Guild Wars 2

Nah, that looked full legit from where I sit. Very impressive use of your shadow stepping to get in and out as needed.

I am glad commander is character-bound. It is important for servers to be able to recognize their commanders, and for them to be a lasting presence. If you could just switch to an alt and stay as a commander, players would have little vested knowledge into who you are and what your qualifications / style / etc. are.

I also think that this WvW progression will be character bound, but for a different reason. Habib in his recent interview suggested that this would be a way to tailor your character based on how you play your character. This suggests to me that you might be a sieger on one class, and a resupplier on another, and so forth. In this vein, I think it’s important for it to be character bound.

That said, I wish I had a reason to play an alt in WvW outside of them getting portalled in the JPs for siege prints. I think this is something that ANet should work on somehow, though I don’t think account bound progression is the answer.

It’s unfinished content. The designer of the JP said so in another thread (too lazy to find it).

I used nuggets and silver and made jewels. It cost me 26s to buy the materials, and I made 17s back (after taxes).

It would definitely be nice if a player’s AR translated onto their summons / pets. That would help a lot.

I’ve done two guild bounties so far, and they are a blast!

I loved hunting down the targets ahead of time, locking them near WPs, and then coordinating based on which ones were targeted. They have some pretty interesting mechanics, and were relatively challenging to be honest… More challenging and interesting than most dungeon bosses (this is a very, very good thing). They also scaled very well to the 10-20 players we had attacking them.

It’s not cheating to find them ahead of time. Tracking is a critical part of bounty hunting, and I think a fully intended part of the missions. Besides, I think it adds a lot of fun and coordination to the missions, and encourages the guild to visit more areas, solicit more help, and meet more people. It is much better this way.

Also, the rewards are very nice. I felt appropriately rewarded for our success (only 4 more weeks for an ascended item!).

This isn’t bots farming that makes them cheap, it’s the fact that they drop from all Risen and there’s a ton of players running around down in Orr. Stop trying to short-spike the market and rise prices prematurely; they will continue to drop as the supply is continually increasing.

Their hit box and size box for targeting is the same as any other class. You can also tab target them pretty easily. However, the ‘real’ advantage is that their size makes their animation tells more difficult to read. You can get around this by staring at the screen really closely, however.

Still, it wouldn’t hurt if Asura were something like half a foot taller in general.

Sure, I’ll fire you a PM shortly!

The better loot from these chests was a step forward. Do not encourage ANet to take steps backwards now.

The proper solutions to this “problem” are as follows:
- Address culling so more allied players can render during the events
- Get the events and the pre-events to properly scale to the number of players (Seriously, some intermediate champions would help a lot)
- Prevent players from guesting to bypass the daily chest limitation
- Give players guaranteed rares from other group content such as fractals (one guaranteed salvageable rare/exotic in the Jade Maw chest, for example), then make the number of rares scale to tier (so level 48 Jade Maw might give 3 rares, for example, and level 32 might give 2)

This will encourage people to spread out to other content rather than sit in the zone farming these, and will also make these events harder and not so deliriously bad.

Email them to ‘exploits@arena.net’ without the quotes.

Anyone who said this would be a dull week was so wrong.

Tonight has been the most intense night of the match-up since we’ve been grouped. I had a lot of fun battling [AoD], [SoCo], [NoQQ], and some others in EB tonight, fighting back and forth for ground. You never let us get Bravost, but kitten I at least gave you a run for your money. (P.S. I hate it when random pugs see [GROUP EVENT] KILL THE GRUB and lure it into our siege) I also want to give a special shout-out to a particularly resilient group of AoD (Charr commander buddy, looking at you) who made it tough for us to claim QL the most recent time we did. Your mesmer friend is quite the trickster, too!

IoJ, you guys are relentless. You laid siege to overlook for hours, and we defended as hard as we could. I lead the assault against you and pushed you back repeatedly, but eventually we just got drained of supply and couldn’t keep the walls and gates up. I have to give you mad props; I’m not even mad we lost that keep. At least we gave you a run for your money is what counts.

Anyway, this has been an absolute blast. If we move on to a higher tier come reset night, know that you guys put up a stupendous fight that the point score doesn’t do justice to.

Looking forward to more, and good luck to all.

MegaManExpert.8413:

Also I don’t know if you guys noticed you had about two Arena Net people running with you.

Pretty sure that’s Evan Lesh, one of the sPvP Gameplay Programmers. Looks like his Charr. I’ve run with him a few times before.

Oozo.7856:

Looks like there is a good chance that SBI will move up and EB will move down. I’m going to try to convince AD/NoQQ/BSty to not play for points at all this week and only go for open field fights to help make that happen.

Well that’s no fun. If DR doesn’t show up to fight and take points, I’m going to have to start organizing jump puzzle events! I’ve always been a firm believer that no matter what the score is, and no matter what goes down, it’s good to try your hardest. When you’re losing is when you learn the most, because when you have to deal with overwhelming coverage or whatever you face down difficult strategic scenarios that will only make your server stronger when you come out on top. That’s what I’ve been encouraging on SBI all the while we were crashing through the tiers, and I am convinced it paid off. Anyway, if you still don’t want to fight, that’s up to you, but I don’t think that’s good for anyone.

Regardless, last night was a blast on EB. We had an absolutely massive force, but so did IoJ and DR (maybe not consistently). I loved the open field fight we had at IoJ’s keep back-to-back and how we almost lost it to DR and IoJ repeatedly. That was fun. I also had a lot of fun alongside [Kiwi] holding Langor against an absolutely massive DR force. I’m guessing this was from your guys BL too? I can’t say, but it was huge, and it was great. We were going back and forth for a good 15 minutes. By the end of the night, I lead SBI to successfully paint EB green, which made me feel pretty good about myself, but I was bloody exhausted.

Thanks for the good fights and the tough challenges no matter what happens. That’s what this is all about.

Bumping this for the weekend! Maybe some interested players will see it.

Even though we’re a small-ish guild of dedicated players, we’ve got guild missions coming in a week or so! We’ve got the influence for the upgrades, we just need to wait the hours for them to complete.

My blunders all come from selling too early.

- I invested heavily in Armored Scales, and when they reached 11s I sold them because that’s where they were before and I anticipated price to crash. Unfortunately, they sold and they jumped up to 17s. There’s something like 100g I missed out on.
- I invested heavily in Abyss Dye before the dye patch fix. I sold them at 6g, thinking that ANet had actually fixed the drop rate for dyes, not made them worse. They are now at something like 20g a pop, losing me a lot of potential profit.

Then of course I could blame myself for not seeing the future, but I was a poor chap in-game early on. I couldn’t really have done much investing back in the day. Still, the real winners of the TP are:

- The players who invested in 17c Vicious Fangs back in the day. These people, selling today, would see thousands of gold in profit.
- The players who invested in Unidentified Dyes back when they were dropping more frequently.

Vol.5241:

Let’s see
-failing to invest in glob of ectos when they were 11s. I should have known that globs were a big part of crafting many desirable items at the time. It should’ve dwelled on me that in the future there could be more recipes using it
-investing way too much in piles of putrid essence. I thought that it had to go up at some point since it’s a rare quality and Arenanet has shown the willingness to introduce temporary recipes. But I totally forgot that this item only drops from Risen – so any future recipes would have to be related to Risen, such as undead buff food
-investing in armored scales after the bot ban in November. I think it became quite obvious that Armored Scales were the T6 that was massively underpriced. Now alone, this was a good investment. But during the patch fix in January, it took probably 2 weeks for the market for scales to react since there was soo much invested supply. People invested too much in Armored Scales. I should have invested more in Claws or Fangs, since those were still relatively cheap

Recently I had invested in ancient bones and two Storm precursors, but I have sold my inventory. I’m considering investing in the lower-priced lodestones in anticipation for new legendaries several months down the road, but I have a feeling that Arenanet might introduce better drop rates or drop locations for them in the near future.

I like reading your posts because they actually provide good insight into how you made the money for your legendaries. Unfortunately, I always spend my money on other things, so I still haven’t got the T6 to finish mine up. (Accepting donations!!!!)

Lol, Sky, you didn’t know about that? I have much to teach you yet it seems…

Yes, it does function like this. ANet specified in another thread that they fully intend this to take time. That’s why the only other way to get the accessories is via Laurels, and the number of Laurels is comparable to the number of days it’ll take you to get them via Guild Commendations (unless you get lucky).

That all may be true, but in PvP/WvW the Blood Fiend is very easy to drop with aoe skills or even weapon attack cleaving. Forcing it to drop early puts the Necromancer at a huge disadvantage. Do yourself a favor and don’t give yourself that kind of lynchpin that the enemy can so readily take advantage of.

At what part of the animation did you do it at? Maybe that plays a role. It’s also possible that my eyes betrayed me, though. I don’t discount that possibility.

Lucky.9421:

Rising Dusk.2408:

…we fought this one Graveling that tunneled constantly and evaded 90% of our dps if only because 90% of the fight he spent underground. Either he was using the skill far too often, or his mechanics were just meant to waste time. It wasn’t a fun encounter.

When it goes underground and pops-up, if it hits someone it gains evasion. So the key is that everyone in the party needs to evade the attack so it doesn’t gain evasion every time. I think it may also be blockable and blindable but am not certain.

I figured that out, but I mean, while it is underground it is also immune to all forms of damage. The problem was that as soon as it would pop out from underground, it would go back understand 1-2 seconds after. The issue was never that he was evading once he came up (my guild knows how to dodge blatant attacks!), but that he kept going under.

Lucky.9421:

So, I haven’t read every single post in this thread yet, but am I the only one who thinks AC is easier overall now? Enemy damage is generally lower, health is generally lower.

No, I definitely think it is easier. For example, I facetanked Kohler for the first time ever post-patch; he was pathetically low-damage.

Yes, the match-up is the same.

John most definitely will not respond with an answer to your liking. If he did, it would shock the Crystalline Dust market. Regardless, I do wish these things dropped more often.

Yeah, he’s probably just mad, but for real I was very sad when I interrupted him successfully and he smashed and downed me anyway.

Not sure if you already got the hits you’re interested in, but your attitude and general style indicates that you’d be a good fit for [VZ]. The link to the thread is in my signature, but we are a 40-50 user casual-but-very-talented guild on Stormbluff Isle that will have guild missions in about a week, that’s filled with all people who are friendly with each other, and we specifically are looking for friends, not just random people we don’t want to know. I lead in WvW nightly, and we do dungeons and all manner of high end PvE. I’m also Fractal level 50 if that sort of thing interests you, and I’m always willing to do dungeons. We don’t use a website or the like because we’re trying to be as down-to-earth as possible, and make people feel like they’re not obligated to do things they don’t want to do just to be a part of the guild.

If any of that sounds interesting, hit me up in-game by mail, post in the guild’s thread, or PM my account and I’d be happy to answer any and all of your questions. If you want to run around with us before joining, that’s also cool.

Hoping to hear from you!

The troll had 0 stacks of Defiant when interrupted.. But was not actually interrupted.

He almost certainly means Crystalline Dust, the T6 version.

I tried the new AC paths last night, and this is how I feel.

The CC spam from gravelings now is particularly annoying. I also find the tunneling mechanic particularly annoying now too, as we fought this one Graveling that tunneled constantly and evaded 90% of our dps if only because 90% of the fight he spent underground. Either he was using the skill far too often, or his mechanics were just meant to waste time. It wasn’t a fun encounter. In a sense, I miss the leap knockdown from the Scavengers before because the tell was obvious and it rewarded paying attention. Now, the knockback from some Gravelings has no tell (or perhaps the constant culling my team was experiencing is to blame for that….) and just knocks you around everywhere. All of this CC is annoying, it’s not really challenging (The gravelings don’t take advantage of the CC, they just do it to you constantly).

Spider web laser was an amusing special effect, and her poison wells are a lot more threatening now. I’m also happy that you’re forced to fight her and can’t skip her. That said, her fight is still a faceroll if you have a decent team (we melted her in less than 45 seconds). Not bad, but didn’t really feel new and fancy at all.

Kohler appeared to not have changed at all besides getting a lot weaker. I guess he spawns adds now, but they died so fast in the heat of the battle that I didn’t even actively target them, just punched Kohler. Also, I’m not sure if it’s because I’m awesome or Kohler’s a lot weaker, but twice when he did his spin-to-win… I tanked it. I didn’t even move, I just kept wailing on him in melee. He applied his conditions, and when he was done I cleansed it and that was that. Is this intended to be so weak? (I was playing a half-berserker geared warrior, for reference)

Troll is annoying as all hell now. His attacks stun, his jump launches shockwaves that deal a ton of dps and can layer, and he has this really annoying AOE fear for like 8 seconds. Jeez I hate him now. He’s not even hard, he just mitigates damage by making the team run away for 1/3 of the fight and CCing everything else. I miss the old troll. He was one of the few bosses where it actually paid to use aggro to your advantage (getting him to chase X player as the others shot him).

Howling King apparently spawns adds and we have to lure them into the fire rings? Well, what we did was simply line up the add spawn points to be on the opposite side of the rings as where we fought the HK, and so totally ignored the adds altogether. We melted HK in ~55 seconds. Not a very impressive fight.

Colossus Rumblus was AWESOME. Probably the only thing in this dungeon that I felt visibly and strategically impressed by. We actually wiped our first time because we didn’t realize that Grast has to be alive to save us! Very exciting. We wiped first time, then once we knew what was going on, we played it up by keeping Grast safely behind us but within bubble range of where we fought CR. CR went down in ~1:20 minutes, but largely this was because his melee attacks really hurt now! I like this fight.

Anyway, not bad, but I am kind of disappointed. I was expecting and hoping for bosses more like GL with phases and large scale battles. I was hoping Kohler would teleport around and do something epic with his super sweet arena, or that Spider would climb on walls or something. I don’t know, I feel really let down as a whole outside of CR. Good try, though. Maybe the revamps of the other dungeons will be better.

Just wanted to note that if the AC troll is using his super air-dangley-feet-jump-smash-ground move which results in shockwaves heading out in all directions and you interrupt it (Noted by the “Interrupt” text above his head), he continues to do the move anyway.

It would be even nicer if the loot just went into your inventory, and only went to the ground as a loot bag if you didn’t have inventory room for it.

KinkyGiraffe.4123:

See picture one, notice IoJ has the outmanned buff in ETERNAL and we cant even get our keep
http://i.imgur.com/Pj7effp.jpg

Then see picture 2
http://i.imgur.com/S84Nxkt.jpg
What is the strategy for Devona’s Rest? Try and get as much points in before SBI come for them? Thank you DR, for kicking us why we’re down, i wont be trying for Wildcreek anymore, Durios it is.
This isnt just a one off thing, DR have hit us the same time SBI have a lot of times, and we’re still in second?

Fight on IoJ!

I want to comment that we left only a handful of our group at overlook to keep you guys busy. I personally dropped most of the siege that was holding you back. The rest of us (a sizable group) were holding off DR. They were trying to take our stuff and we just hit them with cannons from SM and totally pushed them back at Golanta. They went after you guys because you were easier points. Strategically, that’s not a bad idea at all.

Anyway, I had a blast setting up at and holding the IoJ keep for as long as we did. That was a ton of fun, and you guys were relentless at throwing bodies at us. That encounter was definitely the highlight of my night (although I also thoroughly enjoyed cannoning DR). Looking forward to more before and after reset!

DreamOfACure.4382:

Just like with the other thread that got closed today:

None of your complaints count as reasons to reduce the rare-item chance.

They’re reasons to buff the world bosses to be more difficult – More specifically, to make them anti-zerg.

Learn to see the bigger picture -> See the next step forward instead of wanting to go back

This is how I feel about this topic in a nutshell.

Your herald.

..DUN DUN DUUUUUUN!

A bug. They’re aware of it. Try relogging and trying again.

Tyler Bearce.3427:

The best thing is probably just to post in the warrior forums. Though for Banners specifically, we are already working to improve them.

The reason they ask here is because you actually answer, unlike whichever developers supposedly browse the class forums.

None of the new ascended items (including the rings with the new stat combinations) can be infused currently, though the files exist in the GW2 item database for infused variants of the Amulets (with the exception of the Triforge Amulet). I anticipate when ANet stops forgetting about Fractals, we’ll see this fixed.

Pinkus.2860:

Can you imagine if the first Ascended weapons and or Armor is released in WvW. Dem PvEers will lose their kitten! Hahaha

Do it!

Appearance options!? Oh you got my attention; does that mean new skins, or will we just see skin sets recycled and cannibalized from other PvE content? Please say it’ll be new and exclusive in appearance because I’d love nothing more than to look awesome for playing WvW.

Krash.9486:

This thread was taking a positive direction and then this clown decides to snidely derail it again with claims of massive 40 man zergs and PvD as our only merits!

Calling him a clown isn’t helping either.

I’m very passionate about my server, and have been with it forever. That said, some of our best representatives don’t post on the forums because they’re only interested in the fights and that’s their forte. It isn’t helping anything by retaliating to a nasty comment any more than it is to make the nasty comment in the first place. I’ve seen solid strategy from DR and IoJ in this match-up, and I know that I can continue to expect more down the road. I know that we also employ excellent strategy as well. Coverage plays an immense role in the success of a server as far as points and ppt go, and while I know I strive to maintain as many holdings as possible, I’m not playing for the ppt, I’m playing for the thrill of the combat and the strategies and counter-strategies that get used to take and defend a holding, or in the tactics necessary to come out on top in a massive ground battle. I have seen those tactics, and I have employed those tactics, and it is good. That’s all need be said.

Oozo.7856:

I think we are all going to be shocked by what we see when culling is removed in March.

I hear that.

Gab Superstar.4059:

I was hoping it would be interesting because I actually play in that timezone, which I am not so sure you do(?) And yeah, I do get a bit riled up for that exact reason. Whenever SBI claims to NOT have a crushing nighttime crew, it diminishes the effort of the few DR players who play during those times. We are not many at all, but when you (and many others in this thread) claim that we lose our entire EB side, as well as our entire BL to a crew of 5-10 SBI it just doesn’t ring well with me.

I certainly didn’t mean that 5-10 take your entire zones in normal NA hours! In that instance, the 5-10 group is usually something at 4AM EST (had to think for a second there). Maybe you guys are distracted elsewhere or something; I cannot say. It’s always difficult to qualify because the numbers I fight with my squad are likely not the entirety of your server’s presence on a given map and definitely not representative of your presence across all maps.

Last night when that happened and I was on, we did quite the opposite and went to help! I blame my lack of personal 24/7 coverage for this disparity.

It’s interesting to hear this from a player on another server. In past weeks prior to this match-up, we were relocated to only playing in our BL because we simply couldn’t hold anything else. Most of our forces now are always in our BL, except when the whole thing is green and we station only a small group there to alert us if we’re about to lose something major. At that point the group from SBI BL moves on to either DR BL or IoJ BL, while our EB crew stays pretty consistently in EB (guilty as charged). If we sweep EB, which we have been able to do in recent nights, then we PvDoor DR BL, yes.

Anyway, my interpretation of our zerg numbers based on the number of green dots I can physically see on my mini map around me is largely irrelevant. I don’t enjoy talking about numbers, because everyone sees something else (culling!). Sorry if this got you riled up; it certainly wasn’t my intent.

You are indeed a day late and a dollar short. They were locked out of WvW last patch. At least these things are useful in PvE still, though.

Every time I have gone to SBI BL there hasn’t been a queue. The one time I know there were like 40 of us there last night was after we saved Bay (and my squad was pulled from EB to do that). Afterwards we ran through the map to make sure that we had control before heading back to our regularly scheduled plan. I don’t really want to argue numbers because that isn’t a fun use of my time, but I will say this: I know we have outnumbered the other servers many times in this match-up, and sometimes that causes us to paint our numbers low and those we outnumber to paint our numbers high.

Krash.9486:

Just FYI in case you haven’t been watching what is happening in T1….SoS is on the way down here as BG has lured their more fair-weather guilds like other servers did to us…I have heard they even paid some of them in gems to transfer……mercenaries can not be trusted to be loyal in the long run though I am thinking….and so the server-go-round continues…lol

Yeah, I’ve been watching, and hope they find the tier that most suits what they are capable of soon and without weeks of slaughter.

Only, no, but that is the composition of our primary zergs. Of course sometimes it varies by +/-5, and I know we procced swords twice last night during a few sieges. There are also guilds and groups that run off and assist in other ways such as running interference, taking camps, or scouting. Tuesday we had a queue in EB and a surprisingly large force, which is anomalous and definitely hasn’t been typical even during this match-up. That said, this morning we had 6 people in EB altogether, and had quite the time taking Veloka from IoJ.

The match-up is imbalanced, and we do have better coverage than the other servers, but this isn’t anything like the higher tiers in terms of numbers fielded, and I say that from having been there.

Oozo.7856:

A lot of the green servers are halfway between the brackets in terms of relative power. What I mean by that is that they crush their opponents when they are green, but when they move up they get crushed by their opponents when they are red.

From firsthand experience, I certainly agree with you. Still, I guess my only point made toward the OP is that being green doesn’t give you an unfair advantage over other servers. Your color is a result of your server’s competency (numerically and strategically), not the cause of it.

We’re definitely not at the point where we can field 20+ zergs in all maps, otherwise we’d not be in T5. We can, however, usually field 10-20 in two maps at once during our primetime, and usually get a few small groups of 5-10 going on in the off hours. More often than not, the only reason we can get such high ppt during off hours is because those 5-10 player groups encounter zero resistance. Being able to constantly flip DR/IoJ holdings also makes it worse for you guys because you just can’t upgrade anything, which makes it all that much easier to take back. It’s a vicious cycle.

I know a few people have come out and followed me only because I was working at painting EB green and they needed overlook or valley keeps or something. If anything, though, it’s more important than ever for those of us who have been with SBI through thick and thin to stick with it, because we have invaluable experience in T1 against the likes of JQ, SoR, SoS, and so forth and it was instrumental in our capabilities now. We just need to stick together and keep doing what we’re doing. Maybe now that we’re doing well in a tier again, we can work on rebuilding up our numbers by luring some of the more fairweather players to stick around.

To be fair, the server is green because it is winning consistently, not winning because it is green.

Unfortunately, team class make-up is more important than ever now for high levels. Not only do you need 1-2 Guardians for fractals like the Grawl fractal, you need Thieves (at a minimum maxed that you can switch to mid-fractal) for the Dredge fractal.