Guild Wars 2

kingcragus.6810:

Did you know that account bound Wxp does not prevent you playing alts? It is just peoples opinions and attitudes that prevent this.

You are now assuming that WXP would be nothing more than just a title, but it actually gives the player very powerful abilities e.g. full ranks in defense against guards give you potential 2500 added health. Ballista mastery allows you to hit multiple targets with spread shot. Canno mastery allows you to remove boons. Guard killer increases your power and condition damage via guard leech. These are nothing to sneeze at!!

Now with the current system and upcoming system the game punishes for playing alts. If your alt has zero ranks it is considerably weaker than your main who has many hundred WXP ranks. It is like asking a player to play a weaker character, who doesn’t have access to these abilities. So obviously most players stick to mainly just one character in WvWvW.

The proposed system, which would add some vials to transfer WXP to alt characters is an unnecessary complication and won’t solve the above problem (why not stack those consumables on your main?). We really don’t need yet another drip/drop of karma or currency. A well designed game has simple rules and system, yet allowing deep and complex play. Arenanet seems to be pushing us towards the opposite.

The majority of the player base wants account bound WXP. Please give us that!

And also ability to reset WXP traits.

mini.6018:

Delete all water please.Water combat is terrible,delete that next.

Nobody is forcing you to fight underwater. You can even move from North to South of map without touching any water. The only occasion where you are forced to touch tiny bit of the wet matter is Bay, but you could ask a friendly mesmer to portal you over, so your feet don’t get wet. ;-)

To deny the pleasure of underwater combat from others if you don’t enjoy it, doesn’t make sense.

I am not interested in basketball or LeBron. I want underwater combat. Period.

Do not replace the lake with dry land (stuff inside the lake can be redesigned).

Great news! I am finally equip all my 8 characters full without doing the fractals (grinding fractals was so boooring).

In this match up Desolation hasn’t been 2 vs 1 much at all (except for our own BL, which happens always). It has really been more or less 1 vs 1: Visunah vs SFR, while Desolation players have been farming giant mounts of loot and gold in pve.

If both enemy servers would have concentrated on Desolation, I can just imagine how bad our score would have been. So thanks for both enemy servers for playing fair and nice towards us. Now we are still gaining raiting and rising up to EU rank #4.

Good luck for next match up!

For many months we haven’t seen this desolated Desolation. Every single time I have went to EB I have seen the outnumbered buff on us. Same for two out of three borderlands, almost 24h/7 outnumbered “buff”. Sadly this is a numbers game.

Visunah has very “entertaining” fighting strategy. Even when Desolation has a total of 3-4 players on entire EB map, their players like to stay near their own castle to take advantage of the siege, guild fortified stat boosts, and increased number of guards. Why not at least attack our towers or keeps? What can I say… words fail to describe this more.

/facepalm

Rednik.3809:

You forget to mention one small detail. Core and majority of melee train is guardians, not warriors. And warriors here primarily for hammer CC, not for hammer damage. So I do not understand what kind of “potentially dangerously OP hammer” you are talking about.

Greetings to an Ex- Desolation guild!

Here in EU the most effective melee train has slightly more hammer warriors than guardians e.g. 5 hammer warriors per let’s say 4 guardians. Anycase setup varies per guild. But I admit both are very common professions indeed. Guardians compete with warriors and thieves as the most common WvWvW profession. And none of them need any serious buffs for WvWvW.

Please don’t make the meta even more distorted than it already is!

PS. Warrior is my 2nd most played profession. Almost 400 hours on it. Full ascended + exo set (actually several set of weapons, trinkets etc).

Enter the lake in any of the borderlands. You can see there more solo roaming rangers or roaming in small groups than any other profession.

Trust me, I have been playing as solo roamer in WvWvW for ages and I have the nick name “King of the lake” or “Lord of the Lake”. Rangers are there the most common profession. Many 5 man roaming teams, who specialize in harrassing enemies, sniping and taking their supply camps, also use rangers. Many top gvg teams use rangers and thief’s as snipers. If you want to point out the least used WvWvW profession, that is engineer. Necromancers also used to be rare, now they are all over the place thanks to recent buffs.

Guardians, warriors and thieves are of course most common.

I am quite sure guardians are causing more light fields than engineers, which are the rarest profession in WvWvW. I often see 10 times more guardians in a large group, compared to the sole lone engineer. But I of course understand why good commanders do not want light fields messing up their area healing.

However the combo field things are way too over the top in WvWvW and one of the main reasons why zergs are so powerful and can even counter concentrated enemy siege fire etc.

These combo fields need their effect to be toned in a WvWvW setting:
water (reduce its healing by 33%)
fire (2 stacks of might, instead of 3)
lightning (50% less swiftness duration)
smoke (cap total consecutive duration of stealth to 8 seconds max, then 4 s revealed)

wads.5730:

this issue with an overabundance of hammer trains in wvw stems from the stagnant meta, and lack of innovation. less so from game balance.

people run hammer trains because it’s easy, and organizing an counter is hard. but the current game allows for hammer trains to be countered without running a hammer train yourself.

Hmm. Please tell me how to counter a well-organized top melee train team. If you do not wish to discuss it publicly, you can send me a private message. I have really honestly spent couple of hundreds of hours trying to invent a counter and we have been theory crafting with our guild mates about it. So far we come up with the following:

1. Have a larger melee train (aka winning by numbers)
2. Surprise attack with another melee train (surprise is huge advantage)
3. Surprise AoE stun and CC their staff elementalists and necromancers (their weakest link, but even this requires a melee front line)
4. Massive amount of boon removal (but even this requires melee train front line)

The conclusion is that countering a really good melee train, you need at least some sized another melee train. This just underlines how incredibly powerful they are. I admit we haven’t yet tried running like 10+ necromancers (I doubt we could summon so many necromancers from our guild with full ascended gear and everything).

I hope I won’t get flamed with my post. A lot of people, who play WvWvW, have never met a really good melee train. I am talking now about team which can cut through enemy zergs like knife cuts melted butter. When the best EU guild, Red Guard [RG], went to play on NA servers, it face rolled everything. I have personally played against (or sometimes been on the same server) with most of the guilds on this list:

http://www.gw2gvg.com/

Out of all the top guilds in EU, Melenya [Mya] is the least melee heavy. Pity I have only faced them in one match up and they transferred to another server (Piken), so I was able to observe them in game for so short time. Mya uses more ranged strategies than other top teams I have seen, but even they use the hammer melee front line.

So what is the counter to a really well organized hammer melee train without using hammer warriors yourself?

PS. Daecollo’s suggestions are over the top like usual. Hammer burst 900 range <- huh!!

WvWvW meta for organized zergs since Autumn 2012 have been hammer warriors. Almost any top gvg team has more hammer warriors than any other build in this game!

Buffing them even more would be like the most stupid idea ever. The amount of hard CC, stuns, knockdowns from a large force of lots of such hammer warriors is ridiculous. Without stability your character will be just a ping pong ball and downed in 1-2 seconds.

Adding longer knockdown, more conditions, larger area, faster animation or damage to an already super overpowered zerg weapon is never a good idea. We got traits like these:
http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Unsuspecting_Foe

Which gives +50% increased critical chance against stunned foes.

Now imagine a good group hammer warriors, who can sync their area stuns (earth shaker, aka hammer burst). One area stun after after another chained, so that the area where they hit has permanent stun (as the burst skill recharges roughly 10 second). Each warrior dishing their hits with 100% critical hit rate. That is already happening and you want more!?!?

+1 for keeping the lake

Nobody is forcing players to enter the lake, but we need a large underwater combat area for those who like it and it is great for solo roamers.

-1 for adding more siege as this game already has too much of it

I would rather have the lake with an underwater fortress and completely siege free area. Well, golems work underwater, but they move slow as molasses.

runeblade.7514:

Engineer rifle has way too many utility. Net shot to immobilize, Overcharge to knockback, Jump shot to escape or charge in.

Ranger Longbow is all about damage, with only PBS, and a unreliable cripple that one can avoid easily.

No doubt rifle has utility. But you intentionally didn’t want to mention ranger’s longbow’s most powerful utility skill: hunter’s shot
It gives ranger 3 s stealth, 10 s swiftness to pet and is a combo finisher with mere 12 s cooldown (9.6 s cooldown with quick draw trait). Stealth around 30% of uptime is incredibly powerful without the need of using any utility skills slots or traits or combos.

Ranger’s longbow does clearly more damage at 1000+ range than rifle does, when the characters have equal stats / gear. Long range shot, ranger LB #1, from 1000-1800 range has damage multiplier of 0.9. While hip shot, engi rifle #1, from 0-1000 (1200 traited) range has damage multiplier of 0.65.

Engineer’s rifle #2, net shot, is very easy to kite (no need for dodging) at long range. So maybe also call it useless, like you just said barrage is unreliable cripple.

Long bow is also the furthest reaching weapon in the game. Just like some elementalist staff skills it hits much further than the tool tip range (in fact elementalist staff, which says 1200 can reach further than grandmaster grenadier engineer with 1500 range, tested yesterday in WvWvW). The real range of ranger’s long bow with eagle eyes trait is around 1800.

Note: you get pet damage + utility on top of that!

If you claim that ranger is useless at close range, why not swap to another weapon, which is good at short range e.g. greatsword or sword/dagger combo. The former has amazing mobility as well (swoop moves 1100 forward, on a short cooldown)

I also got a level 80 ranger. Done personal story with it and big part of world completion.

I also dislike the one shotting mechanism. Dodge at right time = you don’t take any damage. Dodge wrong time = you die. Gear / build won’t matter. It is matter of reflexes.

We can just wish that someday this game would have better monster / NPC AI, just like Guild Wars 1 had. I find that GW1 artificial intelligence was totally superior to this game.

Imagine if boss fights would be like this: the monsters / NPC would move out of AoE, dodge intelligently, use snare on melee and ranged interrupted or pull on far away enemies and so on. As result the hit point point for monsters would have be toned down accordingly and the party of players would need to co-ordinate their effects better e.g. one is interrupting / snaring the boss, so that others can use their channeled attack skill (like 100 blades) on it. Without snare, stun etc, the boss would dodge.

Currently berserker gear is the best for most dungeons and pve content (and rabid / rampager gear for condition heavy builds). Only few professions, like guardian, select different gear.

I do not think the developers are ignoring any profession. Some developer once mentioned in these forums that his main character is an engineer. And more than one Arenanet developers have thief mains.

Even if all the bugs get fixed, turrets are problematic. While they can be useful in some spvp/tpvp scenarios, they are nearly useless in dungeons and WvWvW, because of the following reasons:
- turrets are immobile, sometimes combined with high cooldown
- incredibly stupid AI e.g. net turret attacking a door, which is of course immune to its attack
- very low health pool (generally around 7k health)
- huge hit box (any nearby AoE hits them)

Turrets get destroyed literally in 1-2 seconds on a boss fight or high level monster mob or a WvWvW zerg fight. The only useful turret at the moment is healing turret and even then you use it immediately for condition removal and water fields.

Rangers have been complaining about pets for ages. I have a level 80 ranger and I can testify that pets are more useful than turrets in the above mentioned situations. Pets are mobile, can have over 40k health (5-6x turret health pool!), they can be healed and commanded (albeit it is quirky and pet might be out of range) and lick wounds (ranger underwater downed state #3) is incredibly powerful underwater. So despite all those ranger complaints in most situations pet is many times better than a turret.

I am afraid that all these issues won’t be fixed, because that might make turrets overpowered for 1 vs 1 in WvWvW. I am mostly a solo roamer in WvWvW and do that everyday, but still true 1 vs 1 pretty rare. Thus I am afraid we will continue to see turrets being useless in WvWvW and high end pve.

Arenanet could however gives some WvWvW and pve only buffs to engineers. After all engineers are the rarest profession in those game modes:
- change mortar elite into a kit (it can be carried around and swapped, currently mortar is more or less useless as it is stationary and gets destroyed so easily, mortar #3 is the weakest heal in the game)
- increase range of blunderbuss + overcharged shot by 100 (to current) with rifled barrels trait
- make blunderbuss (rifle #3) a blast finisher
- make backbag regenerator trait scale better with healing power (new healing 120+0.1*healing power / second)
- reduce cooldown of slick shoes to 45 seconds
- toss elixir R, reduce revive percent to 10%, make elixir R instant cast stun break, refilling endurance and 40 s cooldown
- rework personal battering ram’s toolbelt skill so that it gives engineer 5 s stability (which engineer is seriously lacking)
- leg mods trait should be completely reworked to give 5 s stability on 60 s cooldown when engineer is dazed, knocked down, launched, pushed back, or stunned (similar to last stand)

Pretty much all of the above are rarely used skills and traits in WvWvW / pve.

Of course. Our guild does regular WvWvW raids and everybody there wants account bound WXP traits, because we are often shuffling characters.

What about people who already have over 250 WXP ranks?

Just make WXP and WXP traits account bound and give us a mechanic to reset WXP traits e.g. for 200 badges.

I really dislike the suggestion.

Giving such buffs it totally unneeded and would seriously punish solo or duo roamers against a group of 5. The latter already has a huge advantage and doesn’t need more.

Even when I have a commander tag, I often don’t belong to any party. Forcing people to join party is really bad. I didn’t buy this game and invest time to be forced.

The combo field’s do not require any buffing, but the following combo fields need to have their effects reduced in WvWvW: water, fire, lightning, smoke. The 1st three are hugely overpowered in organized large scale battles and smoke fields are the thing, which allows permanent stealth.

With your suggestion, I could not even revive anybody on my side unless I am a member a party. HUH!?

I was just guesting on SFR.

It seems pve is dying.

I could roam in Orr for 10 minutes without seeing another human player. I went to Crown Pavilion. SFR didn’t even have any overflow there! And their LA was without overflow! Pve commanders were also missing (well Crown Pavilion finally had a pve commander).

Oh my! Here in Desolation we have a thing called pve. ;-)

Aberrant.6749:

Holy mother of… some one that enjoys underwater combat?! Must mainly play a mesmer or a ranger…

Well, people on my server have given me nick name “Lord of the Lake” or “King of the Lake”. If they remove the lake I will be soon king of nothing.

Some go even overboard telling that I am the best underwater fighter in EU. I am really not that good. Surely I win almost all the 1 vs 1 fights, but that also happens above water if I get to use the terrain to my advantage. In fact underwater fights often end so the enemy swims away and flees to dry land, where I CC him and kill.

My main is engineer and I do not play cheap gimmick builds. I play balanced hybrid build, which is actually not good in anything, but okay in everything.

I meet a lot of enemy rangers in the lake. I would argue that rangers are the most common profession as underwater roamers, probably because they have 1500 range + pet and lick wounds is so powerful that you need to CC the pet away from the downed ranger to actually kill him. Warriors, elementalists, thieves and mesmers are also common to fight against in the lake.

The map is designed so that you can avoid underwater combat. So the game is not forcing that those who don’t like it. Which is good. But if it were to replaced by dry land, where to have that underwater combat fun? (please don’t tell me pvp).

I am still dreaming about the underwater fortress. Great epic battles outside and inside that underwater fortress and no siege, besides golems (which move slow as molasses). Finally siege free warfare. Yum!!

Excellent video. Should be forwarded to the spvp/tpvp developers. This of course applies to WvWvW small scale as well.

I really hope a large underwater area remains. I won’t get angry, if the quaggans or krait will be gone, but the completely remove one major aspect of game (underwater combat) from WvWvW, that would be a sad decision. The tiny pond in Eternal Battlegrounds really isn’t enough.

I really hate jumping puzzles, so I hope there won’t be anything even remotely like that instead. We already have separate jumping puzzles in WvWvW. No need to add more.

I never claimed overcharged shot is a bad skill. It is one of my favorite rifle skills, together with jump shot and I do not mind the self CC. But its range and the range for some other rifle skills should be increased more with the rifled barrel traits. Currently the trait increases the range by very small amounts.

For some reason Arenanet doesn’t seem to want engineer to be a long range fighter e.g. changes to grenade kit, increase the spread so that only 1-2 grenades hit from long range and the underwater spread is even worse (plus some harpoon gun stuff doesn’t even hit I should make a BUG report about it. I found repeatable bug concerning harpoon gun #1). Real life damage output for engineer at this very close to medium increases dramatically compared to long range. Yet, engineer is a medium armor profession with no access to shadow stepping, extremely limited access to stability and aegis, limited access to stealth and so on. Thus we should sort of fight in the melee + medium range, yet don’t have the tools for that in large scale organized combat. I mean organized guild groups in WvWvW (not your average random PuG zergs). The meta is extremely melee heavy (plus necros on the rise). Tons of hammer warriors synced and backed up by guardians, eles, necros and few mesmers. There is so much AoE CC that without stability you will die literally in 1-2 seconds.

I really don’t have much interest in spvp/tpvp as it is conquest mode only. I am sick and tired to see this game balanced only based on that unpopular game mode, which around 1% of those who bought GW2 play. Telling how some skill is overpowered in contesting a small circle really doesn’t correlate well with the rest of the game.

Well, my experience is mostly from WvWvW and WvWvW surely is much more popular game mode than pvp. According to my observations:

1. Engineer is the rarest profession in WvWvW
2. > 90% of engineers (in WvWvW) use pistol/pistol or pistol/shield, less than 10% use rifle

Does that sort of imply that rifle is the godmode weapon for WvWvW? It sorts of spells the opposite.

I urge the developers start to balance the game also for WvWvW.

Warriors and guardians were already the king of WvWvW meta since Autumn 2013. Buffing them for that game mode was just beyond any reason. Rifle engineers are rare as hen’s teeth on organized top guild teams. Despite that I spent most of my WvWvW roaming solo, I see 10x more rifle warriors than I see engineers. And 100x more rifle warriors than rifle engineers.

Rajnesh.4526:

Nice Fights on Desolation Border so far.
Greets to [TLA] nice fights at the Easttower.

Actualy our perfect coverage is our worst problem.
When the PvE-Farm-Event ends and people start to play WvW again, queues will be massive. A lot of people trasfering to SFR at the moment, and not everyone is glad about it!

The KoA-Guild

Thanks for the kind words. I am from TLA, but I was on another BL at that time, facing guilds like ECL and “just a few” Visunah. But like everybody knows, I am mostly a solo roamer.

Desolation actually had queues last week, but now with the new pve farming events which give crazily good rewards (10-20 g/hour!) and this new match up our WvWvW coverage had dropped to a new low. I can get to any map any hour, no queues. At EB one can see a commander followed by 5 PuGs. Often same situation at Deso BL. I was commanding there a short while today noon. We managed to hold the Garrison, but I heard it was lost afternoon when I was at work. Sieging up places is a bit frustrating as with so low player attendance you are prone to lose everything. But all small scale battles have been huge fun! I really like that there are now so many SFR and VS players who don’t run, they even fight against larger odds like that Opt elementalist at VS BL next to Greenlake tower.

I would say Desolation is doing amazingly well point wise considering how freaking empty our side has been (this is not just my own comprehension, we really have been having the outnumbered “buff” on us almost all the time).

Good luck to SFR becoming the #1 super stacked server in EU!

Hmm. What is the logic behind all these unbalanced and overpowered WXP traits? Their power level compared to each other seems random. Wasn’t Arenanet’s official slogan: small changes. Yet every month we seem to get new WXP traits, which can even double the effectiveness of a siege weapon. Sighs…

Once again it seems Arenanet is adding even more power to the side with larger numbers and bigger zergs. Especially adding radius to treb shot sounds like a bad idea (I won’t publicly describe what locations could now be abused). I guess Arenanet really wants that nobody in WvWvW does any small scale. Better migrate to servers, which can summon 50-120 man blobs 24/7. Welcome to Siege + Zerg Wars 2!

Please add a way to reset WXP traits e.g. using few hundred badges. Thank you!

As some others pointed out the spvp/tpvp population surely must be higher than 4000, but it is probably in the magnitude of couple of tens of thousands, which is still just roughly 1% of all Guild Wars 2 accounts. That is little.

I am 100% sure that the WvWvW player base is much larger than the spvp/tpvp population. Just one server can have over 100 players on each WvWvW map (4 maps) and there can many hours of queue to WvWvW. Yet, WvWvW continues to have less attention from Arenanet. Pve is obviously the most popular game mode, but instead of having new interesting permanent pve content (Southsun Cove is dead and empty again), we get time-limited Living Story stuff, which people play just for the achievement points and rewards (not because it is interesting itself).

Even more sad is that this game continues to be “balanced” based on tpvp/spvp only (there is very little or no skill split between spvp and WvWvW). As if the rest of the game is about sitting in a small circle and contesting or holding it!?!

Arenanet clearly doesn’t have any person, who plays WvWvW at highly competitive level. You can laugh about this, but there are players who do it:
http://www.gw2gvg.com/index.php

The meta in top guild vs guild and organized zerg fights has been more or less the same since Autumn 2012. Guardians and warriors form the base melee line, supported by elementalists, necromancers and mesmers. Medium armor professions aren’t needed (some top teams use thieves and rangers as snipers, but they are still small minority). Despite warriors have always been good in pve and WvWvW, Arenanet has been buffing them in those game formats, because they have been doing badly in tpvp. Yes, they also needed to buff the guardians, which compete with warriors being the most frequent profession in WvWvW and pve. I am quite sure thieves are in top 3 as they are by far most common roamer profession in WvWvW.

Last night I was playing warrior in WvWvW. Our server was heavily outnumbered (yep, we had that “buff” on us) at Eternal Battlegrounds. We often had just 5-10 people following our thief commander. There was also several other thieves and mostly others were playing the typical roamer professions, who have easy escapes. I play a very low mobility warrior (nor warhorn nor greatsword). Despite that I died only one time despite the overwhelming enemy and our group getting wiped several times. Obviously this was because warrior is so “bad” in WvWvW and needs more buffing. LOL

Profession balancing fails for other game modes. And wait a minute: the game balance for spvp/tpvp seems to be wrecked at the moment.

There are certainly people playing spvp/tpvp outside primetime in EU. I can see that from my friend’s list / followers. But obviously the number of players is the greatest when it is evening time in Europe. This is true for any game activity in EU.

I am on Desolation, which probably has the highest spvp/tpvp population in EU. We got several pvp oriented guilds and large guilds, who do both WvWvW, pve and tpvp. One could also argue that we have some of the best tpvp guilds e.g. Team Paradigm.

I personally haven’t found any of the living world stuff interesting. Yes, some had nice scenery like Bazaar of the Four Winds, but I would really have that stuff entirely left out of WvWvW. First fix WvWvW, then think about some embellishments and extra activities.

DevonCarver.5370:

There are some updates coming soon, quite soon even, that hopefully will dispel this. Say bye-bye to the Quaggan.

I really hope this doesn’t mean that the lake will be replaced by dry land in the Borderland maps.

I never liked the Kraits, but I really love the underwater combat and I think that aspect + places for solo roamers should stay in WvWvW. The pond in Eternal Battlegrounds is way too tiny. How about an underwater fortress for some really nice fights and stuff there to capture and use? Maybe also some underwater tunnels.

Yes. While it is too early to tell the winners in this week’s match up, I will comment a bit anycase:
http://mos.millenium.org/eu

Our server Desolation, which is rank 5, got matched up against EU rank #1 Visunah Square (VS) and EU rank #2 Seafarer’s Rest (SFR). Visunah and Desolation are both mostly PuG servers. We both have guild groups, but except for few guilds no guild is able to muster more than 10-20 players on a typical night. Visunah seems even more PuGs. The big differences between Visunah and Desolation is that VS has larger WvWvW population and better coverage. VS are also more playing for the points, really loving tons of siege weapons, while Desolation players often like open field battles. Desolation is used to fight outmanned, so we know that game very well (probably better than any other top server). For comparison SFR is a stacked server with lots of large hard core WvWvW guilds and to them even 30-60 player force is not a blob (“SFR never blobs” ;-) ). SFR though lacks night coverage, having probably around 40 players at night (my estimates might be off). So no EU server is perfect.

Desolation players are often fighting with the outnumbered “buff”, but still able to put on a good fight. In fact we are right now still #2 in our match up. We are gonna end up #3 in most likelyhood as Visunah is always weak during weekends, but strong during week. Still I predict we will be going up in rating (rising to EU rank 4) and Visunah will lose rating.

Our morning coverage is really bad and noon is weak as well (evening time in NA). We sometimes have just few players on a map. No wonder that enemy then captures anything it wants. Just 1-2 morning or noon time guilds, who play everyday and would be willing to border hop would completely change the situation. In fact if any of the top 6 servers in EU would get significant player force from NA or Oceanic guilds, they would rise to number 1.

So the game in EU is actually potentially very volatile. No server here is fully stacked 24/7. So far it has been EU guilds moving to NA to have easier wins and match ups. But if opposite movement (big NA guilds moving to EU) would happen, that could have big impacts on the match ups for sure.

I can confirm the bug (1000+ hours played as engineer). It is truly annoying underwater. Grenade barrage is useless skill underwater unless the enemy is inside your character model (closer than melee range). At long range only one of the 3 grenades hits the same target due that massive spread, meaning that the total damage is like… wet noodles, even with all the traits. Grenades were (notice) our best weapon underwater. Currently I am using 4 kits underwater. And rotating between them + harpoon gun for maximum damage and utility. There is one down side to my method. My left hand gets very sore, so I am forced to take breaks. 4 kit engi = bye bye left hand. Playing any other 7 profession feels like brain on vacation and left hand needs to do less presses even as a D/D ele.

Also it is very annoying that grenade kit #1, grenade, doesn’t remove blind. If you are blinded you need to use other grenade kit skills or swap to another weapon and swap back (few seconds wasted).

Please fix this soon.

I am fine with the self-knockdown. It is good compromise between risk and reward. But the skill’s range is pathetic compared point black shot (ranger long bow #4):

http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Overcharged_Shot
http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Point_Blank_Shot

Both have 15 second cooldown.
Overcharged shot (engi rifle #4) has 400 range (500 traited), self-knockdown, 450 launch
Point Black Shot (ranger LB #4) has 900 range (1125 traited), 400-600 knockback, no self-knockdown

The engineer’s overcharged shot should have at least 500 range if not traited and 800 range with the rifled barrels trait.

But rifle #3, blunderbuss, is an even bigger problem. Maximum damage at 100!! (less than melee range). When is this gonna get fixed?!?

http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Blunderbuss

Wasn’t SFR supposed to be the server, which doesn’t blob? Right now SFR has a freaking big blob at Deso BL capping everything.

Well, we can recapture what belongs to us back.

Hmm. Lately everybody has been complaining about the loot bags. I also noticed that loot from zerging is reduced, but loot from solo roaming seems the same. I got very lucky today:
3 WXP ranks, 200+ random items worth over 3 gold, 1 exotic worth 3 gold, 1 rare, tons of t5-t6 materials = over 7 g profit from 4.5 hours of WvWvW today.
(that was from both solo roaming and following the karma train)

It seems they changed the formula that you need to inflict more damage on opponent to “tag” them and have a chance to gain loot. This has of course no effect for solo roamers.

Just too sleepy to check if the latest patch fixed this issue.

So far I haven’t seen any co-operation between SFR and Desolation, like Wemil suggestion. SFR and VS were both attacking Desolation non-stop at Desolation BL. And we even got the outmanned “buff” on our own BL.

Good luck to enemy, who will probably win with superior numbers. But at least some of us will have loot

Silent Shino.7239:

no offence, but I really want SFR to win this week, I want someone else to be the top server for a change

Why not Desolation? ;-)

We are surely the underdog when it comes to coverage and numbers this week, but we are gonna put up a good fight for sure.

At the moment Desolation is leading in points and tick, but reset night is often misleading.

I have noticed that loot is heavily reduced in zerg situations. E.g. I spam AoE at enemy zerg, get 10-25 stacks of bloodlust and lots of WXP, but get much less loot bags than before.

BUT when I solo roam, I still get the same amount of loot when I kill enemy players, NPC or monsters.

It seems they probably increased the limit of how much damage you need to inflict on a target to be eligible for loot. When are you killing stuff alone, of course you always meet these limits, thus loot is the same.

If this really is the case, then I am all for it. You may call me crazy, but I like this kind of change. It urges people to roam in very small groups instead of mindless zerging. On the other hand the solo rewards are too small, compared to any other form of this game. Thus I think the drop rate of more valuable things (instead of chips and broken fangs, porous bones etc) should be increased.

But can somebody confirm or disproof my theory?

This rune needs an internal cooldown of 15 seconds or so for the #6 ability. With 30 points to trait line, which increases condition duration and +40% confusion duration consumable, you can achieve +100% confusion uptime on ANY profession.

Currently each single interrupt (daze, stun, knockdown, pull, push, launch etc) causes confusion:
http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Superior_Rune_of_Perplexity

Warriors have access to a lot of those e.g. warrior’s hammer has multiple area interrupts. And warriors have this trait:
http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Distracting_Strikes

Even more power to the already overpowered melee train!?

It seems movement speed is capped to 33%. Some people report that you can get 34-40% speed increase using engineer’s super speed, which states it gives 200% speed, but this might be a glitch or measurement error.

Lemoncurry.2345:

Sorry to say it bluntly, but this is nonsense. I don’t know where you get the impression that we sport ‘huge number of players’ with [outnumbered] on 3 of 4 maps even at primetime and no queues whatsoever…

Well, first 1.5 days of this match up all three servers had good numbers and the score was even during first 24 hours. But I know how it goes. When one sees that enemy has better coverage, a lot of the “merry weather” WvWvw players just go back to pve and hard core stays. This will also probably happen to Desolation when we be facing Visunah and SFR again, but oh those loot bags… Visunah has always been such a good source of them.

Yesterday evening was unusually empty for all 3 servers, because of the patch bringing so much new content. I mean Queen’s Jubilee and especially the Crown Pavilion. Desolation had constantly overflows to there and huge number of players farming the events there. I am sure this affected the numbers for all servers.

Yesterday TLA raid started at Kodash BL, but then we hopped to Desolation BL, because there wasn’t enough resistance. We tried to avoid blobbing together with DVG, who was also running in the same map. We used different TS channels, as we wanted to practice playing on own our. I feel sorry for the enemy, which we facerolled with bigger numbers. Yes, I can admit when we have bigger numbers. But I also feel TLA was running very nicely. It was interesting to see home some Miller teams fight, especially Ponys Will Never Die [NO].

I mostly solo roam as an engineer. But lately warrior has also been much fun. Thief feels like using a cheat mode.

I hope Kodash will get their numbers back and some easier match ups. I heard you lost some guilds, like KoA.

My intention wasn’t to be disrespectful, but I still disagree about the main point: that thieves can no other place in WvWvW than roaming.

Of course if you build thief for solo roaming, he is gonna suck in a zerg setting. But similarly if you build your ranger or engineer for solo roaming purposes only, he is also gonna be one of the most useless in a zerg. Similar if your character is built only for large groups, he will be at disadvantage when alone.

Thief can be built to be an effective commander and functional part of the zerg. I agree that thief is in the bottom 3 profession when it comes to pro guild teams, but ALL the medium armor professions are in that bottom. Heavy armor professions form the base of the pro guild team, supported by light armor professions.

None of this is still gonna change the fact that stealth (and to a lesser degree teleportation/shadowstepping) is broken in WvWvW.

MistMirage.4706:

I don’t believe you. Yesterday entering on EB, looking that Deso trying flip SM. So, while I’m going to our commander I meet 3 Kodash ganking groups. 3+3+5=11ppl. So while you defending SM and your friends sitting in a queue on EB, this guys who were not able to learn pvp and win any spvp tournament desided to gank single players. They even do not flip nearest camps because are afraid that they will be noticed. And it’s a not random pugs, it’s a big guilds who regularly write here at a forum.

I can confirm that Kodash has a lot of these ganking teams and Miller’s has a few of them as well, on borderlands maps. They have same guild tags, so they are definitely not PuGs and I can even see the same players playing in those ganking teams day after another.

They sometimes take a supply camp or NPCs, but mostly just snipe enemy players. Some of them are actually good players and could do well in spvp, but personally I don’t have much respect against gankers. But let them have their “fun”. It only hurts solo roamers like me. And even then if I need to pay a <2 silver repair bill once per 2 hours, what does it matter? Oh wait a minute, I didn’t need to pay anything, because we were outnumbered on that map.

Many of the enemy gankers are playing such builds, which are great for dueling and small scale, but would suck in a huge zerg. For comparison, I always balanced builds (not optimal for anything, but will do okay in any setting).

Kodash and Miller have huge number of players. The reason for their loss is not the numbers. They are losing because they prefer ganking over the objectives, which give their server some points. And once the enemy has huge lead in points (like Desolation now has) the merry weathers go back to pve.

Desolation is mostly a PuG server, but we got sustain. You gank and overrun us, but we keep on fighting. We still need to work on many other issues, but our internal forums are the right place for such discussion.

Plainview.7029:

I’m sorry, but when you are with the zerg, you are practically untouchable to theives.

I don’t know what game you are playing, but it doesn’t seem to be the same. I get targeted by thieves in every second zerg fight. Steal, backstab attempts, heartseeker spam etc. And lately also main hand sword thieves. Usually they fail, because I have built my build to counter many of their typical attacks. But I constantly see my allies stealth stomped by thieves.

Contrary to the propaganda spread by stealth defenders in these forums:
- thieves are rather common in a zerg setting
- even several of top guild vs guilds (gvg) guilds utilize thieves and now I am talking about the best pro WvWvW guilds, which are playing on totally different level than your so called “good” zergs (but I agree all 3 medium armor professions, including thieves, rangers and engineers, are the most rare in a pro guild setting)
- thief commanders are much better than most would expect (they seem to have one of the best survivability in the game. I have rarely seen our thief commanders go down even when everybody else gets wiped and having your team wiped can happen to any commander)

Basically you wrote a long essay, which was just trying to paint thieves as weak useless profession for WvWvW, which they are not.

This has been in the game since launch. Arrow Carts are broken. They should require line of sight just like all the other siege weapons. Yet for some weird reason Arenanet buffed them and gave us overpowered WXP traits, while any sane developer would made sure that AC is the last siege weapon to be buffed (until it gets fixed). It is as if the devs really don’t spend much time playing their own game. Since Autumn 2012 we have been having threads and complaints like this about ACs and these complaints are well-founded.

What will be have next? Golem mastery? Giving new golem skills. One button press make all the walls of enemy keep crumble down?

I really hope not.

All the WXP traits should be revalued and players should be given an option (e.g. 100 badges) to reset their WXP traits, which should be account bound. Some WXP traits are underpowered e.g. mercenary’s bane (+5% dmg against Quaggan/Hylek/Ogre/Dredge mercenaries) and some are totally overpowered e.g. 2.5k extra health from defense against guards.

I want to make a distinction between these situations:

1) part of a PuG group vs enemy PuG group

I mean a group of random players, probably lead by a commander with visible tag, against another group of random players. Engineer can do variety of roles from condition cleansing, healing, buffing allies, to AoE damage and CC. The only problem is that engineer really is jack of all trades and master of none, thus other professions can do almost any of those roles better than the engineer.

2) Member of a pro guild group

I am talking about guilds like these. In WvWvW they usually run with commander tag off (not to attract PuGs):
http://gw2gvg.com/

Engineer’s role in top guild vs guild and pro guilds isn’t actually well-defined as it has been more or less non-existing. Your commander might in fact ask you to reroll into some other profession. Heavy armor professions, warriors and guardians, form the front line of the guild group. Staff elementalists provide needed combo fields, healing and AoE from range. Necromancers put massive condition pressure and remove boons, blind, chill, poison and cripple the enemy. Mesmers are needed for their great utility skills like portal, veil, nullfield and time stop. These 5 professions form the base of the WvWvW meta.

Rangers and thieves snipe the enemy ranged players and thieves also do stealth stomps. Engineers are the rarest profession in such setup. I don’t want to repeat all the reasons for these, but here is another thread, which explains WHY engineer is not part of the WvWvW meta and why medium armor is rare and engineer is the rarest and least needed:

https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/professions/engineer/Do-Engineers-get-more-accepted-into-groups/first#post2480748

So unfortunately from a pro guild group point of view engineer is the bottom profession. I have been thinking a lot of different builds and ideas how to change it, but I cannot.

I however have some ideas how to slightly buff the engineer, in ways which make engineer more viable in such setting:
- increase range of blunderbuss and overcharged shot, which are both very short range considering a zerg setting (rifle is relatively retaliation safe weapon, unless the grenade kit, bomb kit or flamethrower, which can get your engineer killed)
- make blunderbuss a blast finisher (I know engi has tons of blast finishers, BUT many of them e.g. the turrets are useless in a pro zerg setting)
- backbag regenerator should scale better with healing power (now it scales horribly)
- engineer must get better access to stability (the constant stun, knockdown, knockback chains will turn your engi into a ping pong ball if you get hit by their melee. Note you can also get pulled into their melee even if you stay in range and the enemy rangers can knock back you a lot nowadays with point black shot) e.g. personal battering ram and elixir U could give 4 s stability

Mmm, more paper armor rangers. Our dear enemy servers have loads of them. Our roaming teams are wondering how their rangers always melt so fast. If they run with about 2k total armor and zero defensive traits, I can imagine why. No doubt that build packs a lot of offense, but to e.g. solo roam with it, oh my…

For comparison a full glass thief, with zerker ascended gear, scholar runes + 25 stacks of bloodlust can do 20k+ against 2.5k armor. Against above armor it would mean 25k+ crits = instant death, even if that character has 2.5k extra health from the WXP trait + consumable buffs.

While I agree that blademaster is very weak 20 point trait compared to most other warrior weapon related traits, I think this is not a good moment to ask any more buffs to warrior ( I feel that my 2 swords warrior is already a bit overpowered, thanks to generic buffs to warrior ).

Forceful greatswords, which is also a 20 point trait, doesn’t just reduce the cooldown of greatsword skills by 20%, it also gives might on crit and does the same for spear (warrior’s spear is one the best underwater weapons). That is a huge amount of stuff packed into just one 20 point trait.

So logically blademaster should also reduce the cooldown of one weapon skill by 20% and do some additional effect to be on the same level (e.g. that +10% increased crit chance).

Zenith.7301:

Only reason mesmer exists in wvw is null field and veil/portal. Their aoe is nonexistent because phantasms die immediately when summoned before even pulling off their ability, illusions will die to cleave/aoe when they reach the target, and mesmer doesn’t have the sustained aoe that guardian/warrior/dd ele melee trains can bring nor the expansive aoe+cc chains of staff ele and necro.

Mesmer shines the smaller the engagement, just like the ranger. As soon as engagements go beyond 5+ people, like 10v10, the ranger and mesmer lose their shine real quick.

The thief is relegated to backline harassment with all invested on shadowstep/escapes since they can’t go with the guardian/warrior melee train, and quite frankly shortbow doesn’t stand up to staff eles/necros.

I agree with most of that, except…

Have you ever participated or observed how the top guild-vs-guild (gvg) play in WvWvW? Most of them are EU guilds, which are playing far better than your average or so called “good” zerg. In fact they can demolish enemy zergs twice their size. I am talking about guilds like these:

http://gw2gvg.com/

Many of them practice and play together a lot. Their commander’s job is very difficult indeed.

Interestingly many of them also utilize some thieves and rangers to snipe enemy ranged (who tend to stay away from the melee part of clashing). I recently saw [Mya] using even more interesting composition with almost like semi-ranged guild group with rather small melee front line, softening enemy at range before the hammer melee train hits in.

Practically almost all those top guilds use one or several mesmers in their 20 man setup. Main force is of course warriors and guardians. Elementalists are traditionally the 3rd most profession, but now I have seen many of them run lots of necromancers.

Medium armor professions are the rarest in zergs. I already commented in another thread, why engineer are almost totally unseen in such top gvg:
https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/professions/engineer/Do-Engineers-get-more-accepted-into-groups/first#post2480748

I agree that mesmers are mostly utility & support in big fights, despite in small scale they are also very good roamers. But still I wouldn’t rank them as non-viable or as the worst WvWvW profession. I think the developers would get pretty good idea what professions to buff and which to nerf in WvWvW, just looking at the usage: which professions are most used and which are least used.

I don’t know any reasonable way how to make phantasm mesmer viable for large zergs. If you give those phantasms much more hit points they would be totally overpowered in small scale. Same problem with ranger pets, necromancer minions and engineer turrets.

Many of the Xeph’s suggestions in this thread are actually very good. I like the idea of slightly toning down the damage, yet giving a bit more sustainability. At the same time I feel that some other professions will now need some nerfing (I know players hate to have their fav profession nerfed).

Engineer downed skill #2 can miss if the engineer died on uneven ground, where as e.g. guardian’s #2 seems to be a guaranteed interrupt (unless enemy has stability, which would prevent those interrupt down skills enemy case).

In big WvWvW zergy situations guardians #2 is light years better as it is AoE and engineer’s downed #2 is single target, just like warrior’s #2. Engineer won’t survive long enough to use #3.

In my honest opinion engineer and warrior have the worst set of downed skills in the game. But warrior is heavy armor with higher hit pool.

Because this game is intentionally made alt unfriendly.

- You have to pay another 100 g to get commander for another character.
- You can only get one charged quartz crystal per account per day (count how many days you need to get full celestial gear for 8 characters!!!)

Arenanet doesn’t want you to play more than one character. You try others and then stick to one. End of versatility.

Combo fields are already overpowered in large scale WvWvW battles. You can get 25 stack of might from fire fields to your entire zerg. You can have tons of area healing from water fields negating enemy arrow cart fire. You can give very long time (1+ minute) swiftness to your entire zerg from lightning fields. Need I go on?

Buffing these combo fields would just give even more excessive power to zerging in WvWvW.

So far there has been extremely little split between WvWvW and spvp/tpvp skills and the splits don’t in fact many any sense whatsoever:
- dhuumfire does 2 s burning in tpvp, but full 4 secs in WvWvW (where burning is as effective and you are fighting against other human players)
- revealed is 4 s in pvp, but 3 s in WvWvW (even though stealth is much more powerful in WvWvW)

There is no lack damage in WvWvW. Killing is easy (unless enemy just trolls e.g. using constant shadow stepping + stealth). Please do not buff the damage multipliers or add more damage effects as this has already went too far.

What we could have:
- some additional skills could become finishers e.g. blunderbuss (engi rifle #3) would be a logical blast finisher and confusing images (mesmer scepter #3) would be a logical projectile finisher and so on