Guild Wars 2

Obtena.7952:

Shiro Tegachii.5619:

after about 11,000 hours in Anet’s game. my money seems to be more important then my satesfaction for them….

Is this serious … you played 11000 hours and you don’t think you got your due satisfactions from the price you paid?

#unreasonableexpectations

Assuming that the core game was bought at full retail price and that HoT was also bought, that works out to about $0.01 per hour. That is rather expensive… (sarcasm)

I agree. This has been bothering me for a while.

DR makes sense in many of the areas in the core game since events are spread out enough that you have to really jump around and do a lot of events to get it to trigger. I rarely ever see it trigger. But it doesn’t make any sense in the newer areas like the Silverwastes, Dry Top, and all of the HoT areas. It’s absolutely absurd to be playing in the new areas in the intended way and getting punished for doing so.

If the DR code absolutely has to stay, then it needs to be relaxed significantly in the newer areas where the intention is to have players do tons of events. That is the entire point of every new area added to the game since launch except for Southsun Cove. Punishing people for playing as intended doesn’t make any sense.

While putting “no tree exploit” in LFG should work ok to get around this problem, in practice I’ve found that this doesn’t work at all. I create a group with such a requirement, people join, and then kick me from my own group when they don’t agree. Most people don’t seem to read beyond the difficulty scales. If I mention that it’s a “no exploit” group, the reaction is usually extremely hostile and results in me getting kicked. Why? Because people have it in their heads that exploiting this boss is the easiest and fastest way to beat him (hint: it isn’t — fighting him directly is).

They see the group is almost full and then take over once they’re in it. Because of the way party controls work, the group creator has no recourse against this kind of behavior except to create a new group and hope people follow the established rules. At least Guild Wars 1 had a party leader mechanic that allowed some level of control against this kind of thing.

What’s the solution to this? Fix the exploits so people have to actually play the game. Or temporarily ban people for exploiting (imagine that!). Since these exploits usually take years to address, I don’t know what else we can do beyond playing with people we know. Unfortunately, that isn’t always viable since my friends aren’t always online when I am or they aren’t available for fractals. In those situations I have to PUG if I want to play, and then I’m back to exploit hell if I want to get the daily done without wasting my entire evening on it.

As others have said, the Mossman is actually much faster and easier if he’s just attacked directly without using exploits. Good luck explaining that to most people, though. The usual response is an instant kick.

I’m really glad that a fix for this is in the works. It isn’t a game breaking issue but it certainly is annoying. Thanks for the update on this!

AysonCurrax.3254:

that is, if there is actually a version control software being used, which i dearly hope so… otherwise i dont know what i am supposed to think of this anymore.

ArenaNet is a multi-million dollar game development company. The Guild Wars 2 source code is hundreds of thousands of lines (that’s a conservative estimate, by the way). No one does serious software development with millions of dollars on the line and teams of programmers without version control. Even open source projects use it. ArenaNet is using version control. It’s absolutely ridiculous to even suggest that they might not be.

And while it might be easy to figure out where something went wrong in a small code repository, when you have a game as large and as complex as Guild Wars 2, it isn’t just a matter of using a diff command or examining every single line of code that’s been changed. For starters, there are likely way too many changes to go through them one at a time unless you know exactly which system the problem is occurring in.

Without knowing exactly what’s causing the bug, it’s also impossible to look at code changes and expect to see something useful. Sometimes if you happen to look at exactly the right section of code something might stand out to you as wrong. But if you’re dealing with a very large program (e.g., such as GW2), that isn’t the most efficient approach to solving the problem. The various subsystems in GW2 interact in very complex ways. Extensive testing needs to be done to isolate the bug first. Then the code can be more closely examined and a fix can be written.

If you don’t do that, then you run the risk of breaking even more stuff or not truly fixing the bug you set out to fix. And then you’ve just wasted valuable programmer and QA time accomplishing nothing particularly useful.

As far as I can tell, it’s unknown how the Gift of Infinity and the Gift of the Fractals are obtained. Neither are in the game yet. I’d also be curious to see the source for that recipe, though. Datamined perhaps?

deejayberzerker.1940:

I do not have access to GW1 anymore. I’ve ‘retired’ from that game and I don’t really feel like installing it again. This is not an acceptable bug to lose every single point available from HOM (50/50 and GWAMM). Anet, pls fix and don’t you dare tell me to log into GW1. I didn’t break this you did.

Have you tried the other suggestion in the thread? That is, completely exit Guild Wars 2, login, and fully load a character. If it doesn’t work on the first try, do it again.

My points and titles are all back too. It looks like I just earned them all again.

For those testing this, make sure you fully load in with one of your characters. The character selection screen doesn’t appear to be enough to fix this.

Note that I didn’t log into GW1 at all. I simply logged into GW2 and loaded into Rata Sum with one of my characters.

Serhaph.6397:

I just happened to exit the game and log back into my main toon and now it seems that the titles are back again, as well as access to my HoM items along with getting my AP back. Dunno what went wrong but seriously ANet needs to rethink how they go about “fixing” this.

Unfortunately, this didn’t work for me. I’m still at least 443 points short and I’m missing my titles. Oddly enough, the HOM calculator appears to be working just fine for me. None of my points are missing from that.

I’m having the exact same problem. I’ve never earned the GWAMM title through legitimate or illegitimate means yet I received a letter stating that I have.

The first attached screenshot was taken on November 19. And as you can see from the second screenshot, which was taken a little while ago, I’ve lost at least 443 achievement points. Note that I’ve obtained the achievement chest for 21,500 points, which is where I get the 443 number from. The next chest is for 22,000 points (as shown in the screenshot). It appears that I’m missing all of my Hall of Monuments achievement points and associated titles.

I really hope this can be corrected. Losing over 400 achievement points and titles that I’ve legitimately earned for not doing anything wrong is extremely frustrating.

DR absolutely exists. It’s very noticeable as far as events are concerned, especially on the newer maps where there are constantly events going. I seem to hit event DR in 10-20 minutes in all of the Heart of Thorns maps and in the Silverwastes/Dry Top. This wouldn’t be so bad if the penalty wasn’t so high but it’s quite severe.

I go from about 18.8K experience per gold event completion to about 4K experience per gold event completion. I’ve actually seen it go as low as 2K before. In the Silverwastes and other newer areas, I hit this barrier extremely quickly just by playing on the map and doing what I’m supposed to be doing in said map (i.e., completing events and working towards the meta event).

Visiting new maps doesn’t usually reset this problem for me either. If I play in the Silverwastes for about an hour (I would have hit DR after 10-20 minutes) and then head to Verdant Brink, the same harsh penalties remain in effect.

It’s completely ridiculous to hit us so hard with that when the main point of all of the new maps is to take part in lots of events. The focus of open world content is on completing events and we’re punished for doing exactly that. It’s absurd to be doing level 80 events, being required to obtain millions of experience to train masteries (not everyone enjoys killing enemies in a certain dungeon for hours at a time to progress), and then only getting 2-4K experience per event. I find this to be extremely frustrating and counterintuitive.

Rincebrain.4857:

A workaround for this is probably to use one of the Infusion Extractors; I was about to say that I didn’t have this problem with my Infused Rings, then remembered that I used those to extract the infusions first…

That doesn’t work. Even if you remove all of the infusions, the old infused rings don’t show up as being usable in the forge. The only infused rings that seem to work are old non-infused rings that have been infused after the HoT patch or newly infused rings that drop from the fractal encryption boxes. Likewise, if you buy a ring from the vendor in FotM, that ring can be infused and then attuned without trouble.

If a ring was infused before HoT, the forge doesn’t recognize it as being part of a valid recipe even if its infusions have been extracted. It’s quite frustrating.

Azure Prower.8701:

I did make use of those. They even destroyed my expensive precision infusions and reverted them into a regular +5 agony resistance.

I haven’t experienced the infusion extractors destroying infusions/converting them problem at all. And I’ve extracted a lot of infusions (well over 50). A few of them were fine infusions too.

Corvus.5430:

I’m starting to wonder if it’s not ready yet. It’s sure easy to put loads of pay content on Gem store yet when it comes time to something already paid for POOR service!

Putting content in the gem store isn’t remotely the same as fixing bugs in the game itself. Have some patience. They’ll fix it. There are plenty of other things to do in Heart of Thorns in the meantime.

ArenaNet’s service for Heart of Thorns has been incredibly good so far. The speed at which they have been fixing bugs is impressive and so is the smoothness of the launch.

Same problem as well. Infused rings don’t show as items that can go in the Mystic Forge.

Only newly infused rings (i.e., post-Heart of Thorns) or infused rings that have dropped since the expansion launched show up on the list of possible infused rings to use. This effectively makes 2 entire bank tabs full of infused rings worthless to me.

What’s the point in being able to upgrade rings if you can’t even use existing rings? I intentionally salvaged or got rid of my non-infused rings because I didn’t see the point in hanging onto them. Apparently this was a major mistake since I’m now stuck being unable to use my other rings.

I really hope this can be fixed.

Pretty much all of that stuff is optional. Many features default to being enabled but it doesn’t take much effort to turn them off.

Performance seems to be about the same in Windows 10 for me. The biggest issue I’m having with GW2 in Windows 10 is the game will has a tendency to hard lock on me if I alt-tab out and then back in. It happens about 50% of the time. AMD video card. If I were to guess, I’d say this is most likely related to my video drivers.

There are far worse things that could be happening I suppose. It just makes checking things on the wiki a bit obnoxious. I tend to use my phone now instead, unless I forgot I’m not in Windows 7 anymore and then I’ll alt-tab out like an idiot…

xuebi.8273:

Can we play or should we wait for a fix ? I don’t really wanna play now if we experience a rollback later…

The game seems playable as it currently is. Despite the game saying otherwise, traits and skills should still be unlocked and usable for you. The daily reset is just a visual glitch (you can’t earn the achievements again) and the same appears to be true for most of the other things impacted. So basically, you should be able to play if you don’t mind that some of the UI isn’t displaying the right information.

Of course, this isn’t any sort of official answer. I have no idea what the actual fixes will include or how they’ll be deployed. I highly doubt a rollback will occur, however. It doesn’t seem like any actual data has been lost. It just isn’t being displayed properly in the UI.

I’m also having all of these problems.

And I should clarify: all of these issues appear to be visual for me. It doesn’t look like I’ve actually lost any progress. I still have access to all of my skills and traits, my achievement point total remains unchanged, I still have all achievement related titles, etc. It just looks like all of those things have been lost.

This is also impacting the thief Steal mechanic. Since that skill shadowsteps you to your target, I’ve been finding that I can’t even use that. It’ll just randomly refuse to trigger. It doesn’t use ground targeting either. I also tried out with the various guardian teleport skills (like Judge’s Intervention). It happens with those too. So I need to revise what I originally said. It impacts all teleport skills regardless of whether they use ground targeting.

This problem is extremely annoying because it randomly disables most of my escape skills. It’s bad for all of the classes that use teleports to escape but it’s especially awful for thieves since so many thief skills rely on teleporting to function in a consistent, reliable manner. Teleports are a huge part of being able to survive as a thief. If you factor in skills like Infiltrator’s Strike and Infiltrator’s Return, it even impacts other utility found on skills (e.g., condition removal). This issue removes that consistency and reliability. And that’s a really big problem. I can’t imagine having to deal with this in PvP. It’s bad enough in PvE and WvW as it can be the difference between winning and dying.

I’ve found a location (looking for others as well) where I can consistently cause this message to come up despite not trying to do anything abnormal. If you go to the southwest of the Splintered Coast Waypoint in Sparkfly Fen there’s a Risen Brute near some boat wreckage. This wreckage is right on the edge of the beach. The ground is flat and there are no visible objects in front of the Risen Brute.

This error is triggered every single time a teleport skill is used to try to approach this enemy. The type of teleport doesn’t matter. Teleports also don’t work if you’re “inside” the boat wreckage.

Hmm, interesting thoughts on that. You may be onto something. The only issue I see with that is I’d have to be constantly finding those locations where surfaces overlap. I wish I could provide more useful information in this thread that might make this easier to reproduce but the error is popping up seemingly randomly for me and it won’t even show up in the same locations if I try it enough.

This seems to happen about 40% of the time with me. On some surfaces, it happens 100% of the time. But even that isn’t consistent. There was an area in the Silverwastes where I simply couldn’t get Infiltrator’s Arrow to trigger at all. I tried for a good 30 seconds to see if I could figure out why it wasn’t working. Eventually I gave up. Just out of curiosity, I tried it again when I was at that location a while later. The skill worked without trouble at all.

Like I said above, sometimes it’s an obvious issue (e.g., I’m trying to teleport across a trench or something) and the error makes sense in that case. In those cases it’s clear that the skill is trying to be used in a manner that it isn’t intended to work in (whether intentional on the player’s part or not). But the message pops up so frequently for me that I can’t rely on the teleport skills at all anymore. And a lot of the time I can’t even tell why the message is appearing. It might be obvious from an internal perspective in the game but it isn’t obvious from a gameplay perspective.

Since the large update last week, I’ve been encountering an error message stating that there is “No valid path to target.” with all of the teleport skills that require ground targeting in the game. Blink and Infiltrator’s Arrow are the skills that I encounter it the most often with but it seems to happen with every teleport skill that uses ground targeting. I understand that the system used to determine what valid paths are has been revamped significantly. I don’t have an issue with that as the new system seems to prevent some odd behavior with those types of skills.

Having said that, the problem is the skills arbitrarily fail to teleport me to my destination even if I’m on completely flat ground. This makes them incredibly frustrating to use in combat as they may randomly fail and with no obvious reason. They just refuse to work.

This happens consistently when on ramparts of towers/keeps in WvW. But not on all of them. Note that I’m not trying to teleport off of them. I’m just trying to teleport to another location directly ahead of me on the rampart. I’ve also had it happen when trying to teleport up onto a rock in various areas and then work perfectly fine if I move my character slightly. Or it’ll fail on completely flat terrain. It also happens inconsistently on stairs.

I can’t seem to reproduce this problem reliably unless I specifically try to teleport to a location I obviously can’t reach. In those cases the error seems to be displaying correctly. The problem comes in when I receive the error and I’m simply trying to teleport across an open space.

Yeah, that definitely isn’t working right. If you check the description of a locked trait it says you can either complete the event listed or you can buy the unlock with gold. Currently only traits you’ve unlocked are available, which doesn’t match the description of how traits are unlocked.

It’s certainly the latest patch that’s caused this problem. I could buy traits I have never unlocked on my new thief last night without trouble. Today I’m limited to traits I’ve already unlocked, which is kind of worthless unless I create a second thief.

Ardenwolfe.8590:

Sure are a lot of “I told you so” even before it’s announced. Hope that doesn’t come back to bite you guys in the behind when it’s not what you expected. . . .

Ok, if it isn’t an expansion pack or new campaign of some sort, what is it? Why has NCSoft trademarked a new logo, a title, and other related items? And no, it doesn’t mean it’s season 3 of the living story. They haven’t taken these kind of steps for the other seasons. So, what is it?

Ashen.2907:

Im not sure that announcing an upcoming event, particularly on your own peoperty, constitutes hype.

Indeed. It’s just marketing. And of course they want people to be excited about it. They’re probably just as excited to be able to talk about this project. Excitement/interest generally results in sales. They want to make money and they want happy players.

Valento.9852:

I don’t intend derailing the hype train, but here’s a thing:
“On January 8 2015, NCsoft filed to trademark Guild Wars 2: Heart of Thorns. The type of the trademark is service mark.”

Source

As lordkrall correctly pointed out, there were several trademarks that were submitted. You can easily do a search for Heart of Thorns and multiple trademarks will show up under NCSoft’s name. That many trademarks would not be submitted if the intent was simply to release season 3 of the living story or do a few small updates.

As I mentioned earlier, companies don’t register trademarks unless they intend to sell a product or service. Trademarks are generally used to help market a product and protect key features of said product. A logo, a name, a slogan, the name for a technology, etc. Given that Guild Wars 2: Heart of Thorns is a new trademark that is being treated as a separate entity from Guild Wars 2 (along with all of the associated logos and names), the logical conclusion is it’s a brand new product that will be distributed and sold as such. In other words, it’s an expansion or new campaign based on the Guild Wars 2 core game.

I can understand people being skeptical given some of the past comments about there “never being a Guild Wars 2 expansion” (I believe the statement was there were no current plans at the time the question was asked) but the evidence that this is actually the plan now is pretty overwhelming. What’s unclear at this point is what shape the expansion will take, how much it’ll cost, what it will include, when it’ll be released, etc. We’re going to have to wait until PAX South to find out some (all?) of those things.

My experiences were almost identical to what Nokaru described above. Unfortunately I don’t remember the IP addresses of the servers I was on. In a few of the cases, 4 out of 5 champions were defeated during the breach before the Vinewrath spawned. In other cases all 5 champions were defeated. It doesn’t seem to make a difference when it comes to the event being glitched.

But if the event does glitch, it seems to happen on the first lane, which then prevents any of the champions from being fought and the only option is to let the event fail.

I think people are confusing “in-game cinematic” with “game trailer.” The video shown at the end was a trailer for Heart of Thorns, not a game cinematic. It was a preview of what’s to come. The living story episode ended before the trailer was shown. The episode ended with…

I don’t really see how this is an issue. It was a great surprise for those who played through the episode and it was a great way to get the news out about the next big GW2 thing without spoiling the surprise for people playing.

Let’s just say that companies don’t trademark names, logos, and other types of content on products that they don’t intend to be marketing separately and making money on. None of the living story releases have been trademarked or have had their own separate copyright information. Nor have they had a completely revamped Guild Wars 2 logo accompany them.

How this new content will take shape remains to be seen. But there’s no way it’s simply an announcement for season 3 of the living story. There’s a new subtitle, a new logo, and updated copyright information in the trailer:

“©2010–2015 ArenaNet, LLC. All rights reserved. Guild Wars, Guild Wars 2, Guild Wars 2: Heart of Thorns, ArenaNet, NCSOFT, the Interlocking NC Logo, and all associated logos and designs are trademarks or registered trademarks of NCSOFT Corporation. All other trademarks are the property of their respective owners.”

This indicates a new product, not just a new chapter in an existing one. This is an expansion.

I’ve tried to do this event 4 times tonight. Every fight was on a different copy of the map, and every single one was bugged like this.

The siege carrier at the southern vine wall can never break through to the boss. This will repeat until the event fails.

I’m having the same problem. I tried all of the above and also tried deleting

%appdata%\Guild Wars 2\Local.dat

thinking that something might have been messed up in that. Unfortunately, I’m still having the same issue. It isn’t that big of a deal but it’s definitely an annoyance that wasn’t there before yesterday’s patch.

HHR LostProphet.4801:

Noone should be forced to do them, but if you want to them, you should be able to do them again and you should get goodies for doing so. I’ve already said, instead of the 46c – 5s reward, they could give you 1 item from the heart vendor for free.

I don’t have a problem with people having the option to redo them. I do have a problem with people losing progress and being forced to redo stuff. We already had that happen with fractals and that definitely didn’t go over very well.

The heart vendors have mostly useless items that are only useful to characters that are leveling. Karma isn’t even an issue if you just play the game semi-regularly. Getting an item for free might save you an event or two worth of karma. That’s hardly a reward. And to make it worse, you can’t even salvage or put the items in the Mystic Forge. Nor can you sell them to vendors. So basically, the item would just be something to throw away. I’d rather just have the silver or copper. But with the gold inflation being what it is, the copper/silver would be just as worthless as the karma items themselves.

A better solution would be to give the karma vendors items that people would actually be interested in buying with karma. That would actually be a reward.

The hearts are some of the most uninteresting PvE content in the game. They’re the GW2 equivalent of “kill X of monster Y and return to me for a terrible reward” that most other MMOs use as a form of questing. I really can’t get behind the idea of resetting those and forcing people to redo them or any other type of PvE content every month. The game should be becoming more flexible for veteran and new players alike, not more restrictive.

Regina Buenaobra.6193:

More information will be released next week about features that are more suited to veteran players.

Well, that’s something I guess.

Sadly, the crafting timers are still broken for me as well.

I just ran into this tonight. Everything was fine last night and earlier today. Then I logged on after the reset and all of my daily stuff seems to be bugged. I can’t craft ascended mats because they immediately went on cooldown when the daily reset, my daily achievements are at 3/5 despite not doing any of them tonight (they were at 0/5 before I tried logging in again), and daily chests aren’t triggering.

I almost started a thread about the crafting issue as I didn’t even realize it was connected to this problem.

Farzo.8410:

Eh… Pretty lame. I’m all for finishers but it just becomes too lame if they try to make hip and silly finishers.

The SAB music interest me though…

They’ve had “hip and silly” finishers for quite a while now. I mean, is this really much sillier than a cow landing on someone? Or a snowman landing on someone?

I like the concept of the megaserver system. But there are definitely some issues that need to be ironed out with it. This is a long thread and I haven’t read every post so please forgive me if this has been brought up and/or addressed already.

My guild was doing guild missions last night and people kept getting thrown in map instances without guildies. I thought the system was supposed to take people’s guild into account when determining which instance to put them in? If there are 30-40 people from the same guild in an instance, and I’m representing said guild at the time, shouldn’t that instance become one of the top possible instances to put me in?

To get around this we had to group up and ferry people to the right instances. While this is an ok workaround, it’s an extra and (in my opinion) completely unnecessary step that shouldn’t have to be taken. We never used to have to do this sort of thing when going to a particular map. It also creates a lot of unnecessary confusion.

This llama finisher is basically a giant love letter to all the Carls that play this game (Confused? Look up “Llamas with Hats” on YouTube). Let’s just say there’s no way I’m not getting this. Just…epic.

Geekfox.4267:

They reset my traits.

That’s because traits were given a major overhaul.

Geekfox.4267:

It’s too late. This chat bug had hard consequences and is the reason why we just failed to take down Tequatl.

Yeah, well, it’s a game and this was a huge update. Stuff happens. This bug sucked, I agree, but it’s not like ArenaNet deleted all of your characters or something.

Oh look. It’s fixed…

https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/info/updates/Game-Update-Notes-April-15-2014/first#post3902550

I ran into the exact same problem as soon as I visited Heart of the Mists. Note that I used the game UI to teleport there and didn’t use the asura gate in Vigil Keep. But now I seem to be permanently silenced.

MysticalDiamond.4037:

Anet I know you’re slow and all on fixing your kitten but please hurry up, this bug is seriously annoying, for me and everyone else as well.

They’ve acknowledged that they know of this bug and they’re working on it. I’m sure they’re working as fast as they can. This is a serious enough issue that it would immediately be bumped to high priority.

DevonCarver.5370:

It is actually a bug. We are currently investigating a fix and hope to have it fixed as soon as we can. We agree, we want you to see people’s names.

This is actually really good to hear. I was a bit baffled about this naming issue and knowing that it’s being worked on and isn’t the intended behavior is really good to know. Conceptually, I really like EotM. But not being able to easily communicate with the people you’re playing with really takes a lot away from what could otherwise be a potentially fun experience.

^ Support might be able to refund laurels and destroy the ring that Empire purchased (skeptical that they’ll do much). And ANet should probably clarify what “unique” means in-game. However, you cannot equip two of the same items that are stated as being unique. This isn’t a bug. It’s the design of the “unique” tag on items.

If you want to wear two ascended rings/trinkets with the same stats, you can accomplish this in two ways. Infuse one of the rings (as Jeffrey mentioned above) or wear one of the alternative rings with a different type of infusion slot (i.e., buy a ring with an offensive infusion slot and one with a defensive infusion slot). In this case, the Crystalline Band (defensive infusion slot) and Red Ring of Death (offensive infusion slot) would accomplish this. Both rings are power, precision, crit damage and have the same stats.

Norjena.5172:

Tankygruops have to stack aswell to be “effective” stacking is the logical consequence out of the game mechanics.

1. No tank>no place where mobs are they follow rnd players>chaos
2. Buffs/Support isonly useable in a area around the player. U have to stack to support others. Healing or might it doesn´t matter
3. ranged dps is bad (even Staff eles dps is bad in ranged gruops), and mobs which are following a ranged guy will be a loss of dps for melees.
This isn´t a zerkergroup problem. They are probably the only ones who care about, cause they know it.

If u wear Dire, Zerker, Clerics or PVT all these problems will be exactly the same. To “fix” stacking, they should make GW3 i think it´s to late for such a big change to combat mechanics.

So, standing up against a boss or wall to prevent the boss or mobs from using AoE attacks against the group is ok in your book? It makes logical sense that mobs or bosses won’t use cleave/AoE attacks to hit all of the players at once when they’re standing right on top of them? Enemies should just stand in place and dumbly get hit?

I’m not saying stacking is an invalid tactic. There are situations where it has advantages and makes strategic sense (e.g., grouping up enemies to AoE them to death). I’m saying that it needs to have a greater risk associated with it if people choose to go glass cannon. Enemy AI doesn’t know how to deal with this technique (at least not very well anyway) and as a result it’s become the norm for a lot of players.

The gear itself is fine. The problem is that other gear is significantly less desirable for a lot of players because the game mechanics emphasize DPS over everything else in PvE. Support and control have their place but they aren’t powerful enough to be desirable to a lot of people outside of sPvP and WvW. Most boss fights are just giant DPS checks. And on top of that, enemy behavior just encourages the stacking and auto-attacking strategy. In that sense, zerker gear is a problem but only indirectly. That just isn’t good for the longevity of the game and it goes against many of the design goals ANet seems to be shooting for.

Miku Lawrence.6329:

But it’s not an issue…

Not to some people perhaps. But it’s an issue to me and many others. And it’s clearly an issue to ANet given that they’re working on addressing it.

I just wanted to say thanks to Blood Red Arachnid for posting this well-reasoned and well-thought out thread about this particular issue.

In addition to everything else said in the opening posts, a big part of the “berserker problem” is the way the enemy AI behaves. Stacking against a wall (or boss) and having enemies dumbly all cluster around the group is just plain stupid and isn’t fun. Smarter enemy AI would go a long way towards fixing this issue and discouraging this sort of play without impacting the damage that zerker gear does.

Enemies need to use AoE skills to hit party members when they attempt this strategy. They need to spread out again. They need to focus on downed players to take them out. They need to heal and buff themselves to counteract high damage attacks. And so on. These changes would make the game more challenging but that’s desperately needed. I personally think it would also make the game a lot more fun.

shiri.4257:

What games did you guys play before gw2? In particular lineage 1? I knew a group on there with that ran with that tag and also similar player ids. Could just be a small world or nothing at all.

VII existed in GW1 in some form but I’m uncertain if the guild existed in other games as I only joined it in GW2. I’ve personally never played Lineage (although I did briefly play Lineage II) but I was a huge GW1 player. I was not, however, part of VII in that game. I helped run my own small guild in GW1. It’s entirely possible you ran into some of us in that.

Not sure that’s very helpful… >.< lol

Being able to get the toy frames and glue/stuffing/cogs would have been a great thing to keep. It’s really quite odd that it wasn’t kept.

jazzllanna.1278:

No it is way over priced. As I said in another thread it should be about the price of a transmutation crystal because the only thing it is good for it preserving a skin.

Well, no. It isn’t only good for preserving a skin. If you want to remove an expensive infusion from an item, it’s potentially worth using to recover that as well. A single +10 AR infusion is almost worth the same as a full set of tier 3 cultural armor. If we’re talking about sigils and runes, however, I agree that it isn’t worth it.

I like the concept of the item. It’s been needed for a while. But I intensely dislike how it’s been added to the game. And to make that even worse, I think the price is ridiculous for a single use item. On top of that, there should be an in-game way to obtain similar functionality. Either a Mystic Forge recipe or an NPC that’s only available after a dynamic event (remember when that sort of thing mattered?). Or something. The gem store item can be kept but it should be a convenience item, not a necessity to remove expensive infusions.

Items like this have really started to make me lose faith in ArenaNet especially after they design systems specifically with items like these in mind.

It isn’t just you. It’s price gouging. Simple as that. If you could buy a permanent version of this upgrade, I’d probably get it (provided that it’s reasonably priced). But 250 gem, single use items is absurd. It’s approximately $3.13 per USE. This is a quality of life item that shouldn’t be in the gem store. There should be an alternate way to perform this task in the game without having to sink that much gold into an item.