devastoscz.9851

Your deliberate exclusion of any nuance is a perfect example of a reductive, simplistic and smooth brained though process.

I've experienced and enjoyed two types of roaming, both of which are now "dead". 1.) Gank squad: I used to belong to a guild that, in its origins, would chase zerg tails and harass backlines during fights only to immediately scatter when the main zerg set its eyes on it. Sometimes the zerg would chase after you and stop, in which case it was ideal to turn back on the over extenders and nuke them into oblivion, setting your cycle in motion again. Incredibly fun, very risk/reward oriented gameplay. Anywhere between 2-6 of us used to do this. 2.) Solo/Duo Roaming: Besides the usual cycling through camps to find fights, the main attraction here was to intercept reinfrocements/respawns to zerg fights. Most of the zerglings cannot 1v1 or even 2v1 a well played roaming spec so they become easy pickings until you're enough trouble that they actually have to group up to fight you instead of reinforcing the zerg. BOTH of these activities have been greatly diminished by the Warclaw. The problem is people can now choose to just plain avoid you or chase you down on their mounts while you're unmounted in combat. Try to pick a backline? They're all on mounts running at full speed. If you dismount one and try to gank it, those not in combat mount up and swarm you. Try to stop reinforcements? They're all on mounts and you only have 1 (now 2) charges on your dismount skill, which is easily avoidable if they're paying attention. This is why people are now forming up in gank squads. Because to do what you could do alone before, you need 2-3 people to actually force a single target to engage. Honestly, the Warclaw is an amazing QoL addition, but it completely changed the face of roaming. We've always had high stealth, high burst, high mobility classes. More classes have that now, there should be MORE solo/duo roaming not less. The problem is now its become too easy to avoid the solo/duo roamers, to the point where you need more people to be effective. At this point its impossible to get rid of mounts in WvW. And honestly, I dont know if I would want to, but I think they need some tweaks. A good middle ground for this would be if Warclaws were not immune to CC's. I could see the whole face of roaming change if you could cripple, chill, immobilize, pull or even knockdown people on their mounts. Have 3 dudes chasing you on their mounts? Drop a static field, fear ring, lines, etc. to delay them and give the unmounted roamer a fighting chance. Missed your lance? A couple CC's could stop that mount if only long enough for your skills to be in range to dismount the player. Honestly I think the warclaw is the biggest problem, and it has created and snowballed other behaviors, including super mobility, that make roaming a lot less engaging for those who attempt to do it or fight against it.

I was under the impression that Sniff was showing damaged walls, not what walls could be damaged. Honestly I haven't paid close enough attention to it, because like most of you, I know what walls can be broken. That said, I'm getting proper enemy dots when I Sniff, so that doesn't seem to be bugged on my end. This is interesting. I could've sworn I've seen it work on Fire Keep when enemies are on a different level than me, but honestly I can't be sure. But yes, if its not showing stuff on top of you or below, it should.

Retal's implementation was kinda dumb to be honest. At least reflects have an animation you can see, and can choose not to use your skills while its up. With retal you had to keep an eye out for a specific boon among the myriad of little icons on every single enemy. An ele casting staff 5 would nuke itself immediately if they hit targets with Retal with no real way to stop it once it was cast. It was dumb. Glad they removed it, hope it never comes back in that way.

I have 2 accounts. My main is 10 years old and the one I spend 99.9% of my time on. The other was an alt I made, I can't honestly remember the reason for it, probably mystic coin farming from daily logins. But I got HoT and PoF on it cause it was bundled cheap a few years ago. That one I played WvW in during the first WR beta cause the system bugged out and put me on the wrong team. I haven't really touched WvW with it since though. I did fractals on it for a bit, since I already had it, but the lack of QoL I accrued over 10 years on my main made playing the alt insufferable by comparison. So now its just a thing to log on to when I remember for the Astral thingies.

Considering that more people aren't posting this extreme behavior, I doubt it's origin is in the servers. Yes the servers do get overloaded on occasion and especially during prime-time, however the magnitude of delay described here is extreme, and apparently not affecting every user which would be the case should the servers be struggling that bad. Most likely, being prime time, your ISP is either throttling you or re-routing bandwidth in a less than optimal way to the GW2 servers. I've had this happen before. As for solutions, you first have to identify the problem. Try running a continuous ping to Google DNS - 8.8.8.8 - (it helps if you have two screens) while playing WvW in prime time. If your lag spikes happen at the same time as packet loss (ping timeouts) or severe delay in the response time... then your internet is dropping packets and you should contact your ISP. Anything beyond a 1-2% packet loss is not acceptable and will likely warrant a visit from a maintenance team. If you're not dropping packets, try using a decent VPN (I use Windscribe for NA servers) and connect close to where the Anet servers are in Europe (no idea where that is). If this mitigates or solves the problem altogether for you, the issue is your ISP is routing the packets poorly to the servers. This has happened to me when my ISP's main internet line went down and they used their backup, but it's routing was terrible. You could call your ISP as well, but I don't know if they'll have any solution for you. You could stick to your VPN, usually they're quite cheap nowdays. Hope this helps at least in diagnosing your problems.

Exactly this. You need to explore the Chat UI a bit OP. You can see all guild chats in one tab if you set it up (its not difficult). And you can type in any of your guilds with the /g1 - g/6 commands in the chatbox.

If 10 or less people on siege can actually stop/kill a 50+ man group on an objective, then there's no point in attacking anything and structures would NEVER flip. So yeah, it would absolutely break the balance of this game mode. OP misreads why the T3 keep was lost, it had little to do with siege, and more to do that the defending team had no organized group (either out of stubbornness or low pop) to face the attacking force.

If the situation is indeed like OP describes, then it's just terrible defending. Manning 5 trebs + catas + arrowcarts hitting a gate will absolutely delay an PvD attack. PVD'ing a T3 gate takes a LONG time, even with "80 people", not to mention 2 gates. Enough time for the defenders to get organized and actually do something about it if they wanted to. Now if the defenders are all scattered trying to snipe away at a blob one at a time, obviously, its not gonna work. If people are elsewhere, or being stubborn being yanked off of walls instead of grouping up, its not gonna work. To fight a blob under siege you don't need equal numbers, but you need a group. If you don't have a group, its not the siege's fault, its not the enemy's fault... its your team's fault for not grouping up and getting organized to defend correctly. You're pointing the finger at the wrong target buddy.

In general WR has been a net positive for my experience. Even when the matchups have been less than desirable, I know they wont last long and look forward to the monthly shuffle. The only thing I can genuinely say I dont like is the queues... holy hell, the queues have been ridiculous. The 5th tier thing seemed like a good idea for a bit, but that was apparently too overkill; unfortunately as it stands right now the queues on the weekends during prime are absurd. Moving a 20 man group has been next to impossible, not to mention queue bugs are rampant both in being requeued and somehow 10 people stuck in the same position in the queue. As for boon blob combat, I don't mind it honestly. The recent changes to balance have really kept people on their toes, adapting all the time, which makes it entertaining. Personally I've adapted to it, but I'm open to the idea of a combat revamp to make combat less bloaty in terms of boons. Side note, as this comment is slightly tangential, but related to both questions: The one thing I'm hating is the LAG. What the hell is going on with the lag? The past few weeks its been terrible, skills not going off for 10+ seconds (if at all), massive rubberbanding, etc. It's really getting to an unplayable state. Personally, I've gotten to the point that starting this week, I'm not even gonna try to play on reset; there's more enjoyable ways of spending a Friday evening than grinding my teeth to dust as I watch my skills blink and do nothing.

I won't disagree that the combat system has its problems, particularly with something you mentioned: bloat. But as you said, there's no alternative, there's no better combat system out there. Does this make the GW2 combat system "good"? Not necessarily (although I think it is, despite its flaws), but it's better than anything else I've played. I too enjoyed New World's combat system for a bit, but that was also incredibly unbalanced (sword and board, the axe kitten, zoom wizards etc.). Given that its a massively simpler system, it should've been handled better. I think the level of complexity in the combat system is not necessarily a bad thing, but the effects of it do rear its ugly head in PvP because of a vicious cycle of low population affecting the matchmaking system. Players get placed in matches that are way out of their league in ranked, causing landslide results. If the matchmaking was more even, players would have a chance to learn their professions on a gradual scale, facing people with a similar level of understanding of the game and graduate into tougher matches. But this requires a much higher population. As it stands, the low pop matchmaking leads to pvp cannibalizing itself and less knowledgeable players quitting so as to not get farmed. I too belong to a guild that wins most of its fights, we usually only lose when we're considerably outnumbered. And that's why we keep our guild numbers low, so the chance to be outnumbered is very frequent, and we enjoy the challenge. Maybe that's why I don't find it mindless and boring, because for the most part my experience is purposefully tailored to be a challenge and coordination/skill based. And when it's not, we log off; clubbing spread out baby seals is not engaging content.

Lol, why are you even playing then, if you hate the principal mechanics of the game? I actually find GW2 combat to be awesome. If anything, the combat system is what's kept me in the game, no other game has come close to this level of active combat in an sandbox pvp scenario. I don't play end game PVE (other than fractals for money) because I find it kinda boring after a while. As for sPvP, I played it for years but the population decline made matchmaking a nightmare and I got into playing WvW with my friends instead. I find it amusing that a lot of people in this thread say that group play "isn't fun" and yet there's a fairly active GvG scene and the borderlands are "invaded by boon blobs"; ironically, the only times where the maps are queued are when comped groups are around. I think the overarching WvW population just happens to disagree with "zergs aren't fun" , because if these zerg hating people were the majority, the comped groups wouldn't even be able to get on map. And yet, every reset, at the highest population time in the game..... the zergs always get in. I do think WvW needs objectives that cater to smaller groups though. I think small group play can definitely be more exciting and should have a defined purpose in WvW, especially within major objectives. For example, borrow some Skyhammer mechanics for keeps, where a smaller ring needs to be fought for and capped and only 5 players can join from each side and that would have some impact on the main keep cap. I'm not sure if a giant laser from the sky should down 50 people in a keep, but at least properly delay an attacking force; they could make it a tactivator with a short cooldown. Even splitting the single cap point into 3 points that need to be held and can be contested within a keep would be interesting, forcing a large attacking army to disperse somewhat. New World had something like that and I found it made for a very dynamic system. It could even tie in with keep upgrades so higher tiers of keep have more cap points. I could see SMC having this is as well, considering there are 3 floors.

That's fair. If sPvP is your main focus then its more of a hassle for you than a benefit. That said, the developer is quick to update it, usually within the same day, when a patch releases.

There's no risk. The company doesn't support it because they don't develop it (obviously), but Arc follows their requirements for an allowed 3rd party extension; they won't flag you for using it. Anet partners use it, streamers use it, Anet developers use it themselves. Get Arc.

There's a directory for this? Mind sharing where?