Guild Wars 2

Armor doesn’t help at all against conditions and that is how it should be. Logically if you bleed or are poisoned the armor won’t help with that. But even if you have 3900, a full glass thief, fully traited, optimal damage runes, bloodlust stack and everything can crit hit you 13k+ with one backstab. Warrior’s killshot and eviscerate can also hit as hard. I have said this many times: this game has too much burst damage. And unfortunately Arenanet plans to add even more offensive stat in the form of BL bloodlust (and later with ascended armor).

But I also agree with the [Buka] guy. Warrior is currently very powerful in every aspect of the game. Warrior was always good in pve and melee train zergs, but now it is also good in spvp and as a solo roamer and small scale in WvWvW. There are several viable warrior builds for WvWvW and you can find or ask them in the warrior subforum. You can be pretty tanky and still have good damage, hard control and very high mobility. Warrior has access to many of the best condition mitigation and removal tools of the game. I would even argue that condition necromancer’s worst nightmare is such warrior (signet of stamina, cleansing ire, traited warhorn, dogged march and so on). You also have so high health pool that rarely ever get bursted down immediately without given chance to react or flee. It is a learn to play issue. After all the recent buffs to warrior, you should rarely ever lose 1 vs 1 now.

Immolator.5640:

Oh for the love of god get over yourself already :/ been watching you posting all over the forums ‘Gandara this’, ‘Gandara that’, ‘Gandara has so many people on all borderlands, Deso are a poor coverageless server Gandara blobs us’.

Get your facts straight and clear your head before you post this crap.
…

Whisp me in game and we can have some small scale, if you’re bored come at me, I wouldn’t mind knocking some sense into you.

/rant over, I hope you enjoyed your daily dose of drama!

EDIT: Also to clear your ‘exaggeration of Deso forces’ thing, I was there, there were at least 30+ Deso, all on TS, the majority of which were DVG – making it a guild group. Furthermore none of our people were on TS, or voice comms of any sort, we had no commander, and were outmanned by the enemy.

Calm down.

In what way I am hypocritical? E.g. yesterday evening I was playing at EB and defending Stonemist castle against both Riverside and Gandara. Desolation had zero arrow carts inside Stonemist, while I saw our dear enemy building superior arrow carts just outside the Stonemist castle walls. Surely we blob, but have I ever denied that Desolation doesn’t blob. We are a PuG server and PuG servers blob and have few lone roamers besides that.

The video was good, but:
- you did not have the outnumbered buff on that video
- without any better knowledge it is pure guess work how many players are on the entire EB map (maybe Deso had a total of 50 and Gandara had 30, that is possible, not denying it, but also the opposite could have been true)

You are free to whisper me in game. I am not angry at all. I am curious to know how people are on other servers. But I think I should to get my server some points. We are badly lagging in this current match up (that is our own fault, Deso players farming in pve). I get my fun when I can capture a lot stuff alone or with some random PuGs who just happen to be on the way. You can probably find me in Deso BL, mostly doing supply camps. The lake is soon gone and I am going to enjoy the last moments in the 3 borderland lakes as well.

Cheers!

Vizunah Square and Desolation are the biggest PuG / militia servers of EU and both have a night capping team (rarity in EU), but the similarities ends there. VS has much higher WvWvW player base, more into points and using siege. Desolation has its roots set in spvp/tpvp and most Deso players would actually prefer to have the game without any siege besides flaming rams and lots of big epic fights in the open or in the keeps without the ACs. The lake used to be only siege free zone in WvWvW and now it ends up deleted as well. Desolation does’t have much small roaming teams, but we have several prominent non-thief solo roamers. Some of you might have followed Sir Koroshi’s streams + videos, which are worth watching:
http://www.youtube.com/user/SirKoroshi?feature=watch

Sadly he got burned out of this game and I can very well understand him. I also solo roaming on Desolation and all the recent changes, the horrible meta have made solo roaming less fruitful. I don’t like the direction this game is heading for.

A long time ago there was a post by a Vizunah player, telling that moaning and complaining will never get anything done, but positive attitude will get the developer’s attention. The post hinted that Arenanet is working in co-operation with some VS players, but I think that post is already deleted a long time ago.

Anycase, if you think about all the changes which have happened in WvWvW this year, especially since March 2013: massive buff to Arrow Carts, real pro night capping patch, overpowered WXP traits, super cheap golem blueprints, even more range and power to Trebs and so on. That all definitely suits Vizunah style. But honestly all the top German servers: (especially) Riverside, Elona Reach and Kodash are heavily into using siege as well. Gandara has been upping this respect as well. 21 ACs in one place (and serious exaggeration of Desolation forces in this otherwise great video):
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f3IPk0n-DsA

Simonoly.4352:

I’ve been on four EU servers (including Deso) and they all had mature, friendly communities. The only reason you might not want to join a server like Desolation is due to a greater risk of being stuck in a queue for WvW – unless you intend on WvWing outside of peak times.

Uhm. What queue?

In past few weeks Desolation has had queues only at reset (I think almost every server can have queues then) or when 3 guilds run events on same BL map (those events usually last max 2 hours). No queue to EB and today we e.g. had outnumbered buff not only on the enemy borderlands, but also on our own BL (I am pretty sure you Gandara and Riverside both had then more numbers than us). But situations like these are volatile and can change. If WvWvW would suddenly give as good rewards as the invasion farming in pve, I am sure there could be much more people wanting to do WvWvW at Desolation. IF we can activate just 5% of our pve base to WvWvW, things can be very different.

I do NOT claim that Desolation is the only EU server with nice PuG friendly community. I can imagine pve is also good in Underworld and Gandara has some good roaming guild teams.

Very good points by OP.

Unfortunately there is NO dialogue between Arenanet and its WvWvW player base. There is mainly just one WvWvW developer commenting in these forums, but I am sure the WvWvW team consists at least half a dozen developers (including artists and programmers). I guess everybody is just incredibly busy doing those Super Adventure whatever.

Arenanet tends to ignore the serious and important questions. Instead the side notes and minor things might get a humorous answer. More over the communication feels very one directional. All the pleas and ideas by the player base, especially by the hard core player base are consistently ignored and Arenanet implements the opposite choice. E.g. the player base pleas for account based WXP or toning down some of the overpowered runes of perplexity or WXP traits and siege warface, Arenanet ends up always doing the opposite. This is sure sign that the developers are out of touch the with their hard core player base. Of course some of the ideas presented in these forums by the player base are just plain bad, very difficult to implement or would wreck the balance even worse, but in general I feel that all the comments go just down the drain.

I have many times suggested State of the Game for WvWvW, happening on a monthly basis. I haven’t ever gotten any developer feedback for that. I could even organize some great players from different servers for that. Wouldn’t it be interesting to see and hear some of the most dedicated WvWvW players talk with Arenanet devs on a live stream?

NO

We already got Power of the Mists, which offers similar bonuses to the servers based on their score in their current match up.
http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Power_of_the_Mists

I do not want more power to snow pile on the server which has superior numbers and coverage. I have suggested some defensive buffs to the structures and NPCs and to a smaller degree players on a heavily outnumbered side, but I have explained already well before that giving offensive bonuses even to the outnumbered side is a bad bad idea. Giving offensive map wide boosts to the side, which is already winning, is just plain madness and a great way to drive off the outnumbered side back to pve and other games.

Bloodlust would be bad for guild-vs-guild, who want as equal fighting ground as possible (e.g. stacks from weapon sigils must be nulled before match). EB jumping puzzle is difficult location for gvg and the long queus to EB might make gvgs a thing of the past. Arenanet should be careful not alienate their hard core player base.

Desolation is unofficial English language pve capital of EU. You will find a lot of people doing pve events (overflows are common). We also host many of the best tpvp teams.

Desolation is probably the most militia / PuG friendly international top server in EU. The other top international servers are more guild oriented (big guilds doing their own raids). We got lots of very good veteran players and commanders, we just lack numbers and 24h7 coverage to win the EU ladder.

Medium population = cheap transfers.

I know that Melenya [MyA] moved to Piken Square, but I guess a lot of other guilds have also moved to Piken Square in past 3-4 months. I also heard that you got some night capping team. Of course your rating goes up if you got more WvWvW players and also getting matched up against higher ranked server generally rises your ranking (while getting matched against much lower rated opponents lowers your rating).

Desolation lost over 1500 dedicated hard core WvWvW players in the Spring 2013 mass exodus. SO many got burned out to fight against Vizunah Square, 6 months in a row. Forsaken Gamers [FG] came back to Desolation from Piken, but that is the only major guild transfer we have got in 6 months. Now when have been facing Vizunah Square and SFR in match up we have been outnumbered 90% of the time. In fact in our recent match up against Gandara (rank 14 then) and Abaddon’s Mouth (rank 11 then), we have also been enjoying the outnumbered “buff”. The buff doesn’t lie, it just shows we have relatively low amount of players big part of the day. I am not denying that the opponents wouldn’t also have skill e.g. SNCD from Riverside is very good.

Note that Underworld is also a very high population server. And their predicted ranking is 17. The server population in EU doesn’t correlate well with the WvWvW player population.

One other reason is the Arenanet dev team. It seems the WvWvW part of the game is not given proper resources. All the changes and buffs to the siege weapons did nothing, than just alienate huge part of the player base. The next dying breed are the solo roamers.

Sir Koroshi, the most followed Desolation streamer besides Tinker Teldo, recently published a farewell video. Xeph from Team Paradigm, an exceptional Desolation tpvp guild, also resigned. I am also thinking to quit this game, because honestly all the planned changes: deletion of the lake, bloodlust on borderlands, gaining points from stomping, league system etc. sound really bad for this game and solo roaming on an outnumbered server.

Spvp/tpvp balance has been horrible for many months. More spam and even more spam. Yet Arenanet plans to further buff professions, like warrior, which don’t need buffing at the moment. Talk about serious power creep and this game is just 1 years old. It is so to see such a great game, with amazing visuals and audio, good pve stories go down the toilet by incompetent game design choices and totally ignoring the good solid advice of their hard core player base.

I am not laughing.

Well-designed games try to make the matches more interesting all the way to the end. And most people agree that even matches are the most interesting.

Adding yet another mechanism which adds power to that server which has better coverage is a bad idea:

1. We already have Power of the Mists

http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Power_of_the_Mists

Which can provide up to 10% bonuses to health and healing power, etc.
The more points your server has the bigger the power of the mists bonus. This feature should have never been in the game. Now to add yet another similar mechanism on top of this just adds more power to the winning side, snowballing all the benefits for them and making come backs or wins for the outnumbered side a mission impossible.

In general it is also easier to get WXP on a highly populated WvWvW server following the karma train (zerging). Guard leech and applied fortitude WXP traits already give stat bonuses and my hunch is that players on a fully stacked server are more likely to have high enough WXP ranks to have those bonuses.

2. We need game mechanisms to make come backs easier for the losing side

Instead of giving flat map wide stat bonuses, these 5 new capture locations should give a variable random bonus. The lower your current score is the better chance to get a better bonus. Thus the bonus benefit has inverse relation with your current score. The highest score holder has lower chances to get really good bonuses. Similar system has been used successfully in MarioKart for ages. E.g. in Nintendo 64 MarioKario 64, the player on the lead usually just gets a single banana or green shell, while the last players are likely to get something really good like: lighting strike, golden mushroom, star which gives invulnerability or 3 heat-seeking red shells.

Example of bonuses (varying from low power to high):
+10% crafting EXP bonus
+10% karma bonus
+10% EXP bonus
+10% luck bonus
+10% WXP bonus
+50 vitality bonus
+50 to power and condition damage

The server with the least point is more likely to get better bonuses from above.

3. Giving 3 points per stomp is a bad idea

That is 3 times more than capturing a sentry. This will encourage even more players to run ganking builds e.g. have a team of 3 thieves. Traited steal from 1500 range. Burst down the victim very quickly and then stealth stomp it. I don’t see how this would be fun or fruitful to the game except for those 3 thieves laughing their kitten off if they have psychopathic personality disorder.

Already the rewards are skewed towards attacking e.g. keep reward 3-5 dragonites for those who slay the keep lord. This urges all the players to go high dps and just rush the lord. If one or few attacking players would stay elsewhere to stall the defenders, they get no rewards. The WXP points are also rewarding selfish play. You get much more WXP by just flipping objectives, instead of defending. The incentives to upgrade keeps, siege them etc. are really low if you are against a server who can capture everything in ease while you are at sleep / work (aka night capping problem, which is still not solved, in fact the new changes would just underline it).

Questions for the developers:

- Imagine that you are playing on a horribly outnumbered server and being spawn camped. You might not even have 10 players to start the Siegerazer/Siegecrusher NPC commander event and it won’t stop the larger enemy groups from stomping you near your own gates. What should you do?

- Are you really planning to remove the outnumbered buff? This sounds like a bad idea. I agree it needs to be reworked, but for above mentioned reasons the outnumbered side really needs more incentives to play. Game should be more fun for all, not just for the winner.

I really urge the developers to have a State of the Game (similar to spvp/tpvp SotG) on a monthly basis with representatives of the WvWvW player community. More two-way communication, actual discussion, not just dictating stuff stubbornly is good.

Three most common professions in WvWvW guild group: hammer + sword/warhorn shout warrior, support guardian and staff elementalist. This has been the overpowered WvWvW meta since Autumn 2012. The only thing which has changed has been the rise of necromancers.

Arenanet: Make a proper WvWvW, pve and spvp/tpvp skill split. Stop buffing those things, which do not need any buffs in pve or WvWvW.

Warrior has been king of pve since launch and even more buffs to warrior…

This weird match up is finally over. Gandara has a lot of small 5-8 man teams running similar builds seen in spvp, but very little solo roamers besides the typical thieves every single server has. But I guess it must be a bit boring for the zerg type of players as Desolation is used to fight against higher quality zergs e.g. The Good Old Days [GD], VII [VII], Melenya [MyA], Golden Horde [GH] or the massive server wide blobs (100 + golems) SFR is doing every morning. The Dark Alliance [TDA] appeared the best guild from Gandara (sorry for my short observation cycle).

For 3rd week in a row Desolation WvWvW player numbers have been really low compared to 1 month ago. I would have not expected to have outnumbered “buff” on us so often against rank 11 and 14.

Well played enemy! Good numbers from you.

Good luck!

While many other professions have specific standard builds for organized large groups e.g. hammer + sword/warhorn warrior, engineer is just an optional part. Many top teams in EU, who are doing guild vs guild, do not accept engineers, unless they are truly exceptional. If you don’t believe me, just look at the guild recruitment posts. Warriors are the most common profession and most guild want to recruit even more warriors, because Arenanet keeps buffing the warrior.

Like others have already commented: retaliation (and also confusion) hurts engineer more than any other profession, the lack of stability, many CC skills being single target and so on.

I have played engineer against couple of pretty good guilds in guild vs guild matches. One of the main tasks of an engineer in such setting is to take away pressure from your ranged team, mainly your staff elementalists. Staff elementalists are often using zerker armor and thus enemy thieves are targeting them. The situation changes when engineers get into picture and the enemy thieves are usually targeting engineers as their 1st target. Thieves and even rangers can do the sniping role better than the engineer, thus the best EU teams use these other 2 melee professions in the task of sniping enemy low armor targets. The zerg engineer should have a lot of sustainability and durability on its own as it generally cannot rely on its team mates for heals and condition removal. It needs to avoid the melee train and flank on the rears and sides. It should harass the enemy staff casters (necromancers + elementalists) as they often don’t have any stability and will be easy to stun, launch, knock etc. The most important task is: revive control. Traited grenades have amazing range and you can throw them at any direction, while moving and kiting the enemy. The downed enemy opponents will be rained with grenades and against an roughly equal opponent this can decide the game for you.

Some top teams have 2 condition spamming engineers if they go extremely condition heavy. Then they usually have 5-6 necromancers. Thus necros are the main condition output.

But the bottom line is: engineer is the least common profession in top guild-vs-guild teams for a good reason.

EU SERVERS IN GENERAL (primer for NA players and those who are not much into WvWvW)

The very high population vs medium population has very little meaning in EU when it comes to WvWvW. For example Underworld is very high population, just like Desolation. Yet Underworld’s current rank is 17. Piken Square is medium population, but their current rank is 6 and they are going to rise up to rank 3. I do not know all the EU servers, but I have fought against several of them multiple times to give few guidelines:

Vizunah Square (French, PuG server, stacked, strong night crew, famous for their love for golems, siege and playing for points, ability to do amazing come backs)
Seafarer’s Rest (International, mostly English, but lots of Russians, very stacked and getting even more stacked, lots of big WvWvW guilds, has had issues with elitism)
Piken Square (International, very guild oriented server, not that PuG friendly, currently lacking a bit in night crew, but peak hours stacked as well, hosts many of the best guilds in this game, but has been lacking server wide organization)
Desolation (International, mostly Northern + Central Europe, PuG server, pve oriented thus lacking WvWvW players, only around dozen major WvWvW guilds, no queues at the moment)
Elona Reach (German, heavy armor, has more WvWvW players than Desolation, but seems to lack internal organization to score high, loves to use siege)
Riverside (German, for their love of Arrowcarts they are sometimes called Rivercart)
Jade Sea (French, similar to Vizunah Square, but less dedicated players)
Augury Rock (French, small but very high quality guild oriented server)
Kodash (German, small scale roamers, loves to use siege)
Abaddon’s Mouth (German, massive blobs earned them the nick name: Blobbadon’s Mouth)
Gandara (International, small scale roamers mostly, lots of spvp play style & builds)
Miller’s Sound (German, hosts couple of good guilds, but lacks 24/7 coverage to fight in the top)
Baruch Bay (Spanish, hosts couple of strong guilds who used to play on Desolation, has a decent night crew, but seems to have unknown issues to make it unable to fight in the top)

(PuG = Pick up Group, random players, militia in NA)

My assumption is that NA servers are much more stacked than EU servers. The queues are longer and the fighting is much probably more zerging in NA. Here you can still amazingly do fruitful stuff solo roaming as in busy prime time e.g. yesterday me + one guild mate were taking one tower while our enemy (we were outnumbered) was busy blobbing elsewhere. I also started to solo capture enemy Garrison in busy prime time, but I unfortunately got spotted so I had to flee. Grr, reinforced door 80%, all guards killed. So even playing on EU rank 3, there can still be solo / small scale fun for others than thieves (I usually play engineer).

I already apologize if I insulted anybody with my server wide or NA vs EU generalizations. Note: they are just my personal opinion, based on my limited experience.

I like to correct and add a few things.

EU RANKS

Desolation’s current rank is 3. We haven’t been rank 6 for about 2 months. http://mos.millenium.org/servers/history/15

Desolation is unique server in EU. We are the leading spvp/tpvp server. We are also the English language pve capital. You can find overflows on several pve maps and Lions Arch is full almost around the clock. Our WvWvW attendance is however close to medium ranked server. In our recent match ups against EU rank 1 and 2 (VS and SFR) we have been “enjoying” the outnumbered “buff” almost all the time. Still surprisingly we didn’t lose score wise that badly, despite it was obvious that enemy had at least twice as many players on most maps I must say this is probably big part to entire Desolation server using same TeamSpeak + good coordination and we have a decent night team. We also have some amazing commanders.

Now we are matched up against EU rank 11 and 14. NA player would assume that rank 3 would completely overrun the lower populated opponents, but believe me or not the difference in number of players has been small. Today I have several times seen even our own borderland (Desolation BL) having so few players on our side that we have the outnumbered buff, not to mention those other BLs which were all empty from Desolation players. We regularly have the outnumbered buff on EB. That implies that Gandara (rank 14!) and Abaddon’s Mouth (rank 11) have at least twice as many players on those maps. We will win this match up by large margin, but since we are not facerolling our opponents, we will drop in rating and our next rank will be 5 or 6.

LAG

I bought a brand new powerful PC this summer. I can enjoy full frame rate even when there is over 100 players fighting on the screen + have pretty high details on, but especially those situations where all the 3 servers bring in their blob at the same location enormous lag hits the entire map. Arenanet devs have confirmed that the lag is caused by lots of players in same vicinity and their servers being overloaded. And I know that other servers in EU (and probably in NA) are facing the same. All three server blobs in Garrison or massive fight in Stonemist is guaranteed lag, unfortunately.

Mindroach.6149:

Deniara Devious.3948:

I have been roughly 400 hours as sword/sword + rifle warrior, so here are my thoughts:

1. Rifle #1 is fine. It should bleed, not do vulnerability like someone suggested. With a bleed build (+100% bleed duration + condi damage) it actually does nice damage

It’s not a condition weapon, and everyone doesn’t want to make a condition build out of a burst weapon.

Engineer rifle has bleed on attack #3, blunderbuss, which does its amazing 4 stacks of bleed at 100 range (yes, you need to be closer than melee range to do full damage). Engineer rifle is called a control weapon, despite it has only 2 control skills, which are both single target, and in fact any ranged physical weapon (ranger + warrior longbow, warrior rifle) have 2 control skills.

To get most out of your warrior’s rifle, you should select crack shot trait, which is 20 points in the arms tree. You should also get 25 attack of opportunity trait, which gives +10% damage against bleeding opponents and deep cuts, which increases bleeding duration by 50%. That trait combination synergizes well. I know the damage will be less than from longbow, but the trait makes all rifle attack pierce, so in a zerg situation e.g. you can hit multiple targets and cripple them for 10 seconds + do one bleed stack on top of it ( either from precise strikes or sigil of earth ) using single skill on a mere 8 s cooldown.

With additional condition duration + sigil of earth and the above mentioned trait selections you can easily achieve 20 stacks of bleed on a single target using rifle only (and easily full 25 stacks with dual swords). Even without any condition damage (arms tree gives you it), 20 stacks of bleed do 850 damage/second. With mere 750 in condition damage, 20 stacks of bleed would do 1600 dmg/s. You don’t need to go condition build to achieve that. Just select enough celestial trinkets + few pieces of celestial armor, rest can be any gear you desire and you can still retain ability to do strong crits (+50% or more crit dmg).

I am not claiming rifle is a perfect weapon, but warrior rifle feels less clunky than the engi rifle. Warrior has a stronger ranged option at the moment, especially for condition builds: long bow. But that is another story.

Bombs and Nades [ENGI] on Desolation. We are not very active at the moment. Focus on WvWvW.

I have been roughly 400 hours as sword/sword + rifle warrior, so here are my thoughts:

1. Rifle #1 is fine. It should bleed, not do vulnerability like someone suggested. With a bleed build (+100% bleed duration + condi damage) it actually does nice damage
2. Rifle #2 is fine as well. It fast activating 1200 range cripple. With crack shot you can easily maintain 100% uptime of cripple.
3. Rifle #3 is also fine. Comparing the firing rate + damage multiplier it is equal with thief’s pistol skill unload
4. Rifle #4, brutal shot, does low damage considering it has 15 second cooldown. E.g. compare with ranger long bow #2, rapid fire, which has mere 10 s cooldown and 1500 range (it fires further than the tooltip says, see http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Rapid_Fire ). Rapid fire does 10 stacks of vulnerability vs 8 and almost 7 times more damage.
5. Rifle #5 is also fine. Same damage multiplier as engineer #4. Push back is weaker than engi rifle #4 launch effect, but rifle #5 is cleaving and does no self-knockdown.

Kill shot has the highest damage multiplier of any attack skill in the game. It should be easily telegraphed and slow as it is 1500 range (and pierces with crack shot trait). If its activation time is reduced to 1 second, its damage should be adjusted accordingly.

Summary: Warrior’s rifle is fine and in line with the ranged options of other professions, EXCEPT brutal shot (warrior rifle #4) should do more damage or have it’s cooldown reduced.

The problem more is that warrior’s longbow at the moment is a bit too good. Longbow offers more conditions (syncing well with warrior condi builds), fire field + finishers and potentially 100% uptime of burning (massive damage condition).

Funnily I get the imprint of a bad player if I have trouble landing engi rifle #4. I wrote that I play mostly WvWvW in top tier. I do solo roaming most of the time, even during busy prime time with my engineer. This evening busy prime time I was trying to solo cap Gandara Garrison (got all the guards + some siege down, then they spotted me and I had to flee). The lag has sometimes today been so bad that no skills work or they fire 3 seconds later. Try to time your overcharged shot there.

Landing warrior rifle #5 is a bit easier as it cleaves in a cone shape, despite it has shorter range. And despite somebody claimed in thread warrior rifle is not useless at all. E.g. you can often see several enemy players trying to revive a downed ally. Warrior rifle #5 knocks of them all away unless they have stability on. Having a cleaving interrupt at 12 second cooldown (warrior rifle #5) is not useless, but of course warrior hammer is even better CC weapon. In fact I would claim that warrior hammer is the superior CC weapon for large scale battles.

Net shot is pretty bad considering: it is single target, does no damage at all and it is easy to kite from distance. If the projectile speed was a bit faster, it would be okay.

Some people on this thread comment like engi rifle is some god mode super control weapon, better than the rest. Then why: 90% of the engineers I see in WvWvW are using pistol/shield or pistol/pistol instead? Why almost all the top tpvp players in tournament video streams also use the above mentioned weapons instead of the rifle?

asuryan.4386:

Firt I would like to apologise for my english, if something is not griht.. sorry, *right.

Once upon a time, just 1 night ago there were 20 gandaran’s pugs in SM, in a beautiful symmetry:
http://imgur.com/xc6Yu0K

Here is the rest of the story
http://youtu.be/f3IPk0n-DsA

Thank you Kamikaze (you were not online, cannot ask permision, if you ask, i take it out) for the video, Playita for the audio of Desolation side in one of your recorded streamings (the same for you, i retire if you ask), Lutto for this nice and fun idea, Eze for encouraging everything that moves a little, Illusion Lies for saving my life several times when I was a mesmer (I made my first portal to a tower with you the sexy Illusion Lies, sure you dont remember), and all those Pugs and Randoms that sometime we are, Gandarans and i dont remember all of you now (just waking up).

Have fun! This is an amazing game!

PS: Desolation, you have great players, but i hate a little, just a little one engineer that put cows on my face once in a while! Be prepared, i am coming for you with my necro… lets fight conditions with conditions! Roaming nights things.

A pug from Gandara.

The video is NICE, but the text in it are a bit weird. In the video you talk that Gandara doesn’t care about points and wants fair fights. Well, is abusing the broken Arrow Cart mechanisms your idea of a fair fight? I counted almost 30 Gandara green dots in that video and never 60 Desolation, which you claim. Realistically those ACs should never be able to hit from there, but all veteran WvWvW players know the ACs are broken and even hit through gates and break other laws of physics.

I didn’t see any good fighting skills in that otherwise funny video. I have never been on those night WXP trains, so this is not personally hurting me in any way.

Some Desolation guilds, when they run a guild event, generally ignore small enemy teams and solo players and run without a tag on not to attract PuGs and try to hone their skills against roughly equal sized opposing teams. Isn’t this form of fair play? Gandara on the other hand likes to hunt down even solo Desolation players with a guild group while Desolation “enjoys” the outnumbered “buff”.

I think Desolation has several great engineer players: Sir Koroshi and Tinker Teldo to name a few. I also solo roam with my engineer, but I don’t use a cow finisher, so it cannot be me, besides I refuse to run condition spam gank builds. I actually wish that condition spam would be put in line (by replacing it with more direct damage) and those perplexity runes should be nerfed.

We even got an engineer only guild [ENGI] at Desolation. I am one of its officers if you want an invite. Someday I will arrange engineer training (for Desolation players only), topics will include combo field magic, comboing main hand weapon + kit skills, glitches, underwater tricks and tips, discussion of builds, how to survive alone in the cruel world.

Wemil.7052:

I can tell you this. a lot of americans night capping morning force from na want to come to eu when this league starts problem is.

TOO MANY. a lot of NA pugs from lower tiers will come to top 3 servers in EU because they want to win this.

we are talking massive massive heavy ques all hours 4h all times around 24/7

Well, not happening here… yet.

This is just my personal opinion: I think SFR deserves this. You wanted to win (again) by stacking and now you will become super stacked. SFR forum warriors have been telling in every thread how they win with their “superior skills” and how bad the enemy is, but everybody else knows it is numbers. Morning capping everything with 100 man blob + golems, while enemy still sleeps.

Desolation is still EU rank 3. http://gw2.millenium.org/eu

But we are dropping to rank 6, because glicko punishes us for not totally face rolling rank 11 and 14 opponents. No queue. EVen at prime time I can just click a map where I want to go instantly.

Amazingly EU top tiers can still offer small scale fun and allow fruitful solo roaming even at busy prime time without playing a thief or mesmer (or any other profession with easy escape). I hope this won’t change too much.

Like I wrote in other threads, the possible server migrations from NA to EU might make ANY top 6 server win.

SFR is a more a guild based server. Piken Square is even more guild based. You will have huge trouble when you are so full that guilds need to wait 2-3 hours in queue to get to same borderland map. Desolation and Vizunah Square are more PuG lands or militia. I predict we will survive the queues better.

TheGuy.3568:

About your rifle comment who cares? Rifle is for CC and control. Rifle players know this. Most of you who do not use rifles and obviously do not. Our rifle pierces naturally, has limited aoe, and much better CC than warriors rifle.

Or really?

I have 1000 play hours as an rifle engineer and 400 hours as a rifle warrior.

Tell me how engineer rifle has better CC against a skilled opponent?

Warrior’s rifle #2 has longer range (untraited) and is more guaranteed to hit than engi rifle #2. I know immobilize is more powerful than cripple, but the aimed shot cripple lasts 2.5 times longer than immobilize from net shot. The net shot projectile travels so slowly that it can realistically hit only from close range if the enemy knows the word kiting.

Warrior’s rifle #5, rifle butt, is 15 s ( 12 s traited ) cooldown cone shaped AoE 450 range push

Engi’s rifle #4, overcharged shot is 15 s (12 s traited) cooldown single target 450 range launch, which self knockbacks the engineer.

I know launch is more powerful than push, but we are now talking about self-knockdown and single target vs AoE cone push, which doesn’t have any penalty. Both have exactly same damage multiplier, but the engi skill can hit single target only.

Do a simple test: have an enemy who runs in circles around you. Even at very close range overcharged shot misses most of the time, but you can make the rifle butt hit much easier. Note: my play experience is mostly from top tier WvWvW, where the map wide lag is a serious issue, messing up timings with many skills.

So theoretically engineer rifle has a stronger single target CC, but that implies an enemy who is like sitting duck, not kiting around. If the enemy knows how to move, he doesn’t even need to use a single dodge or evade and engineer will be blasting into air.

Engi rifle #1 pierces to 1000 range, but warrior can make all its rifle + harpoon gun attacks pierce taking 20 point crack shot trait, which is really good: 20% cooldown reduction on harpoon gun + rifle, all attacks pierce, including kill shot, which has the highest damage multiplier of any single attack in this game, 1500 range. Now kill shot is actually the only warrior rifle skill which can be easily avoided due its long animation + cast, but I still find crack shot + kill shot very fun combination against mindless enemy zergs in WvWvW.

Compared with the other match ups of year 2013, I haven’t found solo roaming to be any more difficult than before. I was last night solo roaming in prime time in Deso BL for many hours. I got couple of WXP ranks and didn’t die a single time. No stealth, no teleportation, no easy escape buttons to reset a fight. I probably got lucky, but I am looking at the map for potential enemy movements all the time.

Interesting to claim that Desolation has more zerker armor players than other servers. I don’t know about the rest, but the members of my guild TLA, are mostly wearing soldier’s (PVT) and knights armor (TPP). Of course certain professions, mainly mesmer and thief, prefer berserker armor, but this holds true for any server for obvious reasons. Maybe you were running into some PuGs and not guild teams? Because I have also run into Gandara players doing massive damage, taking half of my health down in 3-4 seconds, but then also dying very quickly when I attack them back alone (this implies they are running on mostly berserker or rampager gear). But the enemy guild teams are not like that, now I was referring to random players. I am NOT claiming that all or most of Gandara players are running on full berserker / rampager gear.

Here is my server armor rating (based on my observations):
heavy armor servers: Elona Reach (ER), Seafarer’s Rest (SFR), Piken Square (PS)
…
very low: Vizunah Square (VS has guild groups running very heavy armor, but they are mostly zerker PuGs), Jade Sea (similar to VS)

everything else in the middle, this includes Abaddon’s Mouth, Desolation and Gandara.

A lot of people seem to have inflated ego about their 1 vs 1 skills. Of course if you run a solo ganking build with solo gear you are going to have a big advantage in 1 vs 1 against another player, who has traited and geared himself for support in large groups. Then on the other hand: most solo builds are not that good for huge zergs. I am myself one of those rare people who is keen to running hybrid builds: not optimal for anything. Little bit of this and that from group support (e.g. area healing and condition cleansing and buffing) to direct damage and condition damage, jack of all trades. I have a minor advantage in solo situations against the zerg geared heavy armor opponents, but I am also at minor disadvantage against solo geared / traited players. But the same build can function in a zerg and I can dive through enemy zerg.

Skapocalypse.5236:

Watch as your group while in a T3/4/5 server won’t be able to take anything but camps and maybe a unguarded tower during European/Oceanic/SEA against T1/2 servers that you probably won’t hold for the point tick. Watch the karma train while sitting in a T1 or T2 server against T3/4/5. Watch in the lower tiers the literal ghost town at these times. Then you’ll understand the true gaps between the servers and maybe then it will lead you guys to a solution. As many have stated it’s not skill and never will be skill it’s all coverage and population

This maybe true in NA, where the rating gap is really big between rank 4 server (TC) and rank 5 server (FA): currently 169 rating points. Here in EU we have 27 servers (vs 24 in NA) and the rating differences are smaller. I play for Desolation, which is currently rank 3 (but going to drop down). We are now matched up against rank #11 (Abaddon’s Mouth) and #14 (Gandara). So this is a tier #1 server against a tier #4 and a tier #5 server. Exactly what you were writing about. See:
http://mos.millenium.org/eu

We are going to win this match up, but only because we got a bit better night time coverage. During prime time we are constantly at the brink of being outnumbered. Our enemies, Gandara and AM, are high population and Deso is very high population. I would claim that the actual number of WvWvW players at prime time doesn’t show any indication of this. Our enemies can summon a zerg + several roaming teams on the same map. Last night I saw us ticking as low as +150 at prime time. Surely we felt like both enemy servers concentrated on us.

The things to take into consideration: Despite Desolation is so called EU tier 1 (rank 3) server, we currently don’t have any major queues to speak of. Except for prime time I can get to any map without any waiting. 20-25 man guild group is big for us. Even in prime time usually just one BL map has a queue, if 3 big guilds are having a raid or gvg there at same time. After 2 hours, when the raid / gvg is over, queue is gone and we get outnumbered buff on that same BL. Desolation really is unlike any other server in EU. We are hosting the best tpvp/spvp players and also the unofficial pve capital of EU, but our WvWvW attendance is relatively low and we are still lacking big WvWvW guilds. In our previous match up against SFR and VS (EU rank 1 and rank 2 vs rank 3) we had the outnumbered “buff” on us almost all the time. Despite having clearly less than half the numbers of our enemies we were able to tick pretty well due good coordination using server wide TeamSpeak.

What I understood is that the top 4 servers of NA (JQ, BG, SoR and TC) are all very stacked servers. Here in EU we have just 2 stacked servers: SFR and VS. The league is going to be won by either SFR or VS. There is no other choice, unless some major population shifts occur e.g. a lot of people band wagon to SFR and its main guilds will /ragequit due having too long queues (happened before) or Piken Square getting bandwagoned, because it is only a medium population server and has the lowest transfer costs of any top server.

Yes, I fully agree that the winner is mainly decided by the WvWvW population and coverage. And EU is much much more volatile than NA in this respect. If 1-2 big NA guilds would move to any top 6 server in EU, that server could easily be winning the league, because of better night and morning time coverage.

I doubt that many Desolation players would want to transfer to Gandara just to do solo roaming, but new upcoming league system will definitely shuffle a lot of server populations. The details about the league and its rewards are still a bit too vague, but I think the following weeks will give us more information.

I have always thought why Desolation lacks the small roaming teams. We tried to form them using our internal now defunct forums. I suggested the thing in the new forums as well, but so far the pain train (blobbing) is much more popular idea. People want fast and easy WXP.

Personally I find solo roaming using a non-optimal build as the most exciting thing. If you play without any easy escape skills (e.g. stealth, shadowstepping / teleportation or 1200 range move skills), you cannot afford to make any mistakes. I refuse to use ganking builds, which are so popular among roamers. If my build would fail in a gvg or as a commander, I don’t wanna use it for roaming either. This might be dumb, but I rather learn one build really well. One build for each profession.

One theory for the lack of roaming teams:
Desolation has been facing Vizunah Square (VS) as an opponent more than any other server. The constant fights against highly stacked servers have forced Desolation to adapt. In our previous match ups against VS and SFR we have had the outnumbered “buff” on us almost all the time on all maps. This implies that both the EU rank #1 and rank #2 server have at least twice as many WvWvW players on each map compared to Desolation. I would also estimate that Elona Reach (ER) has higher WvWvW population, but they have some issues with the server organization, thus Desolation was able to win them.

If you start roaming with 5, your chances to run against an enemy zerg are very high in EU tier #1. They will chase you, start even building siege weapons in the open field, use veil + 20 man zerg to wipe just a small roaming team. Done it and seen it all. But if you roam solo you can still easily snipe dolyaks, sentries, do the NPC objectives and capture supply camps. As a solo player you are often ignored by the large enemy blobs, who are more eager to take a keep or tower than waste a lot of time chasing just one player (but the latter can also happen).

Desolation has faced Abbadon’s Mouth before and I think AM is well known for running large blobs. I don’t blame for that. Arenanet designed the game to give players easy WXP, loot and karma that way.

Perhaps Gandara is now adopting to this fight. You certainly don’t lack the numbers in prime time. I have also seen Gandara run in a big blob, even when they have two roaming teams (or more) in the same map.

Simonoly.4352:

What’s with all the emote spamming by Desolation? I had five guys spam /laugh whilst jumping on my corpse to the point where my combat log had over 200 emotes one after another. Overkill much? Been seeing this all weekend. Haven’t seen that since, well….when I was on Desolation 5 months ago and used to cringe whenever I saw anyone do it. Are there any mature nice natured players left on Deso, or did we all leave?

I am sorry to hear that. But I think there are badly behaving players on every server. Even if you win against larger group /laugh or dancing on corpses is simple badly behavior.

I never use /laugh emote in WvWvW or spvp. But I had to admit I was giggling to myself and commented in text chat (just to our side) when I won 2 Gandara engineers underwater with my engi. They had the advantage of friendly NPCs + numbers against me alone. I haven’t yet encountered any true solo roamers from Gandara, except of course: thieves. Gandara’s 5 player roaming teams are pretty good and Desolation sadly lacks that type of play at the moment, but our general organization seems better. Then on the other hand why to have 5 if you can do it alone. ;-)

Let’s keep this game clean.

League system where you can transfer to a winning server by just paying gems = failure

Imagine any team sports where all the members of the winning team are rewarded handsomely. There is no upper limit how many members the team can have and you can pay a bit to transfer to the winning team. Who would ever want to transfer to a losing team? Nobody.

This will just lead to the already stacked servers becoming even more stacked.

When does Arenanet developers understand this:

Best 24/7 coverage = Win

The weekly WvWvW victory has very little to do with skill. It is mostly decided by how many players actively play that game around the clock.

Spears.5381:

I cried a bit when I saw this match-up

Don’t worry. We will be merciful and kill you fast. My warrior is called Ayna Merciful.

So crazily many Desolation players are still farming the pve events, so I think our numbers will be on similar level with Abaddon’s Mouth.

Ayna Micro
A friendly fellow engineer from Deso

Draygo.9473:

Anyway I don’t think netcode is the problem here because even with 300+ people running around in the same area, I don’t get the chugging skill lag of zergfights.

Well, obviously 300 people just running on the same map shouldn’t cause problems. You just need to update their 3D coordinates, direction, animation frames, action etc, but there are no combat calculations.

And if there would be 300 people spamming their auto attack at one legendary boss without much other monsters around (typical world event), the lag would be less than the 50vs50vs50 zerg fight.

I think the heart of the problem is those tightly packed battles where both or all three sides have massive amount of players attacking each other. AoE effects can take the largest time to resolve as they can affect so many targets. There are some skills, e.g. necro wells, which ignore the 5-man limit. Each grenade can hit up to 5 different targets and grandmaster grenadier engineer throws 3 grenades at a time. For some strange reason Arenanet buffed the radius of guardian symbols and necro marks by 50% (2.25x area increase). This obviously can lead to even more lag.

Now Arenanet developers should have a serious discussion:
Should we do something about the game breaking lag? (which can be so bad that no skill triggers, even skill #1 fails. At least I have several times logged out of the game because such mega lag makes it unplayable)

This is not just a programming problem. The current meta favors very tight blobbing, which is the worst thing for lag. All the smart groups do this to get the combo field effects, area heals and area condition cleansing. And if you stand in a tightly packed spot with 30+ allies, most enemy AoE skills can only affect up to 5 of you, thus most of you don’t get any damage whatsoever, without any dodging.

Here are game design changes to reduce this problem:

1. Reduce the effectiveness of some combo fields:
- fire field should give only 2 stacks of might for 10 seconds (allows crazy might stacking)
- water field healing should be reduced by 33% (allows crazy area healing)
- lighting field swiftness duration should be reduced by 50% (allows zergs to move with perma swiftness)
- smoke field stealth duration should not stack to more than 8 seconds total (currently allows permanent stealth, not much of a zerg battle problem, but overpowered)

2. Reduce the radius of AoE skills
- large AoE can hit more and as everybody wants maximum loot they just spam AoE all over in hopes of tagging as many opponents as possible
- aiming small AoE requires more skill

3. Player characters should occupy 3D space, which blocks others
- just like in GW1
- this would allow body blocking
- no possibility to be inside enemy or allied character model

4. Cap the WXP rewards per players involved
- e.g. max 5 players get full reward from killing an enemy invader, guard or capturing a supply camp and max 10 players get full reward for killing enemy tower lord and capturing enemy tower and so on. Others get diminished WXP rewards
- server side points and other rewards like XP, loot are unaffected

5. Limit number of players per map
- I do not know the current limits, but my guess is circa 120 players per side at EB, reducing this to max 80 players per side could potentially reduce the needed computations to half
- this would lead to longer queues on highly popular servers
- offer alternative to fight as mercenary for some other server match up (no need to wait)

I am suggesting these changes for WvWvW only. Probably implementing just 2-3 of the above would be enough to make the situation much better than it is.

Just an update:

You do not need O(n^3) approach to update the information to all players. The naive approach to send every single bleed stack + health information per each attack to all players in range, would generate absurd amount of unneeded network transfer and probably lead to network glitches as well (getting kicked out of the game). There are some rather well-known old school techniques to reduce this to:

1. Do all the calculations server side, as described in previous posts

2. Once per update tick, let’s say 10 times per second, send the 3D coordinates, direction, animation frame, actions to all players in range (culling included) and between those frames use interpolation and prediction techniques e.g. assume that each allied and enemy player continues to move to the direction it is moving at the same speed and continuing its action. E.g. if player is viewing the game 60 fps, every 6th frame has real information and 5/6 are predicted, interpolated frames. The prediction might sometimes show erroneous results, leading to short range teleporting players etc. but this would greatly reduce the network traffic and create impression of having much less latency (lag)

3. Once per second send the health, bleed stack information etc. to all players in range

I do not know the internals of Guild Wars 2, but I heard EVE Online uses asynchronous server side code. I have been teaching this topic and I am a firm believer than for many problems, especially those related to massively popular online chats and games, would benefit from asynchronous programming model. The more traditional approach, especially most Java and C++ programmers use synchronous input/output and threaded programming model. This is what most school are unfortunately teaching. And this scales very badly for very large amount of simultaneous users.

In asynchronous, aka non-blocking, model each input / output operation is just triggered. The program doesn’t wait them to finish, but goes on to accept new tasks. A callback function might be called when the asynchronous tasks gets ready. If the server program is divided into processes, which communicate efficiently using sockets, you can then easily divide the task to take advantage of not only multiple CPU cores, but also distribute the task over a network of multiple computers. This the model companies like Google are using.

MRA.4758:

Deniara Devious.3948:

The amount of computations needed at the server side e.g. which targets your AoE or cleaving attack hits grows exponentially with the number of players in the same map area.

Please stop spreading this piece of misinformation. I know that this is a direct quote by Devon Carver, but there is no sane reason to believe that the need for computational resources is indeed exponential. As I tried to explain in another thread, it is much more likely that the growth is quadratic. While this still may be to much to find a viable real-time solution, quadratic growth is substantially different from exponential growth.

Sorry for my bad wording. I actually meant O(n^2) behavior, where N is the number of players. What I wrote in the rest of my message should however still be true. If e.g. player number increases from 50 to 100 the computational requirements increase by 2×2 = 4 fold. The AoE cap limit tries to circumvent it, but I feel that only applies to damage + area heal etc. type of calculations. Anycase the game engine needs to check at server end whether certain AoE skill (beneficial to allies or hurting enemies or both) collides with certain players. There are some old school tricks to reduce calculations e.g. no need to calculate square root, which is a slow function, but I would assume Arenanet programmers know this stuff better than me.

I would not be surprised if the server code is multi-threaded and currently doing computations in just one machine e.g. one server computer per each overflow and per each WvWvW map. To change it into processes which communicate over the network, so the work load could be spread over a farm of server computers is no small task.

I am also guessing that the computational requirements depend on amount of conditions and skills used. Probably a grandmaster grenadier engineer spamming ’nades non-stop and using both short fuse ( lower cooldown) and shraphnel traits (15% chance to bleed) and sigil of earth (more bleed stacks) would be close to the optimal heavy load for server. Luckily for Arenanet engineers are the rarest profession in both pve and WvWvW. I could imagine that just 10-20 grenade spamming engineers could indeed generate as much computations as 100 man zerg, thus 25 vs 25 engineer guild vs guild showdown in one tight space all throwing grenades would probably bring down the entire server. Anybody else noticed that grenadier engineers bring more lag? (I am playing one of them )

This is just an educated guess. I do not have any inside information from Arenanet nor access to their source code. I have however a background in both game design and game programming. In recent years I have been teaching this topic at university level. I am also teaching cloud computing and how to do that distributed programming stuff. But I do not claim to be ant sort of leading expert in either topic.

I am not expecting any fast fix to this.

The amount of computations needed at the server side e.g. which targets your AoE or cleaving attack hits grows exponentially with the number of players in the same map area. The 5 man AoE limit is actually implemented to battle this problem. Instead of checking if the large AoE can hit up to 100+ potential targets, the game engine needs to check 5 targets and can ignore the reset. However even with this system, the amount of computations required is very heavy indeed.

If there is a lot of players from 2 or 3 servers in same place e.g. fighting over Stonemist castle or a keep, this will incur gigantic increase in calculations and probably leads to an entire map wide lag and several disconnects and crashes as well.

There are few ways to combat this problem:

1. More processing speed at the server end
- Arenanet probably already has powerful servers
- as the computational requirements grow in power of two, we would need to wait a long long time = many years, maybe a decade to have powerful enough hardware to solve this problem with brute force approach
- if the original server code was written multi-threaded it is then limited toonly one server. It would probably mean a complete rewrite to make it distributed / cloud computing (process + sockets based distributed system with multiple servers doing the computations). Not a small task!

2. Reduce amount of players per map
- I don’t know what are the current player quota limits, but it seems the game allows circa 120 players per side at EB. That would mean a total of 360 players at worst case. Reducing this number to 80 would mean more queues for certain servers but would drop the computational requirements to roughly half. Reducing player quota to 60 would reduce the computational requirements into one fourth, probably making really huge lag a rarity.

3. Reduce the incentives for blobbing / zerging
- If players are far away from each other e.g. at other sides of the map, several algorithms can be used to do the computations so that only those players who are in the same map area affect the calculations
- unfortunately current meta heavily favors blobbing and zerging and the suggested changes (in last week’s dev live stream) would just snow ball more advantages to the server with more players / better coverage, thus wrecking the game balance even more

Sorry for getting a bit too technical for some readers.

The amount of computations needed at the server side e.g. which targets your AoE or cleaving attack hits grows in power of two, O(n^2), with the number of players in the same map area.

Thus if there is a lot of players from 2 or 3 servers in same place e.g. fighting over Stonemist castle or a keep, this will incur gigantic increase in calculations and probably leads to an entire map wide lag and several disconnects and crashes as well.

There are few ways to combat this problem:

1. More processing speed at the server end
- Arenanet probably already has powerful servers
- as the computational requirements grow in power of two, we would need to wait a long long time = many years, maybe a decade to have powerful enough hardware to solve this problem with brute force approach
- if the original server code was written multi-threaded it is then limited toonly one server. It would probably mean a complete rewrite to make it distributed / cloud computing (process + sockets based distributed system with multiple servers doing the computations). Not a small task!

2. Reduce amount of players per map
- I don’t know what are the current player quota limits, but it seems the game allows circa 120 players per side at EB. That would mean a total of 360 players at worst case. Reducing this number to 80 would mean more queues for certain servers but would drop the computational requirements to roughly half. Reducing player quota to 60 would reduce the computational requirements into one fourth, probably making really huge lag a rarity.

3. Reduce the incentives for blobbing / zerging
- If players are far away from each other e.g. at other sides of the map, several algorithms can be used to do the computations so that only those players who are in the same map area affect the calculations
- unfortunately current meta heavily favors blobbing and zerging and the suggested changes (in last week’s dev live stream) would just snow ball more advantages to the server with more players / better coverage, thus wrecking the game balance even more

Sorry for getting a bit too technical for some readers.

BakedWaffle.8751:

Look, the outmannedbuff only says you are outmanned, it doesn’t say how much you are outmanned. It’s perfectly possible that there are 3 guildgroups running on the border, all of 30 men each. They all are running on another part of the map. You are saying it isn’t possible they are running apart? With outmanned buff you can have fair, even fights, think before you post something pls.

It is also possible that you are so badly outnumbered on a map that you have a total of 2-3 players on that map. If enemy runs in three 30 man blobs, what is the likelihood of a fair fight? Zero.

What you write is theoretically possible and happens sometimes, but the most probable outcome is that the outnumbered side is facing fights where it needs to fight against larger group than its own.

Anycase thanks for all those brave Visunah and SFR players on Deso BL today, who were fighting in pairs or solo against Desolation, who had at that moment more players on that map (see not that difficult to admit that you won because of numbers <- SFR can never do that).

Kudos to [Hovi] warrior from that tiny Asura engineer. The lone SFR thief commander with the tag was also a curious sight to see.

Later VS came with lots of golems and a huge blob to flip all the keep, so we had our outnumbered moments as well. But reseting all the keeps = lots of WXP.

Judging from the live stream (the minimap there wasn’t updated), the lake will be almost 100% gone. I don’t know what happens to Bay water area.

Raid of the Capricorn is the only pvp map with underwater combat and even there > 80% of the combat occurs outside the water as most of the map objectives are on dry land.

It is not surprising that the lake gets eliminated. The Arenanet lead WvWvW designer seems to hate diversity e.g. note his stubborn stance on WXP being character bound (very little reason to play alts as they will be seriously lacking those overpowered WXP traits). He is so stuck up in his own idea of how WvWvW should be played that he does everything in his power to force that vision to his remaining players.

Bye bye water combat. More power to server with superior numbers. More Siege Wars 2.

SFR has some good players and guilds, but what some of their forum warriors write here doesn’t make any sense. It is as if there is some reality distortion field clouding their minds.

If some Desolation guild has e.g. 25 guys on TeamSpeak, few of them AFK at the starting point or at another map, SFR tells here that we had 40 and that they won that “40” with only 30. Mathematics must be hard for some.

Obviously outnumbered “buff” means that you have much less players than some other server. And to claim that the number of players has no effect on any battles, is just lying. In fact a winning server has a minor advantage via Power of the Mists:

http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Power_of_the_Mists

And generally the server with best coverage and highest number of players has the best buffs from Power of the Mists.

But the new outnumbered buff is pretty nice as it gives +25% more WXP. WXP ranks go now so fast, because we have outnumbered buff almost all the time. And no queues.

Adminir.8140:

Deniara Devious.3948:

Ranger

Ranger’s longbow can actually hit longer than 1500, roughly 1800 range, with the eagle eyes trait.

Just like to correct this. Rangers have a BASE range of 1200 and eagle eye gives them MAX 1500. They DO NOT have a base of 1500 with eagle eye bumping them up to 1800. I wish this were the case, though it is not.

I know all that, but read this:
http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Long_Range_Shot

Several skills in the game can hit longer than much longer than the range in their tooltip says. Me and fellow elementalist from my guild tested. A staff elementalist can hit such locations (upwards the walls) which grandmaster grenadier cannot reach even though staff has official 1200 range and traited grenades have 1500 range.

I have a level 80 engineer, ranger and warrior. Here are my thoughts:

Warrior

Warrior’s longbow offers pretty good set of conditions + AoE damage, but I would suggest a melee weapon set besides it. Sword/sword condition build synergises very well with longbow. That is a good build for solo and small scale roaming. Most large guild group warriors are hammer / sword + warhorn. Mace/shield+greatsword offers good mobility (via GS) and feature of the month stun lock build.

Warriors together with guardians form the base of any organized zerg. Warrior’s elite battle standard is a must skill for this type of play. If properly traited + right weapons warriors compete with the thief as the most mobile profession in the game.

If you want to play a profession, which has easy to begin with and currently excels in pve and all forms of WvWvW, select a warrior.

Engineer

Engineer can feel very weak compared to other professions in the beginning, due very high skill cap. Engineer excels in small scale and solo roaming. But in large guild groups and zergs engineer is the rarest professions. Grenadier 30 point trait gives you 1500 range with grenades, but this is more theoretical as you will only hit immobile targets and large enemy groups from such range. Grenades are most effective at close (about melee) range. Retaliation damage can hurt a grenade spamming engineer more than it hurts enemies, so be careful. Bomb kit is another good option for dps.

If you like to play a complex deep quirky and funny character, jack of all trades, master of none, support + solo roamer, select engineer. Engineers can quickly adapt to almost any situation. Their support ability is topped only by the guardian.

Ranger

Ranger’s longbow can actually hit longer than 1500, roughly 1800 range, with the eagle eyes trait. It does more single damage dps than the grenades at 1000 range, but ranger lacks AoE damage. Ranger is a bit overpowered underwater as its dead pet can still revive it (with lick wounds), but in large battles the pet dies very quickly. Ranger can be very strong as a solo roamer or in 5-player group if played correctly. Don’t believe all the crap in these forums people say about ranger.

Ranger is also easy to begin with. If you like sniping from long range and almost endless dodging / evading + small scale battles, select ranger. Longbow + greatsword is good beginner weapon set.

Anybody knows where one can view the stream? I was on a work trip for few days, so I missed it.

While it is great that WvWvW finally gets attention and the live stream is a superbly good idea, the summary on this thread sounds like a nightmare come true.

Keeping the BL maps as small, but practically eliminating the lake + adding more objectives around where the lake should be is a really bad idea:
- the side with bigger numbers will have a superior advantage
- offering the leading side map wide boosts is the bad idea (read below)

We already have called Power of Mists and I consider it has an educational example of failed game design. The winning side shouldn’t have any bonuses, which make the winning even easier. Luckily the stat bonuses are rather small, thus it is not entirely game-breaking. But now adding a similar system on top of it could easily create a snowballing effect. The winning side gets even more morale, encouragement to utterly trash and steam roll the outnumbered side. The side with much less players seems the challenge as Mount Impossible and goes back to pve. Combination Power of Mists, the new proposed system and Applied Fortitude + Guard Leech WXP traits could be devastating for small scale and solo roaming (one side / player having enormous stat boosts compared to no/almost no boosts).

In the current system matches are generally decided already within the first few days from reset, now the proposed system might make this even worse.

http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Power_of_the_Mists

(In a well designed system this should be the opposite and probably completely random e.g. the more your server is behind in points, it has a better likelyhood to gain some minor buff points e.g. +4% to healing power or health. Thus giving a better chance for a comeback and higher likelihood of really even matchups).

Here are question for the devs:

1. Where can we have large scale underwater combat if / when the lake gets more or less eliminated?
The lake provided a different combat experience (variety is good!) and siege free environment (a lot of players really hate the abundant siege wars, but Arenanet doesn’t seem to listen to them). The current pond in Eternal Battlegrounds is pitifully small and few very players reside there. The Raid on the Capricorn map in pvp is very small and the underwater is very small part of that map. So where is the underwater combat?!

2. Any plans to give players ability reset WXP traits?
(this could be a good money / badge / karma sink)

3. Any plans to tone down overpowered WXP traits?
( +250 to vitality, added power + condition damage, +25% damage buffs, 1.5x radius—> 2.25 times area etc. are obviously way too good to be true)

4. Any plans to balance the professions for WvWvW?
(Now it is obvious that some professions are much more frequent than others and also requested by good commanders, who might tell that that profession XXX is not needed)

Without any points in condition damage burning is equal to roughly 8 stacks of bleeding.
burning 328/s
bleeding 42.5/stack/s

with 1000 points in condition damage:
burning 578/s
bleeding 92.5/stack/s
With slightly over 1000 in condition power 6 stacks of bleeding = burning in damage.

The three professions which are able to inflict massive bleed stacks quickly are:
thief (P/D)
warrior (e.g. dual swords, but certain rifle builds are also able to do that)
necromancer

Warrior can keep up that bleed stack as well (unless cleansed). But is the dual swords warrior really the overpowered build now? It has no protection, no aegis, not that much mobility nor burst. At least here in EU the mace/shield+greatsword warriors seem to be the flavor of the month. And sword/warhorn + hammer warrior is still the base of the zerg warrior.

Like I was trying to point out in my 1st long message. Every single build has some weakness. My current engineer is a heal bot. She can heal like no tomorrow, but burst can still take her down fast. So a guardian, which is built for dps and burst, can take her down. Remember no stability at all. But if you play a bunker guardian, as most seem to do, then of course a heal bot with tons of sustain and different types of damage (hybrid combination damage + condition damage) will slowly win the game. A typical altruistic healing bunker guardian has much more blocks, aegis, better access to protection and regeneration, higher armor etc. compared to my engineer build. Plus it also offers more team healing. A spirit or pet bunker ranger should also be in upper hand in most 1 vs 1 situations. A bunker guardian will can laugh at most thieves, but if aegis is down the burst from a full glass D/P or D/D thief can hit over 20k against 3k armor. Condition thief and perma evade sword thieves can also be really annoying to fight against. I would say the medium armor professions are at upper hand when it comes a typical pro zerg guardian bunker.

As you see everything is a trade off.

Continuing from above post.

I am gonna get flamed for this:

1. I would advice against buffing guardians. Guardians feels very powerful, easy to play and balanced profession. Many other professions are still lagging behind it. No single profession should be best in everything. Why do you think engineers are the rarest professions in top guild groups? Because they are the most difficult to play efficiently and have serious disadvantages in zergs. In fact all medium armor professions, thieves ranges and engineers, are rare in top guild groups. But all those medium armor professions are good for solo and small scale roaming. No single profession in solo roaming should be “I win automatically” or “I can survive against anything 1 vs 1”. Yes, this means that engineers and guardians need to have some weaknesses. Engineers really lack access to stability and don’t have as good defense against bursts as guardians do. Burst builds, which can kill an engineer are common. Guardian’s worst nightmare is a condition spammer semi-bunker, who can sustain and condition dps the guardian to death.

2. Burning is the most powerful condition and its damage needs to be toned down. Giving necromancers access to burning and buffing necromancer damage was a serious mistake. Necromancers never lacked damage if they used a proper build, but necromancers could still get a bit more long term sustain (the dmg needs to be toned down before this). Dhuumfire lasts still 4 seconds (8 seconds with +100% condition duration runes/food buffs) in WvWvW. Warrior’s longbow can also be traited to give almost 100% uptime of burning. Combine this with 25 stacks of bleeding, cripple, immobilize and 2-9 stacks of torment. If you analyze the damage, burning easily does more than 50% of the total damage in a pure condition build.
The burning damage should be:
0.25 * Condition Damage) + (2 * Level) + 8 damage per second
(instead of current 0.25 * Condition Damage) + (4 * Level) + 8 damage per second)

The duration of poison, which can really screw healing, should also be looked upon.

3. Runes of perplexity are indeed overpowered and need to be toned down. Warrior with distracting strikes straight can quickly put full 25 stacks of confusion and the confusion from these runes last way too long time. The duration and the number of stacks needs to be reduces by about 50%. The 6th effect needs an internal cooldown of maybe 20 seconds.

My main is engineer. I got 7 out of 8 characters at level 80 now, one each profession. All with exotic / ascended. And I have been playing my characters, instead of craft leveling them. I do a lot of solo roaming, but as a PuG commander and member of a guild who does weekly WvWvW events / raids, I also do large combat.

Currently warriors and guardians are by far the most common professions in any organized large group. I am talking about the top gvg guilds. You can see guardians all over WvWvW. They are definitely not a weak profession when it comes WvWvW. In fact I would rank guardians in top 3 when it comes to both pve and WvWvW.

Guardians were never the ideal profession for solo roaming. Thieves and warriors have superior mobility and a good solo roamer needs mobility. Thieves can more easy escapes than any other profession, thus I encounter them more than any profession. Rangers are most common profession underwater due their 1500-1800 range (harpoon gun) and dead pet able to lick their wounds and revive them underwater.

I have been fighting a lot of guardians in 1 vs 1. Most of them tend to be missing their zerg and trying to catch up the rest. I win almost all of those fights and the guardian is often unable to get fully away since I have 6 CC skills on my typical bar. But these fights last a long long time, over 1-3 minutes. My build is jack of all trades, not optimal for anything and I carry useless support stuff for solo roaming. I refuse run to the FotM condition spammer builds as those will not be that great against top guilds in zerging situations. Almost full celestial gear, just some added PVT stuff to get more durability for zerging. Actually a guardian could select the same gear. ;-)

The fights turn to my favor, because my engineer can actually outheal the damage guardian can dish on me, as almost all WvWvW guardians are bunkers or semi-bunkers. A full zerker guardian would be dangerous as the burst can kill anything short of a full bunker in a flash, but those are rare as hen’s teeth.

But when it comes to 2 vs 1, I find that a good thief + guardian duo is very strong indeed. The thief has insane burst and guardian can heal and buff the thief to do even more damage (the easy might stacking really allows insane crits, 20k+ backstab against 2.5k armor). These type of duo solo roamer teams are common on my enemy server. Buffing this would be downright stupid. You cannot expect to win with your PVT / cleric/apotechary zerg build against a good solo roamer with solo roaming gear or even against a hybrid jack of all trades like me.

(continued in next post)

It is not just underpowered and slow, but if fails to hit certain targets 100% of the time. I created another thread of engineer underwater bugs:

https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/professions/engineer/BUG-Engineer-underwater-bugs-and-features

Engineer’s homing missile, Harpoon gun #1, isn’t just the slowest projectile / ranged weapon underwater, it is also missing some targets 100% of the time.

You can repeat this bug easily. Waypoint to Twoway loop point at Frostgorge Sound. There should be some undersea ice wurms and undersea ice wurm hatchling next to this waypoint. Fire harpoon gun #1 at them. The homing missile misses 100% of the time, but e.g, harpoon gun #2 and #4, grenade kit, elixir gun etc. can hit the target. Perhaps the skill should be renamed Missing Missile?

I also did some tests:
Harpoon gun #1 does 13 attacks in 20 seconds, so the actual firing rate is once per 1.5 seconds
Elixir gun #1 tool tip says above ground 3/4 s, but underwater it says 1/4. I did the same test: 22 attacks in 20 seconds, same under water and above water. So the actual attack rate is about is once per 1.1 seconds

Thus EG #1 underwater tool tip is wrong. The EG #2, Elixir F, tooltip is wrong as well. I have +80% condition duration and it says 9 s cripple, but in reality the cripple seems to last around 5.5 seconds.

Mind you, these tests were performed using the rifled barrels trait (increases range to 1200).

I would rather see harpoon gun #1 doing 50% less damage than it does now, but firing at higher rate (1/2 s) and having faster projectile speed and hitting the targets reliably, instead of the current state.

Harpoon gun #5, netwall, is really quirky to use in pvp situation the slow projectile speed and needing to time it yourself. This is however not a bug. Just a nuisance.

I cannot tell the exact date when the stealth nerf / change the grenades occured, but already for more than a month their spread under water has been increased. You can fire the grenades at stationary or very slowly moving targets. The grenadier grandmaster trait makes you throw 3 grenades at a time and 8 with grenade barrage (toolbelt skill). At further than 200-300 range only 2 out of 3 grenades hits the same target. At 1000+ range it is typical that only one grenade hits the same target. Effectively cutting the damage to 1/3. While this is not big a problem fighting against mobs of underwater NPCs and monsters, it is a real problem when fighting against other human players. The grenades travel slowly. Thus you don’t even need to dodge them, just strafe / kit side ways to avoid them. Now a lot of 3x grenades are all missing.

I have analyzed my underwater combat logs a lot and found out that at long range even 70%-80% of the grenades can miss in a real life combat. All three grenades can miss a downed opponent at around 1000 range. A downed opponent is unable to dodge and his kiting speed is greatly reduced, thus the grenade spread / hitting is truly broken underwater. Bomb kit #1 does clearly more damage than grenade kit #1 even if all 3 grenades hit and both have as fast firing rate. Thus grenade kit skills need to be fixed, because current bomb kit offers much better real life dps than grenade kit.

Grenade barrage, the tool belt skill, is more or less useless underwater as those 8 grenades fly to all different directions. Sometimes several of them hit at closer than melee range, but sometimes all of the 8 grenades fail to hit an NPC underwater monster which is swimming next to the engineer!

The WvWvW players of my server have given me titles like “lord of the lake” or “king of the lake”, “best underwater fighter EU”. This is a bit of exaggeration, but I really love the underwater combat and it is difficult to defend such title. I am now forced to use bomb kit a lot (melee range only) and rotate with elixir gun, harpoon gun (never using #1). I rarely use toolkit underwater.

Bomb kit tool belt skill, big ol’ bomb, has a strangely long aftercast delay underwater. This doesn’t seem to occur in LA, but it always occurs on any WvWvW borderland map. Above ground big ol’ bomb acts normally, but underwater there is around 1.5 second after cast. Please remove this after cast! This skill is very much needed to kill enemy rangers, because their dead pet can still revive them (ranger underwater lick wounds downed skill is bugged). I need to CC the pet away from the range to score the kill.

Thank you!

PS. If other players know any other underwater bugs, please add to this thread.

Bump up.

Runes of perplexity shouldn’t give more than 2 stacks of confusion per activation and the 6th rune effect should have a 20 second internal cool down.

Now warriors can stack full 25 stack of confusions very fast using them + distracting strikes.

http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Distracting_Strikes

No single set of runes should be the main source of damage.

The new colors for the map are ugly and the colors for name tags of the team members and guild members are badly chosen (mix up with certain common backgrounds e.g. yellow grass/hay, blue sky/water).

I guess Arenanet hired a new designer from Microsoft. My computer has Windows 8 and it’s Metro side of UI has one of the most horrible aesthetic designs I have seen in many decades. Mind you, I have been teaching UI design at university and even programmed and designed my own touch screen GUI library. Microsoft Windows 8 Metro has incredibly badly selected font and colors, making readability bad. Google’s UI design e.g. gmail and picture search, has also went down hill in past 2 years. More and more mouse presses required to perform simply common actions, less contrast than there used to be, drop down menus which suck even with mouse. So I guess Arenanet is just following the trend.

This is happening because of one thing:

Pve currently offers much better rewards.

Most people do not choose pve over WvWvW, because it is more exciting or they find the living story stuff so interesting. It is because it offers so much loot and achievement points.

Many of my guild mates and people on my friend lists are constantly farming in pve and tell me stuff “I made 120 g yesterday… I got 90 g from farming Orr for 4 hours… I got a precursor… I made 300 g last week at Crown Pavilion”. This type of pve rewards just went overboard and are prone to lead to inflation for some rare items in the game.

The amount of achievement points you can earn from WvWvW is ridiculously low and you need to do 100x or even 1000x more work to get those points compared to pve. And achievement points give you chests with gems, gold, items, account wide buffs. Just look at these. The requirements for most WvWvW titles and achievements are beyond any reason. 1 million dolyak kills would take around 2 decades with any sort of normal play rate.

http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/World_vs_World_

And you get 56 achievement points in total for sniping 1 million dolyaks. And compare with this:
http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Queen_Jennah%27s_Jubilee

You can arrive to the location and do few dozen group events and get tons of loot and you get a whopping 174 achievement points.

The situation would normalize if WvWvW rewards (both loot and achievement points) would be on the same level with pve.

FaKie.5634:

Nope, two server can have this “buff” at one time… i made some 1on1 with a few friends of mine on SFR, and we both had that “buff”.

Thanks for confirmation. This is good information!

But it seems that there needs to be some proportion of player number difference to trigger it e.g. at least twice as many (this is pure speculation). E.g. one server having 100 and other two both having 70 doesn’t seem to trigger it.

Mighty Ice Arrow.9268:

The usual nonsense from you. I’m so glad that you state that you have played on EB map.

We are waiting from you to come to SFR and organize us; of course we don’t know watts are our weak points on the EB map.

You noticed that you are leading at late night, you are still outmanned, but I guess because you are sleeping that as a good effect on you server
.
You are outmanned? Poor you….But you know that you still have more than 10 players camping the sentry’s near Ogres and Anza, Overlook spawn, and 2 or 3 more camping Speldam. This guys don’t leave even if Deso as to defend one tower. Who needs to organize now?

The double team is so easy to prove. Las week we flipped 3 towers on VS map, they have 3 T0 and one T3, at the same time we had 3 T3 and one T1, can you guess watt your server did? No? I will help you, Deso did attack our map.

Are you suggesting that the outnumbered buff is lying? That when the game shows that we have that outnumbered “buff”, we actually in reality have equal numbers or more than you? Psstt…

The outnumbered “buff” is designed badly. It seems only one server can have it at a time per map even when A server has 100, server B has 20 and server C have a total of 10. In that case a fair system should give outnumbered buff for both B and C. And in my case even a 60 vs 100 should trigger that buff, but it seems it doesn’t.

If we can allocate 10 players to capture one sentry, and still have that “buff” on us, it means that the other two servers have much more than 10 players (probably 20 or I should say even 40+) at other parts of the map. So your talk here actually proves nothing. I usually solo the camps (or do it with some random player who just happens to be there), but any single server certainly sometimes has more than 10 players capping a supply camp. Do I need to post you screen shots of 10+ SFR standing inside a sentry circle? So what is your point?!?

This morning at Eternal Battlegrounds SFR blob captured everything Deso had on that map. And yes, we had that outnumbered buff on us, so please don’t tell me fantasy fairy tales that you won those fights with skill. It was a victory based on superior numbers. Almost all the Deso players left the map, no commander on Deso. One person asked on the map “Is there just 3 people on the map?”. Well, some players don’t quit. I started to flip a camp. Next build a ram, myself running for more supplies to finish that ram. We took a tower. Then recaptured our keep. Then 2 more towers and a supply camp, 2 NPC camps. In less than one hour we controlled nice amount of the EB map even though we only had a handful. That is the true Desolation spirit.

I don’t understand your logic about double teaming. As I explained before, the borderlands are allocated before the weekly match up (even before knowing the opponents). Should we say that you are constantly double teaming us when you and ER are both attacking our t3 garrison instead of enemy BLs with non-upgraded keeps? I think it is a fair assessment that any server will be victim of double teaming on their own BL.

I won’t even comment about coming to SFR.

colesy.8490:

Seems the Deso keyboard warriors are out again. SFR don’t cower from fights unless hopelessly outnumbered.

I think Circle of Nine [CoN] is one the best SFR guilds and you are probably a good player, but I seriously doubt that any daytime SFR player know what it means to be hopelessly outnumbered. SFR is a super stacked WvWvW oriented server. You have the numbers to be #1. Your biggest enemy at the moment is yourself. Too much elitism and not a proper respect and organization of your own PuGs (VS knows this). I can explain that better, if you don’t understand this.

For your information: Desolation was outnumbered at EB, SFR BL and ER BL pretty much whole noon and afternoon yesterday. I went to all maps and Deso BL was the only one where we didn’t have the buff on and even there was just few players. Today I went played only on EB and we once again that outnumbered “buff” on us. If we have that buff, it means that both ER and SFR have more players on that map. It is plain dead obvious that for major part of the day Desolation is the server, which is outnumbered. I know that at some night hours we are ticking more, but I am sleeping at those hours, so I cannot comment who has the buff then.

Funnily while enjoying the outnumbered “buff”, I saw an enemy thief with CON tag. He started to run away when our group got near. And ín recent days I have seen SFR players sit proudly next to their arrow carts and raining arrows at the outmanned Desolation players. And this just continues and continues.

I think it is fair to say that some players from every server take advantage of the game mechanisms e.g. overpowered siege weapons and run away from some fights, including even fights. At least I have got guts to admit it. I was today roaming as a warrior. I played pretty cautiously as I didn’t want to get overrun by enemy blobs. As result I didn’t die a single time.

To Wemill: It is sad that you blame Desolation for double teaming you last week with Visunah. Desolation attacks enemy players and keeps and towers from any server it seems as viable attack targets. Desolation is certainly eager to attack VS, as everybody knows where the easy loot bags live. The BL map assignments are decided before the match up. E.g. certain guilds will go to Bay or Hills BL and we don’t yet know what the opponents will be there. And some guilds have guild raids few days per week and might select the borderlands just based out of whim or take that borderland which has least queue. This might lead that are 3 strong guilds raiding the same BL at same time.

I am not a member of DVG, but I can recommend DVG for others.

Unlike some other guilds DVG doesn’t have any hint of elitism, despite they have some really nice veteran commanders, who know their job.

If you want to join a server, who is playing like a server with server wide TS and large active community, not just for elitistic bunch of competitive guilds (“My guild is better than yours”), I can really recommend Desolation. EU currently doesn’t have any better International servers for that type of play.

We had some rough times in Spring 2013 and lost around 1500-2000 hard core WvWvW players due stale match ups. Now we have been improving week after week. Our morning coverage is still really weak at the moment and yesterday afternoon I saw us once again heavily outnumbered (the “buff”) at EB and two BLs. Despite the enemy is outnumbering us, we are most likely going to end up #2 in our current match up, against two higher ranked servers. At best 1 Desolation guy is worth 5 enemy players.

This is NOT a paid promotion. I have no association with DVG. I am just another fighter and PuG commander working to make Desolation the best server in the world.