Guild Wars 2

I can see one major flaw. As your system has no ppt and is entirely based on player kills from what I can gather, there will be a bias towards trying to get solo players to leave the map and for the largest guilds to only attract and recruit the very best players. I can just see the abuse aimed at any players not in the guild being told to leave the map they are ruining the score.

Top guild groups could then jump into, say, a half full silver map which is mainly pugs, wipe them until they quit the map (no reason to hold anything, so no reason to attack a structure either), withdraw, pick next map, rinse, repeat.

In fact, a guild could organise around several different squad sizes so they can fit into any size map and fill it up – at which point they can rack up the points against less organised resistance. Add a couple more guilds in for good measure and call it a ‘server group’.

Eventually gold tier would mainly consist of one mega guild against another, with no other guild having a realistic chance of fighting their way near the top, as any good players and leaders are likely to be poached by the top two guilds. It’s exactly what happened in another game that I used to play.

So after a few months it’s back to stacked whatever and some gamed ‘leader boards’ which don’t measure anything except the ability to tag kills or the size of your guild or the size of your server guild alliance- which is pretty much where we are now.

As there doesn’t seem to be any wvw devs or any sort of team at all, and practically no pretense of even addressing the most basic of issues like glitching in to keeps and towers , any suggestions along the lines of ‘redo wvw’ are a bit of a waste of finger time.

I’d love to be more positive and say I’m hopeful they have something in the wings and a team working on it and they will relaunch wvw mark 2 at some point, but there is precisely no evidence for that and indeed we don’t even have a wvw lead dev any more since the last one left.

So basically encourage solo play and rofl stomping by a well formed squad of bounty hunters.

Sorry support players, no bounty for you….

Besides the fact the chances of this ever happening are less than me winning the lottery, I don’t really see the point of it.

Why would anyone enter with more then the absolute minimum? Why would anyone enter with 10 times the amount of someone else? There is zero incentive to do so.

Not forgetting if they ever brought this live all the non-bounty hunters would happily kill anything that moves on the map and destroy any chance of having a 1v1. Are you saying a non-bounty hunter who kills a bounty hunter gets money or just a price on their head that they can’t see?

60 man blob kills a bounty hunter with 1g on their head- does every member of the mob get a 0.015 price on their head?

Maybe they could bring this in for spvp so they can bunker even more…

Dawdler.8521:

They already have it with the reward tracks.

Well in theory at least. 5 runs of the bitterfrost path get you berries for an ascended armor piece if I read the rewards right. Thats probably a weeks job for someone farming EB/EoTM WvW. Dont know if it gives enough of the unbound magickitten currency though.

But still… You can get it. Is that not a longterm goal?

What path? Oh the new one. Is it already unlocked or do you have to complete some mind numbingly NPC talk heavy pve in order to unlock it, then spend forever to get to the end of one run of the path?

There should have been a way of getting Ascended in wvw as soon as ascended came out, same with Legendary stuff, but wvw is so far down their list I’m sure they no longer even consider it in 99.9% of their decisions.

I love portal bombs. They are my favourite source of easy bags. And best of all, they pop out right near you so no running around, just wipe them and yum yum bags.

Deli.1302:

There was a vote.

People voted for it.

Democracy kittenes.

That vote is about as useful as people who sign petitions to keep a local pub open, or as a pub, and swear blind they are either regulars or will go there often. Loss making pub is forced to stay open, hardly any of those that said it was a wonderful place and they would use it actually do so.

They should have tracked those that voted for it, and force them to have to log in to it if they log into wvw and stay in it for at least one hour before being allowed on the other maps.

Then have another vote about keeping it or ditching it with the above rule applying.

Will be bandwaggoned. Game it so all your friends take all the spots in Diamond league then just run in circles all day backcapping and hey presto, you and your friends are top of the guild ‘leaderboards’ and all top ranked Diamond whatevers without showing any skill at all.

How does this new system attract players to lower servers? People will always go towards the more successful guilds and servers so your system just accelerates this drift by making it free.

It’s a terrible idea that just won’t work unless there is some reward system that can’t be gamed to encourage people to join the roaming maps or lesser population ones.

And that’s before we even start on coverage.

It’s with some of these top end damage skills (and CoR, that is still a very OP brainless skill) that you realise the armor effect is broken as it doesn’t cap or mitigate damage enough and you may as well be wearing a bikini instead of 3000+ armor rating for all the good it does you.

I’m glad you’ve pointed this out. Another reason for avoiding LS. Or pve for that matter. Having limited time to play and not knowing how long I will be on for means I’ll never bother with that part of the LS.

My personal gripe is the tedious long NPC non-skippable verbiage that seems to spew forth in every ls story part. And can’ t be skipped, even if you’re doing it for the 2nd, 3rd, 4th, 20th time. Makes me tab out or log out.

I’d buff the trap so that not only are thiefs revealed for 30 seconds but upon triggering the trap are reduced to 25% HP- think of it as a reverse gank, so instead of a thief freezing you to the spot and macroing you down to 25% HP inside 0.25 seconds or throwing endless condi on you or being totally invisible, they get to experience the other side of life. And their movement speed is reduced to 25% too.

Given it takes 4 seconds to deploy and costs so much supply, these traps should be much more effective and cover a wider area rather than a thing strip.

Or just fix stealth so that in order to be in stealth you have to move steathily, ie slowly, not disappear off the map at lightspeed.

They will probably bring this idea in, as an extension of the account wide bags, so 500 gems per slot and you can have a maximum of 20 across your screen somewhere…

Too much talking. I actually tab out the game now when the NPCs start talking, and go find something useful to do with my time.

And yet more items to clog up my bags with, getting ridiculous now.

Mordachai.1896:

shrugs I had the same issue so i sat my toon down, had a chat with a friend and before i knew it the event was over and i could get the story going. A little patience gets you a long way.

Not everyone logs on and decides to spend their limited leisure time being forced to wait and chatting with ‘friends’. Some people might only have 30 minutes or an hour before it’s the kid’s bedtime or other RL issues pull you away, so not being able to access the new story when you log on is an issue.

It’s got very little/nothing to do with patience.

I’ll just +1 Swagger’s responses.

In particular, I don’t think you could kill off wvw any faster than if you replaced gear with the pvp system.

McKenna Berdrow.2759:

If players on the bigger worlds don’t transfer but other worlds do, we could still end up with better pieces to create more balanced matchups. For example say World 1 is 120% of our population goal and World 2 is 100% and our smallest world is 50%. If we were to link the smallest world with World 2, then World 2 would be at 150% and now is much bigger than World 1 creating a matchup that isn’t competitive. However, if the smallest world split their population creating a new small world that is 20% we would have a better world to link with World 2.

Tiers would still remain the same as they are currently. We wouldn’t be adding new tiers along with the new worlds.

You’re really missing the point.

A decent wvw guild could fill one of your servers, especially if you shrink the already way too low population limit per map. They would then ‘discourage’ anyone else from joining and force others to leave.

You could then stack 150% randoms against this server, but this guild server will win every single time.

You are missing the huge influence guilds have in successful large scale fights and also smaller raids etc and appear to think that population= solution.

Creating new worlds and assuming anyone would willingly transfer to them- why would they? Leave your established world that you know and love to join some random underpopulated world without even a ts? for what? to be roflstomped by every organised guild and server?

Why would a large guild move to one of these servers other than to dominate it?

What we need is a completely new map design. Scrap borderlands, and have 5 way fights on one massive map a bit like EB but with five teams each with their own area and a penalty for each object you hold outside your own area so it becomes more and more difficult to hold objects the more you have and dominating against 4 other servers is impossible.

If the software couldn’t support enough players in one area then make it more interesting, and have two copies of the map instead of one so each team has two areas to defends and 8 to attack.

Then communication and organisation will be needed and no server could dominate a match for long.

Contested should mean some damage has been done to it. You can set this at 1% of the walls or gate. One solitary person should not disable a waypoint for 3 minutes just from waving at the keep as they pass by.

Reverence.6915:

Kamara.4187:

I got to see the cannons in action this morning. They were an excellent counter to a massive zerg. Usually when you are faced with an enemy that is like a huge red tide rushing in on your “smaller numbers” you could kiss anything you were holding goodbye.

Its a game changer. Will it be exploited in the near future? If it can be done you can take it to the bank that players will try lol.

I wanted to add that it didn’t help every time, but sometimes it could turn the tide. (bad pun intended :P)

That’s nice and all when you’re defending, but it just becomes stupidly obnoxious when a large zerg uses it against you while you’re the smaller force. It legit renders any kind of counterplay impossible due to the chill stacking. When you have 60-70 people camping 10+ cannons, there’s nothing you can do but give up the structure.

Whatever happened to using your brain when attacking?

Trebs have greater range, catapults can be placed to not get hit, split your forces so the enemy have to defend in multiple places (zergs aren’t good at splitting), ninja other places to destroy siege and be ready to die a few times against much greater numbers.

If 60-70 people are just in one structure then send a team off to cap something else whilst keeping their entire zerg busy.

So for the small minority that raid, they get to aim for legendary armor that animates, causing even more lag in large scale fights in wvw. At least we’ll know who to blame for the next lag spikes…raid guilds that visit wvw.

Shame it’s not available to the mode where it would be most useful: wvw, where changing stats and builds is useful.

Story has too much unskippable talking which means I can’t face redoing it with another toon. Once I have heard it once (and that’s too much really, I tab out during most of the monologs), I have zero desire to be forced to listen to it again and again.

Map is good, apart from the JP, which is horrible, and which I have to do to to collect my last 4 tokens. It’s just all the same featureless red fiery stuff without much definition. And I can’t get where to jump for the second check point, then I have to start again, not my favourite thing in the world as when I have to log off (frequently) you lose the checkpoints, etc..

atheria.2837:

Swagger.1459:

Lahmia.2193:

You gotta evolve man. Stop complaining and find a way to counter. Because there are ways to counter already.

I have a much better idea… how about anet, who takes in millions per month, devote the effort to work on professions and create some different cc rule sets for pvp modes.

How about your suggestion be across the board in all game modes?

Players should not be able to be hit by any MORE than three other players, thereby removing the CC from the equation and replacing it with a far more skill and cooperation based fight.

How about that, Anet?

So, we’ll all wander around in super tanky builds not being able to make any impression on each other’s blob and all fighting will become pointless?

MaLeVoLenT.8129:

apharma.3741:

Infusion.7149:

There should be a free HoT legendary if you get Ultimate Dominator, honestly or AT LEAST the ones on the Trading Post.

Each maxed out title in WvW should give an ascended weapon/armor box. It’s essentially the only thing relevant besides ascended trinkets.

I.e. Defender of camp/keep/tower/SMC = Defender’s box of armor, Assaulter of camp/keep tower/SMC = Assaulter’s Box of weapons/armor

Then have X maxed WvW titles = legendary backpack.

Current titles:
Ultimate Dominator Get 250,000 total kills in WvW.
Yakslapper Kill 2,500 enemy supply caravans.
Leader of the Yak Succesfully escort 2,500 supply caravans.
Fixer-Upper Spend 10,000 supply on repairs.
Unstoppable Force Capture 7,500 objectives.
Unhappy Camper Capture 2,500 total supply camps.
Tower Toppler Capture 2,000 total towers.
Plays for Keeps Capture 1,000 total keeps.
Kingmaker Capture Stonemist Castle 200 times.
Immovable Object Defend 3,000 objectives.
Camp Counselor Defend 500 total supply camps.
Keep Guard Defend 1000 keeps.
Tower Guard Defend 750 total towers.
Royal Guard Defend Stonemist Castle 500 times.

Then have reward tracks for ascended trinkets/backpacks. (Bloodstone fen / ember bay reward tracks do okay though)

Except people kill traded in OS to get ultimate dominator and excessive loot. I don’t know anyone that is even close to ultimate dominator from normal WvW even playing most evenings for nearly 4 years.

Not saying some haven’t got it legit through pressing 1 on their lootstick guards when massively outnumbering other groups, just not anyone I personally know.

I have Ultimate Dominator and theres at least 10 people with it on my server that all got it legit. We didn’t even play EoTM to do it. We played WvW normally.

UD is the worst one to base it on. Because basically to get it by blobbing and tagging everything that moves, and it rewards frontliners much more than support players, higher tiers over lower, more bandwagonning server hopping guilds than other players.

I’m not sure exactly how you’d design some way of obtaining it that would be fair across all servers and participation modes in wvw- maybe if they release a new 5 sided (one) mega map they could look at designing in a mechanism.

At present, I can’t think of a sensible way of making it obtainable in wvw which is fair to all wvw regulars.

5 way map with central objective as well as 2 towers and a keep each and 2 camps each. Mobile siege (moves slowly, can’t be ported or speeded up, very low hp whilst moving compared to fixed in position).

More objectives held gives you a penalty to all stats, so it’s almost impossible to cap the whole map. Capping whole map grants TEQ like boxes and gold, etc to all that participated in wvw that week.

Map is reset upon domination. Next match the winner from the previous week starts the match with a penalty to all stats. Maximum 10 ‘teams’ per region. max players per team on map 100. All players near an enemy structure will be revealed to the whole map. Transfers only allowed to losing teams, one transfer per account per 13 weeks.

Obviously a whole new wvw experience and something that will never happen.

To the poster a few above, I do know how to play against thieves- unless there are two or three of them plus a mes and a necro or an engi and they just permanently make each other disappear then burst on recharge without you being able to see them.

It’s not a L2P issue- I just don’t like the mechanic of stealth in this game (or any class) as it has no penalty.

I don’t really have a problem dealing with anything one to one on my support ele, I just ignore them for the most part whilst making my way to the nearest safety as staff ele isn’t a good build to fight against solo builds on (unless I change my build entirely).

JahCool.3812:

Baldrick.8967:

JahCool.3812:

It’s also like this. Because of all the power creep classes in HoT almost all of them can melt a thief in a few seconds. Stealth and dodges are your most important tools to prevent melting of course every thief will use those tools every chance they get. Do not expect them to just stand there and give you easy kills. Example is this. If you are a revenant are you not gonna spam sword 2 every chance you get? If you take away stealth for thieves then let just anet delete the class. As if all the nerfs they got isnt enough. And i bet anet is actually believing all this QQ about thieves being OP cause of guys who cant, once again, l2p against thieves

I’d have no problem if they just deleted the thiefs as a class. It’s a very badly implemented class with zero penalty whilst in stealth and zero penalty for reveal. If ‘stealth’ actually meant you had to sneak around to not be detected then great. And the classic thief response of ‘wave your weapon around and hope to contact’ whilst they await cooldowns and pop back out at full HP to have another go with their macro whilst your defences are all still on cooldown or you’re still regaining HP from the last macro having blown your main heal on the 15k damage from the first one…

Personally I find thiefs annoying just because they can pop in and out of stealth at will, plus dodge like it’s going out of fashion when you can see them, whilst moving around like a pinball.

Not many can kill me unless they bring friends (which they usually do) or get really lucky on their first macro when I’m not paying attention as i tend to run quite tanky support builds in wvw, but the whole stealth mechanic plays wrong for me. There should be a penalty in the form of slower movement speed so stealth= sneak or be noticed.

Omg. I hope you’re just trolling bro. Cause if you’re not then you’re hopeless. Good luck. May Dwayna bless you.

Not hopeless, if you read my post you’ll see they don’t cause me much of an issue on their own against my non-solo builds.

It’s just in an ideal world I’d remove the class or totally rework the cheese oops I mean stealth mechanic to have benefits AND costs.

It’s very annoying against stealth classes when you lose target and they pop back out, press ‘target’ key and it targets some random piece of wall/door/creature, in fact anything but the pesky thief wailing on you and by the time you manage to click on him he’s popped back into stealth….

Actually, it’s pretty annoying full stop.

JahCool.3812:

It’s also like this. Because of all the power creep classes in HoT almost all of them can melt a thief in a few seconds. Stealth and dodges are your most important tools to prevent melting of course every thief will use those tools every chance they get. Do not expect them to just stand there and give you easy kills. Example is this. If you are a revenant are you not gonna spam sword 2 every chance you get? If you take away stealth for thieves then let just anet delete the class. As if all the nerfs they got isnt enough. And i bet anet is actually believing all this QQ about thieves being OP cause of guys who cant, once again, l2p against thieves

I’d have no problem if they just deleted the thiefs as a class. It’s a very badly implemented class with zero penalty whilst in stealth and zero penalty for reveal. If ‘stealth’ actually meant you had to sneak around to not be detected then great. And the classic thief response of ‘wave your weapon around and hope to contact’ whilst they await cooldowns and pop back out at full HP to have another go with their macro whilst your defences are all still on cooldown or you’re still regaining HP from the last macro having blown your main heal on the 15k damage from the first one…

Personally I find thiefs annoying just because they can pop in and out of stealth at will, plus dodge like it’s going out of fashion when you can see them, whilst moving around like a pinball.

Not many can kill me unless they bring friends (which they usually do) or get really lucky on their first macro when I’m not paying attention as i tend to run quite tanky support builds in wvw, but the whole stealth mechanic plays wrong for me. There should be a penalty in the form of slower movement speed so stealth= sneak or be noticed.

I recently tried out ranger again for a laugh (I used to main ranger when wvw first came out), and find it just lacklustre in any sort of zerg situation. It is fun for soloing around and capping camps or with a couple others taking unguarded towers or even small scale fights, but as soon as the numbers increase I’m jumping on to my ele which just has way more strengths and contribution to make.

I’d rather thy removed the tokens from it, so I didn’t have to spend hours doing something I hate (JP’s) in order to complete the collection for something I’d like to have.

For someone my age this JP is the perfect precursor to what certain religions depict hell as.

Leave whatever bandwagon server who are on and move down a tier or two.

No blobs. No lag. No fun either, but you can’t have everything!

It’s a lot harder to play without H0T, and if you want to be more useful in wvw then HoT is the way to go, like most professions.

Build a staff ele and remember that water is the best element you have in a zerg situation- spamming 1 can keep people alive, and water fields are there to be thrown down and blasted by you and others.

Playing ele badly is what I see a lot of people do- staying in fire doing some damage whilst half your zerg dies for lack of a water field isn’t smart play, so make sure you are in the zerg group as it helps watching hP bars and helps time your switches. Water 2 is also fun to throw around (and a lot more use than most fire spells). MS is good for finishing off multiple downed players:-)

I built my staff HoT ele quite tanky with boon duration runes but it still has good damage and can happily run with the front of the zerg.

My pre HoT ele relies more on armor of earth and lightening flash and mist form to escape, along with ether renewal for the heal to help remove those pesky condis, but I can really notice a huge difference between it and my decked out HoT ele.

As for duelling, not a thing for me on a staff ele, but you can bore people to death with decent rotations/healing.

Don’t make the mistake of going full zerk unless you’re running with a guild group and that’s what they want.

Traveller runes aren’t bad for pre HoT staff ele.

Buy Some Apples.6390:

Loot is where the zerg is.

It’s really hard to get scouts these days, but this again boils down to WvW neglect.
Anet want the zerg mentality as it means WvW is stay active for longer.
Why else do you think from launch that WvW as no rewards for defending, patrolling, scouting, escorting yaks, or even rewards for support roles!

If you are a true water ele, you do a lot of heal but very little damage!
This means half of your tags on enemies do not count as you didnt hit them for enough points.
But when it comes to your support role, you heal thousands of health on several allies, you keep them alive to kill your enemy zerg.
But what do you as a support role player get? Nothing!

I get quite a few drops as a water ele as I use 2 on cooldown and it hits quite hard (and helps the zerg by slowing enemies etc), but no where near as many as I get if I play almost anything else. But that’s the role I mainly use as I used to monk a lot in Guild Wars (before heroes, etc) or play ele…

As to the OP, telling people what to do- if you want a proper squad you’d better find a big wvw guild and go command there, where there is some chance you might get people to do what you want and maybe even one or two scouts. But the main fun in wvw is the massive battles and taking objectives (for most, anyway) so trying to tell random people to go do the boring stuff whilst NOT doing it yourself isn’t going to fly.

Hesacon.8735:

The developers put a lot of effort into making the original Desert Borderlands and then updating it in response to feedback and people are still disproportionately toxic towards their work. I wouldn’t expect another borderlands as the community has shot itself in the foot.

I’d be amazed if the DBL was anything other than a spare half finished map for the continuation of ‘Living World’ that was binned when they stopped the two week updates to it.

Then it was rehashed into a BL. It just feels like the next map after Dry Top, but with all the gliding taken out.

And the devs ignored most of the feedback from the players who tested it and released it anyway.

I don’t think they have anyone even thinking about a third map at the moment- and if they do, it’s in a pile of other work which is labelled more important such as ’ change colour on left foot of NPC 3036786 in Lion’s Arch’. or ‘design more outfits’.

I’m of the opinion that all those who voted in favour of it and state they like it should be ported in to it every time they log in, and be unable to access any other wvw map.

However, the way the vote was rigged and the dark sayings on Reddit meant people were ‘forced’ into saying they wanted to keep it, otherwise the chances of ever getting a new wvw map receded from 1% in the next two years to exactly never.

We’re stuck with it now- think positively, there should be more people on EBL and the other two maps now as most avoid Deserted like the plague.

Actually the biggest disappointment for me at launch and still, is the lack of ability to save/share builds using templates.
I would swap builds several times in a session with a few clicks- no need for endless pieces of paper.
Not having that ability in GW2 feels like trying to play a class with one arm chopped off.
Many times do I think of switching my character build around but then I think of all the hassle of writing everything down and not losing it so i can switch back later on and end up just not bothering. It kills build diversity.
As for skill levels in GW2 compared to GW1, you’re comparing two different games, as GW1 was primarily a pvp game where skill and build really mattered whereas gw2 is more about casuals, pve and dumbed down pvp (mostly).

The vote to bring back Deserted BL reminds me of the public outcry when a pub is about to close, when hundreds of people get together to protest against the closure and the local council states that no other use will be sanctioned.

The pub is ‘saved’. But then all those people who were so up in arms about it possibly closing never show their face in the pub and six months later, the pub closes due to lack of custom. Then sits and goes derelict as the council won’t allow change of use.

Some builds don’t work without food, so it’s not a question of skill- the build is optimised to take advantage of food.

Let us know how many is your ‘entire guild’ Pomp and how many actually turn up and stay solely on Deserted BL on Friday when they find next to no one to fight on it- or does your guild just pvd?

Fantastic effort to get it sorted so quickly, big thumbs up to the team!

As I tend to play a slow casting ele, my biggest bug bear is invuln followed by block when it takes soooo long for one auto attack of mine to even cast.

It makes players stupidly OP as they can run into middle of an entire zerg, dance around, and then escape and have zero damage taken.

Invuln needs a cap either as a percentage of damage absorbed, or a total absorbed, or shorter duration. Same with block.

There are so many problems in wvw combat though, I doubt they will ever fix them as they don’t directly affect the pve or more importantly spvp so much.

Some servers use spies a lot- we had a few battles in the last few weeks where it was exceedingly obvious that they were listening to our TS as they knew our every move. Spies on maps are not uncommon so they can co ordinate attacks across maps.

It’s all part of the game and can make it more satisfying when you beat them anyway- especially when you beat a guild that transferred off with a group of pugs:-)

I think to promote fights enemy locations should be revealed on the map whenever they get close to anything you own or if one of your players is within sight of them, which would make it much more realistic.

Full bags never a problem for me as a support ele- that and the fact you can now group salavage.

I have far more of a problem with loot piling up in pve than I ever do in wvw.

I just hope Anet don’t decide to restrict loot in wvw because of the OP saying it’s a problem.

Personally I need the loot and feel that you can actually get some rewards now for playing wvw over and above breaking even after spending on siege, traps, food, etc.

Jeknar.6184:

Zephyra.4709:

Don’t think it would be very fun.

I think it would. It promote people to stop rellying on siege to win fights.

Siege is a valid way to win fights. Just because most of us would prefer to be able to have decent fights doesn’t make it any less valid as a tactic.

As to the OP’s suggestion: NO. There is no reason whatsoever to make a minimum distance range on a catapult. If people plant them next to the wall it’s easy to throw a siege disabler on them, or to jump off and damage the kitten out of them if you are prepared to die doing it. The real problem is the wall flowers that stand and watch while the wall is destroyed whilst doing nothing as their attempt to build a AC on the wall failed and they are out of ideas.

People need to learn to act and think rather than be lead like sheep all the time. I blame those pve mega events that people afk at.

Ardenwolfe.8590:

But it is easy if you simply pay attention to what the NPCs are telling you. . . .
.

As most of what the NPC’s say throughout LS is a pile of ‘hot air’ filling in for not having actual playable content, expecting people to suddenly pay attention to a particular bit of waffle is expecting a bit much- especially as most of the time I find their drone annoying and have NPC voices turned down low.

Also, dragging that red thing through the path isn’t that easy as it doesn’t appear to be as long for some toons as others- I literally had to stand in the path then slowly creep backwards until it only looked like i was in the path but the shield misses and the red line didn’t break off as being too far away from it- and that only after several bounces and deaths as the graphics edges are poorly defined.

The key to defence is to plan for it BEFORE the objective is attacked.

Supply traps – place them, renew them if they drop.

Ninja attacks on enemy held objects with 5 people- even if you die, if you breech the wall or gate then they need to spend supplies repairing.

Trebs – place in defensive spots so you can take out enemy cats/ballys. Place supply traps on likely cat spots. Trebs drain supplies very fast, make sure the person firing it knows to use cows and is traited.

If you expect to defend a tower by running into it when’s it’s already under attack and start building stuff then, it’s not going to happen against a zerg.

Too many servers don’t use disruption tactics to drain enemy supplies, then are surprised when 10 golems come knocking on the keep door…

Or just surrender the map and wonder off to another one and flip there until they come back to defend then move again and split your forces onto several objectives so their zerg is much less effective.

This all takes work and co ordination and that’s sadly lacking these days on most servers, where most are lazy zerglings and just want to steamroll the opposition with their 70 man ts guild driven blob.

Once I figured it out it wasn’t so bad, but the lack of instructions made it a complete pain . Having a special action default button is all well and good, but it really wasn’t much use of you don’t know what that is before the scene starts.

Trying to figure something out whilst you are dying wasn’t my idea of fun- even my wife came in and asked me what was wrong as I was muttering so much!

THE most annoying thing about the final fights is the constant HP drain whilst using the magic beam (and the fact the enemy’s circle is slightly larger than shown).

You won’t notice it whilst on a warrior or even a regen guard but that constant 330 hp degen tick is a real pain in the * if you don’t have ready access to regen whilst holding the magic beam.

The enemies themselves aren’t all that hard once you work out what to do (which isn’t explained AT ALL), it’s just annoying.

Personally didn’t enjoy that episode at all on a mesmer. Might just breeze through it on a guard and a warrior next just to emphasise the fact these fights all seem to be designed with warriors and guards in mind.

Another problem to consider is bandwaggoning guilds that hop servers fighting against mainly pugs, which rapidly just becomes a farm until the pugs realise they are just being farmed.

It’s recently happened on my server, where our mainly pug groups are being run over by well organised band wagon guild groups when we no longer have the core guild group, and made worse by comms who just reform and rush back in to be wiped again and again rather than just conceding the tower and map hopping to attack something else or splitting forces so you force the enemy organised blob to split to defend multiple targets at the same time making them much less effective.

Part of the problem is people don’t form small raids any more to try and sneak objectives, don’t want to think, don’t seem to be capable of having a few supply traps or siege disablers in their inventories to frustrate the enemy zerg and generally act like either lemmings or sheep.

Large scale fights are fun if you are evenly matched – but once one side has an organised 30+ in it and the other one doesn’t it’s only going to end one way.

Best way of defeating a fight orientated guild dominated blob if you don’t have one of your own- don’t give them any bags or fights you know you will lose, and keep them starved of supplies with traps and trebs. They aren’t that interested in pvd and will get bored. In the meantime split into 5 man teams and attack everything else. Another thing people have forgotten is that you don’t have to take something first push with a small team- it’s more a question of draining supplies and forcing them to defend and post scouts.

much more annoying is seeing ‘invuln, invuln invuln blocked blocked blocked’ when you try and hit the front line who can have a free go at killing everyone while taking zero damage for an extended period of time.

Pretty terrible focus they had, looked more like a spam fest without enough spike damage focused on the right targets.

I do miss death penalty though, would be great for proper gvg fights (not these ‘mash keyboard and run in a circle’ gvgs).

I’m not a fan of guild fights for precisely the reasons the OP gives, as well as the fact that without proper maps it’s just a steering competition.

Ok, I know I’m dissing the skill involved- there is quite a bit of skill and timing on rotations going on but gw2 doesn’t really lend itself to large scale fights, the balance for it is all focused on 5 man fights and pve.

Forced myself through the second part last night- and almost died to the one spawn of chak as had got bored of the waffle and tabbed out to do something interesting online.

There is WAY too much NPC talking and way too little action so far- please tell me it will improve.

As for achievements, don’t think I could ever bear to go through it again just to get one, even if it has some mastery point attached.

Just ‘playing’ (well, ok, listening to NPC’s talk talk talk talk) the first section, is the rest of it so full of endless talk?

It’s not so bad when you just do it once, but by the 3rd or 4th time through all that endless talking between NPCs that you are forced to watch is just mind numbingly boring.

Pleae, Anet, can we have the chance to skip through the meaningless NPC endless talking?

I’d like to see alternative methods of obtaining legendary armor instead of having to grind out raids, which is just as boring as any other grind in any other game- learn mechanics and timings and repeat until bored to tears.

It’s an extremely restrictive way to pigeon hole legendary armor (and obviously meant to force people to do raids whether they like them or not if they want best armor) but I guess they want to show off high raid participation to justify adding it in in the first place.

As a mostly wvw player (who would actually benefit most from legendary armor) I’d like an alternative route to obtaining the armor. Even if the stuff was tradeable that you require in order to make it- like ascended was meant to be before they decided to time gate all that too.