Guild Wars 2

Hi,
My guild and I want to know the state of servers of low bronze tier in europe (Vabbi&co).
Is there nobody on map ? Roaming teams ? Some zergs ?
Thanks

Well – we left Vabbi and Whiteridge two weeks ago and got up one rank but Whiteridge and Vabbi were pretty active when we were still fighting them, though Vabbi has always been at a disadvantage number-wise. Both Whiteridge and my server (Dzagonur) did outnumber Vabbi significantly in our prime times.

Zerg fights … when I was playing (mostly on EB) I never met a Vabbi zerg outside of one of their forts (but, boy, they LIKE to defend their towers/forts with hand, tooth and nails) and Whiteside .. well, they do have a big Zerg with WvW and TASH but unless they’re 2:1 in numbers they usually show you their backsides and running skills

Whiteside has a few very good roaming teams – usually from OTAN and Vabbi has had a few running as well though I didn’t encounter them personally so I can only conclude their existance from the camps that changed colour.

As for the current bottom 6 server:

WSR: Probably biggest population of the 6. They have some really good zergs. Roaming in their borderland though will get you pm flamed or emote spammed almost every time which is too bad since wsr has some good roamers.

FR: Don’t know much about them but they seem to fit right in where they are ranked atm.

Vabbi: Have the possibility to field quite high numbers. They used to be horrible defenders but they’ve been getting better and better at it. Will golem rush at any given opportunity.

Underworld: Good server, nice people(Biased much? :P). Decent ammount of roamers. In need of more organised wvw guilds if we’re going to rise in the ranks. We try our best with what we have.

Fissure of Woe: Has been having a hard time recently but they seem to be doing a comeback now. I think they have less numbers than UW or Vabbi but they do have a strong core community so I wouldn’t be suprised if they beat us. Some fun roaming groups here.

Blacktide: Just lost alot of guilds and have been struggeling alot ever since. Currently lowest wvw population even though they sometimes get some big zergs going. Hopefully they’ll get back in there soon enough!

HtFde.3856:

… and Whiteside .. well, they do have a big Zerg with WvW and TASH but unless they’re 2:1 in numbers they usually show you their backsides and running skills

Uhm… what? Are we playing the same game?

As a WSR rallybot i second what Bubi said. Really DZ moves only in zerg and runs from anything else if not vastly superior in numbers (3vs1 and up). More than one time they turned away if a tower was defended by one (1) regular ac…

Back to topic i’ll add my impressions.

Fort Ranik (FR): They are able to field huge, for our league, numbers but very bad players individually or in small groups. They lose many engagements maybe because not used to small furrballs

Vabbi: As with us they suffer coverage, very good roamers btw

Underworld: Even less numbers than Vabbi, I think they are in the situation that we were a few months ago. They need to organize a bit. They are becomimg more cunning in the meantime. Their yesterday’s cap of SM while we were facing FR on another side was very well played.

I think HtFde and Kungsmurfen gave a somewhat accurate version of how the 6 lowest ranked servers are but I felt like I just had to contribute to this.

For the last few months we (vabbi) been going up and down between t8 and t9. For months Dzaganur dominated the t8 match. I do not agree that Dzaganur (Dz) was the better server when it came between them and WSR. Dz had numbers (lots of them) but WRS had more organized guilds (WvW, TasH, OTAN,… ) During primetime (and at night) it was often WRS that dominated but Dz had the upperhand most of the time during the day. Us Vabbi, we are always outnumbered and during the day we went from retaking our borderland to retaking our corner in EB. During primetime we tried to stick in eb to fight.

WRS gave nice fights while Dz just outnumbered us 1 to 5+. Even when you roamed and you wanted to flip a camp, 10+ Dz would just come out of nowhere just to make sure you died.

2 weeks ago Dz finally promoted to t7 (For months they made sure they didnt promote to t7, Hench why they didn’t really played the last few days) and we got matched up with Fort Ranik. I’ve to say it was 1 of the better matchups we had in a long time. FR felt really weak and until Monday, we were still in the lead for winning the matchup.

Sadly we dropped to t9 this week. With all my respect for FoW and BT but I feel like we are being punished for having 1 good week in WvW. I did see a decrease in Vabbian players this week.

Here’s my summary of the bottom 6 servers.

WRS: Most organized server. Sometimes I wonder if they even have pugs zergs in the evening. Always nice to fight the WvW group. Although most of the time that guild got more numbers than our pug zerg. I like to magnet pull their commander and watch the guildraid collapse.

OTAN is annoying and won’t let me solo roam. Stop chasing me with your 5man condi group :p

Fort Ranik. Only fought them once. Didn’t impress me much. But it was fun to have a 3 way fight on vabbi border. Can’t remember the last time we had that.

Uw: Been too long since we fought them. We have been swapping places in t8 for months now. Last time we fought them, they did had a hacker thief. (not going to judge an entire server for that). The Zerk guild should change their name to condi :p

FoW: Stronger than we fought them the last time. Im not sure if the picked up numbers or if we lost people because of this boring Matchup. Likes to flip Bt border all day long.

Bt: They have a nice zerg from time to time during the evening. During the rest of the day, you see small groups trying to flip stuff in eb or green borderland for mapcompletion. Most of them are below bronze rank. I hope they restore quickly because t9 really needs a 3rd server to fight.

And now my own server: Vabbi.

We don’t have much organisation. There are a couple of guilds that try to do WvW activities (SWAT, WAR, star, ACT, Fury) but they just don’t have the numbers. We have some good pug commanders but when they don’t tag up, we have almost no people.

My guild (SWAT), tries to do raids on a daily base but most of the time we have 10-15 people. We do wipe mindless zergs because we can outsmart them but we could use 10- 15ish more members to make a difference.

When it comes to defending I can say that most of vabbi don’t care about our border. Even if you spend an entire day upgrading bay/hills/garri to t3 it will be t1 again the next day. But we will defend our stuff in eb.

Overall I would say that vabbi is the smallest server but we manage to do with the people we have. Even when it can be frustrated from time to time.

I’m perfectly happy with the current state of t8. There’s a bit of freecapping, 1v1, smallscale fights, zergfights and sometimes cool threeway blobfights. The fact that doesn’t happen daily makes it more special, thus more enjoyable. I love the close & friendly community here and that every individual can make a difference, even without performing extraordinary deeds. There’s the rare queue for EB here for a few minutes a week when everyone at the same time decided that SM should be ours or something.

I have only ever been on Whiteside Ridge, so can’t compare to higher tiers or accurately judge other servers around us (e.g. DZ thinks we outnumber them while I always thought they outnumbered us). I also rarely play outside of primetime, but I heard that mornings could use more activity in here :P

(zerg = 10-25/30, blob = 30+ in my opinion)

Marpo.8695:

As a WSR rallybot i second what Bubi said. Really DZ moves only in zerg and runs from anything else if not vastly superior in numbers (3vs1 and up). More than one time they turned away if a tower was defended by one (1) regular ac…

It sure depends on at what time and in which borderland you play. During my runs in EB we sometimes camped in front of WR spawn with 23 people and – according to my screenshots – against 30+ enemy players – and killed them, killed then, killed them.

I am quite sure, however, that at other times the situation might have been exactly reversed.

If you take a look at the points we scored in our encounters (and still score in our current matchup) you’ll come to realize that your statement cannot hold true – you just can’t get as many points as we did by running ONE zerg and running away if there is one AC inside a fortification.

In addition to that we dont have many large WvW guilds so many of our players are ‘publics’ and I really doubt that our more organized guilds will run from a single AC

The Scars of Time.6324:

I have only ever been on Whiteside Ridge, so can’t compare to higher tiers or accurately judge other servers around us (e.g. DZ thinks we outnumber them while I always thought they outnumbered us).

Giggles – and both are right

It’s the curse/benefit from being a country specific server that has only one time-zone. When we come, there’s a lot of us – when we’re at work we don’t have compensation.

So from 17:00 CET to 21:30 CET DZ did outnumber WSR. 21:30 CET to 22:00 CET we were about 1:1, past 22:00 CET WSR fielded more people and from 23:30 CET we often had the undermanned buff while WSR was still able to field rather large groups via WvW and TASH.

We have about the same situation in our current matchup so we lose almost everything over night (less than 10 people on a map defending against 30+ Zergs – usually 2 of them against different objectives) but from early morning on to early evening we can reclaim and upgrade.

As for active WvW population … as long as ANet does not provide numbers or re-posts the current queue-over-time diagrams … we can only guess. All I can say for my side is that at prime time we might get a queue on EB that rarely surpasses 4 people in it and no queue at all in any of the other borderlands.

Bubi.7942:

HtFde.3856:

… and Whiteside .. well, they do have a big Zerg with WvW and TASH but unless they’re 2:1 in numbers they usually show you their backsides and running skills

Uhm… what? Are we playing the same game?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sR0CQoak5jE
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JcUT7ETzX6Q
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HqDzKRM2cQg

First two videos are defending a structure not open field encounters which is what I was talking about. Last video … I have to watch this at home in full screen to see if that was a public mini zerk you encountered or not. If it was public there is no reason to be proud of farming players that have no communication (usually 1/4th of our publics go on TS and 3/4 for some unknown reason do not) with a group 2 mesmers and 1 thief – specially near Golanta with all those nice NPCs to hide in and to make sure you can’t be targetted when you become visible again … can’t read the guilds tags unless I am home … are you from OTAN – the loved to farm at that location with a thief/mesmer/engi or thief/thief/mesmer or thief/thief/engi team …

Nah, I’m from TasH, and actually these are not my own videos, but one of my guildie’s (as I cba to record), and I only feature in 1 and 3 (well I feature in 2 too, in guild chat compalining about forum complaining).

Yes, first video is defending a structure with ~15 against ~ 50 with no siege. Not sure why you want that to be open field.

Second is 3vs12. Yes, if they were equally skilled, 3v3 would be hard. The video is just there to question the statement: “but unless they’re 2:1 in numbers they usually show you their backsides and running skills”.

Anyway, I don’t really want to derail too much, most of the server descriptions above I find pretty accurate.

WSR/DZA have the biggest populations in T8/T9. WSR has more overall coverage while DZA has huge zerg during prime time and I barely see any roamers/people outside prime hours. Roaming on WSR bl is painful, although the server has some good small guilds/roamers.

FoW population seems volatile, one week they are so few, they get rekt all the time, next week they wipe the floor with us. Some really good roamers.

BT is the weakest of bronze league, most are not even bronze rank and die fast. The server has some good roamers but they are very few.

Vabbi was my home server for 1,5yr. They have good roamers and small guilds as well but lack regular commanders, when nobody tags up, very few roam.

UW has slightly smaller population than Vabbi, seems more organised tho. UW hasnt faced Vabbi since I transfered :/

Is there a differend meta on the lower servers??

Gearwise & Guild composition?

casual lol

Many people transfered to low tier from medium or high in the past but very few stayed longer then a week.
I would say there is a different meta down here but not gear or comp wise, more like mental wise
IPHIW ftw!

I have never been on a higher tier server, my home was WSR since ever (except for the first month when I started). With that said I “imagine” 3 main differences in the “meta”.

Firstly: because we generally have less people than silver or gold league, smaller guild groups are the norm. A Guild group of 15 is perfectly fine to do everything. That means that you can’t really afford people to be in the sniper/gank team however -> but since there are not many people, othe servers don’t really have them either, so there’s no one to “gank”. Generally Guards, Warriors and other melee train classes are always welcome.

The second difference being that small roaming groups make A LOT of difference. Even solo you can flip a few camps, if you are lucky maybe you can even flip a paper tower. A small group of 4-5 can cause a lot of dread in the borderlands.

The third thing is being a “family” like server (at least here, but I imagine the same for our bronze server fellows). I know the 95% of the people that I meet in WvW and who talk on map chat. It really is kinda personal (with all the up- and downsides of that).

@HtFde: I get the feeling you have some kind of blurred view on what’s the situation. I’m on WSR myself and what I observed is this: you have a lot more players than we do and can afford to have scouts in every keep and almost every tower. If one of your structures gets attacked, your scouts apparently message their friends and our rather small attack groups (in case the attack group isn’t a guild raid group) gets overrun by at least double the manpower that we brought.
Also, apparently there’s enough players on DZ that it actually is possible to build and maintain (retag) siege which isn’t really possible for us to do.
Yes, WSR has a rather good nightcap in comparison to DZ but starting from about 7 to 8 am german time DZ outnumbers us almost everywhere.
The fights you put up though aren’t really based on skill or commanding but on blobpower. Especially in EB there’s always a big blob of publics running around (30 – 40 I guess). In a WSR 1:1 DZ or 1:1,5 or sometimes even 1:2 situation DZ zergs lose against most of our guild groups of about 15 ppl from what I’ve seen.

A few days back I even met some guy from DZ in pvp who also said that DZs success is mainly based on manpower and outnumbered fights. He also said that WSR always puts up good fights. So I guess that your view of things is not exactly right.

To answer the question of the OP:
Blacktide: almost no organized groups and not exactly skilled roamers. Even in the last tier they are overwhelmed by the other servers.

Fissure of Woe: Also a quite low population. Can’t remember any roaming groups of FoW but sometimes you encounter a small group of them.

Underworld: Fought them last week. They have some organized groups (Wvw gone Rogue e.g.) during primetime but not much roamers. I guess, their “roamers” are mostly ppl doing their dailies. Population there is also quite low.

Vabbi: some good roamers are based on Vabbi though there’s almost only zergs during primetime, I guess. During the day there’s some small groups of maybe 5 – 10 ppl trying to take towers and a keep here and there. This week they really push hard into our corners and since friday we had some nice fights against evennumbered groups of Vabbi. We’ll see how that works out I don’t know what’s up with the guild VIN (vis in numeris) though. I think there’s quite a few of them but I mostly see them roaming. I guess it’s a roaming guild?

Fort Ranik: Are quite organized and my guess is that they have a little bit more ppl in WvW than we do (based on the numbers of players I’ve seen scouting and defending their BL while they still have zergs going on elsewhere). During primetime there are some organized (?) groups running around EB and the BL. They will defend their stuff in their BL really hard and apparently also have some communication going on between players. They also have some roaming groups here and there. FR also has some guilds that are seen in WvW quite often. I think I’ve seen GeT (or similar), ELCO (dat mistform warrior, lol!)… I don’t really remember guild tags and I’m fighting FR now for the second week since I’ve started to play again last year in october.

WSR: we have some guilds who are dedicated to WvW. We vanquish Worlds (WvW) and TasH are the most known although there are other guilds that try to make themselfes known
We have a bunch of roamers that also scout and stay in touch with commanders to inform them. During primetime we have 2 – 3 or sometimes 4 guilds raiding (WvW, TasH, Wolf, TT, CC) and during the day members of the WvW guilds and publics loosely group up to roam and/or take towers/keeps.

(wow, sorry. that post got longer than i initially planned ;D)

khornemuse.5930:

Hi,
My guild and I want to know the state of servers of low bronze tier in europe (Vabbi&co).
Is there nobody on map ? Roaming teams ? Some zergs ?
Thanks

Hey, Underworld here.

Most of the time there are small groups of people capturing objectives or doing their dailies. Zerg fights usually happen during the afternoon, sometimes a bit sooner than that. You won’t find many huge guilds with a zerg of 200+ people or anything like that. The WvW population of bronze servers is not that high, so most guilds are rather small but there are a couple of big ones.

Most people seem to play in EB unless the commander decides to go to another BL. I imagine that also applies to other servers like WSR, BT, and VABBI.
From what I’ve seen so far, all servers seem to have a decent amount of roamers, although many prefer to roam in a group.

wullxz.9574:

@HtFde: I get the feeling you have some kind of blurred view on what’s the situation. I’m on WSR myself and what I observed is this: you have a lot more players than we do and can afford to have scouts in every keep and almost every tower. If one of your structures gets attacked, your scouts apparently message their friends and our rather small attack groups (in case the attack group isn’t a guild raid group) gets overrun by at least double the manpower that we brought.
Also, apparently there’s enough players on DZ that it actually is possible to build and maintain (retag) siege which isn’t really possible for us to do.
Yes, WSR has a rather good nightcap in comparison to DZ but starting from about 7 to 8 am german time DZ outnumbers us almost everywhere.
The fights you put up though aren’t really based on skill or commanding but on blobpower. Especially in EB there’s always a big blob of publics running around (30 – 40 I guess). In a WSR 1:1 DZ or 1:1,5 or sometimes even 1:2 situation DZ zergs lose against most of our guild groups of about 15 ppl from what I’ve seen.

A few days back I even met some guy from DZ in pvp who also said that DZs success is mainly based on manpower and outnumbered fights. He also said that WSR always puts up good fights. So I guess that your view of things is not exactly right.

I only play home-defense and on EB – I play from maybe 19:00 German time earliest to like 1am latest … so this is the window and locations I can describe with no knowledge of what happens on the other borderlands and at other times.

As I already said … we dominated the matchup number wise until about 22:00 – from there on WSR had WAY more people (maybe UK because they’d be playing at 21:00 from their point of view)

As for scouts … we change them often and we usually have 2 in our third on WB – homeland is a bit more chaotic, so I can’t say for sure. Some people like to camp for hours at hills or bay.

Night tag – that’s obvious if you have UK players. They are one hour behind – same thing in the morning – we get up earlier than them but when we’re at work they can still play and recap what we did from 06:00 – 08:00

So if you have been playing during early morning and early night only you did indeed get a very accurate impression of DZ dominance. A few hours later, though, you’d have found the situation reversed.

I’ve played during all times of the day. If you mainly defend your structures you might get the impression that our groups run from half the numbers they are but most of the time we just can’t fight under siege. A player on siege weapons deals a lot more damage than one in the field. You just can’t compare that.

As for open field fights, I observered multiple times that DZ just blobs through our rather small groups during primetime or another guild from DZ backstabs us when we fight another group. Also, it happens a lot that a group of us is attacking some DZ structure and suddenly gets steamrolled by a group at least twice the size of ours obviously called in by your scouts.

Nods – a server wide TS is a nice thing to have, especially if you cannot field full maps everyhwere

wullxz.9574:

Vabbi: some good roamers are based on Vabbi though there’s almost only zergs during primetime, I guess. During the day there’s some small groups of maybe 5 – 10 ppl trying to take towers and a keep here and there. This week they really push hard into our corners and since friday we had some nice fights against evennumbered groups of Vabbi. We’ll see how that works out I don’t know what’s up with the guild VIN (vis in numeris) though. I think there’s quite a few of them but I mostly see them roaming. I guess it’s a roaming guild?

I like the fact that you give a somewhat accurate version on the situation on Vabbi but there are a few things that i want to point out/correct.

There aren’t only zergs. There are a few organised guilds on Vabbi. Something I mentioned in my previous post. Currently (this week) there are 2 active WvW guilds, SWAT and WAR. The issue is that people just stick to them. Simply because there is no other commander who wants to step up.

After being in t9 again last week, most of us realised it sucks to be in t9. We would get (omega) golem rushed by FoW atleast 4-5 times a day on our border. It was a little overkill, which made us stop upgrading our stuff. Which made it easier to cap it again.

This week we finally promoted back to t8 and so far we have been able to defend our border. Something we failed in the past. During primetime we often lack numbers to defend our border, fight on eb and push another border. Sometimes we get told our border needs help but turns out they would have been able to defend it.

The biggest mistake you made was saying that VIN is a roaming guild. VIN used to be the (only) biggest active pve guild on Vabbi. 3 weeks ago it disbanded because the leader and the officers transferred to Gunnars hold, Gandara or SFR. Some will still rep VIN for unknown reasons. For the last few months vin didn’t had a big influence in WvW anymore. This was because their main commander left to gandara.

cryokro.6270:

The biggest mistake you made was saying that VIN is a roaming guild. VIN used to be the (only) biggest active pve guild on Vabbi. 3 weeks ago it disbanded because the leader and the officers transferred to Gunnars hold, Gandara or SFR. Some will still rep VIN for unknown reasons. For the last few months vin didn’t had a big influence in WvW anymore. This was because their main commander left to gandara.

I guess that’s why I thought that VIN is a roaming guild
I think, last time we were up against Vabbi, VIN also had some bigger groups (15-20 ppl) …

I usually also don’t remember guild tags unless I see them very often or there’s something special about them (like condi bombing on DZ’s NOX blobs – apparently NOX doesn’t have teambuilds and every public just runs with roaming builds – or that hilarious mistform-warrior of elco ^^). But since you mentioned them, I remember the guildtag SWAT and WAR.

I’m thinking of getting back to WvW but my server (Gandara) mostly plays with blobs or some organized guild running. I was all weekend in WvW and didn’t saw much roamers from my and other servers.

I have a week computer, blobs aren’t for me, I can’t see anything and can’t enjoy the fight. That why I tend to focus on roaming. I was in Underworld and I enjoyed the roaming there, but came to Gandara because of my guild and the constant blobs just made my left WvW.

From what I’ve seen here WSR and Vabbi look like really good options for what I’m looking for. WSR looks like it has more organized zergs If I ever want to play with that but Vabbi seems to have stronger guilds for small group roaming.

I’ve a build on my Guardian for Roaming and Zerging and a build on my Thief for Roaming or backline killing on enemy zergs.

From these 2 I want to focus on just one, when I have that decision made I’m pretty sure I will want to change servers.

mPascoal.4258:

From what I’ve seen here WSR and Vabbi look like really good options for what I’m looking for. WSR looks like it has more organized zergs If I ever want to play with that but Vabbi seems to have stronger guilds for small group roaming.

If it is small group roaming (3-5) then I think FoW and WSR have the most groups to fight. That said, solo and duo roaming is fine on all servers(way better than T1 solo roaming anyway ^^).