Guild Wars 2

PierPiero.9142:

If they ’d do that there would not be any condi build viable …. you could do that if you reduce direct damage of 10 times for each skill. Condi damage is time based …avoiding a condi burst or avoding a direct skill is the same thing. The only difference is that direct damage is immediate… not the condi one … why so much hate to condition builds ? try it and you will see that they are strong but they have also their weaknesses.

If that were the case, there wouldn’t be an issue. Consider engineers—their condi is tied to specific skills and dodging the skill results in dodging the condi damage. So, in effect, they have much higher damage on their skills than comparable power builds but the damage happens overtime, can be cleansed early and ignores defense. No one complains about condi engineers.

Now, look at mesmers. They inflict Confusion when they blind. They AoE blind when they shatter. They blind when they block or evade. They have several blocks/evades and the ability to reset those CDs. Shatter skills inflict Confusion and Torment. One inflicts Confusion as a base as well. Shatters happen over a period of time as each clone reaches the target, making it often impossible to dodge each one. Add Runes of Perplexity to that (inflict Confusion when struck) and you have a build that inflicts huge stacks of condis that cannot be mitigated by dodging attacks and are made worse by actually trying to fight.

Oh, and recall that Confusion/Torment deal the most damage out of all condis so long as your opponent is either moving or using skills. So unless you’re fighting a potato, you get huge damage coefficients essentially for free. They can’t, realistically, stop moving or using skills.

Then, on top of that, add copious amounts of stealth, blinks and gear with high defensive stats that does not sacrifice damage. The result is a class that hardly shows up to the fight and is impossible or very difficult to dodge against that also punishes you for taking any action whatsoever.

That’s going to be a pain in the ass to fight against even if you somehow “balance” it by using good numbers. It is low-risk, high-reward at its finest.

As soon as the outnumbered buff goes away, people will be yelling in map chat for others to leave.

Also, outnumbered doesn’t proc if one huge server is steamrolling you and the other isn’t on the map at all.

The map was not designed for gliding. You can easily enter Firekeep, Earthkeep, Airkeep, and NET with even basic gliding.

@Jacion
You could make the upgrade option itself cost 10 supply, which is the difference between the two. That way, no build sites and no skipping the extra supply cost.

If you want to keep the time component, make the upgrade have a hammering animation like building siege but it does nothing if canceled early.

The point remains that siege built for a defensive purpose is intended to be ready at the time of the attack, rather than built after the attack starts. That’s true no matter how you mince the words.

In terms of your earlier exploratory question ‘what is siege,’ it is simply the tools used in a siege. When attacking a structure, it must be temporary or mobile. When defending a structure, it is almost always permanent and fixed. Whether it is permanent or temporary is defined by what the intended use is—or more strictly, whether or not it needs to move. Siege that protects an immobile object does not have to move.

Aury.1367:

did the mesmer forum vanish? Why dont you put it there?

He did put it there. That’s the second sentence in the OP.

Offensive siege is temporary. Defensive siege is supposed to be permanent. You don’t dismantle your defenses because no one’s popped up in a while. There’s a reason castles are preferred to tents.

But that’s not the real point, I think. Why don’t you want to see a garrison with 20 arrowcarts? If the issue is that arrowcarts are too strong, that’s a different fix.

It seems like guidance through achievements, which is not a bad idea. It is in play already, to some extent.

However, tracking the achievements will prove difficult. Scouts especially are hard to pin down as their role may consist of running all over and reporting on enemy positions without actually doing much engaging.

If that problem can be solved/side-stepped, I think a list of resetting achievements would be helpful for new players to figure out what to do.

I tried to explain alternate value to ninja-capping it in the paragraph above the quoted one.

Small teams can break down a T3 structure and leave it vulnerable to attack from a larger team. Or, if the enemy group defending it is also small, they can attempt to take it themselves. It’s much more effective for a small team to do this than a zerg as the cost in manpower is much lower for a similar effect.

Having siege decay over time leaves us in an even worse situation. It still dies if you can’t get back to it soon enough and, now, unless you’re topping it off every 5 minutes, it won’t be at full health when it needs to be used.

Rather than solving the initial problem, it’s just introducing an additional problem.

Or, perhaps you wanted to solve the problem of structures having siege ready made for an assault?

Simonoly.4352:

It’s only really Necros that are problematic from a condition standpoint right now. This will be solved by the PvP version of Deathly Chill being introduced to WvW and another change to Epidemic. The last change to Epidemic in WvW only solved a small part of the problem and this skill still has a negative effect on the longevity of fights in WvW. Being able to block Epidemic will go a long way to adding some counterplay.

Mesmers are also problematic with condi. Thieves are a little problematic but that’s likely more due to Dire than the class itself.

But, yes, it’s not a universal issue. The condi classes where they have limited, non-passive application are in fairly good shape outside of bad stat combinations.

No thanks.

There’s nothing to be gained from more people jumping off the ground in fights. It would also undo the point of the no-combat rez change as large groups would benefit vastly more than small.

I’ve been facing JQ this week and they don’t seem very big at all. It’s certainly not an objective measurement, but they might actually have lost some folks.

@Svarty

I think you identified the problems well, but I cannot condone introducing handicaps. Handicaps are not very satisfying for the weaker team and will be despised by the stronger team. Even if they technically solve the problem, they won’t do much for making things more fun.

At the core, I think we need to accept that we’re trying to balance for a certain range of population imbalance. Once it gets too extreme, solutions will start swaying close matches.

Unfortunately, I think the core issue here is player behavior. The accepted strategy is to try and ‘one-push’ a keep. If you get rebuffed, you give up and go home. Sometimes, if you have even numbers, you’ll stay and fight—but if your server is undermanned then it’s considered impossible. If even a few players make a sustained assault, then even a T3 keep may eventually fall. Even if it doesn’t, they’ll disproportionately draw enemies to defend the keep which can alleviate pressure on the rest of their forces.

We just need to get away from ninja-capping as the only accepted contribution from small teams.

Good for you, I guess.

When Anet works on bigger issues, they ignore us for months and then release an update that largely fails to fix the issues they were working on.

When they work on small changes, the game noticeably improves. Allowing team chat to go to all maps is one of the best changes they’ve ever done, imo.

Offair.2563:

Simply ask in mapchat if people can refresh siege at other keeps/towers.

That doesn’t work. It’s also attempting to solve a problem that doesn’t need to exist.

Simple, but positive. I like it.

I always keep a list of enemies I encounter along with their guilds, the objectives they hit, any patterns of objective taking, their builds and a physical description. Thus, I know it’s not personal bias that the people I encountered in my last play session were almost all condi. Unfortunately, I keep this list by hand on a dry-erase board (I was burning too much scratch paper q_q) and I use it often, so the list doesn’t last long after a play session.

I should note that the low ratio of power thieves was unusual. I don’t see a ton of thieves but they’re more likely to be power than mesmer/necro/ranger/etc.

Also, I encountered all of these people on the borderlands. I sometimes visit EBG but it’s a very different culture and possibly a substantially different local meta.

edit: Servers are JQ and FA. I wasn’t playing a ton vs BG last week and I don’t honestly remember them having a bunch of roamers.

I would rather keep the supply cost but lower the badge cost, though I wouldn’t be against removing the supply and still lowering the badge cost. As it stands, the roles that are going to be getting use out of these traps are not the roles that are constantly getting badges from farming enemies.

babazhook.6805:

Sviel.7493:

BlaqueFyre.5678:

Guardian, Necromancer, Revenant, Elementalist, and Lesser extent Warrior Dominate Guild/Zerg fights.

Thief, Druid, Mesmer, Warrioor and to a lesser extent Engineer are the Roaming Classes

See a trend that’s pretty good diversity.

Of classes, sure. In terms of what they do, roaming is overwhelmingly condi.

Subjective observation. I still see the majority of roamers as being power.

On the server I play Rangers, Thieves, warriors and Mesmers are the majority of roamers. Rangers , thief and warrior power still dominate in numbers and mesmer condition dominates.

If the other classes are seen roaming (much less frequent) The DH is generally power though I have seen a few more burn builds of late, Necro condi . (since the changes to bleed there also more of these)

Engies I do not see a lot but there more condi of late. Ele and rev just not enough seen.

That’s great for you, I guess. What server is that?

I don’t have the data to give an objective statement, but based on the numerous subjective statements given, I have confidence that I haven’t simply been mislead by my own experiences.

The 6 5-man groups will win that scenario even if the zerg caps objectives 5x faster than them. In other words, that already exists in-game. There’s no need to hard punish people for groupings of more than 5 when there are already advantages to running small.

BlaqueFyre.5678:

Guardian, Necromancer, Revenant, Elementalist, and Lesser extent Warrior Dominate Guild/Zerg fights.

Thief, Druid, Mesmer, Warrioor and to a lesser extent Engineer are the Roaming Classes

See a trend that’s pretty good diversity.

Of classes, sure. In terms of what they do, roaming is overwhelmingly condi.

If you lower supply costs for siege, zergs will still take unguarded structures faster than small groups. The small group may have more siege but the zerg also has more siege. The only way to normalize the speed would be to restrict the amount of placed siege and ensure that groups of all sizes could hit the cap. That seems like a terrible idea to me.

Isn’t there some other way to impact the game besides quickly capping unguarded structures?

Given that on-kill stacks are trivial to get on NPCs and mobs, I’m not worried about res stacks being abused. Any abuse case would still be more difficult and take longer than the baseline for on-kill stacks.

DaShi.1368:

The game isn’t balanced around 1v1. Certain classes and builds are going to dominate. Threads like this are why there can’t be open world pvp. People will just complain about how their class/build isn’t competitive around 1v1.

If you want to roam, play a roaming class/build. If you want to tank, play a tank class/build. If you want to zerg from range, play a ranged class/build. There are plenty of options for you.

It’s fine for certain classes to dominate, so long as there’s enough variety to keep things lively. Unfortunately, we have one subset dominating in both 1v1 and 5v5.

On top of that, the manner in which this domination happens makes for extremely uninteresting fights.

The situation you’re describing is just K-Train station. The blob shows up and you can’t do anything about it, so you go hit a bunch of other things they aren’t defending atm. Everybody caps everything comfortably.

That sounds more contentious than I want, but I’m not sure how to fix it so…I love you?

I also want to ask what you define as comfortably. I’m currently comfortable taking any objective in the game with 2 people. For things like upgraded keeps, I’ll shout out in team chat and usually get 5-10 people. If I’m alone, I comfortably cut supply lines and deal substantial damage to walls. What, specifically, do you feel needs to be improved about small-group gameplay?

I think it’s more likely that the xpac tries to make resistance more of a thing and claims that solves the problem.

Editing was good, I’ll give you that. Gameplay was basic skillspam, but such is the life of a condi reaper.

I think we all know about the build, at this point ._.

Yeah, roaming is a royal pain in the ass right now. In the last 2 weeks, I’ve seen one power Mesmer, two power Dragonhunters, 1 power Reaper and 1 power Berserker. Meanwhile, I’ve seen dozens of condi Mesmers, condi Druids, condi Reapers, condi Thieves and what have you.

As a result, I run as much condi cleanse as possible, but since they tend to have high def and high sustain, I can’t cleanse condis and also do damage before I run out of cleanses and am left at their mercy. If I do, they disengage (Mesmer/Thief/Druid) and either try again after a reset or assume I’m not going to follow and hit an objective.

There’s not much in the way of actual fighting. Just semi-passive condi applications, stealth and defense. They know all they have to do is outlast my CDs. Alternatively, a Reaper can just put so many condis on that I can’t possibly cleanse them all. I also can’t do meaningful damage in the length of any resistance I might have.

But, alas…Anet wanted to shift the meta to condis and here we are.

This is definitely something we cry about often.

The WvW team (if it exists) is not the balance team, though. We’ve been told they don’t have any sway over balance changes, generally. You’ll have to convince the PvE devs that their decisions are onerous in our PvP gamemode.

Yeah…while I like that Reapers are powerful now, they’ve gone too far. I think the problem is more with how conditions work, though. It could also be a Dire thing. Basically, condi is borked.

To be fair, Nightcapping is far less of an issue than it used to be. It’s still a problem and likely always will be, but it’s been improved.

As for blobs…when players stop complaining about the things that break blobs up, maybe we’ll make more headway on that. Right now, any change that allows defenders to even slow down an attack is decried as pro-PvD and anti-fights. If blobs can’t be slowed, there’s no point in splitting up.

Svarty.8019:

The mode has to do what it originally did;

1. It needs offer a variety of playstyles
2. It needs to allow some player decisions and actions to affect the outcome
3. It needs to offer a sense of ownership (objectives), investment (upgrades), belonging (zergs), community (squad/team/map chat)
4. It needs to offer scope for player-deployable objects to affect static objectives

… all of this without mentioning scoring or rewards – which are what Arenanet are reportedly working on at the moment (29/04/2017).

I think you’re right here, but if you make me shell out cash for upgrades again I’m going to strangle someone.

I’m already invested in the structures I protect—both emotionally and in terms of dropped siege. Some things I guard just for PPT reasons, but the things I guard most fiercely are those that I’ve nursed from fresh flip to T3. Making me pay for the upgrades means it’s only going to be one structure at most and not in every play session. I won’t be breaking my back trying to guard paper towers.

Which problem got fixed?

You were stuck in a wall? I’m not sure what’s going on here…

zhonnika.1784:

The problem with this question is that every person you ask is going to have their own idea of what ‘perfect’ wvw is. Some like to scout/siege/sentry, others like to zerg, then you have the roamers, guild groups, and havocs. Changing any part of that instantly closes someone out of the way they play the game, in favor of the way you want them to play.

It’s not a question that translates well into direct game updates, but it’s useful to see what people dream about. We can take those dreams and try to hit as many near-perfects as possible.

@SpellOfIniquity
I’m interested in your vision of perfection as it’s very different from mine. I want to try and understand it better so that I’m more adept at figuring out ways to make the actual WvW more fun for both of us.

In this 24/7 death match, would population be controlled automatically or would it retain the server system? That is, are servers part of your vision or is it just the death match that’s key?

I don’t really recognize what I was talking about in your post which suggests that I’ve been unclear. A concrete example should help, no?

Say there’s a map with 7 Dragonballs. The objective is to capture more of the Dragonballs than the other team(s) and take them back to your base.

Staying a blob means that if you find a Dragonball, you’ll likely win the fight over it and can transport it back to base in safety. Splitting up means that you may lose some fights over Dragonballs, but you’ll be contesting more of them at once and will end up winning anyway. In order to compete, the blob will have to send small raiding groups off to stop you from taking 6 Dragonballs while they take 1. The groups can be strong enough to snatch the Dragonball or just enough to slow you down.

In this way, the blob cannot win by itself but there is an advantage to having larger sized groups provided small groups still exist.

If you implement a ‘negative to escalating combat sizes’ as a literal negative buff, people will be upset to see other players join them. It would not be hard to do more harm to a party with your presence than good if you’re new. Anet has also stated they’re not going down that path.

Instead, we should look for ways to make smaller combat sizes naturally more beneficial. SpellOfIniquity’s idea doesn’t allow for this as it’s just pure combat and thus numbers are always a boon (unless you include a negative buff). This is where objectives come in. Depending on their number, what it takes to accomplish them and how spread out they are, they make splitting up into smaller teams a better choice in many situations. You have leeway in the details of the objectives but removing them altogether isn’t going to work.

Large scale fights are cool and all, but there’s no way to make the game mode hinge on their outcome. If large-scale is the be-all, end-all, then the server with the most people online wins. Conversely, if organized groups are powerful enough to account for numbers, then casual players have no place and may actually be detrimental to a group.

Part of the reason objectives exist is to avoid those pitfalls. If you can’t match someone in manpower, you can use other tools to still accomplish your objectives.

Of course, there are problems with the way that’s going right now. Notably, it’s more effective to run away and PvD than it is to contest your enemies unless you have overwhelming numbers. Some players just want fights, of course, but there’s not enough of them to sustain a population—especially since the types of fights they want vary wildly in size.

I play WvW for a constrant stream of objectives where I fight for one outcome against other factions that want a different outcome. The ultimate standard by which our actions are judged is that outcome—not pure combat.

Done well, this allows groups of varying sizes to fight each other in a meaningful way. A cooperative faction of players can all work towards the same goal in very different ways and all make meaningful contributions. Communication, strategy and tactics have a bigger impact than any single warrior, but being highly proficient in combat is a strength that can be leveraged into victory.

Here are a few of my own suggestions to get things rolling. The second is probably more fitting for the borderlands as that’s where I play, but I’d like to see if the first could give some recourse to players who want to damage T3 structures on EBG. I’d love to hear more ideas, especially from EBG folks.

WvW has been accused of being a Karma Train for years at various points and by various people. The reasons behind it are less universally agreed upon, but the solution is generally believed to be reasons not to blob.

During the WvW Sneak Attack event (Dec 2015-Jan 2016), no white swords appeared on any objectives. Scouts become mandatory. Reaction to the event was mixed—some said it broke up blobs while others said it just reinforced the K-Train. Most agreed that it was helpful for small groups looking to hit objectives. At the end, one of the loudest complaints was that it increased the importance of scouting without making the activity more interesting or rewarding.
Some Sneak Attack feedback: https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/wuv/WvW-Sneak-Attack-Feedback/first#post4700678

I want to try can capture the helpful to small groups part while also addressing the boring parts of scouting. I think it’s possible to do that while also giving reasons not to blob without flat out punishing people who want to blob.

I propose that we brainstorm mini-objectives that fit the following criteria:

1.) They must be helpful to groups of 5 or less without being helpful to groups of 15+
2.) They must not change how quickly a map can be K-Trained when undefended.
3.) They must encourage player interaction—both between allies and enemies.
4.) They must reward either moving as a small team or hanging about allied areas without veering into PvE much, if at all.
5.) They must work mostly within existing game mechanics so as not to be too difficult to implement.

Please be sure to include a numbered list with your suggestions that details how they fit the criteria.

This would definitely make stealth/burst roamers even more powerful. There’s not any skill involved in showing up out of stealth with the help of massive teleports in order to burst someone down in a few seconds. I don’t think it deserves any additional reward.

I say this as a roamer that often fights 1v2 or 1v3 and often sees downed opponents rezzed. If their allies are busy doing that, I’m free to light them all on fire for a few seconds. That’s fine by me.

Thank you—I was about to waste a lot of rams trying to figure that out.

Do you happen to know the map-wide limit?

Chinchilla.1785:

What was the OP about again?

I thought it was something along the lines of: Here were some issues with DBL, and here is what ANET did to accommodate.

Or is that wrong? Then I read on, and everything is completely derailed! Useless.

Yeah, these threads tend to derail and I’m way too happy to ride the trainwreck all the way to the end. I have a few more informative threads in the works (research pending) where I’ll be more clear in the OP that I don’t want it to devolve into this sort of mess again.

On the bright side, it’s the messy threads that let me know what sort of issues I should look into first.

Found a red post from May 2013 which explains why siege timers exist. https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/wuv/Siege-Despawn-Timer/first#post1955076

Devon Carver says they must have a siege cap for technical reasons and the timer ensures that unused siege gets recycled.

Now, I’ve never personally experienced a siege cap being hit, so I have no idea what it is. I have seen videos of dozens of rams being built in a single lord room, though. It would be helpful to know what the siege cap is in order to better suggest alternative ways to accommodate it. It would also be helpful to know if Cannons and Oil contributed to the siege cap.

Asuras are a lie. They’re like the gremlins that steal your socks.