Guild Wars 2

I doubt this would work against top notch players, but your average FotM player caves under early pressure. They panic and mis-target their elixir tosses (or don’t do them at all) and don’t have the huge might stack. With only about half of their potential might stacks, the build is much more tame.

Also, grenades have a flight time, so constantly strafing at a distance reduces the number of hits you take from average players.

Forestgreen.7981:

Sorry kick only affects 1 target, and my rifle 5 does a better job, its instant and hits 3 (maybe5) targets on a lower CD and does way more damage. Why waste it on a 100% worthless utility.

Kick has a cone targeting area just like a melee weapon. It can hit anything in the cone, not sure on the target cap.

The problem I have with kick is that it doesn’t really accomplish anything. Sure, it’s a knockback – if it connects – but the knockback isn’t far and by the time you perform the full kick animation, you haven’t gained any time in which to attack. You almost have to partner it with an immobilize for it to be useful. If Kick did as much damage as a regular attack, it might actually see use.

Guardians tend to run Toughness and Healing and don’t pick up a lot of Vitality. Any mainstream guardian build has a lot of ways to heal, which increase the value of those two stats, whereas vitality is static.

Using http://gw2buildcraft.com/ I found my damage reduction, which is used to calculate effective HP (don’t use the number on the site). Then from your max HP, add in how much healing you think you’ll do over the course of an average fight. Then divide by (1 – Damage_Reduction_From_Armor) to get true effective HP. When I did the math for myself, I estimated that vitality was either equal or just slightly ahead of toughness at the 3100 toughness mark. However, if fights went a little longer, Toughness came out ahead.

I run a 0/5/30/30/5 build, though. If you do Healway, you have a lot more healing, which changes the outcome. In short, you’ll have to do the math yourself.

Vi Au.8341:

now db do you really want to go up a tier knowing that FA and KN both kick both our kitten and that they are now getting destroyed by TC in T2?

Things will be different for Dragonbrand in tier2. When we played those servers in tier3, the third server pretty much disappeared after reset night, so it was closer to a 1v1 with each. Having a full tier2 server as a third will lessen the pressure on DB. Also, DB has picked up a few NA guilds since we last played those servers. Yes, it’s still a challenge, but it won’t be as bad as it was fighting a tier2 server in tier3.

Yes, “Hold the Line!” is bugged and converting conditions to boons without any traits or runes. It’s been bugged since the patch that fixed Pure of Voice.

You can’t balance around extremely powerful food buffs though. They make some builds a lot more powerful than they should be, yet good builds that can’t take advantage of extremely powerful food buffs get left behind.

For reference, I was a warrior alt and guardian main.

The concern about condition removal is a bit overblown. Unless guardians spec for condition removal, they’re terrible at it as well. The difference is that guardian condition removal has multiple options, all of which fit nicely into most builds. That’s true for other professions as well. For warriors, condition removal is often viewed secondary to other goals like damage.

The biggest problems I’ve seen with warrior are
1. Burst abilities and Adrenaline. Some are good (axe), some aren’t (greatsword), some weapons build adrenaline quickly and some take a while. The 10 second cooldown restriction hurts some weapons as well where their burst ability could be used as a utility.
2. Bad traits and necessary traits. Practically every build I’ve seen or used takes fast hands, which uses up 15 trait points. Many of the master and grandmaster traits are limited to one weapon and do little for it. And this is the class with the biggest weapon variety.
3. Very few anti-group CC or escapes. Although some CC hits multiple targets, it often does so in a line or a cone. Those are easy to avoid and don’t help you in melee when you get swamped from all directions. In addition, a lot of it can’t be used while stunned and is susceptible to being interrupted.
4. Full recovery of HP is rare. Although warriors have the second most base HP of any profession, they rarely get it all back unless they drop out of combat for a while. Combined with few ways to self-heal in large amounts, this mechanic doesn’t do well to offset more limited defenses in a longer battle.

You won’t kill a smart one. If you come close, they’ll run away and you won’t be able to catch up. The best you can do is stalemate.

Yes, keep conquest as the only competitive mode.

Though the forums aren’t really a good indicator. Lots of vocal minorities.

(… continued from previous)

[Team Deathmatch limits roles and in doing so, limits builds] can be said for conquest. Conquest created bunkers, then burst. TDM would support a dynamic for balanced builds. Conquest requires someone to stand in one place: how fun is that? Admittedly, mobility disparities could be a factor in TDM, but they are even more so in conquest, where people are expected to run from point to point, always having an incentive to disengage from battle.

There is a lot of misunderstanding here based on your perception of conquest and the meta-game in PUG tournaments. First, the conquest format has far more depth, so it takes longer to “figure out”. In beta weekends, sPvP was all about 100blades warriors. That quickly became obsolete once people learned the combat system. Then bunker builds – your “stand in place” comment – and strategies that employ them emerged, which isn’t unprecedented; they are easy to figure out and implement. It took longer than I had expected, but teams have figured out how to break bunker strategies. And strategies in conquest will continue to evolve as balance tweaks are made and players develop new builds and strategies.

Mobility in conquest isn’t a problem as you portrayed; it’s an element of depth. Certain builds aren’t very mobile and that’s a weakness, this is true. However, in order to gain mobility, you often sacrifice damage, control, or survivability. So the mobile players have weaknesses too. Part of the strategy in conquest is balancing the two in a build and on a team and using them properly.

To contrast, TDM strategy has always been shallow and stale. The two options are 1. Have everyone be as survivable as possible or 2. Burst and CC so much in a short interval that no one can survive it. I doubt anyone finds stalemates or dying 10 seconds from the start of combat enjoyable. Sure, the builds and professions for that change, but that’s usually in response to balance changes, not players learning new things.

Balance should be under a microscope.

I probably didn’t explain that well. What I meant by “balance under a microscope” is that any tiny advantage has to be eliminated. That’s impossible to ask in an RPG where there are so many variables. I guess the counter analogy would be “balance with a ruler” where it’s “close enough”. In an RPG, there will always be builds that will win against another when both players are of equal skill. Balance under a microscope would demand that those be eliminated and the win rate be 50%. Balance under a rule would say “a better player of the disadvantaged class will win more than 50% of the time and at even skill, it’s only a 65% win rate, which isn’t too excessive”. The reason conquest can get away with this is because you can avoid the disadvantaged matchups. If warriors always lose to mesmers (just an example), you rotate your assignments so that the warrior doesn’t end up engaging with the mesmer or has a teammate with him that counters the mesmer. Or you just avoid fighting the mesmer altogether through clever maneuvering and delay tactics. Team splitting is something conquest requires that TDM shuns.

[not being fun to watch] can be said for conquest.

I can’t really respond to you on this since you basically constructed a straw man and rather unsuccessfully beat it down.

Balancing has nothing to do with the PvP format. With a new game, you have be careful with balance changes. Something may be too powerful because players haven’t adjusted to it, not because the skill or build is too good. You don’t want to destroy something that isn’t broken. See my 100blades warrior example from earlier in this post. The only point you could reasonably argue is that the developers have been overly cautious when it comes to balance changes.

E-sports was not the only reason conquest was chosen. It was a secondary factor. The other points I listed also favored Conquest over TDM and I could do the same other formats such as capture the flag.

Master Charles.7093:

I’m not trying to pick on you dude, but it seems like (next to Anet) you are the most adamant about the community having nothing more than conquest, so…

My argument was that it’s better than other formats, so why create an inferior format. Maintaining multiple formats also has its own set of issues that will lead to one being favored.

Most people PvP to kill each other, not for the excitement of standing in circles or killing NPCs.

No, most people PvP in order to compete against other players. Conquest allows this perfectly fine while adding other elements to keep the game interesting. Killing isn’t the only option – out-thinking your opponent is enjoyable as well. Also, most people do not agree that “conquest blows”. It’s just a vocal minority.

I’ve spent plenty of time arranging 2v2s in servers. Those fights are always quickly engaged and settled in a decent amount of time:

Once you add something long-term, like prizes or ranking, this behavior will immediately change. This is also a by-product of some profession balance issues where those professions have nothing to lose by attacking recklessly into small groups (elementalists are the prime example). If things go bad, run away and reset. Conquest counters that by adding a consequence for abandoning a fight even temporarily.

Complaining about unequal numbers in skirmishes in Conquest or other objective-based formats shows lack of understanding. Part of playing intelligently is avoiding battles you can’t win or delaying their conclusion to achieve a secondary benefit. Positional gameplay adds a level of depth to the competition. You can place defensive players to hold areas and send high damage players to take out disorganized opponents or utilize mobile players to always outnumber opponents in skirmishes.

The 2v1 stunlock to death scenario is very exaggerated. Most professions have access to stun breaks or stability, as well as dodging. In a TDM scenario, the same thing can happen and the only thing an ally can do in GW2 (with the exception of guardian elite) is provide minimal healing or stun back. But your attackers can employ stun breaks and stability as well. In Conquest, if you are in a 3v1, your team has a potential 4v2 somewhere else. Intelligent play will capitalize on that.

On the other side, 1v1, 2v2, (and most likely 3v3s) are great ways for newcomers to practice because they are naturally more fair and ability-centric, relying on skill and execution rather than the more dominant factors of field positioning and reinforcements in which conquest demands.

Even small TDM involves far more than skill and execution. Positioning still plays a huge role with the use of terrain to obstruct attacks or limit opponents’ movement options. Unless you want your TDM to happen in middle of the biggest flat and open field ever.

TDM being the better for beginners is only true when viewed within its own context. TDM only teaches players TDM builds and tactics, which are very limited. By virtue of less options, it makes it easier. However, when your goal is more options in building your character for PvP, which I’m sure everyone can agree is a good goal, TDM’s limits are a poor teaching ground. Many builds that exist in conquest will fail miserably in TDM. For example, conquest allows you to run a build that can unload high damage and escape while being somewhat squishy. In TDM, you would just train down a build like that. Are you going to teach new players not do play like that?

The crux of the issue is that it’s hard to balance skill levels among players and teams in any format. If you want to test a build, then you want to eliminate the variable of being carried or being crushed. But when others want the same and may be trying a build that just doesn’t work (but is unknown to them), it creates large disparities. Having 8v8 hot join is a bad decision in my opinion because it does turn into giant battles too often. I feel that using 5v5 or 6v6 for hot join (6v6 gives some buffer against players leaving and joining) would do enough improve the learning environment for the conquest format.

(continued…)

DiogoSilva.7089:

I have some big problems with conquest.

These aren’t problems with the format. They’re problems with players and inexperience.

1. Offensive play is in theory just as good or better than defensive. However, bunker strategies are simpler to understand and organize and some professions are a little too good at it right now. Strategies just need time to mature as players figure out what works solo and in combination with others and as balance changes and bug fixes are implemented. In the past month, a few anti-bunker builds have seen a rise in prominence. Starcraft Broodwar took years of professional play in Korea until the game was “figured out”.
2. Every good competitive format in a team game requires communication and coordination as a tenant of good gameplay. This is true even outside of video games.
At a PUG level, it’s more of a problem with tunnel vision – attack what’s in front of me and ignore objectives. And no matter what format you propose, that will happen. 8v8 has a tendency to exacerbate this behavior because new players can constantly stream into a fight and prolong it.
3. So in a team deathmatch, you’re killing other players because … ? The point control format is easy to understand through the simple UI. If it’s your color, you earn points every tick. If it’s your enemies, they do. First to a certain number wins. How is it hard to grasp that someone standing on their point is guarding it? Why do players in other sports run around when the ball doesn’t go to them?
4. Opinion. Some people enjoy it and others see the greater good. If you don’t like it, find a team where someone else will guard.

I agree that secondary objectives could use tweaks, but I disagree with some of your assessments. I find Spirit Watch to be one of the worst secondary objectives because of its special orb rules (inconsistent and heavily favor some professions and builds) and the map layout. I do agree that out of the tournament maps, Legacy of the Foefire is the worst. The secondary objective doesn’t have a persistent impact on gameplay and the map structure entices large clashes in the center instead of spreading out players.

Why do people still want team deathmatch PvP (with no other objectives)? It doesn’t work well in MMORPGs and if you’re looking at making an e-sport, team deathmatch is a bad choice for spectators. I’m sure ArenaNet tried it during development before settling on Conquest.

1. Team Deathmatch often begins with stand-offs or staring contests until someone gets antsy and everyone jumps in. If you rush in or open before-hand, you usually get focused and die. This is bad for casual play and wastes time in organized play. For a spectator, this is also boring to watch.

2. Team Deathmatch is not enjoyable for many players when teams grow larger. Players who are learning to play or trying new builds can be easily frustrated by being shredded by a full enemy team. Just look at all the complaints about how big of a zerg-fest 8v8 conquest is. Team Deathmatch would exacerbate that.

3. Team Deathmatch limits roles and in doing so, limits builds. This also leads into some professions being shunned in teams because there is no mainstream build for them. Other game formats, like Conquest offer additional roles such as area control, both defensive (bunker builds) and offensive (trap rangers, necros), mobility vs static, etc. In general, any format that favors balling up and entire team is bad.

4. Balance is put under a microscope in Team Deathmatch. Because of limited roles and playstyles and the relatively short time in which most matches are decided, balance between professions is crucial. In an RPG where skill variety and profession identity is important, it’s near impossible to achieve this. On the other hand, the conquest format reduces the burden of balancing by providing alternative strategic decisions to overcome some profession imbalances. Balance still matters, but it doesn’t need to be as tight as for Team Deathmatch.

5. Team Deathmatch isn’t fun to watch. To an observer that doesn’t know a lot about the game, it just looks like a huge ball of particle effects and then someone dies. To be a good e-sport, someone with basic understanding needs to be able to observe progress or quickly make sense of what actions accomplish. When you have a score and a node control list, it’s clear who is winning. Also, Conquest tends to avoid a full 5v5 and often has encounters ranging from 2 to 6 players, which are much easier to follow.

I wouldn’t use main-hand mace as a primary weapon, but it makes a good back-up in some builds for the reasons you stated. Basically swap to it, pop the cooldowns as needed, and swap back to your primary weapon.

But again, that 5% dmg increase, do that work on dot dmg? And the : 3% chance to gain Might for 20s when hit. Is that when i hit a target or a target hit me?

Doesn’t look like it.

So I thought maybe it wasn’t stacking with sigil of force. Turns out, the 6pc bonus doesn’t appear to work at all, at least in sPvP.

Ezeriel.9574:

Longbow is kinda weak. You won’t melt faces with it, but it is viable.

Agree about not melting faces, but that doesn’t make it weak. 100blades + frenzy could drop people quick, but it would also die quickly. Longbow has some okay burst, but it’s a bit more sustained damage, especially with its conditions. It doesn’t have the downside of having to be in melee, so the attacks have less interruption from kiting and CC.

MysticoN.5068:

thanks for all the reply. i see that you are talking about bleed here. do warrior have enough way to affact bleed on longbow to make it viable? Its only 1 bleed on each crit right? If i favor crit chance and crit dmg before con dmg it just going to make those few bleed im able to put out even weaker.

The first minor trait in Arms gives you a 33% chance to apply bleed for 5s on critical. Longbow #1 is actually two attacks, so you get 2 chances per auto-attack. Longbow #5 applies 6x Bleed for a good duration. In addition, if you go far into Arms, you usually take major trait III which increases bleed duration by 50%. You can add in Superior Sigil of Earth as well (60% chance on critical to apply 5s bleed). I wouldn’t go condition damage only, but if you have a high crit chance, having some condition damage doesn’t hurt.

Also Discipline increases burst ability dmg, do that work on the bow F1 attack? That dont realy do any dmg but alot of “dot dmg” or im a mistaken here?

The burst ability damage increase is of little benefit for pretty much every weapon. Axe may be the only one that gets a noticeable benefit. Combustive Shot deals damage in addition to applying burning. It ticks as soon as it lands and then every 2 seconds afterwards. Each adrenaline level makes the AoE last 2 seconds longer (one extra damage tick and burning re-application per adrenaline rank). With ~3300 attack, the damage tick was ~400 on a heavy target golem.

From what i see its realy not a problem for a warrior to have one or more stacks of might at all time so i was thinking of going for rune of strenght

It’s a pretty good choice. More-so if you use “For Great Justice!”.

But again, that 5% dmg increase, do that work on dot dmg? And the : 3% chance to gain Might for 20s when hit. Is that when i hit a target or a target hit me?

Doesn’t look like it.

Changing the order alone wouldn’t be enough. You would need to make the “Hot Join” button also route to 5v5 because a lot of people use that.

For longbow, you want something that allows you to use the burst ability (F1) Combustive Shot with as many marks of adrenaline as possible every time the cooldown is up (10s base). In WvW, you basically hang toward the middle or back of a group and drop Combustive Shot into the enemy group and follow it up with Arcing Arrow (#3) into the combo field. The higher your adrenaline level, the longer the Combustive Shot field lasts, which means more damage ticks and more burning applications. Arcing Arrow is a blast finisher, and when you use it in a fire field, it gives 5 people 3x Might for 20s.

The more common build is a high DPS build that uses 30 in Arms for the extra adrenaline on critical strikes and 30 in Discipline for the reduced burst ability cost (reduced adrenaline cost by 1/3). Arms traits give you access to bleed damage on crit, so you want high crit and having a mix of power and condition damage is good.

There are alternatives, such as 30 in Strength to get the Berserker Strance when you have 5 stacks of might trait. Further, you can employ Signet of Fury for the activation or Berserker Stance and Healing Surge as your heal. For stats, burning doesn’t scale that well in damage, so unless you can produce a lot of bleeds, you probably want to favor power and crit damage over condition damage. It’s worth noting that the Might boon increases both power and condition damage.

Kwll.1468:

Archaon.6245:

Yeah let’s put an Healing-Tough-Vit amulet and let’s make pvp die once and for all.

Its not close to the stats alone that make someone hard to kill its op abilities and traits in combination with them.

Stats do make a huge difference. The combination listed – all 3 defensive stats – is not available anywhere in game. You can only get 2 of the 3 from a combination, which limits how powerful bunker builds are. If you could get all 3, you would do no damage, but be near impossible to take down, even if some of the more powerful bunker traits were nerfed.

Maybe something like in beta1 where they had 5 jewelry slots that spread out the stats. The stat combos were still the same. It would give you more granularity rather than going to extremes.

Also, I’d like to see the sPvP Knight’s Amulet have its vitality changed to toughness like it is in PvE/WvW. Does anyone use that amulet?

If anything, it will be nerfed because of PvE. It’s making too much PvE content too easy. If it does receive a nerf, it will probably just be a cooldown increase.

In sPvP, it’s not strong at all, and in WvW, it’s no stronger than the myriad of other AoE spam.

Otokomae.9356:

Still no word on what the point cap actually is for killing a Supply Caravan.

It’s 3. You get 1 point per person killing the yak with a cap of 3 points.

Not sure how it works in the rare situation where players from two enemy servers kill the same yak.

I wouldn’t do Rune of Strength on a guardian. We have few sources of might, so extending it isn’t worth it. Rune of the Pack has a decent stat boost, but you’d be better served by 6x Exquisite Ruby Jewel if you were looking for damage.

I’d say to stick with 5xEarth + 1xDivinity or Exquisite Ruby Jewel or 6x Forge and pick up damage stats elsewhere. None of the power or precision runes are very good for a guardian. If you do PvE dungeons, just make sure you group with a profession that can put up burning or drops a fire field often and you won’t have to worry about burning duration.

I used Forge for the longest time and switched to Earth. Earth is not nearly as random as you’d think and the fact that it can proc when you’re at 100% is far better than losing half your HP before it kicks in. Also, you’re rarely sitting around taking damage for a full 12 seconds. You’re moving in and out of combat, using blinds, etc. to reduce damage, so the full duration isn’t even needed.

Fiery Wrath works well with Forge because of the burning duration increase, but that’s the only benefit of it.

It’s a problem with greatsword and how people learn in games. They pick up GS, use 100blades, it slices up most of the PvE content quickly because mobs are dumb. So the immediate reaction is to just build around that. Add in Bull’s Charge. Add in Frenzy so you drop things really really fast and it can’t get away. But then you’re stuck in a corner. It works on most things, so there’s reluctance to deal with the small subset where it doesn’t, and people become comfortable with it. In addition, there’s no easy way to expand out of it without breaking the build. So the reaction is to ask for devs to fix weaknesses of the build, not to try and find a new one or dramatically change the original. It’s very hard to un-learn reliance on a skill like 100blades after being in a bulls charge – frenzy – 100blades build for months.

Give it a few weeks and people will start to adapt.

If you kill a dolyak en route, you still prevent your opponent from earning 3 points, even if you only earn 1 for your team.

I don’t think conditions are as big of a problem as they originally seem. From playing guardian as my main and also playing warrior, it seems to me that warriors are primarily meant to to avoid damage or pressure an opponent to stall it rather than take the damage. That includes conditions. What killed me the most was stuns or other CC that prevented me from avoiding the damage or application of conditions.

The quickness nerf is one of the best things to happen to warriors. It will force development of other builds that may not have the same problems. Granted, warriors still need a buff, and I think reducing the cooldown on Balanced Stance would be a great start, but it’s too early to go with new abilities.

Caliburn is from my guild and we did an experiment when we were in tier4 or tier5 late at night for hours. We had a group of 5 or so people on an empty borderlands killing and capping various things to determine the point scores. I was a bit vague in my original post since we didn’t want to divulge the exact details when we first worked it out months ago. Knowledge is an advantage in warfare.

We don’t have screenshots or anything. We just recorded numbers mentally or on notepads. But it was an entire night worth of data. If you don’t believe us, do the same experiment yourself. However, doing it in a tier1 or tier2 server may be difficult because there’s always action going on. You need to run the experiment when the match-up is as dead as possible to reduce external variables (the points from other maps). Ours was done on an enemy borderland. Have your scoreboard up and do the following:
- Sit just outside a camp. When the dolyak leaves it, kill it. It will respawn in 5 minutes from death. Repeat 5 times.
- Do the previous experiment with 2, 3, and 4 people.
- Move to the end of a dolyak route and repeat the previous two experiments.
- Keep the board open and watch for when any dolyak completes its route (it has to despawn). This is a bit weird because there is a few seconds of delay in when the escort event ends and when the fort gets its supply. I think the point tick is based on the fort getting supply, not the event end.

If you do that, you’ll get the numbers that Caliburn posted. Remember that one instance is not proof. You need to repeat multiple times and deduce what the external variables are and eliminate them. If you have two people on two different maps with their scoreboard post their points, you’ll see there’s a slight difference at times.

Yaks and sentries account for about 25% of the points earned in WvW each week. The potential maximum is much larger but because of idle yaks, route times and speed boosting yaks, etc it’s never achievable.

As another tidbit of information:
- Yaks respawn 5 minutes from death when killed.
- If a yak completes its route in under 5 minutes when no speed boosts are used, the yak respawns 5 minutes from the time it completed the route.
- If a yak completes its route in over 5 minutes when no speed boosts are used, it will respawn immediately, regardless of the actual time the route took.

For that reason, camps with longer routes actually provide more potential supply per hour to forts than some closer camps . The closer camps have an advantage of yaks being less vulnerable, however.

Longbow is a bit misleading when you first look at it and its damage. Unlike other warrior weapons, a good chunk of it is from condition damage generated by combos. Longbow 1, 4, and 5 are are all projectile finishers. Longbow 3 is a blast finisher. The burst skill is a huge fire field. The basic playstyle is to drop the combo field, then use #3 in it to get 3 stacks of might (up to 5 allies) then shoot your projectile attacks through the field in order to stack burning on your target.

I play that style on my warrior and with “For Great Justice!” I can get burning to tick for 450-500. Build is 10/30/0/0/30. You get the +% damage and +% crit chance based on adrenaline level and then reduction in burst skill cost and increased adrenaline on critical hits. That allows you to use the longbow burst at level 3 pretty much every cooldown. Since Might increases both power and condition damage, having more sources of it helps this build. Note that calling down a banner is a blast finisher as well.

For other slot kills, it depends on the setting. Group PvE, you’d probably want to go with banners or shouts. In PvP, I use “Shake it Off!” and “Fear Me!”. The first is good as a short cooldown stun break, as well as removing cripple or huge stacks of bleed. The latter is used to survive melee burst or to stop revives and stomps or to just give you range to your opponent.

I use sword/shield as a secondary weapon. Sword 2 has great mobility, 3 is a cripple to get range for yourself, shield 4 stun is immensely useful, and 5 to stop damage when you’re not CC’ed. The sword burst skill isn’t half bad either once you get used to when to use it, since it does root you. Combined with soldier and knight gear with a little berserker jewelry, I have decent survivability and damage.

Here’s my current build, though I’m still iterating it a bit:
http://gw2buildcraft.com/calculator/warrior/?8.3|3.1c.h2|c.1c.h16.e.1c.h1j|1n.7d.1c.7d.1c.7d.1c.7d.1c.7d.1c.7d|41j.0.2s.0.3s.0.21j.0.31j.0.2s.0|a5.u53b.0.0.u5ac|0.0|5y.6b.69.68.6k|e

The downside is that you don’t have the huge spike like frenzy+100b, but you also don’t have to be in melee. I haven’t played ele or necro, so I can’t compare it. Staff necro in WvW tends to be heavier damage though in order to stack AoEs and melt people in large battles or in choke points.

Yaks reward points to their team if they complete their path (the yak enters the fort and despawns).

Killing yaks is based on the number of players killing it with a cap on total points possible. Distanced traveled has no effect on points earned. Also, idle dolyaks don’t count. They have to be actively traveling a route.

Sentries also give 1 point if you capture their circle. However, since they get flipped back and forth all the time, that’s inconsequential in the long run.

People have so many theories because of how the non-tick points get updated. non-tick points for your map are updated instantly. However, non-tick points from other maps are updated only when certain events occur. I don’t know which count. Because of that, you may see non-tick points be added when you do kill a yak, and it misleads you into thinking something else.

This research was done by my guild on a mostly dead borderlands late at night / early in the morning (removes a bunch of variables). Specific values are withheld, but maximum points for killing is equal to the points for a completed delivery.

TeamBattleAxe.3901:

Population is all it takes to move up. Any problem can be solved by throwing an endless stream of people at a gate until it falls (see Kaineng).

Entirely not true. Having played Kaineng in tier3, we could always overcome their numbers in NA primetime with better play. Kaineng’s strength is the War Machine guild, which can cause queues in multiple maps while most servers are asleep. Without War Machine, Kaineng would be stuck in tier4.

Sierra.6352:

Oh for the love of everything good and nice. This is exactly what Anet didn’t want in their game.

What do you mean? They already put it in the game themselves in the hero panel. This calculator just makes it easier to figure out which combinations of gear give you the stats that you want. It’s been a royal pain because you can’t get certain stat combinations from a single piece of gear.

If you want to min/max, then you need a damage calculator to tell you what the relative values of each stat are. Right now, it’s just what each player feels is the best stats for themselves.

And a damage calculator in GW2 is far more complicated and unreliable than other games. It has far more combinations of traits, stats, and abilities, as well as more chaotic combat with the addition of cross-profession combos (how much damage on average is a projectile finisher worth?)

“Less health is better” is not the complete argument. It’s “Less health with stats elsewhere, such as toughness, is better than high health and the lack of those other stats”.

Yes, a high HP pool is better at absorbing large damage spikes and is less likely to overheal. Conversely, toughness and healing power are good at reducing the total damage taken over time. Over a long period of time, toughness will prove more useful than vitality. I’m not sure on healing power. You have you look at effective HP – basically convert all damage reduction and scaled healing to raw HP.

If you look at some common PvE guardian builds, many of them have a lot of small heals over time and are built to survive taking hits for an extended period of time. Toughness plays into that naturally, giving them far more effective HP from all those small heals over 1 or 2 minute fights.

In addition, it’s difficult to obtain precision, vitality, and toughness in large amounts because of the currently available item affixes. There is an affix for Toughness/Power/Precision, but the affixes with both Vitality and Precision have a less desirable third attribute.

I’ve seen lots of complaints about how “skill-less” Retaliation is and how it causes various issues because defensive guardians can keep it up the entire time.

So what if Retaliation stacked intensity instead of duration? The base boon damage would be significantly lower than what it is currently. However, you could now choose to run it the entire time for a small damage return or stack a lot of it at once for big returns for a short time. For example, you could stack it when a thief uses Daggerstorm or a warrior is using 100blades or Axe Whirl. But similarly, they could avoid taking a lot of damage by staying away when you have retaliation stacked.

Obviously skills and traits would need adjusted. However, with allowing intensity stacking, you have two tuning knobs (number of stacks and duration) instead of just one.

A potential problem would be stacking retaliation in WvW zerg balls and having opponents melt themselves, similar to confusion stacking.

Thoughts?

I agree with most of the problems that Brutaly listed, but don’t agree with the solutions. I won’t go into what should be done because it’s far more complicated than what was listed here and would rather let the Developers hash that out over days or weeks.

On the topic of playstyle, I think it would be safe to assume that most guardian players who aren’t flavor of the month chose the profession because of its supportive melee role. The traits lines that don’t have group play in mind in some way, either by boons or control, should have some kind of boost.

It doesn’t stack with other forms of swiftness because of how it had to be implemented. In beta, it worked like all the other symbols where it pulsed a short duration boon, and the longer you stayed in the symbol, the more it stacked. However, that didn’t work too well with Symbol of Swiftness because stopping to stand in it defeats the purpose. So now, each time you activate it, it refreshes its own boon duration that is separate from other swiftness boons.

I doubt the melee AoE attacks will suffer much, if at all. They’re referring more to ground target AoE.

See ANet post:
https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/pvp/wuvwuv/Incoming-AoE-nerf-and-rezzing-in-WvW/page/5#post1239927

Keep in mind that Friday evening is Saturday afternoon for East Asia and Australia. So seeing a few more of them on at reset isn’t unprecedented.

The staff symbol works differently from all the other weapon symbols. In the BWEs, the staff #3 used to work the same and pulsed a short duration swiftness every few seconds that was additive. However, since you’re generally moving when you want a swiftness boon, you’d end up only getting a few seconds of swiftness from the staff symbol, making it near worthless. To address that, ANet changed the staff symbol to apply the full duration, but due to game mechanic limitations, it doesn’t stack with other swiftness, just refreshes itself.

Vitu.3580:

Exedore.6320:

The staff has always suffered from wanting to do a bunch of things that aren’t really cohesive. As a result, it ends up in a a few niche rolls that play to part of its strengths and ignore the rest. If you’re not building around the staff, it’s pretty awful as a combat weapon. Some people just don’t like the staff playstyle.

I don’t really know what you mean by you first sentence, therefore, I must disagree.

And everything else you said…..could be said for almost all other weapons in game

The staff #1 is a weak AoE damage ability that is useless if you’re using it as support, but some builds that focus on damage have turned it into a great weapon. The #4 and #5 ability are great for support, but their stationary aspect hinders using the staff as a DPS weapon because they leave you vulnerable. Basically, it’s half support and half offense, but the same build can’t do both.

As others have said, if you avoid being hit by Churning Earth (large AoE with ~3 second channel that puts up 8 bleed stacks), you negate at least half their damage. If you avoid their lightning attacks that knockdown/daze and don’t run through fire, it helps a lot as well.

The staff has always suffered from wanting to do a bunch of things that aren’t really cohesive. As a result, it ends up in a a few niche rolls that play to part of its strengths and ignore the rest. If you’re not building around the staff, it’s pretty awful as a combat weapon. Some people just don’t like the staff playstyle.

Rummie.9720:

We were pretty sure we swept the place, so I guess that’s our fault.

[WE] and [DR] know tons of different mesmer hiding spots that we’ve learned from playing all kinds of different servers and quite a few of them aren’t common knowledge yet.

Rummie.9720:

Just watched a group from [WE] on Dragonbrand hack into redlake on their borderlands. I know that not even my own server is squeaky clean, but it still sucks to watch people hack that openly.

You’re just grumpy. We hid a mesmer after you finished your siegerazor event, waited 5 minutes, then ported our guys in. No exploit whatsoever.

Do you have the “Autotargeting” option turned on? If you de-select a target but are auto-casting, it may be picking a target again and auto-attacking. Additionally, if you’re hitting #1 a lot, it queues it up and will trigger autotargeting.

Spirit weapons have problems. Symbols are okay, but their trait placement is a problem.

Symbols don’t do so well offensively in PvP. However, the Zeal trait line has 3 minor traits that all deal with symbols, which devalues the trait line. I would recommend removing at least one of them or making them more useful such as making the “symbols are larger” into a higher tier minor trait.

Spirit weapons have lots of issues. The AI still needs work. The shield and bow don’t work so well when you’re mobile. The hammer’s knockback makes using melee weapons frustrating. In addition to that, to make spirit weapons viable, you need to take a lot of traits that often don’t help you out besides improving the spirit weapons. At minimum, I would suggest making the command ability not destroy the spirit weapon. However, the base cooldown on the command would be doubled and add a trait to halve the command cooldown. That makes the trait less necessary but still useful.

Twill.6217:

why is it against game design? don’t other profession’s auto-attacks..auto-hit? doesn’t focus attack auto-hit already?

The game is built around dodging or avoiding attacks. If you take that way, you’ve taken away a good chunk of the game. There are a select few abilities that are instant cast and not projectile like the scepter immobilize. But I’m sure the designers decided to make those exceptions rather than the rule.

It’s just the movement prediction going into effect. Normally people strafe and don’t wiggle, so the weapon is designed to aim at where they’re expected to be, not where they are now. Scepter just makes it more apparent because of its slower movement speed. The only way to fix this is to make all projectiles auto-hit, which goes completely against the design of the game.

Tuluum.9638:

At least now it seems there are a few left on DH that are willing to accept their own responsibility in DHs shortcomings, rather than blame everyone else. Maybe now we can truly build a strong server that focuses on communication and education done through means accessible to anyone who owns and plays the game.

Time will tell, I suppose. I wont be holding my breath though

On the contrary, a lot of what you have left on DH are people who blame everyone else but themselves for their own shortcomings. Their latest scapegoat is the people that left. It’s the poison that brought about the ultimate downfall of DH. We’ve tried to work with PUGs and other guilds on DH that are doing stupid things, but it’s near impossible when half the teachers (commanders and guild groups) are just as dumb and stubborn as the students (the PUGs). And when you try to correct what’s wrong, you’re told to “kitten off” or that you’re a terrible commander in /team.

I’ve started to see DH’s abandonment of the karma/xp train mentality for favor of a more wholesome approach, but it’s just too little too late.

As a contrast, the only badmouthing in /team on Dragonbrand is coming from a DH troll.

Darkhaven has always had a lot of problems and I personally, and probably others, were just getting overly stressed at having to deal with them. The biggest problem is that no one wants to listen to anyone else. Guilds did their own thing, wouldn’t listen to experienced leaders, and people would nag, complain, and troll in /team all the time when they weren’t riding the karma train to victory. Most would prefer to bang their heads against a fort they couldn’t take than to fall back and defend one we already owned.

If we did ride it out on Darkhaven, we would have had to wait a month for it to slide down to where it could win, then wait and hope for fair-weather players to enter WvW again, spend another month training them (and un-doing bad habits), and then hope for months to get a transplant from a higher tier. And hope they would be friendly and cooperative. Meanwhile, WvW would turn mostly into boring PvDoor because few of the servers would have enough coverage at exactly the same time and the lower tier servers don’t really defend well.

Most of us play games to have fun. If it’s causing increased stress, it’s probably time to change something. For me, that was moving to a less stressful environment.