Guild Wars 2

Hello,

all game servers are in NCSoft-owned networks (at least on the europe realm), thus those are allowed in my firewall.

Today I noticed several failures to connect when trying to enter maps, but I thought they were due to demo weekend load. Upon checking my firewall logs, I noticed rejected connection attempts to
35.157.151.65
35.158.79.75
which are owned by A100 ROW GmbH, which appears to be part of amazon.

Were these connections made by gw2? Did anet buy servers from amazon? Do I need to whitelist those servers?
And if so, can I get a list of ANet-owned server IPs? Whitelisting all of amazon kinda defeats the purpose of a firewall…

Thanks,
Tub

I had the same problem, but it was unrelated to HoT. Make sure your system clock shows the correct time and the daily SAB category should become visible.

Here’s a hint: stay away from mesmers for now.

I don’t want to post a repro in a public forum (so nobody goes deliberately crashing people), but I’ll send what I know to gaile.

Illconceived Was Na.9781:

Nevermore is the sort of weapon that almost requires you to change whatever you have to fit it, not the other way around

But.. but.. I can’t just radically change the characters I invested so much time in!

..so I made a new character just for the staff.

I considered doing a blue-leafed Sylvari (I already have red, green and yellow/brown), but in the end I decided to make a Norn Druid due to their closeness to the raven spirit.

The character was created on HoT release, I got my Nevermore last weekend. And I like it.

archive.org to the rescue!

EULA:
Old EULA for US, updated March 26, 2013
Old EULA for europe, updated March 26, 2013
New EULA, updated August 25, 2015

Privacy Policy:
Old Privacy Policy
New Privacy Policy

At first glance, they changed NCSoft to ArenaNet, changed the formatting and merged the region-specific versions into a single document. I’ll take a closer look when time permits.

From today’s blog post, “Guild Halls: Missions for All”:

For most of the missions, aiming every guild in the game toward the same one won’t cause a problem, but Guild Challenges and Guild Puzzles will get backed up in a big way. To avoid that, those mission types will be moving into their own instances. You’ll access them from the same places in the world, but they’ll otherwise function a bit like a dungeon.

I’m a bit concerned that this may be implemented as “one instance per guild”, effectively preventing the guild cooperations we see and use almost every week.

We’re a small guild (and don’t plan to extend), and the amount of people showing up for the weekly missions is usually between 4 and 6. There is a hard requirement of at least 6 people for the puzzles, and many of the challenges aren’t feasible below 10.
Luckily, there are often other guilds around. Sometimes, they’re smaller guilds just like us, and both guilds band together for the challenge before us. Sometimes, they’re larger guilds, so we support with portals, boons and firepower as best as we can. Or sometimes they’re larger, but less experienced, and we end up explaining mechanics or taking over some of the tasks.

In either case, both guilds profit from the cooperation. This possibility has lead to social interactions between guilds that we considered mostly enjoyable. Cooperation has also allowed our small family to keep doing guild missions despite our low numbers. Not only would we be sad to see the social aspects of cooperation go, it would also put a major roadblock on our (surely ambitious) path toward our own guild hall.

Lawton Campbell.8517:

Also, calling IRC cobwebby is a bit of an understatement — the protocol is riddled with all kinds of undocumented extensions and it really baffles me that clients are even capable of communicating with the wide range of implementations that they do.

eh.. the extensions are either channel modes/user modes which a client is allowed to ignore, or arcane protocols for server-to-server communication. A client implementing all of RFC 1459 must work with all IRC servers, and a server implementing nothing but RFC 1459 must work with all clients. Implementing just some core functionality would be sufficient for everything.

That being said, I dislike IRC and XMPP because they’re unencrypted (or only optionally encrypted). I really don’t want external apps to start sending my guild chat unencrypted over the wire. I’m aware that all ingame-chat is fully logged by arenanet and thus should never be used for confidential information, but that doesn’t mean it should be readable by just anyone.

I also insist that it is always possible to see who is logged into the chat, including API logins. If someone decides to run a 24/7 logging-bot, I want to know.

As for feature requests: Eventually, I’d like to be able to export my character with weapon, armor and dyes in a pre-selected pose as a 3d model. You know, 3d printers. Not sure if that’s feasible (doesn’t the posing rely on vertex shaders, which are difficult to emulate on CPU?), but it’d be cool.

darkace.8925:

For $11.25, I’m hoping not much.

$11.25 per character, so $90 (or 90€) for an 8-character-account. While one could buy just one and transfer it between characters, the added effort outweights the convenience.

I’m not buying this. Not only is 90€ too much, I refuse to pay more just because I love alts. I didn’t pay for character slots to get the privilege to pay even more later.

Get back to me when there are account-wide offers and I’ll gladly buy stones, sickles and whatever. Until then, I’ll keep using the Hall of Monument stone for my afk parking.

Hi,

after the initial fix, the problems went mostly away, but every once in a while the inventory still resizes itself.

Playing on windows, always fullscreen, hidden bags. All chars have 8 bag slots with at least 6 20-slot-bags, the other two are at least 12 each. The window is arranged in a 10×16 grid.

My inventory is rarely completely full; at least it usually isn’t when the bug triggers.

On my workstation, I play at 2560×1440, custom gfx settings (my GPU is bandwidth limited on that resolution), native rendersampling and normal interface size. The bug triggers very rarely. Might be related to switching to windowed mode for a minute to handle teamspeak or bounty hunt maps, but I don’t have a reliable repro either.

On vacation, I played on a notebook at minimum resolution and minimum details (subsampling, but still normal interface size). The bug happened a lot during that week, even though I didn’t play much besides dailys.

BobbyStein.2315:

Braham’s original name was Dyre, but some felt that the pronunciation sounded too much like “Die, Eir” so it was changed. Considering their strained relationship, this was for the best.

Good thing he isn’t an elementalist. Every time he’d switch to lightning, he’d shout “Glorious Eir!”.

(Which is one of two lines in the game I keep mishearing. The other one is from the announcer on Spirit Watch. I never really understood why the orb has a beard.)

While I like the change in general, it’s going to destroy the larger world events. Tequatl and the Wurm were specifically designed only to be winnable with a large, coordinated group. There was even a stealth-buff to tequatl’s health a few weeks ago, possibly because it was considered too easy.

Now imagine you have the required 100 to 120 people in a teamspeak, as coordinated as it gets. But you have no map to do the event on.
Every map that’s being joined is already half-full, there’s no low-population world, no empty overflow, nothing. You cannot do the event, because your group cannot play together.

What we need for those two events is the ability to create our own map instances. For guilds and/or commanders. Those instances can only be joined by partying with someone already on the map.

While I understand that the first rollout will not impact Sparkfly Fen or Bloodtide Coast, I hope that such a feature will be implemented prior to the full rollout.

…

Some people have expressed negative feelings towards making these events invite only. The open world is for everyone. And I generally agree.

But Tequatl and the Wurm are very unforgving, to the point of being griefable. I’ve seen either event fail for no other reason than a single (malicious or clueless) person doing the wrong thing and failing the event for everyone. You need everyone to be coordinated, and that unfortunately excludes random passerbys. Note that this exclusion wasn’t decided by the guilds, but by ArenaNet when they designed the events.

Some people worry that they won’t be able to do the bosses any more, but worry not. There’s barely any guild large enough to do these events on their own. Either boss has plenty of coordinated groups where the only barrier to participation is the ability to join a teamspeak server, request a taxi into the overflow and listen. For an event that requires coordination, that cannot be asking too much.

Minami Kaori.2548:

If something had to be removed, WP costs would’ve been better and more universal.

Ahh, good old GW1 days. I wish they would.

John Smith.4610:

You can opt out of waypoints I don’t feel that it’s the same as repair.

Unless you’re dead on the floor in an explorable area with nobody around. Half the gold penalty for dying remains. And the “newer and less experienced players” you were targeting are rarely in dungeons, wvw or large pve zergs where they can be rezzed.

nGumball.1283:

Wait they are making a changing and you are telling them it is not right cause you are assuming they will add item tiers?

I’m saying it’s not right because it doesn’t solve the problem for the current item tier.
And when ascended gear was introduced, ANet were very explicit that they will add new tiers if they feel it benefits the game, so it can only get worse from here.

Wasbunny.6531:

Wha? I was wondering how long it would take for someone to try to make this change sound negative. Not really sure what ‘solution’ you are proposing.

It’s certainly an improvement, it’s just not a solution to many of the problems brought up in the CDI. And sometimes, an inadequate solution is worse than none, because it’ll lead people into thinking the problem is solved when it isn’t.
What solutions I was proposing is right in the CDI post I linked btw, if you’re interested. Here’s the link again:
https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/gw2/CDI-Character-Progression-Vertical/page/33#post3387182

Malchior.5042:

Don’t share your ascended then?

Let the Mesmer play with its ascended and let the Necro continue on with the specific exotic gear with just the right stats.

Well, obviously I won’t be sharing my ascendeds if I can’t. It still means that I cannot take my necromancer or anyone else into highlevel fractals (or other highlevel content with gear checks) unless I do the ascended grind for every. single. character. Over and over again.

Having alts that cannot access all content isn’t alt-friendly. Having an insane ascended grind-wall that increases by a factor of 8 for people who love alts isn’t alt-friendly. These points have been brought up in the CDI, and this announcement changes none of that.

I’m not even saying that the cost of ascended gear is unreasonable (though many feel that even the first set is too grindy or expensive). It’s the factor of 8 that I object to.

I understand that acc-bound ascendeds are somewhat helpful when you want to retire a character and start a new one, assuming the weight class/weapon type and stats are compatible.
But it doesn’t help people like me, who like to switch between characters, playing most of their characters for a little while, every single day.

Why won’t it help? Let me quote myself from the CDI:

Three problems:
a) my mesmer wears zerk with damage runes, my ele wears soldier’s with boon duration runes and my necromancer likes rabid with condition damage. How are they supposed to share an armor set?
Same with my adventurers (zerk, knight’s and cleric’s) and my heavys (knight’s and cleric’s). With my character setup, not a single set would be shareable.
b) even if the attributes and runes work for multiple characters, skins and dyes probably don’t. What happens when you transmute a cultural armor skin onto it?
c) Having to visit the bank before and after switching characters cannot by any means be called a fun game mechanic.

So while this is probably just a click of a checkbox to implement, it’s not going to help.

Which means that I cannot share a single piece. I’m still looking at a total of ~2500 gold for the damask alone, plus 850 dungeon runs for the empyreal fragments, etc etc.

Worse yet, it appears that ANet has decided on a “solution” and is now done with the topic, so I – and those like me – can now abandon all hope for something that we could actually call an “alt friendly” solution, a system that honors the promise of the GW2 manifesto:

We just don’t want players to grind in Guild Wars 2. No one enjoys that, no one finds it fun.

sigh I don’t want to abandon the game, but the burden of grind is no longer bearable. Mostly, even if I went through with it all, there will inevitably be a higher level cap or new item tier someday, and then I’d have to do it all over again – 8 times. That’s not healthy. That’s not fun.

Randulf.7614:

Was a bit small to read, but #9 stands out for me as a major bugbear. It’s a flaw in so many films and TV series these days as well.

TVTropes calls this the Idiot Ball.

I’m a bit unhappy when my enemies carry the Idiot Ball. Like installing portals to the important secret base right inside lion’s arch, and giving keys to your leutnants down there. I gladly jump at the opportunity, but it makes the enemies less believable.

I’m really unhappy when my allies carry the Idiot Ball. “Hey Scarlet, just give me a minute here. I’ll finish you as soon as I’m done smacking Rox for abandoning her mission over a broken leg! I’d also smack Marjory for moving close to you instead of letting me snipe your eye with my longbow, but I doubt she’d notice while she’s dead.”
It kinda ruined the final sequence for me.

But if you want to make me really angry, hand the Idiot Ball to my character. The moment Scarlet revealed herself, I knew I should’ve gathered intelligence about her. In Rata Sum’s Archives. In my Order’s headquarters. From the last breaths of the lackeys I killed. I should’ve talked to whoever invented the Watchknights, figuring out how they could’ve been captured. I also knew about the attack against Lion’s Arch since visiting the Secret Lair, but wasn’t allowed to notify anyone – leaving it for Marjory and Kasmeer to discover in a later patch, but even then I couldn’t act on that information, leaving LA defenseless.

Seeing my character lobotomized by a story writer just hurts.

Just to clarify, I wasn’t suggesting to replace all AoE circles with the orange ones, just the ones in my examples. I think the AoE fields are important enough in these situations that they should be visible, no matter what.

By the way, there are two places where the AoE rings can turn invisible:

• In Uncategorized Fractal, the Harpies’ knockback attacks. If they target the center of a small platform, the whole rim of the AoE circle is in the air, thus nothing is drawn.
• In Swampland Fractal, against Bloomhunger. Whenever an AoE circle is underwater, it’s invisible, and there’s a lot of water.
• (Tequatl has similar issues with his poison fields in the water, but that’s not a fractal)

Is it possible to replace those with the new full-orange AoE circles that were used in the marionette, wurm and hologram fights?

Mad Queen Malafide.7512:

An interesting suggestion. But how about making it so that it doesn’t kill the player? Maybe there’s some sort of ballista on the cliff, that helps to clear the mobs during the boss battle.

Yeah, that was my first idea as well. But then again, “have someone jump to the big cannon” could be added to every single encounter, so I deliberately tried to avoid that in my examples.

I used the bomb idea because an attack from above fits a fractal with cliffs and scaffolding, and it provides an epic and funny moment. Also, I like jumping off things.

Commandeering a siege weapon would fit into Urban, digging a tunnel and placing explosives would fit Underground, and in Volcanic you might dive through lava to find a hidden Scroll of Ice that removes the burning debuff and/or lava pools in the final boss. Or something. I’m just saying that these things need variety, and they need to fit the theme of the fractal.

Regarding secondary ways to solve an encounter, the suggestions so far were mostly “all or nothing”-alternatives. Everyone goes and grabs firewood? Again, why not split the group? Let me throw some more ideas in here.

Snowblind Fractal, Ice Elemental
There’s an alternate path up a cliff next to the ice elemental. If one (!) party member manages to ascend it, jump along some planks etc, there’s a ledge with a bomb, right above the elemental. You grab it and you jump. Upon impact, large AoE-damage kills all the minor elementals and deals around 50% damage to the boss. Of course the player with the bomb is toast, and won’t be able to contribute to the fight until he gets rezzed.

Groups that are willing to split up and take the boss with 4 can use the bomb to speed up the fight, but there’s the safe, puzzle-free backup strat with all 5 players.

Underground fractal, first room
The current “puzzle”-solutions (i.e. bugs) rely on a pretty boring skill: knowing the bug.

Though maybe someone could jump somewhere to grab an environmental weapon that grants strealth, aegis, knockback or other things useful in the cage? Right now, it’s a bit thief-heavy..

Oh, and I like the idea of seeing the other side of the urban battleground fractal!

Chris Whiteside.6102:

I think the idea of different ‘types’ of fractals is really interesting. This said anything that is to divergent from the core will lead to polarizing opinion in the community I think.

Well, if the fractal mechanics prevent you from implementing new and fun ideas, then I’d mark that as another point for changing the core fractal mechanics.

Solution A
Mechanics that would allow the group to choose their fractals have been proposed. If, say, each step offered two combat fractals and a puzzle one (randomly taken from the list of available fractals), players could always pick the playing style they like, without removing the randomness altogether.

Solution B
Another way would be to split the tasks between the group.
Imagine a jumping puzzle with lots of traps. There are buttons that fire the traps, and a horde of enemies (probably skritt) determined to push the buttons.

Three players need to traverse the jumping parts, standing on the end-platforms at the same time, while the other two need to defend the buttons.

Something like that wouldn’t work in the open world (since it’s impossible to do alone), nor in guild puzzles (since 20-man groups will just break the system), but it’d be perfect for a controlled environment with coordinated 5-man groups.

If not in the mists, where else are you ever going to implement all those weird ideas people keep having?

KyreneZA.8617:

Besides, the finished products are all account bound and not all that useful for most common builds out there. I think I got an exotic hammer recipe and exotic tailor chestpiece recipe, shrugged and moved on with my life. Perhaps, so should you.

I don’t want to trade them, I want to use them. It’s the perfect combination for my ele (getting some healing power without sacrificing power as the main attribute), and it looks tempting for my guardian and bomb engineer, too.
Basically, it’s a good combination for anyone who benefits from healing power, but doesn’t want to sacrifice damage by going Cleric’s.

They made Sentinel’s and Settler’s available for ascendeds from the crafting vendors for laurels+gold. I’m not sure why it hasn’t been done for these. Restricting what’s arguably the BiS items to a small minority of the player base does not seem like a reasonable thing to do.

Hello,

despite regularly farming the marionette for all the four weeks it was available, I got a total of.. 1 ascended recipe, the high-droprate inscription. I would like to have a total of.. at least 15.

So since actually trying to earn them didn’t work, I tried getting them on the trading post. But apparently the drop rates weren’t any higher for everyone else, and low supply and high demands resulted in prices that simply weren’t reasonable. For many items, the costs of the recipes exceeded the costs of the crafting materials. And let’s just say the prices haven’t dropped since marionette was removed..

Are there going to be other sources to acquire them? They’re not available from the crafting vendors, I couldn’t find any references to them in the rewards of yesterday’s release, and I haven’t stumbled upon any dev-posts about that matter.

Just for reference, the dev quote is from here:
https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/archive/madness/When-will-Scarlet-s-Secret-Lair-be-closed

CC Danicia.1394:

Just spoke to the team. Scarlet’s Lair will be sticking around!

Orswich.6423:

you people are ridiculous… OH NO I HAVE TO DEAL WITH A 30 SECOND LOADING SCREEN!!!

Depending on the computer, the time of day/population in the city and the speed of the network connection, that can be up to 5 minutes per map change.

I wish everyone including me had a 16-core machine with a RAID of several SSDs, connected via fibre optics directly to ANets servers, but that’s not the reality.

Orswich.6423:

its a free asuran portal and how much crafting are you doing on a constant basis that it really affects you that much?

Several ascended materials are time-gated; you can only craft one per day. So if you don’t visit the crafting stations every day, you miss out.
Asura gate to the city, waypoint to the crafting stations, crafting, waypoint to the gate, through the gate to vigil’s keep. Even on fast computers, that’s a few minutes of detour, every day. It adds up.

If you don’t craft often and it doesn’t inconvenience you, good for you. But don’t belittle other peoples disappointment in the change.

Mad Queen Malafide.7512:

This whole issue would be instantly solved if we had crafting stations in the Hall of Monuments. Just double click that portal stone, and you’re there. And you can instantly pop back to where you were as well.

Why hasn’t that been implemented yet?

Because they want us to pay gems for it.

This thread seems stuck in a loop around semantics.

The issue is not that crafting stations etc were removed. Of course they’re available elsewhere.

What has been removed is convenience.
No longer is everything in one place, we have to accept additional 3-minute loading screens to travel between cities. No longer are there waypoints close to every important service, there’s only one in the middle and it demands coins.
Driving the point home is the fact that today is a “Daily Laurel Vendor” and “Daily Mystic Forge” day. It’s just a waste of the player’s time.

Is that acceptable? Considering the old promises of “having fun instead of preparing to have fun”, I’d say it goes against the core principles of the game. I like the vigil camp as a storytelling device, but at no point does the story dictate the removal of important services from the hub area.

Now the airship ticket is a convenience item. Which is what the BLTC is about, and the Terrace Pass was an acceptable addition.

What many players seem to take take offence at is the combination of removing convenience and selling it back for gems. Some people seem to be fine with it. To others, it feels like extortion.

If we could focus the discussion around that, instead of pointing out locations of crafting stations or reminding that the same item was already offered under entirely different circumstances, I think this thread would be more productive. Is it ok to remove convenience from the game? Is selling back the removed convenience for gems covered by the BLTC’s premise of covering convenience and style only?

Then again, what matters to ANet isn’t whether some people complain or not, but how many of the tickets they sell. If you don’t like the policy, don’t buy the item.

Isaiah Cartwright.8569:

Some other interesting ways we could midigate the pressure on alts is just make all ascended gear account bound it would remove some demand but it’s something we’ve discussed before.

Three problems:
a) my mesmer wears zerk with damage runes, my ele wears soldier’s with boon duration runes and my necromancer likes rabid with condition damage. How are they supposed to share an armor set?
Same with my adventurers (zerk, knight’s and cleric’s) and my heavys (knight’s and cleric’s). With my character setup, not a single set would be shareable.
b) even if the attributes and runes work for multiple characters, skins and dyes probably don’t. What happens when you transmute a cultural armor skin onto it?
c) Having to visit the bank before and after switching characters cannot by any means be called a fun game mechanic.

So while this is probably just a click of a checkbox to implement, it’s not going to help.

Isaiah Cartwright.8569:

Another idea is we could make it easier to craft ascended gear after you’ve made the first set

Yes, please. I’ve mentioned it before, but the bulk of the costs should have been in leveling to 500 and unlocking the recipes, not in crafting the final items. It’s a bit late for that now that everyone is at 500, but some kind of cost reduction for subsequent items (reducing both the timegated mats and dragonite requirements) would be greatly appreciated.

Note again that this must apply to subsequent items regardless of attributes or it won’t help.

Isaiah Cartwright.8569:

or we could allow you to duplicate ascended gear with some recipe so once you’ve created one set you can copy it for an alt for less.

Again, this would only help if the copy is allowed to have different attributes.

Isaiah Cartwright.8569:

You could allow people to give up other time gates for the crafting one by letting people craft stuff with laurals or mystic coins.

This is not going to help players with alts, since anyone with lots of alts is not going to have a single laurel left. Amulets and ascended recipes for 8 characters already require way more laurels than anyone could have earned in the game until now.

Having to pay laurels not just for every item, but for every item/attribute combination is a major pain for everyone who likes multiple builds, and I think that that’s one of the first things you should revert. It’s just not reasonable that some players should pay as few as 40 laurels and others somewhere around 400 (depending on the amount of 1-handed weapons you wield). I think that a factor of 10 is unreasonable in general, but it’s especially outrageous when said currency is behind a hard time gate.

(continued from last post)

Timegating and buying out of it
While I’m sitting behind a 230 day timegate, looking at an immense bill for crafting materials, other players just built their second legendary for their single character and still have gold left. Those can just ignore the timegate and buy out of it.

So last week on Tuesday, the first people said “alright, full ascended armor, I’m done.” The same people will say come january “hey, there’s nothing to do any more, game’s getting boring”. Arenanet will listen, will add more grind progression, and I’ll have to follow even though I’m not through with the previous patches’ grind.

Timegating is a good way to make sure that newly introduced goals and content will keep the players busy for a while. But for that to work, it has to apply equally to everyone.

It doesn’t have to be cheaper, or easier, or faster to get your first set of ascended gear. The whole point of ascended gear was for us to spend gold and time on it, so stick to it.
It has to be cheaper, easier and faster to get your second, third and eights set of ascended gear.
I’m convinced that making any significant part of it tradeable is absolutely the wrong way to go. That includes both Damask etc, as well as the final ascended gear.

So how can this be fixed?

Before any of this can be fixed, it has to be acknowledged that it is a problem. I understand the desire for more gold sinks, and I understand the desire to give the active players more “work” to do than those with less time on their hands.

However, I argue that there isn’t really a strong correlation between “active players” and “those that like build diversity”, and even if there were, a factor of up to 8 in the amount of work required is way too much.

Would arenanet agree? Or, if not, explain to us why things are the way they are, and why it’s considered to be a good thing?

Going forward, I’d like to propose five new design principles that every future content is checked against:

1. For all forms of progression that are infinite, progress should be awarded account wide
2. For all forms of progression that are very expensive or time consuming, the bulk of the costs should be shared between all characters.
3. For all forms of progression with timegating, the amount of time required should be the same for all accounts, independently of the number of characters or any other decision regarding playing style.
4. All one-time rewards should be available account wide.
5. All all gem shop items should be available account wide.

1) The first one is almost there. I’m glad you turned around on fractals and WvW rank, and luck has always been account bound. I’d also suggest turning the +Agony infusions into an account wide bonus, since a shared fractal rank is worthless unless there’s a reasonable way to get multiple characters equipped with enough agony resists.

2) The second one is mostly about ascended gear. IMHO it should have been expensive to level the crafting professions, but cheap to craft the actual gear. Can this truly be fixed now that ascended crafts have been released? I doubt it.

3) The third one is one of the major issues I have. Laurels.
As a minimum, I’d like to see the recipes for “Berserker Heavy Helmet” etc (5 laurels each) to be turned into a generic unlock for all heavy helmets, and the same for weapons, with laurels retroactively refunded for those who bought multiple recipes. This would at least limit the amount of laurels per account to a maximum of 185 to unlock everything. Which is still way more than the ~40 some players can get away with, but it’s not the ~360 I’m looking at.
I’d also like to see a way to acquire ascended amulets and accessoires without laurels/gild tokens or other forms of timegating. Jeweler 500? Maybe unlock the ring recipes with fractal tokens, the accessoire recipes with guild tokens and the amulet recipes with laurels, so you can unlock them once, then craft as many as your characters need, for a reasonable price, without further timegating?
Timegating on damask etc is still an issue, but I’m not sure this is fixable post-release without radical changes, like removing the timegating altogether. Though maybe that can be done 2 or 3 months from now, making it easier for everyone who hasn’t yet finished their ascended gear to “catch up”?

4) Number four is mostly about one-time skins from living story chapters. Making multiple copies of all skins available next to the Zenith Skins, with the ability to withdraw as many as you need, would be perfect.

5) The gem shop one. Why should a player with multiple characters pay more? “Because some people do, and that makes NCSoft happy” isn’t really an answer that I, as a customer, would accept. You got my money for the character slots, if you want more of it, start treating me fairly. I’m not your cash cow and I’m not your gold sink.

Hello,

Sorry for the long post. I tried to make it shorter, but the issue is too complex for that.

There’s a quote from Izzy I want to comment on:

Alts
As for alts why I lump these up is I think often leveling up alts can feel grindy, our goals here are really about how we make things feel a little less grinding for some actions and we’ve been making a lot of steps with that combing WvW xp, adding tradable level up books, birthday gifts that level you up ect.. I think we are not done with the initiative to progressing alts being a bit more smooth and it’s something we will keep working on as we move forward.

The issue with Alts is not about about leveling. Let me explain why I, caretaker of 8 characters, am pretty frustrated with the way the game treats us:

Alting as a playstyle
Some people choose to lern a single character to perfection, others like to constantly dabble in different builds, yet others choose to spice up their playing experience by playing a different character every now and then.
Personally, I don’t have a “main char” and “alts”, I have a family of 8 characters, all of which I like to play. Unless dictated by party composition, I choose the character I feel like playing at the moment, and on most evenings at least half of them get something to do.

Thus I consider “alts” a misnomer. It’s about build diversity. How many different builds do you want to play? Do you want to specialize or do you prefer variety?

It’s a whole spectrum, and I’m aware that I’m probably at the extreme end of it.

The issue is that the choice of playing style has a profound impact on the amount of time, gold and grind required. Since build diversity is a form of horizontal progression, a certain amount of additional work is acceptable. But in some cases, it’s way too much.

• The initial investment is way too expensive for horizontal progression. Depending on who you ask, that includes leveling, but for me it’s mostly about the cost of ascended gear.

• It’s not just an initial investment to “unlock” the new build, but a continuous investment you need to repeat each time. New skill? Spend 25 skill points on every character. New gear tier? Get a copy for every character. New skin? Buy for every character. Bag slots, infinite sickles or salvage kits? Pay gems for every character.
  Since most patches balance the costs of the new stuff around the average player with 1 or 2 characters, those with many characters have problems keeping up.

Leveling
Just to answer izzy, the leveling “problem” has been solved since release: crafting. Those who don’t like playing lowlevel areas can just spend a couple of gold to craft to level 80.
Given the discrepancies between lowlevel-rewards and lvl80-rewards, that process is still financially better than just playing through.
Making it even easier/cheaper to skip to lvl 80 means that playing through regularly is throwing even more money out of the window. Personal story rewards are usually less than the forced waypointing costs to backtrack to the next cutscene, and the hearts and events barely pay for the Training Manuals.
If anything is done about leveling, I’d like to see more rewards on lowlevel content to make regular leveling an enjoyable experience your wallet won’t regret.

If the problem is to keep people playing by introducing more grind progression, then the solution is not to make content skippable, but to make the existing content more enjoyable.

Ascended Gear
Let’s just say I want to fully equip 8 characters with ascended gear. This takes

• 160 full fractal runs for the rings, unless you’re lucky. I’m at 117.
• at least 8 months of guild missions for the accessoires.
• ~800 gold for the back items. Getting more than 2 with fractal tokens won’t work if you want to do anything else besides just fractals. Don’t forget all the tokens you need for the infusions.
• ~700 gold to get all crafting professions to 500.
• >1000 gold for all the crafting materials for the ascended gear.
• 230 days timegating for bolts of damask.
• >200 days timegating for dragonite ore.
• ~525 days timegating for the 700 laurels for amulets and recipes.

Note that this does not include underwater weapons, any infusions with attribute bonuses, cultural armor skins or even multiple equipment sets for different builds.

By the time I’m through with that, will ascended gear be obsolete? Will the next tier have arrived, or the level cap been raised? Can I even invest all the things I need to invest, or will there be more grind for horizontal progression, which I have to do eight times as well?

So this is where the horizontal progression of build diversity is way too expensive. The build diversity I absolutely require so I don’t get bored with the game is offered to me at a price that I cannot pay.

(continued in next post)

Hello,

tl;dr: When an activity has been played past a certain point, please lock the instance so that no new players can be joined.

Why? Let me elaborate how the current system affects certain activities:

• Bell Choir: Many players leave at the beginning of the free play round. But the instances remain open, new players are joined in, even though there are no more songs to play. Joining Bell Choir currently has a good chance of putting you in an instance that’s over. From the remaining joins, there’s still a good chance to get into an instance where the difficult songs have started, which is a terrible experience for someone new to the activity, or even for someone who hasn’t done this in 11 months.
• Winter Wonderland and Clocktower: again, 2-3 minutes before the activity ends, most people just leave. The game assigns new players into these instances, even though there’s nothing to do.
• Sanctum Sprint: Players joining late are put into a “practice round”, earning no rewards. Ironically, starting in the middle of the track is a poor way to practice, and it’s just a waste of time – especially if you never asked to practice. Lock the instance and give us a fresh one please.
• Southsun Survival: You enter late, you’re a little blue orb. Depending on the time you joined there’s no way to influence the game or earn points, because you need to find vengeance motes, then you need to find a survivor, and usually you end the game with 2 points and no chest because the game decided you didn’t contribute enough.

While I understand the need to keep slots filled in competitive matches (sPvP, Keg Brawl, ..), this is not the case in the activities mentioned above. Joining late hurts the experience, and I think this warrants a change.

I’m aware that it’s always more complicated than I think, and your backend programmers are terribly busy doing other high-priority tasks. But given the cumulative annoyances this has caused me (and undoubtedly other players) over the last months, I kindly ask that this change be considered.

Don’t ask me to dig up the old thread, but someone quoted an answer from support, saying that the omission of the Giver’s stats on ascended weapons was deliberate. It’s not an oversight, they don’t want to have it in the game.

No reason given, though.

Hey Thagan.

I had to play over a UMTS connection for a while, too. As you noticed, entering a map is a fragile issue. The server has to send a lot of data to the client – position, armor and names of all players, position and health of all monsters, running events, gathering nodes etc. Your connection must be fast enough to receive all of that data before it is outdated. I would assume that the server just disconnects you with a cryptic error message if the data isn’t received in time. It also possible that your mobile connection just couldn’t handle the sudden data spike and dropped the connection.

While you will never have a good experience, I found two workarounds to help a little:

• Don’t start GW2 immediately after starting the mobile connection. At least for me, the connection took a while to “settle in”, until it was fast and stable.
• Don’t log out in busy areas, especially not at the bank in Lion’s Arch. I found logging into characters that were stationed there very painful.
  Depending on the server you’re on, the bank in your WvW homelands is less populated, and you can just log out in a safe spot in any explorable area.

hope that helps!

Evan Lesh.3295:

The AFK timer will also be shortened so that it’s more strict.

While I appreciate a shorter afk timer in sPvP, I hope this change doesn’t affect activities. If the timeout in activities gets changed, I’d like to see it increased, since it likes to kick in when

• you’re waiting at the finish line of Sanctum Sprint
• you’re waiting for the next round of the Mad King’s Clock Tower to start
• you’re just chilling in Southsun Survival while your competitors get chewed on by karkas

i.e. during legitimate gameplay.

Well, the update notes say they “added” the empyreal fragments, it says nothing about removing the bags.

I was very confused about the initial rewards nerf, reducing the rewards to the point where even a skilled and perfectly consistent jumper will gain less than anyone who can follow a labyrinth zerg and spam a few AoEs. Why isn’t skill rewarded?

Now it’s just the same as every other JP: a waste of time. Which is unfortunate, since I like playing them. I really hope this is a bug.

1) Viability of multiple characters
I dislike the word “alt”, since that implies a “main”. I don’t prefer any of my characters. But due to timegating and astronomical costs of ascended crafts, it’ll take forever to equip 8 chars. Combined with the fact that char-based rewards are continued to be moved to account-based rewards, while char-based costs are continuously increasing, this game is currently very unfriendly towards people with multiple characters.

2) Difficulty versus Rewards
The most profitable gaming activities are often mindless zerg farms. Highlevel fractals, difficult jumping puzzles (clock tower reward nerf? wtk?) and others aren’t as rewarding.
There’s also an imbalance in zerging (both PvE and WvW), in that the most loot goes to the person who manages to “tag” the most enemies, which is a flawed way of measuring contribution.

3) Living story – existing lore vs. new chapters?
There’s plenty of dragons left to write stories about. There’s enough lore that can be explored and elaborated on. What about that other sylvari tree? What are we doing about Faolin, Kudu et al?
Instead, we’re seeing new groups and villains being pulled out of a hat.

Jornophelanthas.1475:

No, the “hint” is to go looking for any bugs involving footwear, so that these will have to be fixed by adding the “hide” option.

Simple. Asura’s three-clawed feet clip through virtually all footwear. I’ve assumed that this was due to launch deadlines and would be fixed eventually, but since it hasn’t been, how do we get this entered as a bug?

I’ve also heard about some very weird bugs with pants…

Mortifer.2946:

I did it exactly by Dulfy’s guide. I am 100% sure I got all baubles and chests.

Same here, except I did it on normal mode instead of infantile. After the boss died and the counter ticked down, I got no achievement. Two hours for naught.

Bauble bag wasn’t full at any time (and even if so, why should that impede progress?).

There are people on dulfy’s site reporting the same problems, both people who followed the video and people who followed the screenshots. That leaves three possibilities:

• there are weird circumstances where the achievement is not awarded despite getting all the baubles.
• dulfy has screwed up and is missing a bauble both from the video and from the screenshots.
• Multiple people were too stupid to follow a straightforward, numbered guide. Which I would consider pretty plausible, if I wasn’t one of them

Vince, can you confirm whether or not there are exactly 63 bauble pickups to be acquired? Just to rule out problem number 2.

And can I ask again for a bauble counter to be implemented ingame? I hate having to resort to external walkthroughs, but having to end the zone to check your progress wastes just too much time in trial&error for me to try.

Zone 3: Back to the good news, I found most of zone 3 to be really enjoyable. The vertical shaft before the first block-“puzzle”? Exactly what I’m looking for. Difficult but fair jumps with the right amount of tension. Teaches you to get better or get out. Nice.

• The mountain goats? Borderline sadistic with the high penalties that any knockback incurs. But cute.
• The button puzzles? Nice touch.
• The snowstorm section had a nice feeling to it.
• I think you overdid the room with the four (?) large icycles you need to shoot down. Nothing wrong with the large icycles or the jumping or the puzzles, but then you went ahead and placed multiple small icycles right onto the most difficult part of the jumping. Right where the penalty of falling is the largest. Not so nice.
  With timed sections, I think there are two important issues to keep in mind: a) inform the player beforehand that this is a timed section. Like having cloud platforms. Or maybe a smudge on the floor below the icycle locations? b) make sure the player can plan ahead. In this room, the path is very hidden and almost impossible to plan ahead from below. So you jump on top of the last pillar to look around where you need to go, get an icycle to the face, fall down and die. I tried jumping one platform back when I saw the red cross, but either due to lag or due to hitboxes, it still hit me.
  What made it worse was the fact that the checkpoint before that places you in unsafe territory. I was just finished calming down when a goat kicked me down the mountain, wasting another life. Bah.
• The Yeti boss. Maybe I missed the hidden mortar cannon, but I don’t see how you’re supposed to attack and kill him without wasting hearts. There’s no safe place at the top of the mountain, and his health bar is too long for a boss where you’re supposed to climb, hit & run. Whipping doesn’t seem to help. So what’s the secret?
• Wizard, first phase. Nice one. Except for his attack where he charges you three times. Is that avoidable at all? Can’t dodge three times, and I’ve tried pretty much every weapon I had without much success. He said I cannot evade his wrath, but there has to be a way to defeat him without taking damage, right?
• Wizard, second phase. I wish I had known beforehand that I should just evade until the time is right, but meh.. learning experience, right?
  Overall a nice boss, even if my first encounter was a bit painful.

There is one more issued I want to touch. The first one is player expectations. SAB World 1 was an awesome new thing, it was experimental and it was fun because it was different. Not saying it was bad (it wasn’t) but you could have done a lot worse and it’d still have been fun.
For the second release, players expect something more mature, more polished. Still lacking the bauble counters, punishing players for exploring a little more after the chest opened (without warning), having multiple achievements not working at the initial release.. those are things that make SAB look bad. It’s not just a little experimental side project any more, apparently it’s now a recurring living world content.
I know you have all these awesome ideas you really really want to put in the game, but please: there’s more to a good release than ideas. If an idea doesn’t really work out due to technical issues, shelve it. If an idea takes more time than you have, shelve it.

Just to reiterate, for me the most fun part of the release was not the technically difficult frogger section or the block “puzzles”, but a simple, black vertical shaft in 2-3 with tricky jumps. And the most frustrating part was not the fact that you didn’t include references to [favourite childhood game] or that you couldn’t technically include the mario-style cannons with wing-cap or a double jump. It was the fact that I had to do 2-1 twice because it didn’t count the first time, every single lag- or bug-induced death I didn’t deserve, and the fact that apparently I’ll have to find a walkthrough for the 100% baubles again.

Please, for World 3, fix those issues before you go ahead and shoehorn any new ideas into the engine. I know it’s difficult to take an awesome idea out back and shoot it, but sometimes, it has to be done. If world 3 ends up less awesome, but more polished, I think that’d be an improvement.

Let me conclude by thanking you (and your team) for your work on SAB. It’s such a nice concept, I’m looking forward to see what you’re doing next.

Hi. I thought I’d leave you my feedback in here. I realize that it’s too late for tomorrow’s patch, but maybe it’ll be useful for world 3.

I consider myself a good jumper. My favourite puzzle was the mad king’s clock tower. I cursed at it for a good 2 hours before I finally managed to reach the top. Then I kept at it until I was consistent enough to not only get the boots for all of my characters, but also to farm the chest for a while. It was a lot of fun. And I left it a better jumper than I was before. That’s the kind of challenge I look for.

When SAB World 1 was released, it was awesome. It wasn’t much of a challenge, but more of an adventure. Discover a whole new world, relive the nostalgia, explore every nook and cranny. It was good.

Right now, I’ve only played World 2 once. Haven’t gotten any additional achievements or done any systematic exploration yet. So here’s my preliminary take:

Zone 1: Pretty good. The spout-problem has been identified already, otherwise I didn’t have any major problems. Took me a while to get up the buggy sprouts. The frogger-like logs part was fun.
Getting across the last waterfall is really difficult if you don’t spend a minute watching all the patterns, and the backup-path is a problem on your first playthrough since you lack the items to fight in the dark. This part could have been more accessible.
I hated the frog (?) behind the last corner before the spouts though. Two crocidiles, a turtle, then finally a tiny little ledge, and you made that ledge into a death zone. If you can’t whip him fast enough, you’re dead.

Zone 2: Ugh. As said, I consider myself to be a good jumper, but it took me no less than 15 continue coins until I saw the end of it.

• You’re saying that we should watch our surroundings to spot the spike traps before they kill us. Then you go and fill the spike trap rooms with ninjas, frogs and whatnot, so we don’t ever have the time to watch our surroundings. And surround the room with tiny ledges above the infinite void, so that fighting outside is as dangerous as running in and evading the first attack right into the spike trap you couldn’t see. I don’t think that spike traps and combat should be mixed. Ever. When the best tactics are to either rely on luck, or to throw lives at it until you found all the traps by accident, then the challenge isn’t fair.
• It may in part be due to lag, but the hitboxes of the spike traps were all over the place. I have a few screenshots where I’m clearly not near a spike trap, but dead anyway. I know, engine limitations make them buggy, engine limitations make the penalty be death instead of a knockback, engine limitations make the camera useless at times, but the result is still a frustrating experience.
• The gong room? The less said about it the better. Partially because of the buggy spike trap hitboxes. I ended up releasing the gong, killing myself, running back in from the checkpoint and meeting the gong at the bottom.

In conclusion, the whole zone had very few difficult jumping, but lots of spike traps and fighting, and I don’t like it.
If I want enjoyable combat, there’s the world’s best combat system right outside the super adventure box. Hitting stuff with a stick won’t ever be able to live up to that.

(continued in next post due to length restrictions)

The behaviour was different in april, when normal mode achievements didn’t grant their infantile counterparts.

So then I guess my next question is: why was this behaviour changed without retroactively awarding the baby achievements for all feats already done in normal mode?

Hello.

I would never ever play infantile mode (How dare you?), yet every time I finished an area in normal mode, it progressed the achievements “Baby’s First Super Adventure” or “Baby’s Second Super Adventure”.

I’ve been very careful to keep that achievement at 0 during April. It’s a matter of pride. Infantile mode is not for me.

Yet it progressed when it shouldn’t.

Did anyone else experience the same? Is that a bug? Can it be undone?

Vanity.2506:

Edit – Emissary is offering another communicator.

Where?
Like I said, Emissary Vorpp, standing at the Crown Pavillon Waypoint, does not offer one for me. I just checked again, he does not.

/Edit: the Projector is not needed to progress “Portal Invasion Closer”.

So I did the closing ceremony with one character, then noticed that I’d be sent off on a scavenger hunt across the world. The perfect chance to use some of my alts that need to do some exploring, anyway!

But I cannot mule the projector, since it’s soulbound. I cannot do the closing ceremony again, it’s a one-shot instance. I tried talking to Emissary Vorpp at the pavillon waypoint, but he wouldn’t offer another either.

So do I have to complete the story with one character? Or can I use another, but have to do without the help from the projector? And why isn’t it simply account bound?

I’m really disappointed for two reasons:

• The abuse of mesmer portals and character creation should have been foreseen and stopped before releasing the puzzle. It’s not like it’s a new concept.
• The “solution” to the farming issue is again hurting the wrong people.

Those who spent the evening cashing in on the bug have already sold their shoulders, now they can keep their gold.

Those who did the puzzle without character creation tricks, and for some reason decided to hold onto the shoulders for a while, get almost nothing. Did the puzzle the legit way without portals? Get the same nothing as everyone else. Did it a day late? Tough.

What’s so difficult about making the intended one-time reward drop only for characters of, say, level 10 and above? Would have solved the Canach problem, too, without retroactively screwing over players with alts. And players below level 10 can still get a normal chest drop.

Mesmer portals? If an environment effect that disables the skill is too much work, the game already has both teleport and kill triggers that could’ve shielded the chest from portal abuse. And not placing the chest right within jumping distance of the entrance would’ve been a good thing, too.

ArenaNet keeps saying that we shouldn’t be using bugs, we should report them. And that bugs can unfortunately happen, but ANet is learning from their errors and getting better at avoiding them.
Yet today they have again sent two clear messages:

• If there’s a bug, abuse the hell out of it before it gets “fixed”. You’ll be fine. If you don’t abuse it while it lasts, you’ll get screwed by a hotfix that removes your legit earnings. Not only is there no reward for honesty, there’s usually a kick in the rear and the sound of someone laughing.
• Even after numerous incidents, their QA checklist still doesn’t include an item “Can this be abused by creating new characters?”

I’m a game developer myself, and I’m usually pretty lenient towards developers, since I know all the myriad of ways things can and will go wrong. But this time, I’m really disappointed. This should not have gone through QA, and the “fix” should not have been done the way it was done.

TheBandicoot.5294:

They are working as i´m saying.

So maybe they do. And I recognize that an MMORPG engine is entirely different from a FPS engine, and creating proper jumping pads is likely to run into a lot of weird problems I can’t even imagine right now.
For example, firing only once every three seconds should not be needed, but I recognize that there can be circumstances where it’s an acceptable tradeoff to do, since programming it the right way would’ve taken way more time than is reasonable.

But those limitations of the pads were known by the designers. If you cannot enter a launch pad while it fires, why did they place multiple launch pads in a row, with no way of controlling whether you hit the second pad at the wrong time?
If there’s the possibility that launch pads launch you at a downward vector, why are there no safety nets like in Goemm’s lab so you can try again? Do you really argue that it’s the player’s fault for not knowing about all the undocumented intricacies of this implementation of pads?
If the launch height of jump pads is variable and there’s no way to determine the height at the start of the jump, why are the target platforms often at maximum height, again with no safety net on failure?

There’s two ways to go. One can either spend the time to get the jump pads right, so they work like expected for the puzzle. The other way is to recognize the limitations of the pads and design the puzzle in such a way that the limitations don’t hurt the experience. Neither has been done.

You can argue all day that the pads are not “bugged” and “working as intended”, but you cannot deny that the current combination of pad programming and puzzle design is hurting the experience.

I’m having the same issue. Vertical jump pads give different heights each jump, and horizontal jump pads randomly fall short of the intended distance.
I’m not sure if it’s network lag, server lag (due to the hordes of people around today) or something else entirely, but the jump pads in dragon arena suffer from similar problems.

It’s just a minor annoyance in the regular JP, but on the way to the googles, every time it bugs you’re going all the way down. I stepped onto the first of the jump pads (on the first floating platform) four times. Three times, I fell short. Not just a little bit short, I barely got half the distance. I don’t think I want to try again.

Evan Lesh.3295:

There is a small threshold that determines whether your tiny movement should actually be a target selection.

One of the issues is that the threshold is a movement threshold only.

I can right click, keep the button pressed for a long time with only tiny camera movements, and when I release it’ll still count as a click. Since I usually just keep the right button pressed during combat, that happens fairly often.

Adding a time threshold would greatly improve the situation without any requirements for additional settings, UI changes or localisations, i.e. the stuff that always takes much longer than any sane person would believe.

Hi,

I’d like to have access to the time when an event last changed its state, or a WvW objective changed owners.

For events that are running, I’d like to see if they’ve just started (so I can join) or if they’ve been running for a while (so it’s likely finished by the time I get there) or maybe if they’ve been running for hours (likely to be bugged and worth checking out and reporting).
If they’re not running, I’d like to know when they’ve finished last, possibly making a prediction about their next start.

Same for WvW: did that camp switch owners in the last 5 minutes? Can it be taken back or not? Has the keep been in enemies hands for long, is it likely to be upgraded?

It’d be nice if a single query to the API could answer these questions.

Of course I can get that data by continuously polling the API, comparing with a local cache and inserting the time of change on my own. This is however
a) inaccurate, since I really shouldn’t poll every second
b) a waste of my bandwidth and system resources
c) a waste of ANet’s bandwidth and system resources
d) likely to get me a scolding from the College of Statics

My suggestion is to change the APIs as follows. The events.json might return something like this:

{
  "current_time": 1369858634,
  "events":[
   {"world_id":42,"map_id":42,"event_id":"12345","state":"Success","laststatechange":1369858217},
   {"world_id":42,"map_id":42,"event_id":"67890","state":"Active","laststatechange":1369858453},
   ...
}

• .current_time is optional. It would be useful for synchronization, making it easier to deal with network lag or poorly synchronized local clocks.
• .laststatechange is the time when the value of .state changed to the value it currently has. I don’t really care about the time format. Unix timestamps may be the most efficient in terms of encoding and calculations (seconds_since_change = myevent.laststatechange – data.current_time), but a properly formatted datestring should be workable, too.
• Similary for wvw, match_details.json should add .lastownerchange to all objectives. Maybe lastownerguildchange for completeness’ sake.

Of course a proper push API would be even better, but since we’re stuck with polling, this is the next best thing to reduce load while increasing accuracy. It it possible to add this information with the current architecture, or should I expect to keep polling for my project?

Oh, and while I’m here: thank you ANet for this awesome toy!

Another +1 on the OP.
Since I knew the sewers, I went right through the gate as I saw it (where else to go but down?). I noticed Forgal saying something about the gate, but I was already through.
Since I didn’t want to bother with the fish, I swam right through them. Forgal teleported back to me and we killed the scout.

As you can guess, the mission didn’t finish since the gate objective was still active. Even swimming back and/or killing the fish didn’t rectify that.

Bonus Bug: the green pathfinding arrows are totally useless here. They seem to show some path above ground, which can lead you in the wrong direction. Just using the green stars (without any arrows) would be more helpful.

I was pleasantly surprised to see this bug fixed with the latest patch (at least in ascalon fractal, didn’t test the others).

Thanks to whoever is responsible!

This was confirmed to be a Bug by Jason King here:
https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/support/bugs/Mesmer-Deceptive-Evasion-doesn-t-work-when-transformed-Merged/first#post923552

Whether or not it’s on anyone’s list of things to fix remains unknown. Sure doesn’t seem to be a priority, and if Jeffrey isn’t even aware of the bug and its consequences, that’s not a good sign. sigh

For reference: the transformations in AC3 and ascalon fractal are only visual transformations for flair. They do not affect skills or traits or combat in any way – except for this single trait that’s suddenly gone and thus breaks a good chunk of mesmer builds.