Guild Wars 2

Most elite specs have non-elite specs that still benefit them. E.g. necromancer minion traits have synergy with Rise.

For some reason, scrapper skills don’t really have anything to spec into outside the scrapper spec itself. For some reason, turret traits do not benefit gyros even though minions summoned by reaper skills benefit from minion traits.

For some reason, blast gyros don’t benefit from explosion traits.

If turret traits generalized to gyros, it would open up a few more possibilities:
Explosive Powder: Manual gyro detonation could knock back.
Experimental Turrets: Gyros could pulse boons.
Advanced Turrets: Gyros gain damage reduction and raise temporary projectile shields.
Power Wrench: Tool Kit could be used to heal gyros (unlikely anyone would use this…)

People don’t use these traits since turrets were gutted, but they could see some use if they affected gyros.

Assuming each gift drops one drink (stats point to ~0.9 so this is likely an overestimate), you would have to get at least 1000 gifts.

The JP gives 10 per successful run.

Getting 1000 from the JP in two hours implies you found a way to cheat and finish it over eight times per minute, or 7.5 seconds per run.

You are a liar.

This issue still affects Reactive Armor on scrappers and Last Rites on necromancers post-HoT.

The issue with masteries now is that unlocking them primarily requires grinding easy content over and over. It’s not compelling.

By removing the experience requirement and slightly increasing the number of mastery points required, the game becomes about overcoming challenging content, but not grinding it.

In the jungle, players still need to run events for loot and to unlock the meta-event bosses (which hold achievements for mastery points). There’s already incentive to run them. This change would benefit the game.

Well if they’re totally killing it even as an avenue for characters to level then that really sucks. Fractals are hard-gated behind agony and nobody’s gonna take a sub-80 into a raid so that leaves… no instanced content for new players whatsoever? That seems incredibly wrong.

All that was mentioned is that dungeon “liquid rewards” are being nerfed heavily. Does that include experience gain? I’m wondering if this is also a move to stretch out central Tyria masteries…

Not exactly. Minor stat stacking sigils aren’t level-gated, but if you have something like a superior sigil of power (+10 per kill) in an ~ level 20 zone it will grant zero power per stack even though a level 20 character could have +2 per stack with the minor version.

If a level 1 character takes a minor stat-stacking sigil into WvW they can gain ludicrous amounts of that stat by killing mobs and then entering combat with players because the game doesn’t treat the sigil any differently than gear stats while scaling levels.

So this apparently also applies to stat-stacking sigils, including both being broken by downscaling and upscaling. It’s exploitable even at lower levels though, for much greater effect.

Bearhugger.4326:

It’s not a programming bug, it’s a game design issue. You can’t let level scaling affect a skill whose effectiveness is already based on level. They probably didn’t think of that.

The easiest solution would be to just let some traits apply their effect after level scaling, and then give that property to all skills that use level.

But the scaling system has always been broken and it just doesn’t scale well, so I’d like them to eventually replace it. Since they use a base stat -> derived stat model, where the derived stat is the one that really matters in combat (ie: toughness -> defense, power -> damage multiplier, vitality -> health, etc.) I think that letting the base stats grow unhindered but then applying an asymptotic diminishing return formula on the derived stat would work best.

I’ve thought about your second point to rework scaling and it seems good but I doubt they’ll go and overhaul it now.

Also, this isn’t a design bug. It is a programming bug. Some traits behave like regular buffs and are unaffected by level scaling while others are affected.

You can actually exploit this with the first death magic trait for insane toughness as well.

glaphen.5230:

Tulki.1458:

If the death recap showed 35k direct damage coming from a power build, would you be making a post? Honestly.

Nope because it would be my fault for not preventing it with the many many ways to prevent big physical damage. Only thing you can do about conditions is hopefully remove what you want it to after it’s applied.

The difference being that you have to predict physical damage to prevent it (dodge/block/apply protection), but with conditions you can react after the enemy applies them (cleanse/resistance in addition to dodging or blocking)… that’s too big to ignore.

Also, the death report shows 52 stack ticks of burning. So even if the enemy applied 8 stacks of burning that means they would have had to let those stacks burn for 6.5 seconds. It’s almost as if the target stood still to try to prove a point, or they were just unprepared against conditions and died expectedly.

If the death recap showed 35k direct damage coming from a power build, would you be making a post? A ranger can deal half that with rapid fire from further away, and you can’t cleanse direct damage after it hits you. Why is it that when a condition deals lots of damage it’s instantly complained about while direct damage isn’t?

^ Yes, I’ve actually tried this with a Mesmer mantra as soon as hero points unlocked.

The upscaling combined with channeled toughness made me effectively invulnerable to direct damage while casting a mantra. That’s why I reported the bugs under exploitable. And yet, still they haven’t been fixed. It’s niche and awkward since you have to play as a low level character, but it absolutely is exploitable. You can get up near 10k toughness.

Misguided.5139:

Aren’t there stat caps at lower levels?

There aren’t stat caps. The way the game works is it divides your stats based your effective level versus actual level. The further those two are apart, the bigger the divider.

The problem is that many skills and traits which grant stat bonuses are having their bonuses scaled by the same system, which devalues those abilities for higher level characters in central Tyria.

So as an example, a level 35 necro could walk into Ascalonian Catacombs with a trait that gives +55 toughness while shroud is active, but if a level 80 necro walks into that same instance with the same trait, it will give them only ~8 toughness while in shroud. The trait is essentially useless.

It’s one thing to downscale gear bonuses, but it’s another to downscale stat bonuses from traits. Downscaling gear makes sense because players acquire better gear as they level (which counteracts downscaling). But traits? Those don’t scale up with your actual level, yet downscaling will keep making them weaker and weaker in lower level zones as your actual level increases. It doesn’t make sense.

Granted, since HoT is all level 80, these problems won’t affect those zones. But it’s a VERY glaring issue when a whole bunch of traits have severely diminished or even nonexistent effects in areas <L60. And I mentioned the issue here in the HoT sub-forum because I noticed it’s affecting elite specs in the expansion as well.

Is there a delay to it or does it just never apply the bonus? What if you pick up a conjured item then switch in the trait?

Aaaand it seems to affect Last Rites, i.e. all necromancers who slot blood magic.

This also affects necromancers and reapers because the armored shroud (death magic) trait is bugged the same way.

Shrapnel is not being properly applied to non-weapon explosives.

Utilities and tool belt explosives are only applying the bleed effect when they activate shrapnel, but aren’t applying the cripple effect.

It’s happening with charr too pls fix

And in zones that it should give 37 toughness, it gives < 1 per stack.

There’s an issue in the game right now with traits that grant stat bonuses. There’s already a bug post for it here: https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/support/bugs/Traits-and-skills-still-scale-twice/first#post5561663

I’m also posting in the HoT subforum because this affects some HoT traits, and to be quite honest it’s because this issue is quite severe but goes mostly unnoticed because unless you pay attention, it’s hard to notice. And unfortunately this isn’t getting any notice. These issues aren’t being fixed.

The issue in the link causes many traits to be completely worthless when used in downscaled zones. The straw that broke the camel’s back (so to speak) and made me duplicate the post here is when I tried the scrapper’s Adaptive Armor trait in the beta. Here’s what it gives:

When struck, you gain 20 (+ effective level) toughness. It stacks.

But the problem is, the game gives that amount to your total stats before downscaling. The result is a substantially reduced bonus when downscaled, to the point it’s really not worth using. At level 30 the trait should give you +50 per stack, but instead it ends up giving just +5 per stack. That’s 10% as effective as it should be.

PLEASE fix how stats are granted by traits. This is really, really bad. A lot of stuff works like this and is worthless in the majority of central Tyria because it gets cut down substantially (and unintentionally) by downscaling.

I reported every one of these in-game. I posted on reddit. I posted here, twice. None of them have been fixed. They’re all still in the game like this. This is an RPG. The stat mechanics deserve some quality assurance. Don’t ship HoT with stat-giving traits behaving like this.

Here’s the reddit post with even more details: https://www.reddit.com/r/Guildwars2/comments/3l4nvq/many_traitsskills_that_buff_stats_are_still/

This issue also affects the scrapper trait “Adaptive Armor”.

These issues still exist as of the pre-HoT balance patch.

Also affects Corrupter’s Fervor: https://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Corrupter%27s_Fervor

This bug also affects one of the Revenant traits: https://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Hardening_Persistence

Same logic as in the original post applies to that. And yeah I know it’s bumping an old thread… but this issue still hasn’t been addressed.

Has anyone tried this trait in the Chaos tree? It says you get +3% boon and condition duration per boon on you.

I checked the character sheet. No change in those stats with boons applied.
I checked the character sheet in combat with boons. No change.

I checked skill tooltips with boons in and out of combat. No change.

I can’t even feasibly test if they’re working because with three boons it’s still only 9%, which is not noticeable when hovering over the condition’s icon on an enemy or the boon’s icon on my tray.

Has anyone managed to reliably test if this is actually implemented?

Tested after the recent batch of trait fixes. Still bugged.

This was claimed to have been fixed a couple of patches ago, but many traits and abilities that provide bonuses to attributes are still granting fixed bonuses rather than scaling with effective level, and this is causing them to give wildly differing values based on effective versus actual level.

Some examples:

Flesh of the Master: https://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Flesh_of_the_Master

ALL mesmer mantras: https://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Mantra_of_Recovery

Many of these skills / traits that claim to offer an attribute bonus are doing one of two things incorrectly:

1) Their bonus scales with effective level and then is affected by level-scaling causing them to inflate or deflate massively.

2) Their bonus is fixed as long as your effective level is the same as your actual level, but then the bonus is affected by level scaling causing it to get weaker and weaker as you gain levels, eventually granting zero bonuses or less than half of what they should.

Many of these bugged skills ARE abuse-able under the right conditions. A mesmer can enter WvW at level 11 and become nearly invulnerable to direct damage so long as they channel a mantra, because for a level 11 mesmer, channeling a mantra gives over 7000 bonus toughness.

Please change all of these skills to scale solely based on effective level as they should. As it is now, none of them work properly.

Just tried this, it works for me. Note that the trait says it blinds targets around you when you use a shatter skill. It doesn’t make your illusions inflict blind when they explode.

The toughness bonus when channeling mantras is upscaled / downscaled twice. This means if you go into a lower level zone as an 80, the bonus shrinks to almost nothing. If you go into an upscaled zone as a low level character, it will grant several thousand points of toughness (and will effectively nullify direct damage while channeling).

The tooltip on mantras shows what seems to be the intended toughness bonus while channeling, and it shows it scaling depending on your effective level. But the amount granted by it is further multiplied by upscaling and downscaling. On the character sheet, the toughness amount looks like it’s being granted to base stats rather than being counted as a buff, which might be the problem.

The toughness bonus when channeling mantras is upscaled / downscaled twice. This means if you go into a lower level zone as an 80, the bonus shrinks to almost nothing. If you go into an upscaled zone as a low level character, it will grant several thousand points of toughness (and will effectively nullify direct damage while channeling).

The trait compounding power grants +3% damage and +50 CD per illusion. The amount of CD granted was broken from upscaling / downscaling, and it was reportedly fixed a couple builds ago.

… but if I activate the trait now, instead of being fixed it’s just disabled. The trait doesn’t do anything at all. What’s going on? Does the effect just not show up on the character sheet? To be honest, with the number of traits that have been flat-out not working, I don’t have much faith that any of the expansion will work properly.

The system changed pretty drastically.

Now, you purchase slot skills and traits with Hero Points. You get hero points at every odd level after level 10 (so at 11, 13, 15, ..) with increasing hero points at each interval as you go. Skill challenges were changed to hero challenges, and give one hero point on completion. Even without completing any skill challenges, you will have enough hero points to buy everything on a level 80 character. Your existing characters were retroactively granted the amount of hero points they should have, so yes you have to buy anything that happens to be missing. But since you’re level 80 it doesn’t matter, because you’ll have more than enough points to buy everything.

All the skill points you had before the patch were converted into a new currency called Spirit Shards. You use those to buy the same items skill points were used to buy before (stuff from Miyani). Spirit Shards drop from various sources and can drop randomly for level 80 characters.

The trait system is completely different. You now pick three trait lines, and then you pick a major trait at each tier within each line.

The last patch claims to have fixed this but it only did so for one mesmer Duelist trait (as far as I saw). Everything else, including the stuff I mentioned in my main post, is still broken.

“Added Aim Assisted Rocket damage different when kit is equipped”

This bug actually applies to all traits that trigger and cast a damaging skill. Long-fused Powder Pack and the on-dodge Bomb trait are both reduced by about 15% if a kit is equipped.

Seems to me that either those trait skills are incorrectly using the old kit weapon damage (before the patches changed kits to adopt weapon damage). This is a bug that’s come up time and again in engineer skills.

“Buffs from claimed Keeps getting upscaled”

Does this actually happen? I thought those counted as buffs on the buff bar?

Yes I did.

I reported this (15 chars).

Just a friendly reminder slash “holy crap this should be posted in general so people take notice”…

Every single trait or skill in the game that provides a bonus to stats but does not show up on your buff bar is currently being multiplied twice by level scaling. I put more details here: https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/support/bugs/Stat-buffs-break-when-up-downscaled/first#post5245828

What’s it mean? An example:

Mesmers gain +7.5*level in toughness while channeling mantras. This doesn’t show up on the buff bar. The game instead adds it to your character’s total stats while channeling, and then applies level scaling to it. The result?

Level 21 mesmer in WvW channels a mantra. Level 21 mesmer gets +600 toughness for being a scaled level 80, right? Wrong. Level 21 mesmer gets +600 toughness TIMES EIGHT = +4800 toughness because the game is scaling the buff twice.

Got a trait that offers +200 precision “at level 80”? Slap it on a low level character and walk into WvW or fractals. Every hit is now a critical hit, and as long as you’re holding a level 21 masterwork weapon, you will deal level 80 ascended damage.

By the way, this also works against you when downscaled. Taking the mantra example again, suppose you’re a base level 80 mesmer in a level 21 zone.

The tooltip will say +157 toughness (the correct amount for a level 21). You do not gain +157 toughness. The game downscales it again. You get +19 toughness instead.

What if a level 21 mesmer uses it in a level 21 zone? They get the normal amount. +157 toughness.

This needs to be fixed. A good three quarters or more of the stat buffs that exist in this game are currently broken in this fashion, and are either significantly weaker than intended if you are level 80, or can be exploited in spectacular fashion if you’re not level 80 yet. This is honestly the most hilariously bugged mechanic I have ever observed in the history of Guild Wars 2. Like conditions on your necro? Slap on the lingering curse trait and gain +1200 condition damage baseline, then melt all your enemies in WvW.

This is the exact same exploit that the birthday blaster had when it came out, except you can do it with most stat buffs from skills or traits. As long as it doesn’t appear on the buff bar, it can be exploited / is far weaker than intended.

There are an alarming number of traits and built-in ability stat buffs that are completely broken by scaling. If you take some of them into WvW or fractals of the mists, they will be scaled up twice. Some stat buffs that scale with effective level will be affected by downscaling or upscaling even though that doesn’t make sense.

Examples:

If a mesmer is taken into WvW or fractals at level 21, they will gain +4800 toughness while channeling any mantra because they scale up to your effective level of 80, and then are scaled again based on your actual level. On the other hand, bringing these into a downscaled area will downscale them twice.

Many traits and skills, if taken into WvW or fractals at low levels, will explode in power. This is easily replicated or abused if you have lower level characters. Examples:

Blood to Power: Gain +960 power while above 75% health when upscaled.

Last Rites: Gain +1200 to +3600 healing power based on remaining health when upscaled.

Compounding Power: Gain +400 condition damage per active illusion when upscaled.

The tooltips displayed on these abilities / traits do not reflect what actually happens to your character.

All of the skills that behave like this are also affected just as severely in the opposite direction while downscaled.

Please fix the stat buffs in the game so that they’re calculated based on effective level and don’t get modified again by down/upscaling. It makes low-level characters exceedingly powerful in high level zones and high-level characters exceedingly weak in low level zones.

What is the expectation as far as paid cosmetics go in the expansion? Will thematic armour and weapon sets continue to be sold via the gemstore? Or will they be earned through gameplay?

The game hasn’t had a paid expansion before, but one of the common complaints is that practically all skins require gems to be gambled in black lion chests for a tiny chance at acquiring any new skins at all, including skins that are extremely thematic (e.g. Ley Line equipment around the time we entered a Ley Line in the story). Since the expansion is paid, will this change?

Karizee.8076:

There’s always a spike in the gems/gold conversion when they add new items to the gem store. Always. Players cash in their excess gold to get the new items. This isn’t the biggest one, not by a long shot:

http://www.gw2spidy.com/gem

Biggest spike was over the 10 day 2014 anniversary sale when they offered these items:
http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Gem_...niversary_Sale

Things they added today that would have spiked the conversion are the Noble Count outfit (the vampire/mesmer attire which was looked forward to by many), Phantom’s Hood, Devil Horns and most likely the Foil Wrapped Candy.

That gw2spidy link is invalid. The API call for gem prices was mysteriously disabled as soon as the patch hit, so that graph shows gem prices up until immediately before the patch, when they suddenly became very expensive.

The damage is already done, even if they revert it back. They artificially inflated gem prices the moment the patch released, and ripped the price graph out of the game UI and disabled the gem price function call on the API to hide it. That’s why if you go to GW2spidy the gem price graph hasn’t updated since the patch but everything else has.

Don’t even think for a second that this change was done to accommodate a certain type of player. Gem prices don’t naturally spike 22% in the span of ten minutes, not even on a patch day. That has never happened in the history of GW2, even on the anniversary.

How come the API call for gem prices stopped working, while every other commodity price call in the API still works? Why did you feel the need to remove the gem price history from not just the game, but all outside sources as well?

Gaile Gray.6029:

Hey there,

Here are a few tidbits from the team:

• A lot of newer players had trouble with the interface. That doesn’t apply to you, you’re veterans who have been around the conversion block a time or two. But newer players will benefit from the updated system.
• The goal was to make the Gem Store more like other shopping experiences, and if you think about it, there is more of that feel to it now.
• You may be surprised to know this (I know I was) but very few people bought gems at smaller denominations than the first one offered in the new system. That’s not to say they never did, nor that there wouldn’t be the desire to do so. But overall, the current options were selected based on player purchases in the past.
• The team is going to listen to your feedback and, if and when it’s practical and desirable, they can look towards adjusting the new system to better meet your needs.

So please keep your thoughts coming on the new system. Feel free to make suggestions but please, keeping them constructive would be very much appreciated.

Saying “it’s for new players and you don’t understand” is not a satisfactory justification for harmful patches any more. This was the exact same excuse given for the trait changes which provoked over 2000 replies against the system, none of which were acted upon.

Immediately before this patch: 10g = 70 gems.

Immediately after this patch: 10g = 57 gems (going off the 400 gem exchange rate).

They tampered with prices to make gems more expensive at exactly the same time as they removed the price history and made 400 gems the lowest increment you can buy in. Did anyone else see this? No other holiday event has had that big a fluctuation before.

Gaile, this isn’t directed at you but…

The trait unlock system needs to go for everything except possibly grandmaster traits. All adept and master traits at the very least should be unlockable purely by gaining levels, not by being forced to go places you don’t want to go and do things you don’t want to do. In its current form, the system is hostile to new characters and therefore new players. I don’t recommend this game to people any more solely because of the trait revamp. In fact, I encourage people to stay away from it because new characters after level 30 are, simply put, garbage.

Arena Net took the awesome open exploration of Tyria and turned it into a grocery list of tasks that gate your character’s power. This is the best paid MMO for characters that existed before the patch, and by far the worst paid MMO for characters created after the patch. Revert the system. Just revert it. People are leaving because of its tedium, and I’m talking both new and old players.

The main trait feedback thread seems to get zero responses. Here’s an idea for a different method of unlocking traits, because quite frankly a lot of people hate the current method.

L35: Traits I unlocked
L40: Traits II unlocked
L45: Traits III unlocked
…
L80: Traits X unlocked (all adept and master traits unlocked)

Then only the grandmaster traits should require these sorts of objectives.

This is simple. It makes levelling more rewarding. It still requires some challenge and direction to unlock end-game traits, but the core of every build is fleshed out without the player having to be sent on a grocery run.

Just got a post-patch alt to 30. Probably just going to shelve him now after seeing all the absurd trait objectives. They ask way too much of new players. I find it odd how a bunch of stuff was level-locked in order to ease new players into the game, but the moment a player hits level 30 you’re suddenly asking them to journey to every tiniest corner of the world to complete super niche objectives that are all way above the player’s level. The juxtaposition between these two things makes me sincerely believe the new trait system was just an on-purpose gold sink to make people panic and buy gems → gold so they can actually fill out their build without massive tedium.

If anything, the traits should have been level-locked as part of the NPE just like everything else.

Well I changed from an infused spinal blades pack to a zephyr pack and the infusions in both slots were destroyed.

Be careful. If you transmute an ascended item it destroys all the infusions in it.