Showing Posts For Nazrin.5614:
So, the current system for WvW is that some number of players per server are allowed into each map (unclear on numbers, let’s say 100 each for simplicity’s sake). This is helpful when a highly populous server is thrown up against a smaller server, but it ends up just being frustrating and solving nothing when three big servers are fighting. Furthermore, it does nothing to solve the issue that the server with players spread around the globe beats the server with everyone in America, or everyone in Britain, or so forth.
What I suggest are dynamic caps to the amount of people that can be in a WvW map. Consider Server A has 90 people trying to get into WvW. Server B has 70 people, and Server C has 50 people. With the current system, everyone gets in, but Server C is horribly disadvantaged because they have a 40 man disadvantage to Server A. However, if you take the server with the least amount of people trying to get in – 50 – and take that many people and add some number, let’s say an extra 50% of it, you get a more even playing field. Now, you have a cap of 75 instead of 100, allowing all 50 people from Server C in, all 70 people from Server B in, and 75 out of the 90 people from Server A in. Server C is now pretty evenly matched with Server B and Server A now. Later, 10 people hop on Server C, and 10 people leave Server A. Now, Server C has 60 people playing, Server B has 70, and Server A has 80 with the cap being 90.
However, let’s say some hours have passed. All the Australians in Server C have woken up, and the Americans in A have gone to bed. Server B has an equal number of players from both countries, so they’re pretty much the same. Server A now has 30 people playing, Server B has 60 people playing, and Server C has 90 people playing. In what would originally be a horribly frustrating experience for Server A and a mildly annoying experience for Server B, Server C is now restricted to 45 people, putting a damper on their nightcapping shenanigans.
Still, what happens when the lowest server has 10 people on? Do you restrict everyone to 15? A minimum cap should be set, so let’s say 50. If any server would have so few people that the cap would go below 50, it’s automatically bumped up.
Now what about queue times? I’ve only given examples that lengthen queue times, not shorten them. The hard cap of 100 currently in place is there to prevent a server with 300 people trying to get in from rolling over a server with 100, but what if it’s three giant servers? If Server A is trying to put 500 people in, Server B is putting 400, and server C is putting 300, then that’s 900 people in queue. With the changing caps, you no longer need the hard cap of 100, so you can allow 450 people in since Server C has 300. Now all of C’s 300 are in, all of B’s 400 are in, and only 50 people from A’s 500 are put in queue, eliminating 850 people from a previously endless queue.
It would be understandably difficult to recalculate the caps each time someone joins or leaves a map (and, honestly, it would probably be difficult to do dynamic caps in the first place), but due to the nature of WvW and people rarely just hopping in for 5 minutes, it would be possible to recalculate the caps every 30 minutes.
Right now, Rangers feel a lot like Warriors with half of their damage moved onto a minion. This is largely due to the lackluster AI that pets are given. Pets will not move out of AoE circles unless you manually call them back to you – which means not only do you have to take them out of the fight entirely for a few seconds, you have to keep watching to know when you can send them back in. There is no option to tell you pet to kite around the enemy and continue the attack. The other large issue is that pets seem to just use whatever skills aren’t on cooldown, save for their F2 skill.
Now, AI is rather tricky to figure out for pets in GW2, because different situations rely on different methods. I obviously don’t want to spend my time dropping poison fields around enemies that cannot be poisoned, or attempting to immobilize enemies that cannot be immobilized. So, I propose that pets be able to be manually controlled, with an AI kicking in if a command is not received given some time. For instance, holding shift (or some other modifier key) and clicking on the ground would order the pet to move to that spot, pathing to the best of its ability. This would resolve the issue of “I want my pet to get out of the giant red circle of death, but I don’t want my pet to leave the fight for the entire duration”. Holding shift and clicking on a target would order your pet to attack the target. This would solve the issue of “I want my pet to attack an enemy different than me, but I can’t spare the time it takes to target a different enemy, order it to attack, and retarget my own enemy”.
Last, the biggest change to how pets are handled are the F keys. As it is, F1 and F3 are both movement related, and the proposed shift-click movement would render those unnecessary. So, F1 would use the 3rd skill displayed when examining a pet’s info, F2 would use the 4th skill, and F3 would use the first skill (which is currently mapped to F2). The second skill would simply be an autoattack like it already is, being used whenever the pet is not being ordered to use a different skill. To see why this would be necessary, the Jungle Spider – an otherwise great pet ruined by shoddy AI – provides a great example.
It is all too common to come across 2 or more enemies bunched up that you want to take out methodically, or maybe you only want to kill one. Instead of being able to lure 1 enemy away from the group, have your Jungle Spider immobilize it with Entangling Web (3rd skill), then have your Jungle Spider throw down Poison Gas (4th skill) while you finish off the enemy, the Jungle Spider will frequently toss Poison Gas the second you start shooting, aggroing everything in the group while conveniently missing the enemy you’re actually aiming at because it has moved toward you, and then immobilizing your preferred target after it has left the circle and become dangerously close to you. With manual skills, Entangling Web would be mapped to F1, Poison Gas would be mapped to F2, Paralyzing Venom would be mapped to F3 (currently mapped to F2), and Spit would be an auto-attack, therefore resolving any AI issues.
Another upside to this entire system would be that it would make it harder to forget about your pet, forcing you to pay more attention to where it is, what it’s doing, and how much health it has left, instead of just hitting F4 whenever you notice your pet is down.