Guild Wars 2

HoD, DH and SF do not fight each other in the last week. HoD has no influence on the outcome from here on out. DH is 4th seed and SF is 5th so they’ll be against each other with ET in the last week. The first week this same matchup was a moderate victory for SF.

SF has been having some internal trouble (or so I’ve heard) and DH has been more inspired after the first week so they may be able to upset them.

As for Silver, likewise, this is pretty sealed in. YB is not matched against either SBI or FA and will take an easy victory. Presumably YB will take an easy first and FA will beat SBI, meaning that excluding this week they’ll both be at 26 points. It’ll be FA, YB, SBI unless SBI can turn this week around and fast.

Longbow rangers are super common amongst the ‘randoms’ in WvW for a few reasons. I don’t particularly care for the class either but it has some visible strengths for a casual player in WvW.

1. A MS signet – straightforward, getting around and keeping up without relying on other players for swiftness.
2. Low risk gameplay – you can join a zerg as a random player and easily avoid personal danger thanks to long range and easy retreat skills.
3. Easy water field – people love spamming for water fields.
4. Possibly the easiest class for an inexperienced player to solo a camp with due to easy pulling with range and pet soaking all the damage.
5. Easy to run into towers past enemies with thanks to evades, 1/4 second condi removal and long duration stability.

Its the weekend so these types of people are out in numbers – you see them on every server. Such players are not the best but that they’re far from irrelevant – essentially the same for rangers.

WhiteRose.6934:

So, I think this group was just trolling us ‘cause they weren’t hitting anything with those catapults….at all…

This siege was simply dumbfounding. I think those 20 KN fired those catapults for another 15 minutes hitting nothing but the vet scout at the gate (actually built one more than pictured along the way too) and started building a ram at northeast outer on the inside to try and break it down to get more supply in.

I’m not going to deny that HoD outnumbers Kaineng in general, but see the outnumbered on us there and the large number of people literally doing absolutely nothing is an example of numbers not being the problem.

Solstice.1097:

Justine.6351:

Lol @ wanting nsp.
After this run hod will no doubt be silver and you will get your nsp. They will roll ya just as hard if half their server doesn’t transfer by then.

I think HoD is just having a good week. Since reset night they’ve only hit 400 PPT twice and Kaineng looks like a T7/T8 server. If we had HoD/FC/SF I’m not saying HoD wouldn’t win but I can guarantee you the match would be very close.

Kaineng can probably bounce back to being more competitive, but every server suffers a big morale hit after incidents like that. The HoD/FC/SF matchup should be interesting. HoD brings out a big reset usually (as we saw) but the last times we’ve fought them SF does as well. If we get less of a running start that may impact participation.

styx.7294:

My secret Henge of Denravi source tells me they’re taking a conveniently timed PvE holiday.

There’s definitely some of that, but truthfully we’re also just getting thrashed too. With KN exodus part 2 or 3 or whatever there’s less combined resistance with the two servers. Ebay has no coverage gaps (atleast, relative to us, I’m sure they do relative to other silver servers) and they’re taking the match seriously.

When we went against CD/YB/BP etc they just karma train the crap out of us. Ebay has been upgrading and defending (partially because atleast some of them said they want to make sure KN gets sent down to bronze since itd just be cruel otherwise). They peaked at 11 waypoints built out of 13 this week and you can find northern camps in HoD/KN BL at 250/250.

Glad to see NSP is rising to the challenge, shame we won’t get to hunt Kevin for weeks though.

Lord Kuru.3685:

Necros have zero reliable blast finishers.

While they are certainly not good for blast finishers this is the internet and since you’re wrong it must be pointed out.

Necrotic Traversal (flesh wurm secondary activation) is a reliable blast finisher.

Margonite Queen.7325:

Decided to hop into WvW tonight but after seeing people say stuff like ‘’idk why we’re trying so hard to cap towers and camps’’, how bad of a position will I be in when leagues roll around? That quote was actually said during WvW tonight and it got me thinking. Just how bad will it be for HoD? Ideally i’d like to transfer before other servers potentially fill up, if of course, that’s the case.

inb4 HoD fanboys tell me the server is better off with people like me gone.

One of three servers (HoD, Kaineng or NSP) will be thrown under the bus, so to speak. They will get decimated every week (EDIT: PPT wise that is, they’ll probably do well on rating and have no shortage of fights to be had and enemies to fend off). The other two will be the prime competitors for top spot in the bronze league. Right now that bus is honking at Kaineng, we’ll see if they can get out of its way.

I’m a little sorry for EBay in this match up. Its going to be boring. At least if we want to find fights we can but in what’d already be a one-sided matchup, Kaineng and HoD are going to show up even less because its currently a struggle for Kaineng, HoD and NSP to try and avoid being the ones in silver.

Personally I’m all for the trip the silver anyway, even though it’d be undeniable beatdown after beatdown with a guaranteed third every week but I know a lot of my servermates don’t want that.

AR also has a morning zerg these days which has been getting a fair bit done but yes, they’re mostly down in numbers. That said, I feel like there’s been more AR out than in our past matchups (a few weeks back is the last one) where you could slowroll your way over the entire AR borderland and maybe see two people.

Now you might encounter that fro asura engi who will toss nades at you (maybe you’d been around previous times but I hadn’t seen it). It’d be nice to see more of ARs sPvP community get into WvW but with the constant stream of additional ‘imbalances’ between players being added it seems less likely.

PS. One of my guildmates (another serial engineer) is secretly in your fan club Ostrich. He’s not been around this week but when we get a future matchup, if you find a GT engi relentlessly chasing you for no other reason – thats probably him.

PPS. Here’s a big secret to the posters earlier on this page too. It doesn’t seem like it should need saying but it comes up far too often. With 3 sides someone is being double teamed at all times.

I don’t go into EB too often but every time but once I have this week I’ve gotten lag dropped within 5 minutes. That time I lasted about half an hour with stuttering 10 second spikes the whole time.

We haven’t had AR for a while but it is nice to see them rebounding from where they were. A couple guilds I don’t recall from last time have been making an impact and a couple sPvP groups that I’d not seen in WvW before have surfaced. Seems you guys still have a ways to go but the progress is there.

While we’ve seen a bit of ET recently, it hasn’t been without a dominating force hanging over our heads (IoJ/KN) so this is a little different. ET as a whole seems much more organized especially defensively. Their BL is no longer just a bunch of paper towers waiting to be taken – they’ve got upgrades and frequently ready siege and I frequently see camps with upgraded supply output and defenders reacting quickly. I think they’re doing the best organization wise of any server in this match up by far but I’ve seen a lot of inexperienced players who aren’t used to the new order and the coverage still is spotty.

Hopefully with a couple more weeks of practice ET will be competitive in the bronze league. If so, I think bronze might be the most balanced league of the three.

PAXA is on break (possibly permanently). If you check many of our previous match up threads that was actually about half our forum posts. We’ll have to recruit some replacements to keep things flowing.

Banzie.5248:

I state New HoD because you were able to compete with DH, Last time we played you, you were on par with us. So either you’ve gotten xfers, or have done major recruiting for your WvW on your server to field more numbers. Hence why you are New compared to last time :P

I think our beating DH was more that they have a huge population of less hardcore militiamen in PvE last week rather than out on the field. So while we’d see the big guilds out their supporting numbers were smaller.

Xom.9264:

Just a reminder Fight night Thursday at Green windmill,.

On a side note all the HoD people laying into Kain saying they just zerg and have low skill levels. ET says the same about you. There are solid Kain people just like there are some solid HoD folks but very hard to find them inside zergs.

Hope to see some Kain people repping their server at fight night.

This is a lot of perception. The generalization gets made when attacking listed servers BL. In that case, the defense is usually made by an unorganized militia of well-meaning players who are holding down the fort. The organized groups are on the offensive. This means when you’re in a BL, you will see the people who want their defense to hold and don’t care about piling on while the aggressors are usually small groups of organized players. If HoD encounters ET in their BL they usually will either meet little resistance or the pub militia ‘zerg’ (the difference being for ET/HoD its generally 5-10 people whereas on KN it can be 10-20 due to the #s difference), and vice-versa if ET encounters HoD in their BL – thus the opinion is formed. Likewise if the organized groups are called back to defend its because a zerg has already amassed with the intention of being aggressive – thus more zerg opinions. Its generally when they’re in the third BL thakittens different.

Such as this morning – we encountered BS plenty of times (since they were clearly looking for us after the first one) in Kaineng BL. Neither of us could claim any zerging between HoD/ET there though your insistence of forcing our guys off their upscales and defending Kainengs structures for them was certainly an annoyance.

Oof, that Kaineng night force is going to be an issue against ET/HoD. I wasn’t there for all of it but its refreshing to see some different tactics. NSPs strategy of ‘flip camps, waypoint golems then zerg something and hope no one is watching’ is not remotely interesting. Kaineng gets catapults down fast.

As for ET, while we have you again, I suspect we won’t actually be running into too many of you this week as we’ll both be busy.

Keep in mind that spawn camping in EB is strategically forced by the map layout. If any servers wants to defend the keep (which generally they do) they have to spawn camp the main exit because otherwise no yak will ever get through since all keep yaks run directly in the spawn-facing gate.

I don’t know what the big fuss about it is anyway. It means you don’t have to go as far. It means you typically have a strategic advantage as every class has a get out of a bad situation free card that they can use when 6 feet from spawn to not die and none of the spawns are really easily defensible locations anyway (Use them, for reference, war have stability/endure, guardians have stun break/renewed focus among others, ranger has a number of back dodges such as lightning reflexes, engineer has S, thief has numerous shadowsteps, mesmer has blink, ele has mist/flash and necro can precast wurm/walk – build your bar for the situation). Yes, it may discourage the pubs who come into EB, but if you don’t have enough players or leadership to break out of spawn then those random players will be lost and quickly lose interest regardless of the spawn camping.

And to the post two up – HoD does understand it. We got spawn camped in both EB and our own BL for weeks. WvW is war, you won’t get pity from your opponents which is why my servermates are telling you to stick in there. Hopefully you guys get the ET/FC/AR matchup next week now that your rating has dropped sufficiently – I think it’ll be a fairly balanced week and give you guys a chance to rebuild morale. Once the less hardcore players get a chance to come back in after a break they’ll realize how much fun WvW can be and you’ll start rebounding – the downfall of the random matchups now is you don’t know when that’ll be.

Until very recently, there wasn’t really a fix for this. For a long time SF dropped to T8 and smacked FC/ET around, but it was the evenest matchup you could get. Then SF moved up and GoM came down, problem persisted, GoM went up, HoD came down, a couple weeks later it was the same problem. Then random matchups came in and anytime FC/ET were together it would happen, anytime they weren’t they had a better shot to sneak around but it could only do so much. Hopefully with AR in its current state, you’ll get the ET/FC/AR matchup which based on experience playing against each of them could turn out fairly even – and FC would definitely have the numbers advantage in that match up.

irishhaf.1692:

So ummm is this normal numbers for HoD?

I’m not sure what you’re referring to, specifically, but we tend to get a good push in Sunday mornings. That said, though we had a lot of AR BL for the morning too, we didn’t have to commit many numbers to that so what you were seeing was probably most of the server. Its unfortunate how few AR are coming out, but our server has definitely been there before so hopefully they’re able to bounce back a bit too.

Edit: It will be interesting to see the full dynamics of our matchup come out too, between the last two matchups BP clearly loomed over us both giving almost no interaction between us, and NSP has groups who likes to stay in HoD’s face through the night/in the morning. That said, with the DR/HoD/NSP match up, I get the feeling DR has a bit of coverage gap in the late night/morning as well.

kymaera.4739:

I’m really getting a bad impression of the PHZE guild from HoD.

PHZE is the largest guild on HoD with pretty loose recruitment standards so I’m not surprised that this would come up occasionally. With that said they definitely don’t endorse that kind of play and have been working hard to clean up and train up their WvW crew so this is not a good representation of the guild as a whole. The leaders of PHZE frequent these match up threads so I’m sure they’ll take a look into it.

DR trying to spawn camp AR everywhere or something?

Was doing some solo roaming in DR BL, stumbled my way into the water camp near AR spawn and found quite the mass of siege. Five trebuchets pointed in all directions ready to intimidate any AR that dare wander close – a crafty strategy indeed! Totally mangled my AoE limit trying to clear the guards as quickly as possible too.

Dsybok.1405:

If you are that annoying solo Mesmer who just likes to run around with groups spamming your clones, you are right, no one wants to play with you because you are kitten annoying.

As I recall, this is FCs first time with NSP in recent matchups. At any rate, you better get used to it. NSP roamers have a lot of mesmers and predominantly partial if not full bunker/support builds and nearly all of them run -condi duration food. Its a very powerful strategy but not a very interesting one.

Its not their fault either though, +/- condition duration food is too powerful that they essentially necessitate each other. Hopefully we’ll see that absurd 40% value reduced in an upcoming patch. Makes me feel dirty using koi cakes on my necro against people who won’t be able to handle it but they’re the only way to even dent the cheesy melandru + lemongrass.

Fortunately, though, they still have a few more cutthroat roamers still that keep things interesting (Teivo/Mugi come to mind).

Rams are underrated. Six rams is clearly a legitimate tactic because anyone trying to flip the tower after hits the AoE limit and can’t take them down!

People need to use them in open field fights more too, tons of hp to soak AoE with and a condi necro with terror flame vent can one-hit straight down people with no stun break.

Spets the MilkBandit.9031:

NSP has 5 defenders in a paper tower, IoJ have 20-30 people outside and hod already brought door down to 50%…

As one of the silly 4 HoD we had ramming that tower, it was an amusing situation. Saw NSP coming up the ramp, assumed we had to bail – 5 steps towards Speldan and a flood of blue appears. Not a happy position to be in. Props to the NSP crew though, as we high-tailed it out of there we figured we just fed IoJ an easy tower – all paper with the gate at 40% but 10 minutes of orange swords later the scrappy NSP squad still had it, though it didn’t make it much longer than that.

Went to the EB JP after that and I have to say, I’m disappointed to share the same tag as Global Takeover (GT) from NSP. Immediately 2 rangers jump me at the entrance spamming their autoattack as rangers do. May have been able to beat me 2v1 but I had a party member who was a bit behind show up to finish clearing them out. Get to the arena room and 3 more of them camping up top with two more allies. Losing 5v2 is fairly humiliating on even ground – but with an escape route portal, spawning NPCs while you heal and a height advantage. Ouch.

Real GT: 7
Fake GT: 0

This idea is terrible. Firstly your server is almost ‘winning’ the match up by Anet standards. The problem is almost nobody assesses the success of a server in a matchup by those standards, so if they adjust the scoring system to reflect that then it won’t seem so bad to people.

Secondly, your idea is terrible anyway. Your solution won’t do anything to improve your goal. Punishing the dominant team won’t make the outmanned team show up any more, they have to improve the rewards for those that are fighting with their backs to the wall – especially in defense situations.

Steve Whitley.8359:

HoD have similar numbers to BP

Credibility gone.

Not even BP thought that (or even thought it was anywhere close) during our match up and the typical human behavior is to exaggerate your enemies numbers and understate your own.

Agriope.4523:

Hello, new frenemies.

Does Darkhaven or Henge have any roaming guilds? Serious question.

I’ve been moving so I haven’t had a chance to see how this matchup is shaking out for myself, but soon, very soon….

Henge has a number of roaming guilds – most of them, really. The two that tend to get the most attention are KoM and PAXA for their in-your-face attitude both in game and on the boards. Besides that though, I can’t think of a major guild on HoD that doesn’t have its contingents of roamers. Its a lot more in the culture in the lower tiers so AR may get to see more of it if they don’t rally from their player losses. Mind you, I’m definitely not saying its not a bad thing at all and for those of us who like the small fights, the sneak attacks, guerilla tactics and general unpredictability its great.

DH too has some groups, I’m not as familiar anymore with them as its been a long time since we’ve fought them but I definitely recall them about. You’ll just have a harder time finding them out on their own because they generally just have a lot more people running around.

Anyway, when you get a chance to get in the match, keep an eye out for us (GT). We have a number of people who do solo roaming to small groups/random tasks starting from about noon NA time. Hopefully we’ll have more opportunities to fight the pvps from AR if we can get DH to stop smashing us both.

Grimno.6172:

Starts a slow clap for the 2 AR assaulters in DH’s Borderlands, I believe from a guild with the initials CoD, who decided to use 2 golems to try and take the paper bluebriar by themselves, unguarded by allies, who then were killed once they finally got the door open, which was then immediately repaired with supplies on site. Best 200 supplies and 2 gold spent

Should be flat out applauding them. WvW is way more interesting and dynamic when people are trying out crazy things all over the place. Plus, lets be honest, 99.99% of players never once spent money on a siege golem – between JPs and random drops, most people have more than they will use.

BC definitely has a style of play – and it gets results. Sure, not everyone would agree with it but people take different roles and he’s definitely popular on the server.

On a side note – did SF lose some guilds? There’s a couple big ones from previous matchups that seem to be absent. Notably, also, the ones that seemed to do the most forum battling. If so, that sucks but I’m sure you’ll pull through.

Looks like ET and HoD got some new blood in the form of Chinese WvW kill farming bots. I’m not really sure how this is efficient, but near ETs northwest tower last night I stumbled across the following – 5 ET bots autoattacking 1 against a single target while he is rezzed by the rest.

Still – it was an easy 300 WXP fearing all of them off the cliff.

The HoD bots were still there when I wandered off, so if any ETers head up there – there may be a few easy points.

Drastic.8920:

Just curious if someone knows the answer to this:

Is original rating match on MOS for ET correct? Was just wondering how they jumped so much.

No, they’re off. If you look at the previous week, somehow it saved the changes for like the first 8 seconds of reset and clocked them in as rating changes. This means server with low ratings in their previous matchups (ie, ET, HoD and so on) got absurd rating calculations for no reason. Its an error on mos side.

It shows HoD went 6 points v 6 points on BP v 5 points on DR, giving us a 75 rating gain. ET went 5 points v 4 points on FC v 4 points on GoM, giving them +98. This is not reflected on the actual guildwars2.com WvW rankings on the leaderboard, which should be the correct values.

Anyway, entertaining reset as usual. Its actually very refreshing compared to last week for us. FC/ET players in general hold their own better. BP had so many people, most you went against were just zergers who were lost on their own – there were good players mixed in, but the percentage was lower simply because it was a higher population base.

FC – you guys totally overreacted when GT tried to sneak your hills. Our 4 man team got to inner and then had to bail/got slaughtered and there were orange swords leftover just from beating down our poor abandoned golem.

I am a little curious about the FC/ET feelings about the new matchup system. Is it an improvement for you guys or just a wash? It seemed like the first week when you got split, it gave you much more an opportunity to shine because you could capitalize on the fights between the other servers, something that is less present when you’re in the same matchup – but I could be wrong. Unfortunately, even with the new system the odds aren’t great of that but they are better than before, nonetheless.

AtlasSi.9130:

SandySothe.7950:

Stay classy, BP. I’m glad our borderlands was worth blowing 100g on to you guys cause it sure isn’t to us.

20 Omegas was worth the fun. We were just out to have fun last night. :P As a farewell to one of BP’s best and well known commanders. <3

Probably was in good fun for most of BP. Marred, unfortunately, by the fact that there were BP (probably not related to the actual organization of the event) who were inviting themselves to HoD in our BL talking trash beforehand.

BP definitely stays up later than we do on Friday nights. I also wonder if they’re a little more into it this week now that they’re free of their EBay oppressors. They’ll definitely keep our backs against the wall but I think both DR and ourselves will be able to carve out some of the map for ourselves.

That said, some of our guildies and the other small group teams I think have been interested in fighting DR’s – hopefully they’ll be able to find each other amidst the BP storm. The new matchup system hasn’t been kind for us (atleast in terms of prospects of winning, we still gained rating last week after all), but its interesting to see new opponents and knowing that you won’t have to put up with week after week of the exact same beatdown is an improvement.

Anyway, welcome to BP – if you could do me the favor of keeping HoD outmanned in your BL so I can roam into fights I shouldn’t be in and not suffer gear damage, that’d be appreciated.

LAD Infinitum.1675:

This is actually a lot more than we usually get. The excitement for people that we wouldn’t be facing EBay and AR for the 14th week in a row no doubt brought everyone and their mother out for some WvW!

Good to know its doing your server some good, we’ve definitely been on both sides of that. SF finally escaping T8 (where they’d spent more time in than you guys did vs EBay) had a similar result, and they didn’t even know it was coming since the adjustment happened barely right beforehand. The first couple hours they were fairly quiet, then word of new opponents got around and they were everywhere.

Its not really the answer a lot of people like but one available tool that a lot of people overlook are consumables. Many people either use none or straight damage consumables rather than what covers their weaknesses.

You took 8k damage from retal over a 12 second barrage. If you were using an omnomberry pie, it has a cd of 1 sec which matches barrage ticks – assuming you crit atleast once per barrage tick (which is expected as a damage ranger), you’d have proc’d 12 omnomberry pie steals, at 325 hp each or 3900 hp stolen, mitigating half of the retaliation damage.

If thats not your game, then the standard strategy applies – focus fire when retal is a problem to drop single targets, AoE when there’s a window. Retal is supposed to counter wanton AoE, and while it does arguably have too much uptime countering it too readily its a matter of adapting unless that gets changed.

Havvik Nightseeker.3485:

HoD is gross……….

Agreed, SF has earned their hold over EB but HoD will keep going for Mendons because there is a population on the server with a perverse Mendons fetish. Honestly, SF, if you guys knew what we did in there you’d probably just leave it alone.

playable wvw already exists on 66% of other servers.

Otokomae.9356:

Well, the best deal in the entire Rank system seems to be the very first Tier 1 in Arrow Cart Mastery, which increases your Range for only 5 wxp. Start there, even if you rarely use Arrow Carts. extended range makes a bigger difference than 1% damage to/from anything, whether it’s siege or guards. The Tier 2 of most Siege Mastery ranks, +25% Damage, is kind of ridiculous, and likely to be rolled back a bit at some point, but if you have the points for it I suggest you enjoy those while they last.

Seconding this. AC1 is incredibly strong and AC2 is as well. Those are must haves if you ever use an AC ever, and if you play any defense at all you should. If you’re the kind of person who just runs in karma trains/zergs, get the siege bunker or supply boost. Yea, 1 supply isn’t much, but it can be the difference maker when that ram blueprint gets tapped during build. Spreadshot on the ballista is very situational, but it is hilarious when someone rushes your ballista and gets 1 hit ko’d – and they pretty much will at point blank regardless of their spec. The high level guard killer/defense ones can be quite significant too, but the low level ones are so minor that the build up doesn’t seem worth it. Until rank 8 on both, you’re not getting much.

King Amadaeus.8619:

From the minds that brought you “lets just sit out of wvw until SF leaves” last time we faced you.

Actually (EDIT: most of) those people transferred off HoD during the last SF matchup, so it doesn’t really apply anymore. We actually owe you a debt of gratitude for that by the way, they caused a lot of server drama.

After ET/FC went into stand-by mode last week waiting for the change of pace, we really didn’t have to work hard at all. That fact made this a jarring experience back into a much more challenging environment. Still, atleast for me, its an improvement to feel like we’re going to have to make our numbers count instead of taking it for granted that we’ll be able to throw whatever we have around and come out with atleast some success. I suspect it’ll be even a rougher journey than last time too, as ET in its current state is probably going to offer less pressure to SF than NSP had.

I hope we don’t suffer a repeat of the previous encounter with SF where the HoD general population just says screw it to get them up faster since our performance won’t really correlate with the possibility of the matchup again.

Vash.9183:

Well SF is going to get lots of rating off this match-up! :p

You might even pass DH

SF knows better than that. They’re experienced at trying to steal rating from people 300 rating below them and it never really worked.

Hematuria.4051:

It’s a numbers thing. You run to one side of the map and wipe their pvdoor, only to have to run to some other side to take care of a separate pvdoor. They you have to go to your BL because their 3rd and 4th group are there.

I feel like this is a reference to the recent BL wipe of FC. I don’t necessarily know where you were in that but it is part of our tactics. We only have a couple particularly large WvW guilds, but a lot of smaller organized ones and that is what we do – each work our own thing. We also have a couple of serial map hoppers, which means the pressure can hit anywhere.

Our most recent push on FC BL, I’m not certain we did have the numbers but we did have an organizational advantage. We pulled 10-15 FC to our group of 5 by throwing a golem at watergate while our larger group took Bay. Then the small group moved on Dawns while the large group moved on Garrison. Our group of 5 managed to take the tower and pick off 10 people trying to reinforce the garrison group because the FC militia was unsure if they should be fighting on rescuing to the valued objective.

Perhaps you had gotten reinforcements in after that, but once a single objective remained we did not have enough to actually fight you straight up.

Its not something unique to us by any means either, we just managed to execute it successfully there. Just before that three FC groups had hit three different objectives while trying to retake their BL, but working it with militia doesn’t quite work as well as organized groups. And, of course, it works better with more numbers which we definitely have this week – but more numbers in total isn’t more numbers on a map or all the time either.

Anyway, I spent about 10 hours in FC BL this morning/afternoon and it was a great back and forth with both sides pressing advantages. I’d like to thank VLK for setting me up with a hills late last night and hopefully it’ll be returned to them tonight with the shiny new waypoint if we can hold it til then. Also thanks to the FC commander who portal bombed the west cliff of hills for some reason, leading to 6 instant fear kills for me :P

PS. Should TTA want to investigate, 9 hours into that 10 hour run we saw a TTA thief on the outer walls of [EDIT: y]our hills inside the keep. It was fairly suspicious, though nothing came of it.

rng is a crazy thing. It’ll occasionally work in your favor as here, but generally it’ll just kick your kitten .

And, of course, if the camp is heavily upgraded you’ll have to pull them 3 or so at a time like most any class will – just watch for cabalist pulls.

Are you seriously complaining about having to adapt to a situation? Or that preparation and effort be rewarded with efficiency? This is something that 6 year olds learn and accept – ‘always be prepared’.

There will always be min-maxers, there is nothing in the game that necessitates this and its not some ‘autowin’ strategy. These strategies all have drawbacks too.

Stack swapping has the time investment to build the stacks. If you fight someone out of spawn with a stacking sigil and they don’t, you’re already disadvantaged. If you go down mid-fight while building stacks, you’re back at the start and weaker than someone who hadn’t. If your fight turns to day with a night sigil out, you’re running empty. Nobody needs all the sigils for dungeon farming either, if you’re not a serial farmer it isn’t efficient. If you plan on doing 4 runs of CM to finish your dungeon master and get one offhand item, buying the sigil is not efficient at all. The previous is an example of the majority of players.

Down in these tiers there’s basically no lag ever. If you just want to do small open field fights, its the best place to be. No impact by the other 150 people smashing into each other because they don’t exist.

Dobri.9804:

KyoHanakaze.8145:

Dobri.9804:

It is easy to win when you have the numbers. It is much harder when you do not. Like us.

From what I can tell,. FC actually has the highest WvW pop of all three servers fighting in T8.

And you honestly believe that?

This is a difficult one to determine, obviously. However, it seems to me that FC has the most consistent coverage – not that that says much in T8, the land of spotty coverage.

As someone who has been here a long time, I’d like to emphasize the last point. Its not just a kittenick, but in the lower tiers its real. People recognize others for their contributions, and not just because of the guild tag or the blue icon running them around. You, and your allies, know when something minor you did made a difference and there’s a lot of mutual respect on the server for it.

Compared to the old days in the upper tiers when sometimes you could spend a couple hours in WvW and wonder if it really mattered that you were there. Here, there’s tons of opportunities to actually be a deciding factor in the way things play out.

Another thing to keep in mind is T8 has a pretty strong duel tradition at this time, lots of small guilds looking for good fights that you’ll encounter (primarily in NA primetime). Get familiar with them and you’ll find a lot of opportunities for high quality honorable fights where people stand aside and spectate even matchups instead of piling it on as soon as they can.

ErlendR.6107:

ET BL, i mean …
ET Rage

Congrats on PvDooring us. Its not really news. NSP did it with 3 people one night and reported they saw literally 0 HoD the entire time.

The match has reached that point, as it always does for us. HoD has the largest coverage gaps of any server and it always is a problem for us. ET and FC are double teaming us at night – not as a premeditated attack or any sort of cooperation, but because its so easy. FC in EB, ET in our BL. Preceded by SF in EB, NSP in our BL when they’d previously been doing SF in our BL and NSP in our BL. Before that, NSP in our BL, GoM in EB and before that DH everywhere. It was just a matter of time before ET and FC realized it as well. Its not their fault at all though.

I’m on nights for HoD half the week and it gets tiring, not because of our opponents – they’re playing smart. We have a few very dedicated individuals who also cover that gap but when enough of them need a break from it, the above happens. Hopefully, if nothing else, those who struggle with coverage gaps on other servers will be reassured that someone has it worse.

That said, we know about the problem and no one is impressed.

Was an interesting reset night. HoD came out swinging as usual in the borderlands which meant for me, it was more interesting once things started winding down for us.

Flappy left us a nicely upgraded FC Hills with full buffs once he went to bed, we had a small group still keeping you guys at bay for another hour or so, taking down trebs and golems til you guys amassed enough to steamroll over us with the reckless abandon we deserved at that point.

Then it was ETs retalation on our BL, which started going downhill when we saw the Outmanned buff on us. The three pronged rush on Garrison, Hills and Lake was crafty. Garrison was held back easily, as I suspect you expected but lake was quickly gone and it bought you enough time to break outer at hills. Then started the see-saw between Bay and Hills – went in your favor when we managed to hold off Bay but it gave you the chance to grab hills. Then it went in our favor when Battlecamp managed to sneak Hills back before it swung back the other way and you managed to pressure us into choosing one and snatched Bay from us before you called it a night.

Lets hope it keeps going this way instead of sinking into coverage gap wars for points like it has a tendency to in the lower tiers.

Spets the MilkBandit.9031:

Oh you mean like GoM and HoD constantly playing for seconds, and then combining their WvW guilds AFTER the organised** teamup fiasco backfired and sent pretty much both server into t8?

This post is stupid on many levels.

Firstly, GoM and HoD never played for seconds in our matchup, nor did they ‘team’ up for anymore than a couple of hours.

Secondly, even if it did happen, ‘teaming up’ and ‘playing for second’ are mutually exclusive concepts.

Thirdly, in the five weeks of our matchup, GoM and HoD won two weeks and NSP only won one, so even if we were playing for second we were so terrible at it that NSP somehow ended up second 4 weeks out of 5. GoM and HoD playing for second would ensure NSPs victory, GoM and HoD teaming up would ensure NSP being in third, both basically the opposite of what actually happened.

Fourthly, HoD and GoM in no way combined WvW guilds. One single guild leader made a conscious decision on their own to transfer off, and did not even take their entire guild with them and did not combine with any GoM guild.

Finally, both the servers being sent to T8 wouldn’t be attributed to that either. GoM dropped because of the sudden rating shift and that they were ‘busy’ with other things (which they bounced back from) and HoD dropped because said above guild had already stopped contributing, removing a chunk of our playerbase.

I’m surprised anyone on our server would make a claim anyway. HoD and ET have had such a similar story that you’d think we’d understand. Huge exodus, pummeled for weeks by new opponents, pummeled for weeks by the same opponent (DH for us, SF for ET).

Millenium has some great memories to relive:
http://mos.millenium.org/matchups/history/5#NA

Sf barely had twice your combined scores there. In our descent together, that week Blackgate had 20 times our combined scores.

They got close to the WP.

However, it takes a long time to get a waypoint if the enemy pressures you. BL camps spawn yaks slower and they generally have longer routes and are extremely susceptible to hits. For BL keeps on the offense, you can’t really count on yaks getting in from anywhere but water/vale for hills/bay respectively unless you’re just destroying your opposition. Even if you hold garrison, its unlikely many yaks will make it through from the north camp and the south camp will likely be flipped constantly by roamers from the third server.

KWBH did a solid job in our BL, even when most of our people thought they were pushed out, they boxed up the water camp and managed to retake redlake too for a while. I like that there’s a lot of movement in this matchup – there’s been weeks in the past where it seems like everyone just wants to sit in their own BL and fight over EB, and that is dull.

Just wanted to thank my fellow server mates as well as the opponents on ET BL this afternoon for my first day as a commander. The dream was the waypoint in hills – we got close but not quite.

Maybe if we hadn’t committed so much to Bay as well but it was a solid siege deservedly held back by ET and much needed practice.