Experienced commanders who know more than just how to zerg.
Large, organized groups that play WvW regularly and are invested in going for the win and not just personal advancement or fun.
Cooperation between these groups. That is, if someone says in map chat “Our hills are under attack by a group of 40!”, in less than a minute, all the main commanders know about it and a force is dispatched to take care of it.
A good, solid late night/early morning crew. Typically this means players from another country, but not always.
The next two are hard to find because they aren’t that fun for most people.
Scouts. (Some people have two accounts and keep a scout on a separate monitor that they just glance at from time to time or switch to when swords appear on the map.)
People who repair walls, build defensive siege, and keep siege updated so it does not disappear. It’s frustrating to have trebs and omegas vanish because nobody kept them up.
Recently I was very excited when I saw that you could purchase increased stack size for collectibles. I immediately started saving my money to buy the gems to buy said improvement. I was disappointed that the exchange rate for gems was much worse than I remembered it, but I gritted my teeth and started saving up my gold.
At that time I incorrectly assumed that it meant increased stack sizes regardless of where the items were. I envisioned every stack in my bank, whether it was in the collectibles area or the main area, having 1000 items in each stack as well as each stack on my various characters and in my guild bank. I would be able to start using storage characters as player characters. Organizing my bank would be so easy with all the extra space I imagined having.
I then discovered that the stack size increase was for the collectibles tab of the bank only and no where else.
I still thought to myself, “Well, it’s not as good as I thought, but I will still eventually get it when I save up enough gold.”
Then I started doing the math. I started thinking about which collectibles I horde and which ones I do not. How many stacks of stuff do I keep that would normally go into the collectibles tab, but won’t fit because of the 250 per stack limit?
Let’s say I have 20 different types of stacks of 250 each that I keep on storage characters because they won’t fit in the collectibles tab. I may have 100 of these stacks, but for some items there will be multiple stacks and I am theorizing that I only have 20 actual types of stackable collectibles which I horde.
The collection expander costs 800 gems, which currently costs about 60 gold. If I buy this, I am really only buying the equivalent of 20 extra storage slots. For example, if I horde orichalcum ingots, I may have 10 stacks of them. However, buying one expander means that only one of the extra stacks gets to go into the collectibles tab.
For 600 gems, I get an extra bank tab, which means 30 extra slots. This currently costs about 45 gold.
For 52,500 influence, at a cost of 105 gold, I can get 250 bank slots by creating my own guild.
Unless you have already bought all the bank tabs and all the guild storage OR you are hording not just many stacks of collectibles but many different types of collectibles, it just isn’t worth the expense. The money could be spent more efficiently elsewhere.
Furthermore, and I am just assuming that this is the case as I have not actually tested it, suppose you get all three expanders and can now store 1000 per stack in the collectibles tab. Now imagine that you fill up that tab and need to empty it to start over. You will have to split that stack of 1000 up into 4 stacks of 250 which will take up 4 slots elsewhere because you can’t simply move it to another slot like you can if you had never bought the expanders.
I’ve done the Tequatl event exactly once and I was only able to do it that time by guesting on another server. It’s too much of a pain to do and takes way too much time when I could be doing other, much more enjoyable and rewarding activities. If there were some colossal reward for doing it, it might be worth the effort. If I were guaranteed 20 gold on success, it would be worth wasting 2 hours a pop and failing 4 times out of 5.
I don’t even try to get the various achievements connected to Teq because it’s just too much of a pain.
What is the point of wasting half an evening of GW2 play on the small chance that I will actually succeed and get a fraction of the loot I could have gotten in the same period of time doing other things?
I know the idea was that large numbers of people would end up working like some giant well-oiled machine and that we would all have a tremendous sense of satisfaction when it was over. It just doesn’t work that way. Half the people that show up pay no attention to instruction and refuse to use a program like Team Speak. They are just there to get a few achievements at the expense of the group as a whole. Many of them are under-leveled. Regardless of how poorly they play, they make the event scale up in difficulty by their very presence as if they were good players.
As it is, I’m not even sure that anyone has attempted Teq on my server in the last several months. I only go to that zone when guild bounties take me there or sometimes for a daily achievement.
It’s different every time. In most of GW2, if you find a way to beat something, it will work every single time until they reprogram the event.
WvW allows multi-group play unlike dungeons and fractals which limit you to 5 players. The social aspects of this when using software like Team Speak is very gratifying.
Not only do you have to use all kinds of tactics that aren’t necessary outside WvW, but there is a strategic aspect as well. What will the enemy do if we take that tower deep inside their territory? Can we use it to attack their keep? With the limited number of players we have on at 3am in the morning, should we go all-out defense, should we put all our eggs in one basket and move fast, or should we split into small teams and take out yaks, camps, sentries, and unguarded towers?
There are ways to progress in WvW that take much longer to max out than PVE. I’m nearly maxed in terms of gear in PVE except I haven’t gotten around to getting an ascended back piece yet or the finer versions of the ascended infusions. In terms of DPS, hitpoints, etc. this shortcoming is fairly trivial. In WvW, abilities like arrow cart mastery, etc. take hundreds or maybe thousands of levels to get them all.
Regarding downed traits, the thief one that makes you invisible almost never works for me. (and yes, I do stop attacking before triggering it and no, I don’t have a DoT on me or an enemy AoE covering the area when it fails to work). Sometimes it works, but probably 80% of the time it does not. It never has worked well for me and I’ve been level 80 since early this year.
I think an additional tweak, with regards to the comment:
“Obviously, if a player is max rank already, he/she would only be able to be bumped by the original thrower.”
would be if when you tried to kick someone off and you were the original thrower, you would get a message like, “This player has higher skill than you. Are you sure? Yes/No”
My reason for this is that I build a lot of siege, and while I do like to use it, in the event that someone has higher skill, I do NOT want to automatically kick them off. Fortunately I have max AC skill already, so it’s not an issue for that one, but I do not have max skill in anything else and as a team player, I want what’s best for the team.
I had the same experience. Looking back, I do recall that on the farthest southeast shard in Kessex Hills, I tried to dash in and grab it without killing the krait first. I got interrupted. That may be what caused it for me. Regardless I went back through the entire 24 shards trying to find the one I missed. I got the message from each shard that I was done with that shard. Still stuck at 23/24.