27 replies to this topic

[FoxBat]

There's one change hidden among the patch notes that has a huge impact on WvW:

Quote

Many skills, items, and traits were applying healing to an infinite amount of targets and have now been limited to 5 targets.

If they truly hit everything, no more healing balls o death.

Portal was barely nerfed to 90s but I don't see that having much WvW impact as long as any number of players can still use it.

[Bottoms_Up]

And a not so bad change that might help get people into WvW:

"The drop rarity of Rare and Exotic weapons from certain places in the world (champions, veterans, and players in WvW) has been increased."

And another one:

"You can no longer view opponents’ account names through reporting in WvW"

I'm guessing people will be divided on this.

[FoxBat]

Bottoms_Up, on 15 November 2012 - 11:55 PM, said:

"You can no longer view opponents’ account names through reporting in WvW"

I'm guessing people will be divided on this.

There's really no sense in hiding player's names in everywhere but *one* place. All or nothing is the only consistent position.

[Orikx]

Overall no huge changes for me in WvW.

I love that ANet basically just told all the peopel crying about Portal to shut up and sit down, the skill is fine.

[Quietnine]

Orikx, on 16 November 2012 - 12:19 AM, said:

Overall no huge changes for me in WvW.

I love that ANet basically just told all the peopel crying about Portal to shut up and sit down, the skill is fine.

they didnt say the skill is fine, they just didnt do anything because the problem is rendering and for portal, there was no easy solution other than increase the cooldown.

im surprised nothing was done about cloak and dagger though. that skill needs a cooldown or cost adjustment to force thieves to be out of stealth long enough to actually render on peoples screens.

and seriously, why can you contest a node during stealth and immediately after stealth? fixing that wouldve been huge for wvw.

[Norseman]

FoxBat, on 15 November 2012 - 11:30 PM, said:

There's one change hidden among the patch notes that has a huge impact on WvW:

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If they truly hit everything, no more healing balls o death.

Portal was barely nerfed to 90s but I don't see that having much WvW impact as long as any number of players can still use it.

Yep it'll be interesting to see how this affects turtling. My guess is that it'll be much less effective but testing will tell.

[Voison]

Bottoms_Up, on 15 November 2012 - 11:55 PM, said:

"The drop rarity of Rare and Exotic weapons from certain places in the world (champions, veterans, and players in WvW) has been increased."
"You can no longer view opponents’ account names through reporting in WvW"

I'm happy.

[ilr]

How does that in any way help Support builds and supply runners?


The complete lack of WvW getting its "own section" in the Patch Notes is pretty much a big fat "G.G." at this point

Edited by ilr, 16 November 2012 - 12:54 AM.

[Impmon]

To get rid of portal rendering just give the portal an icon on the map or on the mini map that pulses to indicate theres a portal.

[murtas]

Huge nerf to healing.
Lets see how metagame shifts to after this.

[Lalnuir]

Mesmers now need line of sight for their god dam annoying phantasms.
Which means everyone drop MORE siege as it's much harder to take out! =P

[LavaSquid]

loot bags still don't go to inventory directly, awww.

[Velron]

Lalnuir, on 16 November 2012 - 01:43 AM, said:

Mesmers now need line of sight for their god dam annoying phantasms.
Which means everyone drop MORE siege as it's much harder to take out! =P

This is probably the real biggest change for WvW. The turtles had already been countered fairly easily...this was a serious problem though. The phantasms spawn and attack instantly, even with a dedicated person watching for phantasms to spawn its very hard to keep siege up with a persistent mesmer targeting someone near it.

[bieberfanxoxo]

Impmon, on 16 November 2012 - 12:52 AM, said:

To get rid of portal rendering just give the portal an icon on the map or on the mini map that pulses to indicate theres a portal.

If people aren't smart enough to pan their camera every 15-20seconds what makes you think they'll be checking their map for a portal symbol?

[Beastgate]

No turtling only affects the largest servers. Shoot.

[lioka qiao]

The nerf to healing definitely makes it more dangerous to directly assault a defended gate with large groups.

[Acidbaron]

Those in on the anti-turtle bandwagon will like this but there is a bitter pill to these changes.

It means numbers mean even more and smaller groups have less options to counter if any, it continues to favor what i see as a full offensive group, aka as the zerg.
Organised groups can maintain a turtle due to a better rotation of heals and an increase of support players.


I much rather had them focus on effective group combo abilities rather then nerfs to encourage smarter play, Although this doesn't change that much on organised levels, for me the precedent of putting the focus on more offensive play again makes me go -meh-.
Then again i'm an advocate of large scale battles based on specific skills and tools to counter specific setups, wishful thinking here of a former EVE player perhaps.

The mesmer change is good bit silly of them  being able to take out siege that way and it was honestly expected a single person shouldn't be able to render siege well placed in a structure useless.

[Alathon]

Re: zerg, it's the other way around.  A large group could scale healing, booning, and condition removal far past the point where a smaller group could even hope to do damage.  The capping of heals at 5 targets is a removal of a vast zerg advantage.

[Voison]

I lied about being happy...

Anet's lack of love and support for WvW is upsetting...

[Acidbaron]

Alathon, on 16 November 2012 - 11:29 PM, said:

Re: zerg, it's the other way around.  A large group could scale healing, booning, and condition removal far past the point where a smaller group could even hope to do damage.  The capping of heals at 5 targets is a removal of a vast zerg advantage.

A flat nerf to support roles is not the answer, regardless of how you look at it.

Those who played EVE will agree with me that on mass fights you need such roles, now did it require balancing it probably did but now something has changed and the current direction is that as a small group you cannot make a significant impact, the large blob will always win, rather then the smartest blob. That's my issue with the course being taken here.

Then again their interest in WvW balance and keeping it interesting is none excistant and this change probably happen for PvE reasons to begin with.

[Hennet]

The change to portal was for sPvP not WvW. A single mesmer could easily cover two points in sPvP and quickly jump from one to another with no cooldown on the skill. There is now a 20 to 30 second window where they cannot do this.

[Darknicrofia]

no shouts affect more than 5 ppl regardless of it healed or not, probably the hardest nerf to the Guardian class.

[Real]

Pretty sure guardian shouts always affected 5 targets only. The issue is that the prioritization is still messed up so one of those caps might go to a mesmer illusion, or a ranger pet, or a friendly NPC/player outside of your party. Really annoying when you're trying to provide stability for your party.

[bieberfanxoxo]

Real, on 17 November 2012 - 05:28 PM, said:

Pretty sure guardian shouts always affected 5 targets only. The issue is that the prioritization is still messed up so one of those caps might go to a mesmer illusion, or a ranger pet, or a friendly NPC/player outside of your party. Really annoying when you're trying to provide stability for your party.

Same as most buffs. Ele swiftness was always a pain in the ass because it'd hit 1 of the bads trying to follow our group around and miss our members.

[Alathon]

Acidbaron, on 17 November 2012 - 04:42 PM, said:

A flat nerf to support roles is not the answer, regardless of how you look at it.

Those who played EVE will agree with me that on mass fights you need such roles, now did it require balancing it probably did but now something has changed and the current direction is that as a small group you cannot make a significant impact, the large blob will always win, rather then the smartest blob. That's my issue with the course being taken here.

Then again their interest in WvW balance and keeping it interesting is none excistant and this change probably happen for PvE reasons to begin with.

The nerfs to healing were entirely appropriate, this game is not meant to be more tank/dps/healer trifecta drivel, but the inappropriate inifinite targeting of heals was pushing it that way.  Putting heals in line with damage, capped at five targets per effect.  Heals should never have had infinite targeting.

If you've played EVE you should understand by now that quantity brings its own quality.  It's so well understood in EVE that blueballing is the default tactic when one side doesn't have numbers.  They know damned well that numbers will tell unless you're completely incompetent, or they have more batphone than you do.. which is, again, numbers.  There are exceptions for really bad matchups, like BS fleet trying to kill ahacs, but those are exceptions and that ahac fleet can get ownd down in minutes by fleets that aren't horribly gimped against their traversal/sig radius.

Logistics don't change this dynamic, they reinforce it, as infinite target heals were doing in GW2 before they were fixed.

Just because you're smaller doesn't mean you're better.  Seen this a hundred times over the last decade, "small, tight-knit PvP-centric" doesn't actually mean "better at PvP than the guilds ten times bigger", though the little guy will always claim he's awesome and only ever loses when he's outnumbered.  It's an easy narrative to run, especially for guild leaders who want to be a big fish in a small pond.   It's also a ready excuse for, say, battles where they tell everyone to spread out at the start, then complain after they wipe that they didn't stack fast enough at the start.  But their identity is based on the assumption that they're better than the people they're figting, so the lies come out.

[khalid_war]

Alathon, on 17 November 2012 - 11:10 PM, said:

It's also a ready excuse for, say, battles where they tell everyone to spread out at the start, then complain after they wipe that they didn't stack fast enough at the start.  

Ahh Freelancer, how we love thee.

[Acidbaron]

Alathon, on 17 November 2012 - 11:10 PM, said:

The nerfs to healing were entirely appropriate, this game is not meant to be more tank/dps/healer trifecta drivel, but the inappropriate inifinite targeting of heals was pushing it that way.  Putting heals in line with damage, capped at five targets per effect.  Heals should never have had infinite targeting.

If you've played EVE you should understand by now that quantity brings its own quality.  It's so well understood in EVE that blueballing is the default tactic when one side doesn't have numbers.  They know damned well that numbers will tell unless you're completely incompetent, or they have more batphone than you do.. which is, again, numbers.  There are exceptions for really bad matchups, like BS fleet trying to kill ahacs, but those are exceptions and that ahac fleet can get ownd down in minutes by fleets that aren't horribly gimped against their traversal/sig radius.

Logistics don't change this dynamic, they reinforce it, as infinite target heals were doing in GW2 before they were fixed.

Just because you're smaller doesn't mean you're better.  Seen this a hundred times over the last decade, "small, tight-knit PvP-centric" doesn't actually mean "better at PvP than the guilds ten times bigger", though the little guy will always claim he's awesome and only ever loses when he's outnumbered.  It's an easy narrative to run, especially for guild leaders who want to be a big fish in a small pond.   It's also a ready excuse for, say, battles where they tell everyone to spread out at the start, then complain after they wipe that they didn't stack fast enough at the start.  But their identity is based on the assumption that they're better than the people they're figting, so the lies come out.

Never denied that numbers don't matter, for me it's a question of how much it matters and with no future out look of how they see mass PvP in this game, i think we'll simply see a move to zergs with no counters (you can already zerg down doors without the use of siege equipment, yet that is not deemed an issue while i would put that on the same line as infinite healing/cleansing)

Right now why bring support in a GW2 zerg? I don't see any real reason to do so
Bring a few mesmers, add enough offensive roles have more numbers that can focus target = victory.

While i would rather have stalemates and those stalemates to be broken by CC and support roles but perhaps i'm expecting too much from this rather simplistic mmo.



I know the stereotypes, small guilds claim to be superior and big guilds are written of to be just mindless blobs / zergs, it's nothing new

(I do find those belonging to smaller guilds are generally better equipment in dealing with PvP situations then those who are dependant on a large blob support, not to say all members of a blob aren't on equal footing but that's my experience from being part of small and larger groups, as the margin of error is smaller in coordination)

Edited by Acidbaron, 18 November 2012 - 10:29 AM.

[Gully]

I play a support thief and I have to say that I help win fights for my server, 2 man groups, small zergs or big zergs... It really doesn't matter. And yes, I was in a large guild and the majority of the players just run glass cannon specs without healing or crowd control, they have the mindset of just hoping to kill people quickly. I have seen large groups getting destroyed by really small teams and yes, smaller teams mainly try to focus on synergy and balance...

A nerf to healing might have been needed, but no matter at how you look at it, a well timed heal will still win you fights.

We had a group of 3 taking on a group of about 10 at a supply camp down south in the blackgate borderlands a few hours ago, we won the fight due to synergy between us 3. It doesn't always mean we're better players, I still get wrecked when running by myself but in combo with my partners you won't kill me. Also we spend a good amount of hours a day just tweaking and theory crafting on how to improve...

I love heals : )