My thoughts on the April 19th patch for WvW.
Stability and crowd control changes:
ANet gets an A+ from me on that. I am not sure why things like Static field and rings/lines/fear wall, etc were not limited to how many times they can hit before, but I am glad they are limited now and I am glad that they changed stability in the way they did while retaining their “stability stacks” system.
Desert BL changes:
Well, it is an improvement for sure. But the earth things that pop up in your face around the earth keep are still there and still very annoying for roaming. The cripple and stealth there is also unacceptable for WvW. I do like how they made the map more open and created several routes to get to places now instead of just one path to get somewhere. It is certainly improvement, but it is still not “WvW ready” in my opinion. There are still a LOT of bad choke points and even several of these narrow passage-ways that they created with this patch just created more choke points. Removing the barracades is a welcomed change for me personally since I am a roamer primarily and it was like a maze before because of these. Removing some massive cliffs in areas was also a welcomed change and the hay bails are funny.
Auto Loot (only thing that matters in the new Provisioning line):
Best thing that ever happened to this game, hands down. My mouse button that I am constantly spamming for AOE loot thanks Anet for this one. I’ve broke this button on my last mouse (same model of mouse) because of picking up loot lol. I do wish I had an option to change my WvW rank points around though. It doesn’t matter for my main account that is rank 2720, but it does matter for my alt account that is only rank 160.
WvW Reward Tracks:
The new armor set is ugly (at least on the light armor male asura lol), I am not sure how great the rewards are just yet, but it is certainly a step in the right direction. The rewards that WvW has given have been little, the only way to get any nice things is generally to do PvE so if this brings additional income to WvW, it is going to be a very nice thing.
Squad changes:
This is also a welcomed change because we can finally reward our scouts for splitting off from the main group to check on our objectives.
World Linking:
I really wish there was more information on this, we’re kind of in the dark and not really knowing what to expect for WvW reset this Friday. I do really like the IDEA of this, and I hope it works out like I think it will in my mind, but I am not holding my breath since the details were pretty vague.
Over all pretty happy with the changes for WvW, which is honestly a shocker to me because generally when WvW is touched, it is messed up worse. Progress is great. I am looking forward to having the Alpine maps back so that roaming is more viable again. I think if they continued working on Desert BL and maybe 1 other WvW map, we could have a 3 map rotation where each server gets a different map. I just hope that our feedback is heard about whatever new maps come in to play instead of dealing with another disaster for WvW like the Desert BLs have been since October.
