I find it interesting to see what happens with the Ravious household when Guild Wars 2 is not pumping out updates every two weeks. This happened earlier during the winter holiday break, and now it is happening again as we wait one more week for the feature patch update (4/15).
First, I’m back to doing Tequatl. I have fun with that “raidâ€. I like how TTS does it. Zubon muses on the new event timetable that will be coming in a week. I know I am line generally with the comments in his post. With Tequatl, I’ve been on a timetable for quite a long time. Some nights Mrs. Ravious and I do world bosses, and we’ve headed to fan-made websites that use the Guild Wars 2 API to tell us where to head. For me the timetable is just incorporating something that I (and many others) have taken for granted anyway.
The other thing I am doing is WvW, in Season 2, in a server that is now on the dark side of the WvW rankings curve. Tarnished Coast is where all our Sanctum of Rall ex-pats went. Good luck to them. I hope they give Blackgate some good competition. Sanctum of Rall is lining up for a second week of being the whipping boy.
This sounds horrible in the ultimate score, but I am still having fun in the short term because our opponents are not tactically superior to ours. They just have better coverage. When we do join the field, we seem pretty good at taking what we want. It’s just that usually we can only do this in one or two maps in peak times. It’s weird when the immediate fun is great, but then the long term view gets a bit gloomy.
Then I go in to Edge of the Mists where the meta has hardened. I do not like it. No one wants to defend. Ever. Hyperbole. My favorite thing to do in Edge of the Mists is to upgrade and hold down a tower. It is not rewarding in a mechanical sense, and usually once a zerg trains their horde, there is little I can do but maybe cause them to lose 5-10% efficiency. I feel right now the pendulum of offense vs. defense in WvW is way too far gone to the offensive side. In server WvW, our commanders are crying for scouts to stay at towers and keeps, and no one wants to do it for fear of missing out on the precious karma train.
Still, I find others like me. It is a happy day when there are four of us hunkering down in a tower. Building cannons and burning oils, and then smashing up a zerg as best we can. Good times.
I feel Mrs. Ravious and I agree that the zerg karma train is getting tiring, but we diverge to our personal solutions. She loves playing in small havoc squads. I do admit that the excitement gets pretty high when my squad of 5 or so is trying to take down a nice objective. However, it is a very tense situation, and it requires very high communication and good leadership. I like defending and scouting objectives, but then it gets depressing when a zerg just smashes through a paper objective as if it were nothing.
Hopefully the developers are keeping all these stratagems in mind when moving to the next step with WvW. They have their test bed with Edge of the Mists. I hope this was enough to get the core WvW moving.
–Ravious
I rather like defending in WvW a lot of the time. However, I’m not likely to be doing any of it any time soon because if I’m in WvW (which I normally do only occasionally and casually) it’ll be to work on season achievements, and those come best from joining the train. So there you have the problem.
I have suggested to friends that we should roleplay in party chat in WvW. Our usual practice is to sit in a town and chat; why not sit in a supply camp or tower, and chat until it needs defending, and then return to roleplay? Gives the server some lookouts who aren’t getting bored.
Tarnished Coast has/had a few groups that do this from time to time. They sentry up in a tower and roleplay and are great lookouts/dolyak walkers/unfriendly watchdogs to any hopeful red names trying to take it. And they usually have commanders on a direct whisper line to seek help from the zerg should anything too big crop up.
At least there is one achievement that is tied to defending this time, but it can be easily achieved by zerging.
It’s aggravating how often towers/keeps are left without upgrades, would it be possible to include an achievement that keeps track of how much a player spends on upgrading, even if it is just the amount of gold to upgrade several camps, Give the achievement credit to the player who bought the upgrade, players who got a defend objective credit and players who got a defend dolyak credit to the keep while it is being upgraded.
I saw the changes planned for sPVP, the gear merging, and the reward tracks specifically, so I started giving that a whirl, since pvp would actually be useful for something. I don’t think I have done anything else since, it’s really fun and I can’t wait to actually get something out of it other than useless rank.