Riba.3271

They need to just remove relinking. Relinking just brings too much variance in how WvW plays out. Servers that are often linked together such as GH+FoW are flourishing due to power of friendship! Well truthfully, it most likely is just people knowing commanders and commanders knowing how skilled people they can get, without it drastically changing every 2 months. This brings improvement and stability. Do note I mean relinking, not linking itself. Keep the links as it is until expansion and count population as main+link server rather than separately You do have a point that every server that has experienced being full and unlinked at same time is still suffering from it: Dzagonur, Kodash, Deso, Piken, Gandara, WSR, Jade Sea. Basically 2 unplayable WvW months with lower numbers than linked ones made their internal scene crumble. All experienced players on those servers basically changed exclusive to guild raiding or hopped servers. BB seems to be a special case, we all know they have more population than other full servers. They went full in the past but all the spanish people were flooding on other servers and after some forum complaints, it hasn't been full ever since.

Just playing devil's advocate here, but given old bloodlust used to give 50 power per stack for a max of 150 extra power (if memory serves, do correct me if I'm wrong), if that was too much then I can kinda see where he is going when he says 200 power from keep buff is too strong. Never mind the other stats you get from it. Edit; I do agree with what others have said tho, that while it is strong, the keep buffs don't really kill roaming. If you are building glassy you will die in seconds anyways, and I think it's foolish to make your build dependant on stats you might not have because a keep flipped under you. If the OP is trying to build his character assuming he will have these buffs as he has said, I can see why he thinks it's such a big deal, but it's actually him making these buffs have such a large effect by trying to build off them instead of seeing them as just icing on the cake. It killed roaming by indirectly reducing activity roamers can do: They can't fight equally strong players at camps because those players will defeat you, the movement speed boost is especially noticeable (look at sPvP where everyone uses Speed/Lynx runes). I am sure you know from your experience that lot of good roamers are very toxic and don't take losing lightly.Dueling around SM died. Duelers were cream of the crop. Put any top sPvP or dueler against another, the one with 400 extra stats will always win. And no one is interested watching mediocre players duel.No1 threatening attacks keeps thus no1 defends camps and keeps eye on supply routes actively. Same applies to dolyaks. Do note that keep scouts are same people who defend/Keep eye on camps, so they're almost full-time roamers.There is no being "the best" anymore. Most gankers and roamers these days are forced to run in small groups because claim buffs extra runeset already makes massive difference when hitting high gold levels in pvp, that is basically anyone that takes the game seriously.Basically while soloroaming itself might exist in form of ganking. Other factors are that people aren't pretty much needed to upgrade anymore as it happens so fast and much more passively than before meaning less people care about objectives and camps surrounding them. Overall Soloroaming often resolves around camps/duels, and that scene is dead. And this reduces amount of groups also as groups often form by having friends online at same time. Creating a build depends, for example it is a waste going 100% crit chance in a build for WvW while often you can replace that precision with ferocity and deal like 1% less damage without claim buff while dealing 5-10% more near friendly objectives (that is active approx ~40% of the time). It is just math and claim buffs extend all the way to open field. So usually on classes like Rev and necro that can easily hit 100%, you often wanna cut back 130 precision (claim buff + borderlands bloodlust) for optimal dps. My point is: Even moderate amounts of extra passive stats ruin any kind of PvP mode and WvW wasn't balanced around defender having extra passive stats. Instead they nerfed wall HP, tactivators and AC damage but we are still at same state of the game where little bit weaker defender wins always even without utilizing siege, lords, respawns, stealth, clouding and whatever. And no one who takes the game seriously wants to lose against worse players. Attemping to siege a keep one more time and possibly being repelled by enemy outbraining you with siege is much more tolerable than getting destroyed by weaklings that never activated their brain regarding defending.

Lich is annoying. dying in 4 hits with 22k hp

Was messing with different Berserker builds in PvP and noticed this. It is kind of big deal because you wanna go rifle berserker and if you take blood reckoning instead of mending against low condi comps, you might wanna cut Peak Performance. Don't see many reasons to run rifle over hammer tho, so no flame.... Gun Flame... ;)

Well if I could give you a timeline, it is that HoT was introduced with claim buff+dragon banners+tanky lords and soon people realised to take things you need to be much stronger than enemy and started stacking their blob servers. Now as time went by, the veterans on core OG servers with big PvE pop also realised this and went along with it, as just waiting for enemy to come to you is boring. Now you end up with servers that have only 3k+ rank players while enemies are majority new players below 1k. However fighting people below 1k rank isn't exactly exciting because they just get 1-shot with little bit of agression. So these fight servers are just passing time until they face each other. Now to give context, there are 5 stacked blobguildservers on EU, so there is still a high chance they will get some fights daily. So as experienced wvw player you have 3 options: Never challenge yourself by being on weak server because taking anything hard is impossible with low ranks alongside you agaisnt high ranks. Basically give up being nr 1 or having high skilled fightsJoin a guild and ignore pugtagsorStack with other veteransUltimately the need for stacking started with things being easy to defend and upgrade, for example soon after alpine bls was returned after HoT, there were multiple matchups were every single side/north keep and towers were T3 on their relative home borderlands. That ment that defender won everytime someone attemped to take them. So playerbase adapted by making their group stronger by stacking on servers, still better than taking a fight you will lose 100% or twiddling you thumbs at spawn. Now funnily as pug groups stopped hitting upgraded objectives, scouting died as well because who builds a siege and keeps eye for that 1 time a day guildblob rolls through ignoring defensive siege with shield gens taking the thing. Sniping upgraded objectives fot PPT still exists but as objectives, due to lower upgrade times and no upgrade cost, and tick matter less with new scoring system, even it has been reduced (sniping objectives was mostly adapting to being outnumbered anyways) But yea, its just playerbase adapting so they can play alongside equally skilled players while being able to take things and have fights. There are no coordinated fights being in a pugserver where you can play firebrand and hit maybe 3 of your party members if you're lucky.

Etc. Anyways the trend seems to be that if Desert bl is used as base: Alpine BL is as popular as 1.5 desert maps but there is 2 of them meaning they're most likely slightly more than thisEB is as popular as 2 alpine maps or 3 desert maps.But there is somethign that scews this stats for desert maps disadvantage: It is easier to dodge fights on desert map leading to less killsIt is easier to cap objective before scout shows up on desert map leading to less killsTake it as you wish

Yup, people aren't interested in playing the gamemode itself anymore. Just the combat system. Scouts and truly open commanders, ones that don't stack on server with 3+ guilds raiding together, are extinct Its basically habits, community and nostalgia keeping them coming to log in as from my knowledge there aren't fastpace largescale games with better combat system where they can fit in with their friends. Combat system is fiiiiiiine and serves the purpose for fights. The balance behind objectives, scoring, population, transferring and sieging isn't which damages any group that wants to play real WvW that works around objectives AND fights (I would estimate that less than 0.1% of population would enjoy capping empty objectives over and over)

Yea, they should come back and fix what they broke with and after HoT. This is where they went wrong. For example it is obvious that the keep and SM upgrade times being boosted massively wasn't good for the gamemode. Now this could be simply fixed by increasing amount of dolyaks required for SM and keep, but no apparently having more important objectives requiring equal amount of dolyaks as towers is "easier to understand". Already 6 hours before primetime you can log in and see everyone have T3 borderlands. Then you can spend hour to reset a few objectives and risk getting rekt by ANY guild that raids around that time to defend relying on extra stats instead of siege that used to be necessary before. Overall you often just need to mass 60 people to do anything even during off hours which leads to people not even joining tags unless they already have 30 people in the bank. But ye, they just need to fix the stuff, simple numerical changes, very simple task.

...20% extra damage and survivability... 20%? LOL Come on man, you can't just pick numbers out of thin air! Well precision and power have almost equal value in damage output and 200 power is between 6.66%-10% damage increase depending on how much damage you're running (between 2000 and 3000 power). While realistic number is more around 2500 power it would become 8%. So it isn't just pulled out of thin air but 10% is because minstrel players, that are dominant in groups, get way more than 10% from it. So yea 10% is for 2000 power which is about average of what your blob deals damage which. Now you can argue it is 15%, because some people tend to ignore the supports damage, but same point stands that is it too much as it varies from side to side. So in one location you have 15% more damage and survivability and in one location the enemy has. Doesn't seem very in line with competitive balancing. Now this applies fully to roamers but organised groups get little less hurt to it due to high stacks of might upkeep but regardless that might goes up and down due to corrupts and you can't assume the average to be above 14 might. Of course people tend to go overly crit chance on Necros, weavers and Revs while ignoring things like borderlands bloodlust and claim buff while sacrificing 8% potential damage from their build just to get 100% crit chance while sacrificing lot of average DPS that the 8% more the precision would give you. That's funny, because the number crunching math academic raid min/maxers seem to think that 90 power from stat infusions only gives 2-3% more damage and (the agony ones) are not even worth getting (due to cost) because that is statistically insignificant unless you are doing perfect rotations on immobile golems, your standard variance will be greater than that. So at absolute most it could be 15% additional damage.90 power is 2% damage increase if you have 4500 power because 90/4500 = 0.02it is quite simple math, and you don't hit 4500 power in WvW. So if it is 3% increase in damage, 200 power is still at least 6.66% increase in damage, as I did say in my math. And yes, 15% is completely unacceptable if you want to have a competitive scene, even 5% is too much if it reaches outside keeps and towers. You're also making the assumption that minstrel players are dealing any damage at all. I mean, sure it's theoretically possible that they should be dealing more damage, but in reality they are hitting hardly anyone. I know when I am playing my FB that I get like 10 bags all night and far less XP because I simply am not hitting other players enough for any amount of extra damage to be doing anything at all. Yet I hop on my Weaver and I'll get 5-10x more bags. I can be convinced otherwise, but just don't see it being that big of an issue. Well it is true that minstrel players might deal only 15% of damage (600-800 dps) of very good dps players (5kish dps), however only a few of the DPS players call to that category even in bigger squads. From my experience Firebrand gets comparable, or even more bags than weaver. Falls short of necro though. You should use F1 tome 3 skill to pull enemies,, mace 3 and shield 4 to apply/remove aegis while applying protection, f3 tome skill 2 skill to taunt enemies and staff 3 to remove aegis while using staff 2 to heal allies that are the most in danger. Also mace 2 applies regen so dropping that symbol will guarantee tagging enemies. And also as you're the most sustainable person in the zerg with most stunbreaks, you should be able to tank something while tagging enemies with retaliation (that scales with power btw). Defenders need more tools to take down the siege, not more stats to fight overwhelming numbers. They literally nerfed wall HP and siege damage, while buffing siege health, after HoT. I already suggested multiple options that would help outmanned defenders A LOT more than stats. Do note that Claim buff didn't exist pre-HoT and overall HoT just made both attacking (Stat buffs and upgrade times) and defending (Siege useless against shield gens, rams/catas too sturdy, acs do literally 0 damage and T3 walls are weak) more annoying. Especially since both are so much more rare these days because everyone already knows T3 keeps are just farming spots against pugs these days as you can't really have nice fights there anymore. My personal opinion is that whichever team originally designed WvW obviously put a lot of thought into things like upgrade times, passive stat strength (BL bloodlust), siege damage/health, population status and objective sturdiness, than whoever completely oblirated all that.

...20% extra damage and survivability... 20%? LOL Come on man, you can't just pick numbers out of thin air!Well precision and power have almost equal value in damage output and 200 power is between 6.66%-10% damage increase depending on how much damage you're running (between 2000 and 3000 power). While realistic number is more around 2500 power it would become 8%. So it isn't just pulled out of thin air but 10% is because minstrel players, that are dominant in groups, get way more than 10% from it. So yea 10% is for 2000 power which is about average of what your blob deals damage which. So total of 20% with precision. Now you can argue it is 15%, because some people tend to ignore the supports damage, but same point stands that is it too much as it varies from side to side. So in one location you have 15% more damage and survivability and in one location the enemy has. Doesn't seem very in line with competitive balancing. Now this applies fully to roamers but organised groups get little less hurt to it due to high stacks of might upkeep but regardless that might goes up and down due to corrupts and you can't assume the average to be above 14 might which will reduce the percentage from power but not precision. Of course people tend to go overly crit chance on Necros, weavers and Revs while ignoring things like borderlands bloodlust and claim buff while sacrificing 8% potential damage from their build just to get 100% crit chance while sacrificing lot of average DPS that the 230 potential precision would give you. So one 4th of the stats in claim buff aren't utilized fully by every group due to bad awareness of how frequent these stats are in WvW while being easily replacable by things like ferocity Now as you see, the numbers weren't pulled out of thin air. And I believe the phrase was UP TO 20% extra damage, which was true.

Well, I am guessing that is partly to fault the fact that being higher tier means nothing anything as the people, guilds and your tier changes every relinking, So some servers just didn't play off hours because points don't really matter as you will bounce up during relink anyways, which led to other servers having less fights and stopping as well. Relinkings are quite a big issue as it means either you game the system (f/e the 2 unlinked full servers on EU already left to empty servers leading to 2 stacked and 2 empty links) or you suffer for the consequences it causes. It just snowball effect because there are people that care about score but if score doesn't matter as your server pop/tier resets every 2 months anyways, WvW has less activity which snowballs into enemy servers having less fun. But yes, T1 is same in EU, very little off-primetime activity. However for us the observed solution is removing relinkings (but keeping amount of tiers) instead of making relinkings more frequent.

It is 8%+ damage and survivability for 1 side, it is enough to break high level in any game. Imagine 10% bonus for one side in any competitive game like AoE2, SC, OW, LoL, CSgo etc. Even sPvP. It is just busted which led to people stacking on a few servers just to overcome/enjoy (SM) it more. And if it would stop at 8% fine... But it becomes at least 20% difference within keeps and then that 20% difference can even swap sides depending on who owns the objectives. Basically as long as it exists, WvW is very one dimensional on who is the agressor and who isn't, there is no bouncing back and forth with epic comebacks. I do understand though it is hard concept to understand that it is actually twice as potent because it can swap sides while being passive buff that is hard to observe with anything else than empirical data.

You're 100% right, relinkings are not necessary, just linking low pop servers together would suffice. The population status FULL and transfer costs are already there to prevent/dismoralize overstacking so having relinks, that do not even do same job considering link servers stay open, is just redundant. So basically relinking every 2 months doesn't fix anything other than preventing servers from dying fully (and guilds would flock to those servers because they would be 500 gems until they get higher status) I feel like they mostly listen to the streamers, and those streamers are mainly GvG/sPvP that don't talk about things like why open tagging is dying and why relinks with having serverlinks open despite main server being full are bad for the longetivity of the gamemode. So WvW for average joe gets ignored. Wish they'd just play the gamemode and make their own decisions based on that. Just touching the combat balance isn't enough with so many glaring issues with the infrastructure. Combat balance is like a modern car and the infracture behind WvW is a bumpy unmaintained mountain road, needless to say the modern card would break. Current system just doesn't seem logical once you actually understand how commanders and server internal communication work.

My only idea in this thread was reducing claim buff and buffing active defences instead... Literally what you yourself typed. Section 5. Promoting Active Defences over passive ones suggests some ideas about how to buff defending so attacking doesn't get out of control. Do note that they did reduce AC damage, wall HP and other things after claim buff was introduced even though it was claim buff that made people so reluctant to play offensively unless in a stacked group. The same issue will exists until claim buff is removed or reduced close to nothingness. And please do not put words in my mouth, I never mentioned anything about karma training. don't think there is a single person out there who prefers karmatraining over good old long-term sieges. I wanted more fights around objectives and to have more linear and lenient difficulty scaling regarding location. Basically WvW should be more forgiving while also more interactive. I truly don't understand this karma train narrative that people have. As long as you play when sun is up after noon, tagging up to cap a few objectives is completely acceptable. If enemy gets a commander to match you, then you fight for mapcontrol and fun. But point is that someone needs to tag up first and enemy should have to match you, so there does need to be more incentive for people to tag up, if ktraining is what happens first hour before enemy matches you there is 0 reason to make it intolerable, just make it a bit slower while providing scouts more options to defend/slow enemy down. Losing and taking objectives sometimes is fine, acceptance of that only shows how much one likes wvw. As a commander it pains me when people really buy into this mainstream ktrain narrative, sometimes there just aren't enemies and you have to do something, not just wait for enemy to show up else you risk them waiting for someone to show up as well.

Yup, this is what they should do. Roaming has suffered from multiple things over the years but the occassional roaming scene from sPvP has completely died out as dueling around SM is nonexistant and no one is really interested in camps anymore. Its basically a spiral of causing bad experiences in WvW for some people often leads to other people not having enough activity and quitting as well. Lack of commanders also increases amount of gankers and hordes of unorganised camp defenders seeking thrills that old WvW gave them. But I do believe some people within roaming scene would be interested in proving they are the best at their class if it was still possible.

I do believe there is seed of truth within what you are saying but you must understand that there used to exist a scene between casuals and "Fight commanders" in the past. Just currently it is nonexistant because attacking enemy objectives and defending yours has such a stark contrast. Yes, people might not observe it was the claim buff, but they can still recognize patterns of action and result. Once a person is aware of claim buff and observe old commanders logging in to live nostalgia days of actions like "PUSH SM, ALWAYS!", it becomes quite a tragedy. This is not the kind of WvW they became commander for. WvW has become survival of the fittest and from deep love of WvW, some commanders chose to become take the ultra tryhard fight route and by doing so is the only way you could actually attack enemy objectives every day, get a challenge and guarantee you have something to do. Lot of commanders however quit because they were not interested in the dance of baiting enemy to come to your stats because once you cross a that claim buff line, they know the fight is lost and it won't be even close. And to keep up such a strong following, you would have to tag up nearly everyday which obviously isn't in everyones interests. What I am trying to say is that Claim buff is what forced the separation of "Fight commander" and "Random tag". Lot of the issues within WvW arise from the fact that people are logging in for nostalgia and to seek old glory days. The meta is just not good and long good fights between servers don't last over an hour but rather end once one side manages to cap the first contested objective. I would even claim that these old veterans wouldn't have sticked around for long if they started WvW in its current state. Minstrel stats were another mistake that was released with HoT which definitely makes small and large scale kind of.... uff....

Needless to say there can be no dueling scene with 1 side having massive stat advantage, and that varying by ownership of nearby objective, thus dueling died around SM and soon dozens of duelers per servers turned into a few of those. Beating a person with 3 extra sigils worth of stats will lead to you losing quite heavily when they have it, especially if they're not running movement speed runes (claim buff) and you are. So dueling scene around SM died and same happened to every other place. This extends to things like camp flipping because there used to be camp flipping and defender scene in the past. Escorting dolyaks to get supply and upgrades going was also very important because supply played essential role in defending, not just passive stats. So as a roamer, you were guaranteed action, if not by other roamers, then by upgraders/scouts. Current upgrade meta includes very rarely scouts defending camps and one might ask why: Because attacking is so scarce (claim buff) and siege isn't needed to defend; Only numbers. So roamers do not only die to much worse players, they also are running on desolate wastelands where very few really care about camps, dueling, defending, attacking or dolyaks. Overall claim buff just reduced WvW from 24/7 gamemode into very few hours due to defenders just needing numbers, not siege or upgrades, to match enemy combatwise.

Please, do reconsider how much 20% extra damage and survivability actually is. And it varies from side to side, so the difference is twice as potent and often leads WvW to stalemate between objectives. And do try to provide answer for following also: Do you really think sizable passive stat defences are good for WvW compared to active ones?

Hello everyone. Point of this post is to prove following things about claim buff: Overpowered stats: Gives too many stats thus affects outcome of battles directly. Basis for following arguments.Players shun attacking: Defending is much easier thus mainstream.Fights being less epic - Objective fights being reduced to only "points" and "farm" instead of epic largescale battlesCompetitive scene suffers Fights between High level guilds, blobs and roamers, even pugs, often end up coming down to the wire. Unseen locational variance kills motivation to become better making them quit the game.Promoting active defence > passive defence: There are better alternatives to keep attacking in lineNow those of you who played WvW before HoT and slightly after it, know that keep and tower fights were hourly occurance and often ended up in stronger side winning. Once a group managed to defend, he was often ready to take offensive instead of defensive like today. Commanders and guilds were more equally matched and things like Garri and EB keep were completely viable places to strike at while today they're suicide spots unless you're twice as strong as your enemy. Keeps were pre-sieged more and guilds fought each other inside objectives. Main difference however between this "Defending" and old "Attacking+Defending" meta however is the amount of cloud: Before you had no extra stats so to match enemy organisation, you had to organise yourself. 1. Overpowered statsLets see what claim buff itself gives: 100 power + 100 precision100 vitality + 100 toughness25% movement speedThis translates to ~8-10% power damage (depending if you're power dps or not)~5% more health and 100 armor (~ +10% survivability)Builds not requiring swiftness or other sources of speed (random builds are often viable defending)Now these don't seem like big numbers but do realise that it does mean that you have permanently 2 extra offensive sigils and 200 defensive stats (compare to stacking sigil). Needless to say, from sPvP we already know that 1 sigil already makes a huge difference in 1v1 or 5v5 fights if we consider the stats as 3 sigils, it wouldn't be weird to say that it affects all the way to 30v30 size considerably. Presence of the keepWith presence of the keep these difference becomes even more noticeable: 200 power + precision -> 17-20% extra damage200 Toughness+ Vitality -> Up to 20% extra survivabilityNeedless to say, as your players deal 17-20% extra damage and require 20% less support, it means 5v5s are actually 5v6s, completely impossible situation. Look at sPvP. 30 man guild fighting 30 man guild is actually fighting 36 man guild and if both are at level where neither messes up a lot, the side with the buff will win always. Do note that at high level people focus certain group of targets meaning boon removal isn't spread equally between everyone and the people you're damaging shouldn't have boons as long as you land the removals you got. 2. Players shun attackingWell as there is advantage to defending, it is the smarter thing to do. But what is your response after you wipe enemy at your objective? Is it that you're stronger? No, even if you don't understand that it was the claim buff stats, your experience will often show that difference between fighting at your corner and shifting towards attacking enemy SM is a huge difference and often leads to you becoming a corpse. So by past experiences, some players don't even bother trying it. So not only is it harder, you also lose people because "not defending is too hard". enemy vs allied objectiveSo lets say 30 man guild has amazing fights with 30 man guild at neutral spot, at enemy keep enemy will instead effectively have 36 players and beat you everytime. So they beat you and they should attack you after with their newly found morale right? But once they go to your keep, they're fighting against 36 players themselves and stand no chance. So summary of this is: At allied keep you should never lose against equally strong group unless you mess upAt enemy keep you can never beat them unless they mess upSo instead of WvW being this back and forth gamemode where one or two good players logging in can turn you from defensive into offensive, you literally need to get a dozen of good players for it to make a difference. You defend your keep and try fight enemy open field, but it doesn't work out. What changed? If you do not understand it is the claim buff and the fact that some people leave/afk instantly, due to past experiences, when you leave the objective, it only makes everyone in your group more frustrated as nothing seemingly changed. I only used 30 man guild as example but this affects small-scale, especially 1v1ers, slightly more. As top level player can never beat top level player that has 3 extra sigils in a fair fight. This means guilds often choose defensive playstyle which means they "bore enemy to attack them" to get this massive advantage. They never hit enemy keeps if enemy has a commander/guild on the map unless they're going for easy points. Defending also caters to lazy build making, while in sPvP people opt for mobility runes, in WvW often soloplayers run builds that do not have swiftness or other mobility. Then once they leave friendly objectives where it is easy to survive, they become fodder for the enemy. This means while good players often struggle unless on stacked servers, casuals are often happy just showing up when defending because thats the only thing their build can be decent at because the stats and movement speed provided. 3. Fights being less epicsNow that it has already been shown that going near enemy keeps leads into fights where you can easily lose against worse players. Now it was fine before claim buff because defenders had siege, respawns and ranged pressure to fend off enemies with multiple attempts. Defenders have multiple lives while attacker has only one while also having combat advantage that attackers can't remove So naturally this has lead into WvW being played around towers and camps, less meaningful objectives. Keeps give enemy 800 stats so a commander will always choose to fight enemy at where they have 400 stats instead. Then you might lose against weaker group. Now this weaker group with newfound morale pre-HoT would push your tower but now you will one-push them due to the 800 total stat swing and you will have to go back to enemy objective yourself for constant uphill. Overall, one can depicts pushing enemy objectives as stupidity, because you're climbing a 100 degree wall when hitting a keep. Very very unfun and only power that keeps people doing it is nostalgia and the fact that it worked far in the past. 4. Competitive Scene suffersOnly spots smaller and even larger groups can fight each other on equal ground, unless 3rd server has the objective claimed, are: NPCs on EBRuins on borderlandsIn front of enemy spawn Needless to say, with equally strong groups, one side having 3 extra sigils will always lead to the one with extra sigils winning. Then when you reverse the claim buff, the other side wins. Fights can't come down to a wire due to skill, but rather due to passive buffs. Obviously this means there can be no power hierarchy between any group that is below 30 players, I would even argue it affects up to 45 players. Which means legends are dead, there can be no roamer above all roamers, there can be no guild above all guilds anymore. Guild/roamer with 90% efficiency compared to another can match them. 5. Promoting active defences over Passive onesActive defences are related to things like time given for defender to respond, the potency of defender options and amount of those options. Attacker can play around tactics like emergency waypoint, in ways such as baiting them out with an attack and showing up while it is on cooldown, and take down enemy siege with ballistas and trebutchets before pushing in. Quite simply, defenders biggest advantage is time given. If acs hurt more, they do more damage to enemy siege thus attacker needs to breach in less time. If wall HP is increased, the attacker will take longer to breach and defenders will have more time to respond to the siege. So there are multiple ways to buff active defending: Making pre-sieging easier: More defensive siege, more options to respondIncreasing wall/gate HP: Increasing time to regroup, the attempts you have to kill enemy groups, taking down enemy siege and settings up defensive siegeBuffing defensive siege: While this is annoying in a way, attacker can somewhat play around them by meteor showering arrow carts and building ballistas, trebs, bubble rotations and such.Nerfing offensive siege: rams, golems and catas tend to survive 1 treb fire long enough to breach the gate/wall which wasn't the case pre-HoT. Siege HP but not damage to other siege was doubled in patch where condis were made to affect siege, which was an overlook by anet balance teamNerfing offensive strategies that shut down most defensive options such as quickness guild golems and shield generatorsSo there are better options to keep attacker in balance that give not only defender, but also attacker, more control over the situation. Instead of relying to a stat buff that neither side can interact with. This would not only increase the interaction between players but also how often it would occur as attackers would be more willing to take a fight at enemy objective. Basically brain over brawn and more action. Now a question rises to everyones mind: A: There is simple answer to this: Enemy was just much worse and disorganised. If they were truly organised and made very few mistakes, they would have never lost. Now ask yourself: A: You can simply find answer to this by gathering personal data how fights play out when enemy or your team shifts from defending to attacking. You will often notice close fights become onesided depending on a location. With this data, you will arrive into conclusion that there is no variance in who owns the claim buff if you get multiple epic close fights in a row. Meaning you're often locked at 1-spot. Do think about this: How should claim buff be touchedThere are some options: It could instead provide slight non-combat buffs like increased siege damage, activating gliding, lowered tactivator times, reduced amount of supply needed for siege etc. Things that enemy can play aroundThe stats could be reduced to a more reasonable level such as 30 stats each. This would revive high level competitive scene and claim buff could be used as small adjustment to give advantages to otherwise weaker enemy.The radius of it could be reduced: Half assed solution. Wouldn't make fights within more objectives more epic but only outside them. Would help openfield, duelers and roamers a lot.AfterwordsIt took me about a year after HoT to start breaking down how HoT changed WvW. WvW overall suffered from introduction of claim buff as high-level guilds, commanders and roamers slowly disappeared from the scene. Some can blame metachanges but the epic fights are still there, they might be hiding at only one spot on the map instead of multiple like beforehands. Fluidness of WvW suffered a lot thus leading to experienced people stacking on a few server to get same experience every day. Open commanders often have varying types of leading and ones that prefer offensive gameplay in a server that has a lot defensive ones often end up having a bad time due to players not being able to keep up with the skill required and opt for only guild activity these days. I truly believe claim buff, while seemingly irrelevant, is a plague within WvW and source of server stacking, as attacking now requires you being a LOT better than enemy combatwise, while also causing death of dueling/roaming scene. It pains me that the buff isn't spoken about more. Yes, you can play around it against weaker groups, but that isn't the point but rather the fact it affects how players act, how willing they're to attack/tag up, the server stacking and the kind of people left in the game. One of the worst thing that can be done to a man is take away his identity, which is what claim buff does with the variance it brings: Making one feel unsure where he ranks at. @Cal Cohen.2358 you said on Teatime that you read motly PvP forums so putting this here as you left it unclear if you read WvW ones

It is simple, just win every fight AND have a commander 20 hours a day. No problem. Fight servers are the perfect for PPTing because they can def every thing and reset most of the enemy ones. So fight servers just need to tag up more, surely they have lot of commanders. Casual servers put in extra hours to it because they can enjoy taking some empty keeps. Anyways, fight servers shouldn't complain about having no link. Now they can PPT as much as they want without getting bandvagoners.

Amazing! Figured these forums needed some positivity! Thanks. Faster response next time tho, please, we literally went though all 7 stages of grief on these forums

Several dragon banner threads a week for several months already. I don't understand why this thing isn't in their hotfix list already. Next balance patch is way too far away. I would like to add that spellbreakers remove boons and immobilize with CC meaning stunspam (dragonbanner 2) is also boon removal and immob spam. So just slight damage nerfs might not be enough as permastunning enemies and removing boons 3 times AoE every 8 seconds while stunning enemies is quite a lot of CC spam (dragonbanner 2).. Repeat after me: HOTFIX

From my experience, PvP is the key to getting good at the game. If you don't care about your PvP rating, you can play a similar build there and learn. Getting 5 or 6 big fights every 15 min is much higher frequency than what you would get in WvW.

Yes. Before the map capping test, during the first hour on reset days, we have map queues only in one and maybe two maps. Two map queues was very rare. And even then the queue is short, like less than 20. And, there are days where there is no queue at all on all maps just 30 mins after reset. Yesterday's reset? WOW!All maps were on queue and some even as high as 40+ in queue. I didn't know that 7 is such a magical number... edit: I told youu ♫ Queue isnt necessarily a bad thing. It means more people are enjoying WvW due to reduced lags. If it keeps up, some of The guilds and pugs will just go to a server with less qs. Also reset as overhyped event shouldnt be measurement for issues. How were qs on saturday Prime?

Think blue is the best colour. Both Durios and QL are fun places to fight around and inside. Can't really be spawncamped. Has an alpine BL as home bl, meaning enemy guild blobs will provide you some extra action. Green side is too cramped, has watery areas, there are gankers on cliff and the inner towers are protected by smaller chokes than blue ones.