Guild Wars 2

Server: Sea of Sorrows (possibly more servers)
Location: Any (tested in Queensdale)
Character: Any (tested on Norn, LV80 Thief)

Issue
I haven’t found anyone seriously complaining about this, but I must:

Since that utterly menacing patch some two weeks ago, there has been an issue where stats do not scale as they previously did when travelling between different level zones, occurring under most means of relocation, but most noticeably on foot. When I move from one map area to another, depending on the area level, I find my stats dropping when I move to a higher level area, instead of increasing as my level goes up; this does seem to be reset every five levels of the area’s level cap. The bug also affects some traits and utility skill passives that affect stats, which may have a negative or ridiculously positive offsetting effect on the passive’s base value, but this can be reset if the player moves between maps or uses the waypoint in that area.

Personal Observation
I do not understand why I have not heard more complaints about this issue, but as a user of several critical and condition-type build characters, this has become a major issue for me, as my critical chance can have (and have frequently had) a 20-40% falloff, merely by moving between map areas. As such, I have found myself being kicked from dungeon parties because I cannot maintain damage output as well as I used to.

Demonstration/Replication
Rather than uploading images and whatnot to demonstrate, I ran a series of tests to analyse where these changes occur to best demonstrate the statistical problem, and I shall instead post here the results of those tests. These tests use the fore-mentioned LV80 Thief and was performed by walking across each boundary line several times, both with and without any related traits or utility skills. Please note that I was only interested in recording changes in Precision and Critical Chance, as this is what I saw the most significant change in; as such, I only used Signet of Agility for the skill-equipped test. Lastly, all bugs involving passives are reset/corrected via. waypoint travel between tests, so bugged figures from previous test do not carry over.

Divinity’s Reach to Village of Shaemoor, Queensdale (Level 80 to 5)
Without Traits/Utilities: Precision decreases by 1615 (approx. 94% of previous level cap), Crit. Chance decreased by approx. 7% (approx. 19% of previous level cap).
With Signet of Agility: Precision decreased by 1743 (approx. 92% of previous level cap), Crit. Chance increased by approx. 19% (approx. 72% of previous level cap), Signet of Agility effect has 22 points of additional Precision at lower level.

Village of Shaemoor to Shaemoor Fields (Level 5 to 6)
Without Traits/Utilities: Precision did not change, Crit. Chance dropped by approx. 2% (approx. 94% of previous level cap).
With Signet of Agility: Precision did not change, Crit. Chance dropped by approx. 3% (approx. 94% of previous level cap), Signet of Agility effect has 2 points of missing Precision at higher level.

Shaemoor Fields to Altar Brook Vale (Level 6 to 9)
Without Traits/Utilities: Precision did not change, Crit. Chance dropped by approx. 4.5% (approx. 86% of previous level cap).
With Signet of Agility: Precision did not change, Crit. Chance dropped by approx. 7% (approx. 86% of previous level cap), Signet of Agility effect has 6 points of missing Precision at higher level.

Altar Brook Vale to the Heartwoods (Level 9 to 10)
Without Traits/Utilities: Precision increased by 65 (approx. 165% of previous level cap), Crit. Chance increased by approx. 24% (approx. 149% of previous level cap).
With Signet of Agility: Precision increased by 65 (approx. 147% of previous level cap), Crit. Chance increased by approx. 12% (approx. 126% of previous level cap), Signet of Agility effect has 2 points of missing Precision at higher level.

The Heartwoods to Phinney Ridge (Level 10 to 12)
Without Traits/Utilities: Precision did not change, Crit. Chance dropped by approx. 3.5% (approx. 92% of previous level cap).
With Signet of Agility: Precision did not change, Crit. Chance dropped by approx. 5% (approx. 91.5% of previous level cap), Signet of Agility effect has 4 points of missing Precision at higher level.

Phinney Ridge to Godslost Swamp (Level 12 to 16)
Without Traits/Utilities: Precision increased by 65 (approx. 139% of previous level cap), Crit. Chance increased by approx. 24% (approx. 116% of previous level cap).
With Signet of Agility: Precision increased by 65 (approx. 131% of previous level cap), Crit. Chance increased by approx. 12% (approx. 105% of previous level cap), Signet of Agility effect has 8 points of missing Precision at higher level.

For the sake of my initial argument, I applied this procedure to a dungeon instance as well:

Shire of Beetletun to Caudecus’s Manor (Level 14 to 42)
Without Traits/Utilities: Precision increased by 481 (approx. 391.5% of previous level cap), Crit. Chance increased by approx. 8% (approx. 122.5% of previous level cap).
With Signet of Agility: Precision increased by 537 (approx. 352% of previous level cap), Crit. Chance increased by approx. 1% (approx. 101% of previous level cap), Signet of Agility effect has 4 points of missing Precision at lower level after leaving instance.

If you have any concerns about the figures, I’ll upload a spreadsheet of the values in question. If you would like to test these circumstances, run this course and observe changes in your stats.

Edit: Spreadsheet file uploaded to http://www.filedropper.com/gw2-stat-bug-analysis.

As far as I know, this has little to do with the March 16 patch, unless I missed something and ANET had smoothed this out before, and the March 16 patch has introduced a regression.

The behaviour was originally introduced with the New Player Experience. Whereas previously your basic stats would increase on each level gain until 80, under the NPE your stats increase by larger increments every 5 levels. Mob stats in lower level zones were adjusted to match the new stat distribution. What ANET failed to do quite correctly is to account for the interplay between stat adjustment – which follows the new scheme – and level scaling – which apparently still follows the old per-level adjustments where secondary stats like crit chance are concerned – for down-levelled characters.

As I stated earlier, the March update made these changes, whether introduced with it or not noticeable. However, my plight is that it is having a negative effect on the way level scaling is being calculated whenever you migrate to another level-capped area, especially when it comes to how traits and passives calculate bonus stats.

While I haven’t heard of this New Player Experience program, it does not appear to cater to the general thrust of playing this sort of game; by the sound of it, they are preparing new players to become soloists.

Wyrdhare.6890:

As I stated earlier, the March update made these changes, whether introduced with it or not noticeable. However, my plight is that it is having a negative effect on the way level scaling is being calculated whenever you migrate to another level-capped area, especially when it comes to how traits and passives calculate bonus stats.

While I haven’t heard of this New Player Experience program, it does not appear to cater to the general thrust of playing this sort of game; by the sound of it, they are preparing new players to become soloists.

I think you might have misunderstood the previous post about what the NPE was designed to do and how it was implemented.

The feedback they got from people who quit the game was that they were asked to learn too many things at once. The NPE re-arranged the order in which that happens and made it happen in larger (more noticeable) steps, instead of the gradual growth in the game at launch.

The way in which they originally implemented this failed to recognize that larger steps introduced the likelihood of obvious breakpoints, which is exactly the type of thing you are observing in your travels. That is, L25 content was designed for L25 characters, but the downscaling meant that L80s might be either too strong (or too weak), and this could change when going into a spot designed for L24 (or L26) — and this behavior was absent in the original game.

In a subsequent release, they claimed to have fixed this. (I would argue that they can’t actually fix it completely, because the mechanics create mathematical breakpoints that can’t be easily accommodated for all combinations of profs, levels, traits, etc. Still, they did pretty good at hiding the effects.)

Now, having given you all the background… it wouldn’t surprise me if some of these breakpoint issues have returned with the last patch — it seems to me that about 1/3 of the bugs introduced by that update had the appearance of someone re-using code from an older build of the game and not realizing the consequences when it got merged with the code base. (Not that I really have specific evidence — that just explains a lot, if true.)

My recommendation is that you also create a support ticket linking to this thread. And that the next time you observe the specific situation, use the in-game /bug tool — that provides the QA team with more clues to replicate your testing. (You can also link them to this post.)

Stuff like this is difficult to troubleshoot, so it’s probably going to take them some time to absorb your feedback and do something about it.

Thanks for all the work you did to document this.