Guild Wars 2

CherryChiicake.1378:

I wish the marionette was staying instead of the wurms!

This. This right here.

“There will be a limit of 10,000 daily and 5,000 monthly achievement points” (source)

Thank you, ANet, for this. Above all else in this patch, thank you for this. If you don’t understand why this matters so much, I’ll tell you:

- Once I have 10k daily AP and 5k monthly AP, I can do monthlies/dailies leisurely without feeling like my AP is becoming irrelevant if I don’t grind more
- It gives players like me a goal to work towards. I will now push to max those boundaries like never before!
- It makes the permanent achievements more valuable to your overall AP, reducing the impact of daily/monthly AP.

This is awesome. Best patch ever. This is without a doubt the best thing I’ve read in any blog post yet. You guys rock.

goes to throw money at the gemstore now

JonPeters.5630:

We are trying to take steps to address some of the dominance of Berserker/DPS players. More info next week, I think.

Jon

The dominance of Berserker/DPS is because of the WEAKNESS of other archetypes, not the strength of Berserker/DPS. So long as you and the rest of the balance team remain cognizant of that, whatever changes you make will be good. We do want condition builds to be good in PvE. We also would like you to completely get rid of Defiant stacks and use some other means of control reduction (give bosses stability when they use a skill or something, so that there is counterplay and we can remove the stability to CC them, for instance) so that control builds like Hammer Guardian/Warrior are useful in PvE. These sorts of changes will be welcome and wonderful for the PvE meta, and will also not hurt the direct damage players, which is good and helps keep things paced appropriately for speed clears.

The biggest change I think that can help condition damage dealers in PvE is to, in general, reduce the HP of enemy mobs and increase their Toughness. In this way, condition damage does greater percent damage over time, whereas if you tailor the enemy stats appropriately direct damage percent damage over time will be unchanged. This would be an optimal approach that helps all schools of thought.

But please, whatever you do, don’t nerf Berserker/DPS builds heavily! If you do that, you just slow down the game’s action, and you will alienate and damage countless players, and shoot yourself in the foot.

These achievements are arguably worth the 50 in terms of time investment to achieve them. Honestly, they could even be worth more and it’d be fine; getting 50/50 HoM points is a serious accomplishment.

And for the record, anyone can still get them, just go hop over to GW1 and work on the HoM.

This is one of the most disappointing things I have ever read regarding GW2.

The legendary weapons and precursor collections are some of the most impressive and greatest experiences I have had in-game, and I was looking forward to the rest of the Heart of Thorns legendaries more than anything else in Heart of Thorns. We were promised that we will get new legendary weapons for every single land weapon types, and that was a major part of why I wanted to get and participate in Heart of Thorns. With that loss, I lose a major part of what I was excited about with this expansion, and my love for this great game dwindles a great deal.

This is a bad business decision.

When my company has problems meeting deadlines and getting things done, we hire more people. We don’t cut out the exciting projects that people were excited about. Do you know how many people have been sad about the dungeons team getting absorbed by the LW team oh so long ago? A great deal. I read thousands of posts a month on multiple community outlets from unique players who tell me that they loved dungeons and miss them. You are making that exact same mistake here, except now it affects literally every player in the game.

The work of the legendary/precursor team is something to be commemorated.

You guys worked really hard, and as sorry I am for myself and my fellow players that we will not get what we were promised for these legendaries, I am sad for you. You poured your hearts and souls into this content, and despite the minor flaws along the way, you have made something great. You deserve all the recognition for this achievement, and I wish nothing more than that you could finish the job, get a few more people on your team, and move it along quick enough that the current game director would support it moving forward.

I want LW season 3 very much, but not enough that these 6 developers have to stop working the new legendary weapons to get it. I want what I bought Heart of Thorns for. Thank you.

John Smith.4610:

Is the intention to deincentivize dungeons
Yes

This is horrible, and I can speak for the dungeon community at large when I say that no one is happy about it.

ANet is quick to fix exploits. ANet is, however, very slow to fix anything that is a glitch that hurts the players, which we might call an exploit in favor of the enemies. Fractals has many of these, and they need to be addressed.

• Snowblind Fractal: The boss can die while on the ledge where he cannot be reached, meaning his loot is stuck up there.
• Snowblind Fractal: While running to the end boss from the elemental event, if a class uses a teleport skill while hugging the right wall, they have a very high chance of getting stuck inside of the wall and being unable to continue with the group (mobs cannot kill them). They have to leave the instance and come back to continue.
• Snowblind fractal: Activating the flag to get late access into the last boss fight will leave a player stuck in ice until they free themselves.
• Swamp Fractal: Mossman will only ever activate his Wolf Form transformation at 25% if you initiate the fractal, go back to the hub, and then get the fractal again. He will never transform if it is the first time your group is in the Swamp fractal.
• Swamp Fractal: Bloomhunger’s agony-inflicting red circles do not show up on the areas of the floor that are in shallow water.
• Grawl Fractal: In the hallway with the rolling boulders, the veteran vampire bats will only ever spawn if you initiate the fractal, go back to the hub, and then get the fractal again. They never appear otherwise.
• Dredge Fractal: If you get this fractal and then go back to hub and then get this fractal again, the enemies do not despawn and there are double present.
• Dredge Fractal: When the Dredge jump out of the car at the last event before the boss, they are invulnerable and stand around doing nothing for multiple seconds after they have landed on the ground.
• Asuran Fractal: Harpies go invulnerable frequently while shooting you; the only way to fix this is to get on the same platform as the harpy, which puts you at danger and nullifies many long-range builds in the process.
• Asuran Fractal: Many times when you fall, you will not get downed, you will be automatically killed, causing armor damage.
• Asuran Fractal: There are locations where you can fall and you won’t be teleported / downed, you will just fall forever into nowhere.
• Cliffside Fractal: Events do not properly reset to their pre-start state when the party wipes; they will continue spawning the same mobs. They should reset to the state where only a few mobs exist, and only if they die do new mobs spawn.
• Cliffside Fractal: If you are at the stage where you need to break the seals on both arms, you can kill the initial group on both sides to have large groups spawn on both sides. If you now exit to the hub, restart, and get to Cliffside again, the large groups will still be there.
• Cliffside Fractal: Chanters during the final boss encounter often aren’t dazed and can attack you while the players are locked out of all skills and dazed.
• Cliffside Fractal: The first time you engage the final boss, he will begin spawning the agony-inflicting wells before the players can react while their skills are disabled and they are dazed.
• Cliffside Fractal: At the chest seal event when the novices point at the players, they will often become invulnerable to players if attacked while pointing, and can stay invulnerable for several seconds after they begin engaging and attacking the players.
• Cliffside Fractal: The final boss can still be made to drop his hammer repeatedly even if the players are disabled, allowing players to power through the seals without having to dps the boss significantly.
• Underwater Fractal: A Krait at the first cage has a very high chance of pathing into the ceiling and getting stuck there.
• Urban Fractal: There is a bug (I think if you roll ascalon repeatedly and don’t do it the first couple of times) where the veteran mobs won’t follow your group.
• Urban Fractal: Unless the entire team wipes, the veteran mobs that follow you will not respawn. If surviving members get out of combat and then the remaining players revive, the mobs do not revive as well.
• Solid Ocean Fractal: The tentacles, when doing their knockback sweep attack, do not have red circles indicating their AOE (this is particularly relevant because their actual aoe is larger than their physical model’s aoe).
• Solid Ocean Fractal: The Irukandji still damage, stun, and poison players even if they die during their stealth duration.
• Solid Ocean Fractal: The tentacles continue casting their skills if they were initiated before they died. These attacks cannot be blinded because they get all their conditions removed when they ‘die’.
• Solid Ocean Fractal: Dead pets can still be targeted by the Jade Maw.

If you know of any more I’ve missed, please let me know. I’d like to keep this list up-to-date so that the developers can actually fix things and do something helpful for the players. Cheers!

Kryptonite.9376:

… there’s no reason to be re-exploring the open world on an alt since it’s no fun and zones are all dead.

This is where your entire post breaks down. The assumptions that every zone is dead and that no one could conceivably enjoy single player / small-scale multi player are wrong.

We had events in GW1 where frogs talked to us, rabbits sold us booze, we gambled with Canthans, we stood in rings for hours on end to win tokens and chat, we ran around in circles as beetles, and so much more. ANet has 99% of its fans because it makes crazy, off-the-wall, amazing, and totally irrelevant content like this. The super adventure box might not be for you, but ANet is giving enjoyable content for all walks of life; you will still get your exciting real-tyrian patches, but thankfully ANet also gives crazies like myself patches that include things like the super adventure box.

If there were a “Donate Gems to expanding the Super Adventure Box” option in the gem store with absolutely nothing else attached to it, you best believe I’d send them swaths of money.

I pray ANet never stops doing this sort of thing (and expanding on it).

BaconCatTheGreasy.9542:

We always, ALWAYS win (the one time we didn’t was because of an exploit!) and as such we are always Green. This makes WvW Map completion very difficult to get.

First-World Tyrian Problems at its finest.

thewaterguy.4796:

Please give me one objective proven reason as to why I am wrong, […]

It would (at least) double the development and maintenance time of raids, and inhibit their ability to deliver new raids and raid wings in a schedule that meets their current intent. In other words, there’s no way they can support another raid mode without reducing the amount of content they output in a year.

GM Awesomeness.8619:

As for refunds: if you’ve had these account-bound items for ages, we won’t be doing refunds because you’ve already derived substantial benefit. If, however, you bought them more recently, we’re doing refunds on a case-by-case basis.

I appreciate the response, but respectfully contend that I don’t think this is an appropriate stance for customer support to take. When infinite gathering tools became account bound, players were able to get complete refunds for the extras that they did not need any longer regardless of time purchased. Additionally, when the wardrobe went live players were able to get complete refunds for any town clothes previously purchased regardless of time purchased. This situation is no different. Players’ gem store items become obsolete with the acquisition of this new functionality, and their permanent items that are no longer useful should be refunded regardless of time purchased. Seriously, with an account bound bag slot the best course of action regarding extra items like Salvage-o-Matics is to destroy them. That feels horrible and should not be something you guys proliferate.

Please reconsider your stance.

This kind of complaint thread is why we can’t have nice things.

I think this is a good thing because what will matter more in a treb / counter-treb situation is how well your treb user can hit the other, not how big a group they had (and thus how many swirling winds or guardian bubbles they could employ). This rewards good play, and rewards large group size less, and thus is a step in the right direction.

Currencies that have no value beyond being used as currencies should never be items that take up inventory space. That means the following should absolutely appear in the wallet:

• WvW Claim Tickets
• Geodes
• Bandit Crests
• Black Lion Ticket Scraps
• Bauble
• Bauble Bubble
• Queen’s Gauntlet Entrance Ticket

So forth. Obviously, it make sense to split up the Wallet possibly into multiple tabs or something to distinguish between temporary or location-dependent currencies, dungeon currencies, and so forth. I would imagine the division as follows:

• Basic
  • Coin
  • Gems
  • Karma
  • Transmutation Charges
  • Laurels
• Specialty
  • Guild Commendations
  • Badges of Honor
  • WvW Claim Ticket
  • Black Lion Ticket Scrap
• Dungeon
  • Ascalonian Tears
  • Seals of Beetletun
  • Deadly Blooms
  • Manifestos of the Moletariate
  • Flame Legion Charr Carvings
  • Symbols of Koda
  • Knowledge Crystals
  • Shards of Zhaitan
  • Fractal Relics
• Tyria
  • Geodes
  • Bandit Crests
• Temporary
  • Bauble
  • Bauble Bubble
  • Queen’s Gauntlet Entrance Tickets

I think this would make the most sense.

I don’t think RNG chests or what-not or gem store minis are a cheap tactic. They aren’t “preying” on people, they are simply doing what is statistically most profitable in order to maximize their ability to continue to hire and keep themselves churning out great content. It is your money, and you can put your money where your mouth is. I don’t buy RNG chests, but I buy permanent convenience items like the molten pick. I don’t buy RNG chests for skins, I buy skins that are guaranteed and for 600 gems on the store. If you can’t control yourself and buy $400 of gems for RNG chests and don’t get what you want, you need to seek help outside of the game, not blame ANet for your own mistakes.

I applaud their approach, I just hope they don’t forget about people like me. I would’ve spent 1200 gems on a fused weapon skin, but with them locked in RNG chests, I would never get one. I spend my money in accordance with that, and I think it’s the best way we can give ANet feedback.

I, fortunately, was not banned, but I’m terrified. I don’t think I’ve done anything exploitative or banworthy, but then again, I can’t be sure that my normal gameplay doesn’t include something banworthy in the eyes of ANet.

Some disclosure and transparency with whatever the ban was, now that it has been closed, would be greatly appreciated. If we don’t know the details of the exploit, there’s a huge feeling that anyone could get banned at any time without their knowing something they did was wrong.

I’m okay with reducing the gold output of dungeons, but I’m not okay with reducing the value of playing dungeons. Replace parts of the gold with T6 materials, lodestones, or something that matters to someone and can be sold to recoup some of the value. Don’t just take away the gold and give it nothing in return. A number of people play dungeons because they’re valuable even in spite of how old and unsupported they are; reducing their value will move those people elsewhere and that’s not good.

This is, currently, one of the biggest problems with underwater combat. We cannot get waterbreathers above green rarity, which reduces our stats by a non-negligible value. Furthermore, half of the stat combinations aren’t even available for waterbreathers. Right now, the only L80 green waterbreathers come in Rabid for Light and Heavy users, and Soldier’s for Medium armor. That’s pretty limited, and generally fairly useless for most classes.

It’d be really helpful for underwater combat at large if we could get exotic waterbreathers at least so that we can gear up appropriately for underwater combat. Even if we had to craft them, that’d be acceptable.

P.S. Ascended Waterbreathers would be nice, too, but I’m not holding my breath for that any time soon.

Great! More gold sinks in WvW with no increased monetary rewards! Just what we needed!

Things that should be in material storage:

• Legendary Insights
• Golden Fractal Relics
• Milling Basin
• Copper Doubloon
• Silver Doubloon
• Gold Doubloon
• Platinum Doubloon
• Amalgamated Gemstone
• Shimmering Crystal
• Tenebrous Crystal
• Blade Shard
• +1 Agony Infusions
• Crystalline Bottles (…and other scribe base materials from the vendor)
• Bottle of Elonian Wine
• Philosopher’s Stones
• Mystic Crystals
• Chak Eggs
• Reclaimed Metal Plates
• Black Lion Tickets
• Black Lion Ticket Scraps
• Blood Ruby
• Petrified Wood

I hate Dredge, but I do love this:

“NO NO NO! We should go to the armory—NO NO NO—NO NO NO! We should go to the armory. That’s where Zadorojny is likely to—NO NO NO—NO NO NO!”

You’re correct, Paul, except that the cost/reward for this specific item is crazily out of whack. It costs roughly 60-70s to make 1 of these items, whereas the 30 minute equivalent item is about 3.5s per.

So we have this 500/500 achievement that has 14 tiers and so on, yet it’s not a title even though it seems perfectly suited to be one. Why not? Can you guys make it a title so that we can show off that we’re super awesome and amazing and have grinded fractals until our eyes bleed?

Yeah, this is incredibly aggressive and basically makes it impossible to maintain participation unless the enemies literally respawn and throw themselves at your zerg one at a time.

Burtnik.5218:

Sword fix. When? Its been over 2 months. How long are we supposed to wait for this gamebreaking bug?

It’s not even close to a game-breaking bug. All of the sword skills were carefully tuned based on this bug and they’ll have to rebalance it once they do fix it; you won’t suddenly get much stronger.

Be the better man and report them. Put it in ANet support’s hands.

Tasao.4623:

This is just flat out terrible. Core gameplay should NOT be gated behind a grind. Some of us play 9+ characters. You want to shut cosmetics behind grinds? You want to shut toys and vanity items behind grinds? You want to shut proportionate rewards behind grinds? Sure. Cool.
But it’s just plain bad design to shut core gameplay for the expansion specs out behind a long grind.

If you can unlock all the traits and skills in short order, that’s fine. It’s ok for the special skins to then take another 200+ points to unlock. But people are going to despise running around for the first week with a half-finished traitline and missing abilities.

Feeling forced to dash off into the jungle and skip content and rush hero points so I can fill out my trait line is going to directly reduce my desire to play GW2. When I think “I feel like playing my Mesmer now that Chronomancer is available” and then remember I need 100+ more points to unlock Chronomancer abilities and traits and the only way to get those points is to grind WvW or to skip jungle content in favor of focusing on hero challenges, I may well just not bother. Because this issue won’t just come up for Chronomancer. It’ll come up for Reaper, and Daredevil, and Berserker, and Tempest. It’ll come up for every single spec.

This is an incredibly alt-unfriendly design decision.

Considering the number of people who have told me I am a terrible forum specialist because I disagree with ANet’s choice to make elite specializations so expensive, I am just going to quote, +1, and emphasize this post here. This post perfectly reflects how I feel in the matter.

This thread makes me sad.

• You can play and beat any content in the game using any build you want. (Including even raids)
• The ‘meta’ is decided by what minimizes risks and maximizes efficiency while still doing as much damage as possible, and varies wildly for different content.
• If you play with a guild group, you can play whatever you want wherever you want so long as they’re aware and cool with it (and if you find casual groups, they will be).
• This exact same thing happened in GW1 (DwG / Trenchway / Ursanway / etc) and happens in every other team game. People want to be efficient.

Far more players buy keys with gems than you give them credit for.

As a player around the top 500 NA in achievement points, I absolutely agree that dailies/monthlies shouldn’t count for achievement score. Dailies and monthlies pollute the achievement score with points that really don’t say anything about one’s achievements, but speak more to the volume of hours spent in-game.

They definitely care about all of the dungeons. Notice that Rob didn’t say “Time invested doesn’t matter at all”, he just remarked that he feels that dungeon difficulty matters more than dungeon time investment. Note this key statement of his:

Robert Hrouda.1327:

My feelings towards Arah vs AC rewarding is of course that there is an imbalance due to time that is fairly steep, but rewards shouldn’t be based solely on time, but also on difficulty.

See how he clearly denotes his understanding of the imbalance in Arah vs. AC? That’s the most extreme example, of course, but I’m sure he’s aware that dungeons like CoE are leaps and bounds more difficult than AC, and also more time-consuming, and thus deserving of better rewards. These tweaks will be present in future, as-of-yet undetermined, patches for sure.

thewaterguy.4796:

I get your point in theory, except…I believe that you are exaggerating, how would it double the development time exactly?

There are a lot of moving parts to a system like this. They’d have to design the alternative mode(s) to be sufficiently rewarding without impeding on the unique rewards of the current mode, they’d have to tailor/rebalance their already very specifically made bosses to still work with fewer/adjusted mechanics, there’s a lot of base code necessary to support new mode(s), they’d have to change the GUIs to support the new mode(s), this (legitimately) multiplies the QA time on literally every change that goes out related to raids by the number of new modes… There are a lot of things to consider. Even if the number doesn’t come to exactly +100% per mode, it’s very clearly enough to impact their release cadence for new content, and that’s bad for GW2 overall.

Zikory.6871:

I’m sorry but personally I find that video and speech embarrassing. I could understand how SoR would find it inspirational but to every other server it looks like a try hard kitten. I mean you say your community is great but your so called leader has to resort to flaming other servers in order to pump up your players.

Everyone is impressed with SoR, they have done a great job but your guys look pathetic constantly chest thumping at every turn. At least JQ had some humility when they were winning (excluding a few forum warriors).

GG SoR. Let us know when Indo has a more creative speech that wasn’t the bullet points of every match up thread we have.

I’m quoting this post because that’s exactly what the OP says to me, too, as someone not on any of the top three servers. Furthermore, I remember back in the day when we faced #1 JQ and back when we faced #4 SoR, and I always felt that JQ was a more honorable server with better attitudes than the majority of SoR. I’d love to fight JQ again, but I couldn’t say the same about SoR.

But really, quit the chest thumping. You take your server’s namesake and rub his memory in the mud every time you do it.

As cute as the bobblehead thing is, this brings up an interesting point.

I was really excited for today because it not only was April fools day, but it fell on a typical release day. I was hoping for something really exciting because last year we received the Super Adventure Box. Maybe it would come back for a day and we could play! Maybe something else equally as awesome would show up!

The problem? I got myself excited and hopeful. It’s my own fault, really.

Now we’ve got bobbleheads and I can’t help but be disappointed even if it is cute. I was expecting something super awesome. I honestly just wanted to communicate to ANet developers via this thread that SAB set the bar really high, and bobbleheads just didn’t cut it. Maybe next year you’ll do something awesome again.

Cheers.

I would sacrifice gold to the TP taxes to acquire Fused weapon skins, I would spend gems in the gem store if they were listed like Wintersday weapons, but I will not purchase keys for an RNG chance to acquire them. If I am spending my money on something, I’ll spend it on something I know I am getting.

calyx.9086:

Exactly. I think the people who complain about this are unemployed and have no income and instead spend 40+ hours a week in-game. Which, btw, is fine, they have ample playtime to earn gold and exchange for gems to purchase that armor.

I make more money in a month than a significant portion of the American population makes in a year, and I still think it’s crap that every armor set is in the gem store. There’s no prestige or sentimental attachment to anything if I throw my credit card at it (or if I grind easy content for gold to get it). I want to work for some of the new stuff that comes out in ways that demonstrate mastery of the game or at least involve playing a video game with my friends with goals besides earning gold.

Excuse me for wanting to play a video game and do some cool stuff to acquire gear.

This is my biggest gripe about this living story.

I killed the five champion types, but I didn’t get awarded any achievement credit for it. The reason is because EVERY GROUP has to succeed in your lane in phase 2 in order for credit to be given. So these achievements do not depend on your ability to succeed, they depend on other people. This means that they can be griefed, and this means that these achievements are simply impossible if you get even a couple unskilled players in your lane who ruin a power regulator phase.

This is bad design. An achievement should never depend on someone other than the player themselves doing something. Maybe a small group effort, at most, like the dungeon achievements from the Aetherblade and Molten Facility dungeons, but not something open world that can be griefed like this. This is totally uncool, and I implore others who share my distaste for this style of achievement progress to post here for ANet’s feedback.

I will remark that other than the poor achievement progression structure, I find this one of the best living story segments I’ve ever participated in. I absolutely love the fight, and I love that there is room for personal skill in phase 2.

Cheers.