The WvW 2023 Roadmap

[Xenesis.6389]

As per the spring 2023 roadmap for Guildwars 2. Guildwars 2 Spring Roadmap

Here are the important wvw information pieces to look forward to.

 

MAY 2 - PROFESSION BALANCE UPDATE

Small update, to be honest not much to look forward to here, mostly pve changes. May 2 Class Balance Update

Couple elementalist changes which would maybe be impactful, or maybe not.

Boon application vs boon removal investigation gone missing.

 

JUNE 6 - WVW REWARDS UPDATE PART2

In February we were treated to an update to Weekly achievements which rewards 8 gold on completion.

We also received objective scaling rewards, which added some extra rewards for defending and capturing objectives. This is still an ongoing process, we hope, as there are some things that still need to ironed out, participation and proper credit for events.

•  We will now also be receiving a new infusion, which is gathered through a wvw achievement for an account bound version, and a tradeable version dropped from keep lords, I heard you like ktrains. Is this just a visual or a stat infusion? we'll have to wait and see how precious or junk this will turn out to be.
•  New weapon set, which could be much like Mistforged Obsidian Weapons, Mist Lords Weapons. To be honest, how many ascended weapon skins do we need? and why, when there's better black lion skins on the trading post to get for gold. I'm still looking for the art team to really put a wvw stamp on wvw weapons and make them stand out in every other area of the game much like sublime mistforged armor.
•  New items to spend your stockpiled skirmish tickets and emblem of the avengers on, could be anything, keep expectations low.

 

JUNE 27 - PROFESSION BALANCE UPDATE

Bigger balance update which will include:

•  Improving the feeling of moment-to-moment gameplay for many boon support builds. We want these builds to have more flexibility in their utility skill choice, and not be required to press a particular utility type on cooldown to provide quickness or alacrity.
•  Introducing alternate playstyles for some specializations, including quickness-support deadeye and damage builds for druid and tempest.
•  Tuning up some underutilized weapons and solidifying their roles within their professions. For example, we’re looking at further defining ranger sword as a mobile, power damage weapon.
•  Removing additional skill-type-specific recharge-reduction traits and rolling the reduction into baseline skills where it makes sense to do so. The goal of these changes is to give players more interesting trait options to choose from.

Basically focused on support specs.

Boon application vs boon removal investigation printed on milk cartons.

 

JULY - WORLD RESTRUCTURING AND FIRST ALLIANCE MULTI WEEK BETA TEST

Slated for mid summer, so let's say July. This will include two weeks of testing, first week for the new code and fixes added to the world restructuring part of the system, second week will test the alliances itself, the code, UI, and the 1u1d matchup shakeups between resets.

•  We’re targeting early to mid-summer to run the first World Restructuring beta with alliances. Functionality will be straightforward, but it should give guilds and alliances everything they need to manage their communities: creating alliances, inviting guilds, kicking guilds, and leaving. All players that have selected a battle guild in an alliance will be placed on a team together after the World Restructuring event.
•  Prior to that, we plan to run one more World Restructuring test without alliances so we can test recent fixes to matchmaking, team assignments, queues, and some backend work we’ve done to support the alliances feature. This will be our first multiweek World Restructuring beta test, meaning that we’ll also be able to verify that teams are properly moving into different matchups and tiers using the one-up, one-down system. We’ll follow up with a date for this test once it’s been confirmed.

 

AUGUST- DECEMBER 2023 AND BEYOND - CORE GAME REWARDS WILL BE UPGRADED, EXPANSION 4

Don't expect anything crazy when it comes to rewards from Anet. Wvw base rewards could be included, but don't hold your breath as we already have been getting reward updates this year. Still many months out.

•  After the allied visual-effect filtering feature releases on June 6, the team primarily responsible for core game updates will be turning their attention toward completing their most ambitious project yet—a rework of an existing core game reward system. Intriguing, right? This feature is still many months away from shipping and we’re not ready to talk about it quite yet, but we wanted to let you know that they’ll be heads down on this one for a while.

Personally I'm also expecting expansion 4 to be released somewhere in this time frame, which will not being bringing anymore elite specs by the sounds of it, but breaking barriers of classes which be anything from giving them more access to similar skills from their other specs or even other classes, to unlocking weapons for that class entirely to all it's specs.

•  In the current design and implementation of elite specializations, we feel that with every new expansion there’s been increasingly limited “design space” left to add new and differentiated roles for each profession. In other words, most of the playstyles that we’d like to see supported for each profession already exist or should exist within their existing elite specialization options.
•  With our next expansion, our goal is to further augment the combat options for each profession by adding new tools to their arsenal and by lifting constraints that will unlock an unprecedented number of playstyle customization options—while keeping the feel of Guild Wars 2 combat true to its origins. Theorycrafters are going to be very busy.

 

So what do you think? is this enough to keep you trucking along in wvw for another year?

Add your confused emotes as usual my dear stalkers-->

Edited May 2, 2023 by Xenesis.6389

[Infusion.7149]

IMHO:
Generate added cashflow. Arenanet would be wise to generate more revenue streams for WVW, their first priority should have been putting in skins for siege and such. Alliances are diametrically opposed to profits.

Improve Objective equity and fix the defense bugs. Make objectives equitable to both sides of the conflict. It is no secret to actual WvW players rather than forum warriors that captures reward far more consistently than defenses right now. Obviously it does not make sense to reward repairing outer walls, but killing players within the inner keeps does not register sometimes and you get zero credit, not even bronze. Meanwhile some person on the attacking side will get something so long as the structure is capped if they hit the lord or stood in the ring. The current status is that attack failure rewards nothing but groups with overwhelming numbers that are sure to cap will always be essentially ktraining. Defense failure does seem to reward players which is extremely odd.
--- Because grandmaster mark shards are valued at less than 1 gold equivalent and they are also illiquid , there should be a conscious effort to restore their distribution to lower tier caps of keeps (i.e. T1/T2) which still require a time investment to tier and therefore cannot be easily k-trained.
* Supporting data keeping in mind a grandmaster mark requires 10 shards: https://gw2efficiency.com/crafting/calculator/a~0!b~1!c~0!d~1-80799;1-80857;1-80685;1-80835;1-80746;1-80787

Reduce the ridiculous WXP disparity introduced by objective scaling. Remove the egregious WXP gain or give players that reached 10K WVW rank prior to objective scaling something to show for it. Eternity would be apt given its description. In the process the boosters no longer scale as much since boosters do not affect the instant use WXP from objective scaling.
--- if the point of handing out WXP is so people obtain WVW masteries faster then the WVW masteries rank requirements should have been cut drastically.
--- if the point of handing out WXP is so people can get their skirmish tickets faster then the base pips from skirmish track should have been increased.

New weaponset is probably just the rest of the war machine skins. There is still no collection for any of the WvW specific skins whatsoever so there is little reason to dump so much gold (memories of battle are not cheap) into more than a few select skins if you like them.

New infusion is probably just the WVW armistice bastion effect in infusion form. I would be wary of Arenanet making it +5 stats and +9 AR. People that do not have fractal titles would have 162 AR normally and this means they would have 153 without one agony infusion. This is something to keep in mind.

Memories of battle seem to be an omission from the daily / weekly achievements for WvW but maybe Emblems would have memories of battle for sale. I am unsure of this.

Rewards for existing WvW titles other than God of WvW. Give actual non-title rewards for maxed WvW objective titles such as yak slapper, defense, keep/tower/SMC caps and defenses.

Edited May 2, 2023 by Infusion.7149
add note on Grandmaster mark shards

[cyberzombie.7348]

8 minutes ago, Xenesis.6389 said:

 Improving the feeling of moment-to-moment gameplay for many boon support builds. We want these builds to have more flexibility in their utility skill choice, and not be required to press a particular utility type on cooldown to provide quickness or alacrity.

Supports are already strong as is and they want to add more QoL? What's lacking is viable anti-supports across the whole roster.

 

9 minutes ago, Xenesis.6389 said:

Removing additional skill-type-specific recharge-reduction traits and rolling the reduction into baseline skills where it makes sense to do so. The goal of these changes is to give players more interesting trait options to choose from.

Then why not just buff/rework the underutilized traits to compete with them? All I can see out of this and the aforementioned is nearly everything becomes maxed apm without drawbacks.

 

31 minutes ago, Xenesis.6389 said:

 Tuning up some underutilized weapons and solidifying their roles within their professions. For example, we’re looking at further defining ranger sword as a mobile, power damage weapon.

So buffs for warrior's maces and off-hand sword?

[Riba.3271]

No fixes to siege and objective balance is yikes. I can't believe they're shipping alliances in a balance where attacking and defending objectives is so one-dimensional and dull.

Edited May 2, 2023 by Riba.3271

[MedievalThings.5417]

Anet - we're adding an infusion drop that only comes from keep lords (or you can buy an acct bound one).

WvW players - why do you hate people defending?

[Ya Ya Yeah.7381]

Buffing boons and nothing about boon removal. Got it. Lol. 

These guys really got this balance thing down to science.  😞

[aspirine.6852]

34 minutes ago, Crazy.6029 said:

Buffing boons and nothing about boon removal. Got it. Lol. 

These guys really got this balance thing down to science.  😞

The update after this you get all boons just by entering wvw I guess. Just get it over with Anet.

[Xenesis.6389]

17 minutes ago, aspirine.6852 said:

The update after this you get all boons just by entering wvw I guess. Just get it over with Anet.

They might as well at this point, they're obviously not interested in the back and forth of application and removal of boons, and pve only cares to have 100% application uptime on alacrity, quickness, fury, might. Adding spam alacrity and quickness to the game was such a mistake, it's obviously the most important buff to pve'ers only ever seeking to kill faster. Even WoW only allows limited time, Heroism(quickness) once a fight 40sec duration, 5mins cooldown, debuff after so can't use multiple effects per fight, for near 20 years.

This is what happens to willy nilly balancing with no real rules in place.

Edit: forgot to mention, got a good laugh the other day when a wow streamer was doing a raid series from mmo's, they're currently on gw2 and going through the raids with a pickup group, eventually they got to a point when they synergized their group comp and boon applications and couldn't believe they were basically doing triple the damage which allows them to even skip mechanics.

Now as you can imagine players are put in a situation where they need to keep those few important boons up all the time because it makes a huge difference, and probably why anet now feels they're forced to spread the boon applications to make sure everyone gets generous access. Of course this boon spamming will trickle back into wvw.

 

Edited May 2, 2023 by Xenesis.6389

[hardloop von edgehoven.851]

On 5/2/2023 at 5:00 AM, Riba.3271 said:

No fixes to siege and objective balance is yikes. I can't believe they're shipping alliances in a balance where attacking and defending objectives is so one-dimensional and dull.

it is. joined gw2 again after years. and gave wvw on the eternal bg map a try and while it looked fun at first glance, the flawed mechanics are gettin obvious vry fast. and its is foremost the very BASICS of wvw. siegeweapons are plain and simple completely and utterly useless, unless you need one to open a wall quickly. the handling of some is to say it calm and reasonable: gdm effin annoying. the way tehy preferred attackers to lets say 99% is the lousiest aspect of wvw. i mean you suppose to DEFEND and all you got is is worseless clunky siegemechanics and permanent out of line of sight for ALL skills you have, while you get massacred in seconds or pulled by the attackers you dont even see. so defending on walls, REAL siegedefending is again utterly useless. 

it all ends up in aoe spam blob vs aoe spam blob pvp the higher the count of players the worse it gets. thats pvp at the worst, but not siege wvw. it all is centered on taking the big castle with a big blob. no tactics needed, just run around and maintain the blob. 

the map is HUGE compared to pvp forms, maybe a bit too huge, but you could fix that. what makes wvw areas intersting in a 3 faction system are the borderzones between each faction, but anet decided to put the most boring areas between them, instead of towers or forts. towers should be THE place of battling each other wiht players and siege mechanics etc..the big home forts are way too easy to be taken. 

to force more tactics, i would limit the amount of players per faction in a single area of towers or supply camps to 12 players, so that youre forced to spread the groups over the maps, instead of one giant blob. castles and the home keeps are the only ones you can attack with more than 12 of course. thou i would prefer to force multi front attack tactics.

the castle itself, once taken should be unattaqckable after been taken to give factions time to check vendors or whatnot. instnat flips are the worst crap imo.

didnt even mentioned class mechanics, but thats imo the least problem wvw has, although its annoying to be more or less unable to compete with some professions.

[prototypedragon.1406]

It would be interesting if anet restored siege damage back to what it use to be with arrow carts, but we can't have that. Last I checked the siege is more like a trap for the defender rather then to the benefit of those that defend unless maybe it's a  balista, but like regular balance anets answer is " This is fine" 

[Caille.7214]

the fact that these ********** aren't fired yet...

[MedievalThings.5417]

I'm just gonna say, keep trading (with no defending) will absolutely happen if the infusion ONLY drops from keep lords.  It needs to be a random, miniscule chance from doing anything in wvw.  Otherwise, this will pretty much kill the remaining spirit of what wvw should be.

[Mabi black.1824]

On 5/2/2023 at 5:00 AM, Riba.3271 said:

No fixes to siege and objective balance is yikes. I can't believe they're shipping alliances in a balance where attacking and defending objectives is so one-dimensional and dull.

You do not think it is possible to launch alliances without considering the advantages to defense. I do not believe it is possible to launch alliances without first contextualizing them and giving meaning and motivation so that winning or losing takes on meaning. The problem here is that our favorite mode has seen few significant updates. Hence the irrepressible desire that alliances solve everything. But I am afraid that will not be the case.

[Burnfall.9573]

Throughout the years, including The Community and I I've witnessed and experienced enough of repetitive patterns; including Patterns of Lack of Communications, Distrusts, Dishonest, Patterns Of Disrespectfulness, Patterns of Constant, Stress of False Hope, Ignoring our Need for a Healthy Competitive Experience, Manipulative Balance Tactics with Increase and Decrease Nerfs, Deception of Profession Roles and their Identities, Theft and Hijack of Profession Roles and Their Identities, Constant Refusal To Invest In Our Concerns By Allowing Exploits and Design Abuse To Continue Endlessly, Lack of Taking Responsibility To The State of The Game, Willingness To Invest In A Healthy Permeant Remedy To Address Our Concerns...

Again, June Balance will be my deciding factor to finally end my investment with  11 years+ Toxic relationship with Guild Wars 2 for good.

I Do Not Owe Anet Any Explanation For Taking Care Of My Experience And For Putting It First!!

Edited May 18, 2023 by Burnfall.9573

[prototypedragon.1406]

3 hours ago, Burnfall.9573 said:

Throughout the years, including The Community and I I've witnessed and experienced enough of repetitive patterns; including Patterns of Lack of Communications, Distrusts, Dishonest, Patterns Of Disrespectfulness, Patterns of Constant, Stress of False Hope, Ignoring our Need for a Healthy Competitive Experience, Manipulative Balance Tactics with Increase and Decrease Nerfs, Deception of Profession Roles and their Identities, Theft and Hijack of Profession Roles and Their Identities, Constant Refusal To Invest In Our Concerns By Allowing Exploits and Design Abuse To Continue Endlessly, Lack of Taking Responsibility To The State of The Game, Willingness To Invest In A Healthy Permeant Remedy To Address Our Concerns...

Again, June Balance will be my deciding factor to finally end my investment with  11 years+ Toxic relationship with Guild Wars 2 for good.

I Do Not Owe Anet Any Explanation For Taking Care Of My Experience And For Putting It First!!

I get that, as of vet going on 11 years myself  I can only push myself to login one day a week anymore and I'm sick and tired of their antics as well.

[Zok.4956]

On 5/2/2023 at 2:42 AM, Infusion.7149 said:

give players that reached 10K WVW rank prior to objective scaling something to show for it.

Well sure, why not. But only for players that did not get their ranks with the Obsidian Sanctum farm or EotM karma trains. 😎 But since it is not possible to differentiate this, I am against this idea. 

[prototypedragon.1406]

I miss the team from launch, where boons were few and far in-between and ability was more tied to armor stats and traitline designs coupled with weapon abilities, now the game has become a ghost in a shell.

[Mal.1670]

Came to the forums for news on WvW overhaul. Seems everyone else is guessing where it goes next too. 

 

On 5/1/2023 at 8:42 PM, Infusion.7149 said:

IMHO:
Generate added cashflow. Arenanet would be wise to generate more revenue streams for WVW, their first priority should have been putting in skins for siege and such. Alliances are diametrically opposed to profits.

Improve Objective equity and fix the defense bugs. Make objectives equitable to both sides of the conflict. It is no secret to actual WvW players rather than forum warriors that captures reward far more consistently than defenses right now. Obviously it does not make sense to reward repairing outer walls, but killing players within the inner keeps does not register sometimes and you get zero credit, not even bronze. Meanwhile some person on the attacking side will get something so long as the structure is capped if they hit the lord or stood in the ring. The current status is that attack failure rewards nothing but groups with overwhelming numbers that are sure to cap will always be essentially ktraining. Defense failure does seem to reward players which is extremely odd.
--- Because grandmaster mark shards are valued at less than 1 gold equivalent and they are also illiquid , there should be a conscious effort to restore their distribution to lower tier caps of keeps (i.e. T1/T2) which still require a time investment to tier and therefore cannot be easily k-trained.
* Supporting data keeping in mind a grandmaster mark requires 10 shards: https://gw2efficiency.com/crafting/calculator/a~0!b~1!c~0!d~1-80799;1-80857;1-80685;1-80835;1-80746;1-80787

Reduce the ridiculous WXP disparity introduced by objective scaling. Remove the egregious WXP gain or give players that reached 10K WVW rank prior to objective scaling something to show for it. Eternity would be apt given its description. In the process the boosters no longer scale as much since boosters do not affect the instant use WXP from objective scaling.
--- if the point of handing out WXP is so people obtain WVW masteries faster then the WVW masteries rank requirements should have been cut drastically.
--- if the point of handing out WXP is so people can get their skirmish tickets faster then the base pips from skirmish track should have been increased.

New weaponset is probably just the rest of the war machine skins. There is still no collection for any of the WvW specific skins whatsoever so there is little reason to dump so much gold (memories of battle are not cheap) into more than a few select skins if you like them.

New infusion is probably just the WVW armistice bastion effect in infusion form. I would be wary of Arenanet making it +5 stats and +9 AR. People that do not have fractal titles would have 162 AR normally and this means they would have 153 without one agony infusion. This is something to keep in mind.

Memories of battle seem to be an omission from the daily / weekly achievements for WvW but maybe Emblems would have memories of battle for sale. I am unsure of this.

Rewards for existing WvW titles other than God of WvW. Give actual non-title rewards for maxed WvW objective titles such as yak slapper, defense, keep/tower/SMC caps and defenses.

 

Of course there's a reward for failing to defend an objective. It's a paltry consolation prize that gives SOME merit to putting in effort to defend, which is what people are already complaining about. Whoever controls SMC can rack up lots of defend rewards every 3m, dunno what this is on about.

And getting WXP has always been RNG with the bonus loot drops. If they're increasing the rate of WXP, obviously they're looking at fun factor i.e. more rank up chests and rewards for playing the game mode. Those who already got max rank is virtually the same as those who did map completion before mounts. It's how the game evolves.

Now the BOON meta is so strange to see returning after time away from the game. Suddenly all but every profession gets quickness and alacrity now, and for some reason they're removing sources of boon removal in all game modes. Necro DAGGER 5 REALLY for PvE needing that change if it's for WvW? Surprising people are not complaining to nerf alacrity and the like. Alac already nerfed so much from when it first came out as chrono exclusive way back when.

But you know what? Most surprising how the UI still hasn't been updated and there's that overlap with the map chest icon and the first reward pop-up chest. People been frustrated with that since they made it that way years ago, for real. But if people grin and bear it through that, same deal with boon meta. So it goes.

[XenesisII.1540]

17 minutes ago, Mal.1670 said:

Surprising people are not complaining to nerf alacrity and the like. Alac already nerfed so much from when it first came out as chrono exclusive way back when.

Go read the professions forums, the game is now entirely revolving around quickness and alacrity spam, it's being spread out and specs are being butchered for them, scourge being the latest.

[hardloop von edgehoven.851]

wvw is an amass of pure brainless spam, that melts even very high hp specs in , we stopped the time, less than one second and thats not by a big castle blob waltzing around, but by a group of not even half a dozen players. there is no gameplay in this. even wow wasnt that worse of a cc spam trap, and it was already bad. uinfortunately most players wanna play exactly this form of braindead clownpvp with props around to fake sieges 

[Burnfall.9573]

There are so many new Amazing  Mmo game releasing this year by game Companies who put and prioritize players experience first, having a open Communication with players.  Who does no incorporate Guild Wars 2 Philosophy of Totalirianism with removing Profession Identity and Roles, Toxic Stealth Mechanic, Bad Design including One shot, exploits, spamming and abuse as being "balance" and "competitive", ignoring root cause problems to continue for months, years...unresolved and to be replaced with more unresolved, neglected root cause problems and lastly, who does not have a reputation of Favoritism and Bias to Professions and Mechanics like Stealth Mechanic and Thief Profession in Guild Wars 2.

So there

There is no mention of removing Bad Design Mechanics and Professions like Stealth Mechanic and Thief Profession; who remain Guild Wars 2 most Toxic  Profession and Mechanic to the players experience for 11 years. 

Until Anet mentions removing these two Toxic elements in the roadmap; I have Zero Interest in continuing playing and investing in Guild Wars 2 

I  deserver to be with a game Company/s who treat the player experience like diamond instead of worthless endless trash especially for 11 years.

 

[daimon.9876]

I didn't start playing WvW until about 4 years ago. Before that I was only PvE with occasional PvP. Then I got a good WvW guild, and I have really enjoyed playing that mode. That said, I'd like to see it thrive and grow, and I don't really see that happening. Mostly, I think this is due to the mode being neglected, and mostly I think that neglect is due to this mode not being a strong revenue stream. OTOH, I think there are things that can be done to make more revenue here. So, here are my suggestions for things that could bring revenue:

1. More/Better/Faster WvW Rewards: Really, this has to be done and should be the main priority. One of the main problems trying to recruit people into the game mode is that they can get WAY MORE GOLD PER HOUR playing PvE/PvP content. They want to obtain skins, unlock items, do achievements, etc. And in WvW all of these things AND gold go far slower than they do in, for example, Fractals, Rift Hunting, playing open world Meta Events, or PvP Tournaments. A lot of players feel like they'd be wasting time in WvW because they just aren't going to unlock much while playing there. Anet can sell a lot more to WvW players if there are a lot more WvW players. There won't be unless the mode is more rewarding.
2. New Tactivator: Skyscale Defense: works like a Banner Tactivator. Allows a player (or maybe more than one player? - say 3-5 players) to mount a skyscale which appears in the courtyard. The skyscale can then be used within a radius of the objective to bomb players using the fireball skill. If dismounted (either on purpose, or by being downed), the skill is lost for that round of the tactivator, just like with a Banner Tactivator. How to monetize it: helps push more WvW players into PvE to obtain skyscales, helps sell more skyscale skins, brings more players into WvW.
3. New Tactivator: Siege Turtle: works like a Dune Roller. How to monetize it: helps push more WvW players into PvE to obtain siege turtles, helps sell more turtle skins, brings more players into WvW.
4. Elite Guild Skins: The "Guild Armor" and "Guild Weapons" that can be crafted are a bit ordinary and boring. Maybe make some fancier, more customizable versions that are sold through the gem store. Or, better yet, maybe make a way to add some kind of "Guild" decoration to some existing armor sets (ones where it will fit) and sell that through the gem store. If I could add a guild emblem to the chestplate of one of my favorite skins, I'd definitely buy that upgrade in the store, and am sure lots of my WvW friends would, too. Also, some things with Guild emblems that could go in the gem store: Capes, Gliders, Warclaws that carry a flag/banner, Kites (why did you remove the Guild Kite?), a Banner/Flag that can be "planted" in WvW, an Emote Tome that lets you wave a banner with your guild emblem. 
5. Warclaw Skins: They're added kind of slowly, and in particular there are several that go with "sets" which could easily be sold to players who have the rest of the "set." For example: Cozy Wintersday, Shiverpeaks, Awakened, Spooky, Mad King (and BTW, why isn't there a roller beetle skin in this set that's just a riding Jack O' Lantern? - it's such an obvious idea - cmon guys!). Personally, I'd like to get 2-3 of those to complete my sets.