Guild Wars 2

Thankyou sir

Seems like its turned WvW into a bigger karma train. Tonight my guild went into EoTM and full capped the map which didn’t have enough opponents to defend. Then we went back to WvW and full capped multiple maps because there weren’t enough opponents to defend them. Its either a direct result of EoTM, or a huge amount of players have recently quit the game.

Does this work together properly? Both the 6th rune bonus and pure of voice are meant to remove a condition. So when a guardian uses a shout it removes two conditions types from a group?

In BGs defence I do feel that they were the underdogs going into Season 1. Especially considering they had not just been beaten, but wrecked leading up to the season by both JQ and SOR. Now, however, things have changed. The server itself is just extremely stacked. I am glad I am no longer there. In the long run it will be a burden on the server itself.

This week I have built around 80 paper trebs in obscure positions and been trebbing their keeps/towers. Most of those times BG has been able to pull an entire zerg off what they are doing, often from another side of the map, to deal with my single effort. They never react by sending one person. In the few times where it hasn’t been a full zerg its 5+ players. The server is so stacked now and the attitude and conduct of many of the players is not what it used to be. There is a large following of players who are just there for the easy win.

I see a really bad scenario coming for T1 in NA in the near future. SORs collapse means a two horse race and because BG is so stacked JQ will slowly lose its morale. Alot of BG players and guilds are already complaining about a lack of fights. And quite frankly its because its getting old that other players have to constantly fight them in outnumbered scenarios. The wise thing to do would be for BG to self destack. But I honestly think for both positive (friends on the server) and negative (easy wins/fights) reasons it won’t happen and BGs guilds will have no choice but to destack unless they want to login and have nothing to do in WvW. But hey, at least we got EoTM now!

Thuron.5648:

Fuzzion.2504:

Will this get me banned if i use it?

No. There are a lot of websites and overlays that provide the exact same information. This program is just a way of getting the same information neatly integrated into your game.

Is there any way we can get an official response on that. To me it just looks way too much like an ESP hack. But if I definitely won’t be banned for using it then I definitely want to use it because it will quite frankly be very useful.

If Anet where to say, remove the backstab attack and replace it with a normal (wildstrike) attack, would players still hate permastealth? Or is there more to it than that?

It doesn’t really bother me either way. As both a roamer and someone who has run a thief at guild level with permastealth and various other builds Ive personally steered away from permastealth outside of pure zerg/guild scouting. Ive found it to be highly risky against certain builds and opted for a more consistent build that seems to perform better overall. I still repec to permastealth if I am going to be doing mobile scouting but outside of that I find it weaker compared to the other two builds I run for combat.

I’m aware of its previous damage nerf. With my guild build Earthshaker is doing a 2 second large AoE daze, ~4.5k damage in the same AoE and serving as a blast finisher. All of this can be spammed every 10 seconds from one skill. Its really exciting to scream “HAMMERSTUN” in TS every 10 seconds or so, but really. How many skills out there can be used with such a short cooldown that provide so much Crowd Control and deal so much damage whilst also having the utility of a blast finisher? For me, it feels like one of the skills that is currently overperforming.

BG has the most EU coverage. They have several guilds that raid during this timezone. They also complain that there is nobody to fight. And that it will be difficult to get onto BG at present because they are always full. So a reasonable alternative would be JQ. They have some guilds that raid in EU. They regularly outscore their opponents in the timezone despite having less guilds in the EU timeslots than BG. Prior to leagues SOR had the biggest EU coverage, however, since their semi collapse they experienced alot of EU players leave. SOR still has the strongest NA (albeit inconsistent at times) and it is East coast based so its more common to see NA players logged on during EU timezone so SOR is still an option but moving to SOR with their implosion is still a bit of a worrying move because nobody knows how much more they will lose.

Ive recently moved back to solo roaming. I moved to JQ a while back as an Oceanic and found we are usually outmanned on 2-3 maps until SEA kicks in. So I go solo roam as it feels the most efficient. Most of my small scale encounters are 5 man gank squads. So I roam exclusively on my thief so I can just avoid them. Its rare to see people react to my ninja tactics solo. If I build a ninja treb or cata I regularly get a reaction of 5+ players. A few times this week Ive had a map zerg come chase me (up to 50 one night). I figure the more people I pull away from attacking to deal with me the better so I measure my effectiveness that way. I tend to find ninja trebs best as they have to move a reasonable distance away from any objective to deal with me, wasting more of their time. It seems these days few people want an even fight. Most people seem to think that baiting me into a 1v1 or 1v2 only to have their friends join in afterwards is outplaying me so I don’t bother fighting unless I think I can take them down quickly.

I prefer T1 NA to any other tier or EU. In T1 NA there is always someone to fight. Its not always a blob vs blob when people are taking a break. Ive played in lower tiers in NA and in high tiers in EU and its the same thing. Its often casual play where you can PvDoor if thats what you really want to do because there are not enough opponents on at all times.

Its a big concern though to see SOR going the way it is. It really does feel like the server can barely stay in T1 now. Thats not just bad for SOR but for everyone in NA.

Hi guys. It (the status) changed after restarting client. Not sure why it didn’t update straight away. Thought I would mention in case anyone else has the same problem.

In the Dulfy guide for Scarletts secret lair it say you first have to do the "Twisted Marionette event in Lornar’s Pass for the first time (win or fail both works), your Living World story in your top right corner will update and you will be asked to head to Lion’s Arch to enter a story instance. After completing the story instance, you will be tasked with finding Scarlet’s Secret Lair, which is also an achievement called The Secret Lair. "

I have failed the event in Lornars Pass 3 times now. Same character. My Living world box has not updated and I cannot proceed. Is Dulfy wrong or is there a bug that won’t allow me to continue through to the story?

Just to point out, there appears to be some bug where you can go through a wall. I accidently did this the other night with my guild. Have no idea how I did it. I just stayed on the inside and DPS the gate down as by time I would have run up the stairs and jump over the wall the gate would have been down as well. At first I thought it was lag that had temporarily said I was on the inside then corrected itself, but no, I stayed on the inside.

I seen a speed hacker tonight on a well known guild on JQ. I really don’t know why speed hackers think they are getting away with it. It is so obvious to allies and enemies but major guilds regularly have these players getting around. It seems like major guilds overlook them.

Bombsaway.7198:

Perhaps Morrolan, but the case studies so far and corresponding client data seems to suggest that gamers find the best available option versus leaving the genre. So long as GW2 is “best available” holding back doesn’t result in lost interest.

It is murky science to be sure, but that is the working theory many companies are under right now.

Xenesis, true if you are looking at a consumer that easily tries a month or two of a subscription service. The trouble is the model of consumer/gamer expectation is moving away from subscription models so it is easier to keep people from that initial sign up with “all at once” content patches when you are free 2 play and the other is not. Again, the assumption is that the bar of expectation on a subscription model has greatly increased forcing buzz and initial perception to have to be that much higher to covert a customer.

Again, murky science at best, but that is the current thinking of many companies.

Still. There are guilds that have now taken a break or will be taking a break before ESO starts. An example of this is TKG who raided every night and they have now stopped raiding as of 21/1/2014 and will be taking a break before ESOs release. Perhaps GW2 is the “best available”. But to players and guilds who have been playing the game since launch the definition of “best available” would be heavily weighted towards a fresh game over a stale old one where the game mode you play gets very little attention.

Aeonblade.8709:

Lightsbane.9012:

Asmodeus.5782:

Maining an engineer, so legendaries are not even an issue for me. :P And after 2000 hours you should have more than enough gold to buy a prec.

95% of my game hours have been spent in wvw. that’s an issue that’s not even brought up. how in kitten kitten is a wvw player supposed to even come close to a legendary? luck? gems?

Gems, WvW has been a lackluster reward area since day 1. Do loves me some WvW though anyway.

It depends where you play. Some servers, WvW is the most rewarding place to “farm”.

It has a 5 second ICD in sPVP. But does it have one in PvE/WvW? Also does this apply to regeneration granted by Soothing disruption?

Look like the best we can hope for is maybe April or May. The WvW development for this patch was pretty intense though. Guard leach is now called Applied Strength. So much content…

godofcows.2451:

Jolene.7316:

LetoII.3782:

There’s actually a few places in the middle of the Atlantic. Heard of EVE online?

Their servers are in London

ausin, texas. even for eu servers.

The NA servers are in Texas. The EU ones are not. I have been dealing with this alot lately as I reside on an EU server with a 600ms ping to the WvW server. On NA servers I sit around 190-200ms ping. If I reroute my connection through Dallas, my connection gets worse. If I reroute my connection through Germany, it improves slightly. I live in Australia so it makes no sense that this would happen unless the EU servers are in EU somewhere.

I have been having major lag issues since around early December. The WvW game mode is literally unplayable for me at present when any major fight breaks out. When there is no fighting it is fine. Prior to lag getting bad in December, I had no problems with lags for the 3 or so months before that.

Interesting topic. Every other discussion Ive seen or had in the past 9 months has gone in the opposite direction of removing waypoints altogether due to its nature in promoting zerg gameplay over organized smaller scale fights. I also believe it was either stated or inferred that Anet was removing waypoints in the future or at least that they were looking at how to rework them to reduce their effectiveness.

Im coming up to 100k shortly. It blows my mind that there are so many people who have already hit 250k. Well done to you.

You can hit a player for over 20k with killshot and a glass build. In small scale this really should not be an issue. Where it would be OP would be as an elementalist killer in larger group/guild/zerg play where you would be able to drop them in situations where they often cannot see you. But I never see this happening. So yeah, in the right situation it could be “OP”. I think there should not be a skill in this game that can kill (down) a player in one hit. But there are plenty of examples that can. Another example would be the thiefs steal on a warrior, where I have been able to achieve 32k damage from the one skill with a full GC build.

I guess there are alot of examples like this that are justifying the upcoming nerf to critical damage. However, I still disagree with the nerf and feel that the skills themselves should be nerfed because people have recently outlayed alot of investment in ascended gear, armor in particular.

Its mentioned/inferred constantly. I don’t see it. For me WvW is >99% PvP. The other 1% is me farming 25 stacks of bloodlust or perception when I bother to do so before I head out into a PvP area. But every decision Anet makes in regards to PvE has a direct effect on WvW, which I see as a completely different entity. How is it that WvW does not have independence over PvE like sPvP does. I can stomach the concept of having to do PvE to acquire what I want in a PvP area. I can understand the incentive to be involved in various parts of the game. But it feels surreal to see balance changes coming out based around PvE. The devs frequently refer to WvW as PvE and it confuses me.

Bladorthin.6429:

I have been having serious ability delay over the past week. It is more than just lag, I’ll click and ability, which won’t fire for a full 30+ seconds. I am curious as to how many people are being affected by it…

I am being effected by it as well. Some of my guild members have said they are having problems also.

Some might find this funny for me to say, but from a WvW perspective I would have said that PVT/soldier’s gear is what needed the biggest nerf. If you were to sum up all the armor worn regularly on NA I believe PVT would make up the biggest portion. In EU the same except they use a little more zerker/damage.

The thing is Anet still see WvW as part of their PvE content. We will probably not see a nerf to PVT armor because of this. I honestly think berserker needed to be balanced, but PVT needed it moreso. But outside of WvW there is no need to wear anything else other than berserker’s unless your messing around with a condi build or some other “fun build”.

I don’t know about anyone else, but my initial interpretation was that they would be changing crit damage due to what I expect to come from the sigil/rune rework. That is, that you can currently gain 25 stacks of precision (250 total) and then weapon swap and gain the buffs from the second weapon sigil whilst still retaining the 25 stacks. My guess was a buff to level this out specifically for crit chance/damage. But perhaps I am wrong.

This sounds great in theory and I do hate that people blob so much. But there are some problems that will be caused by this. Firstly, in my situation, I run with a guild that raid 5-6 times a week and plays 7 days a week and our raids last for 6 hours each day. We run tagless and make every attempt to roll exclusively as a guild. But we cannot shake the pugs. No matter what, our 30 man raid turns into a 40+ man raid because the pugs will not leave us alone. To add to this, they also die very easily and are bad at the game. So we end up with them causing more problems for us than they are helping us. We have tried everything to shake them including asking nicely, asking not so nicely, troll linking waypoints etc etc. Not going to stop following us. So we already have this handicap where pugs rallybot for us and now we have this debuff as well? The problem is there are many people who are not willing to learn. In the end this kind of addition will do nothing. The pugs will follow us still and we will have even more problems and the environment will just become more hostile.

EDIT: Just to point out here, I do not think that the full map blob or zerg is the best way to victory. The key to victory in the game format is playing effectively with smaller numbers. But this requires skill and organization, both of which are lacking on all servers.

Trying to work out if others are experiencing this as well. I moved to EU right after seasons and was pleasantly surprised that there was no increase in lag. But things have just gotten worse and worse to the point were WvW is now unplayable for me. But I don’t know if its the fact Im no in EU, if its my ISP or its just the game developers have made some changes for the worse. Are others experiencing the same thing at present?

If the commander is telling only heavies to attack the gate, it might be because he has a rough estimate of how many players he has with him who have heavy armor and asking only those to attack so your group does not proc orange swords. Regardless of the other semantics being argued in this thread, just thought I would mention that.

Their profit model doesn’t really encompass these kinds of things, although it probably could. Their are alot of examples like this, but they seem content with adding a few things here and there as they go. If you buy gems regularly, it doesn’t take long to run out of things that are actually appealing.

Im an Australian/Oceanic. I moved to EU’s SFR right after leagues finished last year from NA. As far as I can tell, there are no Oceanic guilds on EU servers. The East Coast prime time (Brisbane, Sydney, Melbourne) is a real dead zone. On SFR it seems like on an average day there might be one float team with 30-40 covering 4 maps. There are no where near as many fights in Oceanic prime in EU as there are in NA. Often it ends up being a capping war to keep the highest PPT (which stems from other problems with the way EU play the game). And the bulk of these players are EU players, not Oceanic based players. The latency on EU servers is significantly worse than NA servers, which as you can imagine can be pretty bad when the game mode itself is already had its fair share of lag issues.

Honestly, I would not recommend moving to EU at all. I went to EU for the WvW experience. To see what they do differently from NA. For the learning experience. I will probably move back to NA. Things are much better there.

This goes the same if you are only partly interested in WvW and you have a focus on PvE. Just have to look at CoF. If you want to do the dungeon on EU during Oceanic prime your probably going to have to do the pre event yourself and host a party because all EU servers are usually contested during OCX prime.

If your going anyways, Id suggest to go SFR though.

By far the fastest way to farm gold is do overtime at work. Im not even kidding. Do an hours overtime. For the average Joe this might be $50 in your pocket. Buy 4000 gems. Convert 4000 gems at a rate of around 6 gold per 100 gems and you just earned 240 gold in 1 hour. The next best method I know of is frostgorge champ farming train where you might earn 20 gold per hour. Its that math that allows me to play the game the way I want and not feel like I need to grind of farm the game.

We should leave this discussion for when it gets closer to being a reality in 2015.

Mogar.9216:

It continues to amaze me how many SEA players still have their head in the sand and refuse to see the unfairness of it all. As about whining, this is not a whine , I solo roam 99% of the time. I don’t really give a crap about wining a match up. I’m just pointing out facts that’s pretty plain to see. BTW I play on SBI , when I logged off last nght at 11 we were ticking at last place. This morning as I write this post SBI is ticking 515.

If you think us “SEA” players have our head in the sand, explain to me the solution whilst keeping in mind my previous comment. As I have stated, many servers have and have proven to have the capability and capacity to have full map queues during both Oceanic and SEA timezones. So a direct reduction in PPT gain would be unacceptable as it would be a direct “nerf” to the contributions made by SEA and Oceanic players.

The second and other push from those requesting a “nerf” to the timezones, for lack of interest in explaining more clearly, is based around the idea of nerfing it not by specific timezone, but by difficulty in taking a keep in terms of opposition and/or time taken to flip an objective. Whilst this sounds great, it is completely exploitable and will be completely exploited going by previous experiences I have had with players over other additions such as points for stomps from orb buff.

So I invite you or anyone else to explain to me how my head is in the sand. Because all I hear from those raising the issue is “the world revolves around me so my contributions should be worth more”. I invite you or anyone to explain a more elaborate, non-exploitable and fair solution for all to the system we currently have that will cater to everyone no matter the matchup or various situations that occur right across WvW in both EU and NA because I cannot see one.

If your cashed up heavily on gold, one option is to buy giant wintersday gifts. The return of dragonite isn’t excellent, but you will get some amounts faster and get some of your gold back from what you purchase. Throw in some temple farming and it will speed up the acquisition alot. This is what I have been doing.

The giant wintersday gifts have a chance to drop dragonite Ore of either 1 or 50. Its the 50s you really want but the 1s still add up. I only have a small sample size of around 4000 gifts, but it appears I am getting around 120 dragonite per 1000 gifts. Current buy price is around 1s 68c for a gift so 16.8g for 120 dragonite but you get a reasonable amount back, particularly if you get alot of the back recipes. And you also get alot of essence of luck and materials etc.

As I said, its only if you really want to speed up the process and you have alot of gold. You will make a loss and RNG plays a factor on just how much you lose and I haven’t got a reasonable sample size to give accurate figures on how much you will lose. But for me it felt worth it.

If you intend on making the legendary that the precursor goes with, hold onto it most definitely. It will cost you less in the long run. You will just have to suck it up and figure out the best way for you to acquire whatever else you need.

I don’t think its convenient. I do not visit my home instance, ever. If it appeared for me in LA which I visit at least half a dozen times a day then yes, I would definitely purchase it. But my home instance? Nope.

Mogar.9216:

comes down to fairness. If a keep took 50 people 2 hrs to take it should worth more than the same keep taken by 3 person. Yes I have taken keeps with 1 golem and 3 players a few times in the morning. I really don’t think my 10 mins of pvd with 2 friends is the same kitten people at 8pm est working 2 hrs to take the same keep.

You SEA player keep whining about how your effort should count as much as prime time players. The fact is you fail to see that right now your effort is worth WAY MORE than NA players. It is the NA prime time players who are getting shafted because their hard work counts for little in wining a match up.

Its not so much that we are overlooking the efforts. Thing is there are many servers that have or can have full queues during SEA. So a direct “nerf” to PPT during the timezone would result in our “efforts” being worth less. The other point that was made about how it should be rewarded according to effort is obviously completely exploitable. Can’t defend from an organized guild? No problem, just log off and let them take everything for very little PPT. You might think that sounds lame and I agree but going by the large spike in combat logging I experienced when points for stomps from bloodlust came in I have no doubt it would be exploited heavily.

This isn’t just a PvE farm. He is generating more PPT for his server than most zergling would and is denying a huge chunk of supply from an opposing server. However, he is doing it wrong. He should not actually flip the camps. It would be more beneficial overall to his server to not flip the camps and just kill yaks and sentries.

I have played in NA previously and now reside in EU. Have played there since leagues finished.

The question is fairly broad. I see two main components to being the top guild in WvW:

1. Open field fights.
Without a doubt in my mind this would go to (Agg) Agression. Their composition is great. Even the direct counters to it will struggle immensely if things do not go their way because Agg do it well. I honestly would love nothing more for this game than for Agg to clash with some of the top EU guilds. On their down side, they don’t play the PPT game and often their actions are detrimental to overall PPT.

2. The PPT game
Some will make snide thoughts about this one. But its a big part of the game and one that shows alot of skill and knowledge in the game. Right now, there are quite a few guilds I could name that are right up there in playing the PPT game. But the one I would name as being top is (GoF) Get of Fenris from Blackgate. Its not hard to see the difference between EU and NA right now. NA plays the PPT game on a whole other level to EU players. And its guilds like GoF that I see paving the way, training the militia and setting high standards. Finality, one of their lead commanders, has a good knowledge of the game and implements it with a certain charisma that is about getting the job done and never lets his ego get in the way of good commanding. On their downside, they are reasonable at open field but they are not a standout.

But overall, I don’t know who I would say the top guild is. There isn’t one out there that screams to be the dominant force in both PPT gameplay and open field fighting. Some are stronger than others at certain things but none out there are clear top dogs at the whole game that is WvW.

I had my first precursor drop around 3100 hours played. It was the quip and I got it in WvW from a player kill. I doubt I will get another, however, I will probably play another 3100 hours so there is a chance I guess

The only way I could ever stomach any movement in “primetime” capping would be if Anet provided Oceanic/Sea servers to play on. People regularly bring up these ideas on how it should be done, but thus far they are all heavily exploitable.

I noticed a sharp decrease in activity on the NA server I was on. I transferred to an EU server which apparently had massive queues during leagues and it now struggles to get one map queued fully.

All these BG players and guilds talking about how bad it is on BG, but they never leave.

What I can earn in gold per hour from my employer is considerably more than I can grind from GW2. I think thats what they are aiming for. I had grinded out some (2) legendarys previously. But it got to the point where I would lose alot of sleep staying up all night grinding away and I just decided that this wasn’t the way to go. I don’t enjoy grinding. So I just decided recently that I will just buy any precursor and some of the materials I need to make legendary. It might sound strange, but now I can play the game the way I want a little more than I did before. My only concern now is that I still have to farm achievements for laurels. If there was a way to buy laurels I would finally be able to play the game the way I want with no need to do anything else.

Against organized groups/guilds any emphasis on increasing condition duration is a waste of stats. There are enough cleanses in the game to remove any increased duration off a guild indefinitely. I presume the complaints would be related to small scale solo fights. I do have alot of trouble with some bunker condi specs on my thief as I just don’t have enough cleanse and sword usage reduce my DPS output considerably when I deplete my entire initiative trying to cleanse several conditions that are being applied to me right the way through the fight.

I wouldn’t be surprised if there was something like this that happened though. I wasn’t going down that avenue though. My guess was they would increase the amount of levels required to unlock the current traits. As it stands I have around 1200 levels, but its spread across 9 chars. So I don’t have the majority unlocked on most. But if I get 1200 levels on each char I will have just about everything unlocked on all chars. I would be fine with that personally. But those who have enjoyed the luxury of only playing one class would lose out.

Proposals 1, 2 and 4 are all extremely exploitable.

Last I read, they said they wanted to thoroughly test it in beta before releasing it. From what I have heard they are not even testing it in beta at present, so I honestly would not be surprised if we were waiting another 6+ months going on Anets track record.

There are alot of things in this game that can be contributed by various means from various classes. As an example, two staff guardians can contribute 24 stacks of might with a staff and a warrior can contibute the might to get to max 25 stacks. Alternatively eles could lay down firefields and another class such as a thief can blast it with their short bow. But what exists that cannot be contributed to a party by other means? I asked this as I was thinking about the warriors banner of discipline and banner of strength. Yes you could argue that these two abilities might be able to be compensated for by other means but I don’t see it the same way as say the example above of 25 might stacks from other sources. But what other buffs like this in the game are there that can only be contributed by one means and cannot be directly compensated for?

Yes this question is from the so-called “elitist” viewpoint of maximising DPS for speed runs