Lost Elegy.9276

I agree. To be brutally honest, little about Warrior works with the theme it has. The class designed to be the cannon fodder that charges in first can't even do that right. The weapons are a complete design mess. The 1h swords are the only melee weapon that applies damaging conditions. Somehow. The rest are riddled with archaic block skills that are hilariously bad when compared with newer options. Everything about the mace makes me want to cry. The hammer is even worse. One of the most feared weapons in the dark ages, alongside the mace and dagger, is reserved to a stun stick. Amazing. The only positive is the absurd power mess of greatsword. It has two gap closers, a ranged slow, burst, and great range. Its primal burst is to be feared. The cooldowns aren't even bad. A warrior without GS is a mechanist without their mech, and Anet has been happy with this for 7+ years. It's baffling. Shield is also nigh mandatory for a viable build. Offhand doesn't exist for Warrior. We are born with the shield and GS, and we will die with them. The trait lines heavily enforce... well, nothing. They honestly confuse me. The things each trait line make you better at is almost random. Defense trait line? Oh, so that should be the place for self sustain, buffs, and defense-oriented weapons, right? No. Shouts and sustain are in Tactics. Along with the Warhorn, a weapon that grants barrier and heals. Defense makes MACES better. In fact, you can pick a line of traits (Cull the Weak, Sundering Mace, and Cleansing Ire) that have no defensive properties. The class needs a complete facelift. The core idea and adrenaline system? Fine. The list of viable weapons and options? Nonexistent. Traitlines? Bewildering combinations that have been shuffled around too much.

Damage HAS to be high. Anet drank a lot of glue and decided all the self-sustain tools from PvE should make their way into SPvP. The worst offenders being traits. Even with repeated nerfs, sustain is still nutty in this game. Even if we discount the manual pressing of your primary heal skill, plenty of classes have trait lines that provide regeneration, protection, heal on X condition, passive condition removal, and a slew of other behind-the-curtain effects that just honestly shouldn't be there. The power creep over the years added a ton of stun breaks. Truly locking someone down is hard and needs to be rewarded. People HAVE to die in under 5 seconds. If not, people with any sort of investment in defensive options would just never die.

No, you are absolutely right. Asymmetric gameplay is doomed to fail from a balance perspective. WE, THE PEOPLE, DEMAND SPVP BE REPLACED WITH ONLY STICK. NO SKILLS. NO POTIONS. FINAL DESTINATION. STICK ONLY.

Your contribution is immeasurable. Most companies don't ban hackers immediately. Some have good reasons, others are lazy. Letting people abuse it gives the developers a clearer image of how it's being down and lets them knock out a larger group of guilty at once. That being said, Anet doesn't have a good track record on this issue. It feels more like incompetence than malice or laziness, though.

Honestly, I feel like this post gets closest to the real issue. Power builds have very obvious attacks to dodge. Mesmer? Dodge the shatter combo or block it. They typically daze you right before they do it to reduce your options. This clear understanding of what's dangerous and what isn't make power builds inherently more fun and rewarding to fight. Like a dark souls boss, you master the timing and see the improvement immediately. Condition builds, since games as old as WoW, have had very wonky interactions with PvP. Warlock in old WoW literally won the fight by using 3 instant cast curses that would tick down your entire health bar. They spent the rest of the fight spamming Fear so you couldn't reach them. They weren't OP (Outside a specific patch) because everyone died before the 20 second DoTs finished their work. Combat was FAST. GW2 has a slightly different issue. Condition damage builds up from a wide range of sources, and the threat is from ALL of those sources, not specific attacks or bursts than can be dodged. Take Condi Mesmer, for example. Even if you systematically kill the illusions as you chase the player, they will still hit you with small DoTs that chip you down. It's practically unavoidable. Few condition builds will burst you down, but the constant damage feels very horrible to fight against. It makes the player feel very helpless to prevent it, even if they actually have the ability to win the fight. There is a stark difference between fighting a Warrior, which feels very much like Dark Souls-esque PvP of winning through good dodge rolls and knowing when is safe to attack, and fighting a Necromancer who spends the fight swinging his stick in the air and attacks manifesting on top of you and applying a wide range of debuffs. It REALLY doesn't help that condition builds can do most of their damage at safe distances. The most comparable "annoying" power weapon that feels like fighting a condi build is the Mechanist Mortar Engi. They spam huge AoEs at you while a constant source of damage ticks away at your health bar. It's unrealistic to kill the mech, so you might as well just consider it a DoT. It's equally unrealistic to dodge all the mortar shots, given their AoE size. Condi vs Power will always be a FEELING BAD argument more than any actual balance issue.

The biggest issue with condition builds is how little you FEEL their presence. When a Norn runs at me with a sword and hits me, I see and understand it quite simply. Big monkey hit me with stick. It hurt. GOT IT. Condis? Completely different story. Old man hobbles over to you and points a finger at the ground. A skeleton from the afterlife starts moaning. Next thing you know, you suddenly have 7+ of every negative status effect in the game and you either cleanse them or you die. How am I supposed to register that? Is the old man the threat? Or the ground he's pointing at? Why is a skeleton moaning? What's this weird, massive circle on the ground? Why do I feel bad all of a sudden? I can kill a god, but standing in a green circle does this much to me? Tl;dr - The difference between how they feel is a huge issue. If something is going to hurt me as much as a Norn with a greatsword made out of a literal galaxy, it should probably have the same visual and audio weight to it.

Honestly, new players don't join sPvP. Beyond the "let's try this for a week" players who have already long since come and gone from this mode, there is next to no reason to play PvP in this game outside of masochism or delusion. There are just way better combat systems in other games. If I want a fight with tight, rewarding controls, I go to a 2d fighter. If I want adrenaline, I can go boot up an FPS or action brawler like Smash Brothers. If I want to feel smart and challenge myself, I pick up a calculator and make it say funny haha words. sPvP is a shadow of its former self. It's flooded with bots abusing the mode for currency farming (with a minimum of one in every 2 matches. Fun fact, they've moved over to Mechanist), elitists who think "fun" is min-maxing to the point of breaking the game and removing any enjoyability for the rest of us, and the broken few who still delude themselves into believing sPvP is what it used to be. The fact you're here on the forums and not in a match says all it needs to about the game mode. If it was good, you'd be playing it and not wasting your time here. If it was bad, you wouldn't be here at all. It's painfully mediocre and the devs abandoned it.

It's painful. The more you love something, the more you wish it will improve. Anet just doesn't have the same passion for sPvP that a lot of us do. Their attention is on PvE and WvW, something they care much more about. Just as a reminder, sPvP didn't get ANYTHING but a balance patch when EoD hit. We didn't even get a new map so we could ignore most of it to stand inside 3 circles for 10-15 minutes. We either accept the mode for what it is or spend more energy than its worth yelling into an uncaring void.

You are both correct. It was not satire, just a bad attempt at a joke. The joke flopped. IT HAS BEEN RECTIFIED.

Oh gods, you're RIGHT. Time to start a PETITION.

This, 100%. I would unironically adore a ranked costume brawl mode. I need to see the pulse-pounding skritt vs skeleton with a chainsaw 1v1 on twitch.

No no. He has a point. If we make it so nobody can teleport, use weapons, armor, traits, runes, sigils, or skills, we can perfectly balance the game mode. Of course, we have to limit it to a single amulet with no vitality or healing power, because that would be unfair. If everyone is the same as <INSERT MY CLASS AND BUILD HERE> then sPvP balance would be fixed.

Your first mistake was suggesting something that sounds interesting and unique. Anet doesn't like that. Anet only likes a new word they recently learned: homogenized. Reaching into the mind of the Anet balance team: *AHEM* "If everything is the same, no one will be upset. If everyone can do everything, no one will ask for buffs."

Honestly, there's a joke to be made that the only class in the game that worships the gods has the health bar of an asthmatic and exclusively relies on horrible gimmicks to stay alive. At least a D&D Cleric or Paladin can fight without cowering behind a magical barrier. Edit 2: Removed the poorly structured joke because the punchline failed.

Honestly, the issue is Mesmer itself. The class is just a clusterduck of design ideas that DO NOT mesh well. A summoner class that is also an illusionist that also is a heavy crowd control class that is ALSO a nuke machine that is ALSO an evasion machine that is ALSO... You get the point. The class is just a pain to fight, and a lot of these core class traits are to blame. Condi mesmer wouldn't be so cancer if the illusions did NO DAMAGE and didn't apply debuffs. But they do. Meaning the mesmer can just spawn illusions/phantasms and play super defensively while the illusions stack debuffs for free damage. If we look at Mesmer in its unnerfed glory?1) It is a nuking machine with access to 6 seconds of teamwide stealth every 60 seconds and a total uptime of over 12 seconds of personal stealth. It can easily pump out over 20 thousand damage in under a second FROM STEALTH in a combo that requires no skill to pull off and can be done with a macro.2) It is a class that summons an endless stream of minions that block skillshots and projectiles. Unless the enemy has piercing shots on all their attacks, them being able to hit you isn't just based on if they can find you anymore.3) Mesmer is a class with access to over 6 seconds of CONTINUOUSLY re-apply daze. You need over a stack of 7 stability to endure the daze chain, and stun breaks won't stop it. In terms of ganking power, the daze spam alone can instantly end a fight.4) Incredibly annoying to fight. Unlike other classes, who at most have a stealth to make you lose targetting of them, Mesmer has the uniquely frustrating ability to teleport around and just remove themselves from your target. Because why not? Fighting mesmer is not a fight between you and the opponent. It's a 2v1 fight between you + the game's mechanics and the opponent. On top of disjointing, the class is well known for their insane mobility and constantly movement.5) Uniquely frustrating to fight. It's entirely possible for a mesmer to completely evade your attacks in the short time it takes them to burst you down. I've had several fights against the same mesmer where I either don't hit them a single time OR kill them before they can even hurt me. Having such a flip-flopping extreme between wins and losses is BAD class design. There simply isn't another way to describe it. If I had to choose, I would rather Mesmer be outright deleted and have something else take its place. Seeing as that won't happen, the class just needs to be completely redesigned. If they want to be an illusionist, they shouldn't be harming people with ILLUSIONS. Smoke and Mirror characters are fine, but not when the smoke is actually poison gas that slowly kills you while you desperately smash all the mirrors to find them. If they want to be a unique spin of mental magic? Go for it! You can't have both. It causes way too many problems.

Duration was never an issue. Them doing my healthbar in under two seconds with burning was the issue. Nothing says fun like a burn guard setting themselves on fire, standing next to you and giving you 9 burn stacks. Good game. 10/10.

Yeah, no. I can mirror this experience. I played one game as a hammer warrior (For the lulz) and encountered a burn guardian. I died in under 2 seconds from two 8k burn ticks. Unless they hotfix condition damage, power builds will cease to exist. Condi spam is back, boys.

Awww, a mesmer is mad that their infinite invulnerability chain was nerfed. Poor baby.

I'll update this as I test everything out, but I'm going to be blunt: The meta isn't going to shift as much as it should. There are a few reasons: 1) Reducing overall damage across the board doesn't change burst combos, it just slows them down. In the case of the combos that just barely 100-0'd players, those combos now do 80% of their health at the same time. Call me crazy, but anything doing that much damage in a safe burst will never NOT be meta. The combos need to be addressed, not their damage.2) The core, problem amulets are STILL in the game. Sinister and Berserker amulets are still in PvP for some ungodly reason. The only people who use these amulets are people abusing burst combos or the absurd scaling of their class. Amulets that go too far in one direction (PURE physical burst, PURE condition burst, etc) should be outright removed. If having toughness and healing power on the same amulet was a crime that needed to be fixed, why are these pure damage amulets still around? With the nerfs to quad stat amulets, these tristat pure amulets will be even more oppressive.3) The problem traits are STILL untouched. For example, Ranger's oppressive dominance as a ganking god is due to the power of Moment of Clarity. This trait is disgusting. It gives them a flat 1.5x damage modifier on the ENTIRE next skill they use. Barrage doing 14k+ damage was entirely due to might stacking and this ONE PROBLEM TRAIT. How this got past Q&A amazes me. There should NEVER be a flat damage boost in traits, let alone one that can cause a 4-second cooldown greatsword ability to crit for 10k.4) While it seems that stealth has been touched, it doesn't change the core problems of how obnoxiously widespread this has become. The way it acts is still an issue. Previously, only thief and Mesmer had access to stealth. The two classes with a base health pool of 11 THOUSAND. A light breeze would kill them, so they needed some incredible defensive tools to compensate. Stealth was considered so powerful that an entire ultimate ability was JUST stealth for you and your allies. The original cooldown was 1/5 minutes and lasted only 5 seconds. That's how strong the original designers understood stealth was. Our current dev team looked at this and decided that wasn't unfair enough, so they reduced the cooldown by 33% and increased the duration. WHY!? Stealth is ANNOYING. There isn't any counterplay unless you're playing a SPECIFIC ELITE SPECIALIZATION with a SPECIFIC stealth removal skill. I'm sorry, but stealth needs to become like other games: If you get hit, you lose invisibility. If you get too close to an enemy, they can see you. I play a thief. I'm complaining about stealth. It doesn't feel good to fight and I never feel like I outplayed my opponent by walking away from a fight with 0 ability for them to find me.5) Warrior and Greatsword. They deserve their own bullet point. For context, I have almost 1k games on warrior. I'm no god at the class, but I know it inside and out. Greatsword is the biggest crutch weapon in the game, and has needed a massive rework since day one. It provides literally everything: Damage, Burst Damage, High Mobility, a ranged cripple to chase foes, high AoE damage, fast animations and can be used to escape ganks. Every. Single. Warrior. Uses. It. Even condi warriors used them for mobility. By the way, did I mention it has one of the BEST Burst skills for the entire class? Seriously. What does this weapon NOT do? It needs to be nerfed. HARD. I would like the ability to use ANY OTHER WEAPON, please. The moment I lock in warrior, my weapon slots are automatically filled by Greatsword, Axe and Shield. I have NO CHOICE if I want to be viable. That's a problem. If warrior could run two greatswords and swap to reset cooldowns, they would. The weapon is absurd. UPDATES1) So, it seems Conditions were not worthy of nerfs. My condi Ranger still oneshots people with 2 traps. My condi thief is still bursting people down. All while their recently nerfed power characters struggle to even take me to half health. It's not like Scourge, Weaver, Guardian and Firebrand couldn't burst players down just as fast as a power build before the changes. Glad to see they still can. I was worried these braindead builds might require some mental effort now. Phew~! I also think the scourge bots needed a buff, Anet. Glad we're on the same page.

I will be blunt: I played the Classic World of Warcraft stress test and it IS going to be used in this explanation. If comparing two games in the exact same genre or the thought of WoW offends you, move along. NOW THEN, ON TO THE MAIN POINT. The PvP in Guild Wars 2 is flawed. No sane individual with any understanding of the game will argue that point. The pro scene is dead, win trading is rampant and the Guild Wars 2 dev team is doing everything in their power to pretend that PvP doesn't exist. The point I want to focus on is far more fundamental than these issues, though. I wasn't able to notice it at first, but coming back from the WoW stress test has given me a fresh pair of eyes and now I can't un-see the fundamental issue Guild Wars 2 has: Abilities simply do too many things at once. What do I mean by this? Let me give a few examples from WoW for a moment: Shadow Word: Pain, Frost Bolt, and Garrote. For those of you that don't know what these do, I'll explain:-) Shadow Word: Pain is a targetted Damage over Time effect that has no cooldown, low mana cost and can be cast instantly. It does no initial damage and cannot stack with itself. It's a fairly weak ability that has a VERY simple task: Damage. Over. Time.-) Frost Bolt is a spell that has a roughly 1.5 second cast time for a small amount of damage and slows. The slow is dependent on the rank of the spell, which also increases the damage and mana cost. Damage and a slow, but has a sizable cast time.-) Garrote is an ability that silences the target for 2 seconds (In Guild Wars 2 it would be a Daze) and does damage over time, but can only be used from stealth. Stealth cannot be regained during combat without using another ability with a 3-minute cooldown. Stealth slows you by 50% and taking ANY damage causes you to lose stealth. Why am I wasting your time with these abilities from another game with a much, much slower combat system? It's rather simple: These abilities don't do much, and that's the entire point. WoW gives you a long list of spells to make your character with, and you won't use all of them. You have to choose what you want your character to be good at, and that specialization comes with a cost and a glaring weakness for that set of skills you chose. Guild Wars 2, on the other hand, can't seem to simplify any buttons on their action bars to save its own life. The most BASIC of abilities in the game have special properties tied to them. Necromancer's Staff 1, the simplest of their abilities, do the following: It can hit up to 5 targets, pierces through all enemies, has a 20% chance to be a physical projectile combo finisher, gives the caster 4% life force and has the ability to be traited to do EVEN MORE THINGS. In WoW, when a rogue hits someone with a dagger, the attack does nothing but cause your weapon's damage to the target. Plain and simple delivery of damage. GW2's Thief's Dagger 1? The first attack is a double strike, followed by an attack that regains endurance, followed by an attack that causes poison. A simple auto-attack applies a debuff, regains energy and hits 4 times with 3 attacks. Starting to see my point? Abilities are overloaded to an absurd degree in GW2, and nowhere is this more so than within the Elite Specializations. Let's pick on Holosmith: Corona Burst, a single button, does ALL of the following: "Strike nearby foes and begin to store up energy, gaining boons and heat each pulse. After charging, the energy explodes, inflicting conditions on nearby foes." In other words, it's an AoE attack that grants two stacks of might, causes 8 out of 25 total possible vulnerability stacks, hits multiple times over 5 pulses, counts as an explosion and is affected by three traits. If these traits are taken, this ability furthermore grants stability, shields, can cause additional vulnerability and has a chance to cripple and bleed the target. All of this on a single push of a button. This bloating is hardly limited to Holosmith. You can argue that all these effects are a "necessary evil" due to the limitations of the 10 button system that Guild Wars 2 has in place. You're entitled to that opinion, but let me explain why this limitation makes no sense:-) While WoW can have the ability to have 40+ button slots onscreen simultaneously, the vast majority of them aren't even used for combat. A plethora of abilities are not used in combat and would be better off considered as novelty item-like effects. On average, the characters in WoW use around 16 buttons.-) Guild Wars 2 has weapon swapping, special stances, kits, stealth-exclusive abilities, etc. While there can only be 10 abilities on screen at once, any good engineer can happily show you the 40+ buttons they can have on-demand with their kits. PvP is a symptom of a deeper problem. These "Meta Builds" that people run are practically the only viable ways to play their classes. When one out of the five players trying to kill you has 7 different ways to stunlock your character across 4 buttons, you need to have immediate access to multiple stun breakers and mass stability. When anyone running a condition build can do your healthbar over time with the press of two buttons, you need to have access to mass condition cleanse. Classes without access to either of these have to abuse long evasion/invulnerability times to avoid being obliterated. PoF has done little more than pour oil onto this fire of a problem by bloating what each elite can do. Deadeye Thief, for example, can mash 4 on their rifle and remove a stack of debuffs in less than a second. They still need to run Precision Signet (Removes 3 stacks of conditions immediately at the press of a button from themselves and allies) to avoid exploding when a condi class so much as looks at them. In summary: I'm all for fast-paced combat, but the reaction time expected of the average player in PvP is just unreasonable. I've watched players in platinum-ranked games, who by all accounts are far better than me, die to being clipped by some random ability they had no way of reacting to and exploding in less than a second. You can call me bad all you want, but I feel like abilities need to have a large amount of what they do stripped down and slowed down. At least in PvP.