damage does is make it even more needed.

Remember gw1 we had so many skills and different builds and they could all be used because they countered each other. But that didn’t mean that some builds weren’t better than others for certain things. There is too many players complaining that 1 build is too powerful but in my opinion its all based on skill level. Burst can 1-shot bunker or condis but they have more defense making it harder.

Do you guys want a game with no “Overpowered” skills and everything the same and boring? Half the fun of games is to have fun and in gw1 I sure had fun in pve with my shadow form tank lol. So in all honesty maybe try different classes more and try to learn all the different skills and how they can be countered. There is no reason for nerfs because you guys refuse to adapt to the meta.

I played gw1 had fun but this combat system is more dynamic being able to actively dodge and every class having their own heals. I just get bored of the whole dps wins everything while damage mitigation and healing is not even considered. I think gw2 lacks depth and with a monk it could easily have it.

Maybe I’m just the type of player that likes when I’m needed such as Shadow Form tanks in gw1. There are many other players that I think want to be able to feel like they can help the party and be useful instead of just another player. This is why I love healing and damage mitigation and tanking is so fun.

I truly believe Thief's burst meta with bunker Guardian’s tankiness and Warrior’s Healing Signet and Revenant's invuln balance each other out. Also Engineer’s, Necromancer's and Elementalist’s Aoe damage controls conquest points. Meanwhile Ranger's pets and long distance damage can take out these targets from a distance. Mesmer’s spamming of clones also allows them to easily confuse an enemy long enough for them to burst them down. This is truly the best meta we can get and if you don’t like it experiment with builds and kill the passive no skill builds as you call them.

If some builds don’t have a counter then reroll to them since they’re obviously so overpowered and never die. Maybe try playing as a team instead of trying to 1v1 everything. Burst/zerker will die quickly that’s a fact. Would you prefer the meta to be bunkers and conditions only?

This is the state of the meta and Arenanet will not change it because it attracts the most players. Do you think that there is more skill to playing your build and everything else is cheese? This is called not playing to win and making excuses.

Everybody plays for or against a profession and thinks it is Overpowered. Well I am simply going to say that is your opinion. There is no balance when everything is “overpowered”.

Arenanet will not listen to your complaints obviously biased against certain professions. Because all you want is for them to be nerfed and your own profession buffed. I will link “Playing to win” by Sirlin now.

http://www.sirlin.net/ptw-book/introducingthe-scrub

[Stand The Wall.6987]

its easy to point fingers, and most of those fingers would have truth to them, but I think its a multi-tiered problem:

• garbaggio balance is by far the biggest factor. in most cases its too much damage. people in charge need to realize what is healthy gameplay and what is not. this is not a third person shooter. coordination and effort over skill rotation and op-ness. fix things the moment they are broke, don't wait for the entire car to fail.
• incentives need fine tuning and maintenance. the ladder and rewards were a great way to get a resurgence of players. pvp desperately needed these incentives, it was on the brink of collapse post eleague failure. im not quite sure on how to do this, but I think a shift away from material goods to mode specific skins/ skill animations/ reward buffs (the better you are the more you get rewarded, instead of homogenous grind fest) and whatnot could work. pve/ wvw have a mastery system, could pvp have one?
• i'm not sure how anet would police pvp and make sure match manipulation is curbed, but it so desperately needs to be done. if ppl don't feel like they're on an even playing field the likelihood of them leaving increases greatly.
• pve doesn't prepare new players for pvp (it doesn't prepare them for anything really). do they know the actual objective, stand on points and capture them? does their build reflect this? do they know the strengths and weaknesses of each class, what counters what? how to rotate, good team comps, general combat strategy? ppl have been asking for a tutorial for years, I think it would be a great addition and help progress newbies knowledge, leading to better fights and a more enjoyable pvp experience overall.
• fine tune matchmaker. glicko is nice, it gets most of the job done, but it was built for chess. there are so many more factors in a game like this. one of the things I think could be beneficial would be for mm to consider amulet instead of just profession. a scrapper playing the bunker build is not the same as a mender medkit scrapper, etc. deny more then one profession per team, so not even a holo and a scrapper could be on the same team. deny profession switching pre match start, this game of hot potato is not skilled and irrelevant anyway with 1 profession cap. only thing that should be able to be changed imo are traits. maybe this will see some professions/ builds not being played as much, that will suck but its a necessary sacrifice. anet will be able to see this and more accurately make balance changes based on this. yeah yeah cynics will cry bloody murder, in time myself included no doubt, but at least the option is available. deny alt accounts for ranked seasons, if not through a 1 account per ip, maybe through a credit card? that would mean f2p players can't play ranked seasons, unless their credit card info is still collected? another necessary sacrifice imo, sucks but majority rules. lastly, don't let plat2 vs gold2 lol. maybe increase the skill rating deviation mm uses to match players together for legendary and bronze, but not for the rest of us.

welp that ends my tirade. love this game but its got some problems.

[Carnifex.3275]

U joking? Every veteran player who used to take PvP seriously either moved on to other games or are 100% PvE now. Thanks to anets balancing team.. no1 enjoys that clusferf anymore. Unless just new players who still are naive and hopeful.

[KryTiKaL.3125]

@"Stand The Wall.6987" said:its easy to point fingers, and most of those fingers would have truth to them, but I think its a multi-tiered problem:

• garbaggio balance is by far the biggest factor. in most cases its too much damage. people in charge need to realize what is healthy gameplay and what is not. this is not a third person shooter. coordination and effort over skill rotation and op-ness. fix things the moment they are broke, don't wait for the entire car to fail.
• incentives need fine tuning and maintenance. the ladder and rewards were a great way to get a resurgence of players. pvp desperately needed these incentives, it was on the brink of collapse post eleague failure. im not quite sure on how to do this, but I think a shift away from material goods to mode specific skins/ skill animations/ reward buffs (the better you are the more you get rewarded, instead of homogenous grind fest) and whatnot could work. pve/ wvw have a mastery system, could pvp have one?
• i'm not sure how anet would police pvp and make sure match manipulation is curbed, but it so desperately needs to be done. if ppl don't feel like they're on an even playing field the likelihood of them leaving increases greatly.
• pve doesn't prepare new players for pvp (it doesn't prepare them for anything really). do they know the actual objective, stand on points and capture them? does their build reflect this? do they know the strengths and weaknesses of each class, what counters what? how to rotate, good team comps, general combat strategy? ppl have been asking for a tutorial for years, I think it would be a great addition and help progress newbies knowledge, leading to better fights and a more enjoyable pvp experience overall.
• fine tune matchmaker. glicko is nice, it gets most of the job done, but it was built for chess. there are so many more factors in a game like this. one of the things I think could be beneficial would be for mm to consider amulet instead of just profession. a scrapper playing the bunker build is not the same as a mender medkit scrapper, etc. deny more then one profession per team, so not even a holo and a scrapper could be on the same team. deny profession switching pre match start, this game of hot potato is not skilled and irrelevant anyway with 1 profession cap. only thing that should be able to be changed imo are traits. maybe this will see some professions/ builds not being played as much, that will suck but its a necessary sacrifice. anet will be able to see this and more accurately make balance changes based on this. yeah yeah cynics will cry bloody murder, in time myself included no doubt, but at least the option is available. deny alt accounts for ranked seasons, if not through a 1 account per ip, maybe through a credit card? that would mean f2p players can't play ranked seasons, unless their credit card info is still collected? another necessary sacrifice imo, sucks but majority rules. lastly, don't let plat2 vs gold2 lol. maybe increase the skill rating deviation mm uses to match players together for legendary and bronze, but not for the rest of us.

welp that ends my tirade. love this game but its got some problems.

• Balance has been a huge factor in killing off this games "competitive" aspects for a while, especially considering the game mode that meta is developed around in regards to sPvP. Its trashy, its cheesy, its unhealthy. It is basically just "What build better abuses the tiny circles we have to capture?"
• Incentives have needed fine tuning across pretty much every aspect of this game, its why its so casual. There isn't a freakin' reason to care. We can see that very glaringly in how they tend to "abandon" content, like PvE Dungeons and with their working on "Swiss style tournaments" and "on demand tournaments" we can very clearly see how little they care about Ranked and have been moving towards the AT style of functionality for sPvP. They need to shift away from this 5v5 Conquest obsession. It clearly didn't work considering ESL just up and went "Yeah bye" with this game 2 years ago and that was before PoF hit so you can't imagine its gotten any better.
• Incentives to play and making sPvP/PvP actually worth a damn would improve this a lot. The reason people loophole or manipulate their way into the top spots isn't just because they can, its because PvP is such a joke in GW2 that they have zero respect for it because Anet has shown they have zero respect for PvP as well.
• There was a tutorial at one point early on in the game but they removed it, mostly because it wasn't a great tutorial. It didn't really explain more of the nuances it was literally just "Look, this is a capture point. Stand on it to capture it." and thats about it. This falls into my belief that Anet needs about 1000x better communication with the PvP crowd, like actually trying to find out how their own game is played at "higher tiers". talk to streamers, youtubers, players winning in mATs even. Just something more than what they haven't been doing. Thats been the biggest problem with their balance patches as well, the changes they make just make it look like they don't even play their own game.
• Anet has need to work on its queuing system for years, they absolutely destroyed it when they removed 5 man que from sPvP. Which the only reason they did that was because, at least from my perspective, they were too lazy to add separate que options for Solo, Duo, and 5 man like literally any other "esport" PvP game and have them ranked separately.

Now as my own little addition I want to talk about how Anet needs to add more PvP modes into this game. PvE wasn't the only thing that made people love GW1, it was also all of the PvP modes that people had access to. Jade Quarry, Fort Aspenwood, Random Arenas, Team Arenas, Hero Battles (replaced with Codex Arena), Guild vs Guild, Alliance Battles, Heroes Ascent. Thats 8 modes before they merged 2 of them, and now its 7. How many does GW2 have? 2. WvW and Conquest. Could you argue that Stronghold is one? No, no one cares about it because no one plays on it and its not even used as a map in ATs because no one likes it. GW2 has needed GvGs back since it released, it baffles me as to why they haven't added it yet. "Oh because WvW can fill that gap" no it can't, especially not when it isn't supported and people can purposefully harass guilds trying to do so. They need a structure around it and actually support it. New modes would do wonders for increasing the PvP population on this game, and I don't mean some new weird brainchild that gets concocted, I mean bring in Heroes Ascent, bring in GvGs, those are the prime examples of some of the most competitive gameplay that people loved from PvP in GW1 and Anet was foolish to abandon it for their "sequel".

I honestly really hope Anet has not been working on a new paid expansion, which is an unpopular opinion I'm sure. I would rather they dedicate their time to improving on existing features, fixing QoL problems (terrain glitches, skill glitches, ingame menu functions, inconsistent design functions, etc), and balancing properly, as well as improving their communication with their community by actually* communicating with them and not just giving us some blog post.

A free massive update that includes things like new PvP game modes (GvG, Heroes Ascent-like mode, etc), Challenge/Hard Mode for Dungeons with incredibly improved and relevant rewards, a Balance Patch built from actual feedback from actual good players, addition of Solo, Duo, 5-man Ques and separate ranks/ladders for each for sPvP, and much improved incentives actually doing well and basing ranking more on individual performance rather than performance as a random team. Something like that, a free huge update, would do wonders for improving on this game after 7 years and would likely bring a lot of people back and make a lot of people actually care more.

! What I mean about "inconsistent design functions" is that there are things that they design for the game that aren't consistent with other things. As an example, take HoT maps; out of Verdant Brink, Auric Basin, Tangled Depths and Dragons Stand...Tangled Depths is the only map, literally the only one, in which its map chest (Crystallized Supply Cache) is the only one that does not have a 100% chance to give at least 1 of its map currency. Verdant Brink does, Auric Basin does, even Dragons Stand does despite its currency being probably one of the most important and sought after materials for making new Legendaries. It just doesn't make sense.

[Traveller.7496]

I've only started doing PvP a little while ago but I'm losing more matches than winning (getting close to rank 20 now) and I'm getting pretty discouraged. Am I even helping my team at all? Should I even bother when my opponents seem to be completely superior to me? What can I do to get better instead of constantly getting 1vX'd?

[bladezero.9470]

@Traveller.7496 said:I've only started doing PvP a little while ago but I'm losing more matches than winning (getting close to rank 20 now) and I'm getting pretty discouraged. Am I even helping my team at all? Should I even bother when my opponents seem to be completely superior to me? What can I do to get better instead of constantly getting 1vX'd?

What class do you play? Who do you follow online to learn? What friends do you have?

[Traveller.7496]

I've been playing your standard spellbreaker, since I do WvW and PvE on my warrior and know it the best. I have been reading some PvP resources on this forum regarding placement, tactics, rotations and combat awareness, but it's kind of a lot to take in.

I guess the main problems are I'm getting forced off the points by classes with more AoE than me and sometimes I just get spiked like crazy out of nowhere (usually revs, but also mesmers and thieves). I know it's probably just a matter of class skill awareness and experience, but it's just kind of a daunting uphill especially when you've had a long losing streak and you start to notice there being a single common denominator in all of those matches.

[Gamble.4580]

When the old gods leave, new gods are born.

[Vague Memory.2817]

There are much less people taking ranked PvP seriously. A lot of the PUGs I've been in just want to fight, even if it means losing the game. How many fights have you seen when almost all of your team are fighting far from any cap, when the other team has two caps. I'm usually the one saying "CAP" in chat. People quitting the game because their spec gets totally owned by another class, and there isn't anything they can do about it. People testing new builds in ranked and playing classes they have no experience with because they want to eke out a few wins to complete their accension track to get the Legendary wings back pack. I didn't play GW2 for about a year and when I came back I practised in unranked to get my skill level back up, and then I went into ranked, and I honestly couldn't tell the difference between the two. That wasn't always the case. The positive is there seems to be less salt in ranked now because fewer people actually take it seriously any more.

[bladezero.9470]

@"Vague Memory.2817" said:There are much less people taking ranked PvP seriously. A lot of the PUGs I've been in just want to fight, even if it means losing the game. How many fights have you seen when almost all of your team are fighting far from any cap, when the other team has two caps. I'm usually the one saying "CAP" in chat. People quitting the game because their spec gets totally owned by another class, and there isn't anything they can do about it. People testing new builds in ranked and playing classes they have no experience with because they want to eke out a few wins to complete their accension track to get the Legendary wings back pack. I didn't play GW2 for about a year and when I came back I practised in unranked to get my skill level back up, and then I went into ranked, and I honestly couldn't tell the difference between the two. That wasn't always the case. The positive is there seems to be less salt in ranked now because fewer people actually take it seriously any more.

Fighting on points and rushing for caps is a low tier tactic. Instead, understand enemy composition. See their respawn timing. Keep them off balance and off the points.

The only player that should be interested in caps and decaps is the roamer, namely S/D thief and possibly in a pinch the side noder, that is Warrior.