Guild Wars 2

Supposedly, explorable mode dungeons were going to have several optional parts and bonus / surprise bosses. I distinctly remember the developers saying this during the pre-purchase / pre-beta period (“Players will have to adapt quickly when one of these random events triggers, and there will be several of them, making each path totally different each time you play it.” – yeah, right).

In practical terms, that ended up being limited to Ascalonian Catacombs’ giant troll. Even the spider (also in AC), which was supposed to have been an optional boss (and still says “bonus encounter” or something along those lines , IINM), was changed before release to spawn every time. If there ever were other optional bosses planned for AC, we never saw them.

And the other dungeons don’t even have that. Overall, I’d say dungeons were (along with Orr and some user interface issues), the most disappointing thing about GW2 at release, and they haven’t really improved significantly since then.

Heh, I decide to check GW2 again 5 months later, and guess what, the bugged loot table that all players were saying was bugged (despite developers insisting it wasn’t) really was bugged (and could have been fixed much sooner if they had actually checked, instead of assuming the players were wrong). What a surprise. I guess this sets the bar for future “developer confirmation”.

I wonder what other things that were (supposedly, but not really) “working as intended” also got silently fixed…

JJBigs.8456:

When will people realize EVERY class can do everything.

Wait, so rangers can give their party stability and aegis? Warriors can stealth their teammates? Elementalists can make portals?

I stop playing for two weeks and they add a ton of new skills!

SynfulChaot.3169:

I have had others request me to run my ranger (on multiple occasions) over the alts as they (and myself) feel I contribute better with her.

I see that as a very unflattering comment about the way you play your other characters.

I play them all very well, thankyouverymuch

Well, if you say so it must be true.

SynfulChaot.3169:

some prefer the high survivability of my ranger at all ranges and in all situations.

High survivability? If your ranger is more survivable than your guardian or necro (for example), you’re probably doing something wrong when playing those.

SynfulChaot.3169:

I have saved parties with my mobility and utilities on more than one occasion.

Saved parties with your mobility? Could you be a bit more specific?

SynfulChaot.3169:

Rangers do not lack party support any more than certain DPS spec’d professions.

Of course they do. A necro can give its entire party stability for 20 seconds, while also blinding every enemy around them. A guardian can put up a reflecting wall or dome, protecting the entire party from projectiles, while periodically giving his teammates regeneration, adding a burning effect to their attack, and giving them aegis, that will absorb 100% of any hit. Elementalists can give the whole party boons every time they change attunement, have the biggest AoE heals, etc..

Rangers are the closest thing GW2 has to a pure DPS class, except their DPS isn’t even that impressive.

SynfulChaot.3169:

Rangers are not meant to be heavy support, thus why they do not have a lot of support skills.

I have no idea what any class is “meant” to be; I’m not inside the designers’ minds. I know what they are. And ranger is by far the least versatile and least party-orientated class in GW2. I’m not saying it’s your fault or that rangers are necessarily clueless (I play ranger too, BTW), I’m just stating something that anyone can confirm by playing the game (or even simply by looking at the lists of skills available to each profession). Ranger have far less ways to help other players or compensate for their mistakes.

SET.3275:

You can recognize the good necro by the time he is swapping his weapons. I guess the above statement is about those who play all the time with staff and doesnt swap at all.

Another good hint is what elite they equip. Lich Form is fine for boss fights, but Plague (20-second multi-target AoE blind + party stability) is the best “ohkitten” skill in the game, and any necro with a clue will have that on when fighting large groups of dungeon mobs. It can keep the entire party safe while running through pretty much anything.

SynfulChaot.3169:

I, personally, run a ranger main and several other level 80 alts (fully geared). I have had others request me to run my ranger (on multiple occasions) over the alts as they (and myself) feel I contribute better with her.

I see that as a very unflattering comment about the way you play your other characters.

SynfulChaot.3169:

Also, saying that just because the ranger has ‘the fewest party utility / survival skills’ (a questionable statement) they cannot be a boon to a team is a disservice.

The post you are replying to starts with “[rangers] can certainly be competent and help the rest of the team”. Any competent player is “a boon to the team”, compared to a bad one. But rangers objectively lack party support skills, compared to any other class. The fact that they can take advantage of other players’ combo fields doesn’t really do much to help those other players, it just means the other players can help the ranger.

SynfulChaot.3169:

Any change to re-add the ability to WP during combat would make it less desirable to rez party members if they fall. We are supposed to want to rez our allies, not just ignore them and wait for them to return.

I thought we (and they) were supposed to make a tactical decision about which was preferable: taking the risk of reviving him (knowing that the game freezes you in place while reviving, and doesn’t respond to the dodge key, etc.), or him reviving at a waypoint and walking back (taking some time and potentially dying along the way).

Now, if they remove the second option, the choice becomes one between risking the revive (with all the same problems) and not risking the revive (i.e., simply leaving the dead guy on the floor until you finish off the boss). And some people will opt for the second.

I don’t think that’s necessarily an improvement.

The best way to encourage people to revive their teammates is to make it easier (i.e., less risky) to revive them. I’d say that easily 50-75% of my deaths in dungeons happen when trying to revive someone else.

Dodging should obviously take priority over reviving, but that’s not how GW2 behaves. Reviving basically glues your character to that spot, and can cause a delay of 2 or 3 seconds when you try to move, which is more than the warning time of most boss attacks. And let’s not even go into mechanics that seem deliberately aimed at punishing players who are reviving, like the burning condition in the imbued fire shaman fractal.

Arena Net’s designers are trying to “fix” the wrong thing. It’s the same kind of attitude that led to the tiered skills. Some skills are boring and no one was picking them, but instead of making them more interesting they just locked them into arbitrary tiers, forcing people to buy skills they don’t want and have no intention of ever equipping (let alone using) before they can buy the ones they do want.

It’s like a restaurant that serves soup and cake, but no one was ordering the soup, so the they implement a new policy where they refuse to let you have any cake unless you eat the soup first.

It might increase the number of people eating soup, but it will drive away half your clients.

https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/suggestions/Magic-Find-Merged/first

Draygo.9473:

It is a bit presumptuous to assume just because no one has found this item that it doesn’t exist.

Er, no, that’s kind of the definition of existing. If no one has found it, the item doesn’t exist in the game.

Its name / ID might be listed in some event’s loot table somewhere, but it doesn’t actually “exist” as an item available to players, either because the loot table is bugged or the way the drop chance is calculated is bugged (ex., being rounded down to 0.0%), or because, despite three million people playing the game, the random number generator has persisted in returning the wrong result.

Or, of course, it might not even be listed on any loot table, and might be just a little social experiment on the part of some developers, to see how long they can keep some people playing by making them chase something that they can never actually catch (people who might otherwise stop playing, if they ran out of things to chase).

Until it actually drops, it’s not in the game, in much the same way that there are no pink elephants, although there might be a chance that a genetic mutation will one day produce one.

Syeria.4812:

His methodology doesn’t prove the loot in the chest changes, but your reply doesn’t prove it doesn’t either.

There’s a simple way to test it. Loot the chest, then kill the boss, and click on the chest again, to see if any items have been added.

I’ve killed Rotbeard about a dozen times (he’s easily soloable) and:

a) If I had looted the chest before killing him, the chest remained empty after killing him, and
b) There was no significant difference in the quality of the loot, regardless of when I opened the chest (before or after killing him)

So, while it is of course possible that Arena Net coded this particular chest to behave in a completely illogical way (just as it’s possible that the contents of this chest depend on what dyes players use in their armour or how many consonants are in the character’s name – after all, that can be coded), there is no evidence to support that theory. Ockham’s razor and all that.

https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/suggestions/Magic-Find-Merged/first

Calcifire.1864:

the chests loot changes if you kill him,

No, it doesn’t.

Calcifire.1864:

I opened the chest, got a blue pirate boot, then killed him, the second time I killed him first, THEN opened the chest, and got a bunch of greens and an orb

And if you open the chest a third time, you’ll get something else. And if you open it a fourth time, you’ll get something else. It’s called random loot, and it’s how nearly every chest in GW2 works.

I realise this entire thread is about religion (discussing where to find an item that isn’t actually in the game), but I thought people would have figured out how chests in GW2 work, at this point.

If you can see the chest, you can loot it, and the loot you get is selected from that chest’s loot table. If the loot is only available after completing a certain event, then you won’t even see the chest until you complete the event (and if you’ve looted it recently, you’ll see it but won’t be able to open it).

It wouldn’t make any sense for items to appear inside a chest just because someone died nearby. If there was additional loot intended for people who kill the boss, that loot would drop from the boss, or from a chest that spawns when the boss dies, to make it clear to players that they are getting that reward because they killed the boss.

matemaster.2168:

when I want to reactivate the unactive one I have to pay ridiculous 40s WHY?

I think it’s supposed to be an incentive for players to trade with each other (instead of simply everyone having every profession on every character).

Unfortunately 40s is too low for that, and the whole trading system is messed up in other ways (excessive TP fee, no CoD mail, etc.).

Omniderad.2713:

As a JC I am finding it isnt worth making items to sell on the TP. I can sell the materials and make more money.
Do all professions feel the same?

They are all bad, but the introduction of ascended gear was the final nail in the coffin for JC. Not only do the ascended items have better stats than anything a JC can craft, but they also lack a gem slot, so JCs can’t even sell gems to players using ascended items (or craft items with infusion slots).

I have yet to see any positive effects of the introduction of the pink junk.

It’s just another example of how disorganised GW2’s evolution has been since release. It’s as if the people responsible for crafting and the ones responsible for dungeons don’t communicate at all. Another good example is the way you can get potions of slaying from dungeon vendors and sell them at the TP for less than the cost of materials (which basically screws artificers).

As to advice, use GW2Spidy to check the cost of materials and decide if something is worth crafting. It will give you a full breakdown of materials, projected profit, etc..

Due to the 15% “tax” charged by the trading post, crafting is usually cheaper than buying the items, but you don’t really make a profit by selling them (ex., even if you can sell the item for 10% more than the cost of materials, you’re still losing 5%).

Mirta.5029:

There’s a server that hosts Europe and a server that hosts USA. This is impossible to do.

Wrong. People were able to transfer between US and EU servers whenever they wanted after release (before Arena Net added the “cooldown period”). It took about 1 minute to copy your player data from the US datacentre to the US datacentre or vice-versa. I did this every day, often twice a day, to play with two groups of friends (one in the afternoon, the other at night).

Mirta.5029:

And even if it was possible it would have lots of problems (like a ping higher than 2000).

Complete nonsense. The increase in latency between the EU and US is around 100 ms. Even for fast action games (ex., TF2), it’s perfectly playable. In a game like GW2, it’s virtually unnoticeable.

There are lots of US players playing in EU servers and vice versa. This new patch doesn’t prevent US players from having a EU server as their home.; it just just makes it impossible for them to visit the other region for free (i.e., forces them to pay a transfer fee).

Don’t use magic find armor, then. There, problem solved.

Kilrain Daggerspine.6843:

so they average about 1g for 1+ hour of work.. about 1/10 of what you can get..

If it takes you 1 hour to do a fractal run, you’re probably doing something wrong. And that 1 gold is just from selling rares (assuming it’s gold you want). It doesn’t include all the blues and greens, the crafting materials and the actual gold looted from mobs / bosses / chests.

You “can get” >100g in one second, if you happen to sell a desirable item at the trading post, or if you simply buy gems and exchange them for gold.

I play through dungeons to have fun, not to get some virtual pixels at the end (or, even worse, to see some number increase). If you’re not having fun playing the game, maybe doing something else would be a better investment of your time?

Kilrain Daggerspine.6843:

how is that anywhere near the best way of getting globs?

Huh? Where did I say anything about “the best way of getting globs” in my post…? The “best” way is to buy them (or buy items to salvage).

You wrote "Fractals best loot? AHAHAH! please, Im laughing so hard it hurts.. ". So what other dungeon in the game provides better loot?

Serraphin Storm.2369:

It is also not adviseable to use a bow in genral against the borrows since it is a mostly single target weapon

And burrows aren’t a single target? Are you saying you normally hit two (or three) burrows at the same time with a your AoE attacks?

The reason why AoE attacks sometimes work better is the bug that makes a lot of single-target attacks miss. If that bug is fixed, single-target attacks will work correctly (same as against any mob – which is also a single target, like the burrow).

X The Manimal.5293:

To be honest you did kinda sound like you were just complaining with no actual suggestion

The “suggestion” seems implicit and pretty obvious: if the spinning camera is annoying, make it stop spinning.

AnthonyOrdon.3926:

while the risen temple of Grenth is a fine example of very hard event

Is it? I mean, not trying to sound pedantic here, but it seems pretty straightforward if people communicate or define their roles in advance. What makes it fail is the lack of organisation in public groups, and the way a couple of players standing in the wrong place (i.e., on top of Jonez, making him get hit by ice) can effectively screw everyone else.

It’s certainly more complex and interesting than the typical GW2 dungeon boss (who just stands in one place going through his 3 attacks over and over again), but I’d still establish a difference between “very hard” (i.e., something that puts pressure even on coordinated groups, for its entire duration) and something like Grenth, which can simply fail suddenly due to the actions of a couple of players.

BTW, IMO that kind of encounter would make a lot more sense in dungeons (that currently have very simplistic bosses, with almost no environmental interaction) than in open-world areas (where players can’t really control the actions of “passers-by”).

AnthonyOrdon.3926:

A few missions haven’t even been completed by our internal testers yet (but they came extremely close).

Must resist temptation to point out that previous patches show some of your internal testers couldn’t find their own a… Must resist… Mustttt resisttt….!

Kilrain Daggerspine.6843:

I imagine for a small percentage of the population who get rares and exos like fraking candy from fractals sure, but for the majority of us, the fractals are absolutely horrible for rares or any loot in general.

And then there are those of us who tilt the other way, Hell lately i’ve been LUCKYYYY if i break 1g from a 20-30+ fractal, hell most of the time i barley reach 50s..

Everyone I know gets, on average, 2 or 3 rares per fractal run (i.e., for every 3 fractals), without any magic find armor (though most do use magic find food). That’s about 1 gold (~33s each), if you simply sell them at the TP. Plus a ton of blues and greens that can be sold or salvaged for extra money, plus a lot of T5 and a few T6 crafting materials, in some fractals (ex., dredge).

The grawl, dredge and jade maw fractals are probably the most profitable, due to the high number of mobs. If you manage to save all the prisoners in the grawl fractal, you’ll get an extra chest and there’s a decent chance of a (soulbound) exotic at the end.

Naturally, if you skip most mobs in the dungeon, not only won’t you get the blues and greens (and gold, and crafting materials), but you also decrease your chances of getting rares, simply because you’re looting less often.

The highest chance of rare drops seems to be from the final chest in the underwater fractal, possibly to offset the fact that you don’t have many mobs to kill. I’d say I get a rare trident about 40% of the times, and two rare tridents about 20% of the times. Strangely this doesn’t seem to apply to the swamp fractal (where there’s even less enemies to kill); maybe because it’s very short, so the “extra reward” is the time you save.

Lord Kreegan.8123:

• Why do we get walnuts from pine trees?

Because that’s where squirrels hide them.

Lord Kreegan.8123:

• If Sylvari are “born” in the roots of trees, why are there male and female Sylvari?

Because they were modelled to look like humans.

Lord Kreegan.8123:

• Do female Sylvari breasts produce tree sap?

I’ll check. If I don’t come back, assume the answer is “yes, extra-sticky”.

Mesket.5728:

when a players gets 3 or 4 precursor in 600 hours of play without looking for them and others with 1500hs struggling to get a legendary gets nothing I stop thinking its only RNG.

I hear Arena Net has 5 employees just monitoring you and making sure you don’t get drops. It’s a conspiracy, I tell you!

Mighty Bless.8471:

The true fact is none of us know how Rng loot tables works…
Rng on kill?
Rng on event?
Rng table with a set of drops per kill and then Rng that divide Loot Between killers?

Loot from corpses is decided when the mob is killed. Loot from chests and containers is decided when they are opened. Each player gets a separate roll. In the case of loot from corpses, the roll is affected by magic find. It’s not very clear which ones are affected by diminishing returns (TBH I think even Arena Net’s coders aren’t 100% sure, judging from some of their replies here).

GW2 uses a (mostly) “pure” RNG, so it’s perfectly possible for one player to get five exotics in a row while another gets nothing at all. That’s what “random” means.

Some games (ex., TF2) use a pseudo-random system where your chances of getting a drop increase with time, or increase whenever you dont’ get a drop. This appears random, but in the long run ensures that everyone gets approximately the same number of drops (although they can still get different drops).

It could be interesting if, for every hour of GW2 gameplay, your chances of getting an exotic drop increased by 1% (for example). This would mean that, even if you were terribly unlucky, you would be guaranteed to get an exotic for every 100 hours of gameplay. As soon as you got one, your “luck bonus” would be reset to 0, and you’d have the same chance as anyone else (i.e., the chance would be the one defined in the loot table of the enemy you killed or the chest you opened, as it is currently).

Some people would still be luckier than others, but this would ensure that no player would have “bad luck” forever.

And the same thing could be applied to precursors (ex., +0.1% increase in “luck” for each hour of gameplay, resetting whenever you got one).

Wow, 9 pages about an item that isn’t actually on any live server.

I propose a new thread about the Reaper of Souls.

Nokaru.7831:

If you rapidly strafe left and right while fighting him, his arrows will never be able to hit you.

If only the other idiots valuable members of my team didn’t keep running towards me and making me get hit by “their” arrows…

The main problem I have with the Grawl Fire Shaman is that he sometimes casts his “big” AoE immediately after the shield breaks, without the warning animation (swoop). This can kill players in a single hit, with no warning.

Apparently the server “thinks” the swoop animation played, but, since he was shielded, it wasn’t actually shown on the game client. All his other attacks’ timers should be suspended while he’s shielded, and restart only a couple of seconds after the shield breaks.

BrunoBRS.5178:

“oh what’s that, you need to use death blossom to AoE bleed your enemies? i’m sorry, the battles take place on tiny bridges, so either you risk falling off and spending the entire battle dead on the bottom of the pit, or you ignore your condition spec and spend the battle spamming backstab”

This is a symptom of a bigger problem in GW2, related to falling in general.

• If you’re a player, your own (automatically aimed) abilities can make you fall to your death.

• If you’re an AI-controlled monster, you get a “safety net” (invisible wall) that prevents you from falling off ledges even if players deliberately use a knockdown / pushback skill on you.

Apparently “player fun” ranks below “mob survival” in Arena Net’s design priorities. Go figure…

Viore.7542:

I know you guys were against the whole “trinity” class system, but it would definately help the dungeon experience.

No, it wouldn’t. The WoW-style “trinity” system is based on deliberately stupid AI, that will attack the player posing the least threat simply because that player has certain skills that manipulate the AI variables (increased threat, taunts, etc.). It’s completely unrealistic and artificial, and only benefits bad players who expect to be carried through encounters by the tank, while they stare at their skill bar instead of paying attention to the actual fight.

There’s a reason why no one adopts the standard “trinity” party set-up in PvP arenas and battlegrounds: because it doesn’t work against intelligent enemies. The enemies will simply focus on the healer, kill him quickly, and then kill the DPS one by one, while leaving the tin can (tank) who does the least damage for last.

Having a combat system that doesn’t rely on deliberately crippled AI allows the game programmers to code more interesting mob / boss behaviours, and adds value to players with good awareness.

This isn’t to say that GW2 dungeons don’t need improvements (they do, a lot), but a WoW-style combat model is bad enough in games designed for it from scratch; tacking it onto GW2 at this point would be a disaster.

If you like “holy trinity” games, you have plenty out there to choose from. The last thing we need is to make GW2 into yet another bad WoW clone.

I think that as soon as players walk into a dungeon, every creature in the dungeon should run at them shouting “Banzaaaai!”. Also, if you die, the game should format your boot drive.

RyuDragnier.9476:

I’ve NEVER seen somebody kicked out a fractal group because of their class. We’ve had a party of 4 Rangers and a warrior running a set of fractals for pete’s sake, and nobody got kicked

It would be rather odd if two of the rangers decided to kick one of the other rangers because of their class, no…?

SynfulChaot.3169:

This is sad. Rangers can be a great boon to a team if played properly.

Sadly no, they can’t. I mean, they can certainly be competent and help the rest of the team, but any player with experience and good awareness will help the party more if he plays any other class. Rangers have the fewest party utility / survival skills. Maybe Arena Net thought they’d bee to powerful playing “solo” (meaning with their pet) if they had more utility skills, but the fact is they’re just not as versatile or useful to the rest of the party as other classes.

I’ll still take a good ranger over a bad [insert any class here], of course, but the same (good) player will generally be more helpful if he plays a different class.

Illiander.8049:

I think this can be summed up as:

Ranged: Easier, Less Damage
Melee: Harder, More Damage

I don’t think it can. I do more damage at range with my elementalist, ranger or engineer than I do in melee with my guardian. And, on my mesmer, I find it much easier to fight Kholer with two swords (melee) than with a scepter, staff or greatsword (ranged).

There is no one-size-fits-all rule. In most dungeons, using ranged weapons increases you chances of survival and allows you to attack the enemy 100% of the time, while melee players frequently need to move out of range. I think that makes sense, though, from a realism point of view. The benefit of having melee players is that they tend to be better at holding aggro and can block some attacks that would otherwise hit their teammates.

In other words, yes, melee players need to work a bit harder and sometimes end up doing less damage (because of the times when they need to move, and their attacks won’t hit), but having at least one melee player improves the party as a whole.

And if you have two or three, with some defensive / healing abilities, they can buff each other and make their lives a lot easier. Part of the added difficulty of playing melee is that you’re frequently alone in front of the boss, out of range of your own teammates’ boons, because they’re trying to keep as far as possible.

I do think that some enemies need to be changed, though. Namely, projectile attacks should always take approximately the same amount of time to reach their target, regardless of distance. If you’re fighting a boss in melee range (or just barely outside melee range) and the boss fires a projectile at you, you have no time to react.

Part of that problem is also related to the camera (as are so many issues in GW2). If you’re in melee range, often you can’t see projectiles being fired at all (because they are fired in an arc, off the top of your screen, while the bottom half of your screen is just showing useless ground behind your character). Allowing a wider vertical FoV and adjusting the camera target height (so you don’t have to aim down so much) would make it much easier to see those attacks while you’re in melee range.

But hey, whoever coded GW2’s camera was clearly a sadist, so my hopes aren’t too high that they’ll improve it.

Minion of Vey.4398:

Have to chime in on people saying you can’t melee bloomhunger.

Not only can it be done, but it’s a lot easier than doing it ranged, because he casts far less AoE on you (and as long as you move to stay behind him, he won’t hit you with his fist). Plus you can keep picking up his own fallen branches and smacking him on the head with them, which just feels right.

The issue is that you need to kill the spirits, to avoid letting them buff him, and those spirits spawn pretty far from him, so at least 2 or 3 people need to be ranged, or you’ll waste a lot of time running to them and back into melee range.

I suspect the problem some people have with doing him as melee is they don’t actually stay in melee range. They stand far enough to have him fire ranged attacks at them, but so close that they have no time to react. Some bosses seem to fire ranged attacks even at players standing on top of them, but Bloomhunger doesn’t (or, at least, he fires significantly less at players in actual melee range).

GabGar.4962:

A guardian can heal and keep alive the party.

No, they can’t. Most bosses can hit for >20% HP per second, so if a player just stands in front of the boss for the entire fight, without using any of his own defensive abilities, he’s going to die. No class in GW2 can out-heal damage from silver mobs on other players, let alone from bosses. In fact, I suspect that even 4 “healers” won’t be able to keep a single player alive in most situations, if that player doesn’t avoid damage and use his own self-heals.

GabGar.4962:

the warrior dps can make the difference just by killing fast

So can any other class specced to have high DPS (grenade engineer, fire + earth elementalist, etc.). But no matter how high your DPS is, boss fights in GW2 take several minutes, and bosses can target and kill other players in seconds. Having high DPS isn’t going to prevent your teammates from taking damage.

GabGar.4962:

the elementalist can even solo some parts of dungeons.

So can other classes. What kind of statement is that?

GabGar.4962:

the necromancer will keep you always without conditions

When I play necro I rarely equip a single condition removal skill, unless I know the next encounter applies a lot of conditions (ex., swamp fractal). Guardians and elementalists are far more likely to have some form of condition removal.

GabGar.4962:

the enginereer can surprise you with hundreds of tricks

That one sounds straight out of a marketing department (“What do engineers do? No idea. Just make up something generic about ‘tricks’, it’ll look good on the press release.”)

GabGar.4962:

the ranger is the best rezzer in the game, put double rez with the pet, use the spirit to instant rez people

And then another player gets downed while both your Nature’s Renewal and Search & Rescue are on cooldown, so you’re just the same as any other class, except you’re squishier and have no shield.

Also, the only way rangers can have stability is to equip Rampage as their elite, so very few rangers will have Spirit of Nature.

Thieves can stealth themselves and the downed player, ensuring they won’t even be targeted while reviving. That makes them the best revivers in most boss encounters.

GabGar.4962:

thieves can also pull a single mob to kill him alone

The number of places where Scorpion Wire still works is extremely reduced. Also, not sure how that counts as “carrying the party”. What you’re describing is just a utility skill, and every class has several of those.

GabGar.4962:

the mesmer can be awesome in expert hands, they can negate almost all dmg on the party if they are well used.

Get the best mesmer in GW2, put him in a PUG, now let’s see him “negate all damage on the party”. Good luck with that.

GabGar.4962:

In a few words: If you say a class is less than other, you need learn to play.

If you say all classes have the same party support abilities, or that any class can consistently keep the rest of the party alive even when they make mistakes, you clearly need to play more. I suspect you’ve never even played half the classes you talk about.

Guardians and elementalists have the most party support abilities (as the posts on this thread demonstrate – if there was any doubt), but even they can’t fix other people’s mistakes again and again. GW2 has no taunts, very low team healing and pretty long cooldowns. Players have to rely on themselves for >80% of their healing and damage avoidance.

And if you’re just talking about soloing content when the rest of the party dies, then any class can do that (even classes with very few support abilities, like rangers). But that depends on the player, and how well he knows the encounter, not on the class itself.

If by “carrying” you mean “keeping everyone else alive even if they screw up”, then no class can do that.

If you mean “soloing the bosses even after the others die”, then nearly every class can do (some) bosses, if the player in question knows the encounter well.

IMO the only class that really stands out (negatively) is ranger; they have by far the least defensive / support abilities (which doesn’t mean they can’t solo enemies – or duo them, if you count the pet).

Robert Hrouda.1327:

I actually have an easier time on my mesmer in Melee than my ranger

I think everybody does. A sword mesmer with a non-glass build can basically stand in front of Kholer for the entire fight. Even a guardian needs to move now and then.

But, to be honest, I think that says more about class balance (and specifically about how fragile and one-dimensional rangers are) than about melee vs. ranged.

I play every class and ranger definitely feels like the runt of the litter in terms of defensive abilities and party utility.

Anyway, back to the topic: the original poster has a point; ranged combat is (usually) more survivable, and having a ranged weapon is almost mandatory for many fights (while having a melee weapon is always optional – after all, ranged weapons work in melee range too), but that’s not particularly unrealistic. After all, if you’re fighting a wolf at range, you’re obviously going to take less damage than if you stick your face in its mouth. In an RPG, common sense should trump rock-paper-scissors balancing, IMO.

I do think that some boss fights should be tuned to be more melee-friendly, though (or less melee-unfriendly). Specifically, there are a few bosses that fire their ranged / AoE attacks at players in melee range, which not only gives them less time to react, but also forces them to temporarily move away and stop doing damage, while ranged players can keep attacking while having plenty of time to dodge projectiles or move out of AoE.

Robert Hrouda.1327:

This thread claims that dungeons favor ranged players, which I disagree with. Group dynamics favor ranged players […] 1v1 though, I feel melee is superior

I thought group dynamics were a pretty fundamental part of dungeons. Or were the dungeons designed to be done solo…?

TheRudeDude.1596:

the last encounter can take a while, so why not let us skip, if we so desire?

It’s not just a matter of “letting”; the dungeon is designed to let players skip certain bosses (ex., Kholer – although I find him one of the few interesting bosses in GW2 dungeons, so I rarely skip him), make bosses fight each other (ex., Kholer vs. cave troll), and make mobs fight each other (ex., gravelings vs. oozes).

All this was clearly intended (if it wasn’t, they wouldn’t attack each other), and is what makes AC one of the more interesting dungeons in GW2.

Detha’s bug is just that, a bug. The event objective is “Escort Detha to the Hall of Champions”, and the next part should trigger when players do that, regardless of which gravelings or oozes they killed, which ones killed each other, which ones are still alive, or what Detha had for breakfast.

Jeffrey Vaughn.1793:

On the test server I have access to a lot more debug info—it’s not available on the Live servers because it slows things down too much,

Well, considering the event chain was stuck on (some) live servers, it seems that any potential slowdown in that zone would be trumped by having access to the event’s state variables, leading to the event being fixed.

Jeffrey Vaughn.1793:

or it’s disabled to keep people from trying to cheat/hack to get it.

I’m pretty sure people will try anyway.

It shouldn’t be too complex to make sure that only connections coming from authorised address have access to debug / GM functions. I mean, most MMOs do have GMs with the ability to reset quests, kill or respawn NPCs, etc., and from your previous post I get the impression that so does GW2, but for some reason you (specifically) don’t have access to those functions.

That’s what I found odd (that the guy debugging and trying to fix the event doesn’t have GM-level access).

Anyway, good job finding the (likely) cause, but it really doesn’t seem very efficient to force developers to reproduce the entire chains leading up to bugs on test servers when they could simply inspect the event state on known bugged (live) servers and trace them backwards.

The engineer race needs a Rosa Sparks.

[note: original thread title and first message said players were “racist against engineers”]

Daethz.2417:

I just killed a champion with 3 other people, heres how the fight went

And what champion was this?

If it was (for example), a risen abomination, that’s pretty much how they work: pick a target and chase it for a long time, eventually picking another one (but that “other one” has a 33% chance of being the same, if there are only 3 people nearby).

The good news is that a competent necro should be able to solo a champion abomination (it’s actually easier than doing it in a group of 3 people, because it will gain less frenzy).

MMOJumper.8504:

the thief aggro’d some mob. The mob ran straight passed him and right to the necro

I suspect the thief used a stealth skill and then broke it before you noticed it. When a player stealths, aggroed enemies will immediately pick another target, even if that target never actually attacked them.

Simpler creatures (ex., wild animals) pick their target mainly based on recent damage received and proximity (which means you can drop aggro by canceling your attack and running away, while someone else moves closer). Bosses and mini-bosses usually follow some extra rules (ex., select a new melee target every 10 seconds, or aim a ranged attack at a random distant target every 5 seconds, etc.), but I doubt there’s any class-specific logic in the AI routines.

rozcinana.7249:

All i know is she only bugs when we skip the gravelings north of Kholer’s WP and skip the oozes, and she never bugs when we kill both groups. So I think I will keep killing them even though it annoys some puggers. Sorry! :P

Sorry to interrupt your righteous attack on those evil puggers, but I’ve seen Detha bug after killing everything in the dungeon.

evolverzilla.2359:

evolverzilla.2359:

They have LOGS to look at, and they even asks you for the time you run the dungeon and your timezone, they look at their logs.

Account.9832:

If you actually follow the link of the post I replied to, you’ll see the moderator specifically asked for screenshots and player names.

Because it will be faster to find what happened than just browse all the log.

Sigh…

So, now that you have (hopefully) read the moderator’s post, try reading my original post again.

https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/suggestions/Magic-Find-Merged/first

Kelly.5293:

I wish CoF path 1 was longer, harder and unfarmable. We do it properly, usually no mesmer, mixed group in around 12 mins . . way to fast. […] I do hope that gets corrected. I like 30-60mins a run, more enjoyable, more rewarding an experience.

I see no benefit to having all dungeon paths take the same amount of time, or basing that on what you find more enjoyable. Different people have different tastes and might have different amounts of free time on different days.

IMO, the key to a successful game is having content that appeals to all those people, and that means having at least a couple of really short dungeons and a couple of really long ones.

If you don’t find the <15 min dungeons enjoyable, simply pick one of the others.

And no one forces you to do speed runs. If you don’t like them, don’t do them. Asking for something to be “corrected” (i.e., removed from the game) just because you don’t like it seems a bit egotistical, especially considering no one forces you to do them (“I don’t like [short dungeons / long dungeons / jumping puzzles / skippable bosses / unskippable bosses / whatever] so it should be removed from the game, because everyone should play the way I want them to.”).

Jeffrey Vaughn.1793:

I’m trying to find out exacly where it got stuck. (And I don’t have GM commands on the Live servers, so I can’t check the servers listed above.)

So the guy tasked with tracing and fixing the bug doesn’t have a way to inspect the state of the bugged servers? Er… that doesn’t sound very efficient. Do they at least let you use metal cutlery, or are you stuck with a spork?

Naekuh.7925:

u guys are complaining about the knockback in harpies?

The thread title might be a clue.

Naekuh.7925:

IF you guys want to complain… how about […]

If you want to complain about something else, nothing prevents you from posting in a thread about that issue (or starting a thread about it, if there isn’t one).

This thread is about harpy knockback (as the title suggests), and about how the red circle sometimes fails to render, etc..

Naekuh.7925:

IT takes 2 to kick. If someone agree’s you just got outvoted and your out. IF you dont like it… put him on an ignore list, and never join there game.

You have no way of knowing who voted to kick you. In fact, even the other people in the group (the ones who didn’t kick you) have no way of knowing who cast the second vote (and, if that is done fast enough – ex., by two players who had planned it earlier), chances are no one else in the party will even be able to see who started the vote.

So how do you “ignore him” ? Who is “him” ? Your only option would be to add the 4 players to your block list.

Add to that the fact that the game erases all party chat (and all mention of the party members) when a player gets kicked, and one gets the impression the whole system was designed to appeal to that kind of kitten.

evolverzilla.2359:

Account.9832:

What the moderator failed to mention (or allow players to mention, since she immediately locked the thread) was that being kicked from a party usually erases all party chat from your chat window. So I’m not sure what kind of screenshot they expect people to provide. Often you can’t even remember the exact spelling of their name…

They have LOGS to look at, and they even asks you for the time you run the dungeon and your timezone, they look at their logs.

If you actually follow the link of the post I replied to, you’ll see the moderator specifically asked for screenshots and player names.

optikz.6498:

it’s important that the group waits for Detha to say, “All right. That’s enough bait. Let’s move on.”

Why is it “important” ? Everyone seems to have a different superstition, but unless you have access to the actual NPC scripts, or if you’ve done extensive testing (ex., doing 10 runs where you wait for her to say it and then 10 where you don’t wait), that’s really just anecdotal evidence and / or wishful thinking.

optikz.6498:

have that kill her while everyone else remains at the sand/gravel area.

Are you saying that you’ve tested this extensively, sometimes with people standing on gravel and sometimes with people standing on stone?

This is turning into a religion…

DanH.5879:

can the a-net guys tell me HOW i can do a Leaping Death Blossom on 1 harpy without falling to my death ?
or a flanking strike ? how about the healing with withdraw ?

Arena Net seems to have falls a bit bass-ackwards.

Player character: Your own skills make you fall off ledges and platforms.

Enemy creature: Even when you hit them with a knockback, an invisible wall prevents them from falling off ledges.

I guess the designers / programmers consider that protecting the mobs’ right to have fun is their main priority…

Malediktus.9250:

rules to follow when playing with people you dont know: […] enter the dungeon/fractals first, so they also kick themselves if they kick you. If you cant enter first, consider leaving the group.

And since they don’t know you either, if they follow your “rules”, the party will never manage to start the dungeon, let alone finish it.

Erebus.7568:

on the other hand i never allow people to kick others

And pray tell, how do you achieve that? All it takes is 2 votes. And you can’t even see who voted.