Hunter's Insight – A Guild Wars 2 Blog

Still Waiting

It was clear from the beginning that Arenanet didn’t want people hopping servers solely for the purpose of joining a successful WvW team. It’s just too bad they failed to put in place any sort of deterrent. Here we are months later and entire guilds are still free to jump ship and add their weight to already successful worlds.

This is the result of free transfers which I was under the impression would end within weeks of launch. 2 and a half months later the only deterrent seems to be a 7 day wait before you can return to your old server, as if that’s likely.

We’ve already seen large alliances shifting around to the already successful servers. What a difference they make moving 5th place servers up to 3rd place contenders! Meanwhile my own server is absolutely outnumbered by every server we go up against. We lose more and more people every day to other servers. I’ve never been a big fan of the PvP personality type and this is why. We do okay in WvW matches but it only takes one week of losses to set the tears flowing and have guilds migrate elsewhere. Which only leads to even lower morale and worse showings.

One of my main concerns is that servers that are already successful are getting plenty of players to continue that success. Meanwhile my own server will continue to sink in the rankings. All because Arenanet have essentially twiddled their thumbs on this issue even when they knew far in advance it would be a problem.

This all stems to guesting not having come in, but at this point I’d be far more willing to wait on guesting and have a cost associated with moving servers than continue to allow rats to abandon the various sinking ships. If I recall correctly the idea was that full servers would cost more gems while unpopulated servers would cost less. Let’s get on that Arenanet.

World Versus Me

Despite having a mass desertion from our server because World versus World queues were too long, I helped take Stonemist a couple days ago. It really wasn’t much of an accomplishment, I barely saw anyone defending it.

It was my first time in WvW since launch. I have to admit that yes, the queues really were that bad. Having patience worked out for me, however. I can now WvW at will.

So I went in merely to see if the puzzle I had added from the southwest Eternal Battleground keep had been converted to a vista since beta. I can confirm it is now a vista and will probably remove it from the guide. Once inside WvW I couldn’t help wandering around.

That’s when I ended up at Stonemist helping to take the keep. There were maybe a dozen defenders but they were definitely unprepared and no reinforcements came to back them up.

I spent my time outside the wall targeting people trying to cast spells from the ramparts. My pistols do AoE damage, and if I can manage to hit one player, I can hit others, and make small groups back away from their viable range. Even if my shots were obstructed by the wall, my AoE still goes off and I sometimes am still able to do damage. This worked really well for the people attacking the door. Wall defenders rushed back and forth along the wall never able to focus on one player. I ended up using this tactic quite a bit.

Once defending it was me on the wall shooting down at enemies. I ended up changing my engineer firearms trait to one that improves pistol range for just this purpose, and changing my healing skill to a turret so that our players could withstand the AoE return fire.

While not defending most of the players in the area would venture out to just north east of Stonemist. We tried to take the tower in that area but that must be one of the easiest towers to defend in the entire game. A choke point bridge that runs right under a high wall, a river that prevents easy access from another angle, oakhearts that are triggered by defending players so that attacking players have to deal with it. And good luck if the other server happens to come up behind you.

The other server came behind us. Which is fine, it’s meant to be that way. Actually, we ended up taking advantage of this a couple of times. Instead of staying out there to get sandwiched, we noted the next time the other server came up behind us and fled. This led to the two other servers, who both outnumbered our own, fighting amongst themselves. As we had Stonemist to rally at, we ended up preying upon both sides as they engaged within battles in sight of Stonemist.

I ended up chasing one guy, melee, who had come in alone from the north. He noticed me and started to attack, so I laid down some turrets and did a bunch of damage, at which point he backed out of turret range. I chased him for a bit, but in the distance I could see red names and started to return to the area outside Stonemist’s gate. His two friends ran through the area but ignored me and continued to that bridge I spoke of earlier. Meanwhile this guy was still hanging around so we went at it again. Unfortunately he began to run off a second time. I chased him but he had too much of a lead this time and I discovered to my dismay one of his friends had left behind turrets of their own. So again I backed off. Only yet again he came back at me, not having learned his lesson about my turrets, blind, glue shot, ranged weapons and dodging ability. He ran off a third time, at which point I was pretty bored and decided to ignore the guy from that point forward, only as I was running away, I noticed he once again was headed straight for me. Only this time it was a big mistake, two friendlies happened to be going in that direction and though he turned to run away a fourth time we made short work of him.

That’s the thing about WvW. Do not play alone. It is much more fun in a group as I found out in the numerous ways that I myself was killed. The fight will turn when you’re not looking, people will ambush you, and nobody will be around to res you. You’ll have to then make the long, tedious, boring, tedious (tediously tedious), TEDIOUS, tedious, tedious, run back to the fight. Tedious.

Speaking of tedious I was making a run back to Stonemist which nobody had bothered to put a waypoint in and I noticed in the distance friendlies chasing something. What it was I couldn’t see, it was too far off, but I was in a position to possibly head this person off so I went off in that direction and found four people chasing one lone enemy player. Great, this should be short work I thought. I managed to get in range and started firing off shots, I crippled him, and got him down to half health but the guy had several speed buffs on him so that he had swiftness 90% of the time and I could only damage him for that 10%, which wasn’t enough to kill him before he ran off. So after 5 minutes of chasing him it suddenly dawned on me that I was the only person damaging him. Huh? Of the four other people in the group, none were ranged. None had thought to bring a ranged weapon, none could keep up with this guy, none could cripple him. I left.

Anyway, eventually the other servers got wise to our pitting them against each other. They started assaulting two gates. While our resistance was fairly good, we repelled two assaults on one gate before it gave to a third, we eventually collapsed and I called it a night.

I ended up with credit for over 60 kills, easily fulfilling my monthly achievement in around 3 hours, but I probably only finished a half dozen people. Meanwhile I died around 10 times making the tedious journey back each time. It was fun, frustrating, tedious, and the entire time our server was doing really badly. The only success story was that we held our own and Stonemist in Eternal Battlegrounds. But I did my part, I just wish I had gone in with friends.