Guild Wars 2

Sirbeaumerdier.3740:

Well, beating a thief with a D/D build and doing so with a staff (what I play with most of the time when I roam) are two very different propositions. A lot here seem to assume D/D when they answer or are facing pretty bad thieves to face roll them with any weapons…

A staff ele should never be able to kill a thief since pretty much all of the damage is delayed (note: should never be, there are baddies). Can be a hard time for the thief as well though.

That subcommander commander thing is meh. But it would be useful to give commanders their own chat. Including ALL commanders commanding on ALL WvW map (scratch EoTM). Might be especially usefull on silver and bronze league where zergs are being rotated around to defend waypoints (usually means that the EB blob comes to home border to defend garri). This way you don’t have to send some poor bugger to the other map and scream it out there.

Could be reworked into

“When you critically hit your enemy you also daze your target for <insert time>”. This should get some serious cooldown ofcourse, something along the lines of 20 seconds. The only thing I still do not like about this is that you cannot control the daze for skillful play.

Sifu.9745:

What is the best Ele weapon vs Thief? Staff, Scepter, Daggers? You all just talk about different kind of Thieves and their builds, but you forgot to give us some feedback on ele weapons and builds as well:) Like it’s obvious that Daggers are the only choice? What about Scepter? What about cleric staff?

You can use other options, but D/D is the easiest. Why? All skills are untargeted so its allot easier to do damage to him in stealth. You are also allot tankier which allows you to make an unbelievable amount of mistakes.

S/D-F is allot harder, since you need a target, you are squishier but you’ll do more damage aswell.

Staff is only good in solo/team Q for 1v1’s imo. You can control a node with your AoE. In WvW, where the thief can go where he wants to and doesn’t have to keep the node contested you might aswell just take the run while leaving CC behind.

Esplen.3940:

Well, in PvE, most mobs don’t attack more than once every 2 seconds (if not longer), anyways. They might have some strikes that hit more than once, but you really shouldn’t have an avoid-all button, scratch that, you shouldn’t have a prevent-all-damage-while-letting-yourself-and-team-kill-mobs-without-repercussion button.

And “spamming” (not mashing) Pistol5 isn’t very intuitive gameplay. Even Warrior requires more thought than that, and that says a lot… especially coming from me… and talking about a Warrior. The most thought you have to put into it is:
Is my field down? Y/N.
If Y: Drop field. Repeat from top.
If N: Repeat from top.

1. Your loop is bugged. The N part of the loop never loops to Y.
2. PvP argument invaled. You can’t spam the black powder since there’s something called an initiative pool. Just step out of the circle and move on. Its not like that it has an enormous range.
3. PvE argument is conditionally invalid. It will be invalid as long as the AI is still kittened enough to be whopped in to a corner, where 5 zerkers can a chop it to pieces in seconds.

Some other do’s/don’t are:

• Preemptively using your stability if you see him pop basilisk venom. The trickery thiefs will just strip it (or actually, steal it), and the shadow arts thiefs will just wait 7 seconds in stealth for it to drop off. (You don’t want to know how much this useless preemptive utility popping occurs)
• Always, always watch your and their boons when fighting S/D thieves. They will try to steal your carefully build might stacks. Protect these with other boons at all times, if he manages to steal them anyway and he still has a high amount of health its time for you to start stalling the fight using your FGS, RTL, CC, etc. Your damage just plunged and theirs went through the ceiling. On the other hand if they’re lowish on HP too you might as well try and burst them anyway, but be unpredictable.
• Don’t backpedal (aka, walk backwards) a simple infiltrator signet takes them to you and they will run forwards faster then you to get behind you for a backstab. Backpedaling is a bad practice in general in my opinion.
• Don’t stand still. If he’s in stealth, keep moving. As random as possible while spamming lightning whip (annoying as kitten, believe me). Moving makes it just that little bit harder to backstab.
• Don’t panic and pop everything because you took an 8K backstab. kitten happens, he hit you – use things like aura’s first – you’ll still have 8-12K health left anyway depending on your total health. If you insta popped everything they’ll just sit back and wait for a few seconds for it all to drop off and then fry your butt knowing you have nothing left.
• Poison is poisonous stuff, if you’re using the signet heal. Get rid of it. Fast. Preferably yesterday then now.
• DON’T STAND IN BLACKPOWDERS. It is beyond my understanding why Anet had to nerf this skill. It should not be necessary. Nerfs should be there for things which are forced upon you, like traits – you can’t change your enemy’s traits. You can change your own positioning, though. You should never take more then 1 blind from these things which is fine because he most likely cast it on top of your kitten . But please.. just LEAVE IT AFTER HE CASTED IT. You can perfectly apply melee damage while he’s standing in it. DO SO. (NB: this message is mostly to our zerging 1 spam warriors/guardians). And you will do more damage by taking the time to walk out of it, believe me.

That’ll be the basics. Its quite a read and list, but thiefs are supposed to be the master of 1v1’s and small skirmishes, aren’t they? It takes some time and experience to get used to several flavors of thief.

Depends on what kinda thief you’re dealing with..

The shadow arts thief
Pretty common, both in power and condition form. They’re in the lower bracket of dealing direct damage, but the numbers can still go pretty high on ele’s with strength runes (5-10K depending on your squishyness). The danger in these builds is the extreme survival, especially in the D/P variant. There’s no excuse for a D/P to die in a 1v1 if he does play right. Its basically a “failed, try again”-process. The idea is to try and get a good row of backstabs in (3 in a row is usually the end of the (bunker) ele) and if he/she failed retreat into stealth to generate health. You’ll have to try and lure him out of stealth while you know he has no stunbreakers, because really – with stunbreakers up its just impossible to burst them (as a d/d). If you can’t get him to do so and he’s doing a decent job of dodging your fire burst you might aswell just take out the fgs and take off, he’ll find a hole in you to put his dagger through with time. It might be (a bit) lame, but its highly effective. Especially in situations where the thief is outmanned.

Trickery power builds
These are the OMGWTFBBQ power house builds. They’re standard in PvP and the (EU) GvG scene. It are high risk, high reward builds. They are incredibly squishy but the DPS in beyond insane. Both parties can’t really afford mistakes; if you make a mistake he’ll dagger your kitten , but on the other hand its allot easier to burst these guys. Skills like drakes breath are notorious killers for these thiefs since they have little to no condi removal, so they’re excelent methods to get these thiefs within burstable HP ranges.

S/D builds
Can be played with or without trickery. The one without trickery has more dps, but with trickery has better sustain (healing from mug), vigor from bountiful. Don’t throw all burst in at once with these guys at the start, all builds mentioned above are slippery due to the massive use of stealth, S/D doesn’t. It has an abundant amount of dodges and shadow steps.

Fighting a good thief requires you to play 2 games at once; first of all GW2 (you can leave now, captain O) and a mind game. Especially with elementalists since your attunements are on display for everyone (when you attune to fire you’re not about to heal yourself, are you?). And sometimes you might already be dead before you even realized it (thank you, Ice Shard Stab.

Evan Lesh.3295:

Summary so far:

• Pre-match filters will increase queue times.
• Voting per-match does not increase queue time.
• Add some amount of randomness.
• Avoid chances of encountering non-stop cheese builds.

Cheese builds exist in this game. However I am against cheese builds (not to be mistaken for meta builds), I do not think that the solo/team queue is the place to address these players.

What (in my humble opinion) would be an awesome feature is that class stacking is reduced. You have these matches where you’re stuck with 3 or 4 of the same classes. Generally this doesn’t lead to very good results and I think it isn’t too hard to prevent.

Two of the same classes isn’t a problem, in some cases that can only be really good. But from 3 and on wards (and yes, it doesn’t happen very often but it’s not even close to rare either) is where the problems start arising.

It can be channeled with everything with a casting time, with churning earth being one of the least useful ( a skilled player will dodge anyway, its not like you just invented something new, he’ll see it coming). Most useful I find burning speed + lightning flash or fire grab + LF

Deli.1302:

Facet.5914:

It’s possible that I’m not fully up to date with the latest results, but as far as I knew [EP] only lost to [ST]. If that is accurate then the only conclusion that can be drawn is that the top GvG guild in the game atm is EU. Which is a conclusion that pertains to a single guild, not a group of “top guilds.” If my knowledge of the results is indeed outdated then I apologize, I get all of that information 2nd-hand or later.

I would be interested to hear observations and comparisons from [EP] reps, since they are the only group that has recently faced both regions. Certainly if they felt a pattern that would carry a lot of weight.

EP lost to ST, DISS and iNK. That’s three EU guilds.

Make it 4 (VII).

Silent Shino.7239:

49 phase retreat on the mesmer sometimes causes the mesmer to be completely immobilized and it’s impossible to get out of unless you use blink. (I’m not meaning the condition)

50 lag occuring at random times even though there’s very few people on from any server

51 my favourite one that I secretly don’t want fixed: elementalists occasionally getting a mesmer clone through one of their reflect skills, it happens so rarely that I’m not entirely certain what causes it.

The scepter autoattack makes clones (3rd of the chain I think) if you reflect that (class doesn’t matter) you get a clone ^^

Its usually not the raw power coming out of a thief (sometimes it is, tho) that makes players up set, it is usually the fact that people can’t wrap their heads around a thief. The best mesmer isn’t a mesmer, but a thief. If I would get 1 silver for every person that stops throwing out AoE/autoattacks as soon as I vanish in stealth I’d be really rich. If I’d get another silver for every person trying to face tank me in black powders, well lets not even go there.

Most people fall for the joke “stealth = invul”. You won’t beat a decent one by just blowing your crap into them in those 3 seconds.

Thanks for the fun after the GvG YaK
Grtz,
Wu thiefs

Vissarion.6509:

This is the cause i log in rarely now, eles are not that fun anymore and i can’t play other classes, even though they feel superior to us.

I don’t hold my breath for this tuesday, every time i wait for something good i get dissapointed in the end. Let’s wait and see..

Just a question to arenanet: why are we always the first target at pvp (spvp and wvw)??

We are the first target because we might be squisy but mostly because (that is why I target enemy eles) if you leave one unpressured they will deal massive aoe damage.

Bagi.8530:

you can’t even do the “nightmare unveiled” solo instance as elementalist

God, you have to be kidding me, right? I steam rolled that kitten. You should steam roll it. All they do is put a bunch of condi’s on you, shake it off with ER and you good.

I suppose that people tagging up because they weren’t killing me could be taken as a compliment? To not harass anyone I won’t give you the name of the server where these people came from, but I can tell you that this server has an enormous PvE player base.

Columbo.5924:

Karolis.4261:

Goes for Gunars Hold. Thx for whoever reported me bashing about Anet’s choices made to make www as it is now. Blobby, laggy and unplayable for anyone but keyboard mashing zerglets. Got banned only for 72 h, but be sure ( with your help) I will try my best to make it a perma ban next time.

I’m sorry to hear that. Though I don’t know what your exact words were, I can imagine that somebody was really trying hard to get as much out of this rather broken matchup as possible and the last thing he/she wanted to read was another rant on the public chat. I guess everyone here will agree that the patch showed the good and the bad things about the current state of WvW in GW2.

I know it is hard not to get worked up with the current matchup. There is a very large disparity in population, that is even increased by national holidays (this week a lot of Germans are on vacation/holidays – including our most important raid leaders).

I guess we can both agree that underworld has a lot of rebuilding to do, but the low numbers suprised me a lot. Even with guilds leaving I expected it to be still full, but more a loosely orgnized PuG group flocking around (or multiple groups for that matter). At least that is what its like on Abaddon when no commander is around. When I hit LFG for a dungeon it’s like a 50% chance its either filled with desolation or underworld players, so I don’t thing you are lacking in numbers of players on your server. This is a bit strange.

Kudos to all the players on both Underworld and Gunnar’s Hold that have not given up !

Underworld has always been a PvE server, even with all the guilds left it still has a High Pop ranking (but as said, its mostly PvE).

Columbo.5924:

Very much the same happened to Flare [FIRE] (currently on Aurora Glade, and I suppose at least the underworld guys know where they came from … ). They disbanded because of the infamous bloodlust patch. They are now back in action.

Everyone just needs a break from time to time. If they enjoyed the game they will come back pretty soon i think, bursting blobs and hunting guys like me. A leopard cannot change its spots

They were on RoF or FoW if I’m right (?)

Gorrok.3187:

AM BL mill for duels
have to practice with my twinks

kitten off with your bull kitten nobs. Don’t try to lure people there to jump on them with 3 or so.

Had some great fun this night Both roaming and in zergs I really hope you guys from FR enjoyed your flight back to the WP after our magnificient showoff with the defensive golem. To bad you shove that golem right up where it came from @hills

Something weird happend today on Underworld.. I still can’t really understand it :S

Muchos love to the 3 fsp trying to get me in fr hills. Was a fun fight.

General theme of Underworld right now:

For the record: we didn’t want to lose Xroads on uw border.

Rather be stomped then PvD 7 weeks long is prolly going to be my spirit.

It totally depends on what you prefer. If you got a decent PC care the most about zerg v zerg and fast phase wvw (i.e. no T3 kitten and all) go for the higher tiers of wvw. Piken Square (been there, done that) runs mostly on guilds and guilds only (completly dead at night, but ultra strong during prime). They have a great community and what not. Same goes for Dragonbrand (real good SEA coverage).

If you also care about some smaller scale go to middle tier (GH, AG (both have some scarely good guilds)).

The main difference is that you’ll be rofl stomped allot less if you’re running alone/small group in the middle tier.

Ahh yeh, then the queue’s. Every server above the rank of ~16/17 will have queue’s during prime time.

Attacking a keep these days is by means of speaking ‘90% in favor of the attacker’. How is that, then? Well, you got all those shiny masteries and in the spot light the ram mastery. Drop a few guards on the rams, couple ele’s or rangers nearby for a few waterfields and you should be good to go. Defending from this without a group big enough to actually run outside and wipe them it is really hard to defend. The only way is by having several (read: 3+) superior AC’s ready and manned before they even started ramming.

Having a waypoint (and prolly atleast a T2 keep) requires a certain ‘silence’ around that keep and its camps (you all know what I mean, the dollies can walk there in peace). Getting that waypoint and all those upgrades done takes (usually) great effort of a smaller group of players. If you can’t be bothered stopping the upgrades, you’ll be punished for it.

Silent Shino.7239:

screw it, this is too much drama even for me, time to start posing random photos

ps. great guide Twinny

I want AG again. (Read: I want AG again to chase down Realta Nua with the entire zerg)

kitten girls, this thread goes way to fast

Dranul.2094:

Good to see the map hopping is strong in a lot of so called roaming guilds. Was a shame could of been a much more action packed week.

To many zerging this week, mostly from millers side as you rarely see them 5-. I’m not gonna sit duck and wait for the next train where I have to perma stealth my kitten out. I’d rather hop a border and see if life is better there.

My guild used to siege, upgrade and protect hills + camps to the max (ask the aurora’s, far shivers and gunnars, hehe). However, since the ram mastery we just can’t be bothered with it anymore. Why? Gates go down so much faster, so if you’re even there in time (outer is quite often allready gone with that mastery), then you need a decent number (3+) of superior arrow carts to hit through the 50% (or more) damage negotiation and water blast healing.

So what are you saying with this not so well hidden QQ about the ram mastery? Well I think the idea of the OP is great, but I’m not willing to defend a camp because I can defend a camp. And if its so hard to defend an upgraded keep there is no need to.

(Please take note that not every server has 24/7 coverage with a zerg to wipe outside and that people manning an AC is all you have from time to time)

This would be horific. On low pop servers it might work, but on high pop servers this chat will literaly explode. Enabeling such a feature for commanders would be really good though.

Dammit. Underword’s infiltration in anet didn’t fix our score to be first.

:D

Underworld beating the crap out out of FR and JS, GG

Okaishi.8320:

Well, I’m GuM’s arch traitor, as they so fondly refer to me nowadays, so I expected my bounty to be high. And it doesn’t seem like I can trust my guildies from TUP to protect me either! That bounty seems to be doing a good job of winning them over :P

It’s kinda cute that you still believe there will be no stealth trap

Outmanned on homeborder at reset you wot mate? Atleast we get better loot for what we do manage to kill

Hello AG again, has been a while – WB MS! Have fun everyone!

PS. Realta we are comming for you. The bounty on your head is big.

Sandra Martino.3870:

VaaCrow.3076:

As for benefit, What benefit does running away give? is it rewarded with badges and wxp and realm points? same as kiling a player, capping a tower, camp is? Thought not, you wouldn’t understand i guess.

Well… yes, running away to a group about to capture a tower/keep/camp does indeed award that :P

And seriously, (Almost) everyone from Kale, DW and Punk runs a teambuild. There is no point to fight back against roamers.

Just get your butts on UW, then the massive amount of UW roamers will protect your kitten

Wizard.4056:

Try come back tonight during our prime time for some real fights.

That is the problem with nights, tidal. We walk down every door without much effort. Good scouting this night tho on millers.

majos.8503:

This is a blob. (Elona)

I think there is a huge diference between what is a blob and what do you think that it is.

Yeah yeah, and sfr can do that even better. But you have to put things into perspective. In T1/2 30 people is not a blob, here it is.

Shadowresli.3782:

had a nice raid on UW borderland last evening. Kudos to the thief and the two bodies from GuM in Garrison, you really showed persistence. also nice fighting some time later in garrison, i had to run back from spawn 3 times until you capped.

yeah, the screens also express my experiences

The thief here. Had allot of fun stealthing in there. I was spotted verry early (not intended) and 20 people started searching.. So no way I could rez the mesmers therefore decided to have some fun and see how long I could stretch it and keep you out of the battlefield Ended up dieing in the end because I hit something accedently.

Belma.3986:

Its a bad MatchUp System of Anet. How can you let battle David with Goliath, while David has a broken leg. Ok , ok, not the best Comparison , but its close to what i mean. If you would have more population on your server (you dont, so you have a broken leg) , you would have more players on your maps, not only guilds,but a lot of randoms (pugs) . Try to organize these pugs without an commander tag – an i ll clapp. Its not easy for our commanders.

That is why they invented tags

Lutto.8745:

Same old golemrush against all keeps at nighttime.. Golemworld

[SLAY] dosent want to play against other people? since you only run this late on EU..

Coverage, is what some people call it. Nightcrap is what others call it. And no, it is not an american guild.

Dzent.2750:

I really don’t see what all the whining is about tbh, ok yes GH has single handed brought the price of omega golems up on the trading post, but if they want to waste there money then let them.
All i have to say is that i have a lot of respect to GH warriors, i have not seen a single signet warrior all the time i have been fighting you, if only other servers could learn from your warrior then WvWvW would be free from the dirty scum that is signet warriors.
Anyway thanks for the fun fights and hope to see you guys again soon (not too soon maybe after omega’s cost 3g on the TP).
Dee

I have a little black book and I note down the names of every signet warrior I come across so I can burn them in their sleep. Want to have a look?

Runty Choir.4893:

To the Guardian from Mayh guild on UW who i chased around most of EB fought both you and your friend as i was about to win you both ran. I then caught you yet again and was about to win when a friend of yours showed up and you 2v1 me. Fair do, its open world WvW. But for you both to laugh after. What were you laughing at? Your inability to 1v1 me or your PvP skills in general?

kitten happens. Also you gunnars do that kitten.

ballyboy.9143:

Hey GuM, are we still walking lootbags? How do you like NNF now? it is not wise to poke a sleeping lion. One last thing, to the Mesmer dead in Your hills you may aswell respawn, i am very proficiant at 1v1 and 1v2, so you are not being ressed. Oh and Enjoy the pic of the lootbag that gave me an exotic, Thanks again

Ah. You indeed succesfully managed to camp an ele. And in case this was an invite to duels, it would be an honor to accept.

gagi.4012:

Avatar Yirachi.7162:

ZhouFusion.1826:

So far i been really loveing this match up.

UW has a Huge force in every border. it seems u got atleast 400+ players spread out across the bls.
AS seeems to lack players to really push into GH/UW border. i seen u guys in EB with loads and on your own border with loads.
I do sometimes wonder if AS Servers uses the right tactics.
Cause stacking in a keep with 60players while there is only 30 outside is a bit confusing to me.60 Should eazyly bulldozer us 30 flat.
But if thats your tactic then i am fine with that. (aslong as it works for ya =-P)

Sometimes i would love to see a bit more open field battles but thats just my personal taste of playing.
Keep it up and don’t give up.

Its really not that many :o Wouldn’t even be possible, since ~100 people creates a queue. During prime time usually homeborder and EB are queued (especially EB, 20+ minute queue’s are pretty common during the extreme peak times), GH border usually has a guild or two in it and AS border is outmanned.

And man, that bay defence You almost had more AC’s then our friends from Fort Arrowcart. GJ though!

And Aberstone isn’t their former glory anymore, the people that did stay on the server and still fight for it do deserve a medal tho.

It was just 3 or 4 arrow carts rest was regular players AOE, u were lucky Arb was on inner of hills with 25+ at same time ur Super Pug Death Machine blob was on inner of bay we missed timeloop to set up at lords and u took bay, it was undefended it the end Cheers for determination though. We wiped u at bay so many times prior to that

I death scouted bay to spot the arrow carts :P It wasn’t 3 or 4 XD. 4 on the wall above center gate, 1 on supply depo, 1 more to the south on the wall and I think one in the back of lords.

We just wanted to use the front door :P Another tactic could be to just build a treb and take ’m all out and walk straight in.

ZhouFusion.1826:

So far i been really loveing this match up.

UW has a Huge force in every border. it seems u got atleast 400+ players spread out across the bls.
AS seeems to lack players to really push into GH/UW border. i seen u guys in EB with loads and on your own border with loads.
I do sometimes wonder if AS Servers uses the right tactics.
Cause stacking in a keep with 60players while there is only 30 outside is a bit confusing to me.60 Should eazyly bulldozer us 30 flat.
But if thats your tactic then i am fine with that. (aslong as it works for ya =-P)

Sometimes i would love to see a bit more open field battles but thats just my personal taste of playing.
Keep it up and don’t give up.

Its really not that many :o Wouldn’t even be possible, since ~100 people creates a queue. During prime time usually homeborder and EB are queued (especially EB, 20+ minute queue’s are pretty common during the extreme peak times), GH border usually has a guild or two in it and AS border is outmanned.

And man, that bay defence You almost had more AC’s then our friends from Fort Arrowcart. GJ though!

And Aberstone isn’t their former glory anymore, the people that did stay on the server and still fight for it do deserve a medal tho.

TwoBit.5903:

I’ll trade Lingering Elements for Renewing Stamina any day of the week.

The lingering elements of earth (if you have atleast 5 points in earth) is pretty nice tho. Free 80 thoughness.

Am I reading this correct? An ele is ‘crying’ about the access to boons? LOLOLOL