Guild Wars 2

Jinks.2057:

The new bloodlust is nothing more than sPvP being forced on us WvW players.

I hate sPvP and the entire failure that is tPvP.

All the WvW changes this year suggests ANet no longer think of WvW as a fortress oriented game and instead are turning it into just another large scale point capture game. Specifically:

• Improved siege and WXP abilities have steadily eroded the effective defence of locations
• Rewards for captures have increased significantly while the rewards for holding locations are virtually unchanged

Personally I think this is a shame, as it is only the siege<>fortress aspects of WvW that distinguish it from the myriad of point capture PvP games that are out there.

Stormleaf.1769:

Obviously it’s not ideal, but nothing is going to be. Peoples’ effort would be better spent on coming up with solutions and work-arounds on their own.

Solution: swap the Bloodlust and Outmanned buffs.
This will improve the balance between servers (and in doing so make WvW more interesting) as well as allow GvG to continue.

(I don’t know who first came up with this idea but it’s an excellent one, which is why it keeps getting raised. IIRC, the basic idea was around before ANet announced the Bloodlust buff and it keeps being repeated because it’s such a good idea. It’s possible Anet have missed this one, but I’d be surprised given how often it keeps appearing.)

Pendragon.8735:

Any idea that this a mechanic to help the underdog is cocamamie.

Did someone actually say this would support the underdog?
Whoever said that can’t have thought this through very far. As we’ve been explaining for months here, providing a reward that directly buffs combat effectiveness benefits the strongest servers ahead of the weaker ones, even when it’s spread out across three different maps.

If supporting the underdog really is part of the intention for this, then it must be a very small part. The only underdogs it will potentially help are those on low population match-ups, and even there it all they’re likely to get out of this is their own 1/3 of the buff.

The scale of benefit gained from the buff and the ease with which recapping can be spoiled all point to a system designed for the strongest server to cap and hold the full buff.

I used to think this was the solution.

However, the changes this year have all been eroding the fortress aspects of WvW while increasing PVP style point capture, which strongly suggests ANet no longer think of WvW as a fortress oriented game. It looks like Anet are giving up on trying to do something unique and interesting with WvW and instead are turning it into just another large scale point capture game.
Specifically:

• Improved siege and WXP abilities have steadily eroded the effective defence of locations
• Rewards for captures have increased significantly while the rewards for holding locations are virtually unchanged

Personally I think this is a shame, as it is only the siege<>fortress aspects of WvW that distinguish it from the myriad of point capture games that are out there.

Anyone know if the original architect of WvW has moved on from Anet? Because that would explain the changes, and why WvW is turning from its own unique game into a larger version of PVP.

If you’re the biggest server then logic says you should swarm cap the buff on all three BLs and then keep a small ninja team (with the full Bloodlust buff) active spoiling any attempts to capture it back.
This is too unbalanced.

1. It needs to be far easier to spoil the buff
2. The buff needs to be weaker or, even better, not affect combat performance at all (e.g swap it with the Outnumbered buff).

Vena.8436:

You don’t seem to understand: the bigger server WILL NOT CAP the points because they don’t need POINTS.

You’re not enabling the smaller server because the bigger server will never intentionally capture the points in your scenario.

+4 stacks of might, +7% crit chance, +150 Toughtness, Vitality and Healing, ongoing, for everyone on your server. That level of buff is worth picking up, so they will.

kurtosis.9526:

You realize the points decap on their own if they aren’t babysat, right?

Once you’ve got the buff, you only lose it if an opposing server picks it up. The opposing side has to cap three points to do this, which makes jumping back to the map to stop them capping a third point relatively simple (lets not forget the team that jumps back to do this also has the Bloodlust buff running).

If you’re the biggest server then logic says you’d swarm cap the buff on all three BLs and then keep a small ninja team active spoiling any attempts to capture it back.

What we need are things that introduce more balance to WvW, not less.
The idea to move Bloodlust to the Outnumbered buff is an excellent example, as that will increase rather than decrease balance on each map.

WvW is inherently unbalanced, if for no other reason than servers almost always have different populations in WvW. (It’s only at reset time, when populations get queued at the server cap, that sever populations in WvW are equal – small wonder this is the most popular time to play WvW, as it’s the only time you can be guaranteed an even match.) Yes, skilled play can surpass numbers. But overall WvW players just aren’t well enough organised to compensate for the advantages that greater population gives (and never will be).

Unfortunately, the impending Bloodlust implementation will reward migration to the most successful WvW servers, which will increase rather than decrease the imbalance between servers.

Anet, please monitor the impact the Bloodlust buff itself has on WvW balance, both immediately on WvW maps, and long term on overall WvW match-up balance and diversity.

DevonCarver.5370:

The point of the buff is to affect the WvW game mode as a whole disabling it on your character would lessen the value of the buff to a server and completely invalidate the whole point.

That’s right, Devon. That’s exactly what we’re asking for (and have been for some time).

There’s been more than enough posts explaining why we prefer to play WvW without this buff – they’ve been a regular feature on this forum ever since the idea of replacing the orb mechanic appeared.

As Anet have committed to reinstating this buff despite our repeated requests not to do this, and further objections to this now contravene forum rules, then we are left with little recourse but to ask for options like this.

So, please, consider our request for an option to personally disable this buff.

Nooooooo!

Every WvW player on the most populated server gets +4 Might, +7% crit and +150 Toughness, Vitality and Healing. All this when they introduce big rewards for being on the winning server.

How is that supposed to make WvW more enjoyable? More interesting? More satisfying?

But wait, didn’t this prove to be a bad idea last time?
Haven’t we been saying for months that this is a bad idea?
Hasn’t that message been the most consistent and possible the most posted ever since ANet announced they were replacing the orb mechanic?

The incentives that encourage zerging are bad enough. But to increase the incentives for blobbing at the server level is, at the very best, incredibly naive.

What WvW needs is the direct opposite of what’s happening here. For WvW to be interesting, Anet need to encourage participation on underdog servers; to reward between servers (not imbalance).

show kit backpack: toggle on/ toggle of (does not apply to PvP)

That should do it.
We still won’t see legendaries when we are in a kit, but that’s the next step.

DevonCarver.5370:

We definitely don’t want to go to the level of fragmenting the game to the extent that we have PvP, WvW, and PvE versions of all the skills as that creates a disconnect with the characters we want you to use in all those places. That said, we are certainly discussing the idea of adding skills that would have a WvW focus. But they are just on the discussion level.

But skills are different in WvW already, because GW2’s combat scaling (AoE and cond caps) does that. As soon as the number of opponents goes over 5 the relative effects of skills change radically. They may look the same on paper, but in practice some skills are nerfed into insignificance by those caps while others are unaffected.

Throw the book at them – yeah!

Engineers seem to be aimed at being a versatile high-skill PvP class.

Zerging is caused by two mechanics:

1. Flat location rewards with negligible scaling (lord only) makes zerg capping both the fastest and the most reliable way to earn rewards in WvW.
   The bigger the group, the faster the cap, for the same personal reward – this makes zerging a no-brainer.
2. The AoE cap means zerging outperforms all other methods of reducing incoming damage.
   Over 70% damage reduction with 100% up time and no impact on other skills, simply by running with a group of 10+ others! – who wouldn’t want this buff?

The way location rewards and scaling works is, on its own, enough to cause the near mindless zerging we get in WvW. That the AoE cap also makes zergin the lowest risk way to WvW just cements zerg behaviour.
Why play smart in WvW, when the smartest way to play WvW is to zerg?

People will only shift away from zerging when something else provides a faster, more reliable way to earn rewards in WvW.

To achieve this we have to make zerging less profitable and bring the rewards for other styles of play up to the same or higher levels. Then it will become a matter of balancing rewards against the relative risk of different behaviour. Doing that will require a) increasing the risks associated with zerging to be comparable with other sorts of WvW play, and/or b) increasing the rewards for non-zerg play to offset their higher risk compared with zerging.

One of GW2’s strengths is the ability to test out builds – we need this for our WXP builds!

DevonCarver.5370:

Ahmrill.7512:

I agree Zeitlogik that the commander and squad system could use more functionality.

As do I. We will address this system when we are able to completely revamp it and bringing it to the level it should be at.

Noooooooo!

Sorry, Devon, but your answer means we get zero (repeat ‘zero’) relief from this problem until the full feature takes-a-long-time-to-develop solution comes along – and work on that won’t even start until it gets high enough up the to-do list.

How many of us will still be here by the time that gets rolled out?

Is there a reason why you can’t add something like different colored commander tags to help us out in the interim?

Think about the return on effort of such a small scale change, even a temporary one. Allowing color changes will more than double the sophistication of the tag system, with the corresponding benefits to play. It may only bring us up to the bronze age, but that’s still a heck of a lot better than leaving us stuck in the stone age.

The problem is the simplistic approach to scaling the GW2 combat system.

The only scaling build into the combat system right now is the 5 target AoE cap and the 25 stack cond cap. All these caps do is kill off large parts of the combat system and by doing so cause mindless zerging. Instead of retaining the richness that is GW2’s combat system, all that happens in larger battles is AoE and conditions are nerfed to irrelevance. I bet the designers never intended all the great work on AoE and conditions to be lost when it comes to large battles – but that’s all the current scaling rules do.

It’s time ANet took the GW2 combat system, which is optimised for small scale (max 5v5) PvP), and came up with a better scaling system to handle battles involving more than 5v5 (or 5 v Boss) players.

Thanks for doing all this work Anymras.
It will be good to have turrets working properly (and not just being multi keystroke bombs).

Latest GW2 patch update”

After a game update, players will be allowed to remain in public maps associated with the previous build for up to one hour.

Thank you, ANet. :-)

I’m all in favor of an ‘I surrender’ option where you die, the enemy gets their reward, and you can return to a WP and get on with the game.

Zacchary.6183:

Updated for clarification. Successfully killing yourself in the downed state will remove all credit from everyone before Defeat. Nobody will rally off of you, nobody will get loot, nobody will get xp. MAYBE get half points in PvP but otherwise nothing happens except for your repair bill.

That would be prone to abuse by spiteful losers. If you’re beaten, then whoever beat you deserves their reward, regardless of whatever personal feelings you might have about that.

If someone already has you targeted, then they deserve to rally off you when you die/surrender. If they don’t have you targeted, then using the ‘I surrender’ option means you’re completely out of the combat before they get the chance to rally off you. Both of these sound like good solutions.

Some skills haven’t been updated as the game has changed – Eng’s multpel attack forms being the classic example.

The high attack rate of grenades and Ft #1 made sense when most on-crit effecs didn’t have ICDs. But now almost all on-crit efects have ICDs, eliminating the advantages of those high attack rates, while leaving the disadvantages unchanged.

Now what’s really needed is to reduce the rate of some of our attacks and adjust their damage accordingly. This will leave them at the same level of overall effectiveness, while balancing out the loss of their high on-crit effects.

The Engineers’ Flame Thrower #1 attack has a high attack rate (10 attacks in a 2.25s channel), with each attack doing low damage.

This was great when it first came out, especially for stacking on-crit effects. But as almost all on-crit effects have since gained internal cooldowns, FT#1 has lost almost all the advantages of its high attack rate while still retaining all the disadvantages.

The changes have been gradual but the overall effect is the skill is now considered a liability rather than an asset in PvP and WvW. This last is because the use of group retaliation now means that not only does an engineer using FT#1 suffer more damage than they inflict, but the extreme attack rate means they suffer this damage at a very high rate (often faster than they can react).

Please bring the Engineers’ Flame Thrower #1 attack up to date by reducing its channelled attack rate and increase the per-attack damage to equal its current damage overall.

Yes. This is needed. This is really needed.

(all that to get to 15 chars)

Here in the WvW forum and you see several threads about ‘unbalanced’ stomping. Check out the Class forums and you’ll see several of them have threads about ‘unbalanced’ downed skills (we occasionally see them here too). While each usually argues a specific case, the range and persistence of these suggests there is an overall balance problem with downed survival.

Put all that together and it looks like it’s time downed skills and stomping got some balancing love.
(I suspect just balancing the downed skills will sort out the problem.)

GW2 runs a combat engine optimised for complex small group (max 5v5) PvP.
Then this same 5v5 combat model gets used in larger scale WvW (and PvE).

WvW will be much better when Anet starts to tweak the GW2 combat system to better accommodate larger scale battles.

In particular, the condition system, which grows exponentially with the scale of the battle, needs to be simplified for large scale combats. Doing this will reduce thelag problems and free up capacity for things like raising the 5 target cap on AoE.

Some suggestions on how to reduce the condition system’s impact on larger battles can be found here.

TLDR:
1. Introduce a new armor rating (condition armor)
2. Bundle up condition stacks
3. Fix condition damage at the time it is applied
all of which will eliminate low value condition traffic and free up capacity for other combat system improvements.

GW2 has a wonderfully rich combat system for small scale (max 5v5) PvP. This is great for the few of us who spend our GW2 time doing small scale PvP.

Unfortunately, a lot of us spend time in larger battles (PvE events and WvW battles) where the small scale optimisation of GW2’s combat system has resulted in a dumbing down of its large scale combat.

The biggest issue is GW2’s condition system which, while great for small scale PvP, comprises the bulk of combat processing and traffic. This creates a massive performance load in larger scale battles where the level of this processing/traffic increases exponentially. The limitations imposed to allow large scale combat with this system have degraded the quality and fun of large scale battles in GW2. Specifically:

1. AoE capped to 5 targets (to limit the number of condition calculations) has made mindless zerging the dominant strategy for large scale battles.
2. Condition capping (to limit the number of condition calculations) has removed condition based combat styles from large scale events.

Part of the problem is that every build of every class constantly generates conditions on their targets regardless of whether or not the build was designed with condition damage in mind. This means the combat engine spends a large part of this time processing a lot of low value conditions.

But what if the combat engine didn’t have to spend so much time processing low value conditions?

Suggestion #1: Condition armor

• Condition armor is an armor rating that ignores conditions below a certain damage threshold. The threshold may be different for different conditions (e.g. the threshold for Burning may be higher than that for Bleeding, because Burning has a higher base damage).
• The code: Each target has a condition armor rating (by condition type) which is passed to the client. When the character generates a condition on the target, the client checks against the targets condition armor rating and only reports conditions to the server that exceed that rating.
• Scaling events: the condition armor rating can increase as the event/battle scales up.

Suggestion #2: Condition bundling

• Condition bundling is where conditions are held back until the character has stacked enough to apply them as a bundle. This reduces what would be 25 individual applications each requiring processing, down to a much smaller number of higher value bundles. (E.g. Instead of applying each stack of Bleed individually, the character’s Bleed stacks are held back until it has generated at total of 5 stacks which all get applied as a single bundle.)
• The code: Targets have a bundle level for stackable conditions. When the character generates a condition on the target, the client checks against the targets bundle level and holds back stacks below the bundle threshold. When the character has accumulated the number of stacks required for the bundle, then the bundle is reported as single large application of the condition.
• Scaling events: The bundle level can increase as the event/battle scales up.

Suggestion #3: Fix condition damage at the time it is applied

• Set the +/-cond duration and +cond damage values at the time the condition is applied, rather than adjusting these each tick. This reduces processing each tick to reporting the damage applied only.
• Code: Set the +/-cond duration and +cond damage values at the time the condition is applied.
• Scaling events: Use this whenever the server starts to come under load.

Overall, these changes will free up server capacity and bandwidth for things like removing the 5 target cap on AoE (the biggest single driver of mindless zerging). Other effects will be: non-condition based builds will do less condition damage (cond armor); some condition based builds may do more damage (easier to get on the stack); some condition damage will be delayed (bundling); minor changes to the level of condition damage applied (fixed cond damage).

Dristig.9678:

Yes. Symbol of Swiftness only adds one second of swiftness if you already have swiftness. Always save it for when your swiftness falls all the way off. Use Greatsword leap or sword 2 on rabbits to catch up when you already have swiftness.

That extra second of swiftness is worth having, provided Symbol of Swiftness will be off CD again by the time you need it.

A good rotation is:

1. Use Symbol of Swiftness first to get the full 8s swiftness
2. Pick up swiftness from Shouts and allies/ally fields
3. Check to see if you have enough swiftness for one complete CD on Symbol of Swiftness?
4. If yes to 3, then use Symbol Of Swiftness for an extra 1s swiftness and go back to 3.
   (FYI, the extra few seconds you get from doing this can make all the difference when trying to keep up with a group.)
5. If no to 3, then wait until swiftness expires and go back to 1.

Support tip: When running with a group and you have lots of swiftness, try dropping Symbol of Swiftness behind you to help out people who’re falling behind.

MusicMuse.5749:

Im not against pistols, its just that rifles have been my preferred weapon last time I played, although I really did hate how they were hip fired.

Don’t be mislead by the name. We call them ‘rifles’ out of blind hope, but they aren’t really rifles. We throw grenades farther than we can shoot with those things, and their abilities are blunderbus abilities, not rifle abilities.

What Engineers call ‘rifles’ are actually ‘shotguns’ or more accurately ‘blunderbusses’.

Wouldn’t it be nice if one day the Gods of ANet replaced our ‘rifles’ with shotguns and then let us have access to real rifles?

Speedy Kits trait for perma-swiftness out of combat. Coupled with Invigorating Speed for perma-vigor.

In combat my Eng is always moving to manage the ranges for different attacks and stay alive. I use the mouse to control my facing along with forward, back and strafe keys for movement. This combination is very responsive but makes ground targeting skills difficult to use (“Where the —-- is the cursor now?”) Kit swapping with the above traits gives perma-swiftness and perma-vigor in combat.

If I used Grenade Kit, then I’d stick to keyboard driven kiting at range. (But I’m not interested in wearing out my #1 key and finger, so I don’t.)

Lack of auto-target (and associated autoattack) option on the Grenade kit.

Fields that have effects when you pass through them – the move though effect seems to be uncapped.

You think skill lag is bad now . . .

Folk.2093:

if there’s anything that’s annoying in the stomp/downed arguments is the fact that certain classes need 3 stomp attempts to succeed due to stealth and teleport downed abilities.

QFT

zamalek.2154:

Swamurabi.7890:

I find it hard to believe that someone on the 4th most populated WvW server in NA is losing money.

<snip>

If you are brainlessly running around in zergs, then sure, I would find that hard to believe – but that clearly isn’t the case with the OP and most of the people on this thread.

Too true.
1 Hour spent defending Hills against repeated attacks from a small group (5-8 people) during the off hours – good for my server but pathetic in terms of gold for me.

Think of the gold farming – prices will rise.

My wish list

1. Fix Eng’s #2 downed skill
2. Make conditions count in multi-player PvE and WvW battles
3. Balance kits for multi-player WvW and PvE (to be the value of Grenade kit)

And all that extra PvE gold is inflating TP prices :-(

Problem #1: Rune of Perplexity and Rune of Torment stack too much confusion/torment respectively.

Problem #2: Might stacking is too powerful, especially in regard to condition damage.

Problem #3: Zerg have too much condition removal which means condition damage is only an issue for roamers.

Problem #4: Non-bunker builds that are used to high survivability are now finding they can be countered by strong condition builds. (Stealth used to mean end of damage provided you avoided AoE. Now conditions can keep eating your HPs.)

Its the same for all classes: tool tips corrections and maybe one or two minor bug fixes.

We should be grateful that, trivial though these may be, Guardians still got the second greatest amount of love among all the classes.

DevonCarver.5370:

Hugh Norfolk.2798:

DevonCarver.5370:

You’ve made a classic mistake in not rolling an Ele. So, my advice is delete your other, clearly worthless characters and roll up a real winning class, elementalist. Then we’ll see you on the battlefield. :P

See obviously Devon doesn’t know about the “Ultimate” Class aka Warriors. We all know Warriors are the obvious choice when you want to Main a specific class. Great in PvE content, amazing armor choices, and well I main one so that should sway your choice.

Pick Warrior!

Sure, if you want to look like a Hug(h)e sucker you could pick Warrior. I’m sticking with my Ele.

And there we have an explanation for 50% of GW2’s balance problems, right there.

Now if the Devs who main a Guardian or Thief would join the discussion we’ll have the rest of the GW2 balance picture. (Necro’s late arriving strength being a temporary abberation that no doubt will get ‘balanced’ out very soon.)

Guys, it’s great that you like your classes. But, does the imbalance in WvW have to be so obvious?

Make golems the first targets for aoe damage.
A 10’ golem should not be able to shelter from damage behind a 3’ Asura.

Yes

/fifteen char

TLDR:

1. Scale the division to to keep it friendly among allies
2. If it helps, thinks of this as a way of getting better rewards for smarter capping.

Shoe.5821:

what it will do is cause endless kittening and fractured communities over ‘leechers’.

That’s an important point, as one of GW2’s major draw cards is its open cooperative environment. The last thing we want is people bad mouthing others who turn up to help with a capture.

The solution is a non-linear spread. That way the reward reduction still occurs, but not so drastically that a few more people joining a fight really hurts. For example:

• 1 person 1000
• 2 people 900/ea
• 3 people 800/ea
• 4 people 710/ea
• 5 people 630/ea
• 6 people 560/ea
  …
• etc.

At the high end it will also help if there rewards get to the point that other people simply won’t bother to join in. The threshold for this would depend on what’s being capped: small target, low threshold; large target, high threshold. (E.g. a 12 person zerg is overkill for a supply camp so they might get little more than some supply and dolyaks moving again. “They’ve got enough there already. Let’s go hit another target.” But more people might join the same zerg if it starts capping Garrison.)

Of course, there will always be those who’ll complain about every little bit they think they’ve miss out on, and others who’ll turn up in the last few seconds and claim unearned rewards – but that all happens now anyway.

The underlying problem is that zergs have a inverted risk/return curve: they get increasing returns with decreasing risk – and capping rewards play a large part in this. Zergs cap faster, with lower risk and no reduction in rewards. That’s why people zerg on uncontested maps. It’s not interesting gaming – but it’s a logical behaviour given the current way capping rewards work.

We can’t change the combat mechanics (e.g. aoe caps are here to stay).
We can’t do much about the capping rate of zergs (Lord scaling does a little of this, but only for the very last part of the capture).

But we can do something to fix the distorted reward side of the equation. – Change the capping rewards and the zerging behaviour will start to mature (not completely, but it will be a marked improvement).

If it helps, thinks of this as a way of getting better rewards for smarter capping.

TLDR: Divide the rewards for capturing a location by the number of people who capture it.

WvW has devolving into near mindless zerg trains, because zerging is both the lowest risk and fastest way to get WvW rewards. Instead of the usual risk/return trade-off, zergs have a inverted risk/return curve that gives better returns with decreasing risk. A lot of this distortion comes from the way capture rewards are given out.

In WvW everyone currently gets the same individual rewards regardless of how many people are involved in capturing a location. Not only does more people mean each location is captured faster at lower personal risk, there is no reduction in the amount of reward received by each individual. This is a clear and direct incentive to zerg.

Solution: Assign overall reward values to locations and divide this across the number of people who participate in their capture.

This will rebalance the risk/return equation for capping, reducing the incentive to zerg and making it more profitable for people to break into smaller groups for capping.
- And that will make WvW much more interesting.

WvW forum discussion here.

TLDR: Divide the rewards for capturing a location by the number of people who capture it. This will reduce (but not eliminate) zerging and breathe new life into WvW.

WvW has devolving into near mindless zerg trains.
Why? Because zerging is both the fastest and the lowest-risk way to get WvW rewards. Some of this comes from the combat mechanics, but a lot of it comes from the way capture rewards are given out.

In the middle ages, wars were expensive. Invading territory was profitable (if you were successful) but the rewards were offset by the costs of fielding your army. The bigger the army, the more territory you had to capture before you could turn a profit.

But, in WvW everyone currently gets the same rewards regardless of how many people are involved in capturing the location. This means locations return more profit the more people that participate in capturing then: e.g. a zerg capturing a tower will earn far more than a ninja team that caps a keep. This inversion of warfare economics is a major cause of zergs.

Solution: Assign overall reward values to locations and divide this across the number of people who participate in their capture.

If we want WvW battles to get more interesting, then WvW needs to go back to more sensible economics and set an overall value of reward for capturing a location. This overall value then gets divided across the people who participate in the capture. The more people who participate in the capture, the less each individual gets.

This will reduce the incentive to join large zergs (due to the reduced personal rewards), and reward people who capture locations in smaller groups. It won’t stop zerging, because zergs will still be the safest way to participate in WvW. But it will encourage breaking into smaller groups to capture locations – and that will make WvW much more interesting.

Ragnar.4257:

IMO, all that’s needed is a cap of damage-per-second on gates (and walls). Make it so gates can’t take any more damage than (for example) 3 rams (4-5 golems) worth. This means that a group of 20 is just as much of a threat to a tower as a group of 80.

This is a very good idea, especially as it will work on both high and low population WvW matches.

Victory.2879:

Unhittable inside structure type trebs don’t make the game much fun, when you can destroy an upgraded wall without any fear of being attacked.

That’s the problem. The biggest step backwards in WvW has been the increase treb ranges so they don’t have to be deployed in the field anymore.

Just say no to giving stat rewards to the strongest server.

Roy.7405:

If you remove tower to tower siege the zergs will mostly sit in towers until one decides to come out to build an open field treb, at which point the defenders will rush/suicide the trebs and then return to turtling.

People won’t turtle for long if the rewards only come from defending towers/castles that get attacked.

Roy.7405:

Forcing an active defense reduces turtling.

Yes, we want active defense. But right now that’s not what happens.

Roy.7405:

Also, most trebs in range of another tower can be countered from the outside or after breaching the outer walls, forcing defenders to engage instead of allowing them to turtle forever. Aside from 3rd floor SMC trebs, some of which are uncounterable without practically taking SMC, treb range is fine.

But right now this is back to front. Attackers aren’t forced to commit to the field where they’re exposed to siege and open field counter attacks. No, the attackers can set up their trebs in a secure tower/castle and don’t have to risk entering the field until after their opponents gate/walls have been breached.
- To illustrate how back to front things are: Bay defenders have to field deploy arrow-carts within easy sally range of Garrison’s west gate because its the only way (short of a full-on assault on Garrison) they have of stopping the Garrison trebs destroying their walls. The Garrison attackers get all the defensive advantages right up until they decide to finally march on the already breached Bay.

Roy.7405:

As for the upcoming treb mastery, I interpreted the supply draining ability as only affecting players and not tower supply; I haven’t seen any official explanation on what it takes supply from.

Either way, it makes defense even less useful than it is now.

Roy.7405:

As for actual defense, walls need to be thicker so that defenders can actually stand up there and defend without getting destroyed by zerg AoE, and there probably needs to be a counter to point-blank catapults so that a defender can get in more than 2 hits before getting nearly AoE’d to death by the zerg below.

Absolutely.

Roy.7405:

Contesting and waypoints also needs to be worked on for multiple reasons (easily contested, waypoint rushing, etc). But I imagine those changes would require significant tampering with other systems in the game, so it would take a while to implement any changes.

Simple solutions would be delete the WPs or disable the upgrade that grants them while the timer rolls over. Failing that, moving them to the outer area would help.

There’s another issue as well: whereas attacking is dynamic, tower/castle defense is boring because defenders don’t have much they can do until a) they have the numbers to counter zerg, or b) attackers breach the outer walls and come into range of any back-up arrow carts/balistae.

This is a good idea.

The trade-off is the impact on those elsewhere on the map. “Why’s it taking sooo lllooonnngggg to get to the supply camp” Oh, that’s right; those two zerg blobs must finally be doing battle."

But if it cuts down on death-by-skill-lag, then I’m all for it.

Turn around!

Seriously, thieves get a lot of their damage from backstabbing you – when you turn to face them their damage drops, by a lot. (And you can do this on any class.)

Check the keyboard options and bind the turn around key to one you can use fast, then practice using it before you go into WvW. When a thief attacks the first thing you do is hit that key, instantly reducing the amount of damage they are doing to you.
Keep facing them in combat and if they disappear for a moment, turn around – keep turning and keep moving. If you see them, attack immediately – never turn your back.

Blocks and Aegis are also good as they can interrupt some of the thief’s attack chains (which can depend on a successful hit for the next attack to be effective), and high toughness reduces the damage they do.

Also, clear any poison condition before you heal (because poison reduces your heals by 33%).

Almost all sneak thieves are after easy kills and depend on high backstab damage and poison nerf to your own healing to win. Once they realise you know how to avoid those and are aggressively taking the fight to them (which keeps you facing them) then they’ll back off, disappear into stealth and wait for easier meat.

When you see their Shadow Refuge, drop aoes on it to keep them hurting and then head off at speed. (If they leave shadow refuge before it finishes they drop out of stealth, and by the time the refuge has finished you should be well away.)