Guild Wars 2

This is a damage cap and it exists for system design reasons.

You set a limit on the amount of damage x number of players can receive in x amount of time and that allows you to balance skills. You know that no matter how high the number of players scale, there will always be a window of time that you can activate a defensive skill and mitigate/avoid incoming damage without your entire team exploding instantly.

In teams that are of a consistent size (i.e. 10 vs 10) then you don’t need a damage cap because there is an effective player cap. But in Guild Wars 2, fighting in WvW can be any sized team against any sized team. Sometimes its ridiculous like 50 players killing 1 dude mining a copper ore node.

Then there is balancing single target damage against area of effect damage. In WvW the number of players scales far beyond what the party wide call target can support. It is therefore not realistic to call a single target damage “spike” using 5 players in 5 different parties. Spiking is pretty clumsy in this game but if they ever improve the functionality of commander squads (so they have all of the functionality of a party) then a damage cap on aoe is one of the things that will keep single target damage viable over aoe in game modes like WvW. In WvW right now, single target burst is not very effective in large scale battles. To spec for single target damage you really need to be carrying alot of team synergy/control otherwise your team is not being as effective as it could be.

Its not as simple as saying: “remove the damage cap”. You can point to games that do not have an aoe damage cap but the reality is that its a different game with a different system.

If you change something fundamental in a system, it can have far reaching consequences that are difficult to predict. Right now, there are a number of incentives to balling up lots of players, so you can’t point to DAOC or whatever. You have to look at the system in GW2.

Shout range is 600 units so this is roughly the radius in which you can share boons, venoms, cleanse conditions, auras etc.

Good positioning necessitates that you fight within a certain radius of your support players so you can receive these benefits and extend beyond that range only when you have an evade (or some other invulnerability) or some other means of reflecting/redirecting incoming damage or neutralizing your opponent’s ability to deal damage to your team (i.e. an aoe blind). That in turn is preferable to burning a heal skill when it is not necessary.

Disorganized teams in WvW can collapse precipitously because of bad positioning and poor situational awareness. For instance, a Geyser is a pretty nice heal and if blasted gives area healing but it only lasts 2 seconds. This means that if you want your team mates to benefit from a Geyser you need to tell them where you are putting it (i.e. on commander icon) and players need to be within 2 seconds run to gain any benefit from it at all.

So buff range is also tied into skill duration. You can think of distance and time as being interchangeable in many ways. If you are so far away that you cannot get to a Geyser in 2 seconds, you are strictly speaking, out of position.

The amount that a Geyser can or should heal is predicated on the amount of damage players can receive over the same time interval.

Geysers and Meteor Showers are static ground effects. You put them on the ground and they stay there for x amount of time, affecting x number of players in range. The best way to avoid taking damage from a Meteor Shower is to not stand in it over its full duration.

marnick.4305:

Yesterday I figured out the meaning of hardcore sauna use.

In the evening, my fiancée told me she needed a few hours of playing Guild Wars 2. I said sure, quit the game and let her use my liquid nitrogen cooled rig to get in some phat world boss kills.

Hardcore would have been to tell her I needed to be driven down to the sauna right this instant so I can steam myself like a dumpling.

How many of you would have told your significant others to quit in the middle of Jormag because you wanted to sit in a very humid airing cupboard?

Fixed.

I know that feeling.

Thats a problem with MMO design full stop. They are designed to be played for thousands of hours so that the game generates more money over time via subscriptions and/or micro transactions.

How do you get someone to repeat the same thing for thousands of hours? You basically give them a long term goal with a shiny thing at the end of the tunnel and pad it out so it takes thousands of hours to get the shiny.

As long as thats how you get shinies – grinding the same 6 minute dungeon path for hours every day – then people are going to run CoF on their warriors. Thats the goal being really messed up.

If the monetary reward for doing all paths in all dungeons was any where near as significant as running CoF p1 till the end of time, then people do it for their shiny sword. You just watch them queue up for Arah exp path 4. Half of them will probably kill themselves before Lupicus but there it is…

At some point someone somewhere needs to stop screwing around with the gear and the skills and the stats. Just. Stop.

If you want to screw around with anything, try changing the goal rather than the tools that players use to achieve the goal.

If running CoF requires 4x 100b warriors to do it optimally because pve mobs stand still to get 100b’ed in the face? Give some of those little charr fodders a ranged interrupt that they will use on targets channelling DPS skills. No need to nerf pve warrior builds when they already have difficulty in spvp. No need to split skills.

In PvE if the goal is to get a shiny glowing sword and it costs a vast amount of time and resources to get it, then people are going to find a way to farm, in order to minimize the wait. If you nerf every conceivable farming method and time gate everything, people are just going to do it anyway but will just have to jump through more hoops.

I have never heard it said that split pvp/pve skills were a good idea. That was a measure of last resort to alleviate long term problems will skill balance. When they implemented it, there was already a sizeable pve and pvp playerbase that remained largely separated so anet were effectively developing 2 different games for 2 different audiences.

The original concept was that pvp was a part of guild wars pve endgame. You would travel across several contents in the story missions, picking up free skills along the way. In prophecies these skills were always the natural counters to the monsters you fought in those areas (i.e. you would get Shatter Hex and Shatter Enchantment in the northern shiverpeaks area which coincidentally is where you get tonnes of stone summit spamming Empathy and Crippling Anguish + using Channeling to fuel the energy cost).

The prophecies campaign pretty much teaches you how to counter skill. You get to the Crystal Desert and ascend which gives you access to the Tomb of Primeval Kings in which you go 8vs8 pvp in order to win the favour of the gods, which opened up the endgame pve dungeons – Underworld and Fissure of Woe.

PvP players spent a not insignificant amount of time in these dungeons because the exp rewards for the quest were huge and exp was needed to buy respec points for build testing and switching secondary professions.

But the pvp and pve communities in GW1 remained largely separated. Pvp can be hostile and confrontational and when you play team pvp, there is a mandatory level of structure and organisation required for success, which made it stressful having to deal with players who do not share similar goals as yourself. For various reasons alot of the pve/pvp synergy that was present in the beginning was removed over time because people didn’t want to be forced to play a part of the game they didn’t want to.

The incentives for playing are also different. For a pvp game to have any staying power whatsoever, the only reward needs to be the satisfaction of beating competent, intelligent opponents. The reward for pve is different but an emotional connection to the game world is important. Since pve is telegraphed, scripted and preprepared, once you experience all of the content in the game, there is nothing left to do unless anet adds more content. However, creating content that is repeatable and enjoyable multiple times takes an enormous amount of development time and resources.

Pvp on the other hand doesn’t need new content if the game has solid foundations. All you need are good opponents to adapt to. Adding content can be detrimental because it is a very delicately balanced system of skill interactions. You start adding new classes and skills after the fact, it has far reaching consequences for the existing pool of skills and cross class skill combinations.

So now you have a real problem trying to appease 2 separate audiences with 2 different ideas of what they want out of the game. Anet got alot of criticism from pvp players especially for some of the skill balancing decisions they made but ultimately, the job was impossible – the addition of so many new classes and skills, resulting in so many broken cross class skill combinations guaranteed it.

The root of the problem necessitating split pvp/pve skills goes all the way back to design and concept of the original skill system. It was originally not designed to have 4 additional classes and hundreds of new skills in the mixup. It was designed to have a friendly, very in depth intro to pvp but it was actually incredibly elitist. It had to be given the amount of time you could waste trying to get a game and then having one of your pro backliners leave to go eat. You could spend an eternity waiting and losing if you weren’t playing regularly with people that have a very good attitude towards competitive play/work ethic.

What was the system originally designed for? How much can you extend it to do something it was not designed for, before it becomes an idiosyncratic mess and you need scrap the system and start over?

In Guild Wars 2, history appears to be repeating itself, because we now have 3 separate games (pve, wvw and spvp) with 3 largely isolated communities. People in pve don’t want to have to wvw to get their map completion. People in wvw don’t want to spvp for dueling and small team fights. People in spvp want a level playing field which means no gear/ticket grinding and proper matchmaking/laddering and obs tools to watch and learn but thats completely useless to anyone who just wants to run dungeons, get rich, buy a glowing sword, get poor.

At every turn, someone, somewhere will complain about undue attention being given to the spvp community (all these pvp skill nerfs are ruining my class in PvE but 100b warriors are still trucking!), or to the pve community (why can’t I make as much money in WvW as I can running dungeons?). 3 separate games for 3 separate audiences.

Ren.6351:

Talked to [Me] before but the timezone difference is really iffy… Yeah we do need the practise badly as its quite hard to find anything more than 15 enemies in one area, open ground during our timezone haha. We both decided that it would be near impossible for us to get a good timing on the weekday T_T

Weekends would suit us fine. Its difficult for us to organize any sparring matches outside EU/NA time since we have hardly any players on at other times. On weekends we nerd out and go nocturnal though.

Rekka has been trying to get guild vs guild practice in all week. If you see my character in game, hit me up and I’ll get the [ME] guys to spar with you. I’m not really interested in winning or chest thumping. The reality is that alot of people need more experience fighting in open field and you only get that by playing against competent players in equal numbers. We should share TS info too so we can voip server hop and talk about what we do right and wrong. Its better if our opponents are very strong because it makes us very strong too.

JakobGW.5730:

My question was why are you claiming that you like playing outnumbered in small skirmishes when you actually take active steps in-game to gather lots of folks around you?

There are certain things that are really important to do in WvW for the integrity of your team and by executing them correctly, you inevitably get alot of people following you.

I used to go into completely dead borderlands all the time without a tag, invite the 2 or 3 dudes getting spawn camped and tell them to call target on me so theres a big red target over my character’s head. Then I explain what we can do with our numbers and where we are going and off we go.

When you update your position and direction of travel in map chat so other players are aware of your presence and what you are doing, people start tagging along when you get stuff done. Within 2 hours of doing this I will always have a zerg. It is the same with Tsarazi, hes just less…diplomatic about it.

I like having just enough numbers to adequately fight open field, which means I’m looking to have enough group swiftness for 100% uptime and enough anti immobilize and stability that my team has unconditional freedom of movement. If I get enough numbers that I consider overkill or I feel there is an over concentration of force in one place, such that we are losing territory everywhere else, I try to split the team on the move.

I think we have traditionally been good at doing impromptu splits but when we went to tier 3, the size of the zergs there were much bigger than in tier 4 so we naturally had to roll around in larger groups (and still cover group swiftness, anti immobilize and stability). On reset nights in tier 3 it was common for a 40 man enemy zerg to go after a supply camp.

In going back to tier 4, the same thing works except it should in theory be easier since we fight teams that aren’t nearly as big.

I can’t speak for Tsarazi but I like fighting slightly outmanned too because it forces your team to pay attention. Your team cannot just roll into an enemy team smashing their “1” button with no stability up. Half your team can get downed in a frozen ground/ring of warding but if you have such an enormous numbers advanage you can just keep throwing bodies at the problem to get a cheesy rally and everyone is back up again.

Nobody learns anything, people get lazy and they don’t think about what they are doing. They don’t think about their positioning in relation to their teammates and do not understand the absolutely devastating consequences of being overextended and getting downed. In a fair fight thats the kind of thing that rallies 6 or 7 downed enemies and you are done. Rez and run back.

Its better when your opponents test you, but its bad to turn people away. Its better if they follow and learn and become confident enough to split away their own team when we have over-concentration of force.

I don’t use my tag anymore and am out of WvW for the time being, but recently I’ve felt that the tag is more of a liability than anything else. It allows you to ignore things like effective communication in map chat, so that people on private voice comms or no voice comms do not know where you or what you are doing and cannot plan around it.

With a tag up, you can ignore map chat to your detriment and people just beeline to the blue icon. Nevertheless, if you are being proactive and communicative, people will inevitably follow you. At some point I’d like to think that when we have too many people in one place, at least 1 person will take the initiative without me asking all the time, to split a second team off so we have more map control. Tsarazi is not the type of player that ignores map chat and he understands its importance, even when you are running a full team on voice comms. I sometimes had people copy typing what I say in voice comms and if someone else has control of the situation, I will copy type what they are saying too.

But it doesn’t matter if you have the tag up or not when it comes to gaining numbers. People see you get stuff done and they will follow you.

Its not really a good idea to go deep into specifics, especially in scenarios where theres a tonne of things going on, multiple attacks on your stuff necessitating you to trade. Thats a very complicated situation that requires alot of knowledge of what has happened.

When you are starting out, you should always start small. Go into a dead borderland with outmanned buff. Rope up the 2 or 3 players that are getting spawn camped or whatever and add them to your party. Get them to call target on you, so a red reticle appears above your head. Talk to them in voice comm if its shared but you or someone else has to type what you are doing and where you are going next in map chat or alot of people will not know you are even there.

When you start like that things are very uncomplicated because theres not much you can do. You can reset some supply camps or kill dolyaks to prevent the other teams from upgrading quickly. You can fake contest keeps and towers and observe, watching how the enemy reacts and in what kind of force. You can deny them the use of their waypoints against another server by shutting them down, which can make their fights harder and more protracted as they are more likely to get out of position.

But on the whole the best thing about starting small is that you have nothing to lose. So you screw up? You haven’t lost anything. People see you start something and communicate well and being courteous and they start following you.

Pretty soon your 3 man turns into a 5 man. Then theres 10 dudes following you and things get more complicated because you have enough supply on the move to ninja a tower.

So if you capture a tower? What do you do? You try to hold it and upgrade it. If you lose it, its no big deal because you only lost a tower. Identify what you think you did wrong, talk to your teammates about it. Be honest about it. If you screw up, people will understand if you talk to them and are polite, if you express an interest in doing things well. Then next time, try something different. This is an iterative process.

You identify the things you do well and you keep doing them. You identify the things you did badly and you stop doing them. As the number of allies with you and the number of enemies you face grows, things get much more complicated and you will be forced to choose between bad and worse and you risk losing the work of alot of people. But you will jump those hurdles as you come to them. Just keep iterating. What did we do wrong? What can we do right in future?

Respect your opponents, always. If you achieve some level of success, don’t believe your own hype. If you keep your eyes and ears open, you will learn something from literally anyone. Even newbies making a hash of things (they will teach you how not to do things, as long as you can identify what they are doing wrong).

A positive attitude towards failure is important. You never really fail when you think about it. You never lose anything permanently. You just learn another way that doesn’t work. If you think like this, you are communicative and polite to other people and you show up regularly, people will respect you for your honesty and your willingness to step up when nobody else will, if nothing else.

Try not to get angry ever. Everyone in high pressure situations can lose the rag, but its important that you recognize when you do and apologize for it. If you have the right attitude at the outset, many things just logically fall into place with time and practice.

Lastly, don’t reinvent the wheel. Identify a commander you think is doing things right and copy them. It might seem silly at first but if they are doing things right, why change whats already working? Over time you begin to realize that even the people you look up to make mistakes (we all do). With the right attitude, you are in a better position to see them and fix them.

Did we ever confirm if the confusion on interrupt trait works on catapults? My recollection was that it did and it was reported at least a month ago at this stage.

Heh, does this mean Infiltrator’s Strike gets another free pass? I’ll laugh if Anet buffs it because you know…theres no distance limit on its shadow return.

Heijincks.9267:

Thieves are ultimate 1V1ers.

They really aren’t.

1v1 depends on the tools you have at your disposal. Some class specific builds are impossible for others to beat 1v1 because they don’t have the correct tools. Sometimes neither player has the correct tools or they both have them, which results in a stalemate that goes on indefinitely until someone makes a mistake or the futility of it makes one or both players give up.

Dagger/dagger/shortbow burst Thief vs a double or triple meditations sword/focus Guardian is a very very bad 1vs1 for the Thief player.

The best you can really hope for is to keep resetting the fight, keep coming back and hope you drop the best Thieves Guild ever whilst the Guardian player is sneezing IRL during a lag spike.

I know it has been dismissed already by a number of players but playing a class you have difficulty with is a really good way to understand how it works. Then when you have to fight that class, you know how it works, what its capable of, what its weaknesses are.

I think some players are conflating 2x separate issues – d/d thief burst play and getting ganked. If you see it coming, most classes have plenty of tools to deal with it as long as you aren’t super glass cannon. If you don’t see it coming and react too late then theres pretty much nothing you can do about it. You got ganked.

Its pretty much the same as getting immobilized from behind, bulls charge, hundred blades. Pretty easy to deal with if you can see it coming because the animation is fairly obvious if you ever play a Warrior but its rage inducing when you don’t.

Same deal with getting ganked by a shatter mesmer. You get hit with 12 stacks out of nowhere and you destroy yourself when you try to teleport away.

In every example I can think of, if you are prepared for something, you can deal with it. But WvW is a game with loads of people running around and sometimes you will just get ganked. Just take it on the chin, run back and take comfort in the fact that if the guy that killed you is a glass d/d thief running around WvW on his own, then hes probably died alot more than you have.

Ehhh, home borderlands are designed so you can hold 2x north towers, garrison and the north supply camp against 2x equally numerous attackers.

When I think about what occurred in thos 18 minutes the only thing I could come up with was “bystander effect”.

Xsorus.2507:

If it was Kain, and it was during the night, I’m going to guess WM got you.

Ahahaha. No. North American Primetime.

Xsorus.2507:

Oh…..Ok yea no answer on that….I’m sure its happened to our server though.

and plenty of servers.

Exactly. It happens everywhere, all the time. People drop the ball. Theres no need to rub it in. We’ve had some really good ones. Like fumbles that would make the international financial crisis look like it was handled by pros.

Xsorus.2507:

Besetment.9187:

Still not as impressive as Mag losing 2 keeps and 2 north towers against Kaineng/Dragonbrand in 18 minutes. That one was a corker. Shouldn’t have finished the second cigarette I guess.

To this day I don’t even know how its possible to lose that much stuff in 18 minutes...

Plenty of ways that can happen, people didn’t check for mesmer’s….Golems….Multiple Superior Rams….

i mean 2 servers hitting you at once really fast can blow through stuff really quickly.

This was on a Saturday with over 60 defenders…and the keeps were tier 2 and 3 respectively (west and east). Both north towers were fully upgraded. I wasn’t kidding when I said it was a corker.

Still not as impressive as Mag losing 2 keeps and 2 north towers against Kaineng/Dragonbrand in 18 minutes. That one was a corker. Shouldn’t have finished the second cigarette I guess.

To this day I don’t even know how its possible to lose that much stuff in 18 minutes...

Collective brain farts. We all have them.

I haven’t been playing much lately but wanted to drop by and say hi to Grundlebad and the [KT] guys. I remember playing with you for a spell during SBI’s euro timeslot of DEATH way back when. Seems like ancient history now…

The biggest problem for me is finding people who want to take control of a situation that is unravelling fast. Nobody wants to be “that guy” holding the hot potato of shame that is making a series of bad decisions ending in a total collapse in morale.

But making mistakes is a part of the learning process. When I came up in this game, people weren’t nearly as unforgiving as they are now towards fledgling commanders.

I used to start small in dead borderlands, rope up the 2 or 3 people that were getting spawn camped and we would go out the side entrance. We would do supply cap, yak ganking, recon or interference (fake contesting everything, watching the hapless guards come running and timing how long it takes them to react).

In the beginning things are simple, because you can’t do a whole lot when massively outmanned with only 3 people. Crucially, you have nothing to lose either. I talk to my party members in party chat and ask them to put the target reticle over my head. I relay my position and direction of travel in map chat.

As you go around doing stuff like this, more players join up and things get more complicated. Now you have enough supply on the move to take towers and later on keeps. You can split and engage large enemy forces whereas before you didn’t have to worry about battle micro, you just had to avoid enemy players altogether. Things are alot more complicated now, when you directly influence nearly a hundred people and micromanage an entire borderland but you build up to that. Even dumping a situation as complex as that on another experienced commander is enough to make their eyes bulge.

But as you are building up to that, each time you will stumble, hit a wall, make a mistake and learn to try something different next time. I don’t think its inaccurate to say that I learnt how to do the right things by getting it wrong a thousand times first.

So I respect anyone for trying. Its a rough gig to take over when things are about to turn bad and a hundred players direct their dissatisfaction towards you. Its the kind of negative attitude that makes you not want to turn your icon at all, or bail the hell out before things go south. But you only get good by sticking through the bad times and seeing your team through them too.

Theres a bit of a dilemma now. Without new blood taking on positions of responsibility and being fearless and creative, you have people who are self conscious to a fault. Alot of people paralysed for fear of screwing up and reliance on a few known players who are expected to handle the organizational bits. I think its a very serious problem.

I wish more people would turn on their icons, give it a shot and make some mistakes. I’d help you out. A hundred others would mock you, but I’ll help you out. How many commanders on your server have burnt out completely? I’ve lost count of the ones on mine except I can say authoritatively at this point that I am one of them.

But he has an indomitable warrior spirit.

Sovereign.1093:

He solo’s everytime we see him. A few minutes later his number of troops come, but always after 5 minutes or so.

It is either he’s roaming to look for us or… we always find him by accident.

That means his team is horribly out of position and hes trying (and evidently failing) to buy enough time so they can get to him. Which means that Maguuma team chat at the precise moment you took those screenshots is chock full of “bonyisms” – grossly disparaging (and hilarious) truisms about the sheer incompetence of all the people who don’t have super human Australian DNA. Like Bony.

Bony never truly dies. He’ll be back like some kind of incorporeal Charr terminator.

I’m pretty much done with asking people to sit on a treb for an hour pressing 2 or worse, getting into siege dead locked treb wars with 4 swirling winds eles on both sides, extending this chore ad infinitum.

If thats what it takes to win, its not worth it. Theres no faster way to hemorrhage players than to expect them to do stuff like this every day and gain no benefit from it. You don’t improve as a player, there is no test of intellect or ability. There is no significant material reward for doing it. It is for all intents and purposes, utterly pointless.

Attrition is the worst thing about this game by a long way. I really don’t care about spying or cheating or whatever. Its the mentality that dictates when you get into a competitive deadlock, the principle objective is to destroy your opponent’s will to continue playing the game. Traditionally it has been by recruiting until you can replenish losses to attrition war faster than your opponents can. It is fundamentally anti competitive in my humble opinion, since the most creative and skilled players are not made in that kind of environment.

Those players grow in an environment that encourages friendly rivalry, sparring on a level playing field and learning from failure because failure is a necessary step in the learning process. You must fail over and over again so you that when you succeed, you understand why and what it means.

What I don’t understand is the mentality of people who transfer out of a toxic attrition war with apparently the sole intention of helping another server get straight back into it (except hopefully with more numbers so attrition wears you down slower than your opponents). Its a never ending cycle. With players now openly offering to pay for transfer fees and recruitment threads beginning to plague the forums again with blind self promotion, its like the people involved in perpetuating this sorry PR game don’t know how to play any other way.

Sovereign.1093:

we lack na coverage. so we shouldn’t blame our na counterparts. they’re doing what they can.

Honestly, if your NA guys are anything like our Oceanic guys (going 15 vs 40 every day in battles they know they can’t win) then they are probably some of the hardest working players in this game.

I mean regular joe NA players on other servers may balk at the idea of fighting outnumbered. Take a little bit of comfort knowing that yours can breath fire and shoot lasers from their eyes.

Nope, because making bars go up as quickly and efficiently as possible is also farming. See title grinding in GW1. Gold is transferable. There is no need to grind anything.

Acknowledgement is earned long before you get the donations for an icon anyway. II can already observe a couple of future WvW commanders on my server. I’m not sure if they realize it yet but they already do the things that are important and are de facto leaders. Why? Alot of people on my server know who they are and listen to them intently. You don’t ever see them talking shop, seeking validation, navigating around their own ego. Every time you go into WvW, they are starting something (or finishing something) that matters.

They could take cmd icons out of the game entirely for all I care. We used to do it without icons all the time and we can do it again.

Gold is the best method because it is fungible. If you have enough influence, you don’t need to spend any gold yourself. Other players will donate money and buy it for you.

Kyrime.6958:

There’s something far too fun about kidnapping golems and putting them on supply huts.

Try this if you haven’t already. Its totally awesome if you get the opportunity:

1) spy a small enemy team running supply to get up ninja cats/rams/golems.
2) when they all run off to the supply camp, destroy the build site and put down an identical build site of your own in exactly the same place.
3) Now hide! (make sure you can see them running back with supply.)

Its worth the money just to see the invisible WTF bubble over their heads.

Any Mags remember that time when we capped Borlis Pass garrison and Shads got our entire 30 man zerg to just stand up in the rafters in one spot? They recaptured the garrison and started sweeping for mesmers. One Borlis guy gets up on the rafters and near soils himself when he this gigantic army. It was glorious.

Ayestes.1273:

It’s a silly idea to decide not to play any week period if that reason has anything to do with what Tier your WvW is in. I’d rather fight outmanned and outgunned in Tier 3 then do the opposite in Tier 4. I’ve had some awesome fights here in Tier 4 though, nothing against anyone here.

You should try being an Australian on Maguuma or a US night shift worker that players during Oceanic primetime. You go 15 vs 60 in your own borderland every single day. They are the hardest working players on our server and if they’ve had enough they’ve had enough. No qualifiers necessary.

To the CD guys fighting in Maguuma BL in the past 2 hours:

That was some of the best small team pvp I’ve seen in WvW since I’ve started playing this game. Very good play by the [FEAR] mesmer and necro. The necro had very measured use of shroud. Even with stability up, he landed his boon rips on the right targets, used his shroud 3 to bait out skills and interrupt my heal skill (twice).

There was a sick guardian too with a [NAGA] tag and all round just really tight play by the whole group. There was a random mix of tags, not a single guild group. We got handed 3 or 4 times initially with even numbers until we copped on that holy cow, these guys can play. No shame in getting beat by play like that imo.

Expunge.4926:

it seems like just last week maguuma was calling the BT zergball bad because it lacked guardians. so nice to have a new perspective, tool.

Nobody said it was bad. It has notable strengths and weaknesses. BT does need more guardians to overcome its main weakness – extreme vulnerability to aoe control effects like static field and physical barriers like lines of warding, rings of warding, sanctuary bubbles etc placed cleverly around point of impact.

Still my favourite guild to fight because if you don’t pay attention, they make you go splat. Keeps you sharp.

No worries. If you guys want to hop on our mumble to shoot the breeze, organize duels/skirmishes and make the most of a matchup that is pretty skewed by population difference (such that the outcome is largely irrelevant), feel free any time.

I have never joined Ehmry’s TS or any private voip server without prior invitation. My post history on this forum and every other GW2 wvw forum at this point should speak for itself. By the way, my handle on eBay’s forum is “Hayte”.

I would have thought by now, having played with me and read my posts on eBay’s forums that I think spying is one of the most ridiculous things anyone can do in a game with a meta as dysfunctional as WvW.

IRSyKo.5843:

I am sad to see maguuma go.

I enjoyed it when BT would run into the maguuma mumble grp of 20-30 people and scrap with them.

I’ll miss BT too. We’ll be back after the holiday.

I like how we started out as buddie bro homies and now like lovers locked in a dysfunctional 20 year marriage with 3 obnoxious children, we can’t stand the sight of each other anymore.

Where did it all go wrong? The first kid or the second?

Waking.6052:

Destroy us until we beg for mercy, then don’t stop!

If you wanted a challenge, why on earth did you leave IoJ to begin with?

The guild that wins underwater GvG is the guild that has the most mesmer alts. Sorry to say.

Mister Mustard.7203:

arminius.5270:

If DB wasn’t playing for 2nd I think they could actually challenge FA. That would make the match interesting.

If Mag wasn’t playing for 3rd I think they could actually challenge FA. That would make the match interesting.

Touché.

Honestly, I don’t think many of those players were transfers. I think we can legitimately queue 4 maps during NA primetime on reset but about half of those players are a no show when we are losing or we know we are going to lose because the same matchup repeats itself. I imagine this is the same on every server. Theres a massive untapped playerbase that enjoys playing WvW on a weekend and is more inclined to stick out the weekend if the matchup is new, theres a shot at victory, you have the green keep POI and it doesn’t cost alot of money.

When we are on the bad side of timezone coverage, WvW is much more expensive and its much more critical to do the little thankless things that matter (like trebbing for hours, walking dolyaks, guarding supply camps).

Again, I don’t think this is an aberration. I’d be surprised if every other server did not have an enormous amount of players that fall silent, and don’t WvW when things are bad. But they’ll show up when you are winning.

IRSyKo.5843:

Am I allowed in maguuma mumble to hangout? :>

Yup.

Anything super sekret is talked about in code anyway. So if you hear:

“We have a dude is in the G, I repeat the skylark is nesting” followed by
“Extracting the bun from the oven” and then
“Spaceship firing escape pod, the mars bar has been deep fried”

Then you deserve to win if you can figure it out. Because I sure as hell don’t know what the hell is going on.

The guards in a supply camp are not meant to guard the camp against players by themselves. They are meant to support players who defend the camp so they can realitically hold it against bigger teams that want to capture it. Scouts blind and cripple so they are really annoying to have them run around. Cabalists are super annoying because they have scorpion wire and will pull you out of a clutch rez. Zealots blind, immolize and stun and are super annoying if they interupt you when you are getting DPSed down by players.

The keep guard upgrades are worth it too. You ever tried to 4 man ninja an East Keep with lvl 82 guards and patrols. Oh my god its annoying…

This is a real question? A fully upgraded supply camp can hold 250 supply.

You ever tried to defend a borderland before on 1 (north) supply camp because both attackers are applying maximum pressure on both sides of the map? Yeah that extra 150 supply will save you.

Also the raise guard level upgrade makes the npcs die slower so you need to draw orange swords on a supply camp to take it quickly. You see it on the map and you have a better chance of saving it if you have a nearby waypoint. Losing a 250 supply source is a big deal if you need to bust a siege deadlock via building tonnes of trebs and/or golems.

If you need to resupply your team it also means less stops need to be made, since you can get 25 people resupplied without having to take a detour to another 2 camps. When trying to catch enemy teams out of position to trade towers, shaving those seconds off is the difference between taking their tower and losing yours and taking their tower, waypointing back and saving your own tower too.

^^^ Wow, are people still complaining about that?

The system itself isn’t fundamentally flawed. The attitude of many players towards winning in WvW is, hence the months of bracket stacking and the insane panic over paid transfers making prolonged losses expensive to avoid.

No because the absence of ladder rankings does not mean you cannot create server pools by active player count and timezone coverage and then just do random match making within those pools. The absence of ladder rankings will remove only one thing – the fool’s notion that going up a rank means you are collectively doing better and going down a rank means you are collectively doing worse.

Ketharius.9018:

From my understanding so far; it’s okay for BG and SoR to have fought each other for 11 weeks prior to bursting through their Rating/Tier, but it’s not okay for T8 to have been fighting for 6 weeks? It’s okay for a server like SBI to fall to T8 (I wish they wouldn’t, and here’s hoping for that to not happen) in their condition, but it’s not okay for servers in their condition to be in T8?

If there was was a rating Reset, nearly every Tier would be another Kaineng vs Doors vs Doors scenario for a very long time, and everyone being in some rather unpleasant moods until they are reorganized to where they are now.

I honestly don’t get this thread, I really want to truly understand this.

Its pretty simple really.

SF is currently 120,000+ points in the lead and is night capping the hell out of FC and ET whilst they are at work. What is their glicko rating shift for this awesome displace of timezone coverage advantage? +2.2 points.

How far behind HoD is SF? 107 points. At this rate FC and ET can look forward to getting completely out pop night cap dominated for the next 48 weeks in a row and they will still be fighting SF. SF players can’t get out fast enough. They would have to win by an impossible number of points to “convince” glicko that they do not in fact belong to tier 8 for the next 3 months straight because of one pre transfer loss that tanked their rating. Glicko expects them to score alot more points than they currently are and herein lies the absurdity of it all.

Tier 8 has become a glicko blackhole. The constant barrage of “lets bandwagon onto a t8 server to rise through the ranks” pet projects over the free transfer period has resulted in an absolutely enormous ratings difference between 1st and 2nd place in tier 8 so that not even light can escape this tier. FC and ET are probably two of the most stable WvW servers in the game, since they have endured months of totally asymmetric off peak timezone stacked beatdowns that would ordinarily send anyone with even a notion of hitching their guild to the bandwagon screaming to the hills.

An ELO type “soft reset” could help this situation but only if the rating of second and third place is adjusted closer to first place in tier 8. If its adjusted closer to the median rating then SF loses a tonne of points and they will be in tier 8 for the next 9 thousand years.

[MATE] has been on Maguuma for a while. [EK] has been on Maguuma since forever. I’ve spoken to Paralda about some of the things they do community wise which are very interesting but focused predominately in PvE. There are some [EK] guys that I know of that hop into WvW and are regulars.

Nevertheless I’ve never heard of anything quite like the things they can do on our server. Paralda has seen them do things like rally the whole of Lion’s Arch, get them to rampage through Orr Shrines and end up with literally a 100+ man army moving as one. Whatever language they use and openness they have is very effective at getting alot of Maguuma players together to achieve a common goal. I think thats incredible. Imagine if that enthusiasm can be harnessed in WvW?

In the Devonas/Borlis matches our active population seemed to swell dramatically and we have never actively recruited. I sometimes think that alot of the players that turned out were here all along but we haven’t always made WvW the most inviting place to be, especially when its high pressure (like when we are getting outnumbered, hard). So if the MPA guys ever express an interest getting something organized together in WvW and trying to cultivate the right attitude to make really good creative PvP players than I’ll support it.

We can organize a server wide event to raid FA’s borderland over 2 days with everyone drinking Quaggan tonics. You will desecrate the Temple of Storms no more Aspenwooooooood.

Coo-

Large zergs are not difficult to deal with as long as you are structured in your approach. You do need enough knowledgeable players using the tools necessary to dismantle large teams however. Over time it becomes an attrition thing because structured teams are difficult to maintain over time. For example, if you rely on a Mesmer and Necro with excellent well/null field placement and they log out to eat, your capacity to remove boons is very much diminished.

A server that actively recruits can keep throwing numbers at you until your structure collapses. You nevertheless pay a big price for zerging up and you can capitalize on such weaknesses under certain circumstances. If you concentrate enough players in one place on the map to overcome all individual weakness in combat, you naturally cede much of your ability to react to concurrent threats on the map. Your scouting and ability to guard supply camps/walk dolyaks and man defensive siege is diminished because so many players that should do these things are running in a giant pack and are required to do so for team synergy.

There are also very significant weaknesses to running large groups that move in a tight formation stacking boon duration. They are extremely vulnerable to targeted use of static fields, frozen grounds, wells (of corruption/power), null fields, sanctuary bubbles, rings/lines of warding etc. They are very vulnerable to mass control (knockdown, stun, daze, chill, cripple) which forces a team to separate/break apart so they cannot share buffs or combo off each other effectively.

I think that boon removal is a little too limited right now. Targeted boon removal needs to be a bit more prevalent and there needs to be a method available to some or all classes to remove or “pierce” boons like stability which totally negate control effects. Running in larger groups just lets you have greater stability uptime compounding the problem.

Nevertheless, it is easier to structure small teams than it is to structure very large teams. Another great weakness of zerging is that controlling every player and using every skill to best effect is often impossible. Getting large numbers of players to move correctly, spot and use terrain advantage is harder than if you have less players desiring structure.

Ultimately I think it is best to take an iterative and fluid approach to team composition. You cannot always have the tools you need for every conceivable circumstance so you need to make do with what you have. I think education is of primary importance since the goal is to inspire as many players as possible to play well, to not treat defeat as failure but rather as discovery of methods that do not work.

On one level zergballing works because having so many players in a tight formation increases the likelihood of benefiting other members in the team through synergy/sharing even if it is accidental. But overreliance on same breeds in weakness and zergball teams like this can be dismantled or at times avoided altogether in order to accomplish objectives that matter. Have you ever seen 30 enemies charge into a null field/static field/frozen ground? I have. You get alot of loot bags if you are capable of controlling the movement of your enemy (by seeking terrain advantage, using cheap AoE, marks etc to herd players into avoiding them).

I would encourage dueling/sparring. I think it is important to play every class so you are aware of the limits of what can you can achieve and what contribution you are capable of making in team.

I’m not keen on high levels of structure like in Guild Wars 1 because it is a double edged sword. GW1 was insanely structured to the point where if you didn’t have one very specific person playing one very specific character build, your team build does not work. GW2 calls for a more fluid and adaptive approach but it is sadly not talked about enough.

The talk is mostly about winning games via attrition – usually by throwing more resources (supply and manpower) at your opponent than they can at you, thus wearing them down faster.

I’ve always wanted to spell LOL with flame rams in an attacking borderland visible from Garrison cliffs. But we would need to have an upgraded, fully supplied West Keep and everyone flash building simultaneously to have a chance of getting them built before it gets zerged down.

Edit: and then we would probably lose our West Keep.

Magiofdeath.2745:

Magummers, another question. I saw flame rams in supply camps that you took yesterday. What’s up with that? Is it something about this whole flame ram god you got going? :P

For reasons I can’t comprehend, people on this server like building siege weapons in hilariously inappropriate places. On reset some guy kept dropping trebs on gates. I dunno. Maybe to catch people out who just rush in blindly and dump their supply into whatever build site goes down without checking to see if its a ram first.

We recently discovered that the Flame Ram 2 skill (Flame Burst) is actually an undocumented fire field and you can stack might off it. Its on a 5 second cooldown so for supply camp defense it can be a quick “free” way to rack up 25 stacks.