You know you just made not only zealots the only build necros will be able to go, but also buffed the minions zerker for pvp to all hell.
Zerker MM is just a cheese build, its not remotely good unless your enemy allows you to run all over them.
We need this “dude you CANNOT get away from”.
Yes, by landing chill/cripple as conditions, not just by pressing one button and going “lul i so skilled”. There is nothing balanced about being guaranteed to always keep your opponent in combat, and it isn’t good gameplay.
NEVER should a DoT deal more damage on 1 tick than 1 hit of a burst skill
I’m sorry, you do realize this is absolute kitten, right? Have you ever seen a 10k condi tick? No? Well I’ve seen 15k direct damage in a single cast. 10k isn’t all that crazy either. And that is with PvE stats, in PvP in a group, you’re going to deal massively more damage than a condi build would ever dream of.
It’s really getting out of hand with people who think they’re “bunkering” home point. All you’re doing is making your team out numbered in every single fight.
Generally speaking, its the safest way to go about things at a low level if you have no idea what you are doing. I also see a lot of players who cap home and then go fight mid with the rest of their team and blatantly ignore home while it gets capped because “hey guys I’m helping the fight mid”, even though a 4v5 in yoloQ takes ages to win, and by the time you do you’ve been down 0-2 in caps for like 5 minutes.
Being a side bunker is something that takes a while to learn, especially for lower players, because unless you understand how to rotate you’ll get back capped all the time, and then it doesn’t matter if you were 4v5ing mid for a few seconds. Rotations take the longest of any other part of the game to learn (in my opinion) and that position involves a lot of need for smart movement, whereas everyone else (again at not-top levels) basically just runs in a big group to wherever the teamfight is.
bhawb how many nhawbs have you shlobbed?
I’m not sure, some are so small like yours that I can’t even tell they’re there at all.
I see. Butin combination with other life steal abilities it still isn’t of use? I mean, you could use Leeching sigl and Runes of Vampirism for better results. Would it still be futile?
Unlike other traits, this one is completely dependent on the amount of damage you do. For a full 6 points in a tree that otherwise doesn’t increase your sustain noticeably, it just doesn’t do enough on your own. You could use all those things you listed with the 6 traits in a much tankier setup and see way better returns (a la MM).
This would change nothing for the better, if anything it has the potential to make things worse.
How well does Parasitic Contagion work with 6 blood magic Vampiric Rituals or Unholy Martyr? I haven’t had the chance to fully investigate it yet, but perhaps some of you have.
Parasitic Contagion is primarily flawed in that if you are actually getting a meaningful bit of healing back, you’re probably going to win the fight anyway, and if you really need the healing you will be unable to put out that kind of pressure.
Necromancer isn’t useless in this meta, it is just a bit weak in sPvP and PvE in this meta.
However I think they could fairly quickly fix us, if they make the right balance decisions.
Oh ya, just noticed that. Wasn’t used to using it in combat.
Still, Dark Path is already very strong for a 15s CD skill, its unreliability is the only thing that bars it from arguably being a tiny bit too strong for its CD. Making it untargeted or directly buffing it in any way is going to smash its CD.
Just look at Riot if you need examples of what people want. I can go on a website like Surrender@20, read their near daily updates on dev posts and PBE changes, and I know months in advance the main balance changes that I can expect.
I realize why a PBE could be difficult for you, due to the fact that you have other things you might need to test that would not be as good to reveal, but putting out at least balance information and actually considering the feedback pre-patch is massive.
As it is now, whether it is factual or just perception, it feels like the devs are scared to ever mention anything meaningful on the forums, won’t interact (even in a limited manner by posting their thoughts for the future and allowing people to talk, but not directly engaging in the conversation), and refuse to admit mistakes. Also, things like stealth nerfs have really hurt the ability to trust ANet and feel respected as a playerbase.
And again, they will never be meaningful when you can proc them 50 times per second.
Also, Spectral Armor is an amazing skill that is by far our best defensive skill and can nullify burst on its own. It just isn’t used in PvP because if you’re in a situation where you’d die without it, you’ll just die after its over.
That is the point of poison, to reduce healing. Non-damaging effects of conditions are already relatively weak compared to the comparable boon.
Well, to be fair that’s a rather generous definition of attrition. If having high defensive stats is all it takes to make the cut, all classes have potentially good attrition. Of course you’re right about WvW necros having access to better resource stacking (primarily through Dire gear). We still can’t reliably renew those resources though.
Simply put, death shroud. I was zerging yesterday in full rabid gear, I would use DS, go through a full DS 5/4, fear someone and jump to them (or do the reverse if stability was up), and say, have 5k LF at the end. By the time my DS was off CD it was nearly full again, almost every single time I did this. I was easily getting what would be comparable to 5-7k “healing” (through LF generation) via deaths every 10 seconds. That is massive sustain equivalent to healing signet at its most broken state, just through the profession mechanic and minor traits (soul comprehension and gluttony, parasitic bond if I had 1 in spite).
We have insane sustain in WvW because of how strongly we get free healing and through it defensive stats via deaths. Each death in my build gives me 12% LF, which is equivalent to 1601 LF, and people die a lot. Its a crazy amount of HP coming back in constantly, with my 2.7k armor build. Its not the armor that gives you sustain, its the high amount of effective healing paired with really high armor.
It affects very little without the bursts, because they rely on multi-hits. Bone Minions in sPvP 1v1s will generally only hit 1, and flesh golem will also only get a few hits (without bugging, it is only 3-5 ticks, which isn’t a whole lot compared to the amount of hits he loses by flying so far away from the target). So the bursts only actually help in AoE situations, where your minions are losing out on procs anyway.
In this game, ICDs are absolutely necessary on vampiric and vampiric precision. ANet cannot make them meaningful in realistic situations as long as you can have situations where you are procing 50+ siphons per second.
Look i cant bother kittening around with someone who has bloody little to noone mmo history who actually does the assumptions, I KNOW FORM EXAMPLES, which trough 5 (7 if you count side scrolling) MMORPGs that icds on offensive sustain, no matter what kind, dont work.
And yet MM, the only build we have that works with sustain, effectively has an ICD on its vamp trait.
And chain fear is not OP? When a necro fears you 4 times in a row and you only have 2 stunbreaks. Necro lost to a thief= l2p.
Except a Necro has to significantly build and give up other things to get 4 fears. There is only 1 fear built into the class, and 1 from staff. After that you need runes, traits, utility skills, or corrupting stability.
Not saying that Skull Fear is too strong, but it isn’t comparable to necros who have to put a lot in to get high fear durations, and a thief who uses their class mechanic to.
Is it good or is it junk?
Maybe its fine the way it is or maybe it could use help of some sort.
Feel free to even compare how well it is compared to other professions or how much of a burden it is.
I want to know what the community thinks of attrition.
What build? What gamemode?
In WvW any build that has toughness in all of its stat components will have tons of attrition.
In general PvE this is also the case due to ho easily things die and allow you to hit them.
In dungeons/boss PvE, it depends on the situation and your build. But generally speaking attrition here is much easier than it is in say sPvP (since a boss will gladly let you hit them in the face with all your skills without dodging), so whatever innate attrition your build has will get upgraded significantly.
In sPvP, attrition depends fully on build. MMs have amazing sustain, tanky builds can also get really strong sustain (although at the moment are too weak to be viable due to lack of weapon support), and DPS builds don’t have good sustain much at all because of how easily they die to focus fire, and the lack of “multipliers” on their sustain.
Compare that to the fields and finishers on Staff. Chilblains leaves a poison field too, but guess what? Chilblains already inflicted poison! What use is it? Are you gonna blast it with Putrid Mark for Weakness, and thereby waste your long cooldown condi cleanse which might save your skin later? Or are you gonna shoot through it with the autoattack? Which has such a slow projectile it literally can’t hit a strafing enemy, an enemy who already has poison on them from the initial Chilblains trigger? Or are you trying to hit someone BEHIND the enemy who originally triggered Chilblains? It’s just terrible, badly thought-out, and redundant.
Actually, in this case many fields, like staff 3 and death nova, give you more and more effect over time. Death Nova is so insane not just because of the weakness uptime, but because of how much poison it will stack just by someone standing in the field for the full duration (note: its a lot). So in Chillblain’s case, the left behind poison field increases the potency of the mark if people stand in it, creating a zoning effect (because you really don’t want to eat that much poison).
That was the original reason I didn’t put a field that passively does anything (whereas ice and poison fields apply their respective conditions) on Mark of Blood.
I dunno man, if they were something short duration with long cooldowns like ele Auras they’d be ok, but if they’re spammable they’ll just give birth to a crapton of utterly noxious builds like they did in GW1. As someone who had to kitten himself out to IWAY and ranger spike teams back then I can tell you it’s horribly boring to just sit in the back spamming them, and you feel dirty for being the blue veins in all that cheese. :p
I know they can be balanced by the detrimental effect on you (whether that’s bleeds or direct health loss), but that’s a hard balancing act. If they’re weak like the conditions you get with Corruptions they’re meaningless and just give you extra conditions to transfer to enemies, if they’re severe then you just sit in the back trying to keep your health up. I can only see it working if they were introduced alongside a serious buff to life stealing so you can keep your health up while staying in the fight.
The point would be that they toggle on and off. While on, they give you noticeable negative effects. The effects are not per cast, they happen over time. For example 5% HP per second while active, or a 10s stack of bleed every second you keep it active. The buff only lasts while you have the aura up, so you need to be constantly hurting yourself to get the aura.
Also, our sustain is just fine in PvE/WvW as it is. So sure it wouldn’t work as your meta DPS build in sPvP (which it shouldn’t) but in other areas it would be very easy to swap in.
Dark Path is good. Really good. With Path of Corruption, one of the best skills in the game.
The only thing it needs is improved tracking range.
This
The idea is to redesing Dark Path’s mechanics. Make it similar as mesmers Blink or elementalists Lightning Flash(ofc with increased cd and other fixes). To make it nontarget and give us one more escape ability. Is it good idea or imba, your opinion?
Too strong. A 15s 900 range targeted teleport with an unblockable few bleed stacks and chill is crazy (note that elementalists with an actual utility skill have double the CD on a skill that does nothing but teleport).
It just needs to be more reliable on running targets.
That’s exactly what I said. When moving the skills don’t require facing, when standing still its not so much that they “need” facing as much as your character is told to turn then cast, and can’t turn. Since the attempt to turn fails, the cast of the skill fails.
Don’t move with melee minions out. They get bugged when you move around, especially when you move over ground they can’t.
It is a bug, but it can be worked around quite easily.
I know you always praise this skill’s healing potential, but even with cleric’s gear the group healing is weaker than what other classes can provide, and our self healing is just pathetic in its current state. If all of our healing (not just WoB) was doubled and could heal us through Death Shroud we’d actually be in an ok-ish spot.
We have the highest raw healing of any profession in the game if traited for it, the issue is more that we can’t fully spec for it and still remain relevant, plus just healing isn’t generally very meaningful except in WvW.
Those all rely on someone not knowing how to dodge fairly easily dodged abilities while getting away from you. Many professions (warrior, ele, thief) can get 900 range from you long before your abilities even get close to landing, others (engi, mesmer) have easy access to ways to avoid your abilities while creating large distance, so really only rangers, guardians, and other necros can’t escape from necros.
Show me at least one person who thinks Skyhammer should be in SoloQ.
If by some miricle you are able to do so, I will provide a 1000 to every 1 of yours that claims it was the stupidest thing ANet ever did. Considering the last year thats a tall order.
Well start finding that 1k because I think skyhammer is great for soloQ. Team queue definitely not, since I don’t think skyhammer (at least not as it is now) should be in competitive play, and that is more or less what teamQ is trying to emulate.
But in soloQ, it allows everyone to completely swap up their build and run something absolutely broken and OP and fling people all over the map. It is very similar to the style of balance that Dota2 uses, where the game is “balanced” by making everyone equally OP.
Have Mark of Blood leave a small water field instead and change the default Well of Blood to a water field instead of light and you’d go a long way towards improving Necro group support.
If Well of Blood was changed, I’d nerf it so you needed to blast exactly once to get the same allied healing, and the self healing was nerfed a bit stronger (so one blast would take it back to ALMOST where it is now, but just a little bit weaker on yourself).
Mark of Blood seems too good. Consider that staff could be fully traited and you’d have a 2s water field on a 4.8s CD, however I guess you could argue that that is perfectly acceptable of a GM level trait (so long as the field itself does nothing).
I agree with 1, 2, and 4, and generally with 3 except that I disagree about LF generation in every build; condi builds have absolutely awful LF generation right now. However with your proposed FoC change, not such a big deal.
Feast: love the idea, it still requires a lot of play from the Necromancer to get the stacks needed to get good healing, involves counterplay.
Signet: too strong, honestly. 7k potential heal (I realize this was thinking more along PvP lines, but in PvE/WvW this would be insanely strong and super easy to max out on). I would suggest just the CD drop, as the passive is also very useful and could help some issues.
Rending Claws: while the idea isn’t too bad, Axe honestly just needs a full rework on #1/2 skills, and until then I’m really hesistent to suggest any other changes. The weapon is simply never going to perform until the #2 skill becomes an actual ranged burst, and the #1 skill finds a useful niche.
Vampiric: Vampiric/Precision both need 1s ICDs with very significant healing increases both as a base and scaling, and Rituals needs a boost to at least scaling (remains the only way to do AoE procs).
There are deeper issues to sustain than just this, however, largely due to how our current condition application works. We need very common low duration access to poison, weakness, cripple, and chill. Its how MM works as a sustain build, and it needs to be transfered in some form to other builds.
The lack of fields and finishers access is a huge problem with Necromancers as a profession. Unless you play MM with Death Nova, you will at best have a 20% projectile chance, and a blast finisher, with a poison and maybe a few dark fields. And none of these can be used in any way as on-demand play, they just kind of happen on accident.
My suggestion is to add play in a balanced way, by generally adding finishers and fields via packaged traits and a few base buffs. Mainly, I want to see better access to poison and ice fields, and better finishers to play with these fields, and to combo with allies more reliably. This makes us far more useful in groups in PvE/WvW because while
Base Buffs
Only a few here, I think in general our base skills are either just fine on their own, or need deeper help than this.
Unholy Feast – blast finisher
Haunt – leap finisher
Spectral Grasp – projectile finisher
Changes that would be via traits
These would be available via traits, some I will list as a specific trait, others will just be kind of left out there as being able to be part of a trait. Generally I’d think you could bundle sets of the open ones into a trait that was just additional fields/finishers on a concentrated set of things.
Lingering Marks – GM Death Magic trait – all marks leave behind a field lasting for 2 seconds after using the skill. Mark of Blood – dark field, Chillblains – remains the same, Putrid Mark – poison field, Reaper’s Mark – ice field. (gasp, staff actually supporting? END OF LIFE AS WE KNOW IT)
Dagger mastery – Enfeebling Blood – blast finisher
Assorted ideas (would be trait/part of trait, not base buff)
Dark Path – leap finisher
Life Transfer – drops a field on start of cast (ice field?)
Tainted Shackles – blast finisher (on immobilize part)
Epidemic – blast finisher
Thoughts? This was just a few ideas I’ve had for a while, made all the more prevalent by all the dungeon running I’ve been doing recently (and feeling like a leech since all I do for the team is WH 5, swap, focus 4, dagger auto, focus 4, dagger auto, focus 4, swap, repeat, with almost no team utility at all, I just sit there saying “thanks for the might guys”). Love to hear feedback, both on what I proposed and the idea in general, and also any ideas you have as to other changes you might do along this line.
Half of your argument is essentially based on “why can’t we change this thing just for the sake of changing it”. That isn’t an argument for change, especially when any changes take dev time away from other things, so making arbitrary changes just for funsies isn’t worth it. What reason is there to not do this? It involves the development team making significant changes to multiple professions just because you want your summons out longer for a completely arbitrary reason.
Is it possible to balance? Technically yes. But you have to consider impact, how things feel, etc. You could, say, change spirits to be untargetable permanent buffs. But then they’d have to be far worse than signets, and you run into an issue of impact; something can be balanced, but still completely feel bad because you aren’t doing anything. If you want an example look at League, when they were balancing things like global passives (Janna/TF) and are now working on Sona. Those champs were fine, but they had to be changed because there was so much power in their passives that they would have to nerf those passives to the point of them basically not even feeling like they exist.
Re spirits: no, you literally pressed the buttons on CD every time they were up. Spirits unbound removed any need for placement. Summon spirits on CD, press actives on CD, spam weapon abilities, and you were viable for literally the highest level of play as far as your build mechanics went. You can go back and watch footage.
You’re wondering about me not wanting variability, by making every single summon the same? As it is now, Thieves/Guardians/Elementalists/Mesmers have duration gated summons, of those, only two of them even remotely have the support for a full summon build (having 2 summon skills that just show up and deal damage is not full support), Necromancer/Engineer/Warrior all have permanent summons (banners are warrior summons), and Rangers have a mix with pets/spirits. This is a perfectly acceptable split. If you want to make those other summon builds viable, then fine. But infinite duration is NOT what it will do. You could make them (the weak builds) infinite duration and excepting guardian (who would become extremely strong and essentially a white colored MM) they’d be every bit as absolutely worthless as a full summon build as they are now.
TL;DR, you have an incredibly narrow minded view of what is wrong with summon builds, and how to fix them. Your arguments are based on completely arbitrary changes that will not improve gameplay diversity, but squash it more by reducing what is currently varied mechanics into very bland ones. You cannot have a meaningful balance change based on the idea of changing something for the sake of changing it.
Love the idea.
They do not need facing, when running. However as you said when standing still you do turn. The issue might be since you need to turn to cast the skill while immobilized, and you can’t turn while immobilized. So you press skill, character goes to turn to cast skill, can’t turn, skill fails.
I thought about this the other day Dark Cloud or something similar, I don’t know how they would see aoe blind on entry combined with enfeeble and if that would be to strong.
It could compete with enfeeble if you place it in adept curses. If you place it in another line then you can get enfeeble and a blind on entry trait.
Master Death Magic trait, have a short dark pulse out from your Necromancer (like a black fart, except it affects your eyes not nose). That would force you to put in 4 traits into a fully non-offensive tree, which I think is reasonable.
The skill should be interruptable. If it isn’t, fix it. The situation shouldn’t matter, it should behave like every other skill in the game.
/thread
Stability stomp and nobody can save that ranger.
Not always an option.
There is huge potential in the life stealing department but it needs to be changed imo from how it currently works.
Instead of true damage / fixed healing (power/healing) it needs to be a base % life steal per attack that scales with healing power. eg 10% +1%/100 hp or something like that.And a GM blood trait that shares this life steal with our party members ( 4 closest allies when out of a party).
Vampiric/Vampiric Precision both needs 1s ICD and major buffs to per hit procs.
VP should be baseline.I never really got why we loose lf while walking in ds.
Or even better we should not have DS degenerate when idle in it.We can have Life Blast cost some lifeforce to avoid perma lb spam, since the other abilities have CDs.
Originally it was a downed state replacement.
As it is now I think its fine. DS is very strong as a baseline ability, I sure notice it a lot more than most other F1-4 profession mechanics. It just needs better traiting options, like AoE blind on entry.
No the only meaningful difference are the skills they give you.
A betting system in solo q/team q would be so funny.
People could literally put their money where thier mouth is nom nom nom
Or I could bet against myself every game, and then spend the entire game running around naked. ezmonie
Now, this leads to a fascinating question; Are the developers in their full right to ignore the customers, because it is their game, their property and their creation. Or should they actually listen to the customers when it counts, since without customers, the game itself wouldn’t exist.
Yes, and yes. It is fully within their right to not listen to us, however they also have to understand the consequences of their actions.
Valid points/questions, but I don’t think that excuses the mistreatment of developers.
I agree.
I think the issue is both sides are very passionate about the game (or none of us would be here), and when neither side will admit a single fault, or communicate well, you get stuck in this weird area where we are now. Unfortunately, I think it is on the developers however to step up as best as they can (in whatever way is reasonable), and be the ones to correct this. We need more communication between players and devs.
(Note: had to exclude quotes for length, each number should be towards a section of quotes)
1. Andele explained this well. Guardians do technically have backstory, just not as direct as the other professions.
2. Putting aside lore reasons for what Andele said, you’d have to really gut their passive strength to make them permanent. Compare guardian hammer to Bone Fiend, it is literally better in every way, dealing more damage, having better CC more often, only it doesn’t last forever.
3. This was directed towards Ele/Thief/Warrior, who don’t have a full summoner basic playstyle.
4. I don’t think it makes sense from a lore point of view, though (ex: Andele’s post).
I think the big issue is that they can only have so many summon-based archetypes. As it is now, they have minions (weak passively, but with strong actives and “permanent” uptime), spirits (walking buff factories), spirit weapons (very strong minions with short durations), engineers (immobile minions), clones/phantasms (profession mechanic). They don’t really have much else to add on to that in an interesting way, except that they can take each of those setups and make them slightly more varied. Elementals, to stay unique as they are now, would be very unhealthy for PvP gameplay if they were made strong because its literally just summon and forget, there is no active play.
5. Somewhat like I said above, permanent duration minions are balanced around their active skills. Ranger Spirits were annoying because if they were ever viable, you have a build which literally only uses 5 buttons to be as effective as you, and the rest of what they do is just press 6-0 every single time they see the button. You’re having to keep track of a bunch of CDs, properly time your skills and actives, and this other guy is literally just managing 5 skills, and is as effective as you. There is no possible way to balance purely infinite duration summons without making them like minions, which I have a problem with, because then why not just play Necro if you want that summon playstyle?
Now, if they found a way to have a different playstyle still based on permanent summons for other professions I wouldn’t arbitrarily hate it, but it won’t happen. It would require them to completely rework all non-minion summon skills. As I’ll say below, finite durations do not make these other setups less powerful, it literally has nothing to do with it.
6. They don’t need them to be viable. Spirit Weapon Guardian isn’t not viable because of the utility skills themselves, it isn’t viable because of how the traits are spread out.
Why do they have to be infinite durations? Infinite durations is not what makes minions viable, minions don’t actually tend to live all that much longer than a duration skill would. Minions are viable because they have the best traiting and overall setup. This can be done with durations as well, and still preserves each group’s unique identity, without turning everything into basically reskins of minions.
Ya, anyone being able to instantly stack 25 stacks of bleeds with 1 button is broken. Even thought Necromancers have awful bleed stacking, the people who can stack 25 bleeds on their own still need to use multiple skills to do so.
Might and boons in general need to be looked at, but that definitely isn’t the way to do it.
Necromancers are the ones who from GW1 had full minion centric gameplay. MM was one of the core Necro builds, and could upkeep a full set of 10 minions (post-nerf) in a decent situation. The natural translation from GW1 to GW2 was to drop the corpse based gameplay and transition it to generally what you see now, and I imagine the actives just came as an extra. Note that Engineers also have infinite duration summons.
Spirits were in a similar spot, the natural translation had them be duration-based things. Note that spirits were at one point essentially infinite duration (they had the same duration as their CD, and CD started on summon), and it was nerfed. Clones/illusions also have a point to their durations.
The rest of the summons are basically just there for funsies. So, to answer your questions:
1) Why do Necromancers and Engineers get the only permanent summons? Because it makes sense for them to, both from a lore and gameplay point of view. Both also have the ability to blow up, so while they aren’t “technically” limited by durations, minions like Bone Minions should never be left out for long anyway.
2) Why do other classes not? Same as above. Duration gated things are far stronger. Also, those other professions in many cases don’t really have summon builds, there is not the traiting to support it (nor should there be), the summons were just added as an aside.
3) No, it would not be balanced. Everyone that gets actual summon builds (everyone except Warriors, who have banners, and thieves/ele who have just one or two temp summons) have their summons balanced all around how they act now.
And as the person above said, you’re comparing different things. Its much better for the game is all summon builds function completely differently, homogenization is bad, m’kay.
Since the next topic is attrition, may I request an appearance, schedule permitting? Sounds like a great topic to discuss live.
Ya, we can get you on. It’ll be on the 25th at 2pm PST.
It’s not something to be fixed, it’s intentional to make them more money. It’s unfortunate but it’s the way it goes.
Make more money by you spending 20c to buy a white weapon?
Btw, the reason for the change was to basically combine PvE and PvP as fully as possible (without changing the whole everyone gets true level 80). It was mainly a change to get PvE players into PvP, and as a small result made things a tiny bit annoying for pure PvPers. Its not that big of a deal though, you just carry around your different weapons (you don’t need sigils/runes/amulets at all anymore though).
I think its too much of a base buff. VP is a strong trait, that doubles your passive time in DS. It might not be super strong for every build but that is fine.
I’m really not a fan of flat buffs to professions that have no tradeoffs, unless they are fixing inherit problems with the profession (and I don’t think this does).
Its a bug with Well of Corruption, that gives you 1% LF per person per tick. They mention it as they lead in to it (although it took me two tries to get it).
Unless you have direct quotes from players on the actual server, you don’t actually know what was said by playtesters. For example, all playtesters say “OH MY GOD THIS IS kitten DO NOT PUT THIS ON LIVE”, on release “playtesters had really passionate and excited feedback on this”. Its PR twisting at worst, at best its simply people seeing what they want to; they did work kitten this map, whether it is competitive or balanced or not, and I can see why players who weren’t thinking “lets throw this in the tPvP queue!” would enjoy the map.
Not trying to say that is what happened here, but this is exactly what happened with Dhuumfire: all the PvPers said it was an awful idea, all the PvE players (and at least some of the WvW players) wanted it. So obviously they threw it in.