Guild Wars 2

This post will be a post about some of the aspects of WvW that cause me to think of it as a non serious/non skill based PvP mode, then I will make some suggestions which might help prove this. I strongly back bringing back AB battles. While they have some similarties with AB they have three distinct differences that made them fun, skillful, and enjoyable. 1 they had a player cap so that massive zergs wouldn’t appear. 2 they ended and didn’t last an entire week. 3 the map was large and open, allowing for a lot of freedom of movement.

Let me first start out by saying WvW is a very fun pvp mode. I do enjoy it.
However, I do have a few problems with it that cause me not to take it seriously. I came to Gw2 with many of my gw1 pvp buddies and WoW arena buddies and most of them never touch nor want to play WvW. Here are some of mine and some of their problems with it.

1. Night teams. As much as others would disagree, your oceanic presence (if you’re on the US server and vice versa) considers your rank heavily. If you dont have a strong enough presence when you go to sleep, chances are you aren’t going to go far in tiers. It has nothing to do with player skill, how much he practices or how much he thinks, those numbers at night will decide whether or not they win or lose.

2. Zergs. Sadly, zergs are one of the most effective strategies. WvW is all about player numbers. Sure you have a team of 8, but vs a team for 15+, chances are you wont survive unless the other zerg is filled with levels below 30. You are fighting and within a couple of seconds of 3-5 people attacking you, you got 10 sacks of bleed and just about every condition on you or you’re just taking ton of physical burst damage.

3. Mad design. The only map I consider really good is EB, and this shows by it being the most popular map. But it still has some of the problems associated with the other ones. The maps feel congested and squished. Towers and keeps and pretty close to each other and many can just trebuchet one another from inside their walls, especailly Stonemist. Borderlands are the worse in the congestion feeling. I always feel like I’m running in a straight line. There are a few chances of using the environment to get the upper hand, but not many.

4. Reward system promotes zerging. Badges of honor mostly drop from enemy players. As a result of this zergs will fight zergs and players will want to tag as many enemies as possible to increase their badge drops. There is no reward for defending or doing other things besides getting in a large group and attacking a structure. (I know this is supposed to change so I want make a suggestion on this, I’m really excited for this change )

5. Lack of rewards. You really don’t make any profit in WvW. The rewards are often really expensive and it is smarter just to go run fractals for a bit and make 5-10g and buy the gear or just go and do dungeons in half the amount of time.

6. Balance. Like all mmos this will get better as the game ages, so I wont complain too much about it or make a suggestion.

7. Lack of Class teamwork. With no holy trinity, I often find three types of builds. Condition damage, Tanky set, and Burst damage. People don’t really care about one another. With the lack of support people place combofields with the intention of personal benefit or attacking the enemy. So sure there are combofield coordination, but its not intentional or really thought about.

8. The effectiveness of AoE damage. This again enforces a zerg mentality. Many skills with have an AoE damage and have large radiuses. So when you get a ton of people whom all can do great AoE damage in a giant zerg, they can take out groups of smaller people really really quickly. Especially with the damage they do.

Suggestions:

1. Sadly it is very hard to counter this. You have two sides of the coin, player freedom and player vs player. I mean if you dont have a strong oceanic presence then when you wake up in the morning or stay up really late, chances are you wont even stand a chance in WvW. People avoid entire border lands because of the defensive zergs they have compared to your numbers. Getting people to try to mount a counter offensive is like pulling teeth. So if you really want to help improve this take the servers location and set its off time to be less lucrative. I mean if you’re a EU player that is playing on a US server then there should be some kind of penalty for playing while everyone is offline. What I mean by this is that instead of the tick counter being at 600, it is halved during a certain amount of time, often the night time, for that server. I know its a bit of a bad suggestion, but as I said its really hard to counter this.

2. Put in more long cooldowns so players actually have to think about what their casting. I’ve tired a few classes and many of them spam weaponskills and you can be very effective that way. You dont have to worry about the cooldowns on them because they are really short. You also need to put in more single target skills. Way to many AoE abilities that just increase zerging. You also need to have more things to capture and have them be more lucrative to capture. This will help with spreading people out, such as in the pre Wotlk battleground AB (quit after that came out so I have no idea what they’re like now). There are large amount of towers and graveyards that could be captured, and they all weren’t in just a straight line from one base to the other. AB also had a cap on the amount of players which helped a lot. Again, with the WvW playstyle it is very hard to counter zerging.

3. Bring in more single target skills. Most of my “support” abilities are just AoE things that I can apply to a ton of people at once. Such as the engineers elixer guns. Sure med kits are good, but its a hassle trying to aim that at someone, and their long cooldowns vs how much they heal for makes them not exactly worth trying to aim it at someone. I should be able to click on someone and be able to cast an ability on them. Not just throw AoE stuff. This will allow players to coordinate, at least that is what I feel.

4. Make rewards…rewarding. To get soliders gear in AC vs getting soldiers gear in WvW takes about half the amount of time in AC. I’m fairly certain you need less AC tokens to get a peice of gear than you need badges of honor in WvW. On top of this the net gain of AC tokens per day is probably a lot more than the net gain in WvW on top of the money advantages.

4. Finally more creative and open maps. I feel like im trapped in a tub made of mountains in WvW. In the BL you have a giant lake and two lines going around it. So zergs naturally stick to these lines. They may swim around keeps and then get right back on that line. EB isn’t as bad, although you can see common paths zergs will take. You basically have a line going from each to spawn to the middle of SM, then you have 2 lines going off from that. Each one going thro the NPC capture points to get to the other server lands.

Those are just our suggestions/take on WvW. They may suck and I am probably wrong. This is just a matter of opinion. I have complete faith in Anet and their decision making. They do this for a living, so they have a lot more experience in it.

GW2 is not a skill based game. If you want that, go to League of Legends, or Starcraft 2. MMOs in general require little skill to play. That’s why they’re going back to the “one skill bar” style of play, that requires little thought to play.

jkctmc.8754:

GW2 is not a skill based game. If you want that, go to League of Legends, or Starcraft 2. MMOs in general require little skill to play. That’s why they’re going back to the “one skill bar” style of play, that requires little thought to play.

This is true, sadly this is what leads to the downfall of MMOs. Without a way to challenge players to the game, it will fall into decline. They have to constantly release new content or a new game every year. Something that lead to GW1 being so well received and pretty active throughout its lifespan was the skill and depth it had. If they don’t manage to bring that over then it could be the downfall of the game. Releasing new content every 2-3 months seems really resource expensive too.

I find two things often lead to the downfall of MMOs. One is that they are too similar other games or have little to nothing unique to them. Second is that they are too easy and too keep the play inclined to play for long periods of times. Gw2 has one, but not 2.

jkctmc.8754:

GW2 is not a skill based game. If you want that, go to League of Legends, or Starcraft 2. MMOs in general require little skill to play. That’s why they’re going back to the “one skill bar” style of play, that requires little thought to play.

>League of Legends takes skill.
>takes skill.
>skill

jkctmc.8754:

GW2 is not a skill based game. If you want that, go to League of Legends, or Starcraft 2. MMOs in general require little skill to play. That’s why they’re going back to the “one skill bar” style of play, that requires little thought to play.

LoL requries skill? How? Everyone I know that is into MOBAs tells me LoL is easy mode, that when they go from say HoN to LoL everythign is so slow, requires so little twitch it is a joke.

All LoL requries is teamwork and knowledge, mechcanically it is a very easy, pretty slow paced game to play, much easier in that department than the likes of GW2.

Which is one of the reasons it is so popular, it is a pretty easy game.

All logic goes out the window when “tight ball formation” is the norm of high tier wvw. Teams do it to take advantage of the AoE limit, culling and lag. WvW is probably the only place in human history where a “tight ball” army beats an enemy that flanks and surrounds. It is sad but players will always go the route of least resistant.

The problem is the AoE limit of 5. More than that the damage distribute randomly. That means when you have 30 guys all in close spaces, everyone takes only 5/30=17% of the normal AoE damage. When you have 60 guys, that further reduces to 5/60=8%. So a “tight ball” of 60 players is pretty much immune to any AoE damage.

Another thing that makes zero sense is tower to tower sieges. People build treb inside a tower, so they can treb another tower.

I also agree with the lack of reward in WvW. It is very hard to keep the casual fanwagoners playing, specially when your server is losing. I was on SBI and our casuals just disappears and went back to fractal.

Maybe they should not put a limit on AoE damage in WvW only, but also decrease the damage it does so its not so bursty. So basically you’d be stupid to stand in it for long periods of times causing zergs to spread out more, but it also doesn’t do enough damage to where if you get 3-4 arrow carts cast on your location you’re not instant killed or killed within 5 seconds.

jkctmc.8754:

GW2 is not a skill based game. If you want that, go to League of Legends, or Starcraft 2. MMOs in general require little skill to play. That’s why they’re going back to the “one skill bar” style of play, that requires little thought to play.

ROFL

LoL is all about group composition. Literally. I had a 2300+ ELO team in S1.
SC2 is mainly about 25% builds, 25% race, 25% luck, 25% strategy. The only skill that comes into that ‘real time strategy’ is in microing, and even that has fallen to the side in many Korean matches. Flanking someone doesn’t give any bonuses, theres no cover mechanic at all.

Saying MMOs don’t take skill is pretty ignorant. Looking at other MMOs the only one that takes more skill to play is DAoC. This game playing as a hammer/GS guardian, I use every attack with both weapons, every fight. I use them when the cost effectiveness of that ability is at its maximum. I use all my utilities the same way.

You can see the people that don’t understand this game. The ‘double dodgers’; the ‘wait till I’m almost dead to use a low CD heal’ etc. Any game can be played by anyone now-a-days. The barriers to enter gaming has been lowered so much thanks to WoW/CoD that anyone can install a game on a computer and be decent.

TLDR: There is skill involved in this game, and LoL is garbage.

How come only the people who die constantly assume there is no skill involved.

As far as I see it, those with skill should handle the skillful parts. Every one else just needs to smack the gate and scream a lot.

Gisei.5749:

As far as I see it, those with skill should handle the skillful parts. Every one else just needs to smack the gate and “complain” a lot.

Fixed that for you :p