enhancing WvW gameplay

enhancing WvW gameplay

in WvW

Posted by: Grunblatt.4608

Grunblatt.4608

Hi there,
since the devs announced that they will focus on rebalancing all the siegeweapons and their role in WvW, i would like to start a brainstorming thread here which hopefully will help them with improving WvW gameplay in another way than just tweaking some numbers

To prevent answers like “make catapults better”, please list positive and negative aspects of your ideas and tell us what you think those ideas would accomplish.

I will start with

make burning oil immune to damage from players
This goes with some hopes and assumptions already. While ACs are very strong right now and get most likely nerfed soon, i still hope that just their damage to siege weapons will be reduced (or removed). It was stated that ACs are meant to be an anti-personell weapon, but they are a very powerful tool for tower and keep defence (even vs rams and golems) right now.
Since burning oil has hardly a role in tower/keep defence right now – except for buying the defending team a few seconds in which it gets destroyed – it could take over the role of arrow carts in the courtyard. By forcing invaders to lay down additional catapults or ballistas to deal with the static defence system of keeps and towers, a general assault is already more interesting than a plain ram-rush. This also enables outmanned defenders to severely delay the invaders, while the invaders still can nuke the walls and use pulls and knockbacks and fear to remove defenders from the burning oil.

I though about suggesting to make cannons immune to playerdmg as well, but since those can deal with ballistas and catapults on their own, this is probably too powerful as defensive tool.

tl;dr
This buff to burning oil would allow a strong nerf to AC dmg vs siege, without making ram rushes too strong.

trebs should one-hit players
I see a big issue with this in fights that create skill lag, in which case this might get very frustrating. But in a smooth WvW experience without lag, trebshots are slow moving projectiles which can easily be avoided. Just for reasons of immersion and epicness and since it wouldn’t be gamebreaking in any way, the impact of a trebshot should instantly down players. Also with the new AC skill the poison-cloud-cows are a bit redundant. So if this is meant to be an anti-personell skill that is supposed to zone out enemies and grant you space-control, please add a decent damage output to this cloud and possibly make it last longer, so that one treb can sustain this field.

more utility for ballistas
Even though ballistas are meant to be an anti-siege weapon, they are mostly used as anti-personell (especially with the new skill). By giving them skills that can remove siege on enemy walls over time, they would be more effective than catapults as an anti-siege weapon and give players more offensive capabilities. The same skill should be able to shoot down from the walls, so that defensive ballistas in the right spots can counteract this.

autorespawn for defeated players
Personally i would like to see defeated players automatically teleported back to the (closest?) waypoint in WvW – however i can see that people might miss the opportunity to be the “noble soul” that is reviving their defeated allies. That is why i will talk about a respawn timer in general. Possible implementations would be

- immediate respawn upon death
- automatic respawn X seconds after death, unless character is revived
- automatic respawn X seconds after the last player interacted with the defeated character, unless character is fully revived

This has the very obvious negative sideeffect that organized groups that want to stay together have to teleport back to the waypoint as soon as one of them is defeated. On the other hand i think that this would be a great improvement to WvW battles in general.
- This would enable small striketeams to slowly take down a larger enemy force by using superior tactics and hitting them over and over again.
- Dead people should not be able to gather additional scouting information for their team. This idea would encourage scouts to stay alive.
- After obliterating an enemy army, you would finally get a window of opportunity to take objectives. This would make major battles a LOT more important from a strategical point of view.
- Lying around dead and wait for someone to ress you is boring! There is nothing wrong in forcing players to get back to play the game and have fun

tl;dr
autorespawn splits up zergs and creates more small scale battles.

(edited by Grunblatt.4608)

enhancing WvW gameplay

in WvW

Posted by: Grunblatt.4608

Grunblatt.4608

My last suggestion (for now) is probably well known already
increase number of targets on player skills, but leave the cap of 5 targets on cross-profession-combos.
This would counteract the tendency of organized groups to stack in a single spot – even without using siegeweapons. While i don’t mind this behaviour at all, i would imagine battles to be a lot more epic if the “optimal” strategy for big groups of players would be to spread out and divide the avaiable professions perfectly to the different parts of the army.

hopefully you guys will add a lot more great suggestions and some of these will inspire the devs for their future WvW patches
Make sure your suggestions are well thought-out and do not change the fundamentals of WvW.