Guild Wars 2

The balista actually is superior in offensive situations if the person with the blue print know where to place it.

Most towers/keeps have a hill or something like that in front of the gates.
If placed ontop of said hill you often can shoot whatever is placed on the walls, especially arrow cart/oil/cannons.

It also has AoE. #1 is some sort of line AoE, as the projectile passes through enemies while dealing damage. #2 actually explodes when hitting a target or a wall. #3 deals massive damage against siege (100% extra), which makes it even better as a siege clearing weapon as written above.

TWMagimay.9057:

tigirius.9014:

Actually no…because ANY mathematician worth his weight in water will tell you that no one can make an equation that generates an absolutely random result, there is always a variance of + or – in which Anet definitely has their finger on to adjust one way or another. So please don’t insult our intelligence by telling us that.

You don’t really know how RNG works, do you? You can achieve close to complete randomness in programming because you have access to actual random numbers. My fav example…take time down to milliseconds as a variable in your equation. While still mathematically processed, calculating based on a constantly changing event generates enough randomness for it to be RNG.

Secondly, My last dealings with salvaging was on 4 rares (because MF just absolutely refuses to give me better drops so I found by not using it I have a higher chance of rares oddly) and when I used their BLC kit with 50% chance of rare mats I got 0 globs.

There’s something wrong when you have a 100% chance of getting nothing.

Oh, darn, smb tempered with my coin! I just got tails 4 times in a roll. Any mathematician worth his wait in water would tell you that the larger the sample, the closer it gets to the actual probability of an event. And that 4 tries is not even close to enough to draw a conclusion. Because, based on your logic, there is 0% chance of getting heads, thus we should always bet on tails.

PS: Isn’t the discussion whether ectos are considered “rare” still ongoing? I always use the pink-ish salvage kits on rare items while my ecto supplier uses basic…guess which one of us gets more ectos…

Actually there are ways to implement real random numbers in a computer system. They require a special piece of hardware though:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Noise_generator

Yellow shoudl always give 1.
Exotics always give 3.

No random number involved.

It would solve alot of frustation.
Sorry but being double lucky is just bad.

If you are lucky, you find a yellow item, and you can salvage it for an ecto, use it, or sell it.

It is like altering the dungeon rewards.
You might get a chest item, which might give you 0,20,40,60 tokens.
Nobody would argue that this would be a good system, yet for ectos it is ok.

Finding 5 yellows should be a moment of joy, but when you than salvage them and get 0 rewards it is frustating as hell. A game shouldn’t frustate you with something so awful like this. It should be fun. Salvaging for a random chance of rare items isn’t fun.

EnemyCrusher.7324:

Kalagon.3120:

So all lodestones drop from either a dungeon in about 4-5 clears you will get 1 or a 00000.1% from a certain elemental mob in the wild. Making farming these for crafting impossible. A-net NC soft failed with Aion in north america because they made the mistake in thinking we like to grind farm like the asian market. We dont mind the farming to a reasonable extent your current Drop% on most end game items is way way to high. Legendary precursors, Lodestones, BLChest. These issues need to be addressed.

Your system is pushing people to Gold buying sites because o these low drop %

Arenanet made a point of making GW2 anti-grind. A higher drop rate of lodestones would encourage people to “grind farm” them as drops. How can you say that the problem is that they assume people like to farm, and the solution is to make people farm more?

If you want to farm for them but don’t want to kill the enemies that drop them, then farm for gold and buy them on TP.

TheRabbit.9478:

The worst part is that the rarest lodestone is used in the most recipes.

That’s basic supply and demand. They aren’t the rarest (in fact its the only lodestone I’ve had drop) but they are in much higher demand with only a similar supply as the others.

There are times, when the global trading post just has about 100~200 charged lodestones. Currently it is at 377.

One Mjolnir takes 350 of them.
Besides the 1000g it requires to buy them, if a global trading post can barely offer enough of a single material to make a single weapon, then there is something horribly horribly wrong.

So that Ele is using 20 different weapon skills to fight you, while you use autoattack and 5?
Seems like a very well balanced class to me.

Raap.9065:

Varonth.5830

And still your server profited from this right?
And with that I mean everyone on your server.

Best thing to do is heavy punishing.
Desolation wants to be T1. Punishment could be 2 weeks in which they can’t join WvW, and setting back to the lowest tier.

Holy s**t are you for real? ONE person cheats and you want to blame an entire server for it? Good God I can tell you’re not learing from real world history at all much have you mister german.

It’s not about a single person using an exploit.
It’s about a single person using an exploit, then others from his team/side/guild/whatever use that exploited position by using legit abilities, in this case, portal.

Now if these people see, that they shouldn’t be there, because that new position was achieved via exploit, and then just leave/logout/teleport back to their base… yeah no problem. Ban that one exploiter, and that’s it. You couldn’t know it before, and you could not do anything against that person exploiting himself into the keep other then reporting him.
Same goes for orb hacking. You cannot stop them, so besides reporting there is no way for you to not abuse the orb bonus for example.
Someone said, your commander ordered you to leave the castle, but that’s not the whole fact. First you destroyed the siege equipment since you now had access to the walls.
Now if you would just let the keep get some supply and let the defenders rebuild that stuff, because the info about the exploit was given too late to stop the destruction of the siege equipment. Ok.
But instead of that you just attacked a now undefended gate with a zerg. To many chances to fairplay given away. So punish everyone would be a solution.

Raap.9065:

i do believe we came in through 2 doors (both the north ones actually) and took it less than 20 minutes after “commander” gray left after saying he couldn’t do it because there were 5 arrow carts on a door…. it wasn’t as heavily defended as you guys have claimed in the thread, there just wasn’t anyone attacking it in a solid enough force.

Kodash had a ton of siege inside, the hacking group cleared them all, and then RUIN arrived on the map to ‘take over’ once Gray asked people to leave the keep because we had a cheater portaling people inside.

Kodash defended really well and it’s a shame the cheating happened, but we still don’t know who did it.

And still your server profited from this right?
And with that I mean everyone on your server.

Best thing to do is heavy punishing.
Desolation wants to be T1. Punishment could be 2 weeks in which they can’t join WvW, and setting back to the lowest tier.
One hard punishment, just one is enough to stop people from using exploit. Secretly banning a cheater/exploiter? Won’t stop them.
Punishing a multiple amount of people extremly harsh, and you have all the time you need to fix an exploit… or don’t fix it at all.

I can name an example from one of my prior MMOs Ragnarok Online.
Keep sieges (called War of Emperium there) are limited to certain times in a week, because keeps were much more important for an alliance. Before the actual WoE started keeps are a non-PvP zone. So everyone can run through it, without getting stopped. In the second WoE starts, everyone who is not in the holding guild gets teleported back to their save point.
Now guildleader had the ability to call their whole guild with kitten casttime ability which gets interrupted if you get hit. He used this ability in our keep 5s before WoE started, and in the second it started, he got teleported out of the castle, but everyone from his guild was standing next to our Emperium (like a lord, just that it doesn’t fight back). They bypassed our defense completly.
Our keep was taken, and eco (you can upgrade your castle in 2 different areas from 0-100, keeps lose in these points everytime they get taken – you can just invest twice a day) was bashed after that.
So how did the GMs react. First, the main offender, the guildleader was banned for 4 weeks. (doesn’t sound hard)
But they also completly wiped his chars, including all of his equipment.
Now to give you an idea, some of the equipment guilds and guildleaders have can be sold for thousands of dollars on ebay. And that would be just a single piece of equipment. It is years and years of a guild which was undone. Like if someone had every lengendary a toon could wear, on every toon he has.
On top of that, they banned everyone in that guild for 2 weeks.

Now the funny part. Gravity (the developer), still hasn’t fixed that exploit, but nobody will ever used it again.
One harsh punishment, and that exploit was ‘fixed’.

shalmont.2539:

Varonth.5830:

Heartseeker is still a problem. Damage got reduced, but the fact that it is cruise control for thiefs is still present.
Oh that Mesmer/Ele just blinked away? Press 2.
The leap still has to go.

If you need a gapcloser: Dancing Dagger/Shadow Shot.

I dont remember the last time i died to heart seaker, roll one, if you have a shield block the other, you may get hit with one, but they can only spam it 3 times in a row far as i know? after that, just faceroll on your keyboard, and the theif dies, most thieves are glassy.

http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Heartseeker

3 Initiative.
12 is base, 15 with points in trickery.

Depending on the utilities and other traits, they can will gain atleast 3 additional initiative withing 4 heartseeker, and up to 6 if lucky.

Also does anything really believe, that chasing a target should just require pressing 2?
A thief can catch someone without touching his mouse or WASD just by pressing 2.
For me atleast, that does seem wrong and cheap.

Heartseeker is still a problem. Damage got reduced, but the fact that it is cruise control for thiefs is still present.
Oh that Mesmer/Ele just blinked away? Press 2.
The leap still has to go.

If you need a gapcloser: Dancing Dagger/Shadow Shot.

Chris.7082:

Dear Same, we don’t want US guilds moving over here to ‘win wvwvw for us’ (you don’t do anything for us btw, you are just here to dodge competition on US servers. Get the facts straight, for once). We just want to play and you take up our spots. So why don’t you play in the region you belong and leave us alone, we would much appreciate that.

You don’t want queues?
Join Kodasch or Far Shiverpeak. You won’t have any queue time, and as a nice little bonus added to your transfer, you get a nice and useless outmanned buff for free!

Brunners.7251:

Varonth.5830:

So no update regarding the snowballing effect most matches have. And the Off-Peak point gaining is still stupid.
It is almost 3am now, and our server was matched against Desolation again.
We already know the winner, because they have the Ruin zerg every night.

30 minutes after a match started, and our people are already leaving WvW because there is no need to fight an already lost match…

Actually Desolation aren’t doing very well tonight, especially not against Kodash’ weekend zerging

http://i.imgur.com/Q2Knn.jpg

Just an image.
Yeah for Desolation standards thats really poor, but wait 2 hours until even those weekend night players went to bed, and everything will be blue again.

So no update regarding the snowballing effect most matches have. And the Off-Peak point gaining is still stupid.
It is almost 3am now, and our server was matched against Desolation again.
We already know the winner, because they have the Ruin zerg every night.

30 minutes after a match started, and our people are already leaving WvW because there is no need to fight an already lost match…

TeoH.2098:

Hammerheart.1426:

GW2 has zero executional requirement

This is just wrong. I gather that every skill ever on every profession “just makes sense” to you, and thus you have some warped view that everyone views everything the same way you do, so all the most efficient rotations must scream out at you from the skillbar, and anything else is just l2p.

That’s nothing to do with execution. Execution refers to the difficulty of performing a particular action once you have made the decision that you want to perform it. Executing a 1 frame link combo in a fighting game is difficult, performing a static damage rotation in an MMO is not. There is no effort required in executing a fixed sequence of Elementalist abilities, or 5 heartseekers: You just press buttons. with a ridiculous input buffer so timing doesn’t factor into it.

I can press 453324234511, it doesn’t require anything that i would describe as effort. Look, i did it just there.

Here i’ll do it again: 453324234511

I’m failing to see where this effort comes from. I suggest you move your argument away from the idea of performing a set sequence of abilities in GW2, because there is no scenario where i’m going to acknowledge that your rotation requires any effort worth mentioning.

If you were instead trying to make some point about the length of time it takes you to deal X amount of damage as an Elem by providing a long list, then your intention missed me completely, but in that case i fail to see what you’re getting at.

if you can’t see the joke of thief damage output for what it is, I can’t help you.

A full damage spec squishy zerker burst melee class hitting you repeatedly in melee does a lot of damage. However, it would do a lot more damage from the start of the fight if it used literally any button on D/D other than Heartseeker. So since the thread is called ‘Heartseeker’, i’m having some trouble seeing how the complaint is valid.

The ele rotation that was written here, has an execution time of over 15 seconds, and deals about the same damage as 3-5 heartseekers.
Now if something happens inbetween like a skill getting interrupted, a crucial skill like updraft or earthquake getting dodged, immobilize getting cleansed, you are taking too much damage/cc etc yourself… everything in these 15 seconds (with churning earth taking a huge chunk of this battle time tbh) can screw this perfect rotation. And then the ele has to improvise, which actually shows the real skill of that ele.

No compare this to heartseeker. It takes ~5s to do the same damage as said ele above (who is just cappable of doing so due to multiple CCs from his side), and if something bad like an interrupt, chill, cripple, blind, dodge… happens… just press it again!

Thief does not have to make real crucial decisions like, should I now use Heartseeker, or Death Blossom, to reduce his health a bit more. Then my Heartseeker would deal more damage… or a dancing dagger, so that he cannot escape if my heartseeker doesn’t kill him…

No the decision is:
I use Heartseeker, then I use Heartseeker again, and if he is still alive, I use Heartseeker again…

That btw isn’t just Heartseeker in my opinion. Every thief weaponset has abilities which are more likely to be spammed over and over.

Dee Jay.2460:

Chesire.9043:

The downed state is fine in sPvP. People just hate it because they think downing someone is automatic win in every situation and need to get over this mentality.

No, it’s because even if you do kill someone in a 2v1, it’s worthless because he’ll just rally once you go down.

It’s because no amount of skillful play allows you to overcome a number disparity.

It’s because of the unbalanced downed abilities.

It’s because it’s a tactical advantage in tPvP to leave someone downed, rather than finish them off.

It’s bad because it really limits tactical choices. Either completely wipe out an enemy force or it’ll be waste. No point in wearing down a zerg in WvW when everyone can rezz you in a matter of seconds.

It’s because for a game that prides itself with not having any targeted healing, rezzing is just that.

Well if you kill someone in a 2v1 he won’t rally because he is dead.
You downed someone, you did not kill him…

I like the part of the second video where the Ele was fighting that thief.
That ele just used 20 different skills with permanent attunement swapping, multiple used utilities etc. and was almost killed at the end by a thief, who constantly pressed 2.

Vanilla
http://www.gw2db.com/trading-post/25065-vanilla-bean-s

Orichalcum Ore
http://www.gw2db.com/trading-post/654-orichalcum-ore

At the current rate vanilla will become more expensive than ori in about 24 hours.

This kind of boni come from the current generation of games, especially the moba genre, where winning punishes the losing opponent with respawntime, while giving some sort of numerical boni to the winner, which in return makes it even easier to win the next fight.

This works (to some degree) in mobas because of the short matchtime.
Games like Call of Duty etc. are also having these sorts of systems with killstreaks etc.
Sadly these sort of boni get thrown into more and more games.
GW2 does have these kind of boni in the form of orbs, which are much easier to defend if you have fully upgraded keeps, which needed time to upgrade.
Since you hold the keep that time, it often implies, that the enemy had to defend, because you were advancing.
This means your team is often already winning.
The winning side (could use some statistical data of course) will probably have 2 or 3 orbs more often than the losing side.
That of course helps them winning.

Sadly there is a kind of gamer who believes that such a system is ok.
Here is a similar, winning team gets more power, example for any kind of sports:
Imagine a league of your favorite sport ( soccer, american football, baseball … ), and the rules allows the team currently in the 1st place to field 5 additional players. The second one gets 3 additional players, while the third one gets one additional player.
I thing no one would argue that these rules are fair, or in any kind healthy for the league.
But some of those would say, in a computer game, such a system would be ok…

I hope they fix LoS for the iBerserker. And in the same Patch they hopefully fix LoS for AoE. It is kinda rediculous to see people complaining about the missing line of sight on iBerserker, while the Ele just said, he put some AoE on the door (ignoring LoS).

One of the problem descriped here in this thread is the fact that, unlike sPvP points, WvW capture points do count stealthed players in.

So if a single stealthed enemy enters a capture circle, they prevent the capture process.
Now we had 2 thiefs running a perma stealth duo. With heal while stealthed, and condition removal while stealthed.
Both with smoke combo fiels and shortbow for blast finisher.

They were perm invisible, while preventing the capture. And spamming AoE on a supply camp capture point isn’t a viable counter, as those points are huge, and both thiefs can run through it freely.

The current vanilla problem is really extreme. What I would also like to add is the huge amount of expensive complete garbage recipes.

An example?
Chocolate Omnomberry Cake.
It requires 15 crafting mats, with 2 being omnomberries and 2 being vanilla beans.
You’ll get 2 pieces of cake, which will grant you 15% longer freeze duration and 70 power.

Every single recipe which adds duration to a single condition is bad. They are often expensive, and useless.

Rare veggie pizza adds 40% to all conditions, and that is a food you might consider when going for conditions. Even then, it is still one of a few choices. You could also eat some defensive stuff or stats etc…

This becomes even worse in low levels. Take a look at these single conditions low level meals. 3% bonus duration for burning… like WHAT? That doesn’t do anything. Unlike stat items, which of course have to be lower, 40% condition duration on level 5 isn’t much different from 40% condition duration on level 80.
And then, some of these low level recipes which are basically useless require mats like rosemary and vanilla.

The chef has so many possible recipes and just such a few produce really usefull food that I would really hope for a huge overhaul of the chef…

The carrying system was done for the simple reason, that it allowed the other factions to intercept that orb.

Just another, really harsh way I always wanted to see a company do is, suing that person for business damaging behavior.

Two things to add:
1.
Won’t stop a zerg from storming a single tower/keep because it would still grant lots of XP/Karma/Gold. Add a reward pool into that. A tower will never be worth more than 2000 karma for example. That amount gets split to everyone participating. Number will be depending on the amount attacker which ANet intended an objective to have. It would of course increase with every unique defender an objective had (everyone who got a defender event bonus while defending).
If there are more defenders, you are allowed to bring in more attackers, without any diminishing return on reward. If it is just empty, will don’t expect to get alot of reward for taking an completly undefended tower.

2.
If one team does not own any supply camp on a map, the base camp will have an emergency (unlimited) amount of supply everyone can take from.

1962 Kill :
1*Invaders Sword
1*Invaders Accessoiry
230 Badges currently

I don’t know what you are doing wrong, but you must doing something wrong o_o

droober.3256:

I noticed this towards the end of last week. Normally on my server all borderlands and eternal battlegrounds are full during peak hours. But as last week progressed and our score deficit approached and surpassed 100k from night capping, players stopped queueing for wvw. I understand anets desire to not punish off hour players but what of the majority of players who play during peak hours but are effectively barred from wvw for the second half of the week?

The best solution I have heard (which has probably been discussed thoroughly on this forum) is to adjust point gains in wvw as a function of relative server participation at a given time. If one server outnumbers the other two in a given map then the amount of points gained will be appropriately modified down. This way off hour players still have reason to play and cap during the night but its effects are not game breaking.

Sorry if this observation and proposed solution has already been canvased. What I really love about wvw was the feeling that my small actions were helping my server in something much larger and bigger than myself. But when were 100k+ points back that feeling really goes away.

The current system has a point of no return, where you are basically locked in your place no matter how good your server plays.
If that point is reached, whatever you do, it won’t change anything, so why bother, or even invest money in siege engines or upgrades.

If your server has already 100k point deficit it would take you 144 point ticks to overtake them if you hold absolutly everything.
With ticks every 15 minutes that would be 36 hours.
Of course that is just completly unrealistic, so that point is often reached way earlier.

Legael.7806:

Woke up today to another night capping session from the other servers. I play on Gunnar’s Hold and we don’t have any international guilds for night capping but we do win when we get to play similar servers that don’t nightcap as well.

So this will be another week I won’t be stepping foot in WvW as your system doesn’t allow for points to be lost just gained and so the snowball effect takes place.

In less than 2 days we already have a winning server with a 20k point lead which was about 8k lead last night when I logged off.

WvW is a pointless part of GW2 for mine and many other servers who don’t have night capping guilds in off peak.

If this carries on for the next few months you won’t have queue problems any more in WvW but you might have to merge a few servers

Just remember WvW is end game for a lot of guilds and if night capping isn’t solved they will move on to pastures new

Kodash here.
We fought against Elonas Reach the last match aswell, and believe, until now, it was ok.
Now that the weekend ends, and WvW population will be lower at nights, Elona will just zerg their way to +600 and more points per tick.

Yes, this match started 2 days ago, and 1st place is already decided, so it is just about who becomes second.

nerva.7940:

thanks for the response Jon. you guys really dont need to feel apologetic in any way. you gave us open world pvp. it’s what people wanted.

players need not to be babies. how do you think EVE players feel after investing hours of their time into building bases and taking territory, just to get invaded over night and get it all blown up? grow some, and stay up all night defending or capping smaller objectives if you care. WvW is kinda hardcore in that sense. if it’s too much for you, spvp is that away ->

In EVE you have one server.
I repeat it again, in EVE you have one server.

You need someone to defend your bases when you are sleeping? Hire a corporation to do that for you. Best thing a corporation with a different timeslot.
Of course you can try to invite other guilds to your server.
But why would they join if:

1. They will join the losing side with less boni like gatherer and stuff
2. They will basically lose all of their guild upgrades

Thing about it, like in EVE if two corporation allies, one corp leader loses all of his corp skills. There would be not one single alliance in New Eden.

Comparing WvW with EVE is like comparing apples and oranges. Both are fruits, and thats all they have in common.

lollie.5816:

@Varonth I think you just need to give it time to smooth out, as above.

Actually, our server was put against the same server who won before by capping everything everynight, again…

I would say, our server already gave up, since we are already 15k point behind elonas reach, after less then 24 hours.

It is discouraging to a point where people just don’t want to play WvW anymore. How should that smooth out?

lollie.5816:

Varonth.5830:

lollie.5816:

Quote button has disappeared again vvv but @Varonth, luckily for the us, the game devs want all their players to have access to the game, not just you.

They probably also want everyone to have fun ingame, not just you

Turn up and you can have fun too.

Yesterday, 2am the matchup resetted.
At ~2:10am the new matches begon.
This is at 2:30am yesterday evening:
http://i.imgur.com/bzv9S.jpg
http://i.imgur.com/GTZb0.jpg

If you are on one of these server dominating a specific timeslot by alot, crushing anykind of small defense in your way, please consider to change your server for 1 or 2 days to the outmanned, last placed server.
After 2 days of defending, please tell us how much fun you had, and how much reward you got.

It’s not against australian players (I am from europe btw), but against players who basically destroy the fun of others with their attitude.

PvPers want to fight other players. And they want to win.
Switching to the dominating server to fight doors counters the first point.
Staying on the underdog server counters the second point, as you won’t win if you are heavily outnumbered, with orb buffed enemies, sitting in fortified objective.

lollie.5816:

Quote button has disappeared again vvv but @Varonth, luckily for the us, the game devs want all their players to have access to the game, not just you.

They probably also want everyone to have fun ingame, not just you

lollie.5816:

Zireael.3285:

People should be…discouraged to fight when other servers presence is close to 0.

Those are our natural playing hours. You suggesting we should be discouraged from playing in our own timezone? Don’t bother replying, because yes this is what you’re saying.

Basically you should be as much discouraged to play as those few defenders fighting a hopeless fight. So yes you should be very discouraged from playing.

Of course you ignored that viewpoint, because it doesn’t fit to your “everyone has the same right to enjoy the game” philosophy.

pedrst.3127:

And to be honest this is not even aimed at nightcappers or people from different time-zones. This is just to balance better the actual FIGHT and PVP on the WvWvW. Because as it stands right now, avoiding fight reward with high score at the end of the week. So how can this be right ?

I’ve no problem of them capping everything at night or in their own time-zone. Just don’t let this gives them a 30-40k point advantage making the other 2 server simple give-up or feel like they completely wasted all their efforts, bringing even less PvP/fights.

This is how these both germans beat us last match up pretty much:

7pm prime-time
http://imageshack.us/a/img594/5520/elonaprimetime.png

3am
http://imageshack.us/a/img10/149/elona3am.png

Again, i don’t give a crap if they’ve higher population at off-peak times or anything, i jsut don’t want the score to reflect PvEing scores, where it is supposed to show PvP scores.

You know, that every night ended up with elona reach have +500-600 points and 3 orbs.

But hell, atleast you seafarers have a new matchup. Our new matchup is:
Gunnar’s Hold and Elonas Reach. Yes, we are fighting the same server again. 1g that we will end behind Elonas Reach again.
Here is the current score: http://i.imgur.com/iWREA.jpg

Can’t tell if gunnar’s gonna hold (oh god that one was so bad) all that stuff during the next week like they do tonight.

Reading through this thread, there is one side (and that is the real minority here), that didn’t seem to post at all, and I am one of them.

I am a nighttime player (playing WvW mostly from 0-6am with guildmates).
I am also playing on a nighttime underdog server (Kodasch [DE]).

It is extremly frustating to fight with 3-10 people, against armies of 30-50 enemies. There is nothing we can do to stop them. Nothing at all. Sure we can kill some with arrowcarts (especially since they aren’t AoE-capped anymore), but we won’t even postpone a towertake by a minute.
Getting undermanned bonus is just like a punch in the face by the game.
“Oh you are less then your enemy? You take this buff, that would give you more rewards, if you would win.”

Also, those 50 player zerg taking an almost unguarded objective gets the same reward as someone taking a heavily fortified objective, with tons of defenders.
(This btw will also affect the ingame economy at some point, by certain players easily racking up money and karma by attacking unguarded objective).
The same btw goes to WvW kills.
Everyone who deals enough damage to a player, gets a reward.
Why has everyone in a 10vs2 the same chance to gain loot, as someone who won a 2vs1?

Btw we also tried geruilla tactics like taking on guarded resource camps deeply in the enemy territory with a small group. If you are doing this, just hope that supervisor doesn’t have Righteous Indignation on him. That buff won’t stop a zerg, but your small group won’t be able to kill him the next 5 minutes.

So what are my options?
Joining a server with a high nighttime population, so that I can zerg down doors, and an occasional enemy aswell? That does sound like as much fun, as being zerged, but at least I would get way more rewards, for doing less.

Saw my first two thief today using the haste exploit in WvW. It seems that it becomes more common. One of them was using a pistol, and could easily stack almost 10 stacks of constant bleeding. The other almost instantly ‘exploded’ when he used Daggerstorm within reaction.

We certainly need a Report: Exploit/Hack option for player reports.

The big cooldown, big heal has another downside, when it comes to proccs depending on healskill usage.

For example mender’s purity, which also cleanse one condition per heal.

My WvW build is running with healing mantra, harmonious mantras, mender’s purity and buff food which cleanse one condition per heal used (and adds +70 healing power).

It allows me to cleanse up to 6 conditions per mantra recast, which I can split up, into 3*2 conditions cleansed.
Sure, I’m giving up 2 trait slots and my buff-food slot, but it is still worth it.

So as we all know the current WvW tends to snowball, and as we can see in this Sub-Forum there are alot of dissatisfied players, who dislike the current system.

So here is my first idea:

Income and Upkeep

At the moment camps provide supply for towers, keeps and stonemist. Now this supply can be used for siege equipment, upgrades and repairs. My idea adds another layer to what camps provide.
They will provide upkeep supply for everything you have in WvW. What does this mean:
Everything except supply camps will need upkeep supply, which is just an invisible artificial number, which could be shown on the WvW Hud aswell as the the current informations shown there.
I already calculated some numbers:

• A camp will add +5 to your income.
• A tower has an upkeep cost of 2 (-2 income).
• A keep has an upkeep cost of 5 (-5 income).
• Stonemist will have an upkeep cost of 12 (-12 income).

If you own everything that will leave you at +-0, so you can actually hold everything.

Now, there is nothing bad happening when your income is >= 0. If it’s +2 you can take another tower, and nothing bad would happen. Now if you take a keep,
it would increase your worlds upkeep costs to by 5, so you would need at least an income of 5 or greater. You are at +2 and took that keep, and now you are at -3. That is a bad state, because your supply camps cannot handle the demand for your world. So since the camps cannot deliver enough income to keep everything running, the keeps start using their own supply over time.
Every few second (I thought about 15-30) the system will reduce the amount of supply every keep has by X where X is your current upkeep cost. So since you are at -3 they will all start loosing 3 supply every few seconds. This is bad, but it can become even worse. When your worlds income is less then 0 and one of the reduction ticks would reduce that building (except camps, which are unaffected) supply to 0 or less, your world would abbandon this building. It would go back into it’s neutral state, like when a new WvW match starts. This would then reduce the upkeep cost, and perhaps bring your world back into a positive income, allowing you to keep the rest of your buildings.

What would that imply:
First thing, camps would not only be extremly usefull, they would be crucial for your campaign. There have to be players guarding a supply camp. The more you dominate, the more camps you have to guard with your players. This will of course decrease your attacking force.

A small guerrilla force from the underdog on the other hand could heavily damage your worlds progress, if they take a supply camp off guard.

And a huge zerg could be stopped by a small organized group of players, taking camps behind enemy lines.
Splitting up, in order to guard the extremly vulnurable camps would be neccessary, probably leading to less mass zerging, and more small scale groups, with groupsizes depending on what you want to accomplish.

Two additional ideas for these camps, are 2 new upgrades, one, which increases the income provided by this camp by 1, and the other making the main npc a champion instead of a veteran.

I’ll probably post some more ideas regarding other stuff (like Orbs and their Snowball effect, middle man constantly attacking underdog instead of topdog etc) once I worked them out a bit better.

milo.6942:

Probably the main reason everyone thinks gw2 is not a team-based game is because the team interactions are less obvious than games that feature the holy trinity. Those roles are set in stone, you wouldn’t try to heal your ally with a warrior — you can’t! In gw2 the roles are loosened up so that each class has the ability to support, control, and damage. Which also leads to premature declarations that gw2 has no teamplay.

Just because there is no dedicated healing class, shouldn’t mean there should not be any form of usefull teamhealing. Actually it should mean, that every class should be able to heal or support teammates equally, just in different ways. Same goes for tanking and DPS.
It works for DPS. Everyone can do DPS, just how they do it is different from class to class and build to build.
Also everyone can control, it is just different from class to class…
Some can tank, some can’t.
Some can medicore support teammates, others can’t even do that.

Just because you don’t need class X (Monk/old Mesmer for example), does not mean that their roles should be completly gone. Dedicated support characters are crucial for teamplay, because by definition a support character has no impact on the battle without a team which can profit from said support.

If just everyone can do everything equally in their specc, what’s the point of giving up that for pure support, if this support just isn’t needed (and not even usefull in terms of numbers).

Sure GW1 has been around for quite some time and got some expansions and additional campaigns, but even on release day, PvP was alot more complex and team-orientated then GW2 is after one month.

GW1 players probably hoped that GW2 would be as teambased as GW1 is, just with updated mechanics, graphics, new classes etc… It would be different but still in its heart it would be GW, which was always a game where team supporting abilities where much stronger then personal abilities.

Thats why you don’t see tools like teambuilder for this game. There is no real need to make a teambuild, where someone takes a skill just for a teammate he does not have the slot for or access to that skill, so that this teammate could use one of his skills more effectivly, which will then turn one of a third teammembers skills into THE defining skill for your team setup…

This is mostly because support abilities (I’m not just talking about pure healing) often have a long cooldown, or long casttime, or small radii, or small range or often a combination of these downsides, while their positive effect is often rather small.

What teamsupport abilities should really do is push those, who got support, by such a huge margin that they singlehandly can do more damage/control/whatever, then you two could do individually. Because then teamplay becomes important:
If two people would fight for 100% effectiveness individually, while two others would fight as a team, one being at 30% effectiveness, but the other at 190% then the team which works as a team, with one giving up his personal effectiveness for his teammate, would and up at 220% while the individuals would be at 200%.

milo.6942:

Varonth.5830:

What you call teamplay is a bunch of people having the same goal, but everyone is doing his own business for this goal. Then add some team-tactics like you go there, you hold this point etc, and there you go… teamplay? Sorry that’s not teamplay in from my point of view.

If that’s the best strategy you can muster I don’t think it’s the game’s fault.

As to your other complaints of there not being good enough support and there being too much damage I suppose you could continue to carry on believing we should have monks again like in gw1, but I think the developers are taking the game in a different direction.

There was alot of non-monk support in GW1.
Ressource Denial Mesmers, Interrupt Mesmers, Support Ele, Support Necro, Paragon and Ritualist, Crippling Rangers… just to name a few.
Alot of that support was also offensive orientated, because it was often better to take someone specific to support offensive, instead of taking another offensive player.

Thats also the reason why I like to watch GW1 matches. Often you thing, oh that person is screwed, just to have someone from his team jump in, and save the day.

milo.6942:

Varonth.5830:

If you are looking for GW1 like teamplay, you will not find it in tournament play either.
Don’t know how many in here actually played GW1 HoH or GvG, but GW2 sPvP isn’t close to what kind of teamplay is involved in GW1.

Give it time.

It doesn’t only need time, it needs heavy buffs to support abilities, and heavy nerfs to personal damage. Teamplay evolves when you require it at all means.

Why should someone take a support Ele for example, which can heal 1.8k health every 20s in a tiny area over 3s, when a damage dealer would just do 8-10k dmg in the same amount of time?

“We are searching for a support guardian to protect our burst thief doing his job for tournament.”
You will never see this at the moment, because the guardian support would to nothing to really help that thief. Another thief so that they make a 2 people burst commando, now thats another thing.

The support abilities in this game are basically crap. What you call teamplay is a bunch of people having the same goal, but everyone is doing his own business for this goal. Then add some team-tactics like you go there, you hold this point etc, and there you go… teamplay? Sorry that’s not teamplay in from my point of view.

Jow.5920:

Thanks for the replies. I guess I’ll try this tournament thing. Hopefully it’s better.

Irishbrewed.6537:

Youre playing wrong, or just have a bad attitude. Even in pugs there is team work. I think you’re just oversimplifying every mmo pvp scenerio ever!

Nah… I played GW1 competitively and have played EVE online for 8 years+. Both PVP-based games. Both MMOs. I’m just trying to wrap my head around Gw2.

If you are looking for GW1 like teamplay, you will not find it in tournament play either.
Don’t know how many in here actually played GW1 HoH or GvG, but GW2 sPvP isn’t close to what kind of teamplay is involved in GW1.

Hell, there is a reason why GW1 has tools like Teambuilder.

Just a small math example of an axe warrior with 2500 attack power:
Lets assume an autoattack occures every second. (I know thats off, but it just to show the concept of Quickness).
It does 1000 damage per hit.
That would be 1000 dps.
That would be 0.4 damage per attack power.
He no adds 5 stacks of might (capped at 25), adding another 5*35 power so his attack power is now 2675.
He will now deal 1070 dmg.
It is now 1070 dps, which is a 7% increase.

The second warrior uses the same setup but uses quickness instead.
His autoattack now occures every 0.5s instead of every second, but still deals 1000 damage.
So 2 attacks per second for 1000 damage, or 2000 dps, 100% more.

Now lets see how many stacks of might that is. He basically doubled his attack power for auto attacks, so 2500 power. Might gives 35 power, so 2500/35 = 71.43 stacks of might. Does any wonder why there isn’t a skill which gives you over 70 stacks of might?

Yet those 70 stacks of might could be dispelled…

The ele downed state is really lacking.
1 is ok in terms of damage, 2 is just bad. It damage is low, and the immobilize doesn’t do anything at all in most battles. 3 rallies you for 3 seconds, which sound cool, but actually is worse than most people believe.

3 rallies you, and after 3 seconds puts you back into downed state. Thats why you get health back after you used that ability. So, what happens when you get downed?
First thing, you downed state counter is increased by one (seen in the lower left corner of your health bubble). This counter will then determine how much health you will have at the beginning of the downed state. Like 1/2 when you just got downed the first time, and then less and less health which each consecutive down. Since 3 does rally and then down you again, it will increase said counter by 1, leaving you with less initial health after each usage.
Also as I said before, your initial health is determined by your downed state counter. That can help, if you were almost dead, press 3 and get back to ~40% health after being downed again. It sadly also works in the opposite direction. An ally, or 4 got you to 90% and you are close to rally, but you won’t make it because an enemy would finish you before you could rally? Press 3, and oh my god, you just lost 50-80% of your progress, because you will rally and get downed again…

I reported this behavior back in one of the BWEs, sadly it wasn’t fixed.

And yes, Ele is the by far worse profession when downed.

I just wanted to clear things up for those reading this forum, and being unfamiliar with how Chaos Storm works.

Yes Chaos Storm is nice, but staff is heavily lacking in terms of damage. Chaos Storm damage is rather low, compared to other AoE of similar size, and of similar CD. Clones attack much slower then you do with auto-attack (~50%), and the vulnerability of the autoattack does not help when playing a condition damage build. It also seem to prefer to bounce back to allies instead of jumping from target to target.
While the buffs of #1 are nice (especially fury), the damage of it is, as most of the mesmers damage, kinda low.
The warlock isn’t even AoE, which does not fit the rest of the weapon at all.

Staff is a jack of all trades, but it isn’t very good in anything, and is lacks direction of what it should be.

If the orb of winds of chaos would not bounce but actually ‘explode’ on impact, making it a small aoe (~180, which is a bit larger than Mind Stab), it would be much better in terms of AoE. The buff duration should be lowered aswell, with fury being between 1/2s and 1s depending on how much bonus boon duration you have.
Also the clones could have a smaller aoe radius on their autoattack.
Then reduce the warlocks damage, and give it AoE aswell, and we have a nice aoe weapon.

Chaos Storm does not give you multiple instances of Aegis. It CAN give you multiple instances of Aegis, but you can also end up with 10s of Swiftness and no Aegis at all. The chance to get aegis after aegis is as big as it is to get swiftness after swiftness.

Also to the 3 times warden thing. Saying that you can summon 3 wardens when fighting a dragon or champion mob does show the awesome AoE of a mesmer? How? You are still fighting a single mob.

In a DE where you have to defend multiple sides of a camp, the warden becomes much less effective.

JemL.3501:

what i mean if you go to wvw for try to do 1v1s is not a go, pretty simple.

they should add 1v1 option in spvp or even 1v1 tourneys

There is alot inbetween zerg and one player. Like teams and stuff. Currently there is just “The Zerg”.

djones.4751:

No, I am not talking about those things although they’re all pretty solid builds.

We’re talking full power precision Phantasmal haste triple warden that throw out 6-7k a piece(a lot more with some nice crit streaks). Now note I did mention a highly specific situation.

The dynamic events where you have a very strong central enemy. Centaur chieftains, Champion risen abominations, etc etc that don’t move about. (mostly due to the mass of melee players there). You drop 3 wardens and smile.

Phantasmal haste currently is…not working right for Wardens where instead of it reducing a 14 attack cooldown from activation to 11.2 seconds it reduces it to 6.6 seconds. As such you can have 3 phantasmal wardens out doing IMMENSE damage over a very short time. They can have a good 50%+ crit chance with Phantasmal Fury and when you’re rocking 2k power they just hit so incredibly hard, and they do it in an aoe.

Note : That will be sustained 20-25k on one target, as well as up to 20-25k on other targets depending on how close to the center they are but to be honest they’re never getting that close.

You want data and builds? There you go. Is it specific? yes. Does it happen? Definitely. Is it applicable in dungeons? Hell no but we weren’t talking about that.

Generally speaking it’s good manners to ask for the data before presuming people don’t have it.

So you can summon a warden around every 7 seconds?
What kind of server a you playing on, when your DE mob does not die in 14 seconds (killing your warden aswell).

Also even if 3 warden deal 20-25k dmg, you will still deal that amount of damage just around every 8 seconds. That would be ~2.500dps. Should be around the same, a fire staff ele does with autoattack.

JemL.3501:

yes it is, isnt 1v1 battles, thats why is world vs world not individual vs individual

Different objective are made for different teamsizes. I read once that they had in mind, that a camp is for a group, doylaks for a 2-3 players, a tower for 2 teams, fortresses for guilds, and stonemist for a worldwide attack. Then after one of the BWEs they added the sentries for solo players.

At the moment there are some zergs with 30-50 people running over everything, getting the same amount of XP/Karma/Gold as a small group.

A small group can run camps as intended, two can also attack a tower, but if the zerg arrives, they will just mow down any offensive they see and keep on circle attacking.

They could break that up, if objective would have a reward pool.
10 players attacking a tower. Here get 20k xp, (on 80), 550 karma and 3s50c for that.
50 players attacking the same tower?. Here you get 4k xp, 110 karma and 70c.

Everyone who contributed at least for bronze rewards drains from the pool.

You can still zerg, but your individual reward will go down alot. I predict people will split up to approaciate sizes for a particular objectives, in order to maximize their personal reward.

Second thing to do:
Increase the rewards for killing actual players. Currently I gain the same amount or even more badges by killing guards instead of players.