Guild Wars 2

Ejiofor.4801:

After leaving TC to join FA,

Welcome to FA!

Thanks everyone for your amazing replies. I have read through them all and considered them carefully. I am still looking for more input if there are others out there who would like to share.

Heinel.6548:

TBH I think your plague necro swarm is much more effective as cover than a bunch of bunker guardians. Especially since you already have the coordinated churning spike down already. It fits the overall aggressive style of your zerg. .

I appreciate the personalized response. Either you’ve read through my forum posts in the past, or you’re playing with/against me on FA—so your input is valued.

Yes, my guild is (currently) predominantly focused with Elementalists. We do “Churn stacking” which is (for simplicity’s sake) a burst of DPS in a small area every 30 seconds.

Our problem is in our ability to hold ground. We can’t do it. We strike HARD for 10 seconds and put a few down. If we don’t kill a lot of them, they quickly recover their dead and we continue to fall back.

These bunker guardians we’re encountering—being very hard to put down—are quite a problem for us. Based on all your feedback, we’re thinking that bunker guardians of our own might be the missing link. Give us the staying power we sorely lack to take the ground we break during our 10 second damage spike.

More information on “Churn Stacking” can be found here:

https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/professions/elementalist/Elementalist-Stacking-Churning-Earth-Video/first

Furiousbeard.7602:

Maybe FA and IOJ should talk alliance now?

We shall have peace… We shall have peace, when you answer for the burning of Overlook, and the children that lie dead there! We shall have peace, when the lives of the soldiers whose bodies were hewn even as they died against the gates of the Garrison, are avenged! When you hang from a gibbit for the sport of your own crows…! We shall have peace.

TC loves to duel.

FA and TC dueled pretty regularly in a backroom of the jumping puzzle when they were tier 3.

CD joined in eventually… after trying to wipe it out a few times and getting double teamed by the duelists :P

TC’s got some skill and honor to boot.

FaithfulForce.2419:

Score update. IoJ now behind by 24,759 and FA by 30,907.

For the record, FA was in second place last night.

Way to go FA Stayin’ in the game!

Darn it, they caught us.

FA had a tribunal where all the Server Elders convened and broke bread about our overall strategy. Even after many heated debates, political discussion, and poetry we had not come to a consensus. To break the stalemate, we had to pull our pugs out of an attack on SMC to perform a 40-player choreographed rain dance to the [GODS].

In our semi-lucid state (having downed a healthy swig of Borderland ale), we all beheld a golden light descend into the tent. It was a beautiful woman. Strong, powerful, naked. She spun slowly, gazing through us. As she turned, eyes turned downcast in humble awe of the deity.

Everything that happened after was a blur. But when we awoke, the message was clear. Seared into the minds of every FA on the server like a hot iron on a cow’s flank.

“Pick on the little guy.”

So if CD or IoJ ever thinks they’re getting double teamed by FA, I just want you guys to remember that we didn’t have a choice.

And certainly not because there’s a dozen commanders who independently make decisions about what to attack on a given day. No. That’s not how it works at all.

Almost completely forgot this thread existed.

There are more videos of churn stacking added to the original post.

Enjoy!

KrazyFlyinChicken.5936:

He still plays, and GODS still exists… but not nearly as regular as they once were.

etrigan.4213:

Not as regular?? ooook.

RET works with GODS on a regular basis. There are lots of GODS commanders in different groups in different battlegrounds. But you don’t see the Derv Zerg as much anymore.

There are lots more of these videos if you’re interested.

Go to youtube and search: “RET Guild WvW”

Elementalist Churn Stacking is what we do

Nice video — over here on FA, we do the same kitten, but it’s not an accident :P

I joined GODS for a day about a month back.

Not even kidding. 2 hours after I joined, Derv freaked out and ragequit saying he was transferring to TC and everyone should follow him.

At the time I didn’t think much of it. Video game drama. Meh. So I guild quit. The next day he was back, and trying to get GODS back together.

He still plays, and GODS still exists… but not nearly as regular as they once were.

Note** This post is NOT a complaint about Guardians. I am looking for constructive comments about the use of this class in mass.

My guild has recently encountered a new Guild in WvW who seems to have a large number of these bunker guardians. When overwhelmed, they die like the rest. But in equal number, their group is very difficult to kill. Generally speaking, I would say 40% of their group makeup is bunker guardians.

With this kind of ratio, every time one of their guys goes down, they can be easily picked up and saved. Their overall health and toughness makes them ideal for holding the line (go figure). They generally stand up front and just absorb a lot of the enemy zerg’s damage with high damage mitigation.

When they’re ready to push, they charge the line boldly forcing the zerg to hit them first. The DPS classes, on instinct (upon seeing their friends attacking the line), sweep in behind them while the guardians are taking damage.

We experimented a little, and tried pitting 3 elementalists against a single bunker guardian. And although they managed to kill him, it took them a very long time. (admittedly, he did almost nothing to hurt the elementalists). But in a larger group, with some other DPS support classes, I can see how having a strong core of these guardians would be difficult to deal with.

The questions:

1) What are this forum’s thoughts on a heavy emphasis on bunker guardians as a part of a group makeup?

2) Do you think their DPS is too low to be useful?

3) Do you think it would be too complicated to work?

4) If you had 15 players in your WvW group, how many of them would you like to be Bunker Guardians?

5) Do you think another Guardian build would work better?

Thanks.

Edit:

Taking suggestions from this forum post, we’ve put theory into practice and started working with guardians:

Today was definitely a blast for PvP.

A lot of great fights with [KH] and [TG].

Pangloss was definitely a victory for you, and a good strategy after SMC had fallen into our hands. But as soon as those castle walls go to wood, it’s like everybody and their sister wants a piece of it. I don’t think we held it long enough to even get a single dolyak in :P

TG defended Hills valiantly on the FA borderland. Took us an hour and 2 golems to breach and by this time the walls were reinforced. We eventually kicked them out with pure strength in numbers.

And of course garrison. I’m not sure how CD managed to get garrison. After we had secured all the keeps in our borderland we left to fight in CD BL. By the time we got back there was a blank-stare on FA’s faces. We figured out pretty soon that clearly [KH] and [TG] had put together some kind of blitz.

We stacked a lot of churns, dropped many-a-portal, but by this point you guys had put some pretty serious arrow cart presence on the inner wall and we couldn’t get past the inner gate. Getting into Garrison was the easy part. Killing the players proved less-so.

We were trying to figure out why the churn wasn’t working so well near the end there. We had 4 elementalists stacking them, but we were only getting 1 or 2 down on average. Are you guys heavy into bunker guardians? We saw a lot of them on the field today, and It’s got a few of my guys thinking it might not be a bad idea to get a few more….

At any rate, amazing fights. We didn’t win, but we’re not ‘gonna cry about it. We’ll see you again tomorrow!

Sidestepping the obvious flamebait which Hek is doling out like water from a well….

I just wanted to state the obvious absence of FA from those very high population servers as of yet. I’m sure that will change as prime time closes, but I just wanted to throw that out there as a morale boost to the rest of FA who might still be reading this tl;dr thread.

Way to go FA!

I thought this was fixed.

Like a month ago.

I agree with Slamz on this one.

Keeps should be fought for. Not snuck in through the back door (unless there’s a good diversion for one on a different side).

The system works well, and accomplishes this aim.

There definitely needs to be more small-group objectives though that are more practical.

Like destructible bridges.

Imagine a bridge that spans a deep, long valley which covers one approach to your keep (Like the one South of the East keep on the Borderlands). You don’t want to destroy it for no reason, because your zerg might need it to launch their attacks. But if you receive intel that an enemy zerg is coming to attack your keep, you set explosive charges beneath it and blow the bridge.

Now the enemy must take the long way around, or waste their much-needed siege supply repairing it.

Flip side: You know your zerg needs a bridge to lay siege to a keep. So the zerg sends 5 guys (and a mesmer) ahead to secure the bridge. If the 5-man group holding the bridge thinks they can win, maybe they won’t blow it. Your 5-man group can secure the far side before your zerg arrives.

Shrug

I actually have my hopes that ANet has this in store for the February expansion. The mechanic is already in place. There are those wall-pieces behind some of the tower lord’s rooms that are no more than destructible bridges.

And getting back to rational discussion… I thought I’d note that if the week eneded TODAY, CD will be bumped into 1st place for tier 3. IoJ will fall to 2nd with FA in striking distance to move up.

The WvW ratings are:

Current Rating:

1 773.965 (IoJ)
1 764.159 (CD)
1 726.746 (FA)

Next Week’s Rating:
1 758.070 (IoJ)
1 767.882 (CD)
1 738.790 (FA)

Source:
http://mos.millenium.org/matchups#NA

Edit:

Also of note — Dragonbrand from Tier 4 is pulling ahead of that tier. It’s possible they’ll be pushing their way to Tier 3 if FA has a bad week.

Dragonbrand’s score next week — 1 672.846

Reading the posts, I’m really not seeing a lot of FA whining about the zergs. We get swept out overnight at least once a week. But we’re still here.

For every 1 FA post about the ‘CD zerg’ I’m seeing 4 posts from CD getting defensive about it…

I think this whole thing is blown way out of proportion :P

Good fights today CD… We’ll be seeing you again tomorrow

Kincaidia.3192:

And not at all like when we (IoJ) were in the midst of a 3 hour defense at Bay from CD and then FA takes the opportunity to golem-rush hills.

It happens. Put on your big girl panties and keep going.

After we took bay from CD BL and managed to nail it down tight, we decided we’d see if we could hold 2 keeps so RET and GODS went to the IoJ BL and started building golems. When they were ready, we messaged BT (Still defending the CD BL Bay) to come to help. When we hit that door, it was 3 guilds with 5 minutes from start to finish. The blitz was perfect.

Immediately after, BT returned to CD BL to defend the Bay as planned.

Within 10 minutes of us holding Hills, IoJ’s zerg attacking the CD-held Bay did an ‘about face!’ and basically set fire to the place.

tl;dr: So no. FA and IoJ don’t team up. We just ended up spending more time on the CD BL because there was definitely a lot more interesting fights there. The IoJ Hills never held long enough for us to put a significant FA presence there

FA-held Bay in the CD BL, however, was held long enough to get a waypoint

In the CD Borderlands today, RET and BT worked together to take Bay.

4 hours later, we were still defending it. Reinforced walls went up, and CD attacked it time and again.

It had some amazing fights for the outer wall. Here’s one of them

(The first 2 minutes of this video is of RET retreating, because we don’t always win… but we withdraw like a proper guild should— Enjoy!)

Props to the CD who were attacking Bay in their BL today.

FA took it early in the day, and the fight to retake it went on into the night (4+ hours).

The outer wall went down multiple times to more than just trebs.

Videos soon.

If anyone’s coin to transfer off of FA then to them I say: Good riddance. Quality over quantity. Great matchup so far, but I can say from experience that FA is a very consistent server in terms of overall attendance. Sure we have our high and low hours, but we don’t slack because we’re losing or grow because we’re winning. We attend throughout and that’s the real reason we belong in tier 3. Not our zergs, not our skill, but our consistency.

Bring it on IoJ/CD

I’m quite proud of FA. The playerbase is quite receptive to strategy and teamwork. The only problem is that FA lacks a lot of good commanders. Sure we have a lot of commander tags, but very few of them carry enough clout to steer clear of the team chat trolls. So it seems when there is a good commander on (Ibludgeon, Derv, etc) we will do very well. But the moment they log off the Zerg resumes its mindless gameplay and one failure leads to another until we’re outmanned again.

It doesn’t matter if FA has players in the borderlands running around tipping cows. We don’t ever have a queue. So the more bodies we can mix into the mess, the better.

jonesbones.9632:

ULTD is done with GW2. Good luck FA!

Good luck ULTD. I noticed you guys were absent of late, which may account for our recent drop of progress.

Meanwhile the opening salvo has been fired and it looks like CD takes the lead. But not by much. This week will be interesting now that FA and IoJ know right away who the main contender will be!

I think the misconception in my post is that I am offering an alternative perspective so that one might better understand the mentality of a commander. I’m not trying to suggest that commanders should avoid tough fights. Only that, if a commander chooses to fight the hard targets—he must be met with some measure of success or face abandonment.

If a commander fails to take the hard target, he must move on. If he does not, the players that were following him will follow someone else who is not fighting the hard targets, and the result is the same.

A zerg is not mindless, but to understand it (and manipulate it) you must think of it like it’s being controlled by a 10-year old boy. You don’t try to reason with him—he will not listen. You show him that, by following you, he will get to kill many bad peoples. When he trusts you, you can lead him back to where he needs to go. And without thinking, he will go.

Edit: Of course, all of this is moot if you have a decent guild behind you that you can reason with. This is speaking in a general sense of commanders without guilds or regular followers. RET, for example, takes Wildcreek and Durios in fairly equal measure.

Twinbabas.6053:

Will someone help our guild Charr?….he hasn’t stopped crying since the tragic event that unfolded with his Aspenwood love….

http://www.yo.utube.com/watch?v=aqe-OmSEIBU

LOL!

I’m noticing a recurring theme in forum posts, so I thought I’d offer my quick input on it. This is regarding (poor) commander behavior. I am not trying to defend poor command decisions—just offer an alternative perspective. I do not profess to be the best commander, but I’m certainly not the worst, so take what I have with a grain of salt.

The truth is most commanders know what they’re doing. We’ve all played RISK when we were kids and we know we need to make pacts and attack the winners, etc. You cannot assume you know more than everyone else—and you may not have fully grasped the concepts listed above until you’ve actually got a list of players following you.

For any aspiring commanders I would offer this.
My philosophy has always been:

I would follow the command of any player, who would follow mine.

Maniac.5163:

It’s funny in these forums, the team you are on is always outnumbered but far more adept at mashing buttons.

I feel like this was by design. The game itself is angled towards making you feel like you’re always outnumbered.

Ever notice that hostile pets/mesmer clones all show the same colour, but all friendly pets/clones do not? At a glance, you can see that your side only has a handful of players (even when surrounded by beastmaster necros and mesmers), but when the enemy is grouped together, there is absolutely no way of telling how many there are.

For me, a good rule of thumb is to estimate the enemy’s numbers and multiply by 2/3.

kylia.4813:

Right back at you *wink:

http://youtu.be/fvgvdOR2IMs

A video of over an hour siege of Greenbriar where FA with superior numbers could not break 15 or so IoJ’ers

(video is just under 20mins to include all the different attempts and counter tactics, enjoy! )

Amazing video!

I watched this right from beginning to end. I especially loved the portal from the back of the lords room. That probably gave them a pretty significant ‘oh kitten’ moment :P

I think you mentioned that you’re largely an oceanic guild which is too bad. I would love to see a video for RET vs. AVTR.

RET is in the american timezones

It’s all a part of our master plan to stay in third so we can hold on to our impenetrable EB keep.

We almost screwed it up last week. We almost took 2nd place by nearly 3 pts and put ourselves in a spot to defend that stupid Durios tower. That was a close one. But nope. We’re still in third which means Durios is still going to be the most easily contestable tower on the map :P

CD a little angry over last week’s defeat

From third to first in a week.
I love this tier.

Raincrow.1840:

6 Golems vs the breakout tower was a bad choice from the start.

This.

Diashame.6328:

You guys kick bottom!! Nice vids.

Ira.5172:

@Krazy: that was an amazing video, keep up the good work guys!

Thanks guys

I’m hoping to get a few more. Preferably ones of us fighting other guilds.

So if you see us on the field in a group (we usually run in groups of 10-15 these days), get a group together and come fight us!

If I’m there, and my fraps is rolling, I’ll post it up here in good spirit.

Mohmohchan.4120:

T3 server.
watch and have fun!

part 1: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jBKHelpY98s

part 2: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zLsWQze9tXU

Nice videos
I was reluctant to post mine when I saw the second video here.

RyuDragnier.9476:

That was some impressive synchronization on the moves Krazy. Now that I think about it, I thought I recognized your name. I think you were there last week when I was killed on the hill just because I was launching Barrage at you guys by myself. XD

Thanks for the praise! I really don’t do anything. I just spout nonsense and the guild takes over with their awesomeness :P I don’t even mention the mesmers on ventrilo anymore because they know exactly what to do when we do it.

MuffinMan.3285:

Great video, got some good organization.what’s the full name of your guild? Ill be looking for you guys

Our guild is called “Reticle” [RET] short. We hang out mostly on EB (Big open fields, lots of hills and bottlenecks to fight in, etc). Our prime-time is usually between 5-9PM PST.

Here’s another video taken after we gave up on IoJ BL and switched to EB. (Sorry for the video spam. Obviously you can just disregard them if you choose. But if you’re like me, and just sitting at work, you might be bored enough to watch :P)

Working on new years eve! Yay!

Niim.9260:

MuffinMan.3285:

Blah, blah, blah.

If you were actually there you would know what went on and have an opinion worth listening too, not to mention your comments would make a lot more sense.

Hey! RET was in that BL with DRGN yesterday

We fought you guys in an open field… I have a video, but I haven’t converted it yet. I can do that tonight if it’s a really hot item.

We were walking to Foghaven when, due to culling, I think both sides just walked into each other on accident. We turned and hammered the first group pretty hard, but it drove a knife right down the middle of a train of players coming in from Garrison. We downed/killed 7-8 on the initial hit and started the push back to garrison, but another group came down from Hills and started picking up the dead where we left them.

30 seconds later, we were surrounded on both sides, culling all around. I should have pulled us out, if I was watching my minimap I’d have known we were fighting two fronts. Alas…

We tried to get them to fight a second time by setting up trebs at Foghaven to hit the keep. It was a reinforced wall, so we figured we’d just hit it until they came out to kill us.

Not so. They built counter treb after counter treb until we gave up -_-

But all-in-all a good fight. I look forward to Fighting DRGN again… but hopefully not on the BL where your spawn points are literally -everywhere- :P

After we decided no one was coming to kill us at Foghaven, we started raiding camps and got this fight:

(The title says “DRGN Defence” to key my own memory. But I’ve since changed the naming scheme to just have the dates. No titles)

When I left for work today I told Jonnyman to take SMC for me.

Drunk scottsman does not disappoint.

Only a 12K difference between us and CD. You guys sure that’s enough to get you through the weekdays?

It wasn’t last week

Waffler.1257:

My comp broke so I’m using a kittenty 3 year old laptop to play while I wait for it to get fixed.

My heart goes out to you, my friend.

Wow you play this game on a really low resolution o.0
Nothing wrong with that, just sayin… darn.

Your text is right in the middle where people should be dying.
It’d be virtually impossible to ignore all the whiners on team chat

For leveling, generally:

Start in lightning usually (you may have skills to increase movement speed, so you’re getting from one mob to another a lot faster). Ride the lightning in. Updraft. (don’t forget the aura. I always do.)

Switch to fire—Burning speed to close the range from updraft.
Ring of fire.
Fire breath.
Burning Hands.

Switch to Water. Drop all abilities (including auras). Use Frozen burst last (this causes chill).

Switch to Earth. Roll back a few feet and start Churning Earth (long cast time). The enemy would be chilled, so they take a second to get to you which gives you the time you need to get it off. Hit ring of earth then earthquake.

If you have no pts in arcane, you may have a slow element cycle time. In which case, just spam impale until Lightning comes back up and you can repeat.

Rinse, repeat.

Another great one is Ice Bow (I know, bear with me a minute…)

Use the #4 ability of ice bow on siege equipment tears it down at an unreasonable speed.

4 elementalists dropping 4 ice bows (and getting 4) means 8 ice bows for a single raid, all using their AoE on the same spot (Attacking catapults or rams) and they just explode. The ones manning them go down in a flash :P

Also – I had a post with a video on Churn stacking previously which I’ll link here. Yes it works. Yes, it’s amazing.

https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/professions/elementalist/Elementalist-Stacking-Churning-Earth-Video/first

I haven’t seen DRGN with any significant force. I see them running around EB in 1s and 2s, but never as an organized group. If they’re taking our players, they’re not taking the very good ones, imo.

But maybe their commanders are oceanic, or they stick to their borderland or something…

@AVTR – We saw you guys on the road from Garrison to bay last night and I remembered you from the forum so we tried to get to you for a little 5v5 But by the time we ferreted away from that zerg we lost you Found you again S side of Bay, but we had a door to help us…

@KH+AVTR – Sorry about the invuln spot exploit near redvale. By that point we’d pretty much given up and were just trying to kill people. We won’t be doing it again in any organized sense.

The only thing this game is really missing is a raid interface.

Shadowbane got around this by using /tar for focus fire… but there’s nothing like that in GW2.

Our groups have to be organized into 5-man groups with a group leader calling targets.

When we run, I have to ask for group status first because I can’t see how many of them are down.

It was the whole reason I got the commander tag to begin with. I thought I’d be able to get a raid interface when people joined my squads.

Yesterday was fun

RET took Bay and the CD garrison at around 2PM PST.
By 11PM PST, KH logged on 20 guys and took it back.
By this point there were 5 of us guarding the keep… and when that fell, we guarded the camp.

And yeah – synch churns only really works well against zergs. I wouldn’t call it game breaking. As you said: Just dodge the darn thing. You’ll be a’ight!

(But last night we only had 2 eles and weren’t stacking them except on the keep door to defend it).

Picking on the weakest team Is the norm. For a commander, their players will only follow them so long as they are winning. If one side routinely kills your players, your commander will have to give up on that side, or face wreckless abandonment after a series of defeats There’s nobody to be admonished here. It’s just the way it’s always been for three sided games. As far back as DAoC (poor Hibernians)

The counter is quite simple. When you’re attacked by a team who has already given up fighting the other opponent, make sure you give them no ground. After that, abandonment of their commander is certain.

It may seem like common sense to most people just to pick on the winner, but you can’t play this game like its starcraft… There are other factors at play.

Waffler.1257:

Diehard.1432:

Grrrr…my fellow CDs!! Where is our kewl videos??!!

We aren’t kewl :’(

Aww, you’re cool bro. <3

Daedalus.3954:

Nice Quenta, the vids came out great. We are so nasty!

Also, can we get a map/score update to bump to the Q/A?

Thanks!

I’m not sure why people keep asking for the score…
Here’s a website!

http://mos.millenium.org/matchups#NA

Finally this thread has some substance! Awesome videos. all around.

I’ve seen AVTR on the field a couple of times, so it’s nice to finally put a face to a name We’ll look out for you. RET usually hangs out on EB between 5-9PM PST if any of you are looking for a fight, you’ll likely find us there.

I absolutely loved the Fort Aspenwood christmas song Was that written or did you just record some drunk fool on voice comms? :P

(Speaking of which, that was some pretty mean FA presence on Christmas… silly CD and their silly family obligations. Should have been playing more GW2!)

I made this video for RET recruitment, but I thought i’d post it here as well as it was footage gathered since IoJ joined the tier so there’s some relevance there.

(Obviously one-sided as a recruitment video, but the fights are amazing to watch all the same.).