Guild Wars 2

If you’re on Maguuma or Dragonbrand, don’t take this matchup as an example of FA being strong overnight. We’re only winning by so much because DB and Mag aren’t that strong overnight either.

FA almost always wins the first night, showing that we’re strong in NA primetime – we’ve won the first night of all our matchups except when we were in T3 vs. the new improved Blackgate (which is currently winning T1, so no shame losing to them).

But then the next morning we see what’s really going to happen as we log in to see a huge point deficit. It was like this vs. TC just last week, and basically every week before that going all the way back to the 1-day matchups. Make no mistake FA is a very lopsided server timezonewise.

If you’re on an EU server the queue time argument is my favorite. I don’t want our overnight coverage to come at the expense of other servers but if people from crowded EU servers come here then we can have our cake and they can eat it too.

FA is almost a textbook “potential” server – we punch above our weight tierwise in NA primetime, we just need some presence during our (NA) off hours.

Also our coordination between guilds was lagging behind a bit for while, but it’s coming together now.

Help us show the WvW world that their authority is not recognized inside Fort kitten.

Edit: haha “Fort kitten.” Nevermind that last bit I guess.

Speaking as a Fort Aspenwood player, I wish we had a public mumble, though maybe I should be careful what I wish for.

As for the Maguuma stacking, I’m kind of impressed that they can actually get people to do it (it’s not just guild groups), but I’m not sure how effective it is. There were fights where Maguuma had equal numbers to us and I think they could have done better if they’d just fought us normally.

You are good at portalbombing siege though. Just keep showing up on at least one map, and screw the score.

I like the idea of keeps giving more points the longer you hold them. On some maps you see a giant zerg of 70 or so just doing a circuit of the map, taking everything they see but making no attempt to defend it. You just take back everything they take after they leave, which is kind of boring since it’s more banging on doors.

And to Moose, his model used oceanic players on server 2 as an example. If the timezones are reversed it’s the same outcome. I don’t think you’re understanding his point.

Yeeeesh this matchup is gonna be over tomorrow

I say everyone just lets this thread die starting now

One thing that I think should be part of commander etiquette: if you’re a commander leading a zerg, you can tell the zerg what to do – but it doesn’t mean you get to tell the entire map what to do. Everyone thinks whatever they’re attacking or defending is the most important attack or defense on the map, and then get to pointing fingers when they don’t think enough people showed up to help. In my experience that’s when /t devolves into arguing.

I’d like it if the upgrades just cost supply and not money, or at least way less money. Not many people want to spend 75+ silver on something that’s gonna be capped overnight. Maybe they’re meant as a money sink, but if you ask me there are already plenty of money sinks in the game and they could stand to lose a few.

So if I’m following this correctly, Maguuma is assigning 30+ people and siege to defend a supply camp and then complaining that they’re outnumbered on the rest of the map

Attention ANet! An engine bug is causing ranger pets to not be invisible in the new game mode. Please fix this ASAP

Seems to me the portal problem would be easy to fix, just limit either the number of players who can go through it total or the number of players who can go through it per second. It wouldn’t ruin the skill at all: you could still hide mesmers inside keeps and have them port friends in after it flips, or use portals to move golems or speed up supply runs.

The only thing you couldn’t do anymore is send 30 people through the portal all at once causing the rendering issue. And make no mistake, the rendering issue is the single biggest reason why portal bombs are so successful right now.

I was aware of pop-in problems before the patch, but they only occasionally happened, or when a portal bomb was used. Now they’re happening all the time, much worse than before.

Pop-in problems have gotten worse since the latest patch. Before the patch, when zergs were in the open (ie not portal bombing) I only occasionally had pop-in, and usually at least part of the zerg would show up, giving you a warning that there might be more not drawn yet.

Now? I fought at Woodhaven for like an hour last night after the patch against invisible enemies. I just logged off after fighting invisible enemies for like twenty minutes at Bay. I’m getting waaaaay more pop-in problems than I used to. After twenty minutes or so even the NPCs near the spawn aren’t being drawn anymore.

Even restarting my client only fixes the problem briefly, it always returns.

I’m on Fort Aspenwood, so I have no horse in the Blackgate vs. Dragonbrand dispute. That said, a 30,000 point swing happening practically overnight doesn’t happen because a few guilds stayed up late.

Blackgate won because they won the overnight, and they won the overnight because of the transfers. There’s nothing necessarily wrong with that, it’s not against the rules or anything. Just realize how weak the “we stayed up all night!” explanation sounds to everyone but Blackgate.

Is there a place to see WvW stats? I saw someone posting a graph of participation rates for a server, but I don’t know where he got the graph from. I’d be interested to see what my server’s population fluctuations/score during different timezones is.

I made a thread about this before the patch, and in the patch notes I saw that the “blade training” trait was fixed to apply to the #4 offhand sword skill “illusionary riposte.” Which is good – but the rest of the problems with these traits are still there. I just tested these minutes ago.

For sword #3, illusionary leap: this is both an illusion-summoning skill and a sword skill, so it should benefit from both cooldown reductions, but if you take both blade training and have illusionists celerity only one cooldown reduction applies.

For sword #4, illusionary riposte: when you use this to block, it summons a clone, meaning it’s an illusion-summoning skill (and has the clone keyword in the tooltip). However, whether you use the stunbolt or the block, the cooldown is not properly reduced with illusionists celerity. (However the tooltip says it is – the tooltip says 12 but its actually 15 for both versions of the skill)

For sword #5, phantasmal swordsman: For this skill, both cooldown reduction traits are stacking properly but if you have both the tooltip will say 12 when it’s actually 9. Just a tooltip problem but should still be fixed.

Please fix these ANet… frustrating to see just one of the many problems in this area get fixed in the patch while all of the others still remain. I want to take blade training for my build but it’s not worth it if it isn’t working properly.

MrPeanut.1543:

Using a skill exactly how it is designed in the game is not an exploit. Mesmer portals were designed to allow anyone to go through them. If they did not want groups to go through them, they would have made it so groups could not go through them.

This paragraph is just a collection of tautologies that could be used to justify nearly anything in any game. We’re saying that mesmer portals are having an unintended effect – unless you think turning the people going through them invisible is “exactly how it is designed.”

MrPeanut.1543:

A group of players going through a gate (Assuming you own the gate you actually go through a portal) at the same time has the EXACT same rendering effect. I assume you would consider that an exploit too? If coordination is an exploit, then we might as well all be unguided, ungrouped and fending by our selves.

This is simply untrue, many times I’ve seen large groups of players suddenly come through a gate, for example to kill a ram or a ram build site. It doesn’t create the same rendering issue.

Alarox.4590:

If teleporting into your group is an exploit due to rendering, then technically so is simply running at your group normally. After all, they both don’t render players. When we use Mesmer portals, we do it for positioning and surprise, not for rendering.

These two things are not equivalent at all. Run into a big zerg and you’ll occasionally have pop-in problems for part of the zerg. Put that same zerg through a portal and you’ll have pop-in problems every time for the whole thing.

And you’re benefiting from rendering issues whether or not you’re using mesmer portals with that intention. Claiming that you’re doing it for “positioning and surprise” doesn’t change the fact that you’re not being rendered on my screen until well after I’m dead.

I like this idea myself. Actually my server’s biggest weakness in our current matchup is euro time, so it seems like europeans are rolling on NA servers right now anyway.

It would be cool if we could have a round-the-clock presence and so did the enemy servers. I would put up with longer queue times if I got that.

“So… balance something that is working as intended, because of an issue with rendering?

That’s like spending a thousand dollars putting in a tiled floor to prevent water damage instead of fixing the leaking pipe."

The issue with rendering is making it not work as intended. It’s not intended to make the people going through it invisible, but that’s what it’s doing, so I don’t see how you can say it’s working as intended.

As for scouting being a counter to this, I don’t see how. This tactics was used on us 5-6 times over the course of a night – we know it was coming, we knew where the portal was starting (inside the walls) and ending (in the middle of our siegers), and many of us were watching for mesmers, which was also called out in /t and /say.

The mesmer can run right out his own door to do this, they can stealth and drop off the walls, they can do any number of things that are functionally impossible to counter. AOEing people you can’t see is not going to work, and AOEing the entrance portal is not possible because it’s inside the wall.

Furthermore, this tactics was rendering other forms of defense redundant. Our server attacked the western keep (Bay) 5-6 times over the course of an entire night. Every time I saw build sites for cannons and oil, but no cannons and oil – they weren’t bothering to build them because there was no need. I don’t think Anet intends for this to be the case.

Bunnehboo.6025:

i like how everyones blaming portals but you get the same effect when you run into a huge zerg v zerg next thing you know you find yourself overextended in a battle .__.

you know how you fight a portal you figure out were that portal is headed and you AoE the heck out of it when you find the other end or you set up trap along the path to stop the mesmer in the first place. heres a hint its either your siege or your back lines

Yes, sometimes there are pop-in problems with zergs but those are not really repeatable. I was on the wrong end of the mesmer portal trick 5-6 times and every time there were load in issues. Like I said the enemy wouldn’t even be visible on my screen until 10+ seconds after I was dead, and it sounds like I’m not the only one with this problem.

As for your second paragraph I’m not sure what you mean. We know where the portals are starting and ending, there’s no confusion there. They’re starting inside the walls and ending just outside. AOEing enemies you can’t see is not gonna work, and traps can be easily bypassed with blink.

We were trying to take Dreaming Bay on our server, and several times we got to the inner walls (or in one case, even inside them), when a mesmer would drop a portal and many many people would come through. I can’t actually tell you how many because I couldn’t see them…. the engine wasn’t drawing them! They killed me and after 10-15 seconds watching my corpse the enemies that came through the portal would finally be drawn by the engine. I should add that I’m not running GW2 on some ancient rig, I have a decent computer and this is the only instance where I have major late pop-in problems regularly.

I can’t imagine the mesmer portal is intended to make the people coming through it invisible – but that’s what’s happening.

A possible solution is to have a limit to the number of people who can use each portal before it closes. If the limit were say 10, it wouldn’t cause the lag spike.

First: everyone I’ve mentioned this to tells me “the tooltip is wrong, but the traits themselves are working properly.” But they’re not, and that bit of misinformation seems to be ubiquitous.

I’m talking about two traits in particular: “Illusionist’s Celerity”, the 5 point minor trait in the illusions line, has this text: “Illusion-summoning skills recharge 20% faster”

Then there are several traits that reduce cooldown times for particular weapons. For this example, I’ll use the sword one: “Blade Training: +50 precision while wielding a one-handed sword or spear. Reduces the recharge of sword and spear by 20%”"

I’ll run through several skills:

Illusionary Swordsman: if you take both of the above traits, the cooldown for this skill is 9, as it should be, but the tooltip says 12. This is a minor bug but should still be fixed. However this is mostly working properly.

Illusionary Riposte: if you take either of the above traits OR both of them, either way the tooltip says the cooldown is 12, but it’s actually 15. I tested this earlier today. It’s true whether you use either variant of the skill (the daze “counter blade” or if you actually block something). So this is the opposite of Illusionary Swordsman – neither trait is actually reducing the cooldown.

Illusionary Leap: If you take just one of the two traits, this is working correctly – it says the cooldown is 9.5 seconds and it is. But if you take both, the cooldown doesn’t actually go down – and it should, this is both a sword skill and an illusion-summoning skill.

I go through the skills in detail because it feels like the misconception that these traits are just bugged in the tooltip is stopping them from being actually fixed.

tl;dr: Illusionary Riposte and Illusionary Leap are NOT having their cooldowns properly reduced by traits. This is not just a tooltip problem! Illusionary Swordsman is working properly but the tooltip is wrong.