Guild Wars 2

Carighan.6758:

Have someone using Blast Finishers. Group is stacked up. Engineer drops smoke field. Fight has reset and you can do it all over.
Is that intended behaviour?

I have to admit that I had not considered the use of group stealth to reset encounters. Ive never done it, and so it never really occurred to me.

Carighan.6758:

But is it really such a big deal?
The way I understand it, mobs still ignore you. After 3-6 seconds, you’re far enough away for them to leash back and ignore you entirely.

You can no longer use it mid-fight against a boss to reset threat, but honestly that seems like a bugfix to me. After all, if mobs are to have non-trivial behaviour, they shouldn’t be cheated out of their scripts that easily, no?

Yes, it IS a big deal.

I do not understand what you mean by ‘non-trivial behaviour’, but I fail to see how dumping aggro via stealth cheats a script any more than runnning away from a mob, and losing damage output in the process, for 3-6 seconds does.

I’d love to know what the thought process behind this seemingly uneeded change is

You guys totally missed the nerf to Decoy…

It has been rendered useless in PvE now. Stealth no longer dumps aggro.
I am really trying to figure out the rationale behind this change.

So, yes, it essentially makes it useless. Decoy was an important ability in PvE because it was a much needed aggro dump for the Mesmer.

Really, more than any of the other changes of late, this one is the most irritating.

Paradox.1380:

Like I said in your original post I quoted, your opinion is fine to be had, but you are speaking for yourself, not everyone hates these changes. To me, they are welcome and refreshing.

To me, these changes are unwelcome and annoying. It makes no sense to make a lvl 40 dungeon off limits to level 40 players

I have to concur in that there is NO way a group of lvl 40 players in greens is going to be able to take on these changes. For this reason alone, this dungeon patch was an utter failure.

Ive not had a chance to run the content with a full 5 man of lvl 80’s but I suspect that it will be doable. Still, this change should have been added as a ‘Hard Mode’ with enhanced loot for level 80 groups that wanted the challenge.

The only thing this change does is tell new level 35 players that they must wait until they hit max level to run an exploration mode dungeon.

Calae.1738:

Zergs tactics display very poor map design.

Arenanet’s servers and game engine are unable to handle 3 servers fighting for Stonemist Castle on reset Friday. Abilities have unbearable lag delays and culling makes most players completely invisible.

They designed a sandbox without multiple critical objectives. This is why zerg tactics work. If there were many critical objectives to defend or assault, zerg tactics would be completely ineffective.

I think this is where most folks are coming from when they complain about the Zerg. The Zerg, and its omnipotence, is just the most obvious evidence of a map that has been designed in a one dimensional way of thinking and playing.

I dont believe that folks want to see the Zerg dissapear. However, the Zerg represents High Intensity conflict (and I am speaking just of the “gameplay” itself, not the mechanics of how GW2 tries to make that happen). This is good, and there should always be a Zerg on the field.

The Zerg should represent your “front line”, or the tip of your spear. However, due to the small size of the battlefields, and the relative close proximity of objectives, the Zerg is made too responsive and too powerful. This is amplified by the population caps in each battlefield.

The end result is a battle WITHOUT front lines, something more akin to a rugby scrum rather than an actual battle where tactics and maneuvers have a real chance of changing the outcome of a battle. And that is, in my opinion, what people are really complaining about when they complain about the zerg: they are complaining about the relative simplicity of WvWvW; where three giant amoeba engage in a bloody three way using the Center Keep as a bed.

Some simple, at least in thought, solutions:
Significantly increase the map area of each battlefield. This will at least make the zerg consider where it wants to be and prevent it from being everywhere at once. This will also open the field for smaller groups and tactics to become more effective, providing ‘low intensity’ conflict areas to exist as well as the zerg battles.

The other solution, which cannot work (again, IMO) without the first:
Fix culling and remove the population cap in WvWvW