Guild Wars 2

I’ve played World vs World since the headstart, and over that period I’ve both stuck with my home server, as well as hopped around all the different tiers of server to pick up tips and tricks. A lot of what I saw start on higher tiers has gradually filtered down to lower tiers, and the meta-game has shifted appropriately. In some cases this has been for the better; in others, for the worse.

Through all of this, I – like most of us – have gained a lot of opinions on what is being done well and what isn’t, and indeed many suggestions on both how to fix underlying problems, as well as how to generally improve WvW in the long-term.

So, since we now have a new game designer on board, I felt it was finally time to present most of these suggestions on the board.

Straightforward Improvements

• Outmanned buff should no longer be visible to enemy players. It’s far too easy for players to spot and immediately capitalise on outmanned servers without proper scouting
• Correctly connect siege weaponry to events. If I destroy an enemy ram attacking a tower gate using a mortar at another location, I get no credit for defence, despite being fairly important. Similarly, if I trebuchet a tower wall down, but my team captures the tower before I reach it, I get no credit, despite again being fairly important. Correctly rewarding players for these activities is important
• Recolour Superior blueprints to a different colour to normal Siege, to make them easier to distinguish. They’re easy to mix up at the moment, and it’s not at all a difficult task!
• Force player release on corpses after a few minutes of being dead. This prevents players hiding their corpses for scouting purposes, as well as dealing with the mesmer-hiding-on-a-door exploit
• Allow salvaging of WvW gear. It’s not like people are getting this gear at rates any higher than players are in PvE
• Add a 10 second delay to waypoint use to prevent people spamming the waypoint in the middle of an assault. You said you were going to do it!
• Allow players to use karma to purchase keep/tower/camp upgrades. WvW is hardly profitable; don’t make us your goldsink!
• Allow Commanders to choose the shape and colour of their tags. Combine the two to aid colourblind players; consider the targeting icons added in WoW, for example, as they had both distinctive colour and shape on each icon
  **Consider allowing Commanders to set ‘Guild-only’ tags. Some Commanders want to run with their guild, without attracting large amounts of attention from other players if they’re the only Commander on the map
• Allow players to use all of their supplies in a single channel. Currently, if you have 15 (or more) supply, you have to channel twice because you each channel caps at 10 supply
• Allow keep/tower walls/gates to be repaired in by less than 2 supply. If you have 1 supply, you can only use that supply to build siege; not to repair
• Instead of dropping loot behind a player on the battlefield, all loot is collected by an NPC at spawn in a ‘bank-like’ stash, with a certain cap. Having to spend half a battle mashing F to pick up loot, or indeed losing it for the same reason, is not enjoyable; an NPC stash where loot accrues is much simpler for players to retrieve their gains from

Quality of Life

• Allow guilds to purchase skins for the keeps/siege weapons/NPCs This goes a long way towards improving guild status in WvW. The modular nature of your keeps that was used to make upgrading from t0 to t3 easier is ideal for this.
  • Racial Themes (Charr, Asura, etc.)
  • Order Themes (OoW, Vigil, Priory)
  • Other (Krait, Risen, etc.) Think back to the variety of Guild Halls in the original Guild Wars
• Better skins for superior siege (similar to the guild catapult). Not only does this reward the upgrade, but it also makes spotting superior siege more easy for enemies
• Consider player-enabled content. For example, a player might pay a supply camp to start an extra-large supply event to a specific tower. If they successfully escort the event, the tower receives a supply bonus. You could do the same with siege blueprints or defensive NPCs.

Eternal Battlegrounds

• The outer wall of Red Overlook should be moved to prevent trebuchet fire between it and SM North walls. Neither of the other keeps have this option/weakness, and it puts a lot more focus on the red team than should exist
• Fix the odd cylindrical movement blocker on the steps beside Overlook’s "water"gate/JP entrance.
• Remove the lip surrounding the watergate entrances into Green Lowlands’ outer court. Replace it with a sloped exit for golems. There’s no reason to force the use of portals for golems here, and it dissuades many players from using these watergates
• Redesign Mendon’s (and to a lesser extent Quentin) to remove problems caused by its open back. Against a Commander who knows what they’re doing, defending Mendon’s is impossible. There are absolutely no safe places to place defensive siege, mostly due to the open back.
• Widen the entrance from Ogrewatch into Orgath to prevent excessive chokepoint. Trebuchets against Ogrewatch are made overly effective by the great ease of locking down this tiny entrance, and the high time cost of running a force around into blue territory to attack the trebuchets from behind
• Move Speldan Clearcut closer. This supply camp is bizarrely further away from everything than any other supply camp on the map. Its distance makes it and its dolyaks vulnerable, as well as slowing supply to Mendon’s and Overlook
• Broken terrain in the cliffside southwest of the Aldon’s needs closing.
• Consider changing the side of the destructible wall on Jerrifer’s and Bravost. In both cases, attacking these towers is almost impossible due to covering mortar fire from their keeps. Switching the side of the destructible wall allows Commanders to set up catapults or trebuchets in positions that cannot be trivially destroyed from the keep (this is more opinion than straightforward improvement; these towers see almost no action due to their positioning and destructible portions)

Borderlands

• Fix Garrison inner watergate to properly upgrade to Reinforced quality when gate upgrades are purchased.
• Move back the cliff on the southwest of Garrison inner to prevent players using trebuchets to hit outer north Bay wall.
• Consider properly clipping the wall of the RGBVale supply camp (southwest), to prevent trebuchets hitting the inner Bay wall from there. I feel this position is far too strong, and there is no counterplay beyond forcing a large defensive group through a narrow chokepoint or over a difficult jump
• Move RGBLake tower slightly southwest to prevent it from being trebucheted from Hills I feel the towers, being the staging grounds for a team’s entrance into the Borderlands, should not be getting trebbed from a much more defensible position, often held by the enemy force
• Expand the area around inner east Bay entrance to give players more room to manoeuvre, and add slopes to the water to allow golems to exit. Almost nobody uses this approach due to limited movement. Golems cannot ‘jump’ out of the water onto the pier, so either add slopes, or fix golems.
• Considering redesigning the two northern towers to suffer a little less from enemies building siege below them. For example, trying to treb Garrison from “Longview” is made difficult as enemy players can hit many of the trebuchet positions with ballistae using its open back, likewise, arrowcarts can bebuilt on the cliffs below “Cragtop” to hit trebuchets built on its slope

Opinions!

• Prevent golems taking fall damage. This simultaneously prevents people trolling teams by destroying their golems, and also removes what is one of the more bizarre design choices for golems
• Stop Golems being affected by Quickness. The ‘flash attack’ effect of golems being TW’d is making many assaults occur far too quickly for defenders to react to. Success should not depend on how many Mesmers your team can field for your golem rush.
• Remove all cases where NPCs attack camps or dolyaks. In general, these are unhelpful for players, and also highly random (some NPCs will kill the Dolyaks, e.g. harpies, and some will barely scratch them, e.g. drakes)
  • Possibly make the random NPC events in the Borderlands (Skritt, Centaur, Warg, Wurm, Ghosts, Harpies) tie into the game similar to those in EBG?
• Consider removing Pearls as a method of capturing Quaggan camps in Borderlands. Players – like myself! – stockpile these for immediate capture, making it difficult for different groups to contest these camps
• Combine aggro-tables for NPCs in supply camps to prevent picking them off 1 by 1. I personally feel supply camps should require a small group to capture them, rather than a single player steadily working through them, but this isn’t a particularly big deal
• The supply camp upgrade that adds guards to dolyak supply trains should provide Invulnerability to the dolyak until the guards are killed. These guards are presently useless against everything except random NPC attacks (see above), as most players can simply kill the dolyak without ever having to worry about them. At the very least, this shuts down the exceptionally frustrating Death Blossom&Caltrops bleed/evasion/stealth method thieves have for killing Dolyaks, which is very difficult to prevent
• Add damage reduction to the users of cannons and oil. These siege weapons tend to be useless against large assaults, as players cannot survive the aoe spells enemy players place on the cannons for long enough to use them.
• Allow blueprints to be built faster. This has very little effect on large groups of players, who tend to ‘insta-build’ blueprints. However, it’s very beneficial for small groups, who are more liable to be interrupted while trying to build
• Remove ‘tagging’ of siege weapons. Replace it with a transparent duration. Forcing players to babysit siege lest it expire is anti-fun. Instead, assign all siege a fixed but longer duration, and a provide a timer for the siege showing how long it has left. You could also add a specific icon above the siege weapon when it’s about to expire, for ease of readability
  • To prevent longer duration siege allowing players to hit siege-cap more easily and troll their team, cap the number of siege any player can have deployed at one point. Raise this cap significantly for Commanders. This allows long-duration siege without the potential for someone to spam 100 rams that cannot despawn for 4 hours
• Instance the WvW jumping puzzles (or at least the EBG one) to prevent organised groups of players hitting their server’s WvW cap while contributing little. Not a particularly big deal, but it would cut down on a few problems servers occasionally experience due to this
• Link your supply count to your Borderland. I think it’s a bit silly that, without owning a single supply camp or tower on a map, players can build large numbers of golems by ferrying supply over from another strongly-owned map. Similarly, even if you deny players all their supply camps, many players will hop to another map, get 15 supply, and return. This is probably not a good thing
• Require a certain quantity of damage to be dealt to a keep structurally before it’s considered ‘contested’. This prevents characters running up and disabling waypoints by doing small amounts of damage to doors or defensive siege. If you want to disable a waypoint to slow reinforcements, it should require a concerted effort, not a throwaway thief

Anyway, thank you for reading all of the above. I don’t expect everybody to agree with all of the suggestions (especially the ones in the Opinions! section), but I hope these at least give any designers reading them a sense of what some if your players would like to see done with WvW in the future!

As far as the WP thing, they also need to make it so a single thief cannot keep that WP contested like they do now otherwise building a WP will be wasted gold since a single thief can keep hitting that door to make it contested.

CreativeAnarchy.6324:

As far as the WP thing, they also need to make it so a single thief cannot keep that WP contested like they do now otherwise building a WP will be wasted gold since a single thief can keep hitting that door to make it contested.

The invulnerable spot in the 2 south supply camps at the base of the cliff needs to be removed.

Ah, yes, I meant to add in a bit in the opinions section, suggesting a minimum amount of damage needs to be done to a keep/tower before it’s considered contested (say, 8k; the amount a ram does in 1 hit, but a single player is not going to be able to do that quickly).

Oh, and I just remembered another one, but can’t edit it in due to post length.

• Siegerazer resets if all his placed siege has been destroyed, or after a certain time limit expires. It’s counter-intuitive, but players leave Siegerazer alive after destroying all his siege, as doing so prevents the enemy server from starting another break-out event. While I accept this is a legitimate tactic at the moment, the event should be redesigned to prevent this behaviour.

I agree with a lot of these points, but if they change waypoints to prevent people porting in during a siege I think this must go together with implementing a minimum amount of damaging having to be done to a gate before it gets contested. And on top of that they should make swiftness not interact with golems, because they can get through those gates far too easy without the defenders being able to react in time. Right now the waypoint atleast gives you a chance to make a last stand in the Lord’s Room, if you’re lucky.

Personally I don’t think there’s any problem with people carrying over supplies from other borderlands. It allows for some more stealthy attacks, and if they do ‘nerf’ golems there’s plenty of risk involved anyway.

I also think Siegerazer should have a way higher cooldown for the invaders, but remain the same for the defenders. I understand giving undermanned servers a lot of help to get their own towers back, but I don’t see why invaders would need this with such a low cooldown.

Most of these are good ideas that should have been in the game for a long time. If half of these ideas will come into the game, I will marry Mr. DevonCarver.

(Un)Fortunately I lost a lot of faith into the WvW department of Anet already (like most people did) so even the slightest improvements will motivate me to keep playing.

Just my few cents, and probably some flames.

*Increase base guard health, dmg, and armor. IMO only, a camp shouldn’t be taken just by one person, even a fully upgraded camp can easily be pounded by one. I would think at least 3+. Most of the times, camps arent fully upgraded anymore, just the increase supplies, and then let it be.

*I agree that people who build and upgrade (especially upgrade), should receive wxp. I would go with what was said, every 2 supply used, gain 1-2 wxp. For upgrading, the higher the cost, the more wxp you get.

*With the dolyaks themselves, anet has to be careful with rewarding them again. Remember, in the beginning bots were tagging along with them to just gain the xp to level, taking up space in the BG. Maybe if the dolyak is attacked and defended, then you would be rewarded wxp for a success or failure. If nothing happens, then no reward.

*The Skritt and centaur camps. While they are basically ignored, why not give them a purpose different than mercenaries? For example: Take the centaurs, dolyaks move faster. Take the Skritt, dolyaks have more supplies. Or make them affect keeps, or something.

*For the orbs, I am surprised this hasn’t been implemented already.
Orbs: give +20%(adjust to whatever) increase to wxp, xp, karma
Outmanned: Increase health by X%, no armor repairs, +5 supply carry. (adjust or change whatever).
Thus, orbs are just a bonus that really doesn’t effect play, and outmanned gives the people a chance. And yes, alter can’t be attacked till lord is dead.

*Maybe add some titles to how you are spec’d using the wvw bonuses. Example: If you have seige dmg, ballista dmg, and cannon dmg maxed out, you get the seigemaster title.

*For some future abilities for wvw to put points in:
Seigebuilder: for ever rank, reduce the cost a seigeplan requires by 2 (i believe there are 5 ranks? so just minus 10 supplies.)

Repairman: When repairing walls and gates, increase amount repaired by 1-5%.

*percentages for walls and gates.

thats all i have for now, I’ll add anything else if I think of it.

I really like a lot of these. +1s all over the place.

Another thing I wish Anet would add would be a limit on how many players can use a tower/keep portal door in a say, 2 second window. A limit like 10 people per second would prevent huge portal bombs from keeps and towers and encourage more players to either 1) jump off walls (spec drop damage traits!) 2) use portals 3) use other parts of the tower 4) encourage defenders to pick at the sides of the zerg 5) setup open door/wall killzones and then push out of the breach… 6) etc

As it is, any coordinated guild can bomb 40 people out of a portal with stability to spare and effectively clash with an unsuspecting hostile zerg mob and melt them in seconds. Putting 10 people per second limit on a gate wouldn’t prevent this tactic, but it would certainly give people time to react to it. A mesmer portal takes time to become active, this is a deliberate choice. A gate is almost instant and currently infinite.

+1 on all of these. This needs to be seen.

Must be seen also add more suggestions for Camps( supply camps) because every 4 minutes Camps are lost you cant even see when they are attacked i was thinking an upgrade something like Barricade that will barricade the Camp (walls) but not too strong even 5-10 people can destroy it without using Siege weapons but The opposite side can see that and react instead of now when you Click M Camp already lost

heck, I’d just like four different maps… would be great if it was four different maps, each having a unique characteristic or some sort of environmental/atmospheric difference. To take that a step further, have them relate to each other somehow so that controlling one has a real effect on the others so you have a reason to have people fighting in each of the four realms.

+1, agreed with all of these.

Lysander Freeman.4186:

heck, I’d just like four different maps… would be great if it was four different maps, each having a unique characteristic or some sort of environmental/atmospheric difference. To take that a step further, have them relate to each other somehow so that controlling one has a real effect on the others so you have a reason to have people fighting in each of the four realms.

while hard, possibly impossible, to balance, this would be awesome. similar to one of OPs suggestions, i would love to have charr-/asura- oder norn-themed battlegrounds (but mainly charr. with cannons and big artillery of course. and drivable tanks.).

What also concerns me are walls (in addition to the oil/canon-issue):
I think they are supposed to give defenders an advantage, but while attackers can easily plaster the walls with ground-target AoE, defenders have to stand on the foremost part of the wall in order to cast anything because of how poorly LoS is calculated in this game which makes them very vulnerable. (on the other hand, everything that isnt ground-target is reaaally bad if youre besieging something. again, due to stupid LoS)
Using siege on walls doesnt work that well either. unless it is placed on the very last pixels of the wall, it melts in a couple of seconds.
So either give defenders an advantage in the form of a damage reduction (or something similar) or make it harder to cover walls in AoE

Minor stuff:
-If upgrades with karma arent an option, we should at least be able to upgrade stuff with badges.
-you can heal up downed players way to fast. the revive-speed should be slowed down.
-the penalty that gives you less downed-hp everytime youre downed wears off waaay too fast. should be changed aswell.
-balance the food buffs. effects like +-40 condition duration are just broken compared to other foods

Another Opinions! one that I forgot to add:

• Make the first Tower, Keep and possibly Stonemist Castle capture per day reward players with a rare or better item, similar to how world events had added in the February patch Just a nice little reward for getting something done in WvW each day

Bethryn.4087:

Another Opinions! one that I forgot to add:

• Make the first Tower, Keep and possibly Stonemist Castle capture per day reward players with a rare or better item, similar to how world events had added in the February patch Just a nice little reward for getting something done in WvW each day

that is an amazing idea :P

Wow ! So many good ideas !
Actually, this makes me sad to see so many good ideas, while knowing less than half can be hoped for.
Just a few things :

Add a 10 second delay to waypoint use to prevent people spamming the waypoint in the middle of an assault. You said you were going to do it!

Well, I don’t really agree, especially if it resets while being put into combat. I think it’s part of the game to be able to escape an opponent’s zerg. But maybe I misunderstood your idea.

Maybe the system of loot is not good enough : if you loot a lot and get disconnected before leaving, you would get absolutely nothing, which would suck. Also, after each and every zerg, people will teleport to fetch some loot, and the work of the commander is more boring to gather people, it slows down the process of the “main zerg”

For all the rest, I wholeheartedly agree

Really, the craziest thing about this game is that we STILL don’t know how many points we’re playing for in WvW, where all of those points are coming from, or how the points are calculated. Simply releasing this VITAL information would be a huge boost to the game, in my opinion.

Some great ideas, especially the waypoint. Would also suggest that Anet fix Warrior Banners and other rezzing mechanics, the ability to instantly rez a keep lord is far too powerful. Fighting for an hour inside garrison can be very frustrating after the 20th insta rez.

Offski.4897:

Some great ideas, especially the waypoint. Would also suggest that Anet fix Warrior Banners and other rezzing mechanics, the ability to instantly rez a keep lord is far too powerful. Fighting for an hour inside garrison can be very frustrating after the 20th insta rez.

I have no problems with it especially when I’m the one frustrating the other side by rezzing that lord. This should stay as it is. You want that garrison, you need to make sure the lord stays dead.

Otokomae.9356:

The way that scoring severely penalizes small group play NEEDS to be changed.

The obvious example of this is Dolyaks; when you kill a Dolyak, it puts points on the board for your server, HOWEVER, the number of points is not the same for every group. You get 1 point for every person who tags the Dolyak, up to 10 points, so if you sneak into enemy territory and solo a yak you are actually LOSING points for the server; you were supposed to have brought a minimum or 10 people with you to kill that Dolyak!

Rules like this seem to be designed specifically to punish anyone who tries to run in a groups smaller than 10, or makes any attempt to win points in WvW through skill rather than numbers. You are SUPPOSED to zerg even the simplest objectives in WvW, or you actually lose points for your server, even if you can do the same job solo.

https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/pvp/wuvwuv/How-many-points-is-a-Supply-Caravan-worth/1742511

I think this should be linked right here.

On the topic of Yaks:

I think there should be something done to make it less viable to simply spike a dolyak down with one or two people. Frankly, it makes it nigh impossible to defend them properly if someone can drop in, spike them dead, and we lose the yak (30-70 supply?) . . . with little to no chance of stopping it.

Sure, we could have five players around every yak. That might make it not happen (I personally doubt it, unless we have people able to place Protection on that yak more than a few breaths worth of duration) but why buy the NPC guards if they can’t reliably protect anything?

. . . I mean, aside from the bonus to camp supply.

Here’s an option or two

- As mentioned earlier, give the Yak invulnerability until the escorts are down if you have the upgrade. It slows down an attack, and gives the 1-3 people stuck with Yak Escort Duty a chance at throwing the attacker away.

- Have the Tier 2 Personnel upgrade which raises the level of camp guards raise the Dolyak to a Veteran. This will give them some robustness and put some more pressure on getting fully upgraded.

- Make it an Art of War upgrade you can build to get “guild guards” who do the above “Yak Defender” thing. This promotes more guilds to focus on buffing their claimed camps.

Bringing back an old topic.

Incentivise guard duty. Added mini-events like building structures, or very very slow WXP gain for staying and protecting a tower. Or even the Asuran chessboard, so that you have at least something to do while you are being a dedicated guard/scout

many good advice to impore WvW here. Anet should copy/paste some/many of em. But i guess they are to proud to let a forum person “fix” the game.

many good suggestions, i think this needs to be brought up again.