Guild Wars 2

Just wondering if anyone solo roams any more basically…

Spent an hour in EB solo roaming and all I have come across is 5-10 man teams, trying to resurface from BF4 but doesn’t look like the play style I enjoy of 1-2 man encounters exists anymore…

And please don’t say “play sPvP” – Horrid build diversity, terrain is shockin, the whole cap point is crap and restricting to movement

Every single day. But not in EB.

dont roam in eb… the map is not conducive with those silly merc camps

I have run in to the same thing. Roaming solo is dangerous compared to how it used to be. Always 5+ player groups roaming around. Even when we played Mag last time I was disappointed for them being a so called good roaming player server, they were pretty much 5-10 man team gank squads running around killing solo players or people running back to the zerg. Either way I just don’t do it as much.

I’m almost always solo roaming, but most of the roaming is running away from large groups of gankers.

I solo roam a lot too, and I agree that you’ll run into a lot of groups, and not a lot of people that will be willing to 1v1 you. Best to keep some mobility handy, in case you need to run from a 1v1 or 1v2 turning into 1v5, especially in EB.

I’d imagine those doing map exploration are liable to be roaming solo. I know I have. I help out zergs and small groups when I come across them doing something like taking a camp or defending SMC. I am down to 1 POI and 1 vista in EB and then I will be done and I will have 2 gifts of exploration. But those are more likely to run from another player than stand and fight.

I have found WvW more fun than I had thought it would be, bit I likely won’t be playing it regularly. PvP has never been a favorite thing of mine to do. But I may pop in from time to time.

I do a bit of solo roaming in enemy borderlands. I don’t recommend ebg because structures on each side are closer together so you are more likely to run into people and get repelled when trying to solo enemy supply camps and stuff.

Radian.2478:

I do a bit of solo roaming in enemy borderlands. I don’t recommend ebg because structures on each side are closer together so you are more likely to run into people and get repelled when trying to solo enemy supply camps and stuff.

Yeah, the layout of EB doesn’t lend itself to a lot of small fights. Enemy borderlands is the way to go.

Dont play NA prime time. More people, more groups. Try Oceanic. Less people, less organized guilds, more solo players used to not playing with and relying on others for motivation to get out there and play.

I do when I’ve had the time to play which is not much in the past couple of months, but I usually Roam and Scout. I only occasionally find a good fight, although often you’ll get interrupted unless it’s late at night on some underpopulated map if you’re lucky enough.
Otherwise you’re left farming Moas and the rest of the wildlife, especially the Ice Wurm.

I’m from Desolation in the EU where we’ve been fighting ‘Gold League’ servers with our population facing post league and PVE patch drops in activity, Jade Sea is the one with the superior coverage and night cap.

Yeah, barely any roaming from the server I’m in. Hopefully that’ll change with the Edge of the Mists

play spvp yeah i said it.

I use to do almost nothing but solo roam, but it’s not very interesting anymore. The meta has sorta fizzled down to a half dozen builds. Most common by far is still two button d/p shadow arts thieves that will run away freely if you best them and can’t cc shadow refuge. Then there’s warriors, which can be kinda fun to fight and can have build variety, but they are also very tough to pressure, and many will also run away. Lastly there are condi pressure necros and engis that are over the top because of a food buff. Mesmers also have a troll condi build, but you practically have to kill yourself, and it was recently nerfed a bit.

I think you see way less solo roamers nowadays because of this lack of build diversity and meta builds that are not very interesting to fight. Perhaps equally discouraging is how ridiculous anet has allowed statistical imbalance to set in with stacks and ascended equipment.

Those problems go away somewhat if you have a numerical advantage in a group or simply play together better.

clint.5681:

play spvp yeah i said it.

have you tried solo roaming in spvp? you get double teamed more in spvp than in wvw!

Echoing everyone else to say that roaming happens in Borderlands, not EB.

I usually solo roam. But people have evolved.
A few months ago, it was quite common to see small groups of people using bad builds with zerker gear who went down quickly to an experienced player. Now almost everyone is running full PVT. So the 1v3+ of before have become almost impossible to win nowadays, and unless you are facing upleveleds every outnumbered fight is going to be way tougher.
Now most solo roamers have taken root in the Obsidian Sanctum, dueling other people, which is way more fun IMHO.
I still solo roam though. But unless I’m on my thief I am forced to do it when I am near a safe spot (tower, keep or friendly zerg) because the chance of meeting a larger group is too high and I hate dying most than everything else.

I solo roam, mainly because I have gotten sick of being lead on suicide missions by overambitious commanders.

Now, I don’t buy any fancy equipment, I just use what I pick up from loot, so most of my gear is yellow, with a few orange exotics that I picked up. I run around with my ranger and choose skills/traits/equipment based on what I find fun. So when it comes to 1v1, I’m no doubt going to lose, thus I avoid fights and run away when I spot enemy players. So what do I do if I’m not fighting players? I run around and start upgrades on everything (camps/towers/keeps), I flip un-defended camps, scout, escort dolyaks, kill enemy NPCs, flip dredge/hylek/ogres, build siege, repair walls/gates, gather/mine/chop stuff in EBG. If the zerg happens to be in the same area that I am current at, then I might join in, depending on what they are doing.

I will solo roam in EB when our server has control over SM. EB is a rare place where skilled players can take on 3+ and win which is fun. BLs tend to have far better roamers so depends on the type of fight a player is looking for. That said, roaming fights these days are rare everywhere. 90% of the fights I get into I am out manned roaming or skirmish.

Solo roaming is all but dead. Unfortunately, it will just end in frustration. Not many players are willing to 1v1 you and you will constantly come across gank groups or 20+ blobs of players. There is a lack of build diversity, most players are running bunker builds of some description or you come across GC thieves that can and will down you in under 2 seconds. So many builds at the moment are frustrating to fight, Bunker Condi necros, PU Mesmers, Stealth Spamming Thieves, Warriors that are built like tanks but hit like trucks.

Unfortunately Guild Wars 2 is just devolving into Blob vs Blob, with aNet seemingly pushing players into this play style with there continuing focus on bunker type builds and less diversity.

I stopped trying for the most part. Even know there is pretty much no real penalty for dieing people just cant handle it. Every 1v1 I get into if I don’t down them in a few seconds half a dozen of their guidlmates show up to try and zerg me down.

We are up against 2 “gold” league servers, jade sea and desolation. They roam camps with more than our zerg. Take supply and portal away without puting up a fight.

The only thing i do is solo roam. Occasionally i do PVE to get ascended and skins to look better while i roam. Also working on spvp r30.

But every single roaming build is labeled “cheese” nowadays. Makes it a bit discouraging knowing when i win ill get flamed for playing some OP cheese build

Carpboy.7145:

The only thing i do is solo roam. Occasionally i do PVE to get ascended and skins to look better while i roam. Also working on spvp r30.

But every single roaming build is labeled “cheese” nowadays. Makes it a bit discouraging knowing when i win ill get flamed for playing some OP cheese build

Not every build. I try and roam on my Power Necro (no MM, No Conditions), I use a zerk Mesmer build, it does annoy me when I come across a PU Mesmer or similar cheese build, I just disengage and won’t give them a fight.

Silent Shino.7239:

clint.5681:

play spvp yeah i said it.

have you tried solo roaming in spvp? you get double teamed more in spvp than in wvw!

Yup im a exwvw player that went to spvp after leagues before i left the game.
I went there because I was looking for fights and as fun as running around solo or duo on a low pop server getting jumped was in wvw its not the best or smartest way to play that mode.

Yea, I still solo roam as a s/d thief but these days there are often moments where I’m really frustrated because of:
1. many times I run into groups 3-5ppl, trying to gank me
2. builds like PU-Mesmer, Perplexity-Thief and some other builds destroy the fun of gaming. (there’s no skill playing these builds)

I stopped roaming when half the classes in the game became unkillable.

Nike warrior and fiery ele have straight line movement speed that is unmatched, you simply can not catch one if they run away. Meanwhile thief/mesmer have 90% stealth uptime and teleports.

If you put a competent player on any of those 4 classes and it’s impossible to die unless you’re zerged by a large amount of people. It’s not fun....

aspirine.6852:

We are up against 2 “gold” league servers, jade sea and desolation. They roam camps with more than our zerg. Take supply and portal away without puting up a fight.

You must be from Gunnar’s Hold. I have high respect for some of your players, but now you are spreading false information. Desolation is now running low numbers in WvWvW. We haven’t had queue to any map. GH on the other hand seems to have a lot of large guild groups, sometimes combing several guild groups into a larger blob. We got just PuGs.. and you know what servers, which are mostly just PuGs do… they all blob. Our predicted ranking is now 11, so what makes you think we are a “gold” league server?

But back to topic: I was mostly solo roaming in EB tonight. As power rifle engi, no stealth, no shadowstepping, no easy escapes. 6 WXP ranks in 4.5 h. And yes, it is much harder now. And I run often into JS roaming teams. Got killed couple of times in those group vs me alone, but eventually was collecting loot bags from them. Yes, I can bring the whole zerg to kill ’em. ;-) I think this is a very good way to educate enemy teams: if you chase & kill enemy solo roamers, be prepared to die next.

The unwise borderland changes on September 17th made solo roaming also more difficult on the BL maps. I wish they would revert all the changes done in Sept 17th!
Bring back the lake and get rid of BL bloodlust buffs.

Ive recently moved back to solo roaming. I moved to JQ a while back as an Oceanic and found we are usually outmanned on 2-3 maps until SEA kicks in. So I go solo roam as it feels the most efficient. Most of my small scale encounters are 5 man gank squads. So I roam exclusively on my thief so I can just avoid them. Its rare to see people react to my ninja tactics solo. If I build a ninja treb or cata I regularly get a reaction of 5+ players. A few times this week Ive had a map zerg come chase me (up to 50 one night). I figure the more people I pull away from attacking to deal with me the better so I measure my effectiveness that way. I tend to find ninja trebs best as they have to move a reasonable distance away from any objective to deal with me, wasting more of their time. It seems these days few people want an even fight. Most people seem to think that baiting me into a 1v1 or 1v2 only to have their friends join in afterwards is outplaying me so I don’t bother fighting unless I think I can take them down quickly.

Yup, “skill groups” of 5-10 everywhere proclaiming their skills when ganking fewer numbers. Its sad. Sometimes I get lucky, but the fact of the matter is is that its better to have a small team with you.
1v1s are best found in pvp on cuz you dont have to spend 5 min to run around trying to find a fight.

Solo/Duo roamer here ~ And yes it’s a little more difficult as of late to find similar groups roaming. Just adds to the thrill when you manage to overcome larger groups.

I try to solo roam still but as of late it has proven to be very difficult, normally I try to instead bring a friend. We never have more than 4 and we find that when we are in a party of five we split up.
I think small scale roaming is definitely drying up. For me I actually blame the rewards that you can receive from wvw now. When I first started playing wvw it wasn’t very profitable and people did it because it was fun.
Now, with champion chests it is so much more tempting to run in a big group so that you can maximize the amount of loot you can get.
I have gotten to the point where I only roam in certain match ups, against certain servers.
Otherwise I get my fix in spvp where I end up playing as much by myself as I can manage.

Yep. I roam exclusively using my stealthless thief build. If you ever see an S/P thief with a fractal sword on GoM, feel free to engage. I love me my 1vX’s, especially all the tears I get when people call me a blind-spamming, perma-stealth, no-skill cheese thief when I outplay them. See, it’s funny because I intentionally cripple my survivability by not running any a access to stealth in the first place for the challenge in it, then get called every name in the book by bads.

You can thank the condi meta for killing roaming.

This is what happened to me the last time I played two weeks ago: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0fwliYYx_Bc
This is not supposed to be a showcase of l33t skill.. :x

I don’t specifically roam in search for duels , they find me. If there’s a large scale fight especially against a Guild I’ll engage cause it’s better than wandering about and my build allows that, but going up against high dmg or condition builds I’ll steer clear once I realize it. (the food/oil and stacks of bloodlust/Corruption is a sign)
It’s a good idea to run a Class with good mobility/stealth (Or a stack of tonics) just in-case those gankers are lurking or some large group is around to run over you. Otherwise you can PvP or use the OS if you want some duels, but you will still not get fair duels in PvP.

And yeah Deso’s now rank 10.. hardly Gold league with not many queues these days, just pugs blobbing on EB, or fighting off Guild Groups on our Home BL.
Our Guilds like fighting elsewhere, but it’s normal for us!

Yes.                                   

I think they should have an anti buff like http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Dishonorable but have one for gankers that double team so roamers can tell if they’re going to get ganked or not and get away before they’re spammed to death by heartseeker or conditions.

I have spent the last few weeks roaming around each borderland, easily 3-5 hours in a day, and I hardly find any 1v2-3, a few 1v1s where they don’t run, and everything else is just 5+ groups which aren’t worth the repair fee, tis a bit sad, the roaming used to be so much better half a year ago.

tbh, you couldn’t have summed it up better^^
I got so sick of being ganked just because I’m a guardian that I created a mesmer and I have had some ridiculous fights so far. I got attacked by three AR (from the same guild) yesterday and I just spammed them with conditions using minimal effort, all three of them ended up running away.
moral of the story: go mesmer if you want to win.

all the time. WHen possible

I fear I’ve become to social too solo roam more than a few minutes at a time. there’s always someone to join me and I don’t mind it, tho I’d really like to have some more time solo as well.

and yes, solo roaming is alot more difficult than a year ago, most solo players you find are thieves and they are rarely a challenge, just a nuisance; not that I ever solo roamed to find 1v1s, but it’s so rare that you find a group of 2-3 players willing to fight you anymore. and then you do and one is a spite necro, other is a full glass d/p thief and the 3rd a hammer warrior who proceeds to banner ress his downed friend.

I blame commander tags, everyone can afford one by now, there’s always one around for the drones to follow in one big blob. how I wish they’d get rid of commanders.

I still get some decent fights now and then :p

@Maska

At least as an engie you have enough utility to cripple or catch people that want to run away from you.

+

Other than that, solo roaming is pretty much dead IMO. I was running around 3 different BLs and EB for the last weekend, encountering only players, who respawn at garrison and run to rejoin with the blob either at hills or bay. Last night I stood literally on the way between AG garrison and bay. There was a big fight inside and AG just ran past me, no one even pressed auto-attack to put me in combat to prevent from fast disengage… amazing.

75% of encounters are with thieves, 15% with warriors and 10% with PU condition mesmers. Group fights are different. Necros in the back line will Spite you and if you cleanse or convert to boons – you’ll eventually get corrupted shortly after.

No one wants to fight :-(

We should do a roaming Bracket .

So yer tried again by standing at enemy spawn and tapping keep….

Just stood there, wasn’t gonna start a fight just wait to see who wants to fight me, out of 10 people only 2 bothered to attack me and both were uplevels :/

the other 8 just ran past me like I wasn’t there but I found a cool trick atleast…. Be a ranger and EVERYONE wants to fight!!!! – Problem solved I have my fights again

I tried that once but ended up getting a ram BP thrown on my corpse =\

Deniara Devious.3948:

aspirine.6852:

We are up against 2 “gold” league servers, jade sea and desolation. They roam camps with more than our zerg. Take supply and portal away without puting up a fight.

You must be from Gunnar’s Hold. I have high respect for some of your players, but now you are spreading false information. Desolation is now running low numbers in WvWvW. We haven’t had queue to any map. GH on the other hand seems to have a lot of large guild groups, sometimes combing several guild groups into a larger blob. We got just PuGs.. and you know what servers, which are mostly just PuGs do… they all blob. Our predicted ranking is now 11, so what makes you think we are a “gold” league server?

I am from Gunnars, and I was patrolling our BL this weekend, also a bit of EB when our BL was fine. And yes you are right I should have be more detailed, it was mostly JS that are taking camps with 50+ zergs and ported. But also many times the Deso pug zerg, aswell as a guild group were taking camps with a large group. In defense of the guild group they needed the supply because they where indeed capping towers and keeps. JS comes and ports. Very annoying.
And I think you are gold league material because in the last league we did not stand a chance against Deso, neither did any other in the silver league. Right now the wurm and marionnete are most likely the problem with the deso numbers in WvW, when those are over you will probably stomp us with ease.

For your information, Desolation still has had almost no queues any time to any BL or EB during this match up. We have been enjoying the outnumbered “buff” on EB at prime time. Gunnar’s Hold probably has at least as many WvWvW players if not more, but the thing is:

GH is guild-oriented. They are generally better in zerg vs zerg clashes, but does worse point wise and don’t fight that well as a server. Funnily GH pro guild zergs rather chase one enemy engineer even when I run into different direction than our zerg. I guess GH rather gets one loot bag instead of meeting our PuG zergs. ;-)

Desolation is mostly just PuGs, which play for the points, but many of our PuGs are much higher quality than the usual PuG. If another league comes and rewards are decent, Deso players will swarm back to WvWvW and it will totally different game. Lots of pve players and fair weather will come to play again.

At one point commander + 2 others (including me) were holding and capping big part of the EB map. And this wasn’t night time capping, nor even early morning. We got a bit more people and got the all the keeps, all towers except 1, all camps except 1 and of course we held the Stonemist castle.

Solo capping big objectives is still possible (given time and opportunity). I know several Deso players have been soloing towers even at prime time, but I am not sure if the Stonemist lord can be soloed right now. Has anybody any recent video of SM being soloed?