Curse

IMMORTAlMITCH · Feb 13, 2008, 10:57 AM // 10:57

These are in my opinion the biggest problems with GvG at the moment.

VoD/ViO:

The recent series of updates regarding VoD were mostly an attempt of Izzy to move away from 'static 8v8 play' and to encourage split tactics, while I think this in principle is a very good move, the updates basically strongly encourage splitting, but at the same time strongly discourage any other strategy.

With all the crazy bonuses to NPC damage at VoD the main goal of splitting is taking down NPCs to have an advantage at VoD rather than threatening the opposing team's Guild lord, the most recent update is a step forward from what it was before because at least the bonus swings sides now if the NPC balance changes.

The problem with this whole situation however, is that there's way too much emphasis on NPCs, the deciding factor should however be the players themselves, it's retarded that right now a close match can be decided at VoD because a team has one more NPC and as such deals 15% more damage.

I think the best way to change the game to still encourage splitting but shift the importance from NPCs to players is to reduce the amount of NPCs to what it was before, this makes it easier to crack a base, split pre VoD, with less NPCs there's less damage to tank and less reliance on a monk type of character to support the split (designated splits aren't really interesting ordesirable).

Suggested changes:
Move VoD back to 20/25 minutes to give teams more time to pull off strategies.

Remove ViO completely and go back to the old VoD minus the health reduction (maybe keep the bonus damage from NPCs against other NPCs).

Reduce the amount of NPCs to what it used to be.

Morale/Flagging:

GvG was so interesting back in the day because the game was really movement based, and there was a plethora of strategies/tactics to create an advantage, in the current state of GvG importance has shifted from a good 'mix' between 'base and flagstand' almost completely to 'base'.

Morale has become much less important than NPCs, this is partly because of the increased importance of VoD but also because of super hard rezzes.

Kills lose their relevance when you can res a person for free with full health and energy (death pact), sure it comes with a drawback but I think the ability to do so makes it much harder to turn games around.

Izzy has been steadily buffing hard rezzes for some reason but all this has accomplished is that boosts to recharge res sigs have lost a lot of their importance.

Back in the day teams would push on the enemy's flagger to delay him and double run flags to create a favorable situation to make a strong 8v7 push or force boosts, I think a big part of why this doesn't happen (very often) anymore is (besides the reduced importance of boosts/morale) the fact that flaggers have superspeedboosts now.

Skills like Pious Haste allow a flagger to outrun almost every character while holding the flag without even much of an investment or drawback.

Why would you double run a flag when you can just run it with a character with a permanent 33% speed boost?

Suggested changes:

Nerf hardrezzes (stuff like flesh is fine but uber hardrezzes, mainly DPS, are too powerful)

Nerf superspeedboosts across the board, e.g. Pious Haste 25% speed 8 second recharge, Flame Djinn's Haste 25% speed shorter duration, Storm Djinn's Haste 25% speed shorter duration, etc. (possibly buff some other speedboosts like sprint that could encourage double flagging).

Passive Defense/Party Healing/Pressure Play:

Ever since the release of Nightfall there's been a steady decline in pressure builds and they have largely been replaced by spike builds and dedicated splits (sinsplit). A big part of the reason this happened is the buff to glyph of lesser energy and it's synergy with Aegis/Wards.

Why would you try to pressure through x layers of defense when you can just spike or avoid them altogether by running a dedicated split? The latest antipressure machine is the 'Partygon' which oddly enough received a buff in a recent update.

This template basically encompasses everything that's wrong with GW, strong (uncounterable) passive defense (shields up/watch yourself) strong (uncounterable) party healing (song of resto/mending refrain) and a ranged DPS turret that can easily switch targets and thus bypass most active prot.

The recent updates to party healing skills were nice in that they gave more options for party healing, however you have to be very careful with this as too much party healing will basically be the end of pressure builds (as if they weren't rare enough to begin with).

Skills like Divine Healing and Heaven's Delight are examples of good changes, they are fairly weak and require sacrifices to be ran (high divine spec and a skillslot).

Skills like Song of Resto and PwK are examples of bad changes, SoR is basically a fire and forget skill that provides good party healing with little attribute investment, it comes at the cost of an elite slot but synergizes well with mending refrain (another good example of a bad change as it's virtually uncounterable) and is quite hard to stop and PwK is a skill on a template that's already specced high in restoration and as such the only investment is a single skill slot, PwK was good as it was before, a decent support party heal that was kept in line by it's recharge.

Heal Party right now is much too strong, at 1s cast it's hard to stop (near impossible under HB) and due to the high energy cost still not very viable on stand monks, I'd much rather see this stay at 2s cast but changed to 10 energy and have slightly reduced healing + maybe a small recharge increase (5-7r)

LoD could get a small buff still as at 10r requiring an elite slot and high attributes it's too weak, change the recharge to 7-8s.

Suggested Changes:

Nerf glyph lesser energy to 5..15 or make it so you get the energy refunded after finishing a cast on it.

Make Watch Yourself and Shields Up end when you use an attack skill.

Make Song of Resto 2s activation and 10r.

Make mending only reapply when a chant ends, not when a shout ends.

Make heal party a 2s cast, 10e and heal for slightly less.

Make LoD 7-8r.

Put PwK back at it's old stats.

Mesmers:

After the complete obliteration of Power Leak there's not much of a place for domination mesmers anymore outside of spike builds.

Power Leak was an extremely powerful skill and basically one of the only things that still allowed pressure builds to work against defenseball/blockway.

With PLeak gone mesmers are reduced to spamming glyph energy gale and shame/diverting monks and shattering enchantments on spikes, I think Dom mesmers were once one of the most interesting templates but now the only way to sorta pressure is to spam gale and bridge the gaps with shame and diversion.

Properly fixing party healing/passive defense might go a long way towards making mesmers more than just a spiketool I think that it would be a lot more interesting to buff some mesmer skills to make their role shift more to energy denial again.

Suggested Changes:

Change Surge/Burn to 10 energy burned and 8 damage per energy.

Change PLeak to 20r and -15 energy (at 14 spec)

Change Feedback to 20r 1c.

Change Drain Enchant to 10e 1s 25r and 5..20 energy gain.

Change Inspired Hex to 5..15 energy gain.

Change PLock to 20s disable (at 14 spec)

Active Defense:

Active defense is something that should be promoted, the best 2 examples of active defense are single target prots and blinds.

I think SoA and SH could get slight recharge reductions, whereas guardian (which was previously sort of kept in check by PLeak) could do with a recharge increase.

Big prots are largely (pun) fine, in future updates maybe skills like shield guardian could be looked at (.25c 75% block for 1-3 seconds for spikestopper maybe).

Blinds used to be one of the key components of stopping a spike, today it is spammed on recharge to stop people from pressuring, condition runes/inscriptions help a lot here but I think to change blinds back to their previous role a good thing to do would reduce the duration of the blind to 1..5 seconds, decrease the energy cost and maybe increase the recharge somewhat.

In future updates skills that apply weakness could be looked at to make weakness more viable as a pressure reliever.

Suggested Changes:

Change Guardian recharge to 4-5s.

Change Shield Of Absorption Recharge to 8s.

Change Shielding Hands Recharge to 10s.

Change Blinding Surge to 5e 1..5 blind and recharge to 6s.

Change Blinding Flash to 10e 2..6 blind and recharge to 6s.

Change Steam to 3..7 blind and recharge to 6s.

Those are In my opinion the biggest issues with the game at the moment, if I think of anything else I'll add it later.

Thoughts/Opinions encouraged, but keep garbage out of this topic, if you're not experienced at GvG please don't post here unless you want to ask questions

JR · Feb 13, 2008, 11:29 AM // 11:29

I agree with absolutely all of Mitch's post, and have nothing to add. I sincerely hope Andrew and Izzy take these suggestions on board and go ahead with implementing them to see what happens. They are in general fairly subtle tweaks or reversions, and it would make a truly fantastic update.

I understand the theory behind making small balance tweaks and then evaluating their impact, but I think that is just taking far too long to address problems right now.

+1 /QFT great post.

deya · Feb 13, 2008, 11:54 AM // 11:54

I'll sign everything but Guardian nerf.

Max 3 seconds of recharge if the GoLE fix would happen imo~~

Vaga · Feb 13, 2008, 11:54 AM // 11:54

I'd say paragon damage + passive defense are pretty big problems atm, people just seem to have forgotten about it...

JR · Feb 13, 2008, 12:02 PM // 12:02

Quote:

Originally Posted by Vaga

I'd say paragon damage + passive defense are pretty big problems atm, people just seem to have forgotten about it...

Quote:

Originally Posted by IMMORTALMITCH

The latest antipressure machine is the 'Partygon' which oddly enough received a buff in a recent update.

This template basically encompasses everything that's wrong with GW, strong (uncounterable) passive defense (shields up/watch yourself) strong (uncounterable) party healing (song of resto/mending refrain) and a ranged DPS turret that can easily switch targets and thus bypass most active prot.

I don't think anyone has forgotten about it? Even if you weren't referring specifically to Mitch's post it has come up repeatedly in all recent discussion about the state of GvG.

Ensign · Feb 13, 2008, 12:30 PM // 12:30

True pressure metas in Guild Wars have traditionally been really bad; you had the dual smite and later the triple smite eras, the various stages with dominant hex builds, or builds like poopnthump and the like.

The 'fun pressure' metas were really high proactive disruption metas, driven by either powerful Dom Mesmers or Nature's Renewal (plus Tranquility) for the most part.

IMMORTAlMITCH · Feb 13, 2008, 12:36 PM // 12:36

Quote:

Originally Posted by Ensign

True pressure metas in Guild Wars have traditionally been really bad; you had the dual smite and later the triple smite eras, the various stages with dominant hex builds, or builds like poopnthump and the like.

The 'fun pressure' metas were really high proactive disruption metas, driven by either powerful Dom Mesmers or Nature's Renewal (plus Tranquility) for the most part.

KGYUish pressure builds have been run quite often and to quite some success and they were some of the most fun builds to play imo.

The 4 Gale warriors 2 blackout rangers was really fun too although a bit extreme.

Btw, although I have a preference for running pressure builds, a pressure meta is not what I'm advocating, I just want there to be a balance between pressure/spike/split builds and the ability of a good balanced build to play to each of these styles.

Vaga · Feb 13, 2008, 12:45 PM // 12:45

Quote:

Originally Posted by JR

I don't think anyone has forgotten about it? Even if you weren't referring specifically to Mitch's post it has come up repeatedly in all recent discussion about the state of GvG.

Everything in this thread has been repeatedly brought up in discussions about the state of gvg, Mitch is basically just consolidating it into one post.

He talks about 1 template that has paragon damage and passive defense, you can nerf that template and there's still going to be a ton of paragon templates you can run that do too much damage and skills like aegis/ward melee that take no skill to use and have great effects.

My point is paragon damage and passive defense in general needs a nerf, not just the one specific motigon. I was pointing it out because whilst most people who play the game can reasonably come to the conclusion that this needs to happen, Andrew and Izzy can't so it needs to be pointed out to them like Mitch's post.

JR · Feb 13, 2008, 12:51 PM // 12:51

Quote:

Originally Posted by Vaga

Everything in this thread has been repeatedly brought up in discussions about the state of gvg, Mitch is basically just consolidating it into one post.

He talks about 1 template that has paragon damage and passive defense, you can nerf that template and there's still going to be a ton of paragon templates you can run that do too much damage and skills like aegis/ward melee that take no skill to use and have great effects.

My point is paragon damage and passive defense in general needs a nerf, not just the one specific motigon. I was pointing it out because whilst most people who play the game can reasonably come to the conclusion that this needs to happen, Andrew and Izzy can't so it needs to be pointed out to them like Mitch's post.

The Motigon/Partygon is by far the most broken. Secondary to that I only see Defensive Anthem Paragons being used for passive defense, and they aren't amazing. Certainly nobody in their right mind would take them over a Partygon.

Fix the clearly broken stuff first, then look at the things that might need tweaking.

Kaon · Feb 13, 2008, 12:59 PM // 12:59

I agree with everything you posted except perhaps a few details in skill changes, but that's not the real issue anyway. The only thing i truely disagree with is killing blind of. Right now a 14spec bsurge makes blind last 5 seconds, it's very easy to pressure through that, so it definately doesn't need fixing at all.

kyynel · Feb 13, 2008, 01:03 PM // 13:03

Signed, sounds really good.

Takida · Feb 13, 2008, 01:08 PM // 13:08

good post!! =)

Beoishere · Feb 13, 2008, 01:16 PM // 13:16

The skills don't need changed as much as VoD does.

Change VoD so that NPCs aside from Guild Lord do not move.

The changes made recently to the VoD SKILL are fantastic and should stay like that, but remove ViO from the game entirely, and fire whoever from Arena net came up with that idea.

Revert number of NPCs back to old amount and change Body Guards back to 2, removing Knights obviously.

When VoD hits, at 20 minutes, Guild Lord -runs- to the stand (Makes it there in about 10-15 seconds) all other NPCs don't move.

Guild Lord does as much Damage as 2 warriors, can move around like the Ghostly but doesn't have any skills. (Can't follow people like Ghostly though)

This will fix alot of things if you ask me, no more "npc advantage" or "winning flag stand" after VoD. It will also fix alot of the splitting builds since they thrive on NPC advantage, and lets face it, the game is way more fun 8v8.

GvG would go back to what it was before. 8v8 forces player skill and actually punishes errors instead of just shrugging them off and retrying later.

Also, I agree with most of those changes, but don't change Surge/Burn. Change LoD to 8 second recharge, change ZB to 7 EN, 1/2 cast, 10 EN return on under 50% (Make the return calculate first). OoB to 15%, Edrain and Mantra of Recall back to old recharges/returns (Keep Edrains half drain double return though) Buff ALL of the Assassin attack elites, buff leads, nerf shadowsteps (all of them!) Some kids will probably flame me for this, but make Scythe swings slower. Nerf Ancestors Rage and Splinter, and warmonger. Give monks a way to remove enemy weapon spells

and COMPLETELY revamp the Paragon class. Needs so many changes I can't even be bothered to list them all.

Tyla · Feb 13, 2008, 01:20 PM // 13:20

With the changes to ViO/VoD did that encourage people to run 'Sins again?
I've been seeing alot of 3/5 splits with 'Sins lately...

But seriously, brilliant post!

DutchSmurf · Feb 13, 2008, 01:23 PM // 13:23

Good post, although basically the same that has already been said a couple of times. And just like the last times I somehow have the feeling that even if those changes are done, I doubt it will help any. I would rather hit things like Mending Touch and ranger interrupts (just look at a discussion on the qq forums, what is said is basically that you should just hit them on recharge). I think that would have more effect on the metagame then the changes Mitch suggested. Unless we want to keep hitting template after template that will take over the motigon role.

Quote:

Originally Posted by IMMORTAlMITCH

a balance between pressure/spike/split builds and the ability of a good balanced build to play to each of these styles.

I don't think that is possible to do without it either resulting in buildwars or in only 1 build. Wouldn't know how that balanced build is supposed to look then either.

JR · Feb 13, 2008, 01:27 PM // 13:27

Quote:

Originally Posted by DutchSmurf

I don't think that is possible to do without it either resulting in buildwars or in only 1 build. Wouldn't know how that balanced build is supposed to look then either.

It has happened in the past.

Beoishere · Feb 13, 2008, 01:29 PM // 13:29

The problem with the game is that so many skills are shitty, no one wants to even take the time to test them to see if there was any way they could be viable.

Anet needs to stop nerfiing, and start buffing.

When discussing a build vent should be like this "I see lots of Melee builds on Obs, maybe we should run some more melee defence" and then you go into the game vs a hex team and have a hard time. That's what I expected from GW, but with only a handfull of skills being viable at any given time, people just run the build that they see win.

Akaraxle · Feb 13, 2008, 01:31 PM // 13:31

Nice ideas overall (not sure about further nerfing blind -.-), but I'm afraid they'll stay conjectures. I strongly doubt ANet will spare the man-hours necessary for someone to sit down, evaluate these suggestions and make the appropriate changes.

JR · Feb 13, 2008, 01:33 PM // 13:33

I'd like to throw in the suggestion of making Interrupts skills, not spells, so they aren't effected by fast recharge mods.

RhanoctJocosa · Feb 13, 2008, 01:36 PM // 13:36

great post, Mitch