Guild Wars 2

Any chance this will fix the bug where people who previously had 100% map completion don’t get rewards on the new maps? I’ve got sixteen characters that I’m not willing to do completion with because of this…

Party members are no longer visible along the edges of the minimap.. This occurs regardless of minimap zoom level and makes it extremely irritating to try and locate teammates in the same zone when they are even a moderate distance away.

Justin ODell.9517:

I disagree because your argument seems to be that, essentially, that since perfection is impossible we shouldn’t even try.

That wasn’t really what I was trying to convey. My point was more that regardless of how things are balanced, newer/casual players are going to be at a disadvantage because they lack options. If it turns out that one of the locked abilities is even more vital to the “meta”, then they’ll be even further from playing on a level field.

That in itself is not going to be fun for them (getting stomped rarely is) and it’s not going to be healthy for the community (which will hemorrhage players).

Personally, I’ve got a bunch of friends who I can only convince to play sPvP maybe once a week for a few games. The bulk of them aren’t great players by any stretch, but they enjoy jumping on for a while and having some fun, win or lose.

Many of those players are running sub-optimal or niche builds — the sorts of builds that lead to them getting stomped over and over by more experienced players. I hear a lot of “that shout warrior’s so cheap” and “oh gawd another minion master so lame” and so on, while playing with them.

However, they at least have the option to view their opponent’s build and adopt it themselves and see if it’s really as “skill-less” and “cheap” as they’ve been complaining it is. A couple of them have done this on more than one occasion and in some cases have come to see that the build they’ve been complaining about actually requires a degree of mechanical play that they’re not able to match (and no, it wasn’t with a minion master build \=) ).

In at least two of these cases this has caused otherwise casual, once-a-week players to play every day, adopting a build permanently in order to “master it” and “be a pvp kitten”. This won’t be an option for them with an unlock system.

Instead of focusing on mastering the mechanics of the game, they’ll instead be forced into some kind of unlock hunt. Most of them are going to realize this and simply stop before they even begin.

It’s one thing to go around questing and getting achievements in the PvE game. That’s half of what that gameplay entails. It’s an entirely different thing to have to do it in sPvP.

Justin ODell.9517:

Yes, high level players will find the best combinations. They already do, and have this advantage over new players. It’s one of the skills they’ve learned that makes them so effective.

The problem isn’t so much that high level players can find the “best” combinations but that other players who don’t have access to the required traits and skills can’t copy those combinations themselves. Until the unlock the abilities they simply cannot compete at the same level.

I’m haven’t played much Call Of Duty but I understand that they have a mechanic which allows you to copy the build of the person who last killed you. From interviews with the designer I’ve read, they implied that they were basically forced to add this mechanic to prevent new players from feeling like they were getting the short end of the stick and quitting before making any real progress.

I know the two games aren’t the same, but any sort of progression system which restricts access to abilities is going to run into similar problems. Sure, it’s not going to bother a lot of players who will just grin and bear it until they’ve unlocked the necessary traits, but others… Others are going to choose to spend their time doing something else — and that means less players and less interest in sPvP as a whole.

Justin ODell.9517:

I don’t know what the outcome will be, but my intuition is that this will help. That said, we’re not so married to this idea that we wouldn’t change it if it wasn’t working. That is one of the things I love most about this company, we’re willing to shake things up to continually try to improve.

I appreciate this. I know you guys are doing your best. I know you’re trying to make a better game and a better game experience. I just can’t see how gating access to abilities and skewing the playing field to veterans (who already have all the advantages) works towards this.

Justin ODell.9517:

Also, this system is designed for horizontal progression. Unlocking traits, or what have you, won’t (at least shouldn’t, barring any balance issues) make you more powerful, they simply give you a wider range of builds and allow you to better tune your character to your play style. Many, many successful games ease players into options, and, in my opinion, trait unlocking isn’t any different

There is no such thing as “horizontal progression” in any competitive environment. The very notion of such a concept is fundamentally naive.

Any complex system with so many interlocking mechanics will always have “better” or “best” options. Either they’re more powerful in terms of raw numbers, they’re more useful in a wider array of situations, they’re more tolerant of sloppy mechanical play, or some combination of all three.

I’m not having a dig at ArenaNet or their design and balance team here. I know they’re working hard to balance things as best they can. However, they’re not perfect and there’ll always be something that’s fundamentally better than the alternatives.

Bearing that in mind, is it really a good idea to be gating potentially overpowered combinations of skills and traits behind an unlock system which prevents all players from accessing those abilities?

One of the fundamental pillars of the original game design was that every player, new or old, had access to everything they needed to be on an equal footing with veteran players. Quite simply, there was no power progression. You got better at sPvP by playing it, experimenting with builds, and by learning the game.

Now, not so much..

With this new system of unlocked abilities that particular strength of the game is going to disappear. Casual players who jump on once or twice a week for a few games aren’t going to have access to what more regular players do and they’re going to resent it.

Even if those locked abilities are perfectly balanced, they’ll be perceived as being more powerful because they’re being utilized by more advanced players in more advanced builds. For a lot of players, being dominated over and over by a player with abilities you don’t have (and can’t realistically expect to have any time soon) is demoralizing.

I wouldn’t be surprised if this increased “barrier to entry” drove away many of the casual players completely. Even if it doesn’t, I expect a lot of them to become fairly bitter about being beaten by “op vet builds” or the like.

Whatever the case, it’s not a good outcome.

I understand the idea behind wanting to add a progression system: ArenaNet want to ease new players into the mechanics, to give existing players more of an incentive to play the game, and to allow for new and interesting combinations for veterans, but this is not the way to implement it.

Aesthetics I can understand. New armour and new weapons are fine. Even new effects on existing abilities I can understand. But gating abilities based on skill- and/or play-time? That a seriously questionable design decision.

Can we get a confirmation on whether or not conditions will cause the In Tune achievement to fail if they continue to deal damage after the protective buff elapses?

Maybe it’s lag or some other issue, but… I’ve done the event several times now with auto-attack disabled and have been very careful about when and what I’m attacking (going so far as to spend 99% of the fight just standing around uselessly), but have still managed to get myself the debuff, without having made any attacks for 5+ seconds but with conditions still ticking.

To be honest, I’m not finding the skill lag too bad lately. Compared to what the game was like at launch, things run silky smooth. However… I know a lot of people who’re still running into a couple of bugs that seem vaguely related to triggering skills and abilities and lag.

The first one is the weapon switch bug. For whatever reason, you’re simply unable to switch weapons using a hotkey (and so are forced to manually switch using the arrows in the [H]ero menu). This seems to occur more frequently when there’s a bunch of stuff going on in the vicinity.

The other one only seems to happen when you’re near a mass of players (doing the marionette, the wurm, one of the dragons, etc). This one locks out your ability to trigger any skill (except some of the instant cast ones like stun breaks). The only way to get your skills working again is to log out, change zones, or to go down and get revived.

They’ve been around a long time now. Any chance they’ll be fixed when these improvements roll out?

For Fractals, dungeons, and other similar content, I’d like to see more fixes for the abusive exploits and glitches that have become the preferred method of playing. Standing in specific spots where AOE circles can’t hit or the mobs can’t path to, using abilities that don’t trigger certain mechanics, and so on is really starting to get old.

I guess I’ll make the point in the discussion itself, but that — and new content is basically all I’m looking for.

Can we also get a fix for the current cheese strategy on this boss? Standing in the corner of the pillars so that he never triggers his rumble attack and can only ever hit one person at a time is seriously pathetic.

Sadly, I’ve been kicked twice from groups for not wanting to do it. =(

So I was thinking about what everyone’s said in these posts. Most of the points are dead-on accurate, but some of them I’m not so sure about. For example, I personally haven’t really had any major issues with keeping my pets alive in dungeons.

Then again, I am playing a melee ranger with two bears and a bucketload of health regeneration. There’s not much that’ll kill the pets outright and the stuff that will is telegraphed way ahead of time.

That being said, there are still a lot of hits that pets take that they really don’t need to be taking. Often times they’ll stick around to finish off an attack or whatever before they bug out and so get clipped by something that hurts them badly.

So, yeah… I think something needs to be done there. Maybe not a complete overhaul or anything, but definitely some kind of change to make the pet controls a little more responsive so that players can leverage their finesse to keep the pets alive.

I gave it some thought and based on the ideas of other people came up with how I’d change the pet mechanics to make them work a little more nicely.

So before I get into it all, let me start by saying that the last thing anyone wants to be doing is further complicating the profession mechanics. The ranger already has quite a lot of micromanagement to deal with. There’s no sense adding more of it. Similarly, too much change is not necessarily a good thing. Consequently, I’ve tried to keep things as simple and logical as possible without re-inventing the wheel (as it were).

With that in mind, these changes wouldn’t affect the F2 or F4 keys which would continue working just as they do now. The stow and buttons would be removed completely (cleaning up some of the UI) and their functionality rolled into more context-sensitive uses for F1 and F3.

The pet would have still two modes of operation: passive and active.

In passive mode, the pet would not fight at all and would never aggro mobs. It would essentially act as eyecandy. You’d still get the sense that you were running along with your bestest animal buddy, but you wouldn’t have to deal with all the annoying micro-management that has so far entailed.

In passive mode, the F1 key would function as a command to Attack. Pressing this key would immediately Optimus Prime the pet to you (magically teleporting it to your side), switch the pet to active mode, and then sets its target (as described below).

F3 in passive mode would effectively replace the Stow ability. It would be a toggle between Heel and Stay. Pressing F3 would command the pet to Stay. It would sit down and stop following you, refusing to move from the spot until you either change pets or call it to Heel by pressing F3 again.

If the pet was close enough to do so easily, it would simply run over to you when commanded to heel. Otherwise, it would just teleport. Either way, there would be no messy pathfinding to deal with or trains of mobs to ruin your day.

In active mode, the pet would attack whatever enemies get within a relatively short range of you (say 600 or so). It would otherwise behave normally (and is capable of generating aggro normally).

In active mode, pressing F1 would set or clear the pet’s target. Pressing F1 with a target selected would cause the pet to prioritize and attack only that target. Pressing the key again or pressing it without a target selected would revert the pet to its normal behaviour — attacking either your current target or, if you don’t have one, whatever is within range.

Pressing the F3 key in active mode would be context-sensitive. If you aren’t in combat, pressing F3 would would immediately toggle the pet to passive mode and recall it to your side.

In combat, however, pressing F3 would cause the pet to dart backwards, evading all attacks as it does so. It would then wait a second before resuming its attacks (this would aid it in avoiding bigger attacks as well as allowing a window of opportunity for the next usage of the key).

Pressing F3 during the brief time after a dodge would recall the pet to you. It would automatically switch itself to passive mode once you get out of combat, but until then would continue to take damage, generate aggro, and so on.

As far as the pet dodging goes, it should probably have an endurance-based limit similar to that used by players. That way a boon like Vigor would actually be useful for pets. To keep things relatively simple, the pets should only have a single dodge available at any given time. The recharge for the pet’s dodge could easily be represented to the player as a boon-duration-style border around the F3 icon.

So, there you go…

Go figure. I guess some people don’t like change — even if it’s for the better.

I ran all three paths of the catacombs a few times each yesterday with different groups (some random, some guildies) and characters (some 35-ish and some 80s) and after the initial shock of the changes (I swear the burrowing gravelings scared the beejezus out of me the first time), I actually found the runs significantly easier overall.

Once I’d figured out the mechanics and could explain them to others, the runs were much quicker than they’d ever been before (even if people did seem to get downed more often in certain parts). After the fourth run through path 1, I was seriously starting to question whether things needed to be made more difficult.

So I’m going to have to disagree with the majority on this one. If you’re thinking these are difficult or taxing tasks in any way, take a beat. Come back after you’ve learned the new mechanics and revisit the opinion.

If you’re still under the impression things are too hard in a week’s time after you’ve played the content a little more, I’d be very surprised.

Also, kudos to Robert Hrouda on the changes. They make the entire dungeon a bit faster and a bit more fun. There’s still some bugs (my guildies and I drop to around 5 fps in the traps part of path 2 and the Ghost Eater traps sometimes fail to trigger even when charged), but overall… A lot of good changes here.

I’ve run a lot of this dungeon and this path a lot over the past few months. It’s been my experience that it’s a fairly “reliable” bug that can be prevented simply by making sure you and your group don’t do a few things.

It’s not a bug fix, but I have yet to see this workaround fail. So…

The first thing to keep in mind is that for Detha, events and combat do not mix. If she starts fighting anything at all around the event triggers, odds are she’ll bug out. I’m not sure exactly why, but to me it looks like she gets stuck in “combat mode”.

As people have said earlier, there are ways to “reset” her (usually by letting the ooze or gravelings kill her), but ideally you’ll want to avoid that particular step entirely. It’s not only annoying but it’s also time-consuming and not entirely reliable.

Preventing her from bugging out is by far the easiest solution. It boils down to one simple rule: under no circumstances should anyone enter the event circle until Detha is in the room and out of combat.

The best way to achieve this is to stay out of the event circle until everyone is ready. Instead of heading in to the center of the circle, head right as you come through the doorway and then run all the way up to the back wall.

Once everyone in your group is present, Detha will run in at super-speed (or will teleport in if she was dead). Once that happens, the ooze and any gravelings will begin to reset and you can safely enter the circle to begin the event.

As long as there’s nothing in the room for Detha to fight, you’re golden. I’ve run this dungeon at least five or six times a day for months and have yet to see it bug out when these simple rules are followed.

When they weren’t though… Bleh.

I don’t mind the mechanics of Unshakable all that much. With even a little coordination, a group can take off stacks of Defiant and leave a boss open to a well-timed interrupt that trivializes many attacks.

That being said, I would prefer some variety. Things would be significantly more enjoyable for me if not all bosses/champions used the Unshakable mechanic. It is, after all, a rather passive effect and that tends to make it fairly dull.

What would be nice to see is some kind of mechanic where each control effect added a stack of something to an enemy and, when enough of these stacks are added, the enemy receives a temporary immunity to all control effects while it performs a powerful offensive or utility ability.

Stacks could, of course, wear off with time, but any control effect would refresh all of their durations, effectively resetting them to maximum.

For example, the spider boss in Ascalonian Catacombs might get ten seconds of immunity to control effects and also spawn a room full of smaller spiders if you apply control effects to her too frequently.

Anyway, just a thought…

So I gave this a little more thought…

I deliberately made the assumption that the designers would want to keep the effects of spirits largely the same, but… If the mechanics were to be changed and the overall theme of nature-based “elemental” spirits kept, what I’d do is:

Change the spirits skills so that only one type of spirit can be active at any given time. If a player activates a spirit skill with a spirit already active, the new effect simply overrides the older one (which then goes on cooldown).

The effects of the spirit would vary based on the spirit itself, but would generally work by providing bonuses both to the Ranger and to any allies that happen to be within range (up to the usual cap for area effect abilities).

This would most likely work best as a pointblank AOE centered on the Ranger that pulses every three seconds to a range of 600 game units or so. The Ranger and any ally caught in the pulse would receive the benefits conferred by the active spirit.

To compensate for how powerful such an effect could become, you’d probably want to limit the effective spirit uptime. A 15 second duration with a 60 second cooldown sounds about right to me. Traited for say +25% duration and 20% faster recharges, it still wouldn’t be too powerful.

A Ranger could also opt to end the effects of the spirit early by triggering its secondary “flip” skill (y’know, after it’s summoned, the skill changes to something else). This would allow players to trade off ongoing benefits for a more situational ability.

As for the specifics of what each spirit would do, well…

As a general rule I’d have each spirit periodically remove a specific condition on all characters affected by the pulse (every 3 seconds). I’d also have it apply a condition on the next attack made by each of those characters (once again, refreshed every 3 seconds). Active abilities would vary but generally would be AOE in nature.

This could work such that:

Frost Spirit: Removes burning each pulse. Causes the next attack to apply one stack of Vulnerability for three seconds. Flip ability does an AOE chill for 5 seconds.

Stone Spirit: Removes bleeding each pulse. Next attack applies Weakness for one second. Flip ability grants AOE stability for 5 seconds.

Storm Spirit: Removes cripple each pulse. Next attack applies Blindness for one second. Flip ability does AOE daze for 0.5 seconds.

Sun Spirit: Removes chilled each pulse. Next attack applies Burning for one second. Flip ability does AOE damage.

Depending on how powerful those combinations end up being, you might split off the condition removal into something that you get only if you trait for it.

As for the elite — Spirit of Nature — I’d bring its cooldown down to around 120 seconds or so, but keep its duration roughly the same as the other spirits — perhaps a smidge longer.

Instead of removing specific conditions, the spirit would instead convert any conditions that affect a character into boons. This would occur at a rate of one conversion per second.

I’d probably avoid having this skill having any kind of “on next attack” effect like the other spirits. It’d be powerful enough with just the condition conversion.

The flip skill for the elite I would imagine working in a manner pretty much identical to the Engineer’s Elixir R toobelt skill. Once activated it would create an area of effect which would restore 20% of a downed teammates health per second for 8 seconds.

So, yeah… There you go.

I’ve been trying out a variety of different spirit builds in open world PvE and dungeons lately and I’ve come to the conclusion that they’re extremely lackluster in comparison to everything else available to the Ranger.

When it comes down to it, they are simply not worth the expenditure of trait points or utility slots, because there are a number of fundamental problems with how they work.

First, the spirits themselves are extremely vulnerable to damage. Even traited for additional health, they have virtually zero survivability in any dungeon encounter — often being one- or two- shot by enemies seconds after they’ve been summoned.

Traiting Spirits Unbound (to allow the spirits to follow you) and then staying at range does not help their survivability in the least. Many mobs will simply chase them down and kill them or simply attack them with their own ranged options and kill them. Either way, they still end up dead — and you miss out on their effects.

I could understand the lack of survivability if the cooldown were lower or the effects of the spirits themselves were better, but in most dungeons I’ve run they provide their bonus to characters in the vicinity once before being killed. Twice, if you’re lucky.

Which brings me to point two on why spirits are so lackluster…

Quite simply, the effects of the spirit are relatively unreliable for characters with slower attack rates. They work fine if you’ve got a fast auto-attack or if you’re using Rapid Fire or Unload or something similar — especially if you’ve traited to increase the chance of the effects being applied.

But if you or your teammates are using something slower, the effective “up time” on the boons granted by the spirit is pretty abysmal. It’s definitely not something that you’d want to waste a utility slot on — or base an entire build around.

To my mind, that’s a bit of a problem. I can’t think of many other support-style utilities that rely as heavily on group composition and that are appreciably worse based on profession/weapon selection.

Pretty much every other utility in the game benefits everyone about the same, regardless of how they’ve chosen to build. So why don’t the spirits?

Between the lack of survivability and the unreliability of applying their effects to characters with slower attacks, the spirits really are lackluster compared to every other utility skill available to the Ranger (including the Shouts)..

It’s true that you can trait heavily to make spirits moderately more useful, but that in itself requires a considerable investment of trait points which could otherwise be spent on things that are significantly more effective overall.

Hopefully, at some point in the near future, when we get those Ranger “quality of life” changes that were talked about a while back., we’ll see some love for the Spirits. Until then, though… I’m going to make some suggestions as to how I’d personally re-work things.

So… Here goes…

Let’s scrap the idea of spirits being separate entities altogether and instead treat them as a kind of transformational shamanic mask. Essentially, the ranger would take on the spiritual characteristics of a particular element, animal, or whatever and would so manifest subtle changes in his appearance to reflect that nature.

So… Instead of a spirit being summoned as a separate entity, it would instead appear on, near, or around the ranger himself. Perhaps as some kind of ghostly-looking aura or effect — in a manner similar to how you get the ghostly animal animations when using certain weapons.

Aesthetically, this would do away with one of the things that bugs a lot of people about the spirits: that they appear pretty much identical to a scaled down oakheart with some kind of ghost effect applied to it — almost like placeholder art.

In gameplay terms, it would effectively remove one of the biggest problems with the spirits while staying true to the general vibe of the ranger itself.

To simplify the aesthetics and to compensate for the balance issues that might be created by not being able to destroy the spirits (and thus deprive the Ranger of his buffs), you’d probably want to restrict rangers to having only one spirit active at a time (like the Stances of the Warrior).

The secondary skill for each of the spirits could remain essentially the same, effectively allowing you to dismiss the spirit early for the usual situational effect.

Traits that affect spirits as separate entities would, of course, need changing. Vigorous Spirits might instead increase the duration (or lower the cooldown) on the spirit skill itself, while Nature’s Vengeance might allow the situational effect to be used without dismissing the spirit, and Spirit’s Unbound might grant vigor to allies affected by the spirit or periodically remove chilled, crippled, and immobilize from the Ranger.

Anyway… Just an idea.

I actually rather like the idea of the rocket boots and the tool belt skill they provide, but…

The self imposed knockdown is ridiculous. It makes using what would be an otherwise solid stun break into an exercise in masochism.

Yes, the skill breaks stun. Yes, it cures all movement-related conditions. Yes, it deals damage. Yes, it acts as a blast finisher, but kitten if any of that actually makes it useful when it puts you on the ground for two seconds whenever you use it.

More often than not, using rocket boots to break out of stun won’t actually help you at all. Given the short durations of control effects in Guild Wars 2, you often spend more time in flight and then on the ground than you would have otherwise spent disabled from the ability you’re trying to counter.

Even at the best of times, the damage you inflict is relatively minor and the distance you put between yourself and your attacker is essentially gone by the time you regain your feet.

Worse yet, if your opponent is quick and has a leap ability of some kind, they can close the distance between you very, very quickly and then use the fact that you’re still on the ground by the time they get to you to lay some serious hurt on you.

Against ranged attackers the skill’s usefulness is even worse. Most enemies won’t be phased at all and will simply close distance with you and keep peppering you with damage while you remain unable to respond.

At the moment, the way the mechanics of the skill work, it really is of very limited use in a very limited number of situations. It’s not even on the same playing field as the stun breaks available to other professions

If they really want to balance out all the various abilities the skill confers, why not just replace the self knockdown with a self daze. Though you’d have to eat a couple of seconds of not being able to trigger anything else, at least you could benefit from the stun break and movement freeing parts of the ability.

Might be nice to get a blast finisher on the kick as well. Just saying…

I don’t think anything else even compares to Supply Drop as an elite. It reliably provides damage, a stun, healing, and extra firepower and can be used quickly and easily in pretty much any situation — and, if you trait for it, it becomes even more effective.

Racial elites and improvement traits aside, the other options you have available an Engineer simple do not compare.

The Mortar is situational at best. Though it can do some decent area effect attacks and effects, it’s typically only marginally more effective than your character’s regular attacks and utilities (especially if you factor in what the turrets from the Supply Drop would be doing).

To use it though, you’ve got to lock yourself into a fixed position — meaning that in the vast majority of situations, you have to trade off a significant amount of survivability (via dodging) for a minimal overall improvement in capability.

In a game like Guild Wars 2 where movement and avoidance are paramount, it’s simply not worth the slot.

Elixir X is just as bad, but for entirely different reasons. While the variety of effects that the skill can generate are decent enough, the fact that they’re applied at random means that you can’t reliably count of getting the effect you want when you trigger the ability.

More often than not, you’ll be wanting the tornado ability and get the unarmed one or vice versa. Either way, you’ve got an ability you can’t trust.

Elites are supposed to be these big, cool, fun skills. Unreliable skills simply aren’t fun.

I assumed it was a known issue, but I had a quick look through the forums and didn’t see anything about it, so here goes…

Occasionally while playing the game, the ability to weapon swap ceases to work. Regardless of how many times you press the tilde key or click the UI buttons, the weapon you currently have selected stays out.

The only way to restore the ability to swap weapons is to get out of combat and manually un-equip and then re-equip one of the weapons. From that point onwards, weapon swapping works normally (at least until it bugs out again).

I don’t know exactly what causes the issue. I haven’t had it occur with enough frequency to diagnose the circumstances under which it occurs. It typically happens around once a day while I’m playing either my Necromancer or Guardian (both of which tend to get stuck using the staff).

I’ve talked to a number of guildmates about the problem. They have all had it occur to them at least once or twice over the last few weeks. Some of them have had it happen to them while playing Ranger or Warrior, so I’m pretty sure the issue is not limited to specific professions and weapons.

Anyone else have this happen?

A few things to bear in mind when making the choice between axe and dagger:

First, the axe has much greater range than the dagger. If you use focus or horn as an offhand, you can sit outside the melee and still deal damage. This means you can gear a lot more offensively with no appreciable decrease in survivability.

Second, the auto-attack on the axe stacks vulnerability very quickly (especially paired with with focus off-hand). This increases the amount of damage the entire team does. and allows for some nice bursts with critical-based builds.

Third, if you don’t get Axe Training (a grandmaster trait), the axe skills deal less damage and can be used less frequently than the dagger ones. Given that Dagger Mastry is an adept trait, it’s much easier to use Life Siphon effectively than it is to use Ghastly Claws. Consequently, you’ve got a little more build flexibility using the dagger.

Fourth, Ghastly Claws has a much shorter channel time than Life Siphon. It hits eight times in 2.25 seconds — as opposing to Life Siphon hitting nine times in 3.5 seconds. If you’re running a high power/critical hit build, you’ll have a bigger damage spike with the axe -- especially if you stack on some vulnerability beforehand.

Finally, even if you trait Bloodthirst to improve the amount of health Life Siphon steals, it still doesn’t spike quite as high as Ghastly Claws. It’s close though. From memory, the difference is only around 6-7% or so. That being said, traiting Transfusion or Vampiric Precision may make up the difference in added utility.

So, yeah… They’re roughly equivalent. To me, which you use is basically personal preference.

The bug where Detha refuses to set up the cannons has happened to me four times in the last two days. In none of those cases did we skip anything. We killed each and every mob that was between us and the objectives. That being said, each time the event bugged out we had killed the oozes inside the room with the cannons instead of outside with the chains.

In two of those cases we ran to the door on the opposite side of the chamber and allowed Detha to be killed by the other group of oozes, after which we returned to the cannons. This caused her to respawn and start the event. The rest of the dungeon proceeded normally from that point onwards.

I’m not entirely sure what is causing this bug to crop up. It might be fighting in the room itself or it might be people Fing Detha while trying to pick up loot (pun intended). Either way, it’s very, very frustrating.

Yeah, the stack-on-kill sigils worked fine if you already had some stacks, but they didn’t accumulate stacks if you killed an enemy with the conjure.

So…

Boss fights in the dungeons are highly repetitive and consequently fairly boring. Most are just big bags of health that occasionally perform a special attack that must be avoided — usually just by pressing the dodge key at the appropriate time. This does not lend itself to gameplay that is in anyway exciting or dynamic. Players just circle the enemy spamming attacks and boons when they become available and dodge occasionally.

This could be alleviated to some degree by adding specific mechanics to each boss fight that require one or more players to do something different for a limited period of time. Multiple phases could also be used to break up the monotony of the fight.

As many people have mentioned in other posts, there’s also very little reliance on teamwork, communication, or coordination for the boss fights. Aside from reviving teammates or triggering/attacking an object/enemy occasionally, there’s really nothing to the bulk of them.

Finally…

Dungeons are highly static and consequently repetitive. The environments and encounters for any given path are almost always played in exactly the same order in exactly the same way. There are occasional “dynamic” elements in play (additional burrows or the troll in catacombs, for example), but for the most part… Not so much.

What I’d like to see is a bit more variety in the dynamic events in the dungeons (bringing them in line with how they were pitched to us prior to launch). Perhaps have a couple of different bosses that could be in a particular area, only one of which spawns — so that you never quite know what you’re going to face, even if the mechanics are essentially identical (eg. Ice Elemental/Dredge in the Fractals).

Maybe add additional enemies to an area or remove the “normal” enemies and replace them with a mini-boss or event. You might expect to fight a bunch of gravelings in an area, but instead run into a troll champion or the like. Or alternatively, have a cave-in cover up a doorway forcing the group to find another way around.

Whatever the case and whatever the balance issues, I’m really looking forward to see what magic is worked with the dungeons in future. They’re fun now. Hopefully they’ll be more fun later.

This started as a couple of paragraphs and kinda snowballed from there. I should state up front that when I say “dungeons”, I’m referring to dungeons other than the Fractals of the Mists (which I think are a pretty good step in the right direction).

So here goes…

I’ve been running an awful lot of the dungeons lately. For the most part they’re pretty good and quite a bit of fun — even when playing a pick-up game full of randoms. They are by no means perfect, however. There are quite a few balancing issues that make certain paths of certain dungeons an absolute chore to play through.

These “balancing issues” are, to my mind, largely caused by two factors: how long the path takes to run and how difficult it is to successfully complete the path — the latter of those two factors strongly impacting the former.

Players being players will almost always go for the biggest reward for the least effort. In explorable dungeons, this means that they’re going to do the shortest, quickest, easiest path. It makes very little sense to subject yourself to a grueling hour of play for 69 tokens when you can do another path twice in half the time and with less effort and end up with more tokens overall.

There are two ways you can approach this really. You can either balance out the duration and difficulty so that each path is roughly the same or you can adjust the token reward to reflect the added difficulty and time. Whichever way it’s done, it’s not going to be an easy task. Though I think the latter method might be easier.

Speaking of difficulty… This is a bit of thorny subject since certain groups will find the same situations significantly easier or more difficult depending on the exact composition of the group — which professions and builds are in play, what level everyone is, how everyone is geared, and so on.

All issues with group composition aside, I think the biggest issues I personally see with the dungeons are threefold: trash encounters are often harder than boss fights, boss fights are typically highly repetitive, and the dungeons are highly static.

As far as the difficulty of standard encounters go (what most players would call the “trash mobs”, the issues I most notice are:

- Though many enemies have “charge up” effects for their special attacks, not all of them do. Some enemies (often ranged “trash”) have no readily perceivable warning before they launch an attack that can one-shot a player (even one with 3200+ defence and 25000+ health). In certain dungeons, this leads to a lot of “WTF just killed me” moments — a source of constant frustration in any game. An alternative to more “charge up” effects might be to use an icon floating above the player whenever he’s targeted by an attack that is a potential kill-shot (similar to how the Jade Maw beam works).

- Often, there is no easily discernible difference between different types of enemies. Some might be slightly larger or have different weapons or whatever, but often they all look the same — especially when the effects are flying. Having to mouse-over enemies one at a time to determine which is the greatest threat while you’re fighting for your life can get pretty old pretty fast. It would be nice to see some more obvious differences between enemies. Team Fortress 2 did a great job with making its classes readily identifiable at a distance using colouration, size, and silhouette. Some changes along those lines would help immensely.

- Certain enemies (often ones that attack in groups) have access to spammable control effects that can lock down players for long periods of time. It can become quite frustrating to be unable to do anything to save yourself or a teammate, because your team only has a limited number of skills that break stuns or grant stability.

- Many such encounters take place in areas where there is very little room to move. Confined corridors, hallways, and similar areas greatly increase the effectiveness of area of effect attacks (for both sides) and can change up the pace of the dungeon somewhat, but they also greatly disadvantage professions that rely on movement as their primary defence. Either way, these encounters only exacerbate the issues mentioned above with spammable control effects.

The last two issues — those of encounter design and balance — are ones that pen and paper roleplaying games have been dealing with for decades. Consequently, there’s quite a lot of great guidelines and good advice available on the subject.

As presumptuous (and nerdy) as it sounds, it might be an idea to make the Building Encounters chapter of the Dungeon Master’s Guide for 4th Edition Dungeons & Dragons required reading for the dungeon development team members. Or not… There are plenty of other systems that have similar chapters.

Hmmm… Had to split the post.

Is this change to bundle/sigil interaction restricted entirely to engineer kits? Or will we see change propogate over to other professions as well?

I’d really love to have sigils working on my elemental conjures is all…

I did a quick check in the mists just now. None of the weapon sigils seem to work at all — on-crit sigils don’t trigger any effects, stacking sigils don’t stack, and so on. I didn’t try the on-kill sigils, but I figured that it’s a safe bet that they don’t either.

I guess it makes sense that the sigils don’t work though. Since the elemental weapons are essentially just bundles they’d have the same problem as the engineer kits in regards to weapon statistics and sigil effectiveness.

It’d be nice if they did though. Conjuration-based elementalists could use a little love.

I managed to get this achievement in World vs. World at around level 72 or so. I spent about a half hour or so flipping supply camps, killing dolyaks, and running away from the enemy zerg, and then did a bit of crafting.

Despite the experience gained from all that World vs. World, I think it was crafting that gave me the bulk of the experience I earned. It scales to your level, so if you get to the level cap and switch to a discipline that you have no training in, you can quite quickly and cheaply earn a few hundred thousand experience just using banked materials.

Ditto for me.

Hardware’s fine, Windows 7 x64, latest drivers for everything. Game’s run fine since the first beta weekend, but about three weeks ago, I’ve started to get intermittent crashes.

At some random point after a few minutes to hours of playing the game will freeze with one or more looping sounds (seemingly more often while accessing either the map or the inventory).

Sometimes the game will pop up an error report dialog. Other times it requires me to alt-tab and use the task manager to close things down.

Either way, not fun.

This is something that’s been eating away at me for a good while now. It’s a small thing, really. Purely aesthetic and ultimately a personal preference, but… I figured I’d post and hope that someone at ArenaNet sees it and writes a bit of code that fixes things.

So… Here we go:

The thing that most irritates me about the cut-scenes in the personal story and the dungeons and so on isn’t the dialogue or the animations or any of that. It’s that when your character appears in the cut-scenes, your helmet settings (and I guess shoulder and/or backpack settings as well) aren’t respected.

Regardless of what you’ve done with your helmet, whether it’s hidden or not, it’s simply not going to show up when you’re talking to someone. (There are a few scenes where it does show up, but they’re fairly few and far between.)

For a game that places such emphasis on aesthetic-based gear progression, it’s extremely irksome to have your character’s helmet not appear when you’re in a cut-scene.

I’ve spent a good deal of time and effort getting the right helmet for my character and I want it to be visible when my character is in the spotlight.

I know the idea is that in the cut-scenes you should be able to see the character’s face and see him talking, but is it really too much to ask not to have it forced on you? To have the cut-scenes respect the same preferences that you’ve set for every other area of the game?

I’d have to say that Selfless Daring is probably my favourite guardian trait in the game. With my cleric’s exotics and 20 points in honour, my dodges heal me and any ally close enough for around 1200 health. That adds a huge amount to survivability in any kind of protracted fight (especially if you’ve got virtues adding additional health per second as well).

That being said…

Warriors may have nastier bursts and may have some nice damage mitigators available to them, but in an extended engagement their lack of “free” blocks and ongoing heals tend to mean they eventually get worn down by attrition.

At least in my experience, default Guardians tend to be built as the “mighty glacier” of professions (ie. they can dish out damage and take it on the chin, but lack in speed), whereas Warriors tend to favour being “glass cannons”.

That’s not to say you can’t build a Warrior that’ll do well in an extended fight, of course. It’s just that most people tend to focus on being so much on offence that they only put a token effort into their defence.

Case in point: the video linked above.

It looks to me like the Warrior has gone pretty heavy into offence and is relying primarily on his slot skills for defence (condition removal via Mending and “Shake it Off”, and Endure Pain as a stun break and escape enabler) and sticking with a group to give him protection from having to fight one-on-one for any length of time.

In a group or with the zerg he’ll run people down pretty easily. He’ll probably even get a lot of kills. But in a one-on-one…

Overall he’s really pretty squishy. 22K health is not a huge amount for a Warrior and his Toughness can’t be all that given how hard the guardian’s direct damage attacks are hitting him (ie. like a truck).

Consequently, he’s having to back off and heal every once in a while — which is exactly the wrong thing to do against a guardian — especially one with armour and healing that strong.

Personally, if I was the Warrior, I would’ve given up on fighting the guardian after the first little skirmish. It would’ve been much more effective and useful to the team to just run away and go fight over an actual objective. Then again, I wouldn’t be running a build that overspecialized and squishy either, so…

Despite what people say, I’m really not convinced that guardian can’t play frontline DPS. You just have to have the right build and be smart about it.

Sure, you’ve got a fair number of support-style abilities by default, but that doesn’t mean that you can’t do anything but play support. Those very same abilities aren’t strictly there to help others. They can easily be used for your own benefit.

Last time I looked at how the various professions matched up stats-wise, the guardian can be specced to have some of the highest sustained DPS in the game. You might not have the burst that other professions (like thieves, warriors, and elementalists) get, but you can do some serious damage much more regularly, because you have a number of inherent defensive abilities that allow you to stay in melee longer (and with less risk).

That being said, for dungeons, if you’re intent on using the greatsword as your “primary” weapon, you really need to think about upping your survivability some. Glassy, power and precision-centric builds work great in open world PvE, but they require a degree of finesse in dungeons that most players simply don’t have — not to mention stats and traits that just won’t be available until you hit the level cap.

As someone else pointed out, the greatsword tends to draw all the enemies in on you and focus on dealing with them all simultaneously via the various AOEs it deals. That in itself really requires you to up your toughness and vitality at least a little (either via traiting or through gear selection).

I’ve gone through various iterations of my “ideal” dungeon build, but overall I’ve found that there’s no single “best” solution. There are many situations where certain weapons and traits shine and others where they’re massively detrimental. Consequently, I switch around weapons and traits and the like as needed.

By default though, my dungeon set up (the “Teflon Soldier”) is greatsword main (with a Sigil of Superior Hydromancy) with mace/shield as secondary (fitted with a Sigil Of Hydromancy and a Sigil Of Superior Energy), Cleric’s set exotics with a six pack of Superior Runes of the Soldier, and a yellow defender’s back brace. Traits and utilities look like:

30 – Zeal: Fiery Wrath, Greatsword Power, Zealous Blade
20 – Valor: Purity, Honorable Shield
20 – Honor: Writ Of Exaltation, Two-Handed Mastery

Heal: Signet Of Resolve
Utilities: “Stand Your Ground!”, “Retreat!”, and Signet Of Judgement.
Elite: Renewed Focus

Overall, it works well enough for most of the dungeons. Hits hard enough and inflicts enough conditions that you can put out some meaningful damage while having sufficient sustain to stay in the melee (just watch those conditions slide right off).

It just fits my playstyle better than going all-out DPS or full-on support tanky.

I know a lot of players (including myself) use voice communications with their friends, but that doesn’t really help a lot when you’re playing with randoms — especially in sPvP or WvW where coordination is (pretty much) paramount (to success).

Given the rather quick pace of the game, and the relative slowness of typing (or of trying to convince randoms to join your voip server), what I’d like to see is a “three key chat” system similar to what you get in first person shooters such as Tribes, Unreal Tournament, and so on.

If you haven’t used one of these systems before, the premise is pretty simple: you use a quick sequence of keystrokes to transmit commonly-used statements and/or animations. One sequence might transmit “Enemies spotted to the west.”, another “We need more supply.”, and so on and so forth.

The interface for this system is fairly straightforward. You have an initial key binding (typically “v”), which brings up a heads up display off to one side of your screen. This display lists a number of categories, each of which has an associated key. So you might have “s” for the “Siege Equipment” option, “e” for “Enemies”, “a” for “Animations” and so on.

Tapping the relevant key selects the appropriate category, updating the display with another set of options — with actual specific calls, each of which is also bound to a hotkey. In the “Animations” category, for example, you might have “d” for “Dance”, “t” for “Threaten”, and so on.

With a little context-sensitivity thrown into the mix, you could quite drastically increase the amount of communication options available to players with very little effort. Not to mention, it’d make the game feel just that little bit less lonely (even in a zerg, the silence is sometimes deafening).

Anyway, just an idea…

I’m not sure I particularly like this change — and I especially don’t like the random re-jiggering of the skills to different hotkeys.

As far as Symbol Of Wrath goes… Isn’t the self-root when you use it a big enough limitation already? It makes it fairly difficult to land the initial attack successfully — and any halfway decent player is going to be out of the area of effect before it ticks more than once or twice.

Even if you’re using it in conjunction with some kind of cripple or immobilize (or with the pull of the greatsword #5), it’s not doing huge amounts of damage that aren’t avoidable. Either way, it’s not something you can chase anyone with — which makes it rather lackluster in sPvP and WvW.

If the problem is the non-stop retaliation it provides, how’s about removing that from the skill entirely? Keep the same recharge and burn effects and so on and allow players to combo for retaliation if they want to?

Either way, can we get the keys back to where they were. Futzing with stats is one thing, but there are a lot of players who’ve been playing for over a month know who are going to have to retrain their muscle memory — just because.

Switched worlds recently and, after the latest patch/server reset, the guild is back. As expected, all influence and upgrades were lost, but… It’s back and working.

The lost upgrades and so on really does act to dissuade people from changing servers though…

It’s been 21 days since my initial post, 29 days since the initial post, and 18 days since the last post from someone from ArenaNet. Is anything actually happening with this?

Are we going to see a fix any time soon?

Hopefully they’re hard at work at resolving the variety of issues. Do we know if the influence we’re earning is still being accrued — even though there’s no guild being listed?

People are having problems with this event? Really? I mean it’s not one of the easiest group events in the game, but it’s also not one of the hardest. You only need 3-4 people in order to beat the event. They just have to be people with half a clue.

Personally, I’ve done it three times now with different characters (guardian, thief, and elementalist) and found that it’s pretty easy to get past the entrance. Swim through the middle of the enemies and they’ll follow you inside. Then use AOEs and kiting to mop them up. You have to deal with a couple more krait, but they’ll stop spawning and you’ll be where you need to be.

As always though, when fighting krait pack on the condition removal…

So it’s in a better format:

Server: Ehmry Bay
Guild Name: Spunk
Guild Tag: SPU

My friends and I put together a small guild on Ehmry Bay just for the fun of it. We’ve been building influence and unlocking things here and there, but have recently moved to Gates of Madness to play with other friends.

Fair enough the guild’s influence doesn’t carry over to the new world, but the guild itself has also disappeared. No-one can access it from anywhere — including a member who stayed on Ehmry Bay.

Attempting to create a new one with the same name, prompts the user with an error message saying that the name is already in use.

If at all possible can you add “Spunk” (SPU) to the list of guilds to look into?