Guild Wars 2

Introducing PPK to reward fight oriented players is fine and all. The problem is that there are hardly any such players left because large fights in WvW have been downright agonizing since the release of HoT.
Not too long ago, I made a post detailing how certain skills are causing massive issues in fights. It didn’t get a lot of feedback so I’m going to try again because against my better judgment, I actually care.

The current “balance” in WvW fights is massively (MASSIVELY!) skewed towards playing defensively. Back-pedal and counter bomb, and you’re golden. Being passive has never been more rewarding. This is boring. Let me state that again: This is absolutely horribly boring. Players need to be rewarded for being aggressive or the game deteriorates into a stare-down where no one ever actually fights, let alone dies.

To put it in terms that a dev might better understand: WvW is currently suffering from something every bit as bad as a PvP bunker meta.

The primary culprits are obvious to anyone who actively play WvW: absurdly high damage and (so much worse) ridiculous amounts of CC completely nullifying stability.

Today’s “balance update” shows clearly that the damage and CC will not be sufficiently addressed. This leaves only one option; we need a rework/buff to stability. The current iteration of the boon becomes significantly weaker the more enemies you’re facing. Note that this is not (only) and issue of fighting outnumbered. Due to so much of the CC having no target limit (barriers, lines etc) the mere presence of more players on both sides of a fight severely weakens frontlines regardless of your backline/frontline distribution of players.

There are plenty of potential ways to fix this. For instance:

• A limit to the amount of stab you can lose per second.
• A player specific internal cooldown on being affected by hard CC (similar to how static field works)

Either of those would be a start. Anything that strengthens stab in large fights would be good at this point. The added benefit with the above two suggestions is that they would both reward people for coordinating and timing their CC usage. The current system rewards you for spamming it.

There are also ways not to fix it, like:

• A limit to the number of people CC skills can affect (barriers, lines, rings).

I include this as an example of a very poor fix because I can imagine (and fear) it being proposed. This would only serve to weaken outnumbered players.

I’ll end the post here because I feel I’ve rambled long enough. If you only want a tl;dr, here it is:
It is currently far, far too easy to simply wait out your opponent and counter anything they do without taking any initiative yourself. Something desperately needs to be done to encourage WvW groups to be active/aggressive in fights. The obvious solution is to buff stability.

As noted the Stab changes changed the meta to defensive pirate ship fights. They doubled down with HoT and the bunker/AoE expansion of the various elites.

The hope by many is that stability comes back as it was before.

Problem is, PPK does not reward fight oriented people. It just reward entire servers choosing not to engage others in primetime and then they nightcap for a 30K point lead per day. I’m still afraid its going to lead to a mentally which galvanize zergers against roamers (“why did you run alone and die, stop giving away points!”) and make commanders gather full zone blobs so that they can kill a slightly smaller zoneblob. If its two equal zoneblobs… well the one with a point lead can just run away and blob somewhere else. Because why give away points?

So fights are hardly going to improve. Its only going to get worse.

But I digress, probably worrying too much.

I 100% disagree with the OP on what the current state is and the direction he seems to want WvsW to go. So I guess for once in a very long time I can say: goodjob Anet

PPK has little to no impact, and as population continues to decline, it means less and less. In T8 there are only 6000 deaths per week total amongst all three servers.

Guys, guys.. I used PPK as a way to broach the subject only because this is one of the few times Anet has done something that pertains to actual fights in WvW. That’s all. I did not intend for this to be a discussion on PPK.

Cerby.1069:

I 100% disagree with the OP on what the current state is and the direction he seems to want WvsW to go. So I guess for once in a very long time I can say: goodjob Anet

Would you care to elaborate?

Just revert the stab changes only in WvW. Problem solved.
Can I get hired as the WvW dev lead?

Agreed, 100%. Skill to a healthy degree should determine fights. In other words, if a smaller group takes on a larger one and has a better comp, coordination and execution, as long as the number of forces on each side isn’t too different (say 50% or more), the smaller group should win. Challenges are fun for some of us.

Stability, banners, siege craziness, etc. completely puts a damper on this and has for a while. The contingent of blob busting guilds and small dedicated groups has diminished because at every turn they have been hurt by balance decisions.

The player base that gets excited about taking on bigger forces and winning by skill is turned off by these changes and that is the majority of the players that seem to have left or benched themselves. Those that enjoy the PPT aspects more or are more casual in nature have done alright.

If this WvWvW combat just turns into “my force is bigger then yours” we’ll just continue to see a-jamming and blobbing like we have for the last 3 months. Either that or pirate ship stand offs. You really do just watch the other force and wait. It’s not exciting

<3

Naithe.4271:

Skill to a healthy degree should determine fights.

But don’cha know? Spamming cc takes lots of skill!1!11!!

Anet’s ideas on wvw design seem to be based on the point of view of someone who pvds, runs from fights and stares lustfully at the scoreboard.

Coldtart.4785:

~snip~

Anet’s ideas on wvw design seem to be based on the point of view of someone who pvds, runs from fights and stares lustfully at the scoreboard.

Quoted for kittening truth.

vana.5467:

Introducing PPK to reward fight oriented players is fine and all. The problem is that there are hardly any such players left because large fights in WvW have been downright agonizing since the release of HoT.
Not too long ago, I made a post detailing how certain skills are causing massive issues in fights. It didn’t get a lot of feedback so I’m going to try again because against my better judgment, I actually care.

The current “balance” in WvW fights is massively (MASSIVELY!) skewed towards playing defensively. Back-pedal and counter bomb, and you’re golden. Being passive has never been more rewarding. This is boring. Let me state that again: This is absolutely horribly boring. Players need to be rewarded for being aggressive or the game deteriorates into a stare-down where no one ever actually fights, let alone dies.

To put it in terms that a dev might better understand: WvW is currently suffering from something every bit as bad as a PvP bunker meta.

The primary culprits are obvious to anyone who actively play WvW: absurdly high damage and (so much worse) ridiculous amounts of CC completely nullifying stability.

Today’s “balance update” shows clearly that the damage and CC will not be sufficiently addressed. This leaves only one option; we need a rework/buff to stability. The current iteration of the boon becomes significantly weaker the more enemies you’re facing. Note that this is not (only) and issue of fighting outnumbered. Due to so much of the CC having no target limit (barriers, lines etc) the mere presence of more players on both sides of a fight severely weakens frontlines regardless of your backline/frontline distribution of players.

There are plenty of potential ways to fix this. For instance:

• A limit to the amount of stab you can lose per second.
• A player specific internal cooldown on being affected by hard CC (similar to how static field works)

Either of those would be a start. Anything that strengthens stab in large fights would be good at this point. The added benefit with the above two suggestions is that they would both reward people for coordinating and timing their CC usage. The current system rewards you for spamming it.

There are also ways not to fix it, like:

• A limit to the number of people CC skills can affect (barriers, lines, rings).

I include this as an example of a very poor fix because I can imagine (and fear) it being proposed. This would only serve to weaken outnumbered players.

I’ll end the post here because I feel I’ve rambled long enough. If you only want a tl;dr, here it is:
It is currently far, far too easy to simply wait out your opponent and counter anything they do without taking any initiative yourself. Something desperately needs to be done to encourage WvW groups to be active/aggressive in fights. The obvious solution is to buff stability.

For myself and many others, we did not leave WVW due to lack of stability, we left it because there was too much of it and got sick and tired of playing nothing but hammertrains.

Then we came back for the condi patch pre-hot, but that turned out to be basically roaming only, it was and still is completely and utterly useless vs any decent group.

Add to that the pointlessness of fights due to nightcapping, 30-40 of us vs 2 servers with full map ques etc.

For me to come back A-Net has to do 2 things:

1. Solve Nightcapping / population issues
2. Make condi playstyles viable in large scale organized combat.

I care relatively little for stability or CC since I have ways to counter CCs on almost all my toons which work out pretty well. Yes its a team thing, yes it requires some coordination, but isnt the crux of the matter to preserve the higher coordinated team wins vs just mindlessly spam stab like condi cleanses to the point where its completely pointless to play condi builds ?

Stab changes will do nothing except make a bunch of those who are current backliners spamming at max range for extra super boring fights into frontliners and it will be back to power based stab+melee, again for extra stupid and boring fights.

Tongku.5326:

For myself and many others, we did not leave WVW due to lack of stability, we left it because there was too much of it and got sick and tired of playing nothing but hammertrains.

Then we came back for the condi patch pre-hot, but that turned out to be basically roaming only, it was and still is completely and utterly useless vs any decent group.

Add to that the pointlessness of fights due to nightcapping, 30-40 of us vs 2 servers with full map ques etc.

For me to come back A-Net has to do 2 things:

1. Solve Nightcapping / population issues
2. Make condi playstyles viable in large scale organized combat.

I care relatively little for stability or CC since I have ways to counter CCs on almost all my toons which work out pretty well. Yes its a team thing, yes it requires some coordination, but isnt the crux of the matter to preserve the higher coordinated team wins vs just mindlessly spam stab like condi cleanses to the point where its completely pointless to play condi builds ?

Stab changes will do nothing except make a bunch of those who are current backliners spamming at max range for extra super boring fights into frontliners and it will be back to power based stab+melee, again for extra stupid and boring fights.

You’ll notice that I’m not advocating a return to the hammertrain meta. There’s no reason to assume that we have to go from one extreme to another*.
My suggestions guarantee a minimum (quite short) stability duration while still rewarding people for avoiding CC as much as possible.
You are of course right that the goal is to benefit the more organized group. And this can indeed be done by making it more difficult to maintain stability up to a certain point. We’re far beyond that point. Because you can easily lose all your stacks a split second after you pop your stability, it’s become more a matter of luck than skill. This issue is worsened by the unpredictable nature and sheer power of some of the new CC skills, like Hunter’s Ward which will easily rip 5+ stacks off an entire frontline with an animation that will not realistically be noticed in a 30+ fight.

In fact, I’d argue that the current system promotes mindless stability spam much more than what I’m proposing, simply because you’re safer if you just fire it all and limit your pushes to very short durations. This, once again, results in 95% of the fight being spent staring at your enemy from afar.

*regardless, even with a reversal of stability’s functionality, the amount of damage going around these days would likely be enough to prevent full on hammertrains.

Tongku.5326:

… mindlessly spam stab …

…was never effective unless your opponents had absolutely no idea what they were doing. In the pre-stab-nerf meta mindlessly spamming stab would’ve left 5 second plus gaps quite regularly; which for obvious reasons makes you quite weak to being cc’d.

Coldtart.4785:

Naithe.4271:

Skill to a healthy degree should determine fights.

But don’cha know? Spamming cc takes lots of skill!1!11!!

Anet’s ideas on wvw design seem to be based on the point of view of someone who pvds, runs from fights and stares lustfully at the scoreboard.

Well spamming cc takes more skill that spamming stability and 111111.