Guild Wars 2

For zerging:
Shout warrior
http://metabattle.com/wiki/Build:Warrior_-_Traditional_Shout_Frontliner

AH guardian
http://metabattle.com/wiki/Build:Guardian_-_AH_Frontliner

For roaming:
D/P thief
http://metabattle.com/wiki/Build:Thief_-_D/P_roamer
P/D thief
http://metabattle.com/wiki/Build:Thief_-_P/D_Condi_roamer

Quells.2498:

Considering you are a designer you should understand the high relevance and popularity of verticality throughout multiplayer gaming in general right now. Lastly, as much as the players think they are design professionals they are not so quoting their opinions is of little use.

Retaliation doesn’t counter anything.

As much as players will hate me for saying this I must say that balance is bad design. It allows for no interesting decisions to be made as there’s a correct answer for each scenario. At that point the player isn’t playing but rather attempting to answer a quiz question correctly and in the appropriate amount of time. Play needs to feel fair but fair and balanced are not the same thing. You, the designer, should already know this as well.

League of Legends (LoL) is right now the most popular multi-player online battle arena (MOBA). Is it heavy on verticality?

Retalation is more or less counter towards multi-hitting skills like the engineer grenade kit (theoretically retaliation can trigger 7×5= 35 times from just one skill: grenade barrage). Retaliation is extremely easy to keep on by guardians just spamming light fields from hammer #1 and the blast with hammer #2. As long as things are like these, there is very little punishment on having your zerg being stacked into a small area.

I have several times on these forums suggested good ways to demotivate zerging, yet not punish it too hard. For example we could alter the game that all enemy forces larger than certain size (e.g. 15 or 20) are automatically shown their location at the map. Thus enemy will know their movements perfectly. This would motivate many servers to split up their forces to smaller units to do stealth/ninja capping, instead of having 50+ men facerub the gates.

I agree with you that the game should feel fair. You are probably now misunderstanding the word balanced. Game balance is one of the most difficult things in game design and it is essential. Gameplay is all about making (hopefully meaningful) choices and in a poorly-balanced game, many of the choices available to the player are essentially rendered useless or you are dealt with unfairly strong or unfairly bad hand. Players generally steer towards the easiest option, the least effort towards win. Game balance preserves game elements from irrelevance and to avoid completely unfair blow outs. Some WvWvW servers are now facing moments when there is almost nobody on the map, since is it not that much fun to play with 2-3 guys against enemy blob. In an imbalanced game, one or more “dominant strategies” quickly emerge, limiting other strategies. Balanced design doesn’t mean that the map is identical for all sides (= symmetrical design), but each side should have fairly equal resources and terrain advantages (terrain and looks can of course vary). The old WvWvW maps meet these requirements far better than EotM. All the three keeps on both the borderlands and Eternal Battlegrounds are different and have their own plusses or minuses.

I feel that WvWvW would be much better if it would have a better scoring. It is obvious that that 1 vs 1 vs 1 doesn’t work as intended. In a fairly even match up the strongest and weakest server both target #2, thus making the win easier for #1 and the an uphill battle for #2 as it gets doubled focused. Ifthe 3rd server is much weaker, both the #1 and #2 prey on the weakest. In other words the strongest server has least focus on it. Now imagine such scoring where both #2 and #3 would have motivation to attack #1? For example flipping an objective has a multiplier directed to the reverse of its score (flipping a keep from winning server earns you more and flipping on objective from the weakest server will earn you less). That would lead to more even match ups.

Thanks for a nice and polite reply Anaktas, but I still have to comment a few bits:

I would want to know why SFR thinks their average quality is better than Desolation has? Vizunah Square still holds more medals than SFR in WvWvW (but since VS is not coming back SFR will someday pass that record). Was Vizunah winning in their glory days because their average quality was better than the others? Or was it because they had superior night coverage? And persistence to defend even they were wiped half a dozen times in a row?

I think pretty much everybody else agrees that the winner is determined primarily on numbers and coverage. For some strange reason SFR players seem to have this grand illusion that their skill level is higher than the others. WvWvW is full of unbalancing things (borderland bloodlust, power of the mists, consumables buffs, overpowered runes, guard leech stack etc), so it is more or less impossible to estimate the true quality there. In spvp/tpvp (which are even more dead game modes than WvWvW), there has never been question, which server is the best.

Yes, Ins moved from Deso to SFR already several months ago. But I have always held Moorta as our best commander and I know that several SFR players hold him also in great respect, despite he plays on Deso. I like the mature style Gabriel has and he moved from SFR to Deso. Jp Bruno from iPro is a great addition as a PuG commander. His German English is so cool.

It is plain misinformation to claim that Desolation is mainly recruiting players from pve. Several WvWvW oriented guilds have transferred to our server in past few months: GH, iPro, PUNK and NUKE.

I have more or less abstained from recruitment to avoid overly long queues. Right now we have often been enjoying the outnumbered buff, even on our borderland in the evening. But when the Tournament starts, we shall see queues on all top servers for sure.

Anyways the best of luck and see you on the battle ground! Let’s keep it fair and also remember to have good fights, not just PPT.

People on this thread are misunderstanding me. And remember: Please keep it less personal.

If added verticality is a great thing, then Skyhammer must be the best pvp map ever. Just check the pvp subforums and you can enormous amount of players complaining about that map. E.g.
https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/pvp/pvp/Should-Skyhammer-Be-A-Tourny-Map
Quote from that thread by sirnibb.4709:
“This is the biggest troll map, and it’s going to encourage troll builds, and pigeonhole people into run mass fears and kds, pulls. If you think necros are bad now wait till you have three or four of them fear locking you off a cliff.”

EotM added verticality has exactly these same problems: encouraging the troll builds and pigeonholing players.

Choke points are not an effective counter against zerging without massive sieging. Most AoE skills in this game have a 5 player limit and those which don’t are usually countered by retaliation. Thus this game is encouraging a huge zerg players to stack into a small pile, even when there are no choke points. I definitely would not want to turn this game into Siege Wars 2. Certain siege related traits are already overpowered e.g. the cow ammo which drains supplies and poisons with treb has way too good effectiveness and radius.

A good WvWvW map should be balanced. Adding more imbalance to an already imbalanced game mode can easily skew it even further. In worst case we are talking about 99%-1% blown outs.

More versatility is better than forcing just one play style. A good map should have fair share of choke points, upper and lower positions, walls, cliffs where you can fall to your death, but also open areas and everything in between. There should be balance of things. EotM pushed things too much into one direction. In other words: am NOT against a map to have cliffs or choke points, but there should not be too much of them.

Just a side note: Nobody was forcing to enter the lake in the original borderlands. Now the borderland middle part ruins area is empty outside the tournament. Players are not even using for duels, but choose to duel in other areas of the map.

The seeds of self-destruction already grow inside this server. And they have been planted by the “leadership” of this server. Internal struggles and poisonous conversation (This is according to the information I received from ex-SFR players who transferred to Desolation. I have never been on SFR).

Some SFR players must be seriously and utterly BORED. Even when Desolation is not matched up against SFR, SFR has spies and now also some prominent SFR players have their alt characters trolling Deso map chat. I could understand such behavior when Deso and SFR are matched against each other, but on those weeks when we are not it seems they have nothing to do. The difference in coverage between EU rank #1 & #2 and EU rank #4 = huge. Sadly this coverage gap seems to widen.

But keep on recruiting and enjoy the queues. The more you recruit, the further the average player quality dilutes (unless one manages only to recruit very good guilds, but this hardly seems the case). Me and most Desolation players are having tons of fun.

Xillllix.3485:

EotM is an amazing map that is underestimated by people who have no clue how to play it strategically. It would balance itself quite well if players bothered to defend it for PPT. With a team rotation between the 3 sides every day I don’t see what the balance problem would be.

The only reason it is used as a karma train is because it rewards you more for PvE events than for PPT. It has nothing to do with the map design.

If you really think so, why don’t you enlighten us “clueless” people why EotM map design is so great.

Note: I have worked as game designer and programmer and teaching the topic for over 10 years at university.

In my analysis EotM has:
- way too much verticality
- way too many chokepoints
- way too many edges where you can fall into void
- way too many distracting visual effects (flying sand)
- unbalanced overpowered NPCs and buffs for the different colors
- completely lacks the element of water (some players enjoy underwater)

Plus it also looks ugly to my eyes, but that is only an opinion. You have to understand that there is a large variety of WvWvW players who enjoy different play style. EotM only caters few of those play styles, mainly zone wide blob zerging. It is an absolutely horrible map for small scale and solo roaming as you are often forced to walk along the narrow bridges, where you are surely going to be spotted without any stealth. Professions have very unequal access to stability and means to knock off other players off the ledge. Heavy armors are already overly abundant in WvWvW, now replacing the real WvWvW maps with EotM failure design, would mean we would have even more of them as they have the best access to stability. Necromancer is also part of the GWEN meta and I can easily imagine that spectral wall would be the perfect trolling skill in EotM, but does that make it a better map? NO.

Huge NO.

EotM terrain leads to nothing but massive blobs and some trolling people off the ledge.

Teabandit.9417:

Hello folks, didn’t know whether this should of gone under recruitment or not as I’m just asking for the time being. I’m from Piken Square, during the day time WvW activity is normally pretty great and always nicely populated, however I find it increasingly more frequent that the only time I’m able to play is quite late on at night, by which point most of the action has died out. I’m not so keen on the idea of migrating just to find a busy server but I feel it’s the only way I might still be able to get involved at unsociable hours since there would still be plenty of people fighting the good fight through the night, that or a server with a cracking nightshift I guess?

Thanks for your time,
Tea

Desolation has a really strong, active night team and we need players who are able to play outside the busiest hours (mainly playing at night, morning, noon and early afternoon). One of the most frequent opposing servers has been recruiting more night force, so you can expect to have some actual fights, not just player-vs-door.

However our prime team is becoming full. If you want to play on prime time, I cannot recommend Desolation or any other EU top server. There will be queues when the Tournament starts. Just remember those 100+ player queues Gandara had in Spring? I would not be surprised if the records will be broken.

I can confirm that Desolation is prime time (7-9 PM GMT) is getting full. We have sometimes queue on all 4 maps. Granted the queue is often short (2-15 players), and lasts less than 5 minutes, the queues are most likely going to be considerably longer during the Tournament. EB can have even 50+ man queue on busiest evenings, like reset.

It doesn’t make sense for large guilds, who want to play on prime to transfer to Desolation or the other top EU servers (they are also stacked), but outside prime time Desolation doesn’t have queues.

We would need players, PuG/militia commanders and roaming teams who want to play outside the prime time, especially on the mornings and noon. We are often faced with enemy enemy, who has lots of players at such hours, so you would not be doing just pvd, but getting actual fights. Several of our opposing servers run multiple roaming teams so if you are looking for small scale fights, Desolation is a good server to transfer as you can often face enemy teams of similar size (plus their blobs, but good roaming teams should be able to avoid them).

Desolation is truly international and multilingual. We got players all over the world. Server wide team Speak with fair share of humor in it. If your server is becoming boring place to play, Join the fun!

Valik Shin.9027:

Euro servers have more fights cause that’s what they tend to play for. But the time u play isn’t good for them

He said we plays from East coast time from 9:00 PM to 12:00 AM, that translates to
03:00 AM to 06:00 AM in Central European Time (CET) with summer light savings on.
During that time most of EU is sleeping, but the Desolation night crew is on. Two other top servers also have night crews on. Those servers matched up against each other almost every week, so there are fights, but surely it isn’t as busy as prime time. So if he wants big fights, I definitely recommend NA at that time.

gennyt.3428:

Deniara Devious.3948:

gennyt.3428:

If WvWvW was introduced from the beginning as Frostreach vs Badlands vs Overgrowth, I doubt anybody would be on here stressing about “server pride”.

If WvWvW would have been introduced as EotM, it would have not attracted the same people who now play WvWvW hard core. EotM = pve karma train for loot.

To clarify, I meant EotM style factions on classic maps and not the actual easy farm Eotm map.

Replacing EotM with a map like EBG would of course be an improvement.

Reducing all the servers into just 3 factions is not that great idea, as there really is such thing as server pride and communities and that would not necessarily solve the population and coverage balance issues. Notice how in EotM green usually wins and blue can be outnumbered 50% of the time. We need a different scoring system and real actual outnumbered buff e.g. make the tower, camp and keep events scale based on the number of enemy players there. Same like the do on pve side. So if 50+ man blob attacks one tower, it will get spawn more guards and archers than the one which is attacked by just two guys.

EU has 4 types of language based servers: French, German, Spanish and International. How are you going to divide them into 3 factions?

gennyt.3428:

If WvWvW was introduced from the beginning as Frostreach vs Badlands vs Overgrowth, I doubt anybody would be on here stressing about “server pride”.

If WvWvW would have been introduced as EotM, it would have not attracted the same people who now play WvWvW hard core. EotM = pve karma train for loot.

CrimsonNeonite.1048:

Well tbh, I based it on word of mouth and this thread: https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/wuv/recruitment/FSP-EU-Where-are-the-roamers/first#post4308969

I didn’t mention Kodash because at least they still have roamers.

Gandara and Kodash have the biggest amount of roaming teams among the TOP5 servers in EU, followed by SFR who has recent influx of ganking squads. Players from these servers often complain that the other servers “hate” roaming and “only” blob. They rightfully complain that they get blobbed when they try to fight enemy PuGs (hint to them: play fair 1 vs 1, no cheese builds like PU, P/D, perplexity etc, to decrease likelihood for this!).

For the health of this game it would make sense of the roaming teams would spread around more evenly on different servers. Then each roaming team would then have higher likelyhood to encounter similar teams from the opposing team. They could have fights in the ruins or other areas, which are generally not occupied by zergs.

I solo roam pretty much every day. If I get ganked by an enemy team, I obviously report their location, movement and call in assistance to kill them if they camping somewhere or assassinating also other Desolation players. If they think ganking me or others with more than 1 player was fine (2-5 vs 1 is huge advantage for them), I see nothing wrong in blobbing them to death.

NO.

It will promote low skill “I win” play by spamming the auto-attack. No other auto attack in the game game as strong condition as torment in it. It would be way too much if the clones summed Ether clone will also spam torment.

Please ignore the nasty comments given by the enemy players of our server.

Nobody forces you to blob on Desolation or any other server. You can at time at EU tier 1:

- solo capture camps
- snipe dolyaks
- kill enemy stragglers, roamers or those lost their zerg
- contest enemy keeps
- build catapult or ram alone and capture a tower
- build catapult or ram alone, call in for 1-4 other players when the wall/gate is down and ninja capture the enemy keep
- scout
- take/defend the borderland bloodlust

These are all crucial roles.

We need more small scale roamers and people who play outside prime time (no queue then). We got players from all over the world: mainly from Europe, but also from North America, East Asians, Australians and so on.

LordByron.8369:

May i have supply crate if you think engi elites are bad?

Supply crate is strong in 1 vs 1 against opponents, who don’t know how to fight an engineer. I have never lost 1 vs 1 when I have been supply crated. Supply crate is weak in pve and it’s long cooldown (180 s) makes me want to have static field (40 s cooldown) instead in WvWvW zerg situations.

Engineer indeed has one of the worst profession elites of this game: mortar. They should revamp its #1-5 skills and turn into elite kit.

After the patch we will know better if glyph of elementals is worthy as an elite. It might be useful on small scale. Conjure Fiery Greatsword will surely still be used by the roamers, for the superb mobility it offers.

It depends what you want to fight against:

SFR (International) best over-all coverage and often the biggest blobs
Desolation (International) strongest night team, 2nd best coverage
Kodash (German) strong primetime, lots of roaming teams
Riverside (German) zone wide blobs, strong siege
Gandara (International) strong primetime, lots of roaming teams

All of them are very high population besides Kodash. If you want to fight against the biggest blobs in EU, I suggest you will move to a server which often facing SFR. If you want to fight against enemy roamers and gankers, then play on a server which is often pitted against Kodash and Gandara. If you do your selection with opposite logic, you might soon come back to forums and complaining “oh by the enemy servers don’t have much any roaming teams… first it is 1 vs 1, then they come back with 10”.

If you plan to play on many different hours and on NA hours as well, then going to the servers which have coverage is a good idea. Fighting with just 1-2 guys against enemy server’s big night team, might not be fun.

I know that my server, Desolation, has the reputation of being the biggest PuG/militia server in EU (plus being the pve capital of EU in the days before megaserver), but I think things have changed. I would give the current zone wide PuG blob crown to SFR, which is obvious #1 choice for bandwagoners. Desolation has gotten an influx of new guilds. Many Desolation guilds now run closed raids and Desolation has become a guild heavy server. But when the Fall Tournament starts the pve people will also flood in, unless they all enjoy EotM. Our night team + many others are now taking a rest before the Fall Tournament, thus our ranking is tanking.

You can see rankings at:
http://mos.millenium.org/eu/matchups/

TheDevice.2751:

Engineer: Enjoy absolutely every mechanic there is in the game while having very little down-sides at all. If you think of any down-sides, use the hidden engi-only skill of forum QQ so pamper-control can fix it all. Feel the power of pretty much being the master race, having a million skills at your fingertips, stealth, crowd control, tank, dps, heal, support, group utility and thats just when you smashed your first 5 keys. Be completely viable in every single game mode. Control the battlefield with the power of dev favoritism and deploy your personal pet, the necromancer, to tickle your enemies while you blow a hole in the internet with your face.

Your post isn’t very constructive and holds little truth in it. Yes, engineer is versatile, on par with elementalist in that respect. And yes, properly specced engineer is very strong against thieves, but depending on the engineer build, engi struggles against condition builds and burst builds.

Engineer has several real weaknesses, which are not addressed in the upcoming balance patch:
- weak condition removal (outside elixirs)
- weak access to stability
- not many viable stun breaks
- vulnerable to focus fire and bursts

Thief has great access to evades, which are pretty much lacking from the engineer. Thief has better in-combat mobility and out-of-combat mobility than engineer. Thief can spec for higher burst as it has superior ways to reset the fight (shadowstep and much easier access to stealth). Zerker engineers are rare as hen’s teeth outside pve.

If engineer would truly be the “master race” and developer’s pet you mention, we would see much more engineers in every game mode. In Pve engineer is probably the least played of all 8 professions (tied up probably with the mesmer). In WvWvW engineer seems to be also the least played or 2nd least played. Many top tpvp teams have been doing fine without any engineers. Yet guardian has been part of the tpvp and WvWvW meta for 2 years. Also many top tpvp teams have been using two warriors or two elementalists.

WvWvW is my main game mode. I solo roam a lot, but also tag along with the zerg (or lead the zerg in). Every single day I encounter much more thieves in WvWvW than engineers. I would estimate that thieves outnumber engineers at least 1:4. Talk about skewed game balance…

My guesses: We will not see more engineers after the patch, but the amount of rangers and mesmers will increase. Some thief builds got slightly nerfed, but P/D got slightly buffed. Let’s see..

Aeolus.3615:

lets all move to a single server and every one wins

This is an excellent idea! Long live healthy WvWvW! And nice fights for all!

/sarcasm

Green color has obvious advantage, blue has the worst buffs there. Just one visit to EotM confirms that. I really hope the EotM maps will not be used as guidelines in creation of the new WvWvW maps, since they are so horribly imbalanced and full of chokes and places to fall.

Since green is the most typical color assigned to the winning server, it would make sense to swap the colors in EotM. So that server who is green in WvWvW, gets the blue part of EotM and so on. I would also argue that blue keep (valley) is more difficult to defend on EBG. Luckily the EotM and WvWvW link is very weak, just the minor amount of supplies from the EotM to your home border.

Another possibility is completely randomized people distribution in EotM, just like Dayra suggested. It would be fun to fight against some own server people as well. This would also make the karma trains a bit harder to implement.

Also it makes no sense that the server gets bonuses to vitality and healing power based on how many points it acquired in WvWvW. This makes the uphill battle even more difficult for the underdog. These should be either completely removed or those who are behind in points have the very minor buffs. See:
http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Power_of_the_Mists

Dayra.7405:

Winner of all 4 rounds get 800 tickets, Looser of all 4 rounds get 400 tickets,
2nd likely get 700 tickets, 2nd last 500.

Do you really think 200-400 of these tickets are worth 1000+ gems?

Rofl!

I gotta agree. The ticket difference between a server which wins every match up and the one which loses them all is just 50%. 1000+ gems buys pretty kitten nice weapon (and armor) skins, for no extra effort.

I think real reasons to transfer would not be the tournament, but maybe some players don’t enjoy WvWvW on their server. But grass is not always greener on the other side and the past shows that super stacked servers can also crash and burn. People should study and think before moving.

Phantaram.1265:

Changes can be made only for Spvp and there has been quite a few cases in the past that this has happened.

I would NOT trust Arenanet doing this. Staff Guardian Hammer Warrior Staff Elementalist and Staff + wells Necromancer (aka GWEN) have been the zerg meta in WvWvW since Autumn 2012. Mesmers are needed for veils, portals, time stop. Thieves are far the most common roaming profession, gankers and sniping enemy rears in zerg fights. This has always been the situation. Ranger and engineer are generally not wanted or needed as they lack a specific role. Now the upcoming changes might make ranger a bit more viable, but engi will remain the least common profession in WvWvW.

During 2013 we saw major buffs to ele staff, warrior profession in general and so on. Arenanet obviously does NOT care about WvWvW and already buffs professions, skills and traits, which would need toning down in WvWvW.

Stealth is far more powerful in WvWvW, yet revealed is 3 seconds in WvWvW/pve and 4 seconds in spvp/tpvp. Out of combat mobility is also much more powerful in WvWvW than in spvp/tpvp, yet warrior greatsword mobility has not been addressed. And we have had countless of threads of people complaining both about stealth (and perma stealth) and warrior mobility.

Celestial + battle of sigil + strengh/Hoelbrak rune D/D elementalist is very strong in small scale and 1 vs 1 in WvWvW as well. It is not part of the official meta, because staff elementalist has a mere 2 point trait (blasting staff), which increases the staff skill radius by 60, staff provides 2x water fields (group healing), 2x fire fields (group might), lighting field (swiftness), huge area chill, ranged area stun (static field) and so on. Staff elementalist provide the biggest damage in zerg fights and are main healer/support (water field with the abundant guardian hammer #2 and warrior hammer blast finishers). Doing any buffs beyond that is just madness.

Arenanet should really start communication (instead of threatening and closing down threads in the WvWvW sub section) with the WvWvW gamers. The WvWvW meta which been has been static since Autumn 2012 and needs to be changed.

And people complain about uplevels in WvWvW! I guess Arenanet fixed this problem. :-)

Some SFR players keep talking about #desotears. In every single match up against Desolation, SFR has focused more on it than the other server. Talk about having a stigma against a server. Shouldn’t we feel honored? :-)

#desotears are nothing more than just a rumor. The loot is good here. “your inventory is full” is a common message, even though I have an extra bag slot.

About the up levels. Well, it seems the opposing servers also got a fair share of them. It is true we often lack PuG commanders, but in general the organization has improved and several hard core guilds have transferred to us.

The winner is mostly determined by coverage and numbers. And SFR still has more players during morning and noon than the other servers. We are often enjoying the outnumbered “buff” then. Unless some drastic transfers happen, the other servers besides SFR and Deso probably won’t have enough coverage to fight for the tier 1 win week after week, despite both Kodash, Gandara and Riverside have a strong prime time. One to few weeks extraordinary push is possible, but that has been shown to lead to a burn out. Baruch Bay (BB) took 3rd spot in The Spring Tournament. Look where they are now.

LordByron.8369:

I wonder where you see 80 players.
I played almost daily last month and few times i saw 30.
Unless you attack home garrison or similar targets, in that case everyone from pve etc comes to defend.

It seems every server has players who greatly overestimate the number of enemy players. Sometimes I have heard enemy players comment: “We just beat 60-70+ Deso PuGs”, when we had 30 people on TeamSpeak, many of them scouts and not on the tag. Thus the 30 Deso players become 60+ in the eyes of the enemy.

Deso has now had low numbers outside the peak hours. When you are defending with just 5-20 against enemy of 30, the enemy blob feels big. Deso now has a lot of WvWvW guilds and we run using split team tactics, not just one mono blob. We are also accepting and training new commanders. I would argue that SFR nowadays has the most frequent big blobs, but every server has their own style.

I think it is smart to have a rest now. When the Fall Tournament begins, then we will see the real numbers.

If I understood things correctly the Fall 2014 Tournament will use similar system to the Spring tournament. In other words, winner goes up and loser goes down. We have now still good changes to drop 4th position. I don’t care if enemies will call us Tankalation. Taking a rest before the league is smart. Dropping to EU rank 4 would mean us matched against rank 5 and 6 on the first week. Winning t2 is easier than t1. Then next match up would be t1 and so on. We won last week against SFR + Kodash fair and square. Now I don’t mind us losing the weeks before the league.

All the top servers have gotten new players. And I think this is just the beginning. I am quite sure most enemy servers already have queues on prime time, but every top server will be full when the Tournament begins. Desolation achievement hunters will flood in when the tournament starts. Desolation still lacks pro small scale roaming teams to counter numerous Gandara and Kodash roamers, to snipe every dolyak and capture every supply camp there is and ninja cap keeps and towers. We also don’t have enough players who want to play during morning and noon hours. This is where we need to improve. Otherwise our chances to win are small, but 2nd place is not bad and will give many tickets as well.

Reverence.6915:

How’s the NA-OCX presence? I’ll be sure to come over after the tournament thingy since I’ll be only on my main account during that time for obvious reasons

Desolation has some NA players and Koreans. Generally we got people all around the world, but majority is of course from Europe. Some of the other top EU servers also have NA players/guilds.

Besides when the tournament will start Deso heroes won’t sleep. Night capping, but after the tournament. I think: well deserved time for rest.

Welcome to visit Desolation. Almost no queues at any hour, tons of enemies to fight and run away from, since Deso is EU tier #1 and enemy servers tend to be stacked.

JJBigs.8456:

Make retaliation affect damage taken from arrow carts.

That would be a really bad idea. AC can affect up to 50 targets. Arrow cart skills 8 times in a row. Assuming mere 200 dmg from retaliation (modest amount). That would mean 50×8×200 = 80000 dmg = instant death to anybody.

They should just revert the AC buffs and not allow AC nor other siege hit through structures (now you can damage enemies by catapulting through the gates etc).

KrisHQ.4719:

Decrease the amount of Condition Damage received per Might stack from 35 to 15, while maintaining the same Power. This will nerf D/D Elementalists and Hambow Warriors, while still keeping Might-Stacking a viable strategy.
A lot of the dmg from D/D Elementalist comes from Poison and Burning, with with less condition dmg I believe it would balance D/D Ele.
This would also fix “Drakes Breath” a skill that is not OP in ANY way. Nerfing it would be ridiculous since it sucks without any kinds of condition damage.

Nerfing might stack condi power from 35 to 15 would really destroy some other builds e.g. the HGH pistol/pistol or pistol/shield engineer, which depends on getting huge stacks of mights with HGH grandmaster trait + elixirs (and does condi dmg).

Drake’s breath has a really high damage multiplier and long lasting burn considering its very low cool down. I know it is a channeled skill, but if you compare it with 100 blades it does more combined damage (assuming average stats, not full berserker vs glass armor, then 100 blades of course wins). Drake’s breath really benefits from having mixed stats. I know that since it is a channeled skill, it can be kited, just like 100 blades (you don’t need to explain me the basics).

Go either combination berserker (power, precision, ferocity) + knight (thoughness, power + precision) + soldier (PVT) or celestial (all stats).

I use 6/2/0/4/2 build with medkit + rifle. You can use it to solo almost all the pve content, except for some of the Orr temple events (yes, all the champions can be soloed). The runes + sigils are a secret. ;-)

Your utility set is good. I used exactly the same and I have 100% map completion on my engineer.

I agree with Phantaram. The most obvious location for nerf would be
Drake’s Breath
http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Drake%27s_Breath

That skill does really high damage considering its very low cool down. In WvWvW the condi duration foods allow it to pump out very long lasting burning.

I suggest either increase the cooldown to 10 seconds or reducing the direct damage by 33% and it should do only 4×2 s burns.

The combination of sigil of battle + strength or Hoelbrak runes is problematic for other professions as well. Engineer and warrior can also stack tons of might using them.

Illusionary Elasticity will now be incredibly good for staff mesmers, pretty much a must trait after the changes. The torment of auto attack of the scepter is a really bad idea and will lead to stupifyingly easy condition spam builds, which will win most small scale fights with ease. I can already see the horrible meta, which is coming soon.

This build is going to be overpowered in small scale and incredibly easy to play. The amount of condis it can stack is crazy. Most professions have no chances to cleanse even half of that.

I really hope Arenanet reconsiders the scepter changes. Having a powerful condition like torment on auto attack is a bad idea.

Combined with runes of perplexity or torment this is going to be crazily overpowered build in small scale roaming in WvWvW. The build will easily stacks tons of confusion and torment (too much to cleanse for most professions/builds) punishing any active move from the other side. Thanks to the perplexity runes, torment on auto attack the build will not require any skill from the mesmer. Semi passive condition spam enemies to death.

Here is the build:
https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/professions/mesmer/Build-Torplexity/first

Really bad move from Arenanet. I sincerely hope this planned change gets reverted.

CrimsonNeonite.1048:

Desolation is already stacked, it may not seem this way but, bring in our PVE pop and then the Fairweather’s who joined recently; don’t be surprised to see hours long queues.. I imagine some players will be looking to transfer just to get onto a WVW map.

Exactly. We haven’t had much any queues and we have been often out numbered during summer 2014, but once the Fall WvWvW tournament begins, we will have long queues as the achievement hunters will flood in. The other top servers will have similar problems.

Swamurabi.7890:

It’s a Swiss-style tournament, meaning that you face off against servers closer to your own, not that you play each server once.

Are you sure? Here is a quote from Arenanet blog message:
The shorter format will ensure that worlds will not be repeatedly matched against one another, which will more closely resemble a true Swiss-style tournament. Each matchup will be unique, and every win—or upset—will make a huge difference!

I hope there will be an official response and clarification how servers will be matched against each other.

4 weeks long tournament is definitely an improvement. In 9 server league it means that each server is facing the other 8 servers exactly once. The rewards are also better: up to 800 tickets for the winner of all 4 weeks.

I am just worried about the upcoming queues. Desolation has been a really great server to play on. We haven’t had much any queues (besides a regular 2-30 man queue to EB during prime) in past 2 months. No queues = no waiting. When the Fall Tournament will start I am sure we will have long queues as we are currently rising to EU rank #1. This is one of the main reasons why I haven’t been actively recruiting any more, as I want to keep up the relatively queue free situation and rather have the opposing servers suffer from the queues.

I really hope there won’t be any free transfers to the top servers. The bottom servers need help (and merging).

In the recent weeks and months several hard core WvWvW guilds moving from silver league to the TOP3 EU servers. This includes my server, Desolation, but it seems Kodash got the biggest transfers, despite being a German language server, because it is the only top server with 1000 gem price.

Clearly the gem price and server rating are the two main factor. Most players transfer up, not down. There are very few reasons to transfer onto servers outside the TOP5 in EU.

Internal struggles, lack of challenge or long queues can cause some guilds and players move to lower servers, but this movement isn’t happening much at all. Recently we haven’t had any queues on Desolation (EU Rank 2), except a short queue sometimes to EB and one of the borderlands. We are often enjoying the outnumbered “buff” even on our own borderland at prime time, not to mention the other maps. I can imagine the opposing servers have queues, judging from the size of their blobs. We are using skirmish tactics and split teams to counter these (and 24h7 coverage :-) ). Still we won last week by a large margin (against lower rank) and this week are coming 2nd.

I have heard from other players that the silver league is pretty much dead outside the prime time, only few people on the maps. And I can imagine bronze league is even deader. If this continues, the people who want to play WvWvW on variety of time zones are forced to either dig up their wallet or farm money to pay the transfer prices (1800 gems to almost all top servers in EU).

Arenanet could merge some servers, but they should inform that well in advance and offer transfers for those who are on affected servers. The worst idea is to allow free transfers to the TOP10 servers. Players should be given options, instead of forced to all migrate with some opposing server.

The decision to remove the match up related sub section of these forums was unwise. It is clearly one of the main reasons (besides the stagnated state of the GWEN meta and no major changes) for the demise of WvWvW. Players want to hear stories, create their own stories. Arenanet might even call them “unmoderated” part of the forums. Forums and a healthy developer feedback are vital for the community.

The mega servers made recruiting harder, but Arenanet could help this a bit by introducing in built WvWvW recruitment system to the game. It must be implemented so that player doesn’t need to press some special buttons to access it via a panel, but maybe so that when the player is loading up the WvWvW map (takes 10-20 seconds), it displays player paid (gold/gem price) ads by different guilds and servers. The prices for such short temporary ads shouldn’t be too high, like several hundred golds, but more like 10 gold, but short time gated (if you want it displayed longer, you need to pay more). This would create another money sink and way for Arenanet to make money via WvWvW, but at the same time they should increase the rewards for regular WvWvW (I mean not EotM, which is just a pve karma train).

Harper.4173:

I doubt GS will ever be complained about too much in sPVP.
The issue is that it has no cc to keep the target in place for you to hit it so it requires a large investment in utility/other weapon in order to work.

No CC?
Blade trail is 900 range 4 s cripple which even pierces, 15 s untraited cooldown
http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Bladetrail

Combine with Leg Specialist to add 1 s immobilize with cripple.
http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Leg_Specialist

This without any sigils or runes.

Greatsword is among the most popular weapons in WvWvW and easily the most popular weapon in pve. GS/hammer, GS/LB, GS/Sw+Wh just to name 3 typical GS warrior builds in WvWvW and after the patch GS+rifle might be viable. GS/hammer is used both in zergs and small scale. Greatsword offers more mobility than any other weapon in the game. This is combined with massive damage if the target is rooted. You should not consider GS just from 1 vs 1. What if the allies of the GS warrior root or stun the poor enemy?

Now the planned 5% nerfs to GS #2 and #4 will be very small compared to the buff they planned for GS burst skill (which is weak as it is). In other words the total DPS of GS will increase, while it still keeps this massive mobility which allows to reset the fights and run back to safety behind own lines. And then come back soon again until the opponent is dead.

The real reason why there is relatively little complains of the GS mobility in spvp/tpvp is the map design and game mode. Current spvp/tpvp is about contesting small circles. You win very little by running away. In WvWvW it is the completely opposite. One shot at the enemy keep gate and their waypoint is soon contested and they are unable to use it (big disadvantage for the other side). Spvp/tpvp maps are very small and full of obstacles. WvWvW maps are much more open and in roaming mobility is much more important.

Short reply: Make a power or partially celestial hybrid build. Use rifle, Elixir gun for stun break and utility, Rocket boots for mobility, Grenade kit or bomb kit for damage. Take some traits, which make it easier to stay alive like protection injection, backback regenerator (or invigorating speed if you are really good at timing your dodges, but the lag in huge fights makes it harder).

I have spent over 1950 hours playing as an engineer, big part of it in WvWvW. Retaliation is NOT a learn to play issue as some players keep telling here. Retaliation is still broken. It can potentially trigger up to 7*5 = 35 times with grenade barrage. The grenades have a long travel time at maximum distance and you cannot cancel them after them after you have thrown them. Maybe the enemy group didn’t have any retaliation when you tossed the ‘nades, but when the nades actually hit them, they all have retaliation on. I remember several times being hit over 10k retaliation damage from just grenade barrage + few other grenade skills. This should be fixed by Arenanet. Retaliation shouldn’t trigger so many times for one skill, which does much less damage on the enemies. Retaliation can be easy kept up spamming just guardian hammer #1 and hammer #2. Maybe limit retaliation so that it can trigger max 2-3 times per second.

Engineer has 3 weak points, which makes it bad for zerging:
1) lack of heavy armor / sustain inside the zerg. Engi’s best power weapons, bomb kit #1 and rifle require close range to deal maximum damage and burst. For some reason even rifled barrels trait doesn’t increase rifle range by 200 like it says, but only 100 for rifle #3, #4 and #5. Warrior rifle has 1200 untraited range and requires 2 point trait to make all its attacks pierce.
2) relatively low access to stability and bad stunbreaks (EG healing mist has long cooldown and the regeneration itself is weak, other stun breaks are not even viable for most builds)
3) condition removal outside the elixirs is bad and elixir healing just sucks. This means if you stay at the back lines or far on the sides the enemy condition builds will eat you.

I don’t think the balance changes planned will make engineer any more reliable for zerging, but rangers will see more use. GWEN is still the way to go.

Please email this to the developers using the game inbuilt reporting tools. I am afraid you will just end up infracted here and this thread, like all the other threads which discuss others using exploits, will be deleted.

I hope Arenenat would issue official reply soon. This has been going on way too long time and many players have farmed their WXP ranks + tons of gold in EotM.

The OP must play on Gandara. The Gandara I knew doesn’t seem the same any more. It was called Gank Dara for a reason. Lots of decent sized guilds and tons of roamers, ambusers and gankers. Fighting like a terrier, sometimes stubbornly instead of going for the easy PPT. Then came the free transfer and massive influx of bandwagoners and the karma train blobs (yes, Gandara does them as well).

Gandara isn’t doing that badly in the gold league, but it clearly lacks coverage to be in the TOP3. Note: I am talking about coverage, not quality. I can imagine the frustration of those Gandara players who are playing outside their prime time. The times of the easy wins and wins by over 400k are over.

Most of the small roaming guilds are on Kodash and Gandara. If they are not matched against each other, a typical Gandara roaming team will most likely face just enemy zergs or solo roamers, lost zerglings or disorganized enemy PuGs. The likelyhood of “fair” small scale fight are small, because the players who like this type of WvWvW stubbornly stacked on these 2 servers instead of spreading out to multiple servers (which would lead to more fun play).

Gandara lost weeks 28 and 29, but not by a large margin. As a player on the opposing side, I can tell you that we have experienced exactly the same: being outnumbered even on own borderlands and EB (yes, and Gandara against us). I consider it normal. What we lose, we capture back at night. I am actually lifting up my battle spirit when I see the outnumbered “buff” on us. But if a TOP3 EU server sees this regularly I can imagine how empty the game is in silver league outside the peak hours.

If I were on Gandara I would actually tank a bit on purpose and enjoy the summer while it still lasts, but that is actually up to the leadership of your server. We have already seen a lot of servers lose the fun, get internal struggles, many important players getting a burn out and then servers crashing down. And if you stack on the winning server, it might just be the next one on the list of that happening.

Any case, I have personally had a lot of fun in recent weeks. I wish you luck and fun games!

All the top gold servers are organized and obviously use TeamSpeak, border hopping teams etc. And there is activity 24h7.

Many of the best GvG guilds are in silver league though. The silver league servers generally lack off-peak coverage, meaning there can be very little people outside their peak hours. Compare your playing times and the server income at:
http://mos.millenium.org/eu/matchups

For GvG you might look at:
http://www.gw2wvw.net/topic/20v20-gvg-eu-tournament-kings-mist

I wouldn’t say it is fair to say that top WvWvW are just omniblobs. Big blobs often occur in EB, but if you play on the BLs you will be finding a lot of smaller teams and guilds running closed raids. And this is true for any server. In my observation SFR tends to have the biggest blobs now, followed by Kodash and Gandara. Deso used to be famous of its blobs, but I haven’t much heard “Desoblob activate” on TeamSpeak lately and outnumbered buff tells a lot (= no queue on many previous match ups). Desolation now has a lot of WvWvW oriented guilds about the size of 15-25 raids, but we still lack small roaming guilds. Desolation has a lot of roamers, but they tend to be unorganized solo PuGs compared to Kodash and Gandara, which have by far the highest amount of ganking teams.

warriorjrd.8695:

I’m waiting for Denaria’s 8 paragraph, bold font, essay on why deso would be your best choice.

My name is Ayna or Deniara. ;-)

There is a very simple reason to join Desolation: game is FUN on our side.

Last night epic fun at Deso BL. I was scouting, roaming alone all over the map and defending keep alone (of course calling help if needed). I went to troll their zerg alone. They chase me all the way to our Bay gate. Our zerg was waiting on the other side. Yummy loot bags.

Rule #1 of WvWvW: Never ever chase a bald asura girl. :-)

Condi thieves are very common in WvWvW roaming. P/D perplexity is considered as one of the most easiest, cheasiest and most powerful 1 vs 1 specs in the game (one of the main reasons for this are the perplexity runes, which still need to be toned down, so it is not just a thief specific problem). I seriously don’t think it needs any more buffing. Even without the perplexity runes, condi thieves can stack massive amount of condi pressure very fast. Most professions are unable to cleanse that. So for example if you are playing a typical ranger or engineer, your best option is just to run away if that condi stack hits you.

The problem with the thief profession is the following:
- lack of cooldowns on weapon skills
- amazing ability to reset fights and avoid damage (e.g. evades)

This had lead the developers to “balance” the thief by giving in relatively low damage multipliers. In other words, if you want your thief to hit hard, you need to go more or less closer to zerker. At the same any other profession, besides thief or mesmer, is free kill if they run a zerker spec.

Giving more damage to thief is going to skew the balance even further away, unless something is done about the ability to mitigate the damage and reset the fights. The way stealth currently works is a massive advantage to the attacker, especially in big open maps like WvWvW. You won’t lose initiative or become revealed if you miss. The one who can land the burst first has massive advantage in small scale. Trying to hit with AoE is a guess game. It works well if you can spam AoE like engineers can, but not all professions can do that.

I know my post is going to be flamed and people will tell me how thieves suck in large scale combat. For some reason almost every single zerg vs zerg fight in WvWvW has more than one thief, usually eating the flanks. Yes, I have witnessed even 5 thieves together ambushing the rear (this was an extreme case though). In Tpvp the top teams seem to be all using these three professions: guardian, warrior and thief. The other 5 professions are optional and vary per team.

Equivocat.8246:

Kinda funny how the thief’s allowed to go zerker and get away with it, and everyone else has to suck it up and NOT play that.

And on topic, having a war as well, it’s a weird game where everyone’s waiting out, or baiting out the Eviscerate. They know you have it, and you know they know that the pain’s coming. The distance on the heatseeking isn’t big, but it is way too reliable since missing it doesn’t drain adrenaline. That, plus the relatively low cooldown, sigil of intelligence, and added condi pressure from Celestial runes/longbow/Impale, and it gets pretty overwhelming. Only have so many dodges, so do you dodge, the Pin Down, Impale, or Evisc?

Well, it is a fact that thieves are driving away other zerkers from the game. This game is soon 2 years old and it seems the majority of the players and developers still think this is okay (“it is your own fault if backstab hits you xxx k dmg”). We would see much more varied meta and more hybrid builds if there would be less extreme burst combined with the ability the reset the fight (this combination should not exist in the game, because it drives so many players to run a bunker build).

But back to the topic of eviscerate:

I fully agree with the above poster. Arguments like “You can dodge it”, are not reasonable, when the warrior burst skills all have under 10 second cooldown. The warrior has more attempts to land his burst than the opponent has attempts to dodge. I think the only way to make warrior balanced, especially for game modes like WvWvW, is to increase cooldown of burst skills. In WvWvW the big problem skill is hammer burst, earthshaker, which been dominating the meta since the beginning from Autumn 2012. 2 s area stun, 600 leap with under 10 s cooldown = madness!! Many people have quit WvWvW because it is stale, meta has been the same. I know the straw men arguments: you can dodge, use stability or a stun break etc.

The alternative way to balance the warrior would be nerfing it’s damage or sustain to the ground, but I don’t want that to happen. Surely some skills require small tweaks and the warrior mobility should be seriously looked upon, but I think most of the burst skills could be kept as they are, only if burst recharge time would be considerably longer (50-100% more). This change would decrease the effectiveness of cleansing ire, which is at the moment the best 4 point trait in the game, far better trait than most grandmaster traits.

So in other words: I am very well aware how powerful spec axe/sword + longbow is. I am not suggesting to change eviscerate skill, but increase the cooldown all of all warrior burst skills.

Grok.6714:

Wohoo!
In before Deinara!

Haha! But you misspelled my name. Most of my characters are Ayna and some are Deniara. I have been pretty busy lately.

The others have already replied in this thread. We don’t have much any internal drama and in general the map chat and TeamSpeak is entertaining, to say the least. We usually have a short 2-20 man queue to Deso BL during prime time.

Eternal Battlegrounds is currently highly volatile on Desolation. On recent days we have had the outnumbered buff during prime. This happened yesterday evening as well, even though we had a good commander on the map (outnumbered buff obviously occurs much more often when there are no commanders on the map). Desolation is no longer just massive blob of PuGs. We have a good number of WvWvW oriented guilds and that number has been growing.

There is not a single server who dominates all the time, each have their relative weak moments. EU T1 match ups tend to be quite even compared to other tiers. Personally I think even match ups are the best, instead of one server completely steam rolling over the others. Another plus for EU t1 is that there are activities 24h7, always someone to fight against.

http://mos.millenium.org/eu/matchups/

I am sorry to hear this. I am quite sure similar behavior is happening on other servers as well. Upleveled, people running wrong gear or failing the dodge the first attacks, will often get called “rallybots”. I can understand the frustration on both sides: somebody new wants to learn the game mode, while a guild doesn’t want enemy to rally from ally who dies too easily. Some of us have sense of humor to even fun of the whole thing and one Desolation player often runs with Rallybot Guild [RG] guild tag. :-)

If there was no visible commander tag, then one can fairly assume it was a closed guild raid. Many closed guild raids don’t welcome outsiders, sometimes not even level 80s. You will have much better luck following very small groups (1-3 players) or somebody who actually has a commander tag on. Getting a character to level 80 is not that difficult. I have done it for all the professions. You will enjoy WvWvW better, as you have access to all traits and the best gear.

I have almost always room in my party and I have no class or level restrictions. And when I have commander tag on, feel free to follow. You can also ask advice for builds and strategies.