Guild Wars 2

This is a good idea. We could really use a place to discuss wvw suggestions.

Zelda.7013:

If this were an actual battle, things should get more difficult as you got further away from home. The fact that My team can fight on my homeland with the same efficacy as when on an opponent borderland doesn’t feel right. I’m not sure if balancing numbers is the right approach (numbers aren’t always the problem) or maybe massively nerfing the amount of supply you can receive while invading, or maybe something else entirely, but capturing an enemy borderland needs to be an increasingly uphill fight with holding the whole map a near impossibility.

I agree with this, the best way to deal with the current blowouts is to make it easier for weak teams to hold near their own lands, and harder for attackers to dominate enemy lands. Heres a few ways I can see to do it.

(1) Upgrade Tier locking:

Allowed upgrades should be capped depending on the location of the fort relative to your spawn. What at this means is the only team that is allowed Tier 3 upgrades in a garrison is the home borderland team. No one else can upgrade beyond tier2, that means no waypoints and no fortified walls in an enemy Garrison ever.

More specifically:
Home team :
Tier 3 in NW and NE towers, and Garrison.
Tier 2 in Bay and Hills (reinforced gates, but no Waypoints)
Tier 1 in SW and SE tower ( reinforced walls but not gates)

Left corner team:
Tier 3 in SW tower and Bay
Tier 2 in SE tower and NW tower
Tier 1 in Gar, NE tower, Hills

Right corner team:
Tier3 in SE tower and hills
Tier 2 in SW tower and NE tower
Tier 1 in Gar , NW tower and Bay.

This effectively caps the degree of domination possible in any BL, nobody will ever have more then one waypointed keep. You can still try to spawn camp a weak team, but it will be harder to lock down.

(2) Siege Cap adjustment

This can be applied in the same way the local area siege cap (Currently 5) can be adjusted depending on the area of the map. So according to the Tier of upgrades allowed in section (1) the local siege cap can also be reduced. Thus in T3 allowed home areas it remains 5, but in T2 restricted area it becomes cap of 3, and in T1 restricted area it reduces to 1.
This means when spawncamping an enemy garrison, you will be allowed to place a grand total of 1 cart when before you could place 5. Reducing overall gate coverage from 15-20 carts to more like 3-4 carts.

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These are anti-domination hard caps to encourage the weak sides to turn up and fight at least in their home areas while reducing the ability of strong teams to farm them with fortifications and siege.

Server population certainly matters, as Full servers cant be transferred to.

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All NA servers still at V-High or less right now, 10:00 server time.

A few months ago one of Devs admitted they plan to stop the practice of spamming the waypoint at the 3 min mark, meaning no more use of WP so long as a keep is under attack. But they are holding off on changing it until they figure out how to prevent people permanently contesting gates with a single hit.

Short term fixes that could be immediately applied:

(1)Change all gates to solid mode, no more “hole” above the gate . This cuts out a lot of the less severe exploiting.

(2)Apply the planned AC range fix of 2800 range when traited. Theres no excuse for the 21 days delay in doing this.

(3)Apply full LOS rules to ACs when beyond 50% range. This will still allow them to fire down from fort walls.

This is absolutely game breaking in the hands of players with increased range and increased radius on arrow carts that bypass LOS rules.

One player can take out all defensive siege inside tower just because of the the extra 1000 range. Previously it would at least require 2-3 differently placed carts to hit all the locations inside.

Its been several weeks since the extra range was added, and 21 days since Devon admitted the range is broken. https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/wuv/wuv/Update-on-Arrow-Carts-in-WvW/first#post2023913
And still no progress on this issue at all is depressing.

Definitely ACs need some form of LOS applied to them, but in the short term if they would at least fix the range this would cut out half of the the abuse.

The official stance is that you should use the in game report system as that will include the targeted players account id to help them investigate faster.

However the in game system does not allow you to select hack/exploit as the reason for the report, instead you must select something such as “abusive name” , and hope the GMs get the hint that you actually meant that the offender is using a hack or exploit.

However this is just an oversight thats been in place for 8 months and should be fixed anyday now.

Meantime, best you can do is submit screenshots via email to the customer support dept, and hope they can do something about the exploiter pictured in the screenshots….allthough they wont be able to determine the account name as it is not a proper in game report.

The 5 point trait brings the range from 2500 to 3500.

Devs have have admitted the range is unbalanced and they plan to fix it. https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/pvp/wuvwuv/Update-on-Arrow-Carts-in-WvW/first#post2023913

DevonCarver.5370:

To that end, we will not be making the adjustment to the range of the upgraded skills until we are able to implement a one-time reset of said points.

Can we have an update on the progress of this reset? Been a while since this was posted.

I really dont understand the delay, we know the traited range will be reduced to 2800 because carts are not supposed to outrange their designated counters in ballistas and catapults.

Everyone is still going to invest the 5 wxp points because 2800 carts are still better then 2500 carts.

Almost no one is going to use the wxp reset to remove those 5 points from arrow cart mastery, instead ppl who have wasted points in other traits will re-allocate at least 5 of them into arrow carts if they hadnt already got it.

Dragging your heels waiting for a wxp point reset before making this adjustment for over 2 weeks now is just rediculous.

Kimbald.2697:

The reasoning for thieves is: because they have only a small damage window, they need to do burst.
That’s how it works in most MMO’s: stealth classes are weak to damage and need to hit fast before they get killed.

But that’s not how it works out in this game, even though they start from the same reasoning.

Because of the high capacity for restealth and avoidance, thieves actually have an incredibly big window for damage. In fact: they have several windows after each other.
The opponents are the ones with the very small window to do damage, not the thief since he can restealth.

Restealth is the reason why thieves should do slow steady damage.
And not high burst…

The thief profession was designed as a one-hit wonder like other stealth classes, but they added restealth to it which changes everything.

Good analysis.

I think a possible solution is to balance the wvw thief stealth burst around the weapon swap cooldown and buff their non stealth dmg. This means changing the wvw reveal timer to match the weapon swap cooldown.

So you could start the fight with with the steal/cnd/backstab then immediately swap weapons to a sword/etc and continue dealing high sustained dmg to finish the target, but this would come at a cost of escape mobility from shortbow.

When the revealed timer is up, you can swap back to daggers to restealth and exit the fight, or go for a burst finish but risk another revealed.

Joker.8064:

Next time we will GvG in your garrison

Outer bay is maybe the best spot for controlled GvG. You could close the gate and let combatants use portals in. Theres a lot of room on the north plateau there.

style.6173:

Wow, wtf? Weren’t you wearing any armor OP? I can’t remember dying to a thief anytime recently.

btw, you know that backstab and mug are the same in PvP and WvW right?

The 7k dmg from cloak and dagger part of the combo hits harder in wvw. It was nerfed by 50% in pvp.
Also Food buffs and oils allow for higher burst dmg from all 3 hits of the combo.

And if the target survives the first wave, the second wave of cloak and dagger+backstab will hit them 25% sooner due to shorter revealed.

These are the main differences I can see with the OPs screenshot.

Pvp.2758:

We decided to attack.

Sometimes this game just sucks, had just spent 6 hours refreshing all that siege in garrison….and I could muster all of 2 defenders to man watergate when it actually mattered.
At least the upcoming change to 60 min timers will make things suck a bit less.

Yes, need to toggle it off to get used to aiming carts properly.

Once its off you can still fire fairly fast by double pressing the skill hotkey , rather then pressing once and then leftclicking.

Haru Kane.4623:

Why is this amount of damage acceptable in WvW and not in Spvp? It’s still player versus player, this makes small scale WvW almost unbearable.

Its not acceptable, but the devs havent yet figured out how apply PvP ruleset to wvw without gimping thieves vs mobs/guards in wvw.

They have slowly implemented some changes such as contesting capture points while stealthed.

Ascii.9726:

‘And there running’ is like a catchphrase in TS3 over here on SoR. Here’s a couple “fights” i recorded within the last hour. I think you can tell from the disappointment in the voices that this has been happening all day.

Both of those fights show 20-30 organised green dots about to wipe similar or lesser numbers of randomly tagged folks.

In the first case its a rushed attack on bay, and they seem to have scouted your team arriving to bay and got the hell out rather then feed you free wxp by staying beating at the north inner gate.

In the second case, an attempt at spawn camp has clearly taken too long and theres massed reinforcements arriving from your team, which now has respawn advantage.

In both cases the decision to leave rather then feed the enemy appears the correct one.

I’ve noticed if there is no 3rd server presence on the map, the outmanned buff never kicks in even if one server greatly outnumbers the other.

For example, in JQBL while there is no BG presence at all. We have about 50 SOR steamrolling over 20 JQ but no outmanned buff.

Later if 5 BG enter the map, now JQ will become outmanned….and BG also.

Moderator.1462:

In any case, the team is also very well aware of the AC exploit and is working on it, with the help of some great suggestions the community provided on this that we forwarded.

Heres another suggestion if you could forward it could be used as a temporary fix:

“Arrow carts now require line of sight, unless they are inside a defensive structure that your team controls.”

This fixes any abusive use when attacking, but still allows defending carts to fire over the lip on the edge of walls.

Spurnshadow.3678:

A nice example of zoom hacking.

https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/support/bugs/Zoom-Hack-Example/first#post2092803

I’d suggest your best option for now is to build your carts 3500 range behind the door on the inside ramp of that gate. Not as convenient but they will be safe.

Killer.4709:

I’m not too worried about it as I’m already banned.

Sounds like its just a short term ban by any whichever of the officers on at the time who didnt like what you were doing, and not actually a permanent ban for spying issued by the owner.

I think easiest fix is, the gate must be below 99% in order for any dmg hitting it to trigger contested.

This would require quite a significant effort by a solo person trying to disrupt the WP, and could be countered by a defender repairing the gate back up.

Killer.4709:

lol well I was told only a select few could unban people. Any chance you know anyone with the power to do it?

Might be difficult, you likely will need to register on either the SoR or the JQ community site, and contact the teamspeak guy directly there.

However forum registration (at least in JQ site) requires you to have a character in the JQ server so that you can be verified. Or you can try asking in the public forums section of the sites.

SmokeyJoe.4927:

And before I enter a server I check how much my team has compared to the other teams, the one I played before making this topic my team had 115+ while the red team had 110+ .

Those overall scores dont really mean that much in the specific borderlands.

When you enter a wvw zone and notice you have outmanned buff, first open then main map, and check which of the 4 zones your team is doing best in, by seeing if your team color owns many things. Its likely that you arent outnumbered in at least one zone.

You can click your teams waypoint in the other zone to move to that one instead , or enter it via the wvw menu.

Snowreap.5174:

it’s actually a really good idea to make the timer a bit higher than the intended refresh rate, but certainly not one that should prevent the current fix from going out as scheduled.

along the same lines, do the jumping puzzle chests reset at the same time every day, or do they reset 24 hours after you last looted? (I don’t know, because I don’t do the jumping puzzle very often). but if it’s the latter they should change it to 23 hours 45 minutes, so you can do the jumping puzzle the same time every day.

-ken

The jump puzzle is exactly 24, it should be changed to 18.

DevonCarver.5370:

The build next week will be adjusting these times. To preempt our own release notes, all siege will now be 1 hour, with the exception of flame rams which will be 15 minutes. This should help and we will continue to evaluate these numbers as necessary.

Can you please make it 65 or 70 minutes, people are going to want to refresh siege on the hour, and a lot could still be lost if the siege is already vanishing the moment ppl are starting to refresh. 5- 10 extra minutes would make it much smoother.

What will end up happening is we will need to do a refresh at 5 minutes earlier each time. So we will refresh at 00:00, then at 00:55, then at 01:50, then 02:45.

Zepher.7803:

Ack! well some people don’t seem to have a problem with WXP ranks, I have seen people up into the mid 100’s? already and I am nowhere near that.

can you take a check of the Average Rank given a sample and see if the ranks are actually to slow? some people seem to have figured out how to get a bunch of Wxp quickly. and they are not sharing :P

The people with huge ranks, have been running with organised zergs, and repeatedly killing less organised zergs.

An organized 30 man blob wiping a less organised 50 man blob can potentially harvest 1-2k wxp each from a single wipe, due to the scoring system which allows an unlimited number of ppl to leech wxp from the same enemy.

Ppl will deliberately deal just a little dmg per enemy and switch targets in order to keep the enemy alive longer to allow more friendlys to “tag” before it dies.

Aoe classes can spread their fire to ensure they tag as many as possible, without killing anyone too quickly. Melee classes will move around using their cleave attacks to tag any downed enemys that would otherwise take too long to manually target.
The entire meta is based on sharing the wxp with as much of the friendly zerg as possible.

Recently killed players yield fewer wxp, but this timer seems to have been set too short and hasnt served to reduce the farming, as the dominant team can simply alternate between farming the 2 enemy servers in turn.

Ethics.4519:

Make a thief and play a couple of hot join matches in spvp. You’ll quickly realize you’re not as invincible as you think you are.

Ppl often refer to sPVP thieves whenever WVW thieves are discussed, as if sPvP balance somehow justifies their power in WvW.

WvW thieves do not conform to sPvP balance rules, they have higher burst, and 25% shorter revealed. And several thief abilities have been “balanced” to hit harder in wvw then they do in sPvP.

Until this changes, we will keep seeing these complaints about wvw thieves.
I suspect revealed could be doubled to 6 sec in WvW, and thieves would still be a problem for most players there.

It is truly rediculous that when we do encounter someone using a hack/exploit in WvW, the report function denies us from actually reporting them.

There should at least be report options for “geometry exploit”

Check this thread:
https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/pvp/wuvwuv/Arrow-carts-and-line-of-sight/first#post2047388

I’d like to apologise to FEAR for false accusations regarding arrow cart usage earlier in this tread.
I’ve seen how the positioning can be done legitimately now.

And congrats on your T1 win SOR.

Hi Omen

Thanks for all you did for JQ, and best wishes with your new endeavors.

Thiefz.3695:

I see three rings in that screen shot. 1 ring on the eastern wall. Two rings in the center. Where did the other 2 AOE’s come from? Are you sure they didn’t AC through the door’s gap?

The outer wall ring was a dragon tooth.

I was running above the gate looking for their acs , there was no carts placed there using the usual area to aim through the hole above the gate, the only cart I could find firing at the time of the red circles was at the side corner outside as show.

But if its legit using an eyefinity setup, that would be good to know at least.

Dementia.9543:

Anyone with an eyefinity setup has a hugely larger FOV and camera view than anyone else. you can easily rotate the camera so that the sides of the screen extend to a further viewable distance than other clients without it. The few times I have run with fear they make a point of pointing out that you can place an arrowcart right up against a keep or tower wall beside the gates and do this.

If thats true, maybe someone with this setup can test the camera view at Bravost and show us if this cart can fire on the inner courtyard from the position shown in the 2 screens.

LetoII.3782:

Yup that’s why you’re losing.
Somebody shot an arrow cart.

You may think its trivial, but heres perspective as the only commander pin in EB for 6 hours of EU prime, with almost no one in voice coms and a max of maybe 5 organised ppl from any single guild and alternating in and out of Outmanned whevener IRON ported their 30 man blob in to squash any PuGs that threatened sor holdings.

We were doing very well just to hold on to our upgraded keep outmanned. And we did so mainly by utilising defensive siege.

NA prime starts, and I left the map for a minute to get a replacement guild to buff the keep and replace me, noticed the waypoint contested and ported back to see a golem rush breaching watergate. Myself and a few other started to man the inner trebs and arrow carts that could easily have held the gate until reinforcements came, only to have them shot out from under us by an arrow cart that had no business doing that legitimately, as there is no legit field of view into there from outside.

We lost the keep followed soon after by everything else and had to hand over a red EB to our NA prime team.

The posted screenshots have been removed since they showed a SoR player name openly exploiting. I will send them privately to Anet instead.

gebrechen.5643:

Lifewaster.5912:

So yeah, kinda sad to have spent 8 hours holding that keep, then losing it in such a dubious manner with inner siege destroyed or unable to be manned due to arrow dmg.

Fear has an addiction to such things. This is just their normal behaviour.

Doesnt mean that the rest of SOR should condone the behaviour. Its clear the Keep was captured due to use of a field of view exploit, those honest SoR who disagree with the use of this exploit should vacate it , not attempt to defend it, and allow it to be re-built before attacking it again.

As posted in the the thread.

The traps are overpriced at 15 badges, the trigger area is actually just a tiny 600 length box which can be blinked or shadowshot through. If a thief sees you placing the trap, it will be quite easy for them to avoid the small area in question.

The additional opportunity costs of 10 supply alone would have been sufficient.

Really hard to justify paying 15 badges for a possibility of a 30 second chance to chase after the fastest most mobile class in wvw…..to gain a possible 2 badges.

Master of Timespace.2548:

Shadow refuge => run into zerg => bye bye 100 supply

Quite ironic really, this actually gives roaming wvw thieves even more ability to troll large groups.

The trebs are actually fairly weak, requires stand still for a 4 sec channel to place one…costs 15 badges as well as the 500 karma, requires 10 supply to place.
And the trigger area is only 600 range.

They will be useful to block choke points and prevent mesmers stealthing in to portal, but will have very little effect against roaming wvw thieves.

The trebs are actually fairly weak, requires stand still for a 4 sec channel to place one…costs 15 badges as well as the 500 karma, requires 10 supply to place.
And the trigger area is only 600 range.

They will be useful to block choke points and prevent mesmers stealthing in to portal, but will have very little effect against roaming wvw thieves.

For the sake of just 5 trait points, I would rather have the range fixed now.

Just immediately reduce the basic range to 1500….thats still enough to defend walls, gates and chokes.

Eventually I would like to see basic range 2000, and maybe traited to 2500.

3500 is just rediculous especially when exploiting LoS.

Thinking more about this, the problem could be solved by splitting WvW stealth into two types.

There is already a wvw only version of stealth, available from mystic fountains in EB jump puzzle…. however this stealth ends when taking any damage.

We could apply this weaker version to the spammable on demand steaths that come from weapon skills and combo fields. While the ability skill stealths which all have proper cooldowns, could remain as existing stealth.

TinkTinkPOOF.9201:

What is annoying are the ones who do not know how to play and use stealth as a fight reset over and over because they started losing. Come in for a kill and find out its not working out of them…Reset (stealth), recover make new plan restart fight, start losing again, reset, start over and over and over until they get lucky or I make a mistake in the 8th fight with the same person in about 5mins. It is to forgiving to bad players, someone else try the same thing and fail, they will have a long walk back from a WP to try again, but not a thief, they can reset the fight just about anytime they feel like it.

This is probably the main issue people have with WvW thieves and constantly available stealth as well as the greatest mobility.

You really cant ever kill them unless they make a mistake and overcommit themselves. Considering theres loot/badges and now also wxp at stake this seems unfair to every other class that doesnt have either of these options.

We will see if the anti stealth fields are effective, all though it sounds like they may only be good for choke points and wont effect open field much.

Personally I think that all the existing sPVP balance tweaks should be applied into wvw, and then look at whether further changes are needed at all.

Outmanned players should yield no wxp when killed.

That should encourage the 2 larger teams to fight each other more instead.

Just to let you know, if theres no queue, you can get one person to restart their client, when they log back in they can immediately right click the party members to kick them, before they rejoin wvw and get bugged again like everyone else.

I know its not a real fix, but can be easier then recreating entire party.

Most of the thief balancing nerfs have been applied in SPvP only. This is why the wvw roaming thief seems very strong at times. They hit harder and they are revealed for a shorter period compared to sPvP thieves.

The new anti -stealth fields may be the devs way of balancing stealth while remaining under the non-sPVP ruleset by utilising wvw specific items/skills.

I’d like to see the basic range reduced to 2000, and have the mastery boost it to 2500. The improved damage would be ok if there was a stricter range limit.

High dmg area denial is fine as long as its a restricted to areas close to the carts. And 2000 range still allows carts to cover gates and hold back players who have a max range of 1200-1500.

3500 range carts are just incredibly strong atm, especially when taking advantage of no LOS requirements.
Perhaps they should follow the same LOS rules as ranger barrage.

Its becoming not worth the bother to siege up multiple towers in off peak time, you will either find yourself wasting all your game time babysitting them and getting zero wxp for your efforts, or as soon as you do something else it will all have vanished.
30 mins feels too short when babysitting multiple holdings.

I find its easier to just stockpile supply in the towers and try to rapid build some stuff if and when enemies arrive.

In this regard, all players should start carrying at least some arrow carts on them, so you can build if you find a tower under attack.

If a treb build site is placed inside your safe area, it will vanish as soon as you try to build it.
This is the new fix to stop people building stuff inside those areas.

Arrow carts in forts used to last for several hours, due to an “inconsistency bug” with the so called 30 minutes timer.

The only siege that actually dissappeared in 30 minutes was trebs and golems.

Now with the patch, everything is completely gone in 30 minutes. This is a huge change to the people who used to actively maintain fort siege.