Riba.3271

Anet pls hire this guy! Lol. Anyone can point out the problems. But this guy clearly has no idea how to solve the issues without breaking something else. For example reason why groups are rolling over maps is because gates are paper, boon golems are op, and shield gens block all the siege. So those should be targets changes. Reason why there are no opposing groups are objective auras: Competitive scene is dead. So that should a target of nerfs. He doesn't mention of these. Anyone can see the problems in WvW, but some people are just clueless. Some people are paid for being clueless about these same things they should fix 😉 They might even come up with restructuring, boon golems, shield gens, dragon banners or linking systems while being on a payroll.

EB isn't queued because playbase has gone up but because: - Defending is overpowered combat wise. EB has double the enemy teams, double the opposing commanders and double the enemy playerbase. So you get free wins more. On borderlands you would have to attack after defending once or twice. - Linkings cause it so that half players don't know borderland commanders, and this applies to enemies as well. So slowly borderlands commanders have been dwindling due to them and enemy having half the initial playerbase from usual. - Scoring doesnt matter. While defending is easy and essentially free kills: even againt boon zergs with right build, doing anything else on borderlands will just be very few enemies and just push your servers population status up. Then you get less populated link and reduced players for EB. Overall, removing linking servers is a great idea to fix EB issues as borderlands activity will recuperate and be more meaningful but EB isn't queued because population has increased. Just current server and objective aura systems promotes EB. These days if you want to play borderland, you will attack, and you will lose most fights... or get no fights... So remove objective auras AND linking system keeping reduced servers. Nerf shield gens and boon golems in addition to buffing objective HP, and siege damage to siege in return.

From the top of my head, the obvious ones are: 1. Objective Auras: There can be no fair fight when there are 800 stat swings even on open field (~25% damage). Of course players will opt to have 75% winrate, over 25% winrate, and now there are more people willing to defend than attack, and then that 75% winrate became 90% winrate. Yes, keep are still lost.. But only by bad players against good ones that have several times better builds, organised mindset and play more effective. Dueling also died because objective auras: WvW needs competitive combat support. Best guild or dueler should best guild or dueler everywhere, not become 10th best when enemy has 800 more stats and no siege around. 2. Shield Generators and boon golems: WvW siege balance is in joke state. Gates are weaker and golems can be given quickness now,. So they go down 2 times faster. Guild golems cost only 50 supplies and can have protection making them super tanky. To top it off, shield gens block all other siege: ballistas, trebs, acs, catapults, cannons, mortars. So the meta is just zerg rushing into lord room in 2 minutes.... And due to objective auras from point 1, they are in immense rush and will just get facerolled if there is defending zerg on map. EDIT: Oh yeah.. And siege HP was doubled against siege damage in the crit/condi patch. So golems and rams effectively take half the damage from other siege now, and siege damage to siege should be buffed by at least 30%. I know their intent was probably to make siege bit tankier, but doubling hp against siege was going little bit overboard. 3. God awful server systems. Linkings are terrible, World Restructuring is bad. We had perfect system of monoservers but there were just too many servers. So instead of keeping most logical and competitive system that kept strong communities, great transfer costs and player influence, they chose to ruin it for everyone. The fact is that they chose to make their game 10 times worse worse because they didn't want to make the logical choice of deleting servers due to bad press. 4. Desert map: Because no1 who wants a challenge will opt to go to map that has no enemies 90% of the time, so it is waste of space for most players and all it does is ruin scoring balance. It is just so much different from alpine that often server that would lose with alpine map, will win with desert map... Or vice versa. So obviously there can be no server rankings. Don't get me wrong, I am not saying youre not allowed to like desert. The problems are that it is too unpopular and different compared to alpines. Having 3 desert maps in same matchup would be fine, if it was close to as popular and wouldnt drop activity to half, but having mix of deserts and alpines is just not the way to go. At least then we would know who is the best server at the end of the matchup... Once monoservers from point 3 are returned 5.. Dolyak amount. While this is minor point compared to points 1-3., it is still important to point out as it affects the map state everytime you log in. With HoT keep and castle upgrades were required having same amount of dolyaks as towers . This was oversimplification of working system and the maps were not designed that way. Keeps upgrade several times faster now, and castles 10+ times. Double dolyaks required to upgrade keeps and quadruple for castles. It will still be intuitive and memorable system, but has better logic and balance behind it. Right now packed doylak is superior for everything: Upgrading and supply. So obviously it needs to specialize in supply and not count as 2 for upgrae.

You can't really critise devs so they think players are the problem. (Even this mention is at the edge of comment being removed) Yes, because GW2 playerbase is more childish than other games. They really need a reality check.

Siege and objective balance is pretty thrash right now. The developers are only focusing on skill balance. If you aren't great player yet, you kind of need to be carried by your server. So I would consider transferring to whatever server is outmanning you at the timezone you prefer to play at. Unless super coordinated then there isn't much to do with 10 people vs 40.

No, you're right. Mount should share endurance bar with player and gliding should be disabled when player is in combat. Defenders shouldn't have absolute safety in high ground. It is because they made combat balance completely skewed towards defenders. They don't only have respawn, increased player count and siege, but also +25% damage worth of stats. It has gotten to a point where equally strong groups don't try to take objectives from each other anymore. The defending blob or a guild just wins everytime unless they're completely outmatched. What they need to do is: Rebalance shield gens to 1 per spot and only bubble around them, so defending siege works Buff wall and gate hitpoints so defenders have more time Increase siege damage to siege by 50%, so defender siege does something. (Note: Originally siege did 100% more damage to siege but then they doubled siege hitpoints and forgot to buff siege vs siege damage) Make golems not affected by boons again since Quickness + Protection golems make attacking attempts unstoppable. Remove gliding in combat since it skews combat Rework objective aura to not provide combat stats since it skews combat Increase upgrade time of Stonemist castle by 200% dolyaks. Packed dolyak should only count as 1 dolyaks for upgrade. Reduce duration of banner tactivators to 5 minutes So there are significant amount changes required for both defending and attacking. This will be about net positive for defenders since they have more time to gather numbers, but also much more fun for attacking groups since they can have better battles and aren't in a rush to capture objective before equal amount of defenders show up.

Well, I guess they would young people with passion for that. It is exactly what the game needs to maintain decent balance and competitive environment though. If someone puts a new artist in front of Mona Lisa and tells them to improve it, they will probably have less suitable ideas than master Leonardo D Vinci himself. Basically the issue with current devs is that they originally didn't create the game or the gamemode, so their ideas do not suit what WvW stands for or was originally loved for. You take anything that is wrong with WvW: Shield gens, SM upgrading in 2 hours, Objective Auras, Dragon Banners, Gliding in Combat, Server Linkings or many more, and original devs would have thrown them straight into thrash can. All of those work to destroy competitive environment regardless of location and to reduce rewarding strategical mind. Don't get me wrong, they added equally amount of good things into the game. But the difference with GW2 devs and succesful games with regular balance patches like TFT, LoL and Fortnite, is that they're also willing to take ideas that didn't work out of the game. PvE way of developing where players can just avoid content they don't like, just doesn't work for WvW: You also have to remove and rework some content you add.

Won't change the fact that 50% boon duration + 75% power DPS+ super tankiness will always be better tankier and more damaging than all damage gearsets. Won't change the fact that blobs are still 40-60% Minstrel players. Cele only became super powerful after they added 50% boon duration so removing boon downtime and increasing amount of might stacks in addition to 50% condition duration so +50% potential condition damage and CC to it for free. Cele used to grant 25% more total stats than 4-stat sets, now it is 60%. 37%/76% more against 3-stat sets. So they more than doubled the incentive to choose Celestial stats over anything else.

Gotta admit this system is pretty awful. No matter how well the server are paired up together doesn't change the fact that even greatest chef can't make a decent meal with rotten ingredients. Delete linking system, fix balance and make all scenes of WvW flourish again.... Or release Guild Wars 3 because you already seem to be over this game...

And you proposed a tiny reduction in boon duration. So run two of them then 🤷‍♂️ Intent of the changes isn't to make other sets unplayable, just reduce cele/minstrel proportionate amount from 40%-60% of players to 20-40%. If half people on your server are playing optimally minstrel in group play, and cele in roaming play, there is hardly much build diversity when you think that rest of the players are split between all other viable sets. It is like Desert map is only a huge problem for scoring balance because of it having half the activity of other borderlands, but if it had same activity then it wouldn't be as big of a problem. Now if people choose to play 2nd firebrand, which is also completely viable strategy right now, then let them. But there are better 2ndary supports that provide difference bonuses (Alac, Auras, Damage reduction, stealth, superspeed, cleanse) as long as you play around timing of your boons.

703 concentration is only 703/15 = 46.9% boon duration as it is. It's already less than your "nerfed" boon duration.. Why aren't you targeting the boon duration from runes and sigils and food instead? Those are overtuned anyway, especially the runes. True, that is also another reasonable request to balance runesets between each other, but changing those have certain issues: 1. It will affect PvE and PvE is developers favorite child 2. Are low boon duration builds really a problem everywhere? Isn't roamer being able to choose between having 15-20% boon duration and none actually build diversity? 3. It will only make Celestial/Minstrel even stronger compared to other sets (Less boon duration => More proportionate increase from boon duration) If they're willing to forego PvE for it, this request can also be done to runes alongside since it is true that Runes that provide % boon duration provide much more stats than corresponding runes of other stats (5% boon duration =75 stats, 10% = 150 stats, 15% = 225 stats, much more after change), so those are also reasonable to tune down across gamemode. But it will only make Celestial/Minstrel even stronger. TLDR: Both of the following can be done: 1. Concentration effectiveness down tuned down in WvW 2. Boon duration runes now provide concentration corresponding to other similar runesets instead of boon duration everywhere but doing only 2nd one will only fix rune balance and make Minstrel/Celestial stronger.

Overall, that sounds like a great result. Minstrel will be significantly weaker and will be mixed with other concentration stats that are not being used right now. Amount of minstrel will go down and other concentration sets will go up. Other concentration sets are weak because they are ill designed for competitive modes. Minor healing power just cannot be considered for either roaming or group play. Should they add ones add that work in WvW or rework ones that aren't popular in PvE either? Definitely they should. Yes you're right. Cele was completely viable to mix in certain builds before Concentration and Expertise were added to it. But since it was changed without any regard to WvW, your expectation should be the same: PvE will always be prioritized over WvW. Minstrel and how many people are using pure minstrel is also a problem. Boon duration is just too strong of a stat and minstrel provides it for basically free: both healing power and toughness as major stat as healer would want. DPS players at least mix marauder/dragon/berserker/toughness DPS. So they make cognitive choices. Overall, forcing minstrel and celestial to be weaker to be comparatively weaker to all other sets being used in WvW is already a great result. Yes, some unused sets which are like raccoons in a cagefight alongside lions and tigers, that were designed like garbage will also get nerfed alongside. But the result will be great. Lol that changes nothing just stack another player. Actually, it isn't that simple. Because Firebrand isn't replacable and running 2 of them is considered excessive amount of same boons. If we look at total amount of stats that a average boon firebrand would need to sacrifice for same durations. Current boon duration is 71.9% and concentration 703. Change in boon duration will be 703/15-703/25 = 18.7 %. So final boon duration will be 53.2%. What does this mean to total boon duration necessary to make up for it: 18.7 % * 25 concentration/% = 467.5 concentration So we are talking about 470 stats worth of concentration. That is 4 700 hitpoints of survivability or 15+% of your total healing you will have to sacrifice for same boon durations. I would say that is very significant since there are lot of times you or your allies survive with low hitpoints. Now this was for pretty low boon duration build that is pretty close to average Celestial roaming build. But there are builds out there with even higher boon durations and if you want 100% boon duration with boon duration runes you would have to get 625!!!! more concentration. That is 6 250 hitpoints. Absolutely gamebreaking amount. If a build loses 4 700 to 6 250 hitpoints worth of stats, is that not a signicant nerf? So don't downplay the impact since mathematics has a baseball bat ready if you do. Note: I use vitality and hitpoints in my examples because it is stat easiest for average joe to understand

Reducing base durations of certain skills is not that simple, because it will affect all builds running the same skill. While it might be strong skill that provides boons, boosting it with boon duration will reach to insane upkeeps on that boon. Every build that runs cele/minstrel has certain boons that are close to 100% uptime, or slightly above it. If that 90-100% suddenly becomes 70-80%, it increases openings your opponents can take increase significantly. Now there will still be builds that can reach 100% uptime with those boons, but they will have to run concentration as major stat, and sacrifice more for that luxury. Now intent isn't to make cele or minstrel builds unplayable, just drop their powerlevel and winrate to a more approriate level.

None of such builds have been seen in years in roaming or group meta so in practice this doesn't matter.Viper is just worse than Grieving in WvW where enemies cleanse regardless. It is true Trailblazer saw some usage at some metas, but its main issues are the amount of cleanse in the game, not the fact that its burning or chills only last 4 seconds instead of 5 seconds. Enemy has to cleanse them anyways if they don't want to die. Yes, boon duration is problem because putting it in your build has no tradeoff. Minstrel has the best major stats: Healing power and Toughness, for healer. Celestial got around 50% extra boon and condition duration for free in attempt to make it viable in PvE. It already had viable builds in WvW. You are incorrect there won't be incentive since currently you can easily reach 100% boon duration with any class without running boon duration as major stat. But after change, you will have to forego Minstrel and Celestial to do so. This includes almost all the unused concentration sets you listed earlier (3-stat sets or 4-stat set with major concentration). The other stat sets that provide boon duration are unplayable because they provide bad stat combination. For example healing power that plaguedoctor provides is not even remotely worth putting in your build because there is no good condition damage/boon duration set that also provides toughness to make the healing more effective. So if you want plaguedoctor to be viable, you will have to ask them separately to change Vitality into Toughness. You can easily add your ideas how to make each of these stat sets more viable in WvW within a comment in this thread. This would be considered unreasonable request, because PvE has much larger playerbase than WvW and main reason celestial was overbuffed was to make it viable in PvE. So it isn't possible unless the gearset provides different amount of stats in each gamemode, which we haven't witnessed regarding anything: Runes, Foods and Gearsets. Everything indicates it would require vast amount of effort to make gear stats transform depending on gamemode. Having concentration and expertise adjusted globally would also be global change so easier for playerbase to memorize, apply and be communicated to. After all, one main factor between GW2 systems is their simplicity to understand them. If you demand playerbase to know that celestial was nerfed specifically in WvW, it would be unreasonable request, whereas reduced boon amounts is easily perceiveable or added to somewhere in the UI. Since boon durations are bigger issue in WvW (just read other threads), increasing price of running it in excessive amounts overall across the board is reasonable solution. You can still easily reach 35-50% bonus boon duration with runes and traits. But above that you should have to start paying a steep price instead of us having statsets where concentration isn't even main stat (celestial, minstrel) reach the boon duration cap. It doesn't matter if its minstrel, celestial, plaguedoctor or randomgearset X, if it has no concentration main stat, it shouldn't reach 100% boon duration with couple of infusions, consumables and runes. You're sacrificing too little for so much. Overall I put lot of thought into it, and this is the best way to adjust the most overpowered gearsets and amount of excessive boons in WvW without it being too much effort or overcomplicated. We can't just change 2 gearsets stats in 1 gamemode because it will be complex and difficult. Doing a global change across the gamemode that has problems with it is the easiest and transparent way to do it.

2 changes 1% boon duration per 15 concentration ➡️ 1 % boon duration per 25 concentration in WvW 1% condition duration per 15 expertise ➡️ 1% condition duration per 25 expertise in WvW Perks Won't affect builds with low amounts of boon duration/condition duration from runes/traits Won't affect PvE and is easy implement. Also balances Minstrel which 40 to 60% of party members have been running since its release. Even lazy dev has energy to do this change on a good day

Well, pure boonball that has no ranged counter, became a thing around time they made heal scrappers overpowered. Since then groups have been having so much cleanse, heals and superspeed that pulsing fields can't keep up. Scrapper got even replaced with holosmith that has better superspeed upkeep with no target cap and heal vindis that can heal more reliably without having to spam 1. Ofc we had some pretty heavy melee metas like HoT with cele reapers, heal tempests and dwarf elite heralds, but herald hammer spikes and meteor showering eles were still capable of downing some people and stop bigger engages: superspeed and heals were still limited back then. Funnily you can also see how meta has changed tighter and tighter by looking at the range of skills: Healers Tempest (Shouts/Auras: 600 heal/buff radius) -> Scrapper (Gyros: 360 heal/buff radius) -> Vindicator (Dodge: 300 radius) Main Stab Guardian (Shouts/Virtues: 600 support radius) -> Firebrand (Mantras: 180 support radius) DPS Ele/Herald (1200 range damage) -> Scourge/Reaper/DH (600-900 range damage) -> Holosmith/Berserker/Vindi (Melee damage) Of course there were some staff thieves, melee berserkers and DPS scrappers in some longer range metas, but those weren't really ran in large amounts.

Why do they keep doing this again: Adding new mechanics without ever fixing the old? Do they really think that the temporary player spikes from adding literally any weird new stuff into the gamemode bring in more money than actual balance and players having more fun? Please, just get a vision for WvW.

Riba, so do these outpace your normal defense buffs issues? ? Defense stat buffs are in the list for killing competitive scene (Dueling, top guilds, iconic blob commanders). But do not misunderstand, I have been also advocating for defending siege to do something and defenders having more time to gather up. So it is mostly promoting active defences, that require attention from both sides, and long-term sieges over passive defences, that no one can interact with, and lord room rushing.

Hammer has 5 AoE skills with CC, immob or chill (Hammer 4 refreshes 2 skill). It also upgrades all other CC skills to heal you. Notable mentions are Sanctuary, Line of Warding and Bow 5. It also upgrades Hammer 2. So it serves as offensive trait too. Now Absolute Resolve is great, but you must not forget that the extra heal only applies if the skill isn't on cooldown.

If you don't make any changes then people will opt for unkillable builds just to have only Draws and Wins on their record. Draw = No rating lost, Wins = Rating gained.

Draw doesn't make sense. Just do it like Tekken where lower health % at the end of the timer loses. Following changes would also be preferred: Increase revealed debuff duration by 100% Reduce all sources of endurance by 25% Reduce healing/barrier by 20% and cap heals to 200% of your health bar with maximum health reflecting that down to 50%: If you heal 4% of max health then your max health will be 99% of the original amount, if maximum of 200% then it will be 50% and you cannot heal anymore. Why is max HP reduction needed? So there is clear winner at the end and you can't cheese win just by healing final second. It also works as indicator for how close you or your enemy is to the healing cap.

WvW is at its worst because: - Burst damage sources are more reliable now (Holosmith) - Boons last forever (almost +100% boon duration is easily attainable) - Boonrips can only deal with above mentioned boons when chained with other players. Meaning it is purely combo meta where fights end super fast. -Quickness (and alacrity) are easy to access boosting damage further (Alac will be adressed in next patch). - AoE superspeed upkeep makes fights too easy to start in addition to skill ranges and radii too small compared to their original design. - Any competitive scenes are dead because objective auras. Interrupting duels and defending are too easy. You simply cannot find competitive timezone, because that competitiveness is tied to location. Example: 1vs1s have 20% damage swings against same opponent with same build depending on who owns nearby objective. It is impossible to be considered the best because 2nd best player or guild is at most 5% worse than you. - Any meaningful communication has difficulties to develop due to how often the server changes: Links, Transfers, Language issues. Find a good timezone? It will be gone in maximum month because all servers change noticeably. How to fix it is quite simple: Nerf holosmith, nerf boon duration stat, nerf AoE quickness applications, nerf superspeed applications, replace objective aura stats with something that doesn't affect combat and return monoserver system. There are quite a few other things wrong with WvW as well before it can be considered scene with any longetivity, but these are the main ones to adress.

Which then begs the question of why avoid commitment to those strong ones already created? Regardless of system available, you can gather 500 people and go to server you want. The main differences are that you can't choose your team or competition, and that you cannot get to know more people outside your initial group well. Another example is that lets say you have a primetime focused group, but you also prefer to play in the morning. Then obviously you would like to get to know people around you then as well. And maybe have some long lasting positive impact from your words and guidance. What you're saying is not an argument at all. What if they made WvW into empty rooms and you could choose who you go with? Yes, you can optimize your personal experience, but it wouldn't be very fun.

Howso though? Servers are just collections of players who benefit from not having strong ties with anyone. There is zero incentive to develop strong ties with anyone. Forum gets filled with these types of posts where someone claims to be a solo player but they like grouping up with others. Like, OK? That's not solo play. I think its more so that if your team changes too often, any social ties don't have enough time to become strong ones. Yes, were all new and don't know anyone at some point. But eventually we learn peoples names, and who works towards same goals. It isn't like you walk to a guy at a gym and youre suddenly best buddies. Servers need to be stable. The environment needs to be stable. If timezone you share with some players changes drastically because your team has guild or server X, there is high chance you or any potential friends will change their timezone preference. You can't compare WvW server with other games where teams are matchmade, because your teams are forever. Even if they're strangers, you will get to know them a little. It is like going to school, you will typically make some friends. Whereas if its random course that lasts a couple weeks, it is unlikely.

All it needs to be is 10-15% of playerbase moving constantly to play with 2 specific servers in region, and they can easily have almost twice the number advantage. Also do you think bandvagoners can read? 🤭 Maybe if you made the poll in rap song filled with excessive swearing, it might reach them?