Guild Wars 2

I rolled with CoLD (an incredible group of PvPers) this round, and we started on HoD.

At launch we learned ‘a big alliance’ was rolling on HoD as well, and we didn’t know how it’d play out. A previous valiant attempt at creating a RIFT player based alliance didn’t pan out.

The game launches and of course, after the introduction and getting some tools use weapons, we jump to WvWvW. Queues were small/none at that point.

-The first thing I noticed was our night presence.
-The second thing I noticed was solid tactics from TA

And then I noticed the game changer: Everyone not in TA.

For whatever reason, there was a sizable population of smarter PvPers on HoD. CoLD brought it’s share.

What makes a smart PvPer?

Take my friend Boda. He gets into whichever map he can, then spends most of his time actively defending and building up defenses of keeps. He runs supply manually often. He rezzes anyone and everyone he can. He focus fires off the people around him and handles the sides of zergs to stop or widen any pincer moves.

When I jump on we go hit supply. I have a personal vendetta against dolyaks and supply depots. We try to roll the far supply before the points the points roll over.

If we encounter a squad of DiE or TRF, we jump into formation. We roll with the green dots tight. When they move, we move. Where they fight, we fight, and we keep an extra set of eyes out where we can. When siege goes up we throw in our supply (we always have supply, and when we need more we try to take only from supply depots). We protect our rams. We reflect and retribution every chance we can. If someone overextends I try to get a portal to them to get back (they rarely click it in time).

The most remarkable thing: It’s not just us. It’s close to everyone doing the right things.

You can’t imagine how good it feels to know what the right thing to do is, and have most of the people around you know and execute it as well.

You can’t imagine how good it feels to be appreciated as well, or to be on the side that encourages our competition.

I believe that we happened to luck into this arrangement. I think about what happened to another server with TL and the crowd they’ve gathered, and I say thanks to whatever powers are out there for us being where we are.

This doesn’t mean that we get to play all the time, in fact the queue times forced CoLD’s hand to splinter off.

This doesn’t mean that we’ll always win, because sooner or later we’ll lose (I secretly hope it’s SBI that takes us out eventually).

I will say though, that most on HoD, the good PvPers would handle a loss better than some alliances and guilds have to date.

Anyway, that’s Virchow’s take….and if you get rolled out there in the evening in the BL by a Norn Mesmer and Norn Ranger, that’s Boda and I kicking butt.

I just like your name dude. That guy was a boss.

You sound like a nice guy but seriously no one cares. There has been 10000 posts about how great HoD is and they all say the same thing.

canadianimpact.6957:

You sound like a nice guy but seriously no one cares. There has been 10000 posts about how great HoD is and they all say the same thing.

You’re probably right. Just felt I had to put it out there.

And yeah, drwookie, Virchow was a giant amongst men.

I feel bad now. I’d be a horrible forum troll… =[

A lot of people on other servers don’t realize that TA is a minor force on HoD. We do what we can, but the players on HoD not in TA (Affectionately called the militia) do the heavy lifting.

And it’s not by chance, there was a great deal of thought and research and HoD stood out due to the guilds that were already on it.

We have a great ‘Militia’ on our server, they work hand in hand with TA. Its been one of the ways we keep strong pressure on everyone we face.

“You sound like a nice guy but seriously no one cares. There has been 10000 posts about how great HoD is and they all say the same thing.”

Virchow how goes it?

Good to see you’re playing GW2, haven’t seen ya since Rift. My guild is running on Stormbluff Isle, pretty good match this week was fun for sure.

Mad love to HoD Militia and Virchow and Boda!

Hey Vitrol! You were a truly gifted rogue in Rift, it’s great to see you’ve landed on one beast of a server.

In fact, a big shout out to all the ol’ Rifters out there. People are representing.

I can’t wait until every baddie transfers to HoD and you guys ess-tee-eff-u.

Key to HoD’s success: 24/7 WvW full queues with 20+ guild alliance to zerg your opposition into submission.

Oh, and the first week, taking advantage of “exploits” such as stacking permanent buffs on NPCs in WvW and far outleveling / outgearing your opponents by farming Yaks / supply camps. I guess the OP forgot to mention these things…

You must mean there use of metagaming yea there real pros lol

In case you need a lil help
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metagaming

Waaaaaah! HoD thought of tactics before us, QQ! Nerf Please.

nah, simple fact is sbi is hods lapdog and they 2v1 every third server they face

Click.5123:

Key to HoD’s success: 24/7 WvW full queues with 20+ guild alliance to zerg your opposition into submission.

Oh, and the first week, taking advantage of “exploits” such as stacking permanent buffs on NPCs in WvW and far outleveling / outgearing your opponents by farming Yaks / supply camps. I guess the OP forgot to mention these things…

^ This.

It can’t even be called ‘tactics’. They simply have not only the time but the ungodly motivation to do lame/boring things just to maximize WvW point totals.

Nobody will ever really remember their deeds 1-2 yrs from now, but I’m sure the bandwagoners on the server will pat each other on the back. And, of course, refuse to actually be sporting/competitive (instead of pretending to be) and transfer around to even up the scores.

If you and your many friends are zerging around and you see that you’re winning too much, maybe you should stop, step back and ask yourself:

1) Are we team stacking too much?
2) Have we gone too far, numbers/time-zone/dedication-wise, against opponents that will never even care/remember?
3) Wouldn’t we enjoy fighting each other instead?

But nobody ever really looks at themselves, because in their own minds, they’re ‘good people’ and doing the right thing. Right? So if you’re on Henge. Ask yourself: am I really being what I believe I am (sporting, competitive, good at the game, etc.)?

just be happy knowing they have 73 hour queues

Posting in thread iv been mentioned in.

If you are the same SkyExile from Planetside, then IDK what to say. Where is the Sky Exile from Vanu Sovereignty, that enjoyed hot-dropping, solo, into red alerts sitting on a cap?

Have you forgotten your roots? Shame on you!

Do you now prefer 3-5 hr queues and zerg to:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vzHRveJGjNU&hd=1
?

Or better yet:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q6h3Vtv2vIw
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1yHE8oC3Q-Q
?

Slic.2406:

If you are the same SkyExile from Planetside, then IDK what to say. Where is the Sky Exile from Vanu Sovereignty, that enjoyed hot-dropping, solo, into red alerts sitting on a cap?

Have you forgotten your roots? Shame on you!

There is only one SKYeXile.

its shame HOD ended up so large, but for an oceanic guild i still see an allaince server as the best option to find good pvp.

I think you’re just making excuses to play on the same side as all the ‘friends’ you think you have.

The top servers fight the same bunch of servers every rotation, who says you need to be on 1 specific server (with the longest queues and the biggest zerg)?

Did even YOUR idea of ‘good pvp’ change that drastically? Did all of the future crew’s, if they followed you to GW2? Or are you still Markovites from Planetside?

Yeah, sorry.

I learned more exploits watching HoD during this most recent matchup than I imagined.

I found out there was a bugged wall segment in the *Bay keep at certain upgrade levels. One treb/cat shot will drop it from full health. Guess who was using that to get into the keep repeatedly?

There is a way to get up on to the *vale supply keep wall from outside to bypass the choke. (Guess who was using that to break the choke by setting up siege on top of the wall).

A group of 4 somehow perma-stealthing all of them for several minutes ( I am still not sure how this one was done), none of the numbers Ive been able to theorize stack up to the total duration youd need to cover for each other).

Organised “retaliation” groups to kill siege with peoples bodies. Seriously, it was funny ( for about 10 seconds) trying to ae as few people as possible with an arrow cart while a zerg tried to dive INTO the circle. Except the arrow cart went from full health to breaking in approximately 15 seconds.

These are just the ones I personally witnessed. I’ve heard reports of everything else from mesmers somehow blinking into garrisons to bypass walls and the like ( and then portal people in).

Nothing about henge is special. The closest you came was being more organised about getting siege up in a hurry. Everything else is just an unequalled numbers advantage and a ( presumably small minority) being willing to exploit through any possible method when you DO run up against something blocking progress.

I play with my AU guild and none of Future Crew, though the way we play is practically identical to FC.

Thought process on choosing server:
we figured oceanic servers or alliance servers would be at the top of the ratings, we were 100%right.
been an Australian guild obviously we have to fight other Australians, so it would be a dumb move of ours to goto IOJ or SOS with the other oceanics.

so what do we do? our original plan was just to goto some server with some supposedly good US guilds and hope for the best. we were then approached by The Elite and Sysapse, to join TA, while skeptical about joining, we came to the conclusion going with them and now DIE also as been the best choice, while it obviously leaves limited known strong oceanic PvP to fight against. theres no guarantee we would endup fighting them anyway. So the having guilds i know i can rely on watching our back is a nice and still is a good prospect.

We knew that this isnt the sort of game we we can solo and treat everybody like dbags like planetside or WAR, going in by ourselves with a roster of 40 people seemed like a dumb plan. with no guarantee we would find either decent or enough oceanics to fight to give us a challenge.

its a shame HOD is really so large but this week will be the test if we were fully right or not, it really depends on how many ET oceanics come out to play.

apparently everyone now in this thread played planetside

@ draculthemad (since quote isn’t showing up as an option atm)

1) More than just those two are bugged. Someone suggested using one of those said bugs during the ‘dead hours’ last night. The response was “yeah, let’s not do that and avoid getting banned.” As far as I know, it wasn’t used and instead they killed the gate with like 3-4 rams and a catapult. Abuse of the bug is an actual exploit, I’ll agree.

2) Chaining the skill Shadow Refuge can accomplish this. Assuming you don’t run out of its area of effect and don’t break stealth, its a 15 second AoE stealth on a 60 second cooldown (48 second cooldown if trait spec’d). 15 × 4 = 60. Not an exploit.

3) That’s not an exploit, that’s coordination. I don’t know if they changed it, but Feedback and other reflect skills used to make Arrow Carts explode themselves too.

4) As for Portal Entre abuse, every server I’ve seen in WvW has used that and had it used against them. Henge, Stormbluff, Jade Quarry, Blackgate, Sorrow’s Furnace, Maguuma, etc. ALL of them have used this. Yes it borders on abuse, but so does everyone piling AoE on doors because they know it can hit targets on the other side.

Not to mention the portal tactic is risky. If the defenders have enough internal defense/reaction speed, the portal group will wipe instantly. In fact, if people are paying attention, its suicide to do it as the defenders will pile every AoE they have on the exit portal and instantly frag anyone ‘porting over. I’ve seen entire assault groups instantly wiped because a guild group saw the mesmer setting up the portals and dropped a crap ton of AoE on the exit.

5) HoD isn’t this all encompasing, endless, full-on zerg people make it out to be. It has it’s peak times and it’s slow times. The difference is other servers don’t have a good spread of players in differing time zones. They get this one MASSIVE queue rush during prime time, then very little for the rest of the day/night. Meanwhile, HoD has guilds/players with staggered prime times.

It’s like this. Say HoD has 40k people queing for WvW. 15k of them are the overnight/morning crowd, 25k are the afternoon/evening (primetime) crowd.
Now let’s say SBI or JQ has 40k people queing for WvW. 5k of them are the overnight/morning crowd, 35k are the afternoon/evening (primetime) crowd.

Yeah, its probably still an exploit.

In case you didn’t know, every other form of stealth gives a “Revealed” debuff on lapse, precisely to prevent chaining them together.

Edit: wiki says Shadow Refuge procs revealed at all targets under it when it ends. So circumventing that is probably an exploit.

I can actually figure out how to circumvent it too from your description, so I am going to take my lowbe thief out and test it in the heart of the mists. If it works I will be filing a detailed bug report.

Thanks for your help :-)

further edit:
Retaliation effecting sieges was officially stated to be a bug. Despite this, Henge continued to abuse it until it actually got fixed on the 18th. Prior to that, if that group was there it was effectively impossible to defend a keep from them. I had one hilarious moment when I tried to cast an AE directly and received 12k damage back.

I’m glad they fixed it for siege, and I expect its only a matter of time before they change its behaviour at least in WvW.

draculthemad.6273:

Yeah, its probably still an exploit.

In case you didn’t know, every other form of stealth gives a “Revealed” debuff on lapse, precisely to prevent chaining them together.

Edit: wiki says Shadow Refuge procs revealed at all targets under it when it ends. So circumventing that is probably an exploit.

I can actually figure out how to circumvent it too from your description, so I am going to take my lowbe thief out and test it in the heart of the mists. If it works I will be filing a detailed bug report.

Thanks for your help :-)

further edit:
Retaliation effecting sieges was officially stated to be a bug. Despite this, Henge continued to abuse it until it actually got fixed on the 18th. Prior to that, if that group was there it was effectively impossible to defend a keep from them. I had one hilarious moment when I tried to cast an AE directly and received 12k damage back.

I’m glad they fixed it for siege, and I expect its only a matter of time before they change its behaviour at least in WvW.

Yes, if you walk/attack out of Shadow Refuge it procs Revealed, as do all stealth skills that you essentially end manually (by attacking out of stealth usually), but not when they end due to timing out (test with Hide in Shadows and stealth spec’d Steal.) Also, as long as you’re in stealth and don’t leave it, you can chain stealth skills and it simply refreshes stealth duration. Revealed is mostly meant to stop you from doing things like Cloak and Dagger >Backstab >Cloak and Dagger >Backstab, which would essentially kill someone instantly with Haste active.

For instance, my thief (lvl 80), uses the stealth on steal trait (shadow arts >hidden thief); in addition to the +1 sec stealth passive. I can steal, putting me into stealth (3 seconds), then before it ends use Hide in Shadows (4 seconds) to refresh my stealth duration, and if I then have Shadow Refuge equipped, I can drop that and add basically another 15 seconds onto my stealth. That works out to essentially 22-23 seconds of continuous personal stealth with good timing.

I would not really call it a bug or exploit, its just refreshing durations on stealth. Now, if they’d attacked/moved out of it and then instantly re-stealthed I’d see the issue. Also, if you walk out of the area of effect while a normal stealth duration is remaining (3-4 seconds), you remain stealthed and can move around as such.

The skill description on the wiki indicates its supposed to proc revealed on all targets in it when it ends.

Im not sure how official that is though.

Glorious battles today and tonight.

I know you might not believe it, Slic, but the fights tonight for HoD were as epic and challenging as anything I’ve encountered in the past decade of gaming.

It’s not quite Meph’s taking on entire small groups and zones solo, but fighting a large scale war on two fronts with both coming for you with everything they’ve got; it’s for real.

Which leads me to something I was suspecting would be the case from the start: HoD, (and TA in particular) is showing pure class this round. A relentess love of the fight. Fighting with everything they’ve got. Again and again.

Real PvPers already know, it’s not about the win, Slic, it’s about the fight….and oh the fights that are happening now…

It goes to show a hard truth people might not like so much. If you want to know who you really are at your core, look really close at you when you’re losing and the odds are against you. What do you do? This is you at your core. And right now I’m prettykittenproud to be on HoD.

@Virchow last post

He is absolutely right.

I was at SBI borderlands last night, and we were being hit hard on both fronts, so like any army spread out too thin, we lost everything. During those moments of defeat, a very small minor started saying things like “game over.” The flak those people got from others was truely surprising. People weren’t going to let a few whiners represent what they believed, which was the fact it wasn’t game over, the game was just beginning.

We came back with a fierce counterattack, and push ruin back to their side of the map. Of crouse we didnt get much farther, because we were still fighting storm to our right. However we held what we could, and during such extreme circumtances, that is the most anyone could have asked from us.

I was very impressed by HoD last night, and I think its safe to say that everyone else was to..

Pretty Impressed by how well HOD and SBI Coordinate attacks. You managed to only kill each other once while gangbanging the last ET Supply camp instead of fighting each other GG

draculthemad.6273:

The skill description on the wiki indicates its supposed to proc revealed on all targets in it when it ends.

Im not sure how official that is though.

Yes, if you end the stealth early by walking out of its area of effect or by attacking.

SR creates a field effect that grants 3 seconds of stealth every second. It goes:
+3> -1> +3> -1> +3> -1> +3> -1> +3> -remaining duration. The remaining duration ends early if affected targets attack or move out of the effect range. This does not include the final 3-4 seconds of stealth duration. The Revealed proc in this case is most likely so you can’t drop the SR field and spam stealth attacks with virtual impunity.

Afaik, no Thief stealth skill in game procs Revealed when it ends via effect time-out. I have tried this with: Shadow Refuge, Hide in Shadows, Cloak and Dagger, and Steal. I have not tested it with the trap yet, though I imagine it will be more of the same.

PS
Sorry Virchow for cluttering your thread with Thief stealth mechanic talk.

Once more for the cheap seats, just incase you missed point:

Virchow.6043:

It goes to show a hard truth people might not like so much. If you want to know who you really are at your core, look really close at yourself when you’re losing and the odds are against you. What do you do? This is you at your core. And right now I’m prettykittenproud to be on HoD.

Pretty proud of our server, held garrison throughout the night while just being utterly hammered by both SBI/ET at the same time. Was an epic defense.
http://imageshack.us/a/img140/3526/gw068z.jpg
http://imageshack.us/a/img694/1364/gw069j.jpg
http://imageshack.us/a/img138/8763/gw070i.jpg
http://imageshack.us/a/img4/1133/gw072a.jpg
http://imageshack.us/a/img100/3343/gw074c.jpg

Basically attack at every angle, at one point ET was on the wall trebbing into our commander room with SBI pounding on the Inner gate just below ET… epic fight to say the least.

We held on to garrison in the end