Guild Wars 2

It just seems odd that only one new event would have been added on the third day, when the second day was almost all new events. The only one I remember carrying over from the first day to the second was destroying turrets, with all the others being new.

Contrasting that against the changes from the second day to the third—only one new event, several from the second day, and several more carried forward all the way from the first day—makes me wonder if something went wrong in the scripting. I won’t be able to do the fourth day until later this evening, but can someone else who has already done it mention how many new events there are today?

Today’s patch notes state:

Wintersday
*Fixed an issue where content from previous days could appear in the Infininarium Instance.

However, when I ran the instance for the first time this evening—after the patch had come out—I still got almost entirely old events. They weren’t overlapping like other people have reported, but the only new event was to defend the toy assembly line from the toy soldiers. In total, I got:

-Gather plant food for toy Ventaris (Day 1)
-Destroy turrets (Day 1)
-Paint princess dolls (Day 2)
-Defend princess dolls’ hamlet (Day 2)
-Protect toy Ventaris from princess dolls (Day 2)
-Defend assembly line from toy soldiers (new)

Did I just happen to get unlucky, or was there really only one new event added for today?

When I used a phantasm build, I went with 10/15/0/25/20 to pick up Phantasmal Haste, but I dropped that build after the Warden interaction with PH was corrected. I would probably still spec that way in terms of points, but I would go with Elasticity as the 20-point illusions trait now.

Deceptive Evasion is really nice—I love it in my current build—but it’s not as important for a phantasm-centric build, I found. That was for PvE/WvW, though, not sPvP.

Ursan.7846:

While obviously, the term “intricate” is a matter of opinion, there’s still some nice skins out there that fall in your category (30-70g range).

There’s some dungeon skins that are pretty nice. Arah weapons have a slight glow to them. AC weapons glow at night. CoE weapons have that electric things going on.

You have the mystic weapons too, which are just like CoE weapons but blue. Very affordable. http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Mystic_weapon

There were some halloween skins too that falls under this category. I remember during Halloween, the Greatsaw was around 50-60G. I’m sure it’s much more expensive now, but I have a feeling Wintersday will have something similar.

There’s the Corrupted weapons, which take around 30 Corrupted Lodestones, which go around I think ~1g50s ish on the market. Which is about what, 45g? Also falls into this range.

There are plenty of these medium-tiered skins out there, you just have to look for them!

At least for my playstyle, I would consider dungeon weapons to be easily attainable in the short-term. They only require 5-6 runs’ worth of tokens to get, which takes a few days at most, assuming you can get consistent groups for the desired dungeons (which can sometimes be a pain, admittedly). That’s not to say that some of them aren’t pretty, or otherwise interesting—I really like my TA staff, and I plan to get some of the Arah weapons as well—but I do think they’re fairly low-effort to acquire.

Mystic weapons are similarly quick to acquire, given their low cost. I think the key point is not that there are no skins which are both easy to acquire and interesting-looking—there are, which is great!—but that there seems to be a large gap in terms of effort require to attain various things. You either have the quick, easy skins or you have the absurdly difficult skins, with not much in between. If you think of the effort in attaining the various types of weapons as a slope, it ends up looking more like a stairstep than a smooth incline.

T3 cultural weapons are closer to what I was thinking of, given the 63,000 karma cost. Assuming you do most/all of the dailies and some events on the side, that’s about one or two weeks per weapon; I suppose I didn’t consider them here because I have such a large stock of karma already built up, even after actually buying a couple of them already. I completely missed the corrupted weapons, too, which also seem to fit the bill.

Thanks for the suggestions…I might just have to start saving for a corrupted focus.

Gilosean.3805:

Well, gigantic quest for legendary weapons is coming, so you could just stockpile materials until then and get a legendary.

We know that ANet is working on all kinds of things right now. I’d wait a bit to see what kind of skins come out.

Even if precursors were to become totally free, legendaries would still cost several hundred gold (close to 1000 gold, in some cases) due to the other required materials, which all fall into the categories listed at the start: lodestones, ectoplasm, T6 materials.

I actually think that’s a fundamental flaw of the current recipes, whether legendary or not—they all require the same few materials, which drives demand for those materials through the roof and straight into the stratosphere, given the incredibly limited supply—but it’s a somewhat separate issue from the one I mentioned in the original post. Reducing the prices of those materials (say, by increasing drop rates, or decreasing the amounts required) might make previously-unattainable items reasonably affordable, but it still doesn’t address the issue of there being a gap between the very entry-level items and the very high-end items, with really nothing in the middle.

Hopefully, ANet will address this issue by adding more items in the future that fall into a mid-level price/effort range, but it goes against the pattern we’ve seen from the items added post-launch thus far. Both the Halloween craftable skins and the Mystic Forge back items require just as many materials—if not more—of the same few types as all of the existing high-end exotics, with the inevitable result being that their prices are every bit as high if not higher.

Just a note up front: This is NOT intended to be a discussion of the merits—or lack thereof—of ascended equipment. As the title states, I would like to restrict this to cosmetic goals only, rather than getting caught up in the endless back and forth surrounding the issue of vertical progression.

Lodestones.
Ectoplasm.
T6 materials.

What do all of these have in common, besides their recent, meteoric rises in price? They’re all used in significant quantities to create many of the Mystic Forge exotic weapons, most notably the guardian/mesmer/elementalist summoned weapons, but also one-off skins like the Stygian Blade, Infinite Light, Immobulus, and so on. Even the special holiday weapon skins require some or all of those materials.

I dislike playing the trading post, and I have neither have the inclination nor the time to farm for 10 hours a day, so I probably won’t ever get one of those weapons. It would be nice if there were other ways of attaining them (perhaps a lengthy quest series for each weapon, along the lines of Everquest II’s class-specific epic weapon quests), but even if that never happens, the cost required to acquire them doesn’t really bother me; they’re just meant for people who are willing to spend more time in the game than I am, or who get incredibly lucky with a one-in-a-million drop.

However, I think there is something missing in the game as it is right now—namely, attainable mid-tier items that are also desirable enough to entice players to work towards them. On the one hand, you have pearl weapons and similarly inexpensive (and correspondingly plain) named exotics, and on the other, you have incredibly expensive, multi-hundred gold exotics with all sorts of flashy particle effects and animations; where are the weapons targeted at, say, the 30-70 gold range, with more intricate designs than the former and more subtle effects than the latter?

As it stands right now, I don’t see myself ever switching out any of the weapon skins on my main character, simply because none of the skins I could afford in the foreseeable future are in any way interesting. I certainly don’t mind the existence of all of the high-end skins—if nothing else, they make people-watching in Lion’s Arch interesting—but I would like to have a realistic, interesting goal to look forward to on my own character.

At least for me, one of the bigger problems with mantras is that they’re boring, not that they’re ineffective.

In a class with so many utility skills that are both useful and have interesting effects (Blink, Decoy, Portal, Feedback, Arcane Thievery, and so on), I have a hard time dedicating slots to skills that all follow the same basic model of, “Press button to get effect X,” where effect X can be summed up in two words at most. Even among non-Mesmer classes, it’s fairly rare for utility skills to be so straightforward; most of them have some sort of secondary ability, trigger criteria to do something else, or lingering effect. Simple skills are probably easier to balance, since they always do the same thing in any situation, but it seems like mantras have been balanced into homogeneity—and, especially for a class like Mesmer, that’s really disappointing to see.

I would love to see something more along the lines of the Illusion skills someone above posted, or at least giving the existing mantras some conditional effects; maybe MoD could give stealth for a few seconds if used to interrupt a skill that was specifically targeted at you, or MoP could add a few stacks of confusion if used on an enemy in the middle of casting a heal skill. Really, it would just be nice to give them some additional flavor, not necessarily much/any more raw power.

Carighan.6758:

Interesting. A 15% reduction in CD is roughly equivalent to a 20% increase in attacks done over a given timespan.
Not what the trait states, but too much of a pattern to be chance.

That’s true, but I think one problem with looking at it from that perspective (aside from it blatantly not being what the trait says) is that phantasm damage is too “packetized,” for lack of a better term, for it to matter much.

If phantasms worked more like clones and just autoattacked, then you would get a relatively smooth damage curve over time, and the trait would start being useful essentially immediately. As it stands, though, phantasm damage is lumped into large discrete attacks, and speeding those up just doesn’t matter all that much given the nature of mesmer combat in the game; enemies die relatively quickly, resulting in our phantasms disappearing, and we’re also encouraged to shatter and resummon even during a single longer fight.

Taking the Duelist as an example, you won’t end up with an extra attack due to the trait until 45-ish seconds have passed since it was summoned. No enemies will last that long, except champions, and your Duelist is almost certain to have died/been shattered/overwritten/etc. in the interim anyways. In fact, given the cooldown timer on the skill itself, you’re probably better off shattering and resummoning no matter what.

I guess what I’m saying is that, bugged or not, Phantasmal Haste seems like a pretty bad trait simply due to the way phantasms function in general. Even if the trait worked exactly as described, you still wouldn’t get an extra attack out of a Duelist until 30 seconds from its summoning; while there are minor benefits to speeding up its attacks prior to that point, it doesn’t seem like they oughtweigh what you have to sacrifice by not taking other traits.

penatbater.4710:

One armor combination I’m really wondering about is the power/crit/vit, since, if you have no prec, idk how you can get much crit % to make good use of the +crit dmg.

To make best use of that armor, you have to be one of the classes that can stack crit chance via traits, ideally in conjunction with raw precision from the relevant trait line. Thief is probably the biggest beneficiary, since they can get a trait effect for 100% crit chance on any hit made from stealth, but Guardian and Engineer can stack a pretty significant amount as well (maybe others, too, but those are the ones I’m most familiar with).

Alternatively—or additionally—you could mix Valkyrie gear with other gear like Rampager’s, Berserker’s, or Knight’s, depending on whether you want to emphasize survivability even more or sacrifice a bit for damage of some sort.

This, to me, is pretty concerning. In many FTP games, it’s fairly common to see various types of gamble packs for weapons, armor, mounts, and so on; they work basically the same way regardless of the game. On opening, you have a random chance on opening to get either the “real” prize—i.e., what you actually bought it for, such as the aforementioned weapons/armor/etc.—or one of a selection of “lesser” prizes such as experience boosters, repair kits, sellables, debt reducers, and so on. Sounds pretty much like the BLTC chests, right?

They may seem like a fun gamble, at first, but they have some fairly nasty aspects as well. First of all, your chance of getting the real prize is always very low—think along the lines of getting a precursor from the Mystic Forge, based on some of the statistical analysis I remember seeing for one game in particular. This is done for both obvious reasons—lower odds means more cash spent on attempts—and more subtle ones, like a rarer item being considered higher-prestige, more desirable (thus likely to prompt more people to try it), and so on. That may be frustrating, and arguably exploitative of people with low self-control, but it’s not necessarily bad all in all, especially since we don’t know that ANet will go with the standard sub-1% FTP odds.

That, actually, is the truly concerning part, and it’s a somewhat less obvious problem than the low odds issue. By not making the odds publically available, the company has leeway to adjust those odds in their favor—meaning, for example, that the odds of getting a weapon skin could be initially elevated, resulting in a number of people getting lucky, and then dropped to the “standard”, lower level after a while, and after people have already received a now-false impression of their chances to win. That, then, obviously encourages over-investment in the cash shop by those who weren’t lucky enough to get in on the first wave with the raised odds.

I think most people would agree that, regardless of opinions on how fun or fair the gambling aspect seems, the second issue is more than a bit unethical. It also sounds like a tinfoil conspiracy theory, but it was statistically demonstrated to occur in at least one game, Atlantica Online (unfortunately, it was on the now-dead official forums from before the game was sold to another publisher, so I can’t provide corroborating links), and suspected in others. Will ANet do that? I would like to think not, but the lack of transparency makes it possible—and, given that gambling boxes are inherently all about making huge profits (seriously…Atlantica Online sustains itself almost wholly off of various gambling boxes) off of impulsive behavior and low odds, manipulation of those odds isn’t out of the realm of possibility.

I should close by saying that I do thoroughly enjoy this game, bugs and all, and I don’t have any problem with the idea of a cash shop or of things being exclusively available on the cash shop. I do inherently dislike gambling boxes, though, primarily for their lack of transparency, and it would disappoint me greatly to see GW2 go the way of other FTP titles by coming to rely more and more on them over time.

Yes, I’m noticing this too. What’s really odd is that it didn’t start happening right away for me. I did a bit of PvE, including a few Orr events (specifically, the Melandru’s Temple chain) with close to 100 players, and I didn’t have any problems then; now that I think back on it, though, there were a number of people there complaining that they couldn’t see the chest afterwards, so I wonder if that might have been related.

Then I went into WvW and ran around with a decent-sized group of people—probably 20ish, I’d guess—and got into a few skirmishes without noticing this issue. Then we attacked a tower, and that’s when everything came unraveled. People just started fading away, both friendlies and enemies, and then various objects like siege equipment vanished too. I ended up dying to…something, and then I couldn’t even see the NPCs at the keep where I respawned, so I left WvW at that point.

Logging to another character seemed to fix the issue, but I didn’t stay on long enough to see if it would have come back after a while.

Edit: Sanctum of Rall server, if it matters, and I was in SoR Borderlands when I noticed the problem.

Your target might have dropped, which would have caused the skills not to summon clones (yet still go on full cooldown). The targeting system in GW2 is…lacking, to say the least, and I’ve noticed during many fights that my target will very frequently switch away from what I initially selected onto some other random thing in the area—usually a friendly PC/NPC, but sometimes another enemy or even an environmental object.

I’ve gotten to be pretty OCD about checking to make sure my target is still what I want before using any illusion-summoning skills, because they will fail if anything but an in-range enemy is targeted. Annoying, but not much to be done about it until/unless the bugs in the targeting system are fixed.

I’m not sure if this is the correct place for this, but there isn’t a general combat forum; basically, I’m hoping to get some discussion on or insight into the aggro/hate mechanics in this game. I completely understand that there are no explicit taunts/deaggros/etc., but there has to be something driving the AI decisions on who to target—and, from my vantage point both as a player and as someone who has done AI development in the past, those decisions don’t make a whole lot of sense in many cases. Even worse, when they do go haywire, they don’t produce very enjoyable battle situations.

The most obvious example is when a mob or group of mobs decides all of a sudden to fixate on a particular player like a heat-seeking missile. When this happens, nothing—absolutely nothing—will cause the mob(s) to move to or attack anything but that player until one of them is dead. I play a mesmer, and when this happens to me, I can dodge, stealth, spawn clones, shatter clones, teleport, yank mobs away from me, slow them, root them, on and on and on. Stealth may or may not cause them to break momentarily (there seems to be a timing bug where stealthing at the exact moment your autoattack fires will cause the stealth to not take effect but still cause the full cooldown), but the instant the stealth wears off, they’re right back chasing me again. All the while, my phantasms pour damage into them and, assuming the mobs don’t have especially nasty crowd control or ranged attacks, eventually they die without ever having even tried to do anything but run in circles after me.

This isn’t something class-specific, either. Most of the time, I play grouped up with a thief, and we’ve had situations where he will hit a mob once and then have it chase him around from 99% health to death while I and my illusions whittle it down—with him never attacking it again. Furthermore, it isn’t limited just to players; I’ve had mobs fixate just as hard on a particular phantasm, to the point where an iWarden supported by two iDefenders actually face-tanked a champion mob for an entire fight with myself and several other players burning it down. Either way, it’s not especially fun to run in circles for an entire fight or to plink away risk-free at a mob chasing after someone.

Then, there are the aggro mechanics which aren’t as obviously bugged but which still seem annoying/unenjoyable, at least to me. Downed state seems to pretty reliably cause mobs to fixate on players in the manner previously described, and the only reason I don’t consider this a bug is because it makes some sense that they would want to “finish off” someone who’s downed. It isn’t particularly conducive to fun, though, when being downed almost inevitably ends up meaning dying shortly thereafter unless you rally due to a coincidental kill on a low health mob.

So, have other people noticed this and found rational explanations, or am I just imagining things/personally bugged (don’t laugh; it’s been known to happen)? Also, are there any other odd aggro mechanics people have noticed?

This isn’t only an issue with dynamic events, either; just when wandering around and exploring, it’s pretty easy to run across some blatantly bugged or mistuned spawners. The best example I can think of is in areas that have spiders that drop down off of trees/cave ceilings/etc., where the spawn is tied to passing a trigger line. You can run back and forth over the trigger line and every time—no matter how little time you wait—another spider will spawn. If you’re kiting something in the area, you can easily end up with a dozen or so spiders following you around after a little while.

Also, any mob that spawns minions (e.g., veteran dredge mining suit, veteran icebrood elemental) seems to spawn infinitely many at a fairly rapid rate. I was doing the Claw of Jormag event last night and, during the pre-event to destroy the crystals, six or so veteran elementals managed to spawn so many minions that they wouldn’t even all load onto the screen.