Guild Wars 2

Maybe you have more resources (time, flexibility) than some?

Some of us aren’t 100% flexible with their time management due to having families and jobs and such. Logging on for an achievement at 4 am was definitely an option for me when I went to uni, but now, not so much.

Secondly, when you start it, you have to see it through to the end. Since it is in a WvW map, you can’t log off when you run out of time and continue later. A time commitment of unknown length, also a problem for people with real life commitments.

This becomes a bigger problem when your internet connection isn’t 100% stable and you DC sometimes. Bam, all progress lost, start over. If you have nothing else to do that afternoon, this is fine; but I’m beyond that age.

All the typical excuses. “But I have a life!”… “I’m an adult! I don’t have time!”

Yeah yeah, heard it all before.

For the record, I’m 34, have a job, have a wife, have a house and large piece of land to maintain, blah blah, blah. No excuses here.

I don’t do OS at 4am or anything ridiculous. I typically do it at prime time because that’s when I get home from work. So yeah, hard to buy that excuse, too.

Time commitment? It takes all of 5 minutes to do after you’ve done it once to learn it. 20 seconds if a mesmer is there helping people. Sorry, can’t accept that excuse, either.

This isn’t some terrible hardship being imposed on you. It’s not even required to finish the main achievement. Stop acting as if it’s this terrible thing that’s just impossible for anyone to do and is ruining your entire life.

Still trying to figure out how some of us manage to do OS without any issues every day, and other people here claim that they couldn’t even do it one time – not even with a mesmer portal? – in the weeks during Sky Pirates.

Like I said earlier, this sounds a lot like people just being really dramatic about something that they don’t like, not an actual concern about the game.

Oh, and I play on a Tier 1 server, where our competitors have 24/7 coverage. A 10 man group trying to get through during Sky Pirates was insufficient to overcome the gankerfest.

I’m on Tier 1 as well and have no trouble at all running OS solo every day in 5 minutes to get my free siege. And I’m not on the server with 24/7 coverage.

This is just a classic example of people blowing the topic way out of proportion just because they don’t like a particular element of content.

I don’t know about lower tiers but in tier 1 it is easy to see how coordination and strategy massively impact a Zerg fight. Even with half the numbers a guild Zerg that is coordinated can wipe a disorganized pug Zerg 9 times out of 10. In tier 1 mindlessly running through will likely get you wiped. My guild has skill rotations, we utilize choke points, and numerous other tactics like dodge rolling through the first time so the enemy blows there skills then turning around and demolishing their squishy back line. Also against other guild zergs adapting to your enemies tactits is key. Yesterday we ran into an Agg Zerg composed of 15 guardians 6 warriors and the rest were mesmers, else’s and necros, around 30 total players. By the way Agg is good so they could have wiped a pug Zerg of 50 people no problem. This means there Zerg has little condition removal so we focused conditions and boon ripped leaving them vulnerable then faked a push making them blow there CC’s and pushed through and wiped them. In an earlier confrontation we didn’t know there team comp and they crushed us. Strategy and quick reaction both play a huge part in fighting an organized enemy. We have a name for mindless zergs, they are called loot bags. Don’t get me wrong though, zergs of 60+ can use there numbers to overwhelm and cause ridiculous skill lag that makes strategy useless.

I hate to be “that guy” but the fantasy of the small group taking down a zerg is just that….a fantasy most of the time. Numbers tend to trump all else in this game, even superior play. (It’s kinda funny seeing a huge zerg of people charging at you in WvW and just swinging at the air as they run at you, because “1-spam” in a melee train is the prevailing zerg strategy most of the time)

All you have to do is look at the Tier 1 scores and PPT most days to see that JQ’s fantasy of being the “small, elite team” just doesn’t beat the coverage and numbers of BG/SoR.

but Blackgate prevailed all of this with a 30 minutes queue and a good 20 second to cast anything but #1 skill.

That’s probably WHY you could defend it. No one could do anything. =D

The devs themselves have said there is no T1 anymore. Let me repeat that, the devs themselves have said there is no T1 anymore.

They can say “There’s no Tier 1” until they’re blue in the face, but as long as every single week (except…one?) is BG/JQ/SoR then the feeling that this is “Tier 1” will remain.

So if Im playing off hours, its where I dont have to fight 50 people by myself, because pretty much everyone on bg/sor are zerglings and cant do anything without superior numbers, and fighting those blobs without even coming close to half their numbers isnt fun.

No one in Tier 1 actually wants to fight unless they have 80 people backing them up, that’s what makes it frustrating sometimes. SoR/BG players almost always run from me rather than engage 1v1. Even 2v1 against me, people will often just run away.

That’s not a slam on just BG/SoR, either. Last night I was with two other JQ’ers, we ran into a group of 3 BG. The 3 BG and the 2 JQ with me immediately ran in opposite directions from one another, leaving me standing there scratching my head. People just don’t seem to want to fight.

It’s just blobs all-day-every-day with most of these people. Which wouldn’t be so bad, except for the fact that once two blobs get in range of each other, the skill lag takes hold and no one can do anything, so whoever has the bigger auto-attack melee train just ends up winning.

There was one fight in particular last week that really steamed a lot of people I think, where a smaller group of JQ had broken into a BG tower and the BG zerg got there just as the doors went down. The JQ team prepared to choke the door and keep the BG crew out as long as possible….except the skill lag started and barely anyone even got a spell off before the BG team flooded in through the door.

Blobbing makes for very uninteresting encounters, but unfortunately NOT blobbing means you’re the, “Small elite force that just got steamrolled by 80 auto attacking Warriors”.

None of this is anything that everyone in Tier 1 doesn’t already know, though. It’s just a source of great frustration for many players that otherwise really enjoy WvW.

I am referring to the stack as a whole moving with the commander, but I guess you can look at it that way as well.

Ah, I see. =D

Only if you don’t move your feet.

Actually, quite the opposite. Just hanging out IN the AE fields with the blob mitigates most AE damage ridiculously well. That’s pretty much the point of blobbing to begin with.

It’s a completely unintuitive system and different from any other game I’ve played, honestly. It’s funny that being the guy who says, “I’ll move out of the AE and away from the blob!” is actually a good way to get killed.

Yeah, this is one of those things in WvW that seems rather ridiculous. Essentially the best way to deal with AE damage is to….have everyone jump into the AE?

Not to mention how frustrating it is to try to fight in any situation where you’re outnumbered by any group with more than 5 players in it. 1v2 isn’t bad, 1v3 isn’t even so bad, but something like 4v6 starts to be ridiculous because just about everything the 4-man group does starts to lose a significant amount of potency, while the 6-man group remains at 100% effectiveness. As long as the larger group remains in a nice “blob”, they’re going to be guaranteed a complete victory unless there’s some really insane gap in skill.

I say “complete victory” because in WvW anything short of a 100% wipe is nearly pointless as well, with everyone being able quickly resurrect downed allies. So even if your well-coordinated 5-man group manages to kill 10 people in a 20-man zerg, you really didn’t stop them at all.

This is why Tier 1 is basically nothing but gigantic blobs on each map. The game just encourages it, even if the designers didn’t intend it that way.

Crixus.9247:

picture from sunnyhill in bg bl, few min ago, must be a glitch or something because i saw sor guys coming through wall while they attacked tower, and no, they were not there prior to attack, after this picture 3 more came through the door (no portal) were capping tower before zerg managed to take down gate. all guys who came through the tower had fire greatsword elementalist elite skill.

Imagine if BGs NA crew was as effective as their SEA crew.

“Imagine if the other servers had as poor coverage during NA hours as they do during SEA hours!”

Fixed that for you.

People aren’t gonna follow your Twitch page, sir. Either just post what the heck you have to say, or move along. This internet “like-whoring” business gets old.

I personally don’t care If we win or lose I’m in it for the fights, most of rallians share that sentiment.

I’m sure a lot of us on other servers feel that way, too. It’s hard to take the points TOO seriously when you know that the final tally really comes down to who can maintain 24-hour coverage the longest.

I think if there was an award for the guilds who play the most, you guys would win it hands down.

I thought that’s what WvW points were for? =D

Not to be a jerk or anything, but for those of us at work or something, do we have to sit through a 15 minute video, or could you just kinda…you know…say it here? =D

Even if JQ were doing what you suspect, SoR guilds have been doing it for months.

It is kinda funny when I think I’m gonna defend a keep against a <certain SoR guild> zerg, only to watch every piece of siege – no matter where it’s placed, even on the ground inside the walls – get destroyed by multiple Dragon’s Tooths dropping all at the same time. =D

The carrion vs. rabid stuff is all quite interesting.

Rabid still feels like it makes more sense simply because we already have a fairly large HP pool and very low armor. Just throwing even more HP onto that might be just as effective on paper when you look at only raw EHP, but it also drastically diminishes the value of any healing effects from any source.

Yes, Life Force pool size scales with HP, but it also essentially scales with Toughness, so it’s hard to say that Life Force is a clear win for Vitality.

Unless Carrion somehow totally blows Rabid away (which I can’t imagine making any sense) it would seem like Rabid would win once you take any sort of healing effects into account, and especially if a fight goes on for any significant amount of time.

This would all be moot if they’d just give Condition specs some decent itemization. It’s rather annoying that Carrion is about the only easily accessible choice, Rabid doesn’t have a craftable exotic version or a full set that you can purchase with Karma, and Condition/Vitality/Toughness doesn’t exist at all. Meanwhile, power builds have just about every stat combination possible and they’re all fairly easily attained in comparison.

My hope is that this will teach people to run a few stun breaks or stability to avoid being knocked around so much.

You already see Stability-zergs in WvW as it is. I tried Spectral Wall last night, but even when I dropped it on a choke point and an entire enemy zerg ran into it, all I typically saw was a shower of “Immune!” messages. =/

I’m still partial to the whole, “Throw it down in front of your own zerg and everyone gets protection.” thing moreso than trying to throw it at the opposing zerg.

It’s not fair that thieves can turn invisible while downed. Ele can’t do that.
It’s not fair that mesmers can summon a phantasm while downed. Ele can’t do that.
It’s not fair that rangers can outheal multiple attackers with their pet heal. Ele can’t do that.

And on…
And on…
And on…..

Better nerf them all to insure class balance.

Yep.

Every day, nothing but the standard, “Whine about something that beat me or kept me from killing someone.” stuff around here.

Thief doesn’t pay the price because of a GC build. He can take a bite out of someone, and if he sees his damage isn’t going to get the job done quick enough he just stealths and moves on. = no downside for GC build

lulz right here.

I can waste the entirety of my dodging, my evasion moves, and my block moves and the thief is very likely to never exit stealth during this, despite having at least 3-4 of his attacks negated. How in the name of hell do you find this fair, where the thief class is REWARDED for failing attacks by staying in stealth, where as the other classes are PUNISHED for preventing that attack from connecting by lack of reveal on the thief?

1) I’d love to see this magical thief that has 20 seconds of stealth running while swinging at the air at you for some reason.

2) I’d love to actually fight you and watch you blow every single defensive CD the first time I stealth.

3) Every class can swing auto attacks at air without penalty. This isn’t something unique to thieves, and actually is detrimental to them. I lost count of how many thieves I’ve killed while they’re stealthed just because I can keep spamming attacks into them without a target.

4) Yours is still the absolute silliest complaint about stealth that anyone has ever had.

Zerg didn’t used to be the way. We all used to wander the maps in singles and small groups all the time. After all, in reality we’re all just strangers on the Internet.

But in other games the zerg worked so well that mega-guilds formed around it. It stifled those games as well, players hated it as well.

Unfortunately some of those guilds came to GW2 since day one. On certain servers it’s been the dominant style since the beginning, and all who play them regularly have to assimilate.

It’s not fun, but unless WvW design changes to make the zerg impractical it will probably spread where it can.

Bear in mind that just because the zerg exists doesn’t mean small groups can’t also exist. That seems to be the assertion people are making here, that just because there’s a larger group somewhere on the map, that they can’t have a 5-man racking up points for their team, and very effectively.

It happens much more often in WvW roaming (at least on lower tiers).

Yeah, but my experience with that (and being IN those groups) is that what happens is the organized 5-man roams around ganking solo people or smaller, PUG groups, and everyone pats themselves on the back for being awesome at PvP. Which is fine, but it’s not what I do when I’m looking for a competitive fight.

Are you talking about the D/P build with the 5,2,2,2,5,2,2,2,2 spam that allows them to keep retealthing, stabbing you for massive damage while all the while making it impossible to hit them during the fraction of the second you can see them? Yeah before i actually tried it myself, i thought they were actually good and thats why i was having a hard time with them. Nope, its stupidly easy to do and yeah it does need a nerf. Heres a perfect example http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1ecl8d0TQGQ Yeah takes real skill to push 2 buttons over and over again. and its not like it requires strict timing or anything. make a thief and test it yourself. effective against 95% of the people you’ll ever run into. as long as you dont fight more than 5 people at once you’ll win with little effort.

Translation: “I haven’t actually played a thief but I watched a video and have concluded that the need to be nerfed some more.”

I suppose that’s true if we’re talking on a strictly technical level…but I’d say you have more of a chance of having a 5v5 deathmatch battle (I assume that’s what everyone is all hot and bothered to get) in a sPvP/tPvP match than you are in a WvW map randomly roaming about.

So you’re ignoring my question?

Seemed a lot like a, “Question I already know the answer to.” sort of thing to me. Not something I was going to bother with.

It really seems like we have a lot of people in this thread who quite simply don’t want to be satisfied.

You get 5v5s in sPvP? That’s news to me!

Go check out those tournament things. Or custom arenas. Ta-da.

I guess I am the bringer of news!

I’ll make it very clear for you buddy. The competitive small man teams come from games 3-10 years ago with open world roaming competitive based pvp. Clearly you haven’t experienced this or else you wouldn’t have posted what you did.

Bad news, I played all those games too. Nice try.

You have people in this game that actually came here SOLEY to kill players, not wanting to feel “epic” by having 60 people in a fight or sitting on siege.

Oh hey, really? You mean like…oh, I dunno…sPvP or tPvP, like I said?

or even better a 5v5 fighting a team more organized and better talented then your own….

Sounding more and more like sPvP here, wow!

And hey “buddy”…even if you don’t want to do sPvP and you still just want to run around with a 5-man ganking people in WvW and thinking that makes you a tough PvPer, you can still do that, too. If you don’t care about the scores and you don’t care about sieges and you don’t care about the keeps, then why do you care that “zerging is the only way to win”?

I do roaming groups all the time either solo or with 2-5 people and we do just fine. So…you know…maybe you’re creating your own problem here.

You don’t have time to read like…two tooltips…but you have time to post a thread, read replies, and respond.

But yeah, nice try at the usual, “Gamers that call other gamers no-life nerds.” angle.

So what do you expect the defenders to do? It is the playerbase destroying WvW. If you hate the karma train don’t join one help defend. Yes we know it is long boring and not rewarding. That is what needs to change. The game help in that regards by offering more rewards for doing preparation and defending and lowering the cost or burden from just a small group of individuals.

It is because of the people fortifying keeps and towers that make for more drawn out fights like the one that we recently had over our hills. We do not know what BP’s numbers were but because they had it seiged up like crazy we could not just zerg in there and take it.

More of what we are saying is make it easier for the defenders to prepare so that the game could be played the way it was designed. Massive epic battles for towers and keeps.

The question is how to make it easier for the defenders.

I guess it’s just something we don’t think about in my groups. We take a keep, someone will volunteer to set up siege, someone will stay behind to start upgrades, and we just get stuff done.

It’s understandable if some people have cash issues and don’t want to spend the cash on a questionable investment, and that’s fine. But by and large I don’t see a need for any more rewards in WvW than already exist, and I’m certainly not concerned with my gold/hour when I’m in there.

If the number of the server means that much to you, you have a serious problem.

I don’t get you people. You guys come into the WvW forum, whine that there’s nothing but zerging, and then when people explain other useful things you can do that help your team and don’t involve zerging you say that the score and winning don’t matter to you.

Why are you in WvW at all, then? You don’t like the zerg, you don’t like defending or doing other things that help your server, you don’t care about the score…so why? What brings you in there? Why aren’t you just doing sPvP/tPvP or PvE?

It just makes no sense to me to keep doing something that you don’t apparently like anything about.

Show exactly where I asked it to be removed from the game. I’m asking to change a specific function on how stealth works (something most MMO players can agree is rather OP),

How exactly do you think that what you described makes stealth “OP”? It’s not even on the top 10 list of things that make stealth effective. I’d wager you’re the only person in the entire game that has even thought of this particular thing, to be honest.

Soooo…. The higher EHP means higher survible no matter whats ur DR on the calc show because it already used it to create the EHP

Well yes, but EHP is a bit of a simplification. It’s really a figure that’s most appropriate when applied to Tank characters in PvE situations. Any calculations using it typically assume that vast amounts of direct healing are available, and even then it’s often misleading in many situations.

In PvP scenarios, there are so many other things to take into consideration that I’m really not even sure that just a raw EHP number means…well, anything. Damage profiles change from fight to fight, availability of healing changes from fight to fight, mechanics of damage application change from fight to fight…it’s really more complex than just, “I have this much EHP.”

So, yes, there are many people who do care and who do want to do what’s best for there server, and not just themselves in terms of loot and WXP. Hopefully you’ll get to experience that at some point.

Of course that’s part of the problem right there….a lot of people that would never otherwise touch WvW go there because there are potential rewards. You see people talk about things like, “WvW Karma Train”, just rushing about flipping and abandoning paper-gate towers over and over.

Heck, even on THIS forum…the WvW forum, for petes sake…I see a lot of people talking about how the score is dumb, how playing to win is dumb, how you should just find the most efficient farming method and let the tryhards get their server nerd points, all that jazz.

So, oh well. Let them worry about how much gold/hour it costs to upgrade a keep.

No, stealth IS broken. Ignoring down state, a person in stealth can attempt to hit you with something, the attack misses or gets blocked, and then retry their attack because they’re still in stealth. This is what makes it too powerful.

In every other MMO missing an attack or getting it blocked throws you out of stealth. All they need to do to fix stealth in this game is to make ANY attack, regardless of whether or not it succeeds, throw you out of stealth. There, no more “Thieves are OP” threads or complaints, Thieves can still spam stealth, and everybody wins.

All you did was illustrate differences between stealth in this game and stealth in other games. (Read: WoW, because that’s all you really referred to, other games are different too.) You also totally ignored how those mechanics relate to the mechanics unique to GW2.

Problem is, all you described were the things that you perceive as being differences that benefit the thief. You didn’t even bother going into all the differences that make stealth tougher to manage compared to other games.

Like I said, just the usual whining from people that lose a fight in an MMO and want <whatever killed me> to be removed from the game. Eventually you guys would just have every ability in the game removed if you had your way, simply because you would rather have them removed than get better at playing with them.

I see paranoid tax hating crazies exist on the internet as well.

I don’t quite understand how UI issues actually keep people from forming whatever size groups they need in WvW. Never seems to have been a problem from where I’m sitting.

Best validation right there. If it doesn’t mean kitten to you don’t look at it, but yes I would like to see who on my server is vested in their characters and to what extent.

Like I said…it wouldn’t even do that. All it would show is, “Who has spent the most time in the zerg?”

It wouldn’t tell you anything about people doing all the other important (actually, often more important) things in WvW, because they don’t grant nearly as much WXP as the zerg.

What is wrong with knowing active particpants in wvw?

It wouldn’t do that, though. All it would show is who spends the most time in the zerg. People doing all the supporting work don’t get near the amount of Wxp.

All you did is demonstrate why some of the downed skills are arguably more effective. It still doesn’t mean they’re “guaranteed get out of jail free cards” by any means. (Mistform can be if you’re near some sort of escape like a keep door, granted.)

C. We can NO LONGER SEE OTHER COMMANDER PINS… really? WHY??? It just doesn’t make sense.

To be fair, I think that’s kinda the point. That way you’re not seeing every pin on the map and it’s easier for people that need to be with a certain commander to stick to that commander.

Now, I’m not saying it’s an awesome idea. Just that I understand what they were aiming for here, and it does make some sense.

He is not asking how to be effective in wvw and help his server win. No one here gives a bloody crap about your stupid wvw score dude.

There’s sPvP and tPvP for that. If you’re asking how to best PvP in WvW but you don’t care about the score at all, then what the heck is the point of the entire topic?

I said what I gotta say. Have a nice forum summer wanna-be—trolls/warriors.

When did this become a thing, anyway? The whole, “I don’t agree with you, so you’re a troll!” strategy?

Ok when you are so smart answer me what exactly are 5-man going to do in wvw?… apart from taking camps,killing solo players and killing sentries? lol . Gonna boost their egos for killing RANDOM players with commander… thats soooooo 2004 lol

You might wanna read up on how WvW scoring works.

Currently being in a 5-man group in WvW is THE worst idea that could have occured on you.

100% false. Understandable that people still think this, given how obscure the scoring details are in WvW, though.

The problem here is that people are way too focused on “rewards” (Loot, WXP, etc) instead of winning.

Every single day. More threads that basically say, “THIS CONCEPT OF STEALTH CONFUSES AND ANGERS ME, ANET MUST DESTROY IT”

You guys never fail to disappoint.

While some other professions (thief/ele/mesmer) dont care about anything and have a pretty much guarenteed “get out of jail free”-card.

Guaranteed get out of jail free card…do tell how that works, exactly? This isn’t beta weekend 1 anymore, where people went, “oops, the mesmer teleported 5 feet away, we’d better just call it quits.”

There ARE incentives not to zerg, but they involve doing things that are either somewhat risky or give benefits to your team that aren’t well documented.

Right now all people really see are the point-per-tick tallies on the scoreboard and think that holding keeps is all that matters. (Ever wonder why the scores aren’t always multiples of 5 if points-per-tick is all that matters?) Therefore just following the zerg around and flipping keeps seems to be the only way to get anything done, by their estimation.

Your bank.

It frightens me.

=D

Meanwhile you have a 66% chance to get 341 HP (341*.66=225) or simply speaking, Omnom Ghosts add 225 damage to your swing,

Wouldn’t that be, (341*.66*.57) give or take a few crit %? Closer to 130 damage/swing on average? Still significant, no doubt, and more damage/swing than the other foods are giving on anything other than backstab, hm. I hadn’t thought about it that way, actually.

I have bought a ton of the Dragon Rolls food for WvW, so I am eager to give it a go in there. I’ll probably end up stocking up a bank full of them before Dragon Bash is over just so I can spend 30 copper versus ~9 silver/each on food down the road.