Fort Aspenwood no longer balanced.

I like Upier's idea of adding an objective for the Kurzicks in order to win. It's not very difficult for the kurzicks to wait it out till the meter is full and win. Maybe add the objective to bring a certain ammount of amber to Gunther in order to win? And if that objective isn't reached, but the meter reaches full, it will result in a draw.
^And to the above post of House Silvermoon: you can always give selective examples which show that the opposite side has a seemingly disadvantage. That doesn't mean anything.

Not the only way, but if you think it is, more one-way thinking to you. Plus if gate is broken, they will not be able to repair it at all.

---------------------

As for draw, just no:

Luxon: Keep turtles alive. Keep mines capped for close rez. Break the gates. Kill Gatekeepers and then Gunther.

Kurzick: Keep gates alive. Keep mines capped for running amber. Run amber. Kill turtles. Kill big Luxon threats. Keep Gatekeepers and Gunther alive.

Kurzick already has a lot of objectives, on par with Luxon, if not more. Maybe you should try to play it instead of hypothesizing. And draws will simply piss off both teams and make FA a desert place again.

And deank81, same as with any other post in this thread. House Silvermoon's points are pretty legit, except of course interrupting clause that I don't agree with.

All of this means rather little when you consider two simple details:

Luxon turtles still fire into walls. lols

Kurzicks respawn in 5s with infinite energy right ontop of the battle.

Kurzicks still pull ahead. Gates mean nothing, holding the mines mean nothing. Against any good kurzick team an equally good luxon team will be destined to fail, because any good kurzick team can negate all luxon advantages way too easily. The turtle changes would be make the luxons great if turtles didn't fire into the side of the walls still. Until that is changed the turtles are only better against dumb kurzicks. As I said before, all that needs to be done is a small AI change on the turtles. It's just rediculous that any character of any profession can stop the most important advantage of the luxon side by standing in certain places.

If you are winning as luxon its because the kurzick team was bad and failed to f**k up the turtles properly, not because your luxon team was good.

Fix turtle group AI so they go after NPC's correctly and all will be fine. If anything luxons will probably end up a bit overpowered.

Oh no, they did, more that once. But anything that goes through walls can still target and kill them, that's why going as any physical profession is pretty much stupid on Luxon side.

Though I agree that Turtles could use some AI improvement. For example, after 2 hits, make them disregard the player. Making them completely ignore players will have a negative effect of Kurzick ganking turtles even more. 2 hits are plenty to kill a normal unprotected player.

If there is one aspenwood aspect that has never been addressed, it's the NPCs.

For comparison, the Luxon NPCs are very well designed. The mine keeping rangers can cripple, harming anyone trying to run amber. The warriors can chain Coward with perfect accuracy thanks to AI reflexes. The green mine has a healer to keep the rangers alive, and priests support the captains. Not perfect, but each fulfills their roll very well.

Meanwhile, the Kurzick NPCs fail. And fail hard.

The minekeepers are spirit summoners with the same skillbar, making each other redundant, and take far too long to finish binding, by which time their squishy caster hides have usually been filled with arrows. Or set on fire.

The gate NPCs are completely impotent, as the siege turtle can fire from far outside caster range. Moreover, the necromancer's skillbar is a joke.

The little guys inside the base are useless, as they are completely out of the battle once killed. Every luxon NPC is capable of respawning, but the small army of kurzicks is always removed in the first few minutes of battle.

And the juggernaut. Oh, the juggernaut.

He's supposed to be an anti-turtle monster. Sadly, he's a meleer who has a slower pace than the turtles he's supposed to hunt, he has only two skills, a knockdown with a terrible recharge, and a useless energy buff to allies which disappears the instant he wanders off, and the fact that he is tied to the gate means monks have to run around trying to help him as he walks out of caster range. He can be literally defeated by a combination of wanding and walking briskly.


If there's something that needs changing, it is the utter failure that is the kurzick army. Maybe it's making the mine cleansers channeling rits. Maybe it's adding another level of amber running, one that allows you to respawn the courtyard NPCs if all gates are whole and you talk to a gatekeeper. Maybe it's doing something to fix the juggernaut's bitter, bitter failure. But for Gunther's sake, something needs fixing.

Then they need to be better at distracting turtles while keeping out of caster range. Or be a monk. Doing either of those I've been able to stand around idle distracting turtles the whole match. Trying to get me from the other side is just playing into my hand because I am now not only distracting a turtle group but also an enemy player. 2 for 1.

If they completely ignore npcs and have to go through kurzick players, the luxon warriors will be with the turtles to smash anything getting near. The luxons can defend the turtles as well, and I believe it should be a part of the luxon strategy to defend the turtles above mindlessly zerging the enemy.

The main point is that the turtle should not be firing at the wall with its siege attack though. Any AI update that would help this would be good.

You don't seem to understand FA. Every kurzick NPC in the map could be deleted and a good kurzick team will still win easily against a good luxon team (note: this is hypothetical, entire good teams don't exist in FA). 5 second respawn with full health/energy and no DP is just THAT good.

The Turtle groups are overpowering if they can attack players but are worthless if they can't attack players. The Turtle groups SHOULD be overpowering in comparison to kurzick NPC's because the luxons are the ones who stand to lose in a stalemate, so they should get the offensive NPC advantage. This works just fine at the moment if FA is composed of 100% stupid players. The problem is that as soon as you get 1 smart player on the kurzick side they can stand in certain spots and totally nullify the luxon NPC advantage, and without the luxon NPC advantage the match becomes an 8v8 with instant spawn where the luxons lose in case of a tie. That is the problem. Turtles need to be given a workable AI so that they can't be disabled by such simple tricks. Once that is done we can quibble about the balance of NPC power, but until luxons NPC's can't be rendered 100% useless by a player with an empty skill bar we have a bigger problem.

Everyone is whining about the turtles. I still haven't seen the juggernaunt be of any use whatsoever. I have never seen the juggernaunt 2-shot anything. Single target or AoE. And rarely will the lone juggernaunt ever reach one of the two turtles to combat it. If it does, the juggernaunt should kill it almost instantly to make up for the insane damage the turtles do to everyone else.



Jayce Of Underworld

Agreed, the Juggy is completely useless, even in melee, because of its slowwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwww speed, character with no speed boost can get away from it safely. I suggest something stationary that deals massive damage like the turtle, or another healer of some sort. The Juggy is useless, a living target that exists for the Lux. to score an easy kill.

With the latest update the balance pretty much shifted completely toward the luxon. Before the match is won by several people capping amber mines and running amber back while a ranger/monk/mes stall the turtle, but now with the auto enchant strip/interrupt resistance whenever the team goes out to run the amber the luxons just need to pressure the monk/ranger a bit and all the gates fall apart. Nearly every match now I run out of the portal and get an amber only to see "Outer purple gate has been breached!", "Inner purple gate has been breached", "Green gate is under attack!" before I even get halfway back.

The alternative is that I stay back to help the ranger/monk fight but then what happens is that we can't get a mine efficiently, and the gates eventually breaks anyways. Not to mention the luxons can recap the mine so easily because of the useless kurzick mine NPCs...

Then once they get past inner the monks become useless with double AoE enchant strip...

My point is: QQ from both sides nullifies itself, so FA is basically balanced now.

That Juggernaut is the only thing that prevents my fire ele from wiping out green in under 10 seconds. If you want to swap it out with a lower armor npc with big dam0ge like an assassin that's alright with me.

Ouch, so you want a side that can respawn every 8 seconds right back at the fight to also be able to generate endless waves of npc's? Luxon ganksquads are endless simply because Luxons respawn so far back and it would be impossible to output constant pressure on the endless Kurzick without them. Kurzick npc's already have a decided advantage in terms of antimelee. Mesmers have excellant interrupts that can be rather irritating. Necros have Plague Signet which keeps Rangers on their toes with Dshot. Ritualists have Displacement which can wreck havok with quite a few builds.

Luxons have to build around these or alter a playing style specifically to counter them in addition to adjusting to the meta of the Kurzick side. Kurzick need to Mend Touch that poor cripple (I do hope you didn't die from bleeding, if so I truly do pity you) and perhaps coordinate/block stance to get past the Luxon gank squad.

If you're going after the Luxon monk npc's and your team loses it is partially your own fault that the Luxons won. As for the turtles, just have two rangers focus on one turtle now if one can't handle it. If they still can't 'rupt a 3 second cast they need some practice with the sheep.

But then Anet might as well as to swap it for a giant gate with high armor and loads of health. And I'm sure that your fire ele is the most powerful chara. in GW.

Back on topic, the Juggy attacks slow, moves slow, so its easy to fight it, get hit by a few hits, run away and heal and then come back perfectly fine and not worrying about the Juggy chasing you. The turtles moves slow too, sure, but at least they do ranged damage that actually serves a purpose: breaking down fortified Kurz. positions. While the Juggy either heal other npc/allies in the defense of the Fort nor damages enemies fast enough so it actually becomes a threat. I'm sure if you ever played FA, most of the time what you will see the Juggy doing is treading slowly across the map chasing somone who is already 10000000miles away from it.

The Juggy, for all its worth, is but a meat shield. An easy target for the Luxons to score yet another kill.

For those saying the Luxon mine rangers are worth anything: they are running something like 3 superior runes and have no health. Kurzick mine NPCs are just as useless.

You're gonna have PS, Spirit Bond, Veil, Spotless Soul/Mind, SoA, RoF on recharge, Guardian, hopefully no-one start bringing Peace, Patient hell you'll even end up with some Healing Breezes () thrown all on the ele.
And everyone is pretty much going to repeat that on RECHARGE! (It really doesn't matter that certain things are useless - you just bury them so deep that if things do get removed you still have some things staying around.)
And that's just the enches.
Add in all the WoHs, Dwaynas, ...
Add in the ritu with things like Life, Recoup, spamming Vengeful and Xinrae, with the possible WoW (but if SoD or Guardian is going to be up there is no point in running that because the guy is going to stand in a ward with Sliver - might as well negate other damage).
The worst kind of luck that you can get in this scenario is when you get 8 resto rits running the same bar!

You want to attack with the turtles so that they hit the unprotted ele with that 300. And you need to make that happen fast otherwise the guys on the other side will react!

Have the Kurzick monks bring fast corpse exploits - and you remove the danger of Profane (WoWeariness or WoBlood). Hell, throw PS on yourself and then Consume things.

That's what going to happen when the Kurzicks stop being morons who rely on luck.
And then the game is going to die. Because there is no way in hell that you can win against that - and because the Luxon faction is rewarded based on how many gates you break - nobody will even bother leeching.


The problem is that the Kurzick objectives - outside of keeping Gunthy alive - are completely optional. The last thing you want to do, when you have the ele so heavily protected, is to open the green gate to bring in amber. Because you're going to have smart Luxons rushing in, attacking the NPCs, preventing them from taking the amber.

If the green gate is secure - all everyone else does is get in the way.


I have to say I REALLY like this variation!
It keeps the game fast paced (compared to my suggestion that only handing amber in raises the Vengeance) and forces the Kurzicks into an active objective!

Perhaps I phrased that badly. Let me put it another way.

I think the problem is that the game is decided by the random party selection, and there's little room for tactics.

With the update, as has been mentioned, amber running is becoming much more pointless. Enchantment tactics are prone to difficulty. Self-buffing enchantments will be removed by the incredible range of siege fire, which hurts a lot of the individual builds run by non-monks. The NPCs crumble like dust.

But spamming heals or overwhelming enchantments works. And it's kind of a downer.

Because the luxons hit the wall that is the 8 second recharge, and gameplay breaks down. I can definitely see the point that's been made, both in game and on paper, that monks who can unload their skillbar to defend Gunther completely shift the battle. The "smart" kurzicks who can spam healing all day until they die, then get up again and continue can hold off Gunther's timely death for quite a while change everything. But they have a much greater problem nowadays holding the extended defenses. You can spend 75% of the game in the green gate against that metaphysical wall, luxon PCs running in again and again to die.


So to try to convey this in a much better sense: my problem is that the game goes two ways: 1) the kurzicks have no healing, and thus are demolished, or 2) the kurzicks have healing, and the two sides play the Green Gate Game, in which luxons fight against quickly respawning kurzicks. The result is that the only NPCs who matter much are Gunther and the turtle squads. And everything depends on the randomness of party selection.

So we can try to balance the game accounting for kurzick monks, and any party without them will fail. Or we can balance it accounting for a non healer party, and the kurzick will perform a turtle maneuver and hide in their shell, irony aside.

Or we can try to shift things around to change both a bit.




Hypothetical: What if the kurzick NPCs were bolstered a bit, given a bit more staying power, and the turtles lost their interruption defense to allow more defensive play against them.

And in turn, the Luxons gained the ability to use the warp points in the field to move directly into the base if both gates on that side fall? Or maybe have an NPC that spawns in the center courtyard, a little shrine all their own which becomes a respawn?

It might be a completely foolish idea. But my point is: at the moment, it's hit or miss. Lots of monks, kurzicks do well and don't need to step outside the green gate. None at all, and the luxon forces that are boosted for taking on monking tactics will overwhelm. If we can chip away at both sides, it might find a better middle ground then trying to balance one or the other.

Anet really messed up the balancing. They should either revert the luxon tutrtls abilities to former versions or do the following to the current release:

1. Lower the turtle's damage ability per hit. Cmon, 300-400 damage on squishies is ridiculous! The kurzicks on the frontlines have NO chance of fighting luxon players backed up by a humongous damage dealer. The damage should be lowered to 100-150 instead or its area of effect drastically decreased. It nukes the shyt out of everything over an entire area. I'm happy if they upgrade the HP of the turtle to compensate for this or LOWER the rate of fire (so kurz can heal or get the hell ouf of there!)

2. Turtle respawn INSTANTANEOUS! WTF! There should be a 1 minute cooldown or something allowing kurzicks the chance to rebuild their gates. Now, the luxons know that they can keep pressure 100% of the time, because a turtle dieing has NO PENALTY.

3. The turtle also 'run's pretty fast if you haven't noticed. When both gates are down, it takes less than a minute for the turtle to reach kurzick base from where it has spawned. Needs a fix too.

Let's sum this up:

Turtle ability: Mega damage dealer, enchant remover, run's like a cheetah, and protected by 4 warriors, no death penalty, instataneous spawn. GG indeed anet.

Nominated for the Thread Winner Award.

fixed.

The turtles were perfectly fine before EXCEPT for the fact that they were shooting into walls. With the recent turtle buffs they are overpowered, but only when the kurzicks actually let them attack. The turtle buffs didn't fix the problem, they just swept it under the rug by making sure the kurzicks wipe unless they exploit turtles. So far since the update I have lost 1 of 7 kurzick games so far and I can say the only reason we lost was because there wasn't a second person just like me messing up the turtle on the other side. As it is now the luxons are overpowered if their turtles actually work but underpowered if they don't. If anet were to fix the turtles so they didn't shoot the wall then scale back some of the buffs we would have a much more balanced fight without exploits dragging things down.

I also really don't like stalemates. How about instead making it so the gates can ALWAYS be repaired as long as the npcs are alive, and that the repaired gates have somewhat stronger/more NPC's? That way amber runners don't end up rebuilding gates that die instantly, they will actually have some effect on the match.

+1

I was actually thinking more in the lines of something like:
Each amber is worth a specific number of points.
If you give it to Gunthy - you gain the full amount of points.
If you give it to Raddy or Polly - you gain a lesser amount of points - but you are able to fix both gates on one side.

Still, ANYTHING that will FORCE the guys into running amber (or any other active objective) in order to win - is a huge step forward.
(Of course, then I don't mind in the slightest if the turtles get toned down. Hell, removed even. Less moronic AI at Aspy would make the game much better.)

QFT!

The update hast been out for a week so most people are still trying out new builds. Give it a week or two till people can get used to the new way of playing.

I've found out that Ray of Judgment will get nerfed soon. I can solo capture amber shrines in FA with my monk ;d Or kill a turtle in 24 seconds, solo. Plus heal/protect Gunther.

Also, RoJ smiteballs roll over PvE faster than Sabway. It's like a car with whirling blades around it.

I'm Kurzick and I play FA nearly everyday. It's unbalanced but it's supposed to be unbalanced slightly. I usually lose a round every 4 or 5 matches. About the same win ratio I have on JQ, Play 5 rounds and win 1 or 2.

No, they don't. iirc, there's a delay between the team being annihilated (and I've seen the warriors survive for a long time after the turtle is killed) and the team respawning...

How? Yesterday I've played 5 FA games and lost only one time, since my Necro was the only healer.

Yes, I do use a healing necro. And I can hold one gate for over 5 minutes, even against heavy anti-enchantment team.

Too bad my team often has terribad builds. W/R with traps...

CM is a lie.
/lockthreadpls

Having played both a healing/protting monk and a turtle interrupter/killer and amber runner, I can say that these new turtle buffs are completed overpowered. Not only are the kurzick NPC's much harder to keep alive due to the huge splash damage and enchantment removal, they are also much harder to kill if the luxons bring any sort of support for the turtles. And seeing how omfgwtfpwnage the turtles have become, it's practically a no brainer to bring turtle support... some of you are talking about buffing the turtle AI, so in other words you want them to pretty much be unstoppable uber weapons of massive destruction? Unlike the kurzicks, the luxons npc's are actually extremely useful; so now you want them to do all the work for you?

Even running amber is pretty much useless now since it takes little to no effort for the gates to be broken down compared to the amount of time it takes to get a piece of amber to the gatekeepers.

And what do kurzicks get in spite of all of this? Nothing, they are still the same stupid NPC's that are nothing but trash. FA has been nothing but nerf after nerf for kurzicks, the only real "balance" being the reduced time so that both sides can earn faction more efficiently...

Good job Anet, you just screwed up some of the most important strategies for the kurzicks to stand a chance.

ive won like 30 straight matches on kurzick side

i just kill the turtles, easy as hell

Funny thing is my friends was on 99.7% and we synced into the Luxon side to see if we could get at least 0.1% of the map. We actually killed a bunch of Kurzicks even though we were not quite on the Luxons side. This is the only game that the Luxons have won in the last 10 or so games I have played. I always play for Kurzick except in that case. I cannot believe that the Luxon players are that bad, so I must assume it is not balanced. Well as long as I get Kurzick why should I complain.

No, we just don't want them shooting at things they can't actually hit...

Actually, only the turtle teams are useful. The mine NPCs and especially the command point NPCs (the monks only have one ****ing spell and it isn't even a heal!) suck much worse than the Kurzick NPCs do...

Nowadays I'm happy when there's only 1 leecher in the team. Which is very sad. I haven't had a match without one this week. This is on the Luxon side anyway.

/Report has proven to be a complete farce. The problem is that FA is actually somewhat balanced if there's actually 8 people playing. But I'm willing to bet that the matches with less than 16 people actively playing easily outnumber the ones where everyone is playing.

Before Anet fixes anything related to balance in FA, they should finally grow a pair and start banning these leechers. Or make the dishonorable rank last for days instead of minutes. Something that actually scares people instead of not being able to play for 10 minutes. Nobody is afraid of this. Nobody.

If the leechers would go away, maybe some sort of metagame could evolve in FA and the balance will sort itself out. With incomplete and unfair teams from the start of the match, FA has no chance to ever be a good place for a fair match.

Rangers aren't terrible. Sniping NPCs is fun. But it's more fun in JQ.

What are you talking about? FA is a fantastic place!



The luxons get to leech as much as they like, while we get 2.5k faction for doing nothing! WIN/WIN!!!

/sarcasm

Luminarus, I also play Luxon at Aspenwood. A very lot, and over a long period of time. Much longer ago I was a Kurzick and also played that probably hundreds of times.

IMHO, the fort is balanced. There are, however, major problems for the Luxons.

1. Leechers are harder for Luxons to deal with than Kurzicks.

2. Average Luxon parties tend to lose focus on the primary objective, kill Gunther, or don't seem to even know about it.

On the whole, leeching remains the primary problem at Aspenwood, not balance which is ok I think.

That leeching remains a problem at Fort Aspenwood is ANet's fault. They should fix it.

It's balanced.


If you play on luxon side you'll see over 50% of the luxons just don't get the objective. that's like having half of your team gone! they are useless! Forgot the leechers! They wait around and kill players and not really go for the npc. (this is why the kurzick side is easier to play on, the "not very smart" players tend to kill players and not npc, which is GOOD for the kurzick)

If luxons would go for ONLY npc and healers then they would win a lot more..but they don't. the failure is in the players, not the set up.

I promise you, that if you sync up with someone who knows what to do and brings a build worthy of doing it...and you leech half the game...then go in and do what you're suppose to do (target only npc and healers) once 50% of the time is up..you'll win 70% of the time.


if kurzick ran all or mostly heal builds, luxons would probably never win.

I've almost maxed kurzick title and am halfway to max luxon by playing aspenwood..i have a pretty good idea of what i'm talking about.


*Side note*

N/Me on kurzick side that sac life with max minions on the gatekeepers and gunthar is something to QQ about. It isn't a huge problem yet..but if more people catch on it'll make aspenwood the "old" jade querry, dead.

also, if you look at the timer and capture points, it shows the game is almost over and all places have been captured. This means odds are this isn't a case of leeching, but a case of domination

If this picture was taken when the timer had recently started, it would have validity.

I don't really thing FA is unbalance, luxons just try to charge in most of the time, without hint or preparation of what they might come up against. Kurzick side always seems to be better prepared in my opinion, also I also tend to see a bunch of leechers on the luxon side.

Of all the times I have ever seen a serious A-whooping from the lukon side- It was when they never worry about the turtle or kurzick forces they team up one side and take out gate guards as a whole. While the kurzick are running around the map with amber or protecting another side not knowing that the whole team is coming on one side full force. By the time things are released they are into green and on there way to the goal.

95% of the other matches they split up and do not focus giving Kurzick plenty of time to defend or repair

I am quite sure that picture is valid. The issue with Luxons has correctly been pointed out as:

#1 - leechers
#2 - Team strategy

As far as leeching, I've seen up to 4-5 leechers a game. I'm usually the only one to report, then I get penalized and get a 10 minute time out. It leads to a wtf moment. In fact, I've seen leechers that have been doing it for over a year. GG A-Net. Can you fing believe it?

Clearly our community relations have not been doing crap about this.

Kurz's have an advantage with defense allowing for easy strategies that can be implemented without much coordination. (one person can kill a turtle, one person can bond a gate, etc.). Whereas on the Luxon side, it's pretty hard to bring the green gate down by yourself. XD

Anet has done a horrible job of dealing with leeching in FA. And it's really not that difficult to address. Especially when a lot of the leechers are repeat offenders... Is it really that hard to perma-ban after x number of reports?

I've even seen a few of these perpetual leechers with near max faction titles which is further proof of Anet's apathy.

That's part of the problem.

That and maybe increase the Kurzick respawn time so they aren't back in the battle within ten seconds of being killed...