Guild Wars 2

Yup, turn down sound quality, haven’t had this bug occur a single time since I did so awhile back.

Go to transaction tab, click the drop down and select “Stuff I’m Buying” and remove the items you want to cancel.

Eanae, as a Maguuma player I can tell you that’s false. TC and Maguuma fight all the time, and Quentin and Durios will change hands semi-frequently. We both constantly harass the others supply to. TC has dug in rather firm though, and in the past few days every Maguuma assault on Jerrifer/Klovan fails. This fact may make it seem like we’re not fighting each other as stuff may not change hands as often as Ehmry stuff does, but we are very much fighting each other.

We also haven’t been able to focus entirely on TC because Ehmry stabs us in the back every time we try. As I explained in an earlier post this gets the attention of our zerg and they just keep pushing north when we get our stuff back.

Generally upgrades are split into two types. The first are the personal upgrades which need to have the supply on hand and stocked up. The second are structural, and these can be bought any time as will upgrade as the supply is delivered.

This has been dubbed as “culling”, a server “optimization” on Arena’s part that limits the number of players on screen, and it prioritizes friendlies first so often times you will end up fighting invisible armies.

I’d like to point out that, in an indirect way, you DO get a return on coin you invest into towers.

Let’s start first with taking a tower. When you successfully assault a tower every player who participated gets an event medal, that’s every player earning a few silver. Even just a group of twenty or so generates 50 silver total or more as a reward. Subtract the cost of siege, and you have some initial profit to invest in upgrades.

Then comes defence. An upgraded tower is easier to defend, and while defending you get a medal every three minutes. That means every three minutes coin is being generated that can be further invested either now or in the future in upgrades, armour repair, and siege.

Sure, the return is split into small increments among many players, but those small rewards for each players adds up over time.

I don’t recall much else happening, that is until Maguuma started sleeping and the TC night zerg formed. They overran Daneleon and Quentin extremely quickly despite us raining arrows down on them at Quentin gate, the gate went down so fast it didn’t seem to matter to them. I went to Langor after this in case they went down there, but they went Durios instead, then disappeared for awhile to wipe Ehmry off the map.

Eventually the zerg came back and went for Bravost, I was one of only three or so players that showed up to defend that, and I’m sad to say we lost it with over 360 supply still in the tower. Spamming my lone arrow cart on the door seemed to do little to thwart the attack.

The zerg went to Daneleon, and we knew Langor was the next target so we rallied our defence there. The moment had come, this is where we were going to stop the full night cap. I spent all day fully upgrading Langor, it had a full 700 supply and lots of siege defense. I honestly think TC didn’t expect us to be so well dug in, as they easily gave up on Langor and to our amusement bypassed us to go for the keep instead, to which we theorized that they thought it’d be an easier target.

I stayed at Langor, but a bulk of our players did go to the keep to defend. They got to the inner wall, but our defence seemed solid from what I was able to see from the distance. I believe TC retreated at least once to resupply at Daneleon and tried another assault on the keep. Eventually though they did seem to give up and regrouped at Daneleon once more.

They tried to go for Langor again, this time seeming to be much more organized. They didn’t go for rams this time, instead trying to set up cata’s and such beyond the bridge which easily died to our siege. They tried building trebs too, which we counter-trebbed. It seemed we had more players show up too, which was a little odd considering the time of night.

We pushed back to Daneleon and reclaimed it, another guild came on the map, I think from our Borderland, to retake Bravost, Durios, Umber, and even pushed into Ogrewatch and Pangloss. We on the south flank had a fight go on at the north Daneleon choke tunnel for quite awhile until we eventually broke through and reclaimed Quentin. We proceeded to head west, clearing the Hylek camp and claiming Golanta.

We then began an assault on Klovan, and many of us knew the front gate was a death trap as Maguuma had already failed to take Klovan at least three times earlier in the day. We opted to go for the walls instead, building some cata’s up on the hill behind a rock to keep them out of LoS of the ballista. We cleared much of the siege and I believe had the walls down to 60%’ish when we got zerged from behind, apparently reinforcement from another battleground.

Unfortunately I didn’t take a screenshot of the early morning map, but I did go to bed happy in the fact that my efforts in upgrading Langor was a key factor in preventing a full night cap, fulfilling my goal I had set for the day.

(Had to cut this into two posts due to length)

I’d like to say that I had a huge amount of fun in Eternal yesterday and into early morning hours, spent a good fifteen hours or so playing yesterday.

Logged in about 12:30 PM, TC had Eternal 100% capped, only a small handful of Maguuma players were present so a small group began doing some small objectives.

Eventually we start getting the prime time players joining, so we assault Langor and reclaim it, which we then used as a base to assault our keep. I believe we had a few players retake Bravost and Umber as well during the siege. I recall at least five cata’s and other random siege being deployed.

I ended up claiming Langor and began upgrading it, and decided I had one major goal for the day: Prevent another full night cap, or at the very least give TC a hell of a fight in doing so. Throughout the day I’d frequently check on Langor, making sure an upgrade was always qued when possible, trying to keep our supply lines going and joining defense and assaults when needed.

At some point Ehmry took Stonemist, we had some random players attacking the castle while for the most part Maguuma seemed to be digging in. Eventually a wall in Stonemist did fall, and we noticed TC was inside as well, so the focus shifted to attempting to take Stonemist. We break through the north inner gate while TC breaks in from south, resulting in a long, massive threeway battle that raged on for over an hour. Despite the horrible lag and the invisible army it was a lot of fun, but eventually TC won out and the remaining Maguuma force had to retreat.

I mentioned this next development in my above post. When TC got Stonemist back they resumed trebbing Durios, so some of us were focusing on upgrading it and doing repair runs from Umber, and I believe we had some people down south as well. Ehmry proceeded to take Umber from us and hold it, preventing us from repairing the ongoing damage to Durios. I believe we barely managed to hold off a TC assault on Durios, only to have Ehmry and TC both assault it again a bit later and fight each other for it.

Some random screenshots I took:
-Stonemist (This particular one was when we came in behind TC at the south gate, we came through North again when we eventually wiped here)
-TC’s attempt to siege Langor (I only got one shot off before the owner there took over)
-Langor still stands bearing my guild emblem shortly before I logged off

Eliteseraph, that’s called tactics. Exploiting a weakness in your enemy because they’re busy else where is common practice among all servers, even yours… Ehmry does this to us too. Example? We nearly lost Durios in Eternal because Ehmry cut off the supply we were using to keep the wall repaired from TC trebbing.

One thing I’ve noticed in Eternal is that nearly every time we shift our focus to TC Ehmry will stab us in the back, usually by taking Umber and attempting to take Durios/Bravost. This catches the attention of Maguuma zerg, angry mob zergs back Umber, goes north to wipe the ogre camp clean, then the zerg mentality continues to go north to Ogrewatch. There’s no stopping it, it’s almost a conditioned response whenever a zerg moves to retake Umber.

Then Ehmry proceeds to whine that we’re double teaming them, when it’s their own fault they’re getting the attention of our zerg repeatedly. And from what I’ve seen Ogrewatch has been a much more attractive target than Klovan/Jerrifer because nearly every assault I’ve witnessed or been a part of into TC territory fails beyond capturing Golanta. Even the more organized assault against Klovan this morning, whereas we avoided the front gate this time and hit the wall instead, ended up being thwarted by a massive TC zerg.

The Swiftness boon granted in cities is a short term buff, it does not persist. Usually you only need it to explore a city anyway, as waypointing within a city is free.

As for character personality, your choice on character creation simply determines which one you start 50% in, while the other two are 25%. You can only every have a total of 100%, and your communication choices will change your personality slightly. As an example, picking Nobility will raise Nobility while slightly dropping Charm and Ferocity.

I myself tend to play Diplomatic, which is a 50/50 split in Charm and Nobility, though I usually have a small amount of Ferocity as sometimes I will choose that option.

The Masterwork is the best available right now unfortunately.

The colour of your team is based on your position on the ladder. Green is highest in the bracket, blue 2nd, red bottom. So if you’re in a more mid-tier server such as mine (Maguuma), your colour will change from week to week, therefore allowing you an easier time to get points that may have been deep enemy territory in earlier matches. However there are some exceptions that I can see, Kaineng for example is at such a severe WvW disadvantage that for the foreseeable future they will always be red.

Based on this you should be able to decide if you’ll need to do some server hopping or not.

R E F L H E X.8413:

For an elementalist to stop the finisher he has mist form, he just has to wait it out, however you get to use that mist form quite often if you get the first one off most likely. Also, it will heal you if you were almost fully out.

It may “heal” you, but in reality it counts as another down. Using the ability once puts you at 50% life (2nd down), if you can manage to get it off again you will have 25% life (3rd down). At this point it’s suicide the great majority of the time if you can manage to use it again, as you die instantly.

While I fully acknowledge that Elementalists have a weak downed state, and I do play one as an alt, I feel I should chime in that Warrior #2 is also pretty weak. In a group battle, I’m essentially dead as I can only knock down one of the 2+ people finishing me off. In a one on one scenario the enemy is generally in melee range when I’m downed anyway, so they can immediately start the finisher. Even if I time #2 perfectly and knock them down during the jumping part of the animation just before the flag finish, it doesn’t knock them away, they just get back up and press f again, and most players do it fast enough that even with spamming #3 it may just start the cast time before I’m finished anyway. #2 also misses a lot if my target happens to be ranged as the hammer is so slow.

If I can also manage to down the enemy then it’s an automatic (Kinda) win for me, if I can’t #1 them down first then it’s one of the rare times I can Vengeance and finish them. The only other time I can vengeance is if my enemy is slow on the finish.

The REAL numbers, as posted by Arena sometime last week (I don’t feel like digging up the post, but it’s around somewhere)

-30% of players have played/attempted to play WvW
-Of those 30%, 3% were never able to play due to massive ques

So, as of Arena’s post, only 29.1% of players have played WvW

In reality, many of those players simply tried out WvW to see what it was all about, so the amount of active players in WvW is much likely way lower than that 29%.

I’d place myself as as a hybrid of the two types, as I play WvW for fun, but I also like getting rewarded for participating in WvW. Sometimes I take one for the team and do boring, unrewarding tasks for the benefit of a greater goal.

You think it’s bad not having a que in the two enemy borderlands? Try not having a que in ANY maps. Seriously, I was able to get into Eternal instantly, and when I got bored in Eternal I hoped over to Tarnished Coast, again with no que, during prime time.

I was in Eternal shortly earlier, our Maguuma zerg was smashing their face against Ogrewatch. I helped take Pangloss and we did hold it for a bit until Ehmry eventually zerged us.

Afterward we regrouped in Quentin and tried to move the zerg off Ogrewatch and against TC, not a lot of players acknowledged us so we went ahead and took Golanta, then attempted to take Jerrifer before we got zerged by TC and pushed back to Golanta, eventually losing that too.

So yes we tried to attack TC, but the zerg has a mind of it’s own… and I hoped over to to another map because our zerg kept attacking that tower and we didn’t have the manpower to get any kind of assault going on TC.

I also play a max size charr, and this is the one puzzle that made me wish there was a first person view as there were times I could literally see nothing but my characters backside, meaning I had to try and pan my camera around just to get a glimpse of my surroundings.

By the way all jump puzzles are doable without swiftness, however swiftness just makes a lot of them a hell of a lot easier.

I’m well aware of the risk of participating in WvW, but as I said I’m not sticking around for a fight that will see me lying on the ground within seconds of engagement. It’s not fun, and it’s expensive to constantly have to repair exotic armour.

I’ll have to click that waypoint to respawn anyway, so might as well save myself the two silver and get a head start on running from the spawn.

A nice competitive match-up between Tarnished Coast, Maguuma, and Ehmry Bay. As of a few minutes ago the pie chart was as close to perfectly split as you could get.

100% magic find simply means you’re twice as likely to get magic drops.

10% sell fee, a fee which is currently hidden.

There’s three different kind of Guild buffs.

Banners: Anyone who clicks it gets the buff
Guild buffs: Everyone in the guild gets the buff (In this case the 10% PvP influence)
Fort buffs: Everyone in the vicinity of a WvW objective claimed by your guild receives the buffs

To the people who keep saying there was admittance to an alliance, show us the quotes.

I was in Eternal for a good portion of the morning, supposedly when this “alliance” was in effect. Reread one of my earlier posts and you’ll see we were clearly attacking each other.

To recap briefly however: They were trebbing us and harassing our supply in the south. They succeeded in wiping us on numerous attempts to take Ehmry Keep, seriously you guys should be thanking TC for allowing you to hold onto the keep for as long as you did, otherwise we would’ve had it much sooner. We made an attempt on TC’s keep, got to the inner courtyard before being wiped, but then had to turn our attention back to Ehmry because they started pushing into our territory.

There was no alliance, just TC capitalizing on our big push into Ehmry territory.

If I’m off solo or with a small group I’ll generally stick around for fair (Or mostly fair) fights, but if I’ve got five people chasing me I’m not sticking around for the repair bill for a fight I know I won’t get more than a few attacks off with, and that’s assuming I don’t get stunlocked.

Sorry you didn’t get your free kill.

I play a warrior by the way, so generally it’s difficult for me to run away if engaged as all I have is swiftness. If I know I can’t escape I turn around and go down swinging, but if I manage to run away from a zerg of players then I by all means deserve to save that two silver bill.

Mobile siege defeats the purpose of golem suits. Also dismantling siege is an invitation for griefing unless you limit it to the owner only.

Despite if this was intended or not, I think it should be allowed to stay. I’ll give specific example locations and explain why I think they’re fine:

Borderlands Maps:
-Garrison Cliff, the keep is generally held by the home team, and one would think that the home team should have the advantage on their home borderland. This cliff does exactly that in allowing them to bombard other locations. Sure this spot favours the west keep and some would argue that it gives an unfair disadvantage to the team on that side of the map, but remember there’s three identicle maps that even this out as the teams can very will be on the reverse scenario on another borderland.

-Bay to Briar both ways, they can counter each other, and the keep is meant to be difficult to hold, it allows the team on that side of the map to advance into the borderland, yet in turn hard to hold due to the garrison advantage of the home team. The Briar is the base of an invading world, so it makes sense that the defender has a method in bombarding it.

-East keep to lake, again home team advantage to warding off an invading force. Not sure the lake can hit the keep though, but there is that platform that might be able to be in range?

Eternal Battleground:

-Stonemist Castle: A strategic objective and difficult to hold, an advantage to having it is the ability to bombard surrounding towers, but the trade-off is that it in turn can also be hit.

-The keeps, red in particular. Unlike the borderlands there is no home advantage on this map, instead each team should theoretically be able to easily take their third of the map. This is obvious with red in particular as their keep can hit three of the surrounding towers, all in the red portion, making it difficult for the other teams to keep towers they take from them.

It goes both ways, attacking forces can attack through the gate too.

Their catapult causing trouble for you? Adapt. Build a catapult of your own if you need to. Range and AoE the gate down instead. Try standing further away from the gate when manning rams to see if you can avoid the splash.

Originally this tactic was used as the only viable means to defend an objective as it was one of the few siege weapons that could withstand retaliation damage. With retaliation no longer able to hurt siege it still has the use of knocking people back from the gate, providing some relief for the defenders.

The catapult doesn’t hurt, it’s not much of a threat beyond knocking you back from the gate, so as I mentioned adapt and build a catapult of your own to take the gate or a wall down from a distance.

dre.8973:

grub gives me 40k exp 1k karma and 6s + siege/badges.

In the time it takes you to kill the grub I can:
-Raid enemy supply camps
-Take sentry points
-Kill Doylaks
-Help take down undefended towers
-Defend an objective and gain a medal once every three minutes for doing so

You get 40k xp, 1k karma, 6S, a measly few badges

I get 150k-450k xp, 5k+ karma, 30+S plus any loot I get, 20+ badges from NPC’s/enemy players. This varies of course depending how fast objectives are flipping, size of forces, etc.

Who’s getting the better deal? Even a small group of players on a losing team can earn so much more than you can for spending 45 minutes on that grub.

That grub needs to be taken out of WvW, or at least made significantly easier to kill so it doesn’t tie up a team for so long.

It’s not just blue that has to worry about it either… I’ve been on red once and we were making a good push for blue’s keep, up until we ran into the grub that is… sure we killed it despite the efforts of blue trying to pick us off, but by the time we finally did we couldn’t take the keep any more as both our momentum was gone and the enemy rallied up a strong defence by that point.

-Players could grief their own server by destroying the orb when it’s not in danger
-“Spies” can destroy the orb to deny the world the buff (Although they’d be stuck for 24 hours)
-A team about to lose the orb would simply opt to destroy it every time rather than lose it
-Where would it reset? The original alter? Sure a home team that destroys the orb would deny it to the enemy, but once it respawns it’s easily taken anyway. An enemy that destroyed the orb rather than let the home team take it would easily be able to get it back when it respawns.

Overall a bad idea, unless restrictions were put in place such as only the home team may destroy the orb, but there’s still room for griefing.

Maguuma player here:

I played on Eternal this morning for a good five hours or so, and although it’s true that Ehmry was being flanked by both teams TC and Maguuma ARE fighting each other. I’m of the opinion that there is just some kind of mutual understanding that Ehmry is the bigger threat.

Quentin was fully upgraded, and we had a few players hanging around down there because TC was trebbing Quentin from Stonemist. I think TC realized that we were making a strong push on Ehmry, so they took advantage of that and hit Ehmry from the other side. Anzalias is also generally an easy target to take in general when you have Stonemist, so it only made sense for them to keep pushing once they took it.

I should also note that just because Ehmry players may not have seen us fighting each other, doesn’t mean we weren’t. In fact, We organized an assault on TC’s keep via their underwater gate, only to get wiped in their inner keep. During this assault we started losing ground to Ehmry, including losing Bravost and such, so it only made sense to refocus our efforts on Ehmry.

Maguuma had been starving the Ehmry Overlook for a good few hours and making a few attempts to take it, eventually TC met up with us from the West and proceeded to hit us from behind and wipe quite a few of our attempts at taking the keep. We were very much fighting each other and Ehmry for control of the keep, a truly three way fight. Really Maguuma would have captured the keep much sooner had TC not wiped us a few times.

As soon as we eliminated Ehmry from the map we did start fighting each other, we made a failed assault on one of their towers before I ended up disconnecting.

One final note, after TC and Maguuma got stomped by Dragonbrand last week I think our two servers have a mutual respect for one another, though I think that they’re fully aware that as soon as they take the lead that we may very well start double teaming them. Our match-up is proving fun and relatively competitive so far, and two on ones are a natural thing to expect on a threeway battle.

“0 Dungeons Completed”

From what I can tell, although dungeons are not counted for the 100% completion, they may count for the achievement?

I’ve got 100% as well by the way but have not done all the dungeons, I’ve also got 97/98% according to character screen and the achievement.

I’ve done all the jump puzzles, they don’t seem to count toward this (Other than the few that uncover portions of the map like the gryphon one in Leonar’s Pass).

Everything goes through the door, even melee swings.

Edited two days ago:
1626.448 Dragonbrand (10)
1577.574 Tarnished Coast (11)
1520.354 Maguuma (12)

Thing is, the match was going well for the first few days, in Dragonbrand’s favour of course, then things just kinda fell apart at the start of the week when both TC and Maguuma were night capped.

During the day we both make gains, but we lose it all at night, and it’s getting more difficult to take stuff back when fewer players are joining WvW and when Dragonbrand is upgrading everything.

Even if Dragonbrand’s night crew is lack-luster, we on Maguuma are outnumbered and have the out-manned buff consistently even on our own home borderland and Eternal. Things were even for the first day or two, but once that tipping point was hit it just kinda snowballed into Dragonbrand dominating us.

And about the transfers: You’re right, Dragonbrand will likely get owned when they move up to the next tier, so sucks to be those who transferred to the winning team, only to get owned next week.

I’m predicting one of two outcomes for Maguuma next week:
1) The server that moves down to our tier will dominate
2) We’ll actually get an even match

I’d like to see TC stay in our tier, our two servers seem to be a decent match for each other.

Steelbane, or whatever his name is, is the Legionnaire up until you defeat him in that duel in the arena. You’re promoted when you either kill him or let him crawl away humiliated. At least this is how it goes in the Blood Legion storyline.

Dragobrand vs. Maguuma vs. Tarnished Coast was a fair and competitive match-up in Dragobrand’s favour when the match first began, we (Maguuma) and TC each holding our own against Dragonbrand.

…which all changed at the start of the week. With no night presence and the weekend crowd gone we started getting completely demolished, which lowered the morale of our players which meant that a lot of people stopped playing WvW, which fed back into the numbers issue and we get steam-rolled some more. Even during prime-time our maps aren’t full any more or have very short ques, so anything we do capture is lost overnight.

Who is this supposed to optimize performance for? The server? Or is this “optimization” supposed to be helping me?

I’ve got 10Mb download, lag is NOT an issue for me
I’ve got a high-end system that I built just last year, performance is NOT an issue for me

So why am I forced to have this “optimization”? It’s frankly ruining my WvW experience as I can’t see who I’m attacking.

An example: I was manning a cannon on our Garrison, yet I was firing blind into an attacking zerg hoping that I was hitting people, and apparently I was as despite no damage numbers coming up what-so-ever I was getting xp and loot bags popping up at my feet. I was largely aiming at the source of spell attacks or where my allies were attacking, and the only reason I’d know we’d succeed in defence is when my allies start leaving our keep and start chasing after the retreating zerg.

I’ve literally ran into a zerg and not know it, not only was I a free kill, it makes me look like an idiot whenever I do so.

If I need to “optimize” my gameplay let me, the player, have the option in turning down my settings, or give me a slider that lets me decide how many players I want to render that includes an unlimited option as well.

It makes it very hard to strategize in WvW when you don’t know what the true size of a zerg is, or where the invisible army is headed next, or seeing that a location is under attack yet you have to physically travel there to see if it’s a real threat rather than being able to gauge from a distance. Siege is a pain as well, not just the cannons but Trebs as well, it’s impossible to know if I’m hitting anything other than the walls or gate. I’ve been sieging from the Garrison in the past and a massive battle of our two zergs will clash between our keeps, I want to be able to see the players so I can actually fire into them, and not fire blindly to realize I’m hitting nothing in the end.

I remember shortly after the game release running around PvE maps and thinking “Wow I really love how I can see enemies way in the distance over there!” What ever happened to that?

I didn’t read any of the replies here so I apologize if this has been suggested already, but I made a suggestion over at this thread: https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/suggestions/WvWvW-Que-Information/first#post131869

If players were able to actually see how full maps were and estimated wait times I think it’d help considerably in spreading out the players, reducing ques, and filling up all the maps all in one sweep.

Player sees Eternal battleground has a 2+ hour wait time, but sees that a Borderland is open, so they decide to hop into the open borderland. This reduces the demand on full maps and fills up ones that need more players.

I’m specced for high power and high precision, so I crit nearly every hit, but I don’t have %crit damage increase so I usually hit anywhere from 4k to perhaps 7-8k I’d say. Did he have might stacks on him? I could potentially see 10k+ hits happening with %crit damage gear.

Three of the maps are identical with each team starting in a different location on each one, the home server having the advantage on their home borderland. The fourth is meant to be more even between all three teams with a desirable objective right in the middle.

Though due to the different terrains of the three sides, different colours end up having certain advantages, though for the most part things are mostly even on Eternal.

Xia.3485:

I would have paid real money to see this battle unfold. I bet the defenders were shacking in their boots the whole time!

It was indeed a bit nerve-racking to be making that last stand in the room, but despite losing our orb anyway due to it resetting in the North alter it was a fun battle. (We kept the keep as they didn’t come back once they got the orb.)

I’ll consider having Bandicam running in the future, though I’ve no real experience in video editing.

Xercisis.9768:

Slyther.1297:

…but the arrow cart had limited range, and the catapult couldn’t hit any of our siege inside the room and was limited to just knocking those of us back that stood in the corridor/stairs.

Ok so you admit that you had them (siege weapons) inside, that you could fire out and that they could not fire in……..sounds exploity to me….

They were firing into the room, the catapult couldn’t hit our siege due to its placement. Our siege also had limited range, the two ballistas we had could only shoot people that tried to rush in, and the arrow cart spam was focused on the corridor entrance. (The radius of the circle may have been enough to barely reach outside, which would account for us hitting them from inside, though their arrow cart did the same to us during the short time it was up)

Those of us not on siege were standing in our arrow spam trying to pick off people in the zerg, and we’d back off when we got to low health from return fire. The catapult was knocking us around until we managed to kill it.

They were mostly standing on the bridge firing at those of us in the corridor firing out, it was really a stalemate, they couldn’t rush us, we couldn’t leave.

Ah I understand what you’re asking now. Hmm… no idea honestly, kills perhaps?

(Summary at bottom)

Alright, so I found myself attracted to a specific build almost immediately and early on, but I’d like to hear some criticisms and suggestions on how I may improve the build.

I enjoy dual-wielding with a preference for swords, and I also enjoy rifles, and so I was very happy to learn the two weapon sets work very well together.

I didn’t mind that both weapons were bleed based, and in fact made me happy as I like constant sustained damage, so I focused on the bleed aspect which resulted in a bleed build.

Looking at the traits I was immediately attracted to the +Condition Duration of Strength, longer bleeds means more damage. I was also attracted to the +Condition Damage, and combined with the bleed on crit trait the precision was very attractive too. These stats are so tempting to me that I maxed both at 30, which only left me with 10 which I used for Vitality.

I also stuck the Earth runes in my swords and rifle, as even more bleeds works great for the build. (I’ve heard that the sigils are per weapon, so I put Earth in both swords)

With the 33% bleed trait and 60% bleed sigils I of course want to get my crit as high as possible too, so I took the +40 precision per signet trait. I felt this worked in my favour too as I highly prefer all-the-time passive bonuses versus active bonuses, so five signets, (Healing/power/precision/toughness/rage) gives me an extra 200 precision.

I use Rage for the Swiftness boost a lot, otherwise I try to keep it unused in combat, and I’ll use Dolyak for stability, otherwise I don’t really use the actives on the signets much.

I’m also gearing Rampager’s which is power, precision, and condition damage. I use five Krait runes for the condition damage and even more bleed, and one Coral Orb.

With dual-sword/rifle I get massive and long lasting bleed stacks with swords, as well as it’s gap closer (Or to leap away if needed), cripple, long range impale and the high damage secondary, as well as the block. The rifle gives me ranged viability also with decent bleed, has the cripple as well so I can kite around, and the butt that I can use to knock an enemy away to lessen damage to myself or save an ally when they’re down or immobile.

This build is kinda just ok underwater, I can apply bleeds with trait and Earth sigils, though I do win a lot of my water battles as it seems most people just suck at them.

Thing is I end up feeling a little glassy with this build, I have a hard time surviving against multiple opponents, and some burst and stunlock builds can absolutely destroy me.

In summary:
Dual-sword/Rifle
30/30/0/10/0
-5% power as vitality, 3%/7%/12% damage, 5% damage with sword off-hand
-+40 precision per signet, +50% bleed duration, +10% crit with sword
-Immobilize for 1 second on cripple
-Rampager’s prefix on all gear
-5 Krait Runes, 1 Coral Orb
-Five signets, healing, power, precision, doylak, rage

If you play smart and participate in a lot of events you should be earning a lot more gold than you spend repairing your gear.

Personally I think they should just lower the rate at which your gear gets damaged in WvW, for example instead of having a piece of gear be damaged on each defeat, have it be three defeats instead. This would lessen the hit to the coin purse, while still maintaining a penalty for dying (Other than the run back of course).

I believe it’s allies only, otherwise why would anyone ever use the lifesteal?

I used a weapon briefly that had this sigil, it’s a small heal range every few seconds to allies around you, just a few hundred I believe, and don’t think I got healed by it.

Issue: Players have no information regarding how full WvWvW is, and how long the que may be.

Suggestion: Add information to the WvW menu, more specifically the number of players in each map compared to number allowed, as well as the number of people in the que with an estimated time of how long it’ll take to get in.

Format would be something like
<Map name> <current/max> <# waiting> <Est. time>

Example: Red player wants to enter WvW
<Red Borderlands> <Full> <24 waiting> <Est. 45 minutes>
<Blue Borderlands> <102/125>
<Green Borderlands> <94/125>
<Eternal battlegrounds> <Full> <103 waiting> <2+ hours>

Issue: Many server match-ups are facing massive population imbalances, especially at night

Suggestion: Introduce a dynamic population cap based on the number of players present.

Details:
-Borderlands: Cap the players per team based on the home teams population (With max cap being whatever it is now). With the cap dynamically based on the home server it gives the home server a fair chance to do well in their own home borderland.

This will allow servers with large populations to dominate their home borderland, but prevent them from steam rolling their opponents with numbers advantage in their opponents home borderlands.

-Eternal battleground: Dynamically cap the players based on the population of the second highest team, this will prevent a high population server from dominating EB with sheer numbers as there will be at least one opponent with equal number players.

Potential New Issue: Que times for higher pop servers may increase due to less players allowed in WvWvW against lower population servers.

Dragonbrand vs Maguuma vs Tarnished Coast

Dragonbrand is the clear dominator, however we (Maguuma) and Tarnished Coast seem to be able to give them a good fight.

During the day the scores vary quite a bit, though largely competitive for the most part. Night time is when Dragonbrand takes over a large portion of the maps, often owning 75%+.

Eternal has had the castle flip a few times, though Dragonbrand usually take it back from Maguuma and Tarnished Coast before long, else all three teams generally hold our respective third of the map pretty well.

Dragonbrand has their borderlands pretty much locked down, Maguuma gets a foot hold during the day but looses it at night. Tarnished Coast seems to be able to hold a lot of their map well, though Dragonbrand takes a lot over at night. Maguuma has both opponents hitting it, but we’ve managed to hold onto half of it.

As of now the score is 94.2k Dragonbrand, 53.5k Maguuma, 46.2k Tarnished Coast with income at 300 DB/200 TC/195 Maguuma

Thing is we WERE using the trebuchets for offence, we were sieging their keep for a good hour or two to starve them of their supply and eventually got a hole in their outter wall, then they mounted an organized assault on our orb keep and we placed priority on protecting it. When we went back to the trebs to resume our siege four of the five were gone. And this is up on the Garrison cliff by the way, the only way to kill them is by breaking into the keep which they had not.

And siege is meant for both offence and defence, why else would you have arrow carts which are meant to disperse crowds? Or ballista that do bonus damage against siege?

Thing is that 30 minute timer should not be there, siege is expensive, and we have to spend supply to build it, why do we have to man it every 30 minutes to keep it on the map?

And what if we go on the offensive and keep them away from our fortification? Why should our perfectly good siege that we spent coin/badges and supply on be gone if we get pushed back to that fortification and need to make use of it?