Guild Wars 2

5. In most cases, you should be able to get into a tower/keep past a zerg right though the front door. (I’d say I can do it 98% of the time, depending on scouts/sight-lines.) Usually I just run up until I see the first guy run toward me (or try a ranged attack), then I hit Arcane Shield, wait 2 seconds, then double-dodge, then hit stability. If you get downed before you’re in, use 2 (Mist Form) to get in the gate if you’re close enough, then get back up when you’re out of combat. If you think you’re going to get attacked really far from the door, switch out Arcane Blast for Mist Form. That will give you more invulnerability to get closer, then the above to get in. Don’t forget to switch back to Arcane Wave when you’re in after the cool down.

6. Arcane Brilliance is the only healing spell to consider in WvW. It will hit up to 5 enemies around you with Arcane damage, and heal you more for each enemy hit. It’s an “ok” heal when you’re alone, but if you’re in the middle of a crowd, hitting full heal from hitting 5 enemies should give you about a 60-70%, plus you’re doing damage to them. And it’s really fun to pull it on someone who’s really low and drops as soon as you heal.

7. Don’t stay in the red rings. While this is not strictly an Ele thing, light classes need to pay attention to this much more than others. In very few cases, when you really need to stay in the rings, blast a water field where you need to be and hit Armor of Earth to mitigate the damage. Save your heal until you really need it. Most player spells (save glass-cannon meteornado) won’t really kill you that fast, but focused AC fire can take you down really fast.

8. CC is your secondary reason for living. This might be debatable (versus Meteornado), but while you’re on tag, when the commander calls for CC, use Static (Air 5) to ring enemies so they can’t move, Frozen Ground (Water 4) to slow the enemy or Unsteady Ground (Earth 4) to cut off charges or retreats. This is what commanders mean when they call for “rings” and “lines”.

9. Got bags? Support Eles are supposed to do just that. So your primary focus should be Heal/CC. But don’t underestimate the bag-delivery potential of the Staff Ele AoE damage spells. Even the weak ones will tag your enemies so you get credit when they die. So while you’re on cool down, you can spam through them trying to land them on groups of enemies as you can. Or even Tab (or whatever you have Next Enemy bound to) and 1 all day long, and you’ll find tons of bags at your feet when the battle is over. As you get better at playing Ele, you’ll still even be standing!

10. Meteor-NAY-DOHHHHHHHHHHHHHH So as a support Ele, you’re not going be pulling the 8k crits that glass cannon Eles do with Meteronado. But, then again, you’re not going to be a rally-bot scrub either.

Meteornado is Meteor Storm (Fire 5), followed by the Elite Tornado skill just after the channel finishes. The way it works is that after you channel the full Meteor Storm, it continues to do damage for something like 5-6 seconds after the spell is complete. Tornado, in addition to giving you stability and increasing your toughness, increases your power as well. So, once it’s activated, the remaining period of Meteor Shower hits at this higher power calculation, significantly increasing the damage. It’s also hella fun to watch people flying all over the place if they don’t have stability.

I would say, be careful about using it, mostly so you don’t get distracted and fail to drop water when the commander needs it. But it can be a lot of fun, and very effective if you have the time to use it.

My favorite YOLO move:
1. Static Field on mass of reds
2. Meteor Shower
3. Pop Arcane Shield while channeling so you don’t get interrupted.
4. Pop Armor of Earth right before channel ends.
5. Nado and bulldoze right through them.
6. Be ready to end Nado prematurely if you’re taking too much damage and heal up. You’re likely to hit 5 guys around you and get a good heal off.

There are a number of possible builds. Just start by Google searching “GW2 Elementalist WvW Build” and you’ll find a ton of forum posts, rated builds on build tools sites, etc. Be mindful of the date of posts, as things have (often) changed in the course of mechanics since release. But here are a few observations from my experience and learning from others.

T(oughness) > V(itality). Obviously you need both, but if you’re getting mowed down fast, you should be putting more into toughness. It’s pretty useless to buff your Vitality pool if people can eat through it really fast.

I run a Celestial Armor build. When I first started trying to not suck at WvW Ele, I read a ton about builds, and there’s has been quite a bit of controversy about the benefits of Celestial (jack of all trades). I’ve tried PVT builds (as well as full zerker builds) and Celestial has worked out well for me. It’s hella expensive and will take you a month to craft. If you don’t want to do that, switch out some (or all) of your pieces to PVT (Power/Vitality/Toughness, known as Soldiers) and see how that works. If you have a ton of Karma, you can get most of what you need from NPC vendors.

Then run zerker items to balance it out. Some of the more hardcore players will mix armor sets to get a “perfect balance” that feels right to them. I’m don’t have that much patience. A good rule of thumb is: try to keep your Toughess >= 1600. If you’re really trying to play support (short of a full-healer build), everything else is secondary to this stat.

Assuming your build is not gimping you, then you need to look at your play style in battles. There’s so much that I’ve learned in the last six months, I wouldn’t know where to start. To some extent, you’re going to have to learn by doing (and dying). Here are a few things I learned.

1. Stay on the tag. Sounds weird, a guy in a dress running around with Warriors in armor? Well, it turns out, you’re much less likely to die that way, especially if you’re in a group with others that can help buff you. Even if you aren’t, and I very often follow commanders while not in a group, you tend to benefit from buffs/heals anyway, but most importantly, you benefit from damage mitigation (most AOE damage only affects up to 5 members, except, importantly, siege weapons). Also, if you’re running on the outside, it will be much more likely someone will target you when they’re spamming for targets. Once they find a nice, squishy Ele, expect to die (until you learn all your escape tactics).

If you can learn how to stay with the tag (not easy, trust me, but you will get to that “aha!” moment), you’re going to find yourself much more effective and much more durable in big fights.

2. Don’t bring Daggers to a Staff fight. This doesn’t mean Staff > DD, in fact the opposite is true if you’re roaming solo (or trying to get to the zerg). But the Staff skills are designed to support large scale combat. Without them, you’re can’t really be a support Ele.

3. Don’t bring a Staff to a Dagger fight. One on one, you may as well /sit if someone attacks you and you’re holding a staff. Freaking uplevels can kill you. So, make sure you have daggers with you at all times, and equip them if you’re roaming. At least you’ll have a fighting chance. If you don’t have D/D experience, either just run around and die a lot until you learn, or jump into PvP. It’s basically the same tactics as WvW roaming, so it’s a really good place to practice. D/D is completely different than Staff when it comes to combat. You’ll need practice in both, but D/D (I found) is harder, but much more fun, to master.

4. For utilities, I use:
- Arcane Shield: Useful for that 3-shot invuln if you’re trying to run into a keep or just to avoid the annoying slow-down when running by guards. (Use this, then Earth 3 when it runs our for a little more protection from projectiles.)
- Arcane Wave: This is your blast finisher. Use this with Waters (3/5) for the Area Regen effect. Waters are your uber support skill. This, above all things, is your reason for being in WvW as a support build.
- Armor of Earth: This provides you 33% less damage, breaks stun, and provides stability. Stability is very important in WvW. If you’re in a group, try to use it sparingly if you can get stability from another member of your party. Keep it as a last defense. If you get snared, crippled, etc., remember that air 4 (the speed spell) will break these.

Epic trolling fun.

1. Please get the Cider team to update the fullscreen code so that it only goes fullscreen where the client is running. Right now all other monitors go black.
2. Get the Cider team to support multiple-monitors as the Windows client does.
3. Please hire a UI/UX designer to take a look at the various user-interfaces in the game. Some of them are really bad. If you don’t believe me, here’s 200 Flame Ram blueprints. Please send back the 100 supers when you’re done.
4. Crashing at ANY graphics settings is due to bugs (most likely in Cider). It’s hard to imagine it would be hard to find them if you actually tried. (PM me if you need help with this.)
5. Unless the Cider team is dead and no one’s doing anything with the platform they should be working on a 64-bit version. Eventually, Mac won’t support 32-bit anything.

For extra credit:
Let people in this forum know that it’s an enormous undertaking to write a game client and ANet has nowhere near the resources to do that. (Oh wait, I just did.)

Lazarus.9716:

Unfortunately, I’m still seeing crashes with a different error message. See attached image. I did delete the ~Library folder after the patch as well, but that didn’t help.

Pretty sure my crash is unrelated. I had fiddled with somme of the graphics settings and hadn’t set them back. Now I’m running fine.

Unfortunately, I’m still seeing crashes with a different error message. See attached image. I did delete the ~Library folder after the patch as well, but that didn’t help.

+1 It appears to happen much more frequently in the Mists.

darksome.1697:

Starting with the patch today, it looks like an Out Of Memory error causing the frequent crashes, reading through the error log.

—> Crash <—
OOM: TCMalloc, bytes=83886080, (Transgaming)
App: Gw2.exe
Pid: 1
Cmdline:
BaseAddr: 00400000
ProgramId: 101
Build: 31302
When: 2014-03-18T17:51:40Z 2014-03-18T18:51:40+01:00
Uptime: 0 days 0:11:26
Flags: 0×10

I’m crashing a lot as of the update March 18th, and it’s not a memory problem. [Edit: Not saying an out of memory problem isn’t causing a crash, just that I’m crashing with plenty of free memory as well.]

Crafty for Guild Wars 2 is a free iOS app now available in iTunes here.

Crafty allows you to browse and search through the 31k+ items in the game, break down recipes into the materials and quantities needed to craft an item and monitor the current prices of all items available on the market (premium feature). Best of all, it works wherever you have your mobile device (even if you’re offline).

For more information about Crafty and to track ongoing development and updates, check out the web site, or follow us on Twitter or Facebook.

We really hope you love using it as much as we liked creating it. Version 1.1 is already in development with some killer new features and user-interface improvements. We’ll be posting some teaser screenshots on the web site soon and expect the update to be available around the end of the month.

Feedback and support is available directly in the app, but feel free to leave comments and feedback in this thread.

It would be awesome if we could use it on the Mac too. Mumble already has an overlay that works, so it’s definitely possible. You could check out their source code on GitHub and figure out how much work it would be.

Crafty for Guild Wars 2, a new iOS app, has been released and is available here: http://tinyurl.com/crafty-gw2-forums.

Killer Rhino.6794:

Lazarus,

I would highly discourage you from modifying your NSURLConnection delegate to ignore certificate checks. Please review that SSL post; it contains some very relevant links for someone like you, who is developing with Cocoa-technologies.

Just read that post. Thanks for the write-up. I’ll implement pinning as recommended in the next version. Cheers.

Killer Rhino.6794:

Lazarus,

Author of GW2Kit here, and I can not reproduce your certificate issue (just pulled Events using GW2Kit’s iOS test app, both on the simulator and the device).

I would highly discourage you from modifying your NSURLConnection delegate to ignore certificate checks. Please review that SSL post; it contains some very relevant links for someone like you, who is developing with Cocoa-technologies.

Odd that you couldn’t reproduce it, especially on the device. (If you had the CA cert installed locally the simulator probably would have used it.)

I read through all the threads and I’m aware of the security issues. I did use the delegate workaround, but ONLY for api.guildwars2.com. Granted, there is still some small chance of a man-in-the-middle attack, since there’s no user-auth or user info exposed I don’t see it as particularly likely to be harmful (if even attempted).

I’m still at a loss at why my machine (and device) aren’t seeing the same thing yours is though. I’ll double check GW2Kit and see what you did. (But from my knowledge of the Cocoa APIs, if a CA isn’t trusted there’s nothing you can really do but ignore the auth check for that host.)

smiley.1438:

Stefan Larimore.6872:

Perhaps the machine you are querying from doesn’t have some standard root certificates installed. Ensure the GeoTrust Global CA cert in installed on your machine.

https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/community/api/Connection-issue/
https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/community/api/Java-access-to-the-api/
https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/community/api/Certificate-problems-with-Android-Apps/

You may also want to check out the list of API Wrappers and dig through some code to see how others handled this problem

Thanks for the info all. The links above provide the info I need. I was thinking the cert itself was expired or self-signed, but it’s the CA authority itself that’s not recognized by iOS.

There is a code workaround to allow you to tell iOS to accept a certificate for a specific auth session, but that didn’t work. I’ll see if I can install the correct CA certificate in the app, which would be the right way do fix the problem.

Luckily, I had a snapshot of the database from about a month ago, so I was able to submit the app yesterday.

Thanks for the posts all.

I’ve just started having a problem loading data from the API. Last time I tried was about a month ago. I’m trying to find a way to get around it under iOS, but a public API really should have a valid, trusted certificate.

Here’s the information from Firefox:
api.guildwars2.com uses an invalid security certificate. The certificate is not trusted because the issuer certificate is not trusted. (Error code: sec_error_untrusted_issuer)

Morhyn.8032:

Why do you insist on including the method name in the response? As an example, if we query /v1/continents.json we know we’re getting back a list of continents. We don’t need to be told again.

That would be bad API design. Any structured information should be self-explanatory and complete so it can be included in other places (nested within another structure of information, for example).

Linking the format to your expectation of your top-level call makes the structure unnecessarily idiosyncratic and brittle. It also makes you write more code when you access the same information from other areas of the API.

Drakma makes a very good point. CCP spent years figuring that out and it’s a good approach to keeping things secure while giving users the ability to control what type of information is available for a specific key. Definitely worth looking at as a model, depending on what type of information you’re planning to release through the API>

Is there a way to get different image sizes from the render service? Most of the images are returning as 64×64, which is fine for many devices. But on retina, it would be nice to have 128×128 for a 64×64 container size. If you’re using a standard image server, that option should be available to add to the API. The query URL could include the size, as in:

https://render.guildwars2.com/file/{signature}/{file_id}.{format}?size={size}
or
https://render.guildwars2.com/file/{signature}/{size}/{file_id}.{format}

The {size} should probably be enumerated, like [small | medium | large] where small = 64×64, medium = 128×128, and large = 256 × 256. I can imagine large would be useful if the underlying artwork for the asset would support that resolution.

BTW, this item’s icon comes back as 128×128. Not sure where the problem is there, but indicates that larger renditions should be available for the artwork.

https://render.guildwars2.com/file/CACFF93ECF1B0F242EC32FAF5EC17108BDC6B900/220501.png

Yeah, the items call returns in about 2-3 seconds, and the ~30k details requests process at ~24/second. I’m only doing English right now as I just created the data model, and also not doing recipe or other ancillary requests. But it sounds like your performance is way off mine. It’s possible that they’re throttling based on requesting IP address or domain if you’ve hit their service a lot or for a while.

But, yeah, change information would be good for us and for them. The biggest thing, though, is the N+1 endpoint calls. My rough estimate is that a single response would only be about 18MB, could easily be cached on their side and would download in seconds rather than minutes or hours in your case.

The 20 minutes, btw is on ethernet on my dev machine. I would hate to even think how long it would take on LTE or even 3G mobile service. (Remember, we yanks live in the mobile stone age compared to Europe.)

TL;DR: Batch detail downloads, queries for only objects that have changed.

I have a number of suggestions on the technical/feed side that would significantly improve mobile app performance and capabilities. These are largely motivated by the fact that mobile applications really to keep data from the API (items, recipes, etc.) stored locally in a database. This is for a number of reasons.

1. Mobile applications should really be usable without a network connection. That’s pretty much becoming a standard requirement for apps these days.

2. Functionality I’m implementing would prohibitively expensive in terms of network turnaround. Right now as I’m testing it takes almost 20 minutes to download full item detail for the ~30k items in the game. That’s not even including images, or the ~6k recipes to make them. So advanced search capabilities (filtering by rarity for example) would be impossible without the full item set requires all the data if there’s no search API.

3. Hitting your servers for information that rarely (if ever) changes is an unnecessary load on your infrastructure. Reducing the number of requests would simply make the service faster for everyone and save you infrastructure costs. Given the search example, I can do search much faster and efficiently with local data (and with better functionality).

4. Mobile applications should able query for changed data (item details, for example) periodically so that we don’t have to re-seed the local database and release an app update. User’s simply aren’t going to sit around for 20 minutes while the app reloads everything and sees what changed and that’s the only option right now.

So, given all that, here are my suggestions.

1. First off, for v2 of the API I would suggest significant changes to the endpoints, response formats, etc. It would make use of the API much clearer, reduce the number of endpoints, and make applications more robust. Feel free to PM me if you want to talk about that.

2. Any API endpoint that returns a large number of IDs that require another endpoint call for the actual object detail (items for example) really needs to have a variant that returns all of the detail for the items in one response. Having to do 30k item detail endpoint calls must be crushing your servers and certainly not performing well for application users considering it takes 20 minutes to download.

3. Add a changedSince query parameter that specifies returning only ids/objects that have changed since a certain time. Unfortunately there’s no standard URL-friendly format. I’d suggest YYYY-MM-DD in UTC. If your database doesn’t keep track of when an item is updated, you might want to try to convince your DBA’s to add one. It’s a pretty standard content management feature.

4. Add an endpoint that returns an array of all the IDs/signatures that are valid for the render service. Add a changedSince parameter as well. If that’s not feasible, add it to the render endpoint call and return an empty document to avoid the ~6k download and the need to compare it on the client side to the stored asset.

Sorry for the wall of text. I think that’s about it for now. These features would make mobile developers’ lives much easier and a much better experience for end-users.

Keep up the good work.