Guild Wars 2

I’m posting this for upcoming commanders and guild leaders specifically. If you thought these strategies were unique to you and you shouldn’t be giving the enemy intel… whatever.

General
1. Take note of how many people you have before you start an attack, and plan how many rams you’ll want for each door based on this.
2. Only throw down one piece of siege at a time. Seems tedious, but people have a tendency to not focus on a single build site, which can break your siege.
3. Siege is ALWAYS good. Always keep at least 3 ballista and 2 arrowcarts on you

Rams
1. Rams have quite a bit of health, they can soak damage via line of sight if needed.
2. Rams can be placed far enough back to avoid the above catapult shot and still hit the door.
3. Also you can stack people on the door to prevent the catapult from hitting the operator.

Arrowcarts
1. Arrowcarts can be placed in unhittable locations and still be very useful.
2. Mesmers are the only class that can hit a arrowcarts in unhittable location using Illusionary Berserker (that i know of)
3. The arrowcarts can hit anywhere in range with vision.
4. You can window mode your screen and expand it left/right very far to hit in ridiculously odd locations.

Ballistas
1. Ballistas work best in sets of 3.
2. Ballistas have massive range and can make the north eastern tower of the borderlands unsiegable without trebuchets or catapults.
3. You can place ballistas on the third floor of stonemist to hit a very large area of the courtyard, and these ones can not be hit by anything but a ballista.
4. Ballistas have the same range as cannons, but can miss easily at long range.
5. The upgraded ballistas do TONS OF DAMAGE to players. Three shots can take down the heartiest of builds.

Catapults
1. Catapults can knock down ram users if you place them behind doors a ways back. They can’t be destroyed in this location.
2. Catapults can tear through walls faster than trebuchets if you build multiple of them. Upgraded catapults are even faster.
3. You can use a catapult to kill the catapult killing your ram users.

Trebuchets
1. Trebuchets are awesome.
2. Trebuchets are AWESOME.
3. Trebuchets do 4k damage to doors
4. Trebuchets do 7k damage to walls
5. Trebuchets do 4k damage to upgraded walls.
6. Trebuchets do 17k damage to siege weapons.
7. Trebuchets can sometimes be built in the courtyard of towers and still arc over the wall.
8. Trebuchets can hit __________ Bay from Garrison on borderland maps.
9. Trebuchets on the third floor of stonemist can hit any tower on the map (not 100% sure, but 9/12 confirmed)
10. A trebuchet in green’s lower right tower can hit stonemist without being in danger of being hit. I’m not sure of the placement, but the cliff in front of it blocks retaliation shots from both mortars and trebuchets.
11. Building a trebuchet early will save you much trouble when the enemy decides to build a trebuchet against you.

Golems
1. Golems are weird, I don’t like them.
2. Best strategy I’ve seen them used for is 4 man breaking into several towers in a row, to prevent orange swords from appearing on the map.
3. They are squishy.
4. They are VERY squishy, enough that NPCs can kill them rather quickly if you’re not careful.

In a perfect world scenario, where every force is micromanaged down to single person, it should be an absolute stalemate.

That being said, I love eternal for it’s craziness in strategy and dynamics. On EB, it comes down to near diplomacy and morale based combat. One of my favorite strategies is creating a siege blockade on the side routes, and using minimum manning to operate the siege, while taking the mass zerg over to the other side.

The implication is that one side will have to dedicate their forces to break your blockade, or they will redirect their forces away from you, which creates a sandwich situation on the side you actually want to take.

Green has a treb point in their south east most tower that can’t be retaliated on from stonemist, giving green the heaviest advantage on eternal battlegrounds. I’ve no idea if this is an intended consequence of the location or just a exploit or bug.

For reference, every other treb point I can think of can be hit from stonemist via treb, very easily I might add.

They need to make the WvW titles tiered, like I believe they were intended to be. There’s a reason it’s called Ultimate Dominator, not just Dominator.

I posted this in the other threads, but I think it’s a pretty good idea so I’m going to post it in it’s own instead. Little bit of hubris I suppose, but oh well.

Since Eternal Battleground’s jump puzzle is essentially instanced, you can play with some of the mechanics a bit differently than other jump puzzles. You saw this in the October events, the developers can do all sorts of fun stuff with an instanced zone. This got me thinkin’, how do you solve the camper “problem” without removing the fun PvP elements from the puzzle?

- Make it reset a short time after the first person gets the chest
- Allow people to loot the chest multiple times with diminishing returns
- Make it so the instance doesn’t take up slots in eternal battlegrounds

Implications of this? If it resets, everyone is spawned at the bottom portion of the map creating a battle royale for a few minutes. A team may advance ahead, but with teams, they will probably stop, deter other players and try to get their team to the chest all around the same time.

How does this stop campers? No server works together 100%. This means that some random guy can run up and tag the chest, and now the campers are faced with the battle royale again and may lose their position. This means that, if the server that is camping doesn’t have substantial numbers, they will lose.

I want to say the eternal JP should be instanced like the madking’s clock tower, resetting every 20-30 minutes to give that ‘rush to the top while messing up other people’ but prevents people from sitting at the top of the puzzle all day.

Say the first person to reach the top starts the timer, 5 minutes left to get to the top.

WvW is the hybrid between PvP and PvE, thus you get a hybrid reward for participating, but not winning (badges buy gear and siege, PvE and PvP respectively)

They will eventually rework the % based bonuses to probably give something more substantial and lasting. The problem with it right now is that on medium/low population servers, you pretty much have to participate in WvW as often as possible to gain those awards, and you get very little time to enjoy them. So the people are earning the rewards for people who don’t participate in WvW.

IMO this could be fixed by pushing the rewards offset by 1 week. So you work hard one week in WvW and crush your bracket, and you reap the rewards the next week.

Borlis Pass is blue this week, if you want just those points.

I can’t say were a great server, but its the best server that I know of (and ive only played on one)

When I play commander, I lead the zerg. Period. That’s generally the best I can provide to the map at the time. My guild is in the background doing all the dirty work (flipping camps, placing siege, making sure the siege stays active, using long range siege to bust open keeps/towers) while I run the zerg around using sheer numbers and minor siege (mostly catapults and rams) to bust towers/keeps.

It works perfectly.

The one who wants to be tactical should drop his commander hat and use his guild to be tactical. If he doesn’t have a guild behind him, he probably shouldn’t be a commander. While said person wouldn’t get full credit for his work, it would win the war, generally.

For those saying what the worst part of lower brackets is?

Not enough players, period. We have plenty of leadership, and good leadership imo, at least on Borlis. If there’s activity on WvW, you can bet there is a commander rallying there. We never have a spontaneous zerg appear ever.

As much as I’d love to play on higher population servers, I’m sticking with borlis for the long haul. I love the guilds on here. We may never leave the bottom two brackets, but I’m okay with that.

It’s a bad situation, if you notice it happening, I suggest just standing down and watching the other commander. If your plan was better, then letting him fail is probably the best solution.

Unfortunately the current system doesn’t allow for much play when it comes to multiple commanders, so you just have to deal with it.

Distance
Direction
Motivation

The US Army has used this model for NCOs for decades, and it works brilliantly. Every time I put on my commander hat I go over those three basic ‘command requirements’. When ever you ‘command’ something, if you fail to provide those three things, your unit will fail in some way.

Personally, motivation is the easiest to kitten up, and usually the most detrimental. If your army is demoralized, you will likely lose.

Try spending 6 hours a day 7 days a week and get nothing but badges which you dont need except to buy more siege.

It’s not worth doing imo, and really takes way too much time

Elementalists are all about set and forget.

You can do some decent damage via ranged wells and marks, but it requires a bit more activeness and your cooldowns are a lot larger.

Except grenades are the most damaging ability in the game currently. At level 80 you can range between 1100 damage per grenade (3 grenades per toss, 3/4th second CD) to 1800 damage per grenade for a grand total of 5400~ damage per throw. This is a lot of damage.

You’re going through leveling pains. I suggest trying rifle and bomb kit for leveling, using rifle to pull mobs and bomb to deal with them when they get close.

If I could magically control every player on the map simultaneously as a commander, then I’d agree to remove orange swords. Other option is to have a 250 man 100% active guild on at all times that only plays WvW.

Yeah nah, it’s going to stay as it is.

This is people trying to get the besieger title.

100,000 for T4 → T5, jesus christ almighty.

You know what a good counter to zerging is? About 4 ballistas and 1/4th of the size of their force. Oh and this tactic pays for itself.

Zerging is fine, it’s a very important part of WvW.

Plok.6145:

Dovgan.8605:

@Lightsbane Isn’t that kind of an open ended insult to Borlis, saying the reason AR is in 3rd is solely because of GoM? Although, if you don’t think AR has lost several guild since release, you’d be wrong, and over all we wished them the best in their new servers(upper tier servers as well). You must really be missing the guild you posted about here.

Well seeing as how several of BP Commanders and our largest guild decided this would be a good week to take off, the fact we are even still in it is a miracle in itself.

Sorry lol

Honestly, it’s best that we can do this periodically. I don’t see us lasting in the next bracket at the moment. I hope they change some of the fundamental properties of WvW, it’s kitten near impossible to sustain the level of playing that every server has been putting out just to remain in this bracket.

dirtyklingon.2918:

lets get off jumping puzzles and get back to the match

gates of madness is in full force this morning, and AR has the lead on 2nd by less than 1k points, with a slightly beefier share of the pie than BP.

I’ve been taking the week off of WvW for IRL reasons. I’m glad y’all can keep up without me, I’ll be back this friday to kick some kitten again.

epicsmooth.7825:

Seriously didn’t think I would have people from my own server (BP) complaining about Jumping puzzle camping.

I have no problem with eternal battleground jump puzzle camping. It has plenty of internal design to give advantage to the forward players. Tons of traps, vantage points, etc.

I have a problem with eternal battleground jump puzzle camping with siege equipment, especially in the arena room where it’s neigh impossible to counter. I came up with a plan to counter it, guess how much supply and silver it would cost me? Around 50s, 190 supply, and 12 people to counter 1 person on an arrowcart.

For those comparing it to camping a supply camp? No. Compare it to camping the siege vendor in the spawn camps. No point value. Oh wait, you can’t do that because they put legendary defenders to prevent stupid kitten like that.

I have a good feeling that they will remove the ability to use siege in the jump puzzle eventually.

melodyca.8921:

Hymnosi.5928:

Hey GoM,

Tell your local windowlickers to stop camping the jumping puzzle with arrowcarts.

Sincerely,
Everyone else in this bracket

Um…Just so you know there were plenty of people from the OTHER teams camping it this past weekend. Its not just GOM so please don’t blame us because it goes BOTH ways.

This is more of ‘in the now’ kind of request. There is about 30 of us who want to finish vs your 5. Your 5 has a mesmer, so they can just port people up whenever they feel like it.

Hey GoM,

Tell your local windowlickers to stop camping the jumping puzzle with arrowcarts.

Sincerely,
Everyone else in this bracket

Let’s discuss being a commander and the strategical implications of the role.

However, let’s place some rules to keep the discussion positive an relevant:

- No complaints about acquisition of the commander status.
- No suggestions on how to improve the game mechanics for commanders. We’re all aware how bad it is currently.

Basically this thread is sharing knowledge, nothing more, nothing less.

You should get drops for killing siege, period. The bigger the siege, the better the drop table.

You’ve clearly never been on a low pop server

Why not go to a lower pop server? We only have full queues on the reset day

Don’t think of the server rating scheme as a rank system. It mostly is determined by population and activity in wvw. In a perfect world, servers wouldn’t have to move ranks at all. However, people quit or stop playing so the servers rank has to be adjusted.

Here we go again,
Same old kitten again.
March down the battlefield,
One more week and we’ll be through!

Good luck all!

I wish the WvW titles had tiers instead of just ‘ultimate X’

It’s going to take years to get any of those titles.

The only mod I’d put is that you should get badges of honor for destroying siege equipment. Right now there’s little to gain from killing siege except the siege not being there.

Thats not the problem Kyus. WvW for our server is fun for me, just too time consuming. Were VERY organized, and really I think that’s the only reason were in the bracket were in.

According to the predictions page, it will be

GoM = Green
BP = Blue
AR = Red

Wish I could be there today! Good luck to all 3 servers.

Snowballing is something I enjoy, that’s how tactics and siege and ‘winning’ works. It gives clear cut defined winners. That’s just me though, probably not a popular opinion.

I’ll put the cliff notes up first

- Just went through 3 weeks of ‘mostly even’ game play on my server
- Score less than 30k between each score
- I feel that WvW rewards don’t make up for the amount of time spent playing
- Gameplay unfulfilling as it is currently
- Maybe just a low pop server problem, straining those who are WvW active
- I believe making WvW objective based instead of score based would make it better, for both hardcore players and casual players

This week, and the past 3 weeks, we’ve had relatively ‘good’ matches. Never a shut out, constantly shifting weight between the three servers. Definitely a lot of fun, on all parts. However, the fun ran dry around the third/fourth day of every week. It always starts with an exciting 12-15 hours of post-reset ridiculous muscling to set the tone for the week. The next 2 days are set struggling for a point lead and holding/taking the orbs. THIS PART IS FUN. I love launch day. It’s refreshing to see everyone out in force.

My biggest concern is that in a few months, WvW will be empty because there is no long term goal for it. Every week it resets with no recognition of the previous week. A feeling of futility right there if there ever was one. You could argue that pvp marks are the long term goal, or maybe titles? The titles feel so out of reach that they are a non issue, and the badges of honor hit or miss at best.

I don’t have a solution that doesn’t radically change what WvW is right now. It’s just… time consuming to the point where I don’t even want to do it, but I want to want to do it, if you know what i mean. If you shorten the periods of play, it’s no longer a 24/7 thing. Some servers would benefit from this, some would be detrimental. If you change it to objective based, it means that WvW eventually closes down for the rest of the week, proclaiming winners and losers.

I’m all for a shorter WvW session. Maybe just the weekend?

RAB: random kitten ballista

RAB best strategy ever

Psy.6153:

Its too late in the game to even discuss this, the bads have their creditcardcommander badge, and you aint getting it off them.

give them a refund of 100g.

Playing WvW is its own reward… it’s fun!

It’s fun, yes. It’s also costly to my time. I spend 1-2g a day minimum on WvW, 3-4g on reset day.

All for what? Next week we start over and gain nothing.

We focused on you. GoM probably thinks we have a lot less people than warranted. Our original goal going in friday was to come in second by a strong margin, we never hoped to come in first as we are currently (close!)

Golems really don’t do too much. Even if you had every person in a golem, it wouldn’t be much better than if you just had them playing regularly.

Best case scenerio, you 4 man stealth the outer door and then zerg the inner door with traditional siege.

Besides the transfer issue, anything else?

I wouldn’t mind a skin reward that only lasts 1 week, which only is given for WvW participation, so that the SERVER knows that you spent that much time in WvW providing said buffs to the server.

Starting to get weary of WvW. I kinda wish WvW was designed for shutouts, and that once your server won/lost, it’s shuffled to a new match. It’s extremely hard to justify 6+ hours a day for simple badges of honor, and the side buffs are hardly worth the effort.

Ah well, game on folks!

It’s intention is to be guild based, otherwise it wouldn’t cost 100g. Commanders should be guild elect (GUILD wars) and supported.

Besides how it works now (terribly), this topic is just about how it’s obtained.

However impossible it is going to be to get arenanet to do something like this, what kind of reward do you think your server should receive for winning a week of WvW?

Before you come and ruin the fun, I’m aware there is subtle bonuses to everything in game for winning the match. I personally don’t think these are enough for people to devote 4 hours a day to WvW, which is nearly required to compete.

You’re kidding me right?
Just for a Squad Chat and up to 25 people involved? Also from a guild? What about the players who have a lot of friends and like to put together small groups in WvW and take up the leadership role?
I am in a guild, but in WvW I spend more time creating small groups from the ground up and trying to run them at times. I run a support build as well.
Influence annoys me to no end because the larger the guild, the more advantage they get in WvW. Remember the Ruin Guild? They had literally everything you could possibly get…
As far as commander goes, the funny thing is that a player can pay 100g but guess what! Sooner or later no one outside of new players will listen to the commander while the more advanced commanders will become known by the community.

larger guilds have a larger influence on WvW, by far. If they don’t care about WvW, they won’t get politics level 5, plain and simple.

Commander status should be bought with influence points through the guild and should be voted for by the guild members themselves on who gets the title.
I.e. Commander status costs 2,000,000 Influence Points and whoever gets it must be resolved by the people in the guild themselves
This basically means that the guild and its members has been there long enough to accumulate the huge amount of influence points. This also encourages bigger united guilds as opposed to smaller scattered guilds.

The right to buy it would cost influence, similar to how you buy guild armor/weapons. How much that cost will probably be in line with other level V permanent upgrades (deep cove is the only one I think, and it’s 30,000)

Should be the ability to purchase it once you attain Politics V, along with the 100g cost.

This means you either spent an extreme amount of gold to buy influence for your guild, or you have a large enough guild to warrant the Commander status.

As for retro action, give back 100g to the people who already purchased it.

In WvW, I’m a commander. I run around with a full tank build (or at least, as far as my current gear can let me) and basically do my best to control the field while not dying. So far It’s worked out fantastically.

Build
0/0/30/30/10
Maximizing in protection and defensive traits, as well as turrets. Also unlimited vigor with speedy kits and that alchemy trait.

Why turrets? Turrets are not based on your stats, giving you a very baseline setup.

Skills
Medkit (required for infinite vigor/swiftness)
Rifle Turret (baseline damage, overcharged it does about 700dps in addition to your damage)
Rocket turret (AoE damage, it’s overcharge gives it a pretty decent damage base, and it’s toolbelt ability does a decent amount as well)
Tool Kit (extra block, box of nails to get away, and more importantly, a pull ability)

Weapons
Pistol… by default. I hope we get more options in the future
Shield… by choice. Engineer shield is probably the second best shield skill set, behind warrior which has a longer block.

Armor
Soldier gear all the way baby, power/vitality/toughness is the best you can manage for tank stats. One day we will have cond/vit/tough but for now… soldier.

Runes
I like Superior Runes of the Pack simply because I’m always around people who could use fury/swiftness/might. It goes off pretty often too.

Sigil
I’m still up in the air around this, for shield sigil I like using one of those stat medallions of the soldier because you rarely actually attack with the shield. Cooldowns are too long to use a proc ability. In WvW stacking sigils are kinda meh.

Gameplay
You have more endurance, health, armor, protection, and blocking than pretty much everyone. My job as a commander is to lead the pack, and not die. It’s also to inspire people to take that extra risk, so if I jump down first, it’s good that I don’t die immediately while doing so.

Controlling the field is important as well. You have a pull which is similar to guardian’s greatsword 5 skill, but only pulls 1 person. Shorter range though, so you have to be careful. You have a knock back bubble and a reflect shield on the same setup, best way is to get focused as best as possible, abuse as many block mechanics as possible, and finish up with that bubble.

Place turrets on top of walls. People underestimate them and dont focus them. It’s extra damage, plain and simple. They blow up for pretty nifty blast combos as well.

http://www.gw2build.com/builds/simulator.php#1.4.6.0.19.0.7.0.7.0.80.82.86.97.102.8.8.29.0.0.0.0.0.0.256.262.267.271.276.275.291.0.0.0.0.30.30.10