Guild Wars 2

It is intended that you need to survive the encounter to get credit for the Jade Heart, as Spatial Manipulation will not hit dead characters (and if you could activate the heart in combat, you could just wait until the boss was nearly dead before using it).

I am sorry that we don’t have a better way to track giving credit for the collection without having to reactivate the heart between attempts, but unfortunately, there’s not an easy solution.

To answer a couple of the questions about the AB Multiloot changes, if you disconnect, you will be able to continue looting the rest of the chests even if you end up in a different map instance, but you are limited in the total number of chests you loot. The restrictions are account-wide.

As a followup, we noticed some suspicious behavior in regards to Thyme prior to the build, which was an ingredient for Savory Winterberry Sauce. The recipe was adjusted to no longer require Thyme Leaves, and the steak and salad recipes are now available to purchase.

X T D.6458:

Gaile Gray.6029:

Skritts are back on the job, doing what skritts do. Contract with them at your own risk, of course.

Did they fix the bug where the skritt get stuck in terrain and don’t open the stash?

If the skritt hasn’t been able to loot the stash for you after 30 seconds, he now gives up and refunds your contract.

Tekoneiric.6817:

Gaile Gray.6029:

There is an issue with the Skritt Worker Contracts that will be addressed as soon as possible. In the meantime, we have temporarily disabled the contracts.

So they went on strike?

Yeah, some people found a loophole in their contract that allowed them to avoid paying the skritt workers for their labor. The skritt have gone on strike until a new contract can be negotiated.

Nokaru.7831:

For clarification, there are 3 skins, right? Experimental Envoy Armor, Refined Envoy Armor, Legendary Envoy Armor.

Yes, this is correct.

How do we get the recipes for these precursor armor exactly? Is it free or do we buy it?
If we buy it, what will the cost be for these recipes? Will it be expensive?
Can you tell us the recipe for the crafting the additional Refined Envoy Armor?

The recipes will either be given out with the Refined Envoy Armor, or else available for a small cost- I haven’t finalized this, but it’s not intended that acquiring the recipes would be expensive aside from being locked behind the collections. I can’t say the exact recipes, but it will be similar to crafting a set of ascended armor.

Do we put Refined Envoy Armor in the Mystic Forge for the Legendary Envoy Armor? Does this mean someone completing Legendary Envoy Armor is going to have one set of extra ascended armor (Experimental Envoy Armor) and one set of legendary armor (Legendary Envoy Armor)?

Yes, you will put the Refined Envoy Armor pieces into the mystic forge along with the legendary gifts to create the Legendary Envoy Armor. You get to keep the Experimental Envoy Armor- you will need to salvage ascended items to create the legendary gifts, but you can salvage other ascended gear if you want to keep the first armor set.

Rednik.3809:

Ayrilana.1396:

For those who don’t use Reddit:

2: The armors aren’t destroyed- you get 2 complete sets of ascended armor by completing the collections.

kitten? Why the hell I made all my legendaries and got nothing but legendary in the end, but raiders are allowed to be special snowflakes?

To clarify, the final precursor set is consumed when you convert it to legendary, similar to how Dusk is consumed when creating Twilight- the main difference from the legendary weapon collections is that you don’t have to salvage the first precursor in order to make the next tier, and there are only 2 tiers for the legendary armor journey as opposed to 3 for weapons.

As some players have started to discover the information related to the journey for Legendary Armor included with the Stronghold of the Faithful, I wanted to give some additional information and clarifications about the overall journey. Upon completing the Envoy Armor I collection, the achievement awards a box of Experimental Envoy Armor, out of which you can choose one set of ascended armor: light, medium, or heavy. This armor is similar to the early-stage precursor weapons crafted when working towards the legendary precursor weapon. The armor is not the final precursor, and you should feel free to choose a set based on which appearance or type of armor that you would like to have.

Completing the Envoy Armor I collection will unlock the Envoy Armor II collection to begin the next step of the journey. Similarly to how the first collection was revealed over the course of the Forsaken Thicket releases, this collection has some items that are tied to future content which will be revealed when that content is released. However, since creating the legendary armor involves more than just earning the precursor armor pieces, the NPC who helps out with the Envoy Armor II collection provides information as to what is required to make the legendary gifts, so that players working on this journey know what to collect in order to complete their armor.

Upon completion of the Envoy Armor II collection, you will receive another box of armor and this will be the final stage of precursor armor. These will be the items you can upgrade to legendary armor in the Mystic Forge. This armor box will similarly require you to choose an armor type, and it will award a set of precursor armors of that type. However, it also will unlock crafting recipes to craft all three types of precursor armor, so anyone wanting to create different types of legendary armor or additional armors for their other characters will be able to do so. Obtaining a Refined Envoy Armor will unlock the corresponding Experimental Envoy Armor skin, so players wanting to unlock all of these skins will be able to do that by creating the Refined Envoy Armors when they have been unlocked.

A few players have noticed that new items can be obtained in the Mystic Forge since last week’s update. We added a number of new items to the possible rewards for combining rare weapons in the mystic forge, including Bloodbound weapons, Aetherized weapons, Shadow of the Mad King weapons, and some orphaned skins from Living World season 1.

This was a part of a bigger update to the mystic forge which wasn’t quite ready for this patch, so we pulled most of the changes as well as the release notes. However, since this change did go into the build, I wanted to let everyone know about it.

Arlee.7038:

So I was in Spirit Vale and I was about to buy one of the Talismans from the vendor which you have to kill Vale Guardian to unlock. But then our raid leader said for people to logout and get the update so I did that. Now the Talismans are locked and I can’t buy them :/

The Talismans are rewards from Sabetha, and they should require killing her to purchase. In fixing the bug where killing bosses wasn’t unlocking the boss rewards, that restriction was corrected, though the text won’t accurately reflect it until the next non-hotfix build.

The boxes that were previously available on the vendor were the same boxes as you could get from fractal dailies. Unfortunately, there’s no way we could distinguish boxes purchased from the raid in order to set up a way to exchange or update them.

If you have unused armor boxes purchased from the raid vendor from before the patch, Support may be able to exchange it for one of the new chests that do offer the new stat combinations if you open up a ticket with them.

Asuaka.1528:

Crystal Reid.2481:

On Rewards
…

Any plans on adding all the ascended trinkets to the vendor? Right now those are the only rings/amulets with stats like assassin, viper, etc

Yes, I’ve got a number of improvements/fixes for Spirit Vale that will be coming out with the next raid wing, and this is one of them. You’ll also be able to infuse the rings and backpack, and extra raid miniatures will no longer clutter up your bags.

The Compendiums of Knowledge automatically give you experience towards your active HoT mastery when you loot them from the chest. Did you not get the experience towards your masteries when you looted the chest, or were you just expecting the items to be in your inventory?

We are planning on having a solution for this that should come out with the second raid wing. I would recommend saving any extra miniatures that you get until then.

khani.4786:

Some of these are unlikely to be used in the first place, but it’d be nice to have an answer regardless

Yes/No on these:

Rune of the Privateer
Rune of the Ogre
Rune of Infiltration
Rune of the Grove
Rune of the Sunless
Rune of the Lich
Rune of Snowfall
Rune of Rata Sum
Rune of the Mad King
Rune of the Flock

Sigil of Demon Summoning
Sigil of Impact
Sigil of Mischef

Ghost Pepper Popper (and other food that is day/night specific)

These should all work – the only item upgrades (sigils/runes) that are disabled are the ones that specifically provide benefits versus specific enemy types. The raid is not set at nighttime, so sigil of the night, and things that provide specific benefits at night don’t work. I don’t think any foods are disabled, and the only utility buffs that I recall disabling were the slaying potions from Artificer.

We disabled these upgrades because we don’t want everyone to have to be constantly changing the upgrades in their gear based on what they’re fighting in the raid in order to be optimal. These upgrades are bad to equip unless you’re fighting the specific enemy type, and we don’t want to create the situation where it’s optimal to swap out for Sigils of Ghost Slaying to fight through the spirit woods, then switch sigils when you get to Gorseval, then equip Sigils of Justice for Sabetha, and then swap out for whatever sigils you usually use when you leave the raid.

Kessex Liberator looks like it should work correctly, though it does depend on other events in the map being completed before it will reset.

Brisban Liberator: it’s likely the case that the Hillstead events should also work, but the collection is currently looking at the enslavement event at Joy’s end (and the subsequent rescue if the event fails).

Overlord’s Defeat and Modniir’s ruin have issues- I’ve identified the problems and we’ll hopefully have them fixed soon.

Frizz’s energy- I can’t see any issues with this, and it’s working fine when I test it out- it works with both the low half-wall as well as the big rotating wall.

For the events breaking, we’re looking into them- they’re working fine for me on the development servers, but hopefully we’ll be able to find the issues.

If you have the Jotun Star unlocked in the collection, you should be able to complete the “Laying the Star to Rest” by visiting the runestone near Heimdall’s Last Stand- it checks that you have recieved the star, not that you have it with you.

Andrew.5468:

What’s your name?
Andy
What do you do at ArenaNet? (Descriptions of the work you do are preferred over just a job title!)
I worked on creature skills and other game systems largely involved with PvE combat (i.e. sidekicking and stuff like that) for several years. Most recently, I was responsible for the Mordrem in Dry Top and Silverwastes and I got to design the Wyvern skills before moving off to the rewards team. I’ve worked on the Map Bonuses system and Precursor crafting in HoT.
What has been your involvement with Raids?
I’m the guy designing and setting up the rewards.
What feature of Raids are you most excited about? (Obviously just the bits you’re authorized to talk about!)
I’m really looking forward to having content that is really challenging and seeing the unexpected ways that everyone finds to beat it.
What’s a funny story about something that’s happened to you or your party while play-testing Raids? (Obviously no spoilers! )
In a test of a prototype boss encounter, due to some of the mechanics of the fight, I accidentally stomped Chris Cleary’s character.
What was your favorite encounter from the existing dungeon/fotm content? Why?
Molten Boss Fractal – because it rewards situational awareness and paying attention to the boss skills

And this time from the correct account

Immobilize also doesn’t currently affect the defiance bar currently. I’m somewhat of two minds on this condition, though- as it effects only movement, a lot of bosses aren’t punished by it, but it can be exploitative for melee bosses, especially in coordinated, small-group situations like dungeons or fractals.

Me Games Ma.8426:

All on interrupt effects trigger when you interrupt a boss monster that has defiant stacks on it. It just won’t interrupt the mob.
Halting strike triggers the damage, Chaotic Interruption will inflict the conditions and Bountiful Interruption will buff the mesmer. The only thing that does not happen is the interrupt.

In that case, those traits should still trigger when using an interrupt ability on a creature with the new defiance bar.

Shiki.7148:

spoj.9672:

Many conditions are reduced by unshakeable simply to balance them for boss fights. If blinds worked without fail on bosses they would be overpowered. However in unshakeables current form blind is still completely useless. The other conditions only have reduced duration. Blind is different to movement impairing conditions as Drarnor mentioned. Its a form of hard CC for trash mobs but doesnt work on bosses because it would be too strong. Now it will atleast have a use. Chill, cripple and weakness already work fine on bosses. And frankly it would be over the top if they reduced the break bar. Chill only increases cooldown time. It has no effect on the skill when it is cast.

I dont even know how you could come to the conclusion that they would count towards it in the first place. The unshakeable buff hardly makes for a convincing reason.

They said “all kinds of CC”, and Cripple and Chill are CC’s in my book – they slow down the opponent, chill even slows cooldowns. Imho they would have said something like “everything that currently strips defiance” instead of “every CC” if those were excluded. If they are, well, just another thing to make Necros garbage in PvE. And as I said, maybe chill will at least slow the recharge of the bar.

Cripple and Chill are not currently prevented by the defiance bar. We have discussed including these conditions, but the effect that they have on bosses is significantly less than other control abilities. For ranged bosses, cripple does nothing to hinder them, and even for melee bosses, it’s uncommon for them to not have targets in range to attack. The cooldown increase on chill makes a better case for it being included, but it’s currently not prevented by the defiance system. We may adjust this based on balance and feedback, but at the current time, we don’t feel like they have a reliable enough control effect on bosses to be included in the defiance system.

Plexxing.2978:

For the new defiance bar:
How will traited interrupts affect the bar?
1) Will traits that give additional effect to a control effect, such as Mesmer Halting Strike trait (Domination 2) or Necromancer Terror (Curses 9), impart a greater effect on the bar?

2) If you have a trait that activates on an interrupt, such as Mesmer Confounding Suggestions (Domination 12), will using a control effect on the bar count as an interrupt proccing such a trait to further deplete the bar?

3) Will effects from traits, sigils (and food?) that increase durations of control effects, such as Necromancer Master of Terror (Soul Reaping 9), impact the bar more?

Effects that trigger on control abilities or interrupts are treated in the same way as they are with the current Defiance system when the boss has one or more stacks of defiance. I believe they don’t trigger, though I’d have to go test it out to be sure.

For things that increase the duration of control effects, those will increase the effect that the skill will have on the defiance bar- a necromancer with Master of Terror will remove 50% more of the defiance bar with their fear abilities than a necromancer without the trait.

When the bar is emptied, the boss will be affected by his defiance behavior, such as getting stunned or becoming vulnerable. After that happens, there’s a cooldown period where the boss is completely immune to crowd control, and then the defiance bar is filled and becomes active again.

This can somewhat depend on the boss, though, as some have custom defiance behavior like the Wyvern. For the Wyvern, there’s no cooldown period, but it is immune to CC except for during its takeoff skill, and the defiance bar is disabled at other times.

Foefaller.1082:

Oh my goodness… I just thought of something…

Dark fields blind with leap and blast finishers, and smoke fields do that with projectile and whirl finishers.

Will Necromancers be called to drop a well on queue that everyone blasts to help chip down the breakbar? Or a thief a smoke screen for the party to shoot through?

Yeah, the easy access to blindness through combo fields is something that we’re paying attention to in balancing break bars, though it isn’t as impactful as it initially appears. Most control abilities aren’t projectiles or leap or blast finishers, so the skill combo generally comes at the cost of the player using a skill that doesn’t cause CC on it’s own.

On the other hand, skill combos do provide a good way that people can coordinate to get a bit more progress against the bar, and can be used to help people running builds without much control to contribute.

Effect clutter in large group situations is something that we’re aware of and have been working on improving, though it’s a difficult challenge with tradeoffs between having good communication of the abilities, especially in smaller combat situations or PvP, versus readability and visibility in large fights.

One advantage we have with the Wyvern is that it is big enough to rise out of the haze of effects so that it’s easy to see the skill animations and effects without being too big to the point that you can’t tell what it’s doing when you’re close to it.

Sorry about that- it was accidentally broken when we were working on some other things. We should have this fixed soon.

We made some changes in the build today, though it looks like we may have missed release notes for the wraiths. The champion wraiths should now lose 2 stacks of defiance each tick of their life drain, and they won’t channel it as long. The Lyssa event was also scaling the veterans and champions more than intended, which should be resolved now (this was in the release notes). The creatures in that event were getting scaled up by both the old and new event scaling methods, so they were doing significantly more damage, and took far longer to kill than intended.

There were no changes to make any creatures harder than they previously were in the patch on Tuesday, and the damage on Veterans and Champions in the events using the new event scaling should be significantly closer to what was intended.

We’re still looking at the difficulty of these events, and may make more changes in the future. If anybody has played any of the events using the new scaling since the patch, feedback is definitely welcome.

nowitsawn.1276:

The Zed.7129:

Jeffrey Vaughn.1793:

It’s displaying the daileys based on your system time, but the server actually hands out credit for completing them. So you need to your system time to the correct time. (It’s probably set for the wrong date.)

So has anyone tried setting their system clock to February? Are we able to preview next months Monthlies as well?

Haha, oh wow. It actually works.

For February it is:
Monthly Dungeon Participation (3 tiers)
Monthly Event Participation (4 tiers)
Monthly Salvage Kit usages (4 tiers)
Monthly Completionist ‘’You completed your daily category multiple times in a month’’…?

And another fun fact, the monthlies for December 2013 include Tixx’s workshop. So I guess we can expect his return?
Edit: unless we have the same Christmas event until 2069 (didn’t bother checking further), I’ll just assume it’s set to a standard rotation

Do note that we generally make and update upcoming monthly achievements for upcoming months when we do updates. The achievements are currently set up for other months, but any of the monthly achievements beyond February are likely to change before we get to those months.

Derk.3189:

Stormleaf.1769:

Erulogos.2591:

Quoting you both as you both make the same argument, essentially, and miss the same issue.

The issue is not with -current- content. No Ascended gear is required to finish every dungeon and kill every boss currently walking Tyria.

The issue is with -future- content. It was stated, when Ascended gear was announced, that Agony (and thus Agony resist) was something that would be involved in content going forward. It was not stated, one way or the other, if it would be required to even attempt future content, and it therefore becomes a simple question: grind Ascended and Agony resist now, so you are ready for the new content no matter what, or wait and see if it will be required, and hope that, if it is, enough other people waited that you can get groups to grind it out.

It is true that as of this moment in time, the grind heavy gear is not required to see any of the content in the game. But we don’t know when or if it will be, and Anet has not said one way or the other. A lot of folks saying it is required are basically taking the cautious path, assuming it will be and preparing for the worst.

The issue with this is that ArenaNet could have easily made this content require Agony resistance from the beginning as well, by making it some Mystic Forge thing and introducing Agony at fractal level 1. They didn’t; heck, they even made it so low levels can participate. Exotics aren’t even a requirement for the early difficulty levels. If they didn’t do it now, why do you think they’re magically going to start doing it in the future? None of the content in GW2 has been restricted like that. There is zero indication of ArenaNet ever restricting content like that, and it’s simply not helpful to base your argument on an assumption that they’ll magically start doing it.

AHHAHA You really think they did that for the players? Its just there to draw out the content, an additional carrot on another stick. Oh you want to see what agony is like? Hit me up 10 levels.

The Agony mechanic wasn’t introduced at the start of the dungeon so that everybody can experience the content. While one of the goals of the Fractals of the Mists dungeon was to provide some difficult content for players looking for a challenge, we also wanted the dungeon to be available for everybody to experience. While getting far into the dungeon requires agony resistance from ascended gear, the content was designed to provide challenging content, and to allow players to choose what difficulty they wanted to play at.

As for ascended gear, to reiterate what Chris has said (https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/info/news/A-message-from-our-Studio-Design-Director-Chris-Whiteside), it’s not intended as a treadmill, but rather as a tier of rewards that can help bridge the gap between Exotics (a few hours of effort to acquire a piece) and Legendaries (hundreds of hours of effort to acquire one). They’re currently only available in the Fractals of the Mist Dungeon, but we’re going to be adding new ways to acquire them, both inside of WvW as well as elsewhere in PvE.

This is something that existed prior to ascended gear, and was something that we saw happen all the time in GW1, even without any sort of gear progression. Some players, typically people who play the game a lot, tend to only want to play with other players that play like them. They require some sort of proof to get into their party, whether it be displaying your Lightbringer Title, equipping or linking some type of gear, or using some other method of showing that you have already done and are experienced with the content. While ascended gear might be the new excuse, this behavior happens regardless.

While this is not really something that we want to encourage, players do have the choice to play the game in the way they want. We can’t force those players to be all-inclusive in who they invite to the parties they create, and to be honest, doing so would probably make people even more unhappy than they are now, and lead to a lot of undesirable behavior.

Salvaging PvP items should only give the PvP materials (tokens, dust, etc). If you remember what it is that you salvaged that gave you PvE materials, could you let me know?

The intent was for the satchels to require the same amount of materials as crafting the individual pieces. I’m not sure where this got broken for these, but I’ll take a look at it.

To clarify, when drops are scaled to your level, there is a chance that they’ll either be level-appropriate for you or level-appropriate for the content that you’re completing. You’ll get a mix, allowing you to collect zone-appropriate crafting materials and drops while also still being able to find gear that’s appropriate for your character. In general, the chance of getting character-level appropriate gear is better the closer that the content is to your actual level. Since the difficulty of the content increases at higher levels, we want to reward high-level players more for playing through the challenging high-level content that is available more than if they play through the easier low-level content that’s designed to let players learn to play the game.

Additionally, when you get gear at a specific level, it’s not guaranteed to be gear that requires that level to equip. It’s not uncommon to fight enemies a couple levels higher than you, and it’s frustrating to get cool new drops from the enemies and not be able to equip them. Generally, the required level to use a piece of gear is a few levels below the level of the area it was acquired, so that when you get gear as loot, you’re able to equip it immediately.

edit:
About the plains of Ashford giving out level 26 rewards, thanks for the heads up- I double checked, and this area is indeed giving out inappropriate loot. I’ve entered a bug on this and hopefully we’ll have it fixed in an upcoming build.