Guild Wars 2

Todd.8162:

Oh, yea … More visual balogna to clog up my display. As if pixel-pooping swords and space-taking minis weren’t enough. I already have to wait for 3,000 or 4,000 or even 5,000 models to load between maps before I get to play. Now I’ll get to wait even longer.

Arena Net: If you’re going to do all this “engineering” (and you abuse that word) to add more visual fluff, have the courtesy to also add an graphics option to switch it all off. “Character Model Quality” isn’t doing enough – the dancing balogna pixels still remain. Let the players who want to etabrutsam to images of their characters in animated armor stroke & schlick themselves to happy content. The rest of us don’t care. We don’t care about adding more glowing, blinking, dancing pixels. We don’t care about “clipping”. (Who stares at their character model that closely anyway? Certainly not any one who is actually PLAYING the game.) Making us wait longer and longer between maps to load their extra model graphics for the egos of others doesn’t make us admire Legendary crap – it makes us hate it.

However, the ability to change Legendary armor stats between fights like Legendary weapons can, now there’s something USEFUL. At least you thought of that.

I think a large portion of the player base cares about how they look.

There definitely needs to be an option to remove all this junk from the screen though. Any kind of fight with more than 15 people becomes a visual clusterkitten where the only option is to press buttons and hope you’re in range. AOE particle effects are dreadful. Tack on everyone’s giant butterfly wing backpacks and there is absolutely no way of seeing what’s going on.
Especially good when the game quite literally revolves around stacking as many people as possible in one small spot…

Not sure how people managed to be disappointed. GW2’s armour design as a whole is pretty awful.

Light armour: Jester outfits, ranging from skimpy skirts for girls to no-pants for guys.
Medium armour: trenchcoats.
Heavy armour: spikes and/or generic fantasy armour.

Aury.1367:

Justine.6351:

Traits
Rune set
Air keep buff
Gliders

Not sure there is a need for this idea.

In WvW for example, theres no room for falling dmg traits and theres no gliding possible. Why should i pick a traitline only for a useless trait. I was asking for sth completly different

Usually useless, but it’s hilarious when you’re outnumbered in a besieged keep. Especially with Warrior’s stomp thing.

I’ve heard of people doing it on PvP maps with Mes portals too. It’s such a pointless (yet ubiquitous) trait 99% of the time though

“WvW: New Borderland. Experience epic battlefield combat like never before inWorld vs. World’s latest core addition, the new Borderlands map. Navigatetreacherous heights with traps that blow your foes to the depths below andferocious defenders to help keep the enemies at bay. Map objectives will be moreimportant than ever before, as they’ll unlock new strategies, tactics, and playmechanics that you’ll want to use to your world’s advantage!”

Hahahahahahaha.
And it’s not even a HoT feature.

Zietlogik.6208:

I use this for my general purpose non-HoT build, works pretty much anywhere you need it to.

http://gw2skills.net/editor/?vJAQJARTjMdQZHWFCmhAnIGICKLAigBQ/ipfKwW/FGBA-TVSHwAGuAAs2fwpSQCHCgfK/4r+DYdBDeAAAOCAAA-w

Without PS it’s just a kickfest every other group you join…even though at least half of pugs i’ve played with don’t even bother to stand in AOE range of it anyway.

Strength is a given.
Without Defence (Cleansing Ire and Adrenal Health) i can’t survive.
So Discipline is the one i dropped, solely for Phalanx Strength from Tactics. Everything else in Tactics is pointless though. The minors are all useless, “Empower Allies” is ok but boring, and Empowered is probably good in an organised group with buff sharing, but totally useless otherwise — like the other T1 traits.

http://gw2skills.net/editor/?vJAQFARjMdQlHW3B+dAnIGKCKbAegAIDif45xVfvDBA-TFRSwAiUCCV9HA7PMR5HA-w
^ That’s what i use. It’s sad without Discipline though. Being able to switch weapons is what made Warrior decent. That plus loss of 25% movespeed is just horrible, but it’s all that works for me without getting kicked or kittentalked for not using PS.

Nusku.3941:

reikken.4961:

for an option purely in game that you can grind all day any time, gathering is 15-20g/h iirc

You do not make 20g/h gathering plz.

Not now you don’t, because wood prices have dropped by ~40% thanks to the event karma gifts.
About a month ago though, yea, definitely. Hard Logs were around 4s each…and they are everywere.

Choppy.4183:

Tbh, I don’t totally understand the purpose of Arms in that build, and would personally opt for Discipline and all of its goodness (including might on swap).

Never understood that about the build. Maybe it’s just for the bonus precision from signets so you proc GS crit-might more for Phalanx Strength — then the extra condition damage is just “why not”.
Seems like a waste.

Water combat — another “unique” feature/gimmick that’s been swept under the rug…

Was it even properly implemented in the first place? You can’t get a level-appropriate headpiece without either Googling for the single karma-vendor (for a green), or from spending a lot of money buying/crafting it.

Doam.8305:

Because a stronger and overall superior class locked behind a paywall is the easiest way to get people to pay to get over that paywall.

That’s what’s scariest.
I remember when i got Burning Crusade for WoW: a whole new world to explore, 2 new races and classes, new crafting professions…

For the same price, HoT has more convenient movement (gliding) to offer. Putting the new professions on steroids was clearly the best they could come up with.

5kb/s
Sure didn’t want to finish that daily or anything.

Donari.5237:

LSD.4673:

I collected 3 exotics for a long time after realising they could be toiletted. Finally got a 4th one the other day, and got an item worth about a gold from the forge.

I’m pretty sure you could put a Mystic Forge Stone in the 4th slot rather than wait for a 4th drop.

Thought they were valuable. Plus kinda forgot i had them until i found another exotic i couldn’t do anything with. They were sat there in the hidden bag of “why am i carting this halloween trash around with me”.

DeanBB.4268:

Some things just can’t be tossed into the Mystic Forge. Some things, if you can’t salvage or sell, all you can do is delete if they are no longer of value.

That was kinda weird to me to begin with.
Some stuff you get as story rewards are soulbound on acquire, others are account bound.
You can’t do anything with soulbound on acquire, but you can seem to mystic toilet account bound story rewards — they just can’t be salvaged.

I collected 3 exotics for a long time after realising they could be toiletted. Finally got a 4th one the other day, and got an item worth about a gold from the forge.

MeinUguu.8256:

in a game where every boss is turned into a blue star of particle effects that just happen to prevent said telegraphing.

“Skill based dodging”, but you can’t see what you’re even dodging.

The particle effects seem to scale more than the world bosses themselves. It’s horrendous. I haven’t got onto raids and stuff, but even in a simple 5 man dungeon it easily devolves into a clusterkitten of particle effects. Especially if you mix in those Ascalonian caster mobs with that blue aerial bombardment thing. It’s like playing Beat Hazard.

Why is there no option to alter particle effects density?

Other unrelated but equally awful thing: why is there no streamlined way of changing spec? Even if it had a lengthy 20 second cast time or something, it’d still be better than fumbling about with the UI.

All these options and you’re stuck with picking just the one unless you want to deal with a convoluted UI. At the very least they could let each individual spec remember what it last had selected.

CMM.6712:

LSD.4673:

CMM.6712:

LSD.4673:

CMM.6712:

Aldath.1275:

LSD.4673:

What about dungeon cutscenes? Gotta be the biggest “did nobody test this before implementing it” parts of the game. Sitting there for about a minute each time, waiting for one guy to finish watching a slow, badly written, badly voiced cutscene of some simplistic dialogue every single time you do a run…it’s incredible.

The only option is to not skip them, and cringe yourself inside out in the process…or to wait at every interval for that one guy.

Some of us care.

Yes, and I totally disagree with the “badly” being thrown about like that. Pretty lame if you ask me.

The cutscenes feel like i’m watching a cartoon. That’s how bad the writing is. Mix that with voice acting that’s for the most part awful, and you’ve got a recipe for disaster.
Even if the cutscenes were wonderful, why would i want them on every run?

The only thing worse than waiting around for that one guy to finish watching a cutscene before you can proceed is having to wait for that one guy before you can LEAVE, because he’s watching the lengthy end-of-dungeon cutscene, and the reward won’t pop till he’s done.

Let’s see your cutscenes, hear your voice acting, so we can critically dissect them…

You can try harder than that, surely?

I can but not feeling very well today. The point still stands though regardless of your deflection.

“This is a problem with the game”
“Ok let’s see you do better”

That’s not a “point”; THAT is deflection. The cutscenes are bad and shouldn’t be forced because they make dungeon runs with pugs painfully long with pointless waiting.
If you want to pay me as a professional writer to come up with something better, then sure thing…but it still doesn’t solve the problem of them being forced.

CMM.6712:

Aldath.1275:

LSD.4673:

What about dungeon cutscenes? Gotta be the biggest “did nobody test this before implementing it” parts of the game. Sitting there for about a minute each time, waiting for one guy to finish watching a slow, badly written, badly voiced cutscene of some simplistic dialogue every single time you do a run…it’s incredible.

The only option is to not skip them, and cringe yourself inside out in the process…or to wait at every interval for that one guy.

Some of us care.

Yes, and I totally disagree with the “badly” being thrown about like that. Pretty lame if you ask me.

The cutscenes feel like i’m watching a cartoon. That’s how bad the writing is. Mix that with voice acting that’s for the most part awful, and you’ve got a recipe for disaster.
Even if the cutscenes were wonderful, why would i want them on every run?

The only thing worse than waiting around for that one guy to finish watching a cutscene before you can proceed is having to wait for that one guy before you can LEAVE, because he’s watching the lengthy end-of-dungeon cutscene, and the reward won’t pop till he’s done.

What about dungeon cutscenes? Gotta be the biggest “did nobody test this before implementing it” parts of the game. Sitting there for about a minute each time, waiting for one guy to finish watching a slow, badly written, badly voiced cutscene of some simplistic dialogue every single time you do a run…it’s incredible.

The only option is to not skip them, and cringe yourself inside out in the process…or to wait at every interval for that one guy.

Khisanth.2948:

I am pretty certain that learning to play the guitar would take many hours of practice. That JP takes one run through.

Woooooooosh.

What MMO even has inspection of the opposing team? This is a non-issue, because A) the solution is simple (don’t add it for opposing teams) and who the hell is going to sit there in WvW right-clicking and waiting for the awful wardrobe to load, checking each piece of equipment before the attack?

“Woah, hold up the zerg, let’s see what these guys are packing first”

Khisanth.2948:

They are all easy once you know where they are.

Just like playing guitar is easy once you know where all the notes are.

Sinmir.6504:

How about a consume all like we have with luck? Or if you have a large number Consume # then you enter the number you wish to use? Then it would only be once, faster for them as well.

That’s not how this works around here, silly.
Mystic forge lady will accept 20 Tomes in exchange for a mega-tome that gives 20 levels. Coming soon.

Khisanth.2948:

LSD.4673:

They’d have to go back and disable portals, gliding and stuff like shadowstep in all the JP zones, otherwise they’d be ridiculously easy to farm (like right now). Probably more work than they care about doing.

But agreed: the rewards are awful. Did Malchor’s Leap or whatever it’s called the other day. Took at least an hour and lots of pain and misery. Reward was some greens. Yay…

What they would need is add checkpoints into every JP but checkpoints also bring their own problems as seen with Chalice …

Both JPs in Malchor’s Leap are easy. o_O

At least half of the 12 orbs you need for that one JP are hidden in places you’d never find without a guide.

Miku.6297:

LSD.4673:

Pros for inspect:
lets you show off (which seems to be 90% of this game)
lets you get a good idea of what kind of gear you should be going for (“oh cool, that’s a good hat or whatever, i should look up how to get that”)
Cons:
GRRR ELITISTS!!!!

I love how you elaborate on what you think is good, and just sum up the cons with a silly line without explaining it.

I’m unsure as to how inspecting would let you “show off” much more then the current visual skins do. It’s not like ascended armor and weapons is hard to get, and the stat bonus of legendaries literally doesn’t exist. So what you are showing off is your look, inspect or not that won’t change much.

As for letting people know what gear they “should” be going for… Why would you assume that random inspected player is what you “should” do? Further for most aspects of this game there really isn’t a need for one specific play or build style. That’s one thing people love. The main issue with an inspect function is when it is used to see someones gear and say "thats NOT what you “should” be going for" KICK.

Back on topic 100% to two out of three suggestions… They have been suggested befor, please just let the horse RIP.

Extra toys like the carpet, I don’t really see any harm, except development effort being used on something rarely used vs something that might actually improve the game experience for the majority of players. Except the hoverboard idea… or a dragon carpet thing that looked like Aurene….

Summed up as GRRR ELITISTS!!! then.
“Why would you assume that random inspected player is what you “should” do?"
Probably by comparing it to what you have already. I know it sounds complicated, but it’s actually really simple.

Kingsdavid.3598:

LSD.4673:

They’d have to go back and disable portals, gliding and stuff like shadowstep in all the JP zones, otherwise they’d be ridiculously easy to farm (like right now). Probably more work than they care about doing.

But agreed: the rewards are awful. Did Malchor’s Leap or whatever it’s called the other day. Took at least an hour and lots of pain and misery. Reward was some greens. Yay…

I don’t think it that a big of a problem to disable gliding, shadowstep and portals inside all the jumping puzzels. They did most of that job during the introduction of gliding in Tyria. And it’s just not enabling you to use those skills insdin the borderd jumping puzzle area.

But i like using portal for safety on hard jumps. I’d rather have that than better rewards

Running is the biggest offender. You have to waste one of your spec talents (Warrior), or one of your utility slots (Mesmer) to get any kind of boost to run speed.
The tedium of running everywhere — that’s one of the most annoying issues.

Steven.9803:

Okay, how bout some new costume brawl weapons then? And not having inspections doesnt make any sense, why is it so bad to have it? Also vehicals are awesome!

The typically regurgitated answer is that “grrr elitists!!!” would make it too hard for people to group up or something like that.

Pros for inspect:
lets you show off (which seems to be 90% of this game)
lets you get a good idea of what kind of gear you should be going for (“oh cool, that’s a good hat or whatever, i should look up how to get that”)

Cons:
GRRR ELITISTS!!!!

Danikat.8537:

On the other hand male characters are very limited. For medium and light armour there’s not even many options for bare arms and bare legs are not an option at all.

A good couple of bare chests though. Man cleavage never looked so good.
Bare-legged skirts aplenty, too…

Zephyra.4709:

Levelling in any game is “fun” for what – the first few levels? Then it becomes cumbersome and super ultra mega repetitively boring. Thank ANet we have ways to skip straight on our way to 80 in this game via tomes/scrolls/boosters quicker. I want to be able to participate in high level content (WvW primarily) that I find enjoyable ASAP.

Funnily enough, before i got GW2, i remember the criticism it got for the emptiness of endgame, as well as the constantly regurgitated response: that “all content is end game content”.
Considering how terrible the hearts system is, i can’t imagine what GW2 was like before Fractals and raids and ascendeds and stuff. Did people seriously go back to low level zones and do hearts?

It’s an absolutely awful system. Quests are never fun in MMOs, but at the very least it gives you a purpose. That doesn’t exist here. You’re literally wandering into arbitrarily set zones to do random jobs (often literal chore-like jobs) for NPCs you’ve never even seen before, with no over-arching goal or story.

Most people i know who got GW2 have only reached about 20-30 because the hearts system sent them packing. The levelling really is atrocious.

They’d have to go back and disable portals, gliding and stuff like shadowstep in all the JP zones, otherwise they’d be ridiculously easy to farm (like right now). Probably more work than they care about doing.

But agreed: the rewards are awful. Did Malchor’s Leap or whatever it’s called the other day. Took at least an hour and lots of pain and misery. Reward was some greens. Yay…

1-80 is far from great. It’s the weakest aspect of the game, and of any MMO i’ve played.

Now i understand all that talk of GW2 as a skin collecting sim…

I’m honestly more surprised people have encountered a single memorable NPC at all, let alone one whose appearance they can recall.

GW2’s definitely the most populated MMO i’ve played. There’s always people around.

But it’s hardly sociable. There aren’t any quests where you need to buddy up. None whatsoever. Without that, there’s no real way to meet people besides guilds. Tack on the fact that GW2 doesn’t lend itself at all to party-questing, and there you have it.

GW2’s just about “doing your own thing”.

I always see people skipping vets. Maybe this was relevant when loot diminished as you farmed, but right now, it really doesn’t seem worth skipping. It takes less time to kill the vet and get your reward than it does to just skip it and go looking for new doors…especially when you’re going round and round in circles skipping that same door…

Fatalyz.7168:

Jewelcrafting, while useful for leveling, falls off once you hit level 80. The highest rarity that Jewelcrafters can make is exotic. With the current highest rarity for jewelry being ascended, and ascended jewelry being relatively easy to obtain.

Ah that sucks. Is there a reason for it (balance) or has Ascended Jewelcrafting just not been implemented yet?

I’m pretty new too. I picked Tailoring and Jewelcrafting as a Mesmer.

Tailoring so far has been a waste. The materials are excrutiatingly difficult to get hold of, because A) they only drop from humanoid-mobs, B) the drops are partly levelled (so if you go to a low-level zone for low-level cloth, you’ll likely leave with current-level cloth instead), and C) because from what i can gather, the low-end cloth types are needed for late-game crafting — so the prices are hugely inflated. The stuff i can craft so far (about 175 skill) has always been worse than the stuff i get from quests.

Jewelcrafting though is fantastic to level with. Everything i can make is 10x better than what i can find, the materials are easy to come by and cheap on the market. Plus a lot of the stuff i can craft has good sell value (some cheap necklaces are about 60 silver on the market).

So definitely go for Jewelcrafting…maybe give Tailoring a miss though.

I actually reinstalled the whole game, and the black screen thing was gone. Then i re-added the launch options i’d been using, and low and behold it returned.
I looked it up, and the wiki says the -nopatchui command can cause that black screen issue if it’s not used right…which doesn’t make sense since it’d been working fine before.

So yeah, black screen is gone, but launcher still persistently crashes — and if i try to bypass the launcher, then i get the black screen.

Hopefully support can sort it out. In the meantime: does anyone else bypass the launcher and know if i’m doing something wrong? The commands i’m using are -nopatchui -email * -password *. I’ve tried sticking -autologin in there too. Anytime i try it though, it fails and gives me the black screen.

Today when i logged in, the character select screen was totally black. Task manager says it’s “not responding”, and i can’t play at all. Just yesterday, maybe 12 hours before, i’d logged in fine. No changes whatsoever to my PC in the meantime.

I’ve tried -repair with no effect. The site (https://help.guildwars2.com/entries/28148006-Repairing-the-Game-Client) claims the error is to do with my router, which doesn’t seem right considering the game’s not had this issue until today, and my router doesn’t use stateful packet inspection. I’ve added firewall permissions, forwarded the ports the game uses, restarted my router, disabled anti-virus -- nothing.

On top of that, i got the game last week, and from the very start i’ve had arbitrary launcher crashes — sometimes it works, sometimes it crashes. The error for that is:

Disk write failed with error 1450 (incomplete): file ‘C:\Program Files\Guild Wars 2\bin\CoherentUI_Host.exe’
Disk write failed (1450); retrying: file ‘C:\Program Files\Guild Wars 2\bin\CoherentUI_Host.exe’
Disk write failed (6: The handle is invalid.): file ‘C:\Program Files\Guild Wars 2\bin\CoherentUI_Host.exe’

The only workaround for that that works is using the auto-login via launch parameters.