The Effects Of No-Downstate in WvW - Why Players Feel The Way They Do <- ARENANET READ THIS

[Gop.8713]

Another great benefit to no downstate that just occurred to me today: I've seen a lot fewer ppl dueling :)

[Lord Trejgon.2809]

@Israel.7056 said:This is a big part of the reason why blobs run all bunched up; they are all in position to quickly fix each other's mistakes.last time I checked zerg stacking in it's most prominent was introduced after target cap was introduced - to counter bombs by oversaturating possible targets meaning that multiskill bomb even if it had enought damage potentiall to kill anyone in that group will just tickle multiple guys.

and limited buff/healing ranges on many classes too

[scureuil.4052]

If one of the problem of WvW is rallying, why not get ride of rallying with the death of an opponent or a gard, and keep the downstate ? If you down someone, the other party will have to chose between saving their mate or trying to kill you(sorry if my english is bad as it is not my native langage)

[Turk.5460]

@road range.6293 said:And, half of the classes are inherently missing important build traits, while others are not.

What.

[Israel.7056]

@Lord Trejgon.2809 said:

@Israel.7056 said:This is a big part of the reason why blobs run all bunched up; they are all in position to quickly fix each other's mistakes.last time I checked zerg stacking in it's most prominent was introduced after target cap was introduced - to counter bombs by oversaturating possible targets meaning that multiskill bomb even if it had enought damage potentiall to kill anyone in that group will just tickle multiple guys.

and limited buff/healing ranges on many classes too

Yeah that's the other main reason. Small target caps and downed state make blobbing relatively safe.

[oscuro.9720]

What you said is almost entirely accurate, but I feel there is one key mistake. This does not reward veteraned players, but SKILLED players. When you look at it with that distinction, think it's extremely beneficial for WvW as a whole. Should a pvp game mode (which wvw is) not reward skill and capability over numbers? With down state, WvW becomes blob oriented because it's not a game of killing, but a game f who can rally more of their downs. As a consequence, the winning zerg usually only loses a marginal amount of players while the losing zerg is completely killed. Without down state, a smaller, more organized group is more effective than a blob. I know there were cases of this before, as I've been in a few fight guilds, but outside of organized guild runs, it became purely a game of size over skill. Tis size over skill often leads to full map flips by a blob that the defenders just don't have enough people to stop because it's impossible to finis of the people you manage to down. However, no downstate also makes defending easier because if you use an AC to down someone on the ram, they cannot be rezzed. I've seen FAR more players get discouraged from being manhandled by an enemy zerg than I've seen people complain about the lack of downstate making the game LES enjoyable. From what I've seen, if people don't like it, they often are neutral and just note that it's a DIFFERENT game than a WORSE game.

I was undecided on no down state at first, especially since duels will no longer be an option, but I've come to see that it drastically improves the game mode by putting higher focus on skill, strategy, positioning and teamwork. I would recommend that this become a permanent addition to the WvW game mode only (spvp and pve should havedownstate, it a fantastic mechanic in those game modes )

P.S. If you could make finishers go off when you kill a person (a sort of last hit bonus) that woukdbe awesome :)

Edit: I want to add that 1 shot classes are an issue of balance, less an issue of downstate. Yes, its a problem that's amplified, but its a problem even with down state. , With separated game mode damage modifiers, its something that can hopefully be fixed with class balance, since they are a balance issue with or without down state.

[Elegie.3620]

@Arcaedus.7290 said:Honestly I don't think we really have such a dilemma here as everyone is making it out to be... The facts are that some love no downstate, whereas some dislike it. I don't have any numbers to back this up but I'd wager that a slight majority dislike the no downstate weekend whereas a slight minority passionately like it. It would be rather disappointing if we never saw any new changes be inspired by this event, so I'd say a good compromise from all of this is to have occasional no downstate events in the future. It definitely shouldn't be a permanent thing but I'd personally be very disappointed if we never had it again.

The no-dowstate is an experiment, they're collecting data on players aspirations and gameplay issues, so I think that they will definitely act on it, besides simple events. The Alliance system, as far in the future as it is, would open interesting opportunities for this - e.g. a league with no-downstate, a league with downstate, and whatever variations they could come with. Players could select their preferences for a week, and enjoy different rules as they like.

[Celsith.2753]

@Hyper Cutter.9376 said:Downed state is a way for players to support each other, baked right into the game design. That's the whole point of it. If you can't finish off the downed players before their allies revive them (or manage to kill one of your allies), you didn't beat them.

Removing it is like tying one hand behind everyone's backs. The only people who like this are the ones who weren't using that hand anyway and are really angry about other people doing it. Especially people who specifically built for reviving others, which is something they otherwise keep telling people to do (see also: movement speed).

Thing is, i'd rather see support players doing their job BEFORE people go down. It seems to be a lot easier to just fail that part and rely on picking people up after.

[Mbelch.9028]

Well thought-out post, Trevor. I wanted to post that I feel as a roamer the downstate change has been refreshing, and has made the game more fun.

Now, when I die, there's less opportunity for BM (so I'm LESS jaded if killed in a 3v1 and they dance on me), and it's actually funny if I get killed out of nowhere with a 20k backstab.

I haven't found this change offputting, and it's kept me in the game more.

[Mizhas.8536]

Many people here are mixing class/skill balance with downed state mechanic. There are 2 diferent things and even if each one affects the other one, they are issues that should be worked on in different ways.

About no downed state, yes, it may be a pain in the ass for new/casual people that want to do things on their way. Hovewer, sPvP or even PvE work like this right now. Lets think about PvE for example. You can join a well organized group for fractals, raids or even tequalt and get it done fast/easily or you can join a group or random people and wipe/lose a lot of time through the content. WvW is not any different. Those who really want to play they will learn the basics.The truth is that combats seem to be quicker just because people are not adapted to this no-down state meta. Probably there are not even trying because is just a week event. In addition mesmers, thiefs, rangers, engineers have some broken builds that basically delete other characters in 1v1. The fact is that this is happening even WITH down state so it is not a real problem about downed state but about class balance.

[Dawdler.8521]

@oscuro.9720 said:I was undecided on no down state at first, especially since duels will no longer be an option, but I've come to see that it drastically improves the game mode by putting higher focus on skill, strategy, positioning and teamwork. I would recommend that this become a permanent addition to the WvW game mode only (spvp and pve should havedownstate, it a fantastic mechanic in those game modes )

But you previously said that WvW is a PvP mode. So what makes it fantastic in sPvP but not WvW?

Because to me, your arguments sounds alot like throwing small scale under the bus in favor of zergs.

[mortrialus.3062]

@Dawdler.8521 said:

@oscuro.9720 said:I was undecided on no down state at first, especially since duels will no longer be an option, but I've come to see that it drastically improves the game mode by putting higher focus on skill, strategy, positioning and teamwork. I would recommend that this become a permanent addition to the WvW game mode only (spvp and pve should havedownstate, it a fantastic mechanic in those game modes )

But you previously said that

WvW is a PvP mode

. So what makes it fantastic in sPvP but not WvW?

Because to me, your arguments sounds alot like throwing small scale under the bus in favor of zergs.

Fights stall out less in SPvP because the damage you are potentially subject to when you take a stomp is coming from 4 people max as opposed to 49 other people so if you're good you can slam down the kill more reliably than if you down someone in a zerg.

[Slaughter.6379]

simple thing here for the new players complaining.. learn to play..

I've spent many hours on guild wars and i love the no downstate because it rewards players for being good players and if these new people coming in and complaining should want to play and want to get better to compete. No downstate brings a competitive side back to WvsW and its a need for a pvp scenario .

[Arheundel.6451]

The downstate mechanic is one of the many things abused by the current scourge meta, loads of blood necros who effectively make the zerg feels seemingly unstoppable thx to transfusion and you have also gyro scrappers.

If we start talking about the roaming scene we can see how people rely on things like stealth ressing/gyro ressing and more to circumvent their obvious lack of skill, players who arrogantly refuse to acknowledge the enemy when they get outplayed.

[Trajan.4953]

so...A well thought out, well written post quickly deteriorated into standard forum garbage.Gratz forum Gods! You did it once again!

You successfully derailed something good for your already ignored agendas.

As for myself, the OP has actually changed my mind and I agree with him.

[Iozeph.5617]

This gushing over no downed state is because you've only had it for a week. If made permanent, once the more savvy players have more time to develop their tactics, the game mode will be completely ruined. It's going to quickly become what Dark Age of Camelot devolved to.; Large blobs moving about for safety in numbers and mini zergs comprised of stealth classes preying on those running to link up with the blobs.

Roaming, for everyone but these gank groups, will disappear because there's going to be no recourse for being camped at an entry keep or a bottleneck by these professions. Blobs are a pretty mindless way to play to begin with but having to run with the blob to get anything done at all is going to get old(well, even older) rather quickly.

Had these problems earlier in the week with being undermanned and trying to defend. There was basically no defence against an optimised group of fifteen plus going after
everything from smaller camp and tower objectives to keeps in our alpine borderlands. The burst damage was/is just too high on some professions to the point where even against one player you might be out of the fight before you know what hit you. Having to face organised groups made up of those professions exclusively meant defending was impossible even with siege until we called everyone in to deal with them. And the trouble with that was that with the other realms having even a one third to one half numbers advantage they were able to flip both Eb and our home BL without much resistance or losss of coverage for their own possessions- basically having kept us on the back foot the whole night if not the whole week with no escape from it. Not fun.

Players having this done in addition to finding themselves for the fourth, fifth, or six time still cut off and camped are going to quit the mode in favour of another -any other- game which doesn't go so obviously out of its way to troll them for not picking a stealth/high burst profession.

It isn't as though these problems haven't existed before with downstate in place but the bigger picture for those who aren't on fight servers- those who actually want to try and defend their borderlands or respective corners of EB- is going to be much more bleak without downed state to allow them to say- pull someone downed off a wall to an interior courtyard to med. If wide radius gtaoe is being exploited from just below and outside it there won't even be a point to having the walls there. Whole garrisons could be cleared from a tower or keep and then subjected to ganking bottlenecks just to try and get back if the defenders are sniped this way. Again not much fun for anyone but the attackers.

[KryTiKaL.3125]

@"Iozeph.5617" To be perfectly clear about WvW, those gank groups existed long before this no downed state event. More have showed up because, yes, admittedly people are rolling hard on the cheese setups like perma stealthing full zerk Deadeyes, Condi Thieves, or full zerk Druids/Soulbeasts just attempting to spam Rapid Fire. These setups are still possible to kill, annoying, but possible. Those will filter out, especially if balance gets adjusted and the over-tuned nature of conditions gets resolved along with them dialing back the effectiveness of some of these cheese setups without ruining the effectiveness of more legitimate ones. Which might not happen, conditions have been far over-tuned for a while now and balance has been rather wonky since PoF hit and Scourge and Deadeye came into being. Both aren't necessarily so bad but they can get away with a lot with very minimal effort put in, the same goes for the state of Mesmer right now. The rework severely over-tuned the class and lowered the skill floor for the Mesmer quite a bit which by proxy made Mirage an issue, Scourge did the same for Necromancer. I'm not sure how I feel about the Deadeye rework. I kind of feel like their Death's Judgment shouldn't be unblockable due to the amount of damage it can just mash someone with from stealth in one hit, almost entirely negating one's ability to avoid it.

Large blobs already move about for safety and strength in numbers, as well as to counteract the other blobs roaming around for safety and strength in numbers. Roaming won't go away since its not entirely limited just to solo roaming, you can roam in a group or function as a havoc group. Being undermanned for defense of a keep, tower or garrison usually matters entirely on your server and its ability, or willingness, to actually respond to proper callouts in Team chat. I'm on TC, we have the Desert Borderland as home, which a few of our comms don't like, and trying to get help for coverage this week has been a nightmare.

Roaming isn't likely to go anywhere, roaming feels much better actually, however I can see how it can be frustrating for those who are either new to WvW, have less experience in PvP or just aren't as skilled as others when it comes to handling an outnumbered situation or 1v1s.

As for getting locked in a spawn area, there is a reason there is more than one route out of the Border Waypoints as well as more than one way out of your Home Borderland's citadel. As well as taking advantage or the Emergency Waypoint when it is pulled. Also organizing your own group to handle these gank squads is an option as well. As far as gank squads go I haven't run into many, and those I have run into have given pretty good fights before they eventually went down (granted these ones were actual good players, not ones running cheese filled cheese with cheese on top builds).

Granted with all of this said I do think that if WvW becomes a no downed state kind of PvP mode that they do need to rework traits and skills that are associated with it. Such as redefining how something like the Warrior's Battle Standard works and have it bring a player back from death, but also reduce the number affected from 5 to either 1 or 2 (ideally just 1). Do the same for the Scrapper's Function Gyro, further adding to their "combat medic" feel they gave to the Med Kit. Defibrillator anyone? Apply that same logic to the the rest of the skills that function this way and maybe add a few more by changing how some traits work for some classes like Tempest to give them a revive feature.

In the same way that their traits system needed a rework a while ago, how they've reworked WvW and are in the process of reworking it again, how they have also now had more dedicated healers in the game since Raids were introduced, I think its about time the downed state got its own rework considering it was initially there because they did not have anything akin to a dedicated healer for support purposes.

[Tiny Doom.4380]

@"KryTiKaL.3125" said:I think its about time the downed state got its own rework considering it was initially there because they did not have anything akin to a dedicated healer for support purposes.

That's really the issue. GW2 was designed to be very different from previous MMORPGs. The mantra was that you would always be glad to see another player, not to see them as a threat. Everyone had self-healing, there were no dedicated healers and especially everyone could revive by intent, so as to encourage all players to feel part of a wide community at all times and not rely on having to group, join a guild or form specific social bonds to function effectively as had been the case in many previous MMOS. There's a reason you get xp from reviving someone and the reason is to encourage you to do it in your own interest because enlightened self-interest is a fundemental aspect of the way GW2 was designed.

WvW differed only in that the "wider community" was split into three teams. Within each team the philosophy underpinning the game remained the same. Chipping away at the foundations of that philosophy will fracture the structure. Sadly, the structure is already on the brink of collapse from numerous impacts over the last six years and the game, in any of its three modes, is scarcely recognizeable from the pre-launch publicity that sold all those boxes back in 2012.

Permanent no downed state might well make WvW a better pure PvP mode. The problem is, that's not WvW was designed to be nor how it was sold. Probably too late for most of us to care, anyway. So much has changed they may as well just remove the last few vestiges of the things that made the game at least a little different from the mainstream MMO model and hope everyone forgets it was ever supposed to mark the start of something new.

[KryTiKaL.3125]

@"Tiny Doom.4380" The existence of NPCs and gates and lords excluded thats what WvW is. It is a PvP mode with castle siege elements. GvG was a PvP mode in GW1, one of the most competitive ones, and even that still had an NPC lord with guards to fight. WvW was designed to be a large scale PvP mode, not a large scale PvE mode and it was sold as the former not the latter, regardless of your feelings on the presence of NPCs. It is even advertised on their website as a PvP mode.

https://www.guildwars2.com/en/the-game/competitive-play/

Join World vs. World (WvW) for an epic PvP experience full of cunning strategy, earthshaking sieges, and pitched battles between hundreds of players. In this massive war, three huge armies—each representing their world—battle for control of the castles and keeps, raid enemy supply caravans, and clash in open-field battles on five massive maps in week-long matches and seasonal tournaments.

The three Borderlands maps and a huge “neutral” center map are loaded with objectives that are worth points for the team that claims them, and successfully holding those objectives will make them more powerful over time. Players can band together to lay siege to castles, raid enemy supply caravans, clash with other players in truly massive battles, wreak havoc behind enemy lines, or build mighty weapons of warlike trebuchets and siege golems.

While in WvW, your character is boosted to max level, and you will continue to gain experience and loot as you normally would while exploring Tyria. You can earn additional prestige by climbing up the world ranks, earned by contributing to the war effort.

World vs. World—it’s PvP combat on an epic scale!

[Etria.3642]

I have played a lot this week but I am worried a net will take that as a 'this player loves downstate' as opposed to 'this player loves the double rewards'.

I play both roaming and zerg and while this week has increased my enjoyment of roaming it has done the opposite for zergs. Heck once the com was like. No voice. It doesn't make a difference this week. No cleaving of downs, rallying friends, rezzing friends. Just fight and run back. Fight and fight. Fight and fight. Fight. Fight. Run looking for another group. Run looking for another group. Chase small group of five. Run looking for another group. Run looking. Take a camp to keep up participation. Transfer maps. Are there any groups? Pip down.

[Strider Pj.2193]

Nicely done Trevor. I think you captured the heart of many of the issues.

[revox.8273]

@Aiga.3075 said:I think no down state double hp would be fun to make fights last longer. It would also help against all the one hit kills that has been going on.

YES double my hp, i will have 40k hp with dps gear, will be able to use 4-5 defy pains..etc.there are builds traits and tactics revolving on rezzing players, basically you will destroy traitlines and core mechanics of the game by wanting no downstatethe only thing they should remove is the rally on kill. thats it, and maybe limit the number of downstate to just 1game fixed

[Decado.9304]

I really enjoyed the event though due to shifts i only played reset night and a few hours before reset and was zerging instead of my usual roaming/scouting but still managed 40 odd levels which was nice.

I think some version of the no downed state needs to be permanently implemented, even if its with the mega update for alliances to give them time to rework many ress based skills/traits and runes.

I am basing this solely on zerg play though my reasoning would apply to roaming aswell. What I found running with the zerg and my normal (although admittedly changed to a fully non defensive dps setup) pewpew ranger allowed me to punish so many bad players - looking especially at you scourges - who basically run at the enemy spamming aoe with the impression they are invulnerable or those who aren't tight to tag or just so far out of position they should be sent back to spawn (to clarify i am not a super player, probably about average)

The power creep coupled various factor like the lack of updates and balance over the last few years has resulted in a much lower skilled game mode and having the no downed state punished the poor play and i'd like that to come back in some form.

I'm not advocating the pure no downed state being permanently implemented (but wouldnt cry about it if it was) however i think rallying needs to be reworked even if it only gives some kind of debuff like a counter which for x minutes which does not allow you to rally again - and reworking skills that became useless, like engi gyro, to let them cleanse the debuff

tl:dr Rallying promotes poorer less skillful play, rework it to limit that

[zinkz.7045]

@Blue.1207 said:Downstate has been a PvE centered meme since the game came out. Rallying in PvE? Sure. Rallying in PvP/WvW? Absurdly annoying.

Not really, downstate, just like the rest of the combat was built around PvP, it was there to increase the skill cap by adding an extra layer of decision making and teamwork, and also to compensate for no healers.

[jihm.2315]

double the health and remove downed state