Guild Wars 2

EP 9 is out, enjoy. From evening of 5.9.2017 Deso vs Vabbi vs SFR. Really hard opponents, very frustrating week overall I must say. The fights today were solid tho, so here are some of those we won. Thx to Jarni of guild Fury for leading unusually strong open TAG.

Hello guys, Vol 8 is out. Its from yesterdays fight vs SFR and JS, enjoy.

McKenna Berdrow.2759:

Fay.2357:

Shining One.1635:

What does this mean for people you knock off cliffs with your own skills? Do they still fall to their deaths?

When cced, you can’t enter the glider in PvE maps, not sure exactly how it’ll act in WvW.

It will function the same in WvW. So if you are knocked back while in gliding you will fall to your death.

But how will you prevent people from abusing the gliding to escape off a cliff or to negate fall damage? In normal PVE you can open glider and save yourself when you were knocked off an ledge, which would be really bad for WvW.

I see it as a thing that does not belong to WvW. It makes escapes easier (not welcomed) fall damage survival easy (not welcome), and map travel faster (not welcome unless DesertBL, there is is Welcome, and I think allowing gliding just for desertBL only in certain areas would be a good compromise, but not more.).

Edit: And yeah as mentioned before, the servers still cannot handle the big fights (5+ years later) especially in EBG its skilllag fiesta, and the upcoming elite specs have even more AOE effects and more condi (which we know that creates extra load) and ETA on fixing that?

EP7 is out. This time from the deso vs kodash vs AR matchup. And this was was great. It provided many nice fights, so enjoy everyone.

EP6 is out. It us from the past matchup vs SFR and Elona. I have upcoming ones with way better play, because the past evenings were amazing and I have it recorded. Anyway, enjoy.

This entire system is there to reward very old WvW players. And it does that job. I for example play WvW for 4 months, I’m still bronze, and even thos I play 4+ hours a day its impossible to ever finish the track, I always finish between gold and mithril, so I do not really care about the rewards, I like WvW, but the armors and backpieces are like… yeah maybe in 2 years I will revisit the system. I think they should have made different thing to reward old players, and the pip system should be more connected to how you play and how well you do.

GW2 is mostly CPU bottlenecked game. 3-thread CPU bottlenecked game.

So, to achieve the best performance, you need a CPU with highest possible gaming IPC. There are 2 out there that dominate.

1. I7-5775C. This is not a popular CPU, but is actually the best gaming CPU out there. Its thanks to its 128MB L4 cache that removes RAM latency issues.

2. I7-6700K/7700K. These can match 5775C but they are memory bottlenecked, so you have to pair them with 3+Ghz memory modules to squish what they have to offer.

Also remember, you can set the details as high as you want, but never set shadows to maximum, as there is a bug in the engine and that causes massive FPS drop. As it comes to GPU, this is ancient DX9 engine game, so it matters little. Still, Nvidia cards do significantly better in this game than AMD. You do not have to over-invest, unless you play at 4K it will not matter if you play on GTX970 or 1080TI as most of the time the game is CPU bottlenecked.

EP5 is out, from one of the better evening in our bad matchup. skilllag was huge, but still pretty good fights.

I do not think any of these changes are big enough to be a concern. Statics smaller but better? Hmm zero sum game, sometimes it can be even better.

Ice spike was bad to begin with, its single hit skills with very long cast time (aka the time between you press the key vs when the attack is delivered), so it rarely does anything in the fight anyway, you have to switch out of water to do dmg anyway. It can blast now so hmm, perhaps it has more utility now, cause as dmg skill it was pathetic anyway.

The core issue of ELE for me remains how extremely slow it is to cast anything with the staff. Everything is so slow and sluggish that actually hitting a target with it thats not brain dead AI is a problem.

Vova.2640:

1. nerf condis
2. fix skill lags.
3. nerf condis again.

This. + Add guild wars, and make tight stacking the whole blob to less desirable strategy.

The fact that its blob vs blob, aka high amount of players on both sides is fine. That is what this game mode is meant to be.

What is not OK is how its played, aka all the boonshare, all the “be tight as possible”. Aka the more people stack and more tightly they move, the harder they are to kill. Sometimes to so absurd level that they are almost untouchable (if they run good setup on all parties and enemy does not have tons of boon corrupt).

This is what I would change. Make offensive skills more anti-blob. Make the boms, veils, symbols deal more damage to the center, punishing tightly stacked groups more. OR skills with up to 50 targets radius 180-240 dealing more damage to its center the more targets are being hit.

Skills like that that would break the stacking playstyle.

Sviel.7493:

This is clear in hindsight, but there wasn’t any way of knowing how successful the update would be. We all expected a population bump but no one knew it would be this large and this enduring. Also, it’s been a little under two weeks—population likely hasn’t settled yet.

Thus, there probably wasn’t a way to handle this much better with the information they had. Whenever population spikes this hard, some things are going to break.

This is not everywhere. On Deso for example, in peak we have less people and commanders than before the patch. A lot of people here got discouraged by the situation and quit (hopefully temporarily), guilds who can do something could not get in, and the new people got constantly slaughtered by the T1 blobs. The fact that we are unlinked, constantly underpopulated and our enemies are linked also did not help. I dunno how you can be top 3 and be linked…

Plus we finished last yet went up in server rating, and got the same horrid matchup again. That system also has issues.

Now we are slowly recovering, the people who stayed are slowly learning but they are not there yet and we have lost some experienced WvWers in the bad days.

Yeah because relogging sometimes changes it. Sometimes you are fine, you relog, get back socket = lagfest.

Iv also noticed one thing, and that is sometimes some people lag heavily and others are fine. For example there are days when I lag heavy and my commander does not, and days when its the other way. It almost seem like the server has a number of “sockets” and if you are lucky you can connect to the one that is less laggy. It has nothing to do with your connection, its just luck. Also, the lags are inconsistent, sometimes we had lagless or very low lag blob fight and sometimes its just unplayable. This would indicate the infrastructure is under powered and more game servers are using the same physical connection/server thus getting it overloaded.

Dunno about that one. I for example never speak with my enemies anyway. Sometimes they message me but those are only insults.

The point about more people to fight is also wrong ,at least in our case, the enemy is full blob all the time, you do not meet more roamers. You have more roamers on lower tier servers actually.

But I agree with your point about server identity. I do not like the idea, I do not associate myself with Deso or any of its guilds except the one I’m in (and Iv always been here, never transferred + a lot of the so called “top” guilds do transfer constantly anyway). I would actually much prefer “guild wars” to be a thing so we can fight each other as well, but that’s a whole different topic.

Its not just that. Linking was supposed to keep dead servers more alive. But ATM, I’m from Desolation for example, and we got unfortunately put up to T1 again, and we are not linked with anyone, and yet facing T1 servers that have say slightly higher skill levels, and also massive population (queues on all BL’s) and they are linked. Why on earth you would link dominating T1 server which already has huge WvW population is beyond me. The current system is not working fine, that I’m sure off.

Yes, TS is pretty key. If you are not on TS and you are with a big tag, there is even a chance you will help your enemy by dying so the enemies will rally on your corpse.

None is forcing anyone to anything. You do not have to speak if you are shy. But listening helps a lot, and not just you.

It doesn’t work. Even if I spec everything to condi cleanse I will die to condi really fast. The issue is how many conditions there are and how easy it is to appy and reapply vs how much you have to dedicate to remove it + the skill levels. I can throw random PVE player, give him tanky condi necro and he can do serious damage. You need amazing player to dodge clense, resistance boon share at the perfect moments. While the condi applier can just brainlessly spam it and probably is still going to win. Its just spamming condi/epi/corrupt boon. If they are not ready they will die in seconds, if they are in a minute.

You can lose only if your team has terrible support like literally no heals, no blocks, etc, aka you all go condi only. It is way easier to mitigate power damage than condi damage.

Another problem is the snowball effect. While 1v1 or party vs party you can kill the condi group. 50vs50 its whole another story.

And last but not least problem, is the lack of defense. There is no stat that protects you against condi. While condi guy can run condi + max everything else on vita and toughness (which protects him from power attacks) there is nothing protecting you gainst condi. There is a gear and runes that give you – condi duration, but duration is not the problem its the initial impact and the first/second tick that kills you, not that you have torment on you for 20 seconds and having it for 16 instead will save you…. Yes there is for example food that helps, but its not good enough. We need some sort of protections, like if toughness would affect condi as well, it would not break the PVE ballance at all and it would help a lot.

I play Guard/DH and Ele. I still have rather low experience with the ele, but it gets the bags home. My DH still gets more bags tho. The main reason is how slow and sluggish ELE is. I need to tag enemy as DH? I plop a symbol in them, boom instant damage. I just with my sword, same, I teleport using judges intervention and spin again, instant damage. It does not have to be high damage, but there is one.

Now the ele… assuming its zerg staff support ele (to give water fields) is super slow. Even the autoattack takes basically 3 seconds for the projectile to leave, enemy dodges, hides behind terrain, anything, runs out of range, anything and you get 0, meteor shower is hittable only when enemy blob is busy and pays you no attention. Even the lava fort takes time to actually do damage. So with that, ELE can be really frustrating to actually do damage with. Its doable, but definitely you need to be a special kind of “character” to play that class, to put up with how slow all its attacks feel.

This one is not exactly part of the series, but it was a good farm:

The cannons are effective against zerg (especially if you have more than one). We always have to clean the cannons first cause otherwise you are a sitting duck getting pummeled and anyone can charge forward from the towers and with the help of the cannot win easily. It takes a lot to outsustain that. Cannons IMHO do not need a buff.

zinkz.7045:

Miyafuji.1340:

The problem is WvW is not making money.

I’d say the problem is their business model rather than WvW, cash shops generally get money from new players, “whales” and very casual players, I mean do you think most long term PvE players sitting on mountains of gold are contributing much to the revenue or PvP players? (Revenue of which has had 4 record low quarters in a row, where has all this PvE revenue gone?)

That is why for an MMO if the game can sustain it then sub is the best model, every player is of some value, resources need to be put into many areas of the game, if your game relies on a cash shop then bad companies simply focus excessively on minorities like new players (you could see this with GW2 for years), “whales” who buy every piece of kitten in the cash shop, etc

Which is why whatever critics may say, a 13 year old MMO still has far more players than the rest and still puts most others to shame (including this one) in terms of the way it is run and the resources that are put into different parts of the game.

I agree with you on this one. I also think P2P is the best business model, but it does not make the most money, that’s why. It is safe to do FTP P2W cashgrab which we see everywhere these days, kuddos to GW2, Anet did not do that here. They cannot go to P2P, everyone would leave (especially WvW players cause lets face it the content quality and amouth in WvW is not P2P worthy), only thing they can do is to add some more fashion wars (and real one, the amouth of stuff there that actually looks good is small) or some sort of premium account stuff, like if you pay xx a month you get better dailies, etc. Its tricky to not get instant community backlash there tho.

One thing is for sure. The WvW servers are obsolete concept as a whole. This should have been reworked the moment megaservers were introduced,, cause it actually reflects PVE population, yet PVE players are unaffected by their home server as everything is megaserver now. On Desolation for example, we constantly have problems with numbers in WvW, yet our server is full, you cannot transfer there. It is full by PVE players that do not actually care what server they are even on.

The problem is WvW is not making money. Its one of the reasons its neglected. As long as you get exotic gear you can go there and that’s it. WvW players are usually not interested in PVE, they do not care about buying gold, nothing. The only way WvW makes money are the paid transfers when greedy players want to get to the top server which is more expensive to transfer. I do not expect them to change this cause at that point WvW would make exactly 0 money.

Just because it does not do high damage does not mean its ok. Can it kill people and take no damage? Yes? Then there is a problem.

That one matters little, there is so much projectile resistance thrown around that the bow is weak as it is. I stopped using it long time ago in WvW cause you cannot have a weapon that will just not hit the target at all in most zerg fights. Wall of reflection was even buffed now, so nope.

No it doesn’t, there is already too much condi (especially on Necro) around. Even without epidemic the condi would still be the meta, epidemic just adds the instantkill moments take make you say “why I even bother”.

Agreed. Except perhaps warrior, things have been buffed. We do not need things to be buffed. WvW suffers from already too much CC and most importantly too much condi.

Vol4 is out, the build is getting better and so does my surviveability:

Yeah, tho I cannot recommend roaming these days, as the ever present stealth condi thief kinds ruins that whole aspect.

Also, I strongly do suggest joining the server TS3 channel ( deso.aimguild.com for Desolation), even just to listen. Without it you would be clueless and lost in the battle.

All right, Vol 3 is done, enjoy:

Vol 2.!

Hello guys. I have started recording our good fights some time ago, and now I’m slowly processing them and cutting them together.

I started playing WvW only a month ago, but it quickly became pretty much the only game mode I play because well… its just so good compared to everything else.

Yes I play pretty bad (especially on this early footage from 9.3.), but slowly getting better and it will reflect with the upcoming videos.

I would like this to be more of an invitation to WvW for new people, especially from Desolation. We are full as server but in WvW we are often outnumbered cause not enough of our players do go to pvp, yet none can transfer here cause it says full. Go ahead and give it a shot, Its not as stressful and way more funny (in my opinion) than the arena PVP. And way more engaging and you feel like what you do matters.

Enjoy.

Th is my little guardian Tomi, (yes she is little for a human). But I finally got her to the state when I’m pretty satisfied. I mean with the looks, I still play horribly, especially pvp but well I keep trying.

I want only one change and that is replace the Ebonblade with Dawn one day, to keep the gold theme going.