mixxed.5862

Wow, this forum is so salty, I'm having a blast reading this. Everyone seems so emotionally invested in this game. It is pure insanity on here. GW2 has a fairly balanced PvP as is. I mean it sucks that they often don't adress the big issues in a timely manner, that there still are some mechanics and numbers so obviously overtuned you'd think they must have realized it by now (Explosive entrance, Grenade kit). But it's what it is. The next patch will come and hopefully bring in the necessary mechanical changes and some more rebalancing. If they stick to the regular balance cadence the next real balance patch should come in about a month. If it doesn't they're probably too busy designing new elite specs. I hope the steam release will bring in a lot of new players and put a bit of spotlight on the PvP as well. Until then I think it's more reasonable to be happy that PvP balance is being run as a side project by one dev (who luckily knows what he's doing most of the time).

Fire balls? You got hit by a citadel bombardment. It's one of the most avoidable skills in the game. It also comes with a hefty energy cost so most won't bother casting it unless their target is in hard CC first. If you're unfortunate enough to tank one, offer up a prayer to the RNG gods and maybe 99% of the missiles will miss you. Look for the big orange portal above the renegade's head and you'll know when to dodge. If you get hit by scorchrazer, be prepared to stunbreak or immediatly dodge when the stun ends so you don't tank all of the missles. It's a bit of a meme. Costly, hard to land, but huge payoff if it does. Basically the equivalent of a Falcon Punch in Gw2. Seven shot can look like a fireball to someone who doesn’t know what it is. And yes, the damage is really high. Especially considering the conditions the weapon skill also puts out. But the same applies to grenades and 10 other builds because for some reason the devs just like throwing conditions on every weapon. Shortbow damage is very high.Shortbow defense is also very low Its the only shortbow in the game with no evade or mobility. It's basically designed as a longbow but with 300 less range. People here often talk about tradeoffs "If you want this you have to sacrifice that". Renegade sacrifices mobility and defense in exchange for damage. It relies on its pressure to deter thieves and Prevs from turning it into mincemeat. If you want to lower the damage, then as a tradeoff, Renegade should recieve better defensive tools (e.g. replacing the useless SB2 with an evade. Nerf Sevenshot's damage and the turn that into SB2, Put the evade on Sb3 so it has a higher CD and isn't too spammable). Nerfing their damage with no compensation would delete the spec from PvP... which is what a lot of people want.Come on, just look at the damage coefficient and cooldown of Sevenshot compared to every other skill in PvP and try telling us it isn't overtuned with a straight face.

What did I just read? What calculations? I'm a little confused on how you arrive at the conclusion of making points tick slower or invincibility on downed fixing whatever it is that you're critizing.

This thread is ridiculous. Damage prior to the february patch was much higher. Although they need to finally put more effort into balancing out the outliers like explosive entrance nade kit holo or seven-shot etc.

Take off the rose-tinted nostalgia glasses boys!Pre-february patch PvP was even worse. Most skills would eat half your health and that forced you to run a full set of immunities, some of which even passive. And don't any of you remember bunker weaver and the old condi mirage? Right now though there's still many issues. Obviously holosmith is ridiculous with the damage spam, easy might stacking and blinds to no end. It's clear the new seven-shot needs a nerf because right now it's on the level of pre-february balance. Clearly guardian symbols need a rework and some of the more tanky builds should get their resustain nerfed to about warrior levels. But I don't think the old balance was any more fun.

There are a couple of aspects about holo that aren't well designed: Obviously grenade kit has too much front-loaded damage. A plain nerf to the damage coefficients is needed. Furthermore grenade barrage should get a unique, distinguishable animation.Holo stacks might too readily. Enhanced capacity storage unit is the biggest offender.The reworked explosives trait line is a little problematic. The damage coefficient on explosive entrance is overtuned, it shouldn't proc on any attack but only on the first explosion skill you use - so that skill + explosive entrance can be dodged. The blind duration on flash bang should be 1 second.

Well, the devs haven't abandoned the game mode at all. The PvP dev team certainly is small but they're slowly bringing good changes. No, you've just come to the right place to vent your frustrations. This forum is filled with frustrated players that love complaining about the mode, the devs, the balance, matchmaking etc. Here's a short list of the changes they did this year: Swiss-style automated tournaments, mini-seasons of 2v2 or 3v3, a very big balance patch for PvP (most skills rebalanced), more regular but small balance adjustments. Later this year we can expect a big tournament, more balance patches that come more frequently, more mini-seasons, we might even see a 10v10(?) map and tournaament. Honestly for this year it's not looking too shabby. I hope the next patch isn't too far away. Condi rev and nade holo need more work.

oh yeah, if there was any part of the nerfs that i dislike it has to be the insane blow to Sand Savant. before the patch hit on the 7th Sand Savant was still kinda useless, but one could argue for the ease of the bigger aoe. now though, there's literally no reason to not run Feed from Corruption. I think the reasoning is that if they left big shade at 3 targets or more, everyone would run that trait on their dps scourge. While small shade is more fun and big shade is meant to be the choice for support builds. In the future they could give it an increased number of allied targets: Still only hits 2 enemies, but 5 allied targets.

Healing overall was reduced by about 33% in the february patch. This change was meant to bring siege back in line with that. In my opinion it was necessary. lol.... Funny. I see zergs shrugging off siege like they're nerf darts all the time. Well, you're not supposed to defend an objective with just 5 people sitting on arrow carts hitting 111111. Arrow carts are still a very welcome boon to any defending team. That's the correct balance. Defending an objective should be easier than capturing it. That's... part of the defensive advantage. We were taught that you generally needed 3 people for each defender if assaulting a position in the military. More if it's a hardened target. Oh... and the defenders typically will stay behind their walls and butcher attackers. Sorties are generally used only to break sieges to allow supplies through. Or... we could just say f**k WvW as a battleground and just scrap the whole idea and do arena only.Defending already is much easier. GW2 is a game first and foremost. If you needed 3 times the numbers to do anything on the map it wouldn't be any good.

No, I don't think so. With spellbreakers bringing bubble and boon strips there's no way we're going back to a tank meta. Even if necro was out of the game (it isn't).

again, scourge needed nerfs. they didn't need 60% nerfs for damage and support across the board lol 60% damage nerf and yet they will still do more damage than mesmers, thieves, rangers... etc.This is balancing, learn to live with it. more than mesmers sure, definitely less than thieves and rangers. This isn't in line, it's nuking the class from orbit. scourge was in line before the patch on the 7th Show me 1 video of a scourge landing a 3 shade bomb on a moving zerg? I'm fairly good on scourge and I can only land 2 with any kind of reliability man lolYeah, you won't always get 6 unless you're in melee range. But if you don't hit 4 targets with your big bomb you misplayed.Target cap is 5 for every other profession. So why was Scourge at 10+ for over 2 years dominating the meta for most of it? Don't worry Scourge will still be fine. No need to be overly dramatic.

Excellent changes. Exactly what was needed to bring Scourge back in line. You'll obviously run small shades which is more fun and more healthy for the game mode overall. For everyone complaining, consider this: With the very low cooldown on Manifest Sand Shade you can always put 3 shades out for your bombs. That puts it at 6 targets (8 if in melee). It's the first time the number of targets on shade actually feels fair. Thank you. This was a proper hotfix, good job.

Healing overall was reduced by about 33% in the february patch. This change was meant to bring siege back in line with that. In my opinion it was necessary. lol.... Funny. I see zergs shrugging off siege like they're nerf darts all the time. Well, you're not supposed to defend an objective with just 5 people sitting on arrow carts hitting 111111. Arrow carts are still a very welcome boon to any defending team. That's the correct balance.

Healing overall was reduced by about 33% in the february patch. This change was meant to bring siege back in line with that. In my opinion it was necessary.

The best buff for warrior is in nerfing nade holo and condi rev. Warrior is a side noder and does well against most builds but gets destroyed by grenades and can't ever hope to kill a condi rev while it's more susceptible to a +1. It's probably still a bit behind after that. But I don't think by that much.

First, I would not call the May patch... a patch. They changed 3 skills on 2 classes. Second, you are getting lost in the meta balancing. The entire sPvP foundation is kitten. Major changes are needed from damage levels, to sustain, boons, CC and boon RIP. Nothing is at an appropriate level for well paced fun game play. I don’t want to play bunker/CC wars. It does not matter if devs make a meta balance patch every week. Fundamental changes need to be made to the overall design. Also, currently the of balance strategy is to remove most option and reducing diversity to the bare minimum, and then nerf everything to the ground, so it is easier to balance. Ya sure.. theoretically you could have better balance like that (we still do not), but is this... worth playing? You're correct about the May patch. It was but a handful of changes. It doesn't change the fact that we've gotten more frequent patches for PvP. And all of them consisted of good changes, all of them improved the meta. I disagree that there is something fundamentally wrong with sPvP. GW2 has an incredibly good combat system. What do you mean exactly? Please be a little more specific. I think the damage is at a much more appropriate level than ever before. Just sustain is a bit too high on some builds. Ideally duels on a side node should always end with a winner, not necessarily with a kill but at least a full cap and disengage. Imo we're getting there. Once condi rev (= corruption trait line and resistance access) is adressed it may look much better already. Although certainly ranger will be the next best profession for bunkering down. It's a balance that's best achieved by nerfing the sustain capabilities of the builds in question. And that's what they're doing. I'm confident that we'll get there eventually. Even if it takes a couple of months. Before the issues kept piling up while right now CMC fixes them faster than the skills team can add new ones. Boons and boon rips should always be reevaluated. Although it's in a hugely more balanced state than before the february patch. Many on the forums keep claiming that it's a CC and condi meta. In the game I don't see that at all. Yes, there are strong condi builds but the power variant is usually better or at least comparable (a notable exception is condi rev, of course). As for CC in my opinion it's alright. It certainly needs work, but it's not even that bad either. It's fine that there are builds that can chain CC. Conceptually that's sound. In 1v1 and 2v2 the amount of CC is manageable. If you die to it you usually got outplayed. In anything larger than that it becomes more problematic. You get CC'd, are being ganked on, the enemy team keeps locking you in CC and you're just done. Therefore CC skills definitely need another pass. Here's the biggest problem with the state of the game: Team fights feel like a wild gamble, a real mess. They are too chaotic to feel skillful and fun (or I'm just not good enough and tunnel visioning). I don't know how to adress that. Maybe it's the amount of AoE, of CC and important abilities per class in general. A moba in comparison feels much better. Mostly because there are fewer abilities per class to keep track of. What they could do is increase the cooldown of CCs and other very impactful skills. The visual tells are mostly there already. But first thing they need to balance out is sustain. So side node play isn't as much of a chore and the build diversity increases. As I said, I believe they are making tangible progress towards that goal. Sorry for the very long post.

That's where I disagree with the community, or at least the vocal part of it that utilizes this forum. I think CMC did more frequent balance patches in the last few months. He did a patch every month and consistently made a couple of very sensible changes to a few builds that were overperforming. There were smaller balance patches on March 4th, April 28th and a few tweaks on May 26th. Yes, the scope of the patches was rather small. Especially condi rev was clearly too strong all that time and should have seen further adjustments. Other than that balance isn't even bad right now - thanks in part to these smaller, more focused patches. The upcoming patch will continue to move balance in the right direction. Finally we get a nerf to condi rev's sustain, condi thief (again), tempest's sustain and the glyph bug, nadekit etc. Btw there are some patch notes missing from the preview i.e. a nerf to Grenade Barrage. But most importantly: CMC communicates more than any of the other balance devs have in a long time. He gives us a good idea of where he wants to go with balance, shows that he has a profound understanding of the game and has a clear vision. In the last dev stream he gave some insight into what he thinks about the state of balance concerning a couple of professions. And honestly I think the points he makes are very reasonable. Seriously, it's worth watching. With CMC in charge of balance I feel like we are slowly but steadily moving towards a better balance in PvP. Builds that are overperforming or simply toxic see reasonable changes. You can rely on it (but it takes a while). That's something we couldn't for a very long time. After all I think the game will soon be more balanced than ever (in PvP at least). I'm convince it'll be the best it's ever been before the next expansion releases...

The problem is that Scourge is an awful AoE spam class. It's detrimental to PvP and killing WvW - painful to play against and not fun to play. Especially in WvW it has dominated the meta for years while making the game mode worse. Whenever Scourge is in the meta in PvP the game is less enjoyable to play. The shade revert is them doubling down on bad design choices. The cd reduction on wells is fine for PvP. Although if there are no splits for Well of Darkness it will be broken! For WvW the changes were misguided to begin with.

I hope that the condi rev nerfs will still be enough. They look decent. And hopefully some condi thief and grenade kit changes are missing from the preview. Why nerf shrapnel grenade but not grenade barrage and the auto attack? Why announce reworks to condi thief and only do a single change that doesn't even do that much? It doesn't make sense. On the other hand the changes to necro look painful for WvW.

I'm a little concerned that this is an immense buff to Scourge in WvW. If this change comes through it'll be 3 Scourges per group again. You need to nerf it hard with a WvW split. Split the number of targets for WvW: Small shade hits 2 targets, big shade hits 3. Also keep Vampiric Ritual please and don't reduce the cooldown of wells. It's a good trait. The new Blood Bank trait is bad.

Good changes Condi Rev's sustain finally gets nerfed, good job. I hope it's enough so other side noders see some play again.Condi Thief gets nerfed a little more. If this change means you can use repeater only twice... Probably there is more missing from the preview.Spellbreaker gets more condi cleanse. Berserker buffs look pretty decent.Druid changes are alright.Scrapper reworks look very strong.Tempest sustain is nerfed a little and they fixed the res glyph interrupt bug. I still dislike shocking aura and tornado CCs.Chrono may be usable again.Disappoinments Holo: No significant nerfs to grenade kit and the explosives trait line. Instead they buffed/reworked shield. I hope the nerfs come in a hot fix... edit: On second thought I believe we're missing a few notes here that were probably lost in translation. There's no way CMC nerfs shrapnel grenade but keeps grenade barrage and the autoattack as is.Ranger: No nerfs to sustain. "Protect me!" finally needs a nerf to barrier!Warrior: Still bad, probably.Rev: Staff #5 still clunky.Scourge is back. This spec is awful for both PvP and WvW. Especially for WvW this change is insanity.The 300 second passive traits weren't reworked.No follow-up changes to the blanket no-damage-on-CC splits yet.ConclusionAs far as reworks go this patch is decent enough. There will be some new builds coming out of this. Although I would have preferred Scourge remaining in the gutter.Condi Rev finally gets the nerfs it deserved for months. Condi Thief hopefully gets a few more changes than were previewed. Explosives grenade kit Holo still needs a few nerfs asap.This patch is a small step in the right direction for PvP. But I'm still eagerly awaiting a thorough follow-up patch to the 20 damage even on elite skills with CC and a rework of the traits that were practically removed with a 300 second cooldown.

The way match making currently works the gold randoms will play WITH the legend duo against plat players at night.

From their normal cadence it should be this week. But they didn't announce it yet, so I expect it in the next patch in two weeks. And I hope they'll give us a preview this week. Otherwise I fear it'll be another month...

How the kitten are you mad about this? Incompetent?! After all they did exactly what they told us. They never even intended to release the regular balance patches more often and were very clear on that! "Moving forward we want to do smaller adjustments more often - with competitive balance ideally closer to every 4-6 weeks". That's honestly pretty impossible to misunderstand. They could have hardly been more clear. We got these smaller balance adjustments every 4-6 weeks (which has never happened before btw) plus the occasional minor tweak in between. Credit where it's due. Btw the smaller patches were mostly good ones as well, specifically targeting currently problematic meta builds. They failed to appropriately nerf rev's sustain however. Other than that they did a pretty good job overall. After all we can still expect a "real" balance patch this month as it's been almost 4 months now - that has been their usual cadence for years. Could be that it's delayed to july... But if so I'd like it to be more sizeable than the average patch with more reworks and a healthy amount of PvP/WvW specific splits.

Lol. Okay. The context was "The MAT Final had Double Rev on both teams. I thought balance was supposed to increase class diversity and representation?" to which CMC replied with that. Correct, and that was what? Over half a year ago?! Back then the condi revenant builds that are problematic now didn't even exist! It was power rev all the way and that got nerfed hard in february - with all the other powercreeped kitten. Power rev indeed requires some skill to play decently (although it's still overperforming). (edit) I dug it up, here's a link to the thread:https://en-forum.guildwars2.com/discussion/comment/1099919#Comment_1099919 I mean sure, it's a nice meme. But complaining incessantly about the developers while citing something that's hardly relevant today and is not at all applicable to the current balance of the revenant profession just to make a dev look bad... that's ridiculous. "This class is winning and performing very well but that's just because only GOOD players are playing it" is hilariously backwards line of thinking regardless of when it was said. Top players will play whatever is meta, and they did and still are playing Revenant because it is meta not because of any special attachment to the profession per say, and that quote is really only one balance patch ago. Maybe you should read the post again that you're referring to. I'll copy it here for you: He doesn't say at all what you claim. He says the best players favor power rev. Which was factual at the time. After all it's always the same couple of players that win the mAT - no matter what comp they're playing. So, why did they favor it? Because it's the best build around or just because they liked playing it more? He says in the very next sentence - so you don't misunderstand - that rev is "definitely strong" and is being reevaluated.As we all know today that resulted in nerfs to revenant across the board like the removal of stunbreaks on legend swap, less endurance regeneration, higher energy costs on utility skills, nerfs to might/boon stacking and of course the blanket power coefficient nerfs. All good changes which brought power rev more in line and even made it more skillful. Although it needs some more changes now. The current state of condi rev however is entirely unrelated to Cal's post from half a year ago. That build clearly is favored by monkeys. Tldr; If you read just the one sentence right after the one you keep "citing", you're entire argument falls flat. You've got it backwards, just like he did. The best players didn't FAVOR rev. Rev was picked by the best players because at that point in the game after super charging the Sword Off hand skills and nerfing the most prominent counters to rev it made Revenant hands down the best class in the game for a variety of roles, specifically both Team Fight Damage and +1 Roamer. Revenant spent a huge chunk of Path of Fire largely considered unviable in high end play. Considered even worse than Water Weaver. At which point it was abandoned by players both high end and low end. It's not that rev appealed to high end players who stuck through it through thick and thin. High end players realized the necessity of it after it's buffs and gravitated towards it. Just like we're seeing now. You're correct, although some of the best players still stuck with power rev throughout all of PoF. Because it's fun. Obviously later on the devs came to the conclusion it was in fact overperforming now, and not simply a community favorite anymore. That's why it received many nerfs. So, in light of that, I don't understand why you're so obsessed with that quote. Because he didn't say "yes, rev's kitten broken and we'll nerf it"? Instead of "rev was favored by the best players this mAT but that doesn't necessitate a nerf by itself, we'll reevaluate revenant ourselves"? Yes, the quote's funny when taken out of context. But I think it's a little immature to use it for your agenda against the devs. For starters in context with what it is responding to the quote reads "Double firebrand both teams is a problem but double revenant on both teams isn't because rev players are just that good"No, it just doesn't. And you can't even misunderstand it that way if you read the very next sentence that follows.