Guild Wars 2

This has been bugged on Ehmry Bay for the last 2 months with the exception of a few hours after a server reset. The rest of the time the waypoint and dungeon show as uncontested but the doors are closed and you’re insta-killed by assorted Risen siege weaponry the moment you teleport there. As a result I have only managed to complete 2 of 5 characters’ personal story lines and it’s impossible to run explorer to have any chance to accumulate the necessary tokens for the gear…too bad since some of it looks really good.

As has been begged for in previous threads on this subject, if you can’t find the fix for it please at least leave the doors open as a temporary measure so people have the ability to run the dungeon (if they can survive getting there).

I was comparing a couple of weapons today and this reminded me that there’s a bug I haven’t reported yet but ought to be one that’s brought to your attention in case you’re unaware of it:

If you hover over any stat in your hero panel to bring up the details tooltip and then swap weapons (while the tooltip is still visible) the tooltip does not correctly update. In some cases where there are multiple stats reported, one or more of them will update but others will not (they’ll continue to show the other weapon set’s stats) and in other cases the tooltip will not update at all on swap, but if you then swap back to the set it will update to the stats of the weapon you just swapped back into your inventory (so they become reversed!); however moving the mouse pointer away and back again (to collapse and then redisplay the tooltip) will cause it to correctly update.

It’s a minor bug since it will only apply to weapon swapping comparisons (you have to move your mouse to make any other equipment change) but it can result in some misleading information for a player who isn’t aware of it.

I’ve combined the details from some screenshots in the attachment below.

- #1 is showing the (correct) attack stat tooltip when I have my staff equipped.

- #2 is showing the (correct) attack stat tooltip when I have my greatsword equipped

- #3 is showing the (incorrect) tooltip if I initially display the tooltip with the greatsword equipped and then continue to hover the mouse there while I swap back to the staff via hotkey…the tooltip is still showing the greatsword data but you’ll notice that the power, precision, toughness, etc in the “background” have all correctly updated to reflect the swap

- #4 is showing the (incorrect) tooltip if I then swap back to the greatsword again while still keeping the tooltip open, so now it’s actually updating its data but it’s a step behind…it’s showing the power, weapon damage and condition damage for the staff, not the greatsword.

If I keep swapping back and forth while keeping the tooltip displayed, it will then continue to update its data but always be one step behind. Occasionally (but not consistently) when I do multiple swaps, the power stat may update to be correct for the weapon that’s actually equipped, but the weapon damage and condition damage stats won’t be. I can’t determine if there’s a pattern or any sort of predictability when this “mixed” partial update happens, other than it doesn’t seem to happen on the first swap…just on the 2nd or subsequent ones.

If at any time I move my mouse away (to close the tooltip) and then back again, the new tooltip will then display the correct values for the weapon I have equipped.

Yeah, in the grand scheme of things it’s a tiny, insignificant bug but I thought you should know about it.

I just completed the DE quest to open up the Temple of Melandru in the Cursed Shore. During the fight with final boss (the ultra-champion type guy with fancy purple icon when you select him) we also had the champion earth elemental spawn so we had to kill both of them — plus the zillion adds that spawned while the 5 of us did it. That was a very tough fight, which is perfectly fine…felt a great sense of satisfaction to survive it and succeed.

What didn’t feel great was the reward. My drop from the champion: a generic blue gloves. My drop from the world boss: a blue helm. My drop from the chest: there is no chest. So for all that epic hard work I got less from killing a champion and a world boss than I did from killing their adds (got a green chest piece and some crafting mats from them).

According to your Nov 15th patch notes: “The drop rarity of Rare and Exotic weapons from certain places in the world (champions, veterans, and players in WvW) has been increased. Rares and Exotics should be much more likely to drop and every champion should be guaranteed to drop loot. This was to ensure that world loot drops were not a significantly worse.”

If that’s the case, perhaps you could double-check that you actually applied those new loot tables and that they’re working as intended. This isn’t the first time I’ve gotten “junk” drops from champions since that patch…in fact as far as I can tell every single champion (environmental and event) and world boss (temples, dragons, etc) I’ve killed since the patch has dropped noticeably worse levels of loot than they used to. The only good drop I’ve had in 3 weeks was from the final event of last weekend where the karka had some nice stuff. My guild mates are all experiencing the same thing so I don’t think I’m an isolated case of someone with phenomenally bad luck.

I completely agree with a few of the above posters who say that the PvP nerfs have really hurt us in PvE (which is what I spend 99.9% of my time doing…PvP just isn’t my thing). The Dancing Dagger one was a very painful one in particular.

I really wish you’d find a way to fix Flanking Strike…I so want to play with a S/D build but having it be so unpredictable that it’s useless, then adding the Dancing Dagger nerf, and it’s pointless to use that combination.

One thing nobody has brought up yet in this thread (though it’s been posted about elsewhere in the past) is the underwater thief. At present the only thing a thief will (or should) consider doing is equip spear, mash the #5 button a few times, hit #3 to regen some initiative, and repeat. It’s the only way we can survive and do anything even remotely worthwhile. And when it comes to utility and elite skills underwater….do we actually have any that work and are worth using? (Yes, this is a bit of an exaggeration, but not much of one). The whole underwater thief skill set needs a rework/rebalance.

EDIT: and yes, as others above had posted, venoms and traps are pretty much useless so they could use some love too

I think I understand why the portal cooldown got a nerf in the most recent class revisions (presumably because it was considered OP for PvP with the shorter CD) but the effect is also to make it a lot more of a pain to use for other situations (the most common one I do is use it as a safety net when doing jumping puzzles since I’m a really bad jumper). Having to wait a full 90 seconds (72 traited) every time I miss a jump is a little long.

I wonder if it might be possible to have it revert back to its old CD when both entry and exit portals are created out of combat (or just the exit) but keep the new CD if done in combat. It’s a small tweak that would make a world of difference for a fail jumper such as myself.

Wouldn’t DR and your bot detection efforts make this something most players would studiously try to avoid doing so as to receive some meaningful drops while also not risking being mistaken for a bot?

The above would, I think, give players a little more incentive to consider spending some time in Malchor’s Leap even after they’ve levelled through the zone, thereby increasing the region’s base population back to a level where it increases the chances of having enough people around for one of the large scale events.

As a side note, many of the mid-level regions suffer from the exact same problem…as I’ve leveled alts through the L30-70 range in the past month or two I’ve almost never been able to do any of the major group events since there aren’t even remotely enough people around to attempt them. It’s not so bad for me since I got to see/do them in the first couple months when the region populations where high as people levelled their main characters through them, but any new players are going to be missing out on a lot of really good content that required a lot of Anet’s resources to create and are now almost never appreciated.

I don’t know what sort of incentives could logically be implemented to draw people back to those zones — particularly ones that don’t require large additional investments in design/implementation time — but it’s a shame that all that initial labour and investment is going to waste so perhaps at least some attempt at doing so would be justifiable. How about changing the monthly achievement for PvE to remove the “kill 50 players in WvW” (which isn’t really appropriate to a PvE category anyway) and replace it with a “complete 5 DEs in at least 10 different regions” achievement instead? You need to do 5 events to complete your daily already, so extending this to 50 total isn’t in any way onerous on the player, and making it require 10 different regions would give players the extra incentive to spread themselves out a little and go back to some of those zones. (though to get L80s to go to zones below 55 you’d need to tweak the loot tables a little again such that the medium and large scale events can drop stuff that isn’t worthless to them).

Sorry for what turned out to be a far longer post than I’d intended. I just feel that the existing barriers to new players (and to some degree to existing players levelling alts) in those regions is something that will hurt the long-term success and replayability of the game and foster a fairly high degree of stagnation — people such as myself who are interested primarily in PvE will tend stick to a couple zones or just run dungeons and the rest of the world you’ve devoted so much time and effort to create will remain sadly unused and unappreciated. Regardless of what solutions you implement (or not), I hope I’ve communicated what I see as an important issue that’s worth your time to consider and hopefully address in the not-too-distant future.

Hopefully this is something that the Anet folks are aware of, consider to be a “problem,” and are actively thinking of ways to address. I do have one or two thoughts about possible solutions…

1. One thing that might go a long way to helping is a little toning down of mob density, respawn rates, and possible skill sets for the generic mobs you encounter in this zone. Their present settings make this zone an absolute nightmare to be in by yourself and are pretty challenging even for a pair of players running together. They make you very much not want to be there. Stylistically this makes sense — Orr shouldn’t be a place you’d like to build your summer cottage in — but the effect of it is to drive players out of the zone as fast as their swiftness can take them. This strongly promotes the utter lack of a player population. By tweaking the difficulty down a bit, players would at least feel less disinclined to being there.

2. There’s nothing in this region that can’t be obtained more easily somewhere else. Any crafting mats you can get here are also farmable (and more plentiful) in Cursed Shore with the added bonus that Cursed Shore also has more potential to drop/spawn nodes of T6 stuff. Or you can go back to Straits of Devastation which is a little easier and has a little higher population (because there is one event chain that people run there with some regularity when it isn’t bugged out) and also has the same stuff. Mob drops are also no better, or different than anything that’s likely to drop in those other two zones, so why expend the extra effort? I don’t have a suggestion for this other than perhaps adding unique armor and weapon skins that only drop here, and/or rebalancing the mats distribution a little to up the T6 chances, have a couple “dens” that are in the ~L75 range and populated by things that regularly drop cores and have a semi-decent chance to drop lodestones that people need to farm for their legendary weapons.

3. Make the Pact a little more resilient and a little less cannon-fodder. They shouldn’t be able to achieve new objectives by themselves, but perhaps scale the acquisition events downwards just a little so more of the medium scale events can be done by 3 or 4 players instead of 6-10. Perhaps allow some “reinforcements” to spawn for a limited time and join the fray when there aren’t many players participating. Perhaps just beef up the existing ones so they are a little more effective than they currently are.

4. Related to #3, make the Pact less defensively inept. A player’s desire to help the Pact capture a waypoint or Cathedral would be a lot greater if they had some reasonable expectation that the objective wouldn’t be lost the instant the player goes on to questing elsewhere. Give the Pact enough wherewithal to actually withstand (by themselves!) the first event or two where the Risen try to retake it. Waypoints on the road to Orr are key strategic objectives so why is the Pact so under-committed to holding them once they’ve been taken? Over time (an hour or two? half a day?) they should gradually weaken and fall, but once initially established they ought to at least be self-sustaining for a little while without a group of players being forced to baby-sit them. That would give the players more incentive to help them initially, and a sense of having achieved something that actually lasts a little while even though they’ve moved on. (Cathedrals wouldn’t need to hold out as long as waypoints, but also probably shouldn’t fall the instant they’re left unattended by players).

5. As a possible mechanic for #3 and #4 above, and an added “bonus incentive” to draw players to the region, have any of these “capture X objective” DEs immediately followed by a “defend X against the Risen counterattack” DE and then a “help fortify the Pact’s position” DE to provide (or extend existing) mini-chains that players will be interested in doing because of the karma/exp rewards. That also means that at the end of the fortification event the Pact would have some sort of added defences to help them hold those positions. You can then have “resupply position X” DEs (like the popular one in southern Straits of Devastation) and if those aren’t completed by players then successive (but reduced scale from the 1st) Risen counterattack DEs will initially fail even if players aren’t helping but will gradually destroy those extra defences and ultimately succeed in recapturing the position. That also opens up possible DEs to “repair the defences” when the Risen have destroyed some/all of them, and those ones should require player help to succeed.

I think perhaps the difficulty level for a player in Malchor’s Leap is currently far, far greater than I suspect the developers intended. Perhaps this only applies to non-max population servers (like mine) or maybe it’s across the board, but it is extremely common for this region to have a grand total of 1 uncontested waypoint in the far east of the map and for it remain that way for hours if not days. I don’t think I’ve seen the Cathedral of Eternal Radiance or Cathedral of Xephrys under pact control any time in the last…um…at least a month, probably longer.

As I’m sure was intended, the Pact can never capture any of the waypoints or Cathedrals without substantial help from players. There are a few where even one or two players might be enough to turn the tide and allow them to accomplish it, but many waypoints require at least 5 or 10 to capture (the one just NW of the Theatre of Delight is a prime example) and the minimum to have a decent chance for the Cathedrals is probably closer to a dozen. Trouble is, there are rarely even half a dozen players in the entire region, let alone all grouped together and willing to try to accomplish it.

Then, even if you do get enough people together to capture one, the Pact will lose it again as soon as the next counter-attack comes from the Risen. In most cases, even having one or two players who happen to be there when the attack comes will not be enough since those events tend to be “medium” level ones that usually require at least 5 or 6 people to have much chance of holding out.

The bridge that’s a little north-west of the Theatre of Delights is a good example. I got a handful of guildies to come and help me when I was levelling through this zone and the five of us, plus a couple other people who happened to to join us, we just barely able to liberate the waypoint (the spawn rare of Risen there is…very high and any of the 15-20 dead Pact NPCs you rez get pretty much one-shotted by even the trivial mobs so all they do is provide a momentary distraction). Our little group of 5 moved on and within 10 minutes I noticed that the waypoint was lost again.

To help me get the PoIs and skill points, the other 4 members of the group ran interference just long enough for me to ninja them, but in most cases we didn’t bother trying to achieve anything there (no chance we could do a cathedral).

All of this makes me feel sorry for a new player who wasn’t around in the first month or two of the game when this zone actually had enough people in it to do these events…they were pretty fun and a new player is never going to get to see them (other than to unwittingly attempt one and be ripped to shreds within the first couple minutes).

It also means that for new players (and people levelling alts) this region is now essentially a “run for your life from east to west, don’t stop to kill any mobs because you’ll be overwhelmed, and make sure you go through the portal to Cursed Shore and get the waypoint there, otherwise you’ll have to run across the entire zone again to get there because none of the other waypoints will ever be in Pact control” and anyone going for 100% map completion will be ninjaing it, not “playing” it.

Again, I’m sure the difficulty level is intended…the developers probably felt that it ought to be a group of players that liberate those places and establish the foothold in Orr; and that premise would work fine if there were enough players to contemplate doing that on a somewhat ongoing basis. Even at peak hours, though, Malchor’s Leap is deserted on my server so that’s simply never going to happen. Nobody stays there for any length of time…they do the absolute minimum and move on to Cursed Shore because at least people farm there so there’s a chance of being able to complete those events.

I feel like the developers put a lot of time and effort went into creating this zone — all the artwork, some very cool medium level dynamic events, and a couple “epic” large events — and it’s a shame that a new player is never going to be able to see, enjoy and appreciate that effort because they’ll be too busy running for their lives, and existing members will only be able to look back and fondly (?) remember how they did it back in the beginning. Perhaps that’s not the case in max-pop servers, but even then I somehow doubt it.

That was a really entertaining two hours and the reward at the end was exactly what I’d expect — in my case “just” a pair of rares, a pair of exotics and the box; but other people got as many as 4 exotics and a lucky few got precursors.

After a disappointing weekend of laggy, bugged events, this final one was the polar opposite: ran smoothly, very little lag (not enough to be a problem at all) and a nice, smooth chain of events that culminated in a great reward. Nicely done!

Keeping the location of the event a secret will certainly help reduce the lag…

Ditto…spent 2 hours “farming” in a group of 5 people, doing most veterans, wore maximum magic find I could put together, plus passive 10% guild buff + guild banner and I got a grand total of 3 greens, 7 blues, zero rare, zero exotic, and a whopping 4 shells. I’ve also found that veterans and champions all over the world are generally dropping far less loot that they used to drop. I’ve killed Jormag 8 times in a row now without receiving a single rare, duoed/trioed at least a dozen generic champions and gotten virtually nothing, and I have no idea how many veterans I’ve killed with absolutely nothing better than a green dropping.

I did get a few rares from doing runs in the Fractal of the Mists but those are the only ones I’ve received since the patch that supposedly boosted those drop tables. Pretty discouraging…

Further note: we dragged some extra krait over and let them kill her hoping she’d reset when revived. Unfortunately that didn’t work…she just swam back the the cage and stayed there.

Server: Ehmry Bay
DE: “Rescue Pastkeeper Sabella from the krait Stormwreck Deeps”

The event spawned and Saballa is at her cage. When the cage is opened she now seems to leash to it…she’ll attack any nearby krait that spawn but as soon as they’re dead she leashes back to the cage and will not move again.

Of course this is a blocker because until she can be rescued we can’t go and jog her memory by collecting stuff for her.

The event was working properly earlier this morning (6:00AM EST) for a guildmate of mine, but as of 8:30AM EST it’s locked/stuck/bugged.

There definitely seems to be a fundamental flaw in the dynamic event system at present and it’s a flaw that’s existed since launch. I have now leveled 5 characters to L80 and a 6th that’s more than half way there and I’d say, conservatively, that every region I have gone to on every single character I’ve player has experienced a minimum of 2 dynamic events that are broken/stuck/bugged. It’s usually the same bugs, and the only time they’re ever not broken is the first hour or two after a server reset. After that, something in your DE mechanics causes them to fail.

I can understand when new content contains the occasional bug, but I have a hard time seeing things that remain that way for months — particularly when a number of them are very serious “blockers” for players — inaccessibility of Arah being the most crucial of them.

Sure, players salivate over new content, and new content sparks new/renewed interest and can grow a customer base; but the failure to devote resources to fixing existing problems — many of them severe — is also driving away many customers and the longer these bugs persist the more they will erode the loyalty of your fan base. I suspect that your retention rate it going to start to nosedive if the numerous existing bugs persist for too much longer…players will lose that optimistic “they just need a little more time to do it and I’ll try to be patient” forgiveness about a new game and will hit the “they’re never gonna fix this so I guess I better find something else that’s better” attitude. Three months of “first blush” is really pushing it when it comes to non-trivial content…

Adding to the list…killed the champion Risen Hylek in Caledon Forest (part of the new Lost Shore events) with gold level award for completion so yes, I definitely tagged him. Drop from the champion: nothing, not even a single copper piece.

Yes, the lag is horrendously bad. Trying to activate Chaos Storm and from the time I press the key to the time the storm actually activates at the spot I targetted is anywhere from 10 to 30 seconds delay

Makes it pretty hard to get much in the way of kills, drops, exp, etc when your skills aren’t activating

Kindeller.3072:

You have to consider that the typical tag rules still apply so when they say guaranteed drop… thats if you do enough damage to deserve a reward still compared to all others. try soloing or getting a party and checking its drop rate.

I’d thought of that, but in my case:
- for the “roaming generic” champions I killed there were only 2 or 3 of us doing damage and I was certainly holding my own in terms of contributing (I had aggro a lot so the mobs certainly thought I was worth paying attention to)
- for the Dwayna priestess of course there were quite a few people involved, but for the event I got gold level completion reward in karma/exp/cash so presumably that’s enough to merit a “use decent loot table” drop

I finished off the night killing the priestess in the Temple of Dwayna…my loot from that WORLD boss (and yes, I got gold level completion for the event) chest was 3 – three – blues. No greens, no yellows, no golds. To say I’m disappointed would be an understatement, particularly because MF doesn’t affect loot from chests. I actually got much better loot from the two veterans that accompanied her…a green chest piece, a green weapon and a useful crafting mat.

On my guardian not good…just some food giving me around +20% or something, plus guild 10%. Can’t say for sure what my friend had.

According to the patch notes:

“The drop rarity of Rare and Exotic weapons from certain places in the world (champions, veterans, and players in WvW) has been increased. Rares and Exotics should be much more likely to drop and every champion should be guaranteed to drop loot. This was to ensure that world loot drops were not a significantly worse way of acquiring rare and exotic items than crafting and running dungeons.”

Since the patch I have killed 3 champions in the L74-77 range with my L78 guardian (was L77 when I killed the L74 champ) with the help of a friend of mine, a L80 warrior. With just 2 of us doing it, each of these is a pretty hard and long battle.

From each of those champions, we each received loot of 1 generic blue trash armor/weapon plus a small amount of coin and a vendor trash white item. No crafting mats, no green items, no rares, no exotics.

Is this the intended new improved “loot” drop we’re supposed to be getting? Sure, 6 samples is a very small number, but so far I can’t say that I’m even remotely inclined to want to spend 5-10 minutes to get the same drop I’m likely to get in 10 seconds by killing a generic risen chicken; particularly if there’s a reasonable chance I could require an armor repair that’s going to cost more than the value of the drop.

I don’t expect a rare or exotic item to drop every time I’m involved in killing a champion, but I do think it’s reasonable to expect at least a green or two and/or some useful crafting materials. I also hope that your target drop rate for a rare or better is at least 15% (without being decked out in +100% magic find gear, etc) and that my friend and I were just very unlucky.

I just completed this quest, being careful not to advance until each step was clearly marked as complete. Even so, I ran into problems several times when a mob would manage to get itself inside a wall. It happened with 1 barracuda, a drake, and then 3 or 4 times during the final encounter with the Orrian monstrosity.

Each of the mobs in question spawned in plain sight (or I encountered them normally) so I don’t know if it was one of the skills Forgal uses that knocks the mobs through the walls or if it’s a glitch in their pathing. I was being very careful not to use any knockback or sink/float skills that might cause problems like this in the narrow confines of the tunnels. With the Orrian in particular, I think it’s the mob’s own skill (a spin-o-rama sort of move that looks like the standard drake AoE tail swipe) that was somehow putting it through the wall…luckly Forgal seems to have no trouble swimming through walls so he was able to do the last 1/4 of the final fight.

Yes, things accidentally spawning or getting knocked into places they shouldn’t be is a very common issue in many games, hence my suggestion.

Granted, timers (or a mechanism of that type) is perhaps an unnecessary complication if one can safely assume that no key mob can ever get into a place where it shouldn’t be; but since that’s demonstrably not the case one would hope that if it’s an integral mob that prevents a quest chain from advancing there should be some way to check for and correct that situation without the user being required to abandon the instance and start all over again. A “quick” pathing check done on these mobs would seem to be a solution, and my timer suggestion is merely a way to have it only be done periodically to avoid undue load on the processor (since pathing algorithms tend to be CPU hogs). But at least that would identify a mob that is blocking progress and then provide some mechanism (either respawn it, despawn it, nudge it artificially to the closest position where it can path, or figure out what bounding box is containing it and place it outside that box and recheck the pathing) to resolve it.

EDIT: Oh…and then doing that pathing check you could also check to see if the player is the one in the wrong place…something that still happens far too regularly for a mesmer with a staff (the #2 skill frequently zips you through/into walls, under terrain, etc) and nudge the player back into “legal” turf instead.

One failsafe you might want to consider is a time-out type check on quest steps. For example, when a quest initializes or progresses to a new step start/reset a timer (set to 10 minutes maybe?) If everything goes smoothly the timer will get reset each time the quest is advanced by the player.

If the timer expires, run a check to ensure that the current step is not yet completed and confirm that any mob that has to be killed is actually present in the instance AND that there is a path from the player to the mob. This will (should) catch situations such as “mob failed to spawn”, “mob spawned (or was knocked) under the floor, through a wall, in a tree, or whatever and isn’t targetable by the player”, “mob is dead but somehow the death didn’t trigger the this_mob_is_dead counter”, etc. If the player simply went to answer the phone and make a pot of coffee, the quest can sit there waiting for him/her to return. But if there’s something missing or if there’s a target the player has to kill that isn’t reachable or there, you can either despawn/respawn it or artificially mark it as “completed” (and auto-file a bug report to yourselves that it happened and bears looking at).

I can assure you that mobs can get into very problematic locations since I encountered this issue earlier this week when doing the mid-70’s quest in the Straits of Devastation where you accompany the Largos into the under water lost temple of the forgotten god (can’t remember the exact quest title). In the first “room” you enter ther is a group of mobs you must kill and in my case one of them spawned or somehow got knocked under the floor. I killed the rest but the quest wouldn’t progress. As I swam around I happened to notice the tip of a fin protruding from the floor but I couldn’t target the mob. The only thing I was able to do was swim close to it, switch to my spear, and use vortex. It never attacked me back, and I was never able to target it, but miraculously it also didn’t become invulnerable so I was eventually (with a lot of patient waiting on vortex’s cooldown) able to kill it even though it didn’t get pulled out of the floor and into view. As to how it got there in the first place, your guess is as good as mine but I never use Illusion of Drowning to sink a mob (because exactly this sort of thing can happen and even if it doesn’t 99% of the time the mob will become invulnerable anyway, even in open water) so it wasn’t me. Maybe the Largos has that skill and used it? Maybe the mob spawned there initially? Maybe a previous use of vortex moved it there while I was fighting other mobs?

Whatever the case, a pathing check on that mob would have picked up the problem, whereas if I hadn’t happened to notice that little sliver of fin in the floor, I would have been completely stuck on that quest with no way to advance it other than to restart it. (I’ve done that same quest without any hitch on 3 other characters so it’s not a consistent bug)

Characters already have this (more or less) with the ability to increase the number of bag slots. Yes, you also have to buy/craft that actual bag to put in the slot and you’re carrying the contents around with you so your other characters can’t access it, but it equates to much the same thing as having personalized bank slots — or do you want other characters to have access?

I don’t mind the price of additional slots (it’s a touch high but not horribly so) but I do agree with a couple of the above posters that it would be really nice if purchasing an extra slot also added a little more bank storage space for the extra soulbound odds and ends that character will accumulate.

I guess if bank-slot upgrades only come in the 30-slot variety (=600 gems) then the free bank space would be too much, however how about offering a promotional deal where you can buy an extra slot and a bank upgrade as a bundle for 1100 gems which you could list as a “20% discount” (in total), or a “get a half-price bank slot when purchasing a new character slot” promotion.

This is perhaps not possible due to the way your databases are managed, but it would be really nice if logging in from your main front page (www/guildwars2.com/en) would also “count” as having logged in for the forums. I can’t begin to say how many times I’ve logged in there then come to the forums and had to log in again.

This happens to me as well, but most often when I’m on my mesmer or thief and use stealth to escape from combat. The mob will leash and reset but my character will remain locked in combat forever unless I engage and kill another mob (starting with whatever health I had left) or log out to the character select screen and then re-enter. It will also do this occasionally if I happen to be in stealth when the mob I’m fighting dies (either via condition damage or someone else killing it).

This tuna in Maelstrom (Ehmry Bay server) seems to be confused…maybe it thinks it’s a shark? Anyway, it’s stuck in that position…does a swimming animation but doesn’t move and is probably somehow stuck on top of the water and is trying to figure out how to get back under the surface.

If my account was hacked and this happened, I would definitely prefer to keep my existing characters even if I got them back in a naked, penniless, empty bank vault state.

I do agree with Zaken that perhaps each character be given a very, very basic level-appropriate starter kit…or else a minimal amount of silver that would allow for the purchase of a basic kit and allow the character to use a waypoint or two. Maybe something in the range of 25 to 50 copper per level would work, meaning you’d get a L80 character back with somewhere between 20 and 40 silver to spend on armor, weapons and initial transport to get somewhere that you could start farming to replace what you’d lost.

Nevertheless, if the choice was either start from scratch or get absolutely nothing except your existing naked characters back, I’d still take the second option (though maybe for propriety’s sake you might want to outfit them with L1 chest and legs to avoid having naked characters running around until they’d managed to go farming :P)

I now occasionally get a strange hiccup effect where I will go through a period of a minute or two where I experience 10+ second lag from the time I activate a skill to the time it actually triggers. Then the client disconnects and then I get dumped back to my character select screen (or sometimes it just freezes and hangs…in neither case does the GW2 diagnostic pick it up and ask me to submit a bug report). If I exit (or ALT-F4) and restart the game, all is well again. If I just try to reload that character I will get a few minutes of good performance, then it will drop back into the lag.

This only seems to occur after a couple continuous hours of play on the same character. This is also an effect/issue that I never experienced prior to mid-October (can’t remember if it started with the first Halloween patch or later, and initially I dismissed it as a ISP problem at my end).

My system if relatively high end (significantly exceeds GW2 requirements) and I’ve made no changes to it in the last 2 months that would account for introducing a new problem (although you never know what new bugs can come with Windows updates…).

I have intermittent problems with these water buckets — in some quests it works without a hitch and for others it seems as though they’re completely non-functional (as though the trigger the sleeping/passed-out NPC is waiting for isn’t one that the bucket gives).

I’m currently trying to do the “Partake in the Moot” heart quest in Timberline Falls (Kyesjard) and I’ve picked up 3 different water buckets and tried each one on 5 or 6 NPCs from just about every possible angle/distance/aim I can and not a single NPC has responded. I’ve tried pouring water on their heads, above their heads, on the stomachs, on either side of their stomachs, on their feet, below their feet, standing further away from them, standing right on top of them…I’ve poured so much water around that the camp should now be a lake!

I had exactly the same problem in Bloodtide Coast for the heart quest in Moriarty’s Hold (“Help maintain order in Moriarity’s Hold”) and a couple others that I can’t immediately remember the location or name of.

On the other hand, I had absolutely no problem at all when doing the heart quest in Lornar’s Pass at Korakatt’s Hall (“Help Hune manage the lodge”) where I was easily able to rouse half a dozen drunks without a single failed splash attempt (and I wasn’t being all that careful about where I splashed them…just walked up and hit “1” when I was nearby) so it’s not likely that I lucked into hitting a tiny sweet spot 6 times in a row…they just have very forgiving targets.

Perhaps a review of the trigger mechanism would shed some light on this "maybe some buckets “effectSplash” while others “effect_splash” and NPCs are looking only for effectSplash or whatever).

One thing I am sure of is that each character that I’ve leveled has had no trouble with some, found others impossible, and that each character has the same result with each quest (so all of my chars have had no trouble at all with the Korakatt’s Hall one and have found the Timberline Falls and Bloodtide Coast ones impossible).

EDIT: oh, and I did run the -repair on my client after the last time I encountered the problem and, as the OP said, it had no effect at all on my ability to do the quest.

I’m not sure if there’s been a change made somewhat recently (in the last 3-4 weeks?) with the way that GW2 uses and releases memory, but I’ve noticed a change in the amount of RAM being used when I play for extended periods (several hours or more at a time) compared to the way it used to.

My system has 12G RAM so it’s not like I’m running “short” at all, but in the past the GW2 thread would typically take about 1.3-1.5G of RAM once a character had been loaded into the world and stay fairly constant during play. In the last few weeks it seems to start in that same range when I first load a character, but as I continue to play it gradually occupies progressively larger amounts of memory. After 2 hours, it is frequently over 2G of RAM and after 3 hours it can climb close to 3G. As soon as I load a different character it will drop again, somewhat; but it requires a complete exit-to-desktop and restart before it returns to that initial old value.

It seems the most likely cause related to a region or instance not being released from RAM when you leave it. For example, today I started in Bloodtide Coast, then went to Fields of Ruin to finish off a couple heart quests, then did the entirety of Blazeridge Steppes, then after a quick stop in Lion’s Arch I did a couple personal story instances in Bloodtide before coming back to Lion’s Arch again. Looking in task manager, I noticed GW2 occupying just under 2.4G RAM. I then shut down and restarted the game, logged back into the exact same spot I’d briefly been standing in Lion’s Arch, and the memory usage was right back to tiny bit over 1.3G, so somewhere that’s in excess of 1G of memory that was being “wasted” prior to the restart.

As I say, for my system that’s a non-issue (well…I suppose it could become an issue if I played for 24 straight hours and changed regions a lot) and perhaps that’s part of the GW2 coding to allow past region/instances to remain in memory provided there’s enough room, but I don’t recall it doing that in the past so I just thought I’d bring it to your attention in case it wasn’t intended (a memory leak or failure to release something from RAM when it ought to be) and might affect other users who have less headroom that I.

Another little (very situational) tweak I’d like to see is for environmental items that you find lying around in various places…tufts of hair, feathers, elixirs, etc. These items can be picked up and used by anyone — including us — but replaces the currently equiped weapon(s) until used so often they aren’t getting used when it would be situationally the best time to do so. That’s fine for classes that don’t use this sort of thing on a regular basis, but virtually all such items are our common steal items so as thieves we’re used to them.

So the tweak I’d like to see is if a thief picks up an environmental item that is identical (or functionally identical) to one of our stolen items it is placed in our F1 steal slot. Obviously if we pick up a weapon conjured by an elementalist, or a shovel, or whatever, it should still replace our weapon set.

Taking that one step further, I’d even like to be able to see something like a tuft of hair, elixir, feather, etc and be able to “collect” it and put it in my backpack for future use. I could then — when out of combat only — open my backpack and equip it to my F1 slot prior to a fight. Similarly, I’d like to be able to take an item currently sitting in my F1 slot (unused) and stow it away in my backpack for another time (again, something allowable only out of combat to avoid abuse). It just seems like a very “thiefy” thing to do…spot something that is strongly associated with our professional mechanic and squirrel it away for a time when it would be really handy.

I tend to agree with the OP in most respects. I understand why Orr is a nasty place to be in — and it should be hard — but I also feel that now the initial influx of people have leveled their mains through to 80 the populations of those zones (except for bots and certain spots in Cursed Shore) are far too low relative to the opposition.

When I leveled my first char through Straits of Devastation and Malchor’s Leap those zones were great because there were plenty of people around wanting to participate in the dynamic events. With my second character it was much more difficult because the population had thinned out…and I just leveled my third through those zones and did nothing more than “run for my life” like the OP did because as far as I could tell there were fewer than a dozen non-bot players in the entire zone. There was never any chance of doing any of the really fun dynamic events — Temple of Balthazar, etc — because there simply weren’t enough bodies around for there to be any chance of succeeding.

It’s a little different in Cursed Shore because it’s a “true” L80 zone so it has its appeal for farmers (mats nodes, karma, consistently L80 mod drops, etc); but I think the mob density and event balance needs to be tweaked down a little now to account for the much lower player population in those other two regions (at least on my server) or else there needs to be more incentive for a L80 player to return to those zones later to participate in those events, bringing the population back to a level where the dynamic events are achievable again. Otherwise for a player leveling through the zones there’s nothing to achieve/do other than tag the skill points, jump quickly to the vistas then plummet back down, run past the eternally contested waypoints, and zip by the PoIs. They’re no longer zones to “game” in and explore…they’re regions to be endured for the minimum possible amount of time before going somewhere more fun to be in. (More fun doesn’t mean “easier”…it means somewhere that there’s a chance of being able to do the DEs, etc and enjoy the gaming experience)

I just happened to be working on leveling an Alt char and came to the “Stealing Secrets” quest to visit Lion’s Arch to meet my friend (Logan since this char is human) in the plaza in Lion’s Arch. Lo and behold, there’s this lovely lion statue in the middle of the plaza. Now how the heck did that get there after the Mad King blew it up at Halloween? :P

It also occurs to me that there are a number of quests in the L20-something through 50-ish range that occur in Lions Arch, some of which involve the plaza. I guess those will also be based on a pre-Mad King plaza build as well.

I imagine it would be far too much work to go and remove all the lion statues from all the assorted personal storyline quest instances, but I thought I should at least make sure it wasn’t an oversight and is actually intended.

Right off the top of my head, the thing I would most like to see is a bit of a buff to almost every single underwater skill except spear #3 and #5, combined with a nerf to those two. I also feel like our utility skills (particularly the elite) are severely limited for underwater, particularly if your on-land build favours condition damage and stealth (since virtually everything you use on land isn’t available under water so all of your traiting is wrong the second you put a toe in the water). I have to completely retrait any time I think I might have to spend any sustained time under water.

In a nutshell, underwater combat shouldn’t be “equip spear, circle/dodge, mash the #3 and #5 keys, rinse & repeat until someone dies”.

I just completed doing the Ships of the Line personal story quest and yet again I was killed twice due to a cut-scene triggering while I was still in battle. When the cut-scene started I was in okay shape (nearly full health on one of them, half health on the other) and the instant after the scene ended I was on my back and dead.

The first time was while I was still on a ship cannon and a giant had targeted my position when the cut-scene triggered. As soon as it ended the rock hit the ship before I had any chance to raise the shield = insta-death (can’t revive from downed state in that battle because the 2 giants lob rocks faster than you can heal yourself back from downed state so you die). I can’t recall exactly what I was engaged with when the second cut-scene happened, other than being in the midst of a heated battle with 4 or 5 mobs when it triggered and coming out of it in a downed state.

I understand that the cut-scenes are intended to ensure that the player sees a key story element, but if you’re going to use that device either you need to trigger it only when the player can safely be “away” from his/her character to watch it (ie must be out of combat and everything else on the battlefield freezes during the scene) or you need to grant the player compete immunity during the scene and then allow a 1-2 second delay after the scene ends for the player to re-orient.

This has happened to me in numerous other PS quests on multiple characters and it’s always a source of extreme aggravation — particularly because I’m trying to pick story options I haven’t seen before so I can’t just quickly click “skip to end” because there could be something important that I need to see in the cut scene (which is why you’re giving us the scene in the first place, right?).

For underwater combat that simply isn’t possible. I’ve been sitting essentially inside the gaping jaws of a shark only to have it suddenly go invulnerable. This regularly happens when you’re nowhere near the surface or the seafloor, when there isn’t even an obstruction within 1200 radius, and when you’re being hyper-careful not to retreat/move from the point where you engaged the mob so you don’t accidentally leash it. This isn’t the end of the world in low level areas, but in the higher zones where you also have very high mob densities it’s a major issue.

My guess is that because the item doesn’t have a level requirement it’s behaving like the backpack item you get early in your personal story questline and will only take a tier 1 gem (without fillament). Hardly worth slotting one…and I hope they find a way to fix that so it will take any gem/jewel up to the character’s level.

Ehmry Bay server – Shadow of the Mad King quest

Site #1 (deep in the Lion’s Arch sewers) is currently bugged. When you activate the candy powered meter the suspicious location flashes visible for a fraction of a second and disappears. Even with 10-15 people attempting to activate it, we either aren’t fast enough or it’s just completely non-responsive, so Samson is never summoned and we can’t get that part of the book.

Yes, I have been running back and forth between 2 events for about an hour in Queensdale (Ehmry Bay server) and the “finale” event isn’t triggering to open the doors to the labyrinth. Was working fine last night, but not now.

Clipping on the wrist for the medium armor Sarayi Gloves (karma vendor at Izz-al-Din Sarayi, Straits of Devastation) when worn on human female thief…sorry, don’t remember exactly which of the human models I chose. I’m pretty sure this isn’t by design since the amount of clipping seems to vary depending on the angle of the wrist and also with camera angle.

EDIT: apparently this clipping only occurs when also wearing the Krytan armor chest piece (gem store purchase). I switched over to a duelist chest and the glove clipping disappeared.

EDIT #2: since it seemed odd that a chest piece would cause a glove to clip, I checked with no chest piece worn at all and the clipping returns. I guess the Duelist chest just hides the issue with the gloves due to the long sleeve.

I just attempted this quest and I have to say that it’s utterly ruined any interest I have in completing my personal storyline quest on this character.

In the defense of the lumber camp, only Trahearne and the archivist actually did any fighting. The other NPCs on “my” side just stood there, did nothing, and were cut down by the mobs.

After finally killing the mobs at the lumber camp and rezzing the useless NPCs the 5 of us (myself, Trahearne, the archivist, the crusader and the can’t-remember-the-third) headed back to “defend the gate”. Trouble was, by the time I’d rezzed them and we’d gotten back, the entire defending gate force had been wiped out, leaving just 5 of us to defeat 16 enemy mobs…yes, 16 of them, I counted.

Oh…and not 5 of us…because all 4 of my little “friends” just walked right up into the middle of the pack in front of the gate and stood there doing NOTHING while they were cut down. So I got to solo ALL 16 MOBS, trying to pull them in the smallest groups I could — no possible way to get to my “friends” to rez them (and honestly, why bother if they’re not even going to lift a blade to help me?).

I started this with armor in perfect repair…by the time I finally killed all 16 of those mobs I had every single piece of armor damaged, and 2 of them broken.

Then along came the second wave of mobs…and I just gave up.

Maybe this sort of thing doesn’t happen on the ANet test server? Maybe their companion AI works like a charm for them. But out here in the “real” world it’s completely hit and miss as to whether any companion is actually going to recognize that there’s a battle going on and decide to participate in it.

I honestly wish at this point that they scrap all companions from all quests, rebalance them on the assumption that the player will be soloing them without any help at all (and that includes from necro minions, ranger pets, etc because most of the time they’re bugged too) and then MAYBE this would become a fun thing to do instead of an exercise in pain.

Yes, when the quests work as designed and the NPCs actually help you, everything’s wonderful. But I can count on one hand the number of times that’s actually happened (and I’m in the process of leveling my 3rd L80 char).

Jason King.2647:

…While it is possible, and entirely probable, that this game will always have bugs (e.g. Guild Wars 1 still does, and it’s been out how long? ), our current solution is to fix these things on a case-by-case basis. We’re always looking to improve the game and our methods of addressing bugs, however, and we may find that there’s a better way to do so. For now, however, we appreciate detailed reports on where you’re seeing this so we can continue to eliminate these issues.

A bug-free game is probably an impossibility.

I guess the point I was trying to make is that to fix this one bug someone on your staff will have to go in, locate the exact position I reported, and then nudge up the landscape and/or adjust the (rock?) position/rotation to have it no longer break the plane of the landscape. Once changed, it has to be added to the build. I suspect in terms of labour the fix would take at least, what, 10 minutes?

Now multiply that 10 minutes by the thousands upon thousands of locations that this is happening. Yes, it’s really that many. I’ve encountered these invisible obstruction bug issues since launch, dozens and dozens of time in every zone, every dungeon, throughout the entire game. I might have 100% of the map “explored” but I’d guess from the standpoint of “can I stand in this exact spot and hit a mob without a phantom obstruction causing me grief” I’ve “tested” less than 1% of the total land area. So that’s hours and hours and hours of your staff’s time to fix issue on a case by case basis and still probably have many more instances of the problem still be out there waiting to be discovered (and annoying players when they encounter them).

My hope/suggestion was that perhaps rather than the case by case fix approach, you take one step further back and look at the problem as a “our obstruction algorithm needs to ignore any little non-obstacles like this,” particularly because that same algorithm (or it’s incestuously close cousin) appears to also be used for a multitude of other things such as mob pathing, character dodging, and a dozen or more skills that involved a character moving from point A to point B. I would guess that a single solution that teaches the pathing to ignore miniscule non-obstacles could be written. tested, implemented and rolled out in far less time than the case-by-case terrain fix could; and further that it will instantly resolve almost all such instances rather than only fixing the ones that players happened to notice and record well enough to be able to make a detailed report about.

Less developer time, a more global fix…seems like it would be worth considering anyway.

(Apologies if this is OT for this thread, though it does relate to the obstruction topic…)

It occured to me after I’d posted it that perhaps this weird floating rock texture ought to have been posted here instead of in a new thread of its own.

https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/support/bugs/Floating-rock-texture/first#post518729

There is a very weird floating rock texture located just a very tiny bit north-west of the Occuintl Grounds point of interest in north-eastern Sparkfly Fen. It’s fully transparent when viewed from below, but from any camera angle about 90 degrees it’s visible as a semi-transparent rectangle.

Attached screenshots to show what it looks like and give you a good reference marker as to where it is. The first attachment is from a low camera angle and thus the texture is invisible. The rest of the shots show the issue.

Additional note re my previous detailed post..

After a little more experimentation, I notice the camera zoom has an effect on whether that little extra orange lump is visible or not. When I zoom out to max, it is visible to a greater degree — on and off through about 50% of my 360-degree pan. It is also visible through larger sweeps of arc (30 degrees or more of pan before it disappears). When I zoom in and pan, it tends to flicker back and forth between being visible and invisible, is visible far less often, and does its flickering through much smaller degrees of panning arc.

Jason King.2647:

2. When attacking a creature: If you get an obstructed message when attacking a creature, the problem is most likely caused by the map. In this case, it’s something that we have to fix on a case-by-case basis. If you come receive an obstructed message while fighting a creature, please let us know your exact location (screenshots are a big help!) so that we can investigate it further.

Not sure if you’re still reading this thread but here goes…

I suspect this particular instance could be useful in helping you to investigate the issue since it involves a tiny sliver of something (a bit of rock protruding from the plain of the land?).

In the attached screenshots below, you’ll see two pairs of pictures taken from a slightly different camera angle. At my feet in half of those is a very small orange bump/lump. It becomes invisible when I pan my camera slightly. If I pan through 360 degrees, it is probably visible less than 20% of the time.

I was fighting some Risen in this location and that TINY orange lump did the following:

1. Initially it obstructed my thief’s ranged shortbow default attack #1 (and it was when I was panning to try to figure out the source of the obstruction that I noticed it in the first place)

2. when I shifted slightly I was able to hit a mob with an attack. The mob then began to path to me (it was a melee thrall). Just as it approached it happened to path to a point where it was on the opposite side of the TINY orange lump. It immediately went invulnerable and started walking away and healing. I am not certain if I had an obstructed attack when it was there, though…wasn’t paying close enough attention.

3. I then stepped over/through the orange lump (did not require me to jump…just walked forward a few paces) and reinitiated the attack. The mob cheerfully began to pummel me so I used the #3 bow skill (disabling shot) to evade backwards and cripple it…except the TINY orange lump happened to be directly behind me so I got “stuck” on it which caused the usual ~240 jump-back to become a non-jump/non-evade and I got smacked nice and hard by the mob.

4. When I stood up again, I dodge-rolled backwards to try to get some range (and leave behind some caltrops) and the exact same thing happened again…dodge failed. Since I had some endurance left, I made a fractional adjustment to my angle and dodge-rolled back again…and it worked like a charm.

So to sum up, this tiny orange sliver of rock that is only visible from a few limited camera angles was able to (1) obstruct a ranged shot, (2) cause a mob to turn invincible on pathing, (3) caused a key skill to fail by obstructing it, and (4) caused a second key skill to fail by obstructing it.

If this sort of tiny protrusion is able to cause these issues and you have to fix them on a case by case basis with landscape tweaks this issue will never get solved. because there are probably thousands and thousands of little glitches like this spread out across the world (and understandably so!). Any meaningful solution is almost certainly going to have to be one where you tweak/adjust/recode-from-scratch your pathing and obstruction methods.

Exact location: Ehmry Bay Server, Sparkfly Fen, Battlement Shore (in the north-east corner of the map) just slightly to the east of the camp along the shore where there is a small slightly orange-tinted patch of sand. The fist screenshot provided below will give you a good idea of exactly where on the beach I was standing. The Risen I was attacking we to the west of me along the shoreline.

Just wanted to add to this…

Yesterday I went to Shiverpeaks to play with Jormag. Moments after I arrived at Earthshake Waypoint (which is a loooong way from water) in I was slightly shocked to see a juvenile shark standing…er….flopping around there. A few seconds later a ranger materialized in the teleport circle and the pet disappeared and was replaced by a normal land pet (I assume automatically) so I would assume that the shark belonged to that ranger (as opposed to a different ranger who happened to be teleporting out of that exact spot moments before I arrived).

So in the teleport sequence, it would seem that the order is something like…
1. spawn pet at new location
2. spawn ranger at new location
3. check to see if ranger’s pet ought to be there —>if no, swap to appropriate pet

It’s a small thing, but perhaps the sequence would be better if it was

1. check terrain type of new location (land/water)
2. check to see if current ranger pet is suitable for that location…if no, swap pet
3. spawn pet at new location
4. spawn ranger at new location