Guild Wars 2

I like how only 1 poster noticed S/P thief has no stealth on the weapon set. It’s the only no-stealth thief build except for P/P (ranged).

Disagree with OP. Down state is already far to powerful against decently good and aware players, and makes 1v2 very difficult and 1v3 almost impossible. While 1v1 it’s not going to matter anyway.

Not sure if this is serious. Thief underwater is terrible and a waste of time. On my thief I never fight underwater and always leave the water ASAP with speargun 5 shadowsteps. Then again I don’t really focus on killing or chasing people 1v1 either.

Atherakhia.4086:

Stealth isn’t the problem. Initiative regen is. You mention a thief in your sig, but do you play it with any regularity? I’m guessing not because even if we pretend stealthing is the problem, you’re nerfing the burst build far more heavily than the stealth builds.

No, initiative regen is the problem. Perma stealth is only possible with the Dagger + Pistol combo and specific skill choices. But at face value, there’s nothing wrong with perma stealth because it should come with a significant drop in damage. You’d expect it to because of the loss of CnD’s damage + vulnerability, but the simple fact of the matter is it doesn’t. Why doesn’t it? Because initiative regen can be elevated to such a degree that losing CnD+vuln in favor of blackpowder+heartseeker+backstab doesn’t result in a net drop in damage despite the significantly higher initiative cost, significantly higher utility, significantly higher regen/condition removal.

You then go on to try to nerf skills and traits (one that no one even uses btw) that most would consider mandatory additions to the thief class. This leads me to believe that you don’t really play the thief class because if any of your changes went through without ENORMOUS buffs in other areas, the entire class would be dead in the water.

Initiative regen is the problem. Remove all the excess regen from all skills and traits. Leave a trait to give initiative on crit with a cooldown and a trait to increase the initiative cap. All other methods of initiative regen can be removed.

“But Ath, even with these changes the Thief would be dead on arrival too!?” — Well yes, of course it would.

So the question then becomes how do you improve it?

Well for starters, you could give it the same health as Rangers. You mentioned the condition removal is high (it is…) but you completely fail to recognize that the thief class has the lowest health in the game and the least amount of regen out of stealth of any class. There’s a reason condition removal is so strong…. because a single burn will deal 50% of a Thief’s health.

Given the enormous drop in burst potential due to the loss of stealth (which means hidden killer, backstab, etc become much less valuable) you could increase auto attack damage and/or introduce a third state for stealth moves where if they’re used from the back they deal 50% more damage (in stealth they deal 100% more) and can be used without stealth (like in WoW).

You get the idea. The point I’m trying to make is that if your focus is stealth and not the root of the problem all you’re doing is quieting the QQ and they’ll simply move to another topic. The vast majority of complaints aimed at the Thief aren’t warranted. Burst isn’t that great because many classes can do more for less effort. They have no mitigation, only avoidance, outside of toughness/armor. They have no real stability option. They have no where near the best regen in the game.

The only legitimate complaint is how much utility they gain from pistol off-hand over dagger with no appreciable loss in damage or mobility.

I can’t really reply to most of that because clearly you didn’t understand my original suggestion. It would reduce survivabilty from passive CnD ‘trolling’ which in practice is the same as perma stealth in combat, and would absolutely NOT nerf thief burst at all — which I see no problem with. (d/d thief is the weakest thief)

There’s strategic issues with a d/p perma stealth thief being able to hide indefinitely in an inner keep and then res a dead mesmer when no one’s looking. Which will then portal a zerg right to the lord.

I have hundreds of hours on my thief. It’s my main.

Vulnerability? That matters in PvE for bosses.

Initiative regen has no problems. What you’re suggesting there would destroy d/p completely. Try playing the build without extra regen…

Every good thief I see uses Shadow’s Embrace. And definitely any thief that even has the slightest chance of beating me.

JJBigs.8456:

Zephyrus.9680:

it is almost impossible to kill even 1v2 or 1v3….. Particularly in 1v3s, 1v4s, 1v5s, 1v2s in enemy supply camps, etc….

This is such a small part of WvW i dont see why anyone would care. No changes needed.

If you visited these forums a little more you would see a huge amount of ‘care’ given to the inability to kill thieves. And btw the majority of my fights roaming are more than 1v1, e.g.:

Disclaimer: I am a thief (mostly s/d and p/d builds) and when needed I routinely take advantage of the gameplay styles I am suggesting need to be fixed because they are flawed and overpowered. Particularly in 1v3s, 1v4s, 1v5s, 1v2s in enemy supply camps, etc…

The Problem: the thief class is rewarded from passive ‘perma stealth’ type play when needed to because it is almost impossible to kill even 1v2 or 1v3. Staying in stealth indefinitely gives regeneration, removes conditions, and is very difficult to counter with current attack-from-stealth mechanics.

In short, thief gets too many free survival passes from passive play in ways that are impossible to counter.

Concept: I think thief should be a highly aggressive active class which means the current rewards and free bonuses for passive play should be removed.

What needs to change for this to happen:

1. Unconditional Revealed: ending stealth without an attack should unconditionally give revealed for 1 second.

Reason: this will promote more aggressive play and less infinite CnD chaining which is super passive play that is essentially impossible to stop and allows a thief to heal in perma stealth while being immune to condition spam as well. (Revealed from stealth attack should remain 3 seconds)

2. Fix Stealth Attack Mitigation: Attacks from stealth that result in block, dodge or reflection need to break stealth as a normal attack.

Reason: The way it is now is anti-skill because an attack burns the damage mitigation (e.g. aegis) without even breaking stealth. It’s impossible to counter an attack from stealth which is stupid. Anticipation/prediction which is player skill should also play a role.

3. Significant skill/trait changes:

Black Powder: reduce duration from 4 to 3 seconds. This is the D/P true permastealth mechanic. True permastealth thieves should not exist. The advantage of the build is about having stealth-on-demand + utility/blind field. True Permastealth just leads to uncounterable problems in WvW.

Shadow’s Embrace trait (condition removal in stealth): way overpowered because it almost makes thief immune to condition damage but I can’t think of how to nerf it without overnerfing.

Shadow Refuge: 3/4 second cast time. 1/4 second it has now makes it an ‘oh kitten’ skill and everything else. It entirely outclasses it’s alternative.

Hard to Catch: Auto-stunbreak + random shadowstep is a badly thought out noskill grandmaster trait that’s just bad… Remake this to give +50% endurance regen while out of stealth (something for the S/P no-stealth thief and very aggressive out-of-stealth thieves).

- – -

The idea here is to have very little effect on aggressive thief play but hopefully force the passive ‘perma stealth’ opportunists to be more aggressive or else punished for their (our) cowardly ways.

Static.9841:

Kyrime.6958:

Static.9841:

Money where mouth is….

congratulations you completely missed the point

it’s quite simple really: tPvP is meant to be a competitive, fair (by the nature of tournaments) environment in which to display you and your teams’ skills . best-of series are also meant to foster such a competitive, fair environment. they occur absolutely everywhere in competitions. is this really something that needs to be debated?

The best kind of PvPer is the kind who can respond to any given situation, not one who requires the training wheels to learn their opponents movements BEFORE they know how the respond.

Sounds like a lot of excuses, is this really something that needs to be debated?

Not to butt in but some builds, skills, and traits have an inherent advantage over others. Some fights are determined by luck. If both players are roughly at the same level of skill, luck and build, mostly build will decide the fight. If you don’t understand that there’s nothing else to debate.

On an unrelated note, I always wish to 1v1 every/any TC and SoS player who is interested. Please PM (Altaerity).

IMO rally should be capped at something like 3 people/kill and should have much higher penalty for multiple rallies over a short period of time (or like death penalty in GW1).

Wow people still post about camping the JP?

WvW JP is a PVP zone. If you don’t want to PvP then go to PvE.

hackdZ.6352:

I think essentially what OP is saying is that, Ele’s can bypass a zerg that are attacking a keep, by running at them with their face, and mist forming through the portal.
Which completely invalidates any attempt to cut off reinforcements from the tower/keep/etc.

No because mist/vapor form is very limited range. That’s not an argument anyway. What about thief that can stealth into the tower or mes that can AoE stealth and/or just portal? Or warrior that can endure pain+break CCs. Many classes can get through if you’re just balling at the door.

@OP, I realize you’re a zerger but everything a roamer does is WvW strategy. Everything short of killing the opposing zerg itself. Unless you include zergbusting teams.

Here’s a guide/checklist so you don’t need a boring video:

- Roamers control supply. Supply wins WvW (in terms of points). They are the reason your towers and keeps are full supply when the siege starts, while the enemy objectives aren’t.

- They ninja towers and keeps.

- They scout the enemy zerg so that your zerg will have the advantage of preparation.

- They are first responders in tower and keep defense and the reason your zerg knows where to go and what to attack and defend.

- They run supply to repair and build.

- They kill roamers (and more) from the opposing team.

Roaming from the last few weeks.

Grub is why I WvW.

I’m built for 1vX more than 1v1 which can’t be replicated in sPvP but would definitely like to 1v1 if you’re facing Maguuma. I don’t know why so many people think tPvP and WvW players are mutually exclusive.

Flirty Nerd.6407:

Also, no one who actually is on DB is convoluted enough to believe that Dragonbrand only moved up because of us. Dragonbrand was very much on its way up. I do agree that transfers helped to maintain the server’s position, but it was hardly enough to skyrocket DB anywhere. There is a bit of an overestimation of how many people DB actually gained in transfers. It’s nowhere even in the ballpark of what we experienced when [RE] was on JQ and we got all of the transfers.

DB was stuck firmly at the top of T3 and in no way moving up (rating was stable) until Kaineng fell on its own, leaving an empty slot which of course DB would have to fill by circumstance. But they didn’t just do that, they shot up to the top of T2 for over a week I believe (correct me if I’m wrong). Stable top of T3 to the top of T2 requires a huge amount of transfers, quality or not.

Apart from that, ‘Bandwagon’ is just semantics and amazingly successful flamebait and as long as it remains successful its going to be trashing the thread…

Tons of fun fights roaming this week from both EB and FA. Such as a 10 minute 1v2 in the middle of a camp, actually just killing a zerker staff ele over and over

How is this still going? The WvW roaming meta which is somewhat comparable to sPvP but is entirely different from the zerg/zerg-busting meta. “Skill” unqualified is therefore meaningless.

But let’s say the average tPvPer is a more competitive PvPer than the average WvW player. Likely true. So all you could say is a guild of seasoned tPvPers would be above average PvPers, including in WvW. That’s not very meaningful.

sPvP is the same as roaming but easier. EVERYTHING in sPvP is predictable which imo makes it boring. It’s more about organization than team tactics. Also tons of WvW players play sPvP.

No joke, first time I played tournaments, the group ended up with 2 other WvW pugs who only played sPvP/tPvP for the monthly (like myself) and another player who was a dedicated sPvPer. 5th slot was random. We went to a 15 win streak and our group of lvl 10-15s was facing lvl 40+s in tournament before one of their groups finally beat us. /Cool-story-bro

But makes OP’s claim hard to believe.

Jinks.2057:

What happened to the Mag players?

All I see now are Tower Humpers, Zergers, and overall just horrible tendencies. What happened to the Mag of old where you could find roamers? Did they all leave or something?

I literally ate 2 MoA’s in a row and still lived……..wtf is up w/ y’all anymore?

Idk if you’re Ebay or FA. Earlier I was solo roaming around FA’s circle of camps. Probably 5+ cycles flipping every camp. Ran into a couple nice 1v3s though I lost them all. Several easy 1v2s. Didn’t find any challenging 1v1s. For the most part my roaming was PvE in WvW… bad luck I guess?

lunyboy.8672:

Zephyrus.9680:

I guarantee projectiles are not causing skill lag lol. I guess you didn’t notice almost the only projectiles that have “gravity” are catas and trebs. Everything else is just visual effects (clientside). ACs don’t even use projectiles. Cannons and ballistas don’t have gravity (except visual), same with arrows.

False. Grenades have physics-based flight paths, can be obstructed, and can proc 15 times simultaneously per throw (once per second).

They most definitely create lag both server-side in big confrontations and client side for the rendering of the models and the explosions. One of my guildies actually asked me to roll non-grenades in Fractals about 2 weeks ago because his frame rate was dropping so drastically every time I would start chucking.

So please, if you are going to be snarky about what you perceive to be a general misunderstanding of the mechanics of lag and the causes thereof, get your facts straight.

Nades and thief’s clusterbomb too. But that’s all I can think of, there’s very few real projectiles with physics. There is collision obstruction but that’s not gravity.

Also what you’re describing is clientside which is corroborating my response (if you read what I was responding to). What’s being called ‘skill lag’ is a serverside cpu/isp bottleneck and nothing to do with clients. You’re claiming projectiles are calculated clientside (I don’t know if they actually are, though it makes sense). Then the server only needs to treat them as a normal ‘attack’ and clients do the rest. If it [projectile path] is calculated serverside it’s still one instance no matter how many people there are. The AoE hits are not.

If it were not against the rules I would name another MMO with much much cheaper development than GW2 where instead of an AoE limit, they made it so AoEs hit everyone but the more targets they hit, the less damage it did each target. Makes sense balancewise… But the mechanics just didn’t work for the server in big fights. 30vs30 would literally lag for 1 minute+. In extreme cases it would be 5 minutes, just standing and not able to do anything while waiting for your command to hit the queue of server processes.

I’m not calming to know how things work on GW2 but from a mathematical standpoint, some things have to scale a lot harder in terms of cpu power and communication when there’s more players. Projectiles don’t. The server is not communicating a projectile’s position in the air in “real time” to players. 100v100 will be 100x more projectiles than 1v1 and that’s all.

Played 1 hour. Already seen roamers from FA to match the best from a whole week of DB.

bartsimpsons.6135:

calling out OP here for bs and lack of promised math.

1. damage calculations are not very clock cycle intensive. simple plus, minus, divide and multiply is not cpu heavy. im sure modern cpu’s have hardware mutltiplication/division.

2. gw2 has heavy cpu demands because there are lots of projectiles that have position, velocity, collision compared to mmorpgs without projectiles. all this data has to be sent to all the players after being determined by the server based on keyboard/mouse inputs sent to server through the game client.

3. hit detection for aoes is very simple. there are no projectiles involved in most cases. cpu must simply check position of players to determine if they are in the aoe and deal damage to them.

4. 5 man aoe cap requires algorithm to decide which 5 men are going to be hit. this is additional processing over simply dealing damage to all those that are inside the aoe radius.

5. lol at 10,000 number. 10,000 calculations is not very many for a computer lol. your computer runs significantly more calculations just to render graphics. 1920×1080 at 60hz is roughly equivalent to about 2 million commands to change a 24 bit pixel colour value 60 times per second….

It’s not BS, it’s a design issue with every MMO involving massive fights — and they always have these types of limitations or else server (or client) bottlenecks that make huge fights unplayable. Two factors that need to be optimized are processing (both clientside and serverside) and communication between client and server. Obviously clientside optimization is just as important.

I guess you never noticed “skill lag”, I rarely do but it happens in big fights. That’s a bottleneck in serverside cpu or bandwidth. I guess you also never noticed your PC struggling in these fights with your FPS dropping.

Damage isn’t simple arithmetic… Armor, effect procs, trait passives, conditions/durations. DoTs are updated in real time (implying serverside) with might stacks etc… If it’s not CPU it’s communicating the data on everyone to every player and the point remains.

I guarantee projectiles are not causing skill lag lol. I guess you didn’t notice almost the only projectiles that have “gravity” are catas and trebs. Everything else is just visual effects (clientside). ACs don’t even use projectiles. Cannons and ballistas don’t have gravity (except visual), same with arrows.

Niim.9260:

Your theory does not take into account that people will have to move out of the AoE range and not stack up as much.

Not that I think the AoE cap should be removed, but your argument is pretty fail and really I wouldn’t use ‘math’ in the title for 100×100.

That’s play style. Not a very good design if the game only works when people are playing a certain way…

The math tag is because the justification is mathematical. You didn’t get that the 100×100 is an abstract example. It’s 100×100x(whatever calculations, processes, latency and bandwidth is involved with 100 players’ skills interacting with 100 other players). Whereas now it’s 100×5x(etc…). That was the point.

Just pointing out that as long as skill lag is still a problem, AoE cap won’t be removed or probably even increased by 1 or 2.

Pryda.8257:

Zephyrus.9680:

Pryda.8257:

You don’t need a single field to keep 100% uptime on retaliation on your melee train, sorry. Guardian isn’t the only class that can do it.

Like I said, if its a 50% guardian zerg built around it, they deserve it. But the power there really comes from stability + super tanks. If you want argue certain specialized zerg compositions are overpowered, that’s a different topic.

For everything else it’s just not a big factor. Already nerfed, doesn’t need another.

What don’t you understand in “not only guardians can run 100% uptime retal specs”? No point to argue with you, like I said first you have no clue.

You’re right I don’t understand that… What other classes/skills? I’m curious because I’ve never seen skills or traits that can keep retal up even close to 100% on other classes.

Feel free not to answer like you haven’t for any your other ridiculous claims.

Beside the point though, guardian is the only one that shares it — which is the whole point of the thread. So are organized guardian/warrior zergs the undefeatable meta now or something?

Because it seems like this thread is more a line of rangers and engineers who are having problems freely spamming their AoEs. That’s not an argument for a nerf as much as a possible rework, if anything, unless its actually every class getting destroyed by retaliation that’s somehow up on everyone all the time…

Or even increased much.

And it’s not because of balance, it’s there to keep the server and/or your CPU from exploding in huge fights… which already happens as is (skill lag and 1 fps). Limitations like this happen in every MMO with large scale fights. Or else unplayable server/client bottlenecks.

Without the cap, the processing would rise almost exponentially with an increase in players. More players casting AoEs x more getting hit by each AoE.

Example: 100 players each casting 1 non-pulsing AoE on 100 other players with no cap would be 100×100x(everything involved with armor, damage, conditions, procs, effects, traits, etc…)=10,000x(etc…) different damage/effect instances to be calculated. Not even counting AoE DoTs like conditions that are updated each tick. Doesn’t matter if it was done clientside or serverside, a real-time fight would be impossible except for a super computer.

Pryda.8257:

You don’t need a single field to keep 100% uptime on retaliation on your melee train, sorry. Guardian isn’t the only class that can do it.

Like I said, if its a 50% guardian zerg built around it, they deserve it. But the power there really comes from stability + super tanks. If you want argue certain specialized zerg compositions are overpowered, that’s a different topic.

For everything else it’s just not a big factor. Already nerfed, doesn’t need another.

On my videos… so what? Because I know how to roam means I don’t know what zerg vs zerg is? It’s no relation.

Every combo field is “pro-zerg bullcrap”. You need combo fields and blast finishers to keep retaliation up and the duration is still ridiculously short. If its a 50% guardian zerg they deserve to have full retaliation uptime… Until they meet a few necros. Combo fields don’t stack and blast finishers cost time and cooldowns. Compare 3 seconds of retaliation to 20 seconds of 3 stacks of might. It’s not really a comparison. Retaliation isn’t free and given it’s short uptime and being almost exclusive to guardians it’s really not that good a boon.

Lepew.7890:

There should be a basic gravity model in the game which has initial velocity, and angle to calculate trajectories. All targeting should be either permitted or not permitted upon the basis of that physics. If a parabolic path exists for the initial velocity (power) of the siege engine between points A and B, then the crosshair should green. This would also mean that cross hairs would have to go through walls etc. So a mortar with is super high arch against a wall should let you target far on the other side of that wall even though you can not see it because the physics of the mortar is right. The game as it stands right now has the physics wrong, letting camera angle determine whether a trajectory is valid or not.

Problem with this is everyone’s computers and the server would explode if each arrow was a projectile. Also what you’re asking would require a new game engine to accommodate viewing/targeting for other arcing projectiles.

Really they just need to limit resolution if only for WvW to put everyone on the same playing field.

Mif.3471:

I love it when players who don’t have a 3 screen setup tell me what is and isn’t possible on my 3 screen setup.

I can clearly see over walls…
/faepalm

Refer to the earlier screenshot in this thread. I don’t think you even need the hardware to get that resolution.

They just need to limit the screen resolution, at least for WvW.

Pryda.8257:

Zephyrus.9680:

Retaliation is the weakest boon, except maybe for aegis.

Are we playing the same game? Retaliation weakest boon? NA ladder sounds awesome for sure. Losing 20k hp to one boon is really weak yeah. Aegis is also a 100% damage mitigation, sucks hard

How the hell 8k “FREE” damage is not a serious threat? How poor is it to damage people doing nothing but having a boon on you?

Edit: nevermind, saw your youtube link, I can understand why you have no clue. Sorry!

I don’t think we’re playing the same game. Aegis is maybe 5% damage mitigation at best – it’s an afterthought in this game. Retaliation free?… No idea what you mean.

Also, speaking of clueless, I’m curious how you think p/d /sb (for zergs) thief + dagger storm or staff ele are somehow immune to retaliation. Lol.

Please, explain. You must have an expert explanation since I take tons of retaliation damage but have little problems dealing with it. Sometimes it limits my damage but, isn’t that working as intended?

Swiftness, might, protection, stability, fury — it would be a different game without these. Compared to the above, retaliation is almost just ‘there’. If all you can do is blindly press 1 in zerg fights like maybe half of the zerg-only player base, I still wouldn’t understand. Because then, why not argue water fields and regen are OP. They heal 50k (yea I can throw out random meaningless numbers too) – and on demand – which completely overshadows retaliation as a meaningful damage source. Actually, water fields are op. Retaliation, no.

It might be a good idea to change the retal damage to be based on % of damage dealt (scaling with power). Probably the same people would still be complaining + all the glass cannons. But it’s just not a big problem to deal with as is.

Terrahero.9358:

Zephyrus.9680:

GJ with hyperbole. If you’re too laggy or just don’t have the awareness to cancel your AoE attack that’kittenting 5 targets, don’t zerg.

Its not a hyperbole. Thats what you get if we actually follow your horribly flawed advice.
Retaliation is always up, on a lot of people, because of how easy it is to get. Guardians everywhere, and that means Light-fields everywhere. And in a zerg that means a metric kittenton of combofinishers proccing (AoE) retaliation. […]

You misunderstood. I was saying attack through it until/unless you need to cancel your attack to heal. Then heal…

The thing about retaliation is it’s both untargeted and uncontrolled damage. It’s not even random damage. You control when you take retaliation damage which makes it very little actual threat, except combined with stupidity. It’s more a form of protection and easy to control this type of damage with AoE healing, regen, and your heal skill. The first 2 happen in a zerg all the time, even more than retaliation.

The OP said he took 8k damage in retaliation. So what?
Was it 8k on-demand damage? No.
Was it a serious threat? No.

It was 8k damage that made no difference. If it would have made a difference, he could have waited until he had to resources to deal with it.

Retaliation is the weakest boon, except maybe for aegis.

GJ with hyperbole. If you’re too laggy or just don’t have the awareness to cancel your AoE attack that’kittenting 5 targets, don’t zerg.

Don’t know what anyone else said but the solution is you stop attacking. Same as confusion. Easiest solution ever.

Retaliation was already nerfed and doesn’t need another.

I have a p/d thief and each sneak attack is retal x 5. Sometimes you just have to stop attacking that target and be smart about your AoEs that trigger retaliation.

Leader of [Omen] Omen Gaming Community on DB PM me if you’re interested in cleaning up your guild. Video evidence will be provided.

I forgot about SoS in terms of T3. With Kaining continuing their fall, SoS is shaping up to be the next T3 contender. Their oceanic is stronger than YB or Mag but their NA is lacking. I have some friends on that server though I don’t know anything about their community as a whole.

If you want T3 scale battles I suggest Yak’s Bend. T2, FA. Skill lag and queues? I’m not familiar with the current T1 servers.

Teamkiller.4315:

Gellor.6497:

D|ERP

The | is bothering me. What’s that there for?

Their guild tag is censored.

Zephyrus.9680:

This match is a good challenge for roaming. Apart from zergs, DB always seems to travel in 3+’s , occasionally 2’s and usually hides in camps thinking they’re safe. Not even the thieves will 1v1

Strangely I could only find condition bow warriors that wanted to 1v1 – seen a few good ones though.

Guess I need to clarify this is purely anecdote. Don’t take it personally if you’re a roamer from DB and I didn’t encounter you.

This match is a good challenge for roaming. Apart from zergs, DB always seems to travel in 3+’s , occasionally 2’s and usually hides in camps thinking they’re safe. Not even the thieves will 1v1

Strangely I could only find condition bow warriors that wanted to 1v1 – seen a few good ones though. Hope I’ll have time to put together a 1v3 roaming video this week.

keep in mind server population != wvw population. And not even a good indication.

Not new idea. Alternating 1v1 with the normal 3-way every week, or a 1v1 every few weeks, would be a nice change. But 1v1 matches only might get bland after a while.

Nothing new here…

What good are infinite rolls when you’re already winning? That’s the only time it gives stamina. It’s not a bad sigil for a thief and maybe some tanky frontline classes. I use it for condition thief build but never ends up useful in zerg vs zerg because as theif I’m either daggerstorming or using long range shortbow in zerg vs zerg.

Also, theoretically if you could infinitely dodge you’re not doing anything else in the fight.

SPvP is usually no more than 3v3 (or 3vx/xv3) in terms of the individual engagements. The sPvP meta is close to the WvW roaming meta but with more variations since mobility is less important and full bunker no damage is legitimate to buy time = points.

My last sPvP group was a pug group for tourneys for the monthly. It was 3 d/d eles (post-nerf), a guardian, and a thief. We ended up on a ~15 win streak till the matchmaking faced us rank ~10s against rank 40s that finally stopped us.

This, to me says how uncompetitive sPvP is, by its design. It’s much more about individual skill, some communication and team composition, but very little emphasis on teamwork. It doesn’t come close to GvG in GW1. And definitely doesn’t resemble two large guild zergs in WvW that would be pass for GvG in GW2. Everything about it is different from skill set, tactics, stat builds, play style.

Edit: Not to put down roaming – that’s what I do most of the time – but just pointing out there’s no comparison between ‘GvG’, even zerg busting and sPvP or small scale roaming.

Without looking at individual server communities, I would consider a stable WvW server to be one that (in order of importance):

- is not T1 #1. Maybe not quite a ticking time bomb but the least stable place to be (except for recent bandwagon servers). Even if it was stable when it got there, the longer a server is T1 #1 the more it becomes a magnet for every casual or new player interested in WvW that wants to automatically be ‘the best’ and you know they’re not there to stay.

- rarely comes in first (bandwagon/fairweathers from being consistently first place in the tier is setting up a stack of dominoes).

- the majority are quite satisfied where they are and have zero ambition for raising tiers, therefore, make little or no effort to recruit (and if so, only to balance the tier they are in)

- has few recent transfers in or out

Don’t worry about it. Yesterday I was hopping borderlands. Then this morning I was minimized, standing sentry over KN EK gates for 3+ hours. While working even.

I saw many other Maguumans doing the same as well. Based on what I’ve read on earlier pages, I’m pretty sure those two activities are as bad as hacking + spying

I did see an interesting 4 Golem rush that did 5% to the outer gate though.

McFribble.2349:

Oil single handedly stalls a group from siegeing a gate for a good minute or two. How is that in anyway useless…?

Just because you aren’t wracking up kills from it =/= serves no purpose.

Because the thread is not about oil, its about an oil WvW skill line. The issue with oil is not its power. It’s already more than powerful enough in the extremely limited use it has.

As you stated, the purpose of oil is to buy 30 seconds of response time before rams are put down. And this is only assuming there are defenders. Basically the point of oil is not actually to use it, just that its there. So what possible improvement could an oil skill line give over its current state?

MLGKorno.5419:

Pardeshir and I were roaming in Yak’s BL last night and I decided to record it. This was also posted in the thief section, enjoy. You can whisper me to join our roaming guild [FEAR].
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1VkWmmILc84

Nice S/P. I don’t think I’ve seen one of those since the pistol whip nerf, maybe half a year ago.

Let it die already…

Zergs are encouraged but your particular arguments are terrible… Points 2 and 3 are anti-zerg. Though AC is more turtle/siege-wars meta which is bad for its own reasons.

Supply traps force zergs out of blob formations and/or punish bad zergs for being bad. You can always see when a stealth thief is near btw, but if you don’t know, I’m not telling.

OP’s logic doesn’t make sense any way you turn it.

I was pretty sure they removed it. But it’s here now.

There’s also the bug where you don’t get credit for captures, even on the circle, so annoying…

MomentofWeakness.1246:

HighRoller.9508:

MomentofWeakness.1246:

Kryopsis.6081:

Wow, I’m afraid to quote anything right now since it’s all probably going to be deleted soon. Anyway, congratulations on your new commander, Kaineng, may he lead you to greatness. Hopefully he’ll fight with the same zeal in-game as he does out of game.

It’s quite interesting that the past 2-3 pages are essentially a silly argument about which server has the highest numbers, with people using that as an excuse for poor performance. There is probably a very simple way to verify numbers but it’s hardly relevant. Winners don’t make excuses, only losers do. I know it’s very appealing to claim that you only lost because the other side had a bigger zerg. This said, all you’re doing is implying that you have no control over the outcome of the battle: you’re giving up.

Speaking of morale and fighting spirit, Yak’s Bend is doing really well right now!

Agreed, but wins to losses, we won last night so GG. And saying well we didnt have numbers cause we moved karma train.. tell them to actually play the game and get some skill, having a high wvw rank means nothing if theres no skill behind it..

I hate to chip in, but telling people to get some skill while you run with a guild zerg against pugs while mashing w+1 isn’t what I would call skill.

There was guild zergs in mag too.. also, PvDoor isnt skill either (karma trainers).

Well I often join EB because it’s fun roaming territory with a healthy mix of mega zerg badge fests so I’m pretty sure those pugs face off all the time against RE+zerg and yes, win regularly, as they have done so in the last couple days without you as well. Xushin was leading then and they did wipe RE and I assume, yourself, before darp showed up.

These are the people you probably lead every day in the weeks you were commanding EB… There’s 4 maps in WvW but the fact that they weren’t in EB to fight RE+server for a couple hours and may have been leveling alts on a map you chose not to defend means no skill?… Territory was not lost with darp in charge but I’m sure you could have found the other zerg taking keeps on YN or YB borderlands.

So declare victory against a much smaller force and regardless, everyone seems to have had fun. GG as you say.

So yesterday in EB between scouting and roaming I was tagging along for some of the epic fights.

As I understand it, shortly after RE appeared, darp was called in and the queued karma/leveling train was intentionally moved to a borderland, leaving EB with no queue.

Second two clips involving the upleveled karma train happened before the first two. Video rendering seemed to help a little but don’t watch if you get a headache from 1 FPS… I do

Would not have kept these but somehow its being argued the numbers were even. The karma train fights we may have outnumbered Kain, only because they came in 2 separate zergs. Darp ones, uh. count it lol… I know I missed most of the fights though.