Guild Wars 2

So I ventured into WvW to complete my monthly achievement to kill ~50 invaders. I killed at least 50 people, maybe up to ~70 since I wasn’t keeping close tabs on my kill count.

I got 4 badges out of this. Last month, I got roughly 15 badges from a similar (undoubtedly lower) number of kills.

Obviously, I am doing something wrong. It seems unlikely that the drop rate changed quite so much. I’m not a killing machine, so can’t imagine that I am running into any sort of DR. How do I get more badges from kills? Do I need to concentrate more on focus-firing someone and less on AoE to get a better chance at loot? I tend to WvW on a mid-level alt – do I need to be max level in order to have a decent chance at loot getting loot or badges? Does using siege weaponry influence the drop rate?

I know there are other avenues to get badges – the jump puzzles, etc. While I’ll certainly be pursuing those methods of acquisition, I’d prefer to go kill some folks and I’d really like to understand what is dramatically altering my badge drop rate.

Do more damage, specifially press the f key before others.

I seem to get 10-15 badges per 100 kills. If you need more, puzzles will be your best option

I got a grand total of 2 badges for 50 kills. (I stopped playing the second the monthly achievement pinged.) I don’t have anything to compare it to, because those are the only 50 kills I ever made in WvWvW. Seems a bit poor.

I see people talk about tagging enemies to ensure loot. So, does qualifying for kill count and xp rewards demand less effort than qualifying for loot? Having so far only played a character that doesn’t sling huge AoE damage all over the place, I can’t say I’m impressed with the rewards.

Some nights I’ll get 10/hour or more. Some nights I’ll only get 1 or 2 total. It’s strange.

Well, at least I’m not the only one getting few badges per kill. Maybe they really did reduce the drop rate.

@Narathkor – I’m actually looting my bags much more often than my last attempt at PVP. I didn’t know how the WvW loot mechanism worked during most of the first month’s attempt at the achievement. I certainly miss some from time to time, but it’s far less than my prior attempt.

The biggest play differences was that last time, I did most of the achievement on a level ~10 rogue. This time I did it on a ~35 elementalist. The rogue was using a bow, and thus doing more single target DPS, whereas the elementalist was doing more AoE spells. The level difference is significant, and many more people are 80 this week, which is another factor to consider.

I use my necro as badge collector. For some reason melee warrior takes forever to get single badge while on my necro I collect 10+ in hour.

It may have just been coincidence but I did find that almost every time I get the finishing blow on another player I get badges. Otherwise I get them once in a blue moon. I really hope this isn’t how it’s set up though cause if you have to get the actual finishing blow to get badges at a reasonable rate that kind of screws over anyone ranged.

Loot bags teleport to you in PvP so make sure you break the habit of running up to dead bodies to see if you got any loot.

make sure auto loot is on as well. and spam f when u see search pop up. sometimes you really have to pay attention to when they drop. i missed alot of bags my first 2 weeks

I got 3,000+ WvW kills so far and about 600 badges, I don’t miss a loot bag very often either, but I do a lot of damage and finish the kills too. That being said maybe 20% of your kills will drop a badge or two.

Anyone have rendering issues for loot bags? I find that on a number of occasions I have started to run off only to notice a bag appear at my feet as it fades in. It’s only a few seconds this transpires over but as a result in any kind of big skirmish Ill hammer the the f button every so often to make sure I haven’t missed one.

You’re not doing anything wrong. Loot bags and badges drop at random. Please don’t be one of these people that rushes to F-bomb a downed opponent because they think it will increase the chances of a badge drop, it doesn’t. I usually get the most badges from large zerg fights where seven or eight people that I’ve “touched” happen to drop at the same time. Play WvW for the joy and don’t stress the badges too much, you’ll drive yourself crazy. The system they’ve implemented for earning WvW rewards is horrible, but all we can do is lodge our complaints in some kind of constructive manner until they decide to do something about it.

Hey

80 warrior here, never experienced this issue, after having 2.5 kills I have almost 800 badges. I’m never rushing into the killbomb of F-spammers, it’s just a waste of time, not giving you any better chances at the badge drop than others. I usually try to use AoE, or in larger fights I go focusing with rifle and even if the target goes down I continue to finish him/her off with skills instead of Finish. Try to “touch” the most players you can, as Winterwolf above me said, because you don’t need to be the one finishing a kill, you can get loot after a mere 300 basic attack hit, even if the player is already downed.

Its not just players who give badges, I’ve often gotten 2 badges when capturing a supply camp after killing the main NPC.

It depends mostly on who did the most damage on the kill. This is why being the person to flag secure the kill helps alot, because you usually can do like 30-40% of their downed health instantly + whatever damage you did to help get him downed.

Personally i get them about 20% of the time on kills (roughly 250 badges now on about 1200ish kills) but i run a tanky supportish warrior. Makes my killing potential worse, but at the same time it makes me beefy enough to run into dangerous places to secure a flag kill finish and run out (so probably comes pretty close with a more glass-cannon build in terms of badge rate)

The easiest way to get badges is siege though. Cannons are the best for this (good range, fast projectile/fire rate), with arrow carts being second. Arrow carts by themselves don’t do nearly enough damage to kill anyone though, so you need multiples of them to realistically secure kills.