Guild Wars 2

Kythan Myr.4719:

1. After playing through a year’s worth of LS updates, do you still feel like you want an expansion?

2. Does the sum of last year’s worth of LS updates feel like the equivalent of an expansion?

3. If no. 2 is yes: What features are missing from the LS updates that would make it feel more like a proper expansion?

My answer is essentially No, a years worth of LS does not satisfy me in the way that an expansion would have.
An expansion adds more stuff so that overall you have a greater viariety of things to interact with when playing. While the LS is interesting and does keep the game feeling new and fresh, it rarely leaves behind permanent additions to the game. Which means that no matter how epic the LS is, it will never equate to the vastness of an expansion.

Honestly I think the LS should be toned down, it doesn’t need to be every month it could be every 2 or 3 months. Holiday/celebration LS’s are fun, like christmas and halloween. The story doesn’t even need to be massive or crazy, but just enough to keep the game feeling like it’s alive and moving.

Also if Anet announced that they were never going to do an expansion, and that instead they were only going to do the LS. I’d feel massively dissapointed, I think I would gradually lose interest in the game as well.
Being an explorer type gamer a game becomes boring to me when there is nothing left to explore. New skills, new classes and new maps are the best thing ever for me. I tend to play games until they break, die, become out of date, or the servers are closed. I like to try every possible conbination of things and explore every nook and cranny until there is nothing left to do. The LS doesn’t fulfill that desrie because a) it’s not actually new stuff, it’s just a story, and b) it’s not permanent so I don’t feel like I am able to explore at my lesiure. There is a kind of unspoken preassure in the LS to do it as fast as possible before it goes. And I really hate that.

If you’re going to add stuff and then take it out in such a frequent manner, you might as well use the public as your beta testers. Add things in and allow the public to play with them for a month, take them out and then put them back in when you’ve made changes.

I should also say that I still keep playing in the hope that I will one day get to explore Elona again (Nightfall was my favourite campaign) and that I will one day get to make a Tengu Ritulist. To be told those things are never going to happen in favour of a LS would make me so angry I’d probably stop palying.

Our guild recently moved to Desolation from Underworld.
We’re a small guild but we’re pretty dedicated to actually achieving things. If you move over you’d be welcome to join us We are currently looking for more likeminded dedicated people.

Thanks Astral for your feedback and sympathy. We have done most of the things you suggested. Luckily we are a group of trusted friends so it wasn’t a problem for one of us to empty the guild bank and move that over. The main problem is the influence and unlocks. We had worked hard to unlock all areas up to level 6 and we were just about to unlock guild challenges (the second to last mission type available) And now we have to start from all area’s at level 1 again. The other problem is the time taken to research such things. With some research taking up to a week to complete it’s still going to take us months and months to get back to where we were.

I know that guild missions can be done on a server if you guest there because one of our members has been on the Gandara server the whole time and he has managed to do these with us. However even if I guest back to Underworld, the unlocks are not available to me to activate from the guild panel and even if they were any influence or merits earned would also still be locked in Underworld.
This whole situation is literally stupid and the way the guild system has been designed is completely flawed. Why have an instance of the same guild in each server if those instances can’t be pooled together? Or why not have the guild bound to a server like a player is since there is very little need for multi server guilds.

I would also like to address two other unrelated problems that I alluded to in my first post.
The first is in regards to the fact that WvW is having such a powerful pull over the rest of the server. Introducing the WvW season event is definitely a good idea in itself and it makes WvW more competitive and fun to play. However it is having knock-on effects for the PvE players across all servers. With WvW requiring huge numbers of payers to be able to do anything effective and long lasting, where these masses of players decide to seat themselves is game changing. As I described earlier doing WvW on a server with few WvW players is both pointless and totally not fun. As a lone player you can do nothing against a castle or a zerg, you can’t really capture anything substantial or hold it. In fact just trying to get WvW kills is extremely difficult because the entire map is void of players and when you do finally come across someone they are often part of a zerg or mini zerg. It’s borderline unplayable.
Then if you’ve got several large WvW guilds moving away from a server, that takes its toll on PvE. Player numbers are generally low everywhere, there is also an unspoken dip in moral as other players become aware that their server is always loosing or that they have been deserted. This is an unpleasant feeling to experience and I only really noticed how much it affected my experience of the game once I’d switched to Desolation who are currently doing pretty well as WvW. The inferior feeling I’d been experiencing was replaced with a sudden moral boost and empowerment which then made my overall game play experience much more enjoyable.
I don’t like that the events of WvW can have this kind of mass effect across a server, especially when it concerns players who might not play WvW at all. There needs to be some way to balance it out so that lower populated servers don’t suffer because of the actions of certain large guilds.

This brings me neatly to my second point which is in a game built to be fully populated; there is no compensation for low populated servers. Lower populated servers experience frequently contested waypoints, constant failings with Tequatl, running out of time before killing a map boss, and group events become stupidly difficult if not impossible. The game just doesn’t respond to low numbers of players, instead t keeps throwing more and more challenges at you which are impossible to do without volumes of man power. This really needs to be addressed.

Dear Arenanet

I started our guild on the Underworld server when the game first came out, rebuilding a guild I had since the early days of GW1. For months and months everything was pretty good. There were loads of players, waves of new players constantly coming through and the guild was quite a lively place.
Then for some reason all the WvW guilds left Underworld and went elsewhere. The sever as a whole just seemed to feel really quiet. Gradually, even though we had many members still coming and going, overall our active numbers were declining. (There are a lot of reasons for this, some concerning the lack of polish on guilds, some to do with the ‘coming and going’ nature of play of the game, and some just personal reasons to the player.)
Anyway guild activity was low and while I wouldn’t go as far as to call the server dead, it started to feel like you rarely saw anyone else. Where once you’d do events in small groups of 3 or 5, you were now doing them alone.
Then the Tequatl update. As it became increasingly apparent that Underworld just couldn’t beat Tequatl more players upped and left the server, adding to the already useless empty feel of the server as a whole.
The WvW season then totally emphasised this with every last few people who cared slightly about wvw just going and joining other wvw servers. For the last month or so Underworld has felt so poor and lacking in anything. Trying to do some of the wvw season 1 achievements and the monthly wvw kills is impossible.
Anyway the point I am getting to is that the few players of us that were still playing decided we should move to a server with a good PvE reputation because we were sick of the guild slowly falling apart, sick of the lack of players in general and frustrated with how difficult everything is on a server where general numbers are low across all maps.

So we moved to Desolation. And everything about it is better. WvW is active and full, Tequatl is easily doable, all the difficult places to get around like southsun cove and the bottom of orr actually have all their waypoints uncontested.
However I was suddenly hit with the fact that everything…. EVERYTHING our guild had worked for over the year the game has been out, all our bounties, merits, unlocks, influence… the guild bank literally everything. Is locked to the Underworld server. Being a small guild we have always stuggled a bit where larger guilds do not in trying to do enough to unlock everything and now we have to start entirely from the beginning?! All because we wanted to move to a server where there are actually people. I don’t even feel angry about this, I just feel at a total loss and cold inside because either we have to stay in a struggling PvE server or we have to start again with our influence. This isn’t even like it’s just a year of my work, it’s a year of mine and my friends work earned from regularly playing a game we love. You’ve done a lot of things right with this game but whoever is in charge of the guild system ought to feel ashamed that they have put players in this position.

As the guild leader and the person who created this guild in the first place It would be nice to have the option to transfer things between servers. I just literally can’t believe it’s all gone. (I know it’s not actually gone it’s still in Underworld but it might as well be gone since we can’t acess it even if we guest there). You said you wante server transfers to be a serious decision and none of us took it lightly. We discussed it with each other before all agreeing to move, so why can’t we also make the serious decision of moving all our guild stuff there too? This whole situation has just disheartened me entirely.

Thank you.
Half Tooth.

My experience of the LS can be summed up with: Everything feels random and meaningless. Events and villains come out of nowhere and then vanish into the ether. You don’t get time to get to know a character before they turn up so I literally don’t care about them, their life or their story.
They don’t linger either after the update so I feel no inclination to involve myself emotionally with the LS.
2 weeks is too short. Sometime I plan ahead and think “It’s ok I have a week left to complete a few more achievements.” But then one night I have to work late, or I get ill or some other real life obstacle occurs and even though I only had 2 more achievements left in that section of living story it’s just gone forever. The only reason I really play the living story is for achievement points so I can work toward the achiever title: the equivalent of the God Walking Amongst Mere Mortals achievement from gw1.

It saddens me that none of the existing lore is really built upon: The orders, the elder dragons, the anti –organizations for each race (Inquisition, Nightmare court etc..) Why are you making totally random villains and events when you have so much to play with already?

It probably has been though about, but if you’re intending to continue with the LS for several years to come, the story of it needs to be though about in a soap opera like manner. There should be a greater story arch (the rise and fall of another elder dragon) with many smaller overlapping story arches. It should feel continuous and coherent rather than disjointed and jumpy.
There are aspects of the LS that work but instead of just thinking from month to month the team really needs to ask “Where exactly is this going in the long run?” You have the opportunity to tell some truly epic stories that players can participate in but so far we’ve only experienced annoying bosses and unthreatening threats. (I believe the threats are perceived as unthreatening because even if every single gw2 player didn’t log in and do something about the threat for 1 month, it would still magically disappear.) Wars, battles and invasions leave scars on the people and the land, but going along with the TV references, at the moment the LS is like a series of Simpsons episodes: Everything just magically resets between episodes as though nothing happened. It makes Tyria feel shallow.

I don’t think the LS doesn’t need to be as wacky as it currently is. Do not be afraid to actually change the world you’ve built. Make a meteor hit that leaves a crater, move mountains, create a landslide, make Mount Maelstrom actually erupt. Change or remove existing events, make new ones. Allow players to participate in what will become Tyrian history by making the living story affect the players and the players affect the living story.

As well as everything that Lonami said, the LS and the PvE world need to react to each other, rather than one just laying on top of the other. I read J.R.R. Tolkien’s essay “On Fairy Stories” for a dissertation but this quote from it seems appropriate:

“The inner consistency of reality is more difficult to reproduce, the more unlike the images and rearrangements of the primary material to the actual arrangements of the primary world.”

He was talking about Fantasy in general, but this also works in terms of a game. As outlined by other players the Alternate world of Tyria is a rearrangement of real world material. Tolkien goes on to talk about that when the human mind finds an inconsistency in the alternate world, it begins to question it, until everything else starts to unravel into nothing. The game as a whole is full of more inconsistencies then I could ever list, but in regards to the living story the inconsistencies (The quaggans of moogaloo, humans and centaurs still fighting over a bridge, passive creatures not running from LS mobs.. etc.) The inconsistencies between the greater world and the LS leave the game feeling hollow, shallow and slightly confused.

I have to agree with the previous posters who have expressed wanting to revisit past LS sections. Aside from the holiday LS (Wintersday, Halloween, The Dragon bash festival…) It would be awesome to have a books case with the History of Tyria it and each LS section adds a new book. With this, players would be able to complete the story quests and instanced parts of the LS, but would not be able to re-experience the parts of the LS that affected the world as a whole. As an explorer type gamer I find the lack of permanent content disappointing. Why do you spend so much time creating wonderful new skins and dungeons only to remove them? What use are they locked away in the Arenanet office when so many people want to enjoy them?

Thanks for the replies and the info about the commendation cap kRiza krimos.

Having a guild, group or clan in any game not just guild wars should rally you in the same way that being at a gig to see your favourite band makes you feel. You look around and know that everyone is hear for the same reason. There is a kind of unity that holds you all together. Wearing your build banner should be like “Yeah I’m in this guild >:) And our guild is way more awesome than yours.” Rather than….. “well, I’m with these guys because this is where I get the most loot….. meh”

I would really love to hear some kind of developer response in regards to this because it doesn’t matter about th lore reasons of why the game is called guild wars, if you can have guilds in a game where ‘guild’ is in the title, they ought to be good. Also good guilds will give players another reason to keep returning. Having a guild in guild wars has the potential to be truly spectacular but as it stands at present, it’s half done, and hard work.

Even if each weapon has 2 sets and you could pick one skill from each set that would go a long way.
I’d also like all utilities to be able to be placed in the elite slot which would then make them ‘elite’. So like their normal versions but with more damage or a shorter cooldown.

Hi there, I am a guild leader in GW2 and our guild has been around during the beta and got started properly on day 1 of the early game launch.
Our guild is still going but I wanted to talk about some of the problems with the guild feature in the game.

1) No last logged on time
Why has this actually not been added yet? I thought it was a blip when the game was released, but over a year later it’s still not here. This is a really simple tool for checking how active players are. Unless I read and memorise the list of player names every day I have little idea who to keep and who to kick. It’s also helpful because it gives me an indication of when regular members are logging on, and if I notice a particular memeber is rarely on at the same time as everyone else I can have a chat with them and ask if they want to stay, given that their usual play time is different from other guild members.

2) Players can Multi guild or guild hop
First of all, I have no issues with people being in 2 different guilds for different reasons (i.e. PvP and a casual guild or Roleplaying guild and WvW) I think that in itself is totally fine. However there is no penalty for being in multiple guilds and no bonus for being loyal to one guild. As well as this, there is no player cap for guild commendations while there is a guild cap for merits. This means it’s actually beneficial to be in mutliple guilds and just turn up for events.

3) No guild home page for basic guild rules and information
The message of the day is such a useful feature, but it would be really helpful to have a page where I could explain some of the guild rules and ranks.

4) No guild halls, GvG, or in guild dueling
I wont rant about this, but these are needed things to make a guild feel more like it has a centre and a home.

5) Would be cool if guilds had birthdays
Like characters do, with a guild birthday bonus that is active for all members of the guild that are representing.

I know that it’s the people that make a guild, and I have met a lot of wonderful people through guild wars (as well as some not so wonderful ones)
But the guild mechanic is built in such a way that it is impossible to hold onto people/players. Keeping a guild together feels like constantly trying to catch grains of sand, eventually all of them fall through your fingers. I believe that being in multiple guilds is at the centre of this problem, sometimes we have good weeks where everyone in the guild is online, representing and we all do some guild events and a dungeon and everything is good. But it only takes one tiny thing, like me not logging onto guild wars for 2 days, or the other higher up people in the guild all needing simultanious time off for school/family and then everyone else seems to jump ship. After a few days no one is representing, and all that hard work of recruiting, helping players out, being active is just undone and I feel like the guild has to start over.

Back when the guild missions were released I decided that we’d have to guild events a week, so that people would have a ‘loot’ reason to come back if nothing else. I also thought that in the process of people coming back to do this there would be more bonding between guild memebers via defeating bounties, or doing rushes.
However holding events like this has caused members to now take them for granted, forgetting that myself and the higher ups of the guild take time out of their lives to plan and organize them. Because of the assumption that they will always be happening and that there’ll always be another one, there is no reason for members to come back. This leads to the reast of the guild feeling disheartened, and often another wave of players stop representing.

I don’t think you could possibley remove the mutli guild feature, but a rewrad/penalty system might definately help keep guilds together.

I don’t know how other guild leaders/members feel about this. I just wanted to voice this to Arenanet.

Hi Arenanet,
I couldn’t make it to Eurogamer this year but I watched the Guild Wars 2 talk which was uploaded onto youtube and I have a few things to say:

First of all I was heartened and inspired by the general attitude of Arenanet, with the wanting to listen to players and wanting to create something that always grows and changes. Also feeling listened to as a player is enough motivation for me to stick with the game and continue to support Guild Wars 2 myself and with my guild.

However I have a couple of points:

- The living story is a really good idea and it’s well carried out. I can definitely see the improvements from the onetime karka event last year. However my overall feeling about the living story is that it all kind of comes out of nowhere, it all feels a bit random and meaningless. I feel like every time something new is introduced I will not have heard anything about it before, the characters will be new and then they vanish after 2 weeks. You mentioned specifically wanting to build on what is already in the game rather than adding new stuff yet the majority of added content does not seem to support that idea.
There is so much existing lore and so many vibrant characters it would be nicer to expand on some of those instead. For example there are already 5 established ‘anti- race factions’ within the game (e.g. The nightmare court, the Inquest, sons of Svanir…) The living story could be used to bring more depth to these factions, it could be used to expand on the story behind them as well as to reiterate them as a very real threat. At the moment they are like some minor criminals you fight at level 5 nothing more.
There’s also all the positive factions, (e.g. The Priory, The Liongard, Order of Whispers….) All of them have a wealth of history, lore and characters that the living story could expand upon.

- The living story could be used to tell stories behind the legendary weapons. Again the weapons themselves seem to have no meaning, no lore and no real place within the game. It would be so awesome to hear something like the flame legion are trying to acquire the Incinerator, and whilst trying to stop them you learn the history of the weapon i.e. who it was made for, who made it, why it was made, and why it was hidden. Such a weapon in the hands of the flame legion could prove disastrous which is why the living story asks for players to stop this from happening. You could essentially use the same archetypes of map invasions, temporary dungeon… new weapon skins etc. But the content would expand on things already within the game rather than just adding new characters and bosses.

- Regarding the Tequatl update: I like the idea of basically setting a server a challenge that will take weeks to overcome rather than hours. I enjoy the whole experience of fighting Tequatl in general. However I greatly dislike the problems of organizing 50 or so people. And I dislike the way this doesn’t fit into an everyday schedule. If I had more spare time than I knew what to do with it would be fine, or if I was still at school where I knew there would be a half term holiday where spending an entire day on GW2 trying to achieve this would be possible. However there is frustration that in the time I set aside for GW2:

a) The Tequatl event might not even happen at all.
b) I will have to spend 4 hours queuing just to get into the actual non overflow server (which I have to spend in Sparkfly Fen, I can’t go and do other stuff while I wait)
c) If I finally get in, about half the people there will be afk while they are holding a space for themselves and wont participate in the event at all.
d) The event just fails, and after all that bother I get nothing.
It’s not that I am not willing to try. It’s that the hassle currently outweighs the reward, especially with a busy lifestyle.

- A small point about Zhaitan.
I read the before launch stuff about how the team had spent a ridiculous amount of time modelling, texturing and animating Zhaitan so precisely and extensively because he is the main boss. I feel genuinely sad that all this work is locked away in one story dungeon and you only get a 10 second cut scene to appreciate this work in. I suppose this goes back to my other points about ‘why create all this supercool stuff that seems to have no meaning?”

Thanks for reading. If you need a summary of what I’ve written, it’s basically. “The content you’re creating is good but it totally lacks meaning, which kind of makes it less fun.”

I am waiting for guild halls but I am also afraid they will be difficult for smaller guilds to obtain.

Jester.1546:

I am not telling you to L2P, but static field is probably our most powerful skill in WvW or large scale PVE engagements. Its situational use is less obvious than fire and water 5, but I would not point to air 5 being the weak skill on that set. Its power stems from its absolute domination in terms of control. If you fight in choke points, this skill lets you OWN the choke point. Air 5 -> Water 4/2 -> Fire 5/2 -> earth 2 -> you just killed EVERYTHING on a bridge.

I can see how that is useful, but situational stuff always has that drawback of being absolutely brilliant in a specific situation whilst being barely used the majority of the time.

Blackhat.4016:

@Half Tooth.1867
Thanks for your feedback!

Chain Lightning
That’s a nice idea although I think it would be pretty difficult to balance the damage. I like the idea Blaine Tog.8304 had a little better though since it fits the air attunement really well (single target damage would be equal to the first target attacked in this case).

Static Field
That’s what I like about Static Field. I really wouldn’t want to change this skill. Lightning Surge should be the high damage skill imo while Static Field is your stun/combo field.

Burning Retreat
I thought about that as well but I am not sure if a leap finisher would be a little bit too strong. You would have access to every single aura (except for Shocking Aura) and a daze then. I like the idea though.

Yes, I find static field useful, but not as 5th skill. It does not compare to the usefulness of Healing rain, nor the AoE of Meteor shower. It would be better as a or 4thskill, with the 5th skill reserved for some colossal spike damage. Or I don’t know if anyone remembers the mission thats later on in the main story where you’re an asuran golem and you get a skill that’s like static field except it starts as a small circle and moves outwards. That would also be more useful, but then maybe overpowered if it kept the combo field?

Also this doesn’t quite fit in, but some of the skills the enemies use in the Molten Dungeon are so cool and I would love the ele to have a firey tornado Also the fire effects used by the Molten alliance are slightly different to the ele’s fire and I much perfer the molten fire.

I was thinking as I was playing earlier that Burning retreat might be more useful if the fire combo was removed and instead it was made into a combo finisher Leap.
There would be no damage, but the elementalist keeps the ‘free’ extra dodge roll, but gains a leap which would work well with lava font and other combo fields.

Blackhat.4016:

Air:
Chain Lightning
Hit multiple foes with arcs of chain lightning.

• Really low damage, no additional effect and slow projectile speed. Really needs a damage and speed buff to keep up with the other staff 1 skills.
  => Increase the damage to 500 (first hit) /400 (second hit) / 300 (third hit) and increase the speed by 25%.

Static Field
Create an electrical field that stuns foes crossing it.

• Fantastic skill on a very high CD. The lightning field helps a lot.
  => No rework needed.

In regards to these 2 skills:

Chain lighting, I’ve always wanted to see this actually work like chain lightning, not like a fireball. I think it ought to work like forked lightning and hit 3 people simultaniously creating a chain of lightning between 3 people. To balance that I guess the damage kmight need to be lowered, or the casting time increased to 1 second, not 0.75 seconds.

I use static field in 2 situations; If I am being chased and need to stun whoever is behind me, and in a boss fight I sitch it near the boss so that melee attackers put stacks of vulnerability on the boss as well as get dazing strike.
I would rather this skill was a second lightning storm, or a bolt of thunder that comes out the sky and strikes one target making them dazed or confused and dealing significant damage to one target.

1) To see when a person last logged on and last represented hen you hover over their name in the guild tab.

2) The option to give higher ranking members a map icon so that within the guild you can see it but outside of the guild you cannot.

3) The option to see where all members of a guild are on the map (on map view only, not in the mini map)

4) To improve how Guild missions work and scale to the size of a guild (I’ve explained better here

5) To encourage players to use the other 5 cities, not just LA. I believe this can be done by allowing free travel to the m,ain city of your characters race (so all sylvari get free travel to the grove) I think this would also help with immersion and roleplaying, seeing mostly charr in Black Citidel and mostly humans in Divinities reach.

It’s the fact that on general PvE, you find the utility skills that works best for you, you use the weapon you like the best on each of your characters and so everytime you play that character you basically play the same way. In GW1 as a necro you could go Minion master, Spiteful Spirit, Blood Battery. As a Ritulist you could be a Spirit spammer, the other spirit spammer (with communing spirits instead of channelling) Healer…. As an ranger you could go out as a beast master, a trapper, a condition spread or Splinter Barrage.

It’s kind of sad that in a game where you no longer need parties you don’t have the flexibility within your class to play as different things.

Wow OP I read your post, and it’s completely awful, so welcome back)
What concerns me the msot is that someone has 2 hours spare in their life to run after another person clapping….

I can only apologise for saying I would be breif and then I wasn’t. I planned to write bullet points, then realised they needed some explaining and then got carried away in my explaining.

This does help in regards to knowing the last time a player got an achivement point thanks

However we are currently in this horrrible cycle of we recriut people, they see people offline/ not representing and leave, so I want to work on getting guild missions so that we have something to center our guild around and give the veterans a reason to come back, the influence takes so long to save up, no guild missions, so people leave, people see other people leaving and leave, the fact that people have left means it’s quiet and then more people leave.
Obviously I can’t stop everyone from leaving but this situation could be avoided and made much easier to deal with if a few things were changed.

Caledon Forest is my favourite! I just feel so relaxed there, the beaches and jungles and wierd giant plants everything about it is colourful eye candy.

I really hate plains of ashford though, charr buildings are hidious, there’s too much brown and yellow and there’s shooting everywhere as well as horrible scrappy bits of metal.

4) Guild missions are something I was really looking forward to, but they really do not scale to the size of the guild and I think this is where they really fail. I was hoping guild missions would be a new focussing point for the guild, something to keep people coming back. However for our guild they are ridiculously expensive, it took us 3 weeks to unlock (including buildingtime) guild bounties, and due to most members being busy at the moment it’s taken us over a month to save up the 30k to unlock the next level 6 upgrade, let alone the 50k to unlock the next type of mission.
The missions themselves do not scale either and this is a problem. We regularly have 5 or 6 people online which is about right for a bounty training but impossible to do a bounty tier 1. The one time we managed to get 20 people online to do a tier 1 we were fine but no reward chests spawned. It was also an awful lot of effort to get everyone organized just for something that lasts 10 minutes. New players felt left out because they could not particpate due to not having enough map completion, feeling excluded when you’ve only recently joined a guild and brought the game is not ideal.

I believe there should be a ‘Vote to Start’ part of a mission. A leader or officer should start a mission but the mission should not start immediately, in this time all guild members should be visibly informed that a mission will start shortly and then asked if they want to participate. On the guild mission tab there should be a check box for members to check if they want to join in and then a list of names of people participating would begin to form as people checked the box. When an officer is satisfied that all the people who want to play have checked the box they would start the mission. A counter counting down from 5 or 3 would appear on the screens of participating members and then the mission would start.
The game would scale the mission to the number of players participating so that guild missions can be done by any number of players greater than 3.

All of these problems are making it so difficult to keep a guild going and active. I haven’t even begun to mention the lack of guild halls or the fact that the message of the day doesn;t sow up in chat like it did in gw1 everytime a player logged on.

I will try to keep this brief as I am tired right now:

I have been a guild leader since gw1, and the guild I currently have has been up and running since the GW2 launch. It isn’t dead but always hovers around 20 active members with an average of 3 -5 people being online at any one time.

There are several problems, some which have definately been mentioned before. I will elaborate on each point in a little more detail below.

1) There is no way of telling when the last time that someone logged on was.
2) Non representing players make is difficult to run a guild.
3) The record of people who have been invited only goes back 1 month.
4) Guild missions do not scale with the amount of people in a guild.

1) Has been mentioned before, but Myself and officer’s cannot be online all the time, it’s impossible to know whether to kick someone for being inactive if I don’t know when they were last on. As someone who see’s a lot of people it’s also difficult to keep track of names, so when I see a list of account names I often can’t link the account name to a character name, or I am in danger of linking it to the wrong one. So I may end up kicking the wrong people and not kicking out people who have been inactive for months.

2) Non representing players just make running a guild even more hard work than it needs to be. For a start they appear by default at the top of the roster as online but not representing. This means they are in full veiw of any guild member who presses G. (because of this if there is a member who is always online but never represents I see their name regularly and when I am trying to work out who to kick from the guild I am less likely to kick a name I recognise, and I can’t always remember why I recognise it.)
Seeing people not representing is demoralising for members who are representing. It means that even when myself and officers really put effort into recruiting, it only takes one time for a new member to sign on and see 6 – 10 other people not representing that they get disheartened and leave, or join another guild and then add to the list of non representatives.
It would also be helpful to see the last time a player represented us (when you hover over their name for example) because I do understand that one guild can’t offer everything so some people might want to be in different guilds but it is so hard to keep track of how often a person is representing, especially when also keeping track of how often people are online.

3) In my guild the ranks are based on time spent in the guild combined with activity. However I cannot precisely promote people due to the fact that I cannot see when a member joined the guild. Keeping track of this ontop of everything else is impossible.

I feel the need to agree with everything that’s been said here, especially the “Horrified of Combat” XD
I do feel disappointed by this pathetikittentle hamster, especially after GW1 where your jagged horror looked like THIS and was the same height as the player.
I love necromancer, but I just don’t understand what happened to him between gw1 and gw2 O_o

My ideas for hardmode were, that since there aren’t instanced areas, instead it afects the players character.
So putting yourself on Hardmode makes you a considerabley lower level than you should be for any area, but you get better rewards. It shouldn’t be a button you can press on and off at any time, it should be a timer on it, or many you can choose to enter a map section in HM, and the only way to get rid of it is to travel to another map section not in HM.

I really like the idea of being able to redo your personal story on HM though, then you’d have more of a reason to bring allies/guildies with you and then every player gets the same reward for helping.

Ok, this post is really adressing 2 problems.

1) Why are there som weapons missing from this set, bur more specifically why is there a dagger missing?

2) I cannot find any weapon skin I really like for my Ele.

Problem 1:
So I understand that the Weapon of the Mists set is based on the weapons held by Mesmer Phantasms which is why some weapons are missing. However The third downed mesmer skill summons a phantasm to backstab your enemy. The phatasm is holding a dagger but it is a plain ordinary metal one. It doesn’t have a skin that matches with all the others.

Problem 2:
I have been trying to find some weapon skins I really like for my main character that I can work towards. I picked the Bifrost as a legendary to go for, but I also wanted a skin that wouldn’t be seen so often so I looked through this List of Unique Forge Weapons And there are so really really epic looking skins in there. However if you order the list by equiptment type there are 3 daggers, all of which look the same and 2 staffs, and both of them are considerably, visually less interesting than some of the bow and greatsword skins on there.
I found the Weapons of the mists set which is my favourite set in the whole game and found that the set has 3 pistols, 2 focus skins, all the underwater weapons but no dagger (which I pointed out earlier) and no staff. I do like both the focus skins so I am working on one of those, but I rarely use a focus.

I then found the corrupted weapons which look really cool but the is for some reason the staff is visually lacking where the other weapons aren’t.

Anyway to summarise, why are there so many cool looking greatswords and no staffs.
Why are the daggers so lacking in visual effects where other weapons aren’t. Why is the weapons of the mists set missing a dagger?
Would there really be any harm in adding the missing weapons to the set so that they can be crafted even if the phantasms don’t use them? Same for the guardian weildable weapons.

From the Point of view of a guild leader, it’s not so much the not representing that bothers me (although it does bother me a little to see loads of green squares with lines through.. it looks sad)
What bothers me is, along with the no last logged on feature, that there is no way to see how often someone represents and when the last time that they did represent was.
It’s just generally difficult to see who’s active and who’s not, since I keep track of activity by name recognition but non represeting players appear at the top of the roster when online so I see their names often and recognise them….. it’s just a bit messy is all.

Hello fellow GW players!
The Dragons of Dusk and Dawn is a Dragon themed guild on the Underworld server. We are a social and chatty guild always looking more people to experience the game with.
We don’t really have a focus, but if someone wants to do something generally others will leap in as well!
The social aspect of our guild is the strongest and we are proud of that. We are looking forward to the Guild Missions update, cannot wait to try those out! If you are interested in seeing our guild website you can see it Here.

The thinking behind the name of the guild was mainly due to my unnatural enthusiasm for Dragons, as well as celebrating the return of Dragons to the Game industry. For ages there were no dragons in games, then 2011, Skyrim… 2012 Guild Wars 2! Dragons are back!

Our ranks are as follows:

Hatchling: For new members, this is to see if you like us and we like you. If you stay with us for a week you’ll be moved up a rank. (Players who represent rarely will be moved to Hatchling Rank)
Dragon: Standard member. Who doesn’t want to be a dragon?
Immortal Dragon: For members who have been with us for over 6 months, who are also notable faces within the guild.
Elder Dragon: Officer Rank, Elder Dragons are represent the majority of the time. They help run the guild.
Ancient Dragon: Officer Rank, Ancient Dragons are trusted members of the guild, who help with just about everything. They are also there to keep an eye on things. They are required to represent near 100% of the time.
Eternal Dragon: Guild Leader.

Representing our guild is not a requirement, but if you never represent… what’s the point in you joining? We have an open guild bank policy, take something you need, leave something you don’t need for another player. Please don’t empty the guild bank.
You must be on an EU server so that we can actually all play together.

If you are interested in joining, leave a message here, or send a message/whisper these people in game:
Eternal Dragon Half Tooth: HalfTooth.1867
Ancient Dragon Xhuuya: Xhuuya.2364
Elder Dragon Jen: Malchihiro.7506

I literally love fire waaay too much, so i’s not suprising that fire is my favourite. I also love water but generally find earth and air to just not suit me or my play style or whatever… I just don’t click with them.

So, Fire is my favourite! Meteor shower just does not get old for me, fire balls are exciting, being able to breathe fire! Having a firey phoenix friend omg! <3

[Master of Magic] An elementalist themed staff. It looks like the basic staff skin when sheathed. When unsheathed it reacts depending on what element you are attuned to.
Water: Looks as though it’s made of flowing water,
Fire: Looks like flames in the shape of a staff, moving with the staff leaves a firey trail as though the staff is loosing its shape a little bit.
Earth: Becomes made from floating rocks, your character leaves cracks in the floor when they walk.
Air: Staff looks like it’s made from angry thunder clouds that occasionally make rumbling thunder sounds, lightning crackles around it.

Ah yer, bosses were something to be feared in GW1, but they had good loot and you could capture their elie skill.

I just wanted to make a post for damage types discussion.
At the moment in GW2 there are no damage types, and no damage resistences, whereas in GW1 every skill had a specific damage type rather than doing some blanket damage.
(a list can be see here )

I realise that there would be a massive flaw in bringing damage types into GW2, and it would be the fear of making one class have more advantages than another.
My response to that is a little off topic but it basically comes down to: Every class can do everything all the time but none can do anything well. This makes it feel that while every class has a different playstyle, none of them are individual. I feel, each class needs a set of strengths and weaknesses that allows it to have its time to shine.

Starting with Damage types and resistences!
I basically wanted to suggest the idea of giving classes damage resistences, Warriors and guardians might have good physical resistence, Necromancers might have dark and shadow resistence maybe becoming immune when in Death Shroud, The elementalists resistenc might depend on what attunement he’s in….etc.

Skills should have damage types to, hammers are blunt, daggers are piercing or slashing, mesmer’s scepters have chaos damage.

Enemies should also have damage types, resistences and weaknesses. For example it is entirely illogical that you can travel to the depths of Frostgorge and kill ice elementals with frost damage. It’s pretty cold there so surely they should take basically no damage from freezing but take extra damage from fire? Something that’s armored should take less blunt damage but more piercing or slashing damage.

As long as class has a variety of damage types, no one class would be at a disadvantage entirely, but each class would have a place where it was weaker and a palce where it was stronger.
I also think damage types might add a bit of thoughtfulness when playing, deciding which weapons and skills are best for a situation rather than just running in doing damage and not thinking about it.

Good idea bad idea? Discuss?

They should have better drops anyway, maybe they shouldn’t be so aware of how many players are killing them. I was just tyring to find a solution to getting a single blue drop from killing a champion by yourself.

Wanted to say I agree, there are plenty of champion/veterans in places where the player population is low. Like the Northwest most corner of Frostgorge for example, there are a few champions there are sometimes I want to take one on and see if I can beat it. Assuming I am victorious, I usually get a blue or trophy item and given that it just took 20 mins or half an hour of careful work, it is so disheartening to just get one blue item.

I read somewhere that veterans and champions were going to give better loot, but more often than not the ones I kill don’t even leave a lootable corpse. In my opinions champions, if not veterans, ought to only drop greens and above, and have a higher chance to dropping a related lodestone or core or something valuable.

I also think champions and veterans should be aware of how many players are killing them. If it happens to be 10 or 15 then each player doesn’t have to put in much effort but when it’s a small group of 2 or 3 each player is working really hard. So drops should be adjusted accordingly.

Just wanted to post about some faults with the no waypoint travel whilst a party member is in combat.
There are probably other dungeons in which this applies but I’m going to talk about CoF, p3 (I think it was p3).
1st scenario is the part where you have to run up a narrow tunnel that is filled with flame legion things that explode and kill you instantly. Good challenge, but if there is someone who has completed it and they are being targetted by the cannons at the end of the tunnel while the other 4 people are still trying to do the challenge, they cannot do it because if they die the person at the end is in combat. This is just annoying and long winded.

The 2nd scenario is the end boss; Tribune Burntclaw. I understand the thinking behind healing your team mates rather than everyone rushing to a waypoint during combat. But this boss knocks you into lava where you have little chance of getting out due to the amount of damage you take. And if you manage to get close enough to the side where sopmeone can rez you, you can’t be rezzed because the lava damage outweighs the healing.
No matter how careful you are, at least one person is likely to get knocked into the lava at some point and that person or people cannot heal, be rezzed or waypoint. In unluckier occasions, you can get his health really low (which takes forever as he keeps going invulnarbale) and 3 or 4 people are knocked into the lava. One person is left and there is nothing to do except wipe and start over.
If the no waypointing in combat does not get changed, specific mechanics need to be added in certain dungeons in order to aid teams in situations like these.

Wanted to post to say I totally agree with you OP.
It feels like the focus could be really amazing, but when compared a dagger (you’re only other offhand choice as an ele) the dagger is just better. I kind of wish flame wall could be replaced with something else entirely. Same for air focus, Swirling winds is such an odd skill it’s generally entirely useless in all situations where you need your other skills, and when it is useful all your other skills are useless. It’s just so out of place.

This is a good idea, if dailies reset at a minimum of every 24 hours if they are completed, but if not completed they don’t reset for a few days.

I have to say I love the flying pets the most. I would love to see more flying pets added, and more sylvari plant animals

GummiBear.2756:

Half Tooth.1867:

Maybe flag toggle create a random cooldown when it’s unchecked so that it could be anywhere from instantanious to 5 minutes before it actually wears off. This would prevent anyone from planning to use it although it might not stop it entirely.

no amount of timer or anything would prevent mesmer abuse, would jsut change the delay from him getting in till he could port the zerg in…

It’s not that it’s a longer timer, its that the timer would be random. Maybe it would be better if an unchecked flag meant you could take damage, but the ability to deal damage is on a random timer between 30 seconds and 10 minutes. So unchecking your flag might mean death since you can take damage but might not be able to defend yourself for another 5 or 10 mins. Obviously you would not be able to check the flag whilst in combat to prevent people who are nearly dead from doing that to save themselves.

If it were random players attempting sneaky solo kills on single players by running up to them with the flag on and then unchecking it , they have no garuntee of being able to deal damage on an unsuspecting player.
As for a zerg planning to abuse it, if a zerg ran around and everyone unchecked at the same time, most people would not be able to attack straight away. So there couldn’t be any planned coordinated attacks.

However it would be easier to remove WvW from map completion, or possibly to just remove the waypoints and Poi’s in the main castle from map completion. You stand a good chance of being able to get everything else even if it is stressful and sneaky, but if you’re on a server that never wins you haven’t got much chance at all of being able to get the ones in the main castle.

Maybe flag toggle create a random cooldown when it’s unchecked so that it could be anywhere from instantanious to 5 minutes before it actually wears off. This would prevent anyone from planning to use it although it might not stop it entirely.

I really like this idea!
I’d like to add to it though that while it is a really great idea, like the legendary weapons, the tier 2 effects would be normal and boring if they were all fairly easily affordable and it was easy to get every single one for every skill you use. So, maybe they’d have to be like 100 or 200 skill points to unlock each one? Then a player who say, had every effect for every skill would be someone who either has waaaay too much time on thier hands, or they are the opposite of an altoholic.

If you had 3 tiers, you could have the 2nd tier as each upgrade being 30 or 60 skill points and then tier 3 being 200 points per skill.

Would be cool if as a necromancer you could get the minion models from gw1. For the engineer (I don’t know why this isn’t the case anyway) but it would be cool if your turrets reflected the race your engineer is. It’s so sad that each race has such unique architecture and technology yet all their turrets look the same Make your sylvari engineers turrets into flowers and vines, your charr’s turrets become all steampunk and agressive…etc

I do like this idea. However I had this thought in a Grenth Temple mission yesturday:
“If this were tf2, imagine how many people would be yelling “MEDIC!” right now."

The circle doesn’t necerssarily have to be green, but I think healing over time skills could definately use some kind of visual indicator to let the player know they will be healing in this area.

The healing skills would be considerably more useful if they had some kind of visual effect that disinguished them from all the other skills.

For example, we in a dungon or fractals. I notice most of my team mates are in need of healing so I watch for a few seconds to see the best place to use Rain so that it hits the most amount of people for the longest time.
I use Rain, my team mates don’t notice and usually all of them run outside of the circle maybe thinking it’s a potential attack. If the rings of over time healing skills were green or blue or had something that distignuished them from potential attacks and other skills, I might actually be able to heal my team mates.

I probably do the same to other players also using healing skills as the general rule thats repeated to you in the game is ‘if you stand within the circle you’ll take damage’ so even nuetral friendly circles are subject to this suspicion. It’s just safer to never stand in a circle unless you put it there because only you know what it does.

I wish you could charm baby pets, wolf and bear cubs and such, and have passive pets. Like you can charm a rabbit, it wont attack but you get a buff while you have the rabbit pet out.
I’ve never wanted to reskin my pets but sometimes I have felt the strong desire to be able to dye them or maybe parts of them.

I really wish there were more titles in the game, because they are a way to simply display something you are proud of acheiving next to your name.
Many of the gw1 titles had benefits or side effect benefits. For example the skill hunter title meant that you then had ever available elite skill in the game ready to use because you’d taken the time to hunt them all down. The cartographer ones meant you could see the whole of every map and travel anywhere. Some of the deliberate benefits were adding a small percentage to keep a lockpick after using it, have bonus health or energy in certain areas, taking percentage less damage from specific enemies.

I feel gw2 is massively lacking in titles, there are loads of acheivements, but no way to display your achivement to say “Look what I have done”
I don’t think titles are any kind of answer to end game content but they do add to the game.

Would be nice to have ones related to each race, doing X amount of events in the sylvari starter area earns you “savviour of the sylvari” or “Legendary warden” or something like that, with equivilent titles for other races.
“Cleanser of Orr” after having slain X amount of risen creatures in the orr areas. (I think Zhaitan’s Bane is the equivilent, but there’s no way to display that)

Why are harder jumping puzzles such a ridiculous NO! when harder dungeons and ever upscaling fractals are a big yes?

Some people like jumping puzzles, some people like dungeons. Neither are compulsary and each has their own set of achivements.

That was genuinely epic and impressive!
Loved it <3

Totally agree, the amount of times I’ve gone on GW2 wiki and typed in somrething like sandstorm to get specific information on it….

Also the speed signets that professions have say 25% movement in the tool tip but 10% movement in you buff section.

I have learnt ways to run through Orr now with the least amount of hassle so in that sense it’s ok. I only just wish you could go to a version of orr where everything is starting to become free of Zhaitans influence. It’s so depressing to have fought risen, killed zhaitan and Orr is still full of zombies?

I’d just like to experience some kind of time skip where we can see the future of a zombie free orr, with plant and animal life getting back to normal.

If they put the male mesmer dance in I wonder how many people would buy that…..