Guild Wars 2

If you got no interest in a longer and more mechanical focused thread and discussion, then this is properly not the post for you ^^

limitation to characters this will be a 2-3parters:
p1.
WvW, anti-zerg and Downing mechanic etc.

So I want to note on some mechanics specificly talking about their effect in WvW. I am not sure if these effects was the intended once with the features introducing them but currently i will argue that a lot of mechanics are pushing specific Zerg gameplay over all others in WvW.

First the base concepts:
If you read the name and think “I know what it is, why it is and how it function just skip over the basic, it is for anyone who are in doubt of the meaning of the concepts”.
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TTK:
There is a simple balance formula which is known as TTK. It means time to kill, it is that the time it takes you to kill a person should equal the time it takes him to kill you given you both play optimally (In a balanced scenario TTK should be equal for all builds vs. all builds. If you do a Trinity scenario, the counter class will always have a high advantage and it goes cloth > heavy, heavy > medium, medium > Cloth, in which armour types beat which by default).
When you got a HUGE amount of skills it is generally done by giving different values of importance to each ability/skill that you give a class/character.
these abilities or attributes are normally set in 4 stages: movability (stealth, speed, soft CC), Dmg(DPS/BURST), Survivability (hard CC/Dmg mitigation). Which you set in each subject varies slightly (mostly on the CC part for where they should be depending on the use in the game).
with these you can insure on a per skill level how much power a single skill is allowed to add to the build (if 100dps is valued to the same as 15% speed increase/decrease, a skill would either do 100dps increase or 15% speed increase/decrease. These a random numbers, Just as an example of the usage, it is a spreadsheet balance setup which insures proper balance and easily auto balancing of Everything if one aspects turns out to have the wrong value for the power increase compared to the rest).

Anti-zerg mechanics:
is mechanics which punishes heavy zerging and forces groups to split up to survive easier. These are usually heavy AOE’s which means if you bunch up a lot everyone will die instead of a few, so you want to keep a reasonable amount of distance to each other to optimize survivability and keep numbers. It can also be heavy bonusses when outnumbered preventing you from wanting to engage much smaller groups (although this leads to a lot of other issues so it is a worse option and it never really prevent zerging due to lack of understanding or bonus amount).
Why is anti-zerg mechanic important? It lowers lag issues due to less people at the same spot. It rewards skillfull play on all area’s, strategic, tactical and personal skills, as it prevents numbers from being the main factor of a fight. It creates more clear overview of what is happening in a fight, by removing the heavy bloob clutter.
but most importantly it creates a Lot of good Comeback situations (so works as a comeback mechanic).

Comeback mechanics:
is a mechanic which allow a losing player to comeback into the game by outsmarting their opponent, not outplaying but outsmarting (using tactics and strategy to move the enemy into a position/situation where he can be heavily punished, which only happened because he didn’t/couldn’t forsee your “trick”).
this can be situations like “mass stealth backstapping”, manouvering enemies into chokes for heavy aoe, baiting them to clump up on a Tank for heavy CC+Dmg, etc.
it is situations which allows for the possibility of turning the fight around when it otherwise would have been impossible to do so.
Why are comeback mechanics important? Because without them it is a numbers game, biggest number wins and a machine will Always be better at number crunching, as well as it removing any suspense from the fighting since you can know who wins by the math from the start.

Basics done:

So to do a quick scenario as example of the discussion:
20 vs. 40.
the outnumbered is forced to kited back as in a straight up fight the limit of “maximum targets” of the skills means that you cannot rely on simply outplaying in a single encounter (as you will not have enough effective burst AOE as the limitation of target hits prevents this.)
as the smaller party kites back and both kill/lose people the pushing part will constantly be able to both finish downed people, revive dead once and almost instantly get up downed allies. This means as both sides “should” lose people, only the side with the least people actually does so (as everyone on the pushing side will be revived, helped up from downed state as their zerg pushes over, and everyone downed/killed from the kiting side will be finished/dead and can’t get revived by their allies, as the enemy zerg is running over them; even revive skills become useless because of this, and getting up from downed state give you roughly the same HP back as majority of revive skills will).

P2.

What this means is that Numbers of the fight functions as an exponential increasing powerspike and becomes the most important in the game.
it eliminates the danger of Heavy aoe’s such as meteor, etc. as enemies will maximum get hit once by running through them (often not at all), and the aoe healing of combo fields negates it completely (as these does not suffer from the same handicaps as skills).
it allows the already outnumbered Ratio of players to continually grow to the already outnumbering sides advantage.
it removes the possibility of outsmarting and outplaying the opponent (as no matter how badly you outplay them their numbers never diminish as reviving/helping downed up continues forever).

so what it does is created a gameplay where the Biggest Zerg will have a Huge advantage from the start, and as the fight goes on the number advantage will increase exponentially.

As I started out saying I am not sure this is intended. but as the only “Anti-Zerg” mechanic currently is Siege/anti-Siege equipment and there have been made protective equipment which prevents their effect. There really isn’t any true comeback mechanic due to the lack of anti-zerg mechanic on top of all the pro-zerg mechanics.

To run through pro-zerg mechanics:
1. Downing systems -> heavily fevour zerg play.
2. combo fields -> heavily favour zerg play (as the more people you got that can do it the more bonusses you will have for every encounter and the more permanently you can keep the bonusses).
3. Maximum Targets On Skills -> meaning you NEED those extra people to be able to hit enough of the enemy zerg, hard enough, to be able to Zone/pressure zergs. The biggest zerg will both counter everything coming to them, and hit a Far larger % of the enemy zerg with their skills.
4. SlowDown in combat mechanic -> as the kiting party will be constantly slowed down while laying suppression CC+dps to prevent the enemy from simply easymode overrunning them. While the enemy will constantly have people not in combat getting high speedboost to outmanouver and continually catch the kiting part while never having any handicap by the slowdown (as it will never be to their disadvantage).
5. Bruiser builds being extremely much stronger than other builds -> bruiser builds is made specificly to constantly charge in and do heavy damage, they TRULY shine when they are running people down as they can survive most surpression fire, are generally heavily protected from CC and Burst danger and do heavy damage on fleeing and CC’ed enemies.
6. Commander/group setup -> only commanders seems to be able to have the interface setup for easily leading a larger group, due to the involved things of being a commander it creates the issue of VERY few commanders on a map at a time, it almost looks like your only supposed to have 1 commander at a time which pushes one place, instead of Many commanders where fights then will happen in a lot of places at a time (which would push strategic gameplay of managing player resources to how many you need where etc.)
7. Auto-full healing out of combat -> outnumbered advantage will constantly be able to take advantage of this while the kiting side will never be able to do so. Meaning sustain is far less important for the once with more numbers and they can focus their builds on gaining more push power.
8. Lastly “the ease of escaping CC/dmg” -> as it is now there is TONS of CC breaking, cleansing, immunities, etc. which works all on ALL CC types. On top of the CC’s having very low durations and being primarily single target (everything but slows/wall effects). This makes it incredibly hard to lock anyone or anything down to punish them for bad tactical/personal play. This is as such not too bad at it creates longer fights, but combined with the aboves it heavily strengthens the already powerful Zerg synergy.

These are the heavily pushers of the “Pro-Zerg/Bloob” playstyle and with all these in mind and how heavily it is pushed I cannot help but wondering if “Zerg Playstyle” was the intended target of the game? To eliminated tactical, strategic, and personal skilled playstyles to much heavier promoted the Zerg-playstyle.
I can imagine this is done to avoid having to balance to much as in a big zerg it is nearly impossible to figure out where the balance issues are as it is all just a big cluster f’d. however it doesn’t remove or fix the issue at all, it simply just makes it impossible to distinguish and thereby impossible to fix.

p3.

So to add a few suggestions to WvW pvp design change which would combat the heavy Pro-Zerg:
1. Remove Downed mechanics and Ressurect without skill use from WvW. If you die and no one around you invested a skillslot to ress skills, then you will need to ress at obelisk.
2. Remove “Max targets” from all skills, and introduce a diminishing return effect (meaning if you are hit by the same skill several times in a row the effect of it becomes less and less. So first skill 100%, second skill 75%, third 50%, etc. numbers there is obviously not balanced at all, but that would take the Database of skills and a genetic algorithm to find the optimal balance diminishing of the skills)
3. Lower Slowdown in combat to ONLY effect you while you are taking damage or using skills (just set it to 1second of not engaging in combat before it counts as out of combat.)
4. Remove out of combat healing from WvW (having sustain from healing is a BIG part of strategic and tactical play. It’s a resource which should hold great value, also between fights).
5. Lowering the effectiveness/powerspiking of combo fields (the bonusses they can give now is incredibly strong to the point of gamebreaking, and they promoted extreme clumping up which pushes zerg-play).
6. Allowing everyone to Flag up as “raid parties”, so anyone in WvW can lead at least 10-20 players easily with proper interface making it easy for Randoms to follow whats going on.
a. Having commander bonusses hit your entire faction (only highest bonus apply. If you want to keep these bonusses that is. A flat stats bonus just because person X is on is kind of a none-productive mechanic imho).
7. Bruiser builds vs. everything else rebalancing according to TTK principle’s.
8. I don’t believe it is needed to touch CC/Escaped mechanisms once the proper TTK balance have been corrected as with that it should all equal out in a fair and balanced manner and with the changing of the heavy Zerg-focus mechanics it should not be needed to do so. Imo.
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So if you made it this far you are a persistant one and I thank you for your time and ask you:
What do you think and how do you feel about a Pro-Zerg setup instead of the alternatives? And do you agree with my view of it being a pro-zerg setup if not, why not?

Best regards
me

Thanks for putting in all the effort to type this out, but please try to condense this, and highlight important suggestions, so it’s easier to read.

Swagger.1459:

Thanks for putting in all the effort to type this out, but please try to condense this, and highlight important suggestions, so it’s easier to read.

Thank you for the constructive answer
will look it through a few more times and see if i can condense it in a way which still get the concept and massage but isn’t 4 pages of WoT

i find it hard to do because i don’t know how much i need to explain different concepts, reasoning etc. as the base knowledge for gamers differs so much when it comes to the mechanic and design part ^^

I tried to read all of this and just keep getting lost due to distractions(probably will not change anytime soon). Any chance you could just give the cliff notes? Or as Swagger asked condense it a bit?

Malerian.8435:

I tried to read all of this and just keep getting lost due to distractions(probably will not change anytime soon). Any chance you could just give the cliff notes? Or as Swagger asked condense it a bit?

Absolutely
The “water down version” here will only be stating cliff-note kind of thing with no deeper explanation of why or how it would change stuff (it’s in the text).

Colour code: can’t easily colour so Bold or italic instead
Overall idea, slightly more specifics. (italic only works for 1line at a time so, skip to bottom line after bold if more details isn’t needed/wanted).

Combat related mechanics in GW2 is made in a way that they are Rewarding zerg/bloob play so much that it is the only play that is reasonable to do (everything here is regarding to WvW pvp).
Personally I would like it to make anti-zerg mechanics more effective so to created more skirmish fighting, less clumping up, allow for effective comeback mechanics, and give more power to tactical/strategic/personal RL skill lvl.
Thoughts on whether or not you prefer Zerg-gameplay focus over the alternatives? Knowledge if Zerg-focus was truly the intend or an unforeseen by-product of the mechanics not being adjusted for WvW.

from here it is listing the mechanics which promotes the Zerg/Bloob focus currently and what I think would be a good way of fixing it:
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The mechanics which Rewards Zerg play right now:
1. Downing+resurrect systems. (biggest zerg never diminish player count, smallest lose players).
2. combo fields. (more players = more+logner lasting buffs+more engagements with buffs).
3. Maximum amount of Targets On Skills. (more players = more % of enemy zerg will be able to be hit)
4. SlowDown in combat mechanic (bigger vs small zerg = constantly players out-of-combat without penalty to run down).
5. Bruiser builds being extremely much stronger than other builds. (only 1 build type truly rules).
6. Commander/group setup. (preventing easy creation of multiple groups=multiple fighting of small group)
7. Auto-full healing out of combat. (bigger zerg = less need for healing skills to sustain the constant fighting)
8. too easy to escaped back to your Zerg’s protection (escaped/dmg mitigation vs CC/dmg mechanics).

Solutions:
1. Remove Downed mechanics and Ressurect without skill use from WvW.
2. Remove “Max targets” from all skills, and introduce a diminishing return effect to avoid 10 meteor 1hitting everything (diminish return might not be needed).
3. Lower the time which Slowdown last when no in/out dmg is done to 1sec before norm speed
4. Remove out of combat healing from WvW.
5. Lowering the effectiveness/powerspiking of combo fields.
6. Allowing everyone to Flag up as “raid parties”, just give them another colour icon. (also consider removing commander bonus or make them map wide=highest bonus apply)
7. Bruiser builds vs. everything else rebalancing according to TTK principle’s. (might want to read the TTK part of the p1, first post. I think every gamer should know TTK base concept/idea as it is good for our understanding of balance and design reasoning).
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Hope this made it a little less daunting to get through and that it gave a better overview of what I am trying to look at and here opinions on

Best regards from
Me
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I felt this was somewhat easy to read. Flows well and the summary in p3 basically says it all.

I think it’s a great idea and you explain well when you say why WvW is a numbers game. I think the diminishing returns on skills you mentioned in p3 #2 would be very hard to calculate and optimize, considering it would eliminate small scale groups who run multiple players of the same class. While it would promote having small scale comps that have a wide variety of classes (good thing), it may also discourage and punish players from playing what they want (bad thing). My tip to this suggestion would be to have it start diminishing after being affected by the same skill five times.

Having diminishing returns after 5x could mean that dps will be through the roof. 5 Necro well bombers would be kitten strong if 1 well can hit all targets in the area. Base health/armor of all players in WvW would probably have to increase to compensate for this proposed anti-zerg mechanic, but then this is have a massive impact on small scale.

Not sure how possible it would be to have player’s stats/skill change on the fly as they are joined by many players (zerg mechanics) and accompanied by less than 5 (small scale mechanics).

Probably one of the most outstanding problems of balancing WvW, there are too many players who value small scale and too many players that value large scale where it’s near impossible to balance for both parties to exist in the same instance. Think this is why people are calling for instanced 15v15 arenas, or open world toggle-able pvp, etc.

Arricson Krei.9560:

I felt this was somewhat easy to read. Flows well and the summary in p3 basically says it all.

I think it’s a great idea and you explain well when you say why WvW is a numbers game. I think the diminishing returns on skills you mentioned in p3 #2 would be very hard to calculate and optimize, considering it would eliminate small scale groups who run multiple players of the same class. While it would promote having small scale comps that have a wide variety of classes (good thing), it may also discourage and punish players from playing what they want (bad thing). My tip to this suggestion would be to have it start diminishing after being affected by the same skill five times.

Having diminishing returns after 5x could mean that dps will be through the roof. 5 Necro well bombers would be kitten strong if 1 well can hit all targets in the area. Base health/armor of all players in WvW would probably have to increase to compensate for this proposed anti-zerg mechanic, but then this is have a massive impact on small scale.

Not sure how possible it would be to have player’s stats/skill change on the fly as they are joined by many players (zerg mechanics) and accompanied by less than 5 (small scale mechanics).

Probably one of the most outstanding problems of balancing WvW, there are too many players who value small scale and too many players that value large scale where it’s near impossible to balance for both parties to exist in the same instance. Think this is why people are calling for instanced 15v15 arenas, or open world toggle-able pvp, etc.

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Tyvm for the nice words and the very constructive reply, and you are right the diminishing return solution is a bit iffy, so needed some more thought in it (which took a little time to get to a good solution hehe).

I do agree the diminishing return would be hard, especially when we are talking multiple of same classes as you explained very well.
I am not sure the diminishing return would even be needed though. The issue I see coming with not having it is actually on the “defensive skills” (do keep in mind offensively we want big zerg’s to be destroyed if you run in a big bloob instead of properly splitting up and fighting on multiple fronts) as imagine guardians chaining AOE dmg-immunity skills and making everyone under it immune to damage Forever, or “return damage skills” and suddenly you do 1 AOE and you instantly explode from hitting 50 people who all reflect 200 dmg :P

So the trick is to find a way to prevent the Defensive skills from getting completely out of hand when stacking them in this manner. A good way of doing this could ofc. Be to change their effects slightly so they are not Vastly more powerful than the offensive counterpart skills.
Say a guardian shield would only mitigated an 80% of incoming damage instead of 100% (and only highest mitigation will be in effect, so no stacking of DR (damage reduction)).
same with “reflect damage” skills, making them reflect a max 50 % of the skills damage to a single person (so if each skill reflect 15% dmg, then if you hit aoe which does a max of 15k to each target you will take max 7,5k damage in reflection, if there was more than 4 people getting hit when they had reflect damage on. And no more than 7.5k could be returned from that 1 skill use).

Such changes would be Far preferred to other solutions. However, it would mean changing the mechanics slightly for these type of skills. But it shouldn’t require noteworthy extra computations (no noticeable decrease in performance. However the ability to hit more targets with AOE’s might decrease performance slightly, but I think the splitting up zergs more, would easily make up for that).
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Btw: when trying to find solutions etc. it is always important we remember “it needs to be as simple as possible and cannot introduce new issues needed to be fixed. if a solution can already exist by slightly changing something existing it is likely the best solution”.
we always have to be careful to not try and fix complex problem by adding more complexity to it, or creating new problems which then need solutions which then adds complexity.

i think some of the balance problems in GW2 comes from trying to fix a problem by adding a system to fix it, then finding a problem with that system and adding another system to fix that, so forth and so on (looking at just damage sources and mitigation sources as example:

just with dots and dmg mitigation alone; we got So many dmg dots types, and So many mitigation types for the different once that it is Very complex to even figure it out. Which raises the question of "couldn’t we have gotten the same gameplay effect/experience with only 1-2dot types and only 1-2 dmg mitigation type? what specific gameplay experience is it that the extra complexity adds and is it worth the negatives?
(i want to do a post about Complexity layers at some point as to explain how each complexity lvl in the combat system adds exponentially amount of information you need to balance out, compute and remember. but that is a Major post in itself. but very interesting subject i think.)

best regards
Me

Nyx.6532:

this can be situations like “mass stealth backstapping”

Well there would be no point in stealthing, you’re gonna hear those clicky shoes a mile away when the enemy zerg comes backstapping like fancy sirs in their tophats and tuxedos.

Dawdler.8521:

Nyx.6532:

this can be situations like “mass stealth backstapping”

Well there would be no point in stealthing, you’re gonna hear those clicky shoes a mile away when the enemy zerg comes backstapping like fancy sirs in their tophats and tuxedos.

hehe yes and funny :P
my post was talking general example’s of the concept though ^^
if that was to be used in a specific game for it, it would require the movement in stealth to be silent in that game, at least on medium distance.

edit: and yes i actually didn’t know that you could hear people’s footsteps in the game, i rarely play without music in pvp so i haven’t notice it hehe.

I support the general idea of breaking up zergs, especially map blob size ones. But your proposed solutions are a mixed bag at best.

“1. Remove Downed mechanics and Ressurect without skill use from WvW.”

Makes the ability of a blob to kill people easier.

“2. Remove “Max targets” from all skills, and introduce a diminishing return effect to avoid 10 meteor 1hitting everything (diminish return might not be needed).”

Lag will go up due to more calculations, condis will be even worse. Zergs will be even stronger in that they can focus damage even more, no more 5-man cap protecting the smaller force, even if you get diminishing returns in.

“3. Lower the time which Slowdown last when no in/out dmg is done to 1sec before norm speed”

Again, making the zergs able to kill things quicker and more effectively.

“4. Remove out of combat healing from WvW.”

Promotes zerging since a zerg can heal quicker where as the out of combat people clouding around will need more time to heal.

“5. Lowering the effectiveness/powerspiking of combo fields.”

None of the better fighting guilds/groups rely too heavily on blasting fields terribly often any more, far more of their boons and what not come from composition and various traits, especially revs, guards, mesmers. Change to zergs would be minimal.

“6. Allowing everyone to Flag up as “raid parties”, just give them another colour icon. (also consider removing commander bonus or make them map wide=highest bonus apply)”

Can’t you just already tag up as a five man party and do that?

“7. Bruiser builds vs. everything else rebalancing according to TTK principle’s. (might want to read the TTK part of the p1, first post. I think every gamer should know TTK base concept/idea as it is good for our understanding of balance and design reasoning).”

Gear sets that allow you to be extremely tanky while still retaining high damage output need to go. Particularly trailblazers. I should not be able to dive into a zerg on my full trailblazers necro and have enemies explode around me.

You say some smart things, but I don’t think your suggestions pan out. Some won’t work for engine reasons (removing target cap) and others have mechanic problems such as Caliburn pointed out.

Rather than such drastic measures, I think you’ll have to be content with making smaller changes with the same goals in mind. Instead of rewriting the game from the ground up, make a few, small tweaks.

Nearly everything you can do to buff the little guy, buffs the zerg more. Golden rule of wvw.

The only way you can ever increase the max target limit is to remove all conditions, boons and their damage modifiers on all AoE skills.

I fail to see the problem with zergs. Numbers win? Well surprise, surprise, they most often did in real life too! It is certainly possible to outsmart/outmaneuver a larger opposing force, but (again, just like in real life) it is hard to do so. Like it should be.

I’ll be honest, I didn’t read it. But judging by the comments, here’s how I’m going to respond.

Point 1. Arena Net needs revenue.
One of the ways this is achieved is via transfer fees. Transfer fees will not be removed (as far as I’m concerned) because ANet needs money to support their game and to continue making content.

If near perfect balance were achieved in that each world is generally facing fightable numbers, transfers will decrease. I’m sure people would still continue to transfer for other reasons but regardless, it would put a significant dent in the income that transfer fees provide. This is because most players prefer to win/be on the winning server, as can be seen with bandwagoning.

Point 2. WvW = World versus World. It is by design, a large scale combat mode.
While it is true that many players do not enjoy the large scale aspect of WvW, that does not mean that they aren’t free to play it differently. There are many ways you can approach combat in WvW and you can see this with only a few minutes of exploring the maps.

Zerging is the most effective because it was designed to be. Objectives have become progressively more difficult to capture on a smaller scale because ANet wants to enforce that it should be a job for an army. This can be troublesome when the offending servers greatly outnumber you but that does not mean it is impossible. A little effort can go a long way, if you want something bad enough, all you need is planning and co-ordination.

Point 3. Everything you need, you have.
It’s easy to break up zergs and to make intelligent assaults with what we’re provided.
There’s siege, chokes, specific group compositions, squads, the ability to create multiple zergs with multiple objectives, etc. etc.

The heart of the problem is that most players don’t want to think. They want rewards and they want them fast. When rewards don’t come, they find some where else to go. Not everyone is like this, but a significant percentage are. And that’s why we often only see one giant blob with one simple mission: capture and kill.

Final point.
It’s great to make suggestions and to brainstorm ideas. There’s nothing wrong with that and perhaps ANet will consider the best ones. Still, it’s important to remember that not everything you want will come to you. What is important, is to enjoy what you have while you have it. Do you like WvW? Are you passionate about it? Great, keep doing that and keep having fun. Everyone finds entertainment differently. Respect that and it will be a lot easier to accept and understand why perfect balance, no matter how great or how small, is nothing more than a myth.

Few things power spikes would be nice to have but if you do go down that path you go back to the ranged meta. Right now every one is super tankly and do more dps though condis with some power spikes at mostly melee ranged. power spikes from ranged classes often comes out to slow to make it worth it and need to build too glassly to be viable in wvw. If you up this power spike though higher dmg or though stronger cc or split tools you push the game back to the full on ranged meta (i do not like the pirate ship name it realty dose not make logic to me).

When it comes to fields there skill a cap of 5 targets so if you blast a field 5 times with a group of 5 in the same pt your just applying the same effect 5 times to that pt. In some ways fields are more able to be small grouped aimed with a higher skill cap then the larger groups just kind of spaming effects.

That realy what this all comes down to is skill caps. If you have a group of 10 that realty good they should be able to beat bigger groups IF and only IF that bigger group is not as skilled. If the bigger group is just as skilled then the smaller group should lose.

If you make it so one class or one build type is made to destroy big groups then every one will go that build in both the zerg and small groups. So only a temp. fix.

i like your ideas, here are some of mine.

raising the cap on smaller cooldowns (even aa’s) to give room for a decreased cap on bigger cooldowns (like wells and soft cc) should give smaller more organized teams an edge.

as I stated in an earlier post, I think there should be duration/stack caps on boons and conditions (so its impossible to get 20 sec of chill or 20 sec of resistance). once the cap limit is reached the boon or condi counts down to 0 then futher application is possible (so if youre unorganized and spam everything you will get punished).

pulsing immob has to go.

all stunbreakers should provide 1 stack of stab for 1 sec.

group stab should be accessible to more classes.

lower max squad size.

make it so a defender cant be pulled off walls as a previous poster suggested. maybe give said defender on a wall a buff so they don’t get insta killed. big maybe.

an idea I just had is to limit the amount of siege a squad can throw (maybe 6 within 1 min? idk) and put a 10 min timer on anyone leaving the squad. it could force people to split up to capture objectives but might be a little extreme.

Im completely pro-zerg. By the way, the anti-zerg mechanic already exists is called Structured, Player versus Player.

WvW is one of the best Mass-combat i have seen.

1-The game, shouldnt be completely designed around ppl with low end hardware. we all know, most of the ppl avoid zerg, is ppl with low end hardware.

2-The game shouldnt be entirely designed around thievs and hit and run classes. When that happens, its become camper wars.

Many people just want to relax. I do not want to be “strategic” or look “smart”. I can spend hours, a whole morning in the zerging without seeing the time pass.

Consider the current population and how many go to zerg, and how much they are roaming. Usually never has more than 15, 10 doing roaming on the map, if the anet implement something anti-zerg, the WvW would turn only a sPvP giant map version with 10ppl against 10ppl.

by the way zerging isnt a “brain dead” gamestyle, positioning is the key. And a large, unorganized zergs are already punished by guilds medium or even small size zergs.

Caliburn.1845:

I support the general idea of breaking up zergs, especially map blob size ones. But your proposed solutions are a mixed bag at best.

“1. Remove Downed mechanics and Ressurect without skill use from WvW.”

Makes the ability of a blob to kill people easier.

“2. Remove “Max targets” from all skills, and introduce a diminishing return effect to avoid 10 meteor 1hitting everything (diminish return might not be needed).”

Lag will go up due to more calculations, condis will be even worse. Zergs will be even stronger in that they can focus damage even more, no more 5-man cap protecting the smaller force, even if you get diminishing returns in.

“3. Lower the time which Slowdown last when no in/out dmg is done to 1sec before norm speed”

Again, making the zergs able to kill things quicker and more effectively.

“4. Remove out of combat healing from WvW.”

Promotes zerging since a zerg can heal quicker where as the out of combat people clouding around will need more time to heal.

“5. Lowering the effectiveness/powerspiking of combo fields.”

None of the better fighting guilds/groups rely too heavily on blasting fields terribly often any more, far more of their boons and what not come from composition and various traits, especially revs, guards, mesmers. Change to zergs would be minimal.

“6. Allowing everyone to Flag up as “raid parties”, just give them another colour icon. (also consider removing commander bonus or make them map wide=highest bonus apply)”

Can’t you just already tag up as a five man party and do that?

“7. Bruiser builds vs. everything else rebalancing according to TTK principle’s. (might want to read the TTK part of the p1, first post. I think every gamer should know TTK base concept/idea as it is good for our understanding of balance and design reasoning).”

Gear sets that allow you to be extremely tanky while still retaining high damage output need to go. Particularly trailblazers. I should not be able to dive into a zerg on my full trailblazers necro and have enemies explode around me.

1. Just no, zergs run with guards with mercy runes, no small organized group does, stomping/ressing is only based on how many people you are, not how good you are (clicking e once isn’t very demanding).

2.

Zerg fights would be over quicker=less lag

Calculating what 5 people gets hit is in itself a calculation that is often more demanding than calculating damage dealt

Zergs would have to split up to avoid being 1-shot, meaning AoE might get less effective, meaning less lag

A 5 man group would take about 0% more damage, while a 50 man stacked blob would take about 1000% more damage if there were no AoE-caps (assuming 5 target cap skills, different numbers for 3 or 10 target skills), fairly certain the 5 man group is getting the advantage from this change.

About condis, should a zerg actually die to condis I just can’t even beign to imagine how terrible they must be with how good resistance skills/condi clears exists for groups from the 2 most common zerging professions revs and guards.

Fairly certain noone is advocating no-target caps on healing/buffs, that would lead to some very crazy situations

3. Personally don’t really think this matters much, but would hardly benefit zergs really

4. One of the few points where you might be right actually.

5. Agreed that the changes to zergs and to non-zergs would be basically non-relevant, combo fields are overrated

6. Being able to have a personal tag for groups that didn’t show up on map would be great, OP’s suggestion I barely get what the difference would be so no comment

7. Gear sets are hardly a problem, builds are. Full zerker warrior is way tankier than any trailblazer necro. The main problem with tankiness in this game is how much of it is tied to evades/invulns and also how it is rarely actually damage that kills but a stunlock.

To add something of my own to the thread

1. Add diminishing returns on hard CC (immob and fear are both hard CC)
2. Remove all target caps on offensive skills (but not on defensive/supportive, also if this is implemented rework retaliation to not mean death for the audacity to AoE a 50 man blob)
3. Nerf ressing speed by 50+% and remove ressing traits/mercy runes (they’re never ever ever gonna remove downstate so this would be a fix for the problem without making it unrealistic)
4. Player collision would be the dream, but I doubt they would ever do this.

Feanor.2358:

I fail to see the problem with zergs. Numbers win? Well surprise, surprise, they most often did in real life too! It is certainly possible to outsmart/outmaneuver a larger opposing force, but (again, just like in real life) it is hard to do so. Like it should be.

Do the bigger numbers in real life stack ontop of grenades to reduce the damage taken? Fairly certain that logic can’t be applied to a game, noone is saying bigger numbers shouldn’t have benefits, but an added benefit of being unkillable just by standing on each other is perhaps not the kind of advantage the bigger group should have, in addition to all their other benefits

Cevni.2049 is pretty spot on and like the extra suggestions. however i do believe there is enough hard CC removers currently, at least for some classes immunities and cc breakers are in such vast numbers you can be basically impossible to CC, also keep in mind how hard it is to track which targets are CC immune in a blob and for how long. ^^

thought with gliding added to pvp it is worth reconsidering this thread. also because i believe it is a pretty big need to revisit for wvw

If you want to dis-incentivize zerg play, create a de-buff that slows (movement speed, not the condition) characters by a % the more other players are in the area around them.

For example only; Starting at 11 players within a 1000 radius, removing 1% movement speed for each additional player within that area, so a 40 man zerg in a 1000 radius area would have a 30% movement debuff.

Heimskarl Ashfiend.9582:

If you want to dis-incentivize zerg play, create a de-buff that slows (movement speed, not the condition) characters by a % the more other players are in the area around them.

For example only; Starting at 11 players within a 1000 radius, removing 1% movement speed for each additional player within that area, so a 40 man zerg in a 1000 radius area would have a 30% movement debuff.

There is already such a debuff in zerg v zerg. Its called 20 necros specced for chill, because deathly chill is still OP as all kitten.

Anyway, the problem with this “debuff” is that Anet would introduce a hard cap to how you are supposed to play. That bad. And even worse you cant help it. You cant control how the zerg runs regardless of being a commander or squadmember. If I roam and a zerg pass next to me, is that my fault so I deserve to be slowed down?

Dawdler.8521:

Heimskarl Ashfiend.9582:

If you want to dis-incentivize zerg play, create a de-buff that slows (movement speed, not the condition) characters by a % the more other players are in the area around them.

For example only; Starting at 11 players within a 1000 radius, removing 1% movement speed for each additional player within that area, so a 40 man zerg in a 1000 radius area would have a 30% movement debuff.

There is already such a debuff in zerg v zerg. Its called 20 necros specced for chill, because deathly chill is still OP as all kitten.

Anyway, the problem with this “debuff” is that Anet would introduce a hard cap to how you are supposed to play. That bad. And even worse you cant help it. You cant control how the zerg runs regardless of being a commander or squadmember. If I roam and a zerg pass next to me, is that my fault so I deserve to be slowed down?

The same goes for any measure introduced to dis-incentivize zerg play. I just see this one as the most effective for the least amount of work.

Interesting ive been asking for that.. at least in some points,
Solutions:
1. Remove Downed mechanics and Ressurect without skill use from WvW.
-> That would be as thesame to bring the old gw1 rez, im totally fine with that, it would be better IMO.
—//—
2. Remove “Max targets” from all skills,

->I have been asking this for a very long time, but gw2 is a game for bad players its ment to stack aoe spam and numbers, gw2 was designed for players with low gaming skills, so they will ad more aoe spam based skills…

what ive been asking: (contradics ANet design and game balance know how)
Reduce AOE/Cleaves make clever skills usage instead ofthe spamporn we have and improve some AOE spells.

—
—//—

4. Remove out of combat healing from WvW.
-> Should be removed from the entire game…. whatever mode it is.
—//—
5. Lowering the effectiveness/powerspiking of combo fields.
->interesting
—//—
6. Allowing everyone to Flag up as “raid parties”, just give them another colour icon. (also consider removing commander bonus or make them map wide=highest bonus apply)
->interesting, bug that would make alot of commander to not tag i think.
—//—
7. Bruiser builds vs. everything else rebalancing according to TTK principle’s. (might want to read the TTK part of the p1, first post. I think every gamer should know TTK base concept/idea as it is good for our understanding of balance and design reasoning).
_

-> Gw2 is not ment to be balanced towards player skill^^ its gimmick to win based, the bigger the gap that gimmick is more players will stay playing thinking they are extremelly good.

Heimskarl Ashfiend.9582:

Dawdler.8521:

Heimskarl Ashfiend.9582:

If you want to dis-incentivize zerg play, create a de-buff that slows (movement speed, not the condition) characters by a % the more other players are in the area around them.

For example only; Starting at 11 players within a 1000 radius, removing 1% movement speed for each additional player within that area, so a 40 man zerg in a 1000 radius area would have a 30% movement debuff.

There is already such a debuff in zerg v zerg. Its called 20 necros specced for chill, because deathly chill is still OP as all kitten.

Anyway, the problem with this “debuff” is that Anet would introduce a hard cap to how you are supposed to play. That bad. And even worse you cant help it. You cant control how the zerg runs regardless of being a commander or squadmember. If I roam and a zerg pass next to me, is that my fault so I deserve to be slowed down?

The same goes for any measure introduced to dis-incentivize zerg play. I just see this one as the most effective for the least amount of work.

your suggestion would mean heavy performance hit as the system would constantly need to check a radius around you for players (which is basicly like having to check for aoe hits, but constantly, on every player around you).
so technically it would be a really bad choice.

also you are talking about hard punishing specific playstyle with no other purpose than harassing them into submission. i believe that is a terrible idea and would do nothing more than force zerg players to not zerg due to the harasment of this mechanic.

i don’t want to “hard punish” anyone. which is exactly what the suggestions made in this thread is aimed towards.
to allow players to play without “mechanical hard punishment”.

currently the max player hit is a hard punishment for fighting large groups, it specificly by mechanics goes in and says that if you are fighting more than 5 people your skills won’t hit them BC we don’t want you to fight more than 5 people at a time, or be equally numbered.
it brings with it a ton of bonusses for then zerging due to how the rest of the systems isnt really well balanced around this (and i don’t believe you could effectively balance such restrictions in a manner that didn’t heavily punish/favor a specific number of players instead of tactic/strategy and playstyle).

by removing these limitations, heavy advantages, which doesn’t make logical sense would exist. we would eliminated the heavy advantage which is given for no logical reason. (i am talking logical as in RPG logical, or RL applied to a fantasy universe ruleset logical).

so when asking yourself:
“does it make sense that a firestorm in an area would only hurt 5 people in that area and the rest would not be able to be damaged no matter how much they roll in the fire?” if that is a big NO, then it’s properly a mechanic which should be reconsidered why it is there, and if it couldn’t be done in a less intrusive manner.
(can do the same with the other suggestions).

mostly this thread is to give some idea’s of alternatives to change “annoying” mechanics, such as heavy slowdown sometimes for a Long time after combat, and “illogical” mechanics, such as max amount of targets, people being downed and becomming invulnerable then incredibly hard to kill considered how badly wounded they are and suddenly being able to magically ressurrect half HP because someone they hitted 1 time died 20 miles away from them, etc.

i think it would have an awesome effect overall, and it would also much heavier promoted far better tactics, multiple attack paths, surrounds, surface of attack, funnelling etc.
(imagine if you actually had to split up and attack from 4 angles to take the main Fort in WvW, as just trying to push through 1 choke would get everyone nuked to death (or you had to use stealth play when it was too well defended, or had to simply fake the attack so enemy wasted to many ressources being ready for the attack while your side splits up to take everything around it and start to set up proper siege equip, shields etc. to finally push in.
think there is tons of good effects comming with such a change, as well as a huge performance increase as Zergs would be splitted up far more or dissapated much faster).

and i do understand that Downing properly ain’t going away (and to be frank i understand it since to many classes can 100-0% in less than 1 sec from stealth or out of sight, so having that extra “chance” is needed as you do not have other means of preventing these deaths in many cases. still believe it would be far better to have more HP-base and then having a heavy debuff when falling below a certain amount, to indicated being damaged and needing help. however would need rebalancing of 1 shots, but its not hard to put in a mechanic which prevent you from dying from 100% to 0% in less than 1 sec, simply end at 1% hp if you take dmg from 100% to 0 in less than 1 sec.
dust an elysiam tale (single player though) did this very well and it made the gameplay SO much more enjoyable)

Aeolus.3615:

Interesting ive been asking for that.. at least in some points,
Solutions:
1. Remove Downed mechanics and Ressurect without skill use from WvW.
-> That would be as thesame to bring the old gw1 rez, im totally fine with that, it would be better IMO.
—//—
2. Remove “Max targets” from all skills,

->I have been asking this for a very long time, but gw2 is a game for bad players its ment to stack aoe spam and numbers, gw2 was designed for players with low gaming skills, so they will ad more aoe spam based skills…

what ive been asking: (contradics ANet design and game balance know how)
Reduce AOE/Cleaves make clever skills usage instead ofthe spamporn we have and improve some AOE spells.

—
—//—

4. Remove out of combat healing from WvW.
-> Should be removed from the entire game…. whatever mode it is.
—//—
split in two answers

Ty for your interest

1. Yup we agree.

2. I think it has more to do with them generally trying to solve every issue with simply adding more mechanics instead of modifying what they already got or in some cases removing what is creating the issue. I will point towards the 25 different debuff/buffs currently in the game, which seems overkill for any game or game design.
I do believe GW2 is VERY high rl Skill based to be amounts the best, the problem I see when discussing RL skill for GW2 is that the vast majority of difficulty is “false” difficulty. What I mean with that is that its difficulty that shouldn’t exist if the system was properly made. It’s the same argument I have everytime I discuss “Dark Souls”, I don’t see it as a “hard game” I see it as a game with “incredibly unresponsive and badly made controls”, imagine if you had actual Good and Responsive controls in “dark souls”, lets say the controls of GW2. Then it would be “piss easy” to the point or 1 handed play.
in the same manner I look at GW2. The difficulty comes from the lack of proper information (which class, which build, which buff/debuffs am I facing, and you need this in a 0,5 second glance before the fight starts, sometimes you don’t even see them before it starts so you needed it X seconds ago), and the Arbitrary weapon switching system which does nothing but add extra clicks, extra server delay, extra lag and a TON of misclicks because of this (no reason with the MAX 25 skills you need to hotkey, to have a “skillbar switch system”, it is made to increase the hassel of playing to increase “difficulty”). as well as the arbitrary 36 combo field effects, which could easily just have been buff skills or added effects on existing skills.

so in short, I agree that the game in its base is an easy gameplay setup, but the arbitrary difficulty added by adding features specificly to lower your precision and your ability to do proper well informed decision making is what makes it “Hard”.
and yes I do believe this is a Bad design choice imho, but it will Never change as “ESPORT” is more important than “More enjoyable gameplay”. It is also why we got the downing system BTW, as it doesn’t make sense to have instead of normal setups for anything than the esport pushing imo.
and this is not new, we see this in almost, if not all, esport focused games and it almost always result in the game going down before it can even get off the floor (GW2 had a massive following from GW1 and hit at a good time, so lucky and smart of them, else their focus on esport and handicapping mechanics for it would properly have destroyed the future of the game)

4. This is a maybe for all area’s. the issue with removing from all area’s is that in Pve you will very often just run from mob to mob and having to stand around just “waiting” to use the heal skill while nothing can touch you and your ability to get back into it cannot negatively impact other players, then I see no reason why you wouldn’t just reset the HP (and skills for that matter), so you can have a more enjoyable gameplay.

Aeolus.3615:

5. Lowering the effectiveness/powerspiking of combo fields.
->interesting
—//—
6. Allowing everyone to Flag up as “raid parties”, just give them another colour icon. (also consider removing commander bonus or make them map wide=highest bonus apply)
->interesting, bug that would make alot of commander to not tag i think.
—//—
7. Bruiser builds vs. everything else rebalancing according to TTK principle’s. (might want to read the TTK part of the p1, first post. I think every gamer should know TTK base concept/idea as it is good for our understanding of balance and design reasoning).
_

-> Gw2 is not ment to be balanced towards player skill^^ its gimmick to win based, the bigger the gap that gimmick is more players will stay playing thinking they are extremelly good.

5. This is mostly because I see full zergs easy mode heal, all get full retaliation, full buffs of everything, extremely fast and the bigger the zerg the more powerfull this gets.
so while I love the idea of “Channelling spells together with other players for even more powerfull effects” I feel like this is not what is going on, it is more like a “bloob” mechanic that forces you to use a lot of skills to get the buffs and to stand on the actual field (which again promotes bruiser builds far heavier than other builds as they get both buffs and dmg out of the fields).
I have also always disliked the extra complexity of 36 different field combo effect I need to keep track off. Which frankly is just annoying extra clutter (when you could simply put the effects on the skills themselves instead, no need for this overcomplication just to add more “flair” to esport aspect).

6. If commanders only flag up bc they get reworded then it is clearly the wrong commanders that are running around. Tons of people would flag up if they could and properly do a fine job (not to be mean to anyone but it doesn’t take much braincells to run from 1 wall to the next and throw up siege equipment. The fact no commander seem to have the slightest idea of actual tactical positioning, protecting flank/back before just pushing and ignoring the zerg picking people off from behind etc. shows that it is NOT the skills of the commander that gave them the tag.)

7. Not sure what is in the word gimmick as you use it. However I feel that the GW2 devs want the game to be balanced, but their choice of class setup and skill setup makes this close to impossible. There is a good reason you generally see “class restrictions” on skillsets, its partly so you can do proper balance while still allowing each class something which feels awesome and OP when examined alone, but when looking at the weaknesses that accompany it makes it balanced.
as an example: most fantasy game has a mage type class, high burst, high dps, long range and Heavy CC. this sound OP as hell until you realise “no survivability when engaged”, meaning their skillset IS their HP-bar, when someone countered around their CC they are auto death. As well as realising other classes will be provided with similar strong suits which makes this balanced (rogue classes will generally have TONS of guaranteed evades vs. mages, and be heavily favoured as well as mages not having any detection so its always a guaranteed perfect engage).
as such you can do balance very effectively, but if you also allowed this mage to take a 10% dmg loss but now gain even medium survive when CC is countered, then it would make them stupidly OP and broken as the thing that was their “death stated” is now just a “you get to damage me stated” which obviously breaks the balance completely of everything which rely on them being Death if touched. (in this scenario it can be fixed by removing the amount of power from other area’s but you will move towards a generalization of classes if you want balance with free role-choice and mixed role-skills as else some skills will be way to strong, the once which truly gives the class the “feel of awesome” which i think is lacking quite a bit in GW2, elite skills generally dont do the name judgestice)

I think TTK can be applied to Every game system as it does not look at skill setups, builds, etc. it simply looks at an overall view of “if you die as fast as your enemy given perfect play, then it is balanced as the one that makes mistakes will be the one that loses, not the one who had the smallest boots on when the knee kicking started” ^^

Gimmick as in press keys this order to be effective, atm u dont even have a decent(defined) rock-paper-scizor gameplay, its a burst gimmick rotations..dps race.
About the balance dev’s want, its a bit of a illusion the work they are doing to pretend game to be balanced

A bit offtopic, but still related:

IF ANet really wanted balance in all gamemodes at same time…. this is a bit of a constructive critic and a rage at same time (at least i tried as well to be maintain on topic), and sorry my poor english typing , ill say it’s brexit fault if something goes deeply awfull lol…

One change i believe it would help alot the balance, would be to avoid everything that is positive being a boon and everything negative it is a condition, this is one of the reason pvp combat is awfull, and will keep failling dragging spvp as well WvW.

Anet imo should try introduce hexes and stances(like they worked) back , stances had some sorta counter in some skills backthen there were skills that removed stances, when the gw series required players to be humans, in adition IMO, stability should be as a stance and some conditions need to be converted to hexes, this way ANet can catagorize better the spam vs counters like they did in gw1 actually it was one of the best balanced gameplay in terms of skill usage, and this game need that more than gw1 needed.

Some conditions should be used as hexes (since ANet as proved more than enough times they cant do anything decent how it works no matter how they nerf conditions) vs boonspam. condi removals, something will go deeply wrong.
They are doing a awfull job on this management, condis damage might be fine the issue is how everything is being catagorized as 1 and 0, and they cant balance nither pvp nor pve to decent levels, all that results is range aoe spam and class stacking fow low risk high rewards gameplay.

This would help alot the new crap that is more than obvious by just reading the skills, and knowing how players play…..

The rant:
Maybe i dont know nothing o:) …. but there were several more simple aproaches that ANet could have done over time during the game launch but they always went to the more and illogical work arround band aid, other aproaches could had leed to much more balanced aproaches that would provide better gameplay for all modes, and more freedom to explore classes on the next games, imo is almost unconscionable how the game has reached this extremelly lame combat gameplay, where everylooks capable on paper but on reallity that is not how it works, wich ANet looks fine with it.

oh.. and sorry about this last part,after reading it felt a bit threadstealling…

I think Anet has a great chance of opportunity to make a better and a more clever gameplay after PoF release.

Aeolus.3615:

A bit offtopic:

one thing i believe it would help alot balance as well would be to avoid everything positive being a boon and everything negative is a condition, this is one of the reason pvp combat is awfull, and will keep failling dragging spvp as well WvW.

Anet imo should try introduce hexes and stances(like they worked) back , stances had some sorta counter in some skills backthen there were skills that removed stances,when the gw series required players to be humans, in adition IMO, stability should be as a stance and some conditions need to be converted to hexes, this way ANet can catagorize better the spam vs counters like they did in gw1 actually it was one of the best balanced gameplay in terms of skill usage.

Some conditions should be used back as hexes (since ANet as proved more than enough times they cant do anythingdecent how it works no matter how they nerf conditions) vs boonspam. condi removals.
They are doing a awfull job here, condis might be fine the issue is how everything is being catagorized as 1 and 0.

This would help alot the new crap that is more than obvious by just reading the skills, and knowing how players play rather than look at logs and metadata collected.

Maybe i dont know o:) …. there were several more simple aproaches, much more balanced that would provide better gameplay for all modes, and more freedom to explore the next games, imo is almost unconscionable how the game has reached this extremelly lame combat gameplay, where everylooks capable on paper but on reallity that is not how it works, wich ANet looks fine with it.

I think Anet has a great chance of opportunity to make a better and a more clever gameplay after PoF release.

hi there, thanks for the interest.

I highly disagree in adding even more complexity to fix a problem which is partly there because of too much complexity (which is the approach which have brought the problem to the point of “nearly” unfixable now).

A condition=debuff, is a fine name for it, there is no need to change this and adding extra terms just confuses more.
I am unsure how you want a “debuff” to be “positive” and a “buff=boon” to be “negative”? could you give an example of existing buff/debuff in GW2 and how you see this change working?
Try using terms which is generally applicable to any game (buff/debuff etc. stuff we all know and are used to dealing with, makes it much simpler to understand the underlaying idea and concept of what you are trying to do).
Or/and explain the issue you are seeing with an ingame scenario as I do not understand what issue you are pointing at
(if it is very unrelated to this thread, please make it in its own thread and post the link instead. As this subject is already WOT big and to discuss all the area’s which effects it is very large, so adding extra unrelated would just clutter a lot I think :P )

As for the “information lack” I did a full thread on that as I think the complexity here is just getting completely out of hand (the lack of good ingame information goes for almost every feature in GW2 though and would be nice if they could start fixing that, as it is Very harsh for new players or returning players to get a good idea of what is important to keep remembering to do and what items is “save them” which are “destroy them collectable trophy” etc.

link to the information post if interested:
https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/wuv/In-combat-Information/first#post6677996

Maybe i explained wrongly.. :] or not so clear.

This is not adding more confusion stuff, this is making what is bad more clean.
Skills by category:

https://wiki.guildwars.com/wiki/Condition
https://wiki.guildwars.com/wiki/Hex_spell
https://wiki.guildwars.com/wiki/Stance
https://wiki.guildwars.com/wiki/Shout
https://wiki.guildwars.com/wiki/Chant
https://wiki.guildwars.com/wiki/Ward_spell
https://wiki.guildwars.com/wiki/Enchantment_spell

This was like the prime directive why GW1 pvp was so good, everything was well categorized there werent massive removals of beside one skills in one or anothersituation, but what i ment is that ANet after PoF should start doing that segmentations for better skill control, and generate less lag as well, since each one had its proper way to be countered, it isnt like the massive stacking mess it is now.

Segmentation and categorising is a process of making stuffed chunks more simple and lighter.
It provides a more clean gameplay.

less iterations, less lag(in theory), more players skill required.

Nyx, none of your suggestions do anything to improve wvw. First, wvw was specifically designed for large scale battles. Second, the only way to spread out players more is to have more maps in play, not by introduce annoying mechanics. Third, you can’t “punish” playing a certain way, and the system has technical limits, so some of what you bring up won’t even work… like at all.

The goal of suggestions should be to make wvw better, not worse and more frustrating. And again, most people, including the devs, will not read this because it’s way too long and difficult to follow quickly. Be more mindful of your audience by being more clear and concise.

To help you…

https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/wuv/How-to-Give-Good-Feedback/first#post6564561

“As you can see, what you are saying is important, but how you are saying it is equally important. Your strongest points will be lost if they are delivered without details, if they’re presented in an aggressive or unpleasant tone, or if they are buried in a huge wall of meandering text.”

Swagger.1459:

Nyx, none of your suggestions do anything to improve wvw. First, wvw was specifically designed for large scale battles. Second, the only way to spread out players more is to have more maps in play, not by introduce annoying mechanics. Third, you can’t “punish” playing a certain way, and the system has technical limits, so some of what you bring up won’t even work… like at all.

The goal of suggestions should be to make wvw better, not worse and more frustrating. And again, most people, including the devs, will not read this because it’s way too long and difficult to follow quickly. Be more mindful of your audience by being more clear and concise.

To help you…

https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/wuv/How-to-Give-Good-Feedback/first#post6564561

“As you can see, what you are saying is important, but how you are saying it is equally important. Your strongest points will be lost if they are delivered without details, if they’re presented in an aggressive or unpleasant tone, or if they are buried in a huge wall of meandering text.”

Ty for your interest ^^

if my suggestion make you feel it would get more frustrating and worse, then PLEASE be specific of What and how this would be.
(exactly as the link you gave me says. I actually read that post quite a few times and I try to model my post after it +-. So agreed that we should all do that).

for technical limitation again be specific pls.
from my knowledge with a AP and a BA in computer science (doing my master courses now etc) nothing I suggest should be an issue due to limitations on the technical side. There has been brought some concerns up which have been clarified and responded too.

Now for the rest
I strongly disagree with your assessment.
My suggestion would, imo, spread out fighting 100% guaranteed. As no human is stupid enough to keep getting “instant” wiped 50+ people by keep bloobing up to be heavily aoe’ed. So no matter how you believe of the overall picture is, we should be able to agee that fighting would Garanteed be split up into smaller groups or/and larger area’s for big fights.

As for map introduction, I don’t believe that would make any difference for this issue, we already got 3 big maps where the majority of them is generally with Far less people than the main one. Which is simply because you are far more rewarded and gameplay advantages you so much more from blobbing together with everyone else.
adding more maps would do absolutely nothing to change this, everyone would still blob in one big zerg at whichever map had the “easiest” gameplay to simply follow the zerg and be rewarded for living in a 50man blob.
Which happens Bc it is so insanely advantages, which is the unfair advantage that I am aiming to remove (as I believe there is more than enough players who would rather run in smaller groups if they wasn’t put at such a disadvantage due to mechanics which specificly give advantages to heavy Blob/zerg play).

I do not believe the Devs want everyone to stand on top of each other and run as a big zerg, but rather that they want massive battle’s with attacks from all sides, vast amount of groups fighting all over the area, trying to outmanoeuvre the other groups and tactically push each other into bad positions, winning a bit here and losing a bit there.
I Highly doubt any dev at this point in time would go “I believe Zerg play in one big blob is the best way to created engaging, enjoyable and high skilled gameplay in massive battle’s” and Still be allowed to keep a job which is SO sort after (they could easily throw a stick and hit 10 competent people who would kill for the position the lead designers has. Not saying they are not competent, just saying there is SO many competent people who’s Dream job is as lead designers for a major MMORPG, so thinking anyone would be incompetent enough to not have followed the development in mmo’s of all kinds at any point the last 10+ years would be silly imho).

As for your ending: I find your pointing out of the good feedback post quite offensive and must say it makes me aggravated that you throw that at me as my OP, and most answers have been Very pleasant in tone and beheaviour and there is nice cuts where you can easily have a good overview of the sections.
However the subject matter is MASSIVE! And to explain such a subject matter in a detailed way which can easily be understood by most people, as looking at single aspects will make people jump to others and we will have to discuss everything anyway so better to get it all gathered from start, which all means Lot of text is needed.

I am unsure if you actually read it or just threw a quick standard answer together and posted the link because you couldn’t be assed to actual read the subject matter yet felt you Had to respond since you where sure from a quick scan over the keypoint that you wouldn’t like it (but without enough thought to come with precise reasons for why not).
If this is the case Please don’t do it again as it is aggravating and is often one of the reasons people start getting less friendly in their tone (and then get blamed for it by mindless CM’s to busy to actually read what was going on )

Nyx.6532:

Swagger.1459:

Nyx, none of your suggestions do anything to improve wvw. First, wvw was specifically designed for large scale battles. Second, the only way to spread out players more is to have more maps in play, not by introduce annoying mechanics. Third, you can’t “punish” playing a certain way, and the system has technical limits, so some of what you bring up won’t even work… like at all.

The goal of suggestions should be to make wvw better, not worse and more frustrating. And again, most people, including the devs, will not read this because it’s way too long and difficult to follow quickly. Be more mindful of your audience by being more clear and concise.

To help you…

https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/wuv/How-to-Give-Good-Feedback/first#post6564561

“As you can see, what you are saying is important, but how you are saying it is equally important. Your strongest points will be lost if they are delivered without details, if they’re presented in an aggressive or unpleasant tone, or if they are buried in a huge wall of meandering text.”

Ty for your interest ^^

if my suggestion make you feel it would get more frustrating and worse, then PLEASE be specific of What and how this would be.
(exactly as the link you gave me says. I actually read that post quite a few times and I try to model my post after it +-. So agreed that we should all do that).

for technical limitation again be specific pls.
from my knowledge with a AP and a BA in computer science (doing my master courses now etc) nothing I suggest should be an issue due to limitations on the technical side. There has been brought some concerns up which have been clarified and responded too.

Now for the rest
I strongly disagree with your assessment.
My suggestion would, imo, spread out fighting 100% guaranteed. As no human is stupid enough to keep getting “instant” wiped 50+ people by keep bloobing up to be heavily aoe’ed. So no matter how you believe of the overall picture is, we should be able to agee that fighting would Garanteed be split up into smaller groups or/and larger area’s for big fights.

As for map introduction, I don’t believe that would make any difference for this issue, we already got 3 big maps where the majority of them is generally with Far less people than the main one. Which is simply because you are far more rewarded and gameplay advantages you so much more from blobbing together with everyone else.
adding more maps would do absolutely nothing to change this, everyone would still blob in one big zerg at whichever map had the “easiest” gameplay to simply follow the zerg and be rewarded for living in a 50man blob.
Which happens Bc it is so insanely advantages, which is the unfair advantage that I am aiming to remove (as I believe there is more than enough players who would rather run in smaller groups if they wasn’t put at such a disadvantage due to mechanics which specificly give advantages to heavy Blob/zerg play).

I do not believe the Devs want everyone to stand on top of each other and run as a big zerg, but rather that they want massive battle’s with attacks from all sides, vast amount of groups fighting all over the area, trying to outmanoeuvre the other groups and tactically push each other into bad positions, winning a bit here and losing a bit there.
I Highly doubt any dev at this point in time would go “I believe Zerg play in one big blob is the best way to created engaging, enjoyable and high skilled gameplay in massive battle’s” and Still be allowed to keep a job which is SO sort after (they could easily throw a stick and hit 10 competent people who would kill for the position the lead designers has. Not saying they are not competent, just saying there is SO many competent people who’s Dream job is as lead designers for a major MMORPG, so thinking anyone would be incompetent enough to not have followed the development in mmo’s of all kinds at any point the last 10+ years would be silly imho).

As for your ending: I find your pointing out of the good feedback post quite offensive and must say it makes me aggravated that you throw that at me as my OP, and most answers have been Very pleasant in tone and beheaviour and there is nice cuts where you can easily have a good overview of the sections.
However the subject matter is MASSIVE! And to explain such a subject matter in a detailed way which can easily be understood by most people, a Lot of text is needed.
I am unsure if you actually even read it or just “annoyed word” threw a quick standard answer together and posted the link because you couldn’t be assed to actual read the subject matter yet felt you HAD to respond since you where sure from a quick scan over the keypoint that you wouldn’t like it (but without enough thought to come with precise reasons for why not).
If this is the case Please don’t do it again as it is aggravating and is often one of the reasons people start getting less friendly in their tone (and then get blamed for it by mindless CM’s to busy to actually read what was going on )

If your thread was more digestible then I would do a bullet point response reply, but there is way too much of the “meandering text” (like Gaile mentions) to sort through. I gave an appropriate response considering I did not notice anything worthwhile that would improve wvw when I scanned through it. Please clean up the thread so it’s reader and response friendly.

Edit- And you are completely wrong on assumptions about design intent.

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=dnOhMeYxhRM

Trivia section at the bottom… https://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/World_versus_World

“The inspiration for World versus World came from Dark Age of Camelot’s realm vs. realm battles.”

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_Age_of_Camelot

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Realm_versus_Realm

Swagger.1459:

If your thread was more digestible then I would do a bullet point response reply, but there is way too much of the “meandering text” (like Gaile mentions) to sort through. I gave an appropriate response considering I did not notice anything worthwhile that would improve wvw when I scanned through it. Please clean up the thread so it’s reader and response friendly.

some subjects simply takes a lot of thought and text, if that is outside your comfort zone or to much for you to want to invest the energy in right now i can totally understand that.

however it is a complete kitten move that goes against nearly every point mentioned in the post You linked me to simply go in and basicly say:
“TL:DR but i disagree bc i think i won’t like what you say without reading it”

if you do Not have the energy to engage, and not even to the point of reading enough to see if the information is “needless” or “it is just a subject which require the base information to be known” then you shouldn’t respond at all as you are not contributing to the conversation but simply aggrevating and derailing it.

have a nice day

Nyx.6532:

Swagger.1459:

If your thread was more digestible then I would do a bullet point response reply, but there is way too much of the “meandering text” (like Gaile mentions) to sort through. I gave an appropriate response considering I did not notice anything worthwhile that would improve wvw when I scanned through it. Please clean up the thread so it’s reader and response friendly.

some subjects simply takes a lot of thought and text, if that is outside your comfort zone or to much for you to want to invest the energy in right now i can totally understand that.

however it is a complete kitten move that goes against nearly every point mentioned in the post You linked me to simply go in and basicly say:
“TL:DR but i disagree bc i think i won’t like what you say without reading it”

if you do Not have the energy to engage, and not even to the point of reading enough to see if the information is “needless” or “it is just a subject which require the base information to be known” then you shouldn’t respond at all as you are not contributing to the conversation but simply aggrevating and derailing it.

have a nice day

I’m trying to help you because the very busy developer team and players are not going to spend 30 minutes sorting through walls of text. Read Gaile’s post on giving good feedback.

I scanned through your post and there was nothing decent in there to help improve wvw. I gave my constructive and rational feedback, you just don’t like it. I don’t have to reply with pages of detailed feedback to match your 3-4 pages of suggestions, I summarized based off of what I scanned through… I don’t agree with any of your suggestions and I gave my reasons why, accept or don’t, but don’t accuse someone of being disruptive just because you don’t like the feedback.

Spreading out already gets you more points than blobbing up, the reason why people don’t do it is because playing for points isn’t fun and WvW isn’t competitive.

completely removing the aoe cap would create unplayable lag wouldn’t it?

I don’t think zergs would break up if aoe caps were removed. the zerg mentality is so central to this game that I don’t know if it could be overcome, and why should it be?

as long as there is more than 1 player and aoe, bombing as one or kill zones will be the meta, which means zerging x coordinated zerging in fights. to be anti zerg, you really need to overhaul the game and so, end up with a totally different game

Sovereign.1093:

as long as there is more than 1 player and aoe, bombing as one or kill zones will be the meta, which means zerging x coordinated zerging in fights. to be anti zerg, you really need to overhaul the game and so, end up with a totally different game

completely see your point in this.
Zerg is kind of a nifty word, but it doesn’t really explain anything but “a reasonably big group of people”.
however i think we all have a pretty good idea of what we mean when we say zergs.

the thing is, you don’t want to remove group play from it, but you want to give tools which allows for a fair playing field.
as it currently is there is no fair playing field because the mechanics are illogical in a way which heavily favors unrealistic Zerg play.

as example:
1. no collision allows people to both stack crazily and fight while being stacked as well as running through others.
2. max hit caps on skills mean that you can stand in the middle of aoe and not be hit at all.
3. slowdown forever after you hit a target (untill you get to a very high distance to the target).
4.etc.

none of these makes logical sense, they are mechanical concepts which are introduced to prevent/created specific goals, and because they are there they are wildly changing the playing field and making it extremely unfair for one side (unfair in the sense of what you would expect when looking at tactical/strategic play).

so the point is not to remove the ability to Zerg, but to remove the arbitrary advantages that illogical systems give them (illogical in the sense as explained above).

i do believe that these changes, or something in this direction, would vastly change the general playstyle in WvW. but i’ve already said how i think this would change it through this thread so won’t WOT to repeat it :P

Stand The Wall.6987:

completely removing the aoe cap would create unplayable lag wouldn’t it?

I don’t think zergs would break up if aoe caps were removed. the zerg mentality is so central to this game that I don’t know if it could be overcome, and why should it be?

coded correctly there shouldn’t be a noteworthy performance decrease.
defensive buffs could possibly be a slight issue, in extreme circumstances, kitten people can stand on top of each other and all throw aoe’s, but here we should consider if defensive skills shouldn’t retain their cap or have another system in place as they would get out of hand fast. a nice poster discussed this part early in the thread ^^
however coded right i do think the extra calc needed is minor enough not to be noteworthy even in those cases.

overall i think it is more likely that you will see a performance boost due to the effect it might have, as you will see less giant zergs in one big blob and the general Lag-zergs blobs would thin in numbers extremely fast which would give you a much lower “time with lag” in giant zerg fights.

depending on implementation you might be able to created uncommen(or/and unrealistic) situationens where you would have an increase in “spike lag”.

you could use other tool to created anti-zerg mechanics but i believe that if it can be done within the existing complexity, it is better not to add new complexity to the system which is already very complex ^^

edit: the kitten is = as …. 50, that’s what it change to kitten, sry

Sviel.7493:

Some won’t work for engine reasons (removing target cap)

I’ll go in here and point out that there is no engine reason preventing removal of target cap because at launch there was no target cap on AoEs – it was introduces long after the launch to cull Elementalists supremacy in every content ever.
[I think you can still look up old WvW vids of 4 elementalists wrecking zergs by luring them into proper chokepoint and cycling static fields and meteor showers between themselves]

[also additional note is that there was common suggestion also back then to just nerf ele by lowerign damage per target on it’s AoEs instead of introducing the cap]

that’s the thing though. no aoe caps wont force the zerg to split. ppl will try harder then log out.

Let’s put on our logical caps…

1- Remove AoE limit = Meta becomes AoE spam professions…

2- Remove AoE limit = Bigger AoE group will decimate smaller AoE group… Works both ways, but nobody thought about that…

3- Remove AoE limit = More strain on the engine because there are a thousand more calculations that need to be processed in real time = More lag… Find your own dev response on how condis bog down the system and you’ll understand more.

Dev response (as I, and others have mentioned, but obviously dismissed as “not feedback” lol)

DevonCarver.5370:

The AoE limit is due to technical limitations.

See number 3 to get your explanation of “technical limitations”…

…Some of you don’t bother to think things through… It generally helps to think about more than the surface idea and explore all positives, negatives and potential harmful and off putting effects on gameplay.

Every suggestion I’ve read in this thread is a rehashing of poor ideas that have been tossed around for years… Yeah, let’s make gameplay even more annoying because some of you obviously don’t understand what makes wvw halfway decent, or even understand the design intent of realm vs realm vs realm gameplay.

No, I’m not going to break down all the other suggestions mentioned to “fix” wvw, because they have all been brought up before and shot down already over the course of 5 years. If some of you followed the boards closely, and thought deeper about things, then you’d understand.

Edit- And whatever mechanic changes you apply to wvw will affect ALL players… So stuff like the “no rez” and “no heal out of combat” idea… hits small groups too… so it makes it that much harder for smaller groups to fight back and win…

These ideas do nothing expect encourage even more zerging for safety and success, and that would have been obvious with a bit more thought.

sometimes I feel like the only thing that could root out blobbing from the WvW [and game overall] would be something overly drastic, like introduction of bodyblocking or sth…..

Still agree with most of the ideas presented by op, but I don’t think I would remove the AoE cap from all skills. This would greatly favor the larger zerg. Barring the technical difficulties, I see a few problems with this.

Defensive buffs.
With no AoE cap zergs will have ridiculous sustain, permanent Rite of the Dwarf, permanent auras, mass distort, undeniably infinite boons (imagine signet of inspiration buffing 50+ people a time), and healbot ele/druid remaxing the entire zerg’s health every few seconds. Even with the Aoe damage cap removed I can’t imagine a 15-20man group laying a scratch on the zerg and I certainly can’t see why anyone would want to spread out when they’re perpetually buffed by 49+ other people at time.

Zergs will have unbelievable damage.
I agree that this would help smaller groups do more damage which is essential to anti zerg, but this is a double edged sword. In the current meta, a 50+ t1 blob can already 1 push an entire 15 man guild with ease. All zergbusting guilds run much much tighter than the average blob which means that the zergs is the one main beneficiary to the Aoe removal cap. I just can’t imagine a 15-20 man group surviving a 50man bomb.

I would rather go for a middle ground. Keep the defensive cap at 5, and double the maximum targets for offensive skills.

if you removed the aoe cap the smaller more organized group would win depending on their skill. they could easily approach from stealth (without the enemy even knowing they are there in the first place) using all zerker gear and insta wipe the zerg.

Agree with overall goal of breaking up map blobs. Hope ANet paying attention, cause what we’re starting to see is mostly necro zergs of 40+ and that’s really, really boring to try to fight with smaller group.

I wonder if the new territories will allow for more refined outnumbered mechanisms?