Guild Wars 2

Apparently I need to provide more insightful commentary. So here goes.

Portal is ruining your game.

It turns a fun 20 vs 20 matchup into a 1 second burst match.

It turns siege into a game of hide and go seek.

It removes the one handicap that golems have, move speed.

It is the sole reason people are complaining so much about culling.

It turns a lone exploiter into the most important person on the map.

I could go on and on if I wanted.

ArenaNET your customer base is frustrated! I have seen numbers dwindle in WvWvW at a rapid pace over the past two months and it’s not because of GEAR PROGRESSION or any other such nonsense. These are people who are leaving who LOVED the massive battles, the siege, everything! They didn’t care! They are gone now! They left in disgust!

And you know what the worst part is? You do nothing. I don’t even know if you care.

Edited by moderator: thread title changed for a more descriptive one

Portals require teamwork to work

also inb4 removed

/signed. The portal skill is actually the root of what most people are complaining about in WvW, they just don’t realize it. More hardcore WvWers are leaving every day, waiting for a game that gets it right.

just add a 2 second “portal sickness” where you are unable to perform any action after using a portal.
ALso swap portal with any elite skill which is NOT Time Warp(xD) and give it a longer cd. Make Mesmers have to choose one of 2 game breaking spells and dont let em have both…

It doesn’t require team work to tell 20 people to click on a purple circle when its ready. That’s like saying it requires team work to tell 20 people to attack the grub.

You know what requires team work? Protecting a flank against a wave of attackers who decided to pincer your siege team…oh wait sorry just got portal bombed.

Most things in WvW now revolve around portals. I remember when defense used to actually matter in the meta game, now any good defense can be broken with a single mesmer laying a portal down in the lords room. I remember defending lords rooms for 3 hours before portals become so common that even commanders have pugs do them now. The commander just needs a reliable mesmer, he then says “PORTAL STACK HERE” and the pugs listen and go through the portal when its ready to be used. I hate the way it is now.

edit: Obvious culling issues play a big part in this. It remains to be seen if they are so effective once culling is fixed. Unfortunately its been going on for months with no progress made. I also like the idea behind portals but it has made wvw stagnant lately, its all about who can portal bomb first.

Mirage.8345:

/signed. The portal skill is actually the root of what most people are complaining about in WvW, they just don’t realize it. More hardcore WvWers are leaving every day, waiting for a game that gets it right.

You mean softcore…

xxxzavulonxxx.8413:

Mirage.8345:

/signed. The portal skill is actually the root of what most people are complaining about in WvW, they just don’t realize it. More hardcore WvWers are leaving every day, waiting for a game that gets it right.

You mean softcore…

Is your definition of hardcore ‘Poof into the enemy’s fort and slaughter them without a fifteenth of a fight’? Because that’s what I’m getting out of this. Softcore players are casuals who play for fun. Hardcores play for a challenge, and with portals the way they are a challenge is becoming less and less common on the battlefield.

As a Mesmer i’ve been involved in this “tactic” and been on the receiving end of it, sadly to say the increase in cooldown has done very little. I personally thought that portals should be destructible targets or else the Mesmer should receive a glow when he has activated his portal entre.

It’s not portals that need fixing, it’s culling and door glitches.

Also, don’t spout such nonsense that numbers are dwindling because of portals – people get bored, the hop servers, they play other games, they pve. You have no facts to back up your suppositian.

My main is an ele, just in case you were wondering.

I’ve seen some of the most dedicated Commanders leave this game over the last few weeks. I’m talking commanders who literally lived in world vs world. They played because they liked it win or lose.

Then portals came and got more and more popular.
Slowly more and more pug zergs started to use em.
Armies that were once slaughtered turned into well oiled machines of death without practice or skill just at the click of a button and the mercy of culling.
So they left.
Not just my server either, on the other sides as well.

I will not mention names cus I don’t want to get this thread closed for “calling” people out.

BTW: To everything think that they will fix the “culling” issue you need to wake up and understands the limits of a game engine and what “culling” is. You may not believe it, but all of our rendered characters have memory budgets in this game with culling set to a certain distance / size. If you increase that budget then you start getting problems as engine starts running out of memory. I seriously doubt arena net has programmers dedicated enough to redesign their entire friggin engine to fix this problem.

How do you think that meeting is gonna go? Hey, so we gotta fix this culling issue by redesigning our engine from the ground up…or we could just remove portal from world vs world.

Sad thing is they don’t care and I know it. They are just gonna wait till WvW dies out as more and more people get bored of portal war, then when only a few remain they will claim they fixed the “culling” issue which no one will be able to refute as people will barely be able to scrape together a 10 vs 10 over stonemist castle.

Why must everything that is “strong” be nerfed. In no way are portals ruining the game. It takes planning to use them and defend against them. Adapt to it. Dont beg for nerfing on everything you get beat up with.

Seems like a bunch of non mesmers here. The biggest issue in WvW is culling problems and thieves that exploit it. Portal is just an excuse for people to continue to hate on mes. It’s QQ like this that has crippled our class.

Portals aren’t as game breaking as people make them out to be. I have used bombs and I have been on the receiving end of bombs. Even when you are portal bombed it’s not the hardest job to defend against (In the assumption that they haven’t been ‘culled out’, which personally doesn’t seem to happen so much now). It might be harder because of the 5 people AoE limit but it’s still not the hardest thing to defend against.

And yes, it is a surprisingly hard work to get randoms to use a Portal bomb, be it that they’re either auto attacking something, missed it in the chat box or simply didn’t care.

Totally agree with op. It takes the fun out of w3 in so many different ways. It’s cool if you disagree with the op but your responses have been pathetic to be honest. Especially the ones about skill as it takes zero to do and removes the long and fun battles out of W3 which all of you have failed to comment on.

Portal Bombing is not ruining the game. If a Mesmer is taking an army straight to your keep lord, it means they already either

A. Have taken down the gates, so your lord isn’t safe anyway

B. Escaped detection from players for long enough that the enemy reinforcements arrived outside the gate.

Seriously, sweeping for Mesmers is an extremely common task when a tower or keep is taken that if a portal-bomb gets used on you, it’s your own fault.

(I play Necro almost exclusively)

Diashame.6328:

Totally agree with op. It takes the fun out of w3 in so many different ways. It’s cool if you disagree with the op but your responses have been pathetic to be honest. Especially the ones about skill as it takes zero to do and removes the long and fun battles out of W3 which all of you have failed to comment on.

Some servers go for the win, a long drawn out battle may be detrimental.

Your sever may have the ability to break the enemies at the beginning of the fight but if it ends in a long drawn out battle you may be wiped.

Not every battle ends because of a single portal bomb. (Seriously at a fight with Drakkars last week in hills keep, we were bombed and bombed about 7 times each, we were still fighting nearly 2 hours later.)

The people fighting might hate long drawn battle?

Why does every battle have to be long and drawn out?

Your right on the skill point but then it DOES take organization. It take more skill to stop a bomb so try and see it as an opportunity to show the enemy that your more skilled?

I dunno, but it’s not as game breaking and fun ruining as people are making out.

The portal cause important changes in a course of a battle. I personally disagree with the actual function of this skill – the ability to port X players to a certain location. In a wvw battle, advancing through field must be made fighting, not by mass porting.
My solution is to make the ability available just for the mesmer and for the party members – fair enough.

I want to see portals be usable by all servers. Don’t know how portals are ruining it for people. Most people that use to wvw with my guild but no longer do say they are just bored/burnt out or busy getting ascension gear. And the guy who says fights are won by who ever portal bombs first isnt in tier 1 I guess. There have been hard wipes because the side being bombed see’s it and responds quickly. Ring of warding + aoe works well against portals.

VLNt.9862:

The portal cause important changes in a course of a battle. I personally disagree with the actual function of this skill – the ability to port X players to a certain location. In a wvw battle, advancing through field must be made fighting, not by mass porting.
My solution is to make the ability available just for the mesmer and for the party members – fair enough.

That wouldn’t change anything. It would just mean the organised forces required to perform an effective portal bomb would simply spread out more mesmers.

Example: 20 man guild group, 4 parties, one Mesmer in each. All mesmers drop a portal entrance at exact same spot where everyone is gathered, then proceed to all rotate mass invisibility while running to the desired location, drop an exit in the same location, everyone has a portal to use, portal bomb achieved.

This is just an example and obviously wont be as common as current bombing but it wont remove the problems that you state you have with the Portal. Simply make them ever so slightly harder to achieve.

KinkyWarrior.1879:

Diashame.6328:

Totally agree with op. It takes the fun out of w3 in so many different ways. It’s cool if you disagree with the op but your responses have been pathetic to be honest. Especially the ones about skill as it takes zero to do and removes the long and fun battles out of W3 which all of you have failed to comment on.

Some servers go for the win, a long drawn out battle may be detrimental.

Your sever may have the ability to break the enemies at the beginning of the fight but if it ends in a long drawn out battle you may be wiped.

Not every battle ends because of a single portal bomb. (Seriously at a fight with Drakkars last week in hills keep, we were bombed and bombed about 7 times each, we were still fighting nearly 2 hours later.)

The people fighting might hate long drawn battle?

Why does every battle have to be long and drawn out?

Your right on the skill point but then it DOES take organization. It take more skill to stop a bomb so try and see it as an opportunity to show the enemy that your more skilled?

I dunno, but it’s not as game breaking and fun ruining as people are making out.

So you wannna use us Drakkars as a measure for portal balance?
Cmon, in terms of being an unorganized mess, there’s not a single server capable of beating us. You guys at Gandara are a totally different level from us and every single fight showed that.
You simply can’t use unorganized karma trains from Drakkar Lake of all servers as a measure for portal balance.

naphack.9346:

So you wannna use us Drakkars as a measure for portal balance?
Cmon, in terms of being an unorganized mess, there’s not a single server capable of beating us. You guys at Gandara are a totally different level from us and every single fight showed that.
You simply can’t use unorganized karma trains from Drakkar Lake of all servers as a measure for portal balance.

The bombing I’m talking about was clearly somewhat organised as it was performed by the guild group [DSS] or something like that (I’m assuming that most guilds have coordination of at least enough to get their group on to the portal and then target at our siege) and of course the random’s which also follow through. The bombing was quite organised. I also use Drakkars as your the only server I can remember using Bombing as much as you did. Either way, it struck me as a clearly organised bomb and we still stopped it.

Edit: Don’t judge your server so harshly, sometimes AM we’re so un organised it was actually spinning us off a few times

Decklan.7540:

It doesn’t require team work to tell 20 people to click on a purple circle when its ready. That’s like saying it requires team work to tell 20 people to attack the grub.

You know what requires team work? Protecting a flank against a wave of attackers who decided to pincer your siege team…oh wait sorry just got portal bombed.

yes it doesnt require people to press f to be coordinated, but being able to portal bomb an objective successfully, i’ve countered portal bombs before a decent amount of time, just as much as i’ve pulled off a portal bomb myself. Its one of the best tactics when being outnumbered i find, because they don’t expect it most of the time, allowing you to defend against their sieges. Protecting a flank of invaders is probably easier to pull off, all you do is just scout and keep some players spread, then say INC left side.

If highly active commanders leaves the game because of portals that proves they can’t field and utilise their own mesmers efficiently or simply not at all.

To remove portals or water them down so they can’t function in the way they currently are you are changing how 90% of how WvW currently rolls for the majority of servers.

And i do not think the majority will thank you for it in the long term.

Agree that portals should go. My reasoning is that, like orbs did, it gives even more of an advantage to the alreay advantaged – the stronger or more organized teams. I’m glad they got rid of orbs. Wish they’d get rid of portals. (And Mes is my main).

Regarding sweeping for Mesmers – that is part of the problem – at least make the portal not be able to go through walls and intact gates. Nah, scratch that – just get rid of them entirely.

ITT: bads that don’t know how to counter mesmers.

Just a note to Anet, please do not listen to the vocal minority, you will push the majority out.

Johje Holan.4607:

Regarding sweeping for Mesmers – that is part of the problem – at least make the portal not be able to go through walls and intact gates. Nah, scratch that – just get rid of them entirely.

If you can’t take two measley minutes to walk around and thoroughly check the place, quite frankly you deserve to be back door’d by a mesmer.

KinkyWarrior.1879:

Johje Holan.4607:

Regarding sweeping for Mesmers – that is part of the problem – at least make the portal not be able to go through walls and intact gates. Nah, scratch that – just get rid of them entirely.

If you can’t take two measley minutes to walk around and thoroughly check the place, quite frankly you deserve to be back door’d by a mesmer.

If you sweep for just two minutes in SM and the Keeps, you will get portal bombed – it is not an insignificant area. My point is that one person hiding should not be able to re-take a stronghold like that regardless of if you sweep or not.

Johje Holan.4607:

KinkyWarrior.1879:

Johje Holan.4607:

Regarding sweeping for Mesmers – that is part of the problem – at least make the portal not be able to go through walls and intact gates. Nah, scratch that – just get rid of them entirely.

If you can’t take two measley minutes to walk around and thoroughly check the place, quite frankly you deserve to be back door’d by a mesmer.

If you sweep for just two minutes in SM and the Keeps, you will get portal bombed. My point is that one person hiding should not be able to re-take a stronghold like that regardless of if you sweep or not.

But that persons whole ability to portal into keeps is all on the hopes they aren’t seen. When I’m commanding all I say is, Sweep, everyone sweeps. Mesmers are flushed out and portalling isn’t possible. With just a few of you, you can thoroughly sweep every keep and Stonemist in 2 minutes, or 3 tops.

One person doesn’t retake the keep, he simply gets the people to do so in there, which if you sweep, he cannot do.

Decklan.7540:

Apparently I need to provide more insightful commentary. So here goes.

Portal is ruining your game.

No its not. Its making the game better.

Decklan.7540:

It turns a fun 20 vs 20 matchup into a 1 second burst match.

Your doing it wrong then.

Decklan.7540:

It turns siege into a game of hide and go seek.

Waaaait a second. You cant just press a button and insta join the battle again to show of your awesomesauce legendary? I guess the clever fools the less clever.

Decklan.7540:

It removes the one handicap that golems have, move speed.

No it gives coordinated people with golems and edge over non coordinated people with golems.

Decklan.7540:

It is the sole reason people are complaining so much about culling.

Culling would still be as big an issue without portals, and it would only encourage even more zerging.

Decklan.7540:

It turns a lone exploiter into the most important person on the map.

If you believe that, you are doing something wrong.

Decklan.7540:

ArenaNET your customer base is frustrated! I have seen numbers dwindle in WvWvW at a rapid pace over the past two months and it’s not because of GEAR PROGRESSION or any other such nonsense. These are people who are leaving who LOVED the massive battles, the siege, everything! They didn’t care! They are gone now! They left in disgust!

And you know what the worst part is? You do nothing. I don’t even know if you care.

Sounds to me like you need to counter some of the basics in the game, instead of joining the forums and expect the devs to solve any tactic you cant beat.

If your still in doubt, go watch http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IS0TJU59ESk&hd=1 and see how people with smaller numbers beat portal bombs, and bomb them selfs to counter siege and in the end win the fight with skills, tactics and coordination.

If you are actually involved in WvW you would know how to defend against a portal bomb, there are ways, learn them. I’ll give you a few tips, watch for stacking, watch for enter portals (sometimes mesmers can’t drop the enter on the inside of a tower/keep), call out those portals ask whose portal is this, use your skills for bombs (guardians/thieves you figure out which skills, maybe back off the bomb so you dont die, yes they will destroy siege but this is a tactic for defense/offense, and of course always mesmer sweep (learn the hiding spots). I understand the frustrations with culling, which Anet needs to work on, but I for one don’t have that big of an issue with portal bomb culling, more perma stealth thieves for some reason. I play a mesmer on T1, and as much as I try to plant, I often get killed because these “skilled” players know the hiding spots. I’m not going to say learn to play, but I am going to say learn to defend and strategize, it’s all part of the game.

KinkyWarrior.1879:

Johje Holan.4607:

KinkyWarrior.1879:

Johje Holan.4607:

Regarding sweeping for Mesmers – that is part of the problem – at least make the portal not be able to go through walls and intact gates. Nah, scratch that – just get rid of them entirely.

If you can’t take two measley minutes to walk around and thoroughly check the place, quite frankly you deserve to be back door’d by a mesmer.

If you sweep for just two minutes in SM and the Keeps, you will get portal bombed. My point is that one person hiding should not be able to re-take a stronghold like that regardless of if you sweep or not.

But that persons whole ability to portal into keeps is all on the hopes they aren’t seen. When I’m commanding all I say is, Sweep, everyone sweeps. Mesmers are flushed out and portalling isn’t possible. With just a few of you, you can thoroughly sweep every keep and Stonemist in 2 minutes, or 3 tops.

One person doesn’t retake the keep, he simply gets the people to do so in there, which if you sweep, he cannot do.

I realize one person doesn’t take it back but that one person is necessary for taking it back. I’ve known Mesmers to be able to hide through a sweep (you can say it wasn’t a good sweep but that’s beside the point).

I just don’t think its right for one person to have that ability to get a whole army through walls. And it as I said, I think it strengthens the already strong. I guess we just disagree.

Portals are an interesting mechanic, but they do need some changes. For a start – like a few other things in game – visible effects like portals should be color coded (like red for an enemy portal and green for your own portals). In the midst of a fight no one really has a clue who put down what. Different sounds for placing friendly and enemy portals would help too.

In addition I think it should be difficult to place the second portal, so for a start a mesmer should not be able to drop the second portal in stealth or for as long as the revealed function lasts (3 seconds?) after coming out of stealth and the exit portal itself should take a couple of seconds to drop.

Finally if a group can’t get to the exit portal by any other legitimate means then it shouldn’t be possible to drop an exit portal. For clarification I mean if a mesmer hides inside then they can’t portal the group through walls and a closed gate. I remember an Anet dev saying something similar a month or so ago.

The problem in a nutshell I see with portals is they are far too easy to drop in order to bomb, provide little risk for the mesmer and virtually ALWAYS come off. I can count on one hand in about 50 hours of WvWvW the number of times a mesmer was killed before dropping a portal. And that is running with an organized guild who are constantly paranoid about being portal bombed and as such always looking for the mesmer.

As a member of an organized guild we do a lot of portal bombing, our guild leader and commander is a mesmer. It isn’t hard to get any sensible pug to join in, so anyone who says they require team work is dreaming.

Most battles are now who gets the portal bomb in first and who gets it right. Getting it right is usually do you have the right classes with you using the right skills. Not hard, and if you don’t have the ideal classes with ideal skill set no big deal, it very rarely means your bomb will fail.

The most fun I’ve had in weeks in wvwvw revolved around a 70 minute battle trying to take back a camp near our spawn. We actually fought in the open, we flanked, we pincered, we used kitten near everything including siege but what we DIDN’T use was a portal bomb. It was a TON of fun.

Whatever you might think I doubt Anet had in mind the constant portal bombing that we see now when they planned WvWvW. Something has to change but I honestly wouldn’t like the entire mechanic to be removed.

Something that powerful (in essence capable of changing any battle, any offence, any defence) really does need to be much more difficult to pull off.

I just wonder why portal bomb works against some groups nine times out of ten, but some groups wipe portal bomb almost always.

This:

I just wonder why portal bomb works against some groups nine times out of ten, but some groups wipe portal bomb almost always.

And this:

If you are actually involved in WvW you would know how to defend against a portal bomb, there are ways, learn them. I’ll give you a few tips, watch for stacking, watch for enter portals (sometimes mesmers can’t drop the enter on the inside of a tower/keep), call out those portals ask whose portal is this, use your skills for bombs (guardians/thieves you figure out which skills, maybe back off the bomb so you dont die, yes they will destroy siege but this is a tactic for defense/offense, and of course always mesmer sweep (learn the hiding spots). I understand the frustrations with culling, which Anet needs to work on, but I for one don’t have that big of an issue with portal bomb culling, more perma stealth thieves for some reason. I play a mesmer on T1, and as much as I try to plant, I often get killed because these “skilled” players know the hiding spots. I’m not going to say learn to play, but I am going to say learn to defend and strategize, it’s all part of the game.

you were too polite, it’s simple as that – L2P.

portal is not the root of cullin issue stealth is. i have never had problem with a portal causing it. only time i could say way something even close to that was when 100 people way pointed in SM on top of us when we already had 60 people in there but i would expect 160 people in one spot to cause some issues

TL;DR

portals are problem ? not sure why is it so, but if your side are having problems with portal perhaps it is because you never really deployed it, or you don’t have capable mesmer to capitalize from it….

People always read a small segment of a post and make the main topic on that 5% of the ops post. It’s not about ability to play or how to do it right, it’s about having fun in actual game play which in a lot of people’s opinion, not the vocal minority is that portal bombing is balls to fun.

I love all the people missing the point here.
I don’t care about winning or losing I care about having fun and trying to introduce new people into world vs world. Portal is the number one detriment to this exercise.

This isn’t about l2p. It’s far easier to coordinate 20 people to click on a button then organize your group to defend against 20 people, 15 of which are culling in, with all these theories and battle plans. In war, he who strikes first usually wins. And by usually I mean 90 percent of the time. It’s why you are seeing so much of it now a days. Why do something different when you have an at will ace in the sleeve.

Someone here said that 9 out of 10 times portal bomb wins. Then goes ahead and says one group will wipe em with a smiley face. Well grats. If you expand those numbers to say 100, you just proved that 90 people will get frustrated wiping to portal bombs while your elite group of 10 stays and wipes em. So now 90 people are just gonna go back to fractal farming and your 10 man group is gonna stay behind.

My point remains. 1 more month of portal bombing and you will start to see the most epic fight at stonemist be a 10v10 portal match with another server hiding a mesmer inside to try and portal inside and wipe up the scraps. We could release youtube videos! If you’re bored you can go hunt the deers. Might as well stick a heart npc in the middle of the keeps. You guys can portal up and down the map all day and farm karma.

I think the idea of a portal makes combat interesting, but I agree it needs some sort of balancing. My idea would be to make the portal destructible like a siege object and make those using the portal require a 2 -3 sec cast time before they are allowed to port to the exit portal.

Decklan.7540:

Someone here said that 9 out of 10 times portal bomb wins.

Against some groups. Other groups wipe the Portal Bombers 9 times out of 10. Read everything instead of 5% of the post.

Smokee.1754:

Decklan.7540:

Portal is ruining your game.

No its not. Its making the game better.

Great argument. I guess mine was kinda of blatant as well so let’s move on.

Smokee.1754:

Decklan.7540:

It turns a fun 20 vs 20 matchup into a 1 second burst match.

Your doing it wrong then.

What does this even mean? It’s a fact that portal bombs wins 90 percent of the time and the fight is over in 1 second. I’d rather lose a 15 minute standoff then lose a 1 second burst match. What exactly is your point here? If you had a point I’d provide a counterpoint but instead you just turn up with an internet meme. I’ll have to do the same them. Lolcat rageface why so serious?

Smokee.1754:

Decklan.7540:

It turns siege into a game of hide and go seek.

Waaaait a second. You cant just press a button and insta join the battle again to show of your awesomesauce legendary? I guess the clever fools the less clever.

Ok, again, what does this have to do with anything? Mesmer sweeping is in the game because of portal. No one likes to mesmer sweep. It’s a chore. No one WANTS to spend 15 minutes sweeping stonemist. No one WANTS to constantly rotate their camera around and hope their team is doing the same because they need to guard against the 1 second wipe that is a portal bomb. Once again, this is NOT how you debate someone. To debate you need to provide a counter argument. Right now you are just spouting out arbitrary non-sequitors.

Smokee.1754:

Decklan.7540:

It removes the one handicap that golems have, move speed.

No it gives coordinated people with golems and edge over non coordinated people with golems.

Dude seriously, how is this proving your point? Golems are slow. Coordination or not, portal removes this counter measure entirely. Maybe to prove a point I’ll give you an example of how ridiculous you sound with an analogy.

Let’s say my argument is that steroids remove the one weakness that athletes have with strength training. Now this is how inane you sound right here. You would reply with; “No it doesn’t it! It just separates the athletes who can take steroids better then the others!” Ask yourself now, how did I prove my point there? Did I just add anything meaningful? Did I provide a good argument as to why it DOESN’T give athletes an advantage in strength training or did I just puff my chest and tell someone to L2P? I wish I could talk to you over a phone or something and explain to you that you sound ridiculous. If you were in a debate your debate partner would leave out of sympathy.

Smokee.1754:

Decklan.7540:

It is the sole reason people are complaining so much about culling.

Culling would still be as big an issue without portals, and it would only encourage even more zerging.

Once again, how do you address my point? Most people can render in 20 people running in from the distance. It’s because the memory budget works that way, it was designed that way in stress tests. Most people (computers) can’t render in 20 people that teleport instantly to one location. It is the NUMBER one reason we are complaining about culling right now on the forums.

Smokee.1754:

Decklan.7540:

It turns a lone exploiter into the most important person on the map.

If you believe that, you are doing something wrong.

I am starting to get frustrated now. Do you even understand the words I am typing? If portal was removed from world vs world then that exploiter who jumped into stonemist would be just that; a lone exploiter who jumped into stonemist. Turn that exploiter into a mesmer with portal and now he is a lone exploiter with a zerg behind him and a flipped castle. The zerg can then just say; “he was hiding in there since TUESDAY!”

I’m removing the last part because you are giving me a headache.
I’m sorry I couldn’t include your name in the quotes but I don’t think this forum supports interstitial quotes with two different account names. (Edit: NM figured it out).

Not being biased cos I’m a mesmer, really It doesn’t bother me cos it doesn’t affect my personal play, but what annoys me is that people in this game cry about anything that requires effort to combat. It’s a legit tactic, it is not game ruining, both side have access to it and I have seen both cases where they have succeeded and have failed multiple times.

Drarnor Kunoram.5180:

Decklan.7540:

Someone here said that 9 out of 10 times portal bomb wins.

Against some groups. Other groups wipe the Portal Bombers 9 times out of 10. Read everything instead of 5% of the post.

No. I did read his post. If you take two unorganized groups, the group who portal bombs first wins. How is this beneficial towards getting more people into world vs world? Most people come into world vs world to try and learn how to get better then get wiped by a portal bomb several times and leave.

Unorganized pvp is a necessary part of massive pvp as most of the customer base is going to be unorganized. It’s detrimental to have an ability in the game that turns off so much of your player base.

World vs World used to be so enjoyable. There used to be so many people present and battles raged on everywhere. It wasn’t the thief stealth capping, or the lack of progression, or getting stomped that turned people off, it’s the simple fact that portal bombing is such an effective counter-measure to pick up pvp that people are just getting frustrated and leave.

A lot of people would stick around and get wiped 100 times to an organized group if it was an actual battle on the battlefield, not a one second wipe.

I play a mesmer.

What I’d like fixed about the game, in order:

1.) Terrain exploits allowing folks to enter areas safely that they normally couldn’t otherwise. There is NO reason for any wall on any WvW map to be exploitable.

2.) Fix the ‘culling’ issue.

3.) Address Portal as a unique movement enhancing ability. If the other issues are fixed and Portal remains the most single important ability in the game, then get rid of it and give mesmers a suitable escape / movement oriented substitute utility.

ShadowSoljer.6524:

Mister Mustard.7203:

I play a mesmer.

What I’d like fixed about the game, in order: blah blah nerf mesmer.

Allow me to do what you just did.

I play a thief, please Anet nerf all our skills that do any damage, I don’t want us to be too strong.

See my point there? You don’t really play mesmer

Wow. Just wow.

His first point was to remove terrain exploits. These have nothing to do with a mesmer.

His second point was to fix culling. Once again these have nothing to do with a mesmer.

His final point was not to remove portal but to change it. It was an idea he wasn’t asking for a nerf.

None of this matters though. I’m opening up a discussion with a guy named shadow.soljer.

So I watched the entire video that smokee posted.

It was quite good watching you guys defend with only 11 using arrow carts / ballistas / and pretty much every ability in your arsenal.

Approximately three seconds of your video were portaling. Wasn’t very exciting watching 11 people click a portal.

All your proving to someone like me is that world vs world looks pretty awesome and portal looks pretty lame. Now amplify this over a week. Against servers that are using portal non-stop as the lynch-pin of their entire battle plan. The entire game is basically becoming a chess match with portal now and its slowly eroding the player base away from world vs world.

And no offense, but for small scale vs zerg I’d rather watch clips by the newlanders guild.

Reverse the logic on culling for portals. Make anyone that comes out of a portal first to be rendered instead of last and we would solve alot of the portal complaints (Well maybe except those that use portal bombs as means of ‘cloaking’ since they would see each other first as they come out of portals while their targets are culled).

Decklan.7540:

Then portals came and got more and more popular

Ahh yes, that dreadful beta last summer before release. The day that the big commanders abandoned WvW, and the game type died. A sad story.

But seriously, Portal has been around since before the game came out, and tactics/strategies have existed for all this time.

Decklan.7540:

BTW: To everything think that they will fix the “culling” issue you need to wake up and understands the limits of a game engine and what “culling” is. You may not believe it, but all of our rendered characters have memory budgets in this game with culling set to a certain distance / size. If you increase that budget then you start getting problems as engine starts running out of memory. I seriously doubt arena net has programmers dedicated enough to redesign their entire friggin engine to fix this problem.

Or you know, maybe Anet can have competent people working on this issue. Using low res models until the actual model loads in is the painfully obvious fix.

As for people that complain about having a Mesmer hiding in a tower/keep and porting in their allies… really?.. even the bottom ranked servers are very proficient at mopping up stragglers after taking a tower/keep.

If anything mechanical is hurting WvW it is the 5 target limit to AoE, all the pro-zerg incentives the game provides, and the disincentives to actually helping your server (supply runs, upgrades/defence).

Variety and options are a good thing. Portals give WvW tactics and strategy more variety.

Junkpile.7439:

I just wonder why portal bomb works against some groups nine times out of ten, but some groups wipe portal bomb almost always.

Because the players who pull of portal bombs alot become paranoid when they see shadow refuge and stacking, as soon as i see i call it out even before it happens, allowing us to defend our siege against portal bombing, granted this doesn’t always work out in our favor but knowing what to look for and to get everyone to be able to coordinate fast enough to just instantly down people coming out of a portal will destroy portal bombing, it’s about as effective as it is ineffective when both sides know how to use and counter.