Guild Wars 2

This is something that surprises me so many times. I think there was one GamesCom, where they announced or at least talked about WvW. And announcing it as massively unbalanced server vs server PvP. This is what it was from the beginning.

In the early days I remember it was kinda fun to see mass fights happening, where you had almost battle real lines and 2 zergs were ranging each other until some ppl decided to charge. I remember specifically one zerg fight in EB where there was a forward and backwards movement of both armies as the front liners fell but new reinforcements came resupplying the armies. Everyone was a nub, everyone ran with whatever build they felt was good for them and it was a total mess. Ah, the glory of those “old days”^^

I also remember the first times a zerg, often guild groups, started stacking and rolling through armies of superior numbers but absolutely no organization. We (meaning my friends and I) called it turteling at this time. These days however, the people have evolved to a certain meta. Zergs are running the GWEN setups with some variations and small groups roaming/scouting around the main zerg and the optimal strategies are pretty much set in stone. Or so we think at least.

Strategies that probably were never intended by the devs. Strategies that simply evolved off a balancing that is done around sPvP. People had to deal with massive population imbalances, organized guilds versus semi organized Pug zergs and so on. Roaming was no difference. Builds exceeding in mobility and/or stealth are the masters of the roaming world putting professions, who do not achieve this, behind.

All of those things are well known, but I believe will never be remotely balanced. HoT may change the meta. But it will be perceived unbalanced again. And this is a design decision ANet took from the beginning. Changes mostly aimed at other game modes will impact on WvW and the quality of players and guilds will determine how well they will adept…

However, as Chaos Archangel.5071 in the mesmer forums once wrote: “Don’t let the Meta define you.” It can only be added: Define the meta instead!. This is what people should do. Breaking out of the GWEN Meta won’t be that easily possible, but it might still be possible. But especially the roaming Meta is something, that is constantly changing (at least for me it is). For instance roaming builds on Metabattle.com are imho insufficiant and there are better more effective builds. The freedom in WvW roaming builds is immense. And so might be the freedom in large scale combat… Evolution not always results in the optimal solution, it supports any solutions that somehow work, until they are pinned against each other and fight for survival. GWEN is the Meta we have, but maybe if someone at some point would have gone another route, we would have another Meta now, still believing it is the only one that works.

So don’t let the Meta define you… define the Meta instead.

Let’s play a game of Chess.

I’ll start with 15 Queens.

You start with 2 Pawns.

What do you mean you don’t want to play? You just need to learn to use your 2 pawns better, noob! Stop bowing to the Queen > Pawn meta. Pawn’s can be better, you’ve just got to believe!

I do know what you wanna say Mr. Negative^^

But your wording is a rhetorical extreme, that won’t really hold up as an analogy to WvW.

I guess you are talking about two kinds of balance.

TyPin about skill balance in fights, Ragnar about Match-balance.

While I agree that ANet cannot really balance skills in wvw, I think they should care about match balance.

And if they cannot balance skills in wow, it would probably nice to have them varied more often, such that skills change before the optimal meta becomes widespread and there is something to discover and improve all the time.

to be honest i think the reason why GWEN got implemented is simply because of 4 factors: CC, AOE, support and base health+armor. these 4 factors all have a very big impact on the outcome of a battle and therefor are prefered over builds that do not have this.
elementalist: CC+AOE+support
guard: bit of CC+AOE, massive support and high base armor
warrior: bit of AOE, CC, support, high base health+armor
necro: CC+AOE, high base health
thief: (when venomshare CC)mid armor
mesmer: bit of AOE and support (veil so only a couple mesmers needed)mid hp
ranger: mostly condi aoe, mid armor+hp
engi: AOE, mid armor mid hp

you can see that GWEN has most of the factors while the the other classes cannot compete with them. i’m not saying that it is impossible for the meta to change, but if anet wants it to change, the first thing to do is adjusting the weapon skills of some classes, ranger and thief will never be able to compete with the rest if they don’t get more aoe attacks for example. (on the zerg perspective ofc) ;p. Instead of changing traits/utilities anet should focus on changing weapon skills instead if they really want to change this meta (however i think it’s fine tbh ;p)

Well… there are new weapons coming for each specialization. So each class will get at least 1 new weapon. The question now is, will they stick to only one new weapon. That would most likely result in Mesmers only getting 2 new weapon skills (cuz of shield).

What I always wondered is, why do ppl rarely stick to havoc tactics? I mean outmaneuvering the enemy zerg by using multiple smaller havoc groups taking care of camps, dollies and just hitting a tower for a short time until enemy zerg arrives and then move on.

I saw that once being on FSP (we had strongest map presence at this time). Another server (forgot which one) sent small groups to our upgrading hills (which I was upgrading), killed siege, damaged walls, damaged gate. That went on for like 10-15 minutes and we were unable to fully repair the damage they did to us, because they kept cutting supplies and such. In the end we lost hills to a relatively small group, who just had to knock on the door to open it…

In my earlier days I was on FoW (bottom tier). One evening in EBG (with actually very good map presence of blue [us] and green [Surmia maybe? Not sure]) a friend and I were constantly cutting enemy supply and our server did relatively well. And then, the very moment we decided to hang out at spawn and talk about stuff we saw how our server collapsed with messages in the chat of being sieged everywhere.

Those are the things I am talking about. Everyone seems to wanna run with a big zerg and clash into each other. Yesterday evening we even lost Hills in one BL to a 4 man deso team, because there weren’t even a few other ppl from FSP ready to come to hills to defend with me (I actually didn’t see the final push due to a dc)…

People’s minds are so stuck in this zerg vs zerg GWEN setup. There are reasons and I fully agree. But to a certain extend there is a lack of creativity on the community’s side to break out of that and try other strategies…

Thats because of most of the WvW community plays solely for these zergfights nowadays. Also people often lack the initiative to start up attacks/havocgroups themselves. Havoc groups are very effective ppt wise, but aslong as people are not willing to start them up, they won’t exist ;p