Guild Wars 2

If it is around 20 minutes then the timer for that isn’t since you switched to grenades.

My build uses Sigil of Battle, Runes of Altruism, and the Enhance Performance and Speedy Kits traits, so during combat I rarely remain in the grenade kit for more than 10 seconds before switching to Med kit and back.

I use Shrapnel Grenade’s 5 second cooldown as a guide for how often I should be switching kits to keep my might stacks and swiftness up, but I can be spamming skill 1, waiting for that cooldown, when out of the blue all but one of the damage numbers disappear, and the familiar sound of pistols starts up.

This is just the most infuriating part of a larger problem; the engineer profession is the only one with a default weapon selection, that is switched to without any input from the player.

As well as happening completely at random when using grenades, it also happens regardless of what kit you were using previously, every time you’re downed, as well as whenever Elixir S is used (or goes off if you have the Alchemy IV trait).

Players of other professions would be pretty annoyed if they were regularly switched back to whatever weapons they had in slot 1 (or fire attunement for elementalists).

I have a grenade build. Grenades are my main weapon. I do not want to constantly have to switch back to them because the game decides by itself to switch to something different.

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Regarding targets like the shadow behemoth; breeze riders, harpies and griffons do not touch the ground either (and the targeting circle under verteran karkas is on the ground between their legs), yet I can throw my grenades at the ground underneath them and do the same damage as I do to enemies that are on the ground in the targeting circle.

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Aiming I don’t have a problem with, but that’s probably because I played a hunter in WoW BGs for so long, and can side strafe circles around things, while using the mouse to simultaneously control the camera, pick targets, and fire off ground targeted abilities (I do miss the tab targeting that was limited to a 60 degree frontal cone though. GW2’s tab targeting is so bad it’s almost useless, thanks to how random it is).

What is a huge problem though is the chronic visibility of the mouse cursor any time a lot of abilities start going off. That makes grenade builds (or builds for any profession that has a lot of ground targeted abilities) a poor choice for any kind of group content, which is kind of stupid considering the AoE is good for the larger numbers of mobs you get in group content.

Same thing’s happened on Gandara with the AER-0000 dead, so of course all golem DEs have stopped running.

• Defend AER-0000 from Inquest as it gathers energy from Storm Cloud Generators
• Defend the RCK-7550 golem as it stores energy
• Defend the etheropods while Bluz harvests breeze rider eyes
• M.E.T.A. golem to the rescue! Help him defeat the WST-8100 golem

The 4 krewe fans who sell the medals are also blocked from cycling.

That’s a lot broken by one golem who won’t get up.

Problem #1 – Archaic server architecture.

Seriously, this is the age of cloud computing. Red5 have seriously solved this problem with the server architecture they’re using on their game, FireFall.

It runs on Amazon AWS, and players are assigned dynamically to available servers, to keep the population on each server as close to optimal as possible. It tries to log players onto the same servers as their friends, or armys (guilds), and allows people to transfer to the same server as a friend from within the game, should they end up on different ones.

It also saves money, because the number of running servers is matched to the number of active players. If the player count rises, new server instances can be created to cater for the demand.

They don’t even need to kick people off the servers when there’s a patch, because they can stay logged into servers running the old patch, and move to the new ones when they want to.

GW2’s zones are already separate from each other, so why not have people walking between them assigned to servers dependant on load, instead of every single realm’s server, having seveal zones empty except for the few people farming resources, or doing chest events.

Problem #2 – Dynamic events aren’t.

Come on, how can you call these dynamic events? The only thing about them that’s dynamic is the timing. After all the hype, they’re a bit of a let down.

There should be no such thing as a group event, because everything should be scaling to the number of players present. A single player should be getting a veteran mob and maybe a couple of normal adds, where a bigger group gets a champion plus some veterans, and for those inbetween there should be more adds.

If more people show up during an event, it should be having additional mobs in the next wave, or more adds spawning during the fight if it’s a tougher mob.

Respawn rates can also be tuned to match the number of players actively engaging at an event location.

With metrics it should be possible to work out exactly how tough each mob type is, and from there assign the right number and types of mobs to match active players.

In all cases, people should want to do the events as groups. They should have a higher chance of dropping better loot than just farming regular mobs, and that chance ahould increase the more people are involved.

Of course there should be a cap too, otherwise you’d just get massive lag inducing zergs, after guaranteed rares, spawning huge numbers of mobs.

Problem #3 – No reason to play lower level areas once you hit 80.

Except for those kill X mobs, gather Y resources dailys, where people are going to pick the lowest level zones to get it done as quickly as possible.

The daily system could be a major part of getting high level players into low level zones, to help out those who are otherwise levelling solo.

Instead of giving people a list things, 5 of which they must complete in order to get their daily, give them a random selection of 5 zones, where they need to get a certain amount of XP in one of them for the daily (straight mob kills would be at a lower XP rate though to discourage farming). They may be going over something they’ve done before, but there’s enough to the world that it needn’t be repetitive. Just ~15 minutes a day in a random area, with a small bonus for doing dynamic events alongside people who are closer to the level of the zone.

Also, while people are doing these dailys, make the loot drops and XP appropriate to their level.

You could prevent people consistently picking lower level, or more popular areas from the 5 offered, by removing a choice from the pool of zones that may be offered, until a certain number of dailys have been completed.

Basically, instead of having endgame players favor farming a small, high level subset of the game for the best rewards, move them around constantly.

Consider making the default arrow cursor black and white. It will contrast better against a wider range of backgrounds. At the moment it’s a midtone, so it blends in amongst other midtones, and has only half the contrast that a combined black/white cursor would have against dark/light backgrounds.

Another option to make the mouse cursor stand out, is to invert both the hue and lightness of the area under it. That way it’s black against white, white against black, light blue against red, magenta against green. It would be grey against grey, but that’s why you put a thick black border around it.

Interface Size in options should affect the mouse cursor too.

The best option all round would be to constrain the space that the cursor can take up, and then use standard icon files so that players can use something from an existing set of cursors, or make something that suits them personally.

Valandil,

You didn’t say what operating system you’re using, so I’ll give answers for both XP and W7 (I’m not using a tablet so I have no use for W8).

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If you have XP, then your only option is to set the screen you want GW2 to show on in Windowed Fullscreen mode to be Primary Monitor, because that’s the only place the game will run.

To do that right click on the desktop, and select ‘Properties’ from the popup menu to get the Display Properties panel. Click the ‘Settings’ tab.

In the area where it show how your monitors are arranged, click the one you’d like GW2 to run on, and check the box labelled ‘Use this device as the primary monitor’.

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If you have Windows 7, select ‘Screen resolution’ after right clicking on the desktop, and check ‘Make this my main display’ after clicking on the monitor you want the game to run on.

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Using either of these methods will make all programs start on the primary monitor/main display, but at least then you can move everything but GW2 to the other one, and put your taskbar on it too.

The DisplayFusion program people have been recommending can give you a taskbar on all of the monitors, and you can set which monitor you’d like programs to start on, to save moving them every time you start them (it doesn’t work on GW2).

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With Windows 7 I’ve found a way to get GW2 to display on the whole of a display other than your main display, without it having a title bar or borders.

To do this you’ll need a copy of HotkeyNet (hotkeynet.com). It’s intended to be used for multiboxing, but can be used to reposition windows, and get rid of their title bars, so you can run GW2 in window mode, and make it look like Windowed Fullscreen on the monitor of your choice.

You’ll also need a script file to set the hotkeys. This is mine:

//# Modifier    Key             Function
//#-------------------------------------------------------------
//#             Scroll Lock     enable/disable hotkeys
//# 			F11			    mouseover focus on
//# Shift 		F11 		    mouseover focus off
//#				F1			    Move to left monitor
//#				F2			    Move to center monitor
//#      	    F3			    Move to right monitor

//### Additional hotkeys to handle windowed GW2.  Maximise the window by dragging the title bar to the top of the desired window,
//### then press the appropriate key twice to remove the border and correctly position the window.
//### The GW2 window can then be moved to other monitors using these 3 hotkeys, with just a single press.
//#      	    F4			left screen
//#      	    F5			center screen
//#      	    F6			right screen


//#### Turn off hotkeys, so that only scroll lock gets passed to HKN
<hotkey ScrollLock>
	<sendpc local>
		<ToggleHotkeys>

//####  Give windows focus on mouseover
<Hotkey F11>
		<SetActiveWindowTracking On>
<Hotkey Shift F11>
		<SetActiveWindowTracking Off>

//###################################################
<Hotkey F1>
	<SendFocusWin>
		<SetWinRect -2560 0 2560 1440>				

<Hotkey F2>
	<SendFocusWin>
		<SetWinRect 0 0 2560 1440>				

<Hotkey F3>
	<SendFocusWin>
		<SetWinRect 2560 0 2560 1440>
        
<Hotkey F4>
	<SendFocusWin>
        <RemoveWinFrame>
		<SetWinRect -2552 32 2560 1440>

<Hotkey F5>
	<SendFocusWin>
        <RemoveWinFrame>
		<SetWinRect 8 32 2560 1440>
        
<Hotkey F6>
	<SendFocusWin>
        <RemoveWinFrame>
		<SetWinRect 2568 32 2560 1440>  

              

It should be pretty self explanatory. The numbers after the SetWinRect commands are the window position then size. Position is relative to the top left of the primary monitor. In this case the center one.

This allows me to have EVE on my center, primary monitor, with GW2 on the right and a web browser on the left, then if I want I can swap EVE and GW2 around.

You’ll have to use Alt+F4 to close the GW2 window, because without the title bar there’s no minimise/maximise/close buttons.

You don’t need any programs to move your taskbar, you just need to unlock it and drag it to another monitor.

RedCobra.7693:

Please do not confuse window mode with fullscreen window mode there is a difference

I own a system with 3 monitors, and I’ve multiboxed several different games, (or run different games at the same time on separate monitors). I know full well the difference between windowed, fullscreen windowed, and fullscreen. You clearly don’t, because you can’t make the distinction between them, to see that I’m talking about different things.

Windowed is where Windows (the OS) displays the game in a typical window, with a title bar with buttons, and borders that can be dragged to resize the window.

Windowed fullscreen is essentially the same thing, without the borders and title bar, and the game sets the ‘window’ to take up the whole of one screen. However, it can be manipulated so that it does not take up a whole screen, by third part apps, through the API calls available through the Windows OS. That includes moving the window to any position, on any of the available monitors, and even scaling it (although the game will still be rendering at the same resolution, even if the window is resized much smaller).

In both those cases, because it is windowed, the mouse can freely be moved outside of the window, without alt-tabbing.

Fullscreen is where the game displays on an entire screen, the mouse cannot leave that screen without alt-tabbing, and there is no way to move or scale the display area, other than changing which screen it is displayed on.

Strictly speaking GW2 does not support windowed fullscreen, because the implementation is broken.

Why? Because the whole point of a window, is that you can move it (and resize it). If you can’t do that, then it isn’t a window (and it doesn’t matter if there’s no title bar or borders, because there are Windows APIs to manipulate windows that don’t have them).

If a game properly supports borderless fullscreen windowed mode, then third party programs will be able to change which screen the program is displaying on, without it resetting back to the primary monitor.

You can do this with WoW, EVE, RIFT, and every other game I have played in the last 5 years, that has an option for borderless fullscreen windowed mode.

GW2 is the only game I’ve come across that keeps putting itself back onto the primary monitor, after another program has moved it.

I think a software solution that does as much of the evidence gathering work as possible, would make more sense, where if a character is reported as a bot a certain number of times, it gets it’s activites logged, so that they may be analysed more closely.

Activities such as:

• Being logged in and active for excessively long periods of time without any breaks (like a real person would need for biological reasons).
• Following a repetitive path over and over (when not engaging or being engaged by NPCs), as well as loitering within one very small area, and not deviating outside of it. A player who was farming would roam outside a bot’s typical area, in order to engage NPCs in visual range, while a bot will turn around and go back into a cleared area, rather than move towards NPCs in front of them of the type they’re farming.
• Doing the above 2 things in the same pattern as other reported characters.

Having played WoW since well before that game got it’s LFG system, I’ve noticed a couple of problems that came with it:

1. Pre LFG I ended up getting invited into a couple of good guilds that suited my playstyle, because everyone in the dungeons was on the same server, and playing with people was kind of like an audition for a place in a guild. With the introduction of LFG that way of accessing guilds was lost. GW2 kind of has that issue solved with guesting, but it would still be nice to have LFG favor grouping people from the same realm where possible, to make it easier for new players to get into guilds that do dungeons on their home realm.

2. The other problem with LFG covering all the servers, was that you could have a great experience playing with a group of people, or at least some of the people in the group, but then never see them again (or be able to requeue for another dungeon with some of them, in the cases where one member of the party either disconnected or refused to leave the group after the dungeon had been completed, at which point the vote-kick function was disabled).

Adding them as friends wouldn’t be entirely appropriate, as you still wouldn’t know them well enough to bug them when they come online and ask them if they want to group up. It would make more sense for the LFG system to favor grouping people who enjoy playing together, up until they get to know each other well enough to make use of the friends list.

To that end, in addition to an ignore system that makes sure you never have to see someone again if you don’t want to, there could be a like system, where if a player wouldn’t mind being grouped with someone again, they can be flagged as such, and moved up a level in LFG, to be more likely to be placed together in future. When the flagging is mutual, the priority could be at a higher level again.

The system wouldn’t need to store every person a player has flagged, just the most recent ones, as with any luck, once people have played together a few times, they’d start using the friends list (you could even give a notification that someone is dropping off the preferred players list, and ask if you’d like to move them to the main friends list).

I’d also recommend punishing players who are so obnoxious that they are regularly added to other player’s ignore lists, perhaps by suspending their access to LFG for a short time (and perhaps the same for players who overuse the ignore function too).

Of course, players who are just bad at the game would get ignored regularly too, but as much as they have more of a right to play than those who deliberately ruin the game for others, pandering to people who unwilling to make an effort to learn to play, results in a large enough number of players being so bad at the game, that there is no alternative but to dumb it down.

A poor player can learn to play to a higher standard, and in time enjoy the content as it is. A skilled player cannot find enjoyment in unchallenging content.

In order to overcome this issue, it would make sense to have a couple of check boxes on the LFG window: ‘learning’ and ‘happy to teach’, so that those who might get ignored, just because they haven’t yet learned to play, can have access to players who aren’t likely to ignore them just because of their inexperience.

Perhaps players who regularly check the ‘happy to teach’ box, and get a like at the end of those dungeons, could be given some kind of reward.

“Personal Story quests MUST be doable at level – so levelling up and getting better equipment is not the answer.”

Exactly. What is the point in these quests even having rewards, when you need better gear and higher levels just to do them?

“They also should in my opinion be doable first try by a reasonably careful and experienced player – some of the quests definitely are not.”

Maybe not always on the first try, but it shouldn’t need you to go to the lengths I went to in trying (and failing) to complete “Lines of Communication” on my engineer (and I must be a careful and experienced gamer, otherwise in WoW I wouldn’t have been able to main tank 7/12 bosses in ICC, on my first attempt ever tanking a raid).

I went out hunting skill challenges, to get the skill points needed to unlock new abilities (twice, because the first change of tactics failed as badly as my original strategy), levelling to over 10 levels higher than the content, and levelling trades/hunting down karma vendors with specific items, in order to change weapons from rifle to pistol/pistol and pistol/shield.

I guess maybe I should have changed my traits to tank better, and got a completely new set of gear and enhancements, but quite frankly, after all the repair bills, I could barely afford to make use of waypoints any more, never mind change my traits and gear over for just one quest, then back to what had been working flawlessly for everything else.

I know I’m supposed to be kiting the boss, but that just isn’t possible when I have cooldowns, and it appears he doesn’t, meaning as soon as he comes out of any CC I apply, he shadowsteps to me and takes off half my health in a couple of hits.

eg. I opened with net shot, and immediately started summoning my defensive golem, and he’d taken half my health off before I could finish the summon. He then proceeded to destroy the golem before I could even do 25% damage to him.

ANet really needs to come up with a better way of finding out what needs rebalancing, than just relying on players to say what’s too hard.

What they should be doing is logging data from the fights, so they can see exactly which encounters have problems.

Data including:

• Profession.
• Character level
• Abilities selected for the fight.
• Traits.
• Number of times the encounter has been attempted (deaths).
• Lowest health value during the encounter.

When you’re getting that data from enough players, you can see very clearly which encounters are too hard or too easy, and for which professions, without it being half as subjective as what you’ll get from players on the forums. If specific encounters stand out as being too hard, you could then go as far as watching some of them in progress, to get a better idea of what the problems are.

Then you can set multiplier values for the hostile NPCs, that affect things like their health, damage and cooldowns, that can be modified depending on the profession or possibly the unlocked abilities of the player doing the event.

That way difficulty can be more consistent, regardless of a player’s profession, without there being so many encounters that are just plain too hard, or too easy.

MithranArkanere.8957:

Meh. Since they have much less weapons that other professions, they should be able to equip an armor item that affects kits, and accepts sigils, and that would be active for kit skills.

Like their backpack, seeing as it’s an item used only by engineers.

Binding your abilities such that you have to take your fingers off the movement keys to use them severely limits your ability to kite effectively.

Nearest mob with a red nametag that is in a cone in front of you, then cycle within that cone.

Auto target on ability use should only activate if you do not currently have a live target. At the moment it switches to a different target if the one you have moves out of your field of fire (if you don’t hit a button, it still turns off auto-attack).

I’m sick of hitting some random yellow mob off to my side, and getting more aggro, just because my target briefly got behind me.

I think the scaling of dynamic events needs to handle both very low and very high numbers of players better.
—--
For high numbers the system needs to spread people out more effectively, firstly by providing enough events simultaneously that players can’t all group up in one place, and also introducing other ways to split them up.

Perhaps if the zone is getting busy, players could be asked to get into the parties they’d like to play as (so as to not split people up if they’re just running around with their friends, and not partied yet). Then once they’re partied all the players in the zone could be divided up into 2 or 3 groups, with each group getting reports and map notifications for a subset of the active events. Go to an event that isn’t being reported to you (or your party), and you get no rewards.

With that system even the big dragon events could be run more often, with half the players being able to take part in each one. Hopping between groups to do the major events more than once could be controlled by flagging a character that did one dragon, so that they could only take part in the one after next.
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For very low numbers the reporting of events really needs to be map wide, with the number of active events reduced to match. At times I’ve had 3 events locally, but there haven’t been enough people around for it to be worth trying any of them. The system in those conditions needs to make it easier for the few people in the zone to group up on just one event at a time.

I’ve just given up on storyline completely. At level 40 I hadn’t done any storyline quests since around level 25, and was looking forward to doing a long run of them.

Then I came up against Rakt.

• As an engineer I rely on turrets to keep my damage in line with other classes. Rakt pretty much one-shots them, leaving me with poor damage output.
• I have hardly any stun/blind/daze/confuse cooldowns that I could chain to reduce incoming damage, and while I do have plenty of slow and immobilise skills, they don’t stop him from damaging me, as he also has a powerful ranged attack.

There are NPCs (who’ve also managed to get control of the golems in the area), but they just stand there the whole fight doing nothing.

Must have died at least 8 times. I’m not willing to completely regear my character, and reset my traits, just to have a marginally greater chance of completing one step of a storyline quest.

For solo content this is just plain stupid. I’ve soloed dynamic events, that while taking some planning, and a bit of hit and run, were much easier.

Repurpose the F key, seeing as we can’t switch weapons, to tell our turrets to target what we’re targetting, and not that corpse that was here when we arrived at the fight.

Why not give us, the players, the option of willingly becoming part of a botnet that is used to DDOS the websites of gold sellers, who cannot be taken offline through legal methods, due to their geographical location giving them immunity to this?

Surely if they are immune to legal threats from specific locations, then they cannot in return make legal threats against anyone from those locations who may be DDOSing them.

I’m guessing you need to escort the Order of Whispers NPCs to the waypoint. Problem is they won’t move.

Where are the GMs in this game?

We need someone who can reset these things as soon as they get bugged, and not have to wait until the next server reset.

It’s always struck me as rather odd, that in games where you are capable of crafting some of the finest armor out there, you’re completely incapable of then repairing what you have made.

Tailors, Leatherworkers or Armorsmiths should really be able to do repairs on what they can make, although it should take some mats to do it.

When you’re downed, try to select a target with low health (you can use tab targetting), as it’ll give you a better chance of rallying before you die.

Be prepared to dodge away as soon as you’re up, and if possible use an ability to slow/immobilise/push away the mobs, You want to avoid incoming damage at all costs until your heal is off cooldown.

If you do die, don’t immediately teleport to a waypoint, because other players can still ressurect you, even when dead. If the area’s busy it might be quicker to wait for someone to come along than to walk back from the waypoint (and it’s cheaper).

It’s also infuriating to rush to someone else’s help, only to have them vanish before you successfully kill all the mobs.

Don’t destroy all that gear you bought with karma once it gets replaced, just because you can’t vendor it or salvage it.

Save it up, and when you have 4 items of the same quality, you can take them to the Mystic Forge in Lion’s Arch, to combine into a new item that you can trade, salvage or vendor.

[edit]

Tried this again with 4 soulbound green items that I couldn’t vendor or salvage, and the resulting item couldn’t be vendored or salvaged too. Either it got fixed, or the final item gets it’s status from the majority of items in the mix.

I’ve got ‘black’ on my main. The darkest black is apparently called abyss though. It’s used on some town clothes, and is darker than ‘black’.

What are you on about? Auto-attack has got nothing to do with ability queueing.

I’ve used loads of blue quality salvaging kits, and never got rare materials, so I assume they’re bugged.

I have a stack of Black Lion salvage kits I reserve for when I want to get good sigil upgrades out of items.

They should definitely not be able to fire on anything that you yourself have not targetted, and should instead have a list of permitted targets that they work through, starting with what you had targetted when you first dropped them.

There should also be a button to tell them to switch to your current target. Seeing as engineers don’t switch equipped weapons, perhaps that key could be used.

crimlet.9872:

One tip that seemed pretty useful to me was switching q/e with a/d. So instead of using q/e to strafe or a/d while holding down r-click, you have a/d set to strafe.

I know some other players that did the same thing. I’m not sure what most players prefer, but I think the a/d strafe is standard for most modern games. I set it when I started, and am now lvl 7. Thus far, it has worked very well for me.

Keyboard turning is one of the worst things a game can set as a default, because players get used to doing it to the point they won’t change, and it puts you at a severe disadvantage to players who use the mouse, and can turn much quicker.

WASD is the default control for just about every game out there, and A+D are always strafe, not turn, except in a few MMOs (because of some misguided attempt to be gaming-noob friendly).

There are few things more pathetic in PvP than a player who slowly putters around trying to get you in front of them to attack, while by side strafing and mouse turning, you remain planted firmly behind them, doing damage to them while they can’t do any in return.

I do have keyboard turning bound, to Alt+A and Alt+D, for the rare occasions where I have to take my hand off my mouse. Putting it there freed up Q and E. Q is target nearest enemy (right next to next enemy on the tab key), and E is a much more convenient place to have interact bound than whatever it was before (it might have been F, which I now use for swap weapons, although that’s also on my mouse).

Something I’d like to see is a display for the number of uses left on my gathering tools, besides the one in the character pane.

Also, if I’ve brought along different grades of tools in my pack, it would be nice to automatically switch to the lowest effective version for the thing I’m trying to gather, so I don’t have to keep opening the character pane to switch the most economical one to use.

If it couldn’t be done automatically, then at least a ‘tool uses remaining’ display could double as buttons to cycle between whatever tools you have on you, to save having to mess around in the character pane. Also the mouse tooltip for resources could show whether or not your equipped tool will give something useful, or just junk.

For the crafting window I’d like a way to collapse all the categories by default, or set filters for the list. I’m only part way through levelling my trades, but the list is already getting huge.

Also what I find really annoying is how the ability bars are fixed at the bottom of the screen. They display lots of useful information, but you have to stare at the bottom of the screen to see it.

In WoW I had my UI customised so that my range indicators and cooldowns were shown right beneath my character (icons were hidden until something was actually on cooldown, to keep that area of the screen uncluttered).

Firestryke.2130:

I wouldn’t mind an addon that lets me control my media player so I don’t have to alt-tab out just to skip or pause a song.

You could just use a program that sends certain inputs to specific windows, that way even if GW2 has focus, pressing a set key combination will control another window. Hotkeynet can do that (along with a whole load of other useful things).

If you’re pulling huge packs of mobs it’s because you weren’t looking where you were going. You need to be aware of your environment at all times. Zoom your view out and look around while you’re moving.

You can set up the camera and controls so it’s possible to pan your camera about while still running in one direction, or you can alternate side-strafing from one side to the other to keep moving in one direction while your camera is panned to the opposite side, eg.:

• While holding the W key down, turn with the mouse to the left and press the D key, as you keep turning release the W key so that you are looking completely to the left of your direction of travel.

After some practice you can move and look around without any effort.

Also, a lot of the time you have to fight your way into an area, not just charge in there, and you may have to plan your attack, and lure out a few mobs from the edge of a pack in order to weaken it gradually (the respawn rate still sucks in some places though, making soloing things impossible, and some dynamic events need to have a wider range of scaling in the downward direction, because otherwise you’re left waiting for someone else to show up).

There are a number of bosses that give absolutely no warning that they’re about to do a high damage melee ability, as well as some ranged abilities that can’t be dodged, even at range.

Really annoying as a thief, as it burns through all your initiative, and can move you away from your target.

Would also be nice to have the zoom controls (mouse wheel) usable while you’ve got the right mouse button held down.

Better yet, some preset camera positions that we could switch between would be nice (I used to use mouse wheel with ctrl/shift modifiers to select these in WoW, along with alt+mousewheel controling the minimap zoom).

It looks like the bahavior of the right mouse button has been changed so that dragging the camera is no longer likely to have you picking targets you don’t want, but GW2 still falls behind other games regarding it’s controls.

This is how mouse click events can interfere with camera/movement rotation control in MMOs. It shows at what point NPCs/players/objects that are under the mouse cursor can be targetted/interacted with while rotating the camera/turning your character.

Game
Left click/release , Left click/hold/release, Left click/drag/release,
Right click/release , Right click/hold/release, Right click/drag/release.

WoW
release, -, -,
release, -, -

RIFT
release, -, -,
release*, -, -

GW2
click, click, click
release, release, -

*Only when the target is in range to interract with.

How formating using a monospaced font can be of use on a forum:

1. Providing data as a table. It’s not possible to align into accurate columns unless all the characters have the same width (or specific table formating markup is available).

1. Sometimes an ASCII type diagram is all that’s needed to convey information, but without monospaced formating being available, images have to be made/uploaded/used instead.

1. Representing commands that are to be typed into the game/other software, without having to use quotes (that some people may end up typing in).

Something like “Will reset traits unlocked by <previous book name>.”

If /follow worked then it would be possible to multibox. I multiboxed 5 accounts in WoW, but I’m glad it won’t be a part of GW2.

Considering that double left click is already usable to interact with objects, and single left click targets characters/mobs, this dual functioning of the right mouse button is just plain stupid, especially considering how it regularly causes you to switch targets to un-aggroed mobs while in combat, which, if you’re a ranged class, you end up pulling, while you also have to reselect your original target.

No, it won’t reset traits, unless it is an upgrade over the book you used previously. The tooltip needs to be clearer about this. The person who sells them has another chat option, where they will reset your traits for a lot less than the cost of a manual appropriate to your level. If this wasn’t the case, then high level characters could use the basic book to reset their traits, at a much lower cost than they’re otherwise given.

Luckily you can mail the book to another character of any class, so it’s not a complete loss that you can’t trade them back to the vendor to get your currency back.