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Flying squirrel wings. Essential.
Pets need a complete overhaul from their code foundation to their design. Baffles me that they actually thought they could take PvE mobs and glom them onto a player as an effective unit. Bad design from the beginning, and there’s never been an attempt to correct it.
LtW is vastly superior, even if you significantly weapons swap, and it’s not even close. It’s nice to hear that most rangers have finally learned the value of S/A as the premium alt power set to LB though; I’ve been running that ever since I first made a pure power ranger a few years ago, and it’s only been the last few months that I’ve seen a significant number of players use axe offhand. Vulnerability stacks, reflection, and the biggest single attack (Path of Scars) available to the Ranger. Great stuff.
Ranger pets need a complete code re-invention to be much more like a “second body” for the ranger, something that provides a unique tactical, fluid cohesion.
That’s what the mechanic should have been from the beginning, or it’s not worthy of being a core mechanic. Right now Rangers have one minimally-responsive pet as their core mechanic in a field where other classes have armies of ‘pets’ at their disposal. When I fight rangers, as long as I’m not standing still I’m almost entirely ignoring their pets to no ill effect.
If I prime my Black Widow with immobilize before engaging a target, it will be a good five+ seconds before that target is immobilized. I don’t need to point out how ridiculous that is.
Okay, so now we have a change that keeps pets from dying in big fights/boss fights. Well..so what? They don’t contribute anything to these anyway!
Serpent Strike needs an upgrade. We need stability during the evade, apparently, because I often get cc’d when I’m supposedly evading attacks, which makes no sense, but happens all too frequently. The evade roll needs to go more towards the target, then snap around to their back quickly on the attack
First stun breaks in general should always come with a base 1/2 second of stability. One of the most essential design necessities of an MMO is survival of one vs. many. Evades, blocks, invulnerability, stability (less so now, though), and movement skills all accomplish this, but stun breaks do not. When multiple players are pasting you with stuns you will not be able to use a skill to get stability, and a stun break you use will typically get immediately replaced by a new stun.
Second, LR is—as has been the history of Ranger skills—a great design with terrible execution (aka bugged). While I have used it consistently since they added the essential immobilization removal to it, it’s quite unreliable, because, as others have mentioned it sometimes goes on a short cool down when you get stunned, and because even though you are supposedly evading, you get interrupted and stunned quite often. All that said, it’s essential (and usually effective), because we have no better alternative.
Third, I’ve started used QZ preemptively for the super speed to keep distance from foes that might immobilize me at range, and it’s been very effective and keeping me from getting snare and overpowered when multiples are in pursuit.
My third utility is either SoS (most of the time), or SoR (when expecting heavy condis). SoR is very difficult to use for it’s condi removal though as it’s impossible to be close enough to your pet and do any sort of normal combat movement. SoR should be changed to clear your condis in addition to the pet’s aoe removal.
Invisibility is a bad mechanic. Trapper runes just exacerbate that to the extreme. Arguing about what counters are available, or how powerful builds are or aren’t is completely missing the point. Game play with a notable amount of stealth suffers for everyone, regardless of whether it’s balanced or not in terms of efficacy and power.
Stealth is poor design, lazy design really. The original designers when they unveiled stealth for the thief were met with an outcry, rightly so, that it would be bad for the game; they in turn assured that it would not be the primary mechanic for the thief (or any profession), and it would be a short, tactical, a minor part of combat at most.
That design intention was completely forgotten by time the game released, and has only gotten worse. Fighting several professions involves constant, tedious (and in a crowded fight, difficult) retargeting as they pop in and out of stealth. Win or lose, it’s not fun.
Hello All,
There are a couple of reasons for the change to reset time. One is for the overall quality of the game. The last few years we have been careful to not disrupt the WvW reset time but this has at times made it difficult for our team to address issues during reset day. This change will give our team an extra day of the week that they can use to respond to issues that may occur with WvW or any other area of the game if it is necessary. In the early days we wanted reset to be during a weekday to ensure we had people available to monitor the game at reset time, but at this point we have seen the ongoing stability of World vs. World and resetting on a weekday is no longer necessary.
Another reason is the emergent gameplay that has come from reset. It has become one of the most exciting times for WvW and we would really love for more players to have the opportunity to experience it. We have many more players logging in on Saturday than on Friday which means with this change many more people will be available to experience the rush of claiming objectives for their world during reset.
However, given the concerns posted here we will be moving the Saturday reset to earlier in the day to give most players the majority of the day to enjoy the start of the new match. Immediately after launch the new time will be 11am PDT / 2pm EDT (6 pm UTC) for NA and 11am BST / 12 pm CEST (10 am UTC) for EU. Keep in mind that the following week with the end of Daylight Savings Time / Summer Time the reset times will be pushed even earlier to 10am PST/ 1pm EST and 10am GMT / 11am CET.
Thank you for your feedback. We realize that no time we pick is going to work for everyone but this change is going to benefit even more players overall while at the same time giving us a little more breathing room to improve the quality of the game during the week.
Thanks,
John
Reset is special because it features player vs. player fighting, with minimal PvD or tedium since nothing is upgraded and there’s no supply stockpile. If WvW were properly designed it would naturally bring players together for fights. The design of the objectives and scoring though emphasizes capping undefended positions (PvD) and a lot of tedium building siege, repairing, running around the map, and ‘defending’ places not being attacked (since running to a keep after swords have been popped, and been noticed, means by time you get there, report the attack, and call in defenders, and they get there..it’s almost certainly flipped already).
WvW needs a fundamental redesign of scoring and objectives with one primary goal in mind: naturally bring opponents together in a variety of combat scenarios, and don’t make players invest in PvD, PvE, or any tedium. Get that right and reset will be a non-issue, because WvW will always be an arena with great action for players who like fights big and small.
The fundamental problem is Druid is like an entirely different profession, not a development of Ranger, and not appealing to those drawn to the Ranger play style.
There will be a big market for powerful support characters if HoT content comes through, so Druid will be played, but not by Rangers.
Rangers would have been a lot happier if you scrapped the pet code, and redesigned pets from the ground up to really be dynamic and almost an extension of the ranger in a second body, as it should have been from the beginning (else why is the ranger specialty a pet, when almost every profession is crawling with ‘pets’). That would have been a much more satisfying use of development time.
Stealth is a bad mechanic and lazy design. Regardless of power level frequent and/or long stealth is just not an interesting or fun way to do combat especially when re-targeting is difficult and slow enough 1v1, and impossible zerg vs. zerg. When I fight thieves, mez and trappers in WvW the entire fight is me doing anticipatory dodges and evades against invisible attackers trying to burst me, and hitting tab a lot while rotating camera frantically to retarget them and hoping to get in an interrupt/burst of my own before they stealth again.
I’m very successful, I win most of those fights, but that doesn’t make it interesting or good game play just because it’s sort of ‘balanced’.
You could create an effect “Grave Gambit”, where the next time you hit something it’s downed, or the next time you’re hit, you’re downed. Technically that’s ‘balanced’, but it’s also obviously horrible. Balance is not the be all and end all of combat design.
WvW Invitational Statement from John Corpening, game director for World vs. World
in WvW
Posted by: Pikka.6023
Nightcapping, Runaway scores. Population Imbalance.
On the surface these sound like different problems looking for different solutions, but really they are all symptoms of the same underlying problem, a problem that was pointed out in development way before the game was released, but clearly not understood, or ignored. The problem is WvW doesn’t scale based on participation.
WvW is the same sized game, and scoring the same each tick, no matter how many are playing. This leads to numerous problems. What WvW needs is a natural way to bring opponents together at a healthy level of competition. Two ways to accomplish that are scaling, and handicapping. Right now the only real form of handicapping in WvW is proximity to each teams’ spawn. The closer an objective is to the spawn the harder it is for enemies to defend it, and easier it is to recap. However that doesn’t allow for a server being overwhelmed by an opponnent’s Omega zerg to establish a point of equilibrium where they can stabilize even temporarily. That’s not healthy for competition. The more success one side has, the harder it should be to achieve the next level of dominance.
Handicapping could be achieved numerous ways, such as extra supply generation, tougher walls and gates, more fixed siege and NPC champions. The goal is the superior side should be able to score more points, of course, but the weaker side should be able to compete from an inferior position, and both sides should enjoy the level of competition, instead of one simply having periods of total dominance.
Scaling would allow the size of the game to match the level of participation, so you don’t have absurd situations like five invaders and two defenders playing a game of “Running Wars” across an entire border. One was to scale could be to shut down a border when a server’s participation falls to low; this would of course require adjustments to how scoring is done.
Anyway, without trying to fully ‘solve’ the problem in this one post, the key point is WvW is should feel like an exciting, epic form of PvP, not a stale rat race of PvD, as it often is, and the game needs structural improvements to achieve that.
Daredevil is finally making the thief interesting and competitive without the crutch of stealth. This is more like what the thief should have been from the very beginning of GW2. Stealth is a fundamentally terrible mechanic. The GW2 developers understood this and when they unveiled stealth they said it would not be a primary mechanic for thief and stealth would never last long , be short and tactical. Fast forward to the release of the game and they failed to develop an identity for the thief beyond stealth. Steal is the worst and least interesting profession specific mechanic and does nothing for the thief’s combat identity or feel. The reliance on stealth has made thief hard to balance and in some ways under-powered due to the fundamentally broken nature of stealth.
A staff thief can now operate as a truly nimble, strong, tactical fighter without relying on “the stealth dance”. Of course it would be better if this was the baseline for Thief and it was redesigned with less stealth and more of this varied, tactical evasion. But this is a step in the right direction.
If you are competent, S/x is far superior to a GS in almost every scenario for melee, even despite the awkward implementation of Sword skills. The only time I ever use a GS is for map running, then swap it off before combat. If GS auto did more damage if would be more viable for tankier builds that are willing to brawl inside aoe. Generally speaking though, Ranger’s main defense is evasion; being tanky and evading a lot is horrible synergy; there’s no alt weapon set that really does well in a build you would want to run GS.
If you get rid of servers, and allow guilds to form alliances on their own, you solve all of the population problems and give players a fair, balanced, competitive match every week. Also, players get to discover new allies each week while keeping their core alliance intact. (There of course has to be a limit to the size of an alliance, and alliance size should be determined not by headcount, but the player hours spent in WvW.) The matchmaking algorithm for this is quite doable. You can also consider not just how many WvW hours a guild plays, but when they are active in the 24 hour clock to help balance coverage.
The coolest thing about Alliances over Servers is they are so fluid, and allow players to self-balance, and guilds to find new partnerships, and dissolve failing ones.
Get rid of the WvW Server model entirely. It’s a fundamentally poor model and can never be balanced. Let Guilds form Alliances, and base match-ups on Alliances. This way you will be playing with and against other players of your caliber; you will have many familiar allies from your Guild’s Alliance, but you may also have new allies. With this you can also allow Alliances to prefer Sparse, Moderate, or Dense WvW population loading for the match-ups they receive each week.
Without being stuck with fixed populations on fixed servers, you don’t have to wait for Glicko ratings to reflect changes to servers as players/guilds come and go. You can easily create full and balanced match-ups each week, while also ensuring players get to play in the type of environment they like, too (more roaming vs. more zerging).
ANet made the egregious mistake of thinking player pets could be just copies of the PvE versions. Which makes them about as effective and dangerous as your typical PvE animal, which is to say, not at all.
I love ranger, but certainly in spite of the awful pet implementation. If they had done it right, pets would feel like an extension of the ranger, a second body for fluid coordinated teamwork, and be an essential part of the fundamental challenge in fighting a ranger, dealing with abilities and damage coming from two tightly coordinated sources.
If people actually split up, scouted and reacted to call outs well there wouldn’t be as much PvD’ing as there is.. WvW has become zerg everything as far as I can see. Not by everyone but just go and attack something with 5 people and see what comes after you.
Thing is people call zergs for everything now a days. I know you have seen it yourself. Zerg at so and so tower and when you get there it is like 5 – 8 people.. If people actually made correct call outs smaller groups would probably react faster.
My WvW life has been made on scouting, upgrading, sieging, refreshing, call-outs and defending. And when it’s done well, you end up with a handful of people on your border, or your third of EB, doing busy work for hours at a time, waiting for a real incursion. And when it comes, sometimes the work you put in makes all the difference, and sometimes your calls for defenders go unanswered. Occasionally it makes for a real protracted siege or great fights, but often the invaders disappear at the first sign of real resistance, or they cap the keep before the defenders arrive. And if people get fed up and don’t defend, then it’s like Golem Week all the time. The problem is the game design, not the people playing the game.
Players should generally be proactive, naturally leading to competitions for points; where it’s desirable for players to be reactive, the game needs to slow down the action enough to promote and reward that. Blasting through a gate in a few seconds with a golem army is bad in all scenarios, not just golem week.
Some of the most fun I’ve had in the game is when one server, or both, becomes determined to flip a keep, and they begin a protracted siege, mixing in smaller group attacks on other gates away from the main action, cutting off resupply, guarding yaks, feinting to other objectives then returning, counterattacks to destroy trebs, and, of course, ultimately epic lord fights. The ratio of that to rapid PvD is far, far too low, and game design is the problem.
Do we really want major changes though? Most will say yes..
Yes, yes, YES!
WvW at heart is a great concept, yet suffers from many major design flaws. Start with the central mechanic of the game, holding territory, offense and defense. Any decent sized zerg can cap a keep unopposed in just a couple minutes. And if your goal is to capture something, the best strategy is to “hit ‘em where they ain’t”. So, there’s a fundamental incentive to avoid fights, not engage them. And, if you want to defend you have to invest a lot of time and money doing all the boring busy work to prepare and waiting to be attacked. That’s fine if you’re an animated soldier from an RTS, but incredibly lame for a real person. The design should be naturally drawing opponents together to compete for points, not creating a rat race of PvD.
WvW could be, and should be, the crown jewel of GW2. And ANet hasn’t even explored ways to monetize it through the gem store. There are lots of opportunities for guild and wvw based cosmetics.
Blood Of My Enemy: Each unique enemy defeated within a ‘region’ (like a tower and surrounding area) grants a regional buff that scales gradually at low death totals, but adds new effects when death totals pass tiered thresholds.
Blood Of My Blood: When defeated a player receives a debuff in that region for five minutes. Additional deaths stack the debuff.
Monumental Siege: Catapult, trebuchet and ram siege is massive, takes a lot of supply and is built slowly by workers from a supply depot attached to the siege. The depot has a low natural supply generation rate, and players can deposit supply into it. Workers can be killed and revived. Players cannot damage siege with weapons. Damaged siege can be repaired by workers, and is less effective with more damage. Players can slowly destroy siege by getting close to it to action key a “Burn Siege” three-second, easily interrupted command.
No Upgrades: All Keeps and Towers are fully Reinforced with Oil, Cannons and Mortar, which can all be repaired by players. Workers also do repairs, and their repairs cost no supply. When captured nothing is instantly repaired.
Clash: Holding keeps and towers no longer scores points; they are merely strategic positions. Points are scored by winning competitive events. For example, SM becomes neutral and invulnerable for five minutes, then, whoever controls SM fifteen minutes after that scores points. Or, defend your garrison successfully for thirty minutes to score points, or those points go to whoever captures it.
Open Caps: Cap circles of various sizes and value are scattered across the map, not inside keeps and towers, which are just strategic locations to help control and fight over the caps.
WvW has some very fundamental problems. What should have been the crown jewel of GW2 was never fully developed and has been withering steadily since release. However, there are some simple modifications to WvW that require very little effort by ANet that can help WvW live up to it’s current potential and make it an accessible and fun format for a much wider player base.
Fix One: Automate upgrades and repairs. Upgrades start automatically and at base level pace. Whenever a yak reaches a tower or keep the upgrades temporarily go a lot faster. At no point is supply spent on upgrades or repairs. In addition to cannons/mortars/oil automatic upgrades include some carts and ballistas. Workers automatically work on repairing walls/gates/permanent siege that has been damaged if it stops taking damage for a minute. Players can spend supply to make additional repairs the the workers’ automatic repairs.
Fix Two: Match WvW rewards to PvE. An hour of WvW should give a similar amount of personal rewards to players as an hour of PvE. Currently the players who contribute the most to the success of the server reap the fewest rewards because it costs so much to run upgrades, and buy blueprints and traps. There’s nothing interesting about the blueprint mechanic; it’s just a gold sink and inventory space waste. Give players a button to the right of their elite skill to select a piece of siege to build; make partially built siege decay a lot faster than the current ten minute build window. Decrease awards for player kills, which is where most of the WvW rewards are right now, even though that’s not how the game is scored. Increase awards for events, especially for defense.
Fix Three: Close borders when population is low There is nothing interesting, and a whole lot that is tedious, about maintaining defenses on a border that is dead. There’s also nothing interesting about the PvD of capping a dead border. When the participation of any one server falls below a threshold, or the total participation of all three servers falls below a threshold, close all three borderlands, and stop scoring them. If the remaining population is too large for EB, start a second EB map. People could be given a several minutes warning and a chance to queue for the new map so it gets “reset night” type activity when it opens.
Certainly there is much, much more to do to improve WvW, but just these three changes could have a big impact quickly. Imagine if you knew when you played WvW it was going to be personally rewarding, the maps would be active, and there wouldn’t be any tedium required!
ANet has created a WvW system that cannot even theoretically work right. There is no way to balance competition with fixed server memberships competing on a fixed size battlefield.
The 24 hour day makes participation fluctuate wildly; and week to week participation can also change dramatically due to PvE content releases, school year, holidays, etc.
This obvious problem was finally solved for PvE with the megaserver, a system that should have been in place from the day GW2 released. Now they need a mega-server system for WvW that flexibly loads maps so anyone can get a good wvw experience at any time.
The answer (which was obvious from when the game first released) is stop trying to match a fixed sized game (3 borders + EB) with various server populations.
- The size of the game needs to scale with the number of participants.
- Opponents needs to be matched to similar quality and quantity of opponents.
These can both be done, but you have to dump the server model. Let players fight for their guild, not for their server. Let guilds form a limited number of alliances such that they are more likely to be on the same team on a map, and less likely to be opponents.
Because Whirling Defense gives both retaliation and vulnerability, the trade-off is rooting. That said, the skill needs a buff. It’s almost impossible to use the skill to support your team because the of the combination of rooting and a minuscule reflection radius. It’s substantially weaker than nearly any other reflection skill in the game, and the vulnerability/retaliation benefits rarely pay out.
The skill has to have it’s radius at least doubled. Right now I can still easily get hit by projectiles like grenades and cluster bombs landing at my feet. It’s almost impossible to do things like step in front of a cannon and reflect Omega rockets to protect it. (The one time that worked was pretty epic though.) Being rooted so long leaves you so vulnerable to aoe and melee, too.
If they keep the rooted aspect, the skill needs to at least give stability while channeling. Or let us move, but at half-speed. Regardless, the blocking radius has to be at least doubled so we can use the skill for team support. Even then, it’s still a quite small area of reflection.
I knew someone would bring up the specter of “custom arenas” as some sort of solution. But it’s not. They are a fantastic way for a guild, or team, or some group that needs it’s own space to do a specific activity, and that’s great. However custom arenas do a lot more to “split the player base” than different queue options ever could. And they are an incredibly awkward play space to navigate; you spend most of your time not playing!
Look, if people who want to play Conquest suddenly are no longer forced to play with people who don’t, the quality of all Conquest game play will shoot up, to everyone’s delight. Splitting queues is a big win for Conquest PvPers, and everyone else, too.
Also, the “splitting the community” is an illusion. Consider 20 players, enough for two matches, 10 want Stronghold, 10 want Conquest. Can anyone really believe the best way to split them into two games isn’t to just let them play the mode they want, but to force them to mix and play a random mode?
(edited by Pikka.6023)
On one hand, exploration and achievement is highly desirable, and necessitates ‘gating’ of some sort. On the other hand, the biggest problem when GW2 released was tons of content, so many map zones and events, and hardly any of it worth exploring for it’s intrinsic challenge or replay value. So, the problem with this intricate gating system is, it doesn’t address the central point, which is, content needs to offer a unique challenge, or it’s not interesting. And the content you >can< fail in GW2 almost never fails in an interesting way; usually it fails because you don’t have enough people, or, for a few mega-events, you don’t have the hyper-organization required.
That’s quite a contrast to GW1, where the challenges so varied from one map to another, and even more so one dungeon to another, that you could easily wipe if you didn’t adjust your team and builds to meet the challenge.
There absolutely has to be a separate queue for Stronghold from Conquest—100%—for many reasons, but mostly because it’s a different game.
One of the biggest problems for Conquest right now is so many players aren’t interested in that game mode, but to sPvP they have to play it, so the quality of play is really low. All it takes is one or two people in the match ignoring the game mechanic and the entire match feels poorly fought to all. If you force Conquest players and Stronghold players to play together it will harm both game modes and reduce overall interest and participation in sPvP.
I honestly cannot believe this would even be considered for a moment. They should add another Deathmatch map or two and make that a separate queue also, so players who just want to brawl can do that without polluting the ranks of players who want Conquest or Stronghold mechanics.
Problem with hybrid builds is you have limited ability to keep reapplying conditions, so versus any player with even modest condition removal, you effectively get no benefit at all; you’re just making their condition removal useful. Conditions and damage mix okay on celestial/sustain builds because they aren’t expecting to get kills on their own.
I think you’re better off forgetting bleeds with longbow and just using a few poison sources, like spiders and sigil of doom, to keep them from healing out of your bursts. Even when I go full condi in sPvP it’s ridiculous how fast some profession can shed conditions; I have to keep reapplying them at a really high rate to be effective.
The problem is, while megaserver is easily the best change to GW2 since release, it meshes horribly with WvW servers, and makes it hard for casuals to join the WvW players ranks. Really, ANet needs to get rid of servers for WvW entirely. At the very least they should remove the gem cost of transfers and let the player population sort itself out. WvW has a pretty high barrier to participation; step one for WvW is create healthy competition, healthy servers, and make it easy for new people to engage in WvW and have a good experience.
Group challenges/adventures of two types. First, an on going continuous challenge new players can jump into and assist, or hop out to a safe zone any time they need a break, and jump back in again when they can. Second, registration challenges for 5 to 8 to 20, or maybe even more people, that can be started by an individual, party, or a guild, and once enough players sign up for it, a countdown begins, then everyone loads into the challenge and it begins.
A continuous challenge might be keeping a herd of cattle safe and healthy in a valley. Ogres come down from the hills to swipe cattle, so you can stop them and/or rescue cattle. You can do that with your normal skills, or use a scoped sniper rifle from the roof of the ranch house. Or you could get transmuted to a herding dog and keep strays closer to the herd, or move to whole herd towards better grazing to improve their health. No win state nor fail state, just better rewards for doing better and easy to join or leave at your convenience.
A registration challenge might be twenty people need to move supply carts down a long canyon to a town at the end. The faster you complete it the better your score. You get attacked from the canyon walls, things like boulders can damage carts, slowing them and needing repairs. Some people need to climb the canyon wall to protect carts from there. Cart drivers get a special skill bar, but may also need to get out and defend on foot. There might be safe zones along the way to stage carts, so different strategies of how many carts you take at a time, and how far. These events should have leaderboards!
Continuous challenges are great for casual players with limited time. The biggest advantage of a registered event is it can load everyone once you have the number of people the event is designed for, and then the event leader can kick it off when you’re done pre-strategizing. (Too bad triple-trouble isn’t a registered event. Would save so much time; who has time to literally spend an hour before an event just to organize and get everyone loaded into the same map? Which is what it takes!)
I use Read the Wind and Piercing Arrows, and pass on Eagle Eye in both WvW and sPvP. Too much value, not only hitting multiple targets, but also not getting blocked by pets, clones, minions, turrets, etc.
A few simple changes could improve the PvP experience immensely, making it more accessible, and more fun.
Current sPvP is facing a few self-imposed barriers to participation that can be easily removed.
First, change queues to a kind of never-ending king of the hill that winning teams keep climbing. So, when a team wins, keep that team together and match them up against another team with a similar number of wins. This will alone will improve the quality of matches a lot, and win or lose, players enjoy a well-played match. (You can even give losing teams the option of staying together.)
Organizing a team takes a lot of effort, and often has unsatisfactory results anyway. But players recognize when they have a team that works well, or enjoyably, so why not make it easy for them to keep it when they have a good thing? And there’s nothing satisfying about a good team beating up on a bad one for either side, which happens all too often now.
Second Community. Players are either in matches, or stuck milling around the lobby with nothing interesting to occupy them. Why not fill a map with arenas and let players watch the games? A player could open their map and hover over an arena to see who is playing, click on camera icons to get views, or click on players to see their view. There could be featured arenas for top rated teams. And a chat tab for each arena when a spectator is viewing so people can kibbutz. This is how community is built in a natural way. Participating, spectating and kibbutzing. Also, being able to watch players in action is a great way to learn. And the more players learn, the better quality games everyone enjoys.
Third The format. Conquest is a great concept for highly organized teams that use chat programs and know each other’s builds. For the other 98% of players, it just leads to a lot of bad play. We need an alternate format that is intuitive for players without a lot of tactical coordination. Conquest splits each team of 5 across 3 points. Casual teams cannot coordinate effectively when split among so many objectives; most games are lost due to bad tactics, regardless of the fights. How about experiment with new formats that let players fight five on five, or split differently?
Some quick ideas:
Hot Zone—the closer a player stands to an orb in the middle of the map, the weaker he is, less health, less damage, etc, but also, the faster that team fills their win bar. On the outskirts of the hot zone could be assorted boons, like healing oases, or power ups. You will get a lot of group fights in this, but also, players will have to advance and retreat a lot, sometimes respawn, and splits can be effective, too.
Slay the Beast—a massive Champion has to be killed, and whichever team does the most damage wins; but, of course you can take out your opponents temporarily with kills, too. This could vary a lot too depending on the type of beast; a highly mobile beast that roams the map could be a very different challenge than a static one. Multiple attack zones on the beast would mean all melee wasn’t cleaving on the same location.
New formats will bring in new players, but they will also improve the quality of play in Conquest and all formats by pulling out players that aren’t interested in certain formats. I see this quite often in Conquest, players who just aren’t interested in good tactics or the demands of smartly attacking/defending caps. New formats will also show you what people choose, how they really want to play; only having Conquest makes it hard to gauge how much people really enjoy it. New formats will also encourage new builds.
ANet is trying to hard to get sPvP “right”. The one best format, with all skills balanced around playing that format. That approach rarely works. Be experimental, make formats that make it easy for players to jump into PvP, foster community. Let the community be part of your creative process!
30 seconds is a LONG time in PvP. I’ve played a lot of power ranger. When turrets are fully traited, they are very, very hard to take down, even with focused fire, which, normally you will never be able to get away with anyway. They have lots of health and toughness and regain health quickly, so they rarely die from collateral damage, even fighting right on top of them.
A single turret is harder to kill than most pets. With shields when they deploy and knockback, a cap point full of turrets is ridiculous.
But ANet has shown time and again, they love extremes. They had such a better concept of balance in GW1. If they had simply added a dedictaed heal and rez to make a 10 skill bar, and let attacks/skills be used while moving they could have elevated that game to a great new level.
The fixed, named server model just doesn’t work. They need a new model to balance competing populations similar to PvE megaserver, and still allows guilds/friends to fight on same side. When people can log in at any time of day from any location in the world and find full, active WvW they can join in easily, it will start to grow again. Right now, WvW has so many barriers to playing the game as it was intended, even for dedicated, organized players and guilds.
WvW needs to abandon the idea of “servers” and allow players and guilds to join the action in a flexible way that prevents barren maps (as megaserver now prevents in PvE, to great success), and allows guilds/friends to play with each other.
How about some multi-hour “events” with good rewards, with a lot more than 3-tiers of rewards. Like whichever side contributes the most to some ‘project’ by the end of four hours gets awarded by the tribe they are helping; you participate lots of ways, like hindering your opponent, scavenger hunt collections around the map, control supply line for building materials, kill your opponent’s workers, etc. By contributing to more events, and more time, you earn high levels of rewards when the big event is over.
I should be able to pop into WvW at any time, no matter my schedule or where I live, and find an active map, get rewarded for my time and effort, and have choices about how to participate, and easily be able to see the big picture.
Imagine this: I log in to GW2 and open my WvW panel. It shows me that my currently active guild is helping build a pyramid on one border, and another guild is trying to flip a keep by a certain time for a bonus reward. But, I decide to do join some friends roaming on another map entirely though, and pop into a new HoT border. I change tabs in my WvW panel and get an overview of the main action on the map, lots of events pop up, including, Red secured friendship with a tribe, and now is trying to escort the tribe’s trade convoy to it’s keep for a big haul of supplies. I decide to join Green and help snipe a few yaks. I’m warned once I join green on this map, I cannot join red or blue here until at least a four hour cooling off period. Yak sniping is going slow, they have good defense, so i change tactics and go to cap a watch tower further along the convoy path. I’ll need help, so I right click the tower on the map and open a call for assistance. Pretty quickly some other people join, and when we get within 10,000 unit of each other we can see each other on the map, making ad hoc coordination a lot easier. We cap the tower and use it’s telescoped rifle to snipe yaks. Etc..
Just ditch the Borderlands for good. Too much PvD.
I’ve died from falling damage running down a shallow slope, so many times. And pet rez still fails on uneven surfaces quite often. Just allow players to activate skills while jumping/falling; that will avoid a good chunk of the problems with the z-axis.
Projectile obstruction is major problem. One solution is make sure ALL projectiles arc significantly. Then all the invisible ground-level obstructions where the visible terrain doesn’t match the “real” terrain won’t matter.
(make believe numbers below for conceptual demonstration purposes only)
old model:
hit 3 10-second bleeds for 330 damage per tick
gain some might stacks, bleed on next four attacks four seconds each bleed, 150 damage per tick per stack
game is now tracking 7 bleed stacks and their individual damage and duration
new model: put 330 damage in first 10 queue slots, then each of the next four attacks fills four queue slots an extra +150, so you get a queue like this, starting with the first tick:
330, 480, 630, 780, 930, 780, 630, 480, 330, 330
So, when you apply bleed damage, all the game does is add that damage to the queue slots, then applying the damage on each tick is as simple as advancing the queue and reading the damage number there. No need to track stacks, or tie up tons of memory or computation, and no need to change the current damage model of the game either; just a simplification to make it more efficient for the server.
My question is, how much one hit damage is too much? Okay, a skill can be avoided, or nullified by various means, fine. So, does that mean you would be okay if a burst skill could hit for 20k? 30k? Where do you draw the line and why? What about the other end, a fully tanked toon sucks up an burst for 4k while sitting on massive health pool and strong regen. Right now it’s possible for the tankiest builds to suck up the zerkiest builds damage and be in almost no danger of getting downed with no active defense on their part.
When you design a combat system, one thing you have to consider is the extremes, and how combat should work at those extremes. If the extremes allow for combat that makes sense, then you can be optimistic about balancing the middle.
Personally I’d prefer combat where a duel between two tanks can result in one of the dying in a reasonable time frame. And a duel between two zerkers isn’t over the first time of of them lands a burst. I feel like the extremes are too far out, both for doing damage, and for tanking damage.
Personally, I think it’s too extreme to have a combat design where a maximum damage attack versus a minimum defense opponent can do more than 1/2 health in one hit, especially since there are so many ways to set up big hits that players can’t actively counter. It’s a design problem. The extremes need better limits.
I have a potentially very simple solution to massive calculation overload from condition damage.
Consider bleeding. Create a ‘bleed queue’, say capped at 90 seconds, with a single damage number for each second. So, bleeding is simplified to tick exactly once per second. In design terms, bleeding is now a managed by a 90 slot circular queue. So, each second you simply apply the single number of damage. When someone applies a new bleed you simply calculate how much damage it is per second and add that to each queue slot for it’s duration.
For example, if I hit something with 8 stacks of 5 second bleeds at 120 damage per second per bleed, then I update the next five slots of the queue with +960.
There’s no need to track each individual bleed and calculate it each time it ticks, or to have “stacks” as we have now.
(Obviously this means people won’t see their individual condition damage numbers popping off the screen, but the damage monitor can be simplified to report duration and damage per second on the initial hit only, so you at least know what your damage potential was, even if you don’t see when the condi was cleansed.)
Simple change to mystic toilet: make a craftable item for each precursor called “Prayer for —--”. When you place this plus 3 lvl 80+exotics of the same weapon type in the mystic whirlpool it returns an item plus an extra Prayer For token. The more tokens you have the better your odds of a Precursor, with a hard limit # of tokens for when you get one. So, it may be more expensive than market value in the end, but at least you won’t burn literally thousands of gold for nothing, as some people have.
The guilds and players that are most attracted to the new GvG format are likely a lot of those that are currently the most organized small-medium WvW guilds. WvW participation is likely to take quite a dip, except for the initial interest in the new map.
WvW already suffers, at all tiers, from much too low participation at many hours of the day to split among four maps. The second way it suffers is stagnant game play since every scenario is basically the same: knock down a wall/gate and win the lord fight.
The only way the new WvW map brings more people into WvW is if it has a variety of objectives solos and small parties can do ad hoc. That brings casual players into the game and gives them a window into the learning curve of other WvW aspects. I’d be happy to discard the current borderlands entirely, leave EB essentially as it is, and let the new map have a completely different flavor with a couple places for massive scale conflict, and lots of side objectives that assist the bigger ones, or stand on their own. The hold, upgrade, siege model is too tedious for most people, and requires a ton of groundwork by players just to set up a good fight once in a blue moon.
More player skill + weaker mobs = more zerkers. Content has to be harder; that’s the only way to build diversity.
Definitely the Mordrem attacks on forts in Silverwastes is the closest thing to a GW1 type PvE experience where you have a mix of mobs that combine their effect. Getting immob snared by a husk and unable to dodge teragriffs/wolves/troll bee swarms is deadly. Fail to finish off a target fast enough and menders might heal it. It’s still a very rudimentary level of cooperation, but it’s the right direction.
What would be great is mini-bosses along with the sea of trash mobs. Lieutenants? Harder to kill than Elites, but not as hard as Champions, and with unique skill sets that change the battle and work with the mobs.
For example, warrior with a large war horn that rallies mobs to it, the rally giving them swiftness and breaking immob/stun. Then another horn blast heals and gives might. Then they go on a “warpath” going after objectives togeher with occasional horn blasts that give quickness.
One fundamental problem with WvW is the game is always the same size regardless of the number of players. This is a big and unnecessary problem. Unbalanced play is perfectly fine within certain tolerances, for example if EB has 100 Red, 60 Blue, and 30 Green, the WvW play still operates like WvW should. But all to often on borders you have situations like a dozen defenders twiddling their thumbs, doing busy work like refreshing seige, and running upgrades and repairing/building oil, cannons and mortars. Ten minutes later you might have three people on the border, when out of nowhere a 60 invader zerg shows up with riding 30 Omegas they’d been gradually stashing at the WP, and blitz the map. That’s effective for them, but not interesting or fun for anyone. Too much PvD in WvW; far, far too much.
Whatever this new border is, I hope it comes with some scaling and flexibility (and of course new mechanics/challenges) so the size of the game better correlates to the size of the participation. And that solos and roamers have more to contribute than flipping camps and scouting.
Consider that in Ranked you can see personal score information after each match, and it is the only feedback players get on how they and all players performed, besides the total team score. So, we’re in this bizarro world of playing so-called ranked matches, but in game have no record of anyone’s rank, including or own, nor how a match affects our rank, nor how many points our personal rank will change based on the final match score (thus, no idea what exactly we are playing for beyond win/loss).
So, we are giving lots of superfluous, and rather misleading, information, yet none of the essential information. Ranked is in desperate need of transparency. At the start of a match players need to be able to see every other player’s rank/rating so they can see how teams are balanced; and they need to see how different score differentials will move their rank/rating.
wvw self-balances the day it has inherent incentives for the best guilds to be on separate servers, not the same ones
This type of really basic graphics mistake bothers me a lot, and the degree it harms this event cannot be overstated. It’s not like a mismatch on some random rock or wall that once in a blue moon impedes someone’s movement, or obstructs a projectile. This graphic is fundamental to the event, one of the most important graphics and effects to get as accurate as possible. How this passed QA is beyond me. Even if you know to jump early, it’s still much harder to execute when there’s a mismatch of what you see and what you know, especially in an environment as busy as this event.
There have been a couple new builds since the new Tequatl event was released, and I’m amazed each time something this important and simple to fix hasn’t been addressed.
However, that’s not even the biggest problem with this event. The complete lack of any animation for Tequatl’s Reach is.
Simple fix for bleeding stack limitation is when it goes over 25 stacks, pop the shortest bleed off the stack and convert it to immediate direct damage.
That keeps the load on the server the same, and keeps the practical impact of bleeds as damage over time the same in nearly any conceivable fight.
Burning and poison could also be made viable damage sources by allowing them create additional stacks once a duration cap has been reached. For example, once a target has over thirty seconds of burning on it, a second stack of burning is started, and the original is allowed to burn down to zero. If you fill up a fifth stack of burning, the first stack, the shortest one, is popped off as direct damage.
I received one of these e-mails today, and it made it into my regular inbox, not junk mail, which is pretty unusual. It’s consistent with the others, but the English is better. Is ANet collecting any information on these, taking any action, or shall we just delete and ignore and feel bad for the more gullible among us?
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