Showing Posts For Swordfish.8512:
This is a very strong proposal, and I think that the WvW guilds will thank you for it. For pugs and native players I think this is a blow to them and foreshadows the loss of guilds which will hurt them, which although isn’t an issue for me personally will be a huge challenge to overcome and work through.
If I could make 2 observations though,
1: These new worlds are likely to be populated with majority guild groups. nature of the beast, and I think you’re aware of this. This will mean that to create match ups that are not only population balanced but also TIME ZONE balanced (read- pairing a server with, for example, 2 oceanic guilds against servers with 3 oceanic guilds to avoid blow outs in that time and to create a fun tier for those guilds) is going to take a lot of insight. To be frank, I’m not sure how much insight you have in to this.
Notoriously out of touch with the WvW community and for not making contact, the match ups are likely to be absurdly bad for many guilds. Please, make contact with more players, create a guild sign up sheet on these forums for people to post how many and what time they run, along with where they are, and pair them in to match ups against similar Timezone guilds. For NA prime this becomes more about making sure there’s a healthy balance of guilds that consider themselves fights and PPT, and not overstacking any pairing with either of these, to keep scores and fights fun for the whole community.
If that’s too hard, then at least contact prominent commanders and players as you did in the past about changes, but this time broaden your scope and get in touch with more people, have conversations with metabattle staff, EU GvG tournament organisers, streamers, and server community website leaders, people of that nature.These people invest hundreds and thousands of hours to the community and the game mode and have very large contact pools, they’re in touch with the players to a very large degree.
2: much shorter- but as people have suggested abolish current servers and make everyone re select. HOWEVER, to not alienate players, if they are currently on a server let them get back to it even if it becomes full, so they don’t feel rushed to log in and get in first. Although you might say ’what’s the point’, many more people are likely to transfer if they see this, I’d predict maybe a 10% increase, just because they see the free option and think why not.
TLDR engage with the WvW community more and this will be a huge success.
Currently, any attempt to be a front line player in World versus World is beyond a joke. The ease of application for condition stacks, especially against the Necromancer and Guardian heavy meta that most people are used to, leads to extraordinarily high condition damage. Previously power was still dealing incredibly high damage, however being able to dodge Area of Effect, utilise Protection for mitigation and have a high Toughness allowed you to at least damage opponents back (Note that you still dropped like it was quite hot if you did not dodge well/pressure the enemies well).
Due to the many sources of poison from all the condition based builds, you now cannot even heal the damage you are taking as fast. For Guardians and Warriors who are constantly healing with Healing Signet and Atruistic Healing this is a 33% direct hit to their survivability.
I have 2 proposals which hopefully players and devs would find reasonable as well as allowing for new play without just REVERT ALL CHANGES I HATE THEM :’(, because some of this stuff is really great and creates new gameplay, just is a little too strong.
1:
Toughness and Protection now effect condition damage. Previously this would have been a laughable change, as trying to stack bleeding alone to the point where it out DPSed a full zerker warrior auto attacking was either impossible or impractical for combat.
Now however in WvW the stacks can go SIGNIFICANTLY higher, and this is causing damage unseen in the game previously. While this effects other areas of the game currently, the NPCs you are speed clearing with 5 venom thieves are not nearly as upset by the guardians being 1 shot and who now have had a whole style of game play removed are feeling the hurt. I play across many classes and I understand the appeal, however I do not want it to ruin the experience for so many players.
In PvP this effect should be reduced so that Toughness and Protection are 1/3 as effective against conditions. Whilst this might seem like a nerf to 1v1 conditions, it is still a buff from the previous instances of the game as there are MANY more conditions to be stacked, accumulating in a higher overall damage even with this (just not AS high)
Keep in mind, Vulnerability now effects condition damage, and so even with this mitigation from protection you can reduce its effectiveness to 8% down from 33% with a condition that is easy to apply and available to all classes.
2:
Re introduce the condition stack for PvP and WvW. (This change was not intended to be AS WELL AS conditions being effected by toughness, it was an ‘either or’ approach.) I believe that stacking to 25 in PvP will still destroy almost every player.
This is because Burning + Poison now stacking increases the damage incredibly on its own. It also encourages game play where you try to get as many conditions as you can, rather than just bleeding a target on repeat (which is still incredibly effective).
WvW players with 25 condition stacks alongside all the other damage sources they are taking still drop incredibly fast. 100->0 occurs for even the tankiest characters in 1 or 2 seconds if they are not avoiding damage. 25 stacks of Bleed, Burning and Poison will kill you, absolutely no questions asked. There are simply not enough condition cleanses in the game that you can run to survive extended engages against such heavy pressure (remember that in this scenario this damage penetrates your toughness)
I understand people will think I am just salty about conditions, but if you look objectively at these proposals you will see they BOTH still allow for new uses of conditions and still allow you to 100-0 enemies in seconds with just conditions. Our condition builds will still be more than TWICE as effective, and that is saying something! I believe these changes can make for a good middle ground where all players can enjoy playing the way they want to.