Guild Wars 2

So after avoiding Spvp for a while due to the overwhelming sense of deja vu every single game (aka 6 thieves 2 warriors 2 guardians and my poor engineer every game) I decided to have a few games today. I just hit quick join, something I am sure a lot of people who are not really that serious about PvP do and after 5 games not a single one of them was even close.

The problem was simple, 4 out of the 5 games ended being 6v3 or 7v5 because of players AFKing in the spawn. This obviously stops it from being auto-balanced.

BTW I was glad to see that 3 of the thieves had been replaced with D/D eles, at least we have 4 classes being used now.

Now obviously this is not an issue in tournaments and more serious games, but for the casual user who just plays a few games it really gets old quick. I dont know how long someone has to be afk before they are kicked but it definitely needs to be much shorter.

aliksyian.7642:

Gear = time spent.
Gear =/= talent. Gear =/= skill.

In order to have a level playing field for players from “24/7 no sleep” to “a few hours a week”, gear should not be a factor in success.

Would you play chess if the other guy got three queens, simply because he’d been playing longer? (Some of you are probably saying ‘Yes, I love a challenge!’. Somehow I doubt you’d play that way for very long)

If you want a level playing field go play Spvp.

The fact is that even without a gear difference someone who plays 4 hours a day is most likely going to be much better than someone who plays 1 hour a day.

Players need things to aim for and some players like those things to be stats and I can guarantee you that far more people will aim for the armor with an extra +5 stats and keep playing than the number of people who will leave simply because of the items presence.

The amount of players who will exclude someone because of a marginal stat difference is a tiny tiny fraction of the player base and is certainly worth ignoring in exchange for the amount of players having something bigger and better to aim for will keep playing. You may not like it but you are a minority, most people do not care if someone in WvW has 1% more stats because they play 10 hours a day, to most people what others have is not important, it is what they have and if they do not have something to aim for then they will not play.

If this game was based around PvP, if WvW was the ultimate driving force in this game then you may have an argument for having the highest stat items easy to obtain, but that is not the case, the driving force is PvE.

I never grinded. I never spent more than an hour at a time in Orr, never did a dungeon more than 1-2 times in a row. The only thing I spent hours at a time on was WvW but that was because it is easy to lose track of time playing that. After 690 hours of play I got myself the legendary pistol (pissed of that if i had waited a week i could have saved 60 gold on the precursor).

I have never really stuck with a MMORPG before gw2. I am not the type of player who likes grinding at all, but GW has so many options to get to the same goal that you dont need to grind.

For people complaining about lodestones… who says you have to grind all 100 of them, or buy all 100 of them. You need to set yourself much smaller goals. Go run a dungeon path and get a core or lodestone, go farm some mobs for 30 minutes, go get some orich ore and sell with the loot from earlier and use the profit to buy a lodestone or 2. Before you know it you have a few lodestones and you never spent more than 30-45 minutes doing the same thing over and over.

Notice how its never the engineers or necromancers complaining bout how OP other classes are. When was the last time you saw someone complain about how powerful a nerco or engineer was? When you main one of the forgotten classes you get use to fighting against people using superior builds.

The issue isnt specific classes, the issue is specific builds. We all know there are a few builds across the thief, warrior and elementalist class that are simply far superior to anything else in the game. Now you can argue all you want about what is more powerful out of those, but at the end of the day they all need nerfed, there are 8 classes in this game each with several available builds, the ultimate aim should be for players to be able to use not only any class and not feel kittened but to also not be forced to use one of only a few specific builds to compete.

Most classes at the moment have the problem of having one obviously superior build, I would honestly prefer builds to be balanced within each class before they even begin to look balancing all 8 classes against each other.

piercing trait + explosive shot with pistol is probably the best, its quick to hit and with a bit of practice in positioning it will be far bigger AOE than any other skill.

will.2105:

Yeah, Warrior 22k HP, 2578 armor, got 3 shot by a ranger, downed, got 2 more hits, went back to respawn, went back, found a thief, 2 hits and i was down again. Funny, never happened before. Hard to walk around the map when you cant even move 5 feet when u encounter someone. Good old times, port bombs, good thiefs or mesmers and actual zergs would be the death of me. Or the difference between the best of Magumma and the best of Fort Aspenwood is that great.

yeah it is that great. you have to remember FA is rated almost 200 points higher than you guys and you have the disadvantage of the 3rd team being HOD. When we played MAG I think our opposition was Sea of Sorrows, MAG rarely got above 100 points and FA won easily.

The crys of of hacking was the exact same thing yaks did. It has already been shown exactly how they do it and there are plenty of youtube videos of the eles fighting more than 6 players.

The problem at the moment is that the servers ranked 7th to 10th are a bit behind the top 6 but well ahead of 11th and down. From the looks of it for the next couple of weeks the servers unfortunate enough to be placed 11th and 12th will have to play whoever out of the 4 servers above them lost the week before (probably FA and YAKS with the weaker offpeak). This is going to result in some unbalanced matches.

I love how some yaks players complain about FAs sudden transfers over and over again, complaining about how we outnumber them, then as soon as it looks like FA might actually be able to come back the map turns blue and the lead gets pushed back out to an almost impossible margin.

As I and some other FA players have been saying, it has had nothing to do with the numbers on FAs side, the only reason we were able to come back was the dramatic decrease of yaks.

Ireniicus.2167:

Lets face it FA’s WvWers volumes are increasing daily and have essentially doubled their numbers as the week has progressed and consequently should be in a higher tier than YB or ET.

I think FA original players will have mixed feelings about this in the coming weeks as their weekend queues will essentially lock out a lot of people but I guess that’s the sacrifice required if you want to be top tier which they will be very soon if they retain these huge numbers.

I think we can match you player for player but in the attracting new talent to your server YB have had their backsides kicked.

Good luck next week.

again, I have played every night this week from about the end of NA peak for about 4 hours. We had an increase in numbers after the weekend but that can be attributed to the fact that yaks lost a lot of players and we were no longer outmanned on every map. Other than that our numbers right now are pretty similar to the numbers we have had for weeks at this time. We might have a few more players as in 5-10 extra players on the 2 maps that we are concentrating on but yaks are seemingly intent on trying to make out as if we all of a sudden gained several hundred player guilds that are all very active in WvW and that is simply not true and not a single person has been able to show that it is true.

To me it just seems yaks are making excuses for a large falling away of offpeak numbers after an easy initial couple of days, its almost as if they expected FA to just give in and when FA kept showing up they decided it was not worth the effort since the lead should already be big enough.

Tetnis.9137

What this week proves is that if you dont have the numbers to win fairly you should spam other servers guilds to jump ship and join your server. I hope those transfers stick around when you start losing in a higher tier FA

ignoring that we have been recruiting for weeks, the japanese guild has been on FA for as long as i can remember, I have not seen or heard about any AU guild even though I am an aussie so would be playing the same time, the EU guild was confirmed to be looking to move but nothing guaranteed, it was confirmed that earlier in the week 1 EU player came here to have a look, his guild were going to discuss it. We had ULTD move over a month ago. Obviously have no way to confirm individuals coming over but servers get new players all the time so yeah.

FAs population for the oceanic period has been pretty much the same as it has been for weeks, the only difference between now and the weekend that put you guys 100k up is the amount of yaks that disappeared. Even now I find it a miracle that we are winning in this time period. YAKS seem to have just as many, if not more players than FA but they are all in 1 big zerg and are missing out on a lot of points by not working as a team.

Again, no one has been able to show these mystical transfers, sure we may have had a few people come to FA but no where near enough to go from losing 100k points in 2 days to constantly holding a 200+ point lead.

Ultriss.9325:

I would just like to congratulate FA for being the biggest bunch of hackers I’ve ever met. I especially like the invisible warriors and invincible ele’s. If anything particularly a couple peoples from “GODS” and “ULTD” really make you look bad. Oh well. no skill tactics for no skill players. Just try to not lose too bad, kk cheaters?

GODS, due to its sheer size may get a hacker occasionally but I doubt they let him stay long, ULTD definitely not, they are just a small but very focused and practiced group of players who no doubt owned you.

Hackers are really not a server based problem, they move around a lot and are not unique or overwhelmingly numbered on any server. I have yet to see any server hacker free but I have yet to see any server with any major hacker problem compared to other servers with similar population.

Moddo.7105:

Reonhato.5914:

While messaging someone with accusations is never a good thing to do both of you obviously have no idea what is actually happening. It has nothing to do with class skills or exploits but with the rendering problems. Im sorry to tell you this but you are probably not as good a player as you think you are, what is going on is whenever you come out of invis you are in fact still invisible to your opponent because you have not rendered, by the time they can see you then you go invisible again and repeat, thus the illusion that you have perma invis.

So many thieves are going to get a rude awakening when this is fixed, it is a huge advantage in WvW for them at the moment.

Yea another person who knows so much didn’t even go read link and thinks he knows all. See the skill called infiltrator strike allows you to charge someone and leaves a point on ground you activated it. This then you can use later to telport back. So rendering has nothing to do with it. Stealth was not issue because I was not in stealth I was behind them. So please like person who whispered me please learn something. And please don’t comment on a situation you have no clue about as you were not even there. And no one said anything about my skill level. I tried to help person out with instructing them in use of a skill when they thought it was stealth, and they were not able to understand it seems just like you who think Infiltrator strike = stealth.

I dont think you get it, based on what you said the person was obviously complaining about you having perma stealth, he was complaining about more than just 1 skill. The issue is that you may not have been stealthed and to you everything is going fine, but to him there is a really high possibility that you simply had not rendered properly from the last time you used a stealth skill and he could not see you not matter what skill you used.

The issue has nothing to do with what skills you used, it is entirely about the rendering and the fact that he could not see you, no matter how much you try and argue against that by saying you were using certain skills it does not change the fact that it is a well known issue that thieves will often appear to be stealthed almost permanently

Moddo.7105:

Chris.5024:

Moddo.7105:

FA is only server that has sent me mass whispers over me killing them. Obviously not all of you but never had a whisper from anyone on another server till Friday. And as of now I have blocked 20 of you FAers because of repeated whispers over and over. And this forum post kinda mirrors what whispers represent. If I was most of you or EU server looking to transfer I’d pick another server. Playing along side people like that giving the impression that FA are immature whiners is not good.

Harsh. I’ve been on FA since launch and I’ve been very happy with our community so far. From what I’ve experienced on FA we have a lot of helpful and nice people willing to help with anything. The community I’ve experienced has been more mature and understanding than in any other mmo I’ve played (I assume it’s generally like this on most servers). I guess this recent evidence proves me wrong though…

Not all are bad. Just a few I guess. A example would be someone called Death Wedding. Called me a exploiter because of thinking I was using perma stealth he was too much of crappy PvP player to understand another classes skills. Try to help him out and pointed him to http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Infiltrator%27s_Strike. I was visible behind them. And when try to give him pointers on what I was doing I get insulted because of my grammar skills. That person will never get any better because in his/her mind they already think they are best PvPers in world and can’t learn anything. That I hope FA is not general population of your server cause I feel sorry for decent ones on FA if it is.

While messaging someone with accusations is never a good thing to do both of you obviously have no idea what is actually happening. It has nothing to do with class skills or exploits but with the rendering problems. Im sorry to tell you this but you are probably not as good a player as you think you are, what is going on is whenever you come out of invis you are in fact still invisible to your opponent because you have not rendered, by the time they can see you then you go invisible again and repeat, thus the illusion that you have perma invis.

So many thieves are going to get a rude awakening when this is fixed, it is a huge advantage in WvW for them at the moment.

morrolan.9608:

Reonhato.5914:

FA won the first night by 1000 points, for the first night 1000 is a fairly comfortable win.

If you think it was comfortable then you weren’t there.

I was there, comfortable does not mean easy, comfortable means we were not 1 bad fight away from losing or anything. 1000 points on the first night indicates a fairly consistent small point lead, you dont get 1000 points up with 30 minutes of good work, 1000 points is an indication that FA spent a majority of the time up.

fivekiller.1432:

Haldunius.7864:

I would assume it’s about as annoying as beating someone in your primetime and then losing to PvDoor while listening to patronizing comments about “superior tactics and coordination”.

FA hasn’t really beat Yaks in the prime time this match up until the past day or two. I get that you guys are used to saying that you’re unstoppable in prime time but that just isn’t what happened last friday. You guys had maybe a couple hundred point lead and as of the end of prime time Friday the match was anyone’s game.

I am well aware that a 1 point lead is technically winning. But the small lead you had just isn’t really enough to claim your server was the superior prime time server. With scores so close it would be foolish to say the match would always play out that way.

FA won the first night by 1000 points, for the first night 1000 is a fairly comfortable win.

I would really love to know who these magically transfers are. We had a few euros transfer that I know of and that is it. The guilds playing in oceanic time are the same guilds we have always had. It really seems a drop off of yaks has given FA the opening, not an increase of FA

Ireniicus.2167:

Good job FA. Your recruitment drive is definitely working as you have managed to get a significant influx of WvWers for off peak.

I hope you enjoyed taking on Yaks famous/infamous ToG guild. We might be old but I hope you agree we put up a good fight and we certainly enjoyed restraining your Zerg.

This is far better than owning maps uncontested as we witnessed at the beginning of the match up and should help attract more and more people to play WvW on our cool servers.

I dont know what map you were playing on but yaks certainly did not put up a good fight tonight. I spent about 4 hours in WvW and after yaks lost out in a couple of decisive battles early we spent the next 3 hours recapturing empty maps as the yak zerg kept transferring to the next borderlands as soon as we showed up to defend.

At one point after I noticed briar had been captured on our home borderlands, I went to check it out and sure enough I found a yak zerg pvdooring bays. I went to EB and told everyone, we had some people transfer to our borderlands while some stayed to capture the rest of EB before coming to help. By the time I got back bays was gone and yaks were starting on sunny and the garrison (with golems) at the same time. We were still out manned so we went to defend crag, we managed to get rid of the outmanned buff and defended crag, while we were cleaning up crag yaks rushed through the last keep and only a couple people made it in time to see a big zerg go into the lord room. By now our EB friends had arrived, we went to crag expecting yaks to show up since it was our last tower…. nope 5 minutes after the outmanned buff went off yaks were now outmanned.

its disappointing that we finally get enough people to show up in offpeak to actually fight and we spend the entire time chasing a giant yak zerg around 4 different maps.

fivekiller.1432:

@Fallout

it was actually 28 golems

Look I get that you guys have nothing better to do but this is the kind of kitten that results in no one bothering to fight the next day.

FA won the first primetime fight, not by much but we won. The second night we did not really get close and things like being able to build 30 golems while everyone is asleep is the reason why. On the first night everything starts even and balanced. The next night though people are logging in to fight on maps against an opposition who has 3 fully upgraded and supplied keeps and almost unlimited siege on every borderlands. The fact that we can even get it back to the point that its almost even points is a miracle but less people will show up tomorrow and even less the next day because no one likes to fight an uphill battle that is completely pointless.

If their was an actual chance of coming back and making a difference maybe more people would show up but that is not the case. I think a lot of servers overestimate just how much population FA has due to our very strong prime time. The amount of offpeak presence is definitely overestimated as shown by yaks surprise at how easily they beat us off peak.

Out of all the NA servers FA arguably suffers the most against offpeak capping. It is very rare to get a fight as good as we did against yaks on the first night, not even the tier 3 servers gave us as good a fight on the first night. The reason being as im sure yaks is now aware, FA has a primetime team that although lacking in numbers is very strong, even though apparently we do not have as much communication as other servers but with a very poor offpeak presence often our primetime team is left fighting against opposition that simply cannot put up much competition. It basically means we get 1 good night of WvW a week if we are lucky.

Eliandal.8735

It’s kind of funny that this is being said about us, especially after last week. We pretty much won every US prime time night…sometimes pushing 500+ for hours straight…but lost it all early-mid morning
All in all some great battles tonight though! INSANE amount of siege at one point hitting our poor partially upgraded keep. Can’t believe we weasled our way out of that one!

you obviously have not played FA yet. We are tier 3, maybe tier 2 at our best during the first night…. at least until our players log off. Last week we won by over 200k points, yet during offpeak we still struggled to maintain a potential point lead. Although we held on longer than previous matches we still ended up losing a majority of our holdings most nights, not everything like normal but still.

Basically our offpeak presence can be described as somewhere between non existent and a couple guys goofing around

I cant remember anyone saying orbs is the reason they lose, a lot of people say orbs were the reason teams lose by so much though.

The biggest problem with orbs was not hacking, it was the fact that whatever team has the most offpeak players would start the next peak session with not only a huge map advantage but also a huge stat advantage. It meant that even if you could match them 166v166 you were still losing out because everyone of their players had 15% more stats.

Picture of ULTD defending bay on yaks borderlands from a couple hours ago. I think we had about 15 or 16 siege within range of the gate and wall that was being trebbed. Fighting certainly has been intense and I hope it continues but I do fear that as soon as one side takes an advantage offpeak then the other side will not be able to recover and population will dwindle.

The balance in the downed skills itself needs to be fixed if downed state is going to stay. I would love to see revives removed from PvP though, or at least adding a timer and making reviving in combat impossible so zergs cannot just run through and swarm everything, revive and continue, they actually have to be careful not to die.

Anyway if downed state is to stay I would love to see downed skills be far more uniformed compared to normal skills and reduced in effectiveness a bit. With just 3 skills it is incredibly difficult to balance so I think the simple solution is to give every class 3 skills that are similar. A single target damage, a single target debuff/interupt and an AOE dmg with condition I think would be good. At the moment it is just too one sided with some classes having huge advantages over others in downed state.

BTW I play an engineer, arguably the most useless of downed classes so I may be bias in wanting it changed.

So defending an orb you did not earn is bad? Well you guys didn’t earn 2 of the 3 orbs you have, you took advantage of the game mechanics allowing you to take orbs against no competition and have now benefited from the stat boost for 2 days. Orb hacking is hardly new on any server, I have yet to come across any team that has given an orb back after it was hacked.

vikramvish.1469:

Usagi.4835:

JUST WANT TO REITERATE WHAT MANIAC SAID IN THE FIRST POST! Keep it classy and friendly! I’ve encountered FA doing questionable things but I don’t come here posting pics and acting snarky.

And you know what? Even though I didn’t agree with what I was told, it’s true. There are three exits. Use them. We don’t condone spawn-camping. We’ve said that numerous times. Do you think we’re lying or falsifying things?

Some of the posters are being very inflammatory towards Tarnished Coast. Asking everyone to quit it and get back on topic.

i totally agree, the ranking system is there to eventually match server skill. it will take time and you guys FA and DB will be matched to servers that are around your skill level, until then please enjoy the game and stop bashing on us innocent TC…

You say dont bash the innocent TC… in the same post you say FA and DB are less skilled, you are obviously implying that you think TC is simply a better server than FA and DB.

The word you are looking for is “POPULATION”. Population decides the outcome of these matches far more than skill, after all despite having less population FA beat TC in the first 8 hours, it wasnt until “skill” could no longer keep up with the bigger and bigger difference in numbers that TC took the lead and made it insurmountable by the next day, taking with it the advantages gained by having orbs and map control.

I really think the TC players here are overestimating how many WvW players FA has. You keep talking as if players staying up late to help in offpeak is something unique to TC…. it is not, FA players do it as well, they did it on the first night but it made no difference.

You talk about 2 hour ques, or 15 minute ques after friday if you lose… FA did not have a que on TC borderlands for most of primetime on the first night. Our home borderland was a 15 minute wait.

TC clearly has the population advantage for this matchup, you guys can pretty much match DB and FA combined for all but a few hours a day, to complain that people are not giving the fight you want them to give is just selfish kittenry.

So heres what I think happened.

People like to win, their is nothing you can do about that, some/most people are only going to play when it is close or you are winning. That is why on the first day on FA we had 2 BLs and EB full and a 3rd BL almost full for most of primetime. The trouble begins when 2 teams log off and 1 team captures everything.

This results in 2 things. A stat advantage for the team who has the most players and a positioning advatnage, they start with everything and lots of upgrades the next day. So what happens is those same people from the night before log in and see their team 20k points down with 100 points on the board. Now some of them might join and try and get some towers and keeps back but after 30 minutes of fighting against a team that not only has superior numbers but a 15% stat advantage is simply a fight that cannot be won, so they do what most do and they leave.

It is a fundamental flaw in the game design that cannot be quick fixed away, it is a flaw that I think 95% of us recognize quite clearly and it is a flaw that hopefully Anet will not be scared to fix by making major changes to the way WvW works.

It is 10:05 server time and the only que is for EB (which happens to be the only map we actually have decent territory). This is not a good sign just 1 day after reset, especially for a matchup that had just 1000 points split FA and TC after the first 8 hours.

Urrid.4593

A lot of TC are staying up waaaay past bedtime tonight. I am going to look like Kitten tomorrow at work. Haha.
Amazing defense of Garrison Fort Aspenwood. We hit your yaks, denied you supply, hit water gate, treb’ed walls down and you still have supply even when your stockpike is 0/1,250. Insane!
And now, sleep, at 4:20am hahah. Oh GW2 you evil thing.

Yeah we were confident in keeping that one even with the wall going down. We had a couple groups running supplies. As soon as it went down you guys ran into about 5 arrow carts and 3-4 ballistas, the delay from all the supplies we ran in gave us enough time to get well organised. As soon as we pushed you back a whole bunch of people went and got more supply while the rest went and defended the southern gate, they arrived back just in time for some hasty repairs as the gate got down to about 5% before we finally pushed you guys out again. I think the wall and the southern gate was tried again a couple times but each time less and less TC were showing up and we held strong.

Goes to show as long as you are not horribly outnumbered organisation can go a long way, too bad we cant put up that kind of fight on all the borderlands.

Pimsley.3681

Huge comeback, TC!

By huge comeback you mean having more numbers than anyone else during the early hours of the morning for most americans. It is sad after 8+ hours of great fights over all 4 maps and only 1000 points splitting FA and TC after that it all comes down to who has the most offpeak players. I think FA players already knew it was going to happen, we have playing DB and TC over the last few weeks and both had stronger offpeak than us.

I get that not many players like it and it affects every server, but if you really want to see how bad it is than come to FA, it is very sapping to have one of the strongest primetime teams in the mid tier but the weakest offpeak, FA will only last so long if this keeps up.

11:45 server time and FA is outmanned on TC borderlands. I think DB actually hit outmanned first but they seemed to recover some numbers. Sometimes I wonder if FA can actually beat anyone during offpeak, I think we may have won a couple nights/mornings during our first matchup but I think that may have had more to do with the folding of the other sides.

Anyway, scores from a little bit back, FA was at 300 for a little bit but we capitulated fast on TC borderlands once we went to outmanned.

Anyway it was fun fighting with even numbers again, hopefully FA can manage to at least compete in 1 or 2 maps for the entire night/morning. Maybe one day we can look forward to the little red icon not deciding the outcome of every match.

OmniPotentes.4817:

@ Reonhato your suggestion has nothing to do with the downed post.

On topic: I believe some of the downed state profession skills are quite OP and deal way to much damage.

sure it does, if you read more than the first post you would realise the thread quickly went into not just about downed but death as well and the advantages it gives zergs, better to fix a broken mechanic before trying to balance it

Remove the ability to revive the dead in combat, dont know if that is possible without changing downed reviving, it should be.

When you die give a 2-3 minute timer, if your not revived in time then make it so you either cant be or you auto spawn to the nearest waypoint.

This match up pretty much sums up what is wrong with WvW atm. BG are basically the new HOD, they have over hour WvW ques and they are matched up against a server that I got straight into TC borderlands about 20 minutes after the start and took 5 minutes to get into home borderlands a bit later. Rankings mean nothing with transfers so frequent.

The other issue is the fact that it is 3 teams. It is well talked about the whole " why dont the weaker servers gang up"…. because it is not that simple. At the start of a match the first thing you want to do is get points on the board, so the first thing you do is go after the easy targets. Logically if you want a good match TC and FA would gang up against BG, but when you work with big groups of people logic rarely works. This results in exactly what happened today, FA lose towers and camps to TC and BG early on pretty much every map, the server that has come from the lower ranks gets targeted and players quickly disappear.

Luckily we held stonemist for a little bit today, it helped keep us near 200 points for a while and probably stopped players giving up after just a couple of hours

edit: I just logged in to see what was going on. The only que we have is for EB and it is the only map we have held our ground, we are outmanned on all the other maps…. its 10:30 pm server time (PST)

Who says maguuma has population issues…. although they didnt give up as much of a fight as actual players.

I hate to break this to you but HoD was a zerg server. Why dont you come play on some of the servers in the lower half of the ranks and see what it is like playing without all 4 maps filled with players, on some of those servers attacking with 20 players is a zerg.

Its about time players on the higher population servers decided to spread out. Every time I see players complain about 2 hours que times I laugh. I guess it is their punishment for going for the easy win. You don’t even have to drop down to the bottom servers to not worry about ques. FA only ever has ques for borderlands on weekends and even then its no more then 15 minutes. EB might be 15-30 minutes during primetime at most.

btw whats with the top tier servers thinking they have a monopoly on tactical play and whatnot? you really think no other server has figured out running around as 1 group is not a good idea? if you want to see some real tactical play fight with the guys who are playing 20 v 100 every single night and still doing there best to capture and hold places.

HUH? Ive farmed 20k karma straight in orr and not hit the karma DR. If your hitting it after 8 or 9 events you are either bullkitten or doing something suss for it to kick in.

Server time: 7:10 pm- FA- 2864, MAG- 2194, SOS-1818

Server time: 11:48 am- FA- 9125, SOS-7722, MAG- 7514

Server time: 2:37 am- SOS- 13059, FA- 12221, MAG- 9481

FA starts with a 1046 point lead over SOS, 4 hours and 38 minutes later and the lead is 1403, that is 357 points for 4 and a half hours of play or 1.28 points a minute.

2 hours and 49 minutes later SOS lead by 838 points, a turn around of 2241 points or 13.2 points a minute ( and of course the lead is only going to get bigger)

This is why every player is not worth the same, having offpeak players is worth so much more because the potential for gaining points by outnumbering your opponent is so much greater. By trying to make sure every player is worth the same ANET has made it so a majority of players do not matter at all, the only players that matter are those in the offpeak period when borderlands are not filled.

Metalripper.5406:

This is such garbage, for the first time in a long while, Blackgate has had a que for EBG during NA primetime, and WE are the ones working the system?

You Dragonbrand guys have been capitalizing on your much larger population almost the entire matchup, and when that wasn’t enough to win, you cried to Twin and Tsym to come spike the map and fight your battles for you. And the biggest gap you could muster was 20k points.

Maybe you guys should organize and communicate, instead of meandering around map in zergs like a horde of zombies.

yeah except that is exactly what blackgate have done to get in front. During the first day when everyone had full maps during primetime blackgate fell behind, the next day blackgate lose population and fall even more but then during offpeak all of a sudden blackgate appears with a giant zerg and just takes everything with no competition.

Congrats Anet, your lack of action on server transfers and nightcapping has made 1000s of players mean absolutely nothing in WvW just so a group of euros on a NA server dont feel left out.

Cant really blame dragonbrand for an individuals actions. Last night/this morning we had an alt build random seige next to the supply in our garrison (FA borderlands), 5 minutes later its attacked by serveral golems, this is despite the fact that we had the outmanned buff.

Some groups of players will do whatever it takes to win. Some people are just kitten and the fact that they feel it necessary to do this stuff in a MMO just makes me sad to about how kitteny their RL must be.

You know what would have made more sense… transferring to FA. You know, the server out of the 3 here that gets outmanned on its own borderlands and has literally 0 presence on every other map including EB during offpeak during the week. The server who put about 6k points between them and blackgate on the weekend only to have it disappear the moment monday came around. That is a server you transfer to if you want to make a difference.

So its 9:15pm server time and on Fort Aspenwood the only que is for EB. Now there are a few reasons for this, some out of ANETs control, others are not.

The performance issues people are having in WvW is killing it for a lot of people. A week ago I had no problem. Today I died multiple times within an hour from invisible armies. Sometimes I can be in a 3 way fight with an uncountable number of players and it will run fine, even on my laptop, 5 minutes later I will be running at 5 FPS and have invisible people running around during a 10v10 skirmish. I have no idea what you guys did about a week ago but you better figure it out quick because all chat is filled with atm on FA is people complaining about invisible players and lag.

Night capping, you have made your stance clear on this but players do not care. No one likes to lose simply because 1 team has more players at a certain time. Im an aussie, one of the few who play on FA and our offpeak presence sucks at best. We are hanging on to 2nd place in our current battle but it wont last another night. The leaders, Dragonbrand did a good job on the first day and got a lead, they extended it to about 7k points overnight but for the last 2 days they have been almost consistently in last place for potential points for 16 hours a day yet they have continued to extend their lead during offpeak. So far the FA vs BG vs DB has been the closest WvWvW I have seen. Right now the score is 74k vs 62.3k vs 61.8k. You would expect with a close score ques would be longer, people would want to WvW, yet after just a couple of days players on FA are sick of it and have basically given up. 24 hours ago we had a 5k point lead over 3rd, its gone now because no one is interested in putting in the effort in a broken WvW when all the work done in 16 hours is undone in just a couple of hours offpeak by a small group of players.

Appeasing a small group of players at the cost of many is not a good idea, and im saying that as an aussie. Everyone knows the current ranking system is just a list of servers with the most active oceanic and SEA player base and it is killing WvW.

Orbs, its a minor issue compared to the last 2 but I dont think many people like logging on to find not only do they have to retake all their towers and keeps but they have to do so against an enemy who has a major stat bonus. I feel sorry for those players who go through that everyday before I log in.

The outmanned buff is pointless. Whats the point of having magic find if you cant kill anything because you are outmanned. All it does is encourage players to go farm mobs and make those actually wanting to WvW fight even more lopsided.

So basically those are the 2 main issues and 2 minor one that I think has drastically reduced WvW participation on FA. 2 weeks ago you were lucky to get in a borderlands within 30-45 minutes, EB took 2 hours sometimes. I understand that school is going back tomorrow for a lot of americans and that might explain it a little for tonight, but yesterday was similar, it took less then a minute to get in to WvW and we were outmanned at least 2-3 hours before we normally are.

Kryzen.6803:

Engineers are definitely not underpowered. There are a couple of secret builds out there that are just completely owning everyone and everything in pvp, to the point of being borderline OP. A lot of weapons, kits and skills the engineer has are pretty lack luster, that is for sure. It definitely takes away from the freedom of the class if you want to actually be a beast in PvP.

mid/close range burst is insane if you know how to spec it and survivability is just stupid crazy with how much CC we have. Long range AoE is insane. But sadly only a few combo of weapons and kits really work well in pvp, both SPvP and WvWvW and a lot of the ones people are running because they enjoy it the most, and rightfully so since they are by far the most entertaining, just simply cant hold up.

Its going to be hard for ANet to buff the engineer because these few builds that are working, are working very very well. And any changes to other kits and skills without the downplay of specific others may result in the engineer being an unstoppable force. A part of me feels that we can expect not to have any real changes to the class for a long time because of this.

as someone who generally dominates in WvW and PvP as an engineer I agree with this. I have tried a lot of different builds with my engineer in PvP and not many work that well. I use grenades, elixir S, slick shoes with a rifle. With the right traits you get double heals, 6 seconds of invulnerability and can disable single targets for several seconds at a time. Anyone who complains about squishiness is obviously using the wrong stats. I think a lot of people look at the engineer and try and build him as a glass cannon with lots of condition damage, as support or around turrets, this is simply the wrong method.

Use the engineer to charge into opponents, get in their face 2v1, 3v1 it doesnt matter. Hold them up and distract them while teammates get free shots from range, grenades mean you will still do plenty of damage to multiple opponents even while using toughness and vitality. You have no fear of being killed because as soon as you get to 25% health you have 6 seconds to retreat and let your teammates take over. Its very hard to lose a teamfight when after 5 seconds all of them are half dead and the only thing they have done is made the engineer back off, especially when he has 1500 yard range on grenades.

also engineers are broken underwater, you can 2v1 underwater no problem . In PvE group events are often soloable underwater, you can literally fight a dozen creatures at once fairly easily.

Want to know what he would do to my engineer? waste his initiative, he would just activate elixir s, I will heal and he will start to chase me at which point I hit slick and he falls over and with 14k hp and 900 toughness he aint getting another chance to move. Thieves stacking damage is hardly new and counters are common.

Anyway if you get sick of thieves owning newbs in SPvP go play WvW where thieves who try and do that get loled at.

Ok I main an Engy am lvl 80 and I play a lot of WvW and a little SPvP and the engineer is one of the most useful classes. I have seen hardly any engineers actually play it right. If you are struggling to kill mobs you are doing it wrong, engineers are pretty much faster than anyone else at continuously farming.

Equipment wise you want power, vitality and toughness, you basically want to be able to take as many hits as possible because you will be getting in nice and close most of the time. Traits are 30 in explosives with two of your traits being +10% explosion damage and 25% range on grenades +extra grenade, 20 in inventions with the traits protection when hit critical and 10% combat speed (the most important one is the health skill reset at 25% hp), 20 in alchemy with traits of drink elixir S at 25% hp and regen when using a kit.

First of all turret skills are meh in PvE and SPvP and useless at best in WvW, they are a waste of a slot really.

First of all I use the Rifle, the main reason being the fact that it has a knock-down and immobilize, an engineer should not be relying on his rifle for any more then a couple of hits in a row anyway and should almost exclusively only be switching to use specific skills.

The first utility is the grenade kit, this is your main weapon. While the engineer might not be able to put out as much single hit damage as most others he can put out far more AOE than even the elementalist and his DPS over a period of time even with vitality and toughness as the focus is still great. Grenades are pretty much useful always, PvE you just aggro several creatures and kill them all at the same time and repeat, making the engineer very fast at farming (this is why you take vit and toughness). In PvP it take a little more effort and concentration to use since people move, this requires the switching to the rifle, immobilize them, switch to grenades and chill, use that 3 second to poison and bleed, switch back to rifle and use knockback, switch back to grenades and make them dodge before switching back to rifle to immobilize again. I wont bother going into WvW it will take too long.

Now with 1500 range on grenades and even with buffed survivability still not super tanky you may be tempted to sit back and throw…. this is not how to utilise grenades full potential though, you need to be point blank to make sure you hit and you want the enemy to hit you not your teammates because of the next 2 skills you will use… Elixir S and Slick Shoes.

You may remember the trait to use Elixir S at 25% hp, basically this elixir makes you tiny, you evade attacks and break stun, it lasts for 3 seconds. Slick shoes gives double movement for 5 seconds and gives you another knockdown. Basically you heal once before you reach 25%, then you keep fighting until you reach 25% and turn tiny, at which point you turn tail and run, your heal will reset due to the trait so you can use that again, once you become big again if no one is following good, if they are hit your double speed and prepare to hit your elixir S if they start attacking again. This gives you about 6-7 seconds where they can do almost 0 damage and you have plenty of time to get help, you also get a heal and with the regen from heal and using a kit with the trait you should be gaining around 250-300 HP a second, once you have escaped or received help just play it a bit more defensive for a minute and you are set to go again.

This setup makes it incredibly hard to die in PvE while still being able to kill creatures fast, in SPvP it makes you an incredible nuisance, if the enemy dont attack you are free to do big damage and cripple the enemy, if they do attack you can escape and they have wasted precious time. In WvW I constantly run into the middle of dozens of opposition players, cripple and poison several of them, knockdown some more with slick shoes and still escape ready to repeat 90 seconds later, it also makes it impossible for the enemy to block you from entering a besieged tower or keep.

Ok that got a bit long but anyway, I didnt really want to give away my build but it really frustrates me when I see engineers put down rifle or rocket turrets, especially in WvW. Engineers are rare, not many people play them and even fewer people play them well.

BTW the downside of my build is it takes practice to get right when fighting in small skirmishes or 1v1. Also if all else fails just go underwater and use grenades because they are super broken.