Guild Wars 2

One CAN get the map to cooperate if you explain it to them. This event (The Kodan Claw) is required for the Chuka legendary as well (twice, if I’m not mistaken), but the biggest problem is that the event very frequently glitches and blocks progress (it’s a known bug).

It’s bad enough to base legendary story quests/activities on an event that has to first FAIL (especially when folks decide not to be cooperative), but they also base it on an event that glitches a lot.

As a suggestion, in addition to actually fixing the glitch, increase the defense and health of the Lagos assassin that kills the Claw of Koda and make it a non-Champ group event that takes AT LEAST five participants to win, meaning that it would take a deliberate act of multiple players to win it. Better yet, hide the “group event” part and just make it impossible for less than five players to kill the assassin before it kills the Claw of Koda.

As it is NOW, just ONE rotten apple can spoil play for pretty much everyone going for those legendaries.

The legendary path is supposed to be challenging, but relying on the skill of the player. The way it is now, it defies both the fun part, and takes all control away from the player and puts it very much on the cooperation of EVERY OTHER player who happens across it. As everyone knows, very often cooperation isn’t on their agenda, or they kill the Lagos before they realize everyone is shouting at them to stop.

That needs to change.

My beef with the mats is the insignias. Specifically, the addition of a stupidly high number of cured hardened leather squares (along with the new legendary crafting system) to craft gossamer insignias – all without doing squat to increase the drop rate of hardened leather (gossamer is dirt cheap easy to get all the time, at least for me) has seriously made making exotics stupid expensive.

Last time I looked, TP prices put the sections at about 24 silver. It appears that the USE of hardened leather was increased, but the drop rate wasn’t.

I’d rather have a root canal without anesthesia than try to “farm” hardened leather.

The rest of the mat farming I see as mostly an intact system, but IMHO, every exotic should salvage out AT LEAST ONE hardened leather section because 30 went into making it, regardless of the armor type. In EVERY exotic armor piece, the insignias require far more mats than the rest of the armor. But one normally only gets the lesser thing (like mithril from heavy armor). Do that, and I think the problem with hardened leather would go away.

Fix the hardened leather situation and you’re mostly good for everything else. Folks may complain about things, but the only really “broken” mat I see is getting hardened leather.

If this isn’t the case for everyone, then maybe the drop rate algorithms for the individual players need to be looked at.

Wow, great suggestions, guys! Thank you!

I didn’t know about BoH spending (I have about 2800 from achievement chests), which would allow me to get there, even if slowly. I also have nearly a stack of old 15 minute WvW XP boosters and a lot of standard XP boosters. I’ll also keep an eye out for the Monument and/or Big Spender daily. If all I need is 20,000, I figure I can get that within a couple of months.

It’s not like crafting a legendary is done overnight, after all.

Avoiding combat would be a good way to go, and it doesn’t sound insurmountable in that respect. I’ve had a lot of anxiety and anger about not being able to get in there to do it without a mental meltdown (even though I know it’s “just a game”), but I’ve been playing GW since 4 months after GW1 came out, did the full Beta with GW2 and been at it all this time – without ever doing a legendary.

I figured it was high time I did.

You’ve all shown me a viable way (or three) around my issues, and I thank you all deeply both for that, and for your understanding.

And X T D.6458, right back atcha. If I told you I was an HM3, well, you might understand better than most why I’d have issues with killing people, even in combat, and who I was with when it happened. For the record, we didn’t lose anyone on our side.

This may be a highly unique circumstance, but I am having emotional issues dealing with obtaining the Gift of Battle.

To explain, I am a veteran who has combat-related PTSD involving the actual killing of other human beings (not just one, but many, in a firefight). I refer to it as “real life PvP”. I have always had issues with engaging in PvP in video games, once they came out with that. I do not do any form of PvP as a result of this.

Once upon a time, a Gift of Battle could be obtained through badges of honor, which can be obtained through achievement chests as well as PvP. But that was changed last Spring to require 40 tiers of WvW.

I know how pathetic this sounds, but when one sees the brains of someone one just shot spraying out and away every time one hits the avatar of another actual living human player, well, let’s just say it takes away a lot from the enjoyment of the game itself. I’m not having issues with NPC’s. Just issues dealing with the sight of killing other players against which I have to fight. Thus far, many decades on, I still can’t objectify avatars as inconsequential manifestations of someone else. I relive those moments.

It ain’t a good thing.

To say that this puts a crimp in being able to craft legendaries would be an understatement.

I’d love to explore this crafting aspect of the game, but without some OTHER way to craft a gift of battle that doesn’t necessarily require gleefully slaughtering other players, it’s just not something I can do. I’m thinking that alternative method could help a lot more people besides me who, perhaps, have remained silent about this kind of issue with PvP-like environments. It’s not exactly an ADA issue, and I do realize how difficult this would be to implement. And I also know it may not be relevant to anyone else but me.

To be honest, had I not found an outdated guide for the legendary I was after, I would have stopped trying for it before I started had I known any form of PvP was involved. I tried WvW several years ago, on the assurances that I could just fight NPC’s. Well, players have a pesky habit of just showing up, and when it was over, I was out for a week getting my head back together. I’ve never gone back in except to talk to the merchants.

Still, I’d like a shot at a legendary. As it stands now, I have none without having to go back on meds and therapy I’d much rather avoid due to their physical/emotional side effects.

So this is merely a suggestion and you can take it as you want: Please find another, extra way to CRAFT a gift of battle than ONLY as a reward from, or involving, a PvP-like track. There seems to be ample room in the game for such a “quest”, as an alternative for the less homicidally-minded in the game.

Is there anyone else with this issue (even to simply having problems with getting through the WvW tracks)? Never having done it in this game, I don’t know the situation there, and really don’t know if this suggestion has any support worthy of making that effort. Whatever the community decides, I’m good with. So I toss it out there to see where it goes.

Battle comes in all forms – not just killing other players in a quest for rewards. I think it would be helpful for many if another method was added to the game to obtain that gift, too.

Well, I’m not much of one to be doing art. I last picked up a pencil to draw about 18 years ago (1998, to be exact). I was in college and taking Art 101. I was told back then I had talent, but my interests were (and still are) in computers. Most of my “art” today is digital, but it’s mostly layering from output from other programs (3D Studio Max) for my book covers (I’m too poor to afford a real artist to do them for me).

But I bore easily, ran out of projects I wanted to do (normally, I write, but motivation for that is lacking at the moment), so I decided to revisit my college art days. I dragged out my art supplies (I’m a pack-rat) and sat down today to draw.

In preparation of this day, I grabbed a few (thousand) screen shots and after a challenging elimination period that took a lot longer than it did to draw the thing, I decided on a rare grab of my Asura Ranger, Quiptie as my first actual pencil drawing in way too long to think about. Yes, your Asura ranger will strike this pose with a longbow, but the glance lasts about 1/4 of a second and you have to position the camera just right and, well, I figure you can figure it out if you want a screenshot of the same thing.

I then picked up my 11X14 drawing pad (18 years old as well) and my pencil (18 years… Well, you get the idea) and sat down to draw. Once I was done an hour or two later, I grabbed my camera and took some quick shots.

This is the result.

A disclaimer: I DID run this through the GNU Image Manipulation Program (because it kittens the word “kitten ”?) after taking the picture both to crop it tot he correct size and fixing the reflections from the pencil graphite. The image also came out with darker edges, which don’t appear on the original (but looks kinda cool, IMHO), so this is only an approximation of what it looks like.

This was just a check to break the rust off of my art skills and see if I still had any chance of doing the thing justice. I got some grey drawing paper and will do another one (probably of the same shot) in charcoal and chalk – which is much more my thing. So consider this a preview. The next one, I’ll be taking a lot more time and care on it.

Feedback (good and bad) is encouraged and appreciated!

I figured out how to get the achievement by doing it wrong, then doing it right.

The trick seems to be kill the abomination LAST.

Kill all of the other creatures in the spawn first before the abomination dies.

I ran TT twice at once (had a guild restart it after Cobalt escort failed), so I had the chance to run the escort literally twice in a few minutes. I noticed the spawn, and the abomination, and saw the abomination go down quickly – and do nothing. Then the rest of the spawn was killed, and still nothing.

When we ran it again, I figured it may be an order of operations kind of thing, and no one has said anything about how quickly (or not) the abomination was killed. So I suggested to the Amber escort to kill it last. They agreed, followed through, and all of us who needed the Wurm Bait achievement got it on that run.

Give it a shot. It may be that it’s not bugged, but simply needs to be done right.

Add me to the list. Worked fine until I logged out to get a different character. Now, can log in, and select a character, but can’t connect. Same error code. Same everything.

Are the servers being attacked again? Or did someone trip over a power cord in the server farm?

(Edit) Noticed that if you sit for several minutes on the character screen, it will let you back in. Selecting a character right off the bat… Not so much. Has anyone else tried that?

There is one gem store item I haven’t seen mentioned as a potential thing to get:

Crafter transfer.

The crafting profession is tied to a particular character, and the profession expander lets you keep three active crafting tiers available on any one character without paying to switch. But what if the character you have mastered out is one you want to delete because you don’t play them anymore?

A one-time, one crafting profession transfer that costs gems would be a nice feature for that.

It would allow a player to transfer only master crafter level skills from one character to another character who has already got a Master Crafter in another tier. Making it a master crafter to a master crafter only increases the chances of someone wanting to use that kind of ability, and encourages crafting across characters along with buying the extra tier showing goodie.

For example, a Weponsmith 500 could be moved to another character who already has any OTHER level 500 tier. If they already have Weaponsmith at a lower tier, the new tier would replace their previous progress. You can’t give Weaponsmith 500 to someone who doesn’t already have another 500 tier cracked, and can’t put Weaponsmith 500 on a character who already has Weaponsmith 500.

It would allow someone to more ably manage their crafting, and free up character slots for new characters and increase the reason to have 3 crafting professions available (8 crafting professions that three characters can cover without once paying to switch). It would improve the overall player satisfaction of playing the game as well.

I suppose one could allow lower level transfers to another Master Crafter with the higher of the two being what the new one would have (no combining of their points, just highest takes precedence). That’s your call, of course.

I’d probably charge 800 gems for it, much like opening the availability of the extra tier. Expensive, but for those (like me) who mess up their crafting by having too many characters, it would be better. It’s a way to recoup the loss from having someone transfer the crafting tier and creating a new character from the old one rather than paying for a new character slot. It will also make for a happier player who can derive more benefit from the game.

I’d love to see something like this.

Having had time to review things, I thought I’d post my thoughts on the stress test overall.

I won’t go into specific glitches, even if the wyvern fire moving in a curve to the left was interesting, but for the most part, they were both minor and rare. Frankly, I don’t think that was the point of the Beta.

My feeling was that this was an instanced demo designed to test server loads, environment scaling and other aspects of game play under relatively controlled conditions (numbers-wise). It was also used to help figure out any glitches in the user-side that they hadn’t anticipated likely using folks who have submitted more detailed than most crash reports in the past. (the who they selected part is a guess).

Toward that end, on my side, I had acceptable frame rates at all times, load times were faster than average, and I only had one crash about half an hour into the first round during the first wyvern fight in which I was involved.

Audio was lower than in the regular game, I noticed, especially in the cines. I had to turn my volume up to hear what was being said clearly, then had to turn it back down when I logged back into my normal game side. I almost missed that it was my character who was talking.

I’m always running multiple programs (Typically Firefox, Thunderbird and Clemintine) in the background and had no issues with anything other than that first crash. I did upgrade my RAM the day of the Beta from 8 to 20 gigs, however, I didn’t otherwise have any noticeable effects in the Beta that didn’t happen on the normal game side.

Whatever caused the game client to crash while I was on the first round wasn’t replicated, and I didn’t restart the computer or close any programs between either of the rounds. I’m inclined to think it was something on the ANet server side since all environmental variables on my side remained the same and it didn’t happen again.

I did a lot of other things like minimizing the game client, trying different key combinations (some of them do odd things to the normal game) and didn’t see any differences between them.

My system sometimes doesn’t like to display a (F) key dialogue, so I know that the deploy glider action is available before the prompt appears, but how to adjust when it appears is tricky. I was hopping down in a few places and it popped up when it didn’t need to. I assume it’s programmed to prompt after a certain distance of falling and mastery may let you deploy it sooner.

The (F) key prompt issues are the same for me in the regular game, though, so I didn’t see it as a glitch or problem.

In any event, overall, the experience was what I’d expect for a test of server loads, balance and multiple users on unpredictably configured systems. Folks complaining about the repetition don’t quite get it that it’s hard to make predictive data analysis based on multiple variables, so the same episodes were repeated multiple times to get more consistent data.

I had a great time and am glad to have been part of it. I’m looking forward to hearing more about what’s in the new pack and, with any luck, participating in the Betas for it like I was fortunate enough to do with GW2.

Thank you very much!

I can’t fathom how anyone could draw any definitive conclusions about HoT based on what’s been said about it and this mini-Beta.

I look at GW1 as a guide (having been playing these games for 11 years). It, too, had expansion packs – two of them – plus add-ons. Elona and Cantha were entire worlds, games unto themselves. Eye of the North was an add-on pack for any of the games, with tons of content, new maps, and other buffs and bonuses.

Although GW2 has a different game management style, it’s still made by the same people who gave us GW1. And I don’t expect they’re going to low-ball a LS add-on, or bother to beta test something like that at all. SW and Dry Top weren’t Beta tested. Some of the LS stuff has changed a bit since the beginning. No beta testing there, either.

What I saw was a server/user test.

They had to do load balancing for the new content. From an IT perspective, if they felt they had to do that, there is a TON of content there because otherwise there’d be no point. One server could handle it, based on the number of players I saw there and they wanted to check scaling and other aspects we take for granted because the mechanics aren’t always apparent. They also had to test it on “other machines”, to check how it performed under uncontrolled conditions in multiple user environments.

This is merely the first step before releasing other content.

So from an IT point of view (I own an IT services business) and a GW playing history going back to 2004, what I saw today makes perfect sense if you’re rolling out something gigantic and I expect great things from these folks. It makes no sense, mechanically or technically, to have a closed “stress” beta for something as small as a simple paywall LS add-on.

And nothing I saw, or know of, justifies in any way the conclusions made by the detractors. A business doesn’t waste its time hyping to its current fan base something that will only highly irritate the fans when it comes out (Sim City notwithstanding), or wasting resources beta testing what amounts to relatively minor adjustments to the game environment.

To quote Burt Gummer from Tremors 3 “It’s gonna be BIG!”

Overall impression: Generally good.

Highlights:
- Never having played the Revenant, it was pretty easy to gain competence. But the limited type of monsters made it hard to figure out how well it would do outside of Modrem (if that’s all it can ever fight as a profession, it’s well made against them, but limited in use if that’s the only area one can play them).
- The endurance regen was higher than normal, I thought. Personally, I liked it a lot.
- I did experience one game client crash during the first Wevyrn fight, but noticed no lag or latency on medium to high settings. (In a side note, thanks for not making me re-make the character after the crash.)
- My FPS seemed pretty steady about about 50-60.
- I’m HOPING there is more to the gliding than a sloped ten degree trajectory. I can see it adding a lot of depth to the game (having played AION, I enjoy flying in games).
- I agree that the mastery panel needs to be added to the hero panel UI, but I expect that’s only where it is because this is a beta and doing that would integrate things into the game that only buying the expansion would unlock.
- I noticed one area in the boss fight where a bit of metal is supposedly sticking up, blocking movement. But you can’t really SEE it. I kept getting hung up there. Maybe highlighting it as an obstruction a bit more would help (assuming this whole thing isn’t just a Beta-land test zone, of course).
- If the boss fight is “final”, I agree it’s a bit too easy. With six others and the NPC’s, we finished it off in under ten minutes toward the end of the first round.
- That said, it might be a consequence of the new boss vulnerability status bar. It definitely makes it easier to hurt them more when you know when to spam certain skills. If that’s the intention, congratulations, you did a great job!
- I’m HOPING there’s more to do/explore in the next round. The repetition was understandable for a stress test, but maybe we can repeat something new? If not, I’ll start a different character.

Conclusion:
This was only a taste, and I recognize that. I hope your servers got the data you needed and that the overall player experience was at least as good as it is in the main game. What I see is extremely promising and other than one crash about half an hour into it, it was otherwise very stable. It’s a beautiful, if dark, place and a lot of work went into it. I think I see the seeds of what you’re doing with the “other Sylvari who are not from the Pale Tree” in one of the Sylvari character story arcs in this, but that’s just a guess. I’m hoping that’s where you’re going, since nothing more was ever mentioned of it in the rest of the Personal Story lines.

The next round is in 2 hours or so. See you guys and gals there!

Given the dearth of information we’ve been given about it, I think you’re right, Wound.

A “stress test” in computer terms is stressing the servers to see what load balancing they need to do. But for the first one, I’d be surprised if there’s that much boss fighting. They probably want to see what the loads are with a specific number of players hitting the servers at the same time first. It’s only two hours, after all. They may or may not scale it up and down to see how things flow.

It makes me wonder what “character creation” will actually be in the Beta slot. My guess is we’ll be using one of our already made chars that will be pushed up to Lvl 80 if it isn’t already. It’s a full-on level 80 area, after all. Kind of like EoTN in GW1 was, it’s for max level chars, so having someone playing an unfamiliar character in a boss fight might not get the best feedback.

We’ll find out in 27 minutes, I suppose.

If it helps, I got an invite today to the stress test beta, with what appears to be the correct day, date and times. Tuesday, March 24th at 12 PM PDT until 2 PM PDT, then again at 5 PM PDT going to 7 PM PDT.

Unfortunately, the countdown link a few posts above, for my location, would have me coming in 8 hours LATE, according to the e-mail (The countdown timer goes to zero 8 hours AFTER the first round of stress testing begins and 1 hour after the second round ends).

I’m gonna go with what was in the e-mail.

Given that it says all characters and progress MAY be deleted before HOT goes live, I’ll proceed without worrying about saving them. That may give me a better opportunity to try out different things in the (currently short) time we have for this round.

I assume there will be more rounds of testing and the beta as time goes on, an e-mail explaining how to log into the beta (Assuming it isn’t directly account linked) and information about how to deliver feedback to the appropriate folks before the 24th.

In any event, I’m jazzed and looking forward to it. Thanks muchly for the invite and I’ll try to provide valuable info as to how it goes.

Rcox.4076:

https://twitter.com/itzchF/status/489587818386046976

That’s a bogus claim. Some people are just kittened. If he “forgot”, he’s not doing it.

Dear Guild Wars 2 Developers:

Having a lot of characters as I do, and (as a separate but relevant issue) the avowed desire on the part of GW 2 developers to have players experiment with trait builds, I have to ask, what the hell were you thinking to make people have to pay to unlock individual trait skills?

Yes, I know there are places you can go to get the drops that unlock them, but dear god, you have to be all over the map and don’t get all of them unlocked until you’ve pretty much repeatedly earned the “Been there, Done that” title – which isn’t retroactive to the characters you DO have who have done it.

I get that you folks want players to play the game, but this approach puts WAY too much emphasis on character development (goal-oriented looting of said places to get the manuals to unlock the individual trait skills) and made it way too kitten ed expensive to do it from the ground by buying the things.

One or the other, guys. Drop the cost, dump the skill point requirement, put the tomes where they can be found at level (all of the first tier in level 35-45 areas max because nothing says game killer by being killed just trying to get a trait you used to get unlocked with the tier) and make it attainable as you CAN unlock the trait skills. Some missions/personal stories/etc. NEED to have the trait skills just to survive and we can’t get them anymore at those levels.

So start up with traits at 24 with first tier trait manuals in level 15-25 areas and keep the same schedule as you have (only the two traits at a time would start at 54 instead of 60, and the second tier would unlock at 54 as well). This would unlock the third tier at 74. Go ahead and keep the Grandmaster unlock at 80.

Also drop the prices – they’re ridiculous. Solo/casual players have no way to make that much in a year of playing on ONE character, let alone several. Your whole implementation of making it easy to “experiment” with traits opened the door, then slammed it shut, barred it, locked it, barricaded it and hermetically sealed it. If ever there was a poster child for working at cross purposes, this implementation of the traits was it.

(Also, in an aside, the transformation charges are stupidly expensive – taking the equivalent of EIGHTEEN TRANSFORMATION STONES to re-do the armor appearances only? I used to use them to transfer my rune build to my next armor set as well as appearances, and you can’t do that anymore – thanks ever so much for messing that up for us, too!)