[POLL] Your top reason on why roaming is dead

[XenesisII.1540]

You may have multiple reasons, but which is on top of the pile?

Edited Saturday at 07:24 AM by XenesisII.1540

[ChrisWhitey.9076]

There is no incentive to run small scale content anymore except just to have fun. If you want to make small scale matter you need to make it where there is not an advantage to blob. This could be that keeps will degrade a tier if not enough yaks supply it. This means supply lines have to be maintained. Make jungle camps that give boosts and affect game play like drake in League of Legends. Also make a jungle camp that can just run through a keep like rift hearold. Mechanics like these in league of legends are why people have to split up do do things or right off the start to finish it would all just be 5v5 team fighting.

[coro.3176]

58 minutes ago, ChrisWhitey.9076 said:

There is no incentive to run small scale content anymore except just to have fun. If you want to make small scale matter you need to make it where there is not an advantage to blob. This could be that keeps will degrade a tier if not enough yaks supply it. This means supply lines have to be maintained. Make jungle camps that give boosts and affect game play like drake in League of Legends. Also make a jungle camp that can just run through a keep like rift hearold. Mechanics like these in league of legends are why people have to split up do do things or right off the start to finish it would all just be 5v5 team fighting.

also, rewards.

Win a 50v50 and you get 50 bags (ish). Win a 1v3, and you get 3 bags.

[oatsnjuices.1698]

Battlegrounds are stale and stagnate. 

[Dawdler.8521]

So going by the poll so far, one of the leading causes people consider roaming is dead is because there is too many roamers on cheese specs ganking them.

Makes sense, I suppose 🤷‍♂️

[Gop.8713]

Unique answer: It's not dead, full stop . . .

Roaming is all I do, and while I wvw less than I did back in the day, that's only bc I no longer need anything from wvw and now I'm just there for the fun, which roaming certainly is . . .

[CafPow.1542]

I like roaming and havocing most.

what makes me go offline is when i am confronted wirh indestructible boonballs.

 

anything else i can deal with. Sometimes i get a bit salty when i lose but i try not to. And roaming is not dead.

ofc if you think it’s dead and don’t roam anymore… but that’s silly.

[Jobber.6348]

Roaming died after 2020.

The previous thrill of roaming was because it was literally the wild west, quick draw style combat with extremely high damage that rewarded reflexes, outplaying, and terrain mastery. This meant a properly skilled player can evade crucial skills and hit back with force, killing enemies quickly, manuvering quickly to a better position to fight the next person, which made 1vX montages a huge Gw2 youtuber fad. If you inspect the fights back then, they were extremely fidgety, extremely erratic, and skill combos happened very quickly and with massive overkill damage so that players had more cooldowns to utilize for taking down enemies. 

When all damage and sustain got nerfed, you find it hard to get the same thrilling high octane and high risk combat anymore. Suddenly, everything felt more like a slog to fight. Previously using 2 skills expertly got you a down, now you use a full rotation and people don't even come close to dying. 

So people just mitigated the problem by adding a 2nd person. Then a 3rd. Then a 4th. Then they go and hunt individuals that they know can't shrug off the damage of 4 people on their own. Their victim finds 3 or 4 people. Now it's a smallscale v smallscale. 

Honestly take Willbender as a benchmark, buff all the other classes to similar damage. You'll see more people confident enough to roam on their own instead of finding safety in numbers.

I meet new "roamers" these days and they're a sorry mess. They're running gank or support builds, not fit for zerging, meant clearly for ganking as a group. They don't know how to dodge. They just overextend every fight. They are quick to call hax instead of reading their damage log and attempt to learn what the enemy just did.

Roaming is a dead culture, Anet killed it, and the modern "roaming" is flaccid as heck. 

 

Edited October 9 by Jobber.6348

[RaveOnYou.2819]

willbenders and their mixed with thieves gank groups.

[TheGrimm.5624]

WR.

Servers meant more players that might not be in a guild linked with another that would then create more roamers. Post WR more players during their TZ might have groups and thereby roam less since they have a WR group to link up with or just log. So under the WR Alliance tags might draw more if grouped up soaking up players and creating less roamers. In that end you might see roamers and less pugmanders due to supply and demand. 

[Dean Calaway.9718]

8 hours ago, ChrisWhitey.9076 said:

Make jungle camps that give boosts and affect game play like drake in League of Legends

This is a really good idea, we could call them ruins.

[RisingDawn.5796]

I ran into roaming group the other night, they were playing a sustain comp at least though, so they farmed the pugs for the most part, but i was running a cele scourge after an open tag, because maybe it would help with boon strips, apparently not. (Before the stats NERF)

At the same time 'roaming' groups, tend to just end up clouding anyway, who aren't organized enough or have builds, like power builds with little condi and corrupt boon pressure, to be able to fight similar sized comped groups or havoc against bigger groups.

1v1 can be quite rough against certain builds and then you get in to 1vx, where you have to accept you can't win, even with outside help.

Edited Thursday at 02:16 PM by RisingDawn.5796

[Dinas Dragonbane.2978]

Mobility creep. At release only a few classes could reliably escape (thief, ranger, warrior, ele till ride the lightning got nailed). Most classes were slow, and needed swiftness(it was almost the most important boon back then). Combat in those days were a fight to the finish for most and so that was what it was all about, outplaying your opponent.

Over time with expansions classes gained access to more mobility, more damage potential, and some even more utility like ranger smoke fields. This began a trend of the classes that had the most of these things combining them to burst someone down and if unsuccessful and in danger immediately escaping. There were some others that did not fit those categories but could attempt to power you down such as reaper and harbinger, but typically the roaming classes have a lot of mobility and damage without trading much for it.

[ChrisWhitey.9076]

4 hours ago, Dean Calaway.9718 said:

This is a really good idea, we could call them ruins.

Ruins don't do enough to make a team win an outnumbers fight 3 to 1 like other games with these kind of advantages. Ruins should just not exist because the difference is a joke. Eating and enhancement makes a bigger difference.

[igmolicious.5986]

WvW has been pushed to be zerg vs zerg through balance decisions, team balance with world restructuring, and shrinking the number of matchup tiers to make teams more "packed." All of this adds up to maps having a very high chance of 20+ person groups running, even moreso during prime time. Sometimes zergs will leave solo/small group roamers alone still, but it's neither a guarantee nor a worthwile risk to be in a map with 1 or more enemy zerg and not at least be near an allied zerg. Changing WvW environment is what has done the most damage to roaming.

[H K.4057]

Roaming, especially solo roaming, has always had no real rewards when compared to simply sitting on a tag and staring at a gate/wall. We still did it because it was fun, but the issue is that it's extremely hard for new players to have fun when they have no real chance to win any fight. This isn't an issue with stats or builds or balance, but rather an issue with a 12 year old game having an extremely high skill floor for new players. Not only do they need to become mechanically proficient with playing a good build, they also need to somehow learn and understand 12 years of game knowledge. It's just not possible for someone to do quickly.

There are training wheels for other game modes that help new players. In PvE, they can always find helpful people and groups to help them learn content. In PvP, matchmaking can help to a certain extent if the pvp population is big enough. In WvW, there are no training wheels. They are thrown into the most cutthroat and unfair playstyle with absolutely no guide or help. It would be as if PvE players were expected to solo fractals before they know enough about the game mode to find a group.

It is therefore very obvious that talking about roaming in a vacuum is a waste of time. Players should be encouraged to join groups and stick with tags when they first enter WvW. The in game interface should be much, much better about showing players where tags and commanders are. Once they become comfortable with the game mode, players can then venture off on their own to roam. So, "fixing" roaming is much more about fixing large scale and the gamemode as a whole so people want to actually stick around and learn.

Edit: As far as specific fixes, I'd start by removing rallying from kills. I would be much more likely to grab some new players and try to teach them how to roam if they weren't basically free resses for the enemy.

Edited Thursday at 03:04 PM by H K.4057
A thought.

[Dinas Dragonbane.2978]

I forgot to mention the wardlaw effect, where everyone hits a new max speed until they dismount. Good in theory, but leads to reinforcements or respawns getting back to a battle much quicker than in the past, leading to one side being outnumbered quicker than the old days. It also has a bad +1 effect where if a roamer(or anyone) is dismounted and attempting to escape unfavorable odds, those odds only need 1 person to dismount the target while the rest quickly catch up, nobody likes being on that side of the coin.

Wardlaw enabling all this for free with no downside mimics the power creep we got with specializations. I hoped they would have put something on wardlaw, such as it slowly draining your supply while in use(lance costing some as well too). This would have given SOME counterplay using the one base mechanic unique to wvw, also enabling smaller groups and solo players more speed, as the large zergs would likely not want to waste a zergs supply moving from one camp to another. 

[Shadow.2097]

For me it's the roaming groups going round in 3-4 player boonballs. I don't mind these groups flipping camps and stuff but chasing solo roamers with a comped group is cringeworthy and happens all the time now. I just stick to the duel spot now, only chance at a fair fight. I don't mind fighting thieves and Willbenders they're the most played classes in roaming so I build to counter them, but a close 2nd for me is people who abuse these specs to reset and get OOC every time they take dmg. 

[Remus Darkblight.1673]

Roaming is not dead.

That said, it's not as active and healthy as it could be.

It doesn't have anything to do with playing the wrong spec either - unless of course you're trying to roam on support firebrand. Point is you don't have to be playing willbender or thief, especially if you're any good at the game in general.

[Bleikopf.2491]

I haven't had a lot of time for WvW lately, but I did log on for reset recently. Red borderland is my favourite, so I went there. First we (on tag) took the Camp, and then we went to contest our Lava Keep.

This is the moment I split from the Zerg. I saw that we missed only one Shrine. I took things into my own hands and went and flipped the Shrine, so we had an easier time maneuvering through the Keep.

This was fun for me. I felt like I had agency and was actively changing the outcome of the battle.

Someone mentioned Ruins already. I think the problem with ruins is that they don't feel impactful. Shrines on the other hand don't take long and enable an entire new way to maneuver the map. Similarly, the NPC camps on EBG are a nice touch, although they might take a bit too long?

Camps and Guards are the other targets for roamers. They do not have an immediate effect on the skirmish. Slapping Yaks also only delays the supply. If there is no Zerg putting pressure on the Object, one Yak doesn't feel impactful. And if they want to take an objective, the Camp is usually the first target anyway. 

I don't think that roaming is dead. But I do think that the feeling of agency is not very strong. You do have agency when roaming. Every camp flipped is potentially many dolyaks in supply. But the impact is often not immediate, and not very targeted either. 

That's my 2 cents. 

[Dawdler.8521]

3 hours ago, RisingDawn.5796 said:

At the same time 'roaming' groups tend to just end up clouding anyway, 1v1 can be great rough and then you get in to 1vx, where you have to accept you can't win, even with outside help.

Well cloudy groups can still be roaming. Many will confuse roaming with a solo player running around scoffing at fighting even a 1v2, but that’s just a duelist - a minor part of roaming. If you want to know when it stops being roaming well then the answer is simple - when there is a player on a minstrel support build near.

[XenesisII.1540]

I'm surprised thieves, willbenders, warclaw, celestial are the lowest so far, considering they're usually the top complaints related to roaming. 

☕🍩

[Gop.8713]

My explanation for those results would be that the ppls doing the complaining are likely not the ppls doing the roaming, and the roamers are more likely to vote in this poll . . ?

[Gaiawolf.8261]

9 hours ago, Gop.8713 said:

Unique answer: It's not dead, full stop . . .

Roaming is all I do, and while I wvw less than I did back in the day, that's only bc I no longer need anything from wvw and now I'm just there for the fun, which roaming certainly is . . .

This is the correct answer. Every night I log in there's open field fights on at least one map. The other night we even had a coordinated blue vs green GvG friendly showdown in the Alpine dueling area. Last night it was a pug commander tag running around outside Bay. But the poll options need to be updated. "Fun roaming is not dead. If you can't find it, you're just playing the wrong spec alliance."

[ChrisWhitey.9076]

17 minutes ago, XenesisII.1540 said:

I'm surprised thieves, willbenders, warclaw, celestial are the lowest so far, considering they're usually the top complaints related to roaming. 

Warclaw is for sure an issue but because the maps are so big roamers can rotate just as fast as zergs if needed its just roamers lose impact on what they can take. celestials is fixed now so not an issue. If thieves and willbender were so busted everyone would just play those and not roam with anything else so I think yeah they are better but not absolutely busted. Willbender is probably the most punishing if you play it wrong or just get out played.