Guild Wars 2

BassHunteR.7246:

lets say all 3 servers face each other with 30 man on each..
That is not a map blob or anything.. thats jist 1 guild from each server..
If that happens we all know that this is going to be a terrible fight cause of server performance…

in my experience, it’s not like that, with those kind of numbers
but I acknowledge that if you have more than that, there will be some skill lag and if you have many more it’ll become unplayable

what I’m saying is that it’s not related to the map, it’s related to how networked games work

BassHunteR.7246:

- you said i am speculating when i say there will be lag in big fights on the new map…well i am not. […] Now if you have the exact same situation and add even more proccessing to the server.. you really think it is going to be any better?

I think you don’t know what “speculating” means. “Conjectural consideration of a matter”. You have no proof that the new map will lag more than the current one in a similar fight situation, you are making an educated guess, but that’s pure speculation, as I said

BassHunteR.7246:

- you say that on off hours the situation is already bad.. well sorry for your server but it isnt like that for everyone.. it is going to be on this huge map since only 80 players are allowed to go in but today it isn’t..

You said, I quote:

BassHunteR.7246:

And in not prime server time ppl gonna have hard time finding enemies so they will basically PVD just like it is done on EOTM.. you cap it all and don’t even see the enemy.

So… which one is it? Either off peak hours have enough people and with the help of sentries and towers can easily scout the whole map or they don’t. You are contradicting yourself.

BassHunteR.7246:

when i mentioned cannon will kitten your previous work if you lose the event i didn’t mean that it will automatically flip everything back.. but if you have barely any idea of the time and effort needed to fix all the walls that the cannon hitted..

I can barely follow here…

• the Oasis cannon DOESN’T hit walls, only the gates
• we don’t know yet how much will be the damage to each gate
• keeps have 5 gates, towers only 1
• if you have such an overwhelming superiority that you hold every objective on the borderland, you’ll need to repair 19 gates in total if you lose the event (but if you can already hold all the objectives I don’t see how you gonna lose the event)
• remember that you don’t use supplies for upgrades anymore, so you have all the supplies readily available to spend on repair

BassHunteR.7246:

So basically whenever we encounter enemy in other terrible areas you expect aides to pm each other and say" hey there.. plz stop hitting.. lets slowly move everyone to the southern area of the map.. i think that is a good sppt for us to fight.. and when we get there we fight.."
Sorry but that does not happen.. at leadt out of gvg scene..

WvW guilds already get in touch to organize open field fights (not GvGs, only open field), so nothing will change there…
for the other fights, I can’t predict the future, but from the map layout I think they will happen mostly inside the outer ring of the keeps and inside the towers. Time will tell.

BassHunteR.7246:

You fight enemies where you see thembor you drag the fight somewhere IF there is a best location nearby.. a huge map with 2-4 locations is jist a fail concept…

those I mentioned are “optimal” locations, I didn’t say you cannot fight in the rest of the map… you did.

BassHunteR.7246:

Wvw map is like a paper that is blank. You write the stories that goes on there with fights and with the fun moments on TS that you had during those fights.. […] Those are the things we look for.. PLAYER FIGHTING PLAYERS.. not players fighting npcs or beaultifull locations.. […] Sure that a fancy design is nice and to improve the locations is cool but.. If you ask wvw players: What you prefer? A better looking map with automatic events and automatic siege weapons used by npc OR a better server that can handle any fight at all and increase BL capacity to 100 for each server and know that there will not be skill lag. But in case you choose second scene the map will not be as fancy as the ones from scene A or will even be the same known maps from today..
I am sure wvw community would prefer better server than better design…

You seem really confused. If you clicked any of the videos I posted you would have seen that on my Youtube channel there’s dozens of videos of WvW fights. I played more than 6.5k hours and most of them in WvW, so I’m not exactly “a PVE player”, nor a “arrowcart hugger”. I love WvW and I love fighting other players and I think it’s pretty obvious from what I’ve posted after the previous stress test and after this one.

Sure I would love less skill lag. And I think WvW could use increased numbers in the new borderlands, but not in the current one since that would only increase the blobbing and make non-pirateship fighting impossible. But guess what? That’s a different set of problems, handled by different teams: map design vs network/server programming.

I think this map has been designed making good use of lessons learned from the Alpine BL and EOTM:

• the Alpine borderland is easy to navigate, has a limited amount of objectives that are pretty clustered to each other so blobbing is extremely efficient, having everyone on the map in one single big group is often enough to defend everything
• on the other side, EOTM is too hard to navigate, the uneven terrain makes it impossible to fight in most places and the “fall to your death” mechanic is way too punishing, especially considering how long it takes to go back to the fight
• EOTM has secondary objectives with powerful effects (worm, scorpions, etc)
• the Alpine borderland has huge chunks of the map without a wvw-related purpose (centaur and skritt camps, jumping puzzle)
• the Alpine borderland tower and keep lords are not up to the task even if there is defenders on the premises (that doesn’t mean that I think stronger lords are the best solution, I’m just saying that the current ones are as useful as a training dummy)
• EOTM bosses are stronger, too bad nobody is there to defend…
• EOTM showed that sentries reporting the location of enemy groups are good, but a bit too good to allow players to place them freely on the whole map
• the cost of upgrades on Alpine BL discouraged upgrading, especially on lower tier servers, while the “permaupgrades” in EOTM trivialized the act of defending even more (“who cares if we lose it? we gonna cap it back soon”)
• some active defenses were often useless because destroyed before use (cannons and oil)

… and, I’m sure, many more.

AlphatheWhite.9351:

Menaka.5092:

I would be fine with 2.5% if it worked even on chaos armor you get from other people’s blasts…

It doesn’t?

I didn’t test it after the last patch, but I’m pretty sure it didn’t when they introduced it

Temporal curtain swiftness application fixed after almost 3 years!!!11oneone

And active portal cooldown!

And a tiny buff to Chaotic Dampening… still not enough: I would be fine with 2.5% if it worked even on chaos armor you get from other people’s blasts…

PU nerfed… as expected.

Sword AA buffed \o/

BassHunteR.7246:

huge map. This would be something positive if the servers could handle more players on a single BL. Right now if i am not mistaken only 80 per server may joon one Bl at a time.. that is 240 players. On a map like that you are going to completely eliminate big fights.

if by “big fights” you mean 80v80 people that spam 1 because you can’t do anything else because of the lag… well, I certainly hope that this map will help eliminate big fights

BassHunteR.7246:

And in not prime server time ppl gonna have hard time finding enemies so they will basically PVD just like it is done on EOTM.. you cap it all and don’t even see the enemy.

off-peak hours are already like that
with the difference that in the new borderland you have upgrades on towers that will scout the enemy for you, and the sentries will scout the enemies for you as well…

BassHunteR.7246:

Right now server performance is so bad that the only thing that CAN’T happen on WvWvW is exactly that: 3 worlds fighting each other.

I play WvW every day and with 25-35 people per side there is no lag in my experience. With bigger numbers (say 60 per side) the lag starts to get bad and with the full zone blobs clashing the lag is real.

But that’s not a map problem, it’s a general problem of networked games and one that is hard to solve.

BassHunteR.7246:

Now add that same situation to a map with even more processing required.. elemental keeps with lords full of cc.. oasis hitting whole map.. and there you gonna have hard time fighting even 1world v 1world while the other is backflipping stuff..

This is pure speculation.
Also, at the beginning of your post you said that there won’t be big fights because the map is big and people will spread out…

BassHunteR.7246:

Mobs and events all over the place. Most areas where a decent fight could happen, they placed bunch of veteran mobs or struggle points or anything that can and will ruin the fight.

I can’t recognize the spot by your description… there’s quite a few zones where you can have good open field fights, notably all the south zone (between south camp and south-west and south-east towers), some zones around the northern towers, and some spots in the Oasis

BassHunteR.7246:

keep lords and guards full of cc and making it ao that havoks are almost unable to flip stuff

on this, I completely agree, and I stated it in my posts: too much “pve”, too much automatic defenses: if an objective is undefended it should be easy to flip it even with a 10 man group, IMHO

BassHunteR.7246:

oasis event: if you are having a great fight and that freaking event starts you gotta automatically bail of the fight and run to that just to try and avoid anyone from taking it

well, that’s a strategic decision… if you keep fighting, your enemy either disengages to go to the Oasis (and you can flip the objective it was defending, for example) or they stay and fight, so their side will have less people at the Oasis event

it adds depth to the game, and having multiple groups running around is not like you are the only one that can take care of the Oasis…

BassHunteR.7246:

If you win every fight for 4 straight hours and cap stuff and than for a brief moment your forces go to bio or something and you lose the event..yay cannon gonna kitten you up…

Again, this is pure speculation: we don’t know the final numbers on how much damage the cannon will do to enemy objectives… you make it sound like the cannon will automatically flip objectives and that’s clearly false.

BassHunteR.7246:

- struggle points / ledges and things that break fights. Keeps has underground area… big ledges.. towers make enenies forced into struggle points and those situation that if you get pushed off = dead n no rally. Just like EOTM filled with ledges and bridges where you cant really fight cause any push back or fear = dead.

Choke points have been a fundametal part of defensive design for… literally centuries. And the game already offers tools to deal with those.

About the ledges, I can think of some spots in Air and Fire keep that you can fall from and die, but none of them seems like a good spot to fight on, to me. If you can be more specific maybe it would help the designers fix that… claiming that this map is “EOTM 2.0” isn’t really helping anyone…

Dear me:

• stop trying to ress people, you know all the aoe will be there in a second and you’re squishy
• watch for those static fields
• only use blink offensively if you have other defensive cooldowns ready or if you are pretty sure nobody will survive to retaliate

I was thinking about something really similar just a few days ago, although I was reasoning more on a huge damage reduction (say, 99%) when the phantasm wasn’t targeted. Or the other way around, give them a huge health pool, but they take 10x damage when targeted.

If a similar change affected clones as well, it would fix my biggest grievance with Sword and the Shatter mechanic in large scale fights (and make me extremely happy).

Yep, the signet cast is extremely annoying… I love the functionality but it’s just too clumsy to use, IMHO. Also, shares the same problem with all the “ICD” traits: you don’t know when the effect is ready.

BassHunteR.7246:

This feels 1000% more like a new EOTM map than a new wvwvw map.
And dont you dare saying it is the same thing.. it isn’t.
It feels like ANET is removing wvw from game and replacing it by EOTM 1.0 and now EOTM 2.0
sad

EOTM hasn’t replaced WvW. Nobody but upscaled and karma farmers play there (and the occasional guild farming free bags).

In EOTM there’s no incentive in defending at all. Keeps are always upgraded as soon as you flip them. Green side is disproportionately advantaged and theres maybe 2 or 3 spots in the whole, huge map, where you can have a decent fight…

The desert borderland has nothing of that.

The only thing that is similar is that it takes time to go from one side to the other of the map. And that’s a good thing because it means you can’t cover the whole map with one single blob of 60-80 people, you need to split up your forces, you need people defending or attacking secondary objectives (camps, dolyaks, shrines) that are even farther out of the way.

And on top of that, every few hours you’ll need to be able to win the Oasis event while keeping an eye on all the other objectives and that requires a lot of coordination and even PvP skill. And after the event you need groups ready to be able to repair the damage done if you lost or ready to cap the objectives damaged by the cannon if you won.

That said, I’m somewhat curious to know in what you think this map is similar to EOTM.

Chaos Archangel.5071:

When portal was on an (untraited) 60s cool down.

also, no limit on how many players you could portal…

Dondagora.9645:

Then how else will us mesmers screw and troll others by porting them onto suicide cliffs?

… or inside walls and gates?

Edit: range and timer on Portal are probably one of the most requested features in these forums since the start of the game

Hey para, welcome to the fabulous world of mesmers!

I didn’t have the time to put up a proper post about my raid builds after the patch, but I’ll link you what I’m playing with my guild.

Supportive build – this is intended for the “veilbot” mesmer. Brings tons of utility to your raid and still packs a lot of damage.

Sniper build – this is more oriented to damage. You lose PU (for longer veil), but you gain one more charge on MoP, fury for you and your iZerker. You can try this variation for sharing lots of might with your party (ideally other backliners).

If you are new to the game and not used to play a “squishy” power mesmer in a zerg, you can go for a mix of Soldier (Power, Vitality, Toughness), Knights (Toughness, Precision, Power) and Cavalier (Toughness, Ferocity, Power) to be more tanky. Also, you can lose the Pack/Strength/Hoelbrak runes in favor of something cheaper like Ruby Orbs or Runes of Rage and you can use the “major” (rare) sigils for everything EXCEPT the Sigil of Energy.

If you have any questions feel free to ask here or in game

Fay.2357:

Curunen.8729:

When blurred frenzy was godmode every 8s traited.

When blurred frenzy could be used to make trebuchet shots in WvW go poof…

… when you wouldn’t kill yourself by using BF on 3 targets with retaliation …

Also posted a video about the Dune Roller (aka “Charr Carr”) enjoy!

ZedforZee.1284:

I’ve felt lost myself in the Fire Keep. I saw my party members on the mini-map just where I stand, but because of the multi-layer terrain design I went in circle, and it took for ages to me to reach them. Maybe it’s not a design error, rather the keep was a terra incognita for me, but at that moment I would pay for a tourist guide or a multi-layer map – like the one that we have on the racial capitals right now.

I posted a video with a few hints about navigating the west side of the map

I’m not gonna despair before I test all this stuff, but all in all it doesn’t seem to fix Chrono in WvW large scale battles…

Robert Gee.9246:

BWE3 will change the single block to a continuous block … Tides of Time has some new behavior to bounce if it hits a wall

This sounds good and I’m looking forward to see how it works.

Robert Gee.9246:

Illusionary Avenger: Increased damage of this phantasm by 20%. Fixed a bug which prevented this skill from displaying the benefit from Empowered Illusions. Increased alacrity given to 2 seconds per hit. This phantasm no longer shoots a bouncing projectile but instead initiates a melee attack that slows enemies and gives alacrity to allies within a 240 radius around the target.

In large scale fights, I can’t rely on illusions. Every WvW mesmer has to put up with his own class mechanic being completely broken in this scenario, so I wasn’t really betting my money on iCap… and I really love the buffs, but… I’m concerned that the melee attack will never hit. If it doesn’t, will the phantasm pulse alacrity anyway? Also, the requirement for melee range will make this another suicidal maniac illusion, ready to step in all the AoEs and cleaves where it will be obliterated in a split second

Robert Gee.9246:

Gravity Well: Now performs a knockdown, float and then pull. No longer gives stability on end. Increased final damage by 50%

I liked the triple pull, but functionally this should work the same. I’ll test it and see…

Robert Gee.9246:

Well of Action: Increased damage per pulse by 17%. Lowered aftercast by 0.2 seconds.

I’m not one of those moaning about the buffs, but… you still need to sit in it (or around it and then jump in) for 3 seconds for Quickness.

Robert Gee.9246:

Well of Calamity: Lowered aftercast by 0.2 seconds.

I already stated elsewhere that the damage on this well feels low even when the enemies will stick in it for the full duration, not that many of them will… it simply doesn’t work. And the conditions given off by a single tick, even if nice, are not enough to give up Mantra of Pain damage and support/survival, even with all the clumsyness of a 2.75s cast.

Robert Gee.9246:

Well of Eternity: No longer gives vigor per pulse to allies but instead removes conditions from them. Increased recharge to from 25s to 30s. Increased base initial heal by 25%

The changes seem good, except the cooldown increase. Wasn’t it 20s in BWE2? A 50% increase on CD seems hardly justified.

Robert Gee.9246:

Well of Precognition: Updated functionality. Now gives blur for 1 second per pulse during its active portion instead of on end. When it ends, allies within the well regain 35 endurance.

Wait… so the Unblockable is gone? It’s now a purely defensive spell?
The Unblockable thing was the only useful part of the previous iteration, considering the bug (unlimited targets) on Communal Defenses that makes everyone in the melee zerg block constantly…

Robert Gee.9246:

Well of Recall: Lowered recharge from 45 seconds to 40 seconds. Updated functionality of this well. It now chills for 1 second and deals damage every pulse then gives 5 seconds of alacrity to allies when it ends. New pulse damage is 70% of previous end damage. Effects have been updated to reflect this new behavior.

I’m pretty sure that this alacrity on the last pulse will never land in WvW. Make this 2s Alacrity per Pulse. And 2s Chill. And maybe it’ll be worth the 1s cast time (I’m still adamant that all wells should have 0.25s cast time like the necro’s) and 40s CD…

Robert Gee.9246:

Lost Time – Added a 0.25 second delay between earning stacks of this buff

Does this work correctly with Tides of Time on a large number of targets?

apharma.3741:

If I could make 1 change to chrono, just one change, I would increase the damage on associated wells considerably. Right now I feel mantra of pain simply out performs them damage wise.

It’s bad enough you need to sit in the well for 3s to get the “big” damage but when it’s pathetic damage it feels like a bit of a sting. It would help make wells a little more viable in WvW…though not likely.

The damage on the wells is very low even assuming the target will actually stay in the well for the whole duration… I’ve seen Gravedigger (1.25s cast) “heavy damage” crit in excess of 13k with targets under 50% health (with instant cooldown reset), while I’ve never seen more than 6k on the “massive damage” from the last tick of Well of Calamity (0.75s + 3s pulse).

On top of that, if I’m running Inspiration, Mantra of Pain gives me AoE heals every few seconds and channeling it gives me 600 toughness… I don’t see any reason to take the well over MoP for WvW.

I’m sorry for adding again, but I’m going over my recordings and screenshot and noticed a few more things:

Charr carr

• Smoke Screen: the field in the tooltip is “Dark”, but should be “Smoke”. If I remember correctly, we tested it with a thief blast and it gave us Stealth, so probably the tooltip is wrong
• Pounce: the blast finisher on this skill didn’t seem to work on the Smoke Screen, or on any other field
• Incendiary Rocket Barrage: this skill seems to be a triple fire field (for a very limited amount of time)

Rework the “wells will give you something in 3 seconds” mechanic OR give me some other way to gain alacrity in large scale fights where I don’t have the luxury of shattering 3 illusions all the time (and no, sitting in a well for 2s alacrity is not a good solution for that).

Manvaeris.9857:

No underground-map for the fire keep

I had this as well, again, and it’s quite annoying!

Chiccotot.7296:

Exactly why i said the fight guilds cause server instability, is because of this. WvW isnt GvG. Thanks to the ANET people for coming up with GvG portion so we can be rid of people who think they are the lifeblood of WvW but does very little WvW-ing themselves. (read: wvw isnt just fighting blob vs blob)

After that, GvG arena is out, we can build a stable and proper WvW community that cares about something else apart from getting fights. :p

I’m sorry but… what’s the point of upgrading a keep if you don’t plan to have to defend it?

WvW is a Players vs Players mode, not Siege vs Players mode… the guilds that are fighting players are keeping attackers away from your precious upgraded keeps, you should thank them instead of shunning them…

Another bug I noticed with Lava hounds and Charr car is that the player inside had to be stomped twice after they died, I’m gonna post a clip Soon™.

Edit: posted the charr car double stomp bug video: https://youtu.be/Z9TQNVMyFiU

BrickFurious.7169:

The map. It’s amazing. Caters a lot to roamers and havoc groups, it’s a beautiful map, and I think it’s very cleverly organized. Also I love the verticality. You will get a lot of grief about it early on, don’t let it dissuade you. The map definitely has a learning curve but it felt a lot less maze-like by the end of the test.

Yeah, being on the second stress test myself, the map made a lot more sense and I could find my way around a bit easier. But it’ll take time to learn the best paths between two points, keeping in considerations the shortcuts that you may or may not use (holding keeps, etc).

BrickFurious.7169:

The lords: The earth keep lord actually felt great to me; you can avoid his shockwave by jumping over it, the rock walls he throws up are awesome and fit the theme of the keep well, and his damage is high but not too high. I actually managed to solo him near the end of the test.

Thank you for mentioning the rock walls!
BUG: during the Earth keep fight, one of my friends got stuck inside one of the rock walls and when the wall went below the floor, it brought my friend with it (stuck in the wall and then inside the floor!)

BrickFurious.7169:

The air keep lord though…where do I begin. I think the biggest problem is when the air turrets were turned on in the lord room. I don’t know if they’re always turned on, but they were whenever we fought the lord. And it was ridiculous. Like, a group of 6 of us almost got wiped with no defenders

We tested a strategy for that lord: sitting outside the circle on the south side and hitting it only with ranged stuff. The lord was “stuck” inside the circle and couldn’t damage us.
Not sure if “clever use of game mechanics” or a bug.

BrickFurious.7169:

The air turrets in general. There needs to be some kind of warning before they go off

They could start lighting up a fraction of a second before going off, yeah.

BrickFurious.7169:

Yak-less upgrading. I posted this in another thread too. I love the automatic upgrades. But the mechanic where the timer keeps ticking down, and a successful yak escort just reduces the timer, felt very unrewarding to me, and seemed to diminish the importance of yaks (as well as all the yak guild upgrades and the invulnerable yaks tactic)

I somewhat agree, I think it’s a bit unfair that even if you completely starve a keep for supplies, it will upgrade anyway. But we’ll see with the changes on upgrade time!

That was a proper wall of text! If you read till here, you rock!

Overhauled Guild Claiming

The objective upgrades UI allows you to see in game the status of every objective, including which guild claimed it and which upgrades are available and even the cooldown on them. This is important strategical information readily available for commanders. Very nice!

I didn’t find an easy way to check which objective my current guild has claimed: it was pretty confusing and time-consuming to click on every objective to see which one had the guild upgrades available.

About the UI: it took me a while to understand that you needed to double-click the upgrade to apply it to the currently selected slot. And another thing: you can overwrite previously selected upgrades – including upgrades that are ready to use – without being asked for confirmation.

Not sure if working as intended: if the guild that claimed the objective didn’t select any upgrade for a specific slot, anyone can pick one.

Bug: for some reason, I got the guild buffs (magic find, stats, etc) near an enemy keep.

Players being marked on map

In general, I liked this feature. I’m pretty sure players that are concerned with the defense will love it, but it was really buggy, I was “marked” most of the time, sometimes even marked inside the lordroom of our own keep!

Having the players marked after flipping a keep is a good thing, but for example it happened to us that we managed to breach outer fire keep, we got inside, some of our group got killed but my friends and I managed to hide and stealth, ready to provide a portal after the enemy repaired the gate and went back to other objectives.

Other random bugs

• Mesmer GS clones refused to attack NPCs (keep lords in particular)
• Some cannons still fail to hit the gate (south west tower for sure, maybe others)
• There’s one spot on north-east of fire keep where you get lava damage even if you are on earth

Guild banners, Charr carrs, Lava hounds

In general, I would like for these strong transformations (excluding the Charr car) to be available only inside the radius of the objective they are generated from. It felt “wrong” to fight a Lava hound at south camp. If it were possible I would:

• for banners, teleport the banner back to the Tactivator if it’s brought outside the objective area
• for lava hounds, remove the effect from the player leaving the fire keep area (and maybe reset the cooldown inside the keep)
• the charr car is an attack vehicle (siege damage!) so it’s fine for it to leave the objective area

The turtle banner felt decently balanced (except for the bugs, see below). The damage is quite low but it’s ok. It’s a defensive weapon.

The centaur banner felt a bit disappointing: not much damage, altho the utility from the skill 4 is nice. The skill 5 is basically a mix of Tornado and Plague, but you can’t heal during it’s duration and if I remember correctly you don’t get any bonus HP.

I didn’t get to personally test the Dragon banner, but as a victim of the skills, the damage felt a bit on the OP side.

Not sure if working as intended:

• The Charr car stun removes the full defiant bar from dinosaurs in the Oasis (and I guess from players with the defiant buff)

Bugs:

• Banners don’t have shared cooldowns, if you drop the banner and someone else picks it up you can use the same skill multiple times in a row (particularly bad on turtle banner 3 skill)
• The centaur banner doesn’t have a buff icon displaying the remaining duration
• The turtle banner skill 4 (the wall that gives resistance) allows you to go through multiple times and stack about 30s resistance (maybe if you find a fix for this, fix Temporal Curtain as well!)
• It is way too easy with the Charr car to gain distance, exit combat and refill your HP

Autonomous defenses for towers and keeps

I know that “guard duty” is boring and nobody wants to do something boring in a game, but the amount of “automatic defense” (some may say “PVE”) in WvW is getting out of hand.

In my opinion, defensive siege used by players should be able to slow down attackers (not wipe them like it currently happens with superior ACs) until reinforcements arrive, but automatic defenses (guards and autocannons) should be a minor nuisance: if an objective is NOT defended by players, it should fall easily to an enemy group. The guards marking enemy groups moving around the map and the huge amount of HP on gates and walls should provide enough reaction time for players to go and defend the objective.

Guild autocannons must go. Or be heavily nerfed. Gates are already the easiest position to defend with cannons, arrowcarts, oil (and, sadly, trebs behind the gates). Adding those autocannons to the mix is a terrible idea. I’ve seen groups of 5 to 10 experienced wvw players struggle and being pushed back by autocannons and guards inside enemy keeps. That is not acceptable.

With the current map design I think many of the fights will end up being inside towers and keeps. Fighting (players vs players) in the middle of arrowcart fire is already nearly impossible and I was already concerned with the amount of space all the keeps and towers have for deploying defensive siege, but during this stress test I rarely have seen somebody build an AC:

• guards are easily hitting for 5k and have insanely strong CC
• guild-upgraded cannons can only be destroyed by siege, so they are available to players and can drop tons of damage and CC
• guild autocannons were hitting for 3-3.5k with a knockdown on top: I got nearly stunlocked to death more than once

if you think that organized groups will look forward to fighting in that hell against other organized groups, you are terribly mistaken.

So what will this game become? Siege Wars 2? Trebuchets hitting from max range for hours to drop the walls of upgraded keeps? Counter trebs? Counter-counter trebs?

This game has an amazing combat system, please don’t waste it by forcing the large scale PvP to be all about hour-long sieges!

First things first: thank you for inviting me again!
It was fun and we made a lot of SCIENCE!

Before my full report, there’s a big premise to be made: these “stress tests” could really use more bodies. During my experience I’ve rarely seen more than 10-15 players on each side and we never had a proper 3-way fight. In these conditions is hard for players to “weight” the fights that are possibly designed for more players.

For example, today we ended up in Earth Keep lord room with 5 players, and between the lord, the guards and some defenders, there was no chance for us to capture the objective.

I’m not sure what happened… many people who I spoke to said that either them or their friends didn’t receive the invitation E-Mail and had to check on the website, but I’m pretty sure there was a lot less people online during this test than during the previous test. And this time only one borderland was open!

Now let’s see my notes…

Oasis event

I’m gonna post a video for all the people that were screaming “OH NOES PVE EVENT”, because it’s not a PVE event. It has been a PVP massacre and I enjoyed every minute of it

I’m a bit concerned with the effectiveness of the event, tho. The first time, when I reached a fully upgraded gate after the event, it was at around 95% so I thought winning the event would do about 5% damage to a fully upgraded gate, but then the second time the gate was down to around 50%. I’m confused. Maybe the first time got repaired. Maybe the second time was already damaged. I don’t know…

I know I’m super late to the party, but I want to leave my feedback.
As usual, I’m thinking from a WvW / organized group perspective.

Wells

I think the design decision to have the well effects delayed to the last tick punishes the Chronomancer unnecessarily.
I cannot fathom why ANet wanted the chrono wells to work like this, but at the moment the only well that I would pick is Gravity Well because it gives me consistently a strong CC on EVERY tick.

Well of Calamity: the utility is nice, but the damage is absolutely not adequate considering it has 0.75s cast time and the “big” damage lands after 3 seconds. I don’t know what kind of enemies you fight, but my enemies tend to get away from red circles ASAP.
Well of Action: the utility is somewhat decent. The Slow application is ok, but delaying quickness to the last tick is just… clumsy. Counter-intuitive. The damage is ridicolously low and, again, 0.75s cast time. WHY?!
Well of Precognition: arguably our “strongest” support well, does ZERO damage. But for some reason it’s a stun breaker.
Well of Recall: so OP that needs a whole second cast time. A whole second. If you sit in the well for 3 seconds you lower the CD on your skills by… what… less than 2 seconds? WOW. Totally deserves a kitten CD.

Then we have our “look at me, I have a death wish!” healing skill that tells everyone that in 3 seconds we’ll be inside the circle and we’ll be in need of healing. It’s a trap!

Shield

I really liked the double block/double phantasm mechanic on shield for open world PVE and small scale WvW. It’s quite useless for large scale WvW where the phantasm won’t even spawn because the attackers are out of range and he would die to AoE anyway.
But the real deal breaker is Tides of Time. I wanted this skill so badly, I loved the concept, the unlimited targets you could stun. I used it profitably in some small AND large scale situations, BUT… but it’s so BUGGY that I can’t rely on it at all. If there’s a pebble, a tree or anything else on the path, the wall will disappear, leaving you often with the full cooldown. Terrible.

Traits

All’s Well that Ends Well: I find it extremely disappointing, but everybody seems happy with the 2 seconds alacrity rewarded for sitting in the well (or nearby) for 3 seconds. I don’t see any reason to pick it.
Delayed Reactions: the best thing I can say about this is that it doesn’t have an internal cooldown. Would be perfect if Tides of Time wasn’t so broken…
Time Catches Up: love it for shatter builds. But that means small scale WvW… in large scale your clones will die.
Flow of Time: love it, in general, but I’m a bit disappointed with the nerf. In large scale wvw it’s rare to have the luxury of shattering more than one illusion, so the amount gained from this (untraited) is quite low.
Danger Time: it’s really hard to tell how effective it is in large scale battles because I can’t really see how many enemies have slow applied to them
Illusionary Reversion: still love it for small scale, even after the nerf.
Improved Alacrity: very hard to tell if it’s worth taking over Danger Time with large scale pvp in mind.
Time Marches On: love it, of course…
Chronophantasma: with sub-second daze you could hope for a second run from izerker if you have the protected phantasms trait, but in the current iteration that hope is… shattered.
Lost Time: couldn’t really say how much Slow I was dishing out in enemy zergs using this, but it’s probably a fair amount
Seize The Moment: love it for both small and large scale. Quickness on demand is just lovely!

Chronomancer: yes or no?

It’s really hard to say. You have some obvious perks, but none of the traits or the skills feels “mandatory”. The current iteration of Gravity Well is really good for organized groups, but what to give up for going into Chrono? The support that comes from Chaos or Inspiration? Or the damage and CC you can provide with Domination?
It’s a hard bargain.

TirzahBauer.7238:

Thank you! I have patched these up

woohoo \o/
thank you for the amazing work

In the necropolis lie, most appropriately, the bodies of all the mesmers that failed to blink. RIP.

I’ve seen some really weird pathing in some places… gonna post some videos in the next few days.

A friend of mine showed me this other exploit to enter Air keep, again, I don’t think it was there on the previous beta:

https://youtu.be/reWpqEYv3hU

Synosius.9876:

The new LoS coding works ok on this map with the extra high walls but its going to destroy EBG. Defensive sieging has become straight forward, undermining specialist like myself and we will go the way of the dinosaur.

let me get this straight… you are complaining that they fixed a bug that you and other “specialists” like you abused for 3 years?

Synosius.9876:

The NPCs and automated defenses are god awful strong.

I somewhat agree with this. The autocannons above the gate need to go, or need to be heavily toned down (for example: they could go on 10s “overheat” every 10s of firing)

Synosius.9876:

Try to attack something with 10 players, you dont have much of a chance if even just 1 enemy comes to defend. Small groups have no chance.

Small unorganized groups, maybe… a 10 man guild can easily cap lightly defended towers and probably keeps.

Synosius.9876:

My prediction is that attacking a tower or keep will be building a dozen trebs at max distance and throwing rocks for 30m until a wall breaks. Theres always the standard… just swarm the objective with 50 ppl and 10 omegas method. I dont think anyone is excited about this new type of wvw.

… new? Where have you been playing the last 3 years?

I started testing late tonight, but I found a way to get into Earth keep.
Not sure if it was there the last time:

https://youtu.be/ajAh5tjDrwk

Fingers crossed to see this fixed before the release!

Posted video proof: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WWIgrtmI7mY

Posted video proof: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WWIgrtmI7mY

PLEASE ANet hotfix this…

Posted video proof: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WWIgrtmI7mY

PLEASE ANet hotfix this…

Can confirm, just tested in pvp.

Power Break—Mantra of Concentration: Fixed a bug that caused this skill to apply more than the listed number of stability stacks.

Because for those 2 second duration, 2 stacks was a lot of difference.
I would laugh if it wasn’t so sad.

Wait And See
Disappointed So Far
Seems Quite Useless

- from a WvW/organized group perspective

http://gw2skills.net/editor/?vhAQJAWRlknhy0YjawINwtGLpGE5AOQAK/Qy7G61L62B-T1yAABtfIAQ4BAAk6PyoDwalfAcBAGc/B90EUhSQFMBpxRAIAACQYzbGApAWUaE-w

this is what I use to troll a bit when roaming, the amount of cripple is insane so kiting is super easy… it’s quite vulnerable to heavy condi burst because of the tiny health pool

Jana.6831:

Solution to too many ACs – get either a balli and get them down (or an AC ’til they will be nerfed)

too bad ballistas cannot hit 99% of arrowcarts

Jana.6831:

You’ll still have the problem of too many ACs in the tower, so you ask a friendly mesmer to port you into the tower and destroy all acs you can find so the rest of your zerg can follow safely

because we all know the almighty mesmers don’t take damage from arrowcarts, so they can travel through the fire of 6 superior arrowcarts and drop the portal

it’s all so easy for you “defender” guys… “arrowcarts are not a problem” they sure are not a problem if you are the one sitting on them… they become a problem when you are on the other side, tho…

Zachary Stiers.1879:

An upcoming patch will contain changes to how line of sight is calculate for arrow carts.

was about time…

Ansau.7326:

Basically, you don’t get the crucial offensive things because you think a semi-support mesmer is worth, which is not.

Basically, you are supposing I wanted an offensive build, which I didn’t
I wanted a large-scale control build and chronomancer was supposedly good at that (a lot of slow application, unlimited target stun, gravity well)… but it’s not.

Ansau.7326:

Staff instead of GS throws away a lot of offensive.

Ansau.7326:

Not taking well of calamity, so even less damage.

Ansau.7326:

No izerker+Protected Phantasms+Cronophantasma.

As I said, the build was meant to be about control and staff is a better option for that.
If I wanted to bring AoE DPS I would go necro or ele, no point in playing mesmer for that.

BTW, I tested calamity as well, but the damage is so bad compared with MoP that I couldn’t really convince myself to keep it.

Ansau.7326:

Only using MW makes you less effective.

I’m using all my shatters when they make sense… problem is they don’t make sense most of the time in a zerg, without clones.

Ansau.7326:

I don’t see you using Dueling, so less options.

Dueling has nothing useful for a control build.

Ansau.7326:

Bad stat choice with cele.

Maybe it wasn’t really clear… everything was berserker, only the gem inside the (exotic) jewels was celestial because there was no other option on the beta account

Ansau.7326:

No power stacks from sigil.

Yep, I was testing different stuff (stun duration, damage on stun, aoe poison, etc).

Ansau.7326:

Conservative playstyle.

Couldn’t do much about that, it was extremely laggy and I wasn’t confident to be able to use my defensive cooldowns in time to survive. “Hopefully” they’ll lower the map cap again before the next BWE since it looks like they can’t fix the lag.

During the next BWE I’ll test different stuff, or test the same stuff again if it has been changed, but so far I am disappointed with chrono in large scale fights.

I have some footage of Chronomancer in zergs and it’s a lot less effective than you can think.

Wells are sluggish and underwhelming, tides of time is short range and very slow moving, continuum shift is very hard to use in an environment where you basically don’t have illusions…

Right now I’m planning on sitting on my current raid build (domi/chaos/inspiration) for WvW if we won’t see major changes to chrono before the release.

• Sylvari female (main): power shatterupt small scale/solo WvW roaming
• Charr female (main alt): power sniper/support for WvW raids
• Asura male: hybrid shatter small scale/solo WvW roaming
• Norn male: TROLOLOL celestial bunker hotjoin hero – also doubles as a lighthouse
• Human female: PVE…?

Chaos Archangel.5071:

@Menaka: Uh, I actually kind of like Winds of Chaos & Magic Bullet. =P

alright! *Phantasm bouncing attacks :P

Chaos Archangel.5071:

Yeah, my beef is specifically with abilities that have dual effects on-bounce. If I cast iDisenchanter, its usually because I want condition removal… Not conditional condition removal. An AoE is predictable, I cast it and know when I’m getting the effect. A bounce not so much. Worse, I have no control over which of my allies I can assist with it.

I recently tried iDisenchanter in PvP and quickly switched back to the mantra. The phantasm will either be cleaved to death in a millisecond or miss his attack and the condi removal…

Nate.3927:

asc gear can drop pretty much anywhere. I’ve already gotten several pieces in WvW

got 1 piece in 2600 ranks, can confirm ascended definitely drops in WvW once in several years

I completely agree with Chaos that bouncing attacks are terribad and I want to point out another problem with them: they can also put you on Revealed.

So far, I didn’t see anything that would convince me to give up another traitline for Chrono in WvW organized group fights.

Wells are generally bad for WvW where movement is king and you don’t have a point to defend. Long cast time, delayed damage, long cooldowns and short range: a lot of problems for the entire set of them. The elite well has also been nerfed to the point where it’s completely useless. All in all, the worst aspect of the spec.

Shield is generally quite bad, the wall is too slow to catch fleeing enemies and the double block is pityfull, especially considering the phantasm will either not spawn at all (since the enemy that dropped the damage is out of range) or be obliterated by the general AoE.

Continuum Split suffers – like all other shatters – in large scale PvP because it’s pratically impossible to have illusions up due to AoE. This renders the skill basically a cooldown reset for a single skill, generally Timewarp or Veil.

Alacrity is a very cool mechanic, but we don’t have many ways to gain the buff, since depending on shatters for large scale PvP is a big problem, because the “illusion shattering” mechanic is broken in this scenario. On top of it, we can’t share much of the alacrity we gain with our group, making it quite a selfish thing.

All in all I’d say this Elite Spec is the prime example of how this game is designed and balanced only with structured PvP (conquest) in mind.

in most camps you can easily pull only the lord and 2 guards, if you can’t solo that try open world PVE, it might be better suited for your skill level…