alright, to those who enjoy their necro at 80, do you mostly do WvW? or a lot of dungeons?
right now, i want to get a character in place who can roll dungeons well, and that is warrior. min/max whatever, i feel like they're the most effective class in the game right now, especially when paired with a good guardian. to me, grenade/elixir (with elixir gun if you need a little support) engineer is a close second with 30/0/0/30/10, but i'd rather focus on warrior.
I mostly PvE, but I don't mind spectral grasping fools off of battlements in WuvWuv from time to time. I enjoy my necro, but I also like playing a ranger, another target of derision. Keep that in mind when evaluating my tastes.
Black lives matter.
Law and Order ≠ Justice
ACNH Island Isla Cero: DA-3082-2045-4142
Captain of the SES Comptroller of the State
Radiance may secretly be the most defensive guardian trait. Unlike every other signet, Signet of Judgment decreases damage by 10% of total damage and not a static stat increase. Perfect Inscriptions may increase that to 12%. Stacking with protection, that's a 40% or a little more damage reduction no matter what else you're wearing. Combine that with Inscribed Removal, and you've got lots of uncounterable damage reduction and condition removal in what's supposed to be an offensive trait line. Therefore, you can put 30 (or 20, if you don't believe in swords) and 10 in every other trait for versatility, because you don't really have any other needs outside of the trait line.
A 0/10/30/30/0 Guardian running Hammer or Greatsword and AH with shouts would be able to take advantage of that signet without having to make any investment in Radiance (I like the 10 for the reduced CD on my heal), and likely be far more survivable that something with 10 in every other trait line. You'll get more vitality, more toughness, more dodging and more passive healing.
The problem I'm having with being a guardian is that the Valor and Honor trait lines are just TOO good to pass on.
alright, to those who enjoy their necro at 80, do you mostly do WvW? or a lot of dungeons?
right now, i want to get a character in place who can roll dungeons well, and that is warrior. min/max whatever, i feel like they're the most effective class in the game right now, especially when paired with a good guardian. to me, grenade/elixir (with elixir gun if you need a little support) engineer is a close second with 30/0/0/30/10, but i'd rather focus on warrior.
I mostly PvE, but I don't mind spectral grasping fools off of battlements in WuvWuv from time to time. I enjoy my necro, but I also like playing a ranger, another target of derision. Keep that in mind when evaluating my tastes.
I do everything.
Yesterday, a combination of insomnia and taking the day off work meant that I ran CoF story, CoF explorable, got 100% completion of all 3 orr zones, and Frostgorge Sound. I also spent about 5 hours in WvW and got about 100 badges on the day. I made about 25g yesterday, but spent a lot of it. I'm now sitting on around 10g.
Radiance may secretly be the most defensive guardian trait. Unlike every other signet, Signet of Judgment decreases damage by 10% of total damage and not a static stat increase. Perfect Inscriptions may increase that to 12%. Stacking with protection, that's a 40% or a little more damage reduction no matter what else you're wearing. Combine that with Inscribed Removal, and you've got lots of uncounterable damage reduction and condition removal in what's supposed to be an offensive trait line. Therefore, you can put 30 (or 20, if you don't believe in swords) and 10 in every other trait for versatility, because you don't really have any other needs outside of the trait line.
A 0/10/30/30/0 Guardian running Hammer or Greatsword and AH with shouts would be able to take advantage of that signet without having to make any investment in Radiance (I like the 10 for the reduced CD on my heal), and likely be far more survivable that something with 10 in every other trait line. You'll get more vitality, more toughness, more dodging and more passive healing.
The problem I'm having with being a guardian is that the Valor and Honor trait lines are just TOO good to pass on.
That's one of the problems I have with guardians too. Seems like 90% of players run between 50-60 points in Valor and Honour. The class suffers from build stagnation.
Radiance may secretly be the most defensive guardian trait. Unlike every other signet, Signet of Judgment decreases damage by 10% of total damage and not a static stat increase. Perfect Inscriptions may increase that to 12%. Stacking with protection, that's a 40% or a little more damage reduction no matter what else you're wearing. Combine that with Inscribed Removal, and you've got lots of uncounterable damage reduction and condition removal in what's supposed to be an offensive trait line. Therefore, you can put 30 (or 20, if you don't believe in swords) and 10 in every other trait for versatility, because you don't really have any other needs outside of the trait line.
A 0/10/30/30/0 Guardian running Hammer or Greatsword and AH with shouts would be able to take advantage of that signet without having to make any investment in Radiance (I like the 10 for the reduced CD on my heal), and likely be far more survivable that something with 10 in every other trait line. You'll get more vitality, more toughness, more dodging and more passive healing.
The problem I'm having with being a guardian is that the Valor and Honor trait lines are just TOO good to pass on.
At some point you can be too survivable and miss out on a lot of damage.
Marty: The future, it's where you're going? Doc: That's right, twenty five years into the future. I've always dreamed on seeing the future, looking beyond my years, seeing the progress of mankind. I'll also be able to see who wins the next twenty-five world series.
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DemonStaceyTTODewback's DaughterIn love with the TaySwayRegistered Userregular
After seeing that fancy sword that I didn't know existed... are there any GS recipes like that? Special MF (non mists) skins?
Radiance may secretly be the most defensive guardian trait. Unlike every other signet, Signet of Judgment decreases damage by 10% of total damage and not a static stat increase. Perfect Inscriptions may increase that to 12%. Stacking with protection, that's a 40% or a little more damage reduction no matter what else you're wearing. Combine that with Inscribed Removal, and you've got lots of uncounterable damage reduction and condition removal in what's supposed to be an offensive trait line. Therefore, you can put 30 (or 20, if you don't believe in swords) and 10 in every other trait for versatility, because you don't really have any other needs outside of the trait line.
A 0/10/30/30/0 Guardian running Hammer or Greatsword and AH with shouts would be able to take advantage of that signet without having to make any investment in Radiance (I like the 10 for the reduced CD on my heal), and likely be far more survivable that something with 10 in every other trait line. You'll get more vitality, more toughness, more dodging and more passive healing.
The problem I'm having with being a guardian is that the Valor and Honor trait lines are just TOO good to pass on.
At some point you can be too survivable and miss out on a lot of damage.
Well, that's the thing with going x/x/30/20-30/x...the build itself is so damn survivable, you can basically move the slider as close to "glass cannon" as your playstyle dicates and be hella survivable. You're just giving up so much on the traits that can't be replaced with gear.
Plus, Vitality/Toughness/Healing Power/Crit Damage are all really desirable stats, whereas condition damage and duration are extremely weak for guardians (imho) that even if the traits weren't so badass, those bonus are fantastic.
Radiance may secretly be the most defensive guardian trait. Unlike every other signet, Signet of Judgment decreases damage by 10% of total damage and not a static stat increase. Perfect Inscriptions may increase that to 12%. Stacking with protection, that's a 40% or a little more damage reduction no matter what else you're wearing. Combine that with Inscribed Removal, and you've got lots of uncounterable damage reduction and condition removal in what's supposed to be an offensive trait line. Therefore, you can put 30 (or 20, if you don't believe in swords) and 10 in every other trait for versatility, because you don't really have any other needs outside of the trait line.
A 0/10/30/30/0 Guardian running Hammer or Greatsword and AH with shouts would be able to take advantage of that signet without having to make any investment in Radiance (I like the 10 for the reduced CD on my heal), and likely be far more survivable that something with 10 in every other trait line. You'll get more vitality, more toughness, more dodging and more passive healing.
The problem I'm having with being a guardian is that the Valor and Honor trait lines are just TOO good to pass on.
At some point you can be too survivable and miss out on a lot of damage.
Well, that's the thing with going x/x/30/20-30/x...the build itself is so damn survivable, you can basically move the slider as close to "glass cannon" as your playstyle dicates and be hella survivable. You're just giving up so much on the traits that can't be replaced with gear.
Plus, Vitality/Toughness/Healing Power/Crit Damage are all really desirable stats, whereas condition damage and duration are extremely weak for guardians (imho) that even if the traits weren't so badass, those bonus are fantastic.
I dunno how to move the slider when I'm only using one set of weapons and armor
Marty: The future, it's where you're going? Doc: That's right, twenty five years into the future. I've always dreamed on seeing the future, looking beyond my years, seeing the progress of mankind. I'll also be able to see who wins the next twenty-five world series.
Radiance may secretly be the most defensive guardian trait. Unlike every other signet, Signet of Judgment decreases damage by 10% of total damage and not a static stat increase. Perfect Inscriptions may increase that to 12%. Stacking with protection, that's a 40% or a little more damage reduction no matter what else you're wearing. Combine that with Inscribed Removal, and you've got lots of uncounterable damage reduction and condition removal in what's supposed to be an offensive trait line. Therefore, you can put 30 (or 20, if you don't believe in swords) and 10 in every other trait for versatility, because you don't really have any other needs outside of the trait line.
A 0/10/30/30/0 Guardian running Hammer or Greatsword and AH with shouts would be able to take advantage of that signet without having to make any investment in Radiance (I like the 10 for the reduced CD on my heal), and likely be far more survivable that something with 10 in every other trait line. You'll get more vitality, more toughness, more dodging and more passive healing.
The problem I'm having with being a guardian is that the Valor and Honor trait lines are just TOO good to pass on.
At some point you can be too survivable and miss out on a lot of damage.
Well, that's the thing with going x/x/30/20-30/x...the build itself is so damn survivable, you can basically move the slider as close to "glass cannon" as your playstyle dicates and be hella survivable. You're just giving up so much on the traits that can't be replaced with gear.
Plus, Vitality/Toughness/Healing Power/Crit Damage are all really desirable stats, whereas condition damage and duration are extremely weak for guardians (imho) that even if the traits weren't so badass, those bonus are fantastic.
I dunno how to move the slider when I'm only using one set of weapons and armor
Yes, adjusting your stats in GW2 is going to involved changing gear. But the point is you can move the needle between being damn near unkillable in PvE or a very survivable glass cannon, using the exact same build.
Do you want to do a lot of damage? Or be really survivable? With the x/x/30/20-30/x build you can do both.
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mojojoeoA block off the park, living the dream.Registered Userregular
Radiance may secretly be the most defensive guardian trait. Unlike every other signet, Signet of Judgment decreases damage by 10% of total damage and not a static stat increase. Perfect Inscriptions may increase that to 12%. Stacking with protection, that's a 40% or a little more damage reduction no matter what else you're wearing. Combine that with Inscribed Removal, and you've got lots of uncounterable damage reduction and condition removal in what's supposed to be an offensive trait line. Therefore, you can put 30 (or 20, if you don't believe in swords) and 10 in every other trait for versatility, because you don't really have any other needs outside of the trait line.
A 0/10/30/30/0 Guardian running Hammer or Greatsword and AH with shouts would be able to take advantage of that signet without having to make any investment in Radiance (I like the 10 for the reduced CD on my heal), and likely be far more survivable that something with 10 in every other trait line. You'll get more vitality, more toughness, more dodging and more passive healing.
The problem I'm having with being a guardian is that the Valor and Honor trait lines are just TOO good to pass on.
At some point you can be too survivable and miss out on a lot of damage.
Well, that's the thing with going x/x/30/20-30/x...the build itself is so damn survivable, you can basically move the slider as close to "glass cannon" as your playstyle dicates and be hella survivable. You're just giving up so much on the traits that can't be replaced with gear.
Plus, Vitality/Toughness/Healing Power/Crit Damage are all really desirable stats, whereas condition damage and duration are extremely weak for guardians (imho) that even if the traits weren't so badass, those bonus are fantastic.
I dunno how to move the slider when I'm only using one set of weapons and armor
the spvp gear is a giant playground for this. You should try it.
re RADIANCE -Another big buff from radiance is all the blinds- voj is an aoe blind-> every kill refreshes it. Signets are nice but interruptible. And if you are going to burn a ton of points buffing them... you almost have to be resigned to load up your bar with more than a few. And like you said- valor and honor are just better is the issue.
And for the love of silly geese stop saying you can be 'too survivable'- in this games current incarnation Survival is king. Even the most defensive build has enough gas to trash glass cannons. Its just the current balance, in other games not so much but here - stay on your GD feet..
bear in mind the original framing of the conversation is WVW.
mojojoeo on
Chief Wiggum: "Ladies, please. All our founding fathers, astronauts, and World Series heroes have been either drunk or on cocaine."
So I was visiting my parents for Thanksgiving, and won't have access to a GW2-capable computer for six whole days. How on earth was I supposed to waste productive time without one? Here's how: by writing a WvW guide for people.
IMO we ought to WvW more, since it's awesome. The problem is that WvW can seem intimidating to people who aren't naturally inclined towards pvp, and there's a certain level of experience you need before you feel like you know what you're doing. For someone without that experience, WvW can be frustrating. You wander around the map looking for something to do, find nothing for a while, then outta nowhere a group of like 70 enemy dudes just rolls over you without even breaking stride. It's enough to make you lose interest.
What's more, many people don't have a sense of what to do in a big fight of like 20 vs. 20 or more; they don't have a sense of how to be effective. This block of text is intended to help you find your feet in WvW – and hopefully realize how much damn fun it can be. Reading and understanding what's below should accelerate your WvW acclimation process if you're new at it or haven't done it before.
Hot Zerg-on-Zerg Action
I want to talk about large, open-field group fights, both because they're one of the most common types of engagement and because they're the type that has no analog in other parts of the game. Nothing in PvE is comparable and structured pvp only has smaller fights, with the largest possible one being 8 on 8. A fight of 20 vs. 20 follows different rules and requires different habits. These are habits that experienced WvWers have developed an intuitive grasp of, but which new players sometimes don't yet have.
In my opinion, the key component to understand is the importance of range. Take a hypothetical large fight, for the sake of the example we'll say 20 on 20, on flat open ground with no major terrain features. Here's a picture of what this fight might look like:
Blue dots are your allies, red dots are the enemy. As you can see this is mostly a ranged fight, because WvW fights tend to be mostly ranged fights due to the danger of focus fire. I'll illustrate what I mean with this picture:
Here, blue dots are allies and red ones enemies, and the circle around each dot represents that player's range of fire. The blue dot with a 1 next to it is in a dangerous area, since it's inside the range of several enemy players. The blue dot with a 2 next to it is in a relatively safe area (edit: I put the 2 in the wrong place, sue me), since it's only inside the range of one enemy. The #3 dot is outside the range of all enemies, so he's safe – but he can't damage any enemies either.
The most basic method of staying alive in WvW is to move back and forth between dangerous areas, where you can damage the bad guys, and safe areas where you can recover. Because of this it's useful to think of a zerg as having two “lines” - the front line and the back line. In the picture above, #1 is on the front line and #2 and #3 are on the back line.
Obviously a real zerg won't have players arranging themselves into recognizable lines – instead it'll be a rolling clusterfuck of people constantly milling around. But amidst all that chaos you can think of there being two lines kind of like this:
Any given player will start out on the front line attacking the enemy, and then, as his or her health drops and conditions stack up and so forth, retreat into the back line to recover before rejoining the fight. The opposing players will do the same – any player who spends too long in the range of too many people will be overwhelmed by focus fire, even with a very defensive build. At this point you may be thinking “duh, of course.” You're right to think that, this is pretty simple stuff. But the language I'm using here – the “lines” - is going to be useful in understanding how zerg-on-zerg fights are won, and how they can be reliably won against equal numbers and even against superior numbers.
How to Break the Zerg
If you've WvWed even a little you've probably seen what it looks like when a zerg breaks. First one guy starts running, then two, then two more guys see those two guys running, then it's four, then everyone figures that the fight is lost and bails. This begins the mop-up phase of the fight, where the victorious side tries to snare, down and dunk as many people as possible. Basically the way to win a large-scale open-field WvW fight is to try to make this happen, and in order to make it happen it's good to examine how it happens.
A zerg breaks based on a mixture of practical and psychological effects, which happen on an individual level and lead to defeat when translated up to the group level. One is a lack of a safe place – the absence of a “backline,” to use the above term, to which a player low on health can retreat. If there's no backline, the player has to spend his or her time and attention defending instead of attacking, and starts to use up his limited defensive resources (dodges, heals, and skills). Another is being forced to turn around. If you have to turn and run away from the enemy, you're giving up nearly all of your offense, since very few skills will work without line-of-sight.
It follows from this that the simplest way to break a zerg is to push. By “push” I mean everyone goes to the frontline, everyone gets more aggressive and begins fighting as though they expect to win. When your whole zerg pushes forward, it pushes the opponent's backline – their safe place – backwards. It's harder to get to, and they may have to turn and run to get to it instead, and you've accomplished the double goal of taking away their backline and making them turn around. From there the psychological effects kick in, more and more enemy players start to think they're losing, causing a feedback loop of “shit bail” that leads to a full-scale retreat, and from there to the mop-up phase.
For these reasons, given equal numbers and individual skill/gear, it's usually the more aggressive and confident zerg that will win. A push like this can backfire of course – if too many players run into too much enemy fire, they'll die (especially if their allies don't push with them), and the numbers advantage will swing to the other side. But for the most part, it's the zerg that expects to win that will win. This expectation is often a byproduct of server culture. A server that expects to win its fights will win them, creating a self-reinforcing confidence even in its pugs. I'm happy to report that Fort Aspenwood seems to me to be above average in this respect – our zergs often push confidently, and even when things are going badly they tend more towards a fighting retreat than to breaking.
The Spoon
Of course you were probably looking for more useful tactical advice than just “be more confident.” So another way to get an edge is with the spoon. Spooning is something NICE started doing back in week two or three or something after release. It's kind of hard to describe so I'll use a couple pictures:
If you want to sound all militaryish you could call this a flanking maneuver or rolling up the line or something. We call it the spoon. It works because it takes away part of the enemy's backline, so they have nowhere to retreat to. In the second picture above you can see that the enemy players inside the spoon can't retreat backwards – they'll just be retreating into more damage. So they start to roll up, retreating out of the spoon, and when the spoon follows them you can get the entire enemy zerg inside it, with fewer and fewer options for temporary retreat. This works even better if you can spoon them away from their escape route, meaning you'll get more dunks in the mop-up phase. Note that spooning isn't always a good idea, and in some cases it's impossible anyway due to terrain. But it can help in many fights.
Remember above all that when you're spooning an enemy zerg, they may never have been spooned before. They may be nervous or frightened. So when you spoon, the most important thing is that you do it gently, and with love in your heart.
Melee
So far I've been talking almost entirely about ranged combat, because most WvW combat is ranged combat. Relatively few players have the temperament to pull out a sword or something and charge into a mass of red names. For this reason melee is (IMO) one of the best-kept secrets in WvW. Even just one guy charging in can singlehandedly break a stalemate. The single biggest reason it works is that, again, it takes away the backline. A guy in the midst of the enemy zerg means that when you retreat away from the frontline you're retreating right into a dude trying to smack you with a hammer (or whatever). Melee characters also draw a lot of fire, which means they draw it away from their teammates, and they're often best equipped to survive it since a good WvW melee build is focused around survivability. Then there's things like knockbacks, cripples, fears, aoe blinds and so forth which will get the most use here. Finally there's the psychological effect – having someone up in your face hitting you makes opposing players feel like they're losing, and makes them concentrate on defense more, freeing up your ranged teammates to push forward and apply pressure.
Furthermore, with the right build and a bit of practice you're less likely to die than you think. I haven't played every class but I have played five of the eight and WvWed (and meleed) with all five of them. My guess is that they're aren't any classes that can't melee in WvW at least part-time. However, surviving in melee requires some knowhow and practice. You basically have to alternate skills and dodging to make yourself “invincible” for as long as possible. Also with only one or two exceptions (Punchdance's build and maybe a bunker guardian) meleeing full-time is not really possible. You have to go in, burn your cooldowns, disrupt the enemy as much as possible, and then bail when things start to get too hairy, run to your backline and resume from ranged.
Roles
As we know GW2 doesn't have the so-called “holy trinity” of tank/healer/dps, and there's more fluidity between who's supposed to do what. However that doesn't mean there aren't rough roles to fill, and here they are:
The Line Fighter, named after the front and back lines, is the bread-and-butter ranged guy. Most people you see in WvW have taken up this role. Examples of a pure line fighter could be a longbow ranger or rifle warrior.
Melee is what it sounds like. These are those few brave souls who get right up in the face of the enemy and disrupt them as much as possible. Hammer warrior for example, or any number of classes which can weapon-swap, run in, melee for a bit, then run out.
Support is also what it sounds like. Boons, heals, condition removal, as well as putting crowd control on pursuing enemies in the case of a retreat. A supporty necro, engi, guardian or elementalist for example.
You shouldn't feel like you have to pick only one role. There's only a couple classes and builds that can melee full-time, and few people will want to support full-time because it'll mean a lack of tags and bags. So most people are going to be a mix of line fighter and either melee or support. The build I use on my main (a Mesmer) for instance alternates between line fighter and melee.
tl;dr
The point of all of this is to start seeing zerg-on-zerg fights differently. A beginner at WvW looks at a zerg-on-zerg fight and sees something like this:
A more experienced one starts to see the order in the chaos and sees something like this:
Ideally, NICE should see something like this:
Giving specific and detailed orders about positioning is rarely practical in WvW. So taking the shape in the above picture is something that has to be done kind of through group instinct. If we get in the collective habit of doing this, we should win basically all of our open-field fights (we already win most of them) unless we're outnumbered 2 to 1 or more. Even if there's like 10 of us fighting alongside 20 pugs or something, if some of us melee and some spoon it'll give our side a real edge.
That only covers open-field fights, which are like one-quarter of WvW (the other three quarters are small group stuff, siege, and defense). I might write a thing on small group stuff soon. Yougottawanna out.
So I was visiting my parents for Thanksgiving, and won't have access to a GW2-capable computer for six whole days. How on earth was I supposed to waste productive time without one? Here's how: by writing a WvW guide for people.
IMO we ought to WvW more, since it's awesome. The problem is that WvW can seem intimidating to people who aren't naturally inclined towards pvp, and there's a certain level of experience you need before you feel like you know what you're doing. For someone without that experience, WvW can be frustrating. You wander around the map looking for something to do, find nothing for a while, then outta nowhere a group of like 70 enemy dudes just rolls over you without even breaking stride. It's enough to make you lose interest.
What's more, many people don't have a sense of what to do in a big fight of like 20 vs. 20 or more; they don't have a sense of how to be effective. This block of text is intended to help you find your feet in WvW – and hopefully realize how much damn fun it can be. Reading and understanding what's below should accelerate your WvW acclimation process if you're new at it or haven't done it before.
Hot Zerg-on-Zerg Action
I want to talk about large, open-field group fights, both because they're one of the most common types of engagement and because they're the type that has no analog in other parts of the game. Nothing in PvE is comparable and structured pvp only has smaller fights, with the largest possible one being 8 on 8. A fight of 20 vs. 20 follows different rules and requires different habits. These are habits that experienced WvWers have developed an intuitive grasp of, but which new players sometimes don't yet have.
In my opinion, the key component to understand is the importance of range. Take a hypothetical large fight, for the sake of the example we'll say 20 on 20, on flat open ground with no major terrain features. Here's a picture of what this fight might look like:
Blue dots are your allies, red dots are the enemy. As you can see this is mostly a ranged fight, because WvW fights tend to be mostly ranged fights due to the danger of focus fire. I'll illustrate what I mean with this picture:
Here, blue dots are allies and red ones enemies, and the circle around each dot represents that player's range of fire. The blue dot with a 1 next to it is in a dangerous area, since it's inside the range of several enemy players. The blue dot with a 2 next to it is in a relatively safe area (edit: I put the 2 in the wrong place, sue me), since it's only inside the range of one enemy. The #3 dot is outside the range of all enemies, so he's safe – but he can't damage any enemies either.
The most basic method of staying alive in WvW is to move back and forth between dangerous areas, where you can damage the bad guys, and safe areas where you can recover. Because of this it's useful to think of a zerg as having two “lines” - the front line and the back line. In the picture above, #1 is on the front line and #2 and #3 are on the back line.
Obviously a real zerg won't have players arranging themselves into recognizable lines – instead it'll a rolling clusterfuck of people constantly milling around. But amidst all that chaos you can think of there being two lines kind of like this:
Any given player will start out on the front line attacking the enemy, and then, as his or her health drops and conditions stack up and so forth, retreat into the back line to recover before rejoining the fight. The opposing players will do the same – any player who spends too long in the range of too many people will be overwhelmed by focus fire, even with a very defensive build. At this point you may be thinking “duh, of course.” You're right to think that, this is pretty simple stuff. But the language I'm using here – the “lines” - is going to be useful in understanding how zerg-on-zerg fights are won, and how they can be reliably won against equal numbers and even against superior numbers.
How to Break the Zerg
If you've WvWed even a little you've probably seen what it looks like when a zerg breaks. First one guy starts running, then two, then two more guys see those two guys running, then it's four, then everyone figures that the fight is lost and bails. This begins the mop-up phase of the fight, where the victorious side tries to snare, down and dunk as many people as possible. Basically the way to win a large-scale open-field WvW fight is to try to make this happen, and in order to make it happen it's good to examine how it happens.
A zerg breaks based on a mixture of practical and psychological effects, which happen on an individual level and lead to defeat when translated up to the group level. One is a lack of a safe place – the absence of a “backline,” to use the above term, to which a player low on health can retreat. If there's no backline, the player has to spend his or her time and attention defending instead of attacking, and starts to use up his limited defensive resources (dodges, heals, and skills). Another is being forced to turn around. If you have to turn and run away from the enemy, you're giving up nearly all of your offense, since very few skills will work without line-of-sight.
It follows from this that the simplest way to break a zerg is to push. By “push” I mean everyone goes to the frontline, everyone gets more aggressive and begins fighting as though they expect to win. When your whole zerg pushes forward, it pushes the opponent's backline – their safe place – backwards. It's harder to get to, and they may have to turn and run to get to it instead, and you've accomplished the double goal of taking away their backline and making them turn around. From there the psychological effects kick in, more and more enemy players start to think they're losing, causing a feedback loop of “shit bail” that leads to a full-scale retreat, and from there to the mop-up phase.
For these reasons, given equal numbers and individual skill/gear, it's usually the more aggressive and confident zerg that will win. A push like this can backfire of course – if too many players run into too much enemy fire, they'll die (especially if their allies don't push with them), and the numbers advantage will swing to the other side. But for the most part, it's the zerg that expects to win that will win. This expectation is often a byproduct of server culture. A server that expects to win its fights will win them, creating a self-reinforcing confidence even in its pugs. I'm happy to report that Fort Aspenwood seems to me to be above average in this respect – our zergs often push confidently, and even when things are going badly they tend more towards a fighting retreat than to breaking.
The Spoon
Of course you were probably looking for more useful tactical advice than just “be more confident.” So another way to get an edge is with the spoon. Spooning is something NICE started doing back in week two or three or something after release. It's kind of hard to describe so I'll use a couple pictures:
If you want to sound all militaryish you could call this a flanking maneuver or rolling up the line or something. We call it the spoon. It works because it takes away part of the enemy's backline, so they have nowhere to retreat to. In the second picture above you can see that the enemy players inside the spoon can't retreat backwards – they'll just be retreating into more damage. So they start to roll up, retreating out of the spoon, and when the spoon follows them you can get the entire enemy zerg inside it, with fewer and fewer options for temporary retreat. This works even better if you can spoon them away from their escape route, meaning you'll get more dunks in the mop-up phase. Note that spooning isn't always a good idea, and in some cases it's impossible anyway due to terrain. But it can help in many fights.
Remember above all that when you're spooning an enemy zerg, they may never have been spooned before. They may be nervous or frightened. So when you spoon, the most important thing is that you do it gently, and with love in your heart.
Melee
So far I've been talking almost entirely about ranged combat, because most WvW combat is ranged combat. Relatively few players have the temperament to pull out a sword or something and charge into a mass of red names. For this reason melee is (IMO) one of the best-kept secrets in WvW. Even just one guy charging in can singlehandedly break a stalemate. The single biggest reason it works is that, again, it takes away the backline. A guy in the midst of the enemy zerg means that when you retreat away from the frontline you're retreating right into a dude trying to smack you with a hammer (or whatever). Melee characters also draw a lot of fire, which means they draw it away from their teammates, and they're often best equipped to survive it since a good WvW melee build is focused around survivability. Then there's things like knockbacks, cripples, fears, aoe blinds and so forth which will get the most use here. Finally there's the psychological effect – having someone up in your face hitting you makes opposing players feel like they're losing, and makes them concentrate on defense more, freeing up your ranged teammates to push forward and apply pressure.
Furthermore, with the right build and a bit of practice you're less likely to die than you think. I haven't played every class but I have played five of the eight and WvWed (and meleed) with all five of them. My guess is that they're aren't any classes that can't melee in WvW at least part-time. However, surviving in melee requires some knowhow and practice. You basically have to alternate skills and dodging to make yourself “invincible” for as long as possible. Also with only one or two exceptions (Punchdance's build and maybe a bunker guardian) meleeing full-time is not really possible. You have to go in, burn your cooldowns, disrupt the enemy as much as possible, and then bail when things start to get too hairy, run to your backline and resume from ranged.
Roles
As we know GW2 doesn't have the so-called “holy trinity” of tank/healer/dps, and there's more fluidity between who's supposed to do what. However that doesn't mean there aren't rough roles to fill, and here they are:
The Line Fighter, named after the front and back lines, is the bread-and-butter ranged guy. Most people you see in WvW have taken up this role. Examples of a pure line fighter could be a longbow ranger or rifle warrior.
Melee is what it sounds like. These are those few brave souls who get right up in the face of the enemy and disrupt them as much as possible. Hammer warrior for example, or any number of classes which can weapon-swap, run in, melee for a bit, then run out.
Support is also what it sounds like. Boons, heals, condition removal, as well as putting crowd control on pursuing enemies in the case of a retreat. A supporty necro, engi, guardian or elementalist for example.
You shouldn't feel like you have to pick only one role. There's only a couple classes and builds that can melee full-time, and few people will want to support full-time because it'll mean a lack of tags and bags. So most people are going to be a mix of line fighter and either melee or support. The build I use on my main (a Mesmer) for instance alternates between line fighter and melee.
tl;dr
The point of all of this is to start seeing zerg-on-zerg fights differently. A beginner at WvW looks at a zerg-on-zerg fight and sees something like this:
A more experienced one starts to see the order in the chaos and sees something like this:
Ideally, NICE should see something like this:
Giving specific and detailed orders about positioning is rarely practical in WvW. So taking the shape in the above picture is something that has to be done kind of through group instinct. If we get in the collective habit of doing this, we should win basically all of our open-field fights (we already win most of them) unless we're outnumbered 2 to 1 or more. Even if there's like 10 of us fighting alongside 20 pugs or something, if some of us melee and some spoon it'll give our side a real edge.
That only covers open-field fights, which are like one-quarter of WvW (the other three quarters are small group stuff, siege, and defense). I might write a thing on small group stuff soon. Yougottawanna out.
Awesome post.
I can't tell you how often I have died as a D/D Ele because I pushed and thought everyone was behind me, when actually they turned and ran and I'm all alone. Of course this happens very rarely when grouping with Nice, mostly because everyone is trying to down the giant Norn with two legendaries and ignoring the little Asuran.
So I was visiting my parents for Thanksgiving, and won't have access to a GW2-capable computer for six whole days. How on earth was I supposed to waste productive time without one? Here's how: by writing a WvW guide for people.
IMO we ought to WvW more, since it's awesome. The problem is that WvW can seem intimidating to people who aren't naturally inclined towards pvp, and there's a certain level of experience you need before you feel like you know what you're doing. For someone without that experience, WvW can be frustrating. You wander around the map looking for something to do, find nothing for a while, then outta nowhere a group of like 70 enemy dudes just rolls over you without even breaking stride. It's enough to make you lose interest.
What's more, many people don't have a sense of what to do in a big fight of like 20 vs. 20 or more; they don't have a sense of how to be effective. This block of text is intended to help you find your feet in WvW – and hopefully realize how much damn fun it can be. Reading and understanding what's below should accelerate your WvW acclimation process if you're new at it or haven't done it before.
Hot Zerg-on-Zerg Action
I want to talk about large, open-field group fights, both because they're one of the most common types of engagement and because they're the type that has no analog in other parts of the game. Nothing in PvE is comparable and structured pvp only has smaller fights, with the largest possible one being 8 on 8. A fight of 20 vs. 20 follows different rules and requires different habits. These are habits that experienced WvWers have developed an intuitive grasp of, but which new players sometimes don't yet have.
In my opinion, the key component to understand is the importance of range. Take a hypothetical large fight, for the sake of the example we'll say 20 on 20, on flat open ground with no major terrain features. Here's a picture of what this fight might look like:
Blue dots are your allies, red dots are the enemy. As you can see this is mostly a ranged fight, because WvW fights tend to be mostly ranged fights due to the danger of focus fire. I'll illustrate what I mean with this picture:
Here, blue dots are allies and red ones enemies, and the circle around each dot represents that player's range of fire. The blue dot with a 1 next to it is in a dangerous area, since it's inside the range of several enemy players. The blue dot with a 2 next to it is in a relatively safe area (edit: I put the 2 in the wrong place, sue me), since it's only inside the range of one enemy. The #3 dot is outside the range of all enemies, so he's safe – but he can't damage any enemies either.
The most basic method of staying alive in WvW is to move back and forth between dangerous areas, where you can damage the bad guys, and safe areas where you can recover. Because of this it's useful to think of a zerg as having two “lines” - the front line and the back line. In the picture above, #1 is on the front line and #2 and #3 are on the back line.
Obviously a real zerg won't have players arranging themselves into recognizable lines – instead it'll be a rolling clusterfuck of people constantly milling around. But amidst all that chaos you can think of there being two lines kind of like this:
Any given player will start out on the front line attacking the enemy, and then, as his or her health drops and conditions stack up and so forth, retreat into the back line to recover before rejoining the fight. The opposing players will do the same – any player who spends too long in the range of too many people will be overwhelmed by focus fire, even with a very defensive build. At this point you may be thinking “duh, of course.” You're right to think that, this is pretty simple stuff. But the language I'm using here – the “lines” - is going to be useful in understanding how zerg-on-zerg fights are won, and how they can be reliably won against equal numbers and even against superior numbers.
How to Break the Zerg
If you've WvWed even a little you've probably seen what it looks like when a zerg breaks. First one guy starts running, then two, then two more guys see those two guys running, then it's four, then everyone figures that the fight is lost and bails. This begins the mop-up phase of the fight, where the victorious side tries to snare, down and dunk as many people as possible. Basically the way to win a large-scale open-field WvW fight is to try to make this happen, and in order to make it happen it's good to examine how it happens.
A zerg breaks based on a mixture of practical and psychological effects, which happen on an individual level and lead to defeat when translated up to the group level. One is a lack of a safe place – the absence of a “backline,” to use the above term, to which a player low on health can retreat. If there's no backline, the player has to spend his or her time and attention defending instead of attacking, and starts to use up his limited defensive resources (dodges, heals, and skills). Another is being forced to turn around. If you have to turn and run away from the enemy, you're giving up nearly all of your offense, since very few skills will work without line-of-sight.
It follows from this that the simplest way to break a zerg is to push. By “push” I mean everyone goes to the frontline, everyone gets more aggressive and begins fighting as though they expect to win. When your whole zerg pushes forward, it pushes the opponent's backline – their safe place – backwards. It's harder to get to, and they may have to turn and run to get to it instead, and you've accomplished the double goal of taking away their backline and making them turn around. From there the psychological effects kick in, more and more enemy players start to think they're losing, causing a feedback loop of “shit bail” that leads to a full-scale retreat, and from there to the mop-up phase.
For these reasons, given equal numbers and individual skill/gear, it's usually the more aggressive and confident zerg that will win. A push like this can backfire of course – if too many players run into too much enemy fire, they'll die (especially if their allies don't push with them), and the numbers advantage will swing to the other side. But for the most part, it's the zerg that expects to win that will win. This expectation is often a byproduct of server culture. A server that expects to win its fights will win them, creating a self-reinforcing confidence even in its pugs. I'm happy to report that Fort Aspenwood seems to me to be above average in this respect – our zergs often push confidently, and even when things are going badly they tend more towards a fighting retreat than to breaking.
The Spoon
Of course you were probably looking for more useful tactical advice than just “be more confident.” So another way to get an edge is with the spoon. Spooning is something NICE started doing back in week two or three or something after release. It's kind of hard to describe so I'll use a couple pictures:
If you want to sound all militaryish you could call this a flanking maneuver or rolling up the line or something. We call it the spoon. It works because it takes away part of the enemy's backline, so they have nowhere to retreat to. In the second picture above you can see that the enemy players inside the spoon can't retreat backwards – they'll just be retreating into more damage. So they start to roll up, retreating out of the spoon, and when the spoon follows them you can get the entire enemy zerg inside it, with fewer and fewer options for temporary retreat. This works even better if you can spoon them away from their escape route, meaning you'll get more dunks in the mop-up phase. Note that spooning isn't always a good idea, and in some cases it's impossible anyway due to terrain. But it can help in many fights.
Remember above all that when you're spooning an enemy zerg, they may never have been spooned before. They may be nervous or frightened. So when you spoon, the most important thing is that you do it gently, and with love in your heart.
Melee
So far I've been talking almost entirely about ranged combat, because most WvW combat is ranged combat. Relatively few players have the temperament to pull out a sword or something and charge into a mass of red names. For this reason melee is (IMO) one of the best-kept secrets in WvW. Even just one guy charging in can singlehandedly break a stalemate. The single biggest reason it works is that, again, it takes away the backline. A guy in the midst of the enemy zerg means that when you retreat away from the frontline you're retreating right into a dude trying to smack you with a hammer (or whatever). Melee characters also draw a lot of fire, which means they draw it away from their teammates, and they're often best equipped to survive it since a good WvW melee build is focused around survivability. Then there's things like knockbacks, cripples, fears, aoe blinds and so forth which will get the most use here. Finally there's the psychological effect – having someone up in your face hitting you makes opposing players feel like they're losing, and makes them concentrate on defense more, freeing up your ranged teammates to push forward and apply pressure.
Furthermore, with the right build and a bit of practice you're less likely to die than you think. I haven't played every class but I have played five of the eight and WvWed (and meleed) with all five of them. My guess is that they're aren't any classes that can't melee in WvW at least part-time. However, surviving in melee requires some knowhow and practice. You basically have to alternate skills and dodging to make yourself “invincible” for as long as possible. Also with only one or two exceptions (Punchdance's build and maybe a bunker guardian) meleeing full-time is not really possible. You have to go in, burn your cooldowns, disrupt the enemy as much as possible, and then bail when things start to get too hairy, run to your backline and resume from ranged.
Roles
As we know GW2 doesn't have the so-called “holy trinity” of tank/healer/dps, and there's more fluidity between who's supposed to do what. However that doesn't mean there aren't rough roles to fill, and here they are:
The Line Fighter, named after the front and back lines, is the bread-and-butter ranged guy. Most people you see in WvW have taken up this role. Examples of a pure line fighter could be a longbow ranger or rifle warrior.
Melee is what it sounds like. These are those few brave souls who get right up in the face of the enemy and disrupt them as much as possible. Hammer warrior for example, or any number of classes which can weapon-swap, run in, melee for a bit, then run out.
Support is also what it sounds like. Boons, heals, condition removal, as well as putting crowd control on pursuing enemies in the case of a retreat. A supporty necro, engi, guardian or elementalist for example.
You shouldn't feel like you have to pick only one role. There's only a couple classes and builds that can melee full-time, and few people will want to support full-time because it'll mean a lack of tags and bags. So most people are going to be a mix of line fighter and either melee or support. The build I use on my main (a Mesmer) for instance alternates between line fighter and melee.
tl;dr
The point of all of this is to start seeing zerg-on-zerg fights differently. A beginner at WvW looks at a zerg-on-zerg fight and sees something like this:
A more experienced one starts to see the order in the chaos and sees something like this:
Ideally, NICE should see something like this:
Giving specific and detailed orders about positioning is rarely practical in WvW. So taking the shape in the above picture is something that has to be done kind of through group instinct. If we get in the collective habit of doing this, we should win basically all of our open-field fights (we already win most of them) unless we're outnumbered 2 to 1 or more. Even if there's like 10 of us fighting alongside 20 pugs or something, if some of us melee and some spoon it'll give our side a real edge.
That only covers open-field fights, which are like one-quarter of WvW (the other three quarters are small group stuff, siege, and defense). I might write a thing on small group stuff soon. Yougottawanna out.
Very nice.
If you have time you should do a quick explanation for new players how objectives work and how to prioritize actions in wvw (ie, how keeps get upgraded, not to take siege from anywhere but supply points, optimal places to drop arrow carts, etc).
i agree with @dissociater i generally get the zerg v zerg circle jerk, but have no experience finding actions, getting around the borderlands/EB, or jumping puzzles, or siege.
Someone out there was talking about PvE damage as a Mesmer, using Sword/Sword and Sword/Pistol. I was originally going to go off on a tangent about my Dueling/Inspiration/Illusions build, but I think it really boils down to "trait for Phantasms". Mesmers don't get a lot of direct damage from their weapons and utilities, and Confusion isn't real great against monsters, so that leaves us with Phantasms as the major "big number" damage generators. To that end, here's some Traits to keep in mind:
Adept:
Empowered Illusions (Domination 10): 15% more damage from all illusions; most useful for Phantasms since Clone damage is always crap.
Phantasmal Fury (Dueling 10): 20% higher crit rate for all Phantasms.
Vengeful Images (Inspiration 5): Damage is damage; even if it requires your Phantasms getting smacked into the face.
Persisting Images (Inspiration 10): It doesn't hurt to give your Phantasms extra health to work with. (By the way, Signet of Illusions will help with this even more.)
Illusionist's Celerity (Illusions 5): An absolute must-have. Combine this with the weapon skill of your choice and you can bring a Phantasm's skill recharge time down to about the base skill charge time of a Clone skill.
Master:
Sharper Images (Dueling 15): Your Illusions will inflict a stack of Bleeding, guaranteed, every time they crit. Keep in mind that the Pistol's Illusionary Duelist attacks eight times and the Focus's Illusionary Warden attacks 12 times in an area of effect, and also that Phantasmal Fury combined with a level-appropriate Precision gear set will get your Phantasms up to around a 75% critical rate or more... set up right, this one Trait turns you into a Bleed factory.
Phantasmal Haste (Illusions 20): The more your Phantasms attack, the more damage they do.
Grandmaster:
Phantasmal Strength (Inspiration 25): More damage is always better.
So, to sum up... at the Adept level, I'd say prioritize 5 points in Illusions for the faster recast time on Phantasms, followed by, probably, Empowered Illusions for the flat damage bonus (possibly reverse the two). Once you hit Master, go for Sharper Images ASAP, taking Phantasmal Fury along the way, and then try to hit whatever weapons you want to have faster recharge times. Pistol is fantastic for this, as is the Focus. After that, feel free to diversify; the obscene crit rate and built-in Bleeding from your Phantasms ought to do enough damage on both the direct and condition damage axis that you'll be able to take down most normal mobs easily.
My favorite musical instrument is the air-raid siren.
When if ever do Sword/gun or sword/sword mesmers catch up in damage against creatures in pve while you level? Guardian GS, Ranger SB and GS, and of course rogue have been other classed I've leveled up a bit but a Mesmer's damage (just hit level 10) seems sketchy. I had built one up before to 16 or so but that was at the beginning when it first launched and back when I was trying to be a GS mesmer.
Sword/sword does more pure damage that GS does. GS is just range so it's safer and made for kiting.
Are you sure the stats on your swords are equivalent to those on your GS?
Sorry after re-reading my own post it wasn't portrayed very clearly my question. I'm running sword/sword or sword/gun now as my level 10 mesmer but the damage doesn't seem very high compared to Greatsword Guardians, Shortbow or Greatsword Rangers, or double dagger thieves at this level. Does the damage ever increase or are they always kind of slow to ramp?
THey are a bit of a slow ramp up usually.
Big question: Are you using Phantasms as much as possible?
Getting your phantasm out is probably the most important part of your damage as a mesmer. (minus a late-game condition-damage staff build)
Grab a bit of mob attention and then drop the phantasm. Without one out, your damage is kinda gimp.
Radiance may secretly be the most defensive guardian trait. Unlike every other signet, Signet of Judgment decreases damage by 10% of total damage and not a static stat increase. Perfect Inscriptions may increase that to 12%. Stacking with protection, that's a 40% or a little more damage reduction no matter what else you're wearing. Combine that with Inscribed Removal, and you've got lots of uncounterable damage reduction and condition removal in what's supposed to be an offensive trait line. Therefore, you can put 30 (or 20, if you don't believe in swords) and 10 in every other trait for versatility, because you don't really have any other needs outside of the trait line.
A 0/10/30/30/0 Guardian running Hammer or Greatsword and AH with shouts would be able to take advantage of that signet without having to make any investment in Radiance (I like the 10 for the reduced CD on my heal), and likely be far more survivable that something with 10 in every other trait line. You'll get more vitality, more toughness, more dodging and more passive healing.
The problem I'm having with being a guardian is that the Valor and Honor trait lines are just TOO good to pass on.
At some point you can be too survivable and miss out on a lot of damage.
Well, that's the thing with going x/x/30/20-30/x...the build itself is so damn survivable, you can basically move the slider as close to "glass cannon" as your playstyle dicates and be hella survivable. You're just giving up so much on the traits that can't be replaced with gear.
Plus, Vitality/Toughness/Healing Power/Crit Damage are all really desirable stats, whereas condition damage and duration are extremely weak for guardians (imho) that even if the traits weren't so badass, those bonus are fantastic.
I dunno how to move the slider when I'm only using one set of weapons and armor
the spvp gear is a giant playground for this. You should try it.
re RADIANCE -Another big buff from radiance is all the blinds- voj is an aoe blind-> every kill refreshes it. Signets are nice but interruptible. And if you are going to burn a ton of points buffing them... you almost have to be resigned to load up your bar with more than a few. And like you said- valor and honor are just better is the issue.
Yeah, I find radiance plus virtues plus honor or valor to be a nice combo. Radiance gives some nice survivability and damage boosts simultaneously. Especially if you take GS+Sword/Focus and blind bitches all day, every day.
Note: not for dredge
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AuralynxDarkness is a perspectiveWatching the ego workRegistered Userregular
i'm a fan of dagger/horn on necro, if you're in wvw it's a great combo. extra swiftness and a long daze.
It is very excellent, no doubt. When leveling I had decided on the horn for wvw and the focus for pve (for the 12 stacks of vuln which is pretty useful in dungeons). One on one, in wvw, the focus turned out to be a pretty great tool though. Chill not only slows the enemy but it slows their cooldown rate, which makes it even harder for characters to run from you. It's a great chase down ability. Focus 4 does a little bit of damage (not much to be honest, but everything helps), plus it stacks vulnerability and gives you regeneration. Between that, and the self heal from blood magic, I was ticking for a pretty good amount of self heal. Throw in blood is power on top of that and you do almost 75% more damage for the duration of the vuln+BoP. I was testing this with some vets in Orr. My dagger combo's third strike, unbuffed would crit for about 1100 damage (scaled down to level 76 at the time I believe). With focus 4, and BoP, they were critting for 1950.
Like I said I was mostly going to just use it for PvE because warhorn daze and the run buff were pretty much a waste of time in pve. But i just got used to it and ended up liking it a lot in WvW too.
alright, to those who enjoy their necro at 80, do you mostly do WvW? or a lot of dungeons?
right now, i want to get a character in place who can roll dungeons well, and that is warrior. min/max whatever, i feel like they're the most effective class in the game right now, especially when paired with a good guardian. to me, grenade/elixir (with elixir gun if you need a little support) engineer is a close second with 30/0/0/30/10, but i'd rather focus on warrior.
Yeah, I was running BiP, Focus 4, Axe 2 for single-target grinding for a long while. Still would be if I weren't hardcore WvWvW-ing the necro, who is now 75.
Herd, ignite for about 20 seconds, stack Might on self with Mighty Blow with Purging Flames' fire field, switch to mace / focus to stay upright / get more Might.
That said, when I get tired of Necro-ing, I think I am going to try Sword / Torch ~ Mace / Focus with a serious emphasis on Empowering Might and other stackers of that.
So I was visiting my parents for Thanksgiving, and won't have access to a GW2-capable computer for six whole days. How on earth was I supposed to waste productive time without one? Here's how: by writing a WvW guide for people.
IMO we ought to WvW more, since it's awesome. The problem is that WvW can seem intimidating to people who aren't naturally inclined towards pvp, and there's a certain level of experience you need before you feel like you know what you're doing. For someone without that experience, WvW can be frustrating. You wander around the map looking for something to do, find nothing for a while, then outta nowhere a group of like 70 enemy dudes just rolls over you without even breaking stride. It's enough to make you lose interest.
What's more, many people don't have a sense of what to do in a big fight of like 20 vs. 20 or more; they don't have a sense of how to be effective. This block of text is intended to help you find your feet in WvW – and hopefully realize how much damn fun it can be. Reading and understanding what's below should accelerate your WvW acclimation process if you're new at it or haven't done it before.
Hot Zerg-on-Zerg Action
I want to talk about large, open-field group fights, both because they're one of the most common types of engagement and because they're the type that has no analog in other parts of the game. Nothing in PvE is comparable and structured pvp only has smaller fights, with the largest possible one being 8 on 8. A fight of 20 vs. 20 follows different rules and requires different habits. These are habits that experienced WvWers have developed an intuitive grasp of, but which new players sometimes don't yet have.
In my opinion, the key component to understand is the importance of range. Take a hypothetical large fight, for the sake of the example we'll say 20 on 20, on flat open ground with no major terrain features. Here's a picture of what this fight might look like:
Blue dots are your allies, red dots are the enemy. As you can see this is mostly a ranged fight, because WvW fights tend to be mostly ranged fights due to the danger of focus fire. I'll illustrate what I mean with this picture:
Here, blue dots are allies and red ones enemies, and the circle around each dot represents that player's range of fire. The blue dot with a 1 next to it is in a dangerous area, since it's inside the range of several enemy players. The blue dot with a 2 next to it is in a relatively safe area (edit: I put the 2 in the wrong place, sue me), since it's only inside the range of one enemy. The #3 dot is outside the range of all enemies, so he's safe – but he can't damage any enemies either.
The most basic method of staying alive in WvW is to move back and forth between dangerous areas, where you can damage the bad guys, and safe areas where you can recover. Because of this it's useful to think of a zerg as having two “lines” - the front line and the back line. In the picture above, #1 is on the front line and #2 and #3 are on the back line.
Obviously a real zerg won't have players arranging themselves into recognizable lines – instead it'll be a rolling clusterfuck of people constantly milling around. But amidst all that chaos you can think of there being two lines kind of like this:
Any given player will start out on the front line attacking the enemy, and then, as his or her health drops and conditions stack up and so forth, retreat into the back line to recover before rejoining the fight. The opposing players will do the same – any player who spends too long in the range of too many people will be overwhelmed by focus fire, even with a very defensive build. At this point you may be thinking “duh, of course.” You're right to think that, this is pretty simple stuff. But the language I'm using here – the “lines” - is going to be useful in understanding how zerg-on-zerg fights are won, and how they can be reliably won against equal numbers and even against superior numbers.
How to Break the Zerg
If you've WvWed even a little you've probably seen what it looks like when a zerg breaks. First one guy starts running, then two, then two more guys see those two guys running, then it's four, then everyone figures that the fight is lost and bails. This begins the mop-up phase of the fight, where the victorious side tries to snare, down and dunk as many people as possible. Basically the way to win a large-scale open-field WvW fight is to try to make this happen, and in order to make it happen it's good to examine how it happens.
A zerg breaks based on a mixture of practical and psychological effects, which happen on an individual level and lead to defeat when translated up to the group level. One is a lack of a safe place – the absence of a “backline,” to use the above term, to which a player low on health can retreat. If there's no backline, the player has to spend his or her time and attention defending instead of attacking, and starts to use up his limited defensive resources (dodges, heals, and skills). Another is being forced to turn around. If you have to turn and run away from the enemy, you're giving up nearly all of your offense, since very few skills will work without line-of-sight.
It follows from this that the simplest way to break a zerg is to push. By “push” I mean everyone goes to the frontline, everyone gets more aggressive and begins fighting as though they expect to win. When your whole zerg pushes forward, it pushes the opponent's backline – their safe place – backwards. It's harder to get to, and they may have to turn and run to get to it instead, and you've accomplished the double goal of taking away their backline and making them turn around. From there the psychological effects kick in, more and more enemy players start to think they're losing, causing a feedback loop of “shit bail” that leads to a full-scale retreat, and from there to the mop-up phase.
For these reasons, given equal numbers and individual skill/gear, it's usually the more aggressive and confident zerg that will win. A push like this can backfire of course – if too many players run into too much enemy fire, they'll die (especially if their allies don't push with them), and the numbers advantage will swing to the other side. But for the most part, it's the zerg that expects to win that will win. This expectation is often a byproduct of server culture. A server that expects to win its fights will win them, creating a self-reinforcing confidence even in its pugs. I'm happy to report that Fort Aspenwood seems to me to be above average in this respect – our zergs often push confidently, and even when things are going badly they tend more towards a fighting retreat than to breaking.
The Spoon
Of course you were probably looking for more useful tactical advice than just “be more confident.” So another way to get an edge is with the spoon. Spooning is something NICE started doing back in week two or three or something after release. It's kind of hard to describe so I'll use a couple pictures:
If you want to sound all militaryish you could call this a flanking maneuver or rolling up the line or something. We call it the spoon. It works because it takes away part of the enemy's backline, so they have nowhere to retreat to. In the second picture above you can see that the enemy players inside the spoon can't retreat backwards – they'll just be retreating into more damage. So they start to roll up, retreating out of the spoon, and when the spoon follows them you can get the entire enemy zerg inside it, with fewer and fewer options for temporary retreat. This works even better if you can spoon them away from their escape route, meaning you'll get more dunks in the mop-up phase. Note that spooning isn't always a good idea, and in some cases it's impossible anyway due to terrain. But it can help in many fights.
Remember above all that when you're spooning an enemy zerg, they may never have been spooned before. They may be nervous or frightened. So when you spoon, the most important thing is that you do it gently, and with love in your heart.
Melee
So far I've been talking almost entirely about ranged combat, because most WvW combat is ranged combat. Relatively few players have the temperament to pull out a sword or something and charge into a mass of red names. For this reason melee is (IMO) one of the best-kept secrets in WvW. Even just one guy charging in can singlehandedly break a stalemate. The single biggest reason it works is that, again, it takes away the backline. A guy in the midst of the enemy zerg means that when you retreat away from the frontline you're retreating right into a dude trying to smack you with a hammer (or whatever). Melee characters also draw a lot of fire, which means they draw it away from their teammates, and they're often best equipped to survive it since a good WvW melee build is focused around survivability. Then there's things like knockbacks, cripples, fears, aoe blinds and so forth which will get the most use here. Finally there's the psychological effect – having someone up in your face hitting you makes opposing players feel like they're losing, and makes them concentrate on defense more, freeing up your ranged teammates to push forward and apply pressure.
Furthermore, with the right build and a bit of practice you're less likely to die than you think. I haven't played every class but I have played five of the eight and WvWed (and meleed) with all five of them. My guess is that they're aren't any classes that can't melee in WvW at least part-time. However, surviving in melee requires some knowhow and practice. You basically have to alternate skills and dodging to make yourself “invincible” for as long as possible. Also with only one or two exceptions (Punchdance's build and maybe a bunker guardian) meleeing full-time is not really possible. You have to go in, burn your cooldowns, disrupt the enemy as much as possible, and then bail when things start to get too hairy, run to your backline and resume from ranged.
Roles
As we know GW2 doesn't have the so-called “holy trinity” of tank/healer/dps, and there's more fluidity between who's supposed to do what. However that doesn't mean there aren't rough roles to fill, and here they are:
The Line Fighter, named after the front and back lines, is the bread-and-butter ranged guy. Most people you see in WvW have taken up this role. Examples of a pure line fighter could be a longbow ranger or rifle warrior.
Melee is what it sounds like. These are those few brave souls who get right up in the face of the enemy and disrupt them as much as possible. Hammer warrior for example, or any number of classes which can weapon-swap, run in, melee for a bit, then run out.
Support is also what it sounds like. Boons, heals, condition removal, as well as putting crowd control on pursuing enemies in the case of a retreat. A supporty necro, engi, guardian or elementalist for example.
You shouldn't feel like you have to pick only one role. There's only a couple classes and builds that can melee full-time, and few people will want to support full-time because it'll mean a lack of tags and bags. So most people are going to be a mix of line fighter and either melee or support. The build I use on my main (a Mesmer) for instance alternates between line fighter and melee.
tl;dr
The point of all of this is to start seeing zerg-on-zerg fights differently. A beginner at WvW looks at a zerg-on-zerg fight and sees something like this:
A more experienced one starts to see the order in the chaos and sees something like this:
Ideally, NICE should see something like this:
Giving specific and detailed orders about positioning is rarely practical in WvW. So taking the shape in the above picture is something that has to be done kind of through group instinct. If we get in the collective habit of doing this, we should win basically all of our open-field fights (we already win most of them) unless we're outnumbered 2 to 1 or more. Even if there's like 10 of us fighting alongside 20 pugs or something, if some of us melee and some spoon it'll give our side a real edge.
That only covers open-field fights, which are like one-quarter of WvW (the other three quarters are small group stuff, siege, and defense). I might write a thing on small group stuff soon. Yougottawanna out.
Great post. Definitely agree 100%
The "spoon" maneuver you describe is what the Army calls an envelopment, usually done by either having the middle of the formation slowly retreat or both ends flank in a pincer movement: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Envelopment
weedenbc on
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Thanos Warbow
In game: Lvl 80 Ranger, 400 Leatherworker, Huntsman, Jeweler and Chef
When if ever do Sword/gun or sword/sword mesmers catch up in damage against creatures in pve while you level? Guardian GS, Ranger SB and GS, and of course rogue have been other classed I've leveled up a bit but a Mesmer's damage (just hit level 10) seems sketchy. I had built one up before to 16 or so but that was at the beginning when it first launched and back when I was trying to be a GS mesmer.
Sword/sword does more pure damage that GS does. GS is just range so it's safer and made for kiting.
Are you sure the stats on your swords are equivalent to those on your GS?
Sorry after re-reading my own post it wasn't portrayed very clearly my question. I'm running sword/sword or sword/gun now as my level 10 mesmer but the damage doesn't seem very high compared to Greatsword Guardians, Shortbow or Greatsword Rangers, or double dagger thieves at this level. Does the damage ever increase or are they always kind of slow to ramp?
THey are a bit of a slow ramp up usually.
Big question: Are you using Phantasms as much as possible?
Getting your phantasm out is probably the most important part of your damage as a mesmer. (minus a late-game condition-damage staff build)
Grab a bit of mob attention and then drop the phantasm. Without one out, your damage is kinda gimp.
Well, there's shatter builds, but they still let phantasms attack once before detonating.
Phantasms are a bit gimped right now due to a bug that is stopping them from attacking right away, combined with a bug that also gives a delay to them getting extra health and Phantasms can get insta gibbed before getting any damage out far too frequently. They are still our best PVE damage option you just have to be aware of the issues.
Also Zerker is still bugged to not hit as often as it should when it finally does attack.
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CorehealerThe ApothecaryThe softer edge of the universe.Registered Userregular
i brought it up as I wonder how layoffs may effect the 'theory'
So apparently trying to go in the correct direction with the game's design after learning that content for content's sake is not enough for a long term game is flak for a conspiracy theory.
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I mostly PvE, but I don't mind spectral grasping fools off of battlements in WuvWuv from time to time. I enjoy my necro, but I also like playing a ranger, another target of derision. Keep that in mind when evaluating my tastes.
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A 0/10/30/30/0 Guardian running Hammer or Greatsword and AH with shouts would be able to take advantage of that signet without having to make any investment in Radiance (I like the 10 for the reduced CD on my heal), and likely be far more survivable that something with 10 in every other trait line. You'll get more vitality, more toughness, more dodging and more passive healing.
The problem I'm having with being a guardian is that the Valor and Honor trait lines are just TOO good to pass on.
I do everything.
Yesterday, a combination of insomnia and taking the day off work meant that I ran CoF story, CoF explorable, got 100% completion of all 3 orr zones, and Frostgorge Sound. I also spent about 5 hours in WvW and got about 100 badges on the day. I made about 25g yesterday, but spent a lot of it. I'm now sitting on around 10g.
That's one of the problems I have with guardians too. Seems like 90% of players run between 50-60 points in Valor and Honour. The class suffers from build stagnation.
At some point you can be too survivable and miss out on a lot of damage.
Doc: That's right, twenty five years into the future. I've always dreamed on seeing the future, looking beyond my years, seeing the progress of mankind. I'll also be able to see who wins the next twenty-five world series.
Well, that's the thing with going x/x/30/20-30/x...the build itself is so damn survivable, you can basically move the slider as close to "glass cannon" as your playstyle dicates and be hella survivable. You're just giving up so much on the traits that can't be replaced with gear.
Plus, Vitality/Toughness/Healing Power/Crit Damage are all really desirable stats, whereas condition damage and duration are extremely weak for guardians (imho) that even if the traits weren't so badass, those bonus are fantastic.
I dunno how to move the slider when I'm only using one set of weapons and armor
Doc: That's right, twenty five years into the future. I've always dreamed on seeing the future, looking beyond my years, seeing the progress of mankind. I'll also be able to see who wins the next twenty-five world series.
Yes, adjusting your stats in GW2 is going to involved changing gear. But the point is you can move the needle between being damn near unkillable in PvE or a very survivable glass cannon, using the exact same build.
Do you want to do a lot of damage? Or be really survivable? With the x/x/30/20-30/x build you can do both.
the spvp gear is a giant playground for this. You should try it.
re RADIANCE -Another big buff from radiance is all the blinds- voj is an aoe blind-> every kill refreshes it. Signets are nice but interruptible. And if you are going to burn a ton of points buffing them... you almost have to be resigned to load up your bar with more than a few. And like you said- valor and honor are just better is the issue.
And for the love of silly geese stop saying you can be 'too survivable'- in this games current incarnation Survival is king. Even the most defensive build has enough gas to trash glass cannons. Its just the current balance, in other games not so much but here - stay on your GD feet..
bear in mind the original framing of the conversation is WVW.
he meant Balanced in between the two.... not some 'plexiglass' cannon. Wait.... can we call it the plexiglass cannon?
Any interest in guild, or do I need to painfully pub it?
What's more, many people don't have a sense of what to do in a big fight of like 20 vs. 20 or more; they don't have a sense of how to be effective. This block of text is intended to help you find your feet in WvW – and hopefully realize how much damn fun it can be. Reading and understanding what's below should accelerate your WvW acclimation process if you're new at it or haven't done it before.
Hot Zerg-on-Zerg Action
I want to talk about large, open-field group fights, both because they're one of the most common types of engagement and because they're the type that has no analog in other parts of the game. Nothing in PvE is comparable and structured pvp only has smaller fights, with the largest possible one being 8 on 8. A fight of 20 vs. 20 follows different rules and requires different habits. These are habits that experienced WvWers have developed an intuitive grasp of, but which new players sometimes don't yet have.
In my opinion, the key component to understand is the importance of range. Take a hypothetical large fight, for the sake of the example we'll say 20 on 20, on flat open ground with no major terrain features. Here's a picture of what this fight might look like:
Blue dots are your allies, red dots are the enemy. As you can see this is mostly a ranged fight, because WvW fights tend to be mostly ranged fights due to the danger of focus fire. I'll illustrate what I mean with this picture:
Here, blue dots are allies and red ones enemies, and the circle around each dot represents that player's range of fire. The blue dot with a 1 next to it is in a dangerous area, since it's inside the range of several enemy players. The blue dot with a 2 next to it is in a relatively safe area (edit: I put the 2 in the wrong place, sue me), since it's only inside the range of one enemy. The #3 dot is outside the range of all enemies, so he's safe – but he can't damage any enemies either.
The most basic method of staying alive in WvW is to move back and forth between dangerous areas, where you can damage the bad guys, and safe areas where you can recover. Because of this it's useful to think of a zerg as having two “lines” - the front line and the back line. In the picture above, #1 is on the front line and #2 and #3 are on the back line.
Obviously a real zerg won't have players arranging themselves into recognizable lines – instead it'll be a rolling clusterfuck of people constantly milling around. But amidst all that chaos you can think of there being two lines kind of like this:
Any given player will start out on the front line attacking the enemy, and then, as his or her health drops and conditions stack up and so forth, retreat into the back line to recover before rejoining the fight. The opposing players will do the same – any player who spends too long in the range of too many people will be overwhelmed by focus fire, even with a very defensive build. At this point you may be thinking “duh, of course.” You're right to think that, this is pretty simple stuff. But the language I'm using here – the “lines” - is going to be useful in understanding how zerg-on-zerg fights are won, and how they can be reliably won against equal numbers and even against superior numbers.
How to Break the Zerg
If you've WvWed even a little you've probably seen what it looks like when a zerg breaks. First one guy starts running, then two, then two more guys see those two guys running, then it's four, then everyone figures that the fight is lost and bails. This begins the mop-up phase of the fight, where the victorious side tries to snare, down and dunk as many people as possible. Basically the way to win a large-scale open-field WvW fight is to try to make this happen, and in order to make it happen it's good to examine how it happens.
A zerg breaks based on a mixture of practical and psychological effects, which happen on an individual level and lead to defeat when translated up to the group level. One is a lack of a safe place – the absence of a “backline,” to use the above term, to which a player low on health can retreat. If there's no backline, the player has to spend his or her time and attention defending instead of attacking, and starts to use up his limited defensive resources (dodges, heals, and skills). Another is being forced to turn around. If you have to turn and run away from the enemy, you're giving up nearly all of your offense, since very few skills will work without line-of-sight.
It follows from this that the simplest way to break a zerg is to push. By “push” I mean everyone goes to the frontline, everyone gets more aggressive and begins fighting as though they expect to win. When your whole zerg pushes forward, it pushes the opponent's backline – their safe place – backwards. It's harder to get to, and they may have to turn and run to get to it instead, and you've accomplished the double goal of taking away their backline and making them turn around. From there the psychological effects kick in, more and more enemy players start to think they're losing, causing a feedback loop of “shit bail” that leads to a full-scale retreat, and from there to the mop-up phase.
For these reasons, given equal numbers and individual skill/gear, it's usually the more aggressive and confident zerg that will win. A push like this can backfire of course – if too many players run into too much enemy fire, they'll die (especially if their allies don't push with them), and the numbers advantage will swing to the other side. But for the most part, it's the zerg that expects to win that will win. This expectation is often a byproduct of server culture. A server that expects to win its fights will win them, creating a self-reinforcing confidence even in its pugs. I'm happy to report that Fort Aspenwood seems to me to be above average in this respect – our zergs often push confidently, and even when things are going badly they tend more towards a fighting retreat than to breaking.
The Spoon
Of course you were probably looking for more useful tactical advice than just “be more confident.” So another way to get an edge is with the spoon. Spooning is something NICE started doing back in week two or three or something after release. It's kind of hard to describe so I'll use a couple pictures:
If you want to sound all militaryish you could call this a flanking maneuver or rolling up the line or something. We call it the spoon. It works because it takes away part of the enemy's backline, so they have nowhere to retreat to. In the second picture above you can see that the enemy players inside the spoon can't retreat backwards – they'll just be retreating into more damage. So they start to roll up, retreating out of the spoon, and when the spoon follows them you can get the entire enemy zerg inside it, with fewer and fewer options for temporary retreat. This works even better if you can spoon them away from their escape route, meaning you'll get more dunks in the mop-up phase. Note that spooning isn't always a good idea, and in some cases it's impossible anyway due to terrain. But it can help in many fights.
Remember above all that when you're spooning an enemy zerg, they may never have been spooned before. They may be nervous or frightened. So when you spoon, the most important thing is that you do it gently, and with love in your heart.
Melee
So far I've been talking almost entirely about ranged combat, because most WvW combat is ranged combat. Relatively few players have the temperament to pull out a sword or something and charge into a mass of red names. For this reason melee is (IMO) one of the best-kept secrets in WvW. Even just one guy charging in can singlehandedly break a stalemate. The single biggest reason it works is that, again, it takes away the backline. A guy in the midst of the enemy zerg means that when you retreat away from the frontline you're retreating right into a dude trying to smack you with a hammer (or whatever). Melee characters also draw a lot of fire, which means they draw it away from their teammates, and they're often best equipped to survive it since a good WvW melee build is focused around survivability. Then there's things like knockbacks, cripples, fears, aoe blinds and so forth which will get the most use here. Finally there's the psychological effect – having someone up in your face hitting you makes opposing players feel like they're losing, and makes them concentrate on defense more, freeing up your ranged teammates to push forward and apply pressure.
Furthermore, with the right build and a bit of practice you're less likely to die than you think. I haven't played every class but I have played five of the eight and WvWed (and meleed) with all five of them. My guess is that they're aren't any classes that can't melee in WvW at least part-time. However, surviving in melee requires some knowhow and practice. You basically have to alternate skills and dodging to make yourself “invincible” for as long as possible. Also with only one or two exceptions (Punchdance's build and maybe a bunker guardian) meleeing full-time is not really possible. You have to go in, burn your cooldowns, disrupt the enemy as much as possible, and then bail when things start to get too hairy, run to your backline and resume from ranged.
Roles
As we know GW2 doesn't have the so-called “holy trinity” of tank/healer/dps, and there's more fluidity between who's supposed to do what. However that doesn't mean there aren't rough roles to fill, and here they are:
The Line Fighter, named after the front and back lines, is the bread-and-butter ranged guy. Most people you see in WvW have taken up this role. Examples of a pure line fighter could be a longbow ranger or rifle warrior.
Melee is what it sounds like. These are those few brave souls who get right up in the face of the enemy and disrupt them as much as possible. Hammer warrior for example, or any number of classes which can weapon-swap, run in, melee for a bit, then run out.
Support is also what it sounds like. Boons, heals, condition removal, as well as putting crowd control on pursuing enemies in the case of a retreat. A supporty necro, engi, guardian or elementalist for example.
You shouldn't feel like you have to pick only one role. There's only a couple classes and builds that can melee full-time, and few people will want to support full-time because it'll mean a lack of tags and bags. So most people are going to be a mix of line fighter and either melee or support. The build I use on my main (a Mesmer) for instance alternates between line fighter and melee.
tl;dr
The point of all of this is to start seeing zerg-on-zerg fights differently. A beginner at WvW looks at a zerg-on-zerg fight and sees something like this:
A more experienced one starts to see the order in the chaos and sees something like this:
Ideally, NICE should see something like this:
Giving specific and detailed orders about positioning is rarely practical in WvW. So taking the shape in the above picture is something that has to be done kind of through group instinct. If we get in the collective habit of doing this, we should win basically all of our open-field fights (we already win most of them) unless we're outnumbered 2 to 1 or more. Even if there's like 10 of us fighting alongside 20 pugs or something, if some of us melee and some spoon it'll give our side a real edge.
That only covers open-field fights, which are like one-quarter of WvW (the other three quarters are small group stuff, siege, and defense). I might write a thing on small group stuff soon. Yougottawanna out.
Too late! This should totally be A Thing.
http://www.pcgamer.com/2012/12/04/ncsoft-undergoing-realignment/
One would imagine Arenanet isn't affected, but you never know.
Are you aware of the GW2 conspiracy theory?
No I am not. If it's hilarious, please do share.
i brought it up as I wonder how layoffs may effect the 'theory'
Awesome post.
I can't tell you how often I have died as a D/D Ele because I pushed and thought everyone was behind me, when actually they turned and ran and I'm all alone. Of course this happens very rarely when grouping with Nice, mostly because everyone is trying to down the giant Norn with two legendaries and ignoring the little Asuran.
YOU WILL GIVE ME THIS POST, MARKED UP IN A COPYABLE FORMAT AND I SHALL PUT IT IN THE OP.
YOUR OVERLORD DEMANDS IT.
There is Foefire's Essence which looks like this:
And Naegling which looks like this:
Very nice.
If you have time you should do a quick explanation for new players how objectives work and how to prioritize actions in wvw (ie, how keeps get upgraded, not to take siege from anywhere but supply points, optimal places to drop arrow carts, etc).
http://www.gw2db.com/items/67096-vision-of-the-mists-of-nullification
Adept:
Empowered Illusions (Domination 10): 15% more damage from all illusions; most useful for Phantasms since Clone damage is always crap.
Phantasmal Fury (Dueling 10): 20% higher crit rate for all Phantasms.
Vengeful Images (Inspiration 5): Damage is damage; even if it requires your Phantasms getting smacked into the face.
Persisting Images (Inspiration 10): It doesn't hurt to give your Phantasms extra health to work with. (By the way, Signet of Illusions will help with this even more.)
Illusionist's Celerity (Illusions 5): An absolute must-have. Combine this with the weapon skill of your choice and you can bring a Phantasm's skill recharge time down to about the base skill charge time of a Clone skill.
Master:
Sharper Images (Dueling 15): Your Illusions will inflict a stack of Bleeding, guaranteed, every time they crit. Keep in mind that the Pistol's Illusionary Duelist attacks eight times and the Focus's Illusionary Warden attacks 12 times in an area of effect, and also that Phantasmal Fury combined with a level-appropriate Precision gear set will get your Phantasms up to around a 75% critical rate or more... set up right, this one Trait turns you into a Bleed factory.
Phantasmal Haste (Illusions 20): The more your Phantasms attack, the more damage they do.
Grandmaster:
Phantasmal Strength (Inspiration 25): More damage is always better.
So, to sum up... at the Adept level, I'd say prioritize 5 points in Illusions for the faster recast time on Phantasms, followed by, probably, Empowered Illusions for the flat damage bonus (possibly reverse the two). Once you hit Master, go for Sharper Images ASAP, taking Phantasmal Fury along the way, and then try to hit whatever weapons you want to have faster recharge times. Pistol is fantastic for this, as is the Focus. After that, feel free to diversify; the obscene crit rate and built-in Bleeding from your Phantasms ought to do enough damage on both the direct and condition damage axis that you'll be able to take down most normal mobs easily.
THey are a bit of a slow ramp up usually.
Big question: Are you using Phantasms as much as possible?
Getting your phantasm out is probably the most important part of your damage as a mesmer. (minus a late-game condition-damage staff build)
Grab a bit of mob attention and then drop the phantasm. Without one out, your damage is kinda gimp.
Yeah, I find radiance plus virtues plus honor or valor to be a nice combo. Radiance gives some nice survivability and damage boosts simultaneously. Especially if you take GS+Sword/Focus and blind bitches all day, every day.
Note: not for dredge
Yeah, I was running BiP, Focus 4, Axe 2 for single-target grinding for a long while. Still would be if I weren't hardcore WvWvW-ing the necro, who is now 75.
Re: Hammer Guardians:
http://gw2skills.net/editor/?fUIQNAS5dlUgiDXGSLEsNFS2DR6AVQrCDUVh4BThGlRA;T8AA1yuEQJ5SFlCKKeM8I4xyjjHJPLRGFsFA
Herd, ignite for about 20 seconds, stack Might on self with Mighty Blow with Purging Flames' fire field, switch to mace / focus to stay upright / get more Might.
That said, when I get tired of Necro-ing, I think I am going to try Sword / Torch ~ Mace / Focus with a serious emphasis on Empowering Might and other stackers of that.
Great post. Definitely agree 100%
The "spoon" maneuver you describe is what the Army calls an envelopment, usually done by either having the middle of the formation slowly retreat or both ends flank in a pincer movement:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Envelopment
Thanos Warbow
In game: Lvl 80 Ranger, 400 Leatherworker, Huntsman, Jeweler and Chef
RL: http://www.linkedin.com/profile/view?id=15348585
Well, there's shatter builds, but they still let phantasms attack once before detonating.
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Also Zerker is still bugged to not hit as often as it should when it finally does attack.
So apparently trying to go in the correct direction with the game's design after learning that content for content's sake is not enough for a long term game is flak for a conspiracy theory.
Reddit can go fall in a black hole.