Guild Wars 2

This collection needs the player to gather four different commendations earned for defending each cardinal direction of Tarir (North, South, East and West) against the octovine. I did it for South now and did not get the commendation for that. The meta event in this run was successful and Tarir was defended. So, when it really is a bug, the collection can not be completed right now.

I am not 100% of this is a bug or I missed on something here but the following is the issue:
In the last few days, when i ran into a group of pocket raptors and tried to put down my traps (Light’s Judgment, Procession of Blades, Dragon’s Maw) they would not appear visually sometimes and would also not get triggered by the Raptors. But the skills all went on cooldown.
Things to note:

• This might not be exclusive to the pocket raptors
• This might not be exclusive to the named traps
• This might not be exclusive to the maps of Heart of Thorns

7. Too high mastery requirements
Locking players out through a questionable mastery system is not my definition of fun. The raids should help the player to reach masteries beyond the basics that may be needed to complete the raid (I’m fine with the basics of jungle movement).

8. A lack of information about what is the next step to do
A problem that is not only a problem regarding raids. Well too often problems occur and questions arise because there is a severe lack of game feedback to the player. A dangerous place like a raid dungeon should hint some important information toward the player to help him on his already difficult way.

9. Safe spots…
… like they build literally in every other dungeon-like environment (fractals of the mist and dungeons) that bring up stupid loopholes that allow skipping the mechanic of a fight/event/room. If there is a mechanic and if this mechanic is well thought out, players should be forced to adapt to it. That should not exclude different solutions to a situation as long as it is given by the game and not the lack of testing.

I can in some way relate to the OP. Actually there are two points I totally agree with:

1. There is absolutely no connection between killing a monster or helping some NPCs succeed in their tasks and learning how to glide, learning a foreign language or how to withstand dangerous poison.
2. Even if I slow down my progression (which is totally fine) I am bound to a very limited spectrum of sources of experience so that it somewhat gets to a daily routine after only a few weeks of new content.

The second point may be put into perspective with the release of the raids as long as you don’t get totally locked out by missing masteries or community gating (missing guild, missing equipment, etc.).

If ArenaNet does not want to move from the really unrealistic correlation between experience and the current masteries there might be some ways to release the pain of getting experience:

• Reset the first time experience of the adventures once a week. Thereby they get a bit more interesting and one might try to improve doing them.
• The map “Auric Basin” has nothing on it besides the events that are related to the meta event. You cannot do anything there in it’s downtime. Fill the map with new life – at least in the meta events downtime since map chat beef might occur when they run at the same time. Unlock the adventures more often. They are locked most of the time because it is to dangerous when actually nothing really happens.
• For “Tangled Depths” there could be maps that you can buy from basic vendors which show you the way to active events with these green arrow hints from personal story. That might change the opinion of players towards the map and bring life into it – additional to broadening the exp earning possibilities. The map would still require people to walk the tangled ways of a dangerous jungle. Also all the secrets would be unaffected and still need the cunning of an explorer.

That’s all I can think of right now. Maybe I find some more suggestions later.

For me it is the Guardian. But that can only cover certain aspects. These aspects are mobility, durability, the possibility to do stuff alone or with NPCs and/or other people.

The Guardian offers a broad variety of buffs: speed, protection, regeneration, aegis, retaliation, might, fury and quickness (these are like all boons in the game). Not to forget about insane healing effects from healing skills and staff skill 4 (depending on specialization) and in addition to that blinding enemies, controlling zones and offer reflection. That allows you to react to nearly every situation and bring a gun to a knife fight. Doing stuff alone gets very easy this way.

I played my Guardian with Soldier equipment, Forgemaster runes from Embrace of Sorrow and a shout oriented specialization build. That way i was tanky (with roundabout 20.000 HP on level 80) and good disposal on protection, aegis, burning and retaliation. That did the killing job for me. Even champions were in solo reach but would still take some time.

Having only NPCs with me is not a bad thing, since i can buff them too as i can do with other players around.

So there is almost no situation a guardian could be considered useless. Before HoT, the Guardian lacked in far distance combat but this is now a thing of the past, since he got to use a longbow when choosing the Dragonhunter specialization. Fitting into everything makes the Guardian the #1 PvE class in my opinion. But this is just an opinion after all. If one would have to be honest, every class has their field in which they are the best.

Hello there, Fubai here, an asuran guardian who just started to feel at home in the depths of the Maguuma jungle.
Now that two weeks went past since I first set foot into Mordremoth’s realm I want to share my experiences and ideas on how to improve the general and the less general experience:

1.) The first thing I want to cover regards my class: The Guardian. To be more precise what I will talk about is for all Dragonhunters. Lately – in the fractals of the mist – I discovered that a Dragonhunter cannot use his trap skills under water! That put me off track. Since I am skilled as Dragonhunter and my specialization is kinda related to the use of traps and traps are all the new skills for the Dragonhunter I think it is odd that i cannot use them under water. I could well imagine that these traps could be converted to underwater mines when the guardian is under water so they can be used in three dimensional combat. If you think that is actually stupid than give these shouts (!) a second thought!

2.) I totally understand that maps get full sometimes and that i have to wait to get a spot there. But always having to click and dismiss a server message when you are not successful is a tiring thing to do. So why can’t we have a waiting loop for other instances of a map?

3.) On the map I saw these distance counters for certain points. I wondered why you would not expand this system towards single enemy encounters so you can actually see how far the distance is between you and an enemy. This information could for example be useful for Dragonhunters who get bonus damage based on their distance to the attacked enemy.

4.) For serious sience stuff even Asurans need a good base of information. These days sometimes we lack this information because it is hidden well. This goes from…

• … event and quest descriptions, …
• … to skill descriptions (How do abilities scale with power/healing power/precision?) Why are there varying descriptions of the same effect?), …
• … NPC ability descriptions that follow felt 12 standards depending on the enemy/ally …
• … and descriptions of collaborative activities like Guild Missions and stuff.

On all the places there are only sporadic texts or plain values without an interface for player feedback or build development.

Introduction – The Week 2 PvE Guild Mission Confusion
Today we played our first set of PvE Guild Missions and tried to meet up in the guild hall.

The Guild Hall
We went there with 15 players and found ourselves in three different instances of our guild hall. Why does the game create different versions of the guild hall for only 15 players? It is highly desirable to have 130 people (e.g) in one instance of the guild hall. The guild portal only opened in one instance where the guild leader actually opened it. The other instances would have had to start the portal again respectively.

The Guild Trek
At first we tried our luck with the easy version of the trek guild mission. In our first try – sending people alone to different spots and activating the trek marker – only the players who actually activated a marker got a small chest above the minimap (lower right corner for most of us). It’s very likely, that the number of players and the number of places to find, differ, so that there are way more people than places to find. That results in mission restarts and reruns for people who are still empty handed.

The Bounty Hunt
The bounty hunt was like it always was and worked like a charm.

The Guild Puzzle
Then we went back to the guild hall and used the guild portal to reach Brisban Wildlands and the Proxemic Lab which was our puzzle mission. The portal tried to get us to a contested waypoint. So – as always – we ended up at the next free waypoint. We asked ourselves why it is actually needed to port the people using the guild portal to a waypoint at all and not to the actual entrance of the puzzle.
We entered the puzzle with 14 players; ending up with only 6 of them getting the small chest in the end:

• Almost all of us reached the former cheese chest room (the puzzle description tells the player that there is a chest when there is actually none!)
• 1 player fell to death in the jumping part and was locked in the battery room until the end and got a chest. He used the “Retry from checkpoint option”.
• Some of us accepted the credit and got a chest (like 5 players)
• Some of us accepted the credit and got no chest (like 6 players)
• Some of us declined the credit and got a chest (like 1 player) (way before he declined the credit)
• Some of us declined the credit and got no chest (like 1 player)

The map that was shown while we did the puzzle (Proxemic Lab) was actually a place between Lornar’s Pass and Dredgehaunt Cliffs (around the Point of Interest “Steam Mechagate”) so the labyrinth was not shown and finding all orbs and a way through the maze was a bit harder than usual. Putting the puzzle in an instance seems odd to us. It worked well before and now it had some issues that should be reworked well. Checkpoints should actually be behind closing doors and to be safe a guild should share the latest reached checkpoint to prevent splitting.

The Guild Race
In the end we turned our focus on the guild race. The first thing we saw, was that the timer in the guild window would show 11 minutes. It does not show what these 11 minutes are for, neither does it fit the races own timer of 20 minutes. So if you start a fresh race and the guild race in the guild window, you have 11 minutes to finish a race that only will end after 20 minutes have passed. We think that if your guild’s race is not active in the guild window and the 20 minutes expire, no one gets actually credited for the race. Why is there a difference in the timers? Maybe the timer in the guild window should be set to 30 or even 45 minutes or alike, so that a race can actually expire in the time of the guild race in the window and get completed. Right now you have to start it somewhere near the end or half way through the actual running to match the timers somehow. Last but not least we had troubles with the race’s checkpoint flags. On the whole track it could happen that a flag was not activated and passing the last flag would almost everytime need a long time to transform players back to their normal form. If this is because you have to run very far behind the flag or it just takes the game a lot of time to actually recognize people crossing the last flag is unclear.

Week 1 – The forced PvP Guild Missions
We also had issues with the PvP Guild Missions of the first week. We formed two guild teams of players that actually had PvP-rank 10 (why is there a level restriction to the conquest PvP mode at all?) which only were 2/3 of the players that actually wanted to participate in the guild missions and were blocked by the restriction of rank 10 for conquest game type. First of all not all guilds are interested in PvP that much. Forcing guilds to play PvP then seems not like a great idea at all. We learned that the missions in week 1 were chosen by a random generator and we couldn’t even find a reason for that. We started the mission and tackled it with two teams at almost the same time. Team 1 lost their game so the guild mission was not completed, but team 2 won their game and therefore ended the mission. Only members of team 2 were rewarded. Team 1 needed to restart the mission and another win to get their chests.

Résumé
In the actual system, to get everyone rewarded, some of the guild missions (PvP and PvE) have to be restarted. We have lost a lot of time due to these circumstances, compared to the way guild missions worked before HoT was released. We do our guild missions every sunday evening so when it gets late not all can stay through all the missions and don’t get their rewards on the day the guild does these missions all together.

Suggestions – Information Politics
First of all (and that goes for a lot of gameplay aspects): We need more information!
With a look on guild missions that would mean:

• What gets a player the reward?
• The timers, Mason?! What do they mean?!
• Don’t erase the numbers on Mystery Targets in Guild Trek!
• Make a quest section on the top right corner of the screen for Guild Trek and Guild Bounty Hunt.
• A “Cover this Goal”-Button for Guild Trek- and Guild Bounty Hunt-Targets, that when pressed by a player, shows the number of people covering the respective target in the quest section on the top right corner of the screen, is surely something to think about
• Where does the Guild Portal bring you exactly?
• Can disconnected people rejoin?
• etc. (What else could be a useful information)

Suggestions – Guild Trek
I might have an idea how the Guild Trek could be made a bit more user friendly. Right now one player needs to activate a point to cancel it out in the list of Mystery Targets. Maybe every player who walked by the point should get a buff (“Guild Traveler” or something alike). Everyone with that buff gets a reward when all Targets are activated. This might be a very clear system for Guild Treks that gives every player the information if he is among the people that get a reward (it’s again and mostly about the information the player gets).