Guild Wars 2

Using skill #2 to set up the #3 explosion makes sense… but only if the bomb had zero cooldown, so it would be immediately available. Which it doesn’t.

The best scenario I’ve found is if your enemy has to run over to stomp from ~1000 range, AND you time #2 correctly to interrupt right when the enemy’s stomp is about to land (for maximum do-over time), AND you spam the #3 hotkey…

assuming they don’t block either of your attacks…
assuming they didn’t instantly stomp the first time…
assuming they don’t have quickness, or stealth, or stability, or aegis…
assuming your attack doesn’t just randomly miss…
assuming there is a single enemy instead of 2…

…then you might get the bomb to explode in the last 1-2 frames of their second stomp animation. Maybe.

And then you’re helplessly dead once they get up because you had 0 time to heal with skill #4.

Easy fix: make the #3 bomb usable immediately, just like the #2 pull wire. It can keep the longer cooldown, as long as it’s available within 1 or 2 seconds of going into downed state.

Don’t glass cannon a FT build. Get a good dose of precision, toughness, and some vitality; and slot at least 2 survival traits such as Protection Shield, Protection Injection, Self-Regulating Defenses (if you must), Stabilized Armor, whatever.

FT is about standing (mostly) still and calmly surviving the battle until you win.

What you’ll notice is that FT build damage ramps up over time. The first 1/3 of your enemy’s life bar will take an agonizingly long time to decrease… but the last 1/3 will drop almost instantly. Engi FT engagements are not a burst damage race, they will properly take a longer period of time, and over time you can outlast most other classes as long as they didn’t take you by surprise.

In sPvP/WvW, enemies instinctively try to burst you down immediately… which is a mistake, because that is right when your protective cooldowns will be most effective. You’ll notice their damage spikes at the start—I’m glaring at you, facerolling thieves of the world—and then they scuttle around waiting for their Big Awesome Skill to come off cooldown. Meanwhile your damage remains constant, and once their protective CDs wear off their health drops faster than you’d imagine. Plus you can continually hit them everywhere with just about any decent FT build, you can shove them around or immobilize at will, you can hold off on heals until the last second, or you can out-distance them as you run away (if you included that option in your build).

Glass cannon FT vs glass cannon everything else loses. 1/2 bunker FT vs glass cannon everything else is a longer, winnable battle.

Depends on what you’re farming. Engis can switch out tons of options, whereas other classes (from what I’ve seen) specialize in fewer situations.

For Orr mobs, Juggernaught FT is good. Others have suggested grenades, which is possibly better, but I loathe the play style. Besides, last patch’s changes to FT make it great if you actively use every skill.

For node farming, you want speed and cripples. Ignore mobs, even while gathering, and keep 100% swiftness uptime. I like a 30/0/20/0/20 build, using pistol/pistol and Bomb kit for glue, and Tool Kit+Power Wrench for additional cripples. Power Shoes, Gear Shield, and Speedy Kits+MedKit keep you running full time, with Drop Antidote if you get tagged with cripple.

Nothing will catch you with that spec, in PvE or sPvP or WvW; and if you do feel like killing a mob, Bombs+Wrenches form a powerful melee synergy.

I leveled up farming underwater krait in the WvW lakes, and engi is great for that. Good source of scales for leveling up crafting, too. Underwater areas in Orr tend to be choked with extra mobs; with Rifled Barrels and Grenades, you can easily pull tons to you and fight them all off simultaneously.

(Naturally the first step is to put Orbs back in the game and ban/fix the hacking. But with this change, even occasional hacks shouldn’t cause too much trouble.)

One of the huge problems with the Orb bonuses is that holding an Orb made it more difficult to take the orb, or a keep, to the point that it could become a snowball effect. Basically, if you were winning already, Orbs would ensure you keep winning.

One of the glaring flaws with the Outmanned buff is that it does not help outnumbered players recover at all. Its bonuses—magic find, exp, karma—encourage PvE behavior, not PvP fights. Players are not motivated to join and fight with the buff, because the buff does not help them fight. In short, having the Outmanned buff on a map gave you an incentive to completely give up, and just farm mobs or do a jump puzzle.

The obvious, elegant solution is to swap the buffs. Make holding an Orb give you the PvE buffs (stacking up to 3 times), and the Outmanned buff gives you the HP/stat boost (maybe scaling up with how badly you are outnumbered).

This way, even if a server holds all 3 Orbs, it would not cement their grip on the week’s match. It will reward that server’s players with greater rewards from the PvE environment within WvW, giving them something to do if the other servers stop showing up. It is a boost without a match-breaking effect: still worth pursuing, but not powerful enough to determine who wins.

At the same time, Outmanned servers won’t feel automatically crushed. They will have a slight buff that can still be overcome by numbers, but gives them the edge needed to defend their last holdings, or to win numerically even skirmishes, or to take camps and other “starter” objectives with their lower numbers.

It won’t solve the zerg problem, or the turtle problem, or PvDoor silliness, or other snowballing effects. But at least it gets the mechanics moving in the right direction.

THANK YOU for clearing this up!

I love WvW. It’s my main GW2 activity. It has some great concepts, and its levelling components and separation from PvE are unique aspects that drew me to the game in the first place.

But ANet’s ambition clearly exceeded their technical limitations and their design work. I’ll sign on to a “thank you” thread after I can go a week without losing a fight to some bug, exploit, or glitch.

(I only came to the forums today to see if there was an official response to Broken Thing of the Week this time around, the turtle thing which makes large groups invulnerable to spells that are designed to deal with large groups. Highly related to my discontent above.)

DivineBeing.2086:

Yea, BG isn’t trying too hard either /strokes kitten /rollseyes. Sorry, I don’t believe a word you speak, unless they all get butt hurt from actually having a challenge from a newcomer, which than I could see that.

We were impressed by the newcomer exactly one time: when we heard from our morning crew that, after taking all the keeps in a BL unopposed, one of your guilds had paid for all 3 waypoints on a single map. That was quite a remarkable commitment and worthy of note, even if it’s only a sign of impressive gold farming.

There was also an impressive 2 v 1 in SBI borderlands on Friday before the post-reset patch. SBI took Hills, BG took Greenvale while we were occupied defending Hills, then both started trying to take Greenwater supply camp from us… for 45 minutes. Both servers failed to kick us out once we were cornered, but that was some kitten impressive willingness to repeatedly bash your heads into the proverbial brick wall of our siege.

Other than that, the “challenge” you present is one of hacking, exploiting the turtle, and manners in general. And that is not a challenge worth blowing time or gold on, especially when the game code itself is against you.

And you state we really aren’t fighting JQ and pretty much all of JQ has stopped playing. Points to screenshot, really looks like your server “isn’t really playing” even though they own majority of the maps.

If you realized how few people it took to get those points for JQ, you would leave the forums in shame.

It’s all baseless facts with no data to back up anything. WE have no wait times! Lions Arch has a longer queue than wvwvw! We get outmanned buffs at times too. So try not to use those excuses, mmmk.

How in Grenth’s name am I supposed to take a screenshot of an instant queue time?

I suppose I could take screenshots every time BG owned the whole map and we had Outmanned, and then get accused of putting two screenshots from 2 different times together. I could screenshot every time I encounter an SBI player with the Outmanned buff, or maybe video capture 24 hours of fighting BG players without it, but my hard drive would run out of space.

All these requests for data and proof are meaningless. It is BG avoiding the hostility they are getting for rolling empty maps and bragging about it. No one would whine about losing maps because they fielded no people—I yelled at other JQ people about it near the end of our IoJ/SBI match—it is your inane bragging that you are somehow better or more strategic while rolling empty maps, that gets you the ridicule you deserve.

During the HoD/SBI/JQ fights, we knew why we were losing: SBI refused to fight for first, and cross-server guilds were impossible to beat. During the end of last week’s match, we knew why we were losing: SBI dramatically improved their playing, and we stopped having full queues. And now, we know why we are losing: BG hacks, turtle exploits, and continually empty maps.

The only people who don’t know what is going on is BG, as evidenced by the pitiful defense you and others have attempted here. Willful ignorance is hardly something to be boasting about.

(Edit: for completeness’ sake, I should mention we also know what’s going on the several times we’ve got 100% of all WvW maps simultaneously. We don’t jump on forums and brag about our strategy, commanders, etc when the TS is full of people saying “OMG, there’s a HoD player! Follow him around, he might be the last one left in Tyria!”)

filc.7051:

Jorgamund.7803:

BlackGate players: the correct response to exploiters that benefit you is not a shrug and an “Oh well, hackers gonna hack” attitude. The correct response is to report your own players. All the generalized blame you are receiving right now is 100% justified.

lol

How do you want us to do this? Should we guard your orbs 24/7?

Story time:

20 minutes ago from the time of this writing, on the BG borderlands, the JQ TS suddenly noticed that SBI’s orb, held at Hills for several hours, was on the move towards our keep at Bay. Quaggans weren’t up, we weren’t near the east side of the map, and the scouts didn’t see any of us doing a sneak attack. So the assumption was that one of our JQ guys had hacked the orb.

This made everyone on the server’s TS furious. Everyone started talking over each other trying to find out who it was so we could report them. Half our zerg dropped their current attack and re-routed to find out the name. As soon as the name and guild tag was announced, everyone online was to report them. The order went out on chat and TS that no one was to heal, defend, or portal the person with the orb; if it dropped, no one was to pick it up.

That is the proper response to hacking and exploiting: the entire server turns on the culprit. If your server did this constantly from the beginning like JQ has, you would not have the reputation you do now, and you would have fewer hackers.

Speaking of which, it turns out we jumped to conclusions. Right before we caught up to the orb, a player from SBI hopped on our TS and explained what happened. Their altar at Hills had been destroyed via a hack from BG, and they had no altar to re-place it, so they were running it over to give to JQ for free rather than let BG profit from the hack.

Our commanders on the map didn’t really want the orb. Most of the players weren’t happy getting a “free” orb without having to fight for it. If we were on SBI BL, we would have let the orb reset to the north altar… but we were on BG BL, so if it was not placed within 15 minutes BG got the orb back thanks to the hack. So we reluctantly took the orb from the SBI carrier (sorry about the zerg who shot you, whoever you were!). We put it in Bay, and posted a guard to try and catch the expected BG hacker the next time he tried it.

We’re not buddies with SBI now; as I write this, our zerg is backstabbing SBI’s attack on BG’s garrison. (And I’m sure there are whiners in BG complaining about being double teamed, because they can’t read the battlefield and figure out who is fighting who in a 3 way melee.) The friendly player who hopped on to our TS to let us know what happened had his IP banned—spies are still spies, even if they help you once.

But this is why we have more respect for SBI, and why everyone calls BG a server that plays dirty, and what I mean when I say the entire server is responsible for dealing with hackers.

You aren’t fighting JQ. You are fighting the few hardcore WvW guilds too stubborn to let the map get 100% red.

Every map on JQ is instant queue, and several have Outmanned. I don’t know how long BG has been high or full population, but this is the first time it’s happened on JQ since the game launched. It is hard to explain how bizarre this situation is to others who are used to WvW queues under 1 hour.

And yet BG still needs to exploit and use the turtle crap to keep the score roughly even.

Here on JQ, we hated SBI during the HoD/SBI/JQ matchups because they refused to fight HoD, and several times they had cross-server guilds which teamed up with HoD to defend a keep. The one uniting sentiment across all JQ guilds is that we hate settling for second; fight for first or don’t bother fighting—and SBI was clearly aiming at second for several weeks.

But SBI put up serious fights over the last few weeks, and we respect them now. An even fight with them is now a challenge, instead of an automatic win like a few months ago. I can’t blame them for standing down this week, and I won’t lose respect for them, because this WvW matchup is absurd.

DivineBeing.2086:

Btw, the reason I have found why BG is so good is because of our commanders! No joke, when they login, the whole server gets coordinated instantly. And I am talking coordinated. Sunday morning, commander Chhoco logged in. We took the ENTIRE map! We owned everything by 1PMish. Commanders logged off for Halloween event, map goes back to being pretty much even after a three to four hours.

You didn’t take it because your commander is awesome. You took the map because JQ (and SBI from what I can tell) had stopped playing.

I was online Sunday morning, and we had the Outmanned buff in multiple battlegrounds. People were shifting BL trying to get a group together, so the buff “moved” to different a BL from time to time, but every time I checked we had it in at least one, sometimes 3. It lasted straight through until prime time, at which point we weren’t Outmanned but we still had instant queues.

JQ was a high pop server 2 minutes after the head start launched, and a full server within an hour. It’s been full ever since, with long WvW queues from the start. But Friday through today was the only time on JQ that the Lion’s Arch queue was hours long and the WvW queues were instant. Even EB had instant queues, which never happens even around 4 AM on weeknights.

This is not entirely due to the BG/SBI/JQ matchup; we started losing people and getting instant queues since Wednesday. But BG’s behavior on Friday and Saturday made even us remaining hardcore WvW players leave the fight in disgust.

Zerging in mass form taking over random crap cause you out number your opponent is NOT a strategy!

Ah, so you agree with me, what BG is doing is not actually a superior “strategy”? Glad to find some common ground.

My point is, get some good commanders, build a lot of trust, and use that charisma to lead the group to victory.

We already have good commanders. These are the guys that fought HoD to a standstill during their reigning days, who crushed the other servers to get to the #1 slot, and who lead the entire battleground without even having a commander pin. They’re the guys who earned that 100 gold by showing up for weeks on end, taking charge when others logged off, paying for upgrades out of their own pocket, and getting donations 5-10 silver at a time from the people who fought with them.

For the most part, these commanders are sitting this match out.

I can’t blame them. I lead a small group myself, and I can not justify playing against the crap that BG is doing, especially with the invisible player bug. I can not be a responsible leader by tell my players to jump in to WvW for some fun, when I know they won’t have fun this week, and nothing will be accomplished in exchange for their time and their silver.

That’s not to say the place is deserted. I give huge respect to Agress of FIRE, who apparently never sleeps and runs multiple battlegrounds when necessary; and to the guys in ESOL, who run multiple commanders with great squad tactics… even though JQ hasn’t provided them with the raw manpower to defend any keeps for 3 days. And SBI shows up from time to time, even though 1/2 their players I’ve seen since Friday had the Outmanned buff.

TL;DR: you are not fighting JQ this week. Your commanders are not winning glorious battles through strategy and charisma. You are fighting an empty suit on a broken battleground using questionable tactics.

Look, everyone saying “you can’t blame an entire server for the actions of one hacker” is being disingenuous. We can, because you don’t report them.

I’ve been on JQ since the beta weekends. By the end of the first week of WvW matches, everyone in the Teamspeak was fed up with hackers to the point of hatred. We report every single one we see… including those on our own server.

We have had people speak up in TS, and offer to glitch our zerg through a wall. Sometimes they offer to orb glitch. Every single time the commanders turn them down, or the rest of the TS shouts them down.

We have had cases where someone glitches out an opponent’s orb on their own, and the commander on the scene opts to leave it alone so that we can’t be accused of hacking. Harder to tell which individual did the exploit sometimes, but when we can tell we report them.

BlackGate players: the correct response to exploiters that benefit you is not a shrug and an “Oh well, hackers gonna hack” attitude. The correct response is to report your own players. All the generalized blame you are receiving right now is 100% justified.

If you had been self-regulating yourself like JQ or other servers we know of, your rampant hacking problem would be gone by now. You can’t blame “the new guys” or bandwagon transfers; on JQ, when we had the same influx, we rejected the hackers, reported the exploiters, banned them from TS, and even started harassing them in the forums until they left.

As is, we have no respect for you, your players, your guilds, or any of the vaunted “strategists” you mistakenly think are winning the match this week.

Giving you the most benefit of the doubt possible (a grace you have not earned), the best that can be said is that you use cheap zerg tactics and borderline exploits, against two servers with a constant Outmanned buff, yet lack the introspection and self-awareness to acknowledge any of your own faults or the problems you are causing.

Judas.5432:

Don’t forget, everyone, this game has still only been out for under two months. Complaining about it is all well and good but keep that in mind. I never played WoW but I’ve been told that even they had a similar problem way back in the day.

Sorry, but no. Every software release has bugs, every graphics-heavy game has glitches, but there is a stark difference between minor anomalies and utterly game-ruining bugs.

It is one thing to have problems like “this quest mob didn’t respawn”, or “the scripted event doesn’t fire when weird condition X happens”, or “the loot was 1.5 silver instead of 15 silver”, two months after release. I expect that. I don’t believe in a world where these things can be prevented.

But to have a new update two months later which completely breaks a major section of a game? Arguably the highly hyped end-game of the MMO in question? That’s not a funny little launch hiccup, that is a sign of a poor software development process.

I don’t make that claim based just on WvW being broken—actually, the update broke three big things in WvW (player visibility, getting credit for keep capturing, and the borderlands jump puzzles), so maybe that alone is sufficient. But you can see the problems in the dev process show through in other places, like the tooltips which don’t have a consistent way to update themselves, the traits that were renamed/re-worded from beta but retained old functionality, the utterly broken state of the TP, the lack of preparation for dealing with exploiters, and so on.

Maybe I’m just extra angry because WvW broke in the middle of my server’s big showdown (JQ vs HoD vs ET). But so many things in WvW were already broken, and remained broken after the patch, and even bigger things got broken by the patch, that I think the accusation against their development process is warranted.

If your “patch” breaks more things (and bigger things) than it fixes, then it was not properly developed, regression tested, or run through QA. And that is a fatal process problem which demands repair, no matter how wonderful or helpful your developers are personally.

No, no, and no. In a profession designed around multiple options and variety, why in Grenth’s name would you want to make us more like the boring classes that grab signets and passive buffs as their Big Thing?

Supply Drop, as Casia said, is borderline OP. Drop it on a foe and he’s stunned, plus he will get hit with the initial net turret firing, plus you get a healing turret (without the need to give up Elixir H’s clutch healing), plus about 1/5-1/3 of your health in bandages. Boost it with Elite Supplies and you get more bandages and a rifle turret. Boost turrets with any trait, and it gets more powerful. No other Elite I have seen gives you instant zone control with a single skill.

I have seen Supply Drop turn entire zerg vs zerg battles around almost on its own. If you convince ANet to change it in any way, you are a bad person.

Mortars are less versatile, but quite good in their niche. It’s stationary, long range, replaces your skill bar… hmm, sounds like a siege weapon, wonder where we are supposed to use those?

Drop one on top of a keep wall you are defending, rain down your death from aboveand watch the attackers flee. Or drop one and let another class man it, while you use grenades/rifle to defend, and suddenly you’ve doubled your team’s defensive power. On offense, use it to take out siege weaponry on top of the enemy’s ramparts, the ones behind the crenelation edge that regular ranged shots can’t hit. A 2 minute cooldown and duration lets you use them, lose them, and not worry about “wasting” it.

Elixir X is, admittedly, the least useful; but I would argue it has its niche underwater. Both possible underwater transformations beef up your toughness and do good AoE damage, at the expense of not being able to heal or use skills. But if you use underwater turrets before dropping this, or have some Regeneration going before you drink X, it works pretty well. (On land, I can’t defend its use over Supply Drop, but I think it would be more viable if every elixir trait properly affected Elixir X just like they affect, say, Elixir B.)

I like the idea of Smoke Vent. When you’re wading through multiple enemies with the FT, having a quick “blind everyone” is useful; you’re not going to get by on burns and Toughness alone.

However, I hate the implementation of Smoke Vent. The radius is so small as to be useless. When you have multiple enemies on you, it only hits them if they are all melee and stacked right on top of you… and even then, it doesn’t always work. Simply increasing the radius out to 250-350 would work just fine; a smoke combo field would be excellent, but I suspect that would be giving the FT too much usefulness on such a short cooldown.

By the way, I think you missed a massively important aspect of the FT: “we need to accept what the flamethrower is: a close-range offensive weapon”. Yes, but it is a close range offensive weapon for multiple enemies. The point of an on-the-move channeled cone of fire is not to circle around a lone bad guy, but to toast an entire field of enemies. The point of an explosive AoE 2nd skill is to nuke a group from afar. And (part of) the point of having the key 4 combo field burn anyone who crosses it, is to let you drop it beneath the feet of a group.

The reason you don’t like the Flame Jet’s damage is because you compare it to the quick shots of a rifle/pistol. In actuality, one FT attack will do more damage than a Hip Shot to one target, but it will do it over a longer period of time, which lowers average dps… unless there are more than one target in that cone. Get 2-3 enemies in that cone of fire, and your dps starts racking up faster than if you somehow managed to line them all up for a Hip Shot with piercing.

To be honest the biggest problem with FT is not its design, it is the perpetual bugginess. Flame Jets missing close-by enemies, and Ball of Napalm firing into the ground instead of straight ahead, are effectively massive nerfs to the 2 damaging skills in the kit.

coglin.1496:

CptCosmic.3156:

too bad pistols dont scale well with power.

The worst part is that this is heavily understating it.

Uh, why should they scale well with power?

Power is universally useful, but it isn’t supposed to be the universally desirable stat. There are a lot of stat combinations on gear that emphasize other options.

The Firearms trait line that has Coated Bullets gives you Precision and Condition damage. Getting all the gun skills doesn’t force you to take Power as a stat, and nothing about the Explosives line that does give Power encourages high pistol use.

Now if you want burst damage with pistols, you can go 10/30/0/30/0, choose Incindiary Powder in Explosives, take Elixir U, and burn down an enemy rather quickly while still having decent survivability. Or you can run 0/30/0/10/30 and be quite a mobile damage dealer with the right gadgets.

Every option does not need to be a glass cannon power-stacking build.