It depends on the situation. If you have a fully upgraded Bay full of siege, yes, you defend until that last wall goes down hoping your EB group or someone will come to help. There is a good chance you can get their siege down and cow their supplies off to make them pull off at least once.
If there is a 50 man blob knocking on a paper garry that has no siege, you just wait them out until they get bored and leave.
a) if there is no queue it should be easy to leave, craft, and come back. Park your toon in Hoelbrak or Black Citadel if you are concerned about load times (not LA or DR).
b) if there is a queue, you shouldn’t be wasting a spot crafting stuff. People should come prepared on reset and other busy times, or you can alway buy on the TP.
I just watched Saving Private Ryan again, and verified that nobody on Omaha Beach was whipping up a Veggie Pizza in a stove on the beach at the time of the invasion.
Prep work like crafting should be done before entering WvW. Taking a up a queue spot to sit and craft is ridiculous.
Does Anet have a timeframe for making guardian viable for small scale battles again? I can’t even beat thieves any more.
NA links up yet? Cmon!!!!!!!!!!! I can’t stand the anticipation!
Because LB5 is the “I’ll stand here while you kill me” button, just like LB #2.
And remember, roaming guards can only get hit twice before they go down so using either of those buttons, you are basically giving up half your health.
My guess is it will take less time to do the reward track than what it took to get the badges.
If you absolutely despise WvW fighting you can always help out by scouting (ie sitting in a keep and calling out when it’s getting attacked). Make sure you have the map commander give you squad participation for this and you will reap the rewards of what the zerg is doing.
Or there is always EOTM.
Step 1: unlock all elites
Step 2: go to siege vendor
Step 3: buy siege
Step 4: Sell siege for gold
Step 5: Buy what makes you happy.
Not sure why ANET let T1 become such a horrible mess. Now everyone is trying to transfer, and it looks like linking is gonna change once a month, so in short, they may of just spent money transferring only to find themselves right back where they started.
It’s pretty foolish to transfer during a highly experimental beta event. I have no sympathy for people moving around trying to bandwagon during this period.
I’m frankly surprised that Anet appears to be going the full 3 months with no attempts at rebalancing though.
The poll trend is clear, people want to re-balance matchups sooner rather than later. This minimizes the impacts of bad blood between allies and helps the smaller servers retain some identity.
- Boost health by about 3k so we can diversify our builds to do some damage without being one-hit.
- Add a trait for a speed boost so I can get rid of traveler runes
- More condi options besides burning for build diversity
- Let me move while shooting LB
- Nerf Revenants, delete mesmers from the game
Let’s see,
YB lost a bunch of commanders and is imploding.
DB is a bunch of fairweathers who will quit when they start getting throttled in T1
FA is T3
I guess that leaves JQ as the sensible choice for NA guilds looking to supplement a powerful SEA server and take on the BG / TC monsters.
Or you can always transfer to my server IOJ!
Keep playing guard because melee is where its at and for all its shortcomings, guard is still the king of melee in large scale wvw battles.
I hate stealth. I hate dropping circles on the ground instead of hitting an opponent. I don’t like switching between 4 different weapons and skill groups. I hate pew pewing and yearghhh pirating. What’s left? Guard.
I don’t even think it’s 80. A 40 person zerg floating can easily get a mostly empty map queued up; based on the map blobs I’ve seen, it’s likely in that 60-70 range.
This is great !! You can cry all you like siege huggers this is just the start…..
Every time you call a defender a siege hugger I will kill 5 of your zerglings trying to get back to the blob. This is just the start.
Typical reply from a no skilled siege hugger. I dont run in blobs cause my server doesnt have them in my timezone….. you will have difficulty killing 5 “zerglings” as that is almost the entire “zerg”…
This reply makes no sense. If you don’t run in a huge zerg, why would you even care about hardened gates? 5 people can’t PVD a gate open in a reasonable amount of time.
Both northern towers can be used to treb garry. The SW tower can treb bay. About the only useless tower is SE tower, which is easily trebbed from Hills. The camp is almost more valuable than the tower is in the SE.
Edit: also placing watchtowers in northern towers prevents cata-ing of garry without the group being seen at the switchback. The DBL towers are so far north of garry that they are useless in this regard.
I like how hard it is to flip upgraded keeps now since it is leading to more fights.
The correct tactic is to stop the keeps from upgrading in the first place.
Of the three servers in this matchup, I think only DB has several large single-guild groups. I’ve seen several single guild blobs from them.
JQ relies on some smaller guild runs, a large militia pool, and some dedicated commanders. The JQ commanders push melee hard so this video is pretty funny to watch. Maybe Mag and DB havent gotten the memo that stability is back?
To be fair, I have hardly seen Mag at all in our matchup so I don’t know what kind of zergs you are running. Your KDR seems to indicate you can’t be doing too badly.
SpectralDagger over on Reddit posted some interesting information on NA Pro Week 7 PvP. I don’t personally PvP often, if ever, but the data is interesting;
http://imgur.com/FigyFg7
http://imgur.com/F8IuGEUSimply put, the Guardian saw zero play in these 4 games, while every other class saw playtime.
I’d think this is some pretty clear evidence that the class needs a developmental review when it is not even considered in pro play.
Wow, that’s pretty kitten ing evidence right there for the current state of guardian. Are you paying attention Anet? I have put my medi-trap roamer away for now since I can’t even beat thieves anymore with it and get insta-downed due to the low health pool.
I hate laying circles on the ground so that pretty much eliminates ele and necro. I hate anything with stealth so that leaves out thief and mesmer. I’ve tried rev and its not very fun for small scale combat, so I guess I’ll stick with zerker warrior for now until guard gets fixed.
It has been partially released; reward tracks are live (and awesome by the way); world linking is being tested; stability and other fighting mechanics have been tweaked to bring back melee. The scoring system changes are still be developed. There are several dev posts on this.
Yes, we do have a handful of small worlds, but the more smaller worlds we have, the more balanced linked populations can be. As a quick smaller scale example of current linking dilemma, lets say we have to link worlds with the following populations:
- World 1: 95%
- World 2: 82%
- World 3: 81%
- World 4: 60%
- World 5: 30%
- World 6: 10%
Since our final world total needs to be divisible by 3, we either need to avoid linking any of the worlds, or link some worlds even if they give a large population advantage.
- Worlds 1+6: 105%
- Worlds 2+5: 112%
- Worlds 3+4: 141%
After linking, the difference in population between the highest and lowers teams is much narrower, but we’ve made the 3rd rank server now have significantly more population than the previously 1st ranked server. Also all worlds are now over our goal population cap, and probably have moderate to heavy queues.
However, imagine that instead we had twice as many, half as populated, worlds. It becomes much easier to link them in a way that gives every linked team a similar population.
I don’t think your small scale example is valid since using the real number of 24 worlds opens up your scenarios exponentially. With 24 worlds available you could have between 1-8 matches and a huge combination of potential pairings. You also have the safety governor of the queue if you over do it. Based on my experience playing T1 and T2, I’d say 3-5 matches seems about right for avoiding overly long queues while retaining adequate population.
Several people have also mentioned the timezone issue, which will complicate the search for a “balanced” pairing. Also, an overlooked matter is the quantity of quality commanders available. If a good commander is tagged up, people will gravitate and join, which causes a higher population. If you could somehow determine typical commander “coverage” it may help with your metrics (maybe using some data on time tagged up and squad size?)
Between the hype of the update and the bandwagoning, populations became extremely volatile right before the linking started. Things are a little more stabilized now but weird things can still happen (re: DB last week vs. this week). I heard DB had a 200-man queue for a map last night?!?
Obviously BG was just fine on its own and certainly didn’t need to be teamed with the largest T8. Consistent problems like this can and should be addressed more quickly with re-linking worlds.
Yes it sucks being ripped away from a partner you’ve established a relationship with, but it will also encourage servers to keep their own identity. I think a lot of us on lower population servers are starting to lose ours as we integrate more and more with the larger server.
I would look less at PPT score for this and more at population activity when rebalancing for matches. Linking can be a useful tool to combat bandwagoning.
Hmmm. So the reason you came back is because world linking sparked interest and activity and you are complaining about the world linking?
I don’t think you realize how bad it was getting prior to the big update.
Thieves and mesmers should be deleted from the game.
This is basically an AH frontliner build, except you are missing the “AH” part; you are missing out on a huge healing opportunity when empowering with your staff there. I run all shouts but another possibility instead of your current “Smite Condition” is “Purging Flames”. You may want to consider Master of Consecrations if you use that.
Also, with a 4% crit chance, not sure if the hammer virtue is worth the trouble over the very powerful “Absolute Resolution”. The same goes for sigils that rely on crit hits.
Otherwise you are very similar to what I run on my tank guard, right down to the food and wrench. I love the Durability runes.
You do know that the dead can’t be revived in combat any more, right?
Maybe if EVERY roamer wasnt a cheese mesmer it might be fun. It’s not fun fighting air.
I find WvW to be the most varied and fun game mode.
“Soloing” things is much more dangerous with the combined populations so I recommend getting behind a good pugmander and running with the zerg.
Or if you can get 4-5 friends together run your own havoc group for defending or back capping.
As mentioned above, your build is critical in WvW. Builds are different for zerging, dps, roaming, support, scouting, heavy melee etc… People typically need to be a lot more tanky than they think in WvW, and with the recent changes, melee and tanking have definitely made a comeback.
It’s not that hard to find your role based on your class and build. Once you start filling that role you were made for, you will enjoy being successful defeating your enemies.
Edit: If you really want to have fun.
1) gather as many people as you can
2) Make rangers
3) get longbows
4) get bears
5) WINNING!
(edited by MaximillianVonSchatten.6278)
They should be able to track movement and modify the matchup to match. Right now TC and BG could have about 6 more servers put up against them.
As it is right now, 3 of the 4 matches are total lemons.
I love how people say ET is the strongest t8 server like its t8 and and they were in last place how strong can they be? Maybe BG has a huge rise in population because before veterans quit they moved back to BG like myself and are starting to play again with the alpine bls coming back. But keep saying strong t8 server it makes me laugh.
ET had been dominating T8 and had by far the largest population; then they got paired with the highest population T1.
As I said in another thread, BG should have been left alone, all 3 T8s should have been combined with JQ, and YB should have gotten a T7.
If you still have them you should be able to consume them into your wallet.
All of this discussion about “leadership” on JQ is pointless.
There aren’t enough players in NA anymore to compete. Too many have left the server or the game.
WvW is a numbers game. The team that fields the most players wins. You may think your “leadership” skills are important but you are fooling yourselves.
I would partially disagree with this in that having a skilled and fun tag running a map or maps generally leads to higher map populations and more success. If JQ had 10 Clouds running at all hours of the day the population would be there to follow.
“Tag up and they will come”.
I sure wish Anet had done this about a month earlier, IOJ could have made a huge difference in filling in the JQ NA prime time hole, as it is now, we are hardly making a dent with our low population.
Also, I think Anet was a little off with their matching of servers. BG obviously didn’t need any help, and certainly not the help of the largest T8, ET.
I frankly think they could have lumped all 3 T8 servers and put them together with JQ while giving YB a T7.
TS will be a major issue; I’ve spent 100% of my time in the JQ TS; what happens when we get ripped apart and regrouped? This will be a major pain.
(edited by MaximillianVonSchatten.6278)
I think this week was pretty great and I am looking forward to whatever matchup curveballs we may be thrown tonight at reset.
Now, if we could just tone that AOE CC down just a little more it would be perfect.
Maybe we need to eliminate the term “nightcapping” and rename it “uncontested capping” – this happens when only one side is present on the map and gains tick after tick after tick on the same tower because nobody is there to re-flip it.
Of course the easiest way to get rid of this is to eliminate the time based tick entirely and go to a system that awards points for flipping and upgrading (yes there is still a time based “tick” for upgrades but this can be minimized.)
Along with this, make kill points more prominent in the score to encourage battles and strategy.
Does nobody run Gunflame any more?
I am still using it and having a blast in WvW; I’ve hardly noticed any change in the “gunflame” part and the Adrenal health boost is awesome sauce. And when the melee happens, I whip out my GS and start flailing away with excellent survivability.
It still seems like a good balanced build for transitioning between kite and melee. What am I missing here?
Max, I see you in the zerg all the time. Stop trying to fit a round Dragonhunter peg in a square guardian hole! Come back to the light. I do wish I could find an effective Dragonhunter build for large scale combat. Shield of courage is really nice but the other virtues and traits just aren’t worth it in a frontline build. Hunter’s fortification is kind of useful but I actually perferred the original version of hunter’s fortification that gave protection on virtue use.
Yes, I always bring in my DH with the intent of roaming but that isn’t really working out with T1 populations where a squad of 20 people is considered a roaming group. I have switched my main back to a standard guardian with the recent virtue buffs.
I love my DH because I can clear a camp before swords come up and it’s still decent in a small scale fight, but this is T8 thinking and I need to get away from that.
I’ve also discovered my warrior does pretty well in small and large scale fights so from here on out I’ll be running my base guard or my warrior.
So the moral of the story:
For all interested NA guilds:
- looking for terrific WvW action with lots of juicy enemy blobs in a premier matchup
- looking to make a real difference for a server that has excellent coverage in other timezones
- looking for a warm welcome and appreciation from their new home
they should immediately transfer to IOJ to bolster the out of this world and surging JQ / IOJ alliance!
*(this message is brought to you by friends of IOJ and is not associated with any candidate, server, or time zone)
I’m not sure Anet got the pairings right in T1 at least as population goes.
ET was consistently dominating T8 while IOJ was struggling to compete and AR was non-existent.
On the T1 side, if I read my boards right, both JQ and YB have been suffering losses to TC while BG has been more stable, so the pairing ended up being the highest population T1 with the highest population T8.
The T8 population is not affecting the matchup a whole lot but between the renewed interest in WvW and the relatively higher population of ET compared to other T8s, I can see it being a problem.
As an IOJer I have had few problems getting in as the week goes, with only an occasional queue on EB at night NA. JQ/IOJ seems generally outmanned but we have had tremendous fun this week defending against the BG hordes.
On my base guardian the Virtue of Resolve is major “oh kitten” button to heal up and clear conditions.
While I enjoy the distance-making feature of wings of resolve, it doesn’t seem that the healing happens until I land. This drastically reduces it’s effectiveness as an “oh kitten” button since you must not only spend extra time targeting a landing area, but must also have enough health to survive the time it takes to leap.
I’ve been downed several times in between the time that I started the leap and when it finished.
Since guard is so low on the strength totem pole, maybe Anet could adjust this so I get my healing and condi clearing at the start of the animation? Healing allies can still happen on landing since that is usually the target area anyways.
Thanks for the consideration Anet!
For my DH roamer I prob have about 2.6K armor and about 15K health with zerker armor and weapons, soldier trinkets.
This gets really squishy in a hurry for larger battles but is great for small scale engagements. I used to run travelers runes but switched out to flame legion since I rarely run alone now.
For my zerg guard, I’ve gone full tank old school AH shout with nomad’s armor, soldier trinkets, commander weapons, and durability runes. Armor over 3.4K and 23K health, healing and condi clearing up the ying yang. I’m a little short on the damage front, but not totally useless; I can still clear camps solo pretty quickly.
I think the only solution would be a medi gs/hammer build to pressure targets.
@MaximillianVonSchatten.6278, well super tanky is non existant in guardian world, even with 4k armor they are easilly defeated, a guard that sacrifices damage is a dead guardian.
It all depends on the size of the roaming team. If it is more than 5, a tank guard has merit for empowering, speed, and condi clearing. I would agree that 4k armor is ridiculous, 3,200 – 3,400 is what I consider tanky.
If the roaming group is 5 or less then the Medi is the way to go. This is why I have 2 guard toons.
“I’ve not played Guard much, I have only 1500 hours in it”
LOL! I wonder what you consider to be a lot of hours.
Depending on how many are roaming; he may want to consider the tank AH shout guard instead with GS/staff. He can provide swiftenss for the group to get around faster and it’s also ok for him to get focused since he can tank through a lot of it for a long time as the rest of you wear your enemy down.
I would start uber tanky and then adjust for more DPS as you feel comfortable with. There are many hybrid builds based on AH.
Also note that the virtues got a big buff in the recent update, and I think this only on the std guard virtues, not the DH virtues.
Now if it’s just the two of you, then Medi is still the way to go. There is no getting around it though, a medi-DH is just better and there is no way around it.
if everyone had to wait 5 hours , everyone will quit gw2 lol
As Yogi Berra said “Nobody goes there any more, it’s too crowded.”
The main problem I am seeing with full maps is that when the main zerg blobs clash, it is still a"biggest blob wins" scenario – if havoc groups have broken off from the main blob, that means the main blob is going to have a rough time whenever runs into another blob.
Meanwhile blob #3 is free to take whatever they want when the other 2 are clashing.
The solution to this is more tweaking to the CC and AOE to allow for skilled and organized fight groups to survive against larger ones.
Live by the bandwagon, die by the bandwagon.
Pre-reset WvW experience (IOJ):
- Zero tags on most maps, lucky to have 1 or 2 tags on reset for all maps
- Trying to cobble 3-4 guildies together to run on the maps – maybe 10 on reset
- Desperately calling out in map chat for a few more supply to finish off cata #2
- Hitting fully upgraded walls for 20 minutes with nobody to stop us (because of course nobody was around to stop the upgrades from happening either)
- Running into another 5-man group once and a while and if we are lucky having 15v15 once in a blue moon
Post-reset WvW experience (IOJ / JQ)
- 25-30 excited guildies mashing the button to beat the queue (we got into a bl together with little trouble)
- Seeing 4 tags on a BL map
- Enemies and friends in every direction attacking everything
- Auras and tactivators mattering
- YB keep still having paper walls after an hour (yak running will be a thing up here?)
- Commanders throwing down 5 superior catas to take down a paper wall
- The excitement of my guild group making it YB garry lord’s room only to be demolished by a huge group of defenders
- To top off the night, a 40 minute 3-way fight inside air keep (which we had held all night); running back from spawn to defend air keep? Unprecedented!
All in all – stand ovation Anet (from me at least!)
Yay I made Tier 1 for free!!!
If you look at what they did for EU, they did not merge anyone with T1 or T2 so I would expect that they are trying to make similar populations and similar matchups across the tiers while at the same time still allowing people to play.
Some of the merged EU servers have experienced large queues, but that should be expected with the merger + the patch improvements sparking more interest in WvW at reset. We’ll see how it plays out over the week and during non peak hours.
Interest in WvW has been reinvigorated, and that’s a good thing!