Guild Wars 2

Mastering the warrior in a duel situation takes more skill than other classes but it can be done. Warrior has a limited time frame he can work with due to the lack of sustained healing that some other classes have, but it can make up for it with an initial high armor/HP pool along with high damage and capacity for crowd control.

A cc warri at best can keep an enemy crowd controlled 100% of the time.

Warriors have some decent match-ups in duels. A properly played warrior shouldn’t lose to any thief other than a condi pistol (lack of reliable cond removal) or dagger/pistol thief (due to blind spam).

I would enjoy a skill that steals enemy boons, making the necro an even more effective boon removal class.

Something that gives vigor and stability would be nice.

It was a refreshingly good day for fights, got to have duels, 2v2s and didn’t get zerged much. Fell short of taking Gandara garrison with 5 people but it was an okay attempt.

Players from Augury Rock request an invite to TDS dueling guild for duels. It’s been a tier 4 tradition between Aurora Glade, Gandara, Riverside, Baruch Bay, Far Shiverpeaks and now hopefully Augury Rock.

I will say that for every guild AG has gained they have lost one as well. Reset is great for us but once most of us were done, Riverside took everything.

That’s the way it goes, nobody has 24/7 coverage, the winner is often decided on how they can deal with their worst hours without losing too many points.

Every class can be OP when done right.

A guardian when played right will win many 1v2, 1v3 situations, even against decent players. If you don’t feel like an overpowered beast as a guardian, re-think your build and weapon sets.

I don’t enjoy playing the class because it can be almost too easy to win 1v1 situations.

JJBigs.8456:

Let me re-phrase. If you want to be considered good at GW2, use GS. If you want to be a casual pug, use hammer.

No one needs control. Mesmers are control if you need it and guardian cannot match mesmer control. Your play a inferior version.

Its like a necro saying I can chill/cripple in CoF p1. Thats great control, but no one needs it. As a guardian you should be able to live with a GS and we all know DPS is king in PVE. Even in high level FOTM

As a correction if you want to be considered good in PvE, you don’t need control. Then again nobody really cares about how good you are against NPCs.

If you play any PvP or WvW, then you will definitely need control.

They are well on their way to the Ultimate Technician achievement. Only 950,000 more supply to go.

Blobs have made my roaming easier, soloing supply camps and towers, two manning keeps… Gandara still have some small time guilds taking care of the non-blob players like me but Riverside’s smaller guilds such as REQ have been nowhere to be found.

The more difficult it is to roam about a server’s areas the more respect they are to be given in my estimation. If I see our players get harrassed by a guild group I’ll gather up some players I know and go fight them off.

Ideally you’d get to fight duelists, small organized groups, and larger zergs, but nowadays it’s become increasingly popular to run as a server blob. And the blobs are so well taught that they’ll just pass you by as you are stomping out one of their players and as such present little threat to anybody except the large zergs, not even the scouts that are giving away their location.

Ultimately I think this strategy will prove less effective in the end and also takes the enjoyment out of the game for everybody involved.

This is not a post directed at any server in particular, just a general overview of what I’ve seen in the past few months of WvW.

Yesterday was the first time I’ve had a queue to WvW in Aurora Glade for ages.

Riverside definitely defended their garrison to the bitter end, but later on we ended up taking it with a golem rush as they were focused on defending Stonemist castle. No sleep for us before we took that garri, it had to be done…

The amount of superior AC’s inside was quite impressive.

Biggest blob I’ve seen from AG this week was about 30 players at best. Some of our players and guilds have had to pull some insane shifts to compete with enemy coverage and it’s taking its toll probably. This is not taking anything away from Gandara or BB efforts, it’s they who are putting the strain on us week after week and deserve the win.

It’d be best for us to have a visit in tier 5 to rework our strategies.

Nice vid by the way Froudactyl, the duels have been the best action all week. We should consider doing some 2v2’s and 3v3’s also.

More Gandara and Baruch Bay please join TDS dueling guild. It’s a little Aurora heavy at the moment.

For gentlemanly non-blob fights.

Respect to VLK guild for doing this. Cheaters represent nothing but themselves.

I did not zerg during this match-up.

Verloren Stilte.9623:

I hope you guys are preparing for 24/7 worth of 50 player zergfest by BB, they should move up to your tier at the end of the week.

AG fought Baruch Bay for the past several weeks.

The zergs were a shock for the first week, but you just have to learn how to build an endless amount of arrow carts to slow them down and maneuver the blob as you wish by capping all the undefended stuff they have. Even 1 person can do it. Make it an unpleasant experience for them and the PvE farmers will leave the ranks, leaving only the WvW core group to deal with.

Achievement titles definitely need to go, and even the names should be faded out at certain distance. Right now I’m looking at a sea of red names while hardly making out the action.

It’s easy enough to solo camps and towers. I doubt 5% either way will make much of a difference.

I was not so lucky, I have full ascended on mine. Been thinking for the past hour and just can’t find a viable way to make it work. But getting rid of all the equipment is not really an option either.

I’ll just leave it as it is in hopes that ranger bows get buffed someday, while playing other characters.

ChillyChinaman.6057:

To each his own, and I know Anet envisionaged every class able to play every role, but it can be reasonably concluded that certain classes perform certain roles better than others. For rangers damage, ranged or melee, is not one of them.

Also a quick question, did QZ actually increase the flight speed of LB arrows? I always thought it just fired a bunch of them so more actually hit. Kind of like a submachine-gun versus a semi-auto rifle.

Probably it didn’t affect flight speed but it made using auto-attack and rapid fire actually worthwhile. Right now it’s just way too slow in comparison to the damage done.

I felt quite comfortable with the zerker ranger and the damage it did with quickness, but obviously now it’s useless. I’m not saying it was the greatest ranger build out there, but people were surprised to see a ranger do actual damage on them and it made for a fun, different build from the usual.

ChillyChinaman.6057:

Meh, rangers were always better suited to cleric/knights or carrion/rabid gear in my opinion anyway. Leave the spiking to the classes.

None other could do such consistent damage from 1500 range though. I mean I would auto-attack for 4k and rapid fire for 15k, but without quickness, there’s no way you’re going to land anything unless they improve on arrows and targeting. Quickness just made those arrows fly at a speed they should have in the first place.

I’ll try to make mine revolve around dodging, but if it doesn’t work, I’ll have to give up on it.

The only reason I was able to make a berserker ranger work somewhat was because of quickness, which allowed me to burst out enemies before they could re-stealth over and over among other things. I won a fair amount of duels with it so it was not a completely useless build.

In comparison to other berserker builds, the damage is relatively pitiful without quickness. Longbow arrows will never connect on an enemy without quickness, the only way that the weapon was made somewhat viable.

Skill lag was truly quite amazing today. It was bad enough against Riverside and Baruch Bay, but today it was constant even though I’m only dueling at a location with hardly any players in it.

Later on, once the lag settled down, I did manage to solo one of FSP towers. Don’t ever leave your borderland without scouts when I’m around… I might just try to solo your garrison. It’s been known to happen.

Well, I sure hope the abilities and ranks are easy enough to achieve since I run 5 different characters in WvW. Would rather not be told to get off siege because I have not maxed out the character I play. The improvements to abilities should only be small scale for now until it is figured out whether they work or not in WvW environment.

PvP never been about rewards for me so I will just keep fighting behind the windmill as usual. I do wish they would implement an ability to duel your own server players, for fun. Like a training arena or something.

Tajmo.1836:

It’s like the whole of AG aren’t even trying… We used to do well despite being outnumbered at times, being forced to play smart, but the last couple of days have been ridiculous.

We have some of the best commanders, but with nothing to command. We clearly don’t belong in our current tier, despite disproving that in previous weeks.

I think we belong in this tier and will remain in this tier considering how close it is between us and Baruch Bay at the moment.

People are just a bit tired of the same match-up taking place every week, Riverside showed up with the greatest motivation to win this week and it shows in the points.

The fight still goes on for 2nd place.

Zumy.6318:

Hm, I guess I will have to play around. But i might chose norn in the end.

Ofc he has bigger issues with other sword thieves. He has the same tools and a daze stun can sc rew you up pretty much. He is gc geared :-).
Thieves biggest enemies are other thieves with similar builds.
As they know what you will do.

Glass cannon thief can be so unreliable in 1on1’s though, no matter how good you are a random warrior with eviscerate can drop you in seconds if they get lucky.

I’ve literally seen a 1v1 situation where a thief won 9 out of 10 times, but the warrior once caught lightning in a bottle and eviscerated the thief to oblivion with about 100 hp left.

Zumy.6318:

Hm, I meant something like a viable 1vsX roamer build :-). High kiteability and high mobility w/ good dps avoiding. Conditionfocused also fine. I thought you’d solo a lot on ranger in open field :-).

Norn is not an option though :-D. I only do female humans. Even though I’d prefer nornian facedesigns.

I do, but it is successful because of the 1500 range. Sword brings the dps avoiding automatically because of the evasive moves, but when a group of thieves starts focusing you (realizing that you’re putting out 15k rapid fires every couple of seconds), it’s time to reset the fight.

Ranger without Norn Elite is just not going to have many options for zerg-escaping, except underwater.

Best I’ve done was 1vs4 with ranger, but obviously not against great players. I tried wiping a 6 man guild once, but only killed 3 before having to run away. It’s all about the use of environment.

We dueled TikiTaka once I think, he had problems with our sword thief if I remember correctly, but maybe he has made the proper adjustments by now. I don’t think I got to duel him aside from a 3v3, but I’ve fought a few other OdS thieves in 1v1s. They’re always willing to have a go in a duel so respect.

MRA.4758:

TheGreatA.4192:

Those are signs of respect though.

Well you quoted before I could edit in the flamethrower part, which is certainly not a sign of respect. Although, it isn’t meant to be offensive either.

~MRA

True that. A bit of taunting is all fair in the game, although I try to save that for when I meet and defeat massive odds instead of running over some poor guy with 30+.

It’s an effective strategy at times too, when players lose their cool and try to rush you, making it an easier fight. I’m not here to condemn such behaviour when I’m probably one of the most annoying people there is to fight in the game, frequently using taunts during mid-fight lol.

Zumy.6318:

Hey buddy. You need to post me your soloer ranger build, as I will be roaming solo a lot and thief/elle are just to easy.
Count me in for that duels, too!

My solo ranger is a joke lol. I have played tanks throughout my GW2 “career” and made a bet that I could somehow make a glass ranger with longbow and bear work in WvW while solo roaming.

But if you want extreme difficulty and potential high rewards, a barrage that can wipe out 5 people and yourself on retaliation, then you can receive my build.

Key to success is, press invulnerability and Norn elite when somebody starts focusing you and run like hell.

MRA.4758:

Pheppo.9286:

Just another thing … as i charged alone into your zerg on the bridge to defend the hill and after I got killed … plenty of BB people danced on my dead body … :/

I still fail to see how this is taken as offensive. I find it rather funny. I often also use emotes to wave or salute to tower/keep defenders, and I want to assure everyone that is never meant ill. I also try to make a habit of using /bow after an 1v1 (well, at least the ones I am able to do an emote afterwards).

It’s just a game. Relax, and don’t take it too serious. (Und immer schön flauschig bleiben.)

~MRA

Those are signs of respect though. Being zerged by 30+ while solo defending and having people dance on your corpse is definitely not a sign of respect lol.

Seems we have exploiters on all sides now. Another reason why we shouldn’t blame a server for the actions of a few. There will always be bad apples.

About OdS, LOST is always willing to take you on with our 2-man zerg. If you get bored at killing dollys and ganking people we can have more duels.

The leopard is quite great for WvW purposes. Not only can you escape anything, but #3 and #4 skills do 6-7k damage with a glass cannon build and it’s easy to land both of those out of stealth. Will instakill other glass cannon builds.

You will learn nothing by zerging. It’s just how it is. Only to the extent of knowing how WvW works.

Saying that a good PvP player is not worth anything to a zerg is just silly considering what most zergs consist of, complete filler, any player who has an idea of what they are doing regardless of build is worth a lot to a zerg.

In this game you can easily swap your PvP character to a zerg character, which I reckon is what most duelists will do depending on what they are focusing on.

Anyway if you have duels like this they are best held in a safe location where it’s unlikely that somebody will trespass, and also at a time when queue isn’t full.

Zumy.6318:

TheGreatA.4192:

Zumy.6318:

Cool story bro. Please tell me more zerglingtales.

Mine is a true story. I even got a wave from your guildie.

Sorry I confused you for a TUP-zergling. It was me waving.
And yes, I was karmatraining. sometimes I do that.

No man can be faulted for karma-training every once in a while, rewards being what they are in WvW.

I do wish you had gone for the gate first though, had a couple of superior arrow carts waiting. A treb was in the plans to counter the attack but we could not rally anyone else to defend the tower.

Zumy.6318:

Cool story bro. Please tell me more zerglingtales.

Mine is a true story. I even got a wave from your guildie.

Zumy.6318:

Strang.8170:

Aside from that, foo on [REQ], we just wanted to defend a keep and they had to stroll in, zerg our 3 delayers with liek 150 peoplez and then they came out and there was like 30 of them, but they each had one more guy in their backpack so there was more like 50 of them and they completely zerged me, drank my blood and /danced on the corpse of my poor poor support ele. Bad conduct and totaly not fair and stuff!
(note: you´ll get correct values from forum posts when you divide them by 10.)

I bet our two eles zerged very hard.

You did zerg pretty hard with the 30+ RS players you used to take a tower defended by two people in BB BL.

Good thing RS left the borderland soon after, it was fun 3-manning two keeps until they came back. Almost wiped on keep lord & quaqqan lightning.

Yeah well we have gotten wiped out by BB every Friday in each of our match-ups, mostly because our guilds and commanders are not around at that time, planning for reset. So BB making a last push running through our unorganized mess was not a big surprise.

Maybe there were some elements in our server trying to secure a Baruch Bay win, but if you think our whole server including its PUGs and guilds were rallied to lose on purpose, you’re probably wrong. All I did with a significant amount of other people were EB jumping puzzles, not putting too much effort into a match-up already lost.

It’s just a couple of hundred points either way, so nothing much resolved, we have to do this again and hope one of us gets a dominant win this time to change up the match-up a little bit.

fishergrip.4082:

TheGreatA.4192:

I enjoy the fact that I can give and take a beating with my character, so I disagree. It’s crazy that you can have 2000+ power, 3200+ armor, over 25k health, over 60% crit chance and crit damage, but I like it.

Those stats are only possible on a war.

Yes they are but I do have almost the exact same stats with guard, only 20+k health instead of 25+k because of lower health pool and less crit chance.

Use runes of soldier. It’s what I do.

I enjoy the fact that I can give and take a beating with my character, so I disagree. It’s crazy that you can have 2000+ power, 3200+ armor, over 25k health, over 60% crit chance and crit damage, but I like it.

Zumy.6318:

I would neither call it glassy nor bunker. We try go run pretty balanced with burst coming from the mesmers.

The thieves dont run in our groupsetups. You might have met them when we were roaming solo or roflsquad. As soon as we are 4 ppl we usually form a decent group and in our eyes, thieves dont provide anything to a group that another character coulld not do better.
So our thieves would log to female human Guardian (Me) or Mesmer (Lonny).

Agreed on your notion about thieves.

I believe one thing holding Baruch Bay back a bit is that many of their players don’t relog thieves for more fitting characters in the zerg fights. Nuke guild for example seem to run quite a lot of tanks which partly explains their success.

I’ve run with players who do well in zergs with thieves but it’s quite difficult to avoid all the AoE spam.

Zumy.6318:

I feel you.
As I was a soloer 99 of my 100 reknownranks in Warhammer and am most of the time in GW2, I respect that.
Usually I just think of ppl I meet solo that they are zerglings on their way to the zerg :-).
But we always do spare ppl we know they are duelists and often stop for some 1v1 without F1-stomp. So you can get your 1v1s next time we meet :-).

All my attempts at zerging have failed miserably so I’ve given up on it. Usually I get too drawn to the fighting, only to find out that our zerg has moved its location elsewhere while I keep fighting the 30+ Baruch Bay or Riverside players solo.

I haven’t come across your group in a while but if we meet, let’s have a fight unless there is a tower or keep to be taken.

Mechro.6342:

We usually dont run thiefes in group. We dont run glassy eles. We dont even have ‘’6 or 7’’ active
members at the moment (maybe on weekend we get 6-7 online for 1-2 hours).

Weekend was when I last saw you so I went based on that. I’ve definitely seen you run thieves and had a couple of fights with a REQ thief with my ranger (which ended in a draw because of stealth on both sides).

You eles may not be glassy but they are not full bunker either from what I’ve seen. Based on the damage you were dealing I’d say you were more damage-oriented than bunker. A few days ago I dueled the most bunkeriest RS ele imaginable with a necro and it would’ve probably taken a couple of years to resolve that contest because of lack of damage on both sides.

Zumy.6318:

I know your Ranger.

I remember the resetnight a few weeks ago when we were ganking as three people a hole in the Wall of the AG middlekeep.
And the last time I saw you, you were coming to annoy and running back into your spawntower. We were 5 btw.
I you dont want to get added by an entire party, stop charging into it when you haver your Norn-elite up repeatedly. It grants you kind of faceaggro when we meet you in open field.

Btw: we dont do thieves in our parties, besides the night at your spawntower, that was me. Also our eles are not gc :-).
The first ones to go down usually arent our gc mesmers and as you do, we usually get away of large zergs. But as culling gets worse every day, german players are experiencing lags bigtime due to internetproviders having a problem with anet-servers.

Currently we dont roam much, but the next time we meet I will wave with Twilight and you can have your 1v1. Though in my eyes, Ranger geared and traited for it, is the strongest 1vs1 class if you know the buttons :->

Ranger is not my main and not built for pvp purposes, it’s for scouting and is meant to stay alive in the tower and also give away the location of your server’s zerg. If I get killed by rushing 5 people and there’s nobody in the tower or following your zerg I fail at my purpose. I still won’t turn down a 1v1 of course, objectives be kitten if I can get a duel.

Since it’s objective-based play, I don’t complain if you focus down my ranger, I’m supposed to be able to escape anyway unless I get skill-lagged.

I agree the lag has been bad recently, yesterday with my warrior I went the whole day without being able to use my utility skills. Was a lot of fun trying to figure out how to kill people without using skills.

Zumy.6318:

I dont even remember the last time we were 6-7 ppl. But I get your point there.
Give race, class and guild and send 50g every week.
You will be spared.

I get away from you no problem. Snow Leopard takes care of that. Race and class depend on the character I’m playing (I run 5 of them) but guild remains LOST. Next time we meet a 1v1 would be appreciated.

I’ve never seen you less than 6 or 7. Usually a guard around to keep the glassy mesmer, eles and thieves alive. Is a good team and it works on smaller scale, but once one of you goes down it starts the snowball effect when meeting larger groups.

I believe tankier groups are best for dealing with large numbers, because there is more room for error and more access to stability/condition removal which are essential in those cases. Damage is still more than enough by targeting and focusing enemies.

REQ, let’s not act as if you play any different when you outnumber your enemy even if it’s on a smaller scale. I’m mainly a solo roamer, and I get cc’d and focused down by the 6-7 of you. If you get cc’d and focused down by 15+, it’s the same thing.

When I run in a party, we have an agreement that if we meet a single enemy, only one of us will attack (or two if it’s 2v2). That’s the best way to learn how to play this game, instead of leeching off others work and never truly knowing how good your individual ability is.

Most of us have tens of thousands of kills already so we need not be so kill hungry as to chase after a single guy unless it’s objective-based… I don’t deny your skill, just saying that the way you operate is no different from a large zerg when meeting outnumbered groups, so there is not much room to complain.

I’ve not seen TUP run with more than 15 to 20 players at best. There might be pick-ups such as myself roaming around them, looking for fights, but are not exactly an active or effective part of the group.

Anyway, it’s been another fun even match-up, hopefully the match-ups change up a bit at some point before we get too familiar with each other. I’m starting to know many BB and RS players as well as the AG players.

People shouldn’t be so kill-hungry at this point to intercept agreed duels but the location could’ve been chosen a bit better. The best place for duels is behind the south camp in borderlands, has a lot of free space and little chance to come across roamers/zergs. This is where I have all my 1v1’s.

I see that ele around a lot, is a good player from what I’ve seen and I’ve gotten to fight him a lot. But anyway it seems this wasn’t an agreed duel so interception was understandable and the harsh words were unneeded.

Good thing about Signet of the Hunt is that you can pop up the active and wait for 30 seconds to get the passive back, while still possessing the attack of opportunity for 16 minutes. As a result you and your pet’s opening attack will always do 50% more damage while never truly sacrificing your movement speed.

But I agree that 50% boost to a single ranger attack isn’t going to be much unless playing glass cannon. Even then it’s not as if you have killshots, backstabs or eviscerates.

In my opinion Anet should work towards making WvW more dynamic and more about the conflicts. You should always know where the action is going on and possibly even the scale of the battle (whether it’s 5 or 25).

Right now the system forces certain people to bore themselves to tears in an effort to scout a keep or a tower nobody is attacking into.

Rengaru.4730:

TheGreatA.4192:

Signet of the hunt grants you an attack of opportunity which boosts your next attack by 50% damage. If you’re a glass cannon already, that’s a fairly nice boost to damage.

But the Ranger does not have many high base damage skills to begin with.

The best options would be [Swoop] or [Path of Scars] and even with the boost skills like a <50% [Heartseeker] or [Backstab] by a Thief still deal more damage.

No they don’t, but it’s a good add if you are a glass cannon, have an enemy running from you with low health and need that extra bit of damage to take them down for example with full range auto-attack from longbow or Monarch’s Leap.

The signet cooldowns definitely have to be looked into because the active benefits aren’t great enough to justify those type of cooldowns. It’s as if you’re only supposed to fight every 2 minutes.

I run 930 vitality and 1200 toughness, get around 400 kills daily and get killed maybe 5-6 times a day while roaming solo. It’s not as much the build as being able to play WvW.

My build would probably get laughed at in these forums (glass cannon, bear, longbow, signets) but hey it’s been working so far.

Signet of the hunt grants you an attack of opportunity which boosts your next attack by 50% damage. If you’re a glass cannon already, that’s a fairly nice boost to damage.

Uncle Salty.6342:

Well big numbers are cumulative. Not per hit.

But that’s right. Using Longbow for utility is correct.

Just saying if you’re naming Longbow as a means of sustained dps, it isn’t going to work out.

I don’t think it works out too great as a dungeon/PvE weapon necessarily, but for WvW purposes the damage is more than enough. It’s not as much about damage per second as it is about landing the damage.

Longbow when used in combination with quickness is a very good weapon due to its range and the vulnerability, knockback and AoE it offers. I do think it should be looked into a little more and improved when it’s used in regular speed, because the arrows do have a hard time finding their target at times.

In 1v1 situations against shortbow users, who granted were probably not the best ranger players around, I was always able to utilize my greater range and burst damage to melt them. So there are ways for a longbow user to win against the shortbow.

I’m not saying longbow is better than shortbow but it has its uses and is not automatically a newbie weapon. There is no other weapon that can consistently hit 1500 range.