The other day I realized that Mad Memoires is probably the rarest backpiece skin in the game, because it was only avaliable in October 2012, and you had to be able to go into a level 60 area to get to it, and you had to complete a scavenger hunt, and it was soulbound. It's never been re-released. I even know people who salvaged the damn thing before the Wardrobe came out.
As such, I went, wow, you know what? I should really show that off!
So a few Citadel of Flame runs later and I have a new look to compliment my awesome backpiece.
I had also forgotten that it genuinely glows in the dark! And it even glows if you're using an Engineer Kit, so I have a bubble of torchlight around me at all times.
I'd totally pay for retrospective access to LWS1 content - cheeves, rewards, the whole lot.
Also Molten Facility as a dungeon was miles better than anything else in the game and whilst I'm glad parts of it made it into Fractals, it's kind of not the same.
Relevant to @mojojoeo , wuvwuv peeps are salty because the new stability changes mean they can't just hammer train into dudes anymore. The new "meta" seems to be what folks are calling "pirate ship": two blobs of folks with ranged attacks who open with CC to strip Stability and then just DPS each other down.
My thought: Phalanx tactics. Get a front-line group of people with Block & Reflect. Ideal setup for this front line: Warriors, Guardians, Engineers. Everybody packs Shields. Engineer packs Tool Kit & Elixir U. Guardians are like "yo I got Aegis. Aegis for errybody" When the enemy "ship" opens with CC, pop your blocks & reflects (ey, the one situation where it won't matter if you get Smoke Screen or Wall of Reflection from Elixir U!) Once the initial barrage is over, close to melee, THEN pop your Stability. Have your Necro with Chilling Darkness drop Well of Darkness & go Plague Form, and your Elementalist start laying on the Static Field, Unsteady Ground, & Frozen Ground.
Blocks straight-up stop attacks, including attacks with Pierce. This means that the front line effectively body-blocks the back line, preventing them from being CC'd or damaged. If something's unblockable you're in trouble, so be aware of shit like Static Field, Glue Shot, and the like. This is also why you actually DON'T pop your stability until you close to melee range! You don't want to waste it.
Relevant to @mojojoeo , wuvwuv peeps are salty because the new stability changes mean they can't just hammer train into dudes anymore. The new "meta" seems to be what folks are calling "pirate ship": two blobs of folks with ranged attacks who open with CC to strip Stability and then just DPS each other down.
My thought: Phalanx tactics. Get a front-line group of people with Block & Reflect. Ideal setup for this front line: Warriors, Guardians, Engineers. Everybody packs Shields. Engineer packs Tool Kit & Elixir U. Guardians are like "yo I got Aegis. Aegis for errybody" When the enemy "ship" opens with CC, pop your blocks & reflects (ey, the one situation where it won't matter if you get Smoke Screen or Wall of Reflection from Elixir U!) Once the initial barrage is over, close to melee, THEN pop your Stability. Have your Necro with Chilling Darkness drop Well of Darkness & go Plague Form, and your Elementalist start laying on the Static Field, Unsteady Ground, & Frozen Ground.
Blocks straight-up stop attacks, including attacks with Pierce. This means that the front line effectively body-blocks the back line, preventing them from being CC'd or damaged. If something's unblockable you're in trouble, so be aware of shit like Static Field, Glue Shot, and the like. This is also why you actually DON'T pop your stability until you close to melee range! You don't want to waste it.
I feel like we should do this.
Funny thing is, if the idea is to cover an approach, Toss Elixir U would actually be superior to Wall of Reflection or Smoke Screen, AFAIK It lasts longer than both, and more importantly, it's a ground-target skill that you can toss up to 900 range ahead of you; The Thief and Guardian version of those skills have to be placed at your feet, which might be a problem if the plan is to start charging in at some point.
I'd totally pay for retrospective access to LWS1 content - cheeves, rewards, the whole lot.
Also Molten Facility as a dungeon was miles better than anything else in the game and whilst I'm glad parts of it made it into Fractals, it's kind of not the same.
BTW most of the rewards ARE available--check the laurel vendor, there's a whole tab of them. Technically the first Halloween patch was from before all that. It was the first real content patch after launch, it was secretly huge and hardly anyone noticed all the amazing stuff (Teldra and I did) and ANet got the wrong impression from the community's lack of reaction. I think it took them awhile to recover from that.
Figure you put a couple of these up with the vanguard, toss down an elixir U right in front of the enemy zerg to block incoming projectiles, and a mine into it right after that. Aegis every 15 seconds plus shield 5 means good regen and a free heal every 30 secs from Defender Runes (might even try Nomad's armor for the healing power) Mine Field unfortunately removes only 1 boon per mine, even if it hits more than one target (Though toss mine will remove 1 boon from all targets hit), so it's not quite the crazyawesome boon stripping skill it sounds like. Flamethrower is for tagging, plus the toughness you get from Juggernaut for survivalbility, as well as for Backpack Regenerator and Speedy kits.
Somebody could also run Fortified Turrets with Deployable Turrets for a big fat wall of Reflects (plus the Pet & Illusion distracting abilities of turrets, plus... ... turrets... in general......). If it's Experimental Turrets that also means you have a wall of boons with it.
*e* If for whatever reason you're not concerned about tagging, you could also swap out the Flamethrower in the top one for Tool Kit, giving you a Cripple, a Pull, and yet another Block.
Relevant to @mojojoeo , wuvwuv peeps are salty because the new stability changes mean they can't just hammer train into dudes anymore. The new "meta" seems to be what folks are calling "pirate ship": two blobs of folks with ranged attacks who open with CC to strip Stability and then just DPS each other down.
My thought: Phalanx tactics. Get a front-line group of people with Block & Reflect. Ideal setup for this front line: Warriors, Guardians, Engineers. Everybody packs Shields. Engineer packs Tool Kit & Elixir U. Guardians are like "yo I got Aegis. Aegis for errybody" When the enemy "ship" opens with CC, pop your blocks & reflects (ey, the one situation where it won't matter if you get Smoke Screen or Wall of Reflection from Elixir U!) Once the initial barrage is over, close to melee, THEN pop your Stability. Have your Necro with Chilling Darkness drop Well of Darkness & go Plague Form, and your Elementalist start laying on the Static Field, Unsteady Ground, & Frozen Ground.
Blocks straight-up stop attacks, including attacks with Pierce. This means that the front line effectively body-blocks the back line, preventing them from being CC'd or damaged. If something's unblockable you're in trouble, so be aware of shit like Static Field, Glue Shot, and the like. This is also why you actually DON'T pop your stability until you close to melee range! You don't want to waste it.
I feel like we should do this.
This is what I was saying all along. Stability mid-fight, coupled with condition clears are the way to go. I really think this stab change is going to be a good thing for the meta and open the door for a lot more variety in fights (which is what makes it fun).
Also, Veil. Now that never ending stability and hammer trains of doom are on the way out, smaller havoc team that is mostly invisible can make a pretty serious dent in a larger zerg.
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mojojoeoA block off the park, living the dream.Registered Userregular
Relevant to @mojojoeo , wuvwuv peeps are salty because the new stability changes mean they can't just hammer train into dudes anymore. The new "meta" seems to be what folks are calling "pirate ship": two blobs of folks with ranged attacks who open with CC to strip Stability and then just DPS each other down.
My thought: Phalanx tactics. Get a front-line group of people with Block & Reflect. Ideal setup for this front line: Warriors, Guardians, Engineers. Everybody packs Shields. Engineer packs Tool Kit & Elixir U. Guardians are like "yo I got Aegis. Aegis for errybody" When the enemy "ship" opens with CC, pop your blocks & reflects (ey, the one situation where it won't matter if you get Smoke Screen or Wall of Reflection from Elixir U!) Once the initial barrage is over, close to melee, THEN pop your Stability. Have your Necro with Chilling Darkness drop Well of Darkness & go Plague Form, and your Elementalist start laying on the Static Field, Unsteady Ground, & Frozen Ground.
Blocks straight-up stop attacks, including attacks with Pierce. This means that the front line effectively body-blocks the back line, preventing them from being CC'd or damaged. If something's unblockable you're in trouble, so be aware of shit like Static Field, Glue Shot, and the like. This is also why you actually DON'T pop your stability until you close to melee range! You don't want to waste it.
I feel like we should do this.
This is what I was saying all along. Stability mid-fight, coupled with condition clears are the way to go. I really think this stab change is going to be a good thing for the meta and open the door for a lot more variety in fights (which is what makes it fun).
Also, Veil. Now that never ending stability and hammer trains of doom are on the way out, smaller havoc team that is mostly invisible can make a pretty serious dent in a larger zerg.
Which flanking larger zerg fights is our specialty
Some of the best fun back in the day was flanking for the other guilds and weaving in and out of the larger clashes... We got work done.
I am not equipped to answer Engie meta! Sorry @Foefaller
I think i like the changes alot...
mojojoeo on
Chief Wiggum: "Ladies, please. All our founding fathers, astronauts, and World Series heroes have been either drunk or on cocaine."
As a 5 man we would weave zergs quite a bit. We would target support elements of the enemy zerg that would break down the ability of that zerg to properly fight our teams zerg. When the enemy commander calls for a static field or viel and their Mesmer or elementalist is being attacked by a bunch of people it makes things really difficult. If the enemy driver has a short temper they can completely stop functioning. Now the meta is shifting, but every zerg has its key players, take them out and you can severely cripple a zerg.
One of my favorite things to do in a Zerg vs zerg fight is to find the driver - particularly distinguishable in EotM because of rank disparity - and cast Moa Morph.
@naengwen try MilesL.4317 my number was changed sometime in the process of registering back when. Must have grabbed the wrong one.
Character: Miles Latere
@naengwen try MilesL.4317 my number was changed sometime in the process of registering back when. Must have grabbed the wrong one.
Character: Miles Latere
Thanks for taking the time. Appreciate it.
That worked. Sent! To accept, hit G to bring up your guild interface, then go to the invite from NICE and hit Accept. Then hit Represent to see guild chat and get bonuses. Welcome to the guild!
So is there WvW happening tonight? I haven't logged on in a while. I may be interested in playing tonight if there are some group activities happening.
So, in commemoration of the 1 year anniversary of the end of LS Season 1, the BL store is offering Permanent Airship Pass (next 24 hours only) and for the next three days, Scarlet's shoulders and gloves, Toxic shoulders and glove, and the Lion's Arch Survivor's and Commemorative (i.e. Enameled) dye packs.
Also, for 1360 gems, you can get the Copper and (not quite a) Silver-Fed Salvage-O-Matics, 3 Upgrade Extractors, 3 ticket scraps, and a bunch of salvageable loot to use them on.
So, in commemoration of the 1 year anniversary of the end of LS Season 1, the BL store is offering Permanent Airship Pass (next 24 hours only) and for the next three days, Scarlet's shoulders and gloves, Toxic shoulders and glove, and the Lion's Arch Survivor's and Commemorative (i.e. Enameled) dye packs.
Also, for 1360 gems, you can get the Copper and (not quite a) Silver-Fed Salvage-O-Matics, 3 Upgrade Extractors, 3 ticket scraps, and a bunch of salvageable loot to use them on.
I can't count. The EU/US timezones synch again THIS week. So on the 29th, missions will be an hour EARLIER than last week if you are US/Canada. (And Sharkey/Teldra will be looking after you).
Ah well that's not too bad then. Obviously I'd prefer to be able to have one per char but if I can move them it's not a big deal.
Extractors are a one-use item.
Hey, it's me, Teldra! Did someone say "greatsword"? [Eternity]
0
mojojoeoA block off the park, living the dream.Registered Userregular
edited March 2015
WvW night next wednesday the 1st? You'd be a fool not to come out, an April fool as it were.
Anyone interested in more delicious NICE official WvW? And its April fools.... so there will be at the very least one nude run (until we dies once; should happen fast) so check your modesty at the door; bring your clown shoes because its april fooles.
8 until again. One would hope we dont have t1 queues still......
maybe we get telly and sharky to come and only ask them inane and terrible beta questions that they CAN answer due to how bad they are.
"Sharkey, is the main font still 00ff82# orange? ""has the auto attack cool down changed?" Was the sky removed in HOT? How big is the .exe? How do i mine for fish? Can you check the beta auction house for copper prices; im a lil low? "we're asura removed from the game?"
The worst, most inane and usless, question may earn the very last sparkle in existence.
mojojoeo on
Chief Wiggum: "Ladies, please. All our founding fathers, astronauts, and World Series heroes have been either drunk or on cocaine."
So I'm gonna talk about WvW and the stab change now. There are a few things people talking about it should know as background that don't seem widely known.
First, pirate ship meta is not new. Agg has been doing it since November of last year if not earlier, and it didn't take other guilds long to copy them.
Second, as far as high level open field/gvg play is concerned, the classic hammer train died a long time ago. Even before the stab change, almost none of the top guilds were running a melee-focused strategy anymore. Different guilds do different things, but a common thread among them is that they try to bait out a melee push, then retreat and drop AoE. The effectiveness of this strategy is not related to stability. If you get kited across wells dropped by glass necros you're gonna melt, stab or no stab.
The resulting trend over the last several months was that the role of melee, and their ability to decisively impact a fight, was already being sidelined before the stab change even went into effect. The change, and with it the ability to strip stacks before melee can even close distance, was just another in a long list of reasons why melee had to be very cautious, and not push the enemy casters until either a. they'd baited out a couple of bombs or b. never.
Both on here and on other forums I see people saying the stab change will open up the meta. Most people who have raided with a dedicated WvW/GvG guild lately think the exact opposite: this change further reinforces the existing trend - the strategy that's variously referred to as "ranged bomb" or "pirate ship." (I didn't like using the term "pirate ship" because I thought it sounded dumb, but that's the name everyone seems to be using now)
Here's another thing: fights between two pirate ships take a long time. Long enough that they start to get boring, especially if you're melee. Very often the first group to really commit to a push is the group that loses, meaning that the obvious solution is to never really push, never really commit.
Some people straight-up hate pirate ship meta, especially in the gvg community. Lots of players call it "cancer" and such. I'm not one of them - I don't mind it, to me it's just another strat - but it used to be that both melee-centered and ranged-centered strategies were viable, and now, for the moment at least, only ranged-centered strategies are viable. Any guild that wants to make a habit out of aggressive melee pushes is handicapping themselves. It results in less variety, not more.
The reason I don't like the stab change is not that I favor one fight style over the other, but that the stab change is the latest bit of evidence that Anet devs don't really know what's going on in WvW. They made a change to counter something (stability) that already had lots of counterplay - it was just counterplay that I suspect the devs just didn't know about and didn't take the time to find out. (Not only that, but apparently the uptick in lag is due in part to the extra calculations the servers have to run for stab now)
What's more, on a basic game design level it's just strange. The counter to CC was stab, and now the counter to stab is more CC. That's like making the counter to rock more scissors. It reeks of some mix of slapdash reasoning and Anet's lack of understanding of what actually happens in high-level open-field fights.
As for the proposed solutions in this thread I don't see them working. First, the CC spam on engage is typically mostly statics and lines, and neither reflection nor blocks will help you against either. Second, even if you get past that stuff with stab stacks still high you still have the wellbomb and other assorted AoE to deal with. If you've never stood in Agg/Syn/NS-level bomb I'm not sure you understand what it's like. Your health goes from 100% to zero in like two seconds flat, even on a tanky build, and it can be done from 900 range. They don't even need immob to kill you, though it's helpful. There's no level of sustain that will tank that damage. You either avoid it, invuln through it, or get melted.
You may not like it, but for the moment at least the simplest way of dealing with the stab change is to run pirate ship meta yourself and swap out heavies for casters. GWEN becomes something more like gwEN, with heavies used mainly to protect casters and secure downs, not to push in and attack.
I have my own crazy ideas. 1. Melee can call targets and scatter, leaping in from several directions, making it harder to focus fire on any one of them. 2. A mass water blast using eruption and arcane wave that's timed to happen simultaneous with the enemy bomb - if anything will allow our heavies to facetank the bomb, that'll be it. 3. Spreading immobilize by stacking it on one guy and then hitting epidemic. Epidemic has a radius of 600 and the conditions it spreads are not (I believe) affected by -condi duration.
I don't know if any of that will work though, it might just be wishful thinking.
"Sharkey, is the main font still 00ff82# orange? ""has the auto attack cool down changed?" Was the sky removed in HOT? How big is the .exe? How do i mine for fish? Can you check the beta auction house for copper prices; im a lil low? "we're asura removed from the game?"
Wait a second. How DO I mine for fish? This is a serious issue, people!
So I'm gonna talk about WvW and the stab change now. There are a few things people talking about it should know as background that don't seem widely known.
First, pirate ship meta is not new. Agg has been doing it since November of last year if not earlier, and it didn't take other guilds long to copy them.
Second, as far as high level open field/gvg play is concerned, the classic hammer train died a long time ago. Even before the stab change, almost none of the top guilds were running a melee-focused strategy anymore. Different guilds do different things, but a common thread among them is that they try to bait out a melee push, then retreat and drop AoE. The effectiveness of this strategy is not related to stability. If you get kited across wells dropped by glass necros you're gonna melt, stab or no stab.
The resulting trend over the last several months was that the role of melee, and their ability to decisively impact a fight, was already being sidelined before the stab change even went into effect. The change, and with it the ability to strip stacks before melee can even close distance, was just another in a long list of reasons why melee had to be very cautious, and not push the enemy casters until either a. they'd baited out a couple of bombs or b. never.
Both on here and on other forums I see people saying the stab change will open up the meta. Most people who have raided with a dedicated WvW/GvG guild lately think the exact opposite: this change further reinforces the existing trend: the strategy that's variously referred to as "ranged bomb" or "pirate ship." (I didn't like using the term "pirate ship" because I thought it sounded dumb, but that's the name everyone seems to be using now)
Here's another thing: fights between two pirate ships take a long time. Long enough that they start to get boring, especially if you're melee. Very often the first group to really commit to a push is the group that loses, meaning that the obvious solution is to never really push, never really commit.
Some people straight-up hate pirate ship meta, especially in the gvg community. Lots of players call it "cancer" and such. I'm not one of them - I don't mind it, to me it's just another strat - but it used to be that both melee-centered and ranged-centered strategies were viable, and now, for the moment at least, only ranged-centered strategies are viable. Any guild that wants to make a habit out of aggressive melee pushes is handicapping themselves. It results in less variety, not more.
The reason I don't like the stab change is not that I favor one fight style over the other, but that the stab change is the latest bit of evidence that Anet devs don't really know what's going on in WvW. They made a change to counter something (stability) that already had lots of counterplay - it was just counterplay that I suspect the devs just didn't know about and didn't take the time to find out. (Not only that, but apparently the uptick in lag is due in part to the extra calculations the servers have to run for stab now)
What's more, on a basic game design level it's just strange. The counter to CC was stab, and now the counter to stab is more CC. That's like making the counter to rock more scissors. It reeks of some mix of slapdash reasoning and Anet's lack of understanding of what actually happens in high-level open-field fights.
As for the proposed solutions in this thread I don't see them working. First, the CC spam on engage is typically mostly statics and lines, and neither reflection nor blocks will help you against either. Second, even if you get past that stuff with stab stacks still high you still have the wellbomb and other assorted AoE to deal with. If you've never stood in Agg/Syn/NS-level bomb I'm not sure you understand what it's like. Your health goes from 100% to zero in like two seconds flat, even on a tanky build. They don't even need immob to kill you, though it's helpful. There's no level of sustain that will tank that damage. You either avoid it, invuln through it, or get melted.
You may not like it, but for the moment at least the simplest way of dealing with the stab change is to run pirate ship meta yourself and swap out heavies for casters. GWEN becomes something more like gwEN, with heavies used mainly to protect casters and secure downs, not to push in and attack.
I have my own crazy ideas. 1. Melee can call targets and scatter, leaping in from several directions, making it harder to focus fire on any one of them. 2. A mass water blast using eruption and arcane wave that's timed to happen simultaneous with the enemy bomb - if anything will allow our heavies to facetank the bomb, that'll be it. 3. Spreading immobilize by stacking it on one guy and then hitting epidemic. Epidemic has a radius of 600 and the conditions it spreads are not (I believe) affected by -condi duration.
I don't know if any of that will work though, it might just be wishful thinking.
Well ya. WvW is sadly an afterthought in every possible way.
Stab changes dont change much on our scale. though... I imagine it pisses a few folks off.
Its a backwards setup- the heavies are the healers/support for the DPS vs the front line fighters they were....
Good info yourgottawanna. Can you make it out next Wednesday or is tax season still all up on you?
Chief Wiggum: "Ladies, please. All our founding fathers, astronauts, and World Series heroes have been either drunk or on cocaine."
My impression of the Mastery system is that it feels a lot like WvW specializations. They scale up similarly in cost (1, 3, 5, ...) and you get one Mastery point every time you "level". From what I could tell, you have to pick a Mastery and set it active to put XP into it. But then there are Mastery nodes, like Skill Point nodes, in the world.
I really like the ability to glide, but it takes too long to pop up the use button. I want to be able to press it immediately. And you can't spam spacebar (the default hotkey for it) or you might turn it on then off again!
The Revenant is fun. Seems like it has a lot of potential, but they lock you into just Hammer or Mace/Axe. Like your weapon skills for other weapons don't even exist in the UI. I didn't play for long enough to really learn all the skills, but I did get pretty good at using Hammer just by playing around.
One bad note: the voice acting. It's kind of rough in places. I'm wondering if it's just placeholder content for now.
Edit:
Forgot to mention Adventures! There's one where you have to burn a bunch of tendrils quickly. That's the green arrows in the last pic. You get gold/silver/bronze depending on how many you burn. I am really, really looking forward to doing more of that type of content!
ky13 on
Hey, it's me, Teldra! Did someone say "greatsword"? [Eternity]
Here's another thing: fights between two pirate ships take a long time. Long enough that they start to get boring, especially if you're melee.
Bollocks! A fight that lasts 10 to 15 seconds is not a satisfying fight. Fights that go on for 30 to 45 seconds are not "long" fights by any stretch of the imagination. Fights that go on for several minutes are much more fun for the vast majority of players. Yes, your super hardcore GvG/WvW players are going to whine to high-heaven about how boring it is, but those players are the vast VAST minority. The game shouldn't cater to those people. In fact, I would go so far as to say that their skewed perspective on pacing and strategy is far more of a "cancer" to the game than any change that a-net is going to make.
They made a change to counter something (stability) that already had lots of counterplay - it was just counterplay that I suspect the devs just didn't know about and didn't take the time to find out.
Counters that can only be used by dedicated teams that have well developed builds and operate outside the realms of "normal players" may as well not exist at all. It's not a case of the devs not knowing or not taking the time to find out - that's reactionary mumbo-jumbo and a load of B.S. and you know it. The devs have access to logfile metadata that you and I as players cannot even fathom.
I worked on a MMO that was designed in the last century. I can 100% guarantee you that there is a logger running on the server that can tell you exactly how many times Skill X was used in Zone Y between 2:17AM and 4:36PM the next day. They have logifiles that can distill how many times Stability was stripped, how long it lasted before stripping and how many CC effects it swallowed before collapsing. Not for a few fights but for ALL fights on ALL servers. Literally hundreds of thousands (if not millions) of actual real in-game applications of that skill/effect.
Anyone (and I do mean ANYONE, and that includes me) who claims that they know more than the devs about a particular aspect of the game is either A. Dead wrong, or B. Have run literally hundreds of thousands of iterative tests. (Note that choice A also includes anecdotal evidence.) Again, from my personal MMO development experience, if there isn't relevant logfile data, the devs have internal tools where they can simulate skill use and can actually run those hundreds of thousands of iterative tests on a working server. This sort of stuff isn't just tested in the game - it's run into the freaking ground by procedurally testing it millions of times before it even makes it to a playable server.
I'm not going to imply that the devs are all-knowing and all-seeing and always correct and right. They can and do make errors in judgment. But when I'm given a choice between trusting a developer and listening to a well-informed player, my money is almost always going to be on the side of the developer. Even if I personally disagree with the change, I have to admit that I'm probably not seeing the entire picture.
I have my own crazy ideas. 1. Melee can call targets and scatter, leaping in from several directions, making it harder to focus fire on any one of them. 2. A mass water blast using eruption and arcane wave that's timed to happen simultaneous with the enemy bomb - if anything will allow our heavies to facetank the bomb, that'll be it. 3. Spreading immobilize by stacking it on one guy and then hitting epidemic. Epidemic has a radius of 600 and the conditions it spreads are not (I believe) affected by -condi duration.
Here is where we are back on track, you and I. How about not stacking every player in the same exact spot? In the big PvP game I came from (DAoC) there was an AE effect that literally removed control from your character for 45 seconds. You may think that sounds awful, but it actual made the fights incredibly like a chess match. The first thing you learned when running with the zerg was DON'T STACK UP!!! All it took was one heavy to NOT get caught in the initial CC blast and they would un-mez their entire team and trigger immunity for a short time. Which led to a counter-mez. And then the fight got real interesting.
Obviously, not the same game and strategies are going to differ, but the whole concept of "stay tight on the Dorito" is, IMO, the real problem. A looser group doesn't have to worry about AE effects at all because not everyone is in the same place at the same time.
Apparently the condition stack max is gone on the PTS, and I've already seen screenshots of 100+ bleeds on a single target. That's going to kill anyone in a hurry, and if the entire zerg runs through that, they deserve to die.
GW2 doesn't have many hard interrupts or assigned roles. That makes it hard to figure out what people need to do (aside from "do damage", which is usually the last thing you really need them to do). IMO melee should be the ones providing distraction, interrupting the other side and laying down the CC, not murdering people. That's what casters do.
Posts
As such, I went, wow, you know what? I should really show that off!
So a few Citadel of Flame runs later and I have a new look to compliment my awesome backpiece.
I had also forgotten that it genuinely glows in the dark! And it even glows if you're using an Engineer Kit, so I have a bubble of torchlight around me at all times.
https://podcast.tidalwavegames.com/
Also Molten Facility as a dungeon was miles better than anything else in the game and whilst I'm glad parts of it made it into Fractals, it's kind of not the same.
My thought: Phalanx tactics. Get a front-line group of people with Block & Reflect. Ideal setup for this front line: Warriors, Guardians, Engineers. Everybody packs Shields. Engineer packs Tool Kit & Elixir U. Guardians are like "yo I got Aegis. Aegis for errybody" When the enemy "ship" opens with CC, pop your blocks & reflects (ey, the one situation where it won't matter if you get Smoke Screen or Wall of Reflection from Elixir U!) Once the initial barrage is over, close to melee, THEN pop your Stability. Have your Necro with Chilling Darkness drop Well of Darkness & go Plague Form, and your Elementalist start laying on the Static Field, Unsteady Ground, & Frozen Ground.
Blocks straight-up stop attacks, including attacks with Pierce. This means that the front line effectively body-blocks the back line, preventing them from being CC'd or damaged. If something's unblockable you're in trouble, so be aware of shit like Static Field, Glue Shot, and the like. This is also why you actually DON'T pop your stability until you close to melee range! You don't want to waste it.
I feel like we should do this.
https://podcast.tidalwavegames.com/
Funny thing is, if the idea is to cover an approach, Toss Elixir U would actually be superior to Wall of Reflection or Smoke Screen, AFAIK It lasts longer than both, and more importantly, it's a ground-target skill that you can toss up to 900 range ahead of you; The Thief and Guardian version of those skills have to be placed at your feet, which might be a problem if the plan is to start charging in at some point.
BTW most of the rewards ARE available--check the laurel vendor, there's a whole tab of them. Technically the first Halloween patch was from before all that. It was the first real content patch after launch, it was secretly huge and hardly anyone noticed all the amazing stuff (Teldra and I did) and ANet got the wrong impression from the community's lack of reaction. I think it took them awhile to recover from that.
http://gw2skills.net/editor/?fdAQJAqelUUpLr1ax8KseNSdhM6odTCyAFEZwhA-T1xHAB7p+T17PUwJA4HlfNpEEgHAwX6JIFATatA-w
Figure you put a couple of these up with the vanguard, toss down an elixir U right in front of the enemy zerg to block incoming projectiles, and a mine into it right after that. Aegis every 15 seconds plus shield 5 means good regen and a free heal every 30 secs from Defender Runes (might even try Nomad's armor for the healing power) Mine Field unfortunately removes only 1 boon per mine, even if it hits more than one target (Though toss mine will remove 1 boon from all targets hit), so it's not quite the crazyawesome boon stripping skill it sounds like. Flamethrower is for tagging, plus the toughness you get from Juggernaut for survivalbility, as well as for Backpack Regenerator and Speedy kits.
One alternative might be to drop Flamethrower, drop all the points in firearms, and put 2 in explosive and two more in alchemy, and do P/S alchemy build, like this: http://gw2skills.net/editor/?fdAQJAqelcTp6q1Xx8KseNyahM6zx7K6kTj+pAA-TFyHABFcCAYTPQ17Poo6P1pEsIlfA8AA+SDBpAYSrF-w Switch out Soldier's for Dire, provide some stab with Elixir B, and remove some boons with every elixir toss you do in the melee.
*e* If for whatever reason you're not concerned about tagging, you could also swap out the Flamethrower in the top one for Tool Kit, giving you a Cripple, a Pull, and yet another Block.
https://podcast.tidalwavegames.com/
This is what I was saying all along. Stability mid-fight, coupled with condition clears are the way to go. I really think this stab change is going to be a good thing for the meta and open the door for a lot more variety in fights (which is what makes it fun).
Also, Veil. Now that never ending stability and hammer trains of doom are on the way out, smaller havoc team that is mostly invisible can make a pretty serious dent in a larger zerg.
Which flanking larger zerg fights is our specialty
Some of the best fun back in the day was flanking for the other guilds and weaving in and out of the larger clashes... We got work done.
I am not equipped to answer Engie meta! Sorry @Foefaller
I think i like the changes alot...
And then they all scatter.
Character: Miles Latere
Thanks for taking the time. Appreciate it.
That worked. Sent! To accept, hit G to bring up your guild interface, then go to the invite from NICE and hit Accept. Then hit Represent to see guild chat and get bonuses. Welcome to the guild!
They really make you work for those things.
Huh? huh?
Meanwhile I'm apparently not a loyal customer just because I don't have 28 legendaries
As did Sharkey. Anet is his number 1 fan after all.
Also, for 1360 gems, you can get the Copper and (not quite a) Silver-Fed Salvage-O-Matics, 3 Upgrade Extractors, 3 ticket scraps, and a bunch of salvageable loot to use them on.
Motherfuckers... I may have to buy some gems.
Not sure about the airship pass but the extractors are a single device, account unlocked, so you would have to move them from character to character.
I can't count. The EU/US timezones synch again THIS week. So on the 29th, missions will be an hour EARLIER than last week if you are US/Canada. (And Sharkey/Teldra will be looking after you).
Extractors are a one-use item.
Hey, it's me, Teldra! Did someone say "greatsword"? [Eternity]
Anyone interested in more delicious NICE official WvW? And its April fools.... so there will be at the very least one nude run (until we dies once; should happen fast) so check your modesty at the door; bring your clown shoes because its april fooles.
8 until again. One would hope we dont have t1 queues still......
maybe we get telly and sharky to come and only ask them inane and terrible beta questions that they CAN answer due to how bad they are.
"Sharkey, is the main font still 00ff82# orange? ""has the auto attack cool down changed?" Was the sky removed in HOT? How big is the .exe? How do i mine for fish? Can you check the beta auction house for copper prices; im a lil low? "we're asura removed from the game?"
The worst, most inane and usless, question may earn the very last sparkle in existence.
Got this so far:
Might drop the Citadel chest for Sorrow's Embrace, not sure yet.
Which makes ask the worst question possible on april fool's day that much sweeter,
We could get actual info, or..... spirit of the day.
First, pirate ship meta is not new. Agg has been doing it since November of last year if not earlier, and it didn't take other guilds long to copy them.
Second, as far as high level open field/gvg play is concerned, the classic hammer train died a long time ago. Even before the stab change, almost none of the top guilds were running a melee-focused strategy anymore. Different guilds do different things, but a common thread among them is that they try to bait out a melee push, then retreat and drop AoE. The effectiveness of this strategy is not related to stability. If you get kited across wells dropped by glass necros you're gonna melt, stab or no stab.
The resulting trend over the last several months was that the role of melee, and their ability to decisively impact a fight, was already being sidelined before the stab change even went into effect. The change, and with it the ability to strip stacks before melee can even close distance, was just another in a long list of reasons why melee had to be very cautious, and not push the enemy casters until either a. they'd baited out a couple of bombs or b. never.
Both on here and on other forums I see people saying the stab change will open up the meta. Most people who have raided with a dedicated WvW/GvG guild lately think the exact opposite: this change further reinforces the existing trend - the strategy that's variously referred to as "ranged bomb" or "pirate ship." (I didn't like using the term "pirate ship" because I thought it sounded dumb, but that's the name everyone seems to be using now)
Here's another thing: fights between two pirate ships take a long time. Long enough that they start to get boring, especially if you're melee. Very often the first group to really commit to a push is the group that loses, meaning that the obvious solution is to never really push, never really commit.
Some people straight-up hate pirate ship meta, especially in the gvg community. Lots of players call it "cancer" and such. I'm not one of them - I don't mind it, to me it's just another strat - but it used to be that both melee-centered and ranged-centered strategies were viable, and now, for the moment at least, only ranged-centered strategies are viable. Any guild that wants to make a habit out of aggressive melee pushes is handicapping themselves. It results in less variety, not more.
The reason I don't like the stab change is not that I favor one fight style over the other, but that the stab change is the latest bit of evidence that Anet devs don't really know what's going on in WvW. They made a change to counter something (stability) that already had lots of counterplay - it was just counterplay that I suspect the devs just didn't know about and didn't take the time to find out. (Not only that, but apparently the uptick in lag is due in part to the extra calculations the servers have to run for stab now)
What's more, on a basic game design level it's just strange. The counter to CC was stab, and now the counter to stab is more CC. That's like making the counter to rock more scissors. It reeks of some mix of slapdash reasoning and Anet's lack of understanding of what actually happens in high-level open-field fights.
As for the proposed solutions in this thread I don't see them working. First, the CC spam on engage is typically mostly statics and lines, and neither reflection nor blocks will help you against either. Second, even if you get past that stuff with stab stacks still high you still have the wellbomb and other assorted AoE to deal with. If you've never stood in Agg/Syn/NS-level bomb I'm not sure you understand what it's like. Your health goes from 100% to zero in like two seconds flat, even on a tanky build, and it can be done from 900 range. They don't even need immob to kill you, though it's helpful. There's no level of sustain that will tank that damage. You either avoid it, invuln through it, or get melted.
You may not like it, but for the moment at least the simplest way of dealing with the stab change is to run pirate ship meta yourself and swap out heavies for casters. GWEN becomes something more like gwEN, with heavies used mainly to protect casters and secure downs, not to push in and attack.
I have my own crazy ideas. 1. Melee can call targets and scatter, leaping in from several directions, making it harder to focus fire on any one of them. 2. A mass water blast using eruption and arcane wave that's timed to happen simultaneous with the enemy bomb - if anything will allow our heavies to facetank the bomb, that'll be it. 3. Spreading immobilize by stacking it on one guy and then hitting epidemic. Epidemic has a radius of 600 and the conditions it spreads are not (I believe) affected by -condi duration.
I don't know if any of that will work though, it might just be wishful thinking.
Wait a second. How DO I mine for fish? This is a serious issue, people!
If you go with the Sorrow's Embrace chest, fused gauntlets might go well with it
Well ya. WvW is sadly an afterthought in every possible way.
Stab changes dont change much on our scale. though... I imagine it pisses a few folks off.
Its a backwards setup- the heavies are the healers/support for the DPS vs the front line fighters they were....
Good info yourgottawanna. Can you make it out next Wednesday or is tax season still all up on you?
My impression of the Mastery system is that it feels a lot like WvW specializations. They scale up similarly in cost (1, 3, 5, ...) and you get one Mastery point every time you "level". From what I could tell, you have to pick a Mastery and set it active to put XP into it. But then there are Mastery nodes, like Skill Point nodes, in the world.
I really like the ability to glide, but it takes too long to pop up the use button. I want to be able to press it immediately. And you can't spam spacebar (the default hotkey for it) or you might turn it on then off again!
The Revenant is fun. Seems like it has a lot of potential, but they lock you into just Hammer or Mace/Axe. Like your weapon skills for other weapons don't even exist in the UI. I didn't play for long enough to really learn all the skills, but I did get pretty good at using Hammer just by playing around.
One bad note: the voice acting. It's kind of rough in places. I'm wondering if it's just placeholder content for now.
Edit:
Forgot to mention Adventures! There's one where you have to burn a bunch of tendrils quickly. That's the green arrows in the last pic. You get gold/silver/bronze depending on how many you burn. I am really, really looking forward to doing more of that type of content!
Hey, it's me, Teldra! Did someone say "greatsword"? [Eternity]
Bollocks! A fight that lasts 10 to 15 seconds is not a satisfying fight. Fights that go on for 30 to 45 seconds are not "long" fights by any stretch of the imagination. Fights that go on for several minutes are much more fun for the vast majority of players. Yes, your super hardcore GvG/WvW players are going to whine to high-heaven about how boring it is, but those players are the vast VAST minority. The game shouldn't cater to those people. In fact, I would go so far as to say that their skewed perspective on pacing and strategy is far more of a "cancer" to the game than any change that a-net is going to make.
Counters that can only be used by dedicated teams that have well developed builds and operate outside the realms of "normal players" may as well not exist at all. It's not a case of the devs not knowing or not taking the time to find out - that's reactionary mumbo-jumbo and a load of B.S. and you know it. The devs have access to logfile metadata that you and I as players cannot even fathom.
I worked on a MMO that was designed in the last century. I can 100% guarantee you that there is a logger running on the server that can tell you exactly how many times Skill X was used in Zone Y between 2:17AM and 4:36PM the next day. They have logifiles that can distill how many times Stability was stripped, how long it lasted before stripping and how many CC effects it swallowed before collapsing. Not for a few fights but for ALL fights on ALL servers. Literally hundreds of thousands (if not millions) of actual real in-game applications of that skill/effect.
Anyone (and I do mean ANYONE, and that includes me) who claims that they know more than the devs about a particular aspect of the game is either A. Dead wrong, or B. Have run literally hundreds of thousands of iterative tests. (Note that choice A also includes anecdotal evidence.) Again, from my personal MMO development experience, if there isn't relevant logfile data, the devs have internal tools where they can simulate skill use and can actually run those hundreds of thousands of iterative tests on a working server. This sort of stuff isn't just tested in the game - it's run into the freaking ground by procedurally testing it millions of times before it even makes it to a playable server.
I'm not going to imply that the devs are all-knowing and all-seeing and always correct and right. They can and do make errors in judgment. But when I'm given a choice between trusting a developer and listening to a well-informed player, my money is almost always going to be on the side of the developer. Even if I personally disagree with the change, I have to admit that I'm probably not seeing the entire picture.
Here is where we are back on track, you and I. How about not stacking every player in the same exact spot? In the big PvP game I came from (DAoC) there was an AE effect that literally removed control from your character for 45 seconds. You may think that sounds awful, but it actual made the fights incredibly like a chess match. The first thing you learned when running with the zerg was DON'T STACK UP!!! All it took was one heavy to NOT get caught in the initial CC blast and they would un-mez their entire team and trigger immunity for a short time. Which led to a counter-mez. And then the fight got real interesting.
Obviously, not the same game and strategies are going to differ, but the whole concept of "stay tight on the Dorito" is, IMO, the real problem. A looser group doesn't have to worry about AE effects at all because not everyone is in the same place at the same time.
Apparently the condition stack max is gone on the PTS, and I've already seen screenshots of 100+ bleeds on a single target. That's going to kill anyone in a hurry, and if the entire zerg runs through that, they deserve to die.
GW2 doesn't have many hard interrupts or assigned roles. That makes it hard to figure out what people need to do (aside from "do damage", which is usually the last thing you really need them to do). IMO melee should be the ones providing distraction, interrupting the other side and laying down the CC, not murdering people. That's what casters do.
You now have to pay 2 gems for every swing.
Trick question, the world is now upside down, so you mean has the ground been removed!
Hella.
Using a can opener, duh.
They actually shut it down, you can only trade via smoke signals and covered wagons.
I hadn't noticed any, but then they are very small.
Hey, it's me, Teldra! Did someone say "greatsword"? [Eternity]