Guild Wars 2

Sticky this please so you teach all the noobs how to do it properly elitists.

Give me a step by step detail by detail playthrough of a ‘proper’ CoF run as apparently I’m not doing it right as a mesmer. I lay down time warps at Slave Driver and at the final boss and port my team though the rolling fireballs but apparently that’s not enough and gets me kicked at the end before the final boss. What did I do wrong this time elitists?

This is why I don’t even bother doing dungeons in this game. My first time doing CoF 2 actually never happened because I told people I wasn’t sure what to do and I got kicked. Great community my kitten . I’m just doing this for my monthly so I can get this dungeon nightmare over.

Second TC I’ve seen flying around tonight. -_-

Not singling TC out, pretty sure there’s gotta be people on SoS that do it too. Flying has been around forever, is there no way to deal with it?

Error message, anyone else?

Everything into AC

Can someone just tell me what the heck is the best build already lol

LetoII.3782:

Six pages because a glass ranger wants to stand a mile away from the fight spamming damage and resents having to stop for a moment to cast water field under it’s own feet?

Six pages because there’s something terribly wrong if a long range damage dealer who has good positioning KILLS HERSELF THROUGH RETAL after firing a single barrage into an enemy zerg. Yes, please tell me more about how it’s my fault and retal isn’t a broken mechanic because I fired a group of arrows into a group of enemies – god forbid, right? Where the hell else would someone fire a barrage into? Certainly shouldn’t be into a group of enemies, no sir! I must be one dumb cookie, forgive me for such a foolish notion.

I think we lost a good half of our WvW population this week. Is this an attempt to kill off WvW or something for lower tier servers and encourage more PvE? I don’t understand.

Outmanned and spawn camped on every map for 3/4ths of the day. Heyo!

Well done Anet, I think you managed to behead our WvW population in half in less than a week.

Why am I even trying?

Decided to hop on WvW for a couple hours this morning, got wiped 5 times in a row (given that we were outmanned) without accomplishing anything. Having the time of my life.

-_-

Mammoth.1975:

SoS really needs to stop complaining. 2 weeks of bad matchups after 8 weeks of sitting comfortably at the top of the tier and your wvw population is broken? I didn’t see SBI and CD spamming the forums with tears when they were getting their backsides handed to them week in week out by you guys.

Are you just stupid or trolling? That’s because they were losing in a bracket they were best fit for. We’re not even a top 5 server yet we’re paired against TC and the NUMBER ONE SERVER in WvW. Back then, CD and SBI had a point in trying because we had good fights and CD and SBI were constantly neck in neck for 2nd – here, we don’t even get that.

#logicoutthekitteningwindow

Don’t know if ignorant or just stupid, you don’t have time to click on every enemy in a 50 man zerg to check if they have retal before attacking.

Things also have channel time. They can pop retal whenever.

“Stop attacking” isn’t a solution. Confusion was the same exact thing. You could just ‘stop attacking’, right?

LOL

This server is bumping up from 10th to 7th place in the span of a week, yet the distance between the 7th to the 6th is the biggest hurdle yet. Help us push!

:)

So the comments I’m getting here is :

I’m an idiot for trying to use Barrage as an AoE function as it’s supposed to be. God forbid I try to fire an arrow barrage into a group of enemies. Because where the hell else would I put a hail of arrows? Definitely shouldn’t be in a cluster of enemies, god no. My mistake.

Just stop using barrage. In fact, just stop attacking. It’s so simple!

Fantastic advice, I guess I’ll just go quit this game now.

Edit : Also, when I’m taking more damage through Retal to myself than I deal to other players while attacking, something is terribly, terribly wrong.

Bokitten.6591:

I typically roam around in wvw and atm the majority of people i run into are rangers and thieves. The rangers are typically all using the beastmaster, regen, bunker build. The reason there are so many out is because its so kitten good and a littel retaliation isnt going to bring them down.
From a guardian point of view, we lack mobility and are easily kited. Basically most classes are able to get away from us and reset the fight. We need people to stick around in order to kill them.
I would suggest reviewing your build and simply paying attention to when the little fist icon is up if the >400 dmg is destroying you..

What if the ranger isn’t running a boring bunker passive beastmaster healing build like everyone else and decides to run a different build that’s based more on damage?

I’m talking about zergs, not individual fighting.

Retaliation damage stacks, you realize this? If you give retaliation to 4 other people including yourself, and if I hit you all once with one attack, I take 5 × 400 = 2000 damage in that one instance?

Forget it, it’s obvious you didn’t read or comprehend my post at all.

iCryptik.1496:

Protip: It’s not up 24/7. It’s up for 5-7 seconds max every 24 seconds with traited, and a few more seconds if they run greatswords.

TL;DR: Watch their boons.

Drakh.3128:

Better yet, try being a confusion mesmer. I hit them for 65 with confusion then get hit back for 375 from retaliation. Yeah, that’s fair…..

Confusion is based on condi damage, retal is based on power.

There usually, just usually, just maybe, happens to be more than one guardian in a 40-50 man zerg.

I am not a professional game designer. But here’s my comment on making mechanics that have no counterplay in this game.

Un-counterable mechanics kill the fun for players trying to outplay the other player / zerg. There is literally nothing you can do while the other player wins – not because they’re good, but because the mechanic is broken and there is no way to surefire counterplay the matter.

One stunning example of this is stealth. No class in this entire game has built in stealth detection. The devs tried to input these clunky, unusable, and difficult to use traps that reveal stealth in WvW, but the truth of the matter is that no one uses them and they’re not realistic for usage in a pitched battle. (It also costs supply to build.)

Stealth is interesting, because only a few classes have stealth and even few of those make optimal and actual use of the mechanic. (Namely, mesmers and thieves.) Mesmers are not a problem – they have limited options for stealth and they have fairly short term stealth options. (Eg. Veil – 2 seconds, Decoy – 3 seconds. Mass Invisibility is something like 5 seconds, but it’s on a minute and a half cooldown.) Thieves on the other hand are famous for their 20+ second stealth combos in fights, their ability to disengage at will with exceedingly long stealth durations, as well as permastealth options if they trait for it.

Now, stealth wouldn’t be as bad if thieves were already not so slippery (but I’m not here to complain about thieves.) Let’s be honest – ANY class, with the stealth capabilities of a thief, would be just as annoying to deal with. Can you imagine a stealth warrior using killshot? Or sneak up behind you with a surprise quickness boosted 100 Blades? And then you being unable to do anything to retaliate because they have chain stealth options to disappear after they’ve hit you? People try to defend stealth by saying ‘if the stealthed person ran from you, you won!’. That’s not true at ALL. Did I spike him? Did I get a loot bag? No? Then I didn’t win. If no one dies in a skirmish, we call that a draw in reality. Time to move away from that fantasy world of coddling stealth.

IMO, torch skills should have been based around AoE burning and stealth reveal. Not only because torches are as ignored as they are, but because for every mechanic, there should be a counterplay to it. No, not ‘swing around and spam 1 button to maybe hit a stealthed opponent!’ counterplay argument people make. Actual, usable, stealth reveal. For example, a torch ability on a 20 second cooldown that reveals and burns all units around the user for 5 seconds with the revealed debuff. It’s not overpowered, and has good utility – and most importantly, provides an option to counterplay chain stealth without wrecking the mechanic. A 15 second window is more than enough to do what you need to do while still creating a window of vulnerability for the stealth mechanic.

Another example is retaliation. Retaliation is a flawed mechanic within itself for a huge reason – it discourages players from attacking other players. Now, I don’t know why other people may play WvW and PvP, but I play to attack and feel the thrill of killing other people. Confusion wasn’t even half as bad – this stuff could be avoided and cleansed, but retaliation is an entirely different issue.

In high tiers of WvW, entire zergs roll with retaliation on due to guardians who spam this boon to their allies. First off, for classes that use repetitive, multiple target abilities, this mechanic is immediately perceivable as flawed – a glass cannon ranger using barrage on a zerg can take over 10,000 damage to their selves through the duration of a barrage without ever having been touched once by an enemy. And most interestingly – there is no counterplay to this mechanic. No class has built in lifesteal or life back on hit. Instead, they’re punished to kill themselves by attacking other enemies. If an engineer or a ranger cannot attack someone in fear of killing themselves due to retaliation feedback, you have FAILED in designing this game to be balanced properly. You advertise that we can play with whatever build or setup as we wish, yet here we are. It’s painfully obvious the design team has never played something like a grenade or flamethrower engineer or a longbow ranger in WvW ever before in their lives or bothered to check out the repercussions of their retaliation mechanic.

I’d like to ask. If there any AoE boon ripping in this game? % based Lifesteal built into classes? Any way to counter the power % based retaliation damage in this game that has taken over as a staple of WvW?

No, there isn’t.

Get a new game design team, Anet. I’m not a game designer, but even I can see the flaws in these mechanics that are causing a lot of grief to players.

I am a ranger.

I use a longbow. (Which is terrible enough as it is.)

I used barrage.

Retaliation ate through 8k HP. And that’s not just bad timing, these guardians spamming group retal have this up 24/7.

Wtf? That’s half my health bar. Even 100% confusion before nerf wasn’t this terrible.

Thieves I know use mostly S/P and SB for WvW. Is D/D outclassed?

Wow, we really deserve to get stomped in this matchup. Some of the commanders have absolutely no idea what they’re doing. At all. We’re barely managing to hold on to our homelands and they decide to go on an offensive tilt instead of staying defensive and upgrading towers (which are barely T2 to mention). In the meantime while they get wiped knee deep in enemy territory (we’re outmanned, why are you invading an enemy’s T3 tower when they have more than triple our number?) we lose 2 towers and supply camps to boot.

/SoS#1

Edit : Also, don’t understand why people feel the need to tag up on an outmanned map when we already have a commander and break up an outmanned server into two zergs. Christ, this server gives me migraines.

Oh god the pain. e_e

Still a good challenge, hope we can rally through the week without losing too much morale in the hivemind.
:)

Nearing the 100g mark for a commander tag but I still have no clue whether I want my ranger or mesmer with the tag.

I play my ranger more, but I know my mesmer is probably more useful in terms of utility. (Since my ranger is a zerker build.)

Help me choose
:(

McFribble.2349:

Pendragon.8735:

Hit and run need not be dependent on stealth. DD Ele’s, especially prior the last few patches, were amazing at hit and run, and had no stealth.

It’s simply lack of creativity to claim that this is the only way to skin the cat for a thief type character.

But yes, moving the reveal timer back down to 3s for WvW was a mistake.

There is literally NOTHING wrong with the Thief’s design other than a few number tweaks. Most MMOs have stealth-based classes in infinite stealth until hit or attacking, with methods to re-stealth in combat. If anything, I’d say stealth is GW2 is very restrictive in more ways than not, especially when a single skill only allows a max of 10 seconds of it (not taking D/P thieves into account).

Complaining about Thieves is like complaining about Mesmer clones, is like complaining about Guardian boons. There was a point in time where people learned to adapt to the game, and not cry about the game conforming to them. Those days are obviously long past.

Thieves are a solid class that have a purpose (as much as Thief players would like to say otherwise). While they can be annoying, it is what they are designed to do (and as much as non-thief players want to admit, that is okay). SOME tweaks do have to be made, but the outcry from both Thieves and Thief haters has gone to insane proportions that make both ends of the spectrum look like idiots (is it against the forum rules to call a non-specific person an idiot? Sorry if it is mods, I’ll edit if need be).

Yeah, that was a terrible comparison. You can rip boons and kill clones. No class in this game has stealth detection on hand.

“Killing people fast” is not a ranger thing. Look at a thief.

1) You can outplay thieves if you know what you’re doing and how to do it.
2) You cannot catch one however, and you cannot kill one. (If the thief isn’t an idiot. If you can’t get away with 2-mash and permastealth, you need to drop GW2 and play Neopets. If you died, you picked a bad fight and underestimated your prey.)
3) Thieves have nothing going for them other than (what is admittedly annoying, and a crappy gameplay with close to no repercussion or counterplay) this pick and assassinate play. Their zerging capabilities are close to abysmal.

I’d say they’re 90% balanced in terms of DPS. HS burst is more or less okay, as it’s their only real spike and execution skill for D/x thieves that aren’t running high condition damage. In my opinion however, HS should take 1 more initiative every consecutive strike in a 2 second refesh window so they retain their slipperyness but are forced to think twice before smashing that 2 button 500 times in one second.

And their permastealth. Ick. So disgusting. There is zero counterplay to it – don’t know what kind of game designers Anet is bothering to use, but introducing a mechanic to the game that has literally ZERO counters to it is absurd. No class has a stealth detection mechanic whatsoever. Stealth detection traps are unwieldy and aren’t useful at all in duels until it’s too late. Things like shadow refuge makes people cry. Ridiculous stealth for thieves was a terrible blunder by Anet I don’t think they’ll ever acknowledge, however, and there’s really no way to counter it. There’s little point to WvW if you can’t spike enemies you beat, and a good thief will NEVER be spiked.

Everyone makes this sound like this is the easiest thing to do. It takes a ridiculous amount of coordination and experience to pull off a well versed stealth mesmer portal let alone a stealth thief / mesmer ‘permastealth team’.

Wtf is the point of this thread? To toot your own horns? Every guild contributes to the war effort one way or another. Some huge guilds may concentrate on PvE or sPvP, but they’ll have quite a few pugs out there. Trust me, no server that takes its WvW seriously or is proud of where they are could be there without pugs and the general dedication of the common player that doesn’t always roll in a guild exclusive zerg.

No one in the military with a sense of pride and dignity goes around saying that their division or military branch is the ‘best one’ of all of them. They know that none of them could be where they are without each other, and that attests to the cohesive nature of a successful military.

Excalibur.9748:

WvW players don’t have any laurels at all.

By making it require laurels, you are requiring the WvW player to do extensive PvE just to get any ascended equipment.

Please reconsider.

You can get most of the dailies done in WvW.

How can you ninja a keep when 0 gates are down?

What’s it been now, a good 4 hours at SBI keep?Amazing siege, very fun.

Doesn’t matter, really. Few hours later and we have all our keeps back to T3. Keep trying.
:)

Deathdom.8250:

So some random hacker on CD takes your castle and keep and now its the whole server’s fault?

Your entire server happily capitalized on the situation. We lost a total of over 3000 supply in less than half an hour from your draining of our lowlands and SM. Pretty sure ‘some random hacker’ did not drain 3000+ supply alone. Also, both servers took advantage of the hackers and took our supply camps and towers while we had to retake our Lowlands, and you were more than happy to assault our homelands repeatedly while the hackers were flipping our keep / castle. From what I’ve seen, you seem very happy with your hacking glitchers and capitalize on their work.

Good going CD.

Edit : You have siege in the SKY. Floating above SM. What?

Wonder how far CD can go with hacks. Doubt they can even come close to us even while glitching into T3 castles and keeps.

Good job SoS!

Rising Dusk.2408:

Now that one was all us! GG at your EB keep, SoS!

Congratz on taking a paper keep with 0 supply and no siege with damaged gates while our zerg is away defending a paper SM due to hackers….I guess?

If you guys in CD could stop glitching to take things automatically, that would be great. We lost SM and Lowlands in under seconds without any warning or a siege whatsoever, that’s messed up.

With the death of confusion builds, I wanted to move on to something different, but don’t know what. Any tips?

I am a bow centric ranger, and I can say it still needs work. I use it for barrage in WvW and that is IT. DPS, condition, utility, raw power, and everything else is practically stacked toward the shortbow side. I don’t even see much of a difference using eagle eye trait for the extended 1000+ range when all it takes it a tap of a left or right button to dodge all my arrows at that range. Longbow is so mediocre right now.

manechi.8061:

dude I think u got something wrong here… we are THIEVES not guardians (tanks) or rangers (range dps) we are suppose to be slippery and squishy.

Not slippery enough to run away from anything and everything whenever you feel like it. If you screw up, I feel like you should be punished for going in when you shouldn’t have, or misjudging the strength of your opponent. Instead, you can do as you please, and it’s extremely frustrating.

Just because you have so much more mobility and seemingly infinite stealth, doesn’t mean that you can consider yourself un-outplayable due to the nature of your class’ slippery mechanics which seem wholly unfair and unrewarding to play against as a player.

I cannot count the amount of times I have outplayed a thief so terribly that I’m more than 75% HP while he’s below 10% after blowing his entire set on me.

Then, he just proceeds to chain stealth and reappears a couple thousand range away.

How in the world do I catch a thief? Even my pet, which has a 25% passive speed boost from my signet, and an ADDITIONAL 30% passive speed boost from one of my traits, along with swiftness, cannot catch up to a thief.

It’s utterly ridiculous and frustrating to have finally learned how to outplay a thief and then come down to the fact that they’re so impossibly slippery that I cannot kill them.

Edit : You all try to make it sound so easy. First of all, as a glass cannon ranger running a double bow setup, to not get blown up in an instant a thief engages is outplaying him by far. Thieves can heartseeker strike me when I’m 0-25% for over 10k damage with their executioner trait from the back. If you’re running Basilisk Venom, you use up 1/2 of my stun breakers right there, and the only two I have is either my healing mechanism, or my only escape tool (Lightning Reflexes rollback). It takes admittedly a lot of work to not even get demolished by a thief in under 5 seconds if they’re running a stealthy backstab build (which like 50% of thieves seem to be running in roam WvW builds.)

Secondly, as a double bow ranger, I have one daze, and one knockback, both of which require you to lock on a to a target before it can be used. The only other way to interrupt or bother a thief in shadow refuge is my barrage, which has a thirty second cooldown.

If you’re a thief running an assassin stealth backstab, spike DPS build, and you fail to kill a ranger who not only has only one skill on a 45 second cooldown to make distance between us as well as vitality and armor numbers both under 1000, you have been terribly outplayed.

Edit 2 : If anyone is asking ‘how in the world did you out play a thief then with a glass cannon double bow build?’ – it involves timing with a ranger ability called ‘Protect Me’.

choon.6308:

This is what someone said to me when I wanted to join his dungeon.

Do all people think rangers are a dead weight in dungeons? With shortbow I spam 1.5k crits and that will be even higher when I get better gear…

Just curious, how do you spam 1.5k crit shortbow autoattacks?

I have a full exotic set, full exotic bezerker build with Runes of the Ranger, with +100 power and +10% crit damage food as my build, but the max I hit is 1.2-1.3k on my shortbow.

Could not get it off to stop a spike for the life of me. it’s supposed to daze, but does not, anyone else having problems?

T1-T3 : Rage
T4 – Tx : Awesome competition

Seyyah.6135:

if you are dedicated ranger player well go play with whatever build you like… no matter what people say you ll have your fun…

if you are dedicated WvW player who wants to be a force to be reckoned in a large group fight, well then play ANYTHING but a ranger…

the Anet ranger is not meant for WvW… its all designed and tested on sPvP/tPvP aspect of the game, and in there ranger does quite good with 2 main builds

edit: well you can call roaming is a form of WvW (i dont) and use your bunker or trapper build for that…

Funny, because I wreck WvW with longbow zerker warrior with piercing arrows.

Unless you know, retaliation.

Just wondering, never seen one actually using P/P and I like it a lot.

Hounds which are under the Canine class also has the fear as is in Beetledun Farm.

Sometimes I need to quickly toggle peaceful back and forth, and it’s a bit of a nuisance to have to look away and pinpoint that tiny button down below to do it. Anyone else? We can have F4 to toggle offensive / peaceful, and F5 to switch pets.

Knowing Anet, they’d probably push out movable Arrow carts next patch for a measly sum of 100 gems each! Hooray!!!

This has been happening for a looong time, just something else Anet keep ignoring. LB is bad enough – LB 2 on the other hand usually lands about 1/3 of the duration and the rest are all ‘out of range’ and ‘obstructed’ when it is clearly not.

:/

In between the heartseeker spam and the infiltrator arrows, and their speed signet, how do you catch one?

Or is it just impossible?

QZ not worth it anymore IMO. 4 seconds of 100% quickness increased DPS by an effective 400%. Now it’s 5 seconds of 50%, which is 250% effectively. That’s a 37.5% decrease in overall power over time.

Not worth it. Reroll something else. Not sure what I’m actually going to be doing with my zerker ranger that’s got more than 250+ gold in it.

Same, just happened to me. I used to run around 40-50 and now get 30 when running around and god forbid combat, it gets around 5-10…

Seems to only happen around the fish oil area in Orr.