Great changes. More suggestions

Hey guys, you might know me from "What is wrong with WvW in 2020?" Thread and I am overjoyed by the direction Anet took with the recent changes that were very much in line with some of my suggested changes. Here is what are my current thoughts of what I'd like to see in the future.

Fixed recently

• Siege being too strong
• Dragonbanner no-cd spam
• Scourge being overpowered
• Weaver and Chrono having too low rewards for how hard they were to play
• Mounts catering to lazy gameplay and making downstate irrelevant
• pending: Skilllag by reducing mapcaps

What is missing?Reducing passive defending

• Claim buff should be reduced; Defenders already have ability to get better positioning/stealth while spamming siege and respawns to make up being weaker. Claim buffs already cover 90% of the map and owner of it makes quite a big difference in outcome of the battles. Defending should require using brain, not brawn.
• Upgrade times of keeps and castles should be increased: Packed dollies shouldn't count as 2, keeps should require 25/50/100 dollies and Castle 30/60/120 dolyaks.
• Lord should only scale based on amount of people that it is in combat in with, not amount of defenders and 3rd party servers. Also Iron guards should be 40% instead of 50% to make up for recent damage nerfs.

Promoting active defending

• Increasing health of walls and gates to increase timeframe of player interaction
• Increasing countering gameplay: Making shield gens not block siege fire but pulse damage reduction instead (Defenders and attackers can use catas/trebs/omegas/ballistas/acs/mortars again)
• Increasing supply costs of guild golems to 80 (50 supply for higher HP movable ram that is affected by boons is too low) is also necessary to reduce 100% guaranteed attacker strategies to get through gates
• Supply starvation should be real for both attackers and defenders: Dolyaks should carry 5 less supply for towers and 10 for keeps. This will mean long term sieges while defending and taking camps will be more frequent. In return packed dolyaks would carry 3 times the supply. The dolyak buff from nearby allied played should be reduced to 50% damage reduction for dolly sniping to be real, 90% was too much of an overkill.

MapsExisting maps could use some small changes, like neutral camp-defending NPCs on EB aren't that well received these days and could be replaced with something else. Lords could use visual update and their models made a bit bigger compared to players for combat clarity.

New maps could be tested in place of EotM (GvG arena would stay) and used to collect player feedback for not another "desert map fiasco".

We could use 5th WvW map, casual gameplay has very little space in WvW these days due to amount of maps being so few. Also if they're reducing map caps, it would make sense to add another map, maybe another EB with new middle castle.

Underpowered and overpowered tactics/improvementsOverpowered tactics:

• Iron guards: Too strong, outshines hardened siege, ever since damage nerfs to all classes, lords take slightly too long to kill, should be nerfed down to 40% damage reduction.
• Presence of the keep: There is no question, you will include this in your keep. Claim buff should be nerfed to bring this down too
• Packed dolyaks: As mentioned earlier, should not count for 2 towards upgrade as you can also speed it up. Instead should carry 3 times more supply as normal dolyak
• Banner: Dragon banners Dragon's breath could still use a damage nerf. All banners should have 5 minute reduced duration
• Airship defence (SM): Lasts too long
• Watchtower: Promotes lazy scouting and by far the superior choice for a tower, should only activate when tower is contested and not reveal stealthed enemies.
• Cloaking Waters: Should have longer cooldown between usages, currently groups get roamed down by commanderless clouds that stealth every 30 seconds.

Underpowered tactics:

• Armored dolyaks: Useless, should be buffed to 80% reduction while the WvW wide dolyak damage reduction from being escorted should be reduced to 50% reduction instead of 90%.
• Autoturrets: Quite bad, should be buffed

Boon duration in WvW:Minstrel builds are taking over the gamemode and people are already running 3 minstrel bots per party. Boons shouldn't have permanent upkeep but rather be applied when needed. Overall best idea to stop this powercreep would be to reduce concentration stat effectiveness from 1% boon duration per 15 concentration to 1% per 21 in WvW.

More frequent balance patches and communication:To keep the gamemode SPICY and not stale. Number changes are sufficient every 2 weeks instead of massive trait and skill reworks.

So what do you think? Are you happy with the recent changes? What would you like to see next?

Wanted to nerf scourge, then wants to nerf boons which got stronger with a weaker scourge..... Grats I guess.

Just get rid of the rest of the defensive stuff so the eotm ktrain zergling game play can finally take over wvw, and the zergers can finally shut up about taking an arrow to the knee.

@"XenesisII.1540" said:Wanted to nerf scourge, then wants to nerf boons which got stronger with a weaker scourge..... Grats I guess.

Just get rid of the rest of the defensive stuff so the eotm ktrain zergling game play can finally take over wvw, and the zergers can finally shut up about taking an arrow to the knee.

Scourge itself wasn't stripping much more than reaper (note: You can run curses on reaper too and also "Nothing can save you!"). Main difference was range, cleanses, barriers and how easy it was to play.

You would still be able to defend things, there are buffs and nerfs to defending (f/e you can have trebs against rams again and walls/gates would be sturdier).

I am not quite sure what logic behind your comment is so can you elaborate.

@Threather.9354 said:

@"XenesisII.1540" said:Wanted to nerf scourge, then wants to nerf boons which got stronger with a weaker scourge..... Grats I guess.

Just get rid of the rest of the defensive stuff so the eotm ktrain zergling game play can finally take over wvw, and the zergers can finally shut up about taking an arrow to the knee.

Except for the fact that all punishment skills corrupt, most of the shouts don't, the shades are basically aoe clones of you around the field for your shroud skills so more areas of denial. Scourge has more access to corruption than reaper or core. I agreed with nerfing the use of shroud skills to be on the shade or the player and not both at the same time, players had to make the choice of which they needed to do in any given situation, but anet apparently doesn't want to touch boons any other way, lets throw the shade back out there, oops wait they don't like the extra aoe fields, ok well lets just nerf targeting, lets also take away wells trait and keep the old timers...... but waitaminute... necros were already in a good place before all this mumbo jumbo started.... so we're making changes for the sake of saying we made some changes, carry on.

But it's whatever, people want to melee boon ball train so be it, talk about lazy game play, that's it right there, grab a bunch of support, boon spam, run over aoes all day cause who cares about proper positioning anymore, pug dies huehuehue you should have been in discord so I could tell you to run over aoes anyways.Just don't come complaining in the forums about how boring it's getting in fights.

And by all means, keep nerfing defense to the point that people won't bother to respond, it'll just be easier to back cap, heck it's already at that point really, lots of coms won't bother to come defend something, but I know zergs don't enjoy a challenge, I mean that's why they're stacking numbers, most will try to find groups smaller than them to run over, and run away to another map when they lose one fight, I see this happen every single day in wvw.

Nerf passive buffs, nerf upgrade speeds, nerf siege damage, nerf npc health, nerf wall health, nerf watch tower cause I'm sure there's scouts who are mad and on strike because of this half useless tactic (hey did you know you can cata most places outside of it's range), nerf banners cause it allowed me to defend farm two zergs in klovan lords last night(idiots who didn't push back out).. no really.. nerf it. Nerf cloaking waters but not stealth in general and certainly not scrapper gyro stealth of course, nerf airships cause people are too dumb to run back out to the wall to wait it out, psst who's got 2 minutes to spare. Counterplay? who has time to think about that, just nerf everything delaying us lol. Lets nerf everything to stop t3 so we can break it easier... hey why won't people come defend t1 stuff after we break it?

Please, turn wvw into eotm.

@XenesisII.1540 said:

@Threather.9354 said:

@XenesisII.1540 said:Wanted to nerf scourge, then wants to nerf boons which got stronger with a weaker scourge..... Grats I guess.

Just get rid of the rest of the defensive stuff so the eotm ktrain zergling game play can finally take over wvw, and the zergers can finally shut up about taking an arrow to the knee.

Overall Scourge weaponskills corrupt less because reaper has GS 4, "Nothing can save you" is 2 AoE boon removal has only 20 second cooldown that makes your other boon removals easier to land and you can run boon removal on Shroud 2 even on reaper with shorter cooldown. Only argument for scourge having more boon removal wasGhastly breach, which I do agree is a great skill but barely better than Lich Form. Do note that scourge also converted conditions to boons which was actually beneficial to meleeball that reaper has ability to break. I do give you that it iis weird having ability that hits 2 people only on 2 locations, not consistant at all, 4 people at 1 location would have been much better. Scourge was just easier to play while providing support, it wasn't better at removing boons. So nerfing it was good to bring it more in line with reaper

Nerfing upgrade times from 2 hours to 2.5 hours (keeps) or 3 hours (SM) isn't gonna break the game. T3 objectives currently are so unfun to look for fights in that commanders don't even bother attempting more than once. This is why claim buff should be nerfed, so at least attacker can at least feel they can improve in taking enemy siege down and making plans to get through chokepoints into the lord room rather than just getting outstatted what you can't do anything about. Increasing upgrade times of keeps and castles will only affect 1 or 2 side keeps on borderlands and SM at any given time anyways. Your EB keep and garri will be near impossible to breach anyways as long as you presiege it up, especially if shield gens are brought in line with other siege.

Do note that objective walls/gates would have more health in return of losing this claim buff. So it would be shift in defences.

And shield gens would be nerfed so defenders can build trebs behind gate to counter enemy rams, catas and golems. Meaning even small amount of defenders can possibly fend off larger number instead of getting Shield gen cheesed

Overall the suggested changes do adjust upgrade times of keeps and castles to more reasonable numbers, increase defenders time to take down enemy siege and gather numbers while making it impossible for attacker to ignore all their siege. You shouldn't misunderstand the changes as nerf to defending but rather moving raw power of defenders to choices one can make while defending.

Currently WvW is more like Ktrain: 2 equally strong blobs, neither can touch enemy objectives because they will lose the fight. So it becomes a stalemate where you wait for enemy to come to semi-neutral spot as just going near enemy objectives can make or break the game.

As you seem to think I am just a blob player, not all suggested changes are just for blobs but rather for smaller groups such as watchtower changes to allow more stealth builds and smaller groups to setup catas before contesting places like Dawns and Sunny. Also claim buff and dolyak escorting nerfs affect roaming groups and camp players more.

You should read the original post again and go through all the defending buffs such as being able to stop enemy rams and catas with trebs and acs again while having sturdier walls instead of focusing just on the nerfs. Goal would be increasing player interaction and importance of single player actions rather than just letting WvW be a shieldgen rush fiesta where you dodge slightly weaker groups objectives. Did you really dislike Pre-HoT meta that much?