Dire/trailblazer really only becomes an issue on classes/builds that already have a freakish amount of dmg mitigation through stealth, block, teleport and invuln. Anything else, including reapers, can be managed and burst down.
It’s the classes that can now face tank some dmg while avoiding whatever they want + resetting or withdrawing at will while condis continue to tick.
Biggest offenders are mesmers, thieves to a smaller extent, perplex runes.
It gets much worse when they run in packs.
Lol, RoF is currently having a slight issue with double teaming. If anyone wants proof, ask comms about footage and stuff.
Yeah been there. When one group is map blobbing the keep for 2 hours the other is capping every tower and camp for free. You’d think they would hit the other server while they’re busy blobbing but maybe they don’t want the attention.
The old mag/sbi/sos matchup was pretty screwed up too but sometimes every server would have a blob at the same time and we’d have some epic zvzvz slideshow fights over sm.
Good luck getting those fights now.
Yeah they need to fix something fast. Unless their intention is to kill off all small servers and let players pay to redistribute themselves on the main servers.
I hear you. We have same problem.
lol – with those #s how did ANY “reds” in that group get downed?
It’s interesting you notice that. The “reds” you see dead or downed are SF. CD’s zerg is steamrolling over SF’s zerg on their way to my little group of 4 or 5.
LOL
But, we don’t care. We always manage to kill one or two before we succumb to the wizardry of Anet’s WvW mechanics.
I’d also like to point out, CD never engages us unless and until they are in their zerg. When my partner and I encounter 1-3 of them out there, we pursue, but they always run. What’s up with that? I mean, come on.
Not all players on CD fight only in blobs. I quite frequently will take a camp with another CD player while 1 or 2 players are trying to defend it. We don’t always run. Only time I run is when I really just don’t feel like fighting anyone.
Props for that. I love to roam around and do see the occasional roaming CD. Even got a nice 1v1v2 the other day. Most of the time pushing cd a bit brings the blob though and they will chase 1 or 2 across the map. I can hardly blame them as I do my best to irritate the hell out of them. They will literally bring 50 to 70 though if you kick the anthill a couple times.
It’s all fine and good if you don’t mind running a guard, necro or ele. Maybe the odd rev or mes. From my perspective, the meta is too narrow though. Needs to be a way to include the other classes. I’m tired of running a melee build and getting stuck with 8 thieves in a pick squad while a herd of guards get boon stacked and 5,000 stacks of stab just running through stuff.
Came to the conclusion that’s it’s just not worth it. If im in a group big enough to organize the squad then ill relog guard/ele/necro or find something else to do.
Are they like bowing in the hope that if they lose, the winner will let them res?
And then if they win, they can just stomp and run off laughing?
Pretty much this
Ultimate troll crew is a few of these with a few condi mesmers. I walked towards pang today and got hit in the face by a 4 or 5 member troll crew condi bomb. I barely managed to get it all cleansed and run into tower. And that’s stealthing up and spamming every cleanse, heal, block and regen I had.
They can still get wrecked in an even fight (and did about 2 mins later) but the sustain + ability to disengage and pick their targets is what makes it work.
Good fun eh. Then they pout in pm when you just walk away. I do have a mes though and maybe I’ll run condi just to dish it back a bit. The condi thief build is boring beyond words.
Often felt if our server pairing would just embrace cheese build day it could be fun.
To be honest, tier 2 is pretty boring. I’m happy with my choice to transfer back to FA, but JQ and YB are two of the 3 worst servers I’ve ever had the displeasure of fighting against. The other is DB. They’re all 3 boring to fight, they run and hide behind walls and use siege every chance they get unless their group is 2x your size or more. Then they may still build open field siege lol….
With FA beefing up our coverage, I suspect we’re going to be stuck with JQ and YB for awhile unless they implode. I do miss the fights in T3… :\
Lets be more honest here, this happens on every server, even your own. The more organized the group that’s on the less you may see of it, but pugs always look for the advantage, whether that’s open field siege or running to a tower to wait for more numbers.
My two least favorites is YB and Mag, YB cause of siege up the yinyang, their keeps are usually loaded with ac, trebs, omegas to defend with. Mag cause every corner there’s a thief, every other step there’s a dh, or a tempest, or a scrapper looking to drop you with a friend, and condi everywhere, I think warriors are an extinct species on that server.
In tier 4, when we actually get a fight, I’ve just gotten used to being knocked down every few seconds by siege and cleansing 10 to 30 stacks of mortar burn. It’s annoying but you take what you can get. Perma treb poison helps keep the mind clear at least.
Mag was always annoying when they blobbed everything but lots of roamers and great fights around camps and such. Lots of condi thieves and mesmers but I’m seeing more of that in tier 4 lately too. Guessing cd and co has some guilds bandwagoning in. Feels like they’ve added a bit more skill or better builds recently.
They make me pay more for yoloing into outnumbered fights now. The other day though a 50+ let me drop them with a cannon against our keep gate and about 10 pushing them. Wish I’d gotten that on video.
So maybe tier 1 then. I really don’t care so much about stale or score. I just want fights…preferably not yoloing into a 1v30+ because that’s all I can get. Currently in T4 hell where the new blob server virtuoso has already won long ago but would rather ktrain doors and run down roamers with a blob then do anything fun.
It really is ok to take the map. I get it. There’s nothing else to do. Back capping everything every 5 minutes or running a 60+ blob to a camp off ri. Catch is people on the other server will just log eventually and you’re left beating down doors. And I’m left yoloing into blobs with stragglers because everyone else was smart enough to find something better to do. Wow mini rant
Guess I’ll check out tier 1 and 2 and see what’s up.
Are there any current matchups with relatively even coverage and population? Looking for a game saving level of fun.
How is the roaming in T4?
Not bad really depending on what you like. Very easy to get outnumbered fights and action.
Catch is the roamer quality seems really low compared to the sos/sbi/mag match up. The blobs are just bad too. Like facepalm cant believe this have to laugh bad. Almost eotm level.
Had a guild move in that does this. Maybe 15+ group slicing up an omni blob. I’ve seen them do it against decent servers too (mag and fa). The blobs we’re facing now are nothing to write home about (T4).
They need to fix glicko. Went on vacation for a week looking forward to not having that 4 server monstrosity in the matchup when I got back. Figured I’d log in this morning only to see a green world. I found something else to do.
I don’t consider myself a fair weather by any stretch. Many times I’ll take whatever terrible odds I get just for a fight. Always back capping your stuff against blobs of 5 to 10 times your numbers will burn you out though.
I’m hoping it’s better than my first impressions. Was looking forward to some fights this week.
If SoS wasn’t so PPT try hard Mag would have moved up weeks ago to replace FA. That’s what happens when your ocx crew drains a bunch of glicko points. Mag doesn’t have that many PPT guilds, the majority of their players are more interested in fighting and having fun rather than avoiding your players to PvD.
Just look at the scores right now, SoS night crew is going hard in a match they can’t win and Mag is losing 8 glicko points because of it. You are killing yourselves.
Mag doesn’t have ANY PPT guilds. When SoS takes a tower, it’s immediately covered in siege and has a couple scouts watching it. When Mag takes a tower, supply is drained and everyone goes running towards the closest OJs.
The best thing SoS and SBI could do right now is just tank for a week to let Mag move up. With any luck Mag would get replaced with a like-minded siege humper server.
Most of the day, if SoS leaves two scouts in a tower they just decreased their fighting force by about 20%
And tanking? Not even sure what to say about that. Most I see don’t care about PPT. We lose every week anyway. We do care about holding our corner and BLs though (I actually don’t care about bl either unless we have a good fight lined up there)
Typically SoS is asleep while mag and sbi are awake. When SoS wakes up mag and sbi start to slow down. It’s not rocket science. If you flipped SoS coverage we’d have a fun matchup. If you move SoS to tier 4 it would bounce back to tier 3. Same with mag and tier 2 unless they get more OCX/SEA
Much of the day in my timezone, SoS is mostly a tagless group of roamers and scouts…ridiculously outnumbered. It’s hard to imagine other servers actually crying over that besides the lack of fights. At least things will get mixed up a little tonight.
I see a lot of stupid stuff in our matchup. Dropping acs and balis open field in even numbered fights. Trebbing and cataing our spawn when we bother to come out and fight against superior numbers of boon stacking, condi throwing cheese builds vs randoms. (Really we come out to fight even in lousy odds and we have to do it under cat knockback, ACs and perma treb poison? wth. We could easily have done something else but we wanted to dance. What part of that did you not get?)
People whine about siege wars and running from fights and then do stupid stuff that makes the fights useless for the other side anyway. Use your brain. If you want good fights show a little respect for the fight.
You might as well be the condi Mesmer or thief always crying in pm because people just walk away.
If you want good fights show a little class. If you’re just out to feed your ego against inferior numbers then enjoy beating those doors down. You get the score and you’re welcome to it. If objectives don’t get good fights they are worthless anyway.
Just adding a few of those servers together would cap out. The rest of the list would be irrelevant. If bg had to fight twice their numbers on every map 24/7 they would probably get crushed.
If there is ever a matchup where 3 sides are fighting relatively even non stop I want to be there though.
Are there any tiers left with action like there was after the first couple weeks of the link up? Is there any way for smart people to stack and even out the coverage on at least one tier matchup so we can all jump in and have the non stop fights and insanity with relatively even match ups again?
I would pay money…
Ah, nuts…doing a Google search I just found where [Grim] transferred to Ebay around February…guess I missed the memo on that! It looks like they are doing well in T4, at least. If they had stuck around, we could be pounding Mag & SBI in NA prime instead of trying to merely stay alive until OCX woke up.
Yep. Haven’t seen much of lord either and I think a couple more transferred out. Would have made a huge difference. We’d be able to give good fights during the day.
I run rabid condi with perplex and some dire mixed. Traited shouts with rise + yaaw for short cd stun break. I run locust sig or swap with plague sig/spectral armor depending.
Really survivable but you have to save dodges for the big stuff, position right and use terrain/los.
this makes me laugh but somehow sad at the same time. Remember to watch your necros carefully so they don’t get chain cc’d to hell when they run out of dodges and cruddy stab!
My scrapper is the most op thing I’ve played in wvw. I can jump into piles of enemies and start dropping cc like rain while reflecting projectiles and finishing some poor downed guy 800 to 900 away + pulsing stealth + stacking super speed + big regen.
It’s kind of ridiculous. I’d feel bad but it’s too much fun.
Could use a bit of polish but very useful in wvw. Very much so in small group fights.
Meh. Constantly outnumbered. Constantly defending 10v50 or worse. Fairweathers taking the week off. People running around apparently naked, getting 1 shot.
We can whine and cry or deal and try to make things better. I’m fine running into an outnumbered fight with a lot of names I’ve learned to recognize on SoS and definately GoM as well. And if I’m defending a keep in a 10v50+ I throw as many ACs as I can get operators for. Throw a couple shield gens you lazy blobs.
Nice take on SMC last night!!!
i’m impressed that GoM doesn’t have more of a presence. from my days there we had a lot of dedicated wvw guilds. problem being, when you ask the larger pve guilds for help, they often tend to not care. It’s mostly a pve server, i guess.
I see a lot of bliss, art, tm and a few others running around. We did lose a few guilds before the link though and we’re mostly NA. We don’t have the numbers to deal with mag/sbi while waiting for the SoS OCX heavy crew to wake up.
A lot of times its tagless chaos and roamers…which can be fun if you can find the right fights or harass the two blobs constantly rolling through our corner. Catch is our corner is pretty much free for the taking and back capping it just to have a place to live is a pain. If we put up too much resistance without having numbers to actually fight back it will just get our BL ktrained. Pretty easy to get frustrated.
You really take what you can get as far as fights. Roamer? Run towards the orange swords!
OCX crew ktrains for 6 hours because the rest of the server is getting ktrained the other 18. I wish we could flip the time zones somehow to match up with NA. I think the matchup might actually be pretty fun with all 3 servers running heavy at the same time.
Meh. Constantly outnumbered. Constantly defending 10v50 or worse. Fairweathers taking the week off. People running around apparently naked, getting 1 shot.
We can whine and cry or deal and try to make things better. I’m fine running into an outnumbered fight with a lot of names I’ve learned to recognize on SoS and definately GoM as well. And if I’m defending a keep in a 10v50+ I throw as many ACs as I can get operators for. Throw a couple shield gens you lazy blobs.
Yeah so old. We have people taking weeks off because match ups are so stale.
I’d like to see this based on alliances instead of servers and with guilds joining alliances. I’d like to see guilds able to maintain wvw spots…maybe with some cost per matchup.
Need to just go to alliances and even them all out + add a couple tiers. It’s complicated but need to use any data collected on when players play most and try to smooth out the time zones a bit. Need to keep alliances somewhat even as people go inactive + let guilds manage protected wvw alliance spots or something. Maybe inactive loses the spot unless a guild specially protects it (long vacations etc).
Hard to solve but without somewhat smoothing out population and coverage wvw will never work. Leaving the 24/7 format makes it something different and worse imo.
There are other issues after dealing with that. It would probably solve the stale match ups and give wvw a more guild based focus but we would still need balance stuff and fresh maps at the very least.
I’ve yet to find anything close to wvw. It most matches a game I played long ago but it’s better and in greater scope. I have little doubt that newbies will keep trickling in even as vets get ticked off and leave.
This would make it even harder to find good fights when crazy outnumbered. As it is now, at least we can find the occasional decent 4v5 or 10v12.
We run with outnumbered buff like 80% of each matchup. I love the extra participation added to the buff. Maybe give us more magic find. 20% is nothing. Try 50% or even 100%. That way combat mechanics can stay even but have a slightly better chance at awesome loot for actually killing.
Wouldn’t mind a 1.2 (or something) multiplier on ppk too.
Buff conditions, make them effected by crit dmg/crit and countered partially by armor. Dial back cleanses.
Currently they’re mostly ok except for 2 or 3 builds but there will always be a scaling issue the way condis work. Smaller group fights it’s op as hell while in blobs it won’t do much.
There needs to be a way to line condi up with how everything else scales while still making the play style worth it. Right now it’s a nightmare to balance.
Just fixing the los on walls and the crazy wrap around staff ele aoe would do wonders. Also getting pulled through walls with stab up is ridiculous.
Tough to balance though as I’m sure there are servers with superior numbers that like to turtle up. Giving defense a buff might make them even more annoying.
In the next release, a 6th pip is being added to the provision master ability line that allows you to buy HoT recipes, sigils, and runes from the heroics notary vendor.
Whoa lol well there goes many hours of grinding pve I’ll never get back. This is amazing though! Wasn’t looking forward to another 10 to 20 hours just for runes.
I tried to discuss some of what I’ve said here last night in chat with SoS but they wouldn’t have any of it. It is very clearly a casual server.
As someone who’s never in a guild and primarily scouts or roams, I totally understand why people don’t want to use TS and why they just want to have fun. It is a game after all and fun is important. But at the same time, these same people are upset that their server is always losing, but they’re not taking any steps to change it. You can’t be casual and still be the best, you know?
Oh well. I told them what I thought and although I don’t think I’m liked because of it, at least they didn’t tear me apart either. Like I said, it’s a good community. It just needs a stronger core because 75% of the players are PPT’ers who can’t/won’t use TS and don’t pay attention when it’s necessary in a fight.
I must have missed the time frame or the map you were on when this was discussed. I tend to agree, though, there are a lot more casual players, it seems. However, if you do a map call for various things, you do tend to get a bunch of solo roamers coming out of the woodwork to help get the job done. The lack of organization, though, contributes nothing against fairly equal numbers of organized enemies.
Playing against mag/fa/sbi alot, they all have their fair share of casuals/scrubs/newbies/pvers. We just don’t have enough fight guild presence to match what mag/fa can bring a lot of the time. Heavy sustain + boon share + organization should make any group of randoms look like scrubs.
I really only see two main fight guilds and maybe a couple roaming for SOS/Gom. They all wreck face though. If we had 2 or 3 more guilds like them then the “all casuals” thing wouldn’t be as noticeable.
You can’t clear damage from a zerker before it takes effect.
Every skill that grants Invulnerability ( http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Invulnerability)
Every skill that does blind ( https://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Blind )You were saying?
If you can’t land a hit you can’t apply condi. Exceptions would be passive proc or unblockable stuff…which power based skills have as well.
The main issue is a couple of classes that can tank up with dire or even rabid and dish out insane condi application. Throw in perplex runes to make it worse. Not sure I can agree with this being a soldiers vs dire thing. The effectiveness of dire/rabid/trail depends heavily on the class.
Yeah I have like 600+ tomes now from wvw. Actually a bit overkill. Nice to not have to grind to level alts though. Tomes to 80 and proofs of heroics for elite spec.
I still run d/p + p/p + dash in wvw. Sb nice to have but I can burst tanky melee classes down at range with pistol and keep good positioning. Works pretty well on just about everything once reflects/blocks/invulns are down.
Good positioning means it’s easier to kite, los, escape and don’t need to rely so much on stealth for survival.
Sb 5 also has a really slow projectile so you don’t get much distance out of it. I find dash competitive and using 40% endurance regen food + agi sig is dashes for days + 100% swiftness uptime.
Still feels really quick and I don’t have a terribly clunky ranged “weapon” taking up a slot.
Yeah this is pretty awesome. Saves a lot of people time while ktraining t3 stuff away from hopelessly outnumbered defenders. Also save tons on siege. The ktrain has a schedule to keep after all.
A really good thief can be a pain in wvw but usually not a big deal unless they’re +1ing you. Even then, sometimes you’ll accidentally kill them while fighting someone else.
It’s about risk/reward. If all you count on is to burst an unsuspecting player down in 5 seconds then retaliation should indeed pose a major counter. Slower hitting players have the risk of a drawn out fight that includes many other factors.
Stack some retaliation. Get hit. Profit!$$$$$
Spying has been around for thousands of years in real life. Spying in games has been around as long as the games have been around. When did it become against any rule to spy on the enemy?
Spying is a bit different. If you’re breaking golems, burning sup, capping out siege with useless siege placements, pulling all the tacs just to keep them on cooldown for incoming hostiles, spamming map chat to gloat, it’s more than just spying and there is no real counterplay.
Now if we could mark the troll account as hostile that would be great. Whatever mechanic responsible for that would need to be carefully crafted though.
Yep, SoS was hit very hard tonight by spies, and hard to tell which server they came from as both teamed up to leave us just our keep on EBG and a couple towers/camps on our BL, but not our garrison.
They took the keep a bit later, after building an armada of rams and misc siege around supply hut and other weird places + keeping the tacs on cooldown in between pushes. No supply, no tacs, siege cap, outnumbered 3 to 1. gg
Scrapper vs tower lord is easy mode. Haven’t tried keep solo yet but duo’d easy on tempest and reaper.
This isn’t a skill thing either. Give me 40 pugs from my server against your 50 guild group and I’m fine. We probably won’t win most of the time but we will get some stomps and we won’t just watch our stuff being taken with no counter play.
The most common thing I see in those scenarios, is that the 40 pugs log out after 1-2 wipes, and you’re stuck with 50 vs 10.
That mentality might be the single largest problem with WvW.
40 pugs defending stuff with siege and buffs is dangerous. Enough to make a guild group work a little for the cap at least. 40 pugs vs guild group open field is something else entirely and just asking for morale problems lol
I get that it’s not an easy thing to fix. Might even be impossible without a full rework. Just really hoping anet will come up with something brilliant.
“Might”… It is impossible to fix. Even if you pit three servers with the exact same population against each other, this scenario will still happen at some point or another. Anet cant control how much each individual player plays. Anet cant control their skill.
Thing is it doesn’t have to be perfect. Just don’t leave me in a 10v50v70 for much of the day. I really don’t mind being outnumbered. It’s when it gets so bad that all you can do is pick off a blob’s tail and then back cap. Ok in small doses but not as the bulk of each match.
This isn’t a skill thing either. Give me 40 pugs from my server against your 50 guild group and I’m fine. We probably won’t win most of the time but we will get some stomps and we won’t just watch our stuff being taken with no counter play.
It’s like the old school tv antennas. You adjust adjust adjust just trying to get that one station in with something you want to watch. It suddenly clears up for a second but then reverts to unwatchable. You scream a psychotic, soul rending scream and then throw the tv through the wall.
For a couple weeks there…just a couple. Queues, fights, wvw craziness, stuff happening everywhere. Things couldn’t be ktrained because they were actually defended. If you wanted something you had to take it by force.
It was glorious! It was so much closer to what I wanted wvw to be. And then everything reverted.
Now we spend most every day getting blobbed off every map. BL crying for help over a group of 15 while EBG is struggling against 15 while a 50+ ktrains the other side.
The keep and garri are flipped constantly. If you engage a group with close to even numbers they bat phone in 30 or 40 more. Havoc groups have to deal with full zergs because we literally can’t give the zergs anything else to do. Oh 5 people capping our tower? Let’s roll stab up frontline eles and necros get ready to bomb get on portal stack might.
Back to population and coverage problems again. 90% of the time it actually feels worse than before.
Honestly screw the score. If anet could just find a way to balance everything so we get those fights back. No more 70 man blob rolling over your corner because you have maybe 10 defenders on all maps combined.
I get that it’s not an easy thing to fix. Might even be impossible without a full rework. Just really hoping anet will come up with something brilliant.
Had a DH of all things dump a 6k burn tick on me from stealth lol. I evaded instantly and even thought he missed me but died like 1.5 secs later.
Comforting to know at least some classes can still be one shot lol (much irony)
This isn’t a result of server links, but of Glicko settling.
and the glicko rating is primarily the result of populations.
so all you need to do is convince ppl to spread out evenly and we will have match up variance.
Yeah this. For many servers, going up a tier means getting wrecked, going down a tier means wrecking everything and staying in current tier means same match ups every week or two.
Well, looks like FA is going to end up close to 40k higher than SoS, so yeah, the deficit was non-recoverable.
As I noted SoS only had a handful (three I believe) ticks that fell below 100. That basically means SoS had some force on some set of maps most of the time. Even though they lost the PPT to Mag and FA during peak hours, SoS never really had any stagnant hours or terrible times to log in.
Naw just means a handful of us lunatics were back capping stuff like mad. Back capping is boring as hell though. Will admit to finding some decent camp fights while the opposing blobs were ktraining our stuff.
Most times we’d try to get everything flipped back right off ri. It’s the only way to stay close but then you get punished for the effort in the next matchup anyway.
Some of it was our fault though. Seems like a lot of people saw the matchup and decided to take the week off…making bad numbers worse.
I don’t mind the occasional blob fight (the 2 times a week we actually manage 30 or 40) but I also love the 5v5 10v10 etc that happens when tags are down and people are just everywhere.
Catch is we’re at the point where you blob up or get ktrained. If there were an acceptable way to encourage blobs to cap out at 30 or 40 then servers could run 2 or 3 groups max and leave a little space for roamers and havoc groups.
You could hit someone with every chill/blind/fear skill on scepter/dagger, staff and shroud + shout elite. Without shroud 5/4 you just spammed all your skills (including stab and 1 condi transfer) for maybe 6 stacks of bleed via dc. Cooldowns make that impossible to maintain though.
You would also need everything traited and you would need to land it all through the blocks/evades/deflect/reflect/invuln/los/resistance/cleanse.
You could further use sigils and runes to try to get a bit more bleed but what you’re getting from dc is not a big deal against most builds.
Most of the time just hitting someone with burn from traited shroud 1 will get you more steady dmg. You’d have to go into melee anyway. If you manage to hit them 3 or 4 times they will melt like butter…along with everything else in cleave. Even better you can drop curses and chill on blind trait + pick up spite for traited might + use whatever sigils and runes you want.