Anti Boon Ball Meta Discussion

[XenesisII.1540]

Except for the fact that back in the day smaller groups could take on big groups, those zerg busting guilds use to do 20 vs 40-50.

I certainly don't expect 15 to take on 75, wtf exaggerate much there. What I would like to see is 15 having a fighting chance against 30 with skill carrying them and not boons. I've seen maybe one or two guilds in the past 6 months that can hang with those numbers for up to 5-10 mins but never be able to fully break them.

Boons carry groups, they don't need to continue to diminish the tools to deal with bigger groups, how is that better for the game? I guess we just wait until these boon balls get bored of fighting scraps and leave the game? Like the game hasn't lost enough players to dumb and neglected balance.

Enjoy your ktrain I guess.

[God.2708]

@XenesisII.1540 said:Except for the fact that back in the day smaller groups could take on big groups, those zerg busting guilds use to do 20 vs 40-50.

I certainly don't expect 15 to take on 75, kitten exaggerate much there. What I would like to see is 15 having a fighting chance against 30 with skill carrying them and not boons. I've seen maybe one or two guilds in the past 6 months that can hang with those numbers for up to 5-10 mins but never be able to fully break them.

Boons carry groups, they don't need to continue to diminish the tools to deal with bigger groups, how is that better for the game? I guess we just wait until these boon balls get bored of fighting scraps and leave the game? Like the game hasn't lost enough players to dumb and neglected balance.

Enjoy your ktrain I guess.

Context Context Context.

Know why they could 20v40? Because they were boon balling vs a bunch of uplevels in rare gear with builds used to beat dungeons with magic find taking up 30% of their stats.

And surprise, people can 20v40 now if the conditions are right too! Amazing what being better than your opponent can do! It's unfortunate that WvW is 75% old jaded veterans who have some semblance of knowledge and usually exotic gear so it's harder to pull off. But there was nothing special about the ancient meta that allowed for magical 20v40s to happen beyond WvW actually being a mode new people got into.

[Ya Ya Yeah.7381]

@God.2708 said:

@"Crazy.6029" said:The thing that I dislike the most about this Boon Ball meta, isn't just the fact that it promotes lazy game play by encouraging zergs to stack over half the raid with heal/boon bots and they can run around forever without being in any danger unless the come across another boon ball, but it seems like by doing this they are turning WvW in to Eotm. Nerf siege damage, make little resistance to flip objectives, buff boon ball squads so that big boon squads run around with very little danger, nerf boon rip/corrupt class to ensure long live the boon ball. So, basically, just run around forever flipping stuff without very much resistance unless other boon ball, just Ktrain and mow over smaller groups. Have they nerfed the walls yet or removed them? Maybe they should and just put a big bridge connecting the maps up to eotm. This might very well be the very lowest amount of effort needed to play without dying in wvw since its creation. If Anet wanted to nerf scourge then fine, but then buff the spell breaker up to at least keep the "I have the most boons so I win" meta in check.

The game play isn't lazy. It's a cohesive group of people with synergistic builds cooperating together. Getting rid of boons won't make your tiny group suddenly able to fight the big group, it'll just make the big group feel like there's no reason to run together.

The end result of that isn't a bunch of small groups. It's nobody plays at all.

Setting that aside it's perfectly feasible for a similar number of players to beat a 'boon balled' zerg whilst operating in separate smaller units. It simply requires higher level tactics and communication than most players are willing to put the effort in towards because... there's no reward for doing so.

I'm not talking about getting rid of boons, they are just to much. When half a zerg raid is made up of boon/healing bots specs and the only job is to push 3 buttons so that the damage dealers don't have to pay attention and they just mash their 3 buttons and roll over anyone who isn't boon stacking then...Yes, there is a problem. It's class stacking boon bots to get an advantage over anyone not doing that to not have to think about real game play. It's being taken to a new level of dumbness. Where is the fun it. Near endless protection, near endless stability, 1+ min of fury...etc... where is the counter play for anyone not big enough to do that themselves? Boons are carrying bad players and getting rewarded for it, where is the fun or challenge of that?

[Justine.6351]

Sounds like you are talking about hammer revs, the things people complained about until they got chronomancered.

Nah man what wvw needs is less damage. Clearly it is the way.

[God.2708]

@Crazy.6029 said:

I'm not talking about getting rid of boons, they are just to much. When half a zerg raid is made up of boon/healing bots specs and the only job is to push 3 buttons so that the damage dealers don't have to pay attention and they just mash their 3 buttons and roll over anyone who isn't boon stacking then...Yes, there is a problem. It's class stacking boon bots to get an advantage over anyone not doing that to not have to think about real game play. It's being taken to a new level of dumbness. Where is the fun it. Near endless protection, near endless stability, 1+ min of fury...etc... where is the counter play for anyone not big enough to do that themselves? Boons are carrying bad players and getting rewarded for it, where is the fun or challenge of that?

A deadeye a dragonhunter and a druid walk into a bar. There's no counter.

Spear of justice, Bountiful theft mark the target, pull them into traps, druid ancients seeds them inside traps. Rinse repeat because target is dead so mercy and virtue of justice are reset.

You're welcome.

[Ya Ya Yeah.7381]

@God.2708 said:

@Crazy.6029 said:

I'm not talking about getting rid of boons, they are just to much. When half a zerg raid is made up of boon/healing bots specs and the only job is to push 3 buttons so that the damage dealers don't have to pay attention and they just mash their 3 buttons and roll over anyone who isn't boon stacking then...Yes, there is a problem. It's class stacking boon bots to get an advantage over anyone not doing that to not have to think about real game play. It's being taken to a new level of dumbness. Where is the fun it. Near endless protection, near endless stability, 1+ min of fury...etc... where is the counter play for anyone not big enough to do that themselves? Boons are carrying bad players and getting rewarded for it, where is the fun or challenge of that?

A deadeye a dragonhunter and a druid walk into a bar. There's no counter.

Spear of justice, Bountiful theft mark the target, pull them into traps, druid ancients seeds them inside traps. Rinse repeat because target is dead so mercy and virtue of justice are reset.

You're welcome.

lol...Thank you sir, I will cling to this information :)

[JusticeRetroHunter.7684]

As someone that has been in a guild that could 20 v 40, 15 v 30...and fight outnumbered. It's definitely true that the meta has changed that favors big groups over small ones. The reason however isn't really the damage getting nerfed, it was, funnily enough, the sustain.

By those that are mystified by how it's possible to fight 15v30 i'm going to briefly explain how it was possible before, and why it isn't as possible now.

Each member of a squad is meant to do a certain task. This task means ultra specializing in said task to accomplish the goal, and this is the primary role you have in the fight. Builds are designed so that as you are doing your primary task, you have auxiliary tasks that are just part of your primary task without having to put any investment into it...for example, if i am a healer primarily, and i have auxiliary cleanses and immobilizes in my rotation, than the additional secondary tasks i have don't interfere with my ability to heal, they are just a part of my rotation.

You can see the same thing going on with builds like necro, where their primary role is to do damage, but have an auxiliary task of stripping boons. Stripping boons is part of their rotations, and their builds are maximized for damage, without having to sacrifice anything to keep the boon strips.

Now because each squad member has a set of specialized primary task and auxiliary tasks, this allows you to fully compress the job of two players into 1 player. So again as an example, if i roll a heal ele and i heal for twice the amount of a cleanse ele, but also cleanse the same amount of condi's as a cleanse ele, then essentially I've compressed his job from 2 people into 1 person. Likewise, for damage builds, if you are doing 20k DPS, and stripping boons, than you've compressed the job of 3 mediocre DPS'ers into 1 person. This hyper specialization basically allows you to amalgamate jobs and functions of the group into fewer and fewer people without hybridization.

Pre-Patch, Hyper specialization was more possible because builds could actually DO more for their primary role, ie: healing and damage. When those things were taken away with the CMC mega-patch, this hyper specialization was basically lost, especially in the sustain department. A healer can no longer keep people alive from spikes that do 30k+ damage because the healing just isn't there anymore. The solution to the sustain problem was to actually just have more people with more sustain., because each healer has basically reached the cap of their capacity to heal which was drastically lowered for some classes.

[KrHome.1920]

@JusticeRetroHunter.7684 said:As someone that has been in a guild that could 20 v 40, 15 v 30...and fight outnumbered. It's definitely true that the meta has changed that favors big groups over small ones. The reason however isn't really the damage getting nerfed, it was, funnily enough, the sustain.

By those that are mystified by how it's possible to fight 15v30 i'm going to briefly explain how it was possible before, and why it isn't as possible now.

Each member of a squad is meant to do a certain task. This task means ultra specializing in said task to accomplish the goal, and this is the primary role you have in the fight. Builds are designed so that as you are doing your primary task, you have auxiliary tasks that are just part of your primary task without having to put any investment into it...for example, if i am a healer primarily, and i have auxiliary cleanses and immobilizes in my rotation, than the additional secondary tasks i have don't interfere with my ability to heal, they are just a part of my rotation.

You can see the same thing going on with builds like necro, where their primary role is to do damage, but have an auxiliary task of stripping boons. Stripping boons is part of their rotations, and their builds are maximized for damage, without having to sacrifice anything to keep the boon strips.

Now because each squad member has a set of specialized primary task and auxiliary tasks, this allows you to fully compress the job of two players into 1 player. So again as an example, if i roll a heal ele and i heal for twice the amount of a cleanse ele, but also cleanse the same amount of condi's as a cleanse ele, then essentially I've compressed his job from 2 people into 1 person. Likewise, for damage builds, if you are doing 20k DPS, and stripping boons, than you've compressed the job of 3 mediocre DPS'ers into 1 person. This hyper specialization basically allows you to amalgamate jobs and functions of the group into fewer and fewer people.

Pre-Patch, Hyper specialization was more possible because builds could actually DO more for their primary role, ie: healing and damage. When those things were taken away with the CMC mega-patch, this hyper specialization was basically lost, especially in the sustain department. A healer can no longer keep people alive from spikes that do 30k+ damage because the healing just isn't there anymore. The solution to the sustain problem was to actually just have more people with more sustain., because each healer has basically reached the cap of their capacity to heal which was drastically lowered for some classes.Or you could pick 10 to 15 decent roamers and hardfocus a player with raw damage (starting with the scourges) and warclaw stomp with a teef, that shadowsteps away after, over and over again until die whole blob was eliminated. You just had to keep the blob infight with some trash aoe to deny the hardrez.

Hardfocus is wet noodle damage now and the warclaw stomp is gone. Tanky big number blobs can run around in enemy keeps and farm poor souls that try to defend for hours without a chance to stop them.

[JusticeRetroHunter.7684]

@KrHome.1920 said:Or you could pick 10 to 15 decent roamers and hardfocus a player with raw damage (starting with the scourges) and warclaw stomp with a teef, that shadowsteps away after, over and over again until die whole blob was eliminated. You just had to keep the blob infight with some trash aoe to deny the hardrez.

Just based on experience, this tactic was never really that effective anyway. I was going to explain in great detail why, but it's really nuanced. But basically, such tactics just didn't work on highly organized groups, because we understood the value of keeping every single member alive. Even if you could down one of our targets with projectiles because our ele didn't magnet aura them in time, he would have been pre-geyser rezzed (pre CMC patch...now it's gyro rez) before you even realized they had went down.

Hardfocus is wet noodle damage now and the warclaw stomp is gone. Tanky big number blobs can run around in enemy keeps and farm poor souls that try to defend for hours without a chance to stop them.

True. And believe me, I would know because i ran 30-40 with Indo yesterday...farming enemy keep for at least an hour, and the only reason we left the keep was because our commander had to take a phone call.

The real solution is basically restoring previous levels of damage and sustain back to what they were before patch, where individually a single person can have more of an impact on a fight.

When individuals don't have as big an impact, than the only logical conclusion is to just bring more individuals to compensate, and you treat the problem as a numbers game. IF you dig through my comment history, you would see that i wasn't so concerned with the nerf to scourges, but rather I was more concerned with what would replace the scourge meta. Like i said then, was that boon ball was coming, and it's now here.