Guild Wars 2

Fluffball.8307:

I can’t say this has been my experience at all. Last night I spent about 3 hours doing very little other than fighting enemy zergs. One server does not equal all 40 servers or however many there are.

I have been on both T1 and T4 on the US servers this week (don’t care about loot). T1 and T4 both seem to be suffering from PvD syndrome. I have friends in T3 that say the same thing. Maybe T2 or EU is different.

If you have a server that is still focused on fighting other zergs and succeeding in finding opposing commanders that don’t run, let me know which server. If it isn’t locked, I will xfer when my lock expires… I just want good fights.

Now that so many are in full PvD mode, WvW is just a farm mode now. I enjoy seeing the new faces but any semblance of defense is seemingly gone. WvW is one dimensional now more than ever. Typically commanders avoid outright fights and often happily leave structures undefended for PPT flipping later.

Maybe others enjoy this style more than I but I would rather have fewer dedicated players than mobs just farming paper. Can there be something in between?

A lot of players run a “bag opener” AKA “vendor seller” AKA “double clicker” even though it is technically against the ToS. The game should have shipped with a “double click” while pressed key IMO.

Yes, yes it was. Step out of a zerg and most effective builds center around condi either as a primary or secondary source. Only a handful of builds run power outside of a zerg and few are as effective as their condi counterparts.

LockeCole.6125:

The most damaged people are on lower tier servers which was always “Outnumbered”, but now they are not. That means their WvW players still lose but now they don’t get Outnumbered bonuses due to a thousand walking bags wandering around giving their enemies more rallies and free bags.

Every tier is having the “Night of the Walking Bags” problem. Those T1 zergs are filled with “bags” mixed in rather than just hardcore players. That said, it is the way the game is supposed to be… we want new blood to replace players aging out of the game. We want old timers coming back that are rusty.

The “I was here first” or “They aren’t good enough” attitudes is a sure fire way to kill a game quickly. Teach those young’uns how to play and some of them will stick around to gripe about the next wave of “newb” players.

A lot of times it isn’t just farming but not wanting to go back into a really long q while a player eats dinner or some other outside of game task. Sure plenty of farmers as well but the q’s certainly aren’t helping that situation either.

Odokuro.5049:

if there is one thing most people know how to do, is abuse a system and exploit it to death.

Which is no excuse to do nothing. If everything becomes compromised by player greed, then everything is compromised equally. The guild system in a way prevents players from stacking in large numbers since the best they can do is stack one guild which is smaller than a servers population by a good bit.

Thieves do very well with Trailblazer jewelry and Viper armor/weapons. I do find the need to run Acro or Stealth for extra survival in this setup but the impact is substantial with many foes falling in a couple seconds.

The “Don’t be a bag” statement is about preventing frustration. 20 random players trying to defend against twice their numbers or more simply isn’t much fun at some point regardless of the score impact.

This is what has completely been missed by score tweakers and even ANet. The score is a symptom not an actual problem.

Turk.5460:

Straegen.2938:

Me. Works with Draining and interrupt traits. Venom, Venom, Steal, Choking, Dodge. That usually kills them. If not evade for 30s and repeat. Boring gameplay but all but the best players gets croaked by it.

What dodge did you use?

Caltrops and Lotus Training. LT is a Whirl Finisher so it adds more poison in the CG field and more cover condi. Caltrops is more of a bonus since we are in that line. If they cannot get the poison off before CG lands their goose is cooked.

FYI the Viper build drops a WvW Keep Lord solo in under 2 min. We tried it today on a Hills lord and basically every time the break bar came up it went immediately down. Switched to P/P in between since Unload can basically be cast 30% more frequently on NPC targets.

DK probably belongs on the list as well. Great commander for rallying the pugs and played ridiculous hours.

shiri.4257:

What a traitor. Where’s your Xushin statue?

Yeah he was a beast.

Stealth has needed a nerf for a very long time… since release IMO. Problem is ANet has nerfed everything around it instead. They need to unwind all those nerfs then take a bat to stealth.

Good secondary weapon but still too inflexible for primary. The flaws are all still there.

Limited defense and that requires taking Bound. Only weapon set that is single target in the entire game. Reflect, projectile defenses, etc are rampant. Anemic auto-attack.

Now condi builds can make use of the weaponset but Unload typically isn’t used.

Choking Gas with the DA changes is OP now. Most players don’t even know what hit them they go down so fast. Good players can deal, but whew I am wrecking everything outside of solid players on a build a scrub can play effectively. That Daze tripping all the interrupt secondary effects is just brutal. Sigil of Draining at the very least needs a cooldown now.

Use Vault only when they are out of dodges. Keep them blinded is the simple play until they run out of gas. Most good players tend to D/P them until they are out then drop the hammer.

Condi or Acro in the mix makes the fights MUCH easier. Even SB allows you to plink them while using Disabling Shot to stay out of their range.

Me. Works with Draining and interrupt traits. Venom, Venom, Steal, Choking, Dodge. That usually kills them. If not evade for 30s and repeat. Boring gameplay but all but the best players gets croaked by it.

Red keep is the worst. No access to the dome for defense, three towers that have easy offensive siege placement and from the hill top both inner and outer can be hit on the keep. It also has a fairly convoluted run out of the keep.This on top of the SMC issue.

The ShortBow buff is evil… works with all interrupt trip abilities including Draining. Better have REALLY good condi mitigation because SB thief builds are a steal, Choking Gas, dead sort of affair without them. The reload is every 30s to boot.

Comical when it was still effecting allies. Players were Epi lords and it would flatten 5 friendly players.

Dagger/Dagger with SB. Venom, Venom, Trap utilites. DA, Acro and Trickery for traits. It was strong before this latest patch but is now near OP strong.

Activate venoms, prime Needle, Steal, dodge. 6+ different condis land with about 30 total stacks. Choking Gas and Twisted Fangs now come with extra DPS on a condi build.

You could also use Panic Strike and Body Shot on P/D and P/P setups. The new patch notes just charged up condi builds significantly.

Cynz.9437:

Yeah man, buffing some poison that nobody in their right mind would use (because it is garbage) but trapper thief and adding more reveal to braindead spells in the same patch will TOTALLY motivate players to use SA. Somebody is in real need of reality check.

Poison builds on the thief are strong thanks to high base condi damage and the heal offset. Problem was that most thieves typically couldn’t stack enough without compromises. The new changes make dumping 10+ stacks of poison on an enemy easy and that may also make the new Choking Gas a real problem with Impacting Disruption and Pressure Striking traited. Panic Strike and Body Shot are also a nice strong combo.

Just tried out the new DA line on a few unsuspecting roamers in WvW and it is effectively a one shot condi bomb if they aren’t quick on the cleanse. P/D and P/P just got a lot better for condi builds.

MadBomber.3719:

still doesnt solve stacking or imbalance. it’ll just be like seasons where everyone stacks into same guild (server) to get rewards. no difference

Guilds have roster limits which makes it impossible to stack a match.

Sviel.7493:

I didn’t mention it in the OP because those builds are likely to be changed soon. At the outset, retaliation damaged siege and it was quickly changed not to do so. Anet moves much slower these days but it seems like that sort of mechanic is not something they want in the game.

Both AC destroying builds survived the latest balance patch with no changes. Firing on a map q zerg or organized guild group will still destroy an ac in about 30s.

Sviel.7493:

As for shield gens, I didn’t cover those either for sake of brevity and pending further research. What do you think about giving the force dome a minimum range, though? If it can’t cover the shield gen itself, there should be better options for dealing with offensive shield gens while defensive shield gens are about the same.

I would leave it alone at least for now. Most commanders are not savvy enough to know how to deploy siege effectively so making it more difficult seems unnecessary. What I would like to see is defensive shield gens protecting defensive siege better. Mortars, cannons and oil are completely useless which is something a shield gen should address.

Fivona.5061:

Condi Shatter Chronomancer. Build below with adjustments. Practice with build needed for success.

The Trailblazer variant is stupid good. The Viper variant in skilled hands is probably the single strongest dueling build in the game right now. That build has zero weaknesses and basically takes substantially superior play to beat it.

The matchups should be manually set by ANet each week. It cannot take more than a few minutes to figure out which servers should be in which tiers. Relinking should be done to combat stagnant tiers.

It really doesn’t need to be any more complicated than that.

I see the exploit but how does it payoff? They cannot flip the keep without getting into inner either way.

Napo.1230:

1vs1 a skilled thief will always win

uhhh only if you count running away a win. In duels, thieves are marginal at best.

Somebody has to say it… Kalkz. Love him or hate him, he was popular.

Well SBI lost to BG in massacres two weeks in a row along with a mid-ranked server in each match. How bad can it be to get BG and the #1 ranked server in the same week?

SBI getting into T1 after getting murdered for two weeks in T2/T3… at this point ANet is grinding SBI into the dust.

Agree with the general consensus above Thief, Mesmer, Druid. All because of mobility and stealth options.

They send me mail now. I get reams of it.

ACs are already near useless against zergs as at least two specific builds kill them passively. They are also the only line of defense against a superior numbered force which thanks to shield gens and those aforementioned builds already have a massive advantage.

Nobody cares these days because winning a tier is a foregone conclusion of numbers. Besides, when was the last time we had a close enough match worth making a PPT effort?

Swamurabi.7890:

In defense of YB, they are linked with two other servers.

I am not blaming any individual servers since they don’t choose their links or their tiers. This is clearly a broken system that needs human intervention from ANet until a better system can be worked out. Glicko simply doesn’t work and it is worse with the heavy variance.

Linked Servers can help but only if someone at ANet takes the time to purposefully balance out tiers during the links and manually set the matches each week. I don’t expect perfection but months of complete blow outs in most tiers is murdering the joy in WvW.

Guardians are OP because a hamster could play them effectively and they are basically good/great at every mode of WvW now. Their defensive sustain even on offensive builds is stupid good.

Stealth remains OP. It is easy to stack for long periods and it is attached to classes with high mobility. It is utterly ridiculous in its current form.

Condi Bunker anything is OP in small scale. All the DPS of a power build with none of the draw backs.

ANet is strangling the last bit life out of WvW with these lopsided matches. They are just painful to play in. Stop allowing servers with large populations into matches with servers that have no chance of competing week after week.

BG in Tier 3… seriously? BG not being in T1 for over a month despite being ranked #2 or #3 overall the entire time… fix it. Just kittening fix it already.

Make the entire map flat. I am sure more would play on the map if they gutted all the cliffs and drop offs. Shrink the size of towers and keeps and they have solved the maps problems.

Roaming and GvG are always going to be meta or die type play. Only in large group play can non-meta builds be carried. We can gripe all day about how OP a specific build is but every meta build currently has a direct counter that is also meta. We are actually in a good spot in that sense. The gripe is that most of the meta in small scale is mostly bunker and condi with little variation.

BTW if you have 3+ players roaming, mix a Tempest and Guardian as anchor and you can pretty much run whatever setup you want.

Someone at Anet needs to spend 5 minutes a week manually setting matches and links to provide a more balanced play. What is happening now is worse than what we had before and in the process they gutted server identity.

A trained monkey could set better matches than this stupid Glicko system. It has never worked well and now it is just laughable. Seriously, BG hasn’t been in T1 in a month and has been ranked 3 or higher the entire time.

Linking servers made sense ONLY when it balanced the matches. Linking and letting ridiculously unbalanced matches continue just kittenes off everyone.

IMO all guards in WvW should flag players like the guard nodes. As it is though, I can be at least half or more on a T2 or less camp before swords pop. Players have almost no chance of stopping those flips unless they happen to be in the immediate area.

zinkz.7045:

Actually it is fine, one of the reasons WvW has died off is because they listened to people who lack basic logic and cried about needing tools to defend against superior numbers, so they added siege like shield gens, buffed AC damage, fortified everything, put in trash mechanics like chilling fog, etc.

Shield gens are actually more offensive than defensive. EWP and Invuln created more fights by giving players a chance to respond. The supply tactic is solid. Chilling Fog nor Air Defense stops a superior force and rarely even slows them down. At best they give an advantage in even numbers for a minute or so. They gutted SMC stealth. All the banners are now meh. Of course all the tactics are often trolled in such a way that makes them completely pointless.

Basically none of what you are talking about had a substantial effect on the attack methods of a superior force with the exception of shield gens which as noted made it EASIER.

Back to the topic on hand, there is little counter siege against rams except ACs. Using a trait that auto-magically destroys ACs (but no other siege) is a poor design.

Scouting keep swords is significantly more difficult. The attacking locations are far more complex and the keeps are more difficult to traverse.

Defending towers while being attacked is nearly pointless due to their size and supply locations. Attackers can knock down a wall down before a defender can build counter siege. Even keeping their siege disabled is nearly impossible without a fast build.

There are WAY too many ways to get lost on the map or outright trapped by terrain from reaching an objective without backtracking.

Those are my big 3 gripes about the map.

Dawdler.8521:

Oh you’re constantly sitting on an AC despite burning? Somehow I dont feel bad for you.

I guess 50 players building a half dozen rams to take down a gate against half their numbers with no line of defense is a good thing.

This has to be a bug… hitting a DH with an AC shouldn’t set the AC on fire. Makes defending against a stronger force near impossible.

Rukia.9860:

S/P is terrible vs anyone not noob and it gets rekt by retal lol defeating the purpose of the set (cleave) of course anything works in unranked or low rating.

Retal against PW is fairly minor damage as PW can dish out up to 10x that damage while evading everything else. Not sure how it gets “rekt” by it. I ran an S/P build for about a year and dueled with it extensively. Once a player learns the timing, it is a very strong build but is vulnerable to specific builds. Retaliation has never been a significant issue at least for me.

Its main strength like most thieves is as a +1. Run with a stun lock warrior and the +1 synergy is beastly.

Ramoth.9064:

Actually its a pretty hilarious non-MM necro killer build with pul impact. headshots, distracting daggers, headshot again. hilarious at silver/bronze

I think the point is if you can land 4 ints with Head Shot, you don’t need three more. Besides a player can take Bandit’s Defense and get one of those interrupts with a 2s knockdown along with a stun break and a block mechanic.

Basically either Headshot gets the job done or a player is fighting a build where Interrupts are difficult to land (evasion builds, perma-stab, high stealth). Adding more interrupts as opposed to more utility is almost suicidal.

naturesoul.3578:

i really didn’t like thief staff, but then i don’t like to play thief in melee range.

P/P is high burst but moderate sustain and performs very poorly in multi-target situations. It just isn’t optimal for bosses with big pools of health because the auto-attack is so weak.