Guild Wars 2

As someone that likes to solo roam I have found the new maps to be awful.
I’ve actually found the camps easier to take without having to deal with scout blind spam, but I can’t personally upgrade camps or keep them drained. Hell I can’t even +5 a camp because I apparently need to PvE to have WvW upgrades…..

Towers are also easier to solo since the lords room only contains 1 npc, but it is tedious as kitten to take one. G-catas now cost 50 supply and I can only carry 15 since they stole my +5, which leads to me playing a running simulator. Then I get to spend about half an hour cata’ing a wall that fortified without any player interaction.

The problem is there is no real point in taking a tower anymore. Towers used to offer a strategic advantage. If the defending group was camping a keeps walls instead of jumping down to fight, I could set up defensive siege and treb a keep to make them come to me. Now the towers are just pointless. I am much better off flipping the camps instead of spending the 30+ minutes it takes to flip a fully upgraded tower.

The places I was most likely to find fights are dead. No one cares about camps since supply is no longer a requirement for upgrades. I can’t fight anywhere near a keep because ridiculous PvE mechanics interfere with the fights, it doesn’t matter if it’s in my favor or theirs. It’ not fun to fight when 1 of us is getting stealthed or burning constantly.

Even taking a keep feels pointless now since only 1 keep gets a WP and it gets it as soon as it turns over. Before the change the fights over the keeps were epic, as a roamer I would spend hours prepping and draining keeps, occasionally I’d ninja them but usually I’d have to call in reinforcements and we could end up in these big hour+ long brawls. People don’t bother to defend anymore since no work goes into upgrading them and they aren’t defending WP’s they spent hours building. They just let us flip them and then back cap it after we leave.

On the flip side if something is being decently defended no one makes the effort to bust a T3 structure since we aren’t taking WP’s or busting something they put hours of work into.

The terrain is annoying to navigate, I don’t mean trying to learn the shortcuts, I’m talking about how they stuck barricades in the way, that zergs brush aside in seconds, but roamers have to take a huge detour to go around because they take too long to solo, and the other PvE gimicks like the walls that continuously pop up in front of you near the earth keep.

Oh and the dino skyhammer event was just a laughably bad idea. It clearly favors the stronger server, making it easier to k-train. I decided to give it a try solo and found that the amount of gears doesn’t scale down for the amount of people doing the event. I would have to spend at least 30 minutes PvE’ing dinos to finish it.

I will say the dino event is one of the few times I ran into enemies but the mechanics of it discourage fighting. If I kill a dino and pick up a gear I lose my weapon skills. I had 2 people show up when I had a dino at about 10%, I had to kill the dino so I wasn’t fighting 2 players and the npc at the same time, and by the time I finished killing the players the gear had already despawned. After that I had to leave the area because they came back with 5 more players.

And please don’t tell me that the new shrines are perfect for roamers. That is just a PvE event that needs to be done before a zerg hits a keep. It doesn’t take away from PPT, and it doesn’t take away from (now meaningless) supply. If you aren’t planning to hit a keep there is little reason to do it.

Tldr: WvW didn’t become “harder”, it became more tedious and soulless now that everything is on auto pilot.

Maybe they should just give siegerazor his own npc zerg and let him k-train the map. There will always be a tag up and action on the maps…. real WvW players not necessary.

It’s sad that the best thing anyone can really say about the new maps is that they are pretty to look at.

The map is pretty for sure.. but it is huge with a lot of hidden places and everything is so far away lol… I like the new sentry function to show enemies it helps you find people but it is not enough.

Fact is we complained a lot that zergs could move too fast in the old maps and now they created one to solve this issue… but for roamers it is pretty bad.

I take about 30 minutes to find some enemy on the map.

Hmm, this does post a interesting question to the devs, as this I feel as yet another player-developer disconnect. And no, I don’t want to blame anyone as the concept of roaming is probably somewhat a more abstract concept then the zerging that is highly popular—- everywhere.

What is the concept of small/solo play as envisioned through the map?

This might have been something that was errr… overlooked in the beta selection for players.

Jim Hunter.6821:

I would have to spend at least 30 minutes PvE’ing dinos to finish it.

I noticed that as well when I went there for the hp, its pointless to try to finish it. One of the enemy sides even had it at 40% but then they had given up lol.

When you take into account keep sizes and extremely buffed lords its quite obvious that desert border is 100% aimed towards zergs. Shame really. I used to complain that ESO had poor scaling because it required 20+ players to get started, while GW2 WvW was awesome and scaled very well even at 1+ because roamers could still do good – especially on the borders. Was.

Jim Hunter.6821:

As someone that likes to solo roam I have found the new maps to be awful..

+1

I’ve played wvw as my one and only thing in gw2 for years now, but I just cannot be bothered to log in and roam on empty maps. And even if the maps would fill up, something need to be done for those who like to roam.

Hope the devs can respond to a topic like this, really wanna know if Id better be looking for another game, or if they will balance it for all again soon.

What is the concept of small/solo play as envisioned through the map?

A small group can accomplish a couple of things:

• take sentries to track enemy movement and help our zerg not to get tracked by them
• take only one earth/fire shrine to deny the enemy the perma stealth or fire immunity, or take all air shrines to deny the air pads/turrets and fall immunity.
• scout a keep/tower and prep it with siege in key locations, call out your zerg when enemies are attacking it, repair walls/gates, activate tactics if a guild has claimed it and placed tactics in it
• contest WPs by attacking one guard to deny the enemy the chance to teleport and make them check if it’s actually attacked
• follow zergs and kill off stragglers and/or turn your tag on to let your zerg where the enemy zerg is moving
• capture camps to deny the supply and camp upgrades, but right now this is pointless and needs to be fixed because there are too many dolyaks
• duel other players which unfortunately this is what most roamers do

The places I was most likely to find fights are dead. No one cares about camps since supply is no longer a requirement for upgrades.

I was leading a team of 5-6 players we took the whole map and by the end of it we haven’t flipped one camp because we took all our needed supplies from the towers/keeps we captured. I believe the problem with the supply is the dollyaks spawn way too quickly. We needed supplies for upgrades, siege and repair and now when upgrades no longer require it, normally the supply income should have been made slower not faster. Not really a good game design decision.

If the defending group was camping a keeps walls instead of jumping down to fight, I could set up defensive siege and treb a keep to make them come to me. Now the towers are just pointless

Didn’t enjoy the trebbing from one objective to another. If I was scouting lake and someone took hills and placed trebs to hit lake then I was feeling helpless because there was nothing a scout can do defend lake from being trebbed from hills.
If the barricades are replaced by real walls which need to be taken by catapults, then zergs would have to plant siege and burn supply for them. By right now zerg burn through barricades like butter while the regular roamer has to go around it or spend 10min to take it down.

People don’t bother to defend anymore since no work goes into upgrading them and they aren’t defending WP’s they spent hours building.

Pls remember that you are basing your opinion here on a stupid bug that hasn’t been fixed since day 1 of GW2 (when it’s contested you teleport in the first second before going into contested again). If this bug was fixed, then that WP would be pointless because enemies will tag garri for one hour before attacking it and you wouldn’t know exactly when the big push is coming. Also, people were defending garri because of the reinforced gates and fortified walls, not just because of that waypoint.
Honestly I would rather not have WPs at all on the map only at spawns. This makes the zerg less mobile. And if you want a reward put into your scouting effort then getting T3 (wall+gates) should be good enough without the WP upgrade.

WvW didn’t become “harder”, it became more tedious and soulless now that everything is on auto pilot.

If you never did scouting where you had build a superior treb from supplies taken from camps even form other maps and spend like 40minutes only on that you would appreciate the auto-upgrades a lot. Supply is important now because you can build your siege painlessly and of course you get to fully repair your walls/gates.
Right now there are lot of more supplies than needed (which can be resolved by decreasing the dolyak spawns) and this makes camps a bit pointless.

Catalin makes some good points. I often found myself roaming mostly for the fights, while also taking camps here and there in the Alpine BL. However, with the new maps, I think it’s a matter of re-defining what the roamer needs to be. At the end of the day, WvW is designed around the objectives. A single person can still accomplish a decent amount, it just won’t be the same as it was.

Is the new roaming “bad”? Maybe, but maybe not. It’s different though, and many people react strongly to change, so we could use some time to let things settle/develop.

I mean, I still get lost on the map, so I’m not going to judge it quite yet.

Soulless is the best descriptive word for it.

Catalin.5341:

Didn’t enjoy the trebbing from one objective to another. If I was scouting lake and someone took hills and placed trebs to hit lake then I was feeling helpless because there was nothing a scout can do defend lake from being trebbed from hills.

Except call for aid? Trebbing gave strategic depth and provided another emergent (rather than artificial) objective.

Honestly I would rather not have WPs at all on the map only at spawns. This makes the zerg less mobile.

I don’t think you thought this through. Only one side is now less mobile – the losing one. The winning zerg can just steamroll on because they can rez each other (during the battle they are winning or afterwards).
A wiped zerg or small-scale group is infinitely more disadvantaged now versus the opposite zerg. This also negatively impacts morale. No one likes to run 5 minutes back just to wipe again, whereas re-engagement is much less of a morale issue with close (or in-keep) WPs, if only as a delaying tactic if seriously outnumbered.

@ Catalin

People don’t bother to defend anymore since no work goes into upgrading them and they aren’t defending WP’s they spent hours building.

Pls remember that you are basing your opinion here on a stupid bug that hasn’t been fixed since day 1 of GW2 (when it’s contested you teleport in the first second before going into contested again). If this bug was fixed, then that WP would be pointless because enemies will tag garri for one hour before attacking it and you wouldn’t know exactly when the big push is coming. Also, people were defending garri because of the reinforced gates and fortified walls, not just because of that waypoint.
Honestly I would rather not have WPs at all on the map only at spawns. This makes the zerg less mobile. And if you want a reward put into your scouting effort then getting T3 (wall+gates) should be good enough without the WP upgrade.

Being able to teleport in when the counter ended has nothing to do with what I’m talking about. WP’s offered a huge tactical advantage to the server that controlled them, that’s why it is important for them to be a T3 upgrade. It promoted fights because they took hours to build. This means the opposing server wants to bust the T3 keep to deny the home server the mobility the wp offered for hours. The home server obviously doesn’t want to lose the wp so they come and defend.

By removing WP’s or giving the WP as soon as a keep flips they removed a huge incentive for players to fight over them.

WvW didn’t become “harder”, it became more tedious and soulless now that everything is on auto pilot.

If you never did scouting where you had build a superior treb from supplies taken from camps even form other maps and spend like 40minutes only on that you would appreciate the auto-upgrades a lot. Supply is important now because you can build your siege painlessly and of course you get to fully repair your walls/gates.
Right now there are lot of more supplies than needed (which can be resolved by decreasing the dolyak spawns) and this makes camps a bit pointless.

You just said supply is important now but then you made the argument explaining why it’s not important now. I’ve been playing the game for 3+ years, since the early betas. I know the effort that goes into repairing walls without draining a keep, or running back and forth from camps to build defensive siege because you know an attack is on the way.

These were the kinds of decisions that added depth to the game. Making things easier isn’t always better.

Jim Hunter.6821:

As someone that likes to solo roam I have found the new maps to be awful.

Everything said was spot on.

I was really looking forward to the new maps.

I find they are very nice looking but rather unpleasant to play in small teams.

I understand WvW dev team won’t have enough budget to create a new map – so in the context of having to work with what we already have…

My constructive feedback is as follows:

Problem: We are finding it difficult to get from A to B quickly but we don’t want map hopping blobs to get from A to B quickly.

Solution: Add something like a Nuhoch Wallow (http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Nuhoch_Wallow) that allows fast travel for 1 person. It will have a 5 second cooldown once used. So a 50 man zerg would take 4 minutes to go through, a 5 man roaming group would be through in 25 seconds and a single roamer would be through instantly.

The wallows would connect towers and keeps with supply camps (and possibly also keeps with keeps) so we can run supply quickly when building a cata. We can also respond quickly as individuals but not as map blobs. A defensive map blob will have to “run it”.

Similar to those lava pools in the fire keep but without needing to own the objective to use them and also having a cooldown so the map blobs can’t use them for mobility.

Additionally, make speed buffs ubiquitous and last longer (30 minutes). However, make them not on a “direct path” along which map hopping groups would run to defend keeps.

You can make the use of a Wallow part of the WXP mastery points (create a new line called ‘Combat mastery’ and it includes wallows and auto loot).

Problem: Everything is fortified.
Solution: It doesn’t make sense that a tower upgrades itself magically, there would need to be someone inside building the pot of boiling oil etc. As such, I suggest you make automatic upgrades operate on a 15 minute dead man switch. If no one is pressing the dead man switch the upgrade halts entirely (15 minutes is enough time to run supply to build siege or flip a nearby camp). Having a DMS makes someone put in some effort to making the upgrade happen, it still costs them zero gold. It makes it worth flipping an objective because you know they put effort into upgrading it and if you flip it they might not put the same effort in again. It means that when a group decides to flip to another borderland they won’t find every objective being fortified.
Add an extra DMS ‘lever’ next to the other three near the keep. This is especially useful for the common case where a map is pretty much dead then a map blob comes back and flips everything to their colour, hops back to EB and everything upgrades to fortified even though there are zero players on that map.

Problem: NPC respawn/damage are OP against ram based attacks and wall guard NPCs make sneaky catas more annoying for solo roamers also.
Solution: Reduce the count and strength of defensive NPCs. Remove wall guard NPCs. Quadruple the the respawn delay on NPCs.

Problem: Keep lord is OP against small groups and mild against map blobs.
Solution: Make the keep lord vary his power/defence/health based on a dynamic buff/debuff calculated based on net population count in a large range. So for example, in a 3000 or 5000 radius. Net_Population=(Enemy_Count – (Friendly_Count + 3)). The +3 is for Keep Lord.

Why do this? Well I see that making the buff dynamic makes a keep lord easy for a solo/small group ninja but very strong for a “zerg” doing PvDoor. However, if it is GvG or ZvZ then the keep lord stays fairly neutral in the fight and the other guild will actually have to fight to defend rather than let the keep lord do it for them.

Basically, with a dynamic buff the keep lord will favour whichever side is weakest.

Problem: Barricades block roamers progress but not zergs.
Solution: Remove barricades from the game.

Problem: Fights are not fair if one side has a buff running
Solution: Disable buffs (not swiftness).

Problem: Laser is meh.
Solution: Disable laser.

Problem: Everything is fortified.

I know I’m going to get yelled at now, but link the auto upgrade to npc workers (we got them already, just add 1-2 more), as long as they are alive the upgrade progress, if they’re dead, the progress halts. Have them walk around on the walls and sometimes outside to "build" on some walls, gates, and cannons etc.

Lets players interact with the upgrade system. Roamers can "halt" progress by sniping out all the npc’s (who then as usual gets dead and must be rezzed), and defending roamers can rez them again and protect them.

It will still auto upgrade if no-one comes and interrupt the npc’s, but it gives the enemy an option to slow down or stop the process. Thus require human interaction to keep all the objectives upgrading smoothly.

I spent two hours in my BL and came across zero enemies only npcs and traps. No map chat at all other than someone asking whether s/he is the only one in the BL.

I used to roam but most camps are our own anyway even when we are losing to the other two servers.

It takes ages to walk to the lower parts of the BL map. Since I am the only one around it would take eons to take a tower and all for what?

No prospect for decent drops, no one to party with, no enemies to fight, and strategy is unimportant.

I am a BL kind of WvW’er. BUT shockingly I had to go to the Eternal Battleground to see a little action. This is a major low for me. A mechanical twenty minutes at Tequatl now brings me ten times as much loot as one day in WvW. It is sad state of affairs to say that doing Tequatl is now more fun that doing WvW.

One person above called the new maps soulless — an excellent way to describe it.

Anet please also think of the roamers and not just whoever it is the new maps were designed for.

(I like the synthesizers. Keep those please.)

Terrible map. I fall asleep whilst roaming, wake up 30 min later and I might just glimpse an enemy player to fight …zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz

EB’s mostly full nowadays and because of this you often get massive skill lag. NOT HAPPY JAN !

sadly and completely agree with op.

If you think it is soulless now, wait till people make most of their decisions based on upgrade timers and how soon it is until the next laser event.

“Its difficult to tell from this vantage point whether they will consume the captive Tyrian men or merely enslave them. One thing is for certain: there is no stopping them; the clocks will soon be here. And I, for one, welcome our new chronometric overlords.”

misterdevious.6482:

If you think it is soulless now, wait till people make most of their decisions based on upgrade timers and how soon it is until the next laser event.

“Its difficult to tell from this vantage point whether they will consume the captive Tyrian men or merely enslave them. One thing is for certain: there is no stopping them; the clocks will soon be here. And I, for one, welcome our new chronometric overlords.”

Yeah that’s already starting to happen. It used to be we would work with our zerg to keep supply cut off while they assaulted something, now people are just looking at the timer and saying there is no point in attacking that right now.

It’s a shame because if upgrades were still based on supply I could see some pretty epic fights occurring around yaks with the new escort buff.

Jim Hunter.6821:

misterdevious.6482:

If you think it is soulless now, wait till people make most of their decisions based on upgrade timers and how soon it is until the next laser event.

“Its difficult to tell from this vantage point whether they will consume the captive Tyrian men or merely enslave them. One thing is for certain: there is no stopping them; the clocks will soon be here. And I, for one, welcome our new chronometric overlords.”

Yeah that’s already starting to happen. It used to be we would work with our zerg to keep supply cut off while they assaulted something, now people are just looking at the timer and saying there is no point in attacking that right now.

It’s a shame because if upgrades were still based on supply I could see some pretty epic fights occurring around yaks with the new escort buff.

Oh? I thought the yaks bring supply to upgrade keeps and towers?

Justine.6351:

Jim Hunter.6821:

misterdevious.6482:

If you think it is soulless now, wait till people make most of their decisions based on upgrade timers and how soon it is until the next laser event.

“Its difficult to tell from this vantage point whether they will consume the captive Tyrian men or merely enslave them. One thing is for certain: there is no stopping them; the clocks will soon be here. And I, for one, welcome our new chronometric overlords.”

Yeah that’s already starting to happen. It used to be we would work with our zerg to keep supply cut off while they assaulted something, now people are just looking at the timer and saying there is no point in attacking that right now.

It’s a shame because if upgrades were still based on supply I could see some pretty epic fights occurring around yaks with the new escort buff.

Oh? I thought the yaks bring supply to upgrade keeps and towers?

Nope, the keeps and towers are on a timer. They will upgrade with or without supply. Yaks coming in takes a chunk of time off the timer to make it go faster but supply isn’t used and they will eventually upgrade even if you stop every yak.

back to 100% spvp. goodbye wvw

shagwell.1349:

back to 100% spvp. goodbye wvw

me too
saved my money for armor grinding

shagwell.1349:

back to 100% spvp. goodbye wvw

That’s where I’ve been spending the majority of my time as well.

Jim Hunter.6821:

shagwell.1349:

back to 100% spvp. goodbye wvw

That’s where I’ve been spending the majority of my time as well.

misterdevious.6482:

“Its difficult to tell from this vantage point whether they will consume the captive Tyrian men or merely enslave them. One thing is for certain: there is no stopping them; the clocks will soon be here. And I, for one, welcome our new chronometric overlords.”

Without knowing precisely what the danger is, would you say it’s time for us to crack each other’s heads open and feast on the goo inside?