Gawd, BB night crew have definitely been breeding over the weekend. You’re allover the place in the small hours of the morning and we just don’t have enough people to stop you from capping everything. Luckily, the few of us around have been able to bunker down in Gandara BL garrison or our keep on EB to stop the BB tidal wave. Although, one of the main reasons we’ve managed to hold a keep or garrison with ease, is due to how unorganised and bizarre the BB night crew are. It’s far too easy to funnel you guys into choke points and your siege placement is atrocious and so easy to take down. It might just be that the current BB night crew aren’t very experienced, but literally all it would take is one guy on BB to say “hey lets put our treb here, instead of here” and your score would be even higher.
AG, where on earth are you this week? Your early morning presence is as small if not smaller than ours. I miss you!
I quite like downed state and how it mixes up combat. In a 1v2 or 1v3 scenario it means I can’t just burst down each player sequentially, but instead have to tackle the group as a whole. When you down someone, you haven’t won anything until you’ve beaten an opponents downed state. If I fail to defeat a group of 3, even though I’ve downed them often, then I simply wasn’t good enough to win. I was good enough to down them, but not good enough to kill them.
I do sympathise with those that don’t like it, especially when you blow up four people with a well aimed cannonball only to watch them get back up and walk away as if I’d only been firing pillows shakes fist. But I find downed state encourages me to play in more interesting ways than I normally would, so I wouldn’t want to be without it.
@SoggyFrog – Aww no we lost the BB Garrison! I had a lot of fun taking and defending it with the 4-5 other people this morning. The funniest part was when the BB herd first broke through the north inner gate with a couple of golems but for some weird reason decided not to rush us with their superior numbers in the Lord’s room and instead hover just inside the gate whilst we picked them off one by one. I don’t think I’ve ever seen so many people melt to Mesmer feedback and traited projectile reflection before. It really was hilarious.
Yes please! The text above each player is far too long. It’s really difficult to tell how many players there really are behind a sea of red overlapping text. It’s a far too messy in its current state.
Why are you trying to dictate how everyone should play in WvW? You kept on rushing our catapults and building counter-catas, so instead of us wasting more blueprints we decided to treb the wall down. You guys actually came to the keep and destroyed one of our trebuchets on our wall which was a good move and probably the best reactive thing for you to do in your situation. WvW battles never play out how you expect because everyone is attempting to achieve and do different things. Instead of condemning entire groups of people for “not being fun” maybe you should try and empathise with your opposition and understand why the encounter played out in the way it did. After all, WvW battles rarely play out in a linear fashion. Also, calling people out for trolling and being drama queens is rude and unneeded, especially when the source of said drama originated from the accuser.
Anyway, I agree, let’s move on. Was good fun holding off the AG steam train punching through our towers in EB in the early hours of this morning. Must put up more Arrow-carts for you tomorrow :-p
LOL @ SoggyFog.. DId you just say that you left because “trebbing work had to be done.” WHat about your fail catapults? Its quite simple. the last few nights as soon as you run into any opposition(minimal mostly) you tuck tail and map hop to find that unguard door. Just say it…. youre not looking to fight your looking to cap. At least then your being honest.
Yup, the catas failed. Hence the trebs. Basic siege warfare.
Sorry I didn’t stay to sacrifice more cata blueprints to help feed your self-image as the valiant defenders. We ended up getting fights on your borderlands against FSP and AG players who were willing to do more than sit inside a tower. Counter-golem golem portal bomb for kittens and giggles, I probably won’t be trying that tactic again.
Well said. If a catapult attack is counteracted then a treb attack is the next logical step in tower offense. It’s up to the defenders of said tower to then counteract the treb attack. This is how WvW works and why all these modes of offense and defence exist.
I think they were just disappointed that we didn’t all rush in and get destroyed by their wall of balistas and instead did the clever thing and trebbed them down after identifying where all the siege was placed. After all, it’s hardly fun for us to get destroyed by a wall of siege.
It happens to me occasionally too. I think as the above poster mentioned, it’s where you’re getting caught on the terrain. I usually find it happens during WvW when I attempt to blink through a tower door that’s been smashed open. It’s generally very rare though.
Hats off to the group of AG that put up such a good defence at Redlake a little earlier. Unfortunately we couldn’t put up a very good offence as we saw this as opportunity to make progress in AG borderlands whilst the wall to lake was being trebbed. Thing is, nobody could be bothered to mount a decent assault on Redlake once the wall was down (there was only 4 or 5 of us left) so the whole encounter just sort of fizzled out.
Although, judging by the wall of balistas you erected inside (along with arrow carts), you were obviously hoping we’d all just rush in like headless chickens so you could stack up your loot bags. Hardly very fun for the few of us left, so we decided to drag the encounter out just that little bit longer, until you obviously got bored and left ;-)
Isn’t this just the initial WvW update? I’m pretty certain Anet said they would be continuing to update WvW with more and more over the coming months.
Personally, I’m completely fine with the update, as the only thing that really irked me was culling. Also, if this update encourages more PvE players to participate in WvW then great. The more people interested in WvW the more attention it will get from Anet.
You will get a ton of karma during WvW and when combined with the karma jugs from dailies you’ll be able to hop on over to Orr and get the exotic karma armour with your desired stat set relatively quickly. You can also use the badges you get from killing other players to purchase exotic invader armour in WvW. I mostly WvW myself and my armour/weapons are a mixture of karma/trade-house sets. I’m saving my badges for….something, don’t know what yet, but hopefully Anet will give me something exciting to purchase with them in a future update.
You won’t be at your best with your up-leveled character, but with 600+ hours of Structured PvP experience, I don’t think you’ll struggle to fill your bag with lots of lovely badges
again small group of nug/ small group of sprt and small group friend together. QQ ^^
nug@ take those kitten in guild
again gandarians sitting in the keep behind 5 arrow carts on every entrance + trebs and catapults. coming out to play only after 2am when everyone’s except french are a sleep. sounds familiar? maybe you should transfer to viz, sounds like match made in heaven
Sounds like effective placement of siege to me. Not sure why anyone would see this as a bad thing.
I imagine Dragon’s Tooth will soon have LOS restrictions put in place. In its current state its application doesn’t follow in-game logic so it needs fixing to improve the state of the game.
I hope they give it a buff though, as it’s far too easy to dodge.
Me: “Hai guys. I’m a Mesmer hiding in an enemy keep. Who wants a portal?”
Everyone else: “Me me me me me”
“Okay, I will jump down this cliff so that I can port right next to champion”
“Umm, that cliff is a little high, you should choose a different place to jump down”
“Nah it’s fine, I’m traited for reduced fall damage. I’ve done this before.” jumps down, dies – no chaos storm – portal timer resets
“Okay, so it appears I forgot to trait for reduced fall damage…….res?”
Both Cleansing Conflagration and Malicious Sorcery have always felt out of place to me.
Maybe swap Cleansing Conflagration with Chaotic Interruption. Next make Malicious Sorcery an adept trait and swap with Masterful Reflection which would then become a master trait so might need a buff (Distortion grants reflection and 5 secs of Swiftness – yay more Mesmer speed).
Just a suggestion. Might clean things up a little.
I’m really excited by this new culling system, but am now more concerned with the recent increase in incidences of skill lag. Been quite a few times now where I’ve just logged off because it’s not been enjoyable at all.
I think many people rolling Thieves and Mesmers will notice a subtle difference in how effective their initial out of stealth attacks will now be and generally Thieves will be a little less ridiculous to fight now.
Still, I’m going to continue to avoid Thieves like the plague as currently they seem to be drawn to me like a kittening bee to honey. Heartseeker 4K, Heartseeker 6K? Umm, no thanks, Ima gonna go find a Necromancer for a tickle fight. Toodles!
I think Compounding Celerity just needs to be reworked into something more appealing.
How about reworking it so that swiftness is granted upon shatter? Mesmers that want to utilise this trait out of combat could also, and probably already do, trait for Illusionary Persona. Therefore, you can just use your shatter skills to proc maybe a 25% increase in movement speed for 3 seconds per shatter skill use (not per illusion shattered).
I’m not sure if having it proc on shatter in a fight would be a little OP bearing in mind the Mesmers already decent in-battle mobility, but it would make travelling in WvW less painful.
There are no illusions to shatter when you are out of combat or even when your target for that illusion dies. This shatter idea does not work because of that.
Illusionary Persona (mentioned in my original post) allows you to create the shatter effect on yourself and can therefore be used out of battle when you have no illusions summoned. So you could hit all 4 of your shatters to give yourself 12 seconds of swiftness out of battle. Those that don’t trait for Illusionary Persona will only be able to reep the benefits of Compounding Celerity in-battle.
Umm, no. I love downed state. It adds an extra layer of complexity to the combat system that I really enjoy. In a 2v1 or 3v1 scenario I now have to manage my combatants as a whole instead of just bursting down each opponent in turn. It makes battles where you’re outnumbered so much more satisfying when you succeed.
Downed state is just another part of your enemy’s life. You haven’t won anything until you’ve either stomped them or depleted their downed health bar. You have to plan for how you’re going to overcome an enemy’s downed state prior to battle or, well, you’re going to have a bad time.
I don’t think I’ve ever seen or been a part of a group of Mesmers chain pulling people up and over the lip of a wall, but I do agree that all parts of a tower’s walls should function the same so you can’t be pulled off and over a lip with a single pull anywhere.
I do like that there are people coordinating pulls during sieges though to accomplish this. That’s quite cool.
That’s strange that it’s showing up as Smoke Bomb. I don’t run a very glassy build, so I think the most I’ve ever managed to crit someone with Phantasmal Rogue was for 3K (less if they’re tanky). 6K makes me think you were fighting a very glassy Mesmer, and you yourself were also a wee bit glassy perhaps. It’s supposed to do double damage from behind, so if timed correctly, it’s great for downing an opponent who is going in for the stomp, if they’re low on health. It hardy ever allows me to actually kill my opponent though because my downed health is so much lower than theirs when they go into a downed state.
It’s a decent downed skill, but I much prefer my Engi Booby Trap for awesome-sauce AoE knockback. If only my Engi had as good a downed survivability as my Mesmer then I’d be happy as larry :-D
I think Compounding Celerity just needs to be reworked into something more appealing.
How about reworking it so that swiftness is granted upon shatter? Mesmers that want to utilise this trait out of combat could also, and probably already do, trait for Illusionary Persona. Therefore, you can just use your shatter skills to proc maybe a 25% increase in movement speed for 3 seconds per shatter skill use (not per illusion shattered).
I’m not sure if having it proc on shatter in a fight would be a little OP bearing in mind the Mesmers already decent in-battle mobility, but it would make travelling in WvW less painful.
Well as far as I tell, iBerserker is no longer a whirl finisher, so I think it’s about time that Mind Stab (or whatever its called later this month) becomes the blast finisher it was always meant to be. It would make it so much more viable without removing the self-root risk.
On numerous occasions I’ve been fighting Thieves (or Mesmers) with a decent stealth uptime and I’ve been swinging my sword around trying to get lucky hits but thinking I’ve done nothing. Suddenly I would have a downed Thief or Mesmer appear at my feet where my attacks had actually landed.
So stealth need a nerf so you can down a thief/mesmer not only in numerous occasion, but always? >.<
Haha. Nice try, but not quite the sentiment intended when you bear in mind the context of the rest of my post. This isn’t about establishing a straight up nerf for stealth, but making it more interesting and ultimately more rewarding for everyone combating it.
Anyway, this thread is healthy and there’s been some decent suggestions and arguments above.
Cliffs are sexist/OP/sexist. I’d like to see them removed or at least made gender neutral.
In other news…….I like traiting for reduced fall damage and having people chase me off cliffs. Sometimes it works beautifully and I have to stop playing for a few minutes due to all the rampant laughter.
Think they went abit to fare, 15 would be better and then count Golem as 5players so 3golem = yellow swords.
This.
I really think there should be swords specific for golems. If there’s, say, more than 3 golems banging at a gate, golem swords should appear. As it stands, it’s far to easy to quickly plonk 8 golems at a gate (using portals) and then swiftly obliterate the gate (using timewarp). In an ideal WvW we’d have people guarding everything, so we wouldn’t need any swords. But in reality, nobody wants to be on guard duty, especially when there’s little to no reward for doing so.
There should be lots and lots of swords appearing to encourage as much PvP and as little PvD as possible.
But why do you want to nerf stealth? It’s the only mechanic thieves have, with it nerfed they will be useless. You want thieves to get nerfed because they whoop your butts in pvp, but have in mind any change you apply to that class with affect pve aspect of the game as well.
No no no. I don’t want to see stealth massively nerfed. I just want it to be made more interesting for the person combating it. This doesn’t just affect Thieves, this affects all of us due to skills like shadow refuge, mas invis and veil. If there was some sort of visual effect when a person in stealth takes damage then it allows all of us to prepare for an attack from an invisible opponent. It means we can react in intelligent ways to an incoming attack from stealth and it also means stealth must be used in accordance with good spacial awareness. Most solo thieves would not be affected by a change like this because most solo thieves will be kiting outside of their opponents attack range before jumping in for an attack. But, if the thief is careless and I land lots of attacks from a melee weapon whilst they are in stealth, then they deserve to be ‘noticed’ without the use of my damage channel. And just make mobs not react to the visual effect when taking damage in stealth in PvE, if it’s really an issue.
I just feel like stealth as it stands now feels half-baked and isn’t as fun to deal with as it could be.
I’d be fine with something VERY subtle, like a faint sound effect.
A faint sound effect would be cool, but I think an accompanying visual effect would help for all those times when the sound bugs out in WvW or when some sound effects are drowned out by others.
I’d want to see a very subtle visual effect though. Something that’s easily missed if you’re not looking out for it and definitely not a sort of “here I am, come kill me” partial reveal.
I wouldn’t like to see a nerf to stealth per se, just something to make it that little bit more fun to fight against. If you’re going to make me fight invisible players, at least try and make it interesting. For example, fighting another Mesmer with full clone deployment can be a real mind kitten at times, but at least I get to play a game of “spot the Mesmer” to make it fun to combat. With stealth there’s nothing like that, it’s basically swing your weapon around like a well-armed and very violent headless chicken, hoping your attacks are landing.
I can’t be the only one who finds swinging their weapon around attacking thin air to be a really rather rubbish way to play the game.
One of the major issues I have with stealth currently, is the complete lack of feedback when successfully landing a hit on an invisible opponent. It’s all fine and good swinging your weapon around when your enemy has turned themselves invisible, but it’s also incredibly unsatisfying attacking thin air with no indication as to whether or not your attacks are doing anything.
On numerous occasions I’ve been fighting Thieves (or Mesmers) with a decent stealth uptime and I’ve been swinging my sword around trying to get lucky hits but thinking I’ve done nothing. Suddenly I would have a downed Thief or Mesmer appear at my feet where my attacks had actually landed. It’s not a particularly fun way to engage in battle and I think the distinct lack of visual clues that your hitting a stealthed opponent is what’s really lacking.
For that reason, I suggest the addition of a visual clue for when an attack lands on a stealthed opponent. This will be good for two reasons: 1) it allows people to effectively follow a breadcrumb trail to a stealthed opponent, rewarding those who persist in their efforts to route out their invisible foe and 2) stealth would therefore require much more finesse to use correctly and would need to be accompanied by decent evasion and spacial awareness in order to not reveal ones location.
I’ve actually quite enjoyed this last week against Kodash and AR. The fact they have such high server activity seemingly all the time, means its very easy to find people to fight and sieges to be involved with. I hate PvDing, so it’s been nice almost always having a decent sized Kodash presence when I’ve been involved in the taking of a tower. Getting double teamed by both Kodash and AR yesterday afternoon on Gandara BL was a nice challenge
;-)
Decoy is still working the same for me now. Mobs still attack my clones when I stealth and when the stealth ends, agro is still on my clones if they are haven’t been destroyed. I like the way stealth works now, it makes much more sense and means I can stealth mid-way through battle without the risk of mob reset. Stealth is now a method of creating a temporary agro lull instead of removing it entirely. It also makes sense that enemies would at least either wait for you to de-stealth or search for you instead of acting like you were never there.
I like what this update with the orange swords is trying to do, but I think it should be lowered further to maybe 10-15 people. I’ve always really liked looking at the map and seeing orange swords popping up all over the place – it was kind of exciting and a great indicator of where the action was without having to spam chat for directions.
The only downside to playing as a Charr or Norn is that it’s that little bit easier for your opponent to tell what attack you’re channelling from character animations than it is if you play as an Asura. But I don’t think the disparity in character model size creates that much of an issue otherwise.
I tend to agree that stealth needs some rebalancing. As it stands I’m finding it far too easy running rings around my opponents whilst dishing out decent amounts of damage as my Mesmer. The problem is, even if my opponents are actually managing to hit me, there’s no feedback on any of those hits and there’s nothing satisfying about swinging your weapons around attacking thin air. Maybe there should be a partial reveal when you land a hit on an opponent in stealth? This way using stealth requires more finesse. I don’t think stealth should drop when hit, but I think there should definitely be more feedback and ‘reward’ for players who successfully land hits on a stealthed opponent.
Well surely the enemy server is also going to be lower on numbers participating in WvW activities, because they also have players involved in this duel too. I don’t think you’re at any particular disadvantage.
There’s a problem with the doylak guards? I always thought that capping doylaks was obviously an event designed to allow solo players who maybe aren’t confident enough to try soloing a camp and don’t want to be limited to sentinels, an opportunity to contribute and generally just get involved (hence the relative ease with which they can be dispatched). I’d rather that doylaks were easy prey even with the additional guards, than having new less experienced players feeling like they have to assimilate into the zerg if they are to contribute. Doylak guards do prevent doylak deaths due to PvE mobs, so they do have a useful function.
I’ve met many people who have told me they rolled sPvP/WvW Asura Mesmers, simply because of the advantages of having a smaller character model. It’s just that little bit more difficult to tell what skill the Asura is channeling, so I can’t react in the same way I do with other species. This is particularly annoying when fighting Mesmers, because things like Moa Morph and illusionary beserker are much harder to avoid. It does serve to undermine the dodge mechanic a bit, especially when you’re a player who puts time and effort into reacting correctly to enemy behaviour.
So it’s a bit lame that simply your choice of race can cause such a disparity like this but I don’t think it’s particularly damaging to the overall balance of the game quite yet. I really don’t see everyone suddenly rolling Asura, because I imagine the majority of people base their race choice on personal aesthetic preferences and not on what gives them that edge in battle.
It depends what you’re looking for OP. My main character since release has been a Mesmer because I love the non-traditional style of fighting it entails. Mesmers have some really fun and interesting utilities to mess around with such as portal, feedback and blink., that I think you’d enjoy messing around with. They’re probably best in smaller battles where the confusion caused by multiple clone deployment can really shine, but with elites such as Timewarp and mass invisibility you can also add a lot to a zerg force.
@Too Frisky – I’m hitting my head against the keyboard and weirdly I’m not getting any kills. It’s almost as if WvW is full of many competent individuals playing many different classes, who are more than capable of killing Mesmers.
You’re obviously having trouble fighting this particular class. Best thing you can do, is ask your fellow Necromancers how to best deal with the Mesmer. I can guarantee you that there will be many people rolling Necromancers who have little trouble with Mesmers. I’ve fought loads of Necromancers who were more than capable of wiping the floor with my Mesmer. And I’m sure you’re just as capable as them.
As it stands, the Mesmer class is quite well balanced now, especially after the nerf to confusion stacking with the trident.
So, that was basically an argument for lowering WvW confusion damage to sPvP levels.
Yes and no. I’m not really arguing either way to be honest. I’m just discussing confusion as it stands now. It’s good to mull these things over before screaming “nerf” or “L2P”.
When another Mesmer manages to stack loads of confusion on me I just use a condition removal skill and then swiftly murder them. To rack up a significantly large stack of confusion requires quite a lot of effort, timing and cooldowns. If a confusion Mesmer blows all their confusion cooldowns on me and they only clock one tick of damage (me using condition removal once) then they’re main damage source is out of the question and the fight is tipped in my favour.
And sure, you take some damage when you use the condition removal skill, but then I would also take some damage from bleeds, poison or burning before I set off my condition removal for them. So to me it’s just another condition to remove.
Whether or not it does too much damage, well, I don’t know. I’ve run confusion Mesmer builds in sPvP too and it was just as effective as in WvW. In fact it’s much easier to stack confusion in sPvP as a Mesmer, because battles are more controlled and intimate so it’s not as difficult to hit your opponents with all those glamour fields. I don’t think reducing the damage output of confusion will really help those players that don’t run with condition removal or those players that take any notice of the conditions that have been applied to them.
How on earth did you account for every person on each map? How do you know there weren’t some people doing jump puzzles or running around more secluded areas of a map before you started counting?
I would like to know how you came up with that number please. Otherwise this is just scaremongering.
The Elementalist skill Dragon’s Tooth really needs to have the same LOS rules that have been applied to just about everything else. On numerous occasions in WvW I’ve witnessed Siege that is off-set behind a keep wall being destroyed by Elementalists spamming this skill.
The worst case of this I have seen is in the Green Keep in the Eternal Borderlands. If you destroy the first south-west gate and get into the space beneath the two oil pots you can target and destroy every piece of siege that is above or off-set behind the gate.
It’s not particularly fair to have other skills on both the Elementalist and other classes subjected to LOS limitations and not this one. It’s also deeply unsatisfying watching all your siege being destroyed by an enemy that is essentially behind a wall and out of sight.
I’d recommend either Asura or Sylvari. Radiation field is great for that little bit of extra flavour in a condition damage build. However, if you’re mostly PvE, Take Root is a great elite for ultimate mob distraction (5 seed turrets + 3 illusions) and has saved my neck on a few occasions.
I found one particular early story mission for my Sylvari Mesmer quite difficult at first, but then I just went away and levelled up a bit so I could drop some points into various trait lines as desired and acquired some new equipment and I breezed right through it. I actually think the personal story difficulty is pretty tight really with only the odd occurrence of something I’d consider unreasonable. At times it seemed to feel more like a personal test to prove how much I had learnt from the thousands of other dynamic events, dungeons and other activities I had participated in.
He’s obviously just taking a moment to photosynthesise. Just chuck a bucket of water over him and breathe on him a little and I’m sure he will have the energy to move once again.
