Guild Wars 2

The problem is people don’t know how to play the game. I know from personal experience that combo fields and finishers are still terra incognita for many players, even experienced ones.
This could actually be a really good way to finally force people to learn how to effectively play their classes instead of just spamming abilities as they pop up from cooldown.

My advice is, just do a dungeon run with a staff elementalist who knows what to do. You’ll ding that daily in five minutes.

Truly disappointing. I know how combo fields work, I spent over a half hour fighting with it on various characters, and I ended up having to switch to my ranger to try to get it done. I shouldn’t have to play a particular class because it’s so finicky that it wasn’t counting combos that should have been valid.

And it’s very annoying to have spent time fighting with a daily requirement not to get it finished; so I don’t think it’s out of turn to request the laurel. Some of us do work very hard to finish every daily we can.

It’s frankly bad planning to release new content with such a short window to try to achieve something. It wouldn’t have hurt anything to wait until dailies reset to make the first laurels available across the board, so that everyone had the ‘standard window’ to work on it, and for bugs to be identified and removed or disabled.

Gaudrath.6725:

The problem is people don’t know how to play the game. I know from personal experience that combo fields and finishers are still terra incognita for many players, even experienced ones.
This could actually be a really good way to finally force people to learn how to effectively play their classes instead of just spamming abilities as they pop up from cooldown.

My advice is, just do a dungeon run with a staff elementalist who knows what to do. You’ll ding that daily in five minutes.

the funny thing is that when me and my boyfriend were doing the achievement, another achievement that requires combo finishers was registering and the daily was not. Later the daily started registering. I personally think that it’s a little bit bugged.

Make sure that the combos you do are damaging ones as you have to make a killing blow with a combo. So combos that only add non-damaging conditions won’t work.

It could be bugged, or maybe it is too dependent on latency, it’s too early to tell. People still haven’t figured out the basic ones like dodging and healer, give it a few days and bugs, if any, will definitely show.

I see that Anet is removing this one from rotation for now. I didn’t get my dailies (& I play every day & I do understand combos) because no matter how me and my sweetheart tried it, we kept getting nothing most of the time until time ran out. I was bummed to say the least. I’ve looked forward to getting my dailies as I craft, explore, level up, do story or do dungeons with my sweetheart & my guild mates. Hopefully tomorrow will be better.

i guess they’re takingn this out for now. i’ve read from reddit that combos that actually deal dmg work best. for e.g. fire field plus projectile finisher.

regardless, i think it was a nice direction to help people understand and try out combos more. cause they can make ALL the difference in any given battle. hopeuflly they’ll be able to polish this daily off cause i think the combo system is pretty neat in this game.

Considering the flakiness of the system, I really wish they had not awarded laurels prior to 4 PM server time. I understand wanting to push that major patch before the daily reset, but surely they could have put a smaller patch in right after reset so we could all be on equal footing. I know it’s just one laurel, but it seems a little unfair that some were able to get it while others were prevented either because they had already completed their daily or because they ran into bugs with the new system.

ive seen people waiting not attacking until someone else has attacked just so they can finish it off to get the daily, its been the first daily i have failed (lvl 80 theif lvl 80 warrior) spent over 2 hours trying to get the combo kills off and when i did get the kill with a finisher it didnt register them, this daily chain has just caused chaos imo with even noob areas affected, with people just after finishing kills and doing nothing else but jumping in a nicking it when a couple of people have been working at getting it done. i felt robbed by failing the daily after devoting 2+ hours to just trying to get the combo kills off while everything else on the daily had been done already

Although this has worked in theory, in practise players failed to make it work.

I wonder what it will be replaced with?

I actually think it’s a shame this has been removed and hope that it is brought back working reliably.

Combo fields and finishers are a hugely understated and generally unknown part of the game that can give a team in any dungeon or pvp (even just PvE with a friend) a great advantage. I suppose, at least, if no one can figure out how to do it I’ll always be on the winning team.

I just think it’s a shame that ANet try and show us an untapped resource they have provided but is being missed by the majority of their player base (because it involves a tiny amount of engaging the brain), and everyone yells bloody murder because after all, we don’t want to know how to play well, we want to stand in one place and press a succession of buttons, we want to play alone… in an mmo, heaven forbid we make friends or play with existing friends.

I can think of one mmo in particular that would be perfect for those of you who find thinking and planning and playing with friends a little too beyond your scope of ability, perhaps you would find that more enjoyable. You can even get mods to tell you which buttons to press if you so wish. But I can promise you, if you ever have a problem with anything THEY do, they will certainly not try to cater to your needs as ANet does, they will give you a big “kitten off, take it or leave it”.

I for one look forward to ANet introducing me to more untapped treasures in this game, playing actively in combat, and exploring the full abilities of a competent team.

It’s a shame this one has currently been removed. My friend and I had great fun last night figuring out exactly what triggered a point for both of us, and once we had it sussed, it took five minutes. It made us examine our skills anew and come up with efficient ways of killing things that we knew about previously, but just took for granted.
This actively made us time our skills to conicide for best effect.

We achieved it by my Elementalist friend casting Ring Of Fire and me as a ranger simply auto-attacking through the field. It was maybe a little unreliable, but we had great fun doing it, and like I said, it took five minutes.

Any achievement that helps people play together and communicate more is fine by me guys

Mungrul.9358:

Any achievement that helps people play together and communicate more is fine by me guys

True, if you have a companion you can play with. But that won’t be the case for a lot of people.

From what I understand, it required you to make a kill with a combo. I see two problems there for those that don’t have a partner they can reliably play with.

1. I have a combo skill (a ring of fire, using my torch). I put it down, but it runs out before the foe gets killed. And it’s still on a recharge, so the foe gets killed without the combo attack. Who do you think will get the blame?
2. Again, I have a combo skill, but the stranger I’m playing with, hasn’t. I will hand him his daily, without getting anything in return for my daily (unless you can combo on your own… as I’ve not been online since the update went live, I’ve no idea how it worked exactly)

AmFah.5974:

ColinJohanson.2394:

The combo killer has been removed from the weekly rotation, clearly not working as intended.

will the ppl who could not finish their dailies because it was simply not workin get a

chance to get the rewards?

We need 1 free laurel due to yesterday daily

Aw, sucks that it was removed. Noticed that it pretty much almost never count until realizing that it only worked when you were actually standing inside the combo field. For some reason that was the only time when it worked, and nothing happened when you stood outside of it. As soon as we made that discovery it became very easy.

Huck.1405:

This whole new daily system was, IMHO, not well thought out.

Half the crap they come up with isn’t well thought out. That goes for all MMOs. Couldn’t they have spent some time fixing the trader by separating heavy, medium and light items instead of coming up with a counter making you heal an NPC? Next thing you know, you’ll give us horse racing….

This was super easy. We used the book that summons a flesh reaver in Queensdale swamp area, and let the NPC tank it. We stood a while back and put combo fields inbetween the mob and us (I’m a mesmer so in my case, I put domes on us and on the reaver) and spammed range. The reaver is a Veteran so lives just long enough to register good damage.

Indeed it is super easy… When it’s not buggued…

It’s been bugged aside, the Combo Killer achievement is a really poor idea for a Daily Progress award because it forces you to try and team up with someone which I think is a ridiculous idea in the first place…..if I want to run around by myself for the day and get the DP, I should be allowed to. Not only that, it forces you to kill things in a very specific manner which is completely ridiculous. Give me a general goal like “Kill 20 veterans” and allow me to play the game the way I want to, not “Kill 20 Veterans by using the following Key Combinations 1-1-1-2-3-1”. :p

harbinger.2698:

the Combo Killer achievement is a really poor idea for a Daily Progress award because it forces you to try and team up with someone which I think is a ridiculous idea in the first place…..

Yeah, really a ridiculous idea to play together in an MMO. What did they think.

I got this using Null Field and Feedback bubbles on enemies in Orr. As long as someone uses your field for the kill you get credit as well as them.

Colin, from what I observed it was actually working fine. From what I saw, if you were either part of the killing blow combo you got credit, as expected. I got all mine using ethereal initiators, verifying that you don’t have to do the finisher to get credit (which was fortunate!). There was no need to remove it… people simply need a moment to catch up on what’s happening. In a zerg it’s difficult to be in on the killing blow, so people were likely thinking they weren’t getting credit for something they actually shouldn’t have but thought they should.

It was simple. Be either the initiator or finisher in a killing blow and there you go. With a guild party of five people that actually thought about it it proved easy.

If for some reasons your contacts aren’t here to play, tell me why it’s a good idea to annoy some pickup (who may have his daily) and ask him “help for my daily, let’s do a combo session. You have nothing else to do right ?” -_-

Gaudrath.6725:

The problem is people don’t know how to play the game.

Yeah. Or maybe the problem is people can’t read, because Colin already said it was removed because it’s not working as intended.

PS: I found the amount of level 80 players that asked what a combo is disturbing too though.

I strongly hope for Combo Killer to come back soon as it was an epic social tool.
Also, I found it to be pretty easy if every party member know what he/she is doing, and it has been my very first new achievement, took just some minutes with guildies

Iruwen.3164:

PS: I found the amount of level 80 players that asked what a combo is disturbing too though.

Indeed, it’s a byproduct of how easy 99% of the game is to mash through.

Grevender.9235:

I strongly hope for Combo Killer to come back soon as it was an epic social tool.
Also, I found it to be pretty easy if every party member know what he/she is doing, and it has been my very first new achievement, took just some minutes with guildies

I agree, it was quite easy. Just be the initiator or finisher in a killing blow with a combo and you get credit. I got mine solely using initiators while the party used them for finishers.

To the people with superiority complex, kitten off !

1) The achievement wasn’t registering all combo finishers so please, cut it out playing pros, because you are not, you were lucky to have the right classes

2) There were, at some points, forced disconnects/outages that beside being annoying as kitten, ROLLED BACK the character for ~5-10 minutes.

Yes I got disconnected 2-3 times when I reached 80% and came back at 20%. Yes I’m kitten about it and If I could I would’ve strangled the dev that was doing this achievement.
Not to mention that the update came SUPER late for the european servers and we had like 2 hours to complete it. Yes the other tasks were extremely easy, and I already had the events done, so no time waste there, the bugged light fields and leap/whirl finishers forced me to fight mobs of ALL LEVELS (yes I actually ran though the whole Tyria) to find the right mobs so I could

1) One shot them with finisher
2) Strong enough mobs to cast few combos with my guildmates

Yes eventually we found out that mesmer have 90% chance of success with mirror blade and whatnot, and me and my girlfriend managed to finish it on one of our accounts, but then I had 2-3 minutes to do 80% because of the rollbacks I had all night.

Thank you, for the great update!

P.S: And seriously who doesn’t know what combo is in this game after it’s been out for around 6 months should really rethink their playstyle. The least most toons have self combo initiation and finishers, especially guardians with hammer/greatsword

Tortitudo Probo.2598:

Did it with a mesmer buddy who used null field and another one (forgot the name), I used kill shot. Just make sure the bullet passes through the barrier. No need to kill the mob with it, if you damage it and finish it off normally it also registers. GL!

That may have worked for you but it is for sure not working for everyone.

I registered MANY combos in a team of five in Order, and it took me about an hour to get “ten”. I’m guessing I did at least one hundred combo finishers (damaging ones) in that time. Something is bugged, maybe not for everyone but for some of us.

I think this is a good example why a test server would be handy. I can’t imagine this getting through ~1000 people in a test server.

I’d be happy for Combo Killer to come back. My frustration with this particular daily comes not from having to perform combos or work with other players to do so, but with the games inability to recognise when we’d achieved it.

I was stuck on 4/10 (which hopefully indicates that I at least understood what was required) and still performing legitimate combo kills in the same manner without receiving credit for it. More frustatingly, my team mates appeared to be registering progress on the daily without apparently doing anything, while being part of the same zerg.

That they have taken this daily out of circulation (as it wasn’t working “as intended”) suggests to me that there was a problem with the mechanics rather than the skill of the player base (in most cases).

Looking forward to more daily action and hopefully obtaining my first Laurel later today!

ColinJohanson.2394:

The combo killer has been removed from the weekly rotation, clearly not working as intended.

Excellent – thank you for removing it. I really hope it stays removed at least until the “pick your own daily” mechanism makes it into the game at a later date. For players who prefer the daily being a solo activity, the forced ally thing was not cool. Not that playing with others is a bad thing or even all that hard – it’s just not cool to take away player flexibility and the ability to play as we want.

Don’t bother Raven, pros fail to realize that this daily was buggued and go “oh it’s easy you noob can’t combo, I dit it in 5min, etc, etc…” Just because they had luck.

Ravenmoon.5318:

To the people with superiority complex, kitten off !

I am just an average Joe, really.

1) The achievement wasn’t registering all combo finishers so please, cut it out playing pros, because you are not, you were lucky to have the right classes

the achievement was working perfectly, Colin is just too much of a good guy to tell you the truth and said “it wasn’t working as intended” (but he meant that probably while facepalming). A guildie of mine logged Warrior, Guardian and even Ranger and he was advancing smoothly. There is no “right class”.

2) There were, at some points, forced disconnects/outages that beside being annoying as kitten, ROLLED BACK the character for ~5-10 minutes.

so what? we’ve been rolled back five times, and did that combo thing again for each of the toons in the party. Still everything went pretty well… and fast.

Not to mention that the update came SUPER late for the european servers and we had like 2 hours to complete it.

I am in Europe too.

2) Strong enough mobs to cast few combos with my guildmates

this was exactly what had to be done to begin with…

And I did exactly that and it didn’t count my combos up.

Yet, I’m up to show you, in 1on1 what types of combo finishers I make, then you could maybe talk about playskill

I was causing grey hearts to go up all over the place on several different toons and many different mobs and rarely got credit. I eventually finished it. But it was very hit and miss. So those elitists telling everyone to l2p, kitten off. It was bugged.

I’d like to see a slight modification of the combo skills daily (once Anet gets it unbugged and running again).

As I understand it the major idea behind adding that part of the daily was to teach people to use combos. As it was last night I believe the combo had to play a part in the killing blow or at least be something that caused significant damage. But that leaves out several combo effects. Especially the healing or regen effects of some combos. Different shield effects and vulnerability didn’t seem to get credit either. It also made it dependent in what did the killing blow.

How about make it “Interact with a combo field or create a combo field that someone else interacts with”. So basically do something that creates a grey heart=get credit. So it doesn’t matter exactly when or what effect the combo created. I imagine it’d be easier to program on Anet’s end and easier to track on our end.

Grey heart=combo=credit

Or, simply put: “Create X combos”.

Grevender.9235:

Ravenmoon.5318:

To the people with superiority complex, kitten off !

I am just an average Joe, really.

1) The achievement wasn’t registering all combo finishers so please, cut it out playing pros, because you are not, you were lucky to have the right classes

the achievement was working perfectly, Colin is just too much of a good guy to tell you the truth and said “it wasn’t working as intended” (but he meant that probably while facepalming). A guildie of mine logged Warrior, Guardian and even Ranger and he was advancing smoothly. There is no “right class”.

2) There were, at some points, forced disconnects/outages that beside being annoying as kitten, ROLLED BACK the character for ~5-10 minutes.

so what? we’ve been rolled back five times, and did that combo thing again for each of the toons in the party. Still everything went pretty well… and fast.

Not to mention that the update came SUPER late for the european servers and we had like 2 hours to complete it.

I am in Europe too.

2) Strong enough mobs to cast few combos with my guildmates

this was exactly what had to be done to begin with…

I was on a TS server with ten or more guildies. We were all playing together and cleared four temples in Orr. In that time only about three of us finished it. It only requires ten. There is absolutely no way it should have taken four temples to get ten combo kills. It was clearly bugged. Maybe not for you, but just because it worked for you doesn’t mean it was working as intended. We even fought enemies specifically to combo kill them and it would only randomly count.

Maybe there are some bugs… give them time.

Took me and a friend 5 mins to get combo killer.

ColinJohanson.2394:

The combo killer has been removed from the weekly rotation, clearly not working as intended.

Now can you understand why we question your bug/local tests. Did someone test this? Or was it released kitten? No need to answer, this is more of a statement…. you can understand why we question Anet and get annoyed with bugs, especially ones that stick around for 5 months.

Ravenmoon.5318:

Not to mention that the update came SUPER late for the european servers and we had like 2 hours to complete it.

GMT here also, 9:30-10pm we started with these combo kills and had 2 hours to finish it before daily reset….. yes.

US time was whatever (lets say 3pm) so they had till 5pm to finish. You don’t understand timezones…. they had the same amount of time to finish the daily as everyone else.

Well a lot of us are frustrated. Even more so because it seemed to me more like “beat the clock” challenge rather than “daily”. Especially with the outages that for some reason rolled me back.
I take it they save user data to the database every 5-10 minutes or so, how about you save data when someone is forcefully disconnected too ? For the first time since I play this game (since headstart) I feel so frustrated :|

I love the idea of a combo killer – with my ele it would be a ton of fun and I would have a great excuse to help others. I had no problem getting the combo achievement Teamwork Gets it Done previously and it was a ton of fun to work on. But for some reason, this one was very buggy. I got 3 of 10 when I should have gotten much more than that. Even when it said great combination I wasn’t getting credit for it.

I was working with a party of four – ranger, assassin, and guardian with my fire ele. We would lay down all kinds of different fields – poison, lava font, and use an assassin finisher skill to no effect. Even against high level monsters. And when we did get it, it seemed very random. One of us would get it but not the other three.

I realize the combo is removed – I just hope it’s temporary. I think it could bring about cohesion and bring people together really well. My guild is already pretty decent at that but working toward a common goal is a lot of fun. Hope you work out the kinks and find a way to include it again!

Turial.1293:

US time was whatever (lets say 3pm) so they had till 5pm to finish. You don’t understand timezones…. they had the same amount of time to finish the daily as everyone else.

I’m not sure US dailies restart at 5pm their time. Seems illogical

Ravenmoon.5318:

Turial.1293:

US time was whatever (lets say 3pm) so they had till 5pm to finish. You don’t understand timezones…. they had the same amount of time to finish the daily as everyone else.

I’m not sure US dailies restart at 5pm their time. Seems illogical

Dailies reset at 00:00 GMT, So those living in the same time zone as the server have their dailies reset at 4:00 PM PST (which is GMT – 8:00)

Hakkero.7120:

Ravenmoon.5318:

Turial.1293:

US time was whatever (lets say 3pm) so they had till 5pm to finish. You don’t understand timezones…. they had the same amount of time to finish the daily as everyone else.

I’m not sure US dailies restart at 5pm their time. Seems illogical

Dailies reset at 00:00 GMT, So those living in the same time zone as the server have their dailies reset at 4:00 PM PST (which is GMT – 8:00)

I thought that’s just for the European datacenter. The NA one having its own time settings o.O

PS: Either way the update should’ve been held back if they were doing work on it last night and release it a lot earlier today. This way they could’ve catch the bug a lot earlier and disable it on time, without screwing players. Now I’m 1 day behind half of my server’s population because I wasn’t lucky enough to tackle this achievement. And excuse me if I’m wrong but, I see no other way of farming ascended amulets, other than obtaining through laurels. For reference, I had both ascended rings few days after fractals were added to the game, so yeah, I’m willing to grind for the best stat, for now >.> although screwing me up big time, is bad

Uhm, there are currently only 5 achievements in the list. So if you cannot do one, you’re not going to get the daily done.

I got mine done i believe Ranger combos worked fine, didn’t even pay attention was doing map completions in orr, and daily popped.

Seems fine on Rangers.

Honestly, what is with all of the complaining? I got mine done within 5 minutes of doing an Orr event as a thief.

yeah why the complaining ? I tried the finisher several times for last hit, at the beginning, at the middle. It didn’t count. A bug ? What bug ? Arenanet don’t do games with bug. No no no.

I also lost out on my first daily Laurel because of this. My friend and I where doing combos right down to the last second, with more than half of them not giving us credit. I was at 90% and cussed for quite some time as we had clearly met the requirements well before the timer ran out.

The daily was not working as intended because some combos although performed correctly didn’t not consistently trigger the daily count. Not sure if we’ll be compensated though. But it sucks trying almost every weapon as a guard, and getting 1 credit randomly every 10 minutes.

Too bad, eventhough it was a bit buggy, i got it from fighting ghosts with a pug for a little while, and actually made a friend. Considering the fact that every profession is so self-sufficient there seems to be a lack of communication and teamwork in dungeons and stuff because it isn’t rly necessary anymore while this actually promoted 2 people working together.

tigirius.9014:

Crafting is fine even tho there’s nothing to craft at this point for most of us at 400 in our skills so asking us to craft all over again is a little weird and probably affects the sale of items, most people who are leveling crafting won’t be getting the items they can’t use to increase their points, they’ll be looking for raw materials so adding this is weird on two fronts. Lower profit for those who sell, no use for those of us maxed already as there’s nothing new to make really (especially nothing end game with the tight constriction you have on the loot that drops including the double RNG on T6 mats), and it requires people who don’t craft to actually do something they don’t want to do. Now I know it’s not that big of a deal to most of us who do craft, but think about it, we didn’t like it when they wanted to force us into dungeons or WvW for our dailies. It’s the same exact thing, lack of personal choice to spend our time for a reward system that’s flawed.

Even though you have some valid points, nobody is in fact forcing you to get the daily and monthly achievements. It is you who wants these things, and I personally think it’s a good thing for there being things like this making you do things you don’t regularly do as it makes you actually hunt them down instead of just getting them automatically by doing your regular farms and not even trying to get them. And besides all of that, there’s always going to be some things people like and some people don’t like e.g. I don’t like doing fractals yet because of the reason I explained above, I actually gone to enjoy doing the monthly achievement as it’s only 2 levels durign an entire month Hope this will give you a different view on these new changes and perhaps you’ll grow to appreciate them

It was buggy but we were able to get it to trigger sometimes. Most often it worked when a field was laid down and others auto-attacked through it. Most times it didn’t work when we tried to actually use a finisher in the field. As long as words pop up (poison, burning, etc.) while auto-attacking we got credit.