Zape.2094

If you do not craft nor play PvP it is far from "sort of fine". It takes about 66 weeks which is a year and a half just to get the shards for ascended armor. At 4 hours a day play time (with which from the start you probably wont even get the full reward, but lets say you do for the sake of the argument), thats 1848 hours invested. For ascended. Armor. Want to get weapons too? No problem, that'll be another 44 weeks. And we're over 2 years of CONSTANTLY playing 4 hours a day. For ascended. Sorry, but this is far from fine lol. As the lads have suggested, there are alternatives, which are crafting and PvP, and those make everything much easier, but if you solely play WvW, it is not even remotely close to being "sort of fine". Even if you play too much WvW. Which I do btw, this week I got last skirmish chest on tuesday. WvW is quite literally all I play in this game, and Ive been around for a couple of years, and yeah, Im still MILES off getting full ascended. Best, Z

Thanks a ton captain! I think I'll have to pick up crafting 😉 Best, Zape

Is getting them in PvP faster / easier? And crafting, what level do I need to do it? And how much does each of them cost approximately? Thanks! Best, Z

Im encountering the exact same issue. I have the gold. I have the tickets. I have the memories of battle. What I dont have is the kittening grandmaster mark shards, because it takes bloody ages to get them at this point, and I do not do anything beside WvW (I dont PvE nor craft). Best, Zape

Hi Splat! I know I'm late to the party, so you've likely already found your new home, but I'll join in on the action regardless because I think I might have just what you are looking for! 🙂 We are [Envy]; a community consisting of 3 guilds - Total [Envy], Totally [Envy] and Total Wrath Of [Envy]. The first two are both close to full, each having over 450 active members, whereas the 3rd only has a good 100. It is our WvW guild (formed for the upcoming Alliances beta). Not to worry you too much with details, what we offer is a very chill and active environment, filled with people who do all kinds of content - from living world and helping with personal story, to raiding and fractals (PvE), to running tournaments in structured PvP, and last but not least, to conquering the world in WvW 😉 In case this interests you in any way, please do pop by on our Discord, as that's where most of the things go down: https://discord.gg/WgxSBXCK I am also available on Discord for any information as Topgun#0222, or in-game as Zape.2094 🙂 No matter what we'll be happy to have you tag along and join us, even if only for a little while to give us an opportunity. Your friend is welcome here aswell. Oh, and we're on EU indeed 😉 Best, Zape

Is this the new alliance beta 🥴

Same thing happened to us. -Blacktide Best, Z

Soon™

I think you'd lose on way too much utility if you swapped the bubble for rampage honestly. I think warriors make pretty good commanders, but Id run bubble since its one of the strongest skills in the entire game for a zerg v zerg scenario, even more so when the commander is the one placing it (better coordination and map control). Its kinda like as a firebrand you could always run the invuln meditation, but it's generally not worth losing the stability (at least in my experience). Thanks for your input! Best, Z

Thanks for your input Hannah! Honestly though, what I feel like is a very strong trait of Firebrands is the amount of stability we can put out. Cause a large part of leading your squad is avoiding CC and being able to always move forward / backwards, at least from my experience. And I am kind of afraid to run tag on other classes, since if I dont have a good firebrand in my party, things can go sideways pretty quickly. I was thinking spellbreaker could be a decent alternative cause of the bubble and the decent amount of stab and tankiness it has. I would probably be afraid of running a class with little to no stab access while tagging honestly. 😄 Thanks! Best, Z

I guess the biggest benefit of a chrono commander would be the use of veil and the pulls right?

Hey guys, I was just curious from your experience, are there any (and if yes, what are they) good alternatives for commanding on Firebrand? I am genuinely curious to see any builds that could match (or perhaps even out-do) the firebrand in the role of a commander. What are your experiences? Does anybody have any "off-meta" builds they like to command on? I've seen some spellbreaker commanding, scourge and even elementalist so far, but Im not sure how viable they really are. Best, Z

A discount on additional character slots would be great to match the spirit of the upcoming Mad King Realm event.... I'm super excited to level my alts and spend time in the event, but I sadly only have one character below 80, other slots are full.... Id definitely buy a couple of additional slots if they were discounted! 🙂 Best, Z

The issue I'm seeing is, "in a few months". Alliances have been first announced in 2015 if I'm not mistaken, which is 6 years ago. Since the beta we've had only included the most basic features of the alliances (it only included guild selection - it didnt include any matchmaking processes, it didnt include the forming of alliances, it had no GUI changes aside from the one menu that wasnt functional anyways...), and even so none of the features were really working (the guild you selected didnt actually lock in for some people, there were overflows of maps there shouldnt be, some objectives were unable to be capped, score wasn't calculated properly...), I am honestly a little scared to say "in a few months". I would honestly expect the next beta to appear soon after EoD launch. And even then, the ACTUAL alliances system is miles away. The only reason why I'd like to move people to a different one is because we were promised to be able to play with our guild this week, when in reality none of us could. And for this we spent dozens of hours gathering people, instructing them, and organising things. So it'd be nice if our effort would actually be useful in some sort. Best, Zape

But for a fee, right? The thing is, I know some of us got free server transfers, but apparently not everybody did. So a lot of my guildmates do not have this for whatever reason. And transferring 90 people, 500 gems per person.... Well, you do the math hehe 😛 I will give you a scenario. No guild wants to be on the same server as every other guild, since that means infinite queues and 0 content to fight against. Im not even sure if you play WvW at this point lol... Not sure about your alliance comment - it has nothing to do with transfers unless Im missing something? So what if it takes years for the alliance system to come into effect? Just the more reason to allow people to swap servers, no? I have used my free transfer, yes. But alot of my guildies havent, and apparently they dont have the option to either. That is where the problem lies. I am not going to transfer. I just want my friends over here. Thats it. Those of us who have formed this guild are mostly on the same server, and we're happy here. Its those that joined after the megaserver system that are spread all over the place. These people are the ones I want over. Best, Zape

I need a discount on bag slots, bank slots or character slots. Thats all. I need this desperately to sink my paycheck somewhere. Best, Z

Hey mate, thanks alot for your input! I've asked around a little, and it seems like not everybody has the server transfer. I am not sure when it was given and/or under which conditions, but it seems as if either older accounts dont have it, or newer accounts dont have it. They have assured me they've never used one yet, and they do have all (both) expansions, so I thought they should have it but allegedly they dont. Not sure tbh - I know I've had it, and I've swapped servers to the one where most of my guild lies. But it's still only about 10 of us, as opposed to 100ish. Fingers crossed about the beta - I was really excited to see it happen, and I am not unsatisfied with it in any way - Im glad they're trying things out and working on it. But I do feel like there were a lot of things going wrong - from being placed into wrong team, to having overflows on standard WvW maps which shouldnt have them.... I feel like they have quite a bit of stuff to work on, and with EoD also coming up on us quite soon, I feel like they may have slightly limited resources for this. Either way, no matter what I am really happy to see development time put into WvW, and all the effort is really appreciated. But yeah, it'd be pretty sick if I could get my people over to Blacktide to play with them a little sooner to "warm up". Best, Zape

Hey PseudO, I really like the inovative ideas in a way, but I feel like most of them arent really in the interest of the majority. At least thats my assumption. From a player who plays WvW exclusively, I can tell you that one of the definite largest reasons for the lack of satisfaction amongst the playerbase, is the fact that PvE players are sometimes "forced" into WvW to get their gifts of battle. While originally a very cool thing, it results in people afking at spawn, or moving around solely for the purpose to reset their participation (e.g. kill a sentry every couple of minutes and thats that). Most of your ideas would make this matter even worse. For example: This brings all sorts of issues. First off, you're encouraging people to afk in WvW. Giving people better loot just because they afk in WvW while they wait for a ranked game is a horrible idea. We do NOT want to turn WvW into a PvP lobby. Honestly this is one of the worst ideas I've seen on the forums in ages. It promotes AFKing for one. Secondly, you never know when your queue pops. So I am defending an objective with 5 others and they all disappear all of a sudden because they got placed into a PvP arena? Yeah, just what I need. People disappearing mid-fight because their arena popped.... Third, as you have already realised, there's queues in WvW (map caps). You said you wanted the people who enter PvP to reappear in the same map they were before. That could drastically impact map caps and is just horrible overall. Can be abused aswell. Imagine everybody enters EB and immediately queues for arena. By the time the first team finishes (lets say about 10 minutes) there could be at least 100 people in various arenas. So, that would mean that within 20 minutes of time, 100 people will apear in EB from nowhere. Effectively leaving 170 people on your team of the map. Do you see the problem yet? As an alternative, if you'd "reserve" the spot in a WvW map for these people, that would mean EB could potentially be a ghost town. 20 people in the map, 50 people in PvP clogging up spots, and a 30 man queue for people who actually want to play WvW. Im pretty sure you can see how bad this idea is at this point right? 🙂 I actually like this idea a fair bit, and it seems pretty fun, but I dont think most WvW players would. Its awesome for PvX guilds, but it discourages people from having WvW only guilds, or playing only WvW, which frankly is a problem, since a lot of us are only interested in this gamemode. Please consider the difficulty in WvW players recruiting PvE people, or preparing them for raids, since most of us arent very experienced in that.... This could turn the strongest WvW guilds currently into memeguilds, and Im not sure many would like this change. But I do love your tactivator ideas lol, they seem like a lot of fun. I just dont think forcing people into PvE to be good at end-game WvW is the way to go. Kinda same as above - just as we dont want to force WvW players to PvE, we dont want to force PvE players to WvW. This ends up in people afking in content cause they're forced to do it but have no interest in doing it, eventually ruining experience for others. For the Warclaw, I agree though. Its a kitten mount in PvE; literally every single mount does better. But again, its not designed for PvE so its not that bad as far as Im concerned. Would be nice to at least give it the raptor leap length in PvE I guess, so we could flex our Warclaw? Idk honestly. Yeah, I agree with all of the above. I like the ideas - they'd bring a little Quality Of Life change to WvW if you ask me. Nah, a literal tickle would dismount you in this case. Dont forget there are red NPCs in most maps, which could literally dismount you for no reason, and also dont forget about fall damage. I dont think it would work well with having 1 HP. I like warclaws as is. They give a little bit of a boost, but nothing too broken. Giving them more movement speed - I cant get behind this idea. It makes people run across maps too fast. This is a balance issue, and I have no opinion on this honestly as I dont roam. But honestly, there is literally no meta build for large squad play with would include celestial gear, so I dont think its that big of an issue? Idk. I dont play small scale combat much in WvW, so I cant say. Something for the balance team to take a look at I guess 🙂 This is where you lost me again. The desert borderlands was a disaster (it kinda still is) in the eyes of most of the community, and I dont think anybody wants to go back to the central cannon meta-event times, or experimenting with new maps too much. Especially underwater combat. Literally NOBODY wants that from the people I know. At current state, when people fall into water at Bay you either chase them to the other side, range them, or let them go. Usually the latter. Theres a reason for this. Nobody likes underwater combat. Its clunky and weird, and slow as hell. If anything, I'd like to see changing the "skin" of the map every now and then.... You know, add in some pumpkins and ghosts for halloween.... Cover more of the map in snow and make it a bit more wintery in christmas season.... Stuff like that. Nothing major that would change gameplay drastically, but you'd have a bit of a fresh feel to it 🙂 Anyways, I hope my feedback doesnt disappoint you, but thats just how I perceive things. I feel most of the things will be agreed by the majority of the WvW community, though Im also sure I may have missed some spots here and there. No matter what, best of luck to you and your guild! See you on the fields one day, when alliances pop! 😉 Best, Zape

Hey guys! Please note that this is merely a suggestion from my particular point of view, and you are more than free to disagree with it and point out any flaws it might have for you. We are all different, play for different reasons and in different communities, so there might be something I am missing from your PoV here. Anyways, a little bit of a background; I have been a member of a large PvX guild (2 guilds both with 450+ members) for a while now, and since the recruiting has basically been done only in PvE, the people are scattered all over the servers. We have a lot of people who enjoy playing WvW, and with the Alliance beta we were largely looking forward to being able to finally play together in this only aspect of the game where we haven't been able to yet, only to find out in a matter of an hour that we will not be able to do so (we have formed a third guild, solely for WvW in which we have gathered about 100 players from both our PvX guilds that are willing to participate in the WvW content). Now, I want to make it very clear that I do not think we are entitled to a compensation or whatever. I do not simply want to be given out freebies. The reason I am proposing this, is because we have seen (and I think we can all agree on this) that the alliances are still in a very early stage of development, meaning it is quite likely that it will take months before another chance to play together with our guild arises. I know that a lot of you guys are looking forward to alliances for other reasons than simply to be able to play with your PvE friends, or people from other servers, and my suggestion doesn't really bring much to you, but I do think this could be a decent start to keep us a little occupied while ArenaNet continues development of the Alliance feature. I know from my perspective if it will take months for another beta to come, a lot of people will likely lose interest in WvW in the meantime; we have generated quite a lot of hype about it within our guild (maybe it's our own fault, I understand that), and I really do not want to lose this momentum and having to re-do all of it again at a later stage. I just really want to get my people together somehow, and paying for 90 account transfers is sadly far out of my scope. Please let me know what you think about this. Disagreements are also welcome - please do expand my horizons in any way you can. 🙂 Best, Zape

In my case it's simillar - the first guild (G1)'s alliance has been taken into affect for me, instead of the one I selected (G3, our WvW guild). Maybe theres something wrong here? Best, Zape

Hi Josh! Thanks a ton for your very swift response. My situation is as follows: We previously had 2 PvE guilds with 500 people in each of them (or 450+ at least). Then we made a WvW guild seperately, for the sole purpose of alliance beta testing. This third guild is the one we all locked in as our WvW guild. It has about 100 players in it (but its almost all active players - although most of them are PvE with little to 0 hours played in WvW). Most of the players got matchmade properly, but me for some reason got matchmade into "Stonefall", which is the Alliance / Team both of our main PvE guilds (500 players) belong to. The thing is though, we all explicitly asked everyone to select the third guild for WvW, which we did, so I should be on Moogooloo. 🙂 Is there any way to fix this? Whats your opinion on this? Id just like to know what to expect, whether I'll be able to play with my guildies this week or I should try to play as a "pug". Either way, thanks alot for all your effort and the alliances beta! I am super hyped to experience it no matter what. Best, Zape

Hi. My entire guild was successfully matched into Moogooloo, and I was matchmade into Stonefall. Despite having the exact same guild selected for our WvW guild (and I even repped this guild the entire time, so theres no way something couldve gone wrong. I also selected it 3 days ago, as soon as news came). Any ideas what happened? Can this be fixed? I am the commander of the guild which is horrible, and I was planning on leading a WvW event every day this week with my guild..... Best, Zape

Just a friendly reminder that its friday today ^^ Best, Zape

I usually agree with your posts, but this one is very far fetched. Either you're not understanding the points I made, or are not really seeing the bigger picture here. First off - I approve of "zergs". WvW was designed as a team activity, and should be kept so. Zergs are a very important part of it, and it doesnt make sense for 4 random people to be able to effectively cap Stonemist castle themselves. I like the large scale combat. Secondly - it's not a small group zergbusting as you have portrayed. It was actually a zerg vs zerg fight (50ish vs 40ish), in which 3 people from the enemy zerg joined our zerg squad. They were (likely) on voice with their commander, following him very closely, but they were in OUR squad. And no, it's far from having little to do with CCing. Generally its rather hard to constantly have focus on the commander, due to stealth pushes, being stacked very tightly (we were all on voice and stacking very tight on the commander) and constant back-and-forth movement with which you can drop target rather simply. But with this, even if you stealth, the enemy can just target you immediately as you drop out, since they literally click on the party icon to select you. This is gamebreaking if you ask me. This is like having a targeting add-on, that with one button automatically targets the enemy commander. No matter where he is. No matter how many people stand on top of him. Maybe you disagree with me, and that's fine. But I still believe that this is UNINTENDED by ArenaNet, and is therefore likely to be an exploit. Best, Zape

Hey guys, so today I realised some people tend to join the enemy server's squad if its open and focus the commander with CC (pulls, moa, etc) constantly whenever an opportunity arises. Whilst I do know that they could generally do a simillar thing by simply targeting the enemy commander in the field, this is reasonably worse, as they can simply click on the commander in the squad to target him at any time and focus down him or whoever else whenever they wish, as it is much easier to track targets and their buffs. This brings me to the question - is this an exploit, or is this behaviour that ArenaNet acknowledges exists, and thinks is okay? What do you guys think? Is this okay? The way I see it, this effectively has the potential to destroy open tags even further (they're already super rare tbh, at least on my server), and kind of ruins the experience for alot of players, since their commander will constantly just keep getting overrun by random CC out of his own squad..... In particular, 3 members (2 engineers and a mesmer) of a certain guild I will not name have joined the enemy squad constantly casting moa / pulls on the commander whenever he would not have a tick of stability going, and it was just plain stupid because all of the fights would end really fast (basically commander would die, then everybody would scatter). Any input on this would be much appreciated - I've taken screenshots and opened a ticket to arenaNet describing this issue and providing the names of the players, just as a heads up. Best, Zape