Swagg.9236

having 1 longer cooldown skill with bigger impact adds more to the game, mind games, baiting it out, assessing risks etc etc, problem is RN many of those elites are long cooldown downgrades. Since you have such a big list of things to do which revolve around one random person's single button (which that person has possibly not even used yet), you are really devaluing the worth of the rest of the game's mechanics. That's why a plethora of baseline mechanics and abilities are much better to an "Ultimate" alternative. The best kind of "Elite Skill" improvement would be to just turn them into Utility Skills and expand that pool. depends from perspective, there is a reason why 95%+ of champions in mobas has basic abilities with low cooldowns and 1 stronger long cooldown ability, giving 1 lower impact low cooldown skill might just make the game more spammyAside from the fact that you immediately reach for another game rather than trying to stand within GW2's fundamentals for its own defense, one of the things about MOBAs is that champions have, at most, single-digit numbers of abilities which work to create a purpose and identity for any given champion. GW2 has dozens more abilities per class than any given MOBA champion (not that that's necessarily a good thing in and of itself), so in the shadow of an "Ultimate" ability, you are really holding a lot more actions hostage in GW2 than in any given MOBA. When four or six skills lose out to one dude's Ultimate, it's already somewhat frustrating, but when 20 are invalidated by a person pressing a single button, it's an even worse scenario. This means that, rather than having two different design paradigms constantly fight against each other, GW2 either deserves to have a massive skill culling or maybe they ought to re-design their "Ultimate" abilities around the fact that everyone is already going to be using a whole mess of skills over a protracted period of time.

having 1 longer cooldown skill with bigger impact adds more to the game, mind games, baiting it out, assessing risks etc etc, problem is RN many of those elites are long cooldown downgrades. Since you have such a big list of things to do which revolve around one random person's single button (which that person has possibly not even used yet), you are really devaluing the worth of the rest of the game's mechanics. That's why a plethora of baseline mechanics and abilities are much better to an "Ultimate" alternative. The best kind of "Elite Skill" improvement would be to just turn them into Utility Skills and expand that pool.

I'll say it again: Just delete the "Elite Skill" classification, re-balance/cull the existing ones, and then give everyone a fourth "Utility Skill" slot. That's infinitely more fun than "better" elites. Elite Skills as "Ultimates" are awful because nobody enjoys it when everyone on the field has to snap-respond to a gameplay-warping mechanic that some player generated at the press of a button: it's not fun because it's not fair; it disrupts the flow of combat with flavor-based, super niche, and artificially-generated circumstances rather than relying on a foundation of core mechanics which players have to use to the best of their ability.

Thief has never been fine. It was in meta-tier from 2012 due to the fact that it either started with or quickly gained access to the most broken abilities in GW2: stealth, teleporting and attacking while mitigating incoming damage (either by evading or by simultaneously inflicting blindness). Moreover, due to the class' sole respective access to Initiative, Thief can repeatedly use many of these skills in oppressive strings which allot them an impunity to combat which no other class could replicate. If a Thief had to peel from a fight, it would peel; and it would consistently flee and teleport around until it found a fight that it simply would win. It's not just an anti-fun, passive playstyle; it's one which cannot be countered by conventional play exhibited by the rest of the class base. What this did for GW2 at large is that, with constant, incremental buffs alongside the introduction of Elite Specializations, every other class in the game slowly became more and more Thief-like in order to compete. Classes inflicted damage more quickly; they started moving around the field faster; and their damage grew higher and higher within the spans of invulnerability which they could now chain together during combat. Thief has never been adequately addressed as an oppressive outlier hiding within a band of 7 (now 8) other classes. Instead of addressing what made Thief fundamentally broken and just re-designing things around it, Anet threw SO MANY BANDAIDS over the severed femoral artery that is "bAlaNCe bY cOOldOWn" that, without any sort of resource mechanic to balance skill use, other classes started competing with Thief due to the sheer value that they received from pressing any given button. This whole conversation has nothing to do with people who play like to play Thief or really Thief in general. Thief is mostly fine but ONLY IF every other class in the game can affect the field in a flow-based way which Initiative allows: multiple instances of the same attack and repeat replication of certain combos. Since nobody can do that except Thief, fighting against any class as a Thief is mostly just a "on-the-rails" schema which mainly involves playing footsies with an opponent's cooldowns rather than really challenging anyone on a mental level. If the rest of the class line-up had the opportunity to mix-up attacks rather than being bound by cooldowns, then we would see a much higher skill level in GW2. tl;dr: Thief is broken, and Anet's solution was just to make every other class just as broken (except also without respective resource mechanics). If you really want Thief to be """OK""" then you just need to balance every class around Initiative and no/low cooldowns (and even if you do that, you basically turn Thief into the hollow shell that it always was from the outset: little more than flavor bait for certain personality markets and an advertisement for "HEY GUYS, WE HAVE INVISIBILITY NOW LOL!").

This is NOT a L2P issue by virtue of the fact that there is no counterplay to an opponent pressing the "Shocking Aura" button: this isn't referring to "just don't attack the shocking aura guy, bro," excuses; the crux is that, if an opponent has a "shocking aura" button, tell me which in-game mechanic is going to prevent that opponent from activating it? Considering how shocking auras are often generated either instantly or in the midst of a rapidly striking, titanic AoE field which people generally attempt to outright avoid, shocking auras are things that are generally going to appear on the field with total impunity. There are no dodges, interrupts or other niche mechanics which are consistently going to stop a player from gaining a shocking aura. What this means is that if a player uses Lightning Reflexes and gets stunned from Shocking Aura, it's probably because of a coincidence rather than a misplay. In fact, I'd argue that it's more difficult to deliberately stun oneself via PBAoE on an opponent's Shocking Aura; and any real certainty within this sort of stun-loop interaction between Lightning Reflexes and Shocking Aura is probably more because the Elementalist builds which employ Shocking Aura are generally (unless the player is entirely hapless) going to just walk up to their targets and hang very close nearby through a combination of scripted movements, extra dodges and stability. Also, good luck trying to contest a point and not proccing Shocking Aura's passive. Honestly, Shocking Aura is a super braindead, passive buff which is mostly just anti-fun. It could use a more proactive re-work to its effect. Stun breaks in general, considering how they are designed to be free-fire skills, shouldn't inflict damage anyway. how is it not a l2p issue when you have 2 other non triggering stunbreaks and stab elite, but you decided to lr into shocking aura which had a big tellThere is generally zero tell when it comes to an opponent activating Shocking Aura (what you meant to say was that it has a high-visibility particle effect). The only Shocking Aura ability with a tell is the Air Attunement Overcharge (and generally people can mitigate that "downside" by pre-casting it and using Lightning Flash, or just by having stability); every other instance of that aura is instant. On top of this, if a Elementalist is using a build that features Shocking Aura, then that Elementalist is going to effortlessly close the gap to you or to a capture node. Only once the gap is closed will that Elementalist appropriately activate an instant Shocking Aura. Basically, if an Elementalist is going to use Shocking Aura, that Elementalist is going to use it once directly on top of you, and there is basically nothing that you can do to stop this. What this means is that anybody taking Lightning Reflexes will immediately, without question and without concession have that ability removed from their skill bar. That's not a "play" issue; it's an ability design issue in how one is utterly cut from viability in the presence of another.If anything, the fact that you casually and without a second thought mentioned three other "more viable" options to Lightning Reflexes in the face of Shocking Aura effectively proves the OP argument for a need to change LR's design. "You took the wrong skill lol," is not bound to player execution. If it's not an aspect of active, on-going combat, then it's not a "play" issue. LR being hard-countered by Shocking Aura is something determined before the game even begins, and that situation cannot be circumvented by active gameplay.

This is NOT a L2P issue by virtue of the fact that there is no counterplay to an opponent pressing the "Shocking Aura" button: this isn't referring to "just don't attack the shocking aura guy, bro," excuses; the crux is that, if an opponent has a "shocking aura" button, tell me which in-game mechanic is going to prevent that opponent from activating it? Considering how shocking auras are often generated either instantly or in the midst of a rapidly striking, titanic AoE field which people generally attempt to outright avoid, shocking auras are things that are generally going to appear on the field with total impunity. There are no dodges, interrupts or other niche mechanics which are consistently going to stop a player from gaining a shocking aura. What this means is that if a player uses Lightning Reflexes and gets stunned from Shocking Aura, it's probably because of a coincidence rather than a misplay. In fact, I'd argue that it's more difficult to deliberately stun oneself via PBAoE on an opponent's Shocking Aura; and any real certainty within this sort of stun-loop interaction between Lightning Reflexes and Shocking Aura is probably more because the Elementalist builds which employ Shocking Aura are generally (unless the player is entirely hapless) going to just walk up to their targets and hang very close nearby through a combination of scripted movements, extra dodges and stability. Also, good luck trying to contest a point and not proccing Shocking Aura's passive. Honestly, Shocking Aura is a super braindead, passive buff which is mostly just anti-fun. It could use a more proactive re-work to its effect. Stun breaks in general, considering how they are designed to be free-fire skills, shouldn't inflict damage anyway.

Pressing buttons to instantly re-position based on scripted actions is not a refined player skill. If you have to rely on scripted movement for fun gimmicks in your movement meta, then everybody needs them. Movement meta is best meta. Don't deny it to anyone. Anyone without it will be utterly left in the dust; it's the reason why Necromancer is only viable by virtue of having raid boss levels of HP. If it can't move freely around the field, then it needs an atrociously titanic brick of a health pool. Which sounds more fun? Everybody teleporting about and trying to catch each other in passing or trying to whittle down that one guy who can't teleport but never seems to run out of HP no matter how often you hit him? (PS: Thief isn't a complete entity: it's a showcase for stealth rather than a fully fleshed out class; a half-executed concept that relies on its ability to spam GW2's most overpowered mechanics in order to crutch its way to being relevant, and it's never really been a truly integrated part of the class line up)

Thinking that PvP still had a chance to be good. Also Meteornado.

The problem with trying to apply "fighting fast vs slow" to GW2 is that most players are punished for being aggressive in GW2. It's far, far too easy to punish aggressive behavior in GW2 by just reactively playing the cooldown game or abusing teleport mechanics. "Super high end play" in GW2 generally amounts to predictable motions on both sides with the victor being determined by mistakes made by the opponent (that is, if the player at a "disadvantage" doesn't just leave the fight). When PvP hinges heavily on automated information dumps (GW2 PvP minimap) and hard-counter match-ups, combat's importance is whittled away from the equation: in GW2, the outcome is the massive emphasis on "good rotations" in almost every PvP match; it's almost better to be able to spam teleports on the ground while glancing at a minimap than actually fighting other players in this game. This sort of paradigm takes combat speed out of the question when it comes to "What is the best way to approach a fight" in GW2. The real questions are generally something along the lines of: Is it a +1 or am I going to have to 1v1? If it's a 1v1, can my build easily beat this opponent?Does that person have cooldowns available?Do they have a node that I can decap for free right now?This is bordering on the levels of flow-charts, which are generally made to mock low skill levels rather than define the complexity of player options in any given moment; and it's mostly derived from the "balance by cooldown" paradigm established by GW2 during its development when they ditched energy and energy potions. If players had the option to use certain skills multiples times in a row, it would be possible to use them "incorrectly" in ways far beyond just flubbing them against someone who was invulnerable at the time (this is how launch GW2 saw a lot of Heartseeker Thieves quickly labeled as "noobs" and such whereas most other classes were just trying to figure out what they could do with most good cooldowns languishing in the 20-40s territory). It's important to talk about different game genres, their differences, their similarities, and how they overlap, but GW2's PvP gameplay is so suffocating when it comes to player expression and creativity that it's very difficult to discuss how "good" aspects of other games can apply to GW2 without automatically discussing GW2's COMPLETE OVERHAUL. Now, I'll be the first to argue that GW2's current combat cycle is utterly deserving of a complete scrapping and re-working, but nobody really agrees, and would rather just see this stagnant mess see little baby iterations until the servers shut down. Overall, the situation is very regrettable.

Ranger is a duellist class by design and concept, evades and escapes are linked to the nature of the class itself, every game you go and play a ranger archetypes ..you will find the same kind of evasive/escape potential : Aion-FF online- EoS - WoW etc etc If people don't want that kind of gameplay..then give a shield and a mace to rangers along with heavy armor and call it "warrior with a pet", I don't detract anything from your post..some giving some additional infos From your Profile icon , shall I assume you play a guard?! Played one for hundreds of hours and know the traitlines by heart, played it from pvp to wvw passing through pve...same thing with war in case you play one . I know exactly the levels of sustain I can reach on guardian and warrior and yeah...without saying too much, you have not much room (if at all ) to complain about ranger sustain ( which I play too) Ranger deserves some nerfs...but let's not get too crazy..because if we start looking at the sustain of ranger too much....guardian and the rest won't get a free pass Wouldn't that also be true to the thief class? It would be like trying to have a thief who doesn't evade and doesn't go stealth and backstab, and people endlessly complain about the mechanics. People complain about the endless reset and engaging/disengaging options which don't make for fun gameplay ...like a 1500 range archer sniper oneshotting people with 3k armor, it's possible to maintain the duellist nature without making it too oppressive for people to faceThe question then becomes why does GW2 have something like 3.5-5 duelists?

You should thank Anet devs for making pets SO worthless that they died in every activity (entirely excluded from PvE because their pets were always dead which resulted in low DPS; very hit-or-miss in PvP due to the same issue). Their solution--instead of re-working pets into something more useful like Engineer kits, Phantasms, etc.--was to just bump their stats out into orbit so that they wouldn't die the moment that somebody glared at them. GW2 Ranger Pets are pathetic, and they need an entire overhaul oriented toward less consistent field presence and more toward direct user control. You can't just have a defenseless, slow-acting, player-level AI minion loose on the field in GW2 and expect it to live more than 3 seconds; this game isn't built for that.

Movement meta is the only good meta. Unfortunately, GW2 is not a good game for high-skill movement.

Just delete the "Elite Skill" classification, re-balance/cull the existing ones, and then give everyone a fourth "Utility Skill" slot. That's infinitely more fun than "better" elites.

I like how the judgement of "your play is bad" hinges entirely on a pre-game, hard-counter decision rather than actually playing the game. Truly this is the peak of the GW2 PvP skill level.

This game's minimap is one of the most egregiously generous info-dumps in videogames. This sort of hand-holding gameplay aspect singlehandedly destroys such a huge amount of otherwise necessary gamesense development, that it becomes very difficult to balance attacks and movement abilities around "being high skill level."While most classes are technically "different," they aren't necessarily "unique" in any particular way. This is evidenced in how everyone who plays [Class X] throws a fit when [Class X] receives a nerf to one of its generic means of teleporting or negating enemy damage or effects, but people generally learn to live with raw damage nerfs or let it slide when random things get buffs to baseline damage. The entirety of GW2's gameplay cycle is effectively based around the few, mostly identical skills in each class respectively which allow them to move instantaneously or take actions/move during periods of protracted invulnerability (i.e. blocking, evading, being "invulnerable"). These abilities are so narrow in scope, so generic, so game-definining, yet so limited in raw execution that it's an utter brain-melter that anybody associated with GW2's development even dared to think that this game deserved more than 3-4 unique classes. This is how Thief has always been meta, and why everybody screamed bloody murder when Ele focus lost its "hahaha, I can do anything I want for 3 seconds now" button. The problem with basing GW2's gameplay cycle around such myopic, auto-pilot abilities is that players can technically become good at GW2, but when it comes to two "good" players in GW2 fighting each other, the only reason that anyone loses a fight is when someone makes a mistake. How does one outmaneuver somebody with teleports and a super-helpful minimap which goes so far as to show potential class match-ups at any given location in real time? How does one out-play a player who can't receive damage while attacking? How does one use raw movement to dodge a player who can just teleport to selected targets (sometimes even through terrain)? While there are concrete answers to these questions (playing super passive, just rotating to other locations, using no-teleport spots, etc), most of the replies to the metagame-defining aspects of GW2 generally put all of the game's combat onto predictable rails rather than allowing players to improvise and iterate.What this means is that, as a player approaches the "top levels" of GW2 PvP, the skill ceiling clamps down on them very, very quickly. Victories and losses often come down to a tally of mistakes made by one side rather than instances of players mechanically outplaying opponents. This game's skill ceiling is suffocating, and therefore, pushing the game to new heights is not the defining factor for wins and losses at the apex of competition. It's not about player expression; it's about patch notes and watching the minimap. That's not fun to grind; that's not fun to watch; it's not fun to play.tl;dr: Balance all you want to the "top tier" of GW2. You'll see zero changes outside of maybe just culling 80% of the game's skills, gear and weapon sets (which, honestly, isn't really that much of a loss). The problem isn't that the game isn't balanced towards "good players," it's that "being good" in GW2 doesn't mean a lot on the scale of pushing player creativity and raw execution.

EXTREMELY debatable to the point of almost being empirically incorrect. GW2 is a spam game in which every action (including auto-attacks) are considered "skills." It's almost impossible to flub an interrupt on a target that isn't actively (passively) mitigating incoming damage or effects (via performing actions while blocking/evading/invulning/memeing). It's more like passives should never have had this much of a grip on combat in the first place if you didn't want a massive meme fest of a PvP mode.

It's impossible for a game to be engaging if players can't just negate incoming control effects because control effects always have to be omnipresent, super overbearing, and incredibly easy to inflict?? lmao OK

Revenant is a forced, flavor-based advertisement for an expac, but it somehow was made into the game as a playable class instead of just being a bunch of new mechanics spread amongst the already-existing classes in a way which provides new, interesting abilities for them.Passives and pre-game build selections still often rule over active skills when it comes to gameplay execution.Manual movement is entirely worthless in comparison to scripted movement and teleports; this game has zero movement tech.Every "good" build in PvP is essentially just a copy of one another: they all utilize the same sort of attacks and movement abilities which passively negate positioning and incoming attacks while also self-healing.This game has such a razor-thin mechanic base that no matter how much anyone asks for "re-works" or "re-balancing" for certain skill types (i.e. Engineer kits, Necromancer minions, Guardian Spirit Weapons, etc etc), you are going to just end up power-creeping and overlapping functionalities. If you ever want to see any sort of roles or unique skills emerge from this game, you would first have to cull about 75% of this game's gear stats options, weapon skills, and utility skills. Only then could you start to sift through the worthwhile, role-defining abilities and divvy them out accordingly to various classes.I fixed your list for you.

Some guy I saw in the HotM lobby mentioned how the game is coming back to life because of the dev changes, evidenced by all the new people trying PvP lmao.

Maybe the problem was trying to put roles into a game with no gameplay systems to support them. Nobody consistently frontlines in a game without dedicated healers, and since people were probably getting pin-balled all over the place during development, somebody suggested throwing stability in to bANd-aiD the issue. Stability is a tourniquet: it just ties people over in the presence of suffocating CC spam; it doesn't do anything about the fundamental problem that GW2 has far too much hard CC with relation to how easy any of it is to land on a target. Anet wouldn't say anything (and honestly, most of the original dev team have since bailed on this tire fire), but if you asked them, I would bet you money that they would say that stability was NOT a core design element of GW2 when it was being initially developed. That's why it's a problem: it's not a real gameplay element; it's a slap-dash attempt at hard-negating an overbearing aspect of this game's combat that nobody could bother to adjust properly. People are free to play what they want and do what they want within a game, but you can't really argue how there is a clear game-design flaw at work if the mere presence of something like a passive, hard-negate mechanic not only swings fights so strongly, but behaves so drastically different at just a slight scale shift in the number of participants within a given PvP encounter. It's not at all in-tune with the rest of the game.

Implying there's no cc spam and condi spam. Actually being okay boon strips in downstate, or just random boon strips altogether that can ruin a whole entire fight with the least of vague calculated weapon swaps on boon generation. Why do a majority of replies have to be the same statement that tries to be edgy in the least related way to the topic possible. Why are stability and resistance so crucial to so many builds in GW2? You've answered it yourself: it's because CC spam and condi spam are baked into most player's basic rotations. So, again, the question becomes, instead of relying on incredibly reactive and mentally passive buffs like stability and resistance, why not just have a game that isn't saturated with suffocating hard CC and DoTs that just outright kill players in short order? If anything, stability and resistance are just wimpy, band-aid fixes: failures from a game-design standpoint; additions of an incompetent dev team that didn't have a clear focus for what they wanted out of the thing that they were making. Rather than asking why people can remove stability and resistance so easily, you really ought to be asking why stability and resistance exist at all. If you can't, then you can't really see the true root of the problems with GW2's clown-tier PvP.

Why not just make a game that isn't so cripplingly dependent on braindead, auto-pilot boons like stability and resistance?

If you're playing a (probably meta-braindead) build which can easily throw the map balance off kilter should you win or lose a fight, you should, instead of being a big passive boi during the pre-game and then getting mad after people tell you where to go, take the initiative and tell people your plan, and try to tailor their opening movements and intentions to your consistency. If I ever planned to do something unorthodox from the outset, I would tell my teammates just to keep them in the loop (or even just get them to tag along). I've gotten a lot of people to split sides from the outset on Foefire just because I would press the "See enemy team line-up" button and make a quick, one-line argument about why the midfight was going to be cancerous. That alone is all it takes. I played a build that often operated best on going far too, but I wouldn't just leave my team hanging on the mid-fight. I would either tell them to split sides (3 far; 2 home) when the gate opened, or at least tell them that I'd try to help the midfight before breaking toward far later on. tl;dr Communication is key, and initiative is the key to keeping that channel for communication open. Just open up the team comp panel, and make an argument for why you going far is good; and maybe even ask some people to join you if you think it's worth it.

GW2's mechanic base is far, far too shallow to support its line-up of individual "class" options. You'll never get proper roles and playstyles unless you see anet remove at least 5 of the professions from the game. The only thing that works anymore is one-man-armies with super-generic builds (even saying "anymore" is sort of a stretch considering how this situation was a massive problem even back in 2012; it has always been a problem, and it has only gotten worse). This feels particularly bad considering how I enjoyed playing multiple professions from GW1, and I respected the fact that any team (particularly PvP teams) were often a sum of their parts rather than a hodge-podge of individuals with braindead skills slamming into each other (i.e. I loved playing Ranger in GW1, and it felt like being part of a team, but I'd delete GW2 Ranger in a heartbeat if I could, and I don't feel good about that).

"JUST DON'T ATTACK, BRO" is not counterplay considering that the Revenant can still take any sort of action during that window. Considering how Healing Skills are designed to sustain combat duration, it's important to compare them within that framework. Looking at all Healing Skills in the game, one is hard pressed to find one which does as much work as Infuse Light: effectively instant cast, a baseline healing amount, perfectly negates all incoming damage and also just adds that damage to the user's healthpool as healing, has a fixed duration which cannot be influenced; it more or less throws every meta mechanic into one skill. Infuse Light isn't so much a Healing Skill as it is a combat rotation skill: people use it to effortlessly keep pressure on when opponents have to rely on their own Healing Skills in order to sustain combat duration (and heaven forbid you're in a teamfight when the enemy Revenant is suddenly no longer a viable focus target because they pressed a button; that can screw up the entire teamfight dynamic). The only other Healing Skill that comes remotely close to being as powerful as Infuse Light is Defiant Stance, and that skill has two large downsides in comparison: it has a longer baseline cooldown, and it has a massive opportunity cost associated with it considering that, in order to take it, one has to give up "hahaha, I'm regenerating health forever now" which nobody would do. The only reason why Infuse Light or Revenant isn't seen as such an egregiously oppressive issue anymore is because their burst output was cleaved into pieces with the global damage nerf. However, considering that Infuse Light still remains the fulcrum upon which the Revenant's PvP viability swings, and also considering how the only thing which would probably tip Revenant back into S-tier would just be a braindead damage buff, it really goes to show just how hard-carried the entire class is by a single, baked-in Healing Skill. If Revenant wasn't "Thief with some cooldowns but also Defiant Stance" but instead just "Thief with some cooldowns," it would be as worthless in gameplay practice as it already is as a thematic class in GW2. Infuse Light is a braindead, garbage skill which has no right to exist, but if you cull it, you also utterly kill the Revenant. That said, the Revenant never deserved to exist in the first place, so it's more or less all up in the air lmao.