sure, but when u have both self regulating and automated, it would normally provide you some chance to recover. However many times doesn’t appear to at the moment.
Regularly having damage completely ignoring it’s way thru Elixir S, self regulating defenses and automated response as if these traits and utility weren’t even slotted. I only play WvW so can’t comment on whether it’s across all game modes.
1) WvW no longer getting under 5% of the rewards (and content) of PvE
2) Player combat modes like WvW being based more on skill less on grind as originally promised. E.G. faster and account-wide WXP, less bi-weekly OP grind from living story affecting wvw and so on.
3) Increased willingness to listen to community feedback overall. You’re finally starting to implement the first steps down feedback that was given in beta. Thousands of players, some of whom have decades of mmo combat experience can’t all be worth ignoring. New instanced wvw map eventually not based on server locked coverage can be great, gvg areas can be great, reduced bloodlust buffs etc. Please discuss other community advice that has been ignored a long time, e.g. commander utility and general organisation tools (working parties too), defense and scouting rewards, mechanics that rebalance not snowball matchups (bloodlust = bad, a new not useless outmanned = good), balancing combat skills independently for wvw (wvw is simply not the same as 5man or 8man matchups nor pve), making wxp less important and less alt unfriendly (increasing gain rates by 10x would be a quick and dirty way to lessen how long wxp is an entry barrier for each character).
This would be a positive change, especially staggered reset times. It might lead to less transfer gem sales though, so could be a hard sell to get anet to implement it.
My main character has gotten a bit stale after a year playing him, and the new ascended weapons grind makes it feel like he’s no longer ready to play whenever I have game time. I could easily be excited about a new character, but the prospect of starting wxp from scratch really drags against my motivation.
Instead of being into learning a new class, I’m looking around at other games, and that is basically down to WxP being char bound, makes my account, and the past years playtime feel a bit worthless.
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Not dying is massively assisted by an extra 2500 hp, wxp has a real and significant effect, siege masteries make a huge difference in the right situations. Etc.
E.g.
Players: “we’d like more balanced matches and balancing mechanics, so we have more fun”
Anet: “We want les balanced matches, and snowball blowout mechanics so we get more transfer gems”
Can the “I am not satisfied with this game”-posts get even lamer? I don’t like the direction WvW took either. But the attitude of the majority in this forum just made me not interested in any of the complaints any more. Luckily I am not a developer, cuz I would simply ignore such a “fan”-base.
Wrong way around, you put the cart before the horse. It was ignoring the fanbase that lead to the hostility in the forums.
Does WXP do more harm than good? I know many players enjoy a feeling of progress, (not all some like to build and finish a character and then create another class) but does progress have to be power creep progress via colossally time consuming grinds?
The fact you need to grind for years to do masteries, unless you are hardcore playtime and regularly transfer servers to the current wxp train seems ridiculously elitist. It’s bad enough the pve grinder creep is ruining WvW balance a little more every 2 weeks, without wvw adding it’s own promise breaking grinds. Most of all alt play is completely punished with the per character implementation.
It’s hard to see any future in playing when there is no chance of ever catching up, and the alt longevity has been removed from the game with charbound wxp making alts completely handicapped and detrimental to trying to keep in sight of the vertical power grinds.
The wxp earning rates are wildly different between servers, classes, organised versus casual players etc. This is a problem because you always need new blood, but handicapping them this hard seems extremely dangerous for game health.
I bought my finisher. And likely will buy another… just read the tag line /supportinGvG
I’ve bought several finishers as well, unfortunately it may be too late at this point and we’re kind of stuck in a Mexican standoff. Anet isn’t willing to devote resources to fixing a game mode that isn’t profitable and WvW players aren’t willing to throw more money at a company that doesn’t support their game mode. Realistically, they have until Q2 2014 to decide if it’s worth trying to keep us around, and we are a rather fickle bunch…
I think anet’s wvw community represents one of the most loyal and patient player bases yet seen in a mmo. Can you imagine the pve community putting up with the party system being broken for over a year with no eta on fix either? Wvw reward to effort ratio is just staggeringly bad and yet the complaints are polite and restrained. Rampant promise breaking power grind that infests our game mode further with every patch. Moves hated by the community like char bound wxp grind, outmanned staying useless while we get bloodlust instead etc.
I’m very surprised anet doesn’t get a lot more ‘feedback’…
Hey folks,
The addition of the bonus WXP for laurels/badges is simply intended to give WvW players an additional option they can spend their laurels/badges on, it is not intended to fix any issues with alts and WxP.
We’re aware of, and actively discussing the amount of progression we’ve added through WxP and the difficulty for playing multiple characters as a result. When we make changes to help address alts/WxP rank, we’ll make sure to specifically call out the change is to help address that issue.
By introducing so much power grind, and punishing alt play so heavily, you simply hasten the point at which many players simply give up, because they cannot keep up. When we give up we don’t buy boosters as you hope, we buy into a new game and hope this time they actually keep their promises about not being grind based.
Ruins had one evenings novelty, but became toxic as soon as I realised the rewards are useless and using my limited playtime on ruins drops one further behind the powercreep grind.
The main issue is that the feedback added by players are in most cases vastly different and in some cases contradict each other. So who should they listen to?
Yes, there’s a lot of contradiction and threads never arrive at a consensus on these forums. Which means that if you look to these forums for ready packed solution backed by common agreement you’ll be right out of luck.
But if you read deeper than that you’ll see that the good ideas do shine through as does the overall concensus of the community.
You only have to take a broader view of the WvW forum over the last month or so to for it to be apparent that:
- The Bloodlust buff has been a PR disaster
- GvG matters to enough people that it needs attention
- Imbalance between servers and its impact on match-ups is a huge issue
- The broken party functions and stone age commander system are ongoing issues
- There is a growing reaction against power creep in WvW
- The upcoming League is highlighting rather resolving all of the above problems
None of these things are new, they have all been apparent in these forums for a long time.
You asked “So who should they listen to?” Rather than follow a single instrument they need to listen to the symphony overall, because that’s where the bigger movements are played out and where the persistent themes will be heard. If Anet don’t have anyone who can do that for WvW, then they either need to get someone who can or accept that WvW will continue to be a difficult part of GW2.
I wish Devon reads this post, others from the wvw team too of course, but are there any others? Who are the rest of the wvw devs?
Seriously. Can we get fricken attention on our downed state?
Great post by OP and comprehensive roadmap of how to begin fixing it, and actually returning wvw to the gw2 manifesto, instead of the un skilled, power grind, buy advantages, snowballing cluster frack that wvw has degenerated into.
Doesn’t kit damage need to be increased in line with the new ascended weapons?
This issue is increasing substantially with leagues.
It’s getting ridiculous. Get rid of Guard Leech, get rid of Applied Fortitude, rework Orb buff to be non-stat related (+300% MF?). This doesn’t even begin to solve the gear power creep.
Honestly, WvW is doomed because new players or casuals soon won’t be able to compete with veteran players. Without new players WvW dies.
Is the imbalance and snowballing deliberate? Do unhappy players buy more gems for transfers ,wxp, trying to catch grinders spend power on the trade post?
Eventually pressure will force A net to reconsider. The wxp system is very very bad as it is currently.
Bloodlust should scale based on each sides current Point Per Tick. High PPT gets very low buff, and vice versa.
Stomp = wxp should be changed to wxp for participating in player kills instead. Some classes stomp far better than others, some people play support or needed roles etc, so wxp on stomp is stupid and unbalanced.
Would be a big improvement to what we got.
Even in legendary mmo mistakes like SWG’s CU / NGE or UO’s AoS I’ve never seen a population change like this. Those changes were much more far reaching. New content normally means more people trying it out before they decide.
Pretty sure it can’t be new pve content e.g. Teakettle, because not even the 24/7 queens pavilion farm fest had anything like this impact on numbers, or guilds or commanders.
It’s like everyone ask just gave up at the same time, it’s bizarre!
Perhaps this ‘blowout snowball buff’ is just a cynical ploy by Anet to farm wvw players for yet more transfer gems?
During prime time there are normally Q’s for every map, minimum 1 commander per BL, around 100 people on TS including the various BL’s squads and guild wvw channels.
Today however: totally out-manned on every map, no-one speaking in our server teamspeak, no commanders anywhere except 1 guy for 20mins and then he left, no organisation at all, extremely low numbers on all maps, some maps appeared to have no-one at all.
What the hell is going on? I’ve never seen anything like this in a year of WvW-ing.
Make the ingredients tradable, make the crafted weapons tradable. Earn ascended weapons by doing something you don’t detest. Do wvw, sell ingredients, buy weapons. Play it your way.
I’m mainly worried that those who aren’t totally hardcore will start to give up because they cannot keep up. It’s very demoralising to know you have both less time to work on your skills, but also large stat imbalances to make the situation that much worse.
I wish there was alternate version of wvw that used the gear system from the arena modes (pvp).
None will leave game if wxp is made account wide, many will leave much sooner if wxp is kept as grind power class based.
Class bound wxp completely penalises playing support and is a really crappy move for game health. The people forced into support because none else will do it, will burn out and leave, which will impact wvw heavily when those roles are increasingly empty.
Class bound wxp will help sell wxp boosters, unfortunately that is ’ killing the golden goose’ stupidity for the long term.
(edited by Kalan.9705)
The constant new grinds require more than my entire playtime, with no chance to catch up to the vertical power creep, I’m considering giving up. Players who enjoy wvw and play for that, especially those with jobs/lives, fall further behind with every patch.
GW2 seems to have broken several of it’s core design promises: it’s a very grindy game, with pay for power items like wxp boosters, constant and unending vertical power creep, and you can’t ‘play it your way’ u have to follow the reward modes. Talk about U-turn!
Engineers welcome changes to make turrets increasingly viable for pve & wvw. However turrets need a few seconds of invulnerability to even survive their setup animation and fire once. Turrets need to fire their over charge instantly not with several seconds delay. Turrets need to apply and benefit from runes traits and sigils properly. The 30+ major bugs with turrets need fixing, including massively increased hitboxes broken fire rates broken over charges broken deployment range.
Please for once do work on turrets without failing to think about deployable versions and supply drop versions.
Ability to use grenades and flamethrower without 10 times more deadly retaliation damage incoming than damage you cause.
Elixir gun doing some damage and more support.
Better pistol pistol and rifle builds.
Delete bomb radius increase trait, make base radius of all bombs 350. Add a new rifle and pistol trait instead.
Add more engineer weapon choices.
they will NOT make them account bound, they have said that over and over again, but i woul love a way to reset your points by spending gold, as you suggested
Pretty sure player pressure will force the Devs to get over their random stubbornness on this one issue and return to the situation where people can play alts in wvw including choosing to play classes who accumulate wxp more slowly without being quite so totally boned.
Account-wide has come to most other systems in GW2, it will come to wxp too eventually providing people keep asking for it (extremely likely).
Wins should be on skill not stat imbalance & grind time, so yes any measures that point wvw towards a skill not grind basis are good.
Not only a good idea on it’s own, but could be a nice optional area to Q in while waiting to get into wvw.
Where Anet gets it’s wvw revenue from, could actually be what’s standing in the way of positive change. We’ve certainly very little from them for wvw for a year, although we might be finally getting our update of any substance with the next patch.
I think games should be supported and businesses must make money.
However it seems like frustrating design and poor mechanics is what generates A-net’s revenue and might actually stand in the way of decent change.
It would be so much better if instead of milking players frustrations with poor wvw aspects Anet aspired to revenue from making better systems, having happier wvw players, and doing optional happy customer purchases e.g. make any wvw skins for example.
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Refusing to change per class wxp to account wide.
WXP boosters on the cash shop (upto £1.50 for an hour wvw play!)
Poor matchup system.
Massive vertical powergrind and gold sinks for largescale pvp (wvw)
No attempt to use any of the 5 trillion suggestions for a better outmanned bonus.
Bloodlust coming to buff up the side with better coverage.
Huge costs to server transfer.
Subscription games seem vastly superior to this rather cynical milking of players via deliberately frustrating game systems.
The devs want to force people to buy hundreds of wxp boosters in the gem store. Unfortunately they are more likely to force people to look at other games, which is very sad.
It’s pretty much the most broken mechanic in game right now. It should have a 1 second cooldown per target, no fast attacks should be punished more than slow attacks in any game.
I’d put the cooldown on the receiving player, so if you have retaliation, you can still damage 20 individuals from your retaliation inside 1 second, but each individual attacker cannot take more than 1 hit personally per second for example.
Flamethrower auto attack is another classic example. Potentially 30x retaliation hits in 2 seconds.
We will not be changing WvW ranks or WxP to be account bound. However, we are going to be implementing a host of changes that should make this seem less like some sort of punishment(a categorization I disagree with entirely) and more of a character progression system. The first step is the liquid WXP that is being added to the rank up chests which is account-bound. We are planning additional systems as well. Hopefully, as we continue to announce some of those changes, you will be happier with the system.
Still extremely unhappy with this system, and I firmly believe that eventually player pressure can force the devs to change it, no matter how proud and stubborn they act.
I hate the devs for making gem store crap effectively compulsory purchases in order to not fall behind the power curve in wvw.
“We don’t make grindy games”
“Gem store options won’t affect power balance”
Lying b’stards.
AoE ranged damage is supposed to be the counter to melee zerg balls (e.g. hammer stun trains).
The awful design of retaliation has a large part in preventing this from working properly for many aoe specs.
A passive type buff that someone else might be perma stacking onto you, should never be severely out damaging actual activated skills.
It sounds to me like the problem is how you approach gameplay with your Engineer. If you don’t have any stability, then you shouldn’t be running in the middle of the zerg. Retaliation is really not that big of a problem. I have never been dealt more then maybe 25% of my health, by retaliation. On any profession. If retaliation is hitting you, stop dealing damage, and change targets.
Generally, medium armor professions aren’t made for big zerg support. They are a small group classes by default. However, that doesn’t mean they don’t belong in a zerg, it simply just means their role is different. Medium armor professions work best on the outer area of a fight, meaning you shouldn’t be running around in the middle, next to the Warrior and Guardian, spamming AoE skills all over. Your advantage as a medium armor profession, lies in your ability to move very quickly, and take out small groups of players in 3v1 fights. So once you see a zerg running towards you, run to the side, fire in on the zerg with your AoE, and then focus on taking out foes deviating from the zerg. If you get focus fired by two or three players, then try to lure them away, and keep their attention on you. Playing this way should give you a lot more success, as you’re then playing to the strength of the Engineer.
I know you’re trying to be helpful, but I think you might need to be more familiar with what happens when two sets of grenades finish limping through the sky and fall on a group that now has retaliation.
More familiar with the range , damage and retaliation hits from using FT.
Retaliation makes grenade kit completely unusable in wvw for one example, upto 15 retaliation hits for one single attack, returning massively unbalanced damage compared to the damage caused. This is a glaring example of the problem, different builds are affected in vastly different ways because the core design of retaliation is totally unsuited to situations of many enemy players at once.
Some builds can ignore retaliation, some might aswell go afk, that is bad design.
I’m so disappointed that the interesting pvp mode (for me and most others based on numbers) is a total contradiction to the mandate and is in actuality:
“Your can’t play it your way”
“You have to grind PvE and living story crap to not be disadvantaged in wvw”
“Gear grind basis for pvp”
“New grinds every 2 weeks”
“No proper support for WvW e.g. party systems broken for a year! I mean WTF”
etc
etc
Retaliation in wvw.
Lack of stability in wvw.
Kits falling behind power curve vs. ascended weapons.
Lack of utility on mainhand weapon based engineers – e.g. sd rifle needs every util slot to work making it quite 1 dimensional, equally P/P HGH condi needs every slot a potion and is still subpar to someone with 25 might stacks whilst being very 1 dimensional (plus HGH is ultra-annoying to run in any wvw lag).After a year of engy main I’m finally caving and redirecting my playtime to a new class. Engy was never very well suited to ZvZ anyways and with the new changes even far less so. Worth considering alts, if you see well populated wvw.
I have alts to play, (ele, necro, etc.) but they interest me far less than the engi, and it hurts to walk away from a character that I really enjoyed playing for so long. I understand that we’re facing some serious issues, but I’m really looking for people’s experiments in finding ways to address those issues, rather than abandoning the class.
I totally understand the prospect of regearing an alt with several wvw sets is horrible, it does make me consider looking for another game.
Try a really tanky healing bomber build, if your co-ordinated enough with your guild group you can often get away without speedy kits as long as you never fall behind your team. Try 10 0 30 30 0. Heal turret, Elixir gun, rocket boots, bomb kit.
Char bound WvW ranks and having all my wvw ranks stuck on my engy make me seriously upset with the completely wilful wrongheaded attitude of the wvw devs who hear the calls for accountwide wxp and reply “No! F—- you, grind more, we ’re doing the opposite of what you want”
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I have very similar experience and conclusions to you in high tier WvW and ZvZ.
Other classes offer my team more, engy water fields are just too short duration for 1 example.
Retaliation in wvw.
Lack of stability in wvw.
Kits falling behind power curve vs. ascended weapons.
I run healing bombs sometime but it’s just too unfocused compared to guardian, necro, warrior, ele, mesmer who can really specialise on a task and or offer something unique and necessary.
Lack of utility on mainhand weapon based engineers – e.g. sd rifle needs every util slot to work making it quite 1 dimensional, equally P/P HGH condi needs every slot a potion and is still subpar to someone with 25 might stacks whilst being very 1 dimensional (plus HGH is ultra-annoying to run in any wvw lag).
After a year of engy main I’m finally caving and redirecting my playtime to a new class. Engy was never very well suited to ZvZ anyways and with the new changes even far less so. Worth considering alts, if you see well populated wvw.
Doubtless some clowns will tell you it’s a L2P issue, but ignore them, and make up your own mind.
(edited by Kalan.9705)