ixon.2496

In EU right now there are 4 people in legend rank. Not even enough for one team. At least with 5 man, even off season 5 man, people can aim to climb there and genuinely influence their chances with communication, chosen team comp and strategy. This dice roll of team composition and random teammate quality removes so much of the players ability to influence the outcome. That isn't competitive. There is only so much you can do to carry a team to victory, and thats without afk/throwers tipping the scales. As it stands the ladder it completely pointless. And its not due to population size, it's by design.

Name a single successful ranked competitve game that limits your party to 2 and forces you to play with random teammates.

Well by the looks of it people are happy to let the population continue to decline, rather than make any change to the system

The way the system is now will never allow the population to grow either since people are unable to play with friends to improve their rank, leading to demotivation.

Overall i'd say it isn't just that the PvP player base attracts toxic players, GW2 has an amazingly supportive community on the whole. I feel the current structure of randomized teams has fostered the toxic mindset or at least has done nothing to alleviate it

I'd argue the reason they are so lopsided is because players can't improve on their teamplay through duo queue. It promotes selfish play, *its everyone else's fault* mentality in ranked since its a coin toss what type of person you get on your teams. I do think 5 man allowed mini seasons would create great space for AT practice and building peoples Pug communication and teamwork.

For those against the idea, what reasons are you against being able to choose your team in a team based game mode? Would you not prefer to filter out the toxicity on your own and get better as a group?

Even rotating in 5 man Queue to give variety.

5 man Q was initially removed due to population/one sided matches. With the current 2 man Q it doesn't foster good teamplay, promotes toxicity of random teammates and we still have 100 - 500 one sided matches. I understand we have automated tournaments for 5 man, but those are time gated, difficult to get a full team practice for due to having to play unranked and require having a consistent team available. With the current state of PvP some changes need to be made to promote and improve match quality and team play.

Genuinely there are less bots after the major bot maker for gw2 stopped support and moved focus to FF:XIV, most of the ones now are teleport bots for farming nodes in PvE or chat spam AHK users as far as i've seen. Nothing really done on anets part tbh.

The teleport part of it was annoying, but lining up the beam to catch teammates in it felt good.

This 100%, it felt much more dynamic setting up your positioning, id have been happier if they just kept the piercing and toned down the numbers. It felt underwhelming after that change

I think the issue i have with spectre is that Thief needed options to benefit group content and make them a viable pick. But single target healing can not compete with AoE coverage that the games been designed for up until now

Wells feel so slow to cast and are easily interrupted, for very little reward

I feel the 1 attack in shroud should either be faster or harder hitting, whenever you enter shroud it doesn't feel impactful, especially when compared to Reaper shroud. Incredibly slow cast times, near impossible to hit any competent player with skill 5, skill 3 misses everything and leaves you out of position, and skill 4 you can never tell whether its going to hit or not. I'm fairly happy with the scepter skills and barrier application, but the spec doesnt mesh well with other weapon sets, basically locking you in to using scepter for torment application. The reduced initiative is also an issue for the other weapon sets, basically nerfing your damage potential, with no real reward in return. Since alacrity doesn't affect ini regen thief gets very little benefit from the wells its placing, which you need to use multiple of to make the alacrity trait worth taking, the cooldowns on wells are also too long, plus long cast times, making them super easy to interrupt ruining any sort of combat flow.

Condi Damage in pvp is abysmal

Well since the Spectre has been revealed as having reduced initative its going to be double as mandatory to get any value out of our weapon sets. Genuinely annoyed they suggested "You'd want to run trickery with this spec" on the stream.. like we don't have to for our builds already. How out of touch can you get.

Honestly since they are giving everyone mobility now, might as well reduce the ini cost of sb 5

(In)Spector Gadgets?

Usually run in for d/d condi builds

I'm having deja vu, i'm sure this change happened back in HoT and it was reverted

Don't worry, the bots will still be there to fill the gaps.

That doesnt work, just redirects to PoF, i think its the EU website thats not redirecting properly

Over the course of thief balancing, its became more and more common to see initiative costs increased rather than balancing then weapon skills functions. This has made Preparedness almost mandatory to get the best use out of weapon sets, I get the idea is to reduce spamability of skills, but this was the one advantage over having cooldowns, at this point Preparedness should be baseline, or Initiative needs a rework since they cant balance Cost vs Reward.

So many times i solo queue in ranked and the match is heavily skewed to one side, I just had a game with 2 duos and a solo on one team and full solo on mine. How hard is it to split the duos across two teams? Sure you could argue their mmr might have been balanced, but in the game mode MMR is a joke most of the time, the communication between players massively affects the outcome and having two duos in your team massively affects the outcome, hence the stomp 500 - 138. i know im ranting but for a games whos combat i love so much the matchmaking, balance and overall support given to its pvp is a joke/.