Guild Wars 2

I’d say a pistol / tool / bomb engi. You know, all of the one good engi that each server seems to have…go find him or her.

On SoS (gold, last place) I have yet to see a queue on an enemy borderland, and only seen a queue on our home borderland a few times.

TC is a good community, but I do have to agree their roaming etiquette, if we are going to pretend their is such a thing, sucks. In these sorts of lopsided matches the players on the losing servers really only have three options: Blob in the one blob we can muster, roam, or don’t play.

Sorry if TC players are bored with the matchup or queue stuck on the one map they could get into with no action, but you’ve known for a long time that TC is in a weird spot of being roughly double any lower ranked server and about 2/3 of a T1 server. Yet, it still seems you have guilds transferring in for god knows what reason…

It would be great for one of the T1 servers to conveniently blow up again. Two months of this will not be much fun.

I wouldn’t worry too much about not being able to get it. All you’re missing out on is blobs that are another degree stupider than they were before, frequent disconnects, skill lag, skill lock, and general lack of fun. Hopefully it improves some during the week days, but for people that want to play on the weekend, this should be an embarrassment. They’ve had 14 months now to fix these issues, yet the only solutions seem to be new ways to compound existing problems?

WvW when you’re karma training yields what, maybe 1-3g per hour? So let’s just say that’s 150-200 hours of playing, just to get the gold required to craft from 400 to 500, for each craft.

Then you need the mats. To get the mats from WvW, specifically dragonite in large quantities, karma training is again the only way you’re going to get a reasonable amount.

Then you need to log in every day to do your time gate craft.

Rinse, repeat for more weapons.

Don’t ever change your build enough to necessitate different stats.

Now how this is fun and rewarding again? You give more incentive for people to blob in karma trains, not even competing against opponents with defense of structures. Players that don’t blob get almost nothing except their pride while the blobbers progress to more powerful gear and faster WXP gain. Ok…

/end weekly rant

I won’t claim to be a psychologist, but I do wish anet would try to identify their core constituency of the game and work from that rather than trying all the random band-aids on the game that have been failing badly.

In politics the right track / wrong track poll is one of the most important metrics that leaders use to pretend they care about the will of the governed. I would guess that such a poll taken of WvW players that really care about the game, and aren’t just there to farm more stuff would be abysmally low.

Good God, how many different ways is there to spin it that that the overwhelming majority of players do not like character bound WXP? More of the same vapid nonsense about personalization, feeling like your character is progressing, etc. Do these guys even play their own game?

Luvpie.8350:

Khalic.3561:

Here’s an idea folks. Maybe if we ask questions with some measure of civility instead of just trying to bash him about our complaints , we MIGHT get some answers?

And maybe, just maybe if we aren’t openly hostile all the time he might continue posting in this forum with the regularity that he used to?

C’mon people. This is an opportunity. Don’t blow it.

Here are the answers.

Please deal with Server pop?
We know server pop is a issue we are thinking about some ideas. When we have something concrete we will let people know.

Are you open to taking out Orbs?
Our metrics indicate that orbs are a great mechanic and people love fighting for orbs and it adds a fun aspect to wvw. Orbs are staying.

WvW rewards?
Leagues will increase rewards in wvw with new achievements. Rewards will be tied to whichever server you start the season with.

Season 1 please stop leagues.
We are open to suggestions and feedback during season 1 and will adjust season 2 if needed. We need season 1 to give us data.

This class is op that class is op.
We are balancing classes in the upcoming match and wvw is a priority for us.

Orbs have ruined GvG and open field fighting, do you agree?
GvG did violate my game mode so I violated the game mode back. Now we are even.

lol, Luvpie for pres.

Q&A’s, we will carefully ignore all well reasoned input from players, while obfuscating answers to direct questions in as few words as possible.

Noah Blackheart.1904:

As for the backlash from the community, it’s been like this since the beggining with Exotic gear as I have said, and everyone pointed out to the manifesto as “proof”. Sure maybe you might be one of the few who have been here “before the start”, but I doubt the large community has, because everytime this is brought up everyone just points to the manifesto, and when someone does read it and pointed out that it does not say anything about no treadmilling, people just go on and ignore it. I am not saying you don’t have a point, I am saying the backlash was based on an assumption, not facts, in most cases it was just based on word of mouth, no one even bothered to verify. It’s not about ascended being a stat increase, because this is just a matter of lazy people perceiving some grand advantage Ascended gear is giving them. I say lazy because when Ascended wasn’t around people cried about exotics.

I categorically disagree with your assertion that players who don’t want to go for ascended equipment are lazy. There are legitimate reasons not to waste your time playing the gear game. In my case, I would probably bite the bullet and do it if I was certain that a time investment in an ascended piece would be the last for that slot, but it won’t be without stat selection or a guarantee against another round of stat creep down the road.

I’m not really mad about it though. Rewards and persistent “bunnies chasing rabbits” as the OP stated it have become the norm and expectation in most games. My fondest memories of gaming were dumb games like UT that you simply loaded and started playing. Progression was your perceived improvement at the game. The excitement of a close game against good competition was the intoxicating addiction. I’ve been playing the BF4 beta the last few days and what now…gun unlocks that are almost like MMO character leveling time wise and cash shop / level RNG rewards…oh boy.

I think you are the type of player that needs to take a break and examine whether this is really worth your time, or if you’ve only become a lab rat hitting buttons and spending money on the game.

Antiriad.7160:

I’m just curious how many other players did the same.

I quit playing after the ascended crafting update.

It seems that the argument against power creep in WvW held no sway whatsoever. I’m still hopeful though that once the ascended treadmill exhaust itself and the league fails miserably that anet might go in a different direction. There’s too much potential left in this game to let it all be flushed down the toilet.

I’d probably be laughing if it wasn’t so sad how quickly these clowns have crashed the game into the mountain.

CrassBippy.4619:

Professor Sensei.2941:

WvW gives players an actual end game objective. If we all used “balanced” stats with no player progression there would be no real investment in any of your toons. That’s how I see it at least. I love using my jacked stats lol.

this is what is wrong with MMO players. Everyone treats it like a second job and thinks higher stats is necessary, when all it does is raise enemy levels to make it all pointless too.

All it does for PvP is ruin it

+1

GW1 lasted a good, solid 6 years with activity in most PvP formats. At the rate things are going, I will be completely shocked if sPvP or WvW can be described as healthy on the 2 year anniversary of this game. It’s difficult to enjoy all your treadmill progression in an empty game.

I kinda, sorta had empty calorie type fun with crafting and hunting down gear for the first few months, but I finally realized that I was spending almost, if not more time out of WvW doing things that were increasingly laborious just to play. I would go months at a time in GW1 without stepping into PvE, or messing around with the gear game to enjoy ALL the PvP formats with any profession or build I wanted to. That was what made the game fun and created infinite replay value. This game has become a grindy mess like every other MMO, with no direction on top of that.

I haven’t played for a few weeks. I’ll continue to be hopeful that things turn around, but it’s difficult to a tangible basis for optimism. Gear becoming outdated, falling behind on WXP, and high economic inflation make it harder to come back after a hiatus too.

I’ve been a GW player since the beta weekends for GW1, and while I certainly have not played continuously 8 years, the breaks have never been longer than 3 or 4 months. There was always something to come back to, some sort of unfinished business or new experience that was actually fun and easy to jump into. There’s little left to do in this game besides get back on the treadmill. It makes me sad that Guild Wars will probably soon be a game spoken in the past tense like all the others, for me anyway.

Brew Pinch.5731:

Everyone is massively overstating the effect of the buff.

Skill is a vastly more important factor in this game than stats, even with the tiny disparity.

150 or whatever isn’t much, but then there’s consumables, sigil stacks, guard stacks, and ascended gear…

A player with all that is a very rare bird, and you can of course choose not to use / obtain all that crap, and yet the disparity will always be a little monkey on your shoulder when you lose or have to retreat from otherwise even battles.

GSSBlunaspike.4153:

However that should clear that up. So yes, seriously. Hey it’s early, I could be wrong. Please correct me.

You’re not wrong at all, I hope more people look into the math on this. Ascended stats, consumables, sigil stacks, and guards stacks all incrementally add up to a ridiculous sum. Sure, player skill will still prevail in most situations, but since the most skilled players tend to spend the most time playing, all it’s doing is making it easier to beat down players who have less time to play. This has been the folly of PvP in most MMOs.

Amazingly, Anet was the first to say no mas to this with a major AAA title, and yet here we are, with the devs continuing to double down on grind at every turn…

DevonCarver.5370:

Speaking as someone who has only gotten Ascended gear via WvW vendors, I’d say that’s nonsense.

I have / had at least 500 hours played since the laurel vendor update, and have exactly 3 ascended trinkets after doing the dailies and monthlies that I really have no interest in completing. You’ve already stated there’s “no chance” that ascended gear will get the stat selection system legendaries now have, so obtaining them is purely an exercise in pointless treadmill grind that’s been put in place to supposedly keep players interested.

Until the entire philosophy of gear grind changes, there’s no hope of this format being anything but PvE with different scenery and an occasional, probably terribly lopsided player battle.

Aeolus.3615:

Lol like i said before WvW is like AB on factions just with walls and siege to counter those barriers, that behavior confirms it, since game is all about cap castles as if they are shrines.
Capping shrines faster makes server loose less ppt, so it makes sense what happened.

I really tough game would envolve.

At least AB battles only lasted about 20 minutes with a winner at the end when it became a game of shrine speed capping or mobbing, and the 4v4s were always fun. Even a well-oiled golem train plowing through paper structures is fairly slow and terribly boring, and if you dare to break off the group, you risk missing out on the rewards. Bring an alt like say, an upscaled mes to help speed it up if there are not enough portals, and you get bakittens and WXP on a character you don’t care about.

Gets old and not worth it fighting the game more than the players at some point.

I was honestly wondering the other night how long it would be before wvw becomes little more than a pit stop for champ farming with different scenery, and how long it might be before people actually trying to play the game are flamed. A couple nights ago I received angry whispers from a roaming group for messing up their camp flips.

Jeez can we get the Cliff’s Notes on the above post?

I love how people are still so defensive about how their server plays. This game is as brain dead and grindy as all the other MMOs now…the server with the most door bangers on at more hours is always going to win. The more you try to analyze it, the dumber it sounds.

I’m not a huge fan of golems or pug blobs either, but T3, waypointed, 1000+ supply keeps are also pretty stupid. At that point golems or night capping are your two best options because very few organized guilds want to invest a large amount of time in a regular siege of a keep that involves trebbing for a long time and wading though dozens of ACs if the keep is being actively defended by a large force.

Although I think anet went about it in entirely the wrong way, I actually like that things are flipping more often now. It’s more of a cat and mouse game and organized groups can defend a paper structure if they really want to, while upgrades are less effective at defending things for you.

I don’t understand this at all.

A 3-4 hour match between 3 teams of equal size would be fun with some major modifications to siege mechanics, upgrades, and sPvP gear. Try this and then make a league if it works.

This does not sound fun at all. It sounds like more mass transfer drama, server communities being wrecked, and anet generating revenue with gem buys from bandwagoners. Good kittening game.

After seeing today how insanely expensive it’s going to be to craft ascended gear, I again have to wonder why the legendary stat selection system will not be available for ascended gear. People go for legendaries for the skins and wow-look-at-me effect, not the stats…and that’s fine if you don’t have to waste two months of your life to have the same benefit sans aesthetics.

Every serious wvw player has probably dumped out dozens, if not more than a hundred pieces of exotic gear to change stats or salvage out expensive runes and sigils. How excited is a player going to be if they spend hundreds and hundreds of gold making a gear set and their build gets nerfed so badly, or a buff makes another build better, and it requires a major change to gear, if not a whole new set? Mind you were are not even considering running different builds without the need for 14+ separate pieces of gear…or alts.

The very high cost of ascended equipment would be much more palatable if it’s the last piece of equipment you’ll ever have to make for that slot. That is a goal that’s not purely a treadmill, or a rug that might be pulled out from under you.

Castaliea.3156:

DevonCarver.5370:

zen.6091:

I take it that since legendaries will soon be able to have stat changes out of combat, it would be possible to do this for other gear?

I don’t see that happening and the main reason is that it sets Legendaries apart. It makes them cooler, it makes them more worth trying to get if you care about stats and not just looks. I could be proven wrong at some point, but I don’t expect us to head down that road.

P.S. No.

You could set them apart by giving them changeable Sigils and Stats while just allowing changeable stats for Ascended Gear. Pigeonholing people into running X build because they have X Ascended gear in a game built around encouraging build diversity is completely counter-intuitive. I didn’t play GW to chase gear to make builds with and yet that’s all I’ve done in GW2 despite it supposedly being built around encouraging build/playstyle diversity. I know you’re not the guy to be angry at for this and I’m not so I don’t mean to be rude to you personally but it hurts when you old, favorite, game company does a complete 180 turn in their design philosophy. I’ve made way too many posts on this and it always puts me in a sour mood so I’m just going to stop with it now but I’m very disappointed with you guys as a whole. Completely lost sight of where you came from.

^ Yeah this.

I have a zerg guardian and a P/D thief, and that’s all I play in WvW aside from a lowbie mes when extras are needed for goleming.

It hurts the game so much when build diversity = hitting your head against a wall gear chasing, and alts (they should not even be considered alts) are even more of painful grind to level, gear, and now get WvW abilities.

There is a happy compromise somewhere where we can have progression that happens doing things we enjoy, and actually enriches the game experience.

DevonCarver.5370:

Bailey.6892:

Sadly my money is that they will be a large advantage. This is based on how anet has handled things in the past (poorly). Being forced to pve to enjoy wvw is a bad idea.

My goal is to eliminate the latter scenario. And I promise to do as much as I can to meet that.

I take it that since legendaries will soon be able to have stat changes out of combat, it would be possible to do this for other gear?

Why not just get it over with and make a system where a character has a set of WvW gear (armor and trinkets) that can have its stat combos tweaked outside of WvW, along with a bag slot for extra weapons? Each piece could also have a slot for the WvW infusions that are ridiculously expensive right now too, if you’re trying to get ascended gear with laurels.

The progression in this system would be account bound unlocks (unlock soldier’s stats, unlock superior sigil of air, unlock superior rune of divinity, unlock skin etc.) for a modest amount of badges. Then you can simply adjust your gear as needed. It would also be incredibly nice to be able to save an entire gear loadout as a template!

If you are serious about letting WvW players play without having to farm PvE for gold or doing PvE for decent skins, this is the only way to do it. It would sill be a bit of a grind, but a goal with an actual result that is useful when you’ve done it and worth playing for so you can easily make different builds for WvW like sPvP. That is what makes the game fun in the long term. Otherwise you are just dangling empty calorie carrots in front of people that are kind-maybe-not-really fun for about two weeks.

If this were to actually happen, it would also be nice to maybe have a special item to put in the mystic forge with our old unwanted gear that returned badges, xp or whatever is needed for the new unlocks. This would probably help the PvE economy so WvW players don’t dump a bunch of stuff on the market all at once too.

PS: Account bound world XP.

I admit the first month or so (last August…), stealth stomps were pretty frustrating. It was like being donkey punched after being cheesed. Fact is though that in a 1v1 or such, when you’re downed, the fight is over unless you rally from PvE, which is even dumber. In a situation where a thief stealth stomps while people are trying to heal you, they should have smart enough to either use CC or drop what damage they could on the spot, unless they could res faster than the stomp channel. At least 3 of 4 thieves run fragile D/D or D/P builds that will melt if you try to stomp taking big hits.

In case no one has mentioned it, black powder is actually way OP for combat stomping. It blocks all 5 of the classes that have CC stomp stoppers when the down player triggers their skill blind, and it blinds anyone trying to use melee range CC. You can also use it quickly if someone has already started stomping to make sure they get it, and of course leap out for stealth if there’s still combat going on.

At this point, because a sort of grassroots GvG has already sprung up, it would be very difficult for anet to please anyone with an official GvG format. I think the grassroots GvG players would be highly resistant to a format that had other game mechanics besides simple deathmatch.

The GW1 GvG format with a larger map and more possible players could be very exciting, but how would people really feel about flagging and having to split into smaller groups? How are you going to protect a guild lord without something like bunker guardians cycling cooldowns? Well, you can see where this is going…it’s hard to imagine how it could be balanced when what little balance there is is designed around sPvP mechanics.

We want each character to have a unique experience in WvW, so World Ranks and WXP are all character-based values rather than account-based. We believe that in the long run, this will actually help incentivize players to experiment with various different ability builds for each character. It also creates a long term goal for players of multiple characters, as they can strive to

Make WXP account bound with stat distribution spent on each individual character…if you have to do something to limit stat spending on lowbies, fine.

There’s no future for WvW long term if it keeps getting harder, more expensive, and less rewarding to play alts, or even change builds on a character. That is what makes the game fun for people that actually enjoy the format and play for reasons beyond the carrots being dangled in front of them. It’s depressing that you still don’t seem to understand this.

Heck, you could even find a new revenue stream making it easier to and faster to create alts and exotic equipment without playing PvE or otherwise banging your head against the wall.

I feel bad for anyone that has to try to put down an angry mob on a forum, but they’ve only brought it upon themselves. Whether it’s someone who only does PR or an actual dev posting, it really does not seem that they’ve grasped any of the real problems in WvW or given us a credible plan to make positive changes. “We’re changing the Quaggon’s” is like saying “We’re changing the flowers in your garden”, as the house is on fire.

I can’t get over how ridiculous anet has allowed a PvP format to become balance wise. Take Joe the Engineer for example…plays through some PvE with his engi, gets to 80, now he wants to play WvW. The kind of player that WvW is ostensibly designed for. First he realizes his class is terrible in WvW. Ok, so he makes a new one. Now he’s out fighting with his level 2 necro against players running around with far better gear, superior sigil stacks, food, and now guard stacks too. It is hilariously lopsided. How many hours of his life does Joe get to look forward to wasting before he’s on an even playing field?

I’m sorry, I know a lot of people from the MMO scene actually like grind, but it’s antithetical to GW PvP and players who got use to 5 minute re-rolls to play anything, any way they wanted, with all the tools at their immediate disposal to theorycraft and learn new things. Why we are still stuck in this awful grind mentality for WvW rather than moving to an sPvP type system, or at least a compromise amazes me. Ahead of all the other problems with WvW, this has got to be the #1 reason players drift away from it or make a decision that their time is more valuable than grinding to simply play the kitten game.

The above two paragraph rant is a direct response to anet’s goal of “making WvW more fun” and “not introducing more power creep”. Aside from fixing culling and making siege not character bound, practically everything you’ve done to the bloody game has made it less fun and introduced more power creep! So I’m not buying a let’s take it easy on the devs plea when they have been going in the wrong direction for a year now.

I already took one three month hiatus, and after doing a clear OS install the other night, doubt I’ll even bother installing GW2 again. WvW can still be extremely fun, but there’s simply too much hassle and the devs stewarding it inspire zero confidence for moving the format in the right direction.

With the rank system and high economic inflation, coming back when or if things improve is even less attractive.

Vena.8436:

Not sure that really works in this game seeing as how the “time invested” in anything meaningful (short of the handful of WvW ranks) is… a week to level and free gear at 80 from karma? They’re handing out laurels at this point too

The gear is not as grindy as many MMOs, but it does not take a week to fully level, gear, learn a class, and learn wvw with a modicum of proficiency either.

I played GW1 4-5 times a week from launch until every PvP format was dead and was never really bored with it…the only grind was HA ranks, which was a natural progression as you played the format anyway. Every time I play WvW I feel needlessly hassled or wasting hours doing something completely pointless to change a build.

It’s disappointing because the people who designed WvW had great ideas and a solid rough draft of how it should work, but the people charged with tweaking and maintaining it are either hamstrung by the usual corporate BS or totally out of tune with what the players want.

Klawlyt.6507:

If you’re not having fun… stop.

This is simple and sound advice.

Trouble is with MMOs, you invest such a ridiculous amount of time getting the point where you believe you’ll be having fun that it’s difficult to rationalize quitting and finding a new game, which would also likely be another half-finished good idea.

At a minimum, I think the 40% condition duration food needs to go from WvW. Just as the pre-nerf pie was way over the top with high crit builds, it’s absolutely ridiculous to have a food that on paper increases the effectiveness of a class by 40%.

I think it’s also a bit ridiculous to see an entire wall glowing red with with marks and how punishing they can be in the field when the zerglings don’t pay any attention to positioning. However, as with many of the problems with wvw, this is a byproduct of the blob mentality.

It’s a fairly simple fact that with any game server, more players requires exponentially more resources to maintain the same level of performance, and there is a limit to computing resources. This game clearly does not function with blobs of 50+ players spamming each other, and yet, nothing has been done to discourage massive blobbing with either a hard de-buff or making it wildly inefficient point wise.

That’s really all there is to it.

Absolutely loving the murderball lag so far. T1 is so fun!

I’ve been trying to figure out all week what has happened to the guilds on JQ? I understand that players and guilds have come and gone from WvW at a pretty fast rate, particularly after a prolonged winning streak in T1 or losing streak in any tier, but it’s like the whole server emptied out and is completely reliant on pug blobs to do even the smallest thing now. I know TC does the same thing, but we also have plenty of guilds that roam and start up borderland action.

Hellride.6571:

KH can you stay up late all the time, your the first organized guild group AVTR has seen in a long time so we are a little rough cant say i speak for all of AVTR but i loved our wipes

It was fun to get a couple fights that were of reasonable size.

It’s just been really hard to do much on fabl this matchup when you guys are putting up a good defense, because JQ is either has nothing, not even a token thief on the map, or their own mega blob that tries to push us off.

I believe it was Clausewitz who wrote that if you are badge farmed in the field or repelled in a siege, the solution is to come back with a larger blob and more golems.

First six hours were pretty fun, but good god, the pugmander blobs after that with all 3 servers were the most ridiculous I’ve seen since moving from T1.

I think the only things that need looking at thieves are the radius of shadow refuge and serious consideration about a hard cap on CD, or reworking of hidden killer. Shadow refuge is not an issue in spvp because of the close quarters and commonality of CC. In WvW, all you have to do is create a gap with roll / shadowstep / etc. very quickly and shadow refuge is an ez mode ticket to safety no matter how bad you play or judgement is.

The base frustration in all the qq thieves threads over the months is that it’s very difficult to kill one unless they are very stupid. I am a player of medicore skill and take a lot of risk rolling through zergs, scouting, baiting players, engaging in outnumbered combat and very rarely die if I don’t want to (i.e. be the kitten that runs off when all my friends are dead).

Their ******* whole blob is coming for us!

Story of wvw…

I agree completely with the OP.

The first six months, despite the overwhelming number of technical problems with WvW, I was really enthusiastic about it. The last six months I have only played in increasingly sporadic spats, which is disappointing because like you said, there still are some extremely compelling and exciting aspects to the game. Most of the time though it’s only advanced mode trash mob farming with some sort of red blob that hopefully becomes loot bags before you do.

Worst though for me, I feel the more I play, the worse I become skill wise as a player. It becomes boring to do the same thing over and over with very little variety, or feeling that you really outplayed your opponent with skill or better tactics. The ridiculous amount of time and effort it takes to create and correctly gear a character for wvw also plays into the boredom, and I believe it also makes some players less likely to roam in small group combat when they are totally spec’d for zerg clashes.

Yes, you’re right. I admit to not paying too much attention to it since I mostly play an s/d thief, and flanking strike not sucking has changed how I play quite a bit.

Still though, culling / rendering issues were the #1 problem with thieves, and that’s pretty much done for. I played more in the last week than I had in the past two months and did not see more than a few token d/d and d/p thieves patrolling the usual borderland areas, and most of them seem to believe in some sort of thieves honor system where they will move heaven and earth trying to gank another thief not interested in 1v1 before anyone else.

People also need to realize that thieves who sometimes roam and sometimes zerg or play with a guild group do actually have to spec quite a bit of additional vitality and some toughness to survive and do anything of use. And your use is pretty much limited to spamming blast finishers, cutting down stragglers, and scouting ahead. Scouting, skirmishing, and screwing with people can be fun, but it’s not like a god mode, super amazing, kill everyone class. Learning to play an ele or guardian is a far better investment of your time imo.

I play a thief mainly and have made plenty of negative comments about the class in the past, but honestly, I now have to wonder if most of the people complaining just started playing. It’s nowhere near as bad as it use to be before culling was fixed, an extra second was added to reveal, and the change to blind has also been huge. Every class, even rangers, has the tools to deal with thieves. Probably still something to be said about the ease of escape with shadow refuge, but that’s also a two way street if you’re playing with a thief that uses it to help you escape or res.

Spend some time playing spvp as a thief to learn the basics of the class if it’s that much of a problem and you have no idea what to do when one is trying to solo gank you. It’s a much better proposition than laying over as a free kill or hoping anet will listen to your prayers to make a class completely useless.

A few tips, the area around “ruin island” between the two invader corners on the borderlands is almost always a free for all of gankers, small group combat, and tactical spawn camping. If that doesn’t interest you, don’t run around in that area like an idiot. If you’re running to join or rejoin a battle, and it seems like there’s a choke that might be a good spot for a smart group of players to harry reinforcements, be prepared…it’s not too hard to use your head and be ready for combat in likely situations.

Anet should have made a smaller neutral borderland map a long time ago with 1 central keep, 3 native towers, and 3 camps. This could be used for very low pop servers and dynamically created on high pop servers when there are queues everywhere on weekend nights. It would even make a sound basis for official WvW based GvG, or maybe even a new PvP format that is a 2 hour WvW match between 3 teams or something.

Will they do anything like this though? No, we’ll still be playing the same maps when WvW is totally dead on every server probably, unless future expansions re-envision the format rather than just dumping more broken classes into it.

It’s not that big of a deal but creating alts in general is still far, far too difficult and time consuming. I would really like to have a mesmer for WvW but don’t want to drop a whole week of my free time on it + time for the gold too (already have 3 toons)…so pretty much been playing less and less since anet is clearly moving towards more restrictive rather than less.

Great fights with FA on TCBL tonight. It sorta felt like back to square one with so many new players running around on all sides tonight…I couldn’t even pick up the bags fast enough when KH was turtled in redlake tower repelling wave after wave of that monster zerg FA had for awhile.

I transferred from SoS to TC a little over a week ago after wrestling with stay or go conundrum most everyone was faced with. Many guilds on TC are PvX with specific times they organize to play as a guild 3-5 times a week or so. There’s no pressure with week long map assignments (and the ensuing burnout), ppt, or the score. Playing at your level of fun and commitment is the name of the game without all the ridiculous drama. You can play a few times a week with your guild, or play all the time and find guild groups to run with in TC’s community mumble.

TC could really use more commanders in your time slot too that have the experience to deal with War Machine’s zerging. Whether it’s turtling with siege, back capping where they aren’t, or taking them on in the field, I know AFS has experienced commanders that are capable of taking on that challenge. You may also find there is a great opportunity to recruit new members on TC with many unguilded players, and players with a renewed interest in WvW post-patch.

Thief…sure some classes may have superior AoE skills, but trick shot and cluster bomb just keep pumping big damage all day with no cooldown. Ballet dancer mode also enables you to make sure everyone who comes to the party stays at the party.

Thieves don’t have any highly desirable combo field initiators for zergs, but cluster bomb is the most spammable blast finisher by far. The SB in general is amazing for pumping damage and finishing off pockets of downed players. Thieves can also finish off runners and stragglers pretty easily. Using a stealth stack or c&d feeding, you can also easily move around to eliminate players on siege or try to gank commanders, both of which can turn the tide of an otherwise pitched battle.

“100 nade” engis are brutal in the hands of a good player. The build has everything you need for zerg combat…range, massive AoE damage, snares, and a damage spike that can actually be higher than frenzied 100 blades. It’s just a little light on condition removal and combo field initiators / finishers, and obviously it takes quite awhile to learn how to play an engi to maximum efficiency.

Rangers I think get a bad rap from the legions of useless noobs that choose the class. I won’t say anything besides that since it is the one class I have not experimented with at all.

I play a thief and welcome the change, assuming culling / render speed issues are also fixed and you will actually be able to see and target thieves for the full 3 seconds of revealed. This will make it much tougher for thieves to land C&D in solo / small group situations where we can’t just keep feeding off random people standing around, because you will actually have an opportunity to dodge and use targeted snares instead of just guessing.

It will also be an end to infinite continued C&D feeding off mobs with no revealed debuff…which is good and bad. It’s good because instagibbers can’t run in and down someone then easily leave, it’s bad because it adds to the zerg safety net.

Lastly, it will be slightly easier to kill thieves that mess up their hide in shadows activation or entry to shadow refuge.

Having said all that, I don’t think this will change a whole lot with S/D thieves that tend to spend more time out of stealth and use tactical strike + C&D for their main damage bump while leaving their target dazed for the entire revealed period anyway. I’ve thought for a long time that S/D is the most OP build for WvW all around because of it’s extreme positioning control and shutdown ability. Most players go for D/D because it requires no thinking at all and is win / lose in a few seconds.