Guild Wars 2

There’s gonna be more raids and fractals, chill guys ^-^

BrickFurious.7169:

Tyler Bearce.3427:

Hi all,

• Keeps will now mark enemy players within their perimeter, for the first 5 minutes, after being flipped.

Will this mark also apply to stealthed players? And if so, will it actually reveal them too, or if they are stealthed will you see the mark on the minimap but not the player?

The ‘Marked’ debuff will apply to a stealthed player, but the player will only be visibly marked on the map while unstealthed. We may set this debuff to also reduce stealth duration, but wanted to get feedback on the basic version first.

Hi all,

The WvW team has been hard at work since the latest round of public testing. Most importantly, we’ve enabled the new and improved Guild Claiming feature for the test. We’ve also reviewed the massive amount of feedback from the previous test and made a large number of changes based on it. These range from large changes like adding health scaling to all objective bosses and updating the rules for rallying off creatures in WvW, to smaller changes like adding map markers for supply depots and rebalancing guards. I’ve included a full changelist below and this week, during the stress test, many of you will get a chance to see all of those changes in action!

Important note: The client you’ll be using to experience the Desert Borderlands map shares a few common backend systems with our normal live servers. Most noticeably, you’ll be able to see your live-game friends list and communicate with your guild in chat. Please note that if you leave any guild for Objective Claiming testing purposes you will also be removed from that guild on your live account.

General WvW Changes

• Overhauled Guild Claiming feature
• New WvW Objective UI can be accessed by clicking on any WvW objective map marker
• Arrow Carts (all types) now require 10 more supply to build.
• Supply camps now auto-upgrade faster.
• Supply depots now are marked on the map.
• Players can no longer rally off of basic creatures in WvW. Only veteran rank or higher.
• Objective bosses now have health scaling based on the number of allied and enemy players in the area.
• Sentries will now mark enemy players on the map for 30 seconds.
• Keeps will now mark enemy players within their perimeter, for the first 5 minutes, after being flipped.
• Shield Generators (all types) have had their range reduced.
• Exotic WvW equipment can now be salvaged. Badge gear yields badges. Tournament ticket gear yields standard exotic salvage materials.

Desert Borderland Changes

• Oasis event now has mapwide announcements and voice overs.
• Skysplitter now attacks all enemy gates, not just outer gates.
• Skysplitter damage reduced.
• Skysplitter has a new animation, updated audio and camera shake while firing.
• Skysplitter now is marked on the map, during the event and while firing.
• Fire Keep lord difficulty somewhat reduced
• Air Keep lord difficulty somewhat increased
• Tower and Keep guard damage slightly decreased.
• Some Tower and Keep guards have had their CC durations reduced.
• Gate guard aggro range increased.
• Range to activate the Dolyak Protected Caravan buff increased.
• Certain very large capture points have had their radius reduced.
• Flame’s Embrace shrine bonus now grants 40% increased movement speed, instead of reducing burning duration. It still also grants immunity to lava damage.
• The north supply camp guards repositioned.
• Fire, Earth and Air shrine blessings have been converted into a single blessing that just increased movement speed by 40%.
• The objective walls that only act to block shortcuts have had their health significantly reduced.
• The north keep’s telepads now put a short duration debuff on players that prevents rapidly teleporting back and forth.
• Vista cinematics have been made smoother.
• Repositioned guards at shrines.
• Reduced the number of creatures on the map.
• Added more ranger pets to the map.
• Reduced the number of air turrets.
• Reduced the knockback distance of the air turret attack.
• Rearranged some jump pads.
• Keeps now have interior supply depots.
• Terrain changed in a few places that will open up additional paths.
• Tower cannons repositioned.
• Fire Keep mortars repositioned.
• Champion wyvern reduced to elite rank.
• Improved shrine tooltips.
• The Additional Guards upgrade will now also post guards outside breakable walls.
• Disabled Siegerazor until we can solve his incorrect team issues.
• Rebalanced the frequency of Oasis event dinosaurs spawning and the number of Power Cores required to turn-in.
• Oasis Power Cores will now ping the map when a new dinosaur spawns, or a player picks one up.
• Oasis Power Cores will now clean up properly after the event completes.
• Earth Keep rock maze control console cooldown increased.
• Earth Keep interior rock maze reworked to be less obstructive when only allied players are present. Half of the rock walls stay hidden until enemies show up.
• Nights are less dark.

Bug Fixes

• Fixed a bug where life siphon damage was hitting object that normally can’t be hit.
• Fixed some lava locations that weren’t properly damaging players.
• Fixed a bug that caused camp guards to respawn faster than intended.
• Fixed a bug where the Inferno Transform buff would linger after leaving the transform.
• Fixed a number of terrain exploits.
• Further protected against the elusive untargetable gate/wall bug.
• Fixed a bug where wood walls could not be repaired.
• Fixed a bug where waypoints were available for a few seconds between repel events.
• Fixed a bug where patrols wouldn’t respawn.
• Fixed a bug where supply depots sometimes wouldn’t update properly when empty.
• Fixed a bug where the Fire Keep could sometimes become randomly contested.

We’ve given veteran players a free character slot, and as others have pointed out, a beta test is not a demo or a preview. If you’re unsure about purchasing Heart of Thorns, consider reviewing our extensive Heart of Thorns website for a great deal of information, then make the decision that is right for you.

queicherius.2563:

Thanks for all the mentions, it’s awesome to know that people like and use the site. Keeps the motivation going to push further!

Oh man, I just noticed the share character function.

Gonna make all my guildies use this to share builds. We’ve been looking for this for awhile — massive thanks!

I know it seems like we’ve forgotten about the APIs from time to time, but I promise we haven’t. Some of this data is just a real adventure to get into usable form that we can expose!

From a design perspective, Mesmers are more about providing fields and less about activating them. It’s not just blast finishers, Mesmers lack reliable sources of many other finishers too. Necromancers fill a similar role. By contrast you might notice that Warriors have lots of finishers but not many fields.

We don’t always get this balance right (and I think there is a different discussion to be had about when we don’t) but I hope that clarifies what we were going for in the case of Mesmers.

Let me clarify:

Since the 6/23 release, dozens upon dozens of players have sent me bugs, exploits, suggestions – etc. This particular group of players decided to put their feedback into a document that they could all edit and then shoot over to me to take a look at. It has been particularly helpful in for nailing down a number of balance affecting bugs, similar to the comprehensive lists that have popped up in a number of the profession forums.

So, to be very clear: this list is neither written nor maintained by myself or anyone else at ArenaNet. It is a list of issues (bugs and balance) that players would like to see addressed.

Randulf.7614:

Any indication on group size required for capture mission?

Will they have to be in the guild to help?

We’re still debating minimum size, you can see a lot of discussion down in the guild CDI thread that’s helping us inform some of those decisions.

And no – you don’t need people to be in your guild to help you capture it. Bring friendly guilds to help you out, ask nicely in Lion’s Arch, etc.

Lord.4270:

Hi,

We are a guild of 3 guys . We love WWW.
With Guild halls , we will have to do guild missions.

So why we have to do puzzle jump and things like this , when in this game we just love killing people on the battlefield !

Why can t we play as we want .. ??

HoT will include a solution for this for both guilds that are WvW, and PvP oriented that want to build and expand their Guild Halls and need the favor generated by guild missions. Same goes for guilds that have a mix of players interested in all three. More info down the road a bit on how this will work once we’ve got it a little more solid on our end.

Edited to add: Everyone will have to do the actual mission to capture the guild hall once per hall though no matter what. If your group online is too small, you’ll need to invite friends (or pay/beg/sing-songs-to-woo peeps in Lion’s Arch!) to come with you and help you claim the guild hall to own one. Or you could always grow your guild

Let’s be clear, this version of condition stacking and condi builds being viable in all games modes is a large part of our goal. We just want to make sure we don’t create imbalances that actually make the game less fun. Don’t expect huge balance swings, but rather our balance goal has always been to make more small adjustments.

Gotejjeken.1267:

Please, for a love of whatever of the GW God’s you choose…get a test server. It is just unacceptable to me personally to see an entire game get unbalanced and the community have to play the waiting game until things are corrected.

This happens, because as bright as the people balancing things are, they simply cannot predict what is going to happen in a mass environment with live players. Can run all the algorithms in the world and that won’t stop a few players from devising a way to totally ruin the game.

Also, I don’t think we should pin this on conditions being too strong. I think everything is too strong.

I understand that this would be helpful but in the absence of a test server, which is our current situation, we will do as much as we can as fast as we can. We made some changes today and more will be coming as the week goes on. After that our intention is to make balance and bug fix changes to this stuff every couple of weeks leading up to the release of HoT.

Also, not everything is too strong, just all forms of damage.

Jon

Daegony.3604:

JonPeters.5630:

Cheshire.8761:

Are you going to address how you forced characters to train into builds using their hero points without their consent? :o

Why not. Basically there were two options, both with a large number of edge cases.

1) We wipe your stuff and let you respec as you see fit. Because so much had changed this was our initial plan. Here are problems it ran into.

• People return from a long hiatus and don’t remember what they were running
• People log in and the first thing they have to do before they can play is learn both the new unlocking system and the new build system.

2) We look at what you had equipped and unlock the necessary skills and traits to re-equip you. Here were some discussions points around that:

• We might give you stuff you don’t want
• at least this won’t matter for lvl 80s if we make all the unlocks possible by just reaching lvl 80.

There is a third option which I’m sure you will bring up.
3) let players choose
Here are some reasons we did not go with that:

• Its twice the work
• Its actually more than twice the work because it would have required temporarily saving both options until you choose which is more complex technical work.
• People who were unlikely to understand or want to explore the new system were going to be potentially more confused by the choice.

At the end of the day we wanted to ship this build so we had to decide. Based on instinct we erred on the side of helping people we thought would be more overwhelmed by the opposite choice, and I would make that choice again because it has less edge cases, impacts more expert users, and leans towards over unlocking for free to benefit most of the edge cases anyway.

Hope this info helps you understand our process a bit more.

Thanks,

Jon

Does it break anything if you just add a “refund hero points” button? That way you can just let the game re-build your choices and if your not satisfied, just refund the points and assign them to what you need/want. Just a suggestion anyway =D

It actually breaks everything. The point of a system with more points that points to spend is to allow players to both eventually unlock everything and to bank for future unlocks. If you take a system like that and allow people to refund in it you break both of these fundamental reasons for the system existing. There are two ways to go with any system that has points spent.

1) Let people continue to earn and continue to progress
2) Limit the amount people can progress or spec and make a refund system.

This new system actually contains aspects of both of these. On the side of unlocking we went with a “keep making progress” system where players would eventually get all of the things they want and more, the more they played. We felt like for unlocks this is a better system because it gives people more to unlock and it doesn’t put pressure on a refund system to make the most basic functionality of having stuff work.

On the build side of things (and this is a general principle of GW2) we went with a make choices and refund system. The choices being which skills, specs and traits you select and the respec process being basically free once everything is unlocked.

Jon

Just getting these out there so we know we are all in agreement:

1) Conditions seem a bit strong
2) World bosses are currently too easy
3) There are some bugged skills and traits
4) There are some overpowered builds

We won’t fix it all at once but these are four large topics we are talking about. In the meantime keep the feedback and bug reports coming, and I guess farm up some world bosses. We are dedicating time towards these issues and are intending to resolve them as quickly as possible. As we have said before, the live environment differs too greatly from anything we can reliably simulate internally so big changes like today’s build will cause things to sometimes change at an alarming rateTM.

Thanks for your patience,

Jon

Bug Fixes:

General

• Fixed a bug in which received whispers were not displaying properly in the chat window.
• Seraph guard: Removed the conversation option that points to profession trainers, as they no longer exist.
• Fixed a bug that caused bandit crests to drop at inappropriate rates from Mordremoth’s champion during the Breach events.
• Fixed a crash that occurred in PvP when attempting to spectate other players.
• Minor traits will no longer appear locked when logging in to PvP for the first time after the update.

Professions

Guardian

• Glacial Heart: Added a skill fact for reduced recharge. Fixed a bug so that this will correctly apply the reduced recharge to hammer skills.

Mesmer

• Maim the Disillusioned: Reduced the torment from 2 stacks for 6 seconds to 1 stack for 6 seconds.

Necromancer

• Signets of Suffering: This trait will now only grant might when a signet is successfully cast.

Ranger

• Instinctive Reaction: Added a health-threshold skill fact.

Thief

• Don’t Stop: This trait no longer grants stability when revealed is applied.
• Backstab: This will now only apply revealed when you hit a foe.
• No Quarter: Instead of extending the duration of a single stack of fury, this trait will now apply its own stacks of fury to avoid allowing fury to reach unintended durations.

Warrior

• Berserker’s Power: You are now required to hit with the burst skill. This will trigger in the same way as the trait Cleansing Ire.

There’s a new threat in Lion’s Arch. While it’s not as dangerous as Scarlet Briar and the Breachmaker, brave Lion’s Arch residents still intend to defend their beautifully rebuilt city against this latest invasion.

Head to Lion’s Arch and look for Turl Sharptooth. He’ll explain what’s going on and how you can help. After talking to Turl, head back to this thread and share your tips on how to rid Lion’s Arch of its latest, unfortunate infestation.

Bountiful Theft has its own stealing table/order. We’re looking into the possibility of changing it to function similarly to the conversions, but there’s also a chance that we move to “first-in-last-out” in the future as well. The big thing is that we always want to assure benefit, so that you don’t steal the tail-end of swiftness for 0.5 seconds (also, it’s preferable for balance that we don’t let the trait steal minutes worth of specific boons). Here’s the order, Resistance and Quickness included:

Aegis
Stability
Protection
Regeneration
Retaliation
Fury
Swiftness
Might
Resistance
Quickness
Vigor (since the trait already gives you this one)

Flanking Strikes still uses the first in last out system and won’t be random, since it’s not a conversion.

Hope this helps,
-Karl

Edit: Quickness, not Slow! :P

Divine Don.9752:

I ended up doing what you recommended. Thanks.

Any ETA on /v2/characters/:id/equipment? No rush, with school and work the site that I’m creating won’t be done for another 3-4 months; I would just like a status on how things are coming along so I can adjust my schedule.

Thanks again,

https://github.com/arenanet/api-cdi/pull/36

We should be able to turn it on sometime after the next patch hits, IIRC.

Strategist.6132:

It’s been a month ago! Sorry for bumping this post:P I was just wondering: What is the state of the Skills and Trait API?

I’ve already seen it being mentioned before but I really think the following API could be useful:

- Account/PvP/ where you can gather statistics on the matches won and against / with who. This way people could check on their previous matches and for example check out other players statistics and things. Maybe this would also be a good way to upgrade PvP with a new better-looking leaderboard?

I am not sure how hard it is though but I really think it would improve the community!

RE: /v2/skills what progress there is can be tracked here: https://github.com/arenanet/api-cdi/pull/5

It’s slowed down some as skills/traits are very complicated to represent and we’ve been focusing on things that can ship sooner and at a higher quality level.

RE: PVP endpoint. This is something we’re looking at soon, some of the data we’d want to expose already exists. A PR w/ a suggested format & data you’re interested in would be a great help in terms of giving some direction on what that API could look like.

digitalruse.9085:

Can you confirm some of the questions about how the projectile finisher will work? The livestream made a point of talking about deploying the light field and condi cleansing, but given the way projectile finishers currently work it relies on the projectile making contact with a target. Or, is Mortar Kit 1 an AoE projectile so as long as it hits a field the finisher fires?

As long as the projectile lands in the field or goes through it will give the combo pop-up – it doesn’t have to hit the target.