Guild Wars 2

You won’t get an answer here. Send any exploits you find like this to ‘exploits@arena.net’ without the quotes.

Vol.7601:

I have to agree here. Usually I defend Anet against the unreasonable fanbase, but I think this new pick is enroaching on P2W territory. It doesn’t matter that the sprockets are cheap, but the fact that it does give you extra items over your standard pick is not good.

Unlimited picks are convenience, which is fine. Unlimited picks which give out extra loot which is not accessable by normal picks is not.

I logged on because I wanted to post, but found that Vol said exactly what I was already going to say. I agree with his sentiment entirely; it is not okay that this new pick gives bonus loot.

Raids should only have one mode, the hardest possible mode available. If you want easier content, dungeons and fractals are still available to play. Raids are not designed to be inclusive, they are designed to push players to get better. You say you’re a casual and a good player, so if you get with a good group you should be able to beat it. You may fail many times, but when you beat it that will be an incredibly satisfying moment—Those moments are what raids are all about; the catharsis from defeating a seemingly insurmountable foe is incredible. You, too, can enjoy these bosses if you’re willing to put forth the effort and join a group to overcome it.

The solution for this is to give these skin items a merchant sell value of 5s (or more), meaning that no player could put a buy order up for them for anything less than 5.01s, which ups the cost associated with this level of advertising 100-fold. I somehow doubt people are going to put 1 million buy orders at 5.01s seeing as that would cost 50,100g to do. I guess if you had that money and really wanted to put that many buy orders up you still could, but just having that sellback value would discourage this behavior heavily.

Raids were and continue to be a great idea, and the raid team continues to be exceptionally responsive to player concerns and very open to player ideas. They stand as an example of success for other teams in the company, and the tech that has been developed in support of raids has already been leveraged elsewhere in the game to great effect. As a specialist, they are among my favorite people to work with, and I say that without any influence from the ANet crew.

Raids may not appeal to some people, but they are a great success that has minimal to no schedule impact on the rest of the game. You are not losing an earlier LS3 because of raids.

Funset.7893:

Tying the achievement points to exclusive rewards is absolutely disgusting.

Getting rewards for playing the game how you want to play it is in no way disgusting. You don’t need these rewards, and if you really want them, you can earn them through hard work. Furthermore, the fact that you can get them guaranteed by achieving certain goals that certain players put a lot of effort towards is great. This is the kind of reward system GW2 needs more of.

Necromancer isn’t terrible, but it’s naive to think that “it’s fine” means it shouldn’t be better. There are a number of completely non-viable weapons, a number of skills that never get taken anywhere even by the worst players, a number of QOL issues that could yet be resolved, a number of balance concerns with legitimate foundations, and more. These things are exactly why this forum exists; these issues should be made public so that people like the developers and like myself can compile these issues into reports and get them worked and out to you all, the players.

The threads that don’t help are the threads like this one that just berate people without offering any meaningful discussion.

I don’t think anything is broken, but I certainly don’t think this is good for the game to have the options for obtaining your precursor be “absurd luck” or “absurd farming”. Precursor crafting can’t come soon enough to at least equalize the values somewhere and provide people an alternate means of (guaranteed) acquisition beyond throwing gold at someone.

CoF is obscenely fast regardless of the group. My pockmark groups with engineers and rangers and necromancers run CoF 1 in 8 minutes, which is only marginally slower than a truly optimized group with mesmers, warriors, and thieves. The problem is that CoF is too easy, too fast, and too profitable. Yes, I said it, it’s too profitable. There is zero reason to run any other dungeon unless you’re desperate for the skins. Hell, it’s even faster to farm CoF and buy other exotic armor stat combinations on the TP than to farm the dungeons that drop tokens which give those stat combinations!

I posted more about this the other week here.

Shinki.8045:

There are spots where you can jump over the walls. Not sure if it is intended or not, but it’s not always necessary.

ANet has said that these are intentional and clever uses of the terrain by the playerbase.

Necromancer: Down State 1

Hi, I’m Dusk, and I am pretty excessively wealthy in-game. I am so wealthy, in-fact, that I can’t appreciate most items in-game because “I can just buy that outright off the TP”. In spite of all of this, I still don’t have a legendary weapon, and the reason is because I have to work on earning a weapon for myself in order to be able to use it. If I don’t have the feeling of earning something, it has no value to me. Earning it is the only thing that makes me want to use it in the first place (besides obviously looking cool). Otherwise I may as well just sell it. My problem is that if I just buy a legendary item, it has no meaning, and I can’t use it; I sell it again. If I buy any appreciable part of the legendary, that’s a huge problem too because “why don’t I just sell the legendary then”. Buying a precursor for me is therefore a big problem because I can’t appreciate the end result after just shelling out some amount of cash that has no sentimental value at all to me.

I wanted precursor crafting so badly because of that.

The idea of building a precursor was so important to me because I could then work toward something, farm some mats, grind some events, whatever. I don’t even care if grinding Frostgorge Sound or doing repeated daily dungeon runs was more efficient, I’ll go out and farm the random basic mats I need myself. You may think I’m crazy, but for my legendary progress thus far I went out of my way to go and farm 250 ghost peppers on my own. It got me out in Orr, and it got me helping out random people, enjoying the game’s content, and experiencing zones I haven’t seen since I maxed all 8 classes long ago. It took me days to get those Ghost Peppers and many, many hours. I could have earned the 7g to buy the stack in about 1 to 2 hours of proper dungeon/FGS grinding, but I chose not to because doing it this way made it feel more like it was my progress, like I was truly out in the world and making a thing of epic proportions.

Doing things that way:

• …keeps me enjoying the game doing different content.
• …feels more natural than just grinding the same stuff over and over and then buying what I want from other players.

I wanted to go out into the world and build a precursor, and then use it to finally finish my legendary, Incinerator. The ability to make constant and continual progress towards the goal of a precursor, and by extension a legendary, is critical for both appreciating and enjoying the legendary for me. I don’t think I’m the only one, either. A lot of people since the game came out have expressed similar concerns. They want to earn their legendary item. They want to build it from the ground up. They want a journey for their precursor that makes it feel epic.

This post was devastating to me.

I had been hoping for precursor crafting more than anything. I don’t care what the materials are, and I don’t care how inefficient it is for me to go out into the world and get them, I want to build my precursor. I’ve been holding out for this enhancement for over a year, and thought that this April feature patch would finally be my time to have a legendary. I suppose not. I’m not going to whine, though; I just want to tell this story of mine so that ArenaNet knows how important it is to me, and hopefully to a lot of other players. I have helped some of my friends build their legendaries by helping them with their precursors. It means a lot to them when they don’t have to grind gold and go buy their legendaries, but someone else gets lucky, or helps out, or the whole guild pitches in and gets it for them. I’m glad that makes those people happy. But for me? I need the sentimental attachment to the process of making a legendary, otherwise I simply won’t enjoy it and won’t keep the result.

Please, ANet, make this a priority for PvE development in the future. Keep your WvW and PvP teams doing the wonderful things they do and give those guys a lot of attention, too, but when you think about “What you should be working on” in PvE, always think of the tale of the hundreds who sit at 3/4 completion for their legendaries and wait for you.

Thanks for the awesome game, and I hope that one day I can have a shiny to show off that actually feels shiny to me.

I’m 25 and I love this game more with every patch.

I think it is inexcusable to have WvW Season 2 begin without account bound WXP. This is a major failing on the WvW team’s part.

It is always, and will always, be released on the specified date in the Seattle (GMT-8) timezone. All dates on all releases and all announcements are relative to the Seattle (GMT-8) timezone unless otherwise specified. I prefer this standardized approach to any alternative, and it even sometimes trips me up too.

No, because as much as I enjoy content I like to feel rewarded for my time so that I can make progress towards in-game goals.

Pifil.5193:

Hi Anthony,

I appreciate what you’re saying however I simply can’t plan to be at home for the Karka Queen Monday to Friday, it’s just not possible, at 9 and 6 I’ll be at or commuting to or from work and because of the whole work thing I won’t be making the one in the middle of the night.

If you changed the order they spawn in from day to day like I suggested in my other post in this thread then it’d be possible to at least try her every now and then.

Day 1: Karka Queen -> Tequatl -> Evolved Jungle Wurm
Day 2: Tequatl -> Evolved Jungle Wurm -> Karka Queen
Day 3: Evolved Jungle Wurm -> Karka Queen -> Tequatl

The weekends aren’t much better.

Similarly why spawn only one boss at a time? It’s not like there’ll be a shortage of people to play with now, why have everyone playing on, for example, 6 Fire Elemental maps when you could have 2 Fire Elemental maps, 2 Svanir Shaman maps and (maybe) 2 Dredge Commissar maps attempts? Surely the choice is worth it.

If you doubled or tripled the number of bosses that spawned at a time it’d be more convenient for people and you would be able to spawn all the world bosses on timers. Maybe off peak you can drop the number of bosses that spawn at a time to better suit the server numbers.

+1, this post really hit the nail on the head for me. I cannot participate in a lot of content I used to enjoy because of these changes. That is unacceptable.

Gaile Gray.6029:

May I ask why you feel that way? Why have two conflicting or competing things going on in a time period when many people have a lot going on in their lives — family obligations, travel, parties, events — which leaves them with less time to log in to their favorite game?

I respect this side of the argument, but consider also that many people will finally be able to take some vacation time from work or will be off of school or some such that gives them more time to think about playing games. I speak for myself when I say that my time on GW2 will increase substantially over the winter holiday season even though I will also be spending a lot of time on familial obligations.

Gaile Gray.6029:

Why not have each release get the spotlight and the player attention that each so richly deserves?

A rehashed holiday — by both design and definition — is going to garner far less attention because it is exactly what we’ve seen before with a very slight twist. Halloween 2014, for example, was fun and something to do, but certainly didn’t shine much in the limelight due to the fact that the core content was identical to the previous year. Given that the same will be true of Wintersday, having another content update alongside it will really give players something to be wowed over.

Gaile Gray.6029:

And why roll out content (some are suggesting just days before a holiday break) that would be difficult if not impossible to maintain with holiday travel, developer unavailability, etc.?

We pride ourselves on addressing issues as promptly as possible, but if an issue arises over a holiday break, it can be very challenging to take care of a problem. (I know this from personal experience: I worked with a server programmer through a full New Year’s Day to address an issue years ago. He was able to get things back to normal, but it was asking a lot to do that.)

This is a much more valid point for sure, but at the same time I think should be ameliorated by proper project planning. As a project manager for dozens of developers myself, I can tell you that I’m releasing a major update to a piece of software to the government next week that we are perfectly suited to support even with hotfixes because we planned for the necessary resources ahead of time. This leaves no surprises, and keeps the people involved happy since we coordinate ahead of time who can be available at what times for possible work.

Gaile Gray.6029:

Saying “This is what I want” is fine. But is what you want really logical? In my opinion the decision of the two release dates makes sense on several levels.

I think it is, and I think I’ve appropriately explained why. I don’t think you’re obliged to follow my suggestions (or anyone’s here), but I at least want to make sure you understand it and why it can work, and more importantly why it is a good suggestion despite the difficulties in getting it handled.

The pros here are numerous:

• More content for a long break
• 2-week cadence successfully maintained
• Players feel like they have short and long term goals because they can finish working on their luminescent armor sets (and other stuff) over the long break
• Natural continuity of content (finishes with a big finale in the same year)

Hopefully now you’ll understand where I am coming from.

Appearance options!? Oh you got my attention; does that mean new skins, or will we just see skin sets recycled and cannibalized from other PvE content? Please say it’ll be new and exclusive in appearance because I’d love nothing more than to look awesome for playing WvW.

Au contraire, good sirs; they should add a Rich Powerful Blood Vein to the game instead! :P

You can get rid of the personal story by finishing it. I consider that the true reward for finishing the personal story, and it’s why I’ve finished it on all of my characters.

I agree with everyone else. There is absolutely nothing positive gained from this change for anyone. We have lost two important functionalities here:

• Can no longer view the fluctuation in the price of gems
• Can no longer select how many gems or how much gold you want

These absolutely must be reverted; anything else is unacceptable.

Let me start by saying that generic models are great and I always have them on, but there are problems with the implementation that bother me a lot. I have a couple suggestions that hopefully people will agree with, and hopefully the ANet developers will feel are worth the time investment to refine this feature.

1. Add an option to enable Generic Models in Unranked Queue

Currently you can only use them in Ranked Queue, and that’s among the only reasons I play Ranked instead of Unranked. I hate playing Unranked and having to figure out what some Charr in the bulkiest animation-blocking armor is doing.

2. Add an option to enable Generic Models for Allies

I want to know when my ally Guardian is about to cast the full heal in his Tome so I can be in range, but sometimes he’s some minimum size Asura and I can’t tell what he’s doing.

I think if these two options were implemented, it’d be of huge benefit to the PvP community. Thanks!

Vavume.8065:

I am 100% behind this decision, Elite specs are not called Elite specs for nothing, they are supposed to be something special, do you really think that you would just get that handed on a plate to you? either work for it or don’t, but stop embarrassing yourselves by crying about it.

I’m sorry, I thought doing 100% map completion just to unlock the elite specialization counted as working for it. The devaluation of core Tyrian hero point challenges combined with the inordinate number needed for the elite spec and the fact that you have to unlock everything else first is truly unnecessary and something worth being frustrated over.

The only education that needs to happen here is that you need to educate yourself to not assume that the way you enjoy playing the game is the way everyone enjoys (or should enjoy) playing the game.

For me, skipping is an important mechanic in dungeons. Knowing when a fight is worth it in a time-sense and whether or not it can be safely skipped without lots of deaths is important. Sometimes, a dungeon is only fun at all because it has challenging skipping segments that I think are worth the risk, and that I know I can make work. A good example of that is TA Forward/Forward.

Anyway, this discussion has been done a million times before, so I won’t press further. Hopefully you feel better after yelling and screaming about it on the forums.

kRiza, all of your points are non sequiturs, and are completely irrelevant to the topic.

Raids are the only thing that’s keeping the difficulty-seeking player base interested and logging into GW2 consistently. It may not be an enormous subset of the playerbase, but it’s a significantly vocal and valuable subset. It also gives average-skill players something to work toward in a PvE sense so that there feels like real end-game content.

I hope for me and other people like me that ANet continues developing raids well into future expansions and beyond.

P.S. Assuming that raids are somehow responsible for low revenue numbers is unfounded and ridiculous.

This is a terrible idea, Josh.

In GW1 it was okay to have one-time items because of a few things:

• They were costume clothes only, and only headgear at that
• They were unable to be sold, and if you didn’t want to hold onto them, you could recreate them at a vendor after initially acquiring them whenever you wanted
• You received them for free merely by participating in the event that gave them

What you are doing if you make these skins one-time only is the following:

• Exacerbating the demand for a to-be discontinued skin that is not subtle or town clothing only, but visibly, audibly, and significantly impressive and thus extremely high in demand as weapon skins
• Making these items one-time without any method to store/retrieve them properly and as many times as the player who acquired them wanted (bank slots wasted doesn’t count, look at how good GW1’s system was for these)
• Making players able to sell and trade in these discontinued items which creates huge markets that people will take advantage of to take advantage of players who couldn’t be there (it’s how the market goes, but this will leave a sour taste in any newcomer to SAB’s mouth)
• Making players feel compelled to farm your content to get these to-be discontinued skins rather than enjoy the content the way you, yourself, said you want them to

Let me tell you this right now. I enjoy SAB, and I play it casually, jump around, collect baubles, and basically do everything that you’re supposed to do in SAB. Until now, I didn’t feel compelled to farm the everliving crap out of SAB because you said the skins would likely return, our baubles would carry over, and so on. Now, by spinning a full 180 and saying they won’t return to make this release “special”, you make me want to spend every living moment in GW2 farming these skins so that I don’t miss out, particularly because GW2 has no proper PvE system for restoring these items once we get them. It’d be different if once we got them we could store them in a locker and retrieve them as many times as we wanted, but that is not the case. Each skin is one-time use, which makes it even more imperative that I farm my brain out to get as many as possible.

What you have just proposed you do by making these skins one-time use ruins the spirit of the SAB, and encourages the farming you, yourself, said you wanted to get rid of.

Please make the smart decision and bring them back with every release.

Areann.1304:

We used 1.000.000 influance to unlock everything so fast. Over 80 members participated and we had 7 commanders where we could rally to if one was found. We had 2 seconds left on the timer. So yes it’s very challenging. Finding them is the hard parth though, you can kill them with 10-15 people.

My God, small guilds really do have no chance at completing these things.

I will pay 1200 gems for an account unlock. I will not pay 800 gems for a one-time use skin. That’s what I will and will not do with my money.

Next time I want Colin’s response on a thread, I’ll quote something he said out of context first!

You’re mistaken, OP. All builds are usable, but only a select few builds are optimal. That goes without saying, though; no matter what you do some builds will be more useful for certain content than others, and that’s okay. You just have to decide if you want to play optimally or not, and make sure to set your expectations both for groups and for your personal speed based on that.

It’s nice that you’re an electrician, but you apparently have no idea how software development works. Bugs happen and are inevitable, and if you don’t get any, your software isn’t complex enough (and sure as the stars isn’t a video game).

I posted this on reddit, too, but I have different friends that read different places, and I think this would also be something I’d like a developer to read for their own personal edification. Thus, I share it with you all here, too.

So, it’s been 7 (or 8?) months of hardships, challenge, farming, grinding, mystic forging, and friendships. I’m not particularly lucky, and I’m definitely not particularly wealthy. I’ve lived at under 50g for pretty much the entirety of my GW2 career. I’ve argued that the prices of precursors are fine, talked on the forums, speculated and made money on the TP, flipped just to see what it was like, forged tons of rares hoping for that precursor, saved a ton of money to just buy it off the TP, and tons of stuff.

But at long, long last, I crafted my legendary: Frostfang.

The thing about this is that it was a journey for me. I took screenshots of every forging, and every step I made towards the goal. But for me, the goal wasn’t the legendary. I think it looks cool, but would never use it on my characters. My resolve was that I would finish it for the journey, and then sell it, and hopefully make back all the money and time (in some form) that I had invested.

Now it is listed.

The moment I listed it, I felt a wave of fear wash over me. I was staking a 7 month time investment on the hope that some wealthy soul would buy it from me. Lots of things crossed my mind at that moment:

• Maybe I should’ve held onto it, waited for a high buy order, and sold it for much less to guarantee the sale!
• Maybe I should have undercut by way more than I did!
• Maybe I’ll get undercut and my goal will waste away on the TP being enjoyed by no one!
• Maybe I should’ve just equipped the stupid thing even if I don’t like how it looks; it’ll get upgraded to ascended anyway!

Oh my. And so there it sits on the TP, lowest sell order, and here I sit, terrified that it might not pull through and that I might regret to some extent the 7 month adventure I took and completed. Did I have fun along the way? Sometimes, yes, because I did enjoy map completion and getting karma and so on, but sometimes no, because I hated farming (that was ineffective), I hate CoF with an undying passion, and I hate how it took me 300 tries in the forge to get my clovers (Curse you, Zomorros!). It was a mixed bag, but like all journeys, you take the good with the bad and make do. I think, ultimately, I made the right decision listing it instead of selling low; I want whoever buys that item to feel like they, too, have reached the end of a challenging journey, and that they will feel great as a result.

I have currently delisted every other item I have on the TP, and am buying nothing. The next time I see that little red exclamation mark next to the TP symbol, I want to know exactly what it means. I want to know that my work has meant something to someone, and that someone somewhere will wear that Frostfang with pride, the one that I spent 7 months creating. I want to meet that person, because that would be awesome, but even if I don’t, that’s okay with me. If that person reads this thread somewhere down the line, somehow, in some language, I want him or her to know that I say “Thank you”, not only for buying it if/when that happens, but for wielding it with pride.

So yeah, maybe there are hundreds of these legendaries in-game, but for me, this one is a culmination of a lot of effort, and I want to see that effort go and be used by someone who will love it… And yes, it truly feels legendary.

Thanks for reading, and feel free to share your stories in this thread too if you have something similar.

Pixelpumpkin.4608:

I am very excited now.

Prepare to be let down, then.

Use the wardrobe to preview them, and then you can preview with whatever dye combinations you want.

The reason they nerfed all the other spots like this is because those spots had mobs which dropped loot. In this case, they drop no loot and therefore have no adverse effect on the economy, and are thus fine. If you want to grind this for experience, it’s fine and it’s not an exploit.

OlliX.1705:

As it stands now every class has at least one viable build in raids. If we’re going to be forced to run mirror comp in order to cover the whole party for quickness, revenant won’t be needed in raids and classes that don’t benefit much from alacrity will be pushed out by other classes that benefit more from it. I fear that this patch may kill the great build diversity we currently enjoy.

Yeah, the proposed changes are devastating to PvE build and class diversity and awful for the health of the game.

Precursor crafting or bust. I couldn’t care less about anything else at this point.

Yeah, Colin, that’s great! Make sure to check some of the champions added to the Temple of Lyssa and other meta events in Orr, too. That risen wraith isn’t the only one totally out of whack.

It was Kralkatorrik’s master plan all along; cut off supply lines from Elona so it’d cost more to upgrade cores into lodestones! Curse you to the Underworld, elder dragons!

The real reward for completing your personal story is that the UI for it goes away in the top-right of your screen. I complete it on all of my characters simply for this reason*.

*and the 2 Flame Rams.

TheFrighteningFrenchFry.3275:

wait druid? What’s good with druid?

gin.7158:

Interesting, I don’t play ranger. Why do people want it? spotter and frost spirit, CC bot?
Or preparing druid for hard encounter? is druid better than the base ranger?

Kitty.1502:

Ranger’s support is inferior to other support, though they can be good dps, but they are not meta material.

In response to all of these, let’s revisit what changes they made to Ranger and Druid that make it in-kitten-credible.

• Glyph of Empowerment: +10% teamwide damage for 6 seconds every 16 seconds.
• Spotter: +150 precision to the whole party.
• Frost Spirit: +10% damage 70% of the time when attacking, no ICD.
• Sun Spirit: If you have anyone with condition damage, namely a Sinister Engineer, this becomes huge. It’s still a big DPS bonus even without a condition class, though.
• Grace of the Land: Everyone you hit with an Astral Form skill gains 3% a damage and condition damage increase for 8 seconds. This buff stacks 5 times. Note that Rejuvenating Tides pulses in an AOE 5 times, so it’s really easy to stack this and bail Astral Form to save DPS.

This is comparable to what a Warrior brings to a party, and overlaps exceptionally well. I would be very surprised if a Druid doesn’t get brought considering all of these buffs and everything else a Ranger already brings.

If you want exclusivity and prestige, pick a skin that is actually exclusive and requires something beyond dollars/euros or gold. If it can be bought with gems or gold, it will never amount to anything beyond a gold deposit. Period.

Dungeons are strung together with difficult-to-parse scripting and are very hard to diagnose when issues come up. Fractals create an environment that’s much easier to simply drop in a new Fractal, whereas dungeons require massive amounts of terrain design and map locations, and require lots of very specific custom skins associated with them. In the case of Fractals, a lot of these things are much lower impact.

I’m not surprised ANet dropped dungeons, honestly. They were an unsustainable system.

As far as I’m concerned, earning (0.2 * 3 * SPROCKET VALUE) more on any node in-game is hell of a P2W. The entire purpose of the game is looking awesome, and looking awesome costs money. A pick that gives you more money per swing is definitely in the realm of P2W for a game like this.

That’s true of most things. Sellers of goods will increase the price of their goods to offset taxation costs.

Smooth Penguin.5294:

Conclusion: Either way you look at it, prices should climb temporarily. How high it goes, no one can be sure. But if you want to turn a quick profit, start acting right away.

Yes, act right away so I can make even more money off of your being late to the party.

Seriously, if this can’t be resolved in-game for technical reasons, then compensation is in order for the affected players. Mail them the karma and the other rewards to make up for this and then people will call it square. The notion that we just have to “deal with it” is unacceptable, and totally uncharacteristic for an otherwise helpful and customer-driven company like ArenaNet.

Fay.2357:

Generally speaking, the disqualification of a participant in a tournament after the tournament has concluded does not result in rematches for all games that they played. The matches occurred within tournament rules, and so the results of those matches are valid. The only change is the removal of the said participant from the final results, and all other participants in the tournament are moved up to account for that.

+1

This is how competitive tournaments function as a general rule, and I would expect this tournament to maintain that.