Guild Wars 2

Kayhel.5074:

Well for the first time in 2 years of play on the Underworld server there is now a huge 120+ queue, this is certainly a New experience. This may be the norm on some servers but it has a downside the more casual user ( like myself ) with limited hours of play seem to be faced with a dilemma .. wrong choice of words let me re-phrase , Zero chance of ever playing WvW. Am I missing something because I fail to spot how this is better?

You have a 120 queued on all 4 maps?

So we find out who we are paired with at reset or is the list released?

I think you are in the ball park; I’m loving the durability runes and commander weapons. Those virtues times are getting crazy long. I’m running cleric armor and soldier’s accessories; the jury is still out whether the healing power is worth anything.

I am currently running the DH trait line but from what I’ve read only the std guard virtues got buffed, so I’ll likely be switching DH back out for Honor for a std shout build.

He probably had traveler runes on.

Without DH, you will prob need to go with a Mediguard type build; GS (with zealous blade trait) is great for mobs, and probably old school scepter/focus or scepter/torch with some burning buffs.

I highly recommend running the bane signet in PVE roaming as the passive gives a pretty good power boost.

No. Stuff those maps full and make WvW an event again.

It looks like for lumber cores you will need to rely on RNG from trees and/or DS pods. Judging by the costs on the TP they don’t drop very often.

Wait, really? I guess I’m lucky I decided to log in an level up my chronmancer this morning!

If you could summarize this in 1-2 sentences… that would grrreatt.

TheGrimm.5624:

Do both PvP and WvW. Since they are using the reward tracks (thank you for the reward tracks option) from PvP, yes plan on a lot. Think I have 1500 in the bank now. Very sad the day they nerfed the key runs, that really should have become a once a day thing versus once a week.

Make 500 Omegas and sell them; your profit should be close to 1g per.

It’s not all that difficult to convert shards to gold in the mystic toilet. Just find an easy recipe you like and start tossing them in.

Edit: for a WvW’er the siege upgrade recipes are likely the best; you can either use or sell what you make then.

According to the leak it’s basically two servers working on the same maps in an alliance. Since the early leak was pretty much spot on, it looks like they have already made the initial pairings and are resetting everything to prevent shenanigans.

These alliances will be flexible so I’m not sure how they’ll determine how much work each server is actually doing to reflect their “glicko”. (ie a T1 server will do 90% of the work when paired with a T8 server, how will this be split up to determine ranking for each server?)

WvW is in a state of flux right now with all the patch changes so some information may not be as correct or relevant as before; just remember that when researching.

omg we are actually able to get stuff through the assembler now in less than 3 hours! My scribe is cranking it up a notch!

Our guild hall assembly device seems to be stuck with whatever was in process before the patch; A guild cata is sitting at 140% completion but wont go through. Everything should cycle through in 30 secs now, correct?

Edit: I was able to replace it in the queue and that has seemed to “flush the clog”.

Wow the WvW changes sound pretty wonderful. As a T8 inhabitant I can’t wait for some old timey stability induced melee clashes along side our good friends at JQ(?)

Until then I’ll be going to town on scribe recipes!

I was in an AB that failed twice in a row in one day using the zerg model. The problem comes in at the end when the final burn is uncoordinated and somebody accidentally pops their vine (many times the zerg itself does this by failing to stop their burn in time).

This leaves 3 undermanned zones to do an emergency burn that they are unprepared for. Many times there is 5 people or less in these zones and they can’t de-slime fast enough to get the final burn done.

I think once the vines get down to 10% the zerg needs to dissipate.

I never had a problem pre-zerg with AB.

Edit: Also it should be made clear that the difficult zones should burn first; my order:

- South bombs
- North herbacide
- East air bombs
- West mushrooms

ShaNA.9018:

Its sad to see Balouga TV leaving the game.You can watch the reasons why they left :

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wFUC8sppdbI

A good indicator of the importance of this is that is likely over half of his whopping 396 views came from this board post.

It’s pretty funny to see the matches being manipulated so badly due to a rumor(?)

Chaba.5410:

I hope not. That doesn’t address stacking at all.

A server alliance mode would address stacking somewhat since a mid tier + a high tier could be paired to take on a stacked server + empty server

I gave runes of durability a whirl last night and think they might work pretty good for a commander-like build.

I can find little to no information on what will be dropping in a few days for WvW changes other than the occasional cryptic comment from TylerB on reddit about “beta testing” for rewards and population.

So we know something is coming, and they are holding off on reintroduction of the alpine bl until this “beta testing” is completed and feedback received.

I’d sure like to know at least if my server is disappearing in 4 days.

Puck.9612:

FogLeg.9354:

um, you know, I doubt Tier 1 servers will notice anything after merge. The last tiers are so completely empty, even adding whole server from last tiers won’t make any difference for top servers. It WILL be big deal for those players who have stayed on those empty servers, pretty much whole WvW as they know it will be gone.

Yup, it will be a nightmare for a lot of them. Hopefully Anet doesn’t jack up transfer prices or lock them because they’ll end up making people quit.

I think most of us in T8 would really appreciate seeing some life in WvW again. I have never experienced T1 style play (closest we got was getting destroyed by a T2 while in T3) so I am excited for the opportunity to see it.

So is this going to be a flexible weekly “server alliance” or straight up merger (deleting half of the servers)?

Willing to trade LB#5 for a 33% hp bump and an optional speed boost on guards.

If the leaked notes are true, it looks like CCs may be addressed in WvW with a big stab boost too.

The low health pool is a major detriment with the power creep going on. I’m getting one shotted more and more often by more and more classes. And increasing health / armor just kills your dps potential to the point of being worthless.

The lack of a speed boost is another big problem; for roaming you HAVE to use traveler runes which really limits your options.

My first and only experience with the raid was 3+ hours of trying to figure out how to get past the VG and resulted in zero rewards. I’ve decided my time is better spent on other things ever since.

gennyt.3428:

Oh you mean turkey pens. And yes they’re annoying.

I always thought of them more as velvet ropes like at the airport or the night club.

I do not blame anyone for leaving the lower tiers at this point Knob, although I think you will be wasting gems if Anet is going to do what I think they are to address population imbalance.

It would be nice if Anet gave us some clues as to what will be happening with this large update they’ve been working on for a year to allay some of this despair.

I am one of Misty’s soldiers so I’ll be staying put with my guild hoping Anet comes through with something meaningful to address WvW’s many ongoing issues.

Jski.6180:

MaximillianVonSchatten.6278:

I forgot to add an unofficial #6 – Please move reset back to Friday. Friday nights were an event (people get off work and want to blow steam by killing other real people in WvW!) and made Saturdays (one of the few days alot of us can get some daytime hours in) more relevant and important. Having a Saturday night reset eliminates 24 hours of relevant play time since matches are decided and no one cares any more.

I don’t think it matters if new builds interrupt things. We’re talking a few minutes of inconvenience for 24 hours of improved gameplay. My guild had much better participation on Friday resets compared to now.

Why not make it Thursday then you make Friday more relevant on-top of making Saturday and Sunday relevant too.

Well for me, I still have to work Fridays so running till 2am is probably out… although Thursday is the new Friday in many respects. hmmmm… We used to do a theme night on Thursdays (aka paper Thursdays).

I forgot to add an unofficial #6 – Please move reset back to Friday. Friday nights were an event (people get off work and want to blow steam by killing other real people in WvW!) and made Saturdays (one of the few days alot of us can get some daytime hours in) more relevant and important. Having a Saturday night reset eliminates 24 hours of relevant play time since matches are decided and no one cares any more.

I don’t think it matters if new builds interrupt things. We’re talking a few minutes of inconvenience for 24 hours of improved gameplay. My guild had much better participation on Friday resets compared to now.

Hmm. A moderator is watching. I’d better add my 2 cents:

1. Stability stability stability – All of the changes for PVE breakbar mechanics are wreaking havoc in WvW. A lot of the great fun of WvW was winning uneven fights and switching between kite and melee. Now anyone who tries to jump into a melee fight with uneven numbers is immobilized and massacred. Since breakbar mechanics are still needed for PVE, a return of a strong stability boon is the easiest way to fix this.

2. AOE stacking – along the same lines as #1 running into what looks like a single circle and getting insta-downed by a dozen necro circles also needs to be addressed in some fashion. These 1st two are the big contributors to the un-fun pirate ship meta.

3. Population imbalances – this has been well discussed in several other threads; it needs to be addressed to get populations back up in the maps.

4. The new BLs – I think they can be saved but would take some work. The major problems I have are navigation, defensibility, and too much PVE. I look back on fights outside of Bay with great fondness (A large open field, a spawn nearby, a tower within siege range, a camp at extremely close proximity, some elevation, and a choke point). Even fights inside Bay were extremely fun with the water barrier and the height differences. Zones like this need to be created (esp zones without major PVE interference.)

5. Rewards – I think the last tourney was close to 2 years ago? People got amped up for those because there were decent rewards at the end (I love my myst longbow skin to this day.) Make WvW and “event” again and not just another empty map to farm some dailies or karma train in.

There are 4 ways they could go to address imbalance:

1. Megaserver as Yuffi described above: If anet could somehow keep the matchups guild based (rank and populate guilds based on activity and numbers in WvW) it would help but the constant opening and closing of instances would cause problems. And say goodbye to any meaningful TS based coordination on anything above guild level. Essentially EOTM 2.0

2. Shrink the number of servers: Look at overall popualation and redraw the lines. This would create quite a mess with server based resources (like TS etc…) and relationships and would not address what appears to be a continuously shrinking population.

3. Server alliances – Match up low population servers with high population servers. This would retain server relationships and resources (although the allied servers would still have challenges communicating with each other).

4. Leave the servers alone and provide larger buffs to outnumbered servers: If a server is outnumbered 2-1 or 3-1 they should be given huge damage and armor buffs to make it a fair fight. Buffs could be managed based on map population.

I think #3 would spark the most interest. The dynamic of cooperating with a different server adds an interesting element and anet could mix up matchups to make them intriguing too (like could the bottom 4 servers take on the #1?)

Another thing I discovered is that if you get as far away from Eir as possible when fighting Garm, she doesn’t attack you, she just stands there.

I’m at about a hundred after concentrating on mastery areas and strongboxes in HoT for a while, but have decided the Central Tyria mastery points aren’t worth the effort. I’ll never use the fractal traits and it sounds like the legendary crafting is just as grindy and expensive as without. I got my autoloot, leyline gliding, and poison, not sure what else I need.

Other possibilities if you really really despise WvW fighting:

- Do the oasis event – this gives a ton of xp and helps out your server
- Escort yaks; not sure how much xp this gives
- Sit in your keep on defense; you will get xp for defending and repairing walls
- Flip sentries (and camps if u can)
- Flip frogs and dredge in EB

Of course all of these pale in comparison to a good zerg run in EB or EOTM.

cranos.5913:

I still feel like guardian or at least DH should’ve gotten a perma 25% movement speed like chronos. I’m personally not rly feeling the move faster under aegis trait. It’s not like you have aegis in abundance for pvp modes where mobility actually matters because of how weak the the boon rly is there. Furthermore actually using retreat for aegis uptime would make the trait useless as it already gives you swiftness.

I would kill to have a speed buff on guard and would give up almost any trait to get it except for meditation mastery.

I’m no ele but have some general suggestions

- Set your build and equipment (if possible) for as much tankiness as possible (see metabattle); with a tanky build, an ele provides pretty good support for the zerg – you need more survivability in WvW than you think.

- You will rank up exceedingly fast in EOTM since there are always zergs running; stick with the commander; (you are considered backline so don’t push with the commander, but stay within dodge distance).

- Suggest using a staff for AOE and tagging, and wxp buffs wherever possible

- Prioritize skills for defense and escape.

- Have fun! Running with a good commander with the occasional fight in EOTM (esp nowadays) can be quite enjoyable.

Edit: – As mentioned above; give REAL WvW a try, you never know, you may like it!

briggah.7910:

looks like the boycotting either got extended another week or it killed your servers morale. well played

Or it may be that we went from fighting the #16 server (191 glicko ahead of us) to the #17 server (still 166 glicko ahead of us).

Yes it took me a while to figure out to calmly walk into the updrafts. Once you understand this, Mordy isn’t all that tough. I had a much more difficult time with the Eir and the others before him.

I feel for you Knob. It looks like all that work you put in the last 4 weeks is going to get flushed down the toilet because of an unfortunate roll of the dice.

It will be interesting to see how bad the score gets this week (already 6-1).

You can take some solace in the fact that we had the lead for a the first few hours of reset. (Kaineg’s server must have been down).

Ah yes, I totally forgot about guild halls and taking away the WvW upgrades that WvW-centric guilds had already worked for and sticking them behind a huge PVE grind.

I know this destroyed many small havoc and even medium sized fight guilds.

There are three main problems as I see it:

1) The new bls are much less fun for conflicts and fights; yes they are nice to look at but people are pining for the epic battles out in front of bay like before
2) The pirate ship meta and stab changes, especially with all the cc that HoT has brought to the table have destroyed the battle mode most WvW fight guilds preferred to play (where it was actually possible for a smaller force to defeat a larger one). Now fights have been reduced to a simple numbers game and whoever can lay down the most red circles.
3) Server population imbalances, which were an issue before HoT have become even worse due to #2

It would be cool to see some of the wing-like backpacks (like light of Dwayna, butterfly wings) transform into a glider based on their look.

Or how about race-based gliders (steam-punk gyro-copter wings for charr, iron-man like repulsor rocket wings for asura, big fan leaves for sylvari, animal skins for norn etc…)

Frankly, I’ve had no issues with levelling but I am out of mastery points and I’m not sure where to get more. Do I need to re-run through the story or how are other people getting mastery points these days?

Check the event timers and go to the one that is closest to its event; also do LFG.

Deniara Devious.3948:

MaximillianVonSchatten.6278:

I also like the dynamic and the diversity that PPK gives us now; I don’t mind the roving thieves/mesmers out to gank. The key is to have a counter or anti-gank squad doing it’s own roaming to clear them out.

If you read my post fully, you would have noted that our server usually has just 1-5 players per map. When have e.g. 2 players on the entire map and enemy has teams of 20+ and those gank squads, you simply cannot afford to have anti squad. And frequent ganking squads motivates most players to form larger groups, thus it just promotes zerging. I would say most top servers in EU are nothing but zergs.

And yes, Desolation is indeed highest ranked international server in EU. Player numbers have been this super low already for couple of months. If you don’t believe me, I can provide screenshots at multiple times, taken just 0-2 minutes from each other from all 4 maps, showing that 3-4 of those maps provide us with the outnumbered “buff”. Same situation around the clock, except few hours at night from 2 am to 8 am when our night team has about 10-20 players in total. Art from Deso Night Crew usually has about 10 ppl in squad, when he starts the open raid. At the same time I guess enemy servers have only half of those numbers, thus we outnumber them like 10-20 vs 5-10 at those night hours.

Well, in the case that you have 2 vs 20 on the map here are your options:

a) Let them flip everything and wait for them to get bored and leave
b) Go to EOTM

I don’t think any kind of buff will help a 2 v 20 situation. You may have a slight chance of delaying them from taking an upgraded keep if it sieged up.

I think you are close but I disagree with the last two. I don’t WvW to fight NPCs and am actually quite perturbed with how fast they respawn at gates and how much they interfere with real fights now. I would favor major buffs to real players when outnumbered.

I also like the dynamic and the diversity that PPK gives us now; I don’t mind the roving thieves/mesmers out to gank. The key is to have a counter or anti-gank squad doing it’s own roaming to clear them out.

I tried LB DH early on and didn’t like it but recently switched out to more of a zerker meditrapper build w/ LB/GS and have had great fun with it (yes I enjoy trolling w/ LB #5).

Picking off people lined up in the pirate ship is great fun and if they get close in, I drop my trap and spam with GS / meditations (especially fun for thieves sneaking up on me). I thought I would have a problem running in the front line as needed, but I can do that too.

It surprising how versatile the build is, from larger zergs, to small group fights, to even 1v1s. I had been distraught about the state of guardians (I have 2, including my main) but this has perked me up a bit.

For WvW? The AH guard is still meta I believe although I have changed out virtues to DH on my AH guard so I can run a trap and for the overall improved virtues.