Guild Wars 2

As Whiteside Ridge player, the shock was real the first few times seeing “Ring of Fire captured x” when we took something. RoF was our main opposing server for the past 2 months and now the game says we are RoF. Not that I want our alliance to change, but I do want to retain my server identity. I don’t like being reminded again and again we are something like mercenaries for the host server.

Besides server loyalty I also have guild loyalty. Getting everyone in our server into one guild is not an option. I do like to see some changes, in the UI for example to start with. They may seem small, but they matter. Instead of “Ring of Fire captured x” I want to see “Whiteside Ridge captured x” for those of us that are on Whiteside Ridge. Same goes for renaming “Ring of Fire borderland” and all other area names (like our entrance to green/blue border or the EB keep). Make me feel like a whole lotta people just transferred to my server, instead of letting the game tell me my server doesn’t even exist. Even the API made us change our online WvW matchup scoring to that of RoF. If you can’t differentiate area names etc. for servers, please call them by the server color instead of name. You can keep enemy names as it is now to make it easier to distinguish 2 enemy groups fighting eachother. I dont really care if it’s a Drakkar Lake or Miller’s Sound guild for example. I’m also ok with seeing our allies (RoF) without the RoF tag.

It would also be nice to have some sort of progression for the guest server, but that will be harder to implement I guess. I’m not sure how the server population caps work now. Maybe something to make transfers to guest servers more likely so that in time, they could become host worlds. Dunno, also less important for me, as it seems we’ll be permanently linked from now on unless this beta testing fails.

I mean no disrespect to our Ring of Fire allies, it’s great to fight alongside you. I just want to retain my server identity.

tl;dr
Make me feel like players transferred to my (guest) server by making the UI pretend we are still on our old server (area/border names, server captured objective messages etc).

Can’t cannons/mortars/oil be disabled?
Do defenders become invulnerable while they man an invulnerable cannon/mortar?

Sure, some of those automatic buffs to structures can raise issues, but it takes a while to make counterplay common knowledge or find out that it actually is massively unbalanced in favor of whoever.

https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLjwow6z_cLGa2bZjcs0ZmFLMmdhbUWTtL

The [So] Shellfish guild created some general information on how fights go. I can’t remember well if they include sieging things up, but these videos contain some of the basics for fights I think.

The metabattle website also has a guide on WvW zerg fights which covers the basics I guess. http://metabattle.com/wiki/Guide:WvW_Zerg_Fights

The minor trait Speedy Conduit seems bugged. Only gives 5 seconds of swiftness instead of the listed 8. Speaking of that, with the Arcana minor trait Elemental Attunement the tooltip on air attunement shows only 5s but gives 8s of swiftness when swapping to air.

Supreme.3164:

Reduce damage on air overload? What are you even thinking? – That covers like 70% of the reasons to go tempest – for the overload damage

People are asking for radius buffs on fire overload and you come here asking for damage nerfs on air overload? Like it can’t be avoided/blocked/negated/interrupted easily….pls my friend stop with the non-sense

You’re right, I tried it a bit more tonight and it isn’t as strong as I thought it would be. Seems to be in a nice spot actually.

Overall quite happy with tempest. Some bugs / suggested small-ish changes:

Bugs/incorrect descriptions

• Tooltip bug: Unstable Conduit trait shows 5s duration for all aura’s. Overload tooltip shows 4s duration for the specific aura. Actual duration does seem to be 5s.
• Persisting flames doesn’t increase the duration for Wildfire (it is a firefield).
• By that logic, Overload Fire should also have increased duration from persisting flames.
• Tidal Surge misses a range tooltip. Seems to be 360.
• Overload earth gives too much protection on the Dust Cyclone aftereffect. 3 seconds of protection each pulse once it’s done channeling. Likely uses the wrong number for that part (grandmaster minor = 3s protection on starting overload, normal channeling pulse is 1s protection). Base pulse duration could perhaps use a slight duration increase.
• Flash Freeze wording “on enemy locations” incorrectly makes one think it’s a ranged enemy centered shout. Maybe it should be ranged, not player centered to make for better escape/chase potential. Then again, 600 radius for a ranged skill is pretty big.

Suggested changes
Skills
• Heat sync: remove sharing resistance and quickness. Keep sharing stability please, or limit the amount of stacks to 3-5. I like my frontline ele in WvW actually sharing an important boon and not be only reliant on guardians for that. Armor of earth, the somewhat unreliable automatic armor of earth at 50% health and perhaps starting and immediately cancelling Earth Overload are our only sources of decent stability anyway. Also limit the outgoing duration for the duration stacking boons to 8ish seconds.

• Overload Air: the damage seems a bit too high. Overload Fire was nerfed because its damage was too high, but air currently is higher in a bigger radius (excluding condi specs). Reduce the total amount of strikes by a bit (from 17 to 13?), field duration by 1 second or attack interval. Preferably not the damage per strike, because lots of small strikes makes retaliation a bigger problem in group situations.

• Overload Earth: reduce the immobilize from 4s to 3s base duration.

• Lightning Orb: while I guess the main functionality of this one isn’t changing anymore, I would have loved seeing the GW1 style lightning orb in place of it. 0.75 or 1 second cast time, moving breaks the cast, high damage (along the lines of Ice Spike for staff or Fire Grab without burn). Also enables the hidden gamemode: dodgeball. Either way, lots of other good suggestions on other changes already.

• Eye of the Storm feels kind of weak for the kitten recharge.

• Rebound: make it instant cast or break stun, so it’s possible to use reactively. Mainly a change to make it more useful for the bursty PvP and WvW roaming. Rebound could be set to a 60s cooldown, but it’s an actual usable elite atm. Nice for auras in zergfights, the burst negate potential in smaller scale fights and oneshot negation in PvE. I read somewhere it doesn’t negate damage, but maybe I read that at the gw1 wiki for divine intervention.

Traits
• Elemental bastion: I expected the healing was pulsing. Haven’t tested this in a tough situation yet, but an option could be to add a 50% of start heal to aura end. Then blasting frost fields can actually function as a secondary waterfield :P

• I’d like a 20% shout cd reduction

• Cooldown reduction on overload, I miss it but can live with this. Makes overloads more special. Besides, overloads are strong enough to have some drawback.

• 20% Cooldown reduction for shouts could be added to Tempestuous aura. It won’t become too strong and should make shouts more competitive.

• Earthen Proxy seems weak and will rarely be chosen. Maybe add a “protection you apply lasts 33% longer”.

Other notes
• Tidal Wave knocks enemies away from you, not in the direction of the wave (e.g. use then lightning flash to the other side).

After I threw in -prefreset at the shortcut it worked. Not sure if it was lucky timing or that actually fixed it. The -perf -windowed behind the .exe didn’t work the minute before that.

http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Command_line_arguments#-prefreset

edit: that was an hour after normal start.

Yes, without arcana or food. Tooltip for protection says 2 seconds. I can imagine that gets extended by the listed 2 seconds for all boons as well, so the expected result would be 4 seconds. Instead it gives 7 seconds, which would mean a base duration of 5 seconds. 50% boon duration from a nearby revenant gave me a little over 9 seconds protection.

Fire overload does trigger multiple whirl finishers, just doesn’t show the text for it. You can aim the projectiles from the whirl upwards with the camera for better visibility, just like you can aim fireball etc.

Sand squall only shows the blast finisher text at start, the blast actually occurs at the end, like many other blast finishers work. It does give more protection than expected.

The matchup predictions for vabbi with your current rating:
http://wvwmatchups.azurewebsites.net/#Vabbi

I’m perfectly happy with the current state of t8. There’s a bit of freecapping, 1v1, smallscale fights, zergfights and sometimes cool threeway blobfights. The fact that doesn’t happen daily makes it more special, thus more enjoyable. I love the close & friendly community here and that every individual can make a difference, even without performing extraordinary deeds. There’s the rare queue for EB here for a few minutes a week when everyone at the same time decided that SM should be ours or something.

I have only ever been on Whiteside Ridge, so can’t compare to higher tiers or accurately judge other servers around us (e.g. DZ thinks we outnumber them while I always thought they outnumbered us). I also rarely play outside of primetime, but I heard that mornings could use more activity in here :P

(zerg = 10-25/30, blob = 30+ in my opinion)

All sites using the event API were taken down or are not functioning anymore. I did find something that uses the event details API in the api development forum section, which is a lot like what I was looking for. It turns out there are more events than I expected :P I think that’s mainly because it also shows all historic events, like the Scarlet portals that popped up all over the place in every map. Those take up like half the events already :P Ohwel, guess I’ll stick to randomly wandering about and keeping my eyes open. Thanks for the replies!

Oh, and here’s that site I found. It takes 10+ seconds to load though.
http://gw2.chillerlan.net/examples/gw2maps-jquery.html

Is there an online map with an overview of all possible events in a GW2 map in it? It would be nice if it also shows a note when hovering over the event that shows its approximate respawn timer or trigger, something like that. A bit like the gw2timer map shows for Dry Top, but with all events instead of just the active. There was an API for all active dynamic events on a map. It basically showed all events there that were active or could be activated at that moment. Since megaserver came out, that API probably misfunctions or all sites using that API had it removed.

The wiki list of events in a map is cool and all, but I would much rather look at a map than having to click on each event to see where it actually occurs.

edit: forgot to add “online” to the topic title, I didn’t want to imply it should be added ingame, just want a nice site to alt tab to when I’m randomly exploring and looking for new events to do.

I have one main question: why interrupt the Meteor Shower halfway through? The way you’re casting it, only 3ish meteors drop per cycle of meteors, resulting in a total of 12 meteors. If you fully cast it, 6 meteors drop per cycle, potentially doubling the damage. Since you’re not the first I found interrupting the channel halfway, I wonder if I’m missing something. Is the advantage of double the amount of meteors not big enough to “waste” time fully channeling it?

My possible solutions to make it less of a giant lag autoattack spamming anonymous drama:

- Reduce the number of people that are mixed into each map. Stick to that +225% figure you mentioned in the feature pack preview and not +2250% which is what happened now. Compared to the maybe 5 others I saw prepatch in Rata Sum there are now at least 50-100 others.

- Add extra areas with target golems to the Hearts of the Mists. There are not enough of those to test damage or builds with this number of people.

- Do split up language servers from international servers. I don’t want to see German, French or Spanish randomly chatting everywhere I go and I don’t want to risk turning all of their chat off through that new option. I’m sure some of them do adapt to a mostly English map and can have something useful to say.

- Add a drop down list of servers/maps to choose from like districts in Guild Wars 1. Make it so that the next district is created at a minimum of ~50 people in the other districts so you still save some on server space, but also let players have the choice of picking what district they play in. Easier for guild missions and mega bosses. Close a district if there are less than 20 people in it for over 15 minutes, then show a popup like the inactivity kick or new build available thing “This world is closing down in 5 minutes. Finish your business here and move to another district”. Only if this was an extra copy of course, don’t close maps that only have 1 copy running anyway.

- Keep at least 1 map/city with access to most services server based. This gives us the possibility to stay in touch with the server community many of us have been working kitten. Advertising for WvW events for example is crap with people of the enemy servers in that same map. And no, don’t make this the home WvW borderland because I guess some servers have constant queues.

- I have no solution for this yet, but is one of my most important issues. I want to feel like I actually contribute to an event. I have not done much random exploring on megaserverized maps yet, but world bosses are awful and I imagine more events will be like that. I can do my best and do all I can for one of the world bosses or I can set autoattack on the world boss and make dinner, it’s no difference. The world boss will die in record time regardless of me being there. I have no individual value and no fun. I am now useless, as opposed to a month ago where I could for example be last man standing in a struggle of 4 players against the fire elemental. I now feel more like trying to mess things up to not be like everyone else. I dont care if someone downs that I dont know and will probably never see or at least recognize again, they dont matter for the event anyway. (theoretically speaking of course, because I have learned to revive downed players or risk failing the event due to the lack of players)

TL;DR
Lower the amount of people megaserver puts together, make map districts dropdown list, split languages, keep at least 1 city server based and bring back individual value.

Depends on what you call reasonable. It’s not our weakest time for sure. You won’t find 100man blobs here at your prime, but you will likely find others to play with.

If you’re still considering, take a looksy at http://www.gw2score.com/server/Whiteside-Ridge (hope links are allowed :P) for our scores at your time. That’s ~10am to 3pm GMT time I think.

Other server recruitment threads have been shamelessly bumped quite a bit, so guess it’s time to push this one back to the first page as well ;P. But not without possibly inspiring others to actually join us during these last few days of free transfers to Whiteside Ridge of course!

In the past few weeks, WSR has been rising through the ranks. We’ve had many fun matchups with (or against, whichever you prefer) Vabbi and mostly Fissure of Woe. Now that we have broken free from the tight grip these servers had on us, we’ve been struggling against servers with a rating advantage of over 300 (that’s 1.3x higher than our rating, or the difference between the current rank 1 and rank 15). And yet, we are still here. We have bested Blacktide in the 2 weeks before the free transfers, but they made a strong comeback and are taking over from us once again. We do believe we have what it takes to put up a nice fight in the tournament. Being in the middle of the bronze league, we are sure to get varied fights to experience.

Are you interested in joining? Let us know (or transfer in without letting us know, fine by me as well really ;P). With the coming tournament, there is even a good chance for newer WvW guilds to grow if you manage to get the mainly PvE players addicted to WvW (as happened to me last season).

I am personally looking forward most to reuniting with Vabbi as friendly enemies on the field of battle. And of course /waving at all our enemies (gotta keep the WSR reputation high! :P)

You have to either point all the way up or all the way down. It might be dependent on the terrain and you have to make sure your character is really aiming up or down (you can check by firing projectiles like ice/stone shards). Moving while doing this seems to be more failproof. The dragon tooth / Comet will drop a bit in front of you, but easily near enough to catch it in a ring of fire. I find the flamewall to be harder to aim at or cast at the right position to catch the blast. I rarely used focus though, so it’s likely easier with more practice.

We love you longtime
You snatched SM away from us (technically from arbor, but it was about to be ours) before our nose, then two third of our zerg tried to rush that invulnerable lord. Some mighty zerg we have indeed

Many much respect to Vabbi from a Whiteside Ridge civilian. Nightcapping or not, you are the best opponent we can wish for in any matchup. It’s a lot of fun to fight with/against you and even more fun to look at us fight from your perspective afterwards. I believe we stimulate each other to try harder next time we meet and make the matchup even more enjoyable.

Looking forward to the final week of the season.

Any WvW players are of course most welcome in Whiteside Ridge (medium population). We are getting stomped by Ring of Fire, but matchups now are unbalanced for most servers it seems. We actually somehow had outnumbered yesterday a bit later in the evening on every map besides our own borderlands, so you won’t even have to worry about repair costs! :P

See also the World recruitment forum, WSR call to arms (quickly overspammed by all other topics though).

Same for Whiteside Ridge. Major lag started, but it seemed more like my PC suddenly couldn’t handle the game. Other applications got slow as well, which was solved when I closed the game. It didn’t feel like the regular plain old lag anyway. Second time in the past month or so this happened.

Tyler Chapman.1832:

This is an intended effect for the Superior set. For balance reasoning we cannot have 3 sets of 15% boon duration.

I’d just like to quote this message and mention the new Superior Rune of the Traveler.

Seems to me that’s good reason to reshape at least one of the two runes to either include 15% boon duration on the Sup. Rune of Sanctuary or remove it from Sup. Rune of the Traveler. With the new platinum doubloons, boon duration increase on equipment has been increased loads anyway, unless they can’t be applied to trinkets/weapons.