Guild Wars 2

I run my Engi as Celestial with 100% condition duration (tree/food/giver’s weapons/malice). Combine this with a full p/p+grenade+bomb build with power tree maxed and you are doing good autohits, 20 stack AoE bleed, 25 vulnerability and alot more if you swap out your kits enough to use all the conditions.

Zero threat from any Mordrem. Remember that Cripple stops the Teragriffs from doing their charge which is the only real problem there.

I find that my condition builds do better than my berserker builds in SW. Even though people swear by zerker, some of the mobs there are just very hard to take down with direct damage and the time taken can outstrip your heals and dodges. This is in contrast with the rest of the game where mobs die easily to zerker.

If you want to do full zerk, make sure you kill all Menders asap.

I strongly recommend against using Sentinel gear. The damage is extremely low and increasing your vitality just makes you that much harder to heal. One of Engi’s best traits is their bust healing so they benefit more from high toughness.

They just don’t have very good lag compensation in this game. I have a hell of a time on DSL and I’m in the US. My partner in AU has even more trouble.

I wish game developers would stop using TCP for games.

+1 for cat ears in gem store. Tired of reading posts from haters lately, meh.

Don’t you guys have something better to do, like play?

They should make Charged Lodestones savlageable from Dark Matter, the same way that you can get Pile of Crystalline Dust from Glob of Ectoplasm.

Knowing their obsession with removing things, they probably deleted it.

I know that I personally abandoned dungeons because 5warzerkstack is not for me, that’s why I switched to group-based (as in, more than 5) a long time ago. There’s just no point in joining “party play” anymore with how toxic and biased it has become.

You say “even more when we make a good group with good players.” But… honestly, what does that even mean these days?

Think about it.

There is alot of mixed views here, but I will say this: Berserker gear is not what it seems to be. You an wear full Berserker gear, and still do barely any damage. This is because its mostly about your build. Gear just compensates for a build that has to put alot of points into defensive traits to get special grandmasters, fall damage (e.g for Grenth and the like), profession recharge, boon duration and things like that.

Furthermore, its possible to have a much higher damage on defensive gear than you may imagine. Because an offensive build on defensive gear will do roughly the same amount of damage as a defensive build on Berserker gear. Its all about what your profession can afford, what traits and skills you need to carry, and what you are facing (for example, Tequatl can’t be critically hit, reducing all Zerk gear to PTV, except without the T & V).

The exponential effects from damage on Zerk gear only occur with a well thought-out, matching build, especially one stacking % bonuses to base damage with the correct usage of runes and sigils to go with it. Similarly, Zerk enthusiasts vastly underestimate what a defensive combination (like Knight/Valk) can do with a good build.

If you would read the NPC dialogs, you would realize that those prisoners are keeping the charr war machine going and are largely responsible for our ability to build siege weapons such as tanks and airships to combat the elder dragons.

At which point do you draw the line on morality, sacrificing Tyria?

You shouldn’t have players spread across multiple guilds across multiple servers. In the future, guilds will span all servers features-and-influence wise. There’s no reason to keep such setups. And its not ANet’s fault, nor should they implement any workaround for bad player decisions.

Home worlds and guilds are the community. You can’t have people “inbetween” and expect to be able to play with them, especially since at the moment that isn’t even possible with the limited guesting functionality.

It only “works” in some situations.

Also , the guild cap exists for a reason, to stop guilds from “monopolizing” the player base, which is common in other games. “Superguilds” as we call them. They have very little benefit for the community as they discourage branching out.

Lets be honest, even 500 is way too much, and it why all the requirements to establish a complete guild with all upgrades are so insane.

Downfall.2671:

Since guilds like TTS are just a symptom of bad game design (placing a 100+ players raid boss, that needs heavy preparation and coordination, into the uncontrollable open world with variable spawn timers), i’d rather fix the initial problem instead

This is correct.

Rangers are excellent bunkers, if you want to go the condi/heal route. Especially if you stack Dwayna runes on the Troll Urguent getting three regens at once (Heal skill, Regeneration and Signet). But be warned that condition damage options aren’t that great for Ranger, Traps help but compared to say, the 25 stacks of bleed Warriors can lay on, its just not much in the long run.

Most of these are not a problem with melee or ranged, but a problem with the related skills, for example the fact that very few support skills are ranged 1200 is just disgusting. Most decent games know that support is the first thing that the developers should always pay attention to, but in this game its pathetic because Anet likes it like that.

This was one of the design goals of the game, so I would not expect any of these things to change any time soon, its built from the ground up for melee zerk stack. They just tried to be too different and largely messed it up. They have tried to invert most of the well-established tropes of MMOs such as T1 support, T2 defense, T3 DPS balancing model and the holy trinity. Some of it good, some of it falls flat.

No professional game designer would build a game where you clear every piece of content in the game (save for WvW and PvP), with a single setup, single group composition (give or take a class or two), and a single tactic. I believe that this is mostly due to vision and communication errors inside of Anet, particularly with all of the employee turnarounds especially at game release time.

Having to go back and release ascended because they miscalculated the actual value of the exotics end-game gear shows that these kinds of things happen.

I like how you consider women loving women , and people in bathing suits, is less for very young people than violence, drinking, religious concepts and necromancy.

The most recent stories have been far better than LS1 or Personal Story.

Galphar.3901:

You can definitely tell that the writers for GW2 are not the same writers A-Net had for GW. The stories in GW were just written much better. I think the writers are even different when you look at the early Personal Story(levels 1-30) and the story once you choose your faction(Priory/Whispers/Vigil).

The most recent chapter has the same story manager as GW1.

As an alternative, there’s quite a few boot armors that do not cover the toes at all. These appear more like “sandals” on Asura (covering only the main portion of the foot and not any of the toes including the front toe).

10/10 would read again

Hmm, people who don’t think that stealth is already rediculous enough.

Stealth is not invulnerability, and does not cancel channeled skills just as nothing else cancels channeled skills except a stun. If you want to stop these skills, you stun your opponent the same way every other class has to, then you stealth.

A good Thief will have no problem adopting such a combination.

Bump. Perma bugged on Jade Quarry. NPCs won’t do anything, event doesn’t start.

Can we get this looked at as it is the most important meta chain leading to the dungeon that completes the entire personal story and all dungeon stories?

The only current fix is to complete it after reset and never fail. And while our server has already learned this, I don’t think its realistic for anything below Tier 1 to keep it completed all day long, every day, indefinitely.

Patches only seem to solve the problem for a short time. I hope this doesn’t end up as one of those repeating glitches like Melandru, Lyssa and Dwayna are all prone to. All of the Arah pre-events themselves were already broken enough.

Orr desparately needs some love. :/

Please ArenaNet restore all 4xLv6 guilds or the small guilds will wither and disband and the game will be worse for it in the long term.

Our entire guild only amounted to Lv5 + 100 favor in the end.

I found the recipes for this gear on the trading post, however they all require a Trailblazer’s Intricate Gossamer Insignia, which cannot be found anywhere? I’ve checked every mastery vendor, there’s also no recipe book, and it can’t be crafted or found on the trading post either. Does anyone know where to obtain it?

Terrible wording. We were confused at first too. Its like ANet doesn’t even speak English anymore in their changelogs because lately they’ve been confuzzling.

Here’s what it actually means:
- When you reach a certain level, skill points are “unlocked”.
- When you reach a certain level, vistas are also “unlocked”.
- Once this has happened the account is flagged to always have them unlocked for every new character that you create in the future.

About 20GB will be added to the game from current estimates. That will be distributed over the one and a half months, is that more helpful ?

But yes, we really need: 1) a percentage meter, 2) a size meter.

Sure, there’s a percentage meter already but it goes by the number of files so you can spend most of your patch time at like 50% and then have the rest of the bar quickly fill up because all the remaining files are small.

Pro tip btw, don’t patch the game at home, do it in public.

Even worse is that people you have blocked can see what map you are on, whether you are online or not, and everything else (unless you set invisible). I have witnessed a few case of in-game stalking that were not solved by a block.

Block is too broken to be useful in its current state.

Um, the whole reason Ranger was made the healer is because of the pet, because ArenaNet knew they could run full support without losing their damage which would prevent alot of outcry against having a real healer in the game.

That said, armor doesn’t seem to matter much anymore. Its a few extra armor points, nothing more—and I’d like to see that changed. The weight of armor that you wear should have at least some meaning beyond how it looks, because currently there’s no tradeoffs to running a light or medium class.

The only reason some of them die faster is because of low HP, not armor.

I’ll make one more reply trying to explain this.
- MMO is not RPG, TBS, RTS, FPS or MOBA.
- MMO is not single player or five player game. You can argue that it should be when no other players are around but it does not work that way, those games are highly optimised for only a few players at all times.

If you cannot understand why MMOs require alot of processing power, then its pointless to discuss it with you. But I’ll give you one more hint: The MM stands for Massively Multiplayer.

Your quintillion cores will not help even if they completely rewrite the game. You are running up against a limit of computer physics:
- A faster CPU will not decrease load times, its I/O related.
- A faster CPU may not increase FPS if its only upgrade was more cores.
- A faster GPU will not increase FPS if it wasn’t a bottleneck.
- A faster HDD will not increase FPS.
- A faster HDD may not decrease load times (much), its primarily network I/O.
- More RAM will not increase FPS unless you were swapping before.
- More RAM will not decrease load times.
- A faster network will not decrease load times, because there are many hops between you and the server and they aren’t all 1Gbit.
- A faster network/lower ping may help with input responsiveness.

System upgrades do very little to improve a game that does not need the features introduced by the upgraded platform. In fact, almost no game can even begin to take full advantage of newer PCs-even the best will only use 2-3 cores and will only max the GPU if you turn on full hardware anti-aliasing.

Weapons have the same problem, really. There are so many weapon skins in the game that people would use (especially BLTC skins and legendaries) but they don’t match your look so you don’t bother using them at all.

Most of the people who buy these items do so because they’re the small niche that the look just happens to fit, or they’re doing collections.

Try changing Character Model Limit to Lowest, this will hide everyone except your party members and make your computer only render the scenery. The slowdowns are mainly because characters have thousands of polygons and the Level Of Detail (LoD) system that is supposed to reduce their polygons as they move away from you doesn’t seem to work very well, and is often buggy.

(But turn on player names so you can actually know if people are there.)

NPCs will still slow it down though, so cities are sluggish regardless of what you do, and there doesn’t seem to be any way to hide them. :/

Also, make sure that you have “Effect LoD” turned on, as this will hide alot of the effects from players although from what I have seen it doesn’t hide nearly enough, you still see hundreds of skills being cast in big battles. Unfortunately culling other players via Character Model Limit does not seem to hide their skill effects, so you will still have to deal with eye-bleeding, FPS-eating lightshows.

The big difference between an MMO and a game like an FPS that can run at 60+ FPS at ultra settings is the MMO has too many characters, its very different from a game where you are just animating and rendering only a few enemies.

I think that all armors should be hideable. If you want to solve the issue of people running around naked (this really only happens with Humans and Norn…), change the underwear to be something people wouldn’t want to show off.

Well, put simply, people are hating because this is not “GW2”.

You have to admit some of the new names and stuff are pretty childish. I understand that developers don’t have alot of resources, but we all know that this is not the kind of content that the original game (and GW1) were built on.

Its almost like the LS season one team was put in charge of the expansion.

All I ever hear about is waypoints.

Did you know for the first three years of the game all I ever heard about was how much waypoints cheapen all content? In fact, in the original dungeons, you didn’t have to wait for your party to die to revive so people simply waypoint-zerged the encounters-this is still done with major events and world bosses, removing any sense of danger from them. This is why the whole motto of GW2 open world content became “if you’re full dead then WP”, because its cheap.

After many years ArenaNet finally started listening to the players and destroying some waypoints, and having less in new maps. But just like all changes-then the other side just starts complaining endlessly that they have to spend 1-2 mins crossing a tiny map even with the ability to FLY.

Its just getting rediculous now, let it go. Yes, we know that you want to do your content a few mins faster so you can spend more time arguing on the forums that the game isn’t easy or quick enough for your liking yet.

I really, really recommend that people try playing the game. I mean, really play the game, as if you were a new player, on a new character, and everything was new to you. You will walk away with it with a completely different perspective. Playing it for too long as end-game warps how you view everything, it changes how you approach everything, it makes it so that you can’t always see the better.

We have completely sacrificed immersion in this game for cheap returns.

There are no leaks in this game except for a bit of data mining. The only reason they seem legitimate sometimes is because ArenaNet takes inspiration from the community during development and changes course.

[HoT SPOILERS]
Did you know that on YouTube, there’s videos of someone predicting the entire storyline of the Sylvari, that they belong to Mordremoth, etc. years before Heart of Thorns was even announced? And of course, people thought this was a leak of early, abandoned material, when its more likely that ArenaNet saw this and say “hey, this matches up pretty well with lore, let’s change things up a bit!”.

Of course, they can’t just come out and say this, because there’s alot of legal red tape in the world of game development.

The core of the problem is this:
Beastmode removes the play how you want aspect from the Ranger, something that, in the past, this class excelled at beyond all others. The Ranger was capable of fulfilling so many roles, from pure DPS, to healtank/evasiontank, to full support healer, and this is a forced attempt at playing a certain way.

Its like every Warrior being forced into Phalanx Strength, or every Guardian being forced to carry a staff for speed. Its not a feature, its just irritating.

There are several solutions:
1) Allow to stay in Beastmode all the time if desired—the best way to do this is with traits that allow you to do either rotation or camping builds.
2) Compliment both power and condition builds.
3) Fix the completely missing synergy with pet traits and skills-this would be most of the power introduced by the spec alone. Pet traits, pet swapping, Shouts, etc. could open up entirely new worlds for the Ranger. -OR-
4) At least allow the use of the pet’s F2 skill (again, trait synergy).

It wouldn’t be too powerful because remember, the Ranger is losing a 15-20k health sink and around 33% of their damage for this to happen.

Deimos Tel Arin.7391:

Scrambles.2604:

i think for a lot of people WvW is endgame.

i think originally they intend for WvW and sPvP to be end game.

unfortunately, guild wars 2 attracted way too many PvE care bears.

them PvE care bears do not WvW or sPvP and kept demanding for more PvE content.

and so we have living stories nowadays.

For me its the opposite, I played RvR MMOs for more than seven years, and before that I played many FPS games and other PvP games like Starcraft, and still do. I am not by any means a “PvE Carebear”. I mostly hang out in PvE in GW2 because its RvR and PvP implementations are , quite frankly, terrible. They keep trying to be something that does not work well in RPGs. The content team needs to learn that this isn’t Quake 3: Team Arena, and start giving us other ways to play besides capturing locations or rolling over everything in zergs for various forms of points and loot.

Anyone who has played a true(typically DAoC-based) RvR MMO with hours-long open-field battles and strategic sieges of forts knows that GW2’s smash-together-and-explode approach to zerg vs zerg battles is little more than lazy coding. At this time, roaming and other small skirmish fights is the only salvation for WvW. Running across a map, dying to 100 people and waypointing only to do it again… ?

If you’re going to have such a zergy, mindless game, at least add a decent rezz system that doesn’t involve having to start over every five minutes.

Guild Wars refers to an event in Human history in the game. Not guilds.

Boon Duration actually used to be a dominant stat because it strengthens DPS builds by ensuring that Might and Fury were always available, even solo. However, it got heavily nerfed during the update to runes so it is unlikely that they would give it a more prominent role at this time since it so recently changed.

Furthermore, Condition Duration would need to get the same treatment.

Do everything in Explorer achievement category (except the legendary stuff) and finish getting world completion while you’re at it.

Unless you’ve seen all of Central Tyria including the hidden nooks and crannies, such as all the jumping puzzles (there’s several dozen) and mini-dungeons, there is still more to do before moving on to the new maps.

When PoF hits, start training new characters so you can unlock the elites and experience all of the different playstyles in old and new content.

I do advice to get at least one character in full ascended, to serve as your main, but I don’t recommend to do it by grindy means. Instead, spread yourself out and obtain it piece by piece by all the different means neccessary like fractals, guild missions, HoT, LS3, collections that reward ascended armor/weapons, etc.

The main reason to do this is because after you do, it costs only the price of an exotic set to change all of your stats in the mystic forge, so you can modify that character freely (for like 30-40g) going forward though it can be tricky to change the stats on ascended jewelry and needs some research.

It makes it alot easier to approach future content.

I also recommend trying to create at least one legendary. Its just something that ever player has to do, even if its a huge grind. I didn’t feel particularly rewarded at the end but I was glad to finally get it out of the way.

It was made harder in the hotfix. I got it by using arcane shield to block the initial attacks, start stomping and then mist form.

Couldn’t manage it on any other class because of the modifications to make her start attacking sooner, most of the guides are no longer relevant. I couldn’t manage to dodge both of her initial volleys and still dodge the knock back.

Note: Blocks do not work on the knock back, only the volleys. When stomping her you either need to evade or use an invulnerability skill.

Alice.8694:

Simple guide to stomping Scarlet regardless of class…
http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Ash_Legion_Spy_Kit

Every time I tried stealth, she just looked right at me in it and attacked me. My SO got the same results on her Thief, unfortunately…

Achivement points are a measure of play time and overall mixed experience. What this means is not that the player has done any dungeons or anything, but that they can learn. Its signifies a pretty good chance that the player has been playing the game long enough to know how to adapt to a situation with a little advice.

Chances are that if a player has a high amount of AP, and is not completely dumb, one or two runs through a dungeon is all that they need to learn it.

On top of this, when mistakes occur (even pro players make mistakes constantly, its a part of the inefficient Human nature), someone with alot of experience will better understand how to salvage the situation into something useful.

For example, yesterday at Balthazar temple event, we were killing the priest, and the commander there kept saying DPS the priest! because of the timer, but he didn’t realize that he had no DPS because there were 20 players dead around him from the Champion Risen Abomination that everyone was ignoring. If it wasn’t for smart players resurrecting each other, pulling it away and salvaging the situation, they would not have killed the priest with the five players they had left in enough time.

As I have said before, skill isn’t just learning and refining repetitive behaviors, its also benig able to adapt to a changing situation.

Before you know it, the Norn will be drinking water instead of ale.

They should seriously rename the game to Autohit Hero by this point. All changes since release have basically been to create larger and larger zergs in PvE and WvW. I know that they want that “epic” feeling but its just getting plain stupid now.

Honestly I prefer the new textboxes over 11111 spam from last season.

They really need to learn to extend the new content though. It seems like they put all of this effort in for something that you play in a few minutes. ANet is experienced at alot of things, but they are terrible with creating effective filler.

So now that this map is added to completion rewards, can we please get a few vistas and hero points spread across it? Its a wonderful detailed map with lots of places where such things could be added, and I’ve been waiting for ANet to flesh it out ever since it original release several years ago.

Old content needs some love now and then.

icelove.4259:

1) You will need level 3 Nuhoch Lore Mastery so you can speak with the Merchant.
2) The Merchant is at the started map waypoint area at Tangled Depths.
3) Insignia/inscription cost 250 Ley Line Crystals each.
4) I was make the Insignia but it seems a bug because when i was ready to make the new piece of armor at Mystic forge the Insigia dont show up at Mystic Forge boxes.

Hope i help and Good Luck.

I think you can also buy it from Tarir, in an underground cavern in the top right corner of the city there is a Nuhoc Mastery Vendor there in some water.

Also sometimes he is at Itzel waypoint in Verdant Brink.

You are not getting rewards that you didn’t get before. They just grouped them all up every few levels instead of spreading them out.

These rewards previously belonged to the Personal Story. Do the math yourself – although the PS gives better rewards now, it does so far less often than before due to all the removing and shuffling of the chapters. And while the overall quality of rewards is higher (e.g Rares instead of Masterwork), its also simultaneously lower in the grand scheme of things (no exotic sigils, some unsalvageable equipment, etc.).

The “new” rewards you get from level-up only just make up for it. This is why so many people are irritated at ANet calling time/level gating “rewarding”.

Regarding this specific reward, by level 38 people are using fine kits, not basic. When a player has to wait seven levels to get something that costs 88 copper at a merchant, it is basically saying “I think you’re cheap and will be satisfied with this”.

It’s not innovative, its shameful.

I don’t know what you mean. A bunker Guardian is almost impossible to kill 1on1 in either WvW or PvP game modes. A Thief may succeed in killing you, but that’s only if he keeps resetting the fight at a rate faster than you can.

Every other class won’t even come close to the same level of longevity and will eventually tire out and die to your meager staff hits.

The problem is more that a Guardian must fight every opponent due to being slow. There is no escape from any battle, and even though the Guardian can keep resetting the fight with their 32sec full HP heal, shouts, virtues, and converting conditions to boons every 48sec (ALL of these dispel when traited properly), ultimately they have to either win or die because there is never any escape.

It would be great if they had some method of chosing their battles like every other class has access to (Thief Stealth/Initiative leaps, Warrior GS/Hammer/CC, Mesmer Stealth/Blink/Portal, Elementalist Teleport/CC, Ranger LB Stealth/GS Leap, Necromancer Fear/DS tanking/Walk).

Too bad they screwed the roleplayers in every way imagineable. I don’t RP, but wow, they really dropped the ball on this in that department…

I want to praise this update, I do. But I just can’t knowing how much some people had their whole game world turned upside down, especially knowing that some of those people were the biggest buyers of gems in the game.

And on top of that, some of the nicest people in the game.

Some armor sets are completely diferent between races too. Look at Winged armor between Asura and Charr. The difference is staggering. Asura use the male versions, yet it looks far more feminine on the Asura…

This stuff should really just be options, for reason I posted about before.

I don’t know why male players play female characters, aside from the general stereotypes that they do it to look at sexy bottoms all day.

But females play male characters to avoid harassment or special treatment.

Personally I wish for less gender segregation in the game. The Charr and Asura come close, but still force you into only one armor set. It would be nice if in the future MMOs would allow people to play more androgynous characters.

The game engine is built upon the GW1 engine, it was not written from the ground up. The main differences is that they rewrote it entirely for shaders.

Don’t listen to people who attribute it to a certain version of DirectX, etc. They don’t know what they are talking about. The version of DirectX has absolutely nothing to do with how fast your game runs, but your programming practices.

Most DX10-12 functionality is already exposed to DX9 via vendor support.

This game was well written for its time but it was not meant to handle the huge zergs introduced by the megaserver update. In other words, the game currently has far more players in each area than it was designed for. This is blatantly obvious when you see how badly zergs overrun everything outside of Silverwastes.

WvW always had this problem due to the design of that game mode.

And no, threading or using more cores (“CPUs”) will not fix this. It is a common misconception. Everything in the game loop always has to run on a single core otherwise you get network and timing synchronization issues.

All that can fix it is tighter, highly optimized object code. But that requires extensive developer effort to profile, examine and implement.

“Dear ANet, I made a legendary weapon fully knowing that I made a legendary weapon. I had [insert rediculously long time] to think about this. Still I did it anyway. Would you please compensate me now because I deserve it?”

This is all I see from the forums anymore, especially regarding this patch. I’m just going to have to start ignoring half the threads created until the patch is live…

A month from now, nobody will remember or care about any of this.

Renholder.2481:

And because ppl like you Nage.1520 who doesent care about game mechanics were getting more updates that are ruining game I dont care how many ppl ill see on map i want to do my stuff without problems and this update made a lot of problems…

Dead servers with empty maps wasn’t ruining the game? What planet do you live on?

The game had basically been reduced to nothing but high-level farming prior to this. Almost no one did anything outside of farming world bosses, temple events in Orr and run champion trains in Queensdale and Frostgorge Sound.

The only people who did otherwise were dungeon and fractal runners, PvPers, WvWers and role players (on some servers). Of those, most of them were unaffected except PvPers who got some improvements and roleplayers who get screwed.

The biggest problems from megaserver right now are open world difficulty being way too easy due to the lack of proper scaling, and guild missions…

But honestly these problems are smaller than what we had before.

And they can be fixed.

Seriously, I avoid joining them just because doing so means that I completely lose track of my party and guildmates, the people that I play with all the time. So I can have someone asking for help on voicechat and have no idea where they are in the blue sea of nameplates unless I have echolocation on.

Its just.. too easy for squads to become am undistinguishable blob.

Contrary to popular believe, women do not hate how armors are depicted in games. They hate when its the only way armor is depicted in some games. That’s not the case in Guild Wars 2 – there are plenty of alternative armors. And if you took out all of the frilly and skimpy skirts and dresses you’d get alot of backlash, because stereotypes are mostly overexadurated and very few people actually hate this.