Guild Wars 2

Not too terribly long ago I remember an Arenanet official response stating that PvP changes would not affect WvWvW, which would instead play under the PvE ruleset.

Has there been any clarification on why or, better yet, have they changed their stance on this?

My main concerns are:

• Class balance. Some skills are being individually balanced for PvP and PvE. This should affect WvWvW. If someone is OP in sPvP, why wouldn’t they be in this pvp?
• New gear tiers will affect WvWvW. Atm, the stat difference is negligible. But as time goes and more ascended/legendary/whatever get put into the game, the stat difference between someone in greens or even someone in full exotics vs those in the new sets will begin to become far more significant.

I’m mostly curious as to where WvW stands.

Tolmos.8395:

This should affect WvWvW. If someone is OP in sPvP, why wouldn’t they be in this pvp?

Because what’s broken in 5v5 capture-the-points gameplay could be perfectly fine in a different context?

Consider the SPvP downed-state health reduction, for instance. With the larger number of players in WvW battles, the downed-state health pool really isn’t much of an issue. If you’re downed in an inopportune place, 5-10 enemies will quickly spike you down even with the rather generous health you get while downed. Would applying SPvP’s downed-state change, designed for 2v1 and 3v2 situations, to WvW really improve how being downed plays in 10v10 and 30v30 battles?

As another example, character stats themselves are different between WvW and SPvP, because of the difference between normal gear and PvP amulets. You can’t stack crit damage as high in SPvP as you do in WvW, for instance.

They have not changed their stance and probably will not in any near term future unfortunately. I think most WvW people wish they had similar rule sets as PvP and its a major complaint amongst a lot of people.

I doubt Anet will change WvW to have SPvP rules. I get the impression that they want WvW to be the noob friendly PvP area. With a 5 man team you really need to carry your weight or your team will fail, but with the 50 man zergs in WvW you can run around clueless, do extremely stupid kitten and it probably won’t really matter. If all you do is run dungeons and decide to try out PvP for the first time, then you will automatically have better gear than most other people so it will be that much harder for you to fail. It seems like a place for people who aren’t really confident about PvP to get accustomed to competitive play.

Waffler.1257:

I doubt Anet will change WvW to have SPvP rules. I get the impression that they want WvW to be the noob friendly PvP area. With a 5 man team you really need to carry your weight or your team will fail, but with the 50 man zergs in WvW you can run around clueless, do extremely stupid kitten and it probably won’t really matter. If all you do is run dungeons and decide to try out PvP for the first time, then you will automatically have better gear than most other people so it will be that much harder for you to fail. It seems like a place for people who aren’t really confident about PvP to get accustomed to competitive play.

Ouch. So WvW is basically a gimmick tutorial to PvP? That kinda sucks. It was the drawing force for me to this game, and what I looked forward to the most. It’s a shame to hear that.

WvW is awesome, but for most it is PVP. IMO Anet should rename WvW to wPVP and apply a (special) pvp ruleset.

Counting WvW as PVE is ridiculous.

To be honest I’m a bit disappointed by the state of WWW.
This portion of game is what I envisioned my end game, and it is simply not providing fun.
This comes to several factors, one of which is population imbalance: playing in a dead server, means absolutely no chance to have any impact.

But ultimately I feel there is dire lack of PVE /WWW interaction.
Take darkfall game, despite its many shortcomings, I feel it reflected more guild wars spirit than WWW could ever bring. The loss of gear on death provided spice, but most importantly, player activities contributed actively to the objectives.
Let me take an example: in guild wars 2, all castles, towers, and assets are pre-built. There is no full destruction, or any building from scratch.
Why gathering and crafting disciplines are not used fully in WWW to build castles/towers at predetermined spots, build siege engines, repair walls etc with actual resources?
The fact that gw2 decided to isolate WWW from the rest of PVE is the main mistake.
No incentive to go on pve world, and at the end WWW feels stale, not dynamic enough, and limits the kind of gameplay to only combat, where it could have been much more.
I don’t know if ArenaNet wished this, but it is clearly not satisfying.