Swagg.9236

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.

It kind of blows that Lightning Rod is the only viable way for core staff ele to inflict """decent""" damage, but it's abused by weaver memes that have far more mobility, spammable strikes and baked-in effect negation via evasion and stability.

There is so little terrain to use in 2v2 that it's laughable that you'd even try to make that point. Denying teleports and invalidating certain classes by standing on a planter just shows how much of a meme that GW2 high-level strategies are.Communicating interactions is one of the MOST BASIC THINGS that anyone could hope for from any group of people in any sort of vaguely cooperative environment. The fact that you're relying on this sort of thing as proof of GW2 having a decent skill ceiling is another travesty.Personal play can be invalidated by build match-ups. More importantly, even in favorable or "even" build match-ups, there will be a CONSTANT stream of abilities which are just negated by things that a player cannot help (i.e. baked-in evades, dodges, stability, blocks, invulnerabilities) because if you go into a fight and, for some reason, refuse to use all of your best abilities either up-front or very reactively, then the guy on the other side who decides to use all of his best abilities up-front or very reactively will probably either outright win or just swing the momentum very quickly. The problem with GW2 players is that they will use these as arguments against someone's skill level ("Oh, you can't deal with someone negating your effects or attacks, you must be bad"), rather than wondering what things might be like if damage mitigation were something more universally accessible such as by using baseline movement or positioning abilities. As it stands, there is very little variety in gameplay mechanics from class to class in GW2, and what sets certain classes or builds above others is in how certain classes or builds just have more access to the best mechanics (i.e. teleports, damage negation, self-healing, and rapid outgoing damage). The only thing that "improving your personal play" in GW2 really earns anyone is a very passive attitude toward encounters; it turns people into cowards who only engage in fights that they know that they can win or escape from with relative ease.

Again, what's so different about 2v2 from 5v5? What does 2v2 bring to the table that 5v5 doesn't? Why would anyone playing 5v5 want to get into the situation which is forced upon participants of 2v2? If 5v5 is so heavily controlled by builds and team-comps, how is 2v2 any different (or possibly even worse in this regard)? I don't hate game mode variety either, but GW2's 5v5 and 2v2 modes don't differentiate enough from each other to warrant support like this. You will never adequately define "adapation" and "team-gaming" in a way which will allow a team of 2 rifle warriors with physical utilities to beat a team of 2 firebrands. I know that I'm drawing a hard line here, but it's for the purpose of establishing the point: GW2 hits a ceiling, after which, pre-game set-up is what determines a winner rather than the active decisions of a mid-match encounter. This is why, wherever you go in GW2 PvP (WvW, Conquest, Stronghold, 2v2), people using one build will groan at the sight of certain other builds or just attempt to avoid other classes entirely. This isn't like Team Fortress 2 or something, where you can pick up meme weapons and top a scoreboard with creative usage or just by being a god at movement; GW2's scoreboard will always consistently reflect the builds that people took into a match far more than how "good" a person is at GW2. In fact, it's far easier to base one's "skill" in GW2 by a metric of knowing good hard-counter match-ups more than mechanical or improvisational skill (because even a build in a hard-counter advantage situation can still lose to its prey if the normal predator just doesn't have cooldown buttons to press vs its opponent(s)). And before you cry about how I used an FPS as an example for problems with a tab-target MMORPG, then, YES, think about that for a second: what sort of mechanics in GW2 REALLY separate the classes out? Who, in a 2v2 especially, brings something truly unique to the table which might adequately warrant a team-play partner build rather than just another copy of itself or another build which more or less just does the same thing? GW2 lacks class differentiation and role depth, and that's what hurts the 2v2 mode most of all: no class brings anything unique to the table in that 2v2 situation, so the mode is just ruled by the class(es) that best perform(s) in dealing damage while self-healing and mitigating incoming effects. There is no Mesmer, or FB, or Necro, or whatever; only "meta." Then why do we have so many build options that don't perform well consistently? That's called bloat. This is where I go back to how I said the "2v2 deathmatch mode is inherently a bad idea pushed (and to an extent accepted) out of desperation for something other than more Conquest." It's like everyone who plays GW2 just likes proving my points. And if it's a "side thing," why not just toss it into the unranked slot instead? Or, HEAVEN FORBID, why not ACTUALLY CODE a means of having 2v2 and Conquest both concurrently exist as activities which would contribute to a ranked ladder placement?

I play core, DPS staff elementalist. Ah yes I see. Basically the same problem but just from the other extreme. 2v2s is definitely gonna favor bruisers. Ele probably has better access to this than some others but their need to specialize presents the same problems.And that sort of response again sort of just reinforces my main point in the same way that: By instantly defaulting to "it's a build problem" response ("bruiser" being a term for "generic DPS lad who self-heals and mitigates damage while doing damage rotations"), you're mostly just reconfirming how GW2's 2v2 PvP is so build-centric that it drowns out player expression and creativity (even moreso than 5v5 already does). You're basically reinforcing my point by condensing the mode's issues down to "delete build X and Y." It's not a matter of which builds are dominant in GW2 2v2 PvP; it's the fact that BUILDS RULE EVERYTHING. There is no room for player creativity, expression or initiative in that mode. It's just a drunken slap-fight with pre-fight build set-ups determining advantage and victors. Delete necro and fb from 2v2, and you'll just have two other builds rule it instead. From my experience so far? There is a variety of builds that can work as long as you don't have to think about "can it win vs fb and necro". Every time I did a 2v2 post patch and it wasn't either of those it was 1, a lot more fun and 2 way more balanced and you really felt like it could go either way at least if both teams were equally skilled.So yea while it might be a bad way to go about it, fb and necro are what is limiting creativity because they are so oppressive.GW2 is not a game of deep mechanics and player creativity. Being so soon after the patch drop, things are still in flux, but the nature of this game has always been to settle with a very narrow meta of optimal builds which mostly just do the same thing. This patch didn't really change anything aside from the cadence of GW2 PvP combat. This game has no more roles or unique mechanics than it did pre-patch, and that's ultimately going to be the determining factor for what the meta line-ups become in the weeks going forward. Things might look different, but they are quite effectively still the same. Kill fb and necro, and something else is waiting in line right behind it. Kill those, and you'll get something else. If you want to avoid this carousel, you need actual roles in your role-playing video game.

You're basically reinforcing my point by condensing the mode's issues down to "delete build X and Y." It's not a matter of which builds are dominant in GW2 2v2 PvP; it's the fact that BUILDS RULE EVERYTHING. There is no room for player creativity, expression or initiative in that mode. It's just a drunken slap-fight with pre-fight build set-ups determining advantage and victors. Delete necro and fb from 2v2, and you'll just have two other builds rule it instead.

I play core, DPS staff elementalist.

To elaborate, first ask the question: what establishes the conditions of a "bad, 5v5 side-node fight?" The answer is generally: it's wasted time because the build match-ups are bad. In GW2's 5v5 Conquest mode, one of the worst things that a player (or players) can do is be in a spot which will not contribute to the score counter. This sort of situation can often be circumvented by just using the minimap, thus making it very easy to identify what might be called a "bad rotation" into an unfavorable match-up. Again, since much of this information is freely and gratuitously given via the minimap (which also displays class icons), many classes will outright avoid certain areas of the map based on where certain other classes are. This interaction not only highlights one of the more fundamental issues of GW2's PvP (the overbearing nature of hard-counter dynamics which often suppress player creativity), but it also sort of shows why and how a GW2 PvP, 2v2 deathmatch mode is inherently a bad idea pushed (and to an extent accepted) out of desperation for something other than more Conquest. Effectively, the current 2v2 deathmatch mode in GW2's PvP is a one-way ticket to the one situation which anyone playing Conquest wants to avoid most. This, however, is not because it's actual fighting rather than just doing a maypole dance around the points; the reason why people in Conquest avoid "bad rotations" is because "bad rotations" inherently mean that you're probably going to end up being forced to "fight" someone with a build that is either going to instantly kill you without any effort or a build that will just press buttons and never take any damage from your attacks. It's not a fight; it's a waste of time, and most importantly, it's entirely dictated by build match-ups. What this means for 2v2 itself, is that the entire game-mode is just build match-ups. No creativity, no terrain gimmicks, no real strategy. Just builds. Which probably explains why it's dominated by such a tiny number of optimal team set-ups and single builds (because, knowing full well, that you're about to be teleported into an inescapable side-node fight, wouldn't you probably choose the most generically powerful build possible?). That said, a 3v3 scale might be slightly better (and possibly even palatable) for a GW2 "deathmatch" mode, since you get a little more team-play with that size. You can stop with the Best of 5, though. That's tortuous. Don't wall fashion behind this garbage, by the way, thanks.

Taking offensive actions while immune to all field effects encourages boring gameplay.

Rocket would like a word with you. You don't aim that skill. It just doesn't track, and it moves slower than players most days. Since you don't have the option of manually aiming it or placing its destination, it's beyond the realm of "easy or hard to hit." huh? You do manually place its destination. You have to manually aim it with a 6 second delay at max range. He's got you there tbhOctober 2013: This skill is now ground targeted.You can tell how long I've since forgone the turret engie memes. That said, it feels like you're REALLY, REEEAAAALLLY STREEETCHING here for an example to my contrary if you're resorting to the engineer Rocket toolbelt skill considering how Rocket Turret is just not a thing that people use. Moreover, with a 240 radius, if all you're looking for is a hit, there's almost no way that you'll miss this if you're fighting on a point. It's going to force an evade/block or something, but, as I've said before, those are technically hit confirms that are just negated because Anet thought it would be best to go the frustrating passive route with combat design rather than really designing skills based on timing, movement and aim. Granted, considering how GW2 is built on GW1's engine (one which was already quite clunky--despite its innovative skill, class, and progression designs--when that game launched). So, yes, while he's got me, it's a super cherry-picked call out that nobody considers a valid skill at any point right now anyway. Now how about you talk about meta build CC and how difficult that is to hit?

Rocket would like a word with you. You don't aim that skill. It just doesn't track, and it moves slower than players most days. Since you don't have the option of manually aiming it or placing its destination, it's beyond the realm of "easy or hard to hit."