Guild Wars 2

Ha I’ve been waiting for the dueling option / open world pvp to be able to roleplay mr evil guy forever, and ANet still hasn’t put out either option yet. (I hate roleplaying without making use of game mechanics in one form or another, otherwise you’re just playing in a fancy chatroom) I don’t even get why half of the RP’ers in this game actually RP in guild wars 2 though. If you are of the I put my hand on your cheek and kiss you Oh im so lucky class of RP’er, you’re better off in a text based rpg.

Seriously, other than having fancy graphics to look at, guild wars 2 offers almost nothing to RP’ers, whereas text based rpg’s have a way better way of blending RP with the in-game world and gameplay, allowing players to have an actual effect on the world in a way more complex manner, and play a way bigger part in the world.

Sheathed weapons on the back are moved slightly further behind the character.
This results in greatswords no longer fitting neatly in the orrian light mantle armor, now they look like crap.

Would be cool if this could get reverted.

Events that rarely happen to unlock traits, this is hell for anyone with a decent amount of alts. Prepare to goldsink or camp events forever.

JerryMain.4371:

Did you enter the Mists yet?

A lot of item names and icons got swapped around. I managed to find the ones I thought that were missing. :’)

Edit: nvm
/15char

Edit: nvm
/15chars

The NPC in Ebonhawke next to the crafting stations for Guild Banks seems to be bugged.
The NPC claims that I do not have Guild Storage researched, which I clearly have (and am able to access from the NPC in Lion’s Arch)

Whenever I lower the setting for Character Model Limit, some graphics simply disappear.

Examples are the pink fog / transparancy on mesmer phantasms. As well as the blue ghost effect on Ascalonian mobs.

My guess would be that Model Quality settings would affect the visibility of effects such as these, while Model Limit would solely affect the number of things onscreen, as indicated by the tooltips when you hover the mouse over these options.

Unfortunately this does not seem to be the case in-game.

Related Thread:
https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/professions/mesmer/Phantasms-are-broken

While the game is not ‘’too hard’’ when properly working, there’s a lot of nonsense going on that makes it harder than I feel it’s supposed to be.

o Pushblocks not blocking while being pushed. (Meaning instakill walls shoot through moving blocks)
o Shuriken hitboxes seemingly bigger than they’re supposed to be.
o Toad can swallow you up if you get hit by the suck-in animation in mid-air even if you land 2 floors below (meaning once you break free you pop out of thin air)
o The water spout knocking back after you jumped off if it turns off while you’re above it. This followed by a CHAIN knockback that can take ages if the game feels like trolling you.
o Instant kill walls triggering even if you’re not in their direct line of sight. (Main offenders are the horizontally placed walls in the big hole, might be that their line of sight is actually slightly wider than the spots on which you can stand without falling)
o Random deaths. (This might be due to lag? WvW suffered from lag a lot after the patch)

Then there’s 2 things that I dislike, which are not necessarily bad.
o Arbitrary instant kill walls forcing you to take things slooowwllyy until you see where everything is. This was a pain when solo’ing World 2 Dojo areas, especially at the gong part. I would’ve personally preferred a way to have a consistent knockback that makes sure you cannot cross the ’’walls’’, with an arbitrary amount of damage added to it if you wanted to punish the player for crossing it.

o Lots of stuff causes knockbacks, which in a level with small spaces tends to screw you over and instant kill you anyway. (Knockback into piranha pit, knockback off the map, knockback into instant kill arrow wall, swallowed by toad – spit out into the void, etc)

Then there’s the fact that some things aren’t dodgeable, while throughout GW2 we’ve learned to dodge a lot. Making you waste coins/lives on undodgeable things killing you.

Once you figure out all the stupid quirks SAB seems to have it’s easy enough to get through it, but being forced to realize them takes a lot out of the experience imo. I feel like World 2 is the warped vision of what 8-bit game difficulty was like back then. It is okay-ish, but it could’ve been better. World 1 then again is super easy for the big part, with King Toad being a proper boss.

They wanted to keep away from the PvE / PvP split skill balancing system. But at this point I see it as a necessity if Mesmers are to remain as viable in PvE compared to the other classes.

My vote goes to the Mantra mesmer.

If I have to believe my friendslist roughly 66% of the people I knew stopped playing, if not more.

Rynarx.6124:

According to the post by Anet, looks more like the latter

https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/gw2/Server-Populations/first

I’d say that post hit it right on the money.
Unless the staffmember lied (Or terribly misphrased what he was trying to say), it’s the latter.

I would because I enjoyed the class the most.
That and I had the vague hope that they may add more mesmer specific legendary particles to attacks.

Personally I started liking mantras more and more the more I used them, to the extent where I practically run mantra build 24/7.

Though they might need a few small tweaks (The charging system could still be improved with regards to zone transfers & possibly specific skillsets for underwater/above water still breaking them) they are very useful in the right hands.

If the majority of mesmers would want them changed and Anet would comply, I wouldn’t want them to add passive effects in any case. That’s too similar to the signets.

1.) I come to the forums and spend way less time (none, actually) in-game.
2.) It started sometime around the halloween patch.
3.) Because the Legendary grind sucks. The skyrocketed economy in combination with the consistent nerfs to Mesmer and lack of bugfixes and nerfing of farming areas made me lose interest. I logged in one time when the 3 day event started planning to get whatever item they might hand out for collections sake, but when I logged in for event one it lagged so horrendously bad that it left an extremely sour taste in my mouth and I decided to call it quits.

I mean minutes worth of lag at a time on an overflow server followed by an eventual disocnnect followed by a different overflow server with zero progress on the event you just wasted your time on trying to complete amidst the worst lag I’ve had in a game since years.

Managed to turn in samples for event. Got disconnected, entered in a different overflow with less progress. Lagged like kitten. So I just logged out.

Hydrophidian.4319:

If a person is already bored with this game, it is due to their style of play. It is not the fault of the game itself.

If a person is already bored with this game, it is up to the game designers to look at his activity and personality to see why he was bored (well not literally but it would be optimal in case of targeted development), and whether his profile fits with that of the user they envisioned as part of their target audience. If someone isn’t, it’s their own fault for getting bored on something that’s not aimed at them. If someone is, then it’s the designers fault for creating a game for a set of people of which at least some fail to derive enjoyment from the game.

To simply say that it cannot be the game’s fault to get bored with the game at this time, is silly.

People are drawn to games for a wide variety of reasons, and they stay around for a wide variety of reasons. But, in my experience, the strongest, most common anchor isn’t progression it’s community. An MMO is not just a game, it’s a social construct. People can and do make an MMO their virtual third place

They can also make any other digital environment their ‘’third place’‘.
In my experience, the strongest common anchor for a game is game design, not community. While an extremely awful community may of course drive people away from the game, in my experience (online) friends are more likely to maintain contact outside a game and play something else rather than play something they don’t really like. Even when opinions are diverse, I’ve seen people rather decide upon their feelings about the game itself, and try to maintain any social connection (if they were significant enough) outside the game.

Cool how experiences work like that.

Hydrophidian.4319:

This is what accounts for an antiquated game like Ultima Online trucking along year after year after year. This is what accounts for the anomalous activity arc of EVE. It’s no doubt what maintains WoW. Social investment. Not game investment.

I’d rather think that it’s a combination of game appreciation, and time, money and social investment.

I did notice one girl once though, she did no longer like the game she played. She did not care about the time and money invested. She only played it because the ‘’guild needed her’’. I consider myself fortunate to have only encountered one person that saw things that way.

When I just started playing it wasn’t uncommon to see dyes going for 7s 50c in the first few weeks. Better hope the dye price won’t continue rising above it.

There’s a vendor at the mystic forge in Lion’s Arch where you can use your skillpoints to buy specific items that can be used in the production of a multitude of items.

More specifically: The items you can buy there are used in the Mystic Forge itself to create new random stuff and not so random stuff. (Eg.: Stuff for your Legendary weapon)

Efaicia.3672:

ZeroStatic.2176:

Sigh Mesmers with the fewest changes again.

I hope this time they’ll actually fix trait / skill bugs for the mesmer rather than just nerf stuff again.

What do you mean mesmers with the fewest changes? The Elementalist get none, zero, zip, nada. Even though we are The Only Class which is overly dependant on Game Mechanics, to the extent that we have to learn them just to be functional, whereas other classess can go to the top of end game (dungeon gear, legendaries and PvP ranks) without even knowing what a field is, or what finishers they bring.

Not to mention our massive list of bugged and non-functional abilities. ..seriously, at least your class is functional.

You claim they get zero changes, which implies that either:
1.) They get zero changes in other patches.
2.) They get zero changes in the coming patch based on the impromptu interview.
In case of the first:
Ele changes in at least three October patches, these can all be found in the Announcements section of the forums.

In case of the second:
The OP states mesmer had the fewest changes. If Ele’s truly got zero this statement would be false.

So I’m not entirely sure what you’re getting at here.

Sigh Mesmers with the fewest changes again.

I hope this time they’ll actually fix trait / skill bugs for the mesmer rather than just nerf stuff again.

I have had many days from the start of this game where I would find at least 10 dyes throughout the day. I have not had any significant increases in dyes found (rather, a slight decrease).

Whether it was luck that granted me craptons of dyes at the start, or something else I do not know. What I do know is that I personally have not experienced a significant increase in dyes found for quite some time.

As has been said, the masked picture you see looking through sunrise looks better overall. Sunrise has some really good art hidden in its own picture but this is only viewable from certain angles.

As far as I know your stuff is still available on the server you came from even after transfering all members, meaning that after these 7 days you can move back and be back on track with the progress you made there. Afaik because I’ve transfered to over 10 different servers for various reasons before and I still had my guild progress in the server I started it on.

Not an optimal solution, but there are lots of people that aren’t willing to transfer with their guilds due to server-specific guild progress.

Gibbel.5734:

it’s sad though for ppl not running a i5/i7 sandy/ivy

We are forced to endure 15 fps while button smashing trying to hit some invisble enemies …

Didn’t know my Phenom X4 965 was considered intel brand.
(Note: You can make an AMD machine run faster than 15 fps in WvWvW)

Marnick

And yet I’m well on my way for most things. You didn’t understand what I’m saying. It is easy to get, it just takes a bit of time. If I could get all that stuff without playing much, then how could it be difficult for people who actually have time in the day? If I were still a student or between jobs, I would have it by now. I’m 100% positive on that one.

And I’m 100% positive that if you were following any course worth following as a student, you wouldn’t. Statements like these are meaningless.

The only thing you told us was that you were on your way to getting the Gift of Exploration / Battle and the obsidian shards. You did not tell us what your actual current gold was aside from it ‘’trickling in’‘. Nor did you tell us about your progress on the other Gifts / T6 mats required to get a Legendary. So as far as anyone here is concerned, you literally have nothing aside from the 200 skillpoint item. You’re not well on your way for ‘’most things’‘, you’re well on your way for the few easiest parts to acquire. (Not counting raw cash purchases through the gemstore)

Of course the Legendary is ’’easy’’ to achieve. Pretty much anything in any MMO is ’’easy’’ to achieve in the sense that you simply perform a repetitive set of simple tasks and buttonpresses to gain more of X and Y. Combine that with the fact that playing the game casually (with friends) lets you get lots of skillpoints & karma & Map Completion due to the way these are connected and it seems easy for anyone with or without a tiresome job.

…Until you hit the grindwall.
If I were to have summer holidays, I might be able to get a Legendary within one month, assuming that I literally do nothing other than grinding all day long, do not hang out with any friends whatsoever (Unless they happen to play GW2 and are chasing the legendary as well), and get lucky with the clovers required for one of the gifts. Add to that the fact that I do have obligations outside of the game, and this quickly gets lengthened to 4~5 months of grinding, that is assuming that I do not get bored by the grind either. If I do anything that might make me less bored I would not be optimizing my income, lengthening the span in which I might get my Legendary even more.

I’m still working towards my Legendary at this moment, and though I will probably keep going for it, there’s nothing Legendary about getting the legendary, unless doing Cursed Shore event runs for 310+ hours in a row is considered legendary. (And this is assuming that those hours spent there will also get me the mats I need, otherwise I’ll need to throw in even more hours)

So in this case I’m with zamrai, if you want the Legendary, be prepared to farm hard or play the TP, because you’re not gonna get it any time soon with ‘’casual play’‘. GW2 was supposed to do away with ’The Grind’, this is the opposite of that.

Or you could you know. Look up the current time in GMT, and see how many hours there are left before it’s 19:00 GMT and then add the same amount of hours to your own time?

At the time of posting this it’s 14:19 GMT, it starts at 19:00 GMT so that means in roughly 4 hours and 45 minutes. (Well more like 40 minutes but w/e)

It’s 15:19 where I’m at. So that means that the event starts at roughly 20:00 here.

Rumor has it gold and exotics will burst out from the lion’s statue like a giant piñata, showering riches all over the people that managed to be there.

No seriously, my guess is that it’s going to be a halloween boss / portal to boss that ’’awakens’’ within Lion’s Arch, followed by a fight or interactive event of some sort.

As for making it repeatable / viewable. I honestly have no idea why they don’t. It’s not like they had any trouble doing that with any other content in the game so far, like the dragons that decide to show up every 3 hours.

I’d love it in concept, I don’t know how well it would work in GW2.
Most MMO’s that had Open World PvP without specific faction zones did it by having some kind of penalty associated with PK’ing. Either you went to jail after x kills, or you’d get a bad rep and people could attack you freely, or some other penalty applied.

If this were properly designed and implemented I could already see the white knighers protecting lowbies from the black named griefers.. Or different (roleplay) guilds practically playing WvW in regular PvE zones.

I thought this game was meant to be played together.
Like others have said, going in with a few others will help out a lot. Especially with tons of people doing the same stuff. Guildies might not even be necessary.

People getting mad about the puzzle because of supposed bugs and limited availability in conjunction with difficulty.. I don’t get it. Not having the achievement will not destroy your life. And if in your view it does.. I’d say deal with it.

There will always be someone who will not be able to get something in the game, whether that’s due to lack of in-game currency, lack of real hard cash, lack of prerequisites that are unrelated to the game, lack of time due to work or time zones, or in this case, lack in skill due to difficulty, limited availability of the object of desire, or any combination of the above.

If everyone had this attitude there would be a kittenstorm of posts about pretty much any facet that could ’’possibly’’ not be achieved by ~some~ subset of people that are stuck in a specific situation.

Personally I only had the camera bug out on me one time when standing on a specific platform (the round one that you can jump on before the wall explodes for the first time, slightly to the left of the stairs) so I taught myself not to jump on that. After that I haven’t had any bugs at all. As for norn and charr blocking the view, well if you wait even as much as one second pretty much everyone is either dead or running ahead of you, while the acid won’t kill you yet, if you’re that bothered by it you can use this to solve the problem in the meantime. (Though perhaps the problem is more prevalent on high pop servers)

I agree with one point, solo instances should be optional for those that still get buggered by it, still put it on a timer though. Don’t want everyone getting a million ToT bags.)

In the end, I am glad that ANet added this puzzle. If ANet normalized the difficulty of everything to the lowest common denominator, then I would quit this game as it would become boring as hell. This puzzle, and Lupicus come to mind, after having seen the tons of posts and people in-game claiming this puzzle and that boss were impossible to handle.

I don’t know about you but my movement keys make me turn left & right while staying on spot.

Arah Explore dungeons do not take hours / half a day when done properly, even without skipping any mobs that would aggro normally if you tried to run from start to finish.
30~45 mins when skipping and not dying often. (1-2 wipes max)
~1 hour when not skipping and not dying often. (1-2 wipes max)
2+ hours when dying a lot (Sir Wipesalot)

‘’I died a lot so arah took the entire day’’ should not be an argument for toning down the duration of the dungeon.

I do agree with some of the other parts of your post though.

I think he’s talking about the chest that you get when you have to go down. (to go up)

The point remains that the puzzle only requires higher reflexes when you don’t know where to go yet.

Just take the puzzle bit by bit and actually memorize where you need to go. There’s a lack of reflexes once you know where to go (unless you accidentally misaligned your character for a jump and have to try and save him). Other than that it’s hold W and jump away.

And if you can’t do that, I suggest trying to do other jumping puzzles you do know, without stopping to ‘’align your character to jump’’. Again this does not require high reflexes, you just have to know the path you need to run and where you roughly need to stand to make each jump, which if you have done many jumping puzzles, you should know by now.

I have a different problem in the scavenger hunt.
I got the 5 pages but I can’t talk to Tassi to give me the reward for completing the hunt.

ANet Says: ‘Reward players appropriately for time spent on puzzles’
Makes puzzles easier.
…..
Profit!

1% 64MB Implies 100% 6400MB not 640 MB. (So 6 gigs)

I was at 1% at ~78MB, 2% at 120MB. 5% 171 MB so it’s obviously not very accurate.
It might be measuring the amount of files more than the actual amount of data.

It’s been long enough for me to warrant paying €40 for it. I’ve been playing it for several weeks but I do feel the drag coming along now. There’s no real further objective for me. RP or farm Legendaries or do WvW or do sPvP, that’s it. With WvW and sPvP there is no sense of real progression anymore which is kind of counterintuitive for me when I’m playing MMO’s. Yet farming mats for a legendary is such a chore, as is farming plain cash.

So now I usually just wander around the eternal battlegrounds mystic puzzle and try to kill random people.

So it was worth the €40 bucks, but the game in its current state lacks a bit imho. I hope things will freshen up with the halloween update.

Dynamite.6584:

Do dungeons for a week. Assuming you play 2 or 3 hours a day, you can get in 4 or 5 runs per day. That’s 240 to 300 tokens a day. In a week, that’s 1680 to 2100 tokens a week. It costs, what, 1400 per set?
Yeah, you can easily get a set with only 14 hours of play. Why can’t I do it with 70.

I didn’t realize they removed the token reward reduction and gave you 60 tokens for every run you did. These numbers are a bit surreal.

Here you go, can’t do any worse than not gaining anything, so why not.

Gardavil.1762:

Heavy Armor Cleric. Primary role healer, low damage, heavy armor, and CC… not a Paladin mind you… a Cleric. Think DAoC Albion healer class.

Ugh how I hate everyone that made the Cleric into the healing wussy it is today, as opposed to the overpowered engine of destruction from the D&D days.

I agree with the poster that asked what we’re really missing though, due to the lack of the trinity system it’s hard to think of any archetypes that do not fit in with any of the current classes somehow, yet can be designed into a non-trinity type class.

I used to think Mantra’s sucked as well. But the more I’ve been playing in WvW (And PvP-ing in the mystic portal area) the more I’ve started to like them. While I still use null field mostly because it also removes enemy boons, the condition removal and stability ones have been a part of my bar in quite some situations by now.

I do agree that they could use some kind of tweak though.

Abarcine.7189:

The clone gets a white revive icon ( NPC revive Icon) the player gets a blue revive icon ( Downed Player). As players get more used to playing with a mesmer nearby it will become less of an issue.

This. I’m amazed how many lvl 80 people still don’t seem to grasp this, or even don’t know how half the skills work.

Best one I’ve had was where I used 2, got up myself and people started rezzing my downed clone even though I was up right next to them.

Nice guide, hopefully pugs will read this and stop posting on the forums about how ridiculously hard ‘’final boss’’ lupus is. The babbling about studying tactics and simin design flaws at the end seems to be a bit unnecessary, as studying tactics for a game doesn’t really say much, nor do you elaborate upon these so called design flaws.

Zathos Karthas, lvl 80 Mesmer:

Alright so when does a boss become too hard according to you?
When average Joe with his band of Average Men cannot complete it?

There’s too many threads about Arah already so I can only say one thing:
Phase 2 is where people wipe.
Phase 2 is where literally all his attacks can be dodged.
Pretty much all classes have at least one skill that gives them something to aid in dodging/surviving the attacks in phase 2.

Learn to dodge, learn what skills you might be able to use against him, learn to make good decisions during the fight. (Such as when to rez people)

It’s a thought process that doesn’t require much thinking.

Good Luck.

Voip Elite Premade groups vs Chatting Pugging average people? Lmao hardly.

I started running Arah with an exotic set and green jewelry. As long as you have a semi competent team that’s pretty well geared most paths are a joke. The only path that I’m scared to run with a pug is path 4, because there’s a chance the group simply doesn’t have enough dps to get Simin down to 0.

It’s the same as in CoF pre-patch: you had the people that exploited the survival room and jumped over the door, and those that simply did it for the extra 5 tokens. People kept saying that it was freaking impossible to clear but I beg to differ. Simply pug with a group that manages to clear it, then add the cool guys to your list and make pre-made parties with them.

This makes 4 hour runs that don’t even finish get transformed into 1~2 hour (sometimes easymode) runs.

The fact that you can even pug it so easily is kind of sad considering Anet wanted the Explore routes to be kind of non-pugged.

I’ll have to say though, even if you have 2 or 3 people that know what they’re doing and successfully run it every single time with a premade, 1 or 2 baddies can spoil the run. This becomes especially apparent on Lupicus where depending on the team you might end up practically 3~4manning phase 2, which makes mistakes all the more punishing.

Final boss… spawn room? Sylvari path right? (The Forgotten)
Are you talking about the wraith or Lupicus? Wraith is the final boss but there’s no reason to kite him. (You can’t even kite him away afaik, at least until you complete the ritual.)