Guild Wars 2

Pretty bummed about this. Coming back after a long absence, friends as well, and Desert Borderlands is a treat.

I’ll second this, using Overwolf with Reshade makes the process incredibly painless, and the sharpening ALONE (forget any sort of image or color manipulation) makes it worthwhile, the game is so much sharper and crisper.

Really the sole gripe I have is having to disable SMAA manually in the config file after switching sweetfx profiles, but I’m sure they’ll get around to making stuff like that selectable in the UI if the overwolf plugin gets more popular.

I stopped playing a few years ago, after all my friends quit playing. I picked it up again this week after reading about the giant patch and the change in game directors, so I’ve been puttering around. I’ve convinced a few friends to come check it out again as well, so we’ll see if the next few weeks gets us back in again or not.

In the meantime, some questions, mostly relating to reasons I stopped.

1) Why no new dungeons in HoT? Why a raid?

2) Is there challenging open world pve content in HoT areas?

3) World bosses all still seem to be a giant zerg where you can push 1 and collect chests of loot (they are really cool looking bosses at least!). I saw that they made a big deal of their Shatterer revamp, but I barely noticed a change to the fight – zerg familiarity in the same way as Teq, or HoT power inflation, or both? Dungeons are a slight step up from that. I’m assuming higher level fractals and then raids are the next step from there. Have the devs commented at any length (or shown through previous action) about how they plan to develop challenging PvE content going forward? Are raids it, or are they looking at other avenues?

4) From my limited experience with LFG, dungeon groups are every bit as toxic as when I stopped. New player and/or not running approved build/class? Immediate kick or complain loudly. Part of this seems to be related to the way dungeons are run – the same as they were when I stopped, which is speed running them and skipping as much as possible. Have the devs given any indication they plan to revisit or revamp dungeon content, or are they being mothballed in favor of new open world content and raids?

5) New content. Have the devs indicated if they’re moving to a ‘proper’ expansion pack model, or is there going to be some mix of living world story content and expansions? I didn’t like LW1 much, but as it was temporary content, my friends will never experience it now. Getting them to pay for LW2 is likely a non-starter. End result, they’ll be transitioning from vanilla to HoT with little connective tissue story-wise. That may harm the experience for some of them significantly, I don’t know yet, we’ll find out soon enough. Coming back to any mmo late you can expect to have some disorientation, but GW2’s… odd… method of content delivery is exacerbating that issue.

6) Real money market content. I have an uneasy relationship with f2p style content and microtransactions in general, as do my group of friends. The feeling that content is being developed for a paywall or that free content design decisions are being affected by market considerations (ie, rate of xp gain/item acquisition when boosters are in the mix), none of that produces feelgoods. Inventory slots and bank space tied to the gem store produced a pretty strongly negative reaction in my group. For long time veterans, how do you feel the gem store content has been handled over the last few years?

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That’s all, just looking for some more clarity on issues that were important to me or my group of friends. There are (were?) a lot, lot of things I love about GW2, but there were unfortunately also a lot of frustrating or baffling decisions that whittled down my guild and then my friends and then ultimately me as well.

Have you given any thought to reworking Flame Aura?

Getting hit is just about the last thing an Ele wants to do in combat, which is also why the Flame Barrier Minor and One with Fire trait are so poor.

Pulsing aoe burn while automatically stacking some Might seems like an obvious tweak, but anything would be preferable to the current implementation that requires you to get hit to have any effect whatsoever.

I think Flame Barrier and One with Fire need to be scrapped entirely.

I’m stunned to see a frank assessment of the quality of Ele traits, and happy changes are coming.

I’m not so thrilled it has taken this long, I don’t understand why traits that were considered either awful or outright broken and bugged over a year ago are only just now being changed or fixed.

Not trying to be excessively bitter about it, but I love the Ele, and the state of Ele traits was one of the reasons I dropped the game for (wait for it) about a year.

When I’m going through the Trait list and going ‘meh, meh, meh, ugh’ instead of ‘ooooh I wish I could take this’, something is wrong.

Anyway, can’t wait to play with the new traits.

Ah no, I meant the queuing was masking the aftercast for me because I’m never ‘seeing’ the aftercast as I always have a next spell queued, so I’m chalking up any aftercast time to the cast time of whatever I have next in the list.

These are really useful numbers though, I wish the tooltips did include them, even if only on the character weapon sheet (‘advanced’ tooltips or somesuch).

Without these, I couldn’t even begin to compare the value of a condition damage setup to a pure power/precision/critd setup, and with conventional wisdom being ‘ZERKERS ALWAYS’, getting constructive feedback on such builds is difficult (particularly on these forums, which have a toxic atmosphere, so I don’t post here about mechanics generally – thanks for your efforts on this, both of you).

Oops, Air Scepter 1, Arc Lightning

For other spells, I suppose it’s possible that the ability queing system is masking the aftercast delay, but if it is a hard restriction on when I can use abilities, that definitely means I can tank my dps by using an ability with a lengthy aftercast if its damage is lower compared to another similar ability with a shorter overall cast cycle.

Still not sure if this helps me with the reason I was looking for this data in the first place – evaluating condition damage in comparison to power/crit

edit: Also with the proper cast/aftercast numbers here, it should be trivial to spreadsheet out dps numbers for most abilities. Some have unique considerations, but this is still very helpful – I was stymied before because the in-game tooltips don’t provide enough information to calculate this accurately, even with coefficients for skills I found elsewhere.

Could you clarify the exact meaning of both cast and aftercast?

It doesn’t make much sense to me in the case of a skill like Scepter 1, where you have what looks like a lengthy aftercast time, but I can immediately go into another skill afterwards, or even clip it early if I want.

Nope, I visited all 24 locations. I even double checked a few of them if I was recently in combat or attacked, just make sure I had completed it successfully.

Clearly I didn’t double check the two that didn’t count as used :P

I wouldn’t care much, but since the achievement doesn’t track the locations completed, nor do the map icons, there’s no way to determine what I’m missing except revisiting every location.

The issue could easily be avoided with an obscured achievement log that marked them off as you completed them, or map icons that marked as completed, or both. Even x/y complete in zone would be an improvement over ‘22/24’, which tells me nothing useful.

I went to all 24 obelisk locations in the world, interacted with them all, and finished the achievement…

Except I didn’t, because I somehow missed two. I don’t mean missed two as in didn’t go to them, I mean missed two as in probably clicked on them and didn’t finish due to interruption.

Ok fine, I’ll just go back and get those two… except there’s no way to track which ones I’ve finished, so now I have to go back to all 24 again and recheck every one.

I can’t seem to get this one to trigger

“PvP Joining Games
Join a PvP game by talking to the PvP Browser NPC, or join tournaments through the Tournament Master. "

I’ve tried talking to the pvp browser, the tournament master, joining games, creating a new character and joining games, nothing is triggering this hint. Any suggestions?

I wouldn’t even care about this, but this stupid hint achievement is stuck on my ‘almost complete’ list, which is a handy reference for tackling achievements.

edit: This achievement is so bugged. I got the Thief steal hint, then started an Engy to get the last class hint. What happened? I got credit for Engy kit tip, no credit for Thief steal hint, despite never recieving the Engy kit tip. ???

I sat down and did some math, and if I’m dedicated and put in some time every day from now until the end of the month, I’ll come up with right about 750 BBs.

That’s enough to buy 250 each of the three major components for a Legendary weapon.

However, here’s my question for those of you who have gone down the road to a Legendary – do you think this is a comparatively time efficient method of farming these items?

I’ll be missing out on all character experience, loot, gold, and karma while pursuing this, so there’s a definite sacrifice.

But if I would be acquiring Obsidian Shards/Crystals/Philosopher’s Stones at a greater rate than I could farming them elsewhere, I might tackle it.

I need some outside input here, both because it’s a fairly significant commitment of time on my part, and because I don’t know how much of a grind it is to get those materials via other methods. If I’d be saving myself weeks (or months!) of farming down the road, this might be a worthwhile ’short’cut.