Guild Wars 2

Zerging has been the subject of debate for quite some time. Many people suggest that it should be prevented and that it is either game breaking or plainly un-fair. While I do agree that it is a bit ridiculous, the fact of the matter is; “strength in numbers.” With the holy trinity (healer, tank, DPS), travelling in groups is much less necessary because a small pack of three if well coordinated enough can survive a lot of abuse. With this system absent in Guild Wars 2 many people have difficulty operating their characters effectively. Someone who is heavily offensive will often forget to heal themselves, or someone who is heavily defensive may be too focused on survival and not enough on defeating their enemy which results in groups snowballing. People don’t want to have to do everything themselves. Although I do enjoy the independence this system was intended to promote, it also promotes the very opposite which is similar to the real world. We all have the capacity necessary to clean our house but why do it ourselves when we can do it faster with twenty others. If instead we were professional, we would only need a small group. One for each area of maintenance which will require less people and the same amount of time. Quality/quantity. With no dedicated professions in Guild Wars 2 it’s easier to rely on odds. If there are x amount of people, at least x amount of those people will be using an ability that will support you (might, regeneration, protection, etc.) when in combat. Where as with the holy trinity, you don’t need numbers because you know that each person will be doing exactly what they are supposed to be doing.
To conclude, Guild Wars 2 has done an amazing job with their departure from the traditional holy trinity. It allows us to more easily and actively explore the world on our own not having to rely on others to reach certain locations. Unfortunately this only works in small combat. We cannot properly juggle large groups of enemies on our own or even with a small group because our professions may not all compliment each other. Thus leading to “well if there are 5 enemies I’ll bring 10 friends.” Where as with dedicated roles the train of thought is more along the lines of “we need an extremely good healer and a nasty DPS.”
You have done a magnificent job with the game, ArenaNet. Unfortunately, you designed a system that works better in small scale combat than large, with an option to compete in large scale.

I have seen many, many times people discussing the downed versus dead state. Although this is far more opinion, I believe that the current system needs much less of an alteration than what most are suggesting. Spies are a problem, that much we can all agree on. The period in which someone can lie dead and still be res’d is a bit ridiculous. However, I do not think that it should be removed as some people so desperately request. Reducing the time in which someone is able to remain in the dead state to say 60 seconds would be more reasonable.
The second part of this I would like to discuss is that some people believe it promotes zerging by being able to endlessly revive dead allies. Although this is true to a degree, I don’t believe that is as much of a problem as others might like to believe. People are lazy: fact. This is yet another reason why we zerg. So that we do not have to look after all areas of our characters while in combat. If close enough to the group, we may receive regeneration, protection or what ever other boon might benefit us most at that time rather than having to eyeball our healthbars and conditions applied on us to remove them and heal accordingly. The same goes for res’ing dead allies. Most people will just hope that someone else takes the time to do it so that they don’t have to. Which results in a lot of people not being res’d and waypointing allowing the losing blob to eventually diminish.
And two ideas for the dev’s to think about: Since a lot of people play games for rewards and not to be challenged, remove the experience a player receives for reviving allies. And/or make it so that when res’ing a dead player, if interrupted, the dead players health bar will begin to fall again instead of pausing where it was left.

That’s it for my thoughts on WvW for now. If you agree, disagree or would just like to share your ideas below please feel free to contribute. Although I do not agree with the majority of the suggestions I’ve seen on removing the dead state or that zerging is game breaking, etc. This is a community and my own preferences should not be held in higher authority than any others.

Yes, downed-state is without doubt a terrible mechanic in PvP. Probably the single worst mechanic I’ve ever seen in an MMO.

But it’s no surprise this thread sunk to the bottom without a response. The editing and layout is terrible and presented as a wall of text. Nobody’s going to read that.

Downstate and rallying are both really bad mechanics for PvP, especially WvW. When you have people rallying from mobs or a 3 way fight it’s really frustrating.

To me it really feels like this game was built for PvE, and then WvW as an afterthought. The game mechanics barely work in PvE, and are terrible in WvW.

Dee Jay.2460:

Yes, downed-state is without doubt a terrible mechanic in PvP. Probably the single worst mechanic I’ve ever seen in an MMO.

But it’s no surprise this thread sunk to the bottom without a response. The editing and layout is terrible and presented as a wall of text. Nobody’s going to read that.

I apologize, I’ll try harder to impress those highly seated in academics next time when submitting my application.
…
……
It’s also no surprise to me that someone like yourself would take the time to read it only to give a negative response.

I also hate downed state but current downed state is a 100% backup of the unholy trinity. Jut think how many times you get downed in those dungeons and power ressed or rallied. If they just remove downed state more problems will appear behind the cover.

I like downed state in WvW and PvP.

MandJ.8965:

I like downed state in WvW and PvP.

Then you have never fought an outnumbered fight where you downed a large number of enemies only to see their allies hard rezzing them in the middle of the fight. Numbers will always > skill with a downed state in a player vs player environment. It’s broken in many ways, not least of which each class is imbalanced when it comes to the downed state and stomping the downed state. You have three thieves in the group you’re fighting? Forget it, shadow refuges forever/stealth stomp. You have a bunch of eles that you’re trying to kill? No problemmo for them, mistform into that doorway. If you kill a bunch of engis, go ahead and celebrate, there’s diddly squat they can do except pray for a friend and that you aren’t paying attention.

Rallying on spikes instead of on death would definitely be interesting. Could create it’s own drama in big fights. Even then, I feel like rallying should be limited.

I still like the idea of no rezzing fully dead players. It just favors the side with overwhelming numbers. I’ve been on both sides of those fights, and it’s not fair for the side that is still killing even though they are outnumbered. I think changes to this system would begin to reward skill over numbers. It won’t fix everything, but it would be a start.

In PvE the reviving mechanic is fine as it is. The problem is with how it works in WvW and Pvp, but most notably in WvW. I do think that if a player is fully dead, they should in some form NOT be able to be revived under certain circumstances. It is discouraging when you kill an enemy in the zerg, only to have 5 enemies stop for the few seconds it takes for them to revive them right away.

The two most obvious ways should be that a fully dead player should not be able to be revived by allies for x amount of time. Perhaps a 60 seconds to 90 second penalty? The other way I can see is that you can not revive a fully dead ally if you are in combat, but I can see problems with this as there could be 2 thieves who stay 20 feet behind the battle for the sole reason to stealth revive those dead allies.

For PvE the revive mechanic is totally fine, and necessary in many cases, such as dungeons to revive your party member who died to the boss attacks (such as the boss fractal fights). It is PvP and WvW that it is a problem and needs to be looked at, especially for WvW.

Oh no, please devs, don’t take this seriously. Downed State is just fine!

hard ressing is a real issue in blob fights. if you died you should just straight up waypoint.

I would be fully behind the change to reading dead players while in combat, though I don’t often have a problem with it. I also like the idea of someone has to be stomped to rally players. I believe that would go a long way to relieving the rally bot issue that zergs tend to create, you would still see people rally, but someone would have to take the risk of stomping to do it, no longer could you just AoE the downed players from safety and rally a bunch of your force.

Pass these ideas along if you can Josh.

All I really think needs to be done is to remove the ability to rez defeated (not downed) players while in combat. Not only would this allow smart play to whittle down larger numbers, but it would also remove some of the clutter on the battlefield since rezzing and spiking unfortunately share the same keybind.

However, I’d LOVE to try out that spike → rally idea. It would definitely be worth at least testing before making a decision on it.

TeamBattleAxe.3901:

All I really think needs to be done is to remove the ability to rez defeated (not downed) players while in combat. Not only would this allow smart play to whittle down larger numbers, but it would also remove some of the clutter on the battlefield since rezzing and spiking unfortunately share the same keybind.

However, I’d LOVE to try out that spike -> rally idea. It would definitely be worth at least testing before making a decision on it.

I agree. I think simply making it so you could only res when out of combat would resolve a great deal of the problems people are having and I would love to try the spike to rally thing.

Things I don’t like about downed/dead state:

1) Full rezzing while in combat. Please remove.
2) Killing someone can revive whoever tagged that person. This needs to be limited to like 1. Maybe 3.
3) The white/yellow/red/dead rally system needs to be changed to only be one rally, and then you’re dead. You get a new debuff called Rally Sickness, which makes it so that if you get downed again in X seconds, you’re dead. If you manage to survive for longer than that time, the rally sickness goes away and you’re free to restart the process.
4) Remove rallying off of NPCs. This is so broken and arguably the most frustrating part of the downed system. They made it so you can’t rally off dolyaks, why not everything else?

Why not tie rezzing to something objective based… oh I don’t know, maybe the ruins?

0 bloodlust: rezzing of a downed player can be done by any method currently available, but a dead player cannot be rezzed.

1 bloodlust: a dead player can only be rezzed out of combat, within x minutes.

2 bloodlust: a dead player can be rezzed by any method, no time limit.

3 bloodlust: a dead player is rezzed whenever a stomp is made.

Restrictions: rez restrictions are applied at time of death. So if you die while only have 1 bloodlust, and your server goes up to 2 bloodlust, you still are restricted to 1 bloodlust worth of rez power.

I would be happy with this:

- Stomped players get auto-ported back to the closest wp
- You can only rez a downed or defeated player when out of combat
- Introduce a food that gives say a 25% chance to defeat a player (no downed state)
- Introduce a new mastery that has a potential to put a player into defeated state

If I were to have to pick one; I think the one that would make the biggest impact while making it actually fair is only allow rezzing while out of combat.

Rally on spike only, limited to 2 up for 1 downed together these would be awesome!!

Spicyhash.7605:

Things I don’t like about downed/dead state:

1) Full rezzing while in combat. Please remove.
2) Killing someone can revive whoever tagged that person. This needs to be limited to like 1. Maybe 3.
3) The white/yellow/red/dead rally system needs to be changed to only be one rally, and then you’re dead. You get a new debuff called Rally Sickness, which makes it so that if you get downed again in X seconds, you’re dead. If you manage to survive for longer than that time, the rally sickness goes away and you’re free to restart the process.
4) Remove rallying off of NPCs. This is so broken and arguably the most frustrating part of the downed system. They made it so you can’t rally off dolyaks, why not everything else?

All of these could go a long way of solving so much frustration and mindlessness i think. Adding to this that you can only rally people on stomps would go even further.

So here’s a crazy thought if these changes were to be made, for adding a new/different layer of ressing tactics and depth:

What if you could drag/carry defeated players? Let’s say:
1) You get a 90% movespeed reduction
2) Port/shadowstepping/portaling will drop the player, treat it like the orb on spirit watch.
3) Resurrecting defeated players can only be done out of combat
4) Getting hit while resurrecting interrupts and the defeated players health goes down to zero (or just treat the res as a commune, all mechanics already there.)
5) To pick a player up, deafeated player get’s a prompt for a confirm, and can after getting picked up at any time release themseles. (No trolling allowed!)

Wouldn’t this add a new interesting layer to wvw combat? Tanky builds could be made necessary for making a rescue-team, trying to drag players to the safety of bases. CC builds needed to keep enemies away and so forth. ould be totally swell! And alot of work

Josh Davis.6015:

Thanks for the post, OP. This is a fairly polarizing topic, but it is interesting nonetheless. It came up quite a bit in the 3 likes / 3 dislikes thread as well. Changing the way downstate works would have such a large sweeping change on the way the game is played – it’s sort of fun to theorycraft the ramifications!

Keep in mind, I’m just spit-balling here – none of this is in the works. I would just like to see some more conversation on the topic.

wow a dev that actually cares about hypotheticals. incredible I didn’t think id live to see the day /end sarcasm

Josh Davis.6015:

So, what if you only rallied allies when you stomped someone, rather than cleaving the body? This would be much more difficult to pull off in large-scale fights, but you would have added risk/reward for attempting. Would even-numbered fights still snowball?

while in large fights it might be harder to pull off I feel like you are shafting smaller fights like 5v5s and even 10v10s since most kills are by well coordinated stomps. Even a well coordinated stomp doesnt deserve to rally an entire team. Soon as you get into “only if you do this or that” it becomes too chancy. Weather you cleave or stomp one body should equal one life. its fair and doesnt get into too many different instances of possibility which we all know can be frustrating.

Josh Davis.6015:

It would almost always affect players in small-scale fights as well. I’ve won plenty of 1v2’s in WvW and PvP from downstate, getting that clutch rally at the right moment – but that would go away too.

I along with many solo roamers have a very VERY opposing opinion on this. While occasionally you win a down state fight in downstate more often than not if its a thief, a mesmer, an ele or you used your stability to actually break a stun (which is what stability was made for; not getting cc’d in combat) ninety percent of the time the downed person on the 2 man side will get back up because of resing. Instead of thinking of the times you have won a down vs down fight, think of the times a downed enemy has caused you to die because you just couldnt get that stomp off before realizing you lost half your HP being self rooted for 3 seconds. (5 or 6 if they stun/ troll your stomp)

Josh Davis.6015:

What if you couldn’t hard rez downed allies? What are the positives and negatives?

positives:
-promotes higher skill (a dead player doesnt want to die again so they get better)
-helps outmanned groups defeat overwhelming odds so long as they can actually kill the group the first time
-makes better use of waypoints since they will be worth more
-helps defenders defend their stuff
-reduces the clutter of all the nametags from dead bodies probably helping performance and visibility quite a bit.
negatives:
none I can state since I do not consent to hard reses unless I yolod off a cliff :P

Josh Davis.6015:

Anyways, just rambling. Feel free to discuss! If you have any good threads on the topic that come to mind, feel free to link them for me.

its awesome that a dev actually wants to discuss things finally rather than what we have had in the past. I hope that players opinions will start to matter a lot more as WvW gets more recognition that it deserves.

rilledorf.3845:

4) Getting hit while resurrecting interrupts and the defeated players health goes down to zero (or just treat the res as a commune, all mechanics already there.)

this bothers me so much. in pvp or wherever else you commune, if you get hit, the commune stops. then again, i feel like if all player channels could get interrupted by being hit it would GG a lot of powerful abilities

I brought this up in another thread in the spvp forums but I think that there could be a valid replacement for the downed state. Two things bother me about it, the fact that in a 1v2 even if I down an enemy they can get rezzed faster than I can either kill them or spike them which makes 1v2s incredibly difficult to pull off against (non brain-dead) enemies. The other is, as other people have mentioned, power rezzing in WvW. This takes away any incentive to run smaller, more organized groups over simply massing in numbers. On SoR fairly often we will have a smaller zerg going up against much larger BG numbers and we can never really “beat” them because they can afford to commit a larger number of people to just power rezzing people that get downed, and even fully downed. So I propose two changes:

1. Most straightforward → spike/death = rez. You can’t get rezzed in spvp so why can you in wvw? I don’t even care if this applies to pve or not, I think it negatively affects wvw.

2. Give each class a new ability slot, “Resurrection” or some such thing. You would be able to pick from either a single target rez or a group rez. Example for guardian:
Brother in Arms: resurrects one target and applies stablity and aegis to them when they are revived. (30s – 1m cd)
Aid to the Fallen: (ground targeted) resurrects up to 5 allies in the target area and raises a sanctuary around them. (2 min cd)

etc. for each class

Just an idea since I do find the current system a little frustrating at times.

If you are stomped, you can’t get revived in combat.
If you are stomped, you are forced to respawn within 3 minutes.

TBH the number of people who can revive someone should be reduced to 3. Downed state gives SO much of advantage to the larger group its not even funny.

Josh Davis.6015:

So, what if you only rallied allies when you stomped someone, rather than cleaving the body? This would be much more difficult to pull off in large-scale fights, but you would have added risk/reward for attempting. Would even-numbered fights still snowball?

I am personally a fan of the rally system as it sets your combat apart from other games… having said that, rallying off of a deer that happened to get caught by a couple of shots during the course of a battle is really lame. In large scale battles rallying off of stuff like that can be a backbreaker. It also makes skill groups fear being tagged along by the dreaded rally bot… heck look at my guild tag. :p

If you took that away and rallied only on spike I think that would make battles tremendously more challenging, and it may give rise to additional “necessary” builds inside the makeup of the general guild group comp. Classes specced to be highly mobile, survive burst damage and get quickness to stomp fast would become an asset. I’m always game for further diversity in play options, and lets face it the medium armor classes could really use something that they are desired for, even if this would only see a small bump to a couple of classes.

It would almost always affect players in small-scale fights as well. I’ve won plenty of 1v2’s in WvW and PvP from downstate, getting that clutch rally at the right moment – but that would go away too.

An excellent counter argument, as killing a downed player while downed and rallying is a hella exciting battle mechanic. So, in the spirit of spitballing… what if the stomp to rally mechanic only triggered when there were orange swords in the vicinity? Make those orange swords give like a 4000 range blanket “rally debuff” to downed players that can only be removed with a stomp?

What if you couldn’t hard rez downed allies? What are the positives and negatives?

I’m personally really on the fence about this. I can’t tell you how many times an epic open field battle has been won by a small group of players knifing off and hard rezzing a couple of players that could turn the tide – a portal/veil Mesmer that went down early who can start moving the group back around the battlefield more unpredictably for example. I would be really sad to see that go. If it absolutely had to though… what about not allowing rez while the rezzer is in combat? That way if you really wanted to keep someone down, you could even engage a stealthed player.

If you coupled that with a way to eject people from captured keeps after some time limit, I think that would satisfy most of the passionate people on the subject, right?

Downed-State/Rally/Reviving

In PvE:

Ok, obviously mobs don’t care if a party is suddenly rallied so there’s no real problem here. Since it can only really affect 5 people there’s a limit to the snowballing too.

My only frustration with it in PvE is that it encourages you, should you be at low health, to not “finish” your current opponent and instead wait to down and then use the mob to rally yourself.

This is completely counter-intuitive and nonsensical really, but that’s how the mechanic works. Fighting 2 mobs, better not kill the first one until after I’ve downed so I can abuse the rally…

In WvW

Small scale roaming: This is where downed-state feels the most frustrating as it is a huge snowballing mechanic. For every 100 times I’ve failed because I couldn’t finish off someone I may have had a “come back” once. All downed-state does is give the already larger group more and more fail-safe options their opponents have to overcome.

Any uphill battle is made a dozen times harder because of downed-state, especially when you account for various downed-state abilities. When fighting 3 vs. 1 you can’t afford to waste valuable cooldowns to secure stomps but this game forced you to.

Zerg battles – In Zerg fights the actual downed-state is mostly ignored. But here Rally becomes a huge issue and just feels completely random and contrived. You can be at 1% downed-health and then suddenly get rallied because….well someone you damage somewhere obviously died just in time. But it’s just pure luck, there’s nothing skillful about it.

And then there’s the snowballing aspect to it. You have a bigger force? Well no need to revive because your team-mates will all be rallied while you roll over your opposition. That’s why you never see anything like “a close victory” in GW2. One side always steamrolls the other, even if people do go down during the fights. They just all get rallied eventually. You simply don’t have a 50 vs. 50 fight with 15 survivors.

The only time it doesn’t work in favor of the larger group is when you have lots of glassy classes, typically casual players. You will hate them more for playing DPS builds because they rally your enemy.

In sPvP

This is where I find downed-state the least offensive. But that’s because fights are typically fairly even and there is a certain risk/reward attached to reviving someone mid-fight.

I wouldn’t say the game is in any way better because of it, but at least it isn’t outright hurting the game. I do however find it extremely cheesy how a Bunker Guardian can safe-revive allies with little to no risk to himself.

Resurrection

A slightly different matter is resurrecting dead players. I see no good reason why this should be allowed mid-combat. Stuff like this should be reserved for “out of combat” only. This applies to PvE as much as it applies to PvP or WvW.

Verdict

Downed-State in its current incarnation is the most extreme example of a snowballing mechanic I have ever witnessed in a game and hurts otherwise positive aspects of the game like WvW. It limits skillful play of solo-roamers, it’s snowballing in Zergs, it’s completely random in large-scale fights and doesn’t have any semblance of skill.

And worst of all it’s not actually fun either. Being in downed-state is not fun. Using the same downed-abilities every time is not fun. Going through the same notions for every stomp is not fun. Having to experience the same humiliating stomp animation is not fun. Being left to “bleed out” in sPvP is not fun. Nothing about downed-state is fun or compelling in any way, shape or form.

However it doesn’t have to be this way.

These steps would allow it to continue to exist as a mechanic without many of the aforementioned down-sides.

• Only stomps Rally players.
• Only 1 Rally per stomp.
• Every downed-denier needs a counter (currently Eles have none)
• No more resurrecting defeated players in combat.
• Faster stomping (2 seconds) and/or slower reviving by allied players.

This would have very little effect on PvE as there aren’t many situations where you need to rally more than one players. It would limit the snowballing effect during zerg fights and give solo-roamers more of and edge when fighting multiple enemies.

Rallying is fine, the main issue is hard ressing. OP is talking about zerging, and what does zerg gets from zerging? More numbers=while half of them dealing with invaders, the other quarter can ress their dead people=non stop zerg. This is the issue here, hard ressing. If those dead people from the zerg need to run back from spawn, then it’ll be fine. It does give the defenders a room to breath a.k.a time to repair the wall/gates. But with hard ressing, defenders won’t get any chance to do that, nor the time to regroup.

Make so hard ressing can only be done when the player that is ressing the dead is out of combat. With this, no more hard ressing in the middle of the fight. No more hard ressing under AC fire and no more freaking unstoppable 100 man zerg. Not only that, skill play can also be done. With this changes, at last a 25 man can wipe a large zerg, without worrying those zerg will be able to get up from fallen a.k.a kissing the floor and totally dead and fight again due to hard ressing. Do change this and I might come back and play gw2.

@Johs Davis
https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/wuv/wuv/Defeated-State/first and hundreds more.

Would like to see some of conversation upon this matter? How bout learn to search old thread and read it.

Hard res needs to be completely removed from WvW. It essentially negates and contradicts the downstate and what it means to be defeated. It’s a game breaking oversight in the death system, since there is no penalty to being defeated because you have overwhelming numbers to be hard ressed. ZERG > skill = GG Anet

Josh Davis.6015:

Thanks for the post, OP. This is a fairly polarizing topic, but it is interesting nonetheless. It came up quite a bit in the 3 likes / 3 dislikes thread as well. Changing the way downstate works would have such a large sweeping change on the way the game is played – it’s sort of fun to theorycraft the ramifications!

Keep in mind, I’m just spit-balling here – none of this is in the works. I would just like to see some more conversation on the topic.

So, what if you only rallied allies when you stomped someone, rather than cleaving the body? This would be much more difficult to pull off in large-scale fights, but you would have added risk/reward for attempting. Would even-numbered fights still snowball?

It would almost always affect players in small-scale fights as well. I’ve won plenty of 1v2’s in WvW and PvP from downstate, getting that clutch rally at the right moment – but that would go away too.

What if you couldn’t hard rez downed allies? What are the positives and negatives?

Anyways, just rambling. Feel free to discuss! If you have any good threads on the topic that come to mind, feel free to link them for me.

The problem with wvw currently is all the mechanics benefits the zerg.

1) AOE cap: Can’t be fixed because of game engine issues, but it allows zergs to exploit ‘PBAoE’ damage. More numbers, the more spread out damage is. If a 5 man attacks a 15 man, the 5 man can only put out damage to 33% of the 15 man. However the 15 man can put 100% damage against the enemy group. This advantage to the 15 man is further compounded by the RNG of the PBAoE system in this game. PBAoE used to mean the closer you were to the center of the AOE, the more damage you would take. Now it means if you’re the closest person to the center you are top on the list of 5 people to take damage.
2) Map size: These things are so small that its really easy to move around in the borderlands. Defense points can attack other defense points with trebs. Waypoints make the maps even smaller.
3) Downed state: The people who have the most players have a significant advantage. More people to revive, more people to soak up damage, etc. Downed state also makes it difficult if your in a group that is half the size of the one you are fighting. They can maintain damage on you while also reviving their people. Since you have less people in your small man, that also makes it harder for you to get stomps since you can’t stack a ton of people on top of the people attempting to get stomps.

There are more but I don’t want this to turn into a bigger wall-of-text

There needs to be a lot more focus put into WvW development, its still very popular and needs help =(

Josh Davis.6015:

Thanks for the post, OP. This is a fairly polarizing topic, but it is interesting nonetheless. It came up quite a bit in the 3 likes / 3 dislikes thread as well. Changing the way downstate works would have such a large sweeping change on the way the game is played – it’s sort of fun to theorycraft the ramifications!

Keep in mind, I’m just spit-balling here – none of this is in the works. I would just like to see some more conversation on the topic.

So, what if you only rallied allies when you stomped someone, rather than cleaving the body? This would be much more difficult to pull off in large-scale fights, but you would have added risk/reward for attempting. Would even-numbered fights still snowball?

It would almost always affect players in small-scale fights as well. I’ve won plenty of 1v2’s in WvW and PvP from downstate, getting that clutch rally at the right moment – but that would go away too.

What if you couldn’t hard rez downed allies? What are the positives and negatives?

Anyways, just rambling. Feel free to discuss! If you have any good threads on the topic that come to mind, feel free to link them for me.

Doesn’t matter if it is a stomp or a cleave, it is a broken mechanic when one person dying can rally unlimited numbers of others. Should be no rally in WvW, or at the very least only the person that did the most damage should get rallied. Nothing in WvW makes your fellow server mates as much a liability to you as rally does.

I also think that you shouldnt be able to help someone get back up if you are in combat, and if someone is downed and stomped then they have to release. The game needs attrition.

I like downed state, I do not like dead state.

The only limit I would put on cleaving/stomping is a 5 person cap, much like most skills in the game. Its a reasonable limitation and can help fights from snowballing. (If a zerg v zerg clashes and 15 are downed on each side, instead of one side getting all 15 back because they happened to kill the first downed, they only get 5, allowing for one of theirs to be finished so the other side can have a rally, not quite as snowbally).

Then there is dead state. Ressing from dead needs to be allowed, it sucks to fall off a cliff and die and have to walk back, not fun, but it needs to be limited.

If you are not being ressed you should be losing your hp, so you cant res someone a little bit at a time. You also should not be able to res defeated players while in combat, these two things together would stop zergs from being able to repair themselves in the middle of a fight, unless they win the field.

Alternatively let cleave rally 1 person and stomp 5.

Draygo.9473:

Then there is dead state. Ressing from dead needs to be allowed, it sucks to fall off a cliff and die and have to walk back, not fun, but it needs to be limited.

The maps are tiny, walking back takes all of what, 5 mins at the farthest point? Gives you time to think about how you can not fall off a cliff in the future.

The game needs attrition, you need to be able to wear down these big blobs.

DeadlySynz.3471:

I would be happy with this:

- Stomped players get auto-ported back to the closest wp
- You can only rez a downed or defeated player when out of combat
- Introduce a food that gives say a 25% chance to defeat a player (no downed state)
- Introduce a new mastery that has a potential to put a player into defeated state

If I were to have to pick one; I think the one that would make the biggest impact while making it actually fair is only allow rezzing while out of combat.

No RNG in PvP please. I’d be pretty perplexed if anything but #2 was added.

I think the suggestion of having ressing be interrupted if you get damaged (or perhaps after you take a certain threshold of damage) is a good one. This not only prevents zergs from just focus ressing downed people while still under fire, but it also gives more importance to traits that improve ressing.

There’s nothing wrong with the downed state.

Anyone who complains about being outnumbered can either sPvP, GvG or transfer to a lower tier.

ANet want to sell finishers, they wont remove the downed state. but what if in wvw if somebody go down automaticly die and the last persons finisher who tagged the enemy appear in his/her body.
or in wvw you dont need to stay at the victim. the finisher arrives instant

maybe this things happens only if there is an orange sword around

I think ‘cannot revive defeated players while in combat’ is the most practical change that could be made to how downed/defeated works that wouldn’t break the system in small scale fights but would still disallow larger groups from benefitting too severely from the existing mechanics.

Coldtart.4785:

I think ‘cannot revive defeated players while in combat’ is the most practical change that could be made to how downed/defeated works that wouldn’t break the system in small scale fights but would still disallow larger groups from benefitting too severely from the existing mechanics.

This
/15

- Completely remove the ability to resurrect fully dead/staked players. This will 100% help smaller more skilled forces taking on larger zergs. It will actually make it mean something if you force players to respawn at WP’s!

- Allow only one player to rally per player death. This is fair. A player for a player. Not a player for 5-6 that tagged him.

The downed state is fine with some tuning. The thing is it’s not really noticeable in sPvP(well i’ve never really noticed it, mostly because it’s even numbers), it’s only in WvW that it comes into play and it hands larger numbers an advantage they do not need.

The fact u come back with 100% damage capacity from being downed and all ur cool downs ready to rock is really pants, and i 100% agree 1 stomp = 1 rally.

Y not have a debuff when u pop up from downed state to take you out of the fight briefly, say 15 seconds. To say ‘hey you just got downed buddy, take a breather to recuperate’. Clearly thats do-able i get that when i use a revive orb in PvE.

Like 50% combat dmg for 15 seconds, or if you drop out of combat entirely, the debuff vanishes, so if u run off and disengage the debuff drops off u. But if you still want to stay and contribute you suffer a 50% damage/healing penalty for 15 seconds. Also gives you something to think about in the overall fight. Is it worthwhile me staying and contributing 50%. Or am i better off trying to disengage and come back with 100% effectiveness? Which is the better option for the fight and my team?

It also hands the team that managed to drop a target a small bonus, as a job well done for downing a player. Sure they didnt get the stomp but they still get some reward for their efforts in reducing his effectiveness and thus impact on the fight.

The form the debuff takes could be discussed at length to work out a good balance between a reward for downing a player. And how effective that player should be upon re-entering the fight from a downed state

what about a feature to remove the red name tags from the fully downed players ?
Would be a lot more overview in a big fight

Josh Davis.6015:

Thanks for the post, OP. This is a fairly polarizing topic, but it is interesting nonetheless. It came up quite a bit in the 3 likes / 3 dislikes thread as well. Changing the way downstate works would have such a large sweeping change on the way the game is played – it’s sort of fun to theorycraft the ramifications!

Keep in mind, I’m just spit-balling here – none of this is in the works. I would just like to see some more conversation on the topic.

So, what if you only rallied allies when you stomped someone, rather than cleaving the body? This would be much more difficult to pull off in large-scale fights, but you would have added risk/reward for attempting. Would even-numbered fights still snowball?

It would almost always affect players in small-scale fights as well. I’ve won plenty of 1v2’s in WvW and PvP from downstate, getting that clutch rally at the right moment – but that would go away too.

What if you couldn’t hard rez downed allies? What are the positives and negatives?

Anyways, just rambling. Feel free to discuss! If you have any good threads on the topic that come to mind, feel free to link them for me.

Near 1 year and 5+ months, why haven’t stealth stomping elimination been intentionally ignored or haven’t been in the works for so long?

" What if you couldn’t hard rez downed allies? What are the positives and negatives? "

To begin with, What if a thief Stealth Stomp down allies?

What is the point of having down dead stomp skills to begin with if stealth thieves are immune to them?

What if you couldn’t hard rez downed allies because they were killed by stealth thieves?

What if we couldn’t rally dead allies because they were already killed by stealth thieves?

To begin with,

obviously…

What can you do against a thief in stealth?

What can anyone do to a person/s you can not see?

What can anyone do to a Fail Proof thief class anyways?

" As the saying goes, "why inquire of change, when you play Favorites "?

The Positiveness of this is called Favoritism

The Negativeness of this is called Favoritism

End Favoritism than we can all talk about the Positiveness.

End Favoritism than we can all discuss the Negativeness?

I believe everyone agrees .. 1 down = 1 up…
nothing to discuss at all. just plain logic.

same goes with hammertrain guardiors.. nerf them to bits to promote other professions to actually be played in wvw..

Then the subject of stunstacking.. Stun isn’t even a condition!!!!!!! kitten . get this kitten out of the game.

My 2cents:

- No rezzing of dead players. There should be a penalty for dying. So you fight a larger force at lake tower , you all wipe in a glorious heroic outnumbered fight, but you also manage to kill 10 or 20 of them in the process. Now the bigger force will have to choose between fighting with more even numbers or regroup and loose the progress.
This will accomplish further important things:

1. Proximity of waypoints will confer an advantage. The further the bigger force are away from their spawning location, the weaker they become and the stronger the smaller force becomes. Instead of a larger(stronger) force getting everything on the map, they will get a portion in relation to their dominance in fights. This will also mean that the PPT will more accurately reflect the relative strengths of the servers.

2. Smaller forces can wear down larger forces. Even if you can’t win a fight, you can aim to secure stomps and kill as many as possible. Regroup and repeat. This will be especially effective against map-flipping zone blobs, since they will get bored of running/dying and move to another map. Now you can rebuild and if you defend your stuff, you can do the same with an even smaller force.

3. It promotes active decision making in the fight. Do you stick to your commander or rez an ally? Does the commander rez the numbers that just fell or continue the offensive. At what point does he do one or the other. Your commander sees that a bunch of enemies dropped, maybe move of slightly to entice the other group to try and rez then hit them hard to kill even more.

4. Stomping becomes important. Once a player is stomped, he is out of the fight. A groups coordination in this matter becomes vital. Decision making around when to stomp and how, becomes important. Where the people drop also greatly affects what the best course of action is on whether to secure the stomp or not. Did they all drop in one spot or are they scattered. Do you break up your formation for the stomps or not. Do you maybe position your melee train in such a way that you guard the downed enemies while your ranged players secures the stomps? The fact that stomps also give points is an added bonus.

- One rally per kill. Rallies only from players. Maybe only the person that did the most damage to an opponent gets the rally from them. This will also contribute to another common issue people have with WvW, which is that Melee Trains are too strong.

- Rally Cooldown. If you have rallied recently, you don’t get another rally or your chances of getting one gets reduced. This will also make it so that smaller group have less potential to give out rallies.

I think the downed state should stay, because there are some major mechanics surrounding it (Warrior banner elite for example).

However, there are two major issues with the downed state in WvW:

A) In large scale battles, it’s too easy to rally off someone you barely grazed and too easy to give rallies for spamming AOEs and going down.

B) In small scale battles, players that do well when outnumbered are punished because players that are downed are rezzed too quickly. Lucky trash mob rallies when you fail for going in over your head are equally stupid, though far less common.

To help fix A, I really like the idea of stomps triggering rallies only. I also think that down state HP should be lowered or rez-rate tweaked, maybe not even in an absolute manner but perhaps through the wvw mastery system (i.e. spend 75pts to get quickness when stomping if you stomp an enemy that had only you as the damage source)

PS: I also think that if you initiate a stomp animation on a player and they stealth, the stomp should follow through if the player remains in the same position. It’s pretty dumb that a 60s CD shadow refuge utility can perform nearly as well as rezzing utilities and elites that have 120-240s CDs.

It would be awesome to change the mechanic so that you can only rally if the player you’ve tagged is stomped, not killed by just damaging.

I would also love to see that the revive function (ressing a dead player) could could only be used outside of combat.

melodey.4652:

MandJ.8965:

I like downed state in WvW and PvP.

Then you have never fought an outnumbered fight where you downed a large number of enemies only to see their allies hard rezzing them in the middle of the fight. Numbers will always > skill with a downed state in a player vs player environment. It’s broken in many ways, not least of which each class is imbalanced when it comes to the downed state and stomping the downed state. You have three thieves in the group you’re fighting? Forget it, shadow refuges forever/stealth stomp. You have a bunch of eles that you’re trying to kill? No problemmo for them, mistform into that doorway. If you kill a bunch of engis, go ahead and celebrate, there’s diddly squat they can do except pray for a friend and that you aren’t paying attention.

I played with 5 vs 20+ and won.
I like the second ‘chance’ you get in Downstate. I do not often zerging, and i dont play pve. But in Small scale fights i like it.

I made a suggestion topic regarding new masteries – one of them (the executioner mastery) deals with downed state in a way.

Since this thread is getting some dev attention, I would love if you (Grouch) and the community would check them out. Sadly it gut buried fast: https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/wuv/wuv/New-WvW-mastery-ideas-discuss/first#post3521615

Also got a thread on improved WvW uprades (like doors with realiation – PvD – solved, but no one seemed to care :*( )

MandJ.8965:

I like downed state in WvW and PvP.

People need to learn wich is more efective, fighthing or getting your allies back.

Burnfall.9573:

Josh Davis.6015:

Thanks for the post, OP. This is a fairly polarizing topic, but it is interesting nonetheless. It came up quite a bit in the 3 likes / 3 dislikes thread as well. Changing the way downstate works would have such a large sweeping change on the way the game is played – it’s sort of fun to theorycraft the ramifications!

Keep in mind, I’m just spit-balling here – none of this is in the works. I would just like to see some more conversation on the topic.

So, what if you only rallied allies when you stomped someone, rather than cleaving the body? This would be much more difficult to pull off in large-scale fights, but you would have added risk/reward for attempting. Would even-numbered fights still snowball?

It would almost always affect players in small-scale fights as well. I’ve won plenty of 1v2’s in WvW and PvP from downstate, getting that clutch rally at the right moment – but that would go away too.

What if you couldn’t hard rez downed allies? What are the positives and negatives?

Anyways, just rambling. Feel free to discuss! If you have any good threads on the topic that come to mind, feel free to link them for me.

Near 1 year and 5+ months, why haven’t stealth stomping elimination been intentionally ignored or haven’t been in the works for so long?

" What if you couldn’t hard rez downed allies? What are the positives and negatives? "

To begin with, What if a thief Stealth Stomp down allies?

What is the point of having down dead stomp skills to begin with if stealth thieves are immune to them?

What if you couldn’t hard rez downed allies because they were killed by stealth thieves?

What if we couldn’t rally dead allies because they were already killed by stealth thieves?

To begin with,

obviously…

What can you do against a thief in stealth?

What can anyone do to a person/s you can not see?

What can anyone do to a Fail Proof thief class anyways?

" As the saying goes, "why inquire of change, when you play Favorites "?

The Positiveness of this is called Favoritism

The Negativeness of this is called Favoritism

End Favoritism than we can all talk about the Positiveness.

End Favoritism than we can all discuss the Negativeness?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pt8TeW2Yor8

Of all the “safe” stomps stealth is by far the easiest to counter… Stability is impossible to counter unless you can strip it. A thief only need one of the many AoE knockbacks or interrupts that’s in the game. Just focusing cleave/AoE damage on the fallen comrade will force the thief to back off or he will die.

A thief is redicolously easy to counter. Instead of spending your days in these forums complaining you could dedicate them to learning how to counter one. Once you have learnt that it will be hard for a thief to kill you by abusing stealth…