Guild Wars 2

I know there are threads about it already, but I think it’s worth mentioning again before the content expires for the year:

The Lunatic Inquisition is so unbalanced and buggy it’s not even fun. Most rounds I participated in yesterday I noticed several of my fellow villagers run straight to the courtier spawning area to jump off the high point and die because winning as a courtier is so easy.
The scream courtiers have locks villagers in place (it’s a bug) until they use an emote.
Mad Kings Says locks a villager in place while they follow the command, or shortly after if they don’t. It’s a death sentence either way.
Courtiers do massive damage with their normal attacks while villagers can do small damage if they manage to find certain rare weapons.
Villagers can’t move while stealthed, which means all courtiers have to do at hiding spots is wait for a few seconds for a villager to reappear. There is absolutely no point in using stealth once a courtier has seen you because he will know exactly where you are anyway.
Villagers go into combat mode, slowing their speed (their only measurable advantage), with almost any skill action, and seem to never leave it. This ensures that any interaction with a courtier will result in their death. Even using the Ripper on a courtier doesn’t do any good because they pop right back up in front of you, ready to kill.

The only way I’ve won as a villager is if I happened to be on a team that tried (usually through boredom of easy kills as a courtier – I’ve even been on teams with bored courtiers that just hung out while I tried to survive the others) and I strategically chained my stealth when necessary by recharging it with food.

The mini-game would be a lot more fun if you guys considered balancing the teams.

I don’t see the problem. I’ve played Inquisition a bunch now and villagers have won it quite a few times.

Secondly, I don’t see why the villagers even SHOULD win 50% of the time anyways, seeing as it is the Mad’s King’s Halloween game. Have any southsun survivors ever held out for 12+ minutes against the spirits and karka?

I keep seeing threads that complain that the ghosts are much stronger than the villagers. Well, apart from being really slow, they also start out with one ghost (I think anyway). The ghosts are supposed to overpower the villagers. Otherwise the game would start with the same number of ghosts and villagers.

When the villagers don’t win, the game is shorter which means you can play more games in the same time. The middle part, when there are ghosts and villagers clashing into each other, is more interesting than the hide-and-seek at the end. Just end it so we can start over with the fun stuff

But that’s just my opinion.

If the part where villagers and ghosts clash is more interesting than hide-and-seek, why wouldn’t you advocate for more balance so that part lasts longer? It’s done in the blink of an eye. A villager is spotted, mobbed and dead in seconds. The only viable strategy is to hide.
That there is only one ghost to start is irrelevant – it’s like an immortal heartseeker thief in a room full of moas that will become allied heartseeker thieves when they’re killed. All you need is one and it’s over, which is why people suicide at start to hurry the inevitable.
The only viable strategy is to hide; the environmental weapons are just different ways to buy insufficient amounts of time.

When I still did that mini-game, I suicided because playing as a villager is boring. They also only win due to afk ghosts and people who rage quit allowing new players to join forcing ghosts to recheck the four corners for the hiding spots not shown on the map. I’ve been grouped up on by five villagers and still managed to kill them one by one.

If you want to add more balance then do two things. Remove the ability for ghosts to see villagers on the map. This extends the time it takes to hunt people down and opens up more viable hiding spots. The second thing to do is cut “Mad King says” to one ability, with a 10 second CD. This will prevent ghosts from chaining the abilities.

The problem is the “Mad King Says” abilities.

They are just way too strong. They are also relatively spammable.

I’ve stopped using them myself, as I think they make the game inherently unfun. I also think the people that use them over and over are scrubs.

Either put them on an insanely long CD, like 5 minutes, restrict them to the first ghost that spawns (or in the case of AFKers, ghosts that the Mad King converts), or get rid of them all together.

Having played this minigame extensively and won both as Courtiers and Villagers, the following is my analysis:

1. I Fear Not Death!

Courtiers have one MASSIVE advantage that should possibly be looked at: their ability to respawn right where they died in just a few seconds. This more or less makes it pointless for Villagers to attempt to fight off the Courtiers, because Courtiers can just res-rush the Villagers over and over until they win. Suggestions have included increasing the Courtier’s respawn time, or making them spawn back at the Mad King.

Now, I say “possibly” because there is the potential for this to go the other way. If you have at least two or three Villagers who are experienced and armed with Hammers/Torches/Bones, it is possible for them to keep killing the Courtier, forcing them back to the middle, and the Courtier will have no way to win. If the Courtier chosen at the start is not particularly experienced, they will not be able to catch and kill any Villagers.

2. Mad King Says spam.

While it is indeed possible for a villager to escape from a Courtier spamming MKS (I’ve done it numerous times), it’s kind of a cheap tactic, and the balance is heavily tilted in favour of the Courtier. For a Villager, knowing which commands to obey and which to ignore can lead to you escaping quite easily, but an experienced Courtier will just use the Scarecrow teleport to close the distance and wait till the MKS wear you down, forcing you to eventually obey the Command or die.

Suggestions to improve this include putting all MKS skills on a global cooldown when one is used, or making it so if the Villager successfully performs the command, the Courtier who initiated the MKS instead takes the damage/dies. (I lean towards the former, especially if Courtier death is changed so that Courtiers spawn back at the Mad King.)

3. The Futility of Hiding.

Currently, hiding is a worthless tactic as a villager due to the ability of Courtiers to see all villagers on the map while standing on a teleporter. (I do NOT support removing this Courtier ability though, as I’ll explain below.) There are only a few rare spots on the map which are out of range of the radar, and those are easily checked by experienced Courtiers.

At the same time, it would be a mistake to remove the Courtier’s ability altogether. Why? Because in matches with smaller amounts of players, it would make it next to impossible for Courtiers to win. The map is fairly large, and if there’s only 1 or 2 Courtiers trying to find 4 or 5 Villagers, it’s very possible for Courtiers to never find the Villagers at all if the Villagers go to ground (fleeing when spotted by Courtiers, outrunning them, and then finding another hiding spot).

As such, the radar ability should stay, but be modified so that the Courtiers have to channel on the teleporter for 3 seconds, and doing so triggers a global alarm (similar to the wall heads) seen by the Villagers so they know that the Courtiers (if they’re close enough) has been alerted to their position. The Villagers can then decide whether or not to move to a new location, or take their chances that no Courtier was close enough to see their hiding spot.

In closing, despite the advantages of the Courtiers, it’s actually very easy for Villagers to win if they are organised. The weakest time of the Courtiers is right at the beginning, when there’s only one of them. If Villagers band together, set up a base camp at one of the NPCs by running items, and cooperating to kill/incapacitate Courtiers when they come hunting, it’s easy to deny the first Courtier any kills and thus deprive them of reinforcements.

As an example, if you have a Spider Web/Torch and you see a fellow Villager desperately fleeing from a Courtier, throw your item at them to incapacitate the Courtier and give your friend a chance to escape. It’s better to waste the item (which just respawns somewhere anyway) than give the Courtier a kill, which results in one more ghost hunting you down. Just like in the real world, the best chance of success comes through cooperation, not through selfishness.

You don’t do that much damage as a villager because the game isnt designed that you’re able to beat a courtier in a straight fight. You need to outsmart them more. Band together as villagers and win as a group, because alone you just die.

I do consider courtiers to have more of an advantage due to the MKS spam, it should have a higher cooldown on the skills or just make it a single elite skill with a random emote assigned to it when it’s cast, as courtiers still have traps that are already in the game and would make up for this lack of MKS with careful placement.

Fix the scream glitch, tweak the mad king says, and keep fears from being stacked to an extent. It would give single villagers a small chance versus 3 or more courtiers which happens when people suicide, which then turns it to a quick courtier domination. Villagers need a way to win besides time even if it is incredibly round about and long… Its not fun to survive in such a way or gang up on the courtier for 13 minutes, a goal would be nice.

My 2 cents real quick, I know we’re mere peasants but why can’t we have the use of both hands to carry two items at once?