Guild Wars 2

When in action camera mode, holding down the left mouse button will repeatedly cast the auto attack. My problem is that activating any other skill will interrupt the auto attack cycle. This seems to be true for skills cast by pressing 2-9 or custom keybinds.

This forces the player to release the left mouse button and re-click it in order restart the repeated auto attacks, otherwise the character will cast nothing while the left mouse button is pressed.

I find this incredibly annoying and distracting. It is especially confusing when you activate an instant ability that does not in any way affect your auto attack casts (e.g. engineer toolkits, revenant facets). The solution is that I have to either keep spamming left click or 1 like a madman or get in the habit of releasing left click when I cast any other skill, which is counter-intuitive.

Really hope this can be fixed as it’s kind of breaking action camera for me.

Edit: After some more testing I realised it does not happen with all skills, but still has the same effect.

Well, first of all, the patch notes are misleading. I logged in thinking doubling their health sounded reasonable if we would be doing a lot more damage from critical hits, only to find out critical hits do not even work? It still feels like I am hitting a destructible object. Or one that can bleed, I guess.

Unless you are supposed to be standing in a very specific spot for each boss, dealing “double damage”, as in literally hitting twice. Is that considered a critical hit? That whole positioning thing is janky and does not feel intentional or designed in any way. I would be really disappointed to find out that they consider this behavior a mechanic, especially when considering the promises for upcoming challenging content in the expansion.

Another point mentioned is that the bosses are now more difficult. The only fights where that argument holds any merit is Tequatl and the Tripple Wurm where failure is a possibility. For every other world boss, this change simply makes the fight longer without adding any challenge. It basically makes these fights more of a time sink. What these bosses need to remain relevant is not larger health pools but more interesting mechanics.

Even for Tequatl and Triple Wurm you can argue that increasing their health does not actually make the fights any more challenging in terms of mechanics. It makes the fights more difficult, because you need more damage in order to finish the fight in time. This is likely the laziest form of difficulty and makes every fight a gear/dps check.

I really hope the unannounced challenging content in HoT will be in a different spirit.

DarksunG.9537:

If the first expansion is going to be about Sylvari I’m gonna puke.

Pick up a bucket then because it looks like we’re sticking to that for a while. :P

The way I see it is, whatever is being announced on the 24th couldn’t possibly be released in less than a few months after that. Until that happens, I suppose we have to wait. So in LS2 we have been playing what now feels like a 6 month long trailer to a big update. Even the final cutscene was essentially a trailer. I was expecting something different.

I am very excited for what is to come, but I am very disappointed at how the ending of this season of the living story was handled. They have opened stories on so many fronts and concluded very little of it with the season finale.

Please support this ANet. It is difficult to have an up to date database with that information. :P

I agree. The first thing that came to my mind when Caithe wanted to join was that she would turn rogue or something. I was quite disappointed to find out I was right. That was more than predictable. :P

Stop pretending like what ANet is doing is the norm for MMOs. In most cases, new content in other MMOs remains in the game and can be played by future players or with alts etc.

Regardless if you enjoy it or not, the living story is very different in terms of implementation and personally I don’t see them ever doing something to replicate the original experience of these patches. I think they’ve stated in the past that it’s not what they wanted to do with it, and it seems to me like small additions to the fractals is pretty much what we’re going to get.

But why should one of them die? That would be identical to what happened with DE, as OP and many others have pointed out. I don’t consider that good storytelling. I would go as far as to say that it is very bad storytelling because it lacks originality.

If they really are forming a new DE, which I’m unsure has been actually confirmed, copying a major plot point from the previous DE story sounds like the last thing they should be doing. They should instead be trying to create interesting characters who will make their own impact on the world, instead of being a shadow of the original DE. It doesn’t have to be DE 2.0 to that detail.

That’s pretty funny. I kinda saw it coming because I noticed LA was snowed in my personal story instance back in December, so my guess was that it makes a personal copy of the map you are into in its current state. I was hoping though that it would be taken care of for this patch.

They must have either not had the time for a proper fix, or considered this an acceptable state of the personal story instance (which is in my opinion unacceptable). Either way, it seems like poor polish on the patch.

Most points have already been addressed by other posters, but I would like to comment on OP’s claim that ANet might be doing it “just because some other game is doing it”.

Decisions shouldn’t be made just for the sake of copying other games, as much as they shouldn’t be made just for the sake of being innovative and different, of which I believe ANet has been guilty in the past. I think ANet should be doing what they think is right for the game and not trying to imitate anything. If they believe a feature is necessary and fits in their game, it is not a shame if they are inspired by others in its implementation. It is pretty much the norm among games in the MMO genre.

On the actual topic, I also believe this feature was necessary and would encourage its use in other aspects of PvE combat. The argument that players should be watching the animations for survivability is weak at best. It is not supported at all as a design choice because of the ridiculous amount of particle effects that even the simplest of player abilities produce, not to mention animation and damage synchronization or other problems that have been discussed in previous posts. I have always disliked that idea and have seen it as either a dogmatic design choice or an excuse for lazy UI coding (example: absence of enemy cast bars), so I may be a little biased.

Regarding the appreciation of animations (and animators), is it a reasonable cause for developing in that direction, or is it a biased opinion (OP being an animator)? Also, should players be force-fed “art” while functionality is being compromised? I don’t think animations become useless if we don’t watch every little detail all the time. It is obvious that animation quality is very important for the artistic appeal of a game, and I believe it serves its purpose regardless of this, or similar, features.

Invidia.9074:

Her name bothers me. Taimi sounds like “Timey” which would indicate that she might be from the future (there was some speculation going on that)…

Actually, I noticed that too. But I dismissed it as a coincidence or a silly pun. I just remembered, though, that she said in one of the dialogs, regarding her friendship with Braham:

“We are good friends, he just doesn’t know it yet.”

or something along those lines. Which would make the time-related argument have at least some basis. This may have been mentioned before, I don’t read all forum posts. :P

I don’t think ANet should be holding our hands through every new fight they add. Discovering mechanics, ability patterns etc is part of the fun and is more interesting when done in the real fight instead of a simulator.

On that note, I believe players are already being trained to these fights. What seems like a problem to me is the 2 hour wait time between tries. It is likely that some people will leave after a single try, getting little experience from the fight. If you could start the fight more often, it would be easier for players to adapt to the mechanics and that would eliminate the random player factor.

EDIT: I also believe that down leveling is an issue. It is obvious that exotic geared level 80s with fine tuned builds are better for the fight, so what’s the point with it being level 59 (or whatever)? Health and damage numbers even seem to be balanced for that audience, so the down leveling of the fight seems sort of pointless.

The buff idea sounds interesting. If it was anything combat related (+power, +vitality, etc…) I could see it becoming a prerequisite for other events. For example: Kill Tequatl to get buff X, then go buffed to the Worm boss which spawns 1 hour later.

I’m afraid the title might be misleading. I love the idea of these large scale battles. I mean, I did Tequatl when it was released. It was a lot of fun, but I haven’t gone back. Mainly because I can’t effectively know when it’s up without using a timer website (same thing that applies for other world boss encounters). And if you just go there without planning ahead you will probably be thrown on an overflow which will not finish the event. So what’s the point in adding more encounters like this without changing the current system? Did you think the trend of waiting around for bosses to spawn was alright so it might as well be enriched? In my opinion if this world bosses system is going to stick around there need to be some changes.

Respawn timer. Get rid of the two hour respawn timers. In fact, get rid of despawns all together. If a boss spawns, it doesn’t need to go away for two hours when you wipe. All this does is create artificial difficulty. Let it stay up until a competent group figures it out and kills it. When it’s killed, put a respawn timer on it. Perhaps in that case it might need to be more than two hours, otherwise the boss would almost always be up and it’d be trivial, like a lot of dynamic events.

Potential problem: How do you wipe if you can just run back from a waypoint?

• Have a mechanic that eventually kills players massively (could be time based). Could be a tidal wave for Tequatl or something like that nuke for the Marionette. Effectively, it would kill all players currently engaged in the fight and reset the boss’ health, rendering zerg kills impossible.

Event awareness. Improve event awareness, especially for the world bosses. I find it silly that there is an API that gives you access to the status of all events on all maps, so you can create a web tool that shows such things, but when you are ingame, and you actually need that information, you are extremely limited to a radius around your character in the map that you are in. I feel that if there is a kittening dragon minion or a huge worm spawned on a map, you need to know just by looking at the world map. Or there need to be people screaming about it in Lion’s Arch. One of the two.

Overflows. I remember reading shortly after launch that overflows were meant as a temporary solution to overpopulation during launch and not as a permanent phenomenon. However, the way newer content is designed creates an overflow problem that it does not seem address. Actually, I’m not sure overflows would still be a problem if the previous suggestions were applied. Would the overflow you’re moved to also have the world boss spawned? If so, even if you were moved to an overflow at anytime other than a patch release, you’d still have a better chance of beating the boss (or at least making some progress) and probably an overall better experience, if you didn’t have only one try.

I might be missing something here but I really don’t think the way these encounters are implemented is the best way for this game. And seeing two more released with the same problems that I identify in the Tequatl fight makes me think ANet doesn’t see anything wrong with it. The new fights look very fun, but they do have these problems, or features, or whatever you want to call them. I’m curious to find out what others think about this.

ANet needs to take this post and start implementing stuff. Especially the UI-related changes. I find it ironic that ANet have stated they do not want players to “play the UI” but so much of their current UI is clunky and works against the user in many cases (trading post, guild management, inventory management to name a few).

Somehow searching for “cast” did not bring up that post, my bad. I found it weird it hadn’t been mentioned before.

I don’t understand why people might see it as an “easy mode”. My point is that I sometimes find the current system to be unfair to the player when you cannot accurately see what is going on or how long the casting time is. Here is an example I just encountered:

I fought 1vs1 with an elite monk mob in Ascalon Catacombs that had a heal with what felt like 1 second cast time. The animation for it was literally just moving his hands around a little bit. It also did not seem to have a long cooldown at all as he could repeat it every 4-5 seconds minimum.

I hadn’t noticed that heal before because of the nature of group combat in this game even though I’ve run the dungeon quite some times. Sure I might have remembered monks healed but only when I fought it alone did I notice how obsurd the heal spell they have is. Does that make me a bad player? Is learning boss/mob animations and cast times through repetition instead considered skillful? The current system doesn’t reward skilled players, it rewards experienced players. Or, in other words, players who played the content enough to actually understand it.

If there were cast bars, any person with a minimum amount of experience in combat would be able to see and understand what a mob is doing. It would then be a matter of skill to respond effectively to what the mob is doing. After I’ve played 1000 hours of this game I shouldn’t be struggling by zooming in and getting closer (which I literally did, because I was playing a ranger) to actually see a monster use a 1 second cast heal to heal themselves. And then attempt to interrupt it because it is sort of irregularly cast. It’s that kind of communication to the player that I believe would help players (and developers) understand PvE combat better and help GW2 improve zerg combat.

Edit: Of course I won’t get into details about how a cast bar should work if it were to be implemented. It is obvious that not all abilities should be displayed (if you will) with a cast bar, like abilities that are used for auto attacking, but other more important abilities can certainly be displayed.

Is the lack of enemy cast bars a design choice or something that was just never added? I find it frustrating trying to figure out when targets are casting and can/should be interrupted based entirely on their animation, which can very easily be lost in the myriad of effects during group combat.

Implementing a cast bar would make it much easier to be 100% effective in PvE and probably PvP too, and in my opinion would help advance PvE group combat because of the visual representation of enemies casting their abilities.

I haven’t noticed what OP is saying, but I agree that the event tracking radius should be increased. I don’t see why we couldn’t have a list showing all of the active events on the map on a seperate dialog on the world map or something similar. It would be better than having to rely on websites that use the API.

I completely agree with all the points made. I think ANet agrees on some parts as well but is hesitant or does not have the resources to review all dungeons, with the living story and all. The fact that so many glitches/bugs still exist in dungeons however shows how overlooked they have been.

Pandemoniac.4739:

I don’t know if anything more can be done to incentivize speed running pugs to kill more “trash” mobs without making farming the mobs more attractive than finishing the dungeon.

Well, for one, I find it weird that trash mobs are skippable at all to begin with. If mobs didn’t reset when you run too far, skipping wouldn’t be possible. So perhaps it was originally designed this way. The latest dungeons they have added are designed in a way to discourage skipping mobs, and I remember reading that was a deliberate design goal. Noone runs Twilight Arbor Aetherblade path though. :P

Either way I don’t think such a change can be done without extensive balancing on dungeons. If you had to kill all trash packs as they are now, dungeons would take a significant amount of time to complete and that would annoy many people.

I believe something must be changed about the way dungeons are ran at the moment so that dungeons feel more substantial and less glitchy. Shortcuts and optional bosses can be built-in, instead of made up or forced by the players.

I agree with the OP. Because the ranger’s damage output relies so much on the pet, I think it’s important that the player has better control over it. In my opinion, pets should not be targeted by some melee/AoE abilities that a player would have evaded by running out of them. Pets are also a burden when they pull mobs/trigger traps (example: flowers in TA dungeon).

I understand that this might make pet regen less relevant in PvE so perhaps it is not applicable. It is however annoying to have your pet die due to factors you cannot control, especially when you are specced to rely heavily on your pet for damage.

Pets currently feel a little forced, you cannot even unsummon them in purpose (say for a fight mechanic) as they keep respawning when you enter combat. I know you can set them to “Avoid Combat” but they are still in the way, in a sense. :P

Fancia.3746:

Yea that’s all… Because you’re dead because now one of the golems pulled you right through a wall, stunning you with the shield so yet another wall crosses you, just incase you didnt die to the first wall, and then procedes to camp you until you’re dead… Which cant be recovered from in this fight… And then what? You see, while the THEORY is that it’s that simple… The reality is, that it’s not… It’s ALL about luck to not get pulled trough the walls, and there’s not a kitten thing you can actually do about it except stacking unlimited stability, which only a limited few classes can actually do…

This. The annoyance factor from many of these encounters that ANet designs comes from the inability of players to control the mechanics.

What Fancia described is based on randomness and will most likely happen after a few tries. It would be very hard for a player to actively avoid getting pulled by golems completely during the whole encounter. And when you die from something you cannot control it is very frustrating. This is, in my opinion, a problem in the design of the fights and it is one that has been done in the past. It was very apparent in Canach’s Lair 5 man version.

What I expect from a well designed and challenging dungeon is the ability to fully learn the fight mechanics after a certain amount of time and, based on player skills, execute the fight properly.

There are also a few other mechanics that make the dungeon less enjoyable such as the constant shielding of monsters and their ability to become invulnerable. The golems in the first boss fight are an example, but many other mobs can do it too, and in my opinion it is done often enough that it becomes annoying as a mechanic.

I am not bashing this dungeon, in fact I enjoyed it very much and believe it is probably much better than anything ANet has done before. That is not to say though that it does not have flaws.

I also believe the dungeon is badly placed in terms of playable content. I do not feel that a 5 man “story dungeon” should be so challenging, seeing how story mode dungeons during leveling was the easy mode. Perhaps these mechanics and that level of difficulty (which I actually enjoy and look for in an MMO) would fit better in an explorable, or heroic if you will, version of the dungeon.