Guild Wars 2

All this talk of “night capping” directed at us makes me chuckle, and it’s exactly why I’ve been posting in other servers’ recruitment threads in favor of whatever recruiting they’re doing.

Yes, as the situation stands right now, SF has the strongest night presence of the three servers. But when you think about our descent into T8, we’ve always been known in every single tier above this to have had the worst night presence by far compared with whomever we were up against. It’s pretty much like three people bowling who consistently hit the gutter comparing how far down the lane their bowling ball goes before hitting the gutter.

The best way to phrase it is that just because our night presence isn’t as anemic and disorganized relative to our neighbors doesn’t mean finger-pointing and accusations need to start flying around.

For the record though, the afternoon/early evening shift on both FC and ET yesterday made my armor repair guy real happy. It seems I’ve already developed bad habits from the last two weeks of 20-30 man zergs hitting the door, completely unaware of any sort of incoming force.

It’s generally accepted as a good idea to check next to the vista. Four of your guys viewed the vista… and then left me alone :X

Hoping for another mostly-balanced matchup here in tier 8! Welcome to any and all new transfers on all three sides, and hope you find your new (almost-)permanent home worlds to your liking!

Great to see red and blue both fielding a lot more people tonight!

If it comes down to allocating where your limited monetary income goes, for offensive classes, buy stuff in this order:

Weapon(s) > Jewelry > Armor — weapons provide your base damage so they get first priority, followed by jewelry which provides a bigger concentration of major/minor stats than armor, followed by armor.

For defensive tanky classes:

Armor > Jewelry > Weapon(s) — it’s an 18% difference between exotics and masterwork armor in all values including defense rating, so getting that on top of 80% of the major/minor from jewelry is a big deal.

If you’re a balanced build, it’s likely smartest to get your “major” armor pieces first (head, chest, legs) followed by jewelry, then upgrade everything else as you see fit.

I know my post isn’t quite helpful in terms of how to acquire gear, but getting it in the right order should improve quality of life more comfortably than just getting what’s cheapest.

As a regular WvW player on SF, I support this 100%.

I hope FC gets some great transfers so T8 can stay a relatively even matchup. One-sided roflstomps are no fun, and the recent transfers to SF threaten to make that a reality.

Portal isn’t just for shuttling zergs around. I love using it while defending a structure since I’ll drop my entry portal, jump into the middle of a zerg, drop my combo, then drop my exit portal to go back home to safety. It isn’t even as guaranteed an escape as just making sure I get downed within vapor form range of the door.

EDIT: I clearly have not had enough caffeine yet… s/shuffling/shuttling/

Can we please get the option to never load customized models? A dropdown similar to forcing team colors for all but for forcing fallback models only would be amazing.

I’m on some decent hardware and rarely if ever see culling issues, but theoretically I should get a couple extra frames out of forced models. (cl_minmodels from CS comes to mind.)

It may just be how the different primetimes line up, but it only feels like we’re hitting FC the hardest because you guys actually put up a decent fight during the times I’m on.

A couple things from just last night come to mind:

• Me, a ranger, and an engineer wiped an ET zerg of 20 in front of Durios right as I got online. 3v20 should not have been easy. Even if NPCs had just respawned, 5v20 still should not have been easy. If the commander in that zerg had posted a couple people on the bridge (or noticed the NPC sentry evaporating) that might not have happened the way it did, especially when I showed up and it was 20 vs door.
• ET keep was essentially undefended. There were literally four people I saw during our push there, none of whom were actually level 80 when our push was about 40 people golems inclusive comprised of about 2/3 level 80s. Veloka had nobody in it. Mendon was literally undefended as well. I switched over to pushing into blue territory after realizing wiping red out on EB was going to be minimal effort at best. At this point, ET BL was completely red, and FC BL was completely blue, I couldn’t see a tangible explanation for this outside of ET being severely undermanned on all fronts and had to try to focus on preserving their borderlands.
• Our push at FC’s keep ten minutes before we launched the ET keep assault was met with heavy resistance despite the fact that we portal chained golems in from SM. There were probably 15-20 blues defending their keep versus about 35 (and no spawncamp during that push to prevent reinforce) so the odds did suck, but they were at least mostly real level 80s, not upscaled.
• On FC borderlands, ET had a supply camp “under lockdown” as reported on map chat. I casually strolled in there with three others to find four arrow carts, two ballistas, a catapult, and a treb, all unmanned. Not quite sure why you guys had a treb in the northern supply camp where literally all it can hit is FC’s spawn.
• Also on FC borderlands, when four reds (all of them real 80s for once! …but two were wearing what looked to be green armor, not rare or exotic…) was capping a supply camp, I downed three of them before my stupidity in cooldown management meant a 100b warrior at 1/8 health splattered what was left of my health bar with no dodge rolls or stun breakers ready. That fight shouldn’t have been that close or even remotely winnable for me. Had I had more than zero allies with me we would have stopped that camp from being capped.

Generally speaking, FC just put up a much better fight when I was online last night whereas the ET groups I ran into last night let me engage recklessly and get away with it most of the time. I’m just hoping that a couple more guilds fill the ranks of T8 so we can keep even matches going. These last two weeks have been the most fun I’ve had in WvW in quite awhile since it hasn’t been an utter blowout, not to mention getting 700 badges effortlessly in that same timeframe as an added bonus. I heard from Banjo that two guilds had transferred in from SoR albeit not during my coverage times, and my only hope is that ET and FC end up getting more transfers than we do. It’s no fun when I’m spending the last couple hours on WvW wondering what’s left for me to do. And please for the love of kittens and everything fuzzy field more real level 80s. 1vXes aren’t challenging when people instagib when I haven’t even had to execute a full combo.

Sarlack.4096:

Small man and Solo Roaming will net you more badges….I only Zerg surf about 10% of the time and that’s if we happen to be going in the same direction…

That pretty much sums it up — small groups roaming their “backfield” camps and supply lines and contesting waypoints usually only warrants a minimal response initially. Solo attempts at recapping or other small groups usually swing in your favor because of NPC presence at camps and sentries, ending up in more kills that you can actually tag, netting you a good badge rate. After holding off a camp 3 or 4 times (or catching a commander without backup) usually gets you zerged, but by then you’ve diverted enough manpower to have indirectly helped an offensive/defense elsewhere already, so you res at a waypoint, repair, reup on consumables and head out again.

Zergs might be the primary way to cap fortified objectives, but it’s the small groups that earn badges and make the zerg push possible.

I think I remember #3 if you’re referring to FC taking DB on SF BL fairly late at night with 4-5 catas up on the cliff inside the southern outer gate. We were held out for quite a long time despite being starved for supply to the north and 20-30 invaders pressuring from a breached outer to the south. If people had put supply into the treb in front of the lord room instead of repairing a downed wall with 4 catapults still up, I’d imagine the situation may have been a little different. But then again, with access cut off to supply, that may have only been a temporary reprieve…

I’d have to agree with @Waffler.1257 — kills still are the easiest way to get badges. Tier shouldn’t matter, either. I’ve been playing on SF (now tier 8) since early access and I’ve gotten about 2.4k badges in 7.3k kills.

If you’re having problems gathering badges, you might be a victim of the current “system” that favors glass cannons that lump enough damage on someone for you to tag someone and potentially receive a drop. It took me months to get the first 2k badges or so, but I’ve gotten about 600 badges in just the last two weeks.

If the problem doesn’t lie with builds, try roaming instead of zerg surfing. You’ll have a much better chance at earning badges in small group combat provided that your group’s skills/gear are up to the task.

Cosmic.6047:

How has SF a terrible night presence when they owning the night between the 3 servers ?

Come Pacific time around 10pm or 11pm, WvW as a whole in tier 8 right now is just desolated. The only reason why we dominate nighttime right now is because we have a few commanders who stay on extra late and go on a capping spree during pretty reasonable hours for the West coast to be awake, but deep into “night capping” territory for East coast.

Despite that, our nighttime numbers don’t hold a candle to the sort of numbers any of the other WvW tiers can field on any given night.

Cosmic.6047:

SF is rolling the maps at night already.

This is more of a related point than a counterpoint — the simple fact that SF (known for terrible night presence) is able to be dominant at night is a sign that T8 as a whole needs better nighttime coverage.

Haldunius.7864:

I don’t think it’s a bug though. I think it’s there to stay. Back in beta people could run back and forth across the buff line to stack swiftness. Creating code to not allow Focus 4 to stack was the solution I believe. I’m not sure if the dev’s are looking for a different answer…

I disagree — the way they currently handle it is largely clunky and misleading due to the tooltips about duration stacking.

They could have handled it via the same mechanism non-stacking passive signet movement speed is handled — they’re still active during swiftness boons but are essentially inactive due to different movespeed buffs taking the highest value instead of stacking in intensity.

If they moved the temporal curtain swiftness to a separate buff like chaos armor or the 50% movespeed while under stealth buff on thieves, swiftness stacking would then be deterministic — having to rely on guesswork to figure out if it’s going to be a waste due to non-stacking mechanics puts undue burden when every other class can still cast an active swiftness skill early and still get the remaining time after their faster buff expires.

Haldunius.7864:

Not quite – just gotta cost focus swiftness first, then the others next. Focus won’t layer onto other swiftness but can be layered upon. I do it with focus and then my rune of centaur swiftness all day.

Whether there’s viable workarounds or not, the swiftness from focus not stacking properly is still a bug. Once that gets squashed, I expect our quality of life as mesmers to go up as the incoming swiftness from other classes with AoE swiftness will finally stack properly. While it’s easy to get hung up on our lack of point A to point B speed, mesmers are still one of the most mobile classes once we (finally) reach the target area (Sword+Focus/Staff comes to mind), especially with stun breakers that do things that are useful.

dank.3680:

Well I was playing my thief today but I have 4 geared 80’s that I play on a regular basis. Ele, Thief, Necro, Mesmer, in the order in which I play most frequently. But yeah a large percentage of the guild is Thief or Mesmer.

Were you that basilisk venom thief hanging out around Durios poking out past the bridge towards SM fairly late last night? I had to hand off my treb to someone else just to answer a cry for halp.

Skarloc.2569:

When it’s 3 on 20, we’re going to run with whatever gives us the best chance to hold off that many numbers.

Not gonna lie — outnumbered fights like that are the ones that feel the best to win. Some mix containing thief/mesmer + a couple of anything else pretty much has capacity to wreck the green upscaled people in that group fast to even out the odds.

Had a couple fun duels with an asura D/D Ele from ENVY last night (I was the human S/S Mesmer) around SM and Klovan with multiple resets and thieves on both sides butting in. I don’t think any of the actual duels ended decisively at all in favor of either of us, but it sure was fun. When you finally got caught (by presumably a million thieves) in front of SM it was definitely worth the /bow despite the hail of arrow cart fire I was standing under.

Sup, SM.

Hopefully everyone can put on the same showing through the rest of the week that we got to see during the weekend!