As a Ranger using mostly longbow with increased range I find this three, obstructed, out of range, invulnerability, happening way to often. And I’m not talking about obstructed behind obstacles, out of range far away from me, or invulnerability on skill use or with corresponding status effect.
Obstructed and out of range usually happen during heavy fighting, so with always present lag, skill delay, and player invisibility. That’s another example why the current main problems with WvW are server related not client/network related. If I see people running around throwing their skills, evading, finishing others and so on, while I can’t even start to autoattack, that means server is not responding to my input.
Obstucted and out of range also happen when people are right in front of me so I’m 100% sure they are within 1500 of maximum range, at least on my computer. Another thing is that server might not be recognizing my, or my enemy position properly thus placing me behind an obstacle or further away from my enemy.
Another funny thing with Obstructed and out of range happen when people start to run away from me, also during heavy fighting. I’ve seen situations like “hit->obstructed->out of range->hit->out of range->obstructed->hit” more times then I care to count. And that was on a flat ground so no possible faulty placing behind an obstacle could have taken place. There might have been Guardian skills placed somewhere which of course I didn’t see, but I don’t know anything about any class throwing “out of range” skills. That again might be attributed to a faulty position recognition on the other hand.
The third one, invulnerability, occurs when a person goes to a downed state. Before he hits the ground, he’s completly immune to any kind of damage. I understand that UI must change to present the player with new set of downed state skills. Unfortunatelly the delay is completly ruining the combat. If 20 people focus on one person, he shouldn’t even enter downed state because the moment he would have been presented with downed state skills all his remaining HP should already be gone. Waiting for the person to hit the ground to be able to start killing him is like asking him impatiently “can I? are you sure? are you ready now?”.
To summarize it all. Everything mentioned above causes the current ridiculous WvW state and strategy. One group attacking another must run into it, throw all AoE skills they have on the ground and start targetting whoever is first to pop up upon hitting TAB. Before the enemies start to appear on attacking group screens, half of them would be downed, few killed, and the rest running for their lives not knowing what hit them. The dead on the attacked side get all the information first because being dead causes the server to send all information out in an instant. They suddently see everything, enemies, allies, npc’s, effects, spells. Unfortunatelly being dead has the down side, you cannot do anything. Attackers see the battlefield last. They see how many people they killed, how many bags they dropped and what’s the current situation. So basically it doesn’t make any sense to do WvW now. You’re unable to avoid skills that you don’t see, you’re unable to outmanuver enemies that you don’t see, you may at best be quick and lucky to evade just in time and just in the right direction to survive and run away. The long lasting truth is more then obvious here – the mindless Zerg wins.
Seriously Anet, fix your game. And you better fix it fast. There’s also a warning here. Don’t you dare to release any content/cosmetic/pve related updates before you fix your engine. People seen that before, and since you became very quiet on the subject of the state your game is in and what is going to happen next with major WvW issues, it’s rather obvious that you have no idea how to fix it yet. It’s a bad sign so be sure that people know it and are ready to give your game back.