Guild Wars 2

AoE blinds are really useful on hammer trains. Necro Plague #2, Justice is Blind, Evasive Arcana.. etc

I find a condi necro is one of the easiest camp clearing professions.

Basically I just load up the supervisor with bleeds/signet of spite and then epidemic it onto the other NPCs and continue to auto attack, drop AoE bleeds and epidemic.

Clear the blinds with scepter auto attack (it’s pretty fast).

The main thing is pulling the NPCs into a place where your AoE can cover all of them.

I use a build something like this – can’t remember my exact sigils – might have a Torment sigil in there:

http://gw2buildcraft.com/calculator/necromancer/?5.0|6.1b.h5.0.0.0|b.1b.h1n.8.1b.h9.0.0.0|1b.719.1b.719.1b.719.1b.719.1b.719.1b.719.0.0.0.0.0.0|1b.62.1b.62.1b.62.1b.62.1b.62.1b.62|u4ab.u29b.0.a5.0|30.d|3r.3x.43.48.4g|e

In terms of dueling it’s pretty hard to lose with that build.

Ropechef.6192:

warhorn improvements:

make the skills blast finishers.

While we’re at it lets make the swiftness AoE for our allies and the daze 360 degree AoE rather than a cone and it cures crippled, chilled and immobilise

Specific Game Mode
WvW

Proposal Overview
Make ranger pets and ranger spirits behave exactly like the Guardian’s invulnerable spirit weapons

Goal of Proposal
Assist with complaints about pets and spirits dying too easily and having poor AI

Proposal Functionality
- Lower pet and spirit damage to account for this new invulnerability
- Add a Duration and a Cooldown when activating a spirit pet – pets and spirits die after Duration expires (exactly like spirit weapons do)
- Buff the Ranger’s other damage to account for DPS loss from the pet
- Make pets / spirits semi-transparent like the guardian spirit weapons so there is a visual cue
- Make them invulnerable like spirit weapons
- Keep the “Charm” feature so Ranger still have to collect pets
- Update F1-F4 skills to offer different skills now that pets are invulnerable – something like:
F1 – Summon pet (requires target, range 600, pet spawns on the target, F2 goes on 1 second cooldown)
F2 – Pet special (fast cast time)
F3 – Free pet (destroys pet, grants ranger boons and/or enemy conditions)
F4 – Swap pet (switches between two spirit pets)
- Give spirit pets (a) fast cast times and (b) perma swiftness to enable them to attack moving targets

Associated Risks
All the usual risks that come from significant rework and testing.

Wasn’t there a lot of complaints around the racial home cities not being used enough? Wouldn’t this be the perfect opportunity for Arenanet to re-establish populations in those cities. It would make more sense to decentralise and use the racial cities than try to shoehorn everyone into a keep. We don’t really need a central location except for the attention seeking ‘look at me’ types who idle outside the bank.

1. Ranger.
2. Thief.
3. Necro.

I have 8 fully geared professions but I mainly play necro and engineer. Given necro damage and healing is being nerfed in this patch I would like to see more damage mitigation added in return.

Currently we are the only profession without a decent skill to escape from bad situations in WvW.

For example on my other professions I have:

1: Thief: Instant teleport + Stealth
2: Warrior: 1200 movement (rush) + 600 movement skill (sav leap) + 600 movement (bulls) + Blocks + Invulnerability + Berserker stance
3: Guardian: Invulnerability + Blocks + 600 movement (leap of faith)
4: Ele: Teleport + Invulnerability
5: Mesmer: Instant teleport + Stealth + Invulnerability + Blocks
6: Engineer: Invulnerability + Blocks + Stealth + 900 movement (rocket boots)
7: Ranger: Invulnerability + Blocks + 1100 movement (swoop)

(This list is not exhaustive)

As I understand it, the necro is supposed to have low mobility because it is meant to have a sustain/attrition style game play.

However, I wouldn’t expect a sustain profession to have the:
- worst stability (none – unless you spec into a grand master trait)
- worst blocks (none)
- worst invulnerability (none)
- worst endurance regen

Death Shroud is basically a meat shield and it does nothing to stop incoming stuns, immobilises and burst – when you are being focused you can’t regen life force because you are perma stunned/knocked down due to lack of stability/blocks/invulns.

Death Shroud is not an appropriate replacement for block/invuln/stability.

Spectral Walk is also unacceptable because of the lack of immunity to stuns and immobilize. So you can start the spectral walk but then you get locked down and it’s over.

This is from a WvW “immobilize meta” perspective – sPvP may be different – in PvE I have no issues.

I actually don’t use my mesmer for exactly this reason. Glamour AoE confusion traits don’t proc enough confusion to make it worthwhile.

I like to see numbers and I don’t feel I’m contributing unless I see multi thousands of damage hitting 5 players.

iZerk does some damage but compared to my necro/engineer/ele/guardian/warrior bleh.

Being a veil slave is really boring – because you give people an awesome advantage and then stand back while they kill everyone and take all the loot.

Kovu.7560:

As a Ranger, with nothing to contribute to a zerg outside of a water field, I’m sad that a profession with so much wvw utility would demand more. =(

~ Kovu

Entangle, Muddy terrain, Barrage, Spirits and an assortment of traps say hi.

Incendiary Powder: 4s burn, 10s cooldown, on crit, master trait
Dhuumfire: 3s burn, 10s cooldown, on crit, grandmaster trait

Can you please explain the logic in Dhuumfire being nerfed but not Incendiary Powder?

It was mentioned that Dhuumfire is too easy to apply so you are making it harder to apply however my condi engineer applies a 4s burn at 1500 range with auto attack as opposed to my condi necro doing a 3s burn at 1200 range (using a grandmaster trait).

So currently:

Dhuumfire: 3s burn on crit, every 10 seconds, grandmaster trait

Incendary Powder: 4s burn on crit, every 10 seconds, master trait

How is it that Dhuumfire is OP and needs a nerf while Incendary Powder is not OP and doesn’t need to be touched?

I have both a condi engineer and a condi necro but it seems like they are basing their nerfs on popular opinion.

Make all ascended items have user selectable stats and that will address most complaints about gear grind and money/laurels already spent on zerker gear.

why?

(15chars)

Most funny stories involve players/zergs running into tower portals that they don’t own or have flipped just as they are about to enter it.

Then there was that time we made a mini zerg of thieves (about 12)..

Try this: http://gw2skills.net/editor/?fQAQNBmODbkRrSPTTcjfPBMpo7xjUU8wUPKH9zB-jEyAYMBZCCMZJQJwiox2GKiGriBTfSEV7NKiWtUAPsFA-w

The main burst comes from this rotation (performed quickly):

Well 1→Well 2→Death Shroud→Life Transfer

The reason you do it quickly is that you get 5 seconds of fury entering death shroud – so your wells will tick with fury even though you put them down when you didn’t have fury – also your Life Transfer will hit everyone with fury.

You want to enter Plague form and use skill #2 to chill and blind the enemy blob. Blind cuts their DPS and chill is -66% movement speed so it spreads their blob out so your zerg focus individuals.

When you get focused switch to DS to absorb damage and protect your real health pool.

You also have stability on entering DS (and DS is on a low cooldown) which is very important in WvW with all the static fields, lines of warding and hammer stun.

Agree, I also use Sigil of Doom on my condi necro – gives me 8.5s poison every 10s (with my condi duration).

hihey.1075:

Last Refuge (Shadow Arts Minor Adept Trait):
Use Blinding Powder when your health reaches a certain threshold.
-Health threshold: 25%

Shadow Arts is a stealth and venoms line.

They could change it from a Stealth proc to a Venom proc:

The best one I can think you would want at 25% is some healing.

So I would suggest:

Gain Skelk Venom at 25% health (cooldown: 60 seconds) – instant cast.

http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Skelk_Venom

Thieves will like this because:
- It isn’t blinding powder
- Gives them better sustain

Other professions will like this change because:
- Stops the thief going invisible just as you are about to kill him
- Rewards the thief for staying in the fight instead of running away
- Long cooldown so the sustain is not over powered

I have no problem with warriors apart from their ability to run away.

Warriors are meant to be a brave profession yet in WvW the new play style is almost cowardly.

They behave in WvW exactly like d/d eles did before the RTL got nerfed.

They barrel in, try to burst you down and if they start losing the fight they run away so quickly (and with strong heals ticking away) that only another greatsword warrior can chase them.

You can try chill/cripple/immobilise to stop them running away but most of them are running Dogged March which makes them even harder to stop.

I would like to see:

nerf: Healing signet passive: only ticks when in 600 range of an enemy.
buff: Healing signet active: improved (to make using it worthwhile using).

Greatsword: Rush
- nerf: needs an enemy target to be selected (removes: running away)
- buff: cleave damage – 5 targets (adds: AoE burst to open a fight)
- buff: 3s cripple (adds: AoE CC to open a fight)

Sword: Savage Leap
- nerf: double cool down if used without a target selected (removes: running away, retains: in combat mobility)

Note: Neither skill has to hit a target, they only have to have a target selected.

Arlette.9684:

You have one useless elite skill and you’re unhappy, I invite you to play a Guardian with 3 useless elite skills and share your opinion there

Say wut?

I play necro main but I have played thief and guardian extensively. In WvW, the invulnerability elite is god mode and the healing book is great for support.

Guardians have some excellent elites.

I agree with OP.

Every system in GW2 is designed with ‘social’ gaming in mind – you go to mine a node or kill a champion and it doesn’t matter that someone else is there. There more the merrier.

With the rally system, PUGs can really hurt your guild activities (even bad guildies can hurt you).

It is really the only remaining ‘anti social’ mechanic that GW2 contains.

Keep down state, lose the rally system.

MagiKarp.8201:

So in summary hell yeah it is an achievement and Beastgate lives on.

You deserve that limited use dolyak finisher.

The issue for me isn’t the ascended grind – the issue is the build lock-in.

You literally can’t switch from power build to a condi build without repeating the grind all over again.

You can’t switch your build to have more toughness and less crit damage or vice versa without repeating the ascended grind again.

Given the massive grind involved stats need to be freely customisable on ascended gear to that we can have more build variety.

Build variety helps with player engagement because they can continue to enjoy their class with another build and not have to go through all of the grind every time Arenanet nerfs their favourite build’s OP trait/skill.

Basically every ascended and legendary item needs to have selectable stats that you can just switch whenever you are out of combat.

I am an alt-oholic and I have resigned myself to exotic armour and weapons because everything is too expensive and time consuming for someone that likes to try different builds all the time.

To me, the game is WvW – I do not find gear acquisition fun in any way.

Tsath.4527:

I personally wouldn’t like just playing WvW during night when most people logged off anyway.

Jade Quarry often has 4 maps queued “during night when most people logged off” (Oceanic prime time and SEA prime time).

Oceanic/SEA has quality guilds and big numbers that are the envy of Jade Quarry EU and Jade Quarry NA. To say that “most people are logged off” is simply ludicrous.

I would argue that Jade Quarry is an Oceanic/Asian server and we should shutdown WvW when most of the Asian players log off (this will stop North American players from playing during their prime time but what does that matter? WvW would be no fun for you when everyone is logged off right?).

Seriously though, night capping is a very, very, very old idea – it’s been touted by shallow thinkers since the start of the game and it’s been dismissed by Arenanet (and every rational player that has put a modicum of thought into it).

People just need to realise that servers are called North America and Europe because of their geographical location of the server farm – NOT because they are specifically made for North American and European players.

North American servers are for all players anywhere on the planet.
European servers are for all players anywhere on the planet.

Every server has coverage blackspots – yours is during Oceanic/SEA and JQ’s is during EU/NA – just learn to deal with it.

Excellent changes recently by Arenanet’s WvW team:

• Leagues – on hold (or gone)
• World XP – account bound
• GvG area added
• Edge of the Mists added

Admittedly two of these items should never have gone live but still it’s good that you’ve seen the light – removing mindless grind and unbalanced match ups is always going to be a winning move with the players.

Cirus.5748:

It’s not our fault Jade Quarry surrendered after 3 days.

Enjoy your Dolyak finisher you guys really deserve it.

Just a general question

Do Arenanet ever add or remove supply of certain items on the trading post by acting as a market participant?

Here is my gem store idea to make GW2 more “alt friendly”:

Waypoint Map of Tyria

Purchase price: 200 gems (1 for each alt = 8×200 = 1600 gems)

Description: Open all waypoints on all maps

(or if that is too generous, open 1 waypoint per map).

JonPeters.5630:

We are increasing base regen by 33%. This is basically equivalent to a patch notes that says: “Warrior: Cooldown on all weapon skills has been reduced by 25%.”

Ini regen won’t create a new meta, new/buffed traits will – the two meta builds of choice have been smashed and nothing new offered as a replacement. What use is having more cooldowns if you are dying because you can’t evade or stealth to mitigate damage.

I think the assumption that not having to take ini-regen traits now will somehow create a new range of meta builds is wrong.

If you disagree, please feel free to post a few examples of what you see the new meta in thief builds might be – now that d/p and s/d are dead.

JonPeters.5630:

Opportunist
This trait was wildly overpowered. I there was a 15 point minor for any other profession that basically read: "Reduce cooldown of all weapon skills by 33%, it would basically be impossible to run that profession without putting 15 points into that line. Because of this every thief build that is effective uses this line, which improves crit and crit damage. This pigeonholes this profession in a way that makes it frustrating for players and developers. This trait has to be closer to an 8% increase if we expect people to consider not taking 15 point in critical strikes.

30 in Critical Strikes is still required. Executioner and Hidden Killer are just too good not to take. This change won’t solve anything about the Critical Strikes line.

JonPeters.5630:

All other thieves will be equally or more efficient.

You mean apart from stealth and evasion meta builds right? So the 3% of thieves who don’t run those two builds will be equally or more efficient. The remainder will be significantly less efficient.

800 of my 2000 hours are on thief but I think I’ll be using my mesmer going forward.

JonPeters.5630:

Infusion of Shadow
For basic use this trait’s functionality is not going to change. By many players it was being used to grant some initiative when going into stealth. However there were some abusive builds that were using this to maintain very long stealth uptime without having to use their utility skills. The problem with this is that it lets them recharge those skills while in stealth, which takes away the risk associated with using them. We are ok with thieves blowing their cooldowns to have longer stealth, and we are ok with theives bouncing in and out of stealth, but we were not ok with thieves maintaining long duration stealth through abusing a single trait.

I haven’t played my d/p thief for a few months but I have played it for 800 hours.

The Infusion change will drastically alter a d/p thieve’s survivability without any compensation.

So I think if you are going to nerf Black Powder + Heartseeker combo to stop chaining stealth then you really should be making Black Powder much cheaper in terms of initiative.

The ini regen buff won’t aid in survivability for d/p thieves (because we were already running max ini regen builds) but a cheaper projectile finisher+blind field would help.

Viking Jorun.5413:

For all intensive purposes

For all intents and purposes.

Cake.4920:

Also, I find that personally I’m able to score anywhere from 2-5x more points in the middle of the night than I would during primetime. This is why people say WvW is about coverage more so than population, and there is a limited amount of oceanics/asians to go around.

Reducing the max map population during off hours, so that less nighttime players are needed per server, or reducing PPT gained during off hours needs to be done in order to say that man hours during primetime are equivalent to man hours during nighttime, otherwise I feel like I’m wasting time playing for PPT during the day.

Geez… not this again. Night capping restrictions during “NA’s nighttime” were ruled out a long time ago.

Your primetime is my night time. My primetime is what you call nighttime.

WvW is an international game – there is no ‘night time’ and every player considers ‘prime time’ to be the time when they are logged on.

I consider Oceanic and SEA to be the true ‘prime time’ on JQ because our North American and European guilds can’t match our Oceanic and SEA guild numbers.

Would you like it if SEA and Oceanic players asked for queue and points restrictions to be applied during your primetime? Probably not.

North American servers are NOT for North Americans – they are for everyone – they are simply hosted in North America.

Oceanic and SEA players should be able to play without restriction and our efforts should be just as valuable and just as rewarding to the server as the efforts of North American players.

DevonCarver.5370:

In addition, we don’t release specific numbers in terms of populations, queues, etc. and I can’t comment directly on those statistics. I’d be more curious to know what people think is the reason behind the fact that score is so directly related to the number of people on a server 24/7 and how WvW could be designed differently to address that moving forward. My personal observation is that the momentum you gain from even a small period of having more people online is so large that it can’t be overcome. Which makes me think we need to be doing more to slow that momentum.

Again, this is intended to be a discussion about the design principles, and not a forum for requests for information about current projects or to request specific changes.

Population imbalance reasons

WvW populations are imbalanced towards tier 1 because of the lack of competition present in tier 2 though 8. PvE transfers were attracted to successful WvW populations because of the WvW buffs.
The guild I am in has about 20-30 players and we want to fight other guilds and zergs of a similar size, all night – for hours on end.
In order to fight these large groups we are forced to go to tier 1 servers because they have the best Oceanic and South East Asian coverage.
The smaller tier 2 servers can’t supply enough bodies constantly for hours on end during the Oceanic / SEA time zone.
Recently when we have been forced to play tier 2 servers via league (or random match up) we actually have to organise with the other server’s commander to even get a fight.
Full time WvW guilds will always be drawn to tier 1 for the constant fights and the high quality opposition. The only way to get us off tier 1 servers is to merge servers sitting in tier 2 though tier 8 until they have similar time zone coverage to tier 1 servers.

Slowing server momentum

Your suggestion of slowing server momentum can be a double edged sword – you risk disadvantaging a “lesser” server that can only dominate 1 time period. e.g.,
Server 1 – coverage – Oceanic: Good, SEA: Good, EU:Good, US: Good
Server 2 – coverage – Oceanic: Excellent, SEA: Average, EU:Average, US: Average
The way that Server 2 stays in touch with Server 1 is by going really, really hard during Oceanic time period where they dominate – they can catch up on the huge gains that Server 1 has during SEA/EU/US.
So you risk giving an advantage to Server 1 (currently winning server) by slowing Server 2’s rapid advance during their Oceanic timezone.

Catch up mode

I would love to see some form of “Catch Up” mode in WvW that allows trailing server(s) to stay in touch with winning servers.
The best and most exciting matches are the close matches that come down to the wire.
I think you need to make ‘points based’ catch up rather than ‘rewards based’ catch up.

An example idea of this would be:

Underdog Buff:

• Earn 0.125% of score deficit on sentry capture.
• Earn 0.25% of score deficit on supply camp capture.
• Earn 1% of score deficit on tower capture.
• Earn 5% of score deficit on keep capture.
• Earn 10% of score deficit on Stonemist caputure.

Score deficit = Leading server’s score MINUS Your server’s score

Example of how it would operate:

Jade Quarry 220,000 (the server I play on currently)
BlackGate 180,000

Score defecit = 40,000

JQ captures anything = 0 point bonus – they are in the lead

BG SM capture = 40k * 0.30 = 4000 bonus points
BG sentry capture = 40k * 0.30 = 50 bonus points

So BG will constantly catch up to JQ and if JQ falls behind they will constantly catch up to BG.

As it is percentage based, the closer BG gets to JQ’s score the bonus points will start to diminish greatly and BG will be much closer to JQ – but BG will have to “earn” the actual lead. JQ’s hard work won’t be fully diminished by a catch up.

It’s like those racing car games where if you get a good lead the other cars catch up until they are close and then the catch up mode wears off. It keeps the race close until the finish rather than discouraging players when they see they are too far behind to ever catch their opponent.

Don’t get hung up on on percentages I am showing here – they are only an example and the optimal percentages would have to be worked on to be ‘fair’ – so the catch up is not too fast or too slow.

It might be an idea to only enable the catch up mode when the deficit is larger than 10k (or some other arbitrary number that makes sense).

Xae Isareth.1364:

dzeRnumbrd.6129:

DevonCarver.5370:

We have some thing that will be in the tests for the new map that will help WvW be more alt-friendly. We will talk more about it as we get closer to the test actually beginning.

Arenanet, why not tell us the design now before you are over committed?

What happened to Arenanet’s new policy of Collaborative Development with the player community?

Is the WvW team not a part of the new Collaborative Development initiative?

What are you doing for EB and Borderlands alt-friendliness?

We’re going to just keep creating these threads every week for the next few years until you make wXP account bound – so why not just do what we all know is right.

Because if they told you right now without actually having the maps to test it out, how would you know if it works or not?

Not everything needs a full build to evaluate its efficacy.

It’s pretty easy to spot obvious design flaws ahead of time.

We knew leagues would suck before we could test it.
We knew league achievements would block up the queues before we could test it.
We knew soulbound wXP would suck before we could test it.
We knew stat based orb buffs would suck before we could test it.

DevonCarver.5370:

We have some thing that will be in the tests for the new map that will help WvW be more alt-friendly. We will talk more about it as we get closer to the test actually beginning.

Arenanet, why not tell us the design now before you are over committed?

What happened to Arenanet’s new policy of Collaborative Development with the player community?

Is the WvW team not a part of the new Collaborative Development initiative?

What are you doing for EB and Borderlands alt-friendliness?

We’re going to just keep creating these threads every week for the next few years until you make wXP account bound – so why not just do what we all know is right.

JQ’s easy matches make up for the fact they get an organised 2v1 for all of week 1 and week 7.

Acidicore.3264:

I’d have to agree and disagree at the same time. The smaller ones take about 5 minutes max to do, and as long as players do something else afterwards, no problems. However, if all they do is hop in a world to get that one thing and leave, they’re wasting time for someone else in the queue. They could cram all four together, make it a bit like conquest for people who want to pvp but also like the added benefit of vertical combat and jumping puzzles.

Yeah let’s not kid ourselves – we all know it isn’t 5 minutes for most players – it’s easy once you do it a lot but most new players take quite a while. It takes even longer if there are hostiles in there that you have to deal with.

Joining the JP into 4 is a good idea but I am suggesting quick fixes that don’t require 3+ months of coding and testing.

azizul.8469:

are you talking about BLs JP or EB JP ?

Borderlands.

AFAIK the EB one doesn’t take queue slots except for a minute or so while you make your way to the OS JP entrance.

When I see Mesmers in a borderlands JP saying they are running ports in the JP it brings back bad memories of the old days of PvE guys blocking up WvW to get badges for their legendaries.

Good on the mesmers for doing this though – it helps clear out the PvE players faster.

Having JP as part of the achievement is going to have people spending a lot of extra time clogging up the queues. Get rid of those achievements and it should help the queue at least a little bit.

The other alternative is to make the achievements far easier so we can get rid of the scrubs blocking up the queues because they’ll have their achievements.

Luna.9640:

• Reinforced Doors must be really reinforced and should be stronger against “Man Mode” or Massive Player Groups auto-attacking the gate really fast due to extreme numbers of players (ZERG!) and be stronger against basic (non superior) siege as well.

Disagree – making doors stronger encourages zerging.

Blackgate have a team called a “Float Team” that has 50-100 players (blob/zerg) that float between borderlands to defend important objectives.

You are giving that zerg more time to respond to smaller, special ops guilds.

If you took that time away from them they would have to stay on one map or split up into smaller groups to defend. Splitting up the blob is a good thing.

The hardest place to zerg successfully in WvW is the ruins capture pads and that is due to the pads having no passive defences. People just backcap objectives after the zerg leaves the capture pad.

Stopping zerging is more about making it hard for the zerg to defend what they have already taken – not making it harder for them to take stuff. Face it – when 100 players show up at a keep door and you’ve only got 20 – you’re in trouble – having thick gates will only delay the inevitable. However, you could go and ninja Bay while the zerg is attacking Hills. If only the gates weren’t so strong at Bay – you’d have been able to take before the zerg got back to defend after they took Hills….

TL;DR – objectives with high defence = easy mode zerging.

Seige.4862:

1. Remove AoE limit.
2. Add diminishing returns to crowd control.
3. Add actual WvW abilities that have meaning. (Ex.
http://www.darkageofcamelot.com/content/realm-abilities )
4. Add more siege.
5. Put orbs back in.

Would do wonders for WvW.
That is all.

The AoE cap is there to stop the server CPU melting during 3-way garrison fights.

Think skill lag is bad now? Try removing the AoE cap.

The only server fielding a zerg that can match an SoR zerg is ATM on JQ.

SkylightMoon.1980:

I was reading through a lot of the posts you guys had, and Mr. Carver has been kind enough to respond and answer questions that you pose to him. However a lot of the replies are still uncalled for, whether its sarcasm or just a low blow at his qualifications.

Well said.

These few squeaky wheels do not speak on behalf of the quiet majority of WvWers.

I am actually quite happy with the many enhancements that have been made over the past 5 months.

Keep the great changes coming Devon

bradderzh.2378:

dzeRnumbrd.6129:

The last time Arenanet tried to buff defence we had the whole arrow cart debacle.

Reward defenders – yes please.
Buff defence – no / reconsider.

Your idea of reward is very different to the average zerglings idea of reward.

Zerglings won’t defend if they don’t get any monetary/Wxp/xp/karma rewards from it.

Que? As it says in your quotation of me, I am pro rewards – money, karma, wXP – defenders should get that stuff.

After seeing how much ACs have ruined small scale ops on walled/gated objectives – I’m totally against buffing supply camps, towers, keeps and castles.

The last time Arenanet tried to buff defence we had the whole arrow cart debacle.

Reward defenders – yes please.
Buff defence – no / reconsider.

Buffing defence makes objectives even harder to take which in turn encourages zergs to form up in order to overwhelm the extra layers of defence.

Usually when the gates are up, the defenders (even when they have greater numbers!) will generally turtle and won’t PvP until the gates are open.

I say: PvP is the fun bit – walls and gates delay PvP – let’s get them open so we can fight.

The main issue is that you want an objective to be difficult to open/take when there overwhelming numbers outside (e.g., 80 outside vs 15 inside) – but easy to open when there are smaller (5 vs 10) or even numbers (18 vs 22) outside.

The only way I could see that happening is to buff the hit points on walls/gates based on the map or radius population. When a huge zerg floats into your borderlands and drops 3 omegas on your keep then you want those gates to be rock solid because you are outnumbered greatly. On the other hand, if you have 20 defenders v 20 attackers then it’s going to be an even fight and you want those doors open quick to get the PvP happening before a float zerg arrives. If you have a 5 player guild group attacking a tower against 10 defenders then you want those gates open ultra quick so the guild group has time to PvP against double their numbers and then cap the objective (assuming they win) before the float zerg arrives to wipe them.

TL;DR: Need to be careful about buffing/nerfing – lots of unintended consequences can result.

lordkrall.7241:

The main issue with catering it to upscaled characters would mean that it would suddenly be extremely easy to do on an actual lvl 80 character, which would defeat the whole purpose of the event.

You don’t have to cater the mobs to the upscaled players, you can cater the upscaled players to the mobs.

Increase the stats on upscaled players.

Having said that, I ran my level 5 mesmer in there. You just need to stay out of the fields while tagging as much as possible. I run full power/precision stats just to make sure I can tag things – no point using vitality/toughness because you’ll die in 1 or 2 shots with or without the toughness/vitality stats.

Just remember that if you mixing normal armour (eg, soldier) with armour that contains Critical Damage stats (eg, zerker, valkyrie) then you should do it in a certain order such that you maximise your stats.

Stat optimisation: http://www.reddit.com/r/Guildwars2/comments/12dmi5/tip_stat_optimization_with_crit_damage/

Note that you can get soldier armour + trinkets from Orr karma merchants for 42k karma per piece:

Armour: http://dulfy.net/2012/09/08/gw2-templegod-karma-armor-sets/
Trinkets: http://dulfy.net/2013/01/28/gw2-new-orr-temple-exotics/

Other reading: http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Equipment_acquisition_by_stats#Level_80_exotic_equipment

For for 6 pieces of exotic soldier armour it would cost 252,000 karma.

If you do your monthly + daily achievement every day you should have ~40 karma jugs at the end of the month.

Each jug of karma with all the boosters should give you about 8000 karma per jug so you’ll have 320,000 karma if you open the jugs with all the boosters active.

Boosters: http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Karma#Karma_modifiers

You can also get the various stat armour for badges of honour + coin from the armour master in WvW:

See: http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Armor_Master

I would start with exotics and only get the Ascended pieces when you are certain you like the stats you are running.

This is in no way a recommendation to run soldier armour – just telling you how you can get it cheaply. I would say run Soldier for your training wheels build in WvW and once you have adapted to the faster pace then switch to zerk/valk and if you can handle zerk/valk then switch to zerkers.

Pretty sure you can see Shadow Step, a few of us were chasing a (decent) thief that was spawn ganking our server’s reinforcements. I saw him step up on top of a mound and continue a 1v3. I knew the 3 wouldn’t kill him because he was too good. So I stealthed (refuge) and went to the circle he left behind and spammed backstab hoping he would shadow return when he got low. Sure enough – downed thief appeared at my feet. So pretty sure you can see the circle on Shadow Step unless they have changed it in past 2 months.

Warriors are the most mobile profession in the game I think. Pretty much no one can catch a sword/warhorn + greatsword warrior in WvW.

The issue is the same as dagger/dagger eles with RTL. The eles kept using RTL to escape imminent death rather than for combat mobility – so it got nerfed to require you to hit the target to avoid a long cooldown.

Warriors seems to be doing the same with Rush as eles were doing with RTL so I would anticipate similar nerfs.

I play a thief (and warrior) and I don’t think you are a coward – just ignore the guy – he’s obviously something-hurt.

jul.7602:

-Stun duration% and heavy stun chains are completely irrelevant. Thats what stability is for. But again, you contradict yourself in your last statement by saying your dodging it completely. If you can so easily dodge CC trains, than you already proved that -stun duration wasn’t needed in the first place.

You are putting words in my mouth – I did not say “completely” – I said dodges are in good supply – dodges are never infinite. But you already know that not everything can be dodged completely. Let’s not forget that players make mistakes when dodging, too early, too late etc.. no one is perfect.
Stability is also a finite resource and at times during long fights you and your guardians can run out of stability cooldowns.
So when stability isn’t up and dodges are missed or unavailable – stuns will happen.
That is where -stun duration comes into play.
Usually those times when you are all running out of endurance and stability is when your group is in the most vulnerable position and it is crucial to stay up.

jul.7602:

Shouts are used for immediate support and buffs. You’re neglecting the fact that all of our shouts are doing far more than removing an extra condition, they are fearing the enemies, and granting might and fury. We don’t give anything up for condition cleansing. With or without traits and soldiers, shouts are already good, soldiers and traits makes them significantly better. Essantially you don’t sacrifice anything.

Fair enough comment – I’m not saying you have to get rid of the shouts if you like the active skill on them – I am saying if you are an organised group and you are only running shouts because you want the side effect of shout heals and shout AoE condition cleansing then you are better off running with water fields and blast finishers and everyone running melandrus. I ran a shout build for a few hundred hours and I found the shout actives underwhelming so I prefer melandru. Do remember I said “Melandru is better IMO” – so it’s only my opinion and you are equally entitled to having your opinion. I can see I’ve touched the raw nerve of a shout heal warrior – so let’s just say both builds have their advantages and disadvantages. You can go your way – I’ll go mine and the battlefield can sort out who is right

When you go underwater your land helm is removed and your aquatic helm is equipped.

If you don’t have a Rune of Altruism installed on your aquatic helm then you’ll drop down to 5 of 6 Runes of Altruism and you won’t get the #6 bonus.

TL;DR – You need a seventh Rune of Altruism installed in your underwater face mask.