Guild Wars 2

VIDEO EDITION: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1yHWst8cV_c

Stronghold? Can we fix it? Yes we can! But first, we have to figure out what’s wrong with it! In the video above, I go through what might be wrong with stronghold and what arenanet needs to do going forward when making maps and new game modes.

Can still be summed up in a simple manner:
Bring back the 8v8 sPvP we had in the GW2 beta and apply it to Stronghold.

I want to see 8v8 but on larger maps. I quit playing ranked to play snowball pvp. The large map is great and prevents aoe clutter. Anet need to get over the capture point circle and make more event style pvp. (Although I hate spirit watch, orbs and circles don’t mix.)

Jeez its bad enough getting 4 Guards on the opposite team, can you imagine if you had 5 or 6, if they increased it to 8 man, ( which I doubt ) the zerging would be real, Anet would have to put into place a limit on the number of classes per team.

You guys understand that I wasn’t saying they should go back to large teams but rather simpler rules that give players more room to explore and play.

@OP

Your video is terrible. You don’t understand PvP or stronghold’s problems. Your video was just a facade for a GW1 GvG love-in. In fact, you never presented ANY real ideas on how to fix stronghold. You just said “make it like GW1 GvG”.

Let me help you with a real analysis…

Conquest
Conquest has huge amounts of depth, map awareness, and decision making, despite it being fairly simple (even you said it, OP).

• There are four popular maps. Temple of the Silent Storm is well liked and produces some of the most dynamic and interesting matches.
• Foefire isn’t as overwhelmingly popular as it seems. When players rank their favorite maps, Foefire exhibits a love/hate pattern. With the map selection system, when around half of the votes split between 2 of the 3 other maps, of course Foefire looks to have amazing support.

GW1 GvG Problems
GvG and even the player run ports of it into GW2 exhibit the big flaws with GvG as a competitive PvP System. That’s why ANet didn’t port it into GW2.

• GvG causes players to congregate in one spot. This leads to “staring contests” followed by either AoE spam or massive concentrated spike damage and CC. Look no further than GW2’s Courtyard map to see how it plays out.
• Large groups hinder the GW2 action-based combat style. GW2 combat centers around knowing when and how to avoid powerful attacks and when you use powerful attacks of your own. When many abilities are being thrown out at once, it destroys that decision making.
• GvG snowballs once a single fight is won. The losing side is pushed back and rarely recovers. In choosing conquest, ANet was looking for a mode where winning a single fight wasn’t the end of the match. Conquest’s design makes larger advantages from winning a fight harder to maintain.

Why the Popularity?
So why do Foefire and GvG seem to be popular?

• Mob play caters to casual players and emotion. You get to see lots of numbers. With more actors in one place, poor play is marginalized and less obvious. When it snowballs in your favor, you feel dominant. “I won”, but “it’s not my fault” when we lost.
• Map design facilitates the previous bullet.

GW2 uses WvW (or at least tried to) to cater to this audience. Desert borderlands failed not because of mechanics, but because the place was a maze where it was easy to fall to your death – more time running around doing nothing instead of being in the ball.

Stronghold Problems
The single biggest problem with stronghold is that all the design elements encourage a playstyle of a PvE race and discourage fighting players. Your PUG may not notice, but any moderately organized team does. You never even have to control territory.

Stronghold Fixes
Fixing it completely will be an incremental approach, but this is the bare minimum:

• Doorbreakers die after one successful hit. Now you can’t carry your initial supply through both gates; players now have to get supply and they’ll fight over it.
• Damage breaks channel; reduce channel times. It’s too easy to stability channel things and completely ignore players. The trebuchet removing all stability was a band-aid, and a terrible one at that. If damage breaks channels, you’re forced to win the territory first.
• Archer gate damage buffed. Archers continue on their path after casting an attack (no chasing). They’re useless now. Players can kill guards just as fast and archers barely scratch gates, even in large numbers. Archers are too easily distracted and due to “stop until target dies” mechanics, they can be distracted indefinitely.
• Mist Heroes buffed in their primary role – getting into a base and killing a lord. They suck as a comeback mechanic. The time you wasted channeling it and going back to a fight could have been better spent in the fight itself. Increase their move speed and gate damage at a minimum.

Exedore.6320:

@OP

Your video is terrible. You don’t understand PvP or stronghold’s problems. Your video was just a facade for a GW1 GvG love-in. In fact, you never presented ANY real ideas on how to fix stronghold. You just said “make it like GW1 GvG”.

Let me help you with a real analysis…

You may be good at analyzing the problem with Stronghold (PS: I’ve already gone through a detailed review of the issues with stronghold in a different post last year) but you failed at analyzing the true intention of my video.

Many people are actually using my video to say that “Oh we need Fort Aspenwood back” or “We need Jade Quarry back” what my video is simply saying is, we need GOOD GAME DESIGN back. I guess I might have done a bad job of breaking it down at the end but yea, you got the point of my video wrong.

And I even wasn’t doing a straight comparison between Legacy and GvG, I was doing a comparison of game mechanics. How simple/complex the different game mechanics were between Conquest, Stronghold and GvG. Conquest and GvG have simple mechanics but players are able to express their creativity through their skills (in GvG especially) and through map awareness (Conquest especially). But Stronghold stretches too far in one direction, too many mechanics to juggle, not enough space to actually see player skill or creativity. <—- This totally should’ve been my conclusion in the video…. jeez.

Exedore.6320:

Stronghold Fixes
Fixing it completely will be an incremental approach, but this is the bare minimum:

• Doorbreakers die after one successful hit. Now you can’t carry your initial supply through both gates; players now have to get supply and they’ll fight over it.
• Damage breaks channel; reduce channel times. It’s too easy to stability channel things and completely ignore players. The trebuchet removing all stability was a band-aid, and a terrible one at that. If damage breaks channels, you’re forced to win the territory first.
• Archer gate damage buffed. Archers continue on their path after casting an attack (no chasing). They’re useless now. Players can kill guards just as fast and archers barely scratch gates, even in large numbers. Archers are too easily distracted and due to “stop until target dies” mechanics, they can be distracted indefinitely.
• Mist Heroes buffed in their primary role – getting into a base and killing a lord. They suck as a comeback mechanic. The time you wasted channeling it and going back to a fight could have been better spent in the fight itself. Increase their move speed and gate damage at a minimum.

The first two changes I think would make it worse.
Door breakers need a bit of a life bar. 1 Successful hit and it would be far too easy to defend the base. Anyone with a bit of AoE could have all your doorbreakers dead in a second. Say, Longbow Ranger, skill 3, invisible, skill 5 around the dbs. Run through the outer gate and wait for the next lot. Defense would be so easy Outer gates would probably never go down and it would be always about wining by points. And if nobody defends you could still get the starting supply doorbreakers to the inner gate, guards kill them in one hit as it is but you need to kill the guards before they do. Maybe if Doorbreakers couldn’t be healed, same for guards but if they were too easy to kill you wouldn’t be able to defend them.
Channeling is fine as it is, It isn’t about capturing and holding territory like Conquest. Stability is the best way to get it. Would be too easy to knock you off if damage breaks commune. I’d say that it should stay as it is.
Archers, I’d agree their AI should be looked at. They should stay on path.

Exedore.6320:

• Doorbreakers die after one successful hit. Now you can’t carry your initial supply through both gates; players now have to get supply and they’ll fight over it.
• Damage breaks channel; reduce channel times. It’s too easy to stability channel things and completely ignore players. The trebuchet removing all stability was a band-aid, and a terrible one at that. If damage breaks channels, you’re forced to win the territory first.
• Archer gate damage buffed. Archers continue on their path after casting an attack (no chasing). They’re useless now. Players can kill guards just as fast and archers barely scratch gates, even in large numbers. Archers are too easily distracted and due to “stop until target dies” mechanics, they can be distracted indefinitely.
• Mist Heroes buffed in their primary role – getting into a base and killing a lord. They suck as a comeback mechanic. The time you wasted channeling it and going back to a fight could have been better spent in the fight itself. Increase their move speed and gate damage at a minimum.

Doorbreakers dying on one hit is excessive. It will actually discourage fighting. If 2 of you are escorting doorbreakers and I come, the 2 of you can spike me/heal the breakers before I kill them. With your suggestion, I will autoattack twice and leave.

I strongly disagree with damage breaking channel. It is actually an important strategic decision to know if you have enough stability and HP to make yourself vulnerable for so many seconds with 1 or 2 people pounding on you. Also, winning the area will never happen. People will run around and hit you here and there to cancel the channel. And if you kill them, respawn is close, their teammates will come in and continue the struggle.

Archers are worse than useless, I agree here. They need to be buffed or reworked or replaced, I don’t know.

I agree with the heroes argument as well. Currently, the biggest advantage of channeling a hero is getting 30 points. Chances are he will be killed long before the lord room. I’d buff their speed by 50%.

Doorbreakers have to have a strong down side to encourage risk vs. reward. Much of the current problem is that you can easily keep doorbreakers alive (get a support next to them, they live for a long time) and go through both gates. The best way to deal with this is to prevent 5 supply of doorbreakers from getting through both gates. Each one would need to have higher gate damage though.

In comparison, archers are the slow and steady option, but if you lose one early, it’s not as large of an impact. Archers also need continued babysitting, but it’s not as intensive as with DBs. DBs you have to watch closely, but only until they do their job. Additionally, they keep going, so a single archer can do a lot of work if left alone.

For a comparison of damage-break or CC-break, look at communes on Temple of the Silent Storm. They’re damage-break and lead to clutch fights and important decision making (do you commit to the buff or troll it and take points, negating the buff’s benefit). Right now, someone with pulsing stability just starts the channel and can’t be stopped. Any build which which is going to channel has enough defenses to tank damage during the channel. And if someone is constantly poking you, they’re not doing something else on the map. Keep in mind that I did say channels would need to be faster in order to compensate.