Why roam on a warrior. Successful roaming is more about mobility than actually winning fights 1v1 or even small group, because there are some fights you just won’t win, vs any significant greater odds, and you need to be able to get away in these situations or its the end of your roaming. That’s why practically all roamers are one of two classes, thieves (often P/D abusing culling) or D/D eles. Occasionally mesmer if they are good, but I don’t see too many.
Some people wonder why there aren’t more roamers to fight, its because other profs don’t get the same tools to be good at it, and game is not balanced. Even if you as a warrior defeat (or start defeating) one of these more typical roamers, they are going to run away from you, then reengage till odds go in their favor.
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Honestly, I fear for Kaineng. By the time all of your bandwagoners and fairweather players realize the wall you are about to hit (whether in tier 3 or worse, 2), it will be after the free transfers are over. You will have a large number of players that are simply not ready to deal with the pressure you will face where you’re headed that no longer have the option to go to a lower tier server.
I’m not sure what will happen after that, but I do know it won’t be very pretty.
These constantly moving bandwagon players are bad for the game and tbh, I think it would be better if they were gone. Anet won’t want to hear that as it would lose customers, but in the end it could cost even more if they forever destabilize the matchmaking system. So hopefully paid transfers does away with them.
Look at Mag now, sure looks like their giant zergball isn’t showing up now that things are getting tough in T3. They wanted to preach tactics last week, now they are in last place. The same result for Kaineng would not surprise me. An earlier post said wait till we go up, it will all work out, well no, not if bandwagon players are just there for easy wins. It would work out if they would keep coming out when things are tough as well as when its easy, but good chance a fair amount won’t keep coming out next week or beyond when they get hit in the mouth back. As if they had any backbone to begin with, probably would not have left their original servers.
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Someone said this is last week all over. In score maybe, but one difference with Mag and Kaineng, Kaineng never stopped shamelessly recruiting. I just hope all these people really love zerg warfare and long queues and won’t just bandwagon hop off Kaineng and repeat this silly cycle all over again when they go up a tier or 2 and run into a wall where its not easy to steamroll everything.
As far as i can tell it looks like Maguma and kaineng have both hit a wall. look at both of there opening night point totals last week and look at were they are now. this is going to be a great week. a long one for a number of servers as well.
Looks like YB and CD are doing a good job at challenging kaineng.
Too early to call on Kaineng, we are just coming into their prime off peak times for the next 6-8 hours or so. If they can balloon leads up then it will eventually produce a huge gap by the end of the week.
Even if it stays manageable tonight, the NA contingent won’t be able to overnight it the same on the weekdays.
You’ll find that a lot of the Necro’s playstyle that the devs seemed to have in mind involves less ‘buffing yourself’ and more ‘debuffing your enemy’. So instead of swiftness we have access to cripples and chills to slow the enemy down. Instead of aegis to block, we have blind to make the target miss, etc, etc. Again though, how successful the devs have been in making this reality you’ll find to be a controversial topic on the board.
This is on point, but the difference is that debuffs (conditions) are so easy to remove in this game compared to buffs. Yes we can spec to be somewhat good at removing those (but Corrupt Boon fails way too often and is on a longish cooldown) and classes built for buffing can keep them up almost non stop, restacking soon after we remove them.
In team situations proper boon removal can let you burst down an enemy pretty fast, but in smaller fights, or 1v1, they usually just take a brief dip in health but rotate them all back (guardians D/D eles, etc).
We knew that Mag and IoJ were working together all along.
Now we have proof!
Five minutes after this picture, there was a third Yak on the map nearby. It was teal.
Kaineng’s “gear check” will be in T4 when they face servers that have previously overcome Maguuma’s residents in battle.
I doubt T4 gear checks them much more than it did Mag, but perhaps if CD can somewhat hold during off peak, it should be more contested than this has been.
The culling bag also has to disappear for every 4 out of 5 seconds. It appears for 1 second, always at least 1200 yards away.
Thieves get a culling loot bag. At first just a placeholder shows up, you go to pick it up but nothing inside. If you can survive the zerg around you for about 20 seconds, the loot finally appears.
Recent interviews have suggested this is not going to be across the board nerf to all AOE. They described it as going over all the abilities and perhaps finding the few most blatant ones and making some tweaks. Doesn’t even mean every prof will necessarily see change.
We don’t want to get stuck in this tier overmatched forever by the big servers that Mag and Kaineng are going to dislodge going up.
Why not? Mag did it for months. It’s fun.
Underdog yes, fodder no. We’ve been underdog, vs Blackgate, SoR, TC, that can be fun, in fact where YB earned a lot of nods from our opponents, but there is a tipping point. I think it turns on being able to take and hold some positions vs just take and run.
Any server that was beat 8 to 1 for weeks would be in the bottom tier fast. So it could not have been that bad.
Even though the blowouts are bad at large, it does get you a bit more interested in the other matches via familiarity with the servers you meet going up and down. I think the eventual Mag/Kaineng battle is going to be fascinating because its such a clash of styles. Large scale tactics (at least their off peak) vs more group of individuals style belief.
People can sling back and forth about the zerg vs skill in this matchup, but truth is it can’t really be proven out with the numbers and score so lopsided, but going up Mag is going to get the chance to prove it out vs similar coverage in the next week and next one past.
For the few YB who are organized and want to become something successful, I suggest you follow the strategies of the super-organized & deadly guilds that are in T1 (recently transferred and have been.)
Most Yaks have no interest in being T1 and all that entails, much of it not desirable. To get there would be more about recruiting than organizing to be honest.
Not that YB isn’t recruiting, but its more because this tier is looking like a cutoff line between big servers that are seeing pile ons pre paid transfers, and the lower tiers that are made up of servers varyingly abandoned. We don’t want to get stuck in this tier overmatched forever by the big servers that Mag and Kaineng are going to dislodge going up.
To your actual point, YB has developed a few bad habits, and they started several weeks before this matchup. But I think a real close competitive match can bring out the best again.
Hmm.
Adding stuff to Mesmer? Engineer? Thief? Ranger?How about we add something to your friendly Guardian class.
Like every class has something fancy and cool above the skill bar.
Every single class. Except for Guardian.Why can’t we have cool stuff too?
Loot bag bubble. Opponent goes to pick it up, repelled by shield.
^ I don’t know, a lot of Yaks are just preparing for the next matchup at this point, or leveling alts and such. I’m sure we could carve out more points if we wanted, just most don’t want spend money or effort when the score gap is so large. If IoJ has many doing the same, then maybe. But if this is close to what IoJ has to field at this point, then probably not. But it doesn’t really matter because a rematch is not likely unless IoJ does major stomping down below this tier, which will likely require a new round of recruiting that will be very hard to do with paid transfers hitting soon.
I’m saving them in hopes that one day they will decide that WvWers are not second-class citizens, and actually give us more options.
At the very least give us some cool looking armor choices exclusive to WvW for badges. PVE dungeons have what 5 or 6 sets, sPVP even more, and we have ugly Invader and whatever the noob version is.
The whole thing with maguuma not actively recruiting is such a crock. People here have been after guilds from other servers since the start, and the only reason we’ve come up this far is because of the transfers. The people playing it down like the transfers aren’t welcome are the same ones trying to grab them up into whatever crap alliance/conglomerate/coalition we have this week. Recruitment and attempts at organization haven’t been this prevalent for months.
Course servers want to get situated at the top before the lock down, and are recruiting like crazy to end up there. But not sure why that should be desired. I think its far more preferable to end up in a middle tier, where we will never see long queues, maybe some short ones at reset at worst, and then have competitive matches every week once populations stabilize. One thing YB has is still mostly the same players and identity it always did. Top 3 tiers, probably well over 50% of those servers are just mercenaries, transplants from elsewhere. So you joined a server already winning big whoop.
We’ve been on both sides, this is typical when the score gets like this. If IoJ could still field numbers there might at least be a fight for second, or possibly even the mythical like event known as teaming up on the top team. But 1st, 2nd, 3rd, its pretty set in stone right now. And without much of a 3rd server to at least draw attention, if YB takes a tower or two, its just like moths to flame signal call for a massive Mag zerg. So that gets old.
Usually the opposite thing that the zerg is doing is more beneficial to your server, if you can find some other people to do it with. The zerg is the frontline, you definitely need it but defeating the zerg is often more about making them split than doing it head to head, as that can take hours if they are evenly matched.
Getting ascended only through dailies is kind of lazy if that is all for us. There should be a specific WvW means to acquire them (simply badges and/or karma would be fine). Yes you can do dailies in WvW, but chasing down random mobs to finish a daily isn’t much in the way of achieving these items through WVW endeavors.
We will see zergs again. But IoJ is not going to be long for this tier. They were ranked so high for so long that showings like this hurt them badly (-154.00) while Yaks is actually going to gain points this week despite the poor showing.
Kaineng will pit stop in this tier and keep going. But after it should settle down some with DB coming back and likely Crystal Desert. Hopefully those two can somewhat balance each other in off hours, because it should be pretty good in NA primetime.
Ah right, was just going off his post. DB in the matchup will alter it a lot, as they will battle with Kaineng off peak.
YB will not disperse it has a solid committed core, and has received no fairweather bandwagoners who will keep jumping, but pop is down this week since its such a laugher.
Um, did I miss something or is Mag scheduled to face FA and CD while Kaineng faces DB and YB at reset?
It will be another week before Mag and Kaineng possibly meet, however Kaineng will be in the same position as Mag is now in T4, vs YB and a depleted IoJ, so should be able to tell a lot about how they fare comparatively to this week.
Has IoJ ever had compelling matches? I’m curious because the first time we played them on the way up, they did not compete in prime time, but killed us off peak. This looks to have carried them far up the ranks, but where it seems they ultimately hit a huge wall where they lost many weeks in a row, precipitating this huge exodus.
Servers with opposing prime periods just don’t produce good matches. And even if you get 1 team out of 3 that is built in such a way, it often imbalances the match for the remaining two (think we are getting a bit of that here). As the intended 3way function doesn’t work then and one side can much more easily exploit small advantages into big ones, and slowly take over a whole map, which leads to the losing side losing population, and the quality of a match quickly deteriorating as the week goes on.
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Joining a squad needs to not make other commanders icons disappear. I realize they did this to probably help newbies stay only with their commander, but it really lessens your ability to understand what is going on, and where, on the rest of the battlefield.
Necro is in a tough place build wise, because by default so much of our base damage is condition (even with no gear on, just our core abilities).
That means if you spec purely for power, you won’t match power or burst of other classes that get closer to 100% of their core damage from direct damage, and you’ll have gimpy conditions.
If you spec condition, you are building more in synergy with the core necro design and can indeed maximize damage a lot in this way. Trouble is that gets negated by bleed caps, and in PVP players with high condition removal.
If you spec condition and power, DPS hybrid, then you actually become squishy.
Death Shroud is meant to perhaps be the bridge to solve this quandary, but doesn’t mesh well with condition builds, and lacks much mobility for getting you out of sticky situations. It’s just a big sponge.
I think the way you balance the Necro and up his attrition value is really through making life steal a lot better, and also not forcing you to totally give up good damage if you want to build a life steal spec.
Right now I’d still take condition over power, there are some matchups that are hell, but those that aren’t prepared, are going to get melted.
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Fixing all the bugs would fix up probably 75% of our problems.
All our skills firing off correctly and pets actually having competent AI would be two things off the bat that would make a lot less wrong with the profession.
I think you are confusing this guild (who I assumed you were talking about, since you replied to Pinko) with our roamers. There are very few roamers that 100% don’t care about objectives on Maguuma.
Maybe I did, often though you have players speaking as if for their whole server, or at least their player type and they painted this impression of people not caring about any points on the map, just roaming around wanting to fight for no other sake than kill/death ratio or something. There is certainly room, and value in, small group and even roaming/scouting players within the confines of WvW as it is intended.
Our guild is composed of people who have done WvW on Maguuma since day 1, and we are very, very far from caring from what the rest of our team is doing.
That is not what others of this ilk from Mag, basically your forum talking heads, have said in that past, that they flat out don’t care about ‘that PvDoor’ stuff. But in a good match killing a door is going to require killing a lot of players first. Best of both worlds. PVP with a purpose.
I actually agree with a lot of what you say about tPVP Pinko. I tried it for a while and the meta is stale at the top, and zergy for casual, conquest being the only mode really hurts it.
But in WvW the best way to win is not by killing. Killing players is actually worth 0 points. You of course need to do it to take objectives, but its just a means to an end.
Why can’t you practice to be good and still want to help your team and take objectives and such, its not like good fights can’t or don’t develop simply playing WvW straight.
This current match is of course borked so it really doesn’t matter, but I can’t say as I would want you guys on my server, good or not, if you don’t care about helping what the rest of your team is out there to do.
Most often in WvW you never run into 1v1s, even in soloing camps, such as my example, its a rarity. Practicing group combat, which is the vast majority of WvW entails is what would improve you more in this game mode.
Isn’t Kaineng’s main strength off peak? I think both servers look huge, but this could turn out to be the difference.
AoN hasn’t been on Mag in weeks, and, as someone who was actually in AoN, you are overestimating the degree which they care about objectives.
They were in the middle of the biggest contested spot on the map, within two big zergs, so maybe they just like fighting huge battles, but it at least had the effect of being very strategically beneficial for their server at the time to prevent that spot being capped.
Since there’s not much WvW going on more yaks/ioj should come do some 1v1’s at Mag borderland south camp windmill area. There’s always Mag waiting around and we’re friendly.
Boring. I’ll go back to FPS games if I want tests of individual skill, on an actual balanced playing field.
WvW is in a bad place right now, hopefully it will all sort out when these paid transfers get settled.
The other day I was out to ninja a camp and ran into this IoJ Ranger, we had a good fight, but he took me out (crazy healing build with tons of condi removal and that is pretty much a hard counter for me). But most bizarre, he did not even capture the camp but offered to duel me. I obliged just to be nice, but I found it utterly pointless. I am not in WvW to duel, I have a team WvW build extremely useful for sieging and large fights and would not even pick my class (necro) in this game if I was interested in dueling.
And the majority of players in WvW are out with the same mindset, team combat and siege warfare, many running under geared toons to boot. I just don’t understand why your types are out in WvW, and not sPVP. I don’t see the challenge, if I made a 1v1 spec/prof, killing the majority of lost loners would be exceedingly easy. I guess they want to turn it into DAoC or something, which had a failed WvW mechanic. But GW2 has an actual working one – when matchups are balanced right.
Is the guild AoN still on Mag? These guys actually impressed me last week with their ability to stay cohesive within a zerg environment with a small group and actually fighting at objectives and staying in there too, not just hit and running with the intent to gank stragglers, which is trivial in the grand scheme, but what a lot of these rambo types usually do.
There is a lot of fun to be had being organized and skilled and not just for yourself, or sort of theorycrafting builds and such, but in the spirit of WvW as intended. That doesn’t mean you have to win that week to make it feel worthwhile either. It’s unfortunate that people can’t appreciate this, and want to subvert it.
Only a WvW player will wonder why their mode feels like the red headed step child of the game, when it is the best thing it has going.
If you are really good players, you could make a difference, even 5 or 10.
Kaineng is a freight train coming up the ranks faster than you guys and their main force is all business about WvW, read their matchup thread when called out about individual play, I doubt you will find many participants for your fights there, or in general the higher you go.
We don’t care about the same things Pendragon
Most of your server does though that is why there are so many people there now. In tier 4 there is plenty of room for diversionary games, but up higher, every man is going to be needed. Transferring back down might be the honorable thing to do.
Derelicts standing out in fields fighting each other are going to be bad for winning in the higher ranks, when the battle is non-stop and their are few coverage gaps.
Maguuma has been used to this since day one. We are all broke, but despite getting our teeth kicked in, we love to play. Did Yaks/IoJ never face match ups like this?
YB is probably burnt out from matches like this honestly. Has happened multiple times now that we end up vs a bandwagon server, who proceeds to tell us to hang in there and give tactical lessons. Said bandwagon servers then go up a tier or two and run into the same type of wall that we are in down here. Funny they seem to forget all their brillaint advice at that point, once matched up with even numbers, but maybe you’ll fare better.
Very instructive video, as always. I was wondering about crit chance in this build. Since it is used to proc (such as Barbed Precision), it seemed to me that going higher than 50% would just improve that proc rate linearly and so also improve DPS linearly. Does this make sense?
For Barbed Precision it should, but not for the Bleed Sigil, which is actually the much better proc, but which you are going to start getting diminishing returns from the 2 second cooldown if you are critting constantly.
You are stating things we all already know. The major guild transfers we got were not because of the scoreboard. Look at our match history.
Your server mate just the exact opposite above.
The difference between Mag’s zerg and Yak’s zerg is that Maguuma built a community based on discipline, coordination and skill PRIOR to having superior numbers. Yaks has actively recruited anyone that will transfer since transfers existed.
Maguuma is the one and only server to not actively recruit and have instead built a community that revolves around talent and have pulled in transfers because people want a high quality WVW experience. Every other server in every other tier has no quality control and just wants numbers.
That’s what separates Maguuma from literally every other server in the game. Yeah we have superior numbers now but we got them from in game skill, not forum hording players.
People joined your server because it was winning its tier by and large, no different than other bandwagon servers. You fell down into easier tiers, outclassed them, and drew the losing sides unhappy players. People that join YB typically do so because of the community not the scoreboard.
What you have to ask is if you really want people that came on, 1) because they were losing elsewhere, and 2) who left their previous server once they were losing. What will happen if they lose on your server where they have even less attachment. I guess you’ll find out these answers upon moving up.
Not to say Mag doesn’t have a core of actually skilled players, and maybe those came to YB on reset, but to say your whole server is full of disciplined skilled players, seems rather far-fetched when you dragged in others that were previous losers.
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It’s kind of funny, Yaks strive to have “godly amounts of players” – but Maguuma doesn’t want zergy transfers at all, yet Maguuma is the one that ends up with truly ridiculous numbers.
Wouldn’t want ‘godly amounts of people’ at all. Servers lose all identity and just become mercenary camps. Same thing that happened to SoR and Blackgate after we played them seems to have now happened to Mag. Of course those two servers are way above us in tiers, so if that’s where you want to go, I guess that is what has to happen, but I wouldn’t want to be them. Bunch of bandwagoners filling them up.
I expect this change to create something of a major and minor league split somewhere in the middle tiers. Where everything above a certain point will be bandwagon servers with long queues and very competitive bases, and the lower servers, very spotty coverage casual servers. The problem for the latter will be their coverage gaps will create extremely decisive score periods where if even one server has a moderate population advantage it will likely decide the whole match.
Once people start paying for transfers don’t see many choosing to pay for anywhere but where they expect to almost be assured of winning and little frustration.
Problem for the higher tiers, people having paid money to move only to not be able to play because of long wait times.
This may be a prelude to the first forced server merges down at the bottom.
Looks like the paid transfers announcement is going to screw up the rankings for several weeks again, just like some of the more free willing exodus periods in the past have done.
I just hope after the deadline kicks in, there won’t be a tier that remains almost permanently imbalanced. But looking at which servers are shooting up, and which are already strong in the tiers above this one, it looks very possible that T4 could end up a lopsided one.
Some professions build for AoE because it is all they are good at. It is the only thing that gives them viability, not just in AoE situations, but any situations. Speaking as a Necromancer WvW player, you absolutely need your AoE if you want to have a chance in any single target fight. For example vs a thief, my 1v1 weapon is pretty much my scepter/dagger, though even there, 3 of 5 skills are AoE. You simply have no choice but to use it, short of auto-attacking over and over, which is a recipe for a comedic defeat.
I would never stand a chance against a competent thief only using this one weapon set. He is simply invisible too often during the fight, and the only recourse during this half of the fight is to try and hit him with Staff AoE, to discern his location and continue to weaken him so he cannot fully cleanse conditions and heal up in stealth. If AoE were nerfed to where it is useless to use in these kind of 1v1 engagements, and then also much less valuable in team and zerg battles by extension, you might as well throw this profession to the dogs, because its player base is going to dry up, more than it already is.
Anet talks about building up more viable specs for all professions, but lets put our money where the mouth is, and then actually get this done before or in tandem with any AoE adjustments. Not just kick the can down the road endlessly with more talk of balancing while the few viable existing specs for several professions are just nerfed into even more weak choices. It has already been far too long since the last balancing patch, when it is clear several professions are out of whack and very over represented in both sPVP and WvW.
What should not be discounted is that while AoE may be easy to splash around in large fights, in smaller fights, and down to 1v1, it can actually miss, unlike single target skills. Especially with stealth professions, clones, high mobility builds, culling problems, lag, etc, its entirely possible to mistarget a certain percentage of AoE abilities which then do zero damage, severely reducing expected DPS, which is something single target never suffers from, outside of natural counters like blind, weakness, etc.
This is less a problem in sPVP where AoE is less likely to miss as the battlefield is a small contested ring, and if your AoE forces them out of it, you are winning the contest. In WvW players are free to dodge around and avoid AoE with no penalty to losing the fight, unless sitting in a Lord NPC Ring.
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Nerfing aoe damage whilst leaving thiefs able to burst down players in under a second…
Relatedly, they mentioned too much AOE on players trying to rez, um, yeah, how else are we supposed to stop a thief stealth rezzing or stomping your ally… by trying to tap on his head with a single target skill while he is invisible?
You have to put out enough AOE damage to drive them out of spot, or kill them, or this ability to stealth rez and stomp becomes far too great, they already have a huge advantage at this.
I think nerfing aoe would make WvW stale. All of it would make WvW stale. I predict it would turn WvW into an arrow cart/trebuchet match.
It’s close to that already too. People may wax on about the great open field fights they have, but for the purpose of WvW, trebs and carts already reign supreme. Too many battles are decided simply by which side has the richer players carrying or willing to plop down siege.
Trying to defend on a wall with your actual character is already a joke as you can’t target for crap, and if you jump up on a ledge, you get pulled down into a zerg in seconds. Sure lets make AOE even weaker so we can have 20 ppl manning siege outside vs 20 manning siege inside… Everyone just standing stuck to a prop while they push the same 2 buttons over and over.
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This was an issue brought up by spvp players and a very valid one at that. Currently it is impossible to ress an ally with the amount of dmg wells, cluster bomb, etc. do and thus aoe dmg should be lowered a bit.
Tell me this isn’t balancing all for sPVP again, which continues to imbalance and ruin other game modes.
Of course AOE might be too strong in a mode where everyone is fighting in a tiny circle that is barely larger than most aoe in the game. But in WvW with big sprawling battles, even the biggest AOE is not going to hit even 25% of a zerg, not just because of the 5 man limit, but because of how spread out everyone gets in these giant melees.
Their different game modes are simply not compatible to be balanced with the same rules, and continuing their fantasy crusade to be an E-sport, which already looks long lost, is only going to serve to continue to diminish WvW, which has actually been a pleasant success.