Guild Wars 2

I personally was “dragged” through that gate of north-west tower once during one of the sieges some time ago. Don’t have any idea what that was, certainly none of my skills since I didn’t use neither blink nor iLeap. Moreover, that was not only me, my guildmate who was there with me was also suddenly inside.

The best we could come up with was that it was defending cata splash that threw us somehow through that gate inside the tower.

P.S. And while I’m a mesmer so you could say “yeeeaaah suuuuure you didn’t do anything you kitten mesmer!”, the other guy was guardian.

… or maybe I was too quick to judge. As usual though, lol. No significant forces of Deso on WvW today and we are losing our 40k lead rapidly.

Well, start of this week so far shows that Deso is not T3 material, being too strong compared to current T3 opponents (no disrespect). The problem however is that we currently are not quite up for T2 either. Is our destiny in the near future to wander between these two tiers?..

On a less serious note – it saddens me that I don’t see much of any mentioning of my guild (GH). I know, silly me – relatively small guild with 3 weekly WvW events, what you’d expect. But last event at saturday… man, it felt like complete domination in the field. Bummer we couldn’t take Garrison from MS during time frame of the event, much respect to you guys figting nails and teeths for your keep. Although you were a bit slow at realizing that you pretty much outnumber attacker forces so you don’t have to sit behind the walls and can go counteroffensive.

ReqX.3178:

It is two wannabe-superstar German servers (I should know as I play on Kodash), so you prolly have to go to https://forum-de.gw2archive.eu/forum/pvp/wuvwuv/dnis-Eu-vs-Millersund-DE-vs-Kodash-DE

Quote from the thread:

Das koennt eine schoenne woche werden.

Lol yeah, that’s for sure.

P.S. kitten they even have separate registration for localized forums… >_<

Baelish.9850:

So, yeah. Keep things simple, and the requirements are simple.

I was addressing your point about portal working distance only. If you use intuition to measure that, you are not a good mesmer.

Portal placement spot and timing – that of course is a matter of skill. Big time.

Slic.2406:

Not trying to be argumentative, but.. I have to make something clear.

If people REFUSE to get better, to try new things, to be good at timing/twitch, then how do they expect to fare against a person that doesn’t refuse to do these things? I’m sorry, if they refuse to change themselves for the better, then they should expect to always get clowned on.

I know it’s tempting to just nerf everything into oblivion so we are all autoattacking each other to death, but maybe ppl should reconsider going down this path again and again.

Now here you are talking to the wrong person. Well as if its something new.

Your posts is this thread are generally quite erratic logic-wise (I could break it down for you if you wish). But I will not follow your attitude and make blanket statements about reasons I personally might see for that.

If you are “person that doesnt refuse to get better”, you may want revise this thread closely to see that you are either trowing argumets to the people who don’t disagree with you on particular point, or skewing discussion in perpendicular directions randomly.

Slic.2406:

Yaro.3251:

It’s not the habit, it’s just one of two channels of information available during combat in a video game – video and sound. Everything else is a product of experience. To quickly get a grasp of opponents’ build major characteristics, to predict his actions and act accordingly.

I know this is going to blow your mind, but you don’t need to CONSTANTLY see your opponent to know where they are (or where they should be, if they are to continue to be a threat).

Did I say anything to the contrary?

I don’t know how many times I have to repeat this for others, frankly I’m beginning to think you don’t believe me enough to even try to change yourselves.

Bingo! Finally you’ve used basic logic to come to enlightening discovery: There’s atleast TWO options – either people do not understand what you are talking about or they just do not agree with you.

And it’s not experience that lets you just read someone else’s patterns from partial clues/observations, that’s something you CANNOT just learn with time. That is all on you, your natural talent and quick thinking and your ability to have what I call ‘battle calm’.

That’s exactly experience. Well, it may be either that or natural talent. “Battle calm” IS mostly product of experience.

It’s not the habit, it’s just one of two channels of information available during combat in a video game – video and sound. Everything else is a product of experience. To quickly get a grasp of opponents’ build major characteristics, to predict his actions and act accordingly.

Baelish.9850:

A good mesmer needs an intelligent, experienced knowledge of the terrain, and relative distance to pull off a good portal bomb. Otherwise the portal will fail. And though I’m sure there’s sloppy players just throwing portals down out there without regard or intuition to the distance cap and how it relates to the terrain they’re in…

Mesmers do not need an intuition for that. Just minimap properly ajusted. And only if reauired distance reaches “red zone”. Which happens not that often in the battle where you don’t have a lot of time to pull it off.

Yeah, that’s perfectly fine, my point wasn’t about validity of ninja tactic. It was about depicting it as personal achievement in PvP.

Yeah, every such video looks really good (oh and btw that Quip sound… man, this probably induces tic and convulsions in your “returning encounters”).
But the thing is – while WvW is an easy way to have solo PvP fun and I don’t have anything against it, to brag about it and to make videos?.. I dunno.

You see, WvW is a game of numbers and tactics at scale without any qualification for participants. Two consequences of this would be:
1. There’s no way to predict personal pvp skill of random encounter. To the contrary, you may rely on it being mediocre most of the time.
2. Even if above is not the case, WvW (if you go there to affect server rating, score and income as part of raid) may require qute different skill- and statbuild. So those who come to WvW for what it is designed for may not be in a best position for 1v1 PvP.

I personally love 1v1 PvP encounters with those solo ninja thief types (or any class for that matter) on WvW with my raid-support-specced mesmer. Because it is often a real challenge and I don’t do sPvP that much.

It is a bummer hovever that you don’t have an optimal build or don’t have time to change utility skills and weapon to be ready for duel against thief.

Please keep that in mind while you are having fun soloing WvW and picturing all your opponents as tools.

Meh, another video of a thief “soloing WvW”…
If you want to show off your personal pvp skill vs worthy opponents, guess what – there’s whole sPvP thing going on around the corner

Not to mention that opponents who allow conditions to grow and prosper freely on them do not even fall into “warm up” category. It is more like gathering omnomberries. Or PvE at most.

I love how SOME pleople are eager to generalize and use “every” word when it is not appropriate. I didn’t. I’m Deso player. I don’t care if there was alliance or not. Hence?..

tita.6358:

basics maths:
you get 15k points between 3am and 8 am.
15k x7 = 105k
actual score Deso 270k . VS 200k

you destroyed nothing…

One could argue that RUIN night crew was heavily draining overall VZ WWW resources as I’ve previously said. But this goes both ways. Coming into game and seeing that kind of lead in points, rest of the server (in general) didn’t have to strain that much. “Well, they cannot possibly catch up with us so we’ll just relax and have some fun, we just have to keep everything in control and not give up too much for too long”.
It will not be the case this time around I’d suspect so only time will tell how it plays out.

buki.3108:

You can even fire through the wall in certain spots from the ground…

True. Walls and dors alike. Just need to find that sweet spot. I hope this will be fixed soon.

Too bad but oh well. It seems that it was something conceptually wrong with RUIN leadership motivation if it lost it when real competition just arrived and is at the door ringing.

P.S. kitten Am I seeing things or there was a post I was answering to that is not there anymore?..

You NA guys at RUIN should realize some thigs should better be untouched. If there’s any significant EU presence at RUIN, I hope you talk some sence to your NA fellows for this post on RUIN site to be taken down…

Let’s keep it clear of politics, history baggage and positive, please.

Excession.2198:

As for whats on the Ruin website, lighten up, learn to take a joke.

Bad joke, bad. Not yours!

The “lighten up, learn to take a joke” is fitting for my words above, but not for news piece on RUIN site, believe me.

EDIT

Whoa… This is definitely out of line if you ask me.

EDIT by Moderator:
Quoted deleted post.

“Embrace simplicity”

Zynthetic.2954:

It does feel kind of stupid that a foot high ledge blocks you from aoeing things on the ground below you.

Yes, that seems to be core problem. You can’t land an AoE down there at all without standing at the ledge which puts you in all sorts of troubles first being the risk of forced emergency evacuation. The fact that you need to bend over the wall edge to hit anything down below that is close to the wall with targeted skills is perfectly fine by me though.

fixit.7189:

I think I need some phone books to stand on please.

Either that or high heels. I’m afraid your krewe will not understand you using BOOKS like that

AsteriskCGY.5931:

One way walls like guardian stuff. Stuff goes out but doesn’t come in.

Sure that’d do. Globe of invulnerability around the castle would be also nice

The reason is that due to game physics embrasures will not give any advantage to defenders. Irl embrasures are advantage becuse defenders are point-blank to it while attackers are at distance. In Gw2 it would be equally easy to target anything inside keep as it is to target outside through embrasures. There’s no distance advantage for defenders.

Yeah, I play mesmer as main character so I understand all problems of MvS (on both sides of the fence) pretty well But following:

I think you’ll find an Elementalist is far more dangerous to your siege than a mesmer can ever hope to be. Huge AoE’s that can cover your entire front wall and watching as you siege equipment health bar plummets. Personally, I’d be trying to kill them instead.

is missing the point. Mesmer’s speciality is taking down siege that is not easily reachable by other classes. If at all. The one you’d expect to be safe. Who cares about on-wall siege, that can be mostly taken care of by standard AoE.

“Speed. Advance. Swiftness.”

More of a “things you’ll never hear mesmer say”

iorlas.6721:

You forgot to mention that the iBerserka is on a 20sec cooldown, only moves in a straight line every 5-6seconds,has virtualy no HP and dies in 1 hit or maybe2,the mesmer also has to be able to target the ac or whatever siege first.

It’s all good and fine but zerker deals initial damage the moment it spawns on target and no mesmer expects their zerker to live enough for another whirl. So there’s no easy way to prevent mesmert hurting siege. You can kill zerkers all you want, your cata’s going down anyway. The only way to prevent that is to put your siege in the spot that is 1200+ away from any place where invader can stand and/or where it cannot be directly targeted under any circumstances (sometimes it still can be targeted with auto-target but having something targetable in front of your siege usually helps, like these same walls or defenders).

Regarding oil, right now it is a joke, just several seconds of delay for capturing team (though these seconds may be critical for defending team in some cases)

I think oil itself should only be vulnerable when actally being manned. How’s that for an idea? This way it will be more of a threat to the attacking team and still be counetrable by constant AoE to deny manning or burst damage when manned.

Well nothing forces anyone to listen to or follow any commander on the map.

Corran.4957:

Infact, I have been in zones where there actually 5-8 commanders on the map, and yet only 2 of them turn it on in order to not confuse the situation. So clearly it comes down to server attitude, rather then a commander issue.

Yeah, that happens all the time. Last time we had 4 members of our raid who had Commander book. In the cource of action there were times when 3 of them were turned on and there were times when only 1 or even none of them were turned on. And I think we have 5 total books in the guild.

Turning it off completely was for stealth and quick kind of operations where you have well coordinated team on a mission and don’t want people attracted to the icon to ruin it. Not intentionally of course but you don’t always want a hive of players around you who cannot be coordinated quickly and precisely which is only possible by voice command.

Achievement system would be as prone to exploitation as voting system I’m afraid. Devil is in details. What’s your idea of fair commander achievement system?

unleashed.8679:

I don’t see a problem with big guilds that can vote for their commander. They have the manpower so why not have a leader?

Thing is, they already have. Commander book is not something that helps to organize “manpower” inside guild. It’s a guild resource that helps it to act on WvW as a vanguard of some bigger force.

Oh, and one more important thing. Being guild upgrade (or rank that becomes available after upgrade) it should be property of the guild and not be soul bound.

I’m of the opinion that Commander book(s) should be a guild upgrade that costs substantial amount of influence and gold. It shouldn’t be available from generic merchant just for gold.

Yea it is frustrating to see one commander say one thing then another say something totally different and it is followed by 3-4 trolls and a lot of confused people. The Title should be something earned, not something bought.

Commanders may disagree with each other and I’d say that’s normal. But you’d better off on a voice with your Commander of choice. Outside of well organized voice-enabled teams it’s just a marker that attracts random forces on the map to make them somewhat of a mountain river stream instead of boiling pot. Also regarding confusion, good commander may not turn his buff on if he sees enough commanders already on the map to control situation.

It just pains me to see such suboptimal design of some parts of keeps and towers. It’s almost like it is intentional.

Take a look at two most known examples which are “jumping puzzles” at Garrison and Bay. When I saw them for the first time when they were used against us, I couldn’t believe my eyes. What military architect in his own mind would come up with such water gate design and what builder would leave some strange stairs on the slope where keep’s walls stand? None. Stairs if they are natural would all be eliminated at the build time to give enemy no chance to just jump around. Water gates would have outer doors to make whole wall perimeter solid.

It’s either intentional and falls in that “MMO abstractions” brasket, or horrible lack of skill on part of map designers. Which I hope is not the case.

P.S. Btw I hate invisible walls even more. It is just unrespectful to players. I was quite disappointed to see them in GW2.

A whole lot of misconceptions from both sides.

• Illusions are not pets. You don’t call your allies that you spawn with elite skill “pets”. And they do not go through or climb walls. Berserker just spawns at targets that may be bihind obstacles like walls or doors.
• It’s not like berserker does not need target. It’s just the way autotargeting works. You hit the skill, autotargeting kicks in. If there’s suitable target around you, you get is as your target. Now Berserker has a target and can spawn on it. But usually it is a wall you are hugging that gets autotargeted
• Because of the above (auto-target mechanics) most of the time mesmer needs first to manually target siege, for example form far distance where it is visible, then go into the skill range (1200 or closer) and then hit 4.
• 1200 is the maximum range to the target that you can spawn berserker at. When it goes off depending on enemies around primary target, it whirls though them in the direction where most of enemies are that are in range of berserker’s whirlwind. As a result, it can hurt things beyound 1200. And then there’s chasing as was mentioned above. Though in my experience clones and phantasms do not chase running away targets indefinitely. They just get stuck at some point or disappear.
• Killing berserker effectively can be accomplished only if you AoEing its primary target heavily at the time it spawns. Otherwise it does its damage at the primary target the moment it spawns, then mesmer just shatters it for additional damage. Even if not, harm is already done since rarely phantasms live long enough to have chance for another attack.
• Killing mesmer can also be a problem because he needs to be at right spot for just a moment. 4+F1, that’s it, retreat and wait for 16 seconds while berserker is on CD.

I play mainly mesmer and I too think that there’s something wrong with the fact that Berserker does not need line of sight to the target.

And by wrong I mean inconsistent. if Anet will ever state that it’s OK and intended, I will be more than happy with that )

I’m not talking about hidden mesmers, don’t have any problem with this tactic, being mesmer myself

I was talking about basically two things – zerg fails at the finish line and burning supplies by scouts.

Oh, and to be more clear that was our rams at the OUTER doors from inside. Which tactic requires that? And how many hidden mesmers it would take to build several rams inside enemy Garrison? Garrison was ours for so long that this is not the case.

If you have mesmer inside Garrison on a home map you colud just regroup your whole zerg at badge merchants inside citadel and port it right inside northern end of Garrison.

jaxom.7469:

never used the jumping bug to have the water fort, never used the thief bug to block supplies indefinitely , and we never see a massive amount of people bashing doors at night.

Let’s stop this already, can we? Yesterday I saw our rams built by the OUTER doors INSIDE our garrison and supply camp inside Garrison was flash-mobbed by OUR arrow carts.

There’a hughe number of players from both sides and there always will be somebody who wants a victory at all costs even if tactics he uses may be questionable to others. It happens on both sides and does not translate to “we” as a servver for either side.

Celimdor.7381:

I could have posted TONS of vids showing 10 PA wiping 20-50 Deso to show you my point, but i don’t even need to do that, you know already what i m talking about

I could tell you countless stories about VZ and AS zergs fails at Hills’ and towers’ Lords and inside perimeters against 10-15ppl worth of GH team. Please realize that your experience is just a fraction of what is going on on WvW at any given moment. As my is.

GrandMechantLoup.8201:

Genev.2450:

Desolation worked hard to be where they are now, they’re not jsut there because of RUIN and it would be nice if people respected that.

False, Desolation is always the worst server in top EU ladder. FS ( Nugos and Green Fire ) was the best but lose against our 30 peoples nightcapping when there was in top ladder.

We don’t have to speculate on who is strong/weak right now and why when we have WvW statistics:
http://mos.millenium.org/servers/view/15

Except of visible RUIN’s “Cap” :-) it was almost a draw between Arborstone and Deso after reset with Vizunah running out of gas after last week’s marathon. More to the point, either I need a pair of glasses of Deso’s graph doesn’t translate to “worst server in top EU ladder” in its EU prime time part.

One would argue that Deso’s NA players drain some of Arbor’s overall WvW resources but I can’t say how bad it really is.

Fairness, kosherity and other characteristics of particular www tactic is up for discussion. I find Bay and Garrison “jumping puzzles” quite unfortunate consequence of flaw in map design and would love Anet getting rid of them. Other examples of things that may rise questions are for example the fact that Phantasmal Berserker does not need a line of sight to be spawned on target. Or burning supplies by scouts.

One thing is clear however – this Bay/Garrison infiltration is not a bug exploit.

What’s your definiton of a bug then?

If walls were 1 feet tall, would it be an exploit to jump over them? There’s no bug at the Bay water gates. There’s an upstand on the outer side and upstand on the inner side. You just jump from one to another.

There’s no texture bug like it was with tier 3 doors at Garrison or at the southern slope of Bay (that one IS a bug that some mesmers tend to exploit to hide inside the texture).

And by “water gates” I don’t mean underwater entrance itself. I mean opening in the eastern wall.

Well yes, If you have Russians as part of healthy Western EU community it works great. But it is partially because your “early morning team” doesn’t have to exhaust itself in its evening prime time.

But again I highly doubt any significant Russian population will ever appear on tagged servers. Except [RU] if it will be introduced in the future. And then they will have this exact problem I’m talking about.

Can you be more specific? What was the exploit?

I have suspicion that it is the old story about “Mesmer-flying-dolphins” since you are talking about Bay.
If it is, stop it already and realize that ANYONE can just JUMP inside Bay. Ask Anet to fix this architecture flaw of Bay’s eastern water gate and stop blaming players for exploits.

Ualtar.5047:

In history, catapults were

In history? You are kidding, right? If we are to make it more realistic, we’d have to get rid of all this ancient siege. Who really needs it if we have, wait, what?!.. GUN POWDER.
Look at in-game rifle models. Some are like modern sniper rifles. It looks like fire arms discipline should be quite developed in gw universe. Why then not just blow that door up with explosive or some bigger artillery piece? Where is all this bada-boom goodness? Looks awfully inconsistent.

It’s all MMO abstractions, eclecticism and trying to make game experience more fun. I wouldn’t expect it to be 100% close to real life or history.

Thorvald.5432:

Right now catapult behind doors are way too OP. You can stop a raid of 10-15 players with 1 AFK auto click on a catapult.

Really? How about building your own cata instead of ram?

eiennnoai.9870:

Also, Europe spans on 4 TZ and there wasn’t any major problem before that, sure Russian (most being GMT+3 since “European russia” accounts for 80% of their population) have a tiny advantage against GMT+1 players (SP/DE/FR) but they aren’t much of a problem since being 2h earlier can easily be compensated, there’ll still be some 2-4h of shared primetime.

It’s GMT+4 since 2011 when Russia Abolished Winter Time

Also, it is not an advantage. One who lives to the west has an advantage because when you go to sleep after your prime time, you have opponent PvDooring and reinforcing everything and profit for 5-8 hours. At the morning however there’s less game activity obviously even if you get up earlier than your opponent. Job and other real life stuff, you know.

You see, everytime you start a conversation about bringing tz into game mechanics, you are hurting someone’s game experience. There’s of course a “majority”, and interests of 50% (or whatever it is) of EU ladder population that localized servers hold is not something that can be ignored. But last time I’ve checked the motto was still “good for everyone” (hovever hard it is to deliver on such promise). Making efforts of one TZ “count more” on WWW is going against it. That’s why I think tagged servers are flawed design decision, not cross-continental transfers.

Gwal.2813:

I think all the localized servers are on a dead-end here

IMO localized servers are dead end conceptually.

EU ladder covers quite a number of time zones actually. And tz problem exists here too. As an example, it was very frustratig for us as a team (close to 100% Russian I’d guess) living in GMT+4 or more, that servers populated mostly by western EU players always had a “last say” in daily WWW cycle. So there you go…

24/7, no tagged servers and global ladder is the way to go if you ask me.

The issue (if it is) is broader – no friendly fire. You dont question AoEs affecting only enemies so why question siege doig the same?

That’s understandable, but it is an obvious consequense of localized server. Personally, I wouldn’t go to [RU] server. No way. For the same reason. Sure you’ll probably have “tighter” community, but will be limited by its nature. And I like variety.

If you prefer localized servers -fine, but it doesn’t mean there should be some preferences in the game mechanics that level you out with multi-national servers that will have probably less of a “community” due to language barriers (that will allways exist to some extent) but a better presence around the clock.

Gwal.2813:

Maybe they already do ? what does it have to do with the topic ?It can go the other way around : Do your commanders speak french fluently ?

It’s not the other way around, that’s the whole point./ English is far more universal language. Oh, and btw, it is not my native. Russian is.

gebrechen.5643:

How many languages do you speak fluently?

Two, as you have probably guessed already.

What bothers me is something like this:

If everybody was able to speak English I would agree..
But it’s not the case, so yeah, this situation (EU ladder becoming Worldwide) is totally unfair to DE/FR/ES because there is no big GW2 community oversea that speaks their language :/

In this time and age of computerization somebody still doesn’t know even basic english (most don’t have to be fluent to coordinate at www)? Really?! Please remind me, what is this language we are using right now here on official game forum?

This is not an excuse, this is weakness.

Jaghen.8314:

I’m getting tired of the unfairness that FR/DE/ES can’t speak english… what about Singaporeans ? Italians ? Norwegians ? And so many more… ?
In fact everyone but English/American have a claim to unfairness ^^

Yeah…

some of our core players and commanders played an average of 18-20 hours per day this week… this is our 24/7 coverage….

Some of these 20 hours per day could have been used, like, I don’t know… to learn another language maybe?..

NoShelter.3817:

I certainly hope its just a few individuals and not the major guilds, but when our scouts, with their own eyes, watch a mesmer dolphin out of the water, past the out gate, port a 50-player zerg into an orb keep, and fast build upgraded siege… well, we draw our own conclusions.

A bit offtopic, but… If you are talking about Bay, the only conclusion is that Bay architects should be hanged on outer walls by keep lord himself. Mesmer doesn’t need to “dolphin out of water”, anyone can just jump from the outer south side of east gateway wall to the inner side, under speed buff ofc. Plain and simple. Architecture failure and game physics. No exploits, just some jp experience at best.