Sheff.4851

Or worse, Support Alac Mechanist, once it gets nerfed on Renegade, Chronomancer, Bladesworn, and Willbender, and Mechanist is the only remaining option.

Yeah, many (but not all) squads that run a comp have been using Cele Firebrand // Cele Renegade // Cele Scourge and then whatever healer they want (usually Scrapper) as the backbone of each party in the squad, with a single high spike DPS profession per party (Mirage, Soulbeast, Berserker, Holosmith usually) to generate downs. Using both a Renegade and Scourge per party is one of the best ways to combat the insane boon uptime in the current meta, because they're support professions that also remove boons, and some groups even run a mix of DPS Scourge or a DPS Spellbreaker on top of that, for three boon removal professions per party. Plus, Alacrity is extremely good. You'll run it anywhere that you can find it. If they nerf Renegade Alac too much, you'll see groups go back to Chronomancer as a support profession.

Hello everyone. I've been working through a series of guide videos for the current four-support zerging meta of Firebrand, Renegade, Scourge, and your healer of choice. For this configuration, Renegade brings high Alacrity uptime, even after the Janthir nerf, allowing everybody else in your party to do whatever it is they do, just faster. Plus, you generate almost permanent Stability, can stack Resistance for 30 seconds while out of combat...Renegade is the glue that holds these squads together, and it's surprisingly easy to play. Check out this guide video for the details and specifics! https://youtu.be/xGxdma1kcqE

No. Just noting an alternative perspective. People may not want to do something for any variety of reasons, I'm just noting what reasons I'm familiar with. There's no single right answer to why do so few people do training and public tagging these days.

At the release of the game, there were no PvE mega servers. If you were on Blackgate, you saw other Blackgate players not only in World vs. World, but also in Lion's Arch, and in PvE maps. This meant that, if you team was under attack in World vs. World, you could go to PvE maps calling for assistance in World vs. World, and everybody who saw that message was on your team by default. As a result, your server's community extended into PvE maps, rather than only being WvW maps. This structure of servers ended with the release of Megaservers on April 15th, 2014, when World vs. World servers were decoupled from PvE servers. Source: https://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Introducing_the_Megaserver_System It's not an assumption, it's a point that I have heard from former public tags that have either quit the game entirely, or decided to run closed. People like Bannok, Paralda, Visual Sun, Star Player, Tyrion Delos Bravos, and others. I'm just relaying what they have told me. If you disagree with it, that's fine, but it's something that about a dozen former public tags have mentioned as being a factor in why they quit or started running guild-only.

Including support skills that give boons like Stand Your Ground, Orders From Above, and Mantra of Concentration? Also including stunbreaks like Mantra of Liberation? Also including stomps/rezzes like Transfuse, Battle Standard, and Tempest signets? That could be interesting. I'd be fine with everybody in my squad getting hit by one Arc Divider if Battle Standard could stomp 20 people at a time. It would reduce group fights to whoever dodges better, and pretty much no other skill input besides reaction time.

The forums are free for all to participate in, that's true. But all players do not participate in them. Look at some of the recent polls -- they have 50, 60, 70 votes. That's not a representative sample of the playerbase, it's just a very small portion of vocal players. A single boonball group that wanted to brigade a poll could wipe all of those votes out, and that wouldn't make it any more or less representative. Meanwhile, a number of WvW-focused Discords are not based on gameplay selection criteria at all. They have preferences -- GuildJen's WvW section of Discord skews towards roamers and solo players, the NA and EU Alliances Discords skew towards organized play, the GW2 Subreddit Discord is a total melting pot, but most conversation involves roaming, dueling, and small-scale play. But that's the neat part about communities. You can expose yourself to multiple different perspectives, to mitigate the groupthink and echo chamber that any one Discord server may have. If you choose to expose yourself to different ideas and ways of playing the gamemode, anyway.

Or, for some content creators to provide resources for people to learn how to command themselves, and start tagging up.

Tags used to share quite a bit -- they'd hold public trainings, hold public raids, and work on training pugs to be an effective fighting force. It was a valuable way for new players to get involved in the game mode, learn a bit, and get tutorialized into the way that organized groups work. This worked especially well before megaservers, because the people on your server were the people on your server, and they never rotated around. Most people who were public tags, doing public trainings, point to the release of the world linking system as the beginning of the death of public tagging, because now people on your server weren't necessarily people on your server. They could be on the link, and transfers were more heavily incentivized for groups looking for good fights and good content. The time that you spent training players didn't necessarily mean they would play in your squad. They might go off and play in your enemy's squad. And so a lot of the incentive for doing public trainings and tagging was lost, and groups spent more time running private (note: this was long before groups had the option of private tagging through the UI, and private tags will happen whether there's an option for it or not). As for your last question, why should we allow for invis tags during prime, it's relatively easy. Deciding to be a commander isn't community service. Some people want to play with just their community, and other people want to limit the size of their group to be more effective at small scales. Some people just don't want to have to sort strangers who aren't going to stay on tag anyway. Commanders can choose to help their team, if they want, but commanding isn't an obligation to put in community service.

This is a major factor for why public commanders stopped doing public commanding when the relink system was introduced back in 2016 or whenever -- random pugs who join your squad may be from the link, and be your enemy two months from now. It's been a problem long before Restructuring.

The easiest fix is to make the ring being up contest an objective, instead of just siege damage + lord in combat. I'm reasonably sure that an objective uncontesting when the lord dies is a bug, but there's just higher priority bugs to work out right now, like the fact that EU exploded on reset, and the scoring changes failed to deploy correctly two weeks ago.

The problem with giving players something selectable, in addition to their guild, is that it's an additional vector for letting teams stack a server beyond the 500 people in their Alliance. For example, say two 500-man guilds want to work together and get placed on the same team, but because the guild cap is 500, they can't. These two Alliances instruct all of their players to select an infrequently-spoken language (let's say French) as their language for EU, even though their guilds don't speak French, so that the algorithm tries to put them on the same team to respect their language. This has two negative outcomes. One, a bunch of people who don't actually speak French wind up on a Spanish speaking team, making the play experience worse for native French speakers. And two, these two groups have managed to put themselves on the same team, when the Restructuring system is explicitly trying to prevent that. It's not to say that Restructuring ignoring the language barrier is good. It's definitely a drawback. But letting players self-select their language preference is worse. Something like locking language selection for the game to your account, and then having Restructuring use that selection, may be something that gets implemented eventually though.

Thief has some busted boon removal traits, it's true, and I think that if Renegade wasn't as good as it is at providing Alacrity, you may see people try and run support Specter because of it. The problem is that Renegade has Brutality (https://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Brutality) and in addition to generating its own Quickness from weapon swaps, it's usually sitting next to a Firebrand in party that's also generating Quickness. It has a few very, very niche uses, like applying venoms in GvGs, and it's not uncommon for a Staff Daredevil to be top of damage meters within those specific types of fights. Like Jack said -- when you know it's safe to go off-tag and ruin somebody's day, it's powerful. But for open field, everything that Thief does is usually done better by another profession, and with less risk.

It would be really interesting if objectives only gave warscore if there was an active defense event in that five minute period. Maybe have them give double points if there's an active defense event, just so that defending groups don't feel completely meaningless if there's no current attacking group pumping the score up. But that's a cool idea.

What is the alternative?