Guild Wars 2

KStudios.2850:

Dethroat.3514:

I just can’t stop laughing at the whining in this thread. Happens every time we play Ehmry. I’m wondering if they reason they whine is either because A) Since they lost a lot of players (probably based on the whining) they don’t have the numbers to compete in anything above T4. or B.) They just aren’t geared, or are bad at WvW.

Yeeeeah, we’re bad at PvP. That’s why I just down to 10 badges after emptying them last match, and am back up to 162 right now. As a solo roamer mind you, lmao!. Lemme tell ya, we outright suck. Keep that train of thought alive. See that shiny Crystal Desert camp over there? You want that, right?… I’ll wait… Oh no. That’s certainly not a knife at your back.

Strippling.3524:

Good fights in Ebay BL today, some large scale battles back and forth betweem Ebay and YB, was very fun.

I think pk is a great guild, from what I’ve seen they definitely contribute a lot to wvw for Ebay. They have some really good strategies and some fine skilled players. Ebay is a fun opponent!!

Look forward to more fun. Keep up the good work CD, love fighting you guys.

YB worst mesmer,
The Devils Den [DD]

A pleasure to make your acquaintance too!

Were you the DD ele that I fought to a stalemate around the north east bay/water/quaggan island in yaks borderland (with a brief interuption when 2 CD showed up when we were NE of bay)? I was playing my necro.

If it was you, then good fight. I think I was closer to losing than you were, particularly when I seemed to have half of quaggan lake chasing me around. If not then as I see you are a fellow roamer then I hope to bump into you some day.

As to the matchup in general, if you can ignore the one bad apple souring things on the forums then this has been a really good matchup so far. Seen some good things from CD and Ebay, keep it up.

I’d been toying with the idea of trying a fear build recently also. I have always found myself playing power builds (I’m a serial respeccer so have tried a few) and had just settled on one I quite liked (I usually judge them by running around solo in wvw and seeing what I can accomplish), but this inspired me to give conditions a try for a change.

I’m a cheapskate though, plus I am not a pve fan, so I don’t have access to (and am certainly not paying for with the prices they are at) the chest, boots, accessories and staff. I filled the staff/chest/boots with rampagers instead and used rare accessories.

So my stats aren’t quite as good as those listed above, but I did go for the 100% bleed and fear duration variant in the runes.

I have to say I’m enjoying it so far, considering I’ve never played a condition spec before (and hence am making a lot of mistakes) it’s proving pretty effective. For a condition build you can put out a pretty nice burst using fear. Using corrupt boon to turn stability into fear is particularly satisfying.

I have to say though, I think I agree about the lack of usefuleness of the fear on being downed. I was never downed when I found a 1v1 (I’m sure I will be, but it wont happen often enough to make it worth it) and in a 1v2+ the fear when you go down isn’t going to save you. I think I’ll change it for the DS skills cooldown reduction as that seems like it will be more useful to me.

Besetment.9187:

At least one of them is ex Fianna, a very old Guild Wars 1 guild held in high regard. We miss Maya (if you are still out there, come back!).

Very off topic and I do apologise, plus you may not even know the answer but…is Fianna related to the Na Fianna (or something like that guild) from very early days in DAOC?

Back on topic, I will miss Maguuma if they drop down a tier next week, I have a lot of respect for many players on that server (including the person I have quoted above) for some great tactics and a great attitude on the forums.

Great fights last night, that was the first reset I have managed to make for weeks and it was great to see 3 way fights going on in all 4 maps through most of the night. I logged off about 7 hours ago when we finally got our own borderlands cleared.

@Gorefiend

Maguuma’s efforts certainly were not laughable. They had a bit of a slow start before their numbers built up, but after that we had a tough fight on our hands trying to keep both you and them contained. They nearly got into ne tower twice and held well in east keep despite the fact that most of the Yaks on the map were trying to get it back. The fact east keep was taken under dubious circumstances was their downfall since that angered a lot of Yaks players and they were focusing on the east side of the map exclusively (at the expense of west, we actually lost west keep to you during our first attempt to retake east keep, whether by luck or by design you got into west keep just as most of our forces were inside east).

Anyway, hope the action keeps up throughout the week. Seen some great manoeuvres from both Mags and EB so far, hope to see plenty more before the week is done.

Of the servers I have come up against the ones that have impressed me the most (in no particular order) are TC, FA and Mag.

Since I have to pick only one I have to find some way to seperate them, thus since both Mag and to a lesser extent FA have a few players who spoil their image on the forums (only a few, the majority are reasonable) my vote goes to TC as I can’t recall ever seeing a TC poster being disrespectful or trolling.

Monztor.9207:

Aside from that, the match up so far has been very interesting and I am enjoying it. I think maguumans have been focusing Yaks a little too much considering they’ve been first place consistently so many of us felt Yak’s was the bigger threat. However, Dragonbrand’s night/morning presence begs to differ. Dragonbrand and Yak’s Bend both have some very solid players and leaders, and I hate for ANY server’s name to be tarnished by the actions of a few who do not wish to play this game legitly. If you find any hackers or glitchers, simply screenshot and report. All of our servers would gladly report a hacker from our own servers if we found them. Just give us info on guild tags and etc.

I agree, this is a very interesting matchup so far. As I stated in the previous thread before its demise this is the first time I’ve had a bit of free time to play since Yaks dropped to this tier. This means other than trying to filter out the reliable information from all the noise in the previous matchup threads I don’t know how those went.

It’s always an interesting dynamic when one server has such a different prime time to the other two servers in the match. I think even though both Yaks and Maguuma did have a bit of pre-warning, not everyone follows the forums and a lot of people were taken by surprise. It’s particularly evident in the way that Yaks and Maguuma have been getting bogged down scrapping with eachother during our primes the first few nights instead of focusing on balancing out DB’s big gains during their prime by pushing them off of the maps first.

Seen some impressive play from Maguuma so far this matchup, some great coordination when attacking or defending points. Also, although I’ve only really run into DB during their prime when they have overwhelming numbers, they also play intelligently making them all the more deadly.

Ignoring the rogue elements who seem to be doing their best to ruin the matchup (hopefully ANET fixes this soon) I’ve enjoyed it so far, it’s just a shame it looks likely we wont be getting a rematch next week to see how things play out without christmas throwing that random element in there.

Ryan.6951:

There is no /bow and /wave peaceful jumping puzzle camaraderie. You zerg maps you already completely own (why?!); and not just small zergs either…. no. I Was just in YB BL flipping a few camps and killing a few yaks and even though you owned 100% of the map… you came down on me and the 1 other guy on the map with a group of 40+!

Holy wtf.

Unfortunate timing on your part. Going by the time of your post I’m guessing you appeared just after we pushed Maguuma off our BL. This, plus the “unfortunate incident” at east keep, means there were still a lot of people running around doing the upgrading/sieging up jobs. As soon as a sniff of any sort of action was had, they all would have rushed straight there for something to break up the tedium.

Since I’m here I might as well also add that I am mightily impressed with what I have seen of Maguuma so far. This is the first chance I’ve had to play since we dropped to this tier (this is a busy time of year for me) and had a completely different image of what they were like formed from reading the last couple weeks of matchup threads. Definately a case of not judging a book by it’s cover (or in this case by paying attention to a servers vocal minority).

Daedalus.3954:

How about that score update, maybe a map? Eh? EH? ;]

Well since you asked so……keenly? :P

@rhonyn
As an outsider looking in on your two servers I will say it appears to me the difference this matchup between FA and TC has been strategy (both servers are incredibly strong opponents).
Despite what it would appear to some Yaks (atleast the people I play with) have not been focusing one server over the other. If we weren’t shoring up our own borderlands we spent an even amount of time in the other two.

The difference being that whenever we attacked FA borderlands, TC would generally concentrate on pushing up their side of the map so we would push up ours. However whenever we went to TC borderlands, FA would be attacking us rather than focusing on their own side. Case in point, we had south east tower, FA had south west. We were building trebs at the se supply camp to attack the east keep when the entire FA force came across and attacked us at the camp, destroying our trebs. Naturally, we left TC borderlands at that point and went to FA instead.

Wasabi Kitty.8247:

Does that guy on the treb ever give up?

Spent a good amount of time running around blocking trebuchet shots until I had to leave to start getting ready for work.

Ah so that was you blocking the shots :P

My brain was in auto fire mode only half paying attention so I didn’t realise it was happening at first, then I started trying to randomly move the shot around so you didn’t know where it was going to land.

Thanks for making the normally dull job of trebbing actually interesting for a change.

I’ve been following this thread all week, but kept out of the “discussions” whilst a couple of minority players on either side (YB and FA) did their best to make the rest of us look bad.

Now the week is (almost) over I thought I would chime in with my appreciation for this weeks action. Unfortunately my lone encounter with anyone from ET was a solo thief who attempted to kill our doly as it headed into our SW tower in YB borderlands yesterday so I don’t have a lot of first hand experience against them. I do have to say though that I admire that despite being heavily outnumbered they did keep up the fight and apart from early in the week always seemed to have a presence in their own BL.

As to FA, some great fights have been had all week. We have learnt a lot from many of your guilds/players. You are excellent at disrupting supply and make extensive good use of siege equipment. A particular shout out to PRO for this, I think it was Wednesday this week I logged on in the day to white crossed swords over Dawn’s in our BL (I am in the UK so I’m meaning afternoon here). When I went to investigate I found 2 rams on the door, jumping inside I was thankful to find plenty of siege up (whoever from Yaks decked out dawns that morning, I thank you!). I destroyed the rams with a ballista and thought that would be the end of it, but more PRO arrived (from a supply camp I guess) and they started to throw siege up all over the place. I was frantically running around using different siege in the tower to kill each piece but you were throwing it up faster than I could destroy it. The tower was only saved because eventually enough people responded to my messages in /t.

This was a pattern of many FA attacks, lots of siege being thrown up rapidly. Yesterday we defended the SW tower in our borderlands (PRO were there again but I don’t know if it was a proper guild group). We only held because we eventually got the numbers to push out, through the course of the siege I think I saw a total of about 2 trebs, 6+ catapults, 2+rams, 4+ ballistas and maybe some arrowcarts being up at various times (not all at once thankfully!) with us trying to play whack a mole taking each down as fast as we could with hit and run or suicide charges.

Anyway, in summary, I just wanted to say great fights FA, I hear mention of you having a lot of fair weather players but from my experience your core WvW force atleast never gives up (honorable mentions to PRO, ULTD, BT and GODS as guild names I’ve learned to keep an eye on, apologies to any FA guilds I’ve not mentioned, I’m sure there are more of you that stand out just these are the names that I currently remember). Be that when you are behind in a match, or if a keep appears lost. You always make a final stand and have often managed to repell an attack even when all walls/doors are breached. I was in the fight to take your garrison already mentioned a couple of posts ago and I think a lot of us thought that once we got inside it would be a quick cap, but the players you had in there put up an awesome fight.

Moddo.7105:

At least Yak is not exploiting invulnerable area to build siege in so it is untouchable. Not going to say which server but it is not GoM or Yak:p

I would say that’s still not worse than spawn camping, and I’m from Yaks Bend.

edit: apparently the word “bad” followed by the word “as” is censored

Wulfrim.4793:

@Schnitter, you can activate DS if you are stunned or daze and you can drop DS cooldown to 6 seconds. Thats 3 seconds of stability every 6 seconds, pretty awesome to me.

I may be just about to make myself look rather stupid (but then I am not well known for my observation skills) but how are you getting DS cooldown down to 6 seconds?

I haven’t played my necro for a while (I went the opposite way to you, from necro to elementalist) so I may have missed it, but the only skill I saw that effected DS cooldown was the grandmaster SR trait.

Minions don’t die when you go into DS, they do die from other transforms though (including if a Mesmer uses his Moa elite on you).

If you’re just running around auto-attacking as a minion master then you’re not reaching your full potential.

Apart from how quickly they die to aoe I was really enjoying my MM spec (despite the other irritations) as it felt like I was playing a support role in a group (my favoured role in other games). It does help to think of it as a pug though, due to how chaotically the pets AI behaves at times…they often randomly go AFK without telling you, or pull when not everyone is ready. :P

Lack of AOE mitigation is the major problem for a minion build right now.

All the other issues could be classed as irritations (although pretty majorly irritating some of them I grant you) since atleast there are work arounds.

Losing all your minions within the first few seconds of an encounter because they get caught in an easily avoidable aoe with nothing you can do to get them to move out of it/dodge it is just a killer for a minion spec. They die easily enough as it is without that, and once your minions are down as a minion spec necromancer that’s you lost most of your effectiveness.

I’m doing well levelling a minion spec currently.

I’ve tried a few different builds out but keep coming back to the minion spec. I originally tried to use the minions to tank/dps while I supported them, but their health was just too low I found and in any sizeable pull I couldn’t keep up with healing them. Actually, I think it’s more that their toughness/defence is too low rather than their health. Plus whenever I left them to tank it always seemed to be the lowest health minions that pulled the aggro first.

I’m having far more success now with me tanking while they dps for me (and soon they’ll be adding a slight bit of extra healing too…I hear it’s not very substantial but I don’t need that much from them). I’m taking advantage of the fact that their stats aren’t effected by our own (rather than letting that be a disadvantage) by using them for the damage while I gear towards survivability.

Their AI can be a problem however, but it’s not such a disaster when they’re not doing anything when you’re specced for survivability as you have time to rouse them out of it (sometimes switching targets and pressing 1 a few times will wake them up, or using one of their skills). I also find the Flesh Golems random aggression to be mostly amusing. Mainly because it reminds me of running dungeons with my ex-flatmates in previous games. The Flesh Golem “AI” almost completely mimics one of them as he would always attack everything that even remotely looked at him also, whether the rest of us were ready or not (and he was a dps not even a tank in our group).