Guild Wars 2

I wonder if we could have body proportion sliders like some other games provide. That’s surely how the different body sizes are implemented internally, not as a bunch of special cases?

Gemstore colours for sylvari bark and pattern would be glorious. I mean, so long as it’s okay to turn the Pale Tree into a Dulux advert… Hmm… Maybe, gemstore colours only for those who can prove they have good taste in colour matching?

• Remove current F1. Instead, F1 invokes Jalis; F2 Mallyx, F3 Shiro, and F4 Ventari. Yep, just like an elementalist’s element buttons. By default, pressing the F-key of the legend you’re already channelling does nothing.
• With an elite spec equipped, F5 invokes your elite legend. While you’re channelling that legend, the other F-keys flip to the old F-key bindings (F2 facet of nature for Glint, F2-F4 citadel orders for Kalla). F1 flips them back to the standard legend buttons so you can choose which to swap to. F5 becomes an ability that returns you to the last legend you used.
• Since I just buffed the kitten out of revenants by giving them access to every legend at once, remove weapon swap.
• Tune for balance by altering weapon swap cooldown time (or lack thereof) and how much energy is charged when you swap.

Low (relatively) dev effort! Restores the original class design (no weapon swap)! Fixes our lack of access to condition cleanses! And… well, let’s be honest, it’s probably a terrible, stupid idea, like many ideas that seem elegant when first conceived turn out to be. Never mind, eh?

So glad we got the stress test! I missed the start and only got an hour to fiddle with Renegade in PvE, but it was enough to be informative

Trying to get high damage out of it certainly felt interesting, what with needing to position the warband correctly, manage your energy and whatnot. The warband appear to synergise with each other enough that I wonder whether a high DPS rotation would involve waiting for your energy to charge to 100 after swapping to Kalla so that you can drop several summons, and maybe F3 bombardment, in quick succession. It’s certainly different. And once again, kudos to the art team — the skill effects are truly beautiful.

I’m not going to play it first, though, because I’m not a fan of this style of gameplay. I like to dive into melee and have to defend myself, and Kalla doesn’t have the defensive capabilities to support that kind of offensive playstyle (does that make sense?) I missed Glint’s heal skill so much (best self-heal in the game, that, imo). I still want a shiny new toy rather than to stick with my Glint/Shiro build I’ve played the kitten out of for the last couple of years, so I’ve changed my mind: I’m going to main holosmith, and leave my revenant on the bench for a little while.

I guess this is part of the point of elite specs though, isn’t it? They’re introducing a new play style to the profession. So it’s normal and expected for some players of that profession to not like it, but alternatively, like the play style being introduced to a different profession they didn’t previously enjoy. (I only enjoy scrapper on a ludicrous flamethrower/HGH build that’s terrible for anything except solo PvE and mob tagging…)

I’m sure there’s loads to like for fans of a strategic, minion master play style, in which you’re in command of the battlefield rather than the flow of battle controlling you. Especially after they fix some of the wonky numbers.

IndigoSundown.5419:

Sikil.9817:

Disable facets out of combat.

Good grief, no. The best part of playing Herald is the speed boost, the profession’s only integral access to a speed buff. Needless to say, this is more of an OOC than IC benefit.

I somehow forgot about that, my bad. Losing the speed boost would suck — at least for accounts without PoF (having access to mounts should remove most of the need for it).

There’s the business with that Invocation trait and flipping between legends, but it’s annoying busywork.

I’m sure an alternative solution could be found…

It’s an interesting thinking point, forgive me if I subvert it!

Herald already has mega start-of-combat burst damage because you get to run around with facets enabled and engage with your full buffs. To the point that when I’m running open world with my berserker geared Herald, my boyfriend complains that I oneshot all the mobs and he doesn’t get to fight!

There’s a whole bunch of irritating little situations already in which facets disable themselves — mounts are yet another — and it would be good to get a fix, but here’s my alternative suggestion

(Prepare to be horrified)

Disable facets out of combat.

It means they don’t need to fix most of the facet disabling bugs, and also implies a buff to the power of facets themselves to make up for it, which I think Herald needs — we ought to be able to stack might like a PS warrior can, and currently we can’t. With facets in-combat only, it would be reasonable to buff them to generate the full 25 might.

There’s been a disheartening amount of negative feedback and, frankly, hate towards the Renegade on these forums (and also on reddit), as a Revenant main it’s been pretty painful to watch. Surely we can have some degree of faith that ANet’s internal testing strategy is good and that it will turn out to be a great group PvE spec (which is what it seems to be designed to be)?

…can’t we…?

It would be nice to get a developer comment, any kind of acknowledgement of the community’s concerns, but I doubt we will. Their new strategy seems to be “don’t comment, only deliver” and I can’t entirely blame them. Any dev commenting on this forum right now would get their face chewed off instantly and that’s got to be an unpleasant experience coming off of months of work trying to make something that will make the players happy…!

I miss the HoT beta days though. Remember the “dodge fluff maybe?” suggestion post, which got our misty dodge effect added?

Anyway, I’m still planning to take my Revenant into PoF first, with the full set of Viper gear I made ready for the occasion. If it’s un-fun though, I’m preparing some gear for my engineer too and I’ll go Holosmith.

Going by the Heart of Thorns experience, I was expecting 100 points per hero challenge in the desert, with the elite spec costing 2000 to 3000. You know, so we have to play the new content to unlock it But, maybe not.

Having the elite spec unlocked right away would remove some of the urgency to explore the new expansion, which I think would be a bad thing, overall… but I expect I’m in a minority for feeling that way!

The Oasis

Coming to a wide open, single layer map after the complexity of Heart of Maguuma was a bit awkward (I like the HoT maps!), although I suppose season 3 zones like Lake Doric should’ve prepared me for that. I get that mounts need wide open spaces to shine. I hope there are also areas with verticality, areas with extra-hard mobs, and so forth; map diversity in other words. If PoF’s maps have been built with a similar philosophy to the season 3 maps, I expect I won’t be disappointed.

Looking forward to the new story and to discovering everything.

The raptor

I’m in love.

Renegade

I main a Revenant and had high hopes and well… I think I might like it. It feels a bit odd, maybe just because I’m so used to Glint. I agree with other posters who have said some of the numbers need tweaking, especially energy costs. But it’s checking all the boxes I expected, ranged condi weapon, offensive support, blabla.

The amount of artistic detail that has gone into this specialisation is fabulous. Armies of Charr inside the portals!

Holosmith

I instantly liked this specialisation, much more than the others I tried. It feels kinetic, weighty, satisfying, packs a big punch, everything a high-risk melee DPS spec should. The only bit that seemed a bit floaty was overheating; perhaps it should also apply a knockdown or launch?

My engineer has been gathering dust since the first year after the whole Beethoven’s piano sonata style started hurting my wrist and my brain too much and I would really like to be able to play the toon seriously again. So, here’s hoping:

• the 24% less damage in PvE thing is a bug that gets fixed (or it’s just… okay?)
• the Holosmith doesn’t turn out to require kit swapping while out of forge to do good DPS
• it doesn’t get nerfed to the ground because of PvP

please?

Soulbeast

I was looking forward to this but it felt all wrong and I think I know why: on other specs that have a transformation as their headline feature (reaper shroud, celestial avatar, holosmith forge thingy), you aspire to stay in it as long as possible. It’s an upgrade over your default state. (Unless you’re running some weird build, anyway.) Rather than leave it willingly, you’re usually forced out of it by the game itself — you run out of the resource that powers it, or are trying not to blow yourself up. With beast mode though, the right way to use it seems to be to enable it to cast a couple of beast skills and then disable it again so your pet’s back.

I don’t know about anyone else but I find that disappointing. I was looking forward to getting a whole lot of power in beast mode and wanting to stay in it! Wouldn’t it be more interesting if there was a penalty to staying in beast mode for too long — for example, to steal from at least one fiction (hi Granny Weatherwax), if you spent too long in beast mode you “lost yourself” and temporarily ran away or went berserk, maybe gaining fear and confusion, attacking randomly, losing the ability to do non-combat interactions, …?

Deadeye

I like the Daredevil spec and approached this one with a great deal of scepticism (I was one of those who were relieved thief wasn’t getting rifle with HoT), but I’m really impressed with what the designers have done here. I just hope it’s not another PvP only spec. I’d like to be able to play the sniper, with the rifle and everything, in PvE and make it work. For this more than anything else, I’m sad we didn’t get to do PvE testing with the new specs — I just can’t get a feel for it from the PvP area.

I think ANet have moved away from pitching a whole map at a single difficulty level and towards deliberately making easy areas and harder areas. Many of the LS3 maps have zones that are more difficult to fight through than the rest of the map: the jade area in Ember Bay; Rata Arcanum; the shrine of Balthazar. Compare the difficulty contrast of those — especially the Balthazar shrine compared to the other shrines, which are positively relaxing — to, for example, the differences in mob difficulty across Tangled Depths (mordrem? Chak? You need to be paying attention against both.)

I’m expecting something similar in the new maps. The toughest areas probably weren’t in the demo. Given that some players think the HoT over world was too hard, and others think it was too easy, this seems a reasonable way to give everyone content they enjoy.

I’m a bit disappointed that my glass cannon daredevil survived being jumped by three Hydras, though. I mean, it was an exciting battle, but I would expect one Hydra to be “exciting” and three to be “I’m eating sand now”, they could do with a tune-up

I’d like to add my voice to those asking: dear ANet, please, please don’t nerf the raptor animations for everyone.

It’s quite simply the most beautiful animation I’ve seen in a videogame. I must have spent at least half an hour just jumping up and down and chasing my own raptors tail in Amnoon. Whilst giggling.

I’m sure a solution can be worked out, maybe a cut-down animation could be placed behind a “reduced mount motion” check box? (Or the full animations placed behind a “full mount motion” check box? Us players are happy with lots of configuration options by now, right…?)

This question has been posted regularly for years, and the answer seems pretty conclusively “no” at this point.

Outfits are your friends.

Mmyeah, Not So Secret the jumping puzzle is fun in a somewhat frustrating kind of way but that dive is downright sadistic. At least you had a mesmer! I did it solo. My poor keyboard, hehe.

I’d love to say they don’t make them like that any more, but Chalice of Tears… I don’t even dare try!

My boyfriend and I are playing a ranger+necro duo and it works pretty well. And yes, we get spots in fractals no trouble.

I agree with their decision to pull the Spider mount, arachnophobia is a thing for a lot of people and it wouldn’t do to make the game physically repellent to a significant proportion of the player base.

That said…

A wall-climbing mount sounds awesome! It doesn’t have to be a spider, does it? How about an ape? Or a giant mantis? Or, heck, a mastery that grants your characters their own climbing abilities?

The highest clocked Intel you can get, I’d say.

Do mess with the graphics settings by the way, some of them can make a large difference. Try turning down the character model count and the shadow settings. (Dropping shadow quality got me something like +50% fps; but my PC’s spec is very different to yours.)

Berries are easiest. After those, go for Petrified Wood (do the hearts, buy from vendors) and Fire Orchids (plentiful on the map and entertaining to hunt for). Blood Rubies are tougher to collect in quantity because they don’t drop reliably from the nodes and Bloodstone Fen doesn’t have hearts. I don’t know about the shards, I didn’t like the Lake Doric map much compared to the others.

Okay provocative title, but I have a question!

When I first previewed the mask it was transparent with blue glowing eyes and I thought, “ooh, that’s pretty cool, I’ve a character who could wear that well”.

I left the instance, wandered the world and then previewed it again and suddenly it’s white with red eyes and goatee and it looks like some sort of awful clown-demon and won’t change back. I even chose stats and equipped it and it still looks like that.

Which is it meant to be?

Does anyone seriously like it in red-and-white?

I can’t play at all right now. Things were fine after the first patch yesterday, but after the second patch I got all manner of disconnect. Got home late this evening hoping everything was fixed, but chucked out with “network error” when I select any of my characters (not just the one I left in Bloodstone Fen yesterday).

Because there are loads of them already and not many non-trenchcoats. Variety is good.

I like the medium leystone armor, but the butt flap is indeed weird, and the game could certainly stand to have some more understated, form-fitting options. Something closer to the bandit sniper’s or shadow assassin’s outfits.

I’m having lots of fun in Heart of Thorns and it’s disheartening to see so much negativity here, but I suppose people who are happy tend to play the game rather than write on the forum.

Verdant Brink and Auric Basin are fantastic zones, and I even find Tangled Depths fun so long as I don’t take it too seriously and accept getting lost and going in circles a few times. I mustered the patience to zone complete it, my revenant has completion of the first three zones and is missing only one vista in Dragon’s Stand that seems to require ley line gliding…

It’s a shame the Tangled Depths meta is so hardcore, I don’t have the play time to dedicate to getting into a group that will succeed at it. It feels unintended, but they’re not patching it or saying anything; who knows? At least the three other zones’ metas are in a good place — not trivial, need everyone to have an idea of what to do and be playing attention, but will probably succeed so long as those basic requirements are met. I feel that higher levels of difficulty are better left to more constrained environments without the open world issues of map instancing and random noobs in Nomad’s gear (raids, etc.)

They haven’t done so well with some of the professions (on my thief, I feel unable to defend myself, with no particular advantage over my other characters gained in exchange). But equally others are great fun. I recently rediscovered my elementalist, and I’ve been having a literal blast running around blasting the warhorn at things. Discovering I could take out a whole pack of those pesky pocket raptors with one well placed air overload was so satisfying.

Guild Wars 2 is the only MMO I’ve played in which in-combat and out-of-combat movement speeds are the same stat. It also has a lot of running to be done in the open world (chasing events, exploring, WvW roaming). As a player who enjoys these activities, it makes me feel forced to trade character power or flexbillity for movement speed:

- My Guardian can never be without his Runes of the Traveler, even though they nerf his damage and build possibilities.
- My Revenant is pigeonholed into Herald, for the swiftness.
- My Engineer is similarly pigeonholed into some trait line that I forget.
- I am sad that my Thief, Necromancer and Elementalist get so much easier access to out-of-combat movement speed, because I don’t enjoy those professions nearly as much.

I humbly suggest that making in-combat and out-of-combat movement speeds different stats, with out-of-combat movement speed no longer something you give up combat ability to gain, would make for happier players with more diverse character builds and improve the health of the game.

For example:

- Out-of-combat movement speed bonuses between 0% and 25% become a reward for leveling up, with the greatest bonus granted at level 80.
- Higher out-of-combat movement speed bonuses up to maybe 40%, and other world traversal things (out of combat blink and portal) could become a Pact Tyria mastery line. (I’m sure some new mastery points could be added to Tyria.)
- Swiftness, superspeed and things that currently grant +25% movement speed are changed to only grant their bonus in combat. To make up for what will now be lackluster abilities, consider increasing the in-combat movement speed bonuses, or adding extra effects to swiftness, superspeed, and the movement speed traits and runes.

I’d like to know this too!

I had all settings at max and was getting a lot of crashes in Auric Basin and sometimes in the other HoT maps when things got busy. I turned textures and character model counts down to Medium this evening and completed an Octovine event without a crash; the GW2 exe never went above 2.5GB usage.

I know, more data required, but it’s feeling promising.

The difference in graphics quality is barely noticeable.

Maybe for the next Lunar Festival, we can build those Zephyrites stranded in Drytop a new airship of cloth and bamboo?

It’s about time

That’s not how it works, the GW2 client is a 32 bit executable and thus is limited to 4GB of address space (I.e. around 3GB of memory actually usable by itself, I believe) even on a 64 bit OS.

I too have been getting semi frequent crashes. Almost all of them in Auric Basin, typically when the action is busy. I’ve been sending the bug reports, of course.

Staff seems to be the best weapon against break bars. But you might not need it (hammer 5 + jade winds is often enough…)

Jalis/Shiro, zerker/assassin + runes of speed. A little squishy perhaps, but still, when I’m downed it almost always feels like it was because I played it wrong, not because I have the wrong stats.

And when I play it right, I’m wrecking everything. I love this profession.

42% of Glint unlocked so far. It feels like a long road. Having nice guildmates definitely helps.

I’m glad I’m not much one for alts…

Unexpected, but enjoyable!

Yes, please buff the open world back up to BWE2 difficulty again.

I understand that raids are the new “challenging content”, but not all of us have the time and social connections to do those. For example, my social connections are all with roleplayers, who have differing goals in game and aren’t all gathering for the purpose of PvE. I play GW2 for the RP community, but also because it’s one of the few MMOs that has been doing casual PvE content that isn’t trivially easy: jumping puzzles, Queen’s gauntlet, story achievements, taking on champions and the Dry Top/Silverwastes events in the absence of the zerg, etc, etc.

I’ve been looking forward to much more of this in Heart of Thorns and it’s pretty sad to see everything nerfed after it was such a satisfying challenge in the last beta weekend.