Guild Wars 2

If you have an empty weapon slot on one weapon set that is filled on the second, the game will use the weapon equipped in the second weapon slot in your first set as well so you don’t end up with empty skills.

Not a bug, it’s intended, and useful too.

bravoart.5308:

So since guilds can spawn certain bosses off their timer… and those bosses are all currently in zones that aren’t affected by the megaserver…

Great job catering to TTS again and leaving small guilds in the dust or outright killing them off.

This update is not even catering to TTS. Even if TTS were in a position to obtain this bonus (which they are SO not) the sheer cost of maintaining it would destroy the guild outright.

In reality the new upgrade caters to no one, because the guilds that make the most sense to have it on won’t be able to use it. The guilds that can research it don’t have the member coverage to make it worth their time and the guilds that need it can’t maintain it because it would be far too costly given the current schedule.

I’m currently experiencing the issue where gold from item sales is not being added to my total trade profit. I just had two exotic sales evaporate into nothing for me.

Account Bound: having everything soulbound to a single character made it too grindy to get all your alts into gear that could stand out and also made getting that unique look prohibitively expensive. Not to mention we now have a massive number of miscellaneous skins rewarded from Living Story metas cluttering up our banks. By changing all skins and dyes to being account bound it will be much easier to customize the appearance of your characters and make it easier to find a look that you like.

Same thing for ascended and legendary gear. It takes a huge amount of effort to get those on even one character, so by having them be account bound it removes a lot of grind from the game. Sure, GW2 may be about character progression, but it is also very much against grinding, and that is what this change is meant to address.

Mixing PvP and PvE: They are not forcing anything, they are simply allowing items that are usually exclusively earned in PvE to be awarded in PvP as well. So if a PvP player wants to get dungeon tokens, he can now. This does not impact the PvE player in any way. And if a PvE player wants to PvP, he doesn’t need to deal with having to change gear every time (though this does bring gear stats into question).

Megaserver: This is their solution to small servers. Granted this one has received a very large amount of criticism, both from people who feel that sense of server community is being ripped away from them and from the groups who will be negatively affected by the changes being made to the game to accommodate the new server algorithms. At this point I’m not really sure why they went with this approach other than it being a fairly clever means of not having to worry about servers being merged.

Anet will not respond to negative criticism, constructive or not, in any way. The most they will do is clarify if something we were saying is based on wrong information, but other than that if we don’t like it they say nothing.

It’s all we can hope for that they heard us and either revise or delay the implementation of the boss schedule. Best scenario would be to put it on indefinite hold until they have enough input from both the newbies and the veterans on what they want. Then and only then would they be able to figure out a plan that works for everyone.

This is not random QQ about some random feature here, there are very real problems with the proposed schedule that would cause serious damage to the game’s longevity for casual players if it were to go forth as-is. I know for certain my play time would be impacted badly, as most of my PvE is now spent with TTS on megabosses. By limiting me to once per day (and those hours are incompatible with my schedule anyway) you are removing a lot of reason for me to continue playing this game, and I probably won’t continue playing at all if it comes down to that.

On the topic of commanders, one thing that could help out there potentially: commander Squads would be factored into the map-join algorithm.

So if you want to stick with a particular commander, join his squad and the algorithm will do its best to keep you in the same map as him.

So how it would work: you get a commander, you join his squad. When the commander moves maps, it checks if the current prime candidate for the commander would accommodate everyone in his squad. If it does not, it would continue down the list until a map is found that does have enough space for everyone who is following him (and there would be a buffer-zone too to allow for random hot-joins to not affect the squad trying to zone in). Once the commander moves maps, if you are in his squad, the megaserver would prioritize putting you in the same map as the commander you are following.

The change for mega-bosses will not work, and this is why I feel this way:

1. It can potentially force a rep requirement for these raid guilds due to how expensive it will be to unlock the world event unlock. Furthermore, this is EXTREMELY damaging to TTS which ranges across multiple guilds. They would likely need to unlock the trigger on multiple guilds to maximize the number of leaders who can actually trigger the events. This would take an incredibly long time.

2. We can’t even instance our raids anymore. There is a very good reason we do this: randoms have proven on multiple occasions that they have no intention of following directions, refuse to come onto a public Teamspeak server to listen to the instructions given, and get in the way of other guild members who might want to do the content as well. The reason TTS and the like uses overflows and dead server maps to do this content is to maximize guild participation and minimize randoms who might cause problems and fail the run. But the megaserver system is completely obliterating our ability to do this.

These new features will actually be detrimental to the guilds they are trying to support. They need to be changed and fast. And also, this needs to be addressed too:

THESE RAIDS NEED TO BE INSTANCED. The organization required is too much to expect a group full of randoms not communicating to be able to accomplish them.

What is desperately needed at this point is a guild map, which would allow the mega-guilds to create private maps to perform these events. the only difference between that map and the public maps are that you would need to enter a password to be allowed in. This is so to not affect multi-guild guilds like TTS and also to allow randoms in when the guild decides to allow it (anyone can enter so long as they know the password). The guild map would need to be purchased outside of the guild menu (again, because making it influence and merit based would be extremely kitten raid guilds who typically don’t do guild missions and potentially force a rep requirement).

No.

Core issues are not being addressed with the next feature-patch (though some good stuff is being added) and numerous bad design choices have been made. These are the following major issues with the game as of now that have not been addressed:

1. Conditions are useless in PvE and overpowered in PvP.
2. Toughness/Vitality stats matter little in PvE due to overused 1-shot mechanics.
3. Defiant renders control specs worthless.
4. Rampant class imbalance based on game mode.
5. Serious lack of build diversity due to low count of skills (and even less useful ones) and restrictively expensive gear re-specs.
6. DPS build supremacy in PvE due to inviability of other builds.

And these are the following design decisions:

1. Emphasis on temporary content is resulting in a MORE static world than if otherwise due to the fact the content is temporary and has little overall effect on the game.
2. Emphasis on large-scale (zerg-style) combat events and not enough actual group content has resulted in an extremely low overall skill level for this game.
3. Emphasis on high-population events results in people being unable to participate with their community due to the Overflow system.
4. Emphasis on high-population events coupled with guesting is causing major problems for smaller servers trying to enjoy this content.

Until all those get addressed GW2 is in a pretty sorry state, and are largely why I barely ever play anymore.

My avocation remains to simply prevent defeated players from being resed at all by anyone who is in combat.

What would GW2 be without Living Story?

We would not be running into these huge issues with overflows because all the new content would be permanent and players could take their time to complete it, rather than be forced to rush it.

We would not have issues with events being designed only for full maps because permanent content will not see as huge a rush of people to complete them. Instead we would have content that properly scales for the number of people present.

We would not have issues with low-pop servers dying due to the need to guest to high-pop servers due to the above problem.

We would not be in mega-guilds out of necessity to complete this content.

We would not have to deal with being soft-locked out of certain rewards because of RNG. Not everyone likes the idea of the TP substituting for bad luck.

In short, it would have been a much better game.

All game times have shifted forward one hour due to DST.

One of two things need to change for Wurm to be worth it:

1. Heavily nerf difficulty (adding an extra minute to the timer for the head phase, for example).

2. Heavily buff rewards (to the level of guaranteed exotics and 1 in 10 chance at ascended chests).

Until then, all the wurm is good for is frustration. There’s no challenge to the encounter anymore, head phase is just banging your head against a wall until you get a favorable die roll. First phase is identical difficulty to Teq, so in all actuality for the wurm to be worth it head phase could just be cut from the fight completely.

Romo.3709:

It’s like watching a show that is constantly talking about a big thing going down, but every episode just adds more and more unknown.

Anet are channeling J.J. Abrams now. :P

(I tried watching Lost, but gave up halfway into season 2 for the same reason I stopped playing GW2: all additions, no conclusions).

[ ] Married
[ ] Have Girlfriend
[X] Employed
[X] Have Pets
[ ] Have Children
[X] Are an Adult
[X] Have a Life
[ ] Have no Manual Dexterity

You Think Living World is too:

[ ] Hard
[X] Time Consuming
[X] Temporary
[ ] Full of Jumping Puzzles
[X] Every 2 weeks is too much to handle
[X] (added) Too focused on rewards and not focused enough on story.

You are Currently Threatening to:

[X] Quit
[ ] Uninstall
[ ] Kick Colins’ Dog
[X] Tell the Internet That You are Upset

To put it very simply, the Living Story is making me not want to play this game anymore. The writing is disjointed, has no direction, and is centered around a villain we didn’t even mew need or want. What happened to the Elder Dragons? They all go on vacation? Or did Scarlet secretly mind-mew them into the abyss?

What the mew is Scarlet up to? All we ever get is “she did this, she did that!” I ask, “well why?” The game responds “LOOK, SHINIES!!” STOP IT. I’m tired of grinding achievements for rewards I never use, just tell me what’s going on. When I first bought the game it was because I felt it had a good story to tell. Well, that’s done now. The Personal Story is over for me, I know how things end, and I’m still waiting for the continuation that the Living Story is supposed to be. Flame and Frost started things off well, but ever since it’s tumbled downhill and is ready to crash and burn.

Seriously, ArenaNet may have said that there is still about 4 months left in the Scarlet arc, but I strongly urge them to reduce that timeframe and accelerate the conclusion of this arc preferably to the end of this year. Players are sick of being dragged by the ear from place to place (including myself) for a small instanced event and a week of mind-numbing achievement hunting in the name of some silly Harley-Quinn reject who insists she’s more powerful than FIVE ALL-POWERFUL DRAGONS. It’s time to rethink the Living World, what we have now is not working.

With that, I fulfill my threat to tell the internet I am upset.

I no longer care either. My current time spent in game has dropped significantly because the Living Story has resolved nothing and is just meandering around accomplishing nothing but a tease at “grand plans” and to make permanent aesthetic changes to the world.

The year is pretty much over, I want some resolution. I want to know that all that we have done actually means something, and are not just excuses to spoon-feed us shinies by coaxing us to log in every day. Because I won’t do that.

Add me to the list as well.

Here are my symptoms:

1. This ONLY occurs in crowded maps, like Lion’s Arch. If I go to a low-population map, everything is fine. but if there is high player activity, I get the “lag” (for lack of better term).

2. I am not experiencing real lag. Chat updates properly, I can see other people moving correctly, and I can receive boons from them. Anything that requires my client to communicate to the server, however, takes an extreme amount of time (sometimes up to 30 seconds if at all) to be transmitted. Skills won’t fire, I can’t talk to NPCs, and I can’t use waypoints being the primary ones.

3. Eventually I get disconnected with error code 7:11:3:191:101 (Game client could not communicate with the server and timed out). But again, this only happens in crowded zones where the server is managing a lot of players at once. As stated above, the symptoms point to severe packet loss on the server side.

In layman’s terms, the server is too busy with other clients and forgets that my client is trying to communicate with it as well, my packets get ignored and I get dropped.

This started manifesting after the latest hotfix patch.

PvE: http://gw2skills.net/editor/?fUAQNAsdRlUgqC33xMEf4ERWBRa9AgH0fYPwI87IA-jwCBYfCiYLJjsAiIAkKAI5ZYsJQJq4qIasqZER1KbYGxFRrWIABjBA-e

Damage/Support build specializing in Sword use. Greatsword provides initial burst and is followed by sustained damage and Vulnerability stacking with Sword/Focus. Utility skills are centered around defensive support. Elite skill is there for clutch moments.

WvW: http://gw2skills.net/editor/?fUAQJAWSlUgqC3FyMEfIFSmCRCBtKIQYPwoMqjuKsQA-jUCBofBCbJZEEAkIQZPFRjtspIasqZER1KbYGxFRrWGAmxA-w

Zerging, Staff provides constant (though low) AoE damage and near-constant swiftness when moving between objectives, as well as CC. Hammer provides support potential with further CCs and a blast finisher. Build provides lots of condition removal through skills/traits, as well as sustained boon-stripping.

Top 3:

3. Molten Weapons Facility and Twilight Assault: These are dungeons the way dungeons should have been designed. An emphasis on group effort and with bosses that actually require tactics to overcome. Molten Facility is an excellent example of a dungeon for newer players to familiarize themselves with how dungeons work in this game, while Twilight Assault is the same for endgame dungeons where success requires experience. Both of these dungeons were very well designed and deserve to be used as examples of what ArenaNet should do to the dungeons going forward.

2. Super Adventure Box. What can I say? The nostalgia factor is nailed dead-on and the content inside is not only fun, it feels like a classic platformer. I am always glad to step into the box whenever Moto opens it to the public.

1. Tequatl Rising, the encounter. This encounter felt like a battle with a powerful and deadly beast. There are a few rough edges (“time limit” being one of them, could have been called something a bit more inspired to get us more into the swing of the fight) but overall it feels great to be there destroying this immensely powerful force of nature. As a raid ,and yes, I consider it a raid, try as ArenaNet might, you just can’t make this stuff open-world and expect randoms to succeed, this encounter is one of the best in the game, and I look forward to what is next in store for the other three dragons and future bosses.

Bottom 3:

3. Ascended crafting, a taste of WoW. I thought we weren’t going to have to grind for stats? What is all this with time-gated daily crafting and the huge material requirements needed for them? Or the need to spend almost 200g worth of materials getting your crafting to the level it needs to be in the first place? Yes, the difference is small, but it doesn’t change that this was a broken promise, as well as a very casual-unfriendly update (which this game caters toward much more so than other MMOs). The point is, we do need to grind now for best-in-class equipment. Let us hope this is the last time we do have to.

2. Lost Shores, event fiasco. Not because the zone they added is still empty to this day, not because I didn’t get a chance to participate in it and get free precursors. But because of just how big a blunder ArenaNet made by making a one-time-only event that they knew everyone would participate in without first being sure their servers could handle the load. Short answer, they could not and the event was ruined by people having trouble participating because of server side performance problems (skill lag being a primary symptom). It was bad enough that ArenaNet gave out a complimentary reward chest to anyone who participated in the event. For gross overestimation of what their engine (which, remember, was originally designed for a game that only ever had instanced content) could handle, Lost Shores gets second bottom for me.

1. Tequatl Rising, overflow singularity. This gets bottom because the way the game was designed caused severe problems for this event, the event itself was great, but being able to participate in it in the spirit that was intended (which is to say, with enough players who are actually active present and as an open world encounter) was nothing short of a nightmare and I don’t bother with trying anymore. Generally speaking, when you design content that could put strain on an aspect of the engine, you need to know this and what can be done to correct this. ArenaNet did not do this with Tequatl Rising, and because of that it was almost impossible to participate in the event the way it was meant to be played (with a large coordinated group). There were a lot of factors (specifically AFK players) ArenaNet did not account for when designing this update. It overall felt very hasty and half-baked because of the above. I regularly run Tequatl raids now with one of the guilds that organized for him, but I know what the original intention of the update was and it failed so miserably that it gets bottom for me on my list.

Just saying this: It is currently a bit past 8:00 at the time of posting this in Seattle. Most of Anet’s employees are at home eating dinner right now.

How can they respond to an issue they probably don’t even know exists yet?

daimasei.4091:

Simple solution: Reward 1 champion bag for day.

This way, if people want to farm champs, they can form a “train” and farm ALL the champs in the game instead of farming the same 5 champs over and over.

There is enough champs all across the world and 99% are never touched so this will be not a nerf but a solutions to the original problem and a fix to the newest.

Uh uh. This game has enough time-gated content already (and in a few places it is not being used very well, either). Very few people want to see more, and it is a band-aid fix at best.

You have the ability to report people, you also have the ability to block people. Use them. Changing the entire balance of in-game rewards over something as trivial as abusive chat messages is pretty extreme.

I’d be up for an invite, as well.

For some reason the gathering nodes in Southsun Cove are changing daily instead of weekly or with a new build, unlike every other zone. Is this intended behavior?

Improving the experience at the cost of intruding on it?

There are much better ways to release patches.

At the very least they should do it the GW1 way again: do not force people out of the game when a new build is released, it gets downloaded next time you restart the game.

This lets everyone finish what they are doing and doesn’t interrupt major events, especially freshly introduced events. It’s flat-out bad form to force people out of content that isn’t even a day old yet.

Only issue with that is that the only recipe the Bloodstone Shard is used in is an Account Bound item, so the binding hierarchy doesn’t really make sense with the Bloodstone Shard being Soulbound. Everything else you buy form Miyani is fine as-is, but my vote is also to make the Bloodstone Shard an account-bound item, just so it’s a little bit less of a hassle to craft the gift of mastery.

It’s nice to know that, all I want is a break from the minigames in the next living story cycle. This one has been REALLY bad because of that, and I actually think ArenaNet should rethink having the Living World team developing minigames. If they are going to put a focus on them (as the candidates have promised), make a minigame team and let the Living World teams focus on the Living World.

My personal expectations of the Living Story were something along the lines of what was delivered in Flame and Frost (but with more permanent additions). The content was designed in a way so that the player felt like he was actively contributing to the story and that the Molten Alliance was defeated with the players playing a pivotal role.

But now, all I can see as far as the Living Story is concerned is two weeks of throwaway minigames bound up by content that I personally consider a joke. Cutthroat Politics is really the last straw for me, as ALL the man hours for this content were spent in minigames.

I do not play the Living Story for minigames, and I never will. I did not buy Guild Wars because I was expecting updates containing throwaway content released every two weeks. If you want to release lots of temporary content, that’s fine, but please stop with the throwaway minigames. I’m sick of them, and it goes against the idea of a living STORY.

I want the living story to be a STORY, not just a new carnival every two weeks.

For the reasons above, I consider Bazaar of the Four Winds/Cutthroat Politics to be the weakest chapter in the Living Story by far and beyond. I would like this trend to stop, and it is for this reason I am posting today.

The Asura Gate leading to the Idea Incubation Lab in Rata Sum is currently bugged. Passing through it teleports you to jail instead of to the Idea Incubation Lab zone like you are supposed to.

This blocks access to a Waypoint and Point of Interest in the area and thus blocks World Completion.

No one even does the temples anymore. That’s how dead it is down there.

The only life you see in the region are people farming for Ori nodes nowadays, no one bothers to stay for any events.

A new jp will be made available that leads to that POI later on.

I don’t think so, she bugged on my run through and there was not a single party wipe until AFTER she bugged (intentional).

Yeah, if only bug hunting were as simple as that…

We definitely know that is where the problem is, but it’s always the why that takes some doing. Only way to get that nailed down is professional debugging programs and access to the sdk.

It is during the final trash mob before the boss area. If she doesn’t participate in the final fight there, her pathing will break and she will get stuck.

This usually occurs if all 5 party members enter the room from the top of the Jumping Puzzle section.

New build did not fix the bug with Kiel. She can still get stuck if she doesn’t participate in the last fight before the boss.

I just got my precursor! Thank you Zommoros!

Now to finish things up. I should have enough gold to buy everything else I need.

EDIT: All done. The Juggernaut is mine.

Although ArenaNet stated in yesterday’s update notes that the number of achievements for Dragon Bash Experience was reduced from 10 to 8 to make up for the Dragon Ball achievements not counting, whatever was changed did nothing. The meta-achievement is still requiring 10 achievements for completion.

I’m close now. I have three things left on my shopping list: 78 Molten Lodestones, 100 Icy Runestones, and my precursor.

Anet systematically killed Orr all over again over the past few months.

Peni/Shelters are now on 30min + cooldown timers, mobs have had their strength buffed and loot nerfed massively, the temples still break quite frequently, and then there’s the issue of culling making at least two temple events almost impossible due to invisible champs.

The only life to be found in Orr now are either bots or people gathering their daily Orichalcum. Other than that, Orr is once again completely dead.

Met one person who did this already. He was literally unkillable.

Needs to be patched ASAP, they ruin the game for all.

I got my golden ticket. I think it was around the 25 crate mark I had one pop out. Turned it into a Greatsword for my Mesmer (it fits the aesthetic I planned for her, so there).

Low-level crafting is never worth it, and you just discovered why. By the time you get enough of the fine materials to make the gear you were going for, your level has already outstripped the usefulness of what you are trying to craft. And buying them is not even worth considering either since the LOWER tier materials actually cost MORE than the higher ones (tiers 2, 3, and 4, are 2x to 3x more expensive than tier 5).

All fine materials (save T6) have the same drop rate, when it should be that the lower tier materials drop more often or in higher volumes (or both). That is the only way to make low-level crafting worthwhile to pursue. As it stands, you simply level up too fast for crafting your own gear to be worth the effort. I don’t think that balancing low-level crafting is very high on Anet’s to-do list, though.

Progress has been made! (The Juggernaut)

Gift of Fortune is DONE. Yay! No more mat farming!

Now for the hard part: Lodestones and Doubloons. I am starting with Lodestones, as I need Molten and it’s stupid easy to farm those (CoF). And since I’m making a lot of money on the side, I will be using it to help fund the core promotions (mainly dust, I’ll use laurels to buy binding agent to help keep costs down) and eventually the doubloons.

Precursor still needed, of course, but it is second to last on my list (last is the icy runestones).

There is actually one more semi-reliable way to get dust in the game: AC.

I know, everyone hates AC now, but with the recent complete destruction of Orr farming, AC is probably the only place left to go if you want to get dust. You can get Crystalline/Radiant dust from the chests in there, and it’s 40 units for Radiant, meaning in just a few runs, you have enough to promote it in the MF and get 15-20 more Crystalline.

If you need dust, give AC some love.

Dragonbrand is open for business!

Open on Dragonbrand

Since the weapons skins do not interest me in the slightest, I do not farm the area for crates. I farm the area for karka shells and blood (and largely thanks to the karka farm I have a full stack of Powerful blood now).

I usually get 1-2 crates per run, though, and sometimes they contain interesting stuff (like my brand new ship-in-a-bottle focus skin). It’s always nice to get them to see what goodies they have inside (and I’m perfectly happy to get more karka shells and passion flowers), but they are not on my lot-to-find list.

Which is probably why I get so many. I don’t really want or need them, so I get more. That’s my superstition regarding RNG.

I’m sure not going to be buying any, either. Not worth the gems.

Yup. Taking advantage of Southsun MF boost for as long as I can. Karka farming for now, but will probably try event farming, too to see if it’s comparable.

I am now up to 209 vials of powerful blood. Appears this will be my second stack to be finished. Once I do, I’ll switch gears more towards CS farming to get an income of Crystalline Dust and the other T6 mats on the side, while using the gold I earn to buy more of what I’m short of.

Ectos are slowly but surely increasing, too.

Progress so far (my aim is for The Juggernaut):

Gift of Mastery is done.

Gift of Fortune: Got all mystic clovers and am working on replenishing my Ectos and getting my stacks of T6 mats. I’ve finished my stack of Ancient Bones (all farmed) and am close to finishing my stack of Powerful Blood (Karka farming ftw).

Gift of Juggernaut: Got plenty of molten cores to convert to lodestones, and will be upping my CoF farms once my Mesmer hits 80 and I get her kitted in Zerker gear. Gift of Metal is almost craftable (just need 60 more Ori ingots). The problem, of course, is the stack of silver doubloons. I foresee a lot of skritt farming in the future, as the supply on those is extremely low. Icy Runestones will probably come last, as I’ll be saving my money for the more expensive items first.

Precursor: I’ll get it eventually. Whether from a drop or buying, I will have it at some point.

By the math, I am now at 59% complete on my shopping list.

I’d say about 50 tries, got nothing.

Then today, I did a casual opening of the chests not expecting too much, and I got a ticket on the very last one I opened.

This really does need to be fixed, and soon.

What happens if the dungeon leader has to leave because of something? Like he starts lagging like kitten for no reason and wants to get a replacement that would do some more good? Or real life catches up and he has to log off to take care of things? He can’t leave the party, nor can he be kicked, since if he does, the whole team gets booted. Is it too much to ask that party leader get migrated to another person when the party leader is forced out of the game due to outside circumstances or if he’s trying to grief the party?