Guild Wars 2

Portals should at least be able to be targeted and destroyed. Doesn’t help with the invisible enemies issue, but it’s at least some defense against the portal bomb.

you can just look for them and see them and when you do put loads of aoe on it that stops them pritty well

Spartyr.6795:

Portals should at least be able to be targeted and destroyed. Doesn’t help with the invisible enemies issue, but it’s at least some defense against the portal bomb.

I think it’s kind of neat idea to make a portal destructible, however they would never get off unless that had a lot of HP as you can see the portal long before we can see you and visa versa with the culling and there is more than enough delay time between its visibility and active state that any medium size group could destroy it before anyone got through let alone the Mesmer to go home.

As is you see a portal and AoE bombs are already dropped on it before it’s even activated and people can use it. But I think it’s cool concept.

Portals are pretty much the only way the outmanned teams can get things done. Remove that and you end up with blob vs blob. Bigger blob will win 9/10 times. Where is the fun in that?

I do agree however, give more classes some unique utility to spice up the playing field. Give us some more tactical options.

I quite like the anti stealth turret idea for one. Probably a lot more good ideas floating around for other classes!

Portaling is fine and if you/your guild doesn’t know how to counter it look into it, it’s not a hard tactic.

If they could fix the rendering then,

The logical counter to portaling is AoE, all net have to do is remove the silly restriction of 5 targets,its that or make portals only able to portal people the mesner are partied with (5 max)

That 5 target restriction yet again favours the side with larger number,i honestly think removing it would help balence a few other areas as well as giving the people using the portal the same risk as there intended victims.

I play a mesner, and while i agree that portaling should stay an be a valid tactic, i dont agree with the heavy usage its getting due to rendering giving the using group 2-5 secs of free dps

MadJock.8710:

If they could fix the rendering then,

The logical counter to portaling is AoE, all net have to do is remove the silly restriction of 5 targets,its that or make portals only able to portal people the mesner are partied with (5 max)

That 5 target restriction yet again favours the side with larger number,i honestly think removing it would help balence a few other areas as well as giving the people using the portal the same risk as there intended victims.

I play a mesner, and while i agree that portaling should stay an be a valid tactic, i dont agree with the heavy usage its getting due to rendering giving the using group 2-5 secs of free dps

we can’t see the enemy either. There is no portal culling buff. Those on the portal have a giant pink circle that says “enemy here”, we have to estimate where we think you are or go on scout reports. The Mesmer can usually see and you can see the Mesmer we the zergs cannot see each other.

The number of people that can take the portal either needs to be reduced or the rendering needs to be improved so people appear without a lagbomb. It’s just not fun to die before the enemies that killed you even load on your screen.

Catisa.6507:

Very simple and fair solution: AoE can only hit 5 targets therefore mesmer portal should disappear after 5 people travel though it.
There is no reason to allow an entire 50+ zerg to use a single portal.

Actually, they arbitrarily put the “max five people for AoE” limit in there because AoE was seemingly too powerful against large numbers. However, it has resulted in this problem. I think, and it’s worth considering, that the AoE cap should be raised to perhaps ten or so instead.

I get why the AoE cap is in place and think it’s smart and important, but what I’m tired of is how much the turtle or clustering/stacking however term the concept of all pixels on one spot either makes people who play ranged only, or melee only for that matter be forced to play a body to reduce damage.

Portal already has a lot of dangers in it, I portaled my group to their deaths shortly after portaling them to an awesome devastating siege destruction just beforehand… we mess up too. But I hate how AoE cap makes people cluster as a sole tactic to the point of wasting 5 minutes just crying stack on me etc…

EQ1 was 2 hours of buffing for a 10-15 minute fight. I loved the game but as MMOs have evolved I never want to go back to that as a buff bot in a previous life. I drop first half of portal commander has 60-70s to get them organized and ready for airdrop. I don’t want to spend 5 mins prepping to portal 200 feet.

It’s the AoE cap that doesn’t force a zerg off the portal pad not the portal. It is the AoE cap that allows a mesmer to be lazy and drop a portal in the middle of a zerg in stead of strategically. I see the lazy portal bombs and as a mesmer it’s insulting to think it’s all we do by some, and especially those who roll a mesmer just to portal.

Where you put the portal should mean as much as all the other aspects, but if you don’t fear AoE then a lazy mesmer has very little need to use that trickery and sneakiness. Like I said portals get shut down just as much as they work, but a lot of that is lazyness is due to little to no AoE fear IMO.

The AOE limit is ridiculous in light of the presence of portal. This basically boils down to a force projection imbalance. In the real world objects occupy space, and you want to diversify your force/positions while maximizing your ability to hit a target with lethal force.

In the game this is turned upside down because the players can all stack in the same physical space, amplifying their ability to project a sphere/circle of lethal force around their position. Because there is an AOE cap, attacking this concentrated force is penalized, making the grouped up force actually much more durable too.

If the players were solid there would be a finite number of enemies that could occupy an area, and aoe damage likely wouldn’t need any kind of limits at all, since stacking up should make your force significantly more vulnerable, not stronger.

The portal spell could use a lot of work. 5-10 player limit, 4+ second cast time (like our mantras) etc, maybe 1 person every second or two seconds throughput etc.

Scyntrus.2458:

Ryuujin.8236:

@fixit: You can rain hell down on people on top of battlements like no other. Only this morning we needed take down some trebs on a battlement and we set up a special elementalist task force to do just that…

Incidentlly, Mesmer is one of the worst classes for attacking battlements and entrench positions for this same reason (serious lack of indirect fire)

iBerserker will spawn without LOS, so it’ll hit siege on the other side of walls.

Btw, I have 80 ele but rerolled mesmer.

^^^ love seeing groups of 3 mesmers spamming the zerker through walls to kill siege on the other side. saying they have they are the worst for attacking battlements is just wrong.

As far as portal bombing goes I have to agree, it is just overused. Fixing the culling is one thing, but the other issue is that it turns the group into an instant turtle. In that Ioj/SoR garrison battle they kept going from the roof down to the floor of the lords room and back. Hell one time we thought they had actually left but they had moved down to the floor and hadn’t rendered for 10+ seconds.

Also, the issue with trying to lay down siege to stop the portal bomb is kind of a moot point, when mesmers can just stealth, double dodge behind the siege and the resulting bomb can nuke the siege before its even usable against them. Once the culling is taken care of this might not be so much of an issue.

I do think there should be some limit or debuff associated with portals though. maybe 10 people would be fine, but not a whole zerg of 30. Or even a debuff that anyone after 5 or 10 people take extra damage from sources for a short amount of time, thus getting rid of the instant turtle stack from the portal.

Need to make portals color coded by server, take a few more seconds to work, make MUCH more visible and make an obnoxiously loud noise. I can’t even see the portals half the time due to culling and I never see the enemies exploiting the rendering bug.

I think it’s a valid mechanic/tactic but culling issues makes it overpowered. In terms of counters, knockdowns, fears, etc seem to do the trick. It will be interesting to see whether it retains its value once culling issues are improved.

Arani.9057:

we can’t see the enemy either. There is no portal culling buff. Those on the portal have a giant pink circle that says “enemy here”, we have to estimate where we think you are or go on scout reports. The Mesmer can usually see and you can see the Mesmer we the zergs cannot see each other.

When both sides are fighting blind, I think there’s a massive advantage to the side that knows it’s coming. Rendering isn’t as big an issue if you already know the enemy is in the area. It’s much worse when the rendering prevents you from even realizing that there’s an enemy there.

Severim.7938:

I think it’s a valid mechanic/tactic but culling issues makes it overpowered. In terms of counters, knockdowns, fears, etc seem to do the trick. It will be interesting to see whether it retains its value once culling issues are improved.

It’s only “valid” because Anet’s complete oversight on how the ability was designed. As was pretty evident in other areas of the game they just didn’t think about how things could be used/abused.

Pretty sure we’ll be seeing some changes to portals in the near future.

As a mesmer i dread any and all talk of capping the number of people per portal use. All this will do is double/triple/quadruple the number of mesmers using portals and be a logistical nightmare to coordinate. Furthermore it introduces problems with randoms using up your charges, too many porting out, not enough uses for people to go back in, and other generally confounding problems.

I do agree 1000% that portals should be made more obvious. They need to be color coded for the server, and they need a tall kitten pillar of light to come out of them, so that they can be seen easily from the sides. This simple change should be enough to alleviate a lot of the problems. It takes ~2 seconds after both exits are down for the portal to become active. that’s 2 seconds of a big kitten beacon shouting “PORTEL HIER GUISE!”.

Rest should come down to organization and execution.

I have used this and faced it.

last night we wiped to a massive portal, we ressed came back and destroyed it.

There are counters.

Just because you can not counter it doesnt mean it should go.

I have seen servers over use it. I love to see this as I did last night. The enemy server we face all portaled around. they lost everything bar a keep because they were not willing to break apart.

Portalling is a tool, understand it, use it and know how to counteract it.

Tactics that punish the lazy, the porr and the stupid and weahen the zerg should always be retained

basketcase.3894:

Arani.9057:

we can’t see the enemy either. There is no portal culling buff. Those on the portal have a giant pink circle that says “enemy here”, we have to estimate where we think you are or go on scout reports. The Mesmer can usually see and you can see the Mesmer we the zergs cannot see each other.

When both sides are fighting blind, I think there’s a massive advantage to the side that knows it’s coming. Rendering isn’t as big an issue if you already know the enemy is in the area. It’s much worse when the rendering prevents you from even realizing that there’s an enemy there.

Wont argue that point, but you CAN see the portal, you can see the Mesmer before they drop the portal (when visible), we an’t see ANY of you. There is a 2-3 second delay from portal drop to activation that everyone is now shouting “Portal everyone AoE the portal”, and we are all on the nice pink target on the ground waiting to port into that AoE, you are all around it somewhere unknown completely.

This is exactly why portal goes wrong often, especially if a Mesmer gets lazy and just thinks all they have to do is drop a portal for an easy win.

Goblin Beet Farmer.3045:

The real issue is the fact the “tactic” takes advantage of occlusion culling.

if this is the real issue, then portals actually make it easier to know where your enemy is.

weve wiped out portal enemies, because we knew where they were going to appear….
im just astounded how simple solutions are, yet they seem to be missed so easily.

Complaining about portals and theifs stealth (other threads) and saying they need to be nerfed is not the problem. No skill should be nerfed because of a rendering bug in the game. The bug is the issue and should be fixed. Untill that bug is fixed you can’t say a skill that might or might not be effected by that bug is OP. Once the bug is fixed and if there are still issues then maybe it should be nerfed in some way. I think limiting it to 5 people is way too drastic. If you going to do that you might as well just take the skill away. And to the mesmers that say it is a must to have on your bar. No it isn’t. It is situational and you equip it when it is needed. I do this with different skills on all my classes not just my mesmer. I personally don’t think portals and portal bombing is that big of deal. A well organized group of people can turn a portal bomb into a wipe of all who come thru the portal.

Why does everyone begin a witch hunt the moment a new tactic is deployed that breaks from the norm?

Next we will be asking trebs to be nerfed because they can damage our keep walls or maybe cannons give the user an unfair advantage….. where will it end?

As was already stated they dont work all the time. The render issues work both ways, thats a fault of the engine so we should not be penalising a characters skills because of poor design.

Swan, Mesmer for Desolation

A mesmer portal effectiveness scales to how many people can take it together and the complaint is once you start getting 10+ people through it, it’s an ability that’s just too good.

Effective counters to portal:

1) You have siege up and you’re defending from where the portal cannot reach. No good if you’re in the open field, because you don’t enough time to your siege equipment up or the exit portal can just be placed at your siege. Will also bet that your force is not grouped together either.

2) you outnumber the incoming portal stack already. In this situation, the incoming stack doesn’t kill enough of you, in which case, after the initial surprise, you wipe them. In case of even numbers, and the incoming stack is executed well, advantage is to the incoming portal.

Amonde Daneren.2380:

As a mesmer i dread any and all talk of capping the number of people per portal use. All this will do is double/triple/quadruple the number of mesmers using portals and be a logistical nightmare to coordinate. Furthermore it introduces problems with randoms using up your charges, too many porting out, not enough uses for people to go back in, and other generally confounding problems.

I do agree 1000% that portals should be made more obvious. They need to be color coded for the server, and they need a tall kitten pillar of light to come out of them, so that they can be seen easily from the sides. This simple change should be enough to alleviate a lot of the problems. It takes ~2 seconds after both exits are down for the portal to become active. that’s 2 seconds of a big kitten beacon shouting “PORTEL HIER GUISE!”.

Rest should come down to organization and execution.

What a shame it would be to require people to use tactics and forethought.

The 1 skill alone takes all the mobility that thieves have and gives it 50+ at the same time. Not one single other class in 1 ability can do that.

Since portals are so game changing in WvW context, I would like to see some tweaking on them. Things that probably would not have such a big impact in sPvP or PvE.

These would pretty much free Mesmers from their portal slavery.

1. Golems cannot use portals.
2. Only one player per second can move through a portal.
3. There must be a walkable path between portal end points.

After another evening of full portal warfare, and most of it done by our opponents (with hideous failures), I am forced to sadly say that this problems seems to be… a L2P issue.

If you have not figured out how to counter portals, or blaim portals when a superior enemy hands your kitten to you (which they will do portals or no portals), or can’t figure out how to minimize the effects of culling (how to live with it), you will be in here complaining about alot of things in the future… constantly.

In short, suck it up. You can’t always win so no need to come up with excuses.

You could limit portals to 15 people. Still devatating but counterable.

Severim.7938:

I think it’s a valid mechanic/tactic but culling issues makes it overpowered. In terms of counters, knockdowns, fears, etc seem to do the trick. It will be interesting to see whether it retains its value once culling issues are improved.

The primary question here though is not whether ANet thinks that portal bombing is a valid gameplay mechanics or whether they think it is not. The primary question here is what we expect WvW to become over the next one, two and more years and what can be done to ensure that it remains fun over a long time.

Portal bombing is a gameplay technic that is too good in the sense that it allows you to move a large number of players from A to B near instantly in order to take your enemy by surprise and overwhelm him while the portal bombing side takes little risk and has to invest only a comparatively small amount of effort into pulling this off. It is also a technique that favors the side that is already stronger because it can shove more players through the portal and by doing so the side which has less players is demoralized even faster.

The portal bombing technique also favors a kind of gameplay where it becomes mandatory to have a certain class in your army and where those toons are considered a liability to the army outside the specific cases where they are used to create a portal.

The rendering problem that is currently triggered by portal bombing is just icing on the cake. Assuming that ANet will be able to fix this then I wouldn’t be surprised at all if some players would then start to shove even more people through the portal to purposefully induce lag on the portal destination site. If you’ve participated in a large Stonemist Castle fight then you may have been able to see that AOE and heal skills start to time out at a certain amount of lag. The only way to use them in this case is to leave the area.

I don’t think that this game format has a future if it ends up in a “strategic singularity” where the only commonly accepted strategy to defend or take a keep is by using portal bombing and where alternative and possibly more elaborate strategies are being ignored because it is less time consuming to achieve your goal by portal bombing your zerg around.

Consequently the portal should be changed so that there is a limit on the number of players that can go through it.

I am a mesmer myself and i want to clear up some things..
As stated before, a mesmers job is actually harder than it looks like, you have to know the tactics yourself.
I myself only portal groups when I know it will be good for the team, i won’t just portal them to the gate knowing they will get killed instantly. You have to make a decision on your own as a mesmer like can we take the tower/keep with the people who step through your portal, will they even come through your portal, how are the defenses, when will te enemy be here. It is not just that a mesmer drops a portal, well at least not the ones who know what they are doing.
And yes maybe are mesmers really game changing in WvW, they can be only be of any use if they know what they are doing.
Also to portal groups you have to be trusted by the people who will follow you, a mesmer alone can’t bring a whole group together to follow him through a portal (unless he is a commander ofcourse). Your team has to be really organized to make use of this kind of tactic.
Portals do have a range, so you have to know as a mesmer how far you can go because the range is not mentioned in the skill, also a portal only lasts for 20 seconds.
As i have seen in previous comments, portals are not that obvious. They are indeed not, but that means they are not as obvious for the mesmer’s allies aswell.

I also read something about that a mesmer can just walk past the defenses of a keep, well we can’t. As a mesmer you have to know when the attack is going to fail and you have to hide at the right time, sneak past the enemies and make sure no one sees you. This is actually a pretty hard job because even when you succeed to hide, after the failed attack everyone will search the area for mesmers so you have to hold the enemies off.
One time i even had to wait for 20 minutes at a tower because my team couldn’t get close enough for my portal, I had to kill a few enemies in the tower, if they don’t inform their team about a mesmer being in their tower, it is not the mesmer who has an advantage, it is just a lack of communication on their team.

I don’t think they should change anything to the portal system because it works as a great tactic, saying that a mesmer has an advantage is true, but it is not an easy advantage. I actually myself find thieves way to overpowered in WvW, and it is almost impossible for me to take out a guardian. Every class has its advantages, not just the mesmer.

http://m.youtube.com/watch?feature=plcp&v=YAE-hjinNWw

go to 7:20 and tell me how anyone can complain on this. its a solid tactic and work only witg good players and organication. its no huge group who cause clipping problem etc.

Trusted? You act like when people see a portal they don’t automatically run to it and mash the use button just to see where it takes them.

Besides that no amount of talking is gonna convince people portal bombing is hard to do.

1 skill gives you the ability to move as many people as you want around an the map as you please.

1 skill can determine the outcome of a siege on both the offensive and defensive.

No other single skill in the game even comes close to being the game changer that portals are.

There are just to many upsides to having portals and not enough downsides. Expect the skill to be changed in the near future.

fellyn.5083:

What a shame it would be to require people to use tactics and forethought.

The 1 skill alone takes all the mobility that thieves have and gives it 50+ at the same time. Not one single other class in 1 ability can do that.

Exactly, which is why it should NOT be nerfed in functionality, but in visibility and other aspects. Instead of killing portal, they should give other professions more “horizontal” tools that can be employed in WvW.

Give more options, not less.

fellyn.5083:

Trusted? You act like when people see a portal they don’t automatically run to it and mash the use button just to see where it takes them.

Besides that no amount of talking is gonna convince people portal bombing is hard to do.

1 skill gives you the ability to move as many people as you want around an the map as you please.

1 skill can determine the outcome of a siege on both the offensive and defensive.

No other single skill in the game even comes close to being the game changer that portals are.

There are just to many upsides to having portals and not enough downsides. Expect the skill to be changed in the near future.

I can tell you out experience that people don’t use portals when you don’t tell them to, because they won’t know if it is safe, only the mesmer knows where the portal will take them. Besides u can only know if the portal is of your team if you are standing on top of it and since it only lasts 20 seconds, you have to be really fast.

What you’re saying that you can portal people around the map is partly true, as I said there is a range and it is not that big. For the next portal u have a 1 minute cooldown, so u cannot portal people around the map on your own.

If your enemy is well organized a portal cannot change the effect of all the siege, yes you can skip some, but not all if they are set up right.

And what do you think of the thief’s stealth skill? Doesn’t it come close? Since the same ammount of players can ambush you unseen.

Besides maybe there are no downsides to the portal skill, but it does take a slot, and that one could be an important one. So it does have a downside.

MartyPartys.9187:

fellyn.5083:

Trusted? You act like when people see a portal they don’t automatically run to it and mash the use button just to see where it takes them.

Besides that no amount of talking is gonna convince people portal bombing is hard to do.

1 skill gives you the ability to move as many people as you want around an the map as you please.

1 skill can determine the outcome of a siege on both the offensive and defensive.

No other single skill in the game even comes close to being the game changer that portals are.

There are just to many upsides to having portals and not enough downsides. Expect the skill to be changed in the near future.

I can tell you out experience that people don’t use portals when you don’t tell them to, because they won’t know if it is safe, only the mesmer knows where the portal will take them. Besides u can only know if the portal is of your team if you are standing on top of it and since it only lasts 20 seconds, you have to be really fast.

What you’re saying that you can portal people around the map is partly true, as I said there is a range and it is not that big. For the next portal u have a 1 minute cooldown, so u cannot portal people around the map on your own.

If your enemy is well organized a portal cannot change the effect of all the siege, yes you can skip some, but not all if they are set up right.

And what do you think of the thief’s stealth skill? Doesn’t it come close? Since the same ammount of players can ambush you unseen.

Besides maybe there are no downsides to the portal skill, but it does take a slot, and that one could be an important one. So it does have a downside.

Downside compared to what? Every other class has to slot skills to be effective too. It’s just none are nearly as effective in wv3 as a mesmers portal. Fact.

Not 1 other single skill in the game can have such a huge impact in a siege on both the offensive and defensive side. As if that weren’t enough, it also gives large zergs insane mobility when moving across maps.

That to me, tells me something is a little out of balance. Yes, it can be defended against, but once again, so can any other skill in the game. And a hell of a lot easier, too.