Guild Wars 2

I really like the confusion duration increase and the on-crit chance, but the interrupt bonus should probably just go away now or be made significantly less potent. An ICD of at least 20+ seconds or reducing to it to 2 stacks of confusion on interrupt could work.

Also, I’d actually lower the overall confusion duration buff to 20%.

I use every weapon except Scepter and Torch in a 20/20/10/20/0 build. This gives me access to almost all of the reduced cooldown traits for weapons/utilities, so I can amend my build on the fly situationally. Keeps things fresh and interesting.

If your tactics failed because you were countered by a wall of arrowcart fire then you just need to back off and try something different. Not every siege that takes place is decided in minutes. If you really want to cap an objective that is being well defended then you just need to invest more time and resources. Even then, not everything is meant to be and sometimes you just need to accept defeat and move on.

Zackie.8923:

if they jumped on you , it means you did well, you actually rattled them .

This. Or at least you meant enough to them that they decided to waste their time emoting and such.

For the rest of us, once someone is dead they’re old news, and we move on to murder anew

Mantra of Pain should be a PBAoE at the target. The 4 additional enemies are hit for 50% of the damage the target takes. Power Spike scales with power (can’t crit) and is mitigated by the armour of the target, but the AoE effect ignores armour. Target the squishiest foe and go to town (sorry Thieves).

Having spent time using perplexity runes now on my Mesmer I have to agree that the 6/6 bonus is far too strong. The boost to confusion duration and the on-crit proc are great and make confusion application more efficient as they should, but the interrupt bonus is just too much. At present, I am simply ruining people with these runes. An ICD on the interrupt bonus would be wise, but personally I’d like to see the interrupt bonus replaced with something else.

Before they are nerfed though, I recommend that everyone at least gives them a go. They’re pretty hilarious

ClickHereToRespawn.7310:

Hey BB nightcapping team, are you really really so desperate? Rofl, trying to take our keep at 4 AM with 3x numbers, failing for an hour, and killing lord inside the wall multiple times?

No respect.

Yeah apparently it’s possible to kill the Lord through a wall in that keep. Kind of sucks.

At one point our T3 keep on EB was the only structure not owned by BB in the whole of WvW, so I think we just felt the full brunt of an entire server’s night presence. Was kind of crazy, but we were victorious and saved the keep. Good fun.

Lots of fun exploring all the ruins last night. Love the Amphitheatre part. That would be awesome for duels if it didn’t have the capture point or drakes for rally bait. BB had a lot of Thieves on one of the maps. Was fun stomping them, especially all the ones splurging their initiative. Good place for stealth traps

I’m really enjoying the new terrain, as quite frankly it’s a breath of fresh air. I particularly like all the little nooks and crannies and structures that can be scaled. Already had many interesting fights there.

As for the buffs, well the stomp buff is great as it allows solo and small group roamers to wrack up some points for their server (zergs very rarely stomp anything). But at present the stat buff doesn’t seem quite right to me. It just doesn’t really add anything of value to WvW and feels out of place. I would have much preferred something that was linked to structure upgrades or created a similar harassment mechanic in the same way as the Quaggan nodes with those lightning bolts.

Also, some sort of reward for capturing and defending the points would be nice too. Maybe just enough silver to cover the repair bills ;-)

Good to know. I shall add “never engage Rangers underwater” to my list of things to never do in WvW along with “never engage Eles near keep/tower portals (immobilise be kitten ed)” and “never try to catch those Warriors” ;-)

So it’s not a bug that the pet is still healing the Ranger after I have killed it? Genuine question there as to whether or not that’s a viable counter.

And if it is intended that a Ranger can completely out heal an attacker when downed, then yes it is very much OP, as is the crazy stacking potential of Siren’s call and Mind blast.

I’m happy for this to be moved over to the WvW forum if need be.

I was fighting a Ranger underwater earlier in WvW on the assumption that Lick Wounds had probably been fixed. But to my horror when I downed the Ranger and killed the pet, the Ranger was still able to completely out heal all my damage. There was literally nothing I could do. Playing a Mesmer myself (also ridiculous, see below).

As far as I know, this has been the case since launch. That’s pretty awful Anet.

Also, have you seen the rate at which Mesmers can stack and maintain bleeds with Siren’s Call? How about how quickly you can stack confusion using Mind Blast? Both are pretty ridiculous.

I know that Underwater combat is rarely ever a thing in WvW, but on the off chance that you do have an underwater battle, it would be nice if it wasn’t quite so broken.

I’m cool with this trap, but only if we can also get some Holy hand grenades ;-)

This tactic does work wonders, but as someone else said, it’s highly dependent on individual competence, so it all falls apart if a large proportion of your spread group can’t self-sustain. It did work well against some of the late night melee trains that Deso were fielding last week, although it often went horribly wrong and my poor Mesmer was trampled often. Was good practice the last two weeks anyhoo.

Also, I do enjoy how Gandara have been labelled a ganking server because many of the players enjoy small group roaming, using small group roaming builds. If you’re roaming with a PvE or zerg build and get ruined by a player who has built for roaming you have only yourself to blame. It takes 2 minutes to waypoint to spawn to change traits and gear to optimise your build based on your chosen WvW activity. That’s all you need to do.

As you are using Focus I think your build would probably benefit from Runes of Perplexity. Phantasmal Warden won’t provide you with much in the way of bleeds unless your opponent(s) enjoys standing next to it, but the potential AoE interrupt of Temporal Curtain would allow you to continue to put condition pressure on your opponent(s) until you switch back to staff. Gives you an extra source of confusion to get the most out of Master of Misdirection.

This is probably one of my favourite updates yet as they’re finally revisiting older content and bringing it to life. Also, the WvW map changes are pretty huge.

I’ve been on four EU servers (including Deso) and they all had mature, friendly communities. The only reason you might not want to join a server like Desolation is due to a greater risk of being stuck in a queue for WvW – unless you intend on WvWing outside of peak times.

Sounds good to me. I don’t indulge much in either activity myself, but it’s pretty obvious that both GvG and duelling are a big part of the current WvW scene. So simple options like this will work wonders for keeping things competitive for these playstyles.

I quite like that we get those messages coming up now and if anything I’d like to see more (but maybe less invasive) messages coming up on screen to link PvE with WvW and vice versa.

asuryan.4386:

Once upon a time, just 1 night ago there were 20 gandaran’s pugs in SM, in a beautiful symmetry:
http://imgur.com/xc6Yu0K

Here is the rest of the story
http://youtu.be/f3IPk0n-DsA

Yay! Glad to see someone posting this. Was good fun. Also interesting hearing the commentary from the Deso Commander – he sounds cool. I was almost certain that they were going to sneak a few Mesmers up so they could plough through the arrowcarts, but it never happened. Shame. Anyway, the most interesting thing I’ve seen in WvW this week.

Oh dear. You should probably rephrase your post so it makes WvW on Gandara sound more……appealing.

Deniara Devious.3948:

Simonoly.4352:

What’s with all the emote spamming by Desolation? I had five guys spam /laugh whilst jumping on my corpse to the point where my combat log had over 200 emotes one after another. Overkill much? Been seeing this all weekend. Haven’t seen that since, well….when I was on Desolation 5 months ago and used to cringe whenever I saw anyone do it. Are there any mature nice natured players left on Deso, or did we all leave?

I am sorry to hear that. But I think there are badly behaving players on every server. Even if you win against larger group /laugh or dancing on corpses is simple badly behavior.

I never use /laugh emote in WvWvW or spvp. But I had to admit I was giggling to myself and commented in text chat (just to our side) when I won 2 Gandara engineers underwater with my engi. They had the advantage of friendly NPCs + numbers against me alone. I haven’t yet encountered any true solo roamers from Gandara, except of course: thieves. Gandara’s 5 player roaming teams are pretty good and Desolation sadly lacks that type of play at the moment, but our general organization seems better. Then on the other hand why to have 5 if you can do it alone. ;-)

Let’s keep this game clean.

Ah I know it happens everywhere. But I just don’t think I’ve ever seen so much as I have this weekend. I actually don’t mind if someone does /laugh but when it’s constant and filling up your channel log it’s just irritating. Deso does seem more organised than I remember though. Must be more competitive with SFR and Vizunah now I expect.

Anyway, I’ve been having the same problem trying to find other roamers. Whenever I do come across a roamer it gets interrupted very quickly. Going to go camp AM windmill and see what turns up

Gandara is great for small scale WvW on the borderland maps. But EB is very much a karma/Wxp train.

I think hopping from a rank 1 server to a rank 20+ might be a bit too much of a shock to what you’re used to. The population/coverage difference is pretty huge, so you might be disappointed with the potential for much less action. Therefore, I recommend going for a rank 10-15 server. Aurora Glade would be a good bet, plenty of cool small scale guild-led WvW there.

What’s with all the emote spamming by Desolation? I had five guys spam /laugh whilst jumping on my corpse to the point where my combat log had over 200 emotes one after another. Overkill much? Been seeing this all weekend. Haven’t seen that since, well….when I was on Desolation 5 months ago and used to cringe whenever I saw anyone do it. Are there any mature nice natured players left on Deso, or did we all leave?

Oh no he didn’t! (oh yes he did).

I can’t imagine the difference in stats between a fully geared Exotic player and a fully geared Ascended player will be significant enough to put anyone at a major disadvantage.

It’s a shame we’re getting another tier of gear, but I imagine it will be pretty easy to ignore if all you want to do is WvW. If anything it will be even sweeter stomping all those Sunrise and Twilight wielders

Glad to see this is still going. I will try and make it along later today. Haven’t done an Orr temple in a while :-)

IGN: Doctor Plok
Home server: Gandara (EU)
Play style: WvW, PvE (soon to start PvPing)
Role: Instructor and Scholar (we never stop learning after all)
Playtime: Variable, but mostly 10pm onwards GMT

Not sure if it’s still going, but Gandara used to host a Mesmer meet up every Friday 21.00 GMT in Divinity’s Reach at the Lyssa Waypoint. Anyone know if that’s still going?

Okay so I finally came across a Warrior using this rune set. The most stacks I had put on me was 21 from the use of just two skills. That’s kind of crazy, and I can’t imagine this is what Anet had in mind when introducing the rune set. I joked about it previously, but I can’t help but think that 6/6 was meant to be a Grandmaster Mesmer interrupt trait. Even if it was, I’d still put a ICD of at least 10-15 seconds on it similarly to Furious Interruption.

If you’re outnumbered 3-1 and you get Moa’d, it’s probably because they just want to remove you from the picture as quickly as possible, so they can move on. Very few Mesmers would ever have Moa slotted regularly in WvW.

I only use it situationally to completely lock-down and remove a pesky foe. It’s very good for preventing tanky Warriors from banner resing a Keep Lord or for removing a D/P Thief that’s trolling away.

Durzlla.6295:

I try to complete them because I find that more fun, I can truly care less about the rewards from champ farming or completing it, they’re both fairly meh in my eyes.

Ditto. I try to complete them because I generally like to succeed at things when I play a video game. It’s fun when you actually work together as a server and complete the event by splitting up etc. Not everyone is obsessed with gold, loot and achievements…..just the majority it seems

It appears that on Warriors this rune set is a tad ridiculous due to existence of a trait that already does the same thing. But what about other classes? Any Guardians trying out these runes? I’m sure Ring of Warding/Line of Warding could be used to achieve some nice stacks too.

I’m very much against any form of stat boost attached to these new control points (unless it’s MF or something else benign). I hate the idea of being involved in a 1v1 or 5v5 and suddenly having my stats boosted because someone not involved in my battle captured a control point on another part of the map.

“You only won because you got Bloodlust half way through our fight!” will be the newest form of moaning you will see across the WvW forum.

I feel like there was an awful mix up at Anet HQ and the number 6 bonus was actually supposed to be a Grandmaster Mesmer interrupt trait instead of Furious or Chaotic Interruption.

Did you land the torment counter-attack on the Thief after blocking with Illusionary Counter? Because it’s perfectly possible that the Thief dodged right after you blocked the attack and would therefore not be hit with the Torment on the counter.

And yes, all blocked attacks should reveal anyone in stealth.

Thanks to UW for the defence of Hills on Gandara Borderland. Twas good fun with much killing all round

I know where you’re coming from OP. I enjoyed it when I was doing one of the events with 10 other people (and it was quite challenging), but as soon as one of the Commander led key spamming zerg trains arrived, it was horrid and immediately trivialised the content. The worst part is when a giant Scarlet finally arrives and is swiftly melted by over a hundred people mashing their key-binds.

I really do like this large warfare style event (much more than being stuck down that hole in Divinity’s Reach) but I would have preferred there to be more than one zone under attack at any one time to break up the herd. This is permanent content though, so I imagine it might change eventually when there’s less people doing it and we therefore need to coordinate as a server

Mind Spike and Prestige bug fixes are pretty big really. That’s a 50% damage increase on Mind Spike when no boons and you can now channel the prestige into a combo field like the good old days, instead of the awkwardness that we’ve been dealing with over th past few months.

That Shatterer event from the Beta looked like it was a lot of fun. That’s the sort of thing I would really like to see in a Living Story update. I don’t like being shoved down a hole in Divinity’s Reach.

A 20% damage reduction across all phantasms is unlikely but I’d happily see Phantasmal Berserker, Duellist and Swordsman getting a damage reduction in favour of a utility buff to make them more than just boring external sources of dps.

Ever since the buff to Prismatic Understanding, condition/stealth builds utilising torch have been quite popular for solo and small group roaming. Survivability, mobility and trickery levels are extremely high at the cost of some burst and yes most enemies can get away with ease (signet of domination helps if you’re not using sword or pistol). Played well, it’s almost impossible to lose to anything other than a decently played condition Necro or Engi (from my experience anyway). There’s also so many variants of the condition/stealth build going around using combinations of sword, torch, scepter, pistol and staff that are all very much viable.

Gosh there was quite a lot of UW people steam rolling through both GBL and RoFBL early this morning, golems and all. There simply isn’t enough people on GBL to put up a good fight against that. Hopefully this was just a one off and early morning borderland maps will become blob free once again

Looks like you’re being DYE’d. Haven’t seen them in a while. Good luck!

MH focus all the way…
Skill 1 is basically Lightning Whip, but pink and full of butterflies. Inflicts weakness.
Skill 2 is basically Death Blossom without the bleeds and a clone is generated that uses Skill 1.
Skill 3 is basically Drake’s Breath and damages and dazes opponents for the duration (like a squawking Moa). Pink and full of butterflies of course

multivira.7925:

Simonoly.4352:

Really fun holding Briar on UW BL this afternoon. We finally managed to get in that last dolly for an upgrade with a bit of a diversion ;-)

[crow] are doing a drinking game this evening in WvW, so be gentle if you see one ;-)

Are the TDA buffs still up? :O

They were when I logged. Think UW eventually got it with a bunch of catas when people started to tail off. The buffs as always were a massive help though.

If it’s suddenly interrupted by baddie NPCs like just about every other part of the Living Story, I will cry. I would really like to be surprised by the events of this update – it’s all getting far too formulaic.

Really fun holding Briar on UW BL this afternoon. We finally managed to get in that last dolly for an upgrade with a bit of a diversion ;-)

[crow] are doing a drinking game this evening in WvW, so be gentle if you see one ;-)

I still feel like the matchup system needs more work. I really don’t think T1 and T6 servers should ever be matched with each other. A difference of one tier can be kind of exciting and fresh, but anything more than that feels a little bit broken.

I’m not against having more PvE stuff in WvW, but it needs to be meaningful and relevant. If we have more mob generation it needs to be in response to something going on in WvW instead of just ‘there’. Now that there are far more unbalanced matchups with T1 servers steam rolling T6 servers, now might be a good time to add larger PvE encounters to give dominate servers something to do and struggling servers more of an edge outside of Siegerazer.

Less ridiculous than last weeks matchup but still, I really am longing for a Miller’s and AG matchup sometime soon. I wouldn’t be surprised if the Gandara EB Wxp train grows exponentially again this matchup. Anyway, will be pushing kitten UW borderland from Sunday evening onwards. See you then ;-)

Edit: kitten = “hard”

In WvW, I enjoy using them for Illusionary Counter and The Prestige, but I do find that Ether bolt, Confusing Images and Phantasmal Mage contribute very little to my condition build comparatively.

I’d just like to see Ether clones given a base function in a similar way to staff and sword clones and Confusing Images and Illusionary Mage a condition duration buff so confusion becomes a threat to super skill spammers once again.

Edit: I do like the idea of Illusionary Mage applying chilled too, even if it’s just for 1 second.