Guild Wars 2

The point isn’t about whether it’s “fair”, “allowed” or “expected”.

Its just about fun.

Lets leave aside formal duels for now, and just talk about roaming, where 1v1s and 2v2s can frequently happen.

If I’m in a 1v1 while roaming, and 2 allies jump in and turn it into a 3v1, I don’t get annoyed because its not “honourable”. I get annoyed because its not “fun”. 3v1 takes zero effort, requires zero skill. You can do it with your eyes closed.

So rather than having a challenging 1v1 where I have to really work hard, by adding in you turn my fun fight into, basically, PvE. You have robbed me of fun.

Its not about honour and fairness, its just about turning fun fights into tedious zergfests.

However, I fully agree that people shouldn’t expect perfectly fair fights if they’re hanging around objectives and main-roads. This is why many people seeking duels on EB go to the east side of Stonemist, where the Oakhearts are, because there is rarely any reason for the PPT hordes to go through that way.

Not all duels are intentional. I may be roaming around and fight another lone roamer, I want to 1v1 not 2v1. I’m sure most others would say the same. Don’t assume because they aren’t in a secluded area means they aren’t dueling.

While you are not wrong for doing what you did, it’s considered common courtesy to not disrupt even numbered fights (1v1, 2v2 etc) or fights between 2 guilds.

New ranger meta! Dance ’till they drop! Get your dancing shoes on Rangers!

finally someone has found something that rangers do better than another class in WVW.

style.6173:

+/- duration food allows for people to better plan strategy. This game lacks that already and removing more of it is a bad idea.

I disagree and think it’s the complete opposite.

If they tone down the condition duration/reduction foods, it will give players more freedom to choose food that actually complements their builds. Many people choose Lemongrass Poultry soup simply to negate the +40% duration of Koi Cakes/Veggie Pizza. If it was shaved down to something along the lines of 25%, players wouldn’t feel so pigeonholed into having to run -condi duration food.

Also, 40% condition duration is quite high compared to the benefits other foods give. It’s the equivalent of going 8 points into your condition duration trait line. You then still get the additional +70 condition duration. Most other foods that give you a stat increase only have their high stat giving you the equivalent of investing 2 in their respective trait line.

One of the issues with the condi meta is that you can get +70% condi duration without using a single point in the trait line or rune. The highest counter would be melandru + lemongrass and that gives you -65% and you are forcing yourself to use melandru runes.

Let us not kid ourselves that putting conditions is such a tough task. With 9s sigil procs (doom/hydromancy/geomancy) and on crit sigils (torment/fire) and runes designed to provide conditions when you are hit, heal, interrupt or a combination of those actions; placing conditions and stacking them due to broken food/toxic crystal/giver duration buffs is trivial. Note, everything I just mentioned doesn’t even include any skills, utilities, elites or traits.

There needs to be an equilibrium between the buffs and the counter. Either lower the duration from food/toxic crystals/giver buffs (14 traits points on condi duration and+170 condi dmg…. on just buffs, really?) or provide a “cleansing oil/weapon” that can lower condition duration on an equal playing field as those nourishment/weapons today without forcing to go into melandru.

Condition builds really get an insane advantage over power builds in WvW:
-They get to wear more defensive gear without sacrificing their damage (Dire/Rabid)
-Condition damage completely ignores armor.
-Their conditions ignore invulnerability once applied.
-Buffing condition duration buffs both damage and crowd control (chilled, crippled, etc) and ability to reduce healing (poison).
—They get ridiculous 40% duration food (equivalent to 8 trait points). That is an insane buff and power builds have no equivalent (they’re food buffs are only equivalent to 2 trait points).
-Condition damage can ignore both weakness and protection (while not benefiting from vulnerability stacks, however)
-Crit Damage was recently nerfed in PvE/WvW so they even deal more damage now relative to power/crit builds.
-They don’t have to constantly attack to still be dealing damage.

Some of these advantages are fine, since condition builds should be unique from power builds, but it’s definitely a little unbalanced right now. Frankly, I think the 40% condition duration food needs to be reduced to 10%. Think about it, a 40% duration buff to ALL conditions is crazy over powered. If people want higher condition duration food, Anet should just add higher duration food that only buffs specific conditions such as burning, bleeding, fear, etc, perhaps by 20-25%.

Ragnar.4257:

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Don’t expect to be able to just take all their conditions and then cleanse/heal through it. Conditions are the same as direct damage -> the only effective counter is to avoid it completely. Same as Killshot. Same as MindWrack. Same as Dragons Tooth. Same as Whirling Wrath. Same as Backstab.

…

-Kill shot you can see coming(running KS on a War in a small fight is like painting a giant bullseye on your back)
-Mind Wrack you can see coming(Clones running towards me? Gee what’s going to happen?)
-Dragon’s Tooth you can see coming (there’s a giant, flaming fang dripping lava on your head!)
-Who complains about whirling Whirling Wrath? lols
- Backstab was problematic, I would fully agree with you on that, you really had to just guess and dodge or pop a block or something.

Anyways, see where I’m going with this? They are not equal. Moving on.

Terrahero.9358:

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I dont ever see anyone complain about the “direct-damage spam”, anyone build for power damage constantly attacking you with power damage is ok.
Someone build for condition damage constantly attacking you with condition damage is apparently broken…

….

I don’t think anybody in their right mind would think cleanses should nullify condi builds, however at this point, the frequent and often obscured application of condi is compounded by high condi damage(passive damage I might add), diversity of conditions, all while high survivability is still easily within reach(condi duration food doesn’t help either). It’s throwing any semblance of balance way off.

People complained about perma stealth Backstab Thieves’ “direct damage spam” on even tanky people but that was a Thief issue not a direct damage issue. I think a sweeping change like ferocity was a really bad decision(which is probably why I don’t see many guards strolling around without at least a full party’s worth of help anymore). Some power builds were straddling a thin line already and I think the change just pushed more people towards condi builds and it’s killing diversity.

JoeYl.4609:

Condi nerf = food + melandru rune
if you have 2-3 skill to clean the condi it will be ok

Yes, build precisely to counter condi spam. A sign that it’s totally not out of whack lol.

/sarcasm

I would be okay with being immune to a certain condition for a few seconds after cleansing that condition off. Sometimes conditions cleanses just can’t keep up with the amount of incoming ones.

Condi needs a serious nerf in WvW. It’s ridiculous that some classes can apply more conditions than you can cleanse, basically killing you in less than 5 seconds. There’s so few ways to counter play that and all of them involve a battle of attrition, which isn’t fun.

It’s not so much the individual conditions themselves, but the combination of several conditions together. Confusion by itself is fine. Torment by itself is fine etc. But Bleed, Confusion, Poison, Vulnerability, Weakness etc etc. all applied at the same time is stupid. Especially with the randomness of cleansing and the ease of re-applying the conditions (seriously needs to be an icd on conditions like confusion and torment, say… 30 seconds, in line with most cleanse skills)

Yeah yeah, this has been talked to death and several threads have been made about it, but even so, we need to keep complaining about this until it gets fixed.

Actually, I feel Necro does not NEED any form of escape outside of WvW, and even there, they do have options (which are only really necessary for roaming, to be honest).

As for Necro’s lack of “team buffs”. I think that’s not really true. Necro, as a class, is not a Guardian. They are supposed to be the debuffers, and that means weakening the enemy as opposed to strengthening the ally. Weakness on a group of enemies is similar to Protection boon on a group of allies. Cripple on a group of enemies is similar to Swiftness to a group of allies.

With that said, I think Necro’s strengths should be debuffing the enemy, whether it’s chill, cripple, blinds or weakness. Unless you grab off-hand dagger, I think the Necro has limited options in weakness right now, which could maybe be improved (For example, adding weakness to Wail of Doom – warhorn daze, after the daze expires – or adding it into certain traits. Maybe adding weakness in trait lines which aren’t Spite, so the condition duration gained from Spite, mixed in with condition duration food isn’t out of control and perma weakness isn’t easily achieved, but is still there).
-I think the Necro is supposed to be the profession that doesn’t directly help allies by buffing them, but debuffs the enemies instead to INDIRECTLY helps allies (after all… it is a Necromancer, not a Guardian).

I don’t know what a Necro’s weakness should be because I think different builds make up for different weaknesses, but generally, I feel like a Necro’s weakness is ranged enemies. A Necro right now can kite melee really well, but ranged units are unaffected by chills and cripples so they can keep shooting.

-I think in group fights, such as WvW, a Necro’s kryptonite is anything that hits hard, is ranged and hides behind a good frontline (hard to get to). A Necro doesn’t have any deflection auras / walls / shields, and so while the melee atackers can be kited, range keeps shooting, ,and that is why I think range is the Necro’s Achilles Heel.

Here are some important questions for the developers:

1) WvWvW skill balance
- Why is WvWvW treated like pve for several skills?
- Why is revealed 3 s in WvWvW, even though stealth is obviously much more powerful in WvWvW than in spvp/tpvp?
- WvWvW meta aka Guardian Warrior Elementalist Necro (GWEN) or hammer warrior + staff guardian melee train has been the same since Autumn 2012. Any chances to shake things up? I consider this as the one of the most important reasons why many competitive hard core WvWvW players quit this game. “Hammer stun, blast water fields, double dodge left, stability, lines of warding, veils, strip boons, hit their backline now…” commander talk remains the same already for soon 2 years in this game. Thieves are most common roamers and enemy flank gankers in zerg fights. What do the developers see as the role of rangers and engineers?

2) PvE skill balance
- Just like in WvWvW certain professions are overly represented in dungeon runs, while some others are generally not wanted.
- most CC skills are useless in boss fights due unshakeable and defiant, single target CC is generally waste of time against normal mobs
- total armor is not important due very slow attack speed of bosses, making the fights all about well timed dodging/evade and berserker gear is still prevalent
- What about reducing the damage per attack, but increasing the attack rate of pve monsters? (while keeping the total dps roughly same, this would probably lead to more varied builds)
- Will the balance patches continue to revolve around spvp/tpvp ?

I would like to point out a serious mistake in many people’s replies. Warrior has the best in combat and out of combat mobility in this game, if you just build for it. Merely equipping a greatsword (no traits or utilities invested) allows warrior to outrun most professions. Combine with sword/warhorn or hammer (earthshaker is 600 leap), bull’s charge, dogged march, mobile strikes, signet of rage for another on demand swiftness (besides warhorn), signet of stamina and/or berserker’s stance, balanced stance and endure pain. After thieves warrior is the 2nd most common roaming profession in WvWvW. Mobility is king in roaming.

I also do not agree that warrior has low condition removal compared to other professions. Cleansing ire + warhorn + signet of stamina + “shake it off” + signet of rage (with 6x Lyssa runes) = massive amount of condition removal, especially if traited. Cleansing ire alone combined with longbow allows more condition removal than most other professions can achieve in long term without the use of any runes, sigils or utility slots. Mesmers, engineers and rangers are the professions, which currently struggle against conditions.

No single profession should be the best at everything? Do warriors know that?

for your own sake, do not ask such questions on these forums. 99% of your answers will be provided by the doom and gloom crowd that inhabits this place.

Any class is strong, if it suits your playstyle and mentality. The limitation of a class is first and foremost a physical and mental limitation, and you will reach those limits long before you reach the mechanical limitations (99% of the players here will try say otherwise, simply because they cannot overcome their own shortcomings and learn to approach things differently)

Rewards for defending
Rewards for defending is troublesome. It’s hard to implement a system that could reward you for a bit more passive playstyle while not giving it to bots. Dolyak escorting used to give a reward, there were armies of bots escorting them.

Matchup variety
Season 1 or the current match up RNG, did you miss those? Variety is good, but lets be honest. The coverage of all the servers is so diverse that there is usually only 3 servers that can compete with each other and the rest is either getting steam rolled or being the steam roller. They tried more balanced match up system in S2 and imo it was better than s1, even if it gave pretty much the same match ups all the time.

Blobs
Sad fact that supply is the key to victory and the more players you have the more supply you can carry with you. They would need to change a lot with WvW to prevent this.

Just wanted to point out a bit of stuff. And yea, I assume threads like these are one of the reasons we don’t see that much communication between devs and community. People see something, they make assumptions and hold into that and paste maybe a sentence and hold into it that they can use to hammer the Devs for their “mistakes”.

I for one wouldn’t do much communication with a community like this. For realz.

You never have to look far for solo roaming fights on a ranger. People like to think they are free kills and come after you.

I enjoy it more than any other class for roaming, but I enjoy the class overall.

So, what should be done about WvW? My answer to this are to rework the incentives. As much as I like the lulz of playing WvW, the fact is that a certain level of incentive is needed to keep people interested. So, for the remainder of the thread, if you don’t want to be a bitter lil’ boi, this can be a good place to come up with new ideas and incentives to help make WvW a more attractive option for players to play in.

Currently, the rewards in WvW are also as strange as U.S. tax laws: the primary rewards in WvW comes from player kills, which have little to do with the actual scoring system in WvW. This creates an extremely strange and unfair reward system for WvW, in that the capacity to get rewards is based upon enemy population, which is based on your own server’s rank. This creates a form of negative feed back where the fewer people there are, the fewer reasons why you’d want to get into WvW, which makes fewer people want to go there, which gives even less reasons to go there in the first place.

Sucks, doesn’kitten Well, as for the “fix” to this problem, I take inspiration from a few other games. And by taking inspiration, I mean “shamelessly ripping off and claiming these ideas as my own”.

The simplest idea I can borrow is to put a series of high rewards that are based in holding towers and keeps, and exploration. Here’s some highly basic and unrefined ideas on stuff that can be done:

-Towers would have workers that would gather materials, and a respawning chest that will give players fine crafting materials after they’ve had control of the tower for a consecutive half hour.
-Keeps would have farming patches and gathering nodes that will replenish themselves regularly (half hour, 15 minutes with worker upgrade).
-Stonemist would have both of these, and also increase the magic find of players in WvW.

The basic idea being that WvW would be about grabbing and holding real estate long enough to get a series of perks from doing so. Supply camps wouldn’t get anything, since their ability to provide supply would directly contribute to the ability to grab and defend other places. In lower population servers, it would be easier to grab and hold things without worrying about flipping immediately, but high population servers will end up with players farming each other for drops.

Likewise, currently in EotM it is far more profitable to just capture places than to keep them. Another idea, albeit a more punishing one, is to make it so capturing any tower/keep starts a 15 minute long event where you have to defend it, and if you don’t defend the tower/keep, then the event fails and you don’t get any awards. That way, instead of gigantic zergs just rushing around grabbing whatever they can, the players would have to hold their captures long enough to get the gold/karma off of the keeps. I say this is “punishing” because ultimately it delays players from getting rewards, instead of giving incentives for playing differently than they do now.

Unfortunately, the flow of creative juices has run dry on my end. But alas, I think this will open up the discussion to more things. For now, I’ll just throw these out

-Week long rewards for player servers winning matchups
-A score scaling incentive other than Power of the Mists

Personally, I blame myself for the following problem, since I wasn’t quick enough on the draw to dispense my wisdom to Anets eager ears before they made a series of paradoxical decisions. So, I am willing to accept everyone’s hate for the next few lines.
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Still hatin? I’ll give you a few more lines.
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Alright, that’s enough. Get over it you spiteful lil’ boi.

Enough fluff. Here’s what I’m talking about. O.K. just a bit more fluff. You’ve gotta love that bunny. This thread will be two posts: post one is what the problem is, and post 2 is what should be done as I decree it.

But to be serious now, there is a strange, almost paradoxical philosophy that Anet has developed regarding WvW, and in fault I blame the players for it because they have developed these expectations. But, I will not resolve the next few lines for my hatred, because I’m better than that. Most importantly, I’m better than you, you hateful lil’ boi.

I’ve seen a few MMOs that have a permanent faction based conflict in the overworld. DCUO and Aion are two such examples, and they are an example as to why this idea sucks: the faction based conflicts result in servers being heavily stacked in one direction or the other, turning the game into a free ride vs. gank fest depending on which side you stumble into.

WvW was designed specifically to be a three-way gank to prevent one-sided domination. If one side had superior numbers, coverage, and skill, then the two smaller sides can team up and kill the biggun’. Disproportionate populations were meant to eventually be balanced out on a server by server basis, but with changing active populations there’s no guarantees, so the whims of the seasons means one server will be roflstomped by the other quite frequently. This was expected, and so the rewards in WvW are based mostly around being in WvW, lest one server be punished for another’s inactivity.

To this end, it has always been my understanding that WvW is inherently unfair. It is a war where the treatise are shaky at best, the size of anyone’s army is up for debate, there is no standard time of engagement, and you will always be fighting on two fronts. The monetary incentives are contrary to the game’s scoring system, causing a conflict of interest in the players. So, you get into big fights for the lulz and for the thrills of large scale combat, and after each week you laugh about what happened and prepare for the next fight.

But, what Anet is doing with WvW isn’t based on this premise. No, the premise of “It’s not fair, have some fun” gets thrown out the door as soon as you have seasons, tournaments, and rankings. Now, we see complaints about 2 vs. 1s, coverage vs. coverage, buying guilds and recruiting players to shore up numbers, time zones and which one is overpowered, etc. Now, under the premise of all being fair in love and war, this is just whining. But if you have an actual competition, then these complaints are legitimate.

Think about it: When in a game of soccer have they put 3 teams on the field, and then tried to award medals for whomever won that game? When has there been a game of football where all the players wait for the other team to fall asleep so they can score touchdowns unopposed? When in a game of basketball is it fair for one team to outnumber the other on the field 3 to 1? When is there a game of chess when the players get paid for how many pawns they take, regardless of if they win? The answer to all this is “never” because these are nonsensical and stupid things, and any serious spectators will laugh in your face over how utterly ridiculous the system is.

A 3 team soccer game might be fun. I won’t argue that. But will it be fair? Absolutely not. The season has epitomized the problems with this model. I mean, look at the standings and ask yourself if anyone is surprised about the outcomes. The only upset I can see is that BG was doubleteamed, which under non-tourney standards is par for the course, but in a tournament is a cheap move.

These problems are endemic to WvW. You can’t fix cheap moves, coverage, time zones, and population differences. It is because of this that the whole tournament thing is utter rubbish. You end up having to hand out cheap, nigh meaningless rewards in a hodgepodge that strangely punishes or rewards tiering in an arbitrary manner. The whole thing ends up more convoluted than U.S. tax laws, except that the rewards have to be low or else people will feel even more ripped off for things out of their control.

If you want my advice for WvW in the future, it would be simply thus: no more tournaments. Change incentives, and add new things to WvW.

Inc gaming breaking fix, everyone run for the hills !

Mark Katzbach.9084:

To clarify some of what was said on today’s episode. There were improvements made to the tournament between the last one and the one that wrapped up today and we believe that some of these improvements were better for the tournament as a whole.

This isn’t to say that the spring tournament was perfect and no changes will be made. Quite the contrary. The purpose of next week’s CDI will be to gather organized feedback from you guys, the players, to allow us to make better informed decisions in changes to make for the next tournament.

The best thing that you as players can do is to give informed, constructive feedback. Let us know what you think worked, what you think didn’t work and what changes you believe would make a more enjoyable tournament for everybody. Whether you believe it or not, we do care about your feedback and our goal is to make the next tournament more fun and engaging.

Please continue to discuss and give feedback in the relevant threads until the CDI thread goes live. We will be reading your feedback, both in the CDI and elsewhere. We can’t always respond and we can’t give definitive plans for the future immediately, but we are paying attention and we are taking your feedback into account.

You have giving zero indication that this is going to be any different from the others so why should we bother? Until Anet starts adopting a less arrogant and condescending attitude towards its playerbase I see zero reason to have anyone participate in another CDI when nothing has ever come from the previous ones. So tell me what are you going to do different this time? The best you can do is start treating people with respect and show you are willing to change. Anet often wants respect and goes so far as to demand it. Well anyone that demands respect does not deserve it. You want respect you will have to re-earn it by being humble and admittibg to mistakes. Not just saying you made mistakes, but which mistakes and what you learned from that. Communicate actively with the community talk to people not just ask questions or blind feedback.

Until you come out of your ivory tower nothing will change. People will remain hostile until it escalates so much you end up with a dead game. The best thing for Anet is getting their head out of the sand and learn to talk to people. Treat people as you want to be treated basically. Only then will things be able to start moving forward again.

It’s silly that you still do those Ready Ups that obviously don’t get much attention.
The reason being that you talk at us but not to us. The one demographic that seems to be your audience, core WvWers, has no reason to watch it.
There are many issues and community developments that WvW has that could be discussed — note, discussed. Just because your streamers discuss a game matter doesn’t mean the company should feel pressured to instantly deliver. In turn, just because you don’t want to commit to said “pressure” doesn’t mean you shouldn’t give your streamers that freedom so they can create an actually relevant discussion.

Yeah. We dont need another cdi while the ranger cdi is not done. Nothing happened there. And if u want ideas pls read wvw forums

Hi Mark, with all due respect, there was already plenty of good suggestions posted in the WvW section of the forum.

….All you need to do is check the trash can of the forum and read those suggestions removed by the mods.

I hope the WvW CDI will be something on a completely different level then what has happened with previous CDIs like the ‘lets pretend it didn’t happen Ranger CDI’. As it stands now not much positive has came out of them aside from ANet at least confirming some fears with a ‘nope nope nope, won’t happen’ here and there but hey that F2 responsiveness! ~_~

When the WvW CDI happens be extremely thorough in all your reasoning especially if you shoot down certain player ideas and complaints. Instead of just deleting posts as it’s harmful to the community as it does nothing but breed discontent and create a toxic atmosphere more so than some posts that may be in question.

If the time isn’t available to properly handle responses to questions brought up or to interact with player suggestions it should be avoided all together.