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Let's Talk About WvW Balance


Cal Cohen.2358

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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 <3

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.

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@Yasi.9065 said: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 <3

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.

Honestly the reflect bubble is balanced as is. Yes it is low cooldown but you are using precious tome 3 charges, and that's the most important tome with a really long cooldown. If someone wastes all their charges on a reflect, that's on them.

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First, thank you for posting in the wvw forums soon after the blog, we've had some problems even being able to discuss class changes related to wvw in this section, I think most of us feel like our voices are never heard, so thank you for opening an official thread to get wvw specific feedback.

Having said that... I honestly don't know if I should bother wasting my time writing up an essay on this.Maybe I'll do it later dunno..

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So to address the broad spectrum of your inquiry in one big post.

Background: Two year commander of a 15-30 man guild group on NA. Day one player. Play every class proficiently (though not necessarily expertly) in a zerg setting. My approach will be directed at group fighting as defined as 10+v10+ in all situations (open field, assaulting keeps, GvGs), but will attempt to accommodate roaming. If the balance team wants I will DM them unsanitized clips of my play to provide context to my statements.

The following will be divided up into a short term look at classes then a longer term play style analysis. I will try my best to define problems, but leave solutions up to the balance team to make

Short Term: The biggest pain points are the overbearing control scourges have over both melee and ranged. Basically how it's been since the release of PoF. Everything below will be looking through that lense.

Warrior: As it stands warrior has a lot of options available and it is in one of the better places its been since the advent of HoT. I do not think any short term small changes will add much beyond maybe a look at some of the recent tactics line change numbers which can come off really strong in the right circumstances.Guardian: Guardians have a very strong grasp of boons, but it is a necessity with how strong scourges are at the moment. For the short I think the only things worth looking at are the healing outputs available in the Honor line (especially the Force of Will trait that totally shuts down the other two GMs). The fact guardians can be both GW1 prot monks and heal monks is excessive and they should lean towards one (I conceptualize them as prot monks)Revenant: CoR needs fluidity added back to it via bug fixes and whatever else. Their damage is in a somewhat appropriate spot, at least in the short term. Making Legendary Renegade Stance useful in zergs would go a long way to diversifying them, but I don't think there's a short term fix there.

Thief: They have some niche uses in zergs. I do not imagine there will be much benefit to looking at them for zerg play in short term. There is no doubt a lot to say about them from roamers however.Ranger: There is likewise nothing short term here. The unique strengths of druid don't work in WvW and so Scrappers and Tempests are the clear choice. They likely need some attention from the roaming perspective though.Engineer: These are in a rather good spot. There biggest issues lie in the inconsistency of the function gyro and the fact bulwark gyro is bugged. Their ally stab applicators are also somewhat inconsistent due to either radius or stacks given.

Mesmer: Chronos likely have a lot to say here. In the short term though I think there are bigger fish to fry from a group fight perspective. There is no doubt some roaming feedback here.Necro: Scourges define group fights. There are half a dozen ways to skin this cat, but I will put it like this. I see scourges as being a support via offensive debilitation. As it stands they are a catch all barrier/cleanse support, ranged nuke, melee grinder, and soft CC debilitation. For the short term I would try to eliminate one of those options From Scourge.Elementalist: These are with warriors in that they have a lot of options available at the moment in group play. Short term I think the best thing to look at would be the earth line and using some short term number tweaks to help cement the tempests ability to be a group support in a variety of ways.

Long Term: We are somewhat close to a balanced melee meta. My largest issue with the meta is that it in general feels like I am leading a group either into a western stand off against another group, or I feel like a lion trying to keep the giant cloud of hyenas off my tail. I would prefer more options to fighting another similar sized group, more UTILITY(not damage) tools to deal with larger groups, and would prefer the melee component of my group being stronger so we can stone wall giant enemy clouds of players to some degree. I could tirade some but Turkeys got the point of it just becoming a pointless circular argument so I'm going to follow a 40/40/20 rule that was what ruled during the early days of WvW. 40% Melee, 40% Ranged, 20% Focus/Pick. As it stands right now.Melee: Soft buffRanged: Hard nerfPick: Soft nerf

To buff melee you need to reduce the ability of ranged damage to perform equally well in melee, and melee potentially needs more PRACTICAL tools to close gaps aside from bum rushing with superspeed + stealth.To nerf ranged there should be a hammer taken to anything with high range that can essentially win a fight simply by standing in their own damage. Elementalist for example gets to deal tons of damage with staff because if the enemy pushes onto the elementalist in all its damaging AoEs and it comes down to who dies first, it will be the elementalist every time. Against a group of scourges? They win every time, and if you don't push they win. Get rid of 'win or win' scenarios for ranged classes. This is almost entirely the necros game, but it IS augmented by firebrands and revenants.To nerf pick/focus I would leave this up to roamers feedback to be quite honest. This will likely happen by proxy through nerfing the strength of overbearing ranged classes and problem roaming builds.

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At this point it is too much of everything. Too many boons, too many conditions, too much cc, too much high hitting skills, too much corruption.

But hey this is everything and yes this is correct it is everything. But here is the thing. The reason why people got so hooked to WvW when the game came out was becaus you did not have everything and there was limitations. We had to work with what we got but what we got gave us fights that lasted. Fights that was real fights engaging, fun and tactics was involved, real tactics. There was no 300 stacks of all condis on everybody, 10 cc every sec, 25 k one shot skills, condi pooping, we were focusing on fights and boons and condis, coruptions and support it all was there and it was fun.

If we were told then that in 7 years we will cleanse several hundreds of conditions in a fight that last less then half a min we would not belive this. We would never thing that you as Devs would poor this out on us. But it happened. And it is not fun. We don't have to get overflowed with this, we just want to be able to fight and enjoy the fights as they are. But instead patch after patch we just get more cc, more condi, more boons, more corrupts and to patch this over we get more counters to this and it is a ever on going hamster wheel.

So stop give us more. Work with what we have and make it less but not as you said for the sake of it but take it down to a level were we get back to the fun again.

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  • ArenaNet Staff

@"TinkTinkPOOF.9201" said: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.

I understand the frustration that comes from being super passionate about something and I don't hold it against anyone. As long as we keep it clean (no personal attacks, general forum rules apply, etc) good feedback can always be gathered.

Bonus: Here's a video that highlights my thoughts on competitive communities (and really what makes them great)

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There are two major problems with WvW, one on the strategic level and the other on the tactical level.

First, on the strategic level, the major problem with WvW is that there is a single dominant strategy, the map blob with light scouting. In other MMOs they have mechanics to force multiple points of conflict simultaneously. This does more than just force blobs to split up - simultaneous points of contention create potential for differentiation in fight vs rotation, but also gives a high level avenue for, say, engage vs siege as elements complement each other. There's a lot to unpack as to the causes of this and why it doesn't work well in GW2, but suffice to say that there being one clearly dominant strategy for almost the entire history of the game has dramatically restricted the meta.

On the tactical level, the meta has never developed enough elements to form a quasi-stable and diverse meta. We have had engage, melee-train focused metas, and ranged, pirate ship focused metas, but never a third (let alone fourth or fifth) element necessary for there to be trade-offs in compositions and variations in tactics. It has always been either melee dominates ranged and the bigger and more organized group just runs over the other one (cue complaints about boon share dominating the meta and how mandatory guardians are), or ranged dominating melee and groups have a staring contest and poke each other out, even worse when there are objectives and choke points involved (cue complaints about scourges and the like).

If there is no strategic diversity, and minimal tactical diversity, you are always going to have a stale meta of basically identical team compositions facing off against each other. It doesn't matter if you nuke Guardians and Scourges from orbit, the structure of the game at the moment has a meta with a single, pure state meta and it will inevitably find its way back to that. You need a mixed state, ideally multiple equilibria structure if you want to even have a chance of balance.

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Powerful skills on too low of a spammy cooldown.

Defense field (bulwark gyro toolbelt) being a 25s cooldown is a joke for example. Skills like this that are basically immunity to ranged damage for xxx players should be like 60s - and this goes for all classes. Guardians shield of absorbtion is the same and is 24s cooldown - way too short of a cooldown for such a fight-changing skill.

To be completely honest, bubble skills like this shouldn't even allow movement in a competitive game. They should act like the power lock skill in halo where your character kneels and is stuck in place for the duration. Non-movement skills are not a bad thing. The only ones who complain about stuck-in-place-skills like hundred blades are bad players who spam a lot.

More powerful abilities should feel powerful and have similar effects to not being able to move for projectile bubbles.

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for me, the priority is a nerf winds of disenchantement because of this skill it's like impossible to fight in outnumbered because u can't kite full warrior bubbles and u can't all cancel and this skill is really too strong, blob have just to full rush with full bubble and it's easy and full rollface

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@Cal Cohen.2358 said:

@Turkeyspit.3965 said: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. :+1:

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.

Pre hot power lvl imo was very enjoyable in competitive gamemodes.

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Hi Cal, thank you for opening discussion with players!

In the current meta the things that stand out to me as "outliers" would be the spaminess of condi Mirage, the stealth uptime of certain Thief builds, and the self-healing of Holosmith's Heat Therapy. I don't want to go into too much detail, but my main grievance with those things is lack of counterplay. Mirage can't be stopped from re-summoning clones while they apply conditions on auto-attacks and ambush attacks. Countering stealth-based thieves is only possible with preparing reveal or marked skills beforehand. Nothing can stop Heat Therapy from activating other than the Holosmith deciding not to use Photon Forge.

On a fundamental level though, I think the biggest issue with balance has always been power creep. This kind of relates to the stuff I mentioned before. For example, on Mesmer we didn't have things like scepter and staff clones applying torment on auto-attack for several years, and on Thief there was no stealth from healing trait until just a few months ago. I think if we take a look at all the little extra perks added over the years we can start to bring things under control.

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You can already start trimming some of the power creep easily - the structure auras (Presence of the Keep and Guild Objective Aura). Nerf them or replace them with something that still makes it worth it for the guilds who upgraded them to claim objectives and slot the improvement. The bonus stats are too much.

You know what, the Guild Hall WvW upgrades probably needs some looking into, like the Armored Dolyaks and Auto Turret upgrades.

@Cal Cohen.2358 said:

@"Turkeyspit.3965" said: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. :+1:

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.

Just play WvW seriously. Like "it's-part-of-my-job" serious. Play it for a whole match-up, within your preferred timezone. Play with zergs as a meta class and follow the different types of tags, especially those that require voice comms and fight. Hopefully there are still some of those left. Roam around with a party or go solo. You will get a good idea of what the power level should be. You should experience first-hand what WvW players go through.

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I'd like to see the dominance and safety of zergs get dialed back. Why would anyone run solo or in a small group when they could join a zerg and mostly turn their brain off? It's not fun getting run over by the enemy zerg and not really fun to join your team's zerg for the k-train. Running around in smaller groups shouldn't be a solely risky venture without some type of reward to compensate that risk. I cannot remember the last time I saw a group smaller than 10 or even 15. I'm not sure if it's better to make running in a zerg riskier or running in a small group more rewarding, but I simply want to see more than the same giant blobs every time I log in.

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  • ArenaNet Staff

@Sazukikrah.5036 said: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.

I do want to have a bigger discussion about the current state of the warclaw, but that's a separate topic. For now I'm trying to catch up with this thread, and we will definitely be keeping an eye on other threads moving forward.

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A fundamental that should be looked at is Risk vs reward. Some classes/builds have little risk vs higher rewards (ie Perma stealth builds, some condi builds). Condi damage in general isn't an issue, its the condi sustain/synergy some classes have with the application of such. Boon spamming can also be problematic in the overall balance of things.

One issue with correctign things (which im sure you are aware of) is that fixing one thing, can open issues somewhere else (As a trained computer programmer, I understand this on multiple levels lol).

As mentioned elsewhere, All changes should come with a defined purpose outside of "we changed it for purity of purpose" which isn't really defined...more of a "we did it just because" kind of reasoning.

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Hi Cal,How will You communicate about our feedback?You (as Anet) stated that you like our ideas, but frankly I dont see them implemented ever. You ask us for feedback, however nothig gets implemented, nor discussed with us. Like in discussion manner, not one way 'thank for feedback - nope'.As of now I'll treat this post like another PR talk for several months. I give you a chance, but I think I shouldn't.

Fellow players, please wake me up in 2020, when Anet post something like below:Having seperate teams for balancing the different modes took too much resources, this is why we are happy to announce a merging of the teams. This will speed up the time between balance patches and let us improve your game play.

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@DKRathalos.9625 said:

@Cal Cohen.2358 said: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.

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.

Also any class that can instant kill you from invis, or have the ability to nearly down you, go invis before you can retaliate, and they come back from invis to kill you, this is a fundamentally broken mechanic in the game and needs overhauled, if you are going to allow near perma invis classes, then make it then do 50% less damage from invis, and give every other class a way to remove said invis, to even it up.

WvW needs completely broken down and rebuilt from the ground up when it comes to skill balance, the current format cannot be balanced, without throwing some classes out of the game mode completely, and making others completely dominate. Just look at the recent change to Necro, they ruined it in open world PvE and made it even more deadly in WvW, but that concept has went over them completely, it needed to be toned down slightly in WvW and slightly buffed in open world ( think raids / high end fractals ) but that wasnt done, even after the patch and people complained its been ignored, what about Warriors doing 40k damage with a rifle!

But ill add i dont honestly have high hopes for this, alliances where announced nearly 2 years ago, we heard in August that they would talk to us in a couple of months about them, and its been radio silence since then, skill balance now cannot save WvW alone, it seems we only ever want to have discussions about these problems but never get around to fixing them or when they think they fixed it, they miss the mark by a mile.

I hope for the sake of this game mode, this new dev gets to communicate with us, and can actually get WvW back on track, but we've seen this before, we get a few comments followed by 6-8 months of silence.

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You cannot take a micro approach to this - it is very much a macro problem.

Players are either unkillable or prone to instant deletion - there is very little middle ground, be it in small groups or large.

And why is that? Power levels? Boon stacking? Corrupts? Crit Chance? Condi spam? Invulns? Evades? Attacking while Invuln/Evades? Ascended gear? Food buffs? Objective buffs/bloodlust? Stealth? Reflects? Buggy abilities/traits? Having a Warclaw? Not having a Warclaw? Server coverage? Server lag?

The answer: yes.

The problem is, I don't know what should be considered "normal", so asking me to point out what needs to be fixed is foolhardy. ANET develops the game, it should be ANET to broadcast what their vision is for WvW and how it should work. You show/tell me that, and then I can point to flaws or issues that need addressing.

Until then, people are just going to tell you what they "want" or "would like", which doesn't suggest, in any way, that it would be good for balance, or the game in general.

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I hope a lot of the talk about bringing the power of everything down, don't affect pve so much. Many classes are in a very good spot right now and nerfing them there achieve basically nothing. Stuff like how old chronos and druids used to be the only good support was bad for the metagame of PvE, but we should absolutely not hand out random nerfs that make no sense to some classes like scourges had recently and then how firebrand tomes increased cooldown in pve for some reason, even though they were only bad in WvW zerging. Scrapper needed a huge nerf in pvp but it absolutely needs to be overbuffed in pve to even be close to supporting like how firebrands, tempests and druids do. That goes for pretty much every single core class and a bunch of other weapons like staff for necro or mace/hammer for warrior.

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reduce conditions ( uptime and spamable )

reduce AUTO might gain ( we need to separate might gain from for example fire fields and auto generated ) Auto generated are bad / combo fields ARE great.

reduce stabi ( especially short cooldown stabi / quickness in general / auto protection / evade spam.

reduce stealth uptime

reduce condi dead eye poison

reduce outgoing damage AND conditions damage

reduce immunity ( for example warrior can be 10 seconds immun and then it can block ... ) -_- (no warrior bashing i like warriors :D)

rework life on classes. ( the system is from 2011 ? early 2012 ? ) give all classes the medium life and the medium armor set. and then balance new ...

holo still have heat therapy.. ( just REMOVE this skill ) its a bad skill

reduce all stability traits and skills to 45 seconds recharge time or more.

reduce the cooldown of all quickness skills

reduce ALL barrier uptime. ( barrier is a BAD skill and should never be brought to the game ) auto barrier is the worst.

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