Guild Wars 2

The supply trafficking rewards coverage, nothing else. If your server has no trouble holding three fully upgraded keeps on its border all week long, chances are you can simply keep porting into them to build the omegas to decimate the borderlands of your opponents, thanks to ridiculously uneven matchups. These 10+ omega trains aren’t built from sups grown locally at Victor’s Lodge.

The Astralholme bug has been around for ages. They just spawn at random times and start duking it out with the other guards. Sometimes it happens as I am trying to cap the camp, which is of course very helpful, although odd.

Exciton.8942:

WvW is still good on higher tiers. But for sure it desperately needs attention from devs for improvement.

Depends on what you consider good. Ever since we hit Gold the experience has been getting progressively worse. The only thing keeping us in a tier higher than where we ought to be is the brainless karmatrain chugging along in EB. Borderland defense is on the very tired shoulders of the few who still have the energy to try. In other words, the EB karmatrain keeps us in enough ppt to ensure that each week the servers we oppose get to pvd our keeps every half hour with little resistance.

If you’re into blobs and alternating between tab and 1, it’s probably great. I’d be far pushed to call that “WvW”, though.

It’s good to know that should I ever become so ethically bankrupt as to resort to hacks in this game, there is realistically no practical mechanism in place to penalize me for it. At least in AA’s case, Trion is helpless to deal with hackings, whereas in GW2 they just can’t be bothered. With all this evidence?

Even if you gave them the exact dates, times, and locations where the hacker would be, they’d still manage to fumble doing anything about it. Boggles the mind.

[Full disclosure: I’m an ex-officer, current rank-and-file member. I wasn’t asked to post here, didn’t even know about it, just happened to see this thread & thought I’d chime in.]

REQ is a great guild for those who seek to not limit themselves to one game mode. People like to glorify things when posting ads for guilds or servers, because gritty realities rarely pull in the applications, and thus sometimes you join something only to find the details to have been greatly exaggerated. This hasn’t been the case with REQ. In the year+ I’ve been with the guild it has never struggled to maintain an active membership, because there’s always something going on. Typically, there’s a scheduled event or theme for each day of the week which adapt regularly to suit the members’ needs and current game updates.

While REQians do PvP and WvW, the guild’s particular strong suit is PvE content, particularly dungeons, fractals, guild missions, and LS/seasonal content. It’s a large guild, but you get to know people through doing stuff with them, and you don’t need to be part of any existing clique to join in, everyone’s welcome.

It’s an exploit. You’re not supposed to be able to just leap into the keep and thus destroy all the siege in outer. I’d report it.

Shintei.9061:

Fay.2357:

Shintei.9061:

Dondagora.9645:

If you’re going power shatter mesmer, it might be better given how you strip a boon per illusion. This means no boons on your opponent to keep them strong or safe.

It is not 1 boon strip per illusion, it’s 1 boon strip per shatter if I remember correctly.

It is 1 boon strip per illusion.

but I think the mesmer itself can strip a boon too. So 1 mind wrack can has 4 boons striped

I think you need Illusionary Persona for that.

Get rid of the 1500 range. What the kitten.

Hamster.4861:

Happy new year to everyone

Does anyone have new perspective on No white swords, or any input on the new standard mode of behavior that your servers have settled into now that we’re deep into this change?

Home borderland defense is pretty much dead. No one upgrades keeps anymore because they cannot be defended without some poor soul constantly standing in there staring into the horizon, and no one finds that enjoyable gameplay. Subsequently we’re not getting as much eagerness from EB to come help, because the garrison tends to not be sieged now or even fortified.

As a scout and roamer I spend most of my time running to camps “just in case” for no reason, and small group fights and 1v1s are way, way down.

Losing interest fast, tbh.

The GMs are asleep at the switch as usual…

Of all Mesmer elites, it’s the absolute most useful in WvW. Not familiar enough with PvE content to praise it there.

Hamster.4861:

Illusions: Masterful Reflection [rangers yo! pre-rapid fire buff I would run the confusion duration trait]

I had to do a slight necro on this thread just to thank you for this tip. I’d never even tried this trait before, but on your mention I gave it a whirl and well-timed it’s just fantastic. Thank you.

Well, a couple of reasons. I don’t follow the zerg, I roam and scout solo, and I feel I can put my scout reports just as well into the map chat where everyone can benefit from them.

Second, my server TS assigns class symbols and I end up frequently being asked to come portal golems, which I deem a waste of my time. Instead of saying no and being considered a prick, I opt to just not have to deal with it.

Finally, the music bots. I have a wildly different idea of what good music is than the idiots who queue up kitten for these things. Justin Bieber, Lady Gaga, One Direction, or any of the other talentless hacks give me migraines.

Thieves and hacks go together like Fred and Ginger. If you’re going to use broken mechanics, what better way to do it but with a broken class?

Regrettably there’s nothing we can do, and the odds are slim that there’s anything ANet will do. I doubt legit players on Underworld are too excited about it either.

Skeletor.9360:

DeadlySynz.3471:

Well the thing is, you stay in your Tier, this happens. You move down a Tier, your now the dominant server.

Ehmry Bay moves up a Tier and someone from Tier 5 moves down, it’ll be even worse. Someone from Tier 7 moves up while ehmry bay moves down; nothing changes in Tier 6, but Tier 7 gets destroyed.

So what exactly do you want? The only ideal situation is to fuse all the servers together into 3 separate factions where the population will be the same throughout all factions…

Are you up for something like that or are you one of the players that holds too much “server pride”?

The problem isn’t tier anything….When I took this I was the only one on the map for our side. Our heavy population time is 30 people (all maps). The problem is that once you go out and get rolled by 5 times your numbers you go do something else.

How is this fixed?
// Function to determine if player can log in or not to WvW.
bool CanILogIntoWvW(int mySideMapCount, int opponent1MapCount, int opponent2MapCount)
{
if (mySideMapCount < MIN_PLAYERS)
{
return TRUE;
}
else if ( (mySideMapCount < (opponent1MapCount + NUM_ALLOWED_MORE) ) &&
(mySideMapCount < (opponent2MapCount + NUM_ALLOWED_MORE) ) )
{
return TRUE;
}
return FALSE;
} // —-— End of CanILogIntoWvW —-—

The above allows you to log in if there are less than some minimum number of players allowed. If you have more than this minimum then you compare the other two opponents numbers and only allow logins if you have less than both opponents plus a allowable few more.

The call of this function brackets whatever login code they have now.
Its a simple solution that should have been done a long time ago.

Thanks

Can we also implement a PVP flagging system whereupon I can flag up and kill any friendly who’s standing around afk at the crafters or doing JPs or any other PvE garbage while taking up slots on the map from actual contributing players?

Not going to buy any gems until this is fixed. As a WvW player with no interest in PvE or their lolEsport, finishers are the only thing worth buying from the gem store. Now even those don’t work. Guess ANet doesn’t need my money – their bank must be full.

I’ve been roaming with a MtD build since the trait was introduced. At first I used the Tormenting runes on my ascended dire set, and kept swapping between that and a set with Traveler. I couldn’t decide between the two, because the Tormenting set killed opponents noticeably faster, but the Traveler made roaming much easier. After the feature patch this fall, I’ve moved entirely to Traveler, as the difference is now more or less negligible in terms of damage. For a roamer, the mobility is huge. If you’re not wearing Traveler and you’re in combat, trying to run away is like wading through quicksand.

pepper.6179:

CrimsonNeonite.1048:

It should be routine for certain groups to run into camps, no? Sentries are another indication of player movement.

i skip sentries to avoid detection

This.

Why bother killing sentries anyway? They can’t even kill a passing-by enemy dolyak which has no escorts.

I was a roaming scout, relying on the white swords, especially of camps, to predict and pre-empt enemy movements. I also upgraded and sieged keeps and towers; not sure why I’d bother with that anymore.

Since you want me standing in towers staring into the horizon, I’d like to see you remove or greatly extend the afk timer. I dc’d four times tonight scouting and enjoying this dynamic content of yours because of your kittenty-kitten afk timer.

The upside is not having to buy gems for finishers, which I used to collect, since, well, it’s not like I’m going to be doing a lot of finishing, is it?

It’s nothing but the EotM that turned it into this. Before it, and the WXP nonsense, you gained experience through actually fighting in the borderlands, and not just mouthbreathing through a karmatrain run. EotM breeds Silver-rank morons who can’t handle any encounters solo, so they run.

Omega placed in water despawned on its own in about 20 minutes. It was on low health (maybe 20%) but did not die from damage. Just vanished. I’ve had alphas sitting at spawn idle without issues. Did they change the despawn timer on these? The wiki just gives the 20 min for rams (then again the wiki is kitten).

Not going to purchase them anymore until this gets sorted, this makes using them a complete pain in the kitten .

I thought EotM was the place to be if you were an uplevel or otherwise helpless.

I don’t play sPvP, but in WvW I ran phantasm and occasionally power shatter up until the crit nerf/ferocity bullkitten patch. To get any kind of reasonable damage out of it I have to go glass, and it still struggles to bring down a guardian or a warrior. With condishatter I don’t have those issues, quite the opposite, I can go full dire and be incredibly effective. However I do miss that perhaps more active playstyle. Besides phantasms are just cool.

I really don’t want this to become a meta of any sorts. As soon as it does, it will get nerfed to oblivion.

There are a few regularly updated WvW playlists on Spotify. I take what I like from them and add to my own playlist. Frankly I like a bit of variety, so it includes anything from game OST pieces to “Cruel Summer.” I don’t like Youtube for streaming music because the song volume seems to fluctuate a lot, and besides I can skip or repeat tracks easier with my G710 if I use Spotify.

Scryeless.1924:

. . . small group of us were assaulting a keep and what should’ve taken 5 mins . . .

Scryeless.1924:

. . . 5 Minutes turned into 40 minutes. That’s 40 minutes of no rewards. No loot, no world exp, no fun fights, etc…

You shouldn’t get into a tower in 5 minutes, much less into a keep.

If you were PvDing a keep with just one guy inside defending it, you weren’t looking for fun fights anyway.

I was never a fan of PvP style game modes. I never walked into WvW at all until I needed it to finish map completion. I’m not a terribly competitive person, and WvW didn’t seem like something I’d enjoy. What drew me in, when a guildie took me there, was that there seemed to be an actual strategy to it. I played a Guardian, and prefer to play solo most of the time, but I found that even a solo roamer Guardian could contribute and feel part of the larger machine through scouting and building defences.

Building and refreshing siege and alerting “the big boys” to imminent threats was all the reward I needed. It’s the only reward I’ve ever needed. Playing the game is largely the reward itself for me, a distraction from real-life responsibilities. I can understand the need for tangible, cosmetic rewards on the PvE side of the game, but I never felt like a glowing weapon was something that made my scouting or defending more fun for me.

Unfortunately, coverage issues, the just-zerg-it methodology, and “don’t bother defending, we’ll flip it later for WXP” mentality, accompanied by the total lack of any development whereas defending is concerned, has all but eliminated that reward. I feel bad after spending hours building siege when the enemy zerg comes with 8 golems and 40 guys and just takes the whole garrison in 5 minutes.

This was less of a problem back in the day when my guys actually cared enough to respond to the threats I reported. With the introduction of WXP and EotM (which brew a whole generation of give-it-to-me-now WvWers), the focus shifted from active defence to just capping it later. Why defend and save someone’s hours of work, when we get WXP and a reward chest for PvDing this here tower.

This was less problematic for a while because we still had our old school commanders running the pug groups, and with them having “grown up” on the importance of defending, they’d respond and drag the reluctant EotM boys with them. Now that many of them have burned out and left the game/server due to uneven coverage, our pugmanders are EotMers who care not one iota about responding to threats. After all, why would they? They didn’t spend gold and hours of their evening upgrading them.

I readily admit that I am in the minority in terms of what style of play I enjoy, and thus my whining won’t mean much, and the defence/reward issue has been beaten to death already, with nothing done about it so only the thickest of heads would hold out any hope. It’s just that I love the maps and the design and the concept of siege and defending and all that good stuff… I’m playing AA at the moment and it just pales in comparison, but with the longtime home borderland defence guild recently disbanding, it just feels like the WvW I want to come back to isn’t ever going to be there to come back to.

I don’t need new maps, I just need some sense put into the mechanics. It takes hours to build defences which a zerg can melt down in a couple of minutes, making defending even more rewardless.

Furthermore, it’d be nice if the guards were actually good for something. The sentries can’t even manage to kill an unescorted enemy dolyak. What exactly is the point of upgrading camps? The swords take too long to come up on a contested camp, meaning if I am looking at the map and see a camp go contested, waypoint to citadel and run, say, to the mill, one solo guy will cap it before I reach it if it’s not upgraded, and if it IS fully upgraded, the ring will already be up. That is, if I saw it was contested right as the swords went up. If I notice the swords already “in progress” then it’s no use even heading there. Maybe, just maybe, a dozen guards shouldn’t get face rolled by a solo elementalist in under a minute.

Get rid of AoE movement speed buffs. This running around at permanent light speed with 30 guys on one pixel is idiotic. Discourage brainless (emphasis on brainless, I’m not talking about organised, TS-running guild groups) zerging by leaving speed boosts up to personal responsibility.

Fix the kittening coverage by assigning someone to prepare the match-ups by hand. Yes, people will complain about match lineups but they do so already. It’s fairly useless to keep playing during the week when the matchup is decided during the first weekend. If we’re winning on Sunday morning, we’ll win. It is known. There is no suspense, no mystery. It’s either complete faceroll or a blood bath. Doing the match lineups automatically also means the same servers get the same opponents for weeks in a row. If you actually had someone look at these matches, stay on top of how they’re going, and do them by hand, you could at least try to keep them entertaining.

I haven’t played PU since I switched to a torment shatter build upon the introduction of MtD. Appropriately geared, the torment stacks are so strong I was absolutely positive they’d nerf the kitten out of torment. Instead, they put it on my scepter auto. I’m not sure they’ve thought this through.

thiagoperne.7340:

All these people that comes to post bad things about WvW still plays and love the game, because they can’t find anything better out there, otherwise they wouldn’t even be here. But they keep trying to scare Anet with all “oh you don’t care about wvw” “everyone is leaving” bla bla, but never worked. Sorry gw2 is a drug, once in never out.

Ummm not so much. I’ve been in each Archeage beta and am going to play it once it launches in a couple of weeks. I’ve bought the highest tier founder pack and will happily pay for a subscription. It’s all cash I’d have happily kept on throwing at ArenaNet, but unfortunately they don’t seem interested. While waiting for the final AA beta, and upon hearing the new season is starting, I came here to see what if anything has changed. The most stacked servers will win, condition builds continue to dominate, and nothing whatsoever has been done about hackers. Very exciting.

I could also do without the “unless I see at least 15 people on my tag in 2 minutes, I’m gonna tag off” line that seems to have become rather common. Work with what you have and more will come; complain about requiring so and so many on your tag before you can be bothered to move makes me wait for a less egotistical princess to tag up.

Neat. From what year is the interview?

Nice that he finds the time to talk to the media at least, since talking to his customers is prohibited by the tight schedule.

Warrior, maybe thief.

Having swiftness only apply to oneself and not have it be AoE would be a nice start.

Assassin X.8573:

See Napoleon’s military campaign
See Caesar’s miliatary campaign
See WW1 & 2
See Battle of Troy
See Battle of Themopoly
See any medieval war anything.
See any war ever in existence.

In all of these examples above, you can see 1 side having a large structured force (ie – zerg) typically tactically attacking a smaller force.

Would you like to go back in time an ask these folks to stop zergimg and using siege against one another?

And here I was hoping for the ever-popular car analogy…

Enjoy.

MightyMicah.7451:

Stark.1350:

Sigh. Who cares about the item being account bound.

The guy idiot who bought several on one character planning to distribute them between his alts

Oh, of course…

Just wondering, can Anet use videos provided to them as YouTube links, or do they need to be uploaded somewhere else and then the link sent to them?

Because to my understanding, ripping YouTube videos for use in a commercial project would violate YouTube’s terms of service. So I’m not sure what you expect ArenaNet to be able to do with all these YouTube links.

Use Google Translate if you want your own Chinese subtitles for your videos. I can only assume this compilation will be a PR vehicle for our new Asian comrades, because it certainly isn’t going to make our socks roll up and down.

I don’t know if this is of any use to you, but I used to run in a 5-man havoc group, and one of the things I tried was a more support-oriented build, with boon sharing and ally heals. Mesmer has a great deal of access to boons, and some very interesting traits in that respect, made even more interesting by runes and food picked to extend boon duration. Unfortunately, you end up giving up a lot of DPS for it, and you need to be close to your allies for them to get the boons you share. It was interesting and opened up new ways of thinking about the profession, but it was also quite ineffective in doing anything else.

Are we allowed to post videos that we created and posted online back in the day when WvW was fun and actively updated, or does it have to be all-new material?

mompen.7952:

msalakka.4653:

CrimsonNeonite.1048:

You could wait until Friday to see who you get on Reset as you have a chance of fighting Gandara.

Not to derail, but this is an interesting comment to me, being as I am on Gandara. Does my server have a particular roamers-a-plenty image or something?

I don’t know why, and don’t quote me on this, but my server (angry zerglings) seems to always talk down to “gandarians”. I think you should take it as a compliment, maybe you guys are hard to fight, I don’t know ;-)
My experience as of fighting gandarians is that I often get runned over by a group of 10 ppl, and they seem pretty happy about taking me down, /dancing and /laughing. A little off topic, and a more generic note, (not pointed against gandara) I’m happy for people finally managing to take down thieves, and that they are so happy that they dance and laugh about it. Good on them!

I doubt it’s that we’re hard to fight. There’s a stigma that FSP has about activities which I cannot mention or I’ll get an infraction. Usually when Gandarans mention FSP they also mention that other stuff and the unfair association probably doesn’t go unnoticed, which gains us some hostility in return.

I’m surprised and a bit disappointed that some of our guys did that to you. It’s been my experience that emote spam etc is discouraged here. I even got chastised by my mates once for doing some frustration-induced corpse-jumping. It’s thought of as low class, so it doesn’t happen that much, or at least didn’t use to. Maybe it happened on EB? I only play on the borderlands, and 10 guys sounds more like EB. Things are a bit different there…

I hope you find a server that suits your playstyle.

EotM has nothing to do with WvW. It’s a Queensdale train and fast level up tool wrapped into one. If they nerfed the champs to give one box per day, EotM would be a desolate wasteland.

A nice start would be removing WXP gain from EotM. Used to be that fighting someone with a high rank meant that you were facing an experienced opponent. Now, when I watch from a distance as a Silver rank Guardian stands in front of one of my phantasms, spamming his staff auto to kill it, I don’t need to ponder where all those rank points were accumulated.

In my PvE guild, EotM is frequently recommended to new players as a way to level up a character fast. That, and loot farming, is all it is used for. I guess it’s useful for Arenanet because it falsely bolsters the numbers; you have loads of PvErs pretending to play WvW, so you can look at server stats and say the WvW community isn’t writhing crippled in its death throes.

I’m not sure what, if anything, you can do to salvage that particular map, beyond the obvious reward nerfs that ANet is never going to make.

CrimsonNeonite.1048:

As far as where FSP is ranked the only other Servers in the ‘Gold League’ with a good amount of roamers is Kodash and maybe Augury Rock, but not sure about the latter.
SFR does have Roamers although they like to ‘Zerg’ Roam. :P

In Desolation’s current match up there’s hardly any roamers, so it’s been a boring week for any Roamers on here.

An SFR roamer = 2 thieves, condi engi & a hammer warrior.

I actually like the Augury guys. They have roamers, feisty ones.

Sean.8274:

On this subject however, they do need to allow golems to be taken by the person who dropped it like any other siege.

I would go even further and suggest that the only person who can operate a siege golem is the person who put the print down. Yes, I realize that many commanders would like to be the only person to put prints down and yet not have to be operating the golem, but I am tired of my 2g omega being walked off a cliff 15 minutes after I build it. If you enjoy suiciding golems, build one yourself.

CrimsonNeonite.1048:

You could wait until Friday to see who you get on Reset as you have a chance of fighting Gandara.

Not to derail, but this is an interesting comment to me, being as I am on Gandara. Does my server have a particular roamers-a-plenty image or something?

Pinkamena Diane Pie.8054:

Read the first line, didnt read the rest.

Yes we’ve complained about how WvW is all about coverage, not skill or tactics.
Dont expect a red reply unless you start necroing old posts.

I don’t need a red reply; I wanted ideas from people who actually play this game mode.

Thank you for your input, I guess.

Pinkamena Diane Pie.8054:

They do not add value, but they do seem to annoy Anet for some odd reason. And instead of talking to us, they made a nice sticky thread. And when they do talk to us, they say they cant talk to us :P

The reason isn’t really all that odd. The forum is, basically, a PR device. Whenever I look into a new MMO, I read about it first, and what better place to do so but its official forums. Some may be interested in WvW specifically, and a sub-forum front page full of threads of unmaterialised content promised ages ago would leave a prospective buyer with the fair assessment that the game mode is no longer under active development. Yes, there are other threads complaining about things, but these are specific developer posts of things to come, and then a year of silence followed. It’s worse…much worse. I’m surprised they haven’t simply deleted those threads. Out of sight, out of mind.

It’s similar to why you’re supposed to post all lag reports in one thread “for data accumulation purposes”. It cleans up the tech support forum. Also why there’s an active community liaison in the account issues and, more importantly, the gem store sub-forums. We don’t need any of that, because there’s nothing to update us on.

I am writing this not to complain about coverage or lack of rewards for defending objectives, but to describe the meta byproduct of being unable to enjoy WvW anymore, and to see if anyone who’s been in the same situation might have advice as to how to rediscover the enjoyment.

What attracted me to WvW was not the player vs. player aspect so much as strategic defense. I like roaming and scouting, building siege, and defending the home borderland. Prior to Season 2, my server was a good place for that. There was a strong emphasis on the sanctity of our border, and always after reset it was a high priority to upgrade it and then maintain it. We even had a guild specifically created to do nothing but siege and defend, which, while may not sound exciting to all, was really cool. Whenever our garrison was attacked, we got reinforcements from EB to stop the onslaught.

Then we got hit with free transfers on the eve of Season 2, and our server profile was unavoidably changed. Our new infantry, and more importantly infantry commanders, were not bred in the same culture of strong home defense, and we sailed victoriously, effortlessly – and quite boringly – through the Season all thanks to a 24/7, nigh unconquerable EB karmatrain.

Once the tournament ended, we had risen to gold league, and began to reap our just rewards. The achievement hunters returned to Frostgorge Sound, many of our longtime commanders were burned out, and those still willing to command on home border found themselves without the numbers to face the gold league zergs. Subsequently, we lost many fine and experienced commanders to other servers.

Now, as it stands, we are unable to adequately defend our home border, and at this point it is waste of gold and time to attempt to do so. We are simply outnumbered, all the time, and anything upgraded is reset with a blob within a few hours. It is also becoming rare to get help from our EB groups because the EB commanders we have now either don’t have the men to spare or they don’t see the value in defending the home border. We lost a fully sieged, fortified garrison recently to ~15 enemies because only three were defending and EB was busy capping SM.

This is to say, we are an easy mark, and our enemies know it, so our home border is now the WvW version of Frostgorge Sound. They come in with 30 guys and 6 omegas, flip everything, and leave. There are no “fights”, just Der Rasenmäher and emote spam. This leaves me with nothing to do. I don’t want to flip camps or ram a tower every hour with the full knowledge that the bessies will never get to sups to the keep that won’t be ours long anyway. More to the point, when the enemy builds a waypoint on our borderland – something the “old server” would never have stomached without constant fighting to strip it – we mostly just accept it, because we can’t do anything. Seeing the most terrier of commanders admit in map chat that we can’t dislodge the enemy waypoint really drove it in for me. They’ve broken my spirit.

I think we should all move to the dominating server, so all the opposing servers in a match would be vacant, and we could just karmatrain the borders on a one-time trip after reset and then go for coffee for the rest of the match. This appears to be what everyone wants now. No strategy, no challenge, no effort, no reward, just a train and a champ box.

My havoc guild is moving to a different, soon-to-be-released game, but I have a lot of friends in GW2, primarily WvW, whom I’d still like to play with. It’s just that I find PvE so mind-numbingly boring. So I come to you to ask if you have ideas of things I could do within the confines of the gold league and my own playstyle to recover my passion and enthusiasm for the game. Is a server transfer the only option? Would it even make any difference? Maybe there’s some niche role I could play in EB that would make me feel useful again?

Thank you for any constructive thoughts you may have.