Guild Wars 2

Problem is some of those lower tier servers still have very high population, they are just not WvW-oriented.

A server that is low tier in WvW and in population should have free transfers though to even it out.

If you think Aurora Glade blobs, you don’t even want to know what’s going on in the higher tiers.

I was on AG BL, during the reset, sticking closer to the Drakkar zerg than their own players did. If all we had on the map were groups the size of which ROF is comfortable with, we would’ve been trampled over pretty bad because Drakkar at one point definitely had up to 60 players together.

Our pug zerg was 10-15 man strong, then there was a 10 man guild running around (welcome to AG), along with that blobbing noob zerg guild that was running atleast 70 players and stealing all the supplies from our keeps so they could build superior AC’s and ballistas on open field.

AURORA NEVER FALLS!

Anyway, this new system seems to keep throwing us numbers we can’t match (Abaddon’s) or numbers that are too low (Ring of Fire) so I agree that it sucks.

Thief can work in a zerg fight, you will just have to build tankier. Shortbow is extremely good at dealing with multiple opponents, sometimes I’ve even ran in the front line of a melee train just spamming cluster bomb, with the option to shadow step out any time I feel I’m getting too low on health, resetting, and coming back.

You can also snipe enemies low on HP with the sword quickly and then get out with Infiltrator strike.

In an organized zerg fight, a thief is almost required to take down the casters at the side.

Guard can tank an unholy amount of direct damage. Eles and thieves can avoid direct damage better, but in a situation where direct damage is unavoidable (zerg v zerg fight), the guard is the boss.

In my opinion, in a game like this, there should always be a balanced amount of risk and reward while attacking a foe and with the thief class, there is very little risk in attacking an enemy, especially with the dagger/pistol set-up.

D/P also promotes such inactive play which will get your allies killed before you can land the backstab that I think the stealth spam with it should just be done away with so thief players can move onto actually making the thief class useful. A little more vulnerable perhaps but more active and more useful in a group fight.

The thief is as good a group fighter as any but it has been made to look otherwise due to the fact that 90% of thieves play like cowards because the class allows you to get away with anything and many players get away with a very low level of skill and support. As a thief I use my stealth skills to take aggro off allies who are low on HP or stacked with condition, steal to grant boons to my allies, and rip boons off tanky guards or elementalists who are keeping their team alive in a fight.

The shortbow alone creates a lot of pressure in the enemy since it bounces off multiple opponents, along with an AoE poison and AoE cluster bomb combo finisher, and once you get enemies low you can go onto rip their boons with steal/larcenous strike and finish them off.

D/P set-up will look for enemies that are low on HP, upleveled or running glass, but they don’t participate actively in the play to take an actual coordinated team down.

I could do with a lot less stealth and a lot less damage and I believe my thief would still be very useful in a fight.

Gunnar’s Hold shall now be christened as… Gunnar’s Handhold.

RiverGlade shall run over you tonight while you’re sleeping.

Aurora never falls!

Gunnar’s have gotten off easy because the bugged tower has made it difficult for AG to maintain any kind of a presence in their borderland. Hills was tier 3, easily defensible & the Miller’s side had 50+ Millers in it most of the time.

Now that our 3 man blob took away the upgrades there, maybe you will actually get some fights there other than against Miller’s since you can’t camp tier 3 stuff which is freakin’ boring and ruins this game.

When I see everybody having waypoints in their keeps in their own borderlands, that’s a quick sign that absolutely nothing worth being involved with is going on in WvW.

Turtle zergs make for a nice farmable group. If you aren’t organized, don’t try to play organized, in my opinion.

You will have a better chance against a guild group by being spread out since they won’t be able to kill more than a few people with their pushes, which you can immediately res afterwards. Eventually they will start melting against larger numbers.

I’d advice you all to ignore this dude. No need to give him any reasons to further embarrass himself publicly.

At the end of the day you only represent yourself over here, not your guild or your server.

fab.3298:

TheGreatA.4192:

RiverHold at work!

http://oi42.tinypic.com/2i9t2cp.jpg

Ah okay, didn’t realise we were supposed to vacate once you got the wall down.

Easy on the AC’s there man.

RiverHold at work!

http://oi42.tinypic.com/2i9t2cp.jpg

Monkeymonger.9235:

Also an honorable mention to Snows blade for some proper trolling over the last few days.

Who is this Snows blade you are talking about… I know of no such person.

For Shino a friendly word of advice, use sword instead of mace in a duel! And be way more aggressive. Guard doesn’t have any large damage spikes so you have to land sustained auto-attacks, retal dmg and burning to kill enemies.

Los Re.4607:

I never saw [team] anywhere. Sorry i didn’t recognise your guild in your riverstyle blob but i’m sure your autoattacking skills are excellent. Keep up the good work.

You don’t want to mess with the [team] man! You just sentenced FURY to get farmed by their massive guild zerg all week.

You can’t complain about blobs if you choose to play in EB. It is what it is and has always been that way.

The numbers will settle down after the reset, I heavily doubt there will be many AG “blobs” for the rest of the week unless the PvErs come out in full force without Abaddon’s Mouth around.

There’s just two types of mentalities on display here.

One wishes to improve on their individual skill and feel individual achivement when playing the game, the other wishes to win against enemies in a pack and feel proud of what was accomplished by their group, not necessarily by themselves.

I can understand where the latter is coming from but I personally can’t take pride in what others have done, I want to know that what I’m doing has actual impact in what has taken place… And consistently seek to improve myself.

It’s just when you’ve played this game for as long as most of us have, you want to actually get good at it, instead of just being zerg fodder. My “enlightenment” came when I first dueled an enemy 1 on 1, with no back-up, and lost. It just showed me a whole new level of playing other than just following around a commander tag like a lemming.

I don’t want to force anyone to give up a casual playstyle since not everybody cares to play as much, but to see skilled play ridiculed in favour of reliance on larger numbers to win, just makes me question the current generation of gamers…

This is a good week to take a week off WvW. There’s nothing to do unless you run 30+.

Seriously there was a point when we were taking a tower with 4 guys, and 15 men came to its defense. Turns out those 15 players + npcs weren’t enough to handle four of us so they sent 50 more.

I can almost imagine the voice comms… “Enemies at tower, send teh zerg!!!”

How about delegating some tasks to smaller forces instead of just server-zerging everything, maybe you’ll actually find evenly matched fights every once in a while. This is definitely not how the game is supposed to be played.

Punching bag build:

http://gw2skills.net/editor/?fIAQNAS3ejcOJvNPyQMxBE0DNML2CThfI9QMGQ0A-jUCBUEAkIwEBQ5cFRjtyqIasKbYKdER1myYecER1CBIbBA-w

You can take a massive beating before going down atleast.

In sPvP you are a bit troubled vs a good thief because you can’t really build the kind of warrior that can tank while dealing enough dmg to put them out.

In WvW you can create a warrior that has the type of dmg and tankiness that the warrior class should have. Thieves shouldn’t be much of a problem. Even good thieves will have problems dealing with a WvW warri, mainly because they can’t burst him out while being fly swatted with 1 or 2 shots if they hang in for too long.

Boasting about your points while everyone else is doing PvE events due to the new update, just a poor show. Bringing down empty undefended towers and keeps means nothing.

If you tick those type of points when any competition is around then you’ll have something to brag about, but you won’t.

No AC mastery, less damage to players, smaller range, siege cap of 3 or 4 per tower/keep. Problem solved.

ACs should still be an option for small scale groups to take down undefended siege so I wouldn’t raise the amount of supplies needed to build it.

Ragnar.4257:

I’m pretty sure any decent WvW guild would be more than happy to show a team of tPvPers precisely how much their egos and 1v1 builds are worth here.

You can WvW with 1v1 builds. That’s what I do. Or I should rather say that I 1v1 with WvW builds and still get the job done.

Playing only large scale WvW will turn a person into a brainless zombie after a while and stop any improvement as an individual player, no matter how organized the action is, you have to have those small confrontations and duels in order to keep yourself “in shape”.

Many times when faced with an organized guild, there are still several weak links involved who are carried by the team and easy for an experienced player to recognize and snipe down quick. They stray away from the main group and have no answer to being focused down harder than usual and just melt.

This is what usually starts the downfall for guilds when they wipe vs random pugs, a few decent, coordinated players from the pug group recognize weakness, exploit it and cause the chain of events which leads to the guild losing the battle.

I’d say if the WvW guilds ran in 4-5 parties which also regularly played tPvP with each other, their communication and coordination would be so much better.

I saw Riverside being forced into bunkering in their garrison last night when faced with our guild groups. No guild groups of yours showed up to solve the situation. You were merely forced into waiting that the enemies leave from boredom in order to take your stuff back.

Sure we capture points, when it’s possible, but it’s a coverage thing. We no longer have 24/7 coverage. Scores reflect nothing but the coverage of one server

It does not mean you are better players when you can golem rush at morning empty keeps and towers with nobody else playing. It does not mean you play more for the points than the other server. It means nothing.

When everybody has numbers online, it is Aurora Glade that often dominates the scores. That actually means something. Yesterday during primetime we were ticking 370 points…

I know we used to do the night train thing, but I don’t think we ever gloated about how great we “play for points” when we were able to hit empty structures. It would have been in bad taste for the few players that were forced to play during those times vs overwhelming numbers.

A player who can play one area of this game exceptionally well will eventually excel in other areas. A good sPvP player wouldn’t play WvW with a sPvP build. He would realize what it takes to be successful in WvW and adapt.

A guild consisting of good, coordinated players who play the game more than the majority of the people will always be successful.

When you have a guild that actually knows how to use dodge rolls, stabilities, combo fields, generally how to stay alive, it will be very tough to take down. Most guilds in WvW actually just stack, melee train and press 1 which takes no great amount of skill.

The leader making the decisions usually makes the difference of winning and losing in WvW battles, not individual effort, but when all the individuals are strong, recognize situations without the leader’s orders and know how to play their role in the game very well, they will be even more effective.

I’d say the biggest problem with this match-up is that it’s just freakin’ boring, regardless of what causes it.

I advice people to take a look at their playing styles and think twice about whether they are being an absolute bore to fight against, and try changing it up. You don’t want to be a bore.

Fact is when players fight it out constantly, they gain more loot and don’t spend as much gold on siege blueprints and upgrades, so it’s just more productive gaming all around. They earn and don’t spend. The game developers would surely like you to spend your gold instead of earning it, but you don’t need to play it like that.

Been playing my lvl 22 upscaled ele recently in WvW… You don’t want to take it too lightly:

http://oi40.tinypic.com/skztd5.jpg

Mix of Berserker, Knights, Cavalier & Valkyrie.

Stats are
3150 armor
65% crit dmg
70% crit chance with fury (permanent unless stolen)
23-24 k hp
lots of power & might stacks (permanent 10+ might unless stolen)

Survivability for warri in my estimation comes from using invulns, blocks and dodge rolls for the big hits and tanking all the light damage.

Nice fights at Miller’s BL during our struggle to hold Briar tower. Team did what they do best which is to take on massive odds and more than hold their own.

Unfortunately I lagged out at the end. Anyway, it was nice to have some proper fighting done with my hammer warri. It’s been enjoyable overall as far as I’m concerned, no complaints.

While this wasn’t an all-out 1on2 situation, I do think warri has decent 1vX potential when used right.

Basically you just need to focus and burst down one person in quick fashion with stunlocks, stability, endure pain, then outplay the other person even with many of your skills on CD (or kite until you get a heal off).

I’m not the greatest warrior player by any means, but I’ve had many situations where I’ve been chased by the enemy, only to turn the tables by basically one shotting the other person with a quick eviscerate/hammer chain, then grinding down the other person.

There is no reason why necromancers don’t have more combo finishers. Putrid mark is not something you can reliably use, because it depends on the enemy walking into it. Because of its usefulness and the relatively long cooldown (not like the 4 second Mighty Blow), you don’t ever want to waste it.

Would improve necromancer’s limited defense greatly if you could cause blinds and weakness with the combo fields, without relying on someone else using them. There’s certain moves that appear to be blast finishers, but aren’t.

If the bone minions stuck to your location they could be half-decent, but as of now they are usually all over the place and explode outside of the combo fields, usually not even hitting the enemy.

Rennoko.5731:

I am curious how you came to this determination?

While I will agree that simply looking at the base numbers of the dagger 1 chain between both classes, the necro chain actually looks better, but that hardly makes up for the other damage tools the have available, and huge array of damage increasing traits that we lack.

Perhaps if he didn’t stealth and leverage backstab, or use heartseeker, we could go blow for blow… but I don’t imagine with our higher base health that would be much of a contest. Looking only at available tools in the 5 weapon set skills themselves, the thief DPS is going to far out shine ours.

I meant going auto-attack for auto-attack which is what it sometimes comes down to when all other options have been used up.

In such a scenario you can afford to trade shots with the thief because your attack chain can potentially do more dmg + you should be built tankier. Every time the thief attempts to use autoattack, trade shots with him, and you will force him to back off. When they try cloaking, use a channel skill and it will hit them through stealth.

Negate backstab with marks, positioning & well-timed dodges and use interrupts for heartseeker/cloak & dagger. Combat against experienced thieves is multi-faceted of course and you have to accomplish a lot of things before you can beat them.

I’m not saying it’s easy work and that you can win by pressing 1, just in the particular scenario when a thief attempts to use his dagger auto against yours, trade shots. Necros without dagger don’t really have the option in close range melee to get the better of a thief in my opinion.

I know this thief played his cards very badly but still an example:

7:00

I have a more damage heavy build now while still retaining 25k hp & 2700 armor. My last auto-attack chain crits over 2k and well of suffering pulses for 1,5k. It’s not thief damage but no thief can tank that damage either, it’s just a matter of being able to land it. Which of course does take some work against a proper thief build.

Dagger auto-attack has enough power so you can trade shots with thieves (going dagger for dagger you will actually out-DPS thief). Marks don’t do much damage but they will discourage glass thieves and give away the location of the thief while stealthed. Try to drown the thief in trash conditions before unleashing your immobs or bleed stacks on them, because smart ones will have cond removal on stealth.

Save fear mark for the eventual use of shadow refuge. It doesn’t always work but a lot of the time it will kick the thief out of stealth. Once shadow refuge is blown they will panic and usually lose, except very experienced thieves.

Pay attention to cooldowns, don’t use up whatever burst (for example wells) your necro has until you’re certain that the thief is finally caught without initiative or utility skills to bail him out. Don’t use up stun break for the steal fear necessarily, using DS #3 on the thief should be enough to last out the fear duration without taking damage. Time the few dodge rolls that you have perfectly for burst attacks.

You’ll have to play it approximately twice as good as the thief to kill him, but it can be done with enough experience dealing with thieves.

It’s better than nothing. I’ve gotten a couple of rares from them, golem blueprints (worth 1 gold) and a friend got an exotic worth 5 gold.

If the rewards were too good in WvW, it would turn into a PvE farm. Enjoying PvP should be the primary objective. I would encourage the developers to focus on improving the player vs player aspect of it as much as possible.

The rewards should be just enough to gear yourself with exotics and ascended, make up for repair costs and buy siege/upgrades. You’re not supposed to get rich playing WvW (although I can argue different after two precursor drops).

I was on my warri on the wall watching as it happened. Nice to see from enemy PoV.

Against the current version of AC’s and some defenders those gates are just too much of a chokepoint to go through. Nowadays you just can’t expect to take a defended keep with one or two tries, it has to be constant pressure even if you suffer a few wipes.

TUP did a great job defending, I was just along for the ride trying to look for fights, but the action was a little too numbers heavy to do anything but zerg. Respect to both sides for fighting it out instead of WP’ing and picking an empty keep somewhere.

I don’t mind use of siege. It’s just that superior AC’s with AC mastery are way too overpowered at the moment. There should almost be a gentleman’s agreement not to use them until they are nerfed.

Give signet of stamina and dolyak signet a stun break please.

Drek Thalon.5490:

Please link us your build using a site such as http://en.gw2skills.net/editor/. I would like to learn more about this super saiyan build.

http://gw2skills.net/editor/?fIAQNAS3ejcOJvtQCPMxBE0DNML4CThiI9QMGwyA-jUyAYLBZKCE9BO5BlAJyYrgFRjVbjpchVxDRVGAmFA-w

Can’t promise it will work for anybody else but I’ve felt good playing it. Any advice for improvements would be welcome, I do not consider myself a master of the warrior class by any means. Utility skills there are random, traits are changed daily.

Unless your boons get stolen, you should never have below 8 stacks of might, and fury should be permanent. With 15-20 prec stacks, you should go over 60% crit chance.

Hammer has 10% dmg boost to disabled opponents sigil, giving a total of 35% dmg boost to stunned enemies, along with 3-12% from berserker’s power and 6-8 % from empowered.

Originally posted this in another thread but

Right now I have a 10/0/30/30/0 hammer & axe/shield warri with Hoelbrak runes, dogged march and -40% cond duration food for a total of 60% reduction from all conditions and -93% reduction from movement conditions. Along with near permanent stability, your warrior is the type of unstoppable beast that it’s supposed to be.

Since I have over 3200 or so armor along with the resistance to conditions, it’s extremely difficult to take me down. With permanent might and fury, I have over 2500 power, 65% crit chance and 50+ % crit dmg, critting between 7 to 10 k with eviscerate and 4-5 ks with hammer.

Tough as nails, hits like a truck, the way a warri is supposed to be in my estimation.

I’ve beaten mesmers, thieves, elementalists in duels so you are not automatically screwed if left in a 1on1 situation. Yesterday I took out a coordinated sword thief and shatter mesmer in a 1v2, both of whom were still capable of smashing 4-5 of our average players.

Right now I have a 10/0/30/30/0 hammer warri with Hoelbrak runes, dogged march and -40% cond duration food for a total of 60% reduction from all conditions and -93% reduction from movement conditions. Along with near permanent stability, your warrior is the type of unstoppable beast that it’s supposed to be.

Since I have over 3200 or so armor along with the resistance to conditions, it’s extremely difficult to take me down. With permanent might and fury, I have over 2500 power, 65% crit chance and 50+ % crit dmg, critting between 7 to 10 k with eviscerate and 4-5 ks with hammer.

Tough as nails, hits like a truck, the way a warri is supposed to be in my estimation.

I’ve beaten mesmers, thieves, elementalists in duels so you are not automatically screwed if left in a 1on1 situation.

From what I remember FSP struggled against Aurora during the weekend the last time we faced you as well, but made a close fight of it for the rest of the week. So I would not yet give up on the match-up. It is true that our numbers have been boosted with people who need map completion, since we haven’t been green in ages.

Small scale roaming in my opinion comes down to individual skill level and running good all-around builds that have no obvious weaknesses, as in full glass, no cond removal, no stun breaks and so on. If we are talking about 5 or less that is.

Usually I run with a combo of necro, mesmer, thief, all direct dmg instead of condis, an odd group but we can manage. Just yesterday won a 2vs9 at a supply camp. No upleveled enemies either, although it wasn’t exactly an organized guild group we were fighting.

When the players are good, any class should work good. Of course whether the team is fully optimal or not can be argued, but most of all you need to get the coordination between the team working.

I think the biggest problems lie in technical issues rather than with simply “zerging”.

As of now 60 man zergs are simply game-breaking as the game has not been desiged to handle such large scale battles. There’s a reason why there are 6 supply camps, 4 towers and 3 keeps in every map and it is so that the fights would spread out between the locations. One possibility would be to make the distances larger so that one single zerg could not run from one place to the next in time to defend a location as easily as they can now.

Even then mass-zerging only works against outmanned servers and a server of similar population with organized guild groups would definitely dominate against such tactics, which are inferior and cause issues in the game system.

The weakness of the strategy could be seen when a group of 25 to 30 Aurora Glade held 2 towers and a keep for the better part of the day at Riverside borderland, continually wiping the massive groups of Riverside and Abaddon’s Mouth and managing to cap defenseless locations due to the predictable movements of the zerg, which was always being scouted.

Much of the complaints are largely due to Aurora Glade having lost a lot of its WvW population, yet still hanging in tier 4 by a thread even though this server’s coverage doesn’t warrant them to being in this tier anymore.

Downed state at the very least should not be able to do the kind of damage it does now.

You should only be able to lay down and perhaps interrupt a stomp but that’s it.

The downed states are simply way too unbalanced as of now.

Guards are beastly in 1v1. As a guard, I only ever lost 1 duel to a confusion mesmer (Master of Timespace) before the conf nerf. Everything else I’ve just ran over with no problems. I have never lost to a thief with either guard or necro. And if you think people haven’t tried, you are wrong.

It’s an overrated class because of the stealth mechanic and people not using builds that have a counter against them.

I enjoy the thief class because it’s the only way people who would otherwise run from you, fight you 1on1 because they think they can escape with stealth. They think wrong.

Thieves are easy work. Fought lots of duels and can’t ever recall losing one against a thief.

A skilled player in control of all his utilities + an awesome build + inexperienced enemies. Miracles can happen.

Mesmer healing skill cooldowns vary from 10 to 20 seconds, so with a healing build it can definitely heal fast.

Cheats do exist of course, just yesterday I came across a speedhacker who still lost 3 duels in a row. A great player > cheater.

Despite complaints of zerging I’ve been having some mighty epic fights during this match-up. ECL taking Abaddon’s garrison was quite a feat and had a nice little fight for Riverside Hills later in the night.

I’ve seen more open field fights than in a long time. I hope it stays that way throughout the match-up.

Anybody from Riverside or Abaddon’s Mouth that is bored of the usual zerging is once again welcome to join dueling sessions, usually below the south camp.

One word of advice, if you try to run past me to your zerg and don’t even try to fight, I will kill you and may even taunt at your corpse for not putting up any resistance.

So fight and try to kill me if you can. If you can’t, trying and dying is not the end of the world, it’s a beginning to your becoming a skilled player sometime in the future, not just nameless and faceless zerg fodder.

Has to be some mighty glassy opponents you have been fighting there, unless you have a max damage build with 50% downed damage trait.

If you go down with a necro, it’s over, you have for whatever reason a lower HP pool than other classes in downed state yet it will still take ages to res you up.

I am a roaming power necro who kills most anybody I come across and consistently succeeds in winning 1v2 or 1v3.

Despite this I will say that if you start playing necro now, unless you immediately feel like it’s a class that has been made for you, it’s probably too late in the game to really get comfortable with it. Problems for a beginner necro is that you don’t have any bail-outs and don’t really get to pick and choose the fights, the fights come at you.

It will take time to be able to perfect the winning combinations and to come to terms with necro’s unreasonable weaknesses as far as defense goes (lack of stability, short cd stun breaks and vigor for example). The little dodge rolls that necros have are extremely precious and cannot be wasted on low dmg moves, you simply use your high HP, death shroud and hopefully stacked toughness to soak up anything else.

My necro is melee-oriented, enormously difficult to beat in close range combat, with some long range options, which makes it fun to play.

Dueling is freakin’ great, especially the Aurora Glade & Gandara tradition (which is why I wish we will remain in the same tiers for as long as possible).

Once you’ve played WvW for months and months and attained a fairly high skill level, you will look for a break from the usual zerging, a way to test your ability against the best players the other server has.

The people complaining about it will eventually be duelists themselves if they play long enough. It’s just a way to get even more enjoyment out of the game with no official WvW dueling option available. No harm done since atleast in the Aurora Glade & Gandara dueling guild the duels never take part in a queued borderland and the location is as far away from WvW action as possible.