Guild Wars 2

Jayne.9251:

Liquid.9672:

Hiya War Machine, KO, and whoever other massive amount of Kain numbers that were also at Bay on TCBL the past 2 hours. [KnT] and Blackgate says hello!

That was epic.

cough

…and TC we can’t forget they made an appearance, they did come in there, I know this because I was one of the internal cannon & mortar operators when they did

However, it wasn’t quite to the same level of blot out the sun, purge all sentient life from the zone, screaming hordes destruction numbers of Kaining (I think it was WM, maybe RE and a couple of others) that descended upon the beach resort known as ‘bay’.

So yes, after fending off the TC gate crashers, 30, maybe 40 kain rolled up and pretty much wrecked everything green in the south after punting us… eventually, out of our alpine resort known as hills.
19 KnT, half a dozen other exceptional BG persons, we can do this and we did.
There was portals, mad dashes for supply, breaking stuff, killing people open field fights on walls, speed-building, more fireworks and we’re thinking we’re pretty clever fellas at this point.

“loooooool” says Kaining… “you only thought there was 30, maybe 40, no we can port in at least another group of 20-30 people and we will poop in your dirty bay and make tier 1 again!”
25 vs 70+, the yanks make hipster ironic jokes about all our ‘oceanic relief’ turning up, how its my fault we need more aussies to play on BG.

Things get turned up to 110% effort as the outer walls are covered in angry people, with sharp objects, siege (and keep breaking my mortar!) and anything past the inner wall will get gobbled up and eaten. That inner wall goes down, it gets a little ‘intense’, we know [NOC] are coming, but we don’t quite know ‘when’, low on hit points, surrounded by evil, knee deep in dead-uns…

But they do and the 20 or so NOC that make it in are enough to save the day!

We then rampage all over TC BL.

Good news!
All your wishes are granted…

….not this month!

/anet dev jokes

A week without an hour or two ganking the puzzle jumpers is a like day without sunshine… or actually its a slow week. Because if I’m fed enough bloodshed & bags from your server mates, I will actually stay out and kill them instead.

35.2 an hour, but I’m mostly an off-peak player blessed with a target rich environment of glass-cannon opposition running around with no condition removal

I’ve seen it do-
Completely nothing despite being fired at someone, facing them and at somewhere between 600-900unit range. That seems to happen about 40% of the time with no combat log report of anything, so I can’t figure out what actually happened.
(mostly against DD Ele’s and Guards, basically the people you want this to work on!)

Inadvertently dodged more by accident than any kind of skill as I don’t think its got a projectile or spell effect shooting out the enemy could actually see.

Disturbed.9305:

Oh and the other response I get is…

“Just make a Warrior or Guardian, everyone loves you then”

You meet the worst people in pve, I stay in wvw, mostly broke and get no drops, but people like me.

(or stick to guild-group runs where you don’t have to put up with cretins)

After getting home last night just in time for the server to be reset, today I’m gunna romance the crap out of you.

Love is a fist

In WAR* there was the Praag map which was basically a sacked medieval city, nothing like running around the corner and slamming into 30 angry people, then having to bail down the nearest alleyway!

*aside from that, the game was 80% garbage, but the map was good!

Red Falcon.8257:

The problem is I see necros have zero disengages unless I’m missing something, so how am I supposed to WvW?

Same way we did in old school MMO’s where there wasn’t the sheer amount of hand-holding and coddling that goes on in GW2 classes that developers seemed to think needed some way of ‘getting out’ of things they where too stupid to get in to, in the first place!
As a primarily ranged support, cloth caster, even a tough one with a lot of hit points- “Fight where the enemy isn’t”

You can pack a lot of speed on one, you can switch out from more AOE to single-target depending on what you’re going to face and you can be places quickly so you’re not cornered. For everything else, there is sheer firepower. On a slow night I might get 30-40 kills an hour in a small group or duo, server resets it’ll sometimes go as high as 100-130 an hour rolling with a guild for hours on end.

That said, there’s a lot of bugs, busted abilities, crap pets and about 2-specs that actually achieve consistent results (condition or wells mostly) and be prepared to face some bitter disappointments along the way if you’re not prepared to play smart and think the class itself will get you past parity with any equivalent.
But you know, theres a certain satisfaction that never goes away seeing what an epidemic does to a bunch of dumb glass auto-attack spec’d zerglings gutted and dropping like flies or watching the ‘feared’ DD-Ele or buffed up Guard melt and die in 10 seconds with a corrupt boon.
(warriors and thieves are still extremely dangerous though!)

European guilds in my experience at how they play, leverage fairly heavily off their “group-dynamic” as a cohesive force thats doing DPS, healing, condition clearing, combo’s, speed, stability etc. Reason I notice it is thats how I used to stack DAOC 8-man groups for zerg busting, basically an amalgam of specialists performing their individual functions.
It does sacrifice a lot of individuality in some ways, in that you’ll be asked to spec to a particular function, perform it as and when required. Back in DAOC it was a big thing, because your spec and function was pretty much valued often over player skill in some ways. So when you where getting a group or groups together it often meant trading a DPS/Tank/Caster/CC or whatever for someone’s extra Speed-Interrupt class etc just so you got a balanced mix. Course, if you knock out a few vital pegs in that group… the whole thing tends to fall over!

American servers, bit hard to generalise everyone as individuality comes into play as pretty much a given right to some extent and there are a lot of individually good players. But, we do stack classes into roles and recommended specs into our guild make-ups that we would prefer people to play, so we leverage a lot off a reasonably decent sized core focus group and make up for the rest with tactical manoeuvring which is where individual specialists come into play.
Often a lot less discipline in some areas, but very heavily focused at least when it comes to strategically defending assets-assaulting new ones, long/short term strategic objectives and maintaining a point-tick.

Thats just my observations. (from someone who’s neither European or American)

ArrowInKnee.4369:

This thread is like kittens and rainbows compared to the T1 thread…
I am so jealous of ya’lls thread :p

Well, to be fair T1 servers these days are pretty much overrun by aggregations of everyone else’s weak-sauce players who couldn’t be any good in a lower tier, cutting and running to those ones hoping their algae-like brains will absorb some skills, class and tactics through osmosis or something.
No offense to the OG-server players there… if anything you have my sympathy as even on the other side and I know quite a few of you are actually fairly nice human beings! But they’re vastly different now and not in a great way either.

As much as I hate being randomly lol-zerged by 50 Warmachine as some solo necro speedbump running to get supply, I do give them a lot of credit for having the sheer balls to simply NOT take the easy way of transferring to another equivalent high tier server, like pretty much every other guild did and make something of a server which was essentially nothing.

Aside from that, I hate them because they don’t actually fall for a lot of tricks we used to play on our T1 and other T2 opponents… like the ‘lol there’s only 10 guys in that tower with no walls, charge!’ trick and the somewhat infamous KnT/AAO Benny Hill-eske, zerg kiting antics around pieces of terrain in one direction until everything behind you is dead and everything else in front of you, hasn’t seen you yet because they’re still technically chasing you trick.

They dont fall for that like the other suckers

I’m mostly friendly because Anet will suspend me if I behave otherwise and they have a somewhat ‘humourless’ attitude to jokes, even if they’re actually really obvious ones.

Nurse.1085:

Though, I think it is really funny when an Epidemic Necro comes into the picture.

Oh hai!

Oh wait, we’re not supposed to talk about what Necro’s and Mesmers get up to together when no one’s looking :o

Jacbo.7598:

Hey TC, I’m hearing these crazy rumors from the Quaggans. They say that there’s a dolyak torture chamber in the bowels of BG Garrison. I wasn’t too sure at first, but when I put my ear to water gate I heard terrible, horrible things.

Because you’re new to T2 here, that’s where KnT keeps people caught touching our trebs.

Hydrophidian.4319:

Furienify.5738:

why are we team lohan

Because she can drink Paris Hilton under the table.

And its also better than having herpes

Esoteric.5490:

We have necros with the same playtime as our guards and warriors and they have roughly 40k while we have 20k.

Some of us have to do actual work when all the heavy metal is running in being heroic, waving knives around and stuff

Condition-spec isnt too bad but its made the class entirely one-dimensional to the point of being severely limiting to the other variations out there.

Power
Make the Axe a proper melee weapon with cleave
Give the MH-Dagger and Siphon Health abilities some proper scaling to where they’re useful.
Staff- higher projectile speed on #1, the rest are ok
Sceptre- apply longer lasting bleeds/or more bleeds per hit
Offhands- mostly ok as-is

Minions
Mostly scrapped in the current format, variety of simpler, higher-cyclic rate of targeted critters that latch onto people and bite them to death before they explode. Maybe make a limit of 5 per character out at any one time.
Defence-Minion, maybe a job for Fleshy kept on a 300 range leash and he beats people up and absorbs some damage that would normally hit his owner?
(But mostly I utterly loathe them, so its a little hard to actually come up with ideas, so utterly garbage is the current implementation!)

Life Force
Deathshroud… going back to what it obviously came from- your downed state with some modifications to make it both balanced and usable
F1 Channel lifeforce into healing
F2 Channel lifeforce into damage
F3 Channel lifeforce into defence
Downside, you get decked without lifeforce = bad! (self-healing only)

Wells
I had a thought, that they should both…
A: Last 10 seconds, assuming they have the same cool-downs
B: Aggregate them into Damage/Blindness and Condition-to-Buff/Buff-to-Condition
…I also kind of think they would also make it kind of cool as a PBAOE-Pulse effect centred on the caster, but maybe an option for people to still use them at range?

Signets
The main complaint with Signets that I hear from other necros, is that their cool-down vs effect simply is not worth them being equipped. So, either greatly improve their effect or vastly reduce their cooldown.

Defence
Seeing as this class is ‘intended’ (and fails miserably) as a relatively static class that doesn’t run away a major rethink is in order. Either give us a practical escape method, or take defence up to the next level.
Protection from spec-armour could use a much lower cooldown
Decent access to Retaliation
A non-elite access to Stability, we’re desperate here.

Elites
Lich Form, can it NOT be the size of a skyscraper? Aside from that it hadn’t got any synergy with the rest of the class like most transformation skills and thats fine if it was worth using. Maybe combine some aspects with Plague and scrap plague-form transformation.
Enhanced-Elite, basically a non-transformation elite which has some buffs and other stuff, but you still get to play your class with the usual style you’re used to doing, but at slightly higher level of power because you’ve popped an elite. Thinking something similar to Signet of Rage that warriors have but maybe some kind of debuff ability to it

Just my thoughts, I don’t expect Anet to read any of it or care.

I honestly think a system of Green ^1 rank, Blue -0 rank, Red v1 rank would see some kind of more interesting match ups because the current system is borked in that you’ll get stuck in stagnation for weeks on end having to put up with the same teams fighting, every week.
Blackgate came to realise after I think about the 7th week stuck in a row, winning every match- is that the system means you must not just win your match, you must DESTROY the opposition to the point that they’re completely broken and it becomes a massive blow-out… not just a big point lead, I really do mean complete and utter annihilation.
Do I like winning? Yes, but I don’t really want to log in, see its all green and then have to figure out what to do for a few hours either and would much rather a down to the wire war to the last minute with only a few 1000pts in the match.

The other problem is a bit of human nature and a bit of Anet too. If I absolutely had to leave Blackgate where I first rolled my GW2 characters, I would go down a much lower tier to somewhere that I felt I could make a difference to something… but thats more of an Aussie thing maybe of cheering for the team no one expects to win.
But the rest of the world doesn’t, they’d crawl over their dead mothers to get onto the winning team and ignore everyone else, simply because there is no penalty to do otherwise in the game.

my 2c

March is pretty much make/break for a lot of people, given Anet shut down a lot of actually reasonably objective criticism (mixed in with some unfair abuse of course) from their customers about the Feb wvw patch being delayed until then…
I can’t see a lot of full-time wvw players being very ‘reasonably sympathetic’ if its grind-fest junk like their pve content seems to be.

Like many failed MMO’s over the years they implode rapidly when chunks of the communities go and all it really takes is a couple of bad patches, people see most their friends list gone and 2 people still repping their guild, ‘pop’ an its all over.
Unfortunately, most MMO companies in the last 7 years don’t actually seem to care once the boxes are shipped and their game dies in 6 months.

SquirtyMagoo.8321:

Do all the T1 servers have strong EU guilds or is this Blackgate’s particular strength?

No, they wrecked fairly much all their opposition in the T1-EU bracket as well. Unfortunately I don’t see them much being on the diametric timezone unless they’re up late or I’m up early.

T2 seems to be a fairly interesting bracket at least with new people to play on a regular basis, it means we have to get a lot more asymmetric in dealing with the new opposition’s tactics… well, except TC, depending on “what” it is you do to them, they might not care if you have their garrison and stand on the walls taunting them in a french accent. But if you killed enough yaks they might well launch some kind of server-wide ‘jihad’ against livestock molesters, in which case we’d all be screwed.

Rambodacious.7495:

Hello,
I asked if you would be willing to transfer to SoR in an attempt at being the best server out there.

Blackgate is the best server out there.
Its got server pride meaning that the people on it stay regardless of a win or loss and more guts in 10 of them than 40 of your pansy bandwagon’ers that run crying back to the next best thing when life gets hard, plus you get to be with some of the best guilds in any US server anyone could ask to be in and play alongside.

so… no

Christos de Soufre.3802:

How do people feel about focus for condition-based builds?

I used to carry dagger quite a lot (it is an excellent weapon) but have more recently switched over to focus for a while because of the amount of enemies out there running multiples of buffs.
Ripping those off will give you an advantage enough to ‘even the score’ so to speak, even if its only brief.
Corrupt boon for the same reason, the things I do to Ele’s and Guards with that are ‘unholy’… course, actually getting the mongrel to hit, that’s an entirely different problem.

IRSyKo.5843:

What a fantastic exciting matchup it has been.

BT enjoyed fighting all the blackgate guilds like LoTD, iCoa, EA, and many more.

Some great fights and you guys are great guilds.

Least no one likes fighting KnT, so we must be doing something right

But yes, there was some pretty fun times in this one, TC gets a ‘Much Improved’ medal and unfortunately by the slimmest margins, FA gets bronze.

Man, if only I had a red slimline stapler I’d have some single target takedown ability…

I’m fairly certain I’m going to lose out on some of my red circles of death, because some new guy Noddy Nobrains hasn’t quite figured out that standing in aoe… will actually kill him eventually.

I did get a 12ft beach rod for christmas I haven’t broken in though, so there is light a the end of the tunnel even if the game collapses.

Greens Daily Ritual.9025:

I saw a post by Anet that they’re not showing favoritism towards PVE. Posting negative opinions in the way Anet handles things only puts you at great risk to get an infraction.
Out of the 70+ members we had, there are 3 left that log semi-daily. There are 3-4 people on my friends list that still log on. For the most part, all the people I started playing this game with have since quit. I quit wvw a week ago when they added the new patch. Way too much lag, culling, ect. Impossible to play. I posted opinions and facts on a topic and both got an infraction. I see a lot of fishing and time spent outdoors in my immediate future.

How dare a customer voice their opinion, we shall censor them because it paints us unfavorably!
…in any other business, wow the repercussions of that would essentially be career suicide. Right or wrong, if the customer has a reason to let you know something isn’t working for them, its a warning sign that service isn’t either communicating to them or meeting some fundamental requirement of theirs.

Like yourself, I pretty much couldn’t keep my old 70 strong guild in the game. I made new friends, started from scratch and moved on with the in-game events, but it saddens me that people I played with for 6-7 years aren’t around anymore to share it with.

I was buying GW2 on the premise that it wasn’t going to be another box sale like WAR or Aion that had maybe 5-6months of play before it started to stink to the point that you couldn’t live with it anymore. Now, I’m not so sure, I’ve checked out Camelot Unchained and not really convinced just yet that’s an alternative.

This is basically, my GW Nightmare:

Hey, you know those 8000 odd badges you had squirreled away on your condition necro and couldn’t use any of them to buy anything except for siege, well now they’re still the same but instead you can buy this other stuff with “Magic WvW Beans” (aka currency #24 in the game) that you can use to buy stuff, that you can actually use! How great is that?

Oh and sorry buddy, those 1200hrs you spent in wvw getting paid basically nothing but badges and Karma… well we don’t see that’s fair for new players that are part of the entitlement generation of gamers. They’re fairly special, so you’ll be starting from scratch because those kids need a ‘fair go’ at actually not having a veteran player deck them in 3 seconds because they’re running around in green/blue armour and never bothered to learn from their guild how to play in wvw and all run glass-specs.
So their ol uncle Anet is going to hold their hand… just that little bit longer.
You still get to spend your 2.4mil Karma though! On what that is actually useful we haven’t quite figured out, but we’ll let you know in another 3 months from now.

Have a nice day! Oh, you’re not having a nice day?
Oh wait, your a necro… yeah about those 73 odd documented bugs about your class you sent us, we’re waiting on Peter in forms to submit them as TPS reports, so we can process them some more. Now if you could move to one side, we’ve got to buff warriors a bit more.
Thanks.

Its also about this point I don’t wake up.

Sunspots.9861:

Esoteric.5490:

Sunspots.9861:

The question is, will they underestimate us?

Almost certainly. Blackgate has a little surprise in store to welcome them to competitive WvW.

I think reset night in particular will be a huge surprise.

Lets just say,
There are some very rough parts of this backwoods, hick server called Blackgate that the nice young men with families coming from nice lower to middle-class servers… shouldn’t wander into.

y’all got purdy hair

I tend to unslot my Spectral walk in static defence situations (or against groups that run a lot of con-bombs) to run Well of Power to turn conditions into boons. Mostly I will be running BIP & Epidemic, I don’t run enough wells, that often to flick a trait over to the ranged wells or anything else.

I think its pretty clear from the update status (or lack of one) you’re going to have to make your own fun… kind of like we have been doing since August last year.

I don’t think its a sense of entitlement, but more a case of we stuck with you through some fairly mediocre times based on good faith in the game’s developers to deliver some well rounded solutions in good time and at least acknowledge the fact that we’re loyal customers.

All a full time wvw player has is Karma, Badges and empty pockets due to the design of the game. For some of us, that is all we do or the vast majority of time spent in game, being very passionate people as well of course this decision is unpopular because wvw players have seen fully developed dungons and season-events pop up that have complete itemisation… and we look at what we have, which is literally nothing and its been the same since beta.

I do project management and in some side aspects I also run developers I do some application development myself and hire programmers, they deliver on time or they get out. We get stuck, then I will get specialist problem-solvers in, that can think outside the box when the existing knuckleheads cant figure it out.

Because at the end of the day- its my professional responsibility to deliver great customer service, (not good, not ok or will make do- it has to be GREAT customer service) or I’m out of a job and funnily enough, customers do speak to potential customers and if they’ve got nothing to say about you, then they will find alternatives.

Search here on minions, many people (myself included) have proffered solutions to the problems with them- since the game was in beta.
The response from Anet has been nil, except for some ‘vague’ note in the last patch about ‘adjusting their aggression’ or whatever the hell that’s supposed to mean.

You want my opinion from someone with a lot of hours on this class?
Don’t put them on your utility bar, because they are beyond worthless and crippling your character performance, in lieu replacing of something that does actually work. I’m not being mean or disrespectful to new players, that’s just how it is.

You’re lucky then, a large part of KnT is actually ‘special ed’ in pve.

The last time we went to Orr on a mithril and lumber gathering mission to stock up the vault for making siege, we also went to a temple to get armour and slaughtered everything (that part actually we’re good at) and at least 3/4 of us where running around aimlessly after it, looking for loot bags.

If I don’t have to run plague with blind-pulse for wvw group dynamics so often, I’ll often run the norn, ‘Super Kitty’, which has pretty much the ultimate in get outa here!
5sec stealth + run like a s.o.b for about 4-5000 game units in 3 seconds!

Has a horrible 3min timer though, so it does mean popping it pretty selectively and its otherwise mostly useless for actually killing things.

DivineBeing.2086:

Lets ask this question, do people go to customer service or even call them to state how amazing their product/service was? Very few actually do.

How often do you tell that checker at the grocery store how good he is doing when you go there? Never right? But if he short changes you than I gurantee he will hear about that!

Customers will note ‘Exceptional Service’ and recommend it to their friends, other people and be very pro-product, but it takes a fair amount of effort to reach exceptional in any kind of industry. Parts of me still wonder if vast swathes of the computer-game industry has any kind of employees in them that have had any fundamental customer service skills at all, because it seems to be pretty barren.

Kind of reminds me of the early-era of ISP’s which where run out of garages and spare rooms by computer-science grads, early 20’s dudes that knew a lot about transmission, modems and switch gear, but not the faintest idea of how to actually engage a customer… they’ve all gone now except the guys who started up and maybe didn’t have the most technical of knowledge, but knew how to keep their customers happy and as a result ’don’t work anymore’ because they’re rolling in cash.

Customer service here by Anet, about a 3/10, the response will be overwhelmingly negative as to be detrimental to the business beyond even the comparatively minor impact to the overall game (lets face it, wvw is a marginal area it would seem) and its not the developers fault. They deal with numbers, code and get stuck in a back room away from the normal people, supplied with lots of caffinated drinks and the odd fluffy animal thrown in for their appeasement.
They aren’t customer service delivery specialists

This isn’t endemic to Anet, but the whole computer game service industry treating its customers like kittens, cheats, liars, idiots and barely tolerated. Considering the cash that gets thrown into games often exceeding blockbuster movies now, you’d think they would have taken a leaf out of hollywood’s book, that even if the end result isn’t great, people will still come away liking it to some extent if you treat them well.

I think dropping incendiary rounds on FA & TC running around in bay last night for about an hour had to be one of the funniest things I’ve done in a while. Every now and then a group or of BG would go over to the shore and troll the vast, angry hordes on the plateau into coming down for easy bags and the next thing they know ‘oh god, oh god I’m on fire, it burns!’ and running around screaming.

Fire makes everything good.

Zoel.9154:

The last fight with KnT shows what appears to be a peculiarity with the new culling mechanic I suspect, in that it appears to have a variable range at which characters are forced to cull past a certain range, even if already loaded. At the start of the fight it’s around 1600, but for whatever reason (I suppose proximity) that range deteriorated to around 800 mid fight, as you see us flow in and out of vision depending on Azilyi’s perspective. It’s equal in so far as neither side has any idea how many people the other have

Could be worse… you could have 19 guildies + 5-8 friendlies and portalled up onto a wall to find out, “oh hey, they’ve got about 40 or so up here and they’re all running really angry high DPS builds” :o

(the ‘queue bug’ also seemed to be getting all 3 servers that weekend as we noticed some pretty wildly fluctuating population levels)

Some major ‘revision’ was done on the fly after that! All part and parcel of fighting new guilds on the battlefield to learn how they work and respond, most of the RET guild members should be grateful to their commanders in the bay engagement… if they’d slipped up even so much as once, we’d have gotten you

Had a lot of fun last night figuring out our new enemies, their strengths, weaknesses, response times and ‘testing’ the limits of what we could do against them. Open field combat rolling with the KnT murder ball was largely successful… force them into a corner, they fight like proverbial rats too (and certainly prolific enough!)
Think it was Rendon that summed up their (FA’s elementalists in particular) description as “human ballista’s” and wasn’t far wrong, ouch.

‘Zerg Island rampage’ against Unreal Aussies last night on the briar tower, as one aussie to another… “Sent off, carried off, but never backed off.”
kitten, that was a lot of dead people!

We where wondering about those ‘entities’ the other night, the people who either log out or disconnect for whatever reason, still showing up as dots on the map if you’re in the same party. (Mind you, those have been around for about as long as I can remember in the game)

At some point the instanced region that is a wvw map seems to not be refreshing its population capacity,
Last night we had 19 in the map, just in our guild with about another 10 people from other guilds with just us. An allied guild who was running parallel had about 15 with another 10. From the extensive running around we did- there was maybe another 8-10 people from our side there.
Total # around 60-70
At 12midnight on the eastern US timezone, we still had just in our guild, 11 players queued up, some for over 1hr. Even factoring in the non-combatants like puzzle humpers, mob fondlers, vista viewers and goodness knows who else running around, there should be a bit more room than that.

We can venture all kinds of hypothetical reasons as to why, but its a real, actual problem and not something we’re imagining.

Depends ‘what’ exactly your role in WvW is?
All roles have some varied specs which will suit what you want to do.
Solo roaming, I tend to avoid doing it as there’s far better classes to do it with, some people do however and seem to enjoy that. I have no idea what they use.
Open Field, a Power-Well spec for running in and bombing people, does just fine.
Support-DPS, some fairly standard pure condition/aoe builds, does just fine.

Personally, I do Support DPS. I spray around conditions, do some crowd control, take conditions off my allies, cover large tracts of land in AOE condition-bombs and kill tons of idiots that don’t have condition removal, the ones that do, tend to die eventually as I overwhelm it. The negative is that I can’t even dent a stacked group running permanent condition removal.

Open field, run in, dump wells all over an enemy group, take conditions off your friends, turn buffs on your enemies into conditions, some group healing and running AOE blind so the enemy can’t hit back as much. The negative is you have fairly long cool-downs, so in any protracted fight you’re pretty much down to spamming weapon attacks for about 40-60sec after.

Envi.2460:

It would be nice to face blackgate with even numbers and not wake up to them ticking 600 cause most of sor wvwers were asleep!

You’re in for a real surprise after reset then… or get used to not sleeping for a week.
There’s a few other surprises as well, but you’ll see for yourself

Full time WvW players are like pack of hungry animals, if Anet didn’t starve us to near-death, ignore us completely for months on end like a neglected puppy in a cardboard box full of barbwire and hand out the beating to the side of said box with a big bat… just to annoy us a bit more.

We’d actually be happy

We’d be happy and not have to kill every single living thing we come across
We wouldn’t have to break everyone’s stuff just for 1s45c a hit
We’d not have the necessary level of sheer hatred to murder 1000’s of people in the space of a few hours BECAUSE THEY TOUCH OUR STUFF.

That level of desperation, hatred and an unhealthy dose of antisocial personality disorder, is what makes a wvw player.

If anything T1 taught us is economy of personnel- how to kill as many of the enemy with as few a people as possible and the bare minimum to hold assets.

Blackgate never really had a lot of ‘fat’ to shed in the last 8-9weeks, what was there in T2 prior to T1 is still there and has been here a while getting their own tactics/group dynamic and inter-guild communications down.
We also picked up a couple of guilds from CD, not ‘mega’ guilds like SoS and JQ picked up, but they like to fight (they fight pretty well!) and have had a noticeable impact.

Trahearne is an obnoxious Mary Sue plot hook that is there to show you just how inferior everyone else is to him.

I don’t normally do story arcs in most of these games, but I needed xp at the time and the off chance I could get some gear/cash, so I suffered through the ‘oh we’re incompetent and will reasonably settle for 2nd best, please help us’ sort of mumbling under my breath, ‘just get that rancid kitten Trahearne to do it’.

The zombie mobs in Orr also have some similar spell effects/types of spells to Necros… except they look probably twice as good as an animation-effect and will actually kill you.

Nuzt.7894:

DAoC ram races anyone … anyone ?

yep… been there, done that :o
(Some nights where slower than others in wvw)

We also need to be able to load Asura into trebs and catapults.

When you must do a job you utterly hate, do it so badly that no one will ever ask you to do it again!

loneknight.8425:

Any server who has whacky sense of humor. Princess dolls parade anyone? XD

You’ll want TC then, pretty much the only server I ever slightly felt at all remorseful about having to kill in this game </3

I’d totally fight a bear and a shark at the same time.

Thrumdi.9216:

This kind of class imbalance in WvW is a bad sign.

I actually can’t remember a RvR style game that had an imbalance this bad. Though, to be fair, the ones I have played have been fairly mature, with imbalances ironed out.

Has anyone else, with experience in RvR games, seen an imbalance this bad?

Yep, like most games with wvw/rvr and so forth, they usually start out with a run-what-you bring kind of affair and the more competitive groups will figure out over time- what will kill the most people in front of me and what will keep me up and running while I do it.
Its simply a risk-reward assessment

DAOC, early days no one cared and it was a screaming horde of everything and anything. Over the years we shaved down our 8-man groups to being:
Primary Speed, Primary CC (crowd control), Primary Healer because not much really changed, they where always something you needed to have the bare minimum of. (I mostly ran a minstrel, which was a primary speed, secondary CC/Interrupt kind of class)

Over the years, casters overwhelmed everything else (no hit-cap there!), so we’d run PBAOE groups which just had those three, the rest made up of casters that blew up a few acres of land and everything in it.
Later on, caster got kind of nerfed, so we began to run tank-trains, the three basic classes, the rest where a mix of heavy-defense/offense hybrids and medium-dps and chased everything down, beat everything to death in wtf time.
At some point, things where actually relatively equal for a little bit, where you could run either type of group or a mix of both and sometimes you’d add in a 2nd-healer or something for kicks or when things got very heavy.

For a very long time, DOT casters never figured in until they gave them a buff, then that was the popular choice for some… pretty much never during that time did archers and rogues figure into a mainline 8-man group for zerg busting.
What those guys did was form ‘stealth zergs’, which is about as fun as falling into a punji-stake trap which is also full of bitey animals for the average solo Joe Blogs wandering around by themselves. A few of the better ones, would also take out a high level 8-man group from time to time.

WAR ended up much the same, for similar reasons, the nerf bat swings back and forth over time and some days after a patch, you’d just wake up and find your character was gimped and have to find something else to play that actually worked!

AION, we just ran gank groups of pretty much every kind of class running around murdering 1000’s of people and probably a few million robots trying to XP/farm in peace… up until the designers decided one day that ‘game mechanically’ it was extremely disadvantageous to do so. (so we all quit!)

GW2, it’ll happen, people will do what they always do in games. Once they blow AOE away we’ll probably be back to almost 100% tank trains again, already against the more premium-organized groups, my DOT caster practically does nothing at all to them with the amount of constant condition removal running in them, so my existence will probably be shelved fairly soon as the composition dynamic changes.

Thats games I guess.

Doing some poking around, the C/Dam applying to basic attacks vs inanimate objects means its a little easier when trying to break siege and other stuff.

Also, C/Dam now applies to the #2 attack on most types of siege that have a bleed (cannon, bolt throwers, AC’s etc) so instead of the piddly little 43 a tick it used to do, it hurts like hell because its using MY stat instead!

Lower the poly count on stonemist to something less fantastically stupid than it is, so people can actually fight in it.
Make each borderland unique.
Get rid of champ mobs and jumping puzzles

Minoru.1237:

It’s silly that they could drop even if they come in second. I’d like to hear what BG players think: Would you guys prefer to stay in T1 to fight SoR or would you rather drop to dominate T2 and thus get back to T1 faster?

To be honest, I dunno if the gap could be closed by the end of the week to eclipse SoR’s lead that they’ll probably have. JQ are still out there and kicking it pretty hard all hours of the day (every Aust prime time I login, I’m always out-manned… but never defeated), but TC seem to have chucked in the towel for all intents and purposes so there’s not a lot of resistance to that expanding lead.

I also don’t count SOS out at this point. Was knocking chunks off ‘locust-apocalypse’ sized, blot out the sun zergs of theirs large enough to stop all skills working and had the fps cranked into the 10’s, in JQ’s garrison only a few days ago!

I wonder if Anet even realises that their community here spends the majority of their time in-game with the only the single minded purpose of hacking and blowing each other up to the point one or the other of us is writhing around on the ground, then ramming a 6ft sharp pole through through a wounded persons face to make them stop twitching.
Downtime for a wvw player involves launching flaming balls of burnination into some asset that each other probably spent some personal/guild bank, in-game gold on making it shiny.

Its not really the same mindset as spvp, we have a lot of personal pride investment based around dumping wholesale violence on one another all day, all the time… sometimes people get a little ‘cranky’