Guild Wars 2

Many WvW focused guilds, including mine use the commander buff simply as a means to provide tactical convenience WITHIN THE GUILD…..we couldn’t care less about the mindless PuGs zerging after us. If we had our choice, the commander buff would only show to our guild, but that apparently is not going to happen.

It’s not the commander’s fault that noobs flock to the little blue icon; and trying to organize 4 or 5 groups without some visual clue as to where the leader is headed is next to impossible.

Are you referring to sPvP or WvW? as these are totally different animals………

In sPvP you have to kill quickly or risk the rest of their team showing up at the control point, where in WvW you can easily duke it out for a couple of minutes with someone undisturbed

irk.2047:

Arkiels.9016:

You could dodge out of the way….just saying.

what I want to happen: I should be able to slam them over the head with my hammer if they get that close.

dodging isnt a proper balance. I mean they jump into a cluster of 10 people and get away for free

You CAN, that’s the point it does no more damage in melee range than it does at a distance….I think people just misunderstand what’s happening with it and run out of misguided fear

Truth be told, it does VERY LITTLE damage on it’s own…most of the damage is done by reflecting projectiles (which go in a straight line and hit the first target they come to [possibly someone other than the shooter]) stop shooting at them and you’ll see how laughable it really is

Khalic.3561:

Stability does NOT stop chill, cripple, or immobilize. I’ve been stopped often enough by a set of bolas when I turn into a tornado. >..>

Thing is nets and bolas are projectile based so they are reflected :-P

Also it DOES NOT grant retaliation…it is straight up 100% reflection…..retaliation still allows the player to take damage it just reflects a PORTION of it back on the attacker, also reflection does diddly to melee, so beat away on them.

As a thief (can’t BELIEVE I’m giving this away)….
Dagger storm does the following, grants stability, reflects all projectiles, snares, and bleeds……

What I find to drive me out of a DS rush quicker than anything is just non-projectile based AOE (ie, Meteor Storm, Barrage, etc) [As a side note, the thief cluster bomb is reflected and SEEMS to do damage aoe to the attacking thief’s group, which sucks for the group unlucky enough to be grouped with such a noob]

The entire problem is that there is a “winner” and 2 “losers” to begin with. The “magic” if you will of DAoC’s RvR was the fact that there never was a winner or loser. It wasnt’ about the points to win a match. The war in the frontiers has been waged now for 10 years and never has anyone “won”. That is what keeps people interested, you never lose hope you don’t wait on some arbitrary “it’s over, let’s reset”.

Do away with the point and ranking system as it stands and simply group servers into sets of 3. The queue times will be enough to eventually even out playerbases as there is no “winner” why not go play on the server with only a 10 minute as opposed to a 2 hour queue.

As long as games end and the world resets on a regular basis, there will always be the crowd that just gives up on a tough match and waits for reset, only further exacerbating the issue.

There was no cooldown listed on earth sigils…..is there a hidden one not in the tooltip? If so it’s simply a matter of swapping out for an agony or the stacking +condition damage one. Either way the build has worked very well in WvW. DO NOT recommend for sPvP though as it does take a bit longer to kill your target and you can’t get a fight in there for very long without the opponent having backup soon.

Have lost only one 1v1 to a guardian while on my thief. However, a necro (built and played properly) is the bane of my existance. [Fortunately there are very few necros with even a smidge of knowhow in regards to their class…all the ones trying to spec for dps make me lawl]

Condition builds are very viable for the thief, mainly due to our resource system there is no CD. All purges, however, do have a long CD. This enables us to “feint” a small stack let them purge, then apply the main stack. Necros, guardians, and warriors alike all eventually succumb to the bleed.

The key, however, is to never allow yourself to be open to attack, don’t just stand in melee range letting them beat on you. LDB a couple of times and be rolling as soon as your feet hit the ground.

Below is the build I’ve been running (quite successfully I might add)

http://www.guildhead.com/skill-calc#Mckzzc0zmbavombavmp9MfxokMVkq

I use superior sigils of earth on both daggers for the added bleed stacks and use the following rune set (the extra dodge rolling really helps)

http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Rune_of_the_Adventure

Tzash.5748:

So you have an artificial population cap like the OP suggests. I can see the following happening:
1) Dominant side is better organised and keeps beating the two weaker sides regardless of the cap.
2) The weaker side players keep leaving WvW because they aren’t winning.
3) The cap gets lower and lower until there is no-one in WvW at all.

In my experience thus far, the top 5 or 6 dominant servers are not there because of any particular organization skill, but because of sheer zerg size. When our little 10 man guild group can kill 20 of them, it only goes to show that it’s not organization or some superhuman skill but purely zerging.

I agree with Shintai, the solution is as simple as an account WvW lockout for the remainder of the current WvW match-up for anyone transferring. This both deters people from simply hopping to the winning server. And is a deterrent to all but the most determined cross-server spies.

WvW is very much PvP, if the system works as it should. The problem is everyone is transferring to the winning server and the other 2 become ghostlands, thus forcing nothing but PvE.

A large portion of the playerbase primarily does WvW and that portion will only grow as people consume the available PvE content. This current exploit needs attention and soon.

D/D is perfectly fine in WvW, if you build for it. Max condition damage, and get sigils that increase duration of bleed. Those sigils make it possible to maintain a 25 stack on a target by yourself. Many times all it takes is just 3-4 death blossoms then you can simply kite the player til they fall over from the bleeding. (Be careful vs good necros though as they can counter this tactic pretty well)