Guild Wars 2

If you can join SFR we can cap stuff together. EB is still king, but there are players on the bl maps too.

I’ll go try necropolis today.

Check my necropolis guide and build a superior cart on the spots that I mention and see how limited the camera angle is – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5juUMG-834U&index=1&list=PLduHbZPbtobHjIvdoZtd_99Y2ZFJpbFAx

You can also see in the video that when I use the normal carts I grab them as far as possible as it lets me and the camera centers on me.

Yeah, it’s just servers are trash and cant handle big fights. Not the map or event.

Once the event is over, there’s no more skill lag. So it’s the event at fault here.
On our server when people see that the event started they take a break from the fights

Sup ACs seem to operate in exactly the same way as regular ACs for me anyhow.

Tested it and it’s still the same issue. When you grab any siege you become the center of the screen and then you can pan the camera to see stuff around you. When you grab a superior arrow cart, the cart becomes the center of the screen. This is a very serious issue when dealing with placing carts further away from the walls so defend from proxy catapults and also not get damaged by meteor shower. Right now I don’t use any superior arrow carts for proxy catas because the line of sight is limited.

Try to defend Necropolis with sup.carts placed right at the edge of the wall. You won’t see any of the ground base wall because of the faulty camera.

Never seen this lag..

The lag is incredible if blobs are fighting anywhere on the map. You must have played when few people were online. Also note that it’s server lag not client lag.

Sup ACs seem to operate in exactly the same way as regular ACs for me anyhow.

Interesting. I will test it tonight and see if they changed it.

This impacts scouting intel for home team, but I guess you can reference supply of tower to tell if the wall is probably reinforced.

You don’t need a description. There are 2 ways to find out the type of wall: you click the objective icon to see the upgrades, or you check the texture (wood = no upgrade, stone = reinforced, metal = fortified)

General:

• Fixed a bug with the map marker for repair NPCs.
• Fixed a bug that caused some outfitter NPCs to sell siege blueprints instead of their standard wares.
• Fixed a bug that caused keep lords to really hate flame rams.
• Reduced the health and defense bonuses provided by reinforced and fortified walls and gates at towers.
• Updated the Mystic Forge vendor to also sell Siege Masters Guides in quantities of 10.
• Disabled announcements for when guilds claim World vs. World objectives.

Eternal Battlegrounds:

• Removed some unintended oil pots at the upper level of Stonemist Castle.
• Fixed a bug at Valley Keep that was causing three sets of patrols to stack and patrol at the same location.
• Fixed a bug that caused the bridges at some objectives to overlap multiple types when upgraded.
• Fixed a bug at Speldan Clearcut in which the supervisor was sometimes on the wrong team.

Desert Borderlands:

• Fixed a bug that prevented the citadel supply depot from being interacted with.
• Moved the tower waypoints into the keeps.
• Fixed a bug that caused dolyaks entering the west keep to take lava damage.
• Added a veteran wurm, warg, and harpy event, allowing completion of the daily Veteran Slayer achievement.
• The daily Master of Ruins achievement has been changed to Master of Monuments and can also be completed by capturing shrines.
• Fixed a bug with missing resource nodes at the southwest tower.
• Increased the event rewards for participating in the Oasis event.
• Lowered the Skysplitter’s damage by approximately 25%.
• Fixed a bug that let the Skysplitter’s attack also destroy a wall at the southeast tower.

About “Reduced the health and defense bonuses provided by reinforced and fortified walls and gates at towers.” , how much were exactly reduced? Are we talking here 5-10% or 25+%?

Ok you lowered the damage of the laser event by 25%. I think it needed like 50%, but maybe you add another 25% in the future.

The SE tower is not the only tower that get’s his wall+oil destroyed. I can confirm it happened to SW and NE tower too.

I’m happily surprised that this patch happened, thank you for all the effort put into it. Maybe we get the other issues fixed too like:

• Superior arrow carts center the camera on the cart instead on the person like the rest of the siege does
• NW tower doesn’t his mortar in the correct spot
• Champions hold their current location after capture instead of resetting it in the middle of the lord room
• The East keep doesn’t get dolyaks from the South camps and there 3 caravan events right next to the south gate
• After capturing a sentry and the marked tag wares off and you decide to attack a keep/tower, you get marked again for 5 minutes. Happened to me when attacking Undercroft from the north
• Immense lag during the laser event, etc, etc.

Anet didn’t help to defend the 2 north towers

I said rampart is easier to defend now because you can’t treb from towers. The 2 towers are just there for the ppt, same as the rest.

A.net did buff the defense for towers by:
- fortified gates
- 2 oils
- sentries at the only choke point to have access to the north side which also mark enemies on the map
- and of course auto-upgrades and abundance of supplies to be used for defensive siege and repairs.

Too bad that stupid laser event destroys 50% of your fortified gate, nearest wall and one of the oils. Talk about OP stuff.

And this is why you have to defend those tower and to take it back asap

Which made garri more vulnerable. What a.net decided to do in the desert maps is to make rampart much easier to defend by removing the treb shenanigans from north towers. So if one server is struggling, they could join on the home borderland map and try to at least defend their 3 main objectives (2 towers + keep).

This change is a boost to defending objectives, which is a good thing. Unless people loved attacking only and flipping objectives constantly.

By isolating garri they have actually made it more vulnerable if people were actually playing on the map cause there is no support from towers.

Lol, so what support did Woodhaven and Cragtop provide to garri? They were only tools for the enemy to take your garri. If for instance you had Cragtop but you didn’t have garri, yeah you could treb garri yourself, from Cragtop. But let’s be serious here, the enemies don’t really expect to keep garrison for their own. Their only objective is to reset the upgrades.

The new desert borderland map is very refreshing change. New places to learn to place siege (offensive and defensive), interesting verticality and very good for both small and large fights.
Places to engage in blob fights are the area on top of undercroft, the oasis, near the south camp, the plateaus near south of palace.

The fact that you can’t treb from one tower to keep makes if much more easier to defend objectives which was a really big problem in the old map and in EBG. It’s not a matter of preferences if you like it or not, it’s about improving defense and giving an extra chance to the outnumbered server to defend their objectives.

In the old map enemies would just steam roll woodhaven because of only reinforced gates and then place 3 superior trebs and hit garrison. If you were outnumbered it was impossible to do anything. Being outnumbered and also being hit by unfair trebuchets from the closest tower created a choking feeling of nothing you can do about it. Most people would just exit the game or go to another map.

I’m glad objectives are not that close and when they replace EBG I hope they create a similar map to desert borderlands.

Barricades are very annoying for the 5 man squad- blobs just blast through them.

If you are solo, then you need to use some crystal bow or something to destroy them and still takes you a while. But if there at least 2 people, the best option is to put a normal ballista. The barricades go down really quickly and you could hide them for future use. For example , if you spawn from the east and you don’t have your spawn tower, you can build a ballista on that small tower where the sentry is. Most people will ignore your ballista and can be used again if they recap your tower or rebuilt the barricades.

People that cant be bothered to run shouldnt be bothered to log in!

I agree. The wvw game mode involves more tactical fights where you wait your enemy to do something or you do guerilla warfare, etc.
If people want fast action packed non-stop combat, then there’s spvp.

They need to remove the WPs completely. If you were playing on your borderland then you could have upgraded bay and hills to WP and it was really hard for the enemies to reset the map when you could just teleport really quickly using the WPs.

Waypoints need to be removed completely and there won’t be any complaining from people about rampart T0.

I agree with the OP, especially about the shrines. The new maps are quite lovely. Would be great to have those bugs fixed though.

My opinion is that the terrain needs to be changed in a big way. Remove a lot of the cliffs, gorges, ravines and valleys and allow an easier path

The terrain has complexity to reduce zerg mentality. People need to learn the map and they will “find” players to fight, or play sPvP for more action packed fights. The WvW game mode is a bit slower paced.

Defense sorely needed a boost, but it got too much of a boost.

Defense is still not buffed enough, attacking is much easier and rewarding than defending. Proxy catapults and omega golems are still very effective.

Arena.Net if you read this, all people that want the old bl maps back are just nostalgic. All the points that have been brought are invalid especially the one about the flat terrain. If you want flat terrain then I would suggest on top of undercroft there’s a huge plain desert area or in the oasis.

I don’t really understand why scouts think auto-upgrades and no supply needed for them are a bad thing.

I play on SFR and the upgrades didn’t meant that much when 50 vizuna would come with 6 superior rams or 12 guild catas at the wall. What really counted was the siege inside and now since you can build your siege quickly with the supplies inside instead of doing 12 runs to the nearest camp, makes scouting less painful.

You can now focus on what’s really important which is defending, not escorting turtle dollies that took one shot from a back-stabbing thief. You also have fortified gates which makes the rams less efficient and for towers you get 2 oils. Guild catas cost 50sups instead of 25sups and with the extra supply you have after finish building all your siege, you can repair the walls/gates without doing 10000 runs to the camp.

People either enjoy the pain or they played in T8 matches where blob are 5 people and run around when you hit them once with a normal arrow cart placed badly on the wall.

The opposite of love is not hate, but indifference. Hate is another form of love.

The WvW situation right now is basically this: you have k-train supporters, those who want more fights and some roamers. You have those who care about ppt and those who don’t.

There are 3 types of players that engage in the wvw mode: blobers, roamers and ppt/scouts.
K-train support don’t play wvw, they farm and they are a byproduct of dumb decisions implemented in the wvw game mode. Easy fix to eliminate them is to separate the wvw environment from the pve one by allowing wvw players to sustain themselves by only playing wvw. This could mean armor/weapons only available in wvw like we have for spvp and no loot drops at all, only wvw currency. Basically like spvp has it.
But as you all know arena.net doesn’t know what to do with this game mode so they keep bringing pve elements and force wvw players to grind guild materials for +5 supply. So you have PVE players farming WvW for badges and WvW player farming Karka for mats. Wonderful!!

I could also be very wrong about K-train farmers. Maybe this game mode was all about pawning people with your grinded legendaries and ascended armor and very expensive food buffs. This would mean that the WvW mode is just a tacked-on mode, very little thought put into it, just to get people to pvp on mass. Sure looks like a poorly thought out game mode and getting like 2-3 bug fixes once every 3 months sure helps this ideea a lot. There’s so many issues with wvw right now and they fixed farming of harvest nodes, aka the farming aspect of WvW which is the most important, not to ruin the PVE mode where their focus is 90%, the other 10% is sPvP.

That’s what my guild did, we would take 5-7 people and build guild catas and quickly break and take T3 structures just before the enemy zerg responded. It was fun taking places that it would take normal zergs 2x as long with 3x the supply to get in doing it the lazy way.

Guild catas were too overpowered because of the supply needed. Now that they need 50 supply is much in tune with the rest of the siege.
I think the best option with +5 supply and all the other guild upgrades is either give them very cheap and early or don’t give them at all.

Proxy catapults can be considered “cheating” too. I don’t stand by these principles when playing WvW. If I can place a siege and does damage then I will use it.

For rams you need a treb at the gate. Doesn’t that work?

Don’t play BlobBG sorry, but as for arrow carts you might consider not using the superior ones. It centers the camera on the cart instead of centering on you. This messes with the line of sight error. Instead use normal arrow carts even if they do 50% less dmg, at least you can use them

It’s not just lag, it’s also unfair. The Depot, Outpost and Necropolis towers gets both the gate and the nearby wall destroyed, and sometimes one oil. Talk about overpowered.

I have updated the first post to include the guide for the Depot tower and with this one we finished all the towers. Next is Rampart.

@Chaba
I have edited the first post to include the link to the playlist.

Chaba made videos starting from the spawn point, but usually you have your spawn tower and starting from there, destinations are much quicker.

Hey Shadow,
I have posted a quick guide with some print screen where proxy carts can go and be hard to kill – https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/wuv/Quick-guide-to-Desert-Borderlands
I’m finishing up the last tower and then I will do the Rampart video guide.

Cool, I have added your other video to the first post. Would be great to make a playlist and just link that.

I never liked EB. Too much blobbing, too much lag and the objectives are horribly close one to another. If I want fights I would rather do SPvP where at least I use more than just my number 1 skill.

SFR
EBG had a queue of 35 people and no queue on the BL maps
JadeSea BL map had one guild raiding for an hour and then got out-maned.
During the night from 12pm to 2pm (GMT+2) we had like 3 camps on all 4 maps.

@Chaba
Amazing video you really did a good job. I wanted to make a similar video but I wasn’t sure of the format of it. First I tried like set paths from A to B, but didn’t know what to say. Then I tried a freestyle format where I just wonder on the map and talk at the same time, but that didn’t work out either. Never thought of just adding music)

Again, really nice, and I like how you’re saying garrison and bay instead of rampart and undercroft, but that’s what will make people understand it better.

I have added your video in my first post so people see it, if this threads gets too many posts.

I have added the video guide for the Outpost tower. Please check the first post which I edited.

I want loot go to PVE, you want duels go to sPvP, you want siege warfare and tactics go to WvW.

On my server guilds barely managed to get to the claiming of camps and I haven’t seen any upgrades slotted in, which makes the entire game mechanic pretty bad since no one is using the upgrades because they are so expensive

There is a spreadsheet made by Radian about each siege how much damage it does to wall/gate. Here’s his video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TwAJB_M2HgU and here’s the spreadsheet which you can also find in the video description https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1S0RkQUsaXhBmv4y1dN7YtFWmuUq8VsUBUk1uxTj4AZw/edit#gid=0
He hasn’t made any updates since EOTM, so I’m also interested to see how much armor did the fortified gate get or if there are any updates.

On a side note, I usually go for catapults because it takes too long to kill 2 canons and 2 oils for towers and 4 canons and 2 oils for keeps. And if you’re placing the rams before killing the oil/canons, then you are making a gamble which doesn’t work all the time.

Sadly most of the time there isn’t anyone defending, so placing all that siege that then times out isn’t much fun.

These guides are not just for scouts, but also for commanders that try to attack an objective.
I see very often commanders that kitten-kitten around an objective and place bad siege everywhere and it takes them 2-3 hours to capture something that is properly defended. I have videos for the old borderlands that I’m able to kill 3-4 omega golems and repel an entire zerg of almost 50 people just by myself with one cart and one treb. They were really bad at attacking it, but it was fun and rewarding to be able to do that.

I don’t scout anymore, but when I command and attack objectives I know exactly where the weak spots are and know where to expect incoming carts/trebs etc. Understanding this stuff makes attacking look easy

I have updated the main post with the 2nd video on the Necropolis Tower

@GROMIT
Not really, since every other siege centers the camera around you and only the superior cart around the cart. I haven’t tested it with all the possible siege, but I didn’t find another one so far, that behaves like the buggy superior cart.

Right now there’s a bug with the superior carts making the camera center on the cart instead of you which makes targeting proxy catapults extremely hard or impossible. For now use normal arrow carts even if they do 50% less damage unless a superior cart grants you enough vision range.

SFR
It’s no longer full and lots of guild left.

Previously, I’d scout a keep for a long period and would repel defenders with the help of whatever comm was running, but we couldn’t get any yaks in so it was only a matter of time before it fell due to no supply for upgrades/repairs/siege. It felt like it was pointless to defend too much because, as time wore on, the structure became indefensible even if the siege was only for 10 minutes out of every hour.

I feel in the same way. Before HOT I just didn’t even both to siege up the place if it was paper. I would wait for think to calm down and at least get the reinforced gate, then I would place a sup.treb for the gate and wouldn’t bother with carts for proxy catapults. Then once I got the reinforced walls I would put carts and a treb for countering other trebs and basically starting scouting it.

The auto-upgrade system we have now helps scouts to quickly siege up the place with supplies from inside and at least in 20 mins with yaks coming, you at least have oils and canons and if more yaks are coming by the time you build your trebs (5+ trebs for keeps and 2-3 trebs for towers) and all the carts for proxy catapults 1:30 hours pass and guess what you have your reinforced gates+walls. Then the fun starts when enemies come in and you destroy their puny rams or proxy catas or poorly placed trebs.

If rampart is under attack when it’s fortified and sieged up, I want to defend it because it’s fortified and sieged up.

I agree. Once you place 5-10 gold worth of siege and also 1-2 hours invested in running to the supply depot to build your stuff, you will mostly care about protecting that, not the waypoint. Like I said in my previous posts I would rather not have waypoints at all besides the ones where you spawn.

The free auto upgrade, no WP on side keep, WP at T0 on rampart and the south tower are a big part of the actual fail of the new map… Even more that the map itself.

I don’t understand why aren.net buffed the borderland map for defenders. Defenders already had a very good garrison with walls and lots of good places to put siege while bay was extremely hard to defend and hills I guess was a bit better. On SFR you would always see our borderland map owned by us and the enemy maps owned by them. Very rarely you would see dominating the other maps, unless we had a very big map jump crew. On top of that most guilds raided on the home borderland map.

Faster and stronger yak is a really good thing… But now the Yak are close to useless…

No they are not. They bring 30 supplies and they come very fast and they take 5 minutes off the upgrade timer which is huge. 10 yaks in and your upgrade timer remove 50 minutes from it.

SFR is suffering at prime time because many guilds left, but last night at prime time there was only one guild raiding and our only objective was Necropolis. I had it all sieged up and for almost 2 hours FSP and JS with guilds like SLAY, Kale, GoldenHorde and others tried to get inside.

They tried for proxy catas at SW walls, then for trebuchets at South wall, proxy catas at NW wall, rams a couple of times and at some point they managed to destroy the SW wall with catas because we were starving for supplies and that wall was only at 30% and couldn’t be repaired.

The commander did a good job [FD] guild, by claiming the Refugee camp to have supplies and basically took all surrounding objectives to know when the enemy was coming.

JS got inside and we managed to kill them all at the lord, but FSP got inside too and wrecked the remaining of us. It was really fun and unfortunately it only happens at prime now on SFR (8-11pm).

Thx this siege guide is what we really needed, now we can defend against nothing

Too bad you weren’t in there last night to see all the chaos cause I see you’re from FSP

Remember the old borderland maps where every week some found a bug to allow him to get inside a keep/tower without siege by simply jumping? Yes, fun days. It took a.net months to fix all the bugs.

Right now the desert bl maps suffer the same issue. I can only count for the Necropolis tower, mesmers getting inside by jumping on the rock next to the SW wall and sometimes getting inside, but I’m sure there are other objectives like this.

If you add up gliding where people can jump from high cliffs and get inside keeps/towers without any siege? That would break WvW instantly and no one will play it.

I’m glad gliding is not in WvW, which is more reason not to pay for the expansion if you’re a WvW player only.

Now the problem has existed for a long time, HoT has just made it worse with the new mechanisms like auto upgrades, to the point it has even tipped many of the few players who still played for PPT and enjoyed things like scouting / upgrading over the edge.

I believe most of the core issues have been addressed by the new map, but haven’t been solved completely:

• Less blobbing => bigger map (versatility), less waypoints, barricades, sentries that mark enemies
• More defending => auto upgrades, lots of supplies inside objectives, more dmg from lord, more oils in towers, can’t treb one objective from another objective
• Comeback mechanic => laser event

But as you all know barricades only stop small groups not zergs, dolyaks bring in supplies too fast even if the amount carried was reduced, laser event actually helps the winning team and it’s too powerful.

If you kill a dolly then the objective doesn’t get the 5 minute taken off from the total timer.
So killing dollies actually hurts the upgrading forcing a fortification upgrade to last 6 hours if it doesn’t get any dollies inside. This also means that the objective has no supplies inside to repair stuff or quickly build defensive siege like a treb, cart or rebuild the oil/canons.

So there’s no need for a change like that. I think easier would be to make the dollies run slower and reach the objective in 5 minutes instead of 2.5 minutes. Also killing a dolly should have a respawn delay of 10 minutes instead of 5 minutes.

Basically double the walking time and the respawn when killed.

Nerfing the nodes means PVE people don’t come to WvW to harvest. If they want to play the WvW game mode, then they are welcomed, otherwise they need to stick to EOTM for farming not come to our beloved BL/EBG maps.
I’m a wvw player and I very rarely harvest, most of the time I don’t even have the tools

So, IT’S A GOOD THING they nerfed the nodes

I only play GW2 for the WvW game mode and from time to time I have a look on the WvW forums. Now, with the new expansion it looks like everyone on this forum only brings in complains, either accompanied by suggestions or not.

So I wondered to the other sections of the forum and guess what.
In the PvP section everyone is complaining about class balance like DH being overpowered etc.
In the PVE section everyone is complaining about hard to kill mobs in the new maps, how stuff is very hard to grind, etc.

So don’t think for a second that people only complain about WvW, they complain about everything. So saying that WvW is dead because there are a lot of complains here, on the same note you could say that sPvP and PVE is dead too.

Didn’t know about the 5 minutes discount when yaks deliver supplies. I always thought something is fishy because I scouted a tower for 3 hours maybe and it went from paper to fortified.

So we can say that camps are still important for both bringing the supplies which help you with siege and repairs, but also for the quicker upgrades.

Cool.

@Chaba
I will make a guide about shortcuts from point A to point B for all towers and keeps, but after I finish with the Necropolis tower

@Fellfoot
So far Necropolis looks like the most susceptible tower to proxy catapults. It’s almost impossible to put carts on the walls and hit all the spots.

Overall, would you say the height of the walls of the towers has made life better or worse?.

The height has made things worse because arrow carts have a hard time reaching the proxy catapults, so it’s harder now to find a good spot for them. The enemies can still target the walls and carts like before, so nothing has changed on this part.