Guild Wars 2

I wish you’d just implemented an underflow system without dismantling the entire world system in the process.

What you’re doing removes the possibility for any huge meaningful long-term event chains by removing any concept of a truly “living” world to the player. The Orr event chains were poorly implemented but there was a hint of the pre-release vision there, the idea of organised community efforts to control and unlock specific areas. With the removal of maps being tied to home servers, and by extension the removal of any kind of organisable PvE community other than guilds, the dream of those epic event chains that affect the world dies too.

Before you implement this, you should consider what happened to your original gameplay philosophy, and how these changes will make it impossible.

Chris Cleary.8017:

Alright, it’s about time I commented on this.

As of now we don’t have a problem with players doing this. While the late join is unintended, if players want to pay for this service, that’s fine. It does trivialize the skins some, but this isn’t any different than the skins from purchasing a raid run or a dungeon run (which we also are ok with). As long as the transaction is completed and players are getting what they paid for, fine.

However, that doesn’t mean that we aren’t going to fix this. A fix is in the works right now, and that fix may happen before SAB closes or be there for the next time the festival opens.

Can you make it so that gear bought with unearned tokens just disintegrates after 30 minutes, or turns into a clown outfit?

Stormdancer.4972:

Spurnshadow.3678:

This should have been addressed a week into HoT. Waaaaaaaaaay too late.

Really, it should have been addressed during the design phase.

Failing that, in QA.

It’s just absurd that this made it to live release, when there’s so much that’s so clearly broken.

PLEASE take a look at your process, folks.

I don’t buy the balancing excuse when it’s as pricy as now, and will probably continue to be pricy even after the patch. It seems more likely to me that somebody higher up decided everything in HoT had to be a grind in order to artificially increase the longevity of the game. But this has never been GW2’s audience. I’ve seen activity in game/guild drop faster in the last couple of months than at any point before the expansion launched. People are complaining about the game feeling like a job, and that’s without raiding.

Guild Halls should be a casual place to relax, not a constant effort for scribing materials and expensive upgrades. The resonance machine and the aetherium is already a good way of slowing things down, so people don’t have 5000 decorations or a fully upgraded hall after a week. The additional major gold cost is utterly inappropriate and goes completely against the casual core of the game.

Well, this topic goes around in circles a bit, so here is some FAQ (or rather a Frequently Posted Interjections).

- Anet needs to focus on HoT content!
No content design is needed, they can just bring back what they already made.

- If they bring back just Worlds 1 and 2, it won’t be enough and people will just complain about world 3 not being released yet.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slippery_slope

- It was too hard and just annoyed players
Tribulation mode was pretty kitten hard, but Infantile Mode just involved running along the rainbow cloud motorway. Normal mode was somewhere in-between.

- World 2 was broken so they can’t bring it back!
World 2 launched with a bunch of bugs which were mostly fixed. Additionally the difficult parts on normal mode (the Geysers in 2-1 and the gong room in 2-2) were both nerfed heavily.

- SAB sucks! Don’t bring it back.
The return of SAB would not inconvenience you in any way, but be great for the people who enjoy it.

- It doesn’t fit the living story!
Haha!

It doesn’t look good for Anet if the guild they gave privileged access to is trolling the community on release day.

It’s the first boss, not the endboss, it didn’t even get killed, and “unavoidable damage” is so you can actually have to deal with different mechanics. You are showing a lack of understanding on multiple levels.

This may be a slight tangent but you really need to squish both the drop rate and amounts needed from t5 materials. Stop us getting 100 greens and blues from one meta chain. I know it may help sell bag slots and salvage-o-matics but it’s just silly now. It would make a lot more sense if we only needed a few bolts of semi-valuable silk to make a Spool of Silk Weaving Thread instead of 100 super cheap bolts.

From a player perspective the ideal loot system does away with things of little to no value. After all, what’s more exciting, getting 50 things worth 2 silver, or getting 1 gold?

This is good: Super Adventure Box is now available to explore on the Tyria 3D map viewer website!

Recreate the tribulation mode experience by closing and reopening your browser every 20 seconds?

(note to Arenanet: Bring back SAB, please.)

It’s about time dungeon gold got nerfed.

It should be replaced with a generous amount of mats though, to keep dungeons profitable. If there is no real profit everyone will just avoid them, like the trash mobs that get skipped on every run.

Rare drops are a good idea too. Ultra rare weapons, mail carriers, minis etc. There should always be a chance of getting something exciting, even it’s a low chance. It’s like Tequatl – it may not give much gold for the time spent but there is some chance of getting an ascended chest or a unique skin.

AnthonyOrdon.3926:

I think we have a lot of room to keep growing. But our team isn’t done yet. We’ve got some exciting things coming later this month. Things you’ve never seen in this game before.

This is what I love about this game. More new stuff later this month, and we just had a nice patch a couple of days ago. In a lot of other games you’d be promised stuff that wouldn’t be out for 4 months and be paying a monthly fee in the meantime.

This update was quite decent. The gauntlet is original. It would be nice if there was some kind of training version of that to teach newer players how to play (starting with really simple stuff that veterans take for granted, like turning with the mouse when running), and eventually it ramped up to maximum difficulty. I know there is some complaining about 1-shot mechanics but it’s really the best way to make stuff hard, if you can survive failing on the core mechanics it just becomes more of a gear check or what class you’re playing check than an execution check.

If there’s one thing I don’t like it’s the ground floor part of the pavilion. I see how this design is supposed to work – along the lines of Everquest 2 content like Skyshrine in which people can from parties and farm mobs. But due to the “anyone who hits it” loot system you just end up with one big zerg train running around the zone rather than small parties. And that’s a shame, because the zone would be more enjoyable as an eq-style zone in which you need to join a party to survive. Maybe that’s too old-fashioned and MMO players don’t want to form parties themselves and talk to each other anymore. I don’t know.

minbariguy.7504:

lordkrall.7241:

I think it is rather naive to assume that people would be content with a post explaining why SAB was not active.

They would see the post, rage about how that is the worst reason ever and then go back to business as usual in this thread.

Good lord, that excuse is getting old. Change the recording, please.

“People will rage” – is there anything you can’t apply that to?

Arenanet had better cancel Heart of Thorns, just in case.

lordkrall.7241:

all hell breaks loose.

If only there were some kind of benevolent patrician on the forums who could deal with their concerns..

There are four common reasons why stacking may not work:

- You are facing the wrong way when spamming the 1 key with no target
- You picked up the fiery greatsword and had autotarget on
- You forgot to copy the meta build off the internet
- You were busy posting a troll forum thread and another system and neglected to press any buttons on the system you are currently playing “Guild Wars 2” on

Apart from that you should be fine for two thirds of the explorable modes.

Tryxtr.6295:

I sell most of my items instantly because I want the immediately gold return without having to worry about whether the item I listed actually sold. Also, it’s way faster when trying to clear some space while in the middle of something. (I know I could salvage, that’s beside the point).

I used to open BLTC, then click Sell tab, then item, then sell, then click Ok. It would sell the entire stack and it was really nice.

Now…. I open BLTC, click Sell tab, drag slider to max, ensure to check box for selling immediately instead of listing, then Sell button, then Ok. If I forget to move the slider it wastes my time. If I forget to check the sell now box instead of listing the item, then I have to deal with the fact that my item may not sell because of shifting prices.

I “sold” like 50 items yesterday before I realized that I was actually listing them instead of instantly selling them. I checked my “items I’m selling” tab and 4 hours later most of my items were still there. That’s just silly for someone who wanted to sell the items right away.

Please fix this. Give us an option to choose certain default settings.

This. Also the popup after selling something “you can pick your coin up from the delivery box!” is just an extra click.

If I want to sell some ores fast when clearing bags, what used to be 2 clicks from the sell list (select item, hit sell) is now 5 clicks (select item, select top buyer, drag slider to max, hit sell instantly, hit ok to close the popup).

Also fewer items are displayed at once on the sell list and they aren’t in alphabetical order by default, making it harder to find things. I know there’s an exciting new bag/search function for finding things, but being able to just see it on the screen in the first place was better.

There are some decent improvements to the trading post (the searching) but the main selling functionality got a whole lot more inconvenient and time-consuming.

Tyseyh.1083:

Anyone here think that the AI of dungeon enemies should be changed to stop us stacking? Kind of like the spider queen?

Honestly i hate it so much when people just stack everything.

yes it’s faster but what if you are playing just to have fun.

When I do a dungeon for the first time I want to experience it “properly” and try clearing everything etc. But doing it for the 50th time I’d much rather clear it efficiently than waste time pulling things that aren’t necessary or kiting things around because people won’t melee.

The problem comes when people who are at that first run stage and people at the 50th run stage are in the same group. Inevitably they will find their conflicting approaches irritating, especially if they’re playing with strangers whom they probably won’t see again.

The best solution is to group with people with a similar mindset, or friends rather than randoms.

Shpongle.6025:

Because you were forced to pay 30g for it, otherwise you couldn’t complete tribulation mode and get tribulation achievements.

Oh wow. Paying gold to win is pay to win? By this logic, the book that lets you learn grandmaster traits is pay to win as well.

C’mon, everybody’s got gold in the bank from the queens’ gauntlet loot fest, and even if you haven’t it doesn’t take that long to get up to 30g.

If you guys are mad about being able to get an event item faster with gems, you’re going to be really mad when you find out you can buy gems and convert them to gold and buy legendaries too.

Got it now, hidden sound..
1630014426 for anyone who doesn’t want to click around for it themselves.

Guys, I’m 75% sure this is a troll thread.

If you like gathering you should set yourself the challenge of finding more efficient routes and farms. Flax isn’t so great. As mentioned already the Elder Wood farm is pretty good. Running the 40-70 maps for hard wood and seasoned wood (and ores+certain herbs) on a fast character (daredevil is best, warrior is good) is probably the most consistent gold. The nodes are everywhere, and if you do ascalon maps you have a chance of getting that lumber core worth 90g or something. Starting from the bottom of cursed shore with the seaweed and coral orbs works too.

GW2 is processor-heavy. As long as you have an intel i5 or i7 processor from 2001 (sandy bridge) onwards and an okay graphics card, it should run fine.

You don’t need to overclock unless you want to play with everything (character model limit/quality etc) maxed

You might think this is affordable for $600 but if you buy a cheap PSU you may regret it

Are you on about the first boss? You don’t need to dodge anything at all, you can just run behind him. The wind up is like 4 seconds, it’s impossible to miss. If you circle strafe like a pro you notice this instantly.

I have no idea why 66% alacrity was introduced the first place if it’s now considered to be that overpowered. I mean, it’s pretty clear what it does. It’s not like a creative use of the buff has let to unintended consequences. Why did they not see this?

Poor mesmers had the same thing with Time Warp not long after launch!

They’re in the jungle…

Auric Basin has the most. The green areas in Tangled Depths, NW quarter of Dragon’s Stand. It’s hard to get many lillies but if you gather everything else with the guild booster and sell the lot, you can have the money to buy the rest you need. Especially if you get lucky with Freshwater Pearl and Giant Mushroom Spore.

I’d quite like them to buff the droprate on Lillies because they make pretty nice guild hall decorations..

Suggest this:

- Make Ceramic Planters a vendor item or craftable for a few silver. Upgrading shrubs and trees is pricey enough without the cost of the planters.

- Remove the resonating slivers requirement completely and instead make slivers an item to buy the minis/recipes in place of crystalline ore and gold. Make guild missions give a few liquid gold each to incentivise them.

- Reduce overall amounts of sand, flax, and pigment required. The price of these will just rocket if one or two are reduced without the others.

- Mast Pole still isn’t in the game, is Decoration Merchant 3 meant to sell it instead of Basic Flagpole?

Trice.4598:

In a berserker setup, the boss literally takes 5-6 seconds to kill without FGS. In 100% of the caes, my group kill the boss before rock start falling from the ceilling.

And this is why many explorables are just junk at the moment. Rumblus is actually one of the better-designed AC bosses in theory, but how fast it can be killed combined with the possible safespots negates any possible merit of the mechanics.

Worse still, there are people who feel that there’s nothing wrong with this boss, because their elite skills (read: standard copypasta meta character pressing 1 or 2 buttons) should entitle them to kill bosses in 5 seconds before they do anything.

JonPeters.5630:

Trait Tier level increase. We made this change because despite what the more hardcore players like myself want, most players need to be introduced to systems more slowly so that they don’t get lost. Every time we overwhelm new players that is an opportunity for them to stop playing the game. Every time that happens it becomes harder and harder for new players to develop into longtime players.

Urggh. Here’s a better design idea: don’t treat players as dumb unless they’re actually being dumb. There’s nothing wrong with introducing traits at level 10. If a player doesn’t pay attention and has no spent trait points, give them another helpful popup every time they level up, getting more direct each time until at level 80 it practically says “look mate, your character’s a kitten”. There’s nothing wrong in saying to players “hey! there’s a new feature available for you now, you can give it a look if you like or go back to it later” rather than “Sorry, this very useful key feature is currently unavailable because there’s a chance you might be too dumb to understand it even though it’s a basic slot/choice system that is in every computer game with roleplaying elements ever”.

On topic:
As for the unlock objectives, the idea has its merits but it doesn’t work at all in practice. This is particularly true for the first tier of traits, where the option to a new player to unlock something basic is to either do some obscure level 50-60ish objective or just pay 2 skill points and some silver to unlock it for no effort (an option many new players won’t even see). It would have made more sense to have all those objectives unlock Elite Skills and tokens for starter level 80 gear and some optional stuff rather than unlock traits.

And sending newbies to Obsidian Sanctum? That’s just evil.

I’m more interested about Krytan licensing law, as Taimi will apparently meet us in the Dead End Bar next week.

dragonewtking.9867:

Actually, it will matter quite a bit. The forum states that there is a 10% increase in the relative stats between an exotic weapon and an ascended one. A 10% increase is not insignificant. Yes, for PvE it doesn’t matter, at least for now, but WvW it will make a difference.

Surely in WvW it will make even less difference than in PvE. WvW is mostly fought in large battles, and a scattering of players on both sides having 10% better in a slot has little overall impact. WvW will still follow the rule of the zerg always wins, unless they meet a very organised guild group.

dragonewtking.9867:

I am aware of the existence of the six ascended slots, as a matter of fact, it is just those slots that I base my opinion on. I run a mesmer, and started WvW with all exotic gear –
and did ok, maybe, but was getting killed way too much. So, I took a look at the build, and decided that I needed the addition of some ascended items. I added 3 of the six, and I am currently running all exotic gear except for the rings and amulet. Those are now ascended. And the difference has been amazing. I survive, and am able to down opponents, much more effectively with the addition of just 3 ascended pieces.

Maybe you just got better at playing? A few Ascended may take a couple of your stats from 1850 to 1880 or something, it’s not a big enough power gain margin to swing most fights.

dragonewtking.9867:

Just take a look at the builds posted for the game – how many of the current builds posted don’t use ascended items? Pretty much zero. Why is that, do you think, if they make so little difference?

Well, obviously people put best in slot items on build lists and ascended are best in slot. It doesn’t mean dropping a couple of dozen stat points suddenly makes the build useless.

I’ve had good personal luck with Freshwater Pearls from Mussels. I often do the “mussels farm” in Verdant Brink on the way to the flax farm from the entry waypoint along the streams. I’d guess about 1 in 50. I had 2 in a row once from the end of the south lane in Dragon’s Stand.

Now Magumma Lily from jungle plants, no luck at all there..

The “event completer” dailies are never worth doing. If you did 2 PvE ones already and there’s just that and a dungeon left, do the easiest WvW or PvP one to get the third.

(though getting DS events done is easy if you join near the map reset. if there is less then an hour left you may struggle to get a map.)

Kal Spiro.9745:

Unlikely? It’s practically guaranteed. Josh and team shouldn’t have been able to make SAB, they didn’t think it could work. They cheated the functionality has hard as they could to make it work. As such the major changes to many systems throughout the game are basically certain to have broken necessary functionality in SAB.

Here is the problem, though. If they tell us, SAB is bugged all to hell, then they have to deal with, “so when are you going to fix it.” Simple answer, they have more important things to do right now than that. But that answer isn’t good enough. They can’t tell us that. If they say in the future we’re right back to where we started. If they tell us nothing then we’re in that impasse. If they tell us the details then it’s not goo enough. Ultimately, not saying anything at all, regardless, still remains their best solution, where or not you like it.

I doubt it’s severely broken (unless you think adding things to gem store breaks content) but we’ll assume it is for the sake of addressing anet’s communication issue here. How is everybody posting “What on earth is happening with SAB? Hello? Anet? Is anyone there?” a better solution than “When are you going to fix it”? At least with the latter there is some vague relationship between customer and company at work; leaving customers to scream into the abyss probably isn’t the greatest form of customer service.

kittening magnets how do they work

#2009memes

Evapor.6849:

..

You’re basically saying it’s bad because you don’t (immediately) like it. Raiding would be pretty dull if all you had to was damage the boss while using dodges to stay alive. I mean one lupi is good but you don’t want every boss to be lupi. Having to find a balance between damage and survivability is a challenge for high end content, without it you might as well remove all survivability, defensive support and healing abilities from the game.

As far as overall difficulty is concerned, come back when you’ve killed it? Then you’ll be able to give proper feedback on how it needs to be tuned before launch.

Lothirieth.3408:

I actually like Rata Sum for crafting as it’s all much closer to the TP.. but problem is, no forge. Then the vigil keep has everything fairly close.. but no crafting. Given how the forge can play a role in some crafting recipes, these two amenities shouldn’t have been split up imo.

This is why the “crafting is available in other cities” argument doesn’t fly for me.

Mystic forge is easy to get to from anywhere. Just port to the mists, run to forge (takes 10 seconds) and when you’re done you can hit “leave the mists” and return to exactly where you were.

No surrender.

Finally done it now, so obviously it’s now the easiest boss ever. The key for me was seeing the pattern to the AoE in phase 2 and then just focusing on not getting slowed.

Seriously though this boss is a bit ridiculous, they should at least fix the camera and make the floor not blend in with the circles so much. Also you need to waypoint and get the Hoelbrak buff every try.