oscuro.9720

Yea, I agree it needs to be sped up. I disagree with the majority of warriors on here that it needs to be unrooted though. We shall see what Anet does moving forward, I’ve said my peace 🤷‍♂️

5 man queue in ranked, solo queue in ranked. The two pools are non-overlapping but affect individual rank the same. Add a permanent 1v1 mode. I really think the solo and 2 man queue system of PvP right now serves the dedicated PvP players but makes the experience overall less enjoyable and less engagable for the general population (though I could very well be wrong about this). I think adding a 1v1 mode with its own seasons would have high appeal to players even remotely interested in PvP because it distills PvP down to really finding out who is better. Duels in this game have been popular for a while and are some of the best expressions of the complexity of this combat system imo. again, my opinions. I’m sure not everyone will agree.

I’ve not played PvP much as of late (over a year since I really tried at this point), a 1v1 mode would have me playing daily. A 10v10 mode where we can actually organize a 10 man team to queue with would likely have me getting groups together in my guild(s) for weekly or biweekly PvP nights. 1v1 would obviously be a duel, 10v10, maybe capture the flag? Maybe just a death match with rounds. There’s a few cool ways to do it I think.

Ah, I know nothing of pve balance and am not qualified to speak on it. Duels and small group play in wvw are what I speak on most times. I used to include PvP but it’s been over a year since I really played PvP aside from the FFA

An update; I believe it now out damages auto attack by 15-20% now (I don’t remember off the top of my head) due to recent buffs. I would argue the tradeoff for that damage makes the skill weak relative to other skills and the tradeoffs they incur, but it is not down at 2% anymore

That’s fair, removing duo and going solo or 5 man and having segregated queues for them would make a lot of sense I think. It certainly would be difficult going in solos against a dedicated 5 man and, vice versa, with how often the average PvP player sandbags or refuses to leave spawn, probably boring when people throw fights as the 5 man even more so than it already is when people throw fights against you.

And if I want to compete in an actually semi-competitive format with a 5 man? Why don’t you solo queue in unranked instead of ranked? Why would those same reasons not apply to playing the team team size the format is literally designed for and the mode is balanced around?

And if I’m playing when there isn’t an AT? Or just want to do a couple rounds for 20-40 minutes with some friends? The AT format isn’t really conducive of people with restricted time or seeking a more casual but still competitive PvP format that isn’t the absolute cluster that is solo PvP. This is part of why Valorant and Apex and Overwatch were all so big. Ranked play can be engaged with and digested in an hour or less on a continuous basis. At least imo.

As title states. I don’t PvP much anymore because logging on and playing at most a duo (and usually solo) just got boring. People sandbagging, salt, etc. It would be nice to be able to run a pre made with some of my guild ones for PvP on a nightly basis and not have to deal with all toxicity and pathetic behavior that crops up when playing with randoms. Furthermore, it’s a 5 man game mode that doesn’t allow a 5 man queue? That literally makes no sense. If you want to progress you can at most influence 2/5 of your team with coordination, build synergy, etc? Why have it be 5 man then? Im sure plenty will disagree, that’s just my thoughts 🤷‍♂️

Oh I said a month, I meant a matchup, lol. I don’t think classes would be equally viable for just core, but fights would be more fun. I am not particularly concerned with balance, I’m more concerned about what is enjoyable to play, and I believe core v core is more enjoyable across almost every matchup then meta or really the vast majority of espec matchups.

Vanilla and the current game are basically entirely different combat systems imo. The pacing, the resource management, the approach to matchups, the mobility, the way in which game systems are accessed and leveraged are all so far apart that even the aspects of a player’s play style that confer advantages have changed. Would I play it? Yes. Is it better? In some ways yes, in some ways no. I personally find core vs core matchups in the current game to be far more enjoyable than fighting with elite specializations. Everything slows down, everything becomes more deliberate, there’s less waiting for the gap in stability coverage or waiting for the gap in blocks or waiting for the gap in [insert high uptime mitigation mechanic here]. edit: I’d love an event where wvw locks everyone out of especs for a month just to see what it is like. It could be fun, it could be miserable. It’s hard to tell tbh. But I know 1v1 matchups on core classes are probably the most enjoyable in the game right now.

Yes, I suppose my language was imprecise. That is a better way of viewing combat mechanics. My argument would be better summarized as the direction of system changes (how boons function as an example of changing a system) and changes made to the skills to lower the skill floor have devalued the game mechanics that require some degree of coordination to pull off (such as coordinating blast finishers). This is coming from someone who really enjoys the 1v1 aspects of the game. The fundamental combat system in this game is one of the best on the market, but I will still be critical of things that detract from the importance of player ability. in that sense, I agree that players are finding ways to maximize the mechanics. My argument is that the mechanics have been dulled down so that a near optimal state of mechanic use is very easy to reach (heavily influenced by build, often simplified to on-button-press). Again, I don’t think skill isn’t a factor. I just think its importance has been whittled away compared to how the group combat in this game used to be and the importance of numbers has grown as a result. I believe this is not good for the game. I also don’t know how to fix it. So I’m just complaining at this point I guess 🤷‍♂️ This is partially driven by my own belief or philosophy, so I don’t expect everyone to agree, and disagreements are certainly valid.

I still disagree with you on decent amounts of this, but I’m pretty sure our conclusions are the same, so I don’t think the disagreement matters much. I also very much respect your ability to articulate and defend your point. I always appreciate the detailed and thought out comments 🙂

This is a good question. All of those would be group combat mechanics. Perhaps my argument was unclear, it is not their existence, it is the changes to the way they function and which ones have been prioritized that have narrowed the importance of skill. This is partially balance decisions and partially power creep from expansions, the latter of which isn’t worth an argument about since the bell has been rung: Let me give you some examples; 1. Changes to stability have benefitted large groups more than small groups. Coordination of stability is still important, but when stability was not reduced by stacks, proper rotation of stability was a larger separator between small, coordinated groups and large, uncoordinated groups. 2. The change of retaliation to resolution directly benefitted large, less coordinated groups. Resolution uptime was a direct damage benefit for coordinated groups with effectively no target cap. By removing retaliation, larger groups benefitted from not having to deal with a mechanic that punished sloppy play and rewarded tight coordination. 3. The move towards boon standardization and a focus on utility and weapon skills generating boons reduced the amount of coordination necessary to reach effective levels of boon uptime. More coordination to get, for example, high might stacks means that it becomes advantageous to have a more coordinated group more so than a larger group. There are more but those are some examples. The point is not that both groups cannot leverage these things, but that the steps required to access these things have been blunted to allow easier access for lower skill groups/players. By removing class or skill interactions that allowed coordinated groups to leverage force multipliers that less coordinated groups could not and killing large groups as a result, they effectively made it a numbers game. Again, I am NOT saying that coordination doesn’t still matter, but it matters a significant amount less now than it did before, and has continued to mean less as we have moved forward. I don’t think balance is a wrong ideal, but I think that group combat should reward people finding and leveraging class interactions rather than moving more towards a button management system than it was before. As long as inter-class matchups (read: 1v1s) are balanced, the disparity in outcome at a group level will be decided by ingenuity, coordination, and skill. If you try to balance outcome for large scale combat, you will inevitably end up balancing to equalize outcomes for even numbered groups because it is the only objective metric that exists for balancing large-scale combat. Zerg combat is actually arguably highly balanced right now; the team with more people wins most often. If you view it from a “what should be the outcome if 100 people fight 50”, the group of 100 winning is the logical, balanced outcome. But we don’t want that. What we want is to be special. To be a part of that group that has 5 people and kills 30. But most people are part of the 30. And they get frustrated when that happens. So the importance of skill is minimized in favor of making sure the larger group of people are satisfied. This begins a gradual slide downward in overall skill until people are looking at a highly balanced game mode and feel it’s lopsided and “cooked” because they can’t overcome a gap of 5 people even if their individual players are better. Again, skill is still important, it’s just the least important it’s been in the game. And it feels bad. And I like to feel good. You should too.

Group combat mechanics are wildly different than individual combat mechanics because numbers are more important now than they ever have been. Large scale combat balancing has degraded the level of skill it takes to form an effective group, narrowing the difference between the floor and the ceiling. This has led to small, coordinated groups having less advantage than they used to. Numbers have become even more important. That’s not to say there isn’t still a skill scalar, but it’s continually being reduced, and criticizing that is a valid option imo. I’m also of the opinion that it’s not a fixable problem and that balance should be abandoned in favor of fun in large scale. I fundamentally believe that group combat in this game can no longer be balanced because the number of team combinations has exceeded balance. Instead, balance should exist within inter-class matchups and group combat should be allowed to be chaoticly unbalanced with a focus on what is fun rather than what is “balanced”. Fundamentally “unfair” things cane weed themselves out of a 1v1 balance strat. But combinations of classes worked in coordinated and unique ways should be able to confer benefits, which doesn’t happen under a unified balance philosophy at large scale. Most importantly, wvw isn’t meant to be a fair or balanced game mode. It’s meant to be fun and chaos. I don’t see a reason that the method of measuring “balance” shouldn’t be the same. Prioritize fun and it will be fun. I don’t think that is too novel of a concept?

How to kill willbenders: Make them have 0 health before you have 0 health.

Mesmer portals are a form of match manipulation. Using portals to circumvent the intended objective of destroying the entrance point to an objective is circumventing the rules of play. Therefore, we should hardware ban all mesmers. And before you start whining like a toddler that hasn’t taken its Xanax that I am misapplying what you are saying, maybe you should take a second and ask if you aren’t yourself taking something and applying your own biases to interpret it in a way that you want. Because I see no difference between us other than the fact that I’m not whining about people doing what they want and not inconveniencing me in the slightest.

Yes, the individual contributions of a player are small, but that is the very nature of wvw. Driving a psychological focus on the “we” instead of the “me” for the outcome of something which you care about can help drive that large, communal feeling that, imo, made wvw so special at the beginning of the game when people really cared about their servers. Community forms, in part, from shared struggle. What you call I flaw I consider a potential bonus, but it depends on that tactical level implementation. Perhaps increased pips per tick when playing during a season, or increase reward track progress could help drive some of it, but I think that guilds and alliances having some sort of shared or structured goal would outweigh the disinterest of fragmented player groups. If anything, it would encourage players to organize more into wvw guilds so that their individual contributions to a 10 man run are then scaled to be more measurable. i think the problem you point out DEFINITELY gets magnified with time and is one worth being cautious of. You can feel like you are doing something in one week, but over 2-3 months, you feel like a grain of sand in a sandstorm 😅 But with a three week timeframe I think it could be manageable. It’s a sprint of sorts, one that ends just as player fatigue starts to set in (hopefully)

Hello my fellow marauders of the mist, If you were slaughtering the unholy invaders in the mists during base game, you would surely remember when WvW had seasons. For those uninitiated, these "seasons" were rather lengthy periods of time where servers moved up and down the 8 tiers of play vying for the best positioning possible. At the end of the season, players were rewarded with tickets (and some other stuff?) based on their server's final placement if I am remembering correctly. Now, these seasons were far from perfect, and they were cut off after only two I believe. Some of their flaws included; 1. Blackgate existing. 2. the exceptionally long period of commitment it was requiring of players. Since WvW is a 24-hour game mode, being evaluated on many months' worth of gameplay can be very daunting. Part of the reason Arena Net axed the seasons was due to "player burnout". The seasons were simply too long given there were 24 servers. Why do I bring up seasons now? I believe they are something that Arena Net could implement to drive player engagement with World versus World. How would new seasons work in my vision? Seasons are only named seasons due to the length of time and the overall standings. They would be three-week tournaments with a series of matchups that are randomly generated across different alliances. There will be six (6) tiers. The first week will be random matchups. The second week, the winners of the matchups will move on to a set of three matchups between the winners and everyone else will fill in brackets beneath them. The third week, the winners of the previous week will go to the final "champion" matchup. Everyone else will fill in brackets beneath them. At the end of week 3, only one team will be undefeated, and they will ostensibly "win" the season. All other teams will score based on their overall score with KDR as a tie breaker mechanic. Frequency of seasons Due to their short nature, I believe between three and four seasons is the best balance. This gives a rough 1 month "on" and two or three months "off", with the "off" months being the standard WvW format well all play right now. This gives guilds a schedule to pattern around for periods of high engagement and recovery, this gives casual players an incentive to enter into WvW on a more frequent basis occassionally (for the rewards), and it keeps the game mode a bit fresher and more relevant in my opinion. Caveats There would need to be suitable rewards to incentivize people to actually dedicate time to three weeks' worth of World Versus World. The rewards should be predicated on weekly activity to encourage players continuing to try and have fairly harsh increments between each placement to incentivize moving up even one place. For example, the marginal difference between 18th place and 17th place should be significant enough to encourage people to want to actually try. However, the base reward (essentially the last place reward) has to be sufficient to make players want to meet the minimum threshold of player activity needed to earn the reward. I do not know how the rewards would work. That is not something I am knowledgeable on; I do not play much for rewards but fully acknowledge it is a primary driver for MANY players and potentially the most critical element of any system being implemented. Just my thoughts, let me know what you all think.

I’d love to see ele have an elite spec that focused on one element, then enabled weapon swap. Then give it bow that is focused on true ling range dps, like an elemental archer. Maybe if it’s an archer style class, have F1-4 become “arrows” that you can cast for different effects based on your chosen attunement. This would help push elements into dedicated roles? just some thoughts off the top of my head.

Scepter as a javelin is like hammer rev and I’m all here for it.

Hey! They put a mid range projectile on gunsaber, what are you talking about?!

What are you talking about pistol being ranged? Why would they make a mid ranged mainhand weapon that fills a niche Warrior currently doesn’t have occupied when they could make a melee offhand that competes with some of the best off hand options in the game and is a crowded design space? Random thought; what if Bladesworn had been a gunslinger type spec instead that locked Warrior’s second slot into pistols (only pistols can be equipped). Then instead of dragon slash, the Warrior enters a stance like a cowboy about to draw in a duel, and then fires off the number of shots that get charged up?

That’s fair, and it’s definitely good to get all the opinions out there! There’s no right or wrong answers here, just opinions from which the devs will (hopefully) pull from to improve the specialization. Mine own opinions are admittedly only from the frame of mind of competitive modes and from someone with minimal playtime on blade 🤷‍♂️

The problem with bladesworn is that the drawbacks are so large, the benefits would be borderline broken (as it was for a little bit). But that would work too. I’m just not a fan of the way that blade was implemented despite the skills all being fairly good.