Guild Wars 2

Mysteries.3659:

b) there’s absolutely no flexibility in water builds

Only because people don’t think about how their builds will perform underwater before putting their approval stamp on it. Sure there’s fewer weapons to work with underwater, but you still have to be mindful of your traits, whether you’re losing your 6th rune because you have nothing on your breather, or a multitude of other things.

Negligence in working on a build doesn’t mean the flexibility wasn’t there to begin with. Everyone thinks about shatter mesmer builds on land, but few can tell you how it works far better underwater than on land.

Bullshizle.2675:

Is the influence needed a bug aswell ?
Small guilds can never reach that amount unless it’s based on percentage of the guild members.

My guild consists of three members and should not have any trouble earning the influence to do so. I don’t understand the unwarranted amounts of whining about the amount of influence required or that it’s unfair to smaller guilds; it’s not.

Grouping up while doing activities actually has a cap on the maximum number of people who can contribute towards that influence gain.

As a 3-man guild i fully support the way anet is handling this. we have almost every single upgrade already including AoW5. The only real upgrades we’re missing are the last few treasure trove ones that none of us need between the restriction on bound items in there and almost all of us having 8 bank panes.

Despite being extremely few in number we’re still earning upwards of 800-1300 influence/night (roughly 4 hours).

If everyone had remembered to party up before doing anything, none of the “big guilds” voicing concerns would even be doing so at all.

Ungood.3054:

For all I know, it could be the same 40 – 60 people taking a lot of no-doze lol

Not entirely sure whether or not to be proud of it or not, but I clocked 32 hours of WvW this past weekend starting Friday night. Didn’t mean to be on that long Friday night, but we were hopelessly outmanned during an enormous Asia/Australia primetime “night cap” push by both ET and FC with plenty of opposing guild tags that I frequently see during US primetime as well.

Somehow Stonemist held but our keep didnt (wtf?) but I stayed on that night long enough to see the beginnings of US East trickling in.

Many Monster Rehabs were chugged despite still being sick :X

roostapro.9827:

Supply income for the golems came from Spiritholme & Gods lore, this is why Fergs were getting heavy resistance on our borderlands and supply camps flipped within seconds if they were ever capped.

That can’t have been easy — running supply cross-map is hilariously manpower-intensive especially for thousands of supply for golems.

Ungood.3054:

If there was a defense there, then it might have mattered if they reinforced the walls and such.

There was a defense, actually.

The 20-30 people who pushed into SM and wiped there were the same people defending that keep when we pushed it. It took awhile for us to stabilize with small hotspots going up around Durios and Quentin soon after, but there were quite a few defenders who unfortunately had the legs taken out from under them without supply to work with.

katz.8376:

even with a trusted commander to follow.

altho by the time i did finally have to call it a night, due to needing to wake up for work early the next day (yuck), it looks like i probably missed some fun. we were definitely preparing some serious shenanigans! such prettty neat rows. O.O

Now I actually know what happened — I got an urgent call for help at Stonemist (something about 9001 golems) and went and hopped onto a ballista there just in time for the inner door to come down. We somehow held that push off and took blue keep soon after.

Then I log in today and see that screenshot of golems under construction.

I’ve kittened at our own people for doing something to the same tune before so I figured I’d let people know that this is not okay.

Hope everyone finds this educational. If you swapped out all the names for SF players, that would be me in that screenshot labeled as ‘priorities straight’.

Always good to learn new ninja catapult spots :o

The new orange swords change is going to make ganking and ninja capping so much more fun. Unfortunately, that also means no more orange swords with most off-peak zerg sizes in T8 XD

FilthyRat.4652:

Unfortunately these players don’t receive as much in the way of rewards as groups that take keeps and towers, so you see less than you should.

You’d be surprised, actually.

When I’m running back-line stuff while the zerg hits a keep, I usually have enough to take 6 or 7 minor objectives till I get a call that we have enough momentum to link back up with the zerg.

In those pushes, I’m getting the same keep capture credit that the zerg gets on top of all the XP and badges that come as part of the territory for small group objectives.

Detharos.3157:

Let’s face it, unless we and Eredon’s Terrace hand over victory to you on a platter or our numbers continue to drop from demoralizing victories, (…)

I’m counting on it.

This time last week the scores were much closer. There have been a couple posts made in this very thread as well about you guys taking a break from WvW. The people who actually posted to that effect cannot be alone in taking a step back from WvW, and I’m banking on that in predicting that we win by an even bigger margin this week.

If this prediction galvanizes people on your server to return out of spite then so be it. More badges for me to earn in that case. If not then cutting into that margin between T8 and T7 is just as good.

Either way, I win.

Detharos.3157:

And just add to the pain, SF’s rating got hosed last week by this crazed system. No doubt it will drop to as low as 7- this week if the score’s remain similar.

Our rating actually went up by about 14 points last week.

If the current trend continues, we should be winning by an even larger margin than last week since it was still fairly even this time last week. This week not so much.

Solution A:

Give us WvWers a daily “talk to an NPC and recieve a free chest” mechanic that gives us 1 of each lodestone and an icy runestone as well as 20 of each dungeon token, 20 of each T6 mat, and a mystic clover so we can get all of those rewards without doing any of the requisite activities associated with earning those items.

Oh and put said NPC next to the laurel vendor. That and make it so you need to have a combined 1,000 objectives captured or defended for the vendor to talk to you.

Solution B:

Enable friendly fire in all dungeons and PvE areas.

Pick your poison. Then let’s talk neutral JP ground and methods for carebears to earn badges without first forking over a “Vial[s] of PvE Whiner Tears.”

Tanryth.1074:

I am so getting tired of the mindless Zergball that gets fielded by any server that plans on winning.

Fixed that for you.

Even if a server has plenty of good roaming groups, they still have a zergblob of people for bigger objectives.

^ What he said.

If you use a zero cast time blink spell like the Mesmer blink onto the thief’s new location mid-stomp, they still get a flagpole shoved in their puppy.

Osicat.4139:

Would be interesting to know who have most revive/h

I already know the answer to this question. People who help pick up the thieves who run into you.

I did in fact actually read every single post.

I still feel the need to reiterate though, that despite their status as a legendary prerequisite, badges should not be available at all (and with zero exceptions) via PvE means.

Not even tower/camp/keep lords should drop badges.

You hear quite a vocal minority posting about how hard it is to get badges, but the rest of us who don’t start those whine threads are either okay with how easy it is to get badges, or think it’s too easy to get them. That there exists even a single way to get badges without actually killing other people is an insult to WvW itself.

Threads like this make me wish I had the patience to camp the jump puzzle.

The way I see it, neither jump puzzles, champion NPC chests, nor map completion should earn you any badges. Murder should be the only way to get badges. If that bothers you, then realize for a moment that we live in a culture of entitlement where enough whining will get you something in the long run. Just keep posting a new thread every day that the jump puzzle isn’t something you can deterministically run with little to no variance in what you face (much like dungeons), and eventually Anet will cave.

In the meantime, I’m going to keep bottling up those “Vial[s] of PvE Whiner Tears” and trade them for golem prints.

While whining about night capping is at least mildly valid when it’s at the puppycrack of dawn or something like that, doing it when it isn’t even midnight Eastern time just comes off as unnecessary.

https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/pvp/wuvwuv/2-15-T8-ratings-sinkhole-FC-ET-SF/first

Already posted earlier :P

It dropped down to page 2 though

Wreckdum.8367:

The stealth and clones mechanic needs so much work.

As a mesmer, it’s real easy to prey on those who still have autotarget and melee assist enabled. That’s part of the clones “problem,” anyway.

Phoenixfudge.5290:

This consumable is ESSENTIAL for running past campers in the EB JP.

Mad King book OP.

20 is actually fairly believable — if I’d been playing a shatter build from the get-go and if I hadn’t taken my sweet time leveling to 80, I might have similar numbers.

One bonus I’d like to mention is that of all the whining people do about thieves, it’s their turn when it comes to whining about shatter mesmer builds.

The thought of being able to take most no-skill FotM D/D thieves from 100 to 0 in a quarter second should be enough to make anyone smile.

Check your kills count in achievements tab.
Divide by your all-characters age through /age.

I know /age includes time wasted spent on not killing people PvE, but gearing up for WvW by farming in PvE counts as prep time to me.

Mine: 10.7

It’s low. Real low. I didn’t know what I was doing build-wise from 1-80 and until the last two months didn’t really do a very good job getting kills either. Sure I brought above-average utility but it could have been better.

Not a whine thread, btw. Just genuinely interested in finding out how effective of killers other classes/play styles are.

EDIT: I guess we could also include this: are you happy with your badge earn rate? Maybe we can find a correlation between what counts as a tagged kill and whether someone is satisfied with how many badges they earn.

Because this is a capture and hold game mode.

It’s not a solo capture, and rejoin the zerg game mode.

Stick around at a camp while you’re doing something else like watching TV on another monitor. Hell you can even do productive things like checking stocks, or doing your taxes while defending a point as long as you keep an eye on any incoming.

TwistedFate.1024:

my mesmer is 80 and full exotics except the acessories, waiting on ascended but i get run over no matter what i do =(

If you look at the stats sheet on exotics, jewelry actually trumps armor for any sort of DPS build. When you’re acquiring exotics on a piece by piece basis, weapon first, jewelry second, armor last.

Cantur Soulfyre.5409:

losing out on most of the badge gathering the zerg tends to do

Actually believe it or not, roamers will by far generate more badges than zerg surfers. Countless whine threads about badge earn rates have been started and almost unequivocally by either zerg surfers in green armor or people stuck in the outmoded ‘trinity’ mindset playing support-only builds.

Re: queues — I never see queues except for reset nights, and even then it’s just EB.

Re: outmanned — While Eastern time primetime is a different beast that I almost never get to see, when about 20 of us decide to move from one borderland to the next freshly red or blue borderland during Pacific peak hours, I never see the Outmanned icon on either opposing team until we take one or two keeps. It feels like being dealt those defeats caps out the night of WvW for whoever in Eastern time is staying on a little later.

In fact, last night we held the Western keep on ET’s BLs despite an opposing force of 30-40 inside the outer gate breach and 12 of us inside. I was shocked you guys pulled back. We were all absolutely bewildered because we saw 30-40 incoming, had 10-12 of us here, and dumped all of our supply into lord room siege intending for it to be a ‘last stand’. The mistake you guys made there was building trebs on an opposing wall. If you had built 4 flame rams instead of trebs, you would have had it.

Anticipating a strong weekend showing from both opposing teams, and ever-decreasing numbers on all sides from burnout.

And remember: tonics and fireworks are far more fun than corpse dancing.

Wanderer.3248:

Yeah, I don’t know how much truth there is to any of this, but anyone corpse dancing has zero credibility. Learn to bow if it was a good fight, or just move on.

I have a new favorite thing to do.

Stand there and /laugh while letting a vengeanced upscaled GS warrior hit me without fighting back.

Turn into a dolyak and continue on my way to a supply camp when they die from vengeance expiring and I still have >75% health.

Not a good fight, so no bowing necessary. No corpse dancing necessary because 100b doing 10% of my health is already shameful enough without me having to do anything.

If we aren’t allowed to kill you in your PvE zones, we aren’t going to let you PvE in our PvP zones easily, either.

Personally I love using trebs as tools for forcing a defending army to split their forces while a commander hits a keep elsewhere. Just as an example, this past week my group took the northeast tower on a borderland with 4 people and started trebbing garrison from the opposite side while the west keep was the site of a zerg vs zerg siege. With only rudimentary defenses, a defended tower can still hold off quite a few people.

Any situation that allows a small group to force a 25-man zerg response is already a victory for your own server and another victory against zerg tactics.

Unfortunately, the relatively long straightaways (even the curved paths have fairly long stretches of unobstructed area) will turn into a turtle of 9001 ballistae.

Voradors.5381:

Earlier this week Mos.millenium had SF score as going down. Even after we stomped ET/FC.
Yesterday, Anet posted the official scores and had SF score going up by 56 points.
Now, mos.millenium shows SF as going up by 56 points as well.

Does this mean Anet is actually doing something to balance things out?

The way Anet posts official scores is just a summary of what happened last week, not what’s currently happening this week.

If you look at the matchup history on the Millenium site, last week’s stats match up with what Anet posted.

Straegen.2938:

There simply are not enough players in the JP at any given time to make a significant difference.

There are, though.

When there are maybe 20 people within range of defending a keep while we’re attacking it with 30, and 7 of them decide to go into the jump puzzle instead, does that affect the outcome? I’d like to claim that it does.

Ferum Flamebender.5910:

What do you guys think? Is bad grouping the problem or ia it something else?

It may just be a reputation “problem” — you might not be well-known enough to gather people up via map or team chat.

A couple months ago, I wouldn’t be able to muster any sort of forces. Last night when I needed 3-4 volunteers to come with me to a whole different map to recapture and hold points, I managed to get 7 responses real fast.

The only thing I’ve done since those months ago was in being more vocal in communicating with commanders when I’m running smaller objectives while the zerg does zergy things. Building a reputation as a productive, objective small group lends you influence amongst the regulars even if you don’t pay 100G for a commander icon.

I’d take it a step further. The entrance should behave the same way as waypoints and become contested the moment SM becomes contested. Aside from mechanics that still need to be fixed (given that a single puppyhole autoattacking the door can contest a point), that helps make sure defenders can’t hurt their own servers by going to jump puzzle instead of defending.

Even if the Mystic Portal doesn’t get moved to SM, using the contesting mechanic at the keeps shouldn’t be difficult, either.

Forcing PvEers to deal with PvP during a momentary contesting of a point can only help reduce the already-ridiculous prices on “Vial[s] of PvE Whiner Tears” anyway.

TheGhostBaron.1250:

That being said, with SFs coverage(large prime time force and a large night crew) this puts them in a position where they should have the chance to fight in T7. And they should have the chance to fight in T7 no matter what their prior results.

Our lack of real night coverage is what brought us down into T8.

That coverage hasn’t changed for the better much if at all. Despite the knee-jerk reaction in claiming that we have a good/large night crew, that’s solely relative to the numbers fielded by a demoralized ET and FC. Up against whomever we’d be up against should we move out of T7, we will still get destroyed during nighttime. What remains to be seen is whether our prime time numbers will be able to carry enough momentum to offset that deficit.

Rob.7624:

NSP has that quality over quantity since the start, and at one point it carried us into tier 5.

But tier 5 is all about Quantity, and we lost our entire night crew (except me) after a few short weeks of being in tier 6. Which has put us at a severe disadvantage.

We’re now losing in tier 6. Not badly, but I think if you put is in the tier below. We would decimate.
And for a server coming up from the tier below? It wouldn’t be pleasant.

I don’t know if you remember the time zone coverage we had during our brief stay in your tier, but nothing has really changed. Our strong time zones have gotten stronger, but our night shift is still deplorable. The only reason why we don’t lose the entire map at night is because by no stretch of imagination, FC/ET’s night presence is worse.

I have absolutely no expectation of being able to hold daytime gains through the night in a higher tier, which may very well knock us back down into T8.

I think you’ve actually misread my post.

We do outnumber you guys, just not by the margins you guys like to claim. While it’s true we do have more fair-weather pugs playing right now, the bulk of that margin came from decreases in FC/ET’s fielded numbers, not increases in ours.

Rob.7624:

NSP is tier 6.
We rolled SF. We rolled them badly for weeks.

I keenly remember the taste of pavement and boots from having my head being stomped into the curb a couple weeks ago at the hands of NSP. Then again, when we were matched up against you guys, we had just lost quite a lot of players to transfers.

After that, we continued to shed WvW presence — I haven’t seen CL for months. The only incoming transfers since then that I’ve heard of were one or two smaller guilds coming in from SoR and a couple one-offs jumping ship from ET and FC.

Past that, any gains we’ve made as a server have come from CoSA’s ever-increasing WvW presence, day-to-day improvements in communication between commanders and small groups, and “original” SF players from day one beginning to work more closely together. I don’t see too many of the old repeat offender fair-weather only guilds on anymore; they’re either long gone or calling themselves PvX PvE guilds now.

Call it cautious optimism, but despite what you hear about the population disparity in T8, I’d like to believe that most of our recent gains have been in quality, not quantity.

Takerukun.8924:

but I feel even worse for them when they escape from T8 and meet servers that can stand up to them.

Trust me, few if any of the commanders are under any illusion that T7 will be easy at all. I know that with every passing week, the threat of complacency looms larger and larger, but thankfully many of us have the foresight to make sure it doesn’t cloud our judgement.

As sick and twisted as it sounds, I wanted to get bootstomped by Kaineng as the Millenium site indicated was the projected matchup. It was going to be a badly needed exercise in learning how to make the numbers we have count for much more. Currently it feels like our daytime and nighttime crew all rely on our numerical advantage to brute force through objectives with minimal skill. It’s not as big a population difference as multiple vocal forum posters want everyone to think, but it is a tangible difference.

We needed that wakeup call for people to actually start thinking long and hard about tactics. A lot of us are already doing so anyway in order to try to keep “in shape” for if/when we finally make it out of T8, but it’s hard to convince fair-weather players to practice being tryhards.

That’s exactly what’s wrong with this matchup.

Nobody actually wants to do what it takes to break this matchup. Until intervention finally happens months or even years down the line, it’s just one big game of chicken now.

Nobody wants to back down, and that’s the only thing worthy of respect out of this whole ordeal. And I’m certainly not about to back down from doing everything in my power to kick the legs out from underneath my opponents, no matter how distasteful the tactics I may need to resort to. It literally does not matter whether we look like the “bad guy” in this matchup when the numbers dictate that we need to win by a far bigger margin to advance. To me, it’s a far worse fate to endure eight more weeks of blowout losses compared to two to three weeks of morally disgusting behavior that ends in the complete spirit crushing routs necessary for us to advance.

While I respect that fighting spirit and hope it never goes away, I’m also keenly aware from our own descent into the depths of the tier chart that while fair-weather players vanish at the first sign of a night that they don’t hold more than 200ppt, even the most jaded of players have a breaking point. At this point, this tier is literally all about finding that breaking point and reaching it.

Ungood.3054:

(lots of good points)

While you do bring up good points regarding ET and FC’s loss of rating points adversely affecting our ability to progress out of T8, I’d like to point out that we’re not holding complete map domination for as long as we need to in order to actually gain points.

As this matchup gets more and more stale, we too gradually lose the ability to hold large point gains despite our high peak WvW population. I’m not sure if the other two sides have noticed this, but anything past 550ppt and it already feels like we’re stretched dangerously thin. Without the ability to hold large point gains merely 2-3 hours past our peak times, our only remaining effort in holding the large point gains we need to earn points lies with cripping the ability for ET and FC to fight. Whether that comes from actual in-game combat, demoralization “tactics” from emote usage, or encouraging infighting amongst opposing servers on the forum, anything that serves to maximize the margin by which we win shortens the time we’re here.

Yes, in doing so, we’re making it that much harder to gain points the following week, and it may not even be sustainable for us to keep increasing the margin by which we win, but I do not for one second believe that we’ll see some sort of intervention that will cut down on the wait time, and with that in mind I’m still going to do everything in my power to widen our winning margin.

insanemaniac.2456:

skeleton crew? you outnumbered us about 40 v 20-30. for hours.

Yes. Skeleton crew. When the main force migrated over to FC BL, that was an influx of another 30-40 more and that’s when things started to get coordinated. Before that it was just small small forces here and there poking at defenses, nothing else.

insanemaniac.2456:

congrats on taking like 6 hours minimum to get a keep

There may have been a skeleton crew there for hours before we showed up, but when we made the call to push FC BL, we blitzed the entire map in under two hours.

Glad to see others learning the importance of spotters though. I’d have never learned how to play Angry Birds vs Towers correctly if it weren’t for friends spotting for me in voice chat.

BeduinoAlbino.9812:

Your major argument is that WvW players are not in for money, and yet, you finish saying that all that is really needed is "*net coin equivalent earn rate up in line with “standard” PvE farming.*"

OK perhaps I worded that badly. I was just trying to echo some of the biggest points that others have brought up. Personally, earning a little more gold would be cool, but if it never happend there’d still be nary a peep from me.

BeduinoAlbino.9812:

But when you say “degrade the existing WvW population into an even more mindless swarm of locusts than it is already.”, I don’t know if I grasp what you meant, but people learn, like everyone that is a “WvW regular” today had to learn at some point.

All I meant is that bandwagon servers will become even bigger bandwagons, and the ones that didn’t might see all their tactics go out the window and turn into yet another zergblob server. Now, I’m not one of those desk-thumping ‘zergs are what’s wrong with WvW’ bull’s rush frenzy hundred blades solo roamer hero warriors since I personally found my role in things expermenting with builds while zerg surfing. But the unfortunate reality is that if people are just in it for the winning server rewards, they’re just going to stick to what works with little incentive to improve.

That’s why as justifiably whine-worthy as the badge system is, I’m okay with it. You really do have to poke around with a bunch of different builds before you find your niche, and it’s not like PvE where a once size fits all build will get you the best mileage.

This past weekend I finally witnessed jump puzzle camping producing a beneficial result, actually.

While we were in the process of assaulting FC’s keep, while I was running through the puzzle myself, map chat seemed to indicate an ever-increasing number of blues coming into the jump puzzle while an active assault was just being launched against their keep. For reasons unknown to me, whoever those guys were were more interested in dislodging the jump puzzle campers than actually defending the keep.

That alone is reason enough for me to go from indifferent to slightly in favor of jump puzzle camping when the map is already mostly green. I’d still consider it a waste of my own time, but if it’s getting positive results in drawing defenders away from where they’re needed, then I’m okay with others doing it.

Regarding running up the score: ironically, running up the score is exactly what’s going to break the stale matchup. Believe me, I’m in the same boat regarding the matchup, but I’m pretty sure my time is better spent in making sure we earn as many points as fast as possible to break out of T8 than waiting for Anet to do something about it. My badge earn rate is terrible when we’re winning by too much — it’s usually shy of 80-90 a night. By comparison, the first week of this matchup I was getting about 120 badges/night. Holding that coordinated attack two prong attack Saturday night earned me north of 150 badges in less than four hours.

For the record, stale matchup or not, if you guys can put on that sort of showing on a regular basis I wouldn’t mind staying in T8.

When people complain about the stale matchup, and then proceed to do their absolute best to keep it stale, forgive me if to me that just comes off as facetious. Perhaps the message everyone’s really trying to send from ET and FC is ‘we hate losing, but you guys are way too strong compared to the rest of this tier for us to have a chance.’ I see nothing wrong with stating things this way, by the way. It’s how I saw things in our nosedive down from T5. Stating things that way would stop the rest of us from wondering ‘wait why are they doing the single thing that’d lengthen the time we stay in this stale matchup.’

As it stands right now, the gap between HoD and SF is widening, and I’m not entirely sure how the WvW population shift affects weekday dynamics, but it sure has already affected weekend dynamics.

TL;DR: JP camping can’t be that bad if it pulls defenders from a keep currently being attacked to try to break the camp. I’d be OK with SF staying in T8 if ET and FC can constantly do what they tried to do Saturday night.

Drop rate increase: as it stands right now, most of the WvW regulars aren’t in it for the money. Most of us barely break even when repairs, consumables, siege, and upgrades are all said and done.
Magic find: This would be cool, but again just like the drop rate, we aren’t in it for the money.
Gold drops: Same point as above.
Increased experience: Would be useful. More skill points = more upgraded siege.
Increased karma: A lot of us already have millions of useless karma sitting around. Having even more of it isn’t really useful.
Mystic forge recipes: As an 85% WvW, 15% PvE player, this barely matters to me.
NPC selling special items: And bring more items like Golem-in-a-Box and Gears to WvW? No thanks.

I don’t speak for the entirety of WvW regulars, but many of us have zero desire to spend much more than bare minimum time in PvE if only to fund our WvW habits.

More PvE perks for WvW serve only to increase queue times on already packed servers and degrade the existing WvW population into an even more mindless swarm of locusts than it is already.

All we really need have already been stated:
A couple map tweaks (size, distances, balancing issues, bugs) and to bring net coin equivalent earn rate up in line with “standard” PvE farming.

I’d be OK with how you have it listed, including the stun breaker if it’s an elite skill. You’re then forced to make a conscious decision between group utility (time warp and mass invisibility), dueling potential (moa morph), or point A to point B mobility.

We also already have five stun breakers. You forgot the second skill in the Illusionary Leap skill chain. Adding a sixth might be overkill if it isn’t an elite.