Guild Wars 2

Let me start off by saying Im a massive fan of WvWvW, and spend a lot of my game time there. I love how it works and plays and really enjoy the experience. However I find the mesmer portals to be a little out of whack… Especially in 2 tier castles (As in castles and keeps with 2 doors, not 1. Not upgraded to 2 tiers)

All sides can use the mesmer portal advantage, but I find it takes so much out of the battle aspect of the game. EVERYTHING is now “Get a mesmer is before they repair the gate” or something to the same effect.

I think that mesmer portals are a great idea, I do, but I think they need to be limited. In WvW you can portal and entire army inside a fully repaired gate. In tune with how long stealth works in wvw due to lag issues, theyre very difficult to catch.

There-in lies the problem… They portal entire armies, by passing defences and making wall and gate conflicts obsolete.

My girlfriend plays a mesmer with me in WvWvW and I can see all the things that happen. She will portal 5 golems and a “zerg” right up to the inner gates of a keep on a frequent basis. And in turn the enemy will do this to us. There’s real challenge in that, and thats the approach everyone is going for now.

My idea is to not restrict the distance or usage of portals, but here are a couple of thoughts of how to adjust them for wvw:

1. Have a maximum body limit who can use the portals, say 10 people max can use a portal.

2. Inability to create portals in opponents territory.

What are the communities thoughts on this matter?

Mesmers have some major advantages in WvW, not only portals can be very annoying, also when you are defending a tower, keep or castle, a mesmer can just pull you off the wall which frustated me often. The pull also pisses me off in the JP’s where random invading mesmers just pull me off for fun :/

Riselight.3695:

Mesmers have some major advantages in WvW, not only portals can be very annoying, also when you are defending a tower, keep or castle, a mesmer can just pull you off the wall which frustated me often. The pull also pisses me off in the JP’s where random invading mesmers just pull me off for fun :/

The pull will only pull you down if you stand on top of the small ledge, in which case any pull ability will be able to hit you.

Kirito.8796:

I disagree. Its not hard to sweep a keep for mesmers, if your lazy you deserve a whole army being ported in.

Its not that easy, you can sweep for mesmers over and over and over but eventually they’ll succeed.

Imo portals are some of the biggest b.s. in WvW because they allow for portal bombing, the skill is largely an exploitation device and as such I think it needs to be nerfed massively.

a limit of 5 people per portal sounds reasonable and those people must be in the Mesmer’s party.

BabelFish.7234:

Kirito.8796:

I disagree. Its not hard to sweep a keep for mesmers, if your lazy you deserve a whole army being ported in.

Its not that easy, you can sweep for mesmers over and over and over but eventually they’ll succeed.

Imo portals are some of the biggest b.s. in WvW because they allow for portal bombing, the skill is largely an exploitation device and as such I think it needs to be nerfed massively.

a limit of 5 people per portal sounds reasonable and those people must be in the Mesmer’s party.

And Thiefs Steath aint getting advantage form culling issue ? Imo Thiefs stealth and some other skills needs to be nerfed more than mesmer portals. I have seen peeps crying about mesmer stealth which can last max 12sec and thiefs can be stealth many minutes.

for the thread started do u know what search option is ? there is already thread about mesmer portals. There is about 5 pages posts.

Mesmer portals are fine.

Arrow Carts.
Ballistas.
Awareness.

Those three things alone keep a Mesmer bomb from happening. It is so highly situational, the other side needs to be brain dead to pull it off.

Try it. Go run in and use all your stealth skills back to back to hide somewhere. See how long you last. See how you can laugh when they don’t see you behind a wall in the open. See how long it takes for your group to position so you can pull it all off.

Most the time, people aren’t pulling it off as wonderfully as others make up. They simply get their team closer or around a bottleneck.

And you can see it coming.

BabelFish.7234:

a limit of 5 people per portal sounds reasonable and those people must be in the Mesmer’s party.

How about limiting 100 blades to maximum of 3 hits on a single target and, oh, limit the summed up damage to, say, 1500?

It would kill any sword playing warrior just as your suggestion will kill the Mesmer for WvW UNLESS you agree to up all weapon damage or shatter damage so that burst will be en par with warriot or thief.

I’d agree to 10 people but requiring them to be in the same party is just saying: Eliminate the Mesmer class from GW2. If they annoy you so much start thinking up efficient counter strategies, please. Can’t beat them – nerf them is a rather pathetic approach to solve the problem.

Thanks to everyone for the feedback, and those I’ve spoken to not in the thread.

There’s a wide view of opinions going around about the portals. One of the most interesting points I’ve heard is that while all abilities that affect an area or group of people are limited to 5 targets, except the portals.

I’ve also heard that given the way a Mesmer is designed and generally played, portals are very much within the character and play style of the mesmer, so any changes would have to be pretty minimal. Their trickery is their key component in world vs world. They perform at their best when they can trick their way around things. They tend to have mediocre damage. I can attest to this personally as I was 1v1 against one earlier after a sweep of a keep, and went through 12+ clones and illusions and still managed to win. Not through any particular skill advantage, but through sheer stats. (I was playing a guardian).

The culling issue comes up an awful lot, too. Would fixing the culling issue mean that the stealth wearing off would be much more noticeable and help stop those pesky mesmers running in and hiding so well?

The last argument I heard that I found was compelling was that if portals are terribly changed, what utility does the Mesmer bring to wvw? What could they do of particular use to the team as a whole?

I’d like to take a moment to say that I do not think it is a particularly unfair advantage, portals are a very great and well implemented portion of the skill set. My frustration is I find that when they are used to completely bypass walls as this can take a lot of the fun out of the siege element of wvw, as it has become a standard way of taking high tier places instead of epic battles at one gate after the next. Ive heard the tactic ‘Breach the main gate and get some mesmers in to hide, go an attack another tower then portal into the keep for a surprise attack’ many times.
It’s no an unfair advantage, my world does it as much as our opposition does, but does it add or take from the value of the wvw experience? I don’t want to put across that any opinion is particularly right, it’s just one of many opinions, and I would love to hear more from people as to how they find the issue.