Let's Talk About WvW Balance
Cal Cohen.2358
ArenaNet ArenaNet › ArenaNet
Hi Everyone,
I wanted to clarify something from today’s blog post while also kicking off a discussion on a topic that’s near and dear to most competitive players: balance.
It’s important to understand that as competitive handles competitive balance, we will continue to primarily use skill splits in order to minimize the impact on the rest of the game. It’s certainly true that not all issues can be addressed through splits, and we will continue to work with the skills team to make sure we are making the right changes for the entire game when splitting is not a viable option.
Mini Balance Roadmap
We have identified the overall power of the game has become an issue and we wish to address this in the competitive game modes.
The next balance update is going to be smaller than usual. We want to make a handful of very targeted changes to address the biggest pain points in the current meta, but we also want to bank some time for bigger plans moving forward. For a future balance update, we are looking at major adjustments across the board. The goal is to re-establish what the overall power level for competitive modes, and then bring everything down to meet that. In true gw2 fashion, everything is on the table.
With that said, we’re not going to nerf just for the sake of nerfing. Every change should make sense, and every change should be working toward a bigger goal. This patch is still super early in development, so I don’t want to go into too much detail, but it’s definitely something we want to talk about more moving forward. As mentioned in the blog post, we want to keep the community involved early and often when it comes to balance.
So, for the purpose of this discussion, consider these two future updates. First for the short-term: What outliers do you see in the current meta? Then think about the big picture: What issues do you see on a fundamental level that should be addressed? Think outside of the current meta and instead about what you want the meta to look like from a power-level perspective. Keep in mind that a majority of changes should be splits, but feel free to also call out issues that you feel cannot be addressed by splits.
This post is intentionally starting a broad discussion as a jumping off point into the new communication of the Systems team, but keep in mind that in the future our posts are generally going to be more targeted at specific issues as we won’t have as much time to handle giant discussions.
I wanted to keep this initial post fairly short, so please ask questions about anything that is unclear. Otherwise, let’s talk balance.
cmc
aka cmc
Game Designer on PvP/WvW
Comments
first post
Thank you for the communication!
Blackgate : Siege Warriors [SW]
YouTube
When will alliance come out?
Hi Cal and Welcome to the WvW forums, it is about time!
I think you do a good job of outlining the balance problems in the initial post. The problems are indeed that there is alot of volatility in the system and that alot of the contextual effects have gained the upper hand over the core stats. Conditions, boons, effects and traits make up a much larger portion of what impacts our balance than the core stats of characters and the stats on their gear. That also means that all these ever changing effects are also more impactful than basic derivative stats like hitpoint pools and armor ratings etc.
So where did it go wrong?
It started already towards the end of vanilla (2014) when the condition system was remade. That marked the start of replacing all the old open world balance systems with new systems more tailored towards instanced gameplay. Things that were unique was rebalanced like how confusion works. The addition of a direct damage component to that condition was something made for PvE that has kept causing balance issues for PvP ever since then. The volume was also changed so abilities that formerly added one type of condition now added multiples and classes that were restricted to certain conditions now had access to most of them - turning condition play more into loading up condition bombs and spreading cover conditions over a rainbow of effects that caused scaling and balance issues in the PvP modes.
Layers of cake on cake
This also marks the first time an additional layer was added to deal with the balance going awry: resistance. Resistance initially kept conditions in check during early HoT as cleanses couldn't keep up. However, it also caused a balance problem for the PvP modes on it's own since it created a very volatile- and difficult to manage balance with conditions, where damage and control became an all-or-nothing issue. This caused conditions to play differently and play in a way that we still see to this day, even if resistance has not been as prevalent in PoF as it was in HoT: namely, that conditions are loaded up and then suddenly do all their damage at once, instantly evaporating a character. Instead of being damage over time they add up to condition bombs in ways that are more difficult to manage than power damage (even if power damage too can have a very instant effect; you will at least see that effect come and you can evade it in different ways).
Later such effects include things like Winds of Destruction, Unflinching Charge (on Tome of Courage) or Shadow Meld that adds counters to counters, only to raise questions of if there should be counters to the counters of the counters and so forth. It is just unecessary complexity that makes it harder to keep track of balance. I believe they were added because you had lost control over the core balance and needed sweeping fixes to what had built up to become big problems due to the lack of attention and iterative work on these things that you now hopefully are looking to rectify.
What about power then?
Other than that, power damage (or all damage) is plagued by similar issues when it comes to boons. There are far more abilities today that do multiple things at once. There are plenty of classes and weapons where even the auto-attack has a power component, a condition component and a boon component. That is one of the sources to all the spam of these things, how they become so volatile and something that could easily be skill split. Several boons that used to be rare and dangerous in the past are piecemeal today. It wouldn't be too hard to just skillsplit all those extra effects away from the abilities in the the PvP modes and hopefully that will have an additional benefit of fewer calculations being made so server performance improves.
Traits in dire straits (and sultans of ping)
The final bit is the traits. There has been a massive inflation of trait power in order to cover up some longer standing balance issues. Plenty of classes today can amass stat benefits from traits that outweight their entire gear. There are 33-50% crit traits (equivalent of full stats choices on gear), some 600 ferocity from traits and powerful boons like fury or protection pulsing out of passive abilities. They should be rare, but have reasonable uptime so they can be ripped. There are few such mechanics left. If you look at older abilities and their mechanics the application is usually over longer intervals but also over longer cooldowns whereas more recent boons application mechanics have shorter intervals and higher reapplication, leading to a feeling of spam and what must become a strain on the servers to calculate when it is pinged back and forth between hundreds of players on maps or even on screen.
Purity of purpose
Another thing to look at are the layers that exist inherently in the systems. You have hard layers of effects (and counter effects) and soft layers of boons and conditions. On several of these factors there is an overlap that causes unecessary complexity when it comes to balancing: for example stability being a boon while the things it is meant to counter-balance are effects. You have a similar situation with cripple and chill relative superspeed where the effect just cancels out the conditions in order to give a more heavy handed counter to all the control condition spam. That's a band-aid to cover the balance issues of cleanses versus conditions with either damage effects or control effects. However, it avoids dealing with the underlying balance issues by adding sweeping to the complexity. There are potential gains in looking over what sort of effect should operate at what level or layer and try to streamline that a bit more to make your own jobs easier going forward; to get better oversight on direct balance and counter-balance rather than having unecessary crossovers.
Norms and exceptions
It is also important to look at what you consider the natural state of things to be. What balance should movement have relative control? What is to be considered normative and what makes playing the game fun? Keep in mind that the value we players attribute to certain things that later causes discussions about class balance often come from this form of core balance. Stability makes a good example here too. It is extremely unfun to play in an environment where control gains an upper hand over normative movement (and dodging) so stability has always been extremely important, at the same time it was made more volatile and spammy (that too with the late-vanilla to early HoT changes; and iterated on once since then) and the more rare and unoppressive it becomes the more valuable do the classes that can maintain it become. That opens up discussions like Firebrand vs. other support classes but in reality it is more a discussion of normative movement vs. oppression and that underlying balance issue. If getting to play your character even with Firebrands spamming books is not as common as it should be then discussing nerfing that class or buffing other classes becomes secondary and problematic.
How to solve population balance
Q&A
Get rid of massive boonshare
Everyone should NOT have 100% boon uptime (e.g. 25 stacks of might)
This might not follow the guide but it is my biggest pet peeve.
Fix that then work from there.
Don't Worry, My Dutch is OK
🐵🐵🐵🐵 Up Thief 🐵🐵🐵🐵
Ty for the communication. Communication is key.
Firebrand and Scourge? If you have more class who can give stability I think maybe the dependency toward Firebrand could decreased. Scourge? No need explanation here the boon corrupt is too strong.
Fix CoR before 2020.
What we have to say carries little weight. Whatever I have to say about 'x' will be rebutted by those who main 'x', often with an invitation to 'git gud', as well as a comparison to 'y' as evidence that 'x' is fine.
So how about ANET decides what the TTK (Time to Kill) should be in WvW, under various situations, and start from there? Once you folks agree on a picture of what that looks like, you'll know right off what needs fixing.
Otherwise you'll just be tossing out -25% to this or +15% to that and hope it works - which is what I've observed to be the case over the past 20 months I've spent in WvW, and which I'm sure many more seasoned players will confirm has been the case since at least PoF or even HoT.
Thanks for the communication.
Thank you for the focus. Agreed that tweaks are vital, and I will leave it to more knowledgeable posters to discern which would be valuable.
Any splits between PvE and WvW would be welcome to me, even if it means I play a different class.
Thank you.
Thank You for the {MEME}
One side argues there are too many boons. another argues that there are too many strips. what a giant clown fiesta of gamers we have.
Spectre [VII] - Wood League Champion. Making "fight guilds" stack on higher tiers since 2013.
Michelin rated WvW guild since 2015. The gold standard. Never transferred, never reformed, adapting and reloading with or without Anet.
Short Term: Scourge Boon corruption is and has been too high. Base Necro has some of the highest access to boon removal and Scourge just pushes that over the edge. Further, when combined with its area control (i dont mean CC), a single scourge can remove or corrupt a lot of boons on a lot of players.
Long term: Boon access. More class being able to contribute to key Boons like stability, instead of entire squads being dependant on a Firebrand would be better. Ie reducing Firebrand's stability access, and giving it to more classes.
Chronos have been unplayable since the removal of the Illusionary Persona. Is there any plans to recover this huge loss? It suffers not only in PvE, where it's clunky and generally unfun, but it suffers also hugely in WvW, where clone generation is nearly impossible.
I would bring much more discussion about how the removal of the trait hugely destroyed any chance for this spec to be enjoyable, but really: it's just about locked shatters.
Adjusting the CDs of the shatters could've been a good compromise, if deemed necessary ( imo it wasn't ) but the complete removal is like playing a costantly handicapped spec that suddenly lost 5 skills to get 4 very hard-to-trigger skills, and they're not even available one after another.
You can't create the clones roaming before getting smashed, and you can't create them in squads because of the huge AoE damage instantly killing them and the frenetic action.
Realistically, if there is a plausible reason why this has to be the chrono situation from now on, at least tell me how we should play it because with almost 4 years on playing this spec and 7 playing mesmer I just don't get it.
Right, but fixing one can negate the other.
This was the mess created by ANET in which boon share was too OP so they had to counter that by making corruption easily accessible.
Look at the biggest 'needs' in wvw. FB (must have), scourge to be carried by and counter opposing FB, bubbles? See where this is going?
You have to start somewhere.
Don't Worry, My Dutch is OK
This is more of a system wide change but hey why not state it. I would love for conditions to see a rework, i believe it would be overall more healthy for the game if certain skills were turned into dot abilities to preserve the dot playstyle and condies themselves took a backsit from dmg and instead mainly focused on debuffing and weakening.
Ofc some condies make sense to deal dmg but imo something closer to gw1 would be overall easier to balance, wouldnt scale to silly amounts of dmg/stacks and would overall feel nicer to the player than the current system.
This is a longterm suggestion btw, im not expecting something like that to happen soon but i think for the longevity of the game its necessary.
For WvW specifically, most professions should have a build that can be a zerger(if you want that playstyle to continue) or a roamer. while you might have outliers like thief or ranger who are mainly dueling classes and therefore wouldn't work well in a large scale battle the 1v1 potential of those jobs should be the focus of their wvw builds. Druid, on the other hand, doesn't fit in the zerg because it doesn't offer the support it needs to and can no longer roam well because it's 1v1 potential was reduced due to pvp concerns. I don't mind ranger or soulbeast not having a place in the zerg as long as we can be the roamers and scouts of wvw but what Druid brings should work in the zerg but it doesn't. The good support builds either bring more to the table or it's the lack of damage mitigation and cleanse that Druids have and the weird targetting of it's heals and none of the Glyphs have any purpose in wvw at all, and they are next to useless in all game modes.
There are both too many strips and too many boons. You nerf boon uptime without hitting strips and then strips become completely out of control and the kitten pirateship meta thats happening right now gets even worse. If you nerf strips but don't touch boon uptime then boons become completely out of control. Both sides are correct here, there isn't just one issue with the games combat right now there are multiple issues from individual classes to overall balance issues. If they address boon uptime in general so its not so easy to maintain every boon in the game but instead takes some skill and coordination to maintain them through the use of combo fields and multiple different classes and their mechanics, and address strips so its not just a giant mess of aoe that if you walk near you lose all your boons and people around you also lose boons because they happened to be standing to close to you and a necro hit 1 button and make it so if you want to effectively strip people you have to actually target and coordinate with other necro's or revs that would be pretty nice and bring some actual skill and brain usage back to the games combat.
First, thank you for the communication. It’s great to see at least some interaction with the community. That being said, I do get concern from a lot of the suggestions I see for balance from my fellow players and hope you take some of these with a grain of salt. There’s a reason some companies keep balance a closed topic and for good reason.
Second, sounds like we’re going to see some dps reduction. That’s fine and all, but please be sure to hand out these nerfs to ALL professions and not just a handful. Also, keep in mind the sustain/defense abilities. It’s already a bit ridiculous how much sustain is given with just a few supporters. This will only worsen if dps is nerfed.
That’s all I have for now.
This is very much what I was talking about for the long-term, and one of the things we want to gather feedback on through this discussion. It's less about the 25% or the 15% for any given skill and more about defining what the power level should be, then adjusting all skills and traits to fit into that paradigm.
aka cmc
Game Designer on PvP/WvW
WvW balance needs a limit on boons and conditions.
It shouldn’t be possible for player character to get 25+ stacks of bleeding or 10+ stacks of burning for example. Or conditions, which lasts longer than 20 sec.
It shouldn’t also be possible, to get or stack boons up to a duration beyond 1 min. It should only be possible for skills/traits to provide a boon or boons with 30 sec max. by 100 % boon duration.
Honestly, I think it starts with boon share first and how many boons/stacks of boons can be pumped out and then it moves to boon corruption. I can understand in the PVE zones the need for boon and boon corruptions to be used on mobs but in WvW, I think the problem is widespread. Going down to the basics on how many boons should be shared and how much corruption to give would be an excellent start. Basically, there's too much power creep and while that is fine in PVE because the base-line mobs are kinda over-tuned in some places, it's not fine when playing PvP or WvW.
A meta I would be interested in (even if it's a pain) would be one where every class had a place in group raids. Currently, some classes are over-represented and other classes just aren't welcome. While there is the option of inviting scouts/roamers into squads for participation, in my experience only some commanders actually do this. Generally, if they're not with the commander then they're not welcome. Some classes just aren't welcome in squads period because they have very little to offer. I would love to see that change. I think a truly balanced meta would give each class something to offer to the group as well as options to roam/scout.
I agree with some of the posters about the FB issue. I play a lot of Firebrand, and sometimes I'm staying in game way past when I want to because the need for stability in groups There need to be either other classes who offer it or perhaps we could introduce food that can give stability or something else (potions etc). A bandaid to the problem would be offering food, as in a new one created by Grandmaster chef's or something.
Also, one of my biggest complaints is the perma--stealth and that so few classes have the ability to break it. Having the traps is practically useless in certain maps (mostly the red map). Nothing is more annoying than a thief/mesmer running all over your base when you have a full squad and can't isolate them to kill them (admittedly this is more a red-map thing than any other map). Either make it so you can drop more than one trap or do something about the perma-stealth.
why do you want to nerf https://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Persisting_Flames ?
iam using it since years... its a good trait and not over powered.
stop nerfing balanced traits.
The level is considered balance, when I'm winning.
Spectre [VII] - Wood League Champion. Making "fight guilds" stack on higher tiers since 2013.
Michelin rated WvW guild since 2015. The gold standard. Never transferred, never reformed, adapting and reloading with or without Anet.
This is really the crux of a lot of things we want to address. Boons vs corrupts, damage vs healing, stability vs cc, among so many other things. These are all in the state of being extremely powerful as a way to counter the other side being extremely powerful, and are all things that we want to address moving forward. It's important to keep these balanced against each other, but we want the power level to come down.
aka cmc
Game Designer on PvP/WvW
Outliers? Simple, those annoying red circles scourges and firebrand!!! Something has to be done.
Here is something to be considered in any gamemode and who got neglected for too much time.
Engineer's turrets. They have to be fixed. They have to be useful, they must have a place where peoples actually want to use them. The supply crate is the worst Elite ever. Mortar is really meh, and well what does this sneak gyro add apart stealth? Not even bonus damages whereas it's an elite.
Here is a very good thread about that: https://en-forum.guildwars2.com/discussion/87029/thoughts-hopes-ideas-about-engineers-rework-on-pistols-turrets-and-kits
Kits also feels really clunky how they are: Only grenades/flamethrowers and bombs are mostly used, you will almost never see an elixir gun or the bad gadget kit.
Some suggested to put kits within F skills and replace them with glyphs. Whereas I think kits is kinda part of the profession it's also due to those nasty kits that us, engie still don't have weapons swap after 6 years. Whereas a swap between hammer-rifle as example would be more than nice. (Adapting to situation CC or Ranged).
I really want to make a little parenthesis about cast times. The hammer is slloowwwww that you can end up with a short period where you can't use any skills = dps loss.
But the worst is elementalist, please take a look on glyph cast time, it's even longgggeeeeerrrrrr you have the time to be killed 30x times by enemies. Try summoning an elemental when a blob is charging on you.
Ah and for the sake of Undyne, buff longbow dragonhaunter! B U F F THAT L O N G B OW. I'm serious. Reduced recharge trait or whatever!
To end my opinion, I ask to fix holographic shockwave graphic, the way it renders just look like a bug or an unfinished skills. I don't see the nerf to 300 range, 600 must be kept but without CC or Throwing enemies or even easier adding a limit to 3 affected foes max. I like how it got nerfed stupidly whereas in same time mesmer gravity well is okay.... especially why not keeping the skill how it was at pof release for PvE? How it is annoying? Only monsters!
I MISS THE TIME OF PRE-HOT when my engie used to have 3200 armor and 3200 power, strong in PvP, strong in WvW, strong in PvE. The players got nerfed but the foes can still inflict you insane amount of damages.
This isn't normal to see everyone using only berserk or condi sets! All the others are useless, what went wrong?
+++In creative mood. New Engie Elite spec' , Housing , New asuran expansion , Designing a new lounge , New GameMode
+++NEW: AEP Asuran Expansion Project available on WIKI.
+++New: GEM GW2 Exploration Map: Discover unusual places around tyria: Here (OSM map)
I feel that WvW is plagued by a disproportional amount of powercreep that came from PvE, mainly the stats, food and then all the stat buffs from objectives which further exacerbates builds and make stuff incredibly overpowering to the point armor literally don't matter and you can hit people for over 15k even if they have 3400 defense.
Fixing all of this seems almost impossible due to the fact is already rooted in the mode. We can't remove food, unbalanced runes or sigils or remove trailblazer from the game like how spvp have it. However, i think there are some things we can to help mitigate the incredibly amount of powercreep wvw has compared to traditional SPvP. The first thing is to remove ALL passive buffs that increase stats from every single objective. Instead of making players stronger, give them better rewards, more exp, or help towards winning the match up. Second, which would be a bit too hard to pull off, but i would do a blanket damage debuff across everything in the mode. Every class will deal 50% less damage, 50% less boon/condi duration and heal for 50% less, this should greatly help towards making fights a bit slower instead of ending in a blink of a second.
My opinion on what should be fixed or balanced first is the overpowered rewarding builds from individual/small scale level.
Examples are below with some clips showing some examples:
boonbeast rangers druids everlasting builds ( rotations that can be made to make a character unkilable or barely hit are no fun for anyone but the player using them ),
holo has the same unkilable problem altho not as bad as boonsbeast
mesmers/mirages ( why a class has so many invul/teleports and huge damage output from a safe position, they stealth and press a few buttons for lightining fast mirages clones to bomb the sh... out of a person and if they fail stealth and run away long enough to try again since the cds for the burst are short compared to many others defenses for such 20 to 30k damage instantly )
-warriors have a problem that is shared from other classes too but they do it better that is constant stun after stun after stun ( too much heavy CC that renders a class vulnerable for too long, sure we can stun break but the cds are low and can be repeated sooner than the stability stun breaks cds and this class on full berserker does easily over 20k damage in 3, some times all it takes is one stun and a burst for a huge 3 hit crits and less than 3s )
I refuse to play firebrand as i think the elite is just too broken so i do not comment but im sure people will.
Resuming, these points addressed would have improve the fights at a smaller scale while reaching our commander or simply caping the camps and sentrys made more fun as a thrilling fight can last longer and more coordination needed in a group that requires actually thinking focus and using more skills other than a 2 3 hit one shot combo.
On a bigger scale i think the boons are the main problem, constant boons being spammed and rushing to just mindlessly spam on top of another zerg does not give a sense of achievement as most of people just dont understand how impactfull they were after the other zerg died.
Also finally, please remove mounts from wvw, that did not help the game mode. Make a pol for it at least if players want to have it removed or not.
Would first like to say welcome, it's been a while since we have had any real communication on these matters by anyone with any kind of competitive mindset. With that said, be ready for lots and lots of negative comments... Maybe even from myself, but would like to point out that its not targeted at you or the new team, but years of frustration by many people who might come off as mad, but they are mad because they still care about the game and want to see progress for it.
As you might see a trend already, some people talking about boons, others about corruption etc etc, my stance is that both have become bloated and need to be brought back under control together, changing or "nerfing" only one side will for sure change the meta, but I think would end up making it worse without the extremes of both sides being done together. The power creep (both dmg and boon etc) has seemingly gone on unchecked for some time that when brought down to small scale can result in some broken builds and very low TTK in some cases without a pocket support. You also end up with some builds that can not, even with perfect rotations take down some of the sustain builds without being full glass. The delta from high DPS builds to sustain builds has been growing, there has always been a delta, and some cases in the early GW2 days we had some stand out issues as well, but not at the scale and extreme ends we have currently.
While this might be on the back burner, we have many troll builds that exist, and in many cases are not even as good as meta builds.. However the main issue with the builds are that they are not fun to fight. There are some of these builds that I have a 80-90% win rate against, yet are one of the builds I see and just dread going into the fight even though I know I have high chance of winning. One example of a horrible "fix" for the stealth monster they made with DE was the affect of marked (Detected!), however using a passive upgrade or the like to effect fights at random depending on location is just horrible, it also affects builds that were not a part of the stealth problem.
Agreed.
However....First question might be if the new balance team has anything to do with population/matchup changes, they may or may not have anything to do with it.
"When you power creep the game and make it so that spam gameplay is nearly as effective as deep knowledge and nuance, the quality of players will decrease." -Exedore
Please listen to this guy!!!! Its exactly what needs to be done
SnoopysRevenge
To be honest, it's a bit too late for me to even be able to grasp all the problems in the balance nowadays. So many things have gotten so out of hand since 2015-06-23 pre-hot patch.
At this point the only thing I can really say are:
Elrik Noj
[https://en-forum.guildwars2.com/discussion/96734/qol-disable-effects-from-other-players](Remove Visual)
Outliers
The biggest outlier in the history of outliers is easily scourge, specifically the trait sand savant. If there was anything in WvW that couldn't be adressed by a skill split, this would be it. The absolute power that the increased target cap gives not only makes scourge far above many damage options, but also actively discourages all melee just by existing.
Things like strength warrior, condi rev, power guardian, staff thief, reaper, and a multitude of other melee options are shutdown by the sheer cleaving power and pressure scourge provides, even with the recent changes to shades. If anything were to happen to normalize the power in WvW removing scourges 10 target capability would be the first step 100%
The other outlier would be firebrand, and how its a jack of all trades while also being a master of some. It has the best access to two of the most powerful zerg boons in the game, aegis and stability, while also doing everything else to a great degree (excluding stealth and superspeed). The spec simply does literally everything, and like scourge crowds out many support options unless they can bring something completely unique to the table like antitox scrapper did. The specialization needs to actually specialize, and decide whether its purpose is hardcore boon support/healing, or damage mitigation and ressurection potential.
Fundamental Balance Issues
Ever since Heart of Thorns the fine warriors of WvW have been engaged in an eternal war between boons and boon removal. The addition of concentration and several new powerful boons, aswell as the rise of the toilet bowl meta years ago, have caused arenanet to answer in turn with more and more boon removal options, culminating in a cold war of balance where you have nukes on both sides stagnating fights into whoever can get their bomb off before their enemies' bar fills back up to the brim with boons.
Boons and boon removal have gotten to an insane degree and both sides have to be brought down to a much lower level. Why practice smart and careful stab usage when you can press a button and have more stab than you know what to do with, degrading combat from a reactionary right move at the right time to a almost pve rotation like style of play. Pretty much every fight plays the same way now and the boon/corrupt war is to blame for a fair portion of it.
This is more of a personal gripe, but I really hate how ranged damage has outstripped melee damage as the years go on. You've always had your rat wells and meteor showers, but in the last couple of years melee has basically been put into the dirt in favor of ranged bombs. Scourge is a big reason for this problem yes, but the support is available if such a playstyle was wanted, but why would you when ranged is so much more effective? Revs hitting like trucks from 1200, eles powercreeped to where 9k meteors are the norm, scourge shades peppering the battlefield at every turn hitting 10 targets each, theres really no way for a melee spec to compete in the PoF meta.
Overall
guild wars 2 remains the best pvp mmo I've ever played, and its a shame how its fallen by the wayside. Pretty much every fight for the past 8 months has been the exact same thing, with the exact same engages and disengages, bombs and sustains, its jist gotten really stale I guess. Perfect balance is impossible, but if we could get to a state where classes like scourge dont crowd out a multitude of other options, and the meta specs are meta but not required to function at a decent level, the game would be enjoyable for another 7 years to come.
Oh and buff shattered aegis
Make combo fields great again!
No offense, I get you're new and really looking to make a difference. However, we've already beta tested literally everything that's been dropped on us for ANet already, leaving virtual volumes of feedback here on the forums with little to no response or even evidence that we're making a connection through the changes that come and now you'd like us to tell you what's wrong with the competitive modes?
Can start by removing aegis when mounting up , make the lances for dismounting unblockable, remove instant finish war claw skill (superiour maul) , add a cooldown on remounting if you were killed and respawned ( to prevent people from coming out from spawn after just dying and contesting capture points infinitely) . Or just remove Warclaw in general. Thats how you can balance WvW right now.
Outliers: I'll let others comment
Big Picture: Balanced small scale (5-10 player group) mechanics become broken in large groups. Things like:
Oh and buff shattered aegis
lol, i knew that was coming
Don't Worry, My Dutch is OK
i am roamer so my opinion is small scale focused, if this has any value in this discussion.
e.g. thief builds endlessly evading (with vault, normal dodges+some traits skills regenrating great amount of endurance). there is no option to deny 80% dodge uptime. so you just can wait until his dodge rotation has end. that forces you to be passive, since you cannot actively working against this dodgerotation, these class is hitting you with 8k+ on a dodge skill (where you cant counter pressure him). its boring for me as player to wait/kite until his dodge skills are all on cooldown and then he just disengaged instantly with high mobility.
same goes for soulbeasts which are chaining gs3, gs 4,smoke assault, LB3, normal dodges in an endless chain of dodge/blocks/invis.
these two are just examples (there are more classes with that potential)
a. sigil of energy and endurance regenerating food create way too much additional evades.
b. while classes are already overloaded with complete dmg negation mechanics/ skills that are not just negating dmg but also doing great dmg itself.
e.g. warriors can have 700 heal ticks per second with healing signet + adrenal health (7k heal in 10 seconds without any invest in healing power.
also just 1 example of several classes that have to easy access to great heal without any invest for it.
make more skills/traits more dependend to healing power.
3. there are too much dmg modifiers like farsighted(trait)/sick em(skill) on ranger or warriors peak performance /and berserkers power (again, just some examples for tonnes of those modifiers). they alsocan increase dmg for MORE than 20%. thats huge.
overall i would be fine if classes play as glass cannon (That means great dmg, but also great risk to die fast). but in current meta you have a lot of FAKE glass cannons that go completely offense with their build and defensive wise they are saved by too much uptime of dodges/invuls/blocks/invis and too big overall base heal by skills/traits. only heal skills should have great heal without much invest in healing power.
thanks for discussion with anet.
i wish you good evening. :-D
In current zerg meta projectile hate is one of the biggest outlier. Firebrand as example can keep projectile reflects up almost permanently with no effort.
Because of vast projectile hate, you are forced to use non projectile ranged damage, or be melee (meleeing is also near impossible because of scourge corrupts and the spellbreaker elite, making ranged pressure most popular type of damage).
The biggest outlier I see is that Scourge has all the AoE and hits 10 targets for some reason. There's just no other class that comes close to that amount of cleave, and it takes very minimal effort or skill. Press 1 button and hit 10 targets around you.
As others have mentioned, boons are a huge problem as well. Even if shade damage was nerfed (which it has been many times), any zerg will still need scourges to corrupt the enemy boonball. It's a balancing act and I'm out of my depth, admittedly. But those are the main factors at play I see in zerg vs zerg.
Also I have no idea if you'd be able to change mount skills, but please remove mount stomping from the game. It just incentivizes staying out of combat mounted for the cheese finish.
Personally the overall issue is time to kill is to low regardless of Meta. Most have touched on a key point, boon application is too much and this has started to be addressed last balance patch. Skills should be more focused in my opinion, 2 boons or two condis max per skill.
Condi duration food should not exist in wvw, it is extremely excessive, allowing for bunker builds to dish out way too much damage.
Torment and confusion should have their base damage removed. Torment only dealing damage and I moving targets and confusion only dealing damage to skill using players. They are the PvP conditions and should be returned to such.
Reducing max stack amounts on various condis will help promote a blended meta
Thank you for the post! Here is my feedback!
https://en-forum.guildwars2.com/discussion/90360/stream-feedback-multiple-topics
The below link is in the above thread, but I wanted to highlight it as a starter, because it’s related to the topics of skill splits and power creep mentioned in your post...
https://en-forum.guildwars2.com/discussion/88428/mark-jacobs-has-the-right-ideas-about-combat-and-anet-has-the-tools-to-do-something-about-it#latest
https://en-forum.guildwars2.com/discussion/62658/alliance-design-that-stops-the-qq
https://en-forum.guildwars2.com/discussion/62555/putting-fun-back-into-designs-and-balancing
https://en-forum.guildwars2.com/discussion/9804/idea-wvw-only-movement-skills
Go back to pre-HoT....look at all the modifiers and start chipping away.
Stick with it doing little changes over time and treat it like a marathon consistently fine-tuning.
BUT, don't disappear after a single thread. Keep us updated.
Look at all the work that needs to be done not as an insurmountable task bur rather as job security
Don't Worry, My Dutch is OK
I have to disagree.
Working towards spreading out stability would be a great help. Sometimes you just don't have enough FBs to go around, and need to pester everyone into swapping, or just figure you're going into battle with not enough stab/sustain. Not saying give it to everyone, but another 2 classes (ele? rev? ranger???? (the chaotic evil option)) would even things out in fights and make it less so that if you're not running the ONE PERFECT COMP you're at least guaranteed a fighting chance vs another zerg.
THe best starting point I could possibly give would be to look at the pre-HoT meta for WvW and start tuning things from there. Obviously the new especs will need tuning in order to fit but in that meta neither boons nor boon stripping where out of control, combo fields had to be co-ordinated and used in order to gain boons for engagements and the power level was such that one job didn't dominate the scene. The one addition to that I would make would be that even in the pre-HoT days many jobs had no space a all in wvw but with the addition of especs and with them being tuned properly at the right power level professions that went unused pre-HoT could be viable.
In PvE you have roles, roles need to be defined in WvW and then decide what profession and what espec will fill that role for the zerg, mid scale(GvG or 20v20), small scale and roaming.
edit: a lot of these changes should be looked at by your PvE team too honestly, raid content has been made trivial no matter the mechanics you create with the ease of access to boons, ccs, dodges and invulns in the current meta.
my pet peeves:
thieves. A class that can engage and disengage at their own terms, should not be able to do that much damage. Also thief portals? Dumbest idea ever.
mirages. same basically
spellbreaker. block block block evade evade block evade block block nuff said.
necros in general but scourges in particular. how this class can still have among the highest base hp AND dish out insane barrier without their damage/stripping/corrupting abilities impaired I never understood
soulbeasts. before you even can pop any block or evade you are down. Thanks to rapid fire's damage being way too high. Also no los and 1500 range? Really? That is balanced? Are we standing in AC fire? Oh, no, it is a single ranger . . .
Revs. hey, lets make a class that can rival weavers in damage output, all other classes in boon output AND be very mobile AT THE SAME TIME. Balanced?
Weavers. Piledriver? I am sorry, you are rooted now. Meteor shower? I am sorry, you can't move. But hey, why are you playing it? Play rev, it is so much better. And does not suffer from the most stupid and klunkiest mechanic in the game. Also all ele elites suck (except the tempest one's. That one is just very situational).
Holo. The whole class is a bad joke.
Burn-guard. Have fun running into it. so much fun. Oh yes.
Chronos. Poor guys still did not get the message to spec mirage.
Tempests. We just crippled you in the last balance run. Deal with it.
firebrand reflects. because we hate ranged classes. Go play scourge.
Game was certainly more fun before PoF dropped. Also less laggy.
I think it's better if some of the devs would play WvW intensively for a week and do changes themselves. That is, anonymously, without the Anet guild tag. You'll meet the new gen of thieve and mirage roamers, the infinite kite builds, the +40% endurance regen food spam, the insane damage, etc. So many things were added in this game without thinking about the PvP. It's not just the numbers, it's the design of the classes and skills itself that is the problem. But still, WvW players adapt by abusing whatever is available.
Capturing empty towers and keeps isn't interesting and neither is waiting for the enemies to fight them with consent. The most fun and tactical fights are inside objectives where the terrain and walls allow more tactics and also allow solo players to participate. These fights are too rare because 1. WvW isn't active enough for it 2. Objectives are worthless since tiers mean nothing so no reason to siege up a t3 keep (not to mention the fact that this is too hard to siege anything). In the end, I would rather see a simplification of what WvW should be, not another balance patch. Think Fort Aspenwood
Why though? If a player gets hit by enough skills to apply 25+ stacks of bleed or burn, they should absolutely take the damage. If they got hit by that many power skills, they would just have instantly died. Players just don't like getting killed by DoT's and won't accept (or don't realize) that they got hit by the skills in the first place.
This is rarely mentioned, but it should be looked at in my opinion. Currently there is no space for projectile based damage dealers (or even supports, if you want to toss elixirs). Giving unblockable to ranged classes would just start an another arms race, similar to stab <-> cc, boon <-> corrupt, so there should be a cap for destroyed/reflected projectiles.
Im not a wvw player anymore, ever since PoF release I havent really touched it anymore because of the boon- and corruptspam, the conditiondmg issues etc. So this thread gives me hope I wont have to switch games for my wvw addiction to be satisfied
Imo the rate of boon application, boon corruption and available strong utility skills is really problematic. Things like reflect, stability, aegis, resistance, protection, quickness and all forms of cc are incredibly strong in WvW.
Im no expert, but looking back to before PoF release (when I was very actively pvp'ing and wvw'ing), most strong skills came with a long cooldown - or some other form of downside. And I think thats a system GW2 should go back to. So that you have to time that skill and then commit to it. The reflect bubble on firebrand tome3 for example could be a channel skill, or have a 20second cooldown. Things like that.