Guild Wars 2

The process for crafting The Chosen (the precursor for The Flameseeker Prophecies) is currently effectively impossible.

The very first item required for the very first collection, the Anthology of Heroes, effectively cannot be crafted at this time. It requires 13 sheets of quality paper, which are account-bound and can only be made by a level 300 scribe. This means that in order to start the collection, you need to be part of a large and rich guild (at guild level 10) and have a scribe levelled to level 300. Both of these are absolutely prohibitively expensive. They cost more than the Flameseeker Prophecies themselves.

Right now, starting the process of crafting The Chosen requires guild interaction even though the item is not guild related (something that has been avoided so far), and encourages people to join guilds for entirely selfish reasons (to level up a crafting discipline and then bail). Scribing items might become cheaper later on, but at this time, the entrance requirement for starting the crafting process for the Chosen effectively locks everyone out of doing it.

This cannot be intended.

Tyler Chapman.1832:

4. Working as intended. Good topic for debate on changing in the future.

This was in regards to Temporal Curtain’s swiftness, and since you’re leaving this topic open to debate, I really really feel like I have to add to this discussion.

As it is right now, Temporal Curtain is rather terrible for teamplay. You used Temporal Curtain to speed up a group or a WvW zerg? Everyone who has 2 seconds of swiftness left gets nothing. This most often includes the mesmer himself who ends up with effectively no speed boosts at all except for the guardian #3 boosts everyone in the group gets. It’s rather frustrating to play. Nevermind trying to be fast as a small group with multiple mesmers in it – timing the curtains so that everyone actually gets a benefit from them is nigh impossible.

It’s really a pity that it discourages teamplay so, especially since IIRC the reason it doesn’t stack is because of people walking back and forth through it in beta, to get a ton of swiftness.

So why not just make it only proc swiftness on any player once? Or put a cooldown of a few seconds on it, that would work too. This way, people can’t abuse the wall to stack huge amounts of swiftness in no time, but it doesn’t interfere with the curtain’s ability to speed up other players who aren’t trying to abuse the curtain but who have some little swiftness from another source.

Zomaarwat.3912:

Cayafas.8290:

Just dropping in to say that these are some excellent, excellent points.

GW2 storytelling has always been hit-and-miss; some storylines are awesome (the charr and asura early missions DRIP atmosphere and have memorable characters, even if those characters get thrown under the bus later). Tybalt/Kieran/Forgal are the most fleshed out characters in the entire game. It’s a pity they get killed off without a decent replacement for them. Let’s face it, kieran and tybalt are likeable, you know what motivates them, what their weaknesses are, what they’re like. Trahearne was a monotonous & supremely unintelligent and banal bore with not the slightest hint of any emotion of any kind.

Anyway, the point I’m trying to make is – storytelling up to level 50 in the personal story was mostly good, after 50 it was… well, “rushed” is probably the kindest way to describe it. Please tell me you’re having the people who did the early bits work on the next bit of the Living Story, not the people who did the Trahearne trainwreck & the hotchpotch of early LS chapters :o

http://wiki.guildwars.com/wiki/Keiran_Thackeray
or
http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Magister_Sieran
?

Sieran, thanks for pointing that out.

Keiran was mostly whiny & annoying, but I suppose that was the point of his character.

Just dropping in to say that these are some excellent, excellent points.

GW2 storytelling has always been hit-and-miss; some storylines are awesome (the charr and asura early missions DRIP atmosphere and have memorable characters, even if those characters get thrown under the bus later). Tybalt/Kieran/Forgal are the most fleshed out characters in the entire game. It’s a pity they get killed off without a decent replacement for them. Let’s face it, kieran and tybalt are likeable, you know what motivates them, what their weaknesses are, what they’re like. Trahearne was a monotonous & supremely unintelligent and banal bore with not the slightest hint of any emotion of any kind.

Anyway, the point I’m trying to make is – storytelling up to level 50 in the personal story was mostly good, after 50 it was… well, “rushed” is probably the kindest way to describe it. Please tell me you’re having the people who did the early bits work on the next bit of the Living Story, not the people who did the Trahearne trainwreck & the hotchpotch of early LS chapters :o

Xavi.6591:

What about the out-manned buff? It wasn’t showing on clones before which was a problem.

In my opinion, the out-manned buff should be invisible to opposing teams anyways.

Aww, do we seriously have the same problem with Outmanned?

And I agree, outmanned shouldn’t be visible for opposing teams. It’s meant to increase rewards for doing well with a lot fewer people than the others, but in effect, it’s just inviting the other two servers to steamroll you, making things even worse.

JonPeters.5630:

Ok so its sounds like you could counter the summon delay by having a subset of traits. So we fixed a bug that lets all those triats work together but that also makes them not able to exploit the delay anymore. Since it seems like they were working and mostly balanced without the delay I am going to go ahead and reduce the delay on this stuff to .25 seconds. I just tested it at 0 seconds and that breaks some other things so I think .25 is the best compromise.

Thanks for responding to feedback on this one, it’s quite the issue for mesmers who use phantasms.

Um, guys, yes, this is a problem. Have you not noticed how empty low-level areas are? The entire idea was that we would not play exclusively in the highest-level areas.

Now if you had the option to – just riffing here – downscale a whole bunch of levels further, in exchange for a good magic find boost, or maybe just the chance for items that don’t drop in any other way – that’d make going to low-level areas interesting again from a reward perspective, and make it a challenging experience instead of a faceroll.

Can confirm that phantasmal healing still has a long delay before kicking in properly.

There’s no obvious reason why phantasmal duelists should work differently from other phantasms though, so it’s not that strange to assume that either it is bugged or the other phantasms are.

And while one tick immediately upon summoning phantasms is better than nothing, it too makes absolutely no sense, and furthermore one tick is pretty negligible :/

Zero Angel: you should really read the OP. He acknowledged this problem and suggested replacing Defiant with a cooldown mechanic on CC skills (boss is immune for x seconds after being cc’d).

The ten-second delay until phantasms actually provide regeneration is still weird, especially since there’s no mention of it in the trait description. I’m curious if it’s working as intended with a wrong description (and a really weird pistol phantasm thing), or if the 10-second delay is a long-standing bug. Or maybe the pistol phantasm is the only one that’s working as intended?

“I’m sure ascended armor will be easy to get in the future”? When the only way to get them now is… paying >50ectos at the very least? No, I highly doubt they will. And “exotics are already amazingly easy to get” doesn’t really fly for all those people who play casually, and for whom ~12g to get the exotic trinkets is a lot of cash already.

@mulch: I’ve no issue with, for example, the level cap increasing by 10 if that just means 10 levels and some traits. That’d be like the current route to 80: a fast and painless road to the top, and then you’re done. But if it means having to go through a new gear grind to get new exotics, then yes, that’s a major issue. The problem is this: Not having to worry about keeping your character “geared up” is something that many players enjoyed. It’s something that many people flocked to gw2 for. There’s plenty other games for endless stat progression.

Hear, hear! I, for one, am never going to bother going for ascended gear – I just don’t want that pressure in my gaming environment. A short walk to being maxed out is fine – leveling to 80 was almost completely free of frustrations in gw2. But I’m really, really not looking forward to level cap increases if those imply that we’ll all have to scramble for level 85 gear. And if all other ascended items are straight-up improvements over exotics… what the hell do they expect casual players to do do be competitive?

@Lucas Ashrok: That’s a large cost, yes, but that’s for Ascended items, you can’t really compare. The apotohecary items are 5x as expensive as all other items of the same rarity, so something’s off.

There’s something wrong here, if not with the drop rate then with the amount of passion flowers you need to craft any passiflora trinket.

Right now, you need 75 (!!) passion flowers for a single ori ring. That’s more than 10g at current market prices. For comparison, most other orichalcum rings cost ~2g. It’s not a case of the market “adjusting to new items” either; the prices of passion flowers have been going up over the past two weeks: http://www.gw2spidy.com/item/37907

So yes, there’s something wrong here one way or the other.

I just really, really need to add my voice to the chorus of those opposing the new ascended gear. I’m sorry, but a game in which being max-stats is something that requires a long, tedious process is NOT what this was going to be, is NOT what arenanet announced this game would be at launch. Getting to exotics doesn’t take long – and hey, having a few rare pieces of jewelry doesn’t hurt you that much. Casual players are fine now.

After this they won’t be. After this there’s a split. Especially if Arenanet does what they announced they’d do; add more ascended items than just back slots and rings. Not looking forward to wvw situations being decided on gear rather than just on skill. Not looking forward to players who grinded a lot having an easier time in dungeons and difficult pve. What the hell happened to the easy-to-reach plateau? I know that the level 80 and exotics was a higher plateau than the even-level-20 gw1 approach, and that was fine. Hell, I’d even be fine with new “ascended” items if infusions were region-specific (help deal with certain mobs, like infusion in gw1), but otherwise ascended items are equal to exotics. But not this. This is everything gw2 wouldn’t be.

tl;dr: Please, please don’t do add this new tier. Please, please don’t keep adding a few ascended items with future items, requiring more and more grind to get your character up to max. Grind was always optional in this game. Keep it that way. PLEASE.

—

@mrstealth: Arenanet has usually been rather adamant about not being pressured by ncsoft and getting to employ their own vision. I seriously, seriously doubt we can write this off to ncsoft making arenanet change the game against their will.

Worth noting that the apparent horizontal FoV is 65°. Last official word was that the FoV was 75°, but before that the number of 65 was common, so it wouldn’t surprise me if it actually is 65 and the developer in question made a mistake.

Either way, it seems like something worth checking out. If it’s a bug , that would explain some of the complaints about dizzy-makingly small FoV. I’d personally appreciate a FoV slider, but if part of the issue is caused by a bug, that’s another issue entirely.

Look – I can’t really disagree with these nerfs. Phantasms were very powerful – though not easy to use, admittedly – and this was probably a good balance decision.

But please please can the scepter and mantras get a buff so we actually have a few options?

Mantras require 3s downtime each, and if you want to max them out with traits, you need to invest 30 in both domination and dueling (forcing you to play a glass cannon, basically) – and even then, those traits are only worth it if you have a lot of mantras, and no one can afford 12s of total downtime on a regular basis in his build. All non-grandmaster mesmer traits are dueling master traits, which means you can only have two of them IF you have 30 in dueling and give up one of the grandmaster traits. The sole exception is Restorative Mantra, which heals allies near you when you cast a mantra. Healing allies near you isn’t all that great in the first place (if you hit multiple people with it, it means you’re way too close to eachother and will get aoe’d to death), and the effect only happens when you charge the mantra, not when you use it, making it both too infrequently used for a master trait and impossible to time (no one is going to delay charging his mantra to make more of a tiny heal).

And scepters – well – uh… I really want to like them, but dear god that weapon is just awful. Is there anything good about it at all?

They are? That’s rather confusing under a header that says “Update 10/5”

Thanks!

The bottom of the first post!

Also, I noticed that the picture suggests Gandara would be matched up against the Underworld and Abaddon’s Mouth, when in fact we’re matched up against Baruch Bay (SP) and Fort Ranik (FR).

I have a question: Why did Gandara drop in rating? We won our week this time (and rather convincingly, too).

People craft to get xp, to get specific looks, and in the process of getting what they want, they happen to have to make some blues and greens, so they do. They then sell ‘em quickly. Nothing wrong with that process. It’s extra noticable when everyone’s going through the same crafting stages at the same time – for example, in the first month since launch – but I don’t think it points at any significant flaw.

It’s quite possible to make a profit crafting rares (yellows) before level 400, and it’s quite possible to make a profit at level 400. Before that, you just get a very significant amount of xp (10 levels!), and you get some sets that you can actually use while on the way to the sets you want (or to the yellows, or to 400).

I don’t think there’s a problem.

For people who are disappointed that they can’t get Rabid armor sets: You can’t craft them, but you can find them. For level 80 exotics, there’s the Dredge and the Svanir sets, and if you combine Grenth and Balthazar karma items, you can get a condition/toughness/precision set as well.

Belmont, it’s not how far it’s zoomed in, it’s the degrees of width you can see. Check out wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Field_of_view_in_video_games. You don’t have it at higher than 65 degrees, because you can’t.

So yes, please please please, arenanet, can we have a FOV slider? It’s currently rather uncomfortable to play on a big screen. There’s no unfair advantage in PvP either, given that it’s already allowed to use multiple monitors to get a bigger field of view, or to play in a window.

I’ll just be happy if I hear the conversations near the tailor in Rata Sum less.

“Are you currently looking for krewe members with a background in Synergetics?”
“Not at the moment, but those kind of positions tend to be highly fluid. Check back later.”

Also, the conversation about water closets in Lion’s Arch is driving me almost equally insane.

I’d just like to confirm that yes, I get this bug too, it’s very annoying, and I’ve indeed never had it happen with characters within line of sight.