Guild Wars 2

^ But it is the same information you are “supposed to” get right now, my whole argument is that Bars would be much more effective at relaying it.

It would simply amount to a huge quality-of-life improvement.

If you need a comparison, you currently have the option to turn off AoE rings right?
If you decide to do so, you’ll get the same information through visual effects and knowledge alone, but it isn’t nearly as intelligible as the actual display of the rings; nonetheless, some people might decide to disable them if they feel like they don’t need/like the extra help.

^ It is not “extra”, it’s just an alternative way to relay that information, which now comes in the form of Party UI, Health Bars on click, and animation/sound tells.

TyPin.9860:

ilcane.3081:

I’m just arguing that the results are unsatisfactory, whether it’s part of the “GW2 game play philosophy” or not.

These were your words. And I assumed this is the bases of your argument. I am sorry, if I mistook your words, but it very much sounds as if the instance of “unsatisfactory” is your actual point.

The “I’m just arguing that” part makes it sound pretty subjective to me, if I had meant to claim it was an absolute truth, i wouldn’t have needed to argue it in the first place.

TyPin.9860:

@ilcane:
Unsatisfactory to you, highly satisfactory to me. Don’t present your own likes and dislikes as objective "good"s and "bad"s.

When did I ever say otherwise?
Am I supposed to end each sentence with “IMHO” or something?

I assumed that goes without saying.

TyPin.9860:

ilcane.3081:

TyPin.9860:

No, please no health bars, please no skill icons and cast bars. I love that in GW2 I am not urged to look at growing and shrinking bars and actually can focus on the actual movement and actions of my opponent.

I don’t see why they couldn’t be optional, many modern competitive games offer this as a choice.

Before GW2 was released, ANet emphasized that they didn’t want players to look at bars and skill icons. If you make this option optional^^ then more and more people will likely use this option, because it will likely offer an advantage (especially the skill bar, less so the health bar). This would defeat the purpose of not having bars by default and it would work against the intended feeling of game play.

You can now argue, how much sense it makes, that there are no bars, but I guess it is core to the GW2 game play philosophy and any option breaking this philosophy would ultimately defeat the intended game play feel.

I’m well aware that the bars I’m talking about will never be implemented, I’ve been following the developments of this game long enough to know that ANet will stubbornly stick to their ideas no matter what, and will only compromise on details.

I’m just arguing that the results are unsatisfactory, whether it’s part of the “GW2 game play philosophy” or not.

EdgarMTanaka.7291:

ilcane.3081:

^ I still don’t see how the addition of optional bars would prevent you from playing that way.

At the same time, people who prefer another kind of information display can play their preferred way as well.

I also like that I don’t have to see a million bars and buffs flowing around…

Why I don’t like it to be optional iether is that players that use this will have the upper hand and this will force me to have this active anyway to be in par with other players who use it.

You are dissenting for the visual aspect, but you are actually agreeing with my main point.

After all, all the information that even a skill bar provides is “supposed to” to be available to you right now through animation/sound tells, but my point is that it isn’t nearly intelligible enough, so having bars would be preferable.
By saying that people who use the bars would get the upper hand, you acknowledge that it would indeed make things clearer.

So is having a small additional bar under the players’ names really too high a price to pay for much greater clarity?
I’m sure they could make it non-obtrusive and customizable with little effort.

^ I still don’t see how the addition of optional bars would prevent you from playing that way.

At the same time, people who prefer another kind of information display can play their preferred way as well.

TyPin.9860:

No, please no health bars, please no skill icons and cast bars. I love that in GW2 I am not urged to look at growing and shrinking bars and actually can focus on the actual movement and actions of my opponent.

I don’t see why they couldn’t be optional, many modern competitive games offer this as a choice.

kdaddy.5431:

ahhhhh no, as someone who played sports competitively into there early 20’s its all realistic.

Peoples health bars are on the top of the screen once you click on them. Not knowing a person skills is the right way to do things. If were playing basketball you dont know if i have a good jump shot or post game until we actually play. Its called the in game adjustments. At no point should you see another players skill resets, its there build and you have no right to see what there gonna do to you until they do it.

People on team speak helps but ultimately it comes down to winning the fights still. Too many times ive seen people lost straight 1 vs 1 and 2 vs 2 and blame them being team speak when really you just got out played.

This is the realist pvp you an get period

Leaving cast-bars aside for the moment, stuff like health levels and buffs/debuffs are information that is already available in this game, so permanently displaying it instead of forcing you to click on several targets or discern which of the names in the Party UI corresponds to your nearby allies would simply be a quality-of-life improvement, and a big one at that.

Each time I go back to GW2, I find myself baffled by the lack of basic features that I feel should be no-brainer components of a competitive game.

One such example are Bars, or the lack thereof; I’m referring to permanent health bars on top of each player, ally and enemy, as well as skill cast bars below them, and possibly a buffs/debuffs display.

I’m sure I don’t need to list all the reasons why they would be helpful in discerning just what the heck is going on during fights, such as knowing at a glance which skills my enemy/ally just used, or which enemy/ally I should be prioritizing with my offensive/supportive skills, and not to mention it would dramatically reduce the edge that communication gives to premade teams versus solo-ers.

Yes, I know there are the Party UI and animation/sound tells, but honestly as an average player in competitive games, even if I’ve played solely PvP since launch, in GW2 I am still unable to understand combat situations to the level I’d need to in order to play tactically, and am forced to go “by instinct” instead (i.e. lots of spamming), which gets boring quickly.

Does anyone else feel like this is a big shortcoming?

Shouts bug:

https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/support/bugs/6-24-Ranger-bug-new-Shouts-RuneOfTheSoldier

“We Heal As One” and “Strength Of The Pack”, now Shout skills, do not remove conditions when used with “Rune of the Soldier” equipped.

See picture.

Chaith.8256:

You can’t prove that it isn’t the community’s favourite Solo Queue map of all time!

Checkmate, GW2 players!

-Anet

Well played.

I’m surprised many people stray so far from the default, I found that if you go from WASD to QWES for movement, buttons 1-5 are easily within reach, and you can just fill the surrounding room with utility/prof skills, while leaving everything else as it is.

In my case:

Movement – Q W E S
Utilities – R A D F V
Profession skills – < Z X C
Rest – default

It would be easy enough to do what they did in LoL: when the match is ready, but before getting into it, all participants have a short time to click a Ready button.
The match only starts if everyone clicked it, otherwise it’s back to the queue for those who did click it, and the ones who didn’t are out.

In addition, just put a simple notifier that lets people know the Ready dialog has popped up even if they are alt-tabbed, like a blinking icon and a sound.

It’s baffling that such simple features haven’t been implemented in nearly two years.

Skyhammer was added as part of the Bazaar of the Four Winds release on July 9, 2013.

We are roughly 6 weeks away from the anniversary of the Skyhammer release.
Will this ‘thing’, with all its terrible anti-fun mechanics, have tortured solo queuers for a whole year?
Time will tell Probably.

It’s ironic that we used to have an ankward map-of-the-week system at the beginning, then our (justified) requests led to a random rotation.
If we hadn’t asked for such a basic feature, we could have simply skipped the Skyhammer weeks and enjoyed the maps where you can actually play PvP during the other ones.

Heh, who would have thought?

mtpelion.4562:

ilcane.3081:

Oh sorry, I associated it with the hacking attempt.

Well, I see I’m just one of many right now, so I’ll just add that I had received fake password-change emails in the past few days, and always deleted them of course (and changed my pwd), yet someone actually managed to change it anyway.

I found no signs of activity on my actual account though.

Change your email password ASAP. Make it something that you don’t use for ANY other site.

Yea, I realized my email was most likely the issue here, so I did just that.

Thanks for the advice anyway.

Oh sorry, I associated it with the hacking attempt.

Well, I see I’m just one of many right now, so I’ll just add that I had received fake password-change emails in the past few days, and always deleted them of course (and changed my pwd), yet someone actually managed to change it anyway.

I found no signs of activity on my actual account though.

Someone is currently breaking into my account.
This is the latest logged-in one:

TX , US (64.25.32.69) 10 minutes ago

I found my password changed today, and two similar IPs logged into my account.
So i changed it again as well as my e-mail password.

Then 10 minutes later, there is another such IP logged in.

I have received no e-mail request to authorize the login attempt as I usually do when I login myself, so something is clearly not working in that field.

Sadly, we both know the real reason why the thread was removed.

Not even 10k negative votes will change the devs’ minds, it’s become very clear that it isn’t a matter of numbers or legitimate arguments, there simply is something else preventing them from giving players what they want.

Whether that something is pride, stubbornness, fear, or misplaced priorities, it’s anyone’s guess.

Triton.8294:

For me, Skyhammer is the only reason to play SoloQ.

^ That is a fair counter-point, to an extent.

But if there is such a thing as a sweet spot where the game is neither too slow, nor too mindlessly spammy, I feel that Guild Wars 2 is leaning way more towards the latter, which is as much of a problem as a “stare-contest”.

Also, I’m not just refering to short Cooldowns when I say “too much of everything”: they could keep the same active Tempo to the gameplay and still tone down the effects of most skills (damage, quantity and duration of conditions/boons/cc/cleanses…) to reduce chaos and redundancy, and increase readability.

Or they could do a bit of both, nerf spammable skills (but keep them spammable) and increase CDs on the more impactful ones; this way you’d always have something relevant to do, but you’ll still have to be mindful of your and your opponents’ “big guns”.

(Premise: I’ve been playing every profession about equally for a long time, strictly on PvP Tournaments; I’m definitely not a Great player, but I have a lot of experience and I play non-meta builds on all characters fairly succesfully)

If I had to pinpoint the biggest issue I have with Gw2 PvP, I’d say it’s “Too much of Everything”.

There is too much damage/damage avoidance/healing/crowd controlling/stun-breaking/boon application/condition application/condition cleansing/gap closing/mobility available to players at any given time, on too short CDs.
I’ll be honest, for the most part this is all remarkably balanced (yes, I said it), because you can counter their “too much” with your own “too much”.

But this makes for an extremely chaotic and spammy experience, where careful planning is often unrewarded compared to thoughtless skill rotation.

Another effect is that people favor defensive mechanics and tanky builds because nothing that is active is reliable: you never know for sure if your CC or damage will land or be avoided/broken/cleansed in one of countless ways that are basically untrackable, so it is always best to focus on what works all the time.
Long story short, skills/traits that affect yourself beat skills/traits that affect the opponents, for the average player at least.

My advice would be to simply “Reduce Everything”.

If people didn’t have a cleanse/gap closer/dodge available at all times, that Cripple you landed on them would actually be a reliable defense.
At the same time, if people didn’t have a hard or soft CC available at all times, you wouldn’t need so much cleansing/stun-breaking.
The same of course applies to damaging conditions vs. cleansing, or simply to damage vs. healing.

You would actually have to be mindful about the much scarcer impactful skills you and your opponents use and when, because they won’t be available again for a relevant amount of time.
Both the reward for success and the punishment for failure would be greater.

Does anyone else feel the same way?

mini.6018:

I see a few italians have problems here .I’m from Italy too and today i got hit.Game is unplayable and i mean 5 sec + lagspikes plus dcs.Could a a problem for our region ? Did you guys made any changes lately?

Uhm, I don’t see enough italians in this thread to make me think of a pattern.

Still, which is your ISP? Mine is Alice.

ip: 206.127.159.254

map: Temple of the Silent Storm + Heart of the Mists

time: 20.30+ CET (01/06/2014)

notes: delays in skill activation and positioning updates

1. Skyhammer removed from Solo Queue
2. New non-conquest maps
3. Visible enemy Cast Bars
4. In-match character selection screen
5. Conditions/Boons reworked into a less chaotic system

So you’re the kitten Necro who feared me inside the hole from behind, while I was letting your downed Mesmer bleed out.

What a fail, I should’ve just stomped him, almost cost my team the match; we got lucky in the end.

Will we ever be able to display enemy cast bars?
Animations can be tricky to read.

What about enemy Endurance bars?

• About in-match Character Change

Changing character before a tPvP match starts is a Feature that often helps prevent unbalanced matches, but the way it works now (logout -> relog) is ankward and can take a much longer time for people with slower PCs; for instance, it takes me 45 seconds on my average computer, meaning I won’t always have the chance to see every player’s Profession beforehand.

Are there plans to implement some kind of template (character selection screen?) to smooth things up?
I think the ability to see which Professions your mates can use would help pre-match strategizing a lot in Solo Queue, given the very short time available.

ahuba.6430:

first world problems lol

This has got to be the quintessential first world comment.

^ That is unrelated, all sPvP skins should obviously be obtainable through sPvP alone.

exinax.2178:

ilcane.3081:

exinax.2178:

ilcane.3081:

I really can’t understand the logic behind the Mystery Coffer contents.

Since Crafting (and originally Rank) is going to disappear, this thing was supposed to supply us with all the Weapons and Armors that aren’t buyable separately (i.e. Dungeon and Cultural).
But, instead of dropping random unattainable equipment from any rank as they were supposed to, they seem to only drop stuff not higher than R40, except a handful of rare Weapon types (such as Frozen, Bramble, Hawk), making it nearly impossible to get all the R50+ Weapons and Armors that aren’t sold separately.

As of right now, the only way to get, say, Rank 60 Weapons, is to buy a bunch of R60 Dungeon Armors and salvage them, until you’ve got enough Tokens to craft what you want; I can’t imagine this ankward situation to be intentional, since Crafting is soon to disappear anyway.

Was there an oversight about this?

It is a possibility for people below the rank. Players who already reached the rank can still buy their chests and get the stuff

But the old Rank vendors are going to be removed soon, most people won’t be able to reach Rank 60+ before then.
The new vendor was supposed to provide all those skins that wouldn’t have been realistically achievable by most players, hence the Dungeon and Cultural tabs.

But how comes all the less prestigeous Armors are actually much harder to obtain?
It doesn’t make much sense.

Remember that this vendor will also be removed when glory gets removed.
Anyway I think if it would be easy to get r50+ skins with the mystery coffers, we had the same kitten as with tournament chests. After a short time every skin is unlocked and you have no reason to get chests anymore.
I also think that mystery coffers are the reason why Magic Find is now counting for spvp as well.

Magic Find drops are supposed to give you a reason to Salvage even when you have nothing to craft; it currently has no use in sPvP, but it will in the future.

What baffles me is that they made the “best” Armors easily available to anyone who gets enough Glory+Gold, but they introduced no realistic way to get the rest.
So now I can easily get Rank 80 Nightmare Set if I play enough, but it would cost me much more to make Rank 50 Champion Set (by salvaging other Dungeon sets), unless I reach that Rank in time?

How is this a reasonable system?

exinax.2178:

ilcane.3081:

I really can’t understand the logic behind the Mystery Coffer contents.

Since Crafting (and originally Rank) is going to disappear, this thing was supposed to supply us with all the Weapons and Armors that aren’t buyable separately (i.e. Dungeon and Cultural).
But, instead of dropping random unattainable equipment from any rank as they were supposed to, they seem to only drop stuff not higher than R40, except a handful of rare Weapon types (such as Frozen, Bramble, Hawk), making it nearly impossible to get all the R50+ Weapons and Armors that aren’t sold separately.

As of right now, the only way to get, say, Rank 60 Weapons, is to buy a bunch of R60 Dungeon Armors and salvage them, until you’ve got enough Tokens to craft what you want; I can’t imagine this ankward situation to be intentional, since Crafting is soon to disappear anyway.

Was there an oversight about this?

It is a possibility for people below the rank. Players who already reached the rank can still buy their chests and get the stuff

But the old Rank vendors are going to be removed soon, most people won’t be able to reach Rank 60+ before then.
The new vendor was supposed to provide all those skins that wouldn’t have been realistically achievable by most players, hence the Dungeon and Cultural tabs.

But how comes all the less prestigeous Armors are actually much harder to obtain?
It doesn’t make much sense.

I really can’t understand the logic behind the Mystery Coffer contents.

Since Crafting (and originally Rank) is going to disappear, this thing was supposed to supply us with all the Weapons and Armors that aren’t buyable separately (i.e. Dungeon and Cultural).
But, instead of dropping random unattainable equipment from any rank as they were supposed to, they seem to only drop stuff not higher than R40, except a handful of rare Weapon types (such as Frozen, Bramble, Hawk), making it nearly impossible to get all the R50+ Weapons and Armors that aren’t sold separately.

As of right now, the only way to get, say, Rank 60 Weapons, is to buy a bunch of R60 Dungeon Armors and salvage them, until you’ve got enough Tokens to craft what you want; I can’t imagine this ankward situation to be intentional, since Crafting is soon to disappear anyway.

Was there an oversight about this?

I opened over 50 of these, and only got stuff I already have, and I’m rank 40.

Guess there’s no way to easily get any mid-rank stuff, you either open a billion coffers and get lucky, or buy Dungeon armors and salvage them for a chance of mid-rank Tokens.

It’s actually much easier to unlock Cultural armor than common mid-rank armor. -_-

This actually sounds reasonable.

After all, starting tomorrow, all you get with Rank is a finisher, a 5 second emote thinghy, can’t see how this could hurt the game in any way.

And this is coming from a Tourney-only player who uses Rabbit finisher, because of how meaningless my Tiger would look in front of all the former Hotjoin farmers.

Remove from Solo Queue and leave it in Hotjoin = Everybody Wins.

It’s already not on the Team Queue pool, why must Solo Queue be treated differently?

• Concerning Jonnis’ replies

What you say is, well, a fact: giving neutral Healing Skills specific Skill Types will make them stronger and more desirable for those who pick certain trait lines, and they will need to be balanced according to such traits.

But that is the whole point of the operation after all, it is exactly how the current type-specific Healing Skills work.
If you think about it, that’s also how Utility Skills work: if you put several traits to strengthen a certain Skill Type, you’ll be inclined to pick all Utility Skills of that type to maximize the effects, but that is not always the best choice, as those skills may lack some important functions that you need.
You have to decide whether you want to compensate with other choices, or pick different Skills.

Currently, I think the crux of the issue is that, while some professions can easily take advantage of type-specific Heals/Elites, others don’t have the same possibilities, and it all looks very disorganic; to even things out, they should either make all Heals/Elites neutral, which would be boring in my opinion, or make all (or at least an equal number) of them type-specific for every profession.

Agreed, for both Healing and Elite Skills.

Every profession should have equal possibilities of synergizing their Trait choices with their Skill choices.

I found the Elegant one twice in Tournament Win Chests during the last few weeks, so I guess they’re rare drops from them now.

It can’t be salvaged by the way, so don’t worry about doing it by mistake.

Krafty.9758:

Can’t blame em though. Ignoring the topic is a lot easier than actually answering.

Actually, if they did clearly answer once and for all, I think we wouldn’t have so many anti-Skyhammer topics popping up all the time.

Still waiting…

It’s no secret that a lot of people would like to see this map removed from the Solo Queue pool, just like it isn’t among the Team Queue maps.

Though I still haven’t seen a Red response in any of those countless topics, so I’m asking them directly: what are your plans to solve this issue?

The “bad” thing about Skyhammer is how invasive its gimmicks are to PvP gameplay; it’s fine to have a unique map with unique features, but an insta-kill mechanic and a global unavoidable cannon blast are so drastic they turn the play style into something entirely different.
When I join a tPvP match, I expect to play PvP, not the Knockback minigame.

But those “issues” are also the defining traits of Skyhammer, removing or heavily nerfing them would also make the map lose its identity, which is a shame for a perfectly fine Hotjoin map that you can Choose to play, much like Raid on the Capricorn; it simply has no place in Tournaments.

My advice for the Devs would be to not go out of their way to change Skyhammer completely for fitting the competitive PvP gameplay, because it is fundamentally flawed in that regard; but, as a unique map that has its fair share of fans, I’d keep its identity intact as a peculiar Hotjoin minigame and simply remove it from Solo Queue Tourneys.

This way, both supporters and haters should be satisfied.

For those who don’t know, the damage caused by the Acidic Elixirs trait is applied after the stealth buff from Toss Elixir S, thus removing stealth immediately and causing Revealed.

As far as I know this has been the case for a very long time, is it actually intended to work in this ankward way?
The wiki lists it as a bug (http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Acidic_Elixirs), but it hasn’t been fixed for so long, I’m wondering if it really is considered as such.

Note that, in the past, there used to be 2 Encrusted versions of each weapon, both with the Orrian skin.
That bug has been fixed, and now Orrian weapons and Encrusted weapons have different names and skins, but it appears there is currently no recipe that will result in an Encrusted weapon.

The wiki ( http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/PvP_Encrusted_weapon ) lists them as a crit from Paid Tournament+Sliver combination, but that’s actually outdated, because of what I mentioned above: that crit results in an Orrian weapon, which was called Encrusted in the past.
None of the other recipe lists I’ve found includes them among higher ranked crafts.

So, has anyone been able to acquire any current Encrusted weapon (check your closet)? If so, how?

I can confirm, and this only applies to the Controls; all keys seem to work fine in Chat.

This may be old news, so apologies in advance, but there is no Trident Token among the Tokens sold by Glory vendors in the Mists; it was supposed to be between the Torch Token and the Warhorn Token (at least this applies to the Rank1 and Rank10 ones, which I’m able to check).

This problem has been going on for several weeks now, though I guess not many care about forging PvP Tridents.