Guild Wars 2

Do siege still take retaliation damage or did they remove that? Back a month or so ago I recall that stacking + ret was the best way to take out trebs.

Eh, S/D isn’t quite that exposed, but yeah I noted the RNG of stripping ret.

Pyroatheist.9031:

7. Thief
S/D thief

A canny S/D could strip ret 100% of the time. With some heals /halftank setup they could probably win consistently if they know you’re using a ret tank build.

They’d have to be pretty sharp though to avoid attacking into chaos armor. Man that would be a longass grindy fight. The boon strip wouldn’t hit the iDefender though. Also it’s only RNG to strip the Ret itself. They’d probably still be at a disadvantage.

30 Dueling can also be used effectively so you can pick up Duelist’s Discipline + Deceptive Evasion for the combo field abuse with iD. Someone ran an sPvP build focused on Confusion, relying on the combo field heavily.

Well, the OP is saying that the snowballed matches last too long, so that leads directly to a consideration of how long the matches are.

Johje Holan.4607:

Let’s face it, as said before, we know who is going to win the tier before the match even starts. But can they beat both servers at the same time?

^
This.

Player problem, player solution.

How easy is this.

This is basically what was about to happen to HOD in the first month, with JQ and ET about to enter T1 at the same time. Unfortunately TA bailed the week that they would have hard a straight 1v2.

In terms of snowballing, all ANet can reasonably do is to give the losing servers the tools to retake footholds on the map. IMO, there should be some tweaks to supply buildup, stored supply, and siege decay. But, that’s about it.

EnRohbi.2187:

I think that with weeklong matches, servers are pretty locked into their fate with scores by Monday or Tuesday. At least if the matches were 2-3 days long, servers could really rally together for a shorter period of time and win a match or two that they would have otherwise lost because they don’t have the population or stamina to compete for a whole week.

Monday or Tuesday is about halfway through the time period. That means you had ~4 (of 7) days of significant action.

If the matches were 2-3 days long, then after 48 hours, people would quit.

In addition you’d have absurd weekend versus weekday coverage disparities that would rock GLICKO on a match-by-match basis. Is that a good thing? Perhaps, perhaps not. It would make matches less fair, but also shake them up.

If this thread is about more fair matchups, then this solution would negatively impact the ratings. If this change is about more chaos and variety, then it would be a positive impact.

Zephyrus.9680:

EasymodeX.4062:

DotA / LoL / HoN are “snowball-y”. Seems to be doing ok for those games. Guarantee score matters more in those games than in GW2.

You also haven’t explained why momentum is unnatural.

No because in those games you win very shortly after you/team snowballs. It doesn’t drag on to become pointless.

And whatever do you mean by ‘unnatural’? It’s unnatural to drag on any kind of score-based match for a week when the winner is already decided. Clearly the fun in WvW is not primarily about the score but it just seems like a big flaw in the design.

Drag on? It’s all relative. 1-week matches in GW2 are a blink of an eye. Compare this to DAOC’s 2-year matches.

Of course, LoL’s 45 minute matches are shorter … shrug?

3-day matches in GW2 are far too fast. I would advocate 2 week matches.

No matter what time limit you set, quitters will quit halfway through.

Problem = not solved.

The current 1-week model allows for a lot of activity during the weekends, once every match.

VOLKON.1290:

I did the actual math on this… the ascended amulet (berserkers equivalent) gives you a whopping… you may want to sit down for this… ready? OK… you get a whopping 0.55% increase in damage with the ascended amulets over the exotic berserkers equivalent.

0.55%. Actual math. Damage, not dps. Outrageous imbalance?

And the Ring ups total dps by around 2.3%. Across 14 item slots, that’s around a net 10-25% increase in DPS depending on how the exact stats pan out.

So yes, if you want to be hit 10-25% harder by players geared with ascended when the full item spread comes out …

There’s also the consideration of how high you want the barriers to entry to be for fresh 80s. I already combo upleveled players for 50% more than their max health. Should I really be overkilling them by 100%?

Well yeah but the problem is that HM would double the power of the Mantras, making it more of a must-have for Mantra builds than it already is.

The generally effective WvW builds are as follows with ratings (siege, skirmish, utility):

1. Power based IP Shatter (2, 5, 3)
2. Condition based IP Shatter (1, 5, 3)
3. 30/30 Mantra DPS (5, 3, 1)
4. Glamour AOE/Confusion (4, 2, 4)
5. ‘Immortal’ Ret tank (3, 3, 2)

Basically numeric ratings out of 5, pulled out of my kitten in 30 seconds.

Bottom line is that shatter builds suck dick in sieges where phantasms and clones can never get to their targets, and melee-range shatters are few and far between.

30/30 Mantra is absurd range siege DPS, but has terrible utility and flexibility. Also a mediocre 1v1 or skirmish build.

Glamour build sucks for skirmishing but is great for AOE suppression. Tons of utility.

Tank build is good to run into an enemy, but anyone can disengage a fight and basically walk away. Good for skirmishing objectives (sitting on a supply camp) or sticking yourself into the enemy in a siege to soak their attacks and … tank. Poor damage of course, and mediocre utility.

Note that any Mesmer can swap utility abilities and instantaneously gain more utility. 30/30 Mantra build is the least flexible though.

There was a time when MoR was only 1 charge baseline.

Uh huh.

with Mantra’s you can’t use

Less misinformation plzx0x tyvm.

Well, I wouldn’t advocate shorter matches based on that rationale.

The Tues-Friday downtime for players allows them to back off from the game and relax more freely. Take some time off and watch LoL LCS, or whatever.

E.g. there’s life beyond GW2.

Week-long still allows for the conclusion of close matches when they occur. Note that “close” doesn’t have to be all 3 servers. Even if two of the 3 are close, it can be an interesting matchup.

TwoBit.5903:

@defrule
That actually gives me an idea. Instead of one giant map that the game’s engine can’t render, why not make a bunch of small or medium sized maps akin to tiles in Civilization?

Your solution does not address a problem that exists as you think it exists.

E.g. the game engine can render the map size fine. It can even theoretically render all the players fine (evidenced by my having >60 fps with any number of players on screen).

ANet has basically chosen to render / communicate a subset of players because they don’t want people running on toasters to have “lag”.

That and they’re trying to save a buck on network bandwidth, or something.

That aside, a tile or hex-based conquest wouldn’t be horrible, but it has unintended consequences.

Benefit: No queues for the game mode in general (should be enough space for everyone to fight over territory).

Disadvantage: Much smaller fight size, queue times / pop caps for individual fights disallow guilds and alliances from working together directly.

Disadvantage: Harder for an underpopulated side to take territory (they have to take territory in smaller increments, rather than just golem-dropping a keep). Also, the distribution of population auto-organizes the zergy side, giving them unnecessary advantages.

DotA / LoL / HoN are “snowball-y”. Seems to be doing ok for those games. Guarantee score matters more in those games than in GW2.

You also haven’t explained why momentum is unnatural.

Cactus.2710:

I can easily imagine that some of those things would be difficult to implement and may even have unintended consequences, but please tell me why any of that would be “silly.”

Underlined for your convenience.

ANet’s not going to overhaul WvW from top to bottom. They’d lose more players than they’d gain.

Hence, silly notion. Much better to enhance what already exists to shift it towards a better course, rather than try to re-build the entire thing.

Folk.2093:

RockonHarder.7235:

Another game he didn’t mention was Shadowbane. that was a great game.

best seige/pvp game ever; daoc was garbage compared to SB!

Shadowbane was trash. You couldn’t PvP without $ because of the death costs. You had to grind PvE for $ and then get ganked by overpowered “naked” (0 gear) PK builds.

Raw hacking and cheating meant you were always out-geared.

Game model pretty much had 0 capability of sustaining itself.

And, of course, there was SB.EXE.

SB had some vague potential, but it’s about as niche as my little pony.

Are snowballs and momentum a bad thing? Are they unnatural?

Tbh, I don’t think it’s useful to even begin any sort of discussion around “build your own keeps”. That seems silly. Edit: in the sense that it’s never going to happen. So no reason to waste the energy.

It’s more useful to discuss a combination of:

1. Making the maps larger, but structured basically the same.

2. Adding non-siege siege items, like collision walls. E.g. walls. Build a small barricade the same way you build a ram. Throw a bunch down and you can create a portable defense to protect siege. You could troll your own server since they have collision, but ohwell. Devil’s in the details.

3. Lay down a bridge across water using similar non-siege ‘siege’ items. Would also be nice to make a siege ladder, but that’s probably more complicated because it has many secondary map exploit implications that would have to be reviewed with a fine-toothed comb. The bridge idea itself would need severe QA around bay keep and the EB keep that has water terrain. Also QA under land if someone falls through the floor into water. May be able to enter the keep using the bridge. That’d be cheating.

As a random sidenote, I hate the term “sandbox”. It’s such a useless marketing buzzword.

Bottom line is that players want more breathing room in WvW to do whatthehell they want. I don’t care if it’s a sandbox or a mud pit, or a romp around the wheat fields. All good PvP implementations have a balanced combination of (a) room for players to be organic, and (b) structure to shape and stabilize the flow of gameplay.

Many tools in the map are already in place. Siege. Some terrain. Supply mechanics. Dolyaks. Sentries.

It’s not a bad setup.

It’s just too constrained and the pressure collapses the overarching strategy into zerg + treb network. More raw space would cause players to try more random kitten like siege setups in the open, more room for tactical maneuvers like feints and such. More chokepoints aside from tower/keep gates.

The WvW maps simply need more space for players to play with.

Currently the maps are mostly connect-the-trebs.

E.g. ANet trying to scientifically engineer an organic PvP implementation. Fail.

Players simply need tools to play with, and roadblocks (e.g. gear barriers to entry, PvE leveling, ascended b.s., queues) removed.

That’s kind of what he said in the prior post.

Light armor doesn’t make much of a difference.

The only tricky part is that the Toughness is useful. If a condition damage / tough/vit or condition damage / tough / power set were available, I’d be all over those in a heartbeat.

Kind of silly how ANet tries to serve up a dozen gear options, and then simply does not allow another few permutations of options.

Harder to use retaliation effectively with low toughness.

Phase retreat has a line that indicates you moved.

Phase Retreat is different — you’re actually ‘retreating’. That implies some actual motion.

The act of gaining a leap finisher involves the motion of the body through a field. For example, you move through a fire field, surrounding yourself with flames, creating a flame shield.

Blink moves you so quickly that the flames don’t actually have a chance to surround you. Too much ninja can be a bad thing.

It would be absolutely fabulous to have WvW use the sPvP ruleset / gear / etc.

Because it’s a kittening PvP game mode.

But they won’t because they’re still stuck to WoW design paradigm.

Well you don’t actually leap when you Blink. You’re just kind of … over there now.

I’ve never quite understood why more players don’t attempt to be condition and power mesmers at the same time via Carrion gear.

It’s not like retaliation scales with crit.

Too much Sharper Image humping imo.

^

The option is for the ground-targeted AOEs to automatically select your current mouse position, rather than wait for you to click the spot on the ground. It does not cast AOEs on your target.

Conditions have 100% armor penetration.

Who needs crits?

And you can only get Pvt in WvW.

QQ.

The other day I wanted to switch from a building using Berserker’s Exotics to Rabid.

I dumped some karma on a few item slots, then looked at the kittentyPvE badge cost for the chest, then the price of the chest on the AH.

Then I logged off and played some LoL.

Because I can actually play the kittening game when I log in, unlike GW2.

Thor.1756:

Rabid stats can start being earned at lvl 55 by farming TA. I stand by my claim that you can get full rabid gear, while levelling 0-80, in under two weeks through a combination of TA farm and Karma Orr gear.

OhgodthePvEdungeongrind.

Sigil ICDs are shared (proc and swaps). This has been common knowledge for awhile. They patched it in beta (with notes). It’s on the gw2 wiki. Etc.

Thor.1756:

You can level and gear a character from 0-80 in full exotic gear in <2 weeks in this game, assuming you’re not power levelling with crafting. This seems unparralledly easy to me.

You can only get a few stat spreads via crafting.

In addition, that’s a kittenton of $ grinding. Full set of exotics is somewhere around 45 gold.

Have fun getting a Rabid light armor chest. That alone was around 18g on the trader the other day.

Also: ascended items give 8-30% higher stats than exotics. So yeah, they are/will be mandatory when more slots are available.

nekos.2584:

only ask for the " rewards " so they can be equally geared with every one else and not have to waste countless hours in PvE.

But wasting countless hours in PvE incentivizes players to purchase gems from the BLTC.

Seetoo.9316:

For a long time, I’ve run a sword/pistol restorative mantras build. I just set up 3 iduelists and spam mantra of pain.

Is this right? I actually lose 749 (EDIT 137) (EDIT 86) dps trying to keep up 3 iduelsits instead of 2 iduelist + 1 scepter clone?

….

Your model is wrong because you are incorrectly comparing 3 iD versus Scept111 + 2 iD + clone.

Cancelling the extra iDs, you are comparing 1 iD versus Scep1 + clone.

This is wrong because Scep1 uses your “time” resource. Sustained iD does not. In your original statement you say you are filling your time with Mantra of Pain.

You should be comparing: 1 iD + Mantra of Pain versus Scep1 + clone.

Additionally you would want to add a comparison with 1 iD + Sword111.

TLDR: You forgot Mantra of Pain. That’s why your original analysis has unexpected results.

It just seems really strange that <insert random stats> are not transferred to illusions. No reason for it. If the player invests in the scaling, then it should scale. If they need to retune the base values, so be it.

Thor.1756:

EasymodeX.4062:

1. If said server has the realistic option to switch maps, then obviously the maps are not full with queues. Your statement here is incoherent.

The point was not that every server in t1 always has full queues on all maps during primetime. The point was that they had the potential numbers there: the assertion that SoS or SoR are hopelessly outmanned by JQ during NA prime time is either false, or now true due to people giving up (i.e. lacking tenacity).

So … you like keep trading in WAR?

Thor.1756:

I was waiting for this argument;

Oh dear, you will now play your trap card!

No server gets to t1 NA without queues on NA primetime, this argument is irrelevant to this particular discussion. If you lack numbers on primetime that’s a problem with your server’s tenacity, and you don’t belong here.

1. If said server has the realistic option to switch maps, then obviously the maps are not full with queues. Your statement here is incoherent.

2. Based on the context, “JQ” is getting the outmanned buff in this discussion because their teammates are bailing. It is strange to claim that the other server has a problem with ‘tenacity’.

Thor.1756:

The point was that if SoR wants even fights, they needed to learn to split single guilds into multiple BL’s, to match their opponents movements, instead of just whining about their opponents not wanting to fight. They’ll get their fights, and they might actually get some PPT too.

If SoR wants even fights, SoR has to recruit more peoples. Or breed with rabbits. Err, like rabbits.

Patronizing armchair general is a waste of time.

^
Old thief megaburst gimmick was PW + Steal (steal traited for longass daze) with quickness.

You should be able to interpret most of their build by analyzing your combat log.

Edit:

Fact of the matter is that a glass cannon can chunk down any target in the game. The difference is that another soft target would be evaporated, while a tanky spec will just be “surprised” that they lost a lot of HP.

Keep in mind that Mesmer ‘bunker’ builds typically require some setup time. If you were cold, then you are squishier than when you get going. As an example, the ‘immortal’ build whips out 3 illusions for 9% damage reduction, a phantasm for regen (and prot), and then possibly another phantasm to soak half damage. Those all take time to build up. If you were blindsided, you’d take 40-300% more damage than you would when you have all your stuff rolling.

The trick is that a full tank build still puts out 33-50% of a glass cannon’s damage output, and you take 10-30% of the damage that a gc would take.

Orikx.9671:

EasymodeX.4062:

What this game really needs is a website output that displays points acquired per player, points acquired per guild, points per death, kills per death.

Then we could have a hell of a lot of fun comparing IRS.

But then this game would have to have points …

I dread the day they ever even think about putting something like this in. Keeping track of peoples k/d ratio does nothing but kill good fights. People are to worried about their ratio to ever fight a fight unless they know they are going to win.

Track total kills all you want but never track K/D ratios.

Lol. K/D and IRS are miscellaneous. Probably should have left it off.

I think most people would be generally more interested in total points accumulated by guild, and points per guild member.

Camelotherald is one of the best things to ever grace the MMO PvP scene.

K/D and IRS are perfectly legit. No need to bash the playstyle/goals of other players. You can play, instead, for total points.

Either way, all this inter-server and inter-guild bickering and “borderland hopping” is shallow without hard [fun] stats to back it up.

What this game really needs is a website output that displays points acquired per player, points acquired per guild, points per death, kills per death.

Then we could have a hell of a lot of fun comparing IRS.

But then this game would have to have points …

ophidic.1279:

MMOs are not about dialog.

“Cookie-cutter characters, white knights, goodie-two-shoes, you name it. There’s no real personality.” – But that’s the story THEY wrote!

SWTOR.

.

Condition damage benefits from condition duration as a secondary scaling stat.

Many condition-heavy builds feature precision for additional condition procs as a tertiary condition stat.

In addition, combo field abuse tends to favor conditions in general.

Obviously the main purpose of Into the Void in super-small-scale is to pull the targets under your Warden, and then you iLeap and immobilize them with a Blurred Frenzy and MW on top.

The pull direction and distance of ITV is highly predictable. I feel like this is a repeat conversation of 3 months ago.

I am curious to know how best to use abilities against large packs though, since most of their abilities seem single target, maybe with a bounce

Obviously not using enough GS + iBerserker + Mind Wrack // swap to Staff Chaos Storm condition tanking.

Yeah I keep going back to 30/30 Mantras because I like seeing my targets fall over.

I have a pack of Carrion gear and will spec for megaGlamour spam + blind/confuse for some WvW zerging. Sometimes. It’s pretty hilarious anti-turtling and general suppression.

But, blowing people up is more entertaining. Especially when 2 underleveled people stand next to each other and Mirror Blade + Mind Stab just melts their entire HP bars.

It’s too addicting. I’m still going for record MWx1 crits. I need to fine-tune my food and stuff to try to get higher. Sharpening stones.

Pyroatheist.9031:

1. No clue
2. wat
3. I’m pretty sure its a 5 target aoe like everything else, but I don’t really know.

2. Does retaliation proc when you block an attack. Or does the block negate the combat step where retaliation is inflicted.

I figure that standing in the middle of 50 people with Blurred Frenzy and Retaliation could either be epic on a scale unimaginable, or it could be a colossal waste of time.

Edit: Or more specifically, Blurred Frenzy followed by Mimic followed by Mirror followed by Blurred Frenzy followed by blurred inscriptions signet followed by Distortion followed by a dodge followed by Blurred Frenzy followed by another dodge etc.