Guild Wars 2

The Crimson Mercenaries (CM) are an online gaming community that was founded in 1999. We started as a Star wars gaming clan Playing X-wing, Tie Fighter, and X-Wing Alliance on the MSN gaming Zone. We added several games throughout the years including Guild Wars 2.

We are always looking for ways to come together to play and grow as a guild and are currently recruiting.

In Guild Wars 2 we are a North American PvX guild which has been established since beta and has veteran members in all game types PvE, PvP, and WvWvW. We can teach members to be successful in any of these areas. We appreciate and encourage members to ask questions and interact with our community.

In PvE we run dungeons every night after reset (8:00EST) as well as fractals where we teach the encounters and have a team to do the higher level fractals we affectionately call our big boy fractal team. We also do guild missions every weekend and have them all unlocked. Anyone who needs help with personal story, leveling, or map complete just has to ask and we can round up some members who are willing to help. Many members also have Mesmers ready to go for guild jumping puzzles.

We also are a member of the Official Northen Shiverpeaks Teamspeak which we encourage everyone in the guild to get on in order to better coordinate dungeon runs guild mission or just for hanging out asking about each other’s day.

In PvP We own our own custom arena called the CM ThunderDome which we use to help each other get our dailies every day as well as practice our new builds we come up with, we encourage theory crafting and sharing build ideas to make us as a guild better as well as testing them on each other. I personally am looking forward to the new leagues with the upcoming expansion and stronghold.

In WvWvW we are a part of the Northern Shiverpeaks Server who has their own teamspeak with all of our major WvWvW guilds coordinating on it so there is always someone to play with there. We have several members who can show anyone interested the ropes around the borderlands and EB.

If you think CM would be a good fit for you and would like to give us a try please message me on here or send a mail to Wes The Shield in guild wars 2 with your in game name and I would be happy to send you an invite to join up and make lasting friendships through gaming!

There should be a happy medium with the two, games can be ruined in the name of balance as well. I can think of games where people so much preferred the original state of the game compared to after a balance patch came out and it caused people to leave the game.

The question I think should be, will this balance improve or harm the quality of life and experience for the majority of players in the game. And there is where the debates can occur as to where that line is drawn. This is where everyone tries to do their best to figure that out through feedback and a variety of opinions. When you can see things from multiple perspectives the overall picture often becomes clearer and we can help give constructive feedback to help improve the game overall.

Most people on our server had and used them to some extent at least in all the larger guilds. We really enjoyed them for dungeon runs and fractals. I wonder if it still affects the server the same if it is instanced like a dungeon or if the problem just is where its the world boss encounter where you have 100 of them in the same place. Because if so they could just code it in somewhere that you only get the cooldown or a longer cooldown at world events but during dungeons they could forego it or have a shorter cooldown if it does not have the same detrimental effect when a 5 man team is in an instance.

You guys make some really good points that I have not thought about before. I agree that a build shouldn’t have to rely on consumables to be functional in the game and if it does you could essentially call it a bad build but I do feel consumables enhance enjoyment of the game and gives people more ways to play so it is worthwhile having a discussion on how to have them viable but not broken. Variety keeps people’s interest so if they can find a way to keep them relevant I think that would be the best solution for the game. I would rather have everyone’s play experience enhanced rather than hamper the zerker build and force them into a play style they don’t enjoy either because they can no longer burn down their targets. That could be done through a buff to certain professions/skills/traits rather than bringing something that is good down to other build’s level. The goal should be making more things viable rather than less.

If they reduced consumables to that 10 min cooldown it would bring it in line with how the guild wars 1 summoning stones were. They had a good balance where it was like the emergency button and you weren’t able to spam them but it wasn’t such a long cool down that people don’t want to pop them when needed. That would go a long way to helping this nerf.

Another thing they could do to help if have the debuff timer still run when you are offline. Right now it works like food that it retains the amount of time you are on cooldown even if you are offline which stinks. I hate coming back online and still seeing like a 10 min debuff on me.

I also never knew about the 5 target rule for aoe, I was always under the impression that if you were in an aoe ring for a boss a whole zerg could be wiped if they didn’t dodge properly. I never saw it working like that in like the Teq fight and I saw tons of embers there when they were spammable. I knew for players it worked like that like on an elementalist meteor shower would only hit so many and I knew an arrow cart would have a player limit it would affect but never knew it worked the same for bosses. You learn something new every day A solution might be somewhere along the lines of making it so something like this would not happen and having the boss aoe affect all the consumables but not in combination with the cooldown or that would be just kill consumable use completely.

There has been a recent consumables nerf to the fire ele powder and the ogre pet whistles requiring a 30 min cooldown. Many people used these for the world bosses, map complete, or helping in dungeons. Do you guys think this will hurt build viability of support and conditions builds because it removes a source of DPS available to all professions and builds and will force people more into the zerker meta?

It seems as if every consumable which might be used to help build variability has been changed to the point where it can not anymore and I feel this is harmful to the state of the game. Anything that helps players find more ways to play the game should be supported rather than nerfed into uselessness.

? I know arena net wanted to help balance the zerker meta out with other options such as better conditions and support options, but this change seems like it will make a lot of these builds less appealing to play because that option for contributing more DPS is now essentially gone with the fragility of the summons.

With world bosses that require a lot of preparation time it was always nice to take players to get these consumables. People appreciated it and it make them feel as if they were learning some extra secrets as to how to be useful in the game. Also it created a sense of greater contribution to the group because they went the extra mile to make sure we had every chance to succeed and it was a community builder.

It was argued that the consumables caused skill lag but that also occurs in big zergs even without the consumables. So at least with the consumables popped the job was still getting done DPS wise which resulted in more successful events and it boosted server morale.

So for example on the phase 2 part of the marionette fight, If people has embers with them when they go through the portal and they were in the loading screen for a long time, the chance of them getting downed and dead would be lessened until they could join the fight. This could also be used to counter the problems on less populated servers where you get an uneven distribution of players on the phase 2 platforms. it would still give you a fighting chance rather than have the whole event wipe. The Marionette fight is one of the coolest additions of content I have seen thus far and I think that would make it even better.

What changes would you guys make to the consumables to try to address some of these concerns? I think a reduction in the cooldown time would make it more viable say even like 5 min instead of 30, then if you play well and can keep your ember alive you could have a consistent up time with it without having players spam them creating extra stress on the server.

TLDR: Do you think the consumables nerf hurts the game by reducing the amount of viable builds and pushes people towards a zerker meta?

Cool I am playing an ele for a main who hit 50 today as well I have a guild on Northern Shiverpeaks called “The Crimson Mercenaries”. I can send you an invite if you like.

Our facebook group: https://www.facebook.com/groups/71058936731/
and our website: www.crimsonmercs.com