Guild Wars 2

The old-timey effect is a nice touch too.

I’m getting this too, I have restarted the PC and the client multiple times.

EDIT: running GW2 -repair fixed this for me.

Thanks for all the new info! Here’s a few things I have been trying since I hit 80. I put a sigil of purity on my warhorn and left the fire blast sigil on my axe. Since each axe hit seems to count as a separate attack, I basically get an extra free condition removal every ten seconds in addition to the automatic condition cure I get every ten seconds from my signet. That and the condition removal from healing spring seems to be doing a pretty good job of keeping conditions off me.

I did some WvW for the first time the other night with my guildmates and I felt that I did OK for my first time playing a ranger. I tried using Rampage as One, but I think entangle will be more useful since I am running with a guild group and I don’t need to worry quite as much about stability as I would if I was solo.

Thanks!
Matt

To be fair, some of the writing is pretty good. Off the top of my head some of the best writing is in the Priory quest line with the Skritt, oddly enough. The writers did a fair job showing the pathos connected to the devatsation wrought by the Destroyers.

I’m sure there are other examples, but I can’t think of any involving Destiny’s Backstreet Boys or whatever.

A lot of people seem to have missed the point of this post. I wasn’t cranky because of grouping. I was cranky because the last step in an entirely soloable quest line was a group quest. It makes no sense at all, and it adds annoyance to an already annoying process.

Frankly, anyone who still thinks that MMORPG should equal forced grouping is an idiot. GW2 itselkittennowledges this by not making you group for their quests, which makes their decision to troll players at the end of their personal story even more puzzling.

Do I play GW2 with other people? Of course I do! I’m an officer in a guild that has existed ever since DAoC’s first year. I mainly do WvW with them (in a group), and when I do PvE I play with other people in events. To conflate grouping with the social aspect of online gaming is silly and reductive.

One of the best things about GW2 is that I don’t have to waste time looking for groups or waiting for my guildmates to come online. I can flit about hither and yon, doing a heart here and an event there, I can go craft, or I can just wander around and explore. I get to decide how to invest my time, it’s not dictated to me based on the number of people LFG.

I find dungeons tedious so I don’t bother with them, and I’m OK with not getting the “special” rewards if it means not having to sit in a PuG when half the people are AFK or semi-AFK (look at porn on your own time!) and the other half say things like, “Lol wut? Noob kitten kitten kitten kitten ”. If you’re really unlucky you get some kind of armchair general who thinks I should waste my precious, precious free time being ordered about by some Cheeto-huffing morlock. No, thank you, and again, no thank you.

As for the lore, I think I’ve made it clear what I think of Destiny’s Child and the collection of two dimensional cliches they call characters. I don’t care if Caithe joins the dark side, and I am completely OK with them all getting put in a rocket and fired into the sun. If they were as awesome as the characters in Order of the Stick I would be more sympathetic, but Logan and the rest of them are incredibly generic fantasy cutouts.

You want to know what’s really silly in a massively multiplayer game? Making a handful of forgettable NPCs more important than the players. It’s not necessary for building a strong narrative, and unless you get it perfect it’s going to suck. There are dozens of ways they could have done the personal story that made each player feel like it was their story. Instead they made you an extra in your own movie. Lol wut indeed.

Lorgus, were you attempting to use sarcasm? If so, I think you need to go back and read the instructions. Bonus points for completely missing the point of the post though, I give you an F minus.

Actually, when you click on the door, you get a choice between the dungeon and the personal story. It said 5 people, but I figured that was for the dungeon, not the Personal Story, which as I said before was soloable all the way up to now. Maybe they need to move that on to the personal story button to be more clear.

Before I rant, let me start by saying that my return to GW2 has been mostly entertaining. ArenaNet has done a lot of things right and, for the most part, PvE has been a lot of fun. That being said…

Despite my better judgment I decided to give the Personal Story another shot, as I’d heard that it had been reworked. Once again I discovered that MY “personal story” was still about the writer’s seventh grade D&D characters (Destiny’s Edge: great name for a boy band, poor choice for anything else).

Still, I dutifully soldiered on, even when Trahearne kept taking the credit for all my work and I was barred from using the Asura gates in Fort Trinity (I would have thought a commander counted as “high-ranking”, but noooo). Speaking of Trahearne, here’s a tip for you: if you don’t want your scouts killed and zombified all the freakin’ time, send Sylvari!

I gritted my teeth and waded through the plot holes, the two dimensional characters and the teen drama until the very end, and then I stood before the gates of Arah. Finally, I could kill the stupid dragon and never, ever see that stupid green blob on my map ever again.

I click on the door, choose “personal story”, and then, after a half hour where I said a lot of very unprintable things about the writers, the devs, and Anet’s game design skills in general I went to the Wiki for guidance.

The last mission in your PERSONAL story is group-only. Best of all, Anet doesn’t tell you this. Instead of saying, “Hey, we know you’ve been able to solo EVERY part of this quest line up to now, but here we’re going to saddle you with a bunch of brain-dead NPCs and make you get a group too”, they just let you blithely pop in so that you can wonder what idiot was in charge of a battle where several elites keep respawning every time you manage to kill them.

Even if you did magically clear the room somehow, you need two people to get through the door. At this point, I can only imagine the writers and devs high-fiving each other before going out to celebrate by giving some hapless nerd a swirlie.

Oh well, at least now I know to stick to doing hearts and events. After this experience, I know better than to try the “Living Story”. I think I’d rather nail my hand to a wall or lick the inside of a toaster.

Many thanks! This gives me some much-needed direction.

Hello,

I’ve returned to GW2 and made a ranger. I’ve got him up to level 56 and after trying various weapons I find that I have the most fun with axe/horn as my primary weapon set and sword/torch as my secondary. I love axe mainhand, it’s lots of fun vs. groups, I use a flameburst sigil for extra AoE and I’m shocked at how many mobs I can fight at once. It’s bit slow for single mobs, for those I switch to sword and torch.

I also like being durable, and when my HP gets low I use healing spring + horn 5 to heal me, my pet, and anyone else in the area. I’ve actually managed to solo a champ mob, something I’ve never done with my other characters.

Anyway, although I’m very happy with my ranger right now I thought I might ask for some advice. I am having a blast in open field PvE, but I plan on doing WvW and I have no idea if my set up will work there. I know my pet will be a lot less useful, but I will be with a couple groups of guildmates. I doubt I will spend much if any time in dungeons or sPvP.

Currently I’m using healing spring, signet of stone, signet of cleansing(?), signet of the hunt and rampage as one for my slot skills. I’m just using whatever gear I find but I tend to focus on power, precision and toughness. I don’t have a lot of trait points right now so I have the increases endurance regen and the healing spring when downed traits iirc.

Thanks in advance for any tweaking advice!

-Matt

I just came back to check on the state of GW2, but I see 9 months and literally thousands of people telling Anet they hate the NPE and nothing has changed. This is not very encouraging.

Am I wrong? I was thinking of coming back, but I don’t want to waste time on the same old same old with a shiny paint job.

-Matt

I just came back to the game recently and I am sorry to see that this post is still relevant. Just tried Claw Island with an Elementalist at level, and was unhappy to see that NPCs are still totally useless (especially Trehearne. STILL.) I only died once, but that was because I sort of knew what to expect. Needless to say, that was not the only “personal” story quest where I ran into bugs and poor design choices.

I see some people suggesting that you group for personal stories, or that it’s OK to die in them because in older games you might have had to do a corpse run. Let me refute each argument in turn.

The first one is easy. This is your PERSONAL story. It is about you. You, not your friends, not your guild, not Destiny’s Edge, and definitely NOT Trehearne. :P (btw: is it me, or does “Destiny’s Edge” sound like the name of some awful 90s boy band?). If you want to force people to group for the personal story, change the name and the advertising and we’re good. If not, then one of the other posters said it best, “the Personal Story should be soloable on the first try by a player exercising reasonable caution and care”.

As for the corpse run argument, well, first off, most earlier games did not have quests that were touted as being part of “your personal saga, your own legend within the world”. I would rather my “legend” not be about Ybrahim the Constantly Resurrected, or Ybrahim the Groundkisser, not even about Ybrahim, Friend of the Respawn Point. Not heroic. Not personal. Quest design should not assume player death, and it certainly should not encourage it, at least not when this is supposed to be your very own little epic story. In older games, those quests were set up in non-instanced worlds, so there was no “guarantee of personalization” if you will.

The sad thing is, there are lots of fixes that could be done right now with minimal work because these fixes already exist in game. The monsters have no trouble attacking me or NPCs, so why not use that code for the NPCS on my side too? That way they won’t stand around playing with their hair (Mira) while I am the victim of an Abomination blanket party. After all, if I have to take second place to the NPCs in GW2, at least make them effective. Also, If I defeat a mob, don’t immediately revive him at full health FOR ANY REASON EVAR. :P If you decide you just have to do it, put it on a timer and/or refresh every one of my timers.

Don’t let mobs beat on me while I am trying to read the stuff I am supposed to be reading. Don’t respawn mobs in a personal story unless there is a valid reason for it. If you do, do not spawn them right on top of me. I have to move from point a to point b, so should they. In Claw Island, for instance, the undead are attacking from the sea. How about having them come from the shore instead of magically appearing in a puff of logic on my head?

Now, I’m not a mighty coder or pro game designer, but these all seem pretty reasonable to me, I wrote stuff like this for Neverwinter Nights years ago and I didn’t have millions of dollars and corporate backing, so I’m guessing this kind of thing would be kid stuff for you guys. I am not asking for Monty Haul mode here, I just thin the personal story should be, first and foremost, about me.

Thanks,
Matt

I’ve seen monsters respawn right after I’ve killed them, so the timers are often 30 seconds or less. This combined with the broken leash code makes PvE kind of annoying. :P As a side effect, it kills any kind of immersion since it reinforces the whole “duck hunt” aspect of the game, reminding you that nothing you do has any significant impact in the world.

You make some good points, but I think realm points were a big part of what broke DAoC, they turned a team based game into individual players finding the most efficient ways to farm RP, turning DAoC into 8v8 PvP rather than three faction warfare.

That being said, I think your other points have a lot of validity!

Thanks,
Matt

There is no reason not to reward support based players. Currently you can grab tons of badges without really contributing due to high radius AoE. I may only get off a meteor shower or two before I am crushed into goo, but I’ll get a lot of rewards just because I am “doing damage”. In reality, I am contributing less to the overall effort than a player that is actively trying to help his side stay up and fighting or boost their damage.

I thought one of the ads for GW2 was “play your way”, so maybe a more complex and nuanced reward system would be a good idea.

Thanks,
Matt

Repair costs are necessary to prevent suicide ganking and the other kind of stuff that occurs in a “consequences free” environment. The costs may need a little tweaking, but overall it’s a decent way to prevent cheese.

I’m sorry, I did not mean that you should not be rewarded at all, I was unclear. Leveling via WvW is one of things I really like!

Perhaps a good compromise would be to make each kill worth a little coin which is automatically given to you. The XP for killing the player stays the same, but you get no badges or loot. that way you have cash for repairs and you can level in WvW, but you don’t have to pick up bags and you can use karma for gear if you help your server in WvW.

thanks,
Matt

That was good stuff, especially binding the 1 key to the toaster! I’ve played a thief and an ele in WvW, and it’s really amazing how easy it is to kill stuff with HS or PW as a Thief.

The problem with full auto loot is that it encourages suicide bombing, like the wizard bombs of DAoC. Personally, i think any rewards you get from WvW should be based around taking keeps and achieving team based goals rather than just killing another player.

http://www.guildwars2guru.com/topic/63501-wvw-population-cap-bug-still-present/

Please note that this bug existed and was “fixed” during BWE. It is entirely possible that it only appeared to be fixed but broke when put under the stress of actual player populations. Also note that Anet has stated that the queues have problems and they are not entirely sure of the extent or nature of those problems.

Basically, if you have definite proof that this bug does not exist, post it. If you don’t, it is in your best interest that this bug be fixed. I’m not sure why anyone would be hostile to the idea of the queue being fixed.

If it will help stop the “Move to another server” posts, I play on SoR, we are not a high pop server. Also, I’m in a guild, so unless my entire guild moves, I am not moving.

So, because it has not happened to you it has never happened. Gotcha. I’m going to go back to collecting instances of this bug instead of arguing with you.

thanks,
Matt

Cazio, you need to read what I said, unless you’re just trolling. This can happen to any server, because they all use the same program code.

I played on Guin Alb mostly, and I agree with a lot of the suggestions, especially regarding the chat and making the orbs more important.

However, right now the game is too buggy to remove the queues. We already have issues with enemy players not appearing until they are literally five feet away, not to mention all the crashes and other more minor problems.

It’s also unfortunate that they chose to make WvW about badges, which is the same mistake DAoC made with RP. This is why you have the same pointless farming at _lake and _briar over and over again, it is much more beneficial to the player to farm badges than to capture orbs or other, more strategic objectives. They should remove badges entirely. You get karma for taking CPs and keeps and such, that is more than enough reward.

DAoC RvR was great, but it became broken when they put too much emphasis on player rewards. In WvW, you should be rewarded for teamwork, not kills.

Thanks,
Matt

There are serious problems with the queues right now, and the biggest is that the number of people allowed to join from each server is completely broken. There have been tons of instances where a server has been out-manned, yet there is a queue to enter the map, thus guaranteeing that that server is at a numerical disadvantage.

Please make sure that every side has the exact same cap for each map, and that it works properly.

Thanks,
Matt

I’m part of a very active WvW guild that started back in the early days of DAoC, and so far we are really enjoying WvW, it’s the closest thing to the old school RvR we loved so much before Mythic ruined it. So, thanks very much!

That being said, one of the things ArenaNet has adopted (in a modified form) is Realm Points (in the form of badges), so WvW is largely about camping _Lake right outside your portal keep and farming for badges. This is unfortunate, since it tends to make RvR more single player focused rather than group focused. People need badges, so they will focus on things that give them badges (killing people) rather than taking objectives and such.

True, many guilds still fight for the orb and cap supply camps and such, but it would make WvW better if there was SOME point other than acquiring badges for teh shiniez. Since you don’t get badges for capping an orb, most people don’t bother, because again, _lake is where you go to get farmed – I mean fight for your server.

If you have to keep the badge system in the game, make it a little more interesting. The orb bonuses aren’t really enough to make them very attractive, so why not get rid of them and make the orbs give a badge drop increase? Then everyone would want them and they wouldn’t all glom up at the first keep they could run to.

While we’re on the subject of badges, it would be nice if we could use them to buy keep upgrades and other WvW things, and it would be nice if guilds could buy these things instead of making individual players fork out huge sums just to get a thicker gate that will get knocked down when they go to bed. :P

Thanks,
Matt

I merely pointed out the most flagrant example. Also, pistol whip is a stun, not a daze, and I am pretty sure it is two seconds, not one. You may be thinking of headshot, which is a one second daze.

I am also fairly certain that I could perma-stun you with pistol whip. I did it to a lot of people in WvW the other night, because WvW is kind of chaotic. I am guessing you do pve and spvp smallball stuff, which is why you think it is hard. Have fun with those zynga games!

-Matt

Some of you are making the assumption that I have no CC breakers or that I do not know how to use them. I play a warrior and I have FIVE of them when I WvW (if you count the warhorn trait that converts conditions into boons). Even so, I can still be completely shut down no matter how carefully I use them.

As for CC timers being a kludge, so what? Computer games use tons of kludges. I would rather see a kludge that promotes more complex gameplay than an elegant mechanic that doesn’t work. Go ahead, tell me with a straight face that spamming Pistol Whip or Ensnaring Roots is a brilliant, complex strategy, I dare you.

CC in this game is broken. It’s not as broken as it was in DAoC when it first came out, but it’s still broken. I’m guessing that those of you posting that you don’t have trouble with CC is because:

a) you like CC and have a vested interest in keeping it as is.

b) you only do pve/spvp

c) you like to argue for the sake of arguing.. :P

thanks,
Matt

Please add an option to allow people to only see their guild or group member’s names rather than all friendly names. This would be very helpful, especially in WvW

Thanks!
Matt

At least you’d hear them in different voices, I guess that’s a step in the right direction. :P

When DAoC first started there were no immunity timers so it was possible to completely shut down another player (in some cases whole armies, if you were a pac healer) for an entire combat so that one person did nothing except die, which most people don’t find entertaining. This led to everyone rolling classes with tons of cc just to stay competitive and the game suffered greatly. This in turn led Mythic to introduce CC timers so that no one could completely shut down another player who had at least a modicum of skill.

Now, I realize that the CC in GW2 is a little shorter, but you still run into the same problem because people die a lot faster in GW2. Therefore, you still end up with some classes that can completely shut down another player, because most players have maybe two CC breakers on a timer much longer than the average combat. For instance, I rolled up a Thief the other day and discovered I can spam Pistol Whip over and over. My opponent may stop one stun, but I just whack the three key again and presto! He’s stunned again! This clever strategy worked in both PvE and WvW for excellent brain-free playing and I acquired many badges of honor.

I would suggest a separate five second timer for each type of CC. At least that way your opponent will have to hit different keys to try and lock you down instead of just hitting the same one over and over. Personally, I think it might be more fun for everyone.

Thanks,
Matt

I would love to have a choice of voice sets for my character, and I would definitely pay you a reasonable amount of real money for those choices if they were done reasonably well. I realize that means more files, but if you released the voice sets over time it wouldn’t be a big deal, and you’d make back the money you spent on talent because I think lots of people would prefer different voices.

Thanks!
Matt

Instead of specific examples, just look at any personal quest where there are:

1) large groups of monsters that zerg the player, especially right after dialogue.

2) single uber-mobs that can one-hit cloth wearers

3) Invulnerable mobs. If it is red, let me kill it. Don’t let it get two or three hits on me while it’s still invulnerable. In fact, don’t use invulnerability at all, it’s a kludge.

4) waves of mobs with no time in between for health regen.

5) “allied” npcs that do nothing at all to help cough Trahearne cough

6) monsters that you kill that miraculously pop back up at full health after all the abilities you sued to kill them the first time are still on cooldown.

7) monsters on leashes. This doesn’t work right anyway, they just go invulnerable, run away, then come back at full health and kill you.

This is a PERSONAL story. Ideally you should be able to do the whole thing without dying, especially since the lore never mentions how we keep coming back to life over and over again. :P

I too am axe/horn, sounds like our specs are pretty similar. It isn’t that I never melee in WvW, it is that usually rifle or bow is more effective.

One of the things Arena Net needs to learn from DAoC is that not getting hit is greater than any amount of armor. A class with lots of ways to avoid getting hit at all is far tankier than a class that wears heavy armor, which was why Infiltrators could tank better than armsmen. :P

I don’t mind the sound, except that it never seems to turn off unless you zone. It makes it sound like someone on Ventrilo has left their microphone on next to an idling engine. :P

-Matt

I’m just curious to see how many of you play Warrior in WvW and what you think of them compared to other classes. For me, I spend most of my WvW time using my rifle or my bow. Guardians and Thieves seem to be the only real WvW melee classes, as far as I can tell, but your mileage may vary.

Thanks,
Matt

I changed my play style several times, but unless you know what’s going to happen by reading spoilers you’ll probably go in with your “regular” build, die, then change your build and start from a checkpoint. Again, I think this is poor design. They had five years to balance this stuff. It would be one thing if you died now and then, but I’m talking about quests where you die six or seven times through no fault of your own.

Thanks,
Matt

There should be some method for guilds to pay for keep upgrades and such rather than just individuals. A guild should earn influence based on its member’s participation in WvW, and this influence can be spent by officers on upgrades. You can leave the money option in, but it makes more sense in GUILD wars for guilds to have some ability to pool resources at an infrastructure level.

-Matt

We need options to reduce graphical complexity in WvW so that we can see people at a reasonable distance and just see in general. DAoC had a toggle where you could disable spell effects for everyone but you, or your group, and we need something like that in WvW.

Another option would be to allow us to reduce the particle count/opacity of effects so that we could still see stuff for combo fields but not have it be such a mess.

We also need to be able to see players at a reasonable distance, even if it is just their name tags (unless they are invisible due to stealth or something). That way at least we’d be able to make reasonable guesses about how many people we are facing and plan accordingly.

Thanks,
Matt

All I have to say to this is that my entire guild is here for WvW. If we have to wait for hours to actually WvW we will most likely go elsewhere. I’m guessing a lot of other guilds feel the same way. I’m guessing you made a little money at release, so the best thing to do might be to add more bandwidth, more servers and more staff to make WvW more viable.

Was the personal story designed with the assumption that it was OK for the player to die repeatedly? I find that constantly dying in a story ABOUT MY LIFE kind of breaks the immersion. I can’t count the number of times I’ve been jumped by 8 or more mobs who dogpile me so fast I am dead before I really get to do much more than start my auto-attack. Now granted, I am an old guy, so I’m not super reflex guy, but it seems like the designers were thinking, “well, if they die they can just go on from a checkpoint.” This is true, but it is also horrendously bad storytelling.

Repeatedly dying in WvW or even regualr PvE is OK, but getting ganked by piles of mobs in an instanced quest that is supposedly tailored for you is not.

thanks,
Matt

Although there are lots of things I love about GW2, I have to say that the personal story almost drove me away. Now, I just don’t do it, and I wish I could turn off the quest notifier for it as well.

My main problem with it is the poor writing. There are tons of plot holes, very little choice in how to proceed, and no sense that my personal story is about me. I played D&D for years and the personal story kind of reminds me of my first efforts as a DM when I was twelve: lots of enthusiasm, but no depth or subtlety.

The voice actors themselves sound fine, but the lines they have to deliver just kind of make me cringe. One slight exception is the carnival stuff in the human story, some of that is kind of fun.

The other big problem is that the personal story isn’t about me! It’s about these Destiny’s Edge people. Based on the name I assumed they were a boy band, but I guess they are Tyria’s Justice League or something, and my whole purpose in life is to get them to act like grown ups. Seriously, if your entire planet is in danger of being destroyed by ravening hordes of undead I think you might be able to work with someone to stop it, even if you hate their guts. Stalin and FDR were able to work together, and they were just fighting WW2!

To be fair, the only game I’ve ever seen that had decent writing was Morrowind, and I think that was because most of it wasn’t spoken, but actually in books you found. I really don’t mean to be harsh, I know how hard it is to do this stuff. Still, after five and a half years plus I don’t know how many millions of dollars I guess I expected something a little more polished and nuanced.

-Matt

I am using the newest Nvidia beta drivers for my GT9800 (304.79) and I have ensured that my anti-aliasing settings are set properly according to the instructions in these forums. Whereas before I used to “just” get the black screen and long pauses, now my game actually crashes with a window appearing in the background telling me that GW2 encountered a serious graphics error and has to close. This almost always happens during my personal story quests for some reason.

I am not sure if others are having this problem but I hope it gets fixed right away!

Thanks,
Matt