Guild Wars 2

Unless siege vs. siege damage was changed, it just got a lot harder to repel an attack using defensive siege.

All this does is make wiping defensive siege easier and make killing abandoned siege a bit faster…I hope they do a repass on this one.

I thought this was a necro at first…didn’t we realize that dire was problematic ages ago? It was removed from sPvP by the time I even heard of it.

Though, yeah…I agree, it’s an unreasonable pain in the butt.

The way splash currently works seems pretty intuitive to me, though I agree there are some issues with it. I think the real problem is the bug that makes diagonal surfaces extend hit-boxes, or w/e, which allows for the splash to hit a wall that’s way further above/below it.

We were told about that bug months ago but I’ve been sparse since then so I don’t know if any progress has been made on fixing it. As for siege in general…I don’t recall seeing any red posts about it ever at all outside of polls. Thus, I’m not sure how much is bugged and how much is intended.

Last I checked, no one at Anet is so good at WvW as for their participation to amount to favoritism.

That sounded a lot less mean in my head…

I think the point is to make flipping the camp take long enough that it is feasible to defend it. Currently, from entry to cap completion, I can solo a camp in ~35s without even being optimized for it. That means that the enemy gets 5 seconds of warning. Tier 1 and Tier 2 add maybe 5-10 seconds and tier 3 maybe has a total of 30s warning.

I would love for people to have to defend their camps to keep them, but they need to be able to reach the camp from some place nearby in time. What I would hope is that the camps take longer to flip but don’t necessarily become harder to flip. Thus, a solo roamer could still take out a tier 3 camp but they couldn’t do it without detection or any real danger.

I don’t think the OP wants to change the base camp, just the upgraded versions. Solo flipping base camps is something that should stick around (though the swords delay is too long). Given the time and effort needed to get a camp up a tier, though, it would make sense if it made them take more than a few seconds longer to flip.

A tier 1 camp should still be soloable by a strong roamer, but perhaps in 90 seconds instead of 30. A tier 2 should take a couple minutes alone and a tier 3 should be a real challenge. Solo players can still keep camps down but they can’t just run up on the north camp that’s been defended for 6 hours and flip it while the home team is in the loo.

Given that supply is limited, this isn’t going to make a dent in how any battle plays out—only in how well siege can be sustained between battles.

If a group rolls up to a keep and drops some siege but keeps some supply in reserve to repair it, they’re going to break the walls/gates down more slowly. In addition, as long as the repair rate is based on supply, defenders will have to do the same amount of damage to kill the siege as if that supply had been spent on additional siege.

Suicide runs will be somewhat less effective but, to be honest, it’s not like they were ever all that effective anyway.

On the bright side, it will no longer be possible to pre-damage enemy siege so that they can not prepare for a later assault.

This hype about zergs with nigh invincible siege fails to take into account supply limits. Even zergs can’t carry forever—and a little supply warfare will devastate their stores anyway.

It’s probably impossible to do something like this without it being contentious, but I think this is a workable idea.

In short, this past week has been the best.

In short, this past week has been the best.

They might not do something as simple as lowering points in various time zones. There are more elegant ways to approach the problem and they’ve had years to think about it…I think they’ll do better.

I think the QoL side has a reasonable case too…though a mix of the two would likely be ideal. I think we could do without the sparkle trail if it meant adding score notifications into the scoring side.

ZombieLeach.5862:

TorquedSoul.8097:

ZombieLeach.5862:

I can’t read it because the page is sliding off the left side of my phone screne and won’t load that side. I’m missing 2-3 words per line. :/

Turn your phone sideways.

Tried that as well as zooming out. The left couple inches or so of the page isn’t there at all. It’s like the page loads seceral inches off center.

WvW Quality of Life Improvements
Add an option for reduced nameplate clutter.
Add cross-map team chat.
Add objective-summary tool tips.
Add a display effect for Righteous Indignation on map markers.
Add floating indicators when gaining points toward war score.
Add a WXP-gain sparkle trail.
Add a territory-control map overlay.
Take suggestions from the community!
WvW Scoring Improvements
Reduce the impact of night capping.
Lessen the gap between winning scores and losing scores so losing teams can still recover.
Adjust objective score relative to upgrade level.
Adjust score for capturing objectives.
Rebalance the score awarded for activities that don’t reward points per tick.
Take suggestions from the community!
No preference

Can we get an explanation on what each of these things means? I understand the scoring, probably, but I’m not sure what an objective-summary tool tip entails or what a territory-control map overlay is. Also, a sparkle trail? Sparkles are all good and well but…what am I signing up for there?

Still, while I believe scoring does need to be addressed, I think score visibility (which is included in QoL) needs to come first. No scoring system can be properly tested if players can’t actually kitten it.

If the wall is only hit once every three minutes and no guards are aggroed, no defense event will pop. I can’t imagine this actually being used to take something as it’d be hours of work…

So, perhaps this is just a completely irrelevant post q_q

Trebs are rough to balance due to their range…it’s really hard to predict what they’re going to hit.

I think the solution is to extend siege restriction considerably further than invincibility. It disallows building siege to fight spawn camping, but there are enough other ways to deal with that.

Blackarps.1974:

I went from disliking it to being just okay with it. I never hated the map but I definitely don’t love it either. The uneven terrain really makes fights hard because some skills like hammer 2 for revenants just doesn’t work. There are too many choke points and small areas where there needs to be more room to fight. For example, the NWT is hard to fight in because of its layout. I definitely liked that they removed that big rock area just coming out of your garrison to the west. That was nothing but an eyesore and wasn’t even necessary to have. One thing I always liked about the map is that there was flavor for each tower and keep. I’m glad that the champions don’t just sit still and take it like they do in EB despite some of them like the Earth keep moving around a little too much. Necropolis is pretty awesome though.

Did you mean the Air keep? Earthkeep lord literally never moves anywhere D:

I’ve had this happen a few times, already, but I think there are enough ways around it except for when Shield Gens are used to cover catapults (because catas have shields as well).

The key is that the shield generally doesn’t cover both the offensive siege and the generator itself. If it does, they’re so close together as to all be hit by a single treb shot or siege disabler. If the situation is truly dire, I hop onto my thief and ask someone to pressure the siege with a treb/mortar while I sneak in and disable the generators. To date, while significant damage has been done, I’ve never lost a keep to a treb farm. Also, since gens take significant supply to build, simply having them is a DPS loss for the offensive group. I think that’s an ok trade-off.

That said, using the shield gen on a treb inside the tower is more problematic. If one can’t get access to an angle that will allow disabling or just hitting it…but I think that’s more an issue with the tower. I would suggest using your own treb to take down the tower wall to at least force them to use supply keeping it up. If it goes down, the situation is easier to handle since someone can sneak in and disable. If it doesn’t, you at least prevented them from building more trebs/gens.

Sound like Henge of Denravi would suit you pretty well, though they have consistent NA and not a whole lot else. They run zergs sometimes but also do a whole lot of roaming.

The damage was high for the class, though in a 1:1 comparison it wasn’t anything special. We have to consider the myriad defensive abilities that DHs have along with all their other powerful aspects. Honestly, even with that change, they’re still fairly onerous when it comes to counterplay due to instantly arming traps that damage and CC, all the rest of their CC and their ability to just negate ranged damage for so long in addition to all of their blocks and what not. There’s nothing to aim for when fighting them because they have the answer for it all.

I like to think that the low activity on SoS is because we’ve stepped up our defense game.

Doesn’t help me finish my dailies, though q_q

Wxp, since the last patch, has been increased by 15% due to the WvW beta buff. If you’re getting less exp it’s probably because the higher population means less k-training.

Play any of the elite specs and you’ll do fine.

I think Kitta makes a good point—SMC was the last place that needed a defense boost. While gripes about the tactivators are more prevalent than just SMC, they do seem to concentrate around the castle.

X T D.6458:

Think you read it wrong, I find it easier to defend now, as opposed to on alpine. Because of all the defensive buffs that were added with hot, guild upgrades, auras, siege buffs, tactivators, hardended gates, lord scaling, etc etc. The keep layout on the dbl makes it frustrating to attack combined with all the defensive buffs, not enough open space, to much cramped space. What I prefer is a more balanced approach when it comes to attacking and defending, neither should have to much advantage over the other.

Yeah, I read it wrong. There was a ‘then’ that should have been a ‘than’ but I didn’t notice even though context pointed to it—my bad. It all makes sense now~

The new entryways into the lord’s room of all three keeps helped with the crampedness, I thought. Each lord room is much bigger than the alpine variants, too.

Bay had a tight corridor and then a moderately sized circle for lord whereas firekeep now has three bridges, a huge lord room and a nice, flat rectangle where enemies can gather outside of aggro range of the lord.

Garrison lord room could only be entered through choke points though it was the largest of the three. You could come in the watergate choke, the north gate/wall which had a small staging area and then a choke or the west gate which led to a bridge choke. Earthkeep now has six stairs that lead to lord’s room, all of which constitute chokes, and a much bigger lord’s room to boot.

Hills lord room could only be entered by a shielded bridge—if the defenders built a few ACs inside, they could defend it indefinitely. If you came in the west inner or south inner wall, there was actually another bridge before that bridge too. The lord’s room itself was tiny. Meanwhile, Airkeep now has 4 ways to enter the lord’s room and a handful of flat fighting areas that are bigger than the whole Hills lord’s room plus the actual lord’s circle itself.

So, I don’t really understand the cramped feeling as compared to Alpine. They all seem sort of cramped to me but DBL less so.

I think it’s pretty good on light/medium. I really like the heavy set—mostly the legs though.

I liked it before and like it better now, though something needs to come along to replace the value that was added by barricades. The south towers just aren’t worth the trouble right now.

X T D.6458:

Its a lot better now, but it still has an annoying layout. I still hate trying to attack keeps because atm there is just to much advantage for defenders. However when I am defending I find it a lot easier then on alpine. Keep layout designs regarding defending/attacking, as well as the other additions still need to be adjusted imo.

Can you elaborate a bit on how defenders have too much advantage on DBL but you find defending easier on ABL? I don’t know how to reconcile those two statements.

I think the minimum rotation will likely be 2 weeks since it seems to require an update rather than a hotfix.

Also, I don’t think there’s much ‘strategy’ involved in snowballing objectives on a BL. Unlike EB, the home defenders are outnumbered 2:1 in an even match-up. Giving enemies a tower to treb from means a zerg has to respond as opposed to any possibility of a small-team taking it out.

Can’t you already see the CD of the tactivator by clicking the objective on the map? I know that when the enemy WP is on CD, that’s when I harass the keep the hardest—they’ll have to sit in it if they want to keep it.

Maybe the airkeep buff would allow gliding in that area? It has the highest cliffs anyway and, since fall damage is already negated, wouldn’t be too much of a pain to balance.

Maybe the airkeep buff would allow gliding in that area? It has the highest cliffs anyway and, since fall damage is already negated, wouldn’t be too much of a pain to balance.

I haven’t been paying too much attention to T1/T2/T4, but T3 is much closer this week than in the months prior.

Larger gaps? Wasn’t it just last week that DR hit an 800k score? There’s nothing remotely close to that atm.

The northern towers at least stop the NWC/NEC yaks from moving to Rampart. It’s not much—not enough—but something.

It doesn’t seem all over to me, honestly. I’ve seen bigger swings happen.

Ah, the difference is that I was calculating the potential points while you were working backwards from the actual points. Both datasets are useful, though I prefer the potential since I don’t think that current playstyles take full advantage of the scoring system.

Still, my main objection to your system is the contribution of killscore. I’m fine with shifting points away from PPT but not if it means going to PPC and PPK rather than PPY (or PPSC as you’ve called it).

It sounds like you’re taking some pretty inefficient paths. With the barriers gone, it shouldn’t take you half that time to get anywhere except the exact opposite corner (which should take ~3m).

If they have a fix for this in mind, it would have to come after they found a way to somewhat even out population. Thus, the linking may just be the first step in the process.

Let’s keep our fingers crossed~

If they have a fix for this in mind, it would have to come after they found a way to somewhat even out population. Thus, the linking may just be the first step in the process.

Let’s keep our fingers crossed~

Having unique maps for each BL would be difficult for balancing. If there were many maps with groups in each archetype, it might be ok to experiment with it, but I don’t think it’ll work out with Desert and Alpine.

For example, it takes over twice as long to go from spawn to side-keep lord room on Desert than Alpine. If one team has Desert, they will have a serious advantage over others in this respect. Ever since reset I’ve been thanking the six whenever I’ve helped save a side-keep—I know that on Alpine it would have been gone. Same for whenever a group fails to take Rampart; if it was Alpine, there’d be no way to defend since they’d be trebbing from tower

Thus, if there are going to be three separate maps, they need to at least be similar in core aspects.

EFWinters.5421:

FogLeg.9354:

I am having loads of fun on Desert maps atm. EB is overblobbed anyway, and has queues. It will be overblobbed even when Apline maps return and will have queues then too.

But then players will have an alternative to EB. At the moment my two options are queueing for EB or going to a dead borderland. The end result is me just closing the game. Currently only one BL keep is flipped in T2. For a Sunday afternoon that is completely abnormal – especially given the increased playerbase the world linking brought.

You can argue as much as you want that desert BL is amazing. The hard fact is that nobody plays it, which is why Arena Net is bringing alpine BL back. If you had played WvW before HoT you would see what an incredible decline WvW has been in since.

I don’t see how someone from FA can say this. I’ve played more WvW this weekend than I care to admit and I’ve been seeing nearly non-stop FA zergs on my BL and I’ve heard reports of them from forces on other BLs. In NA, there’s a constant FA presence and usually an HoD presence and, thankfully, a solid SoS presence too.

What timezone do you play in, perhaps?

The original set-up was a much softer version of this. Hard-coding it, so to speak, would take most of the spontaneity away—the BLs would become a predetermined siege grind rather than truly dynamic play.

I’m not a fan of EBG at all. It plays very differently from the borders and isn’t something I’m all that interested in.

DeWolfe.2174:

Sviel.7493:

Literally every borderland was queued last night. You’re not making a whole lot of sense, here.

Of course, that’s people simply trying to play, anywhere they can. EB is without question the first to queue. Thus making the desert bl not the first choice of players, it makes it the “if I have to” choice.

I agree with the OP, Alpine should be the top priority of the Dev’s. They should not have spend a minute on modifying the Desert map. Instead that time should have been put toward getting Alpine ready sooner.

It was the same with Alpine. After reset, EBG would be queued even while the borders were empty. EBG has always been the first to queue.

Literally every borderland was queued last night. You’re not making a whole lot of sense, here.

Literally every borderland was queued last night. You’re not making a whole lot of sense, here.

I’m in T3? or something like that—on SoS/GoM. We haven’t decided on Gate of Sorrows or Sea of Madness yet, but I like both.

We had a 100 queue for EB and ~15 queue for each BL. I was one of the first folks in but others were able to get into the BLs in ~20-30m or so. I can’t be super sure of that as I only got info from one person. It’s definitely not business as usual but I don’t think it’s unacceptable for a reset night with as much hype as this one.

As for the link, I pretty much love all of GoM. There’s definitely a difference in playstyle, but we did a pretty good job of making it work. We had a zerg big enough to contend with enemy zergs and also had scouts and fluid groups of roamers to apply pressure on enemy fronts and starve their holdings of supply. Also, everyone seemed super nice. I honestly wouldn’t mind being linked forever, if it goes on like this.

That said, I do feel really sorry for the folks that got linked into T1. Not only do I abhor the playstyles there but it also seems like most of the non-Maguuma toxicity is concentrated in the highest ranks. I think it would be fine if tier 1 was left alone and tier 8 as well, maybe?

TorquedSoul.8097:

I’m pretty sure I am close with my estimate. The 4 minute spawn rate isn’t for each camp but rather for each supply connection each camp has. So a camp that supplies 2 objectives will spawn 2 dolyaks over a four minute period. A camp that supplies 3 objectives will have 3 dolyaks spawn. and so on.

If my estimate was wrong my score approximations would be way off rather than just 1-2%.

I could bore you with the details if you like. I think I still have the spreadsheet somewhere.

Here’s an incomplete list of travel times for yaks. I don’t have time to dig up the more polished stuff but it should suffice.

Here are the travel times for Dolyaks from camps to objectives.

NEC to Airkeep – 2:05, 2:12
NEC to Rampart – 3:57

NEC PPT = 5 + 21 + 12 = 38

NWC to Firekeep – 2:10
NWC to Rampart – 4:36

NWC PPT = 5 + 21 + 12 = 38

NC (west) to Rampart – 2:48
NC (east) to Rampart – 2:22
NC to NET – 3:54
NC to NWT – 3:16

NC PPT = 5 + 12 + 12 + 9 + 12 = 50

SEC to Airkeep – 3:14
SEC to SET – 2:08

SEC PPT = 5 + 12 + 21 = 38

As you can see, during any 4 minute period, each camp spawns at least 3 yaks.

As for the ratio, the borderlands have 145 points from objectives and a potential ~220 points from yaks. If we factor in an EBG corner (75 points) for a team that doesn’t own SMC (no yak points) then it becomes 220 points from objectives and 220 points from yaks—that is the absolute limit of objective PPT contribution: 50%.

If you were intending to include EBG w/o SMC, then it was only 10% off, which isn’t too far.

edit: FUN FACT—since the change to the south Airkeep layout, that yak now runs in slow motion to preserve the travel time.

If they have a season and it sucks, people will be less likely to come back for another. Reinstating seasons is, in essence, their trump card—they must play it well or suffer a serious set-back.

Gaile Gray.6029:

We’ll post on the NA list this evening. No sneak peeks, sorry guys!

If we don’t like our partners, will you guys offer counseling?