Guild Wars 2

Won’t matter until they nerf 100% resistance uptime boon blobs.

Adding cannons will make it borderline impossible to actually take any even remotely defended objective with rams or catapults.

Rams can already be hit with cannon splash from behind the door on numerous objectives (i.e. east keep northwest gate, garrison northeast gate), they kill rams much faster than a door treb, and they cost half the supply to build.

Catapults die in something like 2 cannon shots, cannons hit an enormous AoE, and shoot as far as a ballista. Allowing one to go up usually means a catapult attack will immediately fail.

The only way that this isn’t going to be awful is if cannons (and hopefully trebs too) are nerfed to not hit rams through the other side of a door.

Roxanne.6140:

It takes player slots to run boonshare as well?

It doesn’t take as many, each mesmer is a stack of boons for 5 people.

There is no boon removal that’s good at removing deep stacks from multiple players, and there won’t be because it would break stab. The only AoE boon removals are ground-targeted AoEs that remove one per pulse and can be avoided, a necro shout that removes 2 boons and requires being right up in their face, and Grim Specter, which can be used once every 3 minutes, is a really slow reflectable projectile that also tracks the ground and usually misses.

It’s hard to just get quickness off of one player with a full boon stack. I’ve been stripping mesmers and it usually takes SS + Corrupt Boon to actually get quickness off of them, it takes several rounds of that to actually slow them down because they keep getting more copies from other mesmers, and then it takes another minute before it actually wears off of their group.

RyuDragnier.9476:

Or give more classes access to that glorious Corrupt Boon that Necro can use, such as Revenant, Thief, and Engineer. Give more classes the ability to turn those buffs against you, and see how fast the boonshare is shut down.

Sure, as long as you’re okay with stab being useless and everyone going back to venom wells and pirate ship.

Balthazzarr.1349:

Everything to be so balanced that you just spam 1 and see who dies first??

No, but that’s a pretty good description of what it’s like to run boon share against a group that isn’t though.

Quickness and resistance were never supposed to have 100% uptime. I don’t know why this is so hard to understand. If you think they should have 100% uptime from a totally brainless build, then maybe ANet should just make Pain Absorption and FMW grant a minute worth of boons and get it over with.

The counter to boon share is to run boon share. We run boon strips while also running boon share, boon strips aren’t an effective counter by themselves because it takes far more player slots to get rid of all of the boons. If you could rip a full stack of boons from a whole zerg easily, then stab would be useless.

Also keep in mind that the existence of this build completely removes condition pressure as a method of counterplay because none of your conditions will ever do anything.

Jeknar.6184:

But even if it was a boon, the only ways you would get quickness on a mesmer would be from timewarp or signet of rage.

If 2 guards give 8 seconds of quickness to 2 mesmers, then they can keep it going forever with SoI ping-ponging, but it’s more vulnerable to strips or mistakes. Even if they didn’t roll it permanently, 2 FMW + 2 SoI would give over a minute of quickness to everyone hit by it (as opposed to 16 without SoI).

Chrono just removes the need for FMW and makes the whole thing idiotproof, but the real problem is that AoE copying quickness is fundamentally broken, especially when you can ping-pong boons across multiple copies of SoI to get them to many times their original duration.

Jeknar.6184:

But before, we didn’t had the resistance boon and it was much harder to stack quickness than it is now with chronomancer.

It’s not just Chrono that’s ramped up the quickness stacking, it’s the fact that before HoT, quickness wasn’t a boon.

LinhZeri.6412:

Definitely should hit the root of the problem and that is the boon duration food plus Heralds easily spam access to boons.

No, the root of the problem is that stacking multiple copies of Signet of Inspiration lets you exponentially increase boon coverage and also bypass the stack limits.

borgs.6103:

Then don’t use necros. Use the counter to mesmers – thieves. Precast Larcenous Strike + Steal = 5 boons stolen. Then Shadow Step away/back. Thieves are plenty on WvW. Maybe it’s time they join the zerg.

You obviously missed the third point. Here’s the problem: The mesmers can boon up their whole group while out of combat. By the time they engage, even if you boon strip the mesmers, you’re still dealing with a blob that has resistance and quickness for at least another 30 seconds, and once that wears off, all you’ve accomplished is bringing them back down to “normal” until the mesmers get CS off cooldown and restart their cycle. There’s never really a disadvantage to running it.

Boon rips aren’t good enough to strip a whole stack off boons off of a blob and they never will be because it’d make stab worthless.

There are 3 problems with just corrupt-spamming the mesmers: One is that the best class for doing that (necro) is also the easiest one for a melee boon blob to train down. One is that the mesmers don’t have to expose themselves to do their job. One is that even if you strip the mesmers, the rest of the blob still has 30-60 seconds of quickness, resistance, and protection, and you have to kill that before they regroup and their continuum splits recharge. Good luck doing that unless you’re either massively better than them, or are also running boonshare.

The simplest fix would be to just make Signet of Inspiration only extend duration-stacking boons to the length that they’re on the Mesmer, or share them at a preset or capped duration.

Either of those would fix the real problem, which is that SoI becomes exponentially more effective by stacking more copies of it.

I don’t know what you’re talking about, this seems perfectly balanced to me.

Spawn trebs thrown from outside of the no-siege area into the no-siege area are counterable. The problem is that there’s an exploit that allows them to be thrown from inside the no-siege area.

I’m gonna guess they spend up the yaks because sentries have the yak crippling attacks now.

Kylden Ar.3724:

The towers being out of range means you have to gasp, shock take the field and have FIGHTS to get siege on a keep and take it, like it should be.

Trebs only get past the outer wall, so attackers still need to fight through defenders on inner.

The difference is what it took out of each side. Defenders don’t need to wipe the attacking force to save an objective, they just need to destroy all of their siege, so if they can’t just shred catapults with arrow carts and door-treb rams, they only thing they have to do is blind-rush it and dump all of their AoE on it. If they wipe in the process, oh well, still won! Nevermind that shield generators and high-elevation mortars make it much harder to treb the earth keep than the alpine garrison.

The bottom line used to be that if a team just hugged wall siege and couldn’t win fights, they would eventually lose the objective. Now that’s much less true, between the retreat-or-wipe tactivators, shield generators blocking long range siege, golems not being able to strip wall siege, hardened cannons, increased supply costs, and wall-of-health CC-spamming boss arenas.

Taking a keep now means taking it while the other team is asleep.

The terrain/obstacle changes were good, but the fundamental problem with DBL is that it’s too big, and moving waypoints to tier 3 has made that problem worse.

Oh I know the answer to this:

1. Equip llama stomp

2. Wait for the dueler on the hostile server to go down

3. Double-cast Mass Invisibility

4. Stomp them

5. Throw a flame ram on them

If Cloaking Waters should exist at all, it should be a tactic, not an improvement, period.

The simplest solution to “wrong siege” stuff would be just give commanders the ability to select a siege emplacement or build site and use a “Hide Owner’s Build Sites” option that would hide all build sites from whoever dropped it for them and anyone else in the squad.

That wouldn’t interfere with build site drops by legitimate players regardless of whether they’re in squad or party or whatever else, wouldn’t be foiled by trolls joining the squad, and wouldn’t really be abusable.

The simplest “fix” would be to cap PPT at 350 or something so blowout hours don’t contribute as much to score difference.

Chaba.5410:

You can no longer easily “pull” a zerg to your location. They know they’ll just easily flip it back later since you won’t be defending. They don’t need to come help defend because 2 people can handle the defense.

People won’t give up fights to defend waypoints any more either because they know that they can just crack the paper keep back open and get the waypoint back instantly, and they don’t have to worry about it being trained by a havoc group because it takes 14 people to drop 4 pieces of siege now.

Odokuro.5049:

Yolo’ing straight at a Rev/Herald with his/her hammer out, knowing full well that, Hammer #2 is coming…

Actually yoloing at them is the best thing you can do because it does less damage at close range and their stab, condi clear, and disengage all suck. Hammer rev is for pirate shipping.

Odokuro.5049:

Revs sacrifice other energy using things….like attacks.

That would matter if their staple attack cost more than 5 energy or if they had to run Facet of Nature to get 100% boon uptime, neither of which is the case.

I know it’s broken, but what’s broken about it isn’t CoR when the autoattack is critting for 4k and Unrelenting Assault hits for 10k while evading in the same build.

What’s broken is Roiling Mists and Herald 3-2-1 giving an extra armor set worth of stats for 4 upkeep.

CoR isn’t even the main problem, the main problem is Facet of Darkness + Roiling Mists.

Straegen.2938:

I have been popped by a Gun Flame attack from several warriors with 8.5k crits.

The bug where it hits twice also either wasn’t fixed, or wasn’t completely fixed.

What will happen to guild consumables that are in the build queue when the expansion hits?

The main benefits that engineers have right now in larger fights is several solid utility skills on short cooldowns. Flash Shell and Endothermic Shell are good at blunting enemy team pushes, Endothermic Shell is also good at cutting off retreats, and Healing Turret is an extremely good AoE heal.

The problem is that their damage is unreliable on anything that isn’t right up in their face. Eles have much more ranged AoE pressure with similar utility, and necros, mesmers, and rangers have a much easier time getting their damage abilities to actually hit something. Engineers haven’t been threatening in group fights since before the mortar nerf.

There’s also the fact that Magnet, which should be a really good caster-sniping skill, hardly ever works correctly.

For roaming, their main problem at the moment is that they aren’t mesmers, a problem that they share with most classes.

msalakka.4653:

You don’t need stealth at all. I hid in keeps several times yesterday as a Guardian. In this 40vDoor meta zergs don’t care about sweeping since it just slows them down on their journey towards the next door. Besides, they can just melt their way in when it gets flipped anyways.

Sometimes they do sweep though. I just got done back-capping Stonemist yesterday after SBI had 10 people stay around for several minutes trying to flush me out.

I’m getting bored to the point that I’m just letting their zerg see me and then juking them anyway.

Notsoperky.4291:

It’s more trouble than it’s worth to sweep for these mesmers who are usually with a thief so the actual revealed time is close to zero- who wants to spend 5-10 minutes chasing these people around for nothing?

Thief? Pfft. The thief will slow you down! You’re a mesmer, you can stealth for much longer than some crappy thief now, and you won’t drop red circles all over the place giving away your position either.

Jayne.9251:

I didn’t realize the prestige was considered a utility? Unless it’s a bug?

Did you look at the cool down on decoy too?

Decoy is 32 seconds with Illusionist’s Celerity, so you can cast it twice per 72 second cycle, and a third time with Mimic.

Prestige isn’t a utility and doesn’t need to be (mimic is to double-cast Decoy, not Prestige)

Did you try it? The most important step is the first one! Every 20 seconds that you’re stealthed is enough to reduce The Prestige’s cooldown by a full cycle, so every 20 seconds of stealth is another 6 you get for free. Of course, that compounds itself, so in reality, every 20 seconds of stealth that you’d get without The Pledge is 8.57 seconds of extra stealth from it.

So, let’s say you didn’t take The Pledge. Every 72 seconds, you’ll have 18 from the from the 3 decoys, 10 from Mass Invisibility, 4 from Veil, and 14.4 from the 2.4 casts of The Prestige. That’s 46.4 seconds. Add in the bonus prestige casts, and you get another ~19.9 seconds, for roughly 66.28 seconds of stealth every 72 seconds. So actually I was wrong, it’s not 95% uptime, it’s 92% uptime, and the gap is about 5.72 seconds, but because of how the cycles work out, you have to run the cycle twice before you get an actual gap.

Anyone chasing you down still has to wait a full minute just to figure out if you waypointed or not, and the short glimpse that they’ll get of you is just long enough to pop Blurred Frenzy, dodge twice, hit Distortion from the Deceptive Evasion clones, and then start over again, assuming anyone is even near you, and assuming they can cleave you after Desperate Decoy triggers, etc.

Since I’ve seen a few people running this exciting build, I figured I’d share it!

So you broke into a keep, but that clutch disable bought enough time for defenders to show up, run you over, and seal up the door/wall. Drat! Well, you could hide a mesmer and do the ol’ skipperoo when your zerg comes back, but if the other server is smart, they’ll sweep for mesmers and catch you.

Wouldn’t it be nice if you could just have 95%+ stealth uptime on your mesmer and not have to put up with that “getting killed” crap?

Good news, your wish is now a reality!

Just bring:
- The Pledge (Illusions), Master of Manipulation (Chaos), Prismatic Understanding (Chaos)
- A torch
- Mimic, Decoy, Veil, and Mass Invisibility on your skill bar

Here’s how to play the new bleeding edge in portal delivery:
1.) Cast The Prestige, and recast it immediately every time it’s off cooldown.
2.) Start by casting Mimic, Decoy, Decoy, Mass Invisibility.
3.) As soon as Decoy’s off cooldown, cast it again.
4.) When your stealth is about to run out, cast Veil and run through it
5.) Wait for Mimic to recharge (don’t cast Decoy yet!)
6.) Return to step 2 and repeat forever.

Turn autotarget off! Don’t target anything when casting Decoy! Don’t be near enemies when The Prestige triggers its burn effect!

The first time you cycle this, you’ll be stealthed for two entire cycles except for that brief gap running through Veil, every time after there will be about a 4 second gap. Assuming anyone sees you in the first place, you can just burn that off with Blurred Frenzy or evades or Dueling traits or whatever so who cares.

Enjoy back-capping keeps, garrisons, and Stonemist forever unless the other team throws down like 10 stealth disruptors and brings a bunch of engineers with Lock On spamming every square inch of the place.

I haven’t noticed a difference in getting targeted by race, class matters a lot more for that. As far as racial skills, Grasping Vines is the only one that I’ve found useful enough to slot regularly, it immobilizes for a loooong time.

It’s possible to launch over the closed Inquest compound gate in Malchor’s Leap using Jump Shot. Going in particularly far will kick you out half-way across the island though.

Lauren Hotson.5068:

OneEightHundred.5689:

Is it okay to post about getting into areas that were not intended to be reachable here, assuming there’s nothing to be gained by getting in to those areas? Or are those considered exploits?

Yes please! We’re looking for those issues too.

OK. You can get on top of Watchful Fjord by climbing the iceberg near the ship bow on the east side using launch skills, and then launching to the ship bow. I used Acid Bomb but it’s probably possible with other launches.

Unfortunately, it’s not possible to reach the peak.

Why is a special effect even needed? There are plenty of things in the game that can be affected by conditions that don’t make a lot of sense, i.e. things underwater will burn, rock elementals and golems can be poisoned/bled, etc.

Why not just make them affected by conditions?

This doesn’t really work because it means they have to dedicate a staffer just to figure out which filter variation the spammers are using lately. Eventually they’ll just start spamming on multiple lines, spelling the server name out vertically, then what?

The most effective solution I’ve seen is just automatically muting players if they’re reported a large number of times for gold spamming, and infracting players if they abuse that feature.

There’s a stuck area near the Anchorage Waypoint in Cursed Shore, and there are two ways to get to it: Either drop down through the roof while trying to get to the vista, or climb the spiky wall behind the waypoint itself.

Once there, there’s an area you can drop down to behind the wall that is impossible to get out of.

Is it okay to post about getting into areas that were not intended to be reachable here, assuming there’s nothing to be gained by getting in to those areas? Or are those considered exploits?

Incendiary Ammo has too many charges consumed by some skills and many of the things that consume charges will not result in Burning being inflicted even in single-target scenarios.

In cases where charges are consumed on target hit, the charge availability on target hit determines if Burning is inflicted and it is not inflicted if something else used the last available charge.

Explosive Shot: Consumes 1 charge on activation and 1 charge per target hit.

Grenade: Consumes 1 charge without Grenadier and 2 charges with Grenadier on activation and 1 additional charge per target hit.

Shrapnel Grenade: Consumes 1 charge per grenade thrown, 1 charge per grenade that lands, and 1 charge per target hit.

Freeze Grenade: Same as Shrapnel Grenade.

Grenade Barrage: Consumes all charges, does not inflict Burning.

Super Elixir: Consumes 1 charge on activation, does not inflict Burning.

Glue Bomb: Consumes 1 charge per pulse and does not inflict Burning.

Smoke Bomb: Same as Glue Bomb.

All thrown elixirs: Consumes 1 charge on activation, does not inflict burning unless the Acidic Elixirs trait was taken. If Acidic Elixirs was taken, inflicts Burning on all affected targets and does not consume any additional charges.