Guild Wars 2

Organizing a 10 person team. In 7800 hours I haven’t met 9 other people who are regularly in the same time zone and have the same availability as I on a regular basis.

The hard part of having Zojja around for any story is getting Felicia Day to have time to do the voice. But I also really love Zojja and hope we see more of her in the story.

That might be handy. On the other hand you can always tell if you’re in heart range — even before you finish exploring to the heart — because when you are there is a UI entry in the upper right listing the tasks that will fill that heart, and you get a bwomp sound when that activates. If you step out of bounds, the UI entry vanishes.

Maybe they are moving the raid portal out of VB so that people hanging out preparing for a raid don’t take up space in a map where players are trying to do events. I have seen several complaints since the raid was released about players waiting to raid taking up space in VB.

Read the whole patch notes and you can answer that yourself

Profession-based specialists were actually in the pipeline originally, but due to lack of community interest only a couple professions had people for them, so the idea was canned. Instead, myself and the other specialists sort of became the “balance specialists” for our area. I’ve submitted a lot of feedback regarding balance as it pertains to Fractals and Raids and even general PvE.

TheBravery.9615:

The forum tag that goes beside my name may unintentionally influence forum user’s beliefs that I might represent the interest of one profession over another profession if my forum tag is specified to one profession. (E.g. become warrior forum specialist, but make a guardian balance spreadsheet. My credibility in the guardian forum will decline and people would be more inclined to disapprove of my suggestions based only on the tag beside my name) Is there any way to hide the tag?

No, but this isn’t really a problem. I’m an active poster in the PvP forums as well, for instance, and no one takes that I am the instanced PvE specialist as meaning that I have no idea what I’m talking about in PvP. Really it comes down more to how you present your posts and less what your actual title is.

It’s very important as a specialist that your tag be displayed. I get a lot of forum PMs and in-game PMs from people with great feedback for ANet that would like it to get messaged to the appropriate team. Having the title displayed tells people who to talk to and helps a lot.

As for your spreadsheets, I wouldn’t worry about those. One thing you could do is make a thread containing your spreadsheet, and then see what public opinion on your spreadsheet is. Then you could report to ANet thoughts from that discussion. This is how I field a lot of topics in the instanced PvE forums when new things come up.

The ANet team really loves having specialists, though, and if you’ve got a demonstrated effort of making awesome posts throughout the forums and have the motivation to build up reports to help make the game better, then please apply. Seriously, it is a largely thankless job, but I love seeing patch notes where things I’ve proposed to ANet through this program and with player feedback get implemented. The recent patch for the second wing of the Forsaken Thicket, for instance, was very personally rewarding for me.

Good luck if you do apply!

#BlamePeterFries?

Choose laurels if:

• You have fewer than “a lot” (probably over 100) — they are non-renewable and the only source is from the login reward (20 from defined rewards, 20 from the Chest of Loyalty).
• If you want “guaranteed” value, consistently more than the minimum of any other choice except if you get two ascended mats.

Choose ascended mats if:

• You are willing to probably end up with fewer than 20 laurels worth of T6 mats, so you have the chance to get two ascended mats.
• Or if you are currently producing ascended gear — in that case even just one mat saves you enough aggravation that it is worth it for most players.

Choose legendary:

• If you are currently working on clovers for your legendary. (It’s not as economically efficient, but the time & aggro savings makes it worth it for a lot of folks.)

I’ll not ‘sign’ this, as it isn’t something I’m especially interested in.

But, as the Devs have already said they are working on this, it’s kind of a moot point, anyway. /shrug

Unless I’m mistaken, I believe they’ve said they’re working on this feature. It’s not instantaneous when they decide to implement a feature like this.

It takes time to develop and implement.

I think they could use Guild Chat for such things.
I for example would love to have a Guild chat with Raid team to have their feedback on how the players have handled with the first wing. Did they expect so many (or so few depending on the point of view) people to beat it by now? Did they foresee the meta builds that are out now… and are they happy with this ? Have they other builds that are valid but that surprisingly nobody uses?
I’d like to have pvp team talking about the actual metas and their view of the game. Why would they (or not) like the idea of 2v2 arena? Why do they want a more aggressive gameplay ?
It could be nice to also hear the “itemization” team to explain a bit more about the new 4 stats gear : why 4? Why those ratios? Why having higher stat budget? Why always link toughness and concentration ?…..
Artists could give some insight about their inspiration for new weapon/armor sets….

All in all I think the Guild Chat could be made more interactive, like they did last week. Having the announcement of the theme and guest on Monday and taking question till Wednesday. Sometimes I must admit that Guild Chat, though being a nice thing to watch, is a bit disconnected of what we experience in game. I don’t say it is not interesting to hear designers speak about how they work for the game but sometimes having more concrete discussion about the in game side would be nice.

In most other games people would kill for a trenchcoat. GW2 is blessed in that regard.

I’m happy to see that the team is accepting feedback!

I thought that the patch was on the whole positive. The Core Tyria gliding has to be my favourite new addition. I was hoping for that to be implemented since the very start, but never believed it would actually be implemented due to the work involved. I’m tremendously glad I was wrong.

I haven’t tried the new Shatterer, the Lunar event, etc, yet, but my main points of criticism are for the Chronomancer changes.

Most of what I’m saying has already been said. The alacrity nerf feels really significant and hurts the class a lot more than it should, in my opinion. The whole spec revolved around alacrity and a nerf to it meant a nerf to Chronomancer’s personal DPS, phantasm uptime, quickness uptime, shatter frequency, elite skill frequency, etc… Yes, alacrity was a huge factor for party DPS and I agree that it should’ve been toned down, but I think that alacrity applied to the Chronomancer himself should remain at 66% effectiveness. That way, Chronomancer’s party DPS increase will be directly targeted for the nerf (which was the reason for the nerf in the first place) without hurting any other areas.

My suggestion to implement it would be to put it in Flow of Time as an additional effect on top of the “alacrity on shatter” effect. I feel it’s important to put it in a minor trait over a major one, because if it’s put in a major one (like Improved Alacrity) then it would probably just overshadow the other two major traits in the same tier. Either way, as long as Chronomancers get their 66% alacrity back in some form, I will be happy.

Well of Precognition changes depress me. The pulsing Aegis goes against the theme of the well and of the whole class, and Aegis is far too unreliable for the well to find any use anymore, especially with the relatively huge cooldown of 45 seconds. I’m curious as to why this change was necessary. I get why preventing capture point contribution was an important change, but I just don’t understand this Aegis change. The only reason I can think of for the change is to ensure that Well of Precognition doesn’t skip mechanics like Vale Guardian’s green circles.

If the well was changed back to blur AND prevented capture point contribution then that would fix things, no?

Anyway, that’s all my criticism. As a whole the patch was great, and most of the balance changes look sensible. I hope that the Chronomancer changes I mentioned will at least be considered.

There is always a group of people who invest heavily into something new, even though they know 90 days from now the warranty is going to expire and there is no guarantee their investment would have been a wise one.

Revenant was far from difficult to master. It had everything thief, guardian and warrior had been asking for years, with only one draw back.

If you didn’t see this happening from the beginning, then today you just grew up a little and have been made more the wiser for it.

Zoltar MacRoth.7146:

As someone who’s just made a revenant and is learning to play it, I have to ask….. can you shed some light on what exactly you don’t like about it? You don’t offer any details in your post.

Sword AA got nerfed hard, supposedly the power got moved to the 2 and 3 skills but they bug out so much it won’t matter. The facet of light got a cast time meaning you can’t use it when CC’d now, despite the obvious animations and icon, shield 5 healing was nerfed, the teait that granted stab after dodge was given a 5 second ICD, when really it was the GM trait in Herald that gave an extra stack of stab when you got stab that needed the ICD.

In addition, thief and necro were buffed, necro Moreso and as a necro main I can say we didn’t need THaT MUcH boon corrupt. Since rev has next to no Condi clear and relies on resistance for fighting condies he’ll be eaten alive by necromancer. And with thief damage buffs he won’t be able to trade with a thief much anymore. Finally ventari and Jalis, the two legends who need buffs to be usable, received none, which sucks because ventari is just a couple small buffs away from being a good legend (needs his salvation line cleaned up) and Jalis had no stunbreaker unless you burn 50 energy for a 1.25 second cast time for Rite of the Great Dwarf. And again with us necros getting so much boon corruption, a Hearld rev is just a ticking time bomb for us.

Added a Show All Usable Objects check box to the General Options tab of the options panel.

It is also easier to criticise on the internet when you aren’t face to face or accountable to your words. What people say online are not what people say out loud to another.

The structure of the forum also doesn’t help. The general discussion subforum has probably done more damage than what has been gained. If it never existed and sub forums were more specific or focussed, with strong moderation, the culture could have been bred differently over the past 3 years.

You say that Andrew, but old Shatterer regularly had bulging zerg groups and this fight will get easier as ppl learn new methods. If it is being beaten so easily and so utterly now, it will actually be worse ( easier) long term. That is something we have learned with almost every encounter since launch and the map will still be full long term. Achievements, dailies, collections…they all help ensure that as you increase your new playerbase.

Great job in finding the time to get this update in, it was needed and it clearly resulted from years of feedback, but I personally think it needed just a bit more challenge to give it uniqueness.

Riku.4821:

LanfearShadowflame.3189:

Yeah, I can’t get on the ‘delete their name if they have been inactive for ’x’ time or longer’ bandwagon. Nope, sorry.

I would be utterly kittened if names that I stayed up all night to get at launch were suddenly “gone” because I chose to take a break, or because life was more important than a game for a period of time.

But what if they hadn’t been on since the first week of launch?

Some of those come back. I’ve seen posts from people who’ve been gone for a long time. A new guildie was gone for 2 plus years, and has returned. There’s threads on this forum on a regular basis where people are returning after long absences, and they are returning to an intact account without char names having been stripped from it. It’s one of the bonuses to this game that you can leave and know your account is there waiting for you, untouched, when you return.

These are just suggestions and I hope to start discussions and raise awareness to the developers. I’m sure the suggestions below can be much improved – I just want to put them out there. The pathfinding one I think everyone could support, maybe even the UI scale. Achievements and LFG might be a touchy subject and I’d love to hear your thoughts. If any of this gets the attention of a developer I’d love to know, from one dev to another. I’m sure the devs have good ideas already and I’m sure similar topics exist, but here goes!

Let’s try to keep things on topic:
Please quote the topic(s) you would like to discuss in your reply.

1. UI mode and scalability
Drag and drop interface. Key bound to enter “UI mode” where one can drag and place UI elements freely within the bounds of the current resolution. Coordinates in conjunction with anchor points are to be used (or similar) so that when changing resolution the UI elements keep in “place” relative to the resolution. No save/confirm is required as the coordinates update as you drag your elements, just exit the “UI mode”. Generally these settings are account bound.

We all know about the Small, Medium, Large and Largest interface size settings. However due to upscaling techniques DSR (nVidia) or VSR (AMD) and in all honesty any monitor with a resolution above 1080p, these settings are useless.
On a 1080p monitor upscaled to 4K using said techniques, even “larger” becomes way too small. My suggestion is that when in “unlocked UI mode” every UI element gets a settings cog, wherein a slider for scale appear as well as “make unique for this character” checkbox. This means you can have a “global” setting as well as a “per character” specific setting. Your druid might want the party window wider and much bigger than you would playing a warrior, etc.

I imagine one problem being the “tooltips” or more precisely the “game tips”. If one has scaled the UI these might be off/out of place. I suggest they be bound to their parent container using logic to anchor them left, middle or right based on where its parent is located/anchored.

- – -

2. Pathfinding
Protect that dolyak! Follow this NPC, guard that thing. Whichever the case, mobs in GW2 have a set path to “walk”. If the NPC or otherwise gets aggro or starts attacking, this mob will leave its pre-defined path to deal with whatever needs dealing with. But here’s the point, rather than “understanding” the NPC has actually walked an amount of its pre-defined path, it (like a robot) walks back to the “path point” and then resets. Sometimes “walking back to the path” can be a long run and you feel like: "Why is this mob running the wrong way? Ohh.. he had to “check in” to his path point in order to continue. Sigh." This behaviour is very awkward and to me can get overhauled relatively easy.

The idea here is to “hook” into the code and logic that handles an NPC taking aggro or deviating from its pre-defined path. BEFORE triggering “back to checkpoint, pathpoint or whatnot” let’s check in a ~50yd radius or so where we are and IF we might’ve actually passed a few points on the way already. If so, calculate the closest point from where we are and simply continue from here (skipping those left behind). This “addition” in logic should be applicable globally as a extra check in the default pathfinding algorithms/code.

So to clarify, an NPC spawns and intends to go from A to B. Halfway to B the NPC deviates from it course to take action against whatever foe or otherwise it has to deal with. As is right now, our NPC (regardless of how far it has deviated from its course) always has to return to where it left off in order to continue its planned path. This makes for a very jerky and weird behaviour. And as suggested the NPC should, before returning to its “point of origin” where it left off to deal with whatever, insert a snippet of logic to check the surroundings and alter its course to something closer if possible. Fallback to its normal behaviour if nothing is found.

- – -

3. Linkable achievements (with progress)
Ever been asked to “look in your achievements”? If you don’t know where, there are numerous clicks away until you find what you were looking for.

Let’s allow for achievement chat links:
[Achievement: Undefeated]

Clicking the link spawns a modal/popup that displays the progress of the achievement on the account that sent it. Additionally there’s a button “Go to achievement” or “View achievement” or something like that (like a shortcut for opening achievements and clicking your way to that achievement). The modal stays opened and you can compare that achievement to yours. This is to be tied to the Username.1234 for looking it up using the API? Or whichever solution works. So it’d say Name.1234 on the achievement and display its progress.

What gets sent with the chat link is the account it belongs to as well as the ID of the achievement. What the modal does is basically query the achievement ID for Username.1234, pulls data and displays it. Alongside the Username.1234 optionally the amount of achievement points for said account is displayed instead of having to add this person to your friends list and there view his or her points.

- – -

4. Looking for group/raid requirement(s)

Every so often you see people searching for similarly experienced people to make runs go smooth(er). Unfortunately there aren’t any tools for knowing whether a player has enough knowledge/experience or not. This is abundantly clear when looking at raid LFG’s.

The idea here is to allow for people to tag an advertisement in the LFG-system with “experienced” (with a radio button or so). This sets up some requirements in order for you to join that group. These types of advertisements can be filtered out though.

Dungeons
If you’re looking for more to do Citadel of Flame and ticked “experienced group”, this would mean any player who wants to join would need to have completed it before (e.g. exploration done). This could be configured further by allowing to specify paths and have them as requirements too.

Fractals
If you’re into fractals and want an experienced group to run say level 94 you’d automatically get the lower AR requirement to join (lower would mean if ~140 AR is required it’d accept a 6% margin or so).

Raids
If you’re looking for more to kill Sabetha, and you’ve ticked experienced, it’ll require the person wanting to join to have killed Sabetha before.

If you meet the requirements to join the group you can. Otherwise it’s grayed out (or hidden if filtered out).

The idea here isn’t to neglect people who don’t have knowledge (yet), it’s to find experienced people easier. People are looking for experienced people to save time and knowing that everyone in the group knows what to do helps.
Unfortunately we get unexperienced people joining experienced runs which ultimately ends in them having to be removed and a good chunk of time is wasted for everyone in the entire squad/party (who in this case are experienced).

Experienced groups aren’t for learning, nor should they be. But how will people ever learn if every group is tagged with ‘experienced’?
I’ve read people are having hard times finding groups because a lot of people are already experienced. The point here would be that you can now make a group which isn’t tagged as experienced. You can’t cheese off of groups that are! You will have to learn the way the experienced players once did. If that means you’ll have a harder time finding a group then that’s the hard truth.

As a side note I do believe people who are experienced still need shards and sometimes would join inexperienced groups to get shards and teach “newbies”. I know I have! And oh, sorry for the grammar and so on.

Make short, medium and longterm goals.

Shortterm goals could be:
- get full rare/exotic gear and figure out a build for your character. if you want to be very thorough try some talent specs out in the spvp area, then commit
- complete almost finished maps
- try out spvp
- try out wvw and see if you like it and what you could imagine playing there
- start a new character
- find a guild of similar minded people to play with if you are still soloing (absolutely do this, it will increase enjoyment of the game exponentially)

Mediumterm goals:
- finish your personal story
- finish Living Story Season 2 and all the achievements
- finish the HoT Story and the achievements
- try out fractals and try to get to fractal level x
- play more spvp and wvw
- do map completion and get your first 100%
- try out jumping puzzles and other obtional content
- complete the Bioluminescent achievement collection (or any other collection you deem fun)

Longterm goals (for a new player):
- complete a full set of ascended equipment (alternatively keep armor exotic, not necessary worth the upgrade)
- decide on a legendary and start working towards that
- rise up the ranks in spvp
- play wvw

Shikigami.4013:

I don’t understand people who consider putting permanent gathering tools into those slots.

Because I have one watchwork pick and 20 character slots?

Riku.4821:

LanfearShadowflame.3189

kitten ….. I must have missed a memo…
stuffs her latest character (#19) into nearest closet and walks away whistling innocently

Welcome to “Too Many Characters Anonymous”.
We here would like to enroll you in our too many characters program.
I’ll be your guide. I myself have 20 characters and 15 of them are max level and ascended or exotic geared. While being here you enjoy the free refreshments annually. An empty wallet and a wardrobe the size of Texas. Along with countless hours of logging into each of them into farming maps.
We understand your side effects being, but not limited to;
1) lack of transmutation stones
2) lack of in game gold
3) having more than 2 of the same class and don’t know why.
4) Slight OCD problems with characters and their location on the log in screen.

We here at TMCA once more Welcome you, and your problems and will do our best to help you.

Can’t breathe…. laughing way too hard!