Guild Wars 2

Yeah, I’m not sure this is op at all. Situationally it could be nice, such as fighting in a zerg that is being trebbed with cows. But, there are immediate diminishing returns if more than one person runs it as there are only a finite number of conditions to cleanse.

On guardian, I’d stick to shelter over this.

Also, on the bright side, people will stop kittening about signet of perplexity.

Dutchares.6084:

Jharkin.9357:

May want to read that again. I was talking about players and not NPCs.

Still I don’t see this would fix the problem, so people spread out over all servers. Or get more population in off hours when the enemy is running large zerg with 0 defenders.

Guilds run mostly in peak hours. Problems of server balance isn’t in peek hours where most servers have queues on all borders.

Only gold league servers queue on all borders during peek hours when there isn’t an wvw achievement going on . Try dropping down a few tiers and you will get matchups where one server is queued and the other is half queued or worse. Also, there are plenty of aussie and even european guilds that play off hours on na servers.

Dutchares.6084:

Jharkin.9357:

Mercenaries

Mercenaries open up when a specific server is extremely outgunned. What mercenaries does is allow guilds from other servers to temporarily join the outmanned server to help balance the odds. Only guilds from servers that are winning their matchup may become mercenaries. Mercenaries get a bonus in wxp and money, however are unable to interact with supply in towers and keeps to avoid griefing.

Like I said before, I don’t think NPC’s are the solutions.
Did you ever see a zerg avoid a supply camp because the NPC orges are in it?
Even a solo player can take a supply camp with the NPC’s in it, it just takes longer.
If you send lots of NPC’s to towers and keeps will only mean maybe a small delay for the zerg (probably not). I don’t think a zerg in a zone with only NPC enemies will every be stopped by the NPC’s

May want to read that again. I was talking about players and not NPCs.

It probably would have been better doing this discussion in it’s own forum, instead of a thread.

Mercenaries

Mercenaries open up when a specific server is extremely outgunned. What mercenaries does is allow guilds from other servers to temporarily join the outmanned server to help balance the odds. Only guilds from servers that are winning their matchup may become mercenaries. Mercenaries get a bonus in wxp and money, however are unable to interact with supply in towers and keeps to avoid griefing.

As a stretch goal, mercenaries is a permanent flag and the guild becomes “serverless” in wvw. Losing servers are able to offer up some method of payment to entice good mercenary groups to help their server.

Changing the cap is a ridiculous idea. To make it “balanced” the cap would need to be dynamic based on the lowest pop server. Are you going penalize servers with a guild that plays in NA mornings due to the fact that their opponent can only field 10 people on a map?

This is probably the hardest topic to discuss as the only time there will never be true balance without drastically limiting the number of people playing per side, which shouldn’t happen. The only thing you can really do here is to create additional artificial controls which shape the way people play the game. The only control currently is outnumbered, 3 factions and siegerazer which are not up to snuff as a method to help with population imbalance.

1. Boost incentive for 2v1 to aid with imbalances

Currently 2nd and 3rd place tend to concentrate on one another rather than both attempting to knock 1st place down when it’s a runaway/imbalanced match. Most of their decision process comes from wxp farming and the easiest points are from the most picked on (paper), which tends to be the last placed team.

There is a pretty easy fix here. Make it so that the rewards for wxp is greater the tougher the tower. A paper tower should be worth a x1 muliple, t2 a x4 multiple and a t3 a x8 multiple. The same with keeps. Rewards in general should be higher the harder the task. This idea should be extended when facing the server that is “stacked” by having a general multiple when killing or taking land from the server in the lead.

This will help with fulfilling DAOC’s old idea that the two weaker groups will gang up on the strongest group. It’s currently failing in gw2 as it’s more about wxp then winning.

2. Artificially strengthen and weaken servers via NPCs

As a server gets pushed back to next to nothing it causes the weaker server to lose even more players and the stronger server to gain players due to pvers jumping on the “karma train”. As a side is pushed back add more and better defenses that potentially scale to what they have left, and possibly spawn attackers to help take back what is lost. Make reducing a server to nothing an incredible undertaking and give those that are outnumbered hope that as they are pushed back they will eventually see those legendary defenders out in the field and in action.

Gathslan.1870:

If you think War and gw2 combat systems can be compared when it comes to how taxing they are you must be blind ; p

Taxing is pretty much a mute issue as long as your system scales and have the money to throw in additional compute nodes. Plus, the servers now have exponentially more computational power as those that originally ran War.

Zumy.6318:

How come Warhammer in its late state did not lagg in 200+ battles? It also had better combatlogs, more skills, more cooldowns, higher aoe caps and is from 2008.

Warhammer pulled some know how from DAOC and used a distributed system that scaled fairly well when dealing with large numbers of people in small areas. I know some of the original devs along with Mark and they were all pretty happy with it. The more users in an area, which was created dynamically and not just zones, the more computers would be used in that area. Now, with virtualization (vms) where it is, this is even easier.

Regretfully, using a distributed system that scales needs to be thought about when the system was originally written and is hard to shoehorn in later. Once the cpu issue is solved there are other issues you would hit such as updating the clients on locations and effects.

For those saying memory is an issue, lol.

Why would you want to drop ascended gear from wvw considering you can get most of it from wvw? Amulets can only be gotten from wvw, and I’ve personally had 3 ascended drops in wvw (2 rings and a weapon box). My newest alt is only a legend and he already has 4 pieces of ascended.

Great decision doing this.

1. Rewards for defense
2. Imbalance
3. Zerg busting

Fozzik.1742:

To the other servers (IoJ and DB), are you only getting lag / disconnects on BPBL?

It’s only on BPBL, which is a pretty big advantage. Whenever IOJ sends a group over there half of them disconnect and go somewhere else. We had a 20+ omega rush of bay and only 10 of the original pilots actually made it to the gates. There was a different incident in EB this matchup where the game crashed for our entire zerg, while the enemy zerg remained online.

Devanuze.8734:

Felt like hard work commanding in EB for the last few hours. Started by soloninjaring bravost and ended up commanding for the first time in months.

Some pretty decent fights especially against those insane zergs at some points XD Honestly surprised we got our keep back :p

Didn’t see dredge flip more than 5 times in my whole time commanding. Even with red’s having paper towers along their eastern flank All the more fun for us though

You did a good job out there Moose. I particularly liked the duo-ninja guild cata attempt on Bravost. Hopefully we’ll see more of you commanding.

tas.6310:

I agree with you. Borlis Pass didn’t ask this person to go into Teamspeak – as for spying, any reports of streaming someone else’s Teamspeak information into the Teamspeak channel reported to me are responded with in a very harsh manner. The last person who streamed someone else’s channel to our server transferred to Blackgate…

I personally don’t think there was any spying. Core had regretfully gone up to Hill minutes before the rush and the sudden zerg showing up was more than likely a response to us being spotted.

Nice tactics on hill btw. We tried the same thing a couple of weeks ago with great success. Once hills gets it’s wp it becomes a huge asset.

I would still ask your players not to jump on our teamspeak server though, despite their intentions. We’ve had a number of issues of players from other servers sitting in our channels for sometimes an extended period of time before we catch them.

Fun fights all around this week!

Anyone have any idea what the range of justice is blind or inspired virtues?

ilr.9675:

nope, core held their usual pride parade after that and we all just shrugged

BP does a great job massing on their BL. What we were doing was runnin. This is our pride parade :

bishop.7596:

You should be referring to Sunny hill and I reckoned you must be new or very ignorant.. that’s a known bug on this green tower Anet been trying to fix for 1 year and if your zerg don’t give up after a few wipes we won’t even get near.. took our time capping camps + guard pts.. you should know where we’re heading and if we wanna glitch why bother dropping 3 super rams in the first place just sent a Mesmer and blink thru.. was farming your reinforcement and apparently a few of us ended up inside after a blast.. most of IOJ veterans went Kain in the old days but I heard u guys hv some new tier 1 guild so might wanna get your fact right before shooting your mouth off!!

Everyone is well aware of the glitchy gates and every time I’ve seen an ioj glitch through he immediately gets out of the keep. If not, the commander gets on him. You all glitched through and killed the cata and 2 acs wrecking your siege.

Visirale.6097:

Where do TOFU and KOME mostly come from geographically? I can’t imagine it’s that much fun to pvdoor in NA’s weakest time zone. I mean, props for having that many people on consistently at that time, but I certainly wouldn’t stick around in NA servers if that was my prime time.

And yet KOME still takes advantage of glitching through gates despite outnumbering the occupants 5 to 1.

I think everyone is in agreement leagues are going to be a blowout due to the population differences in even a league of 3 teams. Servers at the bottom of the leagues are not going to stand a chance and have a good chance at seeing wvw die off due to constant blowouts.

What if there was a handicap based on the matchup’s glicko scores? Not perfect, but it would give a Kaineng a chance to compete against a Maguuma or any two servers with a huge pop/coverage gap.

The handicap can use the server’s glicko ratio.

For instance :

Maguuma 1,745,619
Kaineng 1,395,645
Crystal Desert 1 509.714

Probably too simplistic, but a straight ratio :

Handicap ppt multiple :
Kaineng 1.25
Crystal Desert 1.16

It would be nice to see any server that played particularly well with it’s playerbase size to be able to compete and hopefully a handicap would let them.

Tamaki Revolution.3548:

Yeah and those GvGers were totally defending their servers.

Actually the 15v15 was pretty much the only way to stop the massive SBI zerg. 15 IOJ [CORE] were able to hold up 55 SBI and NSP for about 45 minutes.

Fungalfoot.7213:

If you’re not in WvWvW to compete on behalf of your server then kindly get out.

How is this not competing on behalf of your server? These are two wvw guilds
who have been playing all week taking 30 minutes for some even fights in at the end of the week. The people watching certainly didn’t want their server’s guild to lose and these fights between two of the server’s bigger wvw guilds have a lot more impact on server morale than flipping sm.

It’s not like these two guilds came from pve to duke it out and then go back to pve.

Titan.3472:

The problem is people in GvG BELIEVE to be the only skilled people who know game mechanisms and playstyle. Always made me laugh hard and I always troll on battlefield these said GvG guilds when they get kitten hard. These GvG players achieve nothing and don’t play anyway better than guilds involved in WvW: basicly GvG is a more simple mode for newbies. This fight just happened to be GvG. We had some earlier semi-organized fights vs mixed groups as well.

These fights were not as much about GvG as they were about finding even fights. Because of the matchup it was a blowout all week and any fights over 10 people were a 2:1 ratio or worse. GvG was a way to throw some even fights out there that involved more then just a couple of people.

This may not be their fault guys. I’m actually looking into traffic shaping at the ISP level, where the ISP artificially slows down certain types of traffic. I have a suspicion FIOS is shaping gw2 and gaming traffic in general.

I have a 10gb connection at work plugged into our core router which goes out to level3. The Gw2 servers also have a peering point with level3. I play about half the time on this and have encountered server lag only once in about 4 months. At home, over my 70mb fios hit lag all the time, and yet the connection ikittenotally clean.

I’m actually in the process setting up a vpn tunnel from home to work to see if FIOS is indeed traffic shaping gw2 traffic.

Due to the matchmaker we (ioj) were matched up with a pretty lopsided group of servers and have had poor fights all week so the last couple of days we decided to do some ad-hoc smaller scale 15v15 gvg fights. Fights were a blast despite bloodlust and in some had well over fourty spectators from all three servers as everyone was a bit frustrated by the matchup.

During our 5th fight an ANET rep popped in and told our opponent that what we were doing was against the rules (trading kills and going against the spirit of wvw). Some back and forth took place and while I didn’t hear the final verdict it sounded like we were allowed to continue.

I would just like to hear from someone official what anet’s stances are on these types of events. We’re hoping to get a game of banishball going where two servers attempt to get a ball (asura from third server) through a goal using nothing but guardian banish. You lose points if the ball dies on your side or if you down an opponent.

Pretty hilarious that the anet employee tried to stop the gvg. I hope TE got a screenshot of that convo and I hope we’re not all banned in a few hours.

ptitminou.6489:

Because Teq is a farce, has kittenty drops and all you need to do is participate a few times for the wings then you’re done? Make it drop a guaranteed pre-cursor on kill, then tell me if the behavior changes.

Oh, I forgot pre-cursors dropped on every kill in wvw. Thanks for the reminder.

Feed Me Change.6528:

Griefing is the problem with this.

As ANet as said around 100 times, they will not add stat buffs for being outnumbered, outmanned or in any direct correlation to the number of people who have on a map, because it will lead to griefing. People harassing others to leave so they can get 50 more stats will happen and that’s the reason the famed “Orb to Outnumbered buff” argument never goes anywhere.

This is totally conjecture and a pretty ridiculous reason not to even try it. They are so apt to bring up the stat buffs for bloodlust are experimental and not set in stone. Why not try bigger buffs for outnumbered for a couple of days? You don’t see this type of behavior with large scale events like tequatl, where some types of characters are actually a detriment.

Only problem with karma trains is that it makes the lopsided that much more lopsided as the pve crowd comes over in droves.

ArkhamsJester.5206:

Congratulations IoJ, for taking Bluelake from 15 ET after about 10 portal bombs, Offensive AC fire and getting peppered by cows from your guys’ hills. It was an IoM commander and ET friends that held that down and we even needed to throw out a merchant for that fight. But those are the moments that drive ET. BTW thanks for the /bows in game much respect.

Yeah, that was hilarious. Core was there leveling up alts in that karmatrain when it hit lake. People were throwing down portals left and right and nobody had any idea of where they went. The raid leader kept yelling at people not to take them, but the pugs kept jumping in them one after another. I wish I brought out my Mesmer to throw down some more. Reminded me of the light grenade in Mom and Dad Save the World.

Banzie.5248:

Think its really just because so many of us are bored this week we’ve really stopped caring what gets flipped sadly. Its a horrible habit to get into and pretty disappointed in commanders ignoring calls about IoJ BL being attacked this week :l

I really don’t think we should be trying for points these next two weeks.

Borlis pass has an outside shot at getting below us in the glicko before the league starts up, and Yak’s Bend and Kaineng have a great chance at it. If these three servers continue to tank on purpose and beat us to the bottom then we’ll wind up at the bottom of the gold league.

Dristig.9678:

What gear are you running? I always feel naked in Zerker when I WvW.

I run mostly knights/cavalier with a tad bit of celestial (3 armor pieces & weapon). My crit is 90% instead of the 50% in the build, but my crit chance is 35%. With full stacks of might and bloodlust, which I didn’t have in the video, I can hit for close to 6k w/ 3400 armor and 24k health.

Edit :

Here is the build w/ my current wvw equipment. I don’t really like celestial trinkets as the ratio isnt as good as celestial armor in those 3 spots, but I was kind of wishy washy on what I wanted there. You’d probably be better served with cavalier or knight amulet. Celestial in a way works for the build.

http://en.gw2skills.net/editor/?fIAQJASTjkOxw9OGP4wBE0DNsK4iTBlQ9YO2w4A-jkDBoeAINQkFAkIQJfCiJQKrlRFRjVVDQvATfSpWFDycGwgGybYZ1SBwkyI-w

I have almost the exact same build same build for wvw, except melandru/lemongrass over lyssas and 25% movement instead of signet mastery. It plays really solidly. Delivers great numbers and defense.

Luckily, I’m not the only one with this issue, but I frequently can’t find the mouse pointer quickly in huge zerg vs zerg fights when not running at high quality which seems to have slightly better contrast. Would be great if we could pick the color of the pointer.

Other people with this issue :

https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/suggestions/Larger-More-Visual-Mouse-Pointer
https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/suggestions/Make-the-mouse-pointer-easier-to-spot
https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/suggestions/Mouse-cursor-visibility-issue

Thanks for the fight outside of longview Bags. You guys are brutes. Next time please bring along some more necros so we have more we can actually down more than one. Think we all ran in circles for 5 minutes. Would love to see more small scale fights like those.

I’d love to finish the 1v1 against your rogue that chased me down N of bay.

Ansilon.6230:

Hello all, just thought I’d share what RUN is all about.

Nice video Ansilon. IOJ is happy to have you all.

Nice job taking back your keep this morning ET with your 15. Our three AC gunners were sent to work in mines after it was discovered they were all working on their Ambient Killer daily during the attack.

sorrow.2364:

Nice footage, I saw you both were running perplexity.

I’m really considering to level up the warrior I’ve parked before the ranger.

Stability really puts the stoppers on the rune and that’s the first thing good players put up when they see you coming at them with a hammer. Against bad players it’s pretty comical. The quickest I have been able to stack 25 confusions is about 6-8 seconds. I was able to get a video of one, but regretfully I had the guy stun locked and he didn’t get off an ability.

I’m not sure if he had rune of perplexity or not. I did notice the confusion on me, but he may have had the warrior ability to inflict confusion on interrupt. I used that ability as well and was able to stack 9 confusion per interrupt instead of 5 that the rune usually does.

Daecollo.9578:

You took forever to kill him and he almost killed you.

Bunker build, plus I’m not particularly good. Have yet to lose a 1v1 though with the build, although a lot of stalemates. Would have done better if I timed my stomp / bull’s charge better.

I’ve been having more luck with it 1v1 then in zergs/groups and only have taken a couple of videos just for myself. Nothing real awe inspiring, but I’m just an average player.

DeadlySynz.3471:

how often has this happened?

It’s happened a good 3 times now that I noticed. I still got exp and the loot so I don’t think he made it out alive. I originally thought that the cc may have knocked them under the map.

I’ve been playing around with rune of perplexity + distracting strikes on my bunker hammer warrior for about a week. It seems effective, but not overly op. In organized zergs if they are cced (interrupted) they are usually dead because they are chained stunned and can’t mitigate direct damage. First thing I notice good guilds doing is pop stability. Problem solved.

It actually seems more effective in 1v1 then zergs surprisingly. Fights last a bit longer, particularly with a bunker build then most stability lasts. I’m not particularly good at 1v1 and am able to hold my own pretty well with confusion in the mix.

Against a decent player I’m really only able to land one application of confusion :

http://youtu.be/wuidDAoqFtg

Against a bad player I’m able to pile on 25 stacks, which I don’t really even need.

I guess. Haven’t seen it on any other build though. Maybe this one is a little too annoying.

I’ve been trying out a new build and have been noticing that a few times people have been simply vanishing on death caused by confusion. I still get exp and loot, but they are simply gone. I started to record some of my 1v1s and finally got one.

Is this a bug?

I was playing around with distracting strikes / rune of perplexity over the past week as well in wvw. I was running with 3.4k armor, 1k condition dmg, 1k health + 43% crit chance though w/ longbow & hammer. Longbow + condition is evil, plus most range couldn’t out dps my healing. Against melee it was brutal vs 1v1. 5 ccs (stomp, bull’s charge, backbreaker, earthshaker & staggering bow) pretty much had them down for 40% of the fight unless they had stability. I usually had 9 stacks of confusion up hitting for 1300 a pop. One poor guy had 25 stacks of confusion and he took himself out with a heal skill.

Greatsword is pretty epic. Here is a 4 second takedown (15k damage) at range in wvw.

I have mixed views on it in wvw at least where it should be the strongest. In zergs you still take ae, which can hurt a lot as you can’t dodge without breaking mimic, and whatever condition damage that is effecting you.

In the end it’s pretty situational. It’s really strong when you are in the front of a zerg, but you need to be really quick with an invis or blink when it ends, or otherwise you’re roadkill. It’s saved my bacon a few times running through zergs in order to get to an objective when invis runs out, and has created some pretty funny moments with perfectly timed “mimic” bombs on zergs.

Tapping seems like a pretty potent strategy in general. Tagging something like bay or hill bl on an off over a few hours can set up a pretty good rush. Boy that cried wolf.

I’ve been trying to figure out the mechanics of contesting, particularly as a roamer, and am seeing some pretty inconsistent things. At SM for instance, it took a good minute of banging on the gate to throw it into contested, while the water entrance of the SE keep in EB it took a single berserker phantasm which makes me question the damage threshold. Or perhaps the damage threshold is damage over the number of people in the vicinity.

Any ideas on the mechanics here?

Pretty simple to roam with as a mesmer /w centaur as well. Have 13 seconds of stealth and 100% uptime on speed.

I’ve been using a build like this in wvw w/ apothecary and it’s been great fun. As stated the only issue I’ve been having are dealing with conditions. I’m relatively new to wvw and not a twitch gamer so this build is relatively easy to play for me. Death blossom and signet of malice/assassin’s reward can keep me in the fight. Steal on this build is brutal, 11s poison, 13s ae fury/might/swiftness, 2 buffs stripped and transferred to you, 100% coverage on ae vigor, 2k heal, 2k damage on a 21s cooldown.