Guild Wars 2

I partially watched the SOAC tournament that was going on last evening/night and one thing i think could be beneficial would be to show skills that players are using and show if they are on cooldown. That way the casters/spectators would have easier time calling “power moves” like players using elite skills if they could see that X mesmer used time warp and X engineer dropped a supply crate in to a fight. They are visible currently, yes, but if caster/spectator misses the animation of the skill, they miss a whole lot of what’s happening in the fight.

If the skills were visible in spectator mode under player names for example it would be easy to see when players decide to use their utilities and elites in a fight. This would lead into the spectators being able to follow the fights much easier.

Arrow carts can deal more damage than any single person ever could do, isn’t that just smart?

Also we’ve been in tier 1 for so long that it’s become second nature to hole up in towers since vizunah outmans you 3:1 most of the time and it hardly matters how kittenty the players who outman you 3:1 are, you will have hard time winning the fights with your pug group(which desolation currently mostly consists of).

I personally wouldn’t mind running with organized 20 man groups like i did before when we had pure WvW guilds in Desolation. With our pugs though, you do what it takes to win fights.

Thanks for all the fights at SFR borderlands today. We had few close calls in Hills keep until SFR finally took it and those fights were really intensive.

Don’t be too disappointed on Desolation if you have hard time finding guild groups roaming around. Most of our pure WvW guilds are not here anymore(we still have some) and the ones that are left are mostly PvX. Most likely you will find “Deso blob” running around in borderlands, but maybe at times you might be positively surprised to find individual guilds moving as groups.

Situation(in my eyes) currently is so that we have to organize our wvw groups from multiple guilds with maybe a backbone of 10-15 from one guild at a time.

I do have to commend SFR guilds already for their fighting ability. Today in SFR borderlands we had to cover what we lacked in skill/build/organisation with tenacity and siege weapons.

Thanks to all the new Desolation people who joined us in our community teamspeak! It’s really nice to see more and more new people willing to join us and listen!

Also not going to pull allnighters anymore, i’ll just leave it for today. Our server seems to suffer from identity crisis atm, since we had to paint stuff green, i’m sure it will sort itself out as we go along.

Ok, last night of WvW against viz done. Hopefully Anet’s ranking fix will make it so that you aren’t stuck fighting the same server for months on end anymore. One thing you can say from vizunah at least is that they will always be there to fight, i hope tier 2 will also have opponents to clash with.

Thanks everyone for your support at Deso border today, was a lot of fun.

And finally grats to Elona for 2nd victory and i wish you good luck against the French.

Oh also looking forward to finally a new matchup, let’s make it a good one!

Lots of fun today at Vizunah borderlands. Thanks GoD and GT!

Need to practice a bit more against GD to get down the proper “stop the melee train”.

As for EB, it has been a long time since i last had so much lootbags filling my inventory in such a short period of time. Thanks Ins&Co for the karma train.

Crazy evening/night in EB today, constant action when we got hit by elona and viz almost nonstop through whole evening. Thanks to all the Deso people for following! In the end i think our pug zerg was able to win most fights and even managed to take T3 SM in the end(although not me commanding anymore at that time).

Actually it’s not impossible to get our pugs into teamspeak Deniara =). I was actively inviting people to join us and validated around 10 new people to our community teamspeak yesterday alone.

But as stated before, Desolation doesn’t currently have the manpower to fight on all borderlands at once. We’ve lost a good ~10 WvW guilds past months and that amounts to good 200-300 WvW players. Currently we have mostly PvX guilds and few smaller WvW guilds holding Desolation. A good opportunity i think is that we have some remnants of those WvW guilds staying in Desolation and getting them to join our active guilds could help out a lot. Currently our “zergs” consist of individual members from 20’ish different guilds which doesn’t really help that much organisation wise unless we get everyone to join teamspeak.

I do agree that our servers current WvW strenght is likely somewhere around tier 3-5, if even that. Hopefully ranking system gets updated soon and the european WvW rankings will become more accurate. I assume there are servers who are much more deserving to fight in tier 1 and tier 2 than us. This however is completely Arenanets issue to solve as with the current system servers are able to game the rankings to avoid correct movement of servers. I personally think a system of “winner moves up, loser moves down” would make that useless as there would always be movement and it would make the matchups much more fresh and exciting. Sure most servers would be battling mostly same 5-6 servers, but at least you wouldn’t be stuck fighting the same 2 for months on end.

Fun times in Viz borderlands today. We started with 10 people and ended up getting our side of the map eventually. We even got to assault cragtop at one point when we actually weren’t outmanned.

In the end lost our keep to 4 times bigger viz zerg. I guess we could have held it if we built 10 more arrow carts, but oh well.

Thanks to people in VZ borderlands for putting up an effort!

I just realized that this friday will be the last day for this thread. Solid couple months of the same matchup.

Now that we have custom arenas available and we are able to organize(and spectate/cast) some actual tournaments/team matches, has anyone though about organizing a highlander format tournament?

If someone isn’t familiar what i’m talking about, a highlander format would mean that each team would only field 1 of each class in their teams(1 warrior, 1 guardian, 1 mesmer etc). I’m (obviously) borrowing this idea from Team Fortress 2 where highlander is one of the competitive formats they use in tournaments. The interesting dynamic in this kind of game is that you can actually compare the classes in each time to one another and see which one does a better job(“engineer in team A was able to hold close point for his team while engineer in team B was having hard time against team A thief”). Also each team is able to call out when they manage to take out a specific class and they don’t need to deal with that class for the next while.

What is your opinion on watching, participating or organizing 8v8 highlander tournament now that custom arenas are available? Would you be interested in following such games?

I’m personally not in a position(at least currently) where i can organize such things nor am i good enough player to actually compete in such matches(unless it’s a casual tournament), but i think this could be one interesting type of matches that could be organized. I’m not certain if current map pool would allow a decent set up for such games, but it would be something different at least(normally you only see multiples of few classes duking it out and rarely you see all/most classes in one team).

Opinions?
Thoughts?
Cookies?

What do you mean failed Qwixx? They won 5 weeks straight.

They should just lock borderland maps between 3 am and 12 am(or some similar timeframe) and let people who don’t sleep or wake up early duke it out in eternal battlegrounds. My experience is that during the off hours, it’s all about borderlands hopping to cap/defend stuff, since nobody has enough people to fill more than 1 borderland, if even that.

Also like many people said, the point system is awful and servers seem to be gaming it quite hard. Vizunah gamed it before by having “power weeks” where they would acquire points as much as possible and then they could take 1-2 weeks off and have no fear of dropping even if they lost badly. SFR and Deso have been actively trying to drop tiers past 2 weeks while on the other hand Elona and Jade Sea have been actively trying not to score too much points to not get promoted to tier 1. This leads to tiers being locked the same. Deso has been in tier 1 for 3 months straight, SFR has been in tier 1 for 2+. It would actually be somewhat refreshing to fight some new guilds and tactics etc for once, but i don’t see that happening anytime soon, as servers are still actively gaming the ranking system.

Of course there is the option of actually transferring, but i consider myself fairly loyal player(been in deso since the start) and i like the people i play with in here. In my opinion a simple “winner moves up, loser drops down” system would make things a bit more interesting as you wouldn’t be stuck playing against the same enemies 2+months straight.

Well done velocity in EB. You guys are hard to kill.

kitten yea perkele. Fun fighs in EB.

Yaro.3251:

Genev.2450:

Teel.9036:

Blobs still up at this hour…!

http://i.imgur.com/TcQ4RXo.jpg

(worst thing is there’s 15 to the right of me outside of the screen, couldn’t zoom far back enough!)

I see myself!
Barely in the screen, a bit off to the distance as always :p

All GHs on this screenshot except one have survived and retreated into Bay safely, I might add. And that one careless m8 wasn’t Amuraag.

Found myself in the screenshot too! Against those numbers we were somewhat out of options so had to tail it out to bay(i made it out alive too)

I agree with Sacrx, this patch is epic. Finally WvW starts to look like proper warfare with waves of enemies running against you. There were many “oh kitten” moments tonight, when you see the masses of enemy rushing on you. If only there wasn’t that skill lag preventing actual gameplay in bigger fights. FPS seems to be a lot more manageable in bigger fights now than before on worse computers(like mine).

A bit late to the SS party, but here is mine from EB:

http://img826.imageshack.us/img826/7853/gw368n.jpg

The glorious blobs are finally revealed. Some insane 60vs60vs60 fights. Now if only we could get rid of skill lag, i’d be thrilled. Good update so far though!

Fun fights against [RIP] in EB today. I hope you guys liked our golem rush in the end.

I think this video perfectly summarizes how reset went for EXG in EB.

The lag in Eternal Battlegrounds produced some really hilarious and also frustrating stuff. It’s fun to have large scale fights though, i just wish the servers wouldn’t be crying every time they happen.

That defense was epic indeed. 2nd best defense of the night was at VZ borderlands hills keep where desolation defenders were outmanned 3:1, but still managed to stop the attack from vizunah. 3rd best one was when Moorta came to the rescue at deso borderlands when our Garrison was under heavy siege.

Fun night altogether. I hope our morning/day team can take off from where we left.

Thanks to GD guild from Elona in Eternal Battlegrounds for the fights. You guys were outmanned, but showed a lot of fighting spirit and used tactics that would have likely worked if you guys weren’t outnumbered. Didn’t back off from fights and tried taking on bigger group.

Agreed Khimael, that lag was just horrid. Was fun fighting against you guys though!

Shout out to our asian shift too, was fun running around sweeping vizunah attacks down again and again.

I have to say that the queue’s on desolation primetime kind of killed this week for me for starters. Finally past 2 days no queue’s even to EB and finally getting together with few guildies to do some stuff.

It has been a while since i enjoyed WvW “as is” without caring for points or objectives and just doing some random stuff. We ran as small guild group leveling our lowbies by capping camps and even towers. Btw, thanks for the VZ who was trebbing from stonemist, gave us 2 free caps of anza, our lowbies liked the extra exp. Also thanks to the friendly elona who dropped us karma banner on our route, that karma boost sure came handy =)

I see vizunah is still using zoom hacks to target with their arrow carts.

Maybe arenanet will actually allow all arrow carts to use top down view, so you will lose your advantage.

Fun fights at VZ and deso border today though.

Yes, ofc it was several towers. I was more referring to as you took 1 tower and held it for a long time at a time and then went on to next one. Good job in any case.

The queue’s in Desolation primetime are just horrible. We had our members stuck in queue for 2 hours+ and finally giving up when they couldn’t get in. On the other hand it’s really nice to have so many organized guilds in Deso, on the other hand it’s really pain in the kitten to try get your own group together in same place.

I would answer “@desolation lacks organisation” with “we can’t get our whole guild groups together inside, so we are stuck with 50% of this guild, 20% of that guild and 30% of pugs” running around, so the organisation isn’t the best. This situation is somewhat new to desolation i think, haven’t had these queue’s before last week i think, so it’s somewhere we need to improve ourselves: getting our different groups or part of them to work better together. I already see it improving though.

As for fights themselves, i’m having a lot of fun battling. We were running around EB for past 2 days with our 10-20 guild members and battling BB and kodash main zergs head on Although it ended up us wiping a lot of the times, many times we were able to show floor to you guys.

Thanks Kodash and BB for putting up a fight. You both are very resilient in holding your territories.

Also lol @Golden Horde taking a tower and farming kills whole evening today.

Eternal battlegrounds couldn’t handle the awesomeness that was going on in there. It imploded on itself.

Good fights SFR and VZ.

I myself like this T1 matchup. The original reason for desolation moving up tiers was, because there was hardly nothing to fight for in tier 2. Blacktide was in decline/not playing and arborstone couldn’t keep up with our numbers. SFR has always been strong competition whenever our servers met and they have many organized and good guilds. Vizunah i’m slightly torn on. On the other hand i respect the fact that you guys have been top dog for so long and are still competitive. On the other side of things the fact that only guild i’ve ran into that comes out and actually fights even outmanned is War Legend. I do like the fact though that in order to beat you, as guilds, we have to be able to win fights while outnumbered by 1:2 or 1:3 or more and it’s really exciting when you actually do it. Also gives us incentive to improve constantly.

I did prefer a matchup against Arbor and Elona in T2 in december over this current one as there was less night capping and more fierce fights during prime time(i remember fighting with IRON against OPT and MOSS zergs and those were some of the best fights i’ve had). We didn’t win that matchup, but it was extremely fun.

The sad fact is/was that outside tier 1 the other servers can’t field enough players to make a competitive matchup against the current form of our server. I was bored out of my mind last week when we steamrolled T2(no offense towards BT or arbor). So thank you SFR and VZ for giving us competition, i’m looking forward to next weeks fights.

Only true gripe about T1 for me is that my computer chokes badly when big zergs run into each other and the occasional skill lag that also occurs during it(good luck fighting when you can get 1 skill through per 5 seconds). It would also be kind of fun to actually see the enemy you fight, before one side is dead.

Also big thanks to all the dedicated WvW guilds of Deso. I’ve ran together with most of you during this(and all previous) weeks and it’s always a pleasure to fight alongside you guys.

I personally can’t wait for the custom rooms for pvp. Our guild is PvX, we partake in every aspect of the game, be it PvE/Dungeons, WvW and PvP. We started out by having a portion of our guild playing pvp almost exclusively, but as time went on either those players have quit or they have switched to WvW to get their pvp fix(i myself have done some tpvp’s, but am mostly WvW player myself). We still have occasional few players that might go to pvp solo/duo(our guild currently has 200+ members with daily activity of 30-50 on peak times), but mostly nobody hardly goes there.

Our guild members however do like pvp in this game a lot(we have an active WvW portion of our guild) and would like to organize things inside our guild to hopefully even introduce more players to pvp and show that it can be a lot of fun(maybe even get few tpvp teams going from it). The fact that you can’t just go into a pvp room and have both teams be pre-made hurts this goal. We have had 1 pvp event in our guild that was 1v1 and it was a pain to organize. We had to fill in the room with our guild members, so no outsiders could come interrupt our dueling and even then getting the 2 persons who were supposed to fight on the opposite teams needed some arrangements.

I’m envisioning a scenario where we can organize a pvp event for our guild with 2 captains of the teams and they can pick members from inside our guild for their teams and then duke it out, while at same time new people to pvp will get to know the mechanics of pvp themselves.

Thus, the custom rooms. I myself don’t really mind “renting costs” for rooms if it’s paid by gems or such. Our guild can surely afford it as we have spent a lot of time in PvE already and renting room for gems shouldn’t be a problem. Naturally i don’t know the payment method for rooms, but hopefully it’s something our guild has an ability to do and we can partake in pvp more.

I’m writing this post, as i didn’t really see this side of the equation(PvX guilds) represented in discussion. I did skim through this topic, but i might have missed any posts that were voicing this kind of view.

From watching that video it looks like infiltrators strike(he could have had it set up before you attacked him) at start + infiltrators arrow as soon as you turn your camera(he appears to be far away). Blinding powder→shadowstep→infiltrators arrow all the way to the end.

We take cheating and exploiting very seriously in EXG and are firmly against it. However in your video it looks like legit play.

Welcome back from vacation Arborstone! Instense fights at EB and Deso border today. Hope to see some more tomorrow!

We seem to be getting actual queue’s on all borderlands now. Haven’t seen this happen in a while.

Amazing fights at Arbor borderlands today! So much back and forth action against arborstone. I hope you guys liked our small strike team flipping your camps for hours on end.

Was my first time watching KAZ fight from this side(i remember facing you guys back on previous matchups) and i have to admit i’m pleasantly surprised by your guilds organisation and skill.

There was some fun fights today. Our guild went into Arbor borderlands and found that GoD was there already and went to help them cap Hills back. Managed to reset everything in that borderlands aside from Bay.

Big Kudos to IRON. They are holding 1.5 borderlands by themselves. I had fun running with their main group most of afternoon and evening. Amazing fights guys, i really appreciate your dedication to desolation and i hope more new guilds(there are some staples like FG, GH, Haven JUG) would show as much effort as you guys. You guys clearly don’t get enough thanks, but i myself am really happy to play along you guys.

During this weekend i actually did see queue’s couple times on 1-2 borderlands first time in a week or two(or three). Maybe the fair weather players are logging back in?

I still see the same guilds that did WvW the past weeks representing Deso for the most part. If not for these guilds pulling big shifts in WvW, deso would be way down the rankings.

Also in SFR and BB match up BB had that big nightcapping force that basically won the matchup over us for them. During primetime we were forced to fight against T3 towers and keeps full of siege weapons while we started from 0 on most days. I myself remember sieging T3 ogrewatch at EB on 3 consecutive days(and capping it too) and then running into even more siege weapons from their keep.

I do give props to Millers and Kodash though, i’ve seen fair amount of organised play from your servers and had some fun fights with you guys =)

Exactly like Marz and Starscream said. In T1 the difference is that every server has a nightcrew of sorts that will nightcap everything if you are not defending it. Even if you did have someone defending during the night, then the Tide in the morning will wash everything away(Xaoc) and come prime time you will be fighting against max upgraded keeps and towers and have to climb your way back. This usually ends up with you getting your own side of borderlands back before realizing it’s time to go to sleep again. Not to mention the higher frequency of good guilds in borderlands(if i remember right, BT for example has more or less 1-2 organized guilds running each borderlands).

I much more enjoy T2 where it’s relatively competitive at primetime and nobody really has too big nightcrews. As for Deso, it seems we can man EB and 1-2 borderlands with our current forces, having to leave 1-2 borderlands void of coverage.

I searched suggestion forums, but didn’t find any suggestions relating to this subject.

My suggestion is to offer option for players to disable skill effects(all the amazing skill effects that look pretty and such, but sometimes block the view). This is more or less for WvW purposes.

I used to play this other MMO which did have possibility of disabling skill effects and add markers on the ground with an add-on(of sorts) showing where aoe effects land. Being able to see what’s happening and flawless gameplay was more important than seeing those pretty effects for me, as the effects often would block your view and when there was tons of effects, it would start dropping fps for fights where you need lightning reactions.

Same thing applies to WvW also. Being able to react fast to incoming enemy forces within second or two can mean the difference between if you live or die. Fighting in WvW while there is lots of players on screen makes my fps drop a lot(i think it goes down to as low as 1-10 fps when there is 50+ players on screen). I think the fps drop in part is, because of so much effects on my screen simultaneously. I would rather have the option to disable all skill effects as long as i can see character animations, damage numbers and aoe circles or even aoe circles that have the skill being cast written on it. For example red circle saying “Meteor Storm” or maybe even color code the circles depending on what kind of effect hits on it(let’s say red is harmful effect, blue is healing effect etc etc). This could maybe improve my gameplay and fps in those bigger fights and i would more than gladly disable skill effects as long as gameplay becomes better. I know my computer isn’t top of the tier anymore, but it’s not that bad either(and no, i don’t think i will be able to upgrade anytime soon). I can run 20 vs 20 or 30 vs 30 fights pretty well, but anything more than that starts to take the toll on my computer.

So if i was given the option to disable skill effects(as long as i can see where aoe’s land) i’d do it.

Just my few cents.

I almost always run with Elixir R, Grenades/Bomb Kit and elixir gun.

Elixir R as stated before is really good. Toss for ressing downed people and the combination of stun breaker+extra dodges is really good.

Grenades for ranged dps, some fights call for melee approach and i like switching grenades or bomb kit on those(grenadier→increased bomb skill radius). The ability to create fire field(bomb kit) and blast finish it for might stacks is good. With grenades you can stack vulnerability for enemies and often the stacks hover around 10-20 from just your grenades alone, in addition you can either stack bleeds or burning(if anyone doesn’t do burning already).

Elixir gun is really good with kit refinement for aoe heals and removing condition. I don’t often use the other skills of elixir gun, the number 4 can be used for escape and weakness from number 1 attack can help in some fights.

As you can see i usually run with mainly dps build(from nades) with a bit of support capabilities.

Fun fights at EB. I saw few individual BB players that were good at pvp, but unfortunately many of them just don’t really compare when i look back to blacktide guilds and the french. Good usage of siege weapons though! Everywhere in your territory there seems to be layers and layers of siege weapons(as it should be). SFR seemed to take advantage of us sieging ogrewatch and taking the other half of BB.

@Joriels screenshot: I see a lot of EXG there :P That was a fun siege against arborstone. They held their tower well though(or more like we had bad tactics at attacking the keep after we broke all the supply and wall).

We were getting fairly close at breaking VS garrison in the end, our firepower just wasn’t quite there for breaking the doors down.

I have to say i’m really happy at how this week in WvW is going. Constant battles, no time to get bored since there is always action going on and always someone to fight against. Last week against FS and Kodash i was bored out of my mind after Tuesday. Thanks VS and Arborstone for bringing the action to us!

Offski.4897:

Hi mate. I for one know how difficult it is to not only try and coordinate on TS with your guild but at the same time try and coordinate on map chat. It is really hard, especially when the situation changes frequently. The ability to give/recieve information quickly is vital to achieving objectives.

I completely agree with this. It’s so hard to keep tabs on normal chat while communicating with your own guild on Team Speak, although it would be vital to share intel with the rest of the people in the map. Today morning we had good siege wars against Far Shiverpeaks in Kodash borderlands. Kodash seemed more than content on just sitting on their towers and keep while we were battling it out(although we did reset one of their towers at one point while duking it out with FS). Also looking at that screenshot from Gray, our siege golem seems to be still parked at our keep. Anyone out there, feel free to put it to good use!

Fun fights at Kodash borderlands. We wiped once at Garrison lords room and 2 times at Cragtop, so GJ Kodash for the siege you had up. Next time we will try to be better.

FS looked like they went to sleep, so we took their side of the map alongside with orb and then concentrated on fighting Kodash. Had some interesting fights against them, of which we ended up actually winning most of. Good effort from both sides.

I’m interested in seeing how the morning will turn out and what the scores are going to be tomorrow.

I for one am happy how our server started to pull itself together towards the end of this week. We have had a hard time for few weeks now and that was getting somewhat depressing already, when we fell down from quite high(T1). I think we owe a big thanks towards Forsaken Gamers[FG] and IRON for starting to get our servers guilds more organized and actually working together. Also i for one heartily welcome RUIN to our server and have had few chances to play with some of them and they were fun guild to play alongside with.

As MagnusLL said, there was literally no queue at morning during weekend and even during week at prime time the queue to WvW wasn’t too bad(the longest i waited was around 30 minutes). Comparing that to the 4-5 hours when the game was fresh out of the oven is nothing.

EDIT: Also in relation to this topic, we had some good fights against Blacktide on sunday. We were outnumbered 2-1 or 3-1, but managed to hold quite well.