Guild Wars 2

ToDblD.9413:

I do have it working with Masterful Reflection, strange about CD though it seems to be fluctuating .. First night I thought it was 3 seconds … Your saying 10 I have had 20 but regardless we were told no cool down. Let’s hope they answer

Huh. That’s odd.

I haven’t gone as far as to see whether projectiles are actually being reflected, but the second buff (the one that shows up in buff bar looking like the Elementalist’s Arcane Shield icon) doesn’t appear, and the visual effect on me is the same as the vanilla Distortion, not the traited Distortion.

I could be wrong, though. Admittedly, the cheese build I’m running it with has me frantically mashing my dodge key trying not to waste any Sigil of Stamina + Sigil of Energy procs…

Bumping this because I was trying out one of these builds (2/6/0/0/6) in WvW last night.

Cooldown is 10 seconds (splitting hairs here, since 10 isn’t 0, either) and worst of all, the distortion granted by this trait does not interact with Masterful Reflection (Illusions4).

Feels to me that the non-interaction is an oversight since they just fixed the distortion on signet activation this patch.

Ithilwen.1529:

That was my point, though, yes, I expressed it clumsily.

I agree. Phrasing it like a chest-thumping post about killing people who couldn’t kill you indeed detracted from the point you were trying to make.

Having a thread title indicating as much would have also been slightly less misleading.

PSA: Using the enemy spawn’s LA portal does not in fact take you to their LA.

I was actually surprised that something behaved properly.

Next try is going to have to be their EB gate :X

Quasi.8096:

Yeh I usually get that stuck state when I use flash while I’m stunned and immobilize, it’s like it perm keeps the immobilize, and I almost did a clean get away there too >:

I’ve been getting this a LOT since the immobilize stacking “fix” with any one of the 3 million mesmer blinks. I suspect it has something to do with the max stacking cap on immobilize duration.

There’s nothing more terrifying than trying to type out /dance in the middle of a zerg fight while running a glass mesmer build to get un-stuck.

Zietlogik.6208:

Happy New Years!

Trivia: we did that with a zerkers-only group. Told people to get out if they were running anything remotely responsible.

Ganking.2089:

Really glad that MUFN guild is deciding to finally come over from Tarnished Coast to help out the Anvil cause! You guys made the right choice picking our server. It will be fun having another guild to wvw with, and your extra 50 or so night time numbers will really be a help.
We look forward to seeing you guys in wvw today/tonight. It will give our other guilds a chance to have some much earned rest while we observe your prowess.

Because 90v5 will be a well-deserved and (most importantly) much-needed upgrade from 40v5, right?

ITT: people who don’t understand that telling people on the internet what irritates you is literally asking for it to happen with far more frequency than before.

JonPeters.5630:

• Symbol of Swiftness: This skill now applies 4 seconds of swiftness per pulse, rather than 8 seconds if you have no swiftness and 1 second if you have swiftness.

How likely is it for us to see the Mesmer’s Temporal Curtain focus4 skill inherit this behavior in some form?

In its current state, even if we have 0.00001s of swiftness remaining when we pass through it, we get no additional swiftness. The only time this skill would function properly in granting swiftness is if whoever passing through it currently had no swiftness.

Fun fact: this specific behavior/bug contributed to the price of Centaur and Air runes and their subsequent collapse when the new Traveler runes came out.

I haven’t been into the JP at all in weeks, but I still think that it’s beneficial to all servers to kill and grief any fresh PvE players that are in the JP for the achievement and nothing else.

Killing off any interest in WvW in those people just out chasing carrots is ultimately healthier for everyone’s WvW populations; if we were in it for the money or drops we’d be farming PvE instead. We want bloodthirsty people in WvW, not carrot-chasers.

All the fresh ‘_ Invader’ corpses are the best ones to dance and sit on.

The faster they’re out of WvW, the faster things can go back to business as usual with fewer glass cannon rally bait PvE longbow+brown bear rangers tagging along and getting everyone killed.

For what it’s worth, originally we only wanted to hold GoM Bay for the tick…

Spazzoni.1703:

Meh. The Sea/Asians do their job very well here on IOJ.

That wasn’t meant as a dig, actually.

We’ve all long since accepted the reality of everything getting capped during our enormous coverage gap.

What makes us (well, me at least) happy is that your night presence was large enough to keep HoD from ever building much of a nighttime lead whatsoever.

Spazzoni.1703:

SF deserves second place….

Sadly, that’ll only happen if your Oceanics “do their jobs” and keep both HoD and SF at 0-30PPT all night :X

King Amadaeus.8619:

SteelEclipse.3614:

Wow, SF is so awesome!

I heard SF commanders are so awesome—she tried to enter our tower instead got ram burned?

- SF commanders like to get ram burnt.

Even more interesting is your lack of opening chests, and apparent need to hide your utility skills.

They must be OP.

Bull’s Charge, Endure Pain, and Frenzy.

Prove me wrong

Something’s a little wrong with this map…

Can’t quite put my finger on it, though…

Ynot.8397:

Should we send in ET too?

Nah, ET is too highly populated.

Let’s try TC/AR/DR instead :P

First round of popcorn is on me.

melodey.4652:

And x/pistol does not equal shatter.

I said sword/pistol, not x/pistol :P

Scepter/pistol is actually quite a fun combo, but is too single-target to belong in a zerg. Being fairly reliant on maintaining distance puts a pretty big asterisk on a small group comp lacking in control effects, too.

Anyway, I was just pointing out that people don’t know when to hit a mesmer and when to laugh at our silly attempts at generating clones and making a big stinking mess of a distraction between important cooldowns. He brought up that mesmers of all classes had the least right to complain about stunlocks, but hammer warriors of all people should have less trouble with clone dump builds as well with real easy access to a gap closing big-hit AoE spell. I spend most of my time playing shatter mesmer and hammer warrior, though, so maybe having so much time logged on both roles helps a bit in knowing how to counter one with the other.

Plains of Ashes.5941:

While Im on I would really like to call out the HoD night crew and the NA morning crew for their great work in helping make this comeback week happen. It was a server-wide effort around the clock for those that chose to fight (often outmanned) while the majority went off to lootfest, but our night-crew and NA morning crew really did a great job!

Thanks guys! /cheers

-Plains@HoD

You forgot to also thank SF’s nearly nonexistent night crew and overpopulation of employed players for that easy PPT during those times

Mepheles.2087:

Never said you were wearing staff, I said especially Staff. Even without staff, hammer still won’t touch you unless we force you to use CD’s successfully while wading through 100k clones because every action spawns one. :P Also, we fought 3 Mesmers from your server who hid behind all their clones while actually doing no real damage, but merely stealthing and moving around, but it didn’t matter, since we could never stay on them long enough. Talk about pathetic :P just saying.

P.S. Mesmers are the last people who should be complaining about stun lock since it affects them the least, and it is still a kitten strategy with Skullcrack + 100swag combo. Those people are terrible. Hammer itself is all around terrible.

Umm, wat?

Mesmers who don’t have a staff as one of their weapon sets are free kills, even as a hammer warrior. GS mesmers are free kills, no exceptions, full stop. Mesmers running clone health signet that you catch casting any sort of glamour field are also free kills.

Only time where everything generates a clone is 20+ points in precision for dodge roll clone. Scepter main hand gives the impression of clones everywhere because 3rd attack in autoattack chain drops a clone with a ranged attack. Move around a bit and you’ll see the clones still hold still. Scepter/focus+GS is an idealistic PvE combo that expects to be able to stay ranged. Pop Adrenaline Rush and hit the mesmer often with Earthshaker and it’s GG.

Only time a decently tough hammer warrior should have issues facing a mesmer is if the mesmer is running sword/pistol or sword/sword with alternate staff, which usually indicates some sort of shatter build. 99% of statistics are made up on the spot, but 80% of the time, all the shatter mesmers I’ve run into on WvW are bad 100% of the time and lose matchups they should have easily won. Stop holding onto those adrenaline strikes for such a long time if you’re on a hammer and most mesmers melt.

I will agree, though, that mesmers have the least right to complain (they still should, though) about stunlock builds. There’s zero excuse to run anything less than two stun breakers when you have things like Blink, Mirror Images, and Decoy at your disposal (all with ~30s cooldown). If your commander wants you to be a toolbox with 3 glamour fields, you can tell him to kindly stuff it three miles up his. A dead toolbox is useless to the zerg.

Also: DH and HoD, you guys need to sweep towers better… The last 3 nights, I was duo roaming with a thief whenever either of you guys contested a tower. We’d permastealth inside while you guys immediately left without sweeping, letting us take the tower after RI came down. They were all running in mixed groups that were likely disorganized, but there were quite a few [SE], [VLK], [FKB], [BRL], and [Abys] tags that took a tower then immediately waypointed.

Gaile Gray.6028:

No, a few people received a second gift. Not a lot, but a few. This was a factor of how the distribution was made, and how the fix was rolled out. It’s not an intentional double-gifting, and you got everything to which you are entitled and of course we’re sorry for any confusion that this caused.

Not entirely sure how “intentional double-gifting” would be defined, then.

Last night, when the patch hit, literally everyone on my server’s voice chat who had received a first present received a second one.

Some people are now sitting on 20+ Birthday Boosters and wastes of bank space Mini Queen Jennahs.

Pffff learn to share. You guys have it all night anyway.

Like Forty Seven Ninjas.6982:

LOL it was worth a shot….

Kinda like how some [Abys] guys think windowed mode is worth a shot, too?

AggieTechGuy.4901:

Great week everyone
Something I also noticed with you all is that when CoSA isn’t in WvW, you guys really drop off. I’m sure you have other good commanders and guilds, but it seems to be a problem that most of your good WvW players are all in the same guild.

That’s actually a little of column A and a little of column B.

While it’s mildly coincidental there were a lot of CoSA tags logging off at around that time, the cold hard truth is that you got to witness the coverage gap brick wall that we have as US primetime ends. We’ve known from since before we dropped down into T8 that there’s no transition between primetime numbers and skeleton crew for us; we hit the same brick wall at roughly the same time every night and 90% of our numbers just vanish.

The reason why GoM felt so outmanned this week (at least during the times I was on) was because we made a concerted effort to hit hard during your relative coverage gap during US West primetime, just like how we expected IoJ’s (and to a lesser extent GoM’s) night presence to bend us over the table.

The coverage gap isn’t something we can fix without months of hard work and recruiting, but it’s something that we’re at least learning how to lessen the impact of when the opportunity presents itself.

That said, after a couple weeks in a row of euthanizing underpopulated servers, this week was a blast. Echoing what someone said barely before Sunday was even over, I hope this matchup happens a lot more often.

Sigh, another week of hoping for a balanced matchup but instead getting another probable roflstomp.

We end up with either a roflstomp or matchups where we get to go ‘welp. time to get nightcapped all week even if we do well when people are awake’… Haven’t really ever gotten a matchup yet where winning or losing was determined by whether we worked for it or not and not by coverage or population difference.

sephiroth.4217:

O Good God! wall of superior ballistas saves the day!

How it looked from the other side

katz.8376:

and his forces tended to fall apart when facing equal or greater numbers.

And lesser numbers as well, so long as any sort of enemy numbers existed :X

For old times’ sake lol

Phoenixfudge.5290:

Most definitely the dredge. All the mercenary groups are pretty much exactly the same with the exception of the freaking dredge.

The fact that the dredge themselves are an exploit and need to be deleted from the game aside, they can take a camp that isn’t fully upgraded by themselves with zero human intervention. Only time they have trouble is a camp with four upgrades, and sometimes if the dolyak bringing supplies is far enough down the road for the dredge to miss it (and its guards) the dredge squad can take a fully upgraded camp as well.

May as well make it a score update

I’ve opened about 40 chests since those rewards went out and I’m still at a 50% rate for rares. I’m still chewing through my backlogged reward chests, but for every level I gain, one chest contains a rare and the other contains a masterwork.

Then again, I also got my Zap after 30g of rares into the Mystic Toilet, so the eternal speculation over a hidden Luck stat may yet continue.

As long as the deviation cap numbers get tweaked like they promised they’d do, there’s nothing wrong with this system except forgetting to order the servers within the matchups by color.

It’s inherently broken to allow the highest rated server to own the most defensible keep on EB and easiest SM treb spots and for the lowest rated server to have an uphill battle.

I understand the matchup variety was institued in part to pacify the PvE kittenheads’ incessant whining about map completion for the legendary weapons that they deserve, but regardless of how each matchup came to be, top rated should always be green, lowest rated should always be red, and that leaves the third team with blue.

Whether it was intentional or not, EB was designed such that each color had defensive advantages/disadvantages and used the team colors to assign those strategic nuances to the correct teams.

Mepheles.2087:

impossible to WvW right now kitten dragon bash taking our peeps away, can’t even hold our home towers against NSP all the while, the kiddies are screaming for their toy castle back…. oh and our BL is getting nuked.

Absolutely nothing to do with the dependance on wide-FoV becoming slightly less relevant due to reduced arrow cart range, right?

melodey.4652:

Before I threw on my tag, we were commanderless and staring at a zerg of SF playing with Omegas in a field covered by your ACs. I’m sure you weren’t all rallied there the whole time, but when I pushed down a few times on my guard only to encounter AC fire from the hill between QL and SM along with a lot more SF than you’re claiming here.

Just to set the record straight, we had exactly 3 ACs.

One was built out in the middle of nowhere out of boredom because about 8 of you guys were standing on the first ridge from SM and turning and running as soon as 2-3 of us took a step forward.

One was all the way back at QL’s door, and the third was on the nearest turret of QL where two trebs were. Each AC (I suspect deliberately) draws multiple different red circles on the ground, but as a commander yourself, I’m sure you already knew that the combat log doesn’t lie when there’s only 1 damage tick per AC per second.

We had about 12 people there total and 6 [KING] members joined us later all of whom were in golems.

We weren’t really even planning on taking SM to begin with. We wanted an open field fight, but didn’t get one so we tried to force the issue. The response (or lack thereof) led to us going ‘puppy it lets just see if we can take it’.

Mepheles.2087:

Yes, offering gold to get us to come out and play, how….distasteful. not considering the fact that last night SF’s mindless zergmind wiped us twice with superior numbers. We’re not stupid, you know.

My mass invisibility (AoE limit: 10) cloaked all but two of our “superior numbers” last night.

I’ll pull up the video when I get back home from work because that’s literally the only way you’ll still choose not to believe me.

Also: it was only twice because the moment that Abys/BURN zerg saw 3 SFs running towards them they’d make a beeline back to SM’s arrow cart coverage and wasn’t content to stop running until they were covered by at least 3 carts.

That ended up being exploitable later as we sent 5 people—guaranteed to make 30-40 people retreat—to flank your zerg, prompting the entire mass to retreat through a chokepoint straight into our zerg from another direction. Fearing the vet oakheart whose binding roots has no AoE limit into that zerg was also hilarious.

Given that sPVP players kitten and puppy about 2v3 already, I’d hate to see what happens when they have to deal with an 8v40. Regardless of skill, there’s a point at which a smaller group putting out literally maximum DPS possible is still outclassed by a mob of upscaleds mashing their foreheads on the trackpads on their “gaming” laptops with their cursor over the 1 button.

Flappybob.1950:

silverfire.2547:

Speaking of BC…

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M7RhqK7SvN8

Here you go, katz

Excuse me while I spend a week putting together the enormous montage of CoSa kills that Mend puts out every night. How about if you guys want a challenge you actually come face us in your bl, rather than give up after 2 hours of us destroying you in open field battles with half your numbers.

All this hate towards BC, and these apparent “bounties” are sad, of course people will be burst down by a zerg focus firing them because of a “bounty”. You accomplish nothing besides making yourself look like a kitten when posting a new video every night.

TLDR – Cut the crap, play the game, respect your opponents.

I’m not sure where you’re getting the impression that I’m not playing the game. I’m certainly enjoying myself every night on WvW. If anything this whole exercise in bounties has helped everyone on the server mumble enjoy the game a lot more — we’re constantly joking with each other about who was the latest idiot (usually me) to zergdive just to try to get someone spiked on video/screenshotted.

The point of all this wasn’t even to prove that we’re better players or anything, which seems to be what your post seems to assume we’re doing. It’s literally just posting enough proof to get me my payment.

If someone’s putting up the silver to get you paid by the head for CoSA spikes, by all means go and post them. If someone really dislikes us so much that someone’s willing to put up a modest monetary reward for making our lives a little more difficult, then go for it. Hell, I’ll even check for you to see if I have any videos of you spiking me.

Besides, at least you’ll have an easier time finding people to kill that way if a bounty encompasses a 900-man guild…

Finishing this week off (won’t be on before reset) with a couple more bounties to collect on.

Speaking of BC…

Here you go, katz

Pooka.3420:

ranger

Deserved it.

I rest my case, your Honor.

It really does feel like GS/LB ranger is slowly approaching FotM status, but since it’s sharing the spotlight with a gradual increase in SD/DD thief, it probably doesn’t feel like you’re suffocating in them like it did with pre-nerf DD eles and confusion mesmers.

Mildly matchup-related — just collecting some more on a bounty.

@katz: I almost got a certain HoD commander last night, but his 3am Pacific time zerg of 30 said no to me

Real timestamps are non-2038-safe 32-bit Epoch times.

All of this DD/MM/YYYY or MM/DD/YYYY stuff is pure blasphemy.

I can’t help wonder if these servers who have dealt with a twelve-week old matchup finally understand the pain we felt in T8 when we had to deal with the same old bootstomping (whether it was the giving or receiving end) for fourteen weeks. On top of that we had to deal with remarks of not having deserved the tier shakeup despite evidence to the contrary.

I might just be too optimistic about the human race, though, and people are too self-entitled to see further than their own misery—even if it’s the same exact thing they assumed was a non-issue when it applied to others.

If we’re already talking about horses, things have escalated way too quickly.

Had quite the bountiful weekend

I wish I actually ran into more ET groups, but since a couple of us want you guys to take second place, we’ve been trying to focus more on HoD :X

In the interest of spicing things up, Filthy put up a bounty of 10s for each screenshot of [PK] getting spiked by an SF.

Totally gonna spend a lot of time in a borderland

Thank Ungood for any undue hate you receive this week!

I Monk For L O V E.7528:

This is what Sorrows Furnace and I decided to do in EB with our superior numbers last night, hope you all enjoy it and ill miss you guys, maybe…

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bto4w8SBSbo

WAT. You missed the part where I was dodge rolling like mad on the inner steps of their spawn while I was in karka form for like a whole minute

That’s literally the reason why they’re doing it.

The intent is to force you to evaluate whether it’s more important to stack that stat or to get the extra gimmick that comes with the infusion. If stacking the stat is more important in your build, then losing that extra bit of guard killer is the tradeoff you have to make to do it.

If that extra % of guard killer is really worth that much to you, then maybe trading that extra bit of precision for a little bit of vitality might be worth it to you.

Either way, the whole point of the offensive vs defensive infusion was to force people to consider tradeoffs.

Eliandal.8735:

Why should this be any different than the 2 champion chests (killed the tree today – got 4!!! badges for a 20 minute fight) or the ‘new’ and ‘improved’ JP that won’t affect queues – did it today and got 2 greens, 2 pieces of siege and 7 badges – that’s just sad for a once per day account lockout period.

4 badges from the champ spirit is already 4 badges too many for a PvE means of earning badges.

7 badges from the jump puzzle is also 7 badges too many. I’d prefer if the JP chest provided nothing but siege.

Pretty sure magic find/gold find has only ever affected drops from kills and not chests.

Once upon a time, there was this game called Counter-Strike that had a maximum field of view of 90 degrees. Attempting to stretch your viewport beyond that in either direction would start eating away at the opposite axis. Trying to stretch out the window like so many screenshots have shown would have hit a cap, and then trying to stretch it even further would have reduced your vertical FoV to maintain the maximum allowable view.

In fact, in order to get a wider field of view, you had to enable cheats on the server.

And this was a game made over a decade ago. There are no justifiable reasons why it shouldn’t be implemented in a modern game that has any possibility having to deal with PvP balance.

DevonCarver.5370:

In the next build we’ll be implementing exits that allow you to turn around and leave through the portals behind you. Hopefully that will help.

I hope that when this goes live, it’s implemented in such a shortsighted way that those exits take you back to the keep — that way I can sit in the JP with portal on my bar if my keep is about to be taken and then take the portal back after the situation cools down there.

Ynot.8397:

You do know that people who play often in T8 do not have 25k kills, right? I have 9k I think and i play quite a bit.

I’d have to disagree. With zero time playing ele, I was at 17,000 kills before we got out of T8.