Guild Wars 2

Erasculio.2914:

2) NCSoft is in trouble

See here - a massive fall in NCSoft stocks. I don’t believe this has been due to GW2, a single game (which is far from being NCSoft’s main game) would not have that much impact. Rather, the fall happened after the announcement of NCSoft’s Q3 quarterly report, as seen here.

With such a bad impact due to the latest quarterly report, I’m sure NCSoft is pushing all its studios to bring as much profit as possible. In the case of GW2, it’s hard to know exactly in which ways a bigger profit could be achieved, but it’s within reason to expect that more people playing means more money earned (since it’s likely that more people would buy something in the game store).

Right?

IMO, no. But I wouldn’t be surprised if NCSoft believed in that, and, under the current circunstances, that they are looking very disfavorably at how GW2 has been losing players.

3) Conclusion: the article Colin Johanson on How ArenaNet Measures Success would be true on an ideal world.

However, for NCSoft right now it’s far from being an ideal world. They need profits, right now; or in the absence of profits, at least big numbers. And considering how long ArenaNet had to make GW2, well, it’s not surprising that NCSoft would like to collect, and collect big.

Ergo – I would not be surprised if NCSoft were pressuring ArenaNet to bring as many players as possible to Guild Wars 2.

No matter the cost.

NCSoft is in trouble because as it turns out the F2P model in general doesn’t work that well in practice for 99% of games, which NCSoft has a huge stake in (GW2 isn’t purely F2P, there’s an upfront cost). It’s only REALLY worked for Dungeon & Fighter (the US localization was horribly mismanaged and never really caught on) and to a lesser extent Maple Story, which are both owned by Nexon Group (a formerly Korean company that moved their HQ to Japan to avoid getting into trouble with “bad” South Korean laws like not giving people’s phone numbers to third parties for money without permission – or try to… they ended up getting nailed with several landmark successful lawsuits despite the fact).

Even Nexon (which now owns a majority of NCSoft shares) had flat net profits last fiscal year in Korea and is being kept afloat almost purely by D&F and MS sales in China (D&F reached the 3 million concurrent player mark there recently, which makes GW2 look like small fries). Nexon manages around 30+ F2P MMOs in South Korea alone and owns most of their development studios, similar to NCSoft.

Blade & Soul was supposed to be NCSoft’s new savior, but it just hasn’t looked that way for them.

Hydrophidian.4319:

Gahro.4095:

Vocal minority. I thought Anet understood what this means.

Now look at this thread. These are the players that were satisfied with the game.

You gave in to the few people on the forums that complained about “not enough to do”. Those people with short attention-spans are long gone.

What you did was alienate those who stayed because they liked the non gear-based game they had.

Who greenlights something like this?

A distributor.

I suspect that ANet wasn’t responding to forum feedback here. I suspect this development is more due to pressure from the Big Bosses, who seem to think there is only one template for a successful MMO.

You see, as someone who played City of Heroes for 8 years, I’ve been here before. The common denominator: NCSoft.

At its heart, I think this is all the result of: 1. culture clash and 2. a dysfunctional corporate methodology (that is plaguing just about every big distributor these days, not just NCSoft).

I suspect that if ANet had been left to its own devices, we wouldn’t be seeing this shift in design trajectory. Unfortunately, a great deal is resting on the success of this title, and NCSoft has recently restructured and ‘streamlined’ its focus.

In light of that, this all makes a certain amount of (depressing) sense.

NCSoft has its own shareholder masters as well, and as of June that includes Nexon Group as the largest holder (the latter of which has no qualms going against a game’s “manifesto” or otherwise gambling a game’s long term success for short term profits, even if the game is already successful). Personally though I’ll reserve judgment until the patch hits. If it is a new tier of gear that requires a significant time investment I think I’ll play something else.

WoW has great phone support if you calmly explain what is going on, and I’ve heard Rift is similar. I honestly wouldn’t highlight the customer support of any game without phone support, as ticket systems tend to be good for only standard issues that aren’t time critical in general (for example, someone I know had a WoW account that was literally being hacked before his eyes while he called in and they banned the hacker and did character recovery etc.).

Speaking of character recovery, GW2 doesn’t even have character rollbacks, let alone recovery, yet…

> No idea why stealth can prevent caps in WvW while that isn’t the case for sPvP tbh.

sPVP uses a different system than the rest of the game uses. That’s why a lot of trait and skill bugs exist in PVE/WvW but not in sPVP (and rarely vice versa).

I’m pretty sure the sPVP way of stealth not capping is the intended way and currently it is a bug in WvW.

It’s a horrible choice not because of design but because so many dungeon paths have blocking bugs at the moment.

EDIT: Not that I mind it as a dungeon runner myself though, and the removal of the salvage requirement is nice.

Rune of the Soldier is of course amazing in party situations or PvP (remove a condition from allies in range each shout) and there are some other niche combos that work. It is a bit of a balancing act though. Divinity runes technically have barely higher stats, but that would mean making full use of all 4 stats plus the crit damage. Also, keep in mind that exotic runes are generally level 60, while cited rare crests are level 80.

JoshForeman

When I made this map I was HOPING that people who aren’t into jumping would do exactly this. They’d see a fun Halloween looking environment, maybe get to the first chest and snag a goodie, then be on their merry way. I see now it was a mistake to make the hardest jumping challenge in the game part of an in-your-face update like a holiday event. I’m not going to stop making difficult stuff like this, they just won’t be so prominent in the future. I honestly hate making people upset and have a very high level of empathy. So it’s been hard hearing all the people that are so angry, frustrated and sad because of something I’ve made. But it’s just another lesson learned.

I want to say I really respect you posting here with your own explanations. They are very sparse, but I really recommend reading the better interview/Q&As with the World of Warcraft designers and, though it’s in Korean, the Dungeon & Fighter designers concerning difficulty, availability of content to players, and of course seasonal events. While one may not agree with everything the reasoning is often enlightening.

From knowing that, the moment I saw the “5% post” on Reddit I knew what would happen. It also injected a good amount of elitism into players as well that spilled out into the other parts of the game. It’s rough learning stuff the hard way.

Personally, I tried the puzzle ~150 times (lol, I wish I was kidding) and never getting to that beam on the second small block jump. I found it pretty fun despite failing, but I completely understand the frustration of those who couldn’t complete it for nearly every reason mentioned. Too bad it’s seasonal…

@AcidicVision
ANet disabled WvW PVE bonuses for the current matchup a while ago when transferring, so that was not an issue.

That said, 7 days isn’t too bad – it should be for the current WvW matchup but I guess that would take too much work.

Mostly PVE people transfer to get around stuck DEs, avoid bots, meet up with friends, et al..

GW2 does have a fairly standard holy trinity-ish aggro system just with toughness and shields weighed in instead of explicit inflated threat for tanks, though some mobs deviate from it. Speaking of which, the holy trinity technically still exists if you want it to – I.E. Guardian for tanking, Elementalist (1 or 2) healing, rest DPS/Support. Only real difference is tank has to dodge roll every now and then.

LOL @ this event dungeon – this is good example why a lfg tool is needed. Nothing like seeing purely “LFG” scrolling across chat at light speed. Even if you had a “LFG Chat Channel” it would be worthless in this instance – people would ignore that, and due people ignoring it people would just spam map chat again.

It doesn’t help that if someone does use the current in-game LFG… uh… “system” a lot of people automatically think they are a noob and discount them entirely. So yeah, no surprise there. Even modern hastily made 2D Dungeon & Fighter copycats in China have better LFG systems.

I have over 2500 badges from PUG runs for AC and the average wait time is about an hour which includes constantly “map chatting” in both LA and the dungeon’s map. Maybe it’s better on other servers.

Of course, psychology doesn’t help. I.E. when there is a group that only needs one person there is 30+ people spamming that group leader, but the lone wolf or groups with only 2 people they wait forever. Plus, people have a tendency to put their ignore lists even if you advert every 20 minutes or so – then when they need to run a dungeon the cycle repeats itself.

It isn’t sensationalist at all. If it just impacted the economy it would merely be frustrating, but I was in Gendarran Fields on the left side where the 4 Centaur DEs take place. Tons of (usual identical looking with obvious similar naming) rangers running in a line with speed boosts going to each DE point killing everything – if you are an at level character chances are by the time you reach each event it’s over; only one I was able to do was the Rock Dogs DE by slamming a speed boost and “going around the back” instead of through the gate.

As for the water below the tower – it (also?) happens rarely right after the cutscene fmv and you have to wait it out for about 2 rounds as you are completely stuck.

Leap of Faith is still bugged, the latest patch just made the elevation part slightly better; still bugged. Also leaps over or through enemies – https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/professions/guardian/Leap-of-Faith-accuracy

For me, it was hard to appreciate the lower levels until I tried it myself.

On my first char (Guardian) I didn’t even enter a dungeon until 80. After 2k or so worth of tokens from AC explorable I wanted to see what it would be like to try out a 35 warrior in there – so I did just that, went full masterwork power+precision gear and the usual 5 signet build I see 80% of the warriors I pug with there – I can see why it’s so attractive, I get 100% critical rate.. at 35.

Anyway, I find a PUG of 4 80s and immediately someone says “are we sure we want to take this guy?” – I figured to give them I break I mentioned I could just bring my 80 Guardian instead but silence ensues and I start to wonder if level 35’s really do suck that much. People enter, and we meet the first breeder and I’m hitting him for ridiculous amounts of damage and 5k hundred blades, and suddenly I’m no longer worried (my Guardian struggles to get the kind of damage my 35 warrior was putting out). I imagine 80 warriors more traits and exotic gear would do more but it didn’t seem that way with this group.

Get to first burrow and I notice the other warrior in the group just sits there and spams hundred blades… missing every time. I figured it was just a one time thing until we got to the burrow event and he did it there too – I was doing more damage then the rest of the group. Of course, the event fails, and after the second time I got kicked.

I’ve really come to find that in practice there isn’t much difference with the downscaling even with traits and such. I’ve come to welcome low levels more in groups, though I may ask what kind of gear they are wearing, since masterwork and even rare gear are reasonably priced. Runs never really feel that much slower, but then again I’m pugging dungeons, so who knows.

This still seems to have a mind of its own, though it did improve slightly with the latest patch. My own example is fighting Kohler in AC – even with him targeted (and no other targets near) sometimes it will do a huge leap right over his head and you land in the water.

It seems to be more reliable if you are just outside of point blank range/melee yet not that far away. Some kind of “sweet spot”.

Save Yourself is pretty useful in unorganized pugs particularly where people tend to get loaded up with conditions (shout or contemplation afterwards to shake off the fallout)… or if your party wants to be lazy and get out of the combat state faster.

Glad they didn’t nerf the PVE version; though TBH not many people use it there – hold the line tends to be more popular.

Guess would be in part due to the retaliation it gives. Still, they really need to get rid of their NIH and rework retaliation and quickness before things turn into a real hot mess.

Dredj.4025:

I would say it’s a combination of things that has killed Seafarer’s.

Hacking during the Deso/Kodash match up culled a lot of WvW presence. Before that the hours upon hours of queueing culled guilds, my guild fell victim to this. Oct 7th patch also culled guilds from doing WvW. And of course getting higher in the ranks means we face more Nightcapping servers which cannot be competed against, so people again don’t WvW due to it being pointless.. we all know the Nightcapping song and dance routine. And lastly the free transfers means that those who still want to WvW will move to a server still capable.

Seafarer’s may be the pioneering server in what happens if GW2 doesn’t get fast changes. Time will tell, just watch each week as Seafarer’s fall further down the rankings, where she stops nobody knows!

This is what I was trying to say, but unfortunately the edit button bugged out – well put Dredj. (This is Sharptrauma BTW, missing our WvW ambushes)

If you’ve got writ of exaltation, you’ve got the big symbols. You may be getting them confused with the consecrations like Purging Flames or Hallowed Ground which looks similar but have a larger area of effect.

It happened to me when I tried it on equipped items. Simply unequipped the stuff I wanted to transmute and it worked.

30 means you hit the DR for speed runs, 20 would be the amount if you did the path already.

If you buying from Amazon, make sure you are buying it from amazon directly – it should be 25$ for 2000, not 30$+ the third party it sometimes lists as the default.

Animus.6073:

[…] I blame most of this on the downed state and the ability to run back to an encounter. Not that I dislike the downed state, but in its current implementation it allows people to make all kinds of mistakes with virtually no consequence other than time. Like I said earlier in this thread, I just ran an AC exp where 3 out of the 5 people in my group were getting downed on Kohler and Howing King. When we downed them they were probably like “that was fun and we did it!” Meanwhile I and the other competent player were thinking “how are these people level 80 and still playing this poorly?”

A lot of people who get to 80 haven’t even touched dungeon content. If their experience was the same as mine they simply followed their personal story line for Arah story mode as their first dungeon, which in and of itself is kind of a brutal introduction (inflated HP included).

As for Kohler and Howling King… it happens. It doesn’t even frustrate me at all unless I’m the guilty one (though it does seem lost on people that you can roll out of Kohler’s spin, but a lot of people use glass cannon builds for dungeons). There’s a semi-rare bug where Kohler doesn’t do the indicator for his pull, and I’ve never seen the indicator for the scavenger leap (they are supposed to lean back in a pouncing animation before leaping, at least according to videos and such – so I have to rely on prediction), so there’s that.

Anyway, I do agree with the overall premise of what’s being stated here by various people – bosses (and various trash) have inflated health and it doesn’t make it more challenging. As for the concern about people rolling glass cannon builds streamrolling content, that’s happened since people turned 80. More bosses and mini-bosses could use some anti-glass cannon mechanics. Dungeons in general seem rushed to be honest, but there is still enjoyment to be found.

I just stand on top of them and strafe a tiny bit (left<→right) essentially staying in place. For whatever reason, this method works for me (Guardian GS). Inanimate object hit boxes in GW2 tend to be buggy in general.

The DR system just seems buggy for some people. Today I cleared all 3 paths in AC with a nice PUG in under an hour with none of us hitting the DR (since I was reading the forums I was actually kind of shocked we didn’t hit it), but I’ve heard stories of people taking longer and hitting it. We skipped the spider, troll, and lieutenant mini-bosses.

One of the first times I’ve skipped those. One of the PUGs wasn’t in it for the badges (he had a mountain of them) and was just in it for the fun and didn’t find the skippable mini-bosses fun. Neither did anyone else really, though personally I find the lieutenant entertaining but for whatever reason there’s a pile of bugs with his name on it.

To top it off you don’t even know when or if you’re going to be punished until it is too late. If you have hit the DR you don’t even know it until the end of the run and by that point it’s too late. Why isn’t there a visual indicator? Any type of warning would be greatly appreciated for as long as DR is going to exist based on how fast a dungeon is run.

Agreed. I’ve done AC a fair number of times but only with pugs and I always feel like I’ll be punished if I happen to meet up with a really good team after reading the developer posts on the forums. Though so far I haven’t hit the DR myself.

Tommynator.4928:

Are you srs about FRs having CAN players to play at night time?
Okaay…
Whats next ? Transfering to us and building 30 balistas (to fill the siege cap) at keep or some more spies in chat?
WvW is so broken atm. No wonder nearly all major players here on sfr gave up. Im going to do the same. Frustrating game mechanics are frustrating.
Even DE side was still attacking us instead of FR just because they are like unlimited stream of freshmeat. Unfortunately some of them can press buttons.
Anyways thanks for ~300 kills tonight frogs.
Good night

Yeah… that was kind of weird. I mean what’s the point in sending the whole server to zerg the other losing server when everything around you is owned by the winning server and you don’t even own so much as a farm. Technically a valid tactic though I can’t imagine it is very productive. Probably just in one battleground for a bit though.

Anyway, agreed about the WvW issues – though, the transferring thing is going to happen free transfers or not, though perhaps on a lesser scale for lower tiers – they really should have anticipated 90% of this stuff happening considering Blizzard learned them throughout the years. A lot of SFR guilds were doing it just for fun without caring much about winning and the bugs and other issues have really taken their toll on SFR now (in fact they did towards the beginning when we were winning last week).

Credits to Arborstone for remaining organized.

Sadly, most of the guilds and players that left last week due to the “super invisible bug” haven’t returned on SFR. There’s hardly any of them playing anymore – I give credit to the few that are still sticking around.

Windows 8 is actually fairly efficient from what I saw in the betas – I was able to get it to use just a tad less memory then my heavily tweaked Windows 7 setup.

Metro is annoying though. In the end if you just want to use the desktop it’s an extra click and a start menu you have to get used to all over again.

Anyway, worked pretty flawlessly for me – didn’t have any driver issues and such. Your mileage may vary though, especially with the release version when it comes out.

Well most threads are closed by “moderator” without showing up the tracker, so yeah I’d say it’s simply a problem where CC or other people close threads with a trivial response and it ends up showing on the tracker.

It appears part of the problem is the forum is mixing secure and insecure content (http vs. https). Most modern browsers will ignore the insecure content without a warning, and depending on implementation can cause issues such as this (in the old days you would be given an option to display both content at once, IE still does this AFAIK).

However, there are other bugs as well at play. Still, I seem to have better luck with IE than Chrome, Firefox, or Opera. Your milage may vary.

The Chantry of Secrets trick (just entering it through the cave entrance) finally worked for me a few days back. Just for the record I filed a ticket and got that as a response a couple days later, and at first I was rather hesitant as I already cleared that area and got the PoI.

However, entering that area does, as one of the Arenanet posters here mentions, seems to trigger some kind of mechanism. It is rather strange though as I got a map icon where the chest icon was supposed to be with the item reward and an additional chest to the right of that with nothing in it (the chest showed nothing, not even EXP – however I did get EXP for it, which was wierd).

The who nightcapped who is pointless (and actually pretty silly considering we were fighting each other invisible a good part of the time at best). I’d rather we finished this with the more cordial conversation we had at the beginning of the thread – we can kill each other on the battlegrounds.

Drama aside – since we are nearing the final stretch here – I want to give credit to both Desolation for making a great recovery considering their circumstances and Kodash for hanging in there. Minus a few random people as always the representatives here have been good sports and that’s always nice to see.

It goes without saying SFR has done a great job considering the rather significant issues we’ve faced as of very recently. People underestimate us and at the same time I think we tend to overestimate ourselves. Hopefully we can keep a tad bit of restraint when posting and acknowledge the success of others (I know, language barrier, still…). This week would have been really boring if Desolation didn’t improve as they did throughout.

@Rezo/other Desolation

As I mentioned above, try not to take the nightcapping posts too personally. It’s just a bit of a sore spot and a lot of people are indeed frustrated from the bugs, hackers and other nonsense that has nothing to do with any of the servers.

@Bonzibu

Thanks for posting. I did put too much emphasis on the communication part as I do understand Kodash is a German server, and if that came off wrong I’m sorry for that. It’s more of a frustration due to the hackers and such.

You can give back an orb though fairly easily – and I was ready to try to arrange one a while back for Desolation but they got it normally. Basically, you can let them take it from the Keep or wait until the storms from the middle Island destroy the altar that holds the orb – it takes about 50 seconds or so for the altar to regenerate and in that time you can move the orb, and I think there may be other ways as well. It’s generally a just a nice thing to do and in no way required. It requires some coordination from both servers and in our case that is quite hard due to the language barrier (if you look around at some of the US server matches you’ll see people moving orbs back and forth all the time due to hackers).

I’m sorry to hear about the organizational issues. This week has been hard on SFR as well as several guilds have nearly collapsed; not wanting to play due to the bugs/invisible enemies. Don’t take some remarks from others too personally – there’s just some rivalry from our last match up that some take a tad bit too seriously.

@EVERYONE

Let’s remain to keep the discussion calm, and back to killing each other before the match ends!

Ianervan.3415:

Another day.. Kodash fights with honor, no problem there. But Desolation continues with trash gameplay.

Could you expand on this? Because…

Ianervan.3415:

Their players closing game to avoid death, quick-teleport to waypoint once they see they’re about to be caught and killed etc.

Closing game to avoid death is kind of cheesy, but they could have crashed you know (plus if you were to do that you might have to fight the queues). WvW is buggy. As for waypoint teleporting to avoid being killed, I don’t see anything wrong with that. Especially if you are with a guild run you are just wasting time if you don’t – nothing honorable in that.

Ianervan.3415:

I thought two week vs Kodash and can’t remember a single bad thing about their players, but for Desolation percentage of bad gameplay is really high. Not all, of course, but definitely the highest of all servers I’ve fought so far.

I don’t have a huge problem with either Kodash or Desolation, though I wish Kodash would have been a bit more communicative in English about the hackers early on. I mean some SFR guilds are russian, italian, and then some and don’t speak English that well but they still listen and communicate. That said I understand – Kodash seems to be having some organizational issues lately, and that can be frustrating. As another SFR player mentions:

Grok.6714:

Many on SFR have given up WvW due to the invisibility bug. Really not fun fighting invisible enemies.

Too bad, this matchup is really great!

Yeah, around 80% of the guild I’m in isn’t even logging in during prime time for WvW. It’s sad, but I understand why – these bugs are ridiculous.

I was bored and went in expecting some short fast action in a borderland earlier tonight (as always I’m on SFR). There were only 7 others to start with (just enough for 2 rams), two of them commanders of some other smaller guilds (complete with marker…) and somehow we intuitively just clicked and proceeded to every point on the map. Nice to see the two thieves willing to make quick checks and go ranged occasionally and the other support/tanking guardian who was actually working with me instead of competing with me. Really though, credits all around to those SFR players who were there.

That was quite the rush. We met 20+ Kodash at a time easily, but we took stuff fast and trapped them in their own towers and keeps. Intuitive teamwork does wonders!

Nice thread, and I’ll restate the obvious yet again – the patch didn’t affect most of the guardians running around with 100% uptime retaliation builds in PvP that people love to complain about. They are still there, and no less annoying.

The reasoning given in the patch notes makes no sense. Even if it refers to PvE it doesn’t make much sense – vast majority of PvE mobs are slow hitters, and even the fast hitters tend to have low health by design.

If the notes stated concern about symbol builds with GS in PvE with AoE damage and healing, then it would be remotely believable. Even then symbol builds tend to sacrifice the better traits like shout CD reduction in order to achieve said result (and last I checked the symbol lengthening trait didn’t increase the damage of the symbol outside of the retaliation boon as it was set damage). Not to mention the obvious that the mob(s) would have to stay in the static, non-mobile symbol.

I could dissect it further but I think that’s plenty for now.

taro.2568:

GG @desolation i really like your comeback

Indeed. 4k within Kodash now. Oh and about one of the posts above mine… nightcapping is just kind of sore spot for many SFR players and guilds – we’ve just got a ton of guilds, large and small, that simply raid during primetime and ever since our first meeting with nightcapping people have deemed it unfair. It’s caused some real discouragement to those guilds that put all that effort and coordination during prime time.

More mature guilds by now realize the reality of nightcapping and simply accept it for what it is, even if we still disagree with the stance Anet on the whole concept. To be honest though the recent bugs and hackings to WvW have done far more damage than nightcapping to the overall dialogue on SFR.

Even when we were low pop we still could get ~4 hour queue times occasionally; this server simply likes WvW.

TLDR: Don’t take the people who hate you for nightcapping too personally – the system is just kinda sucky right now. Not that I’d try to stop SFR’s rise or anything, but I don’t mind staying in the mid-brackets, as once SFR gets to the higher ones I’ll get less badges (LOL).

Schakal.6091:

There apparently is a hard cap for Power. But I have no idea where it’s at.

http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Power

The wording seems to imply that it only affects level altered characters in practice, though since it was put in by an unregistered account with a single edit who knows if it is even true or not. Ahh, the nature of wikis.

Lots of talk in EB on SFR was that Desolation had a speed hacker. I couldn’t confirm it myself despite being there for a while. Some nicely coordinated attacks though. Anyway, please report+kick that guy to the curb if he exists – it’s bad enough fighting invisible players.

Props to the SFR players though, for some reason we practically had the undermanned buff there and both Kodash and Desolation were pushing hard (OK, Kodash not so much as just treb+zerg, still crazy fighting Kodash on one end and Desolation on 2-3 others constantly).

Now Desolation is only 15k away from Kodash. It’s within your grasp – keep it up!

Looks you got 1 orb back at least? I just hopped into DB borderlands and see it at least.

You take the full amount of damage of an attack with Retaliation up (yes, the in-game wording is pretty bad).

I’ll give one anecdote on someone who almost never posts on forums: My father has a job which requires constant travel and often he only gets a couple hours to play each day.

Both me and him started playing the game with the few days before “official release” thing. We planned to play together and such, but eventually he just stopped playing GW2 after a month and went back to WoW (which he’s been playing since release as well). I asked him why, and he said it simply too much of a grind – he never made it even CLOSE to a high level despite trying nearly every profession and race. I disagreed, but he had some very good points that really made me look at this game in a new light ever since. Don’t think he’s played the game since then. (Keep in mind I haven’t played WoW since the Lich King expansion)

So, I will say that it’s true the vocal forum posters often exaggerate and … other… stuff, but it usually does not mean their opinions aren’t valid. Even “L2P” posts often highlight issues hidden by the immediate thoughts of the OP.

Probably the classic 6 ongoing Orr DEs. With just some simple magic find food and nothing else you get a decent enough chance for a rare to drop on the level 84 mobs.

Still, that’s some hardcore farming – good grief.

Meanwhile I seem to hit the DR randomly. One time I hit it on the 3rd event after logging in without playing for 24 hours just finishing places for the 100% map completion. I vote buggy on this one.

bilwit.9752:

Finally got response for my support ticket. This is what the GM had to say:

“The bug you asked us about should have been fixed by now.”

Thanks a lot, jerks.

Did the GM at least compensate you? If not then that’s just downright cruel.

Anyway, I filed a ticket just in case, though I didn’t screen shot it at the time (before I thought it was fixed myself, but I hadn’t checked the forums in a while). I did remember what skill point I last did though (the infamously dead frog that I managed to snag alive right after the last patch – http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Defeat_Utcua).

Some of the bot AI is getting rather sophisticated as well. I came across a mesmer a couple days ago. Thought it was a “real person”, I guess the fact that it was naked should have been a dead giveaway.

Anyway, she was downed under a bridge spamming all downed abilities against some normal mobs, so I helped her up, and she went to a different spot and started spamming the same rotation. At the time it didn’t really strike me as as a bot until I came back to the spot quite some time later (~1 hour?) and found her back in the other spot where she was downed and saw the same process. Apparently the AI on this bot goes between 2 separate spots where normal mobs spawn quickly and goes through a predefined skill rotation. It was even in higher level area (~55).

(SFR player again) Even if Desolation loses and keeps that score ratio when the week is finished, that’s still nothing to be ashamed of considering the fallout at the beginning. Heck, it is still possible to win as long as you hold off the Kodash night team. Best of luck – because I’m a sucker for comeback stories.

Of course, that doesn’t mean I’ll personally hold back at all. See you on the battlefields!

kabaal.1832:

They’re systematically nerfing retaliation builds with every patch.

Not the more popular ones with 100% uptime. If they are trying to do this, they really aren’t doing a very good job.

They really just need to rework (or remove) retaliation and quickness instead of taking the lazy way out and targeting skills they THINK would help them avoid those tackling those issues.

IIRC Retaliation scales with power (unless the wiki and earlier tests are outdated). In invader gear and certain crests you can go get up to 450-500 base damage, but in practice the number is much, much lower.

Just to clarify, it isn’t any harder now – people were doing similar builds to this in PvP anyway. In WvW particularly using symbol of wrath is asking to be loaded with certain conditions or similar thanks to the self-root, so a lot of competent people barely even used it in the first place.