Guild Wars 2

Letifer.4360:

expect some classes with lower DPS to not be allowed in certain dungeon paths (Ranger I’m looking at you) really some encounters are impossible to do without decent DPS, like path 2 CoF for example. Someone here said that he did AC with some low lvl party members and that it wasn’t impossible, sure it isn’t but I doubt people will wan’t to take 2 hours instead of 15/20 min in a path. This will require a massive nerf in the encounters.

I did AC all 3 paths last night with a 35, a 47 a 58 and a pair of 80’s and it didnt take all that long. a powerhouse of decked out 80s would have been faster but only by 5-10 minutes per path and thats mostly because I’d expect the 80s to know the run (2 of the lowbies got their AC explorable cherry’s popped and needed a bit of hand holding) Anybody that feels the need to exclude all but the top potential DPS are either very impatient or just compensating for sub par play as in most cases better play will still succeed in a reasonable time frame.

Valid tactic. Alowing the enemy to compleat the puzzle in peace means more siege for the enemy to use. if left alone I can run all 9 of my character slots through the puzzle in an hour and a half, shorter if a mezmer is providing ports. Thats a minimum of 18 siege my side did not have to buy normally including several trebs and a golum or two. While this is somewhat of an extreme example even folks only running on 1 toon adds up very quickly. Random guy that loves jump puzzles but hates PVE can run the puzzle and then donate the siege he wont ever use to the commanders. If the other team stomps him flat a couple times and he does not return thats siege that the commanders or their support structure must purchase.

Now honestly I dont bother to camp, I’d rather fight outside. However I dont cry about it if I get ganked by campers. I either gather some friends and roll them out of there or I just come back in an hour once the campers either get bored or have been wiped a few times. Alternitively I get sneaky and dash by them while they are distracted. If I make it to the stealth well I’m home free as I can make it past the dark room and normaly past the arena before it expires and there are only a couple spots to easily stop me past that point.

Considering the doors to widespread recruiting will be closeing in a week and a half its not unexpected. Yes some servers may not NEED more right now but haveing a buffer for the future cant hurt and it will be much harder to recruit later on when your looking at 20 bucks or 30 gold a head for transfers to high pop servers. Its a situation of “If we dont recruit then someone else will” and recruits going anywhere else is only more power in the hands of potential enemies. Who wouldn’t recruit in that situation? Show me that man and I’ll show you someone on the loosing team.

I dont really care if some folks in my group want to hide up on those stairs for those boss fights. I normaly just stay down and mix it up with the boss and the adds because i find it more intresting and I can survive it. As long as I live through the fight and I keep the boss close enough for them to keep shooting I dont see why they would have any reason to complain.

Mance.5640:

BG and JQ have to work in tandem to bring down the current big dog. The math is simple. Neither one of us field the #‘s to do it alone. So we have to play smarter, and smash them. We saw this yesterday alot. And truthfully I don’t think SoS cares, they finally have some big equal # epic fights going on, and they don’t have to feel as zergy.

Your prety much right. We’ve been enjoying some of the knock down drag out fights over the last few days even when takeing it from both of you guys togeather. Hell monday night JQ was downright tenatious and left me wondering where you got the numbers to hit us on so many fronts at once. While it can be prety frustrating geting ganged up on it beats the hell out of PvDoor. Those doors dont fight back too well.

I would rather see the yak get a buff that reduces damage takein by a % for every ally withen its radius. Lets say 10% per. with 2 guards thats 20% reduction, not much and probably wont stop a solo kill. Now if there is a group of 5 escorting along with the guards thats 70% and nearly impossible to burst down without removeing a few defenders. escorting yaks is all well and good but frankly as things are now you need 4-5X the number of attackers to even have a hope of protecting the thing. I’ve seen a knot of 5 people bumrush a yak with 15 escorts, the attackers died but not before the yak did.

I dont think upgrades should be part of the monthly. Camps are the only ones with upgrades cheep enough for the avrage casual to not worry much about the cost. Unfortunately camps are often not worth upgradeing as they often flip a couple times an hour unless a particular area is very very secure. While towers/keeps are often upgraded they cost more and are better suited to a group effort. There is also the issue of if you force folks to upgrade for the monthly every joe and their dog will be scrambling to upgrade and pick whatever even if its tactically unsound to order that upgrade.

A much better option would be the use of supply either for building siege or for repairing walls. That is something we want to encurage everybody to do. How many times have you found that only a few people in a large group even have supply when siege is being droped? I’d rather encurage folks to have good habits that we need everybody to have vs just makeing them go order upgrades.

Leo Paul.1659:

I’m calling it now.. SOS and BG will double team JQ. So will JQ and SOS against BG. And of course, SOS will get steamrolled by the combined forces of JQ and BG. But we will all have fun while doing it, won’t we?

So in effect you expect BG to roll in and tripple team everybody including themselves? Madness I say madness. :p

dispite all the cries though double teaming does not happen that much unless a server really pisses the other two off. Most of the time its more two zergs crash into each other somewhere and the third zerg decides to go for low hanging fruit instead of the lag fest. Whichever side loses more when that happens is of course the victim of double teaming at least according to the forums :p

Azure Prower.8701:

dekyos.1548:

They should just make all siege movable. Mobility should be determined by size, catapults and trebuchets would move very slowly, rams and arrowcarts would be quick.

That would be quite a scary sight if all those built rams started moving.

Also what use would golems be?

Well you can portal chain with golems to get to a target prety fast with enough mesmers. they are also somewhat more durable and take doors down faster than a single ram. Personaly I wouldnt mind rams/cata’s being able to be pushed at about 1/2 a golem speed and carts at about golem speed. Lets you do small adjustments if you are just out of range (or a hair too close) but really not worth draging from keep to keep. Trebs just dont really make sense with their model unless you have them pack up siege tank style and add wheels although that would be nice for those times you realize you placed the treb 2 feet too far away.

Then agian if siege could be moved you’d just have another tool for spies to grief the other side. keep has too much siege to crack? no problem send the zerg to other side of the map and have a spy or two move the siege into AOE range so you can bombard it with a small group before the zerg returns.

heh kinda amuseing. However in the future you may want to bear in mind that anything over about 6-10 golems at a time is probably a bad idea. 6 is plenty to rip down a reinforced gate long before cata’s on the other side of the door can down them baring extream counter siege. I was on the defending side of a 6 alpha bum rush. We saw them comeing and had time to setup 3 cata’s behind the door and 3 balista’s in spots that could hit the door… dispite all that they broke the door down as the last golem died.

you would have done far better with 10 golems and 31 players to take out the oil and enemy players.

Musty.3148:

Tulisin.6945:

Musty.3148:

^ yep. 10 seconds but you can add as it is depleted.

http://imgur.com/6Vxjd

I stand corrected.

I went and tested it. I was under a false assumption from Shadows Refuge. I can get to 13 seconds.

So I’d assume from maxing certain stats and traits you could make that even higher.

It used to be around 25 seconds or so when I first played around with perma stealth, was much easier to do then. Also most of the buff duration caps are soft caps not hard caps. if a skill puts you over the soft cap it will add the full duration but untill you drop below the cap new attempts to apply that boon will do nothing. Its entierly possible that there is a 10s cap but hiting a 4s stealth at 9.9s remaining could bump you back up to 13. I did most of my observations on boon duration caps on my warrior playing around with how high I could stack swiftness and such. Incidently 4 minutes was the highest swiftness I ever achieved with sig of rage and alot of boon duration although I think they lowered the cap on that recently as I cant get much over 2 min now.

All the transformation eliets that granted stability were modified to remove stability when they ended because folks were activating them and then canceling to get a long duration stability. This is for all professions not just warriors. Sadly this makes it so boon duration has no effect on jug but such is life.

I do agree with braxxus on the warrior eliets being somewhat lack luster. About the only one I’d call a game changer is warbanner if you get several well timed rallies out of it. Sig is at best a gime all buffs button thats used on CD more often than not and jug is prety much worthless. By contrast some eliets other proffessions have can make major changes to the flow of battle.

Ya your rank in the tier dictated your color. Asumeing you dont want to transfer what you’ll need to do is either win big enough often enough to advance to the next tier of the bracket or loose bad enough that one of the other servers in your bracket takes the top slot. Either way you’ll have a different color as you’d be 3rd in the next bracket up or 2nd in your bracket if you loose.

Your other option is to get a guild that will make specific pushes at a particular capture point at odd hours. While caping an EB keep is rather unlikely with this method almost any tower/boarderkeep can be caped by a hard concentrated push if the enemy is not expecting it. Good luck on your 100%.

PinCushion.7390:

Once a siege starts you have basically lost most of your mobility, which leaves your opponent free run of the map while you sit in your prison cell and wait for the door to get kicked in.

Prety much this. 2 nights ago SoS vs SBI vs JQ. SBI had taken their whole borderland and SoS was trying to regain a foothold. As we were the only game on the map (JQ was on other maps) all of SBI’s force showed up at our spawn tower to defend and we couldnt break through. Our responce, leave part of our force for the siege and send out several 5 man forces to strike all over the map throwing up orange swords and if unopposed flip targets. The result? SBI either had to strip the tower of defenses to regain mobility or loose the rest of the map. We had the tower captured in very short order after that.

Did you ever wonder why they needed to apply this nerf? do you realize how much healing could be done in a large ball like that vs the damage? Say you have 50 people meleeing the door and elementalist on the wall drops an AOE. He does damage to 5 people per tick. You toss out an AOE heal and it potentially effects all 50 assuming there is anything to heal. It does not take much imagination to see how quickly unlimited AOE healing of that nature could quickly outpace incoming damage.

Healing in this game was not designed to have the majority of it come from external sources. It was designed to have the lions share of healing come from each players healing skill with external sources being relatively small amounts in comparison to incoming damage and the self heal. Prenerf it only took a few people healing to completely throw off that design in a large group.

The game is also not designed around just flat out soaking damage and healing it up, its about preventing the damage. Dont try to heal through the damage to your ram opperator try to kill off whats hurting him. Failing that back off the door and use longer range siege. Hint, catapults have uses asside from hammering the back side of a door to kill rams/melee balls

Tier 1 is relatively balanced as well this matchup. haven’t checked today but last night SBI and JQ were within a couple thousand points of eachother and SoS was about 30k out in front. Not sure if that lead was due to the event over the weekend giveing us a strong lead that we’ve held onto or not. The point intake was not particularly lopsided last night however.

More unique content such as a new zone perhaps? we got that. New jumping puzzles? yep that to. The one time event was the introduction to the new zone which will still be available after the event. They were going to release the zone anyway so why not make it epic. The devs have stated that additional events are not that time consuming to make with the tools they have, the time consuming part is the art assets. They already had the island and the new monsters, the only foes unique to the event itself were scaled up versions of those monsters with different fight mechanics.

I think for the carrying banner thing it would need to be a trait so there is a cost for the added convenience. Make it so the trait causes banners to be summoned on your back, F2 would become the banner unique ability, F3 the swiftness and F4 drops the banner to the ground. There is no need for the spammable attack as you’d have your weapons and there are plenty of gap closers so the charge is somewhat redundant as well. If droped the banner now funtions like normal and can be picked up as a bundle but not back onto your back. In the case of multipul banners you can only carry one on your back, Either the new one replaces the old one (which falls to the ground as normal) or the new one summons like they do currently and you have to first drop your back banner if you want to replace it with the new one.

Flarenza.8150:

Why even bother attacking a gate at all? The walls are much easier to take down with siege. While I am not sure about the fully upgraded wall, a basic/fortified wall drops easily twice as fast as a normal/fortified gate.

not really 4-5 rams will drop even a fortified gate in a minute or less if the rams are not killed before then. Rams are cheep both in coin and supplies. To damage a wall you need cata’s or trebs. Not only are those more expensive to produce but you’ll need twice as many of them to knock down a normal wall that quickly. You do have the advantage of being able to set them up outside of easy retaliation from inside the keep but its far from faster than useing the door unless you just cant get rams on the door.
Honestly some of the best defenses I’ve been on didnt revolve around preventing the enemy from getting inside. Saveing the door/wall was hopeless as well as pointless. Instead just setukittenllzone where the breach is expected to happen with multipul arrow carts, balistas and a few cata’s trained on that spot. watch the enemy wipe, go kill any siege left over and drop a load or two of supplies on the breach point to force them to set up more siege. Its about the only way a smaller force has the advantage over the attackers as long as you have enough to cover the needed siege.

majinvegitto.7124:

Any damage to a tower or keep will bring up white swords on the keep icon.. Only if there are enough people doing damage do you get orange swords. You cannot ninja a keep/tower with no indicators on the map showing up. This is why anytime you see a keep under attack orange swords or not, it should be checked out.

True although if you’ve got good control of your zerg you can potentially drop 3 rams on the door and still only have white swords. Orange swords will result in a large response immediately. If it takes 1 minute to run out there from the closest waypoint you double your time to get past the static defenses as it will probably take just as long for the zerg to arrive after the easily crushed scouting party shows up. This can be the difference between having the enemy zerg roll into your back as the doors go down and having them show up right as the lord goes down forcing them to beat the doors down themselves. Still a hit or miss stratagy however as if theres even a single defender inside the call for the zerg can go out right away without the need to wait for a scout to report a false alarm. can work for night caping but otherwise only effective if the enemy is makeing a major push elsewhere and is destracted.

Morgar, First of yes I did read your OP and all your following posts. There is a saying I think you should take to heart. “It is better to remain silent at the risk of being thought a fool, than to talk and remove all doubt of it.”
All your arguments and armchair game development attempts are only coming across as whiny and very often ignorant. Quite a few of your claims are just flat out untrue as well. Most of the time the chain stealth thieves are very very predictable. While not being able to keep them targeted is annoying nearly every ability in the game is able to be fired off without a target and will still hit the stealthed player if you are facing the right way. If this was WoW type stealth sure vanish is bad because it just interupted your skill but its not. Your skill finished casting anyway and unless the thief teleported at the same time as stealthing (burning more resources) then you just smacked him with it despite being invisible. While damage itself cant disrupt stealth the only really long term stealth cd (shadow refuge) is very easy to defeat. Wail around in the area as they can not leave that circle even for a few seconds after it vanishes. Additionally quite a few professions have untargeted attacks that can blow back any nearby thieves out of the circle revealing them.

The only issue I see with thief stealth has more to do with the culling issue. If the player appeared as soon as stealth broke to their opponent peekaboo thieves wouldn’t even remotely be a challenge to any build that isn’t a glass cannon. Better that they fix that problem as it impacts far more than just thief stealth than to listen to an armchair developer wannabe and nerf thieves only to have to rebuff them later when they fix the root problem.

I think any new content will nuke WvW to some extent. Numbers will drop off as players go check out the new shiny but they will be back. After all WvW is there 24/7 but new stuff is only new for a short time. Halloween droped WvW participation overall till it finished, Lost shores all but emptied the WvW zones while the 1 time events were runing. Fratals is probably still impacting WvW but I highly doubt that will last very long. Folks will milk what they want out of there soon enough and then they will be back to whatever else they do day to day.

While its best to get your primary weapon skills all learned like others have said don’t feel obligated to learn every skill for every weapon before joining in. There is actually a level scaling on weapon skill learn rates. Once you reach character lvl 20 or so any weapon you have not learned all skills on will unlock at 1 skill per kill instead of 10-20 for the last couple as normal. If your an elementalist that uses staff for the most part you can put off unlocking all the dagger and focus skills. you’ll have limited options on useing the utility of the other weapons but after 20 you can unlock all those skills in a minute or two of pve killing vs spending half an hour grinding them all out early on.

That said all I can do is reiterate what others have stated. If possible get weapon swap and at least 2 utility slots and try to cherry pick the best utility available to you. Stick with the larger groups, dont go solo. Man siege equipment when possible as your not at a significant disadvantage there like you would be faceing a maxed out 80. Once you hit 30 I highly sugest you bite the bullet and do a quick run through of the PVE zones and grab the skill point challanges so you have the points to get your eliet and any strong utilities you find yourself lacking due to insufficent points. shouldnt take long but eliets have long CD’s for a reason.

One option to band-aid oil would be drastically reduce the damage players can do to them directly forcing the use of siege (balistas) to take them down in a reasonable time frame. Might need to give the operator some help as well considering how quickly they are murdered by the current AOE mechanics. Oil would still die prety quick but it would force the use of more supplies and blueprints potentialy limiting the number of rams that could be dropped depending on the size of the zerg attacking.

Oil asside several game mechanics need to improve. AoE up onto the ramparts makes it near impossible to defend from the wall tops aside from arrow carts out of range of the AOE. LOS issues and limited range of movement also make defence problematic compaired to offense. The main advantage defenders have in most places right now is the attackers can not get in quickly (with cat through door) and a small number of defenders poping their heads up can often tunnlevision enough attackers on them to allow for a force to roll them up from behind. Still theres prety much no way as mechanics stand now to sucessfuly defend from inside the fortress without either a relief force hiting the attack from behind or a large enough sortie from the fort to push the attackers back. About the only exception is the north east borderlands tower as you can target the area of the door with balistas up on the cliff

Unless they were lucky enough to get a precursor item the exotics most 80s recieved were worth a couple gold at best. The 20slot bag was worth double everything else I got combined going by the TP value of the tradeables. Still a 10g+ bag is nothing to scoff at as now I dont have to buy one.

I suspect it was just set to drop a couple of exotics from the global loot table, said loot table includes the precursors as they can technicly drop from anything including the obsidian santum jumping puzzle. those lucky few just got lucky and the dice pooped out a precursor

As its health got low the status went from its almost dead, finish her to floor will colapse in 10 seconds. It gave fair warning and even looking at that area caused me to go ranged as I didnt want to stand on a loose pit we’d been planting explosives around an hour before. Not cool you missed the chest but I saw that comeing a mile away not sure how you missed it.

Worth it for me… not sure what the folks reporting no rewards are on about unless they DC’d at the end or something and missed the chest. I got 2 random exotics, 2 rares, and a chest with an exotic accesory(ring) and a 20slot bag.

Overall the event was fun and the rewards good. The one thing I’d sugest to Anet though is next time dont have an event that involves spawning 30 mobs that all do charge/kd on a very short CD. Those vet kraka’s were anoying to fight because they’d knock you down every 10s if you were ranged and perma knock down from several directions if you were melee. even worse when half of them are culled so you dont see them till after you are a skidmark

Phase 1 the reward was only 5 of the captians commendations. you can get those by donating equipment in the mystic forge
phase 2 had no reward far as I could determin, just opend up the new zone.
Phase 3 will probably have its own reward but I doubt you’ll need to have taken part in the earlier phases as 2 was prety much disconnected from 1.

have you tried with 3 different types of ingots or planks? I didnt try mats directly I tried once with food (3X10 food and seemed to need a lvl req on the food) and random junk blues I had in my inventory. Got 8 off the junk but only 1 off the food.

I5-3570K 3.4ghz
8gb ram
HD5770 GPU

FPS was fine even in the worst of the event hovering in the high 30s to low 40s for FPS. On the other hand any action other than running around took 5-10s from keypress to actually doing anything. Ability lag is even more frustrating than low FPS IMO as you cant even try to respond.

I dont think removing the orbs will significantly impact populations in the borderlands. Truth be told sucessful orb battles have always been quite rare. More often than not an orb capture after the match settled was either a long multi hour grind or a mad dash burn the gates down before defenders can arrive nitecap style (or the friendly neiborhood hacker doing it)

I do feel that WvW will be looseing something important without the orbs but it shouldnt impact the majority of folks all that much. I would have been much happeir if they’d swaped the outmaned and orb buffs. A bit of bonus stats and damage is probably needed for the vastly outnumbered side who probably is not able to hold orbs in the first place where as 25% XP/karma/MF per orb does not exactly make an already dominante realm snowball. Holding all the orbs may be a nice bonus but far from being worthwhile targets for hackers if they dont provide combat boosts.

Then agian I also prefered DAOC’s approach to relics, the more you held the more bonuses your realm got but your realms defenses got weaker taking a supreme effort to hold onto all 6

Oddly enough I’d classify asura as the hardest to learn on if for no other reason than that opening rush out the gates. Its hard to see yourself at all in the crowd and reall easy to fall time after time even if you know the jumps. Once the crowd thins out I honestly bairly notice the difference between asura human and sylvari. Norn are just a tad clumsy and char are anoying due to the issues the OP listed.

Please folks be kind to the others around you and dont try and be funny by summoning a big pet elite in the last moment before the queue pops. That first set of jumps is hard enough with all the players doing the mad dash and putting a ghostly oakheart or an asuran golem in the mix just to be annoying is not nice.

I got a pair of the medium slippers on my elementalist who was lvl 7 at the time. its worth it particularly if your server has no queue and you can get 3-4 characters into the chest befor it despawns.

Kiviar.7063:

Merendel.7128:

GW2 on the other hand has grinds but primaraly for cosmetic/prestigue items.

You mean aside from the grind for lvl 80 exotic gear, which is pretty much mandatory to be competitive in wvw or useful in dungeons.

You can aquire a full set of 80 exotic with a very small amount of grinding via the crafting system and TP. Depending on your leveling habits you may have the funds to purchase this outright when you reach 80. If not the grind to aquire will be much shorter than comperable grinds in other MMO’s. Its only if you want a special skin from a dungeon that you must grind for it. I’ll reiterate you’ve gota grind for the cosmetic/prestige/bling skins but that is far from manditory to be competitive in anything but a costume contest.

Its not that there are no grinds in the game, its that there are no grinds that are required to participate. If this were generic MMO X then you would need to grind so much faction and so many dungeon runs just to do the harder dungeon/raids. AKA you Must grind if you want to play past a point.

GW2 on the other hand has grinds but primaraly for cosmetic/prestigue items. You dont need a shield that looks like a grinning moon or a spider bow to participate in DE’s WvW ExDungeons and the like. If you really want to show off you can grind for said items but at that point its your choice. It comes down to the difference between haveing to grind just to keep up and electing to grind because you want shinny bling.

Only the last 2 really take you anywhere remotely dangerous for a level 15 and the second to last you could probably still solo with care, just avoid agro. The last one just make sure your taging along behind a group makeing their way through the tomb and dont get cought in the traps.

Draxius.7839:

I’m not sure ‘stealth’ is the right way to describe this build though, seeing as you’re basically doing a fireworks display around yourself, alerting every enemy in the area where to murder you.

Dont be so sure, I’m not sure if the “fireworks” even properly render for enemies or if they are stealthed while you are. I’m prety sure they see the smoke screeen and or the shadow refuge fields as I’v had enemies come over to investigate that but they may also be hearing the explosions. If you do a good job in picking your location to refresh stealth by the time they spot the field and get over to it you are already done and moveing for another 15-20s and you can get well out of their range to see the next stop point as long as they dont manage to guess your direction of travel. That over blown house on shadowrefuge seems to be the bigest attention graber.

Ruufio.1496:

I disagree.

Stability needs to stay a boon but skills like Dagger Storm and Lich Form need an entirely new effect like Unshakable.

If the design goal for the eliet is total CC immunity I agree. If on the other hand devs want the eliets to be counterable then the current design is probably intentional.

While you may need a somewhat specalized build to do this by yourself it becomes rather trivial if you’ve got another person with a blast finisher they can use on command. 10 points in shadow arts on one thief that brings smoke screen and the deception CD reduceing major and you can stack stealth high enough on 5 people to get to the next smokescreen. another thief with shortbow is ideal for the second man. My alliance has used this to move small forces around undetected. Every so often one or two people notice the explosions but they rarely manage to catch you if your careful. with 2 people spaming blast finishers you can cap out at 25s of stealth by the time the 7s smoke screen runs out. As long as an observer does not stumble into the AOE in the first few seconds your whole squad has time to relocate to another spot well away and they’ll never find you or know how many are around.

As an alternitive you use a second thief with smokescreen and use any old build you wanted, just alternate the thieves droping SS. Offhand pistol works in a pinch for the smoke but its shorter duration and you risk revealed accidents by shooting something with the ranged portion.

I think that dolyaks should be soloable if they are not guarded at the time. However it should be possible to actually guard the silly things. As it stands its possible for a couple people to just spike it down in a mater of seconds even if a vastly superior force is guarding it. Yes its a suicide run but they got their objective done.

What I would suggest is dont buff the dolyak’s HP but give it a % based damage reduction for each friendly NPC within a close proximity of the yak. If for example each player and guard withen 600-900ish range from the yak gave it 10% reduction an escort of 5-8 players all but forces the enemy to engage or drive off the guards before killing the yak. No more LOL nuke bomb and run, no you’ve actualy got to fight the players. This would alow for soloing undefended yaks (or yaks with only NPC guards) like now but make it progressively harder to take down defended yaks unless you have sufficent forces to wipe out the defenders as well.

I can normally get away from them on my warrior if I want to just run away. Near perma swiftness and several charge/leap type attacks. Only time I cant reliably get away without killing is if the thief has dancing dagger. Then agian most of the time if I’m runing away from a thief without engageing I’m hopeing they will burn off the bulk of their Initiative trying to get in range of me to snare. If they are dumb enough to do so I’ll happily turn around and smack them into the ground for being stupidly greedy.

Scourge.2173:

Anonymity.3602:

If he hits you once you can see him for a minimum of 4 seconds.

That is of course if the game decides to render the Thief before they re-stealth

That is a bug with the rendering engine not an issue with stealth itself. Asside from rendering bugs you cant do significant damage while remaining stealthed (thief can lay down poison field from shortbow without destealthing but they are not going to kill you with that) Stealth not breaking on takeing damage is just fine due to the short period of time you can remain in stealth. I’ve killed plenty of thieves that tried to stealth to get away. Try to guess what way they are likely to go to try an escape and keep attacking, I’ve had to backtrack for the stomp more than once because I downed them and didnt notice till they rendered agian 3-4s later.

Unless this is some wonkieness where they are actualy targeting the base of the cliff and its hiting all the way up to the trebs I dont think this is an exploit. At least no more of an exploit than the balista 2 bolt from down below to hit those trebs.

As to the suden destruction of the treb after the attack was repelled who knows. I’ve seen siege mysteriously vanish from full health after a while on occasion, sometimes while I was controlling it. Unless theres a flight hacker floating around (wich is unlikely as they’d take the orbs before mucking with trebs) its more likely that bug cropped up and had nothing to do with the enemy.

Shintai.5618:

Nor the signet infiltrator, steal or shadowsteps can pass walls or floors.

Depends on the situation. If the shadowstep can path to the location without the need to jump and without going too far around sometimes it will still work. I’ve had a few times where I was able to shadowstep to someone on a platform directly above me when the ramp up was right next to me as well. Its not 100% consistant though, you’ll note some cliffs you can shortbow accross even though you’d need to cover almost twice the range on foot to cross them and other times you’ll hang up on a 2 inch ripple in the ground.

The only debuff I’d want to see in there is siege deploment blocked. There are a few key points in there where it does not matter how many folks you bring along to force them out you’ll never succeed if they setup enough siege. The arena after the darkroom in particular you’ll never make it through with propper arrow cart coverage, 5-10 people could hold that area for hours vs whole server populations. While still difficult without the siege enough could get up top to force them out eventually.

Other than that if you want an unofficial truce in there and the other guys are willing more power to ya, I’ve participated in a few myself. If one side wants to fight however be prepared to fight back or run back, your choice.

Even with its limitations commander is still useful. My guild uses it to heard the zerg. Often our guild commander will only be runing with a single group of the 4 or so we field during primetime. The other 3 will either be on individual asignments hitting small targets or forming up for a larger concentrated strike. Meanwhile the commander drags the zerg along to either the major pushes or to where major reinforcements are needed. There is almost never a risk of him not haveing enough warm bodies thanks to the zerg tending to flock to that icon.

Twinbros.5372:

Well the good thing about being in 3rd is we get to decide who comes in first and seeing as how Dragon and CD are pretty much working as a team, one of them is gonna get the shaft when we pick who gets to win. So far I’m thinking we should let Dragon win since CD doesn’t seem at all concerned with their lead and is focusing us hardcore. Punish CD for ignoring Dragon and ensure they never make it to 1st.

I’m not sure what happend overnight or in the other battles but from the time of the matchup till around midnight (pst) We on CD homefront had been focusing most of our efforts on holding the north and pushing on bay to try and take that orb from DB. No mater what you think we arn’t working togeather with DB. Asside from slaping back your rushes at cliffside and reclaiming titans and fog while wipeing out the groups that took em we prety much ignored TC unless you guys came up to play where we were fighting DB. Trust me we were very much more anoyed with DB than we were with you thanks to that Tsym guild’s creative use of game mechanics and constantly mesmer portaling invisible armies into our lines. We could counter it but by its nature there’s only a couple seconds to spot the prep and react or you get steamrolled.

Still so far seems a very good fight overall CD hopes to win but well see how things play out once the weekend is over. Last 2 weeks we’ve had severe moral issues after geting so thoroughly curbstomped in the first day or so and were not sure how many folks transfered off in that time. I’m just hopeing for a good solid fight all week long as owning it all or owning nothing both stink.

While I know this wont help with the server side issue but couldnt the client side problem be somewhat mitigated by causeing the client to load a cashed placeholder model/texture as soon as it recieves the information from the server and load the proper one as it has a chance? Even if we still run into situations where there are too many players around and we run into hardcaps on how much information the server can send us eliminating that nonzero delay between information recieved and full rendering would make the issue somewhat more barable. I’d happily have a generic racial model show up in generic armor in its teams color pop up and have that morph into the properly customized character model a few moments later as it would at least alow properly targeted attacks and tactical decisions.

Right now the meta game is evolving to take advantage of this system. We have been faceing one guild this week that has only 1 trick in their bag. They cluster up out of rendering range of our forces, send a mesmer at us to kamakazi drop a portal and then all come in and unleash AOE hell. The only way we’ve found to counter this is to keep a close watch for the entry portal to pop up as that will tend to render even if the army about to use it will not and as soon as the Mesmer drops the portal in our midst we AOE the proverbial furry cute hairball out of that area and hope we get them all. They drop in as blind to us as we are to them but have the advantage of having the Mesmer effectively targeting for them by dropping them in the right spot.

I’d just recommend blocking siege deployment across the zone for 5-10 minutes after a maintenance/reset. I dont care how big a zerg they have they are not riping down reinforced doors with melee attacks that quickly, they might get normal doors after a full reset but it still gives you time to show up and face them.

If you havent goten a force out there after 10 minutes to counter them then frankittenhey just out organized you and got everybody to show up at once where you didnt.