SWI.4127

Like I said it would require massive balance changes, I agree that it wouldn't be a change for the better under the current circumstances. Just expressing my frustration with all the projectile hate making many spec/weapons/skills inherently useless.

Scrapper defense field is. Most groups have 1 in every party. Guardian shield 5 is. Again one in every party. No they're not reflects, but they still destroy projectiles. Then you have WoD which is gigantic. Most chokes can be completely covered by one FB courage reflect bubble. It's funny you mention WoR because it's one of the worst offenders IMO. Thank God it's not meta for most groups yet. If traited it has a 10 second duration with 20 second cooldown. So 50% uptime on this huge wall that blocks an unlimited number of projectiles. All it would take is 2 people to completely prevent any projectiles in a choke. It just makes no sense to have these limitless skills. You are right that it would cause balance issues to change it. We'd definitely need adjusting. It's just sad when stuff like Harbinger elixirs get projectile blocked so it can't even function as a pseudo support that they clearly intended as an option. New mesmer shatters are all projectiles, so that class is written off on day 1. Basically any class without mostly ground target AoE has no place in medium to large scale fights and it's because of the amount of projectile hate.

Stealth is capped. I agree about reflects and projectile blocks though. That would probably have to go hand-in-hand with some rebalancing so certain classes aren't just OP. I just hate how a lot of the newer specs are just dead on arrival for zerging because they are projectile-based.

Are you sure it's the condition ticks that are killing you and not just normal power damage? Most groups these days use power because condition damage is so unreliable with the amount of cleanses. I've seen less experienced groups assume conditions are killing them just because they their bar is filled with conditions when they die. Really what is happening is all their boons are getting corrupted into conditions, then they are getting spiked with power damage because they no longer have protection, they have vulnerability stacked, etc.

Transfer to a smaller server then? There are very few things in this game that disincentivize being on a big server. Queues, and having your server locked.

BiS gear is ascended. Legendary has the exact same stat values as ascended, it's only there for the convenience of being able to change your stat type any time you're out of combat (basically QoL for vet players). Seems like you just worked on the assumption that legendary > ascended, but didn't really look into it.

They generally have a lot of off-hours coverage, so you probably just don't see them. I would say that there are servers that are larger in a single timezone than BG, but BG has a more consistent population across a 24 hour period.

Counters: Interrupt the warrior, kite away from the warrior, dodge out of the bubble, stunbreak people caught in the bubble. Channeling bubble reveals you, so if you get caught in a bubble "from stealth", you are really just not paying attention. I'm curious how the bubble nerf somehow helps zergbust now? The larger group can still just chain bubble the smaller group. If anything it's worse for the smaller groups, because bubble used to be one of the only skills that could punish a blob from pushing you too greedily.

Completely backwards change. Imagine getting caught by the perfect bubble, you have the defbuff on you, and you just press Stand Your Ground and walk out anyway. Feels so wrong. If they wanted to nerf bubble while keeping its functionality, how about removing the projectile block aspect of it? You know, so there's not a gigantic 5 second AoE in the middle of the fight that blocks an unlimited amount of projectiles. That way bubble isn't quite as strong, but it still serves its intended purpose and still feels rewarding to play for the Spellbreaker. Do the same with the Scrapper stab bubble. There is so much projectile block that it makes ranged builds completely useless against any type of group, and it limits the meta to only classes with AoE ground-based damage. (DH, Rev, Scourge). If you nerf that aspect of bubble, then it also indirectly buffs some classes that depend on projectiles.

My point was that it's not meant to be farmed in a week or two like most collections in this game. It's a nod to long-time players and long-time goal if WvW is your main game mode. It's not "unreasonably high" if you are a WvW player.

WvW legendary armor was introduced as a way to reward WvW players and let them obtain legendary gear without having to PvP or PvE. It's not meant to be something you "farm". If you love playing WvW, just enjoy your time playing and don't worry about the farm. Before you know it, you'll be able to craft it. If you don't enjoy WvW and just want to get some cheap legendary gear, then I would suggest getting it another way.

I can do this 99.9% of the time by just pressing Space + V with my thumb. It's not that difficult if you practice. Why would you assume anyone who can do it is using a macro?

My advice would be to just check out Eternal Battlegrounds. It's not always the best map, but more often than not, it will have more people on it. Red BL is the biggest, most spread out map. Quite a few people dislike that map and just don't play on it. These are just generalizations, experience varies depending on what server you play on, which servers you play against, what time of the day it is, etc. The mount was a really bad change for new players as now they are at an even bigger disadvantage than veterans. There is a mastery for the mount that gives any unmounted players in an AoE a speed boost that will help you keep up with mounts, so you can try to "hitch a ride" that way. However I think it takes a few seconds to kick in, and the mounted people usually leap once or twice, which you can't do on foot, and you may be left behind.

Tempest Weaver Chrono Scourge Scrapper Herald Renegade Spellbreaker Berserker (in some situations) Firebrand Dragonhunter Out of the 18 elite specs, 11 being more or less meta is not bad. Not counting core specs because I don't think anybody realistically expects them to be as good as elite specs in the current state of the game.

Lol your perception of these guilds is way off. First of all Wavy doesn't even play the game anymore. Secondly, DED/LATE/sQ are already on the same server. If they were going to camp both EBG spawns or whatever, wouldn't it already be happening? I think you vastly overestimate how many people are in those guilds.

You can always create a community guild of "pugs" if that's the case.

It depends. If you onepush a group, scourge can easily be up there among the top DPS if they dropped all their wells, shades, and breach. If it's a longer fight though, then well cooldowns come into play and other classes with shorter cooldowns should be higher.

It depends on the fights, because sometimes there will be a lot of downtime where nobody is doing damage, other times you can one-push a group and do like 20k dps. Just compare yourself to other people in the squad. DH should be near the top. Only getting beat by good Weavers. Also things are kind of skewed in no downstate week, since a lot of damage normally comes from cleaving downs.

You guys fight many guilds at that time?

Good change, but could you guys also look at the lower end of the servers too? 0 medium servers for months now and only 3 high servers. If we want population to even out, then people need cheap alternatives to move a guild to.

If they want people to destack full servers and populate smaller servers, this is the worst way to go about it. Who's going to transfer when your only options are very high servers or 3 high servers?

Thanks so much, this is one of the best changes to facilitate GvGs since the arena was introduced!

It's not like more people are playing in NA. It's about the same or even less than a few months ago. The problem is, there's a bunch of full/very high servers anyway with the same amount of activity. Actual activity is lower than EU servers from what I've experienced. If you look at sites that measure kills/deaths that seems to be the case.

It seems they lowered the threshold for server limits like that across the board. 0 medium and 16 full is kind of ridiculous, especially when you look at EU and see populations are much lower despite the fact that they are much more active than NA servers. I just wonder how long it's going to continue like that. If so many servers are full, then how is the "full" threshold ever going to go up again?

Unless you're talking about something that happened over 2 years ago or longer, I don't agree with your assessment on how mass transfers are affecting NA. First of all, I can't even think of any significant transfers in or out of either of those servers for a very long time. Mag has just been CL/IV and a bunch of pugs in EBG for years, and FA has just been KnT, BOMB, Hate, eA, + a lot of pugs. I don't even know what you mean when you say "look what happened to FA or Mag" because nothing much has changed. I've only really played for the last 3 years though so maybe I just don't know what you're referring to. In general, mass transfers aren't really a problem on NA servers. Guilds really don't transfer that often. It's not like EU where there have been massive population shifts that stack one pairing then leave a dead server in T5 for 2 months. From what I've seen, most of the NA transfers just come from random pugs trying to get on what they perceive as the strongest server link for that period.