Guild Wars 2

1. Guild halls. Heck, just take pieces of maps you already have and throw some NPCs in there and call it a day.

2. Guild instances. Instance of a map for your guild so you can do tequatl or guild missions without interference, if your guild/alliance is big enough and that is what you wish. Only one instance can be active at a time and they should be relatively expensive or time gated so specialized instances are a special event, not the norm.

3. Recruiting channel or LFG recruiting section.

Posting again because it’s been a week without an invite or any contact at all. Just want to make sure my post wasn’t accidentally skipped.

Signing up!
Role: Student
Area: Fractals
Server: Stormbluff Isles (NA)
Timezone: Also NA
Note: I’d prefer voice chat if someone is teaching via voip

I’d love to be a student. I am used to most dungeons but fractals has always been a stranger to me. I’ve got personal reward level 12 apparently and I think my guardian has 10 agony resistance but I still feel really shaky about the fractals I have done and I haven’t done ANY of the new fractals introduced in the Fractured release.

Ha ha, whoops, I have been out of touch with elementalist for about a year. Sorry.

Moving away from staff balance and back to the original topic of the MS/Nado combo, I don’t mind the loss of this unintended feature. IMO, it needed to be done because you couldn’t buff meteor shower OR tornado until this combo was fixed. I just hope that both meteor shower and tornado skills stay useful.

I think MS is fine as is. If had to buff it, I would maybe put 25% more meteors and 25% less damage to emphasis the knockdown aspect and keep total damage the same while burst damage is lowered. It’s already a decent area denial and I think more knockdowns might make it a tad better in lieu of 3x damage.

Tornado needs to remove the 300% and 200% precision thing and just buff the base damage of the tornado (I assume that’s what they are doing already). In Addition, I’d like to see the tornado be reworked to that you can alter it’s functionality based on your needs. Maybe have an attunment based tornado. All would would deal the same base damage and knock back foes but fire mode would apply might to allies, Air mode would destroy projectiles, Earth would apply bleeding to foes and Water would heal allies. I dunno, my suggestion for a new tornado is admittedly bad but I’d like to see something similar to that.

“The elementalist’s cantrips are popular in all parts of the game, and in the interest of promoting build diversity, we’ll be using the feature pack as an opportunity to work on other types of utility skills. For example, the fire and air storms from the Glyph of Storms will now apply conditions of their own. In addition, we’ll rework some of the new grandmaster traits that currently don’t have enough of a payoff or are too difficult to use. Finally, we’ll be addressing the Tornado and Fiery Greatsword elite skills; we’ll make some usability improvements and tone down some of their unintended functionality.”
-Balance Changes in the September 2014 Feature Pack

The post is vague about what is being buffed but I hope that in between utility buffs, trait reworks and usability improvements, we will see improved tornado functionality as well as things that might make MS a tiny bit more worthwhile to appeal to those that just saw a large nerf.

Sadly, yeah. With a few exceptions, elites in this game just don’t feel elite. As a dungeon goer were lucky that we had a great option in FGS but it was only useful because it was broken. Hopefully FGS will receive buffs to make it the powerful offensive weapon that it should have been in the first place. It looks like FGS will be purely a mobility function now. I’ll probably end up using the glyph, even though I find it pretty boring.

Quite a few crashes here.

The crashes I have been experiencing recently (before the recent living story patch) seems to hit about every 2-5 hours of play. (once I had it 3 times in 30 minutes).

When it does happen, almost everyone nearby crashes. Not just my client, the clients of everyone around me. Because of this, unless you are alone in a private instance, I don’t think being an asura has anything to do with it.

I was playing with TTS last week, they were organizing triple trouble. We had the people required, and were about to assign teams when almost everyone crashed at exactly the same time.

Because of this, I am guessing that anyone who views the character that makes the illegal move crashes. My theory is that the people who didn’t crash but where standing in the same spot had their character limits set lower so their client didn’t attempt to render that illegal character.

The issue happened several times after that. For example. it happened 3 times to me and people around me this morning while fighting near the spider queen in Kessex hills. Both me and my friend crashed at once each time, when I came back I was usually the first one back. I was the only one there where previously 5-15 people were. They slowly trickled back into the game usually.

Edit: I’ve sent crash reports via the automatic system several times but got tired of sending it. Next time it happens I will try to remember to copy the crash details here.

Zaxares.5419:

I’m reminded of this social experiment that was once carried out where a world famous violinist busked in front of a subway station for half a day. His total takings? Something like $30. Yet this same violinist would play at a concert hall two days later, where people would pay hundreds of dollars per ticket.

Barely anybody on the street recognised the musician, or grasped the depth of his talent. Yet odds are some of those same people might have gone to his concert and paid large sums of money to hear the same music they couldn’t even appreciate when they got it for free.

Is that a sign of how the unwashed masses can’t appreciate good art, or that good artistic skill is actually overvalued? I’ll let you decide.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/04/04/AR2007040401721.html

Here’s the link to the article for anyone interested. The story won the post a pulitzer.

http://www.gw2spidy.com/gem

The API hasn’t been reporting the exchange rates to outside websites like this for months but funny enough, it’s fixed there now.

Josh Davis.6015:

We should have a fix going in for the Runes of Speed in the Oct. 15th update that will restore the 25% movement speed for the six-piece bonus.

That said, we feel that this rune is underwhelming in its intended state and is going to be a prime candidate for a rework in the near future. (Along with a bunch of other runes and sigils.)

Thank you for the update

I really like the rune as-is (and more than the rune of the traveler TBH) because it fits well with my mesmer. It gives me some extra beefyness while making me that much harder to catch in the first place. The #4 bonus gives a small chance to ever proc (1/20 hits would proc it so you could be dead by then) but when it does, 36 seconds of swiftness is much appreciated.

Only 1 major patch and they usually only fix that sort of thing (skills, runes, traits, etc) on major patches. I’m really hoping next patch will fix it.

Rexonon.6723:

Rypo Falem.8913:

The reason we know that they are aware of the bug is because they said that they are tracking it on the first page in this very thread.

Without going back and reading it (might eat my words now) but I’m pretty sure they only mentioned that they are fixing the Lyssa runes and completely ignored the speed runes.

Nah, Runes of Lyssa were only mentioned once before Josh said they were tracking the bug. Then Josh came back and said that they were working the Lyssa issues as well.

MatthewMedina.5419:

I’m fascinated by web pages which describe how we never landed on the moon, or that 9/11 was a cleverly orchestrated government plot. :-P

Be careful what you say on the internet. I am happy that this thread didn’t turn into a discussion revolving around that topic but it very easily could have…

MatthewMedina.5419:

I too have argued that we need a “hide footwear” option on characters, but to no avail. We got the option to hide gloves/gauntlets not that long ago, and that was in response to a bug that was needed to be fixed. hint

Hmmm….report clipping issues with multiple sets of armor involving footwear specifically?. I’ll see if I can’t rally some support for more show/hide armor by more legitimate means :P

Josh Davis.6015:

Hey folks,

We have this issue in our tracker.

Thank you for the reports.

Thanks for this much. I know a lot of people in this thread feel like they are being ignored since it seems like such a simple fix and wasn’t fixed in the last update. It’s clear that ANet isn’t ignoring us but can we get any confirmation that it will be fixed in next week’s update? If not can you give us a time frame?

I’ve already had these runes on my mesmer for 3 weeks now and they are still bugged so I have 12 gold worth of runes sitting on exotic armor and it provides no significant boost. I don’t want to salvage the runes because that a full exotic armor set wasted. I don’t want to replace the runes because that’s 12 gold wasted.

However, if this issue isn’t planned to be fixed until, say, christmas or later, I feel I would be much better off replacing the runes with something else and eating the 12 gold I wasted so my mesmer won’t be at a disadvantage until the point it is fixed.

Thank you for your consideration.

EDIT:

VictoriousMonk.7150:

What’s sad is it even says that it’s a bug on their official Wiki page:

Bug: The 6-piece bonus still rewards the 5% movement speed it had previous to the 2013-09-03 patch instead of 25%

So they know it’s not working.

Actually, I added that bug note myself. Even though arena net maintains (essentially pays for) the wiki, it is still a “wiki” and 99% of the information posted and updated there is from contributors using their own free time for the benefit of the community.

The reason we know that they are aware of the bug is because they said that they are tracking it on the first page in this very thread.

Chiming in. I can see the rocks fine but it isn’t uncommon for me to party with 2 or 3 friends that cannot see them.

Tested myself with a guild mate. The rune of speed set does give a bonus but it is not 25%. It’s much, much, smaller but you do run very slightly faster than people without any speed boosts.

I can’t believe the general in this thread. You get a small gift and then complain/insult at the gift-giver that it isn’t what you wanted? I know MMO players have a reputation of expecting everything tailored to them just so but geez. This is taking it a bit far.

ArchonWing.9480:

This really shows that all single player “challenge” content needs to be its own instance, instead of this queued stuff.

I thought this myself but I am not certain having that many concurrent instances is feasible when so many people want to farm at once. Maybe it is. I don’t know what sort of server resources that would take.

In any case the gauntlet farming was nerfed today so mayhaps it will be easier to get a match now :)

EDIT: Also, your guild sounds quite spiteful. Get some new friends, man.

I imagine it will get easier to get in the same overflow as the hype dies down. The likely reason it is so hard to get in the same one is that there are too many people trying to move to the same instance.

Not sure if this belongs here but it is a terrain bug. You can jump into an area of the Mount Maelstrom that you are not meant to. This allows one to get into the Infinity Coil even when it is locked (doesn’t allow access to the dungeon if it’s locked though).

Von.2731:

Well, from what I can tell it’s because it’s not fun and doesn’t have any rewards. I just got my scepter pre-cursor and I will likely sell it since I don’t see much of a way to convince anyone to do that dungeon with me again and it’s nearly impossible to do. No fun/too difficult + no rewards = no people to play it. Storm for sale here . . . thanks . . .

I actually do it daily because it is fun and it’s one of the easier dungeons. The part I find that PUGs have trouble on is the console on path 1. Subject alpha is a breeze on path 2 or 3 once you learn to count to 2 or 3 and then dodge when you see a ton of red circles.

Yes, it has its tricks and things won’t go smoothly unless most of your party is familiar with them but this can be said of almost any dungeon.

That being said, unless you get lucky with lodestones/cores you are right that it is one of the least rewarding dungeons because it does take a bit of time (about 30 minutes per path with a PUG) and you don’t get the raw gold drop that other dungeons get (CoF1 has a raw gold drop of 25 silver from bosses each run).

http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Karma

This should clear up karma boost related questions. Everything stacks except the bonfire with the 50% booster combo or combinations of guild banners with other guild banners (make sure you use one that gives +10%, not +5%).

Maximum effective karma boost is 95%. I verified this a month ago myself, no one has yet to present evidence to the contrary since the patch.

In OP’s video he only used a 5% karma banner, a 50% karma booster and a 15% guild bonus for a total of 70% extra karma. What’s important to understand here is that each little karma boost helps exponentially when dealing with jewelry boxes. The simple way to explain this is if you get more boxes, which give you a higher yield in karma back, which allows you to buy more boxes…etc. Mathematically you can model the box yield as a summation equation where

total boxes opened= ((karma_modifier*avg_karma_return)^0 + (karma_modifier*avg_karma_return)^1 + (karma_modifier*avg_karma_return)^2 + (karma_modifier*avg_karma_return)^3…etc)*starting_karma/4500
4500, to clarify, is the cost of a box.

This can be simplified to Starting_karma/4500 * (1/(1-(karma_modifier*avg_karma_return))

When testing this out make sure that avg_karma_return is less than 1 (the tested value seems to be about .38) and that karma_modifier is expressed as 1.95, or 1.7 in the case of a 95% or 70% boost respectively.

With a .38 average karma return and a 95% boost one could expect to open 3.8 times the number of original boxes. However with only a 70% one only receives 2.8 times the number of boxes originally purchased.

In other words, if you start out with 1 million karma, you could be buying 3.8 million karma worth of boxes instead of 2.8 and that doesn’t even calculate that if you had a larger boost you would have had a higher starting karma in the first place.

TL;DR: Use ice cream, a 10% guild banner karma boost instead of 5%, and a karmic infusion in addition to the boosts you already used for about 36% more profit.

EDIT: avg_karma_return is actually the ratio of the price of a box to the actual average karma returned. I wrote this early in the morning when I couldn’t sleep so please excuse me.

Zenith.7301:

Rypo Falem.8913:

Weren’t fractles designed to become increasingly difficult and eventually impossible as the level increased? I feel like most people are missing the whole point.

For those that want a challenge, push fractles to as high as you can exploiting every little resource you can find. To those that want loot find a level of fractles with the balance of time, difficulty and loot that fits you best and run that.

INCREASING THE NUMBERS MOB HIT FOR DOES NOT MAKE IT MORE DIFFICULT.

It just makes you stack guardians because a) group aegis/prot/regen/healing, and b) they have 3 good reflection sources.

Guess what? 2/3 of those dredge in the cage that 2-shot you are ranged mobs that you use reflection for.

It’s not difficult because you complete the event by dying on the buttons and having someone stealth through the control panel (spy kit removal just means people will bring a mesmer or thief for that fractal).

If you are so skilled, film a kitten video of you doing 38-70 fractals, on that dredge cage without using guardians or mesmers, where nobody goes defeated while the control panel is interacted with. SHOW ME.

I don’t want your internet lectures. Put up a kitten video or shut the hell up and begone.

NO Guardians for that cage, NO mesmers.

I never claimed I could do it. I was just saying it’s silly to complain about difficult content being difficult.

Robert Hrouda.1327:

We had them in story before launch, but what we found is that we couldn’t strike a balance between the amount we give for completing story mode, and the difficult difference. Our feedback was that rather than face the challenge of Explorable dungeons, high skill groups would just afk faceroll the much easier story mode content for the guaranteed smaller token amount. We tried several things, but couldn’t strike the balance, so we removed tokens from story mode as a reward and put them into explorable mode only as a reward.

Thanks for the explaination, Robert. It’s always nice to see that staff members have an interest in the issues that concern players.

Though, as others have pointed out CoF1 is clearly unbalanced and gives the best token and gold rewards of any dungeon by an extremely large margin and requires a minimum level of skill, at that. Getting tokens is one thing but a farmable (you can switch characters and do one other path to avoid DR) minimum 50 silver per run is a bit overboard. I won’t dwell on this point because I am sure there is a nerf incoming.

Storymode is something players should play when they want to see the story again and it is neat that you can see it again if you forget. Maybe you guys could reintroduce the tokens but only the first time the account/character completes the story mode? Something like 60-180 tokens if the bonus is account wide or 30 if it is character bound would be very nice since they usually take quit a bit of time to accomplish and this would prevent people from farming storymode altogether.

Weren’t fractles designed to become increasingly difficult and eventually impossible as the level increased? I feel like most people are missing the whole point.

For those that want a challenge, push fractles to as high as you can exploiting every little resource you can find. To those that want loot find a level of fractles with the balance of time, difficulty and loot that fits you best and run that.

Any class can level up in normal PVE content. I assume that is what you mean by “Solo”.

As for dungeons any class (even ranger) is viable, though there are some who would exclude you because they want to speed through the dungeon as quickly as possible.

I think looking into the forums gives one a skewed view of what most players want. I talk to many players who enjoy the game for it’s gameplay but they are much less likely to go to the forums to voice their opinions because they aren’t obsessed with rewards.

I haven’t used it pre or post nerf but doesn’t it still have the same application? Can you not rez people while holding bundle items? 10 seconds of invisibility to res someone for only 28 karma still sounds like a huge boon. You just have be more careful about how you use them.

Naqaj.6219:

darkdomino.9578:

I’ll say it one more time: “Dailies” are not gameplay.

That would be correct. They serve pretty well as intuitive tutorials though. Ravious has put up a pretty neat summary: http://www.killtenrats.com/2013/02/27/gw2-slow-release-storm/#more-11740

I would agree that Arenanets development efforts are unfortunately loot-centric, but it seems that’s what the audience wants.

Loot-centric indeed. It seems like come update time I am the only one happy about new content being added rather than new ways to get items. I am part of a medium sized guild (8-15 on at any given night) and look forward unlocking guild missions most of all because they sound fun! The unlocking mechanic sounds a bit excessive but it will give us time to look forward to as we naturally accumulate more influence.

As for dailies. You don’t have to do them. If the method of getting laurels isn’t fun for you I just wouldn’t do them. I like having a combination of getting rewards for things I do anyway (like kill variety) as well as suggestions on what I can do if I get bored (champion hunting).

Herr der Friedhoefe.2490:

This one chest per boss per day has pretty much killed PvE for me. The Maw event in Wayfarer’s was about the only thing I’ve been doing outside of WvW because I could make a couple of gold in a couple of hours of chilling out and playing the game the way I wanted to play.

I would sit in a safe spot at the Kevach lodge and do the wurm events as those came up, then run for the Maw event when that came up. I could play casual and not bother anyone. I didn’t drag any dungeon team down when I would go eat dinner or do dishes. It didn’t matter if I missed one of these events. I could always just pick up again on the next one.

The point is, I could play the game the way I want to play, and make a bit of gold when WvW was a little slow. Isn’t that what we were told this game was going to be? Why do these kittenheads have to nerf every single way that we players can get a bit of gold when WvW is such a gold sink?

Expand a little. The maw still gives an almost guaranteeing rare once per day and it’s about 5 events so you’re still getting a bit of silver and karma from that. Go to other places! Metrica province has a neat fire elemental boss to fight and is full of events itself. The mega destroyer event series is epic. It’s the only one I didn’t get a rare from (I heard it was bugged but IMO insufficient evidence thus far) but the actually having more than 3 players to do it with for once made it exciting and I got about 50 claws from the mini destroyers that was worth quite a bit by itself!

Anet didn’t kill PVE for you by getting rid of 3-5 blue rarity items every 30 minutes. You can still participate do the same things you did before and your gold/hr probably won’t change much. Even with 1 rare per day that is about 30 silver. It would take about 6 maw chests pre-patch to make that much so unless you farm the maw for at least 3 hours each day (which sounds boring but you can do it if you like) then you will actually see an increase in gold.

Funky.4861:

I’m really concerned that i can’t portal ppl who are stuck in terrain (due to phase retreat, for example) anymore- that will suck BIG TIME! If i can cast the entry portal so that a stuck character can interact with it, will they still be allowed to? Or will the fact that they are unintentionally stuck in terrain make them have to pay to WP in order to get out?

This was to fix a bigger issue of portal abuse without nerfing portal into the ground.

The terrain issue is a bug that happens not too often anyway. Besides, how often do you get stuck in terrain and happen to have a mesmer nearby to fix you? Just Waypoint and move on.

Hopefully we will get a /stuck to fix the terrain bugs in a future update.