Guild Wars 2

I took the day off to take my daughter to college. I had time in that window. I got world completion on my Necro, and fortunately did not lose that. I did spend a couple hours farming iron ore, and I lost all of that, and the ascended pieces I crafted.

I wish Anet had done something here to say sorry to the players for what they lost. If it was soulbound items affected, then make all of those items account bound. Now all players have some unique one of a kind snowflake, a collectors item as thank you from Guild Wars. Instead, we just get losses. Time may not mean a lot to you guys, but my leave is limited.

My son and I have identical computers and we run from the exact same provider at our house. He easily is able to join groups in Dragon Stand. I can not. I have tried merging groups. Doesn’t work. He will leave and I will try to join the one he left, and I get the full message. He then can go back in with no problem. This is not a server problem. How do I fix?

I’ll rehash some of the basic WvW tactics to show a bit where this kind of build pays off.

If you are taking down a keep or tower, you can dump wardens on the door to grant regeneration and protection and reflection to those manning the rams. You can dump feedback on people on top of the wall shooting at your rams, and yank them off with focus 4 x2. You can send up illusionary berzerkers from greatsword to trash siege. Greatsword 3 is a nice long range ground target that can wreck stuff out of line of sight on top of the wall. Greatsword 2 will bounce around from one target in sight to others not in sight. You can veil your zerg as they run up the ramp into the Commander’s room, dumping aggro and giving them a minor defensive boost on the way in.

If you are clashing open field in zerg v. zerg, after laying down veil so that your zerg is invis and not targetable on the approach, you can open with focus 4 x2 to knock down the enemy on the alpha strike, then dump a warden and feedback and leap through to hit them, or just spam sword 1 as you joust through them on the initial pass. Dumping a warden on downed foes is just mean as it will sit there and grind away and reflect their attacks, freeing you to go off somewhere else and do something. You can also establish a retreat portal before you go in to give you a hot out option if things are going bad.

You can put swords on a keep by setting up a portal out of aggro range of the keep, then running in with greatsword out. Hit mass invis just before aggro range, then range attack the door, and port back.

Havoc teams of 5-10 have a huge range of tactical options with the veils and ports and mass invis here. You can evade and surprise other units, and retreat by portal.

Fights on cliffs or walls can use focus 4 to toss people off the cliff, and if that is not enough, greatsword 5 to push them the little extra over.

For taking camps, you can set up your wardens and berserkers and just dodge roll to generate clones, keeping up 3 targets at all time, with veil and mass invis as options to disappear. Debilitating Dissipation (Chaos V) is a nice replacement for mirror of anguish as you will be dodging a lot, generating too many illusions. Extra summons beyond 3 cause one to be killed and trigger this AoE 5 target bleed/weakness/vuln.

This is not the best build for running through the enemy to establish a portal bomb. Yes you have invis and veil to avoid detection, but you really do not have a quick way of establishing a lot of clones for a fast distortion shatter to let you evade through a choke point and get in behind them.

The 0 20 30 20 0 sword/focus + greatsword build

Commanders get focused and need survival in WvW. This is the build I have been using to good effect in WvW. For running with the zerg, you normally have sword and focus out. If you need to deal with siege or are in a standoff situation, use the greatsword.

The basic build is 0 20 20 20 0. You are not shattering as defense comes from phantasms and active clones. I put another 10 in Chaos to improve stealth durations. I would not change Dueling or Inspiration talents. Recharge on focus and sword and glamours is important, and clones on dodge are solid. The only important talent in the Chaos line is 3% defense per illusion. The rest are personal preference. You can take the reduced falling damage talent which is useful for porting people up cliffs or onto keeps. I have Mirror of Anguish mainly selected as you have no intrinsic stability in this build, and mirroring CC back at the guy targeting you may help you live to see another day. Other options for Mirror of Anguish are the falling damage talent, or the clones blow up and debuff talent.

The gearing is what I have on me right now. I am over 20K health with 3200 armor. Crit hit rate is up there to trigger vigor and let you dodge more. Fighting near your phantasms helps as they grant regeneration and through traits, protection.

A typical 1 on 1 fight involves dumping a warden on your target, then a field, and using sword 3 to leap through it. In the build linked I have portal, but if you are not going to be using portal, you can replace it with null field. You would then have 3 fields- 2 ethereal (null field and feedback) and one light (temporal curtain). Leaping through ethereal grants chaos armor, and leaping through curtain grants retaliation. If you cycle through all 3, you can have either chaos armor or retaliation up most of the time, which ups survival. Combine that with blurred frenzy and all of the other defensive buffs, and you can be very hard to drop. The bleeds, buffs, and debuffs build up to be a real nuisance over time in a tough single fight here.

The build shown has mass invis. I will only use time warp if I am running golems. Enhanced by Prismatic Understanding, both veil and mass invis let you position well for an alpha strike or get out of harms way when it gets too hot.

As far as gear goes, I went with a mix of soldiers and knights with Melandru runes and condition duration reduction food. Maintenance oil helps get that crit rate up from your toughness and vit. My goals were 20K health, 3K armor, and 50% crit rate. What is shown is what I am wearing now, which is not optimal, but it works well enough.

Azgarn, I am not the kind of guy who will
Shower you with apologies, nor am I really a subtle subliminal guy. So
Azgarn, here is my sincerest apology of having implied you need to
Shower. Clearly
You are the kind of guy who has impeccable hygiene, and you
Will go far in life with your happy go lucky attitude that will
Make others around you smile with great joy.
Your take on WvW clearly differs from mine, and I should never have brought your
Mother into this discussion as that clearly was in poor taste.
Happy Father’s Day! (Sunday)

Your Pal,

Lepew

I don’t think the moderators have a sense of humor. At least ArKRazor got it.

Azgarn come on by a tower tonight. I’ll come on out. Just ignore that big bucket thing that is being built while I get appropriately attired.

Nice summary Loosin. Saved me a lot of slogging there.
Great video Crixus. How many of you were there? 5? Looked like 3 to me from the green dots.

DDLG has been honing open field tactics this weekend. Need a few more guardians for stability and better flank moves, but it is coming along. Was impressed with coordination of BP on open. Sure beats IoJ pvdooring our homeland while we sleep.

Yesterday was siege Sunday for me. I hid in Bay, VP came in and we ninja-ed it back, and I spent 10hrs solid building, manning, coordinating siege, and keeping eyes in everything of value. Nothing but respect for the DDLG guildies who did this yesterday. I think because of this we held Garrison and Bay til WP upgrades. Wonder if they got wrecked last night. Seemed like things turned around a lot when we went hard defensive yesterday.

Around 6-7pm all of that day of sitting on backsides manning siege in keeps was vented in a epic XP train. Yes HoD, your Harpies were pwned by our uplevels. Nice fight at N. camp. Took the uplevel zerg back to DR, and managed to convince another 5-10 commanders we needed to take down the Harpies there too. I think VP blew off steam and defended hills with golems…lol. Wonder if you guys used those golems on the Harpies? Then took the uplevel zerg to BP, where our goal was to build a treb in arrowcart fire on the south gate of Bay. Sadly, it did not happen. We did roll some other people with our zerglings though.

Liked the flexible force strategy we practiced yesterday. We were able to take a quite a few objectives before we had to sleep. Was it guild mission night on BP?

I sure am tired. Nice weekend guys.

Have you ever watched the reality show Survivor? Ever see a buff military guy win challenge after challenge? Ever see layabouts who do nothing of value to bring in food and complain? Ever see those layabouts team up and vote off the island the military guy? Well that is how IoJ plays WvW. Its ugly. Its effective. It makes me want to turn the channel.

Which is it? Isle of Ferguson? Or Crossing of Janir? Not sure who the dominant is and who the submissive is in that relationship.

I would like to congratulate the IoJ Oceanics who pulled an all-nighter to defend the FC homeland. Never has a door-bashing mindless zerg so tirelessly defended a borderland not their own to give 2nd place to a server that did not earn it. Patiently, the IoJ PVDOOR crew, would over and over they zerg down a camp we took, then wait for the lone FC guy to come and take it back. FC you should be very appreciative of the gift IoJ gave you out of spite.

Hey don’t credit me on that, I learned it from the Invincible Mesmer post.

Last night as I started to gear up, I tried 0 30 15 20 5 since I wanted to be near 50% crit hit chance. Was able to get in the 45%-49% crit range with around 39% crit damage, over 2K toughness, 3K armor, and 20K hp. Took phantasmal fury. Overall I am not very pleased with this, and I will try the 0 20 25 20 5 build tonight. Toughness is king, and I think the 20 pt in Chaos pick is better than phantasmal fury or the confusion on clone death ablility from dueling.

I can report though that greatsword is just peachy in this build as a ranged alternative. Yeah your iberserkers do not cast as fast or hit as hard as they do in a 20 20 0 25 5 build, but they are not your workhorse, they are there for ranged tagging or killing siege. GS3 is very nice for long range siege as it lets you do something on things you can not target.

I have been running with 5 weapons
set 1: sword + focus, knights, w/ superior sigils of bloodlust
set 2: sword + focus, knights, with superior sigil of flame and accuracy
set 3: knights great sword with superior sigil of flame

I start with set 1 + 3 while charging up bloodlust to 25 stacks, then swap to 2+3 until I die. Certainly it is easier doing this now that you can get epic weapons for 1g + ~130 badges of honor.

I am settled on PVT armor with melandru runes. I am not sure on how to accesorize. Seems like the PVT back piece from temple vendors with soldiers crest is the way to go in that piece short of your fractal piece. Going PVT on accessories rings and ammys is overkill defense at the expense of killing. Knights in those slots looks good, but I wonder if Berserker pieces may be a better pick.

Feast is still the heal skill to pick as your illusions stick around since you are not shattering. Null field and feedback are still indispensable for their jump combo field and chaos armor, as well as the boon strip and debuff strip and reflection. Looks like remaining slot goes between veil, port, or decoy, with veil for 5 man mobile stuff, port for moving golems, and decoy for solo roaming. Perhaps blink might be better than decoy for that. Elite of mass invis is the standard, with TW for when you move golems.

There is a danger of too much carrot. Already completionist types are forced into WvW for map completion. Getting power seekers into WvW with more rewards can screw up the game, as those coming in will engage in WvW to maximize WxP and not points.

In the existing system, it is not too hard to go out there, drum up a bunch of low levels and run an XP train. My son got 9 lvls on his Engineer over a 3hr period doing that, and the coin and badges are fair. Badges and karma from doing this can be used on exotic lvl 80 gear when they ultimately arrive. The problem though is one of patience. Few commanders seem to have the patience necessary to spell out things plainly and repetitively over and over to new players in chat, and most PUGs absolutely refuse to get in Teamspeak, because it might bite them or something.

I think Anet should instead spend their time making WvW better so more people view it as one of the main draws of GW2, and wish to engage. Part of why PvE types stay out there so long is the world is fairly large with many POIs and events and skill challenges and hearts to do, and that takes time. Those who like to solo along on their own time, may not have time or inclination to commit to organized WvW.

What you want is Anet improving WvW to the point that people from other epic PvP MMOs come to GW2 to take part in it. I used to listen to a podcast for GW2, and the guys on it were really into WvW, but over time left due to intractable problems with WvW that annoyed them and Anet seemed very slow to fix. Were Anet to be much more responsive to fixing WvW problems, you would retain many of those people leaving, and draw more people into the game.

Last night DDLG guild missions started at 8pm EST and went to around 9:30pm, so if something happened then, I missed it (but I got 5 commendations, yay). I was in WvW briefly until around 10pm. Our stuff got capped while we were on guild missions. Bluevalle took SW back, then NW camp, then feinted N Bay, and was feinting NW Bay, and IoJ ran up on us while we were in arrowcart fire and guards. We pushed off of NE and were killing you when Blue called regroup as some were too deep in the guards to disengage. 4 of you IoJ types spiked me on the lake shore. So sorry, did not see that much open field tactics out of you guys there. Dogpiling on arrowcart fields and guards or fighting close to respawn isn’t much. Hopefully we will get a chance to hit you in the open tonight.

I think what we have is this

Oceanic: 1 way fight- IoJ is on, DR+FC are sleeping
NA Prime: 2.5 way fight- FC +DR are on, give the IoJ on a 0.5.
Euro time- not sure what it is here

I think the really laughable thing is with the Oceanics doing all the heavy lifting for IoJ, it is the prime time IoJs who are out there strutting around and claiming it was something they did. I think our gate guards and keep doors are crying uncle to the Oceanics from IoJ. Maybe the critters like squirrels and deer might pitch in tonight and give the Oceanics a better fight. The Oceanics could probably go away from keyboard with just a weapon autoattack and eventually take our keeps in their time slot.

UPDATE- well there seems to be little to no interest in this build by others, but I have been honing it some and changing it around.

Some variants I have tried

0 30 15 20 5 w/ sword/focus and scepter/sword. Idea was to take retaliation on block as per zerg warrior, and use scepter 2 + offhand sword 4 to generate blocks and retaliation. While this is very nice to pop this as you move through massed fire, overall it has been somewhat disappointing. You lose your jump move in the scepter/sword set, which really ups survival, and scepter is just a garbage weapon imo. Low chaos points mean you have a tough decision on what not to take.

0 20 30 20 0 with prismatic understanding, sword+focus and sword+torch, mass invis, and veil/decoy. The stealth is indeed nice, but there really is no ranged option.

The one I am going to try tonight is
0 20 25 20 5. with greatsword and sword/focus. I am interested in trying out greatsword without 20 points in the first line, as it grants a nice ranged option to cripple on chases. Was agonizing over where to put the 5 points (shown in Chaos) because toughness is high and the condition damage matters. The 5 in Illusions is just too good to give up as it shortens sword 3 and focus 5 significantly. Was considering 0 20 20 25 5 for more phantasm damage, but am considering the 25 chaos for the condition boost from toughness. Condition damage affects bleeds from illusions on crits, damage from chaos armor conditions, and that from debilitating dissipation. My main frustration with this build is applying pressure on walls in WvW, and I think GS does that better than staff. Was not too impressed by confusing combatants.

4. Some other system. See below with a promotion/demotion system.

The most frustrating thing for me is losing because of coverage. Anet should have separate battle groups for NA, Europe, and Oceanic. Merging those into a 24hour server isn’t working. The key to victory is a mismatch with your weakest link. You gain more by trying to recruit people to solve your coverage issue than you do by actually honing tactics.

Define 3 periods

Midnight-8am = period 1
8 am to 4pm = period 2
4pm to Midnight = period 3

When period 1 closes, the board is frozen, people are booted from WvW, and the period 2 matchup initializes with the period 2 servers added. Rank would be determined by time period, and each time period would have a different matchup.

Thus if your server was highly competitive in period 1, but dead last in period 2, you would still face appropriate competition by period. If all that mattered to you was WvW during your highest rank period, you could PvE or whatever in the other periods.

This would hopefully eliminate the need for endless recruiting to solve coverage issues, and get better match ups. I think more would participate in WvW if there was a window for it opening, as it would be like reset night every time the period came up. There would be some strategic talk in the off periods on what to do next push, and overall the game would improve because of it.

There is nothing more frustrating than knowing the main reason why you are losing points is because of the action that is taking place during your normal sleep period, and you can do nothing about it except pay for a transfer.

The most frustrating thing for me is losing because of coverage. Anet should have separate battle groups for NA, Europe, and Oceanic. Merging those into a 24hour server isn’t working. The key to victory is a mismatch with your weakest link. You gain more by trying to recruit people to solve your coverage issue than you do by actually honing tactics.

Define 3 periods

Midnight-8am = period 1
8 am to 4pm = period 2
4pm to Midnight = period 3

When period 1 closes, the board is frozen, people are booted from WvW, and the period 2 matchup initializes with the period 2 servers added. Rank would be determined by time period, and each time period would have a different matchup.

Thus if your server was highly competitive in period 1, but dead last in period 2, you would still face appropriate competition by period. If all that mattered to you was WvW during your highest rank period, you could PvE or whatever in the other periods.

This would hopefully eliminate the need for endless recruiting to solve coverage issues, and get better match ups. I think more would participate in WvW if there was a window for it opening, as it would be like reset night every time the period came up. There would be some strategic talk in the off periods on what to do next push, and overall the game would improve because of it.

My complaints are with the game design, as you said “Coverage Wars 2”. I really wish our primetime could fight your Oceanic. That would be fun. Until we get coverage in the Oceanic slot, I do not see much changing. We have identified a guild, but they will only come with a free transfer, and looks like Anet is in no hurry to offer that, and we have no oil baron willing to buy them transfers. Perhaps we underestimated how strong that Oceanic advantage was when we were playing w/ IoJ + DH. The IoJ + DH alliance was certainly frustrating. This matchup settles in my mind that it is coverage. Did DH give your Oceanic crew any difficulty? Perhaps it is not only the advantage v. DR, but no pressure from DH in the Oceanic slot. I do remember seeing some maps posted in your thread showing IoJ night capping in the new matchup.

I am not sure if you have noticed, but our open field has improved a huge amount since we last faced you guys. Going down from t6 to t7 really made us step up that game (NSP in particular). I think the small roaming groups who went down even further to t8 came back up as the competition there was fierce. As you go up tier it seems to be more about paper gates and endless zerging with few keeps coming to completion. I personally like keep fortification mattering in WvW, as supply matters and where you spend it matters, and defending yaks and camps matter. As much as it was annoying to try to take down, I liked how IoJ was dug in at our keep in EB yesterday. Not sure that happens up tier.

The range of AC’s is excessive for the present map size. As it stands open field not ranged by siege is severely restricted on maps like EB. Catapults need to have a better range advantage over the AC’s. Solution is either to buff catapults or nerf AC’s. The latter is preferred if the map size is to remain the same.

Targeting for arrow carts needs to be changed. Your ground target should be green if there is a possible parabolic path between your arrow cart and that position. The bug right now is your camera angle seems to factor in to what you can and can not target. The physics of the arrow cart should be determining whether or not you hit, and that ground target needs to move through walls. I am assuming the AC fires at a fixed initial velocity, and all you really are changing is the tilt to determine range. The game automatically calculates the tilt for you rather than make you set that, and tries to make this more user friendly with the ground target. An arrow cart next to a wall should be able to fire straight nearly vertically to arch over the wall, and whether or not you can see that spot on the other side of the wall is immaterial to whether or not the cart should be able to fire there. The only restriction here should be maximum cart tilt angle, which seems to be in play when you try to target close to the cart in the open field.

There should be a basic gravity model in the game which has initial velocity, and angle to calculate trajectories. All targeting should be either permitted or not permitted upon the basis of that physics. If a parabolic path exists for the initial velocity (power) of the siege engine between points A and B, then the crosshair should green. This would also mean that cross hairs would have to go through walls etc. So a mortar with is super high arch against a wall should let you target far on the other side of that wall even though you can not see it because the physics of the mortar is right. The game as it stands right now has the physics wrong, letting camera angle determine whether a trajectory is valid or not.

What those charts fail to show is that when Oceanics flip everything every night, we have to rebuild all of that the next day. The normal pattern then is to mop up the previous nights mess, start upgrading camps and getting supply back in, re siege everything…that takes time and sets us back further. So simple points verses time graphs do not take into account recovering from paper. As FC points out, people tire of putting the time and money into upgrading a borderland only to have it all vanish every night when the Oceanics log in. So would be defenders get demoralized and cease participating with the nightly wipe. Those points verses time plots would be a lot different without nightly resets. If it was skeleton crew v. skeleton crew, many of those upgraded keeps would survive the night, and people might defend and siege more because it would matter.

The earlier point I made about poor Anet design regarding lumping in Oceanics with NA remains. People in similar time zones should be in similar matchups. I have had much better experience in MMOs where Euros, Oceanics, and NA were in different battle groups. Were NAs v. NAs, then guilds would be focusing upon tactics rather than recruiting for coverage. What do you as a game designer want your WvW force working on? Recruiting? Or tactics? Hopefully Anet will learn from the problems they have here with coverage dominating points as much as it does. It would be really easy to divide the WvW day up into 3 time slots: Oceanic, Euro, and NA, and grant points and rankings per time slot. Perhaps this is by design to churn more transfer fees and gem purchases to overcome a design flaw.

Compensating for this design flaw by teaming up in team speak really does not prove much. A true 3-way match settles more than a gang up. If you win in a gang up, you can claim no expertise as the loser will invariably and rightfully attribute your victory to teamwork across server.

Recruiting Oceanics is not as easy as you may think. Certainly we as a server have had this coverage hole for a while, and we have been actively trying to resolve this issue, but there just are not that many Oceanics unhappy with their present servers to make a difference with the IoJ Oceanic zerg. To some extent, people will gravitate towards the clear victor in their time slot. I bet the strong Oceanic presence on IoJ attracts and draws more of the available Oceanics.

This matchup is what it is, and as it stands it is pretty meaningless. The strengths are not facing the strengths, and it is coverage dominated. It is what it is. It is sad that the game design is such that coverage trumps tactics and strategy.

I know of one commander who was an equal opportunity offender, keeping as many keeps paper as possible with his never ending karma train. He would flip from BL to BL to EB doing that over and over. It is human nature to only notice your own BL flipping.

In my opinion the upgraded keeps only serve to buy time for defenders to arrive. The real deterrent is massed arrow carts, which are useless without defenders. Clearly oil and cannons serve to handle those times when nobody refreshes siege and it despawns, and it directly slows a golem assault. But from what I see most of these keeps fall because nobody is there defending. The oil is built, the cannon is built, but nobody is home.

Now last night in EB, IoJ had DR’s keep, with loads of AC’s and trebs, and had a full crew there defending. PUGs were coming off WP and going right into the WxP farm IoJ had set up. I tried to drag the PUGs off to attack something deep in the IoJ section, but they were too interested in dying over and over again to massed siege. I think Prizzmo had similar poor results with the PUGs earlier. The few I had with me on the flank encountered very light IoJ resistance as all were in that keep. Anyway because the PUGs were ignoring command, and they were disorganized, that keep with all that siege stood there in IoJ hands for quite a long time, and the only real progress occurred when a significant mass of guildies (VP) took charge and started to coordinate a proper offensive without the PUGs. A well sieged up keep or tower can stand up to a lot of PUGs for hours and hours. But if it is unmanned, it will fall to even disorganized PUGs. This is my central objection to the claims of the IoJ Oceanics. If all we have defending is a few disorganized PUGs, then really any uncoordianted zerg could night cap what we hold. Just build rams, bash door, repeat.

During prime time, we do not face undefended keeps. Usually there are some IoJ there, or can get there unless you are very fast and stealthy. I think turning the IoJ BL green on Mon as we did during prime is a much larger accomplishment than the nightly Oceanic flipping of our BL against our skeleton force.

The annoying thing about IoJ in the past was we would lay off them and attack #1, and IoJ would never attack the #1 team, and back cap everything we took from #1. This is why we said they were playing for #2. They were content never show aggression to #1, and fight for the scraps #1 left them, and let their Oceanic force do all the heavy lifting from a points standpoint. On top of this in Prime, if #1 attacked IoJ, IoJ would just roll over and go all submissive, and let their homeland get capped. This meant that if #1 wanted something more than boring pvdoor, they would go for #2, us, because IoJ would never put up a fight on defense against them. The end result of this submissive posture of IoJ was to engender a (#1 + #3) v. #2 alliance which was really very boring from our WvW standpoint. #1 was happy because they placed high week after week bringing in more players. IoJ was happy because they could get #2.

In this particular matchup, the only way to prevail against the IoJ Oceanics would be for DR + FC to hammer IoJ nonstop during prime and throttle their points. But that will never happen. IoJ has run of the map with the Oceanics, and FC + DR fight frequently during prime giving the Oceanics the win.

You IoJ types better hope your Oceanics don’t rent a beach house with no internet, or you would be sitting 3rd, and leaving your present tier. It is nice as usual to see the IoJ commanders sucking up to another server in hopes of an alliance to compensate for their poor primetime. The question here is will it take flowers and chocolates? What will DH think if they see you around going all snuggletums with FC?

To FC- as you can probably tell, our first pick is IoJ as far as wrecking homelands goes, as that is straight where we went on reset. Mon night DDLG was in IoJ BL, and last night we were mainly in DR BL. It has been good fighting you guys, and you have done much better than IoJ in countering us open field. Perhaps if we went Away From Keyboard for 5hrs and transformed into doors, IoJ would do better against us in the open field.

I am not sure why Anet lumped in Oceanic with NA. There would have been much better matchups if people with the same sleep schedules fought against each other. With IoJ, I wish our primetime crew could face the Oceanics, but that will never happen, and all our matchups seem to be is whose crew gets more done when the other is off.

This reset looked like FC and IoJ might have more primetime, but as week went on, that initial push faded, and we are right back into that orthogonal fight of the IoJ Oceanic v. NA Prime. It is clear that more of us NAs sleep during Oceanic prime than Oceanics sleep during NA prime.

Sat AM I came on to IoJ on our map. I get up early and play a bit with our Euros, and was happy to see some of our guys had held most of it til morning. But there was a good 30 IoJ on our borderland and we were outmanned, and the 5 people we could scrape together could not, even with siege, fend off IoJ. I know it is disheartening for those who spend so much time upgrading and keeping vigil all night long just have all of their hard work get ground down by the IoJ Oceanic zerg. Reports were IoJ had 30 man zergs on all maps in that time slot, which would have been challenging even for our prime time crew to handle. But against the skeleton crew at night, where there is very little organization, it is not really a fight. Those who do that defense earn my respect, but it is pretty much a lost cause.

Spiritualist spent Sunday taking 22 keeps, and kept it up Monday flipping stuff over and over. For the most part he was not opposed and he kept stuff paper for long periods of time. This is what it must be like for the Oceanic crew of IoJ.

DDLG assembled last night for zerg wrecking, and we rolled a lot of people on the IoJ map, and got distracted by taking their stuff. We wanted to do more open field stuff. The only real opposition we faced was taking the last tower (NE) with a bit of fun running around in the keep. My evening ended farming IoJ as they tried to take back Garrison.

If they ever merged DR and IoJ, that server would go high up on the tiers.

I looked at that HARD video. The part that went on the longest was that 25 man crew (I paused and counted green dots on the radar) at the SW camp. What I found interesting was the steady stream of green dots running back from spawn to that camp. I have been in battles like this before, where you wipe them over and over and they just keep running back, and you get maybe 2 WxP killing them the 5th time. Show me some footage in the open field not under support fire from arrowcarts or close to spawn where infinite runbacks factor in. Darkestshadows and Ill Loosin would dance circles around your field moves in that video. I bet the 10-15 VP regulars would mop the floor with that 25 you had in that camp.

I am very interested in seeing how days of dealing with Spiritualist works on IoJ and FC morale.

Thought I would toss this build up and see what you guys thought of it. This is a WvW build, which can be used with little modification for fractals as you have high survivability.

Basics
0 in Domination
20 in Dueling (IV Blade Training, and X Deceptive Evasion)
30 in Chaos (IV Illusionary Defense, and V Debilitating Dissipation, and (pick)
20 in Inspiration (II Glamor Mastery, and VII Warden’s Feedback)
0 in Illusions

Ether Feast, Feedback, Null Field, pick, pick

Sword+Focus is the main weapon set. Pick offhand weapon set.
Knight’s weapons (Bloodlust + choose)
Soldier’s armor w/runes Melandru
Knight’s jewelry+back

Sample build modified for staff.

I developed this build for zergball, where you clump up into a tight cluster, open with disrupts, and tag as you go through. Usually you are just trying to stay on the commander’s tag and shattering is harder to pull off. I group up with the heavies in front.

The build is very strong and hard to kill. You do not shatter illusions as it gives you additional defense. When clones die from enemies or from new ones being generated they apply AoE conditions to nearby foes. The basic play for one on one goes like this:

Open with field (null, temporal curtain, or feedback)
Focus 5 to put warden on target, and his whirl finisher in that field is fun
Sword 3 2x to port through field to target. This generates either chaos armor (ethereal fields like null or feedback or sta kitten or spear 5) or retaliation (light field like temporal curtain).
Stand on Warden
Blurred Frenzy.
Repeat with a different field.

You will find you can maintain a nice rotation through all 3 fields with little wait doing this. You can use your curtain to yank stuff to a wall for a nice cluster, which gets AOE rooted for your blurred frenzy. Feedback, warden, and temporal curtain reflect projectiles, so use their positioning to stymie ranged attackers. This is additional defense, and helps you generate more tags for bags.

For zerg v. zerg open with curtain, yank to interrupt, dump either feedback or null, and use sword abilities. Note yanking with TC removes the bar animation, but not the light field and you can still sword 3 leap through it for retaliation.

Dodging generates more clones, which ups your healing and defense. Glamors are on short CDs, and pretty much everyone on your team likes those.

Things I have tried

for the 30pt talent in Chaos
-II Descent into Chaos is nice if you like to cliff dive or set up ports from high places
-X Chaotic Dampening is nice if you want to have optimized underwater weapons and use staff defensively
-XII Prismatic Understanding is nice if you want to carry for your other weapon torch, and veil/decoy + mass invis…all of these stealthers last longer, and you get a hard to use blast finisher for zerg buffing.

I am running with Staff now because I like enhanced trident, and it is nice having sta kitten for another ethereal field + phase retreat as another source of chaos armor in addition to the usual staff 4 chaos armor. Warlock is weak in this build, but most of your clones are there just to amplify defense.

- For general zerg running I take veil or port depending on whether I am running golems or doing open field, and TW for golems, and mass invis otherwise. Small group roaming with decoy or blink as a stun break is nice.

Food I either take Omnomberry cream for the boon duration and magic find when I am doing PVE and want my speed buff from temporal curtain to be max. Or you can go with -condition duration food to stack with the -25% condition/stun duration from Melandru (I use the cheaper, -37% condition duration food, for -62% condition duration total). I usually use sharpening stones.

Offhand weapon choice really depends on what you want to do. Staff is very defensive and ranged, and makes you that much more tanky. Greatsword is more offensive and ranged and good for destroying siege + crippling people you chase, but the traits really do not support it well. Torch is nice for blast finishes for buffing, and for another stealth getaway if you go to prismatic understanding.

In my present gear which is exotic PVT armor w/melandru, knights sword/focus w/bloodlust and leeching, knights ammy acended, knights accessory ascended, + PVT exotic rings, accesories, and backpiece, I get around 2200 toughness with over 3K armor and around 22K HP. My warrior buddy is a bit jealous that I can do this in light armor. Add to this chaos armor, melandru, blurred frenzy evasion and 3 clone heal and damage reduction, and it is really very hard to drop me. I started with more PVT gear in all slots, and have been replacing jewelry with Knight’s ascended as I get laurels, as my defenses are overkill in the PVT gear.

No way vertical range counts. On a flat map with radar zoomed in, I can port to about the corner from the center. Have a commander sit at a position sometime to try this out. In the NW tower, any borderland, you can drop a portal from that ledge behind the lords room, and run all the way down to NW camp, and still port up from about the edge of the radar. In the two cases one has negligable z-change, while the other has considerable z-change.

Agree the UI needs to be improved. Frankly I think the portal should exit portal should not be permitted to be placed if you are out of portal range. That would be a super easy fix.

I think it should be 50g -and- you have to get 20 other people to nominate you for commander. Yes one can pay people to nominate, but at least it does ask the community if this person is worthy of command. This gives you a yellow tag, provisional command. Then over time you must have another, different 50 people right click your name and check the “worthy” button to change the tag to blue.

Novice commanders would be yellow tagged, and you could follow them, and expect less out of them. Experienced commanders would be blue tagged.

Allow me to translate into whyner.

Waa, waa waa waaa waaaaaaaaaa THIEF waaa waaa. WAA! WAAAAAA! THIEF. Nerf nerf NERRRRRRRRF waa waaa waaaaaa!

Structured PvP sounds to be more suited to your needs. Rather than advocate for changing the epic nature of WvW to make it more like sPvP, you should just go play sPvP.

waa waa waa waa THIEF waa waa waaa. Nerf nerf nerf nerf THIEF nerf, waa waa waa.

My big issue with ACs now is that in tight maps like EB, it feels like there are few areas free from AC fire. The map needs to be bigger to have stretches of open space between keeps where tower/keep siege can not reach.

What a great weekend that was. So much good WvW.

It kicked off early with VP/Evermore running a training session on tight group fighting. Sambob/VP kept the fires pumping by hooking us on an amazing Red Guard video. I tried out some of that with the uplevel xp train guys, and we were wrecking people. At one point we had our uplevel zergball on top of the north camp at GOM or NSP, and they could not get out.

Then Darkestshadows and Ill Loosin gave it the DDLG twist with the lvl 80 crew in EB for a “training session” you see in the video Bluevalle linked. So many loot bags. So many more loot bags left on the ground as we just kept rolling. I held 25 stacks for a long long time. After that EB night, everyone in the guild was ready for more tight fighting tactics, and we have since gone through and dealt with some of the bugs.

The guy who put down the “fighting guys already fighting” comment—-well you guys who get into these protracted ranged battles are just sitting ducks. You are there so long and accumulate so many red tags that you are going to draw attention from groups who are looking for dense clusters to kill. If everyone on the map is in 2 groups going pew pew pew with rangers at each other, the sharks will come feeding….

To the guy belaboring the whole ‘DDLG thief runs back to the zerg’ thing…le sigh…if you want even matches in which you compare your how big your P is to someone else’s P, the place to do that is in structured PvP where gearing is equal. Then you can go thump your chest about how many you single handedly downed. WvW is a strategic PvP game with epic forces, and if you take a nap on the train tracks, you better expect the choo choo xp train to come along and roll over you.

Other mentions
- Our golems getting spotted in tkitten cave with the knot of people and siege pinning us in there for quite a long time before we went down. Too bad. Good job to our foes in tracking us.

-GOM golem rush after golem rush. The ZL commander dumps $20/day in gems for golems? Sheesh. We need to get a Saudi oil baron sugar daddy to come to DR to counter that…Seems like we just finish flipping the home borderland and go off to do guild missions or xp train, when lo and behold you-know-who is back again with piles and piles of golems rushing our undefended homeland.

-OK SPCA, I am onto you. We finally get one of your bruisers down within im-a-gonna-stomp-you range, and they go woo-woo-wooing off to the legendary defenders at the start.

-Not sure who the D/D elementalist was that I was fighting at SE camp DRBL, but nice fight guy. Glad we both ended it after about 10 min.

It would be nice if the name of a party member not on the same map as you or offline were to gray out. That way you could quickly know who was gone. Also it would be nice if you could right click a grayed out name and click “are you coming back”. The “are you coming back” would put an “are you coming back” popup on that player’s screen, with a yes or no button. Clicking no would disband them. Clicking yes would retain them. Not responding to the button for 1 min would disband them.

Active players zoning for reason would be able to stay in the group. Inactive players or players who are quitting could be prompted to leave.

I’ve really been frustrated this week by the GOM BL map lag. 3 times I have tried to bring forces over there, only to have random disconnects and lag kick in to the point that at any given point in time, about 20-40% of my force is either stuck in lag, logging back in from a disconnect, or running back from getting disconnected. People get frustrated and quit WvWing or switch maps, so this drives us off of GOM BL.

Normally the GOM night crew takes all of our stuff, and our day crew comes on and rages back against them with day caps. This cycle is broken. The GOM night crew hits us, we get it back, but we can not effectively regain points because lag is defending GOM BL.

Bird Song you make some good points in your post, but during the day we have eyes on many of our keeps at any given time with roamers spotting large forces, golems etc. At night however, I do not think that is the case. So in the day we frequently get word of an attack before the wp shuts down, but at night I think the first they see of it is when crossed swords appear. This is a direct function of population, and our night coverage has been our Achilles heel, and the reason why we have slid down the tiers.

I think it would be really interesting if GOM went up to fight IoJ, as IoJ has a huge night capping crew that would give you GOM guys a real run for the money. Even though there is a lot of bad blood between IoJ and DR, I sort of hope any kind of low pop server merges force us in with IoJ as they would directly solve our largest problem, and we would solve their largest problem.

Another thing that was a bit tiresome and related to the GOM lagfest was the NSP crew at SW tower last night in DRBL. You NSP guys built a nice kill box, and made it hard for us to get in there. The thing that was frustrating though is in open field or in the supply camp we were just decimating that crew over and over, and the only thing keeping you guys in it was the fact the same guys would run back from spawn quickly and die again for the NSP cause. Never have I seen so many guys wipe over and over to take out single pieces of siege. We would just kill off someone on the north side of the camp, only to have another huge group come in from the south. Just trying to move across from ruins to SW camp involved killing our way through respawn after respawn after respawn. You guys were like a bunch of lemmings who didn’t care if you lived or died. We need to figure out a way to slow your running back to make headway. You guys got your foot in our BL door, and GOM joined the party (after all nobody is fighting on the GOM map defended by lag), and we had our hands full just trying to get you guys off our lawn.

I think GOM deserves #1 this week, but I think their score is higher than it would be if there was no week long lagfest on that map.

On T7 it is the GoM green borderland with this issue. I have logged in there in the morning and evening with the same issue. I have been there with very few other living souls out there and it is still a problem. I can play with no problem on the blue borderland (DR) and the red borderland (NSP) with no issues at all times.

So
-independent of time of day
-independent of population on that BL
-always strikes this one BL

The impact on WvW is severe because nobody fights in that green BL, which means there is no pressure on the home map for green, and they are freed up to hit EB, blue + red borderlands with impunity. Green is running away with the score this week because of this. Think the devs need to go tier by tier, identify which BLs have the issue, and see what they have in common.
-

This is a really great but frustrating guide. Frustration stems from the fact that gw2skills.net is blocked here at work, and all the details on your builds are left to hyperlinks to that blocked site. Have you ever tried the Into The Mists character builder ?

1. Scouts- you need scouts on the walls to get early warning of attacks before they show up as crossed swords 30s later. That same group can pat about for mesmers. I do not think you can dispense with scouts from a WvW standpoint. Since you need to have scouts anyway, the notion that you are tying down a force sweeping for mesmers is beside the point. Just redirect the scouts to that after a capture.

2. Dead mesmers accomplish the same thing. All it takes is one perma stealth thief out there and he can res up that mesmer and its off to the races. Your argument about counters to port/stealth is not just about mesmers, but also thieves and stealth in general.

3. Reveal traps are there, as well as any AoE to counter stealth. Because people elect not to use a counter does not justify the need for new counters. It is obvious the game itself is enriched by a degree of uncertainty in numbers of enemy forces, as it forces players to tactically adjust on the fly to a changing battlefield. The battlefield would be static and boring with fewer options if stealth were gone.

McDingus. My clones are called McDingi, as any proper Latin speaking person knows.

What? How did I come up with McDingus? Well even though someone told me Harry Potter, I don’t really remember that. Perhaps it was the Dingus Egg from MTG. Mabye somewhere back in the gray matter was a good laugh at the name McLoven. Or perhaps it is just because the name for an Azuran thingus is a dingus, and we all love playing with our McDingus.

@Playard /salute Nice to meet one of the DR night crew. I thought all we had were NPCs at that hour.

@Crixus – When that Garrison went down it brought the morale up in our forces. DDLG ran bounties and rush last night, then went to GOM, and we were happily flipping their map when we felt a bit guilty about all the camps and 3 towers in enemy hands on DRBL. So we pulled off and went on D. Glad you guys could get something down out there.

re: Thieves- they feel nerfed in this game with short duration stealth. Never quite understood what all the furor was over. Also, you guys need to stop this bigotry against #2 spamming btches. It takes skill to press 2 over and over and over. Try to live without 1, 3, 4, and 5 sometimes. It is hard. We 2-spammers are have a disability and it is politically incorrect to make fun of us. You should be giving us a handicap, and applaud us when we kill you with our 2 spamming skill. It is a triumph of human spirit over 1,3-5 key disability.

re: Nerf parade- DAOC became very boring for me when the devs started listening to the incessant whining about “class X is OP” and iteratively nerfing everything. All the fun got sucked out of the game in the never ending parade of nerfs. Classes started to look identical with respect to skill sets, with only names distinguishing identically functioning skills. I say give whoever is complaining about professions a nice sanitized pacifier and burp them a few times to relieve the gas.

I am thinking about something like this

http://www.intothemists.com/calc/index.php?build=-NZ-Fc;0kUk-167JV-71;9;5JJO4;119-19-17a
0 Domination
20 Dueling (II, X)
20 Chaos (II, X)
25 Inspiration (II, VII)
5 Illusions

? should I move 5 from inspiration and put it elsewhere?

Sword+ Focus/ Staff
mirror, null field, veil, portal, mass invis/TW
boon duration runes
not sure about sigils
knights gear (its what I have now)

Reasoning: I command with this mesmer, so portal, veil, mass invis or TW are musts. Pick null field as it grants condition removal and boon stripping. I suppose for smaller group stuff I could flip veil and port for mimic and feedback.

Reflection comes from mirror, temporal curtain, phantasmal warden
I have given up GS for staff over the usual greatsword build, and intend to gain more by reflection. Looks like Distortion is still a panic move. Had toyed with the idea of 5 from phantasmal strength to masterful reflection such that sword 2 would not only evade but also reflect, and distortion would give me 3s of evade + reflection

Logged on last night and was joking around with guildies who were complaining about heartseaker spamming thieves. I told them I suck at thief and that’s how I roll, with full berserker gear. This lead to Cream Egg making a brand new guild called “Number 2 spamming btches” which we all joined following the guild rules of ignoring keys 1, 3,4, and 5, wearing berserker gear, and finishing downed players with the 2 skill on a flame ram. We really have trouble getting that ram technique down though, since people port off, and we need garotte wire to drag them back onto the ram. Our little thief zerg was running around the south side of DRBL spamming 2 and flame ram finishing people, and we were at the crucial decision point of deciding whether to go with glory or apricot as our colors when we were rudely interrupted by Os guild.

Now this was my first introduction to NSP/Os guild. They brought a bunch of them. Think big beefy warriors and guardians with CC out the wazoo (think of a guild of SPCA types and you get the gist), whose prime tactic is to bore straight through your lines all the way to the back to the squishy people. They were good, staying tight for the most part, getting their fallen up, and they were rolling us…SE keep, SW keep, Bay…Around this time Zombieland shows up to take down stuff. Unlike Os, which was wiping us, we could easily roll Zombieland. Around the 4th or 5th engagement w/Os we started to get a little better with Os. Nice job Os, we are going to have to come up with specific tactics for you guys. Maybe we should all log to boon stripping fearing and AOE slowing necro alts when you come around and scatter.

I logged when we had the map back. Looking forward to future engagements with Os, and perfecting my technique of 2-spamming on my thief.

Well now consider this. If the daughter of the Choo-Choo’s marry’s the son of the Chugga-Chuggas, would the resultant name be Chugga-Chugga-Choo-Choo, or would it be Choo-Choo-Chugga-Chugga? I am sorry my train of thought is going a bit astray.

I suppose my attempt at humor was not appreciated. Oh well.

Consider this. A woman of surname Choo, wants to marry a man of surname Choo. She wants to honor her family and retain her maiden name. So her name changes to Mrs. Choo-Choo. The big question here is this- is she the first Choo, or the second Choo?

DDLG was taking a break last night with PVE doing temple unlocks. We were coming up on daily reset, so I popped over to DRBL to use the mystic forge, and noticed it was blue. This news was greeted with a chorus of the groans, where we had left defense for 1hr and already the BL was getting trashed.

So our evening was cut short. We called to arms for our BL. Apologies to those roaming groups who got zerged hard, but it was just business. Only significant resistance occured when Zombieland was mowed down quickly at Hills. We mopped up the map, and went on the offensive in GOM BL. Trashed the garrison there. Blitz ended with port of golems beneath pot of oil. Spent some time farming GOM near water gate, garrison. Had a good time with Darkestshadows calling tactical feints and flanks, wiping superior numbers until they just decided they had enough. Logged to watch House of Cards with wife, so don’t know how it ended.

Good fun guys, but really, our PvE coordinator should talk with GOM about good nights for us to just do temple unlocks. Certainly there was a breakdown in communications there. You guys are supposed to go for our stuff when we are out there defending, not on PvE night. Sheesh. Check the calendar.

I have 9 lvl 80s, one of each profession, and an extra ranger. Thoughts on each

Elementalist- clearly valuable in WvW, but I dislike element swapping and cross element combos…too much for me.

Ranger- Love it for keep defense and large scale action, as well for solo camp action.

Mesmer- My command is on a mesmer, and you can do so much with that combo. Definitely the way to go with your tag.

Warrior- Seems to have good DPS, but not much else is offered. Would rather play my guardian.

Guardian- tough with lots of buffs, like the melee gameplay, brings a lot to the WvW table. Prefer this for roaming action in small groups.

Thief- can be really fun, but I am not very good at the timing and combos needed to do this profession justice. Clearly of solid value in WvW.

Engineer- am in a love/hate affair here. Love being grenades when taking down a keep. Hate it for open field or keep defense.

Necromancer- not quite my cup of tea. You do spread lots of conditions nicely, but, sometimes they get cleansed and you get no satisfaction. Bring a lot to the WvW table.

Weekend rehash

A. Reset- ugh. Had about 8 commanders tagged up in DRBL splitting PUGs, and NSP +GOM hit us hard on keeps/garrisons. Had queue on DRBL, yet felt like disorganized population of nobody on our team where they needed to be. Went to enemy BL just to get all guildies on same BL, homeland was a wreck. On top of this, TS crashed frequently disrupting communications. Just a horrible start.

B. Saturday- bunkered in early and built up keep defenses. Organized defenders and had eyes on all towers/keeps/camps/garrison. I dropped personally 14g or so on upgrades that day, and had a blast. Andrew held vigil on SW keep all day and fended off GOM 4x with Siegerazer. Was proud of how DDLG, VP, and my early morning buds pulled together to get our homeland in shape after the thorough drubbing we had previous night.

C. Mother’s Day- wasn’t on too much but was pleased to see that Sat Night crew held all of our gains from Sat on DRBL upgrades through morning. Nice job guys. We tried to leave you with something easier to defend, and you held it.

Did get a break from defense, and went to NSPBL with Duyyy + Vars leading a huge zerg in mass action there. Had a blast with Loosin + Cream Egg as mesmers tossing people off cliffs at hills. Had some fun in an all thief party. Was really enjoying VP’s tight roaming group tactics. SPCA bunker build team…omg….so frustrating. I am going to build an AC for you each time I see your tag.

GOM and NSP- I hope we can give you some competition and close that gap we had on reset. I want to see neither of you go up or down. Good fights all week.

Yesterday was weird. I was in DRBL. Most of my guild was out in sPVP for that guild event last night. We would treb down SE tower from Hills, and GOM would start Siegerazer and do it again. Hardly anyone was defending, so all I could do was bunker up in a tower with an arrowcart while GOM and NSP took turns throttling supply via S and SE camps. The camps would flip, but it would go back and forth between the two of them.

So I was reclining in the Lords room of the SE tower when along comes GOM’s Siegerazer. I start spamming AC, and am slowing the inevitable, when suddenly a golem shows up to help out Siegerazer. I guess they wanted that tower really bad.

To my worthy opponents on GOM- my marching orders are something like this

1. Defend DRBL
2. Get points
3. If you can get points from GOM, do so, they are 1st

Am really surprised at the great job the day crew on DR is doing.

When we were in T6, Darkhaven (#1) and Isle of Janir (#3) had a true non aggression pact, just ignoring each other and ganging up on #2 (DR). This was really annoying because IoJ should have gone down in any non – alliance situation instead of us. IoJ wasn’t playing for the #1 slot, they were playing for #2, which is annoying in any competitive activity. At some point we just threw it and went down to get away from the zergs (DH) and the night cappers (IoJ) who were legally married in the minds of many.

I think part of the big problem we see with GOM is your night crew caps our areas and we face catchup each morning. We got way behind last week by not focusing upon you in the day, and so we are focusing more upon you this week. Had we better coverage, you might see a more even attack order from DR during the day. You guys are the victim of your own success.

Hope that explains it some

After playing a lot of WvW with them now this last weekend on T7, here are my thoughts (these may be issues unique to lower pop tiers)

1. Ballista, catapult range must increase, or AC range decrease. It is really hard placing ballista, catapults beyond AC range. I think the damage is fine, since the whole point is to make it painful enough where people can not stand in it. The range though is excessive and reducing the role of other siege, including cannons.

2. AC’s are driving more catapults and trebs. This puts a supply bind on small servers, where much of the action now is treb from camp or tower or keep, or try to get massed cats up with multiple supply camp runs. Because we don’t have a massive 50 man zergball with a gazillion supply, build costs on cats is slowing stuff down. Perhaps reducing the supply cost of rams and cats might be in order? Walls upgrade before doors, and if AC covers the doors, you have to go into a harder wall, meaning more high supply cats.

3. A skeleton crew can now defend v. zerg, and that drives the zerg to build siege. I like this.

4. It sure would be nice if there was a WvW talent that gave you an eagle eye view of the keep so you can see what siege is in there. So many AC’s and cats are out of sight and hard to spot, and so much siege is wasted building rams against targets that appear empty of siege. Maybe add ravens/crows for ambience in the air, and have a commune with crow/raven talent. Let players shoot crows to defend against eagle eye.

5. Golems are a big deal on smaller servers, and having them melt in AC fire is really a pain. Maybe some engineers need to come up with an arrow cart resistant plan for golems.

6. On a small server with few people, it is really hard finding someone to refresh siege. Sure would be nice if they worked like parking meters, and you could load it up with supply to make it last a few hours, so you could do something like, say , go eat dinner.