Guild Wars 2

The real question is whether there’s a server in a tier lower than Anvil Rock that’s better than Anvil Rock, or whether there’s a server in a higher tier that’s worse than Ehmry Bay.

It may well be that the current matchup is as good as it can get.

And it’s not like Anvil Rock is getting spawn camped. I’ve never seen them reduced to nothing. IMO that’s all you need to say the match is still good. Yeah you aren’t winning but you aren’t getting crushed either.

An “urban” map based on one of the PvE cities would be amusing. On one hand, you’d never see the zerg coming. On the other hand, ducking around a corner would be pretty easy to do with so many corners.

It’s a side effect of having a WOW-style economy where nothing decays. Eventually nobody has a use for crafting anymore because they already have the gear they need. Solution? Consumables.

It’s really just an added expense that results in the playing field being equal again once everyone is using consumables all the time.

Bogus economic model, basically. If they did what you suggest it would probably sweep the legs out from under the crafters.

Maybe repairing things could give you a stackable buff, like +2% magic find per 10 supply used, max 10 stacks (100 supply).

This gives repairers a little something for their work yet won’t encourage people to run around doing this non-stop just to get some reward.

Basically the issue is that any game system should direct its rewards towards what it wants players to actually do. Right now what the system wants us to do is zerg around the map. If the system wants players to repair things, the reward system should reflect that.

I don’t think the big problem is rewards — it’s boredom + time to react.

I love defense. If I see a tower under attack or think it will be soon, I will run in there and man siege. I often leave siege behind after taking a tower just so I can have it ready if we need to fall back and defend.

The problem is that with golems and superior rams and zergs possibly bringing several of both, even reinforced doors can drop so fast that there’s simply no time to do anything about it. Usually with towers by the time you know it’s under attack, it’s too late. Even fully upgraded keeps can be like this due to a sudden sneak golem attack with mesmers porting them — the scout says “omg 20 golems at the NW gate” and it’s already too late unless the friendly zerg happened to be right there already.

If we want more defense I think we need to remove golems from the game and consider a way to limit rams. 1 scout isn’t enough to slow down a zerg and you aren’t going to get 10 people to stand there doing nothing for 30 minutes at a time.

You just have to learn where the hiding place are and always check them. Like in the SW camp of borderlands someone can stand on the backside of the SE structure and get a foot in the circle.

I think it should be allowed. It’s so rare to actually defend a place once the circle is up as it is. A small number of players delaying the cap long enough for reinforcements to show up probably happens, what, 1 time in 50?

All they had to do to fix the orb was make it so that it pops out of the holder when the keep is taken over, and start it off in the garrison, eliminating that indefensible north camp.

The only reason it was exploitable was the baffling decision to let us pop the orb out while the commander was still standing there.

Welcome to last year. Fighting for 2nd has been the thing to do pretty much since the launch of the game. The expectation is that the two losing teams gang up on the winning team but the reality is 2nd beats down 3rd so that they can’t overtake them. If 3rd overtakes 2nd then they just turn and do the same time.

1st place is basically the role of “spoiler” as they can decide who really keeps second and who gets the royal 2v1 beatdown in 3rd.

DevonCarver.5370:

We are not going to remove the score. What we are going to try and do is find a way to make the score relevant throughout a match, but it is not an easy solution.

Easy solution:
Take the score and make the font much smaller.
Where the score is now, put the current calculated rating change, based on the scores, in large font.

So the focus should be on how your server’s rating is going to change, instead of on the score. People see things like “140,000 points versus 120,000 points and 110,000 points” and say “we’re in first place and winning, time to slack off”, not realizing that they are actually going to lose rating because they need to win by more than that.

Similarly, the 3rd place server says, “we lose, we suck, I quit”, not realizing that they may have little rating change or even be gaining rating and fighting harder would make that better, even if they can’t get out of 3rd.

Essentially, Friday night and Thursday night are equally important with regard to rating change but people don’t see that unless they go to a 3rd party website to look it up. Rating change is more important than score.

I see lots of replies talking about classes that can 1v1 or potentially 1vX but that’s not what you need in a roamer, unless maybe you’re in T8 or something.

Roamers need to be able to walk around a corner, see 50 rednames coming and be able to get away. Thieves are #1 at this by a long shot. A ranger can chase a ranger but even a thief can’t catch a thief.

Engineer can roam pretty well and is reasonable at soloing camps if you do a bomb spec with perma-swiftness from kit switching. Bomb kit + double pistols will give you two glue traps to help throw off pursuers. Slick shoes will get a thief off your back and let you run (briefly) while chilled/crippled. Thrown Elixir U just in front of you will give you a wall of reflection or absorption to run through.

It’s not as good as a thief but it’s viable. I can usually escape a zerg as long as I notice them before 20 people are on top of me.

urzen.7096:

Yeah I was going to say, Ballista can already hit max targetable range. What we need is for #4 to have much shorter cooldown.

Not true. There are people you can click on that the ballista bolt won’t hit — it will drop too quickly and land in front of them. Sometimes you can still get them with the AE blast of the #2 shot but at the extreme range even that won’t work.

I would guess that +500 range would make all clickable targets hittable.

Pretty much what Gadzooks said.

I can’t do PvE anymore. No matter how well designed the encounter, how good the story, how challenging the AI, I can’t get past the fact that I’m fighting a computer in a very simple, scripted encounter where my strategic options are basically 0 and nothing I do matters for very long anyway. There’s not enough interesting stuff to think about.

In WvW there’s always interesting stuff to think about. It’s not just a wad of people fighting a wad of people. What else is going on while this is happening? What can we do to change the strategic situation? Should we get out of this zerg and go take the supply camp? Should we try and sneak attack the tower from another side while the zergs fight over here? Do we need to break off and defend something? Should we drop a ballista? Start a golem rush somewhere? Should I setup a pre-emptive defense somewhere?

If you think WvW is boring and predictable I submit that you don’t understand WvW very well.

Granted it could be a lot better — it’s fairly basic as-is — but the strategic options of WvW keep me entertained far beyond what PvE can offer. Although Arenanet throws around the term “living world” a lot, in truth our PvE options are very limited. The scripted events are better than nothing but still pretty far off from “living”. If you play WvW and care about getting and keeping a good server score, there’s a lot of different ways you could go and things you could do to make a difference.

Wanderer.3248:

How to reward defence without making it easy for bots and AFK players?

That’s already handled, it just needs to be added to a little bit.

Currently you qualify for a defense reward (per event cycle) if you:

• Kill an enemy player
• Repair a wall or door

Unfortunately unless you have a zerg with you for defense you can easily end up not killing anyone. People evade out of arrow cart and cannon fire when low and and you can’t sally out and finish them off because the attackers have you massively outnumbered. Once the supply runs out, there’s no more XP to be had on defense.

(And if you DO have a zerg, you’ll wipe the attackers during one event cycle and that’s the end of it.)

These should also contribute to defense:

• Killing enemy siege
• Building friendly siege
• Damaging enemy players
• Damaging enemy siege

Actually that last two are bottable but if someone wants to make a bot sit there all day and shoot an arrow cart at the door, he’s probably more useful than half the real players in the zone.

Also, it would help if everyone realized that 30 supply used in repair = gold event credit. I think some people understand that “repair = reward” but they throw 250 supply into a wall during one event cycle when there was really no need. They rob everyone, including themselves, of credit for future rounds because they used up all the supply too fast.

Crimson Magdelana.9024:

Besides…don’t you think that the smaller groups would need more buffs than a group of 20+?

So your suggestion is for the commanders with the least followers to get the biggest buffs?

That sounds like another recipe for 100 commanders on the map.

The only time I’ve ever seen skill lag in T4/T5 is when all three teams have their biggest zergs fighting in the same space — generally this only happens at Stonemist.

Culling didn’t impact this one way or another as far as I can tell. It’s one reason I don’t like Eternal as much but you can also just avoid Stonemist. While the 3-way-zergfest is there, go cap some towers.

Sarrs.4831:

Guild Merits are supposed to be rewarded for doing organised activities with your guild, right?

Exactly, which we do every single day in WvW. Unfortunately there is nothing we can do in WvW which gives merits.

The fact that bounties can be done in 15 minutes, as someone else said, is not a strong consolation to a guild of people that mostly don’t like PvE, especially when you need a steady supply of merits to purchase the higher tier perks.

Guild heroes banner

• 3 merits
  Prequisites:
  Guild Puzzle Unlock
• 250 merits
  Guild Challenges Unlock
• 150 merits
  Guild Rushes Unlock
• 80 merits
  Guild Trek Unlock
• 30 merits

So our first banner would cost 513 merits.

If we did nothing but Tier 3 Guild Bounties, which is 25 merits for 15 minutes, it will take us over 20 hours of PvE (over 34 hours if you can only manage T1 guild bounties), as a whole guild. Bear in mind most of us have about 10% map completion so we have additional hours of work to get all the waypoints we’ll need to make bounty missions feasible.

20-30+ hours of an entire guild doing PvE seems like a lot to demand of a guild that’s built for and only really enjoys WvW. And we’ll have to keep going back to maintain a steady supply of merits for more deployables.

I guarantee if you came out with something that required 30 hours of dedicated WvW to obtain and there was no other way to get it, we would be drowning in a sea of carebear tears.

I wouldn’t care if the merit rewards were PvE things which we wouldn’t care about but some of them are pretty nice. I imagine those deployable crafting stations have bank access like regular crafting stations so I’m sure they’d be appreciated. It would also be fun to deploy them at a tower I want to defend so at least I can mess around with crafting while watching for enemies to show up.

But there’s no way to obtain these rewards within the part of the game we all enjoy.

Yes, the two monthlies I’ve been able to do were this month’s and last month’s. I hope it’s a new trend but I suspect it was a lucky coincidence.

That wasn’t exactly the crux of my post however.

There is nothing we can do in WvW that will ever unlock the Guild Heroes Banner from the guild research tree (or any other perk requiring merits because there is no way to obtain merits in WvW).

Maybe if commanders only get these abilities based on the number of people following them.

I already think there’s a problem with too many people getting commander tags without really commanding anyone. This will make it 100x worse if simply paying 100g gets you all these perks.

But if it was something like….

Commanders with 10 people following them radiate Swiftness full time.
Commanders with 20 people following them additionally radiate Regeneration and +50 toughness.
(etc)

Commanders with < 10 people following them are just dudes with symbols on the map.

My guild does WvW. We have few players who have any sort of PvE interest at all. Consequently, we can’t get any of these new guild merits needed for the higher ranking guild perks. We have to run bounty missions and all that other PvE junk and there’s just not enough interest.

So is that it? WvW guilds will never progress to the highest tier guild perks?

Can we get some method of obtaining these merits inside WvW? We’d like to be able to spawn crafting stations and get 15% off armor repair and use Guild Heroes Banners and so forth but those cost merits and merits are PvE-only.

Why does Anet keep doing this?
I thought you guys would have learned something with Ascended Gear — you admitted it was a mistake to launch it without any way to obtain it in WvW but you keep making that same mistake. (Since the invention of monthly quests I’ve only been able to complete two of them because only two of them were able to be done in WvW.) If you make new content, consider that a lot of your players are only here for WvW and if we can’t obtain it through WvW somehow, then it’s not new content for us.

Kit refinement:
What if it only worked in combat?

One of my main complaints about it is that it conflicts with Speedy Kits. I end up using my cooldown spells from kit refinement while swapping kits for speed. I’m always dropping some silly effect just running from place to place.

MiLkZz.4789:

Weird I earned 20g in the past 2 days in WvW…

People still complaining about the loot? You play WvW because it is fun, the loot is just to cover for the upgrades.

I think I’m entitled to joke about it when the bag/box system is bugged.

I’ll have to try and pay more attention to the source of the box, I just know that every time I go to loot a “box”, it quite frequently has nothing in it. Nothing at all. I’ve never noticed bags do that; just boxes.

1/3rd chance it’s meat
1/3rd chance it’s a single badge of honor
1/3rd chance:

Daxxter.8920:

Nothing much except that I got tired of this class being so tedious compared to anything else on my roster.

This, at least, is pretty inarguable. Engineer is easily the most tedious class.

Grenade spam = carpal tunnel invitational.
Bomb kit = sloppiest way to “melee” ever invented.
Flamethrower kit = suicide if anyone is running retaliation.
Turret build = largely immobile concept in a game built around mobility. The trait to deploy them is neat and handy but also greatly increases the tedium of the build.

And I’m not convinced that engineer abilities having random effects is really of any value to us. Thank goodness they restricted thrown-elixir-U to two things that stop projectiles, at least. I guess the idea was like a Chaos Mage — “oh no it’s an engineer! Who knows what crazy stuff he’ll do next!” But none of it’s THAT crazy. In a chaotic environment like WvW I’m pretty sure nobody notices or cares about what random effect we just threw because with 20+ players fighting there’s essentially random effects happening all the time anyway. All it does it harm our own ability to plan our attack.

Really I think the engineer is an unfocused class in general but that’s beside the point.

That most of our builds are tedious relative to how other classes play seems inarguable.

GW2 did a lot right….the real problem is they just didn’t do enough of it. It would be interesting to know the population of PvE versus the population of WvW (and how this has tracked over the last few months) but I bet WvW is keeping pace nicely despite representing probably less than 5% of the developer’s total efforts.

They spend months on a new PvE thing that everyone blows through in 30 days and never plays again while the same tiny piece of land representing WvW gets replayed again and again and again. I have to believe that someone somewhere is noticing this and coming to a realization that money spent on WvW content is money well spent. If this game had 4 small PvE zones and the entire rest of the map was WvW (instead of the other way around), I feel like it would have been a lot more popular and held onto a lot more players for a lot longer time.

I think Ehmry does what Borlis does, only slightly better.

Teamspeak seems pretty active whenever I check it. I prefer our own guild’s TS but sometimes I’m connected to both at the same time.

Ehmry forums have a private leader-only area but most of the WvW talk goes on in a public area where we know some people from other servers attend (some of which are actually marked as such). As I’ve said in the past, “if your plan is so weak and rigid that the enemy can foil it by reading your forum, then it wasn’t a very good plan anyway”. No sense trying to be all hush-hush. WvW is so fluid that making plans ahead of time on a forum seems pretty dumb to me anyway.

We have some good, active commanders and guilds. The real core of Ehmry, as far as I’m concerned, are the people who have been here since we were a T7 server.

A word on Teamspeak:
From an administrative view, TS is the best voice comm software. It’s by far the most powerful for creating rooms, groups, restrictions and that sort of thing. Ventrilo is very basic and all you can really do is add passwords to things. I can’t recall the specifics about Mumble other than it wasn’t remotely as powerful as TS3 for setting up permissions. I’m pretty sure the only reason Mumble is really popular is that the server software is free.

Usually when this happens it’s because the attackers pulled the lord way away from the circle. If you kill him in the circle it’s a lot easier to defend him and the circle at the same time.

Also, nothing stops you from building siege in there. One superior ballista and/or arrow cart will help ensure you get the flip accomplished against a determined foe.

Retaliation aside, I’m pretty sure 2 rams can destroy a door faster than 1 engineer, even built around the FT, can kill the rams.

I FT through doors as a matter of routine but unless there’s an arrow cart or several other people backing me up, I can’t stop the rams in time. (Before they nerfed omnomberry pie you could almost power through the retaliation.)

That’s like building a bank vault with a screen door and asking if the robbers are responsible for robbing the vault or if the vault designers are responsible for giving it a screen door.

A design that doesn’t take human nature into account is not a very good design. You can blame the robbers/karma farmers but ultimately it’s flaws in the design that enable them.

Dolkje.4023:

What i dont understand so far in GW2 is the following…..
How can a game like DAoC thats been released in 2001 since day one host over 1000 players in rvr (wvw) without lag (unless with the relic raid where more then 2000 players went in) and GW2 have so many restrictions.

Moore’s Law: Computing power doubles roughly every 2 years.
Slamz’ Law: As computing power increases, game makers leverage this to lower the cost-per-player rather than increasing the computing power spent on each player.

That is, 10 years ago, a $10,000 server would host 1000 players with weak game mechanics.
Today, a $10,000 server will host 10,000 players in 10 separate instances with weak game mechanics.

There are games that are 10+ years old that did cooler things than modern game even bother to attempt. It’s often stated that player collision is too CPU-intensive for modern MMORPGs to support but EQ was doing it in 1999. I think I played EQ on a 233 MHz Intel Pentium-5.

Guild Wars 2 looks prettier than DAOC but mechanically it’s less sophisticated. But I bet their cost-per-player is way lower than DAOC’s.

Avenge.1478:

1. Not a huge issue, ask the brigade of confusion bomb mesmers I usually have in my small group of ~15. Its not terribly hard defeating larger groups when they’re killing their selves while trying to kill you.
2. Not once do we say “Hey lets go take X tower and X supply camp, im almost Rank 10!”
3. Not once do we say “Hey we need more people over here at X supply camp to take out these Dolyaks, I really want more WXP!”

YOU don’t say these things but plenty of other people do. Those karma trains flipping supply camps back and forth aren’t timing it with scoring ticks, so that’s not why they do it. They rarely run down dolyaks that have already left the camp unless they are close by, so they aren’t really doing it to starve supplies.

They are doing it because they want more WXP/karma/XP/loot.

It would be amusing if Anet removed all rewards for supply camps, like they did for dolyak escorting. Then we’d see how many groups are flipping camps for strategic reasons and how many were just farming for personal rewards. I bet supply camp flip rates would drop by somewhere between 50% and 90%.

Really it’s not that Anet rewards “zergs”, it’s that they reward karma trains (now also WXP trains) and the train works just as well with 50 people as with 10. (In fact if you have 50 people you can insta-zerg towers almost as well as supply camps.)

They definitely encourage it and really, they should. “Massively Multiplayer” is not 5 guys running around capping towers or solo duelists meeting in the street. For an MMOG, I’d call 50 vs 50 “a good start”.

The problem isn’t zergs.

The problem is “karma trains”. Zergs that don’t fight other zergs — they just run around in circles capping towers and supply camps back and forth. Towers fall too fast for defenders to show up and standing there ready for an attack that may or may not come is unrewarding and boring.

There’s nothing wrong with zergs and in fact, the game SHOULD encourage and support them. The problem is karma trains and systems that overly reward PvP avoidance.

bromi.7809:

In my opinion that’s caused by the fact that most classes (outside of WvW zerging) aren’t nearly as effected as bad as engineers are.

Have you tried spam 2 shortbow to a retal zerg as a thief?
Have you tried fire 1 as ele?

Thief shortbow is one of the worst weapons to use against retaliation, this is true. However, thieves really worried about facing retaliation can keep a sword in their secondary weapon set and swap to it when needed — it’s better against retaliation builds than any of the engineer weapon choices. Even if you refuse to go sword you could go dagger and rely more on heartseeker.

Not sure which “fire 1” you meant for elementalists. Staff fire #1 is one of the better choices in the game for having to face retaliation. It has a slow attack speed but one of the hardest hits for a spammable attack. Fire dagger #1 will get you murdered but still, at least elementalists have a weapon choice that’s not overly vulnerable to retaliation. Engineers don’t.

That’s the real point here: there is no engineer weapon set that’s tolerable when having to face retaliation builds. The only really hard-hitting option we have is the bomb kit, which mostly nobody uses because it’s probably the worst, most difficult to use melee-range option in the game. Good against NPCs but not players.

Kami.7369:

Should switch Scepter for Mace. Better healing and support with it (Block, extra heals on combo chain and on SoF, protection if the block doesn’t trigger)

Yeah, I go back and forth. Kinda settled on scepter for WvW because Smite is good against people on walls and siege engines and Chains is faintly useful for getting someone killed in the act of fleeing, plus in a hot situation it gives me something to fling at enemies from a safe distance.

Shame about the orbs being probably the worst #1 attack in the game though. :-p Terrible damage. Long travel time. No special effects. Other than that it’s great!

alemfi.5107:

Catisa.6507:

you can easily dps the rezzer through the gate also.

You missed the issue. Consider a dead mesmer on the inside of the gate.

I’ve long thought that we should be able to slap hit points off of dead players the same as downed. We have seen this before, where a mezmer is dead inside the gate at 99% health so that when the army shows up they can get him up in half a second and he can then portal them in.

Usually we camp the corpse until he poofs but unless you guard the body with a solid force it’s going to be hard to kill him faster than he can run up and portal in the army outside.

pupu.8619:

Who would do such a thing? oO
If you do this you knowingly hurt the server… oh my god. Has this really happend?

Not sure if serious.

Yes, this happens frequently enough, either through incompetence or blatant cross-teaming. It used to happen very frequently back when server transfers were free — people would make second accounts apparently just to put them on the enemy server and do things that would screw with them, with “waste supply” being a common one.

Even the “upgrade guards” is probably better for griefing supply if you can coordinate an attack before supply builds back up than it is for actually helping the team. NPCs are so inconsequential that adding a few more with these costly upgrades doesn’t help the defenders that much.

I think a lot of the upgrades need evaluating.

Phineas Poe.3018:

I’m confused. When was this about out-damaging Thieves? I thought the issue was Retaliation and that you think the Engineer has no hard-hitting attacks even though Flame Blast, Thwack, and Pry Bar are exactly that. How many do we have to have?

Can you maybe list an attack that can be done back to back? Hitting someone with a single moderate-damage attack and then going “la de da” for 15 seconds is not really helping your case. The point of the comparison to other classes is that even thieves utilizing 1-handers do more damage in a single hit — hits that can be done over and over back to back — than we do, which makes them more effective when dealing with retaliation. I didn’t take the time to break down all of the classes but then I can’t do everything for you. Do a little research.

As has been stated by pretty much everyone other than you, we are one of the worst if not the worst class when it comes to dealing with retaliation.

I get the feeling you are defending your level 80 guardian’s prime ability moreso than you are actually thinking about engineers. I’m guardian/engineer too and as much as I love decimating people with AE retaliation, I’m not too proud to admit that it really screws over engineers and I recognize it’s an ability with few real counters.

Phineas Poe.3018:

I like how you didn’t say one word about the Tool Kit.

I like how you didn’t either, because if you took 60 seconds to look up the damage numbers, you’d see it’s still on the low end. Only the 3rd chain hit actually hits hard. The first two hits of the chain are only a hair better than the hip shot. I hope you plan on fighting NPCs because most players will find ways to interrupt your chain attacks.

And it’s melee range, which means it has the same fundamental problem as the bomb kit: you are taking a class not known for its awesome bunker builds and putting it front-and-center as a melee in WvW. The thief, warrior and guardian can use their harder hitting melee and live to tell about it because they have the tools to survive it. Engineers CAN show some survivability but front line melee with the tool kit is not our specialty and hardly a good answer to retaliation.

What else ya got?

It’s probably worth mentioning that in DAOC, the WvW (RvR) section of the game had some of the best NPC farms in it. I don’t think that’s the solution we want here but basically it meant that in DAOC, players were out in the field all the time, Doing Stuff, and this promoted a lot of small group hunting and ambushing.

You don’t get that in GW2 because there’s really nothing for players to do that puts them out in the field for long periods of time.

The problem I see with event scaling is the likelihood that it would create unfriendly situations, unless it was balanced perfectly — that is, we could have easily killed this tower lord with 5 quality players but when 20 sub-par players suddenly ran up and joined us, now the encounter is going to take too long and be much more difficult. We’re going to yell at them for showing up “to help”.

Plus I just think it’s a mistake to expect 5-10 people to cap towers quickly and efficiently. We already have people proclaiming that upgrades are a waste of time. If anything, towers should be tougher to capture, with new content created for 1-10 people.

My ideal would be that there would be a lot of stuff to work on outside of towers for 1-10 people — some project that takes a while but can be worked on continuously. Towers would then become a refuge to retreat to rather than simply being a round-robin karma trading post that few people hang out near.

You can’t list an attack with a 30 second timer, whose main feature is not damage but blowback, and expect us to take you very seriously. Although flamethrower and grenade kit suffer most, the engineer as a whole does less damage per hit than most other classes.

Rifle hip shot: base 251 damage
Warrior hammer: 333/333/444 damage chain
Guardian hammer: 296/333/370 damage chain
Dagger/dagger thief spamming heartseeker: 336-672 base damage as long as init holds out
Thief sword: 269/269/437 damage chain

These are the regular hits these classes can do non-stop and it makes them better able to counter retaliation than engineers — the hammer hits slower but it hits harder, which is what you want (even the thief 1H sword hits harder than our rifle). Plus the fact that engineers can’t swap weapons means you are effectively saying that we should all be pigeonholed into 1 weapon, just because of retaliation.

The bomb kit, damage-per-hit, is one of the best options but I think we all know the limits of the bomb kit, particularly when we’re talking about WvW where running around the enemy horde dropping bombs is a good way to find out where the nearest respawn point is.

You really don’t have a leg to stand on when talking about the impact of retaliation on engineers. The numbers don’t support your argument.

Zajo.5946:

There are no dumb upgrades. Every upgrade, may it be additional guards or a merchant adds to the amount of supply you can stock in a keep/tower.

It’s a question of timing. When a keep comes under attack and someone immediately buys the merchant upgrade, thus instantly draining the keep of a lot of supply that could have been used for defenses/repairs, that’s a “dumb upgrade”.

If things like merchants cost money only and no supply, then it would always be an appreciated upgrade.

Arenanet intentionally designed the classes so that none of them can really be “team healers” in the conventional sense of the word. Guardians can be ridiculously good self-healers and one of the better group healers, though. I run a “support guardian” in WvW — staff and scepter/shield with full Cleric’s gear and a consecration build. My damage output is fairly useless but I get some decent group heals plus other nice group buffs (AE might, AE protection, that sort of thing). I do feel I make a pretty good difference in group fights.

So you can’t be a “healer”, but if you want to be “support with some healing”, Guardian is one of the best choices.

It is useful at times, though, like you’ve just brought a new character to 80 and need just a few more badges for your last couple pieces of exotic gear or to open up that first new ballista ability.

Playing watchman at the local fort may help your team, but it’ll take 10x longer to get the things you need to be competitive with.

I have retaliation. Someone bleeds me. Do they get a tick of retaliation per tick of bleed?

I was sure the answer was “yes” as I’m sure I’ve put conditions on people and then ended up dying apparently just from retaliation, but some on the forums are saying otherwise. The wiki didn’t specify.

So which is it?

Run with the zerg.
Use your widest area AEs.

I used to get almost no badges with my staff guardian and now he’s probably my #1 source. I hear staff necros do really well too.

Moral of the story:
Don’t melee a manned ballista.

SilencingMachine.5049:

From the QQ in this thread, I am guessing you do not have GOOD people in your /m or /t or on TS that are broadcasting the countdown timer on those WPs, eh?

That’s a bug which will eventually get patched.

Long term, that’s not going to be a reasonable solution to the “one person knocking on the door” problem.

Where I think a lot of players (and probably Anet) is going wrong is in trying to make some of the current content support small groups.

Tower capping should not support small groups, for example. If a small group can bash down the door before defenders can respond then a huge group can do it in 10 seconds flat. If we time things so that zergs have to do some work then small groups will never stand a chance.

And that’s fine — for towers and keeps.

The problem is that there’s no content designed for roamers, soloers or small groups to DO — that is, something a solo person can go work on which makes him more of a roamer, vulnerable to other roamers.

Suppose, for example, each map had some “diamond dust mines”. They work something like supply camps but instead of just picking up the material, you have to bang on the node for a while. Each pickaxe swing gives you 1 diamond dust and subtracts it from the pile. The pile slowly regenerates. You can carry up to 20 dust but if you die, you lose it. Solo players and small groups can mine these nodes and carry them to towers and keeps where they reduce the cost of the next upgrade (both money and supply costs). Potentially all upgrades can be “free” if enough diamond dust gets brought in.

.

The goal is to give roamers, soloers and small groups something to “do” — something to work at continuously outdoors, leaving them vulnerable to other roamers, soloers and small groups. (The diamond mines won’t regenerate fast enough or build up enough of a backlog to support a zerg.)

This doesn’t have to be “the solution”, but if you want to support solo/roamer/small group, you need to give them an activity that:

• Can be worked on continuously (unlike NPC flipping or supply camp capturing)
• Does not support the zerg (again unlike NPC flipping or supply camp capturing)

The diamond mine idea is just an example of something that would fit the bill. I don’t think any of the current WvW content fits this description.

Teamkiller.4315:

Replace confusion with retaliation, and you’ll see what I mean.

Except we have a lot more ways of dealing with confusion. Formula 409 gives us multiple routes to clearing confusion off and we have a dedicated elixir that removes all conditions and additionally gives a toolkit ability to remove another one. If confusion is causing you problems there are a lot of things you can slot to deal with it.

If retaliation is causing you problems then there’s not much you can do about it. Even Phineas’ suggestion of “use different attacks” is pretty laughable because engineers don’t have any particularly slow-speed, high-damage attacks, such as warriors, guardians and thieves can access. We don’t have good ways to clear retaliation such as necros get. The mine is our only boon removal, and it only removes 1 boon, and pretty well sucks as a skill. If we could trait a better boon removal or if the elixir gun’s #3 would remove boons, that would be different.

Bottom line, engineers have ample ways to deal with confusion.
Our best way to deal with retaliation seems to be “stop attacking and die slower”.