Guild Wars 2

The latest change to blasting light fields has me taking another side-eye look at my old, crazy idea for a cleric-armor elixir-gun engineer for WvW mid-line zerg fights: medic, bolster, and purge gyros, elixir gun, probably Dwayna runes, alchemy & inventions & scrapper traits. I can’t shake the feeling that even though it’s not quite as much up-time on regen as the squad is getting out of a dagger/warhorn ele or a guardian, the tons of extra condi-cleanse might make up for it in light of the Epidemic meta. Has anybody tried this lately? How do-able is it?

Something like this? http://gw2skills.net/editor/?vdQQFASncoCFpidpCubB0ehl7jKciCgMheVb1ZV8A2oQC-TFSDABqs/wRK/Kw8n8PIgU0RAwFEAH1fSVJIA-w

(For comparison, my current WvW build is a soldier-gear front-line buff-bot running the same build only firearms and flamethrower instead of alchemy and e-gun.)

I thought that, between events, it was three regular rolls?

I’m not going to get into arguments about what’s the “fair price” for the expansion plus one character slot. I’m just going to say this: it’s not worth it to me. I had already made up my mind how much I was willing to pay for season 3 of the Living Story plus one character class that I might not even want to pay, and it was at most $30, $40 if it came with a character slot. $75 isn’t even in the same ballpark as what I was willing to pay. So I’ll go play something else.

I don’t see any way to make a viable grenade or flamethrower build. Period.
Grenades lose 40% (!!!) of their range, and 100% of their fields. You can only take grenades cause vulnerability or grenades do full damage, not both, so they also lose substantial damage. The only buff they get is that one of the traits causes them to throw faster, so maybe they hit more often against player characters. But still, the most popular WvW engineer build just fell completely off the map.

I also don’t see how to make the most common flamethrower build any more. Yes, the stability in Juggernaut is nice but not at the cost of the extra toughness needed for a medium armor class to front-line; it’s not like we didn’t already have pretty fast recharging stability elsewhere. Also the traits that used to buff flamethrower damage and recharge as well as elixir gun are now elixir gun only, so unless that’s in one of the TBD slots or it got a substantial baseline buff, there goes about 10% or more of its damage.

Unless the Power Shoes trait gets rolled into the Gadget TBD trait or into Robo-Legs, that’s going to be yet another, third, nerf to several popular WvW builds; I know at least two engineers who count on that plus Rocket Boots as their travel skill.
In exchange, at a glance it looks to me like engineers get two new builds: a mortar kit build that does most of what grenade used to do, and a substantial buff to AoE healing builds of all kinds. Oh, and turrets seem more or less intact, other than the slight nerf to turret survivability that was announced earlier (turrets will be damaged and debuffed by conditions).

Did I see correctly that Med Kit’s #1 skill also does damage to opponents? The tooltip went by so fast I couldn’t make it out. That plus the buff turret, if the buff turret has good stats, could end up finally making med kit builds competitive with healing turret builds.

It was pretty clear that engineer is the most in-progress, incomplete of the core classes, but I have to say that what I’m seeing so far really worries me.

Are the camps, towers, and keeps more or less where they are now?

Is there still a citadel? (Surely there has to be, right?) Does it still have a complete set of crafting stations and vendors?

You said that towers are the fastest way to move between levels of the maps — from the look of it, given the example you gave, because their walls sit astride some of the ramps. What’s on what level? The same layout as now, where the north camp and citadel are above the NE/NW towers are above the NE/NW camps and the keeps are above the south towers and camps?

Do supply animals use the shortcuts that go through towers, or do they always take the long, public way from one level to the next?

Are the Veteran creatures still there, and their associated dailies? Are there still skill points and vistas and Points of Interest? Are there still Ruins and Borderlands Bloodlust?

I asked the same question yesterday, got no official answer.

I’m hoping it works like the Birthday Booster, basically double everything.

What would be awesome would be if it was like the Birthday Booster, stacks with the Birthday Booster. Not entirely crazy; Birthday Booster itself already stacks with XP Boost consumables, food, and weapon boosts.

It’s not just you. It’s the basic tier-2 matts: iron ore, soft wood logs, and cotton; I’m perpetually out of all three. And linen in tier 3.

I saw the press release saying that we’re getting a double experience weekend. That left me with a few questions:

1. When does it start? and …
2. Does that include crafting XP? WvW XP?
3. Does 2XP stack with experience boosters, like the birthday booster?

I’m way down at the bottom of tier 5, and after dominating every matchup we were in for over a month, we’re taking it on the chin hard this week, at least during prime time, because all of our members are in the Silverwastes. Does anything like this happen in the upper tier servers? Or are tier 1 and tier 2 completely dominated by guilds that do nothing but WvW?

I guess I am one of those noobs, I had nothing to do with sPvP until the new monthly reward system. But my impression of that map was that optimum strategy was to send three to mid, and two to beast on their way to home, so that the team that’s grabbing and defending mid has the buff, so that they’re not fighting enemies who are buffed when they’re not. It delays the points from owning home for a few seconds, but I thought it was worth it because it made it easier to hold mid. Where was I wrong? Is the buff that minor?

I just wish that it could work in full-screen mode, via Overwolf or something. Windowed and Windows Fullscreen modes don’t play well with my machine.

Except that /m chat in Heart of the Mists is a swamp of gold-sellers and bigots.

I can’t speak for the higher tier servers, but on my server, having all the “town” services in home BL citadel has been a great thing for WvW. I run into players all the time who only came there, the first couple of times, to craft or to use the merchants or whatever and who got sucked into helping out at some objective via /t or /m and only then discovered that they liked it. Lots of PvE’ers start out with a mindset of “I hated PvP in other games, this one won’t be different” and teasing them into trying it sometimes turns out to be all that it takes.

We’ve had a few reset nights where we were queued on home BL. In my experience, a simple /m announcement that we need people who aren’t fighting to move out was usually enough to thin the non-fighters substantially.

TaCktiX.6729:

… It rewards speedrunners while not adjusting the system based on them. A speedrun team will finish a path faster than the average group, but they’ll get the same reward. And due to their speedrun, their actual completion time stands a greater chance of being ignored by the algorithm when generating the next week’s values. …

Systems that reward speedrunners are half of why I don’t do dungeons. A system that disproportionately rewards speedrunners is a system that rewards “elite” players for kittenish behavior towards “non-elite” players. If a speed-runnable way to get the same reward exists, then new people get kicked from dungeon teams. If a speed-runnable way to get the same reward exists, anybody who didn’t copy-paste their build off of MetaBattle gets kicked.

I’m really not crazy about any system that back-loads the rewards. I know that they made the dungeons so crazy long and so crazy big that nobody has time to clear every trash mob between the path beginning and the boss, but I’d rather see that fundamental design flaw fixed (via what Carbine, a rival NCsoft studio, is now calling “boss in a box” designs that have shorter maps and a lot fewer trash) than see endless putzing around with the existing instance designs.

The subject line pretty much says it all, but in particular: I was running a new alt around the capital cities the other day and it really jumped out at me how much I miss the look of the town clothes. Yes, I know that they’re available as limited-use potions by converting your old outfits on pre-existing characters, but that’s really not enough for me. If even heavy-armor characters can wear obvious streetwear like the Formal outfit and the Wintersday outfit as their combat outfit, why can’t we have the old town clothes as Outfits? Or, at the very least, why can’t we have them as light-armor or medium-armor skins?

Thank Prime for referees. (When they laid off the referees was when oRvR in WAR fell completely to the exploiters.) And doubly thank Prime for referees who work holidays. A million times thank you.

Mishi.7058:

If people place siege in decent spots it doesn’t get stripped out as much. Though that idea of nerfing damage done to siege without siege would also cause some classes to lose 50% of not more of their useful ness in wvw. Causing a decline in said classes use, and also causing upset players.

I mean it’s not like a player can’t set an AC to where it is hard to be AOE’d down, and even if the damage was siege to siege only, AC’s would become the new META for killing siege on walls. (Which would destroy more siege on walls for defenders, then players hitting does.) Also setting Catas/Trebs/Ballista’s/AC’s to take down enemy siege already happens. Heck some people play certain classes, and are built to deal with enemy siege and take it down.

Instead of nerfing out a few classes even further, players should learn where they can set siege which is impossible or nearly impossible for players to hit without other siege. (Yes it is possible to set siege like that.)

Tripling hp/wall HP would deter havoc groups from attacking, and force them to join in on the “blob” and I hate to say it but no matter how much hp/def on walls/gates is increased, a “blob” will nom on them like candy.

I mean how to prevent the blob from getting in quicker then a small havoc group should be the main focus. Not increasing wall/gate hp to promote blobbing and deter havocing.

I was thinking less of placed siege than of the almost entirely useless oil and cannons and the barely situational mortars. The first thing any squad does when they get to a tower is focus down the oil and the cannons, using AoEs that insta-gib anybody trying to use them. It makes them worse than useless. At this point they might as well remove them from the game, they exist just as speed bumps the defending players have to waste supply and worker time on to unlock waypoints.

Useless default siege and paper-thin walls and gates both feed exactly what you like that I hate: the idea that 4 people can flip a tower or even a keep so fast that no defenders can possibly arrive to counter them. It’s what leads to roaming mobs flipping unattended objectives rather than fighting each other. It’s the exact opposite of PvP.

Oooh, I like the brutal weather idea. That could be hilarious.

yanniell.1236:

Lets put in this topic the next experiments you’d like to see after the “no white swords” and the PPK experiments. … What you guys/girls would like to experiment next in WvW?

The simplest one I can think of? Triple the hit points of walls and gates. Slow down zerg rushes and see if the attacker/defender balance tips closer to some hypothetical ideal state.

More controversial, probably not a good idea, but I’d love to see it tried: drastically reduce the price, and reduce the supply needs, of the tier 2 and 3 keep and tower upgrades. I’ll admit my bias here, if you can’t guess it from the above: I think paper gates and paper walls are boring and unfun.

There are probably also some interesting experiments that could be performed with the [Outnumbered] functionality, too, adding buffs. Maybe add toughness and vitality for the badly-outnumbered side? Maybe halve the distance at which they can be seen? Maybe give badly-outnumbered side +5 salvage capacity? Maybe some kind of buff to Downed state so that it’s easier for them to rally? Maybe have Siegeraiser also drop an alpha golem build site if [Outnumbered] is still up when he reaches the keep? I’m sure others could come up with better and/or weirder ideas.

Oh, and speaking of which, here’s a crazy idea that has nothing to do with [Outnumbered]. I’d love to try a brief experiment where siege (other than golems, obviously) is immune to damage from, or at least highly resistant to damage from, anything other than siege. That a couple of staff elementalists or grenadiers can strip all the siege off of the outer walls before the fight even begins, in a matter of seconds per, makes that siege pretty pointless; it’d be interesting to see what would happen if the attackers had to deploy catapults or ballistas to take down oil, mortars, even arrow carts. There are already a couple of places where you almost have to, if the defenders put their arrow carts in smart places.

Straegen.2938:

T1 – Zergs are plowing mostly paper maps now.

T6. Ditto.

Shadelang.3012:

Im kinda suprised theres this many servers that don’t use player scouts. …

Somebody else has already made a video that explains this better (and more entertainingly) than I ever could. There was a really great Reddit thread about that video, too.

But to waste words on what a funny video does better, what the heck good does scouting do? Under current rules, either you roaming scout, or you tower-sit. If you roaming-scout, you’re wasting your time; 9 to 1 odds they’ll have the tower flipped before you even get in. If you tower-sit, you’ll get to fire your one superior arrow cart in support of the upgraded guards, and neither your arrow cart, nor the upgraded guards, will make a lick of difference. You spent all that money and wasted all that time just to feed them two more PvE bags and one more PvP bag. Unless a friendly zerg happens to be running by, in which case the tower might be saved … but not because of anything you did.

There are two big-picture questions that aren’t even being asked by ArenaNet, at least not where I hear it, let alone discussed:

1. Take the maximum number of players from one side who can enter a map, because that’s your worst-case scenario. How long should it take for them to flip a camp? a tower? a keep? the castle? What’s the minimum reasonable time we should allow for defenders to reach the objective and defend it?

2. Take the maximum number of players from one side who can enter a map, because, again, that’s your worst-case scenario. How many defenders should need to be inside it to keep them from over-running it? What’s the ratio?

Back in Warhammer: Age of Reckoning, there were people who thought it was really lame that a team of 6 could hold off a team of 18 indefinitely at a keep. (Gods, I loved that fight.) They didn’t want the objective spots to be anything more than speed bumps, they wanted plain king-of-the-hill like most capture sPvP maps in this game. Others of us argued (successfully) that since the attacker gets to pick the time of the fight, the defender needs an advantage of their own.

But right now, as easy as it is for a large group to swarm an out-manned tower or keep? Scouting is entirely pointless.

What’s blowing my mind about this is that, for whatever reason, at least one of the servers that does have enough population to post scouts and escort dolyaks isn’t bothering. “If things become too K-train-ish …”? I spent all day yesterday watching a couple of 20 to 70 man zergs swarm from objective to objective: flip a paper keep or paper tower, strip it of supply to build more siege, run to the next one. Enough numbers that they’re unstoppable, but no interest in digging in and defending any of the things they take. The only thing that distracts them from PvE is that if, in the process of their PvE experience, they see a smaller group that tries to interrupt their PvE in any way they stomp those people to death so they go away and leave the big-server PvE groups alone.

No white swords is reminding me of really old school MMOs, where the “winning” condition was to be in one of the two largest clans on the server, so you had enough people online to camp the bosses that give good loot 24×7 and grief anybody who wasn’t from your guild who wanted loot. So far, this has been the opposite of good for small servers or small groups … if, that is to say, they actually want any PvP in their PvP. It’s denying them any kind of dug-in spots to defend, forcing them to do all their fighting either out in the open or in paper keeps.

SyFy definitely should have subcontracted the Defiance MMO to Arenanet instead of the third-rate firm that they partnered with on it. With this engine’s map-creation and content-creation tools, and with Arenanet’s superior monetization, it wouldn’t have been the most epic failure of 2014.

Does NCsoft still own the Tabula Rasa IP? This would be the game engine to reboot it in, hands-down.

Same problem, Ehmry Bay server.

Who the heck is Jory? Is this a name I should recognize from somewhere?

Monadproxy.3489:

the engineer’s rifle kills are actually shotgun skills, so it would make sense for them to shoot from the hip. Anet is also going to be adding more shotgun rifle skins so our weapon would be better suited for our skills. It should also be noted that the engineer doesn’t have training on weapons so it should make sense in that regard as to why the engineer doesn’t shoot properly

Well, yes. But shooting from the hip makes every Asura engineer look like Elmer Fudd.

DevonCarver.5370:

… this change is going to require new tactics and those tactics include things like using ballista and catapults to destroy arrow carts. …

I like this idea, it’s how I think the game should work. But you’re going to have a hard time making ballistas useful against arrow carts when …

• arrow carts don’t require line of sight, and …
• the only places high enough to get line of sight on the arrow carts are so close that they’re within arrow cart range.

Beef them up a bit and the obvious solution will be using catapults so that you can use a weapon that doesn’t require LoS to take out the weapon that doesn’t require LoS. But that won’t work, either, as long as …

• catapults are very effective against catapults that are still under construction, and …
• catapults benefit from height advantage, so one that’s on a wall or in a tower has range advantage over one in the field, and …
• spotters up in a tower can call shots for a catapult inside the tower, because they can see the one in the field, but the one in the field can only guess as to where the catapult inside the tower is.

There may be a solution to this, but I admit I’m not creative enough to see it. The most likely end result is probably still going to be that the defenders can set up a couple of arrow carts, and one catapult, so that even if someone treb’s the wall down from a long, long way away nobody can get in without taking out the arrow carts, and any siege capable of finding and hitting the arrow carts can be taken out from within the tower by a single catapult.

Rozbuska.5263:

Cloaking device was ONLY one viable adept trait in that line. Healing turret. They said “heal slightly reduced”.. 50% is kittening slightly? Healing turret is now even more useless than before.

It’s not a 50% nerf if you simply double-tap the button. The Overcharge gives you the other half of the heal. AND drops a water field. AND removes conditions. AND can be fired again every 15 seconds. AND gives 50% more regen, AND gives it to a much wider area. AND more than doubled the recharge speed on the already-nice toolbelt skill. Now if we could just get them to “nerf” the rest of our powers the same way!

I don’t think you’ll attract much grief, but you may still want to wait. The closed beta test for the Chinese edition of Guild Wars 2 is next week. and the live version may not be very long after that.

Reborn.9862:

Hi I’m brand new too the game watched tons of videos.

I want to make a pretty female character, I don’t want too easy of a class I’m looking for good hit rate but can wear really awesome looking armor.

Ps. I’m not being sexist or anything I’m a girl I just don’t want to be guy for races like norn lol.

It’s a matter of ongoing argument which species has the prettiest female characters, but you’ll probably pick human or norn, depending on how much clothes you want to wear (Norn wear a little less) and whether or not it’s a turn-off for you to be taller than most of the guys around you.

Rather than saying that there’s an easiest profession, let me say this: for each of the 8 professions, there’s at least one weapon combo that, in my experience and my opinion, was the easy one for leveling. Here were my picks for the weapons that I found easiest to use for leveling:

• Warrior: axe & mace; rifle
• Guardian: sword & torch; staff (see footnote)
• Engineer: pistol & shield; bomb kit
• Ranger: axe & torch; sword & torch; bear
• Thief: sword & pistol; shortbow
• Elementalist: scepter & focus
• Mesmer: greatsword; sword & focus
• Necromancer: dual daggers; scepter & dagger

Each of those weapon combinations were chosen, by me, to have the least tricky mechanics, the most utility for solo and small group PvE leveling, and the most survivability. Your mileage may vary, but if you just plain like the idea of a class, don’t give up on it until you’ve tried every weapon combo, because learning new weapon combos and buying new (blue quality) weapons is cheap and quick, and each class plays almost entirely differently when you switch its weapons.

(I expect to take grief for recommending sword & torch, it’s not popular among guardians, but it does ungodly AoE damage while giving you a fast-recharging AoE blind; combine that with the fact that guardians are already pretty hard to kill and that’s everything a beginner needs. If you don’t mind waiting for enemies to die of old age, you can make an even tankier low level guardian by choosing mace & focus.)

Lindbur already answered you: assuming you level through PvE, and complete each zone before moving on to the next zone, it is basically impossible to run out of Basic Transmutation Stones. You get 3 for every zone you complete. You also get 3 for exploring the 6 city zones. Let’s be conservative and say that it takes you only 12 zones to hit level 80. 12 zones plus 6 cities = 18 zone completions, times 3 stones per zone = 54 stones. Worst case, you transmute 6 pieces of armor and 5 weapons every 6 levels, that’s enough for 11 transmutations without even passing along any stones from alts or buying any or creating alts just to run them quickly through the cities for another free 18 stones each.

In practice, only one of my characters was I picky enough about to transmute every weapon and every costume piece every time I re-geared. In practice, I was reasonably happy with the crafted armor about half of the time, and was only picky about the weapons. The characters that you only transmute weapons on, or only armor, will have stones left over for the ones you’re feeling super-picky about.

Now, Fine Transmutation Stones — that’s where they get you. Once you get to level 80, if you’re picky about how your character looks, you’ll probably end up having to spend $10 per character or so to keep them in level 80 transmutation stones. But until then, as long as you’re transmuting gear that’s level 79 or less, it’s basically free.

karavik.4803:

About the underwater ground skills. When you use them it flips your skill to a secondary detonate. So for example if you want to toss elixir b underwater just hit it twice really quick. Pretty sure that goes the same for everything else underwater. Not ideal but has helped me quite a bit.

It does. Dear Crom, I wish somebody had told me this earlier.

Of course, elixirs are going to get hit HARD by the warrior boon-hatred trait, so I picked a bad day to learn this (wry grin), but thanks very much for telling me.

vlad.3467:

Hi engis,

im just curious. What would you like to see in tomorrow’s patch, what changes ?
What are you expecting from it ?

Regarding engi profession.

Thrown turrets (Deployable Turrets trait) getting the same buff that regular turrets got in the last patch is the one bug that bothers me at the moment.

And I keep asking them to do something about elixir toolbelt skills under water; ground-targeted attacks and swimming don’t mix well. Same problem with Elixir Gun’s #5 skill.

Grenade Kit getting a proper auto-attack is probably too much to ask.

GhostHawks.6519:

I am about to create a character for pvp i will be playing with others I cant decide on which one to make if u could give me some pros and cons on how they play in pvp that would be great thanx

First, where I’m coming from: I’m a sick, weak, tired old man with the reflexes of a sedentary 50 y/o – because I am, in fact, a sedentary 50 y/o. Doesn’t matter what build I go in with, I lose way more 1v1 fights than I win. But I get lots of praise for my engineer, on WvW teams, because just about no matter what build I play (and I re-trait at least once a day, just for fun) I bring something to the team.

(What? Don’t look at me like that. All of my builds work fine with full Knights gear, so there’s no extra cost there, and retraiting costs about the same as one long-range waypoint jump, or two armor repairs. Retrait a lot. You’ll learn something.)

Grenade Spec: Grenade kit and 2 situationally chosen elixirs, plus Supply Drop. Enemy siege? What enemy siege? Seriously, it’s amazing how often people think that they’re being clever putting stuff near the edge of a wall, or up by the keep lord’s room in a tower, and how fast anybody who tries to stand on that wall to kill me goes down. And I don’t even bother using Toolkit as a backup kit so I can pull them down. Especially if Supply Drop is off cool-down so I can AoE stun people before throwing all six grenade bundles up there.

Pistol & Shield with Turrets & Static Discharge: If this is how much fun Static Discharge is, with super-fast recharging and reasonably useful toolbelt skills, I dread to think how much fun it must have been before they nerfed it. Although the upcoming Confusion nerf may make pistol & shield less fun than it was, it’s still an AoE blind on a nice short cooldown. Oh, and with one quick switch of a trait (Static Discharge out, Deployable Turrets in) I can throw turrets up onto the wall where people would have to expose themselves to incoming fire to take them down. If they ever fix the bug with Deployable Turrets, it may actually become over powered. Oh, and I can keep a lot of our own siege users up, against modest numbers of AoEs, by parking a Healing Turret just out of the edge of the AoEs, giving our cannon or arrow cart users perma regen.

Flamethrower & Elixirs: Situational, but there are two times that are so much fun they make it worth it. (1) Flame rams on the other side of the door? /whoosh/ What flame rams? (2) Enemy zerg rushing into the tunnel, or clumped up around the keep lord? Good thing I have even one guardian with me to provide stability and some healing. /whoosh/ Bag city, baby!

That being said: it helps that often I’m up against pretty stupid enemies. The kind of person who turtles up in a keep manning the siege is often the kind of person who poses no threat to anybody, no matter what their build is or no matter what my build is. I just happen to have several builds available to me that wreck those people.

But it must be said: most people would prefer that you brought a mesmer or a guardian. But if you don’t want to play a mesmer or a guardian, engineers are a lot of fun.

Evilzara.6378:

It isn’t tough when you can outnumber everyone in every map. At least when we did this in tier 6/7/8 we didn’t act like you.

It’s a popular accusation. But we just took an extra roughly 1/3rd of Anvil Rock’s home borderland. With the Outmanned buff on us.

I’ll add: does next Tuesday’s patch include a fix for the fact that Deployable Turrets didn’t get the same damage buff and armor buff that regular turrets got in the last patch?

Also: why do engineers have so many ground-targeted underwater skills, given that it’s almost impossible to hit anywhere or anything with a ground-targeted skill underwater?

Draygo.9473:

Golems are the reason you want to make sure the oil is constructed at keeps. and effective scouting will still spot a golem rush before it can get to the door and you can have your server defending outer or inner pretty quickly.

That’s not my experience. Our guild has long-since adopted the policy that it’s a waste of supply to ever repair oil or cannons, because any one or at most two ranged DPS can AoE down whoever is using them before they can kill anything. We use superior arrow carts placed where they can’t be targeted from the ground. But if superior arrow carts don’t get “tickled” every half an hour, they evaporate, which makes them pretty useless against surprise attacks.

Back to my original topic: I guess it comes down to a difference of opinion as to how epic it should feel to (fill in the blank). I’m perfectly comfortable with one or two people being able to capture an unguarded supply camp in a couple of minutes. I’m reasonably comfortable with a break-out event flattening an unguarded tower in a couple of minutes. But my preference would be for sieging a fully upgraded keep or garrison to be something that it takes a large group, and a major investment of time, to pull off even if the only “people” guarding it are the NPCs. So any tactic that trivializes the capture of even the largest, heaviest, most fully upgraded structures on the map, anything that trivializes the capture of something that cost what, 8, 10 gold to upgrade so that it can be wrecked literally before anybody on the defending side can get in? Feels un-fun to me. Even when I’m the one doing it.

Zephyrus.9680:

The whole point of golems is to beat the response time, right? Not to take objectives when there’s going to be no response regardless.

Exactly. A couple of weeks ago, during that same time window, 15 people showed up at a keep that had exactly two defenders in it. But they had no golems. One superior arrow cart and one regular arrow cart erased their rams faster than they could build them, and that ended that. So maybe arrow carts are overpowered, too, but still my point is roughly the same as yours: even if it is only lightly defended, is it intended behavior and is it good for WvW for it to take that few minutes to seize a fully upgraded garrison?

What if none of the servers in the tier has 24 hour coverage?

At the risk of making this personal — and I want to stress that I am the least angry person on my server about this — we’re from a server that just plain has no coverage for about 4 hours every weekend night and about 6 to 8 hours every weekday night. Not only will there be fewer than 10 people in WvW at those times, there may not be more than 20 or 30 people on the whole server, period. (This morning, during that time, a friend of mine tried to do the Claw of Jormag PvE event. It drew about 8 people.) One of the other servers in our tier has the same problem … during an entirely different time block.

What that means in practice is that there is about 8 to 16 hours a day when one of our two sides can simply show up, any time during our half of that time, and erase all progress in the other side’s home borderland in an hour or two, tops, counting the time to build the golems. But it doesn’t give us any way to hold those positions once we take them. So it doesn’t change the net score, at all, at the end of the day; all it does is cost both sides a couple of dozen gold a day in having to upgrade their keeps and garrison all over again, every day. And that time spent escorting dolyaks to rush the upgrades back in is boring, boring gameplay, and it’s a heck of a cash sink (so I guess it’s deflationary), and it increases personal resentment on both sides, and when it comes to either providing fun fights or having a winning strategy, it’s pointless. In our tier, at least, we’d probably be better off without it.

Burnfall.9573:

To the Thief class, why is The Ranger class always your 1st/Primary kill in WvW?
I also would like to ask other classs the same question as well.

Not a thief, and rangers are generally my last target or nearly last, because they’re harmless. I concentrate my fire on the people who actually scare me: glamour mesmers (kittened confusion spam) and dagger elementalists (kittening pinballs). That being said, I never pass up an opportunity to kill a ranger if I happen to run into one, because they’re generally easy kills. If I have to kill a shield or flamethrower engineer or a shout warrior or something like that, we could both be there all day. If you’ve got any kind of snare to keep him from running away, and any kind of AoE to keep the pet from rezzing him, you can kill most rangers with an up-level’s auto-attack.

This is not a whine or complain thread. This is especially not a thread complaining about any one server or guild for using this tactic. I’ve been on both sides if it; I’ve been in keeps and garrisons that were being golem-rushed, I’ve been in two successful and one unsuccessful golem rushes against keeps and garrisons myself. No, I don’t think it’s cheating, and no, I don’t think it’s any kind of an exploit, and no, given the current meta of the game, I don’t think any less of anybody who’s using it. All those disclaimers provided, here’s the question I want to ask: in your opinion …

Is the tactic of portal-bombing a golem rush good for WvW, or is it bad for WvW?

Quick review for those of you who are new to WvW or from some server that doesn’t use this tactic: what you need is 8 people. 5 can be any class that has reasonably good vitality; 3 must be mesmers with the Portal utility skill, and ideally one of them should also be high level enough to have Mass Invisibility.

1. Build an Alpha Siege Golem right next to the supply pile in any supply camp (or, failing that, any fully upgraded garrison). With a team of 8, this takes no time at all. Have one waypoint that Golem back to the nearest safe point, and join you back at garrison or at the next supply camp.
2. Repeat step 1 four more times.
3. Waypoint all 5 golem operators and 3 mesmers to somewhere near an enemy keep or garrison during any low-population time of day, or any time that their main population is busy in Eternal Battleground or on some other Borderlands.
4. Mesmers take turns portaling the golems so that they can move at the full +33% normal traveling speed (thanks to speed boosts on the mesmers themselves) the entire length of the map, if need be, just by stepping from portal to portal.
5. When you get to the enemy gate, the mesmers use greatsword long-range attacks to take out any oil or cannons. Ignore the rest, including anybody up on the walls or even any arrow carts, because with Time Warp on the golems, the gate will be down before anybody can die.
6. Jump out of golem suits and 8-man the keep lord. Elapsed time from when the enemy finds out their keep is under attack until you capture it: five minutes, tops.

Here’s the thing: what I hate about this tactic is that any 8-man group can basically capture anything unless there are already at least four, maybe five arrow carts capable of hitting the whole area around the gate and 4 or 5 people standing by inside the keep at all time. That means that to defend both keeps and the garrison takes 12 to 15 people standing by at all times, with nothing to do but watch the gates, to protect themselves from an attack that any 8 people can launch at will with no warning. That is, in my opinion, way, way too big of an advantage to the attacker.

What I’d do about it, if it were up to me, is make golem suits incapable of waypointing and incapable of using mesmer portals. You want to golem-rush a keep that has so many arrow carts you can’t take it any other way? Fine. Guard those golem suits the whole time they’re walking there. Or bring enough people that you can rush-build them (with Time Warp) where you need them. But a tactic where any random 8 people, or at most twice that, of any level and in any gear and with little or no organization, can seize everything on the map within half an hour or combat beginning and against which there is no defense other than permanently stationing overwhelming numbers of defenders? Who, if anybody, thinks that this is fun?

And to add to what multivira just said: don’t want to run with a big zerg, and there’s a big zerg crashing around your home borderlands killing small pick-up groups like yours? Take a four to ten person team to that server’s borderlands and run around flipping camps and killing supply dolyaks. Aside from giving you insanely good XP and decent karma and a fair number of honor badges, it also shuts down the repair and upgrade process at every keep and tower. Do it for more than half an hour, and you’ll make them divert some of that zerg back to their home borderlands to stop you, because they can’t let you get away with that for long — and here come your fair (roughly) 5 vs 5 fights. You don’t even need Teamspeak for that (although it helps).

If the paths the swarms take seems aimless to you, it probably means that you’re not listening (probably on Teamspeak or Mumble) to the people calling out directions, because those directions are seldom if ever random. They’re reacting to scouting reports and moving to intercept — not least of which because there are at least four major ways even a medium-sized swarm can overwhelm even the most heavily upgraded keep, if the defenders don’t see it coming in time and don’t deploy the right countermeasures.

I’m on a lower mid-tier server, in a large guild, on Teamspeak every night, and after a month and a half of pretty heavy WvW I’m still learning. Yeah, I’m slow. And yeah, I take time to do things other than WvW and that cuts into my learning time. I’m also irrationally cautious. But still, if you spend a month in the Battle for the Mists, you’ll probably reverse your tune; not only is WvW not aimless zerging, it requires more attention and better coordination than anything else in the game. Arah path 4 and tier 3 Guild Bounties pale in comparison to the level of attention and coordination that goes into (for example) keeping at least three supply camps’ worth of dolyaks running while desperately trying to hold two keeps, one of which doesn’t have its waypoint rebuilt from the last time it got smashed. If the defending server, in that case, does nothing but zerg around on foot in one big mob, I flat-out guarantee you they’ll lose everything in about an hour, two hours tops, even if they have numeric superiority — which given that they’re defending against armies from two other servers, I guarantee you they don’t.

Sanctus.3725:

To my limited understanding, if a glitch exist inside WvW and players find it, it is the responsibility of Anet to patch it and stop glitches and not the responsibility of players to not use it.

You would be wrong about that:

You will not exploit any bug in Guild Wars 2 and you will not communicate the existence of any such exploitable bug (bugs that grant the user unnatural or unintended benefits) either directly or through public posting, to any other user of Guild Wars 2.

- Guild Wars 2 Rules of Conduct

I have one very high priority request: get rid of all ground-targeted effects in underwater combat, the way Anet already did for grenade kit. When under water, any elixir toolbelt skill, or elixir gun’s Super Elixir, should go off at your location, or maybe just a short distance in front of you the way that Med Kit abilities and Turrets default to.

Unless you’re right up against a wall and facing the wall, they’re all impossible to use under water, because the current behavior is to travel in a semi-random straight line (actually, it’s the same direction as the last attack you fired) until it reaches maximum range or until it hits a wall, then detonate. Very, very frustrating.

jkctmc.8754:

Wow, Ebay has a pretty good sized night crew.

And no morning crew to speak of, as far as I can tell. I can say that, I’m an Ebayer myself.

For a ranger, I’d be inclined to go with one of the titles from whichever Order you intend to join: Warmaster, Crusader, Explorer, Historian, Scholar, or Agent.

Golem suit is crap – doesn’t have the hit points to justify its lousy damage output. I mostly use the Defensive Golem for the extra shielding and to tank for me if I’m about to be downed, but there are times I switch to Supply Crate just to stun a metric kitten-ton of mobs at once so I can run in somewhere and run back out.

timidobserver.7925:

AsmallChicken.9634:

So I went over some of the interview, and I picked up that they wanted to add some things that give some hard counters to boon stacking builds. Now as this was mainly aimed towards elementalists, I’m sure our elixer drinking engineers will also feel its effects.

Yes, you know how thieves kill you in 5 seconds? If you have boons it will be 2 seconds.

Actually, the specific counter they mentioned was to create at least a couple of NPCs (not player character abilities, NPCs, presumably dungeon bosses or event bosses) that have preferential hate towards the player character with the most boons on them.

The subject of boon stacking came up in one other regard: their explanation for why thief spike damage is so high is that they were specifically worried that, since they were striking from stealth, they wouldn’t be able to use a boon stripping ability first, so they needed to be able to hit through any plausible combination of boons. They admitted that this made them too powerful against other builds, and said that they can’t do anything about that unless they decide to nerf boons across the board, which they said they’re considering, but only very cautiously if at all. That part really would hit elixir engineers, but no harder than it would hit several other classes.

They didn’t say what their fix would be to the dual problem of condition stacking limits kicking in and ubiquitous condition removal, but they did say that the damage of condition-stacking abilities was balanced around a lot less condition removal than the game currently sees. My impression is that, since they’ve admitted they can’t increase the number of DoT stacks allowed, that pretty much paints them into the corner of having to really increase the damage numbers from all condition stacks. That’d be a huge buff for quite a few engineer builds, not least of which my beloved elixir gun.

out of character: For what it’s worth, all of the NPCs that have Golemancer in their names seem to be elementalists. No, I don’t understand why, either.

Q: How many synergeticists does it take to change a photonic emiter?

A: One. Who hands the problem off to a dynamics grad and a statics grad, reducing it to a previously solved photonic emitter joke.

Seriously, I have to congratulate my dynamacist and staticist friends for the combination of stubbornness and intellectual dullness it takes to keep working on a problem once you know how it will turn out. We couldn’t do it without you.