Guild Wars 2

Hey everyone – As a reminder if you get stuck in a match or get an error when queuing try completely logging out of the game for at least 10 mins.

I’m happy to clear people manually but the above may be quicker for you in case I haven’t yet seen your post.

Thanks!
Ray

@Jaberwocka – you were indeed stuck. I’ve cleared you and the three other team members who were stuck with you.

For those seeking a synopsis of Seasons 1 and 2, you will find such a resource on the Guild Wars 2 Wiki, on this link: http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Living_World

In addition, there are many other similar resources prepared by our fansites and other game participants.

Valento.9852:

If it’s too hard to sync in-game chat with the API, I would still be very happy to at least send “delayed messages” with an internal time restriction (one message every 1min. or something).

The main issue is receiving messages back out in a timely manner. Our backend isn’t designed to do anything but request-reply (and doesn’t have any persistence so long-polling will drop messages). It requires some rearchitecting to get working.

This is marvelous! I really understand how you guys had a “ummm?” moment of concern — our names are important to us, for sure. I am so glad (and grateful) that Susan could work her magic to get your names aligned again.

Pompeia, great idea about the PM. Some of us take part in a lot of threads, so having that little personal nudge about this one is very helpful.

See y’all in HoT! Four days and counting…

DBZVelena.5186:

Are there WvW guild missions that can possibly be completed in Edge of the mists at all?

Just double checked w/ the team on this – you cannot do these while in EoTM.

You can however have people in different worlds running missions simultaneously for the guild that all contribute. They simply only need to have 3 guild members participating in the specific event for it to count towards the mission – regardless of which world.

Misguided.5139:

One point of clarification: can the mission preference be set from the Guild Initiative or do you have to have a hall first?

This could have an impact on when we decide to do a hall capture. Though I guess you need favor first in order to do that…

You’ll set the preference in the guild mission panel itself – anyone with the appropriate permissions can do this from anywhere in the world.

Hello everyone,

I just wanted to pop on here and clarify something very specific, and very important, about the “Heart of Thorns” storyline. The first chapter titled “Prologue: Rally to Maguuma”, which some of you have played a beta version of in our previous BWE releases, is set in a public multi-player tutorial style map, very similar to the way that new players start in a multi-player tutorial map. It is NOT a private story instance.
As such, the rules for story steps in public maps apply, namely that even if you are in a party with your friends together in this map, EACH party member must complete the story step individually in order to receive credit toward unlocking the second chapter “Torn from the Sky”.

In short: if you want to party up to get into the “Heart of Thorns” storyline and enter the first story instance “Torn from the Sky” together, PLEASE make sure all party members have completed the “Prologue: Rally to Maguuma” story chapter first.

The game WILL allow you to enter the “Torn from the Sky” instance even if you have not completed the prologue step, but you will NOT earn progress on “Torn from the Sky” until you’ve completed that step, which may result in party members needing to re-do the prologue and “Torn from the Sky” a second time to get full credit.

We apologize for any confusion or inconvenience this might cause, but hopefully if you all think of the starting prologue experience in terms of the starting tutorial maps, it will be clear.

Thanks for reading, and I look forward to seeing you all playing through the “Heart of Thorns” storyline and giving us your feedback here. See you in game soon!

hoewhoew.4619:

How will the rewards for guild missions work, for let’s say PvP and WvW missions? As to my understanding a PvP team excists of 5 players and quite a lot of guilds have members from different servers.

Can people from multiple servers contribute to one WvW mission and will they all get a reward, even if it gets completed on one server first? And will all players gain rewards for the PvP missions, even if they are spread out over multiple teams?

Correct yes – multiple teams can contribute simultaneously to one mission for PvP – a guild team requires 3 or more players from the team be actively playing to use the team name, and a guild can have multiple teams playing simultaneously.

For WvW multiple groups of players can contribute simultaneously for WvW as well yes – the requirement is three or more players from the guild must be there participating at an event for it to count towards the mission.

MatHack.4316:

Is it possible that you reroll this until you have a PvE, PvP & WvW mission (from what I understood there were three slots initially) considering we have no choice but to have a mix the first week. With only PvP & WvW missions I sorta feel like PvE guilds are getting the short end of the stick.

That was my question when I heard this too! Sadly no, the concept of re-rolling these while seemingly a simple idea – is apparently a mess code wise and would take a really long time to sort out. On the good news side – guild missions reset 3 days after the launch of HoT, so at most you’re waiting 3 days if you’re not interested in doing the launch day missions. Just make sure to set your guilds preferences in those first 3 days!

MatHack.4316:

Is it safe to do the current (PvE) guild missions before the launch, considering you have PvP & WvW rolled only atm? Will doing guild missions before the launch lock the ones that are available after the release?

It’s totally safe to do your guild missions before launch yes. The new guild mission system will activate on launch and offer a brand new set of missions that are not impacted by the ones you had before.

Fade.1743:

The Fractal Backpiece was pretty much my main goal for the start of the expansion. Knowing which components I can work towards and which ones I can’t at the start would be really helpful in trying to divide my time amongst all the content.

You’ll be able to go through all the various steps (tiers 1-2-3) to build your new precursor backpack from day one w/ HoT, that’ll keep you busy for quite some time. The pieces to take your precursor to a legendary hopefully shouldn’t arrive too much further off than when you’re actually able to finish your precursor anyway.

Hey folks,

Wanted to give you a quick heads up on a handful of notes relevant to Heart of Thorns launch in a few days:

Guild Missions: Week 1

With the new guild mission system (https://www.guildwars2.com/en/news/guild-mission-changes-and-improvements/), missions each week are randomly generated. There is a toggle you can use to allow your guild to select between PvE, PvP, WvW guild missions, or a mix of all three for more diverse guilds. When you make a change to the toggle, it’ll go into effect during the next week of missions. We’ve defaulted all guilds to the mix of all three mission options for week one, which means every guild will have the mix of missions option selected for week one.

The random roll for this week already happened and we’re seeing on our internal servers that week ones missions rolled a mix of PvP and WvW missions for the first three mission slots that guilds have unlocked once you’re able to access the expansion (as you unlock deeper into your guild hall, you’ll be able to unlock more mission slots). We wanted to make sure everyone knew this information ahead of time.

Combat Visibility

One change you’ll notice when the expansion goes live – a number of FX for skills have changed. We’ve tried to cut back some of the visual noise of some of the “noisiest” skills to make it easier to see what’s going on in combat with multiple players/mobs on screen. We’ve also made some skill FX end much faster to align with the length their actual combat effect happens in the world – previously some FX lingered much longer than the actual outcome of the skills combat interaction would occur. This is also to help make it easier to see what’s going on in combat.

Fractal Dungeon Leaderboards

Back when we announced all the updates to Fractals for Heart of Thorns – the announce blog also discussed more information coming before HoT about leaderboards for Fractals. Our team of folks working on Fractal dungeons kept iterating on this concept and ultimately we have decided to make it something more involved (re: exciting) than our original plans which will extend our development a bit more. This also means you’ll be able to earn the new fractal backpack precursor, but a few of the components for the new legendary will come with this expanded future fractals feature.

As always, we’ll discuss features once they’re far enough along to share development details on; our Fractal Dungeon team will be back with more updates about this and other plans for Fractal Dungeons in the future: when it’s ready™.

Engineer Profession Icon

We’ve had some issues over the years with folks being able to tell the difference between the Engineer and Elementalist profession icons, in particular when they are shrunk down to smaller sizes for party UI. This became even more apparent when we began testing our updated large squad UI. As a result, we’re going to be changing the engineer icon to better differentiate between the two. We’ve also done a bit of re-work to better differentiate the icons between Scrapper, Tempest, Engineer and Elementalist.

Alright, it looks like there are quite a few questions. Some of them have been answered already or are duplicates, but I’ll otherwise try to address ones that I have answers for.

So teleport skills which needed a target (like guard sword 2, steal, infiltrator signet, infiltrator strike) can be used currently even if the target is not in line of sight – it will teleport you to this target (which doesnt need to be in los). Will I be able to use those skills on locked targets without having them in the crosshair? Or how will it work?

Interesting question. If you have a target locked, it is considered a valid possible hover target (and thus is eligible for action camera targeting) even without line of sight. I didn’t actually know this until today, but you asked and I had to find out. Note that you will still need to aim mostly at the target, as with any targeting done under action camera.

So with auto targeting on the system is more generous in aiming. but what happens if there are for example 5 mobs really close together and all the “auto targeting hitboxes” are on top of each other, can you nevertheless get your specific target (out of those 5). Do you need to preemptive lock your target?

You might want to if you want to be certain what you’re firing at. One thing to know is that when you use a skill on a target, it will become your “skill target” and action camera will give it greater weighting than other targets (similar to locking the target but less permanent). However, if this isn’t enough of a guarantee for you, you’ll want to lock targets.

My main question is: Is it possible to rebind the actual number keys to other skill slots, including one. In other word, if I wanted to use 1, 2, 3 for my utilities, would that interfere with the left-click auto-attack?

It will not interfere. Left click explicitly fires skill 1 and is not reliant on the usual keybinding for skill 1 (i.e. the number 1 key).

Q: Right-clicking selects a target. Would right-clicking also deselect the current target? Sometimes I would be in combat and like to deselect targets, I could press escape but that stops other actions before actually de-selecting targets, and sometimes de-selecting is a top priority for me.
Q: Right-clicking makes the enemies hit-bot more generous. Would right-clicking another target while in this hit-box select that target instead?

Right click will lock the target if there is one under your crosshair and will clear your target if there is nothing under your crosshair. Also, regarding the second question, when deciding whether or not there is something under your crosshair for the purpose of locking/clearing a target, the extra selection weight that you get from having a locked target is ignored. I found that it was just too hard to clear or switch locked targets without this exception.

One question, does channeled skill such as Ranger Lb#2 rapid fire continue tracking stealthed enemies using the new camera?

Once the skill starts firing at a target, it will do whatever it does normally; whether or not action camera kicked it off isn’t relevant. With skill retargeting you can switch targets mid-skill, but the skill still acts as it normally would when firing at a target.

Will snap targetting follow through stealth in any situation? Such as putting a target on a profession that is likely to use stealth a lot?

No, when a target stealths your client no longer knows about their location. Accordingly there is no way it could know where to place the ground target marker.

I have a question regarding snap ground targetting and targets that are above you. For example, if I am aiming at enemies standing on their walls in a tower / keep in action camera with snap ground targetting on, will my AOE get cast on them? Or will it use the obstructed LOS rule you mentioned that is related to structures to place the AOE where the LOS failed?

Assuming the ground-targeted skill in question requires LoS in the first place, yes, it will be placed where LoS fails.

Is it possible to get a keybind for toggling autotargeting on and off? It will be especially useful when switching between classes that have a lot of movement skills (and attack without a target), and those that require a target for most skills; or even when doing different things on a single class.

The complexity of this depends on what the keybind will do. If it acts to simply toggle the state of the option for autotargeting (i.e. the state of the checkbox in the options menu), it would legitimately be pretty simple; however, I don’t believe we have precedent for a keybind like that, so it might be an argument waiting to happen. If it instead acts as an override for the usual option, all places in code that reference the state of the autotargeting option would need to be updated to also check for this toggle state, and we would need to be careful about when the override state is preserved vs cleared, etc. It is an on the table™ sort of thing but I can’t give any guarantees.

Will it be possible to customize the sensitivity of the hitbox of the crosshair to prevent something like when you struggle between the two deers?

If it’s the part of the stream I’m thinking of, I was actually trying to demonstrate how action camera prioritizes the target under your crosshair even if you’ve got a locked target behind you. However, the deer decided he didn’t want to cooperate and kept running in front of me, so I had to take drastic measures. It may be that you’re referring to another thing that happened though, where there was a lootable dead body of a deer in front of a living deer which I actually wanted to target, but the hover selection kept prioritizing the dead body. This was actually a bug that I’d just never noticed before then, because I usually just loot stuff without really thinking about it. I fixed it today on my development machine, though the fix will probably have to go in after launch given how close we are. It’s probably a pretty rare bug in practice anyway; people aren’t going to leave an unlooted body just sitting around.

To actually answer your question, making this sort of thing customizable isn’t planned unless there turns out to be a very wide variance in player preferences. Tweaking the current values is however always an option should it prove to be necessary.

What happens when you use snap ground targeting on a fish while standing on land.

Snap ground targeting attempts to find a point on the ground underneath the target, so it should find a spot on the sea floor, so long as that is within skill range.

What skills does it (skill retargeting) affect beside Rapid Fire? Are skills like ranger warhorn 4 affected?

It’s largely up to how the skill is implemented. You can usually switch targets before the first attack of the skill, and most multi-attack skills will let you switch targets between attacks. I hadn’t tried it before you asked, but ranger warhorn 4 appears to be an exception and doesn’t let you switch, at least not once the birdemic starts. I only tried it a couple of times so don’t take that as hard fact, though.

How will action targeting work along side the use of the “F” Key? Will it kick you out of action targeting allowing the use of the mouse to make selections as in dialogs with npc’s and then back into action targeting once one closes the dialog box?

If you aren’t using autolooting, meaning a little dialog will pop up whenever you loot something, action camera will automatically shut off when the dialog appears and automatically turn back on once the dialog is closed. This is the expected behavior for most dialogs.

Will action camera pip work with UI off?

As the crosshair is itself part of the UI system that gets shut off, no it will not.

Does the aoe-snap to target work on world boss targets as well?

It does.

If I’m auto-attacking the target (with 1 rather than LMB), I assume that the S key will backpedal rather than turn and run at full speed as it would if no skill is being cast. To disengage, do I have to hit esc to stop auto-attacking or can I turn the camera away and run forward key as per the traditional camera system?

Your assumption is correct, and if you turn and run the other direction the behavior should be the same as with the normal camera mode.

This should now be resolved and you can recapture the names that you reserved during the last beta weekend.

You had me with “Stalking the Canyons.” I mean, as a ranger, that’s just perfection!

<3 !! I love the idea of it and the execution. Well done, Unfathomed!

Masteravatar.1509:

My suggestion is to advise the Community that the reset will go back to Fridays within an approximate time frame as Johns post can be misread as indefinate with no timeframe.

I honestly don’t know if it’s possible to set that sort of timeframe today, for the reasons John stated, but thank you for the suggestion.

Lord Kuru.3685:

This cycle isn’t going to stop until something is done. The easiest is communication. Why not do something about that so everyone can move forward?

I believe we’re trying very hard to do that.

Masteravatar.1509:

• FYI I have not seen a Dev mention OCX/SEA customers in these 17 pages of posts.

The truth is, there isn’t an intentional or even unintentional disregarding of your area of the world. There are two data centers, and that’s how the reset is being structured, as it always has been. We value and respect players from around the world, and would never disregard their input.

At this time, we’re not currently asking for a vote. If we want a vote in the future, we’ll definitely let everyone know. Hey, it could happen, but it isn’t going on right now. (Just to be clear because some are not sure if we’re involved in one.)

I think I said it pretty clearly, but due to repeated questions, I’ll say it again: The reset change initially was set for Saturday evening. There were an initial spate of comments along the lines of “We don’t like Saturday evening, so make it Saturday morning,” and the devs tried to accommodate those requests. Then, as it became clear that the majority of those expressing an opinion in this thread made it clear — between the two currently available options — that Saturday evening was preferable, that’s what the devs went with.

This isn’t a “take your choice from a multitude of options” for reasons that were made abundantly clear in the dev posts in this thread. At the present time, in order to properly manage the game (the whole game, not any single element), in order to properly focus on launch of the expansion pack, and in order to take into account other reasonable considerations, WvW reset will take place on Saturdays. It will take place on Saturday evening to accommodate the requests of the majority of those expressing an opinion here in this thread.

Diku.2546:

Offer solutions folks…or the solutions get drowned out in an ocean of argument.

Yes. This.

Also, please express your thoughts as concisely as possible so that the reading of them — and you know they are being read — is as productive as possible. By that I don’t mean to discount your passion or refute your passion. But if you write your thoughts as briefly as possible, that ensures that the team has the time — in what is an incredibly busy time for our company — to read all your thoughts in an efficient and meaningful way. Thanks for that.

I want to address something I’ve seen creep into this discussion from a few forum members. The original plan (call it Plan A, Saturday evening) was adjusted due to what seemed to be preponderant base of opinion from players. It was temporarily thought that going to a Saturday morning reset, Plan B, would be better, based on the first set of comments in this thread. But when it became clear that no, Plan B was actually not as good for players as a whole, the team then went back to Plan A. At absolutely no time did someone come up with a plot to manipulate you. At no time did someone say something in an insincere way , as in “let’s present Plan B to make Plan A appear better.” Both plans were an honest attempt to balance player desires with developer realities. The Saturday reset is needed, as John explained, and of the two options, based on your feedback, the evening reset is the best for the majority of players. That’s where we are right now, and you can be sure that there was no conspiracy involved in the outcome.

It doesn’t look like your account is blocked.

Gatharin.2674:

It seems clear at this point that moving reset to Saturday is non-negotiable for the time being. While this may upset many people, I think this is one of those times where we need to cut Anet some slack. They are pushing out their first expansion and want as many developers to be available as possible during the weeks post-launch to fix the inevitable series of bugs and exploits that come with any new content.

Is it a major inconvenience to some, yes. Is this the end of WvW, absolutely not. The sky is not falling people; the game will still run all seven days, whether you give up on some of them as “karma train days” or not. And as was stated, it may only be temporary.

Also, to those stating that this is a terrible change because of even more bloated queues, you do realize you are making a case FOR Anet to do this right? The idea of readjusting the server population caps was to spread people out and long queues would do just that.

Thanks for these insights. I believe you’re looking at things logically, and I appreciate that.

Jayne.9251:

Someone please send Gaile a big bottle of wine? This doesn’t appear to be a one glass day.

I’m ok, Jayne. But thanks for thinking of that — very thoughtful!

wolvz — I understand, and thanks for sharing your thoughts.

Jerry — could you please read John’s most recent post (or read it through again)? (It’s probably on this very page.) I think it might give you some valuable info.

Simzani.4318:

I suggest that arenanet staff take a good look at their changes before hitting “implement” too.

Which they provably have done. For goodness sake! The need for the change has been explained by John, and the team considered suggestions in this very thread in making a possible alternation in plans (from evening to morning) but, based, again, on feedback, they’ve gone with what data supports, and with their initial plan. I think that’s a good thing.

Chaba.5410:

Constructive feedback: have more resets so more people can experience reset rush. Also have reset on Fridays, give Anet employees Fridays off and have that extra work day on Sunday. I think those suggestions adequately line up with Anet’s statements.

Thanks for offering a constructive suggestion. But wouldn’t that sort of tilt things, to have multiple resets? I’m not an expert on competitive play, and I’d leave and assessment for the people who are more knowledgeable. But it seems to me there’s a reason for the resets not happening on a more frequent basis.

How do others see this suggestion? (Remember, I have no influence on this, I’m just genuinely curious!)

Guys,

I’m stepping in here to suggest that you take a good look at your comments before hitting “Post Reply.” Express your thoughts, of course! (Well, unless like a few people here ~gives a beady eye~ you’re doing so again and again!)

If you feel inclined to post, having seen tonight’s status update, please do so in a constructive and non-inflammatory way. No need to use insulting language, rude commentary, name calling, or any of the other “contributions” that actually contribute nothing at all to a thoughtful conversation.

Thanks.

Thanks for the report. Fixed in the HoT release.

Hello All,

Launching a game is an enormous undertaking and our teams need time to address any issues that come up. Therefore after launch we must move WvW reset to Saturday. We will keep resets on Saturday to address issues and once we are in the clear we will evaluate the best time for WvW reset both for us as a company as well as for our players.

Since it is clear that we cannot pick a time that will work for everyone, we will be maintaining our original plan of shifting reset by 24 hours, to Saturday evening. That time was based on data for when prime time occurs in each region.

Thank you,
John

Xbon.9086:

Rising Dusk.2408:

Non-commander raiding squads are available for all players to set up raids for free. You’ll have access to all necessary functionality without buying a tag.

Not all functions though.

This is correct. The only functionality you will have is the ability to form a squad and move yourself between subgroups. All other functionality (Ready Check, Broadcast, making private squads, etc. etc) will be restricted to Commanders with tags.

Entries will be accepted on these official forums, and promoted (and winners announced) through Twitters. (Winners will also be PMd the week after Halloween.)

Enter here.
One screenshot per forum member, please.
Prizes will be distributed by November 10th.

So post in the linked thread and let’s see your best work!

A few forum members provided some feedback on the original suggestion and I wanted to post to say that I amended the plans and here’s what we’ll be doing: We’ll collect Halloween screenshots (described above) here in the Community Creations forum and award prizes on a random basis across all languages.

We can accept just one screenshot per forum account, and winners will be contacted by November 10th.

Let us see your best shot!

Nice initiative. Will definitely be important for people to get up to speed if they intend to climb the ranks in PvP Leagues!

Hi all,

Academy Gaming will be helping you pass the time before Heart of Thorns a bit more quickly next week by hosting a Stronghold Tournament on Monday, October 19th, for both North America and Europe.

Per the usual, we will be awarding 2,000 gems to members of the first place team, with 800 gems going to each member of the second place team. In celebration of the upcoming Heart of Thorns launch, we’ll be giving a llama out to every member of every team that participates, regardless of placement.

Here’s a few things you should know:

• Sign-ups will be hosted at http://battlefy.com/academy-gaming for both NA and EU.
• The tournament begins at 10:30am Pacific (19:30 CEST) for EU, and 5:30pm Pacific for NA.
• The first 16 teams to check-in 60 minutes prior to the tournament will secure a spot, not necessarily the first 16 to sign-up.

The livestream will begin approximately 45-60 minutes after the tournament begins at http://www.twitch.tv/guildwars2. Jebro and Brunners will be hosting the EU event, with Storm and Heurix hosting NA.

GLHF!

+1. Pls.

I’ve cleared all of you that were stuck. Please remember that if you are stuck in a pvp match you can clear yourself by logging completely out of the game for 10 mins.

I’ve cleared a few more people that were stuck. Rasfar.6921, Genettik.7102 and Dark Blade.2894 you should be ok. If this isn’t the case please let me know.

Looks like the other thread got moved over to the HoT forum.

Josh Davis.6015:

As mentioned on today’s GuildChat, we will indeed be adding a slew of new stat combos, runes, and sigils to sPvP with the launch of Heart of Thorns. A small example of what we’ll be adding are trapper runes and sinister stats, but there’s plenty more for you to discover on October 23.

As a note (and to address concerns), we won’t be adding dire stats or perplexity runes to sPvP. We’re vetting and discussing each and every rune/sigil/stat combo as a group before adding them in, with the main goal being improving build diversity.

I’ll also mention that we’re going to be changing the 6/6 bonus on Vampirism. After HoT launch it will no longer proc Mist Form at 25% hp, but will instead cast an AoE lifesteal to up to 5 nearby targets. This will reduce the binary defensive nature of the rune and bring it more inline with similar sets.

There’s going to be a lot of change with the launch next week, and we’re going to be watching balance very closely in all game modes. We will be working to address any emergent gameplay we’re not comfortable with as quickly as possible.

-Grouch

PS, thank you Roy and Izzy for getting these changes in.

Due to a design discussion that arose yesterday the recharge on gyros are going back to starting on the death of the gyro.

To help with the recharge going back to the gyro death the recharge themselves are being dramatically reduced. Below is a before and after to help clarify what is happening.

On Cast Medic Gyro CD: 35s
On Cast Medic Gyro Duration: 14s
CD at full duration: 21s
New Medic Gyro CD on Death: 20s

On Cast Purge/Bulwark CD: 35s
On Cast Duration: 15s
CD at full duration: 20s
New Gyro CD on Death: 20s

On Cast Sneak Gyro CD: 45 seconds
On Cast Duration: 30s
CD at full duration: 15s
New Sneak Gyro CD: 20s

This amounts to an overall buff to gyro recharge as the net recharge time is reduced on all gyros except sneak gyro, which is effectively a buff if the sneak gyro would have been destroyed anytime before the final five seconds of its duration.

Blast Gyro’s toolbelt skill, Bypass Coating, is going to be a stunbreak.

Hmm, sounds like the backend server crashed and/or was restarted. The last flipped data is only tracked in-memory; I may need to serialize that out to disk.

(EDIT: Wasn’t a crash/restart. Looking deeper).

shadow.6174:

Long story short: they are very aware about the issue and are also annoyed by it, but they haven’t been able to fix it or change it because they used a third party software that’s no longer supported, and no one there was able or had chances to learn how stuff works in order to be able to fix it.

This is correct. It would take substantial time to fix and it’s not a priority for the company right now.

Sorry, I wish search worked better too.

There aren’t well-defined plans for it, no. If there were it’d be under the big ball of “have the game client provide a websocket-based service for local applications” but that’s kind of a large undertaking and a bit outside the purview of the web team. We’re mostly focusing on JSON-REST endpoints for now, which have the unfortunate drawback of being totally unable to provide real-time data.

Looks like it’s a case of content being broken and my code having subtly different behavior from the client code. I’ll have a fix out probably in the release after HoT. Thanks for the heads up <3

As mentioned on today’s GuildChat, we will indeed be adding a slew of new stat combos, runes, and sigils to sPvP with the launch of Heart of Thorns. A small example of what we’ll be adding are trapper runes and sinister stats, but there’s plenty more for you to discover on October 23.

As a note (and to address concerns), we won’t be adding dire stats or perplexity runes to sPvP. We’re vetting and discussing each and every rune/sigil/stat combo as a group before adding them in, with the main goal being improving build diversity.

I’ll also mention that we’re going to be changing the 6/6 bonus on Vampirism. After HoT launch it will no longer proc Mist Form at 25% hp, but will instead cast an AoE lifesteal to up to 5 nearby targets. This will reduce the binary defensive nature of the rune and bring it more inline with similar sets.

There’s going to be a lot of change with the launch next week, and we’re going to be watching balance very closely in all game modes. We will be working to address any emergent gameplay we’re not comfortable with as quickly as possible.

-Grouch

It means that if your pet has 5 stacks of might (durations don’t matter) and you have 10 stacks of might (durations continue to not matter) that when you hit WHAO you’ll gain 5 stacks of might for 10s and your pet will gain 10 stacks of might for 10 seconds.

NikeEU.7690:

We aren’t going to release any videos, guides, etc for raids until multiple guilds have cleared the wing. Our goal is to preserve competition for all the guilds interested in progression and not spoil the fun of learning the fights by doing anything to taint that. We will do our best to ensure that everyone has the best experience possible in the raid, which is the whole point of having guilds invited to test these things.

I should make it clear that no one testing will be allowed to video, screenshot, or otherwise record or document any test content whatsoever, whether for use immediately or for future use. That is part of the NDA.

Any guild posting about raids will gather information, screenshots, videos, and all resources only from the released, live game and never through access to a test server.

Hey all,

As we hurtle toward launch most of my time is locked into Druid and Scrapper changes.

After much tribulation I was able to make a change to WHAO to remove the static boon stack application on Might and Stability stacks being copied; this was actually a fairly difficult change to implement as we don’t really have support for copying boons with preset durations.

This’ll go in with the 23rd.

Clerigo.9475:

Hi Gaile,

What about making the community showcase a monthly event?

ANet could have a monthly contest for GW2 related fan art, maybe add some gem rewards for the 3 top spots, add some form of media presentation in the youtube channel every month to showcase the submissions, and i think its a win win for continued community development support, GW2 art and game promotion to the general public. This could grab some players to join GW2.

Maybe do some larger community art showcase related to special events, like the upcoming Halloween, and spreading same showcase to both DeviantArt and Tumbler…

…hey…schhh… remember this one?

http://guild-wars-2.deviantart.com/art/Mad-King-s-Arrival-263189868

:D

Oh believe me, I have a lot of ideas for CSL, and some of what you’ve mentioned is what I’m looking at.

I should mention that we’re looking at CSL as a monthly show. With Halloween for this theme, with Wintersday, and with so much non-holiday art being featured on both this forum and Tumblr, I don’t see how we’d ever run out of good art to feature! So yes, look for CSL in November, December, and beyond!

Mireles Lore.5942:

bound by NDA? Why even post this? Just to let everyone know they were passed over for something they never had a fair shot at being considered for?

Why? For transparency and as a means of communication, which I think we all agree is a good thing.

Too, I see some concerns about claims of world firsts. ArenaNet doesn’t track, verify, record, or reward world firsts. But making public that certain guilds were involved in testing seems appropriate and relevant in that context, does it not?