Guild Wars 2

Guys, the WvW Resurgence has already been and gone. This was it, from the latest patch notes:

World vs. World

General

The score tick countdown timer in the top-middle of the screen is no longer 1 minute ahead in WvW maps.

Breaking scoring into sessions was mentioned on these forums 3 years ago as well!

More details coming April 1st.

And another month goes by. Looks like it turned out to be later rather than soon.

Soon™…

Soon
Player – 2 weeks – 1 month
Anet. – before next year

I would love for the devs to go thorugh the player’s LW S1 and give the skins back that were earned but cannot get. I earned the Teq wings and lost them due to a bug and the devs said its against their policy to return them to me.

I mainly smash buttons and hope that mesmer is bad. If you play necro you really can’t outplay good mesmer no matter how good you are. Necro is just too simple class.

My Reaper uses skin armor

server merges were needed a long time ago. this game has too many servers and too few players. it’s been a problem that has only been exacerbated over time, and the huge new BLs have made it so much more apparent.

to fill up the maps mostly around the clock…

we’re at about 3.5 years since original release..populations have vastly changed..HoT brought a lot back but nowhere near what it was.. and most of those people aren’t coming back outside of occasional pve content…

that being said..to focus on the solid population that does remain..

would server mergers for WvW help?

There’s a red tag on the thread. History says they won’t be looking here again.

Honestly, I like the current numbers.

It means that camps matter a lot more, and are things people want to defend and attack for reasons other than a supply dump. Those “paper objectives” are paper because people are still attempting to play an all-assault meta in stead of a strategic meta.

By spreading the upgrades out this way, it creates an imperative for defense, but not the boring kind of defense where you twiddle your thumbs behind a wall for an hour. In stead, you have to defend your assets to get the upgrades by patrolling the whole area of your objective and its feeder camps, which pulls you in to the field to fight enemies trying to disrupt your supply in the field. Overall it results in more fights, in more places, and ensures that more fights actually matter than the ones directl on top of an objective.

Even sentries become a lot more important in this system as having that intelligence on enemy movements can be crucial to protecting those supply lines, and telling you where you need to defend.

It gives real tactical utility and meaning to yak patrol as well, as having someone running yak guard duty and swifting them significantly speeds up upgrades, and upgrading the camps themselves for more yaks or slotted yak upgrades does as well.

This serves to seriously break up zergs, as even a small havok group can completely shut out a tower or keep upgrade without too much trouble just by back capping camps.

People hate this because they’re used to a WvW in which strategy simply wasn’t a thing, and decisions revolved around flipping camps in stead of holding them, because the yaks were secondary, and easily outdone in a few minutes by a large group of players running supply.

Literally all of WvW boiled down to “which objective do we send the zerg to to flip the fastest?”

If you’re still playing that game, you’re getting paper objectives taken from you and doing nothing but playing catch up by retaking what you’re losing over and over. If your enemy is doing the same then it’s the same boring endless flipping of objectives that people hated before. Of course it isn’t fun. You’re missing the entire point of the changes and complaining about the result of your own poor tactical decisions.

But, overall, this set of changes got rid of “auto defense” and “auto upgrades” without turning the whole thing in to ‘camp an objective’ in stead making the system more about “patrol this map quadrant”

My only real qualm is the laser even in the new BLs, which runs directly counter to this “strategy and defense actually matters” rework by letting people completely ignore your preparatings as long as they have a bigger zerg at the laser

That event is cool, but its reward is ridiculous, and undermines everything Anet is trying to accomplish by making WvW more tactically sound and interesting. it needs to be changed to a less potent effect.

This isnt a fix, its just a quick and easy adjustment which will punish offpeak-points and makes sure primetime population counts something in a matchup.

6pm-12pm Primetime – PPT value 100% – full PPK
12pm-6pm Offpeak – PPT value 25% – full PPK

6pm every day: “Primetime Reset” – For equal terms in primetime – all borders and EB have their upgrade status reset and belong to their respective owner now (just like the reset we know).

Maybe I simply don’t play enough? Maybe my skewed perception of wvw because when I log in its with a guild full of people ready to play together and a leader that knows his kitten BUTTTTTT!!!!! I really see nothing wrong with the new border lands. The new guild abilities are strong and maybe border line OP at some points, but overall these are not easy abilities to achieve and work aside, the mats involved truly “take a village” to achieve at an impressive pace. . The biggest solo farmer couldn’t do it without the help of his fellow homies (guildies) .

It kinda feels like you lazy kittens don’t want to learn something new. New Map new elite abilities new guild abilities new dumb dumb dumb “meta” your just learning hard. cursing and screaming at every lesson saying how terrible this is. until you learn it. succeed in it and inventively love it.

So please. My new generation of secretly try hards do me a favor. Try a little fliipping harder. This is a great game. No pvp/wvw/rvr base or side based mmo can touch it.

think im crazy? think of the newly introduced rev. and how gross and op he was when he first hit the scene. and how much easier rev’s slowly became the more you played and LEARNED about it. admittedly still a grossly op char. but i think you understand what im trying to say. maybe?

Swagger.1459:

briggah.7910:

Swagger.1459:

briggah.7910:

Swagger.1459:

Svarty.8019:

• EOTM is a toxic breeding ground for undesirable gameplay and including non-competitiveness and combat-avoidance, PvE farming events and objectives intended to be fought over to grind WXP/EXP/karma.

• EOTM has been abused since implementation. Most people probably haven’t experienced it as it was intended. I encourage and all guilds and communities to show them. Butcher them!

ArchonWing.9480:

If people wanted to wvw instead of EOTM they would. They’re not there for a reason. If you remove EOTM, there’s no guarantee they’ll go to WvW.

• If you had watched the preshow from Friday’s live stream (22nd January 2016), you would have seen Reyana explain why people are going to EOTM – because WvW is so quiet at the moment, a Catch 22 situation.

• I think it’s time people stopped pretending that EOTM is it’s own game-type. It isn’t.

*Eotm is fun and fast paced.

*Lots of player interaction and combat.

*Great for beginners and experienced players.

*Great for solo or group players looking for action.

*Eotm was popular upon release, nothing new.

*WvW problems are dev development problems sorry. Time for y’all to stop making excuses…

*I played WvW up until the last tournament and it’s boring as all get out compared to eotm… Better map than what wvw has to offer too, and more conducive to encourage fighting and making it to objectives in time to catch the enemy or defend…

*You should spend more time there, you might learn something…

I just came from a QQ EoTM map with players mad because they got wiped. Commander rage quit because of all the QQ. Players were leaving to find a new instance that they were not getting farmed in… Best wvw experience I ever had in all my game time. NOT

I was going to stream a full 3 hours of k-training but the first 10 minutes showed me it is not even worth it..

And I’ve been on plenty of maps with great commanders and great competition…

Go tag up and stream it, let’s see your wvw leadership skills in action…

I don’t know that map like you guys do.. Do I really want to run players off an edge while I’m looking at the map? All I will do is slow down the k-train and make people mad. I come here to make people mad.. In game I’m different and would rather not make people mad..

Tag up and take a leadership role on a map without a commander or wait until reset… Capture objectives, find and kill the enemies, bag farm the enemies… Go lead and win the zone with the highest points… Set the tone and players will follow your command.

Set up your stream and I may even join your squad depending on time and you can lead me too…

You know how some people don’t like the new BL’s? That’s how I feel about the EoTM map.. I prefer desert bl to that one lol

Swagger.1459:

Svarty.8019:

• EOTM is a toxic breeding ground for undesirable gameplay and including non-competitiveness and combat-avoidance, PvE farming events and objectives intended to be fought over to grind WXP/EXP/karma.

• EOTM has been abused since implementation. Most people probably haven’t experienced it as it was intended. I encourage and all guilds and communities to show them. Butcher them!

ArchonWing.9480:

If people wanted to wvw instead of EOTM they would. They’re not there for a reason. If you remove EOTM, there’s no guarantee they’ll go to WvW.

• If you had watched the preshow from Friday’s live stream (22nd January 2016), you would have seen Reyana explain why people are going to EOTM – because WvW is so quiet at the moment, a Catch 22 situation.

• I think it’s time people stopped pretending that EOTM is it’s own game-type. It isn’t.

*Eotm is fun and fast paced.

*Lots of player interaction and combat.

*Great for beginners and experienced players.

*Great for solo or group players looking for action.

*Eotm was popular upon release, nothing new.

*WvW problems are dev development problems sorry. Time for y’all to stop making excuses…

*I played WvW up until the last tournament and it’s boring as all get out compared to eotm… Better map than what wvw has to offer too, and more conducive to encourage fighting and making it to objectives in time to catch the enemy or defend…

*You should spend more time there, you might learn something…

I just came from a QQ EoTM map with players mad because they got wiped. Commander rage quit because of all the QQ. Players were leaving to find a new instance that they were not getting farmed in… Best wvw experience I ever had in all my game time. NOT

I was going to stream a full 3 hours of k-training but the first 10 minutes showed me it is not even worth it..

Tyeme.6589:

The event needs to be removed altogether. It’s a PvE event in the middle of WvW.

The entirety of the WvW game mode is a PvE event if no enemy players come to contest what you’re doing.

I like the event, had some good fights doing it.
So long as the lag goes away it should be fun.

“…..but you’ll have an opportunity to get all the details and give feedback when we go into the beta phase of this massive project later this year.”

Beta in late 2016?

Wow, just wow. ….

One word Bois.. CROWFALL… Bois.

LOL.

One freaking year after HOT release to update WvW? Unacceptable. They wouldnt leave things like this broken in PvE or sPvP.

I

Since the launch of HoT there have been many complaints about the state of balance in WvW. Based on what we know so far, most of these will be largely unaffected by the balance patch. A lot of this revolves around the excessive amount of CC and damage in the game, and how it seriously hampers frontlines, strongly enforcing a playstyle which no one really enjoys.
For all its complexity, the tactics used in WvW can be roughly broken down to just two approaches – melee focused and range focused (also termed “pirate ship”). When I label a skill *problematic" it’s because it strongly enforces the latter.

The following is an unexhaustive list of some of the skills and traits currently ruining fights in WvW and some proposed tweaks.
I’ve based this on large scale fights (15+). Many of the things listed below become worse the larger the fight gets.

• Coalescence of ruin: The damage is way too high. We all know this. There’s no reason to put a lengthly explanation here. I have 3 alternative suggestions for this one.
  (1) reduce the damage. Simple, yet effective. Drop the damage modifiers down to 1.25/1.50/1.75 for the three hits. Those are entirely reasonable numbers (maybe not by HoT standards, but Lightning Surge is 1.3 for comparison).
  (2) Make it reflectable. A big part of the issue is that this skill offers very little counterplay. If it could be reflected, you would no longer be rewarded optimally for spamming it, and we’d have a reliable defense against it.
  (3) Invert the damage so that the first hit is the strongest.
  Any one of those would be great.

• Cruel Repercussion: This trait deserves its own bullet point because it’s so completely out of proportion. 50% damage increase is ridiculous – especially considering how easy it is to proc this when you need it in WvW. This trait needs to die. I have no other solution.

• Herald in general: Due to their previously unheard of ability to passively buff allies (and themselves), herald has singlehandedly been responsible for a large portion of the absurd damage increase that we’ve seen in the game.
  A possible solution for the boons stacking (something I’ve suggested before) is to make the active facet itself shared with allies instead of the boons. I.e. if I’m in a party with a revenant with Facet of Strength active, the facet is applied to me and pulses strength. This prevents people from simply stacking multiple revenants in a party for permanent 25 might because the facets would just override eachother.
  This would retain their ability to stack permanent might (fewer stacks), fury, regen, swiftness, and to be honest, I still think that’s too much – the passive buffing is just not a good thing for the game.

• Gravity well: Firstly, it’s an issue that it’s a pulsing hard CC. Anyone caught in it without stab or invulns is practically guaranteed to die. But there’s an even bigger issue. It ticks immediately when cast, making the first tick essentially unavoidable. Two possible easy fixes would be:
  (1) first tick is delayed 1 second. This would allow players to react to the animation on the ground or
  (2) the first tick is a daze instead of a knockdown. Wouldn’t solve its impact on stability management, but it would allow people without stability to react after being dazed.

• Hunter’s Ward: The concept of uncrossable barriers is fine when it comes in the form of lines. You can easily walk around them on the ground, but if you don’t see them they only take 1 stack of stab. The wards created by this skill will easily rip 5 (or more) stacks of stability off an entire frontline. That’s completely unreasonable. Ideally, I’d want the whole uncrossable barrier ring removed (from Dragon’s Maw as well) but I’d settle for an internal cooldown that prevents the barriers from taking more than 1 stack of stability from a player.

• Eye for an Eye: A big part of WvW play is trying to CC people before you push (to put them in combat and maybe catch a few in the CC). Commonly, this is done with static field. Using static on a group with revs in it is currently an absolute nightmare for eles. You will proc so many taunts that you’re often forced to either mist form or blink out because you can’t just stun break all of them. On top of that, taunt is an extremely strong condition in WvW compared to the other automatic CC reflecting traits (from mesmer and necro).
  My solution? Remove the trait. Remove all the silly passive life savers. They have no place in a competitive game. However, since that’s probably unlikely, reduce the taunt duration to 1 second and give it a longer cooldown. At least this way you will be able to wait out 1 or 2 procs without having to blow your utilities and the other group would have to make a conscious decision to push you since they wouldn’t be able to just autoattack you down from 1500 range in that timeframe.

• Dragonhunter traps: Not only do these deal way too much damage, the fact that you can simply stack a ridiculous amount of them on top of each other and instantly kill anyone that triggers them is beyond silly. Traps need to either
  (1) have a visual tell similar to necro marks (this would be my prefered solution) or
  (2) despawn when the caster is more than x range away from them and after a fairly short time period (50 – 70% of their recharge seems fair).

• Spear of justice: Pulls have always been a bit of a dirty tactic in WvW, but it’s been reasonably kept in check because the two main sources (mesmer focus and engi tool kit) don’t contribute much else to the fight, so they aren’t seen too much. With pulling skills on guardian (which there are a lot of in WvW) you’re just further enforcing boring, no-skill tactics.
  Additionally, the visual tell is not clear enough.
  Proposed solution: Remove the pull effect from the skill. If not that, remove the “link” after the target dodges once. This way, you’ll have a way to avoid it if you notice the effect after you’ve been hit. Also, it should at least be limited to 1 target.

• (pre-emptively) Basilisk Venom: We’ll see how this pans out but I can imagine a resurgence of venom share is coming. Considering how reliant guardians are on blocks right now that’s probably not going to end well.

On top of what’s listed, I’d also like to see a significant buff to stability. Even with nerfs to the biggest offending CC skills, the sheer amount of effects that rip 1 stack off you makes stab extremely weak in the meta we have now.
For example, a limit to how often you can lose a stack would be a great addition to the game. If you could only lose 2 stack of stability to CC every second (random numbers), not only would it require more coordination to use CC to its full effect, it would give frontlines time to actually react when their stab gets stripped.

And finally, an honorable mention that does not fit the skill/trait criteria:

• Banners: Let’s be real, they’re extremely poorly thought out. One of the biggest complaints of WvW players over the years has been open-field siege, and now you give us movable siege weapons? Not a good idea. Since I doubt Anet will remove them, I’ll suggest this:
  Connect them to objectives. They can only be used inside the objective in which they’re spawned and will disappear if you move them outside.

On top of these specifics, I’m of the opinion that the overall damage output in WvW since HoT (actually since the specialization update in June, but HoT made it so much worse) is way too high, but we’ll save that discussion for another day.

Thoughts?

I think Anet was taken by surprise.

Before HoT you couldn’t transfer to full servers. This was to spread out the population. I don’t think it worked as intended. On FA when we went from full to very high we could queue two maps in NA prime time. Our SEA, OCX and EU coverage was considerably less. So over the course of 24 hours, if a server had an even distribution of players you wouldn’t have the population to queue two maps.

After HoT a lot of WvW players raced to get the new elite specializations and guilds raced to get the latest upgrades. This led to a dropoff in WvW participation. What I think surprised Anet, is that they thought the population levels would return to pre-HoT levels, but they haven’t. Now we’re lucky to queue EB once or twice in a week.

I’m an altoholic and a casual PvE player and I have 7 of 9 elites unlocked so I’d expect a lot of WvW players who wanted to get the specializations on their main characters have all done so.

I think whatever plans Anet had for WvW were changed, are changing, will change…. since the participation levels dropped after the release of HoT, and haven’t recovered.

Instead of coming up with just a new and improved WvW, Anet also has to figure out a way to get more players into WvW.

Seriously… Anet. I give up on you.

1. Banners are awful.
A: They do nothing to influence fights. If a server is winning on the PvD fight for a timezone, they can slot in more of these banners. then, when the next time zone comes to fight on that map, they have two choices…

1. Try to stealth PvD and take an objective before they are noticed. But an emergency waypoint with a capable scout can stop that.
2. Get overwhelmingly bannered down from the amount of enemy banners on the map versus the allies trying to fight and retake objectives.

I one time saw 3 dragon banners hit a group I was with. THREE kittenING DRAGON BANNERS!!! And they still had a a turtle in the back in case we did not wipe. We had the availability for one banner on the map so we just left and said kitten it. That is not productive for WvW. Either increase banners respawn times, lower their usability time for only defense, or remove that crap completely… Maybe only allow 1-2 per map. They are stupid and are not conducive to fights. They are also so “Pay-to-win” that you want smaller guilds to have to buy gold or PvE farm more to compete with larger guilds. I see your NCSoft and “Pay-to-Win” upbringing coming full force here.

2. Class Balance is crap.
A: Rev hammer will still hit for a kitten ton on hammer 1 even after the CoR 4sec CD nerf. Stability is a piece of kitten for most front line classes to the point. Stab needs reverted badly to stop this kitten pirate ship meta. Wanted to make Druids healers but still nerf CA generation off number of heals, not amount so healing power is still meh. You continually kitten up classes left and right. I saw the patch preview for warriors and thieves. I’m still sad.

3. PvE updates before WvW
A: I get it…. Blade and Soul is still NCSoft so you can’t give a care. But WvW is bleeding players. You have given NO kittenING IDEAS TO YOUR WVW OVERHAUL despite us hating the HoT overhaul forced on us. You do not talk to the community. Give us a clue what you plan to do so we can provide feedback. At least we know you heard us. As was said many times before on this forum…. Colin mentioned the WvW overhaul to be in the making for a while and their major concern, but we have no release date. No understanding of what it will entail. kitten! The Reyana interviews you claimed to listen to stopped because you said you can’t be bother to listen to them all because the WvW devs don’t have the time and other devs were listening to them and taking notes. If you can not listen to, at most two hours, a day of our concerns.. What faith do I have you listen to our on these forums?

PS: You moved reset to Saturday for patches… Yet, I have yet to see a Friday patch that would have interfered with reset. You gave up on this mode and either admit it… Or talk to us.

Svarty.8019:

I’m guessing that the guild upgrades weren’t behind a 3 month paywall in the beta, lol?

Nope, and we didn’t even have an hint about how stupidly time/money gated they would be.

During the beta, every upgrade was available for free and in unlimited quantities.

Changing that would make for a completely different experience in WvW – right now.

Yeah it speaks volumes about people just wanting a simple map, with simple mechanics, that they can simply go around in a loop, flipping sentries/camps/towers/keeps for money/exp and karma.

1- Bad design to punish people for playing.
2- It doesn’t resolve the situations where there’s no population from a server or 2 of the 3, and one server can pvdoor everything without opposition and can keep most of the structures for hours.

So instead of having 3 empty maps for wvw, you want them to create 32 empty open pvp maps? I’ve played on pvp servers on WoW, it always came down to being a gankfest than anything else, high levels preying on low levels.

Maybe it would be different for GW2 since everyone gets scaled to same levels, but the majority of players in GW2 are pve’ers, and I doubt they would be happy about pvp’ers cluttering up their maps.

I’m sure this would be a paradise for roamers and maybe small groups looking to gank people, not so much zerg groups as they want to find other zergs to fight and the quickest way to do that in 32 zones would be just pick one zone and go there, lion’s arch battle royale! all day every day!.