So after reading all the reviews of Stronghold, I have come to this conclusion. There is a holy trinity to PvP for GW2 and it is as follows: Conquest, Deathmatch, Stronghold.
While I understand that Anet’s stance has been to put them in the same queue, they all need their own queue and here is the basic reason why: They all have different time commitments. Everyone knows that when they commit to conquest they are committing to about 20 minutes of play time. 3-4 min of queue time (on a good day) 1 min of prep, 15 minutes of play. Many reviews of stronghold have requested 20 minutes of play time (25 – 30 min total depending on queue time). Deathmatch has been set to be 8 minutes so that’s about 13 minutes total. If Anet decides to put all these modes in one queue then as a player you don’t know if your commitment is 15 minutes or 30 minutes depending on queue length and map time.
For casuals, this is key because now I know if I am going to be able to do a couple games at (40 min) or 1 game at (30 min) if I have about an hour of play time.
To talk about the modes themselves, what I have seen is that people sway their opinions based on the pace of combat. In deathmatch, the combat is just about constant because your goal is direct player combat. Conquest and Stronghold have slower paces due to the fact that the objectives may or may not require your opponent to counter them. You can grab supply, a hero, or cap a point without running into a player. I think different queues will help people move to the pace of combat that they enjoy.
Lastly, I understand the lack of maps for Deathmatch and Stronghold. However I believe that based on the Festival content, you have maps that can be tweaked for Deathmatch at least. Old content that is reused for a new purpose is still new content without significant development time. (Dragonball/Snowball arenas). For Deathmatch I think you just need to look at preventing spawn camping and more use of LOS terrain so that using your surroundings and your skills is key to winning a match.
Anet has the tools, the maps, and the basis for building good content without large development times. Use them!
They put up a notice awhile ago saying that all unranked will be Stronghold for 24 hours. You’ll need to play ranked or practice if you want conquest.
Hey all,
Normally I play engi but I have been playing my guardian more. This is a build I came up with to help against necro/engi/mesmer/ranger meta that has cropped up.
The first point is that it brings a lot of condition clear and stability. The second is that it brings a lot of protection. So the question I know everyone would ask is “Why shield?” and it comes down to projectiles.
I’m not saying it’s the best but it helps me wade into a turret engi’s point to decap it and control the engi who doesn’t have stability. It also provides group support to condition clear without needing SY. On graveyard I can help keep my team on point. I haven’t seen a shout guard on metabattle but I’m sure it’s been used before.
Feel free to let me know how it could be tweeked.
Not sure how this became a hit against meta battle. The build is good, the video is great. Compliments all around. In the absence of a link on metabattle, the video does a good breakdown of the build so no worries there.
I would also say that a link to the gw2skills.net would be a good idea just to get a quick review even if it doesn’t stay on Metabattle. I enjoyed the lament of lag at the end. Priceless.
I got DC’d over the weekend due to some weird lag spike on my network. I logged back in after a minute or two, no rewards for winning. No nothing. The timer is a bit out of sorts.
EDIT: Full scenario: The load screen took up the entire prematch timer and 30 seconds into the beginning of the game. I didn’t get rewards for the win.
HGH uses 6 in Alchemy, all day every day.
The wiki shows “bug” on that skill. It is a stun break and it may be that the stun break was poorly coded to break even your own skills!
Here is the post where Justin describes how MMR is calculated for parties.
https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/pvp/FULL-SOLO-Q-PLS/page/2
Based on that comment. It sounds to me like the parties’ MMR was inflated to a higher MMR closer to Phin’s MMR but still lower. So by losing to a lower MMR party, he lost a point. So is the equation that Justin is using to pad MMR for parties actually working? You would have to do a data extract on :
Find party where MMR < Solo Q MMR & win = True. Divide that number by total matches where premade = True. That will get you the percentage of how often premades with low MMR win and if that is on the high side, you may want to increase the MMR rating.
So here’s the question though Poe, what handicap would you give (points wise since that’s all we can really use due to MMR being hidden) to a pug team vs a premade team?
I hear you Poe. This is why the leaderboards are still not a good way to show pvp prowess. The ranking system does not accurately take into account premades vs solo q.
The people who say “losing a match means loss of points”, that would be fair IF the matches were fairly put together. Constantly putting a JV squad up against Varsity squads is not going to help the situation. It should ultimately be a wash with neither a gain nor a loss in points. It’s the electronic equivalent of a scrimmage game. The system should try to place people together and if it can’t (meaning it must find the best match without Q times being long) then the points shouldn’t matter.
I will say this, there is one exception to all this premade vs solo queue. I’m in EG as well with Poe and when I asked for a group to pvp with, I didn’t find anyone. So I hopped into unranked for solo q. I found some pugs to play with and we formed a 3 man team for 1 hour. We ended with a record of 4 and 1. We only used team chat. We didn’t have TS and didn’t practice together. So how should we be categorized?
There is no perfect solution but at least the leaderboard rewards aren’t great. If they were, people would be whining more. That’s why I solo q in unranked. I can get the same rewards without the frustration.
(edited by Thiefz.3695)
HGH is our high damage and high risk build. When you go full HGH it means you are stacking might to increase your total damage output. You won’t be tying up a point for 2-3 people though. You will basically be a tactical nuke on point. Put some fire/air sigils on, drink your elixirs, use elixir S toss to stealth in and then you jump shot, net shot, overcharge shot. You can then crate or use elixir x. I personally use elixir X for the stability but you lose access to healing and curing conditions. (risk/reward).
If you want to hold a point against 3 people then you are a bunker which is the opposite of HGH. In my opinion, HGH is used when you want to add a burst role to a team that has bunkers. However thief and elementalist would fill that role better. The pulsing stability on transform with area knockbacks and cc is a nice way to hold the point if you can’t win the initial burst but you will not win a long term fight on point.
Now if we had templates, it would be easier switching from Deathmatch back to Conquest.
Never had a problem with thieves in DM. Perhaps I should say, it’s good for low to mid mmr. I don’t use celestial, I run full dps. If I get the first shot, it’s normally not a problem.
I actually recommend FT but only for death match. Nades has better DPS but FT is easier for me to use. If we had templates, I would have it as my go to death match build.
I have a hard time with thief, mesmer, and ele burst. I was looking at ways I could mitigate that with weakness/chill. The goal would be to apply it well against those classes. So my question was more along the lines of, how do make sure I get them to stick?
So do you use cover conditions to get them to stick or do they get cleansed first?
Is there any point to using weakness/chill as a secondary component to a build? I very rarely hear people complain about these two conditions. I mostly hear about CC/stacks. Regardless of if you go power/condi, do these conditions influence pvp matches that much?
This is just for my own education.
I used HGH and P/S in WvW for awhile but my build was condition focused. I think the question we all have is that you take better advantage of the weapon set when you focus on the primary damage mode of the weapon (rifle = power, pistol = condition). You gain most of your condition off of celestial which is “ok” but you focus your sigils and runes for might stacking. However the point of conditions is to spread/stack them which your runes/sigils don’t do. Condition runes/sigils increase the duration or stack amounts. With the current condition clearing, you need to reapply them quickly.
I’m sure it will do well, but for P/S you should be increasing condi damage and application. Focusing on HGH will increase condi damage but it will get cleared quickly. As people have said, you might do better by switching to rifle and using bleeds/burns as secondary spike damage.
The reason you will see so much Engi defense is that people who have mained engineers since Beta have had to deal with a lot of crap. At the beginning, it was not a worthwhile class. We had HGH, that got nerfed and you will see that Oeggs was leading the charge that it was OP. Many have said that IP is OP just like when Necro’s first got it. The problem is that after the last 4-5 months of these threads, I think the community is burnt out of hearing about Engi’s every week.
Now when I read this thread, I see it talk about specifics without looking at the whole. The issue with engi’s has been that there is no trade offs or that they are few. Might stacking/celestial allow the engi to boost power and other stats so that the CC/Damage ability is high. Take away the damage and the CC becomes less OP because my ability to Down you is lessened. Everyone says the counter to Engi is conditions because there is no clear. That’s true, period.
The real question is, are engi’s balanced against their High CC with deficits in other catagories (power, toughness, vit)? That’s probably a better question to answer than comparing skills of other classes to say what is “OP”. Using burst to down an opponent to hold the point is the same has using CC to keep them off. You just shouldn’t have both.
I disagree with the OP and several others about direction. I played since beta. I played PvE for a year and then did WvW and PvP. Unless you played PvP all the time, it was difficult to grasp the rewards vs PvE. It happened to me. WvW was easier to understand in terms of reward. So they change PvP reward to something that casual PvPers could understand. That’s not a bad thing. They put in eSports to provide a path for truly competitive gamers. That is also not a bad thing. The problem from this rant and from others is that the person in the middle, the person who is not going eSports and is more than casual has nothing for them. What you had was rank but then rank was farmed. Now you have leaderboards which is also farmed. Both have to do with how much you played.
I think that if the matches are bad due to MMR, or stale due to Conquest, or annoying due to mismatched teams vs solo then those people will complain about rewards. Simply put, if playing the game is not fun or the rewards for winning are not worthwhile then the game suffers for those players. People could be ok with one or the other being really great.
But at the end of the day, if you quit a game because your grind is not equal to another person’s grind, then you have an issue. My sense is that most people leave because they no longer find the PvP enjoyable. However if you say, “Well I like the PvP but I didn’t like the implemented change because it diminished the value of my accomplishments.” Then they hurt your pride and you need to get over yourself.
Been running Elixir X for 6 months now. The best tornado moment I had was keeping a ranger stuck in a corner since he couldn’t dodge or break out of my debris knock down. Oh the rage.
Rampage is nice on a burst build, you basically nuke the point. Tornado is not as great since I find that the cc is less so I get conditioned down fast. Not sure about the 60 sec cool down, I thought it was in the 70s. It’s good to use runes that have a trigger on elite. I still use a modified version on my condition build since you can pop some additional conditions with runes of krait.
Rifle + Rampage = CC win. Rifle + Tornado = Not so much. People hate the RNG factor but since the elite pops so fast, even if you get multiple tornado’s, just use it as an aoe blind or knockback and then revert.
Hey Holl. I notice you are using battle and I think doom? The link to gw2skills only has one sigil so I assume it was an over sight. I also noted that half the time you had Elixir X. Did you ever use that or do you normally use the crate? I find that if I can CC someone into a corner, tornado 3 can keep them there if they are out of stun breaks. I never thought of cele in a power, I normally run zerk. So I may switch that into by build.
I hit the practice button for 3 hours on Saturday to test my condi thief. Why? Because no one takes practice seriously. Sure they zerg and sure the builds are just meta but really who cares? It’s a throw away match. Why should I not be rewarded for the 3 hours I played while training the most basic uses of teleports and stealth? There is no tutorial and there is not good mob tests so the only way to truly test is on other players. I normally main an engi so the thief play style is completely different. Why cause my team mates a loss in unranked or ranked when the whole point is to win in those matches?
There is also a reward cap on practice matches so you still earn less points in practice than unranked or ranked. Also, until SoloQ comes back with MMR based matches for your class, practice is probably the best you can hope for.
I think it all comes down to communication and expectation between Anet and the Player community.
Players wanted a better leaderboard. Anet took that feedback and designed a backend and front end system that took into account far more variables than before. That’s good. So players were excited about the prospect of individual “best” boards. The problem was that the players did not expect a full MMR wipe and the imbalance that would cause in the near term. The second assumption it seemed was that more professional groups would gravitate towards eSports and most casual teams would head to Ranked matches. What was missing was thoughts about the casual solo queue player. The previous queues worked, I don’t believe we asked for them to go away. We need to separate the casual solo player who just wants to play the game from the casual teams and pro teams. I don’t think we need to worry about “divisions” so long as the MMR works as designed. However I don’t think any system can take into account team synergy between pugs and pre-mades.
The CDI’s that went through seemed a good way to fix communication between the players and the mods but I’m not sure if that was successful. I think that a new form of feedback between Anet and the players on what we want needs to be reviewed. The forum changes also show that the mods are getting “too much” to review (see also request for player mods) and are overwhelmed. I don’t think that a forum is a good place for this type of communication. I would say that the best idea would be to use pointed surveys to the PvP community with a good response rate to judge changes moving forward. A single way to give feedback in an organized manner due to the lack of people on staff at Anet and the amount of people who enjoy pvp. Then you need to adjust for trolls while at the same time mining the data for the gems.
More then needs to be communicated back to the players about the work being done. I think everyone agrees that the balance is actually good (aside from some cheese builds). It’s really about minor changes to runes and some utilities to put things back into place.
My suggestion: Use Reddit AMA’s and pointed surveys to the playerbase. Mine your playerbase data to include as many PvP participants as possible and send those players in game links to the Surveys. Start small to rebuild the faith of your community.
Suggestion for Players: You need to post more videos on Youtube since twich is not searchable through google. You need to link your twitch and youtube channels. Guilds need to focus less on TS (it’s great but Pug’s don’t use it) and advertise about helping with builds, mechanics, and putting together pugs teams. The goal should be more available content within the last month to 2 months. Searches of sPvP through Youtube shows not a lot of PvP in the last month. If PvP guilds posted 1 match a week, you would flood the first 3 pages of Google.
It’s not really a lot of work but it is organization and it seems that while ESL, Mistpedia, and WTS are great for eSports, it does not really help the community over all if the pros aren’t posting more videos. GW2 shouldn’t be a second job but if you are serious about PvP then 1 hour a week to capture some games is not that bad.
Hey guys,
So PAX East sold out in November but the WTS event was only advertised this month so the GW2 PVP fans who live in New England would only be able to go if they already had tickets to PAX East.
Could you please provide some information, for example, do you have badges that could be given out to watch the tournament? Do you have a day yet? The point is, you have fans that want to join your events but are unable to attend because the schedule hasn’t been presented.
Thanks!
PvP event sub forum is bugged. Reported in Bug section. If you have issues, see that thread.
PvP Events is linked to Dynamic Events in the Archive section. Shouldn’t be there since events are ongoing (not archived) and the sub form has a bad link beside.
Hey all, some of the World Tournament info and other stickies were lost from the PvP Tournament sub forum. Where did they go? Thanks!
Hey all,
Just a comment that it might be good for the team to update how to join PvP and how things work in the PvP sticky that Josh has for new players. It may also be a good place for the team to update once in awhile with the changes so that the people who want to get better at sPvP know how their ranking is done. Perhaps a post within it on MMR and ranking. I understand that the bugs are still being worked out but I think it’s a good bit of polish later on. You also need to update the maps available.
Second, it might be a good idea to get a bit more videos or streams of players up on the sticky. Backpack just did one for engi that is pretty good for 3kit. Not sure if these types of videos for other professions are getting linked together. Link over to the Events page with a short description of eSports
Third, update the events page and make sure players know that the rules for NA/EU tournaments by mistpedia or ESL may have different rules than Tournament play. Update the WTS information with all the stuff you learned about doing the China game. Please get information out soon for all qualifiers and finals since PAX East tickets go fast. I was going to buy tickets but since I don’t know the day, not sure which one to buy. I live like 1 hour away from Boston so I was thinking of going to watch.
Lastly, keep your stickies clean, locked and updated. My advice is that if someone has a good question, update a Q/A section of the sticky with that question rather than having the mod/user posts in there. I think there was a lot of success this week while some people may be negative. Ensure to build on that hype for March with having clear information.
Thanks for reading.
It’s an interesting take, I’ll give you that. Your power is less than a normal HGH running berserker but only by 120. You have no crit but you have increase toughness and healing which will increase your survival. Without 409 though, you are at a disadvantage since you can’t clear conditions. I ran an HGH build without 409 once and that was the last time.
Looks to me that you can swap for hotjoin/nonranked matches but not for ranked matches. Which, to me, makes sense because if ranked matches are there to get you into sPVP then you can’t switch classes in normal tournaments since there are clearly defined rules on what you can swap. At least this is how I am interpreting the new changes.
Quick question. If I went and used 4/4/0/6/0 and used acid coated elixirs, could I strip the stability off of lich form for a necro?
Respectfully, the OP posted in the second page that a turret build has 3s of blocking and invuln. To my knowledge, that is not in a turret build.
Just a reminder, don’t lump together 3kit engi and turret engi and say that engi’s are over powered. I have read through all 3 pages and I continually read people saying that “engi has cc, condition, blocks, invuln, breaks, healing, condition clear” which is obviously not true if you knew the builds.
Thanks Caith!
<15 char>
I see what you did, with the decrease in recharge that allows you to get your tool belt skills back faster which helps you keep might up along with the stab on B and the stealth on S. Do you feel that it’s worth the 200 power and IP? There is a slight compensation with the increase to ferocity.
I didn’t post my build because it’s really not that great. I basically run an HGH build, berserkers, with strength runes. I run Elixir S, Elixir B, Elixir H, and bombs. Then for elite, I run Elixir X. With 20% reduction for Elixirs, I get my elite back in a little over 60 seconds which is better than the supply crate cool down. The point of my build is burst. I run air/fire since I have high crit uptime.
The nice thing about HGH is that it’s simple, you just need to know how to rotate your elixirs and then how to cap the node. Elixir X with Brute allows for all the stability you need however you don’t get any condi clear. however with the burst aspect, you can stealth in and get a squishy thief or elemental down very quickly. The downside is the lack of stun breaks but that might just be a skill issue. I was trying to tweak things a bit but going back to p/s might help with that.
Hey all,
Quick question to the engi community. I have noticed that while I have access to good knockbacks with bomb F1 and rifle 4, my only stun break in my build is elixir s. I was thinking of using EG instead of bombs for the extra regen and stun break. So the question is:
Would you give up the fire fields and knockback for stun break, healing on EG? I could switch to p/s for the defense, knockback but I’ve been enjoying the burst with rifle. I’m not opposed to going back to p/s if people thought it was better than removing bombs.
Thanks Backpack. I always wondered what the rotation for a celestial rifle build was. I use an HGH build so I don’t use healing turret much. I noticed you blew up your healing turret for the extra water blast fairly frequently. Is that the key to using it as a roaming heal? I always think of laying fields as being stationary but in your video you only used it when on decap engi. What’s the best way to use healing turret in your opinion when roaming points?
I see this as two topics. There is the success of sPVP as a game and the eSport side of Guild Wars2.
For sPvP to be healthy in GW2 then it needs more game modes, more builds, and rewards balanced to be the same as PvE. All those will increase the players in that mode.
For eSports to be successful, well I think we saw over the weekend both the highs and the lows of this as an eSport. Over the last year we have had issues on age due to legal issues and rule issues between organized events. However what really shows things off are the amount of teams or lack there of. Perhaps the core problem with GW2 is that it is advertised as a casual MMO. LoL and Dota are just competitive games. Warcraft/Starcraft graduated into eSports. So it is, I think, up to the shoutcasters and the players to hype up the game. The best players need to record their matches and the teams need to self promote. However if this is a casual game, no one is going to do that. What you end up with is eSport burn out where the top few are trying to carry the load of the majority (sounds like WvW commanders).
I don’t really worry too much about the changes in sPvP for eSports because, and I’m sure the forum will correct me where I’m wrong, but Dota and LoL are the same game mode over and over again. If you are a FPS kind of person then yes, the game modes are lacking but ultimately, eSports doesn’t need MORE to be better. It pretty much comes down to team diversity and balance. It is the eSport burn out that I worry about. How long can one person shoutcast, twitch, play in this league without burn out? Especially when it’s the same people? That is a question that I think Anet doesn’t have an answer for.
(edited to clear up some thoughts)
I don’t believe Webster’s dictionary has stated what makes an eSport but since this is a troll post why not troll?
SoloQ and TeamQ are basically after school clubs where people play each other for fun without any true winnings.
The eSport that Guild Wars 2 has is basically intramural sports at the college level. It’s organized by groups who love what they do, is watched by only the people who are really interested in it, and may include money that people donate on their own.
So yes, it’s a sport but it’s the community college intramural team of GW2 vs the Notre Dame varsity college level LoL. Sport is a Sport but totally different leagues. What people have described is how to move GW2 up to the Junior Varsity level. However, does Arena Net want to take it that far? Who knows. My magic 8-ball says, “Outlook is hazy”.
So I read this forum ALOT..perhaps more than is healthy and I play PvP when I get the chance. I love it honestly but my experience does not mimic the majority of posters.
My rank is 44, I main an engineer. I don’t see many 4v5 in Solo queue and most of the time I eek out more wins than losses. About half of the time, the scores are competitive (less than 30 point difference). I see a lot of negative comments on Solo Queue so I have to ask, is the play issue a Level 80 problem?
I have played on weekdays EST and weekends EST. Sometimes at night. I see more issues in the a.m. EST around work hours but that’s just the 5 min it takes to make a group of 10 players.
Are there any mid to low rank players that find SoloQ to have drops/score issues?
Lot of interesting things but while the rifle 4 conversation is interesting. Placed in context of actual PvP, that 3s of CC is negated with a stun break. You also can’t average the 1 sec of CC per 5 seconds because after my 3s are up, I can then CC the engi which would then negate the average. Placed further in context with a turret build, then yes, the amount of CC is strong with this one. It would take a lot of stab and condition clear to stay on point against that build.
Which is the same argument we have been having about engineers for the last 3 months. However, just wait, since Elixir X will be the new Engineer meta. Enjoy the burst.
Just a small follow-up on my post from last page. We have a TON of currencies. Just look at the wallet and you will see just how much we have. If you are going to do something token based please use existing currencies. Half the currencies I don’t even use.
So, I could have missed this but Anet has already valued what the cost of skins are weither they are Black Lion tickets or rare drops. They did this for PvP in the form of reward tracks. So if you remove RNG then Anet has basically stated that the worth of 85% of equipment is 40,000 rank points. Secondly, they implemented a secondary currency in the form of laurels which is directly tied to achievement points.
So why would we use a “secondary” currency when Anet has already defined Achievement points as universal currency? So tie the gain of ascended items or precursors directly to Achievement points which are available to all forms of the game (PvE, WvW, PvP).
We can also do a reverse calculation. If we define that 40,000 points equals a rare skin and the PvP Mercenary title is rewarded for 48,000 points then we can define that Anet believes you should get a new skin every 100 achievement points. Further, Anet has also defined that you should be rewarded with gold/skins every 250 achievement points.
So the item for discussion should be If Anet has valued skins to be work between 100 to 250 achievement points, what is the value of a precursor? Regardless of the actual value, it is something the player has power to achieve.
So since we have a currency for skins (achievement points) why aren’t we using those as our metric for when to be rewarded (precurser, rare, ascended)? This should be in ADDITION to the RNG nature of the game such that getting “lucky” would allow you to gain an additional precursor, rare, etc but everyone at least has a baseline reward. If people want to sell their item, let them for the gold. If people want to keep their weapon or item then that’s fine too. I would say it will probably drive precursors down but I’m not sure if that’s a good or bad thing.
Sorry to sound like a Dev here but your suggestions must also take into consideration:
1. Every player should be able to play. Sorry, but that’s why EotM was originally made. Having someone want to play but not being able to play is bad, very very bad.
2. Skill is supposed to win over all. How does your suggestion make skill the determining factor in who wins?
3. Does your suggestion make one player’s contribution in a specific time/map better or worse than another player in the same or different time?
4. Have you thought about ways that a player, guild, guilds or servers could take advantage of your suggestion?
5. How important is server pride in your suggestion? Server pride is a factor in why players stay on a server, even as it drops from gold to bronze.Are there any other criteria you want in WvW?
This. I would suggest that those who are truly passionate about this rewrite their suggestion into these catagories: Changes in the next 4 months, Changes in the next 8 months, changes in the next Year. I get it that we have waited 2 years for a fix for this but if we can, as reasonable people, look at what is the quickest change we think possible and suggest that and then place what would take the longest to implement then at least we, as players, could help Anet develop WvW roadmap.
Next 4 Months:
Rewards: Update the Outmanned buff to provide greater MF (ex. 100%) for players and keep lords so that players are rewarded more for being on low population servers.
PPT: Group servers into Teams so that PPT is averaged across multiple servers to decide the “winner.” This will allow those who are about “server pride” to stay on their servers while those who want “the win” can transfer to a teammate to assist in PPT.
Next 8 Months:
PPT: Update structures so that PPT is based on difficulty of the capture. Create a PPT bonus over time for taking difficult structures.
Rewards: Create WvW reward tracks so that each captured point provides EXP toward a reward track. With each structure rewards more/less depending on PPT value. This allows people to get good rewards without “winning” the PPT war.
Next 12 months:
Guilds:
Add Guild Fortifications Just like you can build guild siege weapons, you can upgrade fortifications based on what your guild has unlocked for WvW. This will strengthen gates/walls or upgrade defenders from Vet’s to Champions. Make guilds have a presence other than “capturing” a point. It should take LESS time or provide BETTER defense than the normal tree
Allow guilds to claim NPC camps in Home BL (centaurs) and EB (ogres, dredge, frogs) that provide a buff to all the players in that map (speed, toughness, vitality, power)
Add guild missions in WvW that provide PPT when completed as well as normal rewards. Downside is that the opposing team can wipe the guild and prevent the mission from succeeding.
The issue isn’t server population but as people have mentioned the reward factor. I have read “Carrot” several times and they are right. You increase your rewards by joining more populated servers. Since rewards are based on PPT then the real issue isn’t the server population but how PPT is calculated for people to win.
You can do a few things.
Option 1: As has been stated before and should be reviewed, how PPT is rewarded based on population.
Option 2: As has been stated before and should be reviewed, how drops are rewarded based on population
Option 3: Resolve the issues of PvD to ensure that points are awarded for siege use/defense as opposed to zerging (Could also be resolved in option 1)
Option 4: Battle Group. I wasn’t able to get a clear definition of what a battle group is. My take would be (and this could have already been said) merge servers into teams and make their combined PPT against other server groups declare the winner. Allow free transfers within your group so that if you have a blow out in one match, people can transfer to another server not doing well to increase PPT. This basically autobalances servers while keeping individuality. You can form teams of 3 or 4 servers which basically would create 6 – 8 teams. 8 teams would probably be best.
Or you could do all the above…that would be nice.
So I was wondering why Elixir X is not used more in PvP? I used it in Solo Queue for about 10 games and it wasn’t that bad. It’s issue tend to be more that it’s only good for fighting on point. If you are fighting a ranged class, 4 on the brute is about the only option. Then again, supply crate has a similar issue.
The brute is the better of the two. Every skill is useful. With a HGH, Runes of Strength build and a crit of 50% means you can aoe the point with sigils of air/fire. I was able to hold the point against 2 melee classes easily. If you trait the right way, the cooldown is about 1 min which is faster than supply crate.
I get that the RNG for the tornado is a bit worse but the perm blind you can do will help mitigate damage. However if you have 4 people on you, you’re going to melt just like any other time.
My play style is very simple and straight forward, potions+bombs and now the elites gives me enough rotation. With enough might, the offensive power of the brute is just too good not to use. Even if you won’t get it all the time. I just don’t see going back to crate only for the stun and turrets. I feel like using Elixir X’s utilities are much more active than the passive crate.
All in all, I would be very concerned if I were Anet about communication right now. Several popular mmorpg and other gaming sites have had articles stating how bad this feature pack has been received by the client base. While it has been stated in this thread that the idea was to ensure that new users stayed, the fact that it is gathering such negative feedback on multiple sites is bad PR for getting new players to retain. I would say that while Anet has had bugs, it has never been THIS bad. The uproar from this pack however may be enough to disturb the force.
My suggestion is a sticky about engineer/community relations feedback to keep the playerbase in the loop on the fixes and what is being done. Otherwise you will loose the PR and perhaps hurt your brand for western audiences. Just some feedback.