Guild Wars 2

Saw the change after my post. Good change. I am happy to see it.

Mesmer here and I totally agree with the OP. The fact is you can target and do significant damage to things behind walls. I have downed people from full health using shatter immediately when the iBerserker does the first attack. And all of that is AoE damage. Yes, those people are glass cannon, and yes when I use glass cannon I do that. But the fact remains that my other phantasms fail in that situation. If I could summon the Warden on the walls without it always failing due to line of sight, I wouldn’t have an issue with iBerserker.

It seems pretty scary to think that I am capable of a 7k iBerserker followed up with a 6k shatter on anyone within a wall and there is almost nothing they can do to avoid that.

Miu Xie.5872:

I probably shouldn’t look at my map while running, otherwise this happens:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SwAqB2Ioicw

There are some scary players out there.

Ah yes, there are two SET players out there that I see regularly (both asura, one male one female) which have incredible burst damage. Full glass cannons. Been trying to go for 1v1 with them but most of the time something happens to ruin the opportunity. I know I’ve done the dance with those two most nights of this week.

I think the real problem here is the identification of teams. I don’t know the history of how things were designed during betas but for some reason during the design process they decided on making enemies anonymous in name and chose to display “XXX Invader”. If they had made it that all the tags of enemy teams were colour based (i.e. red team is red tags, blue team blue tags, green team green tags) it would be extremely easy to tell who is who.

My guess is that it involved a bit too much to change the colour scheme of tags like that for WvW considering the abundance of both neutral and hostile creatures and which would show up as red/yellow. I would suggest to them to remove the anonymity of WvW, change it so that the tags of the various teams are colour coded to their team colour (change the colours of the WvW teams if you have to in order to accomplish this) and then allow the character dyes of every individual to show through.

Personally I can never tell if someone is friend or foe by their armor colour and have to wait for the tags to load. The armor colour does nothing for me in who I choose to target, just where the blob of red tags are.

EDIT: Actually now that I think about it, probably they had a hard time trying to draw distinctions between party members, team members, clones, guild members, etc. and thats why we have the tag colours we have today. I’d suggest to them to instead create symbols next to tags to identify them as guild or party members rather than use colour, since colour is extremely important for drawing distinctions in large battles.

Except that the weapon placement is necessary. Personally I hate that the vista blocks me from using the siege sometimes!

Cufflink.3985:

As a member of TAC, we are finally starting to get our groups/numbers together, so yes you will likely see squads of 2-8 thieves doing behind lines raids and what not. Not all of us are burst builds, for instance I’m a tanky S/D build and we have lots of condition thieves.

I do have to say, I had some epic fights near Rogues Quarry and at the southeast camp in Mag’s borderland last night. Both times it was two of us versus a steady stream of defenders, and were eventually overwhelmed, but 15 minutes straight of action is intense

Although one thing that has been bugging me: after a tough or close fight, I always /salute or /bow to my opponent… however, I’ve seen the most /laughing, /dancing, or /sitting from enemies this match than ever before…

We do sometimes encourage people to laugh at the opposition to rile them up a bit but I think in your circumstance is should be taken as a compliment. I know myself I frequently get people who dance on my body after a huge killing spree even though it took 5 of them to down me — not exactly something they should be proud of.

I do feel for you guys at Ehmry Bay. Maguuma has had its fair share of having to fight fully fortified positions coming out of a total wipe and sometimes it can be a long bleed out process if the defenders play it right. Personally, it doesn’t matter to me because I find the long bleed outs to be more fun than the super fast caps.

Mass invisibility is extremely powerful as an opening for a roam and can let your group down several people before the fight even begins. Also because of the low cooldown it can be used as an escape should a fight become larger than you wanted. It can also be used to get a teammate up who was downed without the big “aoe me here” refuge circle.

I can’t say there is an ideal roam composition as it really depends on how the group is built to function together. In a high glass group (1 glass mes, 2 glass thieves) Having the opening strike from Mass Invis is critical.

I’ve had a great time this week. This is definitely how the game should be played and I wish every matchup could be as entertaining. There were very few down moments, although some maps could become quiet it just meant that other maps were a raging battle.

I was camped out in the Maguuma border for most of the match and I would just like to give a special shoutout to RE for the great fights there the entire week. My little group constantly probed your south east supply and roamed around that area hoping to cause trouble. When you guys were on in numbers it was near impossible to take the fully upgraded east keep and south east tower.

You can also treb the inner wall of West keep from the supply camp hill while you are taking down the outer wall. For this reason alone, I feel that West keep is the hardest to defend.

I have to agree with Littlefeather, I can’t imagine the nightmare of matchups when it is hard as it is to get a lot of PUGs to cooperate. There are certainly a lot of smart team player PUGs, and they are always welcome but unfortunately the mass are not the sharpest. On Maguuma we advertise our public mumble constantly to help get everyone on the same page but there will always be a subset of players who either refuse or just don’t care enough to organize.

It’s easy to see when you see people enter the map and always ask “where is the zerg at” rather than “where am I needed”. Orange swords or not, people care only about where to zerg so I see no changes if they were removed, just way more people in map asking “where is the zerg at?”

50 vs 20 you will never win unless you use some extremely clever play. Arrow carts in that situation means nothing. Your 20 will not win.

In WvW I have been using a build that is pure offense. It’s actually pleasantly surprising to me how effective it is. I absolutely love Earth 4/5 and Air 2/3/4/5. I love scepter/focus.

wombat, you must be facing very small stacks because the ones I have been a part of anyone who is in range of the stack who is downed is dead unless they are an elementalist or the stack itself is too loose.

Given you are Oceanic and our population at that time is very small I’ll assume you have never gone up against one of our bigger stacks. You do have a point that small numbers in a stack are useless and perhaps we as a server are getting into a bad habbit of relying on it too much in situations which don’t warrant it.

This is why I am glad that Maguuma has a public mumble and encourages all the commanders / guilds to hop on. Even if you are a rookie commander you can learn a lot from the experienced people on mumble while utilizing your title to lead the pubs around and eventually do your own leading.

psirca, I know that in our server we have people calling out incomings to camps and commanders always listen. Sometimes it is simply not possible to respond but most times we try to send an appropriate amount of people back to defend, especially the camp closest to spawn.

In the last 2 weeks we used stack against two different opponents in nearly identical situations: defending Bay keep lord room last stand, enemies coming through breached wall. Against Darkhaven group we last 20mins and wipe them. They return with even more people and actually build counters to stack and we die in 20mins. Against Sea of Sorrows (PRX guild) they immediately have people die near the stack to spot and have several siege built up (several ballista and one catapult) aimed directly at the stack. Result: total stack wipe within 1min.

It’s almost as if they knew what they were doing and prepared a battle plan ahead of time! Shocking.

And that’s what all this ultimately comes down to. Playing, learning, and having fun. Regardless of the matchup and score we at Maguuma always find ways to have fun. Myself and a guildy were running a 2 man Mesmer/Thief roam last night in the DH borderland during the long Hills siege. I know we had a blast and collected quite a lot of loot.

Exactly, is there a cite for it being a “known issue” and a bug for conditions to hurt them? I would think that considering there are many examples in the game of completely immune NPCs it would be extremely easy to fix this “bug”. On top of that, why would it have some arbitrary high condition duration reduction which doesn’t completely nullify conditions?

Besides, I’d rather have it the way it is now, giving people hope to take him down before the 4mins is up and tying up large amounts of players than having people just abandon the place and come back later. In the current form it is a far more effective WvW mechanic.

Yup, stability stops fear. As mentioned above if you try to fear a thief in daggerstorm while they still have stability your fear will do nothing. I have done this many times in WvW on accident (because I click people I see channeling and quickly do a fear to interrupt) and have never stopped a target who had stability. Never. The times I have done so were when I used corrupt boon which turned the stability into a fear.

Defiance stacks do not stop fear but some bosses are inherently immune to fear which may be a source of confusion.

Actually condition duration is what is highly reduced and I doubt this is a bug. Try applying a 40-60s bleed on him and watch it last for about 10-15 seconds. Conditions just need to last at least 1 second (after his duration reductions) for it to tick some damage. Condition builds can bring this guy down easily.

Also stacks of vulnerability will reduce his damage immunity but vulnerability duration is highly reduced making it hard to stack. You will notice when he has some vulnerability you start to do some normal damage.

Animosity.5231:

Stacking on kill will not stack either. Using both the condition and power stacking sigils will only get a single stack of power or condition damage, even if on two different weapon sets. But if you want to stack Bloodlust on every kill, you need it on both sets.

To further expand on this, only the killing blow with the sigil you have equipped matters for which stack you get. Also once you get one stack of one of those sigils you will not get any stacks from the other sigils.

Also technically you don’t need Bloodlust on both sets to get it from every kill — you just need to swap to the set with Bloodlust in order to get the stack when you make the kill. I do this all the time in WvW where my sword/focus set on a mesmer has Bloodlust/Energy sigils while greatsword has lightning sigil. When I know I’m about to get some kill I swap to the sword until I get to 25 stacks but I deal about 90% of all my damage with with the greatsword (at least in zerg fights). The whole “ends on weapon swap” on the wiki is either wrong or bugged right now.

That’s where you are wrong. A picture or video is worth a whole lot more to me than your words. I will not apologize for things I have seen no proof of. It would be morally dishonest for me to do so.

I’m playing a corruption necro and I’d say it is mostly effective. The times I feel much less effective are when I am on the wall defending a keep as all the conditions I can throw get removed easily via combo fields and people retreating out of range. Fighting in the field is extremely effective.

One thing that should be avoided though is minions. As someone above said, those minions are a free rally for the other team and especially in small group fights. This is also why despite using marks I will not spec to make them larger.

The only reason I can think of is the jumping puzzle. Recreating a character and running him through the jumping puzzle over and over to farm blueprints. Then again, this can already be done with tokens via jumping puzzle (though much slower).

That’s the point Cirus. You can’t pretend to know our situation until you have played in it. And for the record, we held the hills keep on an enemy borderland with an orb for over 48 hours in this very matchup. But there is simply not enough players participating to keep that kind of presence on every map the way the other servers can. That’s why we say we need more bodies. We aren’t claiming we would win, we are saying we would be more competitive if we had more and some folks are saying we are wrong as if they know our situation at all.

My system rarely has any FPS drop even in the biggest fights due to the culling, which is great. Just like you said, that’s the point of the culling. Since the latest patch, however, there have been times that things do not load anymore. NPCs stop loading, allies stop loading, and of course enemies stop loading. This is not a feature, this is an error. Even when I port back to some waypoint all of the vendor NPC do not appear until I logout and back in again.

Wow, I’d never thought I’d see the day where someone actually thinks placing 15 rams and other siege in a supply camp, along with people running around naked with fireworks was some sort of strategic move. By the way, while that was going on the other borderlands were nearly empty.

We have a lot of hardcore WvW players on Maguuma who spend a lot of effort and time to build things up. We turned the FA borderland completely blue one night and held the FA orb for over 2 days without even having the outer wall breached. Unfortunately people burn out playing a lot and we just don’t have the numbers to continue that sort of presence on a map.

I’ve been playing around with a warrior build which uses a rune which apparently not many people use from what I have seen. The rune is the Svanir rune. http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Rune_of_Svanir

At first glance it seems pretty bad for a warrior since there is no Frozen skills but it has one great advantage: warrior stun breaks are very effective with it. Basically you should treat the 6th property of this rune as a 5 second invulnerability with 90s cooldown.

The basic idea is that you can run into a zerg and swing a bunch of melee attacks doing a crapload of damage or CC and then when you get targeted and super low you gain invulnerability. To combat your frozen state you use a stun break or have stability on you and can run off without any fear of death. Well, assuming you don’t have tons of conditions that sap your remaining <20% health as those bypass invulnerability if they were applied before you gained it.

I’ve used it a lot and it’s really fun. I can run out of a keep under siege and smack a few guys around and really have no fear of getting back to the door to escape them. Similarly when two large zergs are in the open field I can run up to the front and scare a few guys away or down a few guys while being able to run back to my zerg. In the rare 1v1 encounters I’ve noticed that people for the most part have no idea how to handle it because it’s a big surprise to them when a warrior is suddenly invulnerable and so close to death only to use his heal and to burst the crap out of him.

I’ve often dropped out of a keep, used endure pain, did as much damage as possible to targets of opportunity almost always proc Last Chance on someone, do as much burst as possible to down as many as possible, dropped to <20% health,, hit Frenzy (breaks stun and now 5 seconds of invulnerable + haste without caring about 50% more damage drawback) burst a few more guys and then use mobility skills to get back to safety.

It’s fun and in massive fights you can down a few people quickly before running to safety. Also as a bonus, I have noticed that you become target number 1 for almost everyone in the enemy zerg so for 5 seconds you are absorbing almost all of their attention while your teammates are free to hit them. I’ve combined this with Hammer / Greatsword glass cannon for maximum annoyance/carnage.

Give it a try if you really want melee. I may buy some other weapons and see how they work out with it. You only need one stun break for it to work but I actually run with 3 (Frenzy, balanced stance, endure pain).

I encountered this last night as well. It is a totally different beast from the culling we normally see as nothing but my 4 party members and monsters were rendering. Not even veterent guards were rendering! I restarted the game and then everything was fine again. What I know is that it started when I used Garrison wp and a lot of othrs used it at the same time while I was in a zerg. Perhaps that is related.

You don’t even need to do much damage to get credit for a kill and chance for badges. I have a pure support guardian and have no problem getting badges with pitiful damage dealing and mostly healing. You just have to realize that you need to hit people a couple times once in a while and not worry about killing them.

Pretty sure gloombots means he has 3000 defense and his stats are achievable having a high score in your WvW and all 3 orbs plus 25 stacks of healing. i.e. wear some power/tough/vit with power/tough/heal gear.

I have a guardian and under that circumstance I can easily top 3000 defense with 17k hp and 1700 healing so if I switch out 600 healing for vitality I’m sure I’d come close to what he has.

You can destroy them without taking the keep. Set up some ballistas below the cliff about half way between the Veteren flag guy and the hills and target the Trebs. #2 attack usually hits them. If the ballista doesn’t reach then try a few different spots. We have done this and have had this done to us so I know it works.

The plot thickens today. Orbs being reset in all borderlands with Yak player seen by my own eyes under Bay keep when I came out of the water in Yak borderland just after the orb was reset. Very shortly after while escorting the orb to Hills keep another team member saw a Yak player apparently moving through rock and the ground with guild tag something like [kaos] and took screenshots (I don’t have those screenshots, but the person in chat took a minute to go look at the guild tag in his screenshot when asked).

So Yak players, have you seen anyone with guild tag kaos running around? Shortly after we placed orb in Hills keep we had a hardcore Maguuma player stay with the orb to guard it and what do you know, 3 Yak players somehow entered the room and started attacking the orb while everyone except him were gone, but he was able to kill them all. This is a keep which we have had since early morning so there is no way some mesmer was hanging out without being noticed for over 12 hours.

Stopped lagging for me since late last night. I am in Ontario as well.

Having the same for WvW. 10 seconds of absolutely horrific responsiveness followed by 2 seconds of actual responsiveness. Started around 8pm tonight and has not let up.

As long as jumping puzzle is in a warzone I have no problem with this (within balance).

I guess that’s kind of how I’m seeing things now. The queue charts for Dragonbrand last match clearly showed that in almost all the zones there was a queue at all times of day over the 4 day sample. It seems there are a lot of bandwagon players and/or fairweather players because with that kind of participation I’d find it hard to believe that any score could become so terribly lopsided. But I guess as soon as the kitten hits the fan a significant amount of players give up.

EDIT: I guess my memory is off… after finding that chart again I see that it had large queues over the weekend days but the weekday queue was a lot smaller. Definitely Dragonbrand didn’t have a queue at all times of day. My mistake.

Queue for JQ in their last match: https://dviw3bl0enbyw.cloudfront.net/uploads/forum_attachment/file/6535/Jade_Quarry.PNG
Queue for Dragonbrand in their last match: https://dviw3bl0enbyw.cloudfront.net/uploads/forum_attachment/file/6527/Dragonbrand.PNG

I’m starting to wonder if the whole night activity aspect is being overblown. Last match when it was TC vs Maguuma vs Dragonbrand both TC and Maguuma got manhandled by Dragonbrand. We were simply far less active than them and the server stats released showed that (over a 4-5 day sample) Dragonbrand basically had queues at all times of day whereas TC and Maguuma had hardly any at off-peak times.

Now TC is ahead and they “seem” way more active than Maguuma during the night so I’ll be interested to see more stats if they are released. Looking at that Dragonbrand vs Jade vs Crystal it’s a wonder to me how it’s so lopsided. Dragonbrand used to have huge presence at all times of day. What gives?

Not sure how this happened even though I was on when it occurred. Seems it still only counts as one orb but no clue what will happen when one is captured.

Screenshot: http://i.imgur.com/Q5TCF.jpg

Zireael.3285:

Dosvidaniya, I don’t really want to discuss this with anyone. As Riyu stated, DAoC 10 years ago was able to sustain 100+ people in one spot without them being invisible or without lags. I want the same now and I don’t buy BS about technology and code. If the game lags and people are invisible then the code is badly written and the game runs on s h i tty servers. Period.

You must be amazed that most FPS game servers can’t really handle more than 64 players and it’s been like this for as long as I can remember. That’s more than a decade of technology advancement and yet there is still some relatively small limit on those server capabilities without massive lag.

So what if you can make more in PvE than PvP? The point is repair costs in WvW are not that significant. 10s full repair in maybe 2 hours of play? How often are you repairing?

Even 400k – 150k – 150k is a good indication of participation. It’s not an absolute indicator, but to me that says one server has roughly 2.5 times the presence as the others during a given day. Just taking a look at the queue graphs one can see this trend on the servers dominating the matchups — the winning ones usually have a queue or near queue at most times of the day whereas the losing ones only have a fraction of a day with a queue.

Of course, queue numbers don’t tell us exactly the number present as you could have 90% participation with no queue but to me the score is the one that really tells the story. You would expect, due to “pubbie zergs”, that players don’t like being slaughtered and will naturally stick together when they see they are being effective. If there are enough players, there should be a strong enough presence to capture something even if they are doing rotating captures.

Asbrandr.6324:

[Edit: Removed response to a moderator deleted post]

These statistics do display a disturbing trend that should be sorted out sooner rather than later. Matchmaking algorithms using a combination of scoring and overall activity should remedy the issue; perhaps with more weighting preference given to activity, rather than score, as the scores from this week are clearly skewed and likely not representative of overall server performance/skill level. If this continues into the two week match-ups, WvW will quickly lose popularity, or so I assume given the current state of the forums and the morale on my own server.

I’d argue that score is a very good indicator (right now) of server participation. We aren’t at the point yet where things are so organized that skill is more important. Every time I login at prime time I see that the 3 sides in the match are roughly even in scoring.

Rodarin.6058:

You know what ALL those charts have in common? The queues got smaller and smaller, to non existent on most servers. Even on HOD the queues seemed to be about half what they were at the start of the match up midway through it . SBI went from having massive queues a week ago to having none at all. I didnt need a chart to tell me that though. I expect once the ones for the 19th onward come out they will dip down again. I am sure if there are major match up differences there might be a spike but I would bet money that if people are facing the same opponents this week they faced last week the downward spiral will continue. The only server that remained fairly constant was Chrystal Desert. All other saw a major dip as the week progressed.

So one could conclude that people have left the game or they just arent bothering to queue up for WvW, or maybe a little bit of both.

But the obvious is still obvious, looking at server match ups and overlapping the queues and the ties and it doesnt take a rocket scientist to figure it out.

But to me the most telling sign is that WvW ‘popularity’ spiraled downward Since Last Saturday. Like I said will be very interesting to see what the 19,20, and 21 numbers are.

I’d attribute a bit of that to just people being busier during the week and having less incentive to join up when they see their side dominating the score or being dominated, not necessarily that they quit the game. Also Friday and Saturday will always be the busiest times and will see significant queues no matter the matchups.

No surprises here. While on Maguuma during peak times we are very competitive and so is TC. Usually we hover around 200 to 240 per team in the matchup. Once off-peak hits it’s a total steamroll with Dragonbrand. The graphs just confirm exactly what I experience.

We have people in Maguuma shouting at others in the map saying “Get your butts over to such and such, they are attacking! WHY ONLY 5 of us defending?!” Why? Because there are probably only 15 of us in the entire map and 5 of those are doing a stupid puzzle.

I havn’t noticed a whole lot of difference in bursting down glass cannons from the dominating server with increased stats (I’m Maguuma, and Dragonbrand is dominating). That 4k health and 150 toughness helps, sure, but in my experiences that 3-4k health is basically one more auto attack from me if you have such low toughness.

I’d say domination mantra mesmer spec has pretty good burst and great control just like GW1 but I’m coming from a WvW perspective where I play one. I was a huge mesmer fan in GW1 so my first char for GW2 was mesmer. It has a very different style with clones, but if you play it a certain way you can still have the overall manipulative/strike fear effect.

I’ve spec heavily into power/crit/crit damage and have the ability to burst things from 1200 while also using dazes to interrupt. If the target is soft they sometimes can’t even avoid downed after rolling twice to avoid some of the burst. Then again, I liked domination in GW1 and was never much of a DoT/condition guy.

And yet, each server can start at any of the positions so the advantage is a wash. With different maps this would not be possible.