So this weekend in WvW has been an interesting one. It has been almost entirely dominated by by the spell breaker warriors, and the winds of disenchantment spell. I reported the graphical display bug of this in a separate post, so in this one I just wanted to give some feedback on why exactly this skill would end up defining WvW around itself if it is not heavily tuned down.
So first of all lets look at a few of the important buffs that are important to WvW.
Stability- Stability is the one boon that that many guilds and commanders go out of their way to structure their parties for and is commonly acknowledged as the most important. The reason why is simple: when you don’t have stability you find yourself getting very quickly pulled stunned immobilized or otherwise killed. I understand there are a lot of stun-breaking skills, but they you often are unable to cast them, or the sheer amount of effects hitting makes breaking one sort of not usable. Being in the wrong place can leave you dead in half a second and stability is the only keeping you from ending up in or staying in the wrong place. Usually when using teamspeak or some other VOIP solution commanders will set a system for stability. It usually involves sources in each party (usually guardians). Each source is designated “stab 1” or “stab 2”, and their cooldowns tend to guide the flow of battle.
Might- Before clashes each group usually stacks up and tries to stack up as much might as possible. this is called “Empowering” and is often done before each clash.
Resistance- Is commonly used because it is the only reliable way to survive large amounts of conditions.
Now first of all lets start with the numbers for the spell: it removes one boon every half a second. It affects up to 10 targets, is large enough to often cover the entire front-line section of the average coordinated zerg.
So the numbers work out to this: it can remove up to 200 boons. It will never practically reach that many because it is nearly impossible to cast that much, but the large number essentially means, if you step in the bubble you are probably going to lose every boon if are one of the unlucky 10. If they are traited into Enchantment collapse they you probably loose everything even if you are not one of the unlucky 10.
Now there is some other subtlety the the mechanics which makes things even worse: stacks of boons don’t matter. The way boon removal work it doesn’t matter how many stacks of a boon there are, “it still only counts as one!”. That means it doesn’t matter if you had lots of stability it is all gone. This has never really been a huge problem in the past because there has never been so much boon removal.
Another problem is there isn’t a lot of good counter play for this. Pulsing boons like Inspiring Reinforcement help a little, but it comes down to a timing game and the winds remove boons faster than the road can add them. The obvious tactic of avoiding it is not as easy as you think. Fist of all you have to consider the graphical issues with that, but if it is used during battle; with a large clash of 100 people, it can be pretty difficult to see coming. If you group them up with thieves and give them stealth, you could be inside one with no chance to see it channeled. Combine this with the numerous amounts of crowd control skills often used in battles and they are also very difficult to get out of too.
In a fight between one group with boons and one group without them the group with boons will will every time if they are competent.
What my guild saw this weekend was this: up to 4 of those would be casted at a time rendering the entire squad without stability. With this one group could destroy the other in almost one push. There was no reason to empower and no reason to plan out the stability because it was all going to be taken away anyway. Combining resistance with invulnerability to stay alive for a few seconds didn’t help because the resistance was already gone. The group which was second to cast the spell often lost because the channel would get interrupted because they had no stability. We left disappointed because the fights were entirely defined by warriors casting a skill (which we often could not see them cast).