Guild Wars 2

Boonprot.6274:

When we have a significant pub tail we try to get them killed as fast as possible

That’s cold, man. Ice cold.

As a staff ele, I like being able to rally. But when 5 guardians get up from my meteor shower because of 1 person on our side going down, I don’t like that. The bunkers are hardest to kill, and stand the chance of surviving after rally the best.

Removing rally altogether I don’t agree with. Using a 1:1 ratio based on a percentage of damage you did to the target should be a factor. That seems most fair for everyone, should a change be made. This allows squishies the best chance to get up, as it should be. If I were to go down after casting a water field, I’d probably need to be rallied by a teammate. This also handles those uplevels that aren’t doing any damage and dying all the time. Maybe they’ll catch on and spec properly since they won’t be making so much free loot while dead.

I honestly don’t see anything wrong with the current rallying system. Most of you have come up with some pretty weak arguments against it, mainly based on how antisocial your attitude is towards fellow players. It sounds like you’d prefer a dedicated raiding environment, and WvW isn’t giving it to you. Perhaps this just isn’t the place.
Then imagine if the uplevel system also upped your AR, traits and weapons to a proper lvl 80 standard (account bound wxp, anyone?). They’ve managed to do it in PvP, so I don’t see why it would be a problem. Not only would you not have to worry so much about uplevels, it would also give you more incentive to run with your alts.
Leave the tantrums and abuse for the 12 year-olds playing CoD.

I think a fair compromise would be that you cannot res a dead person while you’re in combat. Revive downed people, yes, but not dead ones.

Billaboong.6821:

I can’t remember the post but once a dev said: what if in order to rally you need to stomp the enemy and not just kill it.
Well, this would balance the WvW scene so much, right now having an upscaled player on an organized group means having 5 potensial rallies for the enemy. The ratio of good players you need to balance a single upscaled is insane, 1 to 5. Right now you just autoattack on downed enemy and make your allies rally, the fact of stomping would make downed skills much more usefull and change the WvW scene.

Another idea for balancing the rally problem could be to reduce the rally ratio 1 to 1, so only 1 enemy gets the rally when an enemy is killed or just remove the rally mechanic

EDIT (from comments): The rally mechanic has created an us (hardcore) versus them (casual) split on every server

This is actually an awesome idea.

I’d say the anti social aspect of it is a fairly strong argument. This especially applies to guilds who constantly fight against odds (20v40). The more the odds are against you the more every mistake your group makes adds to defeat you. The “rallybot” pugs you pick up by having a tag up don’t know any better to survive. Your guild could be the best in the server and those few deaths will destroy the work they put in.

It works like this. TB (my guild) crashes an enemy group 20v40. We dodge their initial hammer train and burst their backline downing 10 of them. Bearbow johnny pug was following us. He wasn’t on TS and was only there for the loot (like most pugs). He doesn’t hear the countdown to dodge and now he eats the dps and hammer train to the face. He then dies. Those 10 guys TB downed at the start get rallied and our entire first crash was for naught. Bearbow johnny aided the enemy with his death. That is why we tag down and use the “ghetto tag” (targeting the cmdr). Johnny can’t follow us and become the liability he is.

Now patch the Rally system to either dodgeball rules, on stomp, or remove it (any of these suggestions). Replay that scenario above. TB crashes 20v40. We dodge the initial train. We down 10 of the backliners. BB Johnny pug doesn’t hear the raidcall on ts and eats the dps to the face. This time he gets bursted down before he could be stompped. Scenarios?
- Dodgeball rules: only one of the backliners gets rallied. We are slightly miffed at how they rallied but could otherwise care less while our dps burns the rest of the downed backliners to kill.
- On stomp: None of the backliners rally. We don’t even notice Johnny die and don’t care if he comes.
- Removed: None of the backliners rally. We don’t notice Johnny die.

— Of the scenarios removed gives the least risk for Johnny to tag along. His death will not be a liability and we would care less about how he performs as a result.
— The current scenario (no changes) makes him a threat to the safety of our raid. He’s not in the raidcall, says “TS is too good for him and that most servers who don’t use TS live longer in fights.” He will not hear our raidcall to dodge the enemy hammer train and as a result will get vaporized, rallying the few we down on the initial crash. With him around we might as well not dps and waste our cooldowns.
— Dodgeball rules makes him a threat to our raid but not on the scale it is today. We still get to have 9 of the 10 that we downed.
— Same can go for stomp rules. The risk is different here. If BBJohnny gets bursted down before he can be stomped then no foul. If he gets stomped then he erases our raid’s effort.

I’m for removing the rally system as it would make guild raids friendlier to pugs. I like getting rallied and with my necro I get rallied A LOT but it cheapens the fights we have. There is no risk to engaging a fight when your numbers are greater than the enemy. There is too much risk and too little tolerance for failure when you fight against odds. Removing the rally system shifts the risk and adds more tolerance for failure to engagements. The other suggestions are for those who simply can’t do without the rally mechanic as a means to reduce it’s impact on a fight.

To compromise I’d like to see dodgeball rules mixed with the stomp requirement for rally. Also to remove rally from npc kills (except vital npcs like guards, lords, and supervisors). That way I don’t have to worry about Bearbow Johnny too much. Now if he brings 10 of his equally squishy and stubborn friends then it will be a problem. Might as well see how they do then.

There is no positive outcome to the current rally system. None. Almost nobody likes it and it is a laughable or irritating mechanic to most.

One need look no further than my old server BP to see what “Rallybots” do to a server. Practically nobody was hatting up before I left despite several guild groups running on a map. This is bad for inexperienced players since they cannot learn from the veterans and bad for the game in general since the “Rallybots” will likely become frustrated and head elsewhere.