Gudradain.3892

Well said OP. WvW without identity is not WvW. All WvW needed was smaller servers.

Vale Guardian used to be one of my favorite encounter. I absolutely loved that fight because of the mechanics. In particular, I like the Green Circle mechanism and the colored floor that forced you to rotate. Then, I took a long break from raiding and... most groups now skips the Green Circle and they don't rotate until the last phase by switching between 2 platforms. It's a good strategy, it's effective but it's boring. I no longer enjoy Vale Guardian as much as I used to. I can't blame it on the players because it's normal that they will use the most effective strategy to accomplish a task, the problem is the encounter. The most problematic thing is that Green Circle can be skipped. Here is my suggestion: When you miss Green Circle for the third time it's an instant wipe. It could be tracked with a stackable debuff that you get each time you miss one.

My suggestions will be around making it easier to form groups. The goal would be to make it possible to try the boss even if you don't have a good group composition or even if you don't have a full party. Getting 10 players that all want to learn the raid mechanics at the same time is a big barrier of entry for many players. Option 1: Boss health scale based on number of players 10 players : 100% health 9 players: 90% health 8 players: 80% health 7 players: 70% health Only the boss health would change and all other mechanics would stay the same. I would probably put a minimum health, here I put 70% but it could be something else. The goal is to increase the flexibility. If you can only find 8 friends for your raid, then it's still viable to run with that number. It will probably be a bit harder to kill the boss with less players as you have less players to do the raid mechanics and each DPS must contribute a bit more but forming the group will be way easier and you won't have to suddenly stop if you lose 1 player. Option 2: Permanent offensive boons You gain the following permanent boons during the fight: Might x 25, Fury, Quickness, Alacrity. The goal is again to increase flexibility and to reduce difficulty. You could run with any DPS, tank and healer without having to worry about your boon up time with this suggestion. I think it would reduce the barrier of entry for new raiders that don't have multiple class and build ready for raiding and can't easily adjust the group composition to have good boon up time. It would also be easier to refill your party with the LFG tool.

You are right 🙂 https://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Rally

I'm sorry but you are totally wrong here. Rally is the problem not Downstate in general. Let's look at a typical WvW battle. You have 2 groups, each with 20 players, that charge into each other. The result of that charge is that 5 players on each side are downed. Now, both group try to focus those down players to finish the kill. What will happen here? Result with Rally: One of the group will get the first kill, then the 5 downed players of that group will Rally and they will finish the other 4 downed players of the other group. It's now 20 vs 15. Result without Rally: It doesn't matter who get the first kill. Both group will most likely lose those 5 downed players and it's now a 15 vs 15. Conclusion Rally help a fight to snowball into one group favor very quickly. Usually, it will always favor the bigger group. Also, it will make it nearly impossible for the smaller group to kill anyone in the bigger group unless they manage to not lose a single player or the Rally will trigger and their effort will be wasted. Rally is also the reason for some toxic behavior in WvW. Many guild groups don't want pug running around them and will call them Rally bot. It's not good for the game mode that having one additional players will hurt your group instead of helping it.

I know why Downstate keep coming back. There are issues with it. But, I don't know why it's always the same suggestions, which is to remove it or reduce the health in downstate, that keep coming back. And, I'm totally against those suggestions. Downstate is good for this game mode. It's good that you have a chance to resurrect your allies. It's good that you don't instantly die when you do a little mistake and that you have a second chance. I want to keep Downstate and I think it's very important to keep it. The only part of Downstate that I think has no place in WvW is Rally. It doesn't make sense in WvW context that someone dying will Rally you because you touched it 20 seconds ago by chance with one of the random AoE that you put all over the place. I'm still puzzled why the suggestions about Downstate mechanism are not targeting the Rally mechanism since it's that part that is the unique problem with Downstate in WvW.

Describe how you would implement "easy mode" in raiding. For the sake of this discussion, please refrain to comment if all you want to say is that you are against "easy mode" in general. I'm aware that many raiders are opposed to an "easy mode" in raiding, myself included depending how it's implemented, but it's a request that is often coming back and it would be interesting to discuss what would be the best way to do it. Instead, if you don't like a particular suggestion, describe why you feel that this particular suggestion would be a bad idea. Thank you

Sadly, I don't know why the raiding community is its own worse enemy. We know that raids are not very popular with the GW2 population in general. It's not up to debate, it's a fact. And, we know that if a game mode is not popular it will not receive a lot of new content from ArenaNet. So, here we are, after 22 pages, and most posts are not even trying to be constructive and find a solution to make this game mode that we all love more popular but are rather trying to ignore or dismiss the problem. The first step to fix a problem is to acknowledge the problem.

Maybe Stand your Ground should be a special WvW skill that every profession has access when it is in WvW :)

Exactly this. The "home borderland" concept is bad and can't be fixed. Nothing kills the fun in a competitive mode more than a map that is supposed to be mostly controlled by only one side out of three.

The main problem is how the game is currently balanced. Guild groups always had an advantage over pug groups but it was never that big. I always liked to pugmand and I have done so since 2012. Things have drastically changed since the earlier days and made it easier for guild groups to completely dominate pug groups. In particular: It's way easier to heal now since you have dedicated build to heal. Healing required to stack in a place, drop a water field and then blast it to heal all the group. That regroup gave pug group a little break to recover and you could even bomb that heal attempt sometimes. The less good the guild group, the more time they would take to regroup, drop water field and blast them to heal. Now they just heal as they move and continuously destroy pugs.Guild groups move much faster now. It used to be a bit comical to run around guild groups unaffected by them while they slowly move in a nearly straight line toward the pug group that was rapidly dispersing in all directions. It was harder for them to catch pug. Now, they have superspeed!Easy stealth engage. Stealth engage is nothing new but it never used to be so ridiculously easy to do it. Nothing better to wipe a semi-attentive pug group than to stealth engage them from very far away.These would be the main issues combat-wise for me.

Tangled DepthIt's also the best map they ever created.

Yes, trebuchets need some love.

I realized the other day that they took the time to nerf Ranger stances in WvW which strikes me as particularly odd considering that stances would be ranger best tool for group support and ranger are nearly automatically kicked from any organized group because they don't bring any group support. Bear Stance: Cooldown increased from 25 seconds in PvE to 30 seconds in WvWhttps://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Bear_Stance Moa Stance: Boon duration bonus reduced from 66% in PvE to 20% in WvWhttps://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Moa_Stance Griffon Stance: Might duration reduced from 8 seconds in PvE to 6 seconds in WvWhttps://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Griffon_Stance Did I miss a time where Ranger was the meta group support and they had to nerf it? As far as I can remember, Ranger have never been welcomed in organized squad because of their lack of group support so I can't understand that nerf. And, it's not like if the trait to share the stance was really strong since it only grants 50% of the stance duration to party members.https://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Leader_of_the_Pack

I disagree. It just need less group healing. If personal healing could be unchanged but healing to other nerfed by 50% it would fix a lot of the problems.

I loved Tangled Depth. It's the only map in the game where you feel like you are exploring a treacherous maze. The mini-map doesn't work (which is awesome). You have to learn your way through this labyrinth. In general, I liked every map from HoT. I liked that mobs kept killing me and forced me to change my play style. I liked the big meta event where all the map had to participate. The first few times in those events were amazing as most players didn't have any clue what to do. I liked that some places were unreachable at first. I liked that there was few map but each one received a big amount of developing love. They did an amazing job with this expansion. About PoF... I streamrolled through the maps without challenge, completed the story and forgot them. The mounts are nicely designed but at the same time trivialized so much in the game. I will take a lot of difficulty to go back to HoT traversal difficulty due to the mounts. I want more than content. I want a game.

I know this is why the skirmish system was created but does it really make a difference? In the end, if you compare who win and who lose, both system usually give the same result except when the matchup is very close. And, to get the same result, I always prefer the simplest system. Personally, I find the skirmish system hard to understand. I would not be surprise if a good portion of the WvW players have no idea how it works exactly.

https://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/World_versus_World#Score The old system is basically the current system without the skirmish part. Only the global score matter and it's not split in 2-hour skirmish. A good way to see the difference is to look at this website: http://gw2stats.com/na The current system is the top part: "Current NA Skirmishes". In this system, it's the "victory point" that determine the winner.The previous system is the bottom part: "Current NA Matchups". In this system, the "current score" which is the global score, is what determine the winner.The current system is another layer, the skirmishes, on top of the old one.

That would be terrible. Each server would actively try to make their least skilled players logged off, or at least leave WvW, in order to obtain the best Kill-Death-Ratio. Anything that is not welcoming to a good part of the community is a bad idea.

because they might as well be NPC since there is not much interraction :( The public event are great but it's missing something. The world feels lonely since there is no need to really party up. Most people you see will just pass by without ever stopping or interact in any way with you.

I think it's different here. The problem with WvW masteries giving stat bonus to individual players meant that each individual player had to have the mastery to be competitive which is not really friendly for new players. It could take them hours to farm WvW mastery in order to start being competitive which is not a good idea. On the other hand, a commander mastery giving bonus to all squad members doesn't run into that problem because only the commander needs to have enough mastery point, which will probably be nearly all commanders. New players just have to join the squad to get the bonus and be competitive. Yea, it is not the same. It is worse. Giving huge advantages to what is already the strongest force in WvW is a no go. Minor stat advantages for individual players were nothing in comparison to your suggestions.No, it's better because it is more friendly to new players. That's the key difference. And, I disagree that it's giving huge advantage to the strongest force in WvW. The strongest force in WvW right now is organized meta squad, not all type of squad. One thing that won't benefit organized meta squad as much is pulsing stability because they already have nearly 100% uptime on stability. On the other hand, that pulsing stability would greatly help all the non organized non meta squad which would level the playing field. It might also open the possibility for more build diversity in zerg.

You can put a restriction that you need at least 10 members in the squad to have any effect of the mastery active. They already put a restriction like that for pips. I'm just not super stoked on the idea of putting more ways to escape a wipe(even if it's just the tag) into what's supposed to be a form of large scale pvp. 7 or 70 tags regardless. You can already glide away in territories you own etc. Commander mastery, sure.Death escape mechanism? Naaaah...can't get behind that personally.I have to agree that if there is more benefits to be the commander versus being in the squad it could create issue where the groups tries to create as many commander as possible. So, it's probably best to limit the buffs squad wise.

I think it's different here. The problem with WvW masteries giving stat bonus to individual players meant that each individual player had to have the mastery to be competitive which is not really friendly for new players. It could take them hours to farm WvW mastery in order to start being competitive which is not a good idea. On the other hand, a commander mastery giving bonus to all squad members doesn't run into that problem because only the commander needs to have enough mastery point, which will probably be nearly all commanders. New players just have to join the squad to get the bonus and be competitive.

You can put a restriction that you need at least 10 members in the squad to have any effect of the mastery active. They already put a restriction like that for pips (reward tracks). https://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Skirmish_reward_track