Dwayna Vs. Grenth? Uneven.

Yellow snow is terrible. There's no way to remove cripple with yellow snow because people move in groups of two or more and they will re-apply the condition. This just causes you to lose time and give them room to catch up to you and your present. Also, the majority of the time it's covered by dazed from hidden rock, making the 3/4 cast easily interrupt-able...and almost never used.

It seems if you are grenth, and are adjoined by a dwayna foe your present doesn't get anywhere. Your teammates have to try and use preemptive daze in the hopes that a snare ends on you and you can burst with "Let's Get 'Em!".

This has all come to light since my guild has started doing snowball AT's. And it's almost pathetic how large a roll this plays in a match. And it always leads to an overly difficult win, or a hard, frustrating loss.

My opinion? Both sides should have the same bar, end of story. Pick one, it doesn't matter.

I agree with this. Our guild has been doing snowball ats since they started the the dwayna side is just so much better. If two good teams are against each other the dwayna side wins almost everytime becouse the avalanche is just so much better.

Coupled with the extremely slow present walking and oppourtunity for ganking,yeah. Just give everyone yellow snow in my opinion,cripple just slows it down unneccessarily.

It follows that if they are unable to balance the few skills used here how the heck do they think they can balance the main game skills.

Unless they were never intended to be balanced which is a possibility.

the inbalance used to be a lot worse! now it only gives a few presents advantage instead of the whole match.

As most decent players last year were complaining all the time, it still RED ENGINE GORED ENGINE GORED ENGINE GORED ENGINE GOing sucks and decides 95% of the matches between teams that don't suck.

They wasted valuable time trying to balance it by changing the profession skills while they could just give both teams either and have saved so much time which could've then been spent on removing the ridiculous thing called fake presents.

Giving both sides Avalanche would leave everyone with a Cripple that nobody could remove. Wouldn't you just love to play games where over half of each team is stuck in one spot for over two minutes?

Giving both sides Yellow Snow would make Elementalists rather OP, carrying the only snare in the game. Assassins would probably start seeing play as well, since there would be an obnoxious amount of degen floating about at all times.

In both formats, against teams of even skill, the winner will be whoever gets more presents spawned on their side. zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz

Giving both sides the same bar is not a solution, or rather, it's a solution for people who don't know a damn thing about Snowball.

Also, the imbalance used to be a lot worse than it is now, and whether you get Dwayna or Grenth is only a determining factor against teams of similar skill. Get better at the game, and maybe it won't bother you all so much.

there is some sort of power loss between the 2 sides?

lets pretend dwayna skillbar is like SF and NERF the shit out of it too.

Anet did not have enough time to change the functionality of skills. They only had enough time to tweak the numbers. On the Test Krewe we tested a few different versions of yellow snow and avalanche. And in the end it was decided (IE no complaints from anyone) that the current version for 4v4 play was pretty balanced. We couldn't test for 8v8 play as the TK had not been up for 14 days,and that limitation could not be removed. That being said, I've also played in AT's and beat good teams as grenth, as have other people I know. Yes it is highly frustrating but not completely impossible.

to be brutally honest
it doesn't matter
my team won 10 in a row and our side alternated each time
forget the skills...its the players who decide the match
don't get mad just cuz u can't wiki build in snowball arena like u do in RA

Nobody cares about random 4v4 snowball.
Single elims are retarded and 95% about luck since there's basically a core of decent snowball guilds that consistently reach SE and it's always the grenth team that loses.

4v4 is balanced, 8v8 is not. This thread is about 8v8

same concept for both
but if u want me to i'll change my statement to:
"don't get mad just cuz u can't wiki build like u do in GvG"

This. Eles are whats supposed to slow people down. not a skill that only one team has. I think yellow snow should be changed to a touch skill that causes knockdown...be a little more balanced.

i agree they should have the same bars.

Dwayna - run + snare.
Grenth - Kill/degen.

l2p different tactics.

Not everyone goes 3 Wars, 4 Eles, 1 Necro (even though we do lol). you'll find that eles on Dwayna will rather use Avalanche to slow (longer than icicles) and use icicles to spike.

Grenth eles and necro need to be smart. simple. your team spreads disease, you pressure dwayna off presents by killing. And if you're confident, run a ranger.

In terms of splitting, Dwayna will obviously have the advantage at the start, but again, Grenth can kill quicker through disease and if you're split across the map, that will cause problems.

It's as ballanced as it can get in 8v8 and this is turning into a QQ thread. We've won and been destroyed as/by Grenth. You just need to know how to play.

It's still not balanced in 8v8. The cripple duration on Avalanche is still too long, especially for the area of effect. Either Avalanche should have a 3-4 second duration nearby, or it should have a 5-6 second duration adjacent.

The issue is that a Dwayna team can do everything a Grenth team can do with DPS, only better. Disease is symmetrical, and a Dwayna team is much better at exploiting positioning fails by locking down targets for Flurry or wells.

If you make Avalanche a very tactical skill that is only effective when it snares multiple people and doesn't last for all that long, you can achieve balance.

Why is everyone trolling me saying I don't know how to change tactics or that I need to pvx a snowball bar? It doesn't make you look cooler, it makes you look like you can create irrelevant posts.

Reddog, maybe instead of trolling you can put in good input. Maybe if you read the OP you would realize that involves 8v8 play. In 4v4 arena you likely only face one dwayna foe per side, making yellow snow useful. The pvx comment has no importance, and just shows immaturity. Actually, it really makes me wish you actually participated in 8v8 ATs.

Fate Crusher, your point makes sense. And it shows what a balanced 8v8 battle should be. However, there is no benefit, or change when using a new tactic for grenth. Yellow snow can't remove 2-3 cripples, the disease is symmetrical as martin said, and your characters DPS is the same. Having to know how to play? Has it ever occurred to you that the other team knows how to play too? My guild wins all the time as grenth, but I will say the only reason we beat Vent Rage, and Smooth writing ball point pen was because of being dwayna. Dwayna has the possibility to just shut down grenth if need be. Dwayna can stop anyone from scoring for quite a long time.

Rekliss, again irrelevant. Dwayna skillbars don't ridiculously exploit the game and fluctuate in game economy.

Shane Hawke. Yes, eles (just like in the real game) would have a snare. But it's a two second cast, it's foreseen and it's able to be countered. Presents don't spawn on teams sides, haha. They spawn directly in the middle either under the frozen waterfall or up on the hill...Giving each team the same bar is actually a pretty astute solution, for people that seem to have actually played a snowball AT. If you read my statement to Fate Crusher you will see that we beat some moderately good teams as dwayna. Do you think my guild is moderately good at guildwars? haha, no. So your argument about this only effecting evenly matched teams doesn't make sense to me.

So I would like to invite everyone to take a new approach to commenting. Instead of spouting how good you are, or how bad everyone else is, just don't comment.

For those of you, like Fate, who don't seem to understand the objective of the 8v8 (or 4v4) Snowball let me re-explain.

There are 2 main objectives, Scoring points, and not letting the other team score points. Besides faction, there is little benefit to trying to kill your opponents, as they instant rez anyway.

With that in mind the Grenth tactic of degen and kill does not coincide with the objective at hand. Snowball is essentially a 2 way relic run, where both teams can grab the relic. Anyone who has played HA in the past can see the similarities - We have designated runners, designated snarers, and designated speed buffers.

The difference between the 2 formats comes from the advantages of killing the other team in HA. Killing the other team would mean they have DP (weaking them overall) and non instant resurection. Neither of which are factors seen in snowball.

Teams who have Dwayna throw off this balance. As suddenly, everybody is able to snare, effectively making them able to stop multiple runners at one time.

Merely haveing the ability to cause degen does not garuntee instant enemy death, skills such as Hidden rock, Snow down the shirt, ice breaker, side step, mmm snowcone, mega snowball (pretty much every skill on the bar) can hinder Grenth side incapable of killing Dwayna team in a timely fashion.

In all honestly, the disease doesn't do too much to begin with, between Holidy Blues and flurry, killing enemy teams (especially when balled up) is a joke. Dwayna is just as capeable of killing Grenth as Grenth is of killing Dwayna.

I can see the point Fate is trying to make about the 2 seperate playstyles, but with the objectives as is, his logic doesn't apply. Maybe if it were a kill- the-other-team objective the odds would be more even. Where Dwayna would play more stratigic, using their snares to prevent damage - while Grenth on the other hand would try to spread as much degen and damage as possible.

IMO, 4v4 and 8v8 skill sets should be slightly different; I propose a change such as

In 8v8 Monks carry "Cripple Remover" or something to that effect, something like 1/4 sec cast.. 5 sec recharge, removes cripple off target ally. As it is now Ice breaker is nearly useless. Coordinated teams never have the same person KD and pick up so the skill is pointless.

Also in 8v8, avalanche becomes a touch skill and is the designated skill for both Grenth and Dwayna - no yellow snow. With it being a touch skill, eles will be the only class carrying a ranged snare. Wth a low recharge cripple remover on the monk, a monk ele and warrior split team can effectively run presents. While forcing the other team to be more skillfull with their use of avalanche.

Painfully not true. It depends on where you kill them. If you're killing things on their side of the map, you are correct. If you are killing things on the side away from spawn, or close to your avatar, then killing an opponent yields a large time advantage because they have to walk back out to the fight after they respawn.