Guild Wars 2

There are various karma vendors in Orr that sell complete sets of level 80 exotic armor (complete with superior runes). They’re generally unlocked by difficult event chains though. There’s one at the Temple of Balthazar, and another at the Temple of Lyssa. I haven’t finished Orr, but I expect the other temples have one too.

Lots of us play dungeons. Lots of us succeed at them. Lots of us like them.

Your opinion is your opinion, but I disagree with every statement you’ve made, and I’m not alone in that. This isn’t a game that needs to be easier.

We were fighting some of you guys near EH on HoD borderlands, and noticed that when we would down some of you, you instantly sprang back up, like you’d killed a rabbit, but it happened too many times for that.

I’ve seen this before, and I’m still not clear on how people do this. How are you doing that?

“I’m certain a lot of players don’t mind spending hours hanging out in towers/keeps twiddling fingers waiting on a Zerg they can’t stop without a Zerg of there own just to avoid portals”

This is a facetious argument. You spend 5 minutes and find a mesmer. Two people are enough to check a tower, five will do for a keep. If you leave defenders, it’s to deal with the speed zerg. Ten people is enough.

Honestly, the number of zergs I see where 10 out of 30 are naked people spamming auto-attack tells me that a lot of people play WvW hoping to brainlessly farm badges / karma. Please don’t support that behavior.

A couple weeks ago I was one of 20 or so people in a BL map where one enemy server had two 30-40 man zergs roaming around speed-taking towers. They would turtle up with group swiftness, drop 5 rams, and generally take a tower in less than 2 minutes. At some point I was manning an arrow cart against them and watched as the zerg ran in, took the tower, and ran back out without even bothering to kill me.

I play a mesmer.

Since then I’ve made a point of hiding in keeps / towers that are getting steam rolled and then spamming map chat to get 5-6 people together so I could portal them in to retake 5 min. later. Any given server tends to catch on after this happens a couple times, but the magic is that they’re now stuck either spending 5 min. looking for the mesmer or leaving people behind to actually defend stuff. This means that instead of taking a tower in 2 minutes and a keep in 8, they now take 10 to 15 for either, which gives us half a chance to counter them, even with our inferior numbers.

WvW needs mesmer portals, or outmanned servers are doomed to always lose to the server with two 40 man zerg balls on every map. Winning in WvW should require at least a little strategy. Mesmer portals, like thief stealth, are a measure towards forcing that strategy to be necssary.

Mesmers can do it roughly one in 20 attempts. They don’t get to choose where they teleport to, they just go somewhere. Going through a tower portal is an extremely rare stroke of luck if it happens.

SF, for refererence, this is how you lost Sunny Hill just now. (I ran in stealthed while the gate was down.)

Two of your guys actually stepped over me to view the vista. And then left.

Nice job taking Sunny, SF. Only took you 4 hours, 4x our numbers, and about 500 deaths on your end You demonstrated that with an overwhelming majority you can slowly and painfully buy our land with your blood.

Notice how much we took while you were busy.

Regarding Rata Sum, if you really know what you’re doing, you can get to the polymock arenas

(not that you can do anything there yet)

Another fun place to visit is Salma district in non-instanced mode (you can get there by climbing over rooftops). It’s… quiet there.

Anyone figured out a way to get into the collapse? I keep wanting to see what’s down there.

There’s two issues I’ve been seeing lately in WvW that I haven’t run into before. I was wondering if these are known to be exploits, or if this is some sort of in-game trick:

1. I see an enemy thief urnning past and I try to attack him, but it keeps saying “X requires a target”. I never lose target, and the guy doesn’t stealth, but it doesn’t let me hit him with anyb targeted abilities.

2. I down an enemy player, and some other enemy starts to res him, and he’s up instantly (not after 5 seconds like with mercy gear, just immediately up as soon as res begins). I would think this was someone killing 1-hit wildlife, but happened with the same 2 people 3 times in a row, and there weren’t that many rabbits around. This also only seems to work when someone is ressing.

Henge defense of Stonemist this evening was awesome. Best defense I’ve ever been part of

And 15 badges and 50 or so kills in less than 5 minutes isn’t so bad either. EB guys, why didn’t you go in any of the other doors?

It’s currently possible to enter the karka hive, but the way the entrance appears it’s not clear if this is supposed to be possible. I reported the specifics usng /bug, but it would be good to know if it’s ok to go in there now or if we should wait until tomorrow.

Sorry to see you go Scyntrelle, (this is Grejis), but I do understand. I spent 10 min. yelling at a group attacking the gate of a tower that we had three trebs hitting the wall of the other night, as they were dying to the oil. There are too many people who get angry when you say, “go attack this instead please, that isn’t useful”. Also, some of the drama has been a rather over the top.

I’d move on myself, but I have a PVE guild I’m attached to on HoD.

It’s rather the opposite.

I think people expect this to work out well for ANet, as they’ll pick up a few thousand WoW players. If they lost 50,000 current players and get 10,000 WoW players, it’s still a net win for them because all of the current players have already paid.

Possibly they could have Ascended gear cause “Agony” outside of the FoTM dungeon? So wearing it anywhere else causes you to just fall over dead in 30 seconds? That would do the trick.

To be fair, most of the people who WvW in green / yellow gear are called “walking loot” :P

Whether that’s because they have less game experience or worse stats is up in the air though.

I really hadn’t meant this to be a debate over ascended gear. I’m honestly still not sure how I feel about the changes coming in the next patch myself.

I was only trying to suggest that given how divided the playerbase is over this that it might help if there was a way for people to “opt-in” or not. And since opting in really has to happen on a server level, it seemed like splitting the servers into two groups might be a way to do that.

Please don’t try to hash out the equipment issue here.

It’s admittedly an emotional thing. A lot of people have grown a real attachment to the way the game is designed, and this radical of an alteration seems like it could make it a largely different game.

The degree to which all of ANet’s responses to the controversy have consisted of spin and intentionally leading statements makes the people who love the game as it is even more wary.

If you split the game and allow free transfers, it gives people who don’t want this an “out”, along with an ability to buy in if they decide it’s not that bad after all.

Possibly ANet could fork the game, so that some servers get the Lost Shores / Ascended Gear / whatever, and some don’t. Then people who want that stuff can move to the servers where they add it, and people who don’t can move to the servers where they don’t. Then ANet can check the population to see how many are in each group. Afterwards they can maybe cater more content to the larger of those groups.

This would require never having WvW match-ups between the two groups, but we already have the NA / Europe split, so this seems doable.

I realize this is extreme, but I think for a lot of people this is the only way this game would remain playable after this weekend.

1. Is ascended gear the “highest” tier? That is to say, will ANet ever release new gear with directly better stats than this stuff? Note that releasing harder to get ascended gear with higher stats later counts as a “no” to this question.

2. Is there anything in place to prevent this from making the jeweler profession useless? If you can no longer craft top-tier jewelry, there’s considerably less point to the craft, as it doesn’t even provide custom skins.

Honestly, if we could get a firm staement from ANet on those two questions, I think it would settle a lot of the worries people have. As it is, if the answers are “no” and “no”, I expect a huge percentage of the game’s players to actually quit, and maybe a few to come in from WoW. If they are “yes”, and “yes”, I think people can live with it.

(Oh, and creating this outside of the combined thread, as it’s sort of an endless ocean of sadness just now.)

Thieves who do this actually are always in stealth if they do it right. Tab targetting doesn’t work whatsoever. Also, going stealth interrupts any targetted skill.

Ricky, are you talking about Null Field, or another skill that strips buffs? None of those remove stealth last time I checked.

Note: reveal does not trigger on stealth end or if you attack during the last 1/2 second of stealth. This is the primary issue.

Also, AoE does not work. I’ve seen this attempted at least a dozen times without one success.

In th north borderlands camp they can stay permanently invisible by cloak and daggering “wildlife”, rabbits and “citizens” and such that don’t fight back.

There’s an easy fix to this though. Stop having stealth interrupt targeted abilities. If I can target a theif and start casting moa mprh, it shouldn’t interrrupt when the thief goes stealth.

I suppose I’m trying to draw a distinction between “persistence to try something for a few hours” and “persistence to try something for 1000 hours across a few months”.

would be easier if it was made into a solo instance

…but not nearly as fun or satisfying.

This is in response to the developer apology expressing that they won’t do a really difficult event limited to a holiday again.

Please, please, don’t do this. The clocktower was awesome largely in part to it being available for a limited time only. Various people have said they wouldn’t have minded if they could always come back, but the whole point of something like this is that it’s something not everyone will be able to do.

Guildwars 2 is a game that rewards skill above persistence. You can’t become more powerful than other people in WvW because you spent 10,000 hours grinding better WvW equipment. You can be better by playing better. If the clocktower was around permanently, sooner or later 90% of players would get through it, just through persistence and eventual luck. Having it only be available for a few days means it’s something people can be proud they achieved. It means it requires skill.

And yes, some people will get other people to do it for them. That’s effectively a cheat, and unavoidable. That’s true for literally anything you can do in the game.

Please include limited time, difficult challenges like this again in future holiday events.

I’ve got every achievement except “attend the party” at max, but my Emissary of the Mad King achievement is stuck at 3. Is this a known issue? Is there a way to “unstick” it?

Just watched a perma-stealth thief keep 20 people form taking a camp for about a half hour. It appears the trick is to stealth, run in, wait for NPC’s to respawn, run away. And then repeat. This is utterly game-breaking. Stealth needs to prevent a person from counting against capture.

Am I missing something here?

Honestly a lot of this (and a lot of topics on this board) reads like people want the zerg to be an almighty, unconquerable force. Thieves and mesmers are just about the only anti-zerg the game has, and it desperately needs them. If you nerf portals and stealth WvW will become utterly pointless as it will just amount to “who has more players in their mass”.

I’ve killed lots and lots of perma-stealth thieves. All you have to do is get a good, long-lasting condition on them when they appear. And I’ve seen many many mesmers accused of exploits when all they’ve done is hit someone with a clone or hid underneath the bridge at the briar tower.

Interesting strategy Blackgate is using. Take everything in mas zerg in first hour and then set up a bunch of siege outside of spawns. HoD borderlands had 6 ballistas, 2 superior arrow carts, a catapult and 2 flame rams (on outside of portal) at our north spawn exit within 90 min. of match start. They set up ballistas on east and west sides and have a small zerg (about 20) patrolling the ring road around our spawn.

We took back titanpaw and got siege up briefly, and then 60 of them arrived…

It’s enormously demoralizing, which I expect is the point.

HoD now owns most of their own borderlands. We killed 3 zergs of 50+ JQ’s, very fun.

Also, someone tried to hack orb away from us just after reset (we owned the keep since before reset, all walls and gates up, then suddenly they were inside with orb, but we killed them anyway ). Anyone get screenshots?

Nice job all.

See here: How to perma-stealth

The people who are saying the thief will be visible for 3 seconds don’t understand the mechanics or how these people operate. I have seen people killed by a thief who was never not in stealth once he engaged.

It actually is possibly to “infinite stealth”. If you hit CnD just as it ends, “revealed” never triggers and stealth never ends. This is what a lot of these people are doing.

I wonder, does the polymock arena count? You can get there using nothing but normal in-game items too. It’s just rather tricky.

A minor update to this: the jailing mechanic in Rata Sum is brilliant

Easiest way I’ve found to get badges is to defend something with siege. I’ve got 20 or so in a half hour when helping to kill off a zerg of 50 with an enhanced arrow cart (or whatever they’re called). I could see that scaling when an enemyside is foolish enough to keep running into the raining death.

People I see doing this tend to be using poisons too (noticeable because the NPC’s turn green). That might be part of the trick to pulling off kills this way. I’ve also seen teams of two people doing this kill off zergs of 10-15.

I generally run a mesmer in WvW (my thief is an alt), and this can be countered by using an AoE stun (max illusions trait) and then moa-morphing them, but large teams that do this are nightmarish to fight.

Not practical against players. Let’s you solo-farm NPC’s in WvW though. I’ve seen thieves solo camps this way.

I’ve been testing this out in the PvP training area after seeing thieves do this in WvW. It’s actually really simply to perma-stealth.

First, the build:
1. Put 20 points into shadow arts and acrobatics
2. Take “Infusion of Shadows”, “Patience”, “Fleet Shadow”, and “Quick Recovvery”
3. Equip dagger offhand

The technique:
1. Use any stealth skill to get into range
2. At the exact moment stealth would run out, hit 5 for “Cloak and Dagger”
3. Wait until the exact moment your initiative meter would hit full and hit 5 again (just before the black swirls would appear around your feet).

If you time it exactly right, you never leave stealth at all. If you screw it up and hit too early, you’re in trouble though, as you have 3 seconds where they can see you. If you’re a half second late, you’re visible for that half second, but this isn’t enough time for many NPC’s to get an attack off (let alone players).

You lose 1/2 an initiative per cycle, but this lets you stay stealthed for at least 20 seconds, which is more than the recharge of other stealth skills.

So, I thought “revealed” was supposed to trigger when stealth ran out. Is this a bug? Is stealth supposed to work this way so you can stay permanently invisible? Why doesn’t “revealed” trigger in this case?

I should explain that I do see the “poof” that normally accompanies a thief entering stealth when I get hit. I’ve been assuming this is a matter of hitting the skill the moment stealth ends so there’s never a rendered frame where he’s visible, but it’s still technically “after” stealth has ended. I gather that’s not doable?

There’s an entire guild (MMAC) that seems to run nothing but whatever this build is.

There’s a kind of thief I’ve run into frequently in WvW that goes like this:
1. Stealth slightly outside my range
2. Hits me and doesn’t break stealth
3. Goto 2

I play a mesmer, and this is still counterable*, but I’d thought this wasn’t possible. My assumption is that there’s a build that recovers initiative fast enough to just hit cloak and dagger right as it would leave stealth over and over. Is that actually possible? My impression is that this build is mostly used to farm Dolyaks (who don’t even react when attacked like this).

*To counter as a mesmer:
1. Take max illusions trait to count self in shatters.
2. Time when they’ll hit you
3. Dodge, hit f4, then f3, then moa morph.
4. Mirror images, Clone, F2, then fight and watch them kill themselves with 10 stacks of confusion.

There have been a lot of updates with “fixes” to ways people can get to off-map areas, and I just wanted to be sure. (To be fair, those may have been fixes to the issue where people accidentally walked through invisiwalls and got stuck.)

As an example, there’s a way to get into the “bottom” of Rata Sum without dying. It doesn’t involve hacking, just combining buffs and traits in a certain way and making the jumps just right. Is that considered an exploit?

There’s nothing you can really gain by this except to explore other bits of the landscape, so it seems like it should be ok, but I wanted to make sure, as no one else seems to do it.

Something on this topic I’ve been curious about: I recently noticed that you can build an arrow cart behind the door of some towers and blind-fire it through the door by clicking on where the ground would be visible if the door was open. Is that considered an exploit? It only seems to work for some of the towers.