Guild Wars 2

It seems to me that ANet’s class mechanic update team has been dropping the ball lately, we see bugged skill every other class patch.

For the recent 15th Nov patch, the Elementalist’s Dragon Tooth for scepter fire 2, as the patch states to trigger the blast combo finisher at the target’s location, but combat testing to prove otherwise where no blast combo finisher was trigger at all when I went to melee range, cast Dagger off hand fire 4 for Ring of Fire, fire combo field and then cast Scepter fire 2 for Dragon tooth, the result was nothing happened, I was thinking maybe the pop up notification was not working but it seems that the blast combo finisher has been removed completely.

Perhaps when “fixing” evasive arcana they introduced a new bug affecting many of our blast finishers, or they just hate Elementalists since BWE 1 or they have further fixes to implement.

According to a dev response in the Ranger forum they had limited time to rollout fixes. Frankly the fact that they only have two people to work on such an important aspect of the game doesn’t help to repair the damage that has been done to the developers reputation.

Honestly, as a former game tester and a Sr. SQA Engineer, I can tell you that there is no such thing as thorough testing on a MMO. The scope is too big, there are too many variables, you can’t even begin to simulate the load that actual users put on a system, etc. The best that AN could do would be to do what DDO and other MMOs do – have a test server with access to a select or not-so-select group of players who bash their way around like they normally would in an attempt to find bugs that SQA doesn’t have the time or the resources to find.

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I do have to support the initial post in a way though. This bug (the dragon’s tooth one) should have been caught.

There is NO circumstances that this power proc’s a combo at all, not limited circumstances but NONE.

When instituting a programming change specific to an item (like changing the mechanics of this combo finisher), its routine practice to make the code changes and then to confirm that its working. You don’t willy nilly change code and never bother confirming that your adjustments work and I don’t see how that could have been done as there is no circumstances you can get this power to function as a combo finisher anymore which would seem to indicate just that (willy nilly changes without ANY testing).

One might assume the following:
1. Have a list of bugfixes and code changes.
2. Institute fixes.
3. On a test build server play and confirm said fix is working as intended, at least to some extent. A few passes up ‘drop field and drop combo finisher on field’ and confirm its working as intended.
4. move on to next item.

To eliminate step 3 would not be a case of ‘not doing thorough testing’ and would instead be an indicator of ‘no testing at all’ which when rolling out patches and updates to a game thats live supporting what is likely hundreds of thousands of players is very poor form.

Now that said I’m not normally one to complain, ‘woops we missed testing that one’, ok fine. But why after more than TWO WEEKS later and subsequent builds being released has this VERY simple item not been either fixed or reversed? Honestly its such a nominal difference was it really worth breaking that mechanic entirely just in the offchance someone was making out like a bandit having their combo finisher proccing in their local combo field instead of if the spell happened to hit slightly farther away?

The fact this hasn’t been addressed and is a pretty large bug (completely non-functional change vs something with some periodic mechanic failure) is pretty disappointing and sad at this point.

I love this game and enjoy every class so far but going back to play my elementalist and finding this is still broken 2 weeks and subsequent patches later is disappointing.

Biggest problem with bugs/patches are that they aren’t daily? So many bugs aren’t fixed yet, but every day I start GW2 and im waiting for another patch but the gaps are huge.

I doubt that there aren’t fixes available so why aren’t they implemented daily. It would ofcourse be annoying to have a reboot every hour, but once a day wouldnt be that bad. The download time would be small and patch time, yet we get some improvements daily and get a feeling things get done.

Cause currently I feel like theres a load of problems considering events, dungeons, fractal d/c’s and quests that dont work and even skills as I read above, but it feels like they aren’t being fixed at all.

The testing will be done by the players when its released, and the reaction time should just be smaller, bugs get posted again, fix and patch etc etc.

Just takes way 2 long for the patches to come, and I just cannot believe it takes a week to address a single one of these bugs.

People have to wait so long they just stop waiting, and currently it feels pretty empty (server piken square) as if we barely get population. Its even bloody hard to get a dungeon group. Most bigger/harder events never get done or are stuck.

Pitty because you defo had an amazing game with GW2, but it looks like new content is more important than fixing important stuff first. And ofcourse the new content is amazing and you guys think about much more amazing stuff, but Id rather see things fixed first before more (perhaps also bugged) content gets in.

And I’m afraid many more players look at it this way. More patches and perhaps exact patchnotes on fixes would helkittenTTENload

miniL.7361:

I doubt that there aren’t fixes available so why aren’t they implemented daily. It would ofcourse be annoying to have a reboot every hour, but once a day wouldnt be that bad. The download time would be small and patch time, yet we get some improvements daily and get a feeling things get done.

People complain, to qualify remember during the first few weeks when there was basically a daily patch? I do, I also remember people complaining about 30-50 meg downloads everyday. There really isn’t an effective way to balance these things.