Siege decay is important to prevent trolls as others have mentioned.
In addition, I’d like to see an individual player siege cap. No player should be able to have more than 5 siege deployed at one time on a cap. This is again to prevent the trolls. A individual should also be able to despawn siege that they deployed. That would allow a commander to despawn their flame rams after taking a tower.
I mentioned this earlier but rather than have a cap on siege blueprints that a player can place. Put a cap on how much a single player can pull from a keep/tower in a certain time period. The problem isn’t a player that can drain 200 sup from a keep. It is the ones that drain 1500 or more. Even a delay between draws would likely be enough to stop most trolls.
When skill beats coverage and population, the idea makes sense. Until then, this is a horrible idea.
My suggestions (many coop’d from other posters):
These solve a host of problems and gives us another useful mastery to pump points into.
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After nearly two years of play I can say this… the score is about 50% coverage, 45% population, 4% organization and 1% wildcard. Has been this way since launch and is exactly the same today. Pretty much every server has great players, good ones and sucky ones. The distribution seems to be about the same to. If a server is winning, it is likely because of turnout not from skill.
Come to Silver! Silver already has a lot of dead time and I can only imagine Bronze is worse.
From what I hear there’s plenty of dead time on HoD now.
HoD like most Silver servers has dead times. FA has a stable population and has gotten several guilds (including some from HoD). NA is also on summer break which means servers with heavy young populations have strong NA off hour support.
Not sure where HoD will settle but right now it looks like a T3 server with FA back to its usual form of a T2 or T2.5 server. I think a lot of FA are enjoying “punishing” HoD for months of the horde beatings they endured. I know we are all looking forward to more diverse matches… a big chunk of HoD now heads to EotM it seems.
DAoC was great. IMO GW2 WvW is a bolt on to the PvE and treated as such unlike RvR in DAoC. Also GW2’s engine just isn’t built for large scale combat. I have been impressed with how far they have pushed it but in its current form the cracks are exposed and they seem to be in the foundation.
This space is still waiting for a game that revolves around RvR/WvW and that probably won’t come until Camelot Unchained which is still many, many months away. That market may not be as big as paint by numbers MMO PvE but it is super loyal and hard core. Some company is eventually going to latch onto the RvR community for a very long run.
Come to Silver! Silver already has a lot of dead time and I can only imagine Bronze is worse.
As others have pointed out virtually everything you mentioned is part of RL warfare and on some level a valid tactic. The sabotage/spy thing is annoying since players cannot do anything about it but that is just going to be part of any online game like this.
I will say this… don’t play EVE Online if you think GW2 is bad. IMO the politics in WvW is kiddie school compared to some other PvP based games.
I still can’t see how Lowlands is easier to defend. Lord’s room siege will hit north and south inner gates, but will not hit north outer gate. In Valley, lord’s room siege will hit north outer gate as well. Lowlands inner is much larger, requiring more siege to cover all assault angles. If a zerg were to break into Lowlands inner, they could run around on the perimeter, take out mortars, build a treb to destroy cannons/AC’s from a distance, and continue the assault. This isn’t possible in Valley.
Build siege at N outer gate which covers the water gates as well. Build siege at S inner gate which hits N and S inner as well as south outer gates. You now have all gates covered. Jerri also has a high cliff that is perfect to build trebs for cover fire. If you are a super defender, you can even build ACs up top that are very difficult to get to.
Basically nothing about being green is difficult or at a disadvantage. Green has most of the advantages of both Red and Blue. Choke points, fewer inner gates, easy recaps, great side towers, minimal necessary siege, easy run from spawn, out of reach from SM, etc. Pretty much every conversation is about how one thing might be better than green not why green has some crappy design problem unlike Blue or Red.
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No class/build should have great damage AND be bunker. Condi bunkers should have to trade toughness/vitality to keep the condi damage up.
Condi damage needs to route through toughness just like direct damage so it can be mitigated. With that change they should remove the condition stack limit and condi removal should remove the effect but not the damage component. Essentially make condition damage a damage over time. This solves the uselessness of condi damage in PvE and adjusts the ridiculous condi-bunker builds currently running.
Raising the lord is fine… resetting the circle timer is the broken part.
Lowlands is a bit harder to defend than OL or Valley because of the large open spaces on inner and the possibility of trebbing from outside of AC/cannon range on inner.
For this reason, I think blue should go to weakest server. Valley is a bit easier to defend than Lowlands, and the Lang/Dane/QL set up is just as strong, if not stronger than the Vel/Pang/OW set up.
Lowlands is easier to defend because the same siege can be used to defend multiple gates requiring fewer players and less supply. Players only need to build siege up in two spots in the keep to effectively cover every inner and outer gate. Jerri can also provide some of the best cover fire of any EB tower. Getting through the WG on lowlands is difficult compared to either Blue/Red keep.
Red keep is too easily trebbed since trebs on the cliff just behind the cliff vista can hit both outer and inner while being completely safe from inner treb counters. Inner can be a tough take for a zerg that is rushing but with a little patience this keep can be cracked open with one set of siege. It also only has one effective defensive tower. Veloka is good but only covers 1/3 of the attack vectors.
Blue can also be a tough take but it requires a lot more siege for that to be true as virtually no outer gate can effectively be covered by inner siege. This keep requires siege in a half dozen places to be a fortress. It also has three inner gates unlike red/green.
Mesmer commanders can be useful with well placed veils, portals, etc. However they are too squishy in evenly matched zergs and heavy fire. GWEN is currently the dominant model and even though that design has necros in the back line, they still hold up better than Mesmers under strong AoE fire.
If I had to pick a non-heavy, it would be a Necro.
The condi-meta changes and WvW player attrition have greatly cut down on roaming. I used to do it all the time but now I either skirmish or try to form up into a havoc group. I just got tired of running away from zergs, getting beat down by 4+ players or getting loaded up with conditions while the other player avoids a direct engagement. Even if you find a half decent fight, most other roamers are so bunker the fights generally end when other player(s) show up.
Roaming build diversity has just gone to hell thanks to direct damage nerfs and the rise of condi-bunkers. If you try to run something effective other than a bunker build, it is too compromised to be effective in most cases. There is no decent direct damage bunker roamer build that I am aware of.
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Winner moves up, loser moves down solves this specific problem. I know their randomization code was meant to resolve this issue but T2 and T3 are too far apart. It also doesn’t help when there are clearly 4 top servers with one rotating down into significantly less populated servers.
IMO they should offer X amount of free transfers to perpetually losing servers each week in an effort to balance populations. The primary goal of ANet at this point should be mitigating population discrepancies.
No…. EotM is a great place for players wanting to level, get dailies/monthlies done and players generally looking for a more passive experience. EotM has sucked out many of the k-trainers that ran in WvW and that is for the better IMO.
Love it or hate it, the place serves a useful purpose.
Green has the strongest keep setup and should be given to the weakest server. There is no choke point getting to its main keep from spawn, easy gates to defend, has the easiest recapture setup for its two weakest towers and short yak runs.
There should be zero keep to keep trebbing possible in this game which is part of what makes Red a PIA. The main gate on Red keep doesn’t have the solid choke points found on Blue and Green. Red is also stuck with Anz and Mendons which are easy caps for most servers even when upgraded. Only Veloka is a strong tower on Red side. OW is decent but certainly no Aldons or Bravost.
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Port to an enemy BL, head to south camp or just north of the south camp near the flag. Most mid-tier and higher servers have plenty of fights around there that are fun.
As for getting hit by the bus, that is part of what makes WvW different than sPvP. Roaming builds are generally built to have some form of escape… that is what makes WvW more dynamic than sPvP. Players have to account for a variety of ever changing combat conditions.
I changed Corrupt Boon for Spectral Wall. CB is a great skill but wasn’t really necessary and Spectral Wall is a great anchor skill. Going to try Blood Is Power tonight as it looks like a great primer for Epidemic. Looking forward to taking it for another spin.
We have only seen one new map and it barely counts. We have seen a light overhaul to the BL maps so far. It has been two years which IMO is enough time to put at least one PPT map into WvW rotation.
A PvP server with beginner and city zones being safe zones would make me very happy. I doubt I would even log in to WvW if this existed.
As to your point, they could but they would still have to balance it which would likely mean a lot of terrain changes.
If I could do one thing and only one thing, it would be to convert the system from Server warfare to Guild Alliance warfare.
Would be cool to a just have one world like Eve and all alliances had territory to conquer Ç_Ç
I would be completely for this but GW2 just doesn’t scale well with heavy populations. GW2’s engine is too limited for this design. If it existed, I would play the hell out of it though.
Thief
The fundamental problem with roaming with a thief is that the other player(s) will be focused heavily. Guardians do stand up to heavy pressure but in out numbered situations AoE and spreading damage quickly becomes key to winning a fight hence necros, mesmers and engis being better suited for the task. A thief cannot soak up extra damage, cannot help remove condi pressure and barely mitigates direct damage with blinds. Thief is a stellar roamer and MIGHT round out a large skirmish group but is basically just extra damage in a duo with little added benefit.
Their big contribution…. watching you go down while stealthed and then reviving. Oh and the oft running away leaving you to die method.
Yes necro is a horrible opponent for condi builds, but it isn’t too hard to overload them either. Timing is everything, that and continuous pressure. Luckily, only 3 classes can apply that condi pressure and still survive even if all condis are sent back at them.
Comes down to the necro build. If they go WoP and take the condition heal, they become very difficult to overload far more so than pretty much any other class. To my knowledge no class has the ability to clear all stacks every 25s and it removes poison effects for a consistent heal. Only my warrior can shuffle off condis faster in my experience and it requires landing a blow (often a very difficult proposition) to do so.
Pre-Nerf days, ElE dnd + Guardian were Gods
Very true… the nerf to power D/D eles has been substantial unfortunately. So much so that the condi variant is now more powerful.
I never really played my necro much in WvW so I am here looking for WvW skirmish necro advice. Our group composition is generally a set of condi-bunkers including an ele, mesmer, thief.
The theory for this build is to be a fairly bunker-y necro that uses Epidemic to spread team condi. It is important that the build be an anchor for the group so it is expected to take a significant amount of heat in a fight.
Anyway here is the build so far. Most thoughts, comments, etc are appreciated.
Thanks in advance!
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I am usually a decent defender of ANet but the WvW changes of late have been anemic. I am guessing the WildStar and China release has them laying off significant changes but I seriously hope we see something substantial in WvW for the GW2 anniversary.
It because Yak’s Bend is green…
Truth… those guys don’t go anywhere without a few dozen ACs in their inventory. They are defense masters. I am still picking arrows out of my armor after weeks of fighting the in season two.
Bunch of bs. If you don’t want zerg fights, don’t join the zerg. Simple as that. You’ll find that lower tiers are comprised of zerg fights too. What’ll you do then?
Zergs do happen on lower tier servers during peak hours but they rarely run on every map (usually just EB). Outside of peak hours on lower tier servers, it is wall-to-wall skirmish. Jump to a BL even during NA Prime and there is a ton of roaming/skirmish play to be had most of the time without having to dodge 30+ player groups.
You don’t even have to drop down that far T4 is probably the sweet spot for skirmish but even T2 (not including the T1 server that drops down each week) is decent.
Borliss Pass has a great community of WvW die hards.
If the troublemakers have left the server, it is probably a great place. I was on BP for 1.5 years and left for HoD due to the near constant negativity on open map chat and lack of commanders willing to hat up. A single mention of DTC or Kalkz would explode in a avalanche of griping.
BP was a great server and hopefully is once again.
Am I the only one who uses stealth trap?
Or maybe skill 4 on arrow cart?
The AC reveal is worthless… 2s is pointless. As for a Stealth Trap, A skilled D/P thief will barely be slowed down. Sure they will be revealed for 30s but kitten , some dodging and HS to stay out range will allow them stealth back up again in short order. I can easily stay away from another player even several for 30s on my D/D Thief. Much easier when standing in Black Powder from a D/P.
The situation is made much worse given how easily a thief CnDs off walls, gates, siege, NPCs, etc.
All it would take is to only allow players to rally if an enemy they were attacking is stomped by an ally.
This would be better but it wouldn’t solve the fundamental unwelcome attitude that skilled players have towards lessor skilled allies. Currently lessor skilled players are usually rally bots and while this change would improve that situation it would still exist and they would remain unwelcome.
Anyway I am taking this OT. I stand by my original point that players should not be able to get un-damageable health back when dead.
Thief has very high single-target burst. Basically something that is slippery and mobile (and does a lot of damage) which usually forces people to target the Guardian eventually.
We have been moving away from the thief because it is too squishy in heavy AoE fights, struggles under heavy condi pressure and brings very few synergy skills to a group. Pretty much any class including the Ranger is an upgrade in skirmish over the thief (and I cannot believe I just typed that). Thanks to Ferocity changes the thief just doesn’t pack the punch it once did and the condi-bunker version is a cheap knockoff of a mesmer, engi, necro condi-bunker.
The class is still a stellar roamer but not a top caliber skirmisher any longer. It also does well in skirmish groups that are essentially several roamers running together but if that group runs into an actual skill group built for skirmishing they will likely get annihilated.
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Pretty much sums up this game, I routinely have to kill people 3-4 times to actually kill them because of all the rallies they get off of bad friendlies who like to suicide. Then, ya know, a zerg comes to rez them and there’s nothing you can do about it because their blob is too good at the game.
I think most skill players would appreciate the removal of rally from killing something and the removal of resurrecting dead players in and out of combat. Rally on death certainly creates a significant amount of animosity towards less experienced allies.
Warrior/Guardian teams have a lot of control but will likely fold up to heavy condi-bunker or evasive condi teams. Condi is currently dominating skirmish so not bringing one to a fight will leave you handicapped at least 50% of the time with one exception… another guardian. The only reason dual guardians work so well is because of how well the two feed off each others class mechanics.
There might be an exception for a Shout Warrior, but bringing one along in a two man group is going require the guardian to be the primary source of damage which is problematic.
Kill ’em deader?
Yep. If you can breath life into a corpse stands to reason beating it senseless would remove it.
The quick regen is designed to prevent players from hitting an NPC from an unreachable location. This side effect while sometimes annoying is a reasonable trade off to fix players safely farming NPCs.
I have posted this before but since you asked:
Head straight to Applied Fortitude (2500 extra health) in Defense Against Guards. Don’t put your points anywhere else until you lock that in. It does require 115 WvW levels but that is very doable in a short amount of time.
With some rare exceptions that is the best WvW skill unlock in the game. It makes you tougher and makes downing you more difficult so your group is better.
My full list:
Defense Against Guards: 10
Supply Mastery: 4
Build Mastery: 1
Repair Mastery: 1
Guard Killer: 10
Ram Mastery: 3
AC Mastery: 4
Cata Mastery: 4
Siege Bunker: 5
Siege Might: 5
Treb Mastery: 3
Cata Mastery: 5 (final level)
Ballista Mastery: 4
Supply Capacity is pretty awesome but not until a player can lock in the full 300 WxP levels to get all 5. If you are part of a skirmish group, you may want to go after that sooner but not before Guard Killer on this list IMO.
If we cannot get a mandatory port on dead, can we get damage on dead players? Being able to res a player under heavy fire because the dead player takes no damage is a warped mechanic. I frequently observe stealthed thieves bringing up their dead allies because over time they can keep adding to a dead players health pool and enemy players have no way of reducing dead players HP. This is particularly frustrating after keep flips where D/P thieves can bring up anyone with a little patience.
Of all the weapon skills to gripe about, this isn’t one of them IMO. Sure it is an above average skill but it is telegraphed and easily mitigated with stability. You can even dodge it but that is somewhat difficult.
GvGs that aren’t tucked away on a corner of a map are fair game IMO… same with duels. I try not to be a kitten and disrupt but you see 5 or 10 guys beating on another group near SM and I am going to barrel in before someone has time to chat “stop”.
There are tons of places in EB to duel/gvg out of the way including around speldan but away from the camp, behind Bravost, in the krait area, near the ogre camp and a few more.
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Sounds like you already made up your mind but IMO T1 is going to be heavy on the zerg and light on the skirmish. That isn’t a problem for a lot of players but if you like to roam and skirmish might want to consider a T3 or lower server.
If I could do one thing and only one thing, it would be to convert the system from Server warfare to Guild Alliance warfare.
Guilds could make guild alliances and declare war on non-allied guilds. Each week the matching algorithm would put guilds together into a pool to fight two other pooled group of guilds using guild play hours, guild play times, guild alliances, etc to balance out the match as best as possible. WvW scoreboards would highlight guild and guild alliance victories for bragging rights.
Any class goes with a guardian IMO, but here are some recommendations from what we have fought against:
Dual guardian teams are ridiculously hard to bring down. They feed off each other making very tough targets.
Mesmers work well since they have very good group stealth allowing the guardian to frequently escape when necessary. They also output a lot of clones allowing the guardian pulls and locks to be effective shatter traps. You don’t want to get “domed” without stability in this fight.
Condi-bunker Necros would also be on my short list. They cannot be ignored in a fight and guardians tend to make them even tougher to bring down.
I really think this is a learn to play issue ,if you place guards and refresh siege you can stop a golem rush, I have pulled a lot of guard time at water gate garri, it takes one guy/gal on the cannon to stop the rush or at least hold it back while reinforcements arrive. And seeing as you have a heck of a lot more players than us it shouldn’t be an issue to get a few trained guards, it can be boring but it will pay off 100fold.
This isn’t a YB/HoD thing… this is a WvW mobile siege issue. Few servers have a population that can defend 24×7 so what some groups do is build golems during peak hours and rush them during off hours. Once they get a critical mass there is little a server without round the clock coverage can do.
If they are spotted it usually doesn’t matter unless a server can round up 50 people in under a minute. Besides, one or two mesmers can get the golems onto a door or wall long before a scout will see them and bring down siege in a couple seconds.
No T3 keep should be able to be flipped as fast as 20+ Omegas can. It is made even worse that they can be used on all the keeps and towers on a map without having to rebuild.
Until they remove the downed state underwater or figure out some form of an underwater stomp, no thanks. Even if they do make that change, they will need to rebalance the skills since as others have pointed out underwater combat is incredibly lopsided.
Nice health bump but uplevels are still fodder with it.
Ultimately game designers need to leave the server design system completely if they want a better PvP, RvR, WvW system.
And that’s the pill the WvW community has consistently proven unwilling to swallow.
We don’t know that because non-server based WvW systems have never really existed. The first game that comes out with a decent WvW system that is guild alliance based will likely be the first to have somewhat balanced matchups.
Most players pick a server initially by using some arbitrary means when they first log in.
Why stay “loyal” to a server that is picked by some random chance? Why should someone be rewarded for stagnation?
Besides a player meets more people by moving around and has a better chance of meeting a larger circle of online friends by transferring on occasion. Who knows, your next best online mate may be one transfer away.
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just make sure that every supply site, siege item or other food/oil item has a 75 range exclusion zone, so that no two items can be put ontop of eachother at any given time in any given way.
This way, no more siege, food, oil or whatever else form of stupid buildsite griefing.
That would certainly be a welcome addition especially for the oft occasion where siege ends up being dropped on top of other siege. I would still like to see a confirmation on group food but would be happy with either change.
… hod got massive server transfers before the season started, of course hod sees more people than it used to.
and I was one of the transfers so I am factoring that in. The servers I faced on BP were EBay, YB, SBI, FA, Mag, IoJ, DB, etc and most still have strong populations. Sure some servers have less WvW players (EBay, AR, BP) but others have more. Seems like the overall population is about as strong as it was a year ago.
We already know T1 has an incredibly strong population. A year ago T7-T8 was almost empty by comparison and that hasn’t changed. Given that EotM is part of WvW, the number of WvW players is probably higher. Granted that is a technicality of sorts.
I think they are fine as is, sever stacking and population needs to be fixed before they take away a viable strategy from under pop severs.
Omegas are stronger than sup rams as they have better defense, can kill defensive siege and can hammer a wall. The fact that they move and can be kept up an entire week is ridiculously OP. This wouldn’t be a problem if 20+ Omegas couldn’t capture a fully upgraded T3 in a few dozen seconds. There is no part of this design that is balanced or makes any practical sense.
So my suggestion stands, reduce the longevity thus preventing piling up a ridiculous amount of mobile siege or gut the damage golems can unleash.
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