Guild Wars 2

Aitadis.8269:

Don’t stack the top tiers and then complain about lag because there are too many people on a borderland.

Except it’s happening on any tier with a major battle going on.

But…ya know…

Junkpile.7439:

Get some PvE players in your guild. Dungeons teach players some basic skills like red circle = bad.

Get some WvW players in your guild. WvW teaches you that it’s very easy to drop an instantaneous AOE CC effect right on top of your head with no 3s warning because PvE is slowed down to -92 difficulty

Jski.6180:

Its simple logic if one thing counter the old stab and you need to eat though other effect to get to that stab you need MORE of one type of effect to be able to removing things fast enofe from an aoe cap of 5 ppl per boon strip. This means that having more boons and gurds over all number would allow you to get by these boon strips more effectively AND having more ppl to eat the 5 person aoe cap all leads to being better to be in a blob then in a smaller group.

Now that you have more effect that removing stab you need less ppl AND less of one effect you need less speed to removing the effect. There go you need less ppl to removing stab now. Having 5 gurd in a pt dose not changes the cap of 5 that there stab will hit and dose not changes lines aoe caps being endless. Its the endless aoe cap that brakes zerg and blob. That is why the new stab helps brakes up zergs more so then the old stab.

To put it simply: You’re not wrong but what you’re talking about has no relevance.

There was never a problem for smaller groups to take on larger groups. This is because with Stability in it’s old form, stacking duration, it gave smaller groups mobility. Mobility meant they could avoid spike damage (Wells) and soft CCs (chills, cripples) and setup their own spike damage. They didn’t need to remove stability from an equal sized or larger group to do this as stripping stability with boons, being that it’s the last boon to be removed, is near impossible without some massive strip like Corrupt Boon (single target) so most people didn’t try.

So your argument that it allows smaller groups to remove stability from larger groups is irrelevant since it was never needed or desired.

NOW…on the reverse side blobs, or massive groups, have an extreme advantage with the changes because where it was impossible for them to really strip stability off before (again, boons being stacked up and Stability last to go) their larger number of players leads to a larger amount of CC which will easily strip Stability off. Simply % wise a larger blob will always have more CC than a smaller group. This CC, when coordinated, can be dropped on player’s heads so there’s simply no avoiding them thus stripping Stability incredibly fast. So now now only does the smaller group have to content with the large amount of soft CC, but they also have vastly higher hard CCs that will eventually catch and separate them leaving them vulnerable to spike damage and they die very fast.

This is why blobs are encouraged by this change. More numbers = more CCs and the more CCs you got the less reliable enemy Stability will be. The less reliable enemy Stability is the more likely hood they will get caught in a CC and killed with spike damage.

DeadlySynz.3471:

The stab change was necessary on so many levels. Previously, it was just wrong that a group could just pop stab and run completely immune to CC the entire battle when rotated (which isn’t difficult). It required no skill what so ever. Now dropping CC on a group means something, where you manage to CC the group or not.

This makes battles more interesting now is it’s literally like a game of chess waiting for your opponents to make the wrong move.

The stab change without CC changes was terrible on so many levels. Currently, it’s just wrong that a group can just pop CC and completely stop any other group in it’s tracks. It requires no skill what so ever. Now stability means absolutely nothing because you can just CC every other group.

This makes battles boring as hell because it’s literally a game of tic-tac-toe where soon as you go for the win you immediately get blocked with Ckittenil both sides get frustrated that no one can win and leave because the only way to win is to not fight.

Memphisjz.1405:

Love the change, nothing was more irritating than setting up a great bottleneck, only to watch the enemy melee train just Choo Choo through it like they don’t care.

There aren’t nearly enough boon-stripping skills in the game to counter the perma stability these melee trains have.

But i have the feeling i’m the only one who has a different vision of what ‘Massive WvW fights are’, 2 60-men blobs running into each other 24/7 is boring.

I wanna see massive fights like Anet demonstrates in their videos.. several 5-man teams trebbing from various locations, tactical siege play, a 10 man team ramming gate Y while another small team takes a necessary objective. For these smaller scaled fights, you should have enough stability stacks

Taking an objective should be a true effort from everyone, not just 60 people smashing on a gate FTW. All this hate on the forums for defenders shooting AC at you etc. Well, if the defenders took the time to properly siege a tower, I believe it to me more than fair that it should be hard to take. Similarly, stability shouldn’t just be a Press to Win button, allowing you to ignore a nice bottleneck trap

Your positions are contradictory. You favor a change that increases blobs but you want to see more smaller man combat which isn’t possible with the large amount of uncounterable CC from blobs.

Which do you want to see more?

Hexin.5603:

Everything just seems to take more time now in engagements. I ran melee last night and still had my stabo for one pushes but having to retreat out of range until the cd’s up once stripped (as expected and it should be). With so many CC’s though it is more wait then battle. Still wiped pug blobs but overall play just felt slower and boring. Everything is too careful and cautious. It’s like one push to drop a few players… range…. one push to drop a few more … range. Am I the only one who feels engagements are much slower paced with this change?

No you aren’t and it’s the primary reason why I, an Elementalist who benefits from these changes arguably the most, dislike them. It slows WvW engagements way down because you either have enough people to just run over them or you spend way too long fighting. There’s basically no way to quickly end an engagement now because CC’s are far too prevalent and prevent quick pushes. This always gives the enemy side a chance to fall back a bit, recover, and go back to using range on each other.

The other night in Borderlands we had our group vs enemy group out in the open and it was a 30 minute fight over nothing for nothing with no resolution. Other side eventually just left to go defend another objective with nothing resolved but a huge chunk of time wasted.

The problem is there’s too many people who simply have no idea what they are talking about or are in lower tiers were their opinions on how WvW goes are diluted by their experiences in lower tiers. I mean Hammer Trains haven’t been a thing for a long time but you still see posts here about them. People say “well just avoid that ground CC!” as if they’re accustomed to uncoordinated fights where commanders don’t have you drop CC right on the enemy’s heads so they can’t avoid it. Hell, half the people posting here in favor of it claim it reduces blobbing when all it’s done is increase blobbing.

Other people see those few initial CC’s and go, “See this is exactly what I am talking about! They completely ignored those CCs!” except what they are completely ignorant about was those CC’s were dropped to bait the enemy into Stability timers so they could follow up with a Soft CC (Chill Fields) and Spike damage (Necro Wells) followed up by actual CC drops (now that stability is gone) to mop up the pack so it can’t recover. They just have no idea that’s how it works and they’re working off the limited knowledge they have on the matter.

Hence we get all this noise which I’m sure the devs roll their eyes at and go, “Oh look…another topic for people to argue over.”

It’s 2015, why are we still talking about Hammer Trains!?!

Bigger blobs and more boring fights.

Only ones cheering this on are the classes who had no place in the old meta.

Literally anything short of deleting the skill entirely would be better than the current version of Tornado.

The only use I have ever been able to find for it after the Stability boon nerf (where it used to give you 20s of Stability even after you cancel it) has been to create a water field with staff and then tornado up to AOE regen people with Healing Bolts.

Even that was made worthless when they introduced “Crashing Waves” on the Ice Elemental.

Terrahero.9358:

Because zerg tactics have never really been the apex of ingenuity. The GWEN meta was just press Stability, Press W in the direction of enemy blob, press 1 a lot.
And before that we had the whole stand densely packed on one spot, and press 1 a lot.

At least, after two years of the same meta, we’re seeing something change. And “quagmire’s” of defense sounds better than what meleetrain turned WvW into. A fight that doesn’t get decided within 20seconds might sound inconceivable to some.

If you really think that’s all there was to the GWEN meta you’re either over simplifying to the point of being hyperbolic or you really have no idea what you’re talking about. In either case you’re wrong. Half you people think it’s a good change to end blobbing when all its’ done is encourage blobbing even more so the latter of the two wouldn’t surprise me.

Change for the sake of change is never good. When you change things, you hope to aim for improvement not “whatever” simply because it’s different. Did stability need to be changed? Sure. However they also need to be responsible and also look at the other side of the equation and realize there’s far more CC’s than the scant amount of stability stacks give and that needs to be reconciled.

We pretty much traded “boring” stability melee trains for boring CC ranged blobs.

You don’t have to wait to see a new meta develop, it’s already developing and it’s far more boring than the last one. Got ranged? Got CC? Spam CC on people’s heads if they’re stupid enough to rush into you and stay ranged. Losing numbers? Drop back and spam enough CC stability can’t keep up with it. The only place it has to go from here is when two ranged blobs run into each other they drop siege in the middle of the field where they fight.

The main people championing this new meta are the ones who had no place in the previous GWEN meta because their CC’s and ranged damage is suddenly relevant.

When HOT comes along and all the maps are choke points you can’t push through cause you don’t have stability to get through CC and everything becomes a defensive quagmire I think you’re going to see a lot of these tunes change. Some people just gotta cut their noses off to spite their face.

The Schedule Argument: Why should I be punished for playing my normal hours?

When you break down the argument against “night capping” it’s essentially people have a problem with equal rewards for unequal effort. More than a few servers only win their matches not because they fought better, not because they used unconventional superior tactics, but rather simply because they had more numbers when the other sides had to go to bed.

The only way to address that is a modular system that reacts to the number of people on the map.

The most accurate way to do this is to adjust point scores based on population. So taking an objective from a lower pop server on that map will yield less total points. For example, for the sake of argument, lets say Red loses their keep but had 25 people compared to 100 on Blue, Blue would only get 19 PPT for that keep. While 10 PPT is better than nothing, it’s still not it’s full value and it won’t skew the score beyond the hope of being able to recover. Naturally this is a rough idea and would have to be fully thought out further (such as windows where if suddenly everyone map hops right before a cap it obviously wouldn’t reduce PPT).

Opening and closing and adjusting servers gets extremely messy. Do you wait for all 3 sides to have population or do you open up another map if two sides have enough population knowing the third is going to be boned? It’s just…messy.

The only way for them to change the effectiveness of night capping is to change how points are granted. It’d have to be some kind of modular system based on population as taking something when there’s less population on map isn’t challenging or difficult and shouldn’t be rewarded the same.

This is pretty complex and would require a complete overhaul, which honestly I doubt they’re ever going to realistically do. WvW is pretty much as is and expecting more or wanting more out of WvW is just going to lead to frustration.

Jarrix.8234:

No matter how good your argument is, no matter how much detail it contains, no matter how much experience you’ve put into it, you’re never going to be able to convince some people that global warming is real.

You’ll never know unless you actually make an argument.

Wish the savages down in the lower tiers wouldn’t talk while the adults are talking.

TooBz.3065:

Frequently they do just the opposite. They nerfed confusion into the ground when if was a zerg killer, now they have nerfed stability. I think they expect that people will just have siege wars over towers.

This is actually the entire reason they nerfed Stability.

Nerfing Stability basically guts mobility. Groups are no longer able to be mobile while fighting. This eliminates blitzkrieg style attacks where organized groups could end a fight very fast.

This in turn favors ranged blobbing. Know what ranged blobbing is perfect at? Defense. What was the #1 thing they said they want to do with this expansion with WvW? Encourage people to fight defensive battles to defend what they own. Like an entirely new map that’s full of chokepoints and Stability is nerfed so you can’t push on through them when it’s defended.

Welcome to the new boring age of WvW where everyone sits in their base and stares at each other behind Arrow Carts.

Lawful.5314:

I know, still stands to reason what i said.

Would like something more permament to define your choice, than being able to just swap out of combat and become a druid or a shaman, every next fight.

Atleast a system like in Rift would have been keen, where you would have to go to the trainer NPC and pay a bit of gold to reset your current specialization.

I mean, specializations themselves make no sense then, not sure why go through the trouble of adding them, if its the same as just changing your weapon.

Logic, there was no need for specializations when you need to get out of combat to change weapons, and specialization, when you could have just directly equipped the new weapon spec.

You take yourself entirely too seriously.

Nike.2631:

I suppose some tanky types with healers watching out for them could step forward and deliberately bait many types of CC, saturate their stability, get CC’d, attacked, healed, killed and then rezed as their side sweeps in.

Would be funny for healing to actually be a thing, finally.

The tanky types already were pushing the front lines. That was the whole Alutristic Healing Guardian frontline pusher with over 3k Armor and 20k HP and lots of Boon Share amongst each other in frontline groups. They’re having problems because soon as you’re CC’d you’re sitting in many people’s AOE.

Healing isn’t viable because there’s no amount of healing in the game that will counter or even mitigate the amount of damage available in game. The numbers just aren’t there even blasting Water fields. Largely this is because +Healing is garbage because it’s been overly nerfed in SPvP which translated to nerfs in the rest of the game as well.

At most you’re looking at a few seconds of Block on Guardian/Warrior, but that’s enough to get by but not enough to really push a line (and it’s still stopped by ground CCs once Stability is gone).

Offair.2563:

“oh noes this affect my hammer train, now ill need to adapt but i woooont”

Please enlighten us all with how you adapt to a larger group dumping CC’s on your head far more than you could ever stack stability?

You can’t not run into it, they’re on your head.
You can’t stack up to avoid max targets, they have unlimited targets.
You can’t be coordinated and rush around, because again CC’s on your head.

The only options with the amount of CC now is to stay range and blob attack back or build Siege equipment. That’s it. Those are your two choices. It’s unbelievably boring and stale.

Haralin.1473:

Finally Engi get feared in zergs, no god mode stability, i like the Changes now CC counts more, no brainless melee zerging pressing #1 staff.

Instead you have ranged zerging pressing #1 staff on Necros and Eles cause no one can push anymore.

Hey come play massive combat WvW with no to a few other players!

Brilliant solution! I know when I go to play massive combat WvW I want the last possible number of people I can run into. That’s exactly what I look for.

Also waiting in queue has never been that bad cause it means you know there will be action there. It’s like waiting in line to get into a bar. Sure I could go to any dive bar and get in instantly or I could wait a bit and get into that hot new night club instead. It’s generally worth the wait.

One Prarie Outpost.4860:

“We were OP before and you took that from us… give it back!!”
Everyone screamed and complained about how zergs and blobs steamrolled through everything – so a change was made to level the field a bit and everyone is screaming how they cannot steamroll through everything.

Everyone is screaming because we were complaining about how zergs and blobs were able to streamroll everything AND THEN THE MADE IT EVEN WORSE.

Nothing “leveled” the field. Now you either blob, or you get blobbed, and if you run into another blob you stare at each other slinging AOEs and ranged attacks until one side gets bored and either builds siege, runs away, or suicidally pushes into you and dies.

Dondagora.9645:

If your argument looks for consistency, that’s fine. However, if every single one of the 40 person zerg decides to run through the AoE, isn’t that enough to deserve them of being CC’ed? Not to mention that it isn’t 9 people’s worth of stability being stripped. It’s 9 skills worth of stability being stripped. And sure, maybe not everyone can get through it immediately? Well, isn’t that what crowd control is about? To prevent crowds from running about uncontrolled? In the end, this is ANet saying “To prevent crowds[zergs], we need better crowd control, but keeping Crowd Control counter-able by non-crowds[smaller groups].”

No one “decides” to run through AOE CC. It’s dropped down on their heads. It’s not like, “Oh well look at that fancy static wall cage 20 ft infront of me, I think I’m going to go bathe in all it’s glory and what do I care with all my Stability hah hah hah…” You move as a coordinated group and go in for the attack only to suddenly find yourself in the middle of a bunch of Lines of Wardings and Statics they dropped literally on top of your heads.

Yes, the purpose of CC is in fact to do CC. However isn’t the purpose of stability to prevent you from being CC’d for it’s duration? If you are going to limit the ability for Stability to work, shouldn’t you also limit the ability of those CC’s to also work? Point → Counter point. Again it’s about consistency.

The problem with your argument and everyone else’s argument that the changes prevent blobs (or “crowds”) is that it’s misinformed. It literally does the exact opposite. It encourages blobs and zerging (or “crowds”), not prevent it. It discourages smaller groups trying to take on larger groups because the smaller groups get stuck in the larger group’s more numerous unlimited CC effects leaving them controlled and vulnerable to the larger group’s AOE damage.

The hard truth is that these changes were most likely done in an effort to slow the pace of WvW action down in an effort to encourage more defensive battles like they’ve been promising for a while instead of just trading objectives. Stability offered blitzkrieg style attacks where while stability lasted you could get in and push and attempt to burst down your opponent and push the battle in your favor. With these new changes to stability, it’s very easy for one side to simply out control the other (again due to abilities with unlimited CC) keeping them at a distance.

The problem with distance PvP is it’s paint-drying boring. Very few classes can get enough ranged burst damage to fully down someone and even if they did it’s far too easy to ress. Honestly where the meta will end up going is basically arrow cart/ballista battles where two sides meet, each drop siege, and it’s whomever out sieges the other side down fast enough that you can survive a push through them.

Coldtart.4785:

BlackBeard.2873:

So don’t you just stack retal, ball-up (to abuse the 5-person aoe limit), and drop heals while prancing in the aoes?

This has never been a thing that good groups do, just like how good groups never had 100% stability uptime.

Trying to ‘abuse’ the 5 person aoe limit is a great way to wipe.

This guy is 100% right.

Balling up and sitting in AOE’s is absolutely absurd and you’ll get wiped in no time flat to any decent group. Retaliation is only good at discouraging glassy builds (IE: Glassy Elementalists) who get the big idea to go glassy and see big numbers when they AOE but have no survivability to speak of and end up being rallybots instead.

BlackBeard.2873:

If everything is a “ranged meta”, shouldn’t groups that have lots of projectile hate (feedback, swirling winds, wall of reflection, traited mes focus) and that stack retal be the natural counter? Projectile hate is an invuln to most ranged damage other than ground-targeted aoes, and a group balled up with retal benefits from the 5 target limit and deals massive damage back to the caster. It doesn’t matter if you are cc’d if you are still doing more damage than you are taking. So maybe melee focuses more on stacking retal, or retal AND might now.

If that isn’t the case, then shouldn’t pull-skills like magnet be incredibly powerful to whittle down the opposition before crushing them in melee?

If Projectiles were the big deal, but they aren’t (yet).

The big deal is GTAOE effects like Wells, Lava Font, etc which is why everyone is talking up Necros and Elementalists at the moment. Might stacking is always going to be big because it’s a raw DPS upgrade.

Only pull skills with good range are single target and mostly projectile based.

Nokaru.7831:

Not “everything else.” There is a lot of inconsistency with target caps. Reflect abilities have as much potential for their effectiveness, for example. It makes those skills more powerful against larger groups. It makes me wonder if that Revenant skill that grants Stability they showed on Points of Interest will be like Veil.

Reflects are certainly their own animal but largely not what I am talking about. While many do cover an AOE radius, they don’t necessarily have an AOE effect to them simply a what gets thrown in gets thrown back out. Even then I don’t necessarily see the issue with capping maximum projectiles reflected as well but that really doesn’t matter much to the stability discussion going on.

PacoXI.7690:

I’m wondering how some people functioned on the frontline before the change if the new stab is a deal breaker. Did you really just into the opposing train without worrying about evading damage and CC because of your stab? If so then the old stab needed to go because it encouraged bad habits.

Stab didn’t go anywhere, you actually have to be away of what’s going on around you now. Your shouldn’t be running blindingly into CCs in the first place. If anything you eat CC so your backline/damage can do its thing. Some peo0le act like it was their stab that was changed, not everyone’s.

The groups that adapt and don’t settle with this “pirate meta” (who the hell came up with that) are going to be ones who wipe the floor with zergs.

What the old Stab encouraged is a different in tactics. Stab meant you couldn’t stop them was on so you had to, as you say, discourage them from being in an area by blapping it with damage. Then, as they survive because they are “bad” as you imply, they’re now vulnerable to CC’s and normal game play.

What the new Stab encourages is the opposite of that. First you blow your CC’s to strip them of Stability and get them controlled and then you blap them with your burst damage they can’t get out of.

That is the problem. Stab is essentially worthless now in the new unlimited CC heavy meta developing forcing people to “pirate ship” each other if you don’t have the numbers to just run over them.

Terrahero.9358:

The previous system wasnt any more balanced. Where do you think these crazy high stacks of Guardians came from? Or why Warriors were so popular? Because they could pretty much go full CC immune for the duration of a fight, with enough boons stacked and condition removal that boon stripping and soft CCs did very little.

How was that fair? Professions who relied on CCs as a form of defense couldn’t do anything, they were en masse neutered by ridiculous Stability stacking.
One skill no longer grants an infinite protection against CC, just a very high protection.

When the arguments were made against Warriors and Guardians CC, their aoe stuns, knockbacks and wards it was a “learn 2 play” issue. Even if you had a profession with little, or no, stability.
And now that these two professions are no longer wading through these CCs with impunity suddenly it’s a problem. That seems disingenuous to say the least.

Guardians are popular because they excel at just about every element of the game and bring a lot to the table. They’re strong, tanky group support with pretty decent damage potential. Warriors were popular after the Hammer train meta died because of Banner resses and natural tankiness. However no amount of natural tankiness is going to help you survive while CC’d all the time. Stability was the only thing that allowed a melee front line to function and having it stripped off so easily due to a colossal amount of CC makes it no longer functional.

In large scale PvP, no one relies on CC for defense. At best you’re talking about 1v1 scenarios where they relied on CC’s for defense, still do, and they still are negated by Stability. To be very clear the problem isn’t one line of Warding or one Static Field, it’s when you have a Blob of guys doing their CC moves and all of them are spamming these down capable of removing 10+ stacks in a few seconds.

The only thing “disingenuous” here is how people seem to want to have limited stacks of stability, limited targets on GTAOE’s and other AOE abilities but not have limits on GTAOE CC abilities as well.

Dondagora.9645:

I’m not saying avoid it all together. Your complain seems to be that a Line of Warding has unlimited CC potential. I’m thinking “Why does that matter if you’re only passing through it once?” because, in this case, if you have a stack of stability you’re good to go through it. It shouldn’t matter how much potential it has so long as you aren’t running back through it again. So, yes, while the Pirate Ship meta is strengthened, the Melee Train meta will still be there, but it’ll have to commit a lot of stability to piercing through a wall of CC instead of just "lol"ing at Static Fields and Warding by stacking everyone and throwing in stability.

So, I say, let the meta change, whether that be Pirate Ship or a new tactic for Melee Train. After all, it’s not like it’s meant to be easy or simple, right?

It matters because, and only because, we’re not talking about a single Line of Warding, a single Static Field, or a single any other form of unlimited CC. It matters because when you are talking about a blob, you are talking about a large amount of available CC available to that blob. It isn’t 1 line of warding removing 1 stability from 40 people it’s 3 lines of warding, 4 static fields and 2 Spectral Walls removing 9 stacks of Stability off of 40 people (and that’s only 9 people’s worth of CC out of say 40 vs 40).

Remember also with the Expansion and the new WvW map that choke points and other limited avenues of travel are going to be even more common. That’s less scenarios where you can avoid those huge stacks of CC because you will be funneled into poor scenarios at best.

All I’m looking for is consistency. Everything else in the game is capped at 5 targets. Most AOE’s are capped. Most abilities are capped. Most heals are capped. Stability is now capped on max charges. I’ve yet to read a single reason why having these GTAOE CC’s that can affect an unlimited number of targets would be a bad thing or inconsistent with the rest of the game.

CETheLucid.3964:

Lawful.5314:

Well, personally i think this whole specialization thing is bull, because what is the point of specializing, when you can swap specializations at any time out of combat, like weapons?

It should have been more permament, like, if you pick a specialization, then to change it, you would have to do a long and annoying quest plus pay a lot of mats and gold in the process to reset it.
Kills the whole meaning of “Specialization”.

o_O

No, thank you.

If how they’re going to do it is the exact opposite of what you suggest, where I can swap it freely, I’ll be quite pleased with that myself.

If you watch the vid I linked with the dev talking about it you can swap freely as much as you want so long as you’re out of combat.

Devildoc.6721:

I’m gonna tell you right now that at least for PVE and WvW, the meta builds only go 2 in Arcana

There are other traits that can be just as useful as 4-6 in arcana that can be worthwhile not speccing deep into arcana for.

what?

http://metabattle.com/wiki/Build:Elementalist_-_Staff_Backline

I never liked escorting Dolyaks but I tell you what…it’s even worse when all it takes is one dude to run up and blap the thing instantly while you got 20 guys escorting it and now you gotta wait for the next one.

Thumbs up to this change!

Terrahero.9358:

Stab in the dark, most people complaining are Warriors and Guardians?

I actually have all classes at 80 but Elementalist is my main and I seem to be playing my Ranger as a close secondary. I actually benefit the most out of Pirate Ship and all the huge CC changes because everything I do now is relevant. Huge ranged AOE. Huge ranged AOE support. Huge ranged CC. One of the best Stability skills (10 charges).

However I also can see an unbalanced system when there is one and not be biased because my class benefits the most.

Dondagora.9645:

Wouldn’t the better solution be not running back and forth through those unlimited CC fields? If you have a standard three stacks of stability, you can pass through a Unsteady Earth or Static Field and have some left. If CC fields were stacked, I see no reason a zerg shouldn’t be punished for all charging through multiple AoE fields. Why should the AoE be punished for the idiocy of their victim? That’s like suing a volcano for burning people who thought lava-surfing was a thing.

I’m glad you brought that up.

For one, the simplest answer is you can’t. When you are running a large scale WvW group it’s pretty much impossible not to have CC’s dumped right on top of your head. This is because of a variety of reasons. First one is many CC’s can be cast “behind” you without having to face that direction. For example lets say you are a Guardian with people chasing you, all you have to do is zoom the camera out (even easier now) and cast Line of Warding behind your character as you run forward. This can cause it to pop up literally right infront of your persuers with little to no chance to turn or avoid the wall. The second, more common occurrence is when one group is pushing into another CC’s will appear right on top of you as you move giving you no chance to react or turn away.

Now the common response to that is to encourage the tried and true tactic of “baiting” out the CC. Bait the CC, pop stability and push through any CC left. However any savvy commander at this stage is well aware of baiting and fake pushes to bait cool downs such as high burst spike moves (Necro Wells) and long recast CCs. Most quality commanders will wait till the enemy side has fully committed and then dump Spike (followed by CC’s after Stability wore off). In the new meta it’s reversed and commanders call for CC first still Stability is gone and the enemy force is stuck (because Stability is so easy to remove) and then follow up with the Spike.

Now a response to that might be, “Well…stop blobbing!” except you see people can’t stop blobbing. Blobbing is like a nuclear deterrent. If one side runs around in smaller groups they will just get squashed by the larger enemy side Blob. The only thing that gives a Blob pause is another Blob (or an entrenched location with lots of siege). Unfortunately with the new Stability changes and the strength of CC, Blobs no longer have to fear each other as the first Blob to commit charging into the other Blob will typically lose. Thus you get the “Pirate Ship” meta where both Blobs blast each other but nothing is really decided.

It’s all very boring because no side can really finish the other off because they can’t commit to finishing them off because they won’t get through the enemy CC. Thus the solution is simple: Limit CC’s that have unlimited CC potential. I’m not saying nerf all CCs, only the CC’s with unlimited CC potential.

A fantastic change admist all the other terrible changes.

The problem in the current system is very simple.

Stability in the old system was unlimited CC immunity for duration that was stacked. This meant that ground based AOE CCs that had unlimited CC potential for their duration were fine. Stability in the new system has limited CC removal for it’s duration, however many ground based AOE CC continue to have unlimited CC potential.

The solution, then, is to be consistent in changes and give these GTAOE CC’s (Line of Warding, Ring of Warding, Unsteady Earth, Static Field, Spectral Wall and any others) limited number of times they interrupt users. If a stability charge is expended, or a person gets CC’d, then the field is weakened until all remaining charges are used and it expires. With the current stability numbers, I would say the standard 5 is perfect before expiring.

However chances are that this is fairly complex and well if things are hard to do then Anet doesn’t do them.

Dayra.7405:

I like (and find it fair) that you now feel like my necro with it’s very limited stability

If it leads to the dead of the hammer train it’s a very nice change!

It’s 2015 who the hell is still running a Hammer train!?!

Sorel.4870:

root.2859:

Another suggestion to nerf stab in an acceptable way that still allows large scale melee combat:
Introduce some sort of stab cooldown to prevent parties from running perma stab: like every 5 seconds are followed by a 2 seconds period, during which you are immune to stab, so no stab can be applied to you and stab stacking gets capped to 5s (or sth similar)

Or an ICD of 0.5s to the ability of a skill to strip a stab stack? That way, a static field with only strip something like 10 stacks on the entire zerg instead of 40.

The simplest solution would be to make it so these AOEs have finite charges so they can only affect X players before they run out of power and dissipate. So after 5 triggers of the effect, the ground effect disappears.

This way the CC generation is limited by charges just like stability is now limited by charges.

It’s all about remaining consistent in their changes. Unlimited Stability is an issue? Okay, fine nerf it. However you also must nerf Unlimited CC potential of abilities as well or the whole system becomes imbalanced.

root.2859:

Consider this:
Hills keep on Bl, one blob at the inner center gate, stacking at the end of the bridge, opposing blob holding the other side of the bridge. How to take the keep (w/o using the north inner gate to keep things simple)?
1. ppl pushing in small groups => free kills for free casters, even with auto attack
2. siege => other side will use siege too => siege wars 2 => sucks
3. ppl pushing coordinatedly, defenders holds cd’s till they push really close, then line/static/cc-bomb the push in front, on top, lines even behind, ppl perma cc’d, 10 icebows and well bombs=>everyone is dead
4. wait for the defenders to push, until next update will redirect you to LA
5. close game and have fun

PS: what really bothers me is from posts you can tell most ppl now happy about the stab changes are ranged slacking behind and most likely not on ts, never seen a gvg and did not figure how to dodge a pushing melee train (hint: they often move linear and predictable)

PPS: with this patch many good warrs/guards are likely to guit the game, including commanders, wvw eotm-style incoming, have fun (WHO THE HELL NEEDS TO FARM KARMA?)

@sorel
its not about using the exact same tactics, also about EXACT timing, banner coordination, stab chains, how often do you hear pug coms hoping for a single ele to call their water fields?

We actually had this exact scenario on T1 last night at Blackgate Borderlands on Hills. We were defending our keep at the bridge choke point. The enemy had sieged down through walls via Catapults, then sieged down inner wall/door to bridge with Catas again. Both sides had siege setup to counter but neither side could counter siege. This left a dead man’s land where anyone who entered would get sieged down.

Eventually what did them in was they pushed. They were unable to get through the huge amount of CC in a choke point and had no way to put down siege against us and half their forces died before they pulled back. Then our blob had the numbers and we pushed through and ran over them.

Prysin.8542:

Use mantra mesmer for AOE stunbreak (2-3 AOE stunbreaks). This will help immensely for groups that cannot spam stunbreaks on all utility slots.
1 mesmer can in theory save 15 players with ONE utility, meaning they can still take portal, veil and mass invis.

Except you’d almost never “save 15 players” with one utility due to how affects apply in group in range (it prioritizes your group over others if they are in range). Also with CC’s being spammed by such a large number of players, a single stun break isn’t going to change anything as the problem with Stability currently is there’s so many CC’s that Stability stacks are being stripped off too fast. So you’ll break CC just to get CC’d again.

Each class has a specialization. One to start. More in the future. When you flip on the Specialization, you get new weapon choices, new traits, new skills. You should be able to flip them on and off at will out of combat.

https://youtu.be/sG5oUKqbIVM?t=5m

Sauce.

Xenon.4537:

No more 100+ blobs in WvW? I might actually play WvW now…

Oh no, there’s even more blobs now because no one can kill them.

See that’s the funny part. People are reading the stability changes and thinking, “Oh there will be less melee train blobbing in WvW now!”

Except what’s really happening is people are going, “Oh look it’s super easy to strip Stability, lets just blob up and spam CCs on the enemy at range and there’s nothing they can do about it now haha…ranged blobbing the new meta!”

Many.8419:

krixis.9538:

wtb 64bit game.

imagine the amount of bugs and crashes for the first 7 years after release of 64bit client

As opposed to the soul crushing crashes we get now whenever we do a large event, crash, and are unable to get back into that large event?

zinkz.7045:

Kodiak.3281:

The complaint here from most people is that they can no longer bust zergs.

The ‘complaint’ in regard to busting zergs comes from NA players where public zergs are well terrible, ‘zerg busting’ has not really been a thing on EU for a long time at least in regard to decent experienced servers.

In EU much of the time the public zergs at least on certain servers, are actually open raids hosted by a guild or are effectively open raids because you have more players from GvG/WvW guilds (or simply are very experienced) than the guild you are facing, so outside of the very rare occasion the days of guilds like RG wiping a 60 man zerg have long gone.

On NA Tier 1 it is no different and many cases it’s a guild running forces around on a map.

Yesterday what we saw was basically no one could push through without grossly superior numbers. If you tried to push through, by the time you were in the middle of the enemy all stability was gone because spammed CC’s like Static Field, Line of Warding, Unsteady Earth, Spectral Wall, etc basically removed any and all amounts of Stability in no time and zergs found themselves caught in CC and bursted down.

People suggesting you bait the CC are wholly ignorant of the fact that baiting has long since been a tactic in WvW and one that most people are aware of. Soft CC has long since been used to bait stability usage out of people and hard CCs were previously held until after the spike since their cool downs would be gone. In fact most baiting was/is used to bait those longer spike damage cool downs (IE: Wells). Most good commanders don’t commit those cool downs until a real engagement is occurring.

The new WvW borderlands maps with many more choke points are just going to exasperate the situation. Most choke points you need large amounts of Stability to get through. With the new map I see it just being huge exercises in frustration to attack anything defended because CC simply reigns supreme now in WvW.

Good time to be an Ele I guess…

Hylgeriak.8250:

Ross Biddle.2367:

If you’re dying in a zerg because you blobbed up and expected stability to carry you, it’s a L2P issue.

The meta is changing. The way forward is there.

This.

\thread

What is it about you guys and your incapability to understand the situation?

The complaint here from most people is that they can no longer bust zergs.

Zergs and Blobs are too strong now because they can dish out a near unlimited amount of CC from their large number of players which can infinitely strip out the extremely limited stacks of stability for you to get in there and bust them. Zerging and Blobbing have never been stronger with these changes.

nightblood.7910:

Yeah, the stability nerf is pretty much as it sounds and as I thought it would be. It just favors the map queue blob over the 15 man wrecking machine.

And a resurgence of terrormancers will be happening in roaming, Im sure everyone with a necro is in joy right now.

Everyone who is ranged is super happy right now. RIP melee except to clean up.

King Noob IV.3560:

i dont get why people play them they look so boring, they just click 1 and 2 the whole time in fights. like how do you enjoy that?

Because it’s hilarious to pop +150% dmg next hit, wait for someone to dodge roll a few times while fighting someone else, and then blindside them with a Rapid Shot that just outright downs them in one go if they didn’t gear a lot of Toughness.

The most interesting part of this is that there’s 4 weapon attunement attacks. The devs said (multiple interviews, such as Angry Joe Interview) that specializations meant the class mechanics, utilities and traits all change when you specialize.

Most of the weapon skills are clearly a dagger base and unfinished however so this doesn’t tell us much other than Sword attacks and Elementalist.

Aomine.5012:

I think this fix is legit, but something else need to be addressed too.
All the CC fields that have infinite targets should be fixed to apply up to 5 targets only. Static field shouldn’t cut stabilities from 100 players, and wall of warding shouldn’t block 100 people from entry.

https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/hot/Stability-Change-Max-limit-to-CC-skills/first#post4842649

Called it.

People think “blobbing” will be fixed by this, but it won’t, people will just blob in another way besides melee train. When you got 20 v 20 or 40 v 40 it’s impossible to avoid all the various amounts of ground CC on the ground. 5 Eles? That’s 5 static fields castable on top of you. Still got CC? Here comes Unsteady ground. And Line of Warding. And Spectral Wall.

Every single other thing in this game is capped. All AOE’s are capped to 5 targets. Stability is capped by charges now. It’s time to be consistent and also make these unlimited AOE CC’s also capped as well.

Azrael.4960:

I think this change may get me to come back to WVW. I got seriously tired of the blobfests that happened all the time.

TS during any fight
“Stack, Stack,Stack,Stack,Stack,Stack,Stack,”
“Might, Might, Might, Might, Might, Might, "
“Blast, Blast, Blast, Blast, Blast, Blast, Blast”
“On me, here, On me, here, On me, here, On me, here, On me, here, On me, here, "
“Go round, go round”

The change in stab basically forces players away from the “one pixel” standard. Not sure how many EU players are here, but the blob fights were brutal.
Now, I envisage players fighting along a much broader front to minimise the boon strips.

The new style of fighting will be lots of skirmishers with necros and engis in the front trying to draw the main group into engaging by stripping their boons and peppering them with conditions. If you don’t engage, the enemy skirmishers and main group will attack with their boons up while your forces will be weakened.

The new fighting style isn’t going to be about breaking a blob, but breaking a line

You seem to completely misunderstand the situation.

Blobbing will still happen. Only difference is the last part where people no longer say, “Go round, go round.” Everything else will still happen, just at range.

Boon Strips are not the issue. The issue is the large amount of CC all classes are capable of dishing out. When you are blob vs blob, there’s enough of them going on that you will use any and all stacks of stability you could possibly have in seconds leaving you entirely CC’d. Stability is also one of the last things stripped, so again boon strip isn’t the thing.

No one knows what the new meta will be. However as it stands ranged stand-off is pretty terrible. It’s the same blob taste only without the old blob finish. Now two sides just stand there neither capable of doing enough ranged damage to finish the other until one side gets bored and pulls off. Not seeing how that’s better.

Lets be 100% clear on why Blobbing or Zerging occurs in the first place: Numerical Superiority. What that means is so long as larger forces and larger groups have a clear advantage against smaller or medium sized groups people will continue to “blob.” So if 40 guys can still completely run over 10 or 20 guys with little to no effort people will continue to blob together.

The Stability changes do not change that fact. Superior numbers will still typically win and Blobbing will still be a viable option.

What the Stability changes do change is the way people fight when in a blob. As some people are pointing out the “Pirate Ship” ranged combat is certainly going to be an early favorite. Ranged CC heavy builds are also going to be an early favorite as Line of Warding, Static Field and Spectral Wall have unlimited potential for Stability stripping. Not hard to see where in a ranged heavy meta it becomes common place to hot-drop siege in the middle of fields to fight.

Where the meta develops from there is anyone’s guess. However until they remove the incentive for blobbing or actively take steps to reduce the effectiveness of numerical advantage it is here to stay.