MLinni.6109

Yeah. We were always outnumbered by about everyone but the wacky system said we were #1. So let's bully the community until it breaks and everyone leaves for other games. This system does....not.....work. And no, I don't believe alliances would fix anything either. Let's see what remains of the wreckage.

> @"Leaa.2943" said:

> I mean i would love for them to remove tier 5 since it is no longer enough players to have that many and NA's tier 5 was removed long ago, but at least tell us about it before doing so, ok?

...and don't forget to move us up a tier please ;)

Apparently the EU T5 matchup server hamster has died.

RIP Fluffy.

Can we get a backup hamster? ;)

New elite specs will also be new WvW content imo. Though some new map or other features might be a nice thing. I will get the expansion anyway since I both love Cantha and also play PvE.

You should have seen the amounts of complaining during the no downstate week and the number of "absentees" who took a week off.

Our system is simply designed around downstates. Downstates promote teamwork and add a layer of complexity to the game.

(Do I try to ress our people while the enemies are bombing us? etc.).

We have downed state skills. We have traits working with/around downed state. We have fricking powers working with/around downed state.

Imo they could have kept the Warclaw stomp to quickly finish off people, but it requires people being out of combat.

Yes, the burst buddies want to do their stealth, nearly instakill combo and kill off people in a small group before teleporting away

twice for 1200" to safety. Does that require "skill"? Does it lead to engaging gameplay? Hell no.

Ok, that's me, waiting for the next week no downstate post.

Yeah, just most of the people I play with in WvW really really hate no downstate. The weekly no downstate post is mainly a circlejerk of

people running spike power builds. About 70-80% of our guilds absolutely hated the even one week experience.

I can just hope ANET will never cave in to those repetitive posts. Else we'll have another Amazon who thought there was a demand

for New World being a forced PvP game.

Yeah, instant downstate kills are a fun diversion every now and when, but like 75% here really hate it. I am not that fond of it myself as it removes a tactical aspect from the game. I like getting up downies in our zerg. You cannot go full offensive tagging a lot of people hoping on a rally if things go south either. Zerg fights consist of turtling people fearing to get instakilled. No downstate is nothing I would like to see permanently.

> This is a rather odd but interesting line of thought.

>

> Why wouldn't your smaller guild want to form an alliance with the guy running the pickup content (or someone similar to him/his guild)?

Oh. Those would get along and I'd see them being in an alliance. Not so my GvG guild as they simply have a different playstyle and scoff at

PPT and people who don't take any chance to fight.

> After all, that is how all the stacks have been composed. They were all formed between larger guilds with pickup commanders and smaller guilds with well-practised players that may occassionally help shoulder the pickup burden. That's how WSR was made, how Vabbi was made, how RoS was made and so on. It is also why places like WSR, Vabbi and RoS also immidiately died when the principal larger and/or smaller guild felt compelled to move.

I see what you are getting at, but we are 8 years into the game. Communities have already formed. And it would suck to meet new people and get along with them only to be ripped apart after 8 weeks again.

> That is the proof that there isn't very much of a server loyalty or community left (or that there never really was a server community because the pillars of the communities may always have been guilds). The only server I can think of that may still be regarded as a server community in EU is Gandara. Almost every other server I see is dominated by a larger guild or a couple of larger guilds. If those guilds befriend one or two GvG guilds that server immidiately becomes a powerhouse that rolls most other servers.

Heh, I AM on Gandara. ;) But still people transfer to us and leave us often, but we kept quite a bunch of people I wouldn't wanna miss.

> It seems like this discussion always ends up here and never really goes on, then someone new comes around and starts talking about server culture again.

Yeah well, the most important point is that there are too many variables here whose effects we may not be able to fathom. Like if they also balance daily participation in night times.....that would rip Baruch Bay, the only spanish server, apart. I already see how English/French/German server links sometimes run into big problems. Now a mixup of all languages with "talk English or GTFO"? ;)

Or how would you structure maps? With all servers rolled into three factions, how many maps would we need? Could we transfer instances? How would Emergency Waypoints work there.......and and and.

I suspect about all of the resources of the GW2 devs would have to go into WvW for quite a while and we know how likely that is to happen.

> @"Dawdler.8521" said:

> But this is sort of the point. In a very simplistic way of looking at it, you've stacked all the things - the GvG guild, the casual guild, the "certain commander" with you as the glue between them. Alliances are *supposed* to break up and shuffle things. Maybe other guilds like that "certain commander" and want to form an alliance. Maybe the GvG guild want to join 2-3 other GvG guilds in their own little fight alliance. Maybe the casual guild just doesnt care and can be freeform balanced onto another world to make more equal populations. If one person can sit and hold everything back... alliances would never work.

>

> The "other way" to improve balance is already in effects - thats the link system. There is no other way to break apart monolithic servers except making the chunks smaller.

Yes, as I tried to point out simplistically, I think a huge chunk of the playerbase is interested in the community more than being partitioned into red, green and blue most evenly. If I cannot play with the people I want to I wouldn't be interested in playing at all. Maybe I am grossly overestimating the size of that part but one can only hope ANET will make the correct decision when deciding whether to go forward with alliances.

Also you can bet your behind that people will just bandwagon to the winning side anyway leaving tilted factions like before. Only at the cost of a (to be determined) part of the playerbase.

Actually I hope alliances will never be released. Not because I'm mean or spiteful, but I actually believe alliances would be the end of WvW.

What do many people fight for? So much is about server loyalty and the community.

So I'm a member of three different WvW guilds, one for casual play, one for GvG and one for friday and saturday nights when a certain commander

turns up which I like to play with.

With an alliance you can be certain my GvG guild will not form an alliance with the casual one and the commander guy which they dislike due to his playstyle.

So, I'd have a 1 in 3 chance to be in any group with any of them, and since there would have to be several shards of any of the factions there'd probably

be a hell of an organizing chaos of several red, green and blue factions for each map.

WvW's main draw for me is the community, and alliances would be the end of it.

I would have NO problem with developers coming out and saying: "The person who announced alliances has long left the company and our leadership and game direction is no longer the same. So we've thought about this and it is just not a good idea and we'll be scrapping this. We'll try to improve population imbalance some other way."

I am sick and tired of the "Alliances when?" memes I must admit ;) Let's put them to rest.

I still wouldn't say Scourge is that bad now, it's just not oppressive anymore. The shades aren't everything, and it still has a lot of corrupts and damage and even support utility.

The main problem in my opinion is that scourge under the current design just does not work in WvW. No other class has this amount of area denial which stays for extended amounts of time. Why does every fight have to consist of wading through a mine field to get at the opponents? No other class is so oppressive that it makes several other professions completely unviable.

The last change may have been a bit heavy handed. Imo ANET should just rework scourges into more of a support class which was the design goal at first. The meta after POF made the whole of WvW unplayable and a lot of people left for quite some time. Place shades, run into opponents, if your zerg is bigger you win. No counter play, no questions asked. Now we suddenly see a lot more variance in zergs. We have melee fighters, we have support tempests, all stuff which is not possible with all those stationary AoEs.

I really like your videos, Risen, and I have "liberated" quite a few ideas for characters which I consider my mains and still play in WvW, but in this I strongly disagree. Maybe the big shade could have stayed at 3 targets, but the nerf to wells and shades had to be this hard for the good of the game.

Wow, just wow. While there are a few nice minor QoL type changes to lesser used weapons, please do NOT inflict that scourge double shade thing on us again. Scourges are a horrible misdesign for a mode like WvW anyway, and we're getting shade double casting back, coupled with lower CD wells?

The game needs less CC, could have been done by lessening some of the stab nerfs. What are we supposed to do with melee classes? Everyone will just bomb their feet....after you have waded through a minefield. Is this supposed to be fun?

Being an avid home instance stuff collector, I would also very much love to see a dragon pinata home instance node. It would make sense too since most of the other festivals have offered some festival based node as well by now. I must admit I am not that interested in holographic weapons and/or armor pieces so this would be something to work towards in this festival.

Please make it happen, ANET! ;)

In my opinion power and condi are balanced decently well atm with a few adjustments needed here and there.

Stab nerfs should be reverted somewhat because CC is out of control. There's nearly nothing worse in the game than not being able to play your own character.

You get pinballed around and every numerically superior zerg will just bomb their feet with CCs to prevent less people from having a decent chance.

Condis are not the problem imo, there's enough cleansing classes for that. If the zerg composition is so bad that they cannot take care of most of them

they should include more tempests, firebrands or scrappers.

Also I disagree with the huge CD increases of a lot of powers. Powers are there to do something decently cool. I don't want to wait for ages doing basic stuff.

And putting 300s CDs on traits is just lazy. So you don't like passive traits? It would be nice to have some new traits instead of being told "Oh well, you wouldn't really want to use that with a 5 min(!) CD, now would you?"

It would be nice if you could offer the missing finishers which are not either in the BL statuettes or prestige ones.

They could either be put into the statuettes or perhaps be offered by an NPC for a "finisher claim ticket" or whatever.

Some haven't been available for like 1.5 years now.

If a zerg has a few dedicated cleansers this is not an issue anyway. Throw in some scrappers, tempests, even spellbreakers (there's awesome cleansing now!) and all is good. Stand around like muppets while people stand on top of structures AoEing into you? Not nice things will happen to you.

While I don't know what kind of buff zeal is supposed to have got with this patch (rather there's been a nerf to burst potential with Eternal Armory) which helps builds like this, people need to get in several hits to cause 5-7k burning. It usually happens if people allow freecasting into their zergs. But in cases like that about anything will kill such players, be it meteor storms, phase smashes etc etc. With all the 1/2-shot power damage stuff going on some condi is not excessive since it requires people not paying any attention and not caring about cleansing enough.

I would change Warrior's Cunning's second line to:

Deal 50% more damage against targets with barrier, but the bonus damage can go only up to the amount of barrier they have.

This would:

- Give the Warrior the ability to be a barrier breaker.

- Not screw over poor non-power scrappers who get their 50 barrier from autoattacking and then are hit for 15k.

- Not introduce another possibly gamebreaking power bonus like from Sic'em

It might be difficult to implement since the bonus damage would have to be calculated first (and destroy the barrier), then

the normal damage would have to be applied.

I agree. Since PoF there has been a ton of "everything explodes" type of content where you are perhaps not required to dodge everything and take less damage but there's a ton of visual spam anyhow.

Examples for me include:

- Several PoF story missions, especially fights against Balthazar and Amala.

- The Twilight Oasis Fractal end boss fight

- Siren's Reef Fractal boss fights

- now Molten Furnace weapons testing facility. Golems to fight, old testing mechanics, the Molten core thingie blanketing at least 1/4 of the playing field and best with instabilities like "we bleed fire" and "flux bomb" etc.

Even being able to complete T4 fractals with 3 people the added chaos does not increase the level of fun for me. You get pushed, pulled, thrown around, moa-ed. Sometimes a little less, but with more impact, should do the trick.

A good example would be the Nightmare fractal for me where you can learn the telegraphs and you can always see well what is happening.

> @"Virdo.1540" said:

> Ye if a Glass cannon hits a glass cannon hard, its almost a one shot. So why is the herald the only class that wont do a oneshot in that scenario? Why low damage even if full zerk? What about Tanky Warriors or Mesmers that onehit everyone too? ._.

>

> (or Deadeyes, all sorts of mage, Rangers, Guards)

>

> Seems like Herald arent allowed to have fun anymore. They take all our Damage away and dont even buff our support or sustain. We are now pretty much like a plastic bowl.

Nono, you misunderstand me here. I am NOT for reducing Rev damage in any way. They could keep the old version of damage for all I care. All I am happy about is the change to CoR that you will finally be able to see the danger zone and have a chance to react to it. Other than in roaming, the shattered ground trail is culled in zerg play so that you don't have any chance to react to it.

You should be able to see what's coming and dodge if you can. Whenever I am playing a glassy character and I am suddenly dead without being able to see any attack and have to resort to the combat log to find out what actually happened it irks me.

> @"Irenio CalmonHuang.2048" said:

> **Items**

>

> * Superior Rune of Antitoxin: Change it so that instead of increasing outgoing condition cleanses by one it instead increases incoming condition cleanses by one, thus only affecting the wielder, but allowing it to scale up with external cleanses.

I guess this had to happen sooner or later. While this change seems to be targetted mostly towards the Scrapper, it would have been nice

to provide an alternative for other support (elite) professions.

>

> **Engineer**

>

> * Purge Gyro: Reduce the number of cleansing pulses from 5 to 3 in WvW. Pending the superior rune of antitoxin change, this may stay at 5 cleansing pulses.

Since the change above already costs 50% of the cleansing a scrapper does, it definitely should stay at 5 pulses.

Scrapper needs to excel at least at something, we only have the odd one or two in full zergs nowadays.

> * Sneak Gyro: Increase the cooldown of this ability from 45 to ~~75~~ 60 seconds in WvW.

This I don't understand. It never struck me as particularly powerful after the latest nerf. Yes, people can blast the smoke field which they can

do with about any other power, but it rarely happens due to random people dropping all kinds of fields over it,

> * Impact Savant: See if there is a way to include condition damage on this trait globally. Reduce the vitality loss of this trait from 300 to 180 in WvW and PvP.

While the HP loss reduction is appreciated and the inclusion of condition damage is as well, I would suggest giving out

barrier for outgoing healing. The spirit of the scrapper seems to be "be active, get rewarded". If you are on the frontline with

reduced HP getting some tangible reward for healing would be nice.

> * _Chemical Field: This skill is replaced by Detection Pulse (from the old Sneak Gyro elite toolbelt) as the toolbelt skill for Purge Gyro._

I am split about this one. While the return of the Detection Pulse is highly appreciated, Chemical Field has lots of utility for a support scrapper,

as in you can drop it on downs to finish them (and get some rare tagging! Bags for poor supporty scrappers are rare!) and make ressing 33% slower.

I would probably prefer getting Detection Pulse back nonetheless for the utility and one argument to even have a scrapper in the zerg.

>

> **Guardian**

>

> * Stand Your Ground: Reduce the stacks of stability granted by this ability from 5 to 3 in WvW.

I don't like reducing stability. One of the most unfun things in WvW is getting tossed around without having much counterplay since many

classes have to rely on their supporters (i.e. firebrands) for it.

> * Tome of Courage, Chapter 5 - Unbroken Lines: This skill no longer grants ~~aegis or~~ retaliation.

I think firebrand does too much of everything, so some aegis removal is fitting.

> * _Tome of Resolve, Chapter 2 - Radiant Recovery: The existing split from PvP of cleansing 2 conditions is brought to WvW as well. This ability would continue to cleanse 3 conditions in PvE._

See above.

> * _Tome of Courage, Chapter 2 - Daring Challenge: This skill grants retaliation for 3 seconds instead of aegis._

> * _Sanctuary: Increase number of enemies that can be knocked back by this skill from 10 to 20 before it expires._

Trying to add some utility to ignored skills is nice, but I'm not sure we need more CC.

> **Necromancer**

>

> * Oppressive Collapse: This skill will require line of sight on the activation.

> * Sand Cascade: Reduce the base barrier granted by this skill by 33% in WvW & PvP, increase the healing power contribution by 20%, as the healing coefficient is already pretty strong.

> * Sand Flare: Reduce the base barrier granted by this skill by 25% in WvW, increase the healing power contribution by 33%.

> * Desert Shroud: Increase the base barrier granted by this skill by 10%, increase the healing power contribution by 15% and reduce the damage inflicted by this ability by 20% in WvW.

> * Sand Savant: We've wanted to address the target cap issue with this trait in WvW for a while, however it is an incredibly gnarly problem because this is a large functional change that would need to be preserved between game modes. This was why the cooldown split was made on this trait originally. We hear you that the trait is an issue and we're working on it. This is a tough case to crack in a manner that does not leave one mode suffering due to the changes made for another.

The trouble is that this power allows for tons of area denial which no other profession has. This design has always been extremely unhealthy for WvW and has made

many professions unviable or unfun in WvW. I can understand this is not an easy problem to fix.

> * _Feast of Corruption: Reduce damage by 20% in PvP & WvW. The existing split from PvP of corrupting 2 boons is brought to WvW. This ability continues to corrupt 3 boons in PvE._

> * _Devouring Darkness: Reduce damage by 20% in PvP & WvW. The existing split from PvP of corrupting 2 boons is brought to WvW. This ability continues to corrupt 3 boons in PvE._

Since this is usually traited to be PBAoE this will definitely stick.

Since the Scourge elite spec is responsible for many of the problems we have nowadays in WvW (i.e. 'pirateship meta', which I would call the 'minefield meta'),

some direction changes are appreciated. Scourges should be changed to more of a support (barrier) role instead of a condi damage role imo.

>

> **Revenant**

>

> * Gaze of Darkness: This skill would reveal stealthed enemies up to 600 range away in addition to striking enemies within its 360 radius.

A bit of reveal never hurts.

> * _Coalescence of Ruin: This skill would no longer deals increased damage with successive impacts; instead it deals damage equal to what was previously the middle impact damage. Damage remains split between game modes. A red warning rectangle visible to enemies has been added to this skill._

Oh yes! This will be a big game changer for a lot of glassier people who will no longer go "huh, I had full HP and am suddenly dead. Why? *searches combat log* Oh, revs."

anymore.

I believe many of the changes are going into the right direction even though some hurt very much. I believe WvW will go into much more condi heavy direction since cleansing is not as prevalent.

Here's my take on the proposed engineer changes:

> **Engineer**

>

> * Chemical Field: This skill is replaced by Detection Pulse (from the old Sneak Gyro elite toolbelt) as the toolbelt skill for Purge Gyro.

This is interesting. While Detection Pulse is a very useful skill and I would love having it back, it robs the support scrappers of most

of their ability to tag stuff. Loot in WvW already has been getting skint, and something was changed a few weeks ago that dropped the

number of bags for supporters significantly for me imo, whether it was a bug or intended.

Also Chemical Field allowed you to keep enemies down and prevent people from ressing them. Unless there was some solution

for this problem I'd rather keep it instead of Detection Pulse however painful that is.

> * Purge Gyro: Reduce the number of cleansing pulses from 5 to 3 in WvW.

Cleanses is the one significant thing this build has. This is getting close to changing Scrappers out from being useful. Do we all have to

play Firebrands? There's already pretty few of us around, and I expect to be kicked from "meta" zergs if this keeps up. We were already

hit pretty hard last patch.

> * Sneak Gyro: Increase the cooldown of this ability from 45 to 75 seconds in WvW.

I don't see the use of it, I've never thought it was THAT powerful of an ability since it doesn't allow you to cloak most of a zerg like

veil and is mostly useless for pushing.

I don't get any wolf animations on my asura tempest either. I am using another legendary in my primary hand, but it doesn't seem to make a difference. When I first made Howler ages ago, I did have the wolf in warhorn skills.

It would be nice if that could be fixed.

It would be nice if you could reoffer the old finishers or make them available in the BL statuette tab (at least for a short while).