Guild Wars 2

So it has been 3 months since the release of Triple Trouble and I have yet to complete the achievement. I think I’ve attended the Great Wurm around 50 times now. Which is insane considering every attempt takes about 1 to 2 hours.

After so many tries I know all about the tactics such as “deboofing”, condition parties and using the harpoon on Amber so it becomes vulnerable. You would expect the majority of players would understand the principles to become Wurmslayers by now. But it seems that every single time I return to Bloodtide Coast our forces are greeted with the exact same pitfalls.

I know this event isn’t supposed to be easy. But I can’t help to think that perhaps Arenanet overestimates the intelligence and devotion of most players. Because the image that I get from people who attend this event is that they are lazy, uninformed and unable to exercise one’s clout. It doesn’t even matter if you put three commanders there explaining step by step what to do. People just think they can zerg which usually doesn’t end well.

People don’t seem to learn from their mistakes because they can just hide in the pack. That is why I liked the Marionette event so much more because people could feel personally responsible for failing the event. I personally think Triple Trouble requires some changes. Not to make it less challenging, but to make people more aware of their mistakes.

Edit:

So today Bloodtide Coast was updated to join the Megaservers. The game put me on a server with Germans. :p Not sure how this is organized but I foresee a whole new level of problems arising.

I hate to say it but our time has come. We are now the most unwanted class out there. Power builds got a significant 5% nerf with regards to seaweed salad. Most classes got stronger condition builds after the recent balance patches, except for Guardian. Our DPS is now at 29k DPS maximum. This is lower than a condition Revenant. We did got our signets buffed even though they are still bad, so there’s that.

This thread is so full of misinformation it’s unbelievable.

First of all, it is not just a 50 gold difference. For example, the difference between Zojja’s Doublet (Light) and Zojja’s Breastplate (Heavy) is already 33 gold. That’s just one piece of armor.

Second of all, for all the people who are saying that the change is intended. Please don’t be sheep and just repeat something just because “an economist” says so. He never said why silk prices are intended as they are and it just doesn’t make sense balance wise to agree with his statement. Light classes are getting shafted because of this imbalance and the forum keeps getting flooded by new threads like these.

The thought that lowering the price of silk might increase the price of the lower level cloths is true. It shows how imbalanced the whole supply mechanic is of cloths. While trees can be cut and ore can be mined there is no reliable source for cloth. As long as this isn’t changed light classes will have to pay a higher margin and these threads will keep making their return.

I was actually surprised that Anet fixed the laser bug before the invisible bug. Due to the extra damage from the laser Tequatl is even more susceptible to become invisible now.

I am quite convinced that this bug is caused by exceeding the damage thresholds during the burn phase. The game doesn’t trigger “the battery phase” if the burn phase goes over the percentage (50% and 25%). Instead, the game thinks the next burn phase has started and puts Tequatl in limbo.

This is what I believe the developers need to do in order to fix this bug:

During burn phase, when Tequatl’s healthbar reaches 50% or 25%, Tequatl needs to become invulnerable so the game properly goes into battery phase.

Another solution I think would work in conjunction with many other ideas here is to allow us to disable combo fields by Delete-clicking on skills. Similarly to disabling auto-attack on skills by Ctrl-clicking I think this solution could solve a lot of issues.

Pros:

• It’s easy to implement in the current system
• Allows us to use skills without overwriting other useful combo fields
• Players can choose when to use combo fields and when not to use them, allowing them to coordinate with the party on tactics
• Simple solution which is not too hard to understand for casual players
• Works with other ideas to fix combo fields

Cons:

• Hard to implement for traits that give combo fields
• Other players won’t know for sure which fields on the ground are disabled and which work.

I am seriously getting carpal tunnel from all that clicking. I am just going to delete stacks like 107 Cold Weather Conqueror’s Minor Kits and 94 Bottle-Shaped Presents. I am not even farming anything and still it hogs up my inventory. It takes up a lot of my free time to just clear it. It’s not worth anything either so it doesn’t feel good to have to do all this. The developers need to balance the rewards so that less is more without too much shenanigans around it.

After playing the beta this weekend these are my main points of critique:

Errand Boy
When I tried to engage in a group I had troubles figuring out what my role was. The longbow is used as back line weapon while my traps are front line utilities. This play-style forced me to run back and forth like an errand boy. So when fights involve more players the enemies don’t automatically come to me. This forces me to move towards the enemy. The same problem occurred when I was individually fighting ranged enemies. Unless I took advantage of poor AI by benefiting from LoS. Surely this shouldn’t be promoted by the developers. I do like the extra damage coming from traps. Although in its current state the symbiosis between longbow and traps is questionable. A solution could be to add a long range pull option to Spear of Justice. The mechanics could be similar to Greatsword #5 Binding Blade, but with a longer range and single target only.

Poor Melee Synergy
I could switch from longbow to greatsword midfight to engage enemies in melee while utilizing the traps. This could solve the problem as described in my previous paragraph. Unfortunately the Dragonhunter traits are solely focused on ranged making the synergy between melee and traps non-existent. This also works the other way around. For example, Zeal does not give any benefits to longbow or traps. On top of that, the short range traps collide with the long range specialization traits. For example, Pure of Sight requires my enemies to stay outside the range threshold to receive a damage bonus and Heavy Light knocks enemies back. I feel like some bridges need to be build here to fill in some gaps.

On the Horizon
The most important sustain for Dragonhunter should be to keep your enemies at bay. It does look like Karl addressed some of these issues. For example, by giving traps daze and adding cripple to F1’s passive. Daze and cripple could definitely contribute to the Dragonhunter’s unapproachable strategy and I am looking forward to testing this out in BWE3. Also Wings of Resolve should definitely have an increased Leap range on activation. It should be in line with Engineer’s Jump Shot rifle skill.

The very first Champion in the Crucible of Eternity dungeon seems to be more of a threat than anything else in the dungeon.

• His Frost Leap attack doesn’t have an animation which makes it nearly impossible to see it coming.
• Frost Leap hits twice instead of once which will likely incapacitate you unless you have Aegis up.

Is this intended or a bug? If it’s not a bug how do you deal with it?

Since yesterday I am unable to leave the overflows when I guest to another server. Every time I try to guest to another server and it asks me to transfer me out of the overflow I get a “Network Error”.

Is this intentional or a bug? My server isn’t very active during the day so it’s fairly pointless to wait there for at least an hour for an attempt with a rather high fail chance. On top of that, the overflows are so disorganized. Especially in Europe where players start shouting in French, German and English.

The annoying low framerate and the instant dead upon failure makes me rage hard. I enjoy harder content but successfully jumping to the diving goggles seems to be more luck than skill for me.

I urge the rulers of Tyria to plant more forests of Gummo, Mimosa and Snow Cherry Saplings in order to battle the deforestation of Tyria.

In temperate mesic climates, natural regeneration of forest will not occur in the absence of disturbance. Deforestation is a contributor to global warming, reduces the content of water in the soil, groundwater as well as atmospheric moisture and may lead to extinction of many species.

Tzozef.9841:

Firebrand’s are Mid-Range, Mid-Line Support. Core Guardians are Front-line support, and DH are straight up long-range to close ranger damage dealers.

I wish that was true. The staff is nerfed to 300 range, mace/axe being 130 range, mantra’s 300 cone, tome has no ground targeted heals. How is the Firebrand ever going to be reliably supporting anyone from even close range while players are scattered around in every game mode? Stacking used to be a thing back in the days where players piled up in dungeon corners, pirate shipping was ideal and the PvP meta consisted out of tanky celestial builds. Nowadays we have Social Awkwardness in Fractals, massive AOE condition/cc spam in PvP and for WvW the Firebrand doesn’t really offer anything we already could (stability, heals & condition removal).

All in all, this feels super rewarding if you ever played a Mercy in Overwatch or a WoW Priest, that sense of healing your allies and you bringing in all that HP juice goodness, you will love the firebrand!

To be honest, Druid feels way more like Mercy with their staff and offensive buffs. I suppose you can define the Firebrand as a priest but it distances itself from this archetype as it lacks sufficient access to its support Tomes.

2. Feedback and Criticisms
Switching and Activitating the tomes themselves feel very odd and clunky. The 1 second castime to use a tome and to another just doesn’t feel smooth.

Not only that, I see: Archivist of Whispers- Minor Trait and Loremaster – Grandmaster trait MANDATORY, you need to make these baseline. Otherwise the cooldown is way too long and too short of usage for the essential skills to be of any use.

I agree with your criticism. Especially the two Grandmaster traits other than Loremaster feel lackluster.

3. Suggestions and Solutions.
Right now, it’s a kitten caster with a kitten core guardian. COMMIT, make a full amazing support caster in all it’s glory. Here’s how.

With the tomes, make it function like Engineer tool kits in terms of toggling and switching/ or Ele attunements. Quick and easy to switch around, will be nice and smooth

“But wouldn’t that be OP? You get to use these skills all the time?”

NOPE! and here’s the catch, you see the cubes right beside the tomes?

MAKE THEM FUNCTION LIKE THIEVES INITIATIVE!!!!! So you have the smoothness and switching of Engineer kits, but make each skill of the tomes recharges be spent and used like Thief initiative skills.

This way, one it’s easier to balance with more control (I.E. how fast the cube pips recharge, and the cost for each tome skill) with the added benefit of feeling smooth to use for the player switching between each tome smoothly. And encourages a playstyle to enjoy the tome usage!

That’s how I initially thought the Tomes would work. No cool downs, initiative system. Tomes need to be the main mechanic of the Firebrand but now they feel as if they are a secondary tool.

4. Final thoughts

Firebrand is 90% the way there!!! It’s a really good spec, with a lot of intricacies and thought put into it.

I can see this competing with Druid in Raids, and highest Mid line Support in WvW Zergs.

It lacks offensive buffs to compete with Druid in raids. It doesn’t have any range to be Mid Line in WvW. But I like your suggestions for improvement.

cranos.5913:

The only thing that actually has a rotation are GS builds, but GS is only decent for high bursts, which overall limits its use to targets that die quickly (dungeons, low fracs) and is less suitable for raids. GS would need CD reductions on its skills (especially whirling wrath), bug fixes (really WW does less dmg on norn and charr anet?) and prob a more viable second set to swap to during CDs since GS auto is weak as hell.

That’s a viable alternative solution. If we can somehow manage to design our mobile builds to be more effective I wouldn’t care so much about requesting mobile symbols. We could probably have even more diversified builds then. Both greatsword and sword are currently under par when it comes to pure DPS output and added support to parties.

I agree with your greatsword suggestions. Although I think the disorganized Zeal and Radiation traitlines have an impact as well. Zeal suffers from reliability on symbols too much. Which isn’t exactly the core of the greatsword. While radiation is too focused on conditions while sword does none of that. At the same time the Radiance trait related to retaliation and signets are too weak. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: Our traits are a mess.

Players like to distinguish themselves through all certain ways, finishers is one of those. Personally, I like the ‘Mortal Kombat’ style approach. Arenanet introduces finishers to PvE because from a business perspective they can make an extra buck. This makes perfect sense.

However, the execution could be more thorough. Personally, I’d prefer to see the finisher requirement only on Champions. First, that would make finishers feel more special. Second, easier enemies usually take the same amount of time to kill as to finish, which can be perceived as a waste of time.

I also have a bank full of ascended materials. I get a lot of empyreal fragments from doing dungeons daily. Also the amount of bloodstone dust I get is greatly exceeding. The general problem is that if players are considering crafting ascended items they already have more ascended materials than they really need.

So of course some people are asking me: Why don’t you just delete them?

This is where the real problem for me kicks in. I have no clue what the developers have in store for us in the new year. For all we know the ascended materials could be one of the key requirements to craft the new precursors. Why else do we have so many of them right now? Seems like we’re missing a piece in the puzzle of a greater plan here. Perhaps we will need a full stack of refined ascended materials. So if I would delete them now I would risk the chance to having to farm them again.

We all saw what happened to Bolts of Silk. At one point they were just a trash item for vendors. Now players are screaming to increase droprates on them. I’m not going to make the same mistake twice.

The Advanced Golem is definitely bugging out now that he can move. I haven’t done CoE enough after the patch to replicate the bug but I have an indication what’s causing it:

If you approach the room of the Advanced Golem the turrets around him activate. But if you move back before the Advanced Golem is aggro’d (but do have the turrets around him activated) then I believe he bugs out.

I am enjoying the looks of the ascended armor on my guardian.

Deathmond.7328:

I am really disappoinment about upcoming changes to guardian…
As always we don`t have any changes for Spirit weapons, shield, sword, torch…
May be we have not bad changes for condition build but my opinion that condition build based only in one condition is meh…

So what are you thinking guys?
Are you satisfied? =)
Or you disappoinment? =(

Although I’m not really excited about the changes for Guardians either I disagree with some of the changes you want. Sword is already in a good position and is our best PvE weapon. Torch might get in a better position with the new burn grandmaster trait.

How they haven’t buffed shield yet is beyond me. It’s a shame really because I always imagined Guardian to symbolize the sword & board yet I rarely see anyone use it. Furthermore, I could care less about Spirit Weapons as I hate relying on AI. They could stay the way they are for all I care.

• The schedule in Europe for Mega-bosses such as Karka/Tequatl/Triple Wurm is right around the time when everyone is eating. It would be great if these bosses could be pushed one hour later. Ideally, set one in the morning, afternoon and later at night.

• The schedule between Tequatl and Triple Wurm is too close to each other. Everyone has to rush from Tequatl to Wurm making it very hard for organised attempts of guilds and alliances. Servers are filled up with randoms before giving guilds and alliances the chance to get in the same instance.

• Starting Guild World Events is too expensive for events such as Tequatl and Triple Wurm. People want to do these events more than once a week.

J Eberle.9312:

You can keep telling me zerker is not optimal but I’m still going to use it, and I’m still going to have flawless runs. Yep, even with my 11k hp I can have flawless 49’s. Must be due to some crazy class mechanics like aegis, vigor, blinds, reflects and…

Show Spoiler

hide spoiler

dodging

Flawless 49 runs as a full DPS build guardian with pugs?

Guardian trait buffs are somewhat disappointing and too much focused on PvP.

You keep pushing guardians towards condition but by giving guardians only burning makes it impossible to build around it. Give us more access to conditions such as chill, bleed, cripple and weakness. Otherwise skills such as Amplified Wrath and especially Radiant Retaliation are never going to be used.

Communal Defenses looks promising for WvW. But only because it has some unintended side effects where aegis can be applied to an unlimited amount of players. When this is eventually fixed the cooldown will make this skill useless.

The other two traits (Force of Will and Purity of Body) feel like they were handed out to us because you took them away from us in the first place. But now we actually have to sacrifice more trait points.

John Smith.4610:

Given the input/output of materials and their value to players I would hypothesize that players find many outputs of crafting worthwhile for one reason or another.

An example, I pulled the approximate amount of crafting materials destroyed in the time I took to read this post and the number I received was 136,909 items. There’s a high demand and velocity of crafting materials, which I would say is good evidence that there must be something to do with those crafting materials.

Although I think ascended gear is at a good place I do like to point out that I find the demand for certain specific ascended materials lopsided. For example, bolt of damask is currently still selling for 14g50s while deldrimor steel ingot is at 3g30s. This leads to the case that heavy and medium classes have a much easier time to craft their ascended armor than light classes.

I don’t see how prices will settle down as long as supply is limited (there is no way to farm cloths) and demand is required from all armor classes.

It has to do with the fact that cloth is used in all ascended armor recipes. Which is a pretty big design flaw because it makes crafting ascended armor for light classes much more expensive. For example, the ascended chest piece for light class is 27 gold more expensive to craft than the chest piece for a heavy class.

I don’t really mind the drop rates. After all, Tequatl and Wurm are supposed to be end-game content and therefore has to keep you busy for a longer period of time. If it was possible to get those items within a month people would get bored quickly.

However, current problems with full maps and bad spawn schedule makes it extra hard to organize it and requires even more of the player’s time than necessary.

You are absolutely right OP. But so many topics have been made about the imbalance surrounding silk. The developers have to be aware of the issue by now but refuse to acknowledge it.

Beldin.5498:

Just join TTS .. everything is easy as kitten then

Or isn’t that suddenly anymore the almighty answer to all problems with these encounters ?

I have been trying to join the EU equivalent of TTS for ages but their recruitment always seems to be closed. I found another great group though and I have been able to complete the achievements.

However, problems are still there. The last few days I am unable to get into the same instance as my alliance. The moment we taxi into Bloodtide Coast the instance fills up with random players and I end up into a different server. This is caused by the following problems:

• We can’t have our own instance. Although we can choose to start a guild event (which is quite expensive) this still doesn’t guarantee that all players will be able to join the same map. This means that in both situations (schedule and guild event) we end up with random people who sometimes don’t even speak our language or can’t communicate.

• The schedule is not optimal. We have one spawn during prime time (during dinnertime). Also Tequatl and Triple Wurm are scheduled too close to each other forcing us to rush from one zone to another without giving us the required time to organize.

• Taxi’ing is a tedious process. Getting every person into the same Megaserver is rather hard and requires the majority of our available time coordinating the event.

• Random people think they can just run with the zerg without trying to figure out what to do to successfully complete the event.

Xbon.9086:

So basically you want to join the most popular world all the time? Just stay on the world your on and try to beat the boss.

In most cases people are trying to join a friend or specific community so it’s not necessarily a popularity contest.

Also if people are not organizing to kill a Hardcore World Boss it is unlikely the Boss will be beaten. I’ve seen countless of times where many players try to join the event in the last 5 minutes because they think they can kill it without getting organized. From my experience the chance to fail significantly increases the later you join.

The constant clicking required to join a party member is a tedious process. That is why the current taxi system needs a queue function. The developers are aware of it because WvW worked without a queue for a long time until they gave it a big update. If this topic gets enough attention then perhaps the developers will realize this is something that could immensely improve how Megaservers work.

Kuya.6495:

We’ve been in this stage before. I just wish anet would decide that if they’re gonna buff pve raid builds, they should probably also buff some for guardian. If not, then they got a lot of power creep to nerf in raids then.

The main problem is that the balance updates are too focused on DPS output and not enough on taking advantage of the diversity of each class. If we look at instanced PvE content you will see that since the expansion release not much has changed with these roles:

- We have the Warrior supplying might, banners and EA
- Chronomancer supplying quickness, alacrity and boon sharing while being able to tank
- Druid supplying heals, GotL, spotter, glyphs & spirits

Then we have only a few spots left for DPS & offensive support which have changed slightly since every balance update, mainly benefiting Tempests and condition Rangers. That means the Guardian has had to compete with all these other classes in order to get a spot. Frankly, there is not a lot a Guardian can bring to a party. I believe the balance team should go back to the drawing board and think why the current Guardian feels hollow instead of hallow. They made a step in the right direction by adding Pinpoint Distribution to Engineers and making Grace of the Lands/Banners focusing on 10 people. Even though the guardian hasn’t benefited from that yet.

To me, the Guardian has always been a supportive class and it took a wrong turn with the release of the Dragonhunter. Dragonhunter is a ranged offensive build with close combat traps which seems purposed for PvP and solo play which didn’t seem to benefit much from the core specializations which relied on close combat, active defense and a focus on support. Hopefully this gets restored by the next expansion. I sincerely hope we don’t simply receive an elite specialization that will deal condition damage and give quickness.

We need something that makes Guardians unique so we can start fulfilling other roles than just DPS. Before the expansion was released Guardian was frequently used for it’s active defense & supportive role. We had blinds, reflects, protection & blocks. But most of these have become useless with the introduction of Druids and Chronomancers. We should go back to that and make supportive builds more viable.

akamon.2769:

Oozo, you were just using the skill wrong. you have to run up to the person you want to heal, stand on top of them, and then pop the skill.

He might’ve used the skill wrong, but that’s because the description is also partially wrong and should be changed.

Great to hear that the healing area actually works though. Might be more useful in dungeons than I thought, where stacking happens occassionally.

Anyone also annoyed by the camera when teleporting with MI and JI? Sometimes when you’re close to walls your camera resets into the wall. Then you have to waste time to zoom out and find the correct angle again. I’d rather have the camera keep the angle the same.

Durgum.2567:

It feels like for whatever reason the silk prices are intentional. A few patches back the number of scraps required to make a bolt was increased to 3 where every other bolt is 2. Further 100 silk is required per ecto combine. Twice the amount of every other ecto combine.

There was a time, before ascended armor was introduced, when silk prices were equal to vendor prices due to the fact there was no demand for silk. I think this is why the developers initially increased the amount of silk scraps from 2 to 3.

But the introduction of ascended armor changed this and now created a high demand in silk, but also other cloths. I believe the developers made a mistake by increasing the amount of silk scraps from 2 to 3 needed to create bolts of silk. Looking at the current market development this needs to be readjusted to its previous state.

Finally got it killed today thanks to gw2community and some really good commanding. However, the megaserver we were in was still full of people who didn’t listen and almost made us fail.

Also the reward was absolutely not worth the hours and hours of time it took to finally kill it. I basically got a bunch of greens and maybe a few rares.

Saiyan.1704:

What’s the new 25% movement speed, has something been announced?

It’s becoming a self-fulfilling prophecy.

foofad.5162:

I really can’t imagine PvE without a source of Stability. I’d swap out at least one of your meds for Stand Your Ground.

From someone who has been playing mostly shout builds I can understand where you’re coming from. But it’s not as bad as you think. As of a few patches ago stun breakers instantly recover you from a stun. Two meditation skills give stun breakers and in certain situations (such as the AC dungeon) you could always decide to equip Stand Your Ground or Hallowed Ground (and even change from symbol to shout trait).

Wanze.8410:

Ascended mats were a bonus to champ bags to accommodate the rising need for ascended crafting. Riding the champ train is not considered regular gameplay and by doing this extensively, you will aquire more mats than intended for the regular game player.
If it clogs up your inventory because it is not tradeable its not the economies fault but your own due to excessive gameplay. Just delete it, if you run out of space.

I can’t remember doing any champ train in the last few months yet here I am with an inventory full of bloodstone dust and empyreal fragments. Just deleting it doesn’t cut it as I mentioned in my previous post. We don’t know whether they will become useful in the future.

I’m not sure if you’re fully aware of the meaning of economy, but there is no economy involved with ascended materials because they can’t be exchanged. Perhaps if they could be exchanged, even only by vendor, it would take off some of the pressure.

The developers did not calculate the droprate correctly or they have something in store for us to use the ascended materials in the near future. Either way, the current situation is far from favorable.

This needs to change. I know a lot of Americans can be patriotic about how great their country is but English language should be linked to an English/British flag.

OnizukaBR.8537:

Itss a margonite. Abaddon is coming.
https://wiki.guildwars.com/wiki/Margonite
Look at the purple aura at the trailer match the purple from margonites, and abadon is the god of secrets.

This guy gets it.

This should’ve been patched and changed already. Posting this while waiting for the third time watching the dialogue. BOOOOOORING (and annoying).

Keksmuffin.1450:

dh virtues arent selfish, using them for allies just requires a lot more effort and coordination

It’s not just a lot more effort and coordination. The whole design of the Dragonhunter is flawed. We have a selfish long range bow, with selfish short range traps and a mix of both short and long range supportive virtues. There are so many mixed abilities for mixed roles that do not fit together. Which explains why guardians still fall back on hammer with old utilities in groups.

Of course there will be times I am going to use Wings of Resolve to jump and heal a party member. But we are not expected to do that. Same reason why players generally do not expect us to use Shield of Courage in any situation. We have other classes who are way better for that (druid/ele heals and revenant glint/dwarf). Virtues by itself are not effective enough to fulfill their role as support.