Master Ketsu.4569

I mean, would it be so hard for the ground circle animation to start as soon as the casting starts? It's a good animation, it just doesn't play until it's already a problem which defeats the purpose.

Currently, looking at things I have noticed that the game is surprisingly balanced for having an expansion that just dropped. Normally balance is in chaos after new especs come out for a solid half year at least, so clearly anet did something right. Every class has at least one build worth playing, most have multiple builds worth playing. Nothing is outright broken dominating. However, there is still a very big problem with the game, and that is many animations aren't very good which leads to an irritating gameplay experience at high level play because certain skills are harder to deal with not because those skills are broken but because they have poor tells. It also makes PvP difficult to get into for new players and low level play because it's harder to learn what skills do what and what is killing you when the animations for those skills are poor. A few examples: Harbinger lift animation plays after the skill has already landed ( This is one good example of a skill that isn't actually broken, but just feels broken because it's nearly impossible to see the windup for it in the middle of a teamfight. ) Pistol skills are also barely discernable from each other. microscopic little crappy handwave animations that are so small they get covered up by damage numbers that cannot be height adjusted. These are not good enough. Even GW1 had better skill animations with the glowing symbols that appeared above characters heads. Rev GS2 looks exactly the same as an auto attack. Ele animations playing after the skill has already landed. Spectre and Untamed visual clutter. Spectre and Harbinger shroud shows incorrectly as health/not health in combat. These issues IMO bring far bigger problems to PvP than any numerical balance issue currently in the game. TL;DR a skill patch focused not on numbers or direct mechanics, but instead on better clearer visual effects, and perhaps better UI options for where damage numbers appear, would do wonders for the game. I believe this is one problem with GW2's combat that anet drastically underestimates. It's like they view it as a secondary issue, when in reality it should be seen as a primary issue. I'm aware that this is easier said then done, as it means the art and animation team working in coordination with the skills team for the purpose of improving "visual balance". But the truth is that they are flushing a lot of GW2's potential down the toilet by not doing it.

1. Equip Jalis with Vindicator 2. Have a player use any unevadeable CC field ( Guardian Hammer 5 is the easiest to test ) 3. Cast Inspiring reinforcement 4. Dodge and attempt to leave the ring What happens is the vindicator dodge will abruptly end in an extremely glitchy way, and you will lose 1 stack of stablity. But you will not be CC'd.

Normally you can avoid unevadeable CCs by having stab. But Vindicator dodge still get's interrupted if you have stab. The dodge will end, but you won't get CC'd. Please fix this it's very dumb.

Ranked stronghold would be terrible because there are multiple strategies that break it. For instance, support is way too strong because you need NPCs to do the objective for you. So a team of 5 support / condi hybrid builds can just bulldoze the map purely because you can't kill them or the NPCs and they will just auto win once they reach the other side of the map.

It's this. Duo Queue is a huge advantage this season because you can count on at least 1 other person who understands rotations. I've noticed an insane number of players new to PvP that just randomly wander around the map, double and triple capping nodes, zerging when they shouldn't, soloing when they shouldn't. This makes solo Q very luck based.

False. The animations on Harbinger are complete garbage. The elixers have no discernible animation. The lift is yet another example of the crappy "necro handwave" animation that is barely discernable until after the skill already lands, and you have no idea where it is being cast even if you can squint your eyes enough to see it because there is no red circle indicator for where the skill will appear. Once the main animation appears, the skill has already hit. There is barely any difference in animation between the pistol skills except rate of fire. Overall very poor quality animations.

This entire thread proves how many people on the pvp forums have never once even touched plat.

GS3 is not 900 range like tooltip claims, only goes about 600. Reavers rage still randomly fails to do anything. ( All alliance skills have random skill failure but on RR it seems to happen most often ) The dodge does not refund endurance if it gets disrupted due to latency/lag issues. It also has about a 5% chance to randomfail to grant its bonus.

One of the Grandmasters could be reworked to give 2 dodges back. Since Saints shield has proven itself "problematic", it's probably the best candidate to be reworked this way. Nerf the healing and barrier down an additional 75% ( Would need to be more than 50% nerf due to vigor and endurance regen on the spec ), reduce the evade duration to 1s, it no longer increases the radius, but you then get two dodges and a normal endurance bar. Basically massively nerf the trait in all other aspects but give it 2 dodge.

The elite has a terrible animation.

This right here is a general issue that could and should be fixed by toggleable skill indicators.

It's easy to avoid on anything. Especially now. The skill needed minor damage tweaks, but the nerf it got was so heavy handed that it's pretty obvious they are pandering to the lesser skilled crowd that thinks they should be able to facetank everything and ignore gigantic obvious circles forming around them. Saints shield nerf was very well deserved though. F**k that trait.

The problem with pandering to less skilled players by changing the design in ways to reduce the skill gap is that the people on top will still be on top, which means the lesser skilled player complaining will not actually get what they want. The only thing reducing the skill gap actually ends up doing is making the game more difficult to balance, due to mechanics mattering more than player skill. This is why "noob pandering" makes sense for PvE, but not for PvP. Pandering can work in PvE because the "skill" level of the enemy in PvE is static. You cannot control for this in PvP.

/thread

Yep. The shiro version of Vindicator that most people are playing is very easy to outplay 1v1, and hard loses to every other Revenant build ( Renegade, herald, EVEN CORE REV ) assuming both players are good. Gets dunked by other duelist specs and most roamer specs as long as you understand how to burst after the 1 dodge. Jalis Vind is strong 1v1 but of course you are then losing shiro on a roamer build which is no bueno. What's broken on Vind comes entirely to its teamfight. 6k heal to your entire team every dodge LMAO. Instant kill button that while easy to dodge in a duel, is basically free gigadamage at the midfight LMAO. Vind is definitely overtuned, it's just not the God of PvP people think it is. You can tell who the unskilled players are because they complain more about GS5 than they do about Saints shield. GS5 is only slightly overtuned. Saints shield is 120% gamebreaking and should actually see an entire rework, not just a nerf.

Think how exploitable duo Q is in ranked. Now multiply that x4. That's the general problem. The main issue with 5 man is that it would only work assuming we have an infinitely large player base. But we don't. And having 5 man doesn't make the playerbase grow either, this is a proven fact. It's an idea that only works in theory, not in practice.

This is actually a problem I predicted with Saints shield and was wondering how long it would take until people unironically tried this strategy. Didn't take long it seems. On one Rev it's only somewhat OP. However, Saints hits everyone. So if you have multiple revs using Saints on each other, they are all healing from each dodge in teamfights. Meaning that 5 vindicators can all build Saints, and all go Zerk Amulet and scholar rune, and still never die since they are constantly blasting each other with a 3k heal/3k Barrier every 2 seconds or so. Saints might need an actual partial rework because I don't see how this can be balanced in a way that it doesn't make it completely unusable for a solo Rev. Something like reduce it by 25% overall, and then on top of that make it so it only heals your allies for half as much, but the outgoing healing buff is increased, so it can only be used this way if the rev actually builds some kind of actual ventari support build with actual investment into healing power. The fact that you can currently do this with 0 stats in healing is pretty busted and will continued to be abused in organized teams until fixed

I did 38k on Golem ( Large ) with Jalis/Shiro and GS The real problem is that Alliance is kind of bad in PvE. It feels like the legends were made to be a grab bag of useful things for PvP, but in PvE the numbers on the new legend seem too low making it inferior to just channeling upkeeps on Jalis and Shiro while doing rotations with GS and damage traits/gear/etc. Perhaps someone better at coming up with rotations than me can find a way to make it less kitten, but I couldn't.

Except you apparently, since you are the one who brought it up in the first place.

Heaven forbid there be a counter to a broken mechanic. Downstate VS GS5 is legitimately just how downstate used to work pre-Feb 2020.

The sustain needs to be toned down, but the people complaining about the burst need to L2P. Rev GS has huge telegraphs. Actually duel someone who is 1600+ and doesn't random dodge, and they will never get hit with more than one or two ticks from GS5.

They need nerfs, but not heavy ones. Something like tree song to 25e and Saints to 2.2k in PvP should bring it in line while keeping it viable. People are already discovering some similarly powerful builds. Also remember that if you are actually dying to GS5 then it's a L2P issue. It's a contender for the most telegraphed and slowest casting weapon skill in the game. Learn to not random dodge and you will find that it is not as oppressive as you think.

No, because that encourages casuals to AFK. They should have to actually try to win.

The sustain is a bit much on Bottom trait. We kind of warned in beta that Saints Shield was a bit much. For some reason it has higher numbers in PvP than in PvE. The PvP/WvW version can see a 25% reduction or so. Possibly more. HOWEVER, in order to truly take advantage of that and be "unkillable" you have to run retribution and camp Viktor stance. Retribution is a massive damage loss, and Viktor legitimately does 0 damage ( No seriously, read Viktors skills. They do not even have a damage stat ). so the only threat becomes GS5. While I can see the frustration of not being able to kill this build, if you are actually dying to it then it means you failed to avoid a skill that has one of the biggest tells and longest casts amoung weapon skills in the entire game. So complaining about the sustain is justified, but those dying to Retribution Vind have an L2P problem.