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.