Guild Wars 2

Please consider fixing stability please ANET (at least in wvw)

It drives commanders insane and with the amount of CC you’ve added to the game and every other thing that the wvw community has beaten to death trying to explain, its just so obvious that it must be changed. It needs to either be duration, or have some neat cooldown on stab strips or something.

Dano.5298:

Please consider fixing stability please ANET (at least in wvw)

It drives commanders insane and with the amount of CC you’ve added to the game and every other thing that the wvw community has beaten to death trying to explain, its just so obvious that it must be changed. It needs to either be duration, or have some neat cooldown on stab strips or something.

I can push 30man guild groups solo a d have no problem with Cc lol… don’t step in lines and run to back, no meleeing frontline enemies. If already done I’d say your probably fighting massive blobs in which case simple hammer #2 on rev to win.

Sadrien.3470:

Dano.5298:

Please consider fixing stability please ANET (at least in wvw)

It drives commanders insane and with the amount of CC you’ve added to the game and every other thing that the wvw community has beaten to death trying to explain, its just so obvious that it must be changed. It needs to either be duration, or have some neat cooldown on stab strips or something.

I can push 30man guild groups solo a d have no problem with Cc lol… don’t step in lines and run to back, no meleeing frontline enemies. If already done I’d say your probably fighting massive blobs in which case simple hammer #2 on rev to win.

My point stands unchanged.

Turtle Banner ftw!

Entenkommando.5208:

Turtle Banner ftw!

Now everything makes sense! I see what they did there. Change stability, wait until everyone gets mad, give us an awesome new feature replacing the old stability and let us grind for it. Get your kitten into PvE!

Stability is fine. I see zergs run right thru CC all the time. I go deep with warr or guard and come out without being stunlocked. Trick is you have to have skill and time you stabs/stunbreaks/evades/dodges/invuns.

I chase down mesmers, eles ect that don’t seem bothered by CC at all. Probably all the new passives but they ain’t getting caught no sir.

displayname.8315:

Stability is fine. I see zergs run right thru CC all the time. I go deep with warr or guard and come out without being stunlocked. Trick is you have to have skill and time you stabs/stunbreaks/evades/dodges/invuns.

I chase down mesmers, eles ect that don’t seem bothered by CC at all. Probably all the new passives but they ain’t getting caught no sir.

You’re talking about on a 1v1 basis. The fact that the pirate ship meta is just getting worse shows that stability overall is still in need of a rework.

displayname.8315:

Stability is fine. I see zergs run right thru CC all the time. I go deep with warr or guard and come out without being stunlocked. Trick is you have to have skill and time you stabs/stunbreaks/evades/dodges/invuns.

I chase down mesmers, eles ect that don’t seem bothered by CC at all. Probably all the new passives but they ain’t getting caught no sir.

Question:

If half the players who play wvw left due to the stability change, is stability still fine?

Question 2:

Do you like being knocked around, pulled, thrown in the air all the time?

Question 3:

What benefit is there to tons and tons of CC on a gameplay and health of game aspect?

Question 4:

Why should stability’s effectiveness scale based on size of battle? Pvp its OP, wvw its literally useless.

Dano.5298:

Question:

If half the players who play wvw left due to the stability change, is stability still fine?

They didn’t left. They just turned into zombies, because of this mind numbing pirate ship meta. They are still around but they’ll never be the same.

Dano.5298:

Question 2:

Do you like being knocked around, pulled, thrown in the air all the time?

You actually get just stucked for eternity. I would appreciate to get knocked around, pulled and thrown in the air. It would be quite some relief.

Question 3:

What benefit is there to tons and tons of CC on a gameplay and health of game aspect?

They can sell you a defiance bar…with the next expansion…as part of their digital collectors edition…for just 100 bucks and more.

Question 4:

Why should stability’s effectiveness scale based on size of battle? Pvp its OP, wvw its literally useless.

They had to nerf it really hard in WvW. It is not okay if a blob gets crushed by a coordinated guild zerg. Where is the fun if you can’t ktrain properly?

tl;dr It’s gone. It will never come back. Reverting the changes would look like they’ve made another bad decision.

Stability nerf back in March 2015 killed melee. With warriors being UP and guardians pew pew’ing and the number of hammer revenants running around and ofcource CCs, no wonder very few runs melee classes. ZvZ is basically range wars 2 aka pirate ship. Run melee, get stunlocked to death in 40-50+ battles.

Sure when your facing more numbers its easier to get killed or stunlocked. Still it’s more of a learn to play issue than it is a broken mechanic.

If your commander is playing pirate ship so will the rest of the zerg… if you don’t have enough good melee in the zerg your push will fail… stability/invuns/endurance/dodges/evades/blocks/passives…. that all works well enogh

When I seen “stability” I was thinking of not getting kicked after having to wait on cue to get into the battlefield :/…really hope that irons out soon.

displayname.8315:

Sure when your facing more numbers its easier to get killed or stunlocked. Still it’s more of a learn to play issue than it is a broken mechanic.

If your commander is playing pirate ship so will the rest of the zerg… if you don’t have enough good melee in the zerg your push will fail… stability/invuns/endurance/dodges/evades/blocks/passives…. that all works well enogh

Its just simply not true. If you 1 push everything, it can almost be true but simple math tells you there just isn’t enough stability or anything to prevent you from getting knocked around. And my point is, why is getting stun locked and knocked around fun?

CC needs to work and all, but when battles reach a certain number of people, forget it. its pirateship, never ending fights or you push and kill your group. Its still that way, and its still really sad.

I fully agree with the OP. Nerfed stabi + even more buffed hard CC with HoT is in my opinion very wrong direction. I loved strong melee position in large scale battles. It made the fights more dynamic and interesting. But obviously the devs think different – they want to buff backline casters with tons of AoE and CC who just stand and spam all the skills. What they added to HoT (dragunhunters traps, mesmers wells) simply shows that they don’t give a kitten about melee fights. Look at all the choke points on the new BL maps. It was also designed just to promote mindless ranged skills spam. Look at the relatively small guild arena – it also promotes spamming traps and wells all around…
This was discussed so many times, that I don’t believe there is any chance to change the combat style direction. Either the devs want the battles to look like it or they had no idea why the WvW was so unique and exciting game mode and they destroyed it unaware… Either way – just a shame…

Xeno.4610:

I fully agree with the OP. Nerfed stabi + even more buffed hard CC with HoT is in my opinion very wrong direction. I loved strong melee position in large scale battles. It made the fights more dynamic and interesting. But obviously the devs think different – they want to buff backline casters with tons of AoE and CC who just stand and spam all the skills.

Actually I truly don’t think they understand the consequences of the change to stability even now.

morrolan.9608:

Xeno.4610:

I fully agree with the OP. Nerfed stabi + even more buffed hard CC with HoT is in my opinion very wrong direction. I loved strong melee position in large scale battles. It made the fights more dynamic and interesting. But obviously the devs think different – they want to buff backline casters with tons of AoE and CC who just stand and spam all the skills.

Actually I truly don’t think they understand the consequences of the change to stability even now.

this^.

Aeolus.3615:

morrolan.9608:

Xeno.4610:

I fully agree with the OP. Nerfed stabi + even more buffed hard CC with HoT is in my opinion very wrong direction. I loved strong melee position in large scale battles. It made the fights more dynamic and interesting. But obviously the devs think different – they want to buff backline casters with tons of AoE and CC who just stand and spam all the skills.

Actually I truly don’t think they understand the consequences of the change to stability even now.

this^.

It happened after their “adopt a dev” program so they know how important stability is. With this in mind it is more like troll lvl over 9000…

illenos.5134:

Aeolus.3615:

morrolan.9608:

Xeno.4610:

I fully agree with the OP. Nerfed stabi + even more buffed hard CC with HoT is in my opinion very wrong direction. I loved strong melee position in large scale battles. It made the fights more dynamic and interesting. But obviously the devs think different – they want to buff backline casters with tons of AoE and CC who just stand and spam all the skills.

Actually I truly don’t think they understand the consequences of the change to stability even now.

this^.

It happened after their “adopt a dev” program so they know how important stability is. With this in mind it is more like troll lvl over 9000…

Dev was getting killed by melee so they tough of killing the mellee on their own way, also since every anet dev plays caster classes, even those with warrior use bow, reason wvw is based on numbers, less player skill, and more aoe, there isnt a balance between CC and stability.

joking asside…
Maybe the problem is that there is much AOE in this game, even most AA are aoe hitting 3 targets… if most skills start to hit only the target game migh become less spammy and people need to really start thinking, if we had lesser AOE game would get better for sure.

Just wondering, lesser hit, lesser calc and load from server, less lag, it would help right?

I concur with the OP.

• It’s sad that this isn’t something the players were able to work around, but there it is.
• Needs developer intervention.

morrolan.9608:

Actually I truly don’t think they understand the consequences of the change to stability even now.

IIRC there was a mention of perma stab in an actual dev post on the issue. This would’ve required 4 guards per party which is a garbage comp that could never win against any competent opposition. They definitely don’t get it.

A wipe before stab changes:

“ah better luck next time, they got us.. good on them.. They sustained well (or whatever)”

A wipe after stab changes:

“Wha, what, stab 2, I’m fenced… gravity well! get ready to push… and stun locked.. haaalppp! I’m dead, all my abilities don’t work, can’t do anything.. can’t do anything.. and dead”

I understand that the Dev wanted to implement the stacking of stability due to breakbar in PvE. But Dano is correct the amount of CC in HoT as increased and it does not only stripping 1 stack. It does not matter if your melee grp got a good stability rotation, it just to big access to CC.
Ex: https://youtu.be/GCEFDOyP4H8
Its hard to see, but in the bomb I got 17 stacks. kittening 17 stacks, 16 stacks is stripped in 1 s, by a fence. Next sec I lose the last stack.
The balance is made for PvP, where it does not matter if you are stun for 1-2s. But in a bomb that is an eternity. You can just relax, stretch your back and watch your health slowly go down until your die.

Why must stability be fixed? Why? The WvW community needs to learn to fight differently. Instead of all pushing in one huge mass, spread out and push, Push with different sub squads from different angles, both ways lessen the CC as it has to be more widely spread. Perhaps the days of Empower – Veil – Leap In – Wells Down – Drop the Bomb have gone.

You wouldn’t see a modern army in trench warfare because they have moved on. It’s all about fast mobile units in the real world. So why shouldn’t WvW adapt?

Every single class has multiple ways to escape CC and stun, if you choose not to carry a stun breaker or two, more fool you, adapt your build and stop running the so called “meta”.

Yes some HoT skill/class combinations are overpowered, but Anet will eventually balance that. But it all boils down to learning to adapt in both tactics and build. Use your brains rather than being a follower of the meta automaton.

I didnt realise this before, resintalled the game 2 days ago and did a bit of WvW, the CC spam and KD where stability dont work, i really dont understand Anet ideal of a game, they do really like to make bad players look good, and that is the reason game isnt that well accepted in esports (as a friend had pointed me out in the past)..

So.. i had to trait shout for faster CD use, cast stand your ground, inside hallowed ground on a pirate ship(there was no melee confront) and i was being interrupted almost every 2,3 second could not jump dodge, was getting kd also, and was also getting dazed every second inside a hallowed ground even when casted SyG inside consecration….
So more 2 skills on guardian that are not working????

Some classes have very low surviability for the amount of damage ouput and CC spam, the actual CC it would make sense if game was based on team work and spike, gank whatever to kill, but atm is the other way arround it is far to easy, it is a matter of pick X and Y class to be effective and spam buttons.

*Q: Anet what is needed to make skills and gameplay balanced (more clever) instead of spam range, aoe and CC to easy win? *

@MoonT.6845 that would be hard to make it work… if those smaller squads didnt get eaten by all aoe at the first seconds they would had to fall back, or proly since that is the same of a splited zerg the bigger blob would just need to clockwise and and invert direction and eat the smaller groups easilly with aoe and spikes.

Stability post hot is basically a joke. With a few shield generators you can create defensive situations where you have unlimited stability and your opponents don’t, in which case you should win any even numbers fight unless you’re bad, especially since the shield generator comes with hard CC. Even if the attacker has shield generators of their own the LOS wins the day.

In the open field there are a lot of unblockable pulls, and in chokes that litter the borderlands you have to wait until people have invulns up to get a non-stalemate, so it’s pretty boring if both parties know how to use the terrain.

Posters above mention having multiple tags and yeah that works somewhat effectively in the open field, but the game is littered with chokes now. However even without chokes rev hammer 2 and well distance on that skill can let you turtle up against multiple tags in the open field, assuming your tag gets sniped. If your tag doesn’t get sniped then you can just be hyper aggressive with no real drawback since there aren’t many cooldowns you have to manage anymore.

Then there’s guardian longbow 5 in a choke. Ok. 10 walls. Alright. Great idea. Very balanced.

MoonT.6845:

Why must stability be fixed? Why? The WvW community needs to learn to fight differently. Instead of all pushing in one huge mass, spread out and push, Push with different sub squads from different angles, both ways lessen the CC as it has to be more widely spread. Perhaps the days of Empower – Veil – Leap In – Wells Down – Drop the Bomb have gone.

You wouldn’t see a modern army in trench warfare because they have moved on. It’s all about fast mobile units in the real world. So why shouldn’t WvW adapt?

Every single class has multiple ways to escape CC and stun, if you choose not to carry a stun breaker or two, more fool you, adapt your build and stop running the so called “meta”.

Yes some HoT skill/class combinations are overpowered, but Anet will eventually balance that. But it all boils down to learning to adapt in both tactics and build. Use your brains rather than being a follower of the meta automaton.

So a couple of things I think you might have missed from the above posts:

1) Its about fun and health of game. 75% of commanders have quit this game, citing stab changes as a huge reason for it.

2) Its incredibly jarring and irritating to get knocked and pulled and stun locked all day. and I run as many stun breaks, stab, resistance, etc as possible.

3) Adjustments for stab still just lead to whoever pushes has disadvantage. Should be opposite or neutral advantage IMO since people don’t want to just stand there all day.

While I appreciate the L2P point you are making, most people’s complaint is that while it is true zerg busting is pretty much dead, its also just a fun issue. Most people, who play wvw, do not like the stab changes.

MoonT.6845:

Every single class has multiple ways to escape CC and stun, if you choose not to carry a stun breaker or two, more fool you, adapt your build and stop running the so called “meta”.

The meta for melee builds involves huge amounts of stability and stun breakers. The point of this thread is that even maximum investment in anti cc can be effortlessly defeated by focus firing cc.

Too many relied on stability. It was broken if you ask me. I don’t see why you should be able to stack it and pretty much ignore every single cc the game throws at you.

Just sucks that instead of players adapting by doing what some others have said they would rather have staring matches and ranged fights. You can still stack and push and win fights but its harder now since it seems the players that had no fear of dying are replaced by those that think if they die in a game they might die IRL.

illenos.5134:

Entenkommando.5208:

Turtle Banner ftw!

Now everything makes sense! I see what they did there. Change stability, wait until everyone gets mad, give us an awesome new feature replacing the old stability and let us grind for it. Get your kitten into PvE!

First new WvW mastery: Standing

Must kill Claw of Jormag 5000 times to activate.

Speaking as a guardian main, I used to hate the stability change. But, we adapted a long time ago and now I sort of like it. It makes things much more challenging, for sure.

briggah.7910:

Too many relied on stability. It was broken if you ask me. I don’t see why you should be able to stack it and pretty much ignore every single cc the game throws at you.

Posts like this one offer a big insight into why people might agree with stability being nerfed. The standard melee party comp for zergbusting or gvg guilds had 2 guardians in it, which was enough for 60% stability uptime in theory and far less uptime in reality. Your average blob had even less reliable stability uptime than even this. The reason why this would look like being able to pretty much ignore every single cc the game throws at you is the same reason why it’s still technically possible to push as melee today:

People suck at using cc.

Coldtart.4785:

briggah.7910:

Too many relied on stability. It was broken if you ask me. I don’t see why you should be able to stack it and pretty much ignore every single cc the game throws at you.

Posts like this one offer a big insight into why people might agree with stability being nerfed. The standard melee party comp for zergbusting or gvg guilds had 2 guardians in it, which was enough for 60% stability uptime in theory and far less uptime in reality. Your average blob had even less reliable stability uptime than even this. The reason why this would look like being able to pretty much ignore every single cc the game throws at you is the same reason why it’s still technically possible to push as melee today:

People suck at using cc.

C’mon, the old stability was pretty much easy mode.

Of course it’s possible to push as melee today. We do it every day in tier 1.

Old stability was only easy mode against bad players that spam and never coordinate. Back when wvw was good and I was playing every day I got tons of people killed with well placed statics.

As a former fighting pug commander for 2 years, ive been through it all- the old stability, the pre HoT full scale pirateship meta all the way to nowadays part pirate, part not meta.

The old stability offered melee lots of diversity and dynamic gameplay, making the role of playing as melee very enjoyabe, smooth and most of all – fun!
The ranged in that old meta were also an important role, eventhough many players didnt realise it and thought that a big melee train is all they needed.
Mostly the rangeds job was to avoid the melee train no matter the cost, apply some well deployed CCs and especialy ranged bombs on called locations given by commanders.

If you were careless when you went full “i dont care about our ranged” with your melee train, then smart commanders simply used this opportunity to wipe out your ranged players and simply order their ranged to kite and flank your melee, which was very viable due to them wiping out your squishies who were the ones who kept enemy ranged away.

Now before the stability nerf announcement, i had some interesting topics regarding what will happen and each and every person i talked with whose experienced in WvW predicted a full scale pirateship.
Everyone knows that CCs in general have been and still are strong cause they practicaly dont go balanced in massive PvP such as WvW. Cant recall the last time anyone in balance patch nerfed a single CC skill, which makes sense since in sPvP it is balanced but not in WvW.
An very easy fix to this and which many players have yelled for is to seperate WvW completely from WvW, as in WvW should have different skill cooldowns and effects compared to PvP.

Anyway once the stability change came out, then pushing anywhere as melee was simply impossible cause your stability didnt even last 2 seconds in large scale fights. You literaly were frozen still by enemy ranged and bombed to oblivion by their aoe bombs.
This made playing as melee completely frustrating and made warrior class completely useless as melee.

As a popular fighting commander i was forced to go pirateship often and often not cause my workaround method was to simply run into an enemy 40-60 man blob with guardians shelter or renewed focus (cause its the only way to counter hard CC and bombs), simply bait out all of the damage and CCs from enemy blobs while doing no melee damage whatsoever and then running back with leap or if i had available- a 2nd invurnibility skill (shelter or renewed focus). After that my squishies were free to push and we rolled through everything.

The only reason it worked was cause so many players saw the effectiveness of the pirateship meta, beliving anyobody dumb enough to push will instantly die if all ranged bombs are called on them. Which was true ofcourse but with some workaround methods which one of them i mentioned earlier countered it.
It still made me feel sad playing melee as a puppet whose only job was to bait out damage, CC, be as an enforcer class when it came to pressuring enemies to my desired terrain locations favourable to me and simply encouraging our ranged to push after the baiting was done.

Now moving onto HoT in WvW- the thing i like about the HoT is that it made playing as melee a lot more favourable again but it still has its downside.
The downside im talking about atm are the increase of CC skills that the new class specializations provide – traps on guardian, chronomancers wells for example.

More downsides are banners (turtlebanner for example) that are heavily abused in blob fights and few of those banners can make a massive difference.
The constant massive boon duration and increase provided by revenants – lets be fair, having constant 25 might stacks on lots of ranged players will hurt anyone a lot.
You may say that the counter arguement will be to use revenants elite skill under dwarf stance for example but that 4 seconds of 50% reduced damage is nothing compared to having permanent 20-25 might stacks.

The plus side i see on melees nowadays is that engaging has been made more balanced due to new skills and traits but as much as i still hate to say it – what i mentioned earlier before this sentence still takes WvW gameplay more towards pirateship which many players despise and find it simply put boring.

Im not saying that playing as an effective melee train with smooth engaging is impossible but it certainly does require far more skills and co operation compared to simply playing as a pirate on your ship.

To sum up HoT WvW:

Melee vs ranged gameplay = ranged has it a lot more easy, forcing more pirateship meta due to this.
Melee needs more experience and skills compared to ranged in blob fights.
Melees need co operation and a experienced commander if wanting to play as an melee will be fun and effective.

Classes fairly a lot out of balanced. Once this gets fixed, maybe hopefuly things will looks brighter for melee.

Banners are overpowered and need a desperate nerf!!!
Take a look at turtle banner, that says more then enough regarding what you find it off.

I swear if i could be a lead dev in WvW id bring it back to life, bring back the blooming and golden age of WvW and its popularity. I would even bring anet lots of money cause of this because lets be fair- devs dont know what they have done and what they are doing regarding WvW. Because of this WvW is in a very grim status. Even me a true WvW lover aint doing WvW even 15% time of i used to play.

Keep in mind that WvW is the last string of keeping guild wars players from leaving the game.
Players who are tired and bored from PvE and/or PvP come to WvW for some excitement and seeing how things are, they wont find any of it here.

Ah well, this post will be lost, nobody will even read it and chance of even a dev reading my post are as close to as a chance of winning a lottery.

/shrug

Many commanders have adapted to the stab change and improved their gameplay and movement, as well as better utilizing things like misdirection and Mesmers to confuse the enemy and waste their bombs. No more blindly pushing with impunity and mowing down enemy backliners, against the good groups anyways. Also, there is this thing called Resistance.

Yes it had made life as melee more difficult, and that is as it should be in my opinion. Do even great commanders get locked down and die sometimes? Of course. That’s WvW. I do think some ranged skills are way out of line and need adjustment (looking at you CoR).

Pirate ship is incredibly boring. It may be easier but it’s not the only way. Commanders are still out there pushing their melee train into blobs pretty much every day.

Lame banners are a separate issue, entirely.

The old stab was pretty broken. If cry babies are leaving because they refuse to not zerg, then too bad.
I agree the current situation is crap, but thats because anet is kittened and havent figured out that having only 1 class reliably providing the most important boon in the game is tantamount to disaster.

They added tons of more CC’s in the game with HoT as well, such as guardian longbow 5 for example. I don’t know if you’ve had to play against 10 to 15 Longbow Guardian’s in one zerg spamming 5 on every engagement but it’s completely broken it is impossible to move. Seems to me with these quarterly updates they could atleast make improvements on stability maybe 10 stacks instead of 5 for some abilities… Or is stab in PvP and PvE fine so it’s not an issue? Anyone else blue in the face asking Anet for stab changes yet?

Edit: Not to mention the ridiculousness of Turtle banners as well lol

A better and more balanced method would be to go back to a time based stability, but cc would remove increments of time from that stability.

I think alot of the problem with stability is actually noting exactly how many stacks of it you have whilst in the middle of combat. Time based stability would be easier to visually represent to players in the heat of the moment.

A better and more balanced method would be to go back to a time based stability, but cc would remove increments of time from that stability.

I think alot of the problem with stability is actually noting exactly how many stacks of it you have whilst in the middle of combat. Time based stability would be easier to visually represent to players in the heat of the moment.

Kirito.2195:

They added tons of more CC’s in the game with HoT as well, such as guardian longbow 5 for example. I don’t know if you’ve had to play against 10 to 15 Longbow Guardian’s in one zerg spamming 5 on every engagement but it’s completely broken it is impossible to move. Seems to me with these quarterly updates they could atleast make improvements on stability maybe 10 stacks instead of 5 for some abilities… Or is stab in PvP and PvE fine so it’s not an issue? Anyone else blue in the face asking Anet for stab changes yet?

The stab change made wvW worse for bout a year now but don’t worry they have a super huge overhaul coming. They’ve been working on it for a year so it’s gonna be completely epic with:
Airship battles
Non stop action (no more running 10 minutes to objective)
DeathMatch, King of the Hill maps
GvG area that impacts the server score
Map variety (EotM will be updated to have upgrades as well)
Graphical update of old maps
Overflow system that keeps all maps full but where you can queue to play with friends
Guild Ranking in GvG and server contribution with complete stats sorting (kills, capture, etc)
Rewards that are related to your rank
An interesting ranking system with cosmetic rewards
And MORE!

Nah it’s none of it is true, but since they won’t say anything we can only make stuff up about what a year of WvW can bring.

Dal.5872:

A better and more balanced method would be to go back to a time based stability, but cc would remove increments of time from that stability.

I think alot of the problem with stability is actually noting exactly how many stacks of it you have whilst in the middle of combat. Time based stability would be easier to visually represent to players in the heat of the moment.

Or even better – time based stability that cc doesnt do anything on, but simply balance the times and the stacking of this time so that it has to be used tactically. That way you could easily tell when you have stability and when you dont, which mean you can counter overpowered cc bombs from a large amount of players.

Hm. Odd. Now when I think about it, theres something familiar about that.

Kirito.2195:

They added tons of more CC’s in the game with HoT as well, such as guardian longbow 5 for example. I don’t know if you’ve had to play against 10 to 15 Longbow Guardian’s in one zerg spamming 5 on every engagement but it’s completely broken it is impossible to move. Seems to me with these quarterly updates they could atleast make improvements on stability maybe 10 stacks instead of 5 for some abilities… Or is stab in PvP and PvE fine so it’s not an issue? Anyone else blue in the face asking Anet for stab changes yet?

It’s funny that you mention that. There was very recently a guild on BG that seemed to stack DHs and do exactly that. But you see, there is always a trade off. They really were a one trick pony, and if you just avoided their bomb, they were easy pickings. They have since disbanded or transferred away, to my knowledge.

While I do generally agree that some of the non-Guardian stab skills should be buffed, 10 stacks is way too much for any one skill. Else, we may as well go back to time-based stability.

I like it the way it is now. It’s challenging, and there’s no guarantee that you won’t get stripped immediately. Basically, it keeps you on your toes a lot more as melee which is exciting and fun, in my opinion. Or, maybe I’m just a glutton for punishment.

They really need to fix the dh 5 skill. The problem I see with it is more than half the time you don’t see the little fence and the second you try to move, you constantly get knocked back down. You use some stunbreaker to get out of it only to move into the next invisible wall. If only there was some sort of, you know red circle like pretty much every other skill, it would be easier to move out of it and not just move right into the next invisible wall.

Boreal.9826:

Kirito.2195:

They added tons of more CC’s in the game with HoT as well, such as guardian longbow 5 for example. I don’t know if you’ve had to play against 10 to 15 Longbow Guardian’s in one zerg spamming 5 on every engagement but it’s completely broken it is impossible to move. Seems to me with these quarterly updates they could atleast make improvements on stability maybe 10 stacks instead of 5 for some abilities… Or is stab in PvP and PvE fine so it’s not an issue? Anyone else blue in the face asking Anet for stab changes yet?

I like it the way it is now. It’s challenging, and there’s no guarantee that you won’t get stripped immediately. Basically, it keeps you on your toes a lot more as melee which is exciting and fun, in my opinion. Or, maybe I’m just a glutton for punishment.

I absolutely despise it the way it is now. I miss the days when melee could consistently be… melee. Now it’s nothing more than pirate ships in most fights where one side doesn’t get immediently steamrolled. Either that or commit and get insta stripped by wildly flung CCs and trait/rune passive procs.

The problem with the stability discourse, as well as many other discussions regarding WvW lately, is that it is obscured by the misconceptions of stupid people. People who are completely unable to either look at the very simple mechanics behind the change and tally up the numbers or look into the context of how the stability change is the driving fault behind the “population imbalance” and general discouragement of content-enablers (like commanders, roamers, scouts etc). I have no better description for people who refuses to argue the points at hand or harp on about incontextual or peripheral issues.

There never was a “permastab” norm before the change. That is the misconception of stupid people who never understood how rips worked and simply wanted their spammable go-to buttons to be the end-all solution to some elitist guild, all-melee, permastab strawman. The changes to stability, making it part of a tit-for-tat cooldown trade, is in direct correlation to superiority of control effects, given how the game has more control effects on shorter cooldowns. It is an imbalance. That is the simple math.

By the same premise, it is in direct correlation to larger groups outperforming smaller groups [with fewer cooldowns to burn] (making transfering to higher populated servers more appealing) and pickup zone-blobs outperforming well-composed diverse groups (that tend to provide said pickup groups with commanders or other forms of leaders and content-enablers). They do not have sufficient counters to cover all the control or the uptime to match the reapplication of control effects. They simply run out of cooldowns.

That used to work well, with more control than counters but higher applied covers that had to be ripped from their players to impose control upon them. The current balance makes pinballing the norm and that is what makes range-to-range combat the norm. We had rips to boons, boons to conditions and conditions to cleanses rather than the breakbar-spam nonsense promoted in PvE now to create a simplistic version of that mechanical context. Tangent: Even in PvE it would probably had been more fun with bosses that corrupted boons to cleanse and reapply or stole boons to rip, steal or corrupt back.

All of this has created a transfer circus where players transfer to win, overpopulating already highly populated servers, followers transfering to find leaders, draining lower populated servers to the point where players have to transfer to even find players to fight and to participate in the basic premise of game mode – to have open world fights – and a dependence of more players upon fewer players, where old established commanders are expected to guide more, less experienced players. That is a terrible environment to command in, causing burn-out, limited tactics at one’s disposal and a general disinterest in the game mode, from the decreasing amount of players that an increasing amount of players depend upon. That’s the context.

Stability is at the heart of everything, from the personal enjoyment of getting to control your own character to the melee-range balance, finding fun friends to follow and exciting frenemies to fight. A game (mode) where restricted movement is the norm is simply garbage and completely counter-intuitively wasteful to the fantastic movement- and combat engine this game promises underneath the WvW scrapheap. That’s why many of us are so passionate about it too, because the WvW mode has so much potential in GW2. It stands to be the open-world market leader. The same can not be said for good stories, raids or esports, with cross-genre competition where our MMO is but a small contender.

Subversion.2580:

The problem with the stability discourse, as well as many other discussions regarding WvW lately, is that it is obscured by the misconceptions of stupid people. People who are completely unable to either look at the very simple mechanics behind the change and tally up the numbers or look into the context of how the stability change is the driving fault behind the “population imbalance” and general discouragement of content-enablers (like commanders, roamers, scouts etc). I have no better description for people who refuses to argue the points at hand or harp on about incontextual or peripheral issues.

There never was a “permastab” norm before the change. That is the misconception of stupid people who never understood how rips worked and simply wanted their spammable go-to buttons to be the end-all solution to some elitist guild, all-melee, permastab strawman. The changes to stability, making it part of a tit-for-tat cooldown trade, is in direct correlation to superiority of control effects, given how the game has more control effects on shorter cooldowns. It is an imbalance. That is the simple math.

By the same premise, it is in direct correlation to larger groups outperforming smaller groups [with fewer cooldowns to burn] (making transfering to higher populated servers more appealing) and pickup zone-blobs outperforming well-composed diverse groups (that tend to provide said pickup groups with commanders or other forms of leaders and content-enablers). They do not have sufficient counters to cover all the control or the uptime to match the reapplication of control effects. They simply run out of cooldowns.

That used to work well, with more control than counters but higher applied covers that had to be ripped from their players to impose control upon them. The current balance makes pinballing the norm and that is what makes range-to-range combat the norm. We had rips to boons, boons to conditions and conditions to cleanses rather than the breakbar-spam nonsense promoted in PvE now to create a simplistic version of that mechanical context. Tangent: Even in PvE it would probably had been more fun with bosses that corrupted boons to cleanse and reapply or stole boons to rip, steal or corrupt back.

All of this has created a transfer circus where players transfer to win, overpopulating already highly populated servers, followers transfering to find leaders, draining lower populated servers to the point where players have to transfer to even find players to fight and to participate in the basic premise of game mode – to have open world fights – and a dependence of more players upon fewer players, where old established commanders are expected to guide more, less experienced players. That is a terrible environment to command in, causing burn-out, limited tactics at one’s disposal and a general disinterest in the game mode, from the decreasing amount of players that an increasing amount of players depend upon. That’s the context.

Stability is at the heart of everything, from the personal enjoyment of getting to control your own character to the melee-range balance, finding fun friends to follow and exciting frenemies to fight. A game (mode) where restricted movement is the norm is simply garbage and completely counter-intuitively wasteful to the fantastic movement- and combat engine this game promises underneath the WvW scrapheap. That’s why many of us are so passionate about it too, because the WvW mode has so much potential in GW2. It stands to be the open-world market leader. The same can not be said for good stories, raids or esports, with cross-genre competition where our MMO is but a small contender.

I just want to say thank you for this post. I hope ANET reads this and takes it into consideration if they truly want people to keep playing their game.

Dano.5298:

Subversion.2580:

The problem with the stability discourse, as well as many other discussions regarding WvW lately, is that it is obscured by the misconceptions of stupid people. People who are completely unable to either look at the very simple mechanics behind the change and tally up the numbers or look into the context of how the stability change is the driving fault behind the “population imbalance” and general discouragement of content-enablers (like commanders, roamers, scouts etc). I have no better description for people who refuses to argue the points at hand or harp on about incontextual or peripheral issues.

There never was a “permastab” norm before the change. That is the misconception of stupid people who never understood how rips worked and simply wanted their spammable go-to buttons to be the end-all solution to some elitist guild, all-melee, permastab strawman. The changes to stability, making it part of a tit-for-tat cooldown trade, is in direct correlation to superiority of control effects, given how the game has more control effects on shorter cooldowns. It is an imbalance. That is the simple math.

By the same premise, it is in direct correlation to larger groups outperforming smaller groups [with fewer cooldowns to burn] (making transfering to higher populated servers more appealing) and pickup zone-blobs outperforming well-composed diverse groups (that tend to provide said pickup groups with commanders or other forms of leaders and content-enablers). They do not have sufficient counters to cover all the control or the uptime to match the reapplication of control effects. They simply run out of cooldowns.

That used to work well, with more control than counters but higher applied covers that had to be ripped from their players to impose control upon them. The current balance makes pinballing the norm and that is what makes range-to-range combat the norm. We had rips to boons, boons to conditions and conditions to cleanses rather than the breakbar-spam nonsense promoted in PvE now to create a simplistic version of that mechanical context. Tangent: Even in PvE it would probably had been more fun with bosses that corrupted boons to cleanse and reapply or stole boons to rip, steal or corrupt back.

All of this has created a transfer circus where players transfer to win, overpopulating already highly populated servers, followers transfering to find leaders, draining lower populated servers to the point where players have to transfer to even find players to fight and to participate in the basic premise of game mode – to have open world fights – and a dependence of more players upon fewer players, where old established commanders are expected to guide more, less experienced players. That is a terrible environment to command in, causing burn-out, limited tactics at one’s disposal and a general disinterest in the game mode, from the decreasing amount of players that an increasing amount of players depend upon. That’s the context.

Stability is at the heart of everything, from the personal enjoyment of getting to control your own character to the melee-range balance, finding fun friends to follow and exciting frenemies to fight. A game (mode) where restricted movement is the norm is simply garbage and completely counter-intuitively wasteful to the fantastic movement- and combat engine this game promises underneath the WvW scrapheap. That’s why many of us are so passionate about it too, because the WvW mode has so much potential in GW2. It stands to be the open-world market leader. The same can not be said for good stories, raids or esports, with cross-genre competition where our MMO is but a small contender.

I just want to say thank you for this post. I hope ANET reads this and takes it into consideration if they truly want people to keep playing their game.

Well the Stability changes came around the time Devon left, so they probably didn’t have 1 person left at Anet understanding the negative impact of that stability change for WvW. They ended up with PvP devs deciding of all the changes for the game, and WvW suffered greatly from it. How many skills, boons and traits, fine-tuned for PvP are now completely useless in WvW?

Just take Ice Bow for example, it was perfectly balanced for WvW, but they completly destroyed the skill just for PvE. It’s clear that for the PvP devs WvW is PvE and not a competitive mode.

Subversion.2580:

There never was a “permastab” norm before the change. That is the misconception of stupid people who never understood how rips worked and simply wanted their spammable go-to buttons to be the end-all solution to some elitist guild, all-melee, permastab strawman.

The only strawman is your permastab nonsense, the reality was even with just two guards in a party (let’s pretend melee blobs didn’t exist or commanders never stacked their party with guards) you had stab pretty much whenever you actually needed it.

Subversion.2580:

That used to work well, with more control than counters but higher applied covers that had to be ripped from their players to impose control upon them.

No it didn’t work well, it was a skilless faceroll joke that rendered hard CC skills, often with a longish cooldown (far longer than stand your ground in many cases) as borderline useless.

As for the laughable boon rip, half the skills that rip boons in this game are unusable in large scale PvP (thief sword, mesmer rip on shatter, etc), the “main” AOE boon rip skill used (well of corruption) was a joke, because stability was last in order to be boon stripped, when most melee were going around with 4-7 boons permanently on them to cover stab, and between at least two guards and a warrior could reapply new cover boons so often it was ridiculous.

Subversion.2580:

All of this has created a transfer circus where players transfer to win…

Which has absolutely nothing to do with stability.

Subversion.2580:

It stands to be the open-world market leader. The same can not be said for good stories, raids or esports, with cross-genre competition where our MMO is but a small contender.

Not really, for a start WvW isn’t open world, it is far more structured, and as a RvR type mode the only really great thing is the combat, but even then that is down to personal preference, in most other regards it is bad, for example as a competitive mode it is a joke where to “win” it encourages people to avoid fights, PvDoor and get up at 4am, it is fundamentally broken.

Stability needed a nerf, now maybe it has gone a little too far the other way, but that doesn’t alter stab was broken as hell.

Xillllix.3485:

Well the Stability changes came around the time Devon left, so they probably didn’t have 1 person left at Anet understanding the negative impact of that stability change for WvW. They ended up with PvP devs deciding of all the changes for the game, and WvW suffered greatly from it. How many skills, boons and traits, fine-tuned for PvP are now completely useless in WvW?

C’mon Devon never demonstrated any great understanding of WvW. IIRC stab changes came with the balance patch that enabled us to use 3 traitlines fully, I’m pretty sure Devon was still there then.

zinkz.7045:

The only strawman is your permastab nonsense, the reality was even with just two guards in a party (let’s pretend melee blobs didn’t exist or commanders never stacked their party with guards) you had stab pretty much whenever you actually needed it.

Now, how is that for comical effect?

“There is no one complaining about permastab but stab was always there when needed”.

Also, are you suggesting that Guardians are still not the staple of a command party, a commander’s preferred class or one of the most widely used and important classes even in boring normative pirateship tactics? They are. The only thing that has changed is that several melee builds have become nigh redundant while common tactics today does not really do a better job at inviting off-meta approaches when squads are evenly matched. Unconventional builds only tend to be appreciated when you can be effective with them and ineffective builds are only really successful when you outnumber an opponent. Whatever success one has then comes from that imbalance rather than a healthier tactical climate. If a balanced melee-range bomb spread, with slight issues of availability for focus classes, was “imbalanced faceroll”, then having only ranged bombs hardly sounds like an improvement. Seeding stability in your squads is arguably more important now.

zinkz.7045:

As for the laughable boon rip, half the skills that rip boons in this game are unusable in large scale PvP (thief sword, mesmer rip on shatter, etc), the “main” AOE boon rip skill used (well of corruption) was a joke, because stability was last in order to be boon stripped, when most melee were going around with 4-7 boons permanently on them to cover stab, and between at least two guards and a warrior could reapply new cover boons so often it was ridiculous.

Stability was first to be ripped on focus skills and last to be ripped on AoE skills. That was a conscious design decision. It worked as intended and it worked well.

It allowed for havoc groups to quickly snap stability but not for it to be punitive on a broad scale. Instead, broad use implied to take stability from opponents when, as you said, they actually needed it. One was focused, one was broad. Focused more applicable and broad sparse. Stating that focus rip is ineffective in large scale is like stating that focus damage is ineffective in large scale and I presume most havoc groups would disagree with you, then as much as now. For someone who dislikes “facerolling” you seem to find many rather active roles laughable.

Similarily, saying that rip wells didn’t work then is like saying damage wells do not work now because the first tick of a single well does not instantly kill a player, but has to tick through the hitpoints or be timed well enough to stack or combine with other skills.

A well-timed combination of multiple wells along with rip-burst combos from an assist-bomb was usually very effective at taking stability away from players when they needed it the most and as such producing successful bomb-control from the group that managed their cooldowns the best, rather than having the most to spend.

The argument still rests on the principle that free movement should be the norm and restricted movement an exception. It is not meant to be easy to apply fight-decisive control as fights are supposed to be won in alternative ways too: through havoc, pushing backlines or surprising free-moving players. I’m not saying the old climate couldn’t be improved upon, I’m saying that the current climate is worse.