Guild Wars 2

Whoa, what a killjoy. You’re telling other people that instead of having fun, they must come and follow you around zerging camps or whatever? You must be a delight in real life.

Fun is permitted within designated Fun mechanic parameters. Praise be to Lopez

When we’re dueling, if some moron comes along and tries to attack the other team, we simply stand by and let our opponents wipe them. If you can’t appreciate the challenging and gentleman-like nature of a duel, whether it be 1v1 or 20v20, kindly leave those who do alone.

That said, there’s no reason duelers can’t take it to a BL with no queue, rather than taking up spots in EB.

Surely that defeats the point of assigning players to a colour based on population, in order to keep populations roughly even?
If everyone can say “I want to join Green, and if I can’t I’ll just queue for it”, how is that an improvement?

I like the motivation behind the suggestion, I just see too many holes.

This would amount to a giant middle finger to all the server WvW communities that have grown over the past few months.
You’ve grown to like seeing certain faces and trust certain commanders? guild alliances/rivalries, server forums and teampseak? Yeah, might as well throw all that out the window.

The mistake people make is to think of WvW maps in the same was as PvE maps. You can scoot around a PvE map grabbing points and finish it in under an hour. People think “I will do all of this map, then I will do all of that map”.

If you peep in to WvW for 5 minutes 2 or 3 times a day, you’re guarunteed to get your map completion after a couple of weeks. You just can’t do it all at once. And tbh why should one of the end-game goals be one you can achieve in a few hours anyway?

That’s 2 hours before when Daendur said. Or 4 hours if you’re in germany?

Point is, we lost more during the night than we took.

Unfortunately RS don’t have the same sense of knockabout fun and crashed the party by glitching into Longview….

No mesmer, no stealth, I saw him come straight through a reinforced gate. And no jumping sportsman-like back out either, so quite possibly intentional.

I’m aware this isn’t the right place for reports (I’ll be sending it to the right place), and that 1 glitcher does not represent an entire server. I just post this in the hope that his own server will deal with him.

Had a pretty good laugh at AM trying to portal into Hills this morning….

Well you’ve pretty much killed it, so thanks.

Sunspots.9861:

Historically there also weren’t magical spells either. You know this is fantasy right? By all means don’t learn to be better, continue dying on walls and asking anet for help.

Are you trolling me, or are you still not reading?

I’m not dying on walls, and I’m not asking for help. Once again, instead of engaging in discussion just go straight to “L2P”.

Honestly, I was just trying to engage in some friendly discussion about the meta-game, but this forum is so vicious and full of whiners that you immediately assume that I’m crying because I keep dying. I know perfectly well how to conduct a siege in game and how to do it without dying. I’m not asking for tips, I’m not saying either attack or defence is over or under powered. Just discussion. Think you can do that?

I was just trying to get a discussion going on how, historically, in a castle seige, the defenders could rain down death from the walls on any attacking footmen with relative impunity, while attackers would set up catapults etc. safely out of range of the castle and would entrench themselves around that until they had made a breach and were ready to storm it.
However in WvW this would appear to be the other way round. I’m not arguing that anything is overpowered or broken or needs fixing.

If you just want to stroke your ego and tell me to L2P, then please go away.

Sunspots.9861:

There are tons of safe spots for siege and if you are standing on the walls during a siege you are doing it wrong. Siege warfare always favors the defense assuming the place siege intelligently and use it, including counter siege. I’d recommend checking Youtube, there are a lot of great videos on siege placement.

I wasn’t asking where safe spots for seige are. Please re-read.

Enenion.8127:

I’d rather see an overhaul of the upgrade system. WvW is a team game right? So why is upgrading structures all done by one person? Upgrading structures should be a team effort. I think that all players should be able to donate money (with a minimum depending on what you’re upgrading) to the upgrade npc and then be placed on a pool of people who get to vote on an upgrade. Then, when someone talks to the npc and starts a construction all people who put in money get to vote on the upgrades that are available at the time (depending on the objective’s supply and the gold in the pool). This would be similar to the voting system for choosing explorable paths in dungeons. The votes of members of the guild that own the tower, camp or keep would count twice.

Here’s a practical example. Say 4 players want to upgrade a tower they just captured. Players 1 and 2 donate 2 silver, Player 3 donates 5 and Player 4 donates 1 silver. Player 4 is a spy so he wants to use the money on buying merchants, so he initiates the vote for what to build. Player 3 is a member of the guild that now owns the tower and he wants to reinforce walls so he votes for that. Player 1 doesn’t vote and Player 2 votes to reinforce the walls. The walls are then upgraded thanks to the collective work from all people involved (even the spy, who helped pay for the upgrade). Had there been a tie between two upgrades there would be a runoff vote eliminating the lesser voted options (except for the option to not build anything yet, which would always be there).

What if the spy is the first person to donate, and immediately initiates the vote?

EDIT: Apparently I have to spell this out for people. I’m not asking for tips on how to play, I’m a perfecly good player. I’m asking if the way the game makes us play makes sense, when you consider that our sieges and siege weapons are roughly based on medieval warfare.

As the game is currently set up, I feel that battles and seiges at towers and keeps are upside down.

Currently, walls favour attacking players. If you’re attacking, it’s incredibly easy to stand at the bottom of a wall, AoE the top and pull off players who peep over the edge. And conversely, if you’re defending, it’s very difficult to get off any attacks without being targetted by half a dozen enemies and pulled over. Simply to get an attack off as a defending player you have to stand right on the edge of the wall. And cannons are only useable if you have a death-wish.

Seige weapons, on the other hand, favour the defender. By far the easiest way to deal with enemy catapults or trebs is to build a counter cata or treb. The easiest way to deal with rams or golems is to put up ACs or catas behind the gate. Meanwhile, for the attackers, seige out in the open is incredibly vulnerable. Vulnerable to the point that the preferred tactic is simply to build another cata or w/e if the enemy rushes it, rather than trying to defend it.

Maybe it’s just me, but this just seems the wrong way around. Walls should make it incredibly easy for defending players to keep attacking players away, while seige weapons, particularly catas and trebs, should be the go-to, first-choice for attackers (the guys conducting the seige), rather than the defenders. The defenders should have to form up and sally out to deal with seige, not just throw a treb on top of the supply depot.

It just seems to make more sense that way around. It’s always bugged me that archers and casters can’t defend at least on even terms from a massive wall. But then I do think there is a fairly nice balance between attack and defence at the moment, so would trying to resolve this screw up this balance? Opinions!

You could make upgrades require the input of, say, 3 people. So if an upgrade costs 1 gold, then 3 people must each donate 33 silver. Only once the third person has paid the 3rd installment does the upgrade start.

This would both help spread the cost of upgrades, and prevent a single person screwing an entire server.

As to voting on commanders, I can see this working on top tier servers with massive guilds, and I can see it working on prime time. But on my server, in tier 4, there are only a few commanders who have that level of respect, and they’re mostly on in primetime. During off-peak hours we rely on not-so-well known commanders to provide a rallying point for the 15-20 or so players that make up the late-night shift. I get the feeling that in that situation voting would simply leave us with no commander at all. Even a bad commander is better than no commander at all, simply as they provide an easy point for people to congregate at.

I see that voting would be a better system when you have experienced and well known commanders online for people to vote in. But those players are not always online, and I worry that voting would leave the lower servers with worse, not better, organisation during off-peak hours.

I would also point to Arnold Schwarzenegger as governor of California and Boris Johnson as mayor of London. Voting favours those who are vocal and well known, not neccesarily those who are best. That said, I absolutely agree that the system needs to be changed, or in 6 months we’ll have as many commanders as players.

Continuing….

An example for you; imagine you’re commanding on EB, you’re green server and you hold SM. Blue have Durios, Umber, Bravost, QL and Langor. You want to secure Durios so they can’t upgrade it and start trebbing SM. You’re standing in SM with a reasonable size force gathering around you, but you lack supply. A good plan would seem to be to dive at Umberglade or Danelon to get supply up, put up orange
swords on Langor or Bravost, but not try to take them because they’re fully upgraded and covered by mortars/cannons from the keep, to distract the enemy, and then quickly get back to Durios and ram it down before they know what’s happening. This is the sort of thing you expect to see from your commanders I assume.

So you explain your plan to your group, and it seems to meet with approval. I can guaruntee that on your way to Umberglade or Danelon, about a third of your force will break off and start auto-attacking the gates of Durios or QL. Then you start your distraction at Langor/Bravost.

Someone who didn’t read the plan will drop some rams/catas, wasting your gathered supply, and when you fall back to go to Durios, again a good third of your force will either not notice you moving away or will ignore it and keep auto-attacking the gate or skirmishing with the enemy. You arrive at Durios with maybe a half of your original force and not even enough supply to get a second ram up. This is the point where people start to blame the commander.

This is why commanders leading randomers often don’t try anything more advanced than head on attacks/defences. What I described above is hardly the battle of austerlitz, it’s just 3 simple steps; grab supply, put up orange swords somewhere else, dash back to real objective. But it will result in a divided and confused force.

Now with a WvW guild of 20, all on teamspeak, the result would be a little different. But rather than crediting the WvW guild with a successful manoeuvre, they credit it to the commander leading that guild and say that that is a “good” commander, while the commander who tried it half an hour ago and failed because his force of randomers didn’t follow the plan is a “bad” commander.

I realise at this point that I may sound like I’m whining to try and make up for my failings, and you may be assuming that I’m the type of commander who spends all their time kittening in team chat. I’m not, I’m just trying to give people some perspective of how it is no simple task to get a force of randomers to do anything other than stand in front of a tower and auto-attack until either they or the
gate is dead. It is simply unfair to compare your commander to Sun Tzu, given the tools they have to work with.

EDIT: whoa, I didn’t notice that Ahmrill necro’d this thread from 4 months ago and that I’m arguing with nobody

This is my experience as a commander leading groups of randomers in tiers 4-6. I tend to put my badge up during off-peak times (3am – 11am), because often there aren’t any other commanders about on my server at that time. I leave it off during the peak times to let the more experienced commanders backed by guilds do their job effectively.

People who have never tried it can’t understand how difficult it is to successfully command. I have yet to meet a commander who was not shocked when they started at how difficult it is to get people to tightly, quickly and efficiently follow them, no matter how good they are. Making comparisons with Sun Tzu or Alexander the Great, or any general you care to mention is pointless. Generals can usually rely on their subordinates to carry out, or at least attempt to carry out, their orders. Not so with random gamers. The only way to get a force of randomers to jump out of a keep and push the enemy away from the wall is to do it yourself. As a commander you can ask nicely a 100 times, scream yourself hoarse for half an hour and still only a few will pay attention, and those few will trickle over the wall and get themselves killed, but the second people see your blue icon moving forward they’ll pile in right behind you. This is precisely why my commander character is a tanky warrior with a shield, so I am always able to be waving the blue-dorrito flag out in front and not downed every 3 seconds.

It’s a little different for commanders with strong guilds behind them who are all on teamspeak. They really can rely on their followers to follow orders quickly and tightly, but it just does not work that way when you’re leading randomers.

If you insist on making comparisons to real life military, then the commander functions more on the lieutenant/captain level rather than the level of a general. A commander who just sits in a keep throwing out orders is very quickly going to be ignored by everyone.

Similarly, people complain that commanders don’t try or are unsuccessful at “tactics” like sneak or flank attacks, coordinating two forces to pincer the enemy, etc etc. They assume their commanders are stupid people who are only capable of marching from one objective to the next on the map.
Let me tell you that, in most cases, this is not true. Infact, most commanders have tried to do these things, and quickly realised that they are simply impossible for a force of randomers who aren’t communicating by teamspeak, or even in the same language. There are always people in your group who insist on auto-attacking every gate or animal in their path, so sneak attacks without orange swords are usually out of the question if your squad is randomers.
Randomers find it very hard, for some reason, to stay tight on the commander, so if you try an do a flank attack in the style of a dedicated guild (balling up, maneuvering to the rear and smashing through), instead what you end up with is roughly a third staying tight on you, a third spreading out from you so as to be not very useful but still vaguely following your path, and a third completely ignoring your path and just running directly at the enemy, getting themselves very quickly wiped, weakening our force, and blowing the element of surprise.

Continued….

Anzu.5702:

ElDudemeister.5108:

First we should answer why so many threads are focused on making WvW less like WvW and more like PvP.

I think you misunderstand my point. I am all for large scale combat. But the scaling is completely out of whack. More than 5:1 ratio and you have no chance as the number advantage is the only thing that matters.

Also its about the decency of not 20v1 a single player. how is that wvw skill? And it ges pretty demoralizing which is why people usually drop out by the end of the week

Why ever do you think you should be winning 5v1s? That group with 5 times your numbers are real people, not NPCs. This isn’t a movie, and you’re not the hero dispatching opponents by the dozen. If you were in a group of 10 would you really see it as fair play if 2 guys could wipe you all? No, you’d be complaining that whatever build they had is OP. If you don’t believe me, just put “thief” in search and pick any one of the hundreds of threads about exactly that.

Thats in reference to battles in open fields. When defending , 2 guys should be able to keep 10 guys out of an upgraded keep, or at least delay them severely. But that is already the case in the game.

If I’m leading a group and I see a couple of enemies nearby, I’m absolutely going to make paste out of them if I can without wasting too much time. Because they’re likely either scouting and relaying our position to their server, or they’re going to flip that camp the moment we leave.
Is that fair? Absolutely. WvW isn’t about standing each server in a line facing each other, and then everyone duels 1v1 and whoever has most standing at the end wins. The whole purpose is to organise yourselves and deceive your enemy so that they’re on a wild goose chase far away and you can bring your force to bear where they aren’t prepared.

That said, I do try to avoid steamrolling a lone enemy who is clearly just trying to get vistas for his map completion.

I don’t know why people are surprised or confused about this. ANet is a business, they’re there to make money, not to make the perfect game or to give out as much joy as they can. I’m sure some of the developers really do want to make a perfect game full of happy gamers, but the guys at the top, the ones calling the shots? Not so much.

ANet already have our money, and post-christmas the majority of people who will buy the game already have. They are now in the business of doing the bare minimum to keep players just, but only just, interested enough and staying around long enough to buy expansions and future games. And if they lose a few players? Not really a problem to them, they already have your money, and you’re not paying a subscription. Releasing patches with slight tweaks, failing to address lag and queues, and promising massive goodies just around the corner is exactly that; dangling a carrot on a stick that looks just juicy enough to stop the slow trickle of players leaving turning into a mass raging exodus.

And guess what? A reduction in WvW map population resulting in massive queues on the larger servers, exactly coinciding with the end of free server transfers; that’s a business decision too.

Like I said, I’m sure some of the developers don’t think like this, but business is business. We can wish it were not so, but we shouldn’t be surprised by it.

Hepan.2709:

Ragnar.4257:

snip

Ill pretty much call BS on the entire post.

1. Never losing to a thief: kitten please. You lose to all classes. More to some but to all at some point.
2. DS is a win vs. bad ranged classes 1v1 or in a zerg cause they keep spamming their ranged attacks while you just swirl there and laugh.
3. Revealed is good. Culling is the problem. Its not as bad 1v1 but there is still some latency in rendering.
4. Stealth 800-1000: lol that is fail thief. Most are traited for mug and stealthing before stealing you get debuffed, CnD fails, backstab fails=gz you just failed your entire opener combo, and if you play like this i thank you for the badges.
5. CC: yes its a good counter, but I run shadowstep that is 1200 range instantly and most players blow all their CC in a row so i make em blow their CDs and step, heal come back. Yes sometimes its on CD, so i die, sometimes its on CD and still get away from CC.

I run a fairly glassy build with some valk in the mix, and its enough to get away when i need to. To anyone saying this build is bad, that gear is bad for WvWvW: No, your playstyle doesnt fit your gear. If you have crap reflexes and run beserk gear you will die. A lot. The best counter to any player is to learn your playstyle, polish it, get appropriate gear for it. I see ppl going full beserk and then never learn to dodge and position themselves, and then complain about dying. That is a fail on your part.

Dont pay attenition to what other players say. Every build, and every gear is viable for every part of the game provided you know how to play it.

1. I said in 1v1. My warrior is the toon I have my commander badge on, so granted I don’t 1v1 that often on it. Absolutely thieves have killed me plenty of times, but always in group situations. So if you’re gonna call me a liar, at least read what I said first.

2. So you agree with me that daggerstorm is only useful in certain situations, and is only ever really effective against bad players who don’t know how to deal with it? Thanks for your agreement!

3. Again, that’s exactly what I said. You say what I said was BS, and then proceed to post exactly what I said. I don’t understand you at all.

4. Again, what I said. Alot of thieves are easy to beat if you make their opening combo fail, because many don’t know how to , or don’t want to, do anything else.

5. If someone blows all their CC at once and lets you break away to heal up, then that is a bad player. Doesn’t mean there aren’t counters to thieves for good players to use.

And your last paragraph again agrees with me ^^ If you’re going to say I’m full of crap, don’t then go and post the exact same stuff.

I’ll raise a hand to add Gandara to the list. 2 days ago we had no more than about 30 of us actively playing in our borderlands. Even once you allow for people idling around spawn or gathering / doing vistas etc. and even allowing for the fact that everyone tends to see fewer allies and more enemies than there actually are, there can’t have been more than 60 or so on our borders. And yet there was a half hour queue.

I play warrior, thief and elementalist in WvW, warrior most of the time now. I can’t think that I’ve ever lost a 1v1 with a thief while on my warrior. Sometimes they escape, and sometimes I have to back off, but never lost. And the reason is simply that I used to play thief alot and I know its strengths and weaknesses, unlike alot of the posters spreading mis-information in this thread. I’m not trying to brag, I’m really not particularly good at PvP, I’ve just taken the time to learn how other classes work. There are so many people on this forum claiming that you can’t be damaged in stealth, or that you can perma-stealth, or that daggerstorm is an absurdly powerful elite. Using daggerstom in a 1v1 or any melee situation is the surest and fastest way to get yourself killed as a thief. When I see a thief start daggerstorm while I’m on my warrior, I smile inside, ‘cos I’ve as good as won at that point. Most don’t even seem to be aware that the Revealed debuff exists.

Thief’s stealth is supposed to be limited by the Revealed debuff, and the only problem with the class is that rendering issues are making a joke of Revealed. The only “nerf” needed is either to fix the rendering issue, or increase the uptime of Revealed slightly (maybe from 3 seconds to 5 or 6) so that it can do its job properly.

They’re definitely not a weak class, and if played well can be amazing, but equally they have plenty of counters if people would only learn them. If you’re roaming and you encounter a thief, they’ll most likely stealth at about 800-1000 range. Wait 2 seconds, throw up a block/invul, let them waste their steal/CnD, use any single immobilize/knockdown, and congrats, you’ve just beaten about 90% of the thieves in WvW by using a grand total of 2 moves. And if they’re in the 10% of good players who really know how to play, why shouldn’t they be able to beat you just because they’re thief?

Very sporting AR. Having someone start upgrades on our keeps just minutes before you attack, killing any chance of setting up defence. It seems outnumbering us 3 to 1 isn’t enough.
Once would be a coincidence, twice would be unfortunate, but this is happening repeatedly. And the timing simply can’t be excused by nubs ordering them without knowing better.
Also seen an increase in the number of pointless rams being built inside keeps lately.

I don’t understand the argument that AoE shouldn’t do more damage than a single-target attack. Single target attacks home in, they automatically hit. This isn’t Call of Duty: Guild Ops, you don’t have to aim your single target attacks. Whereas AoE attacks have to be aimed, placed, and often channelled. And all the target has to do to avoid it is step to the side. You can’t step to the side of a single target attack.

If either an enemy is stupid enough, or you play well enough to force him, to stand in an AoE attack for its full duration and take every hit of it, then kitten right he deserves to take at least as much damage as a single target attack.

Meteor shower is perhaps a little overpowered when targeting the top of a hostile wall. But it is next to useless in 1 on 1 situations. If I manage to maneuver an enemy into a position where I can fully cast meteor shower and it hits several times, I don’t just deserve to do significant damage; I deserve a kittening medal.