Swagg.9236

And the PvP was just as shallow then as it is now.

Lord DGAF is the patron spirit of GW2 mainly because anyone who has played this game for more than a few weeks can probably open up the team roster pre-match in PvP and get a feel for how the game will play out. The team comps are RNG and the encounters are rock-paper-scissors. Might as well just run off meta for the giggles if player skill is suppressed to that degree.

Maybe it's just that nobody here played during launch. Maybe nobody remembers how the only thing that Thief couldn't dance around or utterly obliterate was the apex of the time: d/d Elementalist running 3 cantrips and as much passive healing as possible. Maybe nobody remembers how a very viable, often seen and arguably meta comp was 4 d/d eles + X, and most player-held tournaments at the time forced teams to limit their roster to a maximum of 2 instances of a unique class (entirely just to suppress Elementalists). Maybe nobody remembers how the only time any other classes rose up to challenge Thief for a team slot was either because it was a portal bot Mesmer or because some random class got a flavor of the month buff (such as spirit spam Ranger/"petting zoo"). Maybe nobody realizes that all of the buffs and additions over the course of this game's lifespan have basically all been trending toward emulating what Thief has always had: offensive capability while negating damage and movement with impunity. Maybe nobody can see beyond the surface of how basically every class in the game (besides maybe Necromancer) has more or less become a Thief to some degree: evading while attacking; negating damage for protracted amounts of time; teleporting around. Back in 2012/2013, Thief was nearly immune to damage with a single D/P 3 into 5 while spamming autos. That, combined with built-in stealth access, was often enough to scare people into defensive postures or force players to spend huge threat skills just to get the Thief out of damage range. As skill activation times continued to lower and damage continued to increase, the Thief playstyle shifted from D/P to S/D because of the protracted evasion and teleport spam (because blinds just couldn't suppress outgoing damage well enough at that point). Yet regardless of the patch, shortbow 5 was always there to carry Thief to relevance on any team simply due to how it could let a player traverse a map at ludicrous speeds to constantly keep opponents worried about decaps or in order to +1 fights at will without having to resort to utilities or valuable weapon skills in order to speed up movement. Even as Mesmers got more and more buffs, and became a typical staple on teams, some teams would still run Thief and Mesmer in the same comp only because of how powerful that decap pressure was combined with another player's ability to just teleport an entire team to a fight instantaneously. This whole thread was basically supposed to be a call to remove all of the instant-speed attacks and godmode that has been added into the game, but even if you managed to remove everything that was added post-launch, you'd still be left with a class that repeatedly teleports and evades while attacking as its main, baseline flavor. You are, in reality, just playing Thief incorrectly. The value of no-cooldown, ground-targeted teleports is game-defining in GW2, and has been for the entirety of the game's lifespan (which is why Thief has always appeared in every GW2 PvP metagame cycle since launch). If nothing else, Thief has always been "Shortbow 5: The Class." To just dismiss that for no reason other than because maybe Thief occasionally struggles in 2019 PvP is heinously short-sighted of you. It has only one teleport naturally (Steal), but it is useful only for placing the Thief on top of a target... it cannot be used to run away. Daredevils only have half the range on it, and Deadeyes lack it altogether. You say this like you don't bring other teleports on top of that. Daredevils passively get extra evades and typically just run the regular core Thief sets on top of that (which are laden with teleports and evades both on the weapon and utility bars). If you run into combat as a Thief without a suite of teleports, you're again just playing it improperly (or just trying to meme on people really hard in unranked, which is perfectly fine). There is almost zero justifiable reason to consider any of the Thief's skill "options" outside of a tiny, cherry-picked set of the most obviously powerful (and often similar) skills. Except the Thief is constantly pressuring un-guarded nodes, and can easily inflict troublesome damage to lone players without putting himself at too much risk. It's the nature of the class in PvP. If you can't do this as a Thief, you're either bad at video games, or you've just built your bar incorrectly. A Thief should be able to constantly pressure an opposing team's formation, and it doesn't even have to rely on being in combat in order to do this. That's how strong things like Shortbow 5 are. Right, but again, all I've said was that nothing about getting access to stealth or entering stealth is difficult. For Thief, there is absolutely nothing difficult about getting stealth on your bar or going into stealth. Whether or not going into stealth at any given point is "meta" is up for debate (particularly considering how almost no meta Thief build really utilizes it in huge amounts--outside of maybe the Deadeye gimmick--typically opting instead for extra evades and teleports), but what you're basically trying to argue is how just because stealth doesn't operate as a win-button or let you get away from every threat possible, it's "difficult" to use. Seriously, just spare me. That's really just how damaged a lot of this game's playerbase is. You already talked about how you try not to waste stun-breaks until players use huge attacks like Rampage. How do you, as a Thief, not have access to easy LoS cancelling? You're basically failing at a map-knowledge level: a "skill" so fundamental and superficial that anyone should have it after playing GW2 for more than a few weeks (or even just after watching a video on some of the gimmick teleport spots among the PvP levels). Know your gimmick teleport spots and terrain through which you can teleport. It gives Thief (and other teleport classes, although perhaps not quite to the same level) a massive baseline advantage in a lot of fights. You also can just juke people repeatedly by doing things like getting chased up to that bridge area which borders Temple mid, dropping down from the bridge, and then just Shortbow 5'ing back up to the top of the bridge again from underneath. How is this even difficult?? You have evades to cover yourself while you buy time and reposition for this stuff too.

The Thief class is a flavor-based show-case class for the stealth mechanic. It's fundamental gimmick has always been stealth (even if stealth has been co-opted by basically every other class at this point to some degree). The only reason it has Steal is because somebody (probably sometime around 2009 or 2010) said that it needed a different cover-gimmick so that everyone wouldn't think that they weren't just trying to bait the WoW crowd with another generic rogue rip-off.

But Dagger 5 isn't Stealth on demand. It must successfully hit a target from melee range in order to apply Stealth. And getting a valid hit has as much to do with luck as it does skill. Imagine thinking "skill" equates to chaining a teleport into a buffered attack with a 0.5s activation time. Lmao teleports and Shortbow 5. No Thief ever dies unless it is blatantly their fault or they're going in for some bot-forward, dog-pile play in which they hope to get a positive outcome based on the rest of their team's efforts. There is effecitvely no match-up (aside from another Thief) that can consistently chase down a Thief who knows that they're in a bad position (which should be easy to recognize because this game has a huge field of view and a super helpful minimap with loads of freely given, real-time info; basically zero game-sense required). GW2 is a shallow game. Thief, without sacrificing damage (which is the only thing that really matters in GW2), gets all of GW2's best mechanics in spades without really worrying about opportunity cost. It's effortless.

I for example, I play Fire/Air DD Tempest and DD / Shortbow condi Soulbeast.I play my Holosmith with ElixirsMy Herald is always Jalis/Glint with Hammer as my main weapon. Lately, I only play Core Warrior in pvp, with Dual Axes / GS and as much stunbreaks a possible. Even if it's not "meta," that doesn't at all mean that your builds serve unique, functional roles. Making unique, functional class roles is the goal of legible combat and a "risk vs reward" attack design. No matter what you tell yourself, you're just basically playing less effective versions of the sole, generic playstyle which permeates all classes in GW2.

Yeah, let's shoehorn every class into a single Build. Because that works so well. GW2's fundamental design paradigm already shoehorns all players into more or less the same playstyle regardless of which class is chosen. If you were to limit the ways in which each class respectively deals damage but still maintained the threat from each attack, you would end up with combat that would not only be a lot more legible (as in you wouldn't have each class on the field striking 5-6 times with different actives and passives within 2-second spans), but you would also probably infuse a lot more risk/reward encounters into combat considering how people would know what to watch for and inflicting heavy damage on a targets would require either joint effort among players or a repeated effort from a single player with a limited attack kit. This is the difference between a Warrior just sort of PvE rotating through 8, fire-and-forget combat CDs, some blocks, and some panic buttons before eventually just defaulting to Rampage and a Warrior who would need to move constantly and quickly, only stopping to throw out multiple Eviscerates (or something) when there might be an opening to pressure or finish. It would mean more clarity and risk to combat, which would also mean a much, much higher skill ceiling. If there's only one or two, risk-associated attacks per class to watch, everyone is suddenly charged with avoiding and countering them actively rather than the current meta strategy of just popping a bunch of damage negation and CC immunity before charging/teleporting in and spamming.

This game needs less skills overall. Some builds already have a number of attacks which inflict near-lethal damage on their own. Why have anything more than that? Why not just design classes around one or two powerful attacks and devote the rest of the class' toolkit to unique role support and/or mobility? Within a paradigm like that, protracted damage negation and stability probably have no need to even exist at all. Instead, every GW2 build across all classes boils down to 20 lethal attacks and 4 panic buttons which negate incoming damage and effects.

Best way to change mesmer would be to address their class-defining playstyle engine: the shatter skills. There's never really been anything unique about Mesmer outside of Portal, and, if we're exclusively talking about PvP, nobody even brings that along anymore because it's just generally more meta-friendly to be another generic, unkillable clodhead dancing around a point. If you wanted a unique Mesmer with a functional role, you'd maybe want to turn the shatter skills into utility skills and then replace them with actual mis-direction and repositioning abilities like Decoy (ideally with an added, backwards blink), Blink, Mirrored Images, Portal and/or Illusionary Ambush (probably worthwhile to remove any stun breaks). Maybe leave Mind Wrack behind in the F1, re-work it into a ranged, ground-targeted AoE with a delayed strike (around which clones--also possibly the player--all teleport before the shatter occurs just for a visual cue), then dump the other 3 shatters into the utility pool, replacing them with some revamped (FAIR) versions of Mesmer's more unique utility options (possibly or ideally with clone-scaling aspects). I would have included Mimic in that line-up, but anet hates fun and unique mechanics, so now it's not really worth adding to anything.

whoops double post

Quake (3 in particular) had no builds; just the same weapons and movement tech for every player in the game. It still maintains one of the highest skill-cap thresholds for mind games and creativity that video games has ever seen within the context of PvP competition. Generally, if two players have the same build, the one who uses it more creatively is the better player. GW2 doesn't really allot the mental elbow room for this as most builds play effectively the same, and the majority of "options" in GW2 PvP languish in irrelevance simply because they outright do not compete with the meta options. GW2 is far too shallow and bloat-ridden. At this point, the best thing that anyone could do for the game would to be compress options down to the point at which there would be no "bad" builds regardless of what one picks for a build (which would mostly result in just each profession having 1 or 2 settings). This isn't a card game; no reason to have a truck load of objectively bad options littering the UI. If the compressed version of your game's load-out options results in a bare-bones and generic suite for each of your classes, then you're really just exposing the truth about your game's skill ceiling rather than "dumbing the game down." So choose Falco or Starfox. Got it.Yeah, you can play either of them a number of ways. Just stop being bad.

Quake (3 in particular) had no builds; just the same weapons and movement tech for every player in the game. It still maintains one of the highest skill-cap thresholds for mind games and creativity that video games has ever seen within the context of PvP competition. Generally, if two players have the same build, the one who uses it more creatively is the better player. GW2 doesn't really allot the mental elbow room for this as most builds play effectively the same, and the majority of "options" in GW2 PvP languish in irrelevance simply because they outright do not compete with the meta options. GW2 is far too shallow and bloat-ridden. At this point, the best thing that anyone could do for the game would to be compress options down to the point at which there would be no "bad" builds regardless of what one picks for a build (which would mostly result in just each profession having 1 or 2 settings). This isn't a card game; no reason to have a truck load of objectively bad options littering the UI. If the compressed version of your game's load-out options results in a bare-bones and generic suite for each of your classes, then you're really just exposing the truth about your game's skill ceiling rather than "dumbing the game down."

I find it absolutely nuts that people run core staff ele without Lightning Rod (and Arcane Revival to a lesser extent since I get people just wanting an extra Arcane Shield), but it's cool that people manage to make it work! Oh yeah, also, might while attacking in fire instead of MORE LAVA FONT too. I guess some of the trait options are far more optional than I thought, or maybe I just enjoy surprise rezzing people from the brink and tossing people around with Tornado way too much. Oh yeah, the runes too: I can't imagine playing without Runes of Speed. Permanent super speed is delicious. The whole package displayed in the video is just so foreign to me lol.

They're both significant issues respectively.

Fresh air is a brainlet build, though. The only real difference between "old gw2 pvp" and "new gw2 pvp" is that the numbers used to be smaller. The general playstyle was still super passive and generic across all classes. OK, so the one thing worthwhile to miss is the fact that speed boosts used to affect how far movement abilities traveled.

lmao'ing at your anet defense

This game doesn't have a learning curve: it has a big curtain and a plateau. There are a plethora of guides which reveal the secret machinations of high-level GW2 gameplay. That is to say that pulling back the curtain on GW2's meta only requires one to be functionally literate. The problem with GW2 PvP is not that it's learning curve is too steep; quite the contrary: it's skill ceiling is too low and levels off so quickly that it doesn't hold people's interest (either from a player or spectator perspective). It's a problem with the gameplay cycle.

Doesn't mean a lot to be a top player in a game with a skill ceiling as low as the one above GW2.

GW2 PvP's learning curve is super contrived because it is almost entirely comprised of esoteric, nonsense knowledge pertaining to the most ubiquitous instant and passive effects for each respective class. When it comes to development of raw gameplay ability (movement and gamesense), most of that is utterly gutted by things like teleports, a super passive meta playstyle which pervades every class, and the existence of a minimap which constantly projects so much information that it makes Halo's minimap look like Scrooge on the day before Christmas when it comes to enemy positioning. The problem with GW2's "learning curve" isn't so much that it's too steep; it's more like it's a sheer cliff constructed from absolute garbage which makes no sense to anyone who has ever played a decent video game before. However, once a player grabs one of the nearby ladders lying around (i.e. any sort of meta guide on match-ups and overpowered builds), anyone can quickly scale the wall only to find a pancake-flat plateau waiting for them filled with people lauding their abilities to press buttons just as well as the next guy while glancing at a minimap. This is to say, that learning to play GW2 PvP optimally is just a matter of learning each class' arsenal of invisible and instant attacks (which is not an interesting or dynamic way of learning how to play a non-turn-based game). Moreover, once a player "gits gud" at GW2 PvP, they will never pilot their builds any different than anyone else; the game is just too stripped down and shallow for player expression. That's mostly why the game is super dead.

WP has too many words to say simple, common knowledge.

The only MMORPG housing system is the Wildstar housing system. No others need apply; only emulate. That said, anet would never accomplish anything close to the Wildstar housing plots in their wildest dreams only because the success behind the Wildstar system was in how it allowed players to basically use a proxy for the in-engine tools in order to shrink, enlarge, rotate and freely position (even in open space) a huge number of in-game assets so that players could make huge, sprawling environments ranging from forests to diners and bars to the innards of a space vessel. Anet doesn't let any player use their in-game tools (which is why the game has so little player-generated content and fails to sustain a large population in what is effectively player-driven content like PvP, WvW and RP areas; say what you will, but apparently Wildstar was almost wholly sustained by the lattermost mentioned community during its worst times prior to its shut down). Moreover, the guild hall furnishing thing in GW2 is an absolute joke compared to a proper housing system.

lmao, considering how restrictive and one-dimensional GW2 gameplay already is on land, doing something like forcing a suite of aquatic passives upon the game and forcing players to take them in order to be viable within certain, underwater encounters would basically be the ultimate way to desecrate the already desiccated corpse that is Tyria's underwater content. Thinking further on it, I guess anet could always do that same, tired trick of forcing players to grind collections and brainless farms in an isolated zone so that they could use some arbitrary and esoteric mastery ability to kill some new underwater enemies spawned into a corner somewhere. At least that way, the garbage that would be an "aquatic trait" could be quarantined within a specific area, unable to actively bother anyone outside of its respective instances.

You're free now. You are no longer oppressed by the presence of gems in your land. Live now without gems. Truly a great land.

AND YOU MAY ASK YOURSELFHOW DO I PLAY THIS?AND YOU MAY ASK YOURSELFWHERE IS THAT DYNAMIC COMBAT?AND YOU MAY TELL YOURSELFTHIS IS NOT MY BEAUTIFUL CLASSAND YOU MAY TELL YOURSELFTHIS IS NO SEQUEL TO GW1 LETTING THE DAYS GO BYLET THE META HOLD ME DOWNLETTING THE DAYS GO BYBALANCE PATCHES CYCLE ROUNDINTO THE CODE AGAINAFTER THE DEVS HAVE QUITONCE IN A LIFETIMEBALANCE PATCHES CYCLE ROUND SAME AS IT EVER WAS SAME AS IT EVER WASSAME AS IT EVER WAS SAME AS IT EVER WASSAME AS IT EVER WAS SAME AS IT EVER WASSAME AS IT EVER WAS SAME AS IT EVER WAS

Negating damage and effects on-demand while simultaneously taking positioning and outright attacking is a broken mechanic and, fundamentally, an unhealthy dynamic for competitive combat. Evading, blocking, stability, instantaneous teleporting (often through terrain), invulnerability: they're all damage negation and they're all so consistently paired up with damage in GW2. It's why GW2 PvP is a joke.