Guild Wars 2

Heezdedjim.8902:

geist.3980:

some of that we just have to suffer thru but as for low pop, I refused to accept it, I spent the gems and I moved to tier one and I regret nothing. sure I miss my friends on the lower tiers, but its not all giant zergs here. there are a lot of roamers and havoc groups making a difference at all hours of the day. the wait time isn’t bad either, theres always a borderland open. BG and JQ are max servers now from the transfers, TC will be soon too. join the wvw player base and move up.

This. If you want to play WvW and have it not suck on a regular basis, you have three choices. Pick one and get there today.

It would only suck if you’re a PPT zergling. T1 is garbage for anything but blob v blob. If you want good guild vs guild fights you go T2. If you want good roaming you go T3 or lower (although the skill level as you drop tiers is questionable).

T2 would be balanced if SoS didn’t have enough SEA/OCX to out-number FA and Mag combined during the respective timeslots.

Pyroatheist.9031:

Boonprot.6274:

pza.8024:

Mitsubishi Eclipsed.6732:

pza.8024:

edge no, soil yes. i can already see them war banners used for nothing

There’s something g that already does this. It’s called poison. If you are poisoned while in the downed state and someone tries to war banner you, you will remain at the downed state.

http://www.technobuffalo.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/02/The-more-you-know.png

sorry to say, but this is simply not true. poison does not prevent war banner rezzing. i couldn’t test myself but i let my guild test it and the result was negative.

It reduces the amount of health gained from bannering. So, if your health is sufficiently low and you’re poisoned, you will not rally from a banner. They’re partially right, but not completely.

That’s not a thing. Bannering doesn’t just add health to your downed bar, it rallies you. Poison is a significant counter to ‘Toss Elixir R’, not to bannering or other straight revive skills.

Just read your sig. It’s a mystery to me that someone who hosts a mesmer podcast and has a guide to solo queue doesn’t understand how banner works. Poison countering bannering has been a staple of GvG strategy for aeons.

pza.8024:

Mitsubishi Eclipsed.6732:

pza.8024:

edge no, soil yes. i can already see them war banners used for nothing

There’s something g that already does this. It’s called poison. If you are poisoned while in the downed state and someone tries to war banner you, you will remain at the downed state.

http://www.technobuffalo.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/02/The-more-you-know.png

sorry to say, but this is simply not true. poison does not prevent war banner rezzing. i couldn’t test myself but i let my guild test it and the result was negative.

It reduces the amount of health gained from bannering. So, if your health is sufficiently low and you’re poisoned, you will not rally from a banner. They’re partially right, but not completely.

Hi welcome to the condi meta of 2013/2014. Instead of addressing how easy it is to apply condis and how every single guild group worth its salt actively maximizes condi cleanse to counter it, they nerf crit damage. Yes, let’s encourage a largely broken meta because some PvE players cried a little bit. Definitely good balancing strategy. 100% A+ would do again.

Hule.8794:

Guys one thing to remember: they did not announced WXP accound bound release date.
Just that its posponed.

All informations about releasing it at March 28th is just players speculation.

Of course. Doesn’t change the fact that the community has been asking for account-bound ranks since they released on March 27th, 2013. Nor does it change the fact that it took ~8mo or so for them to finally realize that it was only logical for ranks to be account-bound. Nor does it change the fact that account-bound ranks were announced what, 4-5 months ago now, and the only significant WvW update we’ve seen is the wholly underwhelming EotM. It boggles my mind that PvE can get updates on a bi-weekly basis, and yet the PvP community as a whole sees changes once every 4 or so months. I mean meaningful changes, not the addition of another mastery that no one but the T1 siegemongers actually want. Don’t even get me started on the ONLY sPvP map being introduced since release being Skyhammer, a siege paradise.

For the most competitive game mode in all of GW2 we sure do get ignored the vast majority of the time.

48. Bags spawning underneath you can either bug you into the terrain or launch you off structures if you’re fighting on a wall/bridge. EK bridge and green EBG keep’s outer walls are the biggest offenders.

Can people stop justifying using two utilities and a symbol on cooldown as good swiftness uptime?

Armor combo I came up with a few months ago. Currently dyed a greyscale mix of black, pitch, and white. Still can’t decide if I like Phalanx or T3 boots better.

Here’s the issue with “gearing for WvW.” Your gear is dependent on both your build and the aspect of WvW you’re participating in. A few examples:

• Organized Zergplay Typical builds include 0/5/30/30/5 and 0/0/10/30/30 (with 0/0/20/20/30 being my preferred variant). With the former you have access to a full 300 Toughness, 300 Healing Power, 300 Vitality (3k HP), and 30% Crit Damage. With the latter, you’re losing 100-200 Toughness, 10-20% Crit Damage, and 0-100 Vitality (1k HP) depending on which you choose. In the first case you’re obviously more free to invest heavily into healing power and offensive stats, while in the second case you need to invest heavily into defensive stats to make up the difference.

• Roaming The builds can be all over the place. I’ve seen and played 0/0/30/20/20, 0/30/30/5/5, 10/25/0/15/20, 20/25/0/5/20, and so many others. The sky’s the limit when you’re gearing for roaming, and so your armor loadout will be extremely diverse. Note also that solo roaming will differ from group roaming. In one case you need to be a one-stop-shop for both damage and defense, while in the other you need to coordinate with your group.

• Karma Train/Pub Train Run whatever you want. Almost anything is viable because, in this case, numbers far outweigh personal skill. Just try not to die.

In short, there’s no catch-all for WvW gearing. The WvW game mode is many times more diverse than sPvP or PvE in terms of gearing and builds. You’ll have to figure out what you want to do, and how that fits into your group’s composition before you can even begin to think about gear.

What I can give you, though, is my general rule-of-thumb for gearing a guardian for organized zergplay (my specialty). The strongest build is, in my opinion, 0/x/30/30/x, where you invest either 5 points into both Radiance and Virtues, or 10 points into Virtues. With that in mind, here are the stat points that I try to hit with every build I make. Note that I include neither Applied Fortitude nor Applied Strength in my gearing. However, I do include personal consumables and stacks from weapons (Bloodlust, Perception).

• Health Minimum of 19k, preferably around the 20k mark.
• Armor Minimum of 3050 sans Strength in Numbers. 3200 armor ~42% damage reduction
• Healing Power Minimum of 500, preferably around the 700-800 range.
• Power Minimum of 1800, 1900-2000 with stacks/food is ideal.
• Crit Chance 30% with stacks/food so that you can maintain 50% crit chance w/ perma fury
• Crit Damage Anywhere from 60%-70%

The key, in my opinion, to gearing a guard for WvW is balance. You cram as much party support into your traits and runes as is possible, and then gear your character to match.

The money you make from WvW is many, many times less than what you’d make doing PvE. That said, despite spending almost all of my time in WvW I’m on my third legendary. I’ve found that you make the most money by wiping enemy zergs whilst capping objectives. Karma training is fairly good money, but nothing beats wiping a juicy 60-man blobfest before capping a keep. Even better when the blob res rushes to warbanner the keep lord.

Being saved for super duper seasons 2, undoubtedly.

EFWinters.5421:

A few points:

• Vitality is still pretty bad. Now, if you wanted the major Power from PVT I could have let it slide for 2-3 armor pieces but Clerics is still objectively better.

• Shelter is better than Sigil although you seem intent on keeping it on your bar for whatever reasons.

• You are running massive amounts of condi clears but you still pick up Soldier Runes? I would seriously advice against that.

• I would like to hear your motivation for running Tome when you are so heavily invested into Virtues.

Not the build maker, but here’s my advice.

• For zerging the vitality is a hair low, but otherwise it should be fine

• Shelter is infinitely better than SoR. Signet is a PvE heal; I agree with you 100%.

• Condi meta is only getting stronger over the next few months (ty short-sighted nerf to power builds) so you can never have enough condi cleanse

• High healing power builds benefit far more from Book than RF, so I understand their logic

That said I hate overly bunker builds because they’re inherently self-limiting. PvE gearing allows for so much diversity with the Guardian class, especially when it comes to balanced builds. I can’t quite understand why people would waste it by running an sPvP-esque bunker.

Lucente.5071:

0/0/10/30/30 with sentinels ascended armor, PVT trinkets, applied fortitude and vitality infusions gets you to almost 27k hp with 3200 armor (150 from SIN) if your using Hammer + hold the line your good for protection too. Burst isnt an issue your party shold compensate for this with water fields since this is a party build.

Please don’t ever recommend that to anyone.

0/0/30/30/10 GS/Staff is the most common build and should form the backbone of any organized group. 0/0/10/30/30 is very specialized (I prefer 0/0/20/20/30) and typically runs Mace/Shield + Staff with high healing power. 0/0/30/20/20 is a hybrid typically taken for the secondary stab access, but it’s a bit training wheels for me.

As for gearing, it’ll depend on the build. For a 0/0/30/30/10 build the most rudimentary, un-optimized build I recommend is this. If you feel like tinkering, you can drop vitality and move pieces around/use different stat distribs in different pieces to eek out 10% more crit damage and ~100 more power. If you wanted to go with a 0/0/30/20/20 build you would need to add ~50 more toughness from gear (swapping a couple armor pieces to Knight’s would do the trick).

Rising Dusk.2408:

There were probably critical bugs with it that held up its release. I’m sure they will release it ASAP.

I doubt that very much.

I wish we would’ve gotten account-bound ranks instead of EotM tbqh. I’m sure ANet are holding on to account-bound wexp to release in a big LS patch so they can say “hey, we care about WvW, too, here’s what you’ve been asking for since ranks were introduced))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))”

Peetee.9406:

FA/Mag have both been great opponents this week. Loving the smaller fights and duels.

I do have to apologize for the huge off hour blobs tho. Trust me, We (GC) are trying to run with small numbers but are having a lot of Rallians attach to us.

It happens. From what I’ve heard our SEA/OCX crowd are having a lot of fun during their timeslot so it can’t be all that bad!

Despite what some may say, Mag has this kind of attitude towards both duels and open-field fights. If a Mag guild is engaging an enemy group reasonably close to its own size, other guild groups typically won’t engage as well. It’s part of why we have such an active GvG community, with 5 guilds off the top of my head participating in GvGs.

ParaldaWind.4523:

Maguuma: PYRO, VR, TG, Ark, CTH, WELP, WCS, AoN, Rage, CT, and probably a few more that I’m omitting because typing on a phone is tedious.

Missed aZn and NOVA off the top of my head.

Prysin.8542:

Necromancers, while tanky, they do not bring that much to the group. Apart from Well of Power and Spectral Wall, what the necromancer brings is rather lackluster. These two skills are also on long cooldowns, whereas the ele has shorter cooldowns and more effects

I think almost every part of that paragraph is wrong. I’ll address why you’re wrong one sentence at a time.

Necros should typically be built glassier than other backliners because of access to two health bars and an elite that doubles base power, quadruples base toughness, and triples base vitality. It’s easy to hit 80%+ Crit Damage, 100% Crit Chance, 2k+ Power, and still retain 23k+ HP and 2500 Armor.

Well of Power is actually one of the lesser-used necro utilities. Typical skill choices are Well of Suffering, Well of Corruption + misc. The misc is typically Spectral wall or Well of Darkness. Within those skills you have pulsing boon strip, vuln stack + exceptional damage, pulsing blind (with chill if traited), and soft cc in the form of fear.

Suffering (28s), Corruption (32s), Darkness (40s), Spectral (45). Meteor Shower has a 30s CD untraited (why are you traited into fire?). Considering Suffering and Corruption are where most necro bomb strength is derived from, I would say that necro and ele are more-or-less on par.

I didn’t even address how necro is probably the most effective backline sniping class, and has strong poison + weakness uptime, amongst other denial conditions.

Here’s the most important thing in my entire post, so pay attention. Necros and eles fill different roles. Roles that overlap in some areas (soft cc and bombs mainly), but different roles nonetheless. Where an ele’s main role is frontline sustain and pressure on the enemy stack, a necro is expected to transition in and out of bombing the enemy stack and focusing down backliners.

Jyeoi.6027:

Anyways guys you know you can’t win an argument with Mag so why bother. They’re just bhurt they’re still stuck in t3 with all their amazing skilled guilds.

Well so far we haven’t lost a single gvg to a guild on a T3 server so I think we’re doing a good job? Note that I’m not saying there’s no talent, because there is. Some of the guilds we’ve fought not only have a fantastic attitude but are also rapidly improving. There’s the potential for some really exciting fights in T3, but people seem more interested in sitting on an AC inside a tower, or finding another guild group and grasping them tightly. Plus, as T3 is currently proving, if you hit a server hard enough in the PPT it gives up.

DeWolfe.2174:

The reason you see a lot of heavies is only because they are the head of the train. Light and mediums are mixed in there too. The meta is fine as is. The AoE cap is fine as is. If they increased the AoE limit all you’d end up with is GC Staff Guards, Ele’s, and Necros melting everything in range. Which would be boring as heck.

I actually agree with you 100%. A large proportion of players seem to think that anything with Guardians and Warriors automatically makes a hammertrain. It doesn’t. What does make a hammer train, though, is when your parties are made up of 2x guard 2x warrior 1x misc, like a lot of budding GvG guilds out there. You don’t need anywhere near that much frontline or stab to be successful. You just need to improve your movement. Also, let me re-iterate, hammer trains are really easy to kill and dodge. I promise.

SBI forums also seem to think that the server is imploding. Read some fun posts over there the past couple days.

Mag-related threads are the best threads tbh.

Cantur Soulfyre.5409:

First, please understand that Necros and Mesmers are NOT people so those characters should not be included in this discussion.

If 3 of 4 players are Guardian or Warrior that is because a zerg needs those to really operate. As was brought up before, crowd control is very important to controlling a fight and winning, hence why hammer trains became so popular (and why I love carrying Saffron bread around). So more guardians (for Stability support) and more warriors (counter-crowd control and Stability/clears) were needed, etc., etc.

Except the counter to hammer trains is synergy between, and intelligent use of, Well of Corruption/Axe 3 and Null Field with hard CC skills. Hammer trains are exceptionally self-limiting and are generally easy to deal with. Their mobility is abysmal because all of the guardians are running Hammer/Staff (which is an awful idea; people need to stop encouraging newbies to use that weaponset). Their over-reliance on hammers (and the associated glacial attack speed) means that they are EXTREMELY susceptible to blind, and they always, without a fault, push in straight lines. If you dodge to the left or the right of a hammer train push you’ll miss 100% of their damage every time. The myth that parties need to be composed of 2x warrior 2x guardian 1x backline to be successful is just that, a myth.

I would even argue that backliners are MORE important than frontliners. In the current meta, the truly skilled guilds have absolutely rock-solid backliners, and the guilds who don’t tend to have little to no sustain. Furthermore, I firmly believe that backline has a far, far higher skill ceiling when compared to frontline. Throwing more stability at the problem isn’t how you solve the issue. Better movement, more intelligent skill use, coordination, and proper builds all contribute far more to a group’s success than an extra bit of stability or another hammer.

tl;dr: Hammer trains are only good for either outnumbering your opponents or wiping pug groups.

I’m sorry, is that Mortred as in Mortred from Aion? (Urban Battlegrounds)

3/4 players are warriors or guards doesn’t mean any of them are competent. Which, frankly, blows my mind. Guardian is the second easiest class in the entire game to play well, right behind warrior. Yet some people still play it poorly.

It blows my mind that people STILL think you have to hack/glitch to get into citadel. You literally jump up the side of a hill. That’s it, that’s all.

Julie Yann.5379:

Boonprot.6274:

Julie Yann.5379:

SonofNoob.3102:

Straegen.2938:

warriorjrd.8695:

20 rangers vs 20 warriors would probably end in the ranger’s favour simply due to fields and support. Sure ranger may not have the best support, but it’s better than a warrior’s simply because of healing spring. This is still a bad comparison however, you will never have 20 set classes going against another 20. Although if that were to happen, engi and ranger would probably fight for first place simply because they can do everything.

Non-Signet Rangers only have one native stability and it is on a LONG cool down. A pack of rangers is a dinner bell for Hammer warriors.

Warriors have WAY better support than Rangers… it isn’t even close. Shout warriors group heal, remove conditions, convert conditions to boons, have a MASSIVE amount of control, are effectively immune to immobilize, best passive healing in the game, banner group rez, stack might, they don’t have to stop for healing, come to the fight with over 30k HP and nearly 4k armor. Their sustained DPS is impressive as well. There is a reason the backbone of almost every group of players is the Warrior and Guardian.

Must be those 30/30/30/30/30 Warriors with Legendary armor and trinkets.

Aside from the 30kHP+4k armor and having a impressive sustained DPS, the rest is pretty much true.

Your standard Hammer/SwWh PVT, melandru runes + food, 10/0/30/30/0 healing shouts, with warhorn trait, fgj, shake it off, healing signet, battle standard, will do pretty much all of that. The damage is mediocre at best even with might stacks but the amount of group support and CC is phenomenal.

Not completely true. 30k HP and 4k armor is a massive overinvestment. Drop that armor by a full 800-850 toughness, invest it into Power/Precision/Crit Damage (no, not necessarily Berserker gear), and you’ll find that a traditional 10/0/30/30/0 shout war can do fairly impressive damage. I do agree with the rest, though.

That’s what I meant, it’s impossible to have 30k HP, 4k toughness and have high DPS. Even if you swapped gear for more zerk you would not have what I would call impressive damage on a 10/0/30/30/0 build. Now if you went 10/0/30/0/30 and forget about healing shouts and warhorn trait you still get decent group support, awesome CC, and impressive damage with roughly 23k Hp 3.4k armor.

Back on topic. When you compare what Guardians, Warriors, Eles, Necros, Mesmers bring in terms of group utility (on short CD) and damage, Rangers have nothing to offer that we don’t already have in a better form.

There’s a difference, though. A 10/0/30/0/30 build is DPS, whereas 10/0/30/30/0 is a support build. You can get significant damage from a shout war, but you have to be willing to optimize your gear for it. The two also play fundamentally different roles within the zerg. Obviously, the damage will be less than a DPS build.

Edit: I suppose I should add an on-topic bit, too.

Rangers are meant for small-man, not 15+. I don’t actually see anything inherently wrong with certain classes being stronger than others in different aspects of the game. To me, that’s diversity, although I’m an altaholic so I’m biased. Keep a class where its strengths lie.

Julie Yann.5379:

SonofNoob.3102:

Straegen.2938:

warriorjrd.8695:

20 rangers vs 20 warriors would probably end in the ranger’s favour simply due to fields and support. Sure ranger may not have the best support, but it’s better than a warrior’s simply because of healing spring. This is still a bad comparison however, you will never have 20 set classes going against another 20. Although if that were to happen, engi and ranger would probably fight for first place simply because they can do everything.

Non-Signet Rangers only have one native stability and it is on a LONG cool down. A pack of rangers is a dinner bell for Hammer warriors.

Warriors have WAY better support than Rangers… it isn’t even close. Shout warriors group heal, remove conditions, convert conditions to boons, have a MASSIVE amount of control, are effectively immune to immobilize, best passive healing in the game, banner group rez, stack might, they don’t have to stop for healing, come to the fight with over 30k HP and nearly 4k armor. Their sustained DPS is impressive as well. There is a reason the backbone of almost every group of players is the Warrior and Guardian.

Must be those 30/30/30/30/30 Warriors with Legendary armor and trinkets.

Aside from the 30kHP+4k armor and having a impressive sustained DPS, the rest is pretty much true.

Your standard Hammer/SwWh PVT, melandru runes + food, 10/0/30/30/0 healing shouts, with warhorn trait, fgj, shake it off, healing signet, battle standard, will do pretty much all of that. The damage is mediocre at best even with might stacks but the amount of group support and CC is phenomenal.

Not completely true. 30k HP and 4k armor is a massive overinvestment. Drop that armor by a full 800-850 toughness, invest it into Power/Precision/Crit Damage (no, not necessarily Berserker gear), and you’ll find that a traditional 10/0/30/30/0 shout war can do fairly impressive damage. I do agree with the rest, though.

Checked mos, HoD and ET tanked far harder than IoJ. HoD went from 1st to 21st in 11 weeks, while ET went from 3rd to 24th over the same time period. IoJ managed to fall from 3rd to 18th in 21 weeks.

I guess I remember IoJ more because their fall was really centred around January/Feb and highlighted the ending of free transfers.

Edit: you’re correct, eithinan. SBI IoJ JQ at that point. BG made their rise to T1 the next week.

I’d honestly say Guardian is the best, because of how well they can time their frontline. Stability via Stand Your Ground and Empower are both skills that are often used to dictate your group’s tempo. That is, if your stability is coordinated you always know when you can hard push through a lot of hard CC. If your Empowers are coordinated, you know when best to force a clunge and/or regroup.

Over the past year Maguuma has had several successful thief, ranger, elementalist (staff and d/d), warrior, mesmer, and guardian commanders. It’s not entirely impossible, but I’d definitely say that Guardian is MOST suited to organized play, whereas the others can lend themselves more to pubmanding.

Chaba.5410:

You’re missing some servers in there. IOJ, for example.

Aye, IoJ was one of the more spectacular implosions. They plummeted almost as hard as ET, iirc.

Lower servers also can’t bankroll transfers like a T1 250-man blobfest can.

Aurust.8961:

MiLkZz.4789:

Oh my god, because T1 NA ain’t doing good because of maxed stacked servers, WvW is doomed? Drama much.

We in EU barely notice Eotm, still got good match ups, good fights and good numbers on all sides. Maybe unstack a little and find out there is a world besides who can buy the most guilds.

Eotm is a fun place to blow off some steam after the more ‘serious’ WvW. It wont replace it, maybe for servers doomed to fight a 24/7 maxed out blob server but not for the ones who still get good fights. I think Anet did great with their addition.

There are too many unbalanced matchups before eotm even started… eotm will only exaggerate this….. on NA anyhow dunno about EU.

Did any tiers not notice a downgrade in wvw quality?

Not really, no. Then again, T3 and T4 servers are wholly unimpressive in every sense of the word.

Jyeoi.6027:

Mag is a ghost town SEA time. Like 5 ppl, whatever SEA guilds that go are gonna be alone. SBI and DB are so bored with Mag during that time zone, we spend most our time hammering each other in the open.

Dont be fooled by the illusion that your stuff is still green during that tz Mag, its just that you are a boring server to fight during SEA so we dont even bother going there after a while.

More of this nonsense and im starting another thread.

Except every time Mag NA stays up late we hammer the everloving tar out of DB and SBI. You people have warped perceptions.

Dynnen.6405:

None of that kitten I mentioned belongs in pvp…ever

Lol not according to the devs. Siege around every corner ruining fun engagements. Probably never going back.

DeWolfe.2174:

umm….. no, doesn’t bother me at all. In fact I love siege!

You would be from T1.

We won’t be playing EotM seriously. The terrain is garbage and there’s too much siege for that to happen. Instead, the plan is to camp and kill any PvE objectives/players we can find. Hopefully we get another Reddit QQ thread like when the Aetherblade Cache was at the top of the EB JP.

Straegen.2938:

Boonprot.6274:

Eggyokeo.9705:

your professions Fall Trait is worth equipping as it helps moving around that map quicker and jump of walls when attacking enemy’s at the gate.

Literally the only class who can get away with this is Warrior. No one else should be traited into reduced fall damage.

Thief has a lot of use for theirs since it is a free blind/stealth and easy to trigger. Ranger often picks it up because not a lot of great traits beating down the door.

Rangers shouldn’t be taken into large-scale WvW, so there’s that one covered. I’m not super familiar with Thief raiding builds, but I’ve never seen a large-scale-focused thief run that trait. Only roamers.

Dayra.7405:

As said above ANY scoring is fair as long as it is applied to all servers equally. Even random numbers as score are fair and as meaningful as the current score.

Fairness is not the issue.

The issues are:
- Equal impact of players
- Better match-balance

You’ll never get matchup balance because the SEA/OCX pop congregates on only a few specific servers. There’s not enough of them to go around, and you need at least a modicum of a presence in those time zones to survive in T1/T2. It’s not their fault, though. ANet, in their infinite wisdom, overlooked the fact that coverage is king when they made the game, and have been willfully ignorant ever since.

Eggyokeo.9705:

your professions Fall Trait is worth equipping as it helps moving around that map quicker and jump of walls when attacking enemy’s at the gate.

Literally the only class who can get away with this is Warrior. No one else should be traited into reduced fall damage.

Mag wat. Almost 100% of our off-hours coverage is derived from NA players. Obviously we have quite a few Euros, but not as much as the top 3 (or some of T2).

juno.1840:

I think WvW is unique because of the format — not because you ground out some gear over time.

Your example on D/D ele is good, but not because of “the ability to tailor your gear piece by piece”. It’s more likely due to point-capture, small environment vs. open field, large environment.

To everyone that says the time-based power bonuses are “not determinant” regarding winning and losing — then as Elmo so nicely put it:

“…why not just get rid of it alltogther then? Since it does nothing it’s a useless addition to the game. Right?”

If you want to win due to skill (and time invested in getting more skillful), then remove all other advantages from the equation. Regardless of you how spin it, unequal stats provide an advantage. Whether or not you think the advantage is impacting is meaningless — it still exists.

Here’s where I see a difference. In GW2 exotic gear is beyond simple to acquire. If it takes longer than a week for a completely brand new player to get a full set, they’re doing something wrong. Ascended gear offers very little over Exotikittentle enough so that it won’t be the determining factor in an even fight. HOW you gear, though, can help determine the outcome of an engagement. If you’re better at intelligently gearing your char than someone else, why on earth shouldn’t you have that advantage? How you gear a character is an extension of individual skill.

tl;dr: Since endgame Exotic gear is so quick to acquire, and Ascended offers very little in terms of stat increases, GW2 doesn’t really have a gear bias.

Solstice.1097:

That being said, it would be nice for WvW to be scaled just like PvP with everyone at level 80 with equalized gear stats. The biggest problem is the rally mechanic, which currently makes un-equal players a liability instead of an asset, and that’s not the environment that we should want.

This is one of the most intelligent posts in almost all of the WvW subforums. The absolute last thing an organized guild needs is a rally war, especially when they’re already outnumbered. I’ve been in many engagements where a single, non-guilded player has rallied almost 15 people. 15. That’s more than half the size of our regular guild group, and there are still more enemies to kill. On the one hand, the rally mechanic is important because, no matter how good your group is, people can mess up and die, and ressing them is important. On the other hand, to have 1/4-1/2 of an enemy group rally because some uplevel ranger deemed it prudent to engage alongside your guild is absurd. I’m getting off topic, though.

If you standardized the gearing in WvW you’d be dangerously close to ruining what makes WvW so unique: its gearing. Part of the reason why sPvP is stale and limiting is due to your stats being confined to poorly-constructed trinkets. This, in turn, limits the available builds and causes the meta to stagnate. Case-in-point: D/D ele fell out of favour in sPvP partly because of successive nerfs to its survivability, and partly due to S/D being a much more powerful option. In WvW, though? Completely different story. Thanks to the ability to tailor your gear piece-by-piece, you can maintain extremely high survivability stats and still pump out damage with 2k Power and 80%+ Crit Damage. Turning WvW into sPvP would be the biggest mistake ANet could make.

Is this thread really complaining about siege. Really. What a sad state WvW’s in.

This thread is pointless. Season 2 will roll around and everyone will flock to T1 again, because being exceptionally mediocre and abusing coverage is easier than working for anything. Mostly dead servers will still be carried by their SEA/OCX crew PvDing for 8h straight, and their ratings will be artificially inflated as a result. Then, when Season 2 ends and everyone realizes, yet again, that WvW is beyond extremely neglected we’ll begin the cycle anew.

Also, to whoever said that BP needs a few 40+ man guilds to xfer, that’s probably the saddest statement I’ve ever seen. Nothing in your tier rolls that deep and, if they do, you can wipe them with 1/3 of their numbers. I promise; we’ve done it before.

Elmo Benchwarmer.3025:

Boonprot.6274:

Please stop. If you think guard stacks are in any way a determining factor in an even numbers engagement you need to WvW with better players.

Normalizing gear is bad. If you honestly think Ascended is much more powerful than Exotic you probably haven’t done the math. Hint: it’s not. Exotic vs. Rare vs. etc., though, is significant. Except Exotic gear is extremely cheap and takes no time at all to acquire. If you have difficulty gearing your char fully in Exotic gear there’s something seriously wrong with your playing.

Since according to you the stacks and the ascended gear do not determine the outcome of a fight, why not just get rid of it alltogther then? Since it does nothing it’s a useless addition to the game. Right?

Won’t hear any arguments from me lol.

Natronix.9827:

Boonprot.6274:

Natronix.9827:

There should be more maps like EoTM in the future for the fight lovers.

Wonder if cross server guilds will emerge from this

Except EotM is filled with siege and gates. It’s probably the worst place to go if you want an actual fight, because you’re almost always fighting in siege AoE.

That is dissapointing. Wonder if the community will just frown upon anyone using siege, like GvG community does

Doubt it. Lots of guilds out there who use siege as a substitute for competence.

Please stop. If you think guard stacks are in any way a determining factor in an even numbers engagement you need to WvW with better players.

Normalizing gear is bad. If you honestly think Ascended is much more powerful than Exotic you probably haven’t done the math. Hint: it’s not. Exotic vs. Rare vs. etc., though, is significant. Except Exotic gear is extremely cheap and takes no time at all to acquire. If you have difficulty gearing your char fully in Exotic gear there’s something seriously wrong with your playing.