Guild Wars 2

I’m sure this has been mulled over before but I couldn’t seem to find any posts on the subject.

I feel that WvW, being a PvP arena at heart, would be best served by being combined with the up scaling, weapon normalization, quick gear swapping, consumable restrictions, balancing etc. of sPvP. This would make it much easier for low level toons to jump into the action(be honest, up scaled toons are somewhat kitten) and allow experienced players to quickly swap out build specs and test them without having to acquire all the equipment via PvE. It would also prevent the non-sense of PvE consumables giving players access to unbalanced statistical/game mechanic advantages.

I don’t know how difficult this would be from a technical standpoint and I don’t know much about the pros/cons of the matter since I’m sure it’s been discussed before, but from my perspective it feels like a bit of a no brainer that it should be the case.

I know how you feel :/

You don’t have to PVE to get gear for WvW.

Not all stat combinations, sigils, and runes are available in sPvP. Many WvW builds use a mix of different stats.

Consumables don’t make things unbalanced considering everyone can use them.

IMHO, this will never happen but I could list 100 different reasons why it would be a terrible idea.

I’ll pass, I already don’t like sPvP’s cramped maps and having to deal with it’s cramped stats in WvWvW would make me leave quick, fast and in a hurry.

Terrible idea.

I like the sentiment of the idea… anyone who claims that food buffs don’t cause imbalance clearly have not fought a fully buffed warrior as a mesmer… but too many people rely on food to play wvw and it would cause an outcry from all the less skilled people.

I dont mind food buffs I would like the ability to swap gear out without having to have an inventory full of it

despite you can change your build/gear in PvP for free but like it or not, WvW has more build diversity way more than PvP.

in PvP “Play the meta or go home”.

IF there wasn’t so much power creep we wouldn’t have people suggesting this.

In principle, I agree.

The freedom of playing what you want in WvW is extremely limited, should you want to even begin to approach optimal.

As a level 80 zone, the best statistical gear is ascended, and it’s better by a decent margin, not only because the ~3% additional damage reduction and ~6% total damage boost, but also because of the insidious nature of WvW infusions (<3 laurel grind… oh wait, I kittening hate grind, nevermind), giving an additional boost that’s especially useful for roamers what will be engaging camps and maybe towers in small groups. Obviously, someone is now going to retort that ascended gear isn’t noticeable or something, but it most certainly is at a high enough level of play. (Also obviously, it’s a very minimal thing compared to exotics in non-80 zones because of how the downscale mechanic works… but WvW is an 80 zone)

Essentially, with the way gear works, grind is thoroughly rewarded, and you cannot play additional specs without at least the grind to get another (minimum) exotic set of gear. To efficiently (time-wise) gear, you need to play PvE or even better yet buy gems and convert them to gold. If you want to be optimal, you need to also obtain a lot of dragonite ore. The best way to obtain this quickly and reliably is not to play WvW. EotM is better. Better yet, is scheduling your play around a timer and riding the PvE world boss train, with temples fit into the bigger gaps. And it’s quite grindy. Because ANET doesn’t make grindy games, since grind isn’t fun. Or something.

Then you have the upscale mechanic. If you really want to play a different character, you really do need to reach level 80, and it’s so awful to play real WvW as an uplevel that you’re better off doing EotM (PvE) or actual PvE. For 80 levels. Or burning some gold on crafting (which you’re getting from gems->gold, or PvE, because you don’t make gold in WvW), or burning tomes of knowledge if you play sPvP.

Then, you have food, which requires more gold to burn. If you’re using lemongrass poultry soup, you’re probably not earning the gold from WvW to keep permanent uptime. Which means you’re gems->golding some more, or you’re playing PvE.

And of course, with the trait update, you’ve got trait hunting, or amassing an obscene amount of skill points and a decent amount of gold. How much trait hunting is done in WvW? 4 traits? 7 if you count EotM? 8 if you count a jumping puzzle? Since you can’t earn decent gold from playing WvW, we’re back to buying gems or playing PvE.

Basically, you’ve just got a massive grind barrier to playing a different spec, if you want to play that spec even close to optimally, and an even larger grind barrier if you want to play a different class as well. As the game has progressed, these grind barriers have increased. WvW rewards have remained relatively fixed, but gold has inflated considerably. Not only that, but there are things you can’t buy with gold. WvW infusions are huge, and very grindy (terribly designed, mind you, but only ANET could do something about that…), and ascended gear is pretty big (and you need it for infusions) and also very grindy. And then there’s the trait grind. How I pity new players.

ANET could fix this all rather easily. They could add stat, rune, and infusion swapping to all ascended quality gear, if not to exotic gear as well. This is something that should have been included with the gear anyway, as it’s a simple and good QoL feature for players. They could remove the NPC bonus from WvW infusions. They could unlock all traits when participating in WvW. Food is a difficult beast to tackle; I’d like to see it removed from WvW, but that’s probably not viable from a QQ standpoint, so maybe just look at the good WvW foods that are worthless in general PvE (lemongrass poultry soup, I choose you!) and change the recipe for them and/or allow their components to be easily obtained via WvWing, OR they could fix WvW rewards so it’s roughly on par with PvE DE and champ and world boss trains.

I think sPvP needs a new mode for people who like large scale PvP gameplay, but don’t like Zerg vs. Zerg or PvDoor.

You know what? Let’s call it GvG (not the gvg we have informally in GW2, but something a bit closer to GW1 GvG.)

- Have a largish map. Maybe half or 1/3rd the size of a WvW map.
- The map is symmetrical, there are two sides, each with a keep and some other objectives.
- Each guild participates on a Guild Ladder. Team size is 20? (15? 10?)
- Characters are similar to sPvP, instantly max level with gear of your choice. No food, limited items etc.
- Rather than siege blueprints, instead there are preset spots on the map that you can build siege engines. You just need to bring enough supply to the siege point to build it.
- Victory is achieved when the enemy’s Guild Lord is killed, or having a higher score when the time expires. Match time is 30mins? 1 hour?

So yeah, it’s a sPvP game mode with large teams, and siege/supply gameplay rather than capture points. It has a matchmaking ladder based on Guilds rather than players.

Personally, I feel like this should have been the main PvP game mode of GW2 to begin with.

I like the idea behind this. Personally, I’d like to see it where up scales have essentially a “pvp build option” available to them until they hit 80. After that, they have to get gear for themselves. Then of course there would need to be some restrictions that would make you want to reach 80. Perhaps stopping WxP or perhaps decreasing it or something along these lines.

Just thinking out loud I guess.

please no it brings a fun time to test out your hand crafted build with more options. PvP takes away a ton of your own customization.

Although I have 2, almost 3, complete ascended armour sets and several ascended weapons for my main I’d still love to see this happen.

It is the power creep introduced by ascended gear, food, Bloodlust, Applied Fortitude and Strength and sigil stacking that completely broke combat. Giving players access to builds that can burst an opponent down from 100% to 0% health in one short burst is just horrible game design. This is true for both condition and power based builds. Damage on certain specs is at such a ridiculously high level that killing an opponent with it can’t be considered skilful play anymore.

Now before I get the usual “WvW isn’t supposed to be balanced” reply, please consider that no gaming studio right in it’s mind would market it’s game for being completely broken. WvW like all game modes needs at least a nuance of balance.

Thanks for the feedback folks. I will answer a few key points here.

Crius.5487:

You don’t have to PVE to get gear for WvW.

Not all stat combinations, sigils, and runes are available in sPvP. Many WvW builds use a mix of different stats.

Yes, certain rune sets and sigils wouldn’t be available unless Arenanet decided to vet them and introduce them into sPvP. For instance, Torment focused builds would be sub-par without runes of tormenting/sigil of torment. Players who enjoy mixing/matching various pieces of gear to get a specific stat balance simply wouldn’t have that luxury.

It’s true that the potential for build diversity would suffer as a result of removing this capability. However, having immediate access to nearly all available gear would also mean players could swap builds as needed and, while that’s a quality of life upgrade in it’s own right, it also means players wouldn’t have to wait to acquire anything from PvE before they test out a new idea—thus potentially improving build diversity. Simply saying “You don’t have to PvE to get gear for WvW” doesn’t make it the case.

Crius.5487:

Consumables don’t make things unbalanced considering everyone can use them.

Everyone “technically” has access to them, but like PvE gear(particularly ascended gear), not everyone “practically” has access to them. I believe one of Arenanet’s old development philosophies was that time spent playing a game should not equate to ability in game. There are players running around in WvW decked out with a full set of ascended gear and a seemingly infinite supply of the highest tier consumables(spendy stuff!). It’s far from practical for a player like myself to expect to rival that without a lot of cunning. Think about the casuals who don’t have to time to grind for all the extra advantages.

I would go further to say that I find it hard to believe that things like +40% condition duration or passive life steal on crit are appropriate for a PvP setting.

Juba.8406:

in PvP “Play the meta or go home”.

That’s only true for sPvP as much as it is anywhere else in the game. I spend probably 75% of my time in sPvP and I rarely run meta specs unless I do well with them. It’s about what works, not what you want to run, but I digress.

Elmo Benchwarmer.3025:

It is the power creep introduced by ascended gear, food, Bloodlust, Applied Fortitude and Strength and sigil stacking that completely broke combat.

I can’t help but think of the Precision stat when it comes to power creep because it’s a finite stat while other offensive stats continually scale up. Power creep is such in PvE/WvW that you can reach a respectable quote in Precision(let’s say ~50%) and completely ignore it, where as in sPvP it is weighed against and balanced with all other stats to make it (mostly) equally as valuable.

ITT: people who depend on gear and consumable advantages to to win

sPvP does need more gear customization, and ultimately this is where I hope the conversation goes.

I can understand the idea of “use the PvP character config in WvW”; I thought that was the direction they were toying with in WXP and similar mechanics.

But there are other (and hopefully easier) changes that could be done to change up how WvW works, while also giving various carrots to spread out.

- Remove Badges of Honor from all chests and NPCs. These are instead earned from player kills only (1 per recorded kill). AP chests are fine, but progression of badges here should be slightly smaller at the lower level chests.
- Same with Karma in WvW, but add increased bonuses for being in Silver and Bronze leagues. Add Karma rewards from increasing various WvW Achievement tiers.
- Lower droprate from NPCs, increase it from enemy player kills (again, increased more at Silver and Bronze).
- Remove the Bloodlust mechanic from Gold League.
- Change the NA Leagues from 6/9/9 to 9/9/6. Bronze servers (while not in Tourney) are placed in a rotating matchup, separate from Glicko, but scores for it are still calculated based on how each match went. This allows a low-tier server the ability to (re)build into Silver, either due to recovering from a blowout or just trying to push out of Bronze. Bronze rewards in Tournaments may need to be re-balanced in this format (though this could become self-correcting, if they push into Silver in the process).
- A more controversial suggestion: Winner of Bronze league is given two weeks guaranteed in the bottom of Silver (give them a little push to see if it sticks). Same for the Silver winner to Gold.

Edit – I know some of these can be seen as gamable, but at least its being offloaded to another player instead of an AI. Perhaps a ‘best case’ would be to apply the first three just to EotM (encouraging PvP here), and the rest can apply to normal WvW.