Guild Wars 2

Ranael.6423:

I really can’t feel sorry for those people. Nobody ever said that doing World Completion will grant a big advantage to Espec unlock, ever. People assumed it would and played accordingly.

They did say, “The new system will come to the live game before the launch of Guild Wars 2: Heart of Thorns™, allowing players to experience the changes to core specializations and stockpile Hero Points for their elite specializations. While elite specializations will be available to everyone who purchases the expansion, the upcoming core specialization changes will affect the base game.”
https://www.guildwars2.com/en/news/ready-up-core-specializations-summary/

Kal Spiro.9745:

Bettik.4982:

Kal Spiro.9745:

Bettik.4982:

PopeUrban.2578:

PvE is absolutely a game mode about characters rather than the person playing them. This isn’t a “roleplaying” standpoint, but a basic fundamental fact of PvE world, encounter, and reward design.

I don’t agree with you here, I’m afraid – all game modes should be about the player – the character is subsidiary – the rewards in a game should be designed around the player account, rather than its transitory characters.

You don’t seem to understand how an RPG works. I’m actually curious what RPG, or MMO works this way because I have never experienced it.

Really? I login to PvE as a Ranger. I earn rewards that contribute to both my character and my account. I go to PvP, I’m now a Druid. I also earn rewards that contribute to both. How is this strange…?

But it’s not ABOUT your account, you earn rewards you are able to put toward your account but your experience is about your character.

I don’t agree. It’s all about me as a player – not my character…

Kal Spiro.9745:

Bettik.4982:

PopeUrban.2578:

PvE is absolutely a game mode about characters rather than the person playing them. This isn’t a “roleplaying” standpoint, but a basic fundamental fact of PvE world, encounter, and reward design.

I don’t agree with you here, I’m afraid – all game modes should be about the player – the character is subsidiary – the rewards in a game should be designed around the player account, rather than its transitory characters.

You don’t seem to understand how an RPG works. I’m actually curious what RPG, or MMO works this way because I have never experienced it.

Really? I login to PvE as a Ranger. I earn rewards that contribute to both my character and my account. I go to PvP, I’m now a Druid. I also earn rewards that contribute to both. How is this strange…?

PopeUrban.2578:

PvE is absolutely a game mode about characters rather than the person playing them. This isn’t a “roleplaying” standpoint, but a basic fundamental fact of PvE world, encounter, and reward design.

I don’t agree with you here, I’m afraid – all game modes should be about the player – the character is subsidiary – the rewards in a game should be designed around the player account, rather than its transitory characters.

PopeUrban.2578:

Bettik.4982:

Morfedel.4165:

I have officially lost interest in this thread. Reading a laundry list of useless ire is accomplishing nothing. Off to other threads. GLHF!!!

hold on a mo – I claim my gold…

https://www.guildwars2.com/en/news/specializations-part-two-reward-tracks-and-elite-specializations/

“As long as you’ve purchased Guild Wars 2: Heart of Thorns, you’ll automatically unlock access to all elite specializations in PvP.”

in PvP

And that is totally what is happenning.

Remember that Anet has never referred to WvW as “PvP” and always referred to it as “WvW”

I don’t recall Morfedel limiting his challenge to a specific game mode…

PopeUrban.2578:

DeWolfe.2174:

My thought on it is this, I thought we were finally getting somewhere with moving toward account based unlocks. Characters should be, for the most part, replaceable. Our accounts should be the focus of progression and the character just a visual representation of us. That’s why I like Masteries but, Specializations shouldn’t be so long to obtain. Especially when they’ll likely add more in the future.[…]

I completely disagree.

Characters should always be the focus of progression.

I completely disagree. The player should always be the focus of progression, balanced against the progression of the player character…

Morfedel.4165:

I have officially lost interest in this thread. Reading a laundry list of useless ire is accomplishing nothing. Off to other threads. GLHF!!!

hold on a mo – I claim my gold…

https://www.guildwars2.com/en/news/specializations-part-two-reward-tracks-and-elite-specializations/

“As long as you’ve purchased Guild Wars 2: Heart of Thorns, you’ll automatically unlock access to all elite specializations in PvP.”

Kal Spiro.9745:

Bettik.4982:

for open world PvE, that’s fair enough, but even so it should have been clearly communicated to the player base, e.g. “guys, if an existing character has world completion, or more than x hero challenges completed in the open world, then you’ll gain access to the elite specialisation; but you’ll still have to complete y more to fully unlock it because that’s where we’re going with this”.

but it wasn’t.

Yup, this is the big mistake they made. It honestly feels like there was some kind of shift recently, though. Within the past week, and not much further back, there has been a LOT of communication on the forums. It’s possible that until that point they wanted to but were restricted for some reason, then realized suddenly after the restriction was lifted, “Oh crap, we still need to tell them this part.”

Still, a blog post would have been very useful a couple months ago. People gripe about the grind, but if they had the ability to do that “grind” over a couple months they’d be more willing. It also would have been nice to implement that WvW thing before HoT.

Yes, agree the 400 figure is probably recent – data-mining had different values. Anet clearly told us what the expac wasn’t (no level cap, no gear grind), but they also didn’t say what it was…

it seems to me there are a lot of similarities in this thread to ones from four months ago when they made the change from skill points to hero points and converted excess points to spirit shards.

many people – especially those with exclusively WvW characters (myself included) – were upset that in anet’s original proposition our lvl80s would loose access to skills we had obtained from scrolls and would have to complete open world skill points/hero challenges. quite a few comments then were themed around the helpful ‘just play the game’, ‘get over it’, ‘do you hate content?’, and ‘call that grind?’, ‘maybe you should play something other than an MMO…?’. but in the end anet listened to players concerns and ultimately decided that a character upon levelling to 80, however they got there or unlocked their skills, should be still be able to unlock all core skills and traits without having any additional open world requirements. which was the core argument of those players against the original proposition. it was a great decision for both old and new characters, who upon dinging 80 are able to unlock all of their core profession abilities.

i think we’re back to a similar place (except we’re not talking about losing something, but obtaining something new), yet anet still want to tie traits and skills to per character completion of open world content. that is:

a. elite specialisation unlocks are soulbound/per character
b. they require the completion of hero points in the open world (either directly or indirectly via WvW rank-ups)

those are key design decisions which presumably follow from a guiding principle that the expac provides post lvl80 character progression – to obtain/complete an elite specialisation each character must have additional gameplay to unlock the new abilities (traits/skills/items/skins). or in other words go on a journey without a level cap increase.

for open world PvE, that’s fair enough, but even so it should have been clearly communicated to the player base, e.g. “guys, if an existing character has world completion, or more than x hero challenges completed in the open world, then you’ll gain access to the elite specialisation; but you’ll still have to complete y more to fully unlock it because that’s where we’re going with this”.

but it wasn’t.

69 for me pls

look. the only possible thing the devs could have done to improve this event was to make the selfless potion cost more blooms than the thoughtless….

Sol.6213:

Found this! (I must not have been playing that month last year.)

https://www.guildwars2.com/en/news/act-now-weekend-sales/

I hope they bring the sale back at least – last year in wvw, we (I say we, I mean the night-crew) dressed up, got drunk and watched our border burn as we sat on a boat in Bay and sung songs on ts. good times…. yeah. good times. um.

Menaka.5092:

these “stress tests” could really use more bodies. During my experience I’ve rarely seen more than 10-15 players on each side and we never had a proper 3-way fight. In these conditions is hard for players to “weight” the fights that are possibly designed for more players.

Agreed. I appreciate the purpose of these tests, and was very glad to be able to participate, but there’s going to be a huge difference when hundreds of people, server PuGs and guilds, are let loose on these maps for a sustained period of time…

I don’t think people got bored – they just didn’t know about it – that was certainly true in my (WvW oriented) guild. I didn’t get an email but did get the client download option, so only a few of us ended up being able to play…

^same. we captured a tower without the generator.

Yup, auto-turrets, hardened gates and siege mean you need to bring sup rams, golems and charr-cars to the party! Even so, it seems to take ages to get a T3 gate down… We’re probably doing it wrong!

A new map will necessarily bring with it lots of confusion, perhaps especially for veteran players. Nobody knows where they are going or what they are doing at first, people get lost, disoriented; then add to that the over-turning of the previous standard strategies and tactics that used to dominate the alpine maps…

Personally, I don’t think the map is too big. Instead, it’s rich and full of opportunities for the development of new gameplay, and that’s not a bad thing. It won’t kill the game – it’ll revitalise it. I play on EU Silver and I think we’re going to have an absolute ball on these maps. I love the diversity, imbalances and contentions that have clearly been designed into the map’s landscapes. It’s going to make things much, much more varied, interesting and necessary than just having a zerg steamroll over the map in order to dominate it.

There are a lot of things that need balanced certainly, but the size, scale and variety offered in these maps is not one of them…

Can confirm – just got mine too…

Hi, I’d like to join as a student too please – EU. Engineer is my PVE main, but happy to gear up another class just for dungeons…

Illconceived Was Na.9781:

It’s unnecessarily confusing.

I actually didn’t think it was – when you make Mawdrey (or any Ascended item) it already has one infusion slot in it. The whole point of upgrading it to Infused is to add a second agony specific infusion slot just for running fractals..?

EDIT: Or to min/max…

Arthur.6089:

August 11, 2015,

Getting close to a year later, this NPC is still bugged.

Current NPC behavior – NPC will not enter combat upon being attacked. It follows on a path looking down all weird.

Achievement Status – Unattainable.

Player mood – depressed.

Indeed. If I remember right there were issues with it from the day it was introduced, but could still be done in certain server instances – I’ve got partial completion and wish I’d stayed on to complete it now in retrospect. Were it just a bugged random dynamic event, then fine, but it’s highlighted as an achievement, however small. Almost one year on is pretty bad. So saying, there was a similar issue with the ‘Shattered’ achievement – took well over a year to fix that too…

Might be a bug – existing Enchanted boosters seem to have been converted to retain all the old ones plus the new ones (but at a mere 20 mins duration) – only the Karma boosters have been removed. The Enchanted Combat boosters are just as they were – presumably because they have no replacement in the new system – no great loss frankly and I do like the new combined boosters (plus their 2 hour duration); but if the removal of the Karma boosters is intentional, is this because it’s a currency with generally few sinks, so a great many players already have a hell of a lot of the stuff?

I reported this as a bug yesterday too – the new xp booster is only 20 mins duration; popping two in LA before queuing gave me two matches with only a few minutes remaining. Assuming it’s a bug, and assuming the booster just has to be active before a match ends to get the bonus, I’d ideally be activating them towards the end of matches. Mind you a 20 min boost is a bit mean to start with…

…for the Beta weekend…?

I’d just like to say thanks to for listening for the community – vets getting an extra character slot, new players getting the game is pretty much the sweet spot!

ColinJohanson.2394:

After feedback from presenting the original hero point count – we decided getting to level 80 will give you enough hero points to unlock all the core skills and traits entirely.

Thank you sir for listening to the community. All my WvW characters collectively /bow…

And finally the answer. Turns out ‘grand-fathering’ in wasn’t so impossible after all: https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/gw2/Skill-points-and-Spirit-Shards/first#post5187859

Bettik.4982:

No Call of the Mists for this…

that’s better… thank you!

No Call of the Mists for this…

Torgrim.3642:

It will turn into a big freaking karma bonanza train.
There is no point in defending anymore, why should we defend it will be upgraded anyway.

because if you don’t defend it, and escort yaks, it won’t get upgraded. if anything it totally encourages a more defensive playstyle.

On my first character – created at launch – I unlocked all the skills, including the racials (on an asura – we were all newbies then), exclusively via PvE and has world completion. Legit, right? No problem come the patch. My second character was also mostly PvE and has 42% world completion with 76 skill challenges, spent around 140 skill points on the core and elite (non-racial) skills. Still good.

My third started out in PvE, has 32% completion and 57 skill challenges, but then clearly made some poor life choices and got into WvW. Worse, my next 3 characters were leveled almost exclusively there (and EoTM when it was released) – sometimes even with the help of tomes and experience scrolls (I call hackz) – and I unlocked just the skills I needed for my WvW guild’s builds using scrolls. These guys only really completed their racial PvE starting areas with key waypoints into all the cities. So they have a handful of challenges each, excluding the dozen or so from the WvW maps they got that no longer count.

Will ANet force me to re-unlock all those skills via PvE hero challenges or leave me with four lvl 80 unplayable (or at least non-meta) WvW characters come patch day? Of course they wont.

Donari.5237:

The issue people are pointing out is that there are going to be a controlled number of Hero Points in the game, not infinite as we now have with Skill Points. Those Hero Points will be obtained via leveling and doing the blue chevron challenges. So if someone is grandfathered in without having done the chevrons, suddenly they have more Hero Points available than the system is meant to handle. Coding special case treatment for each challenge to check whether it should or should not count towards the Hero Point total could lead to some horrible bugs.

But won’t the world will always need to contain at a minimum as many hero points that a character can spend? Most likely many more. Yes, grandfathering in could result in some characters having more hero points available to them than the world might currently normally offer to new characters (grandfathered in character subsequently does world completion, say) – but those characters still can’t actually spend them on anything…? Also, the skill points on the WvW Borderlands no longer contribute to world completion, and so won’t contribute to Hero points either. But you can still do the challenge without earning a skill point. Similarly if character with ‘max’ hero points completes a hero challenge, they just complete it without earning another hero point…?

LanfearShadowflame.3189:

Grandfathering people in essentially puts them in debt, which they would need to work off, since they now have credit for content they didn’t actually do. This would require them to ‘work it off’ before they could start earning points to put towards the new elite.

Why? They’re handing out 400 points just for leveling to 80. Grandfather in existing 80s at 465, and leave the skill challenges completed on each character just as they are. Or, since my engi spent 90 skills points to unlock all of his core profession skills (non-racial), the grandfathering process could convert some ratio of those to hero points based on the number of current skill points spent on skills. Regardless of how those skill points were obtained, there’s no debt, nothing to work off.

3 for me please – Gyro Loosegear

My only precursor drop was a couple of weeks ago. In WvW on a Saturday map-flipping event we’d just taken out an enemy garrison and we’re having a cheeky go at Stonemist when a massive zerg of revenge seeking germans stomps us. Just before I go down I see a steel chest appear from one of the enemy dead. I think, ‘that could be your pre – go back and get it’. After two attempts to get back to claim it (kept getting ganked on the way) I manage to open it just before being downed again. Tooth of Frostfang…

90 for me please!

Hi John, just so you know, one of those cupcakes over on https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/cupcakes-for-arenanet was bought for you. You might not actually get one, but hey, RNG…

the writing, pacing, and story telling of this living story was well beyond anything we’ve had before. it has depth, but it was also engaging – not once did i feel as though i’d want to skip ‘next’ on a cut-scene – the execution was as good as the writing! so, well done everyone who contributed, awesome, awesome, job…

jut to say – wow – this was an awesome update. i know you’ll get tons of hate from this place but that was a a massive, and really positive, change to the game system – as well as adding tons of excellent story and content. i love the new explorable area/instanced/replayable story mode combo mechanic – and the wonderful music and map too! ty. just. ty…

bump for a great server!

i’d like to see them in ebook format on kindle regardless…

Magische Boek.2530:

Arcturus.8109:

Magische Boek.2530:

i did all bosses and all achievements including the 8 orb achievement with ranger last year when they first introduced the crown pavillion. dont say things that arent true.

Go ahead and make us a video of your ranger skills.

its uploading while im typing this. it says about 45 minutes remaining goodnight!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qi9SkYK7HhA&feature=youtu.be

there’s also a brilliant ranger discussion on reddit right now – http://www.reddit.com/r/Guildwars2/comments/26n2jl/subject_7_5_gambits_13_seconds_ranger/

@Prysin many thanks for the build – there are so very few for WvW out there! And… it’s totally different from what I’m currently running – S/WH, LB (zerkers), full Solider’s armour & trinkets (scholar runes and ruby’s on the trinkets), lightning reflexes, signets and RaO. I’m going to have experiment – thanks again!

@ Prysin
how about a good solid ‘base’ build? as a ranger new to WvW i’d really like to see such a thing – a ‘start here’ build if you will. personally, i’ve been running with the zerg about half the time, the rest roaming, but i’m not sure either my gear or traits are quite right yet, and unlike other classes we don’t seem to have a lot of builds or information available….

@ Prysin any chance you could post a link to your current WvW build please…?

CC Danicia.1394:

MageIanBorthwick.3054:

CC Danicia.1394:

Hello all,

I talked to the Mac team this morning. A fix for the most recent TP issue is going in today. Regarding the on-going issues in this thread, they tell me that it it actually spans across more than the Mac client. And they’ll have more information on those fixes later.

This sounds an awful lot like:

“This is only being addressed because it affects the NON-Mac community”

The one issue is very specific to you. The ongoing ones are not. Hope that helps clarify.

What this means is that their fix to their CDN for the heartbleed vulnerability – new certificates etc took out the Mac client which needs to be recompiled to support such (the Windows client presumably managed to cope on the fly). That’s our ‘specific issue’. The ‘ongoing ones’ are that heartbleed has potentially exposed all our usernames and passwords (regardless of client) to hackers and hence the recent frantic account security posts here: https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/support/account/Account-Security-What-you-need-to-know/first#post3884150

link is – https://account.guildwars2.com/login?redirect_uri=http%3A%2F%2Ftradingpost-live.ncplatform.net%2Fauthenticate%3Fsource%3D%252F&game_code=gw2 it is, however a tad browser sensitive (should work on safari tho)

^this. same here…

been happening to me since the last patch also – sometimes several times a day, no error message, no warning – not even lag before hand. most often in LA or WvW with me though

I’ve been getting this error too, up to once or twice a day but only since the last patch