Guild Wars 2

(For the tl;dr people my suggestion is in the second last paragraph)

For many AP hunters like myself there’s a lot of psychology behind the need to compete on the AP boards. I’ve always been a completionist, and this being the first MMO I’ve played since launch I have a lot of investment in this game.

When the game was first launched the philosophy behind daily achievements was that you could play however you wanted and attain a small daily reward and small AP boost for doing so, the only real requirement was to play at least 30-60 minutes for that day. Back in those days I could do all the dailies in ~30 minutes then had plenty of time to do what I wanted, the 5 AP per daily was perhaps a bit much, though I don’t necessarily agree how dailies have evolved over development.

Dailies were eventually changed to 1 AP each and made more specialized, diverging from the idea of playing how you want to achieve these. A few examples include daily kills being attached to a specific area of the game, meaning I could no longer do all my achievements in WvW where I enjoy playing most. At first there was about eight, something I tolerated and could do in a little over an hour if memory serves, but more dailies are continually added with time to where we now have 12-14, plus the 4 PvP ones as well. The time commitment to attain all these achievments has steadily climbed from 30 minutes to anywhere from 2-4 hours depending on the difficulty of the dailies for that day.

The result of this 2-4 hour daily AP hunt is really starting to burn me out, to remain competitive on the boards I can no longer play the game how I want. By the time I’m done getting all the dailies I no longer feel the desire to play and just log out until it’s time to do the dailies again… I don’t WvW as much as I used to, and the dailies burn me out so much that I don’t ever feel like knocking out any of the permanent achievements I still don’t have.

Now to further compound this new PvP dailies have been announced specifically attached to Arena play. Yes I could stop playing hotjoins and do the general PvP achievements at the same time I do the Arena ones, but Arenas by their nature take considerably longer than hotjoins. I expect that what used to be 30 minutes for the PvP achievements will now take closer to an hour to complete. This is my speculation of course but it will still further add to the time needed to complete all dailies.

I can feel myself burning out on this game, yes I could technically just stop doing dailies and play how I want but the completionist in me just can’t ignore that dailies tab in my hero window.

So, with all that said, here is my suggestion and one I believe is very doable with mechanics already used in the game:

Add a daily meta for the daily PvE and PvP achievements, similar to how the Living Story have meta achievements. Attach 5 AP onto the metas, then have all the dailies give 0 points. For non-AP hunters this means nothing really changes for them, but for AP hunters this means that you no longer need to do all the dailies, returning to the philosophy of playing how you want to get your daily reward. AP hunters will still do both the PvE and PvP daily metas, but this process shouldn’t take more than an hour compared to the 2-4 hours we currently have to dedicate daily.

This change would go a long way to saving many AP hunters sanity, and allow us to actually play the game how we want while still competing.

The dolyaks “teleport” to their real location when something forces a refresh in their location, such as a knock-back.

Killing returning dolyaks will make it have to respawn, and people like the wxp/achievement credit.

It’s difficult to stay “competitive” on the AP leaderboards when patches continually screw us on Achievement Point income. One of the WvW dailies was replaced with the patch, meaning if you didn’t get the old one you lose a point, plus WvW has been down for 6+ hours now meaning we can’t get the rest of the WvW based achievements.

Daily Activity has also been unavailable due to a bug there, either sending people to SPvP or infinitely waiting in the Sanctum Sprint Lobby.

I was busy yesterday so I couldn’t play, placing me at a disadvantage compared to people who did.

This is in addition to the SAB patch that changed a bunch of the monthlies, people who completed their monthlies ASAP got a point boost over those who thought they had time to do them.

In the end it’s only ~5 AP I’m missing out on, but that can still be huge in the upper leaderboards.

Fractal bags do not compact, I found this out when I bought myself 4 20 slot masterwork grade. I couldn’t live without the compact feature so I reduced myself to just one bag and banked the rest, going back to my 15 slotters.

The whole reason I started looking to third party options in the first place is because there is no in-game option to rebind mouse click to the wheel, that was the first thing I looked for.

Before I get flamed for even mentioning a topic like this, I have seen topics that discuss macros are allowed as long as it’s a single action (This was in a topic about why there are macro keys on the GW2 keyboard if macros are supposedly against ToS). If I am mistaken in this then by all means I’ll abandon what I’m trying to accomplish here.

That said, I picked up a program called AutoHotkey and am attempting to write a simple script where upon activation of a hotkey (Something like alt+click) it’d simulate 250 clicks. The entire point of this is to attain the Thirst Slayer achievement, as it requires a tedious 75k clicks (25k to buy the drinks I need, 50k to consume them all).

As simple as the command sounds I can’t get it to execute properly, I’d appreciate any help.

The overall progress is event based, completing events depletes these bars.

The portal events spawn mobs in waves. Killing all the minions will then spawn the next wave and deplete the bar by 33%. When the last wave spawns the portal is closed and the event completed, and staying to kill that last wave is a waste of time.

Aetherblade events are morale based, each kill reduces the bar, when that bar is depleted the event ends. The Pirate Captain spawns afterward and is considered a new event, and is finished when he dies.

The Molten Alliance tunneller event simply requires the machine to be killed, then it’s done.

The Molten Alliance Shaman’s simply require the Shaman to be killed, then that event is done.

The Golem Rush:

Was north of SM at the time, opened up my map and thought it was odd there was orange x’s on SE SM when we controlled the nearby tours. Went to investigate, entered North portal, ran face first into the Ehmry zerg as I was heading down to SE gate, turned around and ran for the inner gate with my talk key held down panicking and rallying everyone to SM.

Got on the oil, dumped a few on the golems that just kept coming to the gate, ended up dying. Got ressurected, ran into the Lord room and suicided on some golems to try to get some damage on them. Got a screenshot while I was dead relaying info.

Edit: Partial chat block

Kami.7369:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zo2DAWy2W_4

I was going to congratulate this player for besting some of my Maguuman comrades, however the trash talking and combat log-out completely destroyed any respect I had for this guy.

Edit: Can’t seem to edit out that giant space in the quote

Anatax.3905:

At the end of the night we had a hell of a three way Stonemist fight. That was hella fun. And after we got wiped inside Dragonbrand almost took our EB Darkhaven Keep by bringing Golems up through our watergate. We fought em off repaired our keep and I finally called it a night. Great matches guys can’t wait till tomorrow to resume the insanity.

See you on the Battlefields, Exelsior!

I was the Commander of the Maguuma force that attempted to golem rush your keep with half a dozen golems, unless Dragonbrand tried the same thing later in the night?

Unfortunately as it was essentially my first time Commanding the whole map (I usually do small teams) I had made some bad calls during the assault, most notably the call to break and storm into the Keep Lord once the second gate busted. I should have kept us stacked, but no one blamed me for it as it was an understandable call to make, especially when we saw some siege in there.

I’m interested to hear how Dragonbrand reacted to loosing Stonemist shortly after they took it. We stuck a Mesmer in there while you two were fighting and took advantage of it when our Keep assault failed. That’s why you do Mesmer sweeps!

In relation to the Keep assault video here’s a screen shot I took at the wall breach we created.

The story: We breached Fort Aspenwood’s keep and swung around to hit that wall. We then noticed that Dragonbrand was taking down the south-east gate and so we tried to not draw attention to ourselves while racing to take the wall down before they got the inner gate down. However we ended up getting spotted and thus a fight broke out between our two forces. We decided to finish off the wall, the fight continuing to take place once it was down. We rushed in shortly after the screenshot was taken to get our stack away from the ballista they built and to try to beat them to the capture. We stacked on the Keep Lord and killed him while fending off Dragonbrand, and the video tells the rest of the story of what happened.

Really it depends on your build. I use a heavy bleed build which tends to destroy Guardians, as I can apply the bleeds faster than they can cleanse them. I have trouble with other classes and builds however that you might not.

I was not in that battleground, but based on my experience with Maguuma I can infer what happened.

We use voice chat, and as such we get frequent updates in real time. Someone some where is always keeping us up to date on where the SoS and Dragonbrand forces are. My guess is that Maguuma knew SoS was attacking you guys and decided to take advantage of it and see if they could snipe the keep, and it sounds like they succeeded. It seems like Maguuma wiped SoS from behind and claimed to keep for ourselves, which sounds like something we’d do.

Double teaming happens in ALL match-ups, and quite often teams A and B will be teaming up on C on one map while A and C will be teaming on B in another, while B and C will be teaming on A in yet another map. Each team makes tactical decisions based on rapidly changing dynamics.

Obviously the defending team wants to keep their stuff, and will defend against an attacker. The third team may take notice of a large siege and decide to try to snipe it. It’s even a viable strategy to “help” a team take a fortification, only to take it yourself shortly afterward because the upgrades are now all reset and they’ve no siege built in it.

If it’s a player simply using alts to do the jump puzzle and sending the badges to their main via the guild bank, then no it’s not an exploit. They don’t get much in the way of blueprints either as they are soul-bound to the alts, and the gear will be level appropriate to the alt.

The grey area of exploit vs non-exploit comes in if the player repeatedly deletes the character to do the jumping puzzle infinite times.

If someone chooses to do the jumping puzzles on 4+ alts every day, then that’s just how they want to spend their time. Personally I think it’s a lot better to get badges via kills, but some people hate PvP so much but want the Gift of Battle so the jumping puzzles end up being a popular way to get them with little player combat.

Red circles denote AoE skills.

I won’t say any details of the exploit myself, but I tested it in SoS Borderlands (our SE spawn) and could see a path all the way to the East Keep once I was up on the edge of the map. I immediately way-pointed back to spawn.

We’ve been wondering how Dragonbrand has been getting into the Keep, thought it was hacks, and now we know about the map exploit. It IS an exploit and we will continue to report people we catch using it, and now that we know how it’s achieved we’ll be actively discouraging our own server from using it.

We’ve had Dragonbrand inside that East Keep for a few days now and thought they were hacking to get inside. Thanks for letting us know how they’re getting in so we can keep an eye on it.

I can agree that we have a few well established leaders on Mumble, OPey and JerkJerk being the two main ones plus a few other Commanders as well. Our tactics change to suit the situation, be it a blitz to sweep the whole map quickly, a more slow and steady expansion, or hunkering down and turning a few select locations into impenetrable fortresses. Admittedly there have been a few strategies that have made me tilt my head, but generally we are pretty coordinated most of the time.

If you’re vocal and know what you’re doing you may very well find yourself in a position you can be giving orders in, despite the lack of an icon or guild backing.

Our tactics tend to be a bit democratic in nature as well, as our Commanders are very open to suggestions and often incorporate them into current strategy.

I myself have been in a Sub-command/Lieutenant type position leading smaller teams on the other side of the map. I’ve Commanded the map on occasion too, although I feel I don’t do very well at the position despite a few people stating the contrary. I guess it’s a confidence issue as I’m still rather uncomfortable being responsible for everyone.

Phoenixfudge: Sorry to say, but I can think of two reasons why we’d be camping you.

The first is that WvW is an open PvP world, and the rewards you gain for completing that jumping puzzle awards you with free siege you can later use against us. It’s a legitimate strategy to deny enemies access to the jumping puzzles, in which case you’ll either have to come back later or bring reinforcements with you.

The second is simply because Maguuma wants revenge on Dragonbrand. You were our first week long match-up awhile back along with Tarnished Coast and you had destroyed us both, so many of us are glad for the opportunity to take revenge.

Yay Maguuma! I’ll join later if you guys are still around.

I must say that despite having our butts kicked so bad, between us dominating last round and Fort Aspenwood this round it’s nice seeing colours other than green dominate the pie chart.

I don’t think transfers are to blame in this case, FA and SoS play at opposing hours and Maguuma has largely given up.

Botters: Maguuma’s got a lot of botters either sitting at spawn or clumped up in the lake, denying us the outmanned buff a lot of the time.

Hackers: We’ve had hackers taking the orbs or destroying the alters as well as flying into our towers to cap them, making many of us question if it’s even worth upgrading.

Outnumbered: I’ve played for 12+ hour stretches during the weekend where night time is dominated by Sea of Sorrows, followed by a brief lull where we would start being able to take over, immediately replaced by large numbers of Fort Aspenwood. On top of this Sea of Sorrows and Fort Aspenwood have the population to fill up all four maps during their respective prime-times, whereas Maguuma can only ever really fill up maybe two maps.

We have a group of players trying to do our best, but the general morale of Maguuma has officially been crushed, hence the complete domination of Fort Aspenwood today.

It’s a big mistake to compare this game to the Diablo series as they are two completely different styles of play… Diablo has an isometric view point as well as gameplay mechanics that are designed around mouse clicking. GW2 would be a nightmare with a click-to-move control scheme, and is in fact one of the reasons I avoided GW1 (Among other reasons)

I’d say limit it to party members only.

I’ve accidentally picked up banners during the heat of battle as I tend to spam my “f” key a lot in WvW. Whenever I do pick one up I immediately press 5 to plant it again.

They had tried to take Dawn’s Eyrie in Maguuma Borderland too, luckily we had a group nearby that noticed them and thwarted them.

Our garrison alter had been destroyed too but the orb was left lying there so I was able to put it back. It’s unclear if hackers destroyed the alter. If it was these SoS hackers they had no keep at the time so it makes sense that they just left it.

Maguuma player here, these same fly hackers also attempted to take Dawn’s Eyrie earlier in the day. Thankfully we had a group nearby at the time that noticed their attempt and drove them off.

We had our alter break too in Garrison, the orb was left lying on the ground though so I was able to put it back. It’s unclear if it was hackers that broke it however.

You’re not always in melee range of enemies on a weapon swap, and with a melee and range set-up like this it is not always beneficial to be swapping weapon sets all the time.

It’s personal preference in the end, it’s just my opinion that Earth is much more versatile as it’s useful all the time.

Impale (#4) and Riposte (#5) both have long lasting bleeds on them, benefiting highly from a bleed spec. An axe off-hand is all up-front damage and doesn’t benefit from your bleed traits.

And as Defektive mentioned Warrior bleed spec places a high value on critical chance, as the more you crit you have the more bleeds you will have up. With such high critical rates it is beneficial to run Earth Runes which gives an additional 60% chance to apply a bleed on a crit. The 33% minor trait and 60% sigil are independent from each other, meaning that sometimes they won’t proc on a crit while other times both will proc at the same time, applying up to 3 bleeds with a single attack.

The bleeds last longer, meaning you do more damage over the long run as you can achieve higher bleed stacks. Being as they last longer it also helps bleed out enemies when they try to run and keeps them in combat longer.

I’d highly suggest changing that 33% vulnerability to the 50% longer bleed duration, the bleed duration is essentially a must have for a heavy bleed spec.

I ran dual swords and rifle myself for quite some time myself as 30/30/0/10/0 build and also used Rampager’s, however I recently switched specs as I found the build to be too glassy.

First off I feel I should point out I missed the first half of the match-up as I had transferred to Crystal Desert on Friday to see what things were like up in the higher brackets, so my observations on the Maguuma match-up are based on what I saw during the weekdays when I came back.

Yak’s and Ehmry’s morale already seemed to have been crushed when I got back, so that made a huge difference in participation, including on Maguuma’s side as the maps tended to empty of players on all sides when a map turned all blue.

In Maguuma’s case many of the players coordinated through Mumble to decide which map we’d hop to.

Based on what I observed participating in the map hopping group population actually seemed about even on all sides, however while Yak and Ehmry would be spread over all the maps Maguuma had our players concentrated in a large group and take over a map completely, then hop over to a map that wasn’t all blue to help out in there.

Maguuma’s dominance this round can be entirely attributed to the coordination that our new Mumble has allowed us to achieve.

Minors only have two bonuses, so any more than two is a waste. Major is four, Superior is six.

The backpack is indeed better, but not by much. It costs five gold, however it’s an actual backpack with your guild logo while the back piece from story is not visible.

I believe this achievement is bugged, it’s empty for me as well.

The only things workers do is complete upgrades.

When an upgrade such as oil, cannons, or mortars finish they will spawn built and functional, however once they are destroyed you will have to rebuild them yourself once the build sites respawn.

Upgrading the walls/doors will auto-repair the walls and door, however once the Fortify upgrade is finished you have to repair everything yourself.

I transferred to Crystal Desert from Maguuma at the start of this weeks match-up, and although there is a significant difference in the amount of organization and tactics, as well as high population I have noticed Crystal Desert gets out-manned a lot, though not to the degree of Maguuma.

The guild I’ve been hanging out with since transferring have also been commenting about the decline of participation, namely that Crystal Deserts night presence seems to have completely disappeared.

Having a T1 server drop down to the T3 bracket against a T3 and T4 server would just make for even worse domination and lopsided matches than there are already.

-Makes the walls stronger (Not the doors), making it more difficult to siege a fortification as well as easier to repair
-Repairs the fortification when upgrade completes
-Makes the fortification look pretty cool

You can also turn on achievement points in the guild pane which allows you to see the points of guild-mates, it seems to be off by default.

There isn’t different colours of the medals or anything, the rabbit will stay bronze/goldish until you hit rank 10, at which point it changes to a deer icon. I assume you get a new icon for each 10th level.

There is one advantage mortars have that I forgot to mention, they do huge damage to siege. They kill trebuchets in about four hits or so.

But yeah, many of the upgrades deter smaller groups, once a large force attacks a tower you need actual defenders present and defensive siege helps as well.

I will say that although some of the upgrades are questionable in value, having a full 700 supply in a tower is a very big advantage while defending! You only get that full 700 through upgrading.

My view on the upgrades:
-Outfitter, it’s convenient to be able to empty your bags and buy salvage kits and gathering tools without having to go back to spawn.
-Siege Master, can be a huge help in defence. It’s highly convenient to be able to buy blueprints on demand rather than have to go back to your spawn, and possibly have trouble getting back into a fortification if it’s under siege.
-Patrol, makes it difficult for most enemy players to snoop around a fortification or cause an inconvenience while passing by. Stalls solo or small groups, although they do lose effectiveness on a larger force
-Second worker, good and cheap upgrade if the fortification has a large stockpile. Also useful in upgrading faster if there’s a large stockpile of supply, or if the fortification is really close to a camp and one worker can’t use it as fast as it comes in.
-More guards, again helps with solo/smaller forces
-Increase guard level, makes the guards even tougher for small groups to handle
-Oil, semi-useful as while it’s up it’s suicide for enemies to stand under, but it is a high priority target because of that. It’s cheap anyway, and leads to better upgrades
-Cannon, very useful while it’s still up. It can help keep an enemy at bay for a bit, and does massive damage to groups
-Mortar, depends on the tower really, some towers can assist other towers with mortar fire
-Reinforce walls and door, as you already touched on these are very much high priority upgrades
-Fortify, true enemies don’t always go for the walls, but this is a very good upgrade to have if you have the doors defended well and the enemy tries to siege you

The fee isn’t going to stop people like this, people wasting coin on this stuff will have enough coin to make the transfer anyway.

What they need to do is implement a WvW lock-out for transfers.

As for that Stonemist siege in the hallways there, it serves a defensive purpose as the enemy has to funnel through those hallways. Arrow carts and ballista are fantastic choke point defence.

Odd, don’t know how “the” turned into “tkitten”, thread merge glitch?

Anyway, expanding on someone else’s influence idea: Split influence into two types, PvE and WvW. Essentially Art of War upgrades would be bought through WvW influence, and Arena could add the Commander upgrade to Art of War.

At least that random pugger is actually in WvW. As it is now, someone can buy Commadner without ever even being in WvW and be completely clueless when they do enter one.

There’s at least one newbish Commander on Maguuma who has no clue what he’s doing. Doesn’t even know the maps (had to ask where the entrance to tkitten puzzle was), the zerg is attracted to him yet it ends up leading him around and often having no idea what was actually going on or where the zerg was going next. Had no clue how to organize assaults, leaving it to other pugs to try and organize it for him.

I see him constantly showing off the icon in Lion’s Arch too, leaving me to believe he bought it for the novelty rather than actually wanting to be a competent Commander.

Thing is I highly prefer passives over active skills, and the 200 precision from the signets is very useful for higher crit and thus applying more bleeds.

I did just take another look at the signets though and may switch out might for stamina, I use dodge rolls a lot and the active remove all conditions would be handy.

For toughness vs vitality from what I understand toughness does not reduce condition damage, while vitality gives you a bigger health pool overall. Though considering vitality doesn’t seem to exist on prec/cond gear I guess I’ll have to go toughness.

Sorry, I should have included that.

I run 30/30/0/10/0
-5% power—>vit
-3/7/12% damage
-5% damage with sword off-hand
-50% longer bleed
-40 Precision per signet
-10% crit with sword equipped
-1 second immobilize on cripple

I run healing signet/might signet/precision signet/dolyak signet (sometimes use for stability)/rage signet(use all the time while travelling, try not to use it much in combat)

I WvW a lot, so I got in the habit of carrying a Warhorn that I’ll equip for group swiftness and be able to move around quicker, equipping my sword off-hand again for smaller fights.

So I’ve essentially played with dual swords and a rifle since day one, and specced to maximize bleed damage but I am now starting to question my stat choices.

I went with Rampager armour and weapons, use 5/6 Krait runes with a coral orb in the last piece, and run earth sigils (60% chance bleed on crit) on all my weapons. My accessories are only Masterwork right now, but only because I was working on getting badges for Invader stuff.

I’ve noticed that this makes me rather glassy and hence I’m starting to look for more survivability. I bought the Defender backback for it’s vit/toughness, really the best of the three for me. I’m considering changing the jewel/orb type I use to one that includes vitality.

Bleed spec needs condition damage, I can’t give that up, and I need precision to apply more bleeds, so I can’t give that up either, so that means I can change out power for another stat.

I was thinking precision/condition/vitality would be ideal, but I can’t find that stat combination anywhere, though toughness gear does exist.

I’m also reconsidering the accessories I want to buy. I was going to go with Invader (power/vit/tough) but really I should probably follow along the same lines as above and try to find prec/condition/vit.

Lastly, I’m considering switching over to Chrysocola jewels as they have vitality, however they lack precision so I’m tempted to stick to coral, but again coral has no survivability stats.

Any suggestions? It seems difficult to gear how I want as the stat combination I’d like to change to doesn’t seem to be available.

I said nothing about a new currency NoizeMaker, please reread my post.

And I wouldn’t call being 5k points behind Maguuma getting “stomped”. It’s a pretty even match-up, TC only pulled ahead as far as they did because they’re good at holding their map and get some point advantage during the night.

I have gotten event medals for protecting the workers, though it seems to be random… I haven’t figured out how to trigger contribution for that yet, perhaps defending the location if it comes under attack while it’s upgrading?

And I don’t think WvW suffers from the anti-farm code as far as I can tell, I earned a good 100 badges yesterday.

Sentries essentially say that a team was at this location recently. When I’m roaming I’ll usually take them, they’re a nice little bonus that helps WvW be a little more rewarding.

However it’s best to leave them alone if you’re attempting to make a surprise attack.