Guild Wars 2

I am a WvWvW player, so these comments are about WvWvW, not spvp/tpvp:

Mesmers are still very much part of the meta in WvWvW. Good commanders frequently request to have their team veiled. And it is not uncommon to see several veils chained. Few days ago we used 3 mesmers and chained portals to capture enemy keep while being outnumbered just few days ago. Time stop and null field are also frequently used and requested by some commanders. All these are very strong utility skills. No other profession can bring anything like portal.

Mesmers are still one of the best roaming professions. Yesterday we were roaming with thief, necro, mesmer and engineer with a good success. Mesmer shatter burst and ability to give mass invisibility (for party escape) is great. I have seen enemy teams do the same, but all of them seem to run rangers instead of engineers.

The surge of necromancers in WvWvW hasn’t been unnoticed. Some top guild vs guild teams are now having 1/4 of their players as necromancers. Guardian and warrior really didn’t need any buffs for pve or WvWvW, but they happened anycase. Now warrior works nicely as a solo roamer as well. Not optimal like a thief, but I can use the same warrior build at great effect in zergs as well. Lots of sustainability, yet decent damage and tons of CC.

I do a lot of solo roaming and during my solo roaming I end up having real 1 vs 1 duels as well, which are not light years far from spvp situations:

I believe one of the biggest key problems right now are:
1. Too long stun chains and too few stun breaks with low cooldown
- this punishes one badly timed stun break or dodge extremely heavily
- no stun skill should last more than 2 seconds
- put back stun breaks to some of the defensive skills, now strangely stun breaks often occupy offensive skills

2. Excessive condition burst
- unless you really spec your solo roamer against conditions, you can be toast in just few seconds (e.g. conditionmancer necro using signet of spite + chilblains + well of corruption, all from range and traited to trigger burning from dhuumfire as well)
- the key problem is here is the burning condition (note in WvWvW dhuumfire still does 4 s burning and with consumables + traits + armor it does 8 s burning!). It can be buried under a myriad of other conditions. Maybe condition removal skills should work so that burning is always removed 1st OR burning damage needs to toned down
- burning gives to much damage even if you don’t have any points in condition damage. I would vote to reconsider the formula:
old burning: (0.25 * Condition Damage) + (4 * Level) + 8 damage per second
new burning: (0.25 * Condition Damage) + (2 * Level) + 8 damage per second

3. Excessive burst, combined with the ability to reset the fight with ease
- full berserker ascended gear, 25 stacks of bloodlust, scholar runes, traits, backstab can crit hit around 20k against 2500 total armor. C&D doing 7k, heartseeker can crit 6k+ as well. These types of damage are just not possible in spvp/tpvp. Combine this with 3 s revealed, big map, tons of shadowstepping and stealth on demand. It is no surprise most players like to stick to zergs as they are afraid to move alone
- I feel that excessive burst combined with the ability to get away and vanish (e.g. if your ganking attempt failed) is just plain wrong. WvWvW was supposed to be newbie friendly. This really doesn’t create a good experience for most newcomers. Let the elitism stay in tpvp, but WvWvW must remain accessible for all levels of play. I feel that many of the tpvp related class balancing has just worsened the class balance for WvWvW.

Sorry about the long rant in wrong forums!

LordThy.4927:

So much for the “superior skills and ability to rally PUGS at all times”….

Desolation Rating: 1 852.477 NEW -> 1 803.082
Piken Square Rating: 1 772.963 NEW -> 1 803.857

Deso ‘won’ last matchup, while Piken ranked third.

What exactly has Desolation ‘won’?

Good luck following the ‘Ratings Chimera’!

You are misquoting the rating numbers. You are looking at the current match up, which is Desolation against Kodash and Miller’s and Piken against Elona and SFR. And it is just 1.5 days from the reset, so it is way too early to tell the final results. I am glad to see that Piken is gaining rating against ER and SFR, which are both top servers, ranked higher than Desolation.

But the last Desolation vs Piken vs Abaddon’s match up ended with the following rating changes:
Desolation 1870.478 → 1852.477 (-18.001)
Piken Square 1817.242 → 1772.963 (-44.249)
Abaddon’s Mouth 1638.155 → 1704.264 (+66.109)

http://mos.millenium.org/servers/history/15

Abaddon’s Mouth was the one, which gained rating. If you understand anything how glicko works, this is very typical situation when a lower ranked is placed against higher ranked opponents. But Piken lost rating much more than Desolation.

And I saw so many Desolation players leveling their alts. You Piken must be so proud of getting loot bags from our level 3 characters.

Good luck with the current match up!

So far a very nice thread, compared to previous match up threads.

I have been very impressed by the number of players Kodash and Miller’s have been able to summon at reset night and during Saturday. In fact I have been playing under the outnumbered “buff” most of this day. And we still that “buff” on Miller’s BL.

Out of Miller’s guilds Melenya [Mya] and Silencium [SM] have impressed me the most. Desolation BL was a tough spot at reset night with both of the above farming Deso PuGs. Mya showed very nice combination of ranged and melee. Most of my guild mates were in other BL and I was also border hopping. It seems the Miller forces on other BLs were much weaker.

Nachtschattegwägs [NSG] had a nice roaming team from Kodash. Keep on ganking. I play without gank builds. ;-)

I had some really fun fights in the lake (like usual). Me as a warrior vs enemy warrior (my health didn’t even drop 10%). Me as engineer vs enemy engineer. Such a nice change to the countless of rangers I have killed underwater. And today in the central island me alone vs 3 Kodash. Then I saw more Kodash coming, so I called in my guild buddies in TeamSpeak. We won that 3 TLA vs 5.

I hope enemy likes how TLA has been playing. When we see an obvious duel, we try to ignore it.

I ran to 5000 character limit and forgot to add one of the most important ideas to reduce zerging:

Make every 20+ man team appear on the map to enemies at all times (e.g. moving orange swords)

This would mean enemy would know in advance when a zerg is rushing at their gates etc. but realistically a huge trampling force won’t be able to move unnoticed. Their trampling feet would be heard from long distances.

Now if you’d want to ninja cap a keep you would need to do it with less people.

Abaddon’s Mouth was able to summon an impressive amount of players this week. Almost every time I saw huge forces from AM. Big blobs after another. I didn’t meet that many in 1 vs 1, so I cannot yet form a definite opinion about their actual skill. AM seems different from other German servers I have faced. Elona Reach (ER) is running in general much more sturdy builds. More defense and sustain means less damage and burst. So in a way AM appeared like a mix of Visunah offensive glass cannon, blob after blob style (even if you wipe, more will come) and traditional well-organized German defense.

Piken was excellent open field battles, like usual. I really like fighting Piken (despite the forum complaints), because their players certainly don’t sit all day next to their arrow carts. I saw some very nice portal bomb + veil moves.

I feel that Desolation didn’t play its best this week. Our level of play was mediocre at best. Probably last week’s long-awaited win got many people’s stomach’s full. And I know that several people used this week as an opportunity level up their alts and get the vistas and points of interests for alts as well.

Believe me or not, but yesterday I had several level 3 characters in the my party. I guess that added fuel to the rumors that Desolation is just full of easy loot bags. We won with sizeable lead despite all those rally bots. But if we get to face more stacked servers, Desolation really needs to improve its own play.

Thanks for GG player calling Desolation very organized, but I think we are still far from the best server, Visunah, in this respect. Desolation players are more about personal fun and just running around, no matter what the commander was saying. I think this will remain as it is. After all this is just a game!

I had some interesting duels during my roaming e.g. against an enemy thief, when I was soloing their supply camp. But I think nobody is interested in that…

Good luck with next match up!

Valkjre.5401:

FG left Piken and bandwagoned on Deso. Did that affect piken in any way? yes, it did. No more qeue and more quality work and less Bandwagoning and free loot bags for you. So when desolation is able to produce a Guild that can face off with This Is SPARTA [SPRT] come and complain to us. If you cannot do 1 guild that can outrun us. I will allow you 2 guilds that cover whole 80 slot togethere – come and FACE US. We will tear your T3 tower along with your Guilds defending it over and over again.

For your information: FG used to play on Desolation. When many guilds left Desolation in Spring 2013, some of them expressed at the same time that they would someday want to return to Desolation. What is wrong about coming back home?

Calling it band wagoning is just insulting.

I am not saying SPRT is full of bad players, but you are one of the biggest blobbing guilds on Piken for sure. Your guild team + PuGs following you is one freaking blob. For comparison our guild TLA hasn’t been able to muster more than 15 players lately to WvWvW. Often our numbers just mere 3-7 players, so of course most of us then run with some other Desolation guild (besides myself, I do some solo roaming every day).

There seems to be constant exaggeration of Desolation numbers, inflating them to twice as much or even more.

We had some epic fights last night at Piken BL. We took the Bay despite we had the outnumbered “buff” on us. Please don’t spread crap telling that we had more players when we have the “buff” on us. It was obvious that AM and Piken both had more.

Scoobaniec.9561:

Slashing power+forceful gs merged keeping it in str master line.

Also in current state str adapt tier lacking any real traits to pick up unless we running with mending.

Anyways theres too much traits for single weapons.

2x lb
2x gs
2x axe
Hammer+maces in same line with shield
Warhorn should be adapt tier.

Forceful great swords is already too good trait, giving both 20% reduced cooldown and might, and merging it with slashing power would make it overpowered for a master level trait. Note that both traits affect spear and greatsword, so they are actually NOT single weapon traits, like you claimed.

The problem with strength line is that all the compulsory traits (5, 15 and 25 point) are rather weak. I am especially looking at:
http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Stick_and_Move

3% damage increase when endurance is not full is a bad joke. But this game has already excessive amount of burst and warrior is definitely not lacking offensive punch, so maybe to completely redesign the 25 strength line trait:

Stick and Move: dodging returns some of the endurance used.

It could be similar or exactly the same as Feline Grace (a thief trait) is:
http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Feline_Grace

This would promote active defenses. Combine it with vigor or signet of stamina and warrior could mitigate a lot of damage by correctly timed dodges. It could even perhaps make warrior a bit too overpowered by constant dodging (building momentum also gives back 50% endurance)

Even though I am playing in EU, it is really sad to see AR dropping to have the lowest rating in NA. But I am also happy to see that you have players who decided to stay. That’s the right attitude. Our server was in same situation. Still a lot of people stayed and kept on fighting despite being outnumbered against the enemy 90% of the time. Those types of players who can manage to lighten up the mood with great jokes and humor in TeamSpeak and give temporary map domination are the best. Never give up.

You should really try to tap into your large pvp population. Organize guided tours and raids for WvWvW beginners. But perhaps the spvp/tpvp population is too small? I don’t know the numbers. I have never been on any NA server.

Desolation, which is the EU’s unofficial spvp/tpvp server, managed to stop the death spiral. We lost over 1500 WvWvW players in Spring 2013, but we luckily have so huge pve population that we could train a lot of new WvWvW players from there. Now recently a big WvWvW guild transferred back to Desolation and I got a good hunch we will get some more guilds in near future as well. We are still far from being able to win any match up in EU. Our current rank is 5. But many of us actually don’t want to be in TOP3 as that would mean constant fights against Visunah (EU rank 1).

Maybe you can still have nice fights despite being the lowest rated server in NA?

But I can imagine being face rolled and outmanned almost all the time is not fun. Huge zergs clashing against each other bring an annoying lag, but man those fights can also be so epic.

Despite the lag I really enjoyed the fights yesterday at Piken BL. We had the outnumbered “buff” and still managed to take their Bay and both enemy servers had massive zergs there. 20 vs 50 vs 35 (or so, I cannot accurately count everybody). We had 3 portals chained and nice devious tactics.

This post is going to be rather technical. I have a background in game programming and design and I am still teaching that topic at university level.

The worst lag is mostly caused by a lot of players clumping in the same area. Every time a player uses an AoE skill the game needs to check how many hostile NPCs, creatures (ambient to forest animals) and enemy players it can hit. The number of computations grows exponentially to the power of two. For example if there is 20 vs 20 in the same vicinity each AoE needs to be resolved against 20 possible opponents. Now enter’s the AoE cap: each AoE skill can hit only 5 targets. This was probably put to Guild Wars 2, because the lag would have been even worse without it.

There are several AoE skills, which ignore the 5-man limit e.g. several elementalist staff skills, like the meteor shower. Grandmaster grenadier engineer throws 3 grenades at the same time, each capable of hitting 5 targets. Thus it means 3×5 = 15 checks. Luckily engineer is the rarest profession in WvWvW. As I could imagine how horrible the lag would be with 40+ grenadier engineers on both sides. The server would probably crash already at much lower numbers.

Removing AoE from the game would be a horrible solution, as the tightly packed melee train is already the prevalent meta. Some professions, like the engineer and the elementalist, have very few offensive skills, which affect just one target. All good guild teams are a running a tightly packed hammer warrior + guardian front line and in most cases more than half of the zerg consists of those. Notice that warrior’s hammer is also an AoE weapon. Any serious nerfs to AoE would make the tightly packed melee train even more powerful and the game would reduce to just that.

The only good alternatives are:

1. Reduce the number of players per map

This would lead to increased queues on the stacked servers. Sooner or later some of the big guilds would move to lower population servers.

- free or heavily discounted transfer costs to losing servers and those servers with low WvWvW population. Server’s total population is meaningless indicator of actual WvWvW population. Some medium population servers are full of WvWvw players
- introduce a new queue system, showing many players are in queue before you
- if a player wants he can always choose to fight as a mercenary for any of the outmanned servers, which are not part of his own matchup. In other words the queue user interface allows the players to either wait to get to his own map or instantly enter and help the outmanned side on some other server

The latter would also balance the game. Not so much “win by better coverage”. One could even experiment guesting from EU to NA and so on using this mercenary system.

2. Remove incentives to zerging and reward small scale / solo roaming better

Most players like to move in a large group as it is much easier to get WXP, karma and loot that way. Many players are afraid to roam solo, because any moment stealthed enemy thief can suddenly teleport next to you and kill you if you are not fully aware of the surroundings or having a lot of passive defenses. Huge zergs are so powerful in their area healing and mass revival that enemy siege is pretty much useless in stopping them. Adding more power to siege is the WRONG answer as it will make siege way too overpowered against smaller or medium sized groups. This game design mistake already happened and some of the siege related WXP related traits need to be toned down.

- reduce the effectiveness of area condition removal and healing for WvWvW (I am mostly meaning guardians and elementalists here)
- reduce the effectiveness of certain combo fields, namely: fire, lighting and water fields (and to a less degree light and smoke fields)
- add more small objectives to the map. Currently we have sentries, but there could be just torches which you need to light up or put your server’s flag to some post to make it tick some points
- introduce limits to karma, WXP and loot when it comes to unnecessary large number of people doing objective e.g. if more than 3 or 5 people are capping one supply camp, they get reduced rewards, if more than 10 or 15 cap a tower, they get reduced rewards and so on
- increase revealed to at least 4 seconds (same as in pvp) and max the max consecutive duration of stealth to 8 seconds. This would encourage many non-thieves to solo roam
- if you cap a supply camp fully alone you get an extra bonus reward “solo hero”
- increase the size of the maps
- change borderland maps to be just 1 vs 1, while Eternal Battlegrounds stays 1 vs 1 vs 1. Now each world could battle on 2 different BL maps (their own and one enemy map). This would also reduce 2 stronger server against the 1 weakest. And servers could still have the three way fights at EB

If you want maximum amount of loot bags I would suggest something else than playing a grenade engineer. One grenade does around 250-500 per hit, which is not yet enough to tag the target. Grenades spread so it is likely that only 1-2 grenades hits the same target and you won’t necessarily get any loot or WXP. Grenades travel slowly and you are prone to get tons of retaliation damage back. All the moments spend on healing and running away means you are not tagging or hurting the enemy. Anycase take some defense, because you won’t tag anything when you’re dead.

A staff + wells power or hybrid necromancer or staff elementalists would probably do the job much easier. And be more friendly to your fingers.

You didn’t tell what kind of zergs you are facing. If it is mostly the average PuG teams, then retaliation is not much of an issue. You can keep spamming the ’nades from far and not worried getting nuked. For that I would actually recommend mixed gear (e.g. take some celestial gear). Condition damage is a bit slow and very good enemy teams will cleans conditions very fast and are often running 6x Melandru runes + lemongrass poultry soup, which means -65% reduced condition duration, but your traits already give you +30% condition duration, so that offsets to -35%. If you go conditions you should really get an armor, which increases your condition duration and eat koi cakes or similar to get +40% condition duration.

Veritas.6071:

There is more than one game type. The heals saw those buffs because of the warrior struggling in a PvP setting, and I never want to go back to that place.

Nerfing the base heal and buffing the coefficient to encourage heavier investments into healing power on a class with limited access to additional healing sources sets players up for failure. Sure you can dump points into healing power but unless you are running 15 in Defense and 30 in Tactics, you aren’t getting enough use to justify that stat outside of long fights. We aren’t Guardians that have healing coefficients attached to their mechanics, weapons, utilities… pretty much everything, so it is much harder for a warrior to make use of that stat.

Not to mention, that change would make it so much less effective than Healing Surge that there would be no reason to run the Signet. On top of that, warriors were soloing Arah long before the heal buff… should we just nerf the whole class? PvE in this game is not consistent enough to balance a class around. If you want more challenge, there is a better way to get it than calling for nerfs.

I value many of your other posts, but beg to disagree here. PvE is the most common form of the game and it should be balanced as well. I am pretty sure that over 95% of the pve players never even tried tpvp, so to balance the game based on that very limited and unpopular game mode is just… stupid. Perhaps Arenanet lacks people, I don’t know. But for all honesty: warriors did NOT need buff for pve. Yet they have been buffed for many months in a row. I have been playing warrior in pve now almost every single day. It has been so boringly easy, I can almost fall asleep on keyboard.

We have already seen some good actions by the Arenanet developers:
Adrenal health and engineer’s backback regenerator finally scale with healing power (originally healing power had zero affect on both)

But the scaling with the healing power is still way too weak for many skills and traits. Zero investment in healing power should mean weak heals. I am not asking for any drastic changes, but healing power should become a meaning stat, which it currently isn’t for most.

Currently power is the most important stat for most builds. It affects so many things from attacking power (offense is king in this game) to retaliation (which should more logically actually depend on condition dmg stat). Condition builds are the exception and can function well without much investment in power, but even they have big problems against targets, which are immune to conditions (e.g. all objects). Berserker (power, precision and crit %) gear is not just for dungeon speed runs: it is the most prevalent high level armor and trinket of choice and also common in WvWvW and spvp (e.g. many mesmers and thieves run full berserker). If you don’t believe me: go to the trading post and see how berserker gear is most wanted and costs more.

If one thing is so good that almost everybody selects it, it is a clear sign that there is something wrong about the game balance. And this game went too far in burst damage. Now the developers are trying to fix it by upping the defenses while a more logical choice would have been toning down the excessive burst (e.g. no +110% critical damage, which is possible in WvWvW and pve).

I want to see more varied builds and see warriors more than just the CC + burst machines. I want to see balanced and hybrid builds get more common. Now bunkers and burst still dominates the meta. Yes, I count many of the condition builds also as burst, they are really not built for long sustain. Variety is good and vital for game’s popularity in the long run.

About the Arah soloing: I saw one video, which was made ages ago. I think it was made abusing the omnomberry pie / ghost food, before it was nerfed for a good reason. That food is still good, but no longer a build-defining food, which allowed crazy amount of life steal (no internal cooldown) from critting attacks.

Benjamin.7893:

As for Deniara I wouldn’t take everything he says serious. After all he’s been killing those bad spvp’rs with mistwalker titles in WvW (a title who no1 has acquired yet).

That was a mistake from my part. I mixed it with “Ascendant” title, which you can get with 25 Hall of Monuments points (no spvp required). They used to call the spvp title with 14,973,500 points with exactly the same name. That actually comes AFTER Mist Walker. Now it seems it is renamed Legendary Champion (and no I haven’t seen anybody with that title). Thus the confusion. I am not the only one, who got confused:
http://guildwars2.mmmos.com/index.php?page=view&id=14739

Titles like gladiator and champion xxx are rather common, but spvp ranks past ransacker are a true rarity in WvWvW.

It is of course true that 1 vs 2-3 is more common than real 1 vs 1. I call it 1 vs 2, even in such case the fight begins as duel, but somebody comes to interrupt it. Here are the most likely situations for 1 vs 1:
- early in the morning and almost empty borderlands
- fighting near sentry
- fighting in the lake
- sniping a dolyak

Healing signet used to be crappy, but now I feel it is a bit too good. In fact combined with adrenal health + mango pie / omnomberry ghost + some points in healing power I have used it in pve to face tank champions on level 80 areas with ease. No need to dodge. Just sit next to boss with healing signet + adrenal health. The combined passive healing from 3 sources can even counter permanent burning. You can just stand in fire and see your health bar stay up at full health. Welcome to the super easy mode…

Healing signet’s passive heal should be weaker if there is no points in healing power, but scale better with healing power.
The current formula seems to be (for level 80):
392+0.05*healing power / second
with 1500 healing power that would heal 467/s, just 19% better than with 0 healing power

I would suggest this instead:
320+0.1*healing power / second
320/s <- 0 healing power
470/s <- 1500 healing power

Not a dramatic change, but adjustment.

The active effect of the healing signet should be increased to promote its active use and its activation time should be reduced to 1/2 second.
Current: 3275 + 0.5*healing power
Suggested: 3400+0.75*healing power

So much unfounded propaganda against Desolation in this thread. When I can see that there is e.g. 20 players on the TS for some guild, enemy calls it in this forum 40-50 people. And 15 + 20 man team together is 80 for our enemy. Well, it is good if each Deso player counts as two. ;-)

From Desolation players point of view Piken and Abaddon are nothing but a blob. For me 20+ is a already blob. <- yes you can die laughing at my definition

Sadly Visunah Square and Kodash have better roamers and solo players than anybody I have seen on Piken or Abaddon’s. All 1 vs 1 have been wins (I don’t duel, but 1 vs 1 happen when you solo roam a lot).

BurrTheKing.8571:

Now for the most obvious counter, STUN BREAKERS AND STABILITY!

You may have noticed that Arenanet has shuffled stun break skills for many professions. In general moving the stun break away from most widely used skills and moving them to some more or less useless skills. For some professions it is difficult to make an efficient build with more than 1 stun breaker. (warriors who get defensive could take both “shake it off” and endure pain or balanced stance as stun breakers).

I have spent more time playing on engineer and warrior than any other profession. Currently engineers have zero stun breaks on a low cooldown:
http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Stun_break

The access to stability is very much limited on many professions e.g. thieves can only get it either via runes (e.g. 6x Lyssa + using elite) or using daggerstorm elite. Engineers have rumble, which gives 1 s stability. And that comes with thumper turret. I can imagine how “viable” that is with WvWvW. Yes, I know mortar also gives stability, but it requires you to stand with the mortar immobile, which would be a death wish against a stun lock warrior.

Now of course it is possible to equip and trait almost any profession to counter this particular build, but seriously doing that would make those builds pretty subpar against many other builds.

WvWvW is my main arena and I am worried about the recent changes. Mesmer’s signet of domination now also gives 3 s stun from 1200 range (+ 1 s from signet of paralyzation). Now imagine a roaming team of 1 mesmer, 1 stun lock warrior and a thief. That would spell instant death against pretty much any solo roamer. Stunlocked 8 s and bursted to death.

An honest analysis of this should include:
- mace stun lock burst can occur roughly once per 10 seconds
- most stun break skills have a 40-60 s cooldown

This is an example of a game design flaw. Since day one Guild Wars 2 has had excessive burst (go to WvWvW and see how much dmg you can do with full stack, consumables + ascended gear, killing is not a problem, not even >3k armor won’t help you). Yet for so strange reason Arenanet developers keep adding more burst to this game e.g. recent changes to necromancer, allowing condition burst.

I think 3 s stun is a bit too long and ALL 3 second stuns (for all professions) should be reduced to 2 seconds. Also 100 blades should be moved to be the burst skill of greatsword, as has been suggested already many times. This would still allow skull crack + 100 blades combo as it is possible to use signet of fury to refill adrenaline to full. Thus the combo would become: skull crack + signet of fury + 100 blades. But signet of fury has 24 s cooldown traited, thus this combo could be performed only once per 24 seconds.

I liked some of the changes to the warrior profession. Two swords feels more effective now. But I think they went overboard buffing the passive effect of the healing signet too much. It is now almost twice as good compared to what it was without any investment in healing power. It is by far the best passive heal in the game. In fact combined with adrenal health + some healing power I have used it in pve to face tank champions on level 80 areas with ease. No need to dodge. Just sit next to boss with healing signet + adrenal health. The combined healing with mango pie can even counter permanent burning. You can just stand in fire and see your health bar stay up at full health.

Healing signet’s passive heal should be weaker if there is no points in healing power, but scale better with healing power.

The current formula seems to be (for level 80):
392+0.05*healing power / second
with 1500 healing power that would heal 467/s, just 19% better than with 0 healing power

I would suggest this instead:
320+0.1*healing power / second
320/s <- 0 healing power
470/s <- 1500 healing power

The active effect of the healing signet should be increased to promote its active use and its activation time should be reduced to 1/2 second.
Current: 3275 + 0.5*healing power
Suggested: 3400+0.75*healing power

BlackBeard.2873:

I also agree that necros still have problems in wvw due to lack of mobility, which is a much more important survivability mechanism than tankiness.

At the current state, I would advice against giving necro much more mobility. They have signet of locust (+25% speed buff) and teleportation with the wurm (that is situational though).

Now imagine a full condition spec necro with high mobility. +94% condition duration (2x duration) with 30 points in Spite. +10% from 2x Lyssa, +10% from 2xMad King and +4% from 2xNightmare runes. Add in koi cakes, +40%. Very close to 2x condition duration.

He can initiate fight with signet of spite from 1200 range:
http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Signet_of_spite
That is already 6 conditions (without any traits) in less than a second.

Combine that with e.g. Chilblains and well of corruption using focused rituals and dhuumfire to get burning trigger as well. That could mean 9 different conditions on the target, all lasting a long time and applied almost instantly from range. Without some serious condition removal that would spell death from range against most foes, who wouldn’t even be able to retreat due being both crippled and chilled. A mesmer could teleport away, but without nullfield he would also be dead from the condition. Even a full bunker guardian using contemplation of purity might be in a trouble, because well of corruption will turn all those boons back into conditions and necromancer can keep stacking more conditions faster than the guardians can cleanse them.

selan.8354:

so instead of an overnerf for necros, how about a buff for other classes and new ways to clean conditions?

Condition cleansing is already a bit too strong in well-coordinated guild groups. I have often seen top guilds cleanse conditions almost every few seconds using well-coordinated area condition removal skills. Many are already using 6xMelandru runes + lemongrass poultry soup, to get -65% condition duration.

Now imagine what buffing to condition removal would do to not so condition heavy professions? A condition spec mesmer, warrior etc. would see their conditions removed instantly. Since most players zerg, who would want to run even power + condition hybrids besides necromancer or engineer. The latter is the rarest profession in WvWvW, practically missing from top guild-vs-guild.

I don’t think we need to over nerf the necromancers, but some small adjustments like they already did for tpvp (dhuumfire nerf) should be implemented for WvWvW. I don’t want to see ANY profession over nerfed.

Ezeriel.9574:

As long as I can’t go anywhere without getting ganked by thieves, I refuse to do anything without a zerg

I do solo roaming most of the time in WvWvW, generally as an engineer, but I have used all the professions. I generally don’t have trouble with 1 vs 1, but I know this is one of the reasons why so many players prefer to run in a group.

A thief can be traited to steal (teleport + dmg, also often inflicts poison) from 1500 range, become stealthed upon stealing, thus giving the thief a head start in the combat unless the player is always fully aware of all surroundings. A full glass thief with perfect gear + consumables + 25 stacks of bloodlust can crit 20k backstab against 2.5k armor. Full bunkers can survive this burst, but even their health pool will take a serious dent. Full bunkers lack the burst to take down a good thief, thus it is just surviving. If a thief fails the ganking attempt it can always use stealth, shadowstepping + high mobility to reset the fight, remove conditions and heal in stealth. Low risk combined with excessive burst and repeated stealth is a broken combination for WvWvW.

I think the best play to reduce the blobs would be tone down some of the major benefits of zerging:

1) combo fields
Currently some of the combo fields are way too strong: water, fire, smoke and lightning. Many guild groups fun with big might stacks, swiftness, area healing, condition removal (and sometimes also retaliation) from combo fields. They allow the zerg to heal away damage from siege fire, move very fast, inflict massive damage, area retaliation. Reduce the effectiveness of these by 30-50% for WvWvW

2) rewards
Dividing WXP rewards and loot per number of players would lead to some player hate (“go away, you’re halving my reward when killing dolyak”), but they could use some middle road, like this:
E.g. 3 players get full reward from capturing a supply camp, but more than 3 players get reduced rewards e.g. 1-3 = full reward, 4-6 = 75% reward, 7-15 = 50% reward, 16- = 25% = reward
same thing for all objectives, but the bigger the objective the larger the limits e.g. for keep it might be 20 players, 10 for tower and 30 for castle

Norreka.8407:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wYpfx3ea1oA

thx for this great fight at the supplycamp

Nice video. I can see my guild mates from TLA. I was on the same map, but solo capping stuff + killing Piken Square players in the lake. I don’t do that all the time, but I really need some time off from zerging.

I am mostly a solo roamer in WvWvW, but also member of a prominent guild and a Pug commander.

After the necro buffs there has been a lot more necros in the game. I would say their number has been tripled. Some the best guild-vs-guild (gvg) teams are now running 5+ necros for a very good reason.

I feel that conditions are even stronger in WvWvW (than in pvp) when it comes to small scale. Cheap consumables, like koi cakes, gives +40% condition duration. This food + armor runes + traits allow necromancers to have even over +100% duration to bleeding. The conditions really hurt like a brick.

In 1 vs 1 I have gotten huge condition spike that seem to tick over 5k/second. Even with a relatively big health pool and my engineer having the ability to heal over 60k/second (that is much more healing than most players ever have), I was going down very fast. But I lost just one such 1vs1. In other case I managed to kill that same glass cannon condition spike necro from downed state. I very rarely lose 1 vs 1. E.g. last night I was winning also against other engis with ease.

My warrior has crazy amount of condition removal, so I was able to beat a conditionmancer in 1 vs 1 using my hybrid power + condi dual swords warrior. But I can imagine most players are not able to cleanse off 5+ conditions several times per minute, thus they could have lost that battle due having so many shut down conditions as well ( blind, weakness, chill, besides burn, poison, bleed, cripple). Currently blind, chill and weakness really hurt most offensive builds really strong and necro has good access to all those. And did I mention fear. Most players don’t have much stability (it is a rare boon) and stun breakers have long cool down.

I also have a level 80 necro and sometimes use it in WvWvW. I feel that most of the buffs to necromancer were unnecessary. Necromancer wasn’t a weak profession for WvWvW.

Giving necromancers access to burning was a mistake. Now dhumfire is nerfed for pvp (2 seconds), but still does full 4 seconds in WvWvW (what’s the logic!!?). Increased radius for marks allow now necromancers to pass the greater marks trait and allocate even more points to offense. I think most necromancers are running very offensive builds in WvWvW. They complain that they have no defense, no stun breaks, but of course if you only spew for offense, you lack in defense. Necromancers have two real weaknesses: low mobility and lack of blocks, access to vigor. Other than that they are now the king of conditions (crown taken from engineer) and masters of dps and AoE pressure with the ability to run full berserker or rampager and still having huge health pool (together with death shroud).

kekec.6835:

http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Rocket_Boots (900 range, blast finisher, cures immobilized, crippled, and chilled, F ability 5sec burn) 20sec CD
http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Bull%27s_Charge (900 range, knockdown, leap finisher) 40sec CD

Such comparisons are rather meaningless, unless you bring in the big picture. With mobile strikes trait a warrior will break from immobilize using any movement skill and greatsword offers 2 movement skills (rush has 1200 range). Engineer needs to use an utility slot to get 900 range movement skill, warrior can still equip whatever it wants to 3 utility slots.

Here is another WvWvW related comparison:
Engineer’s have just one good elite, supply crate. Unfortunately the turrets have so huge hit box and so little health they get destroyed in a second in a zerg fight. Thus the major usage of the supply crate is 2 s area stun on a 180 s cooldown!

Warrior can get 2 s area stun from hammer burst earthshaker, roughly every 10 seconds (cleansing ire will reload adrenaline in a big fight very fast). So warrior can area stun 18 times more often without the need to even waste any elite skill for that, just use a weapon burst skill.

According to my observations warriors are many times more common in WvWvW than engineers. And there are good reasons for that. I play both in that format.

SugarCayne.3098:

Lol. I just looked at your posting history. Did you really go into another server’s recruitment thread and try to recruit for Deso instead of making your own thread? Haha, don’t think I’ve ever seen anyone do that before.

If you read that thread, you would have noted that I wrote there “Desolation isn’t officially recruiting”. My timing was rather bad, because I didn’t know FG was moving back to Deso, but luckily the guild leader of FG contacted me, so I edited the original post.

I wanted to correct a few things, which I think were miscomprehensions. Of course every server generally feels that they have the best players and they are losing just because enemy has more or using overpowered siege, hacks etc. But in the previous match up Desolation has often been outmanned on so many maps. Of course enemy ticks more then. I don’t see a difference between night or morning or day capping. If one side has more players than others of course they are taking advantage of it. Piken Square is also doing when they are more players on the same map. Piken lacks people at night time and I honestly hope they can recruit some players for that time. But at the same time I of course hope Desolation would have more players in the mornings and noon.

Others might disagree: but game play wise I have found Piken the most similar server to Desolation than any other server I have played against.

I cannot yet talk about this week’s match up, because I have been on a trip and just arrived home. But the crazy one-man capping team is back. ;-)

SugarCayne.3098:

Gee, Desolation looks like a fun, stable server. Every week, the bulk of the match threads are Deso arguing with Deso, lol. Can’t imagine what it’s like in game.

It is few players who are making more noise than a hundred Desolation players combined.

There is very little internal drama. Map chat has more humor than comments about us being VS.

Jayne.9251:

So with the rating gain Deso got this week, does that mean it will increase the chances of them being back in the arms of their beloved Viz?

Yes. Here are the estimates for next match up:
https://dviw3bl0enbyw.cloudfront.net/uploads/forum_attachment/file/89583/eu1-20130725.txt

Most likely servers Deso will face are…

(spoiler alert)

Visunah
SFR

EU rank #1 and #2. How “nice”. ;-)

But here comes the big surprise. Most likely match up partners for Piken are also the same!

Thanks Jue! I edited already the post.

It is of course also true that Deso has higher transfer costs. I am right now listening to Deso weekly server wide meeting in TeamSpeak. We have decided NOT to officially recruit outside our own server. We are however NOT against if some guilds want to move to Desolation. We will welcome them. Many of our guild leaders are not that keen to rise up EU rank #1 as that would mean a lot of fights against Visunah (which might happen anycase).

Desolation lost over 10 guilds and around 1000-2000 WvWvW players in couple of months period in Spring 2013. Any other server would have sunk like stone in a similar situation. Luckily we can tap into our own huge pve (and pretty large pvp) population. We have had only small guilds transfer to us after the mass exodus. Majority of our WvWvW players are Desolation born and raised. Now our rating has been going up for 6 weeks in a row, so I think Desolation is doing reasonably well.

I honestly wish you luck with the recruiting process!

Here are few comments from the dear enemy:

Piken is a guild-oriented server. They have some very good guilds well organized guilds. In fact some of their best guilds, like GH, used play on our server, Desolation. Sadly Desolation doesn’t have any really big hard hard core WvWvW at the moment. Our guilds can usually muster max 20-25, generally just around 15 or so for a raid.

I now have a brand new computer, which can run this game 60 fps even when there is well over 100 players on the screen. There is still some lag, especially when Piken runs in a server wide blob. Some of your most prominent guilds sometimes seem to run with a visible commander tag and that of course attracts a lot of PuGs. I am not blaming you, but of course there is lag if 50+ Piken and 40+ Deso are clashing in same spot. Luckily these mega lag moments are not that common.

Currently Desolation is leading against Piken about 40000 in points and we will win this week for sure. Just like the above poster wrote it is a fact that Piken Square is losing points at night and gaining them at prime time (evening time in EU). But that it is not because Piken would magically have better players than the all the other servers.

Desolation is generally “enjoying” the outnumbered “buff” in the morning and often during day time as well, even at Eternal Battlegrounds. We have a night team, but in the morning our players are deadly tired from staying up so late. So our server has similar coverage issues, just that our weak hours are different. Same thing yesterday evening at prime time we had outnumbered “buff” on us when our guild was raiding. While our enemy Piken outnumbers us on those hours, of course they are scoring more points. On the positive note, we also don’t have queue. ;-)

I would estimate that Desolation and Piken have roughly as good player material, which is high indeed. Piken has more better hard core guild teams and bigger guild teams than us. Desolation has better small scale fighters and solo roamers, because we have needed to adapt to playing seriously outnumbered (e.g. 2-5 against 10-30 enemy), constantly pitted against Visunah (EU rank 1). Desolation (EU rank 6, now rising to rank 5) has been facing Visunah more often than any other server.

In general WvWvW in EU is less about zergs and points than NA, more about open field battles, fun and tactics.

Note: This are just my personal opinion, based on my limited view (I cannot see what is happening on all maps all the time). This is not the official Desolation opinion.

I wish you the best of luck in recruiting. And also fighting against you again!

MistMirage.4706:

Or even someone else complains that they are being killed by the zerg?

Like my guild mates well put it:
“You should be proud if an entire enemy zerg is chasing you alone”. :-)

In this match up I have seen unusually much of enemy teams chasing me when I am solo roaming with my engineer, yes even entire 30+ man zergs. Now you know why Piken and Kodash are behind in points, chasing poor me = zero points for their server. ;-)

PS. This was a humor post, if somebody didn’t get it. But sometimes the jokes have some truth hidden in them. Anycase my hats off to Piken, which really loves open field battles.

I know AR has some amazing pvp players.

Our server, Desolation, had rough times in Spring 2013, when we lost around 10 major hard core WvWvW guilds. Luckily we have a huge pve population + some of the world’s best spvp/tpvp players to tap from. It took us a lot of effort to rebuild our WvWvW society. We are still lacking players and dedicated WvWvW guilds, especially on the off peak hours, but on the positive side, there is rarely any queue.

Our rating has been going up for many weeks are we are gonna win this week’s match up and rise up to EU rank 5. So it is possible to make a come back!

I can really feel your pain. I wish you the best of luck in rising up from the ashes.

Littlefeather.8623:

This game has always favored range over melee, in PvE, PvP and even WvW.

Since when melee sucked in pve? Have you looked at dungeon speed run records? They use mostly melee.

Melee train is the meta in top WvWvW. Majority is melee train is hammer + sword/warhorn warriors, followed then by guardians. Supported by a few staff elementalists, necromancers and mesmers. Some top teams use a ranger and a thief as well, but generally medium armor professions are not part of WvWvW meta.

E.g. look at this list of the world’s top WvWvW guilds. You can see a lot of their game play videos at youtube. It is very heavy melee oriented and pure ranged teams run away.
http://gw2gvg.com/

imaginary.6241:

So you’re telling me highly coordinated GvG is your usual ZvZ? It ’s not.

…

Concerning Eartshaker:

It ’s stun is ONLY at 2 seconds after you have fully build up your adrenaline which requires a build soley to focus on specifiy traits AND another weapon like the axe to build it up really fast to put it out any 10s. Dont forget the weapon swap cooldown is there too, that way you will never ever put out a 2s group-stun every 10 seconds at the most time being ALONE…

Medicore Condition removal … yeh.

Those top guilds are not doing just guild vs guild (I would estimate that 5% of time is spent in gvg). Most of the time they are owning enemy teams in the open field and inside keeps. A well-coordinated guild team can win over twice and sometimes even 4 times bigger PuG group. If you have seen guilds like Red Guard [RG] vs Pugs, you know what I am talking about. I have been on the same server with RG and also fighting against them on the opposing server.

I don’t know how you have trouble building adrenaline on a warrior who fights inside a zerg? Most warriors choose cleansing ire, which can remove up to 3 conditions with a burst. But with that trait you also get adrenaline every time an enemy hits you, no matter how tiny the hit (previously there was a trait called embrace the pain, but it is now merged with this trait). If you are inside a hectic zerg fight or surrounded by an enemy mob in pve your adrenaline is going up rapidly all the time. E.g. an enemy engineer spams grenades at you, 3 ’nades hit and you get 3 strikes of adre for free. Now imagine several enemy engis doing the same. You adre is gonna be full in few seconds.

Alternatively you could take furious (but not that many hammer warriors take that GM trait) or use signet of fury, which completely fills adrenaline bar with 24 s traited cooldown. But I would argue that cleansing ire is the best way to go. Berserker’s stance makes you completely immune to conditions and gives you 5 strikes of adre per second for 8 seconds.

My warrior has 5 second cooldown on weapon swap thanks to fast-hands trait. For your information most melee pain train warriors use hammer + sword/warhorn, not axe as they need mobility, plus warhorn helps with conditions (see below).

People tell that warrior has bad condition removal, but I think that is either old news or simply a fallacy. Let me spell it down for you:
- mending removes 3 conditions besides a nice heal, 20 s cooldown
- shake it off removes 1 condition, 25 s cooldown
- every shout (you can take 3 shouts) removes 1 extra condition with 6xsoldier runes
- signet of stamina removes ALL conditions on 36 s traited cooldown
- 6xLyssa runes + signet of rage removes ALL conditions on 48 s traited cooldown
- cleansing ire removes 1-3 conditions based on how much adre you have
- shrug it automatically removes 1 condition per 30 s if you have multiple conditions
- dogged march doesn’t remove conditions, but it reduces movement impeding condis by 33% and gives you regeneration
- warhorn charge cures chilled, crippled and immobilized
- warhorn + quick breathing makes all warhorn skills to convert a condition into a boon

Overall warrior currently has one of the best condition removals in the game.

Instead of spreading hogwash, let me tell a real life story from today. I was solo roaming as a warrior. I use a hybrid warrior build (2 swords + rifle since Autumn 2012), mostly direct damage, but also condition dmg. The isle of storms events had been on for a long time so it had triggered twice the amount of kraits. I went to kill them with my warrior fully alone. I was down to 50% health due fighting against several dozens kraits and most of my skills were on a cooldown. Then an enemy condition necromancer surfaced from the water and immediately attacked my warrior. The necro spammed crazy condition stack on me. He of course also used death shroud and everything he had. Guess which one of us won?

He lost despite putting crazy condition stack on me twice, because warrior can have good condition removal. I would still argue necromancer are bit overpowered at the moment as they offer very easy insta gibbing of most players with conditions (unless you bring a lot of condition removal and skills that quickly remove over 4 conditions at same time).

I am NOT saying that the current melee WvWvW meta is the pinnacle of fighting and skill. I dislike it a lot. Trust me. I have been spending dozens of hours trying to think how to make engineers viable and counter the melee train, but so far I haven’t figured it out.

ACs are not okay. They were never okay. You can use ACs to shoot locations where they should not be able to hit. This has been reported already many times last Autumn and still not fixed.

Superior ACs were already doing a bit too good damage before the patch and traits.

But like some other people have pointed out the crazy army of golems has made ACs kinda irrelevant. If enemy has a huge blob + tons of omega golems it is difficult to stop it taking your keep.

Azunai.1065:

so what you are saying is basically WvW since the beginning of guild groups

Guard and Warriors are the most important classes, an average guild group runs like 10 war, 10 guard,2 mesmer (only for invisibillity at all), a few necros and some mages for water fields.

if you say splitting WvW,sPvP and PvE is no option, then how is the balance between those 3 parts?

This is indeed a very good question!

Here in EU the meta is pretty much the same. Guardians and warriors are the most common professions and the base of the melee train, assisted by a few staff elementalists, necromancers and mesmers. Some top guild teams also use thieves and rangers. On dry land thief is by far the most common roaming professions and underwater I encounter more rangers than other professions. Engineer is the rarest profession in WvWvW and generally seen only as a roamer (our server has 3 engineer commanders, but I haven’t seen any enemy engi commanders).

From WvWvW point of view the repeated buffs to warrior (and to a smaller degree) guardian seem hilarious. It is same as if everybody complains that spvp/tpvp is full of profession XXX, yet developers keep buffing that particular profession. Necromancer got much more popular in WvWvW as well due the recent buffs, which has actually been a nice change to at least shuffle a bit that WvWvW meta, which has been so static for months. Now the brand new changes to ranger are gonna make it a bit more popular as well, but I can imagine we can see even more warriors.

I think Arenanet needs a person, whose sole task is to think profession balance for WvWvW. It would mean playing all 8 professions there and attending some top guild-vs-guilds matches and playing on both heavily outmanned side and top server facerolling the weaker one.

Engineer is the rarest profession in WvWvW and not part of the top elite guild melee train meta at all (while all other 7 professions have their use, albeit all medium armor professions are rare):

Change the mortar elite so that it is a weapon kit. You can move around it with it, but only the engineer using it can use it (just like other kits).

Imagine running around with the mortar kit (elite). Most of the mortar kit skills are weak e.g. healing from mortar #3 is a bad joke, but launch concussion barrage is powerful area push back.

Giving engineer a mobile siege weapon would suit the profession very well, especially for WvWvW.

Instead of just complaining here a cool idea how to make engineer more viable for large scale battles in WvWvW:

Change the mortar elite so that it is a weapon kit. You can move around it, but only the engineer using it can use it (just like other kits).

Imagine running around with the mortar kit (elite). Most of the mortar kit skills are weak e.g. healing from mortar #3 is a bad joke, but launch concussion barrage is powerful area push back.

Giving engineer a mobile siege weapon would suit the profession very well.

imaginary.6241:

LOL are you trolling or is that for real?

I am NOT trolling. WvWvW is my main game. Yesterday evening our guild [TLA] was about to have a gvg against [VII], which is one of the highest ranked guilds in the world. The patches and entire WvWvW shutting down ruined it the gvg. Anycase [VII] would have won, but it was once again an interesting opportunity to observe how the best guilds in the world play and what kind of builds they use.

http://gw2gvg.com/

The 20-man [VII] team seemed to have at least 5 hammer warriors plus about same amount of guardians, 3 staff elementalists, 1 signet ranger + 1-2 thieves whose role was to snipe out enemy ranged players. They have no engineers. I have also been watching how some other top guilds like Golden Horde [GH] or Good Old Days [GD] play. Currently engineer has no place in the WvWvW meta.

If you think spamming grenades or using the big ol’ bomb is the best thing ever, you have probably never fought against the best gvg guilds. But I am not here to judge your skill or knowledge, I will now just point out few important things:

Very good enemy teams have high uptime of retaliation. Spam in a lot of grenades and your health will go down faster their the health. Theoretically one grenade barrage can hit up to 40 different targets (8×5), but let’s put a more realistic number: barrage hit 20 targets on a tightly packed enemy melee train. Each hits you back 350 retaliation damage. That means 20×350 = 7000 retaliation damage on you just from using one skill. And I have seen it happen. Similar problems with flamethrower/bombs etc vs retaliation.

Engineer area CC simply pales down what other professions can bring to table. Just look at warrior hammer:
large area stun (from burst skill, can be used roughly once per 10 seconds)
cleaving / cone weakness and cripple
area pushback
knockdown

That was just one weapon. Warrior can have another weapon besides that and still choose whatever it wants as 3 utility skills + elite.

And if you think supply crate is better than hammer burst earthshaker, because it has longer range (1200). Well, turrets from supply crate get destroyed in a zerg battle in less than a second. Its only use is that 2 second area stun and it has 180 second cooldown (!). For comparison let’s look at one elementalist skill.
Air staff #5, static field
40 s cooldown, unblockable and inflicts several 2 s stuns in a large area for 4 seconds. And it is also a lighting field, which can be with blast finishers give a very long last swiftness for all allies. So ele just takes a staff and gets 20 different skills from it, one is better than supply crate, which takes the elite skill slot.

Many elementalist staff skills can actually hit more than 5 targets e.g. meteor shower and the radius (especially with blasting staff trait) is much greater than the grenades.

And using the bomb kit against one of the elite teams in the world. They are chaining the stun skills, immobilize, knockback. Unless you have stability on, you will not live more than few seconds inside such melee train with an engineer and engineer is infamous of not having much any stability.

Many engineers are proud of their conditions, but they should realize the good enemy teams have incredible amount of condition removal and generally eat -40% condition duration food (lemongrass poultry soup) plus might have 6xMelandru runes and traits for even more condition time mitigation (e.g. warriors can have -98% condition duration). I have been spectating some of the best guilds play. Even stacks of conditions vanish in a second and when conditions get reapplied they vanish again.

I am not saying engineer is total crap in WvWvW. It has its places in very small groups and solo roaming, but unfortunately in controlled good zerg any other profession is better, easier and brings more to table.

I doubt that any of the Arenanet developers is playing guild-vs-guild or WvWvW at highly competitive level. This game is mostly balanced based on tpvp, which is more less about contesting and holding small circles. Engineer is good in such small scale stuff, but really in WvWvW, engineer is currently in the bottom tier. The rarest profession for a reason.

I was today solo roaming as a warrior. After the warrior buffs, warrior is now in very sweet spot for WvWvW. Guardians also got slightly stronger (larger symbols + monk focus). Two most common professions in WvWvW keep getting buffed. Sure sign Arenanet doesn’t understand about WvWvw profession balance.

100 blades should have been the greatsword burst skill from the beginning. Moving it to burst would promote better play because now players would need to think about adrenaline instead of just sitting on full adre all fight long. I know it roots the warrior, but so does sword burst (flurry) as well, which is weaker in damage (but gives immobilize).

Arcing slice as GS #2 would be better than most players think, as it would allow 100% fury uptime without the use of any utility skill. That would make some utility skills in fact a bit irrelevant. So maybe make arcing slice 10 s cooldown and give 5 seconds of fury, but ability to hit multiple foes? With boon duration runes + consumables that would still give almost 100% fury uptime. Now it could be comboed for devastating effect e.g. arcing slice (fury on), bull’s charge to knockdown the foe and then 100 blades to burst it down. Or alternatively make arcing slice remove one boon (instead of giving fury) and give it 8 s cooldown.

I would advice against buffing greatsword, because it has already been the most popular warrior weapon by far. The reasons are simple: It has two movement skills (and one with 1200 range), the highest damage skill in the game (100 blades) on a mere 8 s cooldown and the best trait synergy (forceful greatsword trait is better than any single hand weapon traits are). Please don’t turn this game into Greatsword Wars 2.

Wrong forums. And isn’t 10k crits from ranger’s long bow auto attack enough for you? Ranger’s long bow now also gives you amazing knockback from 900 range, stealth, vulnerability stacks…

See
https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/professions/ranger/10k-Autoattack-Longbow-PvE-Build-WvW-fun/first

Realistically rifle should have longer range than longbow, but this game is so far from realism.

Warrior’s rifle skills #1-#4 have 1200 range untraited and warrior rifle burst skill, kill shot, has 1500 range.

For some weird reason Arenanet decided to make engineer’s rifle close to mid-range weapon.

Rifle #4, over charged shot has 400 range. It serves a similar purpose as ranger longbow’s point blank shot. Both are knockback skills and have 15 s cooldown. The engineer skill self-knocks the engineer down, yet ranger hasn’t such penalty. Even though the word “point blank shot” would imply extremely close range, Arenanet just buffed it to 900 range. Longbow also now gives ranger stealth.

I have previously explained why warrior’s rifle is superior to engineer’s rifle. Cracked shot trait makes all rifle attacks pierce and reduces cooldown by 20%, allowing to pretty much spam warrior rifle skills (max 12 s cooldown) and make them hit multiple foes. Engineer rifle #1 pierces, but there are no traits which make it pierce. It has in real life inferior damage and worse range.

I would suggest the following changes to engineer rifle, not making it overpowered:
Rifle #1 keep as it is
Rifle #2, net shot, increase animation speed by 30%
Rifle #3, blunderbuss, max damage at 150 range, weaker damage at 450 range. With rifled barrel’s trait the range should be increased to 300 and 600 range. 600 range is still small and this would require a trait!
Rifle #4, over charged shot, reduce cooldown to 12 s, increase range to 600 and 900 if traited (point blank shot can still do longer knockback with no self-knock back penalty)
Rifle #5, keep as it is

[quote=2467814;Forestnator.6298:
This makes no sence for me. Engineers are made for wvw imo.
[/quote]

Engi is great in WvWvW small groups + roaming, but there are far easier choices for that as well e.g. thief, mesmer, ranger or elementalist.

In huge zerg fights engineer is not wanted, because:
1) it offers nothing the other professions couldn’t do better
2) its damage using the same gear is weaker than any other profession unless engineer has might stacks (and pro zergs can have full stacks of might on most of the players, thus engi damage is still weaker)
3) many engineer CC skills have single target e.g. compare with warrior’s hammer
4) retaliation is still a very powerful counter against engineer good damage options

Trust me. I am trying to change the meta to be more engineer friendly and I know 2 other good engineer commanders who play on my server, but it is not easy. Everybody pretty much admits that the melee train zerg base line is: guardians + warriors, elementalists, necros and mesmers. Guess what professions got most buffed in latest update? ;-)

https://www.guildwars2.com/en/news/july-23-content-release-notes/

Engineer would really need love for WvWvW.

Not just buffs. Sword #4 (impale- rip) has been the weakest sword skill in the game. Very difficult to get the rip land against any moving opponent, clunky animation + glitched. Now instead of 4 bleed stacks it will apply 2 stacks of torment. That is more than 50% damage nerf in many cases. Granted 2 stacks of torment can act as a cover condition, but still…

Most top hard core EU WvWvW guilds do not accept medium armor professions. They might sometimes use thieves as scouts, providing blast finishers and doing stealth stomp, placing traps etc. But rangers and engineers are not wanted in WvWvW.

Reroll, run solo or become a commander yourself. ;-)

Hule.8794:

Why there even are sentries? If it is possible to solo camp, all it wants is a little time, it is useless to have those NPCs there. Just take them away.
But what about some difficulty scale?
Sentry – 1 man needed
Camp – at least 3 man team or very very very good 2 man team
tower – at least 5 man team or very very very good 4 man team(not counting siege)
keep – at least 10 man team or very very very good 8 man team (not counting siege)
SM – at least 25 people

And why? My answer is: why not.

At least here in EU there is not a server which has perfect 24/7 coverage. I play on a huge server, but even we have very low attendance in the morning. E.g. today in the map chat there was a question “Is there anybody on this map?”. I replied to that, but I didn’t see any other players at all.

I think the difficulty level of camps, towers, NPC objectives, keeps and castles is fine. Buffing those NPCs to such difficult level that no single human player would be able solo them would make them so strong that they would probably wipe the floor against 5-10 average players.

Imagine how boring the game would be for the badly outmanned side if your suggestion would be implemented? They could just kill a forest animal or maybe a sentry.

Currently most players are not able to solo a supply camp, especially not a fully upgraded (250 supply) camp, which has extra guards, zealots and cabalists and maybe also added NPC mercenary guards (Hyleks, Dredge, Ogres or Quaggans). Most players need a group of at least 3 to do that. And I have seen hundreds of times buffed camp lords down or even kill players.

The Isle of the storms event (in the middle of the lake in any borderlands map) sometimes glitches and spawns double amount of kraits. There will be about 50 kraits + 2 veteran kraits to kill (I have counted them). I can solo that, but it is difficult. Sometimes I have watched other players trying to do it and see them fail even with the normal event.

Blood Red Arachnid.2493:

Here in the US, enemy zergs love to send 20 or so random players from their zerg to chase a solo roamer.

Luckily I don’t play in NA. I have heard and read from several threads that the US meta is even more about zerging and less about tactics. But I guess many EU guilds who moved to NA servers enjoy the relatively easier points.

Being alone and chased by 20 or more can also happen in EU. I have sometimes been chased even half across the entire BL map when I play with my engineer. Few rare times I managed to survive and laughed my head off because I don’t have any easy ways to reset a fight. In those cases the 20 men steam rolled me and jumped around my corpse, I have generally gotten revenge very soon = collecting loot bags from their team.

I still think very small scale roaming (group is smaller than 5) is efficient and I am actually thinking to start lessons for Desolation players: How to capture anything solo. We need the main zerg to attack and defend against enemy zergs, but also couple of very tiny teams / solo runners besides that.

Enemy knows me as a solo roamer, but I also act as a PuG Commander. I often like to run ahead of the entire group. It is so much fun when the enemy sees me approach: “Here comes that crazy engineer alone again… oh, crap… there is too many of them… he CCed us… ouch, we are dead… dang now he is attacking our tower and not even anybody can get inside to defend it”. ;-)

Loco.4561:

After this statement I was expecting more hoping for some quality fights but Most Deso players run from my solo mesmer, they only turn around when they get reinforcements. Those that don’t run, seem inexperienced and don’t provide much of a challenge.

Mesmer. That is the reason.

Guardian and warrior are the two most common professions, probably followed by thieves. If the mesmer is any good, warrior will not have any chances in 1 vs 1 against a mesmer. That is simply how the professions are designed. Most WvWvW guardians are more or less support bunkers. Lots of sustainability, but not enough burst damage nor conditions to kill any decent mesmer alone.

If you built your mesmer for solo roaming, don’t expect much any challenge from anybody. I am now talking about e.g. the shatter burst, phantasm or immortal mesmer builds. If you are traited and geared properly you will have superb advantage over most WvWvW builds. It is not a learn to play issue. If you geared and traited your mesmer for solo play, you should be able to win most 1 vs 1, even if your skills are medicore and the enemy is playing near perfect game.

Most players who equipped themselves for solo roaming and picked an easy profession for that e.g. a thief or a mesmer, have an inflated ego about their own skills. Of course if you meet a player who is geared for zerg fights you will have an advantage. Need I to tell you that I also solo kill bronze xxx or champion xxx titled enemies alone and I am not geared for solo play. Yesterday once again I saw Piken thieves running away from me. Some fools followed and you know what happened to them when they were finally alone against me. I use a hybrid jack of all trades build, not optimal for any anything, but okay in everything. But even that gives me a slight advantage over those who are running alone in a zerg build.

zerg build |———————————— hybrid —-——————————| solo build

WvWvW really isn’t about solo fights. If they happen on the way while you are doing supply camps, quaggans, sniping enemy dolyaks or running from keep to keep etc, let that be. I call them bonus points.

If you want to stop complain how enemy is not giving you enough challenge in 1 vs 1, start playing a solo warrior. Yes, I also sometimes (usually just once per week) solo roam as a warrior in WvWvW, despite my warrior isn’t made for solo runs.

Blood Red Arachnid.2493:

Take any group of 5 players, and they’ll capture camps and kill Dolyaks five times faster.

You are now making couple of false assumptions:
- that 5 man group also travels 5 times faster than a solo player, which of course is fallacy. Big part of the time is actually spent moving around and solo player can do that as efficiently
- that the 5-man team never need to fight against enemy invadersand always captures the supply at right time, in other words when the lord is not buffed, no need to wait

I have found that at least here in EU top tiers a solo roamer without any stealth or teleportation skills can survive much longer than most small teams. One can stay alive hours upon hours. Enemy zergs rarely chase after solo players as it is not efficient, but enemy 5 man-team might chase a solo player (which is not then doing the supply camps). A 5 man team on the other hand often gets the interest of an enemy zerg, thus facing complete or partial wipe.

I agree that 5-man is of course better in building stuff and defending towers. But for supply camps and quaggans etc. 5 solo players all capping different targets would probably get more their server than 5 players moving in one group.

Repuran.1859:

I’m getting sick of this “if you can’t beat them, join them” mentality that a lot of people on deso seem to be picking up. The style of play we have atm is no different from Vizunah’s which is why people are moaning, we nightcap undefended objects and all travel in 1 blob. You say your happy you wasn;t here when IRON were around but tbh the guilds we had apart from IRON like GH, VoTF, Bull, and FG would of done a lot better than our current group is with even less people.

Even in Desolation’s prime it never had this blob or nightcap mentality, it would battle in fair numbers and be strongest in prime time, atm our tick in prime time is really low and we are just as strong at 4am in the morning which is pathetic.

I know you well, but I need to disagree. Visunah and Desolation are very different for many reasons:

Desolation has and probably never will be as well organized as Visunah. We are more of a bunch of individuals. Not to repeat what the above poster well said, here are my points:

1) Visunah is more about defense and server points, than personal fun

When a VS keep is under attack I can see all of the stop their current activities and rush to defend it. I have witnessed at least couple of hundred times their zergs or roaming teams pass me unharmed even if I am capping something when they are hurrying to defend their objective. When a similar situation happens what do you Desolation players doing? Well, killing the sentry of course! Everybody knows that fighting a guard sentry is more fun than rushing into own Garrison and see that no skills no longer work due the mega lag.

2) Visunah is mostly blob + sniper thieves

I have done hundreds of hours solo roaming against Visunah. They have sniper thieves and that is it. Besides their thief teams (yes, they usually run in pairs), Visunah has almost no other solo roamers to speak of (yes, there is the occasional mesmer or ele etc or warrior or guardian lost from their zerg). Today me and my fellow guild mate necromancer have been mostly fighting against a Piken roaming team: thieves (+ some other classes like mesmer) abusing perma stealth. And no, they didn’t kill me a single time, so I am not raging here.

3) Desolation’s weakness has been and still is morning, noon and early afternoon

Especially during the week we lack players on those hours and from past match ups we saw Visunah had much better numbers on those hours. Then you can see our tier 3 keeps flipped with enemy using golem rushes or just capping with superior numbers while we are outmanned. I fail to understand how this is different from night capping. Every server has gaps in their coverage and every single server abuses the weak moments of the enemy server. Should we be blaming Piken and Kodash for morning and day time capping if they have more players on that time!?! Of course not.

4) Piken has some really strong guilds running the melee train meta

Huge amount of warriors and guardians, backed by elementalists, couple of necros and mesmers. Well-timed Battle standards to rez allies, tons of boon stacking and constant condition removal. Arenanet designed the game so that currently this meta is the strongest. Of course such melee train will demolish most PuG blobs, but is it because it the PuGs are bad and not in the TeamSpeak or because this meta is just too good?

Many Desolation guilds don’t have so strong melee front line as people just tend to run whatever build and profession they want and are simple smaller in numbers. Even if we combine two guilds to make up the numbers, we are often on different TeamSpeak channels, haven’t practiced together. We simply won’t be able to match that meta. So of course I am proposing Desolation to play a different game. Cap as many small objectives as possible exactly at same time in prime time. Our main group will probably get beaten by the enemy guild teams most of the time, but the enemy cannot at the same time defend every single supply camp and tower if we are fast. GH and FG are very good and I saw them all playing at Desolation before. VotF and GH are probably the best guild teams in EU right now, but outside their zerg, running either solo or just 2-3 guys, I have been collecting loot bags from some of them. Now it is time for Desolation to show that we can do stuff in very small groups or alone.

Now the question is:
Is winning at afternoon + evening the only real win?

I support this idea.

After 6+ months of unfair match ups, Desolation finally got their dream matchup: Deso vs Piken Square vs Kodash. EU rank #6 vs 7 vs 8. So far the match up has been even and interesting. I know Desolation is strongest during weekend, but I have also heard Piken is really strong during the weekdays, especially weekday evenings, so I am anticipating a very close match up.

Piken has a lot of ex-Desolation guilds, so here is my “hi” to them as well.

Dawdler.8521:

They didnt seem to have any problems bringing in a ton of manpower to defend Hills in Deso border an hour or so ago. Even Piken had more people than usual at this time and we where still pushed out.

But its weekend and vacation so its pretty skewed in terms of “regular” numbers.

Yeah, we now have a lot of people on Deso BL, painting it all blue. I have been there as well, not commanding, but sometimes running with the zerg, sometimes soloing the camps and stuff. Zero deaths today as well.

But now it is weekend. Still too early to tell what will be the final results. It is nice to see both Kodash and Piken having some roaming teams, who play nicely.

Ins.7139:

It’s still the weekend, the same happened when we fought SFR, but as soon as we hit the week days they caught up and then smashed us with our low day time presence. I’m sure The tables will be turned in the week and Pikens Russians will be morning capping without much resistance

Exactly. A lot of people on this thread have complained about the night capping, but the sad fact is Desolation generally lacks people during the morning, noon and most of the afternoon a as well. For many weeks I have seen enemy taking our upgraded keeps and towers with multiple golems on those hours, while we often “enjoy” the outnumbered “buff”. What makes it so different from the night capping? No EU server has perfect 24/7 coverage.

Desolation hasn’t won a single time this year and I think we really deserve a win. We don’t have big WvWvW guilds. We are mostly PuGs, but so what. We cannot summon a big organized melee front line on every single borderline. But with the skill lag, what is so cool about melee trains running into each other when just skills #1-#3 work and you cannot even use any of your active heals? As a PuG commander and a solo roamer I want to see the tightly packed melee train meta blown sky high, to the land of mega lag where it belongs. Medium armor needs to be brought back to the meta. Next week, if I have time, I will begin engineer training for Desolation players. It would be cool to have Tinker Teldo + some other amazing engi players there as well. Let’s blow up this meta for good.

I am also thinking of holding classes of how to solo the supply camps with any profession. Teach our players how to cap the hell out of enemy. Zero supplies for enemies. Constantly contested keeps and towers all over the map.