Guild Wars 2

https://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Fencer's_Finesse

Bugs: This mesmer trait procs on ambient creatures. When the trait activates, it puts you into combat.

How to reproduce: Be a mesmer, select this trait, kill some ambies. Normally, this wouldn’t put you into combat, but it does, and the icon appears on the buff bar.

I don’t think ambient creatures are supposed to affect the core combat too much, so this might also be seen as a balance issue (that said, the trait is absurdly easy to stack to ten in normal combat and each stack barely does anything)

About Ether Renewal: It doesn’t fit into any of our skill classes, but I can think of a workaround. ANet should make it the heal that eles start with in the tutorial so that it doesn’t need to be unlocked with a reward track, and thus doesn’t need a category. Simple enough.

I’m worried about glyphs. Combining the glyph traits does buff them somewhat, but there still isn’t anywhere near enough there to make a full-fledged “glyph build” that can benefit from the Glyph of Restoration and the underused utilities. I’m sad that I’ve never been able to run a “glyph ele” since glyphs are my favorite mechanically of all of the utility categories….

I really hope Ether Renewal doesn’t become a cantrip, mostly for flavor reasons rather than balance honestly. I don’t see why ANet don’t just make it the heal you start out with in the tutorial so it doesn’t need to fit into a reward track?

As an engineer, equip a kit and zoom into first person mode. The backpack is all in your face. Switching to a kit while already in first person does not cause this issue.

Potential fix: remove kit backpacks.

I keep getting a dialog box saying the game can’t connect to the login servers, even though I’m logged in. Very similar to this issue froma year ago that I found from googling. Any help/suggestions/etc.?

The Frost Aura stacks duration. Fire Shield does not, even though there are more ways to activate it (signet-aura traits). I wish sig-aura builds were viable…. Maybe if they made an “aura gives vigor” trait in the water line or something

WASD to move (I only use turning; no strafe) actually I only use strafe
1234R wep skills
[Shift]234 utility skills
[Shift]R elite skill
Q to heal
E to dodge (I also use a pinky button on my mouse sometimes)
[Tab] to swap to next target
[Space] to jump
Z to toggle run
F1-F4 attune switch… or I use mouse buttons
F area loot or interact
Mouse right button hold to turn
Mouse Wheel zoom
` to destroy bundle/conjure or swap weps

I use R instead of 5 for wep skill so I don’t have to move my hand to the right all that much

(edit: formatting)
(2nd edit: I don’t use keyboard turns they are kitten)

The issue: When a charr character runs in snow, the footprints do not face the right way.

How to reproduce: Make a charr character and walk in snow. As far as I can tell it’s true for all charr player characters at medium/high graphics settings.

Come on Anet, seriously? How in the world did this one get through QA? Does anybody at Anet actually have a charr main? (this is a rhetorical question)

I’ve tried everything on this page and still have absolutely no chance:

When I focus on CCing Chomper, Strugar stuns and kills me. When I focus on mobility, all my skills go on cooldown, and I can’t pick up meat while in mist form. When I focus on defense, I’m able to kill Strugar but then time runs out with Chomper at full health.

The closest I’ve gotten is running S/F all glyphs except for signet heal, but even then it’s hard to get enough meat to actually do any reasonable damage before time runs out. I got them both down to half health.

How do you guys even see Strugar throw the meat with fire fields and particle effects everywhere? This is important. Also, where to farm for QG tickets? I cant bring myself to spend my tokens on them, and I’ve wasted all of mine.

If you’re willing to part with Elemental Attunement (!) I would recommend a signet/aura support build like this one, making use of Fire’s Embrace: http://gw2skills.net/editor/?fFAQJAoYhMMqbW2wtBdEBIAC5l92FUgR1E9A
It’s pretty different from meta ele builds; I used to run this in wvw just for the perma swiftness, but it’s a nice play-style, I think. One thing to remember is that fire aura doesn’t stack duration, so you need to stagger signet pops. Also, this has little survivability so it’s good to run pvt or knights or something.

The QD train is not an issue for all new players, it only affects the boring, unoriginal human players. The train indirectly makes it more enjoyable to start playing as a charr, asura, sylvari, or norn, and thereby encourages more character race diversity. I fully support the train for this reason!

If you join a party member on their personal story (I think it has to be the same step in the sequence, or earlier), you can choose to accept the results of their mission as your own. I heard somewhere that this can be used to switch Orders, but honestly it seems a little exploitable.

You can try joining someone as they do the first mission for their order and you switch to that order, I think. I can’t fact-check this right now, but it’s mentioning, right?

I’ve been running HotW paths 2 and 3 recently, which has gotten me thinking:

Which profession is the best for underwater content? I’m asking mostly for PvE, but it’d be nice to know for PvP as well, too.

I suspect it’s either ele or engi due to versatility, but I’d be surprised if the same amount of work went into underwater balance as land combat balance.

Hi, I’ve seen a lot of posts on the forum complaining about the changes to the trait system, but nothing about why Anet might have thought these changes are a good idea. What follows is my theory; if you have other ideas, please post them below!

The main aspect of an MMO like GW2 that determines its long-term success and retention of player base is the state of its endgame content. A game with a varied and engaging endgame is most likely to keep players interested for longer. I think this was on Anet’s mind because prior to the megaserver patch the game seemed sparse and underpopulated on most servers. Also, competitor MMOs like ESO and Wildstar are entering the market soon.

Anyway, so Anet has been talking about introducing more “horizontal progression” into the game, which is not a bad idea. This makes sitting at one level (in this case, the later levels) much more engaging for players, since they can distract themselves from the grind of leveling by hunting down trait unlocks that they will be able to use later. The new trait unlock method (do a world event, JP, etc.) is therefore in line with Anet’s vision, as is the Living World. These are both amazing ideas that should stay in the game, imo.

Now, Anet also concentrates the trait unlocks nearer to level cap. This is really the change that gets the most hate, and there are many other posts about its problems already. However, the good implications are as follows:

• Each level-up feels more significant closer to 80. When I leveled my ele, levels 70-80 was the part that felt most like a grind, even with personal story missions, so this is an important achievement.
• Once at level cap, the player doesn’t feel like they are “done.” Instead of placing the last piece into their build that they have already experimented with, they can now explore all of the different builds with GM traits.

Overall, this change makes the later levels less of a grind, and therefore more likely to retain players in the long run. Inadvertently, this also makes the early levels seem like even more of a grind, since the later levels are now the only fun bit of leveling. Players now feel like they need to zip past levels 1-30 in order to get to the interesting stuff. Players feel bad for being at a “low” level instead of proud of how far they’ve gotten so far. Games that can make players feel satisfied with their achievements at every step of the progression system are the ones that will win in today’s MMO economy.

TL;DR: The new trait system makes the later levels much less grindy, but makes the early levels feel like a total waste of time.

The new air GM trait is “Lightning Rod,” which looks to me like it has good damage, better than the lightning from Electric Discharge. other than that, I’m not sure what to make of it. My first guess is that it’s mean for staff eles because they have a few good interrupts, but I don’t think ele really has many interrupts at all, ignoring sigil effects.

Anyone have opinions on this? How useful is it, really?

The UI is clunkier now:

I. Equipment tab is hard to get to. Since Dyes and Wardrobe are in the same sub-tab as this, whenever I open the Hero Panel, wanting to switch out my weapon sets mid-dungeon or something, I have to first exit the dye/wardrobe sub-section and then click again enter the equipment sub-section before I can switch in my other weapons/armor/etc. Why does it automatically open into Wardrobe or Dyes first, even while Equipment is more often used? If you want them to be separate tabs, they should be in the sidebar, not as sub-tabs of the appearance section.

II. Display is cramped: The new emphasis on extra sidebars (in the Traits panel and the Equipment panel) makes the window too small to display everything at a comfortable size; it all looks squished, especially if you have a charr character like I do. Just make the window bigger, or resizable.

III. Traits are a pain to switch/allocate: Okay, this is literally the worst of all of these. In order to allocate a new trait, I have to click on the trait line, click the dialog box (whether I want to allocate traits or not), then go to the scroll menu and scroll down or up to the trait I want, then click on the trait with the right hexagon selected in the trait line. This is total kitten. The sidebar isn’t too much of an issue, really. But, WHY did anet remove the drop-down menus for each trait slot? There’s no reason why we can’t have both and just use whichever is more comfortable.

I don’t normally post on these forums, but this was such a big annoyance for me that I had to make this topic. Sorry that it’s basically a huge rant…. honestly, all of the other changes with this patch are pretty solid.

So, what do you guys think about the new UI? there are some good things but mostly bad….

I plan to try out the new Blinding Ashes/Fire’s Embrace combo with Written in Stone for a hybrid bunker/signet/aura D/F build that blinds all incoming attackers. This is what I was thinking of, but I’ll need to test once the patch goes live (maybe I want to abandon some aura synergy and go into condis more):
http://gw2skills.net/editor/?vEIQJAodhcMqbW2wvBr0AQ4hAIAw4hIgQiowDA-e

The absolute worst/best lines I’ve ever heard are near the Smokestead Waypoint in Plains of Ashford. I warp there to update traits and run AC, and I have to listen to:

“We don’t need no god,
We’re the firing squad!
So if you don’t want my flail,
Better shake that mighty tail!
Aw, yeah!
Oo-rah; move out!”