Guild Wars 2

Nocturn.3570:

Yeah, but how long will it take to get lvl 80 and exotic gear xD ?

You can also get cheap (paid with karma) berzerker armor sets in Cursed Shore, from the Cathedral of Silence’s karma vendor. Then mix those with valkyrie, marauder, soldier or knight trinkets to gain some survivability. This should be decent until you’ve got more experience – and gold – to get stuff that’s tailored to your needs.

I agree with the rest of what has been said above. For weapons, daredevil staff is great for PVE true, and dagger/dagger pretty uneffective in open world. I generally stick to staff +shortbox, or dagger/pistol + shortbow. Pistol / Pistol also offers great single target dps, which can be good on skill points.

Hello everyone,

Lately I have been working on the Predator precursor collection. At the moment, I’m stuck at the end of T3, with 3 mob kills that seemingly won’t happen. Two are the annoying yet not too obviously buggy sort (Champion Farain in Timberline, and Captain “Wait for me to spawn until you grow old and die” Wiley in Gendarran).
But the last one is really the most problematic: I cannot seem to get the credit for killing Taidha Covington. I have done the event three times, once yesterday, twice today, gotten end the chest and bonus chest (so I did get credit for event participation, at least loot-wise), but no kill credit on my collection window.

Is this a known issue? Is there any way to fix it, or should I just go straight for the ticket request?

As a power mes main who also plays thief, I must agree with most of the reactions. At the moment, thief is the best power build counter to power mesmer.

Yes, the power shatter burst (pre-cast-GS 2, blink to target, cast mirror images, mind wrack; can be murderous if played right. But if you don’t one-shot your target you will be vulnerable right afterwards while you wait for your burst skills to recharge. A lot of thieves play full evade builds that have 5+ dodges, bandit’s defense and D/P can out-stealth a mesmer any day (unless you mess up and get revealed against a moa or something). The only situation in which a mesmer will have more stealth (arguably) is a mesmer with chaos traits and a cannibalized utility bar with only stealth skills + mimic. Which is useless unless you’re hiding in a keep.

Frankly, if a thief can survive the first 10 seconds of the fight vs me, he is more likely to win in the long run, because of vastly superior stealth and evades. Meanwhile, power mes is unforgiving. One mistake, and you’re deader than dead: no passives, no extra dodges, less stealth, longish heal cooldowns.
I prefer mesmer, but I’m under no illusions as to the most versatile class of the two.

tl;dr: a power shatter mesmer hits (very) hard at the beginning, but if the thief survives he will generally win (at equal player level).

WvW is litterally the only place where gliders do not deploy in JPs, because they are disabled in WvW. You’re posting in the wrong sub-forum.

I do agree that sometimes it can be annoying in PvE, when your jump ends up going nowwhere (or rather downwards) because of that silly glider…

Namer.9750:

What’s AG like in daytime rather than primetime? I’d expect less population, but is it that there are no guilds or drivers and so people don’t come out to play?

I scouted and roamed for most of the afternoon while the aforementionned reseting of all our T3 keeps by ROF took place, can’t say I saw more than a dozen AG players at once, except for a single push with a small-sized zerg and our commander (see above) at one point. Later, when the golem rush took place, ROF was already at inner when we had gathered 10 people to defend. Yet we had scouting and fighting tags up for most of that time.
As for guilds, we lost nearly every single guild during the last few months. Haven’t seen consistent guild presence except for XIII and III in the evenings.
In contrast, I saw at least two ROF guilds running around, and one smaller AM guild (AM seemed to avoid the map because of ROF too, or maybe they were just too busy at home).

Overall, this situation isn’t really surprising, and reminds me a lot of the old T8-9 vicious circle: After a few losses, the population sinks, guilds leave, the remaining players get zerged into oblivion over and over when faced with higher numbers, and the server looses again and again. No wonder people loose their movitation and transfer.

Well, if you want flashy bursty attacks, try GS 2 + blink to enemy + mirror images and you get a pretty murderous burst that isn’t unlike a thief’s backstab (and generally does more damage if done right). Then you swap weapons and follow up on sword.
It is true that GS’s auto activates even outside of its range, but after a while you get used to it and it really isn’t an issue. Overall power mes does feel more brutal than some of my more “physical” classes when I manage to land it. But that’s what GS is there for after all: heavily offensive gameplay and ranged dps.

Scepter and Staff are both tailored for condi and defensive gameplay, cause condis on most of their skills, and have animations and attacking speeds which are pretty consistent with that. Otherwise scepter auto would pop clones all over the place, and winds of chaos would bounce all over the place. Queue more people complaining about condi mes.

tl;dr: scepter and staff are defensive and condi-based weapons. They don’t have to hit like a warr’s 100B. That’s what GS and sword sets do.

I guess it’s a sneak preview of the upcoming GW2 – Storms of Steel Expac. They could be preparing two new wvw maps: Pirate of the Carabbean Sea and Defense of Verdun.

I love to defend our borderland in WvW vs small groups on GS/rifle warr. Common reaction to you swatting them like a fly through aegis/block/reflect/whatever blocky HoT mechanic: “You cheater I reported you” rage whispers.
Priceless.

Well, I don’t know how it is for the top tiers, but I have to say that the lower you get in the rankings, the harder the server linking did hit existing server communities. Smaller servers with already weakened communities (say, Vabbi, but I can imagine something similar on FOW, FR or UW) risked being swarmed by bandswagon players, and/or loose their best players to higher tiers. Several friends of mine who were pillars of Vabbi’s WvW community decide after a linking ended to simply transfer to their former host server in order to remain there and enjoy the activity. These transfers already happened before linkings of course, but I feel like they increased. And when you don’t have at least several tightly-knit raiding or scouting guilds, well, your server identity and community vanishes, or only survives in a few old players doing their thing in BLs. Thus, it really is functionnaly extinct.

Then again, Lower tiers had population issues from the very start. It’s not surprising that server identity started unraveling where it was the weakest, i.e. on servers with the weakest player base. Add to this the fact that T8 and T9 matchups were often bogged down for months, and some servers lost over and over and over, and you get a bad situation indeed.

TL;DR: No lasting player-base = no lasting server identity and pride.

As a former Vabbian who transfered out a few months before they started linking servers, I have to say that it saddens me, but I’m not surprised. During the last pre-linkage months our WvW population had critically low levels (couple of dozen regular players over the whole week, i.e. 10ish at prime). Once you shave off high tier bandwagoners, you’ll get those same numbers again. There is no way that GH can get any significant benefit from my former server, especially when compared to other linkages, like AG, where I’m now. We were with Blacktide for the first two linkages, and ended up dropping because we fought servers with higher population, then we got RoF, and there was a very noticeable boost in WvW activity.

Frankly, in order to keep up, GH would need to be linked to a higher tier server as a junior partner (like ROF with AG, or Miller with DL), or get a dual link with Vabbi + something else (preferably with more than 20 players). Otherwise they get swarmed and loose interest. These last weeks we barely saw any GH enemies, compared to the many Germans we fought, so I agree with Shiera on the population issue.

Vabbi has been plaged for a long time by WVW-passive accounts. Really I can’t see how things could improve for that server. It seems to be perma-locked into either low-pop bandwagon reserve or empty wasteland status . Except for it being linked to T1 stuff (which would mean somethig like 99% players from that T1 server and 1% vabbians, before bandwagoners decide to pour in), it can’t be of any significant use to T2 and lower servers. So you would have to add a second junior server in order for that team to be functionnal.
I still have friends over there, including very committed roamers and scouts, but in the end they aren’t many enough to really make a difference. In WvW, sooner or later, numbers decide things.

Tl;dr: Vabbi’s core population is too small to help any server, especially one that was already borderline-underpopulated like GH.

Nice synergy between S/D and S/P; your mobility is awesome and some of your fights on mid are just slaughter haha. I personally use S/P + D/P, but to some extent the concept is similar; a 2nd melee set can enable you to use S/P in a more sustained and effective way.

Nice vid, though I would like to see you build against some HOT classes too, to see if you encounter the same problems as I do vs. some of that awful CC that gets thrown around nowadays.

Akkeros.1675:

set up a lemonade stand.
they are bound to get thirsty sometime

Zerg walks by, kills the duellers, and then everyone buys a drink.
Congrats, you are 100 G richer.

Who said WvW isn’t rewarding?^^

I tend to agree and must say that it surprised me whenVabbi got linked with Deso out of all servers. Though, knowing good old Vabbi’s insane luck, I suspect it might be a case of all mid and higher mid tier servers being already linked to another. Basically the only thing left were SP, DE and FR servers (and I don’t think Vabbians would have appreciated to be paired off with Dzagonur). So it seems that it was either that or get paired with a T1 server. Or doing double stacks (like ROS+Vabbi+GH), which wouldn’t have helped queue-wise either.

As for myself, I left Vabbi for Aurora at the beginning of the year after 2 years on that server, as WvW was becoming unbearably empty and spawncampy. And now we got linked with BT. I get the feeling that they do contribute to our server, with guild raids and stuff (despite being old foes of mine hehe), so I would say Aurora and BT are a lot better matched than say, Deso and Vabbi.

Dangus.6572:

It’s a mixed feeling for me. I miss server name, feeling being home, surrounded by players and guilds I know. Same for enemies. I usually stop to duel or chat with someone with friendly guild tag or player I often meet while roaming.

In other hand DBL started to become fun as they became filled with players. Queues does not bother me. Lag does. It’s nearly impossible to fight in EB when 2 blobs meet. In low population we havent had those often. Also I’m not a fan of huge blob fights. It’s boring.

True, I miss the small server feeling too since moving to AG, and even more since BT joined us. Though sometimes I get a burst of nostalgia when I see ZERK tags in our BL hehe “Well, some things never change”.

HazyDaisy.4107:

I had to look up duel, apparently it’s an archaic form of fighting that ended a week ago.

Duel Noun Prononciation: ?dju??l
From old French: due rit “You didn’t see my crossbow, did you?”, from latin: Deo derisit, “God is laughing”
Ritualistic activity from the Old WvW Era, that has been hypothetized to have links with another badly documented practice known as roaming (cf. Schliemann excavations near the Stonemist See). Archeological evidence suggest that it experienced a steady decline during the late pre-HOT period, before fading away entirely following the WvW server rematch (approx. 6 months post-HOT).
Controversial theories also suggest it may have been linked to a pre-eSports game mode known as PvP (see relevant article) or that it was brought to Earth by Ancien Astronauts.

Joke aside, generally I try to get into the open and see how they react, sometimes I ask if I think there is any chance that they mgiht respond. Except if my ally is in a really bad situation I’ll more often than else walk by and ignore them. Still, sometimes you get into annoying situation in which people “duel” in really unadapted places (between Umberlade and the Blue keep? directly in front of SM’s entrance? Seriously guys?).

Deaeira.2651:

Sviel.7493:

Deaeira.2651:

Use siege disablers on the cata until you managed to nuke it with aoe damage. It might not be “realistic” but there are easy counters.

Kind of how we can just cut off any cancerous body parts until it stops coming back?

I don’t see the point in a solution that cannot be used in reality. I also don’t see how it qualifies as an ‘easy counter’ if it can’t even pass ‘realistic’ muster.

The kind of unrealistic stuff that allows you to respawn when you’re dead. Didn’t happen in the middle ages but works well in games.

1191 A.D., battle of Arsuf
“-Sire! The saracens are bringing in longbows!
-Endeed. So hasten and see to our shield generators, you oaf!
-Aye, m’lord! "

Well, I don’t have a problem with point-blank-catas – that is, as long as other siege weapons and the line-of-sights make it possible to kill said catas. It’s all about balance.

Former Vabbi player here ; I stopped playing two months ago, and even before that, couldn’t really muster any interest in wvw anymore.

Frankly the situation in t9 during the last months has been pathetic. Average EB prime time group was the size of a PVP team. Same was true for ROF. BT and UW had significantly more people – but with those small numbers, “significantly” doesn’t mean much.
This leads to the same people fighting each other day in day out in a very boring manner, because two servers are zombie-servers in the end and the result is pretty much clear right from the beginning.

Of course those aren’t the only issues. A lot has been said about the new maps and gimmicks. And the game balance right now is pretty much screwed (Classes? lol. Stability? … Roaming? zzzz. Pirate ship meta? ZZZZ). Bigger servers have bigger communities and generally more fighting opportunities, while smaller servers, and especially zombie servers like the T9 ones, easily loose their remaining strength.

So, right now, I would be ready for server mergers if they came with fixes for the other gamemode issues. It would be the only way to save Vabbi. Two years ago we had a hard time, but it wasn’t even close to what it is today.
Without fixes… well I fear it would simply create the same problems all over, with new “servers”. If you put simply RoS and Vabbi together… well, two zombies don’t make a living person. Even something as radical as scrapping the while bronze tier would only be a temporary measure – if the gamemode stays as it is, the lowest remaining silver tier servers will be in the same situation as T9 today.

Of course, I’m not expecting much.

Khyan.7039:

PyrateSilly.4710:

I go into WvW about every day. I see lots of people playing on all sides. Not sure why people keep saying the it’s dead. If it was dead then no one would be in there playing and that is just not the case, there are lots playing. Maybe YOU don’t play it anymore but others still do.

It’s right but if you compare with a year ago, it’s way less populated.

In my server it’s … almost dead. There are still people but not that much. ~A year ago, WvW was always full and it was a pain to enter.

I agree. It is very tier related too. As a long time low tier player, i’ve seen my server both in its good and in its bad days, but right now the server population is reaching critical levels. When your main EB group isn’t reaching the size of a PVP team, something is obviously wrong hahaha And I can see the same situation on several enemy servers. Mid and high tiers still have important populations, but queues there are getting shorter too.

I would like to see the player turn-over data, would be really interesting to see. I suspect that there is a concentration phenomenon going on, with remaining interested low and mid tier players moving up to the top tiers, leaving fairly empty tiers behind.

TL;DR: Basically I think HOT and the F2P change didn’t manage to replace falling WVW player interest/numbers. This prompted the remaning players from deserted servers to move up to tiers where there is still something going on.

Interesting break-up. The tiers are pretty easy to distinguish in most cases too.

Any chance of getting the same graph for EU servers? Would love to see how things stand over here.

I agree with the answers above. I believe DH and scrappers are the current hard counters to our class. Sometimes I wonder if scrapper mechanics weren’t even tailored specifically towards killing thieves, considering how much sustain they possess without loosing a certain burst potential that is sufficient to kill most thieves.
Generally I’ll try to test the opposing scrapper, to see if he’s a really bad and thus a potential prey, but more often than else I simply disengage, because I find it uselessly frustrating to fight a guy for 10 min that can down me nearly the instant I do my first mistake. Better, strategically more useful fights gotta be found elsewhere.

FogLeg.9354:

Sinbold.8723:

There are 7 tiers below tier 1. How many of the lower tiers have used an emergency WP?

We used it in Tier 8! Once.

We used it in T9. Our enemies were so awed before that display of superior grinding and might that they were beaten.

Joke aside, I agree with the side WP unlock. Right now if I fight anywhere that is more than a min away from the upper keep’s WP, and end up dying, I’m always wondering if I should bother walking back, because A.) It’s boring as hell B.) The enemy will probably be gone anyway and whatever objective he was capping taken (& with RI).
After that happens once or twice, I’ll generally consider moving to EB. Not that we have a queue there either, so the decision is generally pretty easy to make. And the desert BL becomes even more of a deserted BL.

Interesting numbers, it makes a lot of sense actually. I remember how over the course of two years my server slowly crawled its way upwards, but would end up bogged down with the same matchups over and over at every step of the way. That caused a strong erosion of player interest, and people transfered out even though we were winning. We would have to overperform on a systematical basis in order not to loose points and stagnate even more.

I agree that MU fluidity should be increased. Right now the mid and lower tiers are bleeding out of players anyway, as the recent changes have failed to cause significant enthusiasm (euphemism, much?), so enabling faster server movements could be an interesting experiment.

I run a custom made S/P + D/P build in WvW, which works pretty decently. It requires you to switch between both sets depending on opponents / combat situations, but that way you can get some stealth, and it does makes for some nice bursts, especially the pistol whip + steal opener. That is, if you’re ready to drop the shortbow.
It prolly isn’t the most efficient build to run, due to S/P’s shortcomings, but it’s fun to play. Facetanking some enemies who don’t know how to react immediately to your attack is funny.

Still, chaining sword 2 and steal feels sorta clunky since that steal patch (the one in which they started by making it unusable without a target). Can’t say anet is really promoting the weaponset.

FogLeg.9354:

Deaeira.2651:

FogLeg.9354:

100? I wish. Zerg? Whats that?

FoW has maybe 20-30 players logging into WvW anymore during day. Spread them over 24 hours period and well… you can see where it goes. Thing is, that is about the population of last 5 EU servers, some even having less people now.

So, again, whats the point closing those down? Most of those players in last tiers play in last tiers because they dont like to play in tier 1. Do you really think forcing them into tier 1 by closing down servers they like to be is good solution?

Long time Vabbi player here, we’re also around 20 spread over the day – thought I don’t belive the WvW problems go away by merging servers. Especially if you don’t find a way to keep the server communities intact.

Hey Vabbi (waves). We can probably get to fight you soon, if RoS continues to drop. Do you have any guilds left in Vabbi that raid every night? Cause atm all we have to fight is that blobby WSR server-wide pug-group that keeps increasing steadily as we kill them until they eventually overrun us by pure numbers and it becomes not fun again. RoS has no guilds to fight.

Hey RoS!
Well, we’ve got two WVW guilds left on Vabbi (GOD & WAR), with irregular raids, mostly dependent upon commander mood and availability of WVW guild missions. But like Deaeira said, the server is pretty low on numbers and on par with its current opponents in that regard (for instance, UW and BT both also have only one and a half raiding guild, from what I saw until now), since several of the guilds that transfered to Vabbi during 2015 left it; a good chunk of them actually went to WSR I think, but they may have moved on again since.

Nonetheless, it has been obvious for months now that low tiers are bleeding out of players, even more so since HOT, when the WVW mechanics went downhill. Even though I always liked our small server community, I don’t think that it is realistic to hope to keep it that way. It has been said above that the game is already getting older, and, except if they do a major gamemode overhaul (I know there have been rumors and annoucenements about it, but well, I’ll wait for detailed information, ‘cause if they decide to do it in 2020, I’ll be long gone), the overall player population in this gamemode won’t be going up. So it’s really more about when they will decide to merge servers, rather than if. Or they will give a free/cheaper transfer to the few remaining people before closing the low tier servers. Call me a pessimist, but I expect them to do so after the servers reach critical emptiness. That being said, Vabbi borderland during week days looks like the Gobi desert, so we could be close to that point already…

Norn mesmers are nice. I created mine because it’s a surprising combination, and mesmers are all about surprise and stuff. Seemed adequate, in its own weird way. Then it’s also true that the big clones make a good shield and fill the opponent’s screen. Of course, you don’t get all the fancy dresses and frills that humans get, but well, you can make do without, plenty of ways of looking awesome. I like the zodiac armor, themed with the same colors as my twilight.
The way Norns walk is also better.

The only times when I regret being a big norn ares when I am hiding inside SM in WvW. Contrary to child-sized humans and midget-sized asurans, it’s hard to hide a norn ^^