Guild Wars 2

I will defend the system as it exists because you need to be able to see the account name to report hackers.

I guess you could remove cross-server whispers entirely leaving party invites as the only means of communication, but the system as it currently stands seems less broken than any other alternative.

I like the pet kit idea.

They could do a kit that drops miniatures that drain the gems of enemies for no real gain.

Cameron.6450:

abiyde.5064:

That might have been me you fought. I lost a 1v1 to a much more skilled engie that night.

We get backup because we don’t want roamers to find our BL entertaining. It’s a lot healthier for our yaks and camps that way.

I actually suggested we just party invite you (if you are the one roamer I am thinking of) and set up some duels since you were clearly looking for fights. But I had to log.

Dueling would have been better for all of us. They are more fun than babysitting yaks. We get practice. The yaks flow unmolested. And you get a steady stream of even fights.

Merry Christmas everyone. Thanks for all of the good fun this past week.

Were you an asuran engi running toolkit, elixir gun, and (I think, can’t remember) nades? I ran into one a few times while i was soloing on ybbl. I was on my human male engi (named bengi), ganking yaks to keep stuff paper. Ring any bells?

Yep. I’d love to fight you again. The last fight was the best and I still made some big mistakes.

And leave our yaks alone, thanks.

Ben K.6238:

That’s not just SBI’s thieves like that. I think it’s something about the kind of players the class draws. Yet to see a good one from YB or SoS either.

Actually YB BL was an amusing experience on the night of the 24th – except for one occasion, every YB scout I saw would go run for backup as soon as they saw me. Got plenty of 2/3v1 practice.

That might have been me you fought. I lost a 1v1 to a much more skilled engie that night.

We get backup because we don’t want roamers to find our BL entertaining. It’s a lot healthier for our yaks and camps that way.

I actually suggested we just party invite you (if you are the one roamer I am thinking of) and set up some duels since you were clearly looking for fights. But I had to log.

Dueling would have been better for all of us. They are more fun than babysitting yaks. We get practice. The yaks flow unmolested. And you get a steady stream of even fights.

Merry Christmas everyone. Thanks for all of the good fun this past week.

If you are too slow with the double tap, then the overcharge will fire on the next pulse of aoe regen which is 3s after the initial pulse.

I suggest you learn how the more watery animation that indicates that the turret is overcharging looks.

You’ll eventually get a feel for the timing and shouldn’t need to watch, but, until you do, knowing the animation will help.

Have fun.

Maybe on occasion.

But I’ve played WvW MMOs where servers were permanently matched up until one got too demoralized to force a merger. This system, for all its faults, aint half bad.

Okay, we’re both kind of right.

I was testing with point blank enemies which seems to work. But at range it doesn’t work.

coglin.1867:

abiyde.5064:

I used to agree with the OP and many others here that we didn’t have enough condition removal.

Then I started using the 10s light field on the Elixir Gun’s Super Elixir skill comboed with Throw Wrench and our various other 20% chance projectile finishers for extra condition cleanse and I’m happy.

We may need more to support other builds, but there is more to our condition cleansing ability than has been represented in this thread.

That is a ridiculously unreliable self cleanse. For one, it will never remove a single condition from you solo by using those projectile finishers.

I don’t think you understand how the defensive effects like regen and condi cleanse work with projectile finishers.

The person that initiates the projectile finisher gets the benefit of the defensive effect. Not friendly toons that happen to be in the way of the projectile. I just tested this to be absolutely double certain before replying.

Also, Super Elixir aoe cleanses one condition when it is first cast. It is not on the tooltip, but the wiki mentions it and I tested it to be true.

Throw Wrench is a 100% projectile finisher. So, it is reliable.

Our spammable #1 skills are just 20% and I agree are unreliable. But if you need to cleanse conditions, auto attacking for the 10s duration of the field should give you 1-2 extra cleanses. The auto attacks aren’t great, but they are sure a lot better when you are using them to combo.

So Super Elixir + Throw Wrench gives us two more reliable cleanses on a 20s CD.

And we have another 1-2 unreliable cleanses if we choose to use them.

I used to agree with the OP and many others here that we didn’t have enough condition removal.

Then I started using the 10s light field on the Elixir Gun’s Super Elixir skill comboed with Throw Wrench and our various other 20% chance projectile finishers for extra condition cleanse and I’m happy.

We may need more to support other builds, but there is more to our condition cleansing ability than has been represented in this thread.

Sorry if it has already been mentioned, but I think hiding the commander buff from enemies is a bad idea.

I know it disproportionately hurts commanders of small groups, but finding the commander of a zerg ball and assassinating the commander is not easy and seems like a legitimate tactic for beating bigger zergs.

WvW tactics and skill would suffer if enemies lost the ability to see commander tags.

Berk.8561:

Solstice.1097:

5. Limit Griefing – […] Place a limit of trebuchets, catapults, and rams inside an objective to max 3 or 4 of each (I’ve never seen 5+ rams, catas, or trebs inside a friendly objective when the player was not purposely griefing).

One thing I forgot to add is that I disagree with this part. I’ve often seen 6 or more trebs in the Red Keep on the Eternal Battlegrounds and all of them were justified and placed deliberately by players on my server (generally 3 in the lower keep aimed toward SM and/or Anz and 3 in the upper keep aimed toward Ogrewatch and Langor. And that’s not counting the possibility for a door treb or two. I’ve seen similar set-ups in the other keeps in the Eternal Battlegrounds, too, particularly in the Green Keep (to cover the four outlying towers) but also sometimes the Blue Keep (aimed at Langor and Bravost as well as the doors), and there are towers where I’d put 5 or more trebs given the time to build them (specifically Langor, which may need to broadside and counter-treb the red keep to take it back, and Jerrifers, where there might be two back by the lord’s room and another three on the far side to cover the Green Keep, Golanta, and Klovan). I can also imagine a griefer using such limits to build 3-4 badly placed trebs that are useless to prevent defenders from building the trebs they do need to properly siege up the site. So I’m not a fan of this limit. My preferred fix is to prevent new players from dropping blueprints or starting upgrades until they’ve been playing for at least a week and, during leagues, until league play has ended.

I suppose I should also point out that sometimes deliberate siege placement by one player can look like griefing to another player. For example, I’ve build flame rams in the middle of supply camps like Pangloss because the number 2 attack can be useful when being jumped by a small team to push them back (it does direct damage, 3 seconds of burning, and 3 seconds of fear).

Good point, but I think there is a way to salvage this idea.

Large quantities of non-superior siege are a sign of griefing. Have a very low siege cap for un-upgraded siege but let superiors be placed in greater numbers/concentrations and you can still legitimately place siege where needed and reduce griefing.

The other thing I’d like to add is that we need to drive the AH price of regular ballistas up. Having some temporary event or drop that lets us upgrade ballistas more cheaply (without spending skill points perhaps) would push the price of the ballistas up making griefing more expensive.

Jabberwock.9014:

abiyde.5064:

I did the math. From memory, Celestial armor gives 130-145% more stat points than other armors.

Celestial trinkets give 108-110% more.

There is no comparison.

This is nowhere near accurate. If you do calculations with a fixed stat point value for crit damage like 8, trinkets and armor are both around 30% better than non-celestial counterparts. Armor is slightly better (~1.3x) while “earrings” are the worst (~1.27x) if I remember correctly.

You are right that my original post wasn’t accurate. I was working from memory like you were.

However, my conclusions are correct regardless of how you calculate.

If you give crit a value equal to the number of points lost to buy crit on Beserker gear as I did, then the range for armour is 1.39-1.54 (times the number of points that you get for equipping Celestial). Accessories (amulet, ring, accessories and back) are 1.21-1.29. Weapons are 1.19.

If you use your method of assigning crit a value of 8 points, which is about what it costs for all accessories but nowhere near what it costs for crit in armour and weapons, then armour is 1.24-1.35. Accessories are 1.18-.123. Weapons are 1.18.

So it is closer, but armour is better than accessories regardless of how you calculate it.

A few other conclusions for those trying to mix gear.

-If you want crit, get it in your accessories first unless you want to mix in Celestial gear.

-If you are adding Celestial gear, get it in your Chest and Legs first. Helmet depends on whether you use the first method (where it is the best bang for buck) or the second (where it is the worst among armour).

-If you want to maximize crit damage you want
Helm: Celestial
Boots/Gloves/Shoulders: Any crit armour
Coat: Celestial
Leg: Any crit armour
Amulet: Non-Celestial crit armour
Ring: Non-Celestial crit armour
Accessory: Non-Celestial crit armour
Back: Non-Celestial crit armour
Weapon: Celestial

-Here is how many skill points it costs to buy crit (ignoring Celestial)
Helm/Leg: 16 skill points per crit point
Coat: 14.4 skill points per crit point
2-H Weapon: 13.4 skill points per crit point
Boots/Gloves/Shoulders: 12 skill points per crit point
Amulet: 9.45 skill points per crit point
Accessory: 8.57 skill points per crit point
Ring: 8.5 skill points per crit point
Back: 7 skill points per crit point

What you do with this information depends on what you are trying to accomplish.

Sorry for not properly communicating this in the first place. I didn’t care to spend much time on the original post.

I did the math. From memory, Celestial armor gives 130-145% more stat points than other armors.

Celestial trinkets give 108-110% more.

There is no comparison.

I haven’t read the whole thread, but I wanted to comment on some of the ideas here.

Any ideas about limiting population to the lowest pop should be thrown out. Waiting to WvW is not fun. So making more people wait is not a good idea.

Incentives for Attacking

A number of people suggested adding incentives for attacking the leading server. I agree with the concept, but all of the incentives that I saw were based off of the rank of the objective. This is a bad idea because it will discourage people from ranking up their objectives to more than a minimally optimal level.

I think time-based incentives would be better. Taking a tower or keep that has been held for 24+ hours should offer better rewards and the rewards should increase the longer the objective is held.

Also, as the match progresses and it becomes increasingly obvious that one side will win, bonuses to score won’t help much, so the bonuses should be individual rewards. Bags with a higher chance for purple gear are an example.

Finally, time-based incentives encourage a type of gameplay that I’ve seen in WvW forum fencing where underpopulated servers dare their opponents to take their fully sieged garrison.

Now this particular example would benefit the higher population server, but I don’t think lower population servers would mind giving incentives to fight where they are strongest while the dominant server will still offer many more bonus targets.

Balanced WvWvW Play

There are some who want perfectly balanced WvW play. I don’t think this is possible without limiting the number of players and, as I’ve already suggested, stopping players from playing is a bad idea.

Instead, I think you should introduce a Guild v. Guild style of gameplay that is a cross between PvP and WvWvW.

Guilds can challenge other guilds to fight on 20v20 and 60v60 maps for 2-6 hour matches. The challenges could be between any servers, but fights within the current matchup could contribute score to the current WvWvW matchup.

The advantage of adding this style of gameplay are as follows.

-Hard-core WvW guilds get to fight good opposition without PUGs messing up their fights.
-Casual WvW players will find WvW a little more friendly with fewer hard-cores on the main maps.
-High-pop always-queued servers will have shorter queues with an alternate WvW style of gameplay.
-Either dominant servers will lose more players as their WvW crews get bored and play GvG, or hard-core WvW players on dominated servers will be able to find even matches after WvW becomes imbalanced.

There are disadvantages to this approach, but the ones that I expect can be mitigated. I won’t get in to them since…wall of text.