You can’t choose which order to upgrade until you figure out your style of play and build. I’d suggest actually not spending any of the ranks for maybe 15 levels. If you plan on roaming, then you definitely want the defense against guards followed by guard killer. If you are zerging, you actually want something more like:
Build Master R2
Ram Mastery R3
Supply Mastery T4
Catapult Mastery T1
Arrow Cart Mastery T2
Trebuchet Mastery T1
Repair Mastery T2
Arrow Cart Mastery T4
Catapult Mastery T4However, it definitely depends on which siege you prefer to use. Ram mastery is WAY OP and ramming is way more common than any other siege so I’m very surprised that it was neglected by some posts above. It also depends on the build you use too, though. For a zerker set up, you will be less likely to sit on siege and may prefer the defense against guards and guard killer route. I have 30k hp on my warrior and got defense against guards but don’t really notice a difference at this hp. It makes a big difference for people who already have low vitality armor and a low health pool. Warrior has the highest health pool.
After a couple days noobing it up, this feels like very sound advice.
I don’t see myself doing a whole lot of roaming actually because I suck 1v1 and probably will for the foreseeable future.
Mostly what I wind up doing is finding a blue tag and trying to stay with whatever zerg is running; so lots of re-capping towers and keeps, and only rarely going out solo to sneak around getting my map completion done or knock down a couple of sentries for the dailies.
I am running all PTV gear except berserker weapons and probably will stick with that for a while, until (if ever) I feel like I have enough skill to make something else more useful. At the moment I am traited 30/0/20/20/0, for lack of any better ideas, so I also have ~30k HP. I was using GS/Bow to start out, but I think Hammer/Bow seems like a better combination for zerg fights because stuns and more AOE.
After I get Supply Mastery 4, I think I’ll put 1 point each in build and repair masteries, then wait until 15 to decide what to do next. I am liking the siege path you suggested, because I did wind up spending kind of a lot of time hanging around after fights building carts and oil pots and stuff.
I see the virtue of the guard defense / guard killer lines, but with already having a high HP build (and being kinda likely to die fairly often anyway), and not being much of a roamer except for just sneaking around and doing map completion, now I think the stacks will be of less use to me than the logistics buffs.
Really good suggestions and information. Thanks very much for the replies.
I was looking at the supply abilities since the how-to about WvW talks about how critical suppply is to everything. The supply>guard defense>guard killer ones sound like a good set to start with.
Starting from 1 actually, since I guess we get one ability point for free. My first (only) character is a warrior, if that matters (I assume it doesn’t, since the buffs from WvW trait lines are all very general benefits). Also, with account-wide WxP coming soon, I assume that I will want to focus on things that are most useful in any situations.
So, what are the most useful and most useless WvW abilities that I should rank up first (or ignore completely)? Guard damage? Survivability? Supply capacity?
So, has anyone been able to actually do any of the PvE storyline that is set in this new map yet? It sounds, from dev comments, like there are completely separate instances of this map for PvE questing and for the new overflow WvW system. If that’s how it is going to work, then this entire thread is a non-issue.
Warrior:
Our changes for warrior focus on providing telegraphs to stronger skills and to reduce the passive benefit gained from Healing Signet.
- Healing Signet: Reduced the passive heal by 8%.
- We’re looking for ways to incentivize using Healing Signet’s active without increasing overall sustain. We’d love to hear your thoughts on this.
Healing Signet Active: Cures Poison then quadruples healing effectiveness for the next 5 seconds.
Healing Signet’s base after nerf, 361, would quadruple to 1,444 for each second for the next five seconds, ending up with a 7,220 heal.
Potency, length of time, CD is open to scrutiny.
I suggested something similar in terms of a healing power boost on activation. But in retrospect, this would be useless since the passive benefit of all signets are cancelled during the cooldown for the active.
That seems like kind of a dumb and unintuitive mechanic which is not at all obvious from the tooltips, and maybe is worth rethinking entirely. But, if signets continue to work as they do, nothing involving healing is going to really ever be useful as an active component of a signet which has passive healing as its primary function.
It would have to be something that is a valid tradeoff for healing, like granting vigor, or giving a buff to vitality or toughness for increased buffer while healing is shut off, or something else similar, so you’re basically changing mitigation “modes.”
Or . . . they could just rebalance all the signets around letting the passive attributes work all the time and not shutting them off when the active is triggered, which is probably how most people (wrongly) assume that they work.
OP, you are having fun the wrong way. Please stop.
The thing that I find surprising and excellent every time about the Marionette fight is just how crazy sideways it can go and still, somehow, end up in a win.
Last night the fight I was in seemed like a sure loss with several lanes in a row failing the same warden, then my lane got in (for the second time), killed it, and somehow the fight succeeded with the cannon power sticking at 99% for what seemed like forever.
I really have no idea how half the wins I’ve been in on have happened, because most of them looked like utter fail up until the last second.
This fight makes good things happen, both personally, as you figure out how to not fail on your own little part, and on a community scale when a huge number of players realize that if they try hard they can win it even when the odds look terrible.
I have not seen an encounter like that in any game before, where no matter how lost it seems, you still have a legitimate reason to keep pushing rather than just going /afk or giving up and kittening in chat.
All too often it’s the exact opposite; early on you reach a point where, if a couple of things go wrong, everyone can see that the fight likely is headed for failure and people just give up or leave, making failure certain.
I only have two minor gripes about the fight which are (1) the dodge achievements should be granted if you avoid all the puppet attacks and your platform kills its warden; and (2) it is maddening that I am at 4/5 on the defeat wardens achievement and have no way to tell which warden it is that I need to work on to complete this achievement; these checklist achievements ought to always show us the checklist so we know what we’ve done and what we need to do.
(edited by Heezdedjim.8902)
I think this has been one of the most enlightening threads I have seen in a long time. The poll is a super small number when compared to the entire player base (300 vs millions).
It’s also wildly biased in that most (nearly all?) of the votes certainly were cast by people who came to the forums to gripe about the watchwork pick, and who therefore care enough to bother reading this thread and click on the link.
1) Yes. Allow one to three sentences at most. Keep the topic narrow and pose a clear, yes / no question for players to respond to in each OP, with brief supporting reasons.
2) In-game polls please.
i can’t dictate how others play, i also can’t play this game how i would like to play it because of the QD train.
This is not a reply to your post specifically. But I am curious how and why people are spending so much time in Queens that they have a chance to actually get annoyed by the train.
Other than when you’re leveling through, doing Ambient Killer or Krytan dailes . . . or running the train . . . how exactly are you finding what goes on in one starter zone so ruinous to your entire game experience?
If you’re leveling through, nothing the train does is going to stop you. If anything it gives you a chance to hop in on champ kills you happen to be next to, which otherwise you would have to wait ages to find groups for.
If you’re just there to do some event or champ dailies, then the train is helping you get those done, not blocking you.
And if you’re doing things other than killing these champs, the train has no effect on you at all (other than once in a while clearing out some trash from the areas where the champs live).
If you want to solo farm or “raid” starter zone champs without having the train run through and stomp them, then there are three other zerg-free starter zones where you can do that any time you want, not to mention the other champ mobs in higher level zones.
If you’re saying that the smack talking in map chat is ruining your game, then that’s an issue anywhere that players are anywhere in the game. And if that’s the problem, then you might as well ask to take Lion’s Arch, the capital cities, and every big open world event out of the game as well.
Or maybe you just would rather have map chat removed entirely and leave us only with “say” for area comms. Which . . . maybe some people would prefer.
Actually it is not advertised as giving you sprockets so it is not a selling point, read the item description I am positive it does not say anything.
People know that it does this because of the forum and reddit rage about it, as well as comments on high profile sites like Duly and talk in-game, and at this point many knew that before buying it, and will have bought it for that reason.
Crappy attitudes of some players aside, it’s good for what it’s good for. There is no reason to “stop” it.
I liked it when I first saw it, because it was just the sort of spontaneous, always-running, open-world event that I’ve seen in far too few games. I recognized it for what it is, which is an easy way to get dailies and monthlies done.
It’s not a particularly good source of anything else, except maybe essence of luck if you need that and the bloodstone dust that it seems to give fair bit of. Almost all the loot is trash, and the XP / hr is not that great.
It’s great to drop in on for champion and event dailies and monthlies. It’s a lousy method of leveling at best, and I found map completion to be more levels / hr and more fun, so I never was tempted to hang around Queens by the presence of the train. I can take it for a few rounds, but more than that and it’s just too much frenzy + tedium to take.
There will be wailing and smack talking in barrens chat any time you have a nontrivial number of players in a zone. That’s not a reason to destroy a spontaneous, player created event that is good for some things, and that, if nothing else, gets a lot of players together pretty much 24×7, in one of the first zones new players will play.
The alternative basically is having Queens be yet another noob zone graveyard, where people have no reason to go ever. And whatever you think the champ train is, it’s less worse than that.
I like it because it looks neat and has a nice animation and sound. I could care less about the sprockets.
Whether it’s a problem or not, at this point the obstacle to “fixing” it is that people have spent a non-trivial amount of money on the item knowing that it had this bonus feature. The damage to customer relations caused by nerfing a cash shop item to take away a specific selling point poses a lot more danger than whatever “precedent” people think it sets.
So if they want to “fix” it in regard to other cash shop tools, the only viable option at this point is to add some sort of similarly trivial and useless “bonus” to them, to address the legitimate gripe that tools of equal cost did not come with a trivial and useless bonus of their own.
wha…? You want to boost HS or my eyes are to tired?
Assuming they take away the straight heal part of the active entirely, in case that wasn’t clear. The active heal is useless, and there is no way to make a heal alone useful without making it flat out better than any other heal . . . which it already is.
So take it away and make it do something different, that will make you “want to use the active,” which is their stated goal.
Warrior:
- Healing Signet: Reduced the passive heal by 8%.
- We’re looking for ways to incentivize using Healing Signet’s active without increasing overall sustain. We’d love to hear your thoughts on this.
Well, we have (1) a big burst heal that gives adrenaline and scales with adrenaline on a medium CD; (2) a medium heal that cleanses on a short CD; (3) a stance that heals on hit with low uptime; and (4) Healing Signet.
Since HS is a sustained regenerative heal, it would make some sense to add a boost to it that would encourage you to use the active tactically in order to get more mileage out of its (now mildly nerfed) sustain.
So, first, remove the existing heal on the active entirely. Replace it with one of the following:
(1) A substantial boost to healing power with relatively low uptime. It could add heal power in the range that Banner of Tactics does, but only for 10 seconds on a 60 second CD. This, along with the mild nerf to its sustain, would encourage you to use the active during heavy damage phases (e.g., at the start of a pull of several mobs to give you a little extra sustain until you thin the pack).
(2) A similar low uptime boost to vitality or toughness to give you a bit more buffer or a little more EHP/second to get through high damage phases.
(3) Granting Vigor with low to medium uptime as an option for non-horn builds.
(edited by Heezdedjim.8902)
I’ve been in fights where I did not get hit by the Marionette, was never downed, and we killed the warden, but I did not get the achievement because another lane failed and thus phase 2 failed.
This is why these dodge achievements are all but impossible to get for many; because it happens very often at least one lane fails in phase 2 (some fights I’ve done there was a fail on every chain or all but one and it was still a win).
This seems to be the biggest problem people are having, and it’s a legitimate gripe because the reason for failure really has nothing to do with an achievement that requires you to stay alive and dodge some attacks until the fight ends.
(edited by Heezdedjim.8902)
My experience was either a 50/50 split or maybe more wins so far in OF than main.
I haven’t been in an empty overflow so far, but if this is happening, they do need some sort of collapse rule.
If > 1 overflows exist and none are full, then a rule should kick in that sets all but the most full one to “depleting,” so that nobody else can enter any map except the one that is most full. If two are tied for fullest, then randomly select one to be the sole target for new entrants.
Then the emptier ones will deplete and go away as people leave and cannot reenter.
Maybe allow party invites into depleting overflows, in case someone needs to finish something up and needs to invite friends. Otherwise, just let them deplete and collapse, and then there will never be graveyard overflows.
I second the comment on the dodge achievements. I’ve run the fight 10+ times, and managed to dodge the marionette attacks in at least 7-8 of them after I started to figure the fights out. Still have not gotten even one of the dodge achievements, and at least five of the fights I’ve run have been wins, not fails.
I could swear I’ve defended all lanes now at least twice, with 10+ completed fights, but I’m still 4/5 on the defender achievement, and I have no idea which one I am missing.
Could this achievement and the regulator one have a list that shows us which ones we’ve done, so we know which lane to fight in to try and finish it?
This feature is in the UI elsewhere, for instance in the meta-achievements for the bosses. As a general matter, for achievements that need one each of specific steps, it would be nice to always see the list with green checkmarks for them, so we know what we have done and what we have left to do.
Otherwise it’s just trial and error, which kinda takes a while on a fight with a 2hr CD, just to find out each time that the counter for your achievement still hasn’t ticked again.