Guild Wars 2

The zerg disagrees

Some classes can actually get into the camps, so the invulnerability isn’t for nothing.

Just step back 100 yards and gank the players that run out on their own, if you get your sad kicks from spawncamping.

Stability can be hard to get.

May I ask how you determine the right distance, purely on sight or is there some ‘trick’ to it?

Why not join an existing guild yourself?

I want it just to shoot unlucky (and probably very surprised) Asura mechanics at my enemies.

I’ve used the related ‘tactic’ of flamethrowing through the gate myself, but TBH I think that no damage should pass through a gate at all. Of course it need to go both ways (or well, it needs to not go both ways)

+1 (either way, tbh), not to avoid clutter, but I’d like to have a quick overview of the discussions specific to our current WvW match

increasing difficulty each time when the players win sounds awesome, probably with a bit of jitter thrown in (so it doesn’t become too predictable).

Who does not want to be around when that dragon wipes hundreds of players?

Now that would be a story to tell your grandalts.

Seems to me that the balancing issues on LoL are mostly because they keep adding heroes, which offsets all existing ones on a regular basis (as well as leave less time to balance out existing ones). This is obviously part of their business model so it is to be expected, but it is quite an important factor in balancing.

One thing that both teams have probably learned (but even more probably already knew) is that balancing is hard Even a bugfix can be a buff or nerf with a lot of impact due to combinations, and every change will have a lot of players convinced that the devs are just out to get them.

i was afraid to ‘misuse’ siege initially as well, just learn from others, see where they place it, how they use it, and don’t be afraid to ask for advice. Sure you’ll get the occasional fool saying ‘u r doin it wrong’ but I have found that most people are very supporting and helpful.

having 3 teams itself is great, but I do agree that the theory that #2 and #3 would fight #1 is wrong. And I agree that the scoring system is a least significantly to blame for this; #2 would rather attack #3 because it’s much easier to score there (and second place is better than 3rd if 1st is no longer an option).

perhaps this is automatically resolved if servers even balance out, but in the past two matchups on my server, the game for 1st has pretty much been over on by monday, so #2 tends to try and keep #3 from scoring, instead of attacking #1.

I does sound like a mesmer portal, an often-used tactic. But shouldn’t the portal disappear when he dies though? (one possibility is that they went through before he died, and the culling problem popped in)

I have an engineer and have been mostly playing WvW since lvl 15-20 somewhere. Your gear scales too, but is obviously not comparable to really Geared 80’s. But WvW is not about 1v1 or 5v5, but about relative group sizes, positioning, and siege weapons. So you can still be very much of use, as long as you know when to stand and when to run.

It also depends on what your secondary goals are; if you want to level fast, find a zerg and go capping points. If you want to help your world, you can be a scout (even a defensive one, stay and hang around at locations likely to be attacked to call for backup if it is so) or speed up yaks, or do upgrades. The latter don’t really net you much in experience or karma though, and the last costs you money, but they do help a lot for the rest (it is always good to know enemy location and numbers). And of course you can man siege equipment

It does get easier as you level up, even sub-80, because you simply have more skills and traits to get you into and out of trouble (in the case of my engineer, I switch most of my skills and some of my traits around depending on whether I’m running into a battle, going to defend a sieged tower or keep, running a long distance, or scouting around).

But IMHO map positioning, and even more, communication, is way more important than whether you can beat an individual opponent.

I chose the engineer for the turrets, but have found other builds that I currently like even more, so I’m not too troubled with the current state of them (although perhaps the current state is why I ‘left’ them in the first place).

Perhaps also related, I mostly play WvW, and really haven’t found a way to make them useful there, except perhaps the net in case of a jump by one or two opponents. Maybe someone can enlighten me (I still love the idea of a turret engineer)

In PvE (except for dungeons), I found a full-turret build, together with drop supplies, pretty efficient; you get up to eight turrets down and before those mobs know which one to hit first they’re down. I can imagine that in sPvP they are pretty useful for holding or attacking capture points, but I have not played any sPvP yet.

But in WvW I have so far found that the battles are too dynamic for stationary turrets to be useful, and the supply drop is mostly useful for the knockdown and the heals, not the turrets (still, one of the best elites btw). Probably even if they were movable (you’d just be busy moving them around all the time, might as well get single shots in).

No real suggestions as to how to change that, though. Perhaps there should be a ‘move turrets’ trait or kit skill, that makes your turrets move to a target location. But doing so in any sane way would need more buttons. But perhaps even working deployable turrets with a decent range would make this a lot better.

Hmm, an all-kit setup. Hadn’t even considered that. The one problem I foresee is that I already get lost in buttons, and in a panic hit the wrong one, even with just 1 or 2 kits :p Gonna try that though.

Whatever they intended, I think there should be some reason not to run into multiple enemies like a headless chicken. If repair costs are to prevent that, they don’t work Far too many flies seemingly content to run up to the closest enemy gate and die there.

I spent way, way more money on upgrades and siege than on repair, so TBH I do not see the problem (and I was easily able to buy all trait books). And I die more often than is probably necessary too. But I certainly never had to grind to recoup money for repairs.

ah, thank you. I guess I did unknowingly make use of that

Can’t find the threads right now, but have seen at least two of them; one actually had a video of it happening, and responses from someone who did this (or one of their buddies). The culprits are suspected of being spies from other servers, only out to starve resources. They claimed it was just for some builder achievement (but then, why not do it at a camp? So at the very least it’s passive griefing.). Very annoying indeed.

I was wondering about the freeze grenade thing as well

+1 on that repair costs are nothing.

I’ve almost exclusively leveled from 10-ish to 69 (current) in WvW as well, and the cash-flow has been positive for me too (even after dropping 40s into tower upgrades today just to see it all get burned by a massive attack. Sorry just had to get that off my chest).

How do we have more players at day by your logic? Its canadians playing at night as far as i understood and french europeans at day. At best, we are as many players as they are, we do not have more players than them at any time.

I’m not saying you do, I’m saying you might. Do you have numbers? I’m on an english-speaking servers and there sure aren’t any americans on during the night.

Last night, while we were being wiped of the entire map, a fellow worlder was convinced that the two other worlds were playing together. A quick look at the map showed that this wasn’t the case; unless surrendering both EB and their own home garrisson was part of the deal :p The 2nd world was just beating us as well because we were easy pickings. He was still convinced they were working together, because he had read somewhere that it happened.

This has nothing to do with potential night-capping problems (apart from being outnumbered, but that isn’t just at night for us), but it does show that some people complain about things without even knowing the numbers. And since we (or at least I) don’t know the numbers in your case, I’m saying you might be outnumbering them during the day.

I like 2 and 3, though I would probably suggest making desparation bonus a combination of map control and player numbers.

Not sure if 1 helps (I saw someone today who claimed he wouldn’t upgrade our keep because ‘a noob guild’ had claimed it, because apparently he was sure that that guild wouldn’t upgrade it either. I understand being annoyed for other reasons, but this didn’t really make much sense to me. Maybe someone can enlighten me ).

The problem I see with upgrading is not just that it costs your money for little direct rewards; it is also that there appears to be no extra incentive to then defend that location for the other players (apart from, well, losing the location in the first place). This is especially true for camps; so maybe, in addition to 1, locations should also be worth more points or something.

I think I do agree that such a system would be nice. Not sure about the exact details though.

“You are saying that when you take a tower is is worth 10 points. When I take a tower it is worth less. That DOES mean your time would be more valuable than mine.”

As a counterargument, one could also state that if you are heavily outnumbered, there are two issues;
1. capturing anything takes longer. Not only because you have less people for siege equipment, less people to stomp on the guards, and more opponents to defeat per player. You have even less people because
2. You’ll need every man you have to defend that one tower. All ten of them.
(oh, 3. a lot of players go and do something else, and rightfully so, but that makes the problem worse)

So yes, if you are roflstomping through a map because you really do have 5 times the numbers your opponents do, in the current system, your time is worth more than theirs.

But yeah, perhaps we should wait a little bit more to see if it evens out. But so far it has happened after reset twice in a row, and we are already pretty low on the list…

If they have way more players at night, you may just have more players during the day too, so pure part-of-the-day map domination isn’t really anything to go by. And even if they do have full coverage day and night, in a way they are better (in spending way more time). Not saying that is a good way

What I would be interested in (even if it doesn’t affect the ranking), is pure player-hours spent in WvW next to the points total. Even more than real buffs when you are outnumbered everywhere.

And secondly, I’d like to see some incentive for the world in second place to work with the world in third place; right now they start capping the already outnumbered 3rd quite often.

lots of servers with no chance of winning at all due to lack of players. Queue QQ? Transfer and even it out a bit. More fun for you, more fun for us on the low-wvw-pop servers.

what an incredibly bad time most most of us europeans :/

As someone already said, I suspect they fear balancing issues, and may need to seriously nerf the kits themselves. I am not 80 yet, so I don’t know how crippled the current situation really is.

As far as a credible nontechnical ‘explanation’ goes, why wouldn’t kits ‘fit on’ your weapons (e.g. grenades+rifle = grenade launcher) and hence receive their stats as well?

(and wouldn’ kitten then be even cooler if the kit’s skills would actually mesh and depend on your weapons skills? Guess it’s a bit late in the game for that, and I also guess we are supposed to have enough customizability already as well)

it has its uses in wvw, and I quite regularly deploy it despite my grenades (but I haven’t levelled enough yet for the grenadier trait); mainly the heal and knockback attacks; when trying to slow down a zerg that is attacking over a bridge you can heal your fellow defenders a bit while being in a relatively safe place yourself, and you can shoot a few people off the bridge. And when assaulting towers, I either set it up in a relatively safe pos for healing people manning the rams, or set it up near a tower and try to knock a few opponents down into the assaulting group. In the latter case it does tend to get shot down quite quickly, but if you treat it as the disposable thing it is that’s not too bad, and you should be able to at least get a few shots off (then go back to spamming grenades).

I do agree that the range should be longer, and it’s probably not worth 30 points; maybe it says something about the other elite skills, but I really only use this and the supply drop in WvW (and IMO supply drop is really not that useful when assaulting for anything more than slightly annoying people). I think it should also be possible to use non-weapon skills while attached to the mortar, and/or ‘detach’ automatically if you move.

I love ‘em, I love running into a heavily CC’ed area, patching up a downed mate, then blasting out with me boots just as my health reaches two digits, and even if you then don’t have enough time to clear conditionals and drop, you’re usually well out of the danger zone and can easily be revived yourself; I think not having to look and click before you fly helps in this scenario (and is more in the spirit of the thing,; “Ohshi…blastoff!”).

The only problem I have with it is the limited reliability; it does indeed not always work, and if it doesn’t you do have a problem. It works more often than not though, and I always bring them when running to a tower assault.

2 hours every day? I must admit that I have played more so far on average, but if 2 hours every day is called casual we need more words; I consider ‘casual’ a few hours per week. Also, I would imagine if you only have a few hours you do not want to spend them all powerleveling.

Anyhow, one of the design pillars was that you could level to 80 by only playing WvW; disallowing sub-80 in WvW would certainly break that.

I also disagree that you should be able to shred through an opponent just because you spent more time with the game; sure you may have some advantage, but I don’t think it should be as big as it is now; the real advantage you should get is from actual real-life experience playing, and simply playing better, not because you can down them by hitting 1 a couple of times. Of course, whatever solution there would be, there should certainly not be a penalty for reaching 80. I think changing the way equipment scaling works sounds fine, so then the real difference would be that the end-level gear is just better, but not so incredibly much, and that you don’t have all traits and skills yet. That seems fine to me.

That said, there are still things you can do even if you can’t win in direct fights; support, repair duty, scouting, joining zergs (mostly support again), soloing single guards, or attacking the weather nodes. They may not be the most exciting or thankful things to do, but you do not have to be bored

(personally I think a bigger issue is player numbers, yesterday we had a moment where we were outmanned everywhere; as soon as we got a bit of a group effort going all our points were attacked at the same time, and after that every point was guarded so we couldn’t split up to keep more than 1 thing at a time; of course it was well-played by the opponents, but it is just not a lot of fun to be outnumber on all fronts, and the situation makes itself worse because a lot of players go and do something else then, and I can’t blame em for that)

Dunno about the other classes, but with the tool kit’s shield you can certainly get into any tower that is besieged, then switch to either flamethrower to blast the ram through the door, or IMO a bit more fun, start lobbing grenades (and use the radiation field), down the wall. The mortar also helps in some situations. You won’t be able to do most direct single target damage, but with a range of AoE and combo fields, I think they are quite good at defending.

Permaswiftness has already been mentioned, with that you can cover quite some ground relatively quickly, to make supply runs or just to get to other places where you are needed. Or just scout.

Also, the rocket boots give you a good escape mechanism when charging gates or reviving mates in a heavily attacked area. With the one problem that they don’t always work :p

I have not tried out a flamethrower build, and with the specs I have been playing it is harder to do a breakout to down enemy siege weaponry.

I also like to use the mortar when attacking; it tends to get destroyed pretty fast since the range is woeful for something called a mortar, but you should be able to get a few shots in, and with a well-aimed 5 shot you can quite often knock enemies from towers into the eager hands of your buddies. And you get a new mortar after two minutes anyway.

When unaware and jumped by more than one opponent, I do tend to die quite quickly (this may be normal, or I may just suck and panic too quickly). I also found in 1v1 battles that there are enemies that could interrupt everything i tried to do. Again I may just suck

I’ve been using it ever since I was able to, but I would like to comment that it is 10 points spent in a trait line you might not otherwise use, and the use of a trait slot. So yeah, it’s permanent swiftness, at the cost of a lot of clicking, a different potentially useful trait, and a possible non-kit build, so personally I don’t consider this something that should be nerfed.

Oh and I tend to start battles by dropping a health kit instead of blasting someone in the face, but that is entirely my own fault

In I went again, getting more nervous with every step. I ran into a solo enemy, and lo and behold, we did not fight! As it turns out, for some people there is this unwritten rule of not attacking each other in the puzzles; but as I talked to others, most had given up on this rule because there were attacked themselves. So my new resolve was to never attack unless the enemy seemed aggressive (this does give you the drawback of almost never having the initiative, but hey, let’s hope that karma thing goes two ways).

There was a group of enemies that were agressive, but not really camping (at least they moved away); I revived a mate, and while I was doing so two more joined us. This gave us enough manpower to oppose the foes and we beat them a little bit further. The way clear for us to move on, but I again I lost sight of my new friends quite quickly.

In a later part I ran into another enemy, this time engaged in a fight with a solo of my own world. I do not know who started the fight, but as I walked in the room, the enemy just downed my fellow, and I jumped in to help him. This was easy, since my downed unnamed mate had significally wounded him already. After that it was easy going for a while, did not run into anyone, but falling somewhere again I did lose sight of my new mate.

Some bits further I suddenly saw a few more enemies; a group of three, for which I would certainly be no match all by myself. I do not know if they would have attacked, but I did not like my chances, so I patiently and cowardly hid in a corner until they were gone, helped by one of the fountains that make you invisible, and on I went.

Now the end was in sight! I could almost taste the sweet sweet victory, but there was one last enemy here. I could almost see the choice he was making in his eyes, and was facing the same one. Do we want to fight each other and risk dying so close to the end? Or do we want to leave each other alone and both claim the prize? Trying to act as non-aggressive as I could, I tried motioning that we could go forward, and the opponent did the same. So together we ran the final stretch.

The prize from the chest at the end wasn’t actually worth that much, but man has this been fun.

Some lessons learned:
- It is fun! Reaching the end is the goal, but don’t forget the fun!
- Make use of whatever help the environment gives you (like the mystical fountains)
- Not every opponent is aggressive
- You can usually see if the traps are guarded, and you learn quite soon (usually by dying) where the natural ambush points are
- Yes, there are griefers, and perhaps it is a question of luck whether they are there or not, but in my experience they did move on after a while. You may have to try again at another day or time if it is too bad.
- You are usually not the only one of your team there, if there are griefers, or groups of enemies in general, team up!

If I had to improve anything, I’d say
- Make these independent from WvW region queues
- Let people spawn at the entrance of the long ones (those with independent loading screens)

I am loving these, and I am certainly going to run it again, and try out the others.

OK, so I did the Eternal Battlegrounds one yesterday, let me share my experiences.

Disclaimer: I am not the best PvP player around; far from it, I lose more 1v1’s than I win at this point (I especially have to figure out how not to get ground into pulp within a second when jumped, and how to beat enemies that interrupt my every move). I also tend to run around solo as I hate to wait for people to get organized and my friends aren’t online at the times I get to play.

So yesterday I queued up for EB, and after a while I got in. First I checked the general WvW status, we controlled Stonemist and every location in ‘our’ part of the map. So I figured it would be ok to go and try out the puzzle.

This was a new location for me and it was quite exciting to start exploring, especially with the knowledge that enemies might be lurking around every corner. And yes, there were. Quite soon, you have to cross a bridge with a log trap that pushes you off. The very first time I ran across it without a problem, but I misjumped quite soon after that, and had to do it again. This time a big wooden log came seemingly out of nowhere and pushed me down. So back up again, and I discovered the trap has to be controlled, and you can see whether there are people at the controls. I tried getting passed it but no luck, after a few attempts me and the fellow soul having the same problem got jumped by another group of enemies, and we all died.

Take 2. After getting to the same point, I carefully checked whether enemies were at the trap controls. Sweet relief! It was empty. So on I went, trying to find the next part of the puzzle. A few ways ahead, there is a part where you have to climb a lot over narrow ledges. Afraid of being jumped, and being the coward that I am, I left a few push-back traps on these ledges myself, laughing evilly as I did so. But karma got me; as I got up to the final ledge, two enemies were waiting for me out of sight, got the jump on me, and before I could even scream I was down. I did not immediately teleport back, but hung around dead to see their modus operandi for a bit; they generally either stayed out of sight or AoE’d the ledges. They also looked like fully geared 80’s.

At that time I gave up for a bit, and rejoined the battlefield (capped back a few camps, and helped defend against a few attacks on our homelands, as the enemy was creeping in and it looked like our side needed every hand). After a while the attacks slowed, and everything seemed safe again, so it was time to fight the fear and tackle that puzzle for real!

(arg, forum post length limits! To be continued…)

forced, forced, I play mostly WvW, should I complain that for 100% i need to go into the PvE area?

I have all 4 maps in WvW at 100% now, and I didn’t even try hard, just played regular WvW and sometimes making a little detour (with one big run to finish the last 10% as our world happen to own the entire map).

Then again, I’m not much of a 100% type in general so I really don’t care too much.

If anything, I would be inclined to agree that these things take up valuable slots for people fighting the actual battles. But so far the boss battles in eternal seem to do that more than the achievement target (go away, Grub!).

In fact I was looking quite forward to do some jousting in a jumping area.

heh, now that would be awesome, and engineer engineering shoulder straps and running around with a turret on his back

I dunno if it’s normal for all professions, but I’ve been able to solo skill challenge fights with multiple enemies that were 3 levels above my lil’ ol engineer, using only turrets (including the supply drop). And I have not even gotten to the point where I look at actual armor builds (still at a phase where I just put on whatever I find that gives me the highest armor rating). So I certainly don’t feel like I’m very underpowered in PvE.

Yes, I tried flaming through gates yesterday, and immediately died twice from retaliation. Luckily there were more people there to revive me, and after that I got a bit more careful.

Why even level to 80 if you don’t enjoy the game itself? I mean, if you don’t have anything to do at 80, why would you consider experience point rewards the main purpose of playing?

The way I see it, the game, and quests, and dungeons should be rewarding in and of themselves; exp, karma, gold, and gear are just bonuses… (with the one exception that you need to level to be able to reach more of the game). Maybe that gets boring after a while, and maybe that happens to be around the time you hit 80, but those two things should have no direct causality.

hours?! Wow I did not know it was that bad. As a mostly casual player, that would force me not to play WvW at all. So far I’ve played rather long sessions (and almost all WvW) but waiting for hours to do what you want (and having to reserve time for it) is what drove me away from WoW.

If such a problem exists and persists, Anet should start considering creating extra joinable servers for hardcore WvW guilds, not directly tied to their pve world, and a separate ranking for those. But please please please don’t move such a problem to mine I’m happy in the lower ranks :P

I have and use this only for the shield, and really only to get into a keep or tower that is under siege in WvW.

I suspect the camouflage would be considered too OP (it could be used in combination with the other kits a bit too well). Besides, as a sniper, you should never be near enemies in the first place.

To make it a bit more fair, i’d say you’d also only have the increased range when entrenched, and both entrenching and getting out of entrenchment should take time.

Perhaps cripple instead of knockdown on snipe hit.

What might be fun as well for the toolbelt would be a whack with knockdown; when somebody eventually jumps you, whack ’em with the sniper rifle, then make a run for it

Am I the only one who does not want to be in a top-tier server? I randomly chose mine and it turned out to be in one of the lower ranks; but I quite like that; I wouldn’t want to be on a server dominated by WvW guilds (and certainly wouldn’t want to play against them).

Yes, it is annoying to see most of the players stuck in a spawn-run-to-nearest-enemy-die loop, while other are trying to get them organized but nobody is listening. And yes the circle-raid mentality sucks, and with it the fact that nobody defends and you are usually the only one there and have little to no chance to save the day.

But I like the almost-no-queue parts, and the fact that we’re not up against people who put way too much time in this. So I think the approach should be to reward defending, guarding, and scouting more (relative to capping). Not sure how exactly, you don’t want to have bots or idlers rewarded for doing nothing.

Yesterday I was the only one at a camp when it got attacked by about 8 players, and I had no hope of winning that, but I held them off just long enough for reinforcements to arrive. That was great, but I can imagine people not playing like that because there is almost no reward for it.

Maybe this evens out a little as more people reach the higher levels, but probably not.

Oh, and another idea; I don’t care if it is not taken into account for the rankings, but it would be nice to see how well the server is doing against active time spent in WvW (just to compare yourself against worlds with much more pop, but more importantly, with much more WvW activity, and feel good about your little world)

I love my asura engineer

I’m not near 60 (around 35ish now), but I’ve been using grenades in WvW a lot ever since I got them; they are easy to lob down from walls, easy to lob up to walls, and most importantly, they do area damage. Yes a rifle is more effective against an individual opponent (and has the net and pushback abilities), but when going against groups, I certainly prefer to bring by bag of things that go boom.

But in PvE i tend to use them much less, though the tips above sound very good, have to try them there again

I’m aiming for that trait, but so far, I don’t feel like grenades are very much underpowered. Might be because I haven’t tried it yet.

IMHO, haven’t done math on it, and all that.