Guild Wars 2

The goal of Breakout Events is to allow players a chance to retaliate against being full capped in any borderland. I believe in its current state, the Breakout Event is doing more than just helping teams escape being full capped.

For one, Breakout Events are quite difficult to fight against, especially if you just capped the tower. Let’s say you’re the green team in your home borderlands, and you finally pushed red team off the map by capping Redlake. Oh crap… blue team is attacking the bay keep! 8 players stay to defend Redlake and the rest head to bay keep. Less than 5 minutes later Redlake is under attack from a Breakout Event. Many run back to Redlake to help reinforce the defense. By the time reinforcements arrive, both the wooden gate and wall are already destroyed! There were 8 people defending the tower with 3 arrow carts and a ballista, but never stood a chance…

What happened? Well, the green defenders at Redlake were incapable of inflicting any damage to the attacker’s siege under their protective bubbles. As a result, the Breakout team destroyed the defensive siege essentially for free. An attack on foot was out of the question, because the Champion hits like a truck on top of infantry damage/conditions. This means that the only counter to Breakout Events are LOTS of infantry. Far more infantry than is worth investing, if it means pulling defenses from elsewhere on the map. This introduces a new problem.

Is attacking the Breakout tower actually worth it? The fact that “no” is the answer, when the enemy has enough to activate the Breakout Event, is enough to consider that Breakout Events may be imbalanced. The Breakout Event discourages teams from full capping against invaders, because investing in a successful attack requires far more supplies and infantry than a Breakout Event.

The Breakout team can simply ignore attacks on their home tower knowing that the option to Breakout is available at virtually any time. They can use this knowledge to cap supply camps which will divide the home team forces across the map. It will ensure the Breakout Event has almost no chance of failure. So far it sounds pretty ugly, but this is not the largest issue of all.

Breakout events discourage the two invading teams from attacking each other. This is the most game breaking difference that Breakout Events have introduced. The two southern teams will avoid attacking one another, because either one has to invest far too much in a successful attack which is easily recapped by a Breakout Event.

That about sums up the impact of Breakout Events, and in my opinion they are too strong. If I had the power to influence the design of Breakout Events, I would only change a few things to help bring better balance:

1. Tone down the duration of the protective bubble. It currently discourages making any defensive siege, because the bubble’s duration is enough to destroy any and all defensive siege located inside the tower.

2. Lower the damage output of the Champion commander. He hits for at least 7k every 1 to 2 seconds against max toughness builds. Throw that into the equation against player focus fire / conditions and you got yourself a serious problem on the ground.

3. Increase the time gap between activating Breakout Events. I’m not sure the exact current time gap, but it feels like less than 10 minutes. A more balanced time gap would be 30 minutes.

I’m interested in your thoughts of Breakout Events. Please refrain from ranting or flaming. Thank you for reading.

Breakout events are just the most lame concept ever. I was even surprised Anet did such a thing.

However it has a useful feature too: The dolyak coming with the npc commander. I really liked it, it gives us supply when we don’t have any.

BUT, what on earth is giving people free sieges? How could you give people free sieges, while the other team gets them with gold and badges? Isn’t this unfair? I understand throwing around free supply, it was already necessery, but throwing free sieges around? Come on!

Anet is kittening on their own game…

I think Break out event is working as intended, you are complaining about a “tower” (10 points), while what this event does, is giving some foothold and “hope” to oppressed servers.
It is not a one side advantage since any server could end up on that situation.
Without entering deeply into dynamics involved on the event itself, i would like you instead, to give a second thought about the “why” rather then the “how” this event were born.

While your analysis seems to be accurate, your conclusions all hinge upon a couple things that simply may not be true.

Put simply, you assume:

-Full capping a borderland is a good thing that should be encouraged.

I wouldn’t agree with this assumption, and I feel that Anet strongly disagrees with this mentality. Full capping a borderland is a bad thing that should be strongly discouraged. As you’ve noted, breakout events do a great job of discouraging a full borderland cap.

-Invaders should openly attack each other in a borderland.

This is tactically foolish. The two groups of invaders should never attack each other while the defenders still have a meaningful presence on the map. The logic is simple, if I don’t waste time fighting the other group of invaders, my actual target (and the group that has the strongest position and fortification on the map) has to fight both my forces and the other invader forces in separate locations about the borderland. This is advantageous to both sets of invaders in a way that “teaming up” with the defenders could never be.

When you take away those faulty assumptions, your conclusions that breakout events need strong changes completely go away. That said, I do believe breakout events do need some balancing. Currently (unless they’ve been adjusted in the past week when I haven’t had a chance to wvw) they tend to be available the second the last fortification is lost. There should be at least a 15-30 minute cool-up between the loss of the last tower/keep and the availability of a breakout. A 20 minute delay would guarantee at least one, and most likely two score tallies between capturing the last tower and any eventual loss of the tower. I think the other issues potential balance concerns are at least liveable if the frequency is toned down.

Protective bubble… lol, there shouldn’t even be a protective bubble! Isn’t it enough you are getting free siege, supply, and a champion to lead the attack.

Breakouts also need to be more rare. They almost give you a tower for free unless the entire forces of the enemy are there. So once you get your free objective, it should be up to that team on its own to hold that place for several hours. And if they can’t another breakout shouldn’t be eligible for at least an hour or two. The breakout targets right now are just back and forth karma farms, that actually prevent head to head fighting.

I don’t believe the Breakout Events need strong changes, unless my suggestions are viewed as strong? I’m not dismissing the Breakout Event. I like the concept, but believe that they’ve done too much to influenced the opposition of the 2 invading teams from attacking each other (with exception to the southern center camp Champion’s, Hero’s, Victor’s). I love the idea of double teaming, but that opportunity should swing in favor of any team that is on the map. Either invader should be able to consider moving across the ruins to the opposing invader’s tower, and not be discouraged by the presence of a Breakout event. It did once before, but no longer. I like the idea, but, in the interest of strategic play, it narrows the options of invading teams.

Personally, I’m ok with the idea that full capping should be discouraged, but I am not ok with the event discouraging attacks between the 2 southern invaders. Having a strong offensive event take the nearest tower is a solution that neglects the original map’s strategic design.

Ivano.2604:

I think Break out event is working as intended, you are complaining about a “tower” (10 points), while what this event does, is giving some foothold and “hope” to oppressed servers.

Who takes hope from this?

We’re getting our butts kicked. We should have no structures, but because the game gave us unbreakable siege and a super powered commander w own a tower. The only reason we have this tower is because of the enormous advantage the game gave us for nothing….what hope do we have of taking anything else where we don’t have unbreakable siege and a super powered commander?

We got WvWvW welfare.

In my experience breakout events only succeed when its PvDoor or there is 10 defenders or less in the tower. If the zerg wants to stop a breakout event they will, even with protective bubbles etc. I saw a breakout event fail 5 times in a row because the 60 person zerg just farmed us when we got there. It is supposed to help you break out of a spawn when there is a huge zerg in the zone except break out events only succeed when you are fighting minimal defenders.

I think breakout events should be limited to once per hour .. we had four waves of it, one after the other after the other, on TCBL the other day … after burning it down the third time we all just started laughing when it popped not 5 minutes later …. again.

So you easily wiped the breakout event, defeating the purpose of said event. I don’t see the problem for you?

It wasn’t easy lol .. at one point the NPC commander glitched inside our tower … It became more of a nuisance than a challenge. It would have been more rewarding to fight just the players, not a NPC.

Well we were trying a breakout event on SoR BL (I think it was SoR BL) but it was during an absolute dead zone when BG had less then 150 PP. We didn’t have many players. It failed over and over. As soon as the commander got there we had SoR inside the tower attacking it with their huge zerg and TC outside with their huge zerg attacking it. After attemping it 4-5 times in a row we gave up, laughing at how the breakout event was just a farm fest for the 2 30 man zergs roaming near our spawn.

Not sure what the point of breakout events are as in my experience they only tend to succeed when you are fighting minimal (10 or less) defenders.

The NPC commander can hit in one swipe for more than 15K. It’d be pretty slanted/unfair if he was completely unbeatable. As it stands now, he’s a tough nut to crack and it takes a heck of a lot of damage before he’s down. Cap that with invincible bubbles over the siege that gets placed and well, it’s an uphill climb. It’s good that coordinated effort CAN take him down, but I do think it’s a bit unfair that he can just be respawned over and over and over and over … there should be some kind of timer on his reboot — an hour seems fair to me, gives the opposing team time to rally their troops too.

pot.6805:

In my experience breakout events only succeed when its PvDoor or there is 10 defenders or less in the tower. If the zerg wants to stop a breakout event they will, even with protective bubbles etc. I saw a breakout event fail 5 times in a row because the 60 person zerg just farmed us when we got there.

I would hope 60 people could stop it. But in any match that isn’t being dominated by one side via population imbalance, a single tower is not worth dedicating 60 people to defending against breakout. Not to say you need that many, but you do need a fairly large force as well as plenty of siege pre-prepared. Most teams decide its not just not worth it and let the enemy grab the tower for what is usually 1 tick or less, then just take it back. Endless cycle.

The whole thing is pretty much just a PVE event. Go do your breakout out on opposing BL, then everyone leaves, go do it on the other BL, meanwhile your opponents are doing it to you. And all the while not much real quality WvW fighting going on. This is far from ideal way to help teams in a bad spot.

I am pleased to see that most of us believe the breakout events are doing just as much harm as good. It’s not that we want the breakout events removed, just better toned out so they are more balanced. I cannot get over the idea that it discourages the two invaders from attacking one another now. That used to be such an interesting aspect of the map. I hope a dev finds this and understands what I mean.

I think you need to experience breakout events more to properly analyze them.

Jaha.2840:

Is attacking the Breakout tower actually worth it? The fact that “no” is the answer, when the enemy has enough to activate the Breakout Event, is enough to consider that Breakout Events may be imbalanced. The Breakout Event discourages teams from full capping against invaders, because investing in a successful attack requires far more supplies and infantry than a Breakout Event.

This is like saying that playing on a map where the enemy has more players than you is not worth it because eventually you’ll probably lose stuff you take.

Breakout events discourage the two invading teams from attacking each other.

A fair point. On the other hand, the invaders should generally be 2v1ing the home team anyway. Nothing stops them from ninjaing keeps, supply camps, and other towers from each other. In my experience, nothing clears a map of players faster than having the defender and other invader wipe you off the map anyway. I don’t consider this a good thing. YMMV.

1. Tone down the duration of the protective bubble. It currently discourages making any defensive siege, because the bubble’s duration is enough to destroy any and all defensive siege located inside the tower.

No it’s not? I have successfully defended against the bubble duration, and killed all the siege that was in the bubble. This was with 20 defenders max.

3. Increase the time gap between activating Breakout Events. I’m not sure the exact current time gap, but it feels like less than 10 minutes. A more balanced time gap would be 30 minutes.

It takes more than 10 minutes to start a breakout event. I believe the time is 20-30 minutes. However, it seems like there is a bug where the breakout events come in pairs, e.g. the NPC will respawn in town after the 1st breakout event is successful so they can immediately start another breakout event at any time. I don’t think this is intended, it happens on every map though from what I’ve seen (haven’t seen breakout on EB). Anyway, this is why you think it is happening so quickly.

We discussed this very problem with breakouts. In the spirit of the game its allows low population servers to retake towers easier. On the other hand as we found out it can be exploited by the larger populations as we found out the other day when we saw around 50 players doing a breakout. This should be stopped as it is not in the spirit of the game.

We even had a case of having 2 commanders at the same tower which the other server had already captured. By this example you can see its not working as intended.

Also we should not have BOE in EB only in your own BL. Because of the exploit or not using the BOE as intended.

I feel that the breakout events are fine for the home team. But for the invading teams?… really?

I also very much dislike the point that was raised in that it discourages the invaders from fighting… that’s just ridiculous.

The breakout events for defenders especially make it seem as if there are going to just be even more WvW farming trains that only attack for the rewards, and never defend.

Breakout simple turns off “happy point farm” status from borderland and encourage attackers to come at map and continue onslaught further. Is it uncomfortable for “point farmers”, who prefer to sit at full capped and upgraded map and hunt down occasional loners? Well, too bad for them.

I’m under the impression that I have not conveyed my opinion well enough. I love the idea of breakout events and what they are trying to do. It’s just a little rough around the edges. Those who view breakout events as a terrible idea, or that they are super amazing, are both wrong. They lean slightly more to the negative side from my perspective in tier 2 WvW play.

If you cannot understand the reason why breakouts discourage invaders from attacking one another, that’s Ok. However, as a commander, it has entirely removed my desire to move across the ruins and cap out the opposing invader. Not only that, but it is clear that the enemy teams treat it similarly, and they avoid attacking our tower. This perspective is coming from tier 2 WvW. There’s a significant element of tactics that suffers from the breakout event is all I’m saying.