[GW2] The Lazy Legendary Guide - Gift of Battle - Part 3

I recently reached the milestone of 500 badges of honor - which I traded in for the Gift of Battle (which I subsequently traded in, along with my bloodstone shard, gift of exploration and 250 obsidian shards for my gift of mastery).

Now, I've done WvW on and off since the headstart, and it took me this long to generate 400 badges (through a combination of the jumping puzzles, map exploration and random drops from those enemies I actually managed to kill).

 I managed to grind out my final 100 in just two days. Well, strictly speaking it took about an hour in total. 

If anyone tells you that doing the jumping puzzles is the best way to get badges, they obviously haven't tried actual coordinated WvW. This lazy legendary guide will tell you the basics of what you should do to get involved in your server's coordinated WvW efforts, how you can be most effective, and ultimately how you could, effectively, gather all your badges within a week. 

First - a disclaimer: this guide is being written perhaps only days before the March WvW update is introduced. This update is likely to change a lot of the dynamics of WvW, so some of the terminology or advice I give might need to change a little in light of the update. Hopefully, the fundamentals will still apply. 

Unfortunately, this guide also assumes that you are on a server which is relatively WvW active. I don't mean they have to be hugely successful in terms of winning all their match-ups or being in the top tiers. But having a corpus of dedicated WvW players, hopefully one or two larger WvW focused guilds and a whole load of individual players who like to dash about and pwn face is pretty vital. 

Aurora Glade is such a server. We've got a couple of larger WvW guilds and some well-known and confident commanders who don't mind the cat-herding exercise which WvW usually is. We don't win every match up (currently sitting at 11th in the league) but we always put up a good fight. If you want to contribute to your server, and gather badges at the same time, here's how you do it:

1) Find out how your WvW players communicate. If they do it just in the chat, that's fine, as long as it is effective. If they have voice communication, that's even better, Aurora Glade use Mumble - you don't even have to talk necessarily, just hop into the same channel as the commanding officer and follow his orders. That leads nicely onto point 2:

2) Follow your commander. I can't stress this enough, even if you have a terrible commander, if you are all communicating and moving with the same thing in mind, then you will be more effective than if you're running as an unruly mob or alone. Then again, if you have a good commander then you can be a lean-mean fighting machine, even with a relatively small and inexperienced fighting force - afterall, an army of sheep led by a lion is better than an army of lions led by a sheep. 

When I say "follow your commander" I don't just mean hang onto his boot straps, I mean when he says push, you push, when he says hold back, hold back. When he says stop fighting and waypoint back to garrison (even if you think you're winning) then you stop fighting and waypoint back to garrison. 

3) Use a build which supports your teammates. A while back I was using a build which allowed me to move about the map quickly, but ultimately if I got caught out alone, I would usually die. Watching this video made me change my ways:

4) Bring speed boosts. Your commander will probably ask you to "stack on me" before they move anywhere, when he's ready to move he'll count down from 3 and on 3 he'll expect all your speed boosts to be popped. Swiftness stacks duration, so you can get 1 minute+ of swiftness with a good group. This makes moving about the map much easier. 

5) Learn the lingo. "Right guys, we're going to shave this group" - move around the edge of the group taking out stragglers on the edges. "Push to [destination]" - move into the group and attack, keep moving through to the destination. "stack up on me" - move to your commanders location, this helps your commander get a sense of how many people are following, and standing close together helps hide your numbers from your enemies (think the Sand People walking in single file). Your server might even hold training sessions to get you used to following these kind of orders, if your server has a dedicated website - then the notifications will be up there. 

Ultimately, if your commander does his job  well and helps you take down a few large zergs (20+ players) then you should be able to gather 10-15 badges per zerg-kill. Considering you might take down any number of these groups over an hour period, you should be able to rack up 500 badges pretty easily, and without ever having to repeatedly do the Jumping Puzzle. 

Click here to read The Lazy Legendary Guide - Part 1 - The Prep
Click here to read The Lazy Legendary Guide - Part 2 - Gift of Exploration