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what killed the pugmander?


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I used to pugmand, not the typical pugmander who lacks direction, knowledge, ability, or fear of fighting. The biggest problem I find is pugs simply don't follow a commander who doesn't already have a zerg or guild group with them. If I tagged with my guild, I could easily have a large zerg supplemented by pugs.. on my own, sometimes I'd be lucky if 3+ people followed, even with no other tags on maps.

Adding to this in general pugs simply don't care about anything other than pressing one to collect loot while you and your guild do all the heavy lifting/pushing.. it makes you understand why we don't have more new commanders wanting to tag up and furthermore guilds are more frequently turning to hosting private squads.

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On the flippy flop could say guilds don't know how to fake push and weed out the no comms rallybots. Guilds fight tactics consist of a bum rush stealth push and running away after half of them die. Guilds don't know how to slow push. Guilds only know how to drop a cata up against a wall and have it get disabled and destroyed. Guilds hop maps when their pug farm fails. Guilds dodge actual fights lest their good name be sullied.

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i'D 2nd vote this "lack of incentive, no rewards, no prestige, no love" .. bc its kinda adds in. people often stay full newbies for years, and a pugmander can push the uncoordinated cloudgroups over some metres, but if your pugs then make a moshpit and suicide into a guildgroup... it's just game. people don't even understand what a tag is about (that to be said, half of the pugmanders are simply very bad as well, so they might not notice)

pug quality dropped so hard since the format gets no work done since years, i guess.

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@Dawdler.8521 said:First teamspeak and then discord.

Unfortunately this. I am legit unable to get into discord or TS cause of my crappy connection. So instead of harming a group by not being able to listen in, I just scout and do call outs in chat. It works for me. And if I do get caught up following a commander I go full heals and just throw everything to the wall and see what sticks.

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Its just claim buff, there is no doubt about it.

Pugmanders can't be equally strong anymore. You defend your keep with 800 extra stats? Great! Now try take enemy keep when they have 800 extra stats. You will just get one pushed. No siege or strategy included, just location.

That is literally 30%+ damage and 40%+ survivability difference. Even between friendly and enemy camps it is over 15% of both. Same thing killed dueling/roaming.

One side is forced to be constantly on defence and one on offense. Needless to say, the offending side needs to be 30% better than the defending side, thus bandvagoning occurs killing pugmanders even further.

Playerbase has absolutely no way to make equally strong pugging servers with the current passive stat buffs in place.

It isn't about objectives being hard to take, its just every part of map being obnoxiously easy or hard to play at.

Of course siege balance needs to be looked at as well as defending siege is pretty useless. Rework claim buff to non combat bonuses + buff defending siege (Nerf shield gens. Buff wall hp and siege vs siege dmg)

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Wouldn't say they are useless. Just not on voice chat so I can kinda understand why they would be hesitant to push. I have been pugmanding (or at least trying to) a few days since returning to gw2 after a year and I can relate to most of the views here. Lol I miss the good old days..

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It's the first one, easily. My buddy use to Pugmand quite effectively a few years back, and a few of us would be on comms to support him. We tried a few times when we returned to the game a month ago, and it's basically unworkable. Whether it's new players, or bad players, their characters look like the person behind the monitor is playing with one arm, or worse two broken arms trying to move the mouse with their head. Zero effort to switch to a meta-ish build, zero paying attention to the tag, zero awareness of oncoming pain trains. Sad times overall. So we just roam these days, or help organized guilds.

The other thing we've noticed is after one or two wipes they just scatter about and start doing other things. So there's a lot of pressure on the Pugmander to not lose fights, which makes the train boring.

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maybe it is a NA thing, but the server I am on and our links have and had pugmanders. Mixed blobs from all sides of the link.

The problems a pugmander faces:

pugs not listeningfb not doing their jobbad necros

This kills the blob, pugmander gets frustrated, pugmander goes and plays with guild mates.

It helps when the pugmander has a core group of guild mates around him. Add 10,15 players from known guilds and things improve a lot. But a pure random blob just suffers.

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I'll go with this answer because the other answers all are a result of "useless pugs".

Getting farmed by a guild group? Well, that's often because you've joined the squad of an open tag who is being kind and not removing your or your compatriots' useless builds that aren't meta or can't counter meta. Or your compatriots are wasting their bursts on one or two squirrels rather than focusing on where the group is targeting because they're too busy standing out in Africa rather than following the tag. Useless pugs is why you're getting farmed. Stop making excuses for why you and your compatriots won't change builds to counter guild groups.

Lack of incentive? There are incentives. They're just not enough to overcome having to deal with useless pugs, many of whom will be judgemental about why you don't want to give them a spot in your squad or why you can't win fights 100% of the time. (Also see last paragraph.)

Objectives too hard to take without a zerg? That's because commanders try to make up for mistakes and uselessness by adding numbers since this game favors numbers.

Not enough people playing? What this actually means is not enough non-useless pugs playing. Successful pugmanders generally have a core group of "pugs" who are friends from guild groups that will rally when the pugmander says he's going to tag up and they behave as a guild group even if they're from different guilds. The pugmander isn't left with too many useless pugs in his squad and instead will have a core group of players on meta builds who aren't squirreling off and know how to coordinate, especially by being on discord together. These players aren't likely to join tags that don't institute similar requirements because it's frustrating watching the same people go down for the 17th time and you don't want to feel like you're carrying that person.

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Idk I pretty sure able sentry still running around.

For my guild leader I presumed it was all the firebrand nerfs making it hard for him to carry the questionable ability players while rolling into matchup after matchup of omega karma train zergs that we were getting put up against the prior few months before he threw in the towel and quit the game.

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Many times people shout out for a tag . When one does only a couple people join let alone getting in comms . So why bother when theirs less stress roaming..Another problem , that wasn't mentioned in the poll , is tag watching . This happens more than you think . That's why many tags go private .

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Gonna have to go with that one. If you join up a commander, the least you should do is follow. If you have ideas, voice them out, but understand that the commander has the last say and always should. If they make a mistake, they bear the responsability at all times and they often say so.

If you judge the commander give nonsensical commands, leave the squad and find another one, but dont actively disregard commands while you're in the squad. Some commanders are also learning the ropes and experiment, just as some commanders are generally patient with unruly players, be patient with new commanders, or you'll find none left to command.

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I feel for the WvW players, having PvE players forced into joining your content and play poorly enough to drag the rest of the dedicated players down must suck. I am one of those players, and I wouldn't go to WvW if it wasn't required for Gifts.... I rarely even bother going to WvW because it is such a terrible way to spend my time that I can't be bothered to grind out Gifts with any regularity.

I am the type of player hurting WvW and I don't want to be there, yet..... this game.

I wonder, if PvE players were not required to go to WvW for certain items, would it cause WvW to collapse or would it strengthen the player base.

My vote was based upon the idea that there are not enough of the right player in WvW

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The main problem is how the game is currently balanced. Guild groups always had an advantage over pug groups but it was never that big.

I always liked to pugmand and I have done so since 2012. Things have drastically changed since the earlier days and made it easier for guild groups to completely dominate pug groups. In particular:

  1. It's way easier to heal now since you have dedicated build to heal. Healing required to stack in a place, drop a water field and then blast it to heal all the group. That regroup gave pug group a little break to recover and you could even bomb that heal attempt sometimes. The less good the guild group, the more time they would take to regroup, drop water field and blast them to heal. Now they just heal as they move and continuously destroy pugs.
  2. Guild groups move much faster now. It used to be a bit comical to run around guild groups unaffected by them while they slowly move in a nearly straight line toward the pug group that was rapidly dispersing in all directions. It was harder for them to catch pug. Now, they have superspeed!
  3. Easy stealth engage. Stealth engage is nothing new but it never used to be so ridiculously easy to do it. Nothing better to wipe a semi-attentive pug group than to stealth engage them from very far away.

These would be the main issues combat-wise for me.

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lol. I like to pop the “anything goes” tag. Complete with a caveat squad message that says prepare to die! I do this for the pugs that really just want some wxp and are NOT compt up. Some don’t even have warclaw so it’s hard for them to get into squads etc.

When I do this I run it just as if I’m roaming, except with more people. We ppt our butts off and get all the wxp we can for them. ?

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@Gudradain.3892 said:The main problem is how the game is currently balanced. Guild groups always had an advantage over pug groups but it was never that big.

I always liked to pugmand and I have done so since 2012. Things have drastically changed since the earlier days and made it easier for guild groups to completely dominate pug groups. In particular:

  1. It's way easier to heal now since you have dedicated build to heal. Healing required to stack in a place, drop a water field and then blast it to heal all the group. That regroup gave pug group a little break to recover and you could even bomb that heal attempt sometimes. The less good the guild group, the more time they would take to regroup, drop water field and blast them to heal. Now they just heal as they move and continuously destroy pugs.
  2. Guild groups move much faster now. It used to be a bit comical to run around guild groups unaffected by them while they slowly move in a nearly straight line toward the pug group that was rapidly dispersing in all directions. It was harder for them to catch pug. Now, they have superspeed!
  3. Easy stealth engage. Stealth engage is nothing new but it never used to be so ridiculously easy to do it. Nothing better to wipe a semi-attentive pug group than to stealth engage them from very far away.

These would be the main issues combat-wise for me.

+1 from me on that ,and i am adding the fact that condition to boon was made easier and more systainable while the options to flip boons to conditions got nerfed.Unless somehow a pugmander gets everyone to run that sigil that steals a boon,the odds of pugs dealing with an organised boonspam group in limited space are dramatically low.

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