Patch notes up July 7th, Wvw NERFS.

[XenesisII.1540]

@"SpellOfIniquity.1780" said:I'm confused. Haven't people been complaining about siege since forever? And now it gets nerfed and everyone's upset?

The WvW community is an enigma. I'd say "the happy ones are playing the game and not complaining", but the people complaining are the same ones that wanted nerfs to these things in the past, lol.

Heh no, I'm complaining, but I certainly wasn't one of those that pushing for siege nerfs.

My two cents, all of it sounds pretty okay to me. The removal of Warclaw stomp is 50/50. It had a lot of value in some situations and in others it was obnoxious. So it's both good and bad - I feel roughly neutral about it.

Balista still needs to not do heavy damage to players. It should be for killing siege. Arrowcarts, Cannons and Burning Oil are all perfectly good enough for defense. Why there needs to be something that can cut someone's health clean in half from across the field is beyond me. Sure, it's single target, but it's far too rewarding and easy to be a pest with. It should be doing 5k absolute tops. Ideally more like 3k because again, there are other options for siege to damage players.

I have no problem with balista damage being reduced, I think it should mostly be an anti siege weapon so much so that I think that particle skill on there should have had a reduced cooldown. But even thinking about the damage and that it should only do 3-5k when we have player skills that do 10k is a lil lol, on a weapon that clearly would cut a person in half from one shot, but hey fantasy game.

Cannons can be killed easily, no reason to kill their damage.

I'm complaining about their continued reduction of tools to use on fat blobs, due to complaints from idiots running in said blobs. Most siege placements in the game can be countered, but people are way too lazy to bother, zergs just want to brute force into everything. I do agree that if a defending side can't muster a force of players to counter they should lose a place, but what happened to the foreplay, this is why we have wall and gate upgrades and siege and disablers. Start throwing all out the window then what's the point of defending, anything under t3 can already be taken before defenders get to respond.

[cobbah.3102]

Am I missing something with the nerf to siege ?? where does it also say that the walls can't be painted with toxic aoes and rangers shooting over walls yada yada good on you ANET definitely justified my decision to stop playing WvW

[kamikharzeeh.8016]

another "patch", another feeling of beeing pranked.

can someone fire all these weird people on Arenanet? this is horrific... atm even resetting Wvw to its very launch state in like 2011 or whenever it have been would like 300% improve the playablity and fun. @Fire Attunement.9835 @Stephane Lo Presti.7258 @Cal Cohen.2358

WHY do we even have the shitty warclow now? @ Arenanet HOW ABOUT NEW CONTENT INSTEAD OF DESTROYING the immensly small existing CONTENT? okay, you want Wvw to die, we got that since years now...

so you just nerf everything outside of the dps of roaming kitten ranger and thieftrash and some gimmicky build that u probably didn't even knew.. and your kitten people like it... no wonder most veterans ran faster than usain bolt from this

[Tom.5914]

The do not want to improve the game, they already know it is dead, they just think it is funny to make pointless changes.

[elb.5762]

Looking forward to further updates that excludes warclaw mount stomp, siege adjustments, and please do something with the quagan babies crying about changes. They have to adjust their skills toward actually doing the killing themselves.

[Shroud.2307]

@"Kunzaito.8169" said:

@"SpellOfIniquity.1780" said:I'm confused. Haven't people been complaining about siege since forever? And now it gets nerfed and everyone's upset?

The WvW community is an enigma. I'd say "the happy ones are playing the game and not complaining", but the people complaining are the same ones that wanted nerfs to these things in the past, lol.

My two cents, all of it sounds pretty okay to me. The removal of Warclaw stomp is 50/50. It had a lot of value in some situations and in others it was obnoxious. So it's both good and bad - I feel roughly neutral about it.

Balista still needs to

not

do heavy damage to players. It should be for killing siege. Arrowcarts, Cannons and Burning Oil are all perfectly good enough for defense. Why there needs to be something that can cut someone's health clean in half from across the field is beyond me. Sure, it's single target, but it's far too rewarding and easy to be a pest with. It should be doing 5k absolute

tops.

Ideally more like 3k because again, there are other options for siege to damage players.

Siege is a double-edged sword in that way because of the compounding effects of the current boon/sustain meta. A comped up guild blob can sit with utter impunity under nearly any amount of siege, and moreso now. Their heal-over-time plus quick rez potential means they can just ball up on a gate no problem. And that's before even talking about shield gens.

On the other hand, siege is pretty oppressive on smaller groups. If you have 5-10 on a door, a couple of sup ACs hurt bad, and are more than enough to push you off.

So the answer is kind of twofold - there needs to be a way to area-deny large groups so they are forced to deal with the siege instead of just turtling under it (or the sustain of larger groups needs to be nerfed). But at the same time, smaller groups shouldn't be able to be mowed down by 2 dudes on ACs. Personally I've thought the damage was in a good place for siege in most situations prior to today. I still think shield gens are overpowered (not relevant to this patch, but) and that siege doesn't affect very large groups enough.

Then damage should increase the more targets the siege is hitting. Or alternatively, the Poison/Reveal skill on Arrow Carts should have a lingering effect that prevents healing in the vicinity for a brief time and the cannon skill that Chills should strip boons on hit and more per player hit. Both skills have moderate cooldowns to balance out the strength of those changes.

The real issue is that there are so many possible scenarios that it's impossible to balance for every one of them. The most problematic should be the ones looked at first, and in this case it's zergs being unfazed by siege and small groups being too easily pushed off.

Another major issue is that AC's in particular aren't much of a threat in many cases not because of how little they damage zergs, but because of how long it takes for people to get on the siege. 9 times out of 10 people will dance around on the walls getting killed or nearly killed while any/all siege is being destroyed. Siege taking any damage at all can be mostly prevented if everyone uses siege straight away and all focus whoever is attacking the siege together. Unfortunately, expecting that kind of co-ordination from pugs is unrealistic at best. Point is, I guarantee even a competent group would have a much harder time if siege was manned before the group started to bomb the walls and everyone on the siege actually used it properly instead of shooting the lone Ranger that's dying to ambients.

You make good points though and I agree with most of it. Just offering some thoughts on the matter.

[SexyMofo.8923]

Dead game mode.

[subversiontwo.7501]

@"SpellOfIniquity.1780" said:I'm confused. Haven't people been complaining about siege since forever? And now it gets nerfed and everyone's upset?

Everyone isn't complaining about it. This is the same as with everything else. People are going to end up on different sides with different oppinions and the only difference is that one side is going to be right and the other side is going to be wrong. The only way you can find that out is through argumentation which very few people involve themselves with these days as developers mostly draw their data from statistics and very rarely if at all draws it from any form of qualitative analysis or discourse. If the developer treats their forum like a poll, this is what we get. Everyone will have their oppinion but oppinions without rationale is pretty pointless if you are interested in who is more or less right or wrong.

There already is a thread where people are arguing about whether the mount stomp helped an outnumbering side or an outnumbered side more. However, no one is giving any form of argument, example or reasoning behind their oppinion so its litterally just a tally.

[subversiontwo.7501]

@XenesisII.1540 said:Warclaw stomp and siege made useless!This is pretty interesting. It's one of these things that tends to be pretty hard for people to wrap their heads around because it works in the inverse over time. So, right now people probably see a bunch of tanky builds, especially tanky condition builds. However, what a tanky meta makes over time is putting more players on more glassy gear as you need more of that to punch through. That makes siege better. As such, siege needs nerfs to follow the trends and levels of abilities. Only earlier this day siege was doing a comparatively imbalanced amount of damage.

It was never meant to rake people left, right or center, especially not AC which is designed to be a wide wear over time, and people who use it have a tendency to only look at the lowest damage (eg., a support class) because they expect figures and spend very little time thinking about what kind of damage they do to glassier characters in a squad (eg., staff eles). You can't simply tell the Ele to tank more for siege situations because that would rip their role from them. If anything, siege would perhaps benefit from being more of a %raw type of damage so it doesn't sway balance so much between open field and objective-oriented fights. I'm not sure how to motivate the logic behind such a change but it would certainly be better for gameplay, make balancing siege easier and let siege be more appropriately effective.

[Bigpapasmurf.5623]

Aside from scourges being very very buffed, even just that 1 trait that was redone (Holts tried hard not to say its gonna be OP), however the erf to ACs were pointless as it essentially just deleted them (they were barely holding on from their last damage nerf), now catas are starting to get rendered the same way (I don't use balis enough to comment on them).

Warclaw stomp deletion was not necessarily needed. Reduce the number Of stomped was all it.needed. essentially Warclaw is just a shiny toy that makes you travel a bit faster (only redeeming quality). Could have reverted the speed nerf in controlled territories in turn.

It was a debate what WvW was in the eyes of anet (zvz, roaming, small scale...etc) and it was fairly balanced at one point. Its clear that they are now focusing on larger scale while taking away from smaller scale.

They keep this up and roaming and small scale will be truly dead.

Anywho thats my 2 copper

[Sugar Min.5834]

OP, a more realistic title would be :PATCH NOTES UP JULY 7TH, WVW NERFS.

As expected, every patch is 90% nerfs, 10% changes. And 90% of those changes are either unnecessary or useless.

Once again, the ignorant NERF TEAM strikes!

[Gatvin.6510]

I would have liked more explanation on these changes for sure. I'm quite unclear what the goal here was.

I generally prefer WvW when siege does things other than just punch down walls once the enemy zerg is dead. The ability to place siege (such as ballistae and arrow carts) to strategically counter a medium sized group as a smaller group while defending a fortified position and waiting for backup was a quite fun, though fairly rare, occurrance. Now its kind of pointless. Just dump your supply into the wall and you'll probably last longer.

In that vein, I actually really like the banners, I just think they should actually be balanced like siege engines designed purely for zerg combat. Make them cost like 100 supply and with like a 1-minute timer when dropped so you can't stack them at spawn like golems. The goal would be to force a group to make a choice of "are we going to hunt the enemy zerg and be down 100 supply for the next base, or just avoid the zerg and go for the keep?"

Warclaw nerfs seem QUITE silly, especially when compared to the shade buffs. At least it still moves faster than walking speed :lol:

[SoftFootpaws.9134]

This game makes the same mistake every RvR game makes, favors blobbing nstead of small guild/party play. I don't know why its so hard, to make player skills and siege have more effect the more enemies they hit, instead of target caps and other mechanics that actually hurt small groups and favor big groups that can run over them with impunity by distributing the damage.

Why do game devs love mindless zerging so much? I already left other games because of the same thing. It feels like they're all stuck in this fantasy of Realm Vs Realm games being this epic siege war with hundreds of players instead of what the reality is.

1. Competitive games are better with less players, not more. This allows strategy & tactics.
2. Less players means less server load and less lag, which means smoother, more reaction-based combat instead of skill spam.
3. As long as there's enough players for anonymity, people will enjoy the game mode.

What sets RvR games apart from PvP games is their ability to allow players to face each other without the fear and anxiety of hard staged PvP. But this has a limit, if you take it too far people just become lost in the crowd entirely, useless and forgotten, and nothing they do can affect the outcome of the war, which pushes people out of the game mode instead of the opposite.

You have to find a balance between small and large groups of players, between a random soldier and a worthy foe. When you create a game where people think "lets beware of these players" instead of "lets run over them bagsbagsbags", that's success.

This is not success, this is more of the same that's made the game mode what it is now.

[TheGrimm.5624]

@"SpellOfIniquity.1780" said:I'm confused. Haven't people been complaining about siege since forever? And now it gets nerfed and everyone's upset?

No some people were and others weren't. Now that they listened to the side that wanted it reduced the side that didn't and might have wanted it buffed back to where it was is here to say, WTW! There has always been a back and fourth about attackers and defenders. Just it was already at the point of why defend and then there is even more, why defend with each nerf.

[babazhook.6805]

The biggest imbalance problem in WvW are numbers, that being the amount of people one server group can muster at any given time versus their competitors. Servers that are always outnumbered generally can not compete .

The only side that a nerf to ACS and siege helps is the side with greater numbers. When AOE spells can be dumped on walls above and do more damage then those people above can do with ACS or cannons then this just more "he who gets there with the mostest" wins.

Given alliances seems to be a pipe dream and years off IF it ever occurs, this nerf to siege was ill timed.

There really is no point to people on an outnumbered server going out to fight the blob so what they generally did was try and defend what they could with thier smaller numbers while using siege to help equalize. What this nerf does is basically tell the outnumbered servers "There no point in going out and fighting those blobs when outnumbered 2 to 1 and now there no point in trying to defend an objective".

Bad move.

[Sovereign.1093]

:/ warclaw change i don't like.

Dragon banner, step in right direction.

Scourge change. Back to normal. It only means people have to play scrapper / tempest or malyx legend revs

[Guest]

@Hannelore.8153 said:This game makes the same mistake every RvR game makes, favors blobbing nstead of small guild/party play. I don't know why its so hard, to make player skills and siege have more effect the more enemies they hit, instead of target caps and other mechanics that actually hurt small groups and favor big groups that can run over them with impunity by distributing the damage.

This is a smart post overall, but I really like this point. There has got to be a better way to punish the omniblob meta. I'd almost like to see WvW get a version of the Social Awkwardness or Icy Echoes mechanics. Maybe you could add new objective slots, or be able to slot Unstable Magic abilities on the objective Lords?

[ThatOtherAlt.2984]

The Warclaw changes are actually a blessing to small scale and roamers. You can now get rezzed when outnumbered without having to worry about SlowJoe, that lagged behind the blob and shows up, just in time to stomp and seal the deal.

[Sviel.7493]

You have to remember, the Anet devs are just low-tier zerglings. They probably have a very different experience with AC and Cannon fire than the rest of us.

[Dawdler.8521]

@ThatOtherAlt.2984 said:The Warclaw changes are actually a blessing to small scale and roamers. You can now get rezzed when outnumbered without having to worry about SlowJoe, that lagged behind the blob and shows up, just in time to stomp and seal the deal.Too bad it's the outnumbering zergling that's downed and being ressed when the slowjoe roamer comes just in time to stomp and seal the deal... no more.

[Zenris.8637]

I understand most things in this patch but siege weapons and the Warclaw didn't need nerfed at all. Literally no point of having the Warclaw in WvW anymore as they keep nerfing it. Taking the speed buff in your own territory to this. RIP

[Zenris.8637]

@ThatOtherAlt.2984 said:The Warclaw changes are actually a blessing to small scale and roamers. You can now get rezzed when outnumbered without having to worry about SlowJoe, that lagged behind the blob and shows up, just in time to stomp and seal the deal.

The Warclaw is very helpful for small scale roamers like myself to take on bigger groups with the ability to stomp whilst mounted...

[Jables.4659]

@"SpellOfIniquity.1780" said:I'm confused. Haven't people been complaining about siege since forever? And now it gets nerfed and everyone's upset?

A lot of the people on the forums are just complaining for the sake of complaining. They tend to act like lemurs in a lot of cases where they see someone else complain and then start complaining themselves. Who gives it a shit about a siege nerf? The warclaw stomp was bitched about incessantly and now that Anet removes it everyone loved it? You guys are priceless.

[Sleepwalker.1398]

So apparently Warclaw and siege were bigger issues affecting wvw and needed urgent fixes than actual class fixes.

[Faenar.8036]

EotM vol.2 strikes back! K-train, especially on outnumbered maps, is encouraged now, no counter against it. Welcome to the world of WvW.