Lost Elegy.9276

I agree. To be brutally honest, little about Warrior works with the theme it has. The class designed to be the cannon fodder that charges in first can't even do that right. The weapons are a complete design mess. The 1h swords are the only melee weapon that applies damaging conditions. Somehow. The rest are riddled with archaic block skills that are hilariously bad when compared with newer options. Everything about the mace makes me want to cry. The hammer is even worse. One of the most feared weapons in the dark ages, alongside the mace and dagger, is reserved to a stun stick. Amazing. The only positive is the absurd power mess of greatsword. It has two gap closers, a ranged slow, burst, and great range. Its primal burst is to be feared. The cooldowns aren't even bad. A warrior without GS is a mechanist without their mech, and Anet has been happy with this for 7+ years. It's baffling. Shield is also nigh mandatory for a viable build. Offhand doesn't exist for Warrior. We are born with the shield and GS, and we will die with them. The trait lines heavily enforce... well, nothing. They honestly confuse me. The things each trait line make you better at is almost random. Defense trait line? Oh, so that should be the place for self sustain, buffs, and defense-oriented weapons, right? No. Shouts and sustain are in Tactics. Along with the Warhorn, a weapon that grants barrier and heals. Defense makes MACES better. In fact, you can pick a line of traits (Cull the Weak, Sundering Mace, and Cleansing Ire) that have no defensive properties. The class needs a complete facelift. The core idea and adrenaline system? Fine. The list of viable weapons and options? Nonexistent. Traitlines? Bewildering combinations that have been shuffled around too much.

Damage HAS to be high. Anet drank a lot of glue and decided all the self-sustain tools from PvE should make their way into SPvP. The worst offenders being traits. Even with repeated nerfs, sustain is still nutty in this game. Even if we discount the manual pressing of your primary heal skill, plenty of classes have trait lines that provide regeneration, protection, heal on X condition, passive condition removal, and a slew of other behind-the-curtain effects that just honestly shouldn't be there. The power creep over the years added a ton of stun breaks. Truly locking someone down is hard and needs to be rewarded. People HAVE to die in under 5 seconds. If not, people with any sort of investment in defensive options would just never die.

No, you are absolutely right. Asymmetric gameplay is doomed to fail from a balance perspective. WE, THE PEOPLE, DEMAND SPVP BE REPLACED WITH ONLY STICK. NO SKILLS. NO POTIONS. FINAL DESTINATION. STICK ONLY.

Your contribution is immeasurable. Most companies don't ban hackers immediately. Some have good reasons, others are lazy. Letting people abuse it gives the developers a clearer image of how it's being down and lets them knock out a larger group of guilty at once. That being said, Anet doesn't have a good track record on this issue. It feels more like incompetence than malice or laziness, though.

Honestly, I feel like this post gets closest to the real issue. Power builds have very obvious attacks to dodge. Mesmer? Dodge the shatter combo or block it. They typically daze you right before they do it to reduce your options. This clear understanding of what's dangerous and what isn't make power builds inherently more fun and rewarding to fight. Like a dark souls boss, you master the timing and see the improvement immediately. Condition builds, since games as old as WoW, have had very wonky interactions with PvP. Warlock in old WoW literally won the fight by using 3 instant cast curses that would tick down your entire health bar. They spent the rest of the fight spamming Fear so you couldn't reach them. They weren't OP (Outside a specific patch) because everyone died before the 20 second DoTs finished their work. Combat was FAST. GW2 has a slightly different issue. Condition damage builds up from a wide range of sources, and the threat is from ALL of those sources, not specific attacks or bursts than can be dodged. Take Condi Mesmer, for example. Even if you systematically kill the illusions as you chase the player, they will still hit you with small DoTs that chip you down. It's practically unavoidable. Few condition builds will burst you down, but the constant damage feels very horrible to fight against. It makes the player feel very helpless to prevent it, even if they actually have the ability to win the fight. There is a stark difference between fighting a Warrior, which feels very much like Dark Souls-esque PvP of winning through good dodge rolls and knowing when is safe to attack, and fighting a Necromancer who spends the fight swinging his stick in the air and attacks manifesting on top of you and applying a wide range of debuffs. It REALLY doesn't help that condition builds can do most of their damage at safe distances. The most comparable "annoying" power weapon that feels like fighting a condi build is the Mechanist Mortar Engi. They spam huge AoEs at you while a constant source of damage ticks away at your health bar. It's unrealistic to kill the mech, so you might as well just consider it a DoT. It's equally unrealistic to dodge all the mortar shots, given their AoE size. Condi vs Power will always be a FEELING BAD argument more than any actual balance issue.

The biggest issue with condition builds is how little you FEEL their presence. When a Norn runs at me with a sword and hits me, I see and understand it quite simply. Big monkey hit me with stick. It hurt. GOT IT. Condis? Completely different story. Old man hobbles over to you and points a finger at the ground. A skeleton from the afterlife starts moaning. Next thing you know, you suddenly have 7+ of every negative status effect in the game and you either cleanse them or you die. How am I supposed to register that? Is the old man the threat? Or the ground he's pointing at? Why is a skeleton moaning? What's this weird, massive circle on the ground? Why do I feel bad all of a sudden? I can kill a god, but standing in a green circle does this much to me? Tl;dr - The difference between how they feel is a huge issue. If something is going to hurt me as much as a Norn with a greatsword made out of a literal galaxy, it should probably have the same visual and audio weight to it.

Honestly, new players don't join sPvP. Beyond the "let's try this for a week" players who have already long since come and gone from this mode, there is next to no reason to play PvP in this game outside of masochism or delusion. There are just way better combat systems in other games. If I want a fight with tight, rewarding controls, I go to a 2d fighter. If I want adrenaline, I can go boot up an FPS or action brawler like Smash Brothers. If I want to feel smart and challenge myself, I pick up a calculator and make it say funny haha words. sPvP is a shadow of its former self. It's flooded with bots abusing the mode for currency farming (with a minimum of one in every 2 matches. Fun fact, they've moved over to Mechanist), elitists who think "fun" is min-maxing to the point of breaking the game and removing any enjoyability for the rest of us, and the broken few who still delude themselves into believing sPvP is what it used to be. The fact you're here on the forums and not in a match says all it needs to about the game mode. If it was good, you'd be playing it and not wasting your time here. If it was bad, you wouldn't be here at all. It's painfully mediocre and the devs abandoned it.

It's painful. The more you love something, the more you wish it will improve. Anet just doesn't have the same passion for sPvP that a lot of us do. Their attention is on PvE and WvW, something they care much more about. Just as a reminder, sPvP didn't get ANYTHING but a balance patch when EoD hit. We didn't even get a new map so we could ignore most of it to stand inside 3 circles for 10-15 minutes. We either accept the mode for what it is or spend more energy than its worth yelling into an uncaring void.

You are both correct. It was not satire, just a bad attempt at a joke. The joke flopped. IT HAS BEEN RECTIFIED.

Oh gods, you're RIGHT. Time to start a PETITION.

This, 100%. I would unironically adore a ranked costume brawl mode. I need to see the pulse-pounding skritt vs skeleton with a chainsaw 1v1 on twitch.

No no. He has a point. If we make it so nobody can teleport, use weapons, armor, traits, runes, sigils, or skills, we can perfectly balance the game mode. Of course, we have to limit it to a single amulet with no vitality or healing power, because that would be unfair. If everyone is the same as <INSERT MY CLASS AND BUILD HERE> then sPvP balance would be fixed.

Your first mistake was suggesting something that sounds interesting and unique. Anet doesn't like that. Anet only likes a new word they recently learned: homogenized. Reaching into the mind of the Anet balance team: *AHEM* "If everything is the same, no one will be upset. If everyone can do everything, no one will ask for buffs."

Honestly, there's a joke to be made that the only class in the game that worships the gods has the health bar of an asthmatic and exclusively relies on horrible gimmicks to stay alive. At least a D&D Cleric or Paladin can fight without cowering behind a magical barrier. Edit 2: Removed the poorly structured joke because the punchline failed.

Honestly, the issue is Mesmer itself. The class is just a clusterduck of design ideas that DO NOT mesh well. A summoner class that is also an illusionist that also is a heavy crowd control class that is ALSO a nuke machine that is ALSO an evasion machine that is ALSO... You get the point. The class is just a pain to fight, and a lot of these core class traits are to blame. Condi mesmer wouldn't be so cancer if the illusions did NO DAMAGE and didn't apply debuffs. But they do. Meaning the mesmer can just spawn illusions/phantasms and play super defensively while the illusions stack debuffs for free damage. If we look at Mesmer in its unnerfed glory?1) It is a nuking machine with access to 6 seconds of teamwide stealth every 60 seconds and a total uptime of over 12 seconds of personal stealth. It can easily pump out over 20 thousand damage in under a second FROM STEALTH in a combo that requires no skill to pull off and can be done with a macro.2) It is a class that summons an endless stream of minions that block skillshots and projectiles. Unless the enemy has piercing shots on all their attacks, them being able to hit you isn't just based on if they can find you anymore.3) Mesmer is a class with access to over 6 seconds of CONTINUOUSLY re-apply daze. You need over a stack of 7 stability to endure the daze chain, and stun breaks won't stop it. In terms of ganking power, the daze spam alone can instantly end a fight.4) Incredibly annoying to fight. Unlike other classes, who at most have a stealth to make you lose targetting of them, Mesmer has the uniquely frustrating ability to teleport around and just remove themselves from your target. Because why not? Fighting mesmer is not a fight between you and the opponent. It's a 2v1 fight between you + the game's mechanics and the opponent. On top of disjointing, the class is well known for their insane mobility and constantly movement.5) Uniquely frustrating to fight. It's entirely possible for a mesmer to completely evade your attacks in the short time it takes them to burst you down. I've had several fights against the same mesmer where I either don't hit them a single time OR kill them before they can even hurt me. Having such a flip-flopping extreme between wins and losses is BAD class design. There simply isn't another way to describe it. If I had to choose, I would rather Mesmer be outright deleted and have something else take its place. Seeing as that won't happen, the class just needs to be completely redesigned. If they want to be an illusionist, they shouldn't be harming people with ILLUSIONS. Smoke and Mirror characters are fine, but not when the smoke is actually poison gas that slowly kills you while you desperately smash all the mirrors to find them. If they want to be a unique spin of mental magic? Go for it! You can't have both. It causes way too many problems.