Or just let the waypoint always work provided no single wall or door is under 90% health, regardless of whether the place is in combat or not.
A good catapult volley would shut it down quick but one guy banging on the door with his head would never shut it down.
Retaliation comparatively hits for 200-400 damage depending on the Guardian’s Power and can be easily avoided. Just don’t attack.
It really is that simple.
And what are your enemies doing while you are busy not attacking them?
You plan to beat them how, exactly?
Going to protect the point with harsh language? Get them off of the door by wishing they would go away?
“Don’t attack” is not a remotely reasonable solution to the retaliation problem.
It really is that simple.
This is where I think the Planetside system was more fun: every tower and base could be spawned at in combat and you could additionally deploy mobile spawners. Shutting down the enemy’s spawners was often job 1. Spawners did not stop working just because the base was “in combat”.
This helped both zerg vs zerg and small group combat, since small groups using a mobile spawner could stay in an area longer and keep fighting (until someone found their spawner).
GW2 lets 1 thief shut down the spawner and then you’re running from across the map to rejoin the battle. It ruins small group combat and roamers and really helps make the game zerg vs zerg, since zergs can usually rez downed people very quickly, even if they’re in the process of losing the field.
I’d be real curious to see what this game played like if every tower and keep had a free spawner in it. It lets defense react quicker but it also lets offense spread out more while still being effective.
You mean like Supply drop?
No. An elite turret. Not an elite skill that drops a couple of regular turrets.
Asking for a kit elite is asking for another borderline useless skill. If you want to know what a kit elite would look like, look at the Guardian elites, which are essentially kits. Few people use them because swapping out your toolbar for an “elite” set of skills that you can only use for 30 seconds every 3 minutes hasn’t proven to be very popular.
We really SHOULD have an elite turret. Seems like an obvious oversight that we don’t.
The mortar as a mannable turret is a fine idea but very poorly implemented. I don’t even find it useful in WvW, where you’d think it would excel. The range is too short and the need to target the ground you want to hit keeps its usefulness minimal. (You can tell Anet put little time or thought into it based on the fact that the +range trait for it didn’t work for 6 months and apparently nobody noticed or cared.)
I would give it a 2000 range and make it work more like the regular mortars — you don’t target ground, you just hold down the button to specify how far you want to shoot it, allowing it to be fired over obstacles into ground you can’t see.
Giving retaliation counters is a good idea. Or just reduce the duration by 0.5 seconds for every hit.
Some people in this thread are confusing retaliation with reflection. High damage builds do not take extra retaliation because it has nothing to do with how hard you hit — it’s how FAST you hit. Each hit of retal is a fixed amount of damage, once per hit. You can kill yourself in two bursts of flamethrower against a full group running retaliation regardless of how little damage you do.
The direct counter to retaliation is boon removal, which engineers don’t really have (the mine does it but the mine sucks and has a lengthy cooldown whereas a Guardian is reapplying retaliation usually on a second-by-second basis). The next best counter for retaliation is really high damage hits — which is another thing engineers suck at.
Really we have no effective counter to retaliation. Condition builds won’t work either because retal also hits condition ticks. I’ve flamethrown against a door in WvW, backed off and still died because all the people ticking bleed (from traits) and fire ends up downing me on the retal.
Basically when I encounter a lot of retaliation I back off because there’s nothing I can do about it except hope some necro deals with it.
In a game without trinity – a game where trying to fit in one role results weakness – in this game: the jack of all trades is king.
For PvE I would tend to agree. No specific weakness is a pretty good strength.
For PvP (sPvP and WvW), it’s the other way around. Nobody knows or cares what your specific weakness is but they will care a great deal about your specific strength. If you don’t have a specific strength, then you’re going to come out looking a lot weaker than classes that do. Thieves make good burst damage killers and good bunkers and people who build to one of those strengths can make a really mean PvP character. Trying to build a mean PvP engineer is like trying to build a “support thief” — you can’t easily build towards something that isn’t a specific strength, and we have no specific strengths.
any server in T7 would be mercilessly farmed by a T1 server to the point where almost everyone would stop WvW’ing. It would not be fun for anyone.
And that used to happen all the time, before tiers balanced out.
People see scores like 400,000 to 200,000 and think “oh that’s just awful” but no, awful is when you can’t set foot into any WvW map because every single exit point on literally all 4 maps is camped 24/7 by a large enemy force. And if you do manage to overwhelm them enough to take a tower, words gets out that “there’s action over here” and you get roflstomped out of that tower and out of the map within 10 minutes.
That happened 2 out of 3 beta weekends and often enough at the start of release, until things settled down some.
It was possibly even worse being on the “winning” team because you’d log in, own absolutely everything in every map and either you joined the camping force somewhere or you logged out and did something else.
We definitely don’t need weekly randomized matches. There is no point in pitting a T6 server against a T1, or a T8 against a T4.
I actually like my 80 engineer for melee way more than my 80 guardian. I haven’t made a build for it but I’ve thought about it…
Swiftness on crit to help stay in range of targets (something Guardians have a lot of trouble with)
Swiftness on weapon swap
Exploit Weakness (cripple on low health foes)
Maybe Power Shoes (25% faster in combat)
Maybe Invigorating Speed
Power Wrench for crippling foes…
Basically engineers get a good selection of abilities to help speed themselves up and slow their target down, all of which is rather critical for being a melee.
The main reason I’ve never tried it is because I suspect we’re going to be too squishy, especially in a WvW situation.
Weak? I would say they got overbuffed and soon will be dominating meta once ppl find it out.
Good luck with that. “**** engineers” is something I have never, ever heard in teamspeak.
I think the basic problem is “jack of all trades, not overly good at any of them”, which makes it harder to create good engineer builds and really easy to create a lot of bad builds which lack focus (since we, as a class, lack focus). A lot of our core stuff (like turrets) are lackluster. Our base weapons are pretty lackluster as well, and not really made up for with the kits, most of which are also lackluster.
I would be awfully surprised to see engineers dominating under the current patch.
I would actually do it the other way. Ditch glicko and just lock the tiers. That’s how DAOC worked. That’s how Planetside works. If you don’t like your current matchup, either because you are always winning or always losing, then you fix it yourself by switching teams.
The glicko system effectively encourages people to stick with lop-sided situations by suggesting that if they stick with it, even though it sucks, eventually it will get balanced out without them needing to take any action of their own.
If you people are not setting up scouts to defend a target, it is your fault.
This is like building a bank vault that’s open to the street with just a screen door and then saying “If people walk inside and steal everything, it’s their fault.”
Maybe, but it’s also an incredibly stupid design for a bank vault.
Similarly, if people don’t want to stand bored to death inside a tower, yeah, maybe that’s their fault. But it’s also an incredibly stupid design for a WvW game.
I guarantee most of your “scouts” are second accounts run on second monitors, which is not a realistic solution to expect the playerbase to adopt.
And more to the point, it’s not how things are playing out. How things are playing out is “zerg circle capping”. Do you want to deal with reality or just say “it’s the player’s fault” as the game slowly dies off?
There are a number of little bugs regarding lord rezzing. It also tends to mess up the display of the courtyard control bar.
I reported it back in beta. I’m sure the bug reports for stuff like this have long since been lost, though. PvE is far more important.
Yeah if you don’t siege up your keeps there is no point in upgrading.
And there’s little point in placing siege unless there are people willing to stand there, doing absolutely nothing, getting no rewards, 24/7, on the off chance that an attack actually happens.
I’m pretty sure most people who do this are actually using a second account on a second monitor, so they can play the game on their main while watching on a secondary. That’s not a realistic solution to expect the playerbase as a whole to adopt, though.
The whole point of golems seems to be to avoid PvP by bashing through both sets of gates faster than defense can respond. Nobody uses golems against a manned keep.
Since the point of golems is to avoid PvP, we should just remove golems from the game.
Gates should absolutely go down quick to a zerg if you are not there to defend.
No one to not enought to use siege on the rams is your sides fault.
You can say this but the end result is going to be mindless zergs following each other around the map capping each other in rotation because there simply aren’t enough players willing to sit in a tower waiting for an attack to arrive, getting no rewards while everyone else is speeding towards realm rank 100 and getting a ton of loot in the circular zerg.
People WILL rush to the defense of a tower that’s under attack but when zergs break through reinforced doors in under 60 seconds, there’s no time.
“Small group play” in context of WvW really means “PvDoor”. Either there’s enough time for defense to show up or you are just avoiding PvP.
No, upgrades would have the same problem. We already have people that will go to say Bay on an enemy BL and start merchants and banks just to burn supply, this will just make it worse. There is no reason to have merchants/banks started on an enemy bl on reset night. This will just compound an already stupid problem.
This is a separate issue that needs to be fixed separately.
There should be no such thing as a “junk upgrade that wastes supply”. We should be 100% happy to see any upgrade get bought.
Like:
Merchants should cost no supply, just cash and karma.
OR
Buying merchants gives each merchant and each upgrade supervisor x2 Zealot guards
A lot of the upgrades need a looking-at to determine if they are actually worthwhile or just a “waste of resources”. None should be a waste.
More things should give you credit for defense ticks, for sure. Defense ticks give WXP already.
Presently, to get credit for a defense tick you must:
Once the supply is out and if there’s not enough defenders to actually zerg out and get kills, you can easily do a lot of work (and dying) and get no defense credit.
Other things that should give defense credit:
The problem is:
I would start fixing this by removing golems from the game and making rams cost 100 supply, in order to make it harder for a zerg to swiftly bash down doors.
Cleaning Formula 409. Elixir C, Fumigate, Cleansing Burst, Antidote, Super Elixir, Toss Elixir R
Which of these do you think cleanses retaliation off of a mass of WvW enemies so that I can resume doing some damage to them without killing myself?
Clearly you have some wrong ideas about how engineers work and I’d like to help clear that up for you.
anyone feel that this patch has caused zergs to just trade keeps and towers and run in a big circle for points? seems to be the new fotm and wish they would either make the maps BIGGER or make it harder to take an upgraded keep/tower
No. They were already doing that.
The problem of karma trains has no relationship to anything they’ve changed recently.
I’m just surprised that the “Big WvW patch” had no new maps, no new physical content, and no new mechanics.
Really the only good thing in it was the culling fix.
Meanwhile PvE has been awash in new content.
WvW players like new content too, ya know.
PvEvP > PvP
The environment adds another element to the combat, which I like. Sterile PvP in a completely controlled environment (aka sPvP or “battlegrounds” or “arena duels”) gets boring faster because there are only so many interesting scenarios you can get into in that case. Throwing in NPCs greatly increases the variety of situations you may have to fight in.
If it were up to me, WvW would be more strongly NPC driven, with players impacting the war rather than driving it. Players are notoriously bad at driving in-game wars.
Guard/NPC killers:
Waste of points. Two people can wipe a camp as-is.
Supply boost:
Basically a waste of points given cost-to-benefit ratio but I imagine most people will get it eventually due to lack of other options. It’s not that it’s bad it’s just that it takes a TON of points for a relatively minor personal benefit.
Cannon boost:
Nice but how often do you run a cannon? You’ll spend a lot of points for something that you generally won’t get to use (or at towers, won’t get to use for very long — cannons are quickly killed and cannoneers are exposed). Often there will be cannons but someone else is on them in which case your points are wasted.
Ballista boost:
Easily the best and most useful of the bunch. At least ballistas can be readily available.
Siege bunker/might:
Eh. Again not a great cost-to-benefit ratio but at least it’s generally useful.
All in all pretty underwhelming.
1. Condition damage
2. Single massive hits
3. Boon strippingAny of these three are killers to a retaliation build. I understand you don’t want to change your build to deal with retal. But to say that you refuse to have any of these three options in it…is just lazy.
So what you’re really saying is that retaliation makes this into a cookie-cutter game where many classes really only have 1 viable build available to them.
It’s not like you can deal with retaliation on the fly. I can’t say, “Oh these guys have a lot of retaliation. Looks like I need my conditions!” I have to build for them.
I’d like to see an HMG kit that basically turns us into the “Heavy Weapon’s Guy”.
I think the FT is great for zerg vs zerg. What else is going to do that much damage that consistently to 5 targets without any breaks?
It’s not a good single-target kit but then, that’s not what it was meant for, clearly. I think when people say “such-and-such sucks”, most of them are talking about sPvP and fighting people 1-2 at a time. When you’re fighting 30 at a time, the flamethrower is hard to beat. I build for FT + survival/escape and play on the front lines all the time, which great success. I could surely get more individual kills with another build but I don’t think another build can beat the total DPS output of a flamethrower build for fighting groups.
How about just removing the condition. Lol @ only “stop fighting back”
…says the mesmer.
Not every class has a means of removing boons from an enemy. Even removing conditions from yourself is dubious in a WvW environment where your removal may have a long timer whereas the 40 enemies over there can stack you back up instantly.
If I’m on my engineer and run into a mass of people all running retaliation, “stop fighting back” really is my best option. I have no counter to retaliation.
Retaliation is a stupid mechanic to begin with, as is confusion.
For many classes, the only real counter to it is to “stop fighting back”, which is a stupid counter to have to do in a game whose content is 99% about hitting things. As someone else said, the fact that a 9k thief hit and a 450 damage Guardian staff hit gets the same retaliation damage keeps it unbalanced.
Retaliation in particular is also just another “pro-zerg” element.
I haven’t noticed any lag issues. Had some pretty heavy clashes last night too.
Sounds like “first tier problems”.
Note that prior to the culling fix, this happened:
So being able to realize it’s a zerg and run away without engaging is a serious improvement.
The more clever ones are the ones that hack to run normal speed.
Doesn’t matter if they are chilled or snared; they still run normal speed.
Still, you wouldn’t think it would be hard for the server to detect this. How fast does the server think the player can move? How far did the player move? Is A > B? Ban.
Does it really matter if the racial armors are available through WvW or not? lol
Considering I only play WvW, yes.
I assume the way to obtain racial armors will be to kill a dragon somewhere 85 times or run 112 fractals or otherwise stop playing the game the way I normally play it. This has been the case for pretty much everything so far.
If the major changes are a system of obtaining passive abilities and a leaderboard, I doubt many people will be coming back.
That would require content/mechanics changes. It would be like spending 6 months farming a dungeon and then on the big patch day, instead of a new dungeon, you get a leaderboard for the current dungeon. woooooo….?
O(n) is fine when n is like 5.
There is a massive difference between O(log n) and O(n) when n is 100.
So for values under 5 or so, you might as well use O(n).
For much more than that you should use a binary search, at least, for O(log n).
At some point you should consider a hash table.
Not that there’s anything wrong with using a hash table for n=100, just that the gains over a binary search at n=100 aren’t that big. That’s the argument you might actually use and win.
But to argue that O(n) is fine in a WvW battleground that can have > 100 players going into a list that may need to be updated many times per second? That’s just lazy programming, not to mention bad practice and probably not a real keen thing to have in your sample code you show at your next interview.
O(n) into the 100s of items is an amazing waste of resources.
It is not “lightning fast”. It’s the slowest possible algorithm you can use. If you write code that may use it hundreds of times per second on a server which is also busy doing a hundred other things, then I’m pretty sure I don’t want to see your production applications.
That seems like a feasible correlation.
The server must track all event participants to reward them. After the event, that should all clear out. If lag goes down noticeably right after a defensive event turnaround it could mean that there’s some problem with how they are doing this tracking.
(Imagine, for example, that the list of event participants was a flat array or linked list. Every time someone kills someone or does a repair, it searches through the list, top to bottom, to see if they are already in the list or not. As this list grows, this process takes more and more CPU time and with hundreds of people constantly getting kills it could be a huge drain. If this was the problem, a hash table in place of the flat list could fix it. [Bro do you even code?])
I think the problem is more to do with attack patterns. NPCs in general in this game seem designed to be easy largely because they are easily distracted and don’t choose smart targets. The more players fighting them, the dumber they effectively are.
Maybe bosses should just be smarter. Attack the player with the lowest health. Go after the guy with the lowest toughness. Turn on the Guardian who just blew all his cooldowns. Berserker gear is popular for leveling because the NPCs don’t take much advantage of it and it just makes easy kills go faster.
Basically I think NPCs need a serious looking at when it comes to their “AI”. They seem way too random which makes them easymode for large groups of players.
Swirling Winds can be used to a small group’s advantage too provided they’ve got a good amount of eles.
Well that’s the problem, isn’t it.
A 40-man tower attack group will surely have 6 elementalists just incidentally — plenty to provide full time protection to a nice sized patch of field.
A 5-man tower defense group will probably have 1 elementalist if they’re lucky, and 1 elementalist can’t even protect 1 siege engine, especially when there’s multiple siege engines shooting at it.
Not that I think 5 should defeat 40 but it would be nice if you could at least slow them down or force them to do something more clever than build catapults within plain sight of the walls, especially when the tower defenders have had plenty of time to prepare and have ample siege of their own.
I have little sympathy for people who transferred to higher rating, higher population servers and might now pay for it with long queue times.
Ultimately there’s only so much Anet can do about it. They can’t magically raise the player cap to 2000 per map and expect the game to keep working. It was up to the players to distribute themselves evenly and most of them did the opposite of that.
The issue here is that same engineer can just retreat back into his zerg for respite once his CDs are down and he needs to heal up.
Assuming he has timed things correctly, didn’t overcommit and saved a good escape ability or two to get back into cover. He’s the one who can clear all of his conditions and, 1 second later, have multiple stacks of multiple conditions on him again — something the duelist never has to worry about. 1 opponent can only throw so many conditions on you. 20 opponents can load you right back up.
The difference is as a veteran soloers, I’m self-sufficient, I don’t rely on boons or assistance from other players to be in combat.
And you don’t do anything to support them, either. 1 skilled duelist will surely defeat 1 skilled WvW player but 20 skilled WvW players will roflstomp 20 skilled duelists.
Duelists have little understanding of multi-class synergy because they have no practice at it. Wonder if you’re even aware of all of the different field/finisher combos and what they do? Especially fields and finishers that your allies can throw to play off of you. Any solo guardian can throw down a light field and then do a blast finisher for a little retaliation but only the good WvW players understand that you can coordinate these fields and finishers for mass effect, including things your class isn’t otherwise capable of doing. Combo fields do a couple of neat things when you’re solo. They do a lot of powerful, awesome things when there’s 20 of you — 20 people who know how to coordinate, that is, not 20 soloers. (20 soloers is the very definition of “mindless zerg”.)
Not sure what you mean. If I play on Ehmry Bay I will always be on Ehmry Bay. At 1am I will be playing in Lane 1. At 2am I will be booted to Lion’s Arch, the map will change to the state it was in for Lane 2 and then I can go back in and play in Lane 2. It’s still Ehmry Bay with the same players and guilds, it’s just that the 2am – 10am shift has its own map state, its own scoreboard and its own rating. What happens at 8pm has no impact on the 2am-10am shift and vice versa.
The operative term in the 5v1 argument is “equally skilled”. Do you honestly believe that players who spend the entirety of their PvP experience relying on support from other players and/or superiority in numbers to win out in a situation could ever be “equally skilled” to someone who focuses primarily on 1vX fights and trains to fight them?
Yes.
Your mistake is in thinking that 1v1 is skill and 20v20 isn’t. I guarantee I need more skill and better timing playing a front line engineer who is liable, at any moment, to be targeted by 20 people than you do by playing footsie with 1 or 2 other players. A skilled support Guardian is worth three duelists in a fight for the lord room of a keep. The duelists will all be downed and stomped while the properly specced WvW characters are still up, fighting and supporting each other — something duelists don’t have any practice at or ever build for.
move out of the stacked servers
+1
Even in T4 & T5 I almost never see this type of lag. Once in a while there will be a jam-packed Stonemist battle that’s unplayable so I know what you’re talking about but it’s rare to see it at all and I can’t think of the last time I saw it outside of Stonemist.
Regarding this, I has a suggestion:
https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/suggestions/Making-WvW-competitive-3-lanes-instead-of-1
Under this suggestion, each weekly match is broken up into three “lanes”.
(times are in eastern US because I think this is a reasonable breakout of US, Oceanic and Euro prime times, give or take an hour)
Lane 1: 6pm – 2am
Lane 2: 2am – 10am
Lane 3: 10am – 6pm
Each lane is a separate Glicko-based pairing.
So, for example, you may be facing Maguuma and Borlis in Lane 1 and then Devona’s and Kaineng in Lane 2.
When it’s time for a lane change, the state of the current lane is saved. The state is then restored when you shift back to it. e.g., at 2am it saves the state of Lane 1 and loads Lane 2. When 5pm rolls back around it will save Lane 3 and load Lane 1 back up, the way it was at 2am.
Each lane will have its own score and its own rating. You could be a Tier 1 server in Lane 1 and a Tier 4 server in Lane 3.
Each week, as usual, the lanes all reset and the next matchup is arranged.
I think this will help immensely with keeping all servers competitive across all time zones and nobody will “lose everything overnight”. It will also help keep a big Oceanic server from dragging US prime time players up into a tier they can’t handle, or vice versa, resulting in servers that dominate some hours and get dominated other hours — each lane will get its own tier.
Actually that’s not a bad idea.
Each server would have 3 different rankings. 5pm – 1am, 1am – 9am, 9am – 5pm.
It still runs for a week, but with 3 different lanes.
So at 1am the server state for the 5pm-1am match is saved and the server state for the 1am-9am match is loaded. When 5pm rolls back around that 5pm-1am match is loaded and the server is restored to the position it was in at 1am.
This would make a lot more sense from an “eSport” perspective. You are only competing against your own approximate time zone.
(edited by Slamz.5376)
The scoring is close to irrelevant, in my opinion. Based on that, Ehmry Bay is blowing out the competition this week but in reality there have been good fights every night. If they’re not trying to make progress in our border, we are trying to make progress in theirs while holding more than our fair share of Eternal. So we’re “winning”, by a good amount of points, but it’s not like we’ve crushed them off the map.
The battles are good, every night, and that’s all I really care about.
I agree that there are flaws with the rating system. I would be tempted to just try locking down the matches as-is and let the players sort it out. Servers that crush the map every week will eventually get bored and realize they have to change servers if they want any actual action.
As it is, servers that crush every week just keep crushing because they know that eventually they may move up a tier and get better fights.
The DAOC analogy is that it was a locked 3-team server. If your team dominated 24/7 so much so that the game wasn’t fun, you’d quit or change teams, eventually allowing some semblance of balance to come into play, because you knew it wasn’t going to just fix itself. Right now we are relying on the rematching system to do this for us and it’s not.
I think it should be something like:
If you own EVERYTHING in an enemy world
THEN the orb opens up and you can nab it
The only way for the enemy to get it back is by capping the keep you put it in, which resets it to its initial location.
Really the one blazing oversight Anet made in the initial design is that there was no pre-requisite to stealing the orb, which made it dead simple for hackers to get at. Even a requirement of “keep lord must be dead” would have helped a ton. Instead they made it so you couldn’t kill the keep lord until you got the orb, which was backwards and blazingly stupid.
As to how other games solved it, both Planetside and Battleground Europe (WW2O) had the same “zergball” problem at first and solved it by adding a lattice network.
Given bases A, B, C and D, you can only attack B if you own A and you can only attack C if you own B, etc. You need a link. If you are attacking B and the enemy flips A, tough luck. Your attack on B immediately fails because you can’t capture B without owning A.
This forced players to play defense at least enough to allow their offense time to work.
Another thing Planetside did was rewards people based on how many kills occurred during the event. No kills = tiny reward. Few kills = small reward. Huge kills = huge reward. It rewards zerg vs zerg, but really zerg vs zerg is fine (and maybe even ideal for an MMORPG wargame). It punished zerg vs door, though. Zergballs that intentionally avoided conflict got small rewards.
The key, as you mentioned, is that you need to give players incentive to spread out.
Right now these zergballs are better called “karma trains”.
They don’t care about defense. In fact, they would prefer you didn’t defend. They don’t care about upgrades. They don’t care about the scoreboard.
They are there to farm karma, XP and loot bags. The best way to do that is to roll around in a ball and crush everything in front of you.
.
Most of the WvW design breaks down when nobody cares about winning and therefore doesn’t care about defense or upgrades. The real question, I think, is how to make players care more about winning — about taking towers and holding them and upgrading them and defending them long term. Right now I think it’s fun, which is good enough for me when I’m not trying to level an alt, but I’m in the minority on this (I like defense and do it even though it’s not rewarding) and even I join the zergball when I want to level an alt.
Like maybe there should be a WvW daily of “must get bronze or higher in 5 defensive events”.
Or maybe there should just be more substantial incentive for tower ownership over the long term. Right now there’s more incentive to let a tower fall than there is to save it.
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