Guild Wars 2

In addition to the issues mentioned above, the https certificate for the referenced site guildwars2.ncsoft.com is broken. It’s for *.bluehornet.com , so anone reading that email really must consider it a phishing attempt. Please fix your cert asap.

And as a side note, I was briefly impressed with the “how was I added to this list?” link, until I read the provided data and realized they were wrong, i.e., didn’t actually correspond to me opting in to anything. Kinda defeats the purpose if you can invent things there.

Isaiah Cartwright.8569:

Our goal with this system is to give guilds activities and long-term progression that they can accomplish by working together as a guild. These missions are meant to be difficult and challenging to not only unlock, but to accomplish.

Thanks for the official confirmation that you haven’t learned anything from the fractals feedback. I’ll repeat it once more, for the lulz:
Grinding to be able to even access new/interesting content does not constitute a challenge.
Make the actual content challenging, don’t artificially pad it by making a significant portion of your playerbase unable to experience it in a timely fashion. Unless the challenge is supposed to be “will you still be playing this game in 3 months?”.

We would also like to make every guild upgrade line valuable to every guild.

In the future, we plan to continue to add more guild upgrades, as well as continue to add challenging guild missions, as we don’t want guilds to run out of goals and accomplishments they can achieve.

Influence gain scales with number of members and upgrade costs are fixed. You can not possibly balance them for guilds of significantly different sizes. Having tons of upgrades that are expendable or plain not interesting for small guilds was actually a smart design decisionhappy coincidence.

blackhole.7891:

- some filters don’t work at all.
- some filters are missing (light, medium, heavy armour someone?)

Should get fixed eventually.

- it’s slow
- often you can’t access it properly (selling items or transactions just don’t load)

Can’t be fixed, as it’s due to the tp actually being a website.

- you can’t preview items

Supposed to be fixed with the Flame&Frost: Gathering Storm update next week.

- sometimes you want to sell all items of one kind, but only a few get sold and then you have to sell the rest AGAIN. Although the maximum amount was ticked.

Never seen this one.

And I don’t know if this is right, but is it possible that you can’t sell items under the price you get from ordinary traders, but together with the selling fee yo earn LESS than if you sold it at a regular vendor? If this is true, how about raising the minimum price to the proper value AFTER the trading fee has been deducted?

Reasonable change. Takes 10min of developer time and 3 days of QA. There’s more important things to do….

I mean, the game is running for half a year now. How long does it take to fix the auction house, which is always an important part of an MMORPG?

Long. Anet doesn’t have nearly enough coders. And there’s more important stuff for them to fix, like actual gameplay.

…. I had missed my daily quest….

Your own fault entirely. You were close to the rollover and let yourself get distracted.

Do not spam Point Blank Shot.

PBS is the single reason I sigh whenever I see a LB ranger in my PUGs, because half of them will knock monsters out of AoE, and half of those will keep doing it even after being told not to.
Use PBS only:
1) to remove defiant stacks (!)
2) if a monster keeps chasing you and you have already given the melee enough time to grab it again by dodging/walking away from it.
3) possibly to knock a solitary monster so that it ends up next to other(s) for better AoE.

Never use PBS because you want to increase the distance between yourself and a monster for more damage from Long Range Shot. Whatever damage you might gain is lost several times over because the rest of your party misses their attacks.

Also, bring Healing Spring.

In my experience, pugs were skipping by default until mid-december or thereabouts. And the “skip or kill” question arose as a way to make people see killing as a valid option. (Which is why I adopted it.)

Personally, I wouldn’t mind if killing became the default behaviour. But, as others have said, it’s polite and no effort to ask, and occasionally I just want to gtfo, so I’m gonna keep asking…

Have screenshots of the party chat where they agree to you switching to a lowlvl for the last boss. If they kick you, report them.
If they didn’t agree, stay on your main or don’t participate in the run at all.
Silence doesn’t constitute agreement.
(But a good reason to leave the group in any case. Do you really want to play with people who can’t be bothered to type “sure, np” or “no, kitty you” in answer to such a simple and reasonable question?)

Monkey Fritz.9052

Just make all currency-like tokens collectibles that can be sent to the bank account, just as you recently did with the Mystic Coins, and I am happy.

I agree with this. The only people that would have more than 250 would be stocking them up intentionally.

What? Dungeon armor costs up to 330 Tokens/piece, Dungeon 2h Weapons are 390ea, Gifts are 500ea and the Fractal backpiece is 1350 (and then you need 500 more before you can actually use it, as the exotic version is kitty due to lack of upgrade slot).
So if you never stockpile anything, just save up dungeon tokens until you can afford stuff, you need 25 bank slots worst case at the moment. Tokens being collectibles would drop that to 14. Huge step forward, but far from “only affects stockpilers”.

P.S.:
9*2 bank slots for 8 regular dungeon tokens and WvW badges
6 slots for Fractal Relics,
1 for Pristine Fractal Relics:
25 slots total. 14 if you subtract 1 slot ea (the collectible slot).

It’s quite annoying how ANet acknowledged “grinding fractals should not be the only way to acquire ascended equipment”, and then proceeds to add new ascended equipment with grinding dailies as the only way of acquisition…

Yeah, it’s kind of sad how stupid these people are. Making that “perfect” group may pay off if you are going to farm for several hours, but otherwise, you should be picking up any decent player that comes along and start the instance right now.

And then there’s the guys doing it wrong the other way around: Yesterday, I got invites from 3 different p1 speedrun groups after posting “lfg 1+2” in mapchat. Yay for reading comprehension.

Yes, the context menu is eternally buggy. For me, I’d say in about 1/10 cases the context menu actually works. Usually, it shows only “Report”. Sometimes, it displays fully, but has “Invite to Party” instead of “Join Party” for a player already in a party (clicking it will do nothing). Also happens everywhere, not just WvW.

/join and /invite will always work, regardless. Except for the fact that the one not appropriate will, again, do nothing (in particular not give an error message), and you have to know that this means to use the other one.

I have no idea how/if people actually form parties without using the slash commands.

The getting stuck in autorun on picking things up is well known, and happens reproducibly if you try to pick things up while moving. You can break out of it by releasing, pressing, releasing the corresponding movement key. (And avoid the bug by always stopping before picking up bundles.)

Maybe the stuck in reviving is similar. Also, for me it has always happened semi-commonly since release, no noticeable change recently.

haviz.1340

Or just disable javaScripts by default, site still works.

Not if you’re on EU.

PvE mesmers are fine.

And please, please, for the love of Dwayna, do not introduce more PvE/PvP splits.

Overpowered kitty like 3*10s might/illusion from Shattered Strength (which I’m assume the OP is referring to, given the time of post) has no place at all in the game, PvP or PvE. See the ugly history of GW1 for what happens when you split PvE and PvP and the balancing team goes “oh, it’s just PvE, we can leave it horribly overpowered”.

ramorambo.670

pve, where mesmers aren’t good like others classes.

Sorry, but the only response I can think of is “l2p”. Mesmers are widely considered 2nd tier PvE (with warriors, below the op guardians).

as we can see Anet is not capable of doing balanced skills on both sides.

How is SS now unbalanced for PvE?

DPS meters are notorious for being misused by people who have no clue. It would be nice to have a Master of Damage to test builds against, however.

Schnuffles.5369

Sometimes you get stuck with those magic find users

The proper fix to that is not implementing DPS meters, but removing MF. Or making it affect the whole party.

Those scan results show at best only that the website was not cracked by a 3rd party, who simply planted their malware there. If you’re worried about the actual owner (or anyone with shell access) trying to infect visitors, then the only thing those scans prove is that they’re not stupid enough to hand out the malware to those scanning sites. Anyone serious about that stuff would know to whitelist them and to (try to) infect only a fraction of the visitors. Makes them look legit to the majority, and helps to retain a good reputation for as long as possible.

Not implying that there’s anything like that happening, but “I looked/had scanned and it was clean” proves nothing.

EthanLightheart.9168

split pvp /pve skills

HELL NO! That was the worst thing that happened to GW1, and is right after ascended items on my “omg, they’re gonna break the game” scare list. It’s the perfect excuse to not balance PvE at all and just allow stupid overpowered kitty to exist. Ursan, Cry, Shadowform, for example. And because they were PvE-only, it took them a YEAR each to notice they were ruining the game and do something about it.
(Not implying Shadowform is fine now, but it was nerfed at least. And SoS is still unfixed, afaik.)

It’s ridiculous that the game even has a notion of party leader, since they don’t have any extra powers; the only difference to normal party members is this bug.

Raif.9507

Actually it says that the reward will be based on your fractal level, so long as your reward level will be equal to or lower than the level chosen. So anyone higher will get a lower level reward.

Uh, yes? An f30 player shouldn’t get f30 reards for completing f8, but f8 rewards. So the formula should be reward_scale=min(player_scale,difficulty_scale). What were you saying?

penatbater.4710

I think the people who will use this feature the most are guild groups or pre-mades, and not pugs necessarily. pugs will still say “lf2m fotm lvl 20, must have AR”

And that’s how it’s supposed to be, except that a player on 19 (or 18, or 17) will be able to join that pug and progress instead of spending an hour trying to find a team doing 19.

Would you guys please wait for the actual patch before declaring it’s the end of the world? Guilds/friends not being able to do Fractals together is a real issue, and everyone should be glad it is going to be adressed.

Everything about how the January patch is going to affect PUGs is pure speculation. Maybe ANet will actually display people’s real fractal level next to their name in the “join your party in fotm”-dialog. (As well as the level you’re about to enter. Duh.) Easily done, there goes all your whining.
Even if they don’t, they’ve still said that “rewards” will be based on your fractal level. That (to me) obviously means that you can’t get a daily 10/20/30… reward as a lvl 2, no matter what difficulty you play. It may also mean that mob drops will be the same for that f2 player, no matter whether they play difficulty 2 or 42. Personally, I consider that likely, both for balance reasons and for implementation reasons (due to MF, the game already has to take the receiving player into consideration when determining drops). Also:
(Game Update Notes Dec 14, I can’t seem to get the quote= tag to work)

Fixed mob and boss chest loot drops so that they will now scale up appropriately with player scale.

Then there’ll be no reason whatsoever for low level players to pug any higher than they need to find a full group. (Apart from straight trolls, but if you can’t handle them, then you should stop playing MMOs.)

https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/info/news/Game-Update-Notes-December-14-2012/first#post999226

This means we had to tone down some of the kits accordingly, the biggest of which was the Grenade kit.

Incidentally, what he’s trying to say there is “We nerfed all/most kits, and then nerfed grenade #1 by 30% on top of that”. Which explains why it was nerfed 35% in total.

NeryK.5301

I would be interested to know what you replaced grenadier/rifle with. I am currently struggling to find a new build to my liking. Pistol/shield/flamethrower still does not cut it for me, even with life stealing food buffs. What do you think is our best option for sustained dps now ?

I’m still trying to figure out what to replace it with myself.

Elixir-Infused Bombs was fun, particularly since it gives you an excuse to pick the freshly buffed Power Shoes as well.
I tried hard to like the Tool Kit, but (apart from Throw Wench) it feels underwhelming, probably because my fingers are still too slow to use the block effectively in an “oh kitty”-situation.
I never got along with the FT, the only skill I like there is Air Blast. Juggernaut makes that worse by discouraging you from switching out of it.
P/S for dual sigils just makes me miss the CC of my rifle.
TODO: Finding a build that DPSes in P/P (or P/S, hah) and uses utility slots for utility.

Also, I still like Grenadier/Rifle. But then I knew I wanted to play G/R as soon as the skill descriptions came out during beta, and that it turned out to be the top DPS spec was just icing on the cake.

Galen.9042

But there’s no penalty for staying with one kit/weapon, because all the cooldowns are low enough that switching isn’t necessary.

That depends on your definition of “penalty” and “necessary”. You’re still losing dps. Pre-nerf, I ran around with grenadier/rifle, both traited for reduced CD, and would bunderbuss on CD (when it was safe). No reason not to. Similarly, until they implement weapon stats for this, you should aways use toolbelt skills as “drop your kit – use TB skill – pickup the kit again”, to make the TB skill benefit from your weapon stats.

Perma-kit may not make you lose you as much as a single-attunement ele, but you will not be performing optimally.

Silentsins.3726

Well, that and the same handful of “technically minded” people are all congratulating themselves on seeing this ‘nade nerf coming while ignoring why they were so prevalent: turrets are only nominally viable, gadgets are only occasionally slotted, toolkit trait is still bugged, elixir gun is only a role player, flamethrower is still bugged.

Well, yes, indeed, I could see a grenade dmg number nerf coming, because I know ANet has a history of failing to fix the core problems. ;-) Which in this case is the Grenadier trait. +50% damage and 50% more crits on top of the longer range makes it by far the strongest trait in game. Unless that gets fixed, non-Grenadier grenades will be underpowered or Grenadier grenades will be overpowered.

Which is yet another instance of engineers-are-not-actually-versatile, because your trait allocation locks you into a specific build.

Alturys.682

Yes if you want to maximize dps with grenade you are forced into double pistol or pistol/shield. But you will not often use your weapon so we don’t care. It’s a part of grenadeer build… You don’t invest 30 point in explosive to use your primary weapon…

Hell yes, I do. For the awesome CC, not for the mediocre autoattack. That’s what we are complaining about. If all you care about is maximum DPS, then yes, this wasn’t a big nerf. But if you care about utility and support, then either that or your DPS did take a serious hit, because they require different weapon/sigil setups now.

Kontrolle.3514

You seriously exchanged the last rune of lyssa for some minor % of damage?

http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Rune_of_Lyssa

Supply Crate does not trigger the 6th bonus.

However, I’d use an Emerald Orb in the last slot. 14 power + 14 toughness is way better than 5 extra precision.

EvilExE.3460

That can’t be right, if you have 10 players you only send 10 packets (1 to each player) each packet contains positions for 10 players.

That one packet still would be ~10 times as large as if it contained only updates about 1 player. And since the game runs over TCP, nobody actually knows or cares how the data is fitted into packets. To everyone except the OSs involved, it’s just a stream of bytes.

Tulisin.6945

the first time your computer learns about a character, it probably needs to be told more stuff like the skins and dyes, but that data only has to be send once.

I’m not sure about this. What if one of those people swaps weapons or armor?

Then you send a full update about that person again. Which doesn’t matter in the big picture, since even for swap-happy players, that won’t be more than once per minute on average. As compared to the several times per second they move or cast. So it won’t contribute much to the general bandwith consumption. (Until a WvW commander tells their zerg “on 3, everyone swap their armor, then run in and attack, so we lag out the enemy”.)

But it seems as if ANet is not completely doing it this way, otherwise thieves coming out of stealth would appear instantly. Rather than “lagging in” as they do now, because some of their data is retransmitted/reloaded into video ram.

Just because people don’t seem to get it:
Culling has nothing whatsoever to do with whatever your computer or even your internet connection can/could handle. It’s only about the bandwith of the game servers. The problem is that sending out complete information about players scales quadratically:

If the map contains 10 players and the server sends out all information to each of them, that’s 10*10 = 100 updates sent out per time interval.
With 50 players in the map, it’s 50*50=2,500 updates
With 200 players: 40,000 updates.
With 600 players: 360,000 updates.
That’s going to eat a lot of bandwith. So you need to come up with a plan on how to send only the relevant data. That’s culling. You need that.

And the problem is that, so far, ANet’s plan seems to have been “let’s just transmit the closest x players”, which isn’t a particularly good plan.
(And the other problem is that even if you have a better plan, implementing the new plan, and making sure the clients understand it, and there are no glaring bugs with it, and it doesn’t eat your server’s CPU/cache alive, … is a lot of work.)

Of course, there are other things that also create problems: ANet may be transmitting stuff that’s redundant or otherwise not interesting, e.g. armor skin/dye information. Or the fact that even after the information arrives at your computer, it takes a while for the textures to load.
But just trying to send send out all information to everyone is very unlikely to improve things, if it even works at all.

I think defiant stacks are a very well-thought-out and apropriate mechanic. It allows everyone to meaningfully contribute to CC, by simply CCing when the boss needs to be CCed. Party of 5, boss with x/5 defiant stacks, starts big move: everyone uses a CC, boss gets CCed and is back at x/5 defiant stacks. Basically no coordination required. Very pug-friendly. No annoying “’the RNG hates me, all my CC gets resisted”. And if you are in a good team, then you can improve by minimizing x, and/or trying to hit with particularly powerful CCs.

The only thing that needs changing are bosses requiring more CC, because right now it’s a lot easier to dodge attacks than to bother with CC. Even my hammer warrior tends, on most bosses, to think “screw defiant” and just Earthshake on CD for the blast finisher.

You don’t balance for a glass thief and a soldier warrior standing next to each other and eating the same boss attack.

You (try to) balance for a glass thief to get killed if they fail once-badly or twice-barely. That means the thief has the option of gearing for vit/tough and then surviving even a bad fail. It also means that the soldier warrior is in no immediate danger of dying to anything, not contributing enough dps, and probably bored out of their mind. And finally it means that a glass warrior can’t go afk during bossfights anymore, but won’t get oneshotted either, and hopefully can stay engaged in melee for extended periods of time, even if they’re not dodging perfectly.

Of course, that’s the theory.

(Also, agony punishes high health, since you need more healing to get back up. Assuming you don’t get killed by it outright, ofc.)

Necrovore said everything that needed to be said.

One additional tip: since you’re really strapped for cash, you might consider buying lvl 75-79 exotics right now and wearing them as a quick upgrade until you get proper 80s exo gear. (They sell at the TP for roughly the value of the ectos you get from them, so buying now and salvaging when you’re done with them is essentially free.)

Also, I find http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Item_nomenclature highly useful when pondering which eq to get and where (even if the article is by now way too cluttered and needs a cleanup).

IIRC yes, you get the full 60.

Nike.2631

Robert Hrouda.1327

Change is good! We have some interesting changes coming to FoTM involving the ascended rings we hope will resolve the problem at its core. Expect it soon!

I really like how you roll out a powerfully evocative phrase like “problem at its core” and then leave it to our imaginations what that might be without even faintly hinting at what the Developers see as the problem at it’s core.

Well, it’s been kinda obvious to the entire playerbase that the core of The Problem is that ascended items exist at all. So there’s really no need for him to explicitly state that they’re going to remove the ascended rings (and the agony mechanic) entirely.

I’ve seen many pugs fail because people are kiting adds away from the burrows. Don’t do that. Have one person (who ideally knows the spawn locations) targeted, have the rest of the party follow him/her, and have everyone stand/circle-strafe right on top of the burrow. That way, even your run-of-the-mill 3-target melee attack will provide meaningful aoe damage, and the hatchling adds basically cease to exist.

If you additionally can pop a timewarp or similar to kill the Breeders quickly, you shouldn’t have significant trouble even in a lowlvl party without Eles/Engis.

Unless people are running condi dmg builds, in which case you’re out of luck.

shouts and heals do not cap at 5 people example.

That isn’t proof. Does anyone have actual proof? Once?

1. Be a warrior.
2. Trait “Vigorous Shouts” (Grandmaster Tactics)
3. Stand in a Zerg/Orr event and shout something.
4. See your screen fill with green numbers.

Obviously that does not prove that people actually get healed. You’re free to argue it’s just a client-side display bug. But then you’re free to get a group of players to stand in the fire in the mists and write “x” in chat when they get healed (don’t forget to check out 6/6 soldier rune while you’re at it). And hey, it’s the mists, you don’t even need to be/know a lvl 60+ warrior for testing there.

Also, just to be clear, a lot of heals/buffs DO cap at 5. Of course, that’s irrelevant if you’re using the ones that don’t.

For world PvE, AoE is king, and hence I’d suggest having either Grenadier or Coated Bullets. Or possibly Flamethrower/Juggernaut, but I don’t feel comfortable with the FT, so no insights from me on that front.

For dungeon bosses, I feel engineers are not particularly suited to straight single-target dps, and due to the unshakable/defiant mechanic, our amazing CC abilities are also severely hampered. Hence, I’d recommend going utility/support for them, sorry. Grenade spam still does decent dps and stacks a ton of vulnerability for the team, so that’s not a bad thing to run, if you don’t mind the lack of autoattack.

Dungeon trash would be the place to shine for a DPS build, as both AoE and CC are helpful and effective, but who cares about performance on dungeon trash, assuming they’re not skipped outright?

I don’t get how people claim “grenade #1 can’t have autoattack, because it’s gtaoe” or “grenade #1 needs to be turned into a targeted skill, so it can be set to autoattack”. gtaoe skills not being able to be set as autoattack is clearly a (pointless) game engine limitation, and there’s nothing preventing someone with write access to the gw2 source to change it. Well, apart from time/inclination/process/.. but no technical reason.
Grenade #1 being the only gtaoe without cooldown is also irrelevant, as you can set any skill to autoattack, not just the ones without cooldown. (It’s mostly pointless, however, since you can have only one skill in your bar set to autoattack, so you immediately end up having to spam #1 in exchange for auto-casting FGJ or whatever).

Allowing gtaoe to be set as autoattack would clearly have no game balance impact, unless danger of RSI is considered a balancing mechanism.

If “omg i can’t stop attacking” really is a problem, there’s the easy fix of making gtaoes only autoattack (the point under the cursor!) when the player has a target.

So please, everyone, stop begging for the huge grenade nerf called “make #1 autoaim”.