Why is roaming dead? what happened?

[Firebeard.1746]

I used to roam, before I found a group. Going solo in WvW is just asking to get ganked, and I feel keeping my participation bar up is more difficult. The smaller objectives give less time before you lose participation and they don't give as much. A few bad ganks can kill your participation bar if you can't kill anyone first, which often happens when you run around solo and there's blobs everywhere. 

I will say that a guild isn't out of the question for you: I can almost never make my current guild's start times, but they run long enough I can often hop in at the end of a run, which I do occaisionally. This isn't raiding where the party easily fills and there's no space for you to join later.. You can jump in in the middle and your rewards are the same. Also, i found my guild roaming. They let me join them and invited me to their guild. Even when I roam nowadays, i look for groups to follow. Alot of groups run parties or private tags and you find them by watching what's going on in the map. 

Edited November 16, 2021 by Firebeard.1746

[azizul.8469]

why ? because Anet incentivise zerging and punish roaming that's why. removing outnumbered pip is an example.....

[Shiyo.3578]

Step1 to making roam more popular would be disabling any "main" toughness stat gear in WvW. Trailblazers, minstrels, etc.

 

Trailblazers builds are insanely easy to play while being insanely effective and extremely difficult to beat 1v1.

Minstrels just simply doesn't belong in this games combat.

[Shiyo.3578]

On 11/1/2021 at 7:24 AM, Skada.1362 said:

Thieves and stealth ruined roaming. Anyone who actually roamed knows this.

They are and have been, for years,  a far bigger issue than degen condi bunker builds. 

And no, pepega watchtowers and sentries aren't enough to "fix" it.

Destroy the d/p set and shadow arts and roaming will improve for literally every player in the game. 🙂 Thieves would still have infinite disengage using the most overloaded skill in game, Shadowstep, and other oh kitten buttons like Skill storm, so do not worry you are still gonna be perfectly safe. Imagine if Thief players would l2p s/d again.. amazing!

This is true, it's true in SPvP, too. If your build gets farmed by thief, it's useless.

This is the reason Thief has dictated the SPvP meta since alpha.

[Justine.6351]

58 minutes ago, Shiyo.3578 said:

Step1 to making roam more popular would be disabling any "main" toughness stat gear in WvW. Trailblazers, minstrels, etc.

 

Trailblazers builds are insanely easy to play while being insanely effective and extremely difficult to beat 1v1.

Minstrels just simply doesn't belong in this games combat.

Aka add damage back to skills.

[Heimskarl Ashfiend.9582]

On 10/26/2021 at 3:38 AM, Clownmug.8357 said:

Can't really say it's dead if you have opponents to fight but you don't like that there are too many. I do get where op is coming from though. Roaming isn't fun when the mind set of stacking advantages in terms of number of players, coordination, and build composition to create uneven fights is becoming more prevalent.

That's called Strategy. People have just gotten better at having a strategic mindset and going after every possible advantage available to force the odds of victory into their favor. Like anyone involved in warfare should be doing. All's fair in love and war.

Then, they've also learned the tactics to make that strategy effective on the ground. 

It's a natural progression and to be expected. Particularly when there are such stark balance differences between the classes.

On 10/29/2021 at 1:44 AM, Aeolus.3615 said:

...Thing is most players dont want real risk/reward  builds  they wan reward with low risk....9 

I don't know if that is accurate. Personally I think the most players you are referring to have been insta-gibbed by roamers or small scalers, which is not fun for them, and since they cannot compete on a reflex/ping/experience level, they have to go up in defense to even consider running around out there. 

[Abyssisis.3971]

Stealth, warclaw, terribad balance and general lack of support from devs all contribute to the sad state of the game.

[Clownmug.8357]

8 hours ago, Heimskarl Ashfiend.9582 said:

That's called Strategy. People have just gotten better at having a strategic mindset and going after every possible advantage available to force the odds of victory into their favor. Like anyone involved in warfare should be doing. All's fair in love and war.

Then, they've also learned the tactics to make that strategy effective on the ground. 

It's a natural progression and to be expected. Particularly when there are such stark balance differences between the classes.

 

Yeah, that's why people think it's dead. Treating it like war rather than a game kills all the fun.

[Heimskarl Ashfiend.9582]

16 minutes ago, Clownmug.8357 said:

 

Yeah, that's why people think it's dead. Treating it like war rather than a game kills all the fun.

Do they flip the board and whine when someone puts a Hotel on Mayfair too?

[Clownmug.8357]

1 hour ago, Heimskarl Ashfiend.9582 said:

Do they flip the board and whine when someone puts a Hotel on Mayfair too?

 

Lol, no I think they just stop playing and find something better to do with their time.

[Dagger.2035]

I wonder if there are others like me who only have Ultimate Dominator and God of WvW left to unlock.  Roaming won't allow me to finish these achievements.  I used to love roaming defensively to upgrade objectives or roaming offensively to ninja objectives, but all of that is a waste of time now since winning doesn't matter.  The game balance has also become more casual friendly with tons of damage spam.  This makes larger groups more effective and finishing of downs more difficult.  Outnumbered fights pre-Hot were more easy to win since auto attacks could be ignored and you just had to pay attention to avoid CC and high damage skills.

[Jables.4659]

On 11/17/2021 at 8:27 AM, Dagger.2035 said:

Outnumbered fights pre-Hot were more easy to win since auto attacks could be ignored and you just had to pay attention to avoid CC and high damage skills.

I remember saying something similar to this to a friend on discord and I believe his reply is worth considering.  It was something to this effect:

"The average player roaming around WvW is considerably better than the average player was back when the game was new.  There are a lot of salty veterans around, and newer players have the benefit of resources like metabattle to make sure that their build is at least semi-competitive."

He wasn't saying that the average player is amazing at the game, just that they're generally not so useless that you're going to be able to take on more than 2 or 3 of them at once.  I do believe that its easier in 2021 for a terrible player to deal damage to a better player than it was back in 2012-2014.  That said, do we really want to go back to the balance of those days?  I watched some solo roaming footage from 2013 recently, and I was kind of shocked at how slow most of the fights were.  D/D Elementalists that hardly take damage and slowly whittle away the enemy with their 2000 power and 650 condition damage.  Staff Sword/Sword Mesmers that run in circles summoning phantasms and wait for them to land kills.  HGH Engineers kiting around until they build up enough might to start tickling you. 

[subversiontwo.7501]

1 hour ago, Jables.4659 said:

I remember saying something similar to this to a friend on discord and I believe his reply is worth considering.  It was something to this effect:

"The average player roaming around WvW is considerably better than the average player was back when the game was new.  There are a lot of salty veterans around, and newer players have the benefit of resources like metabattle to make sure that their build is at least semi-competitive."

He wasn't saying that the average player is amazing at the game, just that they're generally not so useless that you're going to be able to take on more than 2 or 3 of them at once.  I do believe that its easier in 2021 for a terrible player to deal damage to a better player than it was back in 2012-2014.  That said, do we really want to go back to the balance of those days?  I watched some solo roaming footage from 2013 recently, and I was kind of shocked at how slow most of the fights were.  D/D Elementalists that hardly take damage and slowly whittle away the enemy with their 2000 power and 650 condition damage.  Staff Sword/Sword Mesmers that run in circles summoning phantasms and wait for them to land kills.  HGH Engineers kiting around until they build up enough might to start tickling you. 

Old and new players, the OP

I'm not sure what you're talking about here. For the first thing I think you need to keep in mind that there are balance issues and one should not conflate balance issues with salty vets or whatever. There are probably alot of salty vets just passing time in pickups waiting for attention to WvW, balance patches or Alliances that are far better than people assume them to be.

I pointed to some of this on page one replying to the OP. The OP essentially had two complaints about roaming. The first was that he did not see many roamers anymore and the second was that roamers would engage him up to 4's and 5's (ie., small party roaming or skirmishing). He just could not piece together that he sees less people roaming because they play the same classes as he does or that he sees other classes in pre-organised parties because of the balance between those classes at what he does. It is simply people adapting to reality (join them, scale up), perfectly reasonable responses in a mode like WvW that you see everywhere. It is as close to an objective answer as you get.

Old and new balance

Everything else you describe here is what the stat-balance already is and what the stat-balance has been for most of this game's existance. If someone wittles away their enemy over time that is called a condition build. If someone is building up boons to fight that is a boon build (ie., celestial or whatever). Then there are power builds and if more classes do not play power builds maybe that says something about the balance. All these people who run hot for the pre-2019 meta do that without realising that it was an exception to the norms and it had broad balance implications for how to gear or how more populated areas of the game played.

Even for smaller scale it was getting to the point where quite alot of things that did damage even overshot kills by the two- or threefold. There are definitely balance concerns to talk about now too but the damage-to-raw-tank (HP/DR) is generally not a problem now and most power damage builds do sufficient power damage to that. People tend to argue that there is not enough power damage either because they are simply not good enough to deal it (this includes both solo and group; those new players overestimating themselves) or because there are other balance issues that the feb'19 patch did not adress that have not been adressed yet (certain specific mechanics that inflate tanks well beyond raw figures and healing).

The forums and roaming threads

As for everything else in this thread. I've been staying away from the "roaming" threads for a while now simply because over the last few it dawned on me that people just talk about different things and have no (or their own) conceptions of what the term implies. People seem to think that these words are descriptions of what someone is and they are looking for an identity in them. They are rather descriptions of what someone does so there are distinctions between things like duelling, roaming, scouting, stocking/defending/ptting, clouding, raiding (skrimishing and scrimmaging have their own fun interactions with "skrim" or how it distinguishes from "GvG" as the difference is more important than most people understand), havoc (which can be havoc on map and havoc on tag), pickups (where zerging and blobbing have their own descript roots as terms) etc.

So it becomes somewhat wasteful trying to talk roaming in a thread where many posts talk about running dolyaks to a tower, which has no connection to the original definition of roaming what so ever, beyond possibly both being small scale activities. So, ultimately it dawned on me that most people were not really talking to me or arguing a different side of the point. They were arguing completely different points and the confusion mostly stems from that people believe that some of these terms have negative connotations so they don't want to call themselves something that better describes what they are concerned about.

I waste my time bring that up because it ties back to the real topic. If you strictly speak roaming and differentiate it from duelling then the balance of eg., a Thief and a Warrior (two traditionally popular roaming classes) is such now that any Warrior - even if they are golden god, a gift to mankind - does not bridge the balance gap to catch just a somewhat competent Thief by playing well. Doing that hinges on mistakes on Thief's part. Ultimately that balance affects behaviour in whether people roam or not, whether people roam on the same things or not and whether people scale up to bridge that gap into better balanced content. It also affects behaviour in how positively they impact the game mode (what sort of ease and place should ganking something 5v1 or w/e have in a mode like WvW). Tellingly, the OP is concerned about facing 1v5's on his preferred classes, but does not consider the balance of 5v1 in his classes' favour. That proverbial Warrior is a lot worse as a ganker 🙂 . That is not explained by assuming that old Warriors were never good or new Thieves quickly get good due to meta sites. That view is oddly pervasive.

Ed. Even if I need to edit this to fairly point out that's not how Jables implied it, as he notes below.

Edited November 22, 2021 by subversiontwo.7501

[Telgum.6071]

On 11/17/2021 at 7:48 AM, Abyssisis.3971 said:

Stealth, warclaw, terribad balance and general lack of support from devs all contribute to the sad state of the game.

You are misspelling Trailblazer and condition spam.

[TrollingDemigod.3041]

9 minutes ago, Telgum.6071 said:

You are misspelling Trailblazer and condition spam.

No, he used language that is very rare on this forum, it's called "facts", something you know little of.
He also wrote "terribad balance", that pretty much can mean anything including condi spam and trailblazer.

[Jables.4659]

6 minutes ago, subversiontwo.7501 said:

I'm not sure what you're talking about here.

My comment was specifically aimed towards the person I quoted.  The original point I was making is that balance isn't the only reason that 1vX fights are more difficult to win than they used to be.  When you took a 1v3 back in 2012, every single player in the encounter had been playing the game for less than a year.  If you were a player who put a lot of time into the game, it was easier to dominate because you were effectively always fighting new players. 

[subversiontwo.7501]

4 minutes ago, Jables.4659 said:

My comment was specifically aimed towards the person I quoted.  The original point I was making is that balance isn't the only reason that 1vX fights are more difficult to win than they used to be.  When you took a 1v3 back in 2012, every single player in the encounter had been playing the game for less than a year.  If you were a player who put a lot of time into the game, it was easier to dominate because you were effectively always fighting new players. 

Ah fair enough. I'd agree with that. At the same time, never underestimate unmotivated players today 😄 .

[Telgum.6071]

3 minutes ago, TrollingDemigod.3041 said:

No, he used language that is very rare on this forum, it's called "facts", something you know little of.
He also wrote "terribad balance", that pretty much can mean anything including condi spam and trailblazer.

I love how in every comment you quote me you always talk about "facts". The Trolling Demigod, true to its name, standing for condition spamming but moaning about stealth.

[Dagger.2035]

6 hours ago, Jables.4659 said:

The average player roaming around WvW is considerably better than the average player was back when the game was new.

This is 100% true too.  I guess talking about balance changes doesn’t matter anyway when roaming feels like a waste of time.  Roaming tasks have been removed from the game and zerging is far more rewarding.  PvP also provides easier access to small scale fights.

[ArchonWing.9480]

7 hours ago, Jables.4659 said:

I remember saying something similar to this to a friend on discord and I believe his reply is worth considering.  It was something to this effect:

"The average player roaming around WvW is considerably better than the average player was back when the game was new.  There are a lot of salty veterans around, and newer players have the benefit of resources like metabattle to make sure that their build is at least semi-competitive."

He wasn't saying that the average player is amazing at the game, just that they're generally not so useless that you're going to be able to take on more than 2 or 3 of them at once.  I do believe that its easier in 2021 for a terrible player to deal damage to a better player than it was back in 2012-2014.  That said, do we really want to go back to the balance of those days?  I watched some solo roaming footage from 2013 recently, and I was kind of shocked at how slow most of the fights were.  D/D Elementalists that hardly take damage and slowly whittle away the enemy with their 2000 power and 650 condition damage.  Staff Sword/Sword Mesmers that run in circles summoning phantasms and wait for them to land kills.  HGH Engineers kiting around until they build up enough might to start tickling you. 

Another thing to consider is the ease of leveling (you get tomes given for free and get one per world rank) and exotics cost close to nothing. I would spend a bunch of hours just to level a new toon and these days we treat tomes like trash.

 

So the floor is much higher now regardless of how bad someone is. Back then uplevels and bad gear were more common. I remember having to spend like 40 gold just to gear out exotics and gold was harder to get too. Then you got elite specs and stuff.

Way back when I was able to 1v3 on an uplevel; don't think that's possible these days unless they're afk. Though I imagine I must have been fighting other uplevels too.

 

Edited November 23, 2021 by ArchonWing.9480

[Dawdler.8521]

2 hours ago, ArchonWing.9480 said:

Way back when I was able to 1v3 on an uplevel; don't think that's possible these days unless they're afk.

The other day we met a 20 man guild that we could have won over with half a dozen people. Given enough time and had no one else arrived, 2 of us probably could have won a defensive keep fight, they just downed one by one and didnt seem to care about helping each other or when they did, every downed generated 2+ downed on top.

We couldnt even identify their builds, it was that bad. Fought them several times and was just as shocked to the point of feeling sorry for them. We literally met a 4 man guild with 15ish on our side and they where far better and more dangerious than those 20 (and probably could have won, when the 2 of us arrived we saw like 4 of us downed, lol).

So magic still happens in WvW.

Edited November 23, 2021 by Dawdler.8521

[saerni.2584]

Roaming isn't dead. There are plenty of people of all skill levels and professions roaming around. 
 

And I've fought competent guardians, engineers, rangers, necromancers, Mesmers, revenants, elementalists...basically every profession in some core or elite variation over the last three months while roaming. Anyone claiming a profession is over represented in roaming hasn't played long enough to run into the roamers of other professions.
 

Solo roaming also isn't "real" roaming compared to small scale roaming. It's just more dangerous and people who take risks (imo) can't complain when other people take a less risky approach by wanting a +1 or 2 before engaging, or using Warclaw mobility. Not all groups are coordinated and there's no guarantee for them that their +1 won't turn into a liability. 
 

Just like someone might only fight near a tower so they can escape or use a watchtower tactic to hard counter permanent stealth fighters. The fight is unfair but why complain when you chose to fight them on an objective like that? 
 

As someone who solo roams a lot: roaming isn't dead and the reasons people give as why roaming supposedly is dead are not issues.
 

The only legitimate issues for WvW: (1) Population balance; (2) Rewards.

[Sylvyn.4750]

2 hours ago, saerni.2584 said:

And I've fought competent guardians, engineers, rangers, necromancers, Mesmers, revenants, elementalists...basically every profession in some core or elite variation over the last three months while roaming. Anyone claiming a profession is over represented in roaming hasn't played long enough to run into the roamers of other professions.
 

I assume you didn't mention thief because it is always implied it does well in roaming, and you didn't mention warrior because it is always implied it does poorly...😉

[MrForz.1953]

21 hours ago, Telgum.6071 said:

I love how in every comment you quote me you always talk about "facts". The Trolling Demigod, true to its name, standing for condition spamming but moaning about stealth.

What's the issue about condition beyond one or perhaps two potentially problematic builds?

Edited November 23, 2021 by MrForz.1953

[spanky.4630]

people running around in groups of 15 think they are roaming 🙂