Guild Wars 2

Hey all, the purpose of this thread is mainly to discuss the current meta for organized guild gvg/raiding and how I feel Anet should go with creating a balanced wvw meta.

For those of you who don’t know what the perma-push meta is, it is essentially full frontline groups taking advantage of damage reduction, resistance and boon duration from revenant.

The combination of durability runes and revenant basically can make a group immune to all soft cc for most of a fight. Top that off with perma-protection, ele heals and longer stab uptime, you have groups that can roll over you while outsustaining.

I dont want to say this meta is op or broken, but it does leave little else for viable comps. Its pretty evident with the almost requirment for durabilty runes and revenant in any serious frontline.

For one, I think the main culprit is resistance. It leaves groups with little to no stopping power against pushes. I think anet should consider changing resistance to -50% effectiveness on damaging conditions and -50% duration on everything else. Its pretty far-fetched, but I think nessessary in all game modes.

Something more realistic would be to nerf durabilty runes so protection, resistance and regen no longer applies to allies. I think this would be the easiest and most effective way of reducing resistance and protection uptime, and give other comps a fairer chance in this meta.

thoughts?

I am surprised the meta doesn’t kill itself. I have all the armor/runes but never use them….that style of play is just too boring for me

To be honest they could make resistance only affect damaging conditions and then rebalance skills that give resistance to take into account this new vulnerability.

For example berserker stance might become 40s CD.
Mallyx might get a boost to self resistance duration and the heal removes debilitating conditions.
Adjust temporal enchanter back to 3s resistance and superspeed.
Guardian conversion remains the same and durability doesn’t need a buff.

There’s so much stuff to get rid of or reduce soft CC duration that resistance really doesn’t need to affect those conditions too.

I miss “HAMMAH-STUN!!!” meta… oh well…

FrownyClown.8402:

Something more realistic would be to nerf durabilty runes so protection, resistance and regen no longer applies to allies. I think this would be the easiest and most effective way of reducing resistance and protection uptime, and give other comps a fairer chance in this meta.

thoughts?

For GvGs it’s actually mercy runes that see more effective use. Since everyone is already balled up as 15, and when a friendly goes down they come back up instantly so bombing on them has less effect. It essentially drags out the combat of the GvG giving even more sustain. The boons provided by durability runes are probably already given/spammed by other classes.

As you say with the lack of viable comps, the gvg scene has seen the loss of backline and pick teams. This is in part of the infinite sustain frontline meta, and small guild hall arenas.

If everyone went vanilla classes for gvg, you wouldn’t probably see this meta.

Chinchilla.1785:

FrownyClown.8402:

Something more realistic would be to nerf durabilty runes so protection, resistance and regen no longer applies to allies. I think this would be the easiest and most effective way of reducing resistance and protection uptime, and give other comps a fairer chance in this meta.

thoughts?

For GvGs it’s actually mercy runes that see more effective use. Since everyone is already balled up as 15, and when a friendly goes down they come back up instantly so bombing on them has less effect. It essentially drags out the combat of the GvG giving even more sustain. The boons provided by durability runes are probably already given/spammed by other classes.

As you say with the lack of viable comps, the gvg scene has seen the loss of backline and pick teams. This is in part of the infinite sustain frontline meta, and small guild hall arenas.

If everyone went vanilla classes for gvg, you wouldn’t probably see this meta.

oh i didnt know that. i guess it proves changing durabilty wont change the meta

I prefer this meta over condi spam and pirate ship meta any day.

Honestly this meta is MUCH better then the old Pirate Ship meta. In fact it is very fun to play. And ultimately the group that does better rotations and better targeting wins.

If Anet nerf resistance, condition damage will be dominant in WvW. And NO WvW players wants that to happen. (except condi roamers I guess)

Resistance may need some re balancing. But finally the meta is shifting into something good. I don’t want to play chase the back line anymore.

Sure it’s good if you’re a melee and all you need to do is ball up and run around a train with perma protection and every boon on them. Not good for balance though, not when you have to load up a ton of boon corruption, which doesn’t even work when multiple boons get reapplied much faster and getting it spammed from skills, traits, runes.

Combat has gone to kitten ever since they decided to make it more about boons and conditions. I prefer the old days when all you had to worry about is stacking might and everything else had to be used at key times.

The dumb down boon meta. You get a boon! and you get a boon! and you get a boon! and you get a boon! everyone gets a boon!

Yeah i think a tone done of boon spam in general would be good. cant do it without hurting rev though. i feel the meta would be more fun if backline got its ability to slow up the frontline back.

Pirate ship meta killed this game, literally. Anything is better then that kitten show of a meta.

yeah pirate ship was worse for sure. Ideally id like a nice balance between the current meta and that one.

Honestly, they should probably make boon sharing easier.
Why?
If it was simple everyone would be doing it and thus it would negate the benefit of it.

Edit: not suggesting it’s hard now but for your average casual Pug it’s complicated.

Its very obvious the group that can use the rotations better has a advantage. That is a great place to be in. Its not like a new player can just into the ball and expect to survive just as well as the experienced player.

I am very interested from what perspective you are looking at this?

For GvG’s this meta is the best it has been by far.
Also it allows Guilds of 20 – 25 to destroy big groups of 40+ if well played. Finally Gw2 is back at a place where organized groups are rewarded vs larger numbers.

Also I want to add that pirate ship was literally the reason most WvW guilds left the game.

My percpective isnt really that the meta is bad or broken, its just too easy and eliminates other intersting styles of play. Keep in mind i am an ele so biased somewhat. Frontliners are probably enjoying it a ton now. I qm happy they can take part more so than before.

I play a ton of Ele, And the aurasharing frontline ele is MUCH more fun then a brain dead staff backline ele xD Just my opinion thou.

apharma.3741:

To be honest they could make resistance only affect damaging conditions and then rebalance skills that give resistance to take into account this new vulnerability.

For example berserker stance might become 40s CD.
Mallyx might get a boost to self resistance duration and the heal removes debilitating conditions.
Adjust temporal enchanter back to 3s resistance and superspeed.
Guardian conversion remains the same and durability doesn’t need a buff.

There’s so much stuff to get rid of or reduce soft CC duration that resistance really doesn’t need to affect those conditions too.

There are better solutions. For one, Resistance combines the effects of stability and Protection against condis. So right away there are balance issues here. Not only does it do the work of 2 other boons, but its better than protection is against power damage anyway.

So absolute least amount of balancing needed is for Resistance to be changed to only ignore 33% of damage from condis as well as ignore all CC effects from them. Really though Resistance needs to be split. It either needs to ignore all (much more balanced would be to just ignore 33-50%) of condi damage. Or it needs to provide immunity from all CC effects of condis (chill, cripple, slow, immobilize, etc…). But it shouldn’t be doing both. And when ANet does this they should introduce a new boon that does the other part. Then they can balance skills that give resistance around either ignoring condi damage or condi CC effects. But 1 boon should not be able to do both, especially if it can ignore 100% of condi damage.

It’s all fine and good if you don’t mind running a guard, necro or ele. Maybe the odd rev or mes. From my perspective, the meta is too narrow though. Needs to be a way to include the other classes. I’m tired of running a melee build and getting stuck with 8 thieves in a pick squad while a herd of guards get boon stacked and 5,000 stacks of stab just running through stuff.

Came to the conclusion that’s it’s just not worth it. If im in a group big enough to organize the squad then ill relog guard/ele/necro or find something else to do.

To me, the game in general has too few boon strips of all sorts, and they are ineffective vs boon generation due to boon spam.

In addition, there are too many abilities now which are not considered boons, thus can not be stripped, but should be.

altiera.6304:

Also it allows Guilds of 20 – 25 to destroy big groups of 40+ if well played. Finally Gw2 is back at a place where organized groups are rewarded vs larger numbers.

Pfft, real gvg guilds never needed to abuse boons in order to beat larger groups, it was about using the right skills at the right time and positioning, this is basically a crutch for those groups that already have the advantage in being organized over pugs, and now they get to run through all the aoe’s and cc’s they want. The bigger the group the worse it gets.

And actual gvg fights, what are they now a snooze fest of going around in circles with a melee train until someone falls asleep and forgets to push a button? Best meta for gvg’s, meanwhile the gvg scene is pretty much dead.

Not that they shouldn’t take advantage of this, abuse it as much as you can. Anet doesn’t balance for wvw, when they do they tend to “fix” multiple things at once which swings the balance from one extreme to the other. Pirate meta sucked, all melee meta boon sharing sucks, would be nice for something in between, you know like the old days when you had to have a good mix of frontline to take the damage and backline to dps for you.

Tongku.5326:

To me, the game in general has too few boon strips of all sorts, and they are ineffective vs boon generation due to boon spam.

In addition, there are too many abilities now which are not considered boons, thus can not be stripped, but should be.

Yes, stealth should be a boon and revealed should be a condition.

Tongku.5326:

To me, the game in general has too few boon strips of all sorts, and they are ineffective vs boon generation due to boon spam.

In addition, there are too many abilities now which are not considered boons, thus can not be stripped, but should be.

This is correct IMO. Keep the gameplay more active by making boonstrip more prevalent rather than nerfing boons.

Make it so resistance, stability and protection cannot be shared/copied by mesmer signet.

Tongku.5326:

To me, the game in general has too few boon strips of all sorts, and they are ineffective vs boon generation due to boon spam.

In addition, there are too many abilities now which are not considered boons, thus can not be stripped, but should be.

Buffing boon strip is not a good solution. Survival has been made far too dependent on boons and this would only enforce hard-counters. You’ll end up in the same situation as stab 2.0 where people just explode with no warning.
They’ve thoroughly power crept themselves into a corner on this one, and outside of a some massive reworks, there isn’t a lot you can do to change the meta while keeping frontlines viable.

Personally, I enjoy this meta far more than the pirateship in blob/open-field fights, but find it extremely boring for organized 15s.

altiera.6304:

I play a ton of Ele, And the aurasharing frontline ele is MUCH more fun then a brain dead staff backline ele xD Just my opinion thou.

How can you call staff ele a brain dead class when it was requiring a really high amount of skill to be really good at, while tempest is just following a leader without even thinking.

What makes this meta a brain dead one is precisely the fact that there is no backline anymore, everyone is stacked up on the leader and if positionning was always such an important factor regarding the skill of a backline (staff eles, necros and focus party), it is now completely gone.

It is unfortunate but those boons allow frontlines to be really useful again, unless you want to revert to the days of pew pew pew?

SkyShroud.2865:

It is unfortunate but those boons allow frontlines to be really useful again, unless you want to revert to the days of pew pew pew?

frontline being useful again has no relation to boonshare meta at all

they became bad because of stab changes, then became good because of stab changes

boonshare is a separate thing that is hyper-buffing your frontline after they were made useful again

stab is also a boon u know? and also u have to account for the excessive amount of condi boosted since patches

Remember when devs use to communicate with their forums and collaborate with players? Days are long gone with these new age mmos/devs lol

SkyShroud.2865:

stab is also a boon u know? and also u have to account for the excessive amount of condi boosted since patches

uhh yes it is a boon, and that doesn’t relate to frontline’s decline and then resurgence

pirate ship meta was directly related to stability changes that made it really bad for pushing through anything.

Then anet buffed stab again with an ICD on how fast it can be removed, and instantly frontline was good again.

Stab being a boon doesn’t mean boonshare is why frontline was useful again. If you nerfed mes boonshare, frontline would still be useful compared to pirateship because of the stability changes.

boonshare is a completely seperate thing to the fall and rise of frontline’s relevance, and if mes boonshare was removed, frontline would still be very useful.

Indeed the current meta is extremely boring especially in 15v15 or 20v20 – just run on com tag and spam skills… But still it’s much better than recent pirate ship… I really miss old days, where you needed frontliners, backline and focus party. This comp was much more interesting to play and watch. But I really have no idea, how to change the current meta. Yeah – revenants’ dwarf, durability runes and mesmers’ boon copy+resistance are the key skills for current meta. Full boon share builds are really a kitten, but most guilds just do not play that comp and just do not want to gvg against others with that crap. You can only see some not much respected guilds on borderlands, who stack 2 mintues of all boons before they even leave the spawn… Nevertheless, I think, that improving boon strips is really a wrong direction – don’t pour salt on the wound.

Personally I think it all started with the power creep builds after HoT. GvG players just needed much more sustain. Now you just can not play any zerked backline or focus anymore, since half of the classes could one-shot you at 1200 range. This is the core issue imo… You need to increase survivability of all members, and then there is no need for backline, so all run a “ball formation” and spam sustain skills.

Perhaps now might be a good time for Anet to introduce some new combo fields built around boon removal, visibility, blocks, invulnerability strips, or other similar group strengths.

This could bring some much needed life to the back and mid line players and maybe provide some combos to largely under used weapon choices.

There are classes that have almost no place in the boon share meta. They float on the outside trying to stay away from the damage but have very little to offer in support either. The pew pew does very little damage, there are few ways to slow up or stop these groups and they get over run by the blob in the end.

Anyone that cares will log into another toon, rebuild to survive and comply, roam only, or simply suffer the deaths over and again. Usually they just run with the zerg until they get tired of dying and log out.

Tweaks are probably needed, but I can’t see how it would hurt to bring a bit more depth to the combat options outside of and in co-operation of the boon share meta from the other classes.

The boon strip option is barely viable. Boon application far exceeds the cool downs that the corrupt/boon strip players are hampered by and it requires specific targeting to be effective, whereas boon application is almost passive aside from the Mesmers that have a bit of work to do.

Plus, I do think that combo fields have been largely ignored from the developmental side. It was one of the key sell features of the game and is widely used in PvP, but stagnated by a lack of real diversity for the players to choose from.

My thoughts on this might be way off of course, but I would much rather see Anet add depth and options to the game to make other classes wanted instead of nerfing some of the current classes. These nerfs all too often end up taking the fun from one player base or class without increasing the fun for everyone else.

The current melee train style is still really easily countered. We’re getting similar complaints to when the “hammer train” was strong a couple years ago. It’s SOOO easy to dodge to the left or right of their push and kite them around with a well coordinated backline. That’s always been how you countered the melee train. Yes, it takes like 10 years to kill them, but it’s not impossible, and there are significant counter-play measures due to having somewhat low mobility.