Guild Wars 2

So recently I have been in WvW quite a lot and I feel it needs some fine tuning to stop the current Idea that huge groups with spam stun is going to be the best way to play.

There are quite a few issues in WvW at the moment and a lot of them is due to the fact that there’s hasn’t be a change in WvW in a long time. I do appreciate the effort that goes into making something like this and I don’t expect to see an overnight change. That being said some of the changes I will suggest will be manageable on a small scale and could be trickled out over say a period of a few weeks and the larger ones over a few months.

Let’s start with the basics. At the moment all I see is large blobs of players running around in a mindless group. This doesn’t encourage team work. It encourages players to mindlessly run in a large group capping towers and getting loot. It’s becoming the new queensdale train. This is obviously more of an issue in edge of the mists, but is still the case with a lot of WvW.
How would I Fix this?
Firstly I would add a debuff to the game called “over confidence” this would be a global buff that would be added to players when they are in a large group. for each player nearby they would take 1% more damage and deal 1% less damage. It would start when there is more than say 10 people with in a a certain range of you. This would mean that if a 10 man organised group encountered a 40+ group of random players they would be able to stop them more effectively rather than being rolled over by just pure damage.
Most people will say that this would be a L2P issue, but honestly when you are outnumber 4:1 you will more than likely lose regardless of skill.

Further upgrades
This is a real issue again in regards to the larger population servers. It doesn’t really matter how much you upgrade a keep or tower. If you are on a lower population server you will get rolled over if they other server can drop 5-6 catas/flame rams and just smash through before you get a chance to react. Scaling Keep defences would allow for this. but it should be an upgrade. The more people that attack the more powerful all the defences should be, It would also not stop small servers as it is a scaling defence. This would mean there was a set time to get into a tower or keep. not the current We have 50+ people lets just build 10 flame rams and get through in 3 seconds. This would allow more tactical defence play from small servers and allow the to compete with servers that just have the population to faceroll. How I would see it is that you summon a device (most likely asuran) that puts a buff on the walls or doors and all NPC that they can only have a percentage of their health lost every interval. for example 1% every second, meaning it would take a minimum of 1min40s to get in and 1min 40 to kill the npcs. This could also be destroyed once inside but would be defended by the lord and some guards. It could also scale the NPCs so they do more damage.
To make it less overpowered it should run on supply. This would allow you to starve them out by cutting supply lines.

Continuation of Further upgrades.
Upgrading your towers and keep should give you a buff that means when you are within a certain distance of your own tower you have more stats. I’m not saying a huge amount but say +10 to all stats for each tower you control in that battleground capping at 40. Keeps could give you an increase in healing and boon duration say 10%.
Also with the more towers and keeps you capture they should have an effect on the area in general. The more Towers you hold the better your defences are and It should scale with location into your borderland. I’ll use Eternal battlegrounds as an example.
If you hold your corner. Keep and all 4 towers. You keep should have a buff that means it has 200% more health and defences. 50% for each tower. Your 2 back towers should have 100% more health and defences 50% for each of the front towers. the front 2 towers should remain the same.
This would stop again larger groups just bombing the keep down. because they just have numbers.

Some more Edge of the mist mechanics.
A supply generator being built in you keep that can double you supply. you have to manually carry supply from the depot to the machine but it would allow you to double your reserves. Tunnels you could build or portals to your outer towers. These are big upgrades so would require a long time to build up.

Manual supply running.
Being able to run supplies to your own tower would be good. If you could take 10 from the supply depot and drop off only 5. It would allow you to help but not allow zergs to take advantage. With the upgrade running it would reach 10 as long as you kept it up and running.

I agree this sounds like a “hate the zerg game” but surely we all do now. If you have a sudden influx of players to one server the numbers just make it impossible to deal with. It’s no longer lets get organised it becomes well we can’t deal with those numbers lets just wait for them to leave.

Match making system
This is a little flawed from my experience. It has cause my server a lot of issues and I’m sure it’s affected others. We have been experiencing the same match ups for weeks now. not just the same few servers. I mean the same 2 servers on repeat. This has caused most of the WvW guilds on our server to leave. I quote one “This is not fun for us any more, we are just getting the same match up and we just face blob after blob after blob. with no guild competition” They transferred to different servers just to get a different match. That’s not right. surely there should be some kind of cooldown system where you can’t fight the same servers week after week. It would increase game diversity.
The system has got our server many times. with our push up to the next league we kept getting matched with games that could only lowered our ranking. With the same matches being dropped on us our wvw guilds leave. this is literally just down to a flaw in the system that could be fixed. by adding a cooldown on servers you have already faced.

My last suggestion:
World Identity
We are a server fighting another server. Why can’t we have more of an identity. Now I’m not suggesting a game breaking idea. more of a skin. guild can customise their keeps and towers. They can choose if they want it to look more like a charr fortress or human castle. Just little tweaks. give us tweaks we can do on all sorts of things as a server. maybe with a voting system. We want our borderlands to look more like Frostgorge than fireheart rise. or even it could look more like Orr. With similar enemies running round in those zones. It would just be a skin and could be voted for over the previous week. Even if these gave an advantage it would make the game more interesting. For example if say we had a damage increase similar to one we all know well. Fire beats forest, Ice beats fire, Forest beats Ice. (obviously there would be more) each with their own buff. but if we knew the servers we were gonna face and what they liked to use you could try and guess which would help you against them. The voting would have to be anonymous until we got the next week up and running.

I personally think these would help break the rut WvW seems to have got in especially since the tournament.

I’m sure there will be lots of “not going to happen” posts but if we don’t put ideas forward nothing will change. Even if only on suggestion from this post is used it was worth my time.

Thanks for reading.

Please also don’t use this as a hate thread.

Just a note about matchups:
Right now there is 140 points difference between Arborstone rank 16 and Baruch Bay rank 15.
Between Baruch Bay rank 15 and Augury Rock rank 7 is difference of 119.
This means Arborstone need to gainat least 100 points to have a RNG chance to fight Baruch Bay, server that is one rank up.
While between Baruch Bay and Augury Rock there is 7 servers.
Because matchups are between 3 servers, this means Arborstone dont have slightest way to fight higher ranked servers for next 8 to 10 weeks. This is based on how much points Arborstone got in last weeks.

We are not T1 or T9 that are limited with opponents because there is nobody better/worse in ranks. We are in middle of roster and still seems like we are combined T1 and T9 because we cant be matched against any server higher than 16th and any server lower than 18th. Just because of this gap that was created by Season 2 and ammount of transfers DL and AS got after league.

I am not saying its wrong to have transfers, but Anet should look on it and maybe manually adjust matchups.
With current population on Arborstone I believe they can be even agains Pikens maybe even against Vizu. But all they need to go higher is one matchup against them.
That will change ranting enought to reflect their current strenght and will make this more that 200points gap disappear.