Guild Wars 2

We won’t get to kill scarlet.
I agree with that above one but have to elaborate on it.
First Scarlet kills Kasmir. Then Marjory and Scarlet fight to the death and it ends with Marjory hanging off a ledge over the drill. Marjory pulls a captain Kirk from Star Trek 3 and “I have had enough of you” kicks Scarlet down into the hole. Marjory has enough time to hold Kasmir and say “I have been and always will be your friend”.

Then the dragon under the drill blasts out of the hole after eating a Scarlet salad smacks into the drill’s main reactor. Everyone has to escape within 2 minutes. The drill then does an ID4 style crash into Lions Arch harbor (like the one that crashed in Sydney).

2 weeks later ANET announces their first 25 man instanced raid to fight the dragon where you get to meet with a more grizzled Marjory and go hunt some sweet revenge against Scarlet’s true master.

Perhaps what I want to do was said above but I’ll shoot it anyway.

Proposal Overview
I would like to see Edge of the Mists become an additional map in the WvW rotation which affects the server score in addition to the other maps.

Goal of Proposal
The goal is allow Edge of the Mists to become what it should have been: A 5th WvW map. I describe it as taking the tires off a Ferrari. The map looks great. It has all the polish and strategy I would expect out of a WvW map. It suffers from what definitely feels like a last minute design change to make it solve problems that it can’t. More description after the next points.

Proposal Functionality
Edge of the Mists operates like Eternal Battleground does currently. The fight formats and map functionality would remain the same as it is now. The change is that it is no longer an overflow map but a normal WvW map.

Associated Risks
EOTM would cease it’s current functionality of letting players play WvW when all other maps are full queued.

Why I want this change:
Going back to the goal of the proposal this change is to breathe life into the current WvW map lineup. Making EOTM part of the standard split server rotation would make matchups on it more interesting. Organized server groups would be able to use the strategic opportunities on the map. The fights would be more than just server color blobs. I want to get my guild into EOTM and fight other guilds. The terrain in EOTM is some of the best in GW2 PVP.

Edge of the Mists does not currently have an impact for being able to play WvW on my server (Dragonbrand, t4 ish). The regular maps are almost never queued. Additionally I am actually hesitant on spending siege on Edge of the Mists since the match doesn’t matter to me if I’m just using it as something to do while I’m queued.

Snowreap I actually did that with a guild raid. It helped wonders until the enemy raids got wise enough to dodge our frontline.

I want to chime in on this subject as it is one that I’ve had to put up with for over a year of commanding.

WvW is a RTS (real time strategy game) in which you’re the units. It is why this commander raged in his Guild Raid and kicked the 2 guys. The reason is simple. His strategy revolved around those guys dropping the correct combo fields such that the raid could trigger them and gain the appropriate effect (most likely a water field to get heals). His strategy was denied because these 2 players were so confident in their “personalized play style” build for their character. They end up denying the strategy their commander wants to use because their personal play style doesn’t have the combo field he needs.

This is something I’ve gone against for over a year. I don’t try to force anyone to change because it’s ultimately impossible. The raid commander here has obviously grown tired of having to compromise the quality of his raid just so that Johnny X can run the ranger he played on for months.
Either Johnny X doesn’t know his ranger is detrimental to the raid or he’s determined to run it because he put so much hard work into it and is not comfortable on anything else.
In a Guild Raid, especially one that expects to zerg bust, there is no wiggle room to put that ranger in and the commander is tired of carrying these players who refuse to build toward the strategy the commander wants to implement.

TL;DR:
This commander sounds elitist right? Well you’re also elitist because you want your ranger to fit into his raid and want him to bend his strategy around your comfort. I would not expect to win his good graces that way and the rage he put out is a result.

PS: If he had to wait an hour to start the raid then his guild is more of a problem than he is. Raids are scheduled usually a week in advance in some kind of accessible medium. Those guild members he waits on don’t put the time in to get acquainted with the schedule and it hurts the 7 or so that show up on time. That adds to the frustration let me tell you.

My advice is to only change half of your gear to PVT, leave the rest zerker. Change enough gear to get 2700 armor rating (i think 2800 is the new soft cap but 2700 works still).

Why fight? Because Balthazar demands it!

I’m his Friday night entertainment. Grenth has a frequent flyer program too.

Can we have Scarlet discover Nuclear Fusion and unleash a Tsar Bomba style hit on LA?

Turn LA into one big-kitten crater.

My top pick is necromancer, only cause I have this power well build that kicks kitten in wvw. Second best: warrior for the survivability, third best: guardian.

The above posts are true. If you aren’t able to lead the charge noone will follow you in. It’s that simple. Noone reads your chat, no one gets on your teamspeak. All they see is you zerg surfing and they’ll want to join in.

I have some ideas I had mulling around for siege. I like most of what you wrote. The changes below are what I want for certain siege.

Ballistas:
Ballistas need help. They need to be dangerous and they currently aren’t. The weapon already suffers by having to have a direct line of sight to its target. This should be the ultimate weapon for zerg busting. Here’s what I propose for it
- Increased range to 5000
(the next 2 are only one of each… Double damage or AOE, not both)
- Double damage for all default skills (the spray shot remains the same)
- All shots pierce targets and have a 350 range aoe hit when they land.

- Ballista shots now properly lead targets even beyond range.
- 15 target hit cap.
- increased supply cost to 50/60 (50 for regular, 60 for superior)
- minimum range 600
- removed bonus damage against gates and walls (hits like player against these)
-Ballistas cannot be deployed in lordroom areas in keeps.

Yes let’s make em dangerous. Ballistas need to be something that makes a commander pop protection skills to charge at and have a flanking force to take down. Nothing would break up a zerg as well as hitting an artillery line that actually does damage and doesn’t miss. To keep them from being over the top a few restrictions get added. The biggest ones are preventing them from being used within a lord room area of a keep. This especially counts for Hills.

Supply trap:
This trap is a little overpowered even though no one really uses it. I’d like to see more strategic play with this. Here’s how
- Players can now place up to 10 supply traps, traps do not despawn when their owner leaves the map.
- Trap effect range reduced from 1200 to 300
- Trap target effect cap is removed (unlimited targets hit by the trap when it goes off).
- Traps placed within 600 units of each other will chain react- that is they all trigger when one triggers.

Stealth trap:
Rework the trap to become a Mud trap. Traps do not despawn when their owner leaves the map.
- Trap applies 4 second immobilize on activate, 2 second ticking cripple.
- 1200 radius
- removes stealth and applies revealed
- players can place up to 10 mud traps.
- Traps chain react within 600 units.

New: Flare trap
Trap triggers when more than 20 enemy players cross it within a 5 second interval.
Trap announces orange swords on the map when it triggers.
- trap does not despawn when owner leaves the map
- Owner recieves message denoting nearest objective to the trap when it triggers.
- players can place up to 10 flare traps
- traps chain react within 1200 units of each other.

The contest rules do need to change though. Here are some conditions that could work. Contest happens when
There are 10 or more enemy players near a gate or wall when it takes damage
There is an enemy siege weapon near the gate or wall when it takes damage (1200 range)
A gate or wall takes damage from a siege weapon.
Any gate or wall takes damage while its health points are lower than 90%. (edit… chat filter bombed )

Make that set of rules and you’ll be able to prevent 1 person from contesting a keep while making it contest for a legitimate threat. Realistically a keep lord should never shut down the portal. That is done to make offense possible against a structure. Keep the WP open and you could port an entire zerg into the keep and constantly rez there. That would make attacking that keep impossible as the enemy has limitless resources.

Click on the badges. They don’t auto loot apparently but if you click you get em.

We need a map where the concept of capturing and holding territory comes into play. Our current maps barely have the concept. Here’s what it’s about:

Take the current EBG: The towers on the sides where the NPC camps are now block the entrance to those camps. The tower must be taken to gain access through the NPC camp into the enemy territory.

Add new “gate” targets on the major paths up to Stonemist. these gates act as a third gate to stonemist and are controlled by the last army to destroy the gate. Each gate starts under control of the side it’s on (red controls the north gate).

This ties in to what you are talking about but makes control of territory much more important to control of the map. The border towers can be easy to take and would allow your side to cut off an enemy zerg from reinforcing your keep when you retake it.

I like the waypoint chain idea but you would have to have the waypoints down the line break the chain. This way you can have a second force threaten the supply line to the front lines. Say waypoints go from your keep on the edge plate to the center objective. Your keep is 1, the objective is 3, and there’s a tower at 2. If that tower gets contested the waypoint at objective 3 would also contest. While this opens you for trolling it also provides strategic requirement to protect that second objective.

I know players love convenience but that same convenience prevents WvW from truly being a strategy game. If it’s structured like an RTS it has more depth in it.

Since it has been out for 2 days or so I can write my first impressions on it.

Pros:
The map is beautiful. It is also a strategist’s dream. Ultimately it works like Eternal Battleground where you need 2 map zergs to actually control it. There are so many nooks and crannies in it that one could set ambushes without ever being seen.

The keep objectives make for interesting boss fights in order to cap a keep. I’ve been on the red side this week. I hope to change to another color soon. I’m jealous of the design for the Green keep cause the oriental architecture is the coolest imo. The red keep is very Greek architecture looking.

Cons:
All this design and work seems wasted by the goal for the map. What could easily be a very strong 5th map in the standard WvW lineup ends up being a place where getting a coordinated group together is nigh impossible. There is no way to set a color wide voice over ip. There is barely any way to get all of my guildies on the same map. I’ve seen guild zergs on the map too. It’s possible but extremely tedious: join party with someone in EOTM, then right click their portrait and select “join in edge of the mists”, then leave group to help ferry other guildies onto the same instance.
- Improvement: Allow me to join guildies in edge of the mists (or on a map) by right clicking their name in the guild roster and selecting “join in edge of the mists” or “join in map”. That way all my guildies can quickly join me on a map. Of course they’ll waypoint in at a common point.

The keep lord fights while they make for interesting fights make for awful pvp fights. This especially goes for the red keep’s fight (I havent’ seen the others but I hear they’re just as hard). The red keep fight is so easy to troll when you defend that it is simply impossible to flip that keep. I was able to defend it with half the zerg that the enemy brought to flip the keep.
- Improvement: balance the fights so that they cannot be trolled easily.

Finally, supply is hard to get in this map especially at the outer walls of your keep. If there is supply in the altar or observatory tell me so. Otherwise these walls are nearly impossible to build on or repair because of the long trip it takes to get supply from the keep out to the wall.
-improvement: add supply depots out near the outer wall. These can feed from the keep supply.

Thanks for reading. Overall I like the new map. there are just some things holding it back from being awesome (mainly the ability to group guildies in it).

Oo boy this is gonna be a fun reset night.

I’ve been trying to find things that a ranger can do for a large scale situation. To that end I found some builds that could work and some features to go with.

Spirit bombing: Use the Nature Magic trait that makes spirits activate on death and the one that makes them follow you. Combine with runes of Rata Sum. Since spirits die easily you can make them trigger immobilize, blind, cripple, and chill as the enemy zerg nukes them. Use power build gear.

Trapway: Loadout spike trap, flame trap, and snake trap. Paltry as a single ranger but if you group that up it becomes the trapway from old GW1. You could wipe an enemy zerg with 5 or more rangers all trapping like this. Use power build gear. Use some condition damage for the flame trap’s damage.

Longbow traits on the Marksmanship line: Use both the range and arrow piercing ones. This makes your longbow shots all technically AOE, even if that aoe is just a line. This trait selection with any WvW build for grouping.

Pets: Krytan Hound and Wolf are probably the best metagame pets to have right now for activate effects. The wolf does AOE fear, the Hound does AOE immobilize. If you keep them on passive they’ll follow you except when you order the F2 activate effect.

That listed the real problem with rangers in zergs is efficiency. Warriors have to do 5 things to be successful in a zerg. Rangers have to do 20 to be as effective. This is where ANET’s balance breaks and why other classes out-class the ranger. That is also why rangers are not preferred in large scale combat. My ele can do a water field and nuke. My necro can do traps and nuke chokes. Just about the only thing ranger can do better than anyone else is immobilize (probably what anet made IMMOB stack). I’ve been looking for something for rangers to do for a long time. This is because the guilds I’ve been in have a large population of rangers and they want to WvW. Some well known commanders on Dragonbrand mained rangers until they saw how easy the other classes have it.

It’s simply easier to play something other than a ranger in WvW. Additionally if that player puts the same amount of effort playing the easier class then that class becomes more powerful than the ranger.

It’s like a boulder sitting on top of a smooth hill. The boulder is where you keep your balance at. Adding gear that has better stats is like kicking that boulder down the hill. Once that ball is rolling you can’t stop it. Players eventually have the gear by the time you add new content so you balance it around the best gear. To reward the players you add gear with higher stats as rewards. Then on the next expansion you have to make it challenging so you make it balanced around the previous expansion dungeon gear. It’s a brutal cycle that was the source of WoW’s power creep. Now GW2 is starting it.

To stop this ball they cannot release any new content that requires ascended gear and they can only reward with that ascended gear. Otherwise they have to update the old content to match the current max gear and make the earlier gear easier to obtain.
World vs World is in that old content.

The problem with the rally that I see it is that it shifts the balance of engaged numbers to the side that starts winning first. Let’s see a scenario:

Your 5 man group comes up against a 15 man zerg. Not too uncommon right? You expect to be able to use your skill to beat that group. The groups clash. In your opening rotation you manage to down 8 of the enemy players. They manage to pick off your elementalist due to her low health. Their remaining players continue to concentrate on her for the kill and before you’re able to start spiking the downed players she dies and rallys all of them. You’re now 4v15 instead of 4v7. You have no chance because of the rally system.

Same scenario, now the rally system is gone. Your ele dies. Your 4 other players are able to successfully stomp 4 of theirs now that they didn’t rally. The other 4 die to aoes. You’re 4v7 instead and now you can more effectively heal up for the next crash. After heals and re-empower you’re now able to down 4 more of them while weathering their damage (most of which you killed in the first clash… mmm all them zerker specs). Your group wins the fight due to skill instead of the enemy 15 getting to come back to full power from killing your one elementalist.

That scenario is what plays out on a server who is constantly out manned (dragonbrand ). Your group is inevitably smaller than the enemy group so you have to rely on your build quality and class composition to give you a win. The problem is that the quality is seldom reliable and you end up with “rally bots”, or players who down easily. Their existence and deaths empower the enemy zergs far more effectively than battlefield rezzes ever do and ensure that the larger zerg wins the fight all the time. If we take out the ability to rally off PK then we take out a huge chunk of momentum from an enemy zerg. This makes fighting with tactics and skill more effective than sheer numbers.

Sure your key player gets saved by rallies a lot. I know as commander i’ve been saved by the rally system so often it isn’t funny. Take away that rally system and now I have to apply stronger tactics to win instead of crash first and hope for a rez when my thieves kill their squishy up level elementalist.

If they just get rid of rallying from deaths it would fix the system. This is where the true power of a zerg comes from. Your small group vs their larger group: you managed to down equal numbers to yours but they got a few of yours down. Since yours die first to their remaining numbers their whole group rezzes back. It gives instant momentum to the bigger group.

Stopping to rez a downed player or stopping to stomp is a tactical decision you have to make. A lot of times this means me dpsing the guy instead of stomping because his corpse gets aoed.

Stocks on rock up 85 points. Paper and Scissors stock down 20 points.

My ideas may have been posted before but here we go:

Short term easy to implement items:

1. Increase the range of /supplyinfo to 1200
This one is simple. Currently I have to ask players to stack on me for a supply count. Half of them do it on the first request, others don’t pay attention till I say it 4 times. Increasing the range to 1200 lets me poll the supply in my zerg and get a head count much more easily. If you’re afraid it will cause performance issues you can give it a cooldown. I only have to use it multiple times because my zerg is spread out anyway.

2. Increase range where ally dots are visible – I don’t know if you want to do this or not: Make it so that a commander while tagged up can see ally dots on the map at a larger range than normal. I think the current range is 2000. Make the cmdr range 10,000 or whole map wide. This would almost instantly alleviate all the other issues with commander tag visibility. You would be instantly able to see where every ally on the map is and it would help you explain where your numbers went after the last wipe. You see a large pile of dots on tower B when you fought the enemy zerg at tower A.

Longer term items:
I like an idea that was posted and I’ll repost it with my spin on it:

3. Tag visibility options: Give me the option to make my tag visible to Everyone, Just my Guild, Just my Squad, or Just my Party. Add a second option which lets me toggle whether it is visible to other commanders (have that On by default). A lot of guilds on my server avoid tagging up to avoid getting pick up groupers following their raid. When I’m trying to lead those PUGs I can’t tell where the other guilds are. It becomes frustrating when I see orange swords pop on an objective: I prepare to attack it, stack fire fields and rush in to find that o hey it’s friendly guild XXX. Having it so I can see their tag as a Cmdr but noone else can would let me plan around their plans.

4. The ability to designate Lieutenants, with the same visibility options as my tag. Sun Tsu describes leading a large army as the same thing as leading a small detachment in being just a matter of sub-dividing the army. Let me do that with my army.

5. Party Leader tags – Allow parties to designate a leader (or make it whoever formed the party. The leader’s tag is visible to the party members. When that party’s leader joins a commander squad the tag is then visible to the commander at all times. This would allow that commander to dispatch parties to locations.

6. Better squad UI: This comes in parts
- Ability to invite players within 1200 units into my squad
- Ability to manage my squad (kick players, move them into parties, designate lieutentants with the UI)
- Raid UI panel which shows the health and supply of players in my squad as well as total supply.
- Raidcall messages that tell when I place a marker on the map (kinda like the message that tells you where Scarlet’s minions are attacking)
- More raid markers. We currently have “attack” “defend” “move”. Give me “get supply”, “place catapults/trebuchets”, “place arrow carts”. Also allow more than one marker of a type at a time.
- The ability to see raid markers from other commanders. These would be visible to me and if i choose visible to my squad.

The UI upgrades would make life as a commander easier for me. Currently I have to just say it and hope for the best. With more markers I could plan out my attack on the map then execute it.

Most useless traits:
1. Any trait that activates on a critical hit that has an internal cooldown longer than 5 seconds.
2. Any trait with an internal cooldown longer than 30 seconds that activates only once before triggering the cooldown
3. Any trait which that falls into 1 and 2 which does not apply its effect to an AOE hit (warrior hammer + leg specialist is a good example)

Why are these useless?
1 and 2 are about reliability vs cost. Having a hit apply burning once every 10 seconds (dhuumfire) for example: you don’t know when it is going to activate so you can’t rely on it. Said dhuumfire trait also suffers from that it only applies to the first target that gets hit with an aoe. If multiple hits in the AOE crit then the fire should apply to all of them, then go on the cooldown. This especially should apply to a Grandmaster trait.

Number 3 is about synergy with your character vs cost. Leg specialist was intended to allow warriors to immobilize everyone in the hit from the Hammer shockwave (3). It got abused by arrow cart users and ended up getting a cooldown (instead of simply not applying to conditions caused by siege). This makes it go from useful to garbage. There are other traits like this that should have low or no cooldown or effect multiple targets before going on cooldown.

This is an idea I though about after reading a comment about Fan Castle from Dynasty Warriors. The idea is simple and comes in two parts:

On a border server (pop caps here are hypothetical)
The home server has a population cap of 80 at all times. The enemy servers each have a population cap half of that (40). They can gain more population cap by taking the objectives on their corner of the map. Holding the border tower adds 10 to the cap, holding the side keep adds 30 to the cap (to bring it even with the home server). If an objective flips the server loses the pop cap. Players over the population cap get debuffed with “overextended” and when downed while overextended they get instantly killed (no down state). This is decided by FIFO: the first 40 players won’t get the debuff.

This idea draws upon the idea that an army taking an enemy territory must gain a true foothold in it. If they don’t get a solid hold they’ll be over extended. The Wu forces in Dynasty Warriors in that scenario didn’t have much available to send into the double-team against Shu. If they sent more they would risk exposing their borderland.

A second idea to include with this is “exposed”. Say the Wu army sent more troops to the castle. They would end up leaving something exposed! The “exposed” debuff would occur when an enemy force has more than 50 players on an enemy borderland. Objectives in the third of the borderland that they are attacking will get hit with this debuff. The debuff would reduce siege damage output from weapons inside the objective by 70%.

Maybe this could break zergs.

I know an “open bar” trap would catch some commanders I know

Practice driving the fight. You’ll start talking more. Lots of raid leaders sound like auctioneers. It is because we have to micro manage the fight.

Once you start calling like that you’ll see people more on your tag and less doin their own thing.

Also when you’re in transit to a location it’s okay not to talk much. There isn’t much to say when you’re going to a supply camp across the map.

Best suicide: Frost bow 4 on a zerg

I’ve gone from full health to 0 all from retaliation.

IMO necro or ele. Necro has wells and every attack is an aoe. Ele has meteor shower and frost bow. Meteor shower alone can destroy whole zergs when you have 2-3 eles stack it on a spot.

I think this could work actually. If there is one thing it breaks is the effect of coverage. It needs to be designed to address abuses but it can be a lot better than PPT.

On-flip rewards. Reward includes equal total points from the upgrades rewarded to the objective.
camp : 100 points
tower: 500 points
Keep/castle: 1000 points

On upgrade rewards
Camp t1 upgrades 200 points
camp t2 upgrades 400 points

tower T1 1000 points, T2 2000 points, T3 3000 points
Keep/castle T1: 2000 points, t2 4000, t3 8000

PK (player kill) points: 1 point per kill, bloodlust bonus for stomp
Yaks: 10 points per kill
guard posts: 10 points

So… To address the concerns

1. Keep karma train trading: Servers engaged in this wouldn’t generate points as fast as upgrading a tower would. Taking a fully upgraded tower will reward significantly more than flipping a blank structure.

2. Coverage gaps: This is why I added the extended points for flipping upgraded objectives. A server which keeps their own BL defended will prevent an enemy server from “catching up”. This catchup is possible if they flip all of that server’s objectives. A server that is inactive during a coverage gap will not be too far behind the active server. If two servers are the active ones then they’ll constantly flip enemy objectives to prevent upgrade score. The coverage gap to maintain is smaller if server C is able to produce a strong primetime presence. Coverage problems still exist, but their impact is greatly reduced and matches would still be competitive. If server C is good at flipping camps they can wrestle a large bonus from the enemy servers back to them.

2b. If coverage is still a problem, then double the points per upgrade on flip.

I’ve been commanding for almost 10 months now. I’ve realized some things that pertain to this whole discussion.

First: numbers matter. If you’re actually out numbered 3 to 1 you’re not getting far.

Second: When you’re out numbered you have to rely on the quality of your troops. Are they staying on the tag well? Do they have proper builds (uplevels in random garbage are not properly built, but uplevels in full “Hearty” are)? Are they all getting into teamspeak? Are they keeping bloodthirst for squirrels from getting the best of em? The answer to this question is quick: Are they eternal battleground pugs? If yes you can’t rely on their quality. If they’re guild it depends on your guild’s culture. Your hardcore WvW guild will be better built than a PvX guild.

If you fail at getting numbers and fail at getting quality you won’t be able to win any fights. This leads to the third part.

Third: Can you evade the enemy zergs? You’ll be constantly PVDoor. You’ll fight so long as the enemy resistance is minimal. You can’t linger in any location for longer than 3 minutes. Are your pugs in with following your strategy of evasion? This means they’ll have to be quick to waypoint, stay relatively well on the tag and above all be FAST.

Barring 3: yea. If you call for “everyone get on my tag” and you don’t even get the time of day there’s no point tagging up. You’re just a kitten with a shiny name plate on the minimap at that point. I’ve tried to do strategies to wipe the opposing server when we’re out numbered but I need our server’s players to do it. If they’re just gonna kitten at the spawn camp spot then I’ll tag down. They punish themselves.

This seems to be about how to fight the fight. I’ll go through how an open field clash works so you can see it slowed down to understand. You’ll have to use a bit of imagination to help you visualize it.

1. Before the fight
What you do before you crash the enemy zerg determines 50% of the battles you fight. Can you lure em into siege? Can you use a choke? Can you use high ground? Did you stack fire fields at the right time? Are you attacking a gate? These are things you have to look for. You want the fight to be on your terms, not theirs. You pick the ground, you pick the siege, when you can stack fire fields, when you hit. If you do these you will have the advantage in the fight.

2. The onset.
This is right before two zergs crash into each other. Let’s say you’re in an open field and you came across them face to face. You both stacked fire fields. Now you’re ready to crash. What do you do? where do you go? The answer to that lies in the makeup of the standard balanced zerg.

The players in your zerg will fall into roughly 4 categories:
Melee bunker
ranged bunker
melee dps
ranged dps

The dps groups come in power or condition damage subspecs. There may be healing specs but usually those aren’t available in militia. Everyone’s in their “i rocked Arah with this, i should be able to rock stonemist with it” spec.

What matters about these specs is how people play them. The bunkers and melee dps will charge head first into the fight. Melee dps thieves will stick to the fringes, they know they’re squishy. Melee warriors and guaridans don’t care till they take some heat. Ranged dps will stay to the back of the zerg. Ranged bunkers will usually be slightly ahead of them. What’s to know about this? That the ranged DPS happens to be the squishiest players. They stack berserker specs with longbows or staves (or mesmers with greatsword) hoping that you don’t notice them so they can dish out the damage. This is your primary target.

So you have to get to this target without getting killed. There are three ways you can do this: Flank left, Flank right, penetrate center. If your group is heavy squishies you want to flank. If your group is heavy melee you want to penetrate. The direction you flank depends on terrain, taking the high ground. You can mask your movement with a veil. Just don’t expect to hit all your militia with it.

3. The crash
So you opted to crash center. Cool. What happens first is that your frontlines (the melee bunkers and melee dps) will swap positions. Your frontline is now past their frontline and both are staring down the backline. If you tried to flank then your frontline is to the side. It will look like a Yin Yang symbol in that case.

When your frontline crashes their goal is to CC the enemy backline. Your backline’s goal is to DPS the enemy backline. This is when they unload Static field, meteor shower, Illusionary Berserker, etc.

Your necromancers should start “linebacking” if they know what they’re doing. Necros pop plague form, hit the blind plague, and crash into the enemy frontline to stop them from hittin your backline. This is something you don’t have control over however. You gotta hope it happens. What you can count on though, is that after about 6 seconds both sides have used their cooldowns and took damage. This leads to step 4
4. The recoil
Did your zerg take alot of damage? Stack them up for water fields and blasts. This is the time when your melee dps need to watch for an enemy stack of the same nature. If they see one they need to disrupt it. Thieves backstab, warriors hit their CCs, Eles their static fields. If you can heal and stop their heal you’ll shift the fight to your advantage and win it. If your side did enough damage to them in step 3 you’ll hit “critical mass”. This is an event where your zerg can wipe the enemy zerg or route them. You stop healing stages and start hammering. If you get a critical mass you go to step 6
5. The crash part 2
This is a repeat of steps 3 and 4 until one side gets critical mass.

6. Critical mass and wrapping up the wipe
Once you hit critical mass your goal changes. You need to push on the enemy zerg. The reason for this is the downed system in this game. You want to push them so they can’t rez their downed or dead guys while you can rez yours. At the same time you’re pushing to cut off their retreat. This reason in my opinion takes precedence over the anti-rez reason. If you cut them off you can full wipe with 90%+ enemy casualties. This increases their respawn time by 1 minute or more and allows you to gain momentum. You use that momentum to take an objective (tower or camp).

Im too close to the character count to add any more.

Contest requirements should be like this

Siege damage hits the tower or keep(door, wall, supply, etc)
Player damage hits a gate to below 90%.
An enemy player is inside the keep or tower’s outer wall. (the keep remains contested while an enemy mesmer or thief is in it).

Contest effects:
Waypoint is disabled (waypoint remains disabled 10 seconds after contest event ends)
NPCs can only be resurrected by a player skills once during each contest event.

Make this happen to make stupid defensive tactics go away. It should be naturally harder to defend a keep that is deeper in enemy territory.

WP needs to remain contested for 10 seconds after the “defend” event ends. That would bring back the intended functionality.

The WP becoming contested is a way to allow an attacker to actually attack a keep. If it stays open then the defender can out-spawn the attacking force by respawning at the keep. It becomes a never-ending uphill battle to capture the keep then. This is why they have it contest at all. The little window where people warp in is a bug in that regard. It should be equally challenging to defend a keep as it is to attack it. As it sits now I rarely bother attacking a waypointed keep because the enemy servers are super zergy and can repel my attack once the WP glitches.

Fixing the waypoint makes attacking a BL with 3 WP’d keeps feasible rather than super difficult.

I would guess about 15 or so un accounted for too but 60-80 sounds like a good ballpark.

Last night I heard our server had a queue so I decided to find out what our population cap was. I managed to get 47 players in /supplyinfo range and another 12 or so in the citadel. This leads me to believe that the population cap is 60 players +/- 5.

Now i know I’ve seen more players on a map than that from the enemy teams but I would believe that Fort Aspenwood also had a 60 player cap since they had two zergs of 30 running around. What does this mean for caps?

Cap is 60 +/- 5 before queues start. There may be 10-15 reserved slots for parties to get in or some other trickery going on behind the scenes as I hear of many stories for how to trick the queue.

I like how they made these so you actually have to participate in WvW to get the achievement.

I finished the tower one, the demolition one, and the keep one. The others will come eventually. I expect to have my key by week 3.

First… read this:
http://suntzusaid.com/book/1

Especially pay attention to chapter 3 part 8.

Ok now that you’re totally confused I’ll drop my advice. Results speak. You need to generate them to be a good commander. You’re only as good as the guys following you and if you generate results they follow you more and trust you more.

Start out by keeping your strategies simple. Engage zergs by the rule of what Sun Tsu said in 3.8. If your zerg is vastly larger split up. If your zerg is even engage em. If your zerg is smaller evade them.

Above all relay your plans to your group in say or team chat. If you can use your server’s public VOIP (teamspeak, mumble, etc) all the better. When you want to take a camp tell em “we’re going to take X camp”. When you want them to build siege “build this X”. Remember to drop reminders of common strategy… “eles meteor shower the wall”, “fire fields blast finish”, “water fields blast finish”, “stay tight on the tag”.

Finally have a thick skin. You will get trolled. I guarantee it. You must not lose composure at all even if you’re getting facerolled by an 80 man megazerg. Remember the part where Sun Tsu tells you to balk at the enemy’s plan. If you know they’re going to hit your keep in eternal, hit theirs first. It stonemist too. Stonemist is the big distraction in the middle of the map that lets you move around it.

If you can, find a guild who needs a commander. Having a guild presence gives you immediate strength in numbers to rally pugs around.

Finally… be prepared to have an alt of every class and to make a kitten load of superior siege. I once dropped 10g worth of siege in a night. You will be poor (money wise) as a commander but you’ll get kitten done.

Let your results speak for you and have fun!

The first thing I’ll say for this is:
Don’t complain unless you’re willing to get a tag and lead yourself.

Being a commander means actually being the armchair general you describe us to be. There will actually be times (and I had this happen sunday) where your best defense is to actually just back cap things as fast as you can. This especially occurs when your server can only muster half of what the enemy brings to the table. Defense at that point is pointless unless you had some poor bored soul stay in a tower on an arrow cart ready to fire at a moment’s notice.

Honestly with today’s game of Superior ram mastery being a best in slot wvw trait you can’t defend unless you pre-empt it. The enemy can bust down both gates of a keep in 2 and a half minutes. This is enough time for maybe 6 of your guys to stream in and scout it. Even the reinforced gates fall that fast. Your only chance to save your keep is to suicide bomb the build sites for rams the moment they appear or use supply traps.

Now that said it is possible to mount a defense if you’re fast enough. You can get ACs and trebs behind a gate to destroy rams. You can have your ranged DPSers AOE the gate.

There’s more than one way to skin a cat. That’s why you get 100 commanders doing things 100 different ways. Some are there for the karma train some for the battles themselves. You know who the ones you want to follow are. And if you can’t find one you want to follow you know where to get a tag.

Kitten is anet’s way of filtering curse words. Words like kitten, kitten, and kitten get changed into kitten.

As far as rangers not catching anything… get your greatsword out and try again. Or don’t bother, you get 1500 range on your longbow, just snipe em.

I have one I missed:

7. Class balance changes to make Thief, Ranger, and Engineer more viable to a large scale combat (zerg if you will) situation.

Iist format:
1. Leagues in a game format where victory is decided by coverage
2. Account bound WXP
3. Commander improvements
4. New Maps
5. New PVP formats outside of WvW
6. New traps or player built structures.

I’ll start. A nice opportunity indeed this is and I thank Chris and other ANET guys for taking time to do this.

I’ll follow that list you gave first. Of things I want to see talked about:
1. Leagues: When the game format of WvW is largely decided by a server’s WvW population more than anything else the leagues don’t make sense. They essentially reward the efforts of server guild recruiters more than actually playing in wvw.
2. Rewards and Progression: I’d like to see some consideration for swaying towards the realm of Account bound WvW XP and levels. It’s not to say that character bound isn’t fun. Its that I think that those who want to see account bound WXP see their account as their presence and not their character. They want to advance their account like in sPVP or Guildwars 1.

3. Commander functionality: I think there is room for improvement. Getting the tag is fine as it is. I wouldn’t mind the tag being account bound too. The /supplyinfo command needs to have a range of at least 600. I want 1200 for it. The problem is I need to stack everyone to get a head count and supply count and maybe 70% of people pay attention. Multi color tags would be an easy feature and would only help. I’d also like to be able to see the positions of allies on the minimap while I have the tag on. This can be either individual dots or markers for locations with more than 5 allied players in a spot.

4. New maps: IMO there needs to be a new map. Anything you can come up with works. I want new lands to conquer. Even if you end up making each borderland unique it would go a long way to making WvW more fun.

5. Format changes inside and out of wvw: I like the gvg arena that you’re coming out with. You can do some more with sPvP (bring back random arenas!).

6. Deployable walls and new traps: It would be fun if we could sculpt the landscape. Say like building a wall across the dredge tunnel or setting fire traps in forests. These traps need to be potent enough to be a threat. I’m talking about unblockable effects that ignore condition reduction effects when they’re used right. Fire trap in a forest is unblockable, spike trap in a grassy area is unblockable. Ice trap in a snow field… Water trap near a body of water.

List format:
1. Reasoning behind leagues given the WvW score format
2. Talking about account bound WXP
3. Commander functionality expansions
4. New maps
5. PVP outside of WvW (random arenas)
6. Player built walls and new traps

IMO there shouldn’t be any greens in the rankup chests. From the few rankups I’ve had since the patch they don’t feel any different.

For those reading deep into my comment here goes:

If you play any organized WvW you’ll come to realize the existence of the Big 5. Warrior, Guardian, Necromancer, Elementalist, Mesmer. Each one performs a game changing role in a large group format: Warriors are tanks and CC, Guardians are stability, buffs and movement control. Necromancers are boon control and AOE damage, Eles are condition control, movement control and combo field providers, and Mesmers are veil, portal, and boon/condition control with wall suppression.

The other classes are simply out performed by the Big 5. Rangers are out performed by eles and necros who don’t have to give up utility slots to be useful. Engineers simply can’t do damage on the level that eles, warriors and necros can. Thieves melt at the initial crash of a zerg and are really only good for blast finishers (which gives them a leg up as a potential 6th). I’ve been looking for niches for the other 3 to fill even. There simply isn’t anything for em that a Big 5er can do better.

What does that mean for this topic? Your party needs a reserved slot for a guardian or mesmer and a warrior or elementalist and is strongly advised to have a necro in it.

The funny thing is that the classes turn table when you get to the area of roaming and small group engagements. At that point rangers, thieves, and engineers out perform the others.

The Vampiric trait changes were actually to make them more powerful when you don’t trait for Bloodthirst or when you use minions. If you’re traited they’re the same as before. My necro runs power/precision/toughness and siphons. I use it in WvW and it lets me tank zergs of 20 or more when all the wells are pulsing alongside warhorn 5 and plague form or life transfer.

The exact build I use is one of my top secrets.

If you think of casual playing as “i’m just here i don’t want to be bothered” and you expect to have your group wipe more organized groups you’re in the wrong game. If you think of casual playing as grabbin 5 of your friends, one who’s a guardian, one who’s a warrior and three who are whatever then you’ll go far with the zerg or on your own.

They did this change to allow you to actually support your party instead of the 5 nearest guys in your blob. Maybe you should invite your friends to your party and enjoy the perma swiftness, stability, regen, and other boons that your party can dish out.

You guys missed a big kicker in there…

“Skills that buff allies in an AoE now prioritize party members.”

That’s the real zerg buff. Now you can guarantee stability for your whole zerg by dropping 1 guardian in every party. Or Aegis, or Might, or swiftness.

You have no idea how much this was asked for in World of Warcraft’s random dungeon finder. It would be such a boon to let us plan out our time while we wait in queue. GW2 should have this. Even with overflow maps a “place in the queue” should be visible.

Hey, even at the DMV you know where you are in line because of that big LED number they have.

I’ve noticed this too. It’s basically giving whoever has the green borderland a free BL because anytime we try to push it half our army gets DC’d

@Caroline

That minion master zerg was just us screwin around. I’ve always wanted to do one of those but never got the chance till then. It was funny that when you wiped us we were just talking about how an organized group would destroy a MM zerg.

Shortly after we did a well-necro zerg and it went better than I expected (loved rocking PINK with uplevels) till we had STUN and (i forget the other, it was probably PINK) camping us at the west gate to citadel.

PS: tell your pugs about Determined. We killed like 10 of em cause they don’t know what it does.

Nanyetah Elohi.4852:

andomon.8314:

Nanyetah Elohi.4852:

Multiple color or otherwise distinguishable commander tags

Without question a warm welcoming feature that hopefully would not take much development effort.

Andomon, I’m thinking it would enable multiple commanders on the field, focusing and coordinating different aspects of the battles. It would introduce creative new strategies and reduce the size of the zergs.

I’m actually already leading wvw raids in this manner. You wouldn’t believe what you can do when you get more than 1 tag on a map working together. Especially if each tag has a guild followin it.

I have some ways ANET could improve WvW
My first one agrees with the commander colors. Having commanders with different color tags would help us distinguish forces on the map. On a related note to commanders making the /supplyinfo command 1200 range would go a long way to improving the tag.

Secondly in relation to that, have all allied forces on a map show up on the minimap. If this is too taxing on the servers to have for everyone then only do it for commanders. When I’m commanding I want to prevent an over-commit of resources. I’ve come across several guilds who are simply un willing to pop commander tags. I thus have no idea where they are and I could end up running into them with my guild/zerg. There were even several times I see orange swords and I prep to attack them only to find that it was guild [zzz] running tagless. If that were real war you guys woulda been vaporized by my artillery.

If I know where my friends are I can plan my strategy to synergize with theirs and gain a tactical advantage on the enemy server. If guilds [xxx] and [yyy] want to push the north gate of stonemist i can bring my force to the southwest gate to block green’s reinforcements. If they’re about to crash the enemy zerg from the left I can take my guild to the right and pincer them. I can’t do any of this without seeing them.

Third: Make the maps bigger. Double their size and use Double floating point instead of single floating point if that’s the technical issue. (make your meshes simpler otherwise) It is too easy for a zerg to cross a map to defend something. I’ve had points facing TC this week where they just finish hills and im on inner bay killin the lord. They somehow manage to cross the lake in the center in 1:30 and wipe me.

Fourth: Better/more traps
First on this one: increase the number of active traps a person can have to 2 of each type. Then add more trap types:

- Rockslide: Causes an AoE knockdown effect like the effect cave trolls use. Gains 50% damage and KD duration when placed near ground walls (not keep walls).

- Flame trap: Causes AOE burning and damage ticks over 10 seconds (like the mortar shot). This trap is 50% larger when placed on grass or in forested areas and cannot be evaded or blocked.

- Spike trap: Like the ranger trap with the same name. Does AOE cripple and bleed (durations based on trap owner) for 10 ticks over 10 seconds. Trap’s conditons ignore condition duration reduction effects if the trap was placed in grass.

- Ice Trap: Like the ranger frost trap: causes aoe Chill and damage over it’s effect area for 10 ticks at 1 second intervals. The trap’s chill effect ignores condition duration reduction effects when placed on snow or ice and is unavoidable.

- Bridge charges: Blow up a bridge with proximity triggered charges. Can only be placed on a bridge. Once blown the bridge requires 100 supply to repair and it cannot be damaged while being repaired.
- Wall charges: Trap is actually a timed explosive which can be disarmed. If not disarmed within 30 seconds it causes high siege damage (50% of the HP of a wood wall) and knocks back all allies and enemies near it. All players and NPCs within 600 units of it are killed instantly. Can only be placed on a wall. Takes 5 seconds to place and taking damage while placing it may result in a pre-mature detonation that only damages players and NPCs.

Fifth: Make field artillery batteries: A new immobile cannon/ballista type siege weapon that while operated its user is invulnerable and is designed to do damage to players. It would have a minimum range of 600 units. It should also cost 50 supply and cannot be moved past by an enemy (blocks movement). It’s placement is restricted to outside of keeps and towers.

4 and 5 would make WvW more interesting with more strategic avenues to explore.

Caroline.4987:

Abstraction.3019:

Thanks.

[Crit] and [ING] run separately but we were in the same area sometimes. We’re in good relations with [Crit] which probably explains why we work well together when were in the same area. But for the most part, we’re in different areas and usually fight by ourselves.

We had less than than 15 at the end there when we fought you at Hyleks. We started with 25ish in the beginning of the night.

Hope to see you guys out there again.

Are you guys gonna be back in DBBL tomorrow? We miss fighting you like yesterday! Bring EA back over too!

TG and GOTL and…I forgot the third guild…was it WAR? It just wasn’t the same.

I’m already missing the fights. I was in command of both GOTL and WAR that night. TG kinda did their own thing. We’re trying new tactics which are making the fights fun!