After the most humiliating Monthly Automated Tournament of all time.... (read on)

[gkoogz.3089]

Metabattle dot com just demoted ALL builds except Catalyst, Auramancer and Spellbreaker out of the meta. That's right: the least amount of builds are considered "meta" in GW2's history.

 

For those out of the loop, this is the worst balance patch the game has ever seen. PvP matches are now determined by how many Catalysts there are. There are no other variables in a PvP match now. On November 29th, Catalyst got insane buff for no reason and now everything else is obsolete. Guild Wars 2 team decided this wasn't a priority for them to fix.

 

Honestly, this is sort of the final humiliation. The amount of damage this has done to the scene cannot be overstated, the fact that they just let it roll without hotfixing it. It's a total humiliation to the Guild Wars 2 team and a shameful display of indifference. Even MightyTeapot was just dejected casting the tourney. The top team was litearlly just 5 Catalysts wearing fairy costumes. As someone who runs 2-4 automated tournaments a day, you cannot understand what a shameful crisis this is for the community.

 

ArenaNet honestly should apologize to the community for how they have handled this, and they need to face their investors and explain why they decided to turn their game into abandonware.

[Aelin.9317]

Aren't they doing another balance patch quite soon? The five catalyst in fairy costumes was hilarious. Every competitive game has a time where it's meta is nasty. And it's been a while since ele was the top dog no? 5 stack of them is silly for sure, they will fix it. 

Quite the doomer take away you had at the end there. I think the game will be ok ^^ 

[soulknight.9620]

3 hours ago, gkoogz.3089 said:

Even MightyTeapot was just dejected casting the tourney.

Oh my, if our lord and savior doesnt like something it must be removed for sure!

3 hours ago, gkoogz.3089 said:

That's right: the least amount of builds are considered "meta" in GW2's history.

Yeah yeah, like that doesnt happen on a constant basis. The scourge meta, the chrono meta, the long and forgoten spellbreaker meta, 5 vindi meta... This thing happens all the time and it gets fixed a patch (or a few patches) later. There is never and nor there shall be any kind of ideal balance when it comes to mmo. I really dont know what is the purpose of this thread. You want anet to pump out a hotfix before the patch thats scheduled in 2 weeks? Gl with that. 

[Nephalem.8921]

buff for no reason? Have you seen ele playrate in pve? It was the most pointless class for years. It did not excel at anything despite being hard to play, squishy with low support.

Still better than the 5cele ele meta. The boon change broke it in pvp and it is just core ele plus anyways. A balance patch is on the way.

Raid meta was 7-8 chronos for a year or something. You can survive 2 months of cata. Some ele damage coefficients are higher in pvp than pve. Maybe very high base values are an issue?

[NotTooFoolish.7412]

Patch is coming on 14th of Feb, so more like 2 weeks xD

[Jukhy.2431]

I can see 41 builds listed in metabattle as part of the current metagame, but I guess your post is only about PvP? There's a PvP section in these forums for a reason, because it might be confusing to discuss PvP balance in the general forums. You also already seem to have a thread in the PvP section about the same issue.

Imo the game's hardly "abandonware" because there are other (more popular) game modes besides PvP.

 

Edit: the post was moved to PvP forum after my reply.

Edited February 3, 2023 by Jukhy.2431

[Shadowmoon.7986]

Well they did advertise for a combat designer on twitter, they literally may not have someone who can class balance. And they seem not very good at recruiting good talent that does not f the game up like whoever made mechanist.

[CraftyK.9062]

5 hours ago, Nephalem.8921 said:

buff for no reason? Have you seen ele playrate in pve? It was the most pointless class for years. It did not excel at anything despite being hard to play, squishy with low support.

Still better than the 5cele ele meta. The boon change broke it in pvp and it is just core ele plus anyways. A balance patch is on the way.

Raid meta was 7-8 chronos for a year or something. You can survive 2 months of cata. Some ele damage coefficients are higher in pvp than pve. Maybe very high base values are an issue?

I think the issue is that Catalyst in sPvP covers too many bases well. It can provide self pretty much 25 stacks of might, quickness, fury, it has a lot of superspeed due to Fresh Air allowing you to go back into Air attunement with One with Air, it can output a lot of soft cc like weakness blinded and chilled, respectable deal of sustain, blocks and invulns, ON TOP of doing big damage.

 

I really get that they can't get balancing done perfectly (no one can and if you exclude the current "outliers", it's mostly fine actually) but it does kind of feel oppressive to be hung up with this strong of a build for a while.

 

Also I believe that the thread has nothing to do with pve elementalist. Hammer Cata is rather difficult compared to other PvE builds and it does a good amount of damage. And at least compared to data such as in gw2wingman, where out of 620k~ logs uploaded from Raids to the website since Nov 2022 patch, Cata has a 2% presence. Having a team winning the MAT with a 5 stack of any spec/build does not exactly scream "fun to deal with" to people.

[Astralporing.1957]

Notice, that metabattle has always been spotty at best with keeping their build list up to date. It could take months for new builds to be listed, and even longer for no longer relevant builds to be delisted. At the same time the way they rate their build is also both not very consistent, and highly subjective. So, the fact that metabattle lists just 3 PvP builds as meta, by itself is no reason for panic. Especially since it also lists 21 builds as "great", with rating a lot of them either as high or just below the "meta" ones (for example there are 3 non-Cata/SpB "great" builds ranked at 5, and 3 more ranked at 4.9, when the "meta" auramancer build gets only 4.7 rating).

Edited February 1, 2023 by Astralporing.1957

[apharma.3741]

I guess someone wasn't there when 5 celementalists almost won the weekly ESL and finally won when they switched to 4 + 1 thief to touch them if they went down so the could vapour form in stealth and get rezzed.

Literal 2 class meta where one was basically a medic 😄 

[Marxx.5021]

Balance is not the biggest issue of PvP. Next patch will maybe nerf and buff a few specs. The best you can hope for is that there are no such big outliers.

Learning from recent news WvW has a team lead and producer. They even have a roadmap what to do - nice. I guess there is no such thing for PvP - propably not even a team of developers. No plans, no team no future.

[Swagg.9236]

I don't get why everybody is so mega heinie hammered about it now.  This was always how GW2 played (except Thief used to kind of exist as a dude who simply spammed stealth and decapped nodes).

[Khalisto.5780]

lmao, we get you frustrated, but you don't need to make multiple posts to say the same thing in different ways lol

[Silinsar.6298]

5 hours ago, Marxx.5021 said:

Learning from recent news WvW has a team lead and producer. They even have a roadmap what to do - nice. I guess there is no such thing for PvP - propably not even a team of developers. No plans, no team no future.

Whatever is happening in sPvP, you might not want to trade places with PvP-oriented WvW players. Seems like they are trying to turn WvW into a perpetual PvE meta event.

[voltaicbore.8012]

7 hours ago, CraftyK.9062 said:

I think the issue is that Catalyst in sPvP covers too many bases well.

I think this sums it up well.

Ele is a pretty neat concept - unlike many other games/fictional works where mages tend to tunnel pretty hard into being just a "fire mage"/"water mage"/"healer"/etc, the attunement swapping really gives ele in GW2 a "real master of magics" feeling. Fire gives you great offense-only power, water has good emergency healing, earth offers a lot of fun cc/ability to tank some hits, and air has nice offense/cc combinations. And I was only thinking of weapon skills there - the kit gets even more diverse when you add utilities to the mix.

From a balance standpoint, this is also (in my opinion) why ele is forever stuck either being useless or brokenly good. If a class has access to that many aspects of combat, the moment it becomes too good at just a few too many of them, it becomes extremely hard to play against. For much of the game's history, it seems like the devs played it safe and kept ele in the "not good enough at anything to be worth it" category.

I think cata + scepter changes just pushed ele over the edge. Good players just have too great of an ability to keep up offensive pressure while retaining all the usual ele tools that restrict enemies to extremely narrow windows of opportunity. This might be one of the times where the smartest balance approach is purely just some numbers/duration tweaks.

Edited February 1, 2023 by voltaicbore.8012

[Azure The Heartless.3261]

Nerf brigading builds and playstyles that were annoying, but counterable ensures that the builds that remain and work will be played exclusively in high level. 

If you nerf catalyst and spellbreaker and don't learn your lesson, chronomancer, vindi, and perhaps untamed will take their place. 

Learn your lesson. 

 

Edited February 1, 2023 by Azure The Heartless.3261

[Tnanever.3192]

17 hours ago, soulknight.9620 said:

Oh my, if our lord and savior doesnt like something it must be removed for sure!

Yeah yeah, like that doesnt happen on a constant basis. The scourge meta, the chrono meta, the long and forgoten spellbreaker meta, 5 vindi meta... This thing happens all the time and it gets fixed a patch (or a few patches) later. There is never and nor there shall be any kind of ideal balance when it comes to mmo. I really dont know what is the purpose of this thread. You want anet to pump out a hotfix before the patch thats scheduled in 2 weeks? Gl with that. 

You're making poor excuses for them.  There are levels of badness, and these types of levels are not a show of professionalism or critical thought.  Having to continuously nerf things to the extreme, only to have them now too weak to compete, shows that one or more things in their development cycle is broken, and/or people have received too much leniency for making these bad decisions that kitten off players, which at the end of the day, reduce their revenue.  They're literally losing money because of this kind of stuff, and it's really weird that people like you try to make excuses.  Hmm...you must play one of the meta classes, don't you?

[soulknight.9620]

7 hours ago, Tnanever.3192 said:

You're making poor excuses for them.  There are levels of badness, and these types of levels are not a show of professionalism or critical thought.  Having to continuously nerf things to the extreme, only to have them now too weak to compete, shows that one or more things in their development cycle is broken, and/or people have received too much leniency for making these bad decisions that kitten off players, which at the end of the day, reduce their revenue.  They're literally losing money because of this kind of stuff, and it's really weird that people like you try to make excuses.  Hmm...you must play one of the meta classes, don't you?

Or you just need to learn some common sense. There can never be anything "balanced" in a game where there are multiple classes with multiple traits/skills/elite specs simply due to them having to be different by definition. And even if you manage to somehow get two classes to work similarly, a single "good/bad" skill/trait would give upper hand to one of them. Thats imbalance by definition. So unless you want there to only be one class and one build availible in gw2, i wouldnt count on the game being balanced at all. 

If you want balance - chess is the answer for you (although white always go first, so....). 

Here is a quick test on how the competetive community works in any game. If all of the spvp community thinks that cata is broken and OP, then why dont all of you just "sign a gentlemens agreement" on not using this class before it gets fixed? The sad truth is - because they want to win. Every comptetetive player wants to win and he will always looks for the most op/broken/easy way to win, which involves specifically looking for and abusing the skritt out of anything that give some kind of advantage over other players. And that takes me back to my previous argument that there is always going to be something "broken OP" that will get abused like scourge meta, 5 vindi meta, chrono meta etc. 

 

You really think that any of the balance team or i might even say any of anet developers actually come to work with a sole idea to ruin their product (their lifes work) and their players life? Stop demonising devs. Sure mistakes can happen here and there, but overall gw2 is in its best state since HOT. And yet all you people do is complain 24/7. There are some internal processes that are involved in developing and shipping patches (yes yes even the small ones). And it takes time. There is a patch coming in a few weeks that will address the issue like they always do when it comes down to stuff being op. 

 

I dont know what community are you interacting with, but my friends and guildies actually enjoy the game (yes yes even pvp). As for revenue... How much $$ are spvp players spending atm? I will give you a hint - not much. The majority of people that actually spends money in gw2 are pve people. And majority of them are happy with gw2 state atm. 

 

As for you sad attempt to attack me personally, i play all of the classes, just like the game is meant to be played. I have a main, but I have no issues with switching classes when i have to. Do you? 

[Greyrat.2378]

Some of you should really take a break from the game and the forum, go touch grass oustide (or snow, depending on where you live), brew cup of tea and just chill for a minute. And I don't mean just few individuals in this topic that have expressed some understandable, yet unreasonable amount of frustration with the game.

They've announced another balance update which, I believe, will probably adresss some of the glaring issues with the current meta, so let's just patiently wait and see what will happen.
 

Quote

Honestly, this is sort of the final humiliation. The amount of damage this has done to the scene cannot be overstated, the fact that they just let it roll without hotfixing it. It's a total humiliation to the Guild Wars 2 team and a shameful display of indifference. Even MightyTeapot was just dejected casting the tourney. The top team was litearlly just 5 Catalysts wearing fairy costumes. As someone who runs 2-4 automated tournaments a day, you cannot understand what a shameful crisis this is for the community.

 

ArenaNet honestly should apologize to the community for how they have handled this, and they need to face their investors and explain why they decided to turn their game into abandonware.

Quote

They're literally losing money because of this kind of stuff, and it's really weird that people like you try to make excuses. 

If you are going to overreact like this, just stop and pause for a minute. Go meditate or something, idk, but this is a bit silly to make such statements.

edit: and don't take it as an insult, just think about it for a second. It's still a game that is supposed to be fun in first place.
If you are not having fun, then take a break. It's not the end of our world (at least not yet).

Edited February 2, 2023 by Greyrat.2378

[Kuma.1503]

I remember when the French Worms won MAT with a team of 5 revenants. Good times...

 

[Terrorhuz.4695]

On 2/1/2023 at 8:27 AM, Aelin.9317 said:

Aren't they doing another balance patch quite soon?

Bruh that thing came out 2 months ago, "quite soon" is really relative

Edited February 2, 2023 by Terrorhuz.4695

[rank eleven monk.9502]

And now in off times you see certain people with top pvp titles queue in duo on random professions only to switch to cata right away. Love it, abusing the system to the max - duoq, just running cata and switching to avoid multiple catas in the other team.

[ollbirtan.2915]

Imagine being so hateful of eles that you spawn topic after topic on the forum. Also, imagine using meta battle as a reference source.. 🙄

[Eddbopkins.2630]

This problem can't be fixed with a simple damage coefficient change right? Something like that can happen in a matter or hours no? Cat seems to be a much bigger problem that the devs can't put there head around. At least this is what the silence and outcome of the summer/fall update has become to me anyway.

[Tnanever.3192]

5 hours ago, soulknight.9620 said:

Or you just need to learn some common sense. There can never be anything "balanced" in a game where there are multiple classes with multiple traits/skills/elite specs simply due to them having to be different by definition. And even if you manage to somehow get two classes to work similarly, a single "good/bad" skill/trait would give upper hand to one of them. Thats imbalance by definition. So unless you want there to only be one class and one build availible in gw2, i wouldnt count on the game being balanced at all. 

If you want balance - chess is the answer for you (although white always go first, so....). 

Here is a quick test on how the competetive community works in any game. If all of the spvp community thinks that cata is broken and OP, then why dont all of you just "sign a gentlemens agreement" on not using this class before it gets fixed? The sad truth is - because they want to win. Every comptetetive player wants to win and he will always looks for the most op/broken/easy way to win, which involves specifically looking for and abusing the skritt out of anything that give some kind of advantage over other players. And that takes me back to my previous argument that there is always going to be something "broken OP" that will get abused like scourge meta, 5 vindi meta, chrono meta etc. 

 

You really think that any of the balance team or i might even say any of anet developers actually come to work with a sole idea to ruin their product (their lifes work) and their players life? Stop demonising devs. Sure mistakes can happen here and there, but overall gw2 is in its best state since HOT. And yet all you people do is complain 24/7. There are some internal processes that are involved in developing and shipping patches (yes yes even the small ones). And it takes time. There is a patch coming in a few weeks that will address the issue like they always do when it comes down to stuff being op. 

 

I dont know what community are you interacting with, but my friends and guildies actually enjoy the game (yes yes even pvp). As for revenue... How much $$ are spvp players spending atm? I will give you a hint - not much. The majority of people that actually spends money in gw2 are pve people. And majority of them are happy with gw2 state atm. 

 

As for you sad attempt to attack me personally, i play all of the classes, just like the game is meant to be played. I have a main, but I have no issues with switching classes when i have to. Do you? 

 

You seem have no concept of thresholds or scale.  Cleary this isn't chess, Einstein - but you've completely missed the point and problem.

 

The game needs to be balanced to the point where all classes are competitive and FUN to play - losing 80%+ of the time to some garbage flavor-of-the-month "meta" build is not fun, and not remotely balanced, and reveals bad development/management.  Games should primarily be determined by skill and not bad developer decisions.  If at the top end, the game was balanced enough to where the the lowest performing classes lost only ~10% more to the very highest performing classes, that would be great. We don't have anything like that whatsoever right now, genius.

 

All you did was type a wall of text defending garbage.