Guild Wars 2

“This is a very old tactic. It goes as far back as Shadowbane MMO (2003).”

Kodiack is right.

Bulwark stack.

We didn’t have this issue in DAOC… know why?

Because DAOC didn’t suck..

if it’s not a bug it’s not an exploit to begin with…

It’s like zun tzu 101 to use your terrain, were peeps expecting everyone to file 4×4 and take volley shots till one side runs out of players?

Yorkie i didnt say it would i said thats just one idea better then making aoe hitting unlimited targets. Caping warrior heals to 5 people is another idea thats also better then unlimited aoe….

its actually the aoe healing that needs to be nerfed, not this tactic. i watched a stacking group bathe in the burning oil no problem. you have to realize that even if aoe hit everyone, those people are healing for like 3-4k a second. they make no effort to avoid cannonfire or aoes, because the heals are too strong. i dropped wall of relfection right on top of them, and the amount of damage they were doing to themselves was absolutely obscene. tens of thousands of damage, probably over 100k by the time the wall ended. they made no effort to move or stop firing. they just tunnelvision turret as a little clump because theyre invincible with that much healing.

guess ill just have to start being a dbag and dropping sanctuaries right on top of them. its really sad what t1 has become. so much trash.

This is the future of World vs World

It’s fn stupid and needs to be nerfed asap. I say get rid of portals and stealth period they seems to cause the most problems with exploits anyway.

This is how the meta-game evolves. Someone will find a very good anti-stack tactic, and then we’ll have to find a good anti-anti-stack tactic, and so on. Removing the interesting mechanics from the game won’t solve anything; it will just make everything bland and boring.

necromancer? or engineer with bomb kit should be able to eat stacking alive

Not an exploit, just another thing that wasn’t well thought out before implementation.

Aoes shouldn’t have limits and neither should condition stacks. Sadly, when trying to decide “how do we fix this” it’s the nerf bat that always comes out first.

Why shouldn’t aoe’s be unlimited? It’s stupid that you can only hit 5 targets at a time. This would allow smaller groups to actually have a chance at killing the zerg more often which would promote more strategy and team play.

If it turned out that thieves aoe need to be turned down a little bit so be it. It’s already a pretty ridiculous move as it is. Allow the thief to be interrupted, or tone down the damage.

Having a cap on aoe’s is stupid imo.

If they remove the aoe limits it would only encourage people to heavily stack “berserker” aoes on doors / pathways / chokepoints. This would enable a gang of 5-10 to COMPLETELY shut off narrow passageways.

A good berserker engineer crit volley does 3k to toughness spec’d players and 4.5k to everyone else. Elementalist? Even larger aoe at 2k-4k per ‘tick’. What the average lie of a player? 20k? With vitality you can push to 30k. This means the average player will get instant popped by a single volley from 8 engineers/elementalists. Or, a toughness/vit specc’d character popped by around 10-12 of these berserker players.

No, removing aoe limits is not the answer. It would cause WAY more problems than it fixes.

Siege weaponry, on the other hand, should NOT have a limit to the number of players it can affect. I’m not too sure on the current status of siege gear.

I hear some reports there are limits and others that there are no limits.

emoleas.4309:

Siege weaponry, on the other hand, should NOT have a limit to the number of players it can affect. I’m not too sure on the current status of siege gear.

I hear some reports there are limits and others that there are no limits.

There’s no limit on siege. Also, I can’t think of too many instances where my grenades would actually even hit more than 5 players outside of these ridiculous stacks. The radius isn’t that large. Increasing the aoe cap would rarely, if ever change how much damage I’m putting out. Two dodge rolls can get almost anyone through a chokepoint, then add on class defenses and you can push through even in these situations. The only people that die in those heavy aoe chokepoints are the people who just hold down “w” and soak all the damage.

there’s nothing wrong with stacking, it’s a PvP grouping tactic, that’s all.
it’s been used in older games many years ago.
with mesmers ports it’s very effective, especially against the poor rendering flaw this game has.

Joined a good stacking team
Saw it work
Saw it being beat too

Has its uses, isn’t unbeatable.

Exploit? No.
Cheap? Maybe.

Plenty of other somewhat underhanded tactics, which we all see though, but would make W3 dull if they weren’t there.
Examples being, hitting through doors with aoe, cata behind doors, siege on hard to reach spots, portals, portals, portals (multiple tactics possible with them), thieves abusing rendering, zergs abusing rendering.

Seen all of this done on any server we faced (as long as they were fighting)

All these surprise/new/different choices of tactics allow for much more colorful fights that can turn out completely different than you expect.

If it’s not a hack and everyone can use it, it’s free game.
And if it’s a huge issue then ArenaNet should get their hands out of their behind and fix it.

It’s abusing the infinite target healing of Warrior shouts, an obvious bug. It would not work, or be much less effective, if this was fixed.

emoleas.4309:

If they remove the aoe limits it would only encourage people to heavily stack “berserker” aoes on doors / pathways / chokepoints. This would enable a gang of 5-10 to COMPLETELY shut off narrow passageways.

A good berserker engineer crit volley does 3k to toughness spec’d players and 4.5k to everyone else. Elementalist? Even larger aoe at 2k-4k per ‘tick’. What the average lie of a player? 20k? With vitality you can push to 30k. This means the average player will get instant popped by a single volley from 8 engineers/elementalists. Or, a toughness/vit specc’d character popped by around 10-12 of these berserker players.

No, removing aoe limits is not the answer. It would cause WAY more problems than it fixes.

As the poster below you said, I disagree. If you can’t push past 5-10 people when you have more than them, then that’s a player issue not a mechanics issue. You can dodge / roll, teleport, your way through and smash them. Blink a mesmer through and portal, or whatever.

My biggest issue with aoe limit is that it severely hinders small groups vs. large group battles -especially- because of the downed state. It wouldn’t be so bad if you could pick people off, but with the downed state people are right back up in the fight even though you down like 4 people. So a bigger sized group gets even more of an advantage.

Personally I’d love to see either the aoe cap removed, or the downed state removed in pvp.

Guess I am one only people here who has played other MMOs; majority have no cap on AoE. Staying in AoE in those games is generally a really really bad idea. You WILL die fast if you do.

But here in GW2, AoE is best countered by getting everyone to stand in it. That is wrong in my mind. AoE should be feared and not brushed off like it is now. Like to point out that other MMOs don’t have dodges which can negate dmg all together. Drop 40 players of AoE in one area and I can pretty much dodge 2x and come out totally unscaythed.

Yes siege can counter it, but zerg ball can just move out of range/LoS it easily enough. That’s if you have the supply to even build them in a spot where they can actually hit stuff and not get countered by AoE/enemy siege. On that note, it also seems lame that the only way to counter this is by spending gold vs people who spent none. Make sense? Not to me.

Imo, baby steps: raise AoE cap on certain abilities to 8 at the very least then see what happens.

As to mesmer ports: that needs a limit period. I would suggest 10 per port. Can still do port bombs but it will require multiple mesmers to coordinate if moving a zerg. Right now you only need one. This should not be a problem for all those ‘pro’ players out there saying it’s fine anyways, right? RIGHT?!!

Stacking doesn’t mean you can just spam autoattack. This is what darkhaven tried to do to us and why they failed when they did.

It doesn’t take considerably more skill to play from outside the stack than inside. You guys make it sound like every decision when you’re standing on your own patch of pixels is a stroke of genius that resulted from constant deliberation. Aren’t a lot of you just spamming your aoe skills as soon as the cd clears. point and click not exactly chess -__-

This is just part of the evolution of metagame, it happens in every competitive game. Follow starcraft for a while and see how people learn to adapt to supposed undefeatable combinations of units “deathballs”
When your base is under attack by a greater force, it’s not gg. You hang back until you can get enough of the right units, you’ll lose buildings in the meantime, it’s gonna look bad but you wait patiently and then push out when you can beat them back. When you’re facing greater forces in the field you work on position, you don’t run directly into them because it’s honourable.

Inability to deal with a stack and to cry exploits just shows how much you lack in wvw. It isn’t just 2 walls of death coming in to compare dps. It’s not about the individual. Intel and coordination are key. I don’t claim to be a maven of wvw but I’m not gonna cry about anything that happens either.

Due to the inflammatory tone of this thread, it will be closed. Please keep in mind that if you want to discuss issues on our forums, you have to do it in a constructive way.