My findings in PvP

It's been used against me enough in the field. No paper talk here.

These are my findings in PvP, not my PvP paperwork.

 

I understand that folks have had an easy time killing you with it, but calling it an "almost absolute counter to move speed" doesn't skew with reality, and is why I'm suggesting "you need to test a bit more in the field". Basically none of the counters that exist right now, especially in capped zones, are "almost absolute" to an adaptive player. A few of us demonstrated this time and time again in OT yesterday, you should have stuck around.

You can be stubborn as you want, but it won't change the countless times the rest of us have seen just how important movespeed is. If you're not seeing that then I will continue to think that "the current limited experience and what you see on paper" is what's holding you back. Unless you're just just completely blowing off "the paperwork" portion, in which case, consider reconsidering that as well.

Working on your situational awareness, separation from target post-stun, being an evasive target, stun resistance, healing/recovery abilities, survivability against burst damage, all these things are what others use to ensure that an incoming blink+stun is a strong move, sure, but not a necessarily fatal one. Move speed is a big help with the first half of that, especially if you have instance master. If you don't think movespeed matters, ask the folks killing you with blink+stun whether the player skill required to do so scales with opponent's movespeed (and with how they use that movespeed).

 

"stun resistance, healing/recovery abilities, survivability against burst damage"

Isn't that a description of heavy armor?

Btw:

Any of the round winners was wearing light armor?

Must be my total lack of understanding of the game, but I swear I saw Vesper "counter" a chaos mage and a bard/tamer with heavy+shield.



Unfortunately my findings in PvP aren't very popular with other PvPers who use/ defend the stuff I perceived as abused. So we get confirmation bias from both sides if anything. My opinion stands still: heavy+shield with body Slam as a fight starter is overused, the most meta strategy I found in PvP landscape. The same guys who claim ranged being the meta can counter it effortlessly with heavy+shield, and murder other classes with this build as well.

In my opinion the one and only way to take this discussion out of "paper" is by making exhaustive testing, with 10's of rounds and at least 15 players. This way we could have some kind of statistics to play with, and not only ideas and small experiments.

 

speaking of confirmation bias, you didnt see me kill the same chaos mage with a sword and a dagger in berserker stance faster eh?

Can we just declare that you know more than everybody else here and never have to talk about it again?

 

Uh... somewhat! And not by coincidence. Light armor has a deficit in some of these areas, stun resistance certainly. Survavibility against burst damage can be very high through health on gear, Evasion (that crit resistance is insane), liberal and skilled use of the short Dodge window, etc. Recovery can be great in light armor, the best in fact, if you're in high int cloth and spec'd in life for instance. Even the increased castability of HoTs is a virtue.

But in general, these are the areas heavy armor does better in, and a player in light will have to put in more skill and effort to compensate for the shortcomings of their build. What you're missing is that the opposite is also true. Heavy armor users have to put in extra effort to increase their movespeed, reduce their fizzle rate, etc. The very things that come naturally to light armor players. It's a "the grass is always greener" situation, and that is by (rather good) design.

When you say "these people in heavy armor are killing me" you're talking about a group of people that have put incredible effort, skill, and understating into to compensating for the shortcomings of their builds. Then when someone suggests that you have to do the same you seem to say "well why, when I can just put on heavy armor". That's not how this works, it's "grass is greener" type thinking.

Yup, several times.

Vesper killed some people in light armor, Vesper was killed by some people in light armor. He runs a heavy armor build (both in PvP and PvE) and in a FFA situation with archers running amok he's obviously going to have a shield out much of the time. You know what else Vesper did? Pulled out a bow and killed people with it, but only when there weren't other archers around. Why? Because he found himself in a situation where the archer grass was greener. There's no absolute counters, there's no true meta. There's grass, and there's grass.

The thing is, PvPers tend to agree that Heavy is very powerful. That Shield is very powerful. About the only thing PvPers all agree on is that PvP isn't perfectly balanced (even if it's a lot closer than first impressions would imply) and one thing no two PvPers agree on is exactly what perfect balance would look like, which is why it's something that can't actually exist. Your observations aren't incorrect (though they're incomplete), it's your conclusion that doesn't skew with reality as others know it to be. Yes, your neighbor's grass is always going to look greener when he's watering it with your blood, but that doesn't mean you're the victim of an undeafeatable meta, you're just not yet able to defeat it.

 

I did inspect Vesper's gear when he was running with a crossbow. You're fully aware he was wearing heavy armor, right?

Which build did he successfully use with light armor?

I'm curious, who was the one to win a round in light armor? Sure I missed that in your stream. I confess I skipped the inter-round parts and may have missed some important content.

PS: just to be clear, I don't believe it's unbeatable meta. I just believe it's just meta.
What does that mean? Every player reasonably trying to decide for the best PvP build will be driven towards heavy+shield sooner or later. Just like the build I use is meta for a PvE archer. If you try to use other archer build, you'll end dying more often and/or taking longer to kill things.
If I were to switch to full PvP (something I probably won't because I found a very toxic niche of PvP that made me unflag for now), I would look for a heavy+shield build with some tricks under the sleeve.

 

Ah, there's a bit of ambiguity there. "Vesper killed some people in light armor, Vesper was killed by some people in light armor. He runs a heavy armor build (both in PvP and PvE)" should be parsed as :
"Vesper (who runs a heavy armor build both in PvP and PvE) killed some people who were in light armor, Vesper was killed by some people who were in light armor."

Juan Solo and I both won rounds in light armor, so 2 out of the 3 light armor users there. If we did a few more rounds I have no doubt the 3rd person in light armor would have taken a win as well, they were competing very strongly in an archery build.

 

Thanks for the clarification buddy!