Guild Wars 2

StormWolf.7645:

You know…I’m getting sick of posts like these, so let me correct this:
RE was on Kaineng 1 week before WM. Therefor WM is a Bandwagon Guild. :p

And who cares who is a “Bandwagon” and who isn’t? Everyone had their own reasons for coming to Kaineng, and people on Kaineng who stayed have their reasons for staying.

All I know about RE is that it’s a free bag when I see one, so if anything people would join the servers opposite from you for the looting opportunities.

War Machine on the other hand is a) huge, b) dedicated, and c) organized. It’s easy to see why people would be interested in running in their wake. And thus they’re the ones I single out for being the reason for the current Frankenstein’s monster version of Kaineng.

As far as the Guilds that left…who cares? They are gone and I am perfectly fine with that. They had their reasons for leaving and were perfectly justified in doing so.

I care. The 8 weeks I spent on Kaineng after transferring off the overpopulated and undertalented zerg servers like Jade Quarry and Blackgate were amazing and great fun. Everything since then has been middling by comparison and it shows in our attendance and the attendance of every other small man roaming guild I know from those days.

I care because maybe if KAIN hadn’t kitten off APEX so much that they left before they arrived, or maybe if Chaster and his crew actually played the game more than twice a week, and maybe if some of the people who kept transferring to DR “looking for a fight” had actually cared about anything but the stupid scoreboard my friends might still be bloody playing and this bloody game might actually be fun.

And to cut the inevitable off at the pass, kitten right I mad.

Chaster Sharpshooter.3640:

Yes. Sorry to offend anyone, but the ONLY thing that getting higher tier in WvW only boosts the following things

1. Amount of attention of trolls and haters, after all, you did stomp them.
2. Higher Chances of getting seriously-considered and/or bandwagon players
3. Drama
4. Ego

Now, on the other hand, guildmates gives you the definition of fun, the definition of friendship, and the definition of cooperation. So, yes, saving the guild is more important than saving the server, after all, we can always come back another day once our troops are more prepared. It’s not like once we lose in WvW, the server is gone for good, but once you lose core member of your guild, it is DESTROYED.

If anything I’m offended that you seem to think I wanted Kaineng to advance out of T8.

I never wanted to go into the upper tiers. I liked T8. All I’ve ever wanted out of this game is to have fun with my friends killing people and the old Kaineg provided it in spades. This garbage we have now is an insult to a once great server.

And let me point out that your server didn’t come back. The old Kaineg died. It’s gone and won’t be coming back. All you have now is its desecrated, reanimated corpse crawling with maggots lurching down the road to inevitable damnation.

Chaster Sharpshooter.3640:

Attic.1562:

You were, by your own admission, totally unreliable. The very moment a significant point gap appeared you guys would vanish from WvW, taking the servers only chance at doing anything in the Asian/Oceanic timeslot with you, and then proceed to complain about us losing.

That post was hoping to find out what exactly was the reason behind losing, just so that we can improve on it, because maybe because I wasn’t smart enough, after all, I did my analogy, but still was no use, so I need someone to tell me the answer of why we were losing,

As for the moment that a significant point gap has appeared and us withdrawing from WvW, it’s because like DR/EBay right now, sure, they can now try to toss every men and women into WvW and try to make a change, but the sad reality is, it’s most likely not going to change a thing. Just like I’ll give you 10 mile advance and jog towards to the finish line, while I race you with a car. The moment I passed you, you KNOW there is no way that you will be able to catch up to me. It’s just that plain simple – know when you are defeated.

Sure, I could still put in every member of my guild in the battle, but what will that achieve? Nothing, except that DR will just still lingers in T8 with us longer, and you think that will bring up the morale? probably not. When a man puts all he could into battle and get defeated, it’s more than demoralizing, sometimes death. In the racing example I’ve told you before, sure, the car passed you, and now you’ve start to run, putting all the strength you have, sooner or later, your body will give up and break down, and soon will your spirit. Is this what you want us to do?

The reason why we are still staying in Kaineng for the longest part is also because I know how to maintain a level of morale that will not going to break us and make us abandon ship. As for those who burned out, on the other hand, will.

I loved Kaineng, as much as my guildmates. But if I have to choose between guild mates and server, I’d still follow the guild mate’s decision, and to avoid guild mates sprouting the idea of switching servers, this is what has to be done.

So you saved the guild but lost the server. That’s a much better outcome isn’t it?

You’re just lucky that a) War Machine decided to boost the server up and attracted all those bandwagoners and b) that the free server transfers are going to end before you guys face any real competition.

Hell, if transferring to really low pop servers is cheap enough you may just loose all your fodder to some place like Fergs anyways.

Kilger.5490:

Attic.1562:

Except you don’t. It’s quite possible to stick to a rigid attunement swapping pattern dumping everything you can on swap with some rudimentary combos like RTL -> Updraft -> Burning Speed -> Fire Grab thrown in and still do pretty bloody well against the vast majority of people (who tend to be quite bad fyi).

It works but it shouldnt.

That is the crux of my argument, yes. I’m not trying to sell you short personally man, I’m just saying that because the spec lets average (read: bad) players beat (or at least, not lose to) average (read: bad) opponents a significantly abnormally high percentage of the time that the spec is very friendly to people who are average (read: bad).

That’s literally what I am saying. It’s not a venom-laced diatribe about how only talentless noobs play the spec. It’s not a “NERF THIS NOW ANET OR I AND MY 30,000 MAN GUILD ALL QUIT” rage induced rant.

It is a statement that once the correct traits are chosen, the correct gear acquired, and some basic skill knowledge & muscle memory is learned the spec works very well almost regardless of skill level and despite the fact that the skill cap is quite high.

Any attempts to read anything further into my words is the work of your own feverish mind deluding you.

Foosnark.1784:

I have lowbie Elementalist and Necro characters. They’re the last two classes I have started.

Subjectively, the Elementalist feels awkward and slow to me, and doesn’t really meet my expectations. Staff is for sure a support weapon, not very good for soloing. D/D doesn’t feel right and isn’t so great for leveling, I find. S/D is a bit better but still, more often than not, I feel like cycling through attunements so I autoattack as little as possible doesn’t quite get me to the killing speed of my other characters — more work for mediocre results. A glass cannon without much of a cannon.

My Necro though… I died once from getting WAY over my head, and once or twice from falling damage. But I’ve been clearing hearts and doing events 3-4 levels above my own level and don’t have a problem with it. Against things my own level it’s hardly any effort at all. I’ve been going with a condition build, S/D and staff.

My only complaints about Necro so far:

— the sounds for staff are pretty hideous. While I use it to open fights at range and in zerg group events, I don’t think I could stand to use it as a main weapon.

— I wish Scepter 2 would just center on your selected target and catch any nearby enemies; I’m kind of lazy about targeting while kiting.

True, I found the elementalist to be an absolute chore to level; I remember trying dagger main hand at level 8-ish and a single even level mob killed me because Lightning Whip was so terrible. That’s because almost all good elementalist specs are, as I said further up the page, absolutely reliant on a foundation of several things. Key among them are boon duration, passive boon gain on attunement swap, and attunement cd reduction. You will have a hard time finding a good PvP elementalist spec that a) doesn’t sit up on walls or behind 50 people it’s entire life and b) has less than 20 points in arcana.

Honestly, the best thing you can do with an elementalist is level to the point to where you can’t bloody stand it (for me it was level 10) and then craft all the way to level 40. Then you can use the 20/0/0/10/0 Lightning Hammer tank build and just breeze through every bit of open world PvE left that doesn’t involve Dredge.

TheAgedGnome.7520:

Ezeriel.9574:

I would guess nothing….

I don’t think the devs play, or care, about necros at all.

When they infracted Ruufio for asking a question about shroudstomping, when they asked for people to ask questions, I gave up on caring.

https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/gw2/Developer-Livestream-Questions/first#post1228926

But then a few posts after that one, someone got infracted for asking if Legendary weapons would become account-bound! So, I don’t know what the heck the metric was for being infracted:
https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/gw2/Developer-Livestream-Questions/1228934

After being completely blindsided by unexpected buffs to underwater skills, I have no predictions for this patch. Its just RNG, from my perspective.

This is a true and accurate depiction of Jonny Sharps class balancing act.

Kilger.5490:

To be fair, I rotate through 20+ skills as a D/D ele, I dont know why you would say noob friendly at all. Timing is precise, you need to always be moving and attacking, if you get stuck you die. If you stick to a rotation you’re going to get tripped up and die, you need to know every permutation.

Except you don’t. It’s quite possible to stick to a rigid attunement swapping pattern dumping everything you can on swap with some rudimentary combos like RTL -> Updraft -> Burning Speed -> Fire Grab thrown in and still do pretty bloody well against the vast majority of people (who tend to be quite bad fyi).

I’ve admitted twice now that actually having some bloody skill makes the class even better, but that doesn’t mean that even bad players can’t do decently regardless. It’s just one of those easy to learn, hard to master specs to pull out the old cliche.

Safety maybe a flash and rtl away but since you’re always in danger you always need to know when to use it. Health is innately very low in the class and you need to be in the thick of it. If you just “rtl + flash away” what have you accomplished exactly?

Always in danger my foot. Name me one other class that routinely has 70%+ uptime on Protection, near 100% uptime on Regeneration, Shocking Aura, a heal on weapon swap that has a 1.0 Healing Power ratio, a teleport, a 3 second invulnerability, ~11 seconds of Protection and Stability, and a movement skill on par with RTL.

Mesmers come closest to that description, but only by using ethereal field combos for extra chaos armor and the norn snow leopard racial elite and they still fail the Stability, heal on weapon swap, & Shocking Aura clauses.

On my necro, safety is always a necrotic transferal away, much easier to use, one click = safe.

So long as it doesn’t bug out due to z-level differences, the fight hasn’t moved too far away from your pet, and nobody kills your fragile little worm. Then it becomes one click = nothing.

Not to mention that the worm can only take you back to a place you’ve already been instead of any direction you choose and has a 40 sec cd to RTL’s 15 secs.

I dont think necros are easy either, certainly harder to catch people, but your comment is just way off.

I really fail to see how.

In WvW d/d eles are very noob friendly.

There are several reasons for this: 1) Safety is, more often than not, just a Ride the Lightning + Lightning Flash away. 2) The healing, mitigation, and avoidance d/d eles can get passively just by sticking to a set rotation of abilities is absurd. If a warrior could get Protection, Fury, Regeneration, 3 stacks of Might, condition cleansing, healing, and Soothing Mist on weapon swap they’d be considered an OP FotM noob class. But you somehow think d/d ele is a pure skill class? I laugh derisively at you.

That’s not to say that a good player won’t take the class above and beyond that into a whole new realm of madness, but let’s not kid ourselves here. There is a reason why d/d eles are so ubiquitous at this point, much more so than any other of the currently strong builds like shatter mesmers and Altruistic Healing guardians, and it’s partially because they’re easy for even really bad players to play decently against the majority of the people they face.

Chaster Sharpshooter.3640:

Attic.1562:

DarkElvenChic.2618:

Hehe, I got here Dec. 14th and didn’t really recall them.

That’s because Kaineng imploded after Thanksgiving due to drama caused by KR, KAIN, and SoS that caused two of the major guilds holding the server WvW efforts afloat to move to Dragonbrand.

So we were probably on Fergs on Dec 14th.

Honestly though, what have we (SoS) caused? >.>

I don’t think most of my guildmate can speak fluent English to understand what’s going on, not to mention stirring up drama.

Don’t blame them leaving on us, kthxbye

I’ll assign blame as I see fit and you are partially responsible for Kaineng’s utter collapse last month, though admittedly less culpable than Darxio and company.

You were, by your own admission, totally unreliable. The very moment a significant point gap appeared you guys would vanish from WvW, taking the servers only chance at doing anything in the Asian/Oceanic timeslot with you, and then proceed to complain about us losing.

That last bit has always been what I found to be particularly galling and obnoxious. Fair enough if you don’t want to play, but bloody hell don’t go around trying to pin failure on other people who were putting in just as much, if not more, effort as you.

DarkElvenChic.2618:

Hehe, I got here Dec. 14th and didn’t really recall them.

That’s because Kaineng imploded after Thanksgiving due to drama caused by KR, KAIN, and SoS that caused two of the major guilds holding the server WvW efforts afloat to move to Dragonbrand.

So we were probably on Fergs on Dec 14th.

Either a mesmer or a thief would be ideal if you’re looking at PvP, specifically WvW. They both provide team escapes and good rezzing capabilities.

Guardian, aura share d/d ele, another necro, or possibly even an engineer would work too. If less spectacularly.

And, of course, bloody near anything works in PvE.

Ah ok. So you rely on shatter, people blinding running through your glamour fields and presumably scepter 3 for confusion stacks and just take the blind on glamour for extra utility.

So it’s very much like your confusion shatter build with some traits swapped around then.

Kiriakulos.1690:

Healing power in soulreaping is about as useless.

Could someone enumerate our skills that actually scale with healing power? I’m having a tough time, all I can come up with is Regen from mark of blood and the 3 healing skills.

Well let’s see. There’s Deathly Invigoration and uh… oh yeah Leeching Venoms… no wait…

Sorry. That’s a thief trait. So uh…

That’s it really.

On the plus side we can do an automatic self combo with Foul Current, that’s gotta be worth something.

OH! Detonating Putrid Mark in an ele or ranger’s water field gives a scaling, non-regen heal.

Osicat.4139:

2nd spec is a glamour confusion support build who is invaluable for groupfighting and I aleays want atleast 1 in teamfights on my side. The spec lock a whole enemy zerg from attack without get puniched, it also defend friendly team by feedback and mass blinds. A timewarp give with rune of lyssa al boons to the team and a sigil of spread the boons give whole team a huge buff.

I’m interested in learning more about this. I’m assuming you use 20/0/0/20/30 yes? Every time I try to play that spec I feel like I’m having issues generating clones when mirror image is down and it bugs me.

Am I focusing too much on shattering or is there something I’m missing? Any other tips appreciated of course.

Several things.

Xruptor.3965:

I would like to take this time to point out a few things that some have said thus far. Although, a few of the posts have been motivating, I did find it a bit discomforting that everyone almost unanimously agreed with question #1. Yet, a few of you have suggested that even though this is the case; the profession as a whole isn’t that terribly flawed. It also has been suggested to work around the issues currently plaguing the profession. I will admit I do like a challenge, but it can only last so long if these so called bugs are rampant in the profession.

Every class has bugs. Go look at the stickies at the top of every class forum. If you avoid the pets there are very few that have any real qualitative effect on necro gameplay.

There was mention of Dagger a few times as being one if not the only useful weapon (Staff aside of course.). I’m not entirely sure why this is the case other then falling under the category of nerfed/bug or just plain needs a complete rework/rehaul. Still I find this very concerning.

It’s also plain false. Scepter/dagger is the default combination for any condition damage necromancer build and they work very well at what they do. The problem weapons are mainly axe (pitifully low auto-attack damage even with vuln stacks) and warhorn (because a painfully long casting time on your interrupt skill is bad).

Dagger’s main claim to fame is that it has far greater LF generation than any other weapon, but it’s only useful in melee power-centric builds which also happens to be where DS shines brightest. So it has the best synergy with the class mechanic, but that doesn’t make it the best weapon.

My general assessment and vibe of the responses I’ve gotten about Elementalists thus far in this post, I’ve translated in to this: (Please correct me if I’m wrong, which I may be. Yet this is the impression I got..)

“Elementalist are flavor of the month. There are a lot of them because they don’t suffer from much opportunity/negative skill costs. They can deal crazy damage and provide a ridiculous amount of support. If played well they can destroy mountains and part water in two.”

Of course I’m exaggerating and I did add a bit of humor, though I’m sure you got my point. I’m not for jumping on bandwagons and I do tend to play the underdog professions anyways. So I’m leaning ever so more towards the Necromancer.

There’s one thing wrong with your assessment, d/d eles do not, for the most part, do huge damage. They don’t burst people down like thieves, shatter mesmers, or even scepter/dagger eles do. Hell their biggest burst attack has a 3 and a half second cast time.

Their main advantage comes from being able to do good sustained damage while also being extremely hard to pin down and kill. It is an extremely forgiving spec and can easily compensate for multiple mistakes while being very able to capitalize on opponents mistakes. It is very noob friendly in other words. And it gets worse when you fight a competent one.

In terms of the DPS I’ve gotten conflicting responses. Those that did sound like the planets have to align and the sky turn purple before a Necromancer can deal decent damage. I really hope I misinterpreted these responses.

There are really only three things that can significantly hurt a necromancers ability to do damage, and two of them are directly under the players control. 1) Gearing poorly, 2) playing poorly, and 3) the bleed cap.

The 25 stack bleed cap is the only thing you cannot control that can seriously hamper your ability to dps. It will mostly hinder you in large scale PvE in Orr/dragon events. Its effects on dungeons, WvW, and sPvP are negligible unless you’ve grouped up with several other condition damage speced people.

6) Necromancers have higher base survivability than eles, true. But it’s not absolute. Ele survivability depends on putting a variety of pieces together. CD management, attunment recharge reduction, boon management, spec, gear. All things that can’t come together until level 80. But once they have everything put together their survivability easily surpasses necromancers.

Necros have great soaking abilities with their high base HP pool and regenerating ablative HP pool in DS, but that’s really about it. We don’t have Vigor. We don’t have blocks, evades, or Aegis. We don’t have great access to Stability or Protection. We don’t have the ability to run away if the fight goes poorly. Our healing is mediocre at best. Trying to build around things like high Weakness or Poison up time or HP leeching effects have large opportunity costs.

Well played d/d elementalists have vastly better healing, vastly better avoidance, better condition removal, and the ability to run away and reset the fight if they’re in danger of losing. They don’t have many opportunity costs, which is one of the reasons you see them bloody everywhere. They can have their cake, eat it too, and light it on fire for good measure.

All that being said, I do love my necromancer. I’m certainly a lot happier with it than I am with my warrior, phantasm mesmer, or staff ele.

Xruptor.3965:

It would appear that the Necromancer has a lot of DOOM AND GLOOM surrounding it on this forum. It really has shocked me at the amount of negativity the class has. Then again I’m not an idiot and I do know that the majority of people posts on forums because they have something negative to say. I can’t remember where I read this, but it’s something like 3% of an MMO’s population ever post on the forums or something. So I’m not expecting a whole lot One can hope though!

Complaining ad nauseum is the norm for MMO forums. If forum goers aren’t complaining about their class it’s probably because it needs to get nerfed. Which nicely segues into your first question.

1) There’s a reason the ele forums are so bloody pleased with themselves all the time, it’s because they only talk about dagger/dagger builds. Go try to find topics about focus or staff builds and you’ll see the same sort of things you see here on the necro forums, though perhaps not as much pessimism.

Pessimism that is well earned by the necro community I feel. An entire line of premiere class skills are utterly worthless due to mechanics issues. The vaunted class gimmick is a) buggy, b) varies wildly in usefulness according to build, and c) has an extremely obnoxious UI. Developers have routinely ignored necromancer issues even while they post on other class forums to tell them what fixes they’re working on. Then you have good old Jonny Sharp posting stuff that is both weirdly incongruent with common experience and is sort of insulting flippant as well, like the well known “master death shroud” line or the balance philosophy screed from the December patch notes.

Of course, there’s always sour grapes and plain old idiocy as well. Which is fully in accordance with Niven’s 16th law: There is no cause so right that one cannot find a fool following it. You’ll just have to decide what to filter out yourself. The class does have limitations, but so long as you understand and accept them it’s a viable and competitive class in (nearly*) every part of the game

*I make no claims about tPvP ‘cause I don’t play it.

2) Eles, along with thieves, are one of the only classes in the game that get a lot of use out of their class mechanic without any heavy investment and can get even more bonuses with said heavy investment.

Necros are not in the same boat. Death Shroud is greatly limited by two major things: Life Force generation and stat distribution. LF generation is heavily dependent on what weapon you use, with main hand dagger being far and away the best and scepter being abysmal. Additionally, the abilities you get in DS are very biased towards power heavy builds. Leaving condition speced necros out in the cold.

On the mobility front necros fall squarely into the ‘ok’ tier. You can easily get to where you’re going in a hurry, but getting out of a sticky situation… not so much. Pretty much the opposite of the mesmer, which has terrible mobility but great escapability

As for build variety, take a look around the forums and you’ll see plenty of them.

3) First I’ve ever heard about necros doing poor damage. Though it is true that most necro builds tend to do better pressure than burst. But I’ve still killed many thieves and even eles and mesmers who don’t respect the power of my wells when backed up with over 3k attack and vulnerability stacking.

4) There’s no denying it, pets blow. In many cases they are actually a detriment instead of a boon. If you want to play with pets go play a ranger. Their pets are awful too, but less so.

5) Necromancers are a great class to have in WvW. Power builds are good roamers, condition builds are a solid addition to any team, and more specialized builds like Mr. Freeze can do wonders in large fights. The biggest weakness of the class in WvW low escapability. If your team breaks and tries to run away you’ll often find that you’ll get caught by the myriad of thieves and d/d eles and die horribly.

Which, coincidentally, is why you see so many bloody thieves and d/d eles. Nobody else can pick and choose their engagements like them. Nobody else can run away and live to tell about it like they can. And nobody else can chase people like they can.

As for sPvP, I personally do well. But pug sPvP is full of idiots who have no idea how to play and spazz out when they encounter a build they aren’t prepared to face. A lot of eles in pug sPvP deal with boon striping very poorly for instance. Again, I won’t talk about tPvP because I don’t play it.

(continued next post)

First things first, Opportunist does almost jack all for you in this spec. With the 20% boon duration from Tactics and the 20% signet cd reduction you can have just shy of perma Fury by cycling only SoR and FGJ. Literally about 2 seconds off.

Blademaster or Unsuspecting Foe would be better choices if you’re intent on keeping the 20 points in Arms.

Which you might not want to do. For hammer Arms is a weak tree if you’re not going all the way to pick up the Grandmaster traits. You could easily lose the 20 points in Arms and either put some in Tactics for shout healing or go full out in Disciple to grab wonderful traits like Mobile Strikes, Adrenal Reserves, Inspiring Shouts, and the redoubtable Fast Hands.

The lost Precision can easily be compensated for by food choices, Maintenance Oils or just forgotten altogether. Full exotic Knight’s armor and an exotic Knight’s hammer will give you 27% crit before Fury is applied.

As for runes and sigils, I personally use full Superior Runes of Melandru (used with Leek and Poultry Soup to help mitigate condition damage), Superior Sigil of Blood on my hammer and Superior Sigils of Strength and Bloodlust on my sword and warhorn respectively

That looks exactly like icon for the proc from Runes of the Vampire. You aren’t using those are you?

To quote the thread at the top of the forum:

Tooltip Problems________________________________________________

1. (NT0001) Spite trait Spiteful Talisman changes the description of “Spinal Shivers” to “Inflicts Chill and Vulnerability on your foe”. However, this is inaccurate, as it stills “Chills your foe and remove three boons”.

Known bug.

MattWuerffel.9743:

Donari.5237:

It looks like the nagging question still unanswered is how the tokens will be stored.

The new currency earned from daily and monthly category completion is an account wide currency that is visible in your inventory, next to your karma. No inventory space required!

Any word on if we can expect dungeon tokens and WvW badges to utilize this same system something in the future? Maybe even give us account wide gold and karma pools? ’Cause all of that would be a great quality of life improvement.

dulfy.1493:

http://dulfy.net/2013/01/17/gw2-dev-livestream-jan-17-transcript/

transcript

We are encourage people […] to break away from large mass mentality of zerging

transcript

WvW is about large scale massive battle mentality where individual players are not as important

Anyone else think these statements are hilariously contradictory?

zastari.1730:

That’s me, the FOTM mesmer with some spec I made up

I usually rep kitten or OG now. OG runs 5mans without me a lot (I’m not an original member), but I think they were missing a 5th for the fight so they asked me to join.

I figured since you had the exact same model. You do pretty good. You’ve caught us off guard with your shatter bombs more than a few times in general open field fights. Certainly a lot better than I do with my mesmer these days. I want my old phantasm spec to go back to not sucking..

dreztina.4820:

Oozo.7856:

Get over yourself, d/d e.

Nobody in AD claims to be the best at anything. Unlike some others in this teir.

BTW, the NoQQ elem who beat you used to be someone we fought against when they were on Kaineng. Their group was better than OG. A guild group we fought against from NSP called PAXA. Yup, better than OG. Envy from FC, better than OG.

Keep on building that self-perpetuated myth that Maguuma has the most skilled players in GW2 though. The rest of us will sit and laugh at you and recognize that all servers have skilled players on them.

Considering I’m not geared for 1v1 and never use my elite 1v1 either, even you guys in AD should be able to get a kill now on me now and then.

I’m still waiting to see those better guilds, though. I’ve never seen OG turn down a fight, even if they weren’t sure they’d win, unlike certain other guilds.

You must not have been around the other night when your guildies refused to fight until your shatter mesmer got online.

Speaking of your little pink haired asura mesmer, is he the same guy that used to be in iRez? Had some decent fights with him in the EBay jumping puzzle a few weeks back.

lcc.9374:

I guess basing ranks through kills would be the lesser of 2 evils

Basing it off objectives would make it really bad on the losing server. Seen quite a bit of 12hour 600/30/30 matches these few weeks. Arent pretty.
And whats the chance of the winning side to actually give up their possesions anyway? Id bet it wont happen.

On the other hand though. If it was based off kills. Me as a guardian would most likely look at the staff elementalist tagging everyone and curse my class.
But i guess i could live with that.

An interesting idea would be to tie the majority of rank advancement to a WvW daily and then give only small amounts for kills/caps/whatever.

It’d also be kinda cool if they revamped the badge system so that you effectively bought ranks and perks (like being able to buy exotic sets with karma like in Orr or additional supply carrying capacity) with badges.

Hell, combine the two ideas together and have the WvW daily give like 50 badges.

I wonder how hilariously unbalanced and/or worthless the RAs will be. And if RR isn’t account wide I’ll be severely annoyed.

Oh well, maybe they’ll have something that could be confused with, in bad lighting, server pride sometime within the next 6 months . How exciting.
Of course there will be mass transfers right before the patch that will probably screw up everything for the next year. But hey, you can’t have everything.

Hmm, I’ve always looked at skipping trash mobs and other non-exploitative ways of speeding up dungeon runs as almost a game into itself. It feels like as much of a triumph over the game systems as turning the critters into pulp, and has the added benefit of being shorter too.

Anything that increases my fun while simultaneously allowing me to do additional fun things in the same time span is automatically win-win in my book.

As an aside, and purely out of curiosity Robert, do you have stance on the idea that avoiding combat can be as satisfying and personally rewarding as combat?

Mich.3981:

saiyr.3071:

Owning our half of the map on both of your borderlands = 2v1?

lol. you can’t convince anyone that there isn’t an alliance between DR and MG. It has been made very obvious at this point.

Would this be the same alliance that Mags and BP had last week? Stop jumping on the cross and realize that this stuff happens all the time. DR is in the same position BP is in here. Neither server has the right combination of population, morale, and coordination to actually attack Mags head on so we either have to fight each other or roll over and do something else for the whole week.

Or we could both gang up on Maguuma, but that will never happen because people are too pig headed to actually stick to such a plan and pug zergs don’t like that level of adversity.

This is the mentality that ANet has bred with their bloody ill-considered ranking nonsense.

xxxzavulonxxx.8413:

Why is there so many QQbirds in this thread? Does it solve any problems your servers may have in T5?

Same reason people on Maguuma were complaining about EBay zerging/night capping/[insert whatever here] oh say… 2 weeks ago thereabouts.

How odd. I figured it was something that wasn’t removed properly given it’s lack of documentation.

Also, I know you probably don’t want to comment on future plans too much, but could you perhaps give your magic 8 ball a shake and tell us if there’s any possibility of getting badges changed into some form that doesn’t take up so much of my precious inventory space?

Maybe make it like gold or karma but only account wide? (Also, why isn’t gold account wide? I hate deal with that deposit thing on my bank.)

Thanks for posting Mike. Would you mind answering another question while you’re at it?

-Is dropping siege blueprints for other characters to pick up an intended function? It seems very bizarre.

Another winning idea from testpig. It’s almost like I’m back on the WAR boards.

Sumwun.3846:

I have a small collection of his commanders tossing fits.

You should share. I’ve always thought that Sir “6 Golems to Take a Tower” Morningstar and his crew of madmen deserved a larger spotlight.

Sumwun.3846:

do you know what sound a dog makes when it’s about to vomit?

[PRO]?

Sylv.5324:

I understand that y’all were very much down to the wire when it came to releasing Sylvari due to the redesign, and that that likely impacted the number of choices we do have.

If any of the races got hosed when it comes to character creation options it is the asura (and/or human if you want your character to be anything but asian, white, or some sort of plastic japanese love doll). It even seems likely that the reason they have such limited options can be directly attributed to the amount of resources & attention spent on the sylvari redesigns given their simultaneous beta release dates.

Check it out sometime. Sylvari even have more sodding ear options than the asura do. Bloody shame that.

Regardless of that, and to stay somewhat on topic, I think the real missed opportunity with the sylvari comes with their lore, not their models.

It really is terrible that the sylvari look a whole hell of a lot more alien and strange than the lore actually makes them. There is a lot of cool tropes and ideas that could be used with a ‘new’ species emerging into an already realized world, but I don’t really see them used to any great effect.

The only conceit I see with any regularity is the idea that they are ‘naive.’ Which I despise. Naive carries too many connotations of childishness and, by proxy, innocence, both of which have an annoying tendency to be used as a shield against criticism for when characters are acting like utter berks. The kender in D&D are a good example of this, a player race with the express permission of the lore to be a complete troll to the rest of the party without breaking character with their ‘innocence & naivete.’

A better descriptor would have been ‘ignorant.’ The sylvari are ignorant of the world at large and the sociopolitical working of the other major races. But we don’t really see that with anywhere. The trait isn’t nearly as pronounced as the norns “beer and everlasting glory” line of thinking, or the asurans “mad science & poltical backstabbing will win the day” theme, or even the charrs “we love meat/fighting/shooting thing and hate gods” schtick.

Instead, for some reason, the sylvari often seem to come off as vaguely noble. Not for any real reason mind, but just as a kind of generality. It gives them a kind of haughty “we’re better than you” vibe, which is only enhanced by the bloody storylines that keep using sylvari characters as a fulcrum for events based around how they aren’t burdened by bickering and squabbling like their non-sylvari peers are.

Which is rather fitting I suppose, since they are the ‘elf’ analog in this game, but it seems diametrically opposed to the whole “brand new race seeking their place in the world” thing.

It’s all rather sickeningly Mary Sue-ish really.

Spifnar.4712:

I’d also rather see the option to trigger protection, rather than have it happen automatically, but I can’t think of a skill to link it to that would work well.

I’ve always thought the best way to give warriors non-proc protection would be to remove the “+90 toughness with shield” part of Shield Master with “shield skills grant you x seconds of protection after casting.”

It’d be very strong with lots of boon duration, but to get really high levels of duration you need to mix and match rune sets and with warrior’s extremely heavy reliance on rune sets to manage conditions that isn’t a trivial choice

Chaster Sharpshooter.3640:

And people have been asking me what sets me off in WvW lately? The reason is simple, I don’t fight in losing war. If I do want to fight, I fight to win. During the match with DR, I foreseen the problem that Kaineng have, lack in EU timezone. That alone really will set us back alot of points. If you guys were to dig up my previous post, you’d find about my rock-paper-scissor theory. So the only time when you guys see SoS in the battle field, was during server reset, and all the way until DR catches over the score. That’s the mark telling me that there’s no chance of recovery. Then we go back to do our own scheduled guild events, etc.

So basically what you’re saying is that if you cannot ride other people’s coattails to victory you would rather not play at all.

Such a great recipe for success. No wonder Kaineng always did so well.

Oozo.7856:

This is something I can see as working both ways. A small group can still beat a larger group if they react faster and are built to help prevent stomps and secure revives.

There’s an upper limit on that though, once you’re facing a critical numbers advantage there is almost nothing you can do vs the zerg. They have too much firepower for you to stomp reliably and downed health is too high and too easily healed for killing them with ranged damge to be an option.

And you can bump into it rather fast. Too fast imo. Even just 10 vs 40 can be damn near impossible without extending the ever living hell out of said zerg.

Something should be done. Zergs have enough advantage already. Personally I’d like to see downed health reduced to sPvP levels and diminishing returns on multiple players rezzing. Oh, and AoE caps increased.

I’d also like to see them balance the bloody downed state. That’d be nice too. I mean in the 150 hours I’ve played my warrior I’ve seen Vengeance proc twice.

Yeah, if you could give us any hint on the direction you guys are taking the warrior that’d be great.

Jonny’s “need to ask for ally help in order to keep themselves free of hampering conditions” line from the patch notes left a sour taste in a many a mouth.

I’m skeptical, given that the last time one of the devs commented on the Fast Hands bug he was utterly wrong is describing how it actually worked.

I wouldn’t be surprised at all if only part of it was fixed.

This is the build I used, and while the poster significantly overstates the build’s tankiness it’s still pretty bloody good.

My one real piece of advice with the lightning hammer is to avoid dredge if at all possible.

Oglaf.1074:

Are you for real? Berserker’s Might is the best 10 trait points any Warrior can spend!

That’s Berserker’s Power. Berserker’s Might is the Strength Grandmaster trait that gives you Berserker Stance every time you have more than 5 stacks of might on a 45c icd.

Nonlinear.9823:

Yeah it is super bad. Probably one of the warriors worst traits.

I dunno, Short Temper and Berserker’s Might would probably get my vote for worst. Or maybe Thrill of the Kill.

JonPeters.5630:

Why not, Signet of Air needs it too

Could I convince you to throw some of that love to Warrior’s Sprint as well?

Oglaf.1074:

What are norns?

Norns are impossible to describe. One might as well ask “What are birds?”

So you want to be in the scrum eh? There are 3 things you need as a warrior in the fray: toughness, a way to deal with conditions, and Mobile Strikes.

Toughness is fairly easy to cover. The Defense tree is one of our better trait lines all told. I personally go 30 deep and use Sure-Footed, Shield-Master, and Defy Pain as my baseline traits. Swapping them out as needed when I change weapons. I also use the P/V/T armor from WvW/Orr/AC and swap between Knights and the Rare P/V/T jewelry from the WvW vendor depending on my weapon loadout.

Conditions are less straight forward. To my mind warriors only have 3 really viable routes to condition management. You can either slot 6 Runes of the Soldier and use Shout utilities to cleanse conditions, use 6 Runes of Lyssa along with Signet of Stamina and Signet of Rage so you have 2 decently low cd full purges, or you can use 6 Runes of Melandru along with a food like Poultry & Leek Soup to get around -60% condition duration.

• Anything else just doesn’t provide enough protection to survive for long when you’re in melee. Trying to sustain yourself only using our built in condition removal abilities, like Shake It Off, Quick Breathing, Signet of Stamina, and Shrug It Off, will get you killed in a hurry. They work nicely to augment the above setups, but are anemic on their own.

• Personally I use the duration reduction method because I much prefer Stances to Shouts. Endure Pain and Balanced Stance have both gotten me out of a lot of bad spots that nothing else could have. Plus Balanced Stance and Frenzy have secured me a lot of kills and stomps.

Mobile Strikes is pretty self explanatory. Nothing can screw you over quite like root does and nothing else in the warriors bag of tricks will allow you to remove roots with such targeted precision on such a potentially short cooldown. All other forms of condition removal (except Warhorn 4) either take time or random chance to deal with root. With Mobile Strikes slotted your Sword 2 and Shield 4 both become root removers. As an added bonus the Disciple line is quite good, Fast Hands and Signet Mastery are both traits I find hard to do without.

Apart from these 3 things everything else in melee is somewhat open ended and you can do as you like.

Two things: A) You’d probably do better posting on the warrior forum for advice. B) You haven’t specified what sort of role you want to fill/weapons you want to use. Nor have said what sort of environment you want to play in.

We really need those last two pieces of info to help you.

They’re ALL full of the same posts over and over though. Have been for weeks.

Shooting the kitten with people who we can’t normally talk to in game and a little drama here and there is the whole reason any of these threads exist. Can’t really talk too much about fights and stuff unless there’s a video or screenshots to go along with it.

Be careful man. You’ll give people ToA flashbacks. You don’t want that blood on your hands now do you?

Honestly, with how unbalanced, obnoxious, and plain old dull underwater combat is in this game I don’t think you’ll find much support.

LieutenantGoogle.7326:

In other words 8 more weeks of the same thing.

And then once Feb rolls around if the head developer sees his shadow it’s another 6 months of no updates.

In other news, saying you have something to say but that you won’t say it is hardly inspiring news man. I’m sure you’re aware of that. And that this is annoying treatment is more a matter of policy than personal grudge-work, but it’s still almost as bad as no news at all.

I wonder if the mods will actually allow these OT threads to exist. Seems like once every tier gets around to making two threads each week it would really clutter up the front page.

But yeah, that last thread was starting to get really fun. Too bad even after they locked it they’re STILL deleting posts out of it.

Oozo.7856:

The fight by the tree? Next to the rock?

Yeah, the one near the zone portal to the land of condensed milk and honey bunches of oats.

I thought about “Devona Pests” or “Devona’s Pestilence” but I didn’t think they were very catchy.

To be on topic. So how about that one fight with the people at the thing where we totally owned just now?!