Guild Wars 2

globe.7238:

Cover Girl.2580:

elderan.2638:

kidbs.8920:

Actually Raven, JQ has the superior coverage not the superior talent.

Whatever you gotta tell yourself.

Blackgate is coming hope they close transfers soon or all JQ bandwagoners will come to us ….

Bring it.

over 32 THOUSAND points in what? 24 hours to take number one spot? I think we both “brought it” and " told you "

I really wasnt going to post anything negative but where was the massive crap talk from you last week? You know, how you lost by what 300k points? You can run around thumping your chest as loud as you want, but enjoy the bandwangoners. Better yet enjoy that massive surge of oceanic players you were so desperately begging for and got. SBI did the same thing, got kitteny when they pulled ahead of HoD then had their foot shoved in their mouth and it’ll happen again. Oh and before you make some stupid retort of how i’m making excuses or mad, i’m not, i’m spitting facts.

To the other SBI players, you know the ones not full of themselves keep up the good fights.

SBI is hardly a bandwagon server. The people that pulled us ahead are the same ones that play their hearts out week after week. The same commanders that always organize the groups came up with the strats that we executed with success. Sure we may have gotten some EU servers which have helped to cover our non-peak gaps and helped us to maintain what we captured during our peak ours, but we’ve certainly not gotten the flood of people that JQ or BG did, nor do we want them.

I look forward to another knock-down, drag-out fight starting tonight. IoJ you guys fought very well and I hate to see you guys go back to tier 2. You are definitely tier 1 quality.

People please stop server hopping. Have some pride.

Melee just needs to know when to swoop in for the hits and when to dodge out and switch to a ranged weapon. You should never rely solely on your melee weapons in WvW.

I would agree that glass cannon melees (other than thieves) probably have no place in WvW b/c you’re just asking to get stomped then.

Please tell me this isn’t the same Daish that once played on the Destromath server in WoW. God help us if it is and you’re a commander.

@Mayam
I think it’s still apparent that JQ still has more coverage 24/7 than SBI. The fact of the matter is that a large group of people did take a break from WvW this week to take advantage of the first holiday event of GW2. If you can’t see the obvious coincidence between the event start and the time at which you guys finally took the lead then you’re just wearing blinders.

You can beat your chest and act like you guys are all hardcore but the reality is you simply have more people waiting to fill the spots should anyone decide to take a break for a few days. And you guys keep getting more and more on your server. I’ll gladly take 2nd if it keeps SBI from becoming the defacto choice of bandwagoners.

It’s been a great week of WvW and I’m sure next week will be just as intense. I’m just saying don’t get too comfortable with your #1 spot.

elderan.2638:

kidbs.8920:

Actually Raven, JQ has the superior coverage not the superior talent.

Whatever you gotta tell yourself.

Blackgate is coming hope they close transfers soon or all JQ bandwagoners will come to us ….

Bring it.

Enjoy the Halloween event while it lasts. JQs days are numbered as SBI was proving prior to the Halloween event kickoff.

Fabsm.5897:

Brutaly.6257:

@Fabsm
whats the food called, cant find it.

Been fooling around myself with a 1h build (1h sword+scepter), 0/30/30/5/5 with leech on swap and leech on crit and i would really like to know what food to use with that.

Got a vampire going that seems very interesting.

This one
Blackberry Pie

Blackberry pie is the level 55 version, but there is a level 80 version (can’t remember the name atm). It has an increased chance to proc the leech (I think it’s 60%), but I wonder if it also has an increased healing amount or if it’s just the same.

Actually Raven, JQ has the superior coverage not the superior talent.

I’ve noticed that during the lagfest in SM (especially last night), my F1-F4 abilities will simply never go off. Other abilities may lag like crazy or take forever to go off but at least they will eventually fire.

Hopefully they can come up with some fix for that situation b/c it makes SM battles nearly impossible.

Hjulstad.6317:

Yeah.. ppl tend to forgett about the importance of the virtues.. sigh..

So it resets your virtues to give you another block, a small heal, and a potential blind if you speced for it. I would still take Endure Pain over it. If it made you immune to CC that would be one thing, but it doesn’t which means any good player with CC is going to CC you and finish you off before you can even take advantage of your renewed virtues.

I think the halloween event kind of boned SBI for this week. As soon as it hit everyone sort of put WvW on the wayside. I guess the JQ folks don’t really care about it as much. It’s still going to be the closest T1 match that I’ve seen and I’m sure next week things will tighten up again.

Stuck trying to get into LA. Somehow my wife managed to get in

SBI had an epic ninja of SM back from JQ. IoJ enjoy the present of SM that we gave to you after that.

It has been an amazing match so far. I still don’t quite understand what has changed to make things so even. Just last week JQ was stomping tier 1. Did they lose a bunch of people and SBI and IoJ get a bunch?

Tyrr.3841:

Oh really? we were hiding there for 30 mins from a broken north gate btw..
if you cant give legit evidence please do not accuse people..

No outer gates were broken, only the inners.

tribeca.3729:

IoJ just used a exploit to port past a outer wall and steal one of the SBI orbs.

GJ guys…

Seriously, class act IoJ.

With the one-handers you should probably also factor in an offhand weapon such as torch to see if that increases the dps any. I would imagine that the burning from torch would be a pretty decent increase or does burning not work on the test golems?

The sad fact is that the server with the most 24/7 coverage will win every week regardless of strategy. The best that you can hope for is a good fight and to have fun while you are on.

Red Falcon.8257:

I posted a thread with math about skills a few minutes ago.
It’s apparent that armor makes a big difference, perhaps people will learn this at some point.

Because if they nerf again I guarantee anyone with some toughness will be nigh unkillable.

Explain to me how I got crit for 14k with 3k armor then in a 1v1 against a thief? There is no defending that amount of burst.

There was no one else around to give the thief buffs and his server had no orbs at all.

Bandwagoners are definitely not wanted on SBI. Spread the love to some of the other smaller servers instead.

frans.8092:

Vrak.2193:

… a Thief can linger on the outskirts of any battle and when the opportunity presents itself they can teleport in and 1-shot any squishy.

They can’t one-shot anyone (other then rabbits), but other then that, isn’t striking – and killing – swiftly and unseen an unsuspecting victim exactly what an assassin (thief) is supposed to do? Should their burst-capability be nerfed so they can never kill swiftly and no longer be able to be assassins and instead … do what?

Please tell us, what is your vision of the Thief profession?

You have all of the tools that you need to escape and reset a fight if your initial burst doesn’t outright kill your target. Just last night I was hit for a total of 14k with the 1-second combo that you can pull off. Mind you I have over 3k armor. There is simply no justification for any class needing that amount of burst damage.

People saying “L2Dodge” and other such stupid things are seriously deluded. How can you dodge a combo that can be done in 1 second? You are assuming that people can always see the thief coming and time the exact moment that he will use his lolburst combo.

Thieves can escape using multiple techniques… stealth, Infiltrator’s Arrow, Disabling Shot, etc… A good thief can easily kite any other class. So saying that they give up survivability doesn’t really hold water either.

I’m not going to say that backstab needs to be nerfed, but the 150% signet and quickness need to go along with the ability to chain multiple attacks at the same time.

They really are going to need to merge servers and then boost the number of people that are allowed to queue for each W3 map. The servers are imbalanced in every tier.

Even tier 1 looks almost like the picture in the OP. It’s silly and sad.

zhonnika.1784:

Major fun on all 3 borderlands tonight! rawnoodles and his team of crack ninjas are a lot of fun to run with.

Please, SBI, don’t go away again. I want to fight; that’s the whole point of WvW.

Just don’t think we’re going to give up, either.

It’s not a matter of SBI “going away”, we just don’t have the sheer numbers of JQ that can play 24/7. I’m willing to bet that the majority of the server population for SBI is North American and a lot of us have jobs. This would explain why the competition ramps up every evening as people get home from work.

JQ will implode on itself like HoD did once people get burned out on the queue times and boredom with the lack of competition. I really don’t know what people expected when they followed the lemmings over to JQ.

Dixa.6017:

redesigning won’t encourage more participation

the problem is the current generation of gamers are inherently anti-social. too many roam wvw alone or in packs of 2-3 and get frustrated/log as soon as they run into the zerg.

if you are alone in wvw, you are doing it wrong. if you are only in a small group you are usually doing it wrong depending on the current battle situations

and lastly, treating it like real battle or trying to institute sun tzu methodology in a game where your enemy just respawns does. not. work.

i’ve been on sea of sorrows since day one of this game. we have a lot of commanders, but only 2-3 that actually command. we have at least three commanders who refuse to actually help, going so far as to tell people to f off my group of buddies will do their own thing while the rest of us would try to take an orb keep. this, again is due to the anti-social and xenophobic-leaning views that are dominating our real lives creeping into social gaming.

wvw is designed very well, even better than vanilla daoc rvr once free transfers are stopped and server communities/pride/ego can be built.

I disagree with your view. On SBI most people tend to follow the commanders. We have a decent group of players but we are simply outmanned against a server like JQ. There is nothing that we can do to compete with 24/7 coverage.

The entire orb idea needs to be rethought. It does nothing but pour salt in the wounds of the losing servers and make any kind of a comeback even more impossible. Also, the week-long matches are overkill as well. Matches are decided within 24 hours and then become nothing but the victors kicking corpses for 6 more days.

Continue to use rifle, then slot Rifle Turret, Personal Battering Ram, and Toolkit as your utilities. Take the Static Discharge talent. Now you’ve opened up 3 great ranged toolbelt abilities that do really good damage. You don’t actually use the utilities, you basically took them for the toolbelt abilities. These abilities will also get the stat boosts from your rifle.

Just consider these as extensions of your rifle attacks and there you go.

I support a 3 day match length. As it has been said, most matches are decided within the first few days, leaving the rest of the week as overkill. It just makes people frustrated and many just quit trying at all. Heck, I would even like the matches cut down to 24 hours. I think it would keep things fresh and more dynamic.

ebigz.4985:

Some of you that want long range viability with the engineer and don’t like the grenade kit should look into the static discharge trait (Tools trait line – II).

It allows you to use certain utility tool kits to “snipe” the way you want to. There are many threads on this already but one suggestion as to a few utilities that will help with this are:

Personal Battering Ram
Rifle Turret
Tool Kit

These are a few of different possible utilities that can work well with static discharge trait, as they will fire directly to the target and have a relatively short cd. These along with your rifle auto-attack will give you a good sustained DPS while still giving you the option to close up to burst with the actual rifle.

This is exactly what I use on my engi in spvp. I spec for crit and crit bonus damage, and the burst is kitten good. I think a lot of people get shocked when I mow them down with my toolbelt/static discharge abilities.

Honestly, thieves 900 yard range is still more effective than a Guardian’s 1200 yard range. The Guardian’s scepter auto-attack only has ~600 yard effective range even though it’s listed as 1200. If anyone needs a better ranged option it’s them. Heck I would settle for pushing back the scepter attack to 900 yards if it just actually traveled faster.

Anyway, I haven’t encountered any PvE fights where being at 900 yards instead of 1200 has had any significant impact on survivability (you’re still ranged and out of melee distance). On any of the dragon fights, just stand on the side and you’re never in danger of being breathed on. In WvW you still have clusterbomb for fighting at keeps, and that’s what you should be using anyway to apply the most pressure.

Using rifle with low-cooldown toolbelt abilities for static discharge seems like a pretty viable dps option. Having rifle turret, personal battering ram, and tool kit as your utilities gives you toolbelt abilities on a 10, 20, and 25 second cooldown that you can cycle as regular attacks with the tasty static discharge proc. These all benefit from your rifle stats as well.

You may not do as much AoE dps, but the single target damage and burst are pretty nice.

I would like to see our Virtues become more interactive. Perhaps give us some mechanic that is similar to a warrior’s adrenaline (some secondary energy bar so to speak) where it builds up more quickittenhan our current virtue cooldowns but where we are only allowed to use one virtue once it hits max. This will force us to pick which virtue we want to use with this energy source but also allow us to use it more frequently.

I feel like our current virtues have much too long of a cooldown unless you take a trait that refreshes them on kill. The passive effects on them make you really not want to use them b/c of the cooldown, whereas if I could reactivate these virtues based on an energy mechanic I would be much more likely to blow them.

Warriors are the golden children of GW2. They are the only class that doesn’t get hit with the nerf bat.

To the people that are saying “just weapon-swap”…

Most people use their other weapon-set for other utilities besides just pumping out additional damage during their main weapon’s cooldowns. For me I use scepter/focus as my second weaponset. This allows me to switch to ranged if for some reason I am taking too much damage in melee and it gives me utilities such as a block, a blind, and a root.

I shouldn’t have to constantly switch weapons just to maintain decent damage (most other classes don’t have to do this).

Depending on how you spec, scepter damage can actually be very good. The main problem which everyone has a problem with is the speed of the projectiles and how easy they are to dodge. If they would just speed up the travel speed of our orbs I would be completely happy with the scepter.

SHM.7628:

Thanks for the input. Anyone try dual axes maces or swords? and if so, did you like it?

lol is this a troll now? We’re not warriors and can’t use dual of any weapon (and can’t even use axes).

What’s ridiculous is that we can’t reorder our action bars to whatever we want. A somewhat flexible UI is MMO design 101.

Hammer does great dps. The third hit in your #1 chain is a bit annoying, but it does give you a symbol which gives protection and does additional damage as a tradeoff.

I’ll be using Hammer for PvE and continue to use GS for PvP. My second weaponset is scepter/focus.

The nerf to SoW makes no sense at all. No guardian that is specing for retaliation in PvP is going to use SoW anyway. There are better, more mobile ways of keeping retaliation up. This was nothing more than a dps nerf for greatsword specs. It is totally unwarranted and short-sighted.

Just go ahead and ask everyone to reroll a warrior since they are the standard that everyone measures everything against. Every other class is substandard by comparison.

I’ll still probably continue to use GS for pvp b/c of it’s utility (Leap of Faith and Binding Blade), however I feel like I’m totally being pushed into using Hammer for PvE now. I wish a dev would take a precious moment to explain what their intent of this nerf was.

It was clearly either a misguided attempt to further nerf retaliation (in which is doesn’t do a kitten thing to stop it), or they wanted to nerf our GS dps.

Just revert the cooldown changes on SoW and replace the boon that it gives with either might or fury. Heck I don’t even care what the boon is as long as they revert the cooldown on it. I just used the symbol for damage.

If I want retaliation I would rather use something that doesn’t tie me to one spot. It’s not like bunker guardians are using greatsword anyway.

green plum.7514:

Hey Animus,

well, I would disagree with you on 1 GS is very good melee AOE damage, with or without the symbol. Of course, both of us can only speak about gut feelings here.

Oh and the OP is right on. The damage nerf is my #1 reason for hating this change. I could care less about the retaliation boon.

Anyway, I think that your problem can be easily solved by slightly increasing the sword auto-attack damage. This way, you still get high DPS you want and the symbol remains a tactical choice.

BTW, there is one more reason why old symbol was OP IMHO. It made self-combos way to easy. You could do symbol + whirl + leap for two finishers in a row, and you could do it really often. I don’t think any other profession has access to self-combos such frequent.

Greatsword damage was good before the nerf, now it’s pretty average and not that great at all. Hammer is better dps now b/c it also generates a symbol after every chain. For PvE dps it looks like we’re going to be pushed to using a Hammer.

Ynna.8769:

Oh, very dramatic. Especially the comment about Blizzard.
If you’re dying in dungeons, it’s likely your own fault. Also, the nerfs don’t affect PvE that much. The most annoying thing is probably the muscle memory.

Just because it doesn’t affect your build doesn’t mean that the nerf doesn’t affect PvE. It affects greatsword builds greatly. If you can’t see the obvious dps and synergy losses that are coming from the SoW changes then you just don’t understand what you were missing.

Stenia.9623:

Update:

SBI 106,248 (570)
IoJ 66,235 (105)
BG 62,787 (20)

Wow that’s an azzkicking right there. BG got punished badly for their little exploit.

JP plays a warrior, what more explanation do you need? And yes, I saw him in-game on his warrior last week.

I’m pretty certain that I saw Jon Peters playing a warrior last week.

Xilo.9567:

Stop over playing it. Small nerf was fine. Coming from a Guardian andvI still do well. Its still kitten easy mode.

No offense, but you probably don’t play a level 80 greatsword guardian as your main to make a statement like this. The nerf was by no means small. It is a large dps nerf as well as synergy nerf (altruistic healing being a biggie). This nerf has killed one of the biggest reasons that I loved playing a guardian. I could give two craps about retaliation.

I get that there is a currently a campaign to nerf retaliation. However, targeting Symbol of Wrath simply because it gives a retaliation boon makes little sense.

First of all, the most offending “bunker” builds that people complain about most in spvp do not use Greatsword to maintain retaliation in the first place. Secondly, it would have been just as easy to remove the retaliation boon from SoW and replace it with another boon such as might or fury. Instead, what you have done is nerf the dps output of our most offensively-oriented weapon as most people use this symbol for it’s actual damage and not the boon that it gives.

You have also left us with traits that are simply not desirable (Symbolic Power, Writ of Exaltation, Writ of The Merciful). These traits of course are all designed around symbols yet you nerf one of our biggest reasons to invest in those traits. You have also left us with a SoW ability that is pretty much garbage. If I want retaliation to deal with a fast attack then I will use a shout as I don’t have to stand motionless in a symbol to use it.

I think that I speak on the behalf of most Guardians when I ask that you revert the SoW change and replace the retaliation boon with something else that is more useful rather than radically changing the greatsword playstyle.

ps – I’m not even addressing the ability position changes which has opened up an entirely different can of worms and is causing just as much uproar.

@Raif
I’m at work at the moment (posted my screenshot over lunch) so I’ll have to make the list of gears for you when I get home. I’m using a mixture of knights and berserkers gear and using ruby, emerald, and beryl orbs in my armor. I basically mixed and matched pieces to get the stats that you see above. I completely ignore condition damage though.

The exact build that I use is this:
http://www.gw2db.com/skills/calc/guardian#7|0|3527|12641|2746|2445|4501|0|0|0|0|10|1828|0|0|30|2281|2175|1395|30|880|1400|2274|0|0|0|0|6|17|3|0|0|0|0|0|0|0|0|0|0|0|0|0|

I may change my utilities and switch around few traits depending on whether I’m using Greatsword or Hammer, but my trait allocations will always remain the same.

This is basically a modified “CritHammer” build that you’ll see people referring to. I love the synergy of this build because anytime that I crit, I will be giving my allies Might and also healing myself from Altruistic Healing. I also have a good amount of crit bonus damage, so my crits hit pretty hard.

Here you go Afro:
http://imageshack.us/a/img84/7060/gw002nw.jpg

The screen shows 45% crit chance but that’s b/c the 5% crit sigil doesn’t show up in the statsheet so it’s really 50%

The more you know…

I would suggest that you head over to the Crit Hammer thread and learn a little more about this build before you start spouting nonsense about something in which you obviously have no experience.

@Afro (since quoting isn’t working for me for some reason)
Do you not realize that you can mix gear and gems to get the stats that you need? I only have 10 points in radiance and as of last night I’m up to 50% crit chance now (counting the 5% crit chance sigil on my weapon which won’t show up in the stat display).

Seriously, just because you haven’t figured this out don’t go around accusing someone of being a liar. I only use gems and not sigils in my armor so that I can get a more balanced set of stats. I’ll take a screenshot of my character stat sheet tonight so that you can see I’m not talking out of my azz.

Also, raw dps isn’t the measure of all things. A dead person will do no dps at all. I also see people pumping trait points into zeal and radiance only to then buy gear that has toughness or vitality on it. So in the end, those people will end up having to sacrifice stats on their gear to help with survivability. It’s all a tradeoff.

Empowering might means I’m constantly keeping at least 6 stacks of might up on me and it’s procing Altruistic Healing like crazy. So that is a very nice dps increase right there that you won’t be getting by investing heavily into zeal or radiance.

I’m thinking you must not be level 80 yet or must be running around in level 50 gear.

I have a low level engineer that is capable of soloing champions with some adds. Not all champions are the same though. Some don’t seem tough at all while others can melt you in seconds, so it’s tough to judge a class based on simply viewing that.

I’m personally using a 30 valor/30 Honor/10 Radiance build focused on Greatsword damage with Altruistic Healing. I’m using a mixture of exotic armors, jewels and gems to give me approximately… 3k armor, 3k attack, 48% crit w/ 60% crit bonus damage, and 15.3k hp. I’ll need to go home and look at my character to get the specific gear if there is interest in that.

Against a pack of mobs with allies around you, altruistic healing can dish out a good chunk of heals. I still do great damage while being quite tough. This is one of those builds that loves to hop into a pack of mobs to AoE them down.