Guild Wars 2

WHY would a thief get this skill- it’s the LAST class that needs any more ways of escaping enemies or doing more damage to them.

I can see the reasoning for mesmers and necros- but why do the devs always want to buff their favourite class (thief).

Thiefs can run away and reset fights, but now they can run away while snaring you and making sure you can’t move?

Stupid idea to even think of giving it to thief- especially as for a necro it will be only accessed via death shroud but no doubt will just be an add on to an existing skill for thieves.#

If only there were proper GvG maps for 20, 25 and 30 man battles per side, with some form of ladder and match up system- oh wait, then it would be like gw1 and there would be ….wait for it…Guild Wars….

They really need to add this, and have the results count in some small way towards point totals for wvw when guilds battle each other from the matched up servers. It would also cut down on queues for borderlands as space would no longer be taken up by 20 people being akitten the spawn area whilst they await spaces to start their GvG.

Maybe then they will bring in factions within each server so people can battle for control of the server areas with bonuses accruing in pve to the side that is winning, etc as in bring back factions battles aka GW.

The match up has been fun- when I’ve managed to get on this week we have been outmanned a lot of the time but the loot bags haven’t stopped flowing:-))

Favourite moment was running into a huge pile of enemies and getting them all to turn and start to chase me, just as our zerglet arrived from the opposite direction- yes, I died, but they got wiped, I got ressed and picked up all those lovely loot bags:-))

Did I miss the bit in the trap description where it says ‘thief becomes rooted in place and is unable to use any skills or move whatsoever’?

Whoopee you are revealed- now you actually have to learn to use some skill instead of just disappearing whenever you want to- poor you.

Welcome to how the rest of us play all the time:-)

If you can’t cope with running over the extremely rare anti stealth trap (anyone actually use them? cost is too high, area of effect is too small) then you really need to go play something else.

Dusted off the ranger (glass cannon -ish, lb/sb one..I have three rangers) this morning for a bit of fun, and got to say it was great fun defending SM against first one server’s 40+ then the next would come, this repeated for over an hour with our 20-30 man pug taking them out every time.

Dropped out when our pug group breached the 40 mark- obviously news of epic defences spreads fast;-)

Thanks for all the fun today.

Anybody but Viziblob. Getting tired of only having them come out to play when they outnumber us 2 or 3 to 1, and even then they are afraid to step out of range of their 50 AC.

Although on the plus side they do yield a lot of bags, so it’s not all bad:-)

It’s been quite amusing this week, when you spot Viz moving around you call it, no need for numbers as it’s always 50-100 of them- the only time you need to give numbers is if it’s actually less than fifty (happens about once a night…).

Ralathar.7236:

If you totaled up the value of everything in each chest you do indeed get alot more ectos. You get 15+ silver, siege, badges, and greens or better. Each chest is literally worth at least 1 ecto, in some lucky cases multiple ectos.

For the average player or for those on lower tiers, one rank per day is not unusual, which may take them 3-4 hours to get. On average they will then receive 15 silver, a green worth 2 silver, 5 badges worth nothing and a piece of siege (most won’t use it, or will throw it down when your attacking a gate on op of the ram that you actually need to build- certainly won’t donate to the commander). So maybe half an ecto per chest, once a day, from which you need to subtract the repair bills (lower tiers get less loot too, as there are less large battles).

After taking into account cost of foods, etc you lose money in wvw- especially as Anet seem to want to keep the price of superior sharpening stones etc artifically high, unless you are on a server that wins a lot of group battles so that you get piles of loot.

He’s stolen my guild tag! BLOB stands for Beings Lost On Borderlands, a Gandaran guild….

I enjoyed the last answer the most, especially exluding rangers, necros and engineers.

Please feel free to exclude necros especially, and even more especially if you are fighting against SFR or Gandara, and I’ll enjoy helping wipe your party.

I feel my necro is OP, until I’m downed, then realise my downed HP is broken…worst time to discover it is when u have just managed to down the other player in a 1v1 and he downs u with his downed skills and then u die as your downed HP pool is broken! Was still a good fight and thanks for the /bow afterwards – one day I will run a solo necro build , it’s already fun to chase thiefs around the map, solo built would be even funnier.

To the OP- not going to happen, mainly as what works well with a particular set of players won’t work with another even with identical skill sets- you have to mold the builds to suit both the leader of the group and it’s players.

Try 2 guardians, 2 warriors 2 ele 2 mes 2 thiefs 7 necro 7 ranger 6 engineers ( I made that up randomly, although could be kinda funny, I’ll call it the ‘zergstopper’ build as it’s designed to stop a zerg in it’s tracks…).

Thanks for a lovely weekend of badges and drops Viz- I love the way open field fights always end up with piles of bags on the floor:-)

Not so great is the complete skill shutdown whenever large groups clash inside SM- although it is quite funny to run right through the other zerg without casting anything, not even an autoattack, and taking very little damage too….maybe this is the future of GW2, kittenwars!

A good weekend for this pug (I can’t really use vent/ts- for personal reasons, so guilds don’t want me).

Beings Lost On Borderlands (BLOB) is not recruiting:p

Ah the joys of playing zergwars- can either play against AM this week (40+ zerg at 2am) or Viz….

Viz are the only server that no one bothers to say numbers when you see them, unless it is actually less than 50, it which case it’s so remarkable it’s worth mentioning.

Thanks for the bags and the ranks tonight – hopefully we can we get some good drops from each other.

I don’t want retaliation removed, made harder to apply, or anything like that- it just needs a cooldown so you can’t be hit for 20k damage from one passive boon skill within a 5 second time frame. At the moment it is entirely possible to have 20 rangers and engineers on a wall firing into a 40 man retaliation zerg and for all of them to die without the 40 man zerg lifting a finger against them and all within ten seconds. and without killing a single zerg member (unless one of them stepped out the water fields, protection, aegis and got unlucky with random hits to their 20k+ hp at 800-1k per hit)

380 damage to everyone in the area that is attacking every second would still be the most powerful attack skill in the entire game – and it’s a boon.

All it needs is an adjustment – after all, they nerfed the hell out of aoe skills (which was terrible, would be great to have it back!).

That’s all it needs to make it a useful source of damage without being stupidly overpowered in certain situations.

Got to agree with the ‘add your buff’ idea to the current claimant, which would be an excellent change and would make the usefulness of guild buffs so much better.

It would mean small guilds can contribute, even if it’s just one buff ’what’s missing from the buffs’ ‘ok, we’ll click that one then’.

So multiple guilds could ‘claim’ a structure, with just the first one having their symbol up (because no one knows who they are anyway!).

Considering I have seen exactly two steel chests in my time in wvw, the fact that one dropped and then I died before picking it up, then despawned just as I was 10 yards away after running back from respawning, makes me a firm believer in auto looting in wvw.

I guess in CK’s view of the world picking up that drop is better than being able to save your team – ‘oops sorry guys, didn’t use that skill I was too busy picking up my loot bags pressing F while running over ground covered in fields and combos and everything else that makes them invisible’.

You can use them for various things-like getting a pile of siege and donating it to your commander, getting armor and weapons, getting some ascended items (yeah, need laurels too). Or get even more piles of them and make some superior siege stuff and donate that.

If you think their only use is to make Gift of Battle then your not really a wvw player! (grins)

No need to hoard them and let them clutter up your bank or toons.

Sorry, maybe I’m being a little thick here, but your suggestion of time-gated servers doesn’t really make much sense. I play at different times every day, and different again at the weekend, so who exactly would I be fighting for? Say I play on the 6pm server and do an all-nighter, does that server close half way through my playtime and throw me out?

Who would I be fighting for? Would I ever see the casual friends I’ve made in wvw? How long would the match ups last?

I expect what would really happen is large guilds would plan a time to join and completely dominate a map full of pugs, leading to the pugs/smaller guilds giving up on wvw for the day or just giving up.

Had a great day with our EB ‘pug’ group playing necro and taking the enemy’s towers off them several times. Our EB commanders are generally pretty good at giving instructions and getting people to move as one, use fields etc. It’s always a shock going to Gandara where there are generally less people and the co ordination and use of group skills is much less evident. That’s not to say it’s not fun, it’s just a real shift in thinking and playstyle between the servers- lot os decent Gandara players around!

I’m sure it would be more fun in a TS controlled guild raid but most days I am unable to use TS as i am sure are many others.

And to define how we play, I have formed Beings Lost On Borderlands (BLOB) to represent, all applications to join will be rejected:-)

It’s interesting that most of those defending retaliation fall into some distinct categories- namely those that solo (so they don’t see the problem), and those that play thief or guardian.

The solution is simple: as the receiver of the damage, you can only receive one tick of retaliation per second. That still means one guardian can be doing retaliation damage on 20 targets a second without raising a finger whilst taking no damage themselves..which seems to be the argument guardians use to justify telling people not to use aoe’s against multiple targets- don’t use your aoe’s, they cause so much damage, and yet what exactly does your no brainer skill do?

Sounds like guardians want to have their cake and eat it at the moment.

All it needs is a cap for the amount per second any player can receive from it – at the moment it is potentially one of the most powerful skills in the game and you don’t even have to be near the other players for them to be damaged by you.

We got back SM again – only to finally lose it when our numbers dropped right off.

Worst thing today was CON asking people to move out of EB to another BL just so they could get their ‘private raid’ going. Not sure that really helps the server or the image of your guild- hopefully it was a one off and not a regular occurence, it really does put people off playing in wvw. And then you drive away players who will take over after you have had your fun..

Probably a better idea to take your ‘private raid’ to one of the other BL’s – we did this with great success and a lot of fun on FSP with AoA- trying to do a raid in prime time on EB was always pretty impossible as you wouldn’t get guildies in and we would never ask people to ‘go to another BL’ as that shows a complete lack of respect for others.

I can understand the ‘no tags’ idea to encourage people to join TS, but is it working, or are people just thinking ‘ho hum no tag, let’s run around retaking camps, oops there goes another tower’?

Bear in mind also there are a large number of people who cannot use TS for various reasons, so if your not showing a tag you’re probably losing a lot of the server strength and negatively impacting the score.

Having said all this, was a good day of wvw for me, some epic fights, and those golem raids on the keeps were just awesome!

Posted this already, but the simple solution is to have it proc once a second on the receiver – so your average barrage will receive around 1900 damage back (which is probably more than you did to any single player anyway, and they will have regened most of that back).

Leaves it as a useful skill doing a decent amount of damage to multiple targets but no longer the ultimate anti- aoe skill.

And un nerf confusion ANet, we need more anti- zerg skills! while your there remove the ‘heal on going into stealth’ and give thiefs ONE heal with a cooldown of 30-40 seconds and 3 condition removals that they have to use up slots for. Then fix d/d eles- maybe make skills unable to heal them while they are moving at faster than normal speed.

And PLEASE nerf my necro, it’s insanely OP in group fights:-)

Oops, dreaming again…

My new record for confusion damage on my necro- 20k. That’s one skill doing 20k damage to me that is unblockable and isn’t even an active.

Yep, working as intended….

Maybe they should have confusion reflect 100% of retaliation damage back to the caster- would be hilarious to see some guardians suddenly drop dead. But then they would complain about the damage they received (being way less than they caused, but apparently that’s ok for rangers and engis), or would have to Learn to Play and not have it running when confusion hits (like they tell anyone who uses an aoe).

People should realise that throwing barrage out when your standing defending a wall is about all a ranger can do- SB skills won’t do anything, and your BM build is completely useless. It’s bad enough that half your damage ie your pet won’t even go out there and attack your target, and if it did it dies in seconds..

I tried a tanky BM build and almost died from boredom- sure, 1v1 it’s almost impossible to kill but all that leaping around got stale real fast, and i’m not the solo roaming type (or I’d play my thief more and stealth heal, etc…).

In small scale fights and 1v1 there is nothing wrong with retaliation damage, it’s when it’s scaled up in wvw that it becomes a problem.

All it needs is a simple cap on the amount of damage it returns per second and it would work just fine, say once per second for 380 damage per second, that’s 1900 damage on an average barrage – about the same damage as you cause to the average zergoid using barrage.

Yes, finally, one dropped for me. Sadly as we were in a group battle I didn’t notice as I was moving (who thought of this idea that loot bags drop behind you as you move….and you have to use F to pick up in the middle of a battle where there is enough going on).

Smoke clears, I’m dead (as Gandara are masters of the art of fighting going backwards and I forgot, used to servers that like to go forwards), and lo and behold there is that wonderful chest.

Respawn, run back as fast as I can and guess what- it despawns just before I get to it.

Whoever thought that loot bags should despawn so quickly needs shooting (by a ranger, so that would be miss miss blocked dodged blocked miss miss).

Bring in auto looting in wvw or at least double the despawn time for loot drops- 5 minutes would be good if you can’t put in autolooting, so at least you have half a chance of running back to the spot.

Ascended rings can be purchased for 25 laurels and 250 badges of honor.

Someone remind me, what is the price at the laurels merchant in Lions Arch?

Laurels are so anti- multiple toons as is the whole current wvw Wexp set up, it’s like ANet saying ’ PLAY ONLY ONE TOON OR ELSE’

Wouldn’t have minded 5-10 laurels (that’s still 5-10 days worth, or about 20 days at my current rate of them) per piece, at that rate all i’d need is another 5000 badges or so and 100-200 laurels to get ascended rings (nevermind the other pieces) for my toons.

The only gating of ascended items is in wvw- in pve they can fly through fractals in minutes and there is a chances of DROPS there.

Maybe they should have added ascended items as a drop chance in the wvw chests and removed the ‘masterwork’ items and traps.

You can see why i gave up even trying to achieve any meaningful wvw rank across my toons- I’m about rank 50 ish, but it’s spread over multiple toons so my highest is 13…

Yes, thiefs are balanced- they can also do more damage at ranged than rangers using a bow, then use several skills to both disappear and heal up. They also have a skill that does great damage for an extended period of time while reflecting projectiles back, so yes, totally useless in a zerg. /sarcasm

There is no downside, so there would be no reason for highers not to go out.

Let’s face it, in most battles you won’t notice people’s ranks as your too busy doing other stuff to scout around.

Higher rank players are supposedly more experienced and should welcome the challenges having their rank brings.

The idea was more to add some more fun to wvw, hell if I was already rank 150+ I’d be welcoming this with open arms and seeing how many people I can lead a merry dance with while my server captures everything else.

Was thinking about the current reward system for Wexp and remembered something from Aion that they could apply here. More points for killing higher ranks, so the bigger the rank difference between you and your enemy the more Wexp you receive for killing them.

This will make highly ranked players targets that are worth killing.

Not sure on the mechanics or how many additional points it should be per rank difference as wouldn’t want people exploiting it for chests but maybe 3 per rank difference might work.

Also, killing an enemy commander should reward bonus points- say 100. As a counter to that, commanders should earn an extra 10 points per kill (yes, they will rank up faster, hence be worth more to kill too).

Could make things a bit more interesting.

Quote: Again, you are looking it merely at a point of view on how much damage YOU took and not the overall effectiveness of your attack. You certainly got hit with a ton of damage but you dished out an overwhelmingly greater number onto the foes you hit. Quote.

That just about sums up everything that is wrong with retaliation and the attitude of guardians on it.

If several people hit your zerg ball then the total retaliation damage your ONE SKILL did could be well over 100,000. You got hit for nothing, and yet you are claiming that it is reasonable for your skill to be able to do so much damage and have no consequences to you.

Let’s see how you would cope if 25% of your retaliation damage was reflected back onto you- would be quite hilarious to see guardians dropping instantly in zerg fights until they learned to use their skills situationally like they keep telling rangers to.

getting same problem- when I do finally manage to get in, skills lag, map freezes and it’s unplayable.

Oh well, off to do something else instead until they fix it next week..

Nordic Natedog.4360:

Victory.2879:

The amount of damage it does is fine, it’s the fact there is no internal cooldown to limit the amount of damage you receive. I fire off one barrage, which hits maybe 3-10 people for 3 hits each of around 1k damage, so the most they got was 3k each, quickly dealt with by zerg boons etc. I get between 2k and 9k retaliation- however, if a pile of people are all bunched up I hit 5 random people multiple times, each receiving around 1k damage and I get hit for 12k. Unless I’m at full health, I’m downed and the zerg or even those few players it hit didn’t even feel it.

IT NEVER MISSES- what other skill has 100% chance of hitting you no matter what?

All they need to do to fix it is give it an internal cooldown of one hit to you per .5 of a second or 1 per second, and fix the duration to last 10 seconds, non stackable, so that it becomes a skill to be used at the right time not just blanketed on recharge without any thought at all.

Your math is way way off. First, if you hit each person 1k three times, so you dealt out 15-20k or so. Retal then deals around 380 each hit for a total of 5700. This is a far cry from the 12k you are talking about.

Roll a ranger and go test it- as a poster below you has stated, the theoretical maximum hits is 5 times 12= 60 at around 380 per tick.

‘Luckily’ a lot of bow shots miss/get blocked/dodged/generally fail to hit so I was showing what happens on an average barrage.

Even 1.5k damage incoming per second from a passive skill is way too much, bearing in mind the incredibly long time barrage takes to animate and complete.

And if you think only barrage is the problem, think again- pretty much all my bowshots can hit multiple targets and most of the time I can get back MORE damage than I am causing without trying very hard.

The duration is what really causes the problem – if it lasted as long as confusion (6 seconds, non-stacking duration) it wouldn’t be a problem, wait for it to drop before firing, along with never missing and having NO cap.

It’s a badly designed skill and needs fixing- how they fix it is up to them. Maybe the easiest fix won’t be anything we have come up with yet- but it does need a fix.

The amount of damage it does is fine, it’s the fact there is no internal cooldown to limit the amount of damage you receive. I fire off one barrage, which hits maybe 3-10 people for 3 hits each of around 1k damage, so the most they got was 3k each, quickly dealt with by zerg boons etc. I get between 2k and 9k retaliation- however, if a pile of people are all bunched up I hit 5 random people multiple times, each receiving around 1k damage and I get hit for 12k. Unless I’m at full health, I’m downed and the zerg or even those few players it hit didn’t even feel it.

IT NEVER MISSES- what other skill has 100% chance of hitting you no matter what?

All they need to do to fix it is give it an internal cooldown of one hit to you per .5 of a second or 1 per second, and fix the duration to last 10 seconds, non stackable, so that it becomes a skill to be used at the right time not just blanketed on recharge without any thought at all.

Retaliation does insane amounts of damage if you try and launch an aoe (or even some bow shots that hit multiple targets – I can easily take 12k + damage from retal. Unlike confusion, waiting for retal to come off your target isn’t going to happen, as they can stack it all day long.

The stupid thing about retaliation is you can paint your entire zerg with it 24/7.

Needs a serious nerf bat – it doesn’t help stop zergs at all, in fact it very much encourages them, it has stupidly long uptime and there is no way to avoid it if you ever want to damage an enemy.

No idea why they nerfed confusion to hell which was very anti zerg and yet left confusion completely alone- maybe some thief complained about confusion….

Having transferred my main account back to Gandara last night (I’m baaaaaccck!) I’m giving kudos to the great fight I had with a FS d/d ele at the ogres on my necro – the timing of your skills was great and it’s the first time a d/d ele has ever beaten my necro 1v1, even though I am built for group play!

Looking forward to moving up a tier for a while.

The problem is that the fastest way of gaining ranks is to join a zerg in a high tier and run into another zerg of 80 people- depending on how many you manage to tag that’s almost a rank right there, certainly half a rank.

What it means is that many players in tiers 1 and 2 are well over the 100 rank mark (150+) and will benefit from the new chests whereas players from the lower tiers will be struggling to make one rank per day.

OP, I’d suggest you contact support and ask them to move you to a tier1 or tier2 server so you can achieve your ranks, and then move you back when you reach 100…

Or be like me and give up chasing ranks and just enjoy what your doing.

I Deschain I.4623:

There is btw the chance for a precursor in those chests.

Also with the upcoming update to WvW, there will be a chance players can earn precursors from the WvW rank reward chests as well.

https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/gw2/New-Legendaries-Rework/first#post2074359

Right, time to transfer to a zerg blob server to crank up those ranks..any suggestions as to which one (generally I play 10pm UK time except weekends)…

We saw a complete classic LOL moment yesterday when GS weilding ranger came leaping amongst the 4 of us, realised we weren’t going to die and then attempted to run into the keep we had just captured a couple minutes ago.

I swear his character looked shocked – nevermind what he must have said to himself in the couple of seconds before we put him out of his misery!

We almost felt sorry for the guy, but thanks for making us smile :-)

Herr der Friedhoefe.2490:

alcopaul.2156:

Badges + discounted laurels. sounds good.

This probably wont cost a lot of badges either. They are currently worth about 1s each based on the 1g for a golem blueprint, or 100 badges. Anet has an economist and he knows that Ectos trade for around 20s, and you can also get ascended gear with laurels and 50 ectos.

Run the arithmaticky that we all learned in school and I expect ascended gear to come in around 1k badges. That’s not a lot for an active WvW player, plus we’ve been told that Ectos will drop from WvW chests. Even at a “reduced cost” the limiting factor is still the laurels, and what’s on offer.

On that topic, Back items?

1k badges would be WAY too high for low tier players or anyone that doesn’t run with the zerg in primetime.

They really get to get sensible and make badges tradeable along with dungeon drops and ascended gears (before wearing, bind on wearing is not an issue) so that everyone has access to them including the more casual players.

Also, laurels are a terrible limiter when trying to kit out more than one toon (I have ten lvl80s and play 4 most days when I log in to GW2).

The chest idea should have been account wide along with WvW ranks – character bound is making even less sense now than it ever did.

In a lot of tiers it is hard to make even ONE rank in a gaming session of several hours, and you might see 20-30 badges all night. The system needs to take this into account, otherwise there will be more people clogging up the queues on the upper tiers to gain access to zerg mode wexp farming…

Maybe Anet thought that the smaller team would throw down a few AC just before the zerg comes along and wipe the zerg with 3-4 well placed AC. Sadly the smaller group is unlikely to even think of throwing down a cart or a bally (or even be carrying supplies in quite a few cases I’ve seen) until it’s way too late.

Slapping down a cart and getting it built fast out in the open can turn a battle very fast, especially if the enemy isn’t expecting it and runs along in a nice ball straight through null field and necro wells just as the AC hits them, followed closely by our much smaller group.

The problem is that the zerg mentality makes for lazy minds (press 1, rinse, repeat), increasing AC damage on people wasn’t that much of an issue just required some thinking rather than head butting doors. It’s the damage to siege that needed fixing, way too high.

I can see one problem with this system straight away- the so called ‘leet’ guilds would be forever telling ‘noobs’ to ‘get off wvw you’re ruining our ability to score points’.

I’d much prefer to see the ‘outmanned’ buff actually be a proper buff, scaling dependent on the number of opposition players on the map, so that it gave you a real boost and helped to even out the numbers.

Was great having the outmanned buff for most of last night’s playtime for me- MS run golems at almost exactly the same time every night, it’s like having our own event ‘spot the golems’:-)

Great fights over SM and in our own BL- but it was a bit sad late on when we were calling for help taking down Hills gates and there was only 4 of us on our own BL!!!

Oh well, which server should we all move to to farm ranks for chests? Kinda seems like we all need to zerg vs zerg and clock up those easy points.

Not happy that there is a laurel cost for the ascended wvw stuff- seems we are still penalised against fractals runners who only have to do what they like doing to get their ascended stuff.

Maybe they should make prices different in each tier- and to stop tier jumping just to take advantage of this make it so you lose all ranks when you join a new server (but get it back when you return to your home server).

The time of day I play these days we are outmanned most of the time, which makes getting piles of badges a little tricky as well as gaining rank when i play many alts- my account overall would be rank 30+ but as they decided it is character based I am penalised and the highest one is rank 11 or 12…if the chest rewards are char bound that is going to be even more annoying!

The problem they are having is deciding on a reasonable price so that it is fair to all players- of course if they hadn’t made so many items untradeable in the first place this wouldn’t have been much of a problem as people would have been able to equip their toons with items bought in the AH.

Badges should be tradeable, along with a lot of other items needed to make armor, etc. Bind on use is fine- account bound would have been better.

Maybe they will bring out different rates for different tiers to reflect the numbers of badges players in different tiers get- it’s a lot harder to get badges when there might only be 10-15 people on an entire map then when two 80 man zergs clash every 5-10 minutes and badges are littered on the ground like confetti.

Was fun last night being outmanned from about 11pm on in EB and from 1am having the outmanned buff in our own borderlands- made the fights interesting!

The golem rush on our garrison meant it was time for bed for me at 3am, but it’s always fund fighting against Gandara.

FSP definitely suffering from a lack of players at the moment- they probably all trying the new pve content or guild missions.

I tried this build out on one of my rangers, and have to say I enjoyed it for a change- it actually worked quite well with a SB as I was fooling around and had swopped the sword out for SB when we got in a battle- was fun healing up effectively while stacking conditions on the guardians.

Didn’t enjoy it so much in any sort of larger group fight but that might be more to do with my noobishness on the build and the fact I’m usually playing ranged than anything else.

Enjoyed the vid, was great watching you leap around endlessly whilst watching people being hit by your pet. Quite surprised at the lack of skill of the opposition- maybe those thiefs will learn to run when they see Jag and a GS, as they could easily have disengaged when it was obvious they couldn’t beat you:-)

Looks like a fun build, but only useful for roaming like most BM builds so not really my cup of tea- but kudos for having so much fun with it and hopefully people will try it out.

Great fun yesterday inside the dredge tunnels, we ran into a similar sized group (about 20+ on each side, they had maybe slighter more than us), and I finally taught one of our commanders the value of throwing down well positioned siege – one arrow cart, quickly built (great job those that heeded the ‘build fast’ call), and I had a blast turning the tide of the battle.
Just goes to show that siege is not just for attacking/defending keeps, etc- it really is useful out in the field too.

More fun was had by the 3 carts we put down when Gandara came knocking on SM’s door- it’s always much more fun when you wait before using them until they are well within range and then all let rip at once!

Ty all, enjoying the battles when I can spare the time to play but still missing the variety after the recent nerfs- so many thiefs, eles, guardians and not a lot of anything else.

Guess I should dust off the mesmer and see if I can make something viable with it without changing every piece of gear on there…

The key to LB is to learn to use it and swop to SB while skills cool down, and make sure you can maintain a gap between you and the enemy (clue: use pets that chill!).

You can run a berserker build and learn positioning and it can be really fun- it’s not easy, it doesn’t really have any burst damage, shots miss a lot, pets are still fairly useless and you can’t stealth trap like a thief can, but it’s still better to play an honest toon than a thief that exploits a broken mechanic.

What’s sad is that thief can actually be quite good in a zerg with a bow- most of their skills do better damage than a full zerk ranger and they can disappear too!

Great buff for thiefs- now they can stealth up and place a supply draining trap..as the stealth revealing trap is WAY overpriced considering it is triggered by practically anything…and bang back you all go for supplies . Ten supples AND badges- who thinks of these things…

The way to deal with stealth is to have a 10 second pot usable by any class with a 2 minute cooldown.

Quote: Also you need to expand your WvW knowledge.

I lol’d.

I’ve played every class in wvw to 80, full exotics, and various builds – I even have three rangers for different racial skills

I have played T1 EU, T2, T4, T7 and T8, and probably all the tiers inbetween.

I avoid T1 like the plague- might be nice to clock up wExp like it going out of fashion but 3 hour queues in my limited (nowadays) wvw time isn’t my idea of fun and relaxation.

And I was talking about the 20-30 man ‘zergs’ when I mentioned it all being guardians, eles and thiefs.

Dependent on the time of day and whether the guild is running something decides which class I will play, although generally it is a bow ranger as I like a challenge:-)

Necro was fun for a while until loads of them appeared, and mesmer glamour support build was great until the nerf bomb fell on it- now it feels like kitten into the wind whilst retaliation still eats me if I try a barrage on a zerg…

here’s what i mostly saw tonight:

Thiefs, usually in pairs, or thief and engineer.

D/d eles

Tank/healing Guardians

There were so many d/d eles freely running back and forth – even if they get to 10% health they just run away and are back to 100% in seconds. Backed up by Guardians stacking all sorts they become almost impossible to take down. Both these classes wonder around quite happily in arrow cart shots ignoring them.

Thiefs are even more annoying in pairs or with engineer support- now that engineers can spike with 25 stacks of might on, keep up healing the whole time while running around on speed and then be stealthed by the thief…

Think I saw ONE mesmer the whole time- and he was probably mainly there for portal duty.

Few rangers around, but they seemed to be a bit clueless.

So the huge nerf to confusion has succeeded in removing the best effective counter to huge stacks of boons, leaving the boon-laden classes free to dominate.

The lack of diversity in wvw is starting to make it a bit montonous.

Got to say it’s a long way from in a good place in wvw- no other class suffers so much from being placed on a wall/firing up at a wall.

Rapid fire is surely the devs idea of a joke name for a skill that takes SO long to cast you can start it at max range and your opponent can have run past you by the time it gets over half way through the channel.

What do all you Gs/SB weilding BM’s do during sieges- pew pew and hit for 200 damage, or stand there and hope other people come along so you can contribute?

At least pets don’t die quite so frequently now in wvw unless they run past 5 or more enemies doing aoe, but they are still about as much use at actually causing damage 90% of the time as a snowball in hell.

Arrow attacks are way too easy to dodge or they miss or they are obstructed (sometimes by your pet or another friendly player!!!).

So yep, might be alright for spvp etc but still needs a lot of work to be a viable option in all areas of wvw unless you like solo roaming – but then you’d be sensible and roll a thief.

Gandara- always the best fun, whatever happened to my little mesmer friend (you know who you are- always being sizest to those big clumsy char…).