Guild Wars 2

Crystal Reid.2481:

They are, and should remain, the most difficult content in the game.

The biggest problem with Raids is that they’re made artificially difficult through weird and cheap mechanics (most notably the enrage timer and not being able to resurrect defeated players), rather than actually programming the boss encounters to be complex and intricate. I’ve got 2 main suggestions for making Raids feel more genuinely challenging rather than artificially difficult:
1. Remove the enrage timer and inability to resurrect defeated players.
2. Add in some degree of randomness in the timing of every Raid boss’ attacks.
3. Rework whatever mechanics need to be reworked as a result of these two changes above.
If you can manage to implement these things into all the Raids, I can pretty much guarantee people will find them a lot more fun, while still staying just as challenging, if not more so.

LinseyMurdock.4165:

• No Keys. I totally understand how much folks want this (my shared inventory slots are largely taken up by keys, so I get it!) but putting keys into material storage is not a viable way for you to get a key ring. Sorry.

The HoT keys (Machetes, Crowbars, Chak Acid, Exalted Keys) really need to go into material storage. It’s already clearly not viable at all to keep them in your inventory, unless you only have one character that you’re ever going to use in HoT.

I know this is an old topic, but seeing as I just went to craft something and saw Hardened Leather Sections costing over 20s each on the Trading Post, I figured this needed a bump.
ArenaNet, I know letting Hardened Leather just continually rise to ridiculous price levels may be funny and all… but can we please stop the joke already, and get these things down to something at least slightly resembling a sane price again?

I noticed today (June 23, 2016), that my Elementalist’s Glyph of Elemental Power isn’t having its recharge reduced properly from the Inscriptions trait. All other glyphs seem to still be affected properly. It isn’t just a tooltip issue either, since I tested using the glyph and it incorrectly goes on its full non-reduced recharge (45s) while I have Inscriptions trait active.
I don’t think this has been happening for long, since I tend to use that glyph a lot and only noticed it today.
If anyone else is noticing this issue, please feel free to post here. Thanks.

Hi there,
I don’t know if this has been suggested before, and its sort of a simple suggestion, but I was wondering if anyone’s thought of adapting the existing Riding Broom and Magic Carpet items as gliders? They already fly (visually at least), so why not just adapt them as glider skins, sort of like how they did with the Black and WhiteWings backpieces? I’m sure it would be fairly easy to program, and ArenaNet could probably make a bunch of money converting it to a glider skin pack in the gemstore for people who don’t have them yet.
I’ve already got the carpet, and would love to use it as a glider skin… and I don’t have the broom, but would totally buy it if it could be a glider as well.

So to bump this topic, the new Guild Armor recipes require 40 Crystalline Ore per armor piece, and 10 for each insignia recipe. So you’re looking at least 250 Crystalline Ore to unlock a full set of armor (40×6 plus 10). If you want all three armor sets, you’re looking at a bare minimum of 730 Crystalline Ore (40×6×3 plus 10).
Let’s keep in mind here that going through the whole story will only get you 50, which is enough to unlock the recipe for ONE PIECE of armor.
Please ArenaNet, do something here… :/

Thanks for the input everyone, I’m glad to read it all, whether you agree with me or not.
Personally I still feel like it would be better to at least split the timer into separate timers for the individual phase sections. That I think would still make sure you had a certain amount of DPS, but without the possibility of ultimately failing late on from mistakes early on.
There are some good points made here though, so thanks for the discussion.

Okay, after doing the Raid a bunch, I really like the concept in general, so I want to thank the Raid team for it. But I do see one big problem with it, and that’s the general “aggro timer” on the bosses. I think the timer is intended as a way of making it difficult, but I don’t think it’s really working to do that. I see it doing the following instead…

1. It potentially restricts the viable party composition builds, requiring you to build the party and characters in the party in at least somewhat restrictive ways. This sort of goes against ArenaNet’s usual enouragement of playing in varied ways. But it’s really only the timer restricting this, not the raid bosses themselves.

2. It eliminates recovery options almost completely. Suppose the team makes a mistake against the first phase of Vale Guardian and misses a green circle, wiping out half the team. Let’s suppose you also manage to recover and revive everyone before they’re defeated. That’s an impressive feat… but by this time you could have used too much time for it to be possible to beat the boss, thus making it pointless to do anything except purposefully wiping and starting over. This is just annoying, not to mention counter-intuitive.

3. It seems to push knowledge rather than skill. If you know the boss patterns, they aren’t really exceptionally difficult. I typically tank it, but I’ve tried the other roles too, and even as the tank I’m not finding this really more complex than a lot of WoW dungeon bosses were… except that the timer is there to artificially put pressure on everyone to know everything about the fight and not make any mistakes. I think that the timer isn’t really making it harder overall though, just less fun than it could be if you didn’t have to be so concerned with it annoyingly looming in the background. It kind of reminds me of the Dragon Stand timer, to be honest, which isn’t any less annoying… but that’s another topic.

Overall I’ve just been coming more and more to the conclusion that the timer doesn’t really serve any good purpose for the Raid bosses. It would probably be a bit better if it was split into individual timers for each phase, perhaps. But having an overall timer like it is now is just annoying and makes it less fun than I think it would be without it.

I strongly agree, LFG needs a lot of work. Trying to fill empty Raid party slots was sort of silly without it.

A lot of my time leading a Raid group was getting the people dying in one hit to change their gear from Berserker into something reasonably sane.

They definitely need to add a Raid section.

This was probably posted already, but the last patch caused a bug where Herald upkeep skills go off when they shouldn’t… especially when transitioning between different zone areas within a map. It’s very annoying.

Chazz.6709:

Well for some classes , which have a “kitten” spec like " tempest" ( it feels so boring and not special at all so far) is 400 hp kind of a “waste” ? … i mean that effort for … well yeah … tempest ? or other unloved specs ?

To be honest at this point I’m not even necessarily planning on getting half of them. At least not unless it eventually becomes really easy to get them once I have Mastery built up enough.

The biggest problem I see with this right off the bat is trying to track down these mysterious HoT hero challenges using a Herald-less Revenant… which won’t be impossible by any stretch, but it’s almost certain to be annoying.

Blood Red Arachnid.2493:

A more apt analogy would be that mommy implied we’d get a bag of candies for cleaning our room, so some of us went and cleaned our room for weeks. Only for mommy to say “the room never mattered. clean the garage”.

Yes, this is a great analogy. In fact, I had been collecting hero points in preparation, but as soon as I heard the 400 pt requirement, I actually lost all incentive to keep doing so. The fact that HoT hero challenges give 10 points makes the core game’s 1-point challenges feel ultimately pointless, and I feel sorry for anyone who went through getting all of them in futile preparation.

So basically I have more than one of every class, and don’t want to do WvW. So does this mean I’m going to have to grind through the entire HoT storyline like a dozen times? If so, I’m at a loss as to how to not make that feel like 100% grinding after the first few runs through…

Mix of Rampager’s, Knights, and Cleric’s for me. Might sound strange, but I already tested it extensively in the beta (including the Raid and Fractals), comparing it to plenty of other stat combos, and it seemed to come out the most ideal overall.

They really need to explain now how we can avoid having to grind out the same Hero Points path on all of our PvE characters, and how this is alt-friendly at all. It sounds like WvW might be getting the better end of the deal now, if these Scrolls of Heroics are account bound instead of character bound, which I’m guessing they are. If so, is there going to be any equivalent way to swap PvE Hero Points between characters?

ColinJohanson.2394:

The random roll for this week already happened and we’re seeing on our internal servers that week ones missions rolled a mix of PvP and WvW missions for the first three mission slots that guilds have unlocked once you’re able to access the expansion (as you unlock deeper into your guild hall, you’ll be able to unlock more mission slots). We wanted to make sure everyone knew this information ahead of time.

I’m seeing a few potential problems with this, not just in the short-term for this week but long-term as well, that concern me as a guild leader.

The obvious short-term problem is for guilds that are primarily PvE focused, it may be difficult to get these missions done this weekend. A lot of guilds can’t even do WvW together easily because they’ve recruited people from multiple different servers. A quick solution could be to artificially rig the results for this week’s guild missions to at least include one of each type (1 PvE, 1 PvP, and 1 WvW guild mission)

Here’s 2 bigger-picture concerns though…
1. “There is a toggle you can use to allow your guild to select between PvE, PvP, WvW guild missions, or a mix of all three for more diverse guilds.” – This sounds like you can choose either 1 or 3 focuses for guild missions, but I’m wondering about 2? There are a lot of guilds that have a focus on 2 but not 3 of these categories. For mine we do everything except WvW, but I’ve seen and heard of some that only do WvW/PvP, and even some PvE/WvW focused guilds. So I’m hoping we can choose 2 of the 3 categories for guild missions, rather than only 1 or 3.
2. “we’re seeing on our internal servers that week ones missions rolled a mix of PvP and WvW missions” – Does this mean that every guild gets the exact same missions within each choice variant? This seems like it could be a big problem, especially for PvP and WvW, since it would create a huge global focus on achieving only a few specific things each week. I’m not exactly sure what the PvP or WvW missions are, but if they’re something specific enough that diverges from regular gameplay in those areas, you could see thousands of players just in there working towards those specific goals over the regular general gameplay goals, which could really hinder the matches. I think setting them at the start of the week is fine, but I personally think it would be better to randomize each guild’s missions for the week individually to prevent this potential issue.

So to summarize my 3 suggestions:
1. Make the 3 guild missions for this first opening week contain 1 of each category of PvE, PvP, and WvW
2. Let us choose any possible combination of PvE, PvP, and/or WvW guild missions for each week after that, including choosing 2 out of the 3 categories.
3. Make the specific guild missions given to each guild after this choice be randomized per guild, rather than universal.
Thank you.

Garimeth.8725:

So you don’t think a tank is necessary?

A Herald will probably be the best tank, imo. It worked wonderfully as a Raid tank when I tried it in the beta, at least.

Sidenti.6035:

While we’re on the subject of character creation, I’ve got a wish.
I want to make a fat person.
I haven’t seen one single fat person in all of Tyria. Fat people can be heroes too! Let me be a fat person! -Sid

You can if you make a male Norn, they have one body that’s pretty fat. I sometimes use it for gag characters for PvP.

Sidenti.6035:

Why would it be a shame for people to sell raid runs? If there are buyers, why should there not be sellers?

This is a good point, and why I encourage everyone not to buy runs.

Atharian.7092:

Why not just sell the legendaries themselves? I always hated dungeon selling, as the people buying it did nothing to actually earn the rewards. Legendary armor will mean absolutely nothing if any fool with X amount of gold can come along and buy it.

It will all be account bound on acquire.

xarallei.4279:

I find it weird that Anet said in the last Guild Chat that they understand doing certain things like world exploration over and over again on alts is a huge chore. That is the reason they eliminated it from the requirements for the new legendaries. But here they are making things miserable with this 170 point hero point requirement to unlock elite specs. If I have to do that on my main, fine I’ll do it. But having to do it for every single alt character is very miserable.

Yes, exactly. I’m not even a WvW player, but I have at least one of every class, a few of which were leveled with tomes. I don’t really want to have to grind out the same path of Hero Points and/or HoT content like 9+ separate times… :/

I totally agree with all of this, please lets see some more variety in the armor, rather than more of the same thing we have dozens of already.

Personally I think all 3 of them look significantly better than their old legendary equivalents. I’m really looking forward to seeing what else they come up with for the others now.

I would assume they would work in Raids, but I can’t really see that being a problem if they haven’t been a problem for Dungeons and Fractals.

Jahroots.6791:

There’s also a reason why they added a kick feature.

I’ve always considered the kick option intended to only be used against people who are rude/abusive, or perhaps who disconnect and can’t get back within a reasonable amount of time.
Any other use of it really just seems like abuse on the part of the one(s) doing the kicking…

What I’m wondering is why is ArenaNet not telling us anything more specific about this? They can’t still be deciding it, can they? And if they do know how many Hero Points is will take to get the Elite Specs, why not just tell everyone so we can prepare for it better?

Mad King fight as a boss fractal please.

Basically, Raids are the new Fractals, Fractals are the new Dungeons, and Dungeons are out.

Either that or they’re restructuring the tiers. Maybe 1-20 is the new 1-10, 20-50 is the new 20-30, and 50-100 is the new 30-50, with equivalent AR reqs, but spread out more so it still ends up needing 70-80AR at scale 100.

Thobek.1730:

Its not babysitting. Its looking after customer satisfaction of your product. You abuse people at any other public event security are going to give you the boot. Online games should not be treated differently. Online bullying is a thing.
The only MMO I’ve really experienced it in was WoW and that was a toxic kittenstorm (I see it all the time in Moba’s and FPS games) But I don’t really want to see it finding it’s way into GW2.

I totally agree, this sort of abuse should really be dealt with harshly and swiftly. It was pretty ridiculous in WoW, and I don’t want to ever see it getting anywhere near that bad here. I think it can unfortunately be a bit of a slippery slope if it doesn’t get dealt with definitively.

reapex.8546:

Selling paths is not a bannable offense. On the LFG Policy thread, it was stated that selling paths is ok.

What I’m wondering is about this. Why on earth would they say that this is ok? Not that I’m doubting you saying it, I’m just literally wondering what they’re thinking in allowing it… it seems like something that can only be destructive to the game in general.

Give ArenaNet time to balance them. I mostly agree with your tier list, but its way too early to say anything concrete about them in the long run yet.

So how does the current RNG work? I can see certain patterns that suggest there isn’t just a flat RNG going on, such as:

1. I’ve noticed is that new players or players that haven’t played for a while seem to have a better initial drop rate upon (re)starting to play.
2. I’ve noticed that when running instanced things in a team (ie. Dungeons and Fractals), the whole team will sometimes seem to have better or worse drop rate as a whole than on other runs. For Fractals in particular, it seems like if anyone gets one of the “high rewards” (ascended weapon/armor or fractal skin), then at least one other person in the team likely will as well.
3. Additionally, it seems that if you haven’t done a particular instance for quite a while, there seems like a higher chance of getting better drops (ie more Rares/Exotics) from it upon first doing it again.

These don’t seem like anything guaranteed, but just some patterns I’ve personally noticed regarding RNG since playing from launch.

I like the sound of the event this year, the Mad King fight the first year was the most interesting Halloween related thing they’ve done in my opinion, so I’m glad to see it returning.
I’m not thrilled about it coming out on HoT release day though. I really think they should have started Halloween at least a few days if not a week before HoT.

Necro I’d say is currently the best fractals class aside from possibly Guardian. I’m guessing that dulfy link is way out of date though, so I’d take it with a grain (or maybe bottle) of salt if I were you…

Fractal 50 isn’t really worth it because it’s the same reward tier but a higher difficulty tier than 49. Even though the mistlock instability in 50 isn’t an issue if you have 70AR, the enemies in scale 50 have been buffed (in some cases quite noticeably) from their scale 49 counterparts. This is why 49 runs typically go faster and easier than 50.

I don’t know if this has been suggested yet, but please give us the option of ending Overcharge early (by pressing the button again), to cancel out of it and leave the after-effect on the ground early.
This alone would help Tempest a lot, because you wouldn’t feel trapped into such a potentially vulnerable position while overcharging. I know you can dodge-cancel out of it, but this uses a dodge and doesn’t leave the after effect, so it doesn’t seem good enough. It would be far better to have an optional cancel button replace the overcharge button while channeling it.

Water line has been fairly weak long before Tempest. Elementalist is simply a bad choice as a healer, it pretty much always has been. If you want to be a long range healer, use Druid, or Ventari, or even Engineer. If you want to do potentially the most DPS in the game, however, then stick to Elementalist.

Are people forgetting that Druid is just one of three trait lines you’ll have active at once? The fact is you can have good DPS and healing within the same build, by combining Druid with other more offensive traits, and swapping between staff and a different weapon. You can even make the staff Clerics and the other weapon Berserkers, for instance. There’s plenty of other trait lines and weapons that focus more on support or healing, but it’s why they give us access to 3 trait lines and 2 weapon sets.

From a PvE perspective, the Hammer actually has a lot of decent damage mitigation on it to cover your attacks. It lets the Scrapper function as a sort of half-tank, where you can safely be in the midst of a swarm of enemies until your skills are all on recharge.
As for the damage, it seems sort of average in general overall. I wouldn’t mind seeing a longer reflect and block on the #2 and #4 though.

Swapping between Hammer and Elixir Gun seemed fine to add a long range option. I tested it along with Gyros and it worked out pretty well in dungeons and fractals at least.

Why not just make Mallyx skills output more conditions, without having to rely on you having conditions… like have the elite just pulse out several conditions every few seconds to enemies within a short range around you? I know it may simplify the concept of the theme a bit, but it’s one easy way to compensate it out.

I tend to agree. Ventari is good, but Druid looks better, especially in its traits. Druid will be the go-to healer in the game.
But alternatively, after extensive Fractal and Dungeon testing last beta, I think Herald just might be the #1 best tank.

Norn Revenant ftw. Norn body and face models tend to be designed better than humans, more detailing at least. Plus heavy armor tends to look better fitted on Norn than human. This goes for both male and female imo.

DiogoSilva.7089:

GW2 is designed from the ground up to avoid, for as much as possible, situations like the one you mentioned. So if they want to be consistent with their design philosophy, then yes, that’s also a major problem.

Perhaps, but to me it seems equally strange and against design philosophy to exclude the racial skills entirely from Revenant.

BlackDevil.9268:

Roy Cronacher.1576:

Druid is more about burst healing in key moments as it takes a while to build up astral force to enter celestial avatar, Ventari is more about sustain healing.

I rather see it the other way around:
Ventari is limited to a small pool of energy with a nice on demand burst healing, while not really healing much over a large duration of time since you would run out of energy quickly.
While Druid can basically heal already quite good with just the weapon skills already and provides for a nice burst but also quite long burst healing after building up astral force.

You can actually output a lot of sustained healing with the tablet by just spamming Ventari’s Will and Natural Harmony constantly.
I don’t know if it will beat Druid, but I think Ventari could still be a very viable ranged healer spec. In which case a valid reason to use it over Druid could be that you just like it better.

Nay of the Ether.8913:

It’s not just the cooldowns they are concerned about though, racials currently won’t use energy, and if you slotted a healing racial (#6) on some legends, you would negate all of your other utilities.

I really only see this happening with Ventari. But if someone really wants to be stupid and ruin Ventari by slotting a racial healing skill into it, what’s really the problem with that?
The bottom line is I only see racial skills having even less benefit for Revenant than other classes, if anything. And to me the idea that Revenant will somehow become too powerful if they get access to the regular racial skills just seems sort of ridiculous.