That said, rather than solving any question or issue, I think, more kitten ingly, this thread more just goes to show why a very significant number of players are put off of using the official forum and putting their opinions forward. It genuinely deserves its reputation as being toxic.
This. This forum in general is incredibly hostile to divergent opinions. And all of you claiming the “majority” wanted the alpine BLs back have absolutely no factual basis for that claim whatsoever. “Your whole guild wanted them back” is not a factual basis.
For me, I’m glad the alpine BLs are back, if only so that 3 months from now all the desert BL haters can finally realize that DBL was not the problem with WvW when HoT launched. The recent changes to stability, the population balancing changes, and the upcoming scoring changes are dealing with what have always been the core issues with the game, which are finally being fixed.
The BL maps are just preference, and frankly, I’ve never been a fan of the “strategic value” of the towers in the EB or ABL maps, which basically just amounts to being able to fire a treb at a wall uncontested. There’s nothing strategic about that, if anything it’s just plain annoying. Maybe if the towers provided shortcuts around the map, or if they were crucial to maintaining supply routes to the keeps, then they would be strategic.
And I don’t mind wide open spaces for fights, but that’s all ABL has. DBL at least has variety, some wide open spaces, but also some chokepoints (which btw, favor smaller groups, ever seen the movie 300?). And the center objective in ABL is boring. If the one in DBL wasn’t bugged, causing massive lag, it would be way more interesting than the one in ABL. For anyone that cares about fights, they really ought to feel the same way; the DBL center event generated lots of fights (when there was actual population online, of course); the ABL center objective is something you send two people to take and then leave alone.
I don’t mind having ABL for the next 3 months, as long as DBL is rotated back. And when that happens, I would really hope that ABL gets reworked; add a little more terrain variety, add some real strategy to the towers (same goes for DBL), get ride of cata wall spots cause that completely defeats the purpose of keeps as harder to take than towers, and rework the center objective to be something interesting.
1. How do you feel about this stability change?
I think it was a massive step in the right direction. Not perfect yet, could still use some tweaking, but a long way toward balancing this boon.
2. Is there something else you would like to see done to stability instead?
Not instead, just some tweaking. I think having stability skills provide a certain amount of guaranteed immunity to CC makes sense. Some people are complaining about boon duration and its effect on stability under this system, but boon duration doesn’t change the amount of guaranteed immunity, that is only determined by the # of stacks and the cooldown on stab removal. Stand Your Ground, for instance, gives 5 stacks, so it provides 5 × 0.75s = 3.75s of guaranteed CC immunity under the current implementation. IMO this is a tad high, I think 3s would be a better target. So you could get there by either reducing the stacks to 4, or changing the cooldown on stab removal to 0.60s. Either way, it’s these kinds of tweaks that I think are needed now; asking how much guaranteed CC immunity you want each skill to provide, and either tweaking the stacks accordingly (assuming you’re happy with 0.75s as the cooldown) or tweaking the cooldown (assuming you want stacks to be able to be removed more frequently). Personally I think 0.75s feels fine, which is most important; the duration of this cooldown has a sweet spot for fun, and 0.75s feels pretty fun to me.
I will say that I think given this stability change, the limits on walls/static fields to affecting 10 people are unnecessary and should be reverted, possibly with the exception of hunter’s ward because that skill just creates so many overlapping walls at once that it’s frankly problematic. Any aoe caps like this just severely limit the ability of small organized groups to overcome larger, less organized ones, and that just makes combat in WvW less skilled and more blobby.
As for boon stripping, honestly I don’t see an issue with this currently as long as the number of stacks of stability that skills give out are toned down a bit. It doesn’t make sense for stability to be prioritized last in boon stripping, that makes it way too powerful. I know it’s annoying to get stability randomly stripped, but you can reduce the chance of that happening by covering it with other boons. Regardless, the solution to lots of boon spam is not lots of boon removal spam; the boon spam itself needs to be toned down, and that’s a separate broader issue not only related to stability.
TL;DR: Stability change is great. Tone down the stacks of stability you get from skills a little, and remove the limit on walls/static fields (except possibly for hunters ward) and I think that helps balance it even better.
Been playing since release, in nearly every tier. EB has always queued first. Always. The alpine borderlands were always hotspots during reset with sporadic activity at all other times, exactly the same as desert borderlands are now. In fact that’s exactly how the game mode was designed, it’s why each server has their own BL only to be occasionally “invaded” by other servers.
I would really prefer if we got to keep the desert BL for a while longer, especially with the new changes to it. I’ve played the alpine BL to death, and it had some annoying aspects too, like north camp way above the home spawn and a ton of useless space in the northern corners of the map. Also the ruins mechanic was terrible, so boring. I would only want them to bring it back if they significantly updated the map to freshen it up a bit. And even then I would still prefer a semi-regular rotation with the desert BL map.
Agree with others above, I like the desert BL changes. Map feels a bit more open now, and it’s still a fun place to have fights which is what matters most to me. We had the alpine BL for a long time, I’d really prefer to keep the desert BL for a while longer.
I tried Mender’s and I too believe it’s a good replacement for celestial in the auramancer build, however I don’t think going full power is a good option for this build.
Have you tried Sage’s amulet with Doom + Geomancy? It’s more diverse dps (great condi pressure) and what I’ve noticed to be the closest to what Celestial used to be.
With a staff tempest build I never had that much condi pressure to begin with. I think mender’s still makes more sense for staff. For other weapons sage’s could be better.
You seem to have a laundry list of things you hate about WvW, why are you still playing?
Who says I am playing that much WvW. I used to run in WvW practically 7 days a week, now I mostly just run some fractal dailies and log… Doesn’t mean I wouldn’t like to see the game mode fixed.
And Anet is in the middle of a huge overhaul of the mode, aka trying to fix it. We know the broad strokes, but not the specific details yet. Given its current state it’s completely understandable that you wouldn’t want to play it, at least until the overhaul is released.
And yet you’re still here on the forums, interjecting your random pessimism about the unannounced changes into every single thread. Seriously. Do yourself a favor and just leave it alone. Until we know more about the specific changes they’re working on you’re just whining pointlessly, getting worked up about something that isn’t worth getting worked up about at all. We know they’re working on something, just chill and do something else until they announce what.
This post is stickied at the top of the forum. It spells out exactly the areas they plan on addressing in the WvW update (population balance, scoring, player rewards). These have been identified as the core problems with WvW by many posts over the last 3 years, as well as the CDI threads a year ago.
Do you want Anet to consult with this forum at every step of the re-design process? Or would you rather have them do the job they’re paid to do, which is to design a better game product, and then put the changes out to the playerbase and adjust them based on feedback after the fact?
This post is from 5 months ago. There is nothing concrete here. There isn’t even any specific suggestion of what might be done. I’m not saying I want daily updates about what can or should be done, but I want something like “Here’s a specific thing we’re thinking of implementing. How would we all feel about this”
For EotM, they had guilds come in and try things, but they did so too long after the development of EotM that nothing could really be changed. I want us, the community, to be consulted early enough in the process that any major change is properly thought through by players who actually care about the game mode. I don’t want another dragon banner situation because nobody thought through how creative WvW players can be with abusing things. I don’t want another golem week. I don’t want broken wvw.
They patched dragon banners, are you still upset about them?
Seriously, I don’t know what you are expecting here. Anet is the designer of a product. They designed a product. It has some flaws. We (the customer) have made it very clear what those flaws are. It isn’t incumbent upon us to re-design Anet’s game for them, we just make our feedback clear and then it’s on Anet to come up with the better design.
Do you want Anet to consult with this forum at every step of the re-design process? Or would you rather have them do the job they’re paid to do, which is to design a better game product, and then put the changes out to the playerbase and adjust them based on feedback after the fact?
As I have posted before, YES I would like them to consult with the forums at a stage where things are not locked into place and cannot be changed. You may not have noticed but there have been NO significant changes to the new BL maps, yet they are a disaster for the game mode. Anet doesn’t appear to be able to do what they are getting paid for, in terms of WvW development.
Do you insist on being involved in the design stages of other products you buy too?
Btw this is a piece of software, nothing is locked into place and cannot be changed.
Yeah should probably clarify, he said details about the overhaul are coming soon, not that the overhaul itself is coming soon.
Automatic upgrades in WvW were terrible. I think everyone playing agreed on that one. And with the release of the latest update I was pretty hopeful for all of the new changes, including the changes tying upgrades to the number of Yaks through the door. Sadly, ANet seems to be interested in extremes, rather than fully thought out changes.
With the patch release on the 26th many of my guild mates and I were looking forward to seeing all of the changes. PPK is great, no rezzing the dead while in combat, and finally an end to the auto upgrades. Unfortunately, the upgrades have now swung too far in the other direction.
I’m a numbers guy by nature, and after the patch launch I went out to an enemy BL to see the changes myself. We hit SE Camp, S Camp, and SE Tower to get yaks rolling into the tower. And I timed the yaks from each camp to the tower.
Yaks coming from SE Camp took 2 minutes and 20 seconds each. Yaks from South Camp took 3 minutes and 20 seconds each. The goal to get to secured is 20 Yaks. Reinforced is another 40 Yaks.
Running the numbers you find that SE Camp will supply a little over 12 Yaks in 30 minutes time. South Camp will supply 9 Yaks in the same time frame. In total, 21 Yaks in the door in 30 minutes. That’s if all things are perfect, no Yak killers show, and nobody flips your camps. To get to reinforced you’re looking at almost another hour and change. So, to have those harder doors and walls plan on about 1 and a half hours.
The results are pretty visible. So many objectives are now paper, and will remain paper.
ANet has now created new “challenging content”. And by challenging I mean the content takes longer. In the recent updates you’ll find that capture and hold missions have had their time adjusted to 1 hour to get your objective to tier 1. Those missions were 30 minutes, and it seems with the mission adjustment they’re acknowledging it takes a long time to get there. I’m pretty sure most of our remaining guild members who are still desperately trying to hang on to this game mode won’t have the patience for 1 hour long WvW guild missions….
I have to say, I’m feeling like Goldilocks here. First it was too fast, now it’s too slow. Will we ever be presented with just right? I’m not sure I can hang in to see.
Good post. Luckily at this point it’s just a matter of tweaking numbers (the number of yaks required). That’s easy. The change to make it so that yaks are no longer optional for upgrades was the big one. I’ll give Anet kudos for that. I think the underlying system for upgrading objectives is in a perfect spot right now, just gotta tweak the yak numbers until it feels right time-wise.
This post is stickied at the top of the forum. It spells out exactly the areas they plan on addressing in the WvW update (population balance, scoring, player rewards). These have been identified as the core problems with WvW by many posts over the last 3 years, as well as the CDI threads a year ago.
Do you want Anet to consult with this forum at every step of the re-design process? Or would you rather have them do the job they’re paid to do, which is to design a better game product, and then put the changes out to the playerbase and adjust them based on feedback after the fact?
Also you seem to be unaware for some reason, population balance is a main component of Anet’s forthcoming WvW overhaul, John Corpening himself said this in the stickied thread at the top of the forum. We don’t know what their solution is yet, but they’ve very explicitly said that it will be part of the overhaul.
So, what significant WvW update has been released since the beginning of this game that didn’t completely miss the mark and resulted in a negative impact on WvW in general? Answer: None of them, with the exception of the middle map ruins which I consider a net neutral…
These updates were all bad for WvW:
EtoM
Stability change
New Borderlands map
Elite specsThe seem to get QoL changes.. but all the major structural ones… Oh Boy. And if the overhaul gets released without ANY post-design feedback that has some impact on the final outcome, well my money is on “goodbye WvW”… I understand that some people remain optimistic, and I was optimistic about the new BLs when they first showed them to us, but now not so much….
I didn’t think my post indicated any kind of sunny disposition toward the update. I was merely stating for the OP that Anet has specifically said that fixing the population balance issues in WvW will be part of the overhaul of the game mode they release later this year.
You seem to have a laundry list of things you hate about WvW, why are you still playing?
Wow guys, you all clearly understood what the OP meant when he said NCSoft, no need to delve into semantic arguments.
To answer you OP: Yes, you’re right. Population balance is the most important core issue facing WvW right now. And old players are not going to return based on recent QoL fixes for WvW until this core issue is addressed.
That said, as a current (though less frequent of late) WvW player, I still appreciate the QoL fixes.
Also you seem to be unaware for some reason, population balance is a main component of Anet’s forthcoming WvW overhaul, John Corpening himself said this in the stickied thread at the top of the forum. We don’t know what their solution is yet, but they’ve very explicitly said that it will be part of the overhaul.
Same build I ran only when I got a boon it was stripped or corrupted and lots of condition pressure. Though I didn’t use a staff
Honestly staff is pretty necessary for this build. Especially against condi necros, healing rain on a 30s cooldown is huge.
Wat I thought we were talking bout guard. Old Tim’s confused now
There’s multiple discussions happening at the same time. I can’t help you with bunker guard, sorry Old Tim :P
Same build I ran only when I got a boon it was stripped or corrupted and lots of condition pressure. Though I didn’t use a staff
Honestly staff is pretty necessary for this build. Especially against condi necros, healing rain on a 30s cooldown is huge.
Yup I ran it too… the other team had two condition necros it didn’t go well
http://en.gw2skills.net/editor/?vFAQFAWn0XCVYi9XCOYCcYilNAzdv+XPsDPgAQBkYFkCGBA-TpQWAAw+DbZAA
Try that (with menders). DS is better than nothing, haven’t had much problems with condis.
For ele, menders seems to be a decent substitute for cele. Ran a menders aura tempest in several games today with decent success. I take a little more damage, but I also do a little more damage and have a little better healing, so…it’s different, but still pretty good.
I was just about to post about this build. I used a mild variation of it, menders seems to be a good replacement for cele. In fact I almost have better sustain and damage. Too early to tell for sure but it’s a promising early amulet.
Edit: This is the variation I’m using (with menders amulet):
http://en.gw2skills.net/editor/?vFAQFAWn0XCVYi9XCOYCcYilNAzdv+XPsErgUwIY4BEAKgA-TpQWAAbZAY/BA
I feel as though the towers require too many yaks for fortified.
The situation is more dire in EBG where taking a tower would mean danger for a keep or SMC.
It does make some sense for keeps to upgrade faster than towers though. Especially on EB where 2v1s happen very often and naturally, having a fortified keep to retreat to means enemy teams can’t really ktrain and snowball the map. Maybe the exact numbers could be tweaked, but it’s probably too early to tell. Give it a couple weeks and see how this plays out. If there’s too much ktraining happening they could lower some of the dolyaks requirements.
“….which would cost you about 4g on the trading post.”
How long does it take someone to make 4g in WvW? How about a party of 5? Cuz, you know, us WvW folks play for the phat lewtz.
That’s a one-time upgrade for the whole guild. If your guild can’t afford 4g, then you shouldn’t even be thinking about trying to unlock wvw guild upgrades.
Maybe they’re catering to the noobs that like the banners?.
I’m not sure what you mean by this.
To me, the dragon banner is an anti-blob/anti-noob zerg weapon. Unfortunately, the majority of the remaining WvWers are terrible at this game, so when they get killed by one they complain instead of learning to adapt. When you create something designed to punish the majority of your playerbase, you’re going to get a lot of complaints even if its overall more healthy for the game. Anet succumbed to the pressure and appeased the masses, further casualizing the game in the process.
Well now use your own brain. Anti blob weapon? If a small group has access to them as an anti blob, the blob can have double banners as the small group.
This logic…
Just because blobs can use banners doesn’t mean they aren’t also anti-blob weapons. The most potent banner effects (dragon banner 5 especially) are all large ground-based aoes, which naturally are more deadly to larger uncoordinated groups than smaller coordinated ones (you’re more likely to catch the larger group in the bomb). Also I use the term blob to imply a lack of coordination; in my mind a blob is unlikely to have a dedicated pick team with a moa mesmer, something more coordinated groups all seem to have lately as anti-banner defense.
That said I mostly agree with the changes Tuesday. Banners are potent because they exceed the 5 player aoe cap, they didn’t necessarily need a ton of damage (especially dragon banner, although I think 40% reduction on the 5 skill is an overnerf). And the fact that they could be used twice on chronos was problematic. Now the only remaining problem is that they are a stupid easy counter to catas/rams, especially dragon banner 5. They need to remove the ability for dragon banner 5 to damage catas/rams, it is way too potent of a counter to them, way more than siege disablers.
SCRIBE needs LEVELS, and SAND is what is needed to level SCRIBE. SCRIBE levels = WVW Upgrades. You need TONS of sand to level scribe – So sand should be available in wvw!
This is the most optimal scribe leveling path right now:
http://dulfy.net/2016/01/06/gw2-scribing-crafting-leveling-guide/
It requires no sand.
I’m sorry but you actually don’t know what you’re talking about. You don’t need sand to level scribe, and you don’t need sand to unlock WvW guild upgrades. I’m the one in charge of unlocking upgrades for my guild, I would know. The only thing you need sand for are glass mugs and sheets of extra coarse sandpaper, neither of which are used for WvW guild upgrades. The only remote case you could possibly make is you need a token amount of glass mugs to unlock the “+WvWxp %” guild enhancement, which would cost you about 4g on the trading post.
The event needs to be removed altogether. It’s a PvE event in the middle of WvW.
The entirety of the WvW game mode is a PvE event if no enemy players come to contest what you’re doing.
Which WvW guild upgrades require sand? I can think of none off the top of my head.
Honestly OP I have mixed feelings about banners, not all bad. I’ll limit my comments to the use of banners in WvW combat, as that seems to be the purpose of your post (I think the fact that they are locked behind guild hall upgrade levels deserves a separate discussion and is something I’m less enthused about).
Let’s look at a few facts. GW2 WvW combat is fun, and is probably one of the few things keeping players interested in this game mode, but it has hardly been without complaints. By far the biggest complaint I’ve heard over the years pertains to the extremely high value of pure player numbers in combat. Stack more players and win fights is a strategy that works absurdly well in this game with the minimal level of coordination that just a commander tag gives you. It is extremely difficult as a small to medium-sized skill group to kill a larger uncoordinated blob, and that’s really frustrating.
The reasons player stacking works so well largely have to do with rally mechanics (multiple rallies per kill) and the 5-player aoe cap. They’re patching the rally mechanics in 2 weeks (1 rally per kill), but have told us over and over that the 5-player aoe cap is a technical limitation. This means that once a group reaches a certain size they can completely ignore choke points and proper positioning, as it becomes increasingly unlikely that any enemy aoes on the ground will hit an individual allied player. All that essentially matters is whether the enemy they’re running toward is roughly the same size or larger; if an enemy group is smaller, large blobs can just roll right over that group with little fear for their safety. It has been like this since the game launched, you all know and I’m sure are intimately familiar with the frustrating feeling of being outnumbered in a fight and not even able to hold a choke against a 1-push blob.
It seems clear to me that the design intent of banners is to help turn the tides of this situation by creating a mobile weapon with an aoe cap higher than 5 (stationary siege like cannons and arrow carts already had a higher aoe cap but they are obviously less useful in group combat). Obviously this isn’t as ideal as making regular player skills hit more than 5 enemies (which would make smaller groups potentially more dangerous). But it’s still something.
Now perhaps tweaks are needed. Maybe dragon banners do too much damage. Maybe the break bar is a bit much (although it’s extremely helpful for locating the banner carrier). Maybe the shear amount of CC in WvW is the problem (dragon banner 5 is a joke to dodge out of, but is ridiculous when paired with the amount of lockdowns in the game mode right now). But the fact that there’s a mobile weapon that can damage more than 5 players sounds to me in principle like a great tool for enabling smaller, skilled, coordinated groups to take on larger unskilled blobs with greater lethality.
Everyone keeps saying things like “but Anet didn’t realize that larger groups could use these banners too” or “they should only be allowed when you have the outnumbered buff”. Seriously? Of course any weapon in WvW is going to be available to any sized group, it doesn’t make sense thematically or mechanically to have it any other way. The question we should be asking is, if indeed banners are designed to be anti-blob weapons, are there diminishing returns to their use by large groups? And the answer seems to me to be clearly yes. A large group using multiple banners and rampaging across a map is more likely than not to be far away from the objective where the banner originated, and the banners only last 15 mins. Go try and cap the tower or keep where the banner(s) originated (you can see which one it is by clicking on it on the map). If they insist on hugging that objective to protect it, then be realistic; they could have just filled the thing with siege and stopped you that way too. And the banners’ most potent abilities are area-control abilities like dragon banner 5, which by definition hurt larger groups more than smaller ones simply because they take up more space as they move around. Also, are pick teams not a thing anymore? I think it’s completely valid to suggest a coordinated pick team as a counter to banners since, you know, the dude with the banner has a break bar, he kind of sticks out. Perhaps the banner carrier should have a giant icon over his head, would that help?
I could go on but I think you get the point. I’m not saying banners shouldn’t be tweaked, but if we believe Anet’s excuse of technical limitations regarding the 5-player aoe cap, doesn’t this seem like a possible workaround? We’ve been asking for the ability to damage more than 5 players with attacks in mobile fights since the game launched, why the hate now?
I will agree though, air strikes as currently implemented blow.
(edited by BrickFurious.7169)
The best way to fix banners is to make the banner effect a pure transformation so no more skills from your class when you have the banner in your hand. This would fix the fact that chron simply brakes the balance of banners.
Definitely agree with this too. I don’t think you need to have a hard cap per guild though, there’s already a cap enforced based on the number of objectives available to upgrade and guilds can only claim one objective per map.
Having played with and against dragon banners a bit now…I have to respectfully disagree that they are an I-win button. They are powerful, yes, though their main power comes not from the fact that they have high damage skills, but specifically because the skills damage more than 5 people at once. But they are hardly all-powerful, and anyone getting 1-shot by them needs to stop running full zerk ele. The game has changed. You can’t run full glass anymore and be effective. Get over it.
They are very clearly designed to be an anti skill-less blob weapon. Any coordinated group worth their salt is not going to have a problem with them. The counters to them are numerous and are generally found in any skill group. Use your focus party to take down the banner carrier quickly (hint: he’s the only one with a defiance bar, pretty easy to find, and if he’s doing as much damage as you claim then he’ll be pretty squishy too). Dodge out of the dragon banner 5 skill (it moves insanely slow and is impossible to miss). Don’t push through a choke that is covered in AoEs. Wear a little PVT armor for crying out loud.
These are anti-pug weapons. Because they hit more than 5 targets they allow smaller, coordinated groups to take on larger, less coordinated groups. That is a really, really great thing, something this game needs more of badly. Yes of course big groups can use them too, but if they aren’t coordinated the banners lose a ton of their potency. And if you find yourself outnumbered against a big, coordinated group using them…go somewhere else on the map (or another map). You probably wouldn’t have had much luck against that group even if they didn’t have banners.
The problem with dragonbanner isn’t in fights, but when used against small havoc groups trying to put down siege. I doubt very much that Anet ever intended a single defender to have so much power against small groups of attackers.
This. This is the major problem, especially with dragon banner 5. It is a 1-shot easy kill against cata rushes that requires even less skill than a siege-disabler (a pretty low bar to cross). Given that the whole purpose of banners is anti-personnel and not anti-siege, I wouldn’t be opposed to disabling their ability to damage siege.
So my marauder staff ele is ok?
Funny you say that. I’ve been having more fun (and success) with my vanilla marauder staff ele lately than the meta tempest auramancer build.
Find a build that clicks with you and get good at it, that’s all I ask from solo queue.
Please let us know what you think of these changes. We’re going to hold off on picking a release date until we have a chance to review your feedback, but we’d like to target early 2016. So please add your feedback about these proposals to this thread.
Collectively these are a sorely needed set of changes, some of which the community has desired for years. There’s nothing to nitpick IMO. Release them ASAP.
I will ask Downwood, how many of the mining speed upgrades did you have to invest in to get to +5 as quickly as you did?
If you find the 7000g cost of upgrading to a +5 supply claim reasonable, then I disagree, but it’s OK for you and I to have different opinions on that.
If the most total time-efficient way of me doing it involves farming flax on my characters for 10 mins a day, and then playing WvW as I normally would…then yes that’s reasonable to me.
In fact, by farming the materials directly, the hall is very obtainable.
This is the opposite of true.
If the value of the materials is 7000g, and gathering lets you get 10g of materials per hour, then it will take 700 hours of playtime to equip your guild hall.
If the value of materials is 7000g and doing Fractals gets you 20g of cash per hour, then it will take 350 hours of playtime to equip your guild hall.
The only relevant numbers are the value of the materials and the income rate of whatever activity you perform to get those materials.
I’m sorry you think otherwise, but I can’t think of a plainer way to explain that.
It’s a lot less simple than what you’re describing, and I think you’re missing Sviel’s point (perhaps he could have worded it differently).
Yes, if the value of the materials needed to level a guild hall to +5 supply is 7000g, then the opportunity cost of donating those materials instead of just selling them is 7000g.
But a significant amount of the materials can be obtained through means which are both highly time-efficient and also highly time-gated. I.e., flax farm, ley-line infused tools, elder wood farm, mystic coins, etc. Sviel’s point is that if you use the most time-efficient means of obtaining the materials, even if it means your daily rate of acquiring them is highly gated, then the total time spent acquiring them is fairly reasonable.
So yes, if you are measuring the effort of obtaining a guild hall in terms of the maximum sustainable rate of gold/hr acquirable in the game, guild halls are going to seem like a huge time sink. But if you measure it by the total amount of time spent at the highly time-efficient, time-gated farms, then guild halls seem like less of a time/effort sink and more of a waiting sink.
Seeing a bug now in T2 where an objective with the “hardened gates” guild upgrade is preventing alpha siege golems from damaging the gates (they do 0 damage with their auto-attack). This is happening specifically at SMC, I haven’t been able to confirm if any other objectives have the same bug.
Appreciate all the comments, a few things:
- Never said the lord was hard, I’m saying it’s not FAST with a few people and it should be. The mechanics can be unforgiving, but for small groups speed is everything (before you get caught).
- I agree 100% that yaks are easy to snipe, guess what, no one is sniping them because, well see above on small groups. People aren’t showing up.,
In my experience, I can kill a keep lord with a group of 5 people 3x faster than with a zerg. The scaling is working, the lords are super easy with a small group and take much longer with a big one. It takes longer than pre-HoT, but pre-HoT lords died so quickly they didn’t even serve a purpose. Making them take longer to kill was an intention design change that IMO was a good one (now it’s actually worth trying to go defend an objective after the inner gate is down, before it was pointless because there was no way you would ever get there in time). Try telling your guildies to spec in the guard killer line, it helps a lot (+20% damage to guards and lords).
Fair enough, I still think it should be faster for small groups only. For the guard killer line, mate we’ve been WvWvW for 3 years, we have everything maxed.
You’d be surprised how many vets failed to pick up that line after the trait reset because they thought it was “worthless” without guard stacks.
Appreciate all the comments, a few things:
- Never said the lord was hard, I’m saying it’s not FAST with a few people and it should be. The mechanics can be unforgiving, but for small groups speed is everything (before you get caught).
- I agree 100% that yaks are easy to snipe, guess what, no one is sniping them because, well see above on small groups. People aren’t showing up.,
In my experience, I can kill a keep lord with a group of 5 people 3x faster than with a zerg. The scaling is working, the lords are super easy with a small group and take much longer with a big one. It takes longer than pre-HoT, but pre-HoT lords died so quickly they didn’t even serve a purpose. Making them take longer to kill was an intention design change that IMO was a good one (now it’s actually worth trying to go defend an objective after the inner gate is down, before it was pointless because there was no way you would ever get there in time). Try telling your guildies to spec in the guard killer line, it helps a lot (+20% damage to guards and lords).
The tactic Minor Supply Drop is currently dropping 200 supply in a keep, when the tooltip indicates it should be dropping 100 supply.
In addition, it appears that if a guild un-claims an objective with this tactic right after activating it, a new guild may claim the objective and activate the tactic again immediately, violating the intended 15 min cooldown on it.
Just confirmed, what is actually happening is the minor supply drop is giving 1000 supply at Stonemist, available every 15 mins, that is what we were seeing tonight. In addition it is giving 200 supply at keeps.
(edited by BrickFurious.7169)
I’ve been using a tanky staff tempest build in WvW that relies a ton on overloads, and it’s a lot of fun. The playstyle is radically different from the glassy backline ele staff build I used to run, but it’s new and interesting and refreshing.
That said, I think even a cursory examination of tempest would reveal that it wasn’t intended to “elevate the ele playstyle” or “challenge our skill level”. By it’s very nature overloading means you aren’t attunement swapping as much, your APM is lower…it just is what it is. It’s a slower and more calculated ele play style. That doesn’t automatically make it any better or worse, just different. If you fell in love with ele for the high APM twitchy attunement swapping playstyle, you probably aren’t going to like tempest as much. That’s ok. You still have access to the base ele.
By nature all the elite specs change their core professions in a significant way that not everyone is going to jive with. But if the tempest and overloads were designed to offer a fresh way of playing ele that is fun in its own right, I think Anet was successful in that regard. It’s just not for everyone, and probably more fun in some game modes than others.
WvW went from a majority of players playing the siege warfare PPT game as intended to a majority of players casually looking for a large fight.
Ask yourself, why did WvW evolve that way?
As others above have also stated well, it’s true that population imbalances weren’t the only reason why WvW evolved this way. Indeed, alliances, or whatever fix for population balance they implement, are not a silver bullet. But they are still a necessary piece of the solution. The other pieces are scoring-related and rewards-related, and I think Anet have made it clear that they understand this. The “fix” for WvW is going to require all three components in tandem; any one component on its own will be wholly inadequate.
This is utter and foolish garbage, whats’ the point of heroics soulbouded to characters that have full map completions? I don’t play WvW with every class.
You can spend proofs of heroics on superior siege, and always have been able to.
Honestly I’m fine with the aura changes, they’re more subtle but w/e. But I really want my fireball back still….
I feel like I’ve been close to burn-out on WvW for a long time now. My old WvW guild came back to the game which has reinvigorated my interest in it, but I fear their stay won’t last long unless Anet gets on top of their plans to overhaul WvW soon.
It’s annoying because if I’m honest with myself, I don’t think WvW has gotten worse over time. It just hasn’t gotten better, unlike say PvE and sPvP. I was generally in favor of the stab changes, though that was before the insane amount of CC that HoT added, which has made me start to reconsider.
Regardless, the “easy” meta switched from pain train to pirate ship. Whatever. There’s always going to be a simple meta that just involves adding more people from whatever professions/builds are part of it, that is easy for pugs to join. Call that the bar above which skilled guilds have to rise through coordination and tactics in order to beat.
But because of the general lack of attention WvW has received compared to sPvP and PvE, most skill guilds are dying out. The score has effectively not mattered for so long that there’s no fun in trying to win. No competitive game mode will survive that kind of environment; all the skill players will move on to other games (or sPvP, as I’ve started to do).
That said, I’ve said it before, the new BL map is the best thing WvW has going for it right now. All the complaints I see about it, and about how it is somehow the culprit for low WvW populations, are ridiculous to me. The new BL map isn’t killing WvW. WvW has been dying all on its own just fine without it.
Yeah, mining rate is really about finding the sweet spot for your guild in terms of it’s ability to gather the required materials. Or you can just wait, it’s not really required.
I don’t know if I would go as far as to say this killed WvW guilds…but it is certainly really annoying, not only in terms of how much time it takes to get WvW upgrades, but the sheer cost and materials involved that are basically impossible to get in WvW alone.
Go ahead and dislike the new map, I don’t care. It certainly isn’t perfect, it could definitely use some tweaks (I’ve posted before that yaks shouldn’t be optional for objective upgrades). But please don’t pretend that the new map has anything fundamentally to do with the decline of WvW populations. And please, pretty please, with a cherry on top, don’t try to speak on behalf of the “WvW community” anymore.
Fair point. I’m certainly not the WvW spokesperson. I guess I could have instead said “based on a fair reading of the WvW forums, a true majority of the WvW community dislikes the new maps.” Its okay to paraphrase the WvW community, right?
For those of us super nerds with 3000+ hours of WvW, the percentage of haters is even higher. My current guild only runs on EB, and that seems true for all the other t2 fighting guilds.
Just read the forums, its an unpopular map.
People would like it if it was implemented with other core WvW improvements. The map itself is well designed and has amazing combat variety. Every fight I’ve had on that new map was completely different.
This. I’m also in T2, and my guild has had phenomenal fights on the new map. It’s very well-designed and the environmental variety really makes combat a ton of fun. But the core WvW improvements aren’t there yet (and they even added some un-improvements like expensive scribing and guild hall leveling in order to get guild WvW upgrades). This has very understandably continued to frustrate the WvW player-base that I’ve talked to and read posts from on the forums, and in my opinion seems to be at the root of most WvW player angst since HoT launched.
Either way Shadow, I highly recommend you encourage your guild to seek out some fights on the new map. Hint: T2 seems to have an obsession right now with karma training enemy BLs, plenty of opportunity to roll in and spank some mindless zergs. Despite WvW’s flaws, mass combat is still a ton of fun, and the new map at least breathes some fresh air into that.
The WvW community hates the new maps. We told you we would during beta for a host of reasons.
Remember when fights happened on the borderlands? Remember when players cared about upgrading and defending and attacking stuff? I do.
So the question you should be asking yourself is how long will you keep the unpopular new maps before pulling the plug on failed content?
If there’s one thing I can’t stand, it’s people claiming to speak for the “WvW community”. I don’t care how many unscientific online polls seem to indicate that a majority of the forum-active WvW population dislikes the map; you don’t get to appoint yourself “Speaker of the WvW-ers”.
For the record, I love the new map, and WvW has bigger problems. Total population has been in a slow decline for a long time now due to a ton of reasons (all stemming from neglect of the core WvW game mode by Anet). The new map is a breath of fresh air, but without fundamental fixes to WvW’s reward structure, scoring mechanics, and population imbalances, it isn’t going to be enough to start moving WvW population in a positive direction again.
Also the time gating and cost of the WvW guild upgrades, including upgrades all guilds used to have access to, are terrible. It’s inept changes like this and neglect of old problems that have largely sapped the life out of WvW (especially for small and roaming guilds) and continued to decimate WvW populations. The new map is hardly to blame.
Go ahead and dislike the new map, I don’t care. It certainly isn’t perfect, it could definitely use some tweaks (I’ve posted before that yaks shouldn’t be optional for objective upgrades). But please don’t pretend that the new map has anything fundamentally to do with the decline of WvW populations. And please, pretty please, with a cherry on top, don’t try to speak on behalf of the “WvW community” anymore.
Yeah, the reactions here aren’t even overreactions. I can’t believe how small my fireball is now. Looks even more ridiculous coming from a charr character. I really hope they revert this.
The side WP’s don’t seem to be working… anyone else seeing them contested on every map?
Well the original design of the tower waypoints was that only the nearest enemy team could access them. So if they just moved them to the keeps and kept the functionality the same…then you won’t be able to use the fire/air keep waypoints on your home BL.
I actually do agree that this is a problem. T3 gates was a necessary buff to defending, but the fact that a single defender on a treb can hold off a 5-ram blitz is not healthy for the game, IMO.
Ideally I think this would be fixed by just not allowing damage to pass through gates (no need to adjust treb damage).
Requiring people to trigger the upgrades is dumb.
Letting people zerg up and manually run all the supply from camp to base to do upgrades is dumb.
Requiring you to actually get supply yaks to the objective to upgrade it is not.
Yaks are more useless now than they were before, and that’s saying a lot.
This. This is the real problem. Auto-upgrades are fine. Inevitable, yak-optional upgrades are not. Walking around and managing the upgrades pre-HoT was a boring necessity, but making sure camps didn’t flip and yaks got to structures successfully added strategic value to the game. Much of that value has been removed now that yaks are optional for upgrades.
Thank you OP for a high-quality, well thought-out post. A diamond in the rough indeed. I have hope for this forum yet.
I have some thoughts on your recommendations:
Recommendation 1
All four towers on the DB map have limited strategic value. In particular the north east (NE) and north west (NW) towers have no effect on game play apart from their contribution to PPT.
I get the sense that this was a particular design decision on Anet’s part. As you noted, in the old BL you could treb bay from the SW tower, but you couldn’t treb hills from the SE tower. Trying to make it so that each keep was treb-able from each tower may have been too much of a hindrance on the design of the new map (especially since they were aiming for verticality).
That said, in theory the towers in the new BL do have some strategic value, I just think there needs to be some tweaks to make it work. In particular, each tower has associated side walls that block off paths through the map for everyone except the owners of the tower. Right now though those side walls are “barricades”; they don’t seem to upgrade along with the tower, they are exceptionally weak, and, well, they’re plain ugly. There needs to be some tweaks so that this “path-blocking” aspect of towers actually feels meaningful.
In addition, the northern towers, for instance, in theory act as a major hindrance limiting the ability for enemy groups to attack the north supply camp and supply lines. But this doesn’t feel very meaningful, not only because the path blocking doesn’t seem meaningful, but also because supply management in general doesn’t feel very meaningful. You’ve addressed this in your recommendation 4, which I have my own thoughts on, but on which I completely agree with the sentiment: supply management has lost its strategic value. Re-introducing that value through tweaks to the upgrade system would go a long way toward making the northern towers feel more valuable all on its own.
That said, your outposts idea is very interesting. I’ve never been a big fan of being able to hide a treb inside an objective with walls and gates (especially if it is difficult to counter-treb), but perhaps if the outposts were placed in a way that players with ranged attacks could still hit the trebs in the outposts, I could be on board with that.
Recommendation 2
To this end, waypoints need to be instated in the Fire and Air keeps and removed from the southern towers.
As long as waypoints were no longer automatic for ownership (only earned though upgrading the keeps to T3) I’d be on board with this. That said, I’d be more in favor of just changing waypoints to be no longer automatic first, and keep the waypoints where they are for now and see what happens. While they’re at it, make it so one enemy can’t troll a structure and contest a waypoint just by killing a few guards.
Recommendation 3
Remove the Oasis Event (OE) from the centre of the DB map. The effect of this event which spawns every 3 hours is to enable the more organised (and usually larger) force to severely weaken all enemy owned objectives. The old breakout event favored that server being at a disadvantage, which is how these events should work. Events such as the OE only foster an easy win and wxp/karma orientation; which diminishes any strategy and tactical approaches to WvW game play.
I think the oasis event deserves a little more time. In theory it could definitely problematic as you describe. But right now there hasn’t been any time to develop a meta strategy around it. If only one server is completing it on an empty map, well they were just gonna ktrain that map anyway; with T3 gates being a thing now, this just helps that process be less cumbersome. If indeed there are multiple servers contesting the event though, a viable strategy could be to ignore the event and go after the more populated server’s objectives. There’s definitely a trade-off to a populated server devoting significant player resources to the event, which could prompt some interesting strategic play. There just hasn’t been enough player activity lately to say for sure whether the interesting theoretical strategy outweighs the theoretical problematic aspects of it. Plus apparently the event has been super laggy, that doesn’t help.
Recommendation 4
Return all upgrades to be manually driven and supply based as in the AB map.
Supply-driven upgrades were problematic though. It made it very possible for players to troll the supply, wasting a lot of it on the “wrong” upgrade, or wasting supply that would have been better used for siege or made available for repairing walls/gates. I also really like now that upgrades don’t cost gold. It’s hard to make gold as a WvW player; even though this did increase player investment in objectives somewhat, it still felt like a very punishing mechanic. I feel like there has to be a better way of getting players to feel invested in a structure than just making them sink gold into it.
That said I could definitely be on board with more player interaction in order to progress the upgrades. And I’d be really, really, really in favor of making yaks/supply line management mandatory again, and not just optional as a way of speeding up upgrades.
Recommendation 5
Restructure the upgrades. The upgrade paths introduced with HoT are over simplified and offer no opportunity for choice to effect the outcome.
While I agree that this limits player choice in upgrading, it also limits the ability for players to troll upgrades. It became quickly apparent that there was an optimal upgrade path in WvW pre-HoT; it’s hard to design any upgrade system involving choice that won’t devolve to a meta strategy. Might as well just make the meta strategy the only choice and allow player decision making to focus more on fights and objective defense/capture.
Guild Halls through the War Room and associated WvW upgrades can have the effect of alienating the smaller guilds and frustrating the larger guilds….
Completely agree with all of your points regarding guild halls and the war room. I don’t feel like this mechanic was implemented well, and is a severe gate for not only smaller WvW guilds, but larger ones too. It seems like a significant amount of the new map was balanced around these guild upgrades, but I haven’t seen any of them in use yet because they are so time-consuming/expensive to acquire for your average poor WvW guild.