Guild Wars 2

Even when they fix arrow cart retaliation damage, I think you’ll find that arrowcarting a stack of 25 people is spreading the damage too thin.

As far as I know, arrowcarts are limited to 5 people per attack just like everything else. They do multiple overlapping circles so you get a lot of numbers but there are people standing in that pile not getting hit because of the AE limitation.

And even disregarding that, arrow cart damage isn’t THAT high. With my level 80 engineer, I intentionally stand in arrow cart rains with retaliation running. Light field + multiple blasts gives me about 14 seconds of retaliation, plus I get another 10 seconds from my elixir B. I run out of retaliation before I run out of health. (Granted, 5 arrow carts would be another story but presently they all die to retaliation anyway. “No ETA” on that fix, so it could be like this until 2013 for all we know.)

An idea so crazy, it just might work!

Although I think an easier alternative would be to just display queue times on all servers. Perhaps there could even be an informative pop-up.

Like Microsoft’s old “Clippy”.

“Hello! It looks like you are trying to PLAY A WVW MATCH WITH A 4 HOUR QUEUE. Did you know that BORLIS PASS has no queue? [TAKE ME TO THE TRANSFER SCREEN]”

I think a lot of people simply lack the information they need. I think more people would transfer if they understood that they could, and that there were places to go with no queues. I mean WE all know this, but WE read forums. What percentage of the GW2 population reads these forums? 10%? 4%? Less?

Under current game mechanics, zerging is an exploit — an abuse of faulty game design.

Area-effect damage can only hit 5 people at a time. If you stack 25 people on a door, it’s virtually impossible to kill anyone. As the various AE attacks rain down, they keep picking 5 different people, spreading the damage out and giving everyone in the stack more of a chance to heal themselves or, at the very least, get out of the rain. So in this way, stacking 25 people on a door is an intentional exploit of a bad game mechanic.

Along similar lines, retaliation is a mechanic that most classes have no counter against. If you stack 25 people on a door and get most of them running retaliation, I’ll kill myself if I stack too much AE on you. Even though I can only hit 5 of you, every hit of a meteor or every tick of a flamethrower or every tick of a damage-over-time ability sends ~340 damage times 5 back to me. With my flamethower I can hit each of you for about 2000 damage and I will take about 17,000 damage in return (10 ticks of flame times 340 retaliation damage times 5 people).

Therefore, zerging is an exploit.

Ban all zergs! (or fix game mechanics….if you want to get extreme)

Responding to Click’s points:

Queue times —
This is your fault, not Arenanet’s. There are servers with low queues. The only thing Arenanet is doing wrong here is not providing information. There may be people sitting in hours long queues who don’t realize that with about 3 button clicks, they could be on another server playing WvW right now with no wait. But YOU read the forums, so you must already know this. If you’re in a queue, it’s your own stubborn fault.

The management at the grocery store can open more registers, but they can’t force you to change lanes. If you want to stand in line behind the three old ladies with packed carts while ignoring the empty lane, whose fault is that?

Zerg load times —
This one is a mystery and I’d like to see Arenanet commend on it. How did DAOC and Planetside, which supported even more people in even tighter spaces, avoid this issue? Is it a graphical issue or a network issue? Can they fix it? Will they?

Zerg vs Zerg —
This problem can be largely solved by removing “retaliation” from the game. 5 people can’t do much to slow down 20 people banging on the door because of retaliation damage (and because AE can only hit 5 people at a time anyway). Under the current design, stacking 20 people on the door is an effective exploit of game mechanics.

Low levels in WvW —
Heartily disagree. Part of the reason I quit DAOC was because I got tired of my main character and there was no way I was going to level a new class to 40 before entering RvR again. Ergo, part of the appeal of GW2 is that I can start a new class and enter WvW at level 2. This is a huge win and must be kept.

Guild claiming —
I agree. Guilds with buffs should be able to overwrite the claiming of guilds without buffs. I’m tired of seeing major structures claimed by single-person “guilds” who just wanted to show off their ‘waving beaver’ flag while I’m sitting on Art of War V buffs that I can’t put anywhere.

Grace period for disconnects —
I agree. You should have a place reserved in WvW for at least 2 minutes after a disconnect/crash.

Cheating —
This should be a high priority for Arenanet. I have personally seen EXTREMELY blatant cheating in PvE. Teleport hacks clearly exist. I’ve seen video of speed hackers in WvW and screenshots of flying people in WvW. If Arenanet can’t crack down on this fast, GW2 could end up like APB (that game that went bankrupt and everyone at the company lost their job because most players quit because cheating was so rampant that it wasn’t fun to play).

Reasons to compete in WvW —
I kind of disagree here. Either it’s fun or it’s not fun. If it’s fun, why do you need personal or guild rankings? If it’s not fun, I don’t see where personal or guild rankings will somehow make it fun. If anything, I worry that WvW has too much incentive to it and it’s attracting farmers rather than people who enjoy WvW.

In DAOC, you could hear about a keep being attacked while you were in PvE and you’d have enough time to run out of PvE and all the way to the keep while it was still being attacked.

In GW2, you have less than 5 minutes. I’m pretty sure 20 unopposed people could sack a fully upgraded Stonemist Castle in 5 minutes without doing anything special. Consequently, once a team is outmanned, the time it takes to lose the entire map is VERY small.

In the current matchup, for example, my server is dominating. The other servers can push out in prime time and grab a few things but later on we’ll outnumber them again and their holdings will collapse in minutes, regardless of upgrades. Once you can bring about 20 more people to a fight than the other team can bring, you’re probably 30 minutes away from owning everything.

Another issue is “AE can only hit 5 targets”.

Why is that?

In DAOC, AE could hit everyone. One defender inside a keep could yell “SURPRISE!” and AE all 20 people at the door, potentially killing them all. GW2 prevents this and I’m not real clear on why.

Also, in DAOC, rams were expensive. You didn’t build 3 of them if you could possibly help it.

AE limited to 5 targets + retaliation damage + cheap rams = power to the zerg.

These all must seem like frivolous little details, but I think it’s the #1 reason we see bad balance happening so dramatically across so many matchups. In DAOC, having 15 more people present didn’t give you an automatic or quick victory. In GW2, because of these 3 things, it does.

Planetside and DAOC didn’t, that I recall, have as much problem with mismatches as GW2 is having.

Why is that?

DAOC
My theory here is that while DAOC did, actually, tend to have some bad matches but I think they were mitigated somewhat but the fact that NPCs were a lot more deadly and keeps were less of a pushover to take. This results in what I like to call “variable resistance” — a vital component of “realm vs realm” style PvP. As players begin to get outnumbered and begin to fall back to their keeps, the help from the NPC defenders and the keep itself starts to mount up to more and more resistance.

In GW2, that doesn’t happen because the NPCs are all pushovers. Even Supervisors with “immunity” go down pretty fast in the face of the zerg, and fully upgraded guards don’t even register as a speed bump in the face of 30 players. 30 players can steamroll a fully upgraded Keep in about….what?….5 minutes? The NPCs might as well not be there so unless at least 15 player defenders show up, those 30 players won’t even be slowed down. (Particularly true with retaliation damage eliminating the usefulness of defender AE on the door.)

I think GW2 would benefit from stronger doors, stronger guards, BETTER guards (more archers, more AE) more expensive rams (in terms of supply cost if not cash cost) and a serious rethinking of retaliation mechanics.

Outta time. Someone else talk about Planetside until I get back!

Trikk.4685:

Please don’t tell him that he needs a guild when there’s literally no way to join WvW in an organized fashion. Unless you’re in a guild with 100+ players, the chances that you will meet a guildie inside WvW is extremely low. Even when we all queue up at once, rarely does it let more than a handful of players inside in the span of most people’s gaming hours.

wat

Sounds like you play on an overcrowded server. Why not transfer your guild to Borlis Pass or Ferguson’s Crossing or similar?

My guild plays together every night because rather than try to pick the winningest server to play on, we picked one with low queue times. We typically wait 0-15 minutes to get in. It’s unusual for anyone to spend 30 minutes waiting. There are still several servers with no queue what-so-ever.

1+ hour queues and “winning”
OR
short/no queues and not winning

Take your pick.

Personally, I have no idea why anyone chooses the top one. So your server sucks at WvW. At least you can play. The only thing worse than being camped at your spawn is not being able to play because every world has a 1-hour+ queue.

My level 80 engineer in WvW with a mix of rare and exotic gear —
1798 power
1747 precision
1603 toughness
1753 vitality
2715 attack
44% crit chance
2649 armor
23452 health

My level 8 guardian in WvW with utter rubbish gear:
1534 power
1324 precision
1345 toughness
1554 vitality
2531 attack
23% crit
2185 armor
17185 health

It’s not like my level 8 can’t hit people.

Just as a test, I added a helm with 3 power and my power went up to 1596. So “3” turned into “62”. If I actually bought the very best gear I could find for level 8, I’d probably get my stats looking a lot more like my engineer’s, if not better.

So basically, it’s not as bad as you seem to think. Yes, you can get creamed in seconds under the right conditions. Happens to level 80s in full exotic gear, too.

Mainly it should be changed because the current method is just silly.

Treb hits. Wall down.
I whack it once with my hammer. Wall up.
Treb hits. Wall down.
I whack it once with my hammer. Wall up.

Up, down, up, down. It looks ridiculous and doesn’t really accomplish much.

The wall should just stay down until it gets to 10% repaired or whatever, just to stop it from changing states so fast.

I agree.

Guild tax is the most fair means of collecting money, and WvW burns up a ton of money.

DEFENSE IS THE BEST XP! (and karma and money)

The defense event cycles. Every cycle, the enemy must do damage to a gate or wall and you must either help kill 1 enemy or you must repair something.

If this condition is met, you will get at least a bronze for that defense tick.

In a nasty defense where your team is barely holding out, you get tick after tick after tick of XP. It’s actually the #1 way to level. Faster than PvE. Faster than offense. If you could arrange this condition to happen all the time, you’d be level 80 in a few days.

What actually is terrible for XP is to be on the other side of this fight — attacking a defended enemy keep where you just can’t quite seal the deal. There’s very little XP for banging on walls or killing defenders. Offense MUST capture the structure to get mission success rewards.

So it’s an interesting dynamic. Offense wants to cap-cap-cap-cap as fast as possible. Defense wants to find one good place to make a stand and do so, preferably for several hours.

So you want credit for exploring the ENTIRE game.
But you don’t want to explore the entire game.
You only want to explore the parts of it that you like.
I’m sorry, there is no “just the parts you like” badge.

Incidentally, I have credit for exploring 100% of the real-life world.

(But only for the parts I like. I mean, who wants to explore Madagascar? There’s snakes and spiders and stuff there. I didn’t think it was fair to make me go there to get a “100% earth explored” badge.)

The only design flaw I see is failure in the queue systems: broken queues making some people wait too long even in a short queue; lack of information on which server has a queue; lack of information on which worlds within a server have a queue; lack of information over our place in the queue.

Arenenet holds some foreseeable blame here too. All of their “stress tests” were held during business hours. I doubt they got as much stress as they needed. BWE’s were the better test but that was only 3 days here and there.

They probably could have seen a lot more issues if they’d let beta run for just 1 week straight at any point.

Samfisher.7942:

Please turn off transfers TO HoD… 2 FULL guilds just transferred from Borlis Pass and Kaineng yesterday…

Haha! Suckers!

All the people I know who went hunting for a “winning server” were there maybe 2-3 days before they gave up on the queues and left.

Syphen.1980:

I really hope this change only affects retaliation and no other abilities like reflect skills for projectiles otherwise stacking seige in one place will make it imposible to take.

Disagree. You’ll just have to think about it more and do something other than “rush in”.

Mass stealth, mass speed, run in, kill the operators. Guardians can teleport 1200 range to target and then bat them away so that’s about as close as they need to sneak in.

Massed siege defending the walls of a tower or keep will be beaten by well place trebuchets. The best arrow carts can also be hit by wide-area AE from the ground (a fully protected arrow cart won’t be able to see enough ground to be effective).

There are plenty of counters available and in beta, they got some use. Once everyone learned about retaliation, all siege tactics and counter-tactics went out the window because the only thing you need is retaliation.

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Lots of big zerg guilds are going to be in for a shock when this change happens.

It’s even less fun from the perspective of Ehmry. Once we’ve taken the whole map, I just log off because spawn camping is unrewarding and uninteresting.

Ehmry is kind of odd because I think we do well during prime time. We’re ranked low because most servers crush us in the night. I log off and we’re #1; I log in the next day and we have nothing. In this case we finally found two servers that we can also beat at night. :-p

Incidentally, while it sucks to have nothing, it sucks more to have everything. When you own everything there are no real options and there’s nothing to do. When you own nothing, at least you have a chance to coordinate with other guilds, pick 1 map and all rush something to take it over and camp in there and farm some defense XP.

That will work better when they fix the problem with retaliation killing arrow carts. Right now 20 people can’t defend against 50. Once arrow carts stop taking retaliation, that’ll change.

I’m sitting in the level 80 PvE zone right now watching 5 bots who don’t appear to run anywhere.

The teleport.

Anytime they move it’s just “poof”, gone and “poof” reappear somewhere else. By “poof” I don’t mean there’s literally an animation or effect for it, but rather, they simply are not where they were and they appear somewhere else, within range of what they want to attack. There is no skill or running involved.

I reported them all for botting but it’s clear that there is a movement cheat available which they are taking full advantage of.

The fix is coming! No eta… Personally hoping to see it before next match, though.

Disagree. Both the operator and the engine should be immune. Otherwise operating an arrow cart will be a form of suicide (as it is for the cart now).

Thagyr.4136:

Despite all these claims no one has yet to take a screenshot.

There have been numerous screenshots as well as at least one video (that I saw). I believe devs have stated that they are looking into it.

There is a big problem, I think, that there’s no way to report enemies. I would gladly report any teammate I saw doing this but I bet a lot of players would overlook a cheating teammate and let the report slide.

Hopefully Arenanet can come up with a way to systematically track it. The server must have some idea of how fast a player should be moving, and at what altitude, and it should be easy enough to auto-flag if not auto-ban.

Someone has to play against the two unpopulated servers. There is no way to fix that short of FORCING player to move there.

If I had a 300-man guild on a server with 3 hour queues, I’d move to Kaineng in a heartbeat. (As it is, I have a 115-man guild on a server with 15 minute queues, so I’m pretty happy with that.)

Why people insist on staying in these long queues, I have no idea. Makes no sense at all. The rewards for “winning” are minuscule compared to the rewards for fighting.

This is why it’s absolutely critical for Arenanet to remove retaliation damage from arrow carts.

May sound flippant, but arrow carts are what allows 5 people to hold a tower against 30 for a fair amount of time. Currently, 30 people show up, bang on the door, and there’s nothing that can be done to slow them down. Retaliation wipes out arrow carts and none of the other siege is terribly viable for defense. (“Ballista Surprise” inside the door is good for a laugh but only works the first time.)

Siege engines not taking retaliation damage will change the face of the game more than I think anyone appreciates. It will make it far more viable for a down-on-their-luck team to take something and hold it for more than 5 minutes. With no retaliation damage, 5 arrow carts creates a massacre.

I just want to re-iterate that this is one of the most important and badly needed changes needed to help get WvW back in balance (displaying WvW zone populations is the other badly needed change).

Without this fix, zergs roam wild and free.

The first server to get even a mild population advantage will steamroll the others because without effective siege, there’s nothing to stop them.

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WvW is broken because siege is broken.
Siege is broken because of retaliation damage.

Autoloot: yes please.

Downed state: somewhat disagree. The only change I would like to see is making the resurrection rate slower. As it stands, 1 person can often raise a downed person back up faster than a cannon can kill either of them. That’s a little nuts. Keep the health and resists but make the resurrection process much slower.

Fall damage: Disagree. Keep it as-is. The reason it kills you is that otherwise you could just ignore falling distances. You would always be able to get yourself back up at the bottom, no harm done. Personally, I enjoy watching people leap to their deaths to avoid me. I still get a bag!

Siege engines: half agree. They should be slowly mobile. I would not nerf their ROF unless you intend to increase their shot damage in order to maintain their DPS. As it is, at level 80 I can stand in an arrow cart rain for a good long while. (I often do this with Retaliation running just to kill the arrow cart.) Also, ballista are pretty easy to avoid once you know they’re there. Siege tactics can get complicated. Don’t nerf them into simplicity.

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Your zerg issues, in fact, would go away if you made better use of siege engines (and if Arenanet will hurry up and make siege engines immune to retaliation, as promised).

Siege engines are anti-zerg. 10 people can beat 30 with proper use of siege. Or they will, once Arenanet fixes the retaliation problem.

Maybe have a supply depot that only functions when your team owns nothing on the map. If you own 1 thing anywhere, the depot does nothing. If you have nothing else on the map, it will pop 10 supply every 30 seconds to a maximum of 50 supply.

On the borderlands, your team has easy, back-door access to supply camps but Eternal Battlegrounds can be REALLY had to stage a comeback in because there’s no back door to the supply camps that doesn’t make you run past a tower.

Probably a bug, but I’ve noticed that engineer turrets seem to “see” stealthed thieves. My net turret will magically net something invisible near me, then my rocket turret shoots it, then I flamethrower the area.

But just in general I think the secret is to be quick on the cripple conditions and then use a lot of AE. I imagine that escaping the wide-angle attack of a Guardian staff’s #1 ability would be difficult, as it’s even more effective than the flamethrower for doing wide area cone attacks. (I’d bet you had a guardian, and I’d bet they were trying to hit him with a hammer instead of the ultra-wide-angle staff…)

There must be an easy way to see what your team’s population currently is in each WvW map (ideally, this would also show the queue, but population display is priority).

This allows all players to quickly and easily assess where their efforts may best be spent.

Red Borderland: 20% full
Blue Borderland: 40% full
Green Borderland: 15% full
Eternal Battleground: 20% full

Currently, people just pick where they want to go more or less at random, and you end up with an example like the above. The team could actually fill one world to 95% capacity but there’s no way to know this or effectively communicate it. They could be having fun in 1 zone rather than being crushed in 4.

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Ideally, this information should also be available from world selection. People looking to transfer should be able to see what worlds are full and what worlds aren’t. Ideally, queue depth would also be displayed but just seeing current population levels would be an immense help.

Arenenet, you simply aren’t giving us the information we need to make good decisions. You expect players to arrive at good, informed decisions presumably because we are psychic technomagicians, able to glean this information from the vibrations of your servers.

(We are not psychic technomagicians.)

They’ll be back, I bet.

At some point people are going to realize that “being able to play” is going to be better than “watching the score go up while sitting in a 3-hour queue”.

Ehmry – Ferguson – Borlis is a good matchup right now and I’m willing to bet queues are low on all 3. You people waiting in queues: transfer to one of these servers and come play!

Even at 80 these things are expensive, especially given the high rate of turnover. Good luck buying a 1 gold upgrade and having it still be there tomorrow.

I agree that there should be a way to split costs. Guilds should be able to set a tax, at least, to help keep contribution fair among its own members, but I also just think the prices are too high for how short lived these things are. I mean yeah, I can afford 20 silver for a supply camp upgrade but I can’t afford to do that 20 times a day, which is about how often supply camps turn over.

Retaliation feels like a broken mechanic.

Only 2 classes in the game seem to have any real counter for it. As an engineer, there is nothing I can do about it except “shoot less”. As a flamethrower build, retaliation renders me fairly useless. If even 1 enemy has retaliation, the flamethrower is as good as suicide, dealing about as much damage to me as I do to a single opponent (if I hit 5 opponents, it is literal suicide!)

I can switch to pistol or rifle but that’s really my only option — “shoot less”.

Confusion is similar to retaliation but there are more ways of dealing with it. Most classes seem to have methods of clearing conditions from themselves. But engineers have no way of removing a boon from an enemy.

(And before you say “wait for it to wear off”, I can show you a screenshot of someone in WvW with a 2 hour retaliation boon. You can do crazy stacking if you take the time to arrange it.)

In my opinion, Retaliation should simply be changed to a boon that causes Confusion in enemies when they hit you. There are more good ways of dealing with conditions on friendlies than boons on enemies. Retaliation is a “no skill” ability because there is no skillful method of handling it.

Sanctum just has more non-prime-time players, particularly in the Euro prime time area. I don’t think Ehmry + Darkhaven together can match their numbers 24/7.

We do well against them in prime time though. IIRC, Ehmry was winning until something like 6am eastern.

Facing the same thing now with Sorrow’s Furnace. Did well against them during the day but overnight they have a Zerg Horde that shows up around 4am and we just don’t have their numbers.

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The update to make arrow carts immune to retaliation will do a lot to resolve these problems, though. Hopefully they can patch that sooner rather than later. 3 people on arrow carts can do a lot to slow down a late-night zerg from taking over the whole map in an hour.

Yeah, I stopped buying the last 2 upgrades for supply camps. They do help against a small group but when 20 people roll through, those two upgrades aren’t even a speedbump. Everything dies in literally about 10 seconds, so what’s the point?

NPCs in general should probably be more “zerg resistant”. More AE attacks. They seem to have ability sets aimed to deal with individuals but you don’t generally get 1 person trying to take a supply camp. (And the supervisor is basically a joke.)

I agree.

Or at the very LEAST, make the grub a useful part of WvW. If your team beats the grub, it should go ravage whoever owns Stonemist or something.

As it is, whatever team starts in the southeast corner is destined to lose because that’s where the the grub is and its primary purpose appears to be to tie up 30 newbies for about 20 minutes, by which time your team will have lost everything.

Fugly.5287:

One gold cost is ridiculous.

1.6g cost 800 gems which cost $10. Either pay up or farm blood, bones, or scales for two hours to afford a golem.

WvW is pay to win

lolz?

Like I said, golems have a very narrow use. Go stomping up the Stonemist lord room with 10 golems and the only result will be you’re out 10 gold as the overlooking ballistas wipe you out before 3/4ths of you can even get in 1 swing on the lord. Their hit points melt away super fast once attacked. They are completely vulnerable on the road — if their escort gets pushed back, the golems are all dead.

The only thing they’re good for is sneak attacks on back doors where nobody is looking and you just need to break it fast. You could accomplish the same thing with rams, with the main limitation of rams being that you would end up needing more supply to get through a double-door keep quickly.

Basically, as an avid WvW player, I almost never want to use a golem. If they cost 20 silver I would still rarely use one. They’re kind of a waste because they just get mowed down if the enemy team sees them coming.

Defense XP:
You must contribute to the kill of an enemy OR you must repair a wall or door AND the enemy must do damage to a wall or door. So fighting out in the field is worth almost no XP while a proper defense can reward a great deal of XP.

Offensive XP, of course, you just have to capture the thing. Running around with a small group flipping supply camps is easy and popular. Kill dolyaks along the way.

You can also kill the solo guards and flip NPC camps (quaggans, ogres, dredge, etc).

I went from 2-80 in WvW (about 98% of my XP was from WvW. I only went into PvE to farm up some skill points). Basically, WvW is good XP if you do it right.

If you’re not getting XP then you’re probably doing something wrong. (If your team has pushed both other teams completely off the map then what you are doing wrong is playing on the wrong server…)

It does need a little work.

Going from “downed” to “up” is too fast in-combat. The rate should be halved from the current value, I think.

The underwater system is truly awful. I always dive into the water if I can because I know it’s so hard to finish off an underwater player. There’s something with water where you can flip between surface swimming and below-surface and keep getting “invulnerable”, too, making it nearly impossible to finish anyone.

1) Defending NPC camps. There’s no reward for it but if you don’t do it, they are easily neutralized — especially the quaggan nodes. Takes 5 minutes to cap them and 30 seconds to destroy them.

2) Defending things in general. There’s no crafting station, no trader, really nothing to do but if you aren’t already inside when the attack starts, you might not get there in time. Un-reinforced gates drop SO FAST and lords only survive for about 8 seconds against 30 players so you have to be inside when the attack starts if you want a chance to delay them.

3) Defending supply camps. No walls. Pricey upgrades that don’t do anything to slow down 30 players. No really good place to stand and defend. Defending supply camps is probably the single most important thing to do but nobody does it because they are basically indefensible (with the exception of Pangloss…)

As I write this I’m “defending” a quaggan camp. I can’t repair the power node so it’ll eventually go down no matter what I do. It’s a great thing to do because I’m sure the lightning is messing up the enemy keep defenses as I type but, yeah, here I am on forums because I’m mostly just sitting here watching my screen, waiting for an enemy.

I’m not sure what can be done to spice these things up, but certainly we could use crafting stations in towers (and NOT in the invulnerable starting area) and NPC camps could maybe get some kind of two-tier system to destroy them to give the owning team a chance to hear about it and rush to defend them, plus a “defense” event, like towers have. Morale and power node health should slowly increase as well.

I kind of disagree. Golems have one real use: commando teams. Want to take a keep but only have 10 people? Golem. Want to take a tower but only have 5 people? Golem. Basically you are spending money to make up for your lack of manpower.

Most people think golems are a front line unit for major battles but that’s not their purpose. They are commando units. You use them when you have few people but want to try and ninja a strong-point. Commando units should always cost a premium.

Current #1 fear for WvW, especially with longer match times coming:

“The match ends tomorrow and we’re down by 80,000 points. It’s a waste to keep trying.”

Even if it’s too late to stage a comeback, even to 2nd place, I’d still like to play and feel like upgrades are worthwhile and do all the usual fun stuff. I still want a tower with cannons, even if it’s too late to help us win.

One idea to help mitigate this problem would be to scale upgrade costs based on scores and how much time is left in the match.

So in a 7 day match:
Days 1-3 — everyone pays full price.
Days 4-7 — score leader pays full price. 2nd and 3rd place pay a price based on their score versus the leader’s score. e.g., 1st place has 100,000 points. 2nd place has 80,000 points so they pay 80% cost for upgrades. 3rd place has 20,000 points so they pay 20% cost for upgrades. (We could go even further and say that on the last day, upgrade costs are halved for 2nd place and quartered for 3rd place. So in the above example, 2nd place pays 40% and 3rd place pays 5%.)

This might also extend to the supply cost of siege engines. (Purchase cost would be abuseable…lose one round and buy 500 cheap siege engines… but supply cost would be on-the-spot.)

Honestly, just go read the wiki stuff on WvW first: http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/World_versus_World

What you have asked is so broad that it would take several pages to answer it all. Several pages that are already on the wiki. If you have more specific questions after reading the wiki, then fire those off here.

Marrond.1385:

You should also look into catapults shooting at the gate from inside to prevent ram usage.

I think you’ll find that this will go away by itself once arrow carts are no longer impacted by retaliation.

We use catapults as door defenses purely because they can survive the retaliation. Arrow carts are MUCH better for getting crowds of people away from doors but they were rendered useless once everyone started to understand how to stack up retaliation.

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I agree with the guy who said sooner is better because this could impact world rankings. Large “zerg guilds” (that is, guilds that simply run up to doors as a giant clump and beat it to death with their fists) will have to radically change their approach and it will be interesting to see if this makes some of the smaller, less organized servers more effective (because it will be less about zerg vs zerg and more about good use of siege. A guild of 10 people will be a lot more effective when facing a guild of 50.)

This kind of irks me.

Guilds claim pretty much anything they can, as soon as possible, to get their banner displayed. Which is fine. But generally speaking, none of them are running any buffs. Stonemist will just end up claimed by nobody-knows-who until the next time it flips. Guilds with buffs ready can’t claim it and help the team.

So, suggestion:

If your guild is running buffs, you may claim any structure that is being held by any guild running no buffs. (I think it would be a bit rude to allow a guild with MORE buffs to push out a guild with fewer buffs, but I do think “some” should push out “none”.)

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As it is, my guild had a keep, started our buffs, lost the keep a couple hours later and got beaten to the punch on the re-claim once we got it back. (I appealed to them to let us reclaim it so our buffs would go back up but there was no reply.)

There are so many counters available though. Frankly, arrow carts are useless — if you know one little ‘exploit’: AE retaliation.

Get your favorite guardians or engineers to apply mass retaliation and then run into the lord room, and, oh, stand there. Against a mass of people all using retaliation, arrow carts will explode in literally 2 volleys.

Done properly, this will easily render arrow carts (and most other forms of AE) useless.

Alternatively, you can do mass stealth + mass speed to bypass the lord room and run up the ramp.

Or follow the advice of Sun Tzu. If your enemy is holed up in a secure position, leave him there and take everything else.

Gilgamesh.2561:

Retaliation is a mindless mechanic and shouldn’t exist in a game about skill.

Confusion is how you properly do reflection damage. At least the player can dispel Confusion. With Retaliation you don’t know how many players have it, and it really deters AE. Remove Retaliation, and replace it with confusion for classes who lose retaliation. That or give every profession AE condition removal.

Why do we need two reflection sources? It’s silly how quickly a player can kill themselves with Confusion AND retaliation.

I think that’s a great way to look at it. Maybe all Retaliation should do is apply confusion to the target. So at least you get your 1 attack and if you see it results in 15 stacks of confusion, you can apply skill to look at that and say “whoa! Better not swing again just yet!”

Retaliation, as-is, cannot be effectively countered by anyone and most classes simply have no answer to it what-so-ever. As an engineer, there is nothing I can do when a mass of enemies has retaliation, other than “not hit them”.

Rivensplit.7509:

I was streaming at the time I saw him and luckily Twitch saves videos. See 26:00, 28:30, and 29:15.

http://www.twitch.tv/rivensplit/b/331998336

Good catch on that video.

Someone earlier saw what looked like “wall hacks”. Guy kept swimming in and out of a wall that we couldn’t go through ourselves. And I thought I’d seen speed hacks as well, albeit not to that extent.

I’ve also seen the altar destroyed on Ehmry Bay with all walls being up and the enemy never having had a chance to sneak in (I was there since the reset and at no point did an inner door or wall go down).

Hope Arenanet can get a handle on the hacks. Don’t wanna see GW2 go the way of APB.

WvW is casual in the sense that you can always just log in and start playing (queues notwithstanding). Even though it’s a huge money sink and you can definitely “go pro”, the fact that you don’t have to form teams or follow a schedule makes it casual.

Cimos.4923:

I thought Retaliation damage was fixed (not a % of the incoming damage). And I thought the fixed dmg was very low. Or are you saying that arrow carts are dieing because of the mere volume of arrows hitting like 50 people with retaliation?

That second one.

Retaliation damage that I’ve seen is somewhere in the 300s per target hit (that is, if you hit 5 people, you take over 1500 damage).

“Per hit” is the critical thing here. The engineer flamethrower hits 5 times per second so you will take a fair bit over 7500 damage per second (double that if you have quickness!) Elementalists doing a meteor shower will take 5 hits of retaliation for every meteor that lands. Arrow carts are probably the worst of all because they fire multiple rings of numerous low damage hits. You can usually look up and see the numbers flying off the top of the wall as the arrow cart takes damage.

So ballista CAN wrack up pretty good damage from retaliation. They will eventually die. Even trebuchets can eventually be killed purely through retaliation. But these weapons have a lot of hit points and they only hit each target once per trigger pull.

Arrow carts (and many of the AE player attacks in the game) hit multiple times per second into multiple people and retaliation effectively removes these attacks from the game as options, particularly for door defense, where retaliation is always stacked.

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It’s important to note that Guardian retaliation, in particular, is applied 1 second at a time. They don’t stack it, they just constantly refresh it. So things like Null Field or Well of Corruption won’t really help with stopping retaliation.

When you see people using catapults as door defense, retaliation is why. I’ve even seen catapults knocked down to 50% health in pretty short order due to retaliation but at least they don’t die instantly.

We do “arrow carts over the Lord room” all the time. Ballista too.

There are several options for defeating this:

• Go away and come back 2 hours later. The siege operators get bored and run off and the zerg is really slow to run back up there and re-man them, assuming they didn’t time out and go poof while unmanned.

• Group up on the ramp and apply mass swiftness. Everyone charge the ramp. As long as most people are charging the ramp (and not stopping to fight the Lord), you’ll easily overwhelm them.

• Group up on the ramp and apply mass retaliation. Swagger into the lord room and stand there. Pop pop pop goes the arrow carts because mass retaliation kills them literally in about 2 shots.

• Small stealth groups. It’s hard to stop dedicated thieves who want to run up the ramp.

• Stand in the wings. On the sides of the lord room there are covered areas. Arrow carts can fire into there but ballista can’t and the arrow cart operators who can fire in there have to do so blindly. Kill the lord with ranged attacks then run in and do hot-foot dances until it caps.

Siege engines. I’m pretty sure the odds of getting a badge are related to how much damage you did. So if you’re a support class, you should probably look into being the first guy to the cannon or else plopping down your own arrow cart or well-positioned ballista.

For example, sometimes we defend a keep by putting about 4 ballista behind the door. The enemy bashes down the door and boom-pow, they all get massacred by ballistas. I will sometimes instead stand there with my flamethrower. I get a lot fewer bags and badges with my flamethrower than I do if I’m on one of the ballistas, even though I’m pretty sure I got a piece of everyone (I get plenty of XP with the flamethrower, but fewer bags, presumably because the ballistas are getting them all).