Guild Wars 2

Orb Buff:
150 to All Stats
15% HP

Orb Outmanned Buff:
Magic find?
Experience gain?

A server needs magic find and experience gain against servers dominating them? How is this still a subject Anet won’t address? Any why would I need a boost to something that won’t benefit me while outmanned?

Am I the only living human being on planet Earth that see’s the Orb buff issue as a huge problem in this game?

When each server has 1 Orb WvW is actually balanced. Once one server obtains all 3, stats and numbers go right out the window and create a very unbalanced WvW.

15% HP and an extra 150 Vitality is horrible against people like me who stack condition damage, might as well say: 25% damage Reduction.

They need to redo the orbs to not add combat stats, but add things like:
-% Repair Cost.
+% Badge of Honor Find.

Badges of Honor are on a terrible drop rate, this will give the winning side an advantage in getting BoH and the advantage of not having to pay so much for a loss.

it would be cool if the orbs gave random bonuses , like % condtion duration, 10% crit damage, 100+ to all stats, 10% movement speed, 10% reduced damage/extra damage and it was randomized making it harder to get a huge advantage while still keeping it an important aspect of WvW.

or make them not server wide and only map wide so the most you could have is 5% and 50 to all stats if you have the orb on your particular battleground.

as they are now its just a win more condition, that more often than not is like kicking a server when they are down and pouring salt in their wounds, or have people irate about orb hacking and such because it gives too large an advantage making for a unbalanced/aggravating experience for everyone playing.

Well you certainly aren’t the first person to comment on how unhelpful the out-manned buff is. I really do think ANet needs to put something in to allow servers to catch back up, otherwise you can have servers giving up by Monday, and to help out servers during times they are outnumbered.

As for the orbs, I like the mechanic they bring to the game, so I’d like them to stay as something worth striving for. I don’t think people would be really all that pushed if they just switched the orb and out-manned buff (a frequent suggestion in other posts on this). Rather than removing their buffs I’d like to see them become double edged swords, sure they let you kick some kitten in the field but they also make you vulnerable. For example if the orbs consumed supply in order to function (and reset after a certain amount of time if there was no supply to consume), in order to keep the orb you need to hold at least one of the supply camps feeding it the majority of the time or move it to another keep every so often to let the first one recover. If you don’t you are liable to lose both the orb and the keep you have it in.

It’s obvious that they want the Outmanned buff where it is. Someone at ANet thought it was a great idea to give 150 stats to the winners and crap to the people outmanned.

Somewhere, in their offices, there are people that STILL think that it makes sense. Even with all of us saying these things, they don’t want to change it. They like it the way it is. Somewhere in that office, there’s a guy that thinks this is a bright idea and nobody has told him yet that everyone else thinks it’s crap. :P

It’s either that or they’re ignoring us all. You take your pick.

This is the sort of thing that a competent PVP designer would have flagged within 15 seconds as a “no go.” That a “rich get richer” sort of buff like the orb buff is still in the game a month later, after thousands of posts worth of negative feedback explaining why it is such a bad idea, tells you volumes about the competency of anet’s WvWvW team.

All I’ll say is, the community has given wonderful feedback on what to do with the score and orbs to make a balanced game. A game that still rewards winning and gives incentives, while allowing the losers to catch up. A wealth of posts.

ArenaNet needs to look at those posts and take the ideas. It is simply done better—well thought out and superior to what Anet came up with.

Yukishiro.8792:

This is the sort of thing that a competent PVP designer would have flagged within 15 seconds as a “no go.” That a “rich get richer” sort of buff like the orb buff is still in the game a month later, after thousands of posts worth of negative feedback explaining why it is such a bad idea, tells you volumes about the competency of anet’s WvWvW team.

That — or their WvW team play on the servers that hold 3 Orbs 90% of the week’s duration.

Btw: something that just slapped me was the Outmanned buff should be: ZERO armor/weapon repair bills. Afterall, that server is the one getting pounded and shouldn’t have repair bills at all.

I don’t know. I just feel Anet has ignored this for far too long (along with performance threads on the game) and I might hang up my hat to this game soon. I know their employee despise me and hate my guts (they know who I am irl) but they could at least listen to the community’s concerns on this Orb issue.

Crawford.4135:

Btw: something that just slapped me was the Outmanned buff should be: ZERO armor/weapon repair bills.[snip]

Love it!
ANet, please let us in on your plans to fix WvW. You really failed hard with your 7 days transfers (since this doesn’t help at all because you matched the frequency these people/guilds were already transferring at).

2 questions that would be nice to have answered (please link me if I missed an answer already given):
1) Why are the orbs giving buffs to the team that already controls the game, skewing the score even more?
2) Why did you put in a 7 day free transfer limit when that is the exact length of a WvW match (allowing them to continue on transferring to the winning server every Saturday morning)?

Yukishiro.8792:

This is the sort of thing that a competent PVP designer would have flagged within 15 seconds as a “no go.” That a “rich get richer” sort of buff like the orb buff is still in the game a month later, after thousands of posts worth of negative feedback explaining why it is such a bad idea, tells you volumes about the competency of anet’s WvWvW team.

Yep, even the most amateur one-year-of-experience game designer knows that giving a huge force multiplier to the team that is already winning and has more population is ridiculously bad game design.

The orb buffs need to be fixed. Every single week, the server that has all three orbs leads with a massive point lead (50k-100k or MORE). This isn’t a fluke or a one time thing, and the WvW stat history bears that out.

Has there ever been anything from ANet about this subject?

Asking them like this doesn’t seem to do anything.

I think people overstate the effect of orbs. No question that it has an impact and I agree it needs changing, but I think the effect is far more psychological than actual. This is certainly not the reason everyone is losing.

Niim.9260:

I think people overstate the effect of orbs. No question that it has an impact and I agree it needs changing, but I think the effect is far more psychological than actual. This is certainly not the reason everyone is losing.

True, but it adds insult to injury.