Guild Wars 2

McKenna didn’t say this, but the other main way of acquiring Proofs of Heroics is from WvW rank up chests. I imagine that will continue to exist.

On (very) rare occasions you’ll get Ascended armor/weapon box drops from WvW (usually from reward tracks). Those will give you a guaranteed Ball of Dark Energy if you salvage it. Buy the Stabilizing Matrices off the TP and make your Cube with those.

You can partly blame ANet’s handling over the cheating fiasco for the last AT for this. If something like blatant disregard for the EULA and standards of fair play doesn’t result in permabans, what’s the most you’ll get for afking in matches? Probably 30 mins of Dishonor at most.

Because ANet tried that in the past, and what happened was that so few people showed up that it was waiting in queues for an average of 10 – 15 mins, or you ended up fighting the same few people over and over (and woe be to you if you happen to get bots or someone with whom you’ve had a fight and they just decide to afk or feed the enemy points).

You want a higher standard of competition. I get that, and respect that. There’s the Daily Tournaments, but I expect that’s too infrequent for your satisfaction. So the next best compromise is basically reverting the game modes to Solo/Team Queue, so you can form a team that meets your standards. However, be prepared to once again end up in the same situation of long queues/too few people.

My MM experience this season has been more mixed. My placement matches went HORRIBLY (3 wins, 7 losses), before settling into the usual win 1/lose 1 pattern that’s defined all my previous seasons.

However, what I HAVE noticed more in this season is a greater bot presence. There’s a few names I’ve already reported as serial offenders. I have a feeling that these bots are what’s accounting for a lot of your woes; the regular fighting off point (because the bots will go wherever the enemy goes), the non-stop zerging (if the bots happen to lock onto a fellow teammate), and sometimes just outright bizarre behaviour like killing an enemy on a point followed by immediately running off without stopping to cap it.

We REALLY need a greater mod presence in PvP (and also the rest of the game) so that these undesirables can be caught and removed faster.

I have no objections to allowing season rewards to be earned in Unranked as well. Ranked can keep their division badges and the specific titles as their unique rewards, as I suspect that the vast majority of PvP players are in it only for the skins/Legendary armor.

Honestly, I feel that ANet should just bite the bullet and revert the modes to Solo and Team Queue. That way, players who want to form their own team to avoid the messiness of unknown factors can do so. (So if any of your team isn’t pulling their own weight, that’s on them, and you for not weeding them out beforehand.)

Just be aware that the whole reason why ANet merged the two to begin was because Team Queue had SO few players that players were regularly waiting in queues for up to 30 mins. If that is something you can live with, you have my support for your suggestions.

While I agree that the Shield buff needs, well, a buff, I do not support seeing this map removed. Different maps favour different builds and team comps, and this is exactly the kind of diversity we need in PvP to keep things interesting. If you get put into Coliseum and your team has no mobile classes, ask someone on your team to swap.

Just started experiencing this 30 mins ago. Can’t seem to stay logged in for more than a couple minutes before I get hit with a “7:11:3:191:101” error (aka “Game client could not contact the login server”). Had this yesterday too and eventually had to log off for a couple hours and play something else.

Other web browsing and online gaming worked perfectly fine, so it’s definitely something to do with ANet’s servers. Anybody know of some software I can use to trace to ANet’s servers and see where exactly the fault is occurring?

Also, what server does everyone play on and where are you connecting from?

Me: Tarnished Coast (NA), from Singapore

Been having more issues this morning too. At first things were going well, but then the lag spikes followed by “We cannot connect to the login server” disconnects resumed. At one point even the forums wouldn’t load for me (Reddit had no issues), so that more or less confirms that it is something to do on ANet’s side.

NA Tarnished Coast, but playing from SEA.

Sunshine.5014:

insanemaniac.2456:

new victory screen encourages bad manners. it should encourage humility in victory and perseverance in defeat, but the stupid dances and fireworks encourage the victors to rub it in and the losers to leave. and now its anet sanctioned, where before corpse jumping and teabagging were only at a players discretion.

Right, Olympics should also remove the award ceremonies to protect the sore losers feeling, right?

I don’t really mind the Victory screen one way or the other, but perhaps a compromise then? Keep the Victory screen, but remove the corpses of the losing team from it, so you just see the winning team standing on their pedestals.

Honestly, outside of Challenge Modes for 99/100, as long as you meet the AR requirements you can bring just about any kind of build into T4 Fractals and still complete it. I run with non-meta builds all the time, PUG daily, and I’ve never failed to complete my T4 dailies. If you need some extra help, chug the potions.

Now, as for the main topic, you sometimes get on “bad streaks”. I haven’t seen an Ascended chest myself in over a week now, but there was a time a month or so ago when I got like 6 in a single week. The thing to note is that certain chests (namely, Chest/Legging/Helm boxes) only drop from the higher tier Fractals. You won’t get Chest boxes from, say, T2 or T3 fractals, I believe. This might explain why some types of boxes seem more difficult to come across than others.

Strider Pj.2193:

Zaxares.5419:

I would not be against adding a small number of tickets to repeatable Diamond chests, but honestly, I’m more concerned about the growing scarcity of Memories of Battle at this point. Just about every single ticket reward ALSO needs Memories, and unlike the tickets, their supply tap was not increased. I think that before any more tickets are added, Memories of Battle should be increased, perhaps by the following:

1. Add Memories of Battle as a reward to the WvW daily chests.

2. Add Memories of Battle to the WvW rank-up chests.

3. Add Memories of Battle (say, 5) to the list of rewards from the Skirmish chests.

Or…. buy stacks of them when people were unloading them for 60-80 copper per like some of us did.

It’s s tradable commodity. Buy them. Or play the mode as the tracks kind of poop them out regularly.

Yeah, I’m generally against economic decisions that benefit TP barons at the expense of ordinary players. :P I also note that you wanted to add Mystic Coins to the repeatable chests when the arguments you made about Memories could also be applied to Coins. (Incidentally, the scarcity of Mystic Coins is another factor that I believe needs addressing, but it seems ANet have made the decision to keep them rare for some reason.)

I say it should go the other way. :P Disallow any sort of grouping in Ranked; you guys have daily tournaments for your 5-man teams. Let Ranked be the true “roll of the dice” random PvP.

This just started happening to me this evening too. Ping will regularly rocket up into the thousands (my record was 3642!), then sort of return to normal (around 200 – 250), then rocket up again. None of my other internet-using programs are experiencing any issues, so the fault must lie somewhere with GW2’s servers. I suspect that it is indeed linked to the faulty datacenters that have been causing so much grief lately. Maybe ANet should look at finding a new provider.

I would not be against adding a small number of tickets to repeatable Diamond chests, but honestly, I’m more concerned about the growing scarcity of Memories of Battle at this point. Just about every single ticket reward ALSO needs Memories, and unlike the tickets, their supply tap was not increased. I think that before any more tickets are added, Memories of Battle should be increased, perhaps by the following:

1. Add Memories of Battle as a reward to the WvW daily chests.

2. Add Memories of Battle to the WvW rank-up chests.

3. Add Memories of Battle (say, 5) to the list of rewards from the Skirmish chests.

Emmibolt.3928:

But what happens when they come for your Liardi? What happens when they come for you Hall of Monuments rewards? You think they won’t do it?

I would shrug and say “Go right ahead.” There are people out there who have Liadri because they cheesed the fight before it was patched. But me? I have the satisfaction of knowing that I did it the “right way”, and that satisfaction is something nobody can ever take away from me. I had the benefit of using the HoM rewards for over 5 years. What’s more, exactly HOW many players did you see using said rewards anyway? I could probably count on my fingers the number of times I’ve ever seen people using HoM skins on their characters.

Besides, as I said before, what does it matter what someone else is wearing? Is YOUR enjoyment of a skin somehow diminished because someone else is wearing it too? If that’s true, then how on earth could you take satisfaction in ANYTHING in this game? Because everything can be bought, if you’re rich and desperate enough to do it. Raid Legendary armor? Get someone to run you through all the wings. HoM skins? Pay someone to do all of the GW1 content for you. Don’t laugh and think it can’t happen; see the PvP controversy only a few weeks ago where a bunch of PvP pros got perma-banned from PvP because they accepted an offer to falsely play using a different team’s account.

The moral of the story? FORGET PRESTIGE. FORGET EXCLUSIVITY. Get items because YOU like how it looks, and don’t give a skritt about what anybody else is wearing.

There is only one way to permanently fix queues/server imbalances, and that is to turn WvW into a RvBvG system similar to how EotM works. Is that worth losing server pride/identity and the inability to properly play with friends and guildmates? That’s a discussion everybody will need to seriously have if we want to actually solve this problem.

I was there during the Scarlet’s War, and I have no issue with newer players being able to obtain these items now. Nothing remains exclusive forever. You complaining that you spent much more time/money on something that can now be acquired more cheaply is like the guy who spent 2 days and more than $1000 waiting in line to buy the latest iPhone complaining that 4 years later, you can now buy that same iPhone for like $100.

What you’re paying for is effectively “early access” where you can strut around and show off for a period of time, but it won’t last forever. If you’re buying these items purely because of exclusivity, you’d best save your money, because you’re always going to be disappointed in the end. Buy something if YOU like it, not because you think it impresses other people. (Because spoiler alert, other people don’t care. They’re more concerned with whether you’re paying attention to THEM.)

Was the dev post talking about Fractal Relics, or Pristine Fractal Relics? I’m generally spending my normal relics about as fast as I collect them by making statted infusions, but my Pristine Fractal Relics are just steadily continuing to grow. I’d love it if there was a way to convert Pristine Relics into Stabilizing Matrices, but unfortunately since the Matrices are tied to coin generation by way of converting them into Encryption Keys, this probably won’t happen.

Dueling for gold will never be implemented because of one reason: gold sellers. It would be far too easy a way for sellers to transfer their gold to buyers by simply setting up a duel, betting a humongous amount of gold on the match, and then intentionally losing so the money gets transferred to the buyer. Sure, such huge sums being transferred would be a definite red flag and the accounts involved would get banned, but that’s more oversight for ANet to handle. The gold sellers don’t care; they’ll just use another bought/stolen account if they get banned.

I didn’t get very much from my free box (1 sprocket, the Helmed Moa, and a Peggeleg which I already had), but I took advantage of the opportunity to snap up several minis (the 2 Karka ones along with Southsun Kasmeer) and backpieces (the Jetpack and the 3 Catcher backpieces) that I’d always wanted, but couldn’t justify the price. This event brought them back within my reach.

It’s a close call between the Raptor and the Bunnyroo, but I think the Raptor juuuust wins out because I’m riding a dinosaur, kitten! XD

I wish they’d bring the Spider back too, but I can appreciate it’d probably cause a lot of map breaking issues.

I made Aurora because I wanted both the aura (looks very fitting for a Mesmer, imo) and the stat swapping, but I agree that there should be a way to disable the aura. Legendary weapons/armor can be reskinned, and infusions can be eschewed in favour of plain ones, but there’s no way to disable Aurora’s aura.

GreyWolf.8670:

maddoctor.2738:

Ferelwing.8463:

It’s a game not a job… Some of us like to take our time, if you’re not one of them please put it out there up front so we all don’t waste each others time.

When you see a group that says the simple: “T4 dailies” what do you expect?
A group that will teach you the details and mechanics of each encounter, or a group that is already experienced with it and wants to finish the daily quickly?

Just “T4 dailies”? I would expect they do not mind who joins.

^ This. If a PUG on LFG just puts that in their description then I expect them to take whoever joins. If you want to specify “Meta, food/pots/exp”, you’re welcome to do so, but if you do not specify that that’s what you’re looking for, then you have no right to complain about who joins.

It’s tempting, but I have to vote “no”. Let the raiders keep their unique skin for their content. PvP and WvW players already have their means for acquiring Legendary armor (and for WvW players anyway, the free stat/upgrade swapping is WAY more valuable to them than some unique skin, considering how frequently their builds change) without needing to touch PvE. It’s the best compromise for all involved.

From a lore perspective, I would prefer that (in PvE), once a character learns the Elite Specialization, they are free to use that spec’s unique weapon whenever they wish. It just doesn’t make sense to me that my character, as part of learning the Chronomancer’s skills, suddenly forgets how to use a shield when she begins training as a Mirage.

That said, given that class balance is much more important in PvP and WvW, I’d be OK with keeping the Elite Spec weapons restricted in those modes.

I found it highly annoying too, so I ended up using alternative methods to complete the Hearts. The Shrine events help a lot; lots of enemies spawn in close proximity, and every bit of reclaimed essence you turn in also counts towards the Heart’s completion. On my Necro, I only pick up Ley Energy if I absolutely have to.

That said, I’d definitely support a change so that it doesn’t destroy minions, especially considering your minion skills are still there on your bar!

@stormseeker: Thing is though, we do have a Youtube video proof showing that they got the achieve even though the Anomaly still had stacks up. The stacks might play a role (as evidenced by the fact that several of us have gotten it via no-stack kills), but it’s still not conclusive.

Still, based on my experience and others, I would indeed recommend trying a no-stack kill just to see if it works for you.

My map just got it. These were the differences between this run and my runs yesterday:

1. We waited for all of his stacks to disappear before killing him. (Not that we had much of a choice. I ended up in a near-empty map that slowly filled as time went on, so our DPS on the first burn was pretty terrible.)

2. Nobody bothered going ahead to clear Coals, so he absorbed a full camp of Coals in between the first and second burns.

3. He actually died to conditions after the 2nd burn, shortly after he started running off again.

As usual, we made sure that no fragments reached the Anomaly during his invulnerable phase. There were still fragments alive when he became vulnerable, so killing all of them isn’t necessary.

While I do support having the idea of having extra tickets from repeatable Diamond chests, I suspect it’s not going to happen. The tickets are the primary time-gated component of WvW Legendary armor; PvP has the Ascended Shards (which are only obtainable during Seasons), and raids are gated behind Magnetite Shards and (to a lesser extent) Provisioner Tokens. Removing the weekly cap would make WvW the fastest way to get Legendary armor, and I think that wouldn’t be fair to the other two modes.

Well now, thanks for this tip. Previously I only saw DH’s using their F1 pull to get people stuck in walls, but now I know my Rev can do it too!

This is a fantastic bit of news, ANet! Thank you for doing this. As someone who always wanted Legendary armor for the stat-swapping capability (I think the raid Legendary armor skins are fugly aside from Heavy, which itself is a very niche look), giving PvP and WvW players the option of attaining this functionality is a great move.

I would like to see Fractals get a similar sort of treatment too, for PvE players who don’t necessarily want/like raiding.

To the people complaining that this development devalues your Legendary armor, how so? You still have the exclusive skins, and I remember being shouted down soooo many times by you raiders claiming that nobody making Legendary armor was doing it for the stat swapping, when making multiple sets of Ascended armor was so much cheaper. Well, nothing has changed; making multiple Ascended sets is STILL so much cheaper, and you still have access to skins that nobody else who doesn’t do raids has. So what’s the big deal? I expect in terms of raw cost, upgrading WvW and PvP Ascended armor to Legendary will still cost at or near the same amount.

And don’t make the argument that WvW/PvP takes no skill either compared to raiding. I’ve heard arguments from raiders all the time that “Raiding is so easy! All you need to do is get the right build, gear, learn the encounters, and learn your rotation.” So if raiding is really so easy that it’s only because “people are lazy that they don’t get into raids”, you can’t make the argument now that your “skill” in raiding translates into some sort of exclusivity aside from the raid skins.

I’d like a Southsun reward track myself, yeah.

Hmm, OK. So I guess the Cosmic Essence is what makes him appear in the Home Instance, but you must feed him one of the other “food” items first. Next time 100 daily rolls around I’ll give CM a crack.

Alternative Suggestion: Allow Tomes of Knowledge to be sold on the TP. I have waaaaay too many as it is. :P

Wait, so to get this new cat (where IS he anyway? I didn’t see him at all during my run through Shattered yesterday), you have to feed him all of the above foods AND the Unstable Cosmic Essence? Or have I misunderstood?

Fixing the new page bug. My last post on 14 as follows:

I’m stuck in a PvP Match Ready window. Zaxares.5419

What happened earlier was that the Match Ready window popped, everybody all readied up, but when it got to 10 ticks, the arena selection window didn’t launch and we were all stuck there.

This bug is also preventing me from entering instances like Fractals, so a speedy fix would be appreciated!

I’m stuck in a PvP Match Ready window. Zaxares.5419

What happened earlier was that the Match Ready window popped, everybody all readied up, but when it got to 10 ticks, the arena selection window didn’t launch and we were all stuck there.

EDIT: This bug is also stopping me from entering instances like Fractals. Quick help appreciated!

I’m not sure that would work actually. Upon reflection, it occurs to me that Gleam’s first day use for me might not have showed the 25 Bloodstone+Empyreal because I’d already used the Sentient Singularity earlier that same day, thus removing it from the list of options.

Gleam is restricted to 6x per option, same as with each of the 4 separate munchers.

What exactly does Aurora give you though? Does it actually give you a full set of trinkets, or just one item?

SkyShroud.2865:

Zaxares.5419:

It also depends on which timezone you are playing in. I think we still have decent’ish numbers during prime time (although we did indeed lose most of our old core WvW guilds), but TC is like a ghost town during OCX/SEA. It’s always been our weakest period, and while there’s regulars who do their best to hold down the fort, we basically can’t muster enough numbers to deal with the sizeable zergs that our opponents can bring against us during these quiet periods, let alone try to take offensive action apart from forming some small havoc squads to ktrain a bit.

TC link has ODA running during SEA time, what are you talking about?

They’re not always there. I think they run organized raids twice a week. The rest of the time it’s pugmanders (if you’re lucky).

^ Pretty much this. I would advise patience. You never know, a following map might allow us to farm lots of Giants in a short amount of time. For example, Draconic Mons was a great place to farm Plant Slayer since all the druid spirits around the first Heart count as Plants (not to mention that lots and lots of spirits spawn during the Wardbough quest chain).

Thanks for the confirmation, Blood. Now if ANet will also allow us to convert the Koda’s Warmth enrichment into an infusion… (Or alternatively, let us change the karmic bonus it gives to another one.)

Yes, you put all 4 Sentient items into the Forge. If you still want to keep copies of the old ones, you can talk to Grandmaster Hobbs in LA and buy additional copies afterwards for 1000 UBM each.

Someone suggested that it might be bugged if you get downed or die during the mission. I did get downed once and I couldn’t get the achieve, so it’s possible. Can anybody else confirm/deny this?

It also depends on which timezone you are playing in. I think we still have decent’ish numbers during prime time (although we did indeed lose most of our old core WvW guilds), but TC is like a ghost town during OCX/SEA. It’s always been our weakest period, and while there’s regulars who do their best to hold down the fort, we basically can’t muster enough numbers to deal with the sizeable zergs that our opponents can bring against us during these quiet periods, let alone try to take offensive action apart from forming some small havoc squads to ktrain a bit.

LS3 Episode 6 allowed players to convert several cosmetic upgrades such as the Preserved Queen Bee and the Halloween Polyrefractors into infusions. This was a great change, ANet; thanks for making it. Would it also be possible to allow us to convert the Koda’s Warmth enrichment into an infusion as well? (Or alternatively, to be able to change the enrichment to a different bonus type?) I love the appearance of the Koda’s Warmth blessing, but I really don’t want to stick a karmic bonus on my character when I already have tons of it.

So people have probably discovered by now that you can combine the various Sentient munchers acquired from the past LS3 chapters to create a unified one, called Gleam of Sentience. (It kicks off the Legendary trinkets collection, but that’s not the issue here today.)

Using Gleam opens up a vendor window that I’m guessing in theory should provide the services of all four. However, there are only 3 options:

1. 25 Bloodstone + 25 Dragonite
2. 25 Dragonite + 25 Empyreal
3. 150 Unbound Magic

The option for 25 Bloodstone + 25 Empyreal is missing, which I suspect is a bug or an oversight. Can a dev confirm that this is an unintended bug?

EDIT: Never mind. After logging in, I see that the fourth option now shows up correctly. It must have been stealth fixed in one of the subsequent patches.

I’m guessing you’re on Tarnished Coast, OP. (I am too.) I think a large part of the problem is that TC has a primarily PvE population. When the WvW update was first announced, I saw considerable interest. Our maps were queued for hours after reset. But after the first week, this tapered off tremendously as players realized just how much grinding was involved in getting the new rewards. So most went back to PvE and never looked back.

Like it or hate it, this is the reality we must deal with. We simply do not have the WvW population to compete, despite having a Full/High server pop. The only way to draw those people back into WvW is to make it more appealing for them to come back (i.e. an adjustment of pips and rewards). Alternatively, the only other option is to bite the bullet and jump onto the server stacking bandwagon.

The most obvious idea for minis is “Polymock”. But that in itself would require a lot of work building new mechanics, new art assets, designing abilities for all the minis (and for all new minis going forward), and then we have to take into account the fact that some minis are SUPER rare, so you can’t afford to give them too powerful abilities because it would be unfair to the wider player base etc. etc.