I’ll give my 2 cents.
Starting with what i like, the asura theme based map is a good idea, it would be great to have one foe each race. I also like the jumping mechanics.
But, imho, it would be terrible to have all of them in conquest mode, having a single mode really gets boring on the long run, and changing map doen not mitigate the problem. PLEASE add new game modes!
Said that, let’s get to the problems. I’d start by saying that bad things here seems to stack with each other here more then being many little different things.
We have the knockback/people-being -instakilled problem and the cannon.
The cannon is far too important to be ignored, aoe unstoppable damage , with no chance to aim bad ( at least you could be bad at trebbing, but whit this..) and good fire rate gain you incredible map control. But then we have to fight for such an important objective in a small space , where we can fall off in so many ways that it’s more like playing bingo then GW2. No real skill required, and positioning can sure help when fighting on points but does very little in the cannon room.
Also, when fighting 1v1 there are chances to avoid the cc/knockback spam and get a skill based fight, but when numbers grow it’s near to impossible to avoid everything and you just end up instakilled with no possibility to fight back. The winner is most likely who smashed buttones faster
Sarcasm apart, we end up with a cannon that should be probably toned down a little bit , maybe by reducing the radius or by having longer cds.
About the “fallling off” stuff, we can now go down by the floor or by the map border. I think one of them should be eliminated, maybe leave the other one. Even whitout considering all the fears/knockbacks movement skills in general are very limited. For example, i play a warrior and GS 3 and 5 are almost suicide skills. (still talking about cannon room here!)
Of course changing builds and weapon sets is possible – and to answer Allie question in the other thread about skyhammer yes, templates would help a lot! – the problem here is that we have one build dominating all the others and it’s very much luck based. On the other maps there are some advantages in adjusting team composition or in changing your build, but you get small advantages and common builds still work just fine.
Now I’m not saying that any build that doesn’t revolve around fears/knockbacks sucks on this map, “normal” builds are still fine if you don’t play to go to the cannon room.
But if you play with a random team you don’t know if anyone’s going to take that role, and you end up having to run troll builds yourself. At least that’s how i see it.
I would still go with the solution I gave above, closing the floor cells permanently or making impossible to fall of ledges and get out of the map.
It’s a long post , so to sum everything up:
- tone down cannon power a little bit, atm it’s so strong that you are forced to go for it.
- mechanics revolving around pressing a button and winning /losing(fear/knockdown) have little to do with skill, positioning can save you on points (eventually!) but there’s little you can do in the cannon room, read point above for the cannon. I want to play GW2, not bingo thanks.
- conquest mode. Besides what i wrote in the first lines, this mode also has another core problem. It requires communication, but the vast majority of players solo queue. This reduces the build variety because everyone wants a selfish build good for most situations, and also the skill cap decreases. Other game modes could both fix some balance issues and promote diversity.
(edited by Lucrimm.4238)