Disruptive Consequences of Warclaw on WvW Gameplay and Discussion on Suggested Solutions

Since ANet refuses to beta test and we're now in live testing of the mount, I think it's important to give detailed yet succinct feedback in the hopes that things will be reigned in sooner than later. Please feel free to add things here in the suggested format. I'd like to request that any discussion here or in any other similar thread remain constructive and respectful so the feedback doesn't get thrown out with a closed thread.

• Negates need for any sort of mobility (run speed/swiftness) in builds; making many traits, weapon skills, utilities, and runes pointless. As long as you can mount you're faster and if you can't mount you're in combat and slower regardless.

          - Not sure how much I really care about this other than the gold I just dumped into Fireworks Runes, but feel it certainly demonstrates a severe lack of foresight.

• Negates downstate and need to build for cleave or safe stomping; making many traits, weapon skills, and utilities pointless. Blobs can run a flanking squad of Warclaws to finish downs. Any individual can disengage a fight and be back for a full finish with a mount before a person can self res.

          - Remove the down finishing ability. Make the engage ability stun.

• Negates need for cc or gap closing abilities, you can't cc them and even if you catch them you have to do 11k damage to dismount them and you can't do that mounted which means you're running slow while they simply walk away.

          - The mounts have to either be cc'able or have a significantly smaller health pool. In my opinion a single hit from another mount should dislodge both players effectively taking the           mounts out of the equation and letting us actually fight.

I concur completely with removing the ability to finish downed players. Currently there is no use for skillful stomp denials such as an interrupt or providing stealth to the downed player.

I like your suggestion of an auto dismount if hit by a dismount attack.

Mount is fine. After maul attack's dmg and cap lowered i think its somewhat balanced. Still room for tweaking should be there. Only thing left is map breaks im sure anet is aware of it.

Try this format for easier reading:(this is copy/paste from the OP, just different syntax)

Negates need for any sort of mobility (run speed/swiftness) in builds; making many traits, weapon skills, utilities, and runes pointless. As long as you can mount you're faster and if you can't mount you're in combat and slower regardless.Not sure how much I really care about this other than the gold I just dumped into Fireworks Runes, but feel it certainly demonstrates a severe lack of foresight.Negates downstate and need to build for cleave or safe stomping; making many traits, weapon skills, and utilities pointless. Blobs can run a flanking squad of Warclaws to finish downs. Any individual can disengage a fight and be back for a full finish with a mount before a person can self res.Remove the down finishing ability. Make the engage ability stun.Negates need for cc or gap closing abilities, you can't cc them and even if you catch them you have to do 11k damage to dismount them and you can't do that mounted which means you're running slow while they simply walk away.The mounts have to either be cc'able or have a significantly smaller health pool. In my opinion a single hit from another mount should dislodge both players effectively taking the mounts out of the equation and letting us actually fight.

Absolute advantage having the mount for roaming. Have an additional 10k ish HP and 3 dodges to burn down opponents cd before engage. The mount can take a full brunt attack with no penalty to my HP and endurance :smile:.

I think the engage should just be damage (and on the low end at that), no CC, no insta stomp etc. It's already a must thanks to it's mobility.I don't think it should affect the actual fights imo

Hello, new player here as i started to play GW2 some months ago, after 15 years on Dark Age of Camelot. In Daoc, mounts have been added like 10 years ago, for realm vs realm battle too. But unlikely GW2, they are just speed bot, 1dmg from any kind of source (mob or enemy) and every cc you got, just dismount you (and enemy of course) and mount does not provide extra life points. This was pretty ok as you can force people to fight... what i found now on GW2 seems very weird to me...

As I think its overpowered; I've been having fun with the insta stomp. Four simultaneous stomps during a blob fight has been my record so far. xDIt kind of brings back the "no downed state week" wvw had in the past. Also, the rise in FB revive bots was getting old.
Anyway, If Anet doesn't remove the mount's stomp ability I'd hope they at least consider changing it to a percent chance of it occurring. ..This way there would at least be more of a risk attempting it.

@Vindikare.3678 said:Hello, new player here as i started to play GW2 some months ago, after 15 years on Dark Age of Camelot. In Daoc, mounts have been added like 10 years ago, for realm vs realm battle too. But unlikely GW2, they are just speed bot, 1dmg from any kind of source (mob or enemy) and every cc you got, just dismount you (and enemy of course) and mount does not provide extra life points. This was pretty ok as you can force people to fight... what i found now on GW2 seems very weird to me...

alot of things in gw2 seem weird when compared to other MMOs

@derd.6413 said:

@Vindikare.3678 said:Hello, new player here as i started to play GW2 some months ago, after 15 years on Dark Age of Camelot. In Daoc, mounts have been added like 10 years ago, for realm vs realm battle too. But unlikely GW2, they are just speed bot, 1dmg from any kind of source (mob or enemy) and every cc you got, just dismount you (and enemy of course) and mount does not provide extra life points. This was pretty ok as you can force people to fight... what i found now on GW2 seems very weird to me...

yes, but Daoc is pretty famous to have a great RvR expercience and i liked how they handled mounts in realms vs realms... just a little reference to improve the WvW :)

@Vindikare.3678 said:

@derd.6413 said:

@Vindikare.3678 said:Hello, new player here as i started to play GW2 some months ago, after 15 years on Dark Age of Camelot. In Daoc, mounts have been added like 10 years ago, for realm vs realm battle too. But unlikely GW2, they are just speed bot, 1dmg from any kind of source (mob or enemy) and every cc you got, just dismount you (and enemy of course) and mount does not provide extra life points. This was pretty ok as you can force people to fight... what i found now on GW2 seems very weird to me...

let me give you some advise: if your argument for a feature/balance/whatever is "another game did it" then don't, no matter how good you think that game is.

well, lot of people are complaining about this mount, so it is a fact that something is wrong actually ;) and there is nothing wrong to watch how other games handled the same thing. But yes, this is just empty chatting.

@Vindikare.3678 said:well, lot of people are complaining about this mount, so it is a fact that something is wrong actually ;)

the only thing you could do to wvw that wouldn't be complained about are bugfixes and performance improvements

and there is nothing wrong to watch how other games handled the same thing. But yes, this is just empty chatting.

it's fine to use other games as an example but not as an argument.

but to adress your suggestion:

no, the issue with the warclaw is not that it tries to be more then an over-elaborate speedboost like every other mount in every other MMO

Add extra escapes and extra life in a pvp environment is always a bad thing from my prospective to be honest, there is nothing wrong to point this out. Like someone already posted on other threads, instead of force a 1vs1 now you just ride side by side, waiting for the enemy to make the first move... if this first move will ever happen :tired_face: i wanted to try pvp/wvw from a different game and this actually is pretty annoying for me.

My idea of WvW mount in this game is something like this: when you got hit by something you, and the enemies, hitting you just lose the mount, without any stun from being dismounted.

@Vindikare.3678 said:well, lot of people are complaining about this mount, so it is a fact that something is wrong actually ;)It's only a fact that lots of people are complaining. Given that people have actually complained about getting free gems, I don't think we can draw any conclusions from the existence of complaints.

A large subset of humans dislike change, especially disruptions. And, good or bad, there's no question that the Warclaw is an extremely disruptive change to WvW. It would be surprising if there were no complaints.

@Illconceived Was Na.9781 said:

@Vindikare.3678 said:well, lot of people are complaining about this mount, so it is a fact that something is wrong actually ;)It's only a fact that lots of people are complaining. Given that people have actually complained about getting free gems, I don't think we can draw any conclusions from the existence of complaints.

So.. while you are a voice of reason on these forums, I would like to ask you what you would set an ‘over/under’ on how long it takes to fix the ability of this mount to enter multiple structures?

If we use the desert BL and several well known ways to enter into structures, since the start of the BL and are still available today, as a benchmark, it might take them a while to fix those issues.

Which, has been a general concern of people who have played this mode for years. The fix times are greatly longer (in perception maybe) than any PvE mode minutes dungeons,

My 2 suggestions:-Mount Skill #1 should have the ability to dismount other players to give mounts a counter. Remove stomp, it's excessive.-Reduce mount dodges from 3 to 2. 3 is excessive and allows you a bit too much mobility.

@Strider Pj.2193 said:

@Illconceived Was Na.9781 said:

@"Vindikare.3678" said:well, lot of people are complaining about this mount, so it is a fact that something is wrong actually ;)It's only a fact that lots of people are complaining. Given that people have actually complained about getting free gems, I don't think we can draw any conclusions from the existence of complaints.

My guess is that the first thing they'll do is create a lot of "no mount zones", that will be annoying because they will often overlap things like gates (that the Warclaw is supposed to help with) and they'll knock people off mounts who are trying to run past enemies. People will criticize it as "simplistic" and "easy out" and so on.

But it will be better than the structures being vulnerable to infiltration by mounts.

If I'm correct, that could be by next major patch. It takes a while to do these no mount zones, even when done hastily. After that, maybe they'll figure out how to add invisible walls to block the mounts (which would also block siege, among other things).

Which, has been a general concern of people who have played this mode for years. The fix times are greatly longer (in perception maybe) than any PvE mode minutes dungeons,

The perception is somewhat incorrect: it takes them a long time to address bugs; that's just the nature of complex software.

Even @"Benjamin Arnold.3457", the hero of many in the Fractal/Raid community (for good reasons) couldn't find, troubleshoot, and fix all the stuff he agreed was relevant and he certainly wasn't able to manage it with the sort of speed people would like.

On the other hand, WvW hasn't been lucky to have a person on the team who is as willing to share their thoughts to the community, so it's hard to know what they are working on (if they are even working on the WvW things that interest you or I... or anyone else). We can see evidence that they do, because stuff does get adjusted. Of course, it's nothing close to 'enough', even accounting for the trickiness of adjusting anything at all in WvW.

Sideways relevant to your question/concern...

It's my hope that when ANet releases something that is intended to disrupt that they have already thought of potential issues and have some solutions/work-arounds in mind, perhaps even ready to implement. That's how I've tried to run RL projects under my purview.

In practice, there's not always been evidence to support that hope. With the sigil|rune overhaul, I would have expected some tweaking or public comment, and we didn't see much. Most balance patches don't see adjustments for months.To be fair: none of those changes should be done lightly and it's expensive to prepare for contingencies the way e.g. NASA does. Even for my projects, there are only so many staff hours that can be devoted to "just in case" versus "what the client|customer needs & wants yesterday."

And that's why I maintain hope, despite there not being as much evidence of such preparation as I would, erm, hope.

Agree on all 3 points.

1- I think speed increases are still useful, just not as much as they were before the mount. This is actually a good thing as certain specs had to run certain traits, utilities or runes, while others had movement increases baked in with something else. Fireworks runes are still solid for the boons it gives during combat :+1:

2- Stun is a good choice because at least a group can counterplay that with stability. I would still like the ability to 'tag' opponents though, as that gives another means for support players to cash in on XP and loot

3- As has been suggested a few times on the forums, the mount should get a defiance bar, so only actual CC will dismount you, leaving the burden for counterplay on the part of the dismounted. Further to that and #2, the Stun would serve as CC against other mounted players. I don't know how large a defiance bar, as I don't think players should be dismounted by a single SA or PBS, but if the bar is too large, mounted players can completely ignore single players on foot (though maybe that's a good thing?)

This game will go down really fast from this point on if no one bothers to communicate with players. They do it, and watch us suffer/use what they did like they watch an ant farm on fire. A little activity in forums from staff and some idea sharing would be perfect.

I just hope Anet has evolved from a boulder rolling down a slope with their WvW decisions.