Guild Wars 2

Target limit need not apply:

https://youtu.be/OeSFuuJWHxk

If you have nostalgia for the pre-HoT days then its not likely you will enjoy the roaming scene now:
-many roam in groups or ‘roam’ along side other groups of people ‘roaming’
- you’re going to have to grind (primarily in pve) to play catchup to gear up with more ebola power level stats that have been introduced
- wvw is more about map blobbing as its ever been
- player culture has changed – i.e. unlikely to have players respect duels or fights in progress, etc

JTGuevara.9018:

If anything killed pvp, it’s the “hardcores” and tryhards in these forums that tried to push this “competitive” scene down everyones’ throats. They’re still doing it. Even as esports has kicked the bucket. Instead of “How can we make this game more fun to play?” it’s “How can we make this game more competitive?”

Don’t you feel that ‘how can we make this game more fun to play’ resides primarily with the devs? After all they have control of everything mechanical in game as well as oversite of the player base for cases of griefers/troll/cheaters, etc.

I’m curious what you believe is on the player side that people are missing that ‘would make this game more fun to play’?

zealex.9410:

Someone whould not pick chrono if the next elite soec revolved around a mechanic that current mesmer/ chrono lacks.

Which is quite likely why we can expect a repeat of what they did with HoT: intentionally crank up the power creep to secure sales.

Mirage > Chrono >> Mesmer

The weapon implementation I think is going to be fairly difficult for the devs to get right for the Holomancer, simply because of the mechanical space engie weapons fill and just how little design space is left in that slot. To me it seems like there’s going to be a significant amount of overlap or stranded and not really fitting in.

Akeno.4962:

I know saying this on a engineer forum is a sacrilege but, don’t you feel engineer is very restricted by kits?

The class is really built around the kits and an overall flexibility. Also the engie was designed to be played just outside melee range. With those two original design concepts in mind, our weapons are much more utility-ish feeling to better fit with kits. The combo of weapon+kits gives this ‘reverse ele’ set up; where eles have loads of skills coming from the weapon & attunements but fixed utilities, engie has a single fixed weapon choice and then loads of skills coming from the kits. As an added bonus there are very short (1s) weapon swap for kit dropping where as most other classes have 9s weapon swaps. Even if kits aren’t used engie still gets ‘two utilities’ per slot in a way due to the toolbelt.

In a way its kinda funny that the mechanic that gives us access to the most skills and in a very fluid/flexible way is one of the most complained about as restrictive to the class.

scorekeeper.6524:

Phineas, I think his point is that if these buffs/nerfs are useless, than why waste time on them at all? He’s right in pointing out that the Devs feel Warrior rifle needs a tweak, yet Engi rifle doesn’t? It’s like they are trolling us on purpose now.

Keep in mind that HoT power creep was intentional and we’ll likely see more of the same philosophy with HoT 2.0 design philosophy. That’s to say if rifle is too weak to be used following HoT, it most certainly will be too weak following HoT 2.0.

Personally, I think it feels pretty bad to have a such a disparity in power level between the core and expansion because in the context of GW2 there’s such a large amount of unusable garbage (traits, skills) already. It leaves such an incredibly small space for players who like to tinker/optimize/experiment builds to do so. Intentionally designing in a step change in power level just puts all those garbage skills/traits even further away from being tweaked up to even potential or corner-case usefulness. Rifle is a relic of the past, and that’s quite likely where Anet’s going to leave it.

Gayle.1807:

What I liked about the engi-farm? I had an application for my engineer. Well, in engineer parlance…back to the drawing board.

Engie’s problems aren’t in the design concept – they lie with having a massive amount of skills and traits that have been left behind with respect to the game’s evolution and power creep, or outright nerfed to make HoT choices/options more appealing.

If you are looking to be able to deliver near 30k dps by doing almost entirely auto attacks, engineer isn’t the profession for you. If you were looking for a profession with a very high skill ceiling, offered the highest amount of player flexibility/creativity, and demanded a high amount of player control/input and most importantly HoT (and the design philosophy that it was based on) was never released; then engie was the profession for you.

Gayle.1807:

It would be nice if the Engineers were improved. They aren’t very effective, and their game-play is a bit dull.

It might help the discussion if you qualified what you mean by ‘game-play is a bit dull’. If we ignore HoT for a moment and look at the engie and its playstyle/design concept from launch, engie is a very active playstyle and is more complex then other professions. Engie had access to nearly every combo field and numerous blast finisher options (google up a vid of engie might stacking or stealthing for old dungeon and fractal vids). Most of engie’s skill fall more towards the skill shot end of the spectrum versus just hit button and get result. Some examples here would be nades (original motor kit was an absolute piece of stationary garbage) and elixirs needing to be aimed to account for target movement and projectile flight time. Bigger hits from grenade barrage, pry bar or jump shot required set up to get them to connect (especially against human opponents). Engie also had a skill queuing and drop kit which lead to additional combos – the infamous ‘100-nades’ build relied of this mechanical interaction (magnet pull + queue grenade barrage partway through the pull channel + drop kit as the pull finishes to proc another grenade barrage from stream lined kits). Engie with kits plays a bit like an ele without the attunement swap cd. This allows for a very high flexibility for the player to pick the right skill for the situation, rather than other professions that are locked into or out of weapons or attunements after switching.

Granted all of the above matter much more when fighting human opponents in the pre-HoT landscape where there were significantly less brain dead passives and skills that were good at too many things at once.

Gayle.1807:

For long range, turrets were the only useful weapon, but they are short-lived. Rifle doesn’t do much. Grenades, etc and such only work for relatively stationary targets – they take too long to recharge, like the Ele scepter skill #2, Dragon’s Tooth. Only useful if you can anticipate where the target is moving. Very limited application.

Engie is not and has never been a ‘long range class’. By design engineer was setup to play most effectively just outside of melee range. The flight time and spread of the projectiles made grenades much less effective out at their max range. Again going back to pre-HoT, look at the mechanical options at your disposal. There are loads of options for kiting (soft cc, blocks, knockbacks). Skills have baked in bonuses for being in close (blow torch, blunderbuss). These aspects all shine much more in the context of pvp (and pre-HoT). HoT added options to play fully in melee range (hammer is melee, gyros are just mobile defensive turrets, even rune of the Scrapper is a passive dmg reduction to attacks that are made in close proximity, etc etc).

Gayle.1807:

Even the elite skills are: mortars (same issues as grenades). Elixir…funny but not overly useful. More turrets. Charzooka….only if knockback is “good idea” – fairly limited considering its an elite.

The motar kit was added to remove some pressure from running grenade kit. If you look at the dmg numbers between the two the motar kit is in the ball park but as its not multi-hit it is less damage than grenades due to on-crit procs (vuln, bleed). In exchange you get combo fields with a 100% projectile finisher on the auto attack and a blast and fairly big hit from the toolbelt. This was something that needed to happen and you’d really probably only understand if you played engie at that time in the game’s life. Engie nade kit was the only auto attack in the game that needed be ground target cast – and you threw a lot of grenades. I mean a whole lot of grenades.

The Supply Drop elite in the context of pre-HoT was such a strong elite that it was often a close second behind Moa for incurring massive amounts of rage from opponents. Even against experienced players it was effective as it could be cancelled during the drop animation thus baiting out dodges or defensive cds and making sure it hit when you did full cast it.

Pretty sure ‘roaming guilds’ are the main zerg these days. If you can’t pop OJs you’re not solo roaming properly

TheQuickFox.3826:

Could you please make it possible to complete the Year of the Ascension achievements with a single character? I’ve been playing PvP quite a bit recently with my main Elly and only active character. Currently reached the Champoin Magus title but the Year of the Ascension are stuck for me because they currently require at least two different professions.

It’s too bad you’re late to the party. Many people just played on their main or class the enjoyed playing and then swapped to another once the match was in the bag to get the ‘win’ on other classes. This isn’t really an option now as Anet has made changes to the disconnect time allowed.

Perhaps I’m just missing it in the proposal, but it seems like this would encourage and steer players towards group stacking and map-blobbing type play over any others?

The answer is that PvP and PvE are much much much higher priorities; so far above that WvW isn’t even considered when it comes to skill balance unless there’s enough qq on the official forums (aka Reddit) to get some action — see epidemic change most recently. Unfortunately, for the foreseable future WvW will feel the brunt of PvE’s (specifically raids) condi creep combined with absolutely borked stat combinations multiplied up by large numbers and competitive players iterating to find the most effective (read: broken) combinations. In PvP the devs can keep the ‘broken’ part in check with several dials to adjust (amulets, sigils, runes, etc) – in WvW all those dials, as well as devs that care enough to use them if they were in place, are missing.

The second issue is that it feels like a lot, if not all, of the QA/QC has been dropped when it comes to WvW. I recall Jessica Boettiger discussing her roll on with QA and her stating that one of the things they asked/tested for WvW was ‘What if 50 people use this skill?’. However, that was some time ago and since then we’ve had a significant amount of broken and/or oppressive mechanics show up in WvW. Bugged golems (stats bug, asura racial skill golems dmg, duplicating) for golem week, boon share, rev’kittenting through obstacles, stability stacks without icd on strip, life stealing on gates, etc etc the list goes on and on.

Long story short: WvW needs devs who are interested in the content and in touch with the players (i.e. a Grouch), and have enough stroke at Anet to suggest and follow through on changes.

I’m also in the camp of players that enjoyed those lord room last stand type keep fights. The whole dynamic had this tension that built to that lord room fight that started from breaking outer, then on to breaking inner and finally the scramble in the lords room; banners included. Much like how Street Fighter accidentally created combos and move-cancelling, bannering the lord and the small window where the WP became available after defend events became fun things that players actually played around and used. The sad reality is that we are way past simply reinstating that lords can be bannered to recapture those epic lord room stands.

Like others have already stated here, the defensive tools available are miserable and oppressive (also keep in mind they’ve been nerfed down significantly from their release). Almost in their entirety they are so unbelievably poor in concept that I almost think that the dev’s were actually aiming for the troll factor.

When we get to hold HoT design choices up to compare with the vanilla game, am absolutely blown away both by how generally ‘right’ the core game got things (I’m not suggesting it was by any means perfect) and just how much of a dumpster fire HoT is in terms of gameplay and design philosophy.

I got this one:

“Hey DevilishLyx, thanks for your post, but could you hold your question and post it on reddit during the AMA following the next living story release? It’s easier for us to ignore you there along with the other wvw questions. Thx, <3 and cookies.”

Packit.8576:

Feel like the main issue with recruiting is the pool to recruit from just keeps getting smaller

I agree on the shrinking recruitment pool. Additionally, there’s not much incentive to necessarily join a guild of the type that Sniffy is describing as players can just pug along with a blob (comms optional).

It’s not really about guilds dying, but more that the wvw game has changed and the community along with it. Guilds and players have had to make decisions on whether they are going to change themselves and how they play, or not. While I personally think HoT had a very negative impact on the way I enjoyed playing wvw, I recognize that wvw is the most causal-friendly its been since launch.

Stand The Wall.6987:

[snip]hot brought so much more damage, and servers have gotten much more polarized. if there is no cap, perhaps putting one at 30 people could help smaller groups[snip]

I also very much miss the days of pre-HoT and pre-stab nerfs. During those times, smaller but highly organized groups were able to take on vastly superior numbers and come out on top. Fast forward and in comes a steaming pile of HoT which gave each class and elite specialization which instead of offering a new way to play your class, just piled on a stack of ‘fixes’ for most of a core class’ baked in weaknesses. Take necro for example. Pre-HoT necros were run as absolute glass canons, capable of decimating enemy targets but they also had very poor mobility and were very susceptible to CC. It was those baked in weaknesses that made for interesting play: somone had to provide the with stability, someone had to maintain their swiftness uptime, the necro had to be more careful with their own positioning to avoid getting hard CC’ed or separated from the group by soft CC. Now necros have access to a leap on a very short cd, access to pulsing stability, passive movement speed buff and incoming soft CC reduction and hence removed the need to rely on organized teammates as much as they did pre HoT to maximize their potential. It’s not just necro; only taking it as an example.

The real issue, imo, is that HoT removed or ‘fixed’ a lot of those baked in class weaknesses and in doing so massively reduced the power level of organized groups over the unorganized. Pre-HoT how big a group you could take on was largely based on the skill level and level of organization of a group. Post-HoT its much more often a ‘who has more numbers’ check.

As zergs can’t get busted down by organized groups nearly as well as they could pre-HoT there have been two side effects that further ecourage blobbing even harder:
- no amazing out numbered zerg busting videos and community to inspire players to join or run their own organized group and emulate this play style
- has become even safer to run in a blob; hence blobbing provides the highest rewards, with both the lowest effort and lowest risk of dying

Personally, I’d like to see much of the HoT trash deleted entirely, but most importantly I want the design philosophy that spawned HoT be purged. Unfortunately, Anet has stated that they won’t be touching old systems and instead focussing on making new stuff. This means that not only will the HoT trash remain in the game, but HoT 2.0 will undoubtedly further powercreep up again (keep in mind you can only pick a single elite specialization at a time) to secure sales. ):

Stand The Wall.6987:

does anyone know if there is a limit to the amount of damage sources? if so whats the number? seems like that would be a good place to balance the game mode. hot brought so much more damage, and servers have gotten much more polarized. if there is no cap, perhaps putting one at 30 people could help smaller groups (and possibly lag by a huge margin). I’m pretty sure it would only benefit the smaller group. thoughts?

The incoming target damage source cap seems incredibly unlikely to be a thing – it seems to make resolving attacks much more complicated and without much, if any, payoff.

How would the game communicate to me as an attacker whether the target is already at the damage source cap?
How would conditions be considered? Does an attacker get to apply multiple condis (both by type and stacks) and hence get to bypass the 30 cap in a way that direct damage attackers cannot?
Would situations be created where a bunch of very small damage packets are taking up potential damage slots for bigger hits?
Would damage packets be lost/nullified if the target was at 30 already, or pass to the next sub 30 target?

As a general rule of thumb, players are very good at identifying something that doesn’t work or feel fun/good, or iterating and potentially overly powerful combinations. Players are generally awful at proposing solutions to those same issues.

A better approach would be to identify what exactly is the ‘problem’ and have a discussion around the specifics of that problem.

vier.1327:

A simple question:

Can a small guild (10-15) defeat a zerg (+40)?

With this new condi meta, is this posible?

Generally speaking, it’s very unlikely. As others have mentioned already the zerg group would need to be very low skill and unorganized (i.e. a pugmander typemanding a k-train group that wasn’t anchored by a guild group) to even have a chance. The vids that do get posted of these ‘zerg whipes’ you’ll often notice that the small group isn’t fighting the zerg but able to pull out squirrels or small pockets and chip away at the larger group.

With regards to the condi comment, where essentially you are asking/implying that condi is so overpowered that an organized group could kill ~4x there numbers, I don’t believe condi is that strong, no. Yes, condi can be very powerful, but keep in mind that when an enemy target goes into downstate, the transition clears their condi bar. So if you are a small group you likely won’t be able to finish off downstates when you are as largely outnumbered as the example you gave.

If winning is your goal, you’re going to want to use the most effective means to do so. Whether your strat is considered ‘cheap’ or ‘cheesey’ or ‘unfun’ or ‘uncounterable’ are all completely irrelevant. The only instance that goes against this is when the community (usually via some sort of organized and competitive tourney structure) employs bans on certain game elements. As an example in GW2, the fairly recent unkillable bunker meta in pvp lead to the competitive community implementing a limit on class stacking in tourneys. WvW has no means available from the player’s side of preventing the use of certain strats, and so players that want to win fights use what is best to do so.

I do believe that it’s an ‘Anet problem’ as the dev’s need to ask themselves stuff like is X both fun to use, and have used against you? What counter play options are available? How will X work in the context of WvW’s large scale combat? And so on. Players will use mechanics or strats that exist in a game – any game, not just GW2 – to win. The power to makes changes to the mechanics lies with the devs. That’t not say they have to foresee every single combination of skills etc before they add something to the game, but if (more likely when) players find a very powerful strat its again up the to devs to make adjustments (nerfs, buffs to counterplay options, etc). Unfortunately, in the case of GW2 in general balance patches are incredibly low frequency; typically requiring a major release to push anything out. As an added bonus WvW really doesn’t carry much weight when it comes to balance considerations – which significantly contributes to a situation of a lot of players using fairly oppressive strats often with very little couterplay and being either ticked at the devs or moving on from the gamemode.

Sviel.7493:

Some of the things you mention there are not map specific. Guild catas, for instance. Also, it was pure foolishness having those at 20 supply. It was more convenient for solo roamers but was even more convenient for large groups that wanted to build 8 catas to delete a wall.

I think the change that locations that could hit both inner and outer being eliminated was enough. The supply cost becomes less meaningful the bigger the attacking blob is as they can carry much more supply. Big groups have the option to rush or ninja (because more supply carried), small groups can only ninja.

Sviel.7493:

Some other things are also off. There are no uncounterable defensive siege placements. There are some that you can’t counter by firing from the base of the wall. However, those can easily be countered by basing your siege out of their range. Note that there’s a band outside of AC range and inside Mortar minimum range. Also, Mortars are always vulnerable to attack and can’t be rebuilt at will. With greater verticality, there are also staging points that can’t be responded to from within the walls at all.

This point is going to require more context either way I guess. From what you’ve written here you’re not considering all of the tools that defenders could use. The terrain and elevations often limit (when compared to ABL) attacking siege options. Additionally, some changes have been made to allow additional points to be broken (eg. fire keep).

Sviel.7493:

Emergency waypoints have a hefty CD on them. If you get pushed out by one, that structure now has to be rebuilt and guarded until the CD resets. If you keep a small amount of pressure on it and strike elsewhere in another group (splitting up?!) to draw enemy attention, you can break the still damaged walls and take it with ease. Or, if the enemies sit in it to wait out the CD, go somewhere else to punish them. The length of the CD is up for debate, but do recall that pre-HoT structures had a free E-WP every few minutes during an attack.

It’s true they have a long CD, however my point was that if you are a small group trying to havoc something it makes it very easy for a blob to respond. Whereas before it was: ’hey, what are those white swords that have been on X for a while?" Someone goes and checks, and then once the havoc crew is located the alarm goes out for a response. It was also a good way to remove pressure on your stuff as players generally want to blob (this game is a leader-follower system with the comm tag after all) and so a havoc crew could pull a disproportionately strong response. Now its very low risk to blob as you can just e-wp and save the day, patch everything up and erase all the progress on cracking something (again, I was replying to a guy saying DBL was for small groups).

Sviel.7493:

The auto-scouting radar is not free and requires defending an objective long enough to get it running. After that, you can still siege it from outside of it’s range. Since players complained and got the tower walls downgraded to barricades and then removed from the game altogether, it’s one of the best things towers have left. Imo, Barricades should be an optional upgrade with the final form being walls.

That’s sorta my point. Point blank catas was a common way to sneak something. Now you have to do it from farther range which is easier for defenders to respond to (shield gens, their counter siege, etc). With auto upgrades I’d say it’s about as close to free as you can get though, no? Again, in response to the guy saying DBL is for small groups the radar hurts havoc the most, imo.

ThomasC.1056:

To be even fairer, all of the above also exist in ABL. These are HoT’s additions, and therefore not on topic.

I think you’re glossing over that the map was also created and added as part of HoT. In essence it’d be understandable if ABL needed some additional tuning or adjustments to account for the fact that those HoT additions had come into the game. However, the DBL was designed knowing that those upgrades were also coming in at the same time, and yet the choice was made to still make a very inherently defensive biased map anyway.

Yes, the HoT power creep for upgrades applies to all maps, but only DBL had the opportunity to be designed to create interesting ways to have that power creep interact with the map and how it plays.

ThomasC.1056:

The tower have not become worthless because of some evil dev’s scheme. It should be remembered they got along with barricades that only the tower’s owner could cross. The other ones had to run all the way around the turret, with a risk to be spotted.
They therefore a huge purpose, yet the vocal majority of players that mistake the W in WvW with whine considered the barricades were making the easy steamrolling of the map too tedious, and so they were removed.
And as the towers can’t be moved without re-doing the whole layout, they stand where they are. In a sense, it’s the lesser of two evils. But it won’t prevent amnesic players to yell DBL’s towers should be the same than ABL. And keep. And layout. And everything actually.

The barriers were meaningless to larger groups though; you could cleave them down extremely quickly. For small groups or solos it was much more annoying.

The old maps you were able to stage an assault on a keep from a tower, it provided an entry point into the map and a point to begin applying pressure to something of significant value. What did the barriers offer again? A few seconds of roadblock to a blob? My what interesting and strategic gameplay that was…

anduriell.6280:

The map is fine, it is not designed for the one blob by server that is EB, but more for small guilds running around.

Now, of the wvw population would be big enough to have that kind of gameplay.

But its not really designed for small groups or havoc though. The map was designed, in general, to be a defender’s paradise.
- increased cost of guild catas (havoc’s primary tool)
- structure upgrade speed, auto upgrades
- oppressive keep lord mechanics
- limited approach options to structures
- structures laidout with uncounterable defensive siege placement locations by design
- addition of powerful buffs available via guild halls encourage joining and playing with larger guilds (damage reduction, invuln, supply drop, airship, chilling fog, etc etc)
- addition of emergency waypoints encourage groups to stay blobbed up as the e-waypoint allows the blob to respond quickly if needed
- auto scouting/radar for objectives with no defensive counter option limits the ‘point-blank w/ splash damage’ option for offensive siege placement
- strong defensive siege addition in shield gens (which reach and work through walls and gates)

In fairness to the devs, some of the above has been revised, but it was much too late and the damage was done in the sense that the DBL already had gained the stigma of being a miserable play experience. What further hurt the DBL image is that Anet reached out to their streamers including those that had no interest in WvW content to get their input and hype the maps in the first place. When the maps came out and was very unpopular with WvW’ers those content creators were gone back their new HoT content (primarily PvE) and weren’t around to help steer the community’s opinion even as updates were made. To give this some context: the new shiny thing that WvW players got with HoT was so poorly implemented and received that the player base fought to get it deleted from the game…

Ramoth.9064:

the ’hahahahahhahahahahahahhahahahhahahahhaahahahaha’s were the correct response. This is what Arenanet gets for constantly ignoring the community’s issues and suggestions

Perhaps Anet wasn’t investing their money or effort in a way or area of the game you prefer, but its disappoint to see the doors close on a more competitive pvp scene. This is just another entry point or point of interest for players coming to the game removed.

Ok I Did It.2854:

I doubt we will get any official comment from Anet on the forums, but I wonder now does this mean they are going to completely ignore PvP now and all its issues, or will they update the game to completely remove PvP from it.

There’s no sense in them putting in any time or effort in outright removing the pvp area of the game. Much like wvw, they can simply ignore the gamemode and/or add extremely low effort and low risk elements and just let the pvp disappear on its own.

Kuya.6495:

I just think that ultimately this is the result of them not making enough money to retain and hire new and competent talent. They have probably switched their priorities to the next expansion and abandoned less successful areas of the game until they can get revenue up.

To be fair, MMOs in general don’t have good PvP. GW2’s action style combat system is really a massive factor in what has retained player interest. Unfortunately GW2 just feels like their was so much pressure to have the game do well financially that the long term health of the game was sacrificed for short term gains. Both staff and players have moved on, and with the stated philosophy of not revisiting or reworking existing content/systems the issues introduced with HoT are not only here to stay, but will be built on with the next expac. For example HoT injected a disgusting amount of power creep into the game and most likely the next expac will do the same to encourage sales.

The game also largely feels like its being balanced more around raid content (this is likely the content we’d find Anet’s whales playing) which is incredibly lame for the competitive areas of the game.

Straegen.2938:

Highest potential DPS skill in the game that is unblockable, on a 13.5s timer and an AoE. The skill is ridiculous in the current condi heavy meta.

imo, there isn’t a a high enough opportunity cost to attain very high boon and condi duration. This is a ‘condi heavy’ meta because its incredibly easy to apply loads of fairly long duration resistance from revs and so players have changed builds/strats to rely on near constant resistance uptime. If it wasn’t possible for a single rev to maintain perma resistance on 5 people I don’t think the wvw meta game would have evolved as it has – where no one cleanses condies (or at least not to a level anywhere remotely close to the active and coordinated condi cleanse in gvg groups in the past) and hence there are loads of juicy epi targets avaiable, with rev and warrior being the number 1 and 2 choice targets. Back when condi, including soft CC, mattered in wvw gameplay measures where taken to manage and actively cleanse not just ignore your condi bar because ‘resistance has got it covered’. An sign of just how little condies matter due to resistance uptime is that Purging Flames, a skill that both clears condies in an aoe and applies a passive incoming condi duration buff is not used for condi managment but instead used offensively to spike up burn stacks for epi bombs.

On the flip side the ‘power meta’ has been gutted out pretty hard. Soft CC has been near erased from impact on gameplay due to not only resistance, but also HoT handed out passive movement speed and passive soft cc duration reduction as well. Additionally, HoT broke two core philosophies from the original game: no healbots and diminish returns are baked into toughness stacking (i.e. diminishing returns on direct damage reduction). There are loads of examples here but one standout example is designing a skill like Rite of the Great Dwarf. A 50% damage reduction to not only the rev caster but allies in a massive AoE and that lasts as long as most ground target skills that ‘pulse’ is absolutely baffling. The only downside is that newer or less experienced players may be stuck on a legend swap cooldown and not have it available which is a very weak (the weakest imo) downside to a skill possible: new players might not use this as effectively as they could.

Anyway, thought experiment here: what if mallyx rev was deleted or reworked? The ‘reworked how?’ detail(s) are irrelevant; for the sake of discussion imagine revs weren’t continuously hemorrhaging long duration aoe resistance. What would you build/play? What do you imagine the wvw meta game would look like?

Caliburn.1845:

Last night YB had a queue on SBI bl, and a queue on YB bl, both queues were single digit.

SBI at one point had double digit queues on all maps, including a 37 man queue on one of the BLs.

I cannot speak to HODs queues.

SBI is pretty thick for a couple of hours in NA prime and then much lighter outside of that for coverage.

Some other interesting trivia about wvw life on SBI is that a sizable chunk of the pugglet population isn’t as useful as it could be. There’s an very high amount of medium armour per capita in the pug zergs, and a strangely high number of people that just like to stand in towers ‘scouting’ (not building or using seige, not calling out numbers or enemies usually until its too late anyway, etc etc) at all times. Between our group’s moves and alts I’ve seen several servers, but I have to say the wvw ecosystem on SBI is a bit strange really.

Xenesis.6389:

When did they say that?
Probably went on the backburner permanently once the golem event showed to be a disaster.

If I recall correctly, I believe it was Grouch that said that they’d be doing more fun event stuff for wvw just before the golem event.

Golem event wouldn’t have been so bad if players hadn’t found a bug to retain the double damage buff from the golems in less than an hour of the event starting. Also a bug to duplicate golems left to run rampant for the entire duration.

Some PR could likely have helped the event by acknowledging the issues and move on. Or go with the option they did: clam up, say nothing and never do an event again. ggwp

Tricare.2946:

Video 1 the person who had 40 stacks of confusion on them should have died, LONG before anyone should have been able to cast epidemic on him.

That many stacks of confusion can come out extremely quickly. Corruption of retaliation gives 3 stacks of confusion. Guardians can’t do anything without hemoraging loads and loads of retal. Any semi decent group uses single target corrupt/load + epi and mallyx revs are the highest priority for epi’s.

Nothing against your post specifically, but people really haven’t walked through the ‘if resistance was nerfed’ scenario fully (imo). Condi cancer has been cranked waaaayyyyy up in an attempt to get it in range of zerker meta dps for PVE. Resistance was/is needed in the wake of this design change as well as HoT (aka The Passive-Play Power Creep Expansion pack). Condi used to be an attrition style of play but post HoT that’s not so true any more. Builds used to have to make meaningful trade-offs (i.e. opportunity costs), but post HoT that philosophy has been set aside. Basically, nerfing resistance alone wouldn’t be enough but also condis and soft CCs would need looked at at the sametime (again imo), which all but guarantees that Anet won’t do anything at all in this area.

ArchonWing.9480:

But YB is full. So maybe YB doesn’t actually PPT.

Once Caliburn dials it back on dat map queue k-train he runs these days then YB will eligible for a link again.

Boom! Got ’em.

Choppy.4183:

I see a lot of jumping to conclusions here.

My response, and I’m quite sure Liston’s as well, was tongue in cheek. I was making a joke based on a very common dev/player relationship in that it doesn’t really matter how unfun a game system or mechanic is, players will use it if it helps them win, gain an advantage, or is deemed optimal. Those same players will use that system over and over and be mad at the devs that it’s not fun. It’s just how it goes sometimes: a player wants to ‘win’ and sometimes dev’s put the ‘fun’ and optimal (i.e. win) in very different spots.

McKenna’s post suggests (at least without knowing absolutely anything about the weighting, tuning parameters and/or other considerations in the population trending) that the ‘best way to play’ is play an incredibly boring turtle up and defend type play style. Not something we’re likely going to see happen in play here, but an example of the ‘fun’ and ‘optimal play’ being miles apart.

TLDR: Jokes are funnier if you include a couple of paragraphs of explanation.

So optimal play is to just turtle up on siege and defend only. This will minimize ranks gained (k-training being most ranks gained) and increase the likihood of gaining a linking.

YB siege-up and turtle meta revival incoming then?

The award has to go to engie here. The class has entire skill groups that are garbage:
Med Kit
Gadgets
Turrets — w/ the exception of healing turret

Also Shredder Gyro wanted to hop in the thread to say hi.

For engie traits its gotta go to Thermobaric Detonation – a trait that is a copy-pasta of Evasive Arcana but made uselss by the fact the player doesn’t really know when the blast finisher is coming out (unlike on ele where a player knows it’s the next dodge after an attunement swap), and made even further difficult to use on top of that due to that sweet build in delay on bombs. Also can’t be used out of combat so not even a useful corner case of blasting stealth or might even.

Honorable mention for engie trait:
Static Discharge – for those times when you just want to tazer the ground

It’ll also depend on the implementation of the condi aura as well. For example if it’s a trait, it may get engie’s a spot back in raids, but the cost may be to run a ‘mandatory’ condi aura trait, in a now mandatory trait line.

There was a short time when MedKit did see play in PvP. Players would build up piles of bandages around the node between fights so that they could then pick them up during the fight. But ya, this kit is pretty poorly designed and I don’t just mean because it is a suboptimal.

AED is awful and has always been awful. The issue with AED is several fold:
• it’s basically an all-or-nothing type heal (compared to warrior’s Defiance Stance)
• it had an incredibly long cooldown
• it didn’t remove conditions on death. In fact its a testiment to how rarely trash skills/traits are revisited by Anet, as its been 3 years since the condi removal was added and to this day it still doesn’t remove confusion
• it has very loud audio cue the lasts its entire duration to signal others to stop attacking you
• it has a long cast time (originally was 1s) combined with the fact you weren’t going to use AED until you were right about to die to try to benefit from the large heal means that an interrupt was an automatic death sentence in most cases
• it doesn’t work well with many of engie’s other tools for survival – auto elixir S, high amounts of regen uptime, bandages from bunker down, even others trickle healing onto you can hose you over
• until scrapper was introduced you had no real way to way to protect the cast with stability
• the toolbelt skill Static Shock is absolute trashcan tier (likely because the devs thought the heal itself could be very strong) – single target, melee range (frontal cone hit zone even though skill is listed as 180 radius), 0.75s cast (its a redressed Fire Grab animation), only 1s stun

I’d really like to see the trash skills and traits get bumps and tweaks much more frequently as well. What does concern me with this is Anet’s approach, specifically Heart of Thorns. As devs they need to be like Batman (or at least put on their bigboy pants) and do what’s best for the game and not just what is easy and/or feeds the endlessly crying massess (i.e. basically everything mechanical added in HoT) . This may mean shaving down rather than just pumping up unused skills and traits.

cyberzombie.7348:

The skills from the kit by itself is bad but it makes a good catalyst for other heal skills via health insurance. Running zealot stats along with cleric trinkets and rune of dwyana I’ve been healing people ranging 500-2.2k per tick along a triple water+blast combo that does 1.6k per blast. Not saying the kit is in a good spot but yeah it does lacks the ability to be efficient on its own.

Except you give up two water fields for blasting that Heal Turret provides, and you are very limited for practical options for blast finishers that you can use when you are in Med Kit.

It is possible to combine:
• Medical Dispersion Field
• Automated Medical Response
• Near perma regen (+ Energy Amplifier)
• Health Insurance
• Backpack Regenerator
• Sigil of Benevolance, Sigil of Transference, Monk Runes (Water Rune is better imo for the additional AoE heal procs and boon duration); stack a bunch of healing power

+

A) Tools — Kinetic Battery (works with Bandage Self so you can use it twice in a every 40s), Optimized Activation reduces CD on Bandage Self to 14.75s

OR

B) Scrapper — Rapid Regen (plus more utility and survivability from the traits, utilities and hammer)

Sure its possible but not practical.

@Sean

For the record I also believe the MedKit is unlikely to see any use in any content and its quite likely the devs are fully aware of this as well. This is likely a contributing factor for recycling the medkit at friendly sentry points in wvw, in the Bunker Down trait (Throw Bandages + Mine Field) and Stimulant Supplier trait. However, I’ll play devil’s advocate here on the medkit:

Who/what is this kit for?
• The short answer here is: new players.
• Engie’s best heal has always been the Heal Turret, but is also the most complicated heal for engie (arguably the most complicated heal in the game). It requires casting it with the overcharge on summon and then blast finishing the water field as well. For vet players this isn’t that big of deal, but I’m sure to new players this is neither intuitive nor well communicated:
—> skill queuing healing burst on summon + need to combine with a swap skill on toolbelt, not at the healing slot.
• The medikit heal offers a low skill entry point for a heal skill (keep in mind the AED wasn’t added until later on); push one button and get health back

Is the healing amount fair(ish)?
• The short answer here is: probably
• I honestly believe that the devs intended for new engie players to fairly quickly come to realize the shortcomings of the medikit (both intended short comings like no combo field and blast finisher, and the unintended shortcomings like how incredibly awkward to use any of the actual kit skills are) and migrate over to the Healing Turret. That said Bandage Self skill does interact properly with ‘on heal’ traits as well as benefit a CD reduction from the Tools traitline (highly taken traitline before gobs of powercreep was injected via HoT).
• The healing value is less than Healing Turret, but the devs added Medical Insurance and put it into a mandatory traitline (again new players will come to realize this on their own soon enough) which brings the healing from Bandage Self much closer inline with Healing Turret for the engie him/herself.

To summarize: the MediKit is pretty bad, but it’s likely intended to be suboptimal. Note: this doesn’t excuse the awful execution/implementation of this kit though (i.e. the unintended badness about it).

For me a really standout flaw with this kit is the #1 skill which requires to you target allies in a game that doesn’t let you target allies with skills by design. The second fundamental flaw imo is that the skills are all needlessly cumbersome. 2, 3, & 4 all remove a single condi from a cateogory (damaging/debilitating/movement-imparing), and a single low impact boon – and this all before the whole ground target, project flight time and run-over-it to get the effect mechanic comes into play.

Hyper Cutter.9376:

Conditions are a viable source of damage, Orpheal. The sooner you and everyone else accept this truth, the happier you’ll be.

The issue with condi imo is that by cranking it to compete as an option for the zerk meta dps in PVE its become pretty oppressive in other areas of the game; WvW in particular. Yes, I realize that the wvw doesn’t even hit the balance dev’s radar for consideration which is an unfortunate reality of this game – but a guy can still hope, no?

OriOri.8724:

With how much WvW players complain you guys should be thankful ANet continues to even work on WvW honestly. You complain when you don’t get stuff implemented and you complain when new stuff is implemented.

It certainly sounds like you aren’t a wvw player as you’ve hopped in the WvW thread to address ‘you wvw players’. In either case it seems as though you’ve come to white knight or troll or both and it seems pretty unecessary – especially in the wvw forum.

While the tone of some of the above posts may be letting the ticked-off seep through a bit too much, they certainly aren’t unfounded. WvW is an under represented element of the game when it comes to dev attention. It’s frustrating when patch after patch other areas of the game receive meaningful changes and additions, and WvW is left stagnant and forgotten.

With regards to DB itself, it wasn’t and isn’t near as fun to play and consequentially much much less played than the original maps. Anet surely will have loads of metrics on the subject, but after 16months in game and still similar complaints (at least until the posts are deleted ) with certain aspects of the map its hard for some not to be snarky at the devs. Imagine if only a single raid wing was released and left in an unfun and hence unpopulated state for more than a year; surely raiders would be crying in the same manner as their wvw brethren. Yes each little shave and tweak here and there improve the map, but its still a poorly laid out map that highlights the HoT powercreep and promotes a dull turtle-up playstyle.

Frost

I’m stuck in a pvp match. Please rescue. Thanks.

EDIT: I’ve been released from PvP purgatory, much thanks.

I’m also stuck in the same PvP match.

official.7362:

lol ppl are so confused on the simple fact that stealth is supposed to give you the opener wtf is so hard to understand about this the game was balanced around this and guess what our burst for stealth openers got nerfd to the ground over and over because bads like you die to thief gibbing you in stealth which is our whole kittening class mechanic…..

It’s fine for stealth to provide an opener, sure. It’s when you can continue to go into stealth and repeated get that free opener, hence there needs to be a happy medium between how often you can stealth up to open and the burst you can deliver.

enough with this stealth nonsense thief is the stealth class and its all directed at them. and frankly we are getting destroyed by literally every class so whats the kitten problem????

If you wanna have a decent discussion on the implementation of stealth you’re gonna have to set your class aside and look at the game play the player in stealth and without stealth. As you noted above you completely agree that stealthing up should get you a free burst. That’s fine. So what’s the counter play for your target? How do you still make that scenario of game play fun as the target?

if ur only arguement is that we dont get to see them open thats because the game is build around that and all of the classes have enough survival to survive through a stealth opener and still merk the thief even if a team does stealth burst you all at once you have things in the game to counter that even if you do die u have alot of classes that can insta res players in downstate and guess what the other team wasted their entire burst and all have revealed now and all u had to do is use 1 chars utility to counter them back or u can just pop one of the 100 immunities given out in this game one way or another after breaking stun and they wasted their entire burst without even downing u

not even to mention the numerous otherways to counter stelath with just good awareness, watching ur aegis/block, aoe rings, channeling , cc, dodging, making it hard for them see your back by moving rapidly back and forth, being an asrua for kitten sakes lol (gl getitng a backstab on asuras in random motion) , auto attack chaining, (btw thats how u stop thieves from shadow refuge surviving)

These all fall into one of the categories I mentioned aside from the asuran size which isn’t an issue anymore in ranked with standard character models. What I’m getting at is that doing nothing or straight out guess and burning cooldowns isn’t counter play. The player in stealth can see if the target is burning defensive cooldowns and just not burst – wasting those defensive cooldowns of the target. This is why stealth is a one-sided mechanic; only the player in stealth is actually playing for that moment.

ps no wonder countless doesnt care about stealth he doesnt even use it

Click his video link – he’s got Mass Invis for his elite.

I do not agree with what Countless is proposing: stealth detect by proximity, but I do agree that Anet needs to take a hard look at stealth and its implementation across the board. I do not believe that more revealed applications are the answer either. It’s going to be a tricky balance between:
- ease of access and cooldown/initiative cost to get stealth
- how frequently can the class gain stealth
- player only or group stealth
- what does stealth provide – burst? escape? other (condi clear, boon application, protect casting of key skills)

official.7362:

u still didnt explain ur argument why stealth is any bit if at all useful in pvp

if u were talking pve or wvw i could understand cause u dont need to worry about objectives and u can stealth for days with no penalty but in pvp LOL no just no….

this is the pvp forums after all give me 1 reason why stealth is useful in pvp i ask again

Take specific classes out of the discussion for a moment, stealth is a completely one-sided mechanic in favor of the player in stealth and that’s the real issue here. Additionally some classes have relatively easy and frequent access to stealth which further compounds the issue.

Stealth is PvP is still very strong, despite your suggestion that ‘you can’t cap in stealth’ somehow makes not valuable. Look at the usage of stealth in even high level pvp:
- Used for openings in match and coordinated burst
- Used for exiting a fight to get a quick decap. Similarly can be used to mind game a player to stay close to a point so as not to get decap’ed allowing you to leave and +1 elsewhere.
- Reviving downed teammates.
- Stealthing lord in Foefire to protect his heal and shutdown damage from skills that require a target

The issue with stealth, and hence the frustration from players, is that stealth in the overwhelming majority of scenarios doesn’t provide an avenue for counter play. Also consider that not only can we not see a stealthed players actions/animations, the stealthed player cannot be targeted thus completely shutting down any skills that require a target for use. If you stealth up (again forget what class you are playing for the sake of discussion) what options do I have to respond and counter play at this moment? My response is pretty limited but falls into one of these cateogories:
- Do nothing, and be prepared to immediately react to your attack from stealth
- Spend defensive cooldowns in anticipation of an attack from stealth (eg. dodges, blocks, invuln, stealth etc)
- Spend offensive cooldowns to discourage your attack from stealth (eg. ground targeted aoe or aoe cleave).

The limited response options aren’t a bad thing be default if stealth was less readily available and/or couldn’t be used so frequently. For comparison, consider if a warrior could use endure pain or zerker stance much more frequently. Like stealth, neither zerker stance or endure pain are invulnerability, but I’m quite confident we’d see much more complaining about warriors because when a warrior uses those skills it very much limits the other player’s response options.

I don’t think the NPC spawn mech would need changed. Instead they could implement a stronger incentive to pushing a lane with your npcs. For example guards could have high defense which would take a relatively significant time investment from one or even multiplayers to take down, but if npcs (archers, breakers and/or heros) are in the area they would reduce or remove the guard’s defensive buff. This provides two options of play: commit more players and/or time to backdoor the guards and take them down or commit to lane management type play where you want to counter their pushers and push your own.

Personally, I think Stronghold really struggles with conveying some of the gamemode goals to players. Additionally, profession design is very deeply entangled with conquest for pvp which makes it difficult to create other non-conquest pvp gamemodes.

Exedore.6320:

Balancing for All Skill Levels
This isn’t as hard as it seems. At high skill levels, it’s aspects of the build/profession that are just too strong. This assumes a player is at or near the skill cap for that build.

At medium and low skill levels it’s often that pulling something off doesn’t require much effort or thought; the barrier to entry is too low. This usually manifests as very passive abilities which give a huge benefit (medi guard healing) or a simple to use combo (ranger longbow 4 into 2) which has high potential damage.

Any competitive game balances for the highest level of competition only. What good games also do is include characters, builds or strategy which let entry level players experience success to transition to a mediocre player level. At this point they are going to start struggling with their entry level X as it can be countered by more experienced and better players and they will need to experiment and continue to learn on their own to transition (if at all) to the high level play. By far the majority won’t make this transition and instead will be okay with just emulating what better players are doing and plateau in their play.

GW2 is all about the passive procs, relatively low cds encouraging spam over skill shots, loads of aoe vs targeted, invisible mechanics, no tells, instant casts with no counter play, mechanics without counter play such as stealth. And yet at the highest level players are still having close matches which are entertaining (to me at least) to watch. Its the mid level and lower players that drown these forums in tears and not constructive feedback. Dev’s have it right to listen to and even work with top tier players (applies to all games with a competitive player vs player aspect, not just GW), and for the most part ignore the vocal minority that is new and mediocre players.

Gern.2978:

Seemingly Tons of healing, Infinite stealth, seemingly infinite teleports plus crazy condition damage seems to be a bit too much. I don’t know though, maybe I just suck.

Seemingly new to the game or drowning us in hyperbole? I honestly can’t tell.

GW2 is hardcore causal and pretty much encourages multiclassing for pvp. Combine this with the fact that balance patches come out so excruciatingly slow at the best of times, and now that the dev’s are focused on the expansion I don’t think its realistic to expect much change until the xpac. I suggest you try a mesmer out in pvp instead.

If something is strong, overpowered or even broken I recommend you get on board and play it rather wait for tweaks to be made. Everyone else is going to be playing/using the strongest mechanics and classes, so why arbitrarily handicap yourself?

IMO, the issue with the revenent is that the dev’s have made it needlessly complicated. I’d even go so far as say its complicated for the sake of being complicated, and this is probably the most surprising thing of this beta test. I’m sure that the forums are going to be spammed to no end about the lack of damage as the issue, but IMO thats probably the easiest thing to fix/adjust – what’s more concerning here is the class fundamentals seem pretty kitten and that’s a much more difficult fix.

Let’s look at the class mechanic itself, you need to manage:
- skills costs and your meter budget
- cooldowns
- legendary swaps

Similarly, healing power is a very very poor stat to use in this game for various reasons I won’t get into here, and the revenant seems to have a bunch of ‘increase outgoing healing’ type traits that are pretty much trap choices.

Also as a heavy class where is my reliable (aka instant cast) stunbreaker and stab skill(s)? Having to trait for it on legendary summon isn’t a fix imo.

Specifics to this beta:
- very low damage output
- endurance bar fills to slow and/or most skills have too high of a bar cost
- long channels on a lot of stuff for reasons unknown
- unable to either condi spike in jalis and lacks defensives to condi attrition targets down
- lack of stunbreakers, active defensives
- trait lines are pretty messy. ele’s have one trait line per attunement and that makes sense as your going to use all attunements. with rev you only get two ‘attunements’ so traits need to be more universally useful across multiple attunements.
- no access to flat damage modifiers through traits
- concept seems to be to ‘tank and heal’ through damage and that concept doesn’t work well in the current iteration of the game

I’ll probably put together a better post with feedback towards the end of the beta event, but the current feel of this rev iteration is that it isn’t even ready for release to players for beta play. And most concerning is the concept of needless complexity permeates this class so thoroughly that I’m concerned on where we go from here (i.e. its gonna be a LOT of work to change these fundamentals).

Frost.

Anet, where are we going from here with regards to creating an area within pvp that works for the new player experience?

In the past you’ve been able to get hype surges to get players, especially new players, into pvp. A huge opportunity is coming up this fall with the expansion. I’m curious what considerations are being made in preparation for this new player surge.

The hurdles in place imo which really hinder new players sticking around in the pvp player pool:
- new players are prone to equating pvp to tdm, and conquest isn’t the most new player friendly in terms of strategy (i.e. a large part of the game is watching the minimap and responding accordingly)
- new players are going to be playing solo likely to test out pvp —> soloQ is currently a very frustrating experience because you can be matched against another team in comms (i.e. unlevel playing field in terms of game design)
- a good build is required, and yet several trap choices are present (i.e. sub-optimal choices in every scenario are presented to players unable to evaluate their choices --> I’m looking at you large pool of trash amulet stat sets and even larger pool of junk sigils)
- a complete lack of any tutorial or a better option imo teach through gameplay exists. Hotjoin is arguably detrimental to introducing new players to conquest
- A large portion of the game is based on mechanics invisible to players (sigil and trait procs) further add to the difficulty of a new player learning their class and others classes

I just got out of a match where my teammates rushed creature (ofc cause pugs) and it got me thinking how would a new player realize that rushing creature is a poor opening strategy. Don’t get me wrong, these players were absolutely awful, but what in game systems are in place to assist them? The match went horribly, the saddistic highlight being ONE mediguard 1v4’ing my teammates on home node made me realize that I would have more fun logging out for and typing this post than trying to soloQ’ing further this evening. I really want to give Anet the benefit of the doubt and theorize that a major major fault with the matchmaking lies in the fact that the player pool is likely relatively small. And it would then follow that getting more players in and STAYing in pvp regularly would help the situation and possibly open the door for leagues based on skill level, the return of soloQ separate from teamQ, etc. I’m really hoping that Anet is putting effort into assessing and evaluating that new player pvp experience because its going to be a valuable long term investment to help the pvp scene.