Guild Wars 2

I loved DAoC as well, but no. GW2 is based on the principle that gear and time spent does not affect PvP.

I put my time getting my ‘Ard Tiarna’ status in DAoC, and I put my time getting my gladiator title for WoW. You know what? Slapping around players because I have Ignore Pain 30, Master of Criticals 700, or my Vanquishers Gear of My Resillience is Too High for You to Hit Me is boring. Only people with serious life fulfillment issues need the sort of emasculation that comes with beating up people who can’t fight back at the same level as you.

I wouldn’t mind Realm Rank titles as a recognition reward, but I’ll vehemently oppose any sort of stat/power modification.

Zin.6170:

Warrior can have 100% swiftness uptime and can switch between GS and Sword for leaps. I’m not sure how it compares to thieves, but I get to places before anyone else.

Judging by test races, thief wins slightly in the beginning, but we pull ahead over time.

Warriors have the best sustained mobility with Sword/Horn.
Thief comes in only slightly slower.
Elementalist is probably the next, but they aren’t terribly safe to scout with.

For the record, we go by the server name “Toast”.

I’ve not seen a SoS player this entire match-up, but they still are keeping pace with us. That is a very, very weird feeling.

Chrysalis.5983:

@Dwok: So what should GoM players do.

Tell Arenanet. It’s the only thing any of us can do. The match up is tainted, but we can make it clear this can’t keep happening. We need at least a player usable ‘reset’ mechanism for the orb pedestals at bare minimum.

Scorpio Shirica.1286:

I’m fine with holding our keep, tower and supply camp in TC borderlands and just attacking GoM non-stop until their hackers are hung from the highest mountain in WvWvW.

It really only makes sense. They get permanent +hp/stats modifier for the rest of the week. Not that I’ve seen any demonstrable need to team up on them. Even with the orb buffs, they melt like butter, but these are players that know they are fighting at triple effectiveness and are perfectly fine with using the benefits because they can absolve all guilt with the words “We didn’t do it.”

No, you didn’t, but the matchup is already tainted against you. If TC or SoS wins, we won despite cheating. If GoM wins, it was because “that hacker at the beginning of the match”. What is done, is done. All we can do now is get ANet to do something about it so it doesn’t happen next week to someone else.

Every altar I’ve checked:

:/

Yep. All SoS/TC altars are busted. Not possible to cap orbs anymore.

Even outside of those two professions the trait can have value. You’re working down an enemy at a node and have just gotten him downed when one of his allies shows up and starts to revive. If that enemy player is smart he will position himself between the downed player and you forcing your rifle shots to hit just him. Then the downed player’s 4 skill will be uninterrupted, the downed player’s 2 skill can still be used against you, the blocking player’s revive isn’t interrupted by damage anyway, and you are likely about to get shafted with a 2 on 1. With cracked shot you can just keep firing through that blocking player, taking the downed player to zero and on the good side of a 1v1. Even if that other player comes after you instead of reviving you can keep the downed player targeted and position yourself so the other player is between you and the downed player and just keep working on taking that downed player to zero while damaging his ally at the same time.

Why would you even use ranged in this case? Leap into melee and get the free kill on both of them.

So how much “fun” do you expect to have with your character who fundamentally stays the same for the entire time you play the game?

I played DAoC for six years. In the first three years, every item at level cap was the same. They only difference was what weapon you used, and what proc you wanted. I logged in every day and PvPed my heart out, joked with random people, and enjoyed a truly social game of Us vs Them.

It wasn’t until DAoC introduced the third expansion that ‘gear grinding for an advantage’ model as we know it was introduced. Unsurprisingly, this also coincided with a large playerbase loss.

Blizzard though…they mastered micro-rewards. The carefully measured psychological engineering behind their game is amazing. I fell into the addiction without even realizing it while being fully aware of the process due to actively working on a research study over it.

Rhyis.7058:

Dwok Immortalus.2763:

Slightly related note, but is anyone else terrified by the rapidly increasing rate of transfers to TC once we started running away on score? I didn’t realize there were that many people doing that.

I don’t remember it happening in DAoC, but it happened in WAR. Eventually entire servers were taken down because everybody jumped ship from the losing faction to the winning one. It was slightly different I guess since the battles were done on the same server, with 2 opposing factions. Ended up being 5v1 kind of numbers and everybody would just eventually quit out of boredom. The winning and losing sides.

Well, it was prohibitively difficult to ‘start over’ unless you had organized help in DAoC. MMOs were still a very niche player base back then too.

Slightly related note, but is anyone else terrified by the rapidly increasing rate of transfers to TC once we started running away on score? I didn’t realize there were that many people doing that.

This is actually a good time to take an introspective of why you play games.

We know the whole concept of the gear grind in a MMO is engineered to develop an addiction. If you find yourself without a drive to play the game without having those grinds, it is likely you never really enjoyed the MMO Genre, but rather just the small constant reward mechanisms.

I can walk into sPvP or WvW for no reason other than to test myself against others. My SO spends hours walking around taking screenshots.

“Last I checked, crack shot was still bugged and not lowering gun skill cds by 20% =( Otherwise it is an excellent substitute but man i like having 98% crit”

It’s also great when synced with crit based sigils, like Might, Lifesteal, or Condition Removal.

Supersun.4603:

gloombot.3519:

I see us play ruthlessly against anyone -not- Maguuma, honestly.

This sure as hell isn’t playing to win when TC has +50% more score then you.

Really, you guys essentially handed this victory to TC on a silver platter. We could of had an awesome week of fighting if you guys had started singling out TC a few nights ago, but now from the way things are looking it’s just going to be TC snowballing for the rest of the week because Ebay’s and Mag’s population are starting to die off.

There have been some ridiculous double standards going on.
Ebay takes an early lead. LET’S DOUBLE TEAM THEM! TC takes the lead. Ehh, we’re going to be over here harassing Ebay while they are actually trying to fight TC.
Night time and low population right now? SEND EVERYONE TO EBAY BORDERLANDS! Don’t bother sending many to Mag’s borderlands.

Maguuma Border has been the primary target of TC most of the weekend. Overall, they’ve been fairly good sports about the amount of pain they’ve been eating all week.

If you’ve noticed, the East side of each borderland favors the bottom right Invader force heavily. The west side of the Borderlands ridiculously favors the home server. EB is too difficult to push in any direction without leaving yourself and your supply lines open, and the keeps are too close to the spawns.

Morthur.3894:

Great thread, I really look forward to trying this build out. Thanks for putting so much effort into this thread and thanks for sharing your wisdom in the first place!

I do have a question though: what exactly gives you perma swiftness in this build? As far as I can see from the online build creator the warhorn #4 skill (Charge) only lasts 13 seconds (10 sec base + 30% from boon duration bonus) and has a cooldown of 16 seconds (20 sec base – 20% cooldown from the trait).

What am I missing?

Cheers
Morthur

Excluding any other choices beyond traits, the build already increases Signet of Rage to 40s, and warhorn swift to 17s. This lets you chain Might, Vigor, and Swift indefinitely. If you get in the rhythm of refreshing them when not in combat, you can often go into a fight with over 3m worth of Swiftness.

Yoinking the orb out of the middle of 15+ Ehmry Bay, and getting away with 3k hp made my night.

Yojack.7082:

Timing your stun removal and shouts in a 6 vs 6 is obviosly crucial. If you have teamspeak or ventrilo and can coordinate your cc with massive burst….well yeah you are going to be prettykittengood regardless.

I’ve noticed there seems to be a bug with ability 4 on the warhorn. Occasionally it will use both condition removal ‘ticks’ on one immobilize, instead of using the stock ability to strip the immobilize, and then converting one of the remaining buffs. My guess is it has something to do with the priority code that the conversion uses though.

On that note, have you figured out the details on the priority code yet?
From what I can tell, from first cleared to last:

• Immobilized
• Chilled
• Burning / Poison / Bleeding (Whichever is stacked higher)
• Vulnerability

I’m also trying to get a good video of this spec in action, but I keep forgetting to start recording before giggling like a schoolgirl upon seeing enemies.
The amount of people on this forum running glass cannon builds and then complaining about no survivability, and that they can’t get close enough to melee are getting ridiculous.

Waar Kijk Je Naar.8713:

Tested this on 2 pc’s, 1 relatively low-end and 1 relatively high-end (see below).
It happened on both pc’s, no matter what graphic settings were used.

At one point, the GPU-usage of the high-end pc was at 60% (with video memory around 40% usage) while the CPU usage was at around 70%. FPS still at a steady 110, but a lot of people are invisible.

What seems a bit weird to me is that it renders all allies -even those half a mile away-, but not enemies 5 feet away.

From my tests, it seems to be network based more than anything.

Jnaathra.6549:

So something you gonna have to put up with on the zerg servers. I’m on Tarnished Coast and I have never experienced it.

We’ve had it happen on TC also.
The most notable was a three way battle for Maguuma Garrison on Saturday night. The server suddenly decided that it was only going to render 10 people on the screen at any given time. Sure, i could still hit 10-70 people with a single melee swing, but I couldn’t see them. I don’t think Maguuma or EB ever knew the other side was there, and we held the garrison only because the Guild Lord was permanently invisible.

The real fun times were when the system decided that I wasn’t important enough to render on my own computer.

GARMAD.3427:

I would love to see a site where the different worlds can communicate in a more professional manner…

We will never parley with you, vile [Maguuma Invader]! You will remain the nameless bloodstains on our swords along with [Ehmry Bay Invader].

Edewen.8304:

EB has been alliance free clearly if you watch the map. But there are more maps then EB and frankly when you witness firsthand enemies stand next to each other but attack only your camp * on mag border *, Then denying is pointless. Was it as wide spread as it seemed, probably not, but even the one morning had EBs morale down so low we had no queues last night.

As someone who has operated in Maguuma Border all weekend…

There are two forces. The ‘Zerg’, which is roughly half of the total TC forces, spends all of its time at the bridge/ruins. The other half is the force run by one of TC’s two Commanders that is constantly harassing the top half of the map. Because of the huge distance between groups, I admit, it would look like we are focusing solely on one team depending on viewpoint.

Maguuma Borderlands probably hosts with the most organized TC forces we can field. Even the force at the ruins has their own Vent.

Supersun.4603:

Frankly at this point, unless we feel like fighting for second, there needs to be an alliance between Emmy and Mag because TCs night presence is ridiculous compared to both of ours.

Whoever says Emmy has a better night presence then TC is just flat out lying. They are virtually sweeping every zone around 5 AM PST when Emmy seems to die off for the night. During the day we have decent fights, but at night TC is just clobbering us all through sheer numbers.

I will say that there is SOMETHING fishy going on though. TC is selectively avoiding Mag at night even though they could easily wipe out a lot of their camps with minimal effort and instead are working on wiping whatever last few places Emmy has on the map.

Tonight will be the first night we see ‘nightcapping’ really deal damage if it happens. Maguuma and TC have no trouble over the weekends, but on weekdays, the populations drop significantly at night.

What I worry, is that with TC in the lead by a significant margin now, we’ll get a large number of ‘free win’ transfers again. I’ve already seen the queues much higher than normal.

Rulem.5720:

Thank you for posting this! I use a very similar build but with sword/sword instead of warhorn. I am excited to switch it up and try this out in a dungeon.

I also tend to use 1 banner with the regen trait instead of shout trait (but I still use 2 shouts) because I am lazy and like the passive regen better, plus it uses 100% +healing where shouts only benifit from 80%.

I tried the banner mod for the same reason, but in practice, i found I had enough uptime on regen from conversion that it didn’t make a difference.

Oh, right. >.>

This spec is awful! I can do far more damage with my greatsword! Buffs don’t last long enough to make a difference anyway!

I’ve fallen in love with this build. You become so hard to kill that dps is largely irrelevant. My best achievement so far was winning a 1v7. Spent the entire fight with almost all buffs up simultaneously. I haven’t lost a 1v1 since swapping.

My guild also loves it because of how powerful the condition reversal is when the enemy carelessly throw out AoEs with debuffs.

My stat priority is:
Pow
Vit
Precision

Roland Falantyr.3290:

Antinoobian.7259:

Wow, If I hadn’t been fighting Mag for the last few hours tooth and nail I would’ve believed the guys at EB. The funny thing to me is that right now it looks from my point of view from the fight in Mag Borderlands like TC and EB are ganging up on Mag… when Mag is in last place.

They’re fighting back pretty well though. Can’t count how many times I defended Greenlake from EB from the west and Mag from the east, although I strongly suspect that Mag and EB have been fighting elsewhere in Mag’s borderlands.

-1. You obviously weren’t here this morning.

Btw, if you are TC i totally understand why you accepted this alliance. Basically a free win. Mag though…Playing for second. Should be ashamed.

This morning? You mean after EB nightcapped the entire map and upgraded everything? I guess it would look like we were teaming up. When our two servers wake up, see the whole map capped, and the losing server in the lead by 4k points, you better expect both sides are going to be very, very focused on you. There’s no coordination needed. We went through this crap with DB last week.

There may be nothing you can do about the fact you have a large amount of night players, but don’t be surprised when the other two servers unofficially gang up on you to offset it. And certainly don’t pretend that lead you guys got had anything to do with player ability.

Maguuma has hit us from behind on almost every push attempt we’ve made against E-Bay. We’ve done the same back.

Don’t get upset because you guys lost your 4k point lead you gained from capping the whole map from 2-9am.

Maguuma, you guys are bloody fun to fight. Our servers are almost perfectly matched.

What you see, is that Dragonbrand only failed to have all zones at cap population twice, for a total accumulated time of around two hours.

Maguuma and TC begin failing to fill the zones from 11pm → 9am. Unsurprisingly, this coincides directly with when Dragonbrand suddenly begins capturing the entire map.

Even more fun though, you also notice, even with the complete decimation Maguuma and TC have been taking, TC’s WvW population has only dropped ~16%, and Maguuma ~21%. That seems to counter some DB posters claims that they are only winning because our servers ‘gave up’ and stopped queuing.

All of this said, it’s not DB’s fault. They are acting within game mechanics, and they can’t help that they have a large night time population. I know we are all grumpy because no one likes an unfair matchup, but shouldn’t be jumping down the throats of people with no control over it.

Asbrandr.6324:

The real problem is that neither Maguuma or Tarnished Coast have a night time presence to keep up with Dragonbrand. So it’s almost pointless to even try at this point when you just night-cap and rack up points when no one’s around.

Essentially this.
We held our own initially, but overnight on the first day, DB was able to take and upgrade almost every point on the map. Dreadfall bay for example was already fully upgraded by the time we had enough players to make any meaningful attempt at fighting back, and we had to do it the slow, careful way of cutting supply lines, and trebbing from secure choke points. All while having the “Out-manned” buff.

Now that we are several days in, no one wants to queue up because any gain we make is lost overnight.

As a result, it’s more fun just to deathmatch with the few Maguuma players out there, than it is to gain the attention of the DB horde.

Keep in mind, the rewards for the Level 80 zone completions (ex: Cursed Shore) is two level 80 Exotics. Roughly 2-6g value by themselves depending on the stats and runes.

Tarnished Coast has the largest RP community, but they are still a very small section of the population. Outside of DR you won’t see any RP (not for lack of trying!). Our level 80 community also appears to be a bit ahead of the curve as well, from talking with people on other servers.

We also always win at WvW due to surprisingly uniform good leadership and tactics, so there’s that.

relaxedfire.2357:

Hey guys,

I need some help coming up with a build for WvW mainly, and I’d like to see what builds people are using in PVE as well. The gear I am using is all DPS based, (berserker exotic set) and I don’t think the build I’m using is taking advantage of it properly.

If anyone can help me out, let me know.

Oh, my weapons of choice are
- Greatsword (good burst dps)
-dual wield axe
- axe/warhorn

Everything I say will be purely anecdotal.

For WvW, the most important thing you will deal with is the Target limit. Most abilities have a maximum number of players they can hit in one tick or pulse. Melee attacks are typically restricted to 3 except in certain cases. Projectiles are typically limited to 1 (or 3 with pierce).

My current setup for WvW is Greatsword / Longbow for reasons I’ve posted before.

• Longbow – Longbow has no target limit on Arcing Arrow, Fan of Fire and the 3-pt Combustive Shot.

This one is big. Not only is the initial damage of the shot big, it stacks burning very quickly on a very large area. Following up with Arcing Arrow will take most enemies to roughly half health if you’ve taken the bonus to Longbow damage on burning targets and will grant Might x3 to all allies. Finally, chaining in a Fan of Fire will result an entire section of the enemy force dropping to low HP with 6+ stacks of burning within seconds. This combo almost always triggers a panic response, and often leads to the enemy front line breaking.

• Greatsword – Whirlwind attack and Bladetrail have no target limits.

Greatsword is not quite as drastic, but it provides high mobility, a free evade, and a gap closer. A key thing to keep in mind is that the majority of the ‘hits’ from Whirlwind attack occur at the beginning of the attack. This means ideally you can run ‘inside’ your target, whirlwind backwards, and lose no or few hits worth of damage, while distancing yourself from the target.

My favorite combo is to Rush in, whirl back, and toss the sword to cripple anyone who rushes in to follow. Hundred Blades should never be used when outnumbered.

Warriors are the best “Force Multiplier” class in game.

Examples:
Longbow 3 pt Adrenaline skill is one of the most powerful AoEs in the game. Not just for the damage, but for how long allies can use it to combo off of. Combined with an immediate follow-up of Explosive shot results in a significantly weakened enemy position, and you just gave every nearby ally multiple stacks of Might.

Banner “Spec” can make an unlimited amount of people roughly twice as powerful as their opponents while they hold position, as well as providing every buff simultaneously except Quickness and Aegis.

Greatsword ‘whirlwind’ and ‘sword toss’ skills have no target limit, allowing for large scale “hit & run & cripple” tactics.

Warriors are designed to be battlefield commanders. While Guardians determine where a battle is fought, we determine how it is fought.

amradio.2513:

No one knows how to play their class, its clear as day. Thieves are so easy to kill its just not funny, and those one-button spam moves are easy to dodge and counter. We have at most 13 initiative, which is 4 heartseekers at most. If you can’t survive 4 of those you are way too squishy.

Moving on, you shouldn’t be alone in sPvP unless you roll a class that is great at 1v1 survival. Thieves roll alone because they have great 1v1 survival skills. 2v1? Not so much, and 3v1 even less. You want to stop a thief? CC and conditions. Blind=waste of initiative which is a very valuable resource. Confusion KILLS us because we attack so fast. Weakness kills our burst dmg for obvious reasons, and leaves us with you still mostly alive while we have 0 initiative.

If you’re sitting there trying to face-tank a thief you are doing it wrong. The same goes vs a mesmer. Classes like thieves and mesmers looooove those 1 vs 1 situations. Don’t play that game.

TL;DR- Make a thief waste his initiative. You can do this via blind, protection, weakness, and dodges. Chill is also fantastic.

I believe there may be a disconnect between two groups happening here.

I actually got to witness what the OP was talking about once tonight and I can understand what the problem is now. In brief, two asuran thieves took out 27 players, and got away scot free.

How could we be so bad we couldn’t kill two people?

Somehow, that I would like to figure out if possible, these two thieves…

• had 45s+ vigor, swiftness, fury, and regen at all times
• only used three skills: Deathblossom, Dodge, and Hide in Shadows
• were able to chain 4+ deathblossoms in a row (breaking the expected initiative drought)

Because of the Dodge/DB combo, they could not be hit by bolas, static field, crippling shot, mud field, or any other condition effects. The only ability that I saw successfully land was the knockback from the Guardian’s dome spell (since it overrides dodge), which did disable one of them briefly.

This has been completely abnormal from any other skilled thief I’ve fought to date, especially when I was running a skill setup specifically to counter the HS/Deathblossom build at the time.

What I suspect, is some smart players have found a skill/trait/gear(?) combination that allows the thief class to do something unintended and as a result we have players who have come up against it thinking the class as a whole has these characteristics.

Note:
The players in question were fought in WvW so I do not know the names. They were members of the Darkhaven server, and were farming the Tarnished Coast portal keep in the Sorrow’s Furnace Homeland on 9/8/2012.

I’ll try to avoid major spoilers since this is the capstone fight of the entire personal storyline, but what you are describing does appear to be a bug. The fight should cycle between 20s of ‘do as much damage as you can’, and then the four ‘beat the mini-game and reach him again’ events. Determined only be up when he is casting his teleport or is doing a phase change.

Trahearne is admittedly very unintelligent during this fight so it is possible his interference managed to mess something up.