Guild Wars 2

An side effect of scorpion wire and Engy magnet boost (and the removal of fully length stability from pre-canceled tornado/lich/avatar) is stability is more important than ever. Guess which class is good at giving stability to people?

Build the ram a bit further back so that the edge of the green circle is touching the gate

I must say I am loving the Rangers forum tonight. The response is like an old man finding 20 kids setting up tents and BBQ pits on his lawn, after being promised that they would leave.

Nidhogg.2950:

Cant wait to morph someone into a tuna :-)

I am going to swim around underwater looking for a mesmer tonight when I get back from work – just to see what kind ability a tuna has.

LieutenantGoogle.7326:

wtf you can get exotic weapons from drops before?!?!?!?!

How come I’ve never found one?<

I have never gotten an exotic drop, anywhere, ever =(

Will this bring more players into WvW?

Cat Amiss.9463:

It’s probably because of turtling, since AOE damage skills had a cap of 5 but healing aoes didnt have a cap, 10 is still a significant amount in turtling in WvW

Yeah, I think it’s just to provide parity – the AOE damage and ally buffs have the 5-person cap, now healing does also.

Wild baseless guessing time? I am in! These are just things I think might happened: not necessarily ones that I want to see.

1. Tennis balls speed increase from 1.2 Wakefield to 1.2 Buerhle
2. Fix ground-casting consecration problems underwater (possibly auto-disabling ground casting under water, or improve the usability for targeting)
3. Jumping through wards no longer possible, dodging still works
4. Staff Symbol now stacks swiftness with other sources
5. No longer able to proc retaliation multiple times from healing breeze with the healer’s retribution trait (has this been removed already?)
6. Reduction on Wall of Reflection duration
7. Blocking from mace skill #3 no longer also consumes other blocking sources such as aegis.
8. Some buffs to spirit weapons, possibly through streamlining the traitlines.

I play a bubble-blowing guardian in WvW. I agree with you that ground denial is one of guardians’ specialties. However, I do think that consecrations, when traited with ground targeting (which I find to be essential), will do exactly what you envision them doing: Jedi’ing with people.

One thing I find about consecrations as a whole is that they are powerful, but have very specialized uses. Unlike shouts, which are used to buff and defend allies and can be used in any situation, sanctuary and wall of reflections are more effective at disrupting the enemy, which requires you to pick your spot as you can’t disrupt your enemy in every situation. Therefore, I find they are most useful to be cast not at places where you want to go, but rather at places where you don’t want the enemy to be.

For example, I find that wall and sanctuary are rarely useful at holding your team’s line when they are already retreating, but work much better when you want to initiate a push, either in an open-field standoff or out of a tower/keep. They are temporary fire-suppressants that gives a huge advantage to your team for a short period of time. However, if your team is not well-coordinated and aren’t pushing, then it’s just a shiny thing that sits there looking pretty for a few seconds. Sanctuary and things like line of ward can also be cast directly into the middle of enemy formations, which cause momentary panic and confusion for a few seconds. Those few seconds can decide which side breaks and retreats, and which side collects bags.

Of course, sanctuary, being my favorite utility skill, is one of the only skills in the game that completely denies passage to a non-stabilized enemy for an extended duration, which is around 12 seconds fully traited. Although the area is small, it can be used very well to hold off choke points such as tower gates, stairs, and some cliffside passages. You can knock people off siege weapons, walls, cliffs, and so on. Usually, the only times that I actual go run into it is when the primary function has been fulfilled – disrupted the enemy line, or in solo/2v2 situations, which can buy you some time against annoying thieves, for example.

That said, the only two consecration that I use regularly are wall and sanctuary. I will pull out hallowed ground once in a while for specific situations, and never found purging flames to be really all that special for my play style. I would like to see a little more functionality from those two skills (make them more fun to play with), and maybe increase the radius of the sanctuary bubble… just a little =).

Tactics Turtle: let us stick together

I don’t mind the downed state. If you can down someone very easily, just continue to focus fire him when he is down instead of running over to try to stomp him. Treat it as a additional sliver of health bar instead of some kind of life-after-defeat state. However, I do feel that the abilities in the downed state could use some balancing among classes.

I agree with OP that there should a penalty for resurrecting the completely defeated. Instead of completely outlawing it, perhaps a severe penalty work better. For example, resurrecting defeated players in combat is 66 or 75% slower (unaffected out of combat). This might even introduce an additional element of strategy since resurrecting players are a beacon for AOE/siege attacks, players can use their advantage to damage a group of players more quickly, and the resurrecting team still has the option to do so, but have to be much more careful even against a smaller force.

Spirit weapon are quite good if you trait for them – but that’s the problem. Hammer is excellent control, sword is good damage, and shield is good defense, but the shield is the only one that I have found to be usable in a vanilla condition. The traits are also scattering in a bunch of different places, making spirit weapon builds extremely rigid. Either you are a spirit weapon build or you are not.

Rhyis.7058:

Velron.3729:

https://d2vn94glaxzkz3.cloudfront.net/wp-content/uploads/2012/11/Ascended-EN.png

Yeah, the gear grind is coming. I am extremely pissed off about this. Everything else I could look passed and wait out for fixes….this has me considering just quitting now.

You’re actually worried about +5 stats? Like, this legit makes you believe you are no longer competitive in WvW unless you upgrade immediately? I feel bad for the WvW community if this is a common opinion.

+5 in itself is meaningless, it’s the percentage that matters. The exotic ring gives +63 stats, and extra +5 is a 8% increase in stats. A ring itself doesn’t really matter, but if this extends to things like weapons, for example, will we see a similar +(a set number) or +(a percentage)? I think the latter is going to happen.

For example, let’s say you have an exotic weapon that normally does 995-1100 and gives 179/128 bonus stats. What will happen to the ascended version? Will it give you 1000-1105 damage and 184/133 stats (5 like you said), or will it be 1075-1188 damage and +193/144 stats (+8% like the ring). If it is the latter, then someone who is outfitted in full ascended set will do 8% more base damage, have 8% more armor, and get additional benefit on top of that from the extra stat bonus. This will almost be like he is carrying two orbs in his backpack – or about 70-80% of the effect of going from a full rare set to a full exotic set. That is a big deal.

That said, even if this is the case, I think the actual gameplay effect will not be quite as large. Even now, a sizable portion of our WvW population in any given map is upleveled, and a lot of them do not have full exotic (I don’t). Also, a lot of us aren’t using top end food + potion/oil, whose combined effect is like a 5% or so increase in a few stats. The problem is that the idea of gear-grinding providing an actual edge in gameplay is very disagreeable to some of us, and completely goes against what appears to be Anet’s philosophy. For example, right now Legendaries have the same stats as exotics, but according to the notes, they will be updated to have increased stats to match that of ascended. What caused them to change gears on this, and can we expect this is continue in the future? It’s only a matter of time when a lot of people have full ascended gear, and calls for more gear progression. It’s a slippery slope.

BAEK.8561:

Cato.3547:

If u don’t bother to check your conquests in case there’s someone hiding you deserve to lose it. I do agree that “portal bombing” is lame due culling issues but then you could ban all thief’s from w3 as well. Stop calling nerf’s due to your own shortcomings.

I bought this game to play PvP, not hide and seek.

Looks like you haven’t played against enough thieves =P

Honestly, that’s a pretty bad argument. Other things you could say in this line of thought:

“I bought this game to play PvP, not to run box delivery to a tower”
“I bought this game to play PvP, not to chauffeur some hairy and smelly animal who is sometimes drunk”
“I bought this game to play PvP, not to hammer at the ground”
“I bought this game to play PvP, not to spend quality time with quaggans”

Hiding mesmer is a part of the “experience”, just like running supplies to repair a wall. Anet may change how the portal work (I think there is some hint of this already for the next patch), but until then, do your serverly duty and hunt down those witches!

I would imagine WvW maps would be more more difficult to design than a sPvP map. A lot of the geographical features in WvW have very precise distances and lines of sight which are designed to allow certain strategic siege placement/visibility distances. A lot of us, especially at the lower tiers are still figuring out all of the niche in the maps, and new places to put siege weapons every week.

I would much rather they fix all of the graphics related issues and class bugs first. After that, then a new map would be wonderful. Otherwise, I think it’ll just introduce more complaints.

Use siege weapons, well of corruption and feedback bubbles.

Does he have a shield of the avenger out?

Bubbles would be the most difficult boss in the history of MMORPGs, because at 25% health, it shapeshifts into a giant Quaggan calf, and all attacking players hhhnnnngggh….

Have you tried the sanctuary triangle? That little space between 3 sanctuaries fits 1 person snugly!

180 radius sanctuaries would be lovely evil grin

SpaceLord.4590:

Yeah because a few badges, a ton of karma and XP, and the fun of killing people is all just a waste. Did you even pick up your loot bags? Hard to believe you lost 15 silver unless you got killed a lot.

Now you will never get rich in WvW, but you really should not be losing money without doing a lot of upgrades or buying a a lot of seige.

It’s very easy to lose money in WvW if you purchase siege weapons and upgrades.

WvW is at best a money-neutral proposition for me (being a bubble-blowing guardian).

Why do I play it? Because it’s fun!

Kardiamond.6952:

My Hidden Escape mecanism :

People rarely use it, but I started use it this week as a gimmick MM build.

Flesh Worm : The activate ability is a teleport to the worm. People tend to underestimate this ability. It’s instant, and leave people confused “A Necro teleporting/Stealthing!?”.

It has a 1200 range, but don’t worry, even if you are 2000 range away, if you use it, it will port you 1200 range in the worm direction. It’s a 30 sec 1200 port. I use it a lot in WvW since I’m not longer a staff user, I got a really short range. I charge, DS, blow my bones minions for 3k damage each and when I’m low I port back and heal.

You can also use it to…. kill people! Yeah! Somoene is chassing you, run to a cliff, summon your worm not far from it, like 1200 range 600 range. Continu to the cliff, that kitten warrior is closing the gap and is going to hit you hard. Fake a jump down the cliff, but just before jumping, port to the worm. As soon as your ported, DS and fear the warrior…. down the cliff!!

The last part is only for fun, since it doesn’t work often.

P.S : The downside of worm teleport is, it doesn’t work with terrain level. What I mean is, If you are on the ground, and you cast your worm on a wall, you won’t be able to port up there. It will port you at the same height, at the wall position.

What it mean is (I tried and died doing it :P) When you want to fake a cliff jump, you have to port before jumping. Or else it won’t work, and you will die.

P.S 2 : Flesh Worm doesn’t suffer from our Stupid Minion AI, and can do some good damage. Around 800-1k damage a hit. But he got a slow attack animation. 1200 range attack is also not bad!

Yes! Furthermore, combine this with spectral walk. Cast a worm near the enemy location start spectral walk, teleport to the worm and do your thing, then spectral walk back to your original location. Several seconds of 1200 range necroninja assult every minute!

Crapgame.6519:

Dodge works. There is also ring of warding or the staff line one. Both stop them. You also have hammer 3 – which is the root.

You have a few options I guess. I hear dodge works best though. Your mileage may vary.

the ring/line will not work if they have stability, which the warrior has pretty good access to.

I actually don’t remember whether Charge/Bulls Charge goes through the line of warding or not since they are kind of buggy, but I am pretty sure they don’t go through a sanctuary dome.

“I just finished a duel with my bunker guardian against a bunker mesmer!”

I think VoC is fine as it is – you have to remember that virtues are the class mechanic of the guardian. Like all class mechanics, they are just “okay” vanilla, but can be traited to be much more powerful. VoC is no exception. If you put 30 points into the virtue line and take all of the VoC related traits, it turns into a 63-second cooldown monstrosity that gives aegis, 6.5 seconds of protection, 4 seconds of stability to the group, and GROUP STUN BREAK. On top of that, you also get 4 second retaliation on yourself, with a passive that gives a 30-second automatic block. It makes VoC a signet with an active effect essentially of 2 shouts (stand your ground, 1/2 retreat + 1/2 hold the line). Makes it one of the most powerful group panic buttons, and potentially freeing up a utility slot for you to do something else. Do not underestimate it!

Sure, it’s not quite as good if you are soloing, but the guardian class as a whole is designed to be stronger in a group – and the class mechanics reflects this. Also, folks complain the VoC doesn’t promote an active playstyle, and that is true, but I think VoC is designed to be an emergency response system, not something that you constantly activate – VoJ is for that.

If I had something to complain about, it would actually be the Virtue of Resolve. It’s a very bipolar skill that doesn’t have many traits associated with it. It’s either “I guess it’s okay….” or “it’s so good you got to be skritting me!” depending on whether you take Absolute Resolve or not… I’d love to see some traits in the future that gives it a bit more flexibility.

I have noticed this happening more often as well, and I am starting to find myself running off cliffs for no particular reason. I think the constant time spend on a war zone is starting to take its toll on us emotionally.

Each server’s war councils should do a better job supporting soldiers who suffer from PTSD (the T stands for thieves =P). Perhaps we should start mist warrior veteran support groups. Folks on our servers, take care of your soliders! Send them some care packages of candy corn and toilet paper, and make sure to rub our backs a bit if you find us lying motionless on the bottom of a cliff. We are NOT taking a nap.

There are a few things that I think make guardians unique – particularly in WvW:

- Wall! The wall of shinies makes a Skritt’s heart melt.

- Sanctuary: I love this skill! I trait for both increased duration and ground targeting on consecrations, and the sanctuary goes from an “okay” skill to a major source of annoying. As far as I know, this skill is the only major source of roadblocking of any class. Other bubbles can be dodged through, but this will block the path of most enemies. Without ground targeting, it’s very risky to use, but with it, you can put it anywhere and impede the progress of an entire enemy force for a surprisingly long time. You can also drop one in the middle of the enemy rank and run into it. It’s fun to watch people get bumped back repeatedly several times… and then slowly back away from you. Sure, AOEs will still hurt, but a lot of classes don’t have strong AOEs, and it usually take the rest a few seconds to get out of tunnel vision and switch their target to you – quite disruptive in siege defense or open-field standoffs. You can also knock people off cliffs, save a downed ally, trap an enemy in a corner. The cooldown is long, but there is a lot of fun to be had with it.

Group stability – Stability is wonderful in WvW, and very few classes has reliable sources of it outside their elite skills. Here you are, Mr. my-boots-are-made-of-rocks, giving group stability with stand-yer-ground (up to something like 8 seconds every 24 seconds if you trait and use runes) to you and your buddies. Not mentioning the incredibly situational, but powerful halloween ground (might as well make it ground-targeting to fit the theme!). Use it to your advantage. Your allies may not realize it, but your enemies will. Stay grounded, my friends.

I am mostly in WvW nowadays, and have tried a lot of skills/combos there. So this will be my context:

- Healing breeze: this skill feels really clunky. it doesn’t really heal that much, has a long cooldown, and takes more than 2 seconds to complete casting. The other heals we have are so much better that I rarely see anybody use this.

- Merciful intervention: nevermind that it doesn’t work, but even if if it did, the problem in WvW is that the person with the lowest health is usually somebody who is getting focus-fired or in a very dangerous area (lots of red circles!). Healing 2000 or so is not really going to help the situation and often end up getting yourself killed.

- Signet of Mercy: actually not as bad as it seems – can save a person from certain death sometimes, but the recharge is just insane.

- Bow of Truth: it’s actually an okay condition remover, but it’s not that reliable and there are so many better skills (even for condition removal) out there that this doesn’t really seem useful.

now for some skills that other folks have listed…
- Shelter: I use to not think highly of this and consistently use the signet for healing, but after playing WvW for a while, I will never use another healing skill again. In my opinion, it is one of the best healing skills of any class. The heal is not much, but guardians have a lot of other skills/traits that will heal for a small amount, and the only time that you really need a lot of healing is when you are getting hit by many things. Those many things don’t stop hitting you after you have healed (so vicious), and the couple of seconds of invulnerability is tremendous. It allows you to do crazy things like rushing into the middle of a large group and consistently survive; rushing out of a besieged tower and wreck havoc. It’s pretty amazing.

Sanctuary – (ground targeted). Without the ground-targeting trait, the utility of the skill is much more limited in my opinion. Sure, it does not block AOE (but it would be the most enormously overpowered skill if it did – 8 seconds of aoe invincibility? sign me up!), but a lot of classes don’t have very reliable AOE. If you are fighting an entire squad of elementalists, it won’t help, but most likely you are not, so it helps you negate a lot of damage. With ground targeting, you can use it to block points, make obstacles in enemy lines. If you run into a bubble that’s within the enemy lines, a lot of them will try to shoot you at no avail, or rush at you and get knocked down. You will have several seconds with all the enemies around you trying to hit you (and probably about half at least failing) – which means they are not trying to hit your allies. When your allies are not getting hit, they tend to push the line. I have seen many standoffs ended by rushing into a sanctuary cast within the enemy lines.

I really don’t think extended WvW lock-out time after transfer is going to fly. As much that it’s a problem, it’s really a problem that only greatly affect the top few tiers. Doing that will inconvenience a great deal of the rest of the player base who are casuals to WvW, or who play on lower tiers. It might be possible for a short lock-out, like maybe a day, but week-long lockouts are probably not happening.

WvW will most likely be at least a week long so that the start of a new rotation can occur on the weekends. This ensures people who have to get up at 8 AM for work/school can participate in the most important few days of a matchup. Given the target audience of GW2, I highly doubt that it will be changed.

Obviously the free transfer is causing this issue, but if all goes well and no major transfers take place in the next couple of weeks, we should be getting better matchups: SOR/SOS/Gate/JQ/SBI occupying the first couple of tiers, with CD/IoJ/TC/Yaks/FA and so forth making up tiers 3-4 (with a poor lad getting killed in T2 every week). These should produce much better matchups. Right now SoR is in the wrong tier (you guys basically tied SoS last week, and now SoS is dismantling tier 2) while you are still in tier 3. Let’s hope no major transfer occurs anytime soon! cross fingers

The other thing is we have to remember that the game is basically 2 months old. A lot of things aren’t working as intended right now and will receive future updates, but they won’t be able to do them that quickly. Like you said, you got through the Halloween stuff in a few hours, but it took the designers, programmers and artists weeks to put it all together. There is probably a mountain of things for them to do; they just can’t do it that fast.

Eventually, I think there will be party/guild based sPvP, more map options, and possibly a duel system, but there is no telling how long it’s going to take. My best recommendation is if you are bored, take a break for a couple of weeks and play something else, then see if they have changed anything. Even if they want to change stuff, it’s not going to be fast no matter how badly we want it – especially not with all the bugs that needs fixing too.

ghostchipz.2341:

Can i just ask with out getting trolled has the make up of TC server changed as people keep posting that most of your server are Casual WvW players how did you get to Teir 3.
I am just intrested i am in no way being Rude
thanks

We have a few very strong and organized guilds in TC, with highly competent commanders. We also have a lot of strong “casual” players with a lot of experience and know-how. That kind of organization allows us to get to T3, and allows us to be extremely competitive on Friday nights when it matters a lot (particularly when a lot of said guilds and players stay up to 4 AM Saturday morning to play!)

Our problem is that our organization is poor compared to the T1/T2 servers like SoR, and we can’t quite cover everything. For example: at the start of this matchup, TC did quite well on two of the borderlands, but was off the map in ET borderlands and EB 4 hours into the matchup. Not coincidentally, we have very good organization in the two borderlands that we were holding our ground, but not so good in ET BL and EB. Against T3 or below servers, this is okay because they won’t have the complete organization on every map either, but against SoR, it causes a complete wipe on two maps, a huge score difference, and resultant waning interest in part of the player base. Of course, we also don’t have the same oversea coverage (we have some now), but that’s not what cost us the matchup this time.

That’s just how it is right now. There is a huge gap between T1/T2 and T3 servers.

Sanctuary is awful for basic PvE, somewhat decent for dungeons, and loads of fun for WvW.

If you can remove conditions quickly with your build, definitely toughness. If not a more balanced approach tends to be useful (like get around 17000-20000 Health).

if you want to be immovable, you should look into stability =)

When I leveled my guardian, it was probably 85% sword/torch + greatsword. Hard to say whether it’s glass-cannonny because I didn’t really care about gears: just grabbed whatever dropped. Didn’t really have a problem with mobs in PvE.

Basically, the build is really stupid and simple: take justice is blind and renewed justice. Use Save yourselves and whatever other utilities you like. First, round up your enemies, either by running around or pulling with greatsword, VoJ for blind, symbol of wrath, jump, whirl, switch to Sword and torch, flash blind, start a fire, and then strafe around your burning cluster and breath fire. You can then do either dodge out and do zealot’s defense on something that’s almost dead, or just run around and autoattack for a couple of seconds, and usually VoJ is ready to use again, and weapon switching has come off cooldown for you to blind again. Mobs are not hard anyway, but this allowed me to get through them much faster than other methods. Champions and bosses are harder since they are essentially immune to blind, and killing them is usually not about doing damage fast, but being able to avoid damage altogether. I also hated the dredge…. gosh I hate them.

Now I am in WvW, and never use that combo anymore. I am honestly not too sure how useful the torch is in WvW, but it’s great and wonderful time for all in PvE! Except those that are on fire.

I like your sentiment, but unfortunately your suggestions I find to be too powerful. Elements of each may be implemented, but with much smaller effects and not without serious drawbacks.

Like several posters has said already, there are some escape utilities like ground-targeted sanctuary, stand your ground for the stability, staff, save yourselves and retreat for swiftness, wall to block projectiles, and also line of warding, which you can use before you start running. Tome of Courage can also be used somewhat to temporarily beef up. Also, use and love shelter in WvW. That said, we will never have the escape abilities of thief and mesmers – because that’s a part of their design mechanics: a thief is supposed to be sneaky, and a mesmer is supposed to be confusing. A guardian is not either. We can be defensive, but not necessarily good at running away from imminent stomping.

In WvW, I don’t really find myself dying overly much, even though my armor is only about 2400 and HP around 14000. Part of the reason is that I am usually running in groups (not necessarily zergs, but groups of a few). The survivability of guardian goes up a lot in these situations (not just because of AH), but because of your ability to strengthen the group or harass the enemy through ground control skills like wall of reflection, shield of absorption, line of warding, etc.

Finally, I find that extra toughness or HP to be not that particularly useful in most WvW situations. When I die in WvW, it’s mostly because I take huge amounts of damage very quickly, which is probably caused by my stupidity for overextending into the enemy line, wanting to spike a downed enemy too much, or getting into a hopeless situation (like 1v7 or something). I play full support with those stats (bubble guardian), and I find it to be quite sufficient.

Scepter 2 is very damaging in theory, but not every projectile hits, and it doesn’t all hit one target. However, the very low cooldown makes up for this.

Scepter 3 is fine.

Scepter auto-attack projectiles just needs to be faster. If you use it in melee range, it’s the fastest autoattack by far, but one of the slowest if you use at max range. That makes the scepter actually a better melee weapon than a ranged one… If they make it like they did with the mesmer scepter, I’d be pretty happy.

I am okay with the scepter, it does its job okay. It’s just not very exciting to use.

PvE: GS + sword/Focus or torch

WvW: Scepter/shield + staff (switch out staff for GS when I do rushes outside the gate of a besieged tower/keep)

Traits are completely different for each as well.

I am no fan of the warrior… but

1) Enduring pain just protect against damage, it doesn’t protect against condition and CC. Renewed Focus protects against everything and now no longer roots you in place. RF is far superior in its power compared to EP.

2) Enduring Pain can be traited to last 2 seconds longer and RF, is not a elite skill, and breaks stun (while RF doesn’t). While its effect is not as powerful as RF, it can be used in more situations, and for longer period.

3) RF recharges virtues: if you are solo’ing and don’t bother with virtues, this may not sound that that big of a deal, but virtues are very much group-oriented, and can be traited to be extremely powerful. VoJ can be made into a AOE blind + 3 stacks of might + 6s burn for each of your allies’ next attack. VoR can be made to remove 3 conditions from everyone + heal and regen. VoC can be traited to give Aegis, Protection + 3 second of stability and GROUP STUN BREAK. EP offers no such depth and potential abilities.

In solo situations, RF is somewhat better than EP depends on how much you like virtues. In group situations, these don’t even compare.

Galrukh.6532:

Just checked the score for last week, yeah TC did exactly as well as we do now. Gave completely up and died with a whimper. Please dont call out your server to be stubborn, brave, tenacious people that fight until the bitter end and then call us losers when we do exactly as well as you did last week. We are as bad now as you were (and we were) last week. Why didnt you rally your server last week ? Why didnt your guilds come together and turn the tide last week ?
As it stands tier 1 is good and tier 3 is good, everything else is in shambles.

No, we did not do well last week (got gaterolled), but we fought hard and I personally enjoyed the time that I spend on the borderlands. We knew the reason that we (and FA) were losing so badly was night hatting. Despite that, we enjoyed finally winning 2-hour tower sieges; we enjoyed fending off 7-golem assaults to the garrison; we enjoyed holding off multiple attacks by a force 3-4x as large 4, 5 times, even if we lost it on the 6th attempt. We didn’t complain about BG because they rolled us; we only complained about some of them being bad sports. We can’t turn the tide against BG because we simply do not have their night coverage. It’s something we accept, but doesn’t make it impossible for us to enjoy the game.

If TC players are trebbing your spawn points, we condemn that type of behavior and will try to stop it if we see it. I do think that this is a very isolated incident though – the only spawn camping from TC that I saw was our squad doing a synchronized naked dance routine with the FA guys (until some dude decided it was a good idea to AOE the dancers for some badges – he is now a part of the ground).

FA and DB are losing right now, but they are putting on a fierce fight. I am sorry that you are not finding this match enjoyable, but I don’t call either of your servers losers (I think the people who are most frustrated at the poor showing on FA are dedicated FA players themselves). As long as you show up and fight, everyone can enjoy the game despite the score. We have been stomped for the last two weeks (CD and BG), but I don’t think we enjoy the game any less.

I think one thing that we can do better (as WvW addicts) is to better reach out to the newer players. When I played WvW the first time, I had no idea what I was doing (the charr guide dude doesn’t help at all), ran around by myself and got slaughtered like 5 times in 15 minutes… didn’t play WvW for another 2 weeks. When you are on yak duty, or when guilds are tasked with upgrading/defending objectives, for example, they can shoot a map message offering to help newer players with WvW (or maybe in lion’s arch). I will try to do this too when I am in.

Excellent double-team work by DB and FA. This is how it should be for the two team that are a bit behind in the score.

My engy alt is in the 20s, so I can’t speak for the later levels, but I find that I can kill things pretty quickly even at this level, but don’t last very long.

I am using nade + bomb kit and Elixir S, and tend to run around in places that are about 4-5 level above me. With melee mobs, I can kill them quite quickly even with some glancing hits here and there (just spam all the damaging skills), and since I can kite most of them, I don’t easily die. However, when there are ranged mobs, my behind is firmly glued to the ground 15 seconds into a battle.

Favorite guardian things #57:

Sword teleport to someone, shield 4, lightning ping-pong, then bubble them away

Can’t speak for other support-build classes since I lack experience with them, but as for the guardian, I agree with your overall observations… but I don’t really mind.

I play a bubble-blowing support guardian, and WvW is a money-neutral proposition for me (and money-losing if I buy too much blueprints or upgrades), but since it’s so much fun, I don’t really want to do anything else except maybe Keg Brawl, so I fund it through trade post acrobatics… It’s like a drug habit, really. That said, it’s one thing to kill somebody, but quite another to know that you’ve slowed the advance of an enemy line, or allowed your team to push them back. I have never really worried about the badges – it’s nice if I get them, but if not, oh well.

Nevertheless, there are a couple of ways to improve your headcount as a support guardian:

1. Tome of Wrath – Tome of Courage is really powerful, but doesn’t just always have to be on your bar. When you know you need to be shooting at enemies, switch in Tome of Wrath. Channel #4 to get quickness and fury, then spam conflagrate (#1) to do thousands of AOE damage in 5 seconds. Collect bags. It also works quite well when you are on the walls (1200 range), behind a door, or trying to clear defenders off walls during a siege. I just wished ANet made the reading glasses equip-able during battle so I can be in character when I open the Tome.

2. Wall of reflection – This doesn’t really need explanation since most support guardians are pretty proficient with it. To get more kills with it, play with timing and location, put it on the gate during a siege, or pop out of the gate and put it in front of the gate during a siege.

3. Spam staff behind a door during siege

4. Ground-targeted purging flame: this thing does pretty good damage, and allows you to tag a bunch of enemies from a distance. Combined with a symbol and wall, it’s usually enough for you to get credit.

score is
FA- 4872 (280)
TC – 4117 (175)
DB – 3841 (+245)

TC folks a bit too disorganized right now, particularly on a couple of the borderlands. Partly is because there are not major guild groups on these maps. Once some of the guilds gets on, I think things will be better

Yeah, but the door is usually a very dangerous place, filled with AOE ouch and burning. People do this (consciously or not) to make it hard for you to repair the gate. That said, spamming the Staff rainbow magic works wonderfully though.

Popping outside is actually safer sometimes because you can drop a wall in front of them, then run around with stability for a few seconds. It takes the AOEer a couple of seconds to recalibrate their targets, and you can dodge and move out of the way.

Sanctuary is awesome in WvW!

There really isn’t a class that can be used to focus on heals – I think Anet designed it this way to specifically reduce a “nothing but heal” class. However, you have a lot of ways for group heal as a guardian. Even if each only heals for a small amount, they can add up quickly.

For example, even with a modest healing power, say around 300, you can run with staff + mace/shield, and take some appropriate traits, you can do this:

1. Empower: 2000 heal on 20 second cooldown
2. Orb: 900 heal on 10 second cooldown
3. Symbol of centaur outrunning: 150 heal/s for 4 second = 600 heal total on 15 s cooldown
4. Mace 1, 500 heal on full chain
5. Mace 2, 600 total heal + 500 regen = 1100 heal total in 4 on 8 second cooldown
6. Shield bubble + pop = 2400 heal on 40 second cooldown
7. Virtue of Resolve = 1800 heal on 60 second cooldown (probably around 50 seconds or less for a lot of builds)
8. dodge roll for around 700 heal, average 10 second a dodge
9. Healing breeze, around 1800 heal on 40 second cooldown
and whatever utilities you care to put in…

Obviously you can’t optimize and do all of these things due to channeling times and weapon switch delays, but just for the goddess of math where you are able to consistently do all of these things on cooldown, you can heal at least 35000 health per minute for your entire group. Probably 25000 realistically, and not counting utilities.

You can’t “spike heal”, but if you really focus on it and invest in healing power, you can sustain a heal of 600-700 per second. This is on top of whatever healing your allies already have. That’s not too bad.

I don’t really have a main or secondary weapon set… While I was leveling, I used GS + Sword/torch or focus. They were basically being swapped constantly on swapping cooldown. I tend of open with one weapon set, but didn’t really have a main set that I kept out longer than the other.

In WvW, weaponsets are basically situational. I carry Staff + scepter/shield for supporting, but always bring a GS when I need some damage fast (like rushing out of a tower under siege to bash on rams).

I use weaponsets this way on my other non-guardian characters too, so that’s probably why I never took one of those “20% cooldown reduction of kittenpower weapon” traits.

Jeul.1068:

Did someone say ‘toast’? I’m hungry all of a sudden.

I move that instead of calling our fallen TCers “corpses” or “dead”, we call them “crumbs”.