The immobilize is worse when the ‘glitch’ kicks in. You get immobilized, cleanse it, and then are unable to move at all. Even if you shadowstep or teleport to another spot nearby, you still cannot move, almost as if you have permanent immobilize. They seriously broke it to where it has to be reverted to how it was before. Before it was something that when timed well, could result in an opponent getting screwed over when trying a mobility move or trying to escape. Now it screws them over completely due to 15 second immobilize being easy to pull off. And don’t get me started on the 10 second fears I’ve seen. <_<
The lock down is a bug. Seems some emotes such as /dance can fix it but still highly annoying. The problem appears to effect elementalists the most but I have seen it on the thief with some frequency as well.
Despite a couple of traits offsetting Immobilize, stacking it is a problem for most other classes/builds. Even when running condi duration foods, runes and traits players that stack condi duration can overcome duration reduction fairly easily.
Only the Warrior has effective passive immobilization removal (Mobile Strikes).
Until Ranger pets are as strong as Phantasms, they will continue to be a joke.
Phantasms are no problem for me, they have low HP pool, pets are too tanky…
One of them does upwards of 5k damage to hardened targets, the other can effectively be ignored the entire fight. One of them comes out every 20s or less even after being destroyed, the other requires a lot of traiting to make it even slightly effective. One of them often steals party boons the other doesn’t. One of them can deal damage when destroyed and synergizes with Clone skills, the other has almost no useful synergy with any traits.
There was a time when pets were dangerous but their damage has been significantly reduced. In their current state at best they generate an occasional knockdown.
How many times have we heard something like this over voicechat: They have an AC up careful, oh wait it is just a Ranger no worries.
Roots the Ranger and makes for a ridiculously easy kill. We constantly call out Rangers on voice chat for leaning back. The damage is laughable and usually they will keep firing while being in 100 Blades. It also makes for super easy Backstabs and knockdowns.
Until Ranger pets are as strong as Phantasms, they will continue to be a joke.
Speaking to BP directly, I think it is the frequency of crap matches we have seen the last 6 months. We seem to get stuck in tiers with significantly stronger servers and routinely get “bad rolls” which promotes us into tiers we cannot effectively compete with.
Then there is all the complaining about our handful of popular commanders. As soon as we have a commander hat up, map chat goes in the toilet talking crap about them. I know we are a small guild server, but the open negativity from a vocal minority quickly drives off the non-hardcore.
I have considered leaving over the last few weeks and I am on the fence to stay or go.
1. Mesmer… Ranger has incredibly limited AoE, doesn’t manage kiting well and PU mesmers with stealth, blink and blocks are crazy hard to bring down even when upleveled.
2. 10 hardcore WvW Warriors.
3. Staff Ele.
4. 5 warriors. Heck 2 can do the job just takes forever.
5. Grub… grub hands down.
6. Defender… they can one shot anything.
7. 4 plex mesmers. Rangers are just too weak.
8. Warrior… a GS and S/Wh is insanely fast.
9. Zombie zerg. Eles and thieves are not bunkery enough to handle the random AoE spam. They could easily out-run the zerg and could wipe 10+ before they were brought down.
10. Guardian. Rangers purge conditions in the most horrible of fashions. Guardians also have a decent amount of control, mitigate all forms of damage and can keep fire constantly on a target.
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The reasons are very obvious… they are incredibly strong in small fight situations. Unlike thieves they don’t have to get in melee range to drop a rip ton of damage. In 1v1 situations it is like fighting two players. A player cannot ignore the phantasms nor can they ignore the mesmer. Good ones are nearly impossible to burst with more escape than D/P thieves.
I will also add I would trade my PU and mesmer defensive line traits for my thieves defensive line traits….THEN THERE WOULD BE CRYING, of that I have no doubt.
Could you imagine if Mesmers could remove a condition for every second in stealth? Oh god the horror! Makes me feel all queazy just thinking about it.
If only thieves had that ability! They can remove 1 every 3 seconds but under any kind of control pressure that does not keep up.
If AOE were completely removed, would there still be healing or boons at all? This change would completely annihilate classes like guardians or necros who rely on groups of allies or enemies, and shift everything to mesmers and thieves. Entire weapons and in some cases classes would need to be overhauled entirely, all for WvW, which they don’t make big changes for with balance.
Two key points here is that both Guardians and Necros are fully capable with the skills they have today to be very potent solo. If AoE was removed, those skills would be replaced with non-AoE skills making heavy AoE classes as viable as they are today. This is really just a thought exercise on par with removing AoE caps in the game, but it is interesting to think about a GW2 with limited or no AoE.
If I could design this part of the game over again there would be some AoE and all of it on long cool downs. No spammable attack would be AoE that is for sure. I would also completely remove the target limits on the AoE that would be left.
I would be money that if ANet could start over, AoE would not be nearly as heavy in the skill system as it is today. Difficult to unring that bell now though.
just think of it as it will never happen…..
This.
It is not feasible in this style of MMO. Friendly fire has to be designed into a game from the very beginning.
I’m not talking about retal only, I’m talking about the perma boon balls of players that never have a counter. A well of corruption or null field will get 1 maybe 2 tics off of one player, only to have the boon replaced immediately. This is imo worse then the condi meta.
If a player doesn’t spam AoE on an enemy stack without healing support, it is not an issue. There are a small handful of AoE attacks that may return a ton of Retal per use… don’t use those without support or consideration. Simply put not every attack, build, skill, ability is meant to be used in every situation.
Most AoE attacks hit at most 5 targets which puts the returned damage around 2k tops. There are some AoE attacks that hit multiple times that simply should not be used in this scenario. If a player cannot mitigate 2k or so worth of Retal in a large group fight, they shouldn’t chain those attacks.
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Wow guys! I’m completely overwhelmed by the positive responses. You guys have no idea how great and appreciative i feel about that. @D best.3547, Glad to know I’m doing things right. I don’t claim to be an expert, and I’m learning as I go. @Straegen.2938, good tip – ill try to narrate mistakes I make as well as the other players in new videos.
No need to be an expert to show and narrate combat videos. Videos that focus on solid fights, that aren’t cherry picked victories with an insight into a fight are simply fantastic and help almost all of us improve our skills.
they need to remove the cap on AoEs. We constantly have the Outnumbered debuff so the only way for 5 people to kill 50 is if Meteor Shower can hit unlimited targets.
If by “need” you mean make the lag ridiculously worse, create even more AoE dependence and ruin WvW. Think it through…
Imagine how ridiculously kitten a Guardian would be without AoE limits? Their shouts would buff and heal everyone in the stack. Their staff spam would hit a crazy number of players. Warriors… holy crap… the control would be disgusting. The shout healing would be insane. Every AoE class would be insanely powerful and fights of 10+ would end in under 3 seconds. Most importantly the lag would make the game UNPLAYABLE.
Removing the cap is not going to happen… it really cannot happen for a slew of reasons. Even if they could and did remove the cap on all AoE, players would still stack and zerg thanks to AoE heals and fields.
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It is an exploit. I am sure if ANet had an easy fix to this they would implement it. Sadly there is nothing that can be done except don’t kill a mesmer by a gate which is MUCH easier said than done.
Boon stripping is really weak and should be improved. Currently the counters are too few and underwhelming.
There are two counters to Retal… boon strip (smaller fights) or out heal (larger fights). Most guardians don’t even notice Retal in a zerg on zerg fight because they are in the stack healing over the damage. IMO players who complain about Retal are usually brittle, outside the stack or hitting a much larger force without thought.
You must not have been around before the AoE limit, because there really were no zergs at all, AoE busted them up real quick. Players were required to actually think about where they were on the field and where they were headed in order to prevent their death, rather than standing in the middle of what should be dealing damage knowing that the RNG target selectors AOE uses are never going to hit the same target often enough to be a threat.
I started playing in Beta. Zergs have been here since the beginning but they were not nearly as big. The reason was simple… lag. The AoE caps were a lag fix which simply allowed more players to stack. Players have been stacking from the beginning for two simple reasons… fields and healing. Defensive AoE which is every bit as prevalent as offensive if not more so. Virtually every zerg build drops a ton of AoE and very, very, very little targeted damage.
AoE is WAY out of balance in GW2. Surely that has to be obvious to everyone at this point.
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Agreed…and regarding the Flame rams: Thats what double door attacks are for….to make it doable with less supply used, they are also easy to defend against.
I think Flame Rams on EB keeps are an oversight. The inner oil doesn’t reach them. Inner catas/trebs often will not hit them. Pretty much the only thing that does hit them consistently is ACs. Being able to drop 4+ rams that hit both doors can often have the keep cracked open before a server responds. That is really cheap supply for siege that effectively cuts through keeps.
Besides it looks REALLY stupid to see a ram hitting air and damaging a door well away from it.
Narrating why certain skills are activated, mistakes you make, mistakes the other player makes, etc are what makes a video good/bad in my book. You had some of that in here but not enough. You should elaborate more on your attack/defense process before, during and after an engagement. Yishi videos are awesome at that style of narration. Video and sound quality were both fine.
The fighting was lackluster and clearly none of the fights were against decent roamers but I don’t think that was the point of video.
Ultimately you have to ask why you are making the video. If it is a vanity thing, most won’t care. If it is for an educational process, focus on teaching. All in all a good start though.
Currently a tactic. However, a waypoint should only contest when a keep has a breach (inner or outer). It should stay contested until the breaches are sealed.
Retal wasn’t really nerfed this patch but fixed. It has been running the PvE damage rather than the sPvP/WvW damage in WvW for a while now. They fixed it so that it would return the damage it was meant to return all along.
pure hammer trains are extremely easy to counter and slowly dismantle if a group knows what they’re doing, that said, the examples in your video are kitten tier wannabe hammer trains getting destroyed, the outcome would have been the same no matter what they were running.
Quality hammer trains are rarely easily destroyed. They can be kited and managed, but one wrong move and it will cut through an enemies back line… fight over. It is like bull fighting only with a much more volatile arena.
Because nothing is more ‘vanilla’ than mindless zerging?
The only reason zergs are mindless is because of AoE. This is how it currently works:
A: Get near blue tag
B: Press random AoE skill key
C: Press 1 (use AoE/multi-target weapon)
D: Goto A
“Skilled” zerg play is when the commander adds in commands like dodge or blast. AoE is target-less and lazy. It allows for lazy/unskilled play. AoE is the single biggest reason zergs stack for both offence and defense. More AoE won’t change anything especially when you look at the current system which is 90% or more AoE. This is the OP point and I agree with them.
In my experience, health recovery scales significantly better with the toughness stat than the healing stat. Seems a bit counter intuitive for a regen to build around toughness but it works. Dire on a solo Ranger is very effective and tanky as hell. It also means a player can completely avoid the now somewhat kitten BM line and push points into conditioning lines.
Healing Power is really only statistically useful (maybe) when the heals are group heals. Toughness only helps you… Healing Power may help everyone around you. If you aren’t built for group heals, I would strongly advise against loading up Healing Power.
This only works in a handful of places. In most of these places a well placed Sup AC can counter them easily.
A bigger problem (and not high priority) is that one set of flame rams in EB can hit both inner and outer doors.
Dear ANet, I am an AoE spammer and I want you to remove the only abilities that moderate AoE use.
1) AoE is suppose to be effective against clumped up groups of enemies, but is in WvW being countered by clumped up groups of enemies.
2) Clumping up sure as hell could do with being a little less effective.
3) Retaliation is pretty kittenpoor outside of highly penalized situations, this would allow Retaliation to be more relevant.
4) “Hi im a blobling and spreading out is unacceptably difficult for me. So i want a passive way to ignore aoe that takes as little skill as possible”
If a group wants to spam AoE, they need to boon strip first. Personally I think AoE is over the top in GW2. Pretty much every zerg build is built around it now. The only thing that tempers it is Retal and even then just barely.
They will likely NEVER remove the AoE cap. Even increasing it on some skills would mean substantially more lag. Even if they technically could, increasing the effectiveness of AoE would make it even more powerful and dominant than it already is. Virtually every large scale combat build centers around AoE skills. Why would anyone want to vanilla up combat even more?
If all skills were single target, wouldn’t it benefit larger numbers even more? I thought the argument was the AOE cap needed to be removed for better WvW, not eliminated completely.
No. Currently the larger the blob the more non-targeted AoE output they produce causing a massive amount of group healing and perimeter damage. If most skills were single target, skill groups that effectively managed target acquisition would have a decided advantage even when heavily out numbered. Dodging and evasion would become even more important while stacking would be relatively ineffective.
A great benefit of this system is more players in a fight with less lag. Less lag also opens up more ability activation because really large fights often degenerate into spamming the base attack since nothing else is going off. We would also see pets and minions becoming useful in large scale fights again.
I am not for eliminating AoE, but I really believe it should be toned WAY down.
Dear ANet, I am an AoE spammer and I want you to remove the only abilities that moderate AoE use.
The AoE, particularly the fields produced, are what give this game a unique combat mechanic over most other games. I run into various guilds, I won’t name names, but when it comes down to it the fighting is not pretty and its very disorganized when you get down to this skirmish style of play. AoE gives the combat structure and rewards organization. The downside is it also helps with blobbing.
Fields are AoE but the damage component of raw AoE without fields is nearly skill-less. A monkey could spam AoE on many classes/builds and do well in this game. Fields and AoE in general should be more limited and not spamable. Having a field come up every kitten in a fight is far different than the non-stop spamfest that is currently fundamental WvW play.
These AoE skills also bog down the game engine making it so that fewer players can engage is massive combat.
The log is buggy and constantly lies. Often a compound source of damage is rolled up into one attack. Lets say you get hit by three players. Sometimes the log entry will appear something like this Unknown hit you for [A Ton of Damage] using [Some Random Skill]. In reality it was a dozen attacks but I think the server rolls it up and delivers the damage as one packet for performance reasons. The log simply isn’t getting all the detail. This is particularly problematic for conditions and siege which often do not show up in the log at all.
ranger rapid fire? lol. just dodge.
It will still continue to track you after you dodge. You will avoid some of the damage though.
AoE as a primary attack system is a horrible design mechanic for any player wanting to focus on skilled play. A little AoE is a good thing such as a grenade in a shooter FPS but it should be rationed. GW2 is almost wall to wall AoE and there is every incentive to use it. Oddly this same mechanic is likely why WvW cannot scale beyond where it is today. Far too many targets per skill to track which likely creates a lot of CPU and bandwidth pressure.
Do not even get me started on auto targeting… uhhh.
Over 1k ranks and no ascended or precursor. I am averaging around one exotic per 200 WvW chest opens as well. The loot system in this game is abysmal and one of the worst I have experienced in any MMO.
My nearly 160 unmodified Magic Find is not working on item drops either.
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It does “work” but it isn’t functional. Most of the pet skills are problematic since they frequently take upwards of 10 seconds to fire. Even then a player typically has to pound the F2 key relentlessly or the pet will simply ignore the request. Yet another reason the Ranger is considered weak in WvW… they truly have the absolute worst class mechanic.
I think they wanted to encourage players to leave the legendaries but it doesn’t work in many tiers. Outnumbered usually means one of two things frequently… not enough people from any side to find a decent fight or too many people on one or more sides to find a decent fight. Even when a player does manage to find a decent fight often a zerg isn’t far behind. Even flipping camps becomes sport for heavy populated servers.
Yes. 1v1 and 2v1 fights almost always boil down to timing and situational awareness. The builds between the two frequently do not transfer but many of the skills certainly do. sPvP is also an accelerated way to learn counter timing against other classes. After enough time, you will begin to see the patterns fighters use in their skill progressions.
Another and often better method is an organized WvW fight night. Show up, bow to your opponent and proceed to wail on each other until someone goes down. Repeat until your fingers bleed.
IMO grenades are more of an offensive siege weapon not defensive. Much better to get on siege when defending or spam the door with AoE attacks.
Bombs have been a better overall open field fight style at least for me.
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We fought them last week and while their zergs are bigger and more plentiful than BPs, Mags had lots of roamer and skirmish teams running around which was highly enjoyable. They even avoided zerging us into the ground just to keep our morale up and the fights more plentiful. Despite their reputation, I came away with a lot of respect for both their general attitude and certainly their skill. Some of the toughest skirmish fights I have ever had.
If I decided to move up, Mags would certainly be a contender.
Unfortunately, this week we are back to fighting under heavy siege fire and watching a plethora of SoS wall warriors
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More uplevel bashing… A lot of them are just scrubs if they die often let them get experience in WvW the hard way.
I don’t think anyone would care except any hardcore WvW player has seen these guys rally hard earned kills time and time again.
Not necessarily; if sides lack coverage during certain time periods and are vastly out numbered the score is still going to stack up. Take into account peoples tendency to avoid lopsided rounds which has a major impact on player numbers at any given time of day.
In my suggested system, there would be a total of 21 games per week (3 games per day 7 days per week) and total of 126 possible points in a week (6 points awarded per game multiplied by 21 games). A server with a dominant 8 hour window would only get 3 points for that eight hours. At most they could skew the week long score by 14 points out of a total of 126 points.
Currently a dominant 8 hour window can easily account for half the points a server makes in a week.
But just to take something because your Guild has more buffs, in my opinion, shouldnt be allowed unless they also then either restore that buff (or buffs) back to the guild that had it up OR something like charge the new claiming guild 5g (or whatever) and give that to the guild that possession was taken from. Again, if the claiming guild has no buffs running then i see no problem taking the claim from them.
If I come up to a camp and XYZ guild has it claimed but no +5 supply buff, why should they get to keep the camp claimed? The current system is stupid. The concept that somehow a guild “owns” a shared resource is ridiculous.
Why does the first person to make the claim have priority? Why would they deserve money to override the claim?
Seems like the AoE limits of Churning Earth would be a problem against a decent sized group. Maybe a necro portal bomb would be a similar trick would have a greater chance of success.
The problem is this is a stick rather than a carrot approach. Rather than introduce a punitive system (guild A has more buffs than guild B, so guild A gets preferential treatment over guild B ), the suggestions I’ve made seek to motivate guilds to activate buffs by rewarding this behavior.
If the objective of WvW is for a server to win, whoever has the best buffs should be able to claim a location.
I really don’t care about some petty guild’s imposed drama. “Oh heavens me I cannot keep Overlook claimed because my guild isn’t running all the buffs.”
Besides practically no location is taken or defended by one guild. Why should XYZ Guild have rights over a location… because they got there first? What is that about?
Just make it so that the best buffs can claim a location, problem solved, any drama created from this change is ridiculously petty at best and in the worst interest of a server.
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Only way to stop pvd is to remove it from the game.
This system isn’t designed to stop PvDoor but it would prevent a server from ticking 600+ points for 8 hours of a day and dominating the scoring of a match for an entire week.
The EoTM system was the basis for this. I like being in a longer match but I also like that when things get out of hand on EoTM that it gets reset shortly. The siggested eight hour games are arbitrary and could be 24 hours, 12 hours, 4 hours, etc. Whatever works best to create a more enjoyable experience.
Simplify it, no if this or that. 1 or 2hour “guild claim refresh” like siege, put a timer on it. First one there or however the system has it now gets first dibs. After 2 hours it becomes unclaimed or the timer just sits at 0 until another person does.
Simplify it even further. A guild with more relevant buffs can assume a claim. No timers to track and no sophisticated system. Just a simple IF check when a claim attempt is made.
Matches would be week long between three distinct servers as they are today. Games would run Eight hours. Each game would yield 3 points to the winner, 2 for second place and 1 for last. At the end of each game, the maps would reset. At the end of the week scores are totaled to determine placement in a match.
It doesn’t solve the fundamental problem of lopsided matches, but it does manage the overnight PvDoor issue better. It also keeps an already strong server from becoming entrenched behind a wall of upgrades.
Obviously the cost and time to upgrade would be reduced. There would also be little reason to put siege timers on most defensive siege so refreshing could be removed.
Thoughts?
The second one is easy since there is no “tick” any longer. Every kill and death counts.
my response was to OP’s suggestion, which most definitely still uses ticks.
Ahh… most of your criticisms apply to any scoring system though even the current one.
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