Guild Wars 2

Illconceived Was Na.9781:

Egrimm Van Horstmann.7921:

Got in a successful run, only broke the bar once. Had 20+ players and the damage was able to get him down fairly well.

Awesome, glad to hear it
Thanks for letting us know.

Any advice you care to offer those who are still finding this one daunting?

Yes actually the best advice I can offer is, park a toon in the cavern to the right side cavern that leads to Vinetooth Den. Safe spot to pop in and if you can see if the pylon event is progressing. So for me that almost always runs solo it made it so if VP is up I could hop down into the Den and fight it or run to the current pylon to assist with event leading up to VP.

Second stay as close as you can to the VP so more people can still lay into him after he leaps with little repositioning.

With some patience it should happen, just park a toon you can forget about for a week or two doing anything other than the East Meta in AB. So if you miss it there’s still some loot to be had.

Sometimes how an inquiry is phrased can very much influence the reaction.

“I cant believe that the devs were too lazy to include <feature X>”

Is likely to get a different response than:

“Does <feature X> exist in this game?”

I disagree. Soft CC, is as the nomination implies, soft. If the group needs to break a specific Defiance Bar, then players should be equipping hard CC, e.g. stuns, launches, etc. Furthermore, in encounters like Vinetooth Prime and Wyvern Matriarchs, the Defiance Bar window is far too short to rely on defiance-over-time effects, which again prompts the use of faster, harder CC.

First point: Are you aware that your server only matters for World vs. World? All other maps are shared with all servers in your region, so the only reason to transfer is because you want to play WvW on a different server or because you want to switch to the other region.

Second point: It is impossible to transfer to a full world, so it’s best to check the one you want to go to before you start. Population is entirely dependant on the number of accounts considered to be active in WvW. It isn’t updated instantly and has nothing to do with the number of people currently online so checking at odds times of day won’t help. Populations update periodically based on how many people have been playing WvW recently. I’ve heard just after the Friday reset is the best time to check, but I don’t know how true that is. Popular servers are highly unlikely to have spaces open up so it might take several weeks before you’re able to transfer there.

If you still want to transfer there are 2 ways to do it:

1) Pay gems – As Widowmaker Z said you can do this via the World Selection button on the Character Select screen. The gem cost depends on the population of the server you’re going to, with lower population ones being cheaper.

2) Delete all your characters and you’ll be able to transfer for free. Anything stored in the bank and anything which is account-wide (like achievements) will be saved but anything in their inventory and anything soulbound will be lost. (Be aware that even if you make an identical character with the same name they still can’t use items soulbound to one of your old characters.) Names will be saved for 24 hours so you’ll have time to reclaim them after transferring.

9:25am central, still only 50 favor in guild panel vs 6150 we had yesterday.

https://www.reddit.com/r/Guildwars2/comments/6xir8j/introducing_guild_wars_2_raid_training_a_discord/

Hello everyone!

Guild Wars 2 Raid Training [NA Only] is a Discord server that has been operating since June to help provide a space for players who are new to raiding to have a jumping off point, and for experienced players to be able to share their knowledge and find other equally experienced players.

We believe we fill a spot somewhere between the toxic LFG “link 150+ LI Exp Only” mess and those who are already lucky enough to have a static group to run with. Instead, we aim to provide a network for players of varying degrees of experience to form up and become more experienced in a low stress learning environment. We are Guild-Agnostic, meaning anyone from anywhere can join us without having to formally join a guild and “rep” with us, so feel free to bring your guild members along for the ride.

Size and Scope: The TL:DR

We currently have over 600 members in our discord server and expect to grow larger in the near future. We conduct our runs every day of the week, often running two or three runs simultaneously if the demand is there and trainers are available. While we would love to expand faster, we are in need of more trainers to accommodate our growing population. Read more on this down below if you are interested!

Tier System – Experienced Based Progression

We use a “Tier” structure to track learning progress with each member that is based off of “your personal experience with each boss encounter.” We have a spreadsheet that we use to help players and Trainers keep track of each player’s “progress” in learning each individual boss. Each Raid boss or encounter has been sorted into one of four difficulty Tiers based on our interpretations of the mechanical difficulties and damage thresholds required to successfully complete the fight consistently. Once a player finds “all of the bosses within a Tier” as trivial, easy, and can clear them with very high consistency, we graduate that player into that Tier so that anyone who is looking for someone to bring to a raid knows that this person “knows their stuff” for any boss “At or Below” their Tier and so trainers will know that this person likely would benefit from training runs for bosses “One Tier Above” their current Tier.

The Two Types of Runs

Training Run – This is a run in which we expect to spend time explaining mechanics and helping players learn the encounter. The goal is not to achieve a quick, easy kill, but rather to get a first kill or at least learn the mechanics! Training Runs are generally conducted on content that is “One Tier Above your Tier” to give players a chance to learn the bosses and encounters that are “a bit” harder than what they are already proficient at killing each week. These can be conducted every day of the week, but generally occur more frequently from Wednesday to Sunday.

Clear Run – This is a run in which we expect to spend minimal time sorting out mechanic roles, and we expect everyone present to “know what to do” and to clear the fight in as few pulls as realistically possible. Clear Runs require that you be “In or Above This Tier” to participate. This is especially useful for players simply looking to get their quick kills completed early during the week to save more time to progress on Training Runs for bosses they are less experienced with. These can be conducted every day of the week, but generally occur on Monday reset and Tuesday to complete anything remaining from Monday reset.

Trainers Needed!

With all of the above said, the primary issue we have run into is that the ratio of Trainers to Trainees is out of sync: we have a lot of people interested in joining our runs, but this has exceeded our current supply of available trainers!
We have been hesitant about posting on the official forums and Reddit due to our relative lack of trainers, so for the time being we would prefer to hold off on linking the Discord directly (also, hello potential Reddit Hug-of-Death!) until we can build up our roster of trainers so that we can provide training to a larger community.

I think you’ve misunderstood how different races work in this game and/or how game design generally works.

All races are the same in terms of stats, weapons and other equipment they can use and apart from a small number of racial skills the skills they can use too. So that’s the easy part to carry over. Reducing it would actually be more work because Anet would have to work out what they can keep and what can be removed without destroying balance (and simply the ability to play the character in all situations) and then modify everything from the trait and skill windows to the combat UI to accommodate it. That’s a lot of work.

And on top of that you’re suggesting that each of these new races should have it’s own, unique storyline, separate from the one everyone else is going through? That would be a huge amount of work. Seriously, writing narratives, building the models and constructing the instances and doing all the animation and voice acting is the vast majority of game design in an RPG. We were told during Season 1 and 2 that they were able to do 1-2 releases per month because the studio was split into 4 teams and each worked on 1 release. So 1 Living Story release took 1/4 of the people at Anet 4 months to build, and that was before they were adding a new map each time.

Unless you can think of a way to produce these “really rich storylines” chapter by chapter which requires fewer people and less time that typical game design you’re basically suggesting they double the amount of work necessary for every release.

And the end result is a severely limited new race with a story that will never relate to what everyone else gets to do?

I think this idea would have completely the opposite of your intended effect – it doubles the time and effort (and therefore money) required to produce new releases for very little benefit for players. For many people no benefit because a race that can’t even use all the existing builds is useless, for people who mainly care about the storyline or the novelty of a new race it might be an interesting choice for one alt, but I can’t imagine it ever justifying the effort required.

To answer the question you first need to understand what the site you linked is.

It’s a marketplace for game keys.

Meaning you don;t actually buy from the site but from some merchant who offers their key via the site for sale. You have no way of verifying how authentic and serious said merchant is or how he aquired the keys he is selling.

If the key you buy ends up getting banned (maybe because it got purchased with fraudulent credit cards) your entire account will get banned too. The website might send you a replacement key, which will do you little good if your main account got banned (and we are talking mostly permabans in this case, not those soft temporary bans).

Make sure you are using Spears.

The names of the achievements “Speargun Master” and “Harpoon Master” are misleading. The Speargun achievement is actually referring to Harpoon Gun weapons (sometimes just called Harpoon). The Harpoon achievement refers to Spear weapons.

https://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Weapon_Master

I will never understand how people can get upset about other people getting nice things.

When I bought the game on launch, I knew what I was getting and decided it was well worth the price.

When I bought HoT I knew what I was getting and decided it was worth the purchase for me.

That’s all that counts.

Why should I care that people get the base game for free now, or that Rev is included with all further expansions?
If it brings just one person to pick up the game rather than not, that’s good for the game I enjoy playing and therefore good for me.

It’s a player to play with, and money for Anet to pay Devs to make more content with.

What’s not to like.

I already got thousands of hours of entertainment for the full price that I willingly paid and the Devs get to make more content with it that I will continue to enjoy.

I didn’t see the issue when HoT came out (and came with the base game), and I don’t see an issue here.

If something feels too difficult, it’s not necessarily because it’s too hard or unfair, it also might be a sign that you need to look at your build and gear and pay attention to what your skills do.

Tune the charater a bit, practice the fight a couple of times, and suddenly it might become less hard, and might even feel like something when you finally win.

The OPs suggestion would not allow anyone to get a Birthday Blaster early, or to get one when they shouldn’t have it. It would just mean that once you’ve got one all your characters can use it.

It seems silly that if I create a new character right now I can give them the Queen Jennah mini, the 3rd birthday finisher, the 4th Birthday backpack and mail carrier, two 5th birthday weapons and the 5th birthday title…but they can’t have a cake gun that gives a very short, basic food buff for 2 years.

Personally I’d love to have it account bound. It would enable me to free up 8 inventory spaces by deleting the extras I have and putting the 1 I keep into a shared slot. But also because I actually find it’s more useful when the characters are below level 80, when it’s not really worth buying food for them. But even I don’t have many 2 year old characters below level 80 and I make a lot of alts and level them ridiculously slowly.

We got a fix weeks ago.

https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/info/updates/Game-Update-Notes-August-8-2017-3/first#post6700890

Fixed a bug in which anomaly fragments could be absorbed by the Legendary Anomaly at long range if they were stunned immediately after spawning.

You are in luck the daily achievements provide 2gold that can be had in 10 minutes

Its a known issue. Like Stitch said: wait until the timer nearly expires before submitting the code and it should work.

Also make sure that the clock of the device you’re using to generate the code is correct. You can check the clock by visiting https://www.time.gov , https://time.is or a similar site that shows the time of an atomic clock.

You can convert soul bound unlimited tools to account bound by visiting the black lion weapon specialist. You just need to make sure it is unequipped and in your character’s inventory to do so. That is a change they made some time ago when they switched all of them to account bound on acquire.

916 is not a random number. Base precision at 80 is 1000. 1000 – 916 = 84. 84/21 = 4. 4% was the base critical chance at 80 from launch. The discrepancy reported on the Wiki indicates that base critical chance seems to actually be 5% (1000-895)/21 = 5

If you look at some of the different formulae shown in the the older pages on Precision in the Precision History tab, you’ll see that the formula has been moving toward simpler over time, perhaps with the intent of making it easier for different players to predict the effect of added precision to their builds, while also keeping Precision as a base stat rather than treating it like Ferocity and preserving the 4% (or 5%) base chance.

See this to me is where the disconnect comes in. OP hasn’t played the game for years, comes back and expects to jump into end game content and do well immediately.

Many who have been here all along, didn’t find HOT as difficult. Didn’t have problems soloing the stories. Taking years off and jumping into end game content should be hard, and HOT was always meant to be end game content.

Other than that, I thought it a fair review, so good job OP.

zealex.9410:

STIHL.2489:

cranos.5913:

Whether or not raiders will buy PoF will depend on if you actually need it for the next raid.

Of course you will, and that that is all they need to do to guarantee the sale.

There is no real fence sitting for people who are serious about raids, and Anet knows this, which is fair, because those guaranteed future X-pac sales are about the only really good reason to put raids into a game like GW2 to start with.

Then why does ff14 and wow market their raids with new expansions?

Because raids are what people expect to be a main point of expacs in those games, and because raid cadence is tied to those expacs. In GW2 neither is true. Here, raids not only will not sell an expac (raid community is not big enough), but can cause a negative reaction in non-raiders due to associations with HoT (and the reasons why HoT didn’t sell as good as Anet hoped).

In short, there’s no reason to advertise PoF raids to raiders, as any raider is going to buy that expac eventually, just to play the new wings (which are coming), or to use some of the new elite specs in old ones. There’s however a reason not to push raids in the face of the part of the community that dislikes them, as that may affect sales. In a bad way.

Substatic.6958:

Also whatever they are doing with raids at the moment isn’t working.

According to who?
The devs said multiple times that they are happy with how the raids turned out, and called them a huge success. Also the said that the Raids far exceeded their expectations concerning how many players actually Raid in this game compared to what they expected.
They added a second Raid team in the mix, which means we’ll get more Raids. You don’t add a second team to a failure, you add it to a success so it expands and gets even better.

So exactly how do you figure that what they are doing with Raids isn’t working?

Twyn.7320:

In Fractals, currently, you play one build for every Fractal, with maybe a different potion if you’re trying to be optimal. With rotating instabilities, and new ones, Anet’s ‘build diversity’ preaching would make sense, as you’d have a different build for different situations, which is the point of GW2’s combat system.

Forcing people to play specific builds for specific content is not build diversity. That would be being able to tackle the content with many different builds with not much difference in their effectiveness. And that’s the exact opposite of what you try to advocate.

Also if you think that a majority of current fractal players would be willing to swap builds/classes/gear for each fractal, you are naive. The only thing that would happen is that many people would simply play only those fractals that would allow their builds. Which is not what anyone should want.

notebene.3190:

Thank you. The new PoF pass will work the same way when it’s active?

Yes, the new POF Pass will work the same way, unless it acts more like the Mistlock Sanctuary Passkey.

notebene.3190:

Is there another type of pass that sends you back to where you were (other than WvW, which they removed the guild bank from a few years back)?

Yes, it’s called the Mistlock Sanctuary Passkey. There is a portal in the middle of the area that will allow you to teleport back to your original location. However, this passkey was only temporary available, and has left the gem store to return another day.

notebene.3190:

Without the ability to use services and go back to where you were, I’m not seeing the appeal of these things.

The main appeal is that it will teleport you to an area of great convenience, and is also a free teleport if you’re heading in that direction already. For example, let’s say you always go to Divinity’s Reach after finishing your things for the day, to unload loot and stop by your home instance. The Royal Pass will bring you there for free, anytime you want.

It really is just a convenience though, the game does not force you to have it in order to play the game. Each area has their own unique aesthetics, and services, and that is just one of the few reasons players may want it.

You mention technology, but wish to forego any discussion of it. Unfortunately the explanations for the game’s poor performance and the likelihood of it being addressed are technical, and there’s little point in having an opinion on a matter without understanding the situation, so I’m going to ignore your desire to ignore the explanation

DX9 is an old technology, and the game engine is heavily CPU bound. Upgrading to DX11 and offloading work to the GPU, or multithreading the game engine, are all herculean tasks. The sort that tend to require complete rewrites of game code. The game recently switched to 64 bit addressing, so machines with more than 4gb of RAM finally saw that memory being used, which did help with performance and killed a couple of nasty crash bugs when large amounts of players were present. In that respect, maybe we can hope for an engine overhaul in the future, but I think that’s unlikely since the game runs fine for most people that aren’t running it off of a toaster oven.

So, my opinion as someone who has an understanding of the technology is that the game engine is fine, runs without issues for the most part, and that incremental improvements to stability and performance would be reasonable to expect instead of an overhaul.

I don’t mean to be harsh but I suspect you’re going to find this a fruitless thread because i) without technical details it’s going to be hard to determine anything objectively, and ii) you’re lumping many technical issues into one lump. The connectivity issue, for example, depends greatly on whether your router is sufficient for the number of devices in your household, not to mention your provider, network, and all the bits and pieces between you and the anet servers. Too many variables, unknowns and uncontrollables. By lumping it together and blaming the ‘client’ there’s just no objective discussion to be had. There’s nowhere to go with this.

Easy (bosses that PUGs rarely fail): Trio, Escort, Mursaat Overseer, Samarog, Gorseval
Medium (bosses that PUGs can fail easily): VG, Cairn, Sloth, Keep Construct
Hard (bosses that can be an absolute chore to do with PUGs): Sabetha, Xera, Deimos, Matthias

Housing was never promised. Not once. Not ever. It was mentioned. Once. In an answer on guild wars 2 guru by Martin Kerstein who only said it wouldnt’ be in the game at launch and that it would probably be added to the game with the first expansion with guild halls.

That really doesn’t qualify as a promise.

I really wish people would stop using hyperbole to try to make points because it weakens any argument they might have.

I’ve always had trouble telling the difference between completed and uncompleted Hero Points (skill points were easy, but hero points look too similar to me). This is going to make it harder.

Sure you can look for the symbol, but if you’re scanning across the map looking for things you need for map completion it’s even harder to tell if you need that hero point than it used to be.

I feel like being a casual player actually gave me an advantage in HoT, particularly regarding navigating the maps.

I wasn’t going in with a checklist of goals I had to complete as efficiently as possible so I could move on to my next set of goals. I was just going to have a wander around and see what happened. I might have an end-point in mind, whether that’s reached a particular vista or POI or the next story step or whatever, but it didn’t bother me if I didn’t get there.

In the process I got to know my way around, not by looking at the map and knowing which ‘level’ each thing was on (I struggle to read maps of all kinds, GW2s is better than many but I’m still inclined to ignore it) but by remembering how I got there.

Draconis Mons is a prime example. When people in my guild were “complaining”/bragging that they’d already finished the story in the first few hours and only had achievements to do but that was going to be really difficult because of the impossible map I’d barely started the story but was able to tell them the map was a spiral and if you just kept going up and left you’d get there because I’d gone in ignoring the mini map and the markers and just wandered around to see what I could find.

The Reward Track
If like me you don’t play WvW or PvP (last time I played it reward tracks didn’t exist) the track itself will be confusing. But it’s actually pretty straight-forward. Each track shows 7 small rewards and then the main one. But that first one is not the first thing you’ll get. Each of the 8 sections is divided into 5 sub-sections (you can see these by hovering the mouse over it).

For example the Gift of Battle track will give you 2 Disciple of Balthazar Loot Boxes, 5 Memories of Battle, 2 Acolyte of Balthazar Loot Boxes, a Tome of Knowledge and then the first ‘minor’ reward – 4 Obsidian Shards.

Your progress towards the next reward is shown in a little pop-up menu above the map. The timer counts down to the next time awards are granted and the number next to it is how many points you earn.

You’ll earn more points for higher tier participation (Tier 6 is the maximum) and you raise your participation level by…well, participating. Killing enemies, claiming things, completing events, defending objectives etc.

Other rewards
Periodically you’ll also get WvW rank chests and Skirmish chests popping up above the map. The rank chests contain random loot, but most importantly they mean you’ve got another rank point to spend on the Ranks and Abilities tab. Skirmish chests are shown on the Match Overview page and contain some nice stuff, in particular this is how you get Skirmish Claim Tickets.

Basically anything you do to progress the Reward Track will also progress these two, so you don’t need to worry about them too much.

When you first enter

Look for a commander tag – if there is one go join them. Follow them, attack what they attack, build siege when they place it, claim control points when you get to them. Try to actually pay attention to what’s going on rather than blindly following because you’ll learn more that way, but the important thing is to stick with the group and do what they do.

If there isn’t a commander tag
Maybe switch maps (if there are others without a queue) to see if you can find one. But if not don’t give up. The best thing to do now is explore the map – even just roaming around aimlessly will help you learn your way around, which will come in useful later on.

But there’s also likely to be stuff you can achieve on your own – claiming camps is best but you can also claim sentry points and shrines (this is why I recommend the Desert borderlands, it has more of this stuff) and ruins.

Keep a look out for commander tags – one could turn up at any time. Or you might find a group of players running without a commander– they’re harder to spot (and sometimes don’t want randoms, they’ll let you know if that’s the case) but they can achieve just as much as a group with a commander – it’s just harder to attract new people without the tag.

If there’s more than 1 commander tag
Ask in map chat which one to join, or see which one/s have their squad open so you can just right click and join. It’s likely one is the ‘main’ squad and one or more is a specialist one – a guild doing their own thing or a 2nd group sneaking into objectives – they’re less likely to want extra people. But it may just be that there’s enough people for multiple squads and you can join whichever.

From then on

Keeps going. Keep running with squads, claiming objectives, or exploring solo and claiming what you can until you’ve achieved your objectives.

For the specific items I mentioned in the introduction:

• Gift of Battle – complete the reward track
• Can of Spicy Meat Chili – get a Skirmish Chest, choose the Canned Food Crate from the list of rewards and then choose Spicy Meat Chili from the options.
• Skirmish Claim Tickets – come from Skirmish chests. You get more at higher tiers, you need to get part way into the Mithril tier to get them all in 1 week, but if there isn’t time to do that don’t worry, just keep going until you’ve got enough. As I said it took me 3 evenings to get 100 by getting part way into the Gold tier.

Other tips

Carry supply whenever you can
But do not take it from Keeps or Towers. Camps are the best place to get it. It’s used to build siege and repair walls, so it’s useful to have and by carrying it (and being willing to spend it) you’re helping your team out.

Don’t attack walls or gates unless the commander says it’s ok
This will alert the enemy to the fact that you’re attacking (which using siege weapons doesn’t) which gives them time to come and stop you. Sometimes that’s ok because they’re busy elsewhere or there’s too few of them or whatever, sometimes it could ruin the whole attack.

Try to have fun
You may go in expecting to hate WvW, or at least thinking it’s not for you. But give it a go and you may find yourself enjoying it. I doubt I’m ever going to be a dedicated WvW player but I’ve had some great moments. The other day we were claiming a keep when a massive wave of enemies attacked us – I was downed twice but somehow got back up and out the way, we actually managed to defeat them and finished claiming the keep and it was a great feeling.

And if you really do hate it? Well, you don’t need to go back again (at least not until you want another unique reward.)