Winds of Disenchantment is stifling WvW class diversity.

Since PoF released a year ago, the WvW meta has been centered around Winds of Disenchantment. It has generally crowded out melee focused builds that were popular at the end of HoT in favor of builds that preform well at range. It also leads to fights ending very quickly once an engage is decided since chaining casts of winds onto the enemy group makes it very difficult for groups to use a winds to defend themself due to its long cast time being easily interrupted without stability access.

The core issue is with winds is the massive area denial that it provides. Winds has a radius of 360, duration of 10 seconds, 10 target cap, 90 second cooldown while also blocking projectiles. This completely outclasses other area denial skills like necromancer wells. This has a disproportionate effect on melee builds, especially in larger numbers since the diminishing returns on stacking more spellbreakers/WoD is basically non-existant. Each winds placed forces melee to stop DPS and move out of danger or die, and because of the massive range it is difficult, increasingly so with larger groups, to stay commited to a melee push without having people cut off behind due to the combination of the Disenchantment effect and CC. This leads to groups not pushing at all until a fight is decided.

The main concerns I've heard about nerfing winds is that it would lead to a return to "toilet bowl" meta and that it would ruin spellbreaker's viability. I think either of these happening would be extremely unlikely. For the first point, the "toilet bowl" meta was a period when many groups ran extremely high sustain comps with low damage output and focused on single targetting to secure a single kill, leading to a "toilet bowl" as the two groups chased eachothers tails in a circle. This had generally stopped being a problem by mid-late HoT as comps, builds and playstyle got better and more damage and boon removal was added into the game. It was certainly completely dead when condition revenent was buffed in the May 16th, 2017 balance patch (4 months before PoF). Both damage and boon corruption have gone up to levels far higher than even at the end of HoT - Break Enchantments alone removes 3 boons on a 15 second cooldown in a large AoE - which makes a fully defensive playstyle almost certainly unviable.

As for the viability of Spellbreaker, it is a class with arguably the best melee survivability, competitive damage with other top DPS (when it gets to be in melee, which doesn't often happen given current winds) and high boonrip output through just Break Enchantments. Not only would spellbreaker still be a very strong, if not the best, melee option, but it would get more active time where it gets to be in melee actually using its skills and contributing to the fight, rather than angling for a perfect winds cast.

WvW desperately needs the radius and duration of winds reduced. 240 radius and 5 second duration would put it on par with other area denial skills in WvW like necromancer wells and help open up a lot of options for builds and playstyles. Other reasonable changes would be reducing the target cap from 10 to 5 and lowering the cast time to 1 second (assuming radius and duration were lowered). While a full redesign of the skill could also be a good option, I think a short term solution of nerfing it is nessecary at the moment for the health and diversity of the gamemode.

Sorry but no. Winds isn't even that strong as you're making it out to be.

Winds is that strong and definitely needs to be looked at.

@funassistant.6589 said:Winds is that strong and definitely needs to be looked at.

It has a place in the game at its current power.

Basically agree I think the best place to start would be removing the boon denial.

@Blocki.4931 said:

@funassistant.6589 said:Winds is that strong and definitely needs to be looked at.

A single skill has become the centre of the 10+ player group playstyles. Any and all fights are decided by a single WoD in a enemy stack.I'm not gonna say it changed the meta because people handle meta as a buzzword and then go off on how WoD is terrible in roaming because you can just walk out of it.

It's worse than the entire immob venom fiasco so many people complained about.

I don't really believe you're being serious in saying it's fine as is.

@funassistant.6589 said:

@Blocki.4931 said:

@funassistant.6589 said:Winds is that strong and definitely needs to be looked at.

The only way I COULD see it changed would be increasing the boons removed per pulse but allow people to gain boons inside it again. Staying in there for a couple of seconds should definitely remove all boons, but then you could potentially stunbreak, get stab and get out while being bombed.

I don't really see changes happening though so I don't care. I don't think something needs to be nerfed just because it makes people play around it. Long and obvious cast animation and the gameplay that comes from it is interesting too. "Bomb here" is something that was missing from the game before and EVERYBODY is keenly away what a bubble means. We need more powerful skills to be very visible.

Winds is strong, but in my experience how its portrayed here doesnt really mesh with reality. Spellbreakers have made up a small part of zergs since PoF while the fb/necro combo has remained the core. There is much more pushes going on now because the melee can move but they are most definetly not deciding battles, heavy aoe bombing still does that (ie necros).

Calling it "toilet bowl" meta is really weird too. When was it ever called that?! Its always been pirateship meta.

What stiffles the meta is the preconception that a hammer must be met with a hammer in battle, instead of trying to work around it. The zergs complaining about winds will be 50 man meta zergs relying on winds. You know what the greatest threat to a 50 man raid we had the other day was? 3 thieves. Just that. 3 god damn staff jumping perma evading thieves that instakilled anything an arms length outside the ball.

One potential solution is to create a condition equivalent to Resistance, that prevents boons from working while applied, but does not remove them, and this condition could be cleansed by the normal means, allowing counterplay (Healing Rain etc.).

This way you can still get boon denial without it being a game breaker.

Winds is completely useless when it's used on it's own if there's no followup to it. One time I had 8 of my 10 squad on a reset night running spellbreaker just to meme it up and even when we landed 4 of our bubbles at a time directly on top of the enemy zerg expecting the other 2 squads to push them, it was all for nothing because no one pushed anyone.

If you want to nerf Winds, you've gotta make it less useless on its own. Make it either convert boons into condis or deal extra damage for each boon removed or transfer boons from enemies to allies that are within the bubble if we're keeping the idea of the skill the same. As for the simple size and duration decrease, we all know that the easy counter to nerf of that is to simply just run more of it. It's happened many times before with other skills being nerfed to be smaller or have higher cooldowns. See Scourges AoE spam how a lot of it got CDs increased by a good bit but all that did was have zergs run even more scourges to adjust.

I personally like the idea that it's a projectile block even though most classes I run have very few if none at all unblockable projectiles.

Winds removes only 1 boon per second per person within the bubble and can easily be dodged if you're keeping a mental count of the ticks it's got going. If you're traited to remove 1 boon from 5 people every time 1 person loses a boon, there's still a CD there that only allows it to tick once every second and doesn't tick multiple times in that 1 tick. So at most you're removing 1 boon from 10 people in the winds + 5 random players boons around 1 of those people who gets procced by the trait. And then preventing boon application while inside the bubble. imo, winds isn't a problem at all and it's easily avoidable and preventable by dodges and the long cast time animation that's bright as day and super easy to see coming #EasyToInterrupt just remove their stab and use an unblockable interrupt.

More often I die to just F1-5 spam from a scourge than from a zerg following up on a winds. So from my perspective, winds really isn't a problem at all. It's spammable skills that are a problem. You want to make winds less effective, just nerf the spam that you are always saying gets put in them. Add a 1-2s CD between each Sand Shade skill, just like mesmer has on it's shatters.

Like I've said before, we all remember when you could create 3 clones on a mesmer and hit f1-4 all at once and the 3 clones would have ALL the shatter effects at once. Give scourge this same treatment and you'll see Winds is no longer an issue.

This is a simple L2P issue. If there's a warrior coming at you, you have two options. Move off or focus CC him. If people just stand there that is their problem.

Step 1: keybind dodgeStep 2: when a SB runs towards the zerg, he MAY be running to cast a WoD. Have your necs boonstrip said SB to the bone and kill SB. Otherwise, combine this with step 1 to get out of the WoD, if he does manage to cast it.The funny thing is that a) WoD was made to counter the main offender, namely Boonspamming fb (and this is a big issue), and b) the zerg with the heavier bomb aka most scourges, wins. You do not need 10 spellbreakers in squad. But think what happens when 1-2 WoD are combined with 15+ scourge shades that remove boons plus wells. Oh boy.

I don't think anyone commenting is at all proficient with group play that utilizes WoD.Forums are getting more and more distasteful on par with the power creep in the game.

I wonder when Anet will do their community outreach to guilds again, probably never. But they'll see that the top % of PvP'ers are people playing or who had played "GvG" at one stage in GW2. Just let those guys do the balancing like foreal

@"funassistant.6589" said:I don't think anyone commenting is at all proficient with group play that utilizes WoD.Forums are getting more and more distasteful on par with the power creep in the game.

I wonder when Anet will do their community outreach to guilds again, probably never. But they'll see that the top % of PvP'ers are people playing or who had played "GvG" at one stage in GW2. Just let those guys do the balancing like foreal

Those who have played "GvG" are probably the same ones loving winds because warrior and melee pushes is back in the meta, which they havent been since the good old hammerstun days.

Boon removal needs looking into. It can be in the form of rips and not centered just around corrupts via necros. Right now, WoD is the only big boon removal to slow down enemies. Even if you don't follow up on the damage, its a reflect and forces commanders to move into a new position giving you about a second to get an edge on the enemy. Its a very strong skill and anyone who disagrees can let me know how many banner warriors they see. Its it terribly overpowered? Nah. It does however need more tweaking though. A fight shouldn't come down to how has more winds to spam and that happens quite a bit. You can blob bust with 15ish people but if they have 50+ and 10 are spellbreakers, you're going to have a much harder time. Its a very important elite and potentially the most important elite in the meta right now.

@Dawdler.8521 said:

@"funassistant.6589" said:I don't think anyone commenting is at all proficient with group play that utilizes WoD.Forums are getting more and more distasteful on par with the power creep in the game.

I wonder when Anet will do their community outreach to guilds again, probably never. But they'll see that the top % of PvP'ers are people playing or who had played "GvG" at one stage in GW2. Just let those guys do the balancing like foreal

I have played a significant amount of GvG. If you've followed it before you might have seen some of my gvg videos such as

@Dawdler.8521 said:

@"funassistant.6589" said:I don't think anyone commenting is at all proficient with group play that utilizes WoD.Forums are getting more and more distasteful on par with the power creep in the game.

I wonder when Anet will do their community outreach to guilds again, probably never. But they'll see that the top % of PvP'ers are people playing or who had played "GvG" at one stage in GW2. Just let those guys do the balancing like foreal

You're not serious right?You can't melee push because you get bubbled????Hello?

not really... without wod we'd have simply less diversity because there would not be a reason to bring warrior as a class into wvw fights. And even without wod the scourge+firebrand+herald combo would stay the same. We'd have simply more pirateship and even less engage.

@Ferus.3165 said:not really... without wod we'd have simply less diversity because there would not be a reason to bring warrior as a class into wvw fights. And even without wod the scourge+firebrand+herald combo would stay the same. We'd have simply more pirateship and even less engage.

Warrior has amplitudes of survival, the most in the game infact barring engi maybe?Warrior will always have a place in WvW no matter what. WoD on the other hands stalls fights unbelievably creating more pirateship than anything else.Pirateship isn't even a bad thing to be, it's a million times better than the current state of the game.Vanilla and HoT was undeniably more preferable than the PoF meta in all stages.

Power creep huhBetter buy those expansions right

@funassistant.6589 said:

@Ferus.3165 said:not really... without wod we'd have simply less diversity because there would not be a reason to bring warrior as a class into wvw fights. And even without wod the scourge+firebrand+herald combo would stay the same. We'd have simply more pirateship and even less engage.

nah that is just your opinion. core warrior is already a nogo in zergfights and spb has only some mediocre boonremoval over core war. The bubble is also easy to avoid if your zerg is reacting fast and deals no dmg by itself. It's a good skill and no changes are needed anymore.

@ProverbsofHell.2307 said:This is a simple L2P issue. If there's a warrior coming at you, you have two options. Move off or focus CC him. If people just stand there that is their problem.

Strawman.

@Ferus.3165 said:not really... without wod we'd have simply less diversity because there would not be a reason to bring warrior as a class into wvw fights. And even without wod the scourge+firebrand+herald combo would stay the same. We'd have simply more pirateship and even less engage.

No one is saying they should delete WoD just that it needs to be toned down.

Also how do you figure a weaker WoD would push the meta more in the direction of pirate shipping when WoD is the main reason for pirate shipping?

@Israel.7056 said:

@Ferus.3165 said:not really... without wod we'd have simply less diversity because there would not be a reason to bring warrior as a class into wvw fights. And even without wod the scourge+firebrand+herald combo would stay the same. We'd have simply more pirateship and even less engage.

Then i am glad you are not in the balance team, because wod is definitly not one of the problems in wvw :D. And you'd still have pirateship because there are no melee zergs that can do well vs scourge/herald range aoe burst. Without WoD there would be far less incentive to ever try to push into the opponent zerg. The main reason for pirate shipping is the ability to burst and dps (on a huge area) from a safe distance, not WoD.Ask anet if we can have one week without WoD to see what would change.

WoD is working as intended. It works great on middle fort lord when I'm trying to optimize dps rotations.

WoD is fine imo, it requires coordination with your team in order to get max efficiency out if it. Looking at recent scrimms for example in many cases the first aggressive bubble gets wasted because the the other guild is expecting it and dodges out/baits it/corrupts/counter bubbles it/etc., you will always need coordinated cc and corrupts/boonstrip for WoD to be efficient.I'm not saying WoD isn't a really good skill, but it's far from being as cancerous as people may think, if anything it's one of the few skills that require good coordination and communication amongst a pug group/a guild.