Guild Wars 2

The 4 used skill, strategy and lots of teamwork to accomplish what they did. While the enemy zerg just kept walking into the aoe choke point and didn’t use any abilities or other skills to reach the group of 4 to cause havoc.

I mean all it would have taken was 1 person getting to the group and doing any form of cc to them and the zerg would have reach them and stomped them. I main an ele and just can’t help think that 1 d/d ele could have easily reached them with lighting flash into RTL followed by the regular cc abilities causing all kinds of havoc and allowing the rest of the zerg to get in close.

So all that video shows is that skill, strategy and teamwork can beat larger numbers as long as culling isn’t an issue.

I have played a staff ele in wvw since launch on the top tier servers with a top guild and I can say that aoe does not need a nerf. aoe is strong in wvw because it helps fight culling issues. This is because most times when fighting a zerg for every 2 that you see there are probably another 3 or 4 you don’t see, so throwing down aoes makes your dmg more effective.

During the live stream they mentioned a scenario where when an ally was downed and players would just aoe the downed player instead of stomping. Aoeing the downed player is the solution to the problem that stomping somebody in wvw most of the time can be very costly.

An example is if you are defending a garrison and are up on a wall why would you jump off the wall into the enemy forces to finish 1 guy if you aren’t instantly killed by the enemy since you are right in there face. This is why most guilds just push out into the enemy since staying behind the wall can be rather ineffective at defending. This also applies to most fights in wvw with zergs because nobody has time to finish a downed player until the majority of the enemies are running or dead. Especially true when 3-4 players can almost insta revive a recently downed player making any attempt at finishing a downed player a waste of time.

As far as aoe not having a enough opportunity cost that is also not exactly true. The entire opportunity cost comes from players being able to avoid the little red circles on the ground. And playing as a staff ele there were times in wvw fighting a 1v1 that i felt spamming 1 on fire was a far better use of my time rather than trying to kite the enemy through all my aoes that they would either use a gap closer or dodge roll to evade.

Matt in case you are checking this thread I have submitted a bug report for the siege in starter area but since it wasn’t my home world not the best screenshot. So the area you want to check is the cliff that looks over cragtop tower in green borderland. It is in the starter area because enemy players are invuln and the only way to kill the siege is to have a balista or treb set up to defend it since they can drop siege really far back.

I also have noticed that this trait skill is doing nothing at the moment.