Guild Wars 2

.. is the lack of balance and the power creep – it’s no fun to die to players that are carried by their builds. Or, as a matter of fact, play these builds and tap your own shoulder for no reason at all.
Yesterday’s balance patch was your (anet) chance to get this game back on track and to save wvw – you failed.
It’s really frustrating to play GW2 since June/HoT last year – and I don’t know if it really makes sense to create a game that’s frustrating.
You can add portable cannons, server linking whatever, it won’t change the main reason why people are leaving.

(edit: spelling)

People play WvW because of its PvP element. Anet fail to treat it as a PvP mode. People leave. Anet are baffled.

Today I got hit for 9020 damage by a ranged auto-attack. That was fun. Since this patch failed to do anything positive for WvW, I’ll be taking an extended break from the game. Bye.

wvw has gone down hill sense the release of the game … I can leave for a few years and there is the same conversations going on lol…

I am not even going to try to reinstall to check out how things have been going on lol

caveman.5840:

wvw has gone down hill sense the release of the game … I can leave for a few years and there is the same conversations going on lol…

I am not even going to try to reinstall to check out how things have been going on lol

Someone had the nerve in another thread to say “I’m not voting for wvw development” as if it was ever happening. OOOO you are so scary lol

In WvW players are carried more by doing whatever it takes to outnumber their opponents, be it 2v1, 5v2, Zergv5, etc.

roamzero.9486:

In WvW players are carried more by doing whatever it takes to outnumber their opponents, be it 2v1, 5v2, Zergv5, etc.

Not really, warriors and scrappers are fine on their own. You have a point though. And even that wasn’t as bad around one year ago. Being outnumbered didn’t mean an automatic loss back then, be it 1 vs 2 or 15 vs 25. (although stability was pretty bad, yes).

WvW has always had meta builds many of which were ridiculously OP.

Prior to HoT nearly every roaming build had stopped because the PU mesmer was utterly dominating 1v1 and were incredibly slippery. Prior to the trait changes, thieves rolled over pretty much every build and could clock near 20k on light to medium armored players out of nowhere.

Jana.6831:

roamzero.9486:

In WvW players are carried more by doing whatever it takes to outnumber their opponents, be it 2v1, 5v2, Zergv5, etc.

Not really, warriors and scrappers are fine on their own. You have a point though. And even that wasn’t as bad around one year ago. Being outnumbered didn’t mean an automatic loss back then, be it 1 vs 2 or 15 vs 25. (although stability was pretty bad, yes).

It doesn’t necessarily mean an automatic loss now considering most players in zergs don’t know how to fight that well anymore.

But I think the zerg meta won’t change unless ANet addresses it directly. There is no incentive to not zerg. You get the exact same rewards for rolling over everything as an 80+ person group as you do if you actually try and accomplish the same thing with a group of 3 or 4 players. Without any reason to not zerg up (read rewards, because we know what gaming communities are like) people will always take the easy way.

The only thing ANet can do is to encourage not zerging up by offering an incentive to run in smaller groups.

OriOri.8724:

Jana.6831:

roamzero.9486:

In WvW players are carried more by doing whatever it takes to outnumber their opponents, be it 2v1, 5v2, Zergv5, etc.

Not really, warriors and scrappers are fine on their own. You have a point though. And even that wasn’t as bad around one year ago. Being outnumbered didn’t mean an automatic loss back then, be it 1 vs 2 or 15 vs 25. (although stability was pretty bad, yes).

It doesn’t necessarily mean an automatic loss now considering most players in zergs don’t know how to fight that well anymore.

But I think the zerg meta won’t change unless ANet addresses it directly. There is no incentive to not zerg. You get the exact same rewards for rolling over everything as an 80+ person group as you do if you actually try and accomplish the same thing with a group of 3 or 4 players. Without any reason to not zerg up (read rewards, because we know what gaming communities are like) people will always take the easy way.

The only thing ANet can do is to encourage not zerging up by offering an incentive to run in smaller groups.

No, not anymore since they reverted stability partly back – but my main point was actually class balance which is important for large scale balance as well.

Right?
Reading through the patch notes I noticed nothing had really changed (except for the ele’s) and thought to myself…wow, how long til the next one again?

But that house in ebg now o.O … I hear that tenant has some cookies buried deep inside the building.

Akkeros.1675:

Right?
Reading through the patch notes I noticed nothing had really changed (except for the ele’s) and thought to myself…wow, how long til the next one again?

4 months – expect another powercreep.

Hexinx.1872:

But that house in ebg now o.O … I hear that tenant has some cookies buried deep inside the building.

as silly as that is…it actually probably took the most time to do (wvw-wise) in the patch. I’m guessing 6-9 minutes?

OriOri.8724:

Jana.6831:

roamzero.9486:

In WvW players are carried more by doing whatever it takes to outnumber their opponents, be it 2v1, 5v2, Zergv5, etc.

Not really, warriors and scrappers are fine on their own. You have a point though. And even that wasn’t as bad around one year ago. Being outnumbered didn’t mean an automatic loss back then, be it 1 vs 2 or 15 vs 25. (although stability was pretty bad, yes).

It doesn’t necessarily mean an automatic loss now considering most players in zergs don’t know how to fight that well anymore.

But I think the zerg meta won’t change unless ANet addresses it directly. There is no incentive to not zerg. You get the exact same rewards for rolling over everything as an 80+ person group as you do if you actually try and accomplish the same thing with a group of 3 or 4 players. Without any reason to not zerg up (read rewards, because we know what gaming communities are like) people will always take the easy way.

The only thing ANet can do is to encourage not zerging up by offering an incentive to run in smaller groups.

Then those people will either quit or play PvE. I think it’s hardly about incentive at this point but more about safety. Apart from the people who just want big fights, the power creep is exposed quite harshly in smaller engagements and I don’t think most of the players left want to deal with that. The combat is getting fairly bad imo.

Straegen.2938:

WvW has always had meta builds many of which were ridiculously OP.

Prior to HoT nearly every roaming build had stopped because the PU mesmer was utterly dominating 1v1 and were incredibly slippery. Prior to the trait changes, thieves rolled over pretty much every build and could clock near 20k on light to medium armored players out of nowhere.

Didn’t see that earlier.
Only ones I had troubles with were: D/D cele eles, Engineers before their elite was nerfed (oh my), some very good medi guards and ironically thieves since the dragon bash pvp event thingy in 2015 (the patch changed the way my D/D thief works and he now misses more often than he hits, especially thieves).
That alone was a mess, yes, but the game as it is now leaves you very little option as what class and build you can use – and that is boring. Solo roaming is lethal because you’ve got no chance if you’re outnumbered.
And: I’ve been a D/D solo roamer, valk/zerker with runes of strength – I never ran signets, I was running 06620 – my backstabs with 25 stacks ofbloodlust were around: 6-7 against heavy, 7-8 against medium, 9-10 against light. I know that with signets higher numbers were possible but speaking of what I was hit with: that was the absolute exception – in fact I haven’t been one shotted in wvw since the ferocity patch (even before not as I was running soldier’s back then).
A lot of good people of my server left and most left because the combat is messed up.

Akkeros.1675:

Hexinx.1872:

But that house in ebg now o.O … I hear that tenant has some cookies buried deep inside the building.

as silly as that is…it actually probably took the most time to do (wvw-wise) in the patch. I’m guessing 6-9 minutes?

That gave me a good laugh.

OP hits the nail on the head, combat has stopped being fun and there is no indication that fun is even “on the table” anymore, combatwise. Looking at how things are developing it seems fun has a completely different definition in whatever dictionary anet is using.

Very good post OP. I agree wholeheartedly. In my opinion, the combat has always been the game’s major selling point. It took a big hit on June 23rd 2015. Too many merges, too much power creep. It got a lot worse with HoT.

The outlines of this once great system are still there, but playing and fighting the new specialisations feels obnoxious at best. They bring too much to the table, both in offence and defence. Patience, careful use of cool downs and game knowledge aren’t rewarded anymore. Uninteresting game mechanics (evades, stealth, blocks, immunities, ludicrously low cool downs, spam) are the new deciding factor.

Jana.6831:

.. is the lack of balance and the power creep – it’s no fun to die to players that are carried by their builds.
(edit: spelling)

This..is precisely the reason. The balance was never right. We saw classes going OP to Trash and the other way all over the last 3 years or so. Ambitious attempts to add elements of fun have almost always gone bad. May it be introduction of runes (e.g. perplexity) or new specialisations. HoT was the starting point for the demise.

The game is old enough be carried on by gimmicks and grinding. Add some substance and we might take it seriously.

People wants to PVP in WvW, as it looks like an Open PVP mode with sieges. Ignoring WvW as a part of the PvP-oriented balance is what is killing WvW…

And now that ANET is trying to balance Raids and SPvP, WvW is left alone with its stupid polls, and is bleeding.

ANET should merge PvP and WvW balance, but also work on stupid op stats combinations and consumables that increase/allows cheesy builds/combinations, like:
1) Condition bunkers
2) Boon stacking perma-everything
3) Power glass cannons doing too much damage

In my opinion, WvW balance should start from this…

gennyt.3428:

OriOri.8724:

Jana.6831:

roamzero.9486:

In WvW players are carried more by doing whatever it takes to outnumber their opponents, be it 2v1, 5v2, Zergv5, etc.

Not really, warriors and scrappers are fine on their own. You have a point though. And even that wasn’t as bad around one year ago. Being outnumbered didn’t mean an automatic loss back then, be it 1 vs 2 or 15 vs 25. (although stability was pretty bad, yes).

It doesn’t necessarily mean an automatic loss now considering most players in zergs don’t know how to fight that well anymore.

But I think the zerg meta won’t change unless ANet addresses it directly. There is no incentive to not zerg. You get the exact same rewards for rolling over everything as an 80+ person group as you do if you actually try and accomplish the same thing with a group of 3 or 4 players. Without any reason to not zerg up (read rewards, because we know what gaming communities are like) people will always take the easy way.

The only thing ANet can do is to encourage not zerging up by offering an incentive to run in smaller groups.

Then those people will either quit or play PvE. I think it’s hardly about incentive at this point but more about safety. Apart from the people who just want big fights, the power creep is exposed quite harshly in smaller engagements and I don’t think most of the players left want to deal with that. The combat is getting fairly bad imo.

The powercreep is more obvious with larger groups, not with smaller groups. In smaller groups it comes down to player skill, not which group has more of the “better” classes in it. Its small group fights where a skilled players can outplay up to 4 other players who just aren’t as good as they are. Except for cheese builds, 1v1 is still really enjoyable in WvW

OriOri.8724:

Except for cheese builds, 1v1 is still really enjoyable in WvW

I disagree with that: I can get boons, heal etc. in blobs, I’m lucky if I’m getting them in small scale. (ETA: blobs are in fact more balanced because of this as in small scale you have to be lucky to have the right people around to get the “same” boons as your opponents – I hope that makes sense).
1 vs 1 isn’t enjoyable anymore because all hot builds are basically the old D/D cele eles – you are saved by your build, no matter how much and often you kitten up.
I tried scrapper for a bit (all my other characters aren’t elites, even my revenant isn’t) and passively killed people and had no idea how I even did that. It is boring and everything else but elites just isn’t viable.
We were a few ganking some others outside of SM yesterday and I downed a ranger, thanks to the newest implementation of a cooldown when missing an attack in stealth I was unable to stomp him, escaped his aoe with 50 HP and when I turned around he was standing and at 80% health – oh what fun! The heavy classes can all go full zerker because they’re saved by their traits – they hit me way harder than I can hit them, yet have more than twice my health and armor.

ETA²: And I get that to people running elites this might seem balanced, but ask youself how many times you’re saved by your passives.

@ OriOri

That’s the thing, the builds in rotation are arguably cheesy. Small fights now are mostly full on condi|boon stacking (group comp does matter, big time). Throw in all the block, block, evade, evade, evade while doing damage, immune, immune, passive traits, passive heal, random 16k backstab, 10k Vaults, 5k Herald hammer autos from range, some guy rolling his face across the keyboard in Reaper shroud and you’re probably going to have annoyed players.

What I’m saying is, that even small fights have become less about skill because builds are carrying harder as they require less player involvement and judgment calls and are quite spammy. Vulnerability affecting condition damage totally makes sense because we all know how much toughness and armor helped with conditions before. The combat system is now riddled with little logical gems like these and they aren’t so apparent in bigger fights.

Also 1v1s for me are a rarity and I generally don’t like standing around dueling for more than 15 mins.

Edit: Spelling and grammar

There will always be meta builds but it does seem the disparity between strong meta builds and average ones are at a near impasse. There are just so many builds now that I completely avoid because I know they are heavy on passive defense and/or AoE spam.

vana.5467:

People play WvW because of its PvP element. Anet fail to treat it as a PvP mode. People leave. Anet are baffled.

Today I got hit for 9020 damage by a ranged auto-attack. That was fun. Since this patch failed to do anything positive for WvW, I’ll be taking an extended break from the game. Bye.

If you’re pure glass getting hit by pure glass, you do take a lot of damage. That’s how the game has been designed. You’ll have a better time building more toughness than complaining about changes that may or may not come.

With merged servers, there’s plenty of WvW population to keep the game active.

My biggest frustration with WvW updates is that they still haven’t fixed the position of that stupid reward track button over the minimap. It overlaps with the pop-up chest. Very not cool.

Jana.6831:

OriOri.8724:

Jana.6831:

roamzero.9486:

In WvW players are carried more by doing whatever it takes to outnumber their opponents, be it 2v1, 5v2, Zergv5, etc.

Not really, warriors and scrappers are fine on their own. You have a point though. And even that wasn’t as bad around one year ago. Being outnumbered didn’t mean an automatic loss back then, be it 1 vs 2 or 15 vs 25. (although stability was pretty bad, yes).

It doesn’t necessarily mean an automatic loss now considering most players in zergs don’t know how to fight that well anymore.

But I think the zerg meta won’t change unless ANet addresses it directly. There is no incentive to not zerg. You get the exact same rewards for rolling over everything as an 80+ person group as you do if you actually try and accomplish the same thing with a group of 3 or 4 players. Without any reason to not zerg up (read rewards, because we know what gaming communities are like) people will always take the easy way.

The only thing ANet can do is to encourage not zerging up by offering an incentive to run in smaller groups.

No, not anymore since they reverted stability partly back – but my main point was actually class balance which is important for large scale balance as well.

He has a point actually but it does depend who/what you’re fighting. A while ago some of our much more experienced guild members were on and we had a 7-10 player squad going with roaming builds but mainly looking to help the main blue tag and ninja paper things while Angry Rock and DL blob up.

We pushed into the back of what I can only assume was their pug blobs and wiped them with a group 3 times less than them because they were too busy doing PvD to notice or care about us. Meanwhile the blue tag was messing around in the keep trying to get people to stack on him. By the time he pushed out they were all dead.

If it was a more experienced guild raid we wouldn’t have killed them, maybe even died but not too likely.

Class balance atm stinks though and every class has it’s stupid stuff even thief.

apharma.3741:

He has a point actually but it does depend who/what you’re fighting
…..
Class balance atm stinks though and every class has it’s stupid stuff even thief.

Who has a point? I’m confused – you do know that I daggerstorm into groups of 15 alone and survive, right? It depends on when I’m doing this and to whom I’m doing it. (No, they’re not downed but I can only do it when they don’t expect it).

Yes, every class has got some OP stuff and everything of this needs to be gone.
I really should consider getting a psychological degree to get to the root of the problem people have with thieves

The other day:
X: “To all running thieves: Can you please uninstall?”
Me: “Can I stay if I walk?”
X: “NO!!!!”

Then I was watching a fight against a thief: The very same guy and 5 of us against him. He would’ve been very stupid to stay BUT OH NO HE RAN HE NEEDS TO UNINSTALL!!

vana.5467:

People play WvW because of its PvP element. Anet fail to treat it as a PvP mode. People leave. Anet are baffled.

Today I got hit for 9020 damage by a ranged auto-attack. That was fun. Since this patch failed to do anything positive for WvW, I’ll be taking an extended break from the game. Bye.

Im sorry but, it doesnt make sense, what was wrong with that? If you dont want to take a high damage, dont build a glass cannon build.

I once hit a thief with 16k Gunflame.