Guild Wars 2

me have a warrior, and uses balanced stance for stability with the balanced stance trait and berserker stability trait.
Stability is stronger and better. enemies cant remove it that easily now since it renews. i like it. my chances of getting knock down has been decreased.. more stability stacks has been added since it renews!!!

(old stability boon)1 use of old balanced stance skill gives me 5 stacks of stability in 10 seconds

(new stability boon) 1 use of new balanced stance skill gives me a repeated renewal of 2 stacks every 3s for 10 seconds. that is like 8 stacks of stability in 10 seconds… which made it stronger!

if i am the stability remover person which is when i play my necromancer… i would just rather remove all his boons including stability if it renews remove it again(if i have another boon remove skill ready) to give him more conditions from boon remove aswell

Stability was more overpowered before… I remember when stability cant be removed at all by any knockdowns/CC’s and doesnt even have any stacks… its just 1 stack and 10 seconds you wont get “crowd controlled” unless its is stripped off by a necro or mesmer or any class that has boon strip

its better now and more balanced way. me likes

McKenna Berdrow.2759:

We changed stability so that it can only be removed every 0.75 seconds and added an effect that plays when it is removed.

Add that the target cap of 10 on nearly all stab-stripping ground-target AoEs has indirectly strengthened Stability so that it is now stronger than its original state as a non-stacking duration based boon.

That target cap is too much in favor of Stability in live-game group play where Stability can easily be taken to 25 stacks and reapplied frequently.

People who love for their own melee to be invulnerable to hard CC are going to love that fact.

People who want their hard CC controls to have a chance at stopping a heavily booned opponent may not even realize why it isn’t happening now, and are generally powerless to answer this with a game mechanical reply. There is no rock-paper-scissors in how this Stability (and a lot of things like it) is working now.

PvP should keep the control AoE targeting with target capping.

WvW should go back to uncapped.

No control skill in WvW should ever strip more than 1 stack of Stability in a single “proc” instance. Especially when the strip is coming from range above 300 units. However, the AoEs do not need to be target capped, and repeatedly crossing the “proc” area should probably repeatedly hit.

I think the stability change were really good, 0.75 seems indeed to be a sweet spot. This really bring better dynamics to the large fights where CC was just too strong in the past. This change rewards coordination (to ensure the stability is kept by your team) without making stability overpowered. This is really the best compromise between the old (1 stack only = immunity) and the less old (1 stack per CC) version.

I also think it is great in PvP, even if the effects are probably less obvious.

The stability change was good. The target capping of walls was overkill.

The fights are more interesting now, both stability change and cap of 10 were great.

The change to stability is welcome. It could probably be reduced to 0.66sec per stack of stability, since right now it is a tad strong against hard cc, but the change has allowed for more intense melee brawls rather than two groups having a starring contest.

I’d also buff cleanses next to counter the increase of conditions since HoT, since cleanse skills weren’t really looked at in any balance patch except, if I recall correctly, Smite Condition on guardian being buffed to 2 condi removal instead of 1.

Not sure if I’m wrong but, for some reason there are still issues with stability. A few days ago I ran around in fire keep and used dolyak signet to get 10 stacks of stability that a mesmer was able to strip with just one attack.

The changes were great, in my opinion. The added stability makes melee so much better, when it was quite discouraged before with the whole “Pirate Ship meta” That was just stale. Been having much better fights, and I think 10 is a good max. Good work, imo.

Gunner Morton.8340:

Not sure if I’m wrong but, for some reason there are still issues with stability. A few days ago I ran around in fire keep and used dolyak signet to get 10 stacks of stability that a mesmer was able to strip with just one attack.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m-Opr-zbnzQ#t=45s

Could very well be a bug. I can see it happening at 0:49, 10 stack appearing and then all gone. Have you report it as the possible bug?

And btw, I am on that video

FogLeg.9354:

Gunner Morton.8340:

Not sure if I’m wrong but, for some reason there are still issues with stability. A few days ago I ran around in fire keep and used dolyak signet to get 10 stacks of stability that a mesmer was able to strip with just one attack.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m-Opr-zbnzQ#t=45s

Could very well be a bug. I can see it happening at 0:49, 10 stack appearing and then all gone. Have you report it as the possible bug?

And btw, I am on that video

Not sure how or where to report a bug like this. The ingame reporting tool isn’t sophisticated enough to link to the video. I’m hoping devs see this post instead.

Gunner Morton.8340:

Not sure if I’m wrong but, for some reason there are still issues with stability. A few days ago I ran around in fire keep and used dolyak signet to get 10 stacks of stability that a mesmer was able to strip with just one attack.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m-Opr-zbnzQ#t=45s

You are wrong. You got hit by Mind Stab (http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Mind_Stab). Skill description: “Thrust your greatsword into the ground, damaging foes and removing 1 boon.”

First of all Stability changes were really great.
But I can guess that the changes you guys did depending on old Dolyak Signet & realize that Balance stance has 5 stack only with 8 sec duration so you guys reworked it.

so here is the thing, as the pirate ship meta is gone , it should not fully be out of the picture.
this cause by

1. stability removed at 0.75sec interval – ok 0.75sec is a bit over kill it’s almost same as old stability , no matter how many cc enemy use to remove 10 stack stability we have to wait full 8 sec (full duration of stability)
So I think if you reduce the interval at 0.5sec or 0.4sec would be a sweet spot , reason behind it is many CCs should be able to remove all stability before the full time expire,
but chain ccc can not just stun-lock you forever like before.

2. Cap on big aoe CCs (static , ward , unstead ground etc)- while this is a good idea to spot the pirateship meta, it doesn’t work with the new stability changes.
Stability changes were made in the first place to stop the melee train from pushing through CCs.
Now with this cap melee train can push like before so the changes you guys made before became null.

So I would say reduce the Stability remove interval a bit & probably keep the CC cap would be fine.

(sorry about the next part)
One more thing : – while you guys worked on Balanced Stance & Dolyak Signet.
you guys forgot about Armor of Earth (Elementalist) which has 10 stack of stability with 6 sec duration , in this case nobody can remove that 10 stack of stability within 6 sec except corrupt/strip.
Besides for a skill that has a 75sec cooldown it’s a bit weak just to have 10 stack stability once for 6 sec is a bit weak.
So maybe rework that skill as well , thank you..
( again sorry about the Elementalist part in this thread)

It’s a good change. Now at least stability has a good impact in fights compared to before, making melee trains stronger. Combined with the 10 player cc cap, one could argue it’s even a tad bit too strong now. I’d suggest playing with the numbers for a bit to try and find the sweet spot, perhaps increase the cc cap to 15 or 20 and see how that goes.

I’d also suggest looking into boon stripping, make it less random. Having your stability being instantly removed after applying it is awful RNG, I don’t think that’s a good thing in what’s supposed to be a competitive environment. You could keep the random stripping for every boon except stability, which should be last in line. With the amount of boon spam in the game right now, it would obviously make the current iteration of stability way overpowered. Such a change would require a lot of balancing across the board (increasing CD on stability sources, lower stacks/duration,…) , but I think it would be for the best.

dR Nobody.8457:

Gunner Morton.8340:

Not sure if I’m wrong but, for some reason there are still issues with stability. A few days ago I ran around in fire keep and used dolyak signet to get 10 stacks of stability that a mesmer was able to strip with just one attack.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m-Opr-zbnzQ#t=45s

You are wrong. You got hit by Mind Stab (http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Mind_Stab). Skill description: “Thrust your greatsword into the ground, damaging foes and removing 1 boon.”

Hmm, so this means that if a pug group runs 2-3 mesmers the stability changes are basically useless? Seeing as it has a five (forum censors the number, wtf) target cap this could strip stab away from all warriors on the frontline instantly.

Gunner Morton.8340:

Not sure if I’m wrong but, for some reason there are still issues with stability. A few days ago I ran around in fire keep and used dolyak signet to get 10 stacks of stability that a mesmer was able to strip with just one attack.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m-Opr-zbnzQ#t=45s

Mind Stab removes a boon on hit. (edit: ninja’d for slow reply)

@OP:
The stability buff is excellent. It has made fights significantly more enjoyable.
edit: After reading some of the other posts here, I’d just like to emphasize that I think the 0.75s icd (resulting in a minimum stab uptime from “Stand your ground!”x2 of ~30%) is completely reasonable.

I’m not too keen on the new limit on hard CC. It allows large blobs to be very disorganized with no real drop in performance. You can be extremely lax with your group compositions as long as you have enough players. From the perspective of a group that fights outnumbered, that gets very annoying.
I don’t mind hard CC being made negligible in group fights (in fact I quite enjoy the way it indirectly forces aggressive play), but it bothers me that it’s now specifically tailored to favor the larger group, which already has superiority in damage output, damage mitigation and soft CC.

As some people stated already.

The change of max target cap for some CC-Skills together with the buff of Stability is too much.
The next thing is, that in my opinion that ICD is too high. I’d set it to 0.5s or even 0.25s. You should lose 1 stack of Stability for each CC you walk into and not just walk through several CC’s with just losing 1 stack.

It’s decent, but as a front line druid, I’m still wanting more from my own skills, the cooldowns are just too freaking long and I have to rely on many guards to keep me standing.
Other than that, fights have been less pirate-shipy which is good.

I know this isn’t the place to rant about this but since it – imo – has an even bigger impact in the current fights than the stability changes could you guys please look at all the damage reduction stacking?

It’s making fights extremely boring with two groups having near or even 100% damage reduction constantly. Is there anything being done about that?

Gunner Morton.8340:

dR Nobody.8457:

Gunner Morton.8340:

Not sure if I’m wrong but, for some reason there are still issues with stability. A few days ago I ran around in fire keep and used dolyak signet to get 10 stacks of stability that a mesmer was able to strip with just one attack.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m-Opr-zbnzQ#t=45s

You are wrong. You got hit by Mind Stab (http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Mind_Stab). Skill description: “Thrust your greatsword into the ground, damaging foes and removing 1 boon.”

Hmm, so this means that if a pug group runs 2-3 mesmers the stability changes are basically useless? Seeing as it has a five (forum censors the number, wtf) target cap this could strip stab away from all warriors on the frontline instantly.

In general yes, but only if u don´t have any other buffs than stability, which is like never the case.

Perhaps the Boon stripping or corrupting skills should only remove one stack of Stability per 0.75 sec, same way the control skills do.

FogLeg.9354:

Perhaps the Boon stripping or corrupting skills should only remove one stack of Stability per 0.75 sec, same way the control skills do.

That is without doubt a really, really terrible idea. The boon stripping/corrupting skills would be useless then, since u do have up like 8-10 different boons in your group.

dR Nobody.8457:

FogLeg.9354:

Perhaps the Boon stripping or corrupting skills should only remove one stack of Stability per 0.75 sec, same way the control skills do.

That is without doubt a really, really terrible idea. The boon stripping/corrupting skills would be useless then, since u do have up like 8-10 different boons in your group.

Perhaps his idea should be limited to stab only so if it tries to strip stab away it should only strip a few stacks instead of all.

Gunner Morton.8340:

dR Nobody.8457:

FogLeg.9354:

Perhaps the Boon stripping or corrupting skills should only remove one stack of Stability per 0.75 sec, same way the control skills do.

That is without doubt a really, really terrible idea. The boon stripping/corrupting skills would be useless then, since u do have up like 8-10 different boons in your group.

Perhaps his idea should be limited to stab only so if it tries to strip stab away it should only strip a few stacks instead of all.

So there shouldn´t be any way to remove stab/punish bad players?

I don’t know really, not bad. Good effort. A+ for that. Bottom line though is that buffs/boons are handed out like skittles and it seems to be a key indicator of who wins or loses.

Anyone play DaOC? Remember all of the buff bots we all had parked at the various towers / spawns? Yeah, I do too. Always had to make sure someone in the party could park and rebuff before leaving again for the next roam around EMAIN. It came down to those who did vs those who didn’t and made a difference. Especially with small groups. This is, of course, pre ToA…

Anyway my point is that to me it seems combat is now secondary and food, utility buffs are primary. When in reality all we should be doing is dodging and fistacuffs.

Anet I’d like you to disregard everyones opinion about said stability changes. That’s what I’d like to say, of course this isn’t realistic. Neither is people giving feedback without looking at the greater scope of it all.

Even though stability has stacks now as opposed to the non-stacking-stability we once had, with the recent change to only remove a stack with a cool down of 0.75 seconds combined with all the boon duration that is currently in the game, stability is at its strongest right now. For example, with a combination of various sources of boon duration – i.e. Durability Runes (20%), Facet of Nature (50%), Concentration stats (x%) and Sigil of Concentration (33%) – you can stack well over 100% of boon duration (I’m not sure if it is intended that we are able to stack over 100%). This mechanic enables us to run more than double of the duration of Stand your Ground (=6 sec duration base, 24 seconds cooldown with current meta build due to Pure of Voice), which means theoretically a normal melee party with 2 Guardians can have a 100% uptime (2x >12 seconds) of stability by just rotating Stand your Ground. Since we cannot remove these stacks with an organized ‘CC-bomb’ anymore due to the recent changes, the only counter to this is random boon conversion, which is not very strong due to it being random. On top of that target limits were introduced to hard CC that was previously uncapped, for example Static or Line of Warding/Unsteady Ground. It’s clear all of these changes were meant to make stability harder to strip, but due to it’s only hard counter being random (!) boon conversion and combined with the current abundance of boon duration, which you don’t even have to sacrifice a lot for to get, stability is just too strong.

I’d like to shortly expand on the new CC target limits. I believe there was a consensus in the community the (organized) smaller groups could do little versus bigger (unorganized) groups, with this change on top of the stability change said smaller groups are even weaker against bigger groups, I honestly don’t know what to say about that; it’s disappointing. In my opinion a strong mechanic versus bigger groups was coordinated CC, which, as discussed in the last paragraph, is useless right now. Another mechanic was well-timed CC, which due to stability being unforgiving because of the 100% uptime (i.e. you are less likely to kitten up a party’s rotation with an early-ish Static, etc..). Lastly, well-placed CC (i.e. a Static on the enemy ranged as their melee pushes, so that their damage is delayed) is weaker right now, due to a silly target limit. In short, all the changes made bigger (unorganized) groups stronger versus smaller (organized) groups, which is in total conflict with what I believe the community wanted.

When I read the leaked patch notes, I was almost 100% sure they were fake, simply because of the mentioned stability changes, which seemed preposterous. Thank you for taking your time to read this.

Stability in its current state is an issue. The issue spans from a few things, so lets address them one by one;

The first issue with Stability, which applies to boons in general in WvW (and the rest of the game) is there is currently way too many. This is an issue from a balance stand point, but the current direction of balance seems to be to up the number of boon strips. I don’t think this is a good direction to take WvW in, as with increased/more frequent boon strips we see stale fights where people refuse to push for fear of stability being corrupted/removed – causing them to effectively instantly die. An ideal fix for this would be to tone down the number of boons applied from skills and passively – causing there to be no need to further increase boon strips; however since that is a far fetched hope a ‘quick fix’ for WvW would be to alter the boon strip mechanics in WvW, to where instead of boon stripping all of a person’s stability stacks it strips 3. This means that even with the current boon strip creep we seem to be seeing people will not be afraid to push – as they do not have to worry about their stability being instantly gone (and them dying).

A secondary issue, which almost directly ties into the first, is the random nature of boon strips. The random nature of boon strips is a change I feel neutral about everywhere except WvW, where it causes issues like this https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4wEzocIAiqo . The feeling of popping a skill to have it instantly negated with you literally having 0 counter play is not a good one, especially when that skill is essential to being able to push in WvW – the crux of the overarching meta. We have seen the consequences of not being able to push before, with the ‘pirateship meta’ buzzword that people use. This was one of the most boring times to play WvW, with neither side wanting to push for fear of instant death. The fix for this point could take many forms; you could re-implement a partial boon strip order, with stability late in the priority list, you could implement a full blown boon strip order which is uniform for every boon strip skill (something that has never been in the game), you could give stability a ‘grace period’ where it can’t be corrupted (~1.5-2 seconds would feel good). You could make these changes affect all the gamemodes, or just WvW.

Personally I think stability as a mechanic needs an overhaul. The direction I would take with this is a ‘breakbar’ style approach. Each stability granting/stun breaking skill increases your breakbar by a % – up to a cap of 100% and each hard CC takes from the breakbar (with a cooldown on how quickly CC can affect it, much like the current 0.75 ICD). When your breakbar hit 0 no explicit stun or daze effect happens – but instead you become vulnerable to hard CC (i.e a knockback or pull would now work on you). The breakbar would have a steady degeneration to it, and all soft CC (chill, cripple, immob etc) would still function as normal (with the exception of fear, which would affect the breakbar and could only be applied once the bar is broken). I would show a small blue bar under the health bars on the party and squad UI to show the breakbars to the rest of the group. This gives you a visual representation of if you can make a push or not, it allows other group members to see if they should use ‘breakbar filling skills’ on you and it allows the enemy an easier to read visual prompt on if they should CC you. This removes the whole “boon strip” issue from Stability entirely, as it moves Stability of the boon bar and into a game mechanic.

The core stability in large scale is Stand Your Ground. With the current 0.75s immunity in most situations you will get the full 5s immunity from it. Similarily you might expect atleast 3s from IC. On paper these numbers don’t seem much but they are getting close to the old Stab which really created a distastleful ease in rushing through any amount of opposition with a huge melee ball. That situation has to be avoided.

0.75s is definetly on the upper boundary, so perhaps 0.5s remove immunity would work better to keep CC dangerous and make people watch their stab stacks.

A single stack of stab is not much in large scale wvw because if there is CC, there is usually bunch of it in the same place (bad play now), so that single stack will not help you get through it (remove immunity is not cc immunity). But as a consiquense of the remove immunity a 2 stack Stability is a lot better. That allows you to dodge/run through stacked CC with the single stab left on your boons.
This should be kept in mind if remove immunity is lowered and AoE stab skills on other classes than guardian are buffed/created. Be super careful with adding more though, because that will simply be extra on top of all the double guards, who will always and always be in the wvw meta.

So in spirit of, 1 stack of stab is nothing, 2 stacks is worth it.
Rock Solid: Stab*2 for 3s in 300 radius
Evasive Arcana: Earth dodge if evade, Stab*2 for 3s in 300 radius.
Throw Elixir B: Unblockable, Radius 360
Well of Power: Pulsing 1*Stab 1s
Ranger Idea #1 . . .
And noone else!

Would be too dangerous to give any AoE stab for warriors for various reasons. But as Shout (the “low” stab war) change I would make Shouts heal without traits and take inspiration for Vigorous Shouts from Ranger Spirit trait. With VS, On My Mark would also strip 1-2 boons, Shake it off would also aoe blind, Fear Me would also cripple, FGJ I don’t know but not stab! FGJ blast? Also all shouts would do 1s of area weakness so they can be skillfully timed against burst attacks (the weakness of a sustainy setup like shout war).

Would be great to hear some input how the amount of Stab is working out in practise, in the 15-25 numbers and in the blob numbers.

dR Nobody.8457:

FogLeg.9354:

Perhaps the Boon stripping or corrupting skills should only remove one stack of Stability per 0.75 sec, same way the control skills do.

That is without doubt a really, really terrible idea. The boon stripping/corrupting skills would be useless then, since u do have up like 8-10 different boons in your group.

How would they be useless?

If you have 8 boons and you remove/corrupt any other boon except Stability, it will work EXACTLY like atm. Only in small chance of 12% cases you would hit Stabilty but instead of removing all the stacks at once, you would still remove 1 stack. Lets say on average you manage to get 3 stacks of Stability, we are talking about 4-5% nerf to the remove/corrupt boon skills.

It would affect more if you have fewer boons so you have higher chance to hit Stability.

If you object the idea so much, I would also be fine with following system:

• as long you have other boons, any boon removal/corruption skill will target those first. They will remove Stability (still all stacks) only if the Stability is only boon you have

with the stability changes favoring the counter CC, please consider reverting the nerfs to DH Hunter’s Ward, Lines/Rings of Warding and Static Field.

I second Cruens.1640 post in that the current iteration of stability is way too strong.
The current 0.75 second cooldown combined with the abundance of boon duration in the game effectively means that the only way to strip someone’s stability is (random) boon corruption.

Combine this increased 0.75 second cooldown with the new hard CC (Line of Warding, Static Field, …) target limit and CC effectively becomes meaningless, especially in large fights.

In my opinion the previous iteration of stability was perfect and in balance with CC.
The only thing that needs to be addressed is random boon corruption (as mentioned by AllIsVain.6409, see: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4wEzocIAiqo)

McKenna Berdrow.2759:

A big thank you to everyone who posted on the Official Feedback Thread: WvW Reward Tracks. We will still be looking at that thread for any feedback on reward tracks, but now that everyone has had the weekend to play, and hopefully had some epic fights, the team wanted to ask everyone their thoughts on the stability changes.

We changed stability so that it can only be removed every 0.75 seconds and added an effect that plays when it is removed.

1. How do you feel about this stability change?
2. Is there something else you would like to see done to stability instead?

There are fewer questions on stability than reward tracks but we encourage everyone to discuss with each other their thoughts on stability in this thread.

Partial quote from a recent wvw thread started by Mike O’Brien…

https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/wuv/Your-top-5-priorities-for-WvW-Overhaul/page/10

“Condition and Control Effects

I would like to see immunity timers implemented on Condition and Control effects.

Condition and Control effects are manageable in core Tyria PvE. The higher difficulty mobs in HoT zones bring a lot more Condition use, and while manageable, still at times we are affected by Conditions a bit too much. In PvP (WvW and SPvP), though, players are continuously hit with these CC effects over and over and over… There are individual profession builds that can put out way too much CC on their own, now multiply that “way too much” by multiple players… The way the CC attacks and effects were designed were heavy handed, and it is overdone when you combine some big direct and burst damage numbers, along with unending Condition DoT and status effects. In addition to continuous movement impairing effects from CC, we are also forced into combat movement suppression as well… All of these put together really kill the fun of combat.

What I’m proposing below is to NOT give immunity to the direct/immediate damage component from weapons and skills that produce CC, I’m saying that the status effects need to be more manageable for players in this CC heavy game.

The below quote is about the immunity timers that City of Heroes implemented in pvp…

“Every time a character recovers from a Hold, Immobilize, Disorient, Sleep, or Fear status, that character becomes immune to all five of those effects from other players for 15 seconds. Every time a character suffers a Knockdown, Knockback, or Knockup effect, that character becomes immune to all three of those effects from other players for 10 seconds. These two timers are independent. It should be noted that Confuse effects, while technically mezzes, are on a separate 15-second timer than the other mezzes listed above.”

So let’s tailor the above quote for GW2… the basic gist is that a character goes on an immunity timer to all “hard” Control effects after the effect ends or the player uses a Stun Breaker. Moa must finally go into this “hard” Control category as well.

For “soft” Conditions there are two ways to do it…

First is an immunity timer on a 1 cleanse-1 condition basis.

Or

Immunity timers to groups of “soft” Conditions. Some grouping examples below…

Group 1… Blind, confusion, vulnerability and weakness.

Group 2… Chilled, crippled, immobilize and slow.

Group 3… Bleeding, burning, poison and torment.

And again, the direct/immediate damage components from weapons and skills that produce these Control and Condition effects remain unchanged.

Doing it these ways allows for multiple CC skills to still be used, but allows for some much needed breathing room. All “hard” CC is either put on a timer naturally when ended or when manually broken. Individual or group “soft” CC are put on a timer once actively cleansed by the player or another player, or when the effect ends. Visual indicators can be assigned to the UI so both player(s) and attacker(s) know what immunity timers are in effect.

There are other factors that we can look at too, but I believe this would be a good start."

Two things I would like to add..

*Please remove the global cool down timer from weapon skills as soon as our character stand up. Being knocked around is more than enough advantage to the opponent.

*I would like to see traits and runes that provide stability.

Feels like nothing has changed. There are just too much boon stripping in WvW.

The change to stability removal was great! Now frontline groups are actually able to push through chokepoints!

However, the target cap on walls and lines was a bad change. Just limiting the amount of stab that can be stripped in a small amount of time would have been enough. This nerf was too much, and also destroyed some advanced tactics like zerg veiling that really made things fun.

It’s strange to me that the question being focused on here is, essentially, about how to fix stability in WvW, rather than how to fix the problem of the entire game mode being so heavily reliant on one, and only one, boon.

In WvW the issue isn’t stability so much as the amount of individual skills piled on top of each other that can affect it, so maybe instead of tweaking stability further you could put some thought in to how to bring the skills that operate on it in to a healthy balance.

This was a really good start, but there should be significantly more discussion about how to balance CC and boon stripping in such a way that no one class, specialization, skill, boon, or number of people becomes mandatory to being competitive or successful in WvW.

That being said I don’t have any suggestions to offer as I’ve had next to no time to play lately, but a bunch of my Guild are logging in and enjoying the game again and that gives me great hope that you’re on the right track.

McKenna Berdrow.2759:

We changed stability so that it can only be removed every 0.75 seconds and added an effect that plays when it is removed.

1. How do you feel about this stability change?
2. Is there something else you would like to see done to stability instead?

There are fewer questions on stability than reward tracks but we encourage everyone to discuss with each other their thoughts on stability in this thread.

1. Very nice addition.
2. Yes, I would like the old boon conversion back, to further reduce randomness into stability removal.

guildabd.6529:

Feels like nothing has changed. There are just too much boon stripping in WvW.

You mean stab removal in blobs, but in terms of boons in an organized group?
There is too much boon stacking happening and little to counter that, in organized group fights.

My two cents: I don’t like the ability for large groups of people to ignore AOEs or CCs. I thought this quarterly update was amazing, but I passionately disagree with the wall and stability changes. It is my understanding that both from a game philosophy and game feel standpoint, zerging is a behavior that you would like to not reward in WvW. The changes introduced in the update make them much stronger.

Choke points (such as door entrances to keeps) are already not as powerful as they should be because everyone can come in all at once and my literal meteor strike can only hit so many targets. The entire point of AOEs is to punish groups of people clumped up, and should directly combat zergs. To me, this design choice reinforced the big, zergy play that we currently see. Of course in T1 (I’m on YB) there is a fair bit of small fighting, havok groups, etc. However, zerg vs zerg fights are still insanely common and more mindless than I would like.

All of that said: I’m not sure what the right change is. Giving spells unlimited targets is nightmarish from a technical stand point I’m sure. But right now the feeling is I can pop Stability and Defy Pain and there is very little the enemy can do to me. “But what about boon strip?” — No, my 20+ other allies that are around me will soak those up just nicely. In my opinion, it’s more of a numbers game now than it ever has been. The stability changes and wall changes are no small part of that.

the changes to stability and walls are great but now since stab in general is in a good spot again you see how broken the random boon stripping is.

you can take 10 equal good fl players that are avoiding all big boon rips like wells but cause there is much random boon strip around or you cannot dodge the first tick of the corruption well always or you get fokus/CB corrupted.

9 players are fine cause they randomly loose other boons but 1 player loose stab and get rekted. that feels wrong casue it had nothing to doo with good/bad gameplay he just got rekt by random boon strip.

jeah the old boon rip order with stab on the last spot was op but randomise such strong gameplay like boonstrip feels wrong cause there is no skillfull counterplay.

just roll back to the old boon rip order but put stab on another spot. maybe 2-3 boons and then stab so if a player play bad and get hit by to much boon rip he loose his stab but good players getting 1 single boon curroption not get randomly rekt.

a randomise mechanik never should make a real important difference in gameplay.

1
The only a couple of counters to Stab at the moment, first is waiting for them to mess up their rotations or for random boon strip from necros or mesmers to strip stab.

Problem with boon strip is most organised guilds are running a boonshare mesmer or an aura ele in the melee parties and they can stack every single boon anyway. So you have to try and randomly strip that stability which is being guarded by Aegis, resistance, regen, prot, swift, might, fury, vigor, quickness and retal. Soooo yeah good luck with that.

In the old meta (when stab used to just be duration stacking) there was no resistance so you could soft CC with chills and immobs to stop their melee. but because of resistance stacking if you wanted to do that you need to strip the stab. Absorbtion strips resistance on interrupt as a priority boon but you can’t strip when they have stab. So you have no choice but to rely on the random strip from a well bomb or from a mesmer shatter.

See the problem?

2
The AoE cap is nice in a guild fight means players can no longer be rewarded from throwing a random CC in a random place and somehow getting profit from it. CC now needs to be slightly more organised so nice job on that one

@McKenna Berdrow,

Instead of having only Boon-strip, why not have Boon Denial effects to really mix up the game’s metas.

New Skills I hope can be added:
Short Duration/Small Area of Effects but here they are:

Thief/Daredevil -Shadow Shroud: Target foe cannot have boons applied to them.
3-5 seconds.

Necromancer/Reaper – Well of the Profane: Foes in this well lose “X” Boons and cannot receive of further Boons.

I will leave this here

If we could recycle these it could mix up the metas entirely and coordinate spikes and coordination, make classes less played even more dangerous and give some new playstyles. Just convert the skill durations over to GW2, Change Wording on Enchantments to Boons

Stability stripping cooldown change: like it very much. Maybe 0.75s is too high, or maybe it feels even strong when combined with the target-cap change.

10-target cap for walls: HATE IT. Maybe I am biased because I play ele, but I now feel like wall-type skills aren’t very impactful for their very-long CD’s. Not only do they require players to run into them to apply CC (unlike a targeted aoe), but they are worthless after a few targets with stab in front just plow through. Before all the stab changes, these skills were great in that the targets with stab would plow through, and those without would get broken up. Walls didn’t lead to pirate shipping, but well-placed walls helped to spread out a group and made them vulnerable to a bomb. Groups would try to bait out long-CD walls, then stab up and bomb. Now, I feel like groups can just safely ignore them completely. This change also favors larger groups who have more bodies to plow in and ignore.

Verdict: Keep the stability CD change, get rid of the wall target cap.

McKenna on the WvW team now? Nice!

So stability feels a lot better. It might not be perfect but its on the right track. I did notice a few bugs though. Last night, I ran straight through a static field placed by an ele and didn’t get CC’d at all. I don’t know if I had resistance but I definitely didn’t have stability as that’s what I looked for on my boon bar. Another instance happened over the weekend where I was literally walking around with about 2-3 seconds of immob on me. The chains and debuff were there, I had stab, and was just walking around. My guess is that this was just a UI and possibly server lag issue.

I think a lot of people are still trying to get boon stealing/stripping prioritized but if we do that, I definitely think that the 10 cap on walls should be removed or considered to be removed.

The 0.75s immunity is a very good change. It stops the giant bombs of CC from shutting down melee entirely and allows for more than pirate ships.

I think stability granting skills are generally giving out too many stacks of stability now. “Stand Your Ground” is the most popular, and piles on essentially 4 seconds of total CC immunity, stacking on top of other sources of stability – it’s not quite what it was before all the changes, but it’s feeling pretty close with a couple Guardians in the party (and the changes to lines to only hit a handful of players instead of the entire enemy team). Other skills, like Dolyak Signet, are essentially total immunities now.

I’d look at chopping the excess stacks off a bunch of skills and going from there.

The stability changes are defenetly more pug friendly .
That doesen’t mean that they are actualy good.
In my oppinion it advantages the larger group who can overrun smaller groups without beeing punished.
On a guardian point of view – Longbow 5 rarely does more then 2 intrerupts
Line of warding rarely does more then 1-2 intrerupts . Players usualy run over Aoe CC without beeing punished consdiering that you can have over 15 seconds stability from 1 single gurdian .
I vote for change : remove on stack every 0.4 seconds so you can basicaly remove 5 stacks ( SYG ) in 2 seconds in the perfect situation . While currently you can remove 5 stacks in 4 seconds.

Lithril Ashwalker.6230:

@McKenna Berdrow,

Instead of having only Boon-strip, why not have Boon Denial effects to really mix up the game’s metas.

New Skills I hope can be added:
Short Duration/Small Area of Effects but here they are:

Thief/Daredevil -Shadow Shroud: Target foe cannot have boons applied to them.
3-5 seconds.

Necromancer/Reaper – Well of the Profane: Foes in this well lose “X” Boons and cannot receive of further Boons.

I will leave this here

If we could recycle these it could mix up the metas entirely and coordinate spikes and coordination, make classes less played even more dangerous and give some new playstyles. Just convert the skill durations over to GW2, Change Wording on Enchantments to Boons

We need less counter vs counter vs counter vs my 2 seconds of this vs your 2 seconds of that vs the other players 2 seconds of whatever…

More complexity layers are completely unnecessary, we need profession balancing separations between pvp and pve, and hard changes to certain combat rules and mechanics in pvp.

CC is way way way over done in this game and that’s what needs to change first.

I do not like the way that 2 stacks of stability can give you enough time to push every CC.

It is now impossible to stop the enemy zerg. Even the wall of the shield generator is useless.

A way to really have the ability to stop an enemy zerg at will (not with skills, too op, but maybe with shield generator) would be nice. They way it is now, they can simply get stunned and then move freely through every CC right into you.

Stability change is great. You could possibly up the 10 target limit of wall CCs to 15, but don’t remove it entirely.

I’d like to see some more boon strip put in place though to counter how incredibly easy it is right now to stack an enormous amount of boons. For some current skills:

Mind Stab: removes 2 boons if hit 3 or more targets
Null Field: final pulse removes 2 boons

Then add some boon removal (not steal or corrupt) to other skills. Add some boon strip to Warriors in particular.

This change helped, but its still not enough imo. On my warrior, I can operate against moderate sized zergs, but against queue blobs, there is just too much boon strip and boon corrupt. Instead of losing all my stab in 1 sec to CC, I lose it in 2 secs to boon strip. Stability needs to be reset to pre-nerf status.

Stability change is good.
What i dont like is adding 10 aoe cap on cc walls. It favors big zergs too much against small organized guild groups.

One of the purpose of changing stability was to remove “pirate ship meta”, which really in my opinion didnt remove it, because the dmg in WvW is still ridicolus. Sources of power creep:

1. June 2015 specialization patch, you have removed stats from traits and put them on gear. + Merged traits. You havent really balanced the toughness and vitality with the amount of dmg you added.

2. Expansion elite specs.

From mop article:

He admitted that “this alone is probably not enough to fix the whole ‘pirate ship’ meta that’s going on where players play very conservatively or passively where they use max range and two zergs would operate like pirate ships passing by and nuking across at one another,” but an additional change to CC fields complements the stack consumption nerf nicely to hopefully make WvW combat much more active in future since “now only the first 10 players affected will get CCed or will have a stability stack removed, and then the skill will fade away and disappear.”