What makes GW2 combat in WvW fun? (and how I feel recent changes go in the wrong direction)

[ZTeamG.4603]

As with many of you, most of the recent changes were a huge disappointment for me. So that got me thinking about what I enjoy about GW2 combat and how I feel the devs have been taking it in the wrong direction. I've primarily been a solo to smallscale (ie up to 10v10) roamer, defensive scout, and occasional zerg flex player in my many years playing WvW on and off since launch. I've gathered my thoughts below and welcome your opinions as well. It turned out to be a longer post than I was expecting, so please bear with me.

What makes GW2 smallscale and disorganized largescale (ie cloud) combat fun for me?

• It has tons of build variety--there are plenty of common archetypes you run into and, once experienced, you can often predict what different classes will try to do, but there are always roamers that surprise me with something new or an unexpected skill/trait choice that gives them an advantage. Similarly, I often find myself swapping utility skills as I'm running into a fight to tailor the build to what I'm expecting. On smallscale, everything feels potentially viable even if a handful of high tier classes are most prominent, and you can always be in for a rude awakening from a class you never see or would initially write off as "low tier".
• Movement. In smallscale, standing in red circles is a death sentence, and by now all classes have a number of ways to stay mobile; some are through movement skills like leaps, others are through teleports. There are all manner of ways to take advantage of terrain or skill range, whether you're line-of-sighting a ranged enemy, juking an opponent to get a quick breather, leaping just out of the enemies' range when they try to burst you, or luring the opponent to a spot from which you can send them plummeting to a gravity-laden death.
• Individual agency and dynamic responsiveness. In smallscale, smart plays can completely swing a battle; this might take the form of key interrupts, working with a teammate to land a big stun and nuke right as 5 enemies are pulled into a tight bunch, dropping a key projectile blocker to save a teammate from focused pressure, deciding whether to try to res a downed ally or use their vulnerability as a chance to down an enemy attacking them, or (before the recent changes) dancing around a pillar to contest an objective for a critical 10 seconds until more allies can arrive, landing a crucial disable on enemy siege, etc.
• Unlike sPvP, WvW has tons of interesting terrain and varied ways of engaging objectives. These provide yet another avenue for elevating what makes the combat system great.
• And more, but those are the key points.

Now, how do these translate to organized largescale (ie "boonball" gameplay)? In my opinion, almost all of it gets lost in translation.

• Build variety is hamstrung and, honestly, doesn't matter as long as you fit the general comp. You know how many builds rely primarily on projectiles? Well, projectile hate is ubiquitous among big zergs, so take all those builds off the table. Target caps and the ability to fill them reign supreme, as evidenced by the main meta DPS before this last patch being the ones that had ways to hit more than 5 targets because of  balance oversights. But really, you don't care what classes the enemies are running when you're in a tight zerg fighting another tight zerg--you just care where the red mass is shifting to. At most, your commander might try to take advantage of the enemies whiffing an important skill in unison.
• Optimal movement is pitifully low movement, and it has been trending down over time. You have to stay in range of your dedicated supports and stack on the tag to minimize the impact of the low target-cap enemy red circles, so take a look at any significant movement skills and discard them--they'll only be used if you make a mistake and need to get back to the zerg. Low offensive target caps and overtuned support mean that staying stacked is more important to survivability than avoiding enemy AoEs, so boonballs move slow (or, if they outnumber the enemies, don't have to move at all) to keep everyone together. Organized largescale in its current state is about 90% of the way there to the "Chinese GvG" meme where the two zergs just stand beside each other pressing skills off cooldown. This wasn't always the case, and I think the most indicative case study of the state of boonball movement is that portal bombing is rarely seen anymore in large zerg fights. Since you can only get 20 players through each portal, the importance of numbers and target caps mean it's a death sentence to drop 20 of your players on a zerg of 50 half-awake enemies. Even if you catch them by surprise, your damage will tickle them and you'll get instantly melted if they respond. Even if you have 2-3 mesmers using portal and/or mimic to get the whole zerg through, unless you all pop up on the same spot you'll have the huge disadvantage of being temporarily split up and losing the local numbers advantage to absorb enemy AoEs.
• Individual agency is minimal. As mentioned, staying stacked is more important to survivability than avoiding enemy AoEs. The enemy boonballs operate by the same logic, so you can forget dropping AoEs when you see an opportunity--if you cast an AoE on a clump of juicy targets when the rest of your DPS are not, yours will just be absorbed and ignored by the enemy boonball. So, toss out player agency and only use your big skills when the commander says to. Since everyone's stacked, there's no point in paying attention to individual skill usages--just "hey look the red mass shifted in this direction or used their wells just now." The one place individual agency is maintained in largescale is among supports, where getting stab, stunbreaks, or heals out at the right time can save your party, but even that is whittled away by zergs running 2-3 supports per party. Once again, this wasn't always the case--a single meteor shower used to be a deadly threat if not avoided, but the downward trend in damage and the drastic reductions in target caps over the years have made individual red circles able to be completely ignored.
• Tools continue to be removed for outnumbered teams to do anything. It's no secret that there is huge population imbalance, both absolute in the match-up and locally across timezones. It's been futile for an outnumbered server to engage in open field battles with a larger zerg for a while now, but until recently defensive advantages gave outnumbered players a way to fight back. Intelligent usage of siege, disables, splitting the zerg or cutting off reinforcements with wall patching, and diving in and out of capture points gave outnumbered defenders ways to temporarily even the odds or buy time for reinforcements to arrive. And it's not as if there was no counterplay--diligent attackers could kill defensive siege, guard against enemy disables, pull defenders, spread out to keep defenders out of the capture point, etc. Intelligent gameplay was (the past tense being key here) rewarded, and it was especially potent if the attackers weren't paying attention and engaging in counterplay. Attackers afking while their siege-users press 1/2 could find their siege disabled or destroyed. Now, most of those defensive options have been nerfed into oblivion, and there's no reason for a large zerg to pay attention to defenders that they outnumber because, quite frankly, there's nothing the defenders can do to stop them.

So, now we've moved from a fast paced, dynamic, and varied combat system that rewards quick thinking, creative build variety, split second opportunities, and interesting movement to a static, boring point-and-click adventure where you only play the game if you have similar numbers and, even then, respond to commander callouts like you're in a Skinner box...and even that's very generous in assuming the servers can keep up with the largescale fights, because most of the time the mode is plagued with skill lag when boonballs clash.

So, what's my ideal balance look like?

Take advantage of what makes the GW2 combat system great. Ultimately, I believe it comes down to target caps. How do you get people spread out and using movement? By drastically raising offensive target caps to the point that stacking your full zerg in one spot while in range of the enemies is a death sentence. Picture this:

• If all offensive skills had very high or no target caps (ie a cap of 50 targets) and support/heal skills stayed capped at 5 targets, then optimal zerg gameplay would shift from the slow, static blobs that we have now to parties of 5 split up across the fight area but still working together. Movement and positioning would matter greatly, as you'd want to be close enough to capitalize on opportunities without getting too far from your party supports and without providing too juicy of a target clump for the enemies. You'd be more frequently engaging enemies in localized smallscale fights within the larger, say, 50v50, and this would make for especially fun fights over objectives and sieges.
  • The skill ceiling would be so much higher than amidst the boonblob
  • Individual agency would be returned to largescale combat, and key plays by individual players could shift the momentum in one part of the battlefield
  • Movement and terrain would be important again
  • Build variety would matter again since you're engaging in localized smallscale.

I love this game and I've had a lot of fun over the years, but at this point I'm feeling battered by the realization that the gameplay I've enjoyed for years seems completely at odds with the balance devs' vision for WvW. Personally, I don't find boonball fights and karma trains against undefended objectives fun, and turning WvW into just another PvE meta train is a travesty to the gamemode's potential.

 

TL;DR: The current balance direction towards boonball supremacy squanders the best parts of GW2's combat system.

This went a lot longer than I thought, but thanks for coming to my TaimiTalk. Let me know what you think.

 

[MysteryDude.1572]

ok, lets say offensive skills have 50 target caps .

so?

10 vs 50 , you still have to bypass 30 suports, what you would get is massive dps padding

oh, and imagine 50 man zerg with offensive 50cap skills....

whatever people think they can abuse in low vs high numbers , has proven to be extra degenerate when it gets abused by high numbers as well

[MysteryDude.1572]

also , it doesnt make sence sense WHY a zerg would split up like you mentioned. just because a meteor stike will affect ALL enemies so it doesnt matter where they stand? (to my understanding). thats cool , but its doent depend on offensive targe caps but rather suport RANGE

fb healing skills are under 200 range cone casts , god forbid dps try to solo commit somewhwere

i guess what youre describing could work if the support range would be like , 3~5 k range so parties can actually stop stacking . and then again this would be abused if suports stay behind walls/gates etc

Edited April 23 by MysteryDude.1572

[ZTeamG.4603]

8 minutes ago, MysteryDude.1572 said:

ok, lets say offensive skills have 50 target caps .

so?

10 vs 50 , you still have to bypass 30 suports, what you would get is massive dps padding

oh, and imagine 50 man zerg with offensive 50cap skills....

whatever people think they can abuse in low vs high numbers , has proven to be extra degenerate when it gets abused by high numbers as well

I see your point, and it's kinda why the "pirate ship" meta existed back in the day. When taken to the extreme of 50 target caps, though, the 30 supports wouldn't be able to outheal the pressure of 10 people dropping AoEs on them with the support/heal skills still capped at 5. The whole point would be to make tight stacking a death sentence--if a group wants to stay stacking as a group of 50, sure they can melt one of the smaller groups just like they can now. However, with all the smaller groups having 50 target cap AoEs, they can swoop in and nuke the group of 50 the moment the group of 50 focuses one of the smaller groups.

[MysteryDude.1572]

it could make the return of focus parties , but party interface needs to make party menebers reconisable easier if they are to be spread more than 1k range

[ZTeamG.4603]

6 minutes ago, MysteryDude.1572 said:

also , it doesnt make sence sense WHY a zerg would split up liek you mentioned. just because a meteor stike will affect ALL enemies so it doesnt matter where they stand? (to my understanding). thats cool , but its doent depend on offensive targe caps but rather suport RANGE

They'd split up to stay out of the deadly red circle AoEs to minimize the amount of people getting hit by them. It only affects them if they're standing IN it. In the current meta, they can just stand in several red circles and ignore them because each AoE only ever hit a few of them at a time, and that damage will instantly be healed up. If the AoEs could hit all the players at once, the groups couldn't just ignore and outheal them.

Edited April 23 by ZTeamG.4603

[MysteryDude.1572]

i think they would just kite mostly , not completely spread left and right

unless its cloud?

[ZTeamG.4603]

Just now, MysteryDude.1572 said:

i think they would just kite mostly , not completely spread left and right

unless its cloud?

If the enemies are spread out, you wouldn't be able to kite them forever, nor would you be able to attack objectives while all stacked in one spot. Whether it would end up as clouds or parties of 5 spread out across the battlefield (ie if attacking a keep maybe one party is defending the rams, one is pressuring the walls, one is on the outer walls trying to shoot at the inner walls, etc.), it'd be more fun and interesting gameplay than blob v blob.

[MysteryDude.1572]

ok , now im thinking , woudlnt that promote extreme pirate ship? if all offensive skills hit 50 people , why would someone risk to come close for a 50 target cap arc diviner where they can eat in the face 50 skills 50 taget each . if the play is to cloud a zerg with eles and kitten , yes , but other than that it would mean 50 man necro shades/50 man CoR/ 50 man holo forge etch , and its not like single target focus aint a thing..

[MysteryDude.1572]

3 minutes ago, ZTeamG.4603 said:

If the enemies are spread out, you wouldn't be able to kite them forever, nor would you be able to attack objectives while all stacked in one spot. Whether it would end up as clouds or parties of 5 spread out across the battlefield (ie if attacking a keep maybe one party is defending the rams, one is pressuring the walls, one is on the outer walls trying to shoot at the inner walls, etc.), it'd be more fun and interesting gameplay than blob v blob.

i think youre describing the old meta , where caster and focus party existed , now spiced up with all the new elites in a way. 😄

[MysteryDude.1572]

id be down , ngl, certainly not 50 man target caps but skill slike meteor/fgs sure deserve to be 10 , or more

 

Edited April 23 by MysteryDude.1572

[ZTeamG.4603]

Just now, MysteryDude.1572 said:

ok , now im thinking , woudlnt that promote extreme pirate ship? if all offensive skills hit 50 people , why would someone risk to come close for a 50 target cap arc diviner where they can eat in the face 50 skills 50 taget each . if the play is to cloud a zerg with eles and kitten , yes , but other than that it would mean 50 man necro shades/50 man CoR/ 50 man holo forge etch , and its not like single target focus aint a thing..

No, because of the huge difference in risk/reward of a zerg running a 50 man pirate ship and 1 or 2 warriors with arc divider attacking it. If you were dead set on hunkering down as a group of 50 and trying to individually target down every attacker that comes in range, it only takes 1 or 2 enemies getting through for your zerg to get wiped--which is incredibly easy to accomplish given things like stealth and invulns. Meanwhile, if the enemies are split up, you can only ever hit a small number of them at once despite the high target caps. And every time your zerg starts focusing 1 of the enemies dancing just outside your range, the other 49 enemies spread around the battlefield can swoop in and nuke you.

[MysteryDude.1572]

i can see the meta in this case , bunch of FA eles with virtus and whatever single target spec u can get , target someone, delete him - target someone else, delete him - target someone else, delete him .. and so on

Edited April 23 by MysteryDude.1572

[MysteryDude.1572]

The only one and true question remains tho :  Would this be the day that rangers finally come down the wall?

[Chiral.8915]

Unfortunately this will have to wait until GW3. This is a limitation of technology as the engine can't handle the strain of of anything more than 5 targets per AoE. It's the reason all of the 10 man skills were phased out last year. 

[Cael.3960]

And the 10 people might manage 3 kills instead of 1 out of 50 before being annihilated. Because that 50 man group has dedicated healers in minstrel gear (often 50% or more) and most small groups are lucky to have 1 heal and 1 support per party. Even with no target cap they're still able to outheal the damage. The extra kills? They're the ones in poorly organized parties without support ie., the map randos who joined an open tag like it's a PvE meta. 

Your 10-man group isn't going to zerg bust unless they run all damage, all glass, and manage an an ambush from stealth or a walled objective or some other LoS. That means your 10-man group is already more coordinated, more skilled, and more composed than most groups in the game. 

Which basically means... you're giving highly skilled players a buff against lesser skilled players. And a 50-man group of highly skilled players will be untouchable with that kind of advantage. 

I feel what you're looking for is really a way for a 1v50 to be effective, particularly as a part of some kind of cloud where a zerg is limited to a very small number of targets whereas solos scattered around the edges have a maximum number of targets and the highest possible damage. 

The cloud meta is one of the most effective, and universally despised, metas in the game. When done right it's so oppressive to new and inexperienced players that they refuse to play. When done poorly it creates a stagnant, prolonged engagement where rewards are few on both sides and a lot of time is wasted to achieve a minimum of warscore on both sides. 

Far worse, if 2 50 man squads can create map-wide lag on a borderland with most skills having target caps of 10 or less, just how much lag will 50 man target caps create with those numbers? I don't even want to think about it. Back when GW2 wasn't running on Amazon discount servers performance was good enough that you could sometimes get away with this. Now? No chance one side even manages a single skill cast with that much going on. It's even possible that most of your cloud gets nothing to go off either, meanwhile that boonblob's passive sustain might just be enough to come out on top anyway. 

Higher target caps aren't the answer. They would look absolutely amazing as youtube content though. 

[Zok.4956]

6 hours ago, MysteryDude.1572 said:

Would this be the day that rangers finally come down the wall?

Nothing is off the table. Not even rangers off the wall. 😉

[Zephyrus.9680]

I recall back in 2013 skills had a 10 target cap or maybe it was no cap and skill lag was off the charts in big fights. Most fights were also smaller at that time with less players in each match up. So it was a huge improvement to WvW when they reduced aoe caps purely because of skill lag. I don't know if servers and/or CPUs could handle much larger caps. 

8 hours ago, ZTeamG.4603 said:

The skill ceiling would be so much higher than amidst the boonblob

We're 11 years in. Most WvW players are not going to get much better than they are now so depending on design, they could chase a lot of more casual players away. I'm a cloud enjoyer but if they make it so following a tag too closely gets everyone instantly melted by 1000% boosted skills (50 player cap!) that's probably not going to be popular with these players, which may be the majority of WvW players. 

[senftube.6081]

Game nowdays is like 10 Supports and 1 DPS. XD It feels boring and super uninteractive.  This Meta is 100% Autopilot and ArenaNet made the same dumb mistake Zenimax did in Cyrodiil.

[ZTeamG.4603]

4 hours ago, Cael.3960 said:

And the 10 people might manage 3 kills instead of 1 out of 50 before being annihilated. Because that 50 man group has dedicated healers in minstrel gear (often 50% or more) and most small groups are lucky to have 1 heal and 1 support per party. Even with no target cap they're still able to outheal the damage. The extra kills? They're the ones in poorly organized parties without support ie., the map randos who joined an open tag like it's a PvE meta. 

I'm not sure where you're getting this idea from that they'd be able to outheal the damage from. Look at the damage you deal with a typical DPS skill, even with minimal might/buffs, and multiply it by 10. Would you be able to perpetually sustain that incoming damage, or would you instantly go down? Those healers in minstrel gear would still be limited to 5 targets for their healing/support, and the 2 or 3 per subgroup wouldn't be able to outheal the equivalent of 10+ people whaling on them and their party--the stacked zerg would get instantly downed. The reason sustain is so strong in the current meta is because low target caps and overtuned supports mean that the DPS to Support ratio is almost 1:1, and the low offensive target caps (some going down to 1 or 2 targets, whereas most support is 5 targets) mean that every AoE from a DPS player is going to have a corresponding support counterhealing it. In a clash of two boonballs of 50 each, you're not getting hit more than you're getting healed as long as you stay stacked. If a few people are caught away from the zerg, they melt even if their supports are sending healing their way. With offensive target caps being 50 each, everyone would rightfully melt when just standing in AoEs.

4 hours ago, Cael.3960 said:

The cloud meta is one of the most effective, and universally despised, metas in the game.

It's only despised in the case of number imbalance (ie Mag) and people who exclusively run in organized zergs and can't adapt to more than a point-and-click adventure. Are you telling me that you seriously enjoy two boonballs slowly circling each other more than you enjoy a disorganized 20v20 fight over an objective, a fight where the frontline ebbs and flows and individual players can actually have an impact? Even at the full cloud level of 50v50ish, cloud fights over a keep--with each side's siege attacks flying overhead as the attackers try to push into the breach and the defenders try to push to the attackers' siege--are far more fun than boonball fights. The cloud only gets boring when it's a stagnant line in the middle of nowhere (ie the "OW sentry meta"), but, even there, that's because it's downtime when the cloud has no objective to attack or defend--the boonball gameplay that corresponds to that is just not getting to fight anything at all.

4 hours ago, Cael.3960 said:

When done right it's so oppressive to new and inexperienced players that they refuse to play. When done poorly it creates a stagnant, prolonged engagement where rewards are few on both sides and a lot of time is wasted to achieve a minimum of warscore on both sides.

This describes boonballs just as well as the cloud, except instead of just new/inexperienced players the boonball drives off everyone from a server that can't match the boonball's numbers. And I'd disagree about the cloud driving off new/inexperienced players. There'd be growing pains, sure, but they'd be pushed to get better rather than just treat WvW like another mindless PvE meta train.

4 hours ago, Cael.3960 said:

Which basically means... you're giving highly skilled players a buff against lesser skilled players. And a 50-man group of highly skilled players will be untouchable with that kind of advantage.

Regarding the effectiveness of experience: maybe, just maybe, the goal shouldn't be to dumb down WvW combat to the point that a brand new player is just as effective as a veteran. I prefer when games with complex combat systems reward skill rather than just rewarding the outnumbering of the enemy. The fight shouldn't be over in the organization phase before the fight even starts.

It's not as if what I'm suggesting is without precedent. Back in the early days of the game, "zerg busting" groups of 15-20 that would win against groups of 40+ were quite common, and WvW was more popular than ever. The higher skill ceiling wasn't driving people off, it was pushing them to get better.

4 hours ago, Cael.3960 said:

I feel what you're looking for is really a way for a 1v50 to be effective, particularly as a part of some kind of cloud where a zerg is limited to a very small number of targets whereas solos scattered around the edges have a maximum number of targets and the highest possible damage. 

Once again, that would only be the case if the zergs didn't adapt. If they refuse to stop plopping their whole group of 50 in a bunch of red circles at once, then they deserve to go down easily. Organized groups would still be superior to randoms because groups of 5 could take advantage of boons and having supports--it's just that they would be a mobile group of 5 rather than one cog in the blob of 50. 

4 hours ago, Cael.3960 said:

Far worse, if 2 50 man squads can create map-wide lag on a borderland with most skills having target caps of 10 or less, just how much lag will 50 man target caps create with those numbers? I don't even want to think about it. Back when GW2 wasn't running on Amazon discount servers performance was good enough that you could sometimes get away with this. Now? No chance one side even manages a single skill cast with that much going on. It's even possible that most of your cloud gets nothing to go off either, meanwhile that boonblob's passive sustain might just be enough to come out on top anyway. 

If all else remained equal you'd have a point, but you're not considering the downstream effects of raising offensive target caps. After the day or so it would take for people to adapt, you would almost never have the target caps getting used up because people would stop stacking all in one spot. There would only be the occasional spike if someone does get caught unaware with their zerg all in one spot (a spike in lag that would immediately subside since the zerg would all be dead). Once people adapted, you'd probably have less skill lag because you'd be spreading the fight out into a bunch of localized smallscale fights within a larger battle rather than 100 players all trying to cast skills within 600 range of each other.

Edited April 23 by ZTeamG.4603

[Junkpile.7439]

Why healers need to be tanks? Anet should remove healing power from every defence set.

[Cael.3960]

5 hours ago, ZTeamG.4603 said:

I'm not sure where you're getting this idea from...

I don't know where to even begin with this. There's a great deal of unspoken assumptions and selective bias here which is going to feel like a personal attack when I try to explain my own perspective and why I feel this would be disastrous for the future of this game mode. I'm not arguing at you, I'm not slamming you for wanting the game to appeal more to your particular playstyle even if I feel it comes without an understanding of what other kinds of players want from the game. I'm not questioning your understanding of the situation or your awareness of mechanics and playstyles that aren't something you personally play or have significant experience with. My intent is to create an open-minded dialogue to explore both sides of the situation so a reasonable compromise, if it exists, can be found. My position on this issue isn't rooted in stone, nor is it based on knee-jerk outrage or a preference for a particular style of gameplay. I'm trying to see the broadest possible interpretation of these changes as it would effect not just how I play, but how a wide variety of players of varying levels of skill and coordination are likely to experience it. So please, understand that I'm responding out of a desire for expansive discussion not to 'win' an argument. There's a difference. 

Hitting more targets doesn't mean an individual player is doing more damage to a single target. At best you're assuming that by having a higher target cap there's more overlap so that multiple squadmates can tag the same enemy player. Yes, this has the potential to generate more kills because you're more likely to land damage on glass targets or those who don't have defensive procs, passive mitigation or enough situational awareness for active mitigation. That's the obvious value of a limitless target cap, anything that can take damage will take damage and thus the odds of generating a down are highest. 

But it also makes the assumption that you're running nothing but DPS players on high-spike builds who always get to strike first. That means your 50 man target isn't running reflects, aoe denial, pulls, strips or spike damage of their own. You're basically assuming they sit there and eat your best alpha-strike with zero pushback, awareness or personal initiative. You're also assuming that they just let you smash them for followup damage while they stand in your bomb and try to heal through it. What exactly are their own DPS doing? Or do you just assume they all died on the first hit? Did you strip all their boons, apply vulnerability and CC on your mega-spike DPS burst so they never had a chance to escape as well? Groups like this DO exist in the game right now. They get farmed by groups half their size because most of them aren't good enough at the game to carry their own weight, let alone punch back at anything of equal numbers. Increasing the target cap to deal with groups like this is basically asking for the ability to farm casuals en-masse. That's not a healthy place to put a competitive meta, especially not one where participation numbers are declining. 

Sustain is so strong in this current meta because coordinated groups of high-quality DPS players working together are rare. Squads who possess that kind of talent can easily burn through squads of 4-support parties already. They don't need the crutch of increased target caps to fight bigger groups, they have the proper builds and enough coordination to get the job done without them. Those who blob up without that kind of punch usually can't succeed against a tiered up keep in the first place. They don't have the confidence to win a real fight so the only advantage their numbers have is to sustain through siege and/or carry enough supply to burn through walls quickly to ninja an objective before they're farmed by defense responders. Increased target caps would collapse these casual groups and either drive them from the game mode altogether or scatter their population amongst the broader base of ineffective defenders. That means less bags for you because now your competition is mostly other solos/roamers who aren't easy meat, casuals who won't play without something to defend, or the kind of highly organized and capable squads whom you won't be able to one-shot wipe without more at least half their number in the first place. At that point it's just a blob-vs-blob with a different meta. Your problem remains but now you've lost the easy bags. Makes for great youtube videos while it lasts though. 

I admire the cloud, truly. On an individual level they represent the level of skill a better-than-average squad with compted parties would usually have. Being better than average, they don't need buffs to dominate weaker opponents. They just need more time because fragmented coordination requires individuals to recognize opportunities and act on them without direction. In a quality cloud most will hunt the tail, prioritize targets without stab who can be pulled away from their supports and resist the urge to clump up to land damage when they know it'll make them a target for the full blob. You're already better than your opponents, why do you need to increase the gap? For a healthy game to exist even it's most skilled, most talented members need a challenge. When the game gets easy people get bored and stop playing. The smart play is to leave yourself with enough challenge that the game never gets boring. Victories don't create personal growth, overcoming disadvantage does that. I think a 50-target cap takes away a lot of the challenge in this game. Veteran players shouldn't be looking for a way to farm casuals, the casuals farm themselves enough already. 

 I get the impression you don't run with squads that have effective leadership, strategy, or a style of engagement that requires critical thinking. More to the point, I don't feel you have experience with large squads who also have these traits. To someone who's never run in a quality group or been in the voice coms of one I can understand how it looks like two big blobs just circle each other until one just rolls over the other. You don't see how one tag baits damage from the other, how the bigger a group becomes the greater the relationship between degrees of attrition have on party cohesion and squad effectiveness. The playmaking abilities of individual players who manage to pull targets, secure downs in the skirmish, and the general level of play and attention to detail required to remain tight on tag so you're not an opportunistic kill. That mindless orbit you describe? That's one commander paring the wheat from the chaff until they can line up a decsive blow on the core of a group--the only real threat in the fight. That orbit? That's one commander getting a feel for bomb timings, the advantages and disadvantages of their differing comps, defensive cooldowns, gaps in boon coverage, the effective level of sustain in that other group and how reactive they are to a push. All the magic you ascribe to that disorganized 20v20 that 'ebbs and flows' where individual players have an impact. It's easy to miss when you see the forest and not the trees, but it's there. Making the assumption that 50 means casual and incompetent (but still too much for skilled veterans to handle) is a disservice to everyone. 

The cloud absolutely drives away new/inexperienced members. You see this everytime someone in chat/forums/reddit mentions the latest Mag matchup and how they're not going to play. It's no different at all from those who say the same about BG or whatever bandwagon server has all the boonblob fight guilds. 'I hate this garbage meta and this trash matchup. I'm just going to PvE this week.' The funny thing is that instead of solo players complaining about boonblobs, it's small-midsize attack groups who complain about unbeatable magclouds. It's the same problem but from a different perspective. In both cases it's typically the newer, less skilled and less experienced players who are upset about being farmed by those who know the game much better. Boonblobs are built around theorycrafted comps and the guilds who train a member to fill them. That degree of skill and coordination is going to outclass casual players without organization. Magclouds are filled by veteran solo/roamers who have spent enough time fighting outnumbered that they can intuit opportunity and quickly move to strike. That level of individual skill is going to outclass a lack of game understanding and poor organization/coordination. Both versions of casual are getting farmed and neither veteran perspective requires a buff to make that farming easier. The casuals who might abandon the game because they have no chance of winning? They do need the help, but what help they get shouldn't be something those with extensive game knowledge can exploit to even greater benefit. 

I'm not an advocate for dumbing down the game. That should be more than clear from this post and others I've made; I prefer new players take it on the nose and learn to grow rather than play with the training wheels perpetually on. Numbers are an advantage, but numbers aren't an 'I-Win' button that trumps higher quality play. Choosing to believe you can't win under any circumstance unless the game devs nerf or buff a particular strategy is defeatist. Worse, it removes the impetus to theorycraft and generate player-driven evolution within the game. You can overcome greater numbers. You can overcome significant greater numbers. But each additional player is an additional advantage and overcoming them requires more out of you and your team each time. Eventually every strategy has a breaking point; when one fails it's time to create another. Or combine multiple so that they have a greater net benefit. Ultimately you're part of a team and a team has many different tools at it's disposal, there's more than one path to victory. 

In the first year or two of launch 'zerg-busting' groups were common, yes. They were established guilds who transferred from other large-scale competitive games like DAoC and Warhammer Online. They were among the first to overcome the limits of the game mode by expanding their group sizes by coordinating 5-man parties in voice coms. Many were also elitist and exclusive, and with no weak links a 15-man could punch far harder than an unorganized mob with numbers and litterally nothing else. Squads were also smaller in general back then as there were much higher ques and activity across all servers so squeezing in a comp group was more difficult. Boonballs existed back then too, but unlike today it could take half-a-day for many of them to form and once they were rolling on a map they could exist in perpetuity so long as there was another commander to tag in. Even then much of the 'ball' were just floaters who glommed onto a rolling mass of people, the real success was always in that voice-com core. WvW was a much different beast back then, however. PvP was the esport scene and WvW was more of a hilarious group combat experience than a serious meta. Balance was rarely a consideration back then, and it wouldn't become one until the competitive skill split divided WvW from PvP. 

As for zergs being forced to disperse as a way to adapt to a higher target cap... I don't feel you understand the reasons why a group bands together. In many cases it has nothing at all to do with winning a fight. People like friends, people like running together while laughing about random junk in voice coms. It's a shared activity. Enforcing a skill balance that tells these players they can't play with each other and have a good time will simply cause them to abandon the game and go somewhere else. You need to understand that the social context of the game mode is just as important as the mechanical balance of it. People will want to play together, regardless of whether or not it's optimal. Creating an environment where they're harshly punished for doing so does not improve the health or longevity of the game. Relish the fact that many of these people are easy bags or the kind of difficult challenge that keeps the game interesting for those with skill. You don't have to win all the time to enjoy something. Strangely enough, casual players understand this far more readily than veterans do. Their silent majority is a voice worth paying attention to, even if it means the training wheels still have to come off. 

As for skill lag... I don't know what to tell you. Server stability has suffered with the switch to Amazon and all the expansions which were added to the game. There's just more going on with less server resources to handle it. If enough people on a map are using their skills, you're going to see lag no matter where you are on the map. When two blobs fight in hills, I've seen lag in bay while all I'm doing is harvesting resource nodes. If your dream of WvW is that there are no groups bigger than 10 anywhere on the map, everyone has a chosen objective to attack or defend and there are no large-scale engagements at all to generate lag.... What's the point? One reason many people play GW2 is because large scale pvp is such a niche form of gameplay there aren't a lot of games that do it. There might be a dozen games that offer 5v5 and 10v10 competitive experiences from an MMO perspective. Very, very few offer 70+ players on the same screen trying to kill each other. And unfortunantely... most of them are terrible. If not unplayable, than so poorly balanced that players have all but abandoned the game mode altogether. People play WvW because it offers them the possibility of true, large scale conflict in a satisfying fashion. I don't feel you'll see zergs 'adapt' and shrink down to 15s and 20s just because they're a target if they get any bigger than that. People will want to play together as a social experience. People will want to play a game that allows them to engage in large-scale combat. You're forgetting that zergs usually seek other zergs. They don't care about the 10-man group who got upset they they were steamrolled by 5 times their number. They'd much rather spend their time 'circling' another 50 man group for the kind of content GW2 offers that no other game does. You need to understand the downstream effects of raising target caps beyond your specific need to have a competitive edge to beat down one form of gameplay. 

Please don't respond to this in another giant blockquote. It was as exhausting for me to read your cut-up of mine as I'm sure this has been for you to read this. If there's something in here that really aggravates you, focus on that and we can talk about it in greater detail and cycle back to the rest if it's still something that you feel needs to be addressed. 

[One more for the road.8950]

*laughs in four supports and one dps per party meta*

[Thron Stal.9367]

2 hours ago, One more for the road.8950 said:

*laughs in four supports and one dps per party meta*

That is what our guild is going too right now; to combat over 3000 condis and boon ball zergs. It takes 3 little guilds to try to coordinate as well.   As was previously stated, if I log in and the map is all one color, I log off. 

[One more for the road.8950]

1 hour ago, Thron Stal.9367 said:

That is what our guild is going too right now; to combat over 3000 condis and boon ball zergs. It takes 3 little guilds to try to coordinate as well.   As was previously stated, if I log in and the map is all one color, I log off. 

It's been the meta for quite a while already. People are trying to get out of it with the last balance, with varying success.