Skill in WvW is difficult to reward though.
A group of players that win a 5v10 fight (requires skill + coordination) get fewer bags/rewards than a zerg that blobs down another group 40 vs 20 (requires pressing 1).
Swapping Rifle 3 and 2 skills – …why?
Reducing Elixir H cooldown to 20s – too low without getting rid of the cooldown reduction from HGH or reducing the heal on it.
Removing swiftness on Streamlined Kits – eh.. reduces build diversity by forcing people to run medkit for swiftness. Would prefer to leave swiftness on swap as it is.
Changing Throw Mine behavior – meh. detonating the mine manually is an essential part of the skill. It adds depth to gameplay rather than waiting for the enemy to walk over it.
Rocket Boots – Blast finisher is an essential part of the skill.
Rest of the changes look pretty good
There’s no class that can escape that quickly while dealing damage. They all have to turn around and use movement skills that take them out of the fight. If they’re damaging you, you can pop stab/resist/invuln and close the gap, or make them turn and run.
So, yes. ranged classes are going to try and kite. That’s how you win a fight vs a warrior. Your job as the warrior is to decide whether you should chase them.
Re: can’t be chilled or crippled. 20 seconds of resistance (from signet + stance) + 15s of stability (from eternal champion) + more if you’ve got Last Stand. If you haven’t caught them in 35+ seconds, you’ve probably chased them halfway across the map into a tower.
Kiting is their defense vs invuln/stab/resistance. You want to give Warrior even more mobility and take that away?
Don’t forget over 15s each of Stability and Resistance. Warrior basically can’t be immobilized, crippled, chilled, or cc’d.
- Charr Car week – all objectives have the Dune Roller upgrade by default
Suppose they wanted to allow you to earn legendary armour in WvW.
Do they put it behind reward tracks? Then it’s just a test of time. Play WvW long enough, get legendary armour.
Do they make it require badges of honour? Then it will go those with the most kills – those that blob up and press 1. Run with the zerg, get legendary armour.
Do they tie it to server victory? PPT hard enough / stack server coverage well enough – get legendary armour?
I can see arguments for all of these options, or some combination of them, but none of them are very appealing. They reward the worst parts of WvW and are not skill-based.
From what week have these numbers been taken? Why did you not include T1? That makes no sense.
Probably because T1 has Maguuma on Red. Maguuma hates DBL so much that 5 people could be taking garrison on DBL, and no one will bother to come defend it.
I bet the kill numbers in T1 DBL are like 1/2 or less of what they are on the other tiers.
If you don’t like the DBL that much, THEN STOP PLAYING OR GO TO ANOTHER MAP!!!!!
That’s exactly what they do, and that’s the problem. DBL is pretty empty most of the time compared to the other maps.
I don’t think there are wide gaps in population. I don’t have the data, but IIRC the server linkings were done with the intent of standardizing active wvw populations across servers based on something like “number of wvw levels gained across all players that week”.
Also, in the absence of data, I would assume that roughly the same number of total kills means roughly the same number of total players.
Warrior can’t have better mobility than it does because it already has long invulns, stability, high damage, great sustain, and is pretty tanky.
I mean, what is a poor condi engi (me) to do when facing a warrior. Warrior pops Berserker Stance for ~15s of resistance. My defenses (with pistol and toolkit) consist of: blind, cripple, immobilize, a 2-second block, and 2 dodges. Given that I need to use the block on Headbutt, the dodges on Shield Bash, and burst skills, and the rest aren’t effective due to stab and resistance.. that leaves me with.. turn and run.
Yeah. I do really like DBL, but the fight avoidance is frustrating sometimes.
Example: 5 players hiding in their keep, building arrow carts to shoot at 2 bored roamers just wanting a fight.
We eventually had to ambush a group taking a tower and catch them by surprise.
(edited by coro.3176)
I would argue kill count is a good measure/activity. If there are enough players from each server on a map, they’ll find each other and kill each other. .. and if they can’t/won’t, well then the map isn’t working properly.
Re: T1. Mag hates Red BL. If you even mention it in team chat, everyone will flat-out refuse to go there. Occasionally, you might draw one of the fight guilds out, but only if a very large group is attacking something. Most of the time a group of 2-4 players is enough to flip the map.
- You can stack lots of swiftness with lightning field + blasts. Start traited Orbital Strike, Use Thunderclap, HealTurret+Detonate for a blast, get 2 more from Orbital Strike. Rocket Boots for one more. If you practice the timing, you can do this while running by starting the OS+Thunderclap targeting at max range in front of you, then Turret blast + Rocket Boots when you’re inside the field.
I posted this over in the Warrior forum on another thread, but figured it might be of interest here. Let’s make a list of mobility tips for Engi. Please add any you know about.
- Streamlined Kits trait + Toolkit equip gives you a few seconds of superspeed. This gains some distance in combat, but does nothing outside of it.
- Rocket Boots – needs a buff to evade during travel + go a bit farther, but currently you can slightly cancel the aftercast “stop” bit of it by chaining the end of it into another skill or kit swap. Also, if you activate RB exactly when you land from a medium-height fall, it’ll go off right away and you avoid some of the landing stickyness.
- Jump Shot (Rifle 5) – for the 3 engineers out there still using Rifle, you can gain a lot of distance by completely cancelling the landing portion of the animation with the stow weapon key. This keeps up your forward momentum, and if you do it on a slight downhill, it goes even farther.
- Sneak Gyro – great for escaping because its movement lags and it stacks stealth, so if you run, then destroy it and immediately change directions, you can gain a lot of distance before stealth ends. You can also use it for chasing if you’re near 1200 range of your target. Pop Sneak Gyro, swap to Toolkit for super-speed, then Magnet to pull them back. They won’t see the animation because you’re stealthed.
Like you said, engi is kinda slow, but there are a few tricks.
- Streamlined Kits trait + Toolkit equip gives you a few seconds of superspeed. This gains some distance in combat, but does nothing outside of it.
- Rocket Boots – needs a buff to evade during travel + go a bit farther, but currently you can slightly cancel the aftercast “stop” bit of it by chaining the end of it into another skill or kit swap. Also, if you activate RB exactly when you land from a medium-height fall, it’ll go off right away and you avoid some of the landing stickyness.
- Jump Shot (Rifle 5) – for the 3 engineers out there still using Rifle, you can gain a lot of distance by completely cancelling the landing portion of the animation with the stow weapon key. This keeps up your forward momentum, and if you do it on a slight downhill, it goes even farther.
- Sneak Gyro – great for escaping because its movement lags and it stacks stealth, so if you run, then destroy it and immediately change directions, you can gain a lot of distance before stealth ends. You can also use it for chasing if you’re near 1200 range of your target. Pop Sneak Gyro, swap to Toolkit for super-speed, then Magnet to pull them back. They won’t see the animation because you’re stealthed.
I’d put Engi above Revenant and below Warrior, but that’s just a guess.
(edited by coro.3176)
.. so they don’t play it (see kill/death statistics), and to be honest, it is pretty empty.
They should give everyone a free waypoint to the oasis. Maybe that’d encourage more to come play.
The cliffs, ledges, pillars and things around objectives are what make DBL fun, IMO. I love fighting between the pillars on west keep inner, or on top of the narrow ledges above them. I love pulling people off the cliffs at east keep and line-of-sight-ing around stairwells. It’s more interesting than the usual zerg vs zerg that happens on EBG every day.
Unblockable/Unevadable are bad game design.
Why?
They put the burden of knowledge on the opponent to know what they can and can’t do to defend. I mean, GW2 has already gone down that road with Unblockable, and it was a terrible decision. As it stands now, a player must know almost every skill and trait commonly played in the game to be confident in their defense. They need to know which classes have unblockable attacks, what the animations look like, how long they take, their cooldowns, etc.
I would prefer we not add to the problem by introducing more things like that.
My complaint was that they won’t fight even when they have a 5vs2 advantage. It’s boring.
Calling in a zerg for 2 people is funny, but it’s not a fight.
It’s 8s with boon duration (I mainly play wvw).
They don’t have crappy condi management. They have the resistance I described above, plus the usual condi clears (weapon swap, etc).. My only chance is to burst them when it’s on cooldown. My point is that it’s not a fun fight to be running away for most of it. There should be some give and take – y’know? They dodge my attack, I dodge theirs. Repeat.
Instead, it’s more like – Warrior chases me for 50 seconds. I chase warrior for 10 seconds. Repeat.
What I want is a fight.
What I get is arrow cart spam and 5 players firing a catapult at 2 players (who haven’t even set up siege on the walls) because they’re afraid to engage.
This is why WvW is so empty..
Yeah. If you watch the end of the video, we tried that. They pulled emergency waypoint and ran us over with a 40-person zerg.
Some people are scared of even remotely fair fights. I’m just saying, it’s boring. If they enjoy it, more power to them, but I don’t think hiding in keeps defending is good for the game.
Here’s one:
This is a game. If you die in the game, you don’t die in real life! In fact, you don’t even have to pay to repair armour or waypoint.
The point of jumping down and engaging is to have fun testing your skill against your enemies’ skill. It’s an exciting confrontation between groups of players! It’s (I assume) why people play WvW.
Now, I understand not wanting to go 1v20, but that’s why you just throw a disabler or two and call backup.
Example of what I’m talking about: 5 players hiding in a keep won’t come out to fight 2 players bored and wanting some action on Desert Borderlands: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EN6fNrfuvjY
I just don’t think it’s very good game design when your opponent can’t engage with you for 30 seconds+ at a time and just has to run away.
For example, on my condi engi which relies on blind, immobilize, cripple, and chill to slow my opponent and keep them off me, I can actually turn and attack the warrior for maybe 10% of a fight without risking a stun-burst-insta-death combo.
I have to kite for ~8s (heal signet resist), then ~15s (berserker stance resist), then 8s (signet), then 15s (Eternal Champion stability), then 8s (signet), then more stab if they have Last Stand and/or Balanced stance, then 8s (signet). Now I have a short window (maybe 10 seconds or less?) to try to cc and kill them.
Occasionally I’ll try and damage them when their resist is down but stability is up. This usually goes badly though, because I’ll have to dodge Headbutt, then dodge Shield-Bash.. now I have no dodges, then eat damage or another stun.
Basically, the entire fight is spent waiting almost a minute for an opening. This is .. kind of bad gameplay.
Unblockable Overcharged Shot would be too good. As much as I’d like this, it would leave the skill with no counterplay. It’s basically instant already. I prefer the self-pushback, maybe with an evade.
Jump Shot 100% needs evades mid-air. It’s too slow and too risky to attempt most of the time. It’s been this way so long that I’d have to un-train old habits and force myself to use it for engaging. Usually I avoid it and use it as repositioning because leaping into combat usually eats a Headbutt or other stun.
Net Shot doesn’t do enough. It’s a really short immob, and immob is cleansed by practically everything these days. Thieves just dodge. Warriors just use a movement skill, etc. Even with the speed increase, it’s pretty hard to land at range.
re: players not coming out to fight. See this video
Here, we have 5 players in DBL sitting in a keep not coming out to fight 2 players.
Later, that same server pops emergency waypoint and sends in a zerg of 30+ to kill 2 people with a catapult on outer.
Despite that, there are still good fights to be had on the BL. It just takes longer to find them.
The last thing we need is to reward players sitting on siege in keeps. If anything, they need incentives to come out and fight.
SW → NW yeah, but people often do run off that cliff. Hell, I do it all the time because I’m cleaning up my inventory. Also, players usually want to check WK on the way north. Compare with Alpine where players can hit SWC, then check the walls and gates on WK on their way north.
SE → NE same idea. Yes, you can do that, but it takes effort and attention. You can’t auto-run without risking death. Compare with Alpine where you’re unlikely to accidentally run off a cliff and die except for a few places around the northern towers.
I personally don’t mind that much because I play the BL pretty often and know the routes, but most players hate it, and cite difficulty of travel as the main reason.
My theory is that it’s just too much mental effort to navigate. Players don’t want to think about the routes. They just want to get to their destination quickly and easily, paying the least amount of attention so they can focus on what they came to do: fight (or ppt.. depending on your server).
DBL feels longer, even if the time is the same because you have to put so much more effort into travel.
South Spawns → North Camps/Towers routes suck a lot. In the west, you have to run way off to the side, then east again, then north across a bunch of lava. In the east, you have to zig-zag back and forth across bridges and through valleys.
Don’t get me wrong, It’s great terrain, but it takes too much effort to get anywhere. There are so many places where you encounter a cliff and think to yourself “oh kitten , really? I have to run all the way back and around?”. You can’t hit auto-run and pop open an inventory window to sell stuff when you have to think about cliffs and lava and rock walls and windy paths.
I personally like DBL much more than ABL for solo and small-group roaming. There are tons of opportunities to use the terrain and mechanics creatively to win a small fight while outnumbered.
It’s my favourite map for roaming. It just takes way too long to get anywhere. If I die, I’m more likely to alt-f4 and go do something else than spend 10 minutes running back.
I think it’s just big without enough options for crossing it quickly. If I’m roaming on on desert and I accidentally fall off a cliff or whatever and my spawn point is all the way across the map, half the time I can’t bring myself to respawn, then spend 10 minutes walking back. I can alt-F4 and be in a game of Overwatch faster than it’d take me to get even halfway across the map.
It’s common knowledge that there still is a lot of work to be done on the engineer traits, It’s good that Wooden Potatoes addressed this issue in his video (although much from a PVE’ers perspective).
I refrained from playing power scrapper because the playstyle of all the serious WVW scrapper roaming builds did not intrest me (too much melee orientated, too kiteable).
I would try to achieve an increase in serious (non yolo) power scrapper build/playstyle diversity and range damage by buffing gadgets and fixing the tools traitline.
My suggestion:
-Fix the bug of “Long Fused Powder pack” so it explodes after 1 second instead of the incorrect 2 seconds it does nowBuff gadgets by introducing strong traits:
-Change “Gadgeteer” to a usefull trait (eg. 20% cd reduction on all gadgets and allow gadgets in the elite slot) ( A.E.D. excluded? or with an increase cd in the elite slot?)
-Change the minor trait “Excessive Energy” to a usefull minor trait (eg. Do +10% damage when endurance is full and using a gadget removes 1 condition” (gadget toolbelt skills excluded)).Do gadgets buffs:
-Removing the random placements of the mines from “Mine Field”.
-Make “Launch Personal Battering Ram” pierce.
-Add a reflect,stability or evade frame here or there.
…Other tool trait changes (Not necessarily for scrapper or gadgets buffs but I just want to be complete with my tools traitline suggestions):
-Don’t let a blind trigger “Reactive Lenses”
-Increase the instant recharge duration of “Kinetic Battery” from 8s to 40s
-Give “Streamlined Kits” a 5s icd and remove the spell effects it triggers, that way it’s more usefull in combination with “Invigorating Speed” just like pre 23/06/2015 patch, plus you don’t lose your mobility for long when your swiftness boon gets corrupted/stolen.
These are some great suggestions!
To OP, I think Hammer/Scrapper has its problems – in particular, some very useless major and minor traits.
However, Scrapper is still the best engi build for pvp/wvw by a large margin. Why?
- Is inherently tanky
- Defends while attacking – Defense Matrix, 3 out of 5 Hammer skills
- Also offers the best self-combos with healing skills
In the past, anet has nerfed base engi to try and take Scrapper down a peg – eg. they raised Healing Turret cast time by 50%. They reduced gear shield block duration by 33% (which is dumb ‘cause Scrapper didn’t run Toolkit … not that I’m bitter or anything). etc.
IMO, what they need to do is buff base engi skills like the gadget + trait suggestions above. This will encourage some build diversity and offer different play options.
But WvW does have villains.
That group of players hiding in a paper tower sieging it up with superior ACs who won’t come out to fight equal numbers?
That zerg spawncamping your server for hours?
The enemy commander running a zerg of 40 against your squad of 12 .. while streaming?
They are the villains. It’s immensely satisfying to beat them.
I do have better luck with condi because I can tag the warrior then run away. (like, full-on escape to max range and run while burn stacks are ticking for ~15s, repeat as needed) This is bad gameplay though. I find it cheesy and unengaging.
Do what neven suggested, then target the leader if needed. Most groups running tagless are organized enough to follow someone without a marker though.
It’s true. The Stability & Resist arent’ permanent, but they are incredibly long. They’re far longer than any player can afford to wait out.
Stability: 15 seconds on, 10 seconds off (berserk mode).
Resistance: 12 seconds (zerk stance) + 6 seconds (signet).
As you probably know, even 5 seconds is long time in pvp. 15 and 18s on short cooldowns are an eternity. You just have to run away.
I play wvw because i love the RvR aspect of the game. There is nothing else out there at the moment that promotes this type of play. Also whenever i go back to another mmo it becomes apparent that they can’t top the responsive combat system of gw2 so they always seem clunky. So even with all their flaws in this game mode, they have still beat their competition.
It’s true. For all its flaws, GW2 still has the best system going at the moment. It manages to be tactical (combo fields, aoe and terrain abilities like walls, conditions + boons) while still being fast and fun. It still feels like an action game where you dodge and reposition to win.
As Wolf said above, it’s the NEED to dodge every cc combined with the lack of ability to counterattack that makes it a bit too strong.
As an off-meta rifle engi, I have as my defense:
- 2 dodges
- 1 block (gear shield)
- 1 escape (prefer rocket boots, but E-gun is better)
That’s not enough to deal with a competant zerker. If I eat any stun, I’m dead to burst. Meanwhile, I can’t attack back because the zerker is immune to my cripple/chill (resistance) or immob (resistance, movement skills) and has pulsing stability when attacking from Eternal Champion, so I can’t knockback.
If I do ever manage to land my cc, I try to follow with burst and 100-0 them while they’re vulnerable. This doesn’t work because of the auto-proc invuln. By the time that’s over, their cooldowns are up again (shield, stances, headbutt, etc). I need to break off and escape. They regenerate to full health quickly because I can’t attack and escape at the same time.
Basically, if I make a single mistake, I die. If they make mistakes, they’re saved by passives and carried by regen.
I liked the combat in BDO. If it wasn’t such an endless gear-grind, I’d probably be playing that. Although, I heard it has its own balance issues in WvW-style gameplay.
Yes, this is a problem, but it’s also a design flaw with Warrior.
Warrior beats almost any class/build in a 1v1 where the opponent stays to fight. The only way to beat the meta stance build is to kite and reset the fight until the Warrior’s defenses are on cooldown, THEN move in for the kill.
Ultimately, I think it’s just poor gameplay.
You can’t interact with something that has 8 seconds of invuln, pulsing stab and long-lasting resistance uptime. You just have to run away or ignore them for 30s to 1m until their stances + defenses are finally done. There’s no back-and-forth there. It’s just boring.
I’m pretty sure the chill/bleed buff being added to WvW was a mistake. They’ll probably skill-split it when they get around to their next balance patch .. in like 5 years or whenever.
Thing is, ‘just kite them’ is not feasible a lot of the time.
- Warrior has good mobility and a lot of gap-closing skills.
- Has perma-stab in zerk mode
- Has high-uptime, long-lasting resistance
So, classes that rely on CC to kite (knockback, chill, etc) are SOL.
You can’t knock them back. You can’t Immobilize them. You can’t Cripple or Chill or Blind them. You have to actually turn around and run away for 10-20 seconds, giving up the point in the process. Meanwhile, they heal 1k/s passively.
That’s a problem for competitive PVP IMO. It’s not engaging gameplay to have to just give up on the fight and wait up to 20s for your opponents invulns to wear off.
Since people have been talking about mostly 1 vs 1 balance and super small man, I’ll throw in deathly chill reaper for large scale fights, I’ve played nothing but condi reaper since the change and am still amazed at how ridiculous it is, 40 bleed stacks + a bunch of cover condis near instantly and I run dual boon corrupts with nullification sigils so I can burn down even a warrior/ revenant by corrupting/removing their resistance.
Given the fact that a good chunk of those 40 bleed stacks come from large-aoe shouts, large-aoe unblockable marks, etc, it’s not unusual to just get 40 stacks of bleed in the middle of a battle instantly and have no idea where they came from.
I’m kind of surprised they didn’t apply the pvp balance to wvw there. I’m sure they’ll remember next balance patch…
.. they have resistance up for a ridiculously long time – far too long for a slow class like reaper to kite/evade.
.. they have pulsing stability up as long or longer than resistance.
Unless the reaper is spec’d for lots of boon corrupts, they are probably going to have a bad time.
Don’t enjoy post-HoT combat. The power-creep killed build diversity.
I don’t disagree but unfortunately we can’t just balance around the base professions. Hot is without a doubt the worst thing that happened to this game and berserker is a prime example of why. The specializations were supposed to open up new build options but in almost every case they are so much stronger that they are mandatory.
Berserker didn’t even offer something new and interesting, it’s basically just the same play style except everything hits way kittening harder, is easier to land, and has shorter cooldowns. The problem is there’s no real way to adjust that without just nerfing the kitten out of it and if they do that you are basically just left with the core warrior again.
Agreed 100%. It is definitely a berserker issue. I’d argue it’s the combination of the invuln + stab stances + Eternal Champion as well as AH regen (triggered by AD + burst skills).
- You can’t CC them (long-lasting, high-uptime stability, resistance)
- You can’t out-damage them (double invuln stance, block, 1k hp/s regen)
- You must dodge/block most of their skills (high damage, long cc)
Core Warrior doesn’t have this problem because it works harder for its burst skills and it sacrifices either sustain, immunity, or damage. Zerker gets it all for free basically.
Mmm. I don’t think it’s very good for actually fighting in wvw. The gyros are too slow and don’t follow you close enough.
However, a full gyro superspeed build is great for getting dolyaks from a camp to a keep or tower. You just cycle through your gyros blowing them up on top of the dolyak and it’s nearly as fast as speedy dolyaks. It is really boring though, so I don’t do that often.