Boonball meta is bad

[apharma.3741]

I hate this boon spam meta, you honestly get the dumbest players in a blob now that essentially macro their skills to be spammed and it's all good because everyone has too much healing, protection, aegis and everything else while siege does nothing to them. Then they just pull people in and flatten, no skill just choo choo and keep up with the commander who will 100% turn around to stop you getting attacked for not having the cognitive ability to realize the commander moved 5s ago. The only thing that's remotely a threat to them is another equally sized boonball or a slightly smaller one with players who are more compact and able to move out of the way of the train better.

How do I know they're dumb players? I catch some of them running around and you see stuff like a scourge back peddling and using PBAoE skills when you're auto attacking at range. They start a fight by dodging, back peddle for a second and dodge again and I haven't even drawn my weapon and attacked them!

Increase cool downs by 5-10s, reduce boon durations, remove minstrels or change it so it's not perfect all defence stats.

[TheGrimm.5624]

5 hours ago, Mabi black.1824 said:

Wait a moment. In this post, we're not talking about how you can organize yourself or what strategy you want to pursue. This post is 10 pages of crying because you can't face a ball formation of 30 men or 40 or 50 use the number you prefer it makes no difference. And I'm telling you that's not true. 

I was more countering I think we might be less organized now versus more experienced since more boons makes people more sloppy, because they can be, which means more blobs. On top of that no reason to win means no reason for people to cover all angles versus just move in mass around a map.

[latlat.4516]

Not saying the boon ball meta is good, but I disagree it's the worse one yet. Pirate ship scourge was boring AF. At least now, melee uptime is high, which I find far better. 

[urd.8306]

Pirate Ship was way more fun than Boonball, because things died and you had to be on the move to dodge the hammer. Now it's sitting, pulling and watching grass grow, while you are full protected from projectiles and even if you see a downstate it gets pulled back into zerg by Minstrel Scourges.

[Chaba.5410]

2 hours ago, diomache.9246 said:

Pirate Ship was way more fun than Boonball, because things died and you had to be on the move to dodge the hammer. Now it's sitting, pulling and watching grass grow, while you are full protected from projectiles and even if you see a downstate it gets pulled back into zerg by Minstrel Scourges.

If you're sitting and watching, you're pirate-shipping.

[ArchonWing.9480]

On 1/3/2024 at 3:37 AM, Mabi black.1824 said:

This one in particular, I think is exactly the opposite. Today, there are many more players who know how to play better. Much better. whether they spin alone, when they spin in a small group of 5 players, or when they take on larger numbers.

The skill floor has increased, in that overloaded elite specs have a greater minimum in performance just by being a warm body, but that doesn't mean people know how to play better; it's just harder to fail and is what many would consider dumbing down, errr... I mean streamlined.

Granted, Gw2 players somehow find a way to fail anyways, but this is also related to how forgiving the game is in general. That is not necessarily a bad thing, but I think the game has shifted  too far in a certain direction.

Furthermore, the population in WvW has become so polarized. that in a lot of these outnumbered "epic" fights  It's basically diehards vs pip farmers. To me, that's basically just sweats farming people that aren't even playing the game. 

It is my opinion that the general direction of the game is about lowering expectations both for the players and also the developers. This is a game where players can play thousands of hours and not know what most of their skills do, because any time they release content that requires that, there is much outrage. And when one caves to players that always find a way to fail, the bar just keeps getting lower and lower, until; we have a yearly expansion that has been half blank for half a year but sells anyways. Because that is what people want.

Edited January 5 by ArchonWing.9480

[Zepoolpe.9217]

3 hours ago, ArchonWing.9480 said:

It is my opinion that the general direction of the game is about lowering expectations both for the players and also the developers.

Lowering expectations?
So there is something beyond absolute zero?

[Rezzet.3614]

simple solution would be rebalancing Siege , my biggest gripe with boonball meta is how boonballs can facetank 40 pieces of Siege at once,   ontop of enemy attacks  and still come out ontop if the enemy blob isnt as large or as coordinated , maybe make Ac's 5 skill  pulse boon strip , lower 4's poison shot strike damage and reduce its cooldown so it can deny heal spam to a degree ,   simple solution right there

Edited January 6 by Rezzet.3614

[latlat.4516]

18 hours ago, urd.8306 said:

Pirate Ship was way more fun than Boonball, because things died and you had to be on the move to dodge the hammer. Now it's sitting, pulling and watching grass grow, while you are full protected from projectiles and even if you see a downstate it gets pulled back into zerg by Minstrel Scourges.

In pirate ship, 2/5th of the squad had something to do while the rest sit and watch just in case the ennemy would be bored with kitting and would decide on doing a stealth bomb more or less skillfully, resulting in your zerg just all backpedaling for 18 seconds. I don't call that "fun". 

At least melee-range metas do require you to be very reactive, to know the difference between 240 and 450 range and actually needs you -and your support- to find your keyboards. The triple support compositions we have today is also a result of melee skills being tendancially more dangerous, meaning you need less dps players to generate downstates and more supports to survive. Also currently, engaged zergs have a harder time to disengage, which means that if you decided to go in-fight you have to commit. There's not as much of this "back and forth" that was just not fun. 

 

Again, the fact that reacting supports, especially the chronomancer and the vindicator are so strong due to the boonrip being low in the current meta is the problem. But I prefer that over the time when you just stacked dps scourges and that was it. 

 

8 hours ago, Rezzet.3614 said:

simple solution would be rebalancing Siege , my biggest gripe with boonball meta is how boonballs can facetank 40 pieces of Siege at once,   ontop of enemy attacks  and still come out ontop if the enemy blob isnt as large or as coordinated , maybe make Ac's 5 skill  pulse boon strip , lower 4's poison shot strike damage and reduce its cooldown so it can deny heal spam to a degree ,   simple solution right there

The conscious choice behind the balancing here is that you need a zerg to counter a zerg. Which is kind of a reasonable expectation. 

1. if you can use 40 sieges, then you actually have the better option of engaging yourself rather than arrowcarting the f* out of your ennemies. Siege shouldn't be the most efficient course of action if  you stack enough that you need a zerg to operate all of them. 

2. Siege is mainly used in order to discourage groups to attack structure if they are not organized enough. The max I'd excpect out of siege is to slow down organized groups, not stop them. If you want that, you can still go and see how siege is done in Warhammer RoR and how castle sieges are about 5 people doing a QTE while the 45 other are just staring at their screen 50 meters back, because if the ennemy decides to use the oil they just one shot the whole zerg. 

3. Adding a boon rip on a high cooldown for arrowcarts may be a good idea, though (btw, you can still strip the stab with the 2nd skill of the shield generator)

4. Poison won't reduce much healing if it's cleansed. 

[Kranlor Greyhelm.8417]

1 hour ago, latlat.4516 said:

The conscious choice behind the balancing here is that you need a zerg to counter a zerg. Which is kind of a reasonable expectation. 

Why? Why is that reasonable? Why is the counter to a boonball another boonball?

Why shouldn't a boonball be beaten by 10 spread groups of 5? Why shouldn't 10 groups of 5 be beaten by a cloud? Why shouldn't a cloud then be beaten by a boonball? If you don't have some kind of choice, some kind of balance, something that encourages reactive, adaptable play, then ANET is basically saying "get in a boonball or kitten you".

I don't want to play in a boonball, I don't find that fun. If ANET persists with the "boonball or die" philosophy, eventually players like me will get the message and abandon WvW entirely.

 

 

[CafPow.1542]

1 hour ago, Kranlor Greyhelm.8417 said:

Why? Why is that reasonable? Why is the counter to a boonball another boonball?

Why shouldn't a boonball be beaten by 10 spread groups of 5? Why shouldn't 10 groups of 5 be beaten by a cloud? Why shouldn't a cloud then be beaten by a boonball? If you don't have some kind of choice, some kind of balance, something that encourages reactive, adaptable play, then ANET is basically saying "get in a boonball or kitten you".

I don't want to play in a boonball, I don't find that fun. If ANET persists with the "boonball or die" philosophy, eventually players like me will get the message and abandon WvW entirely.

 

 

 but a cloud can counter a boonball if done right.

[Rezzet.3614]

4 hours ago, latlat.4516 said:

In pirate ship, 2/5th of the squad had something to do while the rest sit and watch just in case the ennemy would be bored with kitting and would decide on doing a stealth bomb more or less skillfully, resulting in your zerg just all backpedaling for 18 seconds. I don't call that "fun". 

At least melee-range metas do require you to be very reactive, to know the difference between 240 and 450 range and actually needs you -and your support- to find your keyboards. The triple support compositions we have today is also a result of melee skills being tendancially more dangerous, meaning you need less dps players to generate downstates and more supports to survive. Also currently, engaged zergs have a harder time to disengage, which means that if you decided to go in-fight you have to commit. There's not as much of this "back and forth" that was just not fun. 

 

Again, the fact that reacting supports, especially the chronomancer and the vindicator are so strong due to the boonrip being low in the current meta is the problem. But I prefer that over the time when you just stacked dps scourges and that was it. 

 

The conscious choice behind the balancing here is that you need a zerg to counter a zerg. Which is kind of a reasonable expectation. 

1. if you can use 40 sieges, then you actually have the better option of engaging yourself rather than arrowcarting the f* out of your ennemies. Siege shouldn't be the most efficient course of action if  you stack enough that you need a zerg to operate all of them. 

2. Siege is mainly used in order to discourage groups to attack structure if they are not organized enough. The max I'd excpect out of siege is to slow down organized groups, not stop them. If you want that, you can still go and see how siege is done in Warhammer RoR and how castle sieges are about 5 people doing a QTE while the 45 other are just staring at their screen 50 meters back, because if the ennemy decides to use the oil they just one shot the whole zerg. 

3. Adding a boon rip on a high cooldown for arrowcarts may be a good idea, though (btw, you can still strip the stab with the 2nd skill of the shield generator)

4. Poison won't reduce much healing if it's cleansed. 

i see your reasoning, however it is flawed , because for your reasoning to work there would have to be Actual  Balance in the game to justify weak siege  in favor of blob fights

currently player numbers does  not matter so much as to What the composition of professions is; an 80 man zerg of thieves is gonna get Steamrolled by a group of  20 players spamming Aoe Boons+pulls+CCs+  nonstop  projectile hate 

some professions are flat out useless in large combat due to permanent projectile hate and them being stuck with nothing but projectiles and single target skills

poison having lower cooldown instead of a minute long one means that with 5+ ACs  even if enemy spams heals and cleanses some pressure would get through to them specially combined with a boon rip , it would at least bait cleanses and heals that the zerg would have liked to save for group clash or force them out of stacking in one spot   wich would allow for picking off of slower players  , so it would be a Huge deal , dont necesarily need siege to down enemies , just to apply pressure and break them and discourage groups 

Edited January 6 by Rezzet.3614

[Bunbury.8472]

if the issue is anet have overnerfed boonrip, which looking at the last few WvW patches... clearly did happen

why then do I see any solutions that are not reverting those nerfs?

it's pretty obvious nerfs to classes like, mesmer, warrior and necro are why we are in a a boonball meta. heck, I think even throw mine could use with some nerf reversions too.

BRING BACK THE BOONRIP

[Sonork.2916]

2 hours ago, CafPow.1542 said:

 but a cloud can counter a boonball if done right.

Nobody here wants to hear that though. XD

[RisingDawn.5796]

The counter to boonball is, matching comps stacking chronos, holosmith, berserker and heal scourges with greatsword, along with decent coordination and movement.

A strong (not really that coordinated) cloud can be annoying with siege and inside objectives, against boon heavy comps, with not a full squad, but few servers  can cloud well against the stronger groups, who might just avoid fighting  against clouds, so the clouds, usually just end up, farming pug groups with chatmanders.

They need to lower boon duration and bring back the boon stripping ability for other classes or specs.

 

Edited January 7 by CrimsonOneThree.5682

[laoshanlung.3675]

had a "very interesting and interactive" fight yesterday with a WSR group. We were both 50 (or close to it), 2 groups clashed and stood still for a solid 3-min with minimal movement to either left or right. We only timed the bomb/strip and spam boons/healing, the one that stacks less or move/scatter a bit first lose the fight....

And even with only 2 groups fighting, I have never had this kind of skill lag before, might be because of the amount of chaos aura and boon spam, each party has 3 supports nowadays. I hate this meta so much as it:

- introduces a weird way of playing, instead of moving and coordinating strike/strip, it's all about who spam the most boon/healing at the right time. I kinda like the time when scrappers were in the meta, at least there were more moving and less lagging 😞

- makes it really lagging due to the amount of boons the server needs to calculate

- gives almost 0 chance for cloud to break a voice/organized group given that the cloud has more number. This was possible before but now it's extremely difficult. I was in a voice group fighting inside FoW keep (one of the best cloud fighting style servers in EU btw), and we were massively outnumbered but we managed to hang on for more than 30 mins and farmed them inside their keep until we eventually were overwhelming due to their reinforcement.

Edited January 7 by laoshanlung.3675

[latlat.4516]

19 hours ago, Kranlor Greyhelm.8417 said:

Why? Why is that reasonable? Why is the counter to a boonball another boonball?

Why shouldn't a boonball be beaten by 10 spread groups of 5? Why shouldn't 10 groups of 5 be beaten by a cloud? Why shouldn't a cloud then be beaten by a boonball? If you don't have some kind of choice, some kind of balance, something that encourages reactive, adaptable play, then ANET is basically saying "get in a boonball or kitten you".

I don't want to play in a boonball, I don't find that fun. If ANET persists with the "boonball or die" philosophy, eventually players like me will get the message and abandon WvW entirely.

I said "the expection is to counter a zerg using a zerg". Did not speak about boon balls. And if you're making that remark, then you clearly missed the point of my message. The point of that particular sentence  is that it is a choice that I find reasonnable to not allow 3 players on siege to stop 50 players from playing. Nothing more.

 

The reason I spoke about the  boonball earlier with my comment is that I stand on my point that I prefer boonballing to pirateshiping, but also that I also would prefer it they sped up a bit the fights as long as we stay in a melee meta. And doing that requires one thing : un-nerfing the boonrip.

Edited January 7 by latlat.4516

[Alsandar.7420]

It’s true that boonballs just stand in siege. So sad

[Malus.2184]

On 6/27/2023 at 9:15 PM, Ya Ya Yeah.7381 said:

Worst meta yet. Just did some wvw and yep. A little stronger than before, forget about killing the boonball, just run put some damage and escape, nobody dies. I hope someone makes a video of them literally rolling their face on the keyboard while booned up and not dying while doing it, so that Anet gets the picture correctly. 

And now they want 25 dollars to add new weapons to core. Such an insult to the wvw player base.

The Boonball meta is caused by the base performance system of the game. Roughly said, the average maximum performance of everyone is 25% of their total performance value without Boons. The performance system needs to be redesigned so that the base performance of everyone is around 75% of the total performance while Boons only provides the last 25%.

As the system is now Boonballing is too great a performance increase to skip.

Edited January 7 by Malus.2184

[Aeolus.3615]

3 hours ago, Alsandar.7420 said:

It’s true that boonballs just stand in siege. So sad

Not many players know that u can be faced against 10 ac's and only 1 will hit every second :D

In the practice its 10 ac's vs 1 player is the same as 1 ac vs 1 player, it touches the zergs ANET WANT TO CARRY so yeah its nerfed...

I once was PM'ed by a dev  on EOTM i was ruining players experience.... 1 ac vs a zerg in eotm. This is how BAD the vision for this game is .

Edited January 7 by Aeolus.3615

[CafPow.1542]

Is zerging in general even an accepted gameplay here? Reading this forum sometimes makes me think there’s only roamers here.

[Cogadh.1845]

I've been playing since beta on and off. Usually have to take a break for a few months every year due to my work. Each time I come back, this ridiculous boon-vomit-stack-stack-stack just get worse and worse. I look at patch notes and see boon strip nerfed again for example. Whoever is making decisions on this direction needs to be challenged more by other designers. It makes the gameplay stale as hell and is favouring a particular group of players at the expense of everyone else.

It's like an old friend you had that you loved spending time with, and then every time you see them again, you noticed that their life is just spiralling worse and worse as they make terrible decisions on top of terrible decisions. Until one day you reach the stage where you realise you just don't like spending time with them anymore. I feel that day is approaching for me unless the design direction changes. Every time I come back I leave sooner and sooner. It's simply not fun anymore.

[TheGrimm.5624]

7 hours ago, latlat.4516 said:

 is that it is a choice that I find reasonnable to not allow 3 players on siege to stop 50 players from playing. Nothing more.

Even in its prime 3 with siege could not hold 50 at bay. Siege is currently over nerfed even before you factored in boon output these days. Players complained about stacked ACs which even before the boon age you could stand in do by simply using PVT vs Zerk gear. Course in those days players were asking that PVT gear be removed since they couldn't be one shot like Zerk on Zerk could be. 

[TheGrimm.5624]

6 hours ago, Alsandar.7420 said:

It’s true that boonballs just stand in siege. So sad

I like the confused look you received. If you are going to stand in siege wear some armor, or just stand wherever their is a boonball and take in the extra boons they are throwing around. Reset ran up to a squad at Air's north gate under AC fire. Was able to pop my inventory and do some selling while waiting on the gate to fall. 

[XenesisII.1540]

AC's are aegis rips, nothing more.

Cannons are boon rips but they get kill easily and mostly before a battle starts.

Siege is so bad that groups don't even bother to clear wall siege from the outside, they just stand by the gate, break it and then come clean the siege.

Super speed melee boon balls trains is the balance team wet dream.