Hats off to all the ones who stood before me, and taught a fool to ride.
Just poking my head in here to say I’m happy to be fighting the same servers every week. The servers just one rank higher blast us out of the water with coverage, the servers a rank below our match get the same treatment from us.
I don’t care what server name prefix my enemies have over their heads nearly as much as I care whether the match is competitive.
People suggesting 1up/1down are completely out of touch with the state of WvW populations, or not thinking it through properly. People complaining about lack of variety in the name tags they fight either forgot or didn’t live through the random matchmaking period last year.
The problem with match stagnation previous to the random matchmaking system was due to the Glicko math causing servers winning matches to require more points each week to gain anything. If we start seeing matches where every single week the point totals are 100k+ above the middle again then it might be time to bump the random factor a bit, but currently most matches are pretty even.
Random colors would be good. The rest of the changes people are suggesting come under the category of “ain’t broke, don’t fix”.
Hats off to all the ones who stood before me, and taught a fool to ride.
Legendaries, ascended, superior siege, a bunch of mystic forge stuff…..
Plenty of optional (and some profitable) uses for them. Are you asking for more “required” uses?
There’s also the 25 point skills that have come out in the last two major updates, and they plan to continue adding skills afaik. With seven characters that gives me a use for 175 skill-points every month or so. There’s a line between giving the people who play 100 hours a week something to do and making 100 hours of play per week a requirement to stay current, hopefully they continue to stay somewhat on the sane side of the line.
Hats off to all the ones who stood before me, and taught a fool to ride.
That would depend on what you mean by better.
What are you feeling is missing during your current level?Most new content is actually centered around low to medium levels, rather than high levels.
It just seems like at this level with so much to do at a high level you seem like the game is actually pushing you through the levels to get to that stage. And especially at WvW where it really is armour based.
Take your time and enjoy the ride.
I wouldn’t recommend leveling your first character (entirely, anyway) in WvW, use the PvE world to gain some combat experience and try out different skills and traits and armor stats. The mobs in the 30+ areas start to use many of the same attacks that players will, under 30 is pretty basic generally but gives you time to learn the dodge timing and when to heal.
If you feel you’ve mastered this stuff and see traits/skills you want to use against players, jump into the sPvP area and try stuff out. You get autoleveled to 80 in there and everyone has the same “gear” choices (all free).
If you really want to level your first character in WvW mostly, roll a warrior or guardian and stack as much vit/tough into your stats as you can. Due to the scaling math you’ll have insanely high hp/defense at most levels as long as you keep your gear as close to your level as possible (with those stats anyway). You can do this with thief too, but they are less forgiving if you mess up dodging/stealthing and are pretty dang squishy until they get enough traits to benefit more from stealth or boost evasion uptime. Either way, stay with your “zerg”, a solo uplevel isn’t going to accomplish much and your leveling will be slow and expensive solo.
Hats off to all the ones who stood before me, and taught a fool to ride.
The reasons I don’t play s/tPvP are mostly about the format. It’s too small and too fast and quite gimmicky.
I prefer hiking and rock climbing to exercise machines and climbing walls in gyms. Besieging a keep, not knowing whether it will take hours and hundreds of enemy and ally deaths to take, feels so much more satisfying to me than successfully bunkering home point till the 15 min timer ticks down.
The other thing I don’t like is the chat. I’ve never been into smack-talking. I understand some people really enjoy that aspect, and some people can just ignore it and still have fun. I’m glad there’s a game mode that supports it, so those people have their outlet (and stay out of the WvW/PvE chat, hehe).
Hats off to all the ones who stood before me, and taught a fool to ride.
Yeah, Charr area can be a bit underpopulated. It also has some pretty hard events compared to the human area.
Head to the Black Citadel, find the Lion’s Arch Asura Gate. You’ll pop out in a big city (explore it for easy exp) near the portals to all the other racial starting cities. Go through the gate guarded by Humans (or any, if you’re adventurous) and head out the south gate of Divinity’s Reach into Queensdale (it’ll be most populated, but maybe with annoying high levels champion training).
Hats off to all the ones who stood before me, and taught a fool to ride.
From your three picks, I’d suggest starting with Ranger. Thieves can be very squishy in the beginning, and would benefit from the Ranger’s healing and pet’s tanking abilities.
Mesmer early game can be as difficult, or more, than thief. Light armor and medium health pool, most of their damage is built around illusions which can be difficult to master and hard to keep alive until higher levels where specific traits and skills become available. This might make for a duo that spends more time than pleasant in downed state at low levels.
Engineer is one of my favorite classes in the game, capable of doing everything at once decently, or specializing into any role with a quick switch of gear and traits. It’s also the hardest class in the game to learn, and possibly hardest to master (elementalist is probably tied for this title). Slightly more forgiving and useful to a teammate than mesmer though, so out of the three it’d be my second choice. Same health/armor rating as ranger, lacks the pet to draw aggro but can cover that with a ton of knockdown/blind/block/etc skills.
Any two classes can work together, just read all the skills and traits to see how they can compliment each other. You can do it with anything, the most important things to do are:
1) Learn to dodge: save endurance for big attacks, windups usually have a 1-3 second “dust up” animation preceding large damage spikes that should be dodged. http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Dodge
2) Learn the downed state: you aren’t dead yet, kill something or have an ally revive you manually or with skills to “rally”. http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Downed
3) Learn combos: many skills have either a “combo field” or “combo finisher” effect listed. Using finisher skills inside or through fields cause many effects, such as area healing, might buffs, weakening or stunning enemies, granting stealth and others. http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Combo
Hats off to all the ones who stood before me, and taught a fool to ride.
The foods been in game since launch and the only class buffed condition damage wise since then is Necromancer and some classes received torment. Where were all the complaints since then.
This thread is specifically about immobilize stacking, which recently had it’s mechanic changed to be able to stack (5?) times in duration. The foods aren’t the issue.
WvW is a place for min-maxing. Enemy using food buffs to get crazy condition duration? Use food buff yourself for whatever shenanigans you have and hope they beat your opponents’.
I haven’t been immob-locked yet, but I imagine it’s similarly annoying in the way stun-lock is.
It’s more powerful than stunlock in some key ways, and when you experience it, you’ll know why (unless you are running a melandru/lemongrass/dogged march warrior or the elementalist/engineer equivalent, but most classes can’t just be passively immune to root, even with trait/gear/food).
Stuns do not stack duration (knockback/launch sort of does but isn’t easy to accomplish). Stunbreaks remove all stun/daze/knockdown/back/launch effects, immobilize has very few specific skills to break it. Stability counters stuns, it doesn’t help immobilize at all. There are many more quickly available immobilizes than stuns, leg specialist warriors, engineers, rangers, venom thieves (probably more….) all have access to easily spammable immobilize and plenty of conditions to cover preventing the only counter (other than dodging).
In large scale fights it’s not a problem particularly, but in small/medium scale it’s incredibly powerful against most opponents.
Hats off to all the ones who stood before me, and taught a fool to ride.
The only way to reduce blobbing (without revamping the entire combat system or putting in some arbitrary scaling mechanic) would be to reduce the map population caps to about 60 players per map.
Then people would run in 60 man zergs. :P
The only way to stop it is to change average human behavior, which won’t happen. The mistake that Anet makes is that they reward this playstyle instead of punishing it.
The difference is the 60 man zerg (being the entire map population) would lose the match (PPT game, I know, no one cares about it, yeah, sure, whatever, if no one cared about it all the structures would go undefended 24/7). The current meta is 60-80 man zerg and the rest scouts/sentries/havoc. Without those 10-20 support crew the blob can’t keep anything or upgrade anything, if the blob can’t exceed 40-50 players without abandoning all other objectives, it makes small(er) scale fights more viable.
Reducing population cap does nothing to address the mechanics of the game that have led to zergs becoming de rigueur.
If we want zerging reduced, there needs to be changes to the rewards structure, not just around capping, but around every event type in WvW (defence, upgrading, escorting etc).
You can’t just address the symptoms, you need to address the cause.
I believe it does (at least partially) address the cause. The math simply favors bigger blobs beyond a certain point. There is a critical mass of players which makes a metagame including blobbing much more profitable, and I believe that critical mass to be around 60 players per map.
It takes longer for a smaller blob to melt gates. Smaller blobs carry less supply, making it harder to spam siege for everything.
I don’t think they will lower map caps though, it’s unlikely they would risk making that many customers angry.
Rewarding defense is much more problematic, as it can easily be exploited (dolyak walking bots at release are an example, hence the removal or gold/karma from the escort event).
Rewards for upgrades? Players line up to queue useless upgrades.
Rewards for building siege? All kinds of siege placed in dumb spots and wasted supply.
Rewards for scouting? How would you even….?
Dolyak escorts? Welcome back queue hogging bot legions.
Active defense is already rewarded. Kill someone or repair something every 3 minutes for karma, wxp and gold.
Reducing rewards based on number of players might work, but it’s likely to lead to harassment of non-guild players if they bump the rewards down by being there (hello unfriendly game atmosphere). I feel reducing map caps would be overall more player friendly, especially if they added duplicate/overflow maps (perhaps EotM could serve this function).
Hats off to all the ones who stood before me, and taught a fool to ride.
(edited by Thrashbarg.9820)
Wait, are we still back in 2012? Like, when Pistol Whip was actually remotely decent outside of PvE? It’s become such a useless skill after they nerfed the stun on it, to the point of which you will barely get hit by any of the hits. It’s kinda like hundred-blading Warriors, they’re way too easy to just avoid.
Maybe when you have experienced it a few times, this is the first time i have EVER actually encountered it.
Because hardly anyone uses it anymore. Only being able to kill players in gear 40 levels too low, who are surprised enough to just stand there getting hit, is likely the reason.
Hats off to all the ones who stood before me, and taught a fool to ride.
The only way to reduce blobbing (without revamping the entire combat system or putting in some arbitrary scaling mechanic) would be to reduce the map population caps to about 60 players per map. This won’t happen though, apparently it’s not “epic” if there aren’t enough people to auto-attack down all enemies and structures.
The critical mass for a blob to be effective seems to be about 50+. Anything less and it can actually be beaten by an organized group of 20ish. The map blob only functions well with 10-20 roamers and scouts havocing backlines and delaying sieges by enemies. If it’s a choice between efficient blob size and efficient scouting/defense smart teams will split into 2-3 smaller groups at this size.
There still would be wxp trains, can’t control human greed completely. It would be a lot harder to simultaneously wxp train and hold high PPT though, right now it’s easy for the most populated servers to run wxp trains and hold enough points to “win” as well. Running in a blob of 80 has no drawbacks if you can still leave scouts to man siege and call the blob at each location you take.
Most sieges right now go like this:
1) zerg arrives and is called out by scout who begins firing (OP as hell, but necessary in a way) supply draining cow ammo from a treb. Arrow carts are fired as well if in range.
2) Gate melts in less than 1 minute due to ram mastery + superior siege + golems + timewarps. Alternatively catapults with people maxed in mastery swapping (exploiting) turns to keep bubble shield up permanently blast through walls in comparable time.
3) Defending blob arrives and massive aoe spamfest in lord’s room ensues. Might, blast, bomb, water, blast, repeat till one side wins.
Walls, gates, and most defensive siege are useless for the most part. There are variations, and off-hours are different, but assuming at least one size can queue a map this is the meta currently.
Hats off to all the ones who stood before me, and taught a fool to ride.
The Inquest Golem in Mount Maelstrom is a good source if you have multiple 80s, it gives almost as much as the dragons and spawns much more frequently. Using one of the apps/overlays/sites available through the API you can guest to a couple servers which have it running soon before or after your home server does and get it several times in a row quite quickly.
The temples in Orr all give 30 dragonite per chest (except Arah, which gives none for some reason). Melandru and Dwayna are fairly easy and done regularly on many servers. Grenth can be done by 5 people if they are coordinated, but can become a cluster of kittens if too many people are there (more adds/aoe/boss hp due to scaling, and lots of people staying dead since the closest respawn is a million miles away). Balthazar isn’t hard either if everyone knows what to do, watch the mob spawns during the event and make sure they aggro you not the npcs.
As a mostly WvW player, I’ve had to go out of my way to get dragonite while my bank continues to accumulate empyreal and bloodstone.
Hats off to all the ones who stood before me, and taught a fool to ride.
Again, OP and being unfun to fight against are two different things.
I always get a kick out of threads like this by “roamers”. Especially when they have links in their signature to videos of them ganking low ranked bearbow rangers and staff eles while they try to cross the map. I bet your opponents in those vids thought those fights were really fun. They probably saw all the opportunities to learn how to fight a class that can spec glass cannon and still have over 30k HP (5k autoattacks leave so much room for fun counterplay…. yeah….).
Pretty sure you only care about your own “fun” and that means “winning”. Sorry, but I don’t see any evidence to the contrary.
Nice, personal attack against the youtube videos. Didn’t see that one coming but good counter argument. That was my first compilation video and meant to show some of the gameplay of a build that has been less popular in the necromancer community. It was not meant to show an example of “good” play.
Please do not be so dense and continue to equate fun with winning. There is another video on the same page where I fight a warrior and specifically point it out as a fight that was fun. Now, I know that you will say “it was fun because you won” but I did not consider that a win at all because someone from my server jumped in. The warrior was going to kill me. As far as I am concerned it was a loss. And I made many mistakes during that fight and learned from them. The fact of the matter is that fun does not mean winning. It means having a good back and forth fight that does not rely on gimmicky mechanics.
I didn’t mean to attack your videos, for what they are, there’s nothing wrong with them. They do, however, showcase your playstyle, which I see as un-fun to many of your opponents. I didn’t mean to imply the videos were an attempt to brag about skill. Just pointing out the irony that the opponents in the first few fights on your top video probably didn’t enjoy the fights and didn’t really have much to learn from them other than don’t run around alone or re-spec.
The build isn’t at all unpopular, half the necros I know run it or some close variation. It’s quite good at bursting down unsuspecting foes or people running builds not designed for 1v1/escaping. It has counter-builds, but many of them fall into your un-fun category.
tl;dr Your definition of fun (as with many roamers) is strange to me, and you seem to be advocating many of your own opponents to altf4 when you attack them.
Hats off to all the ones who stood before me, and taught a fool to ride.
(edited by Thrashbarg.9820)
Again, OP and being unfun to fight against are two different things.
I always get a kick out of threads like this by “roamers”. Especially when they have links in their signature to videos of them ganking low ranked bearbow rangers and staff eles while they try to cross the map. I bet your opponents in those vids thought those fights were really fun. They probably saw all the opportunities to learn how to fight a class that can spec glass cannon and still have over 30k HP (5k autoattacks leave so much room for fun counterplay…. yeah….).
Pretty sure you only care about your own “fun” and that means “winning”. Sorry, but I don’t see any evidence to the contrary.
Hats off to all the ones who stood before me, and taught a fool to ride.
then again, warrior isnt the only to instant rezz. Rangers got Spirit of Nature, Eles got Glyph of Renewal, Guards got a signet, necros got a signet.
None of those can be picked up after cast and used to provide group stability and blast finishers for fields, none of them passively stack might and fury on the group for a long time after cast, and all of them take skill slots better occupied by more useful skills. On the other hand, war banner is a great skill in many ways beyond the simple aoe rez effect and the other options are lackluster for group play. War banner is by far the best aoe rez in game.
@OP: Guardian. Warriors tankyness is more selfish and depends more on mobility. Outrunning your zerg isn’t useful. Having your own stability when the rest of your group gets CC’d isn’t useful. Warrior commanders can be great (as can any class built and played well) but guardians seem to have better overall group performance across a variety of situations.
Hats off to all the ones who stood before me, and taught a fool to ride.
Any steep slope can cause this effect. It’s due to latency and the resulting disagreements about position between your client and the server.
Some areas seem much worse for it than others. The new ruins area is particularly bad, especially the stairs sections. Other problem areas are the switchbacks near the two northern towers and at the southwestern corner area of hills keep. Any stairs/slope can be bad in a laggy fight or if your connection hiccups at the right time.
Hats off to all the ones who stood before me, and taught a fool to ride.
As Devon said back in October,
Guild vs. Guild is a gametype that has a lot of potential and one that we would never do anything but the best possible version of. That version, if it comes, will have to wait until the resources are available to build it. This change is an attempt to provide a workable solution in a timely manner, one that will ease some of the conflict that we have seen arise on the forums and in the game.
What this means is that the team is not focused on making changes to this map at this time. If and when the resources are available to build GvG as a game mode, the team assigned to it will do the best they are able, but that time is not now. The Obsidian Sanctum was built to ease tensions between GvG players and the WvW community by allowing a place for players to GvG where it does not affect total map population and is not affected by the Bloodlust buff.
GvG, in its current form, is a player-organized and player-run gametype and for the time being, must be policed by players. Obviously if anybody is being abusive or obscene in chat, please report them. But, we cannot devote resources to preventing players not involved in organized battles from entering the arena.
It’s probably against some rules of your company in some way, but if not, try starting a Kickstarter fund for GvG development. I’d be willing to bet you’d get all the funding (resources) required fairly quickly. There are a lot of people who want to play a game that doesn’t exist right now, and GW2 is an awesome platform to make it happen.
Hats off to all the ones who stood before me, and taught a fool to ride.
fight against any decent group and try stacking conditions on a target. it’s not gonna happen.
You may want to remove the links from your signature before posting such nonsense. The very first video in your list shows you handily winning a 2v1 by spamming conditions.
I play engineer as well, so don’t try to tell me how great you are or how bad your opponents are. If your build auto-wins by spamming everything on cooldown, even against mediocre opponents, it’s over powered.
Hats off to all the ones who stood before me, and taught a fool to ride.
Guardian. Staff #1. bind aoe loot to a mouse key….
Hats off to all the ones who stood before me, and taught a fool to ride.
The only part of the meta that didn’t have it’s own reward already was ruins capture, which wasn’t required to get the meta anyway.
Killing 225 dolyaks, for example, rewards over 3 gold and a ton of karma and exp just from the event completions. Capturing towers/keeps usually rewards at least a champ bag. Gaining 50 ranks gives at least 50 chests containing some silver and possibly badges or rares. Players drop loot (last night alone I saw a precursor and an ascended weapon box drop).
Does PvE give better loot? Yes, of course. It should. If it didn’t, we’d have 24/7 karma trains flipping undefended objectives, or zergs arranging kill trading to farm. The type of people who prefer to fail events to farm loot make WvW really un-fun for the people it was designed for: people who like massive open world siege warfare and PvP.
I’m happy that I got a dolyak mini and some dragonite along with the gold and rares and exotics that I got doing the stuff in the first place.
I can see why people are unhappy, but I think they are missing the bigger picture (see the bit above about karma trains and kill trading….).
Hats off to all the ones who stood before me, and taught a fool to ride.
Good thing you blacked out those skills. Now no one will be able to imitate your op-ness.
Hats off to all the ones who stood before me, and taught a fool to ride.
Without videos of your play its hard to offer any advice. By your statements you’re doing well, and have a basic grasp of map strategy. From what I can tell you just need practice, and to abandon the expectation of winning every engagement.
Some good advice here about breaking into multiple coordinated groups. That’s probably the next step in your learning.
A full 80 blob is best suited to breaking fortified objectives. Four groups of 20 hitting camps can resupply 4x as fast as a mono-blob. Two groups of 40 can take two moderately defended objectives at once. One group of 60 can pressure a waypointed keep/castle enough that two 10 person groups can quickly flip everything else on the map. Have your players (at least your guild) form parties based on specialty and give each a name, this way you can quickly assign tasks to sub-groups.
80 people trained to work in different sized groups is a much more effective force than mono-blobs can be.
The most important thing for any commander leading a map force is a good attitude, start raging and you’ll lose followers quickly. Keep them positive and happy and you can lead them off cliffs without anyone caring.
Hats off to all the ones who stood before me, and taught a fool to ride.
The keep lord drops come in a steel chest also, because of the dragonite ore.
Sorta like how the 5 supply that can drop from a dolyak was “rare” loot, originally using the wooden chest graphic when it was introduced, and causing much consternation as no apparent loot was acquired from picking it up (pre-aoe loot also, so you often had to run back).
Hats off to all the ones who stood before me, and taught a fool to ride.
Part of it is (or was, now that it it seemingly fixed, or a whole lot better anyway) skill lag. Passive regen + heavy armor + melee cleave #1 spam was the best counter to not being able to use skills.
I can play any of my characters fine in a zerg and contribute, right up until that 80v80v80 inside garrison makes it impossible to use any skill other then autoattack and dodge. At that point it becomes highly preferable to be on my warrior or guardian.
I think this is one of the main driving forces behind the prevalence of warriors. Hopefully it will change a bit now that skill lag seems less common.
Hats off to all the ones who stood before me, and taught a fool to ride.
Any developers reading this thread?
This is a direct result of your “character progression” scheme and the addition of champion loot bags / ascended materials to keep/tower lord drops.
Account bound WxP, decent rewards for defense and hard limits on golem/ram building (5 golems per map, 2 rams per gate max) need to be implemented as soon as possible. The alternative is this PvE counterflip circle junk play taking over every match. Gone are the days of the epic castle sieges the designers had envisioned, bring them back please.
Hats off to all the ones who stood before me, and taught a fool to ride.
From the launch of the game to now, were the WvW expectations met?
Am I wrong to see it now as a larger version of the PVP meta game. Just everyone going clockwise on the map flipping towers for the most part? I’ve see a couple (2) ,defenses on Bay recently but then we already owned 95% of our borderlands and the attackers had no chance as we are able to port in for the block so easily while they were on outer gate up the hill.
I’d love to have an opinion on EB but since the season started I haven’t been able to access it at all. I try every day and wait for hours before giving up. It’s always full 24 hours a day. Maybe because I’m on JQ.
Am I missing some option here for getting better action? Another server? lowpop? where getting steamrolled might be a new experience. Hopefully there’s some middle ground.
Also I noticed alot of people I used to see are just not there anymore…frustrating.
Yes, that’s why. fifteenchars
Hats off to all the ones who stood before me, and taught a fool to ride.
There is no such thing as T1.
It’s called Gold League.
I know what you are trying to ask, and I’d answer “who cares? the league scheme isn’t a fair representation of skill level anyway.”
Using outdated terminology about tiers further perpetuates the idea which caused the server stacking mess that currently exists.
Hats off to all the ones who stood before me, and taught a fool to ride.
There was a post from Mr. Carver a while back saying the topic of account bound WxP was closed, and off the table and not gonna happen, ever. While I hope they change their minds, I am not confident it will ever happen. I doubt very much that it was his decision and I don’t blame him for it at all.
There is an item in the gem store which suggests why the people ultimately responsible for signing off on game changes would be against account bound WxP. An item that I will continue to boycott until they change WxP to account bound. /tinfoilhatoff
Hats off to all the ones who stood before me, and taught a fool to ride.
so basically the gold league should be the top 9 instead of the top 6……..
Basically not.
Platinum league should be BG, SoR, JQ. It’s nice to farm these servers but ppt-wise, any other match involving any of these ‘special’ servers is pointless.
Gold league should be TC, Mag, SoS, SBI, FA. TC doesn’t even quite fit anywhere but all the others are close to even matches.
I don’t know how the remaining servers should have been subdivided since I don’t have an idea of their power. Point is, it could have been done a lot better to make things semi-competitive at least.
Mag is actually rapidly approaching TC in power and organization.
Tiers should have never been removed. The fix should have been to allow more movement between tiers, even if that meant sometimes manually moving servers within matches when they began to stagnate in ratings despite consistent wins/losses.
Simple effective fixes seem to be anathema to ArenaNet, however. No modified Glicko math or special league competitions were necessary. One employee with the power to compare activity data across servers for a few hours a week and enough intelligence to interpret said data would have been more than sufficient to place servers in somewhat competitive matches.
Hats off to all the ones who stood before me, and taught a fool to ride.
I wanted to further discuss a couple of ideas. Firstly, several posts have called for reduced map caps in WvW. The problem that would create is that we’d be allowing even fewer people to play in a given period of time if we were to do that. So I wonder if there is another way to accomplish the same goal, while not disenfranchising people who would now be unable to get into the maps? It’s a hard problem because the more populated servers face long queues while the less populated ones face empty maps. From my perspective there aren’t a ton of good options, which is why discussing this problem is pretty important.
I am in favor of lower map caps for several reasons, and agree that it would be a difficult thing for many if implemented without any way to mitigate the negative impact on high population servers.
The best idea I can think of is to create a system where if a certain amount of maps (2-3?) are queued with a high number of players, those players can “guest WvW” on a server suffering from “outnumbered” status on more than 1-2 maps. The servers available for guesting would have to be outside the homeworld’s current matchup, to prevent shenanigans, but otherwise they could still gain WxP while in queue. I think this would go a long way toward solving many issues in WvW, including both the issues of the high population server’s queues and the lower population server’s empty maps.
The upcoming new map may help to relieve the queue problem somewhat but it doesn’t address the empty map issue or server load related lag at all.
More briefly: Lower map caps to 60 and create WvW guesting from high pop queued servers to outnumbered servers outside their matchup.
Hats off to all the ones who stood before me, and taught a fool to ride.
This group was obviously specced for long immobilization so looks like it works as intended. This condition should have been working like this since the beginning like cripple and chill does. They also sacrificed a lot of damage for immobilize if those 3 couldn’t down a rooted necro for 21 seconds. They also suck because you turned around and wiped them pretty easily. At least 1 was up leveled
Are you saying that low skill players on upleveled characters using bad builds should be capable of 20+ sec lockdowns? I don’t really think that’s a good argument. Especially since there is nothing preventing speccing for both long immobilize and enough damage to kill.
I’ve been seeing this tactic a lot recently, and it’s got me running on my thief more (withdraw and roll for initiative are good counters to this cheese). Too bad most classes lack a way to easily deal with immobilize specifically. I’d suggest buying Melandru runes and lemongrass soup ingredients as an investment, this tactic becoming “meta” will eventually require full -cond duration builds for anyone wanting to survive.
The change should either be reverted in PvP/WvW or stunbreakers and stability should be made to function on immobilize.
Since most if not all imob skills are single target and most are 2-3 seconds it cannot be stacked easily by one person or on a group. Only in these multi v 1 scenarios is this a problem and only by people who really spec to imob. I think the highest from one person is 9 seconds from a warrior with 2 weapons a trait and a utility skill and one good condition removal can take all that away instantly.
Woah, a warrior has to use 2 whole weapons and a trait and a utility to lock someone for 9 sec?
I guess it’s a good thing they get 2 weapons on swap by default and 3 utility slots to use and 70 trait points to spend. It’s also probably good that they can apply cover conditions easily, preventing most condition removals from even removing the immobilize. (I run a soldier’s rune shout guardian with PoV and this has happened to me, any skill that isn’t a full condi-wipe or immunity, hello again warriors=bestateverythingcrap, probably won’t even touch the immob if your opponents have half a brain between them).
Also, in any semi-organized, large scale fight, people call targets. Pretty advanced concept, yeah, but it happens, there’s even a function in the game for it.
Since you dodged my original question, I’ll ask it again:
Are you saying that low skill players on upleveled characters using bad builds should be capable of 20+ sec lockdowns?
Because that’s what I read in the post I originally quoted, and that’s some broken jive for any PvP game.
Hats off to all the ones who stood before me, and taught a fool to ride.
This group was obviously specced for long immobilization so looks like it works as intended. This condition should have been working like this since the beginning like cripple and chill does. They also sacrificed a lot of damage for immobilize if those 3 couldn’t down a rooted necro for 21 seconds. They also suck because you turned around and wiped them pretty easily. At least 1 was up leveled
Are you saying that low skill players on upleveled characters using bad builds should be capable of 20+ sec lockdowns? I don’t really think that’s a good argument. Especially since there is nothing preventing speccing for both long immobilize and enough damage to kill.
I’ve been seeing this tactic a lot recently, and it’s got me running on my thief more (withdraw and roll for initiative are good counters to this cheese). Too bad most classes lack a way to easily deal with immobilize specifically. I’d suggest buying Melandru runes and lemongrass soup ingredients as an investment, this tactic becoming “meta” will eventually require full -cond duration builds for anyone wanting to survive.
The change should either be reverted in PvP/WvW or stunbreakers and stability should be made to function on immobilize.
Hats off to all the ones who stood before me, and taught a fool to ride.
(edited by Thrashbarg.9820)
The only solution to this mess is to lower map population caps. That would solve most of the other problems as well (lag, zerg meta). 60 players per side max would allow for some epic battles without totally crushing the server’s CPUs.
Fancy point adjustment schemes or buffs/debuffs based on population are hard to implement, harder to balance and not necessary since they would not address any other issues (lag, zerg meta).
Transfers away from over-stacked servers could be discounted or free for a short time as well. Doing that without reducing map caps to something servers can actually handle won’t encourage many (or any) transfers. Massive queues are about the only incentive that will work at this point.
Make the game playable and balance the playing field all in one swoop. Drop map caps to around 60 players per side. Large guilds will be able to afford to transfer, and many already have, but in the wrong direction. Please endure their whining for a couple weeks while they sort out their priorities, it will be worth it for the health of the game mode. For every 500 man guild that threatens to quit, there are probably already 50 ten man guilds that have (or will) quit from the monotony of spamming #1 at the hurrdurr-skill-lag-mega-blob.
Hats off to all the ones who stood before me, and taught a fool to ride.
i just made an elementalist and im not sure how to play WvW with one exactly im not sure which would give me more dps and more of an ability to help my group out while still maintaining decent survivbility.
Staff.
Learn it, live it, love it.
In big fights you won’t even get in range to deal damage with a d/d setup unless you go full bunker, but then you won’t really be dealing damage (always a bit funny/sad to see videos of some bunker d/d rocking 3k crits with churning earth).
S/D has great single target burst and some good pbaoe burst from OH dagger, but requires a target for many attacks, which can be difficult in large fights or fights with thieves (click that low health guy in the middle of the stack for a lightning burst? gl with that).
My advice to new WvW elementalists is as follows:
Spec: Basic zerg support Elementalist.
The basic idea with this build is a live elementalist is better support than a dead elementalist. It’s tanky enough to stand front line combat in large groups, does halfway decent damage and oozes supportive boons and heals mostly just by doing it’s own thing. Feel free to adapt that to your preferred gear/style, add in more damage gear as you learn positioning and get more experience. Weapons and utilities and traits can be changed depending on situation.
Hats off to all the ones who stood before me, and taught a fool to ride.
Rampager isn’t the best choice for a condition elementalist, might even be the “worst” in some ways.
There aren’t any built in “condition on crit” effects like there are with other classes. Our +condition damage line is the toughness line, not the precision line (like engineers, warriors, etc).
Our best condition dps builds focus on bleed duration and stacking with eruption or scepter auto. That locks us into earth for damage, making it hard to apply burning and impossible to heal or use much of our CC without basically stopping damage altogether for 10-15 seconds.
Condition damage is about outlasting your enemy. A condition set with no survival stats makes that very difficult. Waiting for backloaded damage to tick and trying to live with 11k HP and 2k armor sounds dangerous. If you can pull it off and it’s fun, go for it. I wouldn’t recommend it for WvW though.
Hats off to all the ones who stood before me, and taught a fool to ride.
The reason a thief can 1v4 when basically no other class can, is they can go invisible and reset the fight if needed, and stealth stomp.
Anyone who can 1v4 on an elementalist is both very good and fighting very bad players (I would argue the 4 at once a thief can kill are also “bad” players by that standard, but the thief isn’t necessarily “good”).
Skill cap and floor are both higher with elementalist. 20 weapon skills and 4 sets of cooldowns takes more micro managing than 10 weapon skills with a shared resource governing cooldown.
Hats off to all the ones who stood before me, and taught a fool to ride.
I wonder how much it has to do with the new party buff priority system. That’s just another layer of calculations added to the mix.
Skill use > if : then checks for all party members in range > etc multiplied by the number of players in the map……
Hats off to all the ones who stood before me, and taught a fool to ride.
How do you complete Orr without “relying on others”? Solo clear Lyssa or Balthazar temple and post the video please.
Organize a group who need the points, get some siege and supply and give it a go.
Alternatively, transfer to a “green” server for a few days. The transfer fees are pretty cheap compared to a precursor.
Hats off to all the ones who stood before me, and taught a fool to ride.
You could also try posting in your matchup thread that you are looking for duels. Other players can whisper you and you can arrange to meet somewhere you’re unlikely to be disturbed. Near the windmill south of the southern supply camp in the borderlands is the most common dueling spot, sometimes just passing through you can find someone to play with.
Hats off to all the ones who stood before me, and taught a fool to ride.
1) Alt-friendliness. Specifically reopen the “closed” topic of account bound vs. character bound WXP. Also, the lack of ascended gearing options outside laurel currency, as well as general PvE/WvW reward balancing would fit under this heading.
2) Profession skill balance in WvW.
3) WvW specific balance issues. Siege weapons, WXP trait lines, population disparity, etc.
Hats off to all the ones who stood before me, and taught a fool to ride.
I’d say guardian just because the common consensus seems to be warrior is OP. Generally that means nerfs on the horizon. It’s warrior though, or The Great Goldenchild Profession of GW2, so it’ll probably just keep getting buffs. Hey, if over 50% of players play warrior anyway, making them auto-win is good, right? Majority wins, gg.
Anyway, I have both. Leveled warrior first. I find guardian more fun, but that’s me. The amount of detail in the topic post doesn’t really leave room for more than “I like X” comments.
Hats off to all the ones who stood before me, and taught a fool to ride.
The attacks preceding this kill shot were grenades. Grenades can easily stack 25 vulnerability in a very short time.
Warrior ability to shrug off all conditions and dash/charge away while passively regaining all their health and immune to CC is what needs nerfed.
Umm why? Having good escapability is an issue these days? I mean I could understand your point if you were saying all that while said warrior has insane DPS on you downing you…But you are talking about a kitten running from a fight?
In that case sign me up for the list of petitionors for nerfing:
GS guardians with PoV
Every thief ever
Some good mesmers
Warriors
D/D elesMy point is there are a lot more balance issues within this game rather than some classes being able to haul kitten when it looks like they’re gonna lose.
PoV has already been fixed(nerfed) so cross us off that outdated list.
As has elementalist mobility and survivability, several times. Meanwhile, warriors continue getting buffs.
Ask yourself if any of those classes can catch a mobility/regen warrior. Then ask if the warrior can catch them. The answers are NO, and YES, respectively, in case you aren’t into theory crafting or playing alts (I am, so I can verify both easily).
Mobility + damage + sustain is a huge issue of balance. (Well, when all the d/d ele haters were calling for nerfs last year, that was exactly their issue.)
Hats off to all the ones who stood before me, and taught a fool to ride.
Even in a random group with no guardian, it should be possible to have at least one of: Elementalist, Engineer or Mesmer.
All three are capable of applying group stability with either a utility skill or trait (same as guardian, although engi and mesmer may have less uptime, haven’t checked yet).
The only Ele trait/skill that I know of that grants group stability is Earth VIII, attuning to earth will grant a whopping 2 seconds of stability to your allies. Who runs around with at least 20 points in Earth?
Or am I missing something?
20 Earth works fine in a support build. Try 0-0-20-20-30, with the standard boon rune set and you’ll get 3 sec of stability every 10 seconds, which is quite good stability uptime for any class.
Compare to “Stand Your Ground” fully traited with same runes, 8sec of stability every 24sec. That’s the same total uptime (approx 1/3rd). SYG also requires a utility slot.
3sec (or even 2sec) is enough stability to push through a hammer train in most cases.
I realize a lot of eles don’t run this trait, but honestly I don’t know why. Still playing cookie cutter builds from last year (whose main proponents have since changed classes anyway). I even use Rock Solid in a burst build, stability=guaranteed ether renewal (at least enough to get some heal and cond clear, might get ‘rupted right at the end, but oh well….) 0-30-20-15-5, so take what I say with a grain of salt, either I’m cutting edge or stupid, the latter is what most would say.
Hats off to all the ones who stood before me, and taught a fool to ride.
The point of this thread seems to be “Stability is hard to get in pug groups due to the boon priority change.”
Even in a random group with no guardian, it should be possible to have at least one of: Elementalist, Engineer or Mesmer.
All three are capable of applying group stability with either a utility skill or trait (same as guardian, although engi and mesmer may have less uptime, haven’t checked yet). That will get you through that first push/line/wall/etc. It might not be ideal for each player’s style, but hey, I might not want to run stand your ground on my guardian….. Point is, the choices are there.
The game isn’t really meant to have easy high uptime on stability, since that would totally negate all the hard CC. I’m not saying the current implementation is balanced, but the party-boon-sharing change should negatively impact you unless you run an all thief/ranger group that likes to follow guild zergs.
Hats off to all the ones who stood before me, and taught a fool to ride.
All things short, I want to be that damage dealer! So…. Engineer… Or Necro….
Both can really do that about as well.
Necro may be slightly better for zergs because many of their skills don’t incur much or any retaliation damage. Engineer’s primary zerg damage can be pretty well negated by retaliation as either flamethrower or ’nade spam into a buffed group can result in up to 15 ticks of retaliation damage per second.
Engineer may be slightly better for roaming and small scale due to mobility (rocket boots, rifle, smokebomb stealth, etc) and group buffs that can be given without sacrificing damage (elixers, elixer gun, healing turret, etc).
Hats off to all the ones who stood before me, and taught a fool to ride.
Many, many references to tier 1 in this thread.
THERE IS NO SUCH THING.
There was. Months ago.
Anet got rid of tiers, first with random matchups, now leagues.
If you are transferring/stacking/whatever on the OLD tier 1 servers, and talking about how you want balanced competition, you are lying (either to us or yourself).
It’s likely there will only be ONE SINGLE “tier 1” match in the next 2 months.
Not to mention stacking timezones on each “tier 1” server individually…..
Just stop with the “good fights” lip service crap already. (as an excuse for blob-stack-transfers anyway, I like the actual “hey, good fight” posts, keep those coming)
Hats off to all the ones who stood before me, and taught a fool to ride.
(edited by Thrashbarg.9820)
Just be patient. With the match rotation we should have a couple easy weeks every now and then. You might have to wait in queue with all the others looking for an easy ride though.
It’s not PvE completion. It’s WORLD map completion. The mists are part of the world. I’d like to be able to get all the vistas and skillpoints in Orr without having to fight zombies (not really, but it’s basically the same argument).
The gold star, the “been there done that” title, and legendary (gift of exploration) were supposed to mean that you had actually been everywhere and done everything. It doesn’t really work out that way, but “been near the gates but not through” isn’t the title….
Hats off to all the ones who stood before me, and taught a fool to ride.
Put all your trait points into vitality first, toughness second. Use gear and crystals for condition damage. You’ll be pretty tanky and able to deal decent aoe damage. Keep your gear as close to your level as possible to hump that scaling math beast. Use as many blind/chill/cripple effects as possible on enemies, those and corruption/epidemic are just as powerful at level 20 as 80.
1v1 won’t really be do-able, but you won’t be a 2 shot for anyone. Run with groups and defend structures and you’ll do fine.
Hats off to all the ones who stood before me, and taught a fool to ride.
This thread reminds me of the “warriors have bad mobility” threads of last year. The skills/traits haven’t changed (other than dogged march, but that’s not actually required, just more OP sauce on the OP sundae) but half the roamers out there are running builds that no one wanted to play a year ago cause the “traits suck, gimps damage” etc. I hope it takes a year for necros to realize they have the best stability uptime of any class with just a trait (to even approach 50% stability uptime my guard and ele need a combination of traits and utility skills, and without +boon runes it’s still not as much).
I am especially fond of the line “Small man roaming sucks as a necro unless you have other classes to rely on, necros bring nothing to the table as group utility.”
Really? Other classes huh? For a group? Yeah, that probably is a good idea.
Chill, cripple, blind, fear, condition spam, crazy damage. Yep, those are “nothing” and don’t help groups at all.
Perma-stealth thieves are annoying, but if they are stealthing at 10% hp and coming back at full that means they have a very small HP pool. Try to save a fear to push them out of that last stealth, make sure to fire off another attack first to clear the blind from black powder though (that skill is a bit OP, afaik it’s the only self finishing combo field in the game, the guaranteed projectile finisher should be changed to 20% or the initiative cost increased by 2, and yeah, I play a thief also and did pretty bad against them until I had a couple hundred hours on mine).
As for the topic. Yeah. The entire game is balanced around guardians and warriors (or seems to be). High end PvE even requires full uptime of reflection and stability in many cases, the easiest way to accomplish that is “hurr more guardzzz”.
My guard is my new main for WvW. Ele and engi are more fun but wear out my fingers and go totally useless when the “all I can do is 1,1,1,1,1” skill lag hits fighting tier 1 blobs. Thief is great for roaming, but I feel too cheesy running the perma-bs-blah build and my condi/evasion build is fun but lacks the killing power unless people decide to stand in caltrops. Warrior is awesome but seems to need guardians to function well, and my warrior is a Charr and I can only look at Charr butt so long….
Geez, this coffee is good…..
Hats off to all the ones who stood before me, and taught a fool to ride.
Que = Spanish for “what”.
Reminds me of Pulp Fiction. “They speak English in what?” “What?” “Say what again!”….
Queue.
Hats off to all the ones who stood before me, and taught a fool to ride.