Update - Tuesday, July 20, 2010

Update - Tuesday, July 20, 2010

Guild Battle Mechanics

For more information on these changes, please see the Developer Updates page.

The Bodyguard no longer uses Oath of Protection.
The Guild Lord now uses Entourage: "For 15 seconds, the Guild Lord is shielded by his guards. He takes no more than 30 damage from each attack or skill and takes 30 less damage each second. This skill can only be used if there are more defending NPCs than attackers."
This skill cannot be interrupted, disabled, or removed.
Aggressiveness calculations now account for Entourage and effects that cause missed attacks. As always, stacking defensive effects on a Guild Lord is viewed as a sign that your opponent is being aggressive. In Guild Battles where neither Guild Lord is killed, the team displaying more aggressiveness wins.

PvP Skills

Wastrel's Demise (PvP): split for PvP; increased recharge to 15 seconds.

Codex Arena Skills

Armor of Sanctity: added to the restricted list for Codex Arena.
Symbols of Inspiration: added to the restricted list for Codex Arena.
Visions of Regret: added to the restricted list for Codex Arena.

Bug Fixes

Fixed a text bug that caused failed Assassin chain attacks to display "miss" instead of "fail."


Developer Update - July 2010 PvP Balances

Just as in June, we are continuing work on Dervish and GvG updates. In the meantime, we've made a handful of changes to address pressing PvP issues. None of the changes in this update affect PvE.

Guild Battle Mechanics

The Bodyguard no longer uses Oath of Protection.
The Guild Lord now uses Entourage: "For 15 seconds, the Guild Lord is shielded by his guards. He takes no more than 30 damage from each attack or skill and takes 30 less damage each second. This skill can only be used if there are more defending NPCs than attackers."
This skill cannot be interrupted, disabled, or removed.
Aggressiveness calculations now account for Entourage and effects that cause missed attacks. As always, stacking defensive effects on a Guild Lord is viewed as a sign that your opponent is being aggressive. In Guild Battles where neither Guild Lord is killed, the team displaying more aggressiveness wins.

Last month, we introduced some changes to GvG that were designed to reduce player motivation to bring teams specifically designed to stall out GvG matches. This month, we're refining those changes.

We've moved the damage-limiting effects from the Bodyguard (who still heals) to the Guild Lord himself. This ensures that the Guild Lord is the most important NPC, and it discourages players from using a gimmick to kill the Bodyguard and then playing defensively for the rest of the match. Because Entourage can only be used when there are more defensive NPCs around the Guild Lord than attacking players, teams facing a degenerate defensive build have the option of rushing the enemy Guild Lord, thus preventing the skill from being used.

The Guild Lord starts with five defensive NPCs around him: the Bodyguard, two Knights and two Archers. If all five of them are still alive, Entourage can be prevented by five attackers. Pets, spirits, and minions do not count. Only players and henchmen count as attackers and only while they are near enough to the Guild Lord for combat (in casting range or close to it). Each lord room NPC killed reduces the number of attackers required to prevent Entourage from being used.

In the event that a team does find a way to stall, we've made some additional adjustments to how we judge "aggressiveness," which determines the winner if neither Guild Lord is killed before 28 minutes have passed. As before, the fundamental measure we use is damage dealt to the Guild Lord, but we also factor in defensive buffs placed on the Guild Lord. A team that brings enough offense to force their opponents to apply defensive buffs to the Guild Lord is also viewed as aggressive. (In a sense, the damage they attempted to deal counts in their favor even if it is prevented; it is the attempt to deal damage that indicates aggressiveness.) Because Entourage works in synergy with other defensive buffs, a much greater aggressiveness bonus is given when an opponent combines defensive buffs with Entourage. We've also added a modest aggressiveness bonus for missed attacks against a Guild Lord because stacking blindness and hexes that cause misses is another way to stall a battle while preventing damage.

None of these adjustments represent a change in the philosophy behind giving the victory to the more aggressive team, but they should increase the accuracy in determining which team was more aggressive. Teams focusing on defeating their opponent directly should not be significantly affected.

PvP Skills

Wastrel's Demise (PvP): split for PvP; increased recharge to 15 seconds.

With all of the offensive boosts to Mesmers in the last major update, players have been experimenting with ways to take advantage of these changes in GvG. A few guilds have been running a 6 Mesmer spike team that's proven to be out of line. We like spike teams to have some level of viability in GvG, but they should be vulnerable to being countered through skillful play. While the very top teams have had success countering it, this build has been more effective than the spike builds we currently see as balanced (such as those that feature Elementalist/Paragons).

With a 1/4 second cast time, Wastrel's Demise is a key follow-up spike skill. We've increased its recharge to bring it in line with other key spike skills. We're looking to control the frequency of spikes in order to give the opposing team a window of opportunity to counter these tactics.

Mesmer spike teams have only been popularized in recent weeks. Typically, this means that further improvements will be discovered over time. We will keep an eye on them and make further adjustments if necessary.

Codex Arena Skills

Armor of Sanctity: added to the restricted list for Codex Arena.
Visions of Regret: added to the restricted list for Codex Arena.

Because of the rotating lists of available skills in Codex Arena, teams do not always have access to a level of offense or utility necessary to counter the most powerful defensive skills in Guild Wars. For skills that are found to be a problem specifically in Codex Arena, we simply remove them from the rotation. Armor of Sanctity and Visions of Regret were identified as having too strong a potential to bog down Codex Arena matches. They will no longer appear in the Codex.

Symbols of Inspiration: added to the restricted list for Codex Arena.

Symbols of Inspiration copies an Elite skill from an opponent. Due to special Codex Arena rules, however, if the stolen Elite does not match the caster's primary profession, the copied skill is disabled. To avoid confusion for players, we've also added this skill to the restricted list. It will no longer appear in the Codex.

Or instead of all this nonsense, put a real end match mechanic, OR put in an aggressiveness monitor.

meh. tbh i dont kno why they keep trying to bring gvg back to what it used to be. there tbh jsut isnt simpley the fan base to truely sustain gvg for awhile.
but i guess its some nice work on codex.... i guess.

and why do i feel pve is kind of being treated like the ugly kid u shove into a dark corner and make sure it never ever comes out?

sorry for being negative but.. oh well.

I lost a 22 win streak in RA for this? ZzZ

So... they are still working on the dervish...

I guess that means we can expect a para update in November?

I miss the days when we had skill updates every month. Now we have to contend with skill updates every other month... oh wait...

The Live team is just far too small to pump out the updates like they used to. I hope this is all not in vein: GW2 better be top-MMO for 5 years with all this neglect for their current product.

Although it seems Anet is between a rock and a hard place on this one, sacrificing one side of the story for the sake of the other (possibly better?) half. At least we got an update on their progress though.

If there is a skill that can single-handedly pose a major issue for other players if they don't have a specific counter to it, like the ability to strip it (mostly since there are 4 different kinds of effects which each require a different type of skill to strip it, and you can't have them all anyway), then I think that is a pretty serious issue with the power of the skill itself.
And there are a fare number of skills like that right now...

They refuse to admit that as long as there is a "hard end" mechanic to GvG, teams will design builds and specifically play for this "hard end."

These people deliberately drag out a match as long as possible, sucking out all of the fun and wasting everyone's time, even their own, for an abstract win in a video game. What makes you think they wouldn't do the same until the other team just resigns?

Because that's exactly what it is.

Believe or not, pve isn't the only format in this game. Please allow Anet to give some attention to those neglected formats. GvG hasn't been taken seriously by Anet since the removal of VoD (In August 2008 i.e. almost 2 years ago) and they are now finally giving it the attention it deserves.

Can't you people wait a few months for your pve update? The gvgers have been waiting 2 years for this.

ON TOPIC: Great job Anet! Keep it up.

This update needs a concise description. I got confused after the words "Guild Battle Mechanics".

well u see everyone complaining that pvp is dead, so where does that put teh GW community? In PvE.
So im just saying putting attention now after 2 yrs of neglect to a system is like "Hey honey i finally got enough money to pay that mortage that we couldnt pay 10 yrs ago so we had to leave our house".
so all im saying is if the community is pve atm they should focus on pve not pvp.

To my knowledge, considering many resources were going towards WiK previously, you can only guess what's next on the priority list. They DID say updates will take 2 months or so however, back on their journal a long time ago. So if only recently did the balancing start for Dervish, I would not hold my breath for another two months.

lol at people crying about there not being enough pve attention. First off there needs to be more Guild Wars attention. Dissect it further between PvP and PvE and you will see pvp gets no attention at all in comparison to pve. They made the huge mistake this past fall removing TA and Hero Battles because they were too lazy to fix the formats (add ladder to TA and fix overpowered builds in hero battles + AI fixes) and instead removed them to add a format (Codex) which nobody plays.

So don't say they are shoving pve into a dark corner because if you are going to make that analogy they have thrown pvp out the window.

The biggest reason pvp became dead was because they drained all their money into big championships with huge rewards and then ended up with the monthly automated tournament system. With only reward points and a cape trim to play for all the good players quit and went on to play other games they had incentive to play (real world prizes). Hopefully A-Net will learn from their mistakes and conserve their money a bit and not go all out on a huge championship or 2.

Less people playing one format compared to another is not a good enough reason to give it less attention. It's a matter of which format needs it more urgently. GvG has had no real attention for 2 years, so the urgency has built up to a level that it is now Anet's main priority.

PvE on the other hand, has been given plenty of attention over the past 2 years and subsequently, the level of urgency is much smaller.

HB and TA are a special case and they have now become a classic example of Anet failing as both formats needed attention urgently, but Anet neglected them and deleted them both. I personally wouldn't want that to happen to GvG (what happened to HB and TA) and I assume that Anet shares a similar opinion.

Actually , there was big content with War in kryta in pve , so players should not complain.

However , i don't really see at all the point of this update. Who did decide to change those few skills for Codex arena seriously.... Noone plays it , except 10 people on quest day , so how can they know those skills are that annoying in that format( and even , those skills aren't the most annoying generally ).
Aswell about Wastrels demise , i'm not sure it was THE skill to nerf..

An other point is that many of the recent pvp updates concern only GvG , and since not many people do play it ( if you compare to HA or RA , which didn't get ANY single update about maps or objectives for years), it would be nice to get a little care on other formats , and not saying after 2 years : alright we decided to delete it after very hard tries.

So , to sum up my opinion , this update is useless and has no sense.

from what I can tell, ANet is trying to give attention to GvG now (even though it's too late for a lot of people) to prevent the people who have continued to play despite all the shit in the past few years from quitting. one of the biggest goals they've mentioned for gw2 is making the organized PvP more observer-friendly, and all of that would be pointless if they aren't able to build up a competitive community for gw2. my guess is that they want to bring over as many people from gw1 as possible to play in this new game.

No it's not but I agree with the rest of your post, PvP in all of it's forms needs some attention as well (and I say that as a pure PvE player).

Honestly for a game that hasn't have any kind of bought content for years I find that the amount of updates we get pretty fair. This game isn't dead but it's definitely aging, don't get me wrong I wouldn't mind an update every week but lets face it that is just not realistic.

Heehee Yea I know. That's just an opinion coming from a pvper
My apologies if I offended anyone.

REGARDING WASTREL'S DEMISE: replace with overload zzz just as powerful zzz

I really wish they'd tell us exactly how aggressiveness works each time they change the flaming thing.

Having to figure out whether it's better to let 1 war hit the lord, or bother putting guardian on the lord is gonna be annoying before the community figures out how this works.

Does the guild Lord count as a defending NPC? Can you solo him?

So worth the update...owait.

He is not a defending NPC. Only the mentioned bodyguard, archers, and knights count as defending NPCs.

I'm personally kinda tired of the attention that GvG gets. I'm all for keeping PvP viable and interesting, but GvG is only important to a small percentage of players compared to the larger community.
Half of the reason they are having to work on a paragon update at all was because of the massive nerfing of skills they did for GvG balancing.
Until they finally got around to separating PvP and PvE, how many times did we see a nice PvE build ground into dust because it was a part of some GvG gimmick build?

I'm not sure these changes were worth a developer's update; but I don't care if they made this the update for the week (we're so spoiled now, getting weekly updates).

While impatient for upcoming derv and para changes, I appreciate the breakneck pace they set for WiK and the two yearly events held in the last weeks.

Moan moan moan, be greatful for what you've got!

Free game equal to years of free gaming, recent WiK storyline, 2 recent festive events and also the team is quite small atm with promised major updates to certain classes in due course. Yet people demand more...RIGHT NOW - DO NOT TAKE SO LONG ANET!

Proof yet again that the internet is filled with impatient spoilt kids.

Really? We really have people in here claiming that PvE is not getting any love and they should stop paying attention to PvP? Where the hell have you guys been; did you sleep through the past few months of WiK updates?

If not GvG, what is PvP balance supposed to center around then? RA? AB?

That's the problem... look how those 2 formats are after never getting any update : AB is just empty ( even if there are some people, you need wait 20 restarts to go in ) , and too many problems in RA that have been reported on other threads already.What can we expect for those formats , a delete like they did with HB and TA ?

Actually , the last update we had in Heroes Ascent ( not about skills/builds) is the add of NPC's after a strange contest , and the previous one was about 2 years and half ago....

Test Krewe team has apparently many people who still do GvG , thus it could maybe explain the "only gvg updates " ..

GvG gets all the attention because it's a better format.

remember that new ha map they announced back in that "pvp love" announcement that also involved introducing codex? yea, what happened to that ha map?

i also find it funny that you seem to intentionally leave out ha, and skip right to the "shitter" formats. although its funny because i would consider fa/jq/codex the true "shitter" formats, yet these formats seem to receive more updates than ra/ab.


a bit unfair, since anet specifically was biased in choosing gvg players in the formation of the test krewe (if my sources are correct).

Five years of GvG and they still can't make GvG work!

In case you haven't noticed, HA is also a shitter format.
Codex is the only format that has ever been updated in recently. FA/JQ/AB have been untouched for a very long time.


Who can possibly be better than good gvg players?

I don't understand the bitching about pvp getting some attention. To me pvp does not get enough, not even close to what pve gets. Play the whole game and don't limit yourself to just one format. Also please get over yourself if you think they should only focus on the one format that you play.

Explain why HA is shitter than GvG ??I can't consider it is because of the builds played , since every format ( including GvG) has some meta builds that everyone plays, and many people will agree on the point they would rather fight BBways in HA than waiting 40mn for an opponent which will just make you wait for 25mn more.

For the codex part , yes they touch a bit.. but are these " updates " really useful.. . They look like guy was syncing in codex and lost to people using those skills , thus nerf.
There are things much better than restricting 2 skills every 3 months that could have been done for months ( like in HB/TA ) and i suspect this arena to be deleted in the near future ..

Maybe they'll bring back Hero Arena
It may have been terribly unbalanced, but you have to see the awesomeness of being able to pick out your favorite heroes and build them up and customize them just like your main character, using them in PvP to be able to easily set up an elaborate team build, and having a far more dynamic match than normal by basically controlling four characters at once.
It was also the closest thing we will ever get to 1v1.

Disappointment isn't strong enough to describe my feelings on them actually deciding to remove it entirely.
Something more like shame, maybe. To be associating with a game run by such incomprehensible idiots...

You are an idiot.

The amount of attention given to PvE since pretty much about 2008 has been unproportional compared to PvP.
Give it a rest already and accept the fact that there are people playing PvP and ANET should not devote 100% of their resources to PvE just because that's what you play and you think the world revolves around you and because you deem GvG 'dead'.

PvP has had it's balance issues neglected, a broken tiebreaker mechanic introduced and still not fixed, and arenas removed from it, while you guys were running around Kryta killing white mantles with the new content.

The whining and bitching from pve'rs every time a pvp-related update is released is ridiculous.

That's because PvE-ers are idiots.

I'm all for GvG updates, its one of the strong points of PvP in this game. I am just surprised that codex received attention (since its usually a wasteland in terms of participation)

Only the vocal ones.