Guild Wars 2

Portals are dead.

Since you nerfed it to 20 people. I have hardly ever used portals now. And I often run with a guild that deploys portal tactics and my guild was getting better at it. We used portals for a couple reasons: 1, keeps us grouped together, 2, keeps the enemy guessing. The fact that there was culling was not a primary reason for it. As a matter of fact, the culling got better over time. Then they implemented the new culling fix trial a couple weeks ago and decided to roll it back. It seems to me that they rolled it back to something at launch, because for me, it is worse than ever.

Why are we hardly ever using portals? Because it takes 2 good mesmers. Now, it’s just easier to simply run into someone as a group. BTW, there is still culling issues with this. Why? You made it a necessity. We can not risk pugs taking the place of someone in the guild. Yet, often times, I still need to spec for portals and keep the utilities needed on my bar: portal, blink, possibly decoy.

First, you increased the CD, so I have to spend 10 points to get the 20% faster glamor CD. Now you limit it to 20. On top of this, I can’t do anything to anyone on top of a wall with any illusions. I can’t destroy any siege on top of a wall. The only exception is if they are right on the edge. (why you couldn’t have just fixed it so I can’t attack thing s through a gate is beyond me) Your really nerfing the heck out of my class.

OK, so now for my plea. I really miss portal tactics, so as a compromise, if you insist, and i mean insist on keeping this arbitrary, skill breaking policy of 20, then here’s an idea: increase the number to 25 and prioritize whoever is in the same squad as you. That way, you’d be sure to have the right people go through the portal.

Portals are an interesting and dynamic aspect to WvW. Please make them viable again. They can be easy to counter by an organized, good guild. I know I’m whining now, but stop listening to the whiners so much and use your best judgment on what is right and makes the game great.

-Violet Sorrows BG

We use portals all the time to great effect. Not sure what the problem is.

Portal is not dead, 20 people which can port in the same time bring another strategy, cooperation between each mesmer and your team. (and you are not the only mesmer. In WvW I almost see in 5 man team, there is 1 – 2 mesmers.)

Deviller what server are you on? bcoz atm im struggeling to even see more then 3 mesmers per a zerg of 30 >_>

The 20 character limit is near pointless. If you need more than 20, simply have any other mesmers drop their entrance, take the portal another mesmer placed, and then drop their exit. Need more than 40? Have a 3rd mesmer do the same, or a 4th, or 5th…

The only effective change limiting the characters per port did, was make more people roll mesmer, so they can drop their ports in conjunction with each other.

Setting up a golem portal chain? Let the golems take the port first, and any stragglers can run, or have any extra mesmers drop their ports.

The CD increase made absolutely no difference and the 20 player cap made very little.

Now you have to use two or three mesmers for a zerg. No big deal.

He must play on the zergs are us server. Bring 100 people to take a supply camp.

In all honesty, Mesmer portals are just as effective as ever…..

If you have more than 20 people in your zurg…..bring a 2nd mesmer.

I have a mesmer and use them frequently when commanding in JQ and honestly feel the game is more balanced now

Cheers

Portal is dead, yet they’re used just as much now then ever. xD

I have a mesmer, but i wish it was reduced to like 10, so I would not have to feel obligated to use a mesmer… seriously I feel like I am playing at a disadvantage when I’m playing some other class.

Azerwyn is my 80 mesmer. I have no problems with the changes that have taken place with the class. I hit what I legitimately target. I portal, invis, timewarp, null field, etc when appropriate.

I’m not dissatisfied with the changes. In fact, I find that mesmer services are in higher demand now than at any time in the past.

Average and below-average mesmers are being forced to learn and grow to be above-average and excellent mesmers. Mesmers can’t just hover on the sidelines anymore, the now must roll up their sleeves and become an intimate part of planning and execution.

Spurnshadow.3678:

Portals are dead.

-Violet Sorrows BG

I truly wish that were so. I greatly dislike the use of mesmer portals in WvW … I think it is a wholly artificial way to capture an objective. I don’t have any problem with it in the open field for movement speed, stealth, surprise, etc, but I think it defeats the entire purpose of building defenses and turns the game into even more mindless flipping of towers/keeps. I’d support the return to unlimited users of a portal (subject only to the timer) if ANet were to make it unusable to breach walls.

First world problems?

When did they do this ? I suggested this a few days ago https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/support/bugs/Portal-bomb-crashes-game-in-wvwvw/first#post1138474 . Because a large enough zerg crashes systems,and most of the people using a portal in such a huge zerg do not show up untill half of your team is dead.And for people saying..“now you just have to use 3 mesmers to portal bom them all in the same spot”…Please think for a second,they make a change like this for a reason,you’re trying to find a way to bypass it simply by making More portal bombs..You want them to do something about that too ?

i dont think op realizes that a class that supports siege better than any other, supports zerg/counter tactics at least as good as any other, breaks defenses as good as any other, AND can spec for roaming as good as any other… is broken.

i mean really…. what other role is there? supply running and aoe damage?

Portal + culling = 20 invisible players killing people………..portal is OP yet.

Caedmon.6798:

And for people saying..“now you just have to use 3 mesmers to portal bom them all in the same spot”…Please think for a second,they make a change like this for a reason,you’re trying to find a way to bypass it simply by making More portal bombs..You want them to do something about that too ?

Within minutes of the patch going live, the Tier 1 response was… “Ok, cool. More Mesmers, same results.” (Reference Thread: Mesmer Portal Nerfed)

We have been living with this patch now for several weeks (~25 days since patch as I write this). There has been little or no change to business as usual. ANet can lower the cap to 5 players and the net effect will be… MORE MESMERS. Because portal bombs (and leveraging culling) offers too great an incentive.

It is not a bypass. Measure behavior — incentivize results.

“Tell me how you measure me and I will tell you how I will behave.”
— Eliyahu M. Goldratt, author , The Goal — A Process of Ongoing Improvement

Mesmer portals should be nerfed to 5 people in my opinion. No other skill works on 20 people.

They need to NERF it more.. 5 man at most

ERMAGERD!!! ERT TERKS A TERNY BERT ER SKERL NER!!!!

I don’t see why people still whine about it. And don’t give excuses for culling, the whole “20 invisible players __”. Culling works both ways, and portalling gives the enemy a big bright pink sign where to AoE. Just throw all your AoE’s on it, and the portal fails. That easy. You don’t need to coordinate, etc, just know “big pink glowy thing = lay AoE”.

It is one of the easiest things to counter. Enough said.

20 people per portal are still good enough to steamroll stuffs.

Please nerf portal even further to 10 people per portal or 5 people per portal like what some people said here. =P

Thenoob.1480:

First world problems?

/thread

yeah nerf more plz.

Looks like we only need 3 classes for WvW:

Elementalist: you know they have focuses
Mesmer: you know they are op supports
Thief: you know their job is to kill.

nerf plz.

Well, this was originally a thread for Anet, but I’m waiting to start my day drinking some coffee and smoking a cig. So, I’ll take a little time to explain.

I regularly run with 2 guilds. One of which used to use “portal tactics.” The importance of me running with my guild is, hopefully, not lost on better players. We have developed a group synergy to maximize each class and support eachother. The roll of the mesmer was, amongst other things, the portal. What we would do is portal multiple times around a battlefield. Every 10-15 seconds, our whole group would be in a different spot. This is the power of portals. Everyone in the guild would get through supporting eachother properly. This is something that has been obviously lost on many of the responders to my thread because this tactic can no longer work. If pugs take the portal, then everyone will die, because the important people, the ones in the guild, most likely won’t get through if there is a group following that would put us over 20 players. If we are using 2-3 mesmers to transport a group into battle, our portals are on CD and we can’t portal again, so it is a one time use only in a battle. Might as well just rush in. This is why I asked for it to be increased to 25 and prioritize your squad. At lease that way, we could keep our guild synergy.

The only use for portal now is to transport golems (this is still a pain in the kitten because pugs still screw this up) or to use your “one time only” portal with other mesmers to get through a heavily defended choke point in a lord room or to do a quick siege destruction outside of a structure with a return portal (god forbid more than 20 people come through so it’s still highly risky).

I am a very experienced mesmer. I just see no reason to run with portal, blink, decoy on my utility bar just incase a portal is needed. I used to do that, because we would use portals extensively, but no more. BTW, I’m not only speaking for myself and my experience with the people I run with, but I’ve also noticed and extensive drop in enemies using portals. This is a fact and please don’t say I don’t know what I’m doing. Hopefully now, you understand why portals are dead.

With all that being said, this has taken away a small aspect of the game, one that is very dynamic and fun, but now, a little less so. My fear is that over the long run, the dynamicism and fun will keep getting chipped away. Stop now, and bring back portalling, please.

I still see portals being used just as much, and to great effect. Despite all the changes and trials, the busted culling behavior remains one of the most powerful ‘features’ of portal tactics.

Also, the suggestion of prioritizing squad members sounds great at first, but then when you think about it, it’s actually completely half-baked. You could conceivably make it so that no pugs could go through the portal until all of your squad members do, but this creates more problems than it solves, and gets hilariously complicated when you start to think about how this logic would work in the case of multiple simultaneous portals.

I am a mesmer. I only portal when there’s no other option to get past a hard held choke point. It doesn’t matter if it’s 20, 30, 40 for a limit.

It’s straight up cheese tactic. Teleporting 20 people at once over a long distance avoiding legitimate obstacles is weak. If you can’t rush it, your portal isn’t going to save you. 20 players or more keen on avoiding combat is a weak squad.

If its one of those choke points we all know and love where someone drops 6 balistas, sure fine, because 6 balistas at a choke point is cheese tactics too. Turns your six worst players into snipers instantly. Hooray. GJ on that one button win. Yeah, that I can honestly say deserves a portal.

But really, anything else you can do with a portal you can do without one, and have more fun doing it and learn more doing it and become a batter player and a team doing it. Standing around for a minute, hitting F and then mashing buttons is lame.

Hey, if that’s fun for you, whatever, but no need to raise the cap higher than 20. At least make portal bombing take some teamwork.

Portals will be dead for portal bombs anyway, they are so easily defended against. Once we figured it out we hope for them because it is good for a huge pile of bags/exp., they are useless for portal bombs against a decent guild.

It would be nice to be able to get more than 20 inside a tower/keep though after you have been hiding.

Cactus.2710:

I greatly dislike the use of mesmer portals in WvW … I think it is a wholly artificial way to capture an objective. I don’t have any problem with it in the open field for movement speed, stealth, surprise, etc, but I think it defeats the entire purpose of building defenses and turns the game into even more mindless flipping of towers/keeps. I’d support the return to unlimited users of a portal (subject only to the timer) if ANet were to make it unusable to breach walls.

Portals don’t breach walls unless you already have a mesmer on the inside. That’s why people sweep for mesmers after capping forts. They can’t stay invisible forever like thieves can, so it’s not that easy to recap with them unless the other server is getting lazy.

Dear ANet…

Rock is overpowered. Paper is Fine.

Signed
– Scissors

Srsly. The 20 person limit on portal is just fine, You can still get a good enough force moving with with a single mesmer and need to coordinate a little. What’s more the case is that for large insta-portalling of Golems [like chaining multiple portals at the same time, effectively travelling great distances in no time] is more difficult that way and requires more mesmers. That’s perfectly fine, as it’s now more difficult to instantly show up with 15 golems and NO warning at a gate. If you being more mesmers to work around it, you can’t bring other classes that you might need.

Portals still are a great tool for position management and other tactics. I don’t see them dead at all.

hoschi.8693:

Dear ANet…

Rock is overpowered. Paper is Fine.

Signed
– Scissors

I just laughed out loud. Perfectly stated.

If the OP is worried about pugs, drop “distraction” portals – ones that go no where, and your group knows not to take. One of your Mesmers just takes off in a direction having just dropped a portal, then portals back and the pugs go poof in the wrong direction.

hoschi.8693:

Dear ANet…

Rock is overpowered. Paper is Fine.

Signed
– Scissors

I just laughed out loud. Perfectly stated.

If the OP is worried about pugs, drop “distraction” portals – ones that go no where, and your group knows not to take. One of your Mesmers just takes off in a direction having just dropped a portal, then portals back and the pugs go poof in the wrong direction.

hoschi.8693:

Dear ANet…

Rock is overpowered. Paper is Fine.

Signed
– Scissors

I just laughed out loud. Perfectly stated.

If the OP is worried about pugs, drop “distraction” portals – ones that go no where, and your group knows not to take. One of your Mesmers just takes off in a direction having just dropped a portal, then portals back and the pugs go poof in the wrong direction.

I personally think the only ones that should be allowed to use a portal, are those in the mesmer’s party. So, feel good with 20.

There is nothing wrong with portals, 20 is fine, the CD is meh, I do’t get people, its obvios when one is cast, if you don’t Pan/Pay attention you deserve to die to a bomb, players have 2 evades available roll out of the way when you see the giant bright pink circle.

Really whats next, nerf players from flanking because we can’t break the tunnel vision habit ?

Portal Bombs are so easy to avoid if you actually pay attention, portaling an army into a keep/tower deserves to happen if you don’t check for mesmers, other then those two instances portals are pretty much useless aside from getting golems from point A to B.