Draygo.9473

I rather like the change. This is a side effect from the 'tapping' changes, keeps no longer flag if a guard gets hit until the gate/walls are reduced to 95% health or the lord is in combat. To compensate anet made the white swords appear instantly.

Increasing tradeoffs isnt a bad thing, but you are nerfing roamers/solo players more than your nerfing boonballers by nerfing cele. So you are not shaking up the balance between boonball and cloud. Generally when people are complaining about boonball its because the only option to defeat a boonball (a good one, mind you) is to form a boonball yourself. So far you haven't provided any argument or solution that would change this dynamic.

Its how it used to be, don't really see a problem with fights being over quickly. And yes I have stated that I think pin sniping skills should be nerfed along with any stability rework (single target ranged pulls), and all CC should be dodgeable. The idea that certain ccs can only be stabbed through is really bad design in a mode where they likely cant be seen in all the effect bloat and is inconsistent with the rest of the game design. If you want to change the viability of boonball you have to do something that allows players to split apart a boonball. If balance was to be achieved a cloud of players (organized, running optimal builds) should be able to attrition a boonball at roughly the same rate as the boonball is able to run over small groups of players in the cloud and send them to greyscreen.

Can you explain how it would shake up the meta to allow other options other than boonball? I dont see how. The amount of damage a boonball can do is only really relevant against another boonball. This change does not touch the defensive nature of boonball or lead to more proactive play. When a boonball runs over a group of 5-10 players in a 50 boonball vs 50 cloud, missing a little damage isnt going to make any difference. Yes the boonball meta will change, but it still will be optimal unless you start nerfing passive mechanics. I dont think boonball players are bad players at all, I think they will adapt just fine to nerfing celestial, and celestial touches more than just people in a boonball, it touches roaming, pve, solo builds. And these easily accessible builds allows lesser skilled players to enjoy these modes while making that players contribution meaningful. You need to deal with the stability mechanic, you need to deal with the target cap in order to have any real effect.

That wont balance boonball, and will nerf PvE, I don't see anet going with that option at all. A pointless change with little effect.

How.

Cele isn't the problem. Target cap and ->passive<- stability is the problem. Boonball switching to minstrel does not change much other than boonball vs boonball and probably makes the game performance worse because damage is lower so fights will last longer. I don't see removing cele as an option. How exactly would you accomplish this? Introduced normalized stats into wvw like sPvP has? Does anet want to dedicate devtime to that? The cele discussion just feels like a pointless waste of time to me. Anet can keep balancing the game to more active gameplay, make stability last a shorter amount of time, limit the stab stacks, allow dodge to work against all CC. I also think something should be done to discourage stacking, upping target cap is one way. GW2 combat feels great 5v5, but 30v30 it just feels silly to me as the incentives switch from avoiding taking damage to distributing damage.

You have to be in combat for this timer to work. I suspect characters are falling in and out of combat which probably restarts the timer.

What do we have to do here? Put in a ticket? Its been almost a two months now.

The core enablers for boon ball are simply this: Target cap on offensive abilities, this allows stacking tight Stability easily obtained and plentiful. Unless you are talking about these two things I think you are just wasting your time. Personally I think we should rework CC and Stability in WvW. I would like to see a nerf to the range of single target pulls coupled with a stability stack cap in WvW. In addition all CC skills should become dodgable. The game should encourage players to actively dodge through or avoid big CCs and make stability a far more active skill. Probably would put Stab at a max stacks of 2-3. As far as target caps, I would like to see them increased, for ranged try upping to 10, for melee up it to 15. I know anet caps targets to solve lag but it feels like boonballs just throwing abilities into each other without any real effect causes more lag for a longer period of time.

Cata and Treb have the same recharge on throwing their respective rocks. Treb has a longer channel time, but that doesnt matter for two reasons: 1 Damage has been normalized a long time ago where channel time multiplies your damage such that its the same DPS, and two its point blank, you dont need to channel anyway. Though if you are full channeling the shot the Treb fires slower than the catapult. Cata = 9.25 seconds per shot, Treb 13.25 seconds. Also for guild versions of the siege the dps being 20% more means that each supply is worth the same DPS no matter what you build. 40 for cata, 50 for tree, so 20% more supply for 20% more damage seems reasonable to me.

The long term plan is that it is based on what you select as your wvw guild when the relink period is up. Please note that team creation will lock in a few days.

Doesnt sound like the OP was in a guild with their friends... Find a few people you like playing with and join their guild, mark it as your wvw guild, done. You should be able to guarantee that your in a guild with at least a few friends you like.

The 1 queue thing might not be a bug, but someone who hasn't accepted their queue pop for a long time. So they are still in the queue, but there are still open positions available. The other way it can happen is if a lot of people leave a map and your team enters the map slowly. There was one instance where our server intentionally trolled the EBG players by queuing the map on purpose and never accepting the queue pop. The result of this was a 50+ queue with only like 20 people in the map.

There needs to be a middle ground to balls of CC immune players to people getting easily stunlocked. I would suggest limiting the amount of stab stacks you can get to 2-3, and allow you to dodge through all CC. Moving the game in a more active gameplay direction instead of passive boons doing everything for you.

Same here

The biggest enabling change to combat mechanics was when anet changed stability from stacking duration to stacking charges, this fundamentally changed the balance of CC vs CC defense as a consequence and is probably the single change that made boon-ball as meta dominate as it is today (secondarily is the boon application to subgroups). Now there were a couple of things broken about duration stacked stab: Boon corruption resulted in a really long fear. It was hard to push through multiple lines of warding allowing small groups to turtle chokes like the hills lord room. As such it was easier to split attacking groups and pick off stragglers that got caught in CC nets. The current formulation of boon ball it can be nearly impossible to pick an enemy to attrition them if the boon ball is playing correctly (there is a big difference between a bad boon ball with poor boon distribution and a good one). My preference would probably be for anet to cut down on stability sources or move stability to a much more limited boon in wvw (limit max stacks to like 2-3), and then visit all the CC abilities and make every single one of them dodgable, in addition to generally nerfing single target ranged pulls (reason, pin sniping is actually unfun). Leaning the game more into the active direction (dodge) instead of the passive direction (boons). Also by limiting the stacks, you buff active boon application more than passive application, passive meaning you are maintaining a boon on a rotation, vs active is when you use the ability right when you think its needed.

I personally just do map exploration in EoD from time to time and sell a legendary for a large gold boost. Leverage the value of a gift of battle for all the pve'ers that wont step a foot into wvw. GPH becomes a bit hard to compute for this.

Being able to copy messages from chat might be a nice feature, but it doesn't really have anything to do with the squad message on pin, those are different systems. I prefer to stay on topic, which is about the hover info on the commander pin. I cant think of a particular reason you would join a discord for a squad you're not in. Squad would probably think your a spy anyway if you arn't in the squad but in VC. The use case for being able to copy from the map pin is small to non-existent. The main purpose of this as I see it is for tags to state their purpose so I as a player can make a decision to join the squad or not, not as some advertisement tool for a discord. Is the squad an open tag, havoc tag, scout tag? That's what I want to know, not the squads discord info.

You can join the squad and then copy the text in the squad message.... (open party menu, click view squad message, highlight the discord link, ctrl+c, then ctrl+v in browser) Then leave the squad after it copied if thats what you want.

The limit for alliances was 500 members anyway, which is the same cap for a guild. Unless anet was going to allow alliances to have more than 500 members the whole alliance feature is just redundant with a guild slot, so I see why they just scrapped it for just an additional guild slot. An additional guild slot works almost exactly like the alliance system was supposed to work. You simply set the alliance guild as your 'wvw' guild, and you continue to represent your normal small wvw guild as normal.

and the banner/flags people would put down that had collision :o

boon removal isnt that strong, it works sometimes in coordination with some CC, but its so finicky i wouldnt call it a real counter to boonball. The only actual counter that existed for a short while was mobile winds of disenchantment, and that was too strong. If you want to go way way back, the enabling change for boonballs to work as they do now is when they allowed stability to stack instead of extending duration. This is when boonballs became unstoppable. Anet did this because stacking CC in a choke was actually a problem (you really couldn't get into hills lord room with a decent size group dropping down lines of warding). If you want to kill boonball, revert that change for wvw. To compensate something will have to be done about ranged CC. Allow every CC to be dodged through, and nerf the range on single target pulls (pin sniping is a bit degen). These changes will let groups break apart boon balls enough to get opportunities to attrition the group. Which is really all people need, to get the occasional kill on a player in the boonball. Its a radical change, and would change how groups would need to operate. I don't think Anet has the guts to do something along these lines though. The other change that allowed boonball was the boon target priority change and the subgroup changes, I dont think Anet will want to touch this as PvE absolutely depends on it. Some siege changes to consider: You could also up the target cap of ballista 1 (you can evade it by zig-zagging), and make the arrow cart rip barrier on a skill. Maybe visit catapult spread shot and make it not worthless.

Its better than vet creature slayer at least. These are all active things you can go do, instead of having to wait for. Obsidian sanctum doubles up with a guild mission at least.

Siege disruptors do not disable siege, so no.