Master Ketsu.4569

Revenant is strong max level. The game doesn't need to be balanced for low level because pre-endgame is kitten easy anyways. gitgud.

No. Spearbreaker is busted but it doesn't hold a candle to sig Cata at its prime. I suspect people not familiar with the mechanics of how ranked in played past 1600 rating still do not fully understand just how completely gamebreaking sig cata really was. Everyone past that rating has stow weapons and about/face camera style free/normal switching down to a T. Without those mechanics mastered, sig cata was busted. But with them mastered, sig cata was absolutely untouchable and completely invalidated most other classes/builds in the game because you could legit meme people while kiting away from them at the same time. Spearbreaker is busted because it does its job too well and needs to be 1v2'd to kill it, thus anyone can be a top-tier sidenoder as Spearbreaker right now. However, sig cata played properly was SSS+ God tier teamfighter, SSS+ God tier duelist, SSS+ God tier sidenoder, SSS+ God tier roamer, all in one build and required no support at all to do what it did. There is a very good reason that competitive teams ran 3-5 sig cata in ATs during that time. There was very little reason to run anything else.

I'm seeing a lot of people blame full counter for Warrior being in SS+ God tier right now, which is silly because FC was available in its current form for long periods of time that War was considered low tier. Sure, the "bug" should be fixed, but beyond that the skill is fine. The problem right now almost exclusively comes down to the fact that Warrior has been given two very powerful weapon kits in a row with the latest expansions that dwarf most of everything else in the game. Staff Warrior is an amazing weapon for never dying on the point, and Spear Warrior is just straight up busted OP. So when you combine Sp/St into spellbreaker, you end up with a blatantly broken build. But it's mostly spear that needs the nerf. Lets look at what spear can do: Two evades( NOT ONE, TWO ) on a RANGED weapon, one of which does high damage on a 6s CD, the other is 20s and also an unblockable CC for some completely insane reason. Then you have a lock on skill that does over 2k base damage and will thus easily hit for 10k. A daze/immob that has 1k base, an AOE cripple, and then finally an AOE ranged auto attack that effectively generates infinite adrenaline. This is broken. There is absolutely no reasoning that exists that can defend this as being balanced. No other weapon in the game even comes close to being this powerful. Just the burst skill and auto attack alone should raise eyebrows. 1-2k base that is also an evade on a 6s CD. Lol. Lmao even. Toppest of all keks. April fools came early. Compare this to other skills that are considered powerful evade+damage skills like Thief Sw/D-3 ( 6 init ), Rev Sw-3 (15e + 15cd ), or Engi H-3 ( 18cd ). These three skills are considered some of the best abilities in the game for PvP/WvW, and yet none of them hold a candle to War Sp-6 in terms of both DPS and evasion uptime. It is blatantly better than everything else in the game. But the biggest problem with spear is how it adds the perfect weapon to Staff Spellbreaker. Previously, Staff bunker warrior had to choose between a weapon that gave better offense or defense, but with spear you now get both. And like so many other builds that don't have to make this choice, this comes with the added problem of the fact that the build requires absolutely no skill whatsoever to play at an effective level since you can just cycle defenses and win most matchups with this alone. Right now the only class that seems to be effective is condi bunker necro, which also requires very little skill to play due to broken sustain and spammy mechanics. This is why we are now once again in a monkey-meta, with matches dominated by mindless easymode builds. It has little to do with FC and more to do with Anet constantly designing things with simultaneous attack/defend mechanics that remove the need to use your brain.

Imagine Hamster food.

I can login but attempting to load any character disconnects. Update broke the game. Anet probably running around like headless chickens trying to fix it. Panicbasket!

The problem with Rev spear is that it has "Designed for spamming minmax PvE raid rotations" written all over it, except it isn't good DPS and therefore no one in Raids will use it. The mechanics around building stacks on one skill that is obviously designed to hit a raid boss that mostly just sits there makes it feel horrifically clunky and bad in all other game modes. Scrap completely and rework IMO.

GW2 in general has needed a massive Animation/Visual clarity patch overhaul for a very long time. I've already made several threads about it. -Players should be able to edit where damage numbers appear so you don't have the problem of small animations being obscured by damage numbers -There should be an option to toggle skill icons with damage numbers. What's interesting is that this is already a part of the API and there are add-ons that can achieve the effect but Anet had the developer of the add on disable it for PvP. Instead of worrying about a disparity between players using an add-on that gives better combat visualizations, the smarter move would have been to hire the add-on developer and code it in as an official part of the base game. -Many skills could easily have additional special FX added to them in order to make them look more distinguishable from auto attacks. Far too many powerful abilities ( Like DH spear ) have simple windups that again due to being obscured by damage numbers are very hard to pick out. -There are also some skills with huge animations despite the ability doing very little. Ele is a poster child for this problem. Most ele skills that have a major impact in PvP have little to no animation, while most ele skills that have huge animations have little to no impact. All this stuff was maybe acceptable back in 2012, but in 2024 it makes the game horribly dated and clunky.

I think you meant to post this in WvW, not PvP. In WvW harbs have a cel build with near infinite sustain and high toughness that a trained monkey could play, which the WvW balance team keeps around just so the casuals have a build they can run with that doesn't require them to learn2dodge. But in sPvP, the build has been heavily nerfed.

True, but the real problem is they are making matches worse when they do this. People complain about lopsided games all the time, and this is one of the matchmaking exploits that will create a lopsided game. When you have a 1600+ rated player being matched as a 1200 rated player, the algorithm will think it needs to put more platinum players on their team to compensate. It also messes with the amount of rating gained/lossed since when you beat exploiters it rewards you the points for beating a 1200 rated player when you actually beat someone in the top 10, which further messes with matchmaking due to granting everyone involved in exploited matches ratings which are inaccurate, making it harder and harder for the matchmaker to properly balance the teams meaning you get additional bad lopsided games even without the exploiters present. The problem isn't who is winning. The problem is that this exploit makes the game less fun.

If you can't land a 1200 ranged unblockable pull just because they increased counterplay options, your problem is an L2P problem as a result of relying too much on mechanics which lack counterplay. Learn to count and predict your opponents dodges and you will quickly find that even after these changes magnet remains one of the best CCs in the game. If you need everything to be an ezmode no-brain-required goes-through-all-defenses winbutton to play PvP, you don't know how to PvP.

Revenant tends to get more complaints than warranted when it has a playable meta build because its "cheese mechanic" is not as easy to understand or obvious to people as the cheese that other classes have access to. Every class has something cracked in its favor. IE Thief has stealth spam cheese, Mesmer has attacking-while-defending cheese, Warrior has assloads of sustain cheese, Ele has a ton of skills that lack meaningful counterplay/can't be blocked or evaded cheese, etc etc list goes on. All of these are annoying, BUT they are also pretty easy to understand. Revenant's cheese is only understood by playing the class and actually getting somewhat good at it - which is that the low cooldowns plus energy system can either be dumped into offense or defense, and this allows rev to kite and chain blocks/evades for a very long time. This leads less savvy players to complain a lot because top rev builds will seem like they have too many defensive actions in relation to damage access. What they don't realize, is that this ability to chain defenses is no different than a Thief saying "Peace out" of a fight and just going into stealth to reset, because while a Rev is chaining defenses, it doesn't have as much energy for offense. If you see a Rev use something like 'Riposting shadows->Block->Riposting shadows' you now know they have no energy for a PT Burst combo for at least 10 seconds. So it's not actually as broken as it first seems. When you take the time to learn Rev, opposing Rev's actually become the easiest class to for you to deal with in the game, because unlike other classes cheese, Rev's cheese has much more counterplay since it's predictable. If you see a Rev using certain skills, you know whether or not they have enough energy for certain combos, and thus always know what is coming. But at low skill levels, players just don't know how Revs energy system works at all which makes it seem very OP especially if the Rev player also understands their opponents class. More-so than any other matchup in the game "Revenant who understands opponents class mechanics VS any other class being played by someone who doesn't understand Rev mechanics" is the biggest shutout. The same is true for every matchup, but for a Rev to kill a player who doesn't understand Rev is always BIGTIME child's play. This is why silver/golds complain so hard when a Rev build is meta, because a good rev during a season that has an actual competitive rev build will just endlessly farm bad players out of spawn by taking advantage of the low cooldowns. As a plat+ rev main myself I have taken advantage of this to gatekeep probably hundreds of gold players out of high rated games because as soon as I notice someone doesn't know how to fight Rev I will place them on free-farm for the rest of the game. I am not sorry.

Broken poll.

Ranger GS is not much better than Rev or Warrior GS once you account for dumb stealth combos. Maul is a very fair skill to get hit by due to being highly telegraphed. The problem ONLY comes when you can stealthmonkey it. Before damage powercreep was addressed, a long time ago there used to be a really degenerate low-effort build you could play that would just oneshot people from stealth with 30k+ damage on Ranger GS, and then just run away while it recharged. That build got nerfed along with the damage patch so it's not really an issue anymore. However, it's still annoying for the same reason stealth is annoying. It's not actually a problem with Ranger. People need to stop blaming classes and certain weapons for the fact that the reveal-on-hit and no real soft detection makes stealth in this game naturally low counterplay. Ranger GS is not a problem. Stealth is badly designed. Thief DE rifle is not a problem. Stealth is badly designed. Just about every problem build that uses stealth has the central flaw of what makes it stupid and uninteractive rooted in stealth being badly designed in a way that makes it uninteractive. Other games let you either see an outline or hear a sound when a stealthed enemy is close enough ( WoW ), or make stealth reveal if you got hit with a CC Skill ( Tera ), or revealed you when you used an offensive skill instead of after it successfully hit ( Every game except GW2 ). At the absolute very least, dodging or blocking a stealth attack should reveal the attacker and I have yet to see a good argument against this that didn't sound like it came from a Rank<1400 player. The issue is that Anet has repeatedly failed to understand just how bad this mechanic is designed. The current iteration is waaaaaaay too hand-holdy. I can understand MMO's pandering to casuals but pandering this hard is just intellectually insulting.

This is a problem on at least 25% of the skills in the game, not just SoJ. It's part of an overarching "Poor animation balance" neglect issue where skills with high tells are often unimpactful in PvP and skills with low tells have major impact. So now you have all this visual clutter from skills that literally do almost nothing while the abilities that actually win games have either no windup, look indistinguishable from auto attacks, are instant cast, look too similar to other abilities, only play a strong visual tell after the skill has already hit, or a combination of these. Then you have some skill that summons a giant turtle covering the point that does almost nothing and should usually be ignored. This is something Anet has been consistently failing more and more on with every expansion. They really should just consider adding toggle-able skill bars/skill icons to the game. GW2 is has gotten to the point where the combat unironically feels less intuitive than GW1 did despite the fact that GW2 has action combat and a dodge bar.

The fact that no one seems to understand that the problem is how many of DH skills are unblockable or unevadeable gives little hope to it ever being fixed. People would rather complain about numbers rather than the fact that combos which can only be stopped by tons of invuln and stab ( IE: Build wars ) is bad for the game.