Silinsar.6298

The more you're focused on passive sustain, the more you're building to fight outnumbering your opponent, not to be outnumbered. Defensive stats don't scale well to defend against multiple opponents, but they provide the critical mass / sustain to not die quickly when you are outnumbering others and eventually beat them / get more reinforcements. If you are playing outnumbered and in situations you are less likely to get help from other players than your opponents, it's in your best interest to end fights quickly - and most cele builds end up on the more defensive end of the spectrum. Basically, there's two build philosophies: Build as little defense as possible (only as much as you need to fight certain specs), and as much offense as possible as you can manage, or build as little offense as you need (which is a lot less if you're bringing more players that coordinate focus fire) while being as survivable as possible.

Could be leftovers from a duel circle hanging around to chat, otherwise you'll find most good roamers roaming 😄

That's why I said just avoid / go around others if you don't wanna fight. Not chasing someone who's obviously doing that. But there's plenty of lowranks that will come straight at you or engage with objectives and then get mad when you attack them.

Yet the first advice new players usually get is "join a tag". And imo, it's bad. I don't know when exactly it changed, but back in my days new players were first advised to practice the basics (dodging, stun break, boon / condi metagame, combo system) in sPvP / unranked and taught how to avoid ganks. Raid and GvG guilds would even "simulate" them (have 1-2 thieves jump a squishy backliner) in a private server while spectating and giving them tips. You also learned to take a different path altogether when you knew there was someone around preying on respawners or waited until a few more people respawned to travel together. Now everyone just tries to ride right through you with their Warclaw even when they're on their own and expects to be left alone. Look around, use Sniff, take a little detour. Don't approach players you don't want to fight. And it's easier than ever to pack some sustain / quickly switch build to travel. That way you're denying them the opportunity to learn and encourage false expectations. Done that for years - Now I think it's better to teach people how to handle the situation or avoid it. I attack most players (since they won't shy away from ganging up on you either as soon as they have the numbers) but I usually let them self res if they're low-ranked. Still, there's smurfs/alts and sPvP folks in WvW, and Diamond ranks that seem to have never needed their dodge key. Rank's just an inaccurate representation of a player's smallscale experience so you never know how well prepared someone is until you fight them.

Bottom line is: either you learn how to fight popular meta specs with whatever you're running, play them yourself, accept your disadvantage or simply take a break from the game. If you're not willing to do any of those you end up a forum warrior.

At least when it was about possible exploits regarding skills and items in WvW, I have reported some via the ingame report form and they have been quietly (w/o any patch notes as far as I could tell) fixed sooner, later or not at all yet. Regarding bigger design changes I was one of the first people on the old forums throwing around the idea of stacking stability (mind this was long before boon blobs), and there was plenty of discussions around retaliation back then too, which may or may not have influenced ANet's decisions about changing it. In the end players can raise concerns or point out bugs, but they should never design the fixes imo. Those are for ANet to figure out and decide on. I'm sure ANet is well aware of controversial / popular topics in the playerbase (and streamers propagate those), but rarely we get to know if, what and when they're going to do something about them.

As much as I'd like them to fix this, unless you know their tools, processes and current implementation it might be more complicated than you think. It would be nice if they told us what is stopping a fix from being implemented though.

What changed? The Q pop timer?

Nothing new or special, was possible long before WB with other specs.

That's what I was saying and why I put "middle" in parenthesis and specified "at least somewhere inbetween". The forums represent the people who feel the need to share that they (dis)like something who are still invested in the game. Yes, that can be negative-leaning, but at least they still care. The game is full of people rather playing it. The people who were turned away don't show up anywhere anymore. I do think the forums sit inbetween those two.

That the ingame experience is biased as well - and the forums are probably closer to a "middle" (or at least somewhere inbetween) ground when it comes to the reception of the world restructuring. Your previous comments made it seem like you think of the ingame feedback as the more accurate one.

Just saying that players ingame aren't the "objective" truth or accurate reference either. At least people coming to the forums are still interested & invested in the game enough to take the time to voice their concerns. The ones most disappointed and non-approving aren't the ones you're gonna see anywhere, because they left quietly.

It's no surprise that people ingame are leaning towards a more positive view because those who do not like the current state of things are less likely to be playing (as much) right now. People going to a concert probably like the band playing it.

Afaik this can happen legitimately due to someone having and accepting a Q pop mid combat.

What you're describing sounds so much better than 50 man blobs. However, it's still summer, after an expansion, there's less community commanders because there's no server communities anymore and the matchmaking doesn't take into account organisation or playstyles as far as I know. So you could have just landed in an alliance that has fewer commanders and zerglings.