Family Name: Fear

Region: EU

Comments:

In the recent patch, loading screens for respawns and teleports were updated to be much shorter. This overall is a positive change; less time stuck in screens that are influenced by quality of PC setup, more accurate to the actual respawn times provided and as the game improves hopefully will make everything flow better.

It also indirectly buffs the strength of spawns, namely the length of time players can use their respawn protection.

Now this in itself can also be a positive. When a guild is on the defensive it lets them better utilise their respawn protection (without having to worry about pushing too far away from base that they no longer get 'fast spawns') and coordinate due to not having mismatched loading screens. It also makes for a potentially better dynamic for offensive gameplay too when spawning at flag and not losing the flag while still in loading screens (so either you have chance to defend it or at least less likely to have half your raid spawning already after the flag has died).

However, it also opens up for abusing the combination of the mechanics between Command To Gather teleports and features intended for defensive use.

We have already seen in length (even on the cross region stage) the use of Spirit of Blessing CTGs and their raw strength, often the only counter is to counter-teleport and hope you have enough DPS to kill the players through the SA and other stats. It also is already often the case that if a stronger, large raid abuses this against a weaker opponent then they do not have the DPS to kill players through Spirit of Blessing.

Combining this with at least 5seconds of respawn protection will make it so even very often strong guilds, who could DPS through Spirit of Blessing, cannot counter the manouvre. To note, this isn't just supposing the possible impact - this is exactly what happened in an uncapped node war yesterday.

I am all for the dynamic of different win cons and the thrills it brings from pulling off a TP play with good timing and execution, but the way it exists at the moment abuses mechanics intended to help a guild rebuild/turn the fight around and instead uses them to close out fights or just straight up have that play be the only deciding factor in an entire fight no matter what else has happened during the course of a war. It cheapens the value of playing out a fight and reduces the significance of using these features defensively.

Suggestion:

Make it so that if a player takes a teleport (Battle Command to Gather, namely as example) after respawning, they lose the fort/tent respawn protection. Meaning fort/tent respawn protection is used defensively only.

I would also go further and say make it so players lose Spirit of Blessing if they take a TP as I believe it would be an improvement to wars, and make it so offensive teleports are again higher skill and timing based - but that might be up for more debate, so my main focus is about the respawn protection which cannot be countered when used offensively in that way.

Spirit ctgs and iframe ctgs gotta go, they were already bad before the change and now its even worse

I think I saw in the latest glabs patch notes that they were cutting the protection time - in half, I think.

If I recall correctly, that is the Guild League spawn protection being cut down from 10s to 5s - which is separate from node and siege war fort/tent spawn protection