Guild Wars 2

A cap on the portal seems like a pretty fair fix to me for the moment. it’s not really about tactics or coordination (i said not really, yes there are some involved but nowhere near as much as you’d like us to think) when all you do is invis 40-50 people so you can jump on people and get in free shots before they can even SEE you.
Just put a 20 man limit on it, see if that helps out or not. Until Anet can fix the issue on their end i dont see any other simple option. And if Anet can and does fix it then restore the portal to its original glory. done and done.

Alarox.4590:

Vena.8436:

No idea how to quote in this fine forum.

I will say one thing though, these arguments are somewhat absurd. Having to sweep an entire keep for one profession/class is beyond ludicrous

I stopped reading here because you’re wrong.

Vena.8436:

No idea how to quote in this fine forum.

I will say one thing though, these arguments are somewhat absurd. Having to sweep an entire keep for one profession/class is beyond ludicrous, the fact that it is one and only one profession should really make it apparent that there is something fundamentally wrong here. Do you have to scout the entire keep for a lone guardian? How bout a warrior? A thief or even five thieves? Some eles might be hiding in the back corner, better go check. Sweeping your keep to make sure small armies of people are not hiding, say for instance, on top of Garrison’s jumping puzzle or somewhere in the massive expanse of the inner sanctum of SM, is one thing, and failing to do so is a sign of poor foresight, but scanning an entire keep like SM or any version of the Bay’s for a single character? No. That’s beyond game breaking, especially when said class can stealth. Oh ya let me get out my stealth breaking… oh, right. And what if there’s a bunch of them? Heck, if this tactic is valid, every keep, upon being taken, should be filled with mesmers from every team just waiting each other out. What sort of pointless gameplay is this? There’s no longer even a siege at that point, just a cycle of who’s mesmer was the last to be found before an army of 50 showed up to wipe you.

Which bring us to the second point. Stop the mesmer before he drops the invisible army on top of you. How? When? One, he’s invisible. Two, damage doesn’t break his stealth. Three, in a big fight, if he comes running in out from the distance (beyond render range), he’s not going to render for anyone. So who’s going to stop him? My keen sense of clairvoyance that danger is approaching? I’m not spiderman, nor are most people.

The tactic (for moving on the battlefield, taking keeps with it is tomfoolery) I am fine with, abusing the fact that the tactic succeeds because your entire zerg of 30+ people is invisible for upwards of 30 seconds, is nonsense. It leads to degenerate play, people get angry because they died to literally nothing from all around them, and it’s simply down right discouraging.

There is no learn to play or plan here, its pure abuse of rendering to drop massive armies wherever you see fit in the middle of a big fight that no one would ever have a chance to react to because the game will simply not render them. Want to use that portal to sneak in five people to crush the altar in Hills? Good, that’s a sneaky trick and good luck living through the barrage of AoE at the tiny entrance. Loading in 30 people behind a line of siege that no one will see because it won’t render till everyone’s dead? No, that’s not tactics. That’s not being clever. That’s being degenerate.

This.

It’s not Guild Wars anymore, it’s Mesmer Wars. All the tactics and strategies are now about mesmers and their portals. How boring. And using this tactic isn’t even challenging. It’s easymode.

Alarox.4590:

I’m impressed. You’ve managed to make an entire wall of text with constant claims, without any reasoning.

Oh my…

Alarox.4590:

If teleporting into your group is an exploit due to rendering, then technically so is simply running at your group normally. After all, they both don’t render players. When we use Mesmer portals, we do it for positioning and surprise, not for rendering.

No, the situations you describe are quite different, for one it’s far slower and forty people running at you is far different than forty people appearing out of thin air behind you, especially when they are assisted by a class that has access to several blink-type skills that can effectively remove a large chunk of the hazard of moving through an open warzone. Moreover, moving one person is far easier than moving forty as some of them will end up being rendered by the game as you move, and a pack of people moving in unison is very much noticeable. (Also, you seem to misunderstand where the rendering issue arises. It is not simply the people; it is the massive spike server side of transporting that many people at once from point A to point B, and even in a light combat battle this will cause a temporary lag on model loading. The game will not render them immediately, whereas forty people running at you are not causing massive spikes and will come into view gradually.)

I cannot accept your claim be it true or not because, whatever reason you MIGHT do it for, does not change the grotesque advantage it coffers onto those using the ability. You could claim that everyone has access to it, and I’d call that degenerate as I have. If the number of people allowed to be ported is limited, the lag spike is limited and in general situations you will not have the same effect of wiping out everyone before they can even react that something like 20+ people can accomplish.

Alarox.4590:

Secondly, how hard is it to look for a Mesmer? Takes about 1 minute in a keep, 20 seconds in a tower. You have NO REASONING WHATSOEVER why it’s ridiculous to look for a Mesmer. You just continuously claim that it is ridiculous, and make fallacy after fallacy to support it (“you don’t look for a Guardian or Thief after you take a keep” how is that relevant?").

It is relevant because it shows how unbalanced the mechanic is, hence why I gave you a list of scenarios (small armies hidden in keeps) that require you not to focus on location ONE class in a game of EIGHT that can effectively render any and all sieges moot, but to find an army. These are two distinctly different things, and hiding an army is quite a trick to pull off. Hiding a character that can stealth is not… unless you’re army happens to be composed to thirty stealth thieves which is a curious problem in and of itself but requires a group coordination far higher than having a Mesmer hide in a corner and then porting an entire army across walls.

The whole point of it was, simply, to show that Mesmer create an unparalalled effect in this game that no other class does because of how important keeps, towers, and a castle, are in this game. If a Guardian could solo kill a Lord and his guards in under a minute and steal keeps that’d be a problem too because, again, you’d have to sweep the entire keep for ONE class. But, alas, I have not heard of these super Guardians. No team, after winning a keep, should be forced to sweep something the size of SM or a Bay for all of one Mesmer. For an army? Sure. For a single character? No. The logistics of finding the former are far different from finding the latter. And, again, the latter has skills designed for circumventing large distances quickly with blinks and warps. So not only do you have to find it, you have to chase it down before it’s stealth goes off cooldown and it disappears again.

Alarox.4590:

I think you misunderstand what War is. We didn’t send a letter to the Nazis asking them if it’s okay if we can invade the beaches of Normandy. We didn’t ask them if we can drop paratroopers behind their lines. We develop a tactic, you either lose or counter it.

Godwin and only three paragraphs in, that’s impressive.

Alarox.4590:

If you use Mesmer portals better than us, we won’t go raging on forums asking ArenaNet to break a skill because we’re too lazy to counter it. Instead, we’ll copy your tactic and improve it and learn to counter it.

Personally, I refuse to use a mechanic that I consider to be an abuse of a known limitation in the system.

We use Mesmer portals all the time.
Just as we also use a whole bunch of other class-specific things all the time.

We ALWAYS sweep everything we cap, we haven’t had any Mesmer portal trouble ever in any of the keeps we sweeped, and we weren’t jsut sweeping for mesmers, we were sweeping for anything we could find, there should be no enemies in our property.

Fix the exploit, but the portals aren’t a problem.

Alarox.4590:

If teleporting into your group is an exploit due to rendering, then technically so is simply running at your group normally. After all, they both don’t render players. When we use Mesmer portals, we do it for positioning and surprise, not for rendering.

These two things are not equivalent at all. Run into a big zerg and you’ll occasionally have pop-in problems for part of the zerg. Put that same zerg through a portal and you’ll have pop-in problems every time for the whole thing.

And you’re benefiting from rendering issues whether or not you’re using mesmer portals with that intention. Claiming that you’re doing it for “positioning and surprise” doesn’t change the fact that you’re not being rendered on my screen until well after I’m dead.

Vena.8436:

I cannot accept your claim…

I don’t accept yours, either. So there.

It seems a perfectly fine tactic to me.

Depending on how it’s done, it’s either an exploit or just being smart. Usually when a keep that you’re defending is being taken over, you leave a mesmer or 2 and/or a thief (in case the mesmer(s) are found), and wait until the enemy has lowered their guard. Then (especially if you’re trying to retake the bay) just place a portal at top, then jump over the wall into the water and put a portal there. That’s the smart way. If you’re mad about ppl using skills to bypass walls and gates, then get over it. It’s the same as using AoE on gates so ppl can’t heal the gate or to destroy stuff.

Using a skill exactly how it is designed in the game is not an exploit. Mesmer portals were designed to allow anyone to go through them. If they did not want groups to go through them, they would have made it so groups could not go through them. I am sorry that it killed you, do better next time.

Just so you know, the people coming through the portal cannot render you either, I’ve never played an MMO that a large group of players showing up at once does not render right away, that is no reason to stop killing each other.

A group of players going through a gate (Assuming you own the gate you actually go through a portal) at the same time has the EXACT same rendering effect. I assume you would consider that an exploit too? If coordination is an exploit, then we might as well all be unguided, ungrouped and fending by our selves.

Your QQ is no more than QQ. As stated earlier in this thread- I am sorry that you died in PVP.

Adapt.

MrPeanut.1543:

Using a skill exactly how it is designed in the game is not an exploit. Mesmer portals were designed to allow anyone to go through them. If they did not want groups to go through them, they would have made it so groups could not go through them.

This paragraph is just a collection of tautologies that could be used to justify nearly anything in any game. We’re saying that mesmer portals are having an unintended effect – unless you think turning the people going through them invisible is “exactly how it is designed.”

MrPeanut.1543:

A group of players going through a gate (Assuming you own the gate you actually go through a portal) at the same time has the EXACT same rendering effect. I assume you would consider that an exploit too? If coordination is an exploit, then we might as well all be unguided, ungrouped and fending by our selves.

This is simply untrue, many times I’ve seen large groups of players suddenly come through a gate, for example to kill a ram or a ram build site. It doesn’t create the same rendering issue.

lucky, that the game update fixed the current issues with the portal, oh wait.

but the patch is kitten great anyway:
Armor that is currently equipped can no longer be transmuted.
for god’s sake!

Vena.8436:

It is relevant because it shows how unbalanced the mechanic is, hence why I gave you a list of scenarios (small armies hidden in keeps) that require you not to focus on location ONE class in a game of EIGHT that can effectively render any and all sieges moot, but to find an army. These are two distinctly different things, and hiding an army is quite a trick to pull off. Hiding a character that can stealth is not… unless you’re army happens to be composed to thirty stealth thieves which is a curious problem in and of itself but requires a group coordination far higher than having a Mesmer hide in a corner and then porting an entire army across walls.

The whole point of it was, simply, to show that Mesmer create an unparalalled effect in this game that no other class does because of how important keeps, towers, and a castle, are in this game. If a Guardian could solo kill a Lord and his guards in under a minute and steal keeps that’d be a problem too because, again, you’d have to sweep the entire keep for ONE class. But, alas, I have not heard of these super Guardians. No team, after winning a keep, should be forced to sweep something the size of SM or a Bay for all of one Mesmer. For an army? Sure. For a single character? No. The logistics of finding the former are far different from finding the latter. And, again, the latter has skills designed for circumventing large distances quickly with blinks and warps. So not only do you have to find it, you have to chase it down before it’s stealth goes off cooldown and it disappears again.

I for one completely agree with you. If people in PvP were demanding that one specific class be present in every single group it would be considered obvious that they were unbalanced. The fact of the matter is, this one skill makes one mesmer have the battlefield worth of 10 or more people of other classes and that just isn’t even remotely balanced.

Besides, it’s not like capping the number of people who can go through a mesmer portal would disable the strategy completely. You can still port an army behind the walls 5 men at a time, but it would actually give defenders a chance to react to this strategy before the sudden swarm of 40 knocks down the undefended inner door in seconds. Having this sort of strategy require a little more coordination is a good thing IMO.

I would say either a limit in numbers of use or just plain and simple: The portal gets the same restrictions as every other shadowstep in the game. Or why can’t a thief use Infiltrator’s Arrow to get on a wall? It’s even called Infiltration.

OK.. Blackgate and FB why complain bout the portals i agree with the rendering situation but because you are getting out smarted and have not yet learned how to counter mesmer portals just shows me some poor coordination i don’t see anything OP or exploiting at all so get your facts straight and learn how to counter the mesmer portal…

If they fixed the rendering issue it would help a lot.

a cap on the number of people who can enter a portal sounds good simply because of rendering issues where 40 people just dont show up right away. if anet could fix their rendering issues then i wouldnt have a problem with ports but because its kitten near impossible to fight invisible enemies, i think a cap on ports is needed. good teams will still be able to just use multiple mesmers to summon more ppl through multiple ports.

You say Mesmer portals require no coordination, but nobody’s going to jump in a portal they dont know where it leads and who else is going in.
Saw a pug enemy group use a portal last night – most of them stayed at the original starting point, just kinda looking on, and those who went through did it so slowly that i managed to kill 1 and down another before they ran off back to the zerg. (omnom loot bag)

The only people who use portals effectively are guild groups, and they use everything effectively. Such as the Guardian skills.

Actually going through a portal does not make you “invisible” you get no buff for invisibility going through the portal.

The only way to really get rid of the rendering issue, would be to have every person in the map pre-rendered on your computer. Then when the mesmer drop happens, the chars are rendered.

The next set of posts would be “my game is so slow in pvp it’s broken”. Think about what you are really asking for, before you get what you don’t want.

Perdan.1045:

Actually going through a portal does not make you “invisible” you get no buff for invisibility going through the portal.

The only way to really get rid of the rendering issue, would be to have every person in the map pre-rendered on your computer. Then when the mesmer drop happens, the chars are rendered.

The next set of posts would be “my game is so slow in pvp it’s broken”. Think about what you are really asking for, before you get what you don’t want.

I know it doesn’t make you “invisible”. My point clearly was that GW2 has rendering issues where large groups of enemies don’t show up until its too late. Especially if all of them load into a portal at the same time. In some ways it is “invisibility” despite the fact that the game intended not for it to be that way.

Hence I said that capping mesmer portals to a limited amount that may go through it, whether its a small amount like 5 or a medium amount like 10 would go a long way towards helping one of the MANY issues that rendering poses to the gameplay of WvW. And if organized guilds can organize enough mesmers to bring in an entire zerg through portals then good for em. But for the most part, portals especially for organized guilds at the moment, simply take advantage of one of GW2’s weaknesses.

pot.6805:

Its funny seeing people defending this crap. Countering mesmer portal bombs? LOL What a good one. There is no hard counter for portal bombs that can be easily laid down by a single mesmer using invis.

Portal bomb is a legit tactic. The problem is the rendering issues, lag and invincible ball it crates when a lot of people all stack in the same area. All things I hope Anet will fix in time. But using a portal isn’t the problem really, it just makes it easier to stack up and “exploit” the rendering and healing/aoe mechanics.

Spryt.8012:

pot.6805:

Its funny seeing people defending this crap. Countering mesmer portal bombs? LOL What a good one. There is no hard counter for portal bombs that can be easily laid down by a single mesmer using invis.

Portal bomb is a legit tactic. The problem is the rendering issues, lag and invincible ball it crates when a lot of people all stack in the same area. All things I hope Anet will fix in time. But using a portal isn’t the problem really, it just makes it easier to stack up and “exploit” the rendering and healing/aoe mechanics.

That problem you mentioned kinda makes all the difference doesn’t it? Guilds are abusing that “problem” and calling it SUPER LEGIT STRATEGIC TACTICS.

CardboardBox.6087:

Hence I said that capping mesmer portals to a limited amount that may go through it, whether its a small amount like 5 or a medium amount like 10 would go a long way towards helping one of the MANY issues that rendering poses to the gameplay of WvW. And if organized guilds can organize enough mesmers to bring in an entire zerg through portals then good for em. But for the most part, portals especially for organized guilds at the moment, simply take advantage of one of GW2’s weaknesses.

Exactly this in case they would bring for each party a mesmer and portal them, than thats high level organization and tactics, now thanks to the culling/rendering problem is portal just a way to put big grp of ppl into unfair advantage versus another grp of ppl while all it needs is 1 stealth mesmer, since AoE skills affect only up to 5 ppl even if u notice such mesmer portal u cant do anything about the invisible mass getting out of there (it puts them into no real danger at all, thats the problem, if they would be visible could be another story..(but still 40 ppl vs max 5 ppl AoE dmg)

pot.6805:

That problem you mentioned kinda makes all the difference doesn’t it? Guilds are abusing that “problem” and calling it SUPER LEGIT STRATEGIC TACTICS.

I agree. But again Anet will hopefully fix it. Memser portal just makes it easier to abuse. Changing portal skill won’t fix the problem.

Rather they should leave portal as it is for now and focus on fixing other skills. Like the warrior shouts that actually cause more problems then portal. And maybe change max aoe targets to combat zergs.

Without some rather OP healing and the lack of aoe dps from defenders jumping a giant zerg into one spot is pretty risky tactic in my opinion.

Of course not being able to see people is a whole different matter. Something that really needs to be addressed ASAP.

IMO it’s impossible to hide in a keep. unless people are just stupid or something..

As a Charr Ranger, so not exactly stealthy or small, i’ve managed to hide for a bit and report back to the guild as to what was going on, but as soon as they got the keep properly (was a 3way fight with us in the middle and getting crushed from both sides before they turned on each other) and started sweeping (as anyone who just got something should do), i was spotted and cleared out.