WvW Players - After today's Balance Patch and Expansion Announcement

[XenesisII.1540]

1 hour ago, Leger.3724 said:

Yes I will get it. It will provide strikes, fractals, open world content including involving the griffon and skyscale. That is GW2 at its best.

In terms of WvW and pvp more generally... I don't blame them for ignoring it.

This game mode is literally never going to succeed and very few new players will join. It's basically all on us... the people already invested who can't leave. We are the sweats of varying degrees. This is it. No update by Arena Net or time investment by the developers is going to change this.

The things they would have to do to get a healthy community invested in WvW would be shouted down and criticized to hell here. The trolls would be out with their confused emoji on the forums here.

You need to put investment into something if you want it to grow.

But then when they did bother to invest into wvw they did it in such a terrible manner, and then take forever to fix whatever. Like hey guys here's your new desert map!..... ok... did you ask anyone if they wanted a desert map? did you ask them if they wanted another borderland map? did you bother to follow usual map creation guidelines for wvw maps? did you bother to run proper invitations to the betas to test out the map? did you bother to actually listen to feedback and not leave it in the game for six months when it almost killed wvw?

Must be nice for pve to get strikes, fractals, raids, living story, every couple months for ten years. Now imagine if pve didn't get any of these things, do you honestly think pve would be doing so well still? do you think new players would be joining the game playing stale overworld content from the core game? Wvw has some of the most loyal players in the game, some still playing after ten years despite the lack of content.

Sure plenty of ideas get shot down, even my own. But mostly the unreasonable ones that want to turn wvw into something entirely different, or someone just trying to get their rewards as fast as possible and then get the kitten out, without thinking about the long term health of the game mode. Bottom line it all makes no difference because Anet stopped listening to wvw since 2017.

1 hour ago, Leger.3724 said:

What am I talking about? Drastically increasing survivability of all professions in WvW.

Celestial already did this. There's plenty of support specs and boon spam around now to increase survivability of groups.

1 hour ago, Leger.3724 said:

Dramatically reducing the effectiveness of layering and stacking of damage, condition damage and boons.

Aegis, protection, resistance, resolution, vigor, invul, shields, reflects, barriers, cleanses, heals, all spammed. Aoes have been nerfed, conditions have been nerfed, corruptions have been nerfed, feb 2020 had a 30% damage reduction nerf on all damage, cc damage nerfed, boon strips nerfed. How much more survivability do you need?

1 hour ago, Leger.3724 said:

Cutting off teleportation and stealth mechanics off at the knees for stuff like Willbender and Thief.

Yes agreed.

1 hour ago, Leger.3724 said:

Re-thinking the Warclaw mount and the ability track for it. Should you be able to throw a spear and dunk on a new player? 

You get two dodges to avoid the spear... use it when you need to and not just spam it.

1 hour ago, Leger.3724 said:

Should the skillbar have so many abilities?

This game actually has one of the lowest amount of abilities on the skill bar compared to other games which can have like 40 skills to use. Elementalist and Revenant break those amounts, but not every spec is expected to be same low intensity.

1 hour ago, Leger.3724 said:

Should cooldowns be so short? 

No, and blame pve.

1 hour ago, Leger.3724 said:

What about the PIP system?

Backloaded stuff like the skirmish track should be properly spread out. But I don't see a problem rewarding vets more as they play the game mode more, rather than newbies that just want to come in and grab the legendary gear with minimum time and effort. Maybe this can be revisited when the new set in the expansion comes out and draws those "temporary" players.

1 hour ago, Leger.3724 said:

Someone trying and failing in this game will have trouble maintaining tier 6 participation without playing the "cap the camp game". How can we better reward players for trying and failing to take objectives or fight another player?

If you start to reward failing players you will promote players doing the minimum amount to maintain their participation. You might not, but there are certainly players who will, there always is. Defensive participation does need fixing, but hey guess what, that's up to anet not the players to fix. Welcome back to why players become disgruntled with anet, why they lose faith with anet, why the player stops investing in the game and come to the forums to complain in the end.

1 hour ago, Leger.3724 said:

This is all stuff widely derided by the same group claiming Arena Net won't make WvW or sPvP attractive. For many this place is an echo chamber of blaming Arena Net while shouting down any proposed change that would actually bring people into the game mode. 

Echo chamber because there's no one on the other side.

1 hour ago, Leger.3724 said:

So again Arena Net - if you are making GW3 or planning to eventually make a GW3 - keep the combat system in mind and how the average player will engage with it. Keep things simple. Give people clear role choices.

Simple is what's killing the current profession diversity. Low intensity, and boon spam, and quickness/alacrity spam roles.

1 hour ago, Leger.3724 said:

Make it forgiving so a mistake isn't instant death.

Down state?

1 hour ago, Leger.3724 said:

Maybe reconsider a monk class/profession since removing it has led to so many awkward choices surrounding skill cooldowns, the introduction of boons. A smiting prayer monk could have explored open world solo. The open world in GW2 itself is fantastic. The group content is a struggle though and it's mainly because of combat, a lack of clearly defined roles and a lack of a good group matcher or henchmen to replace them. Imagine doing one of the regular story dungeons with henchmen to get a feel.

You can solo open world with any profession.

🤷‍♂️

Edited June 30, 2023 by XenesisII.1540

[ArchonWing.9480]

3 hours ago, XenesisII.1540 said:

My only worry about this system is how many op relics are they going to gate behind content of the expansion.

While we've already had runes locked behind expansions, most of them you can do without, and get cheaper versions from even the tp. With this though I feel like this break from runes will give them freedom to put in even more broken effects, maybe even enough to finally slip over the slope to p2w. 

Well in any case I have like 10 stacks of reward track potions if they stick it all on those lol.

Yea, it seems lost that new options were supposed to provide more utility or special effects and simply more power. Weird stuff like Runes of the Pirate can add fun and memes but sadly it's just been reduced to a spreadsheet of how much dps it does.

It's also why we haven't seen any new sigils/runes/stats. They just need not exist in pve-- there's just not much need for diversity. You're either a damage dealer, or a support.   A lot of sigils and runes basically exist only in WvW.

So unless they want to think about new stuff for WvW, then what is really the point, beyond homogenizing all the runes so they don't fall out of line?

But yea, power always sells.

And yea I have a lot of potions, just because there's no consume all function so too lazy xD

 

Edited June 30, 2023 by ArchonWing.9480

[Jski.6180]

All way too early to tell as wvw has not even had it reset night for this patch (and oddly the ability to use the new weapons from the elite spec will be a thing for this reset). Its kind of silly the way ppl are acting now.

[Leger.3724]

1 hour ago, XenesisII.1540 said:

Simple is what's killing the current profession diversity. Low intensity, and boon spam, and quickness/alacrity spam roles.

Most people are going to look at a rotation that's 10-15 steps long on Snowcrows or whatever website and say "yeah, no thanks". It's not rewarding complexity. It's not engaging complexity. It's not fun complexity. It's "this is stupid and I have to memorize it" complexity and then they don't bother with WvW, sPvP, Raids and even Strikes. But that's still complexity. 

You thinking it's braindead doesn't mean it's simple. And I get it, some people especially extremely experienced ones do make choices and change up their rotations understanding why they are doing that. But this is how we got to a place where no one pvps and barely anyone plays wvw. It's why raids is such a small community and Arena Net have given up making raids.

GW1, LOL and DOTA2 all have a fraction of the skillbar of GW2 and are not action combat. You have lots of choices to be sure. But you lock in a skillbar of 4-8, you have a specific role. Your team knows it. The other team is going to know it on the loading screen or as soon as they spot you. Extremely simple compared to 20+ skills and the action combat of GW2. 

One major reason these games were successful in the past or are successful today is because they were simple and easy to get into. You know your role. You know the pool of options you have to pick from for your role and using your abilities is meaningful outside of a set rotation. A rotation might help but it's not always the best option. The player is not being overwhelmed with choices. The opponent is not being overwhelmed by the player spamming a rotation at them. Players can make choices, players can react to choices. The winner makes consistently better choices over the match or skirmish or whatever you want to call it.

Guild Wars 2 is like Age of Empires or Starcraft. There is a reason the pvp RTS scene has been getting smaller over time. People find out the optimal build paths and follow them. They memorize the rotation. That sounds familiar. Also, yes, Age of Empires and Starcraft have a decent 'esports' scene. Watch pro play and compare it to a typical pvp match by two non-pros. It's completely different. And you know what the people who play these games do? They complain Microsoft and Blizzard aren't putting enough into the games to sell them or improve the pvp experience. It's not that the playerbase sucks and the fundamental way an RTS works is not appealing to people (like combat in GW2). No. It's the developers who just don't understand if they do what the glorious, dedicated playerbase wants then everything would be fixed and millions would play it!

Edited June 30, 2023 by Leger.3724

[ArchonWing.9480]

11 hours ago, Leger.3724 said:

Most people are going to look at a rotation that's 10-15 steps long on Snowcrows or whatever website and say "yeah, no thanks". It's not rewarding complexity. It's not engaging complexity. It's not fun complexity. It's "this is stupid and I have to memorize it" complexity and then they don't bother with WvW, sPvP, Raids and even Strikes. But that's still complexity. 

That's because most people don't care about cranking out the last bits of dps unless they fail the encounter.

Many builds do half their dps just by autoattacking. Heck, just by having the build, you're probably ahead.  If you put your damage skills on cooldown and don't interrupt your autoattack chain, you will probably do close to max dps unless the boss is throwing you all over the place.

Heck, I have a guildie that was given a AA mesmer build and they easily dominate when they play Strikes.

Like yea, I get your point; some rotations are a bit much but it is in no way needed to play the game, and having a great rotation is even less necessary against other players that don't stand there and let you hit them with everything.

This is an excuse, because even if one wanted to be a tryhard, it amounts to 30 minutes on a golem. For 99% of players, it's 5-10.

In a meta group where everyone tryhards, the bosses are basically dead shortly after they're hittable. This is what the multipage rotation is for.

11 hours ago, Leger.3724 said:

It's why raids is such a small community and Arena Net have given up making raids.

I mean, raids is a niche activity and entirely optional. It is simply not going to be as successful in other MMOs. It was their attempt to branch out.

But they are making Strike Missions, which run off the same idea, so not really.

11 hours ago, Leger.3724 said:

Guild Wars 2 is like Age of Empires or Starcraft. There is a reason the pvp RTS scene has been getting smaller over time. People find out the optimal build paths and follow them. They memorize the rotation.

Absolutely not. Have you seen pros play either of these games? They basically destroy their keyboards. We're talking like 200+ actions per minute, and you'd still get destroyed by a Korean robot. Gw2 is simply not a comparison. Even against other MMOs, the difficult content is considered by many to be child's play.

There is more complexity in the Dark Age of an AOE game then playing any one toon of Gw2.

Of course, strictly competitive games are different. Strong fundamentals are required. This is true of being good at anything.

That's naturally going to be more exclusive.

edit: BTW, build orders exist because the possibilities early game are extremely limited and thus can be "solved". That's because things are simple, not complex. The decision making is essentially too trivial to bother with any deviation so people just follow the automated path.  Same thing applies to many pve encounters.

Also, btw, you're working off an extremely flawed premise:

  

14 hours ago, Leger.3724 said:

The things they would have to do to get a healthy community invested in WvW would be shouted down and criticized to hell here.

That has never stopped them.

 

 

Edited June 30, 2023 by ArchonWing.9480

[XenesisII.1540]

Pvp also has way less set rotations, most things are done as reactions to the situation, pve is mostly about maximizing dps with optimal rotations. MMO combat tends to be more complex than something like a fps or moba or rts or arpg since you're dealing with different layers of damage, healing, support in many different forms, and all the counters to them with way more player numbers involved.

Edited June 30, 2023 by XenesisII.1540

[Garkus.2183]

i must admit it's brazenly bold of a company that can't even keep up balance on the skills/weapons and abilities they have had for 11 yrs to try adding a myriad more to deal with.well done anet for giving yourselves another 30 yrs of work and us pain

[Jitters.9401]

7 hours ago, ArchonWing.9480 said:

The good news is they say you can earn it through reward tracks. If you are a WvW regular, I would recommend saving some reward potions (80 will complete a track fyi)

I am still quite disillusioned with this whole mess but I did get a chuckle.

I have approx 2900 of those wvw potions just setting there since I never really cared to use them. Didn't see the need since I have nothing to spend points on.

 

[Aeolus.3615]

with the current promoted changes to the game it is not worth balance the game towards current gameplay but prepare balance skill over time to the next weapon system.

But we all know the history of this game changes...since 2012

Edited June 30, 2023 by Aeolus.3615

[Gorani.7205]

I kind of fear that ANet is tearing away the lid of Pandora's Box they unsuccessfully tried to keep half closed with the balance patches of many years -  by adding the weapon masteries and giving elite profession weapons to core. They can hardly juggle the current set of balls, but they now throw even more variables into the mix.

Not getting anything for WvW, other than the "alliances" (sometimes in the obscured future) was no surprise. I did not expect ANet to have anything for that game mode (and PvP too).

Edited June 30, 2023 by Gorani.7205

[Leger.3724]

16 hours ago, ArchonWing.9480 said:

Also, btw, you're working off an extremely flawed premise:

 

 

Can you read? Yes or no? The answer seems to be no given how you take everything I say out of context to create a strawman to argue against. This is my one and only response to your laughably inaccurate characterization of my post.

[ArchonWing.9480]

 

1 hour ago, Leger.3724 said:

Can you read? Yes or no? The answer seems to be no given how you take everything I say out of context to create a strawman to argue against. This is my one and only response to your laughably inaccurate characterization of my post.

I don't think you understand what a strawman is.

A strawman is intentionally attacking a weaker version of an argument. For example, you just quoted one sentence of my post and did not address the content, rather you addressed my reading ability, which doesn't have anything to do with the topic. If anything, you should consider offering a simplified explanation because not all of us are very smart.

It is pretty unlikely that is meant to really address anything I said, or that you really read anything about it.

I'm actually steelmanning the premise, because I said that even if we assume what you say is true, that the WvWer community would actually block attempts to make the game better, that this would not stop Anet from making these changes simply because in the past negative community feedback has not stopped Anet from changing the game in regards to WvW. Such as the development of the Desrt Borderland.

Simply out, the community cannot veto these changes. So while you and I may disagree on the actual stance of the WvW community at large, it does not actually matter.

https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/steelman.

As for the rest, I agree I mischaracterized your post-- I was trying to be as nice as possible by offering more correct information.

A more accurate characterization is that you are making broad generalizations about game modes like raids and WvW without really investing into them to gain enough knowledge or experience to make these assumptions.

You have also made broad generalizations about communities  that I don't think anyone is fit to make regardless of their knowledge and experience.

Simply put, I disagree and it is very possible to enjoy the game at a high level without being held down by rotations or lack of.

edit: There are also many aspects of the game that should be streamlined, such as having 154643643 currencies and such. But I think those things should be addressed for different reasons.

Edited June 30, 2023 by ArchonWing.9480

[Justine.6351]

Yeah I am done.

gg balance team, you win.

[Sleepwalker.1398]

35 minutes ago, Justine.6351 said:

Yeah I am done.

gg balance team, you win.

I think Justine's pissed ever since Anet tried to "fix" something that was not broken on Rev. The hammer 2 skill. 🤭

[Justine.6351]

4 hours ago, Sleepwalker.1398 said:

I think Justine's pissed ever since Anet tried to "fix" something that was not broken on Rev. The hammer 2 skill. 🤭

I had no confidence in them at that point. Nothing that came after was shocking, just disappointing.

[Ashen.2907]

On 6/29/2023 at 3:33 PM, ArchonWing.9480 said:

changing rune functionality, and it doesn't look like they thought it through very well.

Nah, they thought it through....they just misjudged the backlash that would come in respomse to taking away earned character progression in order to sell it back.

[ArchonWing.9480]

14 hours ago, Ashen.2907 said:

Nah, they thought it through....they just misjudged the backlash that would come in respomse to taking away earned character progression in order to sell it back.

That's just kinda crazy to me.

People demand compensation for literally any change, big or small if you can get anything easier than they did. Heck, people wanted compensation when the game itself sold for cheaper lol.

So if people would flip the table for that, then the backlash for taking away something they already earned would be huge. And it was.

The moment I saw that, I thought of that bad memory of the Guild Hall change where guilds lost those WvW upgrades and had to get them again. That was catastrophic if you ask me, more so than the dime a dozen horrible balance decisions that get made.

I will continue to bring this up because I imagine a lot of WvWers probably were like "oh, PvE expansion, this can't affect me!" because I initially thought the same.

Edited July 1, 2023 by ArchonWing.9480

[XenesisII.1540]

The runes change is one of those things that should have probably been changed beforehand as a QoL change, and then promoted new relics in the expansion, so it doesn't feel like they're repackaging it like they did for Guild halls for HoT. At this point players have unlocked a lot of the runes, so all those similar relics should be grandfathered into their account, not just "one freebie" that's kinda insulting. They plan on releasing more info next week I think, so we'll see how they plan on delivering it to the players I guess.

[Ashen.2907]

38 minutes ago, ArchonWing.9480 said:

That's just kinda crazy to me.

People demand compensation for literally any change, big or small if you can get anything easier than they did. Heck, people wanted compensation when the game itself sold for cheaper lol.

So if people would flip the table for that, then the backlash for taking away something they already earned would be huge. And it was.

The moment I saw that, I thought of that bad memory of the Guild Hall change where guilds lost those WvW upgrades and had to get them again. That was catastrophic if you ask me, more so than the dime a dozen horrible balance decisions that get made.

I will continue to bring this up because I imagine a lot of WvWers probably were like "oh, PvE expansion, this can't affect me!" because I initially thought the same.

Yeah, it reminded me of the GH change too.