Guild Wars 2

Guardian issues largely go away when you start playing with a guild/coordinated group. With coordination, melee weapons are totally viable in zerg vs. zerg situations. In fact, I’d even say melee weapons win those fights. All it takes is 3/4 melee to charge in together, which splits the initial wave of damage you get from being out front enough for you to survive. Once you’re up close with their front lines melee does huge damage (hammer/GS on a closely-packed group is crazy damage), their ranged tend to panic and break and then in the chaos it’s much easier to pick people off. The problem is, if you try to do this without the coordinated support you explode instantly. This is why people think melee isn’t viable in zerg vs zerg fights. 9 times out of 10 a strong, coordinated melee push will win the engagement.

If you spend large amounts of your time AoE’ing things in keep assaults/defences then you’re not contributing effectively to WvW. Even so, there are ways to contribute in these situations.
*Smite from scepter or Symbol of Swiftness (properly traited) are great at clearing walls
*A Purging Flames + ground-targeted Consecrations adds another AoE to your skillset
*Baiting ranged attacks and dropping a Wall of Reflection does major damage
*Staff Orb of Light or Scepter Orb do reasonable dps in the fairly static situation of a keep assault/defence.

tldr: Sure, ranged weapons aren’t our strength, but we do have ok options here. Playing melee solo is tough, but with a coordinated group it becomes extremely effective (and fun!) so go find a guild if you want to WvW.

I really enjoy the staff, but I also kind-of agree with many of the negative comments in this post. I think the negativity is a little exaggerated though; the staff is very close to being a good weapon but just needs a few small tweaks. I’m not going to suggest major skill redesigns here as I doubt they could be implemented any time soon.

1 – most of the time I can’t even tell if I’m casting it or not. I think a more obvious casting effect and sound would help as would a small damage buff and possibly a narrower cone effect to compensate for the damage buff (or alternatively a max 5 targets cap like other AoEs).

2 – I like it, but a small boost in travel speed would be nice.

3 – Fantastic support tool (near-perma swiftness for your entire group is amazing) but a small damage buff to improve it’s offensive use would be nice.

4 – I agree that the root isn’t much fun, but the Asura casting animation makes it worthwhile. Maybe a slightly reduced cast time so we’re not rooted as long? Not sure this needs any changes actually.

5 – Possibly the best skill we have? Well, second to Wall of Reflection maybe…

Paladin.5268:

We lost our Aussie guilds here, as I have not seen any more recruitment on IoJ after day 1 of being matched with your server. Apparently fun for ET is to roffle stomp other servers and keep the pressure 24/7, then have the balls to come into these forums and ask where our players are? Do some research in the future, we are not a hard core WvW server and do the best we can against other reasonable servers who may not have a 24/7 hard core presence.

We’re still here! Yesterday afternoon (Oceanic afternoon, so I guess something around 10/11pm EST) we were getting 230ish points a tick. I know that isn’t winning, but it’s definitely competitive. I’m not aware of any WvW focused Oceanic guilds that have transfered off IoJ or who are “sitting out” WvW as a matter of policy.

I play on IoJ. We have a strong, well-organised Oceanic/overnight presence and a competitive NA prime time presence (at least based on the scores when I get home from work) who are becoming more organised by the day.

The longest queue I’ve had was 20 minutes on a Saturday in NA prime time. Can’t speak for NA prime time queues in general, though general chat in game and on forums would suggest they’re always < 15 minutes. Never had a queue for more than 5 minutes in Oceanic prime time and the borderlands rarely have any queue at all.

We get utterly stomped whenever one of Jade Quarry, Eradon’s Terrace or Stormbluff Isle are in our bracket, otherwise we’re very competitive with servers like Blackgate and CD and typically outperform Dragonbrand (not sure we’ve ever been matched against Fort Aspenwood).