ArchonWing.9480

They should have never nerfed that thing! It was kinda funny luring enemy groups into it.

I generally find it easier to get credit with boon spam builds because you probably will give boons to someone that hits something that dies. You do have to kill stuff pretty close to the structures. I would imagine being Gw2, it must have wonky definitions of what constitutes what is "in the structure" and some places are harder to get credit than others. In general tower defenses seem harder to get probably because they are smaller and also the nature of the fights is usually shorter too.

It'd be hard to calculate, but that's probably why the title doesn't mean much since any way is going to always favor zerging just because of how fast you can mow down bots in a group. And grouping is just exponentially stronger due to the way boons and ress's work. A party of 10 is more than twice as effective as a group of 5 even in terms of output, much less the physical advantage of having to have each finished before they are res'd. It took me a while to realize I even had the title, and I still never use it. I'd rather put on one of the fractal titles. (though incidentally the big fractal ones also don't mean much because you can just farm easy content for them). So of all the rare achievements I have. https://i.imgur.com/aS6Z2JF.png Well, exclude the SotO ones because they're only rare because nobody cares and the ecto ones because that's just degen. and the best title is obviously the yak escorting one. I suppose I am reaching wvw god, but that also feels kinda redundant because people can already see what rank you are and doubt your team cares in wvw. I guess it's there to annoy pvers?

Well the problem is WvW has different values and the golem in Armistrice bastion is useless. It's just kinda crazy how hard is it to get feedback. 🤣 Looks like a pretty fun build you have there, but yea I don't think pistol will be a primary weapon for you. Maybe if you run into a lot of runners that day.

And that's always been the response. Just sweep it under the rug. Bots, afk farming, win trading, ruining the economy with exploits? I sleep. Calling this out? REAL KITTEN. I'm surprised that WvW isn't overrun with more exploits, because you know people exploit them immediately, like whenever people can use skills to destroy the servers and nobody can play anything. Real content guys. So maybe they actually do something. It is extremely hard to stop people from coming back because MMOs tend to attract degenerates who are willing to make 5000 alt accounts to do stuff. When we were linked with JQ last week, some idiot was mass trolling from another server. Fine, block them. But the next day another account with a name similar to the last with an accent immediately appeared. This was an entirely new account; I assume that must be because the previous one was banned. Or maybe it was like that really down period of Lost Ark where a lot of the bots vanished. We never knew if it was because they banned bots or the game got bad enough for the bots to leave and find something better to do. (Then they came back....)

Hmm, the lack of arcdps does really suck because it's hard to say I'm actually doing stuff. I do pistol/sword, scepter/shield, though I see nothing wrong with replacing either set with a longbow, or doing scepter/focus or scepter/torch. I only do shield because I take that trait. And longbow would be better the more people are involved. The bleed from auto is a slightly useful cover condi for the actual burns. I like offhand sword on Firebrand because it has no other mobility otherwise so I think p/s is flexible. The only other mobility choice is greatsword and that takes up too many slots. On a side note, I also had some fun with axe/sword, because axe is too clunky clunky to hit any skills on its own. (Also being cele, the immob is like, 1/2 second longer) Or maybe I'm just lost and thought I was on Willbender. I also run speed relic though so almost nobody expects that from FB lol. Like people just think I'm lost heading towards the zerg.

I had a similar bug earlier this week where I spawned in the middle of HBL because the citadel was contested. Can't say reset was great anyways. The skill lag was crazy so I suppose just will be skipping reset from now on

Well you know, it's kinda sad they didn't crush harder in t1 despite this. Like JQ was definitely trying their best, but having the handicap of being linked to SBI is simply too much. I'm not saying this because my server is filled with bad players that are worse than bots running condi rifle mechs (why is this a thing? I know people run bad builds but they usually don't spread) but rather because the server has almost no havoc group that take anything. In fact most of the havoc is basically just Grimm and Xenesisil and it goes to crap when they are not on and then the later just keeps pulling a dev and pulls get nerfed the next day and w/e. I mean everyone has their own playstyle and granted small scale in t1 is an utter crapshow but there has to be more done outside of following tags. And if one does resolve to only following tags, then they should support them with actual builds instead of being halfway across the map and not actually following said tag. On the other hand I was amazed to see our pugs defeat those organized guilds on occasion this week. That's either a testament to how well the people on our side played, or how bad the other side are. Probably both?

Yea pugging can be pretty bad if they're not public tags and one has to sorta guess where the fights are and you may not get much help regardless, so sometimes it can become a really one sided affair if those do not want to play like a team. Some groups will often assume their followers are psychic and make their teammates adjust to them. If we talk about selfish behavior as the thread is about, that's probably one of the worst ones. In these cases you just have to develop the skills of being able to detour and grabbing a sentry or camp along the way. Sometimes it pays off to pay attention to green dots on the minimap to wait for people to run back with you.... instead of one at a time. Also when heading back to a tag you also want to take detours especially if you know there are many gankers around. For example, let's say you're on the enemy BL, and the tag is attacking bay across from your spawn. Your server also owns the southwest tower directly south outside of Bay. A lot of potatoes will just mindlessly follow the road straight from spawn to Bay and get picked off approximately west of SW tower because it's right in front of the enemy spawn. Instead they could just go into SW tower and glide out from the lord's room which is less time traveled in enemy territory. Or they could try cutting through east side through the ruins where it's less likely to be noticed. That being said it does take some experience. A lot of less experienced players or simply players not good in small scale should never pass through south sentry area on alpine because that's the easiest place to get killed. Funny enough I saw someone post on Reddit that that's the easiest place for new players to get dailies.... agenda much? If your survivability is a concern, do note most meta builds you find online are designed to be used with an organized group with optimal subgroups, so if you don't have that, you'll probably have to adjust that for more survivability. They usually do not have much mobility, stunbreaks, or cleanse because the group is supposed to be taking care of it. It also helps to simply get known by whatever groups you run with, even if you don't want to join their guild or talk regularly on Discord. Like if they know you are someone they can trust, it'll be good. Also this goes both ways-- they should be people that you deserve your trust too. If you do things right, they should need you as much (if not more) than you need them and this is the best way to succeed in this game mode Also this is a PITA, but if you can devote an extra template for mobility on whatever you're playing it tends to help much with traveling to a zerg in case you get dismounted. Unfortunately this is why I just have characters only for wvw or pve because of template spaces but this isn't about me I guess. Finally, I'd also like to say it's not necessary to join a wvw guild to enjoy WvW. A lot of PvX guilds well have members that sometimes delve into it and can convince the guild for the occasional activity. But the real goal here is to get a few regulars to play with. Even having 3-4 people makes capturing anything exponentially easier, not to mention any tag that wants you must accept you all as a package deal. If you have 5+ people and a tag, you can even make your own squad gain an extra pip even when private, and render the whole group situation moot for the most part. Btw, I think you're on the right track. It's just that growing pains are well... painful at times.

Not with that attitude! Just needs more unblockable.

Warrior staff for the party unblockable and core engi mass moa. Turn your boon ball into a boon chicken.

In general , the dodge function is used to avoid the red circles, not to go into them. And nothing can really compensate for the experience gap. A few months is nothing when people have been playing the game for years, so you just have to try and learn. And sometimes you don't know stuff even after years. Recently I picked Rev up again and I didn't remember what the stunbreaks were. So like three people would be like ganking me and I would be reading the tooltips to see which one was my stunbreak, and I eventually found it to survive. That's not a problem with the game. The problem is none of us knew what we were doing. (both me and the enemy) Also yea you shouldn't fight 60 people head on. You mentioned the hit and run tactics, but you should also note the run part.

I mean that's fine; JI isn't going to help you get away without some critters. Also fine. But that's on a 25s cooldown and is made to be spammed. And why wouldn't WB take virtues? CoP should be used as an emergency button, rather than to just clear condis. You have access to f2 and cleansing sigil It's not like the kitten stuff in pvp. Other guardians use CoP to convert immob into resistance but WB shouldn't have any trouble breaking soft cc. IMO, CoP is not necessary. I personally find it hard to not waste it. Especially if you are running something meant for fast kills and it kinda feels like a dead slot vs non-condi. You mean Whirling light, but yea; that is indeed one of the costs of wanting to secure a kill,. I also don't think you are on your last legs when you use renewed focus because all your virtues reset. I mean, yes it can be used to run, but it's also a way of continuing the fight. I mean I understand why people do this. And it's also perfectly fine to prioritize killing over survival. But I'm just saying it's a deliberate choice. And tbh 2 stunbreaks on 25/32 is still pretty solid. But it does require you to play very solidly and not panic.

Well, better inform my guildies they have to CC the bar now.

Well that's the thing right? The forums do not represent the community as a whole, because the forums consists of players that are typically more in the know (ok, sometimes not). The average player probably doesn't know wtf is going on being on some vague things about having to join guilds. If they play in an active time zone, they probably don't care about population issues in other time zones. Heck, I don't myself. At the end of the day, players don't exist in a vacuum. Your average player is also prone to need to follow tags, or at least familiar guilds and groups. But as the game is, public tagging is a lot of work and the game has reach the point where most groups can't take everyone. Part of these reasons are social, but part of this is also heavily gameplay related. And we've seen some links in the beta where it's all entirely invisible small groups that do their own thing. So even if they do not care about what server or guild they are in, it still impacts the gameplay. Of course a more experienced WvW player would be able to play the game without any of that, but I think that's in the minority, even when considering WvW players in general.

Willbender is not inherently squishy. That's a choice by the player. And there's nothing wrong with taking speed relic. Bringing thief into this is not a good argument either; it's not like people like those either. Any class can build squishy and get rekt. These very forums often have 15k hp no stunbreak thieves cry about being deleted when they're not careful and nobody has any sympathy for them for good reason. And if someone gets locked down on a WB because they don't take additional stunbreaks on the one class known for stab, then that's on them. And a lot of WBs only take 1 for whatever reason and that would be considered monumentally stupid if done on another class. I don't necessarily think f2 needs the charge removed. There are other ways to approach it, like reducing the evade frames on it, or absolute resolution clears 2 condis on wb. Also, what is the difference between a WB getting caught, and any other guard getting caught without cd? They don't have ~120 health/second and a block every 40 seconds? That is unlikely to save them either.

Nope, just complaining about it. 😆 But atm, a new player starts the game and probably has no idea what guilds even do, or why they should join them. It's pretty tucked away and many would treat it as some chat room. Guild halls could really use some updates; guess that arena thing wasn't a bad idea but that's niche. The Guild UI is so primitive you can't even see who uses consumables, and of course that disaster of tactivator permissions or pushing siege or whatnot. A lot of it just really sad especially in an established game like this. Players also don't know you can also form small guilds of friends it would seem. Stuff like scribing is pricey and annoying to deal with. It'd also be nice if we had hubs agaain; imagine a certain alliance's version of Lion's Arch or whatever for callouts (currently paywalled by ABastion) I duinno, just some of the stuff we lost. The GvG scene was pretty cool back in the day because it encouraged people to improve and seek content. I suppose some WvWers don't think highly of those that only gvg and wouldn't mind doing so in the absence in a WvW, but that's not everyone. If only we had a working pvp community.... lol.

They should just delete the throw and make torch 5 the main damage skill. This would kill 2 birds with one stone. Yea I suppose that would cause torch to lose its status as a ranged weapon, but let's be honest; the range was a lie anyways. I mean the throw is so pointless since you're throwing it anyways, and torch 5 is deadweight because it's being held back with torch 4 being the main damage. Not exactly a very healthy weapon,

Personally, I think the most chill zerg build is https://metabattle.com/wiki/Build:Tempest_-_Staff_Support Heck, it's even labeled as an easy build. Unlike the other weapon sets, it's not very intense and you can get away by mostly camping water and just healing. Just drop the icicle first (staff 2), before you cast anything else to blast whatever you casted. The most complicated thing is blasting the frost field. Every time you succeed you give people frost aura and cleanse a condi. And if you fail., If you have nothing better to do, you can also dip into earth (probably more needed if your FB is a potato) and give some extra ccs/magnetic aura/stab. Air gives superspeed but it's not the end of the world if you forget. But for the most part you're in water healing people. Like you can also just target someone in your party and heal them with auto. Also med kit scrapper will come back next week.

Well that's the funny thing right? It kinda balanced itself because while endurance food is still really strong, you are foregoing ascended food for that. They probably left it out of ascended food for good reason, and the poors still have that 30% endurance badge food. Also I imagine people don't want that to get hit for obvious reasons. 😆 Funny enough this is also somewhat notable https://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Holographic_Super_Cake because people pay quite a lot for that, and despite the ridiculous difference between buy/sell, people do still buy at the higher price. Someone was buying them at exactly the same time in the morning every day. I usually stock up on them when SAB comes out (this is soon!) when I can buy them for cheap though I also eat a fair amount of them just because. But I really suppose the ascended food might be a better choice in some cases; sometimes I fail to dodge anyways and bads like me are better off with -10% damage.

The problem with that is the difficulty of fitting that in an actual build. If you use staff, then you are probably playing a support build, and therefore should not be taking traits that only heal yourself. I suppose you could be in a wvw zerg build where other classes handle all the cleanses but typically in a comp like that you wouldn't really need the heal Furthermore, the enemy group probably has stab some of the time. Longbow has some use but longbow/hammer would be super unwieldy regardless of spec. I suppose you could have some kind of weird pick group involving a willbender and a pocket healer. There may actually be some argument for mace/shield because you don't have to go out of the way and just push people incidentally. Small scale support firebrand may actually need the extra sustain if they intend to use the heal mantra. But any firebrand build that wants to cash in on cc'ing would take stoic demeanor. and lose access to that small kept resolve passive. But I dunno, in all of these cases, I think it's still a better idea to chill the enemy, because even if cleansed messes with their cooldowns a little. And given how all the guardian heal proc traits are generally doomed I just don't think much will happen. Like they sorta took our dodge heal and passed it around Although it sorta begs the question on what a selfish sustain trait is even doing in VIrtues.

The zerg meta for the most part has always been stack in a tight ball to maximize heals and boons. However I think it mostly got enforced with the advent of minstrel gear; meaning people could go full on healer/tank with little drawbacks. Before that boon duration was hard to get and you had people do weird kitten like doubloons lol. The game was at the time not designed for that kind of boon duration. Before this most "supports" were some kind of hybrid wearing some pvt gear and then investing spare stats into damage. But now most roles are just that minstrel stuff. You also had more ways of reducing damage and also the introduction of the resistance boon negating condis (later nerfed to only negate soft cc) so you had a case where it became harder and harder to pick off or separate the part of the zerg that falls behind. Eventually supports became too effective in pve and wvw, and it became inefficient to play without them. And thus the game became balanced around them. And as sustain grew, all those insta res skills also became perferable since it could compensate for any mistake in positioning as long as you stayed close. And then they just went insane with the projectile hate. Projectiles were already pretty weak against a zerg, but certain combinations gurantted practical immunity to projectiles so that many clouders were not only ineffective but actively griefing their team. A quick glimpse of arcdps, usually reveals a minstrel support has a good chunk of damage via reflect-- yes those useless pew pew players are doing negative damage. While that's been toned down a little so that firebrands cannot just spam reflects all day, it's still pretty annoying and tablet is also very popular. Nowadays if you tab through an enemy zerg, you will find anywhere between 60-80% of them being some kind of minstrel support and thus there are very little targets to pick off, and those that do unless wildly out of position are practically instantly res'd. It doesn't help that boon strip is so gutted that like the boons instantly come back, and often just becomes a long war of attrition. Even organized groups will have trouble killing other organized groups of the same size, so people tend to find some dps builds with massive burst (typically holos and berserkers) and hope to catch people unaware. Unfortunately that usually just involves blindsliding an enemy already fighting a third enemy or just farming pugs. And because things tend to follow the path of least resistance, they usually do the later and only fight each other should they have some element of surprise/advantage. I would say the main problem is that it is very boring because it encourages groups to avoid each other. I mean obviously an organized group will always have a massive advantage over people bringing random builds. So yes while it's always been meta to a degree, we shouldn't have to accept in its current state where it's haevily skewed without any real counterplay beyond your opponent falling asleep. Of course some of you will say "git gud, and organize yourselves!". And yes, we should not listen to the walking bags on the forums that seem to be persecuted regardless of meta, it would be a bit foolish to assume that's all the complaints have been coming from. There's many people that do join the commander's discord and saw better results-- but it still comes across as unrewarding on the other side. It's like winning against people that are playing a different game from you, or in some case not playing the game at all. Also I feel like things have gotten much worse over the last year. The direction since SotO has been very unclear.

GvG was probably the last thing on my mind, lol. But that's a symptom of the greater problem-- guilds don't mean much to the avg player.

Oh, maybe I should post seriously. I think Anet should realize that WvW is one of the few items that makes their game truly unique, aside from their cooperative open world content. This is the reason this subforum still has so many people complaining but they can't leave because there's nothing else, and every wvw killer we've seen hasn't really done much. As endgame content, WvW has outlived almost every other new shiny endgame hyped content there is. 5 person instanced content is some of the best the game has to offer, but they never did that much to improve on them. Dungeons are now archaic and fractals are just kinda there. They spend much time and effort catering for the raid crowd but most of gw2's players just don't care. sPvP, of which WvW was suppposed to be a bridge to, just wasn't a very interesting thing to watch and the esports dream never became anything else. And despite the cries of the GoB, it's not really been a real deterrent to legendaries as people still get them anyways. Could you imagine if the GoB required spvp? Even me typing this sentence would send most of the game's populace out with the pitchforks. Heck, some people will even do the wvw legendary armor, even if pve is their preferred game mode. Maybe some of them just aren't very good at the game, but WvW inherently is closer to the OW that most prefer, because your performance typically isn't monitored under a magnifying glass nor can you be evicted by power hungry squad leaders. Gw2 has a reputation of a game that respects your time. You don't have slave away to for 3 hours in your chair, being unable to go to the bathroom. You can come in and out as you place, and for the most part other players cannot grief you. You can also put the game away for years and come back and most of the stuff is still here unless they want to sell another expansion. And what about WvW? WvW being a sandbox means that it supports a variety of playstyles. You don't have to even be good in the combat system if you find some other way to be helpful to your team. This means you are less bound to meta things, and as a result all kinds of weird stats and builds see use in wvw. Even escorting yaks is a valid role, after all. The greatest threats to this game mode if you ask me are its poor new player experience, population imbalance (related to the former), and railroading the game to only be supportive of certain preferred playstyles. This causes many situations where new players will find themselves griefing their team due to unintuitive mechanics such as instantly being useless in a big fight because your weapons are projectile based. It's kinda difficult for a new player to come in and witness the nonsense that happens in all scales and say "wow, this is very interesting!" Unfortunately, the only way they seem to know how to make players want to play with each other is the boonball. The game has basically been designed around full boons for the longest time. Ultimately, I think it's their duty to reduce this ridiculous disparity where you are simply a fool for not running certain boon spamming traits. Finally, they really need to work on stuff like the guild systems and social features. Some people have quipped that gw2 sometimes feels like a lot of solo players playing together, and they really haven't worked on these social aspects much. Remember when cities were server hubs? Now that the server model is essentially at its end of life and WvW should become guild/alliance based, it should really be a priority that they should indeed put the guild in Guild Wars 2. (Yes, don't come at me with the lore thing)

I mean there is some truth to this like core guard being terrible because all it offers is weak virtues and access to another damage tree, but some of this also contributes to balance issues. The difference between WB and other guard specs, is that outside of greatsword and offhand sword, Guardian has no free movement skills-- they require targets. So other guard specs can pursue enemies but they have a harder time disengaging except when there's random animals or enemy players in a different direction. This is an inherent trade off of the class. Warriors for example easily stick to their enemies but their bursts are very telegraphed while guardians don't really suffer from much animation locks aside from the horrible sword 3 (but that's being fixed). I think that unlocking offhand sword/longbow for all specs was pretty helpful, but not everyone wants to buy the expansion. The other reason why guardians weapons have trouble sticking is most of them are buggy and do not track well . However, instead of fixing that, they just increase the numbers without addressing the problem. Like it's been like 10+ years of sword 3 being utter crap. But the damage isn't going to be rebalanced around that; at least not until people complain. Core Virtues being weak due to being left behind the power creep also leads to problems because the Virtues tree was designed to interact with core skills. Absolute Resolve is one of the strongest guardian traits because it removes 3 condis on f2, while core/dh sees it every 25s, and fb 42, WB sees it 16 seconds and the thing has 2 charges,. I mean 16s is pretty fair given WB has no healing passive and requires hitting the enemy to heal but the 2nd charge's interaction with the trait is pretty nuts, allowing very high burst condi clear which can also be used in conjunction with running away. F2 also inherently removes soft cc. Meanwhile you also have F3 overlapping roles because WBs can trait to give resistance which further increases the difficulty to lock them down, and also it's on a 25s cooldown compared to the (36?) for others while typically being able to trait for breakstuns and then all the other stuff it gives, and it's a massively overloaded skill too. ==== Now this is not solely a problem with Willbender. A lot of elite specs have questionable interactions with core trees. You can look at mechanist and see "wow, they didn't even try". Or just dive in the water with any EoD spec. Of course, Anet in all their genius just hits the core tree in most cases and that just destroys non-meta builds and other specs (but especially core ones) and pats themselves on the back. It's only recently that they've actively decided to change how specific specs interact with a trait, like scourge tranfuse, and also gutting the hillarious way WB was broken with shattered aegis.... by making it useless. For some reason this deserves buffs. Changing sword 3 (not wb specific) makes sense because it's a terribly designed skill in the first pl;ace. Buffing WB utilities may also make sense because most of them suck. But buffing a trait that already makes an overloaded f3 even more annoying is nonsensical. Giving them a finishing skill? Who asked for that? lol. Meanwhile Anet destroys niche builds by essentially deleting Glacial Heart; a trait very few people used. They also hit the valor tree by killing the protection spam trait which might have been stupid on WB but that just ruins the fun for everyone. This only pushes people towards WB, and specifically meta ones. If you replace a few words, you also get the entirety of how the thief class is balanced. To me I think the greater problem of the balance team seems to be the intent to railroad everyone on a few builds so it's easier to balance. (Ah, just like pvp!). Except it seems like they have an excuse to do less since their general idea is to balance by deleting. I mean, even guardian mains cannot see the logic behind some guardian changes. They flat out told us that changing radiant fire would make us less dependent on torch for the skill.... while making it impossible to use without torch. This is also why I reject pvp style balance in WvW. Reducing the amount of things they need to balance won't make them balance more. It just allows them to do even less. I think they need to be expected to do their job and tackle the entire game.