Guild Wars 2

STIHL.2489:

Vayne.8563:

DoctorDing.5890:

Rhanoa.3960:

It was a significant change

Bingo.

Games without significant changes often die faster than games with them The six guys that would still be playing core Tyria if is stayed at that difficulty would be happy as clams. Most of us would have played a lot less, because too easy is as bad as too hard. HoT kept me in the game. And I know for a fact I’m not alone.

This is not true at all. Case in point, EQ didn’t significantly change their game, they merely added to it. In essence, they added levels, which progressed the game, but did do while keeping with the established systems and style of play that the base game was built off of, there were no major system shocks, or massive overhauls on how the game felt from one expansion to the next, the transition from Norrath to Kunark, felt smooth, the Kunark Expansion felt like it belonged in the world of Norrath, making a fitting addition to the game.

Whereas, HoT was an abject change to how the game felt when you played, it didn’t feel like a smooth transition at all.

Ergo, games may need to grow, but they don’t in effect need to overhaul level changes to stay alive, in fact.. subtle small changes are what keep games alive, additions keep games alive.. substantial shocking changes have historically always done more harm then good.

I don’t do this often, but I have to agree with Vayne. Not philosophically, but on the specific issue of “do games have to change or die?”

They really do. They have to give players things to do that aren’t just the same things as they’ve done before.

My disagreement with Vayne is on how MUCH games must change, not whether they have to or not.

Players want new content. And, even casuals like me want new challenges. But, I don’t want overwhelming challenges. Vayne seems to thrive on not just the challenges, but the eventual defeat of those challenges (which s/he does via hard work).

As a casual, my preference is for different challenges, not so much harder challenges.

But, ANet must satisfy both of us, or die. Financially, I think they have to lean more heavily in the casual direction, because that’s where most of their money comes from.

So, I haven’t lobbied to return completely to the original GW2 model. I’m more of a half-way kind of player. Some day … SOME day …, I might want to tangle with those really hard challenges that people like Vayne have asked ANet to implement. So, I agree with Vayne (and others) that some of those challenges need to exist.

Unfortunately for HoT, I think ANet tried to move to hard in that direction, and they did it throughout the HoT game play. It was almost too much for me, and it was too much for you. I mean, if I have to be honest, Draconis Mons has tougher enemies than Verdant Brink.

The difference, and the reason I like it, is that there are a lot fewer of those very difficult fights. And, you can avoid them. Yes, if you want achievement points, you eventually have to tangle with them. But, in HoT, you had to tangle with really hard enemies just getting to the battles that had achievements attached.

There were three areas (in my opinion) where HoT failed: mapping, gating, and difficulty. They eased the gating, and significantly eased difficulty. But, mapping is still a chore and a pain, and there are still too many overlapping difficult places.

LWS3 has overcome those areas, generally. Yes, there’s a very badly mapped Draconis Mons (episode 5). And, there are places where the events and challenges are too hard (IMO), like some areas of Lake Doric and Bloodstone Fen. But, overall, it’s quite good.

If PoF is similar in casualness to LWS3, I’ll like it. A lot. But, if it doesn’t include enough challenges that require peak playing skill, Vayne won’t. And, s/he will be correct.

It’s got to be a balance. The game as a whole needs to have enough variability to accommodate both the majority of casuals AND the majority of hardcores.

STIHL.2489:

Well, After getting to play the demo for a bit (and I really wish they had given us a HoT demo like this), I am willing to openly admit that it is much more palatable then HoT ever was, the maps seemed much easier to transverse, and it felt very close to how Core felt, which is a great thing. From the limited bit I played, this truly felt like what their first expansion should have been like, a nice smooth addition that feels like a continuation of the Core game, just a bit harder with some added new things going on.

It’s a beautiful game, and I can see why some people still plat it.

But, to be honest, I am just not feeling any urgency to invest, still feeling a bit burned by HoT.. so, gonna let this one simmer for a bit.

Thank you to the people that took the time to give me insight and answers.

I feel like the biggest problem with HoT (which I personally enjoyed) was that they dumped four “hardcore” maps at once, without any sort of less hardcore maps to offset them. I like the maps, and I think open world should have a mix of less mob-dense, more navigable maps with some more mob-dense, trickier maps. But at HoT launch, it was hard for players to know if this was an entirely new direction for open world maps or not. And I understand why that would give some players serious concerns.

I think that the six maps released for LS3 were a better blend of the core maps and the new HoT style. I also think that if they continue in that direction with the PoF and LS4 maps, then the open world map seen as a whole will have a healthy blend of casual and less casual elements, which should offer lots of content for all players.

In short, the HoT maps are a good addition to the game as a whole, as long as that isn’t how every map going forward is going to be designed, which it does not appear to be. But Anet did alienate a lot of players when those four maps were released, because we didn’t know if that was the new direction in general.

Iozeph.5617:

GW2 was sold as the ‘game for the rest of us.’

It depends on what you think “the rest of us” is.
If you mean self-proclaimed casual players then it wasn’t sold as a game for them.
If you mean players that do not want a challenge, it wasn’t for them either.

The game was sold to players asking for a dynamic combat experience, a game that has no subscription fees, a game without a gear treadmill, a game with a cooperating open world experience, a game where skill defines the winner in PvP, a game with a more “balanced” world PvP setting based on worlds instead of same-server factions, with an emphasis on sieges, a game with challenging events and encounters and of course a game with hard dungeons to put that dynamic combat system to good use.

Since the game failed in many aspects of the above, they tried over the years to solve the main problems with varying degrees of success

I’m not sure about what others think, but I think having mounts in WvW could be a very fun idea. It would also essentially add another dimension to battles, in the aspect of cavalry charges, and what fantasy setting battle would be complete without a good old heroic cavalry charge? XD

I could also see it working now, with the introduction of territories. You could make it so mounts can only be used in your own territory, or in neutral territory, to prevent them being used to get over walls and such. Or alternately, you could introduce a new mount (perhaps a dolyak type?) specifically for WvW, that is balanced for it and has its own unique WvW masteries (that way you could control its implementation and overall balance better).

All-in-all, I think it could add nice new dimensions to battles in WvW, such as charges and flanking maneuvers, or even new types of defenses that damage and dismount players (such as spike walls or traps).

Any thoughts?

People seriously need to do research on this before posting about it.

It’s not servers lacking speed that’s the issue; it’s profession design and the huge amount of proc effects, boons, and conditions which all need to be calculated, ticked, and updated/kept track of all firing off as interrupts half the time. ANet has come out and said this… more than once.

Until a new system is put in place we will never have population balance. Its abundantly clear that players will not be able to do that for themselves. Bandwagons are inevitable with huge portion of the player base.

Jumpin Lumpix.6108:

Yes it really is about numbers, this Is why BG wins every week. It’s also evident when one server faces a 2v1, which is a situation that is unwinnable, due to the combined servers superior numbers.

Numbers over all timezones = coverage – the basis for your win, superior coverage = guaranteed win

Numbers advantage in your timezone = your blob outnumbers opponents during your timezone, opponents do not have the numbers to face yours. PvDoor, no risk play. Blob server wins skirmishes covering your timezone.

KDR = not necessarily a measure of skill, but rather tracks with the out of balance population of your timezone/server versus your opponents. Easy kills when 2x the opponents squads. And can also be attributed to skill. Mostly, it’s numbers. KDR in outnumbered matchups reflects the willingness of players to throw their bodies at, or get caught by the unbeatable blob force. Good players don’t. New players, think they can or think they should.

Morale – Being the large blob, and largely unopposed group feeds the morale of your map blob and keeps the blob intact. Taking T3 structures your opponents worked for hours to upgrade, in just a few minutes with smaller groups attempting to defend your 3 guild-organized groups, feels good, but isn’t a reflection of ‘good’. Opposite is true for your opponents. Morale drops when a significant structure is lost and the server was unable to muster a reasonable defense. This feeds sense of hopelessness for those players. Facing this day after day results in less player support, less play and transfers off that server.

Yep, largely about the numbers.

And, why I continue to ask for clarity for what the go forward plan is to create some semblance of population balance and a mechanism which does not revolve around “Luck of the Link” manual pairings and is responsive to material shifts in populations.

See post discussion here

From A Message from the Game Director

This year we also took a different approach with PvP and WvW releases. In PvE, we make fresh new content with the goal of surprising and delighting you with our work, but in competitive modes, the community owns the game modes and chooses what we work on, and we definitely shouldn’t be surprising you with where we take those game modes. Instead our goal this year was to develop more incrementally, test with the community on the live side, and take feedback every step of the way.

The “owners” of WvW have been complaining, with good reason, about the population imbalance for years. After all, with BG and JQ as top servers for what, at least four of the five years, you’d think that would indicate that the game setup is flawed.

Locking only prevents a very high server from competing with an overfull server and in NA, linking hasn’t made it so a linked server combination can compete with an unlinked overfull server.

It’s time Anet started to fix the problem with overfull WvW servers.

What, you’ve never heard of Megadeath?!

slayerking.3581:

Faaris.8013:

I like the different looks a map has with hearts undone, it’s much more vivid than after you’ve solved the local problems. All the things that are interactive when you play a fresh character vanish when you do the hearts.

I agree though that hearts are the most boring things the game has to offer.

Of course by all means have the hearts open but make them optional after you have done your first 100% run. The very first thing I do when I make a new character is do 100% so I can get into the events and world bosses, But the hearts make doing map completion easily 10 times slower.

There is absolutely no need whatsoever to get 100% before getting into events and bosses. On the contrary, doing event chains (including pre-events for bosses) is the most effective way to fill some hearts.

There’s really only three reasons to go for 100% after the first time

• Legendaries
• Completionism
• Enjoyment
  And Completionism is really only a subset of enjoyment, just enjoying the fruits of the labor rather than the labor itself.

If none apply, why do it?

I would like to see the hearts be a one time thing. When the game was released it was play the way you like, want to do the hearts do them, Don’t want to then don’t. I don’t see why the hearts need to be done more than once, Sure have the map as it is now you still have to run around and get the way points, POI’s, HP’s and Vistas but make hearts a one time thing, When they’re done they are done account wide.

I have done 100% completion countless times since the game was released and every time the only thing that annoys me is doing the hearts again and again especially the tedious ones that don’t even look like they are moving.

They did it so that people who wanted mounts would shut up about them already and buy PoF. I agree, GW2 never needed mounts, but there was a ridiculous yet vocal demand for them, so there you go.

At least the dead horse can now rest in peace.

The solution for me is simple. I built ascended Celestial gear for all weights and it is neither here nor there but I stopped worrying about meta builds and dropping huge loads of cash on upgrading it when the balance changes. With celestial, you still have some ok condi dmg, ok power, ok boons and solid survivability…and no more gold wasting.

I agree that when cc’ed when gliding, you should instantly fall, and if it’s to your death, then so be it. But you should still be able to glide while in combat, as it is an escape tactic. So get your cc ready if you see your opponent about to take a leap.

I am no fan of gating, but the mastery system is about as unobtrusive as possible. There are a lot of extra points to unlock, so you needn’t do adventures if you don’t want.

In any case, ArenaNet’s “play as you like” comment had to do with reaching max level and equipment; those remain completely unrestricted.

xarallei.4279:

Yeah, that’s the problem with the “realism” arguments. And I’d much rather have more control over my movement and be able to move like mounts do in WoW than to have this kind of “realistic” movement.

But homogenizing everything comes with its own set of problems. Players kitten about lack of diversity in various aspects….. until it actually forces them to do something different. You see the irony in this mind set?

Lack of familiarity is what lead to the most devastating changes from Beta 1…. the dumbing down of the AI behavior (which wasn’t that difficult to begin with), and the lowering of the difficulty curve across the game. In the time that followed, a major complaint about the game was how mobs offered no challenge or threat, because you could face tank them and autoattack your way to victory.

To remedy that, they took steps to substantially increase the difficulty in Heart of Thorns, not only making them statistically tougher, but also increased the synergy and diversity of their attacks and group comps. The immediate response from the players were “This is stupidly hard…. WTF would you do that?” Fast forward 2 years and multiple nerfs, and any half way competent player has little to no trouble dispatching the majority of enemies.

If mounts are going to feel like a distinct element of the game, and not just some uninventive upgrade to regular movement, then it needs to make us behave differently. I can’t be the only one that realize this is capable of opening the door for bigger things- allowing things that wouldn’t previously fit into this game, an avenue that now makes perfect sense.

I never post on the forum, but it saddened me to see such negative feedback on mounts. I can’t understand you guys. I, personally, never liked mounts in mmorpgs and I never wanted them in guild wars. I always told people “mounts have nothing to do in guild wars” and here I am, loving my experience on the raptor. It’s fast, smooth, and most of all, it feels special. Some of you guys were upset about the way the raptor turns, I on the contrary love this. I love the way this feels like I’m riding a beast and not incarnating it. I love the animations, they are awesome and so smooth I’d like to thank the guys that worked on it. I’m still a bit scared that everyone I see will always be on a mount when Path of Fire will be out, and that’s one of the things I never liked about mounts : why move on foot if you have a mount ? But that’s another debate (and contrary to one of the posts here, I really believe that dismounting when interracting is a great way to reduce mount-overcrowding). Right now I can say that I love riding the raptor. I’m not even playing the beta because I want to experience it further with the new elite specs, so I’m just running around on my mount, then log out and play with my regular characters, and then log back in just to run around with the raptor a bit again.

So, just a post to say kuddos to the teams that worked on it. I know it’s often the negative feedback that are loud and visible because when you like something you don’t necessarily need to talk about it, but I really hope you guys at Arena Net still believe the way you made mounts move was the right one. The only thing concerning I admit is the motion sickness issue some of the players brought up already on the forum. I don’t have an opinion about that because I don’t experience motion sickness, but I really hope it won’t change too much the current experience.

Go play Super Mario Galaxy to learn how to orient in a 3D environment and then play Bloodborne or Dark Souls to learn how to die and overcome challenges. Then play GW2 and you notice how easy this game is. Players these days… deconstructing the gaming industry since 10 years. I remember the 90ies where there weren’t any masses who complained about the games. Instead you contemplated and asked yourself: what can I do to get better? Stop the whiny kittening and entitlement and overcome the ‘challenge’.

Redden.5869:

I’m trying HOT for the first time and navigating the maps is a freakking nightmare. Imo when you play a game you should relax and enjoy it, but most of those maps are so kitten annoying and full of hordes of enemies that constantly harass you that I get so kittened to the point I just quit the game.

I agree with you that gameplay should be relaxing and enjoyable. But different people enjoy different things, and find different activities relaxing.

I’m as casual as they come, pretty old for gamer standards, with fulltime job and family (including two very “special” teenagers), house, and whatever else you can think of. I play this game whenever I find the time, to relax, to enjoy myself, to chat with friends. I refuse to grind or play any content I don’t enjoy.

That said, I love the HoT maps, and the Tangled Depths and Draconis Mons are probably my most favourite maps of the whole game. I love the exploration available on those maps, diving in blindly and exploring until I have figured out where to go and how to get to places. I love working my way around groups of mobs rather than just running through without paying attention to what is walking around.

Sometimes I die. Sometimes it’s a nuisance that I want to go places and can’t just walk straight in. But most of the time those maps are just so much more enjoyable and relaxing than going straight to an objective and being done with it.

To me, the journey really is the reward. That’s why I play MMOs in my free time, rather than just watching tv. I want to explore, I want to puzzle, I want to interact. This game sure is good for that, that’s why I’m playing this game to relax and enjoy myself. If it wasn’t like that, I’d rather find something else to spend my time with and leave this game to the people that enjoy this kind of thing.

That said, of course I’m hoping that PoF will give me more of what I love about the game, including multi-layered maps and true exploration.

The word “casual” isn’t particular helpful in discussions. Nearly everyone calls themselves “casual”; it’s only other people that might consider them hardcore.

For example, there are people with over 6000 hours in the game who consider themselves “casual” because they just fiddle around. They don’t practice rotations or theory-craft builds; to them, it’s just playing casually

There are likewise people who spend huge fractions of their gaming time perfecting builds and footwork, who solo challenge mode bosses, and consider themselves to be casual because they don’t have very many hours in the game.

So please try to find another way to describe what is meant by “has ANet remembered the casuals” because as it’s written, it could mean all sorts of things to different people.

OP, while you may self-identify as casual, there is little agreement among all who so identify. Some think of the word as meaning preference for easy content; others for limited time spent playing; still others for solo-only play. There may be as many understandings of what “casual” means as there are people using the term.

Based on what little you’ve told us, I’m going to guess your definition refers to dislike for vertical navigation and maybe dislike for HoT mob difficulty, thought the latter is a leap.

What I can do is tell you a few things.

• Living Story Season 3 zones moved a bit away from HoT design parameters in some ways, but not in others.

1. There are event chains, but no over-arching map meta such as we see in the 4 HoT zones. Participating in events is more on a drop-in basis, as we saw in core, and less dependent on consulting timer sites and hoping to use LFG to get to the one or two active map copies.
2. Mobs in LSS3 zones are not particularly difficult, with a few exceptions. Some of them do have what I find to be annoying mechanics (When you “kill” a White Mantle Mesmer, for instance, it turns out you’ve killed his/her clone, and then need to kill him/her, all while it and then s/he are spamming the bright pink beam of Mesmer Greatsword 1 at you).
3. There is still a vertical component to movement in LSS3 maps, but I find getting around in them to be quite a bit easier, as there is a lot less of the trademark ANet, “Can’t get there from here.”

Perhaps those map designs are going to be indicative of what see in PoF, just as Silverwastes and to some extent Dry Top were precursors to HoT.

As to PoF, we know little. There will be huge zones. There will be bounties. There will doubtless be events. There will be Elite Specs and doubtless some means to unlock them. There will be mounts which have unique movement capabilities, and those capabilities will be necessary to get to some places on the maps. Mounts look to be obtained via Masteries, though we do not know as yet if there will be any major substantive changes to how Masteries are acquired.

As to whether any of that constitutes “casual-friendly” or “casual-unfriendly” to what casual means to you, well, only you can answer that. Bear in mind that the preceding is some amount of pattern analysis and some amount of guesswork coupled with the facts revealed in the PoF announcement. The best, and only really reliable indication of whether PoF will suit you or not is going to be trying it yourself, and the only cost to try the free beta weekends is the large download.

p3.

So to add a few suggestions to WvW pvp design change which would combat the heavy Pro-Zerg:
1. Remove Downed mechanics and Ressurect without skill use from WvW. If you die and no one around you invested a skillslot to ress skills, then you will need to ress at obelisk.
2. Remove “Max targets” from all skills, and introduce a diminishing return effect (meaning if you are hit by the same skill several times in a row the effect of it becomes less and less. So first skill 100%, second skill 75%, third 50%, etc. numbers there is obviously not balanced at all, but that would take the Database of skills and a genetic algorithm to find the optimal balance diminishing of the skills)
3. Lower Slowdown in combat to ONLY effect you while you are taking damage or using skills (just set it to 1second of not engaging in combat before it counts as out of combat.)
4. Remove out of combat healing from WvW (having sustain from healing is a BIG part of strategic and tactical play. It’s a resource which should hold great value, also between fights).
5. Lowering the effectiveness/powerspiking of combo fields (the bonusses they can give now is incredibly strong to the point of gamebreaking, and they promoted extreme clumping up which pushes zerg-play).
6. Allowing everyone to Flag up as “raid parties”, so anyone in WvW can lead at least 10-20 players easily with proper interface making it easy for Randoms to follow whats going on.
a. Having commander bonusses hit your entire faction (only highest bonus apply. If you want to keep these bonusses that is. A flat stats bonus just because person X is on is kind of a none-productive mechanic imho).
7. Bruiser builds vs. everything else rebalancing according to TTK principle’s.
8. I don’t believe it is needed to touch CC/Escaped mechanisms once the proper TTK balance have been corrected as with that it should all equal out in a fair and balanced manner and with the changing of the heavy Zerg-focus mechanics it should not be needed to do so. Imo.
__________________

So if you made it this far you are a persistant one and I thank you for your time and ask you:
What do you think and how do you feel about a Pro-Zerg setup instead of the alternatives? And do you agree with my view of it being a pro-zerg setup if not, why not?

Best regards
me

P2.

What this means is that Numbers of the fight functions as an exponential increasing powerspike and becomes the most important in the game.
it eliminates the danger of Heavy aoe’s such as meteor, etc. as enemies will maximum get hit once by running through them (often not at all), and the aoe healing of combo fields negates it completely (as these does not suffer from the same handicaps as skills).
it allows the already outnumbered Ratio of players to continually grow to the already outnumbering sides advantage.
it removes the possibility of outsmarting and outplaying the opponent (as no matter how badly you outplay them their numbers never diminish as reviving/helping downed up continues forever).

so what it does is created a gameplay where the Biggest Zerg will have a Huge advantage from the start, and as the fight goes on the number advantage will increase exponentially.

As I started out saying I am not sure this is intended. but as the only “Anti-Zerg” mechanic currently is Siege/anti-Siege equipment and there have been made protective equipment which prevents their effect. There really isn’t any true comeback mechanic due to the lack of anti-zerg mechanic on top of all the pro-zerg mechanics.

To run through pro-zerg mechanics:
1. Downing systems -> heavily fevour zerg play.
2. combo fields -> heavily favour zerg play (as the more people you got that can do it the more bonusses you will have for every encounter and the more permanently you can keep the bonusses).
3. Maximum Targets On Skills -> meaning you NEED those extra people to be able to hit enough of the enemy zerg, hard enough, to be able to Zone/pressure zergs. The biggest zerg will both counter everything coming to them, and hit a Far larger % of the enemy zerg with their skills.
4. SlowDown in combat mechanic -> as the kiting party will be constantly slowed down while laying suppression CC+dps to prevent the enemy from simply easymode overrunning them. While the enemy will constantly have people not in combat getting high speedboost to outmanouver and continually catch the kiting part while never having any handicap by the slowdown (as it will never be to their disadvantage).
5. Bruiser builds being extremely much stronger than other builds -> bruiser builds is made specificly to constantly charge in and do heavy damage, they TRULY shine when they are running people down as they can survive most surpression fire, are generally heavily protected from CC and Burst danger and do heavy damage on fleeing and CC’ed enemies.
6. Commander/group setup -> only commanders seems to be able to have the interface setup for easily leading a larger group, due to the involved things of being a commander it creates the issue of VERY few commanders on a map at a time, it almost looks like your only supposed to have 1 commander at a time which pushes one place, instead of Many commanders where fights then will happen in a lot of places at a time (which would push strategic gameplay of managing player resources to how many you need where etc.)
7. Auto-full healing out of combat -> outnumbered advantage will constantly be able to take advantage of this while the kiting side will never be able to do so. Meaning sustain is far less important for the once with more numbers and they can focus their builds on gaining more push power.
8. Lastly “the ease of escaping CC/dmg” -> as it is now there is TONS of CC breaking, cleansing, immunities, etc. which works all on ALL CC types. On top of the CC’s having very low durations and being primarily single target (everything but slows/wall effects). This makes it incredibly hard to lock anyone or anything down to punish them for bad tactical/personal play. This is as such not too bad at it creates longer fights, but combined with the aboves it heavily strengthens the already powerful Zerg synergy.

These are the heavily pushers of the “Pro-Zerg/Bloob” playstyle and with all these in mind and how heavily it is pushed I cannot help but wondering if “Zerg Playstyle” was the intended target of the game? To eliminated tactical, strategic, and personal skilled playstyles to much heavier promoted the Zerg-playstyle.
I can imagine this is done to avoid having to balance to much as in a big zerg it is nearly impossible to figure out where the balance issues are as it is all just a big cluster f’d. however it doesn’t remove or fix the issue at all, it simply just makes it impossible to distinguish and thereby impossible to fix.

If you got no interest in a longer and more mechanical focused thread and discussion, then this is properly not the post for you ^^

limitation to characters this will be a 2-3parters:
p1.
WvW, anti-zerg and Downing mechanic etc.

So I want to note on some mechanics specificly talking about their effect in WvW. I am not sure if these effects was the intended once with the features introducing them but currently i will argue that a lot of mechanics are pushing specific Zerg gameplay over all others in WvW.

First the base concepts:
If you read the name and think “I know what it is, why it is and how it function just skip over the basic, it is for anyone who are in doubt of the meaning of the concepts”.
________________________________________________
________________________________________________
TTK:
There is a simple balance formula which is known as TTK. It means time to kill, it is that the time it takes you to kill a person should equal the time it takes him to kill you given you both play optimally (In a balanced scenario TTK should be equal for all builds vs. all builds. If you do a Trinity scenario, the counter class will always have a high advantage and it goes cloth > heavy, heavy > medium, medium > Cloth, in which armour types beat which by default).
When you got a HUGE amount of skills it is generally done by giving different values of importance to each ability/skill that you give a class/character.
these abilities or attributes are normally set in 4 stages: movability (stealth, speed, soft CC), Dmg(DPS/BURST), Survivability (hard CC/Dmg mitigation). Which you set in each subject varies slightly (mostly on the CC part for where they should be depending on the use in the game).
with these you can insure on a per skill level how much power a single skill is allowed to add to the build (if 100dps is valued to the same as 15% speed increase/decrease, a skill would either do 100dps increase or 15% speed increase/decrease. These a random numbers, Just as an example of the usage, it is a spreadsheet balance setup which insures proper balance and easily auto balancing of Everything if one aspects turns out to have the wrong value for the power increase compared to the rest).

Anti-zerg mechanics:
is mechanics which punishes heavy zerging and forces groups to split up to survive easier. These are usually heavy AOE’s which means if you bunch up a lot everyone will die instead of a few, so you want to keep a reasonable amount of distance to each other to optimize survivability and keep numbers. It can also be heavy bonusses when outnumbered preventing you from wanting to engage much smaller groups (although this leads to a lot of other issues so it is a worse option and it never really prevent zerging due to lack of understanding or bonus amount).
Why is anti-zerg mechanic important? It lowers lag issues due to less people at the same spot. It rewards skillfull play on all area’s, strategic, tactical and personal skills, as it prevents numbers from being the main factor of a fight. It creates more clear overview of what is happening in a fight, by removing the heavy bloob clutter.
but most importantly it creates a Lot of good Comeback situations (so works as a comeback mechanic).

Comeback mechanics:
is a mechanic which allow a losing player to comeback into the game by outsmarting their opponent, not outplaying but outsmarting (using tactics and strategy to move the enemy into a position/situation where he can be heavily punished, which only happened because he didn’t/couldn’t forsee your “trick”).
this can be situations like “mass stealth backstapping”, manouvering enemies into chokes for heavy aoe, baiting them to clump up on a Tank for heavy CC+Dmg, etc.
it is situations which allows for the possibility of turning the fight around when it otherwise would have been impossible to do so.
Why are comeback mechanics important? Because without them it is a numbers game, biggest number wins and a machine will Always be better at number crunching, as well as it removing any suspense from the fighting since you can know who wins by the math from the start.

Basics done:

So to do a quick scenario as example of the discussion:
20 vs. 40.
the outnumbered is forced to kited back as in a straight up fight the limit of “maximum targets” of the skills means that you cannot rely on simply outplaying in a single encounter (as you will not have enough effective burst AOE as the limitation of target hits prevents this.)
as the smaller party kites back and both kill/lose people the pushing part will constantly be able to both finish downed people, revive dead once and almost instantly get up downed allies. This means as both sides “should” lose people, only the side with the least people actually does so (as everyone on the pushing side will be revived, helped up from downed state as their zerg pushes over, and everyone downed/killed from the kiting side will be finished/dead and can’t get revived by their allies, as the enemy zerg is running over them; even revive skills become useless because of this, and getting up from downed state give you roughly the same HP back as majority of revive skills will).

Arricson Krei.9560:

I felt this was somewhat easy to read. Flows well and the summary in p3 basically says it all.

I think it’s a great idea and you explain well when you say why WvW is a numbers game. I think the diminishing returns on skills you mentioned in p3 #2 would be very hard to calculate and optimize, considering it would eliminate small scale groups who run multiple players of the same class. While it would promote having small scale comps that have a wide variety of classes (good thing), it may also discourage and punish players from playing what they want (bad thing). My tip to this suggestion would be to have it start diminishing after being affected by the same skill five times.

Having diminishing returns after 5x could mean that dps will be through the roof. 5 Necro well bombers would be kitten strong if 1 well can hit all targets in the area. Base health/armor of all players in WvW would probably have to increase to compensate for this proposed anti-zerg mechanic, but then this is have a massive impact on small scale.

Not sure how possible it would be to have player’s stats/skill change on the fly as they are joined by many players (zerg mechanics) and accompanied by less than 5 (small scale mechanics).

Probably one of the most outstanding problems of balancing WvW, there are too many players who value small scale and too many players that value large scale where it’s near impossible to balance for both parties to exist in the same instance. Think this is why people are calling for instanced 15v15 arenas, or open world toggle-able pvp, etc.

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Tyvm for the nice words and the very constructive reply, and you are right the diminishing return solution is a bit iffy, so needed some more thought in it (which took a little time to get to a good solution hehe).

I do agree the diminishing return would be hard, especially when we are talking multiple of same classes as you explained very well.
I am not sure the diminishing return would even be needed though. The issue I see coming with not having it is actually on the “defensive skills” (do keep in mind offensively we want big zerg’s to be destroyed if you run in a big bloob instead of properly splitting up and fighting on multiple fronts) as imagine guardians chaining AOE dmg-immunity skills and making everyone under it immune to damage Forever, or “return damage skills” and suddenly you do 1 AOE and you instantly explode from hitting 50 people who all reflect 200 dmg :P

So the trick is to find a way to prevent the Defensive skills from getting completely out of hand when stacking them in this manner. A good way of doing this could ofc. Be to change their effects slightly so they are not Vastly more powerful than the offensive counterpart skills.
Say a guardian shield would only mitigated an 80% of incoming damage instead of 100% (and only highest mitigation will be in effect, so no stacking of DR (damage reduction)).
same with “reflect damage” skills, making them reflect a max 50 % of the skills damage to a single person (so if each skill reflect 15% dmg, then if you hit aoe which does a max of 15k to each target you will take max 7,5k damage in reflection, if there was more than 4 people getting hit when they had reflect damage on. And no more than 7.5k could be returned from that 1 skill use).

Such changes would be Far preferred to other solutions. However, it would mean changing the mechanics slightly for these type of skills. But it shouldn’t require noteworthy extra computations (no noticeable decrease in performance. However the ability to hit more targets with AOE’s might decrease performance slightly, but I think the splitting up zergs more, would easily make up for that).
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Btw: when trying to find solutions etc. it is always important we remember “it needs to be as simple as possible and cannot introduce new issues needed to be fixed. if a solution can already exist by slightly changing something existing it is likely the best solution”.
we always have to be careful to not try and fix complex problem by adding more complexity to it, or creating new problems which then need solutions which then adds complexity.

i think some of the balance problems in GW2 comes from trying to fix a problem by adding a system to fix it, then finding a problem with that system and adding another system to fix that, so forth and so on (looking at just damage sources and mitigation sources as example:

just with dots and dmg mitigation alone; we got So many dmg dots types, and So many mitigation types for the different once that it is Very complex to even figure it out. Which raises the question of "couldn’t we have gotten the same gameplay effect/experience with only 1-2dot types and only 1-2 dmg mitigation type? what specific gameplay experience is it that the extra complexity adds and is it worth the negatives?
(i want to do a post about Complexity layers at some point as to explain how each complexity lvl in the combat system adds exponentially amount of information you need to balance out, compute and remember. but that is a Major post in itself. but very interesting subject i think.)

best regards
Me

NeHoMaR.9812:

Lahmia.2193:

Maybe I’m a minority here but I’m of the mind that the keep lord should have very little impact on the fight.

As I said, 100% think DBL lords are annoying, don’t let trolls, and people misunderstanding my post, confuse you.

The HoT expansion added all that things to PvE, that’s ok, because on PvE everybody is your ally, you don’t need to worry about 120 players trying to kill you.

Just because someone disagrees with your subjective opinion does not make them trolls. Nor does it mean they are misunderstanding your post.

Take your “100% of people find x annoying” and smoke it. It is entirely false facts, which cannot be proven.

I prefer the dbl lords as they are more than mere punchbags. I would go so far as to say WvW would benefit from revamping all the npcs to make them more meaningful.

The lord is the final line of defense.
If a structure is breached by larger numbers the smaller group may rely on that lord’s mechanics to give them a small chance at not losing the structure, or at least not losing it as fast.
I don’t see any of the DBL lords as overpowered.

~ Kovu

Better yet, make the Legendary Spikes not account bound. Some of us got plenty of them and would like to sell!

This turned into joking thread, understandable…

A WvW leaderboard, for both guilds and individual players would be an extremely useful tool, since server balance could be based on this (also time spent by these players & guilds, contribution into overall skirmish score, and so on, specifics could be discussed if and when Anet decides to consider implementing it, but KDR could be a start)

Beyond the “leaderboard” we also need an “alliance” system (this isn’t about battlegroups), it’s something similar to guilds, but server-wide structure: alliance chat, alliance roles (class & more), rating set to each member by leaders based on commitment and skill separately (faithful scout vs. skilled fighter), i.e. 85/40, 30/90.

One of the greatest failures of WvW system is the idea of being “inclusive”, which sounds great when it’s about accepting new players (less skilled), though even an “exclusive” system would need to welcome new blood; but the current gives no means to separate trolls and leeches, many times the map is full and queued with these, and they can’t do anything else but in the best case spam the chat with toxicity. This is what resulted from making a competitive team game mode that is inclusive towards those who aren’t team players.

WXP rating or even kill numbers are pointless, both can be farmed with no skill at all. WvW game mode never liked skilled players, it’s almost designed against them: any troll can still get on a cannon or AC and destroy a fight, and then wonder about why nobody returns…

There is no way to determine the skill level based on any stats currently in use. KDR could come closer than any other, but certainly isn’t an accurate measurement, both kill & death numbers depends just as much or even more on your team and the teams you were fighting against, as your own skill. A list to be used when balancing servers could still be useful, including one for guilds too.

I nominate Biff.