Guild Wars 2

Shinigami Curse.5940:

While doing some steady weapon tests in Mists I noticed the damage for the Mind Stab is still not performing properly. Instead of getting a 33% Damage boost when the enemy has no Boons, we are actually only getting a 19.5% boost.

Test: Tool Tip damage is based on average weapon damage on a 2600 Armor enemy. Steady Weapon vs Heavy Golem means tool tip will be 100% accurate all the time. Damage says it should be 109 from 82, which is the 33%. Actual damage is 98 which is only 19.5%.

So they fixed the whole no boon registry thing, but are cutting our damage by 13.5%…

Try and report this on the bug forums?
Maybe we’ll get a fix ina few months…

Lord Kuru.3685:

sminkiottone.6972:

I haven’t yet found anyone with full stack+full ascendent ( trinkets+weapons), but I bet he will destroy me even if hes not good.

Quotes like this are somewhat worrisome… who’s going to play if they think they’re going to be destroyed — not by skill, but because their opponent has owned the game longer. New players will especially be discouraged from WvW.

It mostly shows that nobody takes his time to do some simple math. Get the data from the official wiki and let’s calc:

Neck: Ascended has 126 points on main stat, 85 points on secondary stats (x2), 5 points from infusion (can be: power, precision, cond damage for offensive and vit, toughness or heal for defensive or 0 for utility slots) – Exotic has 115 on main stat, 79 on secondary stats (x2)

Ring: (asc) 103/68 + 5 vs (exo) 92/63

Accessory: (asc) 91/60 + 5 vs (exo) 81/55

Back: (asc) 56/35 + 5 vs (exo) 43/31

2h weapon: (asc. ) 188 main stat, 134 secondary stats, +10 from 2 infusion slots and 49-55 damage vs (exo. ) 179/128

The difference breakdown is:

• 11 points on main stat, 6 point for each secondary stat (neck)
• 11 points on main stat, 5 point for each secondary stat (each ring)
• 10 points on main stat, 5 points for each secondary stat (each accessory)
• 13 points on main stat, 4 poins for each secondary stat (back)
• 9 points on main stat, 6 points for each secondary stat (2h weapon)
• 40 points from infusions
• 49-55 weapon damage

Total: +75 main stat, +36 for each secondary stat, +40 points from infusions, 49-55 weapon damage

If I didn’t fail miserably on my math, that’s pretty much the difference that you have if you play against someone using a lv 80 food and you don’t have any on you, and I wouldn’t call it game breaking.

Direwind.8409:

So, I have 3900 armor, I have sacrificed a lot of damage to get this, but what the hell is the point, I was under the illusion that armor meant mitigation of damage?! like hell it is, it makes little to no difference; you are still hit for 7k+ conditions still kitten you no matter how many times you remove them since they can be put on faster than can be removed, then you have the confusion spamming kitten that will outright kill you almost instantly if you miss the fact that it was stacked to 16+ in 1 second.

Why bother with Armor/toughness, it seems the only viable defence is stealth, immune utilities and high damage.

Check the direct damage formula on the Wiki: http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Damage

The toughness (armor) mitigation looks like this: http://i.imgur.com/3SKkP2R.png

As you can see, the more armor you get, the less % of damage reduction you get from the same amount of points.

As you said, damage immunity is really powerful in game and, as a warrior, you have access to endure pain (twice, from ability and from trait) and shield block, so get more damage and become immune to conter the burst.

For conditions, you may also consider a traited warhorn and/or shouts with runes of the soldier.

DevonCarver.5370:

Shiren.9532:

I primarily PvE but I still don’t see the actions over the last year as reasonable attempts to make ascended items fairly available to WvW players. I don’t care what you’d like to do, I only care about what you actually do.

Speaking as someone who has only gotten Ascended gear via WvW vendors, I’d say that’s nonsense. Speaking as a developer, we are continuing to make this better, which is not to say perfect. There will be more ways to acquire the ascended mats as part of the season and we will look into adding yet additional ways after that.

Any chance that we will see Dire armor from the WvW vendors?

LionZero.3479:

While it maybe could use a slight buff it’s not what wvwvw needs imo, what wvwvw needs is ways to punish bunkerzergs for being static or face on tanking anything which the new ram mastery will make even easier, making this even better means making gaurd/war bunkerzergs even stronger.

Adding siege that would do a % amount of hp damage per hit or a thing that adds armour devalue per tick, would be better idea’s to punish static bunkerzerging which i think should be added to give the defenders some more options vs these immortal setups, not making it easier for them to facetank your t3 keep under siege.

Maybe if you stopped hiding behind walls, you would discover that fighting outside the walls when you allies stay on their arrowcarts is quite effective in destroying a zerg.

Or you just want for the keeps to be defendable by 3 people sitting on arrowcarts?

selan.8354:

well the problem is though that mesmers will be balanced on the spvp mesmer, which is not what a wvw mesmer needs.we are great in spvp without the condi spam meta, but i play wvw mainly and not the roaming type. i face a lot of zergfights and atm i feel a little weak as all a commander wants me to do is veil his warriors and guardians,portal and tw his golems and massinvis his warriors while casting nullfield for his warriors…
we lack aoe dmg as our clones die before reaching the zerg and phantasms dont last long enough. the only time i felt strong was during glam times….but since the nerf we havent gotten much mutitarget skills back….

they also mentioned buffing warrior shouts…..again great for spvp, terrible for wvw
they wanna buff staff ele=terrible for wvw
im also worried about our condition builds, they are already not that great compared to other classes….

lets hope we get new tools to play with, so we arent forced into phantasm/shatter builds that arent that great in wvw.

yes, I feel your pain
I’m taking the current meta and the last two unlucky matchups as an excuse to test new builds

(sadly, none of them is actually working better than my previous one)

I got a 2950ish autoattack on a squishy elementalist today in wvw, I wouldn’t say that all gs damage comes from iZerker

Legendary Hardmode.3856:

Greetings to YAK…its almost fun to fight against you. I love it.

Hey Deso guys…pls stop blobbing with 70+ to prime time and divide your blobb. Maybe you have a chance to make points.

By the way…awesome fights an RS Homelands yesterday evening. Thanks YAK and thanks to the Deso blobb. Really good Match Up !!!

Greetings from Dies [Irae]

only “almost”? we’re trying hard for “really fun” :P

If they want to make it “meaningful”, they can add a short cast bar, like how it happens in crafting a large amount of items.

Xyonon.3987:

- ITimekeeper: Deals small damage. Causes to stop the timer of all conditions at the target for 3 seconds. Boons will pass with double speed for 3 seconds. Hits 2 targets (bounce).

This is a very mesmery mechanic. I like the idea!
And I don’t think there’s need to balance it with the boon counterpart: it’s a long cooldown squishy phantasm after all.

Skill balancing just before wvw season starts… I can already hear the moaning

Guy.4958:

Heya, I was thinking about buffing the mesmers ability to defend / attack forts, keeps, towers etc. in WvW and started thinking:
What if we had a trait to change all the phantasm-skills to use ground targeting? Aka we could choose where to cast them, lets say at 900 or 1200 range? Currently, we’re stuck with using only few illusions / phantasms (zerger, scepter auto attack, disenchanter, warden) in these situations since the others are spawn next to you. It would increase the use of the remaining phantasms in WvW and when you’re running on a wall or attacking a wall, you could do something else than use Chaos Storm every 30 seconds or use the current, usable phantasms and hope they dont get obstructed… :x
Thoughts?

Phantasms used to be castable without line of sight (on the walls). It has been removed because “OMG OP!!1” (ye, I know, an elementalist rain of fire does probably more damage and hits on the walls, but…)

To be honest, I almost never use phantasms in wvw (big group fights), they die so quickly that most of the time they can’t even start doing their attack cycle

You mention another thing, the lack of AoEs to properly attack walls. Yeah, it’s true. The focus pull adds a nice tool to our belt, but we could really use some ground targeted AoE, considering the current WvW meta.

Stormleaf.1769:

Menaka.5092:

Stormleaf.1769:

Can’t the side with the buff just take off a few accessories to even out the stat disparity, for GvG?

or switch from ascended to exotic jewels, if the same stat distribution exists in exotic.

but this solution has quite a few problems:

• doesn’t adapt to the changing buff status (you can have from 0 to 3 stacks)
• hard to find a balanced combo of which jewel to remove
• can’t be verified by the other party: I’m sure no guild would ever want to lose the respect of the community by cheating, but… it is a possibility.

Obviously it’s not ideal, but nothing is going to be. Peoples’ effort would be better spent on coming up with solutions and work-arounds on their own, though, rather than on calling for Devon to be fired. GvG doesn’t need to die over something as miniscule as 150 extra stat points.

Yeah I agree with you on this, the GvG meta should adapt.

Also, I never asked for Devon to be fired, actually I think he’s doing a good job and I really love and look forward to play in the new borderland area

why?

I want my blueprints in my backpack, it’s not like I’ll have a bank in range when I’m in front of stonemist gates…

Would be nice, but at the same time would defeat the whole “epic, endless war” narrative that’s already present in game.

Stormleaf.1769:

Can’t the side with the buff just take off a few accessories to even out the stat disparity, for GvG?

or switch from ascended to exotic jewels, if the same stat distribution exists in exotic.

but this solution has quite a few problems:

• doesn’t adapt to the changing buff status (you can have from 0 to 3 stacks)
• hard to find a balanced combo of which jewel to remove
• can’t be verified by the other party: I’m sure no guild would ever want to lose the respect of the community by cheating, but… it is a possibility.

Tsezar.6950:

maybe we should infrom NC soft that Anet is killing the game and tehy wont earn as much money as before

… effectively killing the game? Genius.

violentlycar.5267:

Dranul.2094:

DevonCarver.5370:

No. That is not a possibility at this time. The point of the buff is to affect the WvW game mode as a whole disabling it on your character would lessen the value of the buff to a server and completely invalidate the whole point.

Devon, it’s become quite resoundingly clear that the WvW ANET team do NOT understand the jewel in their crown, that is WvW open combat. By hook or crook you guys actually made an amazing fast paced, free flowing combat system – that you ARENT even aware of.

Open field combat is frankly amazing (when your servers aren’t lacking like kitten). You do nothing but shun this type of gameplay, revolving every single aspect/update about siege wars. You are either blind to what you have or just plain ignorant, obsessed with your vision of the game, when in reality what you gave the players is far superior to what you intend do deliver. Yet you keep making mind boggling changes that hinder any sort of balance, making everything revolve around zerging and siege. Hell you call coverage SKILL << congratulations.

You really should watch some videos of guilds in action, I am not even suggesting GvG videos (you can’t even bring yourself to say it) I’m talking guilds taking on the masses. Rewarding skill and teamwork taking on superior numbers. Now though, you want to give the servers with the most coverage 150 to each stat.

Please Devon Clarify what “vision” what “insight” there is to rewarding skill less easy moders stacking on the top servers, running in their giant blobs with even more stat bonuses?

Or in English, how about a statement on what is your vision of WvW. Please say sitting on an AC is still one of the most exciting things you’ve ever done, please.

Yours sincerely, one avid WvW open field combat loving Guild Leader.

I think this really succinctly sums up the feelings of a lot of the community. We’re so defensive because we feel like we’re losing the fun of open field combat for a system that is less so. We’re fighting back because we actually enjoy this game and don’t want to see it go down this path. I hope ANet realizes this before it’s too late.

I’m sorry, but I fail to see how we’re losing the open field combat with the changes to the borderlands. From the stream, the points seemed quite easy to contest: no long sieges required and plenty of options for tactical play and actual open field combat.

I think what Devon is saying is that, at the moment, disabling the buff is not feasible on a technical level AND that disabling it would hurt your server, because of the points you would not gain on stomps if you disable it.

A good middle ground would be a “honorable fighter mode” that gives a stat debuff equal to the current buff from the borderland bloodlust, leaving the “gain point for your server on stomp” mechanic active.

Bunnymancer.6901:

What’s the current state of various professions in WvW?
How’s the balance?
What professions are vital for WvW?
What roles does they fill?

I mostly play with organized groups, so this is from an organized guild group point of view:

• Guardians: a core component of most organized groups. Great survivability and support (boons, condition removals, blasting fields), with decent damage.
• Warriors: huge damage and CC in melee trains, they can also provide support with condition removal and blasting water fields
• Elementalists: the best source for water fields to combo, they also provide nice ranged AoE damage
• Necros: they provide boon stripping and very heavy ranged damage
• Mesmers: mostly used for the utility they provide (boon stripping, veil, portal, timewarp), at the moment they suffer the high condition meta and their lack of decent AoE options in bigger fights
• Thieves: in a group setting they are ideally backline killers and scouts, but they also provide the best blast finisher in game (shortbow) and they can provide water fields stealing from rangers
• Rangers: they provide one of the most powerful controls in game with the current meta. Their elite area immobilize has been the cause of demise of countless players, but they seem quite rare, or more interested in wxp-training with the zerg or roaming solo
• Engineers: quite a rare sight in group fights at the moment, but they have some nice tricks that will work in the current meta (immobilizes/CCs) and they can provide huge dps

I think this will reward servers with many smaller/midsize guilds over the blobby servers. Looking forward for lots of awesome fights

If you get melted, it can be one of these things:

• you are in the wrong place (for example, you take full spike damage)
• you are not using your defensive cooldowns properly (invulnerability, evasion, blocks)
• you are too squishy: get more health (pvt gear, invest in the +vit traitline) and consider hoelbrak (-20% condition duration) or melandru (-25% cond, -25% stun duration) runes. -condition duration food is a must

Is it for roaming or big fights?

I play something like this in spvp and it may work for roaming.

For big fights the only thing that work at the moment is shatter, IMHO.

Seems like these are supposed to be salvaged from exotics.

badge drop rate feels definitely lower since the “account wallet” patch

Memphisjz.1405:

Menaka.5092:

• rams will be countered by ACs
• golems will be countered by cannons, mortars, trebs
• catapults will be countered by trebs, catapults and and ballistas

If you see too many AC’s you should first build a ballista to shoot em down (given they also add the arc-based AoE attack on ballistas). I’m a WvW commander, and i bought 200 ballistas 3 months ago. Currently, i still have 194 left, which should be an indication on how useless ballistas currently are.

An arc attack on ballistas makes no sense and I think it’s very unlikely it will happen.

I understand what you are saying: you want more power for defensive siege, but as an attacker I can assure you that’s not the problem. Drop 3 superior arrow carts behind a gate, you’ll destroy whatever blob tries to tear it down with weapons. And those AC can’t be countered in any way, not even with trebs if they are placed correctly.

Yesterday we were defending Bay, we had about 15 people on, I built one normal arrow cart and rained arrows on a 40+ group while my guild was pushing them: we wiped them.
One. Arrow. Cart.

In game name: Caos Danzante
Server: Gandara (EU)
Play time: EU prime time
Playground: organized group (20+) WvW
Role: Scholar, Tester

I don’t understand the question.

If you are on Gandara and you don’t see why to join WvW, give it a try. It’s about large scale open world pvp (with a space for smaller scale too).
If you find it fun, stay and enjoy, else go back to PVE or sPVP and enjoy that!

If you are on another server and you’re considering transfering to Gandara: we have many small/mid size (10 to 30-35 man groups) dedicated WvW guilds that enjoy a good fight (and not many that enjoy long sieges, we don’t really care about points).

We don’t particularly love the blobs, but we can pull off one when required in Gandara borderland and in the Eternal Battlegrounds with (more than) decent pug commanders.

Also, the queues are quite rare and not very long (maybe up to half an hour for EB during busy primetime).

I tested it months ago (before the changes to interrupts) and I couldn’t make it work for me.

One thing: I would change the jewels from Celestial to that unnamed mix with cond damage, toughness, vit, prec.

Oh, you get 5 stacks of might on interrupt from the trait, so you’ll have quite a lot up (I’d say about 15 stacks) most of the time.

Tsezar.6950:

Gandalf style the gangbang style

typical Dius blob

HAI DIUS

Edit: also, handholding FSV!

HAI FSV

So, basically, trash all your siege but the trebs.
Attacking a keep/tower/whatever:

• rams will be countered by ACs
• golems will be countered by cannons, mortars, trebs
• catapults will be countered by trebs, catapults and and ballistas

So, each conquest will be a really funny bombardment with trebs for hours.
It does not sound really fun…

axe.5621:

Its not about the points, its about accurate measuring of servers performance. Desolation isn’t playing any worse than it played last week against 1st and 2nd place servers, but it will drop to place 6th from 3rd place just because of bad roll. So wtf? I would like to know more accurate where my server stands compared to other servers.

It is “accurate” based on how ANet applies the Glicko2 algorithm.

Does it reflect how “balanced” are the fights between the servers?
Of course not.
For that, you should apply the algorithm to single fights (say the conquer/defend of a tower, keep, castle, whatever) and try to weight it for the number of players involved, so that capping an empty tower rewarded little or no rating, while capping a fully upgraded keep against equal or superior numbers would count more.

Wait, FSV are green now? But… but… all the bags!

Welcome guys

Add it to the wiki, it will be documented then

My huge male norn mesmer alt strongly disagrees with the girly thing.
(yes I made an alt and he is a mesmer too)
(that should tell the OP something)

I still find my power/shatter build more effective for bigger groups (20-25+, ZvZ)

These forums have been quite unfriendly with the devs lately.

Yes, it’s been a year now, and despite what people are saying, WvW has seen quite a lot of changes and looks like more (and bigger ones) are on their way to the game.

Making big changes requires time, and every development team has limited resources. There’s no point in bashing them for what they can’t possibly do!

Keep up the good work guys, we’re looking forward to the changes!

if everyone has access to the same sigils, how can this be a problem?

if you don’t have the money for the superior one, the major gives 7 points per stack instead of 10 and costs about 3 silvers and you can get a weapon from wvw vendors for 130ish badges + 1g (that you make in less than one night)

Direwind.8409:

because not everyone can get into the server, not all ts servers have unlimited space, not everyone knows the ts server address.

why have a 3rd party tool people need to install when it can simply be added to the game

Adding voice communication to a game is not “simple”

This doesn’t work, because it punishes more populated servers that face less populated ones.

The real solution would be to have the population spread on all the servers, but at the moment seems like ANet is not working on tools to easily (and cheaply) move guilds from one server to another: that would be a huge factor in ensuring a more even population distribution

You don’t cap the tower/keep by yourself.

Every person in your group has a chance to get an additional skillpoint – not considering that each level (and capping gives experience too) grants you another one.

Superior siege is quite cheap for organized guilds, all considering.

Wididyth.3847:

What happened between [Yak] from Gandara and [WaR] from Baruch this evening ? We ([DEX] from Jade Sea) were supposed to GvG with [WaR] first and we didn’t understand why you [Yak] attacked them :s
It is not totally true, we think that you attacked them because you wanted to GvG against us before them, but it wasn’t very nice :s

It may have been a misunderstanding with the person that was speaking with the representative for your guild, but we were waiting for DEX to show up on JS border for a friendly GvG for like 40 mins, so we came to seek you.

When we arrived we found DEX facing WaR, we were going for the spectator area (we were all in non combat tonics) to try to understand what was going on, but WaR attacked us. We wiped WaR, then we wiped DEX. DEX left the field, so we fought WaR in a few GvGs and then left.

If you want to try again tomorrow, speak with our WvW leader, icey.7368 – maybe this time there will be no misunderstandings

Did you check the build thread ?

XelNigma.6315:

I just cant see the value in such a short lived stealth even to a group of people. You cant get very far and plenty of skills still hit you be they aoe or channelings.

Requiem is the only one to give an example of this ability being used to some effect. Maybe not 90sec worth of effect but still pretty good.
Maybe if what Nuka Cola said with a group of organized people to weave in and out of it to abuse the quick restealthing it MIGHT warrant the cooldown. Things on paper dont always go as planned once ingame.

Anyone willing to make a video where a group of people use Veil with devastating results?

Just check any GvG video

I would really like the hammer as a melee 2h option featuring dazes and leaps and blinds…

In general, I would like more melee options.

MH torch? 3-swing autoattack chain with burning on the third swing; blind + big damage (increased on burning foes) on skill 2 and cripple+clone doing the autoattack chain on skill 3.

MH mace? 3-swing autoattack chain with confusion/boon removal on third swing, block on skill 2 with clone spawn and daze on block, charged cast (similar to churning earth, maybe with smaller radius and shorter cast) that ends with big aoe damage and stun on skill 3

MH dagger? Short to mid range single target fast autoattack (similar to necro axe, but with shorter range and increased damage the closer you are to your target) with bleeds and cripple, short evasion/aoe whirl attack on skill 2, gap closer with clone spawn on skill 3

To fix our lack of aoe oriented weapons: Shortbow: piercing ethereal arrows autoattack and the other skills focused on AoE attacks applying confusion, burning and blinds. The phantasm could do something like ranger’s Barrage or Rapid Fire and the clone could spawn from a movement skill like phase retreat or disabling shot (or maybe targeted like infiltrator’s arrow?).

And for all the mesmer duelists out there, MH Pistol, as mentioned in the rest of the thread.

XelNigma.6315:

It just grants a 2 sec invisibility, that you have to walk through to gain, and is a light combo field, imo one of the most worthless fields. everything about this says it should be no more than 15 second 20-25 tops.

Am I missing some major use for this that warrants a 90sec cooldown, equal to that of a portal and mass invisibility?

It’s the only skill in game that can apply stealth to unlimited players, so it’s best used in wvw group play: we don’t really lack ways to get stealth for ourselves with the prestige, decoy and mass invis.

Now, if mass invis player limit was removed (since it’s an elite skill), then I would totally agree with you.

Some of our fights from friday reset: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jIMK1_zB6t0

I almost forgot… a guild group (sorry, don’t remember the tag) pulled off an escape portal + veil on us near Briar in JS border tonight: kudos for trying that!

LilMcGinley.3890:

SHAKA ZULU.3128:

LilMcGinley.3890:

Give Arrow Carts limited ammo.. problem solved. You want 20 ACs? congratz you just blew all your supply when you have to rebuild them

That’s interesting. Would you figure all projectile-based siege should have this? Do you think there could be a mechanic to feed it more ammo, but it would cost you?

For other projectile based siege.. it’s iffy. They don’t hold the same “lock down” power that ACs do. It would be really interesting to decide.. upgrade Garrison or treb Bay? Now you can do both really easily.

If there was a way to “reload” them, take it from available supply in the Keep but only after a worker upgrade. You upgrade your workers to “Ammunition Mechanics” for 300 supply and they will reload X number of AC every Y minutes.

The spammability of ACs puts them in-line with thieves, thus creating problems.

Caliban.3176:

LilMcGinley.3890:

Give Arrow Carts limited ammo.. problem solved. You want 20 ACs? congratz you just blew all your supply when you have to rebuild them

While that help a lot I think it opens up too many possibilities for griefing. I do like the general idea of having to tactically pick the right time to use the AC. Maybe give it 20 shots before it goes on a full cooldown for 60s or more. Something to reduce the spam.

The reasoning was the spam-ability of ACs. Making them more tactical is my reasoning behind such a move/change.

I think we may be into something here.

I already suggested something similar in a different thread, but this take on the limited ammo for siege sounds really cool. And the idea of workers recharging unused siege is just perfect.

Here, take a chart: http://i.imgur.com/3SKkP2R.png

Y axis is % reduction over base light armor
X axis is total armor amount

We had tons of awesome fights on Jade Sea border, looking forward for an entertaining matchup!

Jade Sea: we don’t care much about towers and points, but keep it classy, ok? Trebbing the north eastern tower from citadel is not classy: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y3_hbH6Jvzg