Guild Wars 2

Engineers use boons to keep themselves and allies alive. That’s what Jonathan Sharp says. This post isn’t to complain that he is wrong, it’s to prove whether he is right. I’ve seen a video here an there of elixir engi’s buffed up and kicking face, but I’m not sure whether their success is greatly enhanced by the boons, or whether the boons are just a nice little addition to otherwise high-level play at the expense of taking up 2 or 3 utility slots.

So what boons significantly increase an engineer’s and his allies’ survivability? What boons significantly make the enemy re-think ganking an engineer?

P.S. I ask mainly to figure out a good role for my engi in a variety of WvW situations, because right now my engineer strikes fear in the heart of nobody.

Wow, what a terrific even match this week. Wish I could spend some time helping my server, but hey real life family trumps that.

I read just the OP before posting. I can say that a couple guild mates, who I consider perhaps slightly above average level players (and incidently better than me), recently rushed their theives to 80 and geared them just so they could own face in WvW. And they are. They are running glass cannons but the culling issues are making them pretty much untouchable.

Here is the best thing you can do. When you jump into a WvW zone ask in map chat where help is needed. If you get an answer there you will find others doing stuff to help your team. If you don’t get an answer there might not be much going on in that map, so try one of the other three zones.

How serious are you in this question, because the above answers are likely assuming you are just being sarcastic.

Though GoM is getting stomped this match I’m happy to see that we have people actually playing anyway! Sucks when your whole server just opts out of WvW altogether because of a bad week.

It’s not all about transferring up. Largish guilds frequently transfer to lower ranked servers, greatly increasing their population, and ride them in consecutive wins. The process repeats so that those players are nearly always on the winning team. Server pride does not factor in to the equation, only ego and guild pride. I’ll not bother giving an example lest I hurt feelings.

I won’t have a chance to log in for a while. Score update?

Okay I will do that. I noticed it the last time I ran CoF, which was almost a month ago. The weakness would expire before my next Tranq dart landed and it never stacked. I haven’t really played my Engi much lately. But I’ll try again and see if I can figure out if I was just being silly, or if I can find a way to reproduce it.

Eviator.9746:

If you have a condition duration food buff (pizza) or spent points in Explosives, Elixir Gun’s Tranquilizer dart will not apply additional duration of weakness.

OP were you able to confirm this?

I know this has been covered in other threads, but why? That little thing does attack stuff. It even takes a hit or two for me in PvE. It’s not a 100% thing (minion AI?), but it’s not 0% either.

Good luck, have fun. I predict my server (GoM) will be down 10k by 24 hours because we aren’t as good as many on our server think we are, and the fair weather players that got us a huge win last week will go back to PvE for a week. I say this with malice toward none…it’s just how it goes.

You HoD and ET folks are tough. It’s too bad the victory goes to the server with higher numbers and not the server with better skills and tactics. We at GoM have a lot to learn, and I suspect we’re going to be schooled next week in tier 6. Once we get down 10k, the fair-weather PvEers will be back to running FoTM.

I mis-spelled the word Reanimator when creating my necro and didn’t realize it until he was level 60. Add me to the list of players wanting to spend real-world money just to change my character’s name.

Kodiack.2783:

Just wanted to clear up your incorrect statement about Anvil Rock. We fully acknowledged that we had a numbers advantage. I’m sure if you take the time to read through the match-up thread you will see that plenty of us made it clear we won that mach due to numbers.

-K

Indeed. I made an incorrect generalization. I just wanted to head off the argument that GoM was going to claim it was all tactics. But I was unsuccessful at that, so it doesn’t really matter.

Kardiamond.6952:

And what I read on the first page? : GoM are winning because of superior tactics and planning. Stop dreaming up guys.

I think you chose only a few select posts in order to fit your agenda. If you were being intellectually honest, you would note that people are saying both are the cause of the scores, but MOST are saying its the numbers, mostly fair weather PvEers. Nice try!

Well this week a clan mate took advantage of the mismatch to finally get all the badges he needed for the gift. While roostapro seems bound and determined to get this thread locked for trolling and insults, his posts are clearly positively charged and not at all bitter. He is trying to spread holiday cheer, expressing amusement at poor tactics used during a week when it doesn’t matter because his server has no chance. He puts a smiley at the end of his posts, after all.

:)

gkaare.8576:

Firing a projectile through the combo field does not remove a condition from you. It removes a condition from an ally that your projectile hits.

I FRAPS’d a video that says otherwise, though it’s 2 months old. In PvE I got a spider to apply a long poison, set down Super Elixir, then got inside it, then fired my 20% projectile through it. It took a few tries to get the condition removed before it expired, but it did work.

However I get the sense it doesn’t work as it should. On average 20% of the time it should remove the condition on the first shot. It never did, and most of the time it took more than 5 shots. Even with a 100% projectile (e.g. Rifle Turret’s toolbelt skill), the condition removal was inconsistent.

If you have a condition duration food buff (pizza) or spent points in Explosives, Elixir Gun’s Tranquilizer dart will not apply additional duration of weakness. I don’t know whether it correct displays the duration (to the quarter second) in the tool-tip. Frankly I don’t care.

I realize it only applies 1 second. I also realize condition durations are rounded down to the tenth of a second. But if I have +24% condition duration, the weakness applied should be 1.2 seconds, which would gain me an extra second of weakness every 5 shots. That’s something that I counted upon when making my dungeon support build, because I would spend several seconds stacking weakness, with enough extra time on the condition stack to do other things before switching back to applying weakness.

GoM here. I personally think that, though GoM does seem to have more leadership right now compared to prior weeks, our tactics and strategies in ALL aspects are extremely lacking. We’d be overrun in any even-numbered matchup within a couple days, and then everyone would go back to running fractals. There’s not much “learning” going on. So unlike Overworld I’m not too confident in our future, but I’ll conceed I’m wrong if/when it happens.

Another “you guys are bad because you run in a zerg” post… Yes, we all know they are less effecient at map control. But look at the bar at the top of the screen. It doesn’t matter, does it? Let the fair-weather WvWers on GoM (my server) learn the ropes and get an idea how this game mode works. We can refine tactics later when it will actually make a difference. I’m just as upset about the poor matchup, but I’m not about to go around whining and being a poor loser/winner.

GoM here. Yesterday I jumped briefly into WvW. I was amazed by the turn-out! Anyone who says it’s not a numbers thing is kidding themselves. BP said the same thing a few weeks back when they started jumping ahead. AR said it last week when they jumped up. Both servers were made fun of because of thier niavety. Maybe we didn’t get transfers, but WvW participation is way up compared to the last three weeks. Maybe we have a lot of fair-weather players. And perhaps the weather if fair because of the efforts of the above commander organization early on in the matchup. But in any case it’s unfortunate that we have yet another mismatch. I’m starting to think that disabling free server transfers will not fix the problem. Once one server gets far enough ahead, it’s over. That takes at most 2 days. I’m starting to think 3-day matches are required, with faster point gain toward the end of the matchup.

Not to worry, I believe GoM is happy at tier 7, as long as our competitors didn’t get an influx of players. On the other hand, you can never rule out the possibility that folks will see this matchup as an opportunity to transfer to GoM for a week. They really need to stop the free server transfers already…

More WvW players joining our server means GoM moves up in tiers. Does it necessarily mean more fun? I say no. A few weeks back BP, AR, and GoM were so close in server population that tier 7 was the most even matchup, and we liked it that way. We actually discouraged transfers into the tier. Of course, it happened anyway, first with BP and then with AR. The point is that if WvW is to be fun on GoM again, we have to be competitive in our tier, less fickle when a week starts to look bad, and we have to have some kind of organized strategy and tactics. An alliance helps these things, but more server population does not.

Lightsbane.9012:

i’m merely telling you that already like minded people shouldn’t need an alliance on top of an alliance to…be like minded.

Sounds reasonable. I don’t suppose there are folks in CC who would take up leadership responsibility, not in the form of an alliance, but in general to help improve our server’s organization? Getting out the names of leaders who people trust is a big step in the right direction. I.e. “Hey Korvus Mindbend is on, let’s see if he needs our guild to do something.”

Lightsbane I’d like to get your take on the concept of organized leadership. You seem to be advocating no kind of organizational structure under the assumption that smaller disjoint groups will successfully coordinate as a whole, and that individuals will reach out in order to improve their own personal efficiency. I’d argue that hasn’t worked so far at the strategic level, but that is neither here nor there.

What I want to know is, what do you propose as an alternative to alliances, and how does that alternative produce results?

I’m not seeking to build an alliance. I should have thought about the topic title more before posting. I’m waiting for those who are or want to be leaders to reveal themselves. Often times this comes from larger guilds. There’s a lot of small guilds doing their own thing, and they are terrific assets. But a server also needs a higher level of coordination from time to time to do things like:

• Defend against a zerg (“Five minutes ago I said they were at X and nobody came to defend”)
• Execute a strategy (“Squad A take titan then head east, squad B grab the quaggan, we need 15 defenders to stay with me while we upgrade our keep, the rest head with Scarlet Johansen to take DB”)
• Create some kind of off-peak presense so that we at least don’t get run over

Hey, I’m a realistic man. If it can’t be done it can’t be done. If nobody wants to step up, so be it. We’ll just be stuck at the bottom of our tier indefinitely. Leadership inspires. Sometimes it organizes and manages. It certainly doesn’t stand back and complain because groups aren’t self-coalescing to get things done.

I will keep this main post up to date as long as this thread remains active.

Goals:

• Foster organization and participation in WvW on Gate of Madness
• Provide a resource for players and guilds to communicate and coordinate
• For now, become a competitive server in tier 7

Guilds

• BB – Small guild of friends who play late nights. Often runs in small groups with LoR and RH flipping objectives.

Here is stuff we can track:

• Guild names, how many people they have, how many are usually in WvW and when, and what they like to do. Perhaps info on the names of leaders, commanders, whether they are recruiting, whether they have voice chat
• Weekly objectives, e.g. “Guild leaders please have your guild claim and upgrade keeps and towers”, “Looking for 2-4 small guilds to raid supply camps in the other BLs”. Maybe this shows our cards too much, so maybe we don’t do this.

P.S. I realize this thread could flop. It’s up to you.

GoM here. Look my guild chose Gate of Madness because we liked the name and, during BWEs, it was in the sweet spot between queue times and WvW population. The server is nothing like it was back then. It’s a ghost town both in WvW and in the rest of the world. The only place I see people is Lion’s Arch, and since I don’t stand around and loiter, I’m rarely there.

My guild and I would like to join and work with WvW-centric guilds, but what are they? I’ve seen a lot of ONYX tags and I’ve heard about AI (missing special characters). But I never see any effort to recruit except small guilds just starting up. Nobody wants to be a leader, it seems. I don’t…I have a real life that precludes me from spending much time in game, let alone running server operations.

If we don’t have the leadership, and we don’t have the infrastructure (voice chat), and we don’t have the organization (alliances) and we don’t have the population (the world is empty) and we don’t have the interest (everyone is doing FOTM), what chance do we have?

This is a terrible poll, generally weighted toward getting feedback on obtaining “stuff” in game. “Stuff” is not a major factor in my enjoyment of the game, and I trust that AN will not take this poll as evidence that loot and income is the biggest issue with regards to game longevity or overall fun. Nonetheless I will answer the questions because maybe someone at AN will use it.

Edit: Nevermind. I got to question 15 where it asked for one word for something that needs improvement. One word? Here is one word: sheep. I choose not to be one.

Sword 2 has condition removal. Not a full solution to your problem, but a step (pun?) in the right direction.

I was just about to post a topic asking if I understood the thief in PvE, and after looking at the replies, I think I do. I wanted my third alt to be a thief, but I was having trouble coming up with a fun solo leveling build. Let’s face it, you need to be able to take on a bunch of NPCs at once, including veterans, when solo leveling. Coming from an engineer and necro, that’s straight-forward. From what I can tell, thieves have 4 primary options for doing this:

1) Kite and cluster bomb
2) Sword/Pistol for perma-blind
3) Caltrops and Death Blossom
4) Jump in and out of stealth

While trying all these out, I came across personal observations for each:

1 & 2) these are boring
3) initiative issues early on, conditions tend to be rather poor at tagging mobs in group events for loot, a single mistake is frequently fatal
4) though this is a lot of fun and fits my playstyle, fights take rather longer, it’s tough to do enough damage to multiple mobs in group events to tag them for loot, initiative is an issue early on, and a single mistake is frequently fatal

Do I have this right? If so, perhaps thief is not for me.

Bomb 4 is a smoke field. So is the Flame turret overcharge. Elixir gun 5 is a light field. Napalm and I think grenade 2 is a fire field. Toss elixir U is a randomly chosen of three fields. Engineers are great combo field generators, and okay finishers (we have a lot of blasts but you have to nerf your build to use them).

I’ve enjoyed the fairly even matchup. It’s best when anyone can win. When the activity levels fluctuate, it gets out of whack. GoM has been uncharactaristically low pop the last couple weeks, and I’m not sure why.

Dovgan.8605:

Ask any GoM player that got to run through those ranks, it’s a super fun time from what I hear.

Yeah, that wasn’t so fun. Never a good matchup for us above tier 7.

I know HoD and ET are not devoid of WvW players. Now that they are in tier 6 I suggest they start picking it up again because from here on out you’re playing against servers that don’t have a 24/7 presense. Waiting until you get to tier 8 then playing again isn’t going to help stabilize the match-ups.

One of the devs said he sees necros as the “profession you cannot get away from”. That means cripples, chills, some immobilizes, and a couple teleports. If a necro can stay alive, it will often win longer battles. It hard to beat a condition necro using a condition build because necros can thrive on them. A burst build does okay, but one has to get past the death shroud first, which takes some time. The above mentioned dev also said that necros don’t have that many escapes, because that would be too powerful.

Bleed is a condition necro’s bread and butter damaging condition. He can’t apply many poisons, or any burns, to my knowledge.

I don’t mind the same matchups as long as they are relatively even. Seems we’re not quite there yet.

Looks like BP has a good start. Maybe they’ll move up a tier next week and ET will move down. I hope we (GoM) and AR put up enough fight that DR stays in the bottom tier for at least another week.

Your point is valid. Less a problem with game design and more a problem of MMO mentality. My guild members happen to also be my friends. Friends stick together, and there’s give and take. I do group things I don’t necessarily want to do, and they do group things they don’t necessarily want to do. So while belonging to a guild doesn’t mean you get to do the things you want, playing games with friends often does.

Knote.2904:

To the poster above me, I’d say engy’s are much better team condition scrubbers. Elixir Gun and Thrown Elixir trait, enough said. Necro has a broken Plague Signet that doesn’t scrub and a 5 second condition convert on a 60 second cooldown. Putrid Mark is NOT a reliable ally condition scrubber whatsoever.

Engy can do alot of neat things.

I stand corrected. Elixir gun is awesome at removing conditions on teamates.

Engineer is my main. Necro is my alt. I find these two to be the funnest of the 8 professions. In a dungeon both provide a good amount of debuffing (weakness, blinds, chills, etc.) which fits my playstyle. Necros are super team condition cleansers. Engineers are pretty good at all around support with a variety of heals and buffs. Necros have somewhat better control, for those bosses which are not immune. Engineers have at least double the combo potential.

I’m going to give the slight edge to engineers, because engineer cooldowns are more favorable. I typically have 2 kits slotted at any given time (aside from the med-kit, which I use 95% of the time). Elixir gun and grenades or bombs in dungeons, grenades and bombs in world PvE and WvW. Sometimes I’ll throw on the flamethrower for a bit of variety, though it tends to have some of the hit registration issues that we also experience with certain necro skills.

You know I could go on for a while. Given that you’ve already played 6 of the 8 professions, why not just go the rest of the way and play them both?

TeamBattleAxe.3901:

Hymnosi.5928:

I’m just glad GoM isn’t crushing our two humble servers like bugs as every other server that visits us tends to do.

We’ll, we’re TRYING to… but you jerks keep taking everything back. :P

I just want to comment and say that your character names are awesome!

Jaer.1029:

…

Our traits are different because I’m lvl 57 and haven’t gotten my book yet, but your “rotation” (for lack of a better word) is precisely what I’ve stumbled upon. That makes me think I’m on the right track. The downside for general open-world PvE is that the wells and life transfer have long enough cooldowns that I have to take breaks between fights. Contrasted to my engineer, where I have very viable grenades and bombs on auto-attack and more reasonable cooldowns, necro feels weaker. But eh, I guess that’s just the nature of being a necro.

“Hey guys, nice battles last night.”

“This week’s win brought to you by the skilled and dedicated commanders of GOAT.”

“Thanks for the badges.”

These are the kinds of fun, perhaps sometimes slightly abrasive but good-natured comments that would make this community better. But I guess good sportsmanship is not a clause in the TOS. Instead we get stuff like “u zerg noobs” and “y u gang up on us”. What a shame. The whole WvW forum needs to be closed because people cannot be civil.

Tagging yeah. Also for solo PvE because I’m on sporadically. Conditions have worked very well for me, but I’m trying to expand my horizons. (Level 55 so far). Also conditions tag all right, but I suspect they don’t do enough up-front damage because I seem to get a much lower loot rate (both PvE and WvW) than I do with, for example, my engineer.

Well at first I dismissed marks, because they seemed condition-based, but on second look, maybe it works. Maybe power scaling is good enough for power/precision.

I believe I read that the Axe used to be a multi-target weapon in BWEs, but it was removed. I want to play around with Direct Damage (DD) builds for PvE AoE, but all I can really find are wells (with annoyingly long cooldowns) and DS’s life transfer. Minions are also, for the most part, single-target except for bone minions. What options am I missing?

GoM here. Good match all around! That this post turns into accusations, name-calling and finger pointing week after week demonstrates poor sportsmanship, in my opinion. A bit of friendly and tasteful chest pounding is warranted. The way it’s going now this post is going to be closed by a moderator soon.

Nalivan.6451:

I do not take kindly to 40-50 AR hitting me in that back while i am sieging a tower that has been a thorn in my side all day. Oh and by the way before our forces even came to your borderlands we had taken all of GoM borderlands, it was just your turn.

Also you might want to get your server in that GoM is a threat mentality, because the more you attack us in undefended areas while we fight GoM, the more our players will want to wipe you off the map.

AR sure did hit us (GoM) hard tonight! They got into the throne room of SM and we held them off just barely. By the time I logged off two more sections of the outer wall were down and we were still fighting AR on the other side.