Guild Wars 2

I would love for someone to share the link where Anet says its not intended to use the aoe restriction in conjunction with heals/buff non-restrictions.. I hear about it a lot but have not read it myself and would love to do so. Or that it is an unintended side effect for them to counter each other might have been how it was described.

My proposal of a dynamic AoE target cap in relation to how many people are how close to each other is still valid. If Anet can balance health and possibly other stats (or is it outgoing damage from players?) of Bosses according to how many players are present dynamically, I see no technical hurdle to dynamically raise AoE target cap to punish extreme stacking.

By the way, as somebody on another forum put it:
" One (portal bombing) is a clever use of an in-game mechanic by design, the other (clumping) is a “clever” use of an in-game limitation."
Neither is an exploit in my opinion. It just shows some peoples opinion about the game and moreover their attitude about the competitive gameplay of direct one on one/group versus group, or when doing the clump, the lack thereof.

Another video of what happens when a full blown clump (40+ according to their commander) meets 11 enemies (us). What happens is a clear sign of a lacklustre and uninspired (or helpless, I don’t know) gameplay on the side of the clump (including siege) until we doubled back and find half of them went somewhere else, so we went in.
I can’t imagine Anet wants their player to play like the clump (and have fun); but that may be lack of imagination on my part.
http://www.own3d.tv/Pryda/video/849925

I am aware not everyone fancies direct confrontation as much as our guild does. We usually seek it and avoid ‘sitting’ in a keep or tower, but we do that as well if the need arises.

Essentially, in my opinion, you play the game with other people (including the enemies) and clumping shows some people clearly don’t want to play with other people and it keeps me wondering why they are even bothering with wvw.

Regards,
Pannonica
Red Guard, Piken

Rather then introduce game breaking issues by eliminating the aoe cap. Why not make friendly buffs/heals and what not Party specific?

Seems like a better fix for the issue. If you eliminate the AOE issue you just make it so only a stack can kill a stack, siege equipment not withstanding.

If you make the friendly AOE party specific in WVW only you eliminate most of the issues, and bring people to group vs group game play rather then everyone by them selves stacked on the same spot

shouts and heals do not cap at 5 people example.

That isn’t proof. Does anyone have actual proof? Once?

1. Be a warrior.
2. Trait “Vigorous Shouts” (Grandmaster Tactics)
3. Stand in a Zerg/Orr event and shout something.
4. See your screen fill with green numbers.

Obviously that does not prove that people actually get healed. You’re free to argue it’s just a client-side display bug. But then you’re free to get a group of players to stand in the fire in the mists and write “x” in chat when they get healed (don’t forget to check out 6/6 soldier rune while you’re at it). And hey, it’s the mists, you don’t even need to be/know a lvl 60+ warrior for testing there.

Also, just to be clear, a lot of heals/buffs DO cap at 5. Of course, that’s irrelevant if you’re using the ones that don’t.

I seem to be missing something here, but when I play my heals and party buffs etc are all capped to 5 players that favor my party first then proximity second this also includes buffs awarded through combo fields, I have 100% tested this and can confrim this is how it works.

the exceptions are utility skills like sanctuary and wall of reflection that effect an area absolutely. you will find however that the heal effects for these do distribute to 5 people per pulse.

Where i believe most people are getting this misconception is through some of the pulsing aoe buffs. Shadow refuge traited with shadows embrace casts regen on party members.

If you have 10 people 20 people or 30 people in the shadows embrace it awards the same ammount of pulsed Regens each time its used. it does this by pulsing 5 applications at a time repeatedly. if you only have 5 people in the shadow refuge it will stack regen for longer duration. if you have 10 people it will put regen on 10 people but the duration will be stacked less. if you have 20 people I think it will only apply regen to probably 15 of them as I think it only does 3 pulses during its duration but i could be wrong about this.

Noid.2871:

shouts and heals do not cap at 5 people example.

That isn’t proof. Does anyone have actual proof? Once?

1. Be a warrior.
2. Trait “Vigorous Shouts” (Grandmaster Tactics)
3. Stand in a Zerg/Orr event and shout something.
4. See your screen fill with green numbers.

Obviously that does not prove that people actually get healed. You’re free to argue it’s just a client-side display bug. But then you’re free to get a group of players to stand in the fire in the mists and write “x” in chat when they get healed (don’t forget to check out 6/6 soldier rune while you’re at it). And hey, it’s the mists, you don’t even need to be/know a lvl 60+ warrior for testing there.

Also, just to be clear, a lot of heals/buffs DO cap at 5. Of course, that’s irrelevant if you’re using the ones that don’t.

so the problem here is shouts aren’t capping?? if so then lets just start a list of buffs/heals that aren’t capping as intended. I’ll have a check on a warrior tonight to see if the effect is indeed similar to shadow refuges pulsing.

In WAR no cap on aoe was an issue so they changed it, aoe had no limit but did spread its total damage on the targets.

10 000 damage on 5 people did 2000 each. 10 000 damage on 10 people did 1000 each.

They did that in WoW as well, but mainly for PvE reasons. This was back in Burning Crusade during Mount Hyjal.

Yeah remove the cap from AoE my hammer guardian would love this, get might for every crit, get heal for every boon, never die and farm people all day.

I played DaoC and War. You don’t want to remove the cap, trust me I would have bomb groups on the field so fast you wouldn’t have time to figure out how bad an idea taking caps off was.

And there is a problem with restricting boon/heal limits, too.

Boons and Heals are not targeted, and thus if you restrict them to 5 some of them become useless.

EDIT: Besides, that wouldn’t solve the problem of area spells like Feedback or Wall of Reflection or Sanctuary.

If you are going to cap AoE damage, then you must cap AoE heals and buffs. Set heals and buffs to be group first then nearest players next. Make the shield reflect a set amount of ranged attacks, not every ranged attack for x seconds. This makes it better in small combat, but worse for turtling.

It takes a coordinated group effort in order to crack a camping enemy. This is usually what we did in condemned.

We would have our guardian’s drop sanctuaries at the choke point, pop stabilities, and use healing tomes and basically heal bomb our group as everyone rushes through the gap. It worked 100% of the time even if enemy was camping their lords room.

I am 99% sure now that all support boons heals are capped at 5 and when they apply to more what you are seeing is a pulse effect reapplying to multiple people but degrading the strength or reapplications. I will check this tonight and post a video as frankly a lot of whats being said here isn’t true.

I hope that Anet is aware of the problem, and how game breaking it is.

It’s sad that so many guilds resolve to game mechanics exploits like this. :/

Enemy turtles are the greatest thing since sliced bread.Such a high concentration of badges is irresistible.

^

This.

Turtles aren’t exactly hard to smash, just takes coordination and practice.

ANet does need to apply a fix to add target cap limits to friendly effects, though, to be generally fair. Probably a target cap of 10-15 along with an exclusion of Mesmer clones (but not phantasms) and perhaps Necro weaker minions.

Protip: there are some “offensive” AOE-effects in the game that are “uncapped” by their mechanics.

Not to mention there are a few very specific reasons why turtles work at all outside of the AOE capping, and those reasons can be countered in a straightforward manner.

Darek.1836:

Or raise or even get rid of the Aoe cap, which is MUCH easier for the coders since there isn’t even a collision detection function at all yet.

a THOUSAND times this. AoE should not be limited by the amount of people standing in one spot; Heal AoE’s as well.

AoE being capped at a number is just ridiculous imo. get rid of it. if you dont want to be hit by the aoe get out of it.

Rizach.4852:

In WAR no cap on aoe was an issue so they changed it, aoe had no limit but did spread its total damage on the targets.

10 000 damage on 5 people did 2000 each. 10 000 damage on 10 people did 1000 each.

I’d take that over the current AOE cap.

It’s absolutely stupid to be able to clump up to turtle AOEs.

WvW isn’t straight up 40 people battling 40, it’s fought in small pockets in different areas in the front.

Kyus.3812:

I am 99% sure now that all support boons heals are capped at 5 and when they apply to more what you are seeing is a pulse effect reapplying to multiple people but degrading the strength or reapplications. I will check this tonight and post a video as frankly a lot of whats being said here isn’t true.

Ele water dagger #5 skill is not capped at 5 targets, I’ve seen it heal 15+ people (though that was in PvE, I use staff for wvw).

This “Turtle lame game” is just boring.
This week, we’re fighting against OSC / NoE on Seafarer’s Rest., 2 big guilds that they are applying this lame strat…

With 15 Tempest, we can kill 30 or 40, maybe 50 OSC even if they’re doing this turtle game.
Wipe? no problem, yell and stick with NoE.
90+ turtle zerg and they will be invincible.

WvW is broken by 2 importants things :
- Night-capping
- Turtle / zerg nobrain game.

Fix it Anet.

Turtling could be seen as an exploit. and should be fixed ASAP.

Chewablesleeptablet.3185:

Turtling could be seen as an exploit. and should be fixed ASAP.

What part of it is an exploit? It is using the intended aoe limit to increase survivability, nothing wrong about that.

Since defenders from this strategy never posted a video from inside, here it is:

Massive skill and organization requiered, quite amazing!

Pryda.8257:

Since defenders from this strategy never posted a video from inside, here it is:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Oiy3Mh6Ow2w

Massive skill and organization requiered, quite amazing!

Still waiting for my opportunity to dive onto one of those stacks.

Well, night capping is working as intended, you cannot cry about this. If there are some people playing on your night time you want them to stop playing? LoL.
Btw Yesterday you killed us even for culling…we didn’t see ya, at all…

Getting mighty sick of people complaining about turtling. Every class has a CC that can get a turtle to break. Turtles aren’t any indestructible force, and are actually not the best way to fight, unless the enemy isn’t smart enough to know how to crack it’s shell.

Alystene.2418:

With 15 Tempest, we can kill 30 or 40, maybe 50 OSC even if they’re doing this turtle game.

Congratulations, strong!

The problem is not the turtle (if you can kill 50 enemies bring some more and kill the rest) but the player culling (or in just your case a simple minority)

People referencing Dark Age of Camelot in defense of AOE caps are either using selective memory or do not know what they are talking about. Let me break it down for you.

Pro:

1. Casters had as high of damage as the high damage classes in this game, not higher.
2, There was no AOE cap.

Cons:

1. Every pure caster was as easy to kill as a glass cannon elementalist.
2. There were extremely limited resources used in casting. Power ran out quick.
3. This resource regenerated very slowly, and even slower in combat.
4. When you were out of power you were a guy with a stick wearing a dress.
5. Any possible way you had to heal yourself required power you’d need to AOE.
6.. Most did not have a way to heal themselves at all.
7. You think running back here is bad after dying? Bwa ha ha ha ha!!
8. Even if you got a rez you were rez’d with a small fraction of power and had significantly reduced stats.
9. Even with all these limits ground targeted AOE’s were distinctly weaker than other AOE’s.

Some people look back with rose colored glasses. Some people never played but have just heard things. Fact is that while DAOC had no AOE caps, the game was much more hardcore and you had alot harsher limits as a caster to pay for the power you wielded. As well the power you wielded was given strong limits on how much you could spam it.

As well this was a game where you could be rez’d from a distance with a spell. So if you got killed to AOE it was much easier to pick you up. There were even instant rez spells so this could be almost impossible to prevent.

Before people go popping off about how X worked with Y they really should consider that the entire landscape of the game was different and that maybe, just maybe, that is why it worked out from a balance standpoint. I’ve pointed out only a small fraction of things, but hopefully I’ve given you some idea.

Balance is built around the entire game’s design, not 3-4 concepts you cherry picked.

On the subject of turtling specifically? It’s an exploit that will be fixed. Simple as that. Turtling ultimately depends on people abusing shouts and other things that do not have a AOE cap atm. They will gain one due to people’s abuse most likely.

All the arguments in the world can be made against this, but considering the overall game design turtling plainly does not fit. On the bright side there is the chance the skills being nerfed might be improved somewhat to compensate for their shiny new AOE caps. Assuming of course them not having one currently was intentional design and not an oversight.

Oh, and as a final note, I doubt the devs of this game want the epitome of thier WvW fighting being 2 balls of players stacked on each other slowly chipping away at each other either. That just seems like rather unappealing and unexciting gameplay, especially for someone looking from an outside perspective.

What shouts in particular don’t have an AoE cap?

Solution:

Keep AoE cap but modify it. If your hitbox touches another allies hitbox, you take 25% more damage from AoE. And it stacks. If you stand in a stack, the stack is instakilled by one AoE guy. If you spread around, all works as ususal.

Removing AOE Caps creates terrifying fun in different ways. I remember in WoW Vanilla running with a group of rogues (roguhly 10 of us) and we were all Goblin Engineers. We’d stealth into an Alliance Raid at the Tarren Mill/Southshore Tug-O-Wars (Back in the days of Contribution Points.) and via TS we’d all detonate Goblin Sapper Charges at the same time. Was so beautiful seeing their entire raid drop dead at the same time. =)

However, in DAOC I witnessed the power of Street Sweeper roaming teams and we don’t want that in GW2.

Firstly never read every post, so if i cover something that’s already been discussed to death i apologist.

I been gaming a long time, mostly for the pvp. I thought WvW was a joke and could never get any worse (balance wise, i have/do have a little fun there @times) and this week i discovered “The Turtle”

Start of the week it was used successfully against us, within 2 days we had adopted this “Tactic” and are now using it as a standard ,if Anet thinks this is a valid tactic and how they seen people enjoying there game then please post, I doubt anyone who imagines what a game pvp’s would be like had a vision of this.

This game so favours the numbers having a ranking system is most cases = a population count, and the Turtle is just the next step in the “The more people you have the easier you will win”

People are posting that siege’s are the answer. maybe if the populations were balanced that would be the case, but having the experience of being on and fighting against a low pop server its not everyone that can get 10 arrow carts up fast enough and believe me, if we have decent sized turtle and people are listening 10 carts wont be enough.

Increase the aoe cap on players, put an aeo cap on sieges WHY

1. arrow carts should only be able to hold so may arrows
2. Bali = one arrow splintering, not guaranteed a maximum number every chance

Yes the map has choke points, but shouldn’t ambushing be a much more valid tactic than turtling, there is also a number of ways that you can move about a map, your only forced to go one way in forts/keeps

Keep choke points -Shouldn’t some keeps be scarey to take, maybe its just me but having “ninja’d” my fair share of keeps with small groups i personally think sieging in a lot of cases is too easy, yeah i have had tough fights but in a lot of them cases that was down to being outnumbered

Increasing the Aoe limit also throws a bone to the under populated servers, 5 people should be able to put up a decent defence against 20 in sieges, the present system means these 20 people can all target me standing on a high wall while i can only hit five of them and even if i did down one, the 15 free people i can;t target have him on his feet in 2 secs – OUTSTANDING.

My WvW time will be a lot less while we turtling, we use it,its effective but it bores me, if anet don’t balance WvW soon i be joining the growing list of my old guild thats went back to WoW, we might have to pay for our pvp, but 10v10 a lot fairer than 30 v 100 and we can vote out our bots.

Alystene.2418

Hi noob on what map will you go tonight?
Auld want to farm you again and again, like yesterday with u’re turtle-lame game.

Give me more bags, since two prime-time, we farm you more and more day after day.

Get a brain, buy skill @skillshop, u never play daoc to speak on it.
On u’r video, we can see low players (in skill) to be farmed by average players (not top), but just not so crappy that they can bombing a entire zerg.

Humm i can’t understand if you farm SFR so well why your overall score is so crap ?
Maybe instead of farming 10000 OSC and 10000 NOE with your party would be better to score some points maybe taking a couple of supply camps.

On the other side maybe is so easy to win against you that SFR try to give you some better Equip.

Au revoir mon petit guerrier

atai.1467:

Alystene.2418

Hi noob on what map will you go tonight?
Auld want to farm you again and again, like yesterday with u’re turtle-lame game.

Give me more bags, since two prime-time, we farm you more and more day after day.

Get a brain, buy skill @skillshop, u never play daoc to speak on it.
On u’r video, we can see low players (in skill) to be farmed by average players (not top), but just not so crappy that they can bombing a entire zerg.

Humm i can’t understand if you farm SFR so well why your overall score is so crap ?
Maybe instead of farming 10000 OSC and 10000 NOE with your party would be better to score some points maybe taking a couple of supply camps.

On the other side maybe is so easy to win against you that SFR try to give you some better Equip.

Au revoir mon petit guerrier

Some players don’t care that much about Siege Wars. I bet majority of players that stopped GW2 got bored from Sieging all the time. Same reason about people surprised that guys already have 60K+ WvW kills.

Killing players is really fun, and If I was on of those guy on Augury I’d stop kittening on turtles cause this is the only real challenge in the game right now.

Someone from our server made this video.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=iIxV9O8yJaU

On SBI we were initially surpised by the turtle system. We learned to fight them. We are grateful for BG fro bringing new challenges to a rather monotonous gameplay.

I’m glad to see people’ve found something to complain about besides Mesmers

atai.1467:

Humm i can’t understand if you farm SFR so well why your overall score is so crap ?
Maybe instead of farming 10000 OSC and 10000 NOE with your party would be better to score some points maybe taking a couple of supply camps.

On the other side maybe is so easy to win against you that SFR try to give you some better Equip.

Au revoir mon petit guerrier

We’re playing only during the prime time.
Total scoring is just ininteresting… Scoring is not a reward for domination in FIGHT when a lot of player are playing (prime time ie 20h30/00h), just a reward of time spending.

Look at D1 or D2, Desolation and Blacktide are compressing other servers by a large GMT coverage.

Like Pryda, we want to kill players, not to play in “time spending domination”.

Alystene.2418:

We’re playing only during the prime time.
Total scoring is just ininteresting… Scoring is not a reward for domination in FIGHT when a lot of player are playing (prime time ie 20h30/00h), just a reward of time spending.

Look at D1 or D2, Desolation and Blacktide are compressing other servers by a large GMT coverage.

Like Pryda, we want to kill players, not to play in “time spending domination”.

Infact i’m speaking of the Prime Time Score … every single evening your score is … let me said really Crap.

I guess this is intended, or A-Net is too embarrassed to respond. I would be embarrassed too. Again the issue is aoe is limited to 5, healing, and boons are not. Portals are not limited to 5 and stealth is. Is it because stealth is an AOE or was it deemed to powerful.

Sorry if im being negative here, or sounds like im flaming. Truth and Knowledge are two different things am i right.
A-NET has made too many oversights like these, same with their engine and culling. If players aren’t using portals to abuse culling they are abusing aoe caps. Its these things that make WvW a joke.

This was a joke.. “we like the idea of portals”, ANet… Well guess what we like them too so much we exploit your flawed game code each day because you told us it was ok… Portals are cool and all in theory but it breaks your game.

Ender.3508:

Can someone enighten me as to whether or not siege like ballistas and arrow carts are affected by this cap?

Siege will hit an unlimited amount of targets… Which is why this whole thing is a non-issue. Slap down a ballista or two, and you will absolutely tear apart that stack of people.

Xsorus.2507:

It didn’t have a cap on number of players hit in Warhammer Online.

You couldn’t stack AOE though, so two people aoeing the same area with the same spell wouldn’t work..This was done to counter BW’s somewhat..

This isn’t true at all. The general tactic in WAR was for everybody to throw down all their AoE in front of the door and watch anybody that happened to be there get insta-gibbed.

You people clamouring for unlimited AoE caps simply aren’t thinking. You think 25vs50 is bad now, wait until you get hit by every little bit of damage being thrown out there by those 50 people. You will die instantaneously.

earendil.1290:

Someone from our server made this video.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=iIxV9O8yJaU

On SBI we were initially surpised by the turtle system. We learned to fight them. We are grateful for BG fro bringing new challenges to a rather monotonous gameplay.

Looks like a bunch of pitched battles to me. IE within range of keep siege damage, hitting them from behind when they are not really stacked, outnumbering them by a large amount, etc.

Each turtle is also of a varying strength depending on how many many of the needed classes there are. For example there is a big difference between a full stability rotation and only having enough stability to keep it up half the time.

I mean the formation is not invincible but it is very very very strong. Game breakingly strong considering how easy it is.

zastari.1730:

What shouts in particular don’t have an AoE cap?

Most of the buffing shouts, blast finishers (heals, armors, retaliations, etc), some heals but not others, etc. There are actually a fair amount of things without the AOE cap. Then you have the chaining of abilities like feedback and sanctuary that are not specifically targetted abilities that protect a set amount of ground.

It gets pretty ugly really. When done properly people inside are saturated with buffs, constantly being healed, protected from outside projectiles and sometimes in areas melee cannot enter (sanctuary), and even have permanent stability. Then you have self healing on top of all of that.