So we have had a pretty fair amount of time diving into this map, and I believe we all can relate to the pros and cons on the map.
That being said, I want to post some…small suggestions for balancing the maps to facilitate meaningful objectives, creating fights often, and reduce the impact of killing mobs for an purpose. Here it comes:
- While OOC on any neutral roads on the map, you gain a buff that increases movement speed by 33%.
The direct paths to keeps and towers in other words provide a speed buff that helps everyone reach their objectives quickly, while indirect routes will require normal swiftness in case players want to take shortcuts. Furthermore during combat this road buff is killed off immediately without providing an edge in combat. The biggest issue with the map right now is simply traversing it to reach a destination, regardless of how good players get on moving through this map, it is still significantly longer to do so. A bit of time cut helps defenders and attackers find the fights, defend, attack and so forth, essentially doing what we love most. Please note that this buff could also be applied to owned objectives as well given how large keeps and towers are, but I want to start with baby steps first.
- Keeps/Towers T2 and T3 progress is extended further, however Dolyaks provide a bigger time reduction to compensate.
Let’s be upfront about this, right now large objectives are upgrading way too rapidly without any effort put into them. Camps are not necessarily required when your opponent has no one online for say…an entire timezone to capture it! So no point in defending, send your offense to Karma-Train! That’s bad. Let’s fix this, I propose extending how long it takes to reach T2 and T3 by at least 50%! Have it so if you do not own any camps on a map you have that Keep for, it might take at least 12 hours to upgrade it fully rather than I believe 8 hours it is now? Keeps should be valuable objectives, but are treated like the EotM ones which is not a good thing for the health of WvW. Furthermore, my other point about Dolyaks being worth more encourages bringing back camp/yak killing, since they will cut off more from those long timers.
Balance it out so that even with the extended times, getting mostly every dolyak into the keep/tower makes it about par with what it is doing now.
- Laser Event should not have mobs that need to be killed, have the nodes appear off the ground, take a 2 second interruptable channel to pick up. Furthermore reduce the damage they do to paper doors so they don’t outright kill them, and slightly increase how much they do to reinforced and fortified doors.
We have enough NPCs at shrines, towers and keeps to defeat, although it might be a small change the feeling of not needing to kill Stoneheads and focus purely on picking up nodes and killing any enemy players doing the same is important. If it turns out that the laser event gets completed too quickly due to mobs no longer defending the nodes, increase the nodes required. The laser event is substantial enough to warrant fighting going on in mid, and JUST fighting.
As for the laser’s damage to doors, it is blatantly too good on paper objectives, but not good enough on upgraded ones. Does it even do 20% to a fortified objective? It tickles last I checked. Have the laser event not kill any doors directly, but weaken them is a nice perk for the 5 roamers in middle doing a job. If a side sends a huge force to middle, well they will get the objective but likely get one of their major objectives taken such as a fortified one, the one they spent hours working on for.
These suggestions are cumulative. Faster OOC movements means less ‘boring’ travel on main roads, Keeps and Towers reach T1 quickly but remain at that stage for a long time unless defenders actually stop to get supply and yaks in. Attackers do NOT want these objectives to upgrade to T2 or worse, T3, and so they will try to take them out early on or delay them significantly with killing the camps for hours. Worst case scenario, a fully fortified keep or tower can be weakened more by the laser event, which will be a hot spot on a map filled with highly fortified objectives, and since there’s no needed NPC mobs to kill players only need to watch out for each other there.
How’s that all sound? Highly fortified objectives are a big deal once again, Dolyaks/camps have an improved role, the map becomes easier to move across with some perma-swiftness buff on main neutral roads, and there is a bit less mob killing in the middle, a major objective.
Give me your thoughts, I know there might be some issues with my ideas but I think I can cover those questions.
Putting Perspective on Zerg Sizes since 2012. Common Suffixes for 40+ include ~Zilla and ~Train
“Seriously, just dodge.”