Guild Wars 2

Only really noticed the “automatic ducking” (if that’s what’s happening) since upgrading to Windows 10, so I’ve been searching everywhere for solutions to it (and tried all the recommended ones native to Windows) – but can’t seem to solve it.

If this is occurring automatically in GW2, what’s most annoying is that the ducking isn’t consistent in terms of the level of ducking that occurs.

Additionally, I get the feeling it could be culling certain sounds completely. I haven’t managed to confirm if this is just the quality setting though, but I noticed the sound effect of my auto-attack chain was completely muted from time to time while I was raiding – which really threw me off my rhythm if I didn’t watch my skill cast bar the whole time.

I feel it’s important to note that Continuum Shift does not reset your weapon swap cool down i.e. if you swap weapons after triggering Continuum Split you will stay in the weapon set that you swapped to with the remaining cooldown duration when you Shift back.

This felt counter-intuitive to me when I was messing about with it during the BWE, I understand that it’d be worse to swap you back into the first weapon set when you split, but feel like your weapon swap cooldown should be reset like all your other skills.

This currently does not break stun while you are being thrown from skills that knock-back or blow back.

While your character is in the air or bouncing along the ground the skill has the knockdown duration cooldown like all other skills, rather than being available to break out of it.

Now for my quick initial feedback.

It’d be great to have more flexibility with dying the outfits. The 4 universal dye channels just don’t offer enough control IMO. If it were possible to separate the dye channels out “per piece” that would be really cool.

I think the Hero panel should default to the Equipment tab, rather than the last tab opened (or perhaps give us the option of selecting this usability for maximum freedom!). This could be frustrating when you want to quickly swap out weapons or armour and you don’t use your inventory to do this for whatever reason, because you’re forced to exit out of whichever tab you are currently in. Naturally I can see myself adjusting to the new system, and changing my old habits to suit, but being able to use the Equipment tab is more reliable than the inventory (which differs from character to character and player to player).

Dog.1472:

Yeaaah I can probably just bite the bullet on what I’ve wasted. I can’t imagine being that guy that made 2 incinerators.

Well, they’ve now got 2 fully ascended, account bound and stat swappable weapons, so it’s not the worst thing in the world. It’s the expensive exotics where it sucks for people.

It does still sucks to be in that situation though, thinking if only…

Gabby.3205:

Please, PLEASE let me hide the helmet of my winter outfit! The hat looks hideous and I never used it, just let me hide it, please! Oh gods this is a disaster…

You can, it’s not very intuitive though. When you have your outfit equipped and showing, un-tick the box for your helm. It looks like you’re hiding your actual head piece but it will hide the hat of your outfit instead.

Dog.1472:

Sooo, if I purchased multiples of the same item with game gold or gems, am I SOL or is there something I can do?

For example, I purchased multiple sets of light tier 3 cultural armor. The cost of this armor is of course extremely high, but now I essentially wasted all that gold when I could have just used a significantly cheaper transmutation in the new system.

Most people will just say, you paid for what you got at the time. Prior to this update you had to pay for the ability to have T3 light cultural on several toons, and if you did, then you got the benefit of doing so at the time.

The same goes for crafting multiple legendaries of the same type (the difference being you still retain the stats and functionality), or acquiring the same Ascended trinkets on all your alts, or (god forbid) buying 2 Eternal Lights so you can dual wield them like a Harpy. The latter would have cost someone over 1000 gold that they could have saved in the new system. However, people that did this were able to afford to do so, and now, should they wish to do similar things they’ll be able to spend their money in different ways.

Cooba.8925:

My Mad King Thorns outfit dissapeared from my character :/ And frankly I was kinda expecting to have the cultural armor sets in the wardrobe since I have the Emperor title…

Did you talk with a Black Lion Armour trader? He should give you 5 Mad King Thorn outfits which upon use will unlock it as an outfit in your wardrobe (I’m not sure why we get 5 because it seems you only need to use it once).

Cultural armour unlocks just like all the other armour, but don’t expect to use norn skins on an asura. Do you still own the armour sets somewhere? If they weren’t soulbound yet you’ll need to right click and select unlock in order to bind them to your wardrobe.

xKonan.3689:

how can i use my skin on my wardrobe where it only says preview? i also used those 5 free transmutation stones and nothing happened… huhu

is the legendary sharing only or the skin working>? help!

Using the old transmutation stones and crystals unlocks Transmutation Charges which are in the wardrobe UI. When you buy Transmutation Charges, you have to use the item up in order for it to unlock on your account (which seems a bit clunky), so those 5 free ones you got are now available on your account in the wardrobe UI.

Legendary weapons are account bound now, so you can un-equip it from one character and equip it on another if you want the Ascended, stat swapping ability. Also, the skin is unlocked in your wardrobe so you can apply it to any other weapon of the same type for the cost of one transmutation charge.

Not sure what your first sentence means.

Specific Game Mode
PvE (this is where I spend 95% of my time)

Proposal Overview
This proposal suggests developing the interactions that the player has with their Pet in combat, in order to create opportunities for skillful and rewarding gameplay.

Goal of Proposal
The goal of this proposal is to create meaningful and rewarding interaction between the Ranger and the pet, so that rather than wishing for the ability to store the pet, a player is enabled to actively do more with a pet than without.The current state of the Ranger’s profession mechanic is such that for the majority of the time the player is required to manage a nuisance (the Pet) in order to prevent themselves from being inhibited when the Pet dies, leading to loss of damage, aggro control and utility through the pet’s skills etc. Each of the other professions (for the most part) has profession mechanics that feel impactful and can enable the player to do amazing things if utilised well. Heck I feel more attached to Net Turret than any of my Ranger’s pets, and only then because of its infamous antics. Usually at least one person cries out when Net Turret dies, but do you hear similar cries of despair when a pet dies?

Proposal Functionality
Firstly, as has been mentioned frequently in the CDI and prior, the Pet AI or compensation for it needs improvement. In order for the player to be able to make skilfull plays with their pet they need to be able to control them reliably.

Secondly, the F1-4 skills don’t include Guard/Avoid Combat or Stow/Activate Pet, which have to be clicked. I understand this is so that it remains in keeping with all the other professions by only using the first 4 F keys but I would like the option to take control with key binds.

Thirdly, I find that the majority of the Pets’ active abilities are underwhelming in terms of the impact they have. This is likely due to the fact that half the time they don’t even execute properly, which if they did would mean I’d be happier about them being a 4th utility skill. However, with their unreliability I’ve come to feel like they should almost be on the level of an Elite skill. The choice of which pet you take as a Ranger should be as defining as your Elite if they remain the primary defining feature of the class.

Finally, I think there’s an opportunity to make F3 a more useful ability than just an order for the pet to return to your position. For example, turn it into a skill with which you fire out a leash (or magical beam) at your pet and yank it back to your side. This would increase the speed at which the pet can be removed from danger and could be combined with making the pet evade whilst it is being pulled to you. The skill could then have a second active which allows you to toss your pet at your selected target, getting it back into combat immediately. Maybe the pet would just leap or Shadow Step if it seems a bit silly for you to be throwing your Bear around the battle, but how cool would that be!

Both parts of the skill could have traits associated with it:

• buff allies around the pet on pull
• buff allies around you on pull
• debuff enemies around pet on pull
• debuff enemies around you on pull

• buff allies around pet on toss
• buff allies around you on toss
• debuff enemies around pet on toss
• debuff enemies around you on toss

If you were able to combine all these traits this could be an example of what happens: When you fire out your leash, allies around your pet gain Protection and enemies are Weakened. When the pet arrives at your location nearby allies gain Swiftness and enemies are Blinded. When you throw your pet back out nearby allies gain Might and enemies are Crippled and when your pet lands allies around it gain Fury, and enemies are knocked down. Obviously this is just hypothetical, but suddenly there are a huge number of possibilities for high-skilled, active and reactive plays centred around the interaction between you and your pet.

Associated Risks
This proposal increases a Ranger’s dependence on the pet actually carrying out the actions that the player inputs, so it could exacerbate the current situation further.

There could potentially be a great deal of complexity involved in executing the Leash/Toss ability such that your pet actually goes where it should and doesn’t get stuck in terrain or glitch out.

Just want to check that this is actually the thread in which to post CDI feedback for the Ranger and Fractals etc or if each topic will be getting its own thread.

The initial post seemed more like an announcement for such a thread, but I haven’t seen any yet.

1. Thief
2. Ranger
3. Engineer

If immersion breaking or interrupting important game play needs to be avoided (which it probably should be), would one option be to put the poll/feedback mechanic in the character select screen? If you decide to try and get focused feedback, you could put up a poll and include a link to a specific and related thread on the forum if the player wants to give more detailed feedback, it’d also be easy to skip over and won’t annoy the player as much as an in game pop-up, but is more accessible than an in game NPC.

I can’t see polling ever being so critical that it has to occur during gameplay, but as mentioned there still should to be a way to be in contact those not frequenting the forums.

Considering the amount of interaction ArenaNet has always had with its fans pre and post launch I was taken aback that the feedback processes you’ve been discussing Chris weren’t already in place! On the one hand it speaks wonders of the team for doing so well this far, but also reveals why there is a cohort of dissatisfied players feeling they are being ignored.

I figure making the swapped accessory souldbound and only allowing non-soulbound items to be swapped would limit its use to those who get trash drop or screw up.

Right, the mutliples appear to be so that you can pick between Defensive and Offensive infusion slots as opposed to you having to buy different rings. That would be clearest if they were absolutely identical as opposed to having the difference in Utility slot.

The “Are you sure…” happens whenever you trade for Laurels, Dungeon Tokens and karma so that didn’t strike me as unusual in this situation, I expected that to happen so it doesn’t help warn you about it being unique.

The marking as Unique was just so unexpected that putting it next to all the notices about Soulbound and Account bound etc means it’s easily ignored.

It seems the only reason most people found out about “Unique” is because someone screwed up like me (this happened in my guild). I just didn’t happen to be around when it happened and there is no other way that it is broadcast to the player in a clear way, which is why I ended up repeating their mistake.

I just spent 35 Laurels buying a second Ascended ring only to find that I can’t use it, and given I bought it to replace a different Ascended ring which didn’t have the right stats, I’m now left with a soulbound ring I don’t want and another ring that I can’t use.

Trying to equip my Ascended ring was my first encounter with the fact that GW2 contains this mechanism. Even though it’s written on the first ring I got, it wasn’t something I was looking for as no other weapon works in this manner. As a result I didn’t realise until trying to equip the second one.

My suggestion would be to inform the player upon purchasing an Ascended Item that once souldbound they will not be able to use another of that specific kind.

Furthermore, the souldbound Ascended Gear you are carrying should be greyed out in the Purchase Menu to indicate that you already own one and perhaps even go as far as to prevent you from purchasing another one. Seeing as the currency required to buy ascended gear is Account wide this wouldn’t cause any problems.

Another option would be to implement an Ascended Gear swapper – who takes the extra ascended gear you don’t want and swaps it with gear you do want. That way you don’t end up tossing Ascended gear because it has no use to you and you can’t trade it. He’d also be able to swap those accidental purchases you might make if the first suggestion isn’t implementable. Naturally he would only be able to swap gear that wasn’t soulbound.

I stopped farming because the gold you can get in one hour there far exceeds the normal rate you can get farming any other location and I got worried about it being a ban-able offense.

Still no word from Anet though – I tweeted them too – and the longer it lasts the greater the temptation is…

Keeping condition removal on your bar is pretty important in general. While I agree that it’s frustrating, there are already tools at our disposal to deal with this problem, so I don’t think it requires changing.

I for one have condition and stun removal on all my toons.

DreadLord.3275:

Blinding powder with pistol equiped doesn’t work as intended. You don’t get the invisibility but only the debuff. I don’t get it. Annoying really as it got me killed many times in wvw. Sheesh.

This seems to be a general “bug” – not specific to the weapon you use. I’ve found what happens is, depending on the situation, after using a stealth skill (usually Blinding Powder, or Steal) you will auto attack before becoming stealthed and are left unstealthed with the Revealed debuff.

The only way I’ve found to control this is to stop auto-attacking or try and make sure I’m at the end of the auto-attack chain when I attempt to stealth but even this sometimes doesn’t stop my toon from attacking as I use the stealth skill.

Syn, plasmacutter no need to de-rail the thread. Now I think what plasmacutter is trying to explain is that being affected by Blind on say a Warrior is less of an impact because the skill is balanced around hitting the opponent once and then going on cooldown (oversimplification maybe, but let’s run with it).

A Phantasm is balanced around an initial burst (iZerk for e.g.), or longer sustained damage (iDuelist, iWarlock etc.), or the utility it offers through traits and your shatters. So missing a Phantasm has a much greater impact IMO than missing on most other skills. The “fail-on-Blind” was already happening from time to time prior to this patch, which frustrated me and when I explained to a friend they thought that it was off too.

Naturally there are ways to deal with this, i.e. L2P but I feel like a more effective implementation would be to have Blind affect the first attack of your summoned clone/phantasm. It still has the intended effect but allows you to benefit from the long-term effects of your phantasm. Alternatively, Blind could simply interrupt your Summon skills, putting them on a short cooldown (3-5s?).

Something Special I prepared in response to a Guild Wars 2 Guide advertisement posted just before launch.

Coehl and I made another Nightelf Raidpro video, if you haven’t seen the first one the link is here.

At this stage, with no response I’d rather hear from Anet that in future they won’t be changing the order of skills if the cooldowns are changed. Having been out for some time now changing it back is likely to infuriate those that have adjusted.

The cooldown changes I can get behind if retaliation was becoming an issue, but I don’t understand why the skill order has to be changed just to maintain an arbitrary rule which states that skills are ordered left to right from lowest to highest cooldown.

Over one month into the game people are accustomed and comfortable with the basic skill layout. A change in any skill’s cooldown isn’t going to confuse people with regards to which number on the keyboard they have to press in order to trigger it (if that was the reason for the arbitrary ordering system in the first place).

It’s ok to break the Rules if it makes things less complicated. Re-ordering weapon skills = more complicated than leaving weapon skills as they are.

We were discussing this on the “Relics of Orr: Podcast” and Coehl brought up that this might be considered as an exploit.

I hope our initial thoughts of this being an intentional “omission” to allow players to acquire armour and weapons from other Orders is correct, but would love to hear confirmation from Anet.

Jeffrey Vaughn.1793:

Update:

The 10/1 build should reset players who skipped forward back to the “Choose your order” step (which varies by race), though it’s a code-side change so I don’t know any details beyond that.

Character Name: Aethra Ageratos

I completed my personal story a few days ago and now I’ve been reset to the “The Sad Tale of the Ravenous (Level 26)”. Was this the intention of the fix? The only quest that I missed out on was the “Skritt-tastrophe” if I recall correctly, which in the end didn’t bother me.

In effect I now need to replay the personal story on this toon if I am interested in unlocking weapons or Armour from the whichever order I choose (I’d already bought a weapon and was eyeing up the armour). The upside is that I can choose a different Order seeing as I accidentallied the wrong one the first time but I’m not so keen on playing all the way through again on this toon (that’s what my alts are for right?).

Just hoping to hear a bit more about the situation and the options.

EDIT: This seems to cover my questions:

Takeko.8735:

So while it’s certainly not the resolution I (or anyone posting here) was hoping for, there is at least an official response: “sorry, deal with it.”

Just finished up recording episode 51 today. So keep an eye out over the next couple of days.

This week we had a Shongaqurant XD

Now I’m actually interested to see if the Transmutation Stone trick works for the armour as well, if so then I suppose that’s a “reasonable” work-around

I’m in favour of, upon completion of the personal story, opening up the other order’s armour vendors. This could perhaps be done through a “Pact Requisitions Officer” with the gear being higher level or more expensive if it comes from a different faction (money sink! eh? eh?). I’d probably be willing to pay close to the equivalent of T3 cultural armour to access the other Orders’ armours

My story is that I was questing with 2 friends and wasn’t paying close enough attention to realise we’d reached the quest where you pick the Order you wish to align to. They were both going Whispers and I wanted to go Priory but instinctively hit the “progress” button at the end of the Personal Story mission we were on, thereby forever locking myself into the Order of Whispers.

Now I would actually prefer to be aligned with the Vigil as I would really love to pick up some of the armour, which I’ve been previewing in the PvP Locker. PvP toons can mix and match the Order armours as much as they like, so why shouldn’t a PvE character?

It reminds me of the oppositional Factions in Guild Wars (Kurzick and Luxon) where a Luxon aligned player could easily acquire and wear Kurzick armour. I don’t understand why this is this different for 3 allied factions in GW2?

frOst.2198:

1) Dungeon tokens are now rewarded at the end of an explorable chain.
So what about all the work that goes into reaching the end? What happens if someone has to leave, or your group falls apart? You get nothing? Did you even think of things like this? I have to believe no thought at all goes into these design decisions.
—-

Just spent 3 hours in Crucible of Eternity taking the Front Door path in a balanced and very experienced group of Guildies (Mes, Thief, Eng, War, Gua). Got through all encounters without too much difficulty until the Champion Destroyer Crab. I won’t go into the details of what is currently wrong with this encounter but suffice to say after a good hour one of our party called it quits, and the rest followed.

I understand that farming routes are an issue but on this path it was a good 30 minutes before the first chest and the first chance at tokens under the old system.

I feel like, while rewarding the tokens in bulk upon completion prevents farmers (to a degree) and ensures you don’t accidentally miss any tokens on the way, it unduly punishes the vast majority of players who aren’t farming dungeons but haven’t quite got them down-pat yet.

The alternative reward of course is loot, I received one Green and one Gold (which I salvaged, striking out with 1 piece of mithril ore and no ectos). Not worth it. Had I not used Instant Repair Cannisters I would have done a full repair job twice ~ 22 silver in cost, and I died less frequently than others in my party. We even stripped to do the lasers, avoiding unnecessary damage there.

The other reward is that of self-satisfaction at achieving something, which was all fine and dandy until we got stuck and then realised that all our previous efforts were wasted if we couldn’t get past this encounter and progress onwards.

Antiriad.7160:

They are all worthless to create because they sell for like 1/10 of what the mats are worth.

99.9% of crafting in a nutshell ^^

None of the above suggestions actually make it any easier. They simply allow the same tasks to be completed across a variety of characters, thereby making the player’s gaming experience more varied. I’m very much for this when it comes to the dungeons and obby shards.

I think map completion should still be tied to one character, though I don’t really have a reason that counters the logic of my previous statement >_> <_< This was very much the same in Guild Wars, eventually if you were chasing the GWAMM title you would have to pick one toon on which to do all the Cartography and Vanquisher titles (exploration).

I don’t see exploration on only one toon as “dull” as repeating a dungeon 30 times. Many people seem to like having one character that gets 100%-max-level-all-achievements-epicness-uber-leetsauce and then have a bunch of alts that they’re not too fussed about beyond variation in play-style and what they can use them for to fuel their uber-leetsauce toon.

I disagree. It is the one time in the game where I actually have to think about what my group is doing and work together with them to survive. Dynamic Events, Hearts etc are all pretty much face-roll by the time you’re used to your character (this is where you play the way you want to) but dungeons are where tactics, traits, cross-profession combos, projectile blocking, and dodge rolling are actually going to make the difference between your entire group getting 2 shot and surviving.

What you described in the OP isn’t boring, it’s difficult. If difficult is boring then don’t play in dungeons.

Krisko.4093:

However, certain measures should be taken to stop people farming dungeon equipment on one character and giving it to their alts that have never seen the inside of a dungeon.

I don’t really see why this is a problem. The exotic armour skins are level 80 and if it takes 50 runs to acquire a set I don’t see why it should matter whether or not you did it on the character for which you want the armour.

It’s not like getting end game gear and slotting it on a level 1 toon (which you can already do anyway with Transmutation stones so long as the gear isn’t soulbound) and after all, in the end it’s cosmetic.

I’ve been discussing exactly this with my guildies and we’re pretty much all in agreement. If I want to play a dungeon 50 times I don’t want to play the same profession 50 times, granted trying different builds might help but given the specific requirements for each dungeon this is actually quite inflexible (there are 2 or 3 builds that will be most effective for your class).

If I want to get a full set of X dungeon on my Guardian I’d much prefer the challenge of learning how to do that dungeon on my Necro, Mesmer, Thief and Warrior, and do 10 runs on each of them rather than get bored after 10 runs on my Guardian.