Guild Wars 2

Around 30 chests so far and one rare, all the rest masterworks. Got a few golem blueprints though, that’s pretty nice.

Heard a couple people get ascended rings (random stats) and a few exotics, but mostly just masterwork stuffs.

Chuck the ratings system entirely. Adding parts to a broken machine is unlikely to improve it’s functionality.

Make matchups based on comparative number of players in WvW, line up the activity levels by time zone as much as possible, have an employee spend several hours per week evaluating data and HANDMAKING matchups.

Relying on a numerical system to define human behavior isn’t likely to have much success (in this instance). Math doesn’t account for morale. The current math doesn’t even account for actual participation or population fluctuations due to transfers.

The previous matchups could have been slightly adjusted to relieve stagnation by simply moving a server up a tier if it wins 3 weeks in a row (or twice in a row by more than the opponent’s combined totals). All this crazy math to keep from saying “we’re going to balance the matchups as best we can with population data and considering past scores”. Instead we get “we made up some crazy number scheme based on some other ratings system for sports and we are going to allow it to run rampant over your fun until it either works or doesn’t, so deal with it”. Thanks.

By the numbers alone, a matchup where each server played 8 hours per day exactly, then left entirely while the next took over, trading fully capped maps, would be perfectly balanced. Even though in this scenario there would never actually be any player vs. player competition. Having an employee who could look at population fluctuations by time and manually make matches would prevent this (and lots more bad) scenarios from playing out in the live game.

I was reading this thread, and missing threads of the past.

Something, something, narf!

Welcome to the land of kittens.

Also, MMO forums are generally full of complaints and exaggerations about players leaving the game, take them with a grain of salt.

The only things missing from endgame are (mandatory, stat based) gear grind and huge instanced “raids”. If you’re not hardcore about these things in other games, you shouldn’t have any problems here.

As of now, the game is still good for me. Been playing since beta. The thing which has become most boring for me, is leveling alts through the first 30 levels due to the similarity of all professions at low levels and lack of build variety due to trait/skill unlocks up to about that level. By the time this became boring though, I had enough gold on my mains to use crafting to supplement the early leveling process on alts, so it’s not a big deal compared to other games. I don’t farm or speed-run dungeons or anything, I mostly play WvW and open world PvE, which are generally considered the least profitable activities, and I don’t have any problem with gold how in some other games I’d have to “farm” for several hours a week just to do PvP.

There are definitely things that could be better, but it’s sill the best MMO for my playstyle. Especially the way grouping, loot and resources are handled, cooperation among players in naturally encouraged and easy. Coming from playing healers and tanks in other games it’s refreshing to let everyone worry about their own health and aggro, for players used to just one role though it may take some adjustment. Just remember: don’t try to “tank” and everyone is their own healer, and can also heal/support everyone else (that’s really simplified, there’s more depth when you get into combo fields and boon/condition management and CC….. but it’s a start).

The problem with D/D in a GvG setting is, with the current meta anyway, you’ll have to get right into the “kill zone” to do any damage, and you don’t have the inherent mitigation of a warrior or guardian (as soon as your boons are stripped, which they will be, you’re a low hp light armor user all of a sudden, no matter your stats).

It worked a lot better when you could mist>heal, but now there is basically no margin for error.

For GvG static field and water fields are better than anything D/D can bring to the table. You can aura share as a staff user too (arguably better, since shocking aura is countered by stability and magnetic aura reflects a lot of incoming damage in a zerg v. zerg situation).

D/D is best in very small scale fights and large uncoordinated zergs. It can be made to work in GvG but most guilds probably aren’t cool with people playing sub-optimal team builds if they are really into the GvG thing.

Nice work on the map.

Hopefully this will help people play nice and share and stuff.

However, the patch notes are misleading. These things spawn in EVERY ZONE except Orr. Really no need to camp them, just go about your normal (if you normally explore/etc) play.

Coming from a game which people spent thousands of dollars on gambling packs every time a new shiny was released, and reading threads like this where people that should have already learned (southsun crates, etc) I’m thoroughly convinced that gambling packs are a great way to make money for MMO companies.

It’s too bad. PT Barnum was right (back then, even, and birthrates these days….. much higher….).

I’ll buy cool looking skins straight out of the gem store whenever they are available in that way. I’ve bought a few things as presents that way. I won’t ever buy gambling boxes, no matter how cool the shinies. I doubt the amount of players buying tons of gambling boxes will ever decrease to the level where outright selling skins is more profitable, but I can hope, right?

Benjamin.7893:

WvW is much easier. You don’t have to think about your fight and coordinate with your teammates at the same time. In fact in WvW you don’t have to talk at all, just listen to 1 person 90% of the time.

Only challenge that comes with WvW is fighting in a low fps and non balanced environment.

Or roaming, ninja-capping, scouting/sentrying…..

People saying WvW is ONLY about zerg v zerg are about as credible as people saying tPvP is ONLY about bunkering on points.

DevonCarver.5370:

The concept of tiers has little meaning at this point and you should try to stop thinking of matchups in those terms. Servers are matched up by proximity of rating, not proximity of “tier”. If the tiers have ratings that are within the range of the random adjustment, they can end up fighting each other. This is going to result in blowouts, no doubt about it. However, we are not going to make changes to this after just 2 weeks of the system. There are things we can do. We will almost certainly end up adjusting the total added to each server rating to group the matchups a little more closely. First however, we need to let the ratings adjust by having more varied matchups like these. If you look at EU, which is using the exact same system, you can see matchups with numerous surprising results. The same will likely be true by the end of the NA matchup.

TL;DR: We are going to wait at least a couple more weeks before changing any of the math behind the new system, but it is very likely we’ll decrease the size of the variation at some point.

The problem is, the ratings system itself is misapplied. We aren’t talking about individual chess players, or (mostly) static baseball team rosters. We are talking about highly variable populations which very rarely accurately display their true skill level due to numerous factors.

The main two factors I see preventing this math from accurately rating server skill are:
-“fairweather” syndrome, more people show up for the loot/exp/etc duing an easy win, creating a snowball effect, and it’s polar opposite (foulweather effect?) as player simply choose not to participate in an obvious blowout match
-guild transfers creating major shifts in population/coverage (this is somewhat relieved by the random factor currently implemented, but it has had the effect of exacerbating the previous problem I listed with the fair/foul-weather effects)

The math assumes everyone is showing up and playing their best on all sides all the time. Therein lies the flaw. That assumption is erroneous and thus the entire construct of the ratings system is built on a shaky foundation at best.

The problem stems from the design of the ratings system itself, which was meant to rate individual players or teams in competitive sports, and does a good job at that role.

The assumption that this system will translate to an MMO is where the disconnect happens.

The skill level of an individual player, or a sports team which has a set roster, tend to only increase over time (except in cases of injury/retirement/etc). This means when a player/team gains rating in relation to another, it can be extrapolated that their skill has increased proportionately.

The “skill level” of an MMO server is dependent upon many more factors.
Professional sports are not affected by:
-massive guild transfers
-seasonal differences in participation due to hemisphere
-differences in participation throughout each 24 hour period due to concentration of players in specific time zones
-“fairweather/casual” players avoiding participation in losing matches
or any of the other factors involved in a 24/7 online game with thousands of players per “team”.

I’m not in favor of “one up, one down” either. I’d actually prefer if ANet had someone closely monitor the matches and manually create the new ones each week based on observed trends, rather than relying on overly complex math. Attempting to remove the human-error factor from matchmaking hasn’t resulted in error-free match creation so far…..

Math performs many functions well, and often it is the best language to use when attempting to define specific things, but it tends to fail at defining human behavior. Perhaps a psychology major would be better than a math major for the job of WvW matchmaker.

WvWvW is a numbers game. If “all the top tPvP players” made a WvW guild, it would be pretty small compared to many large WvW guilds. Now, if the question was how would this hypothetical guild do in a tier 8 WvW matchup, they’d probably do okay. Guess maybe if you expand the definition of “top players” to “anyone who’s played tPvP more than 5 times in their life” then you’d have a pretty big guild, so maybe it’s all semantics….

In a top tier match they would get destroyed until they learned about siege/countersiege and map control tactics. There are 3 cap points in a PvP map, and 13-21 objectives per WvW map not counting sentry points. Even with smart experienced players there is a learning curve.

I gotta agree about the “Champion X” title players in WvW, for the most part I haven’t noticed them being anything more than average at best. There are exceptions, I’m sure, but I roam a lot and I never find myself thinking “dang, that guy was really good and he had a PvP title, I bet it’s his experience in there which gave him more skill than me”.

Nokaru.7831:

Handin.4032:

One thing I don’t understand is people saying they get hit for 20k damage by retal..I’m not sure how they can do that. If the retal damage is 350 per tick, that would require somehow hitting 57 people with 1 attack, ~28 with 2 attacks, etc…Even if you spread retal over an entire zerg, unless you’re just tabbing mindlessly with auto attack to get your tags in, it won’t get that much.

Enough said. (By the way, this is tame compared to what Engineers deal with)

Grenadier Engineer checking in here.

Grenade barrage throws 8 grenades, each can hit up to 5 targets with it’s explosion. At max traited range of 1500, several more sets of grenades can be thrown before the first lands, each extra set also hitting up to 15 targets per 0.5sec interval. It is not uncommon at all for my engineer to lose half or more of his HP by throwing a couple seconds worth of grenades. Against super tightly stacked coordinated enemies, I really can’t even attack, generally they are loose enough that each grenade only hits 1-2 players (even that hurts when I can toss 15-20 grenades before they start to land, and there’s no way to avoid the damage after that).

Funny enough, I’ve actually downed a mesmer before by throwing grenades AT a feedback bubble when I had retaliation up. With my condition/support build, regular #1 grenades only hit for 100-200 each, so throwing them at a feedback bubble generates more in retaliation damage to the mesmer than I take from grenades, especially if I have some might. Not sure if that illustrates how broken retaliation is, but it seems that way to me.

It seems like throwing grenades would be a reasonable response to a large group of enemies, but they are actually a much better 1v1 weapon due to the random spam and long duration of retaliation in groups.

Looks really squishy, for WvW anyway. Would be fine for PvE but you’ll want to replace those trinkets as soon as you can if you really want to go burst build.

In WvW, I like to have a minimum of 2500 armor rating and 15,000 HP. Anything less and thief burst can instagib you.

If you haven’t upgraded armor and weapons yet, I’d recommend this:
S/D burst build

The traits and utilities can be swapped around for various situations, it also works well with any other weapon set (although lacks the option for blasting staff, so not ideal there).

Beryl jewels can be substituted for rubies for a bit more HP without losing a lot of crit also.

Snowreap.5174:

I think it used to be that /map chat could be seen by all teams on the same map (i.e. your opponents could see it). whether this was deliberate or a bug (or a malicious lie) I have no idea.

but now I can’t see any difference, except for the color.

-ken

Close-ish. In beta 1, /say was visible to everyone.

/map and /team were intended to have different functions but they were buggy as heck at the time (neither worked at all for me, for example).

There was some disconnect between the team coding the engine which handled the maps and the chat interface team though. The engine just didn’t include a way to connect chat across servers, which is how the battlegrounds are designed (each a unique “world”). The /team channel was intended to be able to talk across all maps, but since that was not possible (and likely due to time constraints) both channels were just assigned the function /map was designed to fill and it’s been left at that. Haven’t heard if there are any plans to revisit the code and possibly make the channels function how intended or just get rid of one, so I doubt it’s a priority.

pulsecodesgnl.3470:

I agree wholeheartedly with better map design, but I also like the idea of more unique types of siege. I don’t think these need to be mutually exclusive.

This ^

I know the hardcore GvG guys hate siege of all kinds, many claim to even hate walls/gates. There probably should be a separate GvG arena because the interests of GvG fans and WvW players don’t always line up. I know, plenty of people like both, the more the merrier IMO.

WvW is meant to be a large scale siege warfare themed game with elements of RTS and tower defense games, but with each unit an autonomous player controlling his MMO character. Placing turrets (siege), controlling supply, upgrading and fortifying structures, etc are all these type of elements. This is a type of Players vs. Players game, which is what PvP stands for, although many people seem to have forgotten that.

I’d like to see the centaur and skritt become more important WvW objectives, how the hylek/ogres/dredge are in EB (but better, and those could use a retune too, but I’ll ramble about that later). There is some interesting terrain in those areas but not much PvP ever happens there because there is very little reason to go there.

Skritt could be enlisted to steal supplies from enemy owned camps and delivery yaks, and deposit it in towers and keeps.

Centaurs could be “hired” to reinforce supply camps with a few troops. The could also build low health destructible walls/gates to add more protection to supply camps in their cultural style, once the supply camps have reached maximum upgrade status.

Before anyone goes all “no more PvE in my PvP!” think about how this could encourage groups splitting off from the zerg to hold these objectives. More small scale PvP (possibly) would be the result if well implemented.

The hylek/dredge/orges/quaggans could use a buff too, making them important objectives would lessen the tendency to zerg-cap them and move on without caring at all if they are flipped.

Whole sections of the maps right now are just zerg highways with bonus exp stuffs, where strategic chokepoints are largely ignored because the biggest benefit of holding them is in the exp gained in the cap.

There’s also an RNG component to if you get a bag from each kill, it’s possible you just got bad random rolls that time.

I’ve gotten plenty of bags by hitting downed players a couple times (~500dmg or so seems enough for a tag) running by myself. Has there ever been an official post on the loot/party interaction? Because I’ve seen this repeated a lot, but RNG breeds superstition, and I’ve never seen an actual dev post saying that party damage adds to the probability to get loot.

The other possibility is you missed some loot bags. Make sure you use the “show enemy names” key and look around 360 degrees after a big fight. That will show “loot bag” over each one, sometimes they are hidden in the terrain or partially spawn underground, or don’t render immediately.

Onshidesigns.1069:

I will not play WvW until these things are implemented.

*EVERY player should not see enemy name tags unless mouseover.
*No enemy commander icons on screen unless moused over.
*option to show allies name tags as just a dot.

Turning tags off in options is NOT a option. It would put some players at a disadvantage.

1) If, like me, you have to play on low settings to take it easy on the hamster, often name tags are the only thing you’ll see at the distance where a $1000 machine from this year would render all the player models. Sounds like this would create an unbalanced advantage for players with top end machines.

2) You can’t see enemy commander icons unless you target the player, and then you can only see it in the “buffs” bar, not above their head as allies do. Not sure what you’re on about here. The NPC “Commander Siegerazer” shows up, maybe that’s what you mean?

3) That would be a nice quality of life setting, but listing it as a deal-breaker to ever play a game, dang homey, that’s one closed mind and boring life, sounds like….. If you just want to reduce screen clutter, turn off the “show all player names” option, but if you think name tags are causing lag or obscuring the screen, I’d like to show you the wall of particle effects that name tags can’t even be seen through anyway, it’s called a zerg, maybe you’ve seen one by a dragon before.

I always get a kick out of random internet people being all “I refuse to do X until the world conforms to my standards exactly!” Honestly, who cares if one random dude doesn’t play a game because he doesn’t like the UI. Apparently they feel the need to tell us. If I went to the forums of every game I don’t play, I’d be a busy man……

The answer to this question during beta (when they made the band-aid fix of loot bags, since originally it was the same as PvE, you had to find the corpse….) was that the game engine itself needed a major overhaul to accomplish the loot——>inventory transition, as apparently it wasn’t possible to code into the current way the engine handles loot.

tl;dr
Engine needs major overhaul to “fix” this issue.

In an ideal situation, yeah, that would hurt.

Getting a bunch of glass cannon elementalists to within 900 range of a zerg, and having them not just insta-die and rally everyone they downed, would be an interesting task.

A “nerf dragon’s tooth!” thread would be pretty funny though, so someone should do it.

(hope that was a joke about retaliation, dragon’s tooth only hits 5 targets once, so it’s actually one of the best skills to use against a retaliation heavy zerg, you know, if you can manage to get close enough, land it, and have specced for enough damage to make it do more than tickle)

This same person has made this same thread with countless titles. Just stop responding to him.

/taking my own advice…..

I’m not a big fan of pyromancer’s puissance, but that looks like a pretty decent build using it. I also don’t do fractals, so I have no idea how practical it is to stay in fire attunement all the time.

I would recommend switching the sigil in your staff though. For a build based around staying in fire to stack might, an on-swap sigil won’t do anything really. Try perception or accuracy to shore up your crit rate.

This is sort of what I run for a damage staff build.

The idea is to drop meteor shower>eruption on the same spot, then pop magnetic aura for fury and swap to water for the +20% damage to vulnerable foes (they’ll have vulnerability from the 25 air trait by then). Not a build for hanging in fire and lobbing fireballs, but I find it does more to maximize damage from meteor shower while giving team support through attunement swap effects. A sigil of battle would work well with this build and provide about as much might (maybe more) as pyromancer’s puissance.

I find the fire line lacking compared to air, mostly because there are so many sources of might, and so few sources of crit damage. Point for point, the crit damage you get from traits is “cheaper” than anything else beside jewels. 10 stacks of might is more power than 30 points into fire. Air has more synergy with water and arcane also, fire seems designed for a hybrid condition build, which is generally considered sub-par in dungeons.

Aurust.8961:

You say nerf retal, i say MOAR PTV! VTP would work even better!

Yeah, because it’s so much fun to have two groups that can’t actually kill each other running their groups through each other’s, spamming 1,1,1,1,1,1,6. Then turn and repeat, because no one actually did any damage (well, except for retaliation since it bypasses armor and can’t be blocked or dodged, so yeah, don’t nerf retal any more, because the PVT hordes won’t even be able to down each other when they forget to look at their health bars for several minutes)……

tl’dr PVT vs. PVT = ZZZZZZZ

On crit heal foods and sigils are the obvious counters to retaliation, but they got severely nerfed. “Use boon stripping” is shortsighted, all boon stripping cooldowns are much longer than the amount of light fields + blasts available. I can throw a dozen grenades before they start to land, I see a group without retaliation up and chuck grenades, then a quick re-application of retaliation turns a grenade barrage into “oh crap run and hope all my heals are off CD”, my engineer ain’t glass either.

tl’dr Retaliation hurts some weapons/professions/builds disproportionately harder than others, in some cases making them nearly useless.

(haha, you read the word “disproportionately” in a “tl’dr”, hahahhahahaha!)

OP’s signature suggests he isn’t running a toughness/vitality build……

Glass cannon elementalists hit hard. There aren’t many out there, because they tend to blow away in a strong breeze, but when you meet one with all his cooldowns up and you don’t dodge his burst, you’ll know it.

Like any instagib build, it’s gimicky and easily countered by most balanced builds. It can be fun to surprise a thief with it though. BLAM! Lightning! Hey look, I can burst too!

emikochan.8504:

Two 5% sigils don’t stack, two stats on kill don’t stack. Anything from the same class of sigil doesn’t stack with others from the same class, but you did explain why better than I.

Two stat on kill sigils won’t stack, if they are of different types. However, using 2 of the same type will give 2 stacks for each kill. I use this method to fill up quickly on stacks then switch to a weapon set with other sigils.

Laii.2780:

Look at all those cool an skillful things you can do with those neat classes!
Combo fields mean literally nothing to Necros, as all their fields are undesirable, and all their finishers are awkward and unusable/impractical ; ~ ;.

http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Table_of_necromancer_combo_skills

Lifesteal and aoe blind/weakness/retaliation and poison are pretty useful if you can get people coordinated to pull them off. I agree though, necros seem to have gotten the short end of the combo stick. Seems to be a theme though, the other classes capable of boon stripping also lack fields (mesmer/thief) but they have some nice finishers.

Combo fields are where most of the “depth” of the combat system is. It used to amaze me that people could have been playing for months and not really know how they work, but it seems more common than players who have a good knowledge of all fields and finishers. I think a lot of it has to do with how much weaker the mobs (outside of some dungeons and events) are than originally intended, which makes it too easy to just spam whatever buttons you have on cooldown in most events.

http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Combo

Every ~20sec my engineer can self-combo blast 3 times with 2 water fields, healing from nearly dead to full health, or gain 10 sec of retaliation, or 9 stacks of might, just with the current build he’s using. Elementalists are combo machines, as one of the most versatile classes, but every class benefits from knowledge of the uses of combo fields.

One thing that a lot of people don’t realize is there is a priority list for combo fields. Meaning if several different types are over-layed, the one with the highest priority is the one which will be triggered by finishers. This is key when trying for specific effects. Nothing like trying to blast a water field and getting chaos armor from an overlapping ethereal field (for some reason ethereal seems to be the highest priority).

Generally considered squishy and useless in dungeons, thieves have access to the fastest repeatable blast finisher, making them excellent healers/buffers with a somewhat coordinated party. Two thieves and two rangers could keep up a healing blast rotation better than 4 elementalists: http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Healing_Spring
http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Cluster_Bomb
That’s 100% uptime on regeneration and a blast heal every second, in addition to a condition removed every 3 sec and possibly traited vigor as well.
Not saying that’s an optimal comp, but it’s silly how many times I’ve heard that either thieves or rangers are bad support, or suck for this or that, when they have the best water/blast synergy in game with one button each and no special build required.

On a random side note, I miss the old evasive arcana, that blast finisher would trigger on every dodge no matter attunement, with no cooldown. With the pre-nerfed sigil of energy and runes of the adventurer, my elementalist could perma-dodge, blasting any field in sight every couple seconds. Okay, maybe that was OP…… (especially without a cap on healing targets in WvW, but hey, turtle wars was pretty boring, I guess arrow cart wars is slightly better)

Phantaram.1265:

If anything elementalist is still too powerful in spvp. It’s in a really good state compared to most classes so there was no reason to bring up ele when we were only given an hour to talk.

This is why it is silly to make balance changes to any aspect of the game other than s/tPvP based on s/tPvP. Every class has 1-3 “viable” builds and often the classes which are mediocre in other game modes are considered OP in tPvP.

Standing in a circle wearing one of a small set of stats fighting others using one of a small set of stats is unlike anything else in the game.

My old elementalist build which was viable in WvW (and able to kill the cookie cutter tPvP style builds easily enough there) got hit with the same nerfbat meant to whack down the almighty bunker ele. Thanks to elementalists’ OP ability to, um, move fast holding some orb (?) I’ve lost a big part of what made me able to efficiently engage and burst, if for any reason I miss a single RtL I’ve likely lost the fight.

Where they really need to hit bunkers is in the damage. Make it so speccing to heal and survive means not even being able to put enough damage out to pressure an opponent off a point if that’s what it takes. Then buff damage builds enough so they can kill a full healing bunker, and you’ll have an interesting game.

Three viable builds for elementalist with nearly the exact same trait distribution. Okay, you go on living in that fantasy land where the playstyles are sooooo different between spamming attunement swap for buffs and dodge roll healing and um, spamming attunement swaps for buffs and dodge roll healing while sometimes doing some damage.

Show me a build with less than 30 total points in water & arcane using anything besides cantrips and arcane utilities that can even stay alive in tPvP against equally skilled opponents. At least most other profession’s 2-3 viable builds have their trait points in different lines.

What role do you normally play in WvW?

I see that you’re a commander, but do you lead a small guild havoc group, large guild zerg, or militia zerg?

As far as working excellent, I wouldn’t go that far, but I can suggest a few s/f builds that can work decently enough, if I knew what role you generally play. It’s a weaponset that is great at holding points/chokes, and falls off in effectiveness whenever mobility, healing or ranged aoe is required.

I don’t want to discourage anyone from using s/f, but I’m not going to lie and say it’s the best WvW weaponset either.

stinkypants.8419:

Thrashbarg.9820:

Also, a thief running that type of build can have 18-20k HP, around 2.5k armor, regenerate health and lose conditions in stealth, be able to dodge 3-4 times in a row, has ranged and melee blinds up all the time, 2-4 teleport skills/stunbreakers. ANNNNND can be built to have over 100% crit damage without food and have every attack from stealth crit automatically, so that glass cannon rife warrior will die, fast, like really really fast, sorry homey.

Please share this build.

Ok, if you insist.
(Might need to swap a trait for condition removal, I think this is my easymode permastealther, you can still get permanent stealth without one of the iniative regen traits though, just requires good timing with hide in shadows and shadow refuge when you run out of initiative, shadow return works fine for condition removal though, if you’re planning to stay invisible most of the time anyway, or you can use foods to reduce condition duration, the build is pretty flexible)

Bringing back the orbs has two major roadblocks.

Making the bonuses worth fighting for, but not overpowered, but useful, but balanced…… I haven’t seen a single idea yet that fits all this very well, and I don’t envy the dude tasked with the job of coming up with it either.

Making the orbs hacker-proof. The main reason they were removed completely rather than just adjusting the bonuses, was how tempting and easy it was for single players to use exploits to mess with orbs and the altars. It’s still easy to exploit into a keep, but there isn’t much reason to now, as a single player can’t really solo-cap a keep. Removing the orbs removed most of the hacking without a major server architecture overhaul, by removing the best/easiest thing to disrupt. Bringing them back requires major security work.

declan.3968:

Thrashbarg.9820:

I have 4 “mains” which I switch between for WvW and I primarily roam, escort yaks and defend, so I don’t level fast. With the boosts to WXP gain, I got one level in 3 hours of play tonight, which is about my average time in WvW. This is just another thing that’s a good bonus for the most hardcore players (one main character, 8+ hours a day WvW, etc) but seems almost insulting to anyone who doesn’t zerg surf, or have a single main, or play all day every day.

You\re right, wvw chests is a bad idea, let’s petition ANet to remove them because they make PVE-ers play WvW for rewards instead of WvW.

I didn’t say they were a bad idea. Just that it wouldn’t hurt to have rare be the minimum quality rather than green. I just got about 10 rares running around southsun for an hour or so. A guaranteed rare per WvW chest wouldn’t break the economy.

I also have no idea where that crap about making PvE players play WvW came from. The part you quoted was about the disproportionate usefulness of the rewards for those who have multiple characters and/or don’t zerg, as compared to those whose primary activity in WvW is zerging on a single character.

Also, don’t underestimate Tentacle Power!

Lots of good advice above. A few random things I’d add:

Consider resetting your traits. 10 in arcane for the Elemental Attunement trait gets you regeneration on swap into water and protection on swap into earth, these are huge helps at dealing with damage. 10 in water would be my next suggestion.

Gear for power, vitality and toughness using preferably masterwork (green) gear within at least 5 levels of your current level. Don’t forget trinkets (I did on my first character and I was like “ah, that’s why I was dying a lot” when I finally discovered how much of the total stat pool they are responsible for) they are about half of your total stats from gear. Ignore gear with condition damage for now, and don’t worry much about precision until level 50-60ish.

Gendarran, especially the area with the highly clustered pirates, is a bit like some areas of the level 80 zone “Orr”. The combination of high damage mobs, terrain chokepoints and respawn rates makes it challenging for any class. Elementalists are a late blooming class, so a level 30ish area with endgame style mobs is pretty burly. Try Lornar’s Pass for a slightly less stressful experience.

Tobias Steele.2071:

For your sake I hope your exaggerating the difficulty you have in accomplishing those tasks, I really do.

5000 wexp is so incredibly easy to get its not even funny but in any case it’s not been made to be the wvw alternative to cof farming. Simply wishful thinking to believe that.

You might zerg a lot, and only roll objectives which take under 5 minutes, and not defend anything. I know that is the “meta” in many tiers. I realize if you are trying to “farm” WXP it’s easy, but often you are doing so at the expense of your sever’s points.

600 WXP per keep capture. Tonight I flipped Bay twice, each effort took about an hour, not too hard, maybe a bit easier than average for our server. For another 2 hours we made various attempts on garrison in which the only WXP gain was from tagging guards (due to siege cap bug, we couldn’t really do much inside). In between we took a few camps, and flipped the NE tower a couple times as well. I also repaired some walls, guarded some yaks, killed some enemy yaks, and some roaming enemies, and had some open field ZvZ fights. In 4 hours I got one rank. Not sure what I’m doing wrong, maybe not letting enemies live long enough after respawn….. Lots of them were only worth 3 WXP……

Have you ever done a dragon event? Was it that hard? Did you need to use multiple expensive pieces of siege, coordinate supply runs, haul kitten to defend a backline objective, throw your character to his certain death just to stall a point cap for 5 more seconds, or any of the other things WvW players do every night? Unless they’ve changed recently, probably not.

Not saying it should be a gold every 5 minutes like CoF or whatever, but seriously, if you’re ranking up so “easy” that it’s like farming PvE ANYTHING, then you are playing a different game than I am, or are just realllly good.

Tobias Steele.2071:

morrolan.9608:

Tobias Steele.2071:

Why is everyone complaining about getting greens?

Well for one thing one of the devs implied that either we would get rares or at least a good chance of rares.

Out of four chests today I have gotten two rares. Were you really expecting some kind of hand out? The chance of getting rares from these chests appears to be about the same as pve ones. (excluding the dragon chests) That seems fair.

Yeah, because gaining 5000 WXP is as easy as running (or being ported up) one jumping puzzle, and so much easier than slaying a mighty dragon!

I see now why giving Jormag’s claw a manicure is worth a guaranteed rare per day along with several chances at more from the chest, but taking 8 keeps is only worth a single chance at maybe a rare but probably a green. Gotcha. Thanks for clearing that up.

Where’s the website I can get the timer info for when my server is about to flip keeps and towers so I can farm them like dragon/event chests?

(Considering how fast the instigator events in southsun are plopping out rares and how much the price of ectoplasm has fallen as a result, I can’t really believe they are so concerned about the economy crashing if they gave the WvW players a rare every couple hours or so. I’m not saying there should be a huge chance for precursors or anything, but it feels a bit odd that I can get several rares in an hour of running events in southsun but I get one single green and a blueprint for what is often several hours of hard slogging battle.)

Aphix.9846:

Yeah, but that’s not my problem, I’m talking about NOT playing on my rank 160 necro anymore, but starting a fresh new char. As far as I’ve heard, I will never get those 160 chests unless I force myself to play on my necro again. Since currently the World Ranks are character bound (which is bad as well imo).
I am not bothered about having to earn another 160 ranks for the chests because I surely will, but just on another character.

You aren’t supposed to have alts, or ever change your main. Those 4 slots to the right of your main? Those are for aesthetic purposes or extra sPvP characters.

Many vocal players called for more “progression” for their characters. A week after release the “there’s nothing to do at endgame” nonsense, that content locusts ruin every game with, began.

In order to appease these players, time gated power progression was hastily added in the form of ascended gear, and later in WvW as character bound skill/rank progression (WXP).

I have 4 “mains” which I switch between for WvW and I primarily roam, escort yaks and defend, so I don’t level fast. With the boosts to WXP gain, I got one level in 3 hours of play tonight, which is about my average time in WvW. This is just another thing that’s a good bonus for the most hardcore players (one main character, 8+ hours a day WvW, etc) but seems almost insulting to anyone who doesn’t zerg surf, or have a single main, or play all day every day.

sostronk.8167:

My understand was you need 20 points in trickery to get permastealth. I cannot recall, but Im fairly certain you need points in trickery. If so, what are the screenshots for>?

Nope. With 15 in trickery you get a higher initiative pool, but there’s nothing there to refill initiative faster, which is the real key.

The screenshots are just to show a build capable of “permanent” stealth that has decent survivability and high damage. Check the traits/utilites and how they interact if you’re interested how it works, substitute shortbow for the s/d combo. There have been several comments about how thieves need to be glassy to do damage, or do weak damage when built for survival and stealth. Of course, a rifle burst will hurt, but will be unlikely to insta-down how it would with a berzerker geared build. With that buffer time to react and so many sources of escape/evasion/blind/etc it is extremely hard to score a kill unless you hugely outnumber them or get really lucky or vastly outskill them.

It’s not impossible to kill a decent thief, if they decide to engage you in combat, and I’m not saying it should be made easier even. What I am saying is they should not be able to stay inside enemy fortifications indefinitely.

Haqiang.6480:

L2Read?

In no where did I mention that rifle warriors are meant to 1v1 thief , the OP was complaining about not being able to burst thief down with an entire group of 10-15.
Rifle warrior has THE highest ranged class in the game, and can blow up a thief up in the time he is revealed.

Back at ya there, with the learning to read deal. I wasn’t talking about 1v1, and the thief in that video was NEVER revealed. Apparently you also missed the part where I said I play both warrior and thief, I know what they are capable of. If you have 10-15 people to back you up, the thief can simply NEVER be revealed. If you engage in a small group, prepare to be bursted down, or surprised when your volley doesn’t hit nearly 10k, or he simply evades then entire thing. This build isn’t glass, which you would have seen, had you actually read my post.

Warrior may be classy, but I don’t know what that has to do with anything. If, however, you meant highest ranged damage, I’ve a static-discharge grenade engineer build you may like to try.

Edit: added pics

Oozo.7856:

Cornholio.1567:

He was on the outer why would you bother with him..?? And if you say that he wanted to res a mesmer then place a stealth trap on the dead mesmer and camp..
Sometimes judge a situation and go on.. hes in outer not in inner, he cant do much than harras some people intil he gets borred and jump off.

Yeah dude, you should just move on like the devs said. It’s not like they can kill any siege you have to protect the outer walls after you have moved on.

Well, if they are good at it, they could kill the siege even if you stay. Unless you leave 2-3 people who know how to fight a perma-stealth thief camping each piece of siege.

Also, if there are at least 3 thieves doing this and you leave, they can drop a ram and take the keep (well, maybe not SM, but I bet 5-6 could, given the proper circumstances). I guess you could supply trap all the inner doors, but that’s still a lot of badges and supply for a couple dudes cheesing stealth.

That’s the real issue, the amount of resources/time/players it takes to counter even a few players running perma-stealth builds is disproportionate to the amount of effort required to play these builds, as well as to the effort required to counter any tactic by a similar number of players running any other class/build.

Permanent stealth and long duration CC were things this game was supposed to not have, as they are “un-fun” for people on the receiving end. Neither exactly ended up as discussed during beta, but at least it takes a bit of coordination to run a hammer train or similar chain-CC group, tons more involved to pull it off than one player pressing 2 buttons repeatedly (I have both thief and warrior, before anyone starts on the “it’s hard/easy to play a thief/warrior” jive, I’m quite familiar with both).

In the open field this type of thief isn’t much issue, unless you’re alone, but then any thief build played well will be (and should be). I don’t really see a reason to nerf the stealth stacking.

What I’d like to see is a server-side script that kicks enemy players from intact structures, which aren’t under assault by siege weapons, after a reasonable time to allow tactical maneuvers such as mesmer portals and siege placement (3-5 minutes after all walls/gates are closed and no siege weapon has attacked a wall/gate should be sufficient). It would have to be fairly complex to avoid exploitation, but I think it could be done.

Oozo.7856:

Haqiang.6480:

if you really hate theives, you can try out a rifle warrior for these thieves. 10k volley channel and 12-14k kill shot will definitely get them dead if they try to shadow your group.

volley will still hit even if they go into stealth, same thing with killshot if you started channeling the skill when they are still targetable.

Maybe you didn’t notice, but at no time were the thieves targetable.

Also, a thief running that type of build can have 18-20k HP, around 2.5k armor, regenerate health and lose conditions in stealth, be able to dodge 3-4 times in a row, has ranged and melee blinds up all the time, 2-4 teleport skills/stunbreakers. ANNNNND can be built to have over 100% crit damage without food and have every attack from stealth crit automatically, so that glass cannon rife warrior will die, fast, like really really fast, sorry homey.

It’ll probably get an ICD to match other similar effects (omnomberry pie anyone?) but I doubt it will be soon, since it’s not really used in tPvP or dungeons and those game modes are where most balancing decisions come from.

conflict.6539:

The reason I run 20 in air is for the the run speed buff trait in air, so i dont have to use the signet. Not sure if giving up more damage on lower hps opponent is worth it.

Ouch, don’t use that trait, it doesn’t stack with any other movespeed buff and it takes a long kitten time to even get all the way up to full, then being locked into air REALLY limits your ability to do anything. I wouldn’t use the signet either, so many more useful utilities.

There are many ways to get swiftness, sPvP maps are small, RtL and lightning flash are better for engaging/disengaging than a passive 10-25% increase in run speed.

For keeping 20 in air I’d suggest Zephyr’s Boon and Aeromancers Alacrity (go bolt if you want damage, but really sPvP is about outlasting your opponent unless you play BS thief or phantasm mesmer). With boon duration runes and 30 arcane that’s permanent (or very nearly) +33% movespeed increase just by swapping to air and using shocking aura on cooldown.

If you’re looking to improve damage, consider moving some trait points around so you have 25 in water. Unless you are fighting an enemy with a lot of boon stripping that will give you about 10% extra damage most of the fight, sometimes a little more sometimes a little less but overall a better addition to dps than bolt to the heart.

IMO the amulet/jewel limit in sPvP really hampers the possible viable builds, the best I’ve been able to come up with (for damage, while still surviving sometimes, lol) uses a Valkyrie amulet with Berzerker jewel, traits are 0-15-0-25-30 (bolt to the heart, piercing shards, cleansing wave, elemental attunement, renewing stamina, evasive arcana) and 2-3 cantrips as utilities for the stun breaks, sometimes arcane wave for well, what it does, ether renewal in condition heavy fights or signet if I’m lazy.

Most of the sPvP that I have done has been screwing around with builds with friends, so I don’t have like, competitive experience. To me it’s kind of a weird game mode, revolving around trying to stand in a circle and not die, can’t really get into it for some reason. As far as straight up point holding, 0-0-10-30-30 with clerics and s/d seems to be the way to go.

I don’t know much about dungeons, only done a few here and there, so take any “advice” here as speculation mostly.

It seems like fury/swiftness are of limited use, most classes can get those themselves or a couple warriors can keep them up for the party easily. If I was going with a signet aura build I’d go 20-0-10-30-10 with the protection on aura trait in earth and boon duration runes (that’s actually my ele build atm, but not using it much since I mostly WvW and having no stunbreakers is a death sentence there). 100% protection uptime seems better than fury and swiftness for the amount of damage that dungeon mobs can put out. You’d have aura sharing, boons on attunement swap for extra regen/swift/might/protection, good heals from the water line and decent damage (depending on gear). If you really miss the ability to give fury, get a set of Altruism runes and use Ether Renewal as your heal.

0-10-0-30-30 ; 3 cantrip ; soldier/cleric is just the facerolling build, it’s the easiest to learn and most forgiving. It’s damage is mediocre at best, and the team utility isn’t great. It’s a semi-selfish build since none of the utilities benefit anyone besides the caster (although being alive is a benefit, so if you’re having trouble, it’s a good fall back build).

Nonsense about needing a million guardians to keep retal up. Many classes can provide it for themselves, hell, if I spec for it my engineer can blast out aoe retal with over 50% uptime and keep it up on himself permanently. Any class with a blast finisher can hit a guardian’s light field. ONE SINGLE GUARDIAN can provide retal for a zerg if they know what blast finishers are. Many skills are blast finishers, many of them just get used no matter what, light fields have a fairly high priority, a mindless zerg mindlessly spamming has decent retal uptime by default. Stop suggesting it requires skill.

Retaliation is pretty much a hard counter to most elementalist’s weapon skills. Funny enough, the D/D bunker that ANet hates so much is about the only build that doesn’t kill itself to retal. I thought it was cool that they made Arc Lightning a piercing attack until I used it on the first group, bye bye scepter, not really fun using a weapon where most of the dps skills kill me faster than my opponent (tons of tiny hits, ouch, easily 15+ hits of retal per second) and the others are all on the list of hardest skills in the game to land.

The damage nerf wasn’t the greatest fix. A better fix would be to put an internal CD on retal procs per target to make some weapons not just suicidal, OR make retal damage dodgeable/blockable.

Too many classes can apply retal, too few classes have any boon stripping mechanics. Retal heavily favors some builds and classes. It’s current implementation is bad for variety and balance.

Reikou.7068:

lunyboy.8672:

Unfortunately, those good players ANet listens to all seem to be the sPvP elite players, which is NOT a balanced opinion of ANY profession in a game with so many modes. Besides, with only point capture as the sole type of sPvP, that skews to certain skill sets and leaves other professions behind considerably.

This is one of the big reasons that professions that don’t do well in sPvP fare much better in WvW (mesmers and warriors, for example).

Except that you’re wrong as Mesmers are great in high level tPvP, and warriors are still bad in WvW. Its just that in WvW, most players are playing at such a low skill level that it gives the illusion that Warriors are “viable.” (They’re not)

Warriors not viable in WvW huh? That’s an interesting opinion. I wonder if you are referring to roaming 1vX or something, because as part of a team/zerg a well built and played warrior can be quite beneficial. It’s also possible that I am so terrible at WvW that I am just missing some super obvious point. PvE warrior farming builds would be terrible in WvW, maybe that’s what you mean?

Not worth it for an elementalist. Condition damage doesn’t do well for elementalists without very specific builds (even then, it’s lackluster). I’ve written pages about this, and I would again, if I’d just drank coffee, but it’s late, I’m sure someone else can explain if you’re really curious.

Cleric’s is a much better choice if you’re going for healing power, and you can get a full set (pretty much) for the cost of one apothecary piece.

Engineer advice for fighting a thief:

Shield is better than offhand pistol. Glue shot is decent, but only if you have 25 stacks of might and a crit build so you can kill him in the immobilize period. Shield 4 can reflect a pistol thief’s burst or push a thief out of shadow refuge or interrupt an incoming C&D/BS. Shield 5 can block multiple ranged projectiles or interrupt a C&D/BS or even interrupt twice if you master the throw move.

Even with an HGH build, run at least one kit when roaming. I’d recommend toolkit or grenades, but bombs or even flamethrower can work. I’ve been running a grenadier build that pretty much destroys most thieves, even without the traits I’d still take grenades for the fast aoe damage, CC and conditions they bring. With just pistols it’s hard to stack many conditions quickly, which is required to close the deal with a condition build. Having a kit also allows you to use “on weapon swap” sigils (energy is my favorite, there’s lots of good ones though).

As others have said, roll a thief and try some sPvP to get a feel for how they play at 80. When you learn their timings it’s easier to predict when to use counters.

Get some toughness in your build. High HP is good against conditions, and helps in zerg fights where you have heals and protection coming in from every which way, but it doesn’t offer much sustain in 1vX roaming. Toughness makes your healing more effective at refilling your HP pool. Without at least 2500 armor I feel too squishy in WvW. Try replacing half of your gear with rabid stat (precison/toughness/condition) to get some toughness, the loss of power isn’t much of an issue as the extra crit will add damage to make up for it, and precision actually synergizes very well with engineer condition builds since you can trait for more burning and bleeding on crits.

To avoid this being moved to the engineer forums, some advice for every other class:

Toughness is your friend. CC is your friend. Dodges (well timed through knowledge of thief builds/skills/rotations) are your friends.

Don’t panic and blow everything at once. This is where having toughness helps, a couple extra seconds to think is golden in a fight where your enemy is trying to surprise you and kill before you can react.

If you can fight a thief to the point where they stealth and run away, you’ve won. Just watch your back and be ready in case they come back. They may have reset the fight, but waiting on their cooldowns means yours should be back too.

If you are in a small group getting harassed by thieves, make sure everyone knows not to “revive” downed but to aoe/CC/cleave the crap out of the area right above the downed ally. Stealth stomping is the main technique thieves use to whittle down groups, don’t allow them the luxury. There are ways they can avoid this technique, but they involve blowing major cooldowns or initiative.

Great idea, and still worth discussing even though it’s been brought up tons of times in the last year. Some of the structures and landscapes in the PvE world would be awesome map-making fodder for more interesting and complex WvW maps.

There are 2 main problems (from my point of view).

1) WvW isn’t (or wasn’t originally) a high development priority. I don’t think they correctly anticipated the popularity of WvW in relation to tPvP and PvE. This is changing, but to shift gears in software development on a live product takes time. A public test server would do a lot to speed and guide development but I doubt we’ll ever see one, given the nature of the company that owns the company, so to speak.

2) They have little or no desire to discourage “zerging” in WvW. This is meant to be a gigantic 3 way war game. Bigger zergs means more players, and for everyone who hates zerging there are lots more who enjoy it (need evidence? look at the size of the zergs compared to the small-groups….). Every change made to WvW has either encouraged zerging or had no effect on it either way.

The maps have obviously been designed very carefully considering siege ranges and troop movement speeds, although the PvE maps look really fun for WvW they have not undergone the same process. Imagine placing every conceivable piece of siege in every possible location to check ranges, timing min-max running speeds from each map point, calculating dolyak travel times over every route, creating dynamic events which are balanced but have impact on the battle, etc., then think of how many people are on the WvW development team, what other projects they already have, their inability to fix some terrain glitches in the maps they already have so far, and the likelihood that the parent corporation can be convinced to fund such a project.

Sounds great, but mostly for people who have one main character, like every recent update.

I enjoy playing several characters. I have 4 level 80s and they are all useful in WvW in various ways. Updates like this discourage me from leveling my others.

Additionally, sometimes I spend hours scouting, standing sentry, walking yaks, etc. I don’t have nearly the badge collection, kill count or rank as someone who spent the same amount of time in WvW as I have but only using one character and zerg surfing the whole time. Ectos in rank chests screams “zerg more!” to me, since there is now a gold incentive to rank up as well.

I’m glad for the people that are happy. I’m not unhappy about it either, it’s been obvious for months that they intended to severely time gate and character bind the highest end gear. With my playstyle it would take years to equip just the characters I’ve already leveled in just the ascended gear that’s already available (without even accounting for extra sets for different builds, which some of my characters have two or three each….) so I got a mystery cat tonic with my first 100 laurels (at least it’s account bound) and silly stuff will probably continue to receive the bulk of my currency.

Stealth.9324:

With Signet Build, yes but Condition will eat you alive due to low health and not be able to swap elements fast enough. You walk around with 100% up time protection,direct dam is no issue to u. Other than that, I don’t see any other viable way. This applied to PvP and WvW. In PvE, you can get away with it if you are skilled enough but you will still have trouble against boss in some Duns.

I’ve been trying this recently and using ether renewal I don’t have much problem with conditions. The problem is stuns/knockdowns/etc, would be really nice if they made a signet or two into stunbreakers, and maybe a glyph or two as well (the lack of stunbreakers/stability on other skills is a big reason most go 3 cantrip-water build in PvP).

Running a 20-0-10-30-10 signet aurashare staff build in WvW today to try it out. 100% protection uptime for groups should be interesting. Just gotta find a friendly guardian to shout “stand your ground!” at me constantly….

I’ve tried to make a 30 point fire build work, but giving up either healing or crit damage for a couple hundred power and some +5% damage traits always comes out feeling lackluster. Might is too easy to get, and staying in fire gimps overall performance too much (in WvW anyway, which is my prime game mode atm, since basically anything works in general PvE, and tPvP pretty much requires cookie cutter builds). The return per stat point is better for crit damage than power, so 30 air is better than 30 fire for straight up spike damage (and probably dps, unless you just live in fire attunement).