Guild Wars 2

I’m not sure what you consider high population, but IoJ is a (soon-to-be) T3 server with very defensive mindset. We have a number of guilds already dedicated to securing our BL/corner, walking yaks, scouting towers; the entire server culture is focused on defense as well.

You would fit in perfectly here. If you haven’t already, please consider us as well!

https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/wuv/recruitment/The-Official-Isle-of-Janthir-Thread/

A bit of history

IoJ was once a T1 server which fell to the bottom of T7 after free transfers ended. We slowly built ourselves back up, training our pugs and organizing our guilds, eventually climbing up to T4/T5 — only to be crushed again when Anet restructured Season 1. We’ve hit rock bottom before, suffered from low morale, seen waypoints built in our keeps, and finished last in Silver League.

And yet, despite this, it’s with a mixture of incredulity and pride that I’m writing this post. We braved the storm, rebuilt our community, and have begun to climb the ranks once more. What we need, however, is you!

Our goal is to stabilize in T3. We don’t care at all about Leagues. Let me repeat that. We don’t care at all about Leagues. We don’t care about stupid rewards, meaningless achievements, and artificial server stacking. We want to be stable and competitive in T3, without stomping or getting stomped by other servers.

Who we are

IoJ is without a doubt one of the nicest and most open communities out there, with no significant drama at all. We don’t tolerate trolling, griefing, or bad sportsmanship. We don’t rely on a few popular pugmanders or 1-2 WvW guilds to carry the server (having suffered from this mistake twice). We boast a variety of guilds and commanders, casual and hardcore, who come out every day.

We play defense and we don’t karma train. Every single guild and commander will hop map in a heartbeat if asked to defend IoJ BL. We have players and guilds who spend hours scouting our BL, walking yaks into our keeps, and sinking gold into upgrades and siege. We’re also one of the few servers with a strong OCX/SEA crew focused on defending our assets overnight and papering up enemy BL’s for the day.

Our guilds and veterans are fiercely loyal to each other and to the server. We’ve seen rock bottom, and we come out to fight anyway, whether it be in the face of overwhelming odds or in the face of those two annoying teefs slapping our yaks.

What we’re looking for

The only guilds we don’t want are ones who cause needless drama, bag farm at the expense of the server, and jump ship when the going gets tough. Other than that, defensive guilds, offensive guilds, GvG guilds, havoc guilds, pugmanders, camp flippers – you name it, we need it. Here’s what we’re in high demand for:

• NA guilds, NA guilds, NA guilds! More than anything, we need NA guilds. We have many talented and hardcore NA guilds already, but relative to other servers in our tier, we simply don’t have the same population during this time zone.
• 1-2 OCX/SEA guilds. If we want to be stable in T3, we need, ideally, a zergbusting guild and another havoc guild. We already have a coordinated night crew who would be more than happy to work with you.
• 1-2 EU guilds. Currently, we have one large EU guild and a looooot of pugs. If you’re looking to tap into a rich source of players in this time zone, we’re the server for you.

What we offer

• Server-wide Teamspeak and forums
• Server-wide siege donation drives
• Weekly militia training sessions
• Fun WvW side-events (Thursday night quaggan raids, commander zergs, etc.)
• Large pug population eager to learn and improve
• Hardcore WvW guilds who communicate effectively and work well together
• No queues (even on reset, the longest queues are 3-4 people)
• No drama
• One of the most stable and tight-knit communities to date

To end on a personal note: I wasn’t here for the first exodus, but I was here for the second. That night before Season 1, we were ticking at 30 PPT. Although there were times when I questioned why I should bother logging in, staying on IoJ and rebuilding the server has been one of the most rewarding experiences in this game. I’ve made a ton of close friends who would rather die in our last remaining tower than to give up without a fight. Soon, we were beating servers that once roflstomped us into the ground. And now, here I am, writing this post, with a mixture of incredulity and pride.

If IoJ sounds like it might be a good server for you, feel free to contact the following people in game:

Mango.9267 / Second Child
Hamster.4861 / Ried Stonefist (NA)
Banzie.5248 / Karnaige (EU)
Tonaius.6712 / Sanctus Custode (OCX)

I question how much WvW the people who answered “yes” actually play. If they play a lot, I question which server they’re on — probably servers towards the top of their leagues. I guarantee you the servers towards the end of their leagues will unanimously agree that Season 1 was a terrible idea.

styx.7294:

Yes, the first league did a lot to bring people out and drum up activity. On real low population servers, it was a big boost to the community.

WvW shouldn’t be about being on the winning team (‘cause if that’s too important everyone thinks very hard about that being on the winning team is one button click away) as much as getting people to play together, competing, pursuit of excellence, that sorta thing.

Maybe your server was lucky, but Season 1 had the opposite effect on many, many servers. Like, sure, PvE achievement hunters entered WvW for a week or two, but most never returned.

What did happen, however, is that servers towards the end of their league got farmed for seven weeks straight, with no hope of seeing better match-ups. Many WvW veterans quit from burnout, and countless people/guilds transferred off, either during Season 1 or soon afterwards. See CD, NSP, IoJ, Kaineng, DR, etc.

My answer is a resounding NO to Season 2. All it does is promote server stacking, kills weaker servers, and leaves the hardcore WvW members out to dry, many having to deal with both achievement hunters and put in overtime due to coverage gaps from people leaving.

Would really appreciate an inventory for siege only, separate from bag slots. As it is now, my siege blueprints take up almost 20 slots (regulars, superiors, guild) in my bag. Sounds like it’d be an easy fix for something that would greatly convenience commanders.

You could consider lower tiers. From what I recall, EBay, NSP, FC, DH all have decent roamers, with fewer blobs to boot. Outside of NA, most BL’s will be free of blobs. Of course, you also run the risk of going an hour without finding a fight due to lack of coverage.

Mag, SoS, FA, and TC all have roaming populations. That said, I found that they were sometimes mixed in with the blobs that were also running in the BL’s, and I think T2 blobs harder than T3/T4. At least you won’t have to worry about not finding fights.

I use the p/d condi set to deal with PU mesmers, with a fair degree of success. You can always CnD off their illusions, and sneak attack doesn’t require you to be in melee range to dish out your main source of dps. Sleight of hand + 1500 steal + bountiful theft are all very effective against PU mesmers, since they have poor mobility, few stunbreaks, and lose their boons.

The idea is just to outstealth them. Keep CnDing, and eventually they’ll run out of defensive maneuvers. Then use your combo. 10/0/30/0/30 p/d allows you to burst every 21 seconds, which is more than enough to deal with mesmers’ poor condi removal.

If all else fails, you can reset the fight by either outstealthing them or just using shadowstep/sb 5. A PU mesmer will never catch you. Just make them play to your rhythm instead of playing to theirs.

Just posting in case other teefs haven’t realized it yet. You can CnD off EoTM bridges like you can tower gates. Thing is, CnD off bridges don’t put you in combat and does no damage to the bridge, it seems. Weird, but very helpful when you need to stealth on demand. Not sure if bug or working as intended?

Buffy.9246:

Ioj stands no chance in T4. From what I heard from a friend in ioj, commanders let the enemy take their keeps so they can take it back.

As for T2 balance, SoS got 3 guilds that can basically que maps. I’ve fought them all and they are just blobs running around.

kitten, no idea who your friend is, but he probably doesn’t play WvW much. IoJ commanders are very anti-karma train. There’s only been one commander ever who has purposely let enemies recap their keep, and he’s no longer on the server.

That said, I agree about T4. Don’t think we’d fare too well, and I still shudder remembering DB’s OCX/SEA.

I just tested party priority, and there does seem to be some party priority?

Two staff ele’s, one in my party, one not. Party member laid his field on top, and my blasts prioritized his. Tried when not in party and it seemed to prioritize oldest unless blasted right when the field was laid down?

Can anyone else confirm this?

Pichichi.1975:

Keep in mind when testing that blast order may be affected by party priority, i.e. it depends on whether a field was laid down by a party member of someone who blasted it or not.

Right, that’s why I asked if anyone knew whether or not party affected blasts. I’ll test this out tomorrow if no one has any definitive response.

lept.4692:

mango.9267:

wads.5730:

when there are overlapping fields, the oldest field gets the priority.

That doesn’t seem to be the case. If you lay an ele’s fire field on top of an ele’s water field and blast, you get might instead of healing.

I went in game to see if I could reproduce this with a friend. Surprisingly, out of my 1 and his 5+ blast finishers, we got one to give might (Eruption). We’ve tried this several times, and it seems to only occur if the blast goes off at the exact time the fire field goes down over the water field. If too fast/too slow, they’re all area healing. This was done using staff and Earth 2 -> Water 5 -> Fire 2.

Edit: Also managed to blast another ele’s fire field doing that same rotation using my arcane wave, so it isn’t just eruption.

Interesting. Our set up was one staff ele who laid the fields and me (the thief) using cluster bomb. We got might consistently (or so I would like to believe?), but I’ll have to go back and test this more thoroughly.

P.S. did you try the reverse order? Place a water on top of a fire and blast to see what happens.

mahariel.4981:

By “we” do you mean yourself or are you specifically talking about obal’s gandalf and bearbow solos? Because one person does not mean PvE content is trivial, it’s quite clear he’s an exception.

I didn’t intend my examples to trivialize PvE content, but rather indicate their repetitive nature. Lupi was great the first time I encountered him, and I personally found him quite challenging as well. However, after we (my guild and I) learned his attacks, cast time, animations, etc., it eventually got stale, and what was originally challenging became fairly easy. I suspect the reason people do things like solo Lupi or kill Teq without turrets is just because it’s become too stale for them otherwise.

mahariel.4981:

And how dynamic is it really? People figure out the meta and then play it, which is exactly what happens in PvE. The warrior PvE meta went from 30/0/0/10/30 to 30/25/0/0/15 after the change to empower allies, that doesn’t suddenly mean it’s suddenly more skillful.

My experience of organised WvW could probably be summed up as following orders, keeping myself alive and bantering on voice comms, it didn’t really feel like I was having my (in the case of anything PvP) [lack of] skill challenged, whereas soloing bosses in PvE, or even doing them in a group of pugs can make them a hell of a lot harder. Even Subject Alpha goes from faceroll to a pain in the kitten because people didn’t stack him properly, and learning and waiting for specific tells to dodge and trying to manipulate his movement to get him back in to a corner I found a hell of a lot more skillful than anything I’ve done or seen in WvW.

I guess I should be more specific about what I mean by dynamic. I don’t mean that you’ll be fighting a great diversity of builds (quite the contrary, usually). What I mean is that each server and each guild does things differently. Their group composition, their strategy, which maps they hit, etc. WvW involves taking into account all of those things, along with coordinating with other guilds about what objective to pursue and when. This changes every day, as other servers adapt, and every week, with new servers in the mix (well, less so now with the new match-up system). Lupi, on the other hand, won’t adapt to your feedback, no matter how many times you cast it. Alpha won’t alter the timing of his aoe, no matter how many times you count to 2 and dodge. The same can’t be said for enemy players.

It sounds like your experience has been dominated by zerging with the commander. I admit that individual play in a zerg vs. zerg is pretty boring: avoid aoe circles, stay on tag, and aoe/CC everything you can (with the occasional banner for you, as a warrior). However, zergbusting 15 vs. 40, small scale 5v5 fights, and solo 1vX roaming are all much more involved and dynamic than blobbing would lead you to believe.

Elbegast.6970:

I tried a full day of WvW. It was fun…at first. I’m a thief so I solo roamed, killing dolyaks, taking supply camps, running resources, upgrading, etc. At the end of the day, i had spent well over 100g and couldn’t even afford to repair my armor. After that, I’ve only been back to WvW to enter the Jumping Puzzles…well, until those rewards were nerfed too.

There’s no incentive for me to go to WvW. I like it and all but I like having gold and armor better.

I have no idea how you spent 100g on WvW in a day. WvW definitely nets you a profit in the end, though a smaller profit than PvE would. Even commanders don’t use 100g worth of siege in a day.

Also, as a thief roamer, you probably shouldn’t be dying enough that armor repair actually ends up being a significant cost.

wads.5730:

when there are overlapping fields, the oldest field gets the priority.

That doesn’t seem to be the case. If you lay an ele’s fire field on top of an ele’s water field and blast, you get might instead of healing.

Does anyone know which fields take priority over which other fields? I meant to test this out myself, but just haven’t gotten around to it.

For example, I heard that time warp was the lowest priority field. We had an ele lay down a fire field, then a mesmer lay down time warp on top of it. The blasts gave us aoe might instead of chaos armor. Also tested this with a thief’s choking gas. Had an ele lay down a fire (or water) field, then the thief lay down a poison field. Blasts prioritized might (or healing) over weakness. Similarly with a mesmer’s veil (prioritized retal over weakness). Ele’s fire/water fields seem to get equal priority, depending on which one was laid down last.

Does anyone know what the lexical ordering of field priority is? Does it depend on class (i.e. are mesmer light fields and guardian light fields treated the same in terms of priority)? Does the person blasting the field have any influence on which field gets blasted (i.e. party member fields over non-party member fields)?

mahariel.4981:

What does the average player find easier?

Lupicus, Alphard, or WvW zerging?

That’s a pretty leading question. I could ask what the average player finds easier:

15v15 GvG’s, taking a fortified Hills from 40 defenders, or CoF P1?

Obviously, there’s easy content in both WvW and PvE. Yeah, soloing Lupi might take more skill than mashing 1 in an 60 man blob PvDooring everything down, but that’s not to say PvE requires more skill than WvW.

The reason I prefer WvW, and the reason I think WvW ultimately requires “more skill” is just that PvE content is, for the most part, static. World bosses are often mash-1-fests. We’ve killed Teq without turrets, and we’ve solo’d Lupi with bearbows, kitten . WvW, on the other hand, is always dynamic. And every balance patch creates new metas for both organized GvG’s and solo roamers. You have to constantly adapt to new servers and new situations, and you can go from crushing other servers to being outnumbered in an hour due to a few bad calls.

Aveneo.2068:

So no, it’s not really fair to give Revealed to Mesmers whenever a clone or phantasm attacks because this would make stealth completely unreliable and pointless while similar style attacks do not cause a Thief to be Revealed either.

There’s more to be said than the fact that phantasms act like minions. They’re similar in a number of ways, but also different in important ways. I think there should be much more to consider than whether or not an attack was directly from you.

The main difference is that for mesmers, phantasms are often their main source of dps. Many mesmer builds without phantasm dps would be severely crippled. The same can’t be said about thief minions or ranger pets.

For thieves, rangers, and engi’s to dish out their main source of dps, they do have to get revealed. Because of the way mesmers are, they can still maintain all of their offensive options while remaining in stealth. No other class works like this. (On a related note, I don’t think clone attacks should reveal the mesmer, since that’s usually not a main source of dps).

P.S. For what it’s worth, I don’t think you should be able to drop caltrops without getting revealed as well.

Aveneo.2068:

So because a single very specific (PU-condi roaming troll) build works because people are dying due to their own stupidity is a valid reason to make up ridiculous ‘facts’ in order to nerf all Mesmers?

Dat logic yo!

I’m going to take a wild guess that you play mesmer? If it makes you feel better, people QQ just as much (if not more) about thief stealth.

Most of what people have said about mesmer stealth is pretty reasonable (minus those who clearly play PU specs). PU builds (both power and condi) are easy to play, dish out heavy phantasm dps, and give mesmers a wealth of low cd defensive options from stealth (regen, protection, aegis, and the pain of having to re-target). As far as I’m aware, these aren’t “ridiculous ‘facts’”.

And no one is calling for nerfs to “all Mesmers”, as you suggest. A good number of mesmers don’t play stealth-heavy PU builds (myself included). I honestly think having phantasms reveal the mesmer upon damage would be a fair change, given the way stealth works for other classes.

You don’t need to trait for phantasms and conditions for them to be deadly. Case in point is the PU condi-build. A sword/pistol and scepter/torch PU mesmer will inflict tons of conditions from their duelists, scepter, and clone deaths — all while being able to reap the benefits of high stealth up-time.

For servers without queue problems (that is, for most servers), generally, organized guilds play in BL’s and pugs play in EB. EB is important for coverage gaps, when organized guilds aren’t playing. If an enemy zerg attacks your BL, the EB zerg often map hops to defend.

Having a corner in EB is important because it gets the pugs to come in, and if pugs come in, you can funnel people into your BL to defend it. Most of your points will come from your BL, so you always need people to scout/map-hop to defend it.

I’ve been on IoJ from our T7 days to our T4.5 days before leagues, and this general outline has held true in all of those tiers. I imagine it’s similar until queues actually start to be a problem and coverage gaps are diminished.

Lots of biased opinions. I spend my time roughly equally between mesmer and thief (though I consider myself a mesmer main), and I think mesmer stealth is better than thief stealth.

First, to clear some things up:

1) Yes, thief traps DO reveal you if they do damage.
2) Cush got it right.
3) Don’t even try to compare phantasms to thieves guild. Thieves guild lasts for 30 seconds and is on a 3 minute cd. Phantasms can be summoned every 12-16 seconds and stay up till you die or kill them. They also recharge every 4-6 seconds, which is fairly short.
4) People are really underestimating how brutal phantasms are. Yeah, sure, you can kite/dodge them, but you can kite/dodge thieves too. The thing is, phantasm summons are on a short cd, and their attack recharge is on an even shorter cd. You’d be lucky if you managed to avoid half of a mesmer’s phantasm attacks. It’s incredibly difficult to track multiple phantasm recharges (especially different phantasms), and many strike very suddenly (swordsman, zerker). Yes, you can always kill them, but that means you’ll be spending time and cd’s killing illusions instead of the real mesmer.

There are three things that makes mesmer stealth more powerful than thief stealth, IMO:

1) Mesmers can summon phantasms to do heavy damage without getting revealed. Clones also do decent damage on condition builds. Staff clones/greatsword clones do especially well with the burning and bleeding, so you should definitely NOT dismiss their damage.

2) When a thief de-stealthes, you just tab target and immediately burst/CC. This isn’t true for mesmers. It’s very annoying to target a de-stealthing mesmer, as you have to click around, and you’ll often click a clone first. This is even more annoying because you’re getting bombarded from all sides, taking heavy damage while desperately trying to re-target the mesmer. Moreover, a mesmer can strafe behind his clones so that even when you do manage to target him, his clones still get in your LOS and take the hit for him. Mesmer stealths are also on very low cooldowns.

3) Most stealthy mesmers run PU. This gives them basically perma-regen, with very high protection up-time. They’ll also get a chance of gaining aegis from the stealth and have that up fairly frequently. Basically, they’ll be slowly regen-ing health from stealth (like thieves), but will also mitigate tons of damage even out of stealth (unlike thieves).

To those complaining about backstab thieves. The thing about thief stealth is that it’s used both offensively and defensively. And if a thief wants to commit to killing you, this usually means he won’t have enough stealth to use it defensively. If a bursty backstab thief makes a mistake, he’s probably going to die. If, on the other hand, the thief decides to use his stealth defensively, he probably won’t be able to kill you. He can sit in stealth for a long time, but your cd’s will recharge, and you’ll likely regain most of your health. For a thief, he has to wisely allocate his stealth to both defensive and offensive play.

This is untrue for mesmers. Mesmer can use stealth purely defensively, without sacrificing any of their offensive options. Most mesmers rely on phantasms for their dps, and they can keep on summoning those while hiding in stealth. A backstab thief has to at least get into melee range and will eat heavy damage if he messes up. A phantasm mesmer doesn’t even have to get near you to summon his phantasms to do just as much damage (yes, iZerkers on power PU builds do comparable damage to 0/30/30/10 backstabs).

Add on the problem of re-targeting the mesmer (which is a huge deal, IMO), distortion, blurred frenzy evade, blocks, blinks, dazes/stuns, chaos storm, chaos armor, etc., and mesmers have many more defensive options than thieves do.

Although we haven’t really talked about “officially” recruiting on the forums (whatever that means), I’m glad you like it here, and I fully support your message!

IoJ welcomes everyone warmly! One of the friendliest communities out there.

Pyroatheist.9031:

mango.9267:

Similarly if your opponent is good at kiting, since phantasms move very slowly.

So is this.

Phantasms move at about normal movement speed. However, they all either use ranged attacks or have some sort of gap closing leap (other than the warden) which allows them to hit reliably. In the case of the iDisenchanter, it has a ranged attack, making its movement speed completely irrelevant.

I wouldn’t go so far as reliable. Whenever I fight a mesmer, and I see a phantasm go up, I can run out of range or dodge its attack fairly easily. For example, you can hear when a duelist attacks, and 2 dodges will avoid the entire thing; 1 dodge will avoid 4 hits. iZerker and iSwordsman are probably the hardest to avoid, but even then, a blink into a clever spot will do the trick.

Disenchanter works a bit like warlock, and warlock’s slow-moving, gimmicky projectiles are easily avoided by kiting and blinking in/out of range. I usually don’t have trouble just kiting the disenchanter around.

Pyroatheist.9031:

On average, the iDisenchanter does more in 1 attack than null field does if you stand in the field for the full duration, and it absolutely does more than arcane thievery. The iDisenchanter uses a bouncing attack that will hit a total of 5 targets, removing 2 boons from enemies hit and 2 conditions from allies hit. It uses this attack every 4 seconds, and is on a 20 seconds cooldown, compared to 40 seconds for null field and 45 seconds for arcane thievery. You do the math.

In theory, yes, but in practice, it’s not quite that potent. If you’re constantly moving and making the mesmer chase you, the Disenchanter has to chase as well before it gets in range to attack. Often, due to phantasms’ buggy AI, it’ll chase you, stop, attack, and fall short because you keep on moving and run out of range. Not to mention the fact that it takes up a phantasm slot. It can also be de-summoned if you’re unscrupulous with your phantasm management.

Arcane thievery, on the other hand, can’t be predicted. Your opponent will pretty much be completely unaware of when you cast it. Similarly with null-field. If you place it right, you can guarantee at least one (maybe two) pulses. More if combo into immobilize/stun. Not to mention it gives you a nice ethereal field.

That’s not to say Disenchanter is bad or useless. I find the circumstances in which it’s effective is when opponents don’t kite you/make you chase and when they don’t kill your phantasms. In those circumstances, it does outperform arcane thievery and null field. Otherwise, I find the latter two more reliable.

Tangential note: I think, in general, rabid pieces are the best for condition builds because lots of condi mesmers rely on Sharper Images. It doesn’t matter for you, since you don’t trait into the Dueling line. For you, I think dire pieces might suit you better. Healing power isn’t great on mesmer, though it might work with signet of ether + permanent regen. That said, your survivability really comes from blinks, evades, blocks, distortion, dazes, etc., and you really don’t need the healing power boost. If anything, having more health would help you bunker better in this condi-heavy meta, and dire gear will give you just that without sacrificing that much armor.

On mirror vs. ether feast: I prefer ether feast myself, since I find the heal to be significantly better. That said, if you’re fighting p/d thieves or p/p engis, swapping to mirror could be better for you, for both the reflect and extra condi clear.

Disenchanter could work in your build for small group play. Phantasms are generally ineffective in zergs, since they get killed so quickly. Disenchanter, especially, needs to stay up for quite some time if you want it to be more effective than, say, null field or arcane thievery. If your opponent has good aoe or is just good about taking out your phantasms, then I’d recommend taking arcane thievery or null field instead. Similarly if your opponent is good at kiting, since phantasms move very slowly.

A general note about playing mesmer: I feel like mesmers, more than any class, demands and rewards flexible play. I change my build all the time for dungeons, for WvW roaming/zerging/dueling, for tPvP roamer/bunker/support, etc. In that spirit, MANY of our utilities and heals are useful in certain situations, and you should be swapping utilities frequently. If I don’t change my build, I sure as hell swap my utilities before an encounter. Just about every 5 minutes or so, my utility bar looks different.

My advice to you is to get used to swapping utilities, no matter what you’re doing (unless you’re tPvPing). In that vein, don’t settle on mirror or disenchanter and be done with it. Both of those skills are more useful in certain circumstances and less useful in others. Learn what those situations are and pick the utilities based on that.

+1 to NSP, from your fellow bottom-Silver friends on IoJ. Been matched up against you guys more than any other server in recent memory.

Good to hear you guys are rebuilding, and we’re right there with you!

Odies.8017:

mango.9267:

Righteous.4307:

Since IoJ will continue to dodge… any CD guilds want to 15v15 gvg MU?

Discuss

I can’t speak for everyone, but I’m guessing the reason [MU] isn’t getting many GvG responses is in the way you ask for them.

Most GvG guilds see the mode as a friendly way to improve the group synergy and combat skills of both themselves and the opposing team. For you guys, it seems like you’re using it to flex your kitten and justify your trash-talk. It’s like you start out by calling everyone bad, then throw out GvG’s so you can say “yeah that’s what we thought” when no one bites.

The reason no one bites isn’t because they’re scared of losing. It’s because of your attitude. We, [HARD], don’t mind losing GvG’s, since we still get nice practice, but your attitude is off-putting.

If you earnestly want GvG’s, my friendly advice is that you reform the way you ask for them. I mean this as respectfully as I can, since I support the GvG community, and [MU] could be a serious contender in the lower-silver/upper-bronze GvG scene.

If you actually knew us then you would just realize what you just said is a bunch of kitten. We have given feedback and even go into their VOIP to give our opinion on how they would’ve improved in the fight.

Go ahead and ask COSA, Star, EA, BB, BS, and all the other guilds we have GvG already.

If you’re going to use the excuse the reason you won’t do a GvG with us is because of our attitude, then just stop talking.

That’s the thing, though. Most guilds on servers you haven’t fought before DON’T know you guys. Because they DON’T know how you really are in game, all they have to go on is what you say on the forums. If you presented the offer as a genuine attempt to request 15v15 GvG’s, instead of having multiple guildies open with “all IoJ is bad and blob, GvG us pls”, you’d get a much better response.

Again, I’m sure you guys are cool people in game, but trash-talking other servers, then requesting GvG’s won’t get you as many responses.

And you can treat our refusal as an excuse if you want. That’s honestly the reason. We’ve lost GvG’s before and have been fine with it. The trash-talk is just off-putting for us. Again, I only speak for us, and not for other guilds.

Righteous.4307:

Since IoJ will continue to dodge… any CD guilds want to 15v15 gvg MU?

Discuss

I can’t speak for everyone, but I’m guessing the reason [MU] isn’t getting many GvG responses is in the way you ask for them.

Most GvG guilds see the mode as a friendly way to improve the group synergy and combat skills of both themselves and the opposing team. For you guys, it seems like you’re using it to flex your kitten and justify your trash-talk. It’s like you start out by calling everyone bad, then throw out GvG’s so you can say “yeah that’s what we thought” when no one bites.

The reason no one bites isn’t because they’re scared of losing. It’s because of your attitude. We, [HARD], don’t mind losing GvG’s, since we still get nice practice, but your attitude is off-putting.

If you earnestly want GvG’s, my friendly advice is that you reform the way you ask for them. I mean this as respectfully as I can, since I support the GvG community, and [MU] could be a serious contender in the lower-silver/upper-bronze GvG scene.

Odies.8017:

^ Mostly just [MU] speaks on the forum and the reason behind this is during season IoJ said wait our turn to get crushed. Let me see if I can find that quote.

I’m not sure who said that or what the circumstances were, but I can say the vast majority of IoJ (up until now, probably) didn’t feel one way or the other towards HoD. We don’t really have anything against you guys, and, if anything, we’re excited for a more balanced match-up that doesn’t involve getting farmed 24/7.

Christ, I heard HoD forum warred hard, but this brings me back to the old IoJ/DR/DH days. Keep this up, and you might even be able to challenge Maguuma in PvF (okay, fine, maybe not). In all honestly, not sure where all this animosity is coming from. Besides the whole Mend ordeal, I don’t think there’s any history between IoJ and HoD. You guys were fairly civil and good sports the last time we were matched up a few months ago, so I’m not really sure what happened.

Anyway, to my knowledge, we don’t have a real numbers advantage over you guys, and we probably don’t have coverage as well-rounded as yours. We’re allocating people efficiently and communicating across maps, which is why it might seem like we have more people than we actually do. You fought BP last week, so you probably have an idea of what I’m talking about. Also, everyone psychologically overestimates how many red names there are and underestimates how many green names there are.

With regards to the skill of our “blobs”, I will say that most of our WvW population is fairly young. Silver League pretty much killed off a good number of our more experienced veterans, so many of the players in our pug zergs, and even in our WvW guilds, have been playing WvW for less than a month. I apologize (I guess?) if you’re disappointed, but the current strength/weakness of our servers is mostly due to Anet’s structuring of leagues. If Silver League included 7 servers, instead of 6, HoD would probably be where we are right now. I’m sure CD understands what I mean.

Also with regards to “blobbing”, you haven’t seen anything till you’ve fought SBI, FA, and DB’s SEA. They’ll make our “blobs” look like havoc crews.

All that said, still hoping for a good week, regardless of outcome.

There are numerous threads about the exact same topic. Try a forum search and google search, and you should get some decent results.

That said, there are a few things veteran WvW players might not be aware of tagging up the first time. For example, most of commanding pugs isn’t about micromanaging the zerg vs. zerg (though that is important too), but rather having keen map awareness and keeping track of how much approximate supply your zerg has/needs. I open my map every couple of minutes, and I usually play with two monitors with millenium up on the other screen. Map awareness is probably the most important aspect of commanding pugs. Also, while you’re playing by yourself, waypointing might be faster to get across the map. But when commanding, it’s usually better to run the zerg to the destination. Every time you waypoint, you need to wait a minute or two to regroup and you run the risk of losing a few stubborn idiots who refuse to wp.

A lot of other things will just come with experience. For example, toss rams on opposite corners of the gate, and place them as far from the gate as possible. Toss AC’s from the ground up onto the wall. Know when to push and when to back off. For example, if the enemy is in the inner of your keep, and the waypoint timer reads 1:30 or so, you should push out no matter how many you have and how many they have. Even if you die, the waypoint will pop by the time you die, and you might kill some of them. Learn to recognize when an enemy is weak/retreating and when an enemy is baiting you into a corner ambush.

There are also a number of nuances and small things you pick up as you go. For example, if you don’t know how many people an enemy zerg is fielding, treb something they value (a keep, a fortified tower). If the enemy decides to play treb wars 2 instead of rushing you, chances are good that you outnumber them.

There’s probably too much for people to just write down for you. The best way to learn is to just go out and do it. Ask some of your veteran commanders for advice, and I’m sure they’d be happy to teach you some tricks.

Actually d/p permastealth is possible without “utilities with long cooldowns”. Patience (SA X), blinding powder, and hide in shadows will do the trick. Using the standard x/30/30/x/0 d/p build, you can get 3 HS off 1 BP, and you can rotate blinding powder and hide in shadows when your initiative is low. I’ve tested this and can maintain permastealth fairly easily.

That said, in order to get the full benefit of permastealth, you’ll be very low on initiative by the end of the BP + HS combo, and you’re usually either without a utility or without a heal. That’s a pretty significant tradeoff for maintaining permastealth, IMO.

Also, with regards to the BP + clusterbomb combo, you definitely canNOT maintain stealth from that the same way you could pre-December 10th. Before the nerf, you could take Infusion + Patience in SA and maintain aoe permastealth with BP + clusterbomb (very useful for permastealthing mesmers in keeps). Since the Infusion nerf, that’s no longer possible, and the buff to the base initiative regen isn’t enough to offset it.

Lastly, with regards to the OP’s complaint, I have no idea how a d/p thief won a 5v1. It’s a good build, but it shouldn’t even be able to win a 2v1 against competent players. Maybe if you guys chased him in a line and got bursted down one by one. However, like many posters have noted, if he did win, it wasn’t due to permastealth.

ArkAngel.7940:

mango.9267:

Some good fights tonight. HoD, you guys sure have a lot of emote spammers and teabaggers. I’ve had siege dropped on me countless times, and I’m in Mend.

I’ve yet to see VLK, but I remember you guys being a good fight the last time we met.

VLK go bye bye.

My quote is misquoted a bit. I’m NOT in Mend.

Anyway, that’s a shame. I enjoyed fighting VLK. Did most of the members merge into other guilds, or did the guild transfer off?

Some good fights tonight. HoD, you guys sure have a lot of emote spammers and teabaggers. I’ve had siege dropped on me countless times, and I’m not even in Mend. Other than that, FKB and MU can field some pretty impressive numbers. I’ve yet to see VLK, but I remember you guys being a good fight the last time we met.

prowler.4530:

(polishes 1st place trophy on shelf)

I’m not sure why anyone would brag about karma training against easier servers with large population discrepancies. I have nothing against HoD for winning Bronze, but I do want to defend IoJ for getting 9th in Silver.

The synopsis is that Anet initially announced two leagues only, and IoJ was looking to be at the top of Silver League, so a number of guilds bandwagoned to us. Then Anet changed their word and introduced bronze league, and the multiple guilds that built us up didn’t want to stay and fight stronger servers (you have to at least respect Mend here for not jumping ship when the other guilds left). I don’t really mind their decision to leave, but the tragedy is that this all happened the Thursday before leagues began, so we had no chance of dropping into bronze, where we really belonged. We then suffered 7 weeks of getting farmed.

We’re still in the process of rebuilding, so our WvW force isn’t quite as stable as we’d like it to be. From my understanding, HoD has gotten much stronger through Bronze, so I’m just happy we can still put up a fight. Overall, looking forward to the week.

Epic.3950:

ww, aa, ss, dd 12345`12345 are all good combos for a necro beating a warrior.
contrary to popular belief a good necro should beat a good warrior all the time in a 1v1 unless the warrior plays it perfectly.

That’s not true. Stunlock warriors are very problematic for necros, who really don’t have many stunbreaks. Moreover, warriors have pretty decent condition removal with zerker stance, cleansing ire, etc. and many sources of stability.

Regarding thieves, decoy and blink should be enough. Portal is okay against them, but its long cd means you’ll only mitigate a single thief burst with it. Similarly with veil. Personally, I do fine with decoy alone.

If you’re having trouble, consider swapping greatsword for staff. It still does great damage on 30/30/0/10, and you get the extra phase retreat from staff, along with chaos storm and chaos armor.

More specifically, it’ll depend on what kind of thief you’re fighting. Blink is better against pistol whip thieves, since decoy won’t help against their immobilize. However, decoy is better against backstab thieves because, even if you blink, they have a lot of gap closers, and decoy stealth will prevent them from targeting you. If you’re worried about backstab thieves, learn the backstab timing and use your dodges, distortion, and blurred frenzy to mitigate the burst. Thieves backstab fairly obviously, so once you learn the timing, you should have enough dodges/evades/invulnerability to survive against them, even without utilities. Don’t rely on your utilities to mitigate the thief burst; treat them as a defensive bonus to use if you mess up.

I personally prefer decoy over blink. Mesmer stealth is pretty OP, since your opponent is forced to lose target, and retargeting you can be pretty annoying. It buys you 4-5 seconds of damage mitigation because of this fact, along with a stunbreak and extra clone.

For you, I can see the merits of taking blink over decoy. I usually play staff, so phase retreat gives me the mobility I need. For both WvW and PvP roaming, blink is extremely helpful if you don’t run staff. And you risk losing the point in stealth.

I’m not a huge fan of veil due to its long cd. My personal roaming set up is usually decoy, arcane thievery, and blink. If I’m fighting a condi opponent, I swap out blink for mantra condi removal. If you’re debating between decoy/blink/veil, I definitely recommend decoy + blink over veil.

Lastly, if you intend to play PvP seriously, I’d consider some other utilities as well. Currently, your utilities are very selfish and provide little team support. Portal, illusion of life, and null field all offer more team support than blink/decoy.

This just in. EBay is too good for rams. Watched this group literally PvDoor Briar gate down from 100% to 0% for a good 30 minutes or so. Not sure if intentional or new to WvW O_O

Good times, good times.

Qaelyn.7612:

EDIT: I should wait until I’m more awake before posting, as I just noticed you are talking about replacing the staff, not the scepter/torch. But the same basic principle applies: you’re trading defense for offense. I do this myself (though I prefer the GS) but I recognize that I will die more quickly than if I had the staff.

To be honest, you’re not sacrificing that much defense. Sword/pistol can actually be played quite defensively as well. Sword 2 is a low cd evade. Sword 3 is a blink/stunbreak. Pistol 5 will stun/daze/blind. I also run a sigil of energy on either sword or pistol, so I get an extra dodge as well.

What you’re sacrificing most by removing staff is your mobility. Phase retreat is just great for kiting melee classes around. Chaos storm and chaos armor do provide you some defensive options, but, overall, not something that sword/pistol can’t compensate for.

Overall, I’d take the hit in mobility if it meant I could kill classes with decent condi removal instead of tying with them.

ArmageddonAsh.6430:

mango.9267:

And lol @ thinking PU mesmer stealth is okay but thief stealth isn’t.

Please, Mesmer give up ALOT if they go for a full stealth build. For a start, forced to take Torch. The Prestige is solid, the Phantasm is a joke. No stealth heal. Veil, Decoy and Mass Invis are all on 30second to 90 second cooldowns (before traits) and with that you have ONE stun breaker…

Now compare that to Thief who pretty much just have to use Dagger/Pistol for as much stealth as they want. Then they have stealth on healing slot, Shadow Refuge and Blinding Powder and 3 smoke fields alone.

Thats even ignoring the Stuns, High damage and everything they have as well…
Then you get into what options they have inside stealth – regen, initiative regen, Condition removal, increased speed. What does Mesmer get? 1 trait that gives random boons ONCE a second…

I have NO problem what so ever with Mesmer stealth, Why? They are having to use COOL DOWNS every time to do it, unlike Thief.

As someone who plays both mesmer and thief, I, along with many others, think PU stealth is actually much better than your standard thief stealth. The biggest reason is that mesmers can summon phantasms to dish out damage in stealth and not get revealed. If thieves want to kill you, they’re forced to get revealed.

Moreover, most PU builds trait into torch cd, which also removes condition on torch skills. So mesmer stealth gives regen/protection/AEGIS (which thief stealth doesn’t), removes condition, and allows them to lose all aggro while dishing out dps without the revealed debuff. And yes, the stealth DOES heal. Given how frequently they can stealth, they can almost maintain perma-regen. Not to mention perma-vigor from crits.

And if you cycle your utilities/shatters/blocks/evades correctly, a PU mesmer is nearly impossible to kill. Even when the stealths are on cd, the blocks/distortion/evades aren’t. Thieves don’t have nearly the defensive set up that PU mesmers have. In fact, PU mesmers can rival x/d and even some d/p specs (like Caed’s) in terms of stealth uptime. That’s not even talking about blinks, signet of ether, strafing behind clones, clone death conditions, etc.

Lastly, thieves DO have to use cd’s on their utilities for stealth. And they can be knocked out of shadow refuge and get revealed as well (something that’ll never happen to mesmers). And no weapon skill can maintain stealth that long. Even SA heavy d/p specs have to sacrifice utility slots to maintain stealth, and if they do, they won’t have enough initiative to kill you. Cloak&dagger costs 6 initiative, so if a thief misses one, that’s half their initiative gone. You make it sound like thieves can just stealth at no cost; in fact, builds that favor stealth sacrifice a lot of dps, and weapon stealth costs a lot of initiative.

I could go on, but I don’t want to derail the discussion from the OP’s question.

lol @ non-thieves QQ’ing about thieves. And lol @ thinking PU mesmer stealth is okay but thief stealth isn’t. For overall WvW, thieves are NOT the best class. They bring very little utility to zerg fights.

OP, I’m not sure how you intend to play WvW. Roaming, zerging, yak escorting, scouting, etc. each involve different playstyles, and different classes excel at different things.

That said, if you want to do a bit of everything, roll warrior. They make up the backbone of zergs. They’re great at roaming, with a number of very powerful builds for both solo and support play. And they can disengage and reset a fight almost as easily as a thief can. Warriors can do everything at least decently well, and many things exceptionally well.

tl;dr
best class: warrior
why: because warrior

I highly, highly, highly, highly, HIGHLY recommend sword/pistol instead of staff for damage. Your duelists will stack a kittenton of bleeds that are both more reliable than scepter torment and do more damage. Moreover, I take it you’re running Debilitating Dissipation, and sword clones are the best for that because they run up and melee the target.

When I fight PU staff + scepter/torch mesmers, they usually never kill me. When they’re smart enough to use pistol, I know I’ll lose. Staff is really a defensive weapon on PU condi, and when you’re solo roaming or 1v1ing, you usually can’t dish out enough DPS with the standard PU condi to take down classes with decent condition removal.

Axelwarrior.9084:

After the two dodges, I got hit by a ranged auto-attack from a Ranger (or warrior, I didn’t notice, really) and got downed.

You don’t need to be targeted for a ranged autoatack to hit you. If you’re in the line of sight of the projectile, you’ll still get hit. Similarly for heartseeker. This is why everyone says to change the running direction after entering stealth.

Some interesting replies. It seems most of the alternatives are still fairly defensive in nature: blinding powder, roll for initiative, signet of agility. We don’t seem to favor our more offensive utilities like haste or ambush. I guess thieves treat their utilities as defensive options in general. I think scorpion wire could be interesting, but I’m just a bit wary of how gimmicky it is. It often does nothing when it looks like it should pull the enemy. Not to mention all the terrain bugs.

Personally, I’d consider smokescreen to compensate for refuge stealth and help against engis/rangers/mesmer duelists. I’ve also fought a thief who used tripwire pretty effectively. I’d also consider the torment/immobilize venoms and caltrops if I were playing p/d. Other than that, I guess you can’t go wrong with blinding powder, roll for initiative, and infiltrator’s signet.

Biggest problem is condition removal without shadowstep. Seems to me like you’re forced to take hide in shadows to compensate.

As the title suggests, just wondering if there are any thieves who run neither Shadow Refuge nor Shadowstep on their utilities. Just about every thief I’ve met uses both of them, and I don’t blame them — 15 seconds of stealth and blink/stunbreak/condi cure are pretty good.

If you don’t use either, what do you use instead, and what’s your build? How do you deal with resetting fights and curing conditions?

Alternatively, if you were forced to remove both, what would you take instead?

If you trait into blade training, I’d take offhand sword. Swordsman recharges faster than duelist, and does only a bit less damage per hit. Blade training offhand sword has a lower cd on both riposte and swordsman than does duelist discipline magic bullet and iDuelist. That means more dazes/stuns and more phantasms for you overall, along with a very low cd block. Additionally, blade training affects both mainhand and offhand sword, and frees up a trait slot, allowing you to take something like deceptive evasion or phantasmal fury.

Not sure what kind of necro you’re fighting. “Condi bomb” is a bit vague. A few tips to help with general necro fights:

-If they’re running signet of spite, you need to save a dodge. When you see the signet activate above their head, you need to dodge IMMEDIATELY. Alternatively, you could save your zerker stance and use that to counter the spite. That’s probably the “condi bomb” you’re experiencing.

-Save your dodges, zerker stance, and stunbreaks. A very common combo with necros is using the flesh golem knockdown into spite. When you get kd’d by the flesh golem, stunbreak immediately and dodge. You should avoid most of their “condi bombs” like this. Similarly with fear —> spite. Note that fear counts as a condition, so it can be removed by condi clears as well.

-Try the stunlock hammer and mace/shield build. Necros have almost no stunbreaks, so if you can keep the pressure on, most will panic. Shield also gives you additional blocks against their condis.

-Alternatively, you could run greatsword and just reset the fight when you’re low. Necros have very poor mobility, so you should always be able to run from one, or at least reset long enough that you regen most of your health.

That said, I generally agree with you. A good condition necro, I think, is at the top of the 1v1 chain right now (right up there with spirit rangers and PU mesmers). Gives me trouble no matter which class I’m playing.

sephiroth.4217:

Well we just lost our garrison and map to DB being outnumbered by 3 times the amount but lots of respect to DB for actually making a decent siege out of it instead of the usual omega golems, kept us on toes all night especially your dedicated keep tappers

We might have held on if NNK didn’t join TFV + pugs. Managed to push them off a number of times before NNK entered our map. Overall, I’m just happy IoJ pugs are willing to stick around and defend for 3 hours, despite being so drastically outnumbered. When looking at blobs that size, I know a lot of people will just give up and PvE, but kudos to all of our players who toughed it out and died in Garri in the end!

Ancient Ranger.3276:

Straegen.2938:

Few would give a crap about hills, bay or garri if they did this. The only reason they are strategically important is the waypoints. Holding them for points is secondary to that. A lot of servers wouldn’t even bother trying to hold their BL since the run to the bottom half would be mostly pointless since they could lock down their entry points on BLs easier.

The only way to change that would be put the main respond point in the middle of the map in borderlands. Which i would not be against as it would add a new feel to borderlands and would not be the some old layout. Which i think would bring more people into borderlands simply because of the new layout.
If you server only focuses on EB your most likely losing your matches because unless you can take over all of EB your borderlands has more points than EB.

^Pretty much this. BL keeps are still important because they’re worth way more than a couple of outer towers in EB. Plus, you can treb NW and NE tower from Garri and Lake from Hills.

Have you considered staff instead of GS? Gives you a lot more defensive options and since most of your damage is from clone generation, you don’t sacrifice that much DPS. You could also used the ranged shatter build with GS/staff, though I don’t think you’d want to give up the sword/pistol burst.

Removing waypoints would also help balance match ups. As it is, the weakest server usually doesn’t have waypoints in any of their keeps, making farming them easy for both stronger servers. On the flip side, the strongest server usually has all the waypoints, allowing them to stay aggressive in enemy BL’s and waypoint in to defend if they need to.

If they replaced it, they could make keeps like towers and change the upgrade to build oil —> cannons --> mortars. That said, I liked how waypoints were a very strong defensive upgrade, so maybe they could add in something that encourages defensive play. Maybe an upgrade that, say, drains 1000 supply but applies structural invulnerability to keep walls/gates for 2 minutes or something. This allows you to get reinforcements in and build some defensive siege, and would help prevent strong server karma trains through BL’s.