Guild Wars 2

Well…

A couple of weeks ago, I made about 12 rare swords to toss into the mystic toilet – Dawn on the first 4. Then just yellow crap for the rest.

Today, I made 20ish rare swords to toss into the mystic toilet – Dusk on the first 4. Then just yellow crap once again.

Am I cursed to only get a pre-legendary on the first try when I toss things in?

How about one called the “Arrowcart Operator”. He would have permanent access to a mobile arrowcart that he pushes in front of him. Also, permastealth.

Phoebe Ascension.8437:

Not they are bad, but now they are ‘utility slaves’ of the zerg (veil, portal, time warp).

Wait, are you saying most Mesmers wasnt utility slaves before the patch? O.o

Cant speak for anyone else, but I like being rare. I’ll still play my Mesmer as a main even if 90% stop playing it, I enjoy it too much. The nerf didnt really affect my WvW bunker build anyway, no condition damage and no confusion traits to begin with.

Assyrian.4827:

2-Loot based on damage done instead of participation(a lot of builds are not played because of this).

… You do realize that you can kill of 100% of an enemy and get nothing, while you can also tag 20 mobs with 10% and get bags from 15 of them? Loot is based on damage – if you hit the mob you have a completely random chance to get loot. It doesnt matter what build you use.

I believe every 15 minute the game does this check: if RNG[1,100] <= 10 then join WvW.

As a tip, Afterburner is much better for recording, no watermark and no 10 minute limit.

Well, you have several options here:

- Get a full karma suit and accept what you get in terms of stats. I advice you check which runes goes at which temples and get a full 6 piece there. For WvW you got Melandru for example, or Dwayna for PvE. This cost ~250K karma and an additional ~150K if you want trinkets. You could combine, but you loose the full rune bonus.

- Buy yellow berserker/knight/whatever gear you want and slap some cheap runes on them. Should cost 2-3g or something. For rings I advice green gear, its cheap and not that much difference in stats. This is the “budget” gear.

- Buy WvW gear for badges. Pretty self explanatory.

- Do dungeons runs to buy out exotic armour for marks. Note that this assume at least the yellow gear to begin with. More time consuming, but the “cheapest” way to get armour – you get gold while gearing.

Personally I’d take the yellow gear in the design that I wanted and upgrade as I go. Karma gear is a rather hefty cost, unless you got like 500K laying about. But the only other thing you can spend karma on is a legendary (somethign like 500 for a pickaxe is hardly spending) so its not really worth much either.

Xavi.6591:

Don’t forget that Focus’ swiftness buff doesn’t stack with any other forms of swiftness.

It sucks when you have a few seconds of the swiftness buff from your focus and then another player drops an AoE swiftness buff and you don’t get it because your focus swiftness buff doesn’t refresh.

Now you’re the only person without a swiftness buff and you’re slow.

That’s not true, it does stack if you have focus swiftness and someone pop AoE swiftness (except another Mesmer curtain).

What does not stack is if someone give you speed and you pop focus.

At least its disability is fairly consistent compared to the guardian staff, which sometimes stack, sometimes remove all swiftness and sometimes doesnt do anything lol.

Sometimes it leap, sometimes it dont. It likes to trick you that way. Dont trust an illusion :/

graverr.6473:

Loco.4561:

To those BB in BB borders at the moment, attempting to “camp” the Piken spawn with your zerg, I think I might have set a record, It must of been about 15-20 of you that I managed to instagib on the guards when you tried ganking me!! I have never seen so many loot bags!!

I have a nice screenshot of all your corpses but no fraps, I think my kill count for the last 10 minutes is at about 27 now, thanks for the fun before I goto bed, but please get better at PvP!!

Your pvp skill must be so awesome pressing 1 on an arrowcart is serious business nowdays you know.Next time pls fraps so we can all learn from you cuz rotation is so hard .You press 1,2,3 or 2,1,3?Need info asap.I want to be uber pvp player too.

Ps :Yes, i guess is sarcasm day in some zodiac plane or something

Well I guess that settles it then. If you imply that even Legendary Guards have become arrowcarts, then arrowcarts are truly powerfull and OP. What’s next, catapults as strong as Siegerazer? Keep lords with trebuchets as arms?!?! They are mostly Norn after all.

Photoloss.4817:

New player, recently hit lvl80 with a staff mesmer, here are my general thoughts:

Solo 1v1 PvE is SLOW! As a Warrior you hit “2” and random mobs just die, I had to wait for 5-10s remaining cooldowns on my staff.

Depends on what you compare with. I can tell you that my Mesmer with staff/sword/focus having similar stats to my Warrior with axe/warhorn/longbow (both bunker WvW built) is considerably more flexible in combat than the Warrior and kills Orr mobs about as fast (faster if the phantasms behave). Comparing a staff Mesmer with a greatsword Warrior is silly even with the same build. A full berserker greatsword Mesmer will plow down Orr mobs before a 100b Warrior has even reached them to start his channel.

GhostHawks.6519:

did this patch make rangers any better?

No, it didnt remove the pet. Sorry.

Axle.5182:

Piken wasn’t the highest tier medium server you have SFR with a stronger population of WvW compared to it’s PVE in tier 1 all though winning consistently for a few weeks

Oh you mean the same SFR that Piken guilds migrated to before the free transfers ended in january or whatever it was to bring it up to T1, lol? It was one of the reasons why Piken dropped to T3 – Piken faced SFR with the migrated Piken guilds and never stood a chance. So yes it was the highest tier medium server.

Either way it really doesnt change the fact that Anet need to get their act together and fix the WvW queue system, sigh… I want to see numbers, I want to see what borderland is best to join (ie least queue) and preferably I dont want queues at all, but the last part is wishfull thinking. Right now you are taking a chance. Oh look, we join Piken border today with the guild – 2 hours to get the guild in. Had we joined BB border – 30 minutes and lots of WvW fun. But no, it cant tell me that. Oh no, that would be information overload! Anet is just sitting in the back having a laugh at the time we spend with pointless queuing due to their system not working.

Please Anet. Fix. I know you can.

morrolan.9608:

I take it you don’t play on a T1 server then.

Has it ever occured to anyone… That if T1 servers cant adapt to the new arrowcarts, they dont deserve to be in T1 and will inevitably drop?

More events scale now instead of just spawning more cannon fodder for each additional player, ending up with spawns where 20 mobs die before they are visible. Its not really OP, its how the game should have been from the start. Last time I checked, 1 Orr mob didnt quite match 1 player – even veterans can be soloed without loosing any HP.

Due to the design of the queue system, the only thing you can do is re-queue every 15 minutes or so. Sometimes you get in, sometimes you dont. FiFo doesnt apply, its just random.

Piken Square remain totally packed since the free transfers came upon us, when Anet is all their wisdom decided that the highest tier PvE medium server with dominating WvW players and guilds did indeed desperately need more people joining the server to make it high and balance it with other servers. Anet knows why people migrate to other servers and it must be to balance PvE population for sure, it has nothing to do with WvW does it?!

Sigh…

Silas.8630:

Dawdler.8521:

DeadlySynz.3471:

I think a solution though that could work to quell the complaining is to just have the arrow carts use 1 supply for every shot you take. Basically if somebody hops on with 10 supply, they get 10 shots until they have to hop off. This could be done with all siege equipment. Hell, maybe add a separate “ammunition” supply separate from the supplies we have now that you need to fire the siege equipment. Perhaps also make the ammunition supplies random drops from killing enemies as well.

You could actually simplify that ALOT by doing two things:

- Each shot of a siege equipment reduce its HP by a certain percent
- Siege can be repaired for supply

And there you have it. Constant fire by 12+ carts will drain your keeps supply (or destroy the ACs).

I think this is a fantastic idea, but would probably necessitate the removal of the despawn timer. Losing placed siege to both a timer and lack of supply would get a bit irritating in my opinion, but then again I find the despawn timer a nuisance to begin with.

You could expand on the idea and say that after a certain period of inactivity, the siege will DoT to death, unless someone enter it or it get repaired again (which reset the timer).

I do think a timer is needed to “clean up” siege on a server level. You dont want siege hidden somewhere that stays there forever.

This would also make the timer visible to players, they can warn that hey the arrowcarts are loosing HP now better repair or loose them to despawn.

DeadlySynz.3471:

I think a solution though that could work to quell the complaining is to just have the arrow carts use 1 supply for every shot you take. Basically if somebody hops on with 10 supply, they get 10 shots until they have to hop off. This could be done with all siege equipment. Hell, maybe add a separate “ammunition” supply separate from the supplies we have now that you need to fire the siege equipment. Perhaps also make the ammunition supplies random drops from killing enemies as well.

You could actually simplify that ALOT by doing two things:

- Each shot of a siege equipment reduce its HP by a certain percent
- Siege can be repaired for supply

And there you have it. Constant fire by 12+ carts will drain your keeps supply (or destroy the ACs).

fadeaway.2807:

Interested to see what dawdler runs instead.

I believe its something like this: http://intothemists.com/calc/?build=-N;4VPk0107BV-71;9;5JJT;239-19-37A;1W;04U;16TsW6TsWF0F61-w2L0;0V0-5WC1FYMZQ_8LV4s0NV8aN1-aF1;28;9;9;9;9;94k3b

For PvE (Orr, Fractals, CoF, whatever), I use the same build but a secondary armor set with Dwayna runes instead. Yes, I sacrifice crit chance and crit damage to get that high base numbers. I’ve been able to literally run through a zerg on the SM walls with this.. And yes they nuked the wall good when the zergs met. Unfortunetly that time, the zerg I was in backed away instead. It is slightly disheartening to see 30 red name tags between you and your friends :S

But it all depends on what aim you got. Mobility is there (and you can swap veil for anything that help it if you want, like blink), flexibility… Well its a tough build. But it cant nuke a single target. That’s not the purpose. Its aimed at running into considerably larger forces and outlasting them. Still decent if you want to solo camps and take on just about any other class, though the arch-nemesis is really good glass cannon theives that stun well. I always forget to swap skills before anticipating such encounters, sigh…

Mostly glass cannon? Ick! I have absolutely nothing good to say in small group WvW when it comes to that. They are always the ones that melt first and are a liability to the entire group (if one goes down, that’s pretty much a disaster if you’re only 5). Not even carrying the focus, a critical tool for small group WvW, is an even bolder move.

But I guess I cant really add anything to the discussion other than that :p

Teel.9036:

TallDan.6350:

I for one am looking forward to seeing if this means we need better tactics and if large pug zergs are the ones to suffer for a change.

“I, for one, welcome our new Arrow Cart overlords”.

Jokes aside, how do you think a SMALL/MEDIUM group will behave now? Sure it hurts the large zergs, but who it hurts even more are the small and medium pug groups, those pug groups now have a bigger chance for success if they join the large zerg instead.

Those groups have ALWAYS had a bigger chance for success if they join the zerg.

IMO it only hurts those that cannot rethink the way they cap a keep. A small/medium group should be far more capable of this than a zerg. Its not that hard to find the maximum range of someone shooting an arrowcart at you and then place a catapult just beyond it. Turn the tables a bit – cover the catapults with some of your own arrowcarts to discourage a counter attack.

Isnt the answer rather simple then, based on the things layed out in the op?

- increase time to build siege by 5x across the board
- increase the range and arc of the catapult.
- only allow a fixed degree of aim, say +- 20 degrees, on trebuchet.

This will result in siege not going up so fast, arrowcarts being outplayed by catapults and hinder counter trebbing from an already set up position.

Killtrox.2019:

You have to be a really really really utterly horrible player if you think this buff is a good thing. I just tried taking T3 hills with my 40-50 man zerg against outmanned JQ in T1 fight. Not only did they wipe every thing I tried building, they had a counter for EVERYTHING I had. ACs demolished rams before they had a chance to even be built, golems will just get wrecked by the ACs, they had mortars and trebs to counter my trebs because they kittened swirling winds. I spent 3 hours trying to take it and only scratched about 100 supply from their depot. Not to mention like half of my zerg were getting killed by the ACs at the gate. AND THEY WERE OUTMANNED!!! If you think that’s any fair at all, then you’re a kitten WvW was perfectly fine the way it was. The only buff the AC needed was a range buff. That’s it! Damage was perfectly fine. It is now impossible to take a bunkered down keep/tower/camp because of the unbalance this buff is bringing.

You outmanned them? Then how could they have enough men to withstand 20 people keeping them occupied at the south gate, 20 people keeping them occupied at the north gate and 10 people using 3-4 catapults to punch through the western wall?

At least one of the points should have been breached. Or wait you had 50 people trying to ram and bash the same gate that they could focus all their defense on? O.o

Caliban.3176:

Kreen.3925:

Stop chasing Kittens Aneu and tell it like it is, drink that 3rd bottle, you know you want to.

Its a megazoid smasher

No, it’s like this. It indeed makes it a lot harder for zergs. But it destroys anything that is not a zerg. So basically now everyone has to zerg and zerging has become harder.

I would hope that smaller groups have a higher average intelligence than a zerg and simply plop down a catapult in a more defensible area, far out of AC reach.

I really dont understand peoples issues with catapults. Just stay away from the door until its open and the ACs has been destroyed.

All this change really does in terms of keep defense is stop stacking on the door, be it a 50 man zerg or a 5 man group. Rams become a secondary tool, not primary.

Entropy.4732:

Where does your damage come from? Nuzzling your foes to death?

Where the damage usually comes from – weapon skills, phantasms, reflects and popping shatter when its needed. Its not a 1v1 spec nor traited that way, but I can still beat people and I can still do heavy damage to stacked groups. “Heavy damage” being relative for a light armour class that has 2K toughness and 24K HP.

I have nearly all classes at 80 but I am still sticking with my Mesmer as my main. Even as a Mesmer I cant really say that less Mesmers on the field is a bad thing. You sort of know all to well how bloody nasty it is to meet a good Mesmer

Well I’m still using a toughness build and havent noticed that much of a difference. Confusion is definetly nerfed but I respecced to ignore any confusion based traits before the patch, even though skills are still all glamours .

So all builds arent dead. Condition builds pretty much are though.

… build catapults instead of rams just outside the range of the defending ACs.

I dont really get what the problem is. More focus on clever siege work is better.

guardian.6489:

Na they just run on Valve time.

Then it’ll take 2 more years.

If you’ve played around with the builds of many classes, you’ll notice that the trees are perfectly tuned for level 80. You cant really get everything you want to, you always have too few trait points. I do not see the point to disturb this. Since the only thing level 100 could possibly mean is more trait points…

I’d rather they spend their time on the actual content than satisfy the needs of the ones that feel 100 is a better number than 80 for no other reason than the fact its a bigger number.

Chaos Armor. Learn to love it. Staff 2 and any etheral field give CA, along with 4 on demand of course.

The thing with a staff is that its a pure defensive weapon. You have to keep that in mind if you want to use it – damage need to be combined with your other weapon set and your phantasms (I use sword/focus). Using it like say a Gaurdian staff where the primary purpose is to spam 1 on zergs wont work at all, its all about utility.

But it does take time to learn to love it, lol. I have been using the GS alot. Berserker build and GS = dead Risen in 2 seconds. Oh joy. However, with a staff and toughness build… You can walk through 30 man zergs in WvW.

Nowadays I only swap to GS when there are specific needs. Like killing Jormag, need that extra range on auto-attack to reach him without getting owned by the debuff. Otherwise its the staff all the way. An example where it truly shines is a melee boss like Mossman on fractals. If he hurt you then you did poorly, even if you got aggro the entire fight, lol.

Karma boots from Orr, nothing special.

sostronk.8167:

I can confirm this. In NA Tier 1 its common when running into enemy zerg your going to run into one of two things, either a bunch of warriors and guardians busting stright through to your backline or a bunch of Necros dropping marks on you.

Oh so they purposely limit themselves in NA T1 by doing either or?

Because in EU T3 a bunch of guardians and warriors will slam right into you while dozens of wells are dropped at their feet. And for effect there is usually half a dozen feedback bubbles up on the same location. Sometimes you cant really tell, it may be that a supernova got randomly created at the same location by pure chance. GW2 and RNG you know.

I didnt mention only RS. In fact it was BB that gave us most troubles this evening, at least before I quit a couple of hours ago.

The only sizable guild I saw on EB was SCND I believe. Otherwise we had 1-2 commanders (mostly just 1) and random groups. But maybe I missed all those 20-30 man Piken elite guilds crawling about.

Are you saying RS and BB dont have massive numbers? I guess we could file a support ticket to Anet to double the population limits for two of the sides in WvW, if that is a problem.

hmsgoddess.3869:

Personally, I think class requirements is actually a bad idea.

If the goal is to “be the best 5 man group on the server”, you better be prepared to put demands on classes, builds and gear. It doesnt matter in a zerg (well it does, just not so much) but in a 5 man group the design is critical. What’s even more critical is the intended targets. If the 5 are supposed to be the best solo enemy gankers, then thieves are the obvious choice. Zergbusting, not so much.

If I designed a group, I would say 2 bunker CC (guardian/warrior with hammers), a glass cannon thief to flank and gank what the group CC, a well necro and a glamour mesmer to put pressure in the path of the warrior and guardian. Cant get everything. Possibly swap the well necro for a grenade engineer, more mobile assault but you loose some of the fancier condition applications.

Yes and its so unfair that Anet didnt give every class a ranged weapon or two!

Oh wait they did.

For Piken, Jin (SFRJ) did some excellent commanding on EB this evening, to the point of us wondering if we scared away both RS and BB because it became so quiet for a while, lol.

We lost SM earlier and after multiple attempts to retake it, we finally managed to ninja SM without engaging any sizable force on the way (like… one or two) while BB and RS was busy fighting, hahaha.

Lots of bags, lots of gold, lots of lag :/

Dont worry, Anet is fixing it the immortal condition reducing Warriors by nerfing condition damage by 50% for the Mesmer. It makes sense if you think about it. Sort of.

Clones are for confusion and shatter damage. They have no direct damage.

So the answer is never.

Phantasms are the ones that do damage.

Sometimes you just have to ask yourself the question… “How many Baruch Bay does it take to bring down a solo Mesmer?”

I believe the answer is around 10 :p
Managed to take a screencap at just the right time lol

Deniara Devious.3948:

Mesmers have always been common in WvWvW and after these “nerfs” I am sure they will still remain among top 5 professions.

Since there are only 8 professions that is hardly a feat :/

Also I dont know what server you play on/with but I always see at least 30-40 Guardians and Warriors for every Mesmer.

Nope.

TBH I would settle with a few more seconds on the curtain.

Farzo.8410:

I want to know what this Master Troll can do if he apparently can kitten a whole server off.

“Hey I put these random swords into the forge that I paid 1g for and got something called Dusk. Now I put 4 more swords in and Dawn came out, what is this?!?!”

What the Engineer SHOULD get however is a viable siege elite – mortar. The kittenty kitten poor excuse of a crappy thing that it currently is. There are good working mortars in the game (ie catapult style, aim and hold), yet the Engineer mortar work like a short range arrow cart shooting 1 arrow.

That look like the normal Norn dance.

I dont get it?

Oh I remember the first time I played WoW. I thought “hey, I dont want to be a noob and play on those PvE servers, PvP **** yeah!”, ran out of the city to level and got promptly insta-killed by a troll (literally of course) with a million bazillion HP that I could do maybe 2 or 3 in damage against.

Worst. System. Ever.

That said, IMO it would be great fun to have more world PvP events, like in the beta. An example:

At 18:00, Straights Of Devastation is turned into a battlezone, with capping zones all over the place. All players in it are kicked out to neighbouring zones. When you enter the zone, you are put on a random side, Risen or Pact. Risen get a zombie look (but keep all stats and weapons/etc), Pact keep their regular look. And… FIGHT! At 20:00, the event is over. Loosing side get a small loot chest, winning side get a big loot chest.

Something like that would make for a fun change in the world.

That’s not true at all, the scepter only get like 90% of its damage from confusion.

I can think of a few ways to balance it:

- Guardian burning damage reduced by 50%
- Theif dagger damage reduced by 50%
- Elementalists 50% less damage for each attunement change (stacks)
- Necromancer condition damage reduced by 50%
- Warrior melee damage reduced by 50%
- Engineer kit damage reduced by 50%
- Ranger bow damage reduced by 50%

There you go, its so simple even Anet could think of it!

FractalChaos.6539:

1- They have tremendous “escapability” (decoy clones, stealth, blink).
2- They can do massive damage rapidly.
3- They can render entire armies invisible.
4- They can portal entire armies past walls and gates; no other class can do that.
*5- They can stop an entire army in its tracks with Confusion (well not anymore).

1. So does every other class
2. So does every other class
3. Stealth chaining should have been nerfed overall long ago, but no Anet dont want to do it. Nobody knows why and both Theives and Mesmers rejoice.
4. Its one of the unique things of the mesmer, yes. And it was nerfed.
5. They cant if that entire army knows how to cleanse and combo field. You know what CAN stop an entire army in its tracks? Guardians and Warriors. And they do 10x the direct damage while doing it, while you are stunlocked.

Not to mention, many of your points are build based. A glamour Mesmer doesnt have many escape abilities. A Mesmer that can escape doesnt have glamour. A glamour Mesmer cannot do damage rapidly, every condition cleanse the enemy reduce that damage and it rely on enemy numbers. A Mesmer based around escape and phantasm dueling cannot “stop” an army any more than a backstabbing Theif can.

Thrumdi.9216:

Nope, Confusion didn’t punish poor play.

It punished playing.

That’s why it had to be nerfed.

Condition cleansing isnt part of playing? What is it then?