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A timeline of the different eras we've experienced in WvW over the years?


EremiteAngel.9765

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Any historian here with a keen memory and good research skills to share a timeline of the different major eras that have passed since the start of WvW?With a short write-up on each Era perhaps?Like a history book for WvW.

For example, there would be an Era of Gliding and an Era of Mounts. An Era of Condition Supremacy and an Era on the rise of Power Spike. An Era of bunkers and an Era of Meta builds and classes. An Era where Blobs ruled. An Era where Havoc reigned Supreme. An Era where there are Zerg tail chasers and an Era where guilds destroyed zergs. An Era where server identity was prime and an Era where mass migrations took place.

TBH I've more or less forgotten what happened pre-HOT apart from spending most of my time fighting against a guild called OPP.

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You are likely going to have as many definitions of it as you have replies in the thread. Between different scales and how much attention to detail you want you can regard variations of the same ideas as different eras.

Here is how I would sum it up, using very broad strokes and mostly regarding the span between closed (guild-) groups and pickup groups:

1. The formative daysThere was a huge variety and large portions of that variety came from the fact that guilds were still forming and building with no specific set meta or scale. The formative years culminated with the formation of the Hammertrain meta and the 25-man closed norm.

2. The established vanilla metaThe Hammertrain was never really just a hammer train, it was a rather balanced meta composed of three different types of parties with some variation often on a 40-40-20% split or two melee parties, two ranged parties and one focus party. It was also pretty tied to the armor classes of the game with melee parties mostly being the plate classes, the ranged parties mostly being the cloth classes and the focus parties mostly being leather but a mix of leather of cloth with focus-targetting skills. So you essentially had Guardians and Warriors, you had Eles and Necros and you had Thieves with the odd Mesmer sprinkled in. Engineers and Rangers were rarely seen.

3. The early HoT metaOften known as the boon-ball (or more negatively named variations) was essentially just an adaptation of the vanilla meta with the changes the elite specs brought. The focus parties fell out of favour with Mesmers being incorporated into the melee parties. After the initial pirate ship tactics that appeared with Revenants the ranged parties soon followed suit and folded into the melee parties creating the first type of comp with rather similar parties.

However, the meta was not as stale as players with superficial experience tend to say or ask about. In reality, it quickly grew into a norm with alot of variation and for most of 2016 there were quite alot of very different approaches played even if they looked similar on paper. There was quite a good balance between tank and damage as well as between conditions and power at the time. So there were condi comps, there were hybrid comps, there were tanky power comps and there were bursty power comps.

There difference between them was mostly seen on gear or between very small shifts of just one or two classes so from an outside perspective looking in it would have looked that everyone played rather similar. It could be argued that over 2015-2016 the meta shifted from ranged power to tanky power to bursty power but I wouldn't necessarily say it would fully warrant a division into clear cut eras. Instead, I argue that there was more of a balance than people tend to understand and that these differences were down to preference in most cases. Alot of people would argue that late 2016 was still a tanky power meta based around boon sharing but I would argue that most good guilds were shifting out of that and had been for quite some time. The change was slower at larger pickup scale with pirateships living longer and a shift toward bursty downcleave tactics came rather late, but the process was there. I mean, we have the same kind of varieties now over different servers.

Engineers made it into the meta, Mesmers made it more firmly into the meta and the balance between Chronos and Melee Tempests tended to shift back and forth in what was preferred. The same goes for Necros, Reapers and Berserkers. Revenants obviously made it in and became a staple that they maintain to this day with both ranged builds and melee builds that were powerful and accepted.

4. The late HoT meta (or the prelude PoF meta)The last era of HoT certainly became its own era. The burst meta was cut short by one fateful balance patch that just flipped the balance between condi and power upside down. The last meta of the HoT era was the infamous one-shot epidemic era that drove guilds out of the Guild Hall and quickly turned tactics back to ranged pirate ships again, only this time based around condi rather than power. That meta then persisted into, and some would argue, through PoF and up until today. However, I would give that its own era, I am more picky in calling recent adjustments their own eras so ...

5. The PoF metaIt has been a bit adjusted over the years but I would argue that the meta is still essentially the same as the tactics and general behaviours of players have remained the same. HoT may have looked similar on paper but in reality, for 5 different guilds you could have seen 5 different comps using comepletely different stats and tactics. The PoF meta has been more of what some players accuse the HoT meta for. The prelude of condi pirateships only really carried on into PoF with the introduction of Shades and WoD.

All the rips that have been added has not really changed the way people play, it has rather just peaked the spam and changed rips from focused rips to spread rips making sure more players die when the snowball effects kick in - by that I mean that it is more of a tug-o-war between boon spam and rip spam with both sides engaging in both approaches. Any indication of an alternative where people for example would build comps that rely on not having boons so they can't be as corrupted have really died in their infancy with one balance patch introducing a ray of hope that the next balance patch then snuffed out. The possibility disappeared before it took root. If anything, that has been the norm of the PoF balance up until recently and everyone has kept sort of doing everything.

On and off there have been opportunities to shift more or less into using Breakers actively (rather than individually) so as Scourges have been nerfed more and more of those opportunities have appeared but they have never amounted to more than a potential niche really before the recent changes. At the same time, the divide between GvG and pickups or that the layer of raiding guilds have grown so thin on the maps is part of the reason why the meta has been so conservative. In many ways it has not been the possibility of doing something different that has been lacking but rather that there is no one around to do it and show people how. In the past, the pickup meta have always taken inspiration from GvG (and thus commanders who run pickups tend to run them based on how they prefer running their guilds) but the recent divide have made these connections harder to see and the meta has become more stagnant and conservative as a result. Perhaps appearing more stagnant than it actually (or potentially) may be.

In closing I'd like to point to something else, if you ask me I would say that the smaller scales have always been where balance has shined. Not perhaps when playing solo but the balance in WvW has always had much more variety with far fewer broken things that have stood out around the 5-10 man scale. That scale doesn't see issues between specialist and allround builds as much as the even smaller scale sees and it doesn't see the same type of stacking and scaling issues that the larger scales see. I find the smaller norms pretty pointless to talk about and the larger norms as discussed above may be an interesting phenomenon but there are so many ways to define and talk about it and so many oppinions about what was balanced or not.

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@subversiontwo.7501 said:The last meta of the HoT era was the infamous one-shot epidemic era that drove guilds out of the Guild Hall and quickly turned tactics back to ranged pirate ships again, only this time based around condi rather than power. That meta then persisted into, and some would argue, through PoF and up until today.I dont see how anyone can argue that. The true condi meta was pretty much dead when deathly chill reapers was finally nerfed after 8 months of bleeding WvW to death. That was 1 or 2 weeks or so after PoF release and everyone had already stopped playing reaper in favor of the vastly superior scourge. After that its been overwhelmingly power meta even if there are a few condi holdouts, mostly just for solo roaming.

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The ones I remember . . :

I Need a GoB . . .Oh This Is Actually Kind of Fun . . .Hey I Have Legendary Armor Now I Can Actually Get Off My PvE Build . . .Tiering Is Fun . . .Oh I'm On a Link Now . . .Wow These Host Servers Are Kind of Crap . . .Oh There's No Point In Tiering Now . . .And Lots of Ppl Won't Fight Me Either . . .And I'm Done With All My Reward Tracks . . .I Guess I'll Get My Shards Each Week . . ?

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Date's aren't entirely precise, but....

2012I didn't play2013Early Hammer train Era. This is when mostly nobody knew how to play and it was still common to wear green gear and level uplevels in wvw. Anyone with a mic becomes pro and this is the era where most washed up gamers relish.

Late 2013-2014Tournament Era. A WvW developer that shall not be named begins introducing things to hype wvw, and it did not end well. Also, they buffed siege. Tournaments were the rage in WvW, but it caused tryhards to burn out, and EOTM was also made as an overflow. This caused casuals to really go for the rewards and EOTM meant that there were less casuals for mediocre guilds to farm. But population remained strong. Mostly known for the drama during tournaments. One of the key events that happened this era was the "Violating my game mode" meme which caused Anet to spawn a stadium in Obsidian Sanctum, giving GvGs some legitimacy and jumpstarting better things.

Late 2014- March 2015Golden Era. This is when gameplay grew more refined and the GvGs really got going. People took the game up to the next level and organized play on servers became the norm. People ironed out those builds and comps. Legendary pugmanders became immortalized here, and wannabes popped up all over the place.

March 2015 - October 2015Pirate Ship Era. Due to the stability nerfs, the hammer train was made much less effective and stability became more of a placebo. Game devolves into more of a wait until the other side gets bored. GWEN somehow stays the same...

October 2015- April 2016Vanilla-HoT Extinction Event. Due to a asteroid hitting the mists, the formerly lush borderlands turned into desert, killing all life on it turning it into the much hated Deserted Borderlands. In addition, certain new builds and elite specs were overpowered, leading to massive power creeps and quick deaths for the unprepared. Pirate shipping was taken to the extreme. The redesign of the Guild Halls also put an exorbitant amount of cost and put out most small guilds. Nonsensical gimmicks like overpowered tactivators became a plague. Due to HoT release being a disaster on all 3 fronts (PvE, WvW, and PvP), stuff took forever to address.

April 2016- September 2017Late HoT Era. The fixing of stability and numerous other nerfs, as well as the further adjustment of WvW rewards made the game mode playable and gameplay began to develop again. At first it went from the other extreme of a toilet bowl meta into a weird corrupt/condi/dps meta. But there was certainly more variety now, instead of this nonsensical pirate ship.

September 2017- Feb 2019Degenerate Era. The arrival of PoF was not as devastating to WvW but the arrival of scourge and firebrand again dumbed down fights, and many of the elites still cause much issue because of fundamental design flaws. Nevertheless there was some conscious effort to fix things, if not for a while and while the meta could be better still remains quite playable. The balance team seems bent on redesigning classes for no reasons, eventually deciding to delete Chrono because raids. Alliances were announced

Feb 2019 - PresentDark Era. With the massive layoffs @ Anet revealing that the company has been wasting resources on other projects while not using it on the game and being forced to focus on Gw2, there are no long term plans or even hints of them for any of the game modes. As WvW is at the bottom of the pile, the situation is even more dire here and alliances remain a pipe dream. This is probably the final era of Gw2 WvW as the game goes on maintenance mode and the remaining organized groups cannibalize each other while killing random pugs that enter. At this rate, smaller guilds will most likely turn into red giants and explode but end up as white dwarfs while larger guilds will devolve into supermassive blackholes. It is theorized that every server has a supermassive black hole at its center (Blackgate, duh) but even they will dissipate. In the end, Gw2 will be a very cold place, where the only things that will be left is the gem store and living story.

While the WvW team (person) still works hard to provide updates on the matter, it doesn't really look too good. Will this be the end or will there be a new big bang to happen out of nowhere? Who knows, really. Pretty sure this is an expanding universe though.

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I wouldn't define eras by what was thought to be in the "meta". It was GWEN pre-HoT, and GWEN-R after HoT. All the tweaks and adjustments are pretty much just minor refinements within that framework for zerg purposes. For roaming its an entirely different story of course.

The biggest systemic change to WvW was that over the course of roughly a year we had the three WvW seasons. Those seasons gave servers a reason to organize, and communities to seek new players, guilds and commanders. People played to win, they were invested in the outcome. Then Anet decided seasons were problematic, and removed them. And WvW has been in decline since then.

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for me

  1. tournaments is love. it was so good and great and everyone was having fun and we aimed to win and sometimes we lost and we also assisted others and taught ppl to play wvw and shared our gold for gearing and the community grew and grew.
  2. tournament ended and then wvw slowly stagnated because we have no goal and links split us up and pips killed eotm

metatournament - cleric guards running restoration stamina on monk runes with healing food.after metaboon zerg was immortal that you had to kill the weakest link one at a time.now metapirate chips - with quickness alacrity boon rip stealth ae spike.

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@"subversiontwo.7501" said:You are likely going to have as many definitions of it as you have replies in the thread. Between different scales and how much attention to detail you want you can regard variations of the same ideas as different eras.

Here is how I would sum it up, using very broad strokes and mostly regarding the span between closed (guild-) groups and pickup groups:

1. The formative daysThere was a huge variety and large portions of that variety came from the fact that guilds were still forming and building with no specific set meta or scale. The formative years culminated with the formation of the Hammertrain meta and the 25-man closed norm.

2. The established vanilla metaThe Hammertrain was never really just a hammer train, it was a rather balanced meta composed of three different types of parties with some variation often on a 40-40-20% split or two melee parties, two ranged parties and one focus party. It was also pretty tied to the armor classes of the game with melee parties mostly being the plate classes, the ranged parties mostly being the cloth classes and the focus parties mostly being leather but a mix of leather of cloth with focus-targetting skills. So you essentially had Guardians and Warriors, you had Eles and Necros and you had Thieves with the odd Mesmer sprinkled in. Engineers and Rangers were rarely seen.

3. The early HoT metaOften known as the boon-ball (or more negatively named variations) was essentially just an adaptation of the vanilla meta with the changes the elite specs brought. The focus parties fell out of favour with Mesmers being incorporated into the melee parties. After the initial pirate ship tactics that appeared with Revenants the ranged parties soon followed suit and folded into the melee parties creating the first type of comp with rather similar parties.

However, the meta was not as stale as players with superficial experience tend to say or ask about. In reality, it quickly grew into a norm with alot of variation and for most of 2016 there were quite alot of very different approaches played even if they looked similar on paper. There was quite a good balance between tank and damage as well as between conditions and power at the time. So there were condi comps, there were hybrid comps, there were tanky power comps and there were bursty power comps.

There difference between them was mostly seen on gear or between very small shifts of just one or two classes so from an outside perspective looking in it would have looked that everyone played rather similar. It could be argued that over 2015-2016 the meta shifted from ranged power to tanky power to bursty power but I wouldn't necessarily say it would fully warrant a division into clear cut eras. Instead, I argue that there was more of a balance than people tend to understand and that these differences were down to preference in most cases. Alot of people would argue that late 2016 was still a tanky power meta based around boon sharing but I would argue that most good guilds were shifting out of that and had been for quite some time. The change was slower at larger pickup scale with pirateships living longer and a shift toward bursty downcleave tactics came rather late, but the process was there. I mean, we have the same kind of varieties now over different servers.

Engineers made it into the meta, Mesmers made it more firmly into the meta and the balance between Chronos and Melee Tempests tended to shift back and forth in what was preferred. The same goes for Necros, Reapers and Berserkers. Revenants obviously made it in and became a staple that they maintain to this day with both ranged builds and melee builds that were powerful and accepted.

4. The late HoT meta (or the prelude PoF meta)The last era of HoT certainly became its own era. The burst meta was cut short by one fateful balance patch that just flipped the balance between condi and power upside down. The last meta of the HoT era was the infamous one-shot epidemic era that drove guilds out of the Guild Hall and quickly turned tactics back to ranged pirate ships again, only this time based around condi rather than power. That meta then persisted into, and some would argue, through PoF and up until today. However, I would give that its own era, I am more picky in calling recent adjustments their own eras so ...

5. The PoF metaIt has been a bit adjusted over the years but I would argue that the meta is still essentially the same as the tactics and general behaviours of players have remained the same. HoT may have looked similar on paper but in reality, for 5 different guilds you could have seen 5 different comps using comepletely different stats and tactics. The PoF meta has been more of what some players accuse the HoT meta for. The prelude of condi pirateships only really carried on into PoF with the introduction of Shades and WoD.

All the rips that have been added has not really changed the way people play, it has rather just peaked the spam and changed rips from focused rips to spread rips making sure more players die when the snowball effects kick in - by that I mean that it is more of a tug-o-war between boon spam and rip spam with both sides engaging in both approaches. Any indication of an alternative where people for example would build comps that rely on not having boons so they can't be as corrupted have really died in their infancy with one balance patch introducing a ray of hope that the next balance patch then snuffed out. The possibility disappeared before it took root. If anything, that has been the norm of the PoF balance up until recently and everyone has kept sort of doing everything.

On and off there have been opportunities to shift more or less into using Breakers actively (rather than individually) so as Scourges have been nerfed more and more of those opportunities have appeared but they have never amounted to more than a potential niche really before the recent changes. At the same time, the divide between GvG and pickups or that the layer of raiding guilds have grown so thin on the maps is part of the reason why the meta has been so conservative. In many ways it has not been the possibility of doing something different that has been lacking but rather that there is no one around to do it and show people how. In the past, the pickup meta have always taken inspiration from GvG (and thus commanders who run pickups tend to run them based on how they prefer running their guilds) but the recent divide have made these connections harder to see and the meta has become more stagnant and conservative as a result. Perhaps appearing more stagnant than it actually (or potentially) may be.

In closing I'd like to point to something else, if you ask me I would say that the smaller scales have always been where balance has shined. Not perhaps when playing solo but the balance in WvW has always had much more variety with far fewer broken things that have stood out around the 5-10 man scale. That scale doesn't see issues between specialist and allround builds as much as the even smaller scale sees and it doesn't see the same type of stacking and scaling issues that the larger scales see. I find the smaller norms pretty pointless to talk about and the larger norms as discussed above may be an interesting phenomenon but there are so many ways to define and talk about it and so many oppinions about what was balanced or not.

Good post, rather than write my own post I'd rather build off of yours. Namely I would mention how dedicated healers, particularly minstrel tempests became mainstream. In my opinion I would partition HoT into three metas from launch to pre-pof: Revenant train, Signet of Inspiration (boonshare) meta, and finally the chill-condi.

Early Heart of Thorns

  • Revenants took the spotlight and comps were quick to abuse the 2 second cool-down coalescence of ruin to eviscerate enemy blobs.
  • Healing tempests became integral in any medium to large scale comp
  • Relatively few groups were experimenting with boonshare.
  • Mostly physical damage comps

Middle Heart of Thorns

  • Boonshare stacking with 50+ seconds of quickness and resistance suddenly became immensely popular.
  • Mostly physical damage comps.
  • Comps were generally G/G/M/X/X or G/M/X/X/X with "X" being any class other than G or M.

Late Heart of thorns until pof

  • boonshare was nerfed and major changes to condition stacking
  • I would argue the nerf to signet of inspiration was immensely critical, because prior to that guilds were able to stack minutes worth of resistance which made any condition composition useless as long as they kept rotating SoI.
  • Mesmer stacking became less common and generally moved from 1 per party to 1 per 12-15 people
  • Chill-reapers, condi revs, and celestial purge guards became popular. G/R/E/N/X (G=cele guard, R=condirev, N=chillreaper, E=healing tempest, X=other) became the gold standard for comps
  • Builds became more refined, necros started to add epidemic to their bar.
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The Tournament Era was my favorite. I've never seen the point of fighting for the sake of fighting. The original conception was a "take and hold territory" game and that mindset was at its peak during and for a year or so after Tournaments.

What really killed the game mode (although it's been a slow, lingering death) was the introduction of the Megaserver to PvE. That began the slide away from real Server loyalty, without which WvW becomes the equivalent of an eternal warm-up for a competetive match that never starts. Links accelerated the decline as did the introduction of skirmishes and reward tracks. Anything that drew attention away from the only thing that should matter - winning the match.

Now we're in the era of "someone tell me why we're here again". Everyone running around to no purpose, day after day, week after week. It's like a particularly dull version of Valhalla.

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