City Winner History?

[tefnaht]

Half our guild is playing Destro now and it’s amazingly laughable how overtuned Marauders are and synergy w Choppas.

I think mara needs leap with 0cd and remove gift condition from half abilities, lack in mobility and problems with rotations don't gives them the opportunity to shine BTW sw needs some damage nerfs - they still can kill afk people in low gear. Need more desto pop and less order, each order player must be as a sacred unicorn, hidden somewhere on server and any of his activity will be tracked only in sor

[cleanharry030]

Hello,

I guess this was mentioned before (58 pages and counting ....), but here are my 2cents.

Personally i am not a big fan of city sieges but they offer a unique possibility for an actual good fight, which we, as a guild warband, rarely get in the lakes. The issue is really time for us. Some days we have 18 online because the siege happens during EU prime time, other days we are 10 or less. Either way we rely on /5 recruitment and there is our biggest problem. Our experience picking up players ranges from exceptional to "i don't know what guard range, pre hotting or assisting means". Most of the time it's impossible to que within the first 5 minutes (waiting for guild members to arrive home etc.). Mostly i prefer waiting for as many members as possible and then try to fill the warband. And again results can vary drastically from siege to siege.

I don't think Devs can do anything about this. Usually you have 40 minutes to prepare (announce in Discord and hope enough members log) and eventually pick up players from /5. We are not keeping track of our win rate. Personally i see city sieges as a necessary mean to aquire gear which i will use in the content i actually like to play: roaming with guild warband in the lakes.

The city siege it self can be fun or complete boredom. That is also the reason i don't keep track of how many cities i have won or not. Even when we fight other organised warbands you have to keep in mind that there are rarely the same people in it, /5 recruitment has a heavy impact on those warbands, same for us.

If there was something i would be happy about to see it would be that people who solo que would actually join Discord if a link is offered. But yes, everyone has to play and enjoy the content as they wish, no class balance or class overhaul will change the mentality of players.

[Vandoles]

wanna know why when the order will buffed, no significant changes not happen? I'm telling you, because almost all competent organized wbs will run over to the order side, and you get exactly the same situation only turned on 180 °.

Plenty of us here are highlighting that the issue is orders meta classes are less attractive to play, not weaker. If you buff 2h bruiser builds for tanks you wouldn't actually buff order, since they'd be worse than snb tanks. Just more fun, so you'd see more tanks and massively more tanks in pugs. If you buff melee wp, hybrid am, you'd likely NERF order because you'd see inferior melee WPS/hybrid ams everywhere, but you'd see more healers and especially more healers in pugs (yesterday in T3 order had precisely 5 healers across 3 full wbs lol)

Revert SW back to live, you'll see skirmisher SWs roaming around, they're not better, but they'll be sort of viable in pugs so you won't see them forced to queue without even going into LFG since they're not an actual drag.

Mirror WH to WE or finally do that buff to dragon gun that was teased on live, or make them proper suicide bombers and it won't be a buff either - lots of WL rerollers will go back, WH will still be inferior, it just won't be completely not viable.

I think I'm sort of right in saying most reasonable order players would be totally happy if several roles aren't fully denied from grouping and tanks/Healers were just made more stupid but fun to play.

But this is a moderate opinion, it's not screaming or crying so devs won't notice and people would also rather cry or scream. So it'll go as unnoticed as every other moderate opinion in the world

[dether]

Order lack the synergy of destro on their classes.

About tanks maybe cause their 2h specs are better on destro side people dont think it twice to roll once and just respec between 2h and 1h+shield

If they even decide to buff any class that Vandoles mentioned on order the faction will never be worse if people roll under performing classes now imagine how it will be after a few buffs.

City is not the main focus the the majority of the order anyway they dont care for it they need their medals but during that process some destro are beating the **** out of them but in the lakes and open rvr they never had issues with those destro cause they simple avoid them.

Balance is not easy a lot of things have to be considered like does X perform much better than Y class with less or even 1/3 of the effort?
For example a mara that is a tanky class , can stay inside balls and fight without been threatened , never focused as a priority class to kill spamming aoe with decent dmg ( dmg part can get a nerf) wont get high numbers??

People that post screenshots of stomps on city with order having 0 to 1 kills are pointless if you need to check on balance you need those few close fights and figure out why that side has the upperhand.

Also anyone can play whatever he likes , however ever he likes introduce another way for royal medals and you may see 90% of order not even bothering at all to queue city but thats not the solution.

I imagine if ranked scenarios had the best gear locked behind them we would have the same topics again and again , but this time with people who focus on rvr complaining that they have to do something that they dont like and that their class is useless in 6v6 some classes shine on rvr , some on solo, other on proper 6v6 you will never balance anything 100% no game ever done that unless you have 100% mirrors or 1 tank 1 dps and 1 healer class for people to pick

[Foofmonger]

Play how you want, but city sieges are meant to be competitive. Don't come on the forums complaining when you all know why you lose city's. I don't care how you play. City's are supposed to be difficult, and if you "play how you want" you lose. without coordination and competence when you're up against 12/24 other people you'll get stomped. It happens both ways.

I’ve played in nothing but competent/top WBs LBL, NGE (once) and KoO alliance WBs in cities on this server. It’s a myth and crutch argument for dedicated destro players that order isn’t organized. We do a perfect 2/2/2, similar AoE meatball setup if choose to and still can be a 50/50 win/loss. However Order start handicapped and have to play, coordinate and try harder to eek out a win unless it’s against a complete PUG.

Half our guild is playing Destro now and it’s amazingly laughable how overtuned Marauders are and synergy w Choppas.

Do you not see why most WBs are bringing 3-4 marauders now? It’s not a fluke or organization thing when they used to bring Choppas instead before the marauder damage buff.

SW get a buff and immediately get damage tuned down. Marauders get a overtuned buff and are allowed to keep it. White Lions as the counterpart will never beat Marauder in AoE damage due to the tuning. Heck Slayers and other BWs can’t keep up.

Destro mirror counterpart just have better abilities/tactics for a tight 24v24 arena. Marauder is just overtuned like MSH. If Mara and mSH did the same melee range damage as WL/SH, you’ll only see 1 of each in a WB on Destro side.

Doesn’t take much to look at damage logs internally and data rather than have players post excel spreadsheets or screenshots on various things.

I see Gravord has been forming Order WBs for cities and losing them for most part and players are enjoying that as it’s proving the point. How long before they go back to Destro and pretend it didn’t happen?

I pulled up the last 5 24 v 24 organized cities score screenshot and pretty much just see marauders flooded at or near the top even if we win or lose. Their damage wasn’t meant to surpass every class with all the utility they already have. WL aren’t even close and near the bottom.

Marauders are supposed to be utility DPS, not glass cannon DPS with all the utility too. Few of top TUP marauders have mentioned as well on the overtuning along with alliance mates playing there. I don't see how this can pass for so long.

- 200 HP per second proc from monstro 25% chance on hit
- Ignore all incoming armor pen (Comparable to morale level of abilities like Misdirection in terms of value or Distracting Bellow) but with 100% uptime vs Morale level uptime
- Aoe knockdown, Aoe interrupt, Ap drain, Morale blocker, Weaponskill + initiave debuff aoe
- Mobility of charge, snare breaker, single target pull
- Damage and tactics able to stay top damage dealer in most instances while being such a meta class with no downside to stacking the class

Yes, Destro is organized in stacking one broken class at the moment that has utility and top dmg. Data has been posted, shared and will not post private messages from marauders that know it's overtuned. If they want to leave things as is, so be it, it's their game and vision. Nothing else can be said and done from this end.

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Marauders ARE overtuned. (RR83 Marauder Player here if you don't know who I am, I know you do Spell).

I'll say it, publicly. No reason to be cryptic here and keep this to PMs on discord or anything of that sort. Happy to have this discussion.

So, a couple things I want to dive into:

Marauders are supposed to be utility DPS, not glass cannon DPS with all the utility too.

I disagree with your first statement here, but agree with your second. Marauders are supposed to be a DPS class with 3 distinct play styles that match to their distinct 3 stances. 1. AoE damage and AoE utility, 2. Single Target DPS (almost no utility) 3. Single Target Debuffing. Now just because their utility/dps is currently overtuned doesn't mean they should be a "utility class with low DPS". That being said, they also shouldn't be "a you have everything and do it the best class". So let's dig into some of your points.

- 200 HP per second proc from monstro 25% chance on hit
- Ignore all incoming armor pen (Comparable to morale level of abilities like Misdirection in terms of value or Distracting Bellow) but with 100% uptime vs Morale level uptime

The HP per second is nice, but the ignoring all armor pen is probably the strongest thing the Marauder has. We spoke of it earlier in this thread, and it's just not a balanced ability/proc and in my opinion it's basically impossible to balance this class as a "DPS" class with this proc available.

Suggestions:

1. Rework entirely, removing huge survivability boost and give some other functionality.
2. Just nerf the values, 75% pen, 50% pen, less HPs on the hot, etc..

- Aoe knockdown, Aoe interrupt, Ap drain, Morale blocker, Weaponskill + initiave debuff aoe
- Mobility of charge, snare breaker, single target pull
- Damage and tactics able to stay top damage dealer in most instances while being such a meta class with no downside to stacking the class

Mobility of charge, snare breaker, single target pull

Charge/Snarebreaker is MDPS given (outside of the assassins), and the pull is the good old WL/Mara mirror. Don't think anything has to change here, it's good mobility but WL's have better (and if you nerf the Mara's survivability advantage, they'd be more comparable to WL's in the first place).

- Aoe knockdown, Aoe interrupt, Ap drain, Morale blocker, Weaponskill + initiave debuff aoe

Couple things here (since you listed a bunch).

1. The Morale Blocker is broken and doesn't work (still) so, a non-factor, really. Theoretically could be an issue. If it worked.
2. AoE KD is an issue. It wasn't so bad with a lower AoE cap, but its so easy for Destro to AoE KD and it's extremely hard for Order.
Suggestion 1: Mirror AoE KD to an Order melee class.
Suggestion 2: Change Mara AoE KD into a single target KD.

3. AoE interrupt "is an issue".
Suggestion 1: Mirror AoE Interrupt functionality to WL (give to them core, increase the range, remove the pet interrupt)
Suggestion 2: Reduce range of AoE interrupt down to 30ft.
Suggestion 3: Increase the CD of AoE interrupt from 10 seconds to 15 or 20 seconds.

4. AP drain is basically a non-issue. The main reasons are, 1. It's in the debuff (Savagery path) that nobody specs for city, as you can't get AoE ability/damage/your damage boosting tactics/abilities out of brut, and then go grab the AP drain tactic from a 3rd tree. It's also been nerfed since live and drains over time (40 over 3 seconds) and doesn't stack with itself, so it's really not a huge deal. The spec that runs the AP debuff tends to do "bad damage" as intended (you can't have everything with no drawbacks).

5. Weaponskill/Ini debuff is good but I don't think is an issue. It's a nice bit of utility.
Suggestion: If anything, I think making the WL interrupt core and giving them a mirror of this makes some good sense, as this is the ability that WLs have to spec their interrupt in place for (whereas the Mara gets it at core).

TLDR/Summary/Foof's Opinions:

I agree that Marauder's are overtuned, although I don't think the class needs to be gutted to be balanced. If I were able to propose my own suggestions (as someone who has played this class extensively on live and plays it here):

1. The biggest issue is the Monstro proc. This has to go or be nerfed. I'd rather see it go and something "non-tanky" put in it's place. The surivivability advantage the Mara has is something none of the other MDPS classes can replicate. That's going to cause permanent balance issue as it already has. I hated the Monstro proc in 2009 when it came out, and I hate it to this day.

2. Marauder AoE damage is overtuned. The Marauder did need some damage increases from where it was prior, but frankly, it needed them on it's ST abilities and not it's AoE abilities. I'd revert all PSM scaling increases for all Marauder AoE abilities (wrecking ball, demolition, AoE KD, aoe WS/ini debuff). The AoE interrupt scaling didn't get increased (they said it did but it's broken) so that one is fine for damage.

3. AoE interrupts need parity between realms. Either make the WL better, or the Mara worse. Either way, AoE interrupts, on this server, with a huge AoE cap, are probably the most important things you can bring to the city and the #1 reason that Mara's are being stacked. Honestly they should probably be mirrored and then both nerfed in cooldown. 10 second cooldown on interrupt is excessive and can be as low as 5 with CDR, it should be a 15-20 second cooldown for both Mara/WL (and the WL one should get better range).

4. Either Mirror the AOE KD to order, and/or nerf the AoE KD cd. Right now it's 20 seconds, it should probably be a 30 second cooldown at the least. Other option: Remove and make ST.

Now we can get a little crazier with re-working the class if needed, but I think those 4 changes would basically be what's needed to bring the Mara back down to a realistic level of balance. Effectively reducing their survivability (it's too high for a DPS class), their AoE damage (its too high for a DPS class with this level of utility) and reducing their AoE utility. If we want to go full on re-work level of crazy here, we can get into that, but I don't think its necessary for this particular issue. I'd love to see a re-work, but probably not gonna happen.

The last point I'd like to make here is thus: While I think Marauder's "are" an issue, I'm fairly certain that there are still other macro-level balance issues that are impacting city win rate that aren't necessarily "class" focused, meaning things like CDR parity and such, to some of Telioh's points earlier in this thread. The reality is, besides AoE KD/Monstro Proc/AoE interrupt, the WL and Marauder classes are very similar in city application and I believe you'd see much more viability in stacking WLs once Monstro proc is tuned down. One of the major issues that Order has to counter Mara stacking is that WL stacking doesn't counter it, because WLs are far easier to focus down than Maras (and therefore tend to do less damage overall because they can't stay in the middle of the fight as long), and WLs own personal damage is heavily reduced against Mara's while Mara's don't have that issue vs WLs.

Lastly, to re-iterate why destro swapped to Mara's for cities: It's definitely a combination of things as stated, but the primary reason is for the AoE interrupts to interrupt the Order bomb-balls. It's to make sure we don't get annihilated/whirling axed/slayer channeled to death. If the WL's interrupt was better, and monstro proc wasn't so oppressive, Order could do the same strategy and win as well, as we saw in maybe April or so before we swapped over to Mara stacking to counter the WL stacking.

[Vandoles]

If they even decide to buff any class that Vandoles mentioned on order the faction will never be worse if people roll under performing classes now imagine how it will be after a few buffs.

The idea behind paying attention what I mentioned isn't to balance things, it's to enable balance to ever occur. Because you may fix mechanical issues - but you will never, ever fix what people find cool and fun. You can tune SM snb tanking as much as you want to make it as balanced as possible to BO tanking, but the swordmaster is an elf smacking things around with a big sword and you'll accomplish almost nothing because people will still roll 2h.

I can give dozens of examples of why this is proven, take the most famous mmo ever made - paladins were utterly balanced when they were in alpha, but the 5x crusader strike > holy strike playstyle was so hideously boring, nobody wanted to play it so the whole thing was scrapped and they were made desperately unbalanced. Then addressed and fixed afterwards into something that was both fun and balanced. And you wanna know why it wasn't fixed at first? And why it, alongside all hybrid classes were probably the biggest issue the mmo ever faced? Because the devs who decided that hybrid classes must be forced into the "correct" playstyle were die-hard players and fans, who saw things their own way and represented the dedicated core - lo and behold it turns out that's the worst mentality to introduce and once it was broken, and hybrid classes were enabled the game became an absolute phenomenon. Yes, they went too far the other way, but that's another story. The point is that that game had the exact same issue and presented the fix, which proved objectively successful. After all the other "balancing" changes proved objectively unsuccessful.

[Wam]

Issue with nerfing Mara is you make slayer train even stronger and knock on balance issues

I duo qued on order... got into instance ironically with 12 man (my own guild + solid order players) I think maybe a 6 man and other pug like me... we didn't have no BW, we only had 2 slayer. Enemy premade (i assume) as it looked like premade and im not sure if it was full guild or they had to rely on rng fillers... but they had 5 mara's.

They wasn't that bad with some tweaking, but they wasn't LOB alliance level. Ironically find out afterwards their usual leader wasnt on comms just like i wasn't... but the point is they lost with so many mara's, they didn't really have weak links either as they was dok heavy, a shaman few zealot,a choppa, sorc, msh.

Then with my own group after farming 3.5 sov sets (1 order, 2.5 destro) and people playing their alts more and overly relying on fillers (tanks on healers, tanks on dps due to dps slack and time of day) we face decent order melee train with proper setup, they get over a 100 more kill than us (mostly on our squishy healers) but we still win overall due to experience. This breaks the myth that destro is OP and order cannot win fights or have worse melee train... it comes down to composition / leading / assisting ... something that is completely overlooked in this entire discussion, people don't want to admit other players are better or more experienced or just better composition (its always balance issue... and thinking players are mirrored when that isn't the case)

TUP/Zerg didn't have issues being competitive on order
LOB/MONT didn't have issues being competitive on order

This was pre morale nerfs which now favours order alot...

NGE don't have issues being competitive if they have enough core online...

The biggest issue is relying on /5 fillers... who don't know the pure basics of their class or game, despite having many hours invested being high renowned or gear doesn't mean anything when teamwork and understanding is close to zero... i.e tanks that do not guard swap, do not know how to guard and follow, do not know how to use CC properly.

Same as dps who do not know how to use swift assist / or make macro to assist MA ...

Same as healers who do not know how to kite a melee train, detaunt and handle pressure against 1 or 2 dps without melting...

So basic stuff yet only feels like 1 in 5 people know the rest is just to leach or ragequit...

Order guilds / alliances not as big/organised as destro's... they rely on more /5 and so they are more rng based and desperate
Destro alliances blacklist players who underperform not to make same mistake twice and have a bigger pool to pick from.

You can be right class, you can have the renown, you can even have the gear... but if you are toxic and not team player you are useless and that sadly sums up way too many people with solo mentality, want to leach from wb/team enviroment just to get the gear and go back to solo mentality... that is the cards been dealt and what you have to work with at times.

So good luck to dev's with poison chalice of balancing "the grass is greener" and "ripple effect" when most the player base already refuse to improve instead whine and say its balance...

Personally after acquire 3.5 sov (which is excessive and over farming) i'll sometimes lead organised it depends but look more toward pug/rng some order side for invader farm on slayer ... you get what you get it don't matter.

Alot of the balance stuff is a mental excuse for losing, just like blaming the x realmers... some people tell the lie long enough they start to actually believe it and cannot convince them otherwise its actually hilarious but also tragic lmao.

[CeeJay89]

Play how you want, but city sieges are meant to be competitive. Don't come on the forums complaining when you all know why you lose city's. I don't care how you play. City's are supposed to be difficult, and if you "play how you want" you lose. without coordination and competence when you're up against 12/24 other people you'll get stomped. It happens both ways.

I've said it before and I'll say it again: the devs can do whatever the hell they want. But just because they decided it, that doesn't make it a good design philosophy.

You simply can't lock content (the strongest equipment in the game by a huge margin for most classes) behind a mode that HEAVILY favors one realm over the other, and then tell anyone who plays a class out of meta to suck it up, reroll or don't do cities. Again - asinine.

Also, your comment on organization is more of what I said: you trying to dismiss Order player's very valid complaints, some of who are giving exceptionally constructive feedback with "git gud; destro players stronk". Hate to break it to you, you're not a superior player. Your realm is not full of superior players. It doesn't even have more superior players.

Order has a few less high end organized guilds that still play. This is not enough to skew the city win results in the way you're suggesting. Destro is just as unorganized as Order is. Destro is simply, at this time, in a much better position than Order is for cities. More viable classes, better synergy and abilities as a whole at this time.

Get off the high horse and stop acting like city is 'competitive' when one realm has a better overall class balance than the other.

Finally, if you want a competitive mode...why are you locking content behind it? You can't call something competitive that is required to get the best gear in the game... when it's littered with people who already have the best gear in the game? All this does is either force people to reroll, deal with the agony of losing hundreds of solo queues, or quit the game.

If you want something competitive, why don't you create an ideal 24v24 scenario like ranked with cosmetic rewards that don't affect the balance of the game?

The devs can do what they want, but I certainly don't understand or agree with the whole design philosophy that the best gear in the game should be locked behind a "competitive" wall that obviously favors one realm over the other, and is accessible to more classes on one realm than the other.

[Gurf]

TUP/Zerg didn't have issues being competitive on order
LOB/MONT didn't have issues being competitive on order

What was the gear disparity like then though? Have you won any City instances as Order recently? I have barely seen TUP on Order side and rarely seen them make a dent in rvr or City as Order, but see them do a lot on Destro side.

Destro keep talking about strategy like assisting but in 95% of all cities I have been in Destro barely assist or do alternate strategy, they just clump up and spam aoe abilities, there is no need to assist as Destro most of the time as you stack up Choopa, MSH, Mara, and just run around in a big clump mincing anything up which gets in your way. Destro barely need to assist as their aoe is so strong.

One of the most fun Cities I did was yesterday was 12 vs 12, we had many Engi and SW and we won, as destro tried the exact same tactic as they always do of clump up melee ball, but in those smaller numbers it didn't work and they had no counter strategy as they are so used to that basic strategy always working with larger numbers. So maybe the answer to this is have the option of City in 12v12, or 24v 24, as then you really do see things like assisting making a difference and even in that situation SW and Engi are pretty useful.

[Sundowner]

Literally for 58 pages destro and gm destros are hammering argument that order lacks organization and for some reason destro has most hardcore, orginized and overall better players, while they neatly dismiss or don't even comment on arguments showing CC and melee dominance of destro classes. This says a lot about current city balances.

With 82rr character with full sov I have played my share of cities, both pug, semi-orginized and very organized (guild or alliance, no people added from /5) on order side. I will repeat what a lot of people already said- order severly lacks aoe CC abilities and while in oRVR you can disperse, kite and flank enemy wb's (currently only chance to win against good destro wbs), in city you cannot use given strategy 90% of the time, cc wins the day, almost always.

Also, organization issues (which are not as bad on order side and good on destro side as a lot of people here want to make us believe)do not create 13-3 scores, it was created, in my opinion, by two reasons: first, when cc meta was set on melee train which can only be countered by melee train, destro began to win more and more cities, their win percentage has been growing since (with exception of morale nerf and sw buff week), because order players just don't care anymore, because being stomped by melee train that does nothing but run as blob and cc/aoe damage around it pretty boring. I think given issue will grow and grow, since as GM said he doesn't see any issue at all and cities as competitive part of the game will dissapear (if this didn't already happened).

To conclude, to hide best gear in the game behind part of the game which favors only part of the classes (less classes on order than on destro) is in my opinion very bad game design