adammantium.8031

For years we've had mesmer sweeps; and mesmer players got extremely good at hiding in objectives, and have some limited access to stealth too. It felt pretty fair though; if you spent the time to look you'd realistically find them, but if you were careless you'd be punished (this was pre-reveal buff on capture though). Once thieves got access to a portal, defenders became obliged to do a sweep of a captured structure which dramatically outweighs the effort a thief needs to put in, combining years of mesmer hiding places with strong stealth ability and fast movement when you do catch them. God forbid the enemy broke into inner and the thief went to hide while defenders successfully repelled attackers. Options for the defender are at least 5 people roaming around a pretty large area (particularly Air keep on DBL), or 1 person perma scouting inner. This is not fun and traps are really limited in their counter play. It was never a good idea to give thieves the ability to portal others. Remove it please.

Removing a link from Gandara, and giving a link to Desolation, is frankly absurd. I do not have statistics, I do not have cumulative played hours across each server. But the first hand insight I do have is just overwhelmingly such that Desolation's population far exceeds Gandaras. I would dearly love to see any data presented to support these linking decisions (such as the charts around Blackgate's population several years ago), but I can't begin to imagine such a logic is working as intended. As Kruimjelte said, this just stinks of Anet trying to bleed some money from people transferring. Such a pity, as a competitive WvW mode with a hint of consideration would bring in more players than you'd be making from at most a few hundred people paying $10.

Wonderful move, thanks so much.

Commanders often will call bubbles, and will assign a 'bubble order' to members of their squad. You'd have to be on Discord/comms for this to work though. You may also want to hold your bubble if you're not in order for when they say "any bubbles any bubbles!!!" :) Otherwise, it's situational and you're looking for an opportunity. If there's no assigned bubble order, don't worry about wasting it and just practice. Defensively, are the enemy in the process of pushing your squad? If so, retreating and dropping a bubble will act as a great deterrent, either removing their boons as they push through, or at worst buying your squad time. Offensively, is your squad about to push into the enemy? If so, a couple of options: use a movement skill (sword 2's savage leap, greatsword 5's rush) to get ahead and drop a bubble on the enemy's position. This is quite hard to do timing-wise; if you're too far ahead, the enemy will see you coming, remove your stability and kill you, or just move out of your bubble before your squad engages. If you're too far behind your tag, you'll miss the push and your bubble won't catch anybody. if you're a second bubble, it's great to follow up on an initial push, seeing the enemy move to oneside and position yourself so they walk into your bubble - that can be very effective. The enemy will more likely be distracted dealing with the pressure from your squad so won't be as likely to focus you down. As above though, it's situational, needs practice, and in some cases, the ability to read a fight.

I had one evening a couple of months ago where I logged into a brutal lag spike, 1500 ping, and didn't even bother playing.Other than that, for 2+ years of regular play, no matter the scenario, I've not noticeably lagged.No complaints at all.

But it’s also overall impact of probably being full and very high population. As a server you can’t complain about being outnumbered but then have 60 people golem rushing servers with no defenders. The reality is, gandara is full and all that commander shows is that gandara does have the numbers, they just have no motivation to 1). Do things without a commander. 2). Rise to the challenge of being a solo server, instead people would rather sulk and not play until the easier fights come around. I should imagine if gandara actually tried to effectively play wvw in wvw and not pve in wvw they’d stay at least in tier 3, because coming from a server that has been against gandara many times, you certainly have the people, it’s the organisation and motivation that’s missing I think this starts to miss the point a little bit. Every server can get a blob on reset, every server "runs from fights/humps siege/can't roam" etc. Gandara is a strong server, it has a great community, and enjoys to PPT more than most I've been on.Frankly, we're as well-equipped to deal with being an unlinked server as any. That doesn't make it any less frustrating to have drawn the short-straw in EU by not having a link, and not being ocassionally open to mitigate that.

A lot of players did stop playing in the hope that we could lower our population status and get some fresh blood into the community.I didn't agree with them, but I do think it's a damning indictment on Anet that they've created a game mode where players even think they can be rewarded for not playing the game. I'll give you that we are lucky to have a single commander who tags up like clockwork on a Friday and Saturday night (often the only one), and can be largely uncontested for a few hours after 2am. We do come into Saturday and Sunday morning's quite strong. I don't feel that having a pugmander who runs particularly late twice a week negates the overall population difficulties, though. I haven't found your observations about roamers to be accurate, at least when there's a presence on map to take advantage of their efforts. All we can do in lieu of any solution being implemented is to voice our frustration as our community suffers.

I'm on Gandara. At prime-time and in fights we can hold our own. But we are not competitive without a link. Just not enough people. I dug up total kills/deaths over a week (an imperfect metric I know) on an earlier thread which was removed, can't be bothered to do it again, but we're a good 25% behind 2 linked servers. We were recently linked with Ruins of Surmia and met some great people. But now we're unlinked, we're not competitive and can't play with our new friends. Fundamentally, the linking system is unsatisfactory, and especially unsatisfactory when there aren't enough links to go around. Everyone reading this knows it, there's nothing new, but it doesn't stop it being frustrating.

My first memory of WvW was as an upleveled warrior, zoning into EB on the red side. We were basically being spawn camped, and with no appreciation of tactics, I tried to recreate my PVE styles of running into the mass of players, popping Endure Pain, hitting 100 Blades and waiting for everyone to die... they didn't. Some more fun nostalgia, one particular fight I remember on Alpine border in the lords room going on for hours and hours, with myself and another warrior doing banner rezzes over and over. This happened a lot back in the day, but when the fight was quite finely poised, and defenders slowly make progress, those clutch banner rezzes bought a bit more time. In the current meta it's far easier to whittle down an enemy... Last but not least, I can't really say I did much in this one, but following a raid into enemy's garrison, taking the orb, and escoring someone running it back to Bay trying to fend off enemies targeting him, that was absolutely epic. I know it got abused and hacked horribly, but that mechanic felt super fun. There are probably way too many changes in the code to make it viable, but having a week where orbs were brought back (similar to no downstate) would be super cool IMO. Anyway, thanks for the thread and the replies, made me smile :)

I get the sentiment, but it's a horrid idea.I play quite regularly from 9pm to 11pm each night. There could be people hacking at any other time of day on my server and I'd have no idea. I imagine there are many, many players like me.Yet your idea punishes me for the actions of people I never interact with, aren't in my guild, who I don't know, and have no influence over. The only realistic solution is for Anet to invest resources in preventing hacks.We don't seem to be at a tipping point to prompt that yet, and doubt we ever will, unless the hack in question impacts more game modes. Alliances could help a bit, where guilds could exert influence on their members. But bad apples will find a way to rot somewhere.

Another warrior main here who'd actually been asking for this change to bubble.If you were able to keep up your whole bubble cast time, you'd often already won the fight, otherwise you'd be getting interrupted.During the channeling, the warrior isn't doing any damage, and it's pretty boring frankly. Completely this. I couldn't try it last night due to crashes, but featherfoot grace (superspeed), bubble, hammer, axe 5 (light field combo!), could be a lot of fun.

Also this.It's pretty miserable that a "successful" bubble consists of the player walking around doing nothing for a few seconds while your team mates see big shiny numbers. While there's work in coordinating with your team, it's not a satisfying skill (compared to battle standard with a clutch rez back in the day, shroud for necro, invuln for guard etc).

I'd far prefer it to be reverted so it was no longer channeled. I find it very rare to be able to channel the whole duration against a semi-competent group. Just dropping it and being able to start a hammer rotation in your own bubble was pretty nice. In blob fights, particularly when the tide is turning against you, you're pretty lucky to get 2 pulses out of it. All the while, you're basically a sitting duck with a "hit me" marker on your head. That is me being pretty selfish though, and honestly, the way it is now is more open to counterplay and a bit fairer.

It does say something about the newbie experience of WvW though. They're expected to research on external sources before playing.How is a newbie to know their effective PVE build will get wrecked in WvW? That stacking is imperative? How camps/towers/keeps interact? What objectives you can take as an individual? How to join a group? What is a tag, even? To the OP, it's great that you're determined, and WvW is a unique game mode which is great fun once you're into it. I highly suggest heading to YouTube or Googling some guides on how WvW works, and then some suitable builds for your class.

Agree with this. The advice about keeping participation up would work if you're working from home and just have WvW up in the background... but if you're actively playing, find something better to do with your time. Far better to try and have some fun in WvW, learn the game mode, make friends, join a guild, and let tickets come as a nice side-effect!

It would be a nice QoL, if a commander could set a squad chat URL on his squad info, and have this appear when a player joins the squad.E.g."Squad chat: discord.com/123456" And have that URL be copyable to clipboard.If no URL is set, don't display the message. Don't think it's worth GW2 implementing their own voice comms, but it should be easier for commanders to tell players where they can find voice chat.

I'm on rank 1930, but frankly, it's a passive goal as I enjoy playing WvW. I can't imagine anyone grinding for this.At least rank 500 seems more achievable to people, if there are those who want to play specifically for this. As others have said, it's just a skin, tickets are still a big bottleneck... whatever.

What contributed to all these battles was motivation on the part of the participants. In the early days, players were far more invested, partly because it was a new and more exciting game, and possibly because of server pride.Waypoint every 3 minutes, and bannering lords, served to extend the duration for which a server could cling onto a structure, stringing a fight out. I always found bannering the lord to be kinda cheesy though. I think it's unlikely that many players are so invested in the game they'd go to the lengths described by TinktinkPoof any more. Alliances (theoretically stronger communities), better rewards, and an end to auto-upgrades and incentivizing scouting again... But who am I kidding.

I don't honestly think this change would effect the meta, and not sure what observable effects you will see from this.IMO, it is a great option for certain builds to have, and to be creative. Giving up a trait for this isn't always expected, and full applause to those players who manipulate their surroundings to make it work, either tricking lemmings off a cliff, or just for evasion when roaming. There's not enough of that in WvW. People spoke about jumping puzzles too; I used to play from China with a 300+ ping. I remember trying desperately to do the Aetherblade puzzle as part of my legendary Dawn quest. It was a nightmare. Fall damage traits do serve a purpose. Maybe they are a crutch, but they've come to be an accepted crutch by the playerbase. Some of these puzzles are bloody hard, and removing this trait ramps the difficulty up a notch, impacts high-ping players, as well as any handicapped players as mentioned before. The first post here described fall damage as niche. Maybe it is. But it's also unique in how it lets players change how they interact with terrain.Anet, maybe you have some great ideas of how to better rework these traits, but I can't muster any enthusiasm when this what is being removed.

Just to add my name to the list of people who'd like to see this kept in WvW.While I'd assume it's infrequently used - and I personally don't trait for it - I always have to applaud those who do and utilize it effectively.I also don't think it's particularly confusing. In fact it's pretty clear.This may give you more flexibility in balancing, but I don't think it's worth the cost of a useful ability, both from a QoL perspective, and tactical perspective. Please rethink this.

Like the coordination with a large group of people, be it dropping spikes at the right time, keeping the party alive, or landing a brutal bubble and hammer stun. Like the setup and interplay of the 3 servers on each map. Like the options when logging in, be it roaming, small scale, joining a zerg, tagging up. Previously loved the familiar faces on my server, on top of my guild. Frustrated that the potential of the game mode has never been met.

Agree with the previous poster. The way the big hits match the beat is cool, but the rest of the video doesn't match the bar you set. You include a bit too much footage of when the battle is already won. The odds aren't quite as stacked against your group as in other content creators, either. Probably could've trimmed a minute off it easily.I'm also not a huge fan of revenant gameplay either, but not much you can do with that.

For what it's worth, I transferred over to Gandara and am having a blast pugging it for now. Fights all over the place, close match up, and queus have mostly subsided by the time I get online later in the evening. Thanks for the comments all.

Hi WvW'ers,I'm a long-time player who was based in China and played NA server SEA time for 6 years. For RL reasons, I've moved to the EU, and after 6 months out of game, have my rig up and running again. My former guild has mostly moved on, and even if they hadn't there's no way I'd get to play on the same timezone; I'm in central europe, and don't get to play until quite late in the evenings (getting a toddler to sleep). So though I do see the odd familiar face, there's nothing to really tie me to NA anymore. Fights in EU are on the quiet side, and moving to a ping of 50 would be pretty sweet. But I honestly don't have the foggiest about EU servers. I really don't want to incite the EU equivalent of a Baguma/Wagonbrand/whatever, so what I'm looking for... a server with fights until relatively late EU time (midnight CET)English as the lingua franca. More British humor the better. not that interested in roamingrelatively open to pugsI do know that the prevailing wisdom is to find a guild first and move to them, but my RL schedule doesn't really allow me to commit to a serious guild. Any advice on servers from EU players would be much appreciated, Adammantium

Thanks for the update. For anyone not involved in software development, don't underestimate the work and effort that has been put in so far. The complexity of this must be huge, and that there are so many parts working at all sounds great.UI stuff is important, but is a drop in the ocean in time and effort compared to the work being done on the backend for this. Of course there's expectation management going on, but this sounds far closer to being done than a lot of you are giving credit for. Fingers crossed for something in the Spring. I'm personally waiting for this before dropping back into the game, so please do keep up the good work!