Guild Wars 2

I think you are confusing the problem. Free world transfers are not the problem here and people still want/need them to be able to be on the same server as their friends.

I’m not you, so I can’t speak for you, but from what I can gather your problem is people being able to hop into WvW -right- after a free transfer. Or, more simply, people being able to use resources. So, you’d probably be more okay with a change such that:

“After a server transfer, you cannot collect or use resources in WvW until three days have passed”

Or something like that. It would still allow people who legitimately want/need to transfer to play with guildmates and friends to participate in WvW (albiet with a short, temporary restriction) without allowing the current abuse.

I don’t think commanders should be limited by guilds or influence at all. Obviously, it being linked to cash is a problem, but things would be too limited if we started saying that commanders need to be in/come from bigger guilds.

Actually, I’d put ‘big wvw guilds being able to claim things’ up there with commanders in terms of problematic design decisions. Since once guilds begin to be able to say ‘this is -my- fort’ they attempt to control chat to convince everybody else to hold it at the cost of all else. Especially if it’s a keep. Even if the keep could be easily defended with the numbers it has, you’ll get big guild x spamming chat with defend orders even when other things are under attack and need defense just as much if not moreso. Innocent new-arrivals or yet unlearned players rush to the guild’s spam and…yeah, just as bad as the “I got money and now you must obey me!” crowd.

So, what do I actually suggest? Well, -keep- the 100g cost but make the book only purchasable after achieving a few different WvW titles. I can understand that ANet probably wanted commanders up fast so they could actually work on aspects of squads and such, but as things go on it is in everybody’s best interests that commanders are competent.

EDIT: Actually, why should squad-creation be limited to commander title at all? That would have been even better than -ever- allowing know-nothing or know-little commanders. Maybe I’m missing something, but do the current commanders even make squads?

1) Bring dual images or something on your utility bar to break the stun(blink works as well but in this instance, for vs. this one class, dual images is better).
2) Use any clones you have to, as Tigger said, confuse them (which is why dual images is arguably better here against the scrub thieves who only know pistol whip and such).
3) Take advantage of things like your f4 for distortion, the sword’s blurred frenzy, dual sword’s block, sword + pistol’s magic bullet etc. while trying to keep confuse up.
4) You’ll have made the thief kill itself, essentially, while not allowing it to damage you much.

There are probably other strategies for other weapons, but against the pistol whip scrubs just do what Tigger said. All I’ve written above is what he said + some extra info. Now, what can they do to counter this in turn?

Well, run away. They can exit their combo, switch to a ranged weapon and proceed to outrun you as they flee to get a better position. You’ll have to either give up on them or use some other strategy, being happy that you’ve at least stopped them from scrubbing you.

The moral of the story here is that, at the moment, you probably are better off not hoping for a random group to see the merit in your class/build. If you explain it to them and they agree, then good on them and on you, since you’ve found a good random group. If not, you’ve suffered no great loss from them booting you.

I imagine this -might- change as more people have gone through the game with more classes. Even if the ‘group leader’ wants to auto-boot you or something after seeing your class, the chances will be higher that somebody in there will know what a mesmer can do. But in either case, mesmers are probably the biggest assets for simply not dying. A good guardian can do a lot for that too, but in this game, at least currently, I don’t think it’s too much to say ‘not getting hit at all works a lot better than offsetting damage -from- getting hit’. Mesmer just has so many ways to not get hit, which means you should almost always be there to rez your allies if they take a 1HKO to the face.

If you want pure, from the mesmer itself DPS then what you want is a mantra-build. That is, charge up your mantras, take the trait that increases your attack power for every charged mantra and then go to town with your auto-attack only using the other weapon skills to not die.

The damage/survivability on dual swords is nice and greatsword is wonderful too. Just uh…don’t do this in dungeons and you probably don’t really want to do this when playing with other people around to help you kill things since it kind of offers nothing -but- damage in terms of support.

Anyway, the moral of the story is that for most classes you can do most things so long as you trait it right.

The beautiful thing about this game is that you aren’t paying a subscription. Most of the content I want to play on my higher leveled characters is bugged? Well, I can either play lower level characters and work on bringing them up or play another game or not play any games at all. It’s beautiful. ANet doesn’t lose any money by me not playing, I’m not wasting money by not playing…not wasting time playing something that’s broken.

I’m not really sure what some of you people want. Do you want ANet to reveal something about their internal code repository that explains why they aren’t able to rollback just the DR system? Or the nature of the DR system itself (hint: it’s probably not in just one thing they branched off…given the suspected nature of it, it should be more work than it’s worth to rollback)? Do you want them to tell you the exact time it takes for the DR to kick in (when it’s working) rather than a very broad less than 30 minutes? Because, you know, 29 minutes is less than thirty minutes, as is 28 minutes as is […] 1 minute. If I had to guess, they have a pretty fair/good idea of how long each branch should take. Do you think their goal is to inconvenience you? Make you mad?

No, in fact, that goal has already been stated as ‘stemming unfairness until we can eliminate the (current) possibilities of it’. Is it a band-aid? Yes. Is it designed to hurt the average player? No. Do they -want- it to hurt even the fringe player? No, not that they’ve said. They just can’t give you the exact times and probably couldn’t even say, if somebody posted a 20 minute run for a certain branch, that that’s legit and they wouldn’t kick on DR. Why? Because then the exploiters know they can just tune that branch back to <20 minutes rather than the <30 they are now forced to do (obviously they can still self-experiment that <30 time down themselves if they’re willing, and ANet should know this, but forcing them to find the sweet spot for -every- branch from <30 is purposefully harsher than <20).

Read the tooltip for the shatter skills again. To use them effectively (efficiently?) you probably want to, whenever possible, shatter the fewest things possible. And as for keeping phantasms up? Well, you can actually go two ways. You can shatter ‘em like anything else and time it so you only do so when you can cast them again or you can pile them on and, this is the KEY thing here, shatter them only when it looks like you can either put them up again or they’re getting low on health and will die anyway. Either way, you -are- using your shatters…the only difference is whether or not you consider shattering a priority or a reactive, last ditch thing.

Both styles of play can be traited. Which, I’ll admit, is problematic and probably the mesmer’s biggest weakness: each different style of play really requires you to bite the bullet and -pay- to redo your trait lines. Probably true of all classes though and just a complaint in general since I really don’t like having to -pay- to mess with traits (not fun…ever).

As for all of your individual suggestions? Most would break balance horribly and some can be got from traits (once they work and aren’t bugged).

I think clones are fine, really. About all I could ask for is -slightly- better AI so they can avoid AoE. And even then, I don’t know how seriously I’m asking for that since it isn’t strictly -necessary-. Already, clones serve there purpose(s).

All I’m reading is…you want there to not be clones at all? Or you want them to be learning AIs that copy your normal behaviour? The second would be cool, I guess, if not broken. But, well, yeah, it would be broken (bad design lol) so you probably just don’t want clones but instead want more phantasms or other skills to replace them.

But, I don’t see much behind that either. You complain about mirror images, for example, but the skill still has a -very- good use in terms of breaking out of anything locking you up. Plus, you get two more clones out of it. Good deal? Yeah, good deal since those two clones will give you a few seconds -and- cause a condition, damage or give you distortion eventually. If you see a clone skill that is in no way a good deal, point it out since that -would- be bad design.

I thought I remember reading that this was in the works/planned for launch, but maybe not. Either way, I think it would be nice to be able to point the client to a music folder and tell it when it can play certain tracks from it. Maybe even make different playlists.

At the moment I’m really liking what’s already in-game but there are also times when I want to listen to my own music while I play and having that feature already in the client would be way more efficient. Right now playing my own music means either using an external setup or lowering the in-game settings to run a music player at the same time as the client.

Also wish, just for the in-game music, I could edit track frequency a bit. Some of the quieter, slower pieces are great for setting a mood but without headphones on they’re just too quiet (for my setup) and I don’t always want to wear headphones while I play.

I’ve noticed that if you apply a rune to an un-soulbound piece of armour the in-game info displays it as soulbound and you cannot sell it on the TP, etc. But, when you go to equip it the game acts as if it -isn’t- soulbound and asks you if you want to soulbind it.

You just have to go on pastebin to see that email→password associations are circulating, sometimes even with no money involved (twitter, facebook, etc.).

In general I’ve found that relying on phantasm-based builds isn’t really going to do much for the entire wvw effort. The stuff already slotted onto your weapons is fine to use obviously (especially berserker for putting small dents in siege you wouldn’t reach otherwise every now and again), but you don’t really need to buff it up any with traits since it really shouldn’t be the crux of your build.

Making your stealth last longer, improving your clone (normal clone) health, and reducing recharge on your glamour are effective for, in my opinion, some of the coolest things you can do as a mesmer in wvw. But, you wouldn’t go wrong with trying to max out your buff duration, the number of buffs on you at once and use that signet to give them to everybody around you. Can be a -very- effective AoE buffer that way, though the trade-offs of such a thing are arguably not so great in more general cases where you won’t always be around the huge zerg to make it most effective. But if being in huge zergs is your thing might be fun.

As somebody has been mentioning, if you just want to cause a ton of damage using the trait that increases power for each mantra you have on the ready, that’s viable enough too. Using a greatsword with that is likely your best bet for all of the AoE you’d have. And, you’d still fair better damage-wise than your current illusion damage+ build, I’d think, given how fast phantasms go down.

EDIT: I probably should have asked whether you meant for PvE, PvP or both. A lot of what I said applies to both, though it was written more with PvE in mind. Mesmer PvP tends to exist more in the utilities than PvE, in my opinion, to the extent that you could look up all of their utilities and instantly see if it’s for you or not.

I think it has quite a bit more survivability than ele, though I use Greatsword and Dual Swords mainly. Between the Dual Sword set, your CC breaking passives, clones, defensive phantasms and pretty ace downed state you’re really survivable and shouldn’t be getting hit too much.

As for damage? You can do a lot of AoE damage with greatsword, staff and your clones but it’s definitely a slower setup than most, so for big events where everybody is killing everything you might not get much in fast enough. Though, with the changes to greatsword you can at least hit clusters with your ‘3’.

I’d say they are definitely closer to necro than ele all around, with a few differences here and there. With necro, you’re survivable due to having an interplay between different health pools and some life drain, but with mesmer you’re survivable because you have so many ways to not get hit at all. You stack conditions, but not the same ones as necro tends to and not nearly as high. In return, your main condition is likely to be confusion which is pretty nice for harder fights (it causes the target to receive damage upon skill use). Single target damage isn’t as high as ele all around (if we were to compare all mesmer builds to all ele builds I’d imagine ele would generally have more pure damage), but you should have less trouble lasting long enough on your own to dish what damage you can out. Haven’t played necro too much, but I think mesmer does do more bursty damage even if the condition damage won’t be as constant. I like to think of mesmer as necro/thief hybrid in some ways.

Yeah, I’ve had this happen a lot. It’s one of the many unintended side effects of clones, one other off the top of my head being teammates yelling at you for such and such while it’s your clone that’s up and about while you’re downed in some corner. Though, from randoms, it’s like verbal abuse bait.

I’ve been able to beat all of the personal story missions on my mesmer, save for the last dungeon one which I haven’t touched yet (waiting on the fix to the rewards), horrible bugs aside, but some of them definitely cost me quite a bit in repairs. Most of the time though, it wasn’t due to a specific step’s situation. Rather, there are three main re-occuring AI and enemy behavior problems/bugs (that people have already brought up here, but might as well bring it up again):
1) Risen Abominations max out 25 frenzy if you die and retry during the mission – The time between you dying and re spawning somehow allows Abominations to get to 25 frenzy (or is it fury? can never remember) and it pretty much doesn’t go down. This isn’t every time, but if the timing of your death was during a buffing period for the abomination, it’ll happen and you’ll return to find your entire NPC party dead and only one way of victory: dodging -everything-.
2) Enemies Focus on Player Characters – Perhaps this is due to the difference in damage you can inflict versus what the NPCs inflict or maybe it’s because in certain steps the NPCs are lax in entering attack mode at all and thus never aggro any mob, but regardless you learn early on that AoE during story missions is a very big ‘no’ in most cases. KITE TO WIN or STEALTH TO WIN became my mantras. I understand why you want specific steps, but this really is true for all of them, suggesting -every- step needs to be slowly looked at. Either that, or you need to edit NPC damage globally since this is also true for Dynamic Events (really makes some annoying when nobody else is around and they need to be completed to make the area sane). Oh…except some charr for some reason. I’ve noticed they fare a bit better as NPC allies. Or maybe they were just warriors/guardians.
3)NPCs Die Too Quickly – This actually matters more at the lower levels when you probably don’t have a full skillset to kite and stealth or somehow eek out a victory against the odds, but I’ve found that most of the NPCs die way too quickly even when the majority of the attacks are on you. Why? Well…they don’t even have GW1-level AI! Anything with AoE will wipe them as they don’t get out of the way of AoE. I can understand why you haven’t given this behaviour to most mobs yet (it would be too hard for people still learning the game), but the NPCs desperately need it to some extent. Or some skill buffs to offset it or something…but moral of the story is that their AI isn’t adequate, to the point where you likely are better off just waiting for your guild mates on each step.

I’ve had fun regardless, even considering the kiting and stealth-ing to win, but I can really understand why most people don’t want to do that.

Think of ANet like the government…they can do all sorts of unexpected things to the economy, acting as the hardest factor to predict.

If I had to guess though, they’re going to turn all of the “common sense” speculation on its head and introduce more crafting/mystic forge recipes to make even the lower tier mats valued once a large mass of the playerbase hits 80. Or they’ll do what they did for wood already and inflate the recipe needs to match the inflation of material. Or, maybe they’ll keep crafting and other requirements the same, buy up a lot of the copper already in the market with their own accounts (or just remove it) and decrease nodes and respawn rates.

The moral of the story? The government (ANet) can/could do many things at any point in time to completely change the state of things, to the point where it’s more or less in your best interest to play the market as it currently is rather than look forward to a future that likely won’t ever be since they have -more- power than any actual government.

The one that gets me is the background conversations near the strip in Divinity’s Reach. It’s a bunch of people laughing on a near-infinite loop and one of the guys has this really annoying laugh.

Also, the crafting people like everybody has been saying. Main problem is it’s the same quote. And does one say ‘for great justice’? Or is that just random warriors being annoying around crafting stations because that -really- bugs me.

Zerging is a horrible strategy in that you never -need- that many people to take anything. Want to beat the slow moving massive zerg that’s capping all your points one after the other?

Split your own zerg into portions of 10-20 and take multiple points at once with actual strategy. If the enemy party is still doing something as silly as one massive zerg, you’ll easily win since they’re obviously not making the stuff they cap from you defensible before moving on. Remember, it’s not 24 hour matches anymore! The team to win is the team to ensure -each point- can last the week.

Only issue with the enemy doing a massive zerg? Some members of your own server will get somewhat butthurt since -their castle- or -their camp- got overwhelmed. Oh well. If you want to keep something, be prepared to rally the people and gold for siege and upgrades necessary to keep it.

EDIT: To add to this, I should explain why massive zergs are bad. Simply put, individual players can’t do much and there is a finite amount of resources. So even a zerg willing to throw out siege at every point (which you should throw out siege to take keeps) is only crippling their server in the long run by using resources on points that they’ll just lose again.

This actually applies to karma, experience and gold rewards for DEs too. In my experience, it also has applied to re-entering personal story events or trying to farm off the ones that have a ton of respawn. The respawns stop dropping loot fairly quickly and if you re-enter enough it seems to kill your drop rate on the stuff you’d killed on the last try.

I don’t think it’s a time trigger though as much as a ‘kill’ trigger. You get some people saying 20 minutes and others citing hours, etc. but in my experience any difference in time before it seems to kick in has come down to how fast I’m killing and how fast things are respawning. Respawning being the key word here, since it only kicks in on -respawns-, the personal story mobs and DE mobs obviously falling under this category if you are repeating the same one. If I had to guess, respawn drops regenerate on the same table as crafting nodes.

The windfall? If you want to farm, don’t farm on respawns. Move on to new areas.

I don’t see much PvE use for mass invisibility, but it’s kind of neat in the pvp modes even if you use veil too. I imagine a potential exploit would be a large mob of mesmers chaining the two together. I wouldn’t want to fight that. Not quite the “8 paragons on a team lol” of GW1 before the huge nerfs, but still seems bad.

I think that mesmer is fine for everything other than out of combat movement speed and only because you -need- to have a focus to keep up. It’s kind of limiting for things like WvW or sPvP where I don’t really want to be messing around with menus to not have to have a focus on swap for combat, since I only wanted it for out of combat movement speed boosters.

Still, I don’t really think it should be ‘fixed’ with another signet the way you want. Mesmer gets a ton of things other classes don’t have and if we start playing ‘but I want it for this class too’ mesmer would end up the worst in the long run. As people have said, mesmer gets the edge on stealth, -instant movement- for entire parties and confusion.

If anything, let the illusionary celerity trait or whatever give an out of combat movement speed buff.

My biggest complaint about the risen is the way they hivemind. From a lore perspective, it totally makes sense that they’re spread out in a grid pattern and swarm you (they’re protecting the heart of their territory and don’t really -need- to move), but given the respawn rate together with the hivemind swarm and relentless aggro it isn’t very fun.

Maybe if more of the risen had more varied movesets it’d be more intense/different each time, but at the moment every fight is get swarmed → kite and kill. Most of them don’t really have -that move- I need to dodge or anything or do anything too different. There is that annoying anchor thing, but I usually get hit with that outside of my LOS so no chance to dodge.

As a quick gauging question, have the people who’ve been complaining played GW1? I saw somebody mention that you -had- to have certain builds for the GW1 elite areas, but that was in reference to PUGs (where, yeah, you better be able to sell your build and the average person only -knew- this or that common pvx build). The dungeons here? Designed to be as hard as the entirely optional elite GW1 content which means you have several choices for completing it (and the average player isn’t expected to have completed it…since there’s so much other stuff to do if it isn’t your thing):

1) use a cookie-cutter build and join a PUG, but only if your class can fit into such a build
2) join up with friends or guild mates to complete it, but since none of you really want to put in much effort, copy the cookie-cutter builds you’d use with a PUG
3) join up with friends or guild mates to complete it, failing and failing as you learn the dungeon and put together a somewhat unique party build that allows for completion
4) somehow find a PUG willing to do the same as option (3), which isn’t at all likely and probably why you have ANet saying the dungeons aren’t designed for PUG play. This was true of GW1, where PUG play meant doing option (1) most of the time.

From what I can tell, most of the ‘this is too hard’ complaints are coming from people who want the dungeon rewards without the dungeon effort. The way these things are designed, you are -supposed- to be bashing your head against the wall and feeling that everything is so cheap up until the moment your party puts together a build to tackle it. Each failure improves your party build (or should improve your party build) little by little until you finally get things right. Or you just copy/paste builds off the internet and cookie-cutter yourselves into them…but hey, you can’t really -complain- about doing something so boring/conforming when it’s your decision to do so in the first place.

As for the graveyard zerg, why not do what GW1 hardmode did and allow for a certain number of failures each? Or a collective number like monster hunter? Would mean implementing an explorable dungeon only counter to mimic the GW1 death penalty boot setup.

Oh, so it’s always a temple of grenth…not sure that it affects anything noticeable then. There are a few choices like that where if they affect anything it’s only a few lines of dialogue here or there rather than an actual branch. While it might seem odd to include such a thing in character creation, that’s probably what god choice is for humans.

Another example would be the optional, ‘lost sister only’ choice of what continent you’re from, where you can tell logan you’re originally from Elona and such. Kind of neat that stuff like that is there, but until they (eventually?) connect it into bigger things it’s largely just fluff.

Definitely doesn’t/wouldn’t ever affect skill/stat related things though. Heck, you might be able to throw ‘getting locked into or out of’ item skins into that category too.

Yeah, underwater downed state is horrible on mesmer. Learned the hard way to never hit 2 when underwater…usually better off hovering close to the surface and running. To be fair though, I haven’t actually read the description for 2. Is it a ‘feature’ that it locks your movement or is it actually a bug and thus should be reported on the bug forum/ingame?

Still the same problem.

Occasionally I’ll get what I assume is the cutscene you’d get at the end during the fight with the abomination to enter the tomb. Happened when everybody was dead and I was down.

Other times Trahearne will never move from the beginning unless I make sure I’m behind him. But, then he’ll stop at random again anyway. I think your position in relation to him in regards to first walking up and pressing ‘f’ may affect this.

If I die at any point during the first ambush battle, the Pact NPCs all instant-die and remain dead forever, making the fight with the abomination impossible since the 3 named NPCs are useless and die and if you try to pull the mobs they reappear eventually when killed. It’s all a hard fight anyway since I’ve never had the un-named NPCs -not- remain dead without chance for revival. Intended or another bug?

I wouldn’t call all of this ‘one’ bug. Seems to be many bugs…I hope this is why it’s nearly a week old problem that’s yet to be resolved.

Perhaps you have been trying to level multiple crafting disciplines that fight for mats at the same time? I would recommend keeping it simple and choosing either:
x + cooking
x + jeweling

Jeweling and cooking are the only two disciplines that don’t really compete with any of the other ones for supplies. Beyond that, there is also an efficient way to level crafting and an inefficient way to level crafting. If using the inefficient one (i.e. crafting multiples of one thing rather than taking advantage of discovery and discovering as much as possible), you will have to grind a lot whereas if using the efficient one (i.e. break down materials until they give little to no exp and then discover with them) you will have to grind very little. It is about patience. Build up your stockpile before you craft -anything- and you’ll have leveling droughts, but will level it efficiently and quickly when you do level it. Don’t be premature!

As for whether the game hates crafters…well, I -can- say that the current playerbase/trading post market hates crafters since most crafted stuff is going for less than the mats you’d use to make it. So uh…as an aside you might be better off just selling your mats for now until prices calm down, especially the 2nd tier ones. That way you can use your profits to buy them in bulk once they stabilize as more players move beyond the 2nd tier and start demanding the 3rd and 4th tier items and beyond.

For me the problem was resolved after clearing my mailbox…had it let it become full on purpose because I’m somewhat of a completionist and the hint for ‘mailbox is full’ didn’t fire right away for me. It fired after I had things sent after it filled up, but since I didn’t originally fully clear it there wasn’t enough space for everything that was sent.

Perhaps messaging/checks need to be clearer on this?

As a general note, 5k karma is likely more valuable than 1 gold. Considerably more valuable. Not sure what level you’ve reached, but 1 gold is not a lot whereas 5k karma is, in terms of time it would take, on average, to earn both. A lot of end-game things want karma.

Are you invisible?

Same thing happened to me except with a heart event. Before the maintenance I had finished roughly 80% of a heart, killing enemies to complete it and getting their drops. After maintenance, it was back down to 20% and most of the drops were gone. No big deal in my case, but a curiosity to be sure, especially if it can also effect things like dungeon runs or, say, higher-end chest drops.

I certainly know not to mess around too seriously close to maintenance time until this is resolved.

The same thing happens with mesmer clones/phantasms, but this is actually intended I think. Enemy focus seems to be based on damage done to that enemy (as is normal in MMOs), so your ranger or, in my case, the actual mesmer is simply doing the most damage to things in the general area. Creatures are, in a sense, ‘partied’ together and know when you are damaging other members of their ‘party’ and change aggro accordingly. So, in my case, every now and again focus will change to the phantasm as I run away, but clones or other low damage output units aren’t likely to take aggro from much since PvE enemies ‘know’ when a particular thing is damaging them more or less and can alert all similar creates in the area to that.

As for the risen in particular, are you talking about swarms of thralls? I think something is intentionally built into their ‘frenzy’ skill. If grubs are around, grubs actually have another skill to attract risen to targets. In general, Risen swarm. And it’s not fun for a solo player (especially with respawn rates even for solo), but not a bug per se.

I’ve noticed the same thing and it’s not just location, but level and character swaps that show.

Anti-farming mechanism? I had the same thing with long droughts and I actually thought it might have to do with a potential bug in the magic find system.

For me, I started farming with a bunch of magic find gear and noticed a drought (that is, a drought in terms of -no drops at all- for about 30 kills), but when I switched to gear with little to no added magic find the drops started occurring again. Maybe there’s a bug where, for some reason, if loot isn’t generated from the higher table or whatever magic find bumps up, nothing is given?

Or it really is time based and it just so happened that when I switched the ‘timer’ reset and allowed drops again.

edit: for clarification, I was farming crimson moa in the 15-25 charr lands with a mesmer. The mesmer uses clones and phantasms. Both AoE farming clumps of moa and single-targetting others.