Guild Wars 2

It hit me last night. I hadn’t read this thread, but as an ex-programmer I tried pressing pretty much every key, I tabbed to other apps, made sure keys were working, and tabbed back, I even went back to the character select screen and then selected the same character again — assuming surely that would fix it — and it did not. Had to exit the program and re-launch to fix it.

For me, this occurred on the default, 32-bit version. I found the Mac 64-bit client thread in the support forum, downloaded it, and haven’t had a Coherent Crash since. There are some other issues with the 64-bit client, but I’ve found it to be more stable overall. (Note, the 64-bit client literally has “64-bit” in its name, so if you’re just running “Guild Wars 2”, you’re running the 32-bit client.

Asfalon: I couldn’t login with a Coherent Host Crash on the default, 32-bit version. I switched to the 64-bit version — follow the links on the first page of this thread — and it’s worked flawlessly. The 64-bit version has the word “64-bit” in the application’s name.

In terms of slowness that some people are experiencing, a couple of observations.

1. When I first downloaded the 64-bit, load times were fast. Then I deleted the 32-bit version so that I wouldn’t accidentally run it, and the 64-bit version had to download all the game data again. So the 64-bit will use stuff the 32-bit version downloaded, but…

2. I run Little Snitch so see that at almost every screen load, the 64-bit app reaches out to a different unnamed IP address. Not sure if it loads an image from there or what. If you have connectivity problems, the game might hang waiting for the connection.

3. I am having LONG load times on 64-bit, even though it’s “playable”. I think it’s severely under-estimating what it needs to be playable, and perhaps it’s really not. Letting it run and fully download now.

I thought perhaps I was using the 64-bit version since someone in the thread mentioned “mandatory”, but I wasn’t. I downloaded it and it fixed my crashing problem at login, which was a 32-bit thing. (Hence the emulator crashing.) Did have to set video scaling to Native Resolution, to get rid of the blurry image. Also, set most things at Medium to get reasonable frame rates on my Touch Bar MacBook Pro.

So in my case, things got much better with 64-bit. Oh, with the occlusion setting I also get an odd anti-shadow around my character, but turning that off fixes it — and makes the overall screen brighter.

Xstein: Go into your game’s video settings and look for the scaling setting and select Native Resolution (or something like that). Instantly everything will be clearer and not blocky.

This happens 3 times out of 4 trying to login. If I have autoplay on it happens pretty much every time. I also experience a crash when moving under conditions I haven’t quite established.

This is on the latest High Sierra Beta, on a Touch Bar MacBook Pro.

When I think of turrets, I see several attributes that Anet has tried to balance:

1. Turrets are fixed in location, so it’s possible for your opponent to counter-play by running away from them. Turrets (currently) deploy at the engineer’s location.

2. Turrets have a certain toughness that lets them survive, and can be traited to negatively affect those that (melee) destroy them. They can also be healed (repaired) by the engineer, and they can be cleansed (destroyed) by opponents.

3. Turrets are fire-and-forget allowing the engineer to totally focus on their opponents. In fact, turrets can continue to function indefinitely with the engineer at a fair distance, out of LOS, etc.

4. Turrets also provide activatable effects including overloads (no longer), detonations, and tool belt skills.

5. Turrets provide group support through the healing turret, turret fields, and traits that can cause them to dispense buffs.

6. Turrets can be deployed and picked up and can provide on-deployment effects. For example, they can be traited to have shields at deployment.

Not saying that any of these aspects are super-powerful. Just saying that this is the mixture of things that Anet has available for defining turrets in general. (Of course, a specific turret is also defined by its main function: healing, flames, etc.)

And it’s may impression that Anet has tried to balance these attributes in a way that’s resulted in a fairly bland outcome. People have complained forever about turrets being weak, turrets being fixed in place while PvP and WvW are dynamic and PvE encounters are becoming more dynamic over time. And so on. I think there have been a couple of periods of time when turrets were “overpowered”, but for most of their history I think the general consensus has been that people — including myself — are intrigued by turrets but feel that they’re underpowered.

So I agree with the OP that the current changes are not sufficient, but at least they seem to show Anet trying to move turrets away from the unstable and yet bland middle-of-the-attributes and towards a goal. Hopefully, once they see how a more dynamic style plays out, they can then tweak other attributes to match.

The new change does seem to do several things at once. First, it acknowledges and simplifies the drop-overcharge-detonate-then-use-toolbelt tactics that I think are fairly popular. Second, it indirectly increases the DPS of turrets by allowing simultaneous use of tool belt skills and the turret. Third, it positions leave-them-out turrets as something like semi-permanent buffs/conditions while providing counter-play via movement.

Hopefully, once the new approach takes root, Anet will be able to tweak other aspects of play. This could include buffs or could involve traits so you can trait to double-down on the on-deployment strengths or to bend them towards leave-them-out play. (Currently you can trait to have projectile reflection on deployment or to have them dispense buffs. They could strengthen either side of the equation, or force you to choose one or the other.)

@Belzebu: Ah, so the achievement is exactly the opposite of the point of the encounter. Unless you count bringing a group of friends in to slaughter everything while you stand by the door. Or an exploit. (Actually, I still have the Warbler so I should go try to solo it.)

@Laurie: I think your suggestion is a key. ANet is having problems finding the memory leak in 32-bit executables (which includes us Mac users, since the emulation doesn’t run 64-bit mode). We can’t expect miracles there.

BUT they can modify the code that they do control so that getting disconnected allows a way back in. It could literally allow you back in for N minutes, it could mail you a token that’s soul bound, it could do several things like that. They’re probably nervous about exploits like taxiing in folks who didn’t participate in an event after the fact for gold. Seems to me that they could keep some kind of record where you have to have done certain actions certain periods of time apart during the event, and if you’re present when the boss dies, it records that and whether you collect anything from the chest or not.

Demanding that they find an obscure bug is harsh. Demanding that they create a workaround (to getting the prize, not to crashing) is only reasonable.

Is this the one for the Egg Bearer? It was quite frustrating, but the key is working with the random configurations (of patrolling mobs and where dead allies lie) and raising an army. It’s touch-and-go at first: if you get only one guy raised or if you have two and end up fighting two mobs, you lose, but once you get to three and if you keep moving around the perimeter to avoid massive fights, you can clobber the boss with no problems, solo. I think I had about six raised allies once I got to the boss.

(I think this is the way it’s intended to be done, based on the initial remark that this will show your leadership skills.)

@Gudy: I tip my hat to you. I thought I was pretty clever using Leaning Techniques to get to the Golem HP in the west of Auric Basin. Doing it without that is amazing. Congrats!

I have to add that I like flying puzzles much more than jumping puzzles. Less fidgety, in my opinion, and at least in the case of the Golem HP, it was beautiful flying there. (I’ve also discovered two unmarked mastery points while up there trying long-distance flights. Overall, it’s a fun mechanic.)

Having pushed all the way to Ley Lines — which I think is a nice addition — I’m now having to circle back and work on the Nuhoch Wallows. That’s a bit painful, but at least it’s a much shorter process.

@Fluffball: My thoughts exactly, for useful pets.

We need something in the Wiki that lists major Ley Line runs: Ley Lines that take you a fair distance, like the Ogre Lane run. I came here looking for it, and was surprised that no one seems to have done it.

So far, I’ve found the Ogre Lane run and the Nuoch Lane run (which takes you to an otherwise-unreachable mastery point, by the way). I suspect other lanes have them as well. In DS, I found one useful one that avoids a lot of patrols — it starts near the initial camp — but most of what I’ve found so far are short and don’t appear to go anywhere useful so I’m not sure if they’re only useful during the event or not.

ANET SUGGESTION: Add a Ley Line in VB that takes you up into the canopy. Give a reward to those who stick around — one that lets us help other folks more easily. (Add other top-level mastery abilities to also get there if that makes things more fair.)

P.S. I can confirm that you can get to the HP in the southwest of AB using only Leaning Techniques from the initial WP in the northwest corner. You might be able to do it in one glide, though I always land on a big tree within sight of the goal. I could never get across the broken bridge in the mid-East by gliding only, though. (The one with the Ley Line where the bridge used to be.) I also found a couple of lock boxes while exploring that option, gaining two more mastery points (that aren’t indicated on the map).

You want small pets that more match Asura stature, but pets that perform pretty well? Or just looking for small?

If you mean “HoT’s not selling well”, none of us have any accurate data to make that call. If you mean “people are complaining in the forums about HoT”, so what’s new? Pre-HoT, you could go to every profession’s forum and hear how handicapped their profession was and how many buffs they needed.

If you mean “HoT doesn’t add much to the game”, I’d disagree.

Yes, there are definite areas to polish, including revisiting base classes to fix issues that Elites plug. (For example, Necro has serious problems that Reaper plugs perfectly, making Reaper awesome, but doing nothing for a non-Elite build diversity.)

And ANet still has gaps in responsibility — at least I think that’s what it is — where major annoyances fall through the cracks. For example, over-spawning of mobs in open-world situations, interlocking gating that causes major pains in advancement, and deaths in zones where 80% of WPs are contested and annoying, CC’ing mobs make it easier to quit an event than to try to get back.

But the Elite trait lines are quite good. Some didn’t have enough work and need more, but overall the lines are viable and interesting. (Depends on the game mode you play and how min-max obsessive you are.) The way plait trait lines fit into the existing scheme is much better and less bolted-on than other MMOs I’ve played.

Masteries have poor gating, but I’m really coming to appreciate how they let you switch between alts based on how you feel that day, and still make progress across all of your characters. That’s as anti-grinding as it gets, and it takes the simple account-bound-item concept to a new level.

I had a much longer post that the internet ate, so I won’t go on. I’m actually liking HoT more now than the day it came out. In the next couple of months, ANet has the chance to finish some things that were rushed and to balance some things, and then HoT will be amazing. For now, it’s worth the money spent, and I’m having fun.

@ZeftheWicked: Never said other classes could trait for damage off of chill or fear. As I said, Necros have more traits that can strengthen or benefit from Chill — which includes damage from Chill. But Chill is useful in its own right, even without damage, and not unique to the Necro by any means.

And I’ll repeat, other professions can apply more stacks of more damaging conditions faster than a Necro and maintain them easier. So damaging Chill and Fear don’t open up a condition gap but rather help to close it and bring the Necro closer to others. The Necro has always had a long ramp-up time compared to other condition builds, and as far as I can tell, still does.

So “Master of Conditions” needs to be clarified. They have considerably more access to Fear, which has been nerfed to death, and isn’t as convenient as other CC. (It also depends on what game mode we’re talking about!) On the plus side, they can trait for it to cause damage during its extremely limited (1 second) lifetime.

They don’t have more access to Chill, though they can trait for it to cause its own damage. On the other hand if, say, an Ele goes all-in on Chill, they can also rune for 7% additional damage (from their Fire and other damage sources) against chilled targets.

Again, in PvE and with strong adds that stand near bosses, a Contagion can blow away anything else in the game, because it’s spreading an entire-teams-worth of condition to the adds.

Glad to hear you’re doing well in sPVP. I don’t play that mode, but as I understand it determined Necros have always done better than the general consensus believes. As I understand it, Life Blast hits very hard, but is slow and is most powerful at mid-range, putting you precariously close to the CC/focus train, and base Necro doesn’t have many escape options (Wurm and… ?).

Actually, you get a birthday present in in-game mail when your character is a year old, so you should have one. One thing will be a scroll that instant-levels any character to 20, and another increases your XP gain for 24 hours of playing. Also, if you login every evening, you get a chest you can claim and if you do that every day, each month you’ll have received 10 free levels-worth of experience scrolls.

I say all of this because you should level what seems to be fun, not what levels most efficiently.

I’d also add that base Necros aren’t nearly as great as Reapers, which you can only enable once you hit 80.

@ZeftheWicked: You mean “Reaper kept its promise”, not Necro. The Necro class has several structural defects that the Reaper nicely fixed and even improved on. Reaper is probably the most solid class (well-designed, weapons/traits that work together, etc) in the game right now. Given that you only choose two other (non-Reaper) trait lines, Necros do have some build diversity (condition, power, minions), but it’s not as clear as you make it.

I’d also add that the Necro isn’t THE master of conditions. They can manipulate conditions better than other classes (transfer, corrupt), and if a Necro is in a situation where they are able to use Contagion — building off of of conditions that teammates have applied — they’re amazing. Otherwise, not so great: several classes can apply more conditions more quickly than a Necro, and can provide team support (buffs, reflects, etc) while doing so. The Necro provides little team support.

In terms of Chill, it isn’t unique to Necros either. They do have many more traits that strengthen and benefit from Chill, but other classes have more ways to apply it and can do perma-chill as well. Necros do pretty much own Fear, though it’s not really impressive at this point.

Not saying that DH compares to Reaper, but non-Reaper Necros are in worse shape than Guardians of any build, due to not providing any support for their group.

Not sure if I’ve noticed something, but wanted to get confirmation if possible. It seems that if Pocket Raptors get conditions on them, they don’t do the “swoop out, swoop back in” thing that can make them hard to handle. For example, on my Revenant, if I can hit a huge pack with the mace burning field, it seems to shut them down. They seem to clump up and not zoom around.

Is this just luck, or does continuing damage (or maybe burning in particular) slow them or change their behavior?

I recently leveled another class to 60 or so by using the instant-level-20 birthday scroll plus tomes of knowledge that I’d been banking. (Make sure to login every day, even if for only a few minutes. You need to login — or be on — around 24 hours after the previous login to get the daily chest.) In addition, on each character’s birthday you get a potion that boosts XP, etc, for 24 playing hours and you can bank these.

If you rush to 80, I can’t remember how many skill points you’ll have, but it’s not enough to unlock all Reaper skills. I’m pretty sure it’s enough to unlock Reaper, though. Once you’re 80, the new areas’ hero points grant 10 points each, so you can make pretty good progress there.

In terms of aesthetics, you may not like the Reaper’s scythe, and you ought to get used to (and prefer) the Axe/Focus rather than the staff, in my opinion.

Earn all of your Reaper skills.

Overall-wise, HoT is a mixed bag. Gliding and the overall mastery system is good. Pacing/gating of things is poorly done in many cases.. They also doubled-down on the old ANet trick of having encounters that simply overwhelm small numbers of players, and of making nearly all of a maps’ waypoints contested during events. (It’s better to basically give up than to try to run back in most cases.)

Necro-wise, it’s great. They didn’t fix many Necro issues, but Reaper is good enough — if you don’t mind a melee-oriented play style — that it makes up for this oversight. I can’t speak for raiders or dungeon-runners, but for my play style it’s very fun.

(That said, I’ve been playing my Engineer and Ranger a lot as well. Gotta say that the new HoT Ranger pets — the Bristleback and Smokescale — rock.)

I’ve used the Marsh Drake since I started (by luck, I chose it as the starting pet for my Asura). It’s tough, has an AoE attack as well as a multi-target condition. It’s my go-to pet and it works well against groups. I’ve started running with the Bristleback as my alternate, for the ranged attack. (For something that stands still, the “machine-gun” is awesome.)

For a really tough one-on-one fight, the Smokescale’s actually pretty tough with its stealth and smoke. (Of course, you can also stand in the smoke or fire through it to create blinds, too.) Or if the opponent’s even harder-hitting, I’d use a Brown Bear.

So, yeah, two out of three of my regular-use pets now are HoT pets.

I mentioned it in another thread — and haven’t had a chance to double-check it — but as I remember the Sneak Gyro applies pulses every three seconds that last for four seconds. If you are able to spend a couple of pulses moving slowly or not at all, that gives you a buffer for it to catch up. On flat-ish ground.

Ranger has become my second-favorite profession lately. (I’ve mained a Necro forever — back before Reaper, when Necros suddenly became cool.)

I like the the pet options, managing/swapping pets, and the variety of weapons. Right now, I swap between Longbow and Axe/Torch. Other professions may have mechanics that end up working like pet management, but somehow it has a great feel that adds some complexity and choice, but doesn’t feel too fidgety.

Yes, what Thanatos said: if you don’t delete emails, you won’t see new ones and perhaps that’s where your presents are stuck.

@Talrune: The birthdays are for individual characters, not the account. I’ve gotten gifts for each of my characters on their birthday every year since launch. Do you perhaps delete and then relevel characters?

It’s been in an email with a giftbox-looking attachment, and you open that and get an XP booster, etc. As Xiahou Mao said, the latest two birthdays I had featured a choice of dyes, which was pretty cool.

@Ragion: Your overall point is well-taken, but you do have one thing wrong: the pull on the GS is not single-target. It’s not AoE, but it will pull multiple targets.

I haven’t leveled a bunch of professions back-to-back, but I didn’t feel that Necro was particularly slow — except maybe a lack of leap/teleport/perms-swiftness. It’s fairly easy to tag lots-o-mobs in open world events, you’re pretty tough, you can go Power or Condition fairly straightforwardly. Reaper definitely takes Reaper to another level, though.

My Necro’ better-equipped than my other 80’s, so take it with a grain of salt, but my Reaper feels like it has larger margins for error in (in PvE, anyhow) and is more indestructible.

It took three years for ANet to mostly fix Necro pets. An entire major build, the Minion Master, was thus handicapped for years. So it’s not surprising that gyros also have issues. And Engineers are not unique.

Not to mention that Necros pretty much have to take Reaper — admittedly a great choice — in order to work around all kinds of things that don’t work well in the base class. You can ignore Scrapper and still be a viable Engineer. You can take Scrapper and ignore gyros and still be a viable engineer.

Revenants have such big problems that ANet threw them weapon swapping — they were originally to be the heavy-armor profession without weapon swap, joining Elementalists and Engineers — at the last minute. And at release, two of their four stances don’t work underwater. And if you reset to the two stances that do work underwater, while you’re underwater, they don’t reset back to the previous stances on land. Yeah, they’re pretty broken, too.

All that to say, ANet has a lot of work to do yet, in all professions. There’s enough brokenness to go around. (I say that as someone that mains a Reaper, but my Engineer is a runner-up.)

One tip on the stealth gyro: after you fire it off, stay in it for a couple of ticks — i.e. only move to the edge of the area of effect. I believe the ticks are every 3 seconds, but they last for 4 seconds, so you can buffer things a bit to minimize reveals later. Can’t get on to test it now, but I think so.

I’ve had issues with Mac crashes and seen reports since HoT release. I’ve been forced to download multiple updates since release, but the problem has not been helped one bit. What’s the status of Mac updates?

I crash out a couple of times an hour, usually when zoning in, when scrolling around in the map, or when a bunch of action starts happening on screen.

The final straw was trying to continue with the story line tonight. I went through the absolutely unpleasant grind to master mushroom jumping — having evidently made a non-abet-approved choice to pursue updraft gliding earlier — and was then able to continue the story, but it turns out that if I die in any puzzle, when I try to return to a checkpoint, I crash out to the login screen and have to start the entire thing all over again.

I have to put up with the long, un-bypassable monologues, and perform each puzzle perfectly and one mistake and I have to start all over again. That’s perfectly poor design in the first place — there should be no problem with logging or disconnecting at checkpoints — but it’s doubly frustrating since ANet seems to be doing nothing about these issues.

Another thing to mention is that not only are there the issues that the OP mentions, but there are layers of dependencies. Example:

I get gliding in the first zone. It’s pushing me to do mushrooms, but I see updrafts and think I’ll push for that. It takes a long time, and I have to think outside of the box, but I manage it. I do the story line and it leads me to the second zone. And… the next step of the story line requires mushrooms. OK, I start mushrooms — though I find updrafts really cool — and it takes a much longer time to get the first mushroom skill than theory says. A frustratingly long time, considering that I also now have those markings to master as well. (And I’m of course, ignoring two other mastery lines.)

I’m locked out of following the story and even participating fully in the zone because of how masteries work. It really does become a grind.

Oh, masteries, HP, and views are fun in one way, but often involve frustrating jumping puzzles and yield no real XP as you’re struggling to get the perfect glide, jump, etc, to complete them. You can spend an hour to finally get to that important point and you’ve gotten zero XP and your masteries have advanced zero.

I am following the story line. But I don’t have poison resistance yet, so I’ve died twice now on Hero points that are impossible to get without it. Working on that, but the story leads me to the next zone. Where I’m prompted to master hieroglyphics to advance. Wait, not yet done with… The masteries gating is a grind and is not well-paced.

The maps are confusing and maze-like. Finally got Level 2 gliding, which makes some things doable, but that means other stuff neglected and has to be ground out. And quite a few things that you need to come back to later — except you don’t come back.

How many times have I run into HP’s where I am not worthy, or doors that are closed (literally) and I have no way to know how to open them, or HP’s where you need a crowd but there isn’t a crowd. Repetitive missions where you spend more time fighting your way to them — narrow roads, annoying mobs — than doing anything. Poorly placed waypoints that sometimes necessitate giving up on a mission after a wipe.

Elite Spec is just another talent line, except everything falls into one long progression for which points are hard to get. Could be broken out into sub-lines (Reaper Shouts, Reaper Skills, Reaper Skins) but it’s not.

The mini-games are not well-explained and you can die multiple times without even knowing what you’re supposed to do. Some of the story line involves dying repeatedly with things like trying to figure out where the ghost jumped to, then how to get there — except you die if you go too far down.

No, it’s not impeccably designed. It’s full of seams. Now you happened to do things in the order they demand. You like jumping puzzles (and things like them). Things fell into place for you in a couple of hours. You’re riding the rails with no real choices, you’re grinding for stuff that you have to get to advance, then convincing yourself that you wanted to do them just for the fun of it so it’s not a grind.

Many of us disagree with you.

Mac El Capitan 10.11.1, crashes about every 20 minutes under graphics load: crowded scene, bring map up or down, zoning into a new area. Right now, I restarted it and am locked out: process sitting in the background doing nothing — not downloading or anything.

I think a lot of the “everything’s fine, don’t expect everything instantly” folks aren’t getting what many of us are feeling. Some of it is having the Elite spec gated as it is, rather than being an alternative we could choose — trading off other issues. It’s a grind and then a choice, which is not different from just raising the level cap to 90.

Most of it is the poor pacing, of which the Elite is just the most obvious example. As another, follow the story line and participate in events and you’re led out of The HoT initial zone to a second zone. I haven’t even gotten to gliding up drafts yet! I run into points I cannot access, including points that require poison resistance, and those mushrooms would sure be handy, but I’m not even to Step 2 in gliding. Am going to go back to the previous zone and not consider it boring? (Oh, the new zone has yet another mastery, so now I’m two or three behind and grinding.)

Or what about the twisty, narrow paths that are pains to navigate and have annoying mobs along them? Seemingly their only purpose is to make you glad you ground out flying (to level 2, not there yet) plus mushrooms. Even have parts of the story line that require mushrooms (unless you’re stubborn enough to try a couple dozen times with flying blind and at max distance until you do it. Yay me.

Heck, even the idea of having all of an Elite dropped into a long linear advancement track is painful. There should be an initial gate to enable the Elite spec, then options to advance the parts you think most important first, as you can with base characters. Instead, you have a long slog which requires you to get all elite skills in a particular order.

Same here. If say every 20 minutes or so. Especially when zoning or zooming/moving the map.

If you have a group of folks, love jumping puzzles, are happy doing things the HoT way, don’t care about playing new content with more than a fraction of your Elite spec, it’s all okay. Get gliding, mushrooms, Hylek masteries. Do jumping puzzle-style navigation to get to points you need, in the right order, etc, etc, it’s not so bad.

But most of us thought that new content could be played with mainly complete new specs, that navigation would not be so bad because masteries would help after a short ramp-up, that you’d be able to enjoy the world instead of viewing it as a maze.

So it’s not as bad as the most vociferous complainers make it out to be, but it’s not nearly “not so bad”. They managed to turn what should have been a fun challenge into a frustrating maze (literally and logically).

Another issue I’ll add: since the terrain is so linear and filled with mobs that knock you down, it’s a royal pain to do some things. For example, I was with the Pale rifle guys pushing into the temple and the group wiped. They’re still there, but the closest place to zone in is locked out and if you go back to the starting point, you now have to fight your way through dozens of re-spawned and annoying mobs to get back. So you just give up, and the quest stays locked because no group wants to fight its way to the place where it needs to fight.

This is related to the one thing in GW2 that caused me to rage-quit for a while: some open-world encounters are evidently meant to wipe small groups. You could be in a zone that you can definitely handle, and then suddenly this one quest point would be swarmed with an endless supply of bad guys and you wipe. Nothing to indicate a group was needed, much less a large group. And nearby zone-ins are contested so you have to return a LONG way, pretty much guaranteeing you won’t be able to come back at all.

Gotta agree that the maps are hard to navigate and you need to gain masteries to even enjoy the navigation. Which is lose-lose: while gaining the necessary masteries, you don’t enjoy the region, but once you gain them you’re ready to move on.

Also, I had a bunch of spare points and figured it’d be enough for the Elite or they’d refund points and let us concentrate on the Elite. (Which is not an Elite: it’s a different kind of play style, not a near-OP improvement on the regular play style.) So now I have a little less than half of a Reaper, and synergy of skills is 20+ new-world points (10-points each) away. At a minimum: shouts, skills, and skins could have been three sub-areas under Reaper, so we could focus our points in the direction we want.

It really feels like someone said, “Hey, we worked kitten this content, and we’re going to make players experience every last drop of it! No choices, no tradeoffs, no skipping! Players will experience every special snowflake we put into this or they’ll suffer.”

Naive question: Is the Medic Gyro chosen in the healing slot, precluding HT, or is it chosen through another mechanism, which would allow it to be used with and to extend HT?

In the previous BWE, Grasping Darkness was hard to use. Now that it’s easier to use I’m noticing that it misses the vast majority of the time for me, when the terrain is really uneven. Maybe I’m just mis-estimating the distance in jumbled terrain, but it certainly looks like the animation reaches the target but immediately pops up a “Miss”

Anyone else noticing this? Is it terrain-related or is is the animation… or is it just me?

WSG Delen.9203:

You and others are saying (or at least implying) they are unusable under ALL circumstances which is complete and utter BS. Not only that, but there is the general extrapolation that if there is an issue with minion AI then there would notionally be fallout for other forms of subordinates as well since I suspect they all share a large portion of the base behaviours.

If there is a major game breaking issue as some seem to make out, then there are at least some of us that have not witnessed it despite having put in collectively at least 1000’s (if not 10000’s) of hours with our characters. If that is not “doing the work” then I don’t know what is.

I am pretty certain that if I were to dig deep into one area or another of this game I could find an argument to say that some Feature X is broken, that it is game breaking and should be fixed and then proceed to B&M about it till the cows come home (without giving any solid details) and also find that the very same feature is not seen as broken nor game breaking by another section of the community.

At this point in time, there have been little or no specific details about how the AI is supposed to be broken so if anyone is “just talking” it is those that are complaining that it is broken. At the very least provide links to the threads that offer details to support your premise rather than simply dismissing the personal experiences of players who have not put an insignificant amount of time into playing the game and have been playing it since before release.

Whether A-Net are likely to act on such evidence is moot at this point in the discussion, since it has been mostly just hot air so far.

Did you notice the latest release notes:

Profession Skills
Fixed a bug that prevented minions from quickly targeting your attack target.

Note that there are no special conditions or exceptions listed. Not even the oft-used “under rare circumstances” or “under certain circumstances”. Unqualified: there was a bug that kept minions from “quickly” targeting our targets, arguably under a wide variety of conditions.

First, I love the vision. But I think the key for a nightmare creature is that you seem to be slow yourself, even though you’re running. How about add a chill to anything that dodges the reaper? Or give the Reaper stability or other boon if the swing is dodged? Or drain the target’s endurance by 100%. You’ve postponed the day of reckoning, but it’s not that easy to fool the Reaper.

I had fast-moving mobs run past me while I was swinging the GS and not get hit. I can’t imagine using it in PvP or other situation where players can have swiftness and can dodge.

The bottom line is: is Reaper and GS worth the cost of another trait line? I don’t feel like it. With the Chromomancer, it definitely was: heck, you get wells that rival Necro wells. With the Elementalist elite it also was: it makes a play style with less elemental swapping viable. With Necro, not really. It lets you do a bit of cleaving, but so do Marks.

@WSG: I am not claiming what you think I am claiming.

First, the burden that ANet will do something in light of feedback rests upon you. Others of us have spent hours gathering feedback and experience and ANet has done nothing about it. We have made our case, and it hasn’t been acted upon or even acknowledged, beyond a “keep up the good work” remark we once got.

We’ve done the work. You’re just talking.

And your talking is the issue here. You’re blaming people’s expectations from WoW, you’re blaming ridiculous stretches like “select nearest target”. You’re blaming play style — which is of course blaming the person who doesn’t play as you do. You’re blaming people who have done hard work for not repeating it again, or linking to it in a way that you expect, or whatever.

There are two sets of extremists here: those that just say “minions are unusable!” and you who says, “minions work fine and it’s up to you to prove it for the fifth or sixth or hundredth time or I won’t believe you.” Been there. Done that. Said the silly thing you’re saying, then actually dug into the matter.

WSG Delen.9203:

@starlinvf: I have played Ranger in both GW1 and GW2 and found the AI and behaviours more than adequate in both. I would not claim that subordinate AI is perfect but it does the job I expect it to. I could find several points where GW1 is possibly better than GW2, but the inverse is probably true too – it is not something I generally worry about. I have learned it is better to treat every game as different from any previous game I may have played (including earlier games in the same series) and learn how it works and it’s limitations then work with-in those parameters.

I would not be surprised if half the problem is caused by WoW convert fallout… i.e. WoW players expecting GW2 professions to map directly to WoW equivalents. If this is the case, then I think the individuals in question need to take a reality check.

Assuming the issues being highlighted in this thread are truly down to situational bugs then A-Net will almost certainly need more information (and possibly co-operation from the affected parties) in order to track down the root cause of the issues. Even then, there are no guarantees that they would be able to fix the underlying issues quickly.

This has been addressed repeatedly in threads over the last couple of years. Several of us spent quite some time experimenting with Necro minions and coming up with situations and why we thought those situations triggered issues. This is not a WoW-convert problem. It’s more widespread than you give credit.

Dahkeus.8243:

I don’t know how ANet is expected to fix minions when the only feedback they get is “omg it’s broken! AI so bad!”.

You wanna see a change? Give specific feedback. What decisions in what situations are problematic?

This has been done repeatedly. I had an entire thread a year or two ago where I spelled out conditions I was seeing on Necro pets. After I’d spent quite some time like you and others arguing that things basically worked fine and it’s specific issues with other folks that cause problems. We talked about certain zones, uneven ground, uphill targets, minions squaring themselves off to align with their masters, ranged versus melee, attempting to get them unstuck, etc, etc.

It’s my impression that Ranger pets work better than Necro minions, but then it was my impression that Necro minions worked just fine for most people. Until I ran into the problems others were describing and there were no work-arounds.

Pandaman.4758:

Druitt.7629:

My latest theory is that it has to do with the horsepower of the machine you play on. My guess is that minion AI runs on your local machine, and only sends action updates to the server — just as your character runs on your local machine — so some people may experience situations where the AI always gets the short end of the stick.

That’s definitely not the case, both because it’s just a horrible idea in any MMO to let the client handle minion AI (which exposes it to cheats) and also because in practice minions continue to attack even if their master DC (and will continue to attack until their character times out).

Actually, it probably is the case. Most MMO calculation takes place on the client, and the client sends info to the server which basically checks if the info is sane or not and if its sane it accepts it.

@WSG Delen: I sounded a lot like you until I started experimenting on my lvl 80 Necro. It’s pretty bad and none of my theories worked out. It really boils down to the kinds of pets, the local terrain, and how events happen. I can literally end up with a pet standing there with their back to a mob and do nothing, even if I drag the mob in front of them.

It doesn’t mean I don’t use minions. It doesn’t mean that they don’t work most of the time. It does mean that I can never count on them doing what they should, though.

So far, on my mid-level Ranger, the pet has responded correctly 100% of the time. But I have no doubt that once I hit lvl 80 areas I’ll see some problems, as happened with my Necro.

So it depends on what you mean by “broken”. Does it mean it never works? Or that it is frustratingly bad in some zones? Or that it is inconsistent and hence you can’t count on it as you do your other skills. (And can’t do anything to fix it in situations where it doesn’t work.)

My latest theory is that it has to do with the horsepower of the machine you play on. My guess is that minion AI runs on your local machine, and only sends action updates to the server — just as your character runs on your local machine — so some people may experience situations where the AI always gets the short end of the stick.

I have a level 38 Ranger that I’ve been exploring some starting areas with, looking for new pets. The last several levels, I’ve seen the Next Level Rewards feature thing like +10 Hero Points, but I’m not seeing those points when I level. Is there a bug whereby Hero Points for down-leveled characters might be lost? (I’ve upgraded to HoT, if that matters.)

Hero Points won by doing challenges work properly.

Maybe I’m just losing track and seeing “Next Level” and thinking it was for this level or something like that, but it seems like it’s happened two or three levels in a row. Anyone else seeing something like this?

I’m not as competitive a player as many here, but I have to say that in terms of tagging mobs in open-world events, it’s phenomenal. Especially where groups of mobs are coming in from a variety of directions: its range and rate of fire lets you just walk your fire all around a perimeter and tag about everything that moves.

As you’ve noted, a key difference between WoW and GW2 is what stealth is. In GW2 it’s always fairly brief and there is a lockout mechanism (Revealed) that prevents you from over-stealthing.

I’m not sure if it’s as powerful as it used to be, but I leveled with Sword/Pistol and Short Bow. The Sword/Pistol combination allows you to stand in a blind field and cleave away at 2 or 3 melee mobs. The Short Bow lets you tag mobs in open-world events where you’ve got lots of spamming by AoE classes and it’s hard to otherwise tag things before they die. Even its auto-attack is multi-target (bouncing). Plus, some situations are simply melee unfriendly.

I also really like Shadow Refuge, which is essentially a free reset button, and you can use it to let you run to a goal and reset there, when you don’t feel like fighting your way through things. I don’t think SR is popular overall, though, and not sure how long it takes to get.