Guild Wars 2

Err, bit of a population imbalance in the early morning. Struggled to find anything to fight for the most part. At least a couple of us got to defend some captured RoF keeps from a bunch of golems for a bit. That was fun. But….yeah…..

If you’re going to be commanding a large face smashing zerg at peak times then Warrior or Guardian is usually best. But if you’re playing in the early hours of the morning when server populations are lower and you’re commanding smaller groups, then anything is viable. All you need to do is play to your classes strengths (Thieves are great scouts) and integrate that into the usual Commander duties. Plenty of good Thief commanders on my server.

Right here:

http://mos.millenium.org/matchups

In WvW, lots of moaning on chat about a super ganky D/P Thief causing grief near one of our supply camps. Naturally, I go to the Thief’s last known location and pretend I’m AFK. When the Thief comes in for a backstab, I pop decoy, take two steps to the right, moa morph and then melt the Thief before he even has a chance to react to the fact that he is now a giant bird. Simple, clean, effective – the Thief didn’t come back.

Just slot Signet of Inspiration…..

…..I’ll get my coat.

I really enjoy jumping puzzles and the challenges they offer, but I’m more than happy to use my portals to help those who are struggling or those who simply can’t be kittened to do the puzzle in the first place. It’s not my place to judge and I’m not not prepared to dictate to others how they should or should not be playing with the aim of validating my own personal jumping mastery accomplishments. Knowing that others have bypassed the content to get to end of a jumping puzzle that I spent time doing, does not in anyway diminish my enjoyment or sense of achievement for completing it fully.

It’s a nice community feature. Leave it how it is.

As fun as that heartseeker + black powder combo is I have to agree that it’s a little crazy how easily you can run rings around large groups of enemies with minimal effort. I’m kind of expecting a nerf on that combo at some point in the future but I’d hate to see it taken too far (i.e. removing the combo field). Perhaps smoke field finishers should grant ‘Hide in Shadows’ (not the heal skill) instead of traditional stealth, that way heartseeker + black powder cannot stack with other sources of stealth. I could live with that.

Stealth/stability/invulnerable stomping is just a tactic to ensure you get that important stomp. If anything, you should be more worried about invulnerable stomping because at least with stealth stomping a vigilant team mate can interrupt the Thief with CC.

Murrrrr bacon…

The people have spoken. Make it so Anet.

1. The Obsidian Jumping puzzle is a separate instance, so as soon as you enter the puzzle, you no longer count towards your server’s total WvW population.

2. I know it can be frustrating when all you want to do is get to the end, but it is a PvP jumping puzzle so everything you are experiencing is normal and intended by design.

If anything you should probably be complaining to Anet for including the Obsidian JP as a part of The Black Out Cache achievement. You wouldn’t have to engage in PvP if this achievement didn’t exist.

Great post. As I just said elsewhere, I can’t believe Scepter auto-attack and Phantasmal Mage weren’t buffed. This is just getting silly now.

I’m not really bothered about the nerfs but I am very disappointed that Anet hasn’t used this skill/trait rebalancing opportunity to address Ether Bolt and Phantasmal Mage. How can we be expected to branch out with our builds when we have weapons that are still under performing massively in as basic a function as an auto-attack? It’s just getting annoying now.

Can Thieves use Shadow Escape to get through tower/keep portals? I’ve never actually had an opportunity to try it.

I now consider the use of Dragon’s Tooth to destroy siege without LOS an exploit. I was messing around with my Ele in WvW yesterday and I was able to destroy an arrowcart that was more or less behind the wall of a keep (just offset at the top of a set of stairs) with 6 casts of Dragon’s tooth. As funny as it is to clear siege intentionally placed to avoid attacker damage, this really does need to be fixed.

I find that it undermines the danger of running out of keep/tower during a siege and gives the Elementalist class a sort of free pass where they don’t really need to worry about being defeated as long as they stay within a set distance of that portal. I’ve witnessed pairs of D/D eles taking turns running out of a keep/tower AoEing rams at a gate safe in the knowledge that they are pretty much exempt from the risks of being defeated. Luckily for me they were on my server, but still, it’s a bit ridiculous to watch. I’m kind of surprised too that it’s been left like this for so long now.

It’s an in-game logic fix that Anet need to attend to at some point in the future. Phantasms were given LOS restrictions due to the exact same reason. More consistency please!

Sunflowers.1729:

One thing that I’m annoyed at is how people use ‘hit the stealthed Thief’ as a ‘counter’ to stealth, when obviously it is not.

Is the ‘counter’ to protection continuing to hit the enemy? No, the counter to protection is to remove/convert it. Even Anet agreed when they implemented ‘boon hate’, stating that bunkers needed a counter.

So how is the ‘counter’ to stealth continuing to (maybe) hit him? It doesn’t remove, negate, or reduce stealth’s effect in any way.

The only true ‘counter’ is the long-cast-time stealth trap, which is too expensive and clunky to use.

So much this. The only stealth skill that has an actual counter is Shadow Refuge, every other stealth skill that’s available to the Mesmer and Thief has absolutely no drawbacks or counter. It’s kind of silly that this has gone on for so long now. I really wish Anet were more aware of just how powerful stealth is in this game.

I long for the day when someone is ganked by a well stealthed Thief in WvW and when they moan on chat, I get to say “just use your reveal skills” instead of the longer convoluted explanation I have to give that usually just aggravates them further.

Anet should just make it a blast finisher. Like Rangers and Thieves, Mesmers only have access to one blast finisher, so it would be nice to have more options in that regard.

Great fun on EBG over the last couple of hours defending sm from AG. It’s so much better when there’s less numbers on both sides. I think we must have had around 15-20 people each max both numbers gradually reducing as the battles went on. We were lucky enough to have a really good commander who loved a good bit of flanking. Was very funny sneaking 4 of us behind you to take out your treb in the open that wakittenting Klovan ;-) Can’t quite believe we got away with that one. I had to log out, but I guess AG eventually wore us down. Thanks to everyone involved.

I’m really not sure about this. WvW is neither balanced nor competitive enough for a reward for the server with the greatest score to be evenly remotely fair. It would basically just reward anyone who happened to be on a server with a very large WvW presence. It would also encourage more animosity from servers that are regularly stomped by others.

I’d also rather have less people care about their server’s score than more, simply because it encourages more interesting battles when people aren’t spending all their time pending ticks and trading T0 towers.

MisterPink.7943:

icey.7368:

What tower the party at might drop in not a official wvw [YaK] day …or ifs there any borderlands heating up fir us to roam about in ?

North East Tower (Dawn´s Eyrie) on Abaddon´s Mouth Borderland.

And i think, who wanna fight or GvG, will find some players and guilds there for sure.

Will there be Club-Mate?

It’s what all the cool kids in Berlin drink these days :-P

Can we have a new thread please? This one is broken.

Anyway, really fun battle for the last 3 or so hours taking a fully upgraded Bay back on our borderland. Thanks to guys from AM who stayed so we didn’t have to PvD ourselves into comas. We had pretty similar numbers for most of the siege earlier, so everything just felt kind of right. Just a shame there wasn’t a few more of you when we finally broke through to inner after all that supply draining :-P

All the best.

Meh, can’t say I’m particularly excited about this match up, but thank you to the Ranger from Abbadon that broke off from the collective and gave me a good 1v1, That Beastmaster build is a real tough build to crack, but it was a fun fight. I wish more people from Abbadon would break away from the pack and entertain me. I’m no good at 1v30s.

Whenever someone jumps on my corpse or laughs after having defeated me, I take it as a personal victory that I meant enough to that person for them to elicit an emotional response (emote). Whereas, when I defeat someone, I just walk off. After all, you’re just fodder to me.

If it’s red, it’s dead. If it’s already dead, kthxbai!

Regards

A cold-blooded killer :-P

I’d like to see key-bindable weapon sets that we can switch through when out of combat, so we don’t have to keep on going into our menus. It would be nice to have this in PvE at least.

Difficult to pin down as he could have been using a combination of that magic well and the plethora of stealth skills available to the Mesmer. Traited for Prismatic Understanding you’ve got: The Prestige (4 secs), Decoy (4 secs), Veil (6 secs) and Mass Invis (6 secs). He was obviously there to troll away, so I wouldn’t be surprised if he was using portals to revisist the Magic well and then using other stealth skills.

Gandalf would like to battle Aurora Glade and Piken Square.

Terrorsquad.2349:

5vs1 and they laugh.. But now we know who’s one of the laughers!

Now you have to hunt him down ;-)

Auesis.7301:

Not sure exactly who it was we were up against, but both Arbor and FS, you gave my little 2 warrior/1 mesmer group the most fun I’ve had in weeks! We ended up with 4 or 5 at random points when random people showed up, but holding Dreadfall Bay while outnumbered so heavily for so long – that was GREAT. Felt good knowing we had to make the whole lot of you respawn to finally overwhelm us the second time

If any of you recognise me, I was the Warrior with the Fractal GS who got extremely zealous very often and charged in to you :P

It was the most fun I’ve had in WvW in a very long time. Thank you to the guys from Arborstone for keeping the pressure on and giving us 3/4 Gandarans lots of stuff to do (and loot, never forget the loot). That fight in Bay was just awesome.

I was the sleep deprived (insomnia be kitten ed!) Mesmer from MM who stood behind the two Warriors blasting away with my pink wonder beams of death, like all good wimpy greatsword Mesmers do XD

Not really had much of an issue with retaliation since the nerf. It can still take a nice chunk out of my health at times, but nothing like it used to.

It’s a shame I can’t use Feedback on a blob and die in seconds anymore. That was always a giggle :-)

Oh an how to deal with it? Build an arrowcart instead!

Burrr this matchup is a bit of a mess. Obviously the point system is out the window (does anyone even care about points anymore?) but I hope that Arbor and FSP are still able to have fun. As other have said, there are a lot more Gandarans playing this week probably due to new matchup + new patch + ease to get map completion. There’s commanders popping up allover the place that I have never seen before, which is odd because it’s usually the same one or two commanders playing when I do.

Big shout out to the group or Arbor that had tea with us at their spawn on FSP BL on Saturday. I particularly enjoyed the part where we partied up so we could tag the annoying Gandarans that you were allowed to murder at the tea party XD

With Deception, they need to remove the big red arrow over the Mesmer’s head. It completely undermines the purpose of the skill if you’re always being told which one is the real Mesmer. Deception should also make the clone and Mesmer appear at the same time.

Saturn.6591:

Simonoly.4352:

Especially fun fighting an FSP glassy Mesmer who completely caught me off guard in Bay but then lost spectacularly to my downed state mastery :-P

Lol.

May I ask what class you are playing? ^^

Another Mesmer. When I say “lost spectacularly to my downed state mastery” I say so with my tongue pressed firmly against my cheek. I just spammed the kitten out of my downed skills and hoped for the best. The unpredictability of Deception means you have no idea what will happen when you go down as a Mesmer. This makes it most entertaining XD

I’m not really keen on this matchup. It’s great to see FSP again but, from what I’ve seen thus far, Arborstone just don’t have the numbers to really break out and bring the fight to Gandalf and FSP. It’s just not very fair and I wouldn’t be surprised if Abor are really struggling to make fun for themselves. I hope the rest of the matchup isn’t so ludicrously unbalanced as it is right now.

Did have some great fights with both Arbor and FSP in Arbor Bay inner this morning though. Especially fun fighting an FSP glassy Mesmer who completely caught me off guard in Bay but then lost spectacularly to my downed state mastery :-P

What is this madness?! I LOVE IT

Sythus.2396:

eremos.8142:

DevonCarver:

We were hoping to roll out the new matchup system for the next matchups but unfortunately we ran into a few snags. We are working hard to get everything working 100% correctly and tested and should be able to start the new matchups once we’ve checked everything. I’ll make sure to be back to let you all know as far ahead of time as I can. My apologies for the inconvenience.

Woohoo! We get to fight AG and Gandara again!

I feel so loved.. <3 But it should be a good match-up :P

CUDDLE FIGHT!!!1!!!!

I imagine Moa Morph is strong in sPvP, but it’s pretty much irrelevant in WvW. In my opinion, the 10 second transformation time is justified due to the ease of escape in WvW coupled with the 3 minute cooldown. I’ve been Moa’d twice in WvW and the first time I just ran into the portal of a tower and the second time I just fled and ran around a rock whilst the Mesmer struggled to keep up and get LOS.

Bluesavanah.8562:

All I can say about this match up is summed up by a comment I heard tonight

‘’Watch out the Borg are coming’’

Their main function is to assimilate all sources of Wexpee.

Resistance is futile.

24 hour raid?! You must be knackered. Power through guys! :-)

I got to test Into the Void a lot today in WvW. I can understand that the unpredictability of the skill activation can be irksome to those who want to react to everything in real time, but you have to look at it from the perspective of the Mesmer too. Mesmers rely on the controlled activation in order to make the skill a truly useful defensive tool outside of projectile reflection.

I was fighting against a Thief earlier who came out of nowhere with a backstab, I dodged most of the rest of his burst and he restealthed. I have no idea where the Thief is or what the Thief is going to do so I chuck down temporal curtain knowing that the Thief also has no idea when I’m going to use Into the Void. This immediately balances out the battle as we are both using skills with elements of uncertainty to try and trip each other up. Temporal Curtain is on a 20+ second cooldown and Into the Void has a range of 600. The Thief I played against obviously knew that because, when I chucked down Temporal Curtain he backed off coming out of stealth from a distance with shortbow, filling my face with projectiles. It all seemed to make sense in this encounter.

If it’s really that much of an issue for people, then maybe Temporal Curtain should change colour just before it becomes Into the Void or something. That way all the Thieves can time their dodges and kill me quicker ;-)

I don’t really agree that this is the fault of Anet. We’re not mindless drones ever attracted to shiny loot like a moth to a flame (at least I hope not). We are completely capable of shifting the dynamics of WvW to resemble something quite different……if we want to. This is already happening on some other servers with guild groups that are very much conscious of the potential for stagnation if we don’t try and make WvW more interesting for ourselves. I’m happy for people to play the way they want to, but let’s not be making excuses now.

Also, AM your golem rush was a little later than usual this morning and there was 2 less golems than yesterday. Did you glitch a couple into a wall again? Walls are hungry for golems ;-)

If you see a Mesmer drop it right on top of you, move out of the 600 range to avoid the pull. This is very easy to achieve if you’re a Thief by just shadow stepping away. It can also be negated by stability and aegis amongst other things just like all other pull attacks.

These bouncing attacks must prioritise players over clones within a certain radius of the target. It’s very frustrating seeing the Might buff of Mirror Blade wasted on a clone when there’s a friendly player at the same attack range who could actually be helped by the buff.

Typical TUP ac/balista choke point farming. The trick with this one, is to not run into the choke point that they are farming. Still, I admire your bravery….umm….suicidal tendencies. You are a fun server to fight against FSP.

This is just such a horrible matchup. 6 golems and 25 AM tearing through absolutely everything at 4 in the morning. Early morning golem rushes are about as archaic as portal bombs – I really didn’t think people still did it as it completely ruins the balance for the rest of the day. AM actually had more golems than we had active players on EBG. As soon as you try to engage any of them for an actual fight they just run away even if they outnumber you. I really don’t get that. This is the complete opposite of last week when Gandara faced Far Shiverpeaks and Abbadon’s Mouth. The difference in playstyle is startling really and I can see why Aurora Glade were pining so hard for Gandara the last couple of weeks now.

I don’t wish to moan, but last week was just so good compared to this.

Decent update. I wasn’t that bothered about having Ascended gear in WvW as the increase in stats is pretty insignificant when compared to their exotic counterparts. Saying that, more options to get stuff in game is never a bad thing. I’m glad Anet didn’t go overboard and completely undermine the effort FOTM/PvE players have to put in to get the same thing. And I’m equally glad that the Laurel Vs. badge amount for ascended gear is still high enough to not encourage too many loot kittens into WvW who will take up spaces from those who want to play WvW simply because they enjoy it. After all, the jumping puzzles on borderland still award badges.

I’m excited to see how the new matchup system works, but I fear those that get too bogged down by points and ‘winning the matchup’ won’t be happy when they get steamrolled by a server with a greater presence from initially a higher tier. Personally, I’m looking forward to perhaps coming up against a few of the old servers I used to play on ;-)

I guess stealth traps might help in this situation, but you’d need quite a few and need to be stealthed yourself so the Mesmer/Thief duo don’t see you drop it.

As for stealth as a whole, I think it would be cool to have some skills available in game that can apply a shortened version of the reveal debuff (say, 2 seconds). Stealth mechanics in GW2 are a little too harsh at present and having to explain to new players that there’s no active way to counter stealth (can’t bring a Thief/Mesmer out of stealth; exception being Shadow Refuge) is always a bit lame. It’s not until you’re much more proficient at PvP/WvW that you can truly deal with stealthy opponents. I think it would be beneficial for the state of the game to provide more logical means to deal with stealth.

The only Thief stealth skill that can be actively countered is Shadow Refuge by knocking/pulling the Thief out. This removes any previously stacked stealth and gives the Thief the reveal debuff. Other sources of stealth can’t be actively countered (i.e. you cannot force the Thief out of stealth) so you just have to come up with ways to cope with fighting against a mostly invisible opponent.

Prevention of stealth activation through dazes and stuns really helps lock down a Thief (like it does every other class) but Engineers don’t really have much access to either of those. Best bet with an Engi is to combine tool kit and bomb kit to overwhelm the Thief with AoE and play defensively with Gear Shield to avoid any initial burst. Engineers are pretty lucky because they do have access to spammable ground targetable AoE with grenade/bomb kit. Net turret can be useful too, especially when combined with Supply Crate.

Alternatively, you could just ignore them and go and find some fun elsewhere. 9 times out of 10, I ignore roaming Thieves if I’m on my own as just I can’t be bothered to play yet another game of ‘catch the invisikitten’. It was fun the first couple of times guessing where they might be and timing dodges etc etc, but now I just find it boring. I should probably roll a Thief again myself so I get to be the invisikitten and bore everyone to death ;-)

Acotje.5689:

Hey Gandara!
I just woke up and I wonder, how are the repairs going in your Garrison?
Should we come back to NE to open it, or should we open another gate?

Gandara Garrison is scary. If you get too close to it or use the waypoint, you are catapulted out of WvW and transformed into an error report.

Still can’t waypoint to Gandara garrison. Crashes to desktop a few seconds into the loading screen every time. Also happening randomly in other keeps/towers on Gandara BL. No problems on EBG.