Guild Wars 2

I guess 30s is a little too much considering thieves can only render all of my targeted skills and attacks useless for up to 14 – 15 seconds instantly. hmm….i guess i won’t have to tidy up my play b/c thieves lose one ability. Not to mention that most of the defensive abilities/skills that counter stealth have a cooldown around 15s to 20s…hmm…we really should continue to buff thieves and stop nerfing them every patch. Poor poor thieves.

I honestly don’t care about thieves (easy mode play) b/c they normally only kill me when they are running as a group or surprise me in the middle of a skirmish…I stack a lot of toughness, however, I have no simpathy for hearing a nerf to stealth renders some skills useless due to the fact that an enemy in stealth renders all targeted attacks useless. This actually seems fair since a thief renders most of the enemies skills useless when in stealth that a thief should be penalized when not in stealth.

Look at it this way…everytime you set a trap off you cost someone money. Run away for 30 seconds and come back. If they set another trap you cost them more money. Wash rinse and repeat…it will take you a minute to kill someone now instead of 5 seconds.

If a roaming thief finds himself defeated because of one of these traps, he should consider himself honoured that someone thought he was worth two arrow cart’s worth of badges. Or a catapult. …and a few badges left over at that too.

Dirt cheap!? Are you kidding me?! 1 badge is worth 1 silver in Siege. As demonstrated by, 6 badges = 1 arrowcart and 6 silver = 1 arrowcart.

Do you honestly believe that anyone thinks you are worth that much? Could you think even more highly of yourself? I’d rather take the repaircost, its cheaper.
Some people will use it on Thieves but merely for the sake of trolling them, perhaps after having been trolled one to many times by a Thief themselves.

Also, YOU ARENT USELESS. As someone pointed out, you have plenty of abilities that do not use or require stealth. And still deal a lot of damage, or offer plenty of mitigation.
I’ve played HGH Engineer. And after 2 cycles of cooldowns, when i finally got my 25 stacks of Might so i can actually deal damage. Do you think it honestly doesnt hurt me when some Thief comes along and just takes this stack for himself? You’ll be back in Stealth long before i got my Might up again. And stripping Boons is far more common, far more plentifull, and costs just a small cooldown or a few bits of initiative.

No, this is not a Thief counter. No one in their right mind will use it just for you. But if you are the unfortunate collatoral damage from a zerg going into a supply camp? Well, suck it up. Other professions have to deal with equal, or worst, counters on a far more regular basis.

And lets also not ignore the fact that these traps can be placed while in stealth. If only there was a profession that could chain long durations of Stealth together. He would be able to run into an enemy zerg, say from a tower or keep, and place a Supply Trap in the middle of this zerg unnoticed. Wasting the zerg upwards to 40 supply. Ow snap!

Thieves are the reason why these new traps are going to cost attackers even more Supply when they attack a tower or keep. Either they waste supply constantly building Stealth traps and hoping the Thief steps on them. Or a Thief will stealth out of the tower/keep and place a trap right under their feet unnoticed.

If anything these Traps are a big buff for Thieves because no one gets to use them to such an effective extend as they do. To off-set for this, everyone now and then you accidentally step on a trap. If its with a zerg, suck it up.
If you’re alone, good for you, that trap was meant to catch far bigger fish then just you. And they wasted 10 supply and a whole bunch of badges on it.

Now, I’m pretty annoyed by this. Mostly because of two things:

Firstly, these things are dirt cheap. 15 badges and 525 karma is not a lot, really, while the traps last for up to one hour, which is ridiculous – that’s twice as long as siege lasts (unless tapped, which doesn’t work for traps I suppose, but an hour still feels way too long).

And secondly, the fact that they do not only rip you out of stealth, but also apply revealed for 30 seconds. If a thief triggers one of those, if they don’t outright die because of being unable to avoid being seen (duh), they do not have access to:

1. Stealth skills, which are mandatory for burst damage in D/X specs, control in S/X specs, quickly stacking bleeds in P/X condition specs
2. Ability to throw enemies off about your positioning (which is currently one of the thiefs primary strenghs and an important tool to reduce damage taken)
3. Any and all benefits from the following traits:
Hidden Killer, Last Refuge, Meld with Shadows, Hidden Assassin, Shadow Protector, Shadow’s Embrace, Infusion of Shadow, Cloaked in Shadow, Hidden Thief, Patience, Shadow’s Rejuvenation, Descent of Shadows, Fleet of Shadow, Instinctual Response.

(Some of these have AoE-effects or secondary effects that work without being stealthed, but these are generally rather weak)

Most of these are from the “Shadow Arts” line.
Leaving us with 5 (yes, five) major traits in that tree that do not drastically lose effect by having revealed applied. Two of these are related to venoms, and are therefor only of any interest in a venom-based build. Two of the remaining ones are highly situational (Slowed pulse and Power Shot), leaving us with Master of Deception. However, since two of our four deception wkills are mostly used to apply stealth to ourselves and allies, this trait is severely weakened as well.

This means that if a thief triggers an anti-stealth trap, this entire trait line is essentially useless outside of stat points gained. A high amount of traits from other trees is affected from this as well. No other class can get into a situation where more than 10 traits become useless and a highly important class mechanic (stealth skills) becomes inaccessible for such a huge amount of time. This quite literally is the equivalent of preventing a mesmer from creating clones or disabling a ranger’s ability to command his pet for 30 seconds.

Losing a tool that is extremely important for both offense and defense and that many side-effects are tied to for such a long time by triggering a trap that is most likely invisible to the thief is not acceptable if the traps are as easily accessible as they are, whether the AoE is just 600 units wide or not.

Atherakhia.4086:

90% of that avoidance comes in the form of stealth.

Disabling Shot, Flanking Strike, Death Blossom, Withdraw, Roll for Initiative, Hidden Pistol (Charr only) are all skills that Evade without having stealth involved.

Bountiful Theft and Vigorous Recovery are traits that grant you Vigor without having to go into Stealth.

There are a few Regen sources, but that’s not really ‘avoidance’.

Smoke Screen still blocks Projectiles even if you can’t combo Stealth through it.

Black Powder, Infiltrator’s Arrow, Shadow Shot, etcetera, they do blinds too.

Thieves have more than enough ability to stay alive without stealth in 30 seconds. You’re just going to have to adjust to a slightly different metagame.

Do you like running around with massive skill lag all the time?
Is it fun to mash one button?

I guess not. The reason for blobbing is the same as the reason for Ursan Way in GW1:
People like to win, even when winning means doing something repetitive and boring.

The game seems to favor blobbing as the best (or at least the easiest) way to get tally-points, drops, karma, wxp, xp at the moment. Otherwise, why would you suffer through hours of skill lag?

Here are some suggestions how to change this:
1. Reduce damage done by players to gates to zero and increase the damage done by rams slightly to compensate for this.

If a gate doesn’t go any quicker whether you are 20 or 80 people, naturally the way to win will be to have 4 20-man groups instead.
This leaves the defenders with a choice: Go with one massive blob to 4 towers or go with 4 small groups to every tower. (The speed at which rams can take down a gate needs to be tweaked in way that ensures that a 80 man zerg does not have the time to wipe 3 groups all over the map and travel to the 4th tower before you can cap.)

In this way attackers and defenders would be encouraged to split up into mid-sized groups to win. Et voila, you have yourself 4 mid-sized fights instead of one boring skill-laggy Blob vs. Blob.

2. Make rewards in WvW scale down with the number of players participating.
One could – for example – introduce the following system:
If 10 people take a supply camp, everyone 100% of the reward (wxp,xp,karma,drop rate). If it’s 20 people all rewards are scaled to 50%. At 40 people everyone gets 25% of the reward and so on. That way, the PUGs and Karma-Train riders will be discouraged from blobbing up.

Off the top of my head I would just suggest to make the 100%-Reward marks as follows:
- 1 player for player kill (meaning if you kill somebody 2v1 you only get 50% of the rewards). That way wiping an equally sized group gives you full rewards. Winning despite smaller numbers gives you more rewards and ganking one lonely guy with 80 people doesn’t give you much.
- 5 people for sentry or dolyak
- 10 for supply camp
- 15 for tower
- 30 for keep
- 50 for SM

The scaling could also work in the opposite direction but there it should probably scale slower and be capped somewhere (for example soloing the sentry could give 200%, solo-ing a supply-camp could give 300% of the reward a 10-man group gets, soloing a tower could get 500% the reward or something like that)

3. In order to help spread the players across all four maps (yes, there are maps besides EB), one could make the outmanned bonus reduce damage taken and increase damage dealt. In my experience many people only start coming to maps once some things have flipped to their color. The people who actually fight against the odds should get some actual boni and not just incentives for the Karma-Train riders.

On a side note, for all of you blobbers who might wanna rage about this. Think about it: You could still get the same amount of rewards without having to blob if you ran in mid-sized groups. And do you SERIOUSLY like blobbing??

I do understand that it’s hard to get the PUGs to stop following the nearest Commander Tag and divide up into mid-sized groups. However, if the way to win disfavors blobbing, I figure all commanders will discourage their PUGs from blobbing and encourage them to form mid-sized teams and send them to objectives while perhaps assigning an experienced player to call the shots during fights.

so we can have four groups, or 20 people, in the same party and see where everyone in the alliance is by a colored dot.

nothing.7941:

It’s a little pricey, but if it was too easy you’d screw over the stealth mechanic too much. This is not for dueling a thief, it’s mainly for a stealthed enemy hiding in a keep you just flipped.

^^ This.

The anti stealth trap wasn’t so a person can beat a thief. It was to make sweeping keeps and towers a bit easier. Got a dead mesmer hanging out in your keep? Drop a trap on top of him. Got a thief CnDin guards/archers and can’t nail him down between his stealths? Use a trap.

Great buff for thiefs- now they can stealth up and place a supply draining trap..as the stealth revealing trap is WAY overpriced considering it is triggered by practically anything…and bang back you all go for supplies . Ten supples AND badges- who thinks of these things…

The way to deal with stealth is to have a 10 second pot usable by any class with a 2 minute cooldown.

And then everyone will cry evasion op when thieves star rolling s/d…

lol, these are looking like they will end up as I originally said, useless to use to fight thieves, but now bads cant complain about stealth anymore, and good players will continue to win fights against thieves 99% of the time.

This isn’t to counter thiefs.

It is a trap that can be laid down when facing zergs to have an advantage and render their veils useless. Somehow people still think that WvW should be balanced around 1V1s rofl.

You make it sound like the only way to beat stealth claases is with these traps…

Burnfall.9573:

I’m not Impress at all at this new implementation of “Traps and Tricks Outfitter.”

https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/info/news/Game-Update-Notes-May-14-2013

Instead of giving each non-stealth classes a permanent anti-stealth utility in dealing with stealth class they decided that “consumable anti-stealth” was ‘fair and square’.

Well it aint “fair and square”

“Traps have been added as a new purchasable consumable utility item. Two unique variants are available”.

I call that Punishment for non thief classes because this “new feature” isn’t fair and Balanced at all.

So in other word, the only way to “fight and win a stealth thief class” is to Pay a Price.

“Traps are sold by the vendor for 15 badges and 525 karma; they will stack to 250 and are account-bound”.

This by far isn’t creative design ‘by a long shot’.

This new features states this-

‘Sorry that you’re not a stealth class but if you want to fight and win a stealth class, you must pay a price; 15 badges and 525 karma.. and if you choose not too, you will continue to be Demolished by the invisible one..’

As I stated, I’m not impressed and obviously yet again,

In addition this new "anti-Stealth trap purpose is to Punish and Cripple our mobilities in wvw. In other word, it only leaves us more Vulnerable

Totally,
Poor Design and mechanics.

oh yeah I forgot this one “Traps cost 10 supply to place”.

Can you imagine the Chaos in wvw… instead of focusing on what needs to be done, we are given a Painful burden and duty to "equip this anti-stealth utility’

This not only adds more work for the Commanders but stresses and distracts their purpose in wvw.

---

I leave room for comments

If I was you, I’d be mad too. When you now die to a thief who has no stealth, you won’t have any more excuses. Excuses are better than the truth that some people are just more talented than others.

nothing.7941:

It’s a little pricey, but if it was too easy you’d screw over the stealth mechanic too much. This is not for dueling a thief, it’s mainly for a stealthed enemy hiding in a keep you just flipped.

I’m glad you pointed that out, thanks. I feel a little better now.

sounds like a t1 problem

kaltastic.3146:

I thought this thread was going to be about visitor bathrooms in borderlands

Charmin Ultra Soft or Charmin Ultra Strong?

I thought this thread was going to be about visitor bathrooms in borderlands

DoctorFaust.7103:

I’m afraid I’m not familiar with the abuse you mentioned. Could you clarify?

People want easy karma,exp, and silver. In the past, yak’s escort give you exp equal to killing yak. Which make people want only do escort.

I agree with DoctorFaust. We need to give back this reward for defending yak (escorting). The reward does not need to be big. It can be 1/4 reward of killing yak.

I agree with giving people reward for sitting in objective (afk/defending). For example each 5 minutes, you get 15 karma, 100 exp, 10 copper. Not that big, but at least we give something for these watchers.

I didn’t read everything in detail but I don’t think you quite explained how abuse would be handled. The rewards for escorting caravans was removed because of this and eventually evolved to what we have today.

So, what should be done about zergs?

Let’s face it, a zerg (by which I mean a large mass of people) is needed a lot of the times in WvW. And zerg vs zerg can be awesome when it works right. BUT these things needs fixing to make it easier to play:

1: Skill lag (especially with 3 server clashes)

2: Grey out the names of defeated players. A lot of the time I find it hard to AoE in the fury of combat, because it is hard to spot if people are dead or alive, because the mass of red names covers everything. This makes my AoE often hit nothing in moving combat, especially with casting time and skill lag.

3: Shorten server names/no titles. I don’t need a novel for each enemy.

Also, there needs to be incentives to break up the massive zergs that forms for no good reason. I would suggest:

4: Commander colors. Make it possible to choose your commander symbol’s color. That way you can easily say things like ‘follow the red commander to get supply’ in mapchat. Yes, they have names, but especially at the start, it is hard to keep track off, and even now I sometimes end up following the wrong commander if I am focused on other things.

5: More leaders. Either make it possible for commanders to deputize people so they get an icon as well (maybe a slightly bigger dot in the same colors as the commander), or make it possible to buy lower level of commander for cheaper sums. If there is only one or two icons on a map, of course everybody is going to get drawn to them. But if there were lieutenants as well, there are more spots to focus on for people who are not organized, thus they will get spread out more evenly.

6: Make it worth defending: Right now we defend for pride, and to keep the upgrades we have. But, a lot of people are not interested in defense, because that is boring and gives them nothing. It is awesome fighting to take a defended keep and I wish everybody to have that experience of true carnage and war, so make it worth it for the brave ones in there.

7: Make the smaller tasks count. Killing dolyaks gives a lot. Protecting dolyaks gives nothing. We need to have more things smaller teams/roamers can do on the maps.

8: Anti zerg siege: It would be interesting with more varied choices of what to build for your supply, especially for use in the open field and to encourage tactics. Arrowcarts are nice, but why stop there? For example, spiked pits could be dug so people could lure zergs to run after them only to be crippled. Maybe setting a herd of cows on fire to drive them into the zerg, or other weird things used in ancient warfare.

Well, I failed in my mission to be brief, but I got some of my ideas down. Feel free to weigh in, I know this has been discussed before in many threads.

I will try to be brief: Removing the AoE cap will do little to deter zerging. Why? Because of the reasons why zergs are formed.

First, I’m a long time wargamer/former games designer who plays a lot of WvW. Most of the time I roam alone/in pugs, the rest of the time I play organized guild events. So I’ve seen a lot of different aspects of the game, at least the mid tier one where Far Shiverpeaks usually hovers. And yes, I have run with the zerg many times, but for very different reasons.

What it seems everybody is talking about when they slag zergs is the karmatrain, a massive ball of people circling the map, only interested in Wxp. While I am sure that exists, most of the zergs I have been in have formed for two other reasons:

1: Confusion. This was where I started. No guild, no experience. A nice and shiny commander icon on the map. After having been killed a number of times I learned that if I stuck to the commander there was strength in numbers, I learned how things worked, and it simply felt safer. I don’t think I’m alone there, WvW is a scary place at the start, and we are pack animals.

2: Tactics. This is the zerg I run with on guild nights. It is organized, has a purpose, different teams, different parts, is commanded over teamspeak and in general awesome to be a part of. To bring down a heavily defended T3 keep takes a night, and is a many step process, especially if you need to drain its supplies. Often we break off to run and capture camps, get more supplies, feint-attack other keeps/towers and so on. It might not be the whole zerg that runs off (only those without supply for example) but with enough people, even those amount to a zerg.

If I as a roamer encounters and is killed by a zerg, I have no idea why it was formed and what it is about to do. Karmatrain? Scared noobs? Siergers out to resupply? No idea. At least on guild nights we let roamers and small groups just go since they are uninteresting to us, but since every zerg by its nature attracts followers, others might break off and hack them down.

Increasing the AoE cap would do nothing to stop these things.

I used to play a lot of WAR, where AoE was king both in healing and attack. The only thing a high AoE cap does is give people who play AoE heavy classes a lot of kills, thus making more people roll those classes, thus making more AoE until everything is just a matter off stacking enough fire wizards against each other. A lot of the WvW game is built around choke points, sieges, bridges, doors and so on. Rams melt as it is against a defended keep, can you imagine what would happen if you didn’t even need to build siege?

Siege already has a higher cap than any person, and can be built out in the field as well.

Deniara Devious.3948:

…

…makes …. too much … sense!

If previous posts are correct, the current point system is really illogical. Why should 2-3 or more people killing one Dolyak give more points to the server than one player killing the Dolyak? Developers, please explain your logic!

More power to the groups and even less reasons to do solo roaming?!?

Completing an objective should give same amount of points to the server, no matter how many people contributed to it.

WXP reward pool per objective should be constant and divided by the amount of people who contributed to it e.g. let’s say capping a tower would give 1500 WXP. If 10 people would contribute to it, each would get 150 WXP. With 30 ppl each would get just 50 WXP. If just two players would cap a tower, they would get 750 WXP each. This would steer people away from zerging and we would have more varied split team tactics. Probably less lag as well.

I am on Devona’s Rest in T7. My reasons

PLUSES
1. T7 right now is a fun bracket with even scoring- was a real nail biter last week, and I like my opponents. I like being beaten by skill rather than raw numbers.
2. No queues, except on EB during reset
3. No skill lag
4. Better tactics not based on zergball
5. Keeps, camps can and frequently do reach full upgrade
6. Your participation matters more
7. Smaller population coordinated on TS means you can be social while you WvW without commanders blowing a gasket because you are talking in TS
8. Taking keeps by smacking the door with the zergball instead of siege just doesn’t happen. We don’t have that many people to make any headway on a door. Supply is more of a factor.

Minuses
1. DR has no night crew, so GOM can just cap our stuff because our legendary bunnies make lousy defenders. Sure wish some of you Aussies would come on over to keep Duyyy company.
2. PVEers on WvW map for map completion can swell numbers with unskilled upscales that chase shinies and don’t listen to command. I think this might be a problem that all servers have though.

Lower tiers is best – except when you get a big stack of wvw guilds piling into one server like Ruins of Surmia rather than spreading out amongst a tier. Even then it would be more than fine if GW2 actually had a coherent promotion/relegation system, instead it’s glicko which makes absolutely no sense at all, especially when you have an open transfer system of players. Glicko is for assessing the skill of single chess players over a long period of time, not for moving up and down tiered servers in an mmo.

As a t7 hardcore wvw’er (by your definition)
Im currently on JQ for a 1 week hiatus to stop myself for logging the insane hours for my server. And to learn some new tricks…or so i thought.
From my experience so far only 1 commander is worth his metal. The rest dont move until there is a huge zerg, and the fights are surprising SLOWER paced than in small tiers.
Personal contribution becomes less relevant in those numbers, all you do is autoclick 1 and pop occasional stability and might. There is very little personal fighting and much more ZVZ

Some people prefer that (and admittedly you do get more bags and faster world ranks). But personally for me it has been a very disappointing journey, I always heard rumours of t1 being boring and people QQ’ing about “BLOB WARS 2”, sadly it is true.

I do not feel satisfied as personal player, maybe its as a guild when you pull something off its good, but i cant honestly see any satisfaction in it. You land several hits on the enemy and they die, very rarely do you get prolonged fights with multiple skill recharge cycles.

Tactics is also lacking, sure people stack and follow, but that’s all they do. as soon as they get separated they WP away and dont take their chances, no initiative, no great siege usage/placement as siege becomes pretty irrelevant with those numbers.

Overall i cant wait for my exams to be over and be back on my home server NSP, sure we are losing and out-manned, but we keep fighting, and that’s where the fun is for me.

Also in lower tiers it feels to be alot more close knit group of combatants, as the smaller guilds have been mended together into great allies in face of tougher combat, you rely on your brothers, you fight with them and you die for them… Commradery that is lost in higher tiers as losing 1 or 2 players makes very little difference.

NSP PRIDE!
<3

But in all honesty if you ever get tired of ZvZ (some people like it, im not bashing it) do visit a lower tier and experience true battle

EDIT: Also lower tiers tend* to have much more server dedicated guilds with long lasting battle-bound friendships, rather than server hopping guilds whom go to the winning tier (you know who you are )

like some have already said some don’t like the “zerg” mentality of Higher tiers.

for me personally 15v15 is the most I want to be involved in.
I would love just some constant 5v5 or 10v10 and in higher tiers that might be much harder to get.

It depends on what you want, honestly…

T3 is probably the upper limit of where you aren’t at full queue zergs vs full queue zergs 50% of the time. On Maguuma, we get queues on reset, and we queue 1-2 maps each night on the weekends. During the weekdays, nothing ever really queues.

I like T3’s 30-40ish vs 30-40ish fights… but some people like 20 vs 20, some people like 10 vs 10, some people like 5 v 5 or below.

Lower tiers aren’t necessarily bad, though I’m sure some are. The ranking and point system is mostly a measure of population.