Guild Wars 2

Usually (and I agree not always) the place you want the WoR is right in front of you – which makes it harder for a ranged attacker to step around / through it. There are exceptions… obvious PvE example getting Lupi to shoot himself in the face.
The point is previously there was a choice whether or not to trait for Consecrated Ground – now it’s default behaviour it will take a bit of getting used to… and more than half the time what you really want is the WoR or Purging Flames or Hallowed Ground or whatever right under your own feet anyway.

Don’t be facetious – you know exactly what he means. Prior to mixing up Consecrated Ground with Master of Consecrations placing a wall was a 1 click job and it placed precisely where you were standing, oriented exactly at 90 degrees to your character. Now you have to double click it. Now the default behaviour is Consecrated Ground style – click to trigger and click again to place – which is less intuitive and takes fractionally longer – sometimes you just want the wall here, now – like when you’re about to get feathered by a roaming ranger death squad…

Mostly it’s about practice but it does take a bit of getting used to and a ‘one click option’ would be nice

With the announcement of the guild halls I was hoping that there might be something about an improvement in the tools available to manage your guild. In particular there are two simple(?) things I’d like to see added to the set of tools for guild leaders / officers to manage and coordinate the guild:
1) A ‘Last Represented’ display option on the roster so I can see when the last time someone was actively participating in the guild. Optionally an average hours represented per month’ and a ‘Join Date’ would also be useful in determining ranks based on participation and veterancy.

2) The ability to ‘mass whisper’ everyone in the guild, whether they’re repping or not, in order to inform them of a guild event, gathering or other info that currently has to be relayed to each member one at a time if they’re not representing. Yes I know you can ‘shift up-arrow’ to recall the last typed text – that’s fine if your guild has 20-30 members, less fun when you have 300-400 members. My guild coordinators and I would pay good money for the ability to mass whisper everyone – if you’re worried about spamming then maybe limit its use to once per hour, or costing a chunk of influence or a guild merit (or whatever their new currency representation is).

I’m sure other people will have other ideas for guild management tools… feel free to post them….

Add me to the list… stuck on the last file. The ‘weird glitching’ mentioned above is probably the ‘Connection Error Detected. Retrying….’ message which seems to be happening about every quarter of a second… It might just be peak time overload on the patch server handing too many requests.

For reference, VirginMedia (UK) 100Mb cable. Nothing wrong with the connectiion to any other web service.

Cyclenurse (aka Sarsarun, Copernica, Skysailor) made me feel right at home when I joined The Grey, and was so helpful in every aspect of the game. I still owe her a stack of foxfire too. Everyone that knew her will remember her with great affection.

With respect to the idea of a permanent memorial in game, that would be amazing but there is always the problem of who qualifies (or sooner or later the whole game world will be full of statues of ex-players!). Perhaps it could be a feature of the new guild hall that ‘statue slots’ can be purchased. positioned and ‘populated’ within a shared instance?

I know the map jump method is lucrative and profitable, but the ‘Breach Leechers’ are basically just exploiting a game mechanic at the expense of people who are putting the effort in to getting the map into a 75-80% complete state at which people miraculously start to appear…

Last night I and a group of about 5 or 6 others held 1-2 forts for over an hour trying to get people to join us… occasionally we’d get to 3 forts then lose one and people would leave the map and we’d be down to one fort again… eventually we got to 80% and within 5 minutes the map was full, the Breach was done in another 5 minutes but then the map was emptied as fast as it was filled (the Labyrinth event didn’t even make it past Tier 1).

There has to be a better method of effort vs. reward… the perseverance mechanic is a good start but maybe needs to involve smaller increments (e.g. re-scale it to 100) based on time and maybe reward participation based on the B/S/G event participation (e.g. if someone is afk leeching in the map they should only accumulate perseverance at a base rate for ‘bronze’ participation, whereas silver gets you double and gold triple the base rate). It also needs to mean more in terms of what loot drops are available (i.e. tier based) so the longer you stay in a map the better the loot becomes (up to a maximum) .

Basically there needs to be more emphasis on rewarding people who play the game in the spirit in which it was intended to be played, rather than those maxing the loots-per-minute ratio.

Also unable to purchase gems – attempting to use a credit card I get past the first validation screen (so my card appears to be okay) but when I try to ‘confirm’ the transaction on the ‘Review Order’ dialog I get a message that ‘Unfortunately an error has occurred. Please try again later!’ I’ve been trying again later for 3 days now and it’s just not working for me. Support ticket raised (Request #864814 “Gem Store Issues”)

Yup that’s exactly it – there are many ‘yard trash’ mobs that, when you kill them, do not count for resetting the VoJ skill or stacking bloodlust etc. – fairly frustrating especially when you’re trying to blind a backstabber

I have just done the Fort Salma instance 4 times (after having completed the storymode obviously) – twice as the instance owner and twice as an assisting party member. Each time I had one or the other or both of the ‘Butterflies and Viscera’ and ‘Sheltered from the Rain’ icons still on my buff bar at the end of the instance, however I have still not received credit for the achievements. It’s getting a bit annoying having to repeat it over and over and not getting credit for it.

So now we’ve given the megaserver a chance… I’ve tried to like it. The best I can say is it was a nice idea badly implemented. Whatever the reasons for jamming everyone together in the same instance, however you spin it in terms of “improved player interaction”, it’s not working.

The vaunted ‘smart instancing’ where you were nominally supposed to be assigned to an instance where your friends / guildmates are is simply not working at all. In my small home guild it’s actually more unusual to find yourself in the same instance as a guildmate than in one with French / German / Spanish speaking players. It’s pretty much impossible to find / select an instance where you can get a guild together. If you and half a dozen other people from your guild port into a zone at the same time it’s not uncommon to find yourselves scattered across at least 4 instances of that zone… even if the zone is relatively empty! For larger events taxi-ing people in is slow and inefficient – 9/10 times the zone is hardcapped before half the guild has managed to get in the right instance. (if you can’t automagically get everyone in the same guild in the same instance of a zone then why not allow people to select an instance where a guild commander is tagged up for example by allowing the ‘Join in zoneX’ by clicking from the guild roster?)

The re-scaling of zones (I assume in line with the new trait availability) coupled with the increase in available players in the instance is trivialising every world boss to the point they are boring. For many of the fights the biggest challenge is doing enough damage to register for a champion bag off the boss. Even fights like Tequatl where organisation is more important than pure numbers seem to be much easier… we killed Teq last weekend with more than 6 1/2 minutes left on the clock. And that’s despite the people who refuse to WP when they die, refuse to join teamspeak or stack on commanders etc etc.

Zone instancing is still being flaky: last night we only had half the guild in the zone before we were hard-capped and that was for an off-timer ‘private’ guild-triggered instance (which incidentally is the only way that those of us in Europe with jobs and / or a life can do Teq / Karka / Triple Wurm from Monday-Friday due to the static timer boss rotation).

Also Orrian temples are pretty much permanently ‘open’ since there’s always some people who will do the defence event in preference to the ‘full’ assault. On the rare event that they’re not open, they’re either trivialised as other world bosses or in the case of the Risen Priest of Grenth, turned into one-shot kill monsters due to the scaling (coupled with a large number of people showing up who have no idea how the event works).

What the OP wrote

Just thought I’d add my voice to the general dissatisfaction with this change. I’m another player who, whilst I can commit playtime almost every day to the game, will find it extremely hard now to align my playing time to the Tequatl / Triple Trouble / Karka spawns. I thought that the guild trigger option might allow us to participate in at least the occasional event but as my small guild has accrued a total of only 300,000 influence in the year we have been playing, and as we do these events under the ‘banner’ of an ‘umbrella guild’, (which brings together a number of similar small guilds), that has even less influence (and no merits at all) that isn’t going to be an option either.

Not to mention the ‘static’ nature of the timers … what time is it guys? Oh… it’s Karka o’clock….

Also, whilst the experience of the game last night probably shouldn’t be taken as typical of the numbers of people at the world boss events that I could try (those that weren’t bugged anyway), then the balancing of the events needs some further work.

Some of them (e.g. Shatterer) were trivialised (even further) by the large numbers of people. Megadestroyer suffered from the (usual) idiocy of people not allowing the boss to move off his spawn point in the lava so only those people with (long) range weapons equipped could hit it… (maybe it needs something like a massive health regen bonus while it remains in the lava?).

Grenth on the other hand was scaled off the chart by all the people trying to get their new grandmaster trait… most of whom obviously had no clue about how the event works and were determined (despite numerous people using every text channel available) to not use a waypoint when they got dead from the massive damage. To put it into context, the Risen Priest is a boss that I have occasionally solo’d (with judicious tactics and a bit of luck). Last night I was one-shotted 3 times (once by ice-crystal attack… not sure about the other two) and I still managed to run back before the priest died.

Whilst I admit that the events are better with a decent sized group of people – somewhere between 20 and 50 is about right for most of these events. More than that and it becomes either trivial (no challenge = no fun) or impossible to survive (also no fun).

I don’t post much here because generally I accept the game as it comes and sure, not everything about it is great but on balance it all works out.

But this… This I Do Not like. At all.

One of the first things that I thought was cool about this game was the flexible approach to world bosses… and although yes, some of them do seem to occur with almost mundane regularity at least it means that everyone gets a shot at doing some of them whenever they log in to play for an hour or two.

Now you’re basically enforcing the same old tired metagame aspect of making sure you are able to be online when the boss spawns, (rather than the boss spawning while you’re online for your gaming convenience). I fail to see why it has to be a fixed time every day… I can see that you don’t want people ‘farming’ Teq by jumping from one map instance to another, but surely the current limitations on getting event loot only once per day per event could easily (?) be extended.

If world bosses are only going to be available at certain time ‘windows’ then it is going to make it impossible for some people (including myself) to ever participate in certain events due to RL commitments – some of us do have proper jobs with regular hours; other people have things called ‘families’ (I think). Added to that the fact that people might not want to do Teq at the same time every day… Never mind RL commitments, what about other in-game commitments? Like many other people I do Teq in an ‘umbrella’ guild comprising a loose federation of smaller guilds. It’s already hard enough getting them all to commit to the event at the same time. If half your friends / guilds are running in WvW zergs or doing the next Living Story arc events then dragging them away in the middle of primetime to do Teq for the Nth time isn’t going to be easy. Currently if you don’t get enough people at least you can postpone until the next spawn time.. now if you miss the window you’re pretty much done for the day(?) Most of us don’t play at 3am. Many of us are at work / school etc at 1pm. Some of us are busy feeding / clothing families at 7pm.

The other aspect with the megaserver vs. world megaboss events is control of the events. We already see Tequatl being ‘spoiled’ by people who don’t know the fight mechanics (e.g. causing champion mobs to spawn near the turrets then getting killed and whining for a rez instead of waypointing), not to mention people who turn up just to leech the event loot. Those people who either don’t read their chat window or choose to ignore what they’re being told are a liability – and now we’re going to see even more of them because you’re compressing the event into a smaller window of opportunity.

Yup I’m also stuck on 1 / 5 having successfully done several of the wardens across a dozen attempts at the marionette. Of course I’m still on a total of 0 Marionette kills, but personally I’ve never failed to complete the platform I’m on and in the majority of cases the lane I am in was successful in completing the phase…

Norjena.5172:

Axes are brutal.
Guardians are noble and magic based.

I think a axe wouldn´t be a “good” weapon for us.

Polearms or Naginata´s are better choices for us i think.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Naginata

A two-handed axe or halberd would be a nice (and different) variation on the axe theme. Something between the 2H sword and hammer in attack speed, maybe with a different damage distribution between the selected target and its ‘splash’ damage… a stun attack would be nice too

I’ve played about 15 games of Lunatic Inquisition now and the Blood and Madness’ progression tracker still shows me on 0/8.