Guild Wars 2

Blaine, other classes are far more dramatic about their bugs and problems and they get plenty of attention. How we act is irrelevant. But we need to make our complaints known otherwise we wont get any attention at all (not far from what we get now).

Necromancers are pretty rare. Lots of players have a necro, but they dont play them. The only time I see necro’s looking for a group for dungeons is outside TA and occasionally arah. My server is high population and alot of players hang around in Lions Arch, Im one of about 4 Necro’s you will actually notice in LA. Everyone else is a mesmer, guard, warrior, ele, thief or the odd ranger. LA is so packed that you could have a proper good game of wheres Wally and never find a necro. Quite a few players have necro alts, they just dont use them. Which is pretty much how its going to be for me soon.

lookitsandrea.8531:

And yet players were able to reproduce it over a month ago?

Players play the game substantially more than the developers do, but there’s really no way that couldn’t be the case. Anet has around 300 employees, so let’s assume that all they do all day is playtest, splitting their time equally between the professions. That would be roughly 1,500 hours per week spent looking for bugs.

But according to Wikipedia, GW2 has sold three million copies as of January. Let’s cut that in half, to take into account the people who bought it but don’t really play much at all. Now let’s say Necromancers have one tenth the number of players as they would if each profession were equally represented, so that’s 1/80th of the total, or 18,250 total players. Now let’s assume they play an average of one hour a day on their Necros (some play much more, some play less).

That’s 91,250 hours spent per week playing the Necro, more than 60 times the number I gave Anet, and I don’t think it’s a stretch to say my numbers were exaggerating in favor of your point.

spoj.9672:

Blaine, other classes are far more dramatic about their bugs and problems and they get plenty of attention. How we act is irrelevant. But we need to make our complaints known otherwise we wont get any attention at all (not far from what we get now).

No one gets much attention from the devs. The Ranger and Ele forums had almost no dev communication for months and months. Anet seems to be trying to step up their game on communicating with us, though, as I’m noticing more red posts sprinkled around. We just got another one not one day ago. The Mesmer forum appears to have not had any posts from Anet in about a month, and it’s the same thing for the Eles.

I’m not saying we should shut up and wait for Anet to do their thing. I’m saying this hullabaloo about how Necros are unloved is baseless, and that we need to keep our expectations about game development timelines reasonable.

spoj.9672:

Necromancers are pretty rare. Lots of players have a necro, but they dont play them. The only time I see necro’s looking for a group for dungeons is outside TA and occasionally arah. My server is high population and alot of players hang around in Lions Arch, Im one of about 4 Necro’s you will actually notice in LA. Everyone else is a mesmer, guard, warrior, ele, thief or the odd ranger. LA is so packed that you could have a proper good game of wheres Wally and never find a necro. Quite a few players have necro alts, they just dont use them. Which is pretty much how its going to be for me soon.

Without hard data, I’m going to have to call this observer bias. After loading into Lion’s Arch from the Heart of the Mists, I spotted two Necros standing around without even having to move my viewpoint. I don’t play much sPvP so I’ll take your word for it that we’re scare there, but I personally see plenty of Necros running around Lion’s Arch, the Eternal Battlegrounds, and other such places, and I’m on Dragonbrand, a Tier 2 server.

But again, that’s just what I’ve seen. Without hard data, it’s all anecdotal. If anyone knows where such data is available, I would be very interested to see it.

The Guardian trait Perfect Inscriptions only started working in the open world now. It was non-functional since release, and that’s just a trait. They even fixed the tooltip once but no real fix til now.

Well, my necro will remain shelved for the time being. Maybe in 2015 we’ll get it fixed.

@Blaine

You didn’t read my post. I agree that Anet can’t find as many bug as 3 millions of players.

That’s why they have a bug forum. And all the subforum.

We did our job, 2 month ago! We wrote about it so many time. What do you want us to do? We used their bug forum, they didn’t answer. We did support ticket, we did everything we could.

Maybe they should get a test server? Like most MMO did?

Anet should have known about it since we posted it on the forum 2 month ago. There are no excuse. Take a moderator, roam the bug forum, send it to the team. We even had a moderator confirm he was sending it to the team.

He didn’t.

There is an issue, and it’s not on the player side.

About the dev on each class forum, I’M not one to say “man this forum have more dev post then our forum!”

But You are totally wrong when you take Ranger as an exemple. Ranger are prolly the subforum with the best poster from Anet : Robert Ryunda(spelling?).

He is maining a Ranger and reply frequently on their forum. He keep in touch and inform the players. He is doing a really good job. I don’t see how you can take there forum as an example.

I saw a survey in general forum not too long ago(can’t find it), and without it being hard fact, it still showed necromancer being the least played along engineer. Seing 2 necromancer in Lion Arch is hardly a proof tho.

Honestly Blaine, it’s hard to “keep our expectations about game development time reasonable” and not have this “victimized attitude that Anet has something against the Necromancer(s)” when this kitten (which in my experience has been fixed but somehow got rolled back during patch day) and spiteful talisman (do I need to say anything about this?) is still broken. Also, you have to be in denial to say that necromancers are not rare in this game.

Blaine Tog.8304:

lookitsandrea.8531:

And yet players were able to reproduce it over a month ago?

Players play the game substantially more than the developers do, but there’s really no way that couldn’t be the case. Anet has around 300 employees, so let’s assume that all they do all day is playtest, splitting their time equally between the professions. That would be roughly 1,500 hours per week spent looking for bugs.

But according to Wikipedia, GW2 has sold three million copies as of January. Let’s cut that in half, to take into account the people who bought it but don’t really play much at all. Now let’s say Necromancers have one tenth the number of players as they would if each profession were equally represented, so that’s 1/80th of the total, or 18,250 total players. Now let’s assume they play an average of one hour a day on their Necros (some play much more, some play less).

That’s 91,250 hours spent per week playing the Necro, more than 60 times the number I gave Anet, and I don’t think it’s a stretch to say my numbers were exaggerating in favor of your point.

And that’s what the players do – we find the bugs, and then we report them. The rest is up to ANet to respond and produce the results. About a month ago, a Dev had responded to the issue saying that he had not experienced any issues. He did test it, and he tested it incorrectly or he blatantly lied.

Nonetheless, about the demographics, this may be interesting to some of you…
http://gw2census.com/charts.php?pie=total÷=charprofessionc

spoj.9672:

Cant say im surprised. But theres no mention of the hp fix in the patch notes. I suppose it could of been implemented without being mentioned in the patch notes. But we shall see soon enough.

The only thing in the notes that im glad has finally been sorted is greater marks. Doesnt change that marks are stupid without the trait though.

answer: no.
fifteencharminimum.

Kardiamond.6952:

@Blaine

You didn’t read my post. I agree that Anet can’t find as many bug as 3 millions of players.

That’s why they have a bug forum. And all the subforum.

We did our job, 2 month ago! We wrote about it so many time. What do you want us to do? We used their bug forum, they didn’t answer. We did support ticket, we did everything we could.

Maybe they should get a test server? Like most MMO did?

Anet should have known about it since we posted it on the forum 2 month ago. There are no excuse. Take a moderator, roam the bug forum, send it to the team. We even had a moderator confirm he was sending it to the team.

He didn’t.

There is an issue, and it’s not on the player side.

And I agree that Anet needs to step up their game when it comes to bugs and glitches. WvW is currently bugged so you can’t deploy any siege except golems and it’s radically warping how the mode plays. It’s ridiculous and embarrassing that Anet let something like that go live.

But this is a deeper systemic problem than “Anet doesn’t care about WvW.” They clearly do care given how they’re positioning it as their main endgame content and retention tool. They need a better system for bug fixes. This isn’t specific to the Necro.

THAT SAID, demanding a fix pushed live after only two weeks from reproduction is unreasonable to ask for from virtually any gaming company.

Kardiamond.6952:

I saw a survey in general forum not too long ago(can’t find it), and without it being hard fact, it still showed necromancer being the least played along engineer. Seing 2 necromancer in Lion Arch is hardly a proof tho.

According to the site lookitsandrea nicely linked to me, Necros are the second-least-played profession, after the Engi. But not by very much at all. There are about 80% as many Necros as Warriors or Eles, the two most popular professions at the moment. It’s a difference in total character population of 2.6%, if that site is to be believed. It means that even if they wanted to cut the Necro or the Engi, they would be losing about as many players as if they cut any other profession. The tl;dr is that character population seems to be spread quite evenly between the 8 professions.

Insidion the Insane.9752:

Honestly Blaine, it’s hard to “keep our expectations about game development time reasonable” and not have this “victimized attitude that Anet has something against the Necromancer(s)” when this kitten (which in my experience has been fixed but somehow got rolled back during patch day) and spiteful talisman (do I need to say anything about this?) is still broken.

It’s ridiculous for the game to be as buggy and glitchy as it is. There is no excuse for so many tooltips to be incorrect and incomplete. But it’s a problem with the game overall, not just the Necro.

Insidion the Insane.9752:

Also, you have to be in denial to say that necromancers are not rare in this game.

I’m just telling you what I see. And, apparently, what the data says.

lookitsandrea.8531:

And that’s what the players do – we find the bugs, and then we report them. The rest is up to ANet to respond and produce the results. About a month ago, a Dev had responded to the issue saying that he had not experienced any issues. He did test it, and he tested it incorrectly or he blatantly lied.

While it is Anet’s job, helping them reproduce bugs speeds things along since we have way more time with this than they do.

lookitsandrea.8531:

Nonetheless, about the demographics, this may be interesting to some of you…
http://gw2census.com/charts.php?pie=total÷=charprofessionc

Thank you very much, that’s fascinating!

I don’t know how to tell you :

They didn’t have 15 days, they had 2++ month. They didn’t do there job, so now they are stuck with 15 days.

It’s there fault, and if 15 days isnt enought for a major bug, then maybe next time do a follow up of your bug forum and your moderator.

Make up for your mistake, and step up your game.

Kardiamond.6952:

I don’t know how to tell you :

They didn’t have 15 days, they had 2++ month. They didn’t do there job, so now they are stuck with 15 days.

It’s there fault, and if 15 days isnt enought for a major bug, then maybe next time do a follow up of your bug forum and your moderator.

Make up for your mistake, and step up your game.

15 days from reproduction. There’s a world of difference between getting a bug report and being able to reproduce it in-house. The former means you still need to determine where there’s a bug at all whereas the latter means you can start (START) hunting down the lines of code which need to be fixed. It’s the first big step in a long process.

Now if this bug is still around in 3 or 4 months, then I think it would be fair to say they dropped the ball here. But it’s unreasonable to ask them to fix it this quickly, particularly when even their non-rush-job fixes seem to cause additional bugs.

lookitsandrea.8531:

Blaine Tog.8304:

lookitsandrea.8531:

And yet players were able to reproduce it over a month ago?

Players play the game substantially more than the developers do, but there’s really no way that couldn’t be the case. Anet has around 300 employees, so let’s assume that all they do all day is playtest, splitting their time equally between the professions. That would be roughly 1,500 hours per week spent looking for bugs.

But according to Wikipedia, GW2 has sold three million copies as of January. Let’s cut that in half, to take into account the people who bought it but don’t really play much at all. Now let’s say Necromancers have one tenth the number of players as they would if each profession were equally represented, so that’s 1/80th of the total, or 18,250 total players. Now let’s assume they play an average of one hour a day on their Necros (some play much more, some play less).

That’s 91,250 hours spent per week playing the Necro, more than 60 times the number I gave Anet, and I don’t think it’s a stretch to say my numbers were exaggerating in favor of your point.

And that’s what the players do – we find the bugs, and then we report them. The rest is up to ANet to respond and produce the results. About a month ago, a Dev had responded to the issue saying that he had not experienced any issues. He did test it, and he tested it incorrectly or he blatantly lied.

Nonetheless, about the demographics, this may be interesting to some of you…
http://gw2census.com/charts.php?pie=total÷=charprofessionc

fun fact: this information is related to the PRE-release data and is not current
it says so in the comments of the link.

spoj.9672:

Quite a few players have necro alts, they just dont use them. Which is pretty much how its going to be for me soon.

What worries me is that when Anet looks at internal numbers they see these alts and think Necros are doing fine just because they were once created.

I think Colin once referenced something like this, that because class creation was pretty evenly split (this was a few months ago) it seemed to indicate balance was going good.

But how many are still playing them, even 80 Necro’s sitting untouched that were re rolled. How many are running dungeons with them, high level PVP, WVW – I rarely see any there.

The place I see Necros most, is casually strolling around the outside world PVE. The easiest carefree content in the game. Where someone that probably never reads this forum, nor cares about competition or balance, just like the aesthetic of running around with an army of little ugly critters. And sure, the Necro works for that, but you can’t be using numbers boosted by those type of players to say a profession is fine everywhere else, and in fact, in the places where it truly matters. In casual PVE it doesn’t matter if one prof is slightly better, at farming, at finishing an event, no one is competing for those things.

Pendragon.8735:

spoj.9672:

Quite a few players have necro alts, they just dont use them. Which is pretty much how its going to be for me soon.

What worries me is that when Anet looks at internal numbers they see these alts and think Necros are doing fine just because they were once created.

I think Colin once referenced something like this, that because class creation was pretty evenly split (this was a few months ago) it seemed to indicate balance was going good.

But how many are still playing them, even 80 Necro’s sitting untouched that were re rolled. How many are running dungeons with them, high level PVP, WVW – I rarely see any there.

The place I see Necros most, is casually strolling around the outside world PVE. The easiest carefree content in the game. Where someone that probably never reads this forum, nor cares about competition or balance, just like the aesthetic of running around with an army of little ugly critters. And sure, the Necro works for that, but you can’t be using numbers boosted by those type of players to say a profession is fine everywhere else, and in fact, in the places where it truly matters. In casual PVE it doesn’t matter if one prof is slightly better, at farming, at finishing an event, no one is competing for those things.

Exactly. I only use my necro for guild missions because i have map completion on her and I switch to her on jade maw for fractal rewards occasionally. But i dont dare take her in 20+ anymore, much more useful and quick runs when i take my guardian. Because im just so annoyed at how useless my main is ive re-rolled a second mesmer with a similar look to my necro. So i can actually have a decent and useful main and one that actually looks good (Hate my asuran mesmer, animations are crap).

Blaine Tog.8304:

Kardiamond.6952:

I don’t know how to tell you :

They didn’t have 15 days, they had 2++ month. They didn’t do there job, so now they are stuck with 15 days.

It’s there fault, and if 15 days isnt enought for a major bug, then maybe next time do a follow up of your bug forum and your moderator.

Make up for your mistake, and step up your game.

15 days from reproduction. There’s a world of difference between getting a bug report and being able to reproduce it in-house. The former means you still need to determine where there’s a bug at all whereas the latter means you can start (START) hunting down the lines of code which need to be fixed. It’s the first big step in a long process.

Now if this bug is still around in 3 or 4 months, then I think it would be fair to say they dropped the ball here. But it’s unreasonable to ask them to fix it this quickly, particularly when even their non-rush-job fixes seem to cause additional bugs.

Reproduce it?

You mean logging in the game and getting downed in PvE or WvW?

The first post in the bug section had all the info how to reproduce it, with in game methode.

Should I imagine they took 1 month and a half to reproduce a bug that a player can reproduce and document in one night? When they already have all the info from the pre-named player post? When they have better tool to test it?

You gotta be kidding me.

P.S I already waited for minions AI to be debugged since nearly release, after they said they would look into it. So yeah…

Regardless of whether that census is out dated or not, I do think it is probably safe to assume that those players had all intended to make a Necromancer, and the other selected professions.

With that said… It isn’t about the specific popularity of a profession. There could be a 2% difference between a Necromancer and the most popular. However, upon personal observation, Necromancers typically do not last past the first 30 or so levels and at higher-level zones they become more rare. We therefore need to consider, instead, the levels people have reached when playing certain Professions.

For fun, which will probably not receive many results, I created a poll based on professions and their levels (over 40). That may give us some kind of insight into how higher levels relate to professions.

https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/gw2/Poll-Profession-Over-Level-40-Demographics/first#post2117976

Good to see it getting worked on I suppose.
Jon could you say anything about the spiteful talisman bug? It’s been in the game since before release, and reported as such.

Thanks, it’s not a bug in pvp keep in mind, and there should be more details in the bug thread/other threads.

Good to hear, Jon. Thank you.

In regards to Spiteful Talisman thing.. I’m glad to know that you’re going to look into a Necromancer bug (and I’m not trying to be rude or disrespectful, I love what you guys have done and enjoy the heck out of GW2), but there are so many issues with the Necromancer. It would be even better to hear that you’re looking into more than just one specific bug out of the many Necromancer bugs/balancing issues.. because to be quite frank, we’ve been left out in the rain for a long time with no real headway on anything it seems…

JonPeters.5630:

I’ll look at spiteful talisman first thing tomorrow morning. Can’t say much more than that.

This is the first official comment on this bug since release. Praise Grenth! It’s part of my main build and it’s been annoying me and many a fellow Necros for what feels like an eternity. Hopefully you guys can fix it soon instead of “soon”. Same for downed 1/3 HP.

Could you also look at the related trait, chill of death? It procs in the next hit after target hits 15% HP, not 25% as described.

My chillomancer pvt build will get ressurected if these get fixed. I will also buy you cake.

That explains why while i was doing NULL the other day sometimes i was getting ressed for over 1k per tick and then id down again and it would be back to 300.

Glenn.3417:

When a post about warrior is made they jump right on it.

When it’s necro, we can all go screw ourselfs.

It really sucks that ANet just has all this nepotism towards Warriors and yet Necros (and Rangers, much love for them) get left in the dust because we’re not ~~Mesmers~~. It’s like…all you know how to balance is a DPS, a Tank, and a…

Oh. Ohhhhhh.

JonPeters.5630:

I’ll look at spiteful talisman first thing tomorrow morning. Can’t say much more than that.

I don’t understand this at all… This bug has been around for months….. I can’t be upset for the attention but how is it logical to look into something just because people on the forums happen to post about it, and you happen to read and respond.

I think the reason so many people, as I mentioned in a post just a moment ago, get irritated, is because of the apparent lack of planning involved with how bugs are squashed. I guess I should just stop, as any attention beats no attention at all.

Thanks for the assistance in bug resolution.

JonPeters.5630:

Quick update.

We had a fix that appeared to solve the issue in this build but it may only be solving it for new characters. A more comprehensive fix is being worked out on our internal servers and we are working towards getting this live asap.

Thank you Jon, this is really great to hear!

JonPeters.5630:

Quick update.

We had a fix that appeared to solve the issue in this build but it may only be solving it for new characters. A more comprehensive fix is being worked out on our internal servers and we are working towards getting this live asap.

Thank you for working so quickly to get this bug fixed!

The concern I have about Jon’s statement “I’ll look at Spiteful Talisman in the morning” is that it sounds very much like what business people say when they aren’t going to do anything… “We’ll take a look at it.”

I hope something gets done here…

While they are at it, the focus abilities should be made more reliable. It is aggravating how when you try to use it and you turn so the target is not directly in front of you, the bounces stop. Please fix that too, Jon.

JonPeters.5630:

Quick update.

We had a fix that appeared to solve the issue in this build but it may only be solving it for new characters. A more comprehensive fix is being worked out on our internal servers and we are working towards getting this live asap.

Bugs like this worry me about how clean the GW2 source code is.

- A concerned developer & gamer

Thanks for checking it out Jon.

JonPeters.5630:

Ok Spiteful Talisman is fixed locally. This should appear in about 2 weeks.

Wooohooo!! Why wait to release it though!!? We have been suffering long enough, release the fix!!

But seriously, can you please work on enhancing the reliability of focus #4? It is terrible that just because you aren’t facing your target AFTER using this ability the bounces stop.

Kitedyou.1720:

Wooohooo!! Why wait to release it though!!? We have been suffering long enough, release the fix!!

It has to be QA’d. Only hotfixes that absolutely must be out ASAP go through like you are suggesting (such as the broken Greater Marks / Staff Mastery from last patch).

JonPeters.5630:

Ok Spiteful Talisman is fixed locally. This should appear in about 2 weeks.

This is great news, i can consider throwing this back into my build now. I’m happy to wait 2 weeks so you can make sure everything is working as intended with the trait. Thankyou.

JonPeters.5630:

Ok Spiteful Talisman is fixed locally. This should appear in about 2 weeks.

For reals? For PvE reals?

2 Game Designer in the necromancer forum? And they fix a bug in 2 days and another fix is ready to go?

I knew it, is the end of the world!

Thank you!!!!

We love to hear from you guys here.

Jon, I did forget my manners earlier. Thanks for getting that fixed AND restoring some of my faith in the Necro team.

Awesome work Jon.

Rennoko.5731:

JonPeters.5630:

I’ll look at spiteful talisman first thing tomorrow morning. Can’t say much more than that.

I don’t understand this at all… This bug has been around for months….. I can’t be upset for the attention but how is it logical to look into something just because people on the forums happen to post about it, and you happen to read and respond.

I think the reason so many people, as I mentioned in a post just a moment ago, get irritated, is because of the apparent lack of planning involved with how bugs are squashed. I guess I should just stop, as any attention beats no attention at all.

Thanks for the assistance in bug resolution.

Aren’t you aware? The forums are ANet’s official bug tracking system.

It took him less than a day to fix this, at least locally anyway. This is a bug that has been reported since the game released. I don’t want to sound like I’m ungrateful, I like that it has finally been looked at and possibly fixed for good, but seriously, why wasn’t this looked into much, much sooner?

Kravick.4906:

It took him less than a day to fix this, at least locally anyway. This is a bug that has been reported since the game released. I don’t want to sound like I’m ungrateful, I like that it has finally been looked at and possibly fixed for good, but seriously, why wasn’t this looked into much, much sooner?

You do sound ungrateful (or perhaps irksome), but that isn’t really the point.

And if you really think about it, he posted he would look at it in the morning… assuming he started around 7AM, and focused all his attention on this, he had it fixed in 2.5 hours. Being logical people, we can assume he had coffee, answered some emails, so more like 1-1.5 hours.

But my point earlier was that if these things are really this easy to fix…. perhaps we should be spamming this forum and the general forum about any bug we have… because apparently that is how things get fixed in a timely fashion?

In fact, this post isn’t even about this bugged trait that is now fixed for release. This fix has now come about because someone begged for it because a dev was reading a post about another bigger problem bug. I actually get annoyed when I read posts about one thing and have to sift through post after post about someone begging for something else unrelated. Seems I should be doing the same, in the name of necromancers everywhere.

Just curious why that is the order of how bugs are resolved…. but not to sound ungrateful

Rennoko.5731:

Kravick.4906:

It took him less than a day to fix this, at least locally anyway. This is a bug that has been reported since the game released. I don’t want to sound like I’m ungrateful, I like that it has finally been looked at and possibly fixed for good, but seriously, why wasn’t this looked into much, much sooner?

You do sound ungrateful (or perhaps irksome), but that isn’t really the point.

And if you really think about it, he posted he would look at it in the morning… assuming he started around 7AM, and focused all his attention on this, he had it fixed in 2.5 hours. Being logical people, we can assume he had coffee, answered some emails, so more like 1-1.5 hours.

But my point earlier was that if these things are really this easy to fix…. perhaps we should be spamming this forum and the general forum about any bug we have… because apparently that is how things get fixed in a timely fashion?

In fact, this post isn’t even about this bugged trait that is now fixed for release. This fix has now come about because someone begged for it because a dev was reading a post about another bigger problem bug. I actually get annoyed when I read posts about one thing and have to sift through post after post about someone begging for something else unrelated. Seems I should be doing the same, in the name of necromancers everywhere.

Just curious why that is the order of how bugs are resolved…. but not to sound ungrateful

This is what I’m saying. This bug has been reported in game, and on these forums for the last 9 months, repeatedly, Ad nauseam. It took a programer an incredibly short amount of time to fix it when they actually looked at it. This heavily suggests to me me that no one even bothered to look at it until now. Yeah, I guess you could say I’m irked.

But again, I don’t want to sound ungrateful, its finally fixed possibly, but this is something I feel like is really problematic with ANets bug fixing. This isn’t the first time such a thing has happened like this either. Engineers had a bug with one of their traits that they had repeatedly been reporting and talking about on their own forums. ANet only finally looked at it because the problem was posted on the sPvP forum, and a coder at ANet just happened to have seen it, despite the fact it had been brought up constantly on the engineer forums. It took the coder 5 minutes to fix the problem when it was finally looked at. I’m not even exaggerating. The time between, “I’ll look into it.” and, “Ok I’ve fixed it!” posts was literally 5 minutes.

So yeah, its good a bug has finally been fixed, but perhaps ANet needs to improve their communication between their departments? It doesn’t seem like what we’re reporting in game and on these forums is getting to the attention of the developers/coders unless they come here in person and see it for themselves or something.

Kravick.4906:

It took him less than a day to fix this, at least locally anyway. This is a bug that has been reported since the game released. I don’t want to sound like I’m ungrateful, I like that it has finally been looked at and possibly fixed for good, but seriously, why wasn’t this looked into much, much sooner?

Agree completely with your sentiment. Lately I just feel like I’m always at a loss for figuring out how they prioritize fixes and content in this game. If it was me personally I would be throwing everything I could at balance until every class was in a good place before I did anything else.

It’s awesome that Spiteful Talisman is being fixed. Here’s hoping it works perfectly. As far as the Ranger references/questions went: rangers had a long dry spell of no news, but it has currently been recieving a lot more attention (Robert Hrouda is I believe that so helpful man’s name). Ranger’s pets do tend to die in zergs to focused fire or multiple sources of AoE. They are stupendous solo roamers, though, and in structure defense I usually change to pets that give boons/heal. Being able to change pets situationally seems to make a big difference in comparing their performance to minions in WvW.

The question you’ve gotta ask yourself here, is why was this fixed now?

As far as I can tell it was fixed on the whim of a developer. The ANet apologists have been citing the same old spiel about how “it’s a company, they have POW and agreed deadlines and OMG it’s such a complex thing to code an MMO”, yet when a dev is inclined to do so it’s sorted almost instantly.

And the next logical question is – why haven’t other bugs been fixed?

Aas an aside, if ANet are anything like us, they hold a database with values (ability specifics, HP etc.) which is compiled into a binary or .dat files when they create a new version of the game… so the idea that it takes more than 10 minutes to change a value and 4-6 hours to compile is utterly bonkers.

That’s how I’d build it anyway. Nice Oracle DB with all the games values in, then have all teh hardcoded crap as an executable which simply calls the values held in the .dat. Means you can change stuff in seconds, set it to compile then get on with something else.

JonPeters.5630:

Quick update.

We had a fix that appeared to solve the issue in this build but it may only be solving it for new characters. A more comprehensive fix is being worked out on our internal servers and we are working towards getting this live asap.

Only solving for new characters? That totally sounds like “ah, I have no idea why it doesn’t work, let’s just increase downstate HP by x% for all (newly created) necromancers and we’re done”. Try to focus less on other classes and maybe bring SOME attention to the necromancer. ATM it fells like some kind of trainee is responsible for us while the rest of your development team focuses on the other professions.

SupahSpankeh.8452:

The question you’ve gotta ask yourself here, is why was this fixed now?

Maybe there’s a bug… with bug reports.

JonPeters.5630:

Quick update.

We had a fix that appeared to solve the issue in this build but it may only be solving it for new characters. A more comprehensive fix is being worked out on our internal servers and we are working towards getting this live asap.

^- Thanks! Really nice to have a dev say/do something more than say were not being ignored every few months.

Would also love a fix on Litch Form interrupt going on full CD. (Flesh Gol when wet full CD too).

Kinda would like to be able to res people in Litch (DShroud too in pve if not too powerful). Really love siphons to be stronger. (20 traits to do half of a ele’s 6 sig, if we crit, ours also not work with heal power)

Just read the patch notes today (6/11), another patch and this, acknowledged and breaking bug, has still not been fixed!

Jon, any updates on the delay?