Guild Wars 2

Trying in vain to think of a way of getting boons off a melee train zerg, or getting any conditions to stick or outdamage the regen of a good melee train.

Since they nerfed mesmer bubbles and necro wells into the ground a while back while boosting condition removal skills on melee toons it’s become a losing battle for most medium armor classes. Melee trains replace boons faster than a well removes them (one a second, yawn), for a skill that is on quite a long cooldown and only lasts 5 seconds.

Of course, Anet design for spvp where in small fights condition removal can be a major problem, so we are unlikely to see any changes.

What I’d like to see is some anti- melee train skills for medium armor toons. Instead of one per second, how about ‘converts 5 boons to conditions instantly’ capped at 5 players, and likewise for the ‘converts conditions to boons’ well necros can use for their team mates. The wells used to work a lot better than they do now.

Would make for some interesting mechanics- maybe NOT stacking buffs will become a tactic:-)

Not sure if the change would be too drastic- can water it down if necessary, but at the moment wvw needs a counter to ‘melee train vs melee train’ (apart from standing on a wall while they break down the gate by face rubbing it), so any other thoughts welcome.

Or should we all just give up and grab our guardians and warriors?

How about removing all immobilize from the current meta classes and giving it in spades to the non-meta classes? That way your warrior/guardian train with perma stability can be stopped?

Why not attach a boon dispel that prioritizes retaliation first to skills like barrage and flamethrower?

Make all projectile finishers remove a boon in addition to what they currently do.

Gather enough tank necros with axe,have them all hit #3 while chargeing the enemy melee and clutch swap to ds for life drain spike.
It sounds silly but with a little bit of teamwork it does work.
Also it has other perks which warriors cant do,like for example bombing catapults attached to a wall from the other side of the wall.
Of course the momment necros become mainstream tanks,anet will nerf life drain to have LoS and the axe to have less range.

Victory.2879:

Trying in vain to think of a way of getting boons off a melee train zerg, or getting any conditions to stick or outdamage the regen of a good melee train.

Since they nerfed mesmer bubbles and necro wells into the ground a while back while boosting condition removal skills on melee toons it’s become a losing battle for most medium armor classes. Melee trains replace boons faster than a well removes them (one a second, yawn), for a skill that is on quite a long cooldown and only lasts 5 seconds.

Of course, Anet design for spvp where in small fights condition removal can be a major problem, so we are unlikely to see any changes.

What I’d like to see is some anti- melee train skills for medium armor toons. Instead of one per second, how about ‘converts 5 boons to conditions instantly’ capped at 5 players, and likewise for the ‘converts conditions to boons’ well necros can use for their team mates. The wells used to work a lot better than they do now.

Would make for some interesting mechanics- maybe NOT stacking buffs will become a tactic:-)

Not sure if the change would be too drastic- can water it down if necessary, but at the moment wvw needs a counter to ‘melee train vs melee train’ (apart from standing on a wall while they break down the gate by face rubbing it), so any other thoughts welcome.

Or should we all just give up and grab our guardians and warriors?

Using Rune of Nullification/Rune of Generosity on my ranger longbow seems to work very well. Using those on a Ele’s staff should do some effective boon-stripping

The boon spam it’s pretty good, the inability to removed boon it’s actually only a coordination issue, in my guild we can actually remove pretty much all boon from a guild on the their regroup, pretty much you drop the nullfield from your mesmer on them then bomb with your own melee train, said that, you need to be able to kill atleat 3-5 people on that bomb on their regroup else it’s useless.

Your melee train need to be faster of theirs to be able to bomb their melee train, if you waste corruption and null field in not coordinate effort it will be useless, that’s why some people are able to strip boon and some other they can’t it’s actually just coordination.

Full melee train with Only guardian and Warrior don’t work good as you think, they get kited and melted way too easy.

I personal find the best ratio to be something bewteen 50% at 65% melee train rest range. and range must do damage else they are useless.

The meta in WvW it’s stagnant but not bad, everybody has their place the only real class that has problem it’s range and in minor part engi and thief but they still have viable group build for guild raids.

Melee train don’t run with permastability, it’s about doing CC when they don’t have it, but until people figure out that they need to check for boons before spamming their skill, they will still ask for buff and nerf, while it’s a L2Play issue.

There is a reason why stronger guild beat weaker guild on regular basis.

Thing just is that weak no skill guilds are strong because they have lots of warriors and guards. It’s almost sad how much i can cause havoc when i play my warrior and i don’t even have any idea what i am doing.

Melee train is always going to be a “thing”, whatever you do to boon-stripping.

Melee characters have to accept a risk/reward deal. The risk is that you take too much damage before you can get close enough to unload your own damage. The reward is that you can usually do more damage in melee than you can from range.
The best way to minimise the ‘risk’ part is to gather lots of melee and charge together at the same time. This is true in every game, whether MMO or RTS.

So if your intent is to make melee-trains a thing of the past, well, you’re just going to have to remove melee players altogether.

Taunt the zerg melee train, kite while they faceroll every button on their keyboard, then hit them.

http://youtu.be/syb07q5Lu3A?t=1m12s

Heavy group [EP] vs Ranged group [VR]

It isn’t impossible to run medium/light classes in wvw, in my opinion running such a comp takes a lot more individual skill as you don’t have the safety of perma regen/stab/prot/ and PTV armor.
With coordination you can do some heavy spike damage in a area with ranged spells, there are just to many guilds/people that are afraid to venture from the heavy train.

iAmTheDuke.6201:

http://youtu.be/syb07q5Lu3A?t=1m12s

Heavy group [EP] vs Ranged group [VR]

It isn’t impossible to run medium/light classes in wvw, in my opinion running such a comp takes a lot more individual skill as you don’t have the safety of perma regen/stab/prot/ and PTV armor.
With coordination you can do some heavy spike damage in a area with ranged spells, there are just to many guilds/people that are afraid to venture from the heavy train.

^^ I was going to mention Mag, SBI got to experience this new beast. Great job VR I had run into your Ele meteor bomb crew on another BL, was amazed how fast they could drop heavies. First time I dropped, looked at combat log and saw numerous 7K meteors and a ton of 3-4k. Then was on another BL and saw the VR group hopped as well, warned the commander of staying balled up and to respect your range bombs…they learned the hard way.

iAmTheDuke.6201:

http://youtu.be/syb07q5Lu3A?t=1m12s

Heavy group [EP] vs Ranged group [VR]

It isn’t impossible to run medium/light classes in wvw, in my opinion running such a comp takes a lot more individual skill as you don’t have the safety of perma regen/stab/prot/ and PTV armor.
With coordination you can do some heavy spike damage in a area with ranged spells, there are just to many guilds/people that are afraid to venture from the heavy train.

add in two-three shout-spirit rangers in there and you get perma regeneration, swiftness and 40% protection uptime.

Well of Corruption and Null Field are the obvious choices, but I also think your own guardian squad running searing flames and a nullification weapon could work to top off those skills for even more boon strips that happens right when the damage hits.

The trouble with theorycrafting is that it’s often very hard to coordinate things in the chaos of WvW blobs and get enough competent players together that will re-spec for things. It’s so easy to run a guardian or warrior in a melee ball; I am terrible with my guardian, don’t run a single piece of PTV (all zerker, cavalier, and knight’s), and am usually one of the last to die when things go wrong. Why? Because I have a good computer that always gets 30+ FPS, and have no problem staying on the driver unless imob stacks are not being cleared. Getting out of position is really the only way to accidentally die unless you’re losing as a group.

Weakness is so under-appreciated…

(edit) as is mass chaos armor…

Prysin.8542:

add in two-three shout-spirit rangers in there and you get perma regeneration, swiftness and 40% protection uptime.

Until the hammer train reaches the Rangers and easily AoEs every spirit into the ground. Ranger group buffs are laughable compared to heavy armor shouts. Even the Ranger shouts are horrid.