Guild Wars 2

Apparently it’s possible for Gorseval to drop the spectral prison circle under you while you’re in the air, gliding back towards the platform. Not sure if this is intended or a bug.

Video (spoiler alert, video shows full Gorseval fight)

spoj.9672:

Doesnt that prove the rewards were useless? The fact that you had 70+ pieces of ascended in your bank with nothing to do with them.

In any case after stat swap was added, fractals had very good rewards (the best they’ve ever had). Also newer players get quite a lot out of fractals (free rings, free back, free 20 slot boxes).

deSade.9437:

Rag.3258:

spoj.9672:

Nah they werent. Fractals have never been rewarding enough.

Yes they were. Fractals have been rewarding enough.

No they weren’t.

The 50+ ascended armor and 20+ ascended weapon boxes in my bank would like to disagree.

Edit: Also the hundreds of gold from selling fractal 50/40.

Artemis Thuras.8795:

possibly. However a rev won’t cap at 25 on everyone solo.

Also it looks like PS might duration got nerfed from 8s base to 6s.
(which explains why i’ve noticed might wearing off very fast since patch on war).

So capping 25 might on ps takes more investment now ( str sigil).
It also allows berserker ( warrior) to take prec food over dumplings since they should hit 95% might with str runes + facet. (dropping arms means the need for extra prec, but the % mods are totally worth it).

also partying subsquadding up hinders EA application ( 9s duration, 3s interval) so you’d want the war not restricted to buffing 5 people.

A Herald with strength runes/sigil can maintain 20-23 might in combat, so it will need only a little help.

The EA concern is valid, but I think it may be trumped by the lost might from the PS war due to it being too unequally distributed (wasted on people who already have 25 stacks). Same with the might from the Herald, it might keep buffing people who already have 25 from the PS war.

If you have a 2nd revenant though (+PS war), maybe you don’t need subsqauds.

spoj.9672:

Can you universaly remove them from the game? :P

+1

Artemis Thuras.8795:

However with things like a PS war it may be more desirable to let the boons flow amongst everyone.

I think having a PS war in 1 party and a Herald in a 2nd party is a better way to do it. Also might from the PS war keeps overwriting might stacks on people with 25 already, no?

It’s not as bad as you guys make it sound. If you salvage/sell everything and convert the tokens into gold, you’ll still make 1-2 gold per dungeon path.

Do we know if we can have 5-man parties within a squad for the purposes of boon sharing / buff management?

Frostfire.7492:

So tell me where is the difference in running 14 fractals on on day, or 2 fractals every day for a week?

So would you be happy if there was a ‘weekly’ chest instead of a daily and it awarded 14 fractal pages, so you could do it all on Sunday if you want, but then you wait until next Sunday for the weekly chest to reset?

DrEckers.2039:

Preselecting fractals does not fix the never repeating hard fractals problem by itself. On days when “bad” fractals like snowblind pop up, most people will just skip the dailies that day. In addition assuming rewards are also fixed, it does not give a reason to do higher and harder fractals on any particular day. So, it will be extremely hard for a person to “catch up” if he misses and falls behind his group’s level. This suggestion is fine as a quick fix but it does not fix the core problem of disincentivizing harder fractals.

+1

Unfortunately it seems when designing the new fractals system, they’ve decided to make all rewards easily accessible to the majority of more casual players by allowing them to get all rewards by doing only the easy fractals for the daily. This also limits the rewards Anet can put in dailies, ‘cause you can’t expect amazing rewards for 2 swamps and 1 jade maw.

I was hoping high level fractals would be the 5-man challenging content, but alas.

So I guess selling raids won’t be possible?

Harper.4173:

you see if both Raids ( 10 man instanced content) and Fractals (5 man instanced content) both gave out Ascended then people would most likely do both and get a lot of ascended – and that’s a big no-no in Anet’s book.

On the other hand they’ve added an ascended weapon/armor sink – balls of dark energy are required for the legendary back item, and likely for legendary armor too. So these could be balanced.

Did it with a mesmer hitting the close seal (close to where you’re stacking), a thief hitting the far seal, used portal at the start. Thief can survive using stealth and shadowstep, mesmer’s got stealth and distortion (e.g. if you trait signets).

It’s dead, Jim.

It seems very likely that the best (i.e. most efficient) way to deal with this (and other) instabilities is to ignore the mechanics and power through. It’ll probably be faster than having a specialized boon removal party comp. Which indicates bad design.

So here’s what Colin has announced in this article

In the short term, we need to take a look at iterating on some of the issues with rewards, XP, and potentially some scaling issues on the higher tiers of fractals.

I guess it’s a good start.

If you have the expansion you will need to craft 3 10s and 2 11s, which you will put in the 2+2+1 slots that the rings and the back item provide. The rest are just vendor 7s. As of the latest patch this should be the most cost efficient option.

Foon.5384:

I wonder though, what is your suggestion for improving this?

I’ve edited my point 3 and added some suggestions.

ColinJohanson.2394:

Runiir.6425:

Doesn’t matter what the rate is when you take into account you need every single point in the old maps as well. That x9 is too much.

Except you don’t! There are enough hero challenges in the jungle you don’t need to do any in the core tyrian world – those simply speed you up on day one if you already got them.

How accessible are the jungle hero challenges? Are they gated by masteries? I have 16 characters most of which haven’t done map completion (no old world hero points) and I’m worried most of these characters will become unusable because they’re not able to access the elite specializations.

JediYoda.1275:

The point is that the Dev’s can’t expect all their players are willing to conform to all upcoming changes and that people like me are resistant to some of these changes.

That’s true. It just so happens that these specific changes are very reasonable (and even welcome) by many (and probably most) players.

Lord Kuru.3685:

To stop that they can use one of their favorite mechanics: the time gate.

A time gate is not enough, because all you need to do is buy the daily/weekly max amount of favor with gold and you’re done. The point is that the new stuff is acquired by playing the (new) content, you can’t just bypass it. This is the reason they keep adding currencies with every new map.

Felix.7586:

they just dropped the Master of Peace’s actual goal like it was nothing. You had most of Season 2 revolving about the mystery of the whereabouts of Glint’s Egg and you spoil it before the game even comes out?

This.

JediYoda.1275:

Someone answer this “Why is this suddenly so bad when it hasn’t been a problem for 3 years?”

Because there’s new stuff coming, it’s not the same old stuff as before. You shouldn’t be able to buy everything in a guild hall on day 1 with gold, just as you shouldn’t be able to buy one of the new legendaries from the TP.

JediYoda.1275:

Anet has always said for a very long time even pre-release of core game “play your way” and “we don’t want to force players play in a way/game mode they don’t want to”

This is why they’re adding pvp and wvw guild missions.

Here’s how I would rework the master tier traits:

/————
- Harmonious Conduit – Gain stability when beginning an overload. Oveloads break stun (move the stun break into this trait)

- Earthen proxy – remove this trait and replace with: Overload recharge is reduced by 20%. When you complete an overload, gain increased damage by 10% for 10-15 sec.
————-/
This gives clear separation of function of each trait, one is definitely more offensive, the other is strongly defensive. Depending on the game mode or build/role, you get effects that actually matter and feel strong, instead of getting random effects you probably don’t care about whatever you choose.

Tomiyou.3790:

10% increased damage after overloading is a fantastic idea.

It just needs to last longer.

Jekkt.6045:

i would like to have it normalized to 1200 range, like blink and shadowstep

This is reasonable.

So because the ranger is getting a water field that moves with them, eles can’t have one? Please make the warhorn water field move with the ele!

Also I called this a month ago :p

Do auras at least refresh their duration when re-applied?

Check out builds on http://metabattle.com

Glenstorm.4059:

At the moment, this skill’s DPS potential is wasted if you have more than 1 target.

This is the biggest issue with the skill. Another issue is that the damage is unreliable, noone will be standing still waiting for the orb to do its full damage, they will just sidestep it. And if there’s a wall or some other obstruction behind the target (which happens fairly often), it does very little.

Bandit.8279:

What’s killing build variety in PvE has more to do with those conforming to a supposed meta than anything else.

We can have a discussion of whether this should or shouldn’t be the case, but we have to deal with the current reality. Just look at necro. There are many builds on many classes that are in the exact state necro is in, i.e. (almost) no one wants them. People choose not to use them and do not want them in their party. Maybe things will change some day, but for now there are easy ways to make Tempest more viable in pve in our current reality.

Karl McLain.5604:

Harmonious Conduit: This trait has been re-worked. Upon activating an overload, gain stability for 4 seconds. If the overload is successfully completed, gain 10% damage for 5 seconds.

Since most of the changes discussed here are from a pvp/wvw standpoint, I want to discuss pve issues as well.

The specializations patch killed all build variety for ele in pve. Everyone is now running staff. D/F Fresh Air used to be a viable meta build, not anymore. It seems Tempest is the same way. Karl, please consider what changes to make to Temest to make it work in pve as well. Tempest needs selfish options too.

Regarding the Harmonious Conduit trait (quoted above), 10% damage for 5 seconds is simply too short. Put the 10% bonus in another trait and make it compete with a strong option that will usually be taken in pvp/wvw (e.g. make it compete with stability on overload). Make the bonus damage last for much longer (e.g. 30 sec), or just make it permanent. This way in pve you can take the 10% damage trait without Tempest being too strong in pvp. The way the Arcane line achieves this is pretty good, in pvp/wvw everyone is running Evasive Arcana, whereas in pve you’d run Bountiful Power. Even with a 10% damage modifier Tempest might end up not being used in pve, but it’s a start.

Valento.9852:

Karl, are you considering centering Water Globe water field on the tempest?

This definitely needs to happen.

Ohoni.6057:

damage should be around 125% to 150% the damage you could deal in that spec over the same period of time

Fire overload with a 4 second cast time is already there. In fact it’s probably at 200% or more.

I’m not sure whether these changes are a buff or a nerf to Tempest overall. Some major nerfs:

1. Heat Sync – no longer spreads all boons (only might)

2. 20% Warhorn skill recharge reduction trait is gone

3. 20% attunement overload recharge reduction trait is gone

Apparently warhorn was too strong in its current form.

Absinthe.6982:

Worked for me and i’m running win7

lol, same here.

-perf -windowed worked for me.

The problem with a small map is that a single blob can reach and defend everything. There’s no need to split off smaller groups and it becomes a blob vs blob v blob.

My client crashes in a different way. After I click ‘Play’ and then click the button to accept the user agreement, I immediately get a “Guild Wars 2 Game Client has stopped working” popup, and I only have a “close the program” option. No crash report or dump.

Have you checked what level of the map you’re viewing? On some levels the waypoints are not visible. Check all levels and see if you can see the map.

The new areas have some amazing music, but it always gets interrupted by the combat music. The combat music itself is much louder than most other ingame music, which is annoying, and it’s the same music we’ve been listening to since GW1.

I’ve been playing the tempest/warhorn combo in spvp and one issue I encountered is that very often you have to leave the point you’re holding to chase your water field if you want to blast it a few times. It’s not very suitable for conquest. It would be better if the water fields followed the ele, like the warrior torch fire field.

Also, the combat is very fast paced and the warhorn air/water CC skills will often miss as they move very slowly.

It’s not a feature, what they mean is it locks you out only if you switch away, if you stay in the attunement, you can continue using it.

So there seems to be a bug with the recharge of the overloads/attunements, here’s what happens: when you overload any attunement, then switch to a different attunement, the recharge of the attunement you overloaded will suddenly increase by 2-3 seconds, e.g. if there were 10 seconds left, it will jump to 12-13s. I think it’s related to having the arcane trait line. If you remove arcane line, the issue goes away.

Can anyone test this to confirm, as I can’t record videos?

Tempest needs a damage option somewhere in the traits. Best would be some damage modifier. Boon support only goes so far, and to be viable in PvE, it also needs damage, pure an simple.

I just want to mention that warhorn air #5 is still a weak and boring skill. Offhand #5 skills are supposed to have strong effects (on a longer cooldown), something should be done to this skill.

Jski.6180:

though i must say tempest is better support then ele atm just not that much better.

One of the problems of pure support specs is that they don’t fare well neither in spvp, nor in pve. It needs to be able to do something else as well, be it high mobility, 1v1 ability, high dps (esp. for pve) or something. Even if they improve the support of tempest, it may still not see much play.

morrolan.9608:

The rare time I see staff ele in spvp they are almost always off the point on a vantage point where they can use their range safely.

Nope, cele staff stays on a point 95% of the time. This is the purpose of the build – point holder/support. Watch some weekly tournament vods or high ranked streamers to see how they use it.