Zexanima.7851

Warrior is in a drought, no doubt. I wont stay that way though, I imagine warrior will get its time in the spotlight again sooner or later. Anet is just verrrryyyy sluggish at making highly impactful changes which is its own problem. In the case of warrior it's been sliding down hill, slowly, for a long while. Completely personal anecdote but I think the reason this feels specially awful for warrior is that they're fairly "underloaded" compared to other professions. Meaning, they're skills/traits are very focused on doing singular things vs multiple functions. This isn't inherently an issue but it makes them more rigid and less flexible to shifts in the game. So when something warrior's rely on becomes less useful, it's really felt. Where as other professions may have other tools to swap around or wedge in to cover these shifts. Not saying this is the be-all-end-all reason/issue but just how I see it. Kind of a side note, the people trying to discredit the issues of warrior by stating other professions have issues too is not it. It's not productive and flat out doesn't make sense.

I mostly can only speak to PvP but fast hands is the least of the abilities in Discipline that make it required. Warrior's Sprint and Brawler's Recovery are much more critical. The movement speed is absolutely required and even if you run a movement speed rune the being able to get out of immob is just as important. You need to be able to keep up the pressure as warrior and if you're getting peeled by immob you're gonna have a bad time. With as susceptible to control condi as warrior is and as easy as it is to apply blind/weakness/cripple etc. you have to have Brawler's Recovery as well. While fast hands synergizes well with the rest of the trait line I don't think it's the crux of what makes it too good not to take. That's one reason I support the idea of making fast hands baseline as it'll free a slot for reworking trait lines. On its own it isn't all that strong. If weapon swap cooldown was all that then everyone would be running rune of the warrior. It would make sense for warrior thematically, give them more of a class identity, and be a good step towards making them more relevant again. Enough on that subject though. How would I make Discipline not required? Well, unfortunately I don't think you can, at least not without an entire class overhaul. If you moved the effects from Warrior's Sprint and Brawler's Recovery to other trait lines then those lines would become required and leave you with the same issue. If you reworked them to be active utilities somehow then those utilities would be required. There is no justification to make them inherit to warrior like fast hands. If you removed them completely it would nerf warrior into the shadow realm. They would have to remove/rework those two traits not to be as strong and then give those same tools in an easier to access way. I'm not sure what that would look like off the top of my head, too early in the morning for me to be thinking up that large of a rework. Warrior isn't the only class with the issue of being stuck in a trait line either. The difference though between other professions and warrior/Discipline is that in the case of other professions it's usually because the trait line is too good not to take. You can run without it (say ranger and survival) and still be effective but in those cases it's that the trait line is so powerful it doesn't make sense not to take it. In the case of warrior it's that it can't be effective without it. The traits are so integral to the profession that not taking Discipline isn't just sub-optimal, it makes them near unplayable. Can you run warrior without Discipline and still do things? Sure. You can also drive a car without a windshield but it's going to suck really bad in both cases.

I'm going to use Occam's razor here and ask; Did you reactive the skill? You activate it once to give you the buff portion but with all herald skills you have to reactivate it again to get the effect. You probably have but I should make sure before trying to figure out what happened.

A 50% win ratio is how it should be in most competitive modes in games, roughly. It'll be a little higher if your improving or a little lower if you're playing poorly. Think about it like this. You want to be playing people of the same skill as you right? You should be as that's where competition is at its most fun. In this senario we'll say two teams of the EXACT same skill level get matched up. Everything is the same, skill level, profession, builds, ect. Who would win? Its a coin flip right? No good way to tell. So in a perfect system a 50/50 split would be ideal. However, there is no perfect match making system. To emulate a "perfect" system though they put in conditions like "If you're on a win/lose streak then they'll try to give you better/worse players to play against to bring you back towards 50/50. It's not the most ideal but its the best anyone has come up with.

I have no proof for you but I've done very similar things on thief. I some times even run rune of speed to rotate even faster. It's the easiest way to win matches. Do you win every single match this way? Of course not, but you can easily remain in the positives up to mid plat doing this. Regardless of if it's true or not he makes some valid points.

This is a good point. A poll like this can be misleading in that people may associate what is considered "one dimensional" to being easy or unfun. That's not at all the case. Warrior is rather straight forward compared to other professions but it still requires a lot of skill to play effectively, same with thief. On the other hand you can take something like weaver which has many more buttons than warrior but to me is a lot easier to play and get value out of. The simplicity of warrior is one of the reasons I enjoy it so much. I usually gravitate towards more complicated classes in games (ADHD likes all the buttons). For GW2 at least it seems that the more buttons you have to press the less options you actually have. For something like weaver it more or less feels like I'm doing a PvE rotation when I play it. You occasionally switch things up. For warrior on the other hand I have some go-to combos but you have to crafty to land your damage. Things like retargeting, stowing, managing distance, swapping weapons properly, chaining CC and so on becomes very important. Then how you weave those things into actually skill usage. It can have deceivingly deep gameplay for PvP.

They're all about even tbh. Even the "complicated" professions are pretty one dimensional once you figure them out. Despite the ability to build every professions many ways, each just boils down to a pretty narrow way to play. Skills/passives are so intertwined in most professions it really limits your options.

At least not for a long while. This isn't a doom-and-gloom post arguing the finer points of why this unreleased expansion does or doesn't "suck". People will buy it, people will play it, people will enjoy it. Personally, with as many times as I have been burnt or seen people burnt on game releases I'm much more conservative on being an early adopter. For me it really has to ignite my interest to even consider buying something game related on release day. The previous expansions, when I was a little less cautious, were no brainers for me. I wasn't disappointed either. I much preferred HoT but PoF was great as well. Despite their good track record on expansions something about this one doesn't seem the same to me. I know Anet has undergone a lot of changes since PoF released so maybe it's something to do with that. Maybe I'm just "over" GW2 and no measure of new content would satisfy me (not likely). Regardless of the reason, what we've been presented on this expansion just hits different and not in the good way. If I were to try to pin it down to one thing I guess it might be that there is no game altering mechanic like the last two. Both gliding and mounts changed how you interact with the entire game world, old and new content. This expansion doesn't seem to have that, at least not nearly to the same extent. You have fishing but that seems like a very "low hanging fruit" kind thing to add. Setting aside any specifics on why I may not like fishing, how does this new mechanic alter the existing game? I can go back and fish in places I've been before but that doesn't change how I play the game, it's a whole separate thing. To give an analogy to how I see it (not a direct comparison in any way); Say you're really into some trading card game. When you're playing you can only have 4 cards down. With the next set of cards though they release a new rule that lets you play a 5th face down card you can flip at any time. Yeah, the new cards are cool, but that new rule freshens up how you would even play old decks. Now compare that to them instead releasing a solitaire rule set. It's neat but not nearly as exciting. I know, I know, this isn't the most direct analogy but it gets across how I view this expansion vs old ones. All that being said I may find out my suspicion was unwarranted after seeing some gameplay and rush to buy it a couple days after release. Unless there is something huge they've been holding until release, I'm not banking on it. Maybe a few months down the road they'll release some spectacular new content for it they were just holding out on but I'm not banking on that either. I didn't really have any specific expectations around a new expansion. I had things I would have liked but I never really expected them. If I had any expectations at all it was that something in this expansion would really get me excited, and I know some people are which is great, but I'm not. It could just be a lack of poor presentation on their part. Idk man, I just look at what's been shown on EoD and the beta and go "Okay cool..." and am kind of left feeling like there should be something else but I don't really think there is. It also would have been neat if they had done something more exciting with professions than just another elite spec, but that's not a big deal for me so I wont rant on that. If you made it this far you might be asking why I would bother writing this long post on the forums because no one cares. Mainly, it helps me organize my thoughts on the matter. It's also nice to get different perspectives.

I wonder how things would pan out in a death match mode. Stuff like decapping and holding node would have no value so duelist and roamers would less desirable but probably still useful to an extent. In all honestly I think think it would just turn into a mini-WvW style fight. Each team death balls as hard as they can and pelt AoE's at each other until someone goes down.

I'd like to see more resolution in warrior's kit as well to help against condi and make Hardened Armor actually somewhat useful. Tbh though I wish they would buff warrior in such a way that made them need boons less. One the of the attractive things about warrior to me is that I don't need many boons to be "effective". Leave that to the guards.

nb4 "this is just a noob stomper build" In all seriousness though, this kind of build shouldn't exist. Regardless of how "good" it is. If they do exist, it shouldn't be good in any way. Any kind of "ADC" build is not really suited for GW2 sPvP and that's more or less what this build is. For one, there is no skill involved in landing flamethrower autos, not to mention they're AoE. The other issue with this kind of build is that games where you have an "auto-attack" based class, they have a ramp up time before they're actually good. Late game they may just chew through people like a Gatling gun but in early-mid game they are low impact. That's what makes them balanced. Not so in GW2, you come out the gate blastin' This build is just good enough to be a pain in the kitten. Sure, higher tier play it'll get rolled but in your average matches it gets too much value for the zero effort it takes to play. As someone who personally doesn't have trouble fighting this build, I absolutely HATE having to do so and can see why people have trouble it with. #deleteflameengi

I would love a 1v1 game mode similar to the 2v2s. The main hurdle I see though is balance. With 2v2 you were able to cover each other's weaknesses to some extent. This would allow for you to play most professions somewhat viably, though there defiantly is a pretty small meta in 2v2 and not everything worked. In 1v1 you wouldn't be given that option so if you're matched against a profession that counters yours you're going to be at a pretty big disadvantage before the game starts, build aside. That'll probably lead too an even smaller number of professions/builds that are even playable, let alone meta. Even if Anet perfectly balanced professions for 1v1 death match they would be wildly unbalanced for 5v5's because the two modes are completely different with completely different goals. Thus why WvW and sPvP balance is split. I only see too good ways 1v1s could work well without just being a meme; Splitting the balance or only allowing profession on profession match ups (which wouldn't work for match making and is boring anyways). There may be some better way to handle this so feel free to expand on it. I didn't plan on going too deep into the if/how any of these ideas in this thread would work realistically but I'm really down for a 1v1 mode so I'm curious to discuss it.

I agree that stronghold needs to be revamped badly. I have no idea why they didn't make it more MOBA like. MOBA's formula are popular for a reason and I think they strayed wayyyy too far off of it trying to make it "unique". I think your suggestions are good ones overall.

As someone who enjoys theory crafting builds, this sounds super fun! Maybe instead of "limiting" though they just lock in skills/weapons. They choose 1 trait line (with traits), 1 weapon, and 1 skill that are locked in and you have to build around them. The "setup" maybe be themed or could be entirely incohesive. They might even add like a "bonus objective" that if you also play with a certain sigil/rune you get extra rewards when the match ends, if you win. There are a ton of ways they could do it bu I like this idea a lot.

They exist for a reason but that doesn't mean they serve their purpose well. Stats are not the win condition. You could sit on a side node and smack a fire weaver all game and get highest damage, but since he's holding the node their team wins. You could follow someone around all game being their healing bot and get top healing, but if you're not present in team fights you'll lose them and still lose the game. Stats are only really useful for your tracking your personal improvement. "Am I healing more? Am I doing more damage? Am I defending/decapping nodes better that I was?" In a single match they don't really mean much as they don't strongly relate to the win condition. A great roamer can win you a match but have very low stats in comparison to others while a tempest could fight mid all game, get all the stats, never die, and still lose the game for the team because they didn't go where they should. As far as ranks, they also don't really mean a whole lot. With as low as the player base is a lot of people fluctuate in rank wildly and often. I've had days of poor matching making where I've dropped to silver and I've had days of poor match making where I face rolled to plat. I've faced players in plat games that there was no way they were above silver. I've faced players in silver games that are way above that skill level. Rank is loosely tied to player skill but it is defiantly not the be-all-end-all in this game.

Anet didn't abandon PvP because things are this way, things are this way because Anet abandoned PvP. Also, how this scenario looks depends on how you view ranks. Considering how the system works, the low player base, and general disinterest in PvP I would put low/mid Plat as "average" or just slightly above. Comparing ranks in this game to other competitive games I've played with ranks I'd probably just shift down each rank. What a plat player is in this game would be a gold in another, gold in this game is silver in another, ect. Take any popular sport and imagine if you nerfed the popularity into oblivion. The "peak" players in that case would be no where near as good as what you see in professional sports today. You would be lucky if the pro players in that situation are much better than highschool players now days. Same concept. People don't put the time and dedication into this game that it takes to "git gud" and I don't blame them, I'm among them in fact. It's just not worth the effort. There is just no scene around it and most talk involving it is just something negative. Like you mentioned a lot of content creators have abandoned it which in turn makes it less accessible. Sure, there are still a few places you can get some general "getting started" kind of guides and some build overviews here and there. That's no where near to the degree other "healthy" pvp games have. Content like that is what gets many players interested, helps them learn, and drives them to improve. When you have all of these issues; Poor ranked system, low player base, infrequent updates/balance, stale meta's and game modes, poor content coverage (because frankly there is no content to cover anymore), and so on. It just leads to a "life support" game mode and in those conditions simple tactics that even a bot could do become feasible.

Be as serious or fun with it as you want. Just want to see what people think would make for good sPvP game modes to add. They don't necessarily need to be "competitive" or well thought out. Just something you think could freshen up PvP enough to get more people interested and improve on the fun factor. I'll start off fi something. I haven't really thought it out too much and there are probably glaring issues with this but I wanted to get the conversation rolling. One idea I had that's more on the fun side would be sort-of-kinda team death match but with an objective similar to something we have. The map would be fairly oval shaped with an open lane down the middle. In the middle would be a single capture point and scattered around the sides of the map with terrain and stuff would be objectives. The game has two phases, the first 5-10 minutes (not sure on exact time) would be the prep phase. During this players would fight over the secondary objectives which are "lord buffs". The objectives would function like capture points. There would be 4 of them. Two would open up at a time on a set time in the match (Say the first two when you start, the next two at 4 minutes) on opposing sides. They will remain until they or captured or the next phase starts. Then once the first phase ends the middle capture point opens and on each side of the lane that teams lord spawns. They meet in the middle and fight over the capture point WITH the players. During this they will focus each other while the players try to peel for their lord and burn down the other. When your lord goes down you'll have one last "come back mechanic" sort of chance. While he's down the remaining lord will start focusing enemy players. You can try to rez the down lord and if you do your team gets some kind of buff for ~1 minute but the lord does not rejoin the fight, and instead flees. Once one lord dies/fless the remaining lord will heal up a bit and focus enemy players and hit HARD. The game ends when the middle point is taken and the team that takes it wins. Once one lord dies/flees respawns will start to increase over time to prevent a stalemate. So the team with the dead lord still has a chance to win, but it will be a very uphill fight. How is this death match like? Well, there will be the lord buffs in the first phase but those will be more to just give players a focused place to fight with a bit of a bonus to their lord for taking it. The main way to buff your lord will be through kills. Each kill you get will give them more health and/or damage when they spawn. This will be the main way of buffing your lord with the objectives being a "bit of extra". It'll be balanced in a way that even if you take all the lord buffs but you have way less kills, the lord with more kills will be stronger. The buffs may just unlock specific skills for your lord or something. You could even go a different route in that a percentage of your teams total damage buffs his damage by a percentage, total healing buffs his health by a percentage, and kills will give him the "base" stats. So if you had 10 kills, that would give him 1000 damage/health and if you had 1,000,000 team damage it would be 1000 + 10%. That last part may be too much but just an idea. High level, the first phase would be a death match with some objectives sprinkled in to focus fights. The second phase would be an all out final desperate brawl in the middle to win. Different builds/professions may be stronger in different phases.

Like most things, how impactful it is to you depends entirely on your build/profession. Other forms of CC require you use a stun break but with fear you're given the option to use a stun break OR cleanse so it's weaker than other forms of CC. Also, it isn't as good for setup as other CC so it's pretty much used as a peel/interrupt/zoning. In which case if you play into it, that was entirely by your own choice. There are cases when fear feels super strong and with as popular as necro is it pretty common. As someone who HATES getting fear chained, I don't think fear is the issue or the duration. The only changes I could see being okay would be either being able to evade through spectral ring or putting spectral ring procs on a cooldown so you can't be hit by it more than once a second. If one of those changes were made I would also say give it a lower cooldown and reduce the life force generation by 1% as well.

I'm interested to see how it goes! Feel free to revive this thread once you've used it. We could probably further improve it at that point.

It's all situational, but in general, you're right. If you have won a team fight there is value in going to assist in a 1v1 but that's always secondary. You don't want to be fighting a 1vX as the "X" unless it's a clear, quick win. In the case that you're the "1" in the 1vX, it's only worth fighting if you're sure you won't die. Even if you don't kill anyone, as long as you don't die you're giving the rest of your team the numbers advantage. A single player can win the match, but that depends on the team their facing. Let me give you a couple scenarios of when this has been the case. 1) We were up against a team that had a very skilled burn guard. He rotated to our home (where I was) right off the bat. I capped the node but he kept me busy and was very good at kiting with terrain. It was a losing fight but overall not a big deal if I did as long as our team won mid. Since this guy was fighting me they should have had the advantage, at least for a while. The issue came up in that when my team lost mid and then rotated to help on respawn. By this time I was downed and 2 people rotated in to fight him. One of them died to trying to get me up, the other was having no real impact on the fight. Then by that time the rest of their team has rotated into this fight. They continued to fight into him the rest of the game. In this case, if you know for a fact you can't beat them just go do something else even if that means leaving people to die. They can't be everywhere at once, specially on a build that isn't very mobile. Usually you can figure out a few seconds into a fight if it's worth the time or not. 2) In this case it was a VERY good thief. Not only were his rotations on point but our duelist (fire weaver) could not beat him home so we were constantly down a player and getting decapped. This is a bit of a different case in that, you can't out rotate a thief unless you are also a thief. Trying to +1 a thief is also pointless as they will just port out and go do something else. We lost this horribly all due to him. In this case our thief should have done better at following him around the map instead of trying to fight for their home node. The rest of the team, besides just being better mechanically, could not have done a whole lot about this. All in all, there are just some matches you'll be completely out classed in. Instead of tilting and giving up it's better to try to make it as close of a match as possible. It's a great opportunity to see how they play and what they did right and what you did wrong.

To add to this, these players that can do this usually spend time just running around the map outside of matches. They'll load into an empty lobby in the match finder and then just run about the map and experiment/practice. "Can I jump from here to there? Will this skill close this gap? Can I port to this spot?"

Here is what I did when starting and do when returning to the game from a long break. Your mileage may vary. I pick up a profession that sounds interesting, pick a skill/passive that I like then make a build around it. I test it, if it doesn't seem fun then I scrap it or if it does then I tweak it. Then once I've made a few of my own builds (this could take an hour or it might be across a few days) I check out the meta builds. Make sure to look at different sources and not just one (say, metabattle). Rinse and repeat for every profession. Why do I do it this way? It allows me to get a deeper understanding of the professions and why things are meta. I also just find build crafting to be fun. What is "good" to start with depends entirely on what role you want to play. In some cases a good starting build might not even be a meta build because when starting I think it's much more important you find a build you enjoy. Then as you get better you'll probably start to gravitate to more meta options. Others in this post have already provided good resources on popular builds. I actualy was brainstorming with some people about some advice you could copy/paste into chat before a match starts. I think that would be good here. 1) Don't fight outnumbered. If our respawns are staggered or we're trickling in regroup and push out as a team. 2) We only need two nodes to win so if we can't win team fights on mid focus side nodes and split their resources. 3) Keep an eye on enemy respawns/map locations and rotate accordingly. Do not sacrifice team fight potential to help in a 1v1. PvP in this game is fun, but it's not good. While this games mechanics lend themselves well to PvP, it wasn't designed with small scale (sPvP) in mind. I'm not saying don't play pvp or don't try to climb in competitive. Just keep in mind that the more "serious" you try to take PvP the more frustrated you'll likely be. On the more game-itself specific stuff, I wish I had spent the time to learn all the professions earlier. This really helps you in fighting them in the long run. You know what to look out for and what their win condition is vs you. Plus, you might find a new profession you really like! It will take time to learn everything but it's worth learning if you want to improve. Enjoy the process of learning it to! Don't rush, take your time and enjoy playing wacky/crap/meme builds.

What's considered "spam" is pretty subjective.

The grandmaster skill, Flashbang, in Explosives gives you a lot of blind application. Nothing on part with with thief, but it's still a pretty good amount of blind

Yup yup. You make a good point that even if they did dump the truck loads of money into making this possible it still wouldn't work for everyone.