1. It is my understanding that the battles continue 24/7. With cappable objectives on the map, does it not mean that a realm whose peak activity hours de-facto occur slightly later than on other realms has a significant advantage?
Yes. The first requirement for reaching tier 1 is having a solid 24/7 presence. I think you’ll find that tier 1 servers are far more populated during off-hours than, say, a tier 4 server (which may fill up during the 8 hour peak time but be largely empty the other 16 hours of the day).
So, my question is, what is it like to be playing on the realm that always loses (let’s say this won’t change for the next 6 months)?
Winning = more time spent zerging around on offense and camping spawn points.
Losing = more time spent manning defense and spawning NPC commanders.
I actually prefer the losing side, so long as it’s not totally overwhelming. 3 people manning well-placed arrow carts can really rake in the loot. (1 arrow cart just makes people back off but 3 will start killing people)
There are perks to being on the winning team but they’re very minor. Check the “B”-key WvW screen for details.
Apart from the above two, I also thought I’d ask which profession you’d recommend as easiest to learn for WvWvW.
Tough to say. Not like any of them are really “hard” (well, I’d vote Guardian for most difficult to play and be any good with). I’d say try staff elementalist if you have a group to run with. Or mesmer. Just in general. Hard to go wrong with clones. Ranger is pretty straightforward but their downed skills suck. I love the flamethrower engineer but it kinda sucks til you’re 60+ and can properly trait for it. Rifle/** warrior is amusing and straightforward.
I do wonder if the Glicko system breaks when used in tiers like this.
HoD isn’t doing that badly in tier 7, though. They aren’t getting pummeled, anyway.
I wonder if they need to adjust something like “you can’t go lower than 1000 rating”, then let the bottom servers churn around each other more freely. As it stands, I’m not sure there’s a way out of tier 8.
They just need to change the costs/usefulness of some of the upgrades.
Every upgrade should be something we’re happy to see. No upgrade should be considered to be a “spy/troll upgrade”.
Like:
Currently a lot of the upgrades just suck and the only reason to get them is extra supply storage during peacetime. Most of them aren’t worth the expense.
I agree. At the very least, a keep claimed by a guild not running buffs should be claimable if the claim occurred more than 2 minutes ago.
STEALTH!
Has created controversy across all MMO’s that have used it.My question is, wth was ArenaNet thinking?
^ This.
It’s hard to balance a class that’s unhittable half the time because they can’t be targeted, especially in a game that has no counter-stealth.
Besides, nobody can possibly “suck” at PvE. It’s impossible. All PvE in every MMORPG ever built is designed to allow even the most basic, average player to eventually achieve literally everything. I have never met anyone who failed to make max level or failed to get fully geared unless they quit early out of boredom.
Why would you reward Jade Quarry and SBI for getting stomped week after week in Tier One? Makes no sense.
Because losing the super bowl is still a lot better than winning a local high school match.
Losing in tier 1 is still better than winning in tier 8.
Not looking forward to the next several weeks at all.
Everyone who got an even match this week will have low ratings.
Everyone who had an uneven match will send one or two teams shooting down and one other team rocketing up.
Tier 1 next week is just going to be whatever teams happened to do the best out of their individual tiers. That’s gonna be a week of complete suck.
I’m not sure that a 1st place ranking in tier 8 should count for the same number of points as a 1st place ranking in tier 1.
It would be interesting to see how score add up in a system like:
(10 – tier) * [10 | 5 | 3] for gold/silver/bronze
So gold in tier 1 = 90 points
Gold in tier 8 = 20 points
I wonder, for example, if Henge racked up enough points to be #1 despite the fall in the end.
I’ve argued this in the past.
The scoreboard should show “current calculated rating change” — the “evolution” column from this website: http://mos.millenium.org/matchups#NA
That’s the one thing that you can really impact from day to day. People see “200,000 to 80,000? We lose. I quit until next week” but they don’t think about the fact that their “-82” projected rating change could be improved if they kept fighting. You might still lose but instead of getting -82 maybe you could bring that up to -60 or -40. It’s worth it to keep fighting but the current scoreboard doesn’t reflect this.
Only a WvW player is emotionally invested enough in this game to actually get a forum reprimand over something they posted.
I have leveled every character of mine from 2-80 in WvW.
The only reason I go to PvE-land is to pick up skill points. Usually I wait til 30-40 or so to do that and just grab the low hanging fruit and then it’s back to WvW.
Just try to avoid getting caught in a 1v1 and it’s fine.
Thieves are easy to counter, here goes:
Against all:
Root/stun
AOE
Thief is in stealth almost all the time. You can’t target them for root/stun.
Really it’s not that “thieves are unbalanced” it’s that “stealth is unbalanced”, particularly with the way thieves can constantly reapply it.
Give stealth an 8 second cooldown between uses and I think almost all complaints would cease.
As a thief how do I protect my treb from getting hit by another treb?
You probably meant this to be a defense of thieves but in fact, thieves are one of the other classes that can potentially block treb shots.
Smoke Screen will block treb shots too. It’s a lot trickier than swirling winds which effects a huge area but if the incoming shot hits a smoke wall it will vanish, same as swirling winds.
Thought you were being clever and actually demonstrated another way thieves are an unbalanced profession. Best WvW tank, best DPS and has a chance to block treb shots.
An ele can block trebs from hitting the door/wall. Whats the point again?
Exaggeration.
I don’t like elementalists being able to block treb shots either but the only way to reliably stop a treb from damaging a wall is to stand in front of the wall, which isn’t going to be tolerated for long. The real use of swirling winds is to stop a treb from being hit by another treb. Then you can stand beside it (likely on top of a wall or inside a tower), block shots AND be perfectly safe.
I play warrior, thief and elementalist in WvW, warrior most of the time now. I can’t think that I’ve ever lost a 1v1 with a thief while on my warrior. Sometimes they escape, and sometimes I have to back off, but never lost.
One of the chief points of the thread is not 1v1, but the ability to stop a thief from destroying siege engines.
With their ability to constantly stealth, it’s virtually impossible to keep them off of siege. The best you can do is AE the area and get them to move away but that’s only going to keep them off for about 5 seconds, and then they’ll be back.
Net result is always the same:
10+ siege defenders are running around swinging wildly at the air while the thief pops around slowly killing all the siege in the field. 1 thief can still be there dealing damage long after a group of 5 bunker elementalists (or any other class or combo) would have been killed.
Invisibility is simply the best “tank” ability in the game, and it’s on the highest DPS class.
WvW needs content too!
CS 1.6 hasn’t had new content for years.
Still alive and kicking. Something designed for infinite replayability doesn’t need a constant infusion of new content. That simply serves to upset the state of balance at regular intervals.
I think the critical difference here is that CS is a shooter — shooters have a very long lifespan because there’s always something tactically interesting about having to react, aim and shoot.
For example, baseball players don’t get bored of swinging at baseballs any more than basketball players get bored of shooting hoops. They might get tired of having to trek out to the gym and find parking but the physical activity can entertain for decades. “Muscle memory” tends to strengthen over time rather than “get boring”.
Thinking games, which RPG combat tends to fall under, requires enough depth to keep it interesting, which I don’t think WvW currently has. It’s not exactly chess out there. We aren’t trying to think 5 moves ahead with a myriad of possibilities because there just aren’t that many options that the mechanics or maps support.
WvW gets old where Counterstrike and Chess don’t, because WvW lacks the “muscle memory” of a sports/shooter type game and lacks the depth of a proper strategy/thinking game.
That’s why WvW needs more content — specifically it needs more mechanical depth.
(Also, most Counterstrike servers run a variety of new maps, or periodically update/rotate them. New maps put players in new situations and keeps it interesting. WvW may be stuck with 4 maps for a long, long time.)
Red keep is the hardest in Eternal because it’s the only one where taking the surrounding towers doesn’t really buy you anything (and it’s easy for the defenders to rain on those towers). By comparison, you can take the towers around green/blue keeps and use them to shell the main keep. The keep can fire back but you still have a nice base of operations. Attacking red keep is more of a brute force affair where any siege you make will be in the field, overlooked by the keep.
Overall I’ll go with Hills for toughest to take / easiest to defend. Supply lines are shorter and there are no safe zones where you can siege it from and not get wiped by a wandering zerg. Garrison can be tough to take if the defenders are on their toes but it’s a big place and hard to keep an eye on all the ways in.
The problem is that thieves are both the ultimate DPS and the ultimate tanks.
Their WvW tankiness comes from the fact that you can’t consistently hit them. It makes them the hardest to kill class. It’s harder to down a thief than it is to down a bunker elementalist. Honestly, bunker elementalists don’t even stand out in most fights because once 10 people focus on them, they go down very fast anyway. When 10 people turn on a thief it can still take several minutes to down him, if you ever can, as he flits in and out of stealth and avoids just about all roots, conditions and hits by simply vanishing over and over.
I also don’t get why Daggerstorm is one of the most effective elites in the game with one of the shortest cooldowns (and why must it also reflect all projectiles AND give stability??)
Thief is a ridiculous class and more and more people are flocking to it.
Incidentally, I’m not sure I like daily/monthly achievements that frequently run counter to playing a good, smart game.
I often find myself doing something silly or something I don’t really want to do just because it’s a daily. (“Oo an arrow cart! Let’s all run into his range and dodge around until we hit our daily.” Or, “Noooo, let the ogres die! We need to rez them!”)
Dailies are fail.
Just in general.
It is disappointing, patch after patch, to see tons of new PvE content and no new WvW content. Maybe a tweak or two to existing mechanics but no new mechanics, no new content with existing mechanics; just subtle tweaks. And, of course, new PvE items that can’t be obtained through WvW (“oh we wanted to add that but ran out of time”, gee, thanks).
WvW needs content too!
I hope the expectation isn’t that, 1 year from now, the PvE game will consist of double the material it has today while WvW is basically the same as it was on launch.
Swirling Winds should not impact siege engines.
Done.
It’s yet another pro-zerg element and GW2 does not need more of those. Now if you’re inside with a “defensive treb” or similar, facing a zerg of enemies, your siege engine can be easily rendered worthless. A massive zerg attack will always have 5+ elementalists on hand for swirling winds but a small defense force won’t.
Stop rewarding zerging.
Only a WvW player sees the market as “sell only” because he never has any money to buy anything from it.
Only a WvW player would go into PvP with a build that’s not necessarily good at killing people, and still be happy with it.
Only a WvW player got all of his exotics with karma points.
Only a WvW player looked at Legendaries and the new armor type and said, “Welp, I’m never getting any of those.”
Only a WvW player has to say “the new armor type” because he can’t remember what they’re called because he never sees anything higher than Exotic, and those were from the karma vendor.
Only a WvW player has exotic accessories that all came from a badge vendor.
Only a WvW player hopes the devs read this thread because it highlights some fundamental weaknesses in the WvW experience.
“Class balance” means different things in WvW. I consider staff elementalists to be balanced because even though they aren’t that good 1v1 or even 5v5, their utility in zerg vs zerg and the fact that they are kings of destroying siege keeps them useful.
Engineers I feel are too weak because while they can do well in an open field scrum they don’t really stand out and their WvW utility is pretty low. Nobody says, “we really need an engineer here”.
Thieves are clearly broken because stealth is broken. Not sure how much of it is external hacks and how much is culling or in-game bugs/oversights but there are definitely ways to abuse stealth and the abuse is wide-spread. Last night about 8 of us spent 10 minutes having to deal with a hit-and-run thief who was stealthed for literally 9 out of every 10 seconds, even in combat. (That one was almost certainly a hacker because his “Steal” had no cooldown. He would use it + Hidden Thief trait to pop around and stay stealthed full time. Hoping ANet has a means of detecting that, since we eventually managed to report him.)
Unless Maguuma doubled their population since we last fought them (3 weeks ago?), Kaineng outnumbers them by a great many.
Kaineng has vastly more people than anyone we ever fought in T4.
oh wow disabling auto targetting and not targetting makes the flamethrower 3 times as effective.
Yes.
And manually aiming #2 is pretty fun. Probably useless 1v1 but I use it all the time in WvW. If you aim it right you can use #2 to hit people on top of walls and on the other side of tower doors (aim for the gap at the top of the door — very tricky).
I use the quickness elixir, whatever that’s called, because the toolkit ability throws a wall. If it’s a stealth wall, run through it to make people in WvW lose you as a target. If it’s reflection or smoke just stand behind it and enjoy a moment of relative safety.
Also, omnomberry pie is possibly overpowered on the flamethrower.
I’ve been doing +power builds but maybe I’ll try +condition and specing for all the +condition stuff. I usually go Alchemy line because that’s where all the good survival stuff is and you need a lot of survival when using a short range AE in WvW.
Oh…
Another nice thing about the flamethrower: smoke and reflection walls don’t work on it, since it’s not projectile based. Goes right through em. (Also goes through doors.)
In related news, I hope Arenanet knows about the speed hackers who don’t actually run faster than normal, they just don’t get impacted by speed debuffs. They run normal speed all the time, regardless of what effects are put on them.
I imagine that’s harder to detect and I’m not sure Anet is aware of it or has thought about it.
Ehmry turned out to be a good choice. I’ve been there since the start (since beta 3, really) and it turned out to be a nice middle road: not the crowded “me-too” win-chasers of the upper tiers but also not the total ghost town of the bottom servers. What win-chasers did come to us eventually moved off because we weren’t winning enough but we have remained a middle-tier server.
Really this is something of an anti-recruitment thread. If you want to win and be the best please do not waste time coming to Ehmry. You won’t like us and we won’t like you. Save yourself $10 worth of gems or whatever and move to Maguuma or pile on with Kaineng instead.
If anything, I’d like to see more small guilds or people looking to find a group to WvW with long-term without getting neurotic (good word) about it.
Yeah most of the time it isn’t fun (when numbers aren’t equal). But sometimes you still encounter the very exciting small scale group fights over a group of us (Kaineng) trying to take back one of your supply camps with a whole lot of resistance on your end.
My experience has been we take a camp and no less than 50 Kaineng show up to take it back. If 10 Kaineng show up, it’s because 40 of them aren’t rendering yet.
There may be talent on Kaineng but we’ll never know. The very fact that you all transferred to a bottom tier server purely to ride the zerg-train back to the top says a lot about the guilds there and the types of challenges they were aiming to get. (Also had the Bzzzt guild be apparently ecstatic about managing to kill my level 4 warrior alt in a 2v1. Guessing they don’t usually win anything under 5v1.)
If you are original Kaineng, I apologize (but statistically, that is unlikely).
(edited by Slamz.5376)
This is probably why more and more people are going berserker build. That’s where the money is.
And sure, “it’s not all about the money” but if you want to REALLY support your team — with siege engines and fort upgrades — then money matters and you won’t be getting any as a support role. What makes thieves insanely popular isn’t so much the stealth abuse and culling issues, it’s that they get mad loot bags (and can usually live to loot them!)
It’s a pain for WvW because this place is already a gigantic money sink, and “mandatory” consumables just adds to the cost.
As a full time WvW player I’ve already given up on doing fort and camp upgrades. After siege engines, food, oils and repairs, I simply never have any cash for anything else. (As it is I would love to buy about twice as many siege engines as I do, but there’s no money for it.)
What you have is Duke going up against a middle school in a game of football. It’s not fun to watch or participate in for anyone other than Duke, who gets to beat up the weak.
I seriously doubt it’s fun for them either.
The hurp-durp types will lol it up over being able to kill a dolyak with 45 people but even that will get old after 3 weeks, which is exactly what Kaineng has been doing. I’m sure a number of them are regretting the decision to all jump on a bottom tier server, not realizing it would guarantee them 5+ weeks of no competition.
Sure you “win” but winning doesn’t get you anything and in fact you end up getting almost no karma, XP or badges because most nights you can’t get into a good fight (the 1-2 zones with a fight will have long queues).
Ehmry has been in that position a couple times when we got pushed into the bottom tier, which was basically the two servers with no population. Owning the map with 650+ points is pret-ty useless and boring for the winner too.
(edited by Slamz.5376)
Hey, need I mention that people in your invul they cant do any damage to you lol. Just kill them.
Have you actually tried this?
Finally saw an enemy in our spawn yesterday and thought the same thing. “Well I’ll just kill him”. It was like he wasn’t getting locked into combat though and his regen was off the charts. Took about 3 people to eventually kill him and he was basically just standing there, regenerating health at a crazy rate.
Possibly he was a hacker, of course, but it looked to me like something about the starter area was keeping him from being locked “in combat”.
Kaineng is superior to Dragonbrand, Maguuma and Yaks, at least. Actually they’re better than any of the T3 servers we’ve ever seen drop to T4. Ehmry has fought all of these recently and none of them have remotely the 24/7 all-map coverage of Kaineng.
I’m not making a comparison of skill, really, but point-wise, Kaineng will end up in at least T2 simply because they are like the nighttime coverage of Dragonbrand, except all day long.
Door Machine
wonder how far kain can go before they hit their match
Probably as far as they went last time before they all quit and moved to Kaineng.
Another week, another thread of people crying. It really never gets old and just gets more funny as we climb. At some point we’ll have real competition.
You transferred to the lowest tier server in order to find real competition?
All things considered, that makes perfect sense.
I feel bad for original Kaineng players. They basically got zerged by guilds looking for easy wins, most of which will probably quit as soon as the going gets tough. By all going to the same bottom tier server they basically guaranteed themselves several weeks of easy wins.
I doubt many of them will stick around once the karma train comes to a crashing halt.
We’ll see Kaineng again on the way down, probably thanks to the very same server hoppers that sent Hedge to the bottom.
Kaineng is down to +625. I imagine many of them will quit now.
I actually consider the flamethrower one of the best abilities. I wouldn’t even play my engineer if not for that. I use it in WvW:
If you do all that I think it’s better than an elementalist for straightforward “dirty crossroads fighting”. Obviously elementalists are better at killing things on walls; siege in particular; but the flamethrower is better for frontlining a push.
Even so, though, I’ve dumped my engineer in favor of elementalist because while the elementalist frontline-pushing-nonstop-AE isn’t as good, their ground targeting AE is better and more useful.
Life will be fine since your statement is hyperbole.
Even on a max-pop map, there are things a 5-man group can go do. Maybe not “flip a keep” or probably even a fully upgraded tower, but there’s supply camps, dolyaks, stripping unwatched siege off of walls, etc.
Also, with no defense running, three groups of 15 people can take things faster than 1 group of 45 people.
There you have it, if you ever walk by an objective on the map and do not immediately cap it you have failed.
Well you certainly haven’t succeeded.
In this case, though, the objective was already owned by the elementalists. They were the defenders. The attackers took it.
They failed.
What happens after that is immaterial. They generated no team points and took no objectives. “Dirty crossroads fighting” may be fun but it doesn’t generate points.
Bear in mind that Commander is per-character, not per account. I know of some commanders that are still around but they are playing alts and aren’t spending another 100g for another book.
Personally, I’m glad to see the win-chasers move to other servers. Those are the people who will whine the loudest when their new server doesn’t win every week. What we get left with are long-term community players.
The elementalists in that video failed in the first 30 seconds.
If I were one of the attackers I would have done a /laugh after capping the supply camp and let them go running off. WvW is objective based.
The elementalists lost the objective.
They failed.
The whole concept needs more thinking and design.
Most of the time I can’t claim a fort because they are all already claimed and none of them are running buffs. Maybe they WERE running buffs at one time but that was 12 hours ago. I have to wait for the place to get flipped so I can claim it and put a buff on there.
Guild catapults and golems are one of the most useful things.
More meaningful guild perks probably would have helped stopped server hopping too. If I had to move to a new server and start over with guild perks, I’m not sure I’d be bothered by this.
There is irony that guilds are one of the weakest aspects of Guild Wars 2.
Kaineng recruiting while they 600+ curbstomp their opponents? Really? Are those doors too vicious for you to handle? Need more help with them?
I lol’d.
I agree that recruitment posts are universally silly.
Each matchup is a 3-way. Odds are your server is going to lose 2 matches out of every 3. Running to the forums every time your sever placed 2nd or 3rd is silly and mostly just means you’ll destabilize your server and roflstomp a week or two before getting your next inevitable beatdown, at which time all the grass-is-greener types who joined you will now go somewhere else.
And is upper tier combat BETTER? How so? Even bigger zergs? Even more queues? Even more culling issues?
Maguuma has the right idea. Anti-recruiting. Stop the population flux. Settle in and enjoy the fight.
Have I mentioned what a terrible server Ehmry Bay is? It’s full of cannibals and awful people who are very mean all the time for no reason. We call it “Bully Bay”, but we only bully ourselves and we always /spit on newcomers. Not in game. In real life. We only build rams for siege and we never put them on doors and we play nothing except staff guardians and “fist/fist” thieves. It’s just awful.
hostgator.com — $4/month
phpBB — free
You could host your own community forums. Most servers, I think, have one. Many even have their own public voice comm server.
I agree that “engineers” don’t live up to their name for WvW. Elementalists are experts for killing siege and defending siege. Mesmers are experts for getting forces into (and behind) enemy lines, as well as for rushing golems. Thieves are premier 1v1 killers including Dolyak assassins. Guardians are one of the best for making sure late-arrival enemies can’t get into the tower.
Engineers are basically just a generic AE DPS class. My engineer has over 10,000 WvW kills and I finally switched to an Elementalist and I can’t think of any reason to go back (other than my engineer has the commander icon and it’s non-transferable…humph.)
The problem is that if the wall is blocking you, it’s blocking them too. If it’s not blocking them, it’s not blocking you.
In many cases the wall is no help to the defender other than acting as a barrier because going to the edge is instant death. If the blind wall-targeted AE doesn’t kill them, the direct fire or pull-down effects will.
There is no combat advantage to firing from a wall to the ground rather than vice versa. There really should be.
Currently in WvW, there is no real advantage to standing on a wall.
In real life, the advantage of walls would be that you would have at least partial hard cover while firing on exposed attackers. You aim for them and hit, they aim for you and probably hit the wall.
The game could simulate this by giving everyone on walls a Protection buff (or similar), for as long as they are on the wall.
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