What consequences would antistacking mechanics bring?

[DarkK.7368]

I'm not a very endgame player. I did some fractals, including some T4's. I play a lot of PVP yeah, just silver. I WvW regularly. PVE in general too. But I never did any raid, strike or that stuff. So from pro's perspective into this debate... what consequences would antistacking mechanics bring? That is, mechanics that promote players not to stack into boon-balls. I got some ideas before.

1) Remove the damage-limit-targets for AOE. Those big AOE circles now damage everyone instead of only 5 people. This way, being a ball of people will mean everyone insta-dead, instead of your allies absorbing your damage.

2) Make buffs apply to party members randomly with no distance. Instead of "gives alac in 360 radius for 5 people", make "gives alac to 5 random people of your team". This way, zero reson to stack as ball. Same for healings, same for everything. Shooters can enjoy getting far positions to shoot, tanks can enjoy meleeing the rival to protect allies, melees can enjoy going melee and seeing the enemy without being a ball of people... If you are not in a team, or your team has less than 5 people? Then the "rest unused charges" apply also randomly to the last non-party allies nearby. But your party is prioritized.

You could even forget 1 and do only 2 (to maintain 5-limit in aoe's damage) and that would encourage a lot not to stack

How could this be in all the contexts? It would be a better or a worse change?

Edited May 18 by DarkK.7368

[starlinvf.1358]

It literally breaks all group content.  The underlying problem is everything revolves around boon sharing, because the encounter design is too sensitive to DPS in general.  But you can’t opt for more mechanic heavy design, because players (not exaggerating) are too stupid to handle mechanic focused encounters.  

Just look at whats events players complain and fail at the most.  They’re all ones where they can’t just DPS it to death.  

 

1. this has problems because AOE damage compounds with more players.  Ro stop that you’d have to retool all skills and skew the majority to single target.  This has a knock on effect on combat movement, because tab targeting is too clunky against large numbers of fast moving enemies.  

2. This also creates new problems in addition to 1, since it just encourages more boon spamming on supports and removes all counters CC could offer if they can act purely backline. 

The net result is the death of reliable melee combat, as everyone swaps to range, as you’ve removed the one limitation the overall combat design leans on to make melee viable. 

What you want at its core requires a top to bottom design paradigm reset. In other words, a totally different game.  And one that demands smarter players to boot. 

[DarkK.7368]

1 minute ago, starlinvf.1358 said:

It literally breaks all group content.  The underlying problem is everything revolves around boon sharing, because the encounter design is too sensitive to DPS in general

How does it break it? Boon sharing would remaing 100% the same in group content, just not requiring everyone to be on melee.

2 minutes ago, starlinvf.1358 said:

But you can’t opt for more mechanic heavy design, because players (not exaggerating) are too stupid to handle mechanic focused encounters.  

What you want at its core requires a top to bottom design paradigm reset. In other words, a totally different game.  And one that demands smarter players to boot. 

I have heard that a lot... that would be a different topic. This would even make it easier, because people would not need to think "We have to be close" to get boons.

3 minutes ago, starlinvf.1358 said:

The net result is the death of reliable melee combat, as everyone swaps to range, as you’ve removed the one limitation the overall combat design leans on to make melee viable. 

Melee has a higher dps than ranged to compensate for that, doesn't it? And if not, melee could deal more damage to compensate things like the DPS uptime for when the enemy moves or some mechanics make difficult for melee to attack.

3 minutes ago, starlinvf.1358 said:

2. This also creates new problems in addition to 1, since it just encourages more boon spamming on supports and removes all counters CC could offer if they can act purely backline. 

Aren't supports already boon spammers? And... well, that's true, support from backine could be a little problematic in concept.... and any fix for this makes the "get close" mechanic back again...

[Danikat.8537]

Skills and other effects can be split across game modes so you don't need exactly the same design to work everywhere.

It sounds like you're concerned about WvW specifically since your focus seems to be on making 'boon balls' easier to kill and I think that's only a problem in WvW. In open-world PvE it's more common that commanders have trouble getting people to stack enough to ensure they're sharing boons effectively, and instances already have anti-stacking mechanics when the designers think it's necessary. (Or semi-randomly in Fractals about 26 where you can get Mistlock Instabilities, including Social Awkwardness which makes it literally impossible to stand too close together.)

I'm not sure what they could do to prevent stacking in WvW that wouldn't also push everyone to switch to ranged weapons (since melee requires being in the same location as your target), but they could address it just within WvW instead of trying to change the entire game, which would require re-working all the PvE encounters that are currently designed to encourage stacking.

[DarkK.7368]

1 minute ago, Danikat.8537 said:

Skills and other effects can be split across game modes so you don't need exactly the same design to work everywhere.

Oh no, I speak in general.

1 minute ago, Danikat.8537 said:

instances already have anti-stacking mechanics when the designers think it's necessary.

That sounds nice. Maybe a workarround rather a fix from the core, but it's something. I definitely like when the mechanics make people split. For example, one time I did some SOTO instanced quest where the group had to split in like 5 groups to do stuff arround. That was nice. Then... then the big boss appeared... and we were like dozens in melee. Literally I could not see the boss because of particles and people. That's one of the things that makes me thing about this subject with stacking, and was a PVE.

3 minutes ago, Danikat.8537 said:

I'm not sure what they could do to prevent stacking in WvW that wouldn't also push everyone to switch to ranged weapons (since melee requires being in the same location as your target), but they could address it just within WvW instead of trying to change the entire game, which would require re-working all the PvE encounters that are currently designed to encourage stacking.

Yeah WvW is more complicated because melee is already screwed against big groups. You can get insta deleted. Dealing more damage than ranged would be not enough. Melee would require to have a lot of projectile mitigation (that doesn't mean inmunity).

[kharmin.7683]

2 hours ago, DarkK.7368 said:

Yeah WvW is more complicated because melee is already screwed against big groups. You can get insta deleted. Dealing more damage than ranged would be not enough. Melee would require to have a lot of projectile mitigation (that doesn't mean inmunity).

I thought that there were a lot of complaints already about the projectile hate in WvW?  Doesn't this mitigation already exist in that format?

[AliamRationem.5172]

The content isn't designed for that.

There are no usable threat mechanics.  If we didn't stack, bosses would continually move and switch targets.  In games with tanking and threat mechanics this movement is controlled and the mechanics are designed around that.  In our game bosses are either stationary or we stack to control movement and the mechanics are designed around that.  In some cases the mechanics will be useless because they assume forced stacking.  In others bosses will run around making it impossible to melee DPS while not affecting ranged DPS much at all.

[DarkK.7368]

22 minutes ago, AliamRationem.5172 said:

The content isn't designed for that.

There are no usable threat mechanics.  If we didn't stack, bosses would continually move and switch targets.  In games with tanking and threat mechanics this movement is controlled and the mechanics are designed around that.  In our game bosses are either stationary or we stack to control movement and the mechanics are designed around that.  In some cases the mechanics will be useless because they assume forced stacking.  In others bosses will run around making it impossible to melee DPS while not affecting ranged DPS much at all.

What do you mean no threat mechanics? From my guild times I remember a raid where the boss followed the one with most thoughtness, and you had to use it to lure him etc I don't know if that was a specific mechanic for that boss or some general threat rule...

[Cyninja.2954]

3 hours ago, DarkK.7368 said:

How does it break it? Boon sharing would remaing 100% the same in group content, just not requiring everyone to be on melee.

You mentioned you play WvW. Have you seen what a dedicated bomb does to a squad? There is 2 things saving players from dying to coordinated enemy fire and they are (in order of importance):

1. target caps

2. boons

As a WvW player you should be aware of how damage sharing/soaking works and why groups stack. It leads to different players taking hits at random (and ultimately leads to players which are out of position to go downstate immediately).

Removing target caps would lead to a situation where stacking becomes useless and actually a detriment. It would lead to 5 people death squads which can wipe an entire blob. Which in turn would be interesting in shacking up the meta or the way group play happens. It would seriously impact squad size.

EDIT: just for funsies, let's look at lava font from elementalist staff 2 and how its damage would change. It does 500-600 damage per tick, 1.5-1.6k on crit (no boons, no vuln, no nothing, just the base skill on around 2.6k power), 4 ticks and it hits 5 targets. Let's assume a full squad of players with each 20,000 hitpoints. That's a total of 1,000,000 hp spread across 50 players.Let's assume 5 elementalists.

Current implementation: [(550)+(1550)/2]x4x5 = 21,000 damage over 4 seconds.

No target cap: [(550+1550)/2)x4x50 = 210,000 damage over 4 seconds. (versus a full squad).

Right now, that squad would take 105,000 damage, losing approximately 10% of it's total hp. Most of it would get spread around. In example 2 with no target caps, those 5 elementalists would be doing 1,050,000 damage to the squad, killing it outright. (had a minor mistake here, did not account for the earlier number already being adjusted for no target cap, mistake has been corrected and the point still stands).

Quote

I have heard that a lot... that would be a different topic. This would even make it easier, because people would not need to think "We have to be close" to get boons.

Players not thinking is not and issue, most already do not. No reason to make them think even less.

Quote

Melee has a higher dps than ranged to compensate for that, doesn't it? And if not, melee could deal more damage to compensate things like the DPS uptime for when the enemy moves or some mechanics make difficult for melee to attack.

This has not been the case since before EoD. Your understanding of balance is outdated and not congruent with current game design.

Quote

Aren't supports already boon spammers? And... well, that's true, support from backine could be a little problematic in concept.... and any fix for this makes the "get close" mechanic back again...

No, what this would lead to would be more self-reliant boon spammers, aka players bringing their own offensive boon support builds because they can not rely on stacking with others. Imagine celestial roaming builds dialed to a 1,000. Remember: with your suggestion stacking becomes a huge detriment and build and game play would follow that situation.

Edited May 18 by Cyninja.2954

[XenesisII.1540]

Before anyone brings in more bright ideas on anti stacking anti boon balling measures, you're going to have to convince the developers that this would be a healthy direction for the game in the first place, because at the moment anet balance developers are not against stacking, they are fully for it.

[MedievalThings.5417]

28 minutes ago, XenesisII.1540 said:

Before anyone brings in more bright ideas on anti stacking anti boon balling measures, you're going to have to convince the developers that this would be a healthy direction for the game in the first place, because at the moment anet balance developers are not against stacking, they are fully for it.

This is pretty much what they want.  Guilds that have "fun" stick together and play more.  Players find steamrolling content "fun".  Therefore, we can sort of figure out the gameplan.  Make sure that guilds don't lose much, design content around guilds just steamrolling what they do...so they have "fun".  Sound familiar?  Yeah, that's wvw right now.  Anet thinks defending is bad, because it interferes with the part where guilds are having "fun" by rolling over everything with no resistance.  And, if you are a solo player or in a small guild, Anet wants you to transfer to the winning side, so they make money AND now you too are having "fun".

We are about to get the beta all the time and it will look exactly like what we have now.  Large blobs, making sure they don't face other large blobs very often.  Steamrolling content, like it's Drizzlewood.

[AliamRationem.5172]

1 hour ago, DarkK.7368 said:

What do you mean no threat mechanics? From my guild times I remember a raid where the boss followed the one with most thoughtness, and you had to use it to lure him etc I don't know if that was a specific mechanic for that boss or some general threat rule...

Specific bosses in raids are designed with this mechanic.  The rest of the game doesn't. 

[urd.8306]

14 minutes ago, AliamRationem.5172 said:

Specific bosses in raids are designed with this mechanic.  The rest of the game doesn't. 

The rest of the game (PvE) was designed around it at least. I leveled my first character with my brother and a friend of his and he was the pvt guardian that basically all mobs ran to. Has this changed meanwhile?

[urd.8306]

1 hour ago, Cyninja.2954 said:

You mentioned you play WvW. Have you seen what a dedicated bomb does to a squad? There is 2 things saving players from dying to coordinated enemy fire and they are (in order of importance):

1. target caps

2. boons

Current implementation: [(550)+(1550)/2]x4x5 = 21,000 damage over 4 seconds.

No target cap: [(550+1550)/2)x4x50 = 210,000 damage over 4 seconds. (versus a full squad).

Right now, that squad would take 105,000 damage, losing approximately 10% of it's total hp. Most of it would get spread around. In example 2 with no target caps, those 5 elementalists would be doing 1,050,000 damage to the squad, killing it outright. (had a minor mistake here, did not account for the earlier number already being adjusted for no target cap, mistake has been corrected and the point still stands).

 

 

That's why you don't stand in a red circle but move out of it. Of course you should be punished for that. The actual game doesn't punish you for standing in a death zone (as long as your whole group stands in it)
And fair question: Why you shouldn't an AoE skill deal that kind of damage? Most Eles you see running around in WvW can't place a meteor shower on a group anyway and on the other hand you get oneshot as an Ele from any other class when playing staff (mostly Marauder/Bers). It's a typical high risk, high value gameplay without any value in the current boon meta.

[Cyninja.2954]

1 hour ago, urd.8306 said:

That's why you don't stand in a red circle but move out of it. Of course you should be punished for that. The actual game doesn't punish you for standing in a death zone (as long as your whole group stands in it)
And fair question: Why you shouldn't an AoE skill deal that kind of damage? Most Eles you see running around in WvW can't place a meteor shower on a group anyway and on the other hand you get oneshot as an Ele from any other class when playing staff (mostly Marauder/Bers). It's a typical high risk, high value gameplay without any value in the current boon meta.

.... okay you seem to not understand what an EXAMPLE is.

Okay let's break it down for you a bit more. This example was meant to demonstrate how changing or removing the target cap affects damage. The staff 2, which is a visible and easily evade-able skill was meant to demonstrate how a currently not favorable damage dealer (ele is not necessarily a top pick atm) would become insane.

Let's take another skill: Revenant Vengeful Hammers. The skill does around 1k dps to a single target (no boons, around 2.5k power, no vuln, etc), target cap of 3.

Current implementation: having 1 revenant will yield around 3k dps from only that skill, having 5 revenants will yield 15k dps.

No target cap (against a squad of 50): 1 revenant would now deal 50k dps, 5 revenants would deal 250k dps.

At melee range, unavoidable, all the time.

I could go on and on. There are skills in this game which are unavoidable or nearly unavoidable. Those skills in general are balanced via target caps, cooldowns, etc.

 

If target caps get removed from damage skills, it would create a massive shift in how this game would see play in WvW. Even removing the target cap from healing skills would not be able to mirror this, given that healing is reactive and the damage would scale so high that no reaction would be possible.

You are talking about skill and moving out of circles when you seem to fail the concept that: no target cap means there are a lot of situations where you have 0 ability to not "stand in a red cricle".

Going back to the elementalist example, good on you, you and your entire squad just dodged those first 5 elementalists red circles, what about the next set of 5 elementalists? What about the one after? Roaming clouds would become the death of any squad. What about those 5 barrage rangers which are easily soaked into the squad while sieging a tower/keep? 5-10 Barrage rangers would instant 1 shot any player which does not preemptively dodge the initial hit.

 

TL;DR:

You seem to lack the understanding or imagination of what target caps actually do for this games combat.

Simply put, strait up removing the target cap would be a buff of around 34% per additional target for skills with a target cap of 3 (around 1,600% buff versus a full squad),  22% per additional target for skills with a target cap of 5 (around 1,000% buff versus a full squad) and a whopping 102% buff per additional target for skill with a target cap of 1 currently (for approximately a buff of 5,000% versus a full squad). If those numbers don't make you scratch your head into realizing how unreasonable this is, not sure what will.

Edited May 18 by Cyninja.2954

[DarkK.7368]

That was the point. Learning not to have all the party into the same tile so the AOE doesn't deal 250k dps. Not having target cap is the normal and logic. If 100 players are fool and lazy enough to stack in the same circle, then the person that did that circle deals 250k dps. What's the problem? People has lot of place to move and do stuff... This "target damage cap" is too normalized into the collective mind. When I entered this game, target caps were a "wtf this has nonsense" thing I get used to.

Edited May 18 by DarkK.7368

[Cyninja.2954]

3 minutes ago, DarkK.7368 said:

That was the point. Learning not to have all the party into the same tile so the AOE doesn't deal 250k dps. Not having target cap is the normal and logic. If 100 players are fool and lazy enough to stack in the same circle, then the person that did that circle deals 250k dps. What's the problem? People has lot of fields to move and do stuff... This "target damage cap" is too normalized into the collective mind. When I entered this game, target caps were a "wtf this has nonsense" thing I get used to.

Here is your mistake: you are treating the situation after "avoiding" 1 players damage the same as though there were target caps.

I mentioned this: great your squad evaded that first group aoe, what about the second, what about the third? How many Barrage ranger abilities can you avoid before you run out of dodges?

You do not seem to understand the concept of no target cap applying ALL THE TIME. Which ultimately leads to what I explained: stacking in any form becomes a detriment.

I specifically used vengeful hammers as an example because you are not avoiding those. Those revenants run into your melee range and you are toast, instantly. I chose an easy to understand skill, but I can guarantee you there are just as easy to land, unavoidable ranged skills in this game (revenant hammer 2 would be a great example of "strait line, all dead" and spam-able). That skill was hilariously overpowered when it was released and this change would make it dozen times worse.

Edited May 18 by Cyninja.2954

[DarkK.7368]

Just now, Cyninja.2954 said:

Here is your mistake: you are treating the situation after "avoiding" 1 players damage the same as though there were target caps.

I mentioned this: great your squad evaded that first group aoe, what about the second, what about the third? How many Barrage ranger abilities can you avoid before you run out of dodges?

You do not seem to understand the concept of no target cap applying ALL THE TIME. Which ultimately leads to what I explained: stacking in any form becomes a detriment.

If your group is dispersed and not stacked, good luck for all those aoe rounds trying to aim and hit everyone. They'll have to choose what specific spot to aim to kill specific targets. It's not like WvW maps are that small. It's not like, while your siege weapons are destroying a door, you don't have LOT of space arround it, arround walls, to be. No army of enemies can do round of aoe attacks and hit you all. And if they do, the damage is so dispersed that you can heal it back up fast, as I understand.

Anyway, for my original topic. Target cap AOE was the lesser problem. What really I think made people stack togeter was the buff small range (instead of partywide). Even if damage target cap was removed, that wouldn't incentivize to not stack, really, because small radius buffs would still be there.

[Cyninja.2954]

Just now, DarkK.7368 said:

If your group is dispersed and not stacked, good luck for all those aoe rounds trying to aim and hit everyone. They'll have to choose what specific spot to aim to kill specific targets. It's not like WvW maps are that small. It's not like, while your siege weapons are destroying a door, you don't have LOT of space arround it, arround walls, to be. No army of enemies can do round of aoe attacks and hit you all. And if they do, the damage is so dispersed that you can heal it back up fast, as I understand.

So you agree: this would disperse the group, making stacking undesirable. How many healers have you played in this game? Can you name heal ranges on any of them?

Siege weapons, you actually believe you'd be able to stand and siege? Against defenders which can now pressure away any group?

Quote

Anyway, for my original topic. Target cap AOE was the lesser problem. What really I think made people stack togeter was the buff small range (instead of partywide). Even if damage target cap was removed, that wouldn't incentivize to not stack, really, because small radius buffs would still be there.

It would, you simply do not seem to understand this. If you buff damage skills by over 1,000%, players will have to not take that damage.

[joneirikb.7506]

The problem with "no target cap" on skills:
* First off all, they already capped them at 5 in beta because of performance issues.
* Anything you can do against a zerg, the zerg can do back at you, just much more of it.

The short version, zerg vs zerg combat is now just carpet bomb aoe's, and see who dies first. They might spread out a little on contact, and the ones with the most AOE's (aka the biggest zerg) will generally just get more of the others. In theory smart players might start throwing "feint" aoe's and instead start "clouding" the enemy when they spread out. But at this point, I don't expect enough players to even know how to do that on any one server.

No target cap doesn't encourage "don't stack", it just encourages ambushes out of stealth, to just level anyone before they have time to respond to anything. It actually encourages stacking "loosely" enough that you don't lose your entire group in one stealth ambush, and just instantly nuke down whatever just nuked part of your zerg, and then rez the dead ones. The practical effect is that you remove all "long fights", and pug zergs generally just gets annihilated to random groups of 10 players that can organize a stealth bomb.

----

Now, I can imagine 3 ways to give disadvantages to Zerging in WvW:
* Complete redesign of the combat.
* WvW specific changes (Siege, traps, Strategies etc)
* Taking a hacksaw to the combat system and make a Frankenstein monster (Like the fractal instability)

A complete redesign of combat\balance is not going to happen, because the focus of balance in GW2 is PVE (since 2015), they'd never do that for WvW. And honestly I don't think they have enough Developers with the skills for balancing proper PvP combat balance left to be able to pull it off even if they wanted to. (And heavens forbid we let the playerbase get anywhere near the balancing team...)

WvW specific changes has some potential, though I imagine most WvW players won't like the ideas. The easiest example is to go over each Siege and give it a clear role and change or buff it to do that role well. Example: Say that the AC was supposed to be an anti zerg\boon weapon. It's skill 2 could have a big boon rip, and skill 3 could have a multiplier on damage PER BOON on each target hit. Separatedly the two attacks wouldn't do much, but if coordinated between 2-3 players on AC's they could hurt, or be used well when your own smaller group is pushing to wipe out their boons to create a weak moment. Personally I think this has the best chance of working, especially in regard that it shoudl be completely within the WvW teams control and not affect the PVE-balance team etc.

Most of the usual hacksaw examples, wouldn't really do much other than destroy the fun for most people. Though I personally would be highly amused by any mix of:
* Friendly Fire
* Player Collision
* Boon Overload (fractal instability)
* Social Awkwardness (fractal instability)

----

Also any kind of suggestion to give players penalties for being in zergs\groups runs against one of ANet's core design philosophies that you should "always be happy to see another player" (on your team). Aka the Care Bear Rule. You'll never be able to make them change that, so we will never get any kind of negative impact on zergs, thus no debuffs with slower movement, reduced boon duration, or stats or any such thing.

And perhaps the most important: Most players that play WvW ENJOYS playing in zergs. If you completely destroy that in a way that just removes it, the majority of players will just stop going to WvW because it's no longer any fun. As much as the WvW veterans doesn't want to say it, the majority of players are casual pugs that comes to wvw now and then to zerg a bit for some reward tracks and goes away for a while again. If you just made zerging a death-trap, these players wouldn't try to play any other way, because they would feel too intimidated to play by themselves, and would just not play and instead scream complaints on social media (ok and some of them might actually find the forum as well).

[Cyninja.2954]

9 minutes ago, joneirikb.7506 said:

No target cap doesn't encourage "don't stack", it just encourages ambushes out of stealth, to just level anyone before they have time to respond to anything. It actually encourages stacking "loosely" enough that you don't lose your entire group in one stealth ambush, and just instantly nuke down whatever just nuked part of your zerg, and then rez the dead ones. The practical effect is that you remove all "long fights", and pug zergs generally just gets annihilated to random groups of 10 players that can organize a stealth bomb.

 

Incorrect. We can already see this with proper clouding.

Removing the target cap incentivizes clouding as to deny the enemy multiplicative damage, while taking maximum advantage of being able to multi hit. Currently this is compensated for by, boons, damage dispersion (thanks to target caps) and healing. Removing targets caps would multiply incoming damage so much, that none of those effects would be capable to mitigate enough damage.

Ideal group size would shrink to:

- what is the maximum of damage the group supports can outheal and react to (which is around 3-4 damage dealers atm) as to not give enemies to much scaling

- what is the ideal damage dealer count to ideally 1-shot enemy players (and this would apply to any size squad).

Your claim that:

Quote

Anything you can do against a zerg, the zerg can do back at you, just much more of it.

is strait incorrect. A roamer which is unrestrained by a target cap can hit X amount of people. Any player in that squad can hit exactly 1 player. Now every player in that squad can hit multiple 1 players (not taking advantage of the lack of a target cap), sure, but that will never be as efficient as having multiple roamers focus onto 1 blob/squad multi hitting.

EDIT:

think of the arrow carts of old, without target caps. Those were zerg busters. Now imagine EVERY player is such an arrow cart on every skill (some which are far harder to dodge than arrow carts). Suffice to say, no blob would exist any longer.

Edited May 18 by Cyninja.2954

[AliamRationem.5172]

2 hours ago, urd.8306 said:

The rest of the game (PvE) was designed around it at least. I leveled my first character with my brother and a friend of his and he was the pvt guardian that basically all mobs ran to. Has this changed meanwhile?

More likely he was playing melee and you were at range.  Most enemies seem to have a priority queue for their attacks and of course attacks have a specific range.  This mostly prevents stupid behaviors like switching to the furthest target to use a melee attack.  This could give the appearance of control as the enemy is more likely to attack you than run to 1200 range to melee attack.

You can test this out on enemies with clear priorities to their attacks.  For example, the arrowhead will roll side to side if there is an available target.  If toughness tanking worked you could prevent that behavior by standing in front of it while wearing toughness gear.  But that doesn't happen.

[Rakan Buuyon.8576]

1 hour ago, DarkK.7368 said:

If your group is dispersed and not stacked, good luck for all those aoe rounds trying to aim and hit everyone. They'll have to choose what specific spot to aim to kill specific targets. It's not like WvW maps are that small. It's not like, while your siege weapons are destroying a door, you don't have LOT of space arround it, arround walls, to be. No army of enemies can do round of aoe attacks and hit you all. And if they do, the damage is so dispersed that you can heal it back up fast, as I understand.

Anyway, for my original topic. Target cap AOE was the lesser problem. What really I think made people stack togeter was the buff small range (instead of partywide). Even if damage target cap was removed, that wouldn't incentivize to not stack, really, because small radius buffs would still be there.

AoEs wouldn't matter at that point. At that point, any damage will instant melt whoever the target is, which is way easier to do when everyone is off in their own direction. 30 guardians, necros, whatever, using something like staff 1 all on one person, hitting for 1k, is 30k damage. People will melt to autos, let alone actual skills. Good luck healing them too, as heals are around or in front of the healer.

Target cap is the bigger problem. Buffs don't matter much if you can instant down 50 fully buffed players with one hit. I'm sorry but one lone little guardian isn't going to be able to tank 50 people focusing them, no matter how many boons they have. A stacked group isn't going to survive an 30 AoEs that all hit for 5k, no matter how many boons they have. 

People in this game really over estimate how much boons really do.  Two players are worth significantly more than one player with full boons. The reason why "boonballs" can dominate maps, is because it's 50 organized players VS roamers. The boons are the least important part here, other than maybe stab. The more players you have and the more organized they are, will always dominate no matter what changes you make to boons or target caps. The people taking your keep will still be the people taking it after any change.

[Zyreva.1078]

Having played a game, that not only had no offensive target caps, but also dmg skills that would scale with the amount of players within range, allowing even a single player to blow up a theoretically infinite number of players under the right circumstances, i can tell that players are still going to stack and zerg like no tomorrow, because the benefits of superior numbers and stacking for support are still there and it's what the average player relies on. Only difference is that big numbers aren't completely "fail proof" anymore and very well coordinated small grps with the right builds have a chance at defeating much larger numbers.

Complete absence of (offensive) target caps in WvW would be an issue in choke point that could become impassable, otherwise aoe skills are avoidable and zergs should be just fine with a little bit of adaptation (and maybe a few follow up balance changes in case the need arises). That being said, there is a big difference between the ridiculously small target caps on everything and a complete removal, which would leave a lot of room for some sort of middle ground ...

Alas, anet is going into the exact opposite direction and continuously reducing target caps ...

10 hours ago, Rakan Buuyon.8576 said:

People in this game really over estimate how much boons really do.  Two players are worth significantly more than one player with full boons.

I think you underestimate what boons can do. A player with full boons will likely deal more than double the dmg of someone with no boons while also taking significantly less dmg (technically close to zero dmg if we assume perma aegis, which ofc is not how the game works, but it can still absorb a lot of dmg) and being immune to all soft and hard cc. That's huge. Boons are absolutely insane.

Edited May 19 by Zyreva.1078

[Danikat.8537]

11 hours ago, AliamRationem.5172 said:

More likely he was playing melee and you were at range.  Most enemies seem to have a priority queue for their attacks and of course attacks have a specific range.  This mostly prevents stupid behaviors like switching to the furthest target to use a melee attack.  This could give the appearance of control as the enemy is more likely to attack you than run to 1200 range to melee attack.

You can test this out on enemies with clear priorities to their attacks.  For example, the arrowhead will roll side to side if there is an available target.  If toughness tanking worked you could prevent that behavior by standing in front of it while wearing toughness gear.  But that doesn't happen.

I think it varies between enemies, with the added complication that the only way to tell which 'rules' a specific enemy uses is trial and error.

I often use toughness in PvE and I've definitely seen some enemies who will charge through a mob of players to target me and follow me as I kite around, and sometimes when they've gone for someone else as well/instead I've asked and they're also using toughness. I'm pretty sure the Dust Monster in Dry Top targets players with high toughness. Others noticably target the closest player, or the one doing the most damage or, like the arrowheads, don't target anyone specifically but change which attacks they're using based on player placement. There's a few bosses who will target the furthest player for specific attacks, like the Hollowed Gourdbinder in the Mad King's Labyrinth who teleports to the furthest player. Some don't seem to have any kind of prioritisation, they'll just focus on whichever player they started attacking first, or change seemingly at random. (Maybe they're using tab targeting?)

So there are certain enemies you can 'tank' by using toughness and staying close to them, but it's not consistent and rarely useful even when it does work, certainly not comparable to games with dedicated tanks.

(There's also a very small number of taunt skills, but again not enough that you can consistently hold control of enemies with them.)