Guild Wars 2

I’ve been of the opinion for some time that immobilize, and likely stuns, should be followed by a brief period of immunity from that condition. Not a lot, but some sort of cool down to prevent these absurd chains.

Prysin.8542:

Straegen.2938:

SkylightMoon.1980:

Epidemic is pretty useless since its just 1 bar of conditions that arnt pulsed, and will probably be quickly removed. Plague form however is really useful because of the blindness that pulses. However its not damage, and I was arguing that necros dont have a lot of good aoe damage skills. That the ones they do have(wells) are extremely limited.

Epidemic can straight up murder an entire group of players if they aren’t running very strong condition removal. It transfers ALL conditions from an enemy to all other enemies in a 1200 range. So drop SoS, Corrupt Boon then Epidemic and watch a bunch of players start scrambling. Dhuumfire builds can also wreck poor condition removal groups with Epidemic. Plague drops poison and bleeds in addition to the other conditions.

Epi is countered by Signet of Renewal, Rune of Lyssa, Guardians, Eles if above 90% HP and Diamondskin.

Briefly, so as not to venture off topic. Epidemic, and conditions in general, are countered by the things you mention. However, relatively few people mitigate condition damage particularly well in WvW. And those that do are able to do less damage and survive less direct damage because of it. Epidemic is an extremely useful skill if used appropriately.

Should be bigger. Maybe with flashing and particle effects. And once in a while, for no particular reason, it should fall on your head and down your character.

I like the idea of people only rallying if their target is stomped.

1v1or2: Personally, on my condition necro, I just kite and keep on the conditions. Apply conditions with weapon skills first, let them burn condition removals if they have them, then hit them with plague signet and pile on the bleeds. Do not get in melee range.

Group: Attack from the back, let them use their cc on someone else. Drop marks, fear them off if they get too close. If they have stability, strip it if you can. Don’t do anything too obviously necro-ish in the first few moments, like DS and #4,5. Everyone will see it, and know you are a necro that’s probably in trouble as soon as DS goes down. People will often target necros early, particularly if they still have cc to use, because we have so little access to stability.

The only other thing I can recommend is to play a warrior. You’ll get used to how they telegraph their moves, what the natural rotation is, and know how to best counter it.

Likes:
1) Good, relatively evenly matched battles alongside guild-mates, where tactics, player skill and organization, not numbers, win the day
2) Roaming and encountering a smalled group or skilled player and duking it out
3) Repelling a zerg from a properly defended keep and seiged keep

Dislikes:
1) Devs ignoring and/or delaying fixes for the most glaring, obvious and easily fixable WvW problems (Treb from Citadel (seriously, wtk), complete and utter WvW loot imbalance, character bound WXP)
2) Horrible matchups. I do not want to a) completely obliterate another server or b) be completely obliterated. Match us up against other servers with comparable WvW populations and coverage. I don’t even care about the point tick, I just get sick of there being nothing to do in the first instance, and not being able to even take a tower or roam because of the 2 zergs roaming the map in the second.
3) Having to play extensive PvE content to get an edge in WvW, i.e. get money for siege and materials for ascended equipment

There are places in citadel near the spawn where trebs can be built that can attack the NE tower. These trebs can wipe siege and bring down at least one wall. At first, I assumed this was a bug. However, it is something that should be a relatively simple fix that has gone completely unaddressed for so long, I’m now wondering if its intentional. I’ve read a number of arguments that this is a legitimate way to help out servers that have been completely overwhelmed.
I’d like to know what the opinions of the community are or, even better, get a dev to chime in on this. I’ve had this happen enough to me recently that its starting to give a clear advantage to whoever is willing to do it and if it is a feature, its definitely going into my playbook.

Tongku.5326:

40+ omega rushes require great effort, coordination, and many hours to set-up. Often you have to take objectives on other maps to get the supplies needed. And attacks require LOTS of coordination and tactics. I do not see as an issue due to effort vs reward being balanced in this regard.

I have been on both sides of such rushes, and have both been unsuccsesfully defending, and wiping the 40+ omegas. Last time we literally wiped a map blob with 40+ omegas on Langor (though QL got taken). So there really is a risk vs reward here which appears to be balanced. Do not see it as a problem.

I don’t think this balance is achieved. In my experience, the scales tilt too far in favor of the offense. This is why I think my suggestion would work. Add some damage mitigation to doors and walls and if its too much, scale it back. Currently, defense is simply not rewarding enough for how difficult it is. Ten people who each invest five hours in preparing a keep is completely over run by a fifty man zerg who can melt a door before it even goes contested.

Tongku.5326:

the thing is, if you reduce the DPS, then bigger groups will be necessary to destroy a gate or wall. meaning now map blobs will become absolutely necessary to take an objective.

Is this what you want ? Having no choice but to run in a qued map blob ? Never being able to strategically hit simoultaneous objectives to ninja another objective ?

Do you really want to destroy viability of havoc teams ? And what about every server below T2-T3 ? What do you think happens to servers that can field only 15-20 people per map (Bronze league) if that ? Will they be able to cap anything at all if defenders will now have an hour to react instead of 5 minutes ?

this is a very bad idea which would destroy the strategic / tactical elements of WvW and be very harmful to servers that are not population stacked.

Perhaps I should be more clear: I hope my solution will do exactly the opposite. What I suggest is a DPS cap, e.g. if 10 people can take down a door in 100 seconds, 50 people could only take a door in 50 seconds instead of 20 seconds. This could be implemented by capping the amount of damage that could be done to a door or wall in one second, or by reducing the effectiveness of attacks on the door/wall if its taking a lot of damage very quickly. This would essentially have no effect on small groups ninja-ing a keep or tower, but would slow down super-zergs that cause doors melt in a few seconds. This would also limit the functionality of 40 strong Omega golem rushes (IMO the effort that goes into building an Omega zerg is too little to justify the ability to turn whole map of upgraded keeps as quick as is currently possible). My hope is that this would help provide some defense against blobs while still not making them ineffective.

I don’t think ANet will (or should) institute a mechanic that actively punishes players for playing together. It could definitely lead to people telling other players to leave the map or group because they are weakening the zerg, and that would be toxic to the WvW community.

In order to mitigate the current zerg mentality a little, and to make it a bit more worthwhile to try and defend things, I think there should be something like a DPS cap on doors and walls. Perhaps you can only do so much damage per second to walls or doors, no matter how much siege or PvDoorers you have, or maybe you get diminishing returns (e.g. instead of 10 Omega golems doing 10x as much damage as 1 Omega, they can only do can only do 4x as much).

At the moment, it is extremely difficult to guard even a fully upgraded keep against superior forces. A map jumping super-zerg can wipe out hours worth of work yak walking and upgrading and defending on the BL’s way too quickly.

I think this idea will bring a little more balance between offense and defense in WvW. The biggest problem I see is reduced rewards in WvW, which should be mitigated by significantly increased rewards for player kills, including a chance at ascended materials.

I’d like to know what the rest of the WvW community thinks. I’m on a low-mid tier server, and don’t know how this would fly higher tiers.

Absolutely! I think this match will be decided in the last few hours before reset. I haven’t had this much fun in ages. This is exactly why I play WvW and what matches should look like. Kudos to IoJ and CD, you guys are a blast.

I don’t like blobbing and I don’t like blobs (except when I’m running with a zerg-busting group). But ANet will not, and should not, institute a system where it becomes obviously and drastically more beneficial for people to NOT play. That is just asking for people to get shouted out of WvW. That said, I don’t know what the solution to blobbing would be, or if there even needs to be one.

Conditions are only powerful against you when you don’t bother to invest in mitigating them. Invest in toughness, vitality and/or healing gear to mitigate direct damage, invest with your traits and skills to mitigate condition damage. Ignore either at your own peril.

I am really enjoying the match-up this week. Best of luck everyone, see you on the field.

He’s onto us. Our massive server-wide conspiracy to face the exact same servers we’ve faced for the last seven weeks is out in the open. Let’s hope no one discovers all the other conspiracies we’ve masterminded; big foot, chemtrails, the U.N., rainbows, all of this work could be for naught if we are revealed.

This is great news in my opinion. ANet has to strike the right balance between variety and matches that are fun for all the servers. I really like the idea that sometimes we will get stomped, sometimes we will do the stomping, but most of the time we will be playing servers that are on our level.

I would be very happy seeing the smaller, easier changes. I see those being 1) New tag colors and shapes 2) Ability to be seen by limited number of players (guild, squad, party, etc.) 3) Increasing supplyinfo range.

I’d like to see some gift-able items show up in the game or gemstore that would work for a guild-wide secret santa. Ideas might be black-lion salvage kits that aren’t account bound, or some sort of present that can be given that has a small chance of giving something good. It would be nice to, at least temporarily, give someone a stack of fun tonics or something else unusual.

DevonCarver.5370:

2) How would it feel to have a system that gradually unlocked more commander abilities and icons, but that required dedication to WvW? Let’s say we added a commander line to the ability panel and you unlocked it with WvW ability points. What is the right starting price for that? 100 points? more? If that happens, does it make sense for the system to remain character based? Would requiring commanders to spend their WXP in this way limit them to the point that they didn’t want to do it? What if you still acquired the current tag by spending 100g, but you upgraded to new shapes via the WXP system?

I dislike the idea of diverting WXP from other things just to get commander abilities that we should have in the first place (like colors and shapes or the ability to be seen only by guildies). Now, if you want to give abilities that yield some sort of squad-wide combat or siege advantage in exchange for (large amounts of) WXP, that sounds workable. This would have the added advantage of encouraging people to join squads, also helping to solve the chat suppression problem.

Yes, there should be some sort of system to distinguish experienced commanders from inexperienced, but it seems counter productive to encourage commanders to spend their WXP points on appearing to be an experienced commander when it would actually make them less able to contribute (since they will be lacking siege masteries, etc.)

Also, your list seems spot on.

I would prefer to see a series of small enhancements to the commander system. There are a lot of good ideas in this thread that would make efficient use of available resources and would be ready sooner. I suspect that a complete overhaul of a system that works pretty well already will just bring more problems of a different nature. Also, my suggestions relate entirely to WvW, I do very little PvE.

1. Allow player to change what the commander tag looks like, whether it is just color (Good) or the shape (Best). It would be nice to be able to immediately recognize the commanders guild from the shape of the tag, but I don’t know how to best do that.

2. Increase Supply Check Radius significantly

3. Allow us to control who sees the tag, for instance, guild, squad or party members only.

4. Give commanders (who are publicly tagged up) a special color in the chat bar, to make their orders easier to find

5. Make tags account bound. Give refunds to people with tags on alts. I can see this being contentious, but a good commander is a good commander.

6. I think a commander rating system would be very useful, so that when I see someone on the WvW map, I know if they are uber-commander, or a PvE’r who just stepped into WvW and has no idea whats going on. This is the least important, and likely most difficult to get right, suggestion.

The reason this would not work is that it would create situations in which it would be more beneficial for people to not play. Any system the Dev’s come up with will be exploited. That’s a given. They would not (and should not) create a system in which the optimal play style means that a person new to WvW would be shouted off the map because they want a higher multiplier.

I found a relatively small but active WvW guild with people I enjoyed hanging out with. Even if we’re not having a lot of fights because we’re defending the BL, we still have a lot of fun. And when we do find those fights, its a complete blast.

I got this too. I came closer than usual to clicking the link, its very well done. The redacted link even has “guildwars2.com” as part of the address. The “verify account ownership” thing gives it away, though.

Edit: Also, there is a sticky about phishing emails with this very email in it.

Conditions are fine. There are two types of damage in this game: direct dps and conditions. They work in different ways and a balanced build needs to defend against both of them. You shouldn’t be able to mitigate both types through a single method. You’re welcome to fine tune your build to deal lots of damage and take lots of direct dps in return, but don’t complain when someone who threw the rock to your scissors kicks your kitten with condition dmg.

Thanks for the great match this week AR and ET. The last few weeks we’ve been up against much higher ranked servers who only know how to zerg. Any time we went up against similar numbers we dominated, only to be zerged down a little later. This week, its been great to meet some really talented roaming groups from both our opponents. I’ve really enjoyed a lot of those fights.

I’ll point out that humans are notoriously bad at using “gut” judgments to evaluate statistical phenomena. We’re always looking for patterns where there are none. Combine this with confirmation bias and a few anecdotes you read on the forums or see on youtube, and you can convince yourself that someone at Anet has a personal vendetta against you and is determined to never let you get any exotic of any value.

The following is my opinion. Conditions can be amazing against the right players, particularly pugs, in the right situations. The problem is if you go up against a group that can regularly cleanse conditions, it can be almost impossible to lay down any real damage. A powermancer, on the other hand, has a harder time laying down the epic amount of damage a conditionmancer can in the right situation, but can contribute to essentially any battle. On average, I would say it is a toss up. Personally, in the group I run with I find I contribute more as a conditionmancer. I also find I help more when defending and taking keeps and camps with a condition build.

I am fine with how the downed state works. I also think thieves are fine. They are great for harassing roamers in WvW, work fairly well in a small balanced team (pretty much every class does), and are somewhat useless for zergs or defense. Like every other class, they have situations where they excel and situations where they are terrible. If you can’t handle a roaming thief, find a party to roam with.

I play a fair amount of WvW as a necro and don’t have an engineer. In my experience they would be pretty evenly matched, as far as utility in WvW goes. If you normally run with a guild or small group in WvW, choose whichever class you think best balances with the other members. If you’re looking to zerg, it doesn’t really matter. I don’t know which one would make a better roamer. Bit of a cop out answer, I know. Personally, I really like the necro though.

I run a conditionmancer build. To me the jagged horror has two purposes. First, I occasionally get a small boost to life force. Second, when I’m running around in WvW and a jagged horror spawns, I double check the area for loot bags.