Guild Wars 2

VoxShatterfall.5470:

I know if the NPC doesn’t fight back you can’t damage it past the 1st hit.

As a moa, it probably couldn’t fight back, since it had no ranged attacks.

But I think the fundamental design flaw here is precisely that: the fact that players have to allow themselves to be hit otherwise the AI throws a tantrum and becomes invulnerable.

It’s just nonsensical. Take the bats in the grawl fractal, for example (a very obvious example, but by no means the only one). The developers decided to put some of them on small isolated platforms and not give them any ranged attacks (and, although they’re bats, apparently they can’t fly across the gap). The result is that ranged players can’t kill them.

Players are forced to walk to the enemy and “play against themselves” to work around what is essentially a game bug – if not a coding but, at least a bug in the design of the combat system.

If players can hit a mob, they should damage it, period. If Arena Net thinks this will make combat “too easy” in some places, what they need to do is give the mobs realistic ways to counter this (use a ranged attack, fly or jump towards the player, etc.).

It’s as if they’re trying to “protect” the mobs’ right to have fun at the cost of the players’.

Well, I’m all for things that make the game world feel more interconnected. Events and renown hearts in GW2 are a bit too “short range” for my taste.

I would like to see them add some quests spanning multiple regions (ex., NPC in Divinity’s Reach asks players to retrieve some samples of Orrian writing and some Timberline Falls grawl totems, and then triggers some event in Divinity’s Reach when players bring him enough of those items), and a broader implementation of faction reputation would also be nice.

Ravion Hawk.4736:

that requires you to change your dyes when you change your armor.

Actually, the pieces seem to remember their dyes just fine. Could be because the item names are different despite the skins being identical (ex., Aidan’s Gloves vs. Gloves of the Mad King, etc.). I don’t have items with exactly the same name to test, but I would expect them to remember their dyes too. The only situation where the dyes from previous armor should apply to new armour is when you equip it for the first time (or when you preview it, of course).

Ravion Hawk.4736:

Having the same skin for a combat set and a MF set makes it easier to “hot-swap” your armor in a dungeon without getting caught.

As long as you use the same dyes on both they would be indistinguishable anyway. And would anyone really notice if one player stayed behind for a few seconds after killing the first boss and then joined the rest of the party wearing a slightly different armour? I doubt it.

Anyway, the issue isn’t the sneaky ways in which people could wear MF sets while pretending not to. The issue is that the game should make it so that a player wearing a MF set isn’t just benefiting himself at the expense of party efficiency; his MF set should also benefit the rest of the party, as a way to offset the disadvantages of the reduction in combat stats (which already affects everyone in the party, not just him).

Ridgeblader.7135:

Runes that assist MF also include other benefits to other stats like power, precision, condition damage. I don’t see how they are sacrificing any significant advantage by having increased MF instead of some other stat.

It’s not just runes. It’s the actual armour stats too. When you get armour or weapons with MF, the MF is there instead of another stat. But with runes and sigils, the effect can be even bigger. Compare (for example), the Runes of the Scholar set and the Runes of the Noble set, both of which share one combat stat (power).

Scholar:

(1): +25 Power
(2): +3% Critical Damage
(3): +50 Power
(4): +5% Critical Damage
(5): +90 Power
(6): +10% damage while health is above 90%.

Noble:

(1): +10% Magic Find
(2): +15 Power
(3): +15% Magic Find
(4): +35 Power
(5): +25% Magic Find
(6): +5% Chance to summon a Drakehound when hit.

Now, ignore the Magic Find (which has no influence on combat) and add up the other stats:

Scholar:

25 + 50 + 90 = 165 power (typically an 8 – 11% increase for a level 80 character)
3% + 5% = 8% increase to critical damage
10% increase to all damage while health is above 90%.

Noble:

15 + 35 = 50 power
5% Chance to summon a Drakehound when hit.

In other words, the Magic Find set reduces your power by 115, reduces your critical damage by 8%, and reduces your overall damage (both crit and non-crit) by up to 10% in addition to the previous two reductions. With the Noble set you gain a chance to summon an uncontrollable pet (which might do some unknown amount of damage to one of your targets – or might pull enemies you’re trying to avoid, if you’re unlucky), but does nothing to improve your weapon or utility skills, or to increase your AoE damage. Oh, and to get the pet you need to get hit, on average, 20 times (5% chance per hit). I tend to avoid getting hit, so that doesn’t really sound like a useful mechanic.

Even if you replace the last rune with a rune giving 25 power, you’re still losing 90 power (plus 8% crit damage and 10% damage buff) compared to the non-MF set.

You still “don’t see how one is sacrificing any significant advantage by having increased MF instead of some other stat”…?

The key is in the word “instead”.

Ridgeblader.7135:

Do you have hard data comparisons to support your claims?

What claims? That the MF is there instead of a combat stat? I would assume that much is obvious to anyone who can read the item properties, no?

And Final Rest, from what we’ve seen so far, hasn’t been added at all.

Turial.1293:

AC, CoF, Arah – the weapons from these dungeons you get from the vendors in LA all come with MAJOR runes instead of Superiors

Sigils.

Just making that clear so they don’t go check the runes instead (which come on the armour, not weapons).

Kwith.8321:

Here are several alternatives:

Jumping puzzle to find alternate route around area

This used to be in the game (in CM path 2). Not exactly a “puzzle”, just a couple of jumps requiring precision. They removed it. In fact, they recently did the same in one of the fractals. Apparently funnelling everyone into a single “right way” makes the game more fun, in the opinion of GW2’s dungeon designers.

Siphaed.9235:

these picks are also account bound so dumping them from a main level 80 into your bank to supply your alts isn’t that difficult either. […] And, it’s just a trick of using movement increasing boons, abilities, and stealth (usually Thief alts are used) to get to the node and wait for a very casual other player to distract the Champion while the low level mines the ore node.

[…]

Some ideas to fix this clearly exploited/broken situation

Er… how exactly is it an “exploit” or a “broken situation” ?

Pets, elementals, stealth, etc., are all perfectly normal game mechanics and there’s no reason why they shouldn’t be used while gathering. Same goes for moving in a group and gathering while another player kites the enemies.

If I choose to mine a node with my level 5 thief (who will get 1-shotted by pretty much any creature in those zones) instead of using my level 80 ranger, so what?

If anything, GW2 needs less level segregation. Mid-level zones are empty because there are no high-level nodes there. If there were a couple of randomly-placed nodes of orichalcum, omnomberries, ancient wood, etc., in every zone, players would have an incentive to travel around looking for them, and the world wouldn’t be so dead.

It takes less than one hour to level a character from 1 to 80 anyway; all you need is gold to buy crafting materials (which can also be obtained in seconds through the gem exchange). “Level locks” would just give an even bigger advantage to richer people.

SintLucifer.4206:

Some people say that commander in PVE is nothing more then e-kitten. Well oke but what about legendary and Cultural T3 gear? Is that even more e-kitten?

I had no idea that cultural gear or legendary weapons caused an impossible-to-turn-off icon to appear on every other player’s map. That doesn’t seem to happen in my version of GW2.

This would be far less of a problem if servers didn’t systematically get assigned to the same colour.

As long as servers “rotate” their colour (ex., a server that is green during one match becomes red on the next, blue on the next, etc – either sequentially or randomly), players from any server will eventually get access to most POIs.

Currently, the colour only seems to change when a server’s ranking changes.

I think it’s acceptable to have some required markers in WvW, but they shouldn’t require actually capturing any structures. Maybe Arena Net could simply increase their radius, so that the POI can be “discovered” just by walking up to the wall of the keep.

slapandtikle.8145:

I don’t know about any one else but i really love the Kodan race and i think they would make an excellent playable race.

I bet 1 copper that they’ll be the new playable race in GW2’s second expansion (after the Tengu, in the first).

FaRectification.5678:

Is being a kitten, part of your scheme here? […] the only thing important here is you’re flaming my thread. […] Provide some actual feedback instead of making empty threats […] You have your ideas backwards […] your screaming, […] You essentially think like an idiot, and speak like one too, […] My posts offer incredible insight into game design

The only person “screaming” here seems to be you.

Play a bit more, understand how the core game mechanics work, and you’ll find that the designers are probably a bit more experienced than you think.

And also that maybe your posts don’t offer quite as much “incredible insight into game design” as you seem to think.

So you’re suggesting a kind of “meta renown heart”, where after doing (for example) 10 renown hears for Seraph NPCs, you’d unlock a vendor at the Seraph HQ, for example?

Yes, that would add some depth to the renown heart system, which is currently kind of shallow and fragmented.

IamALie.8190:

Ah, then my bad. I was under the impression that you disliked it when people use it in your dungeon parties.

No, I just expect the game to give all party members some benefit to offset the party-wide disadvantages of reduced combat stats.

Thought you were one of those people that had many requirements to a dungeon party since I’ve seen SO MANY in game.

I know… my block lists grows every time I see one.

IamALie.8190:

if you’re going to be so anal about MF, then you may as well go the extra mile.

I’m not “anal” about MF at all. I’ve never asked people if they were wearing MF gear or told them not to. My suggestion is about game design (and specifically about a stat that goes against the overall design philosophy of GW2), not about controlling what other players do or don’t do.

I wasn’t the one suggesting inspecting other players or putting pre-conditions on letting them join the party. I think the implementation of MF is a bad one from a game design point of view, and should be fixed by improving game design.

IamALie.8190:

If you look at the name of the armor linked and compared it to what they’re currently wearing, you should be able to tell the difference unless they have the exact same skins on their armor.

So now whenever I start a party I should ask 4 people to link me every piece of their armour, preview every single one of them, compare it to the armour they’re wearing, and then monitor them through the entire dungeon to make sure they don’t change any of it?

Seriously…?

Besides, guess what, a lot of people (me included) use exactly the same skins for their MF and combat sets. Actually not exactly, because my combat armour is purple and my magic find armour is green, but that’s just so I can distinguish them easily; the links look exactly the same when previewed.

IamALie.8190:

do you really believe people will go that far just to deceive the group that that they’re not using MF?

Why wouldn’t they? With the current system, a player benefits the most by being in full MF gear in a party where everyone else is in full combat gear. So what kind of incentive do they have to not lie about it, especially knowing that being honest would probably get them kicked, or not invited in the first place?

IamALie.8190:

I just don’t think that his is a huge deal as you seem to be making it..

Where did I say it was “a huge deal” ?

Giving players an “experience gain penalty” would effectively be the same as a direct experience penalty, except it would encourage the player to stop playing while he waited for the debuff to wear off. In other words, completely counter-productive.

“Hitting level 80” is not and should not be “an accomplishment”. All it requires is free time or gold to spend on crafting materials (you can level from 1 to 80 in less than one hour). Player levelling is mainly a way to “guide” players through the world zones in a certain order, and allow the developers to design the zones differently (more hand-holding / teaching in low-level zones, less in high-level zones).

Also, I have to wonder how long you’ve been playing GW2, to say something like “of course when you hit lvl 80 the XP part will no longer apply”. XP gain continues at 80, and is a fundamental factor in the crafting of some high-end items.

P.S. – I checked. 550 achievement points. I guess my suspicions were correct. Play a bit more, I think you haven’t really understood the balance or role of some mechanics in GW2.

exelion.2369:

Obtaining a certain level of reputation would allow one to get certain things like armor and weapons

Isn’t that exactly what renown hearts are…?

I definitely agree about #1, though, and have been saying that since beta.

IamALie.8190:

Ask them to link their armor

Because they couldn’t possibly link their combat set (from their bags) while wearing a Magic Find set, right…? Or they couldn’t possibly swap after entering the dungeon, right…?

Come on, think a bit before posting.

If Magic Find is to work inside dungeons, the only way to prevent it from being a “selfish” stat (i.e., one that benefits only one party member at the cost of the party’s combat performance) is to average it across the entire party.

The alternative would be to add an inspect feature (which I think Arena Net won’t do) and make it impossible for players to change their armour inside dungeons (which I also doubt Arena Net would ever do – and which I think would be a step backwards in terms of gameplay).

The suggestion above seems like the simplest way to make sure that the benefits of MF are shared across the entire party (not just its disadvantages), which is the overall design philosophy that Arena Net used in GW2.

Currently, if one player equips a MF set in a dungeon, he gets both the advantages and disadvantages, but everyone else gets only the latter.

IamALie.8190:

Why not just ask people to not use MF before entering?

Because there is no way to check and no incentive for them to be honest about it. If they are in full MF gear and everyone else is in full combat gear, they benefit the most.

That’s why I said the current implementation of MF in parties is selfish.

One solution would be to allow gear / stat inspection, of course. Personally I think that averaging MF across the entire party is more compatible with Arena Net’s philosophy.

Daddicus.6128:

Did I say they were useless?

No, you are absolutely correct. I apologize for misrepresenting what you said. In fact you said they were worse than useless:

Daddicus.6128:

Vitality DOES reduce the rest of the party […] causing more of the other members of the party to spend more time downed or defeated. (It also causes other members of the party to spend more money, on armor repairs.)

In other words, you just said that having players with high vitality in your party (ex., a “tanky” guardian, warrior, necro, etc.) makes the whole party worse, causes the other players to die more and makes them spend more money on repairs.

Which suggests you haven’t exactly done many dungeons in GW2.

Daddicus.6128:

Vitality DOES reduce the rest of the party because the high-hp guy isn’t doing as much damage.

Dead people do 0 DPS. If you think vitality, toughness or healing power are useless, I hope I never get grouped with you in a dungeon…

Fred Fargone.3127:

Uhm, then you should average Vitality and Toughness across the party too, if someone selfishly chooses to opt for those, as they reduce the players repair costs as (s)he doesn’t die quite that often.

Is that meant as a joke, or did you really miss the point completely?

Toughness and Vitality are combat stats (same as every other stat – with the exception of Magic Find). The balance of stats depends on each player’s build and play style. A player who chooses to have more Toughness and / or Vitality will die less and take less damage, thus requiring less assistance from other players, having more “uptime”, being better at resurrecting players who are inside AoE, being able to block projectiles that would otherwise hit his teammates, etc.. There’s absolutely nothing selfish about support / toughness builds, on the contrary.

If you think that having players with good defensive stats in your party doesn’t help the party, you probably haven’t played much GW2.

Magic Find is the only stat that does not contribute at all to the success of the party (on the contrary, it makes the party less efficient, for the benefit of a single player)

Assyrian.4827:

we need more skills to be put on our weapons so we can have more builds.

There are already more weapon skills in GW2 than in just about any other game. You get to carry two weapon sets (or multiple kits, or multiple attunements) and many of the weapon skills actually contain two or even three different attacks. In addition to that, lots of utility skills effectively behave like weapon skills that you can equip independently from your choice of weapon.

What I definitely would like to see is the ability to reorder weapon skills. It’s very annoying to have two weapon sets where similar abilities are on different slots. (ex., with your primary weapon maybe you have a shield on #4, and on your secondary weapon you have a shield on #5).

GW2’s default order doesn’t seem to be based on any sort of functional logic; it’s simply based on the duration of cooldowns. Ordering combat skills based on their cooldown looks like the kind of thing an accountant would do, not something that an experienced player or competent game designer would.

Just about every other MMO on the planet lets players order the skills to suit their preference. GW2’s UI seems to be designed to look pretty on screenshots, rather than to be functional.

Assyrian.4827:

the ability to save builds and change builds

Agreed. Developers mentioned they were going to add this to the game (it was mentioned even before launch), but have kept very quiet since.

Assyrian.4827:

without having to pay (put gold sink somewhere else). […]
no armor breaking (put the gold sink somewhere else).

I guess what you mean by that is “put gold sinks where they affect other people but not me.”

The cost of repairs is the main deterrent to “waypoint rushes”.

Assyrian.4827:

The reason is many ppl will not fight cuz they will lose money

You need to be incredibly bad (die a lot) to lose money with armour repairs in PvE. I agree that WvW should be a bit more profitable (in terms of gold), not just for repairs but also to offset the cost of upgrades and siege equipment.

Assyrian.4827:

monsters NPC health reset immunity to damage and respawn time all need to be fixed.

Agreed. The respawn rates in most areas are ridiculous. Creatures often respawn before you’ve even finished looting their previous incarnation. It makes the game world feel very fake and defeats any sense of progression or impact on the environment.

Leashing and HP resetting are artificial mechanics and have no place in a game like GW2 that encourages constant movement in combat. Enemies should try to run away if they’re near death (or stop chasing if they decide the player is no longer a threat) but should never become immune to damage or reset back to 100% HP.

People have been mentioning this since beta, but apparently Arena Net thinks that having mobs that magically reset back to 100% because players crossed some invisible leash threshold (or, in some case, not even that – many mobs reset in the middle of fights, for no apparent reason) makes the game more fun.

Likewise, it’s incomprehensible why knockback abilities used by players can’t knock mobs off ledges (they get a magic “invisible wall” behind them, preventing them from falling) but mobs are perfectly able to knock down players.

I guess Arena Net’s main priority is protecting the mobs’ right to have fun.

Hey, at least now it says Bifrost. Used to say “Bifost”, IIRC.

Loggahead.5402:

As a casual player, I feel that loot drops in general in dungeons are horrible and make dungeons an absolute waste of time.

Although I agree dungeon loot is a bit messy and boring (there should be more interesting and unique items dropping in dungeons, like mini-pets resembling the bosses, themed armour and town clothes, etc.), I don’t think that focusing on the loot is a good idea.

If a dungeon is well-designed and fun, people will enjoy playing it even if they get no “loot”. Increasing the amount of gold or items that players get should never be a valid replacement for improving the gameplay; that was precisely the kind of design attitude that led to the decline of certain MMORPGs. It might appeal to number grinders but in the long run it makes the game lose its core RPG player base.

The dungeons in GW2 need better gameplay. The drops are a separate issue, that is more related to crafting, the game economy, etc., than it is to the actual dungeon design.

Nonlinear.9823:

There is no issue with P1.

Considering the time between waves seems to vary between 15 seconds and 2 minutes (yes, I once had no new mobs for two full minutes), I’d say there probably is an issue.

When they spawn at what I assume is the intended rate (one wave every 30 ~ 40 seconds), it’s a “DPS check” (one which I doubt is appropriately tuned for level 65 players in level 65 gear, but that’s another issue – it’s perfectly doable by a party of level 80 characters). When they start spawning every 15 seconds, however, it’s not a DPS check, it’s just an AoE spam fest followed by a “graveyard” (waypoint) rush followed by people leaving and not wanting to come back.

Braxxis.7062:

Way to necro a near month old thread instead of commenting in one the numerous thread since this one about SE Path 1…

It’s the same bug, still not fixed. There’s no reason to create new threads. Also, if you have nothing to say about the actual topic, what’s the point of your post?

It should be called “bag of lies”.

Actually, “bag of coins” would probably sound better and be more descriptive.

The real question, though, is why do they exist at all. Why don’t you simply get the coins straight from the blue boss satchel, or indeed directly from the boss, when you loot. As they exist, the “bags of gold” are just a useless intermediate step requiring two extra mouse clicks and one extra inventory slot.

CM is one of the most nonsensical dungeons in GW2. It’s all about memorizing the exact ways in which you must move and pull mobs. There’s very little room for creativity or variation. Do it “the right way” and you’ll get through with no issues, deviate a bit and everybody dies.

For the traps: You can avoid them completey by being near the door when the boss dies. Failing that, move forward, then diagonally left, then along the left wall with the wooden beams (no traps there). Mesmers are great here (portal entrance, blink across the first traps, decoy stealth to close in on enemies, feedback to suck up the next shots, and portal exit, allowing the entire team to pop up on the enemies).

Alternatively, kill the riflemen with long-range attacks (there are rifles lying around the floor, I think their range is big enough) and then take your time across the traps.

In the next room, you can avoid most enemies. Just jump on the rock on the right side, then from the rock onto the wooden railing, and go up the ramp (BTW, going up the ramp turns the traps off, so you can also have a single player do this while the others wait). Alternatively, have the entire group run together up the ramp (pulling the enemies) and use a group stealth ability at the top to lose aggro.

You can find plenty of videos on YouTube.

BUTTERBLUME.3217:

Lupicus fires SINGLE projectiles WITHOUT circles aswell. Watch them, dodge them.

The smoky things, yeah. They’re kind of hard to see but their range seems to be limited (less than 1200), so as long as the ranged players stay at maximum distance, they generally won’t be hit by those.

I assume you are referring to story mode.

Simply wait at the door for the enemies to finish talking (and become hostile) and then pull them to the tunnel you came from (where you fought the previous mini-boss). Read the tips under each mob’s portrait to decide on the best kill order, based on your party’s abilities (as a general rule you’ll want to kill saboteurs, bombers and scattershots first, since their damage is harder to avoid).

And, obviously, follow the basic rules of party combat: make sure everyone focuses on the same target (Ctrl+T, T), keep melée enemies slowed (chilled / crippled / stunned), put reflecting walls and domes on the ranged enemies, etc..

Random chance drops related to the boss that drops them are a good thing. In fact, I wish there was more of that (as long as those items are just different, not objectively more powerful). It makes the game world more immersive and less predictable.

Making those recipes account-bound, however, is not a good thing.

Players should be able to sell the recipes at the trading post, or send them to other players. The market would then decide how much the recipes were worth, and players who thought they are a good investment could simply buy the recipe (selling it later if it dropped for them after they had it).

Jay.3284:

My main gripe is the HP on bosses. Some of them are WAYY too high

Also another one to note is some silver mobs are just insane…

That is definitely part of the problem. I think GW2 dungeons fail in several aspects:

• Bosses have too much HP and too few mechanics. Fights just get boring. Nearly every boss should have 30% less HP and multiple phases or abilities (preferably triggered at random times and /or in random orders). A lot of them just stand still firing projectiles, or chase players repeating the same attack over and over again.

• Bosses make little or no use of their environment. For example, the door guard in CM has a ton of potential. When I first saw that room I expected the boss to do things like run to a rope, cut it and make the chandelier drop (causing AoE damage in the middle of the room), shake the walls causing books to fall (causing damage near the edges), run to the fireplace and throw out burning embers (forcing players to use furniture as cover), or something like that. Instead, we get a guy that just chases players, then stops and swings his sword (damaging players who are behind him and nowhere near the sword, BTW). Boring, boring, boring. And he’s not the exception, he’s the rule.

• Mobs also have too much HP and hit way too hard. When a group of level 80 adventurers with exotic gear and elite skills goes into a dungeon, they should feel powerful. They should feel that they’re overcoming incredible odds. Instead, it takes 5 “heroes” almost one minute to kill a couple of nameless guards – guards who are able to kill them in 3 hits. This is ridiculous; it makes players feel like wimps. No “trash” mob should be more powerful than a fully-geared player of the same level. Instead, the party of 5 players should be pitted against larger groups, or groups with some tactical advantage (ex., access to cannons, turrets, traps, etc.). That’s how you give players a challenge while making them feel powerful. It’s dungeon design 101.

• The only enemies that should be clearly more powerful than players should be bosses and mini-bosses. And that extra power should be justified by their appearance (i.e., they should be big, or look like powerful wizards, or carry some menacing weapon, etc.). Not just another humanoid guard who happens to have 50x more HP than any player can ever have, and 10x more attack power than any player can ever have. I’ve lost count of the number of times I’ve seen players say something like “GW2… where trash mobs kill you in 2 seconds and bosses die with 5 minutes of auto-attack”. It’s not even irony; it’s just true.

• Mobs’ behaviour is often nonsensical. I’m talking about things like riflemen and archers who don’t move at all (did someone glue their feet to the ground?), like the ones in CM, or armies with infinite soldiers that spawn out of thin air but attack only 3 at a time (like the ones in SE). If you want to have an enemy that just shoots and doesn’t move, use a turret, not a human. And if you want to have a steady but infinite stream of enemies, justify it in some way (ex., make them robots, coming out of an assembly line – not living creatures popping out of thin air but choosing to attack in small groups instead of just steamrolling the enemy). What are the mobs doing there in the first place, anyway, besides waiting for players to come kill them? If you can’t justify their presence and behaviour in some credible way, rethink the dungeon.

• Explorable mode paths are often extremely similar, sharing parts of the terrain and even some bosses, not to mention the first third of the dungeon is always identical. Before launch we were told that dungeons would have “several bonus events” that could “surprise” players. In the end, there is effectively one random event (the troll in AC). Everything else is fixed.

Overall, dungeons are one of the weakest parts of GW2. Unimaginative, unrealistic, unrewarding, repetitive and boring. The fractal dungeons are better (at the cost of making even less sense), but still suffer from some of the problems above (bosses with too much HP, that just get boring half way into the fight, “low end” mobs that are far more powerful than any player, things that pop out of thin air with no justification, etc.).

It feels like the dungeons and their inhabitants were designed by completely different people, and that the latter didn’t really have a RPG mentality and weren’t even trying to create believable places, just sprinkle the dungeon with some semi-random mobs with semi-random abilities. Their guiding objective (reinforced by most of the changes introduced after launch) seems to have been to make players spend time rather than make the players have fun.

I think nearly any player with a couple of years of gaming experience could design more interesting dungeons. Maybe not code them, but certainly design them.

Sunreva.8714:

The AOE’s on the ground magically hit you even when you aren’t inside them […] especially with the AOE’s that somehow always hit you when you are outside their boundaries.

In addition to the projectiles’ trajectory (mentioned above), remember that nearly all AoE circles in GW2 are bugged. The AoE will hit players even when they are 2 or 3 steps outside the circle. They seem to assume that your character is a maximum-size norn, and even then they will hit if your feet are just barely outside the circle.

I have no idea why Arena Net hasn’t fixed this yet. All they need to do is make the red circle bigger than the damage effect by the radius of a player’s collision cylinder (which is identical for all races). I know they’re aware of it; I’ve done AC with Chris Whiteside, and several people (he included) got hit by the troll’s AoE while standing clearly outside the red circle. He said they would look into it “straight away”. This was almost 3 months ago, still no fix.

I guess the AoE red circles use some highly obscure code that is very hard to change (they also seem unable to change their colour, despite the fact that they are almost invisible for colour blind people, as mentioned in a couple of other threads).

TL;DR: Nearly all AoE in GW2 hits outside the circles. Make sure you are at least two steps away from the edge, and not on the side the projectiles are coming from.

Grezko.7950:

Giving the option to force oneself into an overflow might be a good idea

Enabling guesting (which was advertised as a key feature and supposed to be operational at launch) would be a much better idea.

I was told (before buying the game) that I would be able to join my friends on any server at any moment to do PvE content with them. Instead of actually enabling guesting, they put a 24-hour cooldown on server transfers, and then increased it to 7 days.

Obviously, I’ve kind of given up on playing with most of my friends, and in fact just about gave up on playing at all.

The game (and the manifesto, and all that) that we were sold was great. What we got wasn’t quite up to par, and seems to have been moving backwards (with FotM fragmenting the player base more than any other MMO ever has – as was obvious just by reading the description of how it worked, with ascended items turning the game into a number grind, etc.).

Oh well, we live and learn.

SintLucifer.4206:

Well that will be bad. Because in WvWvW you kinda need a commander and not everyone will be in your guild.

Read the title of this thread.

A simple solution would be to make the commander icon visible in PvE only to people representing the same guild. Considering players can join multiple guilds in GW2, it would make it easy for those interested to ask in map chat, join, get the icon displayed, do the events, and then leave. They could also limit their chat to the guild channel.

I have to say I’m getting a bit fed up of commanders who treat maps and map chat as their personal playground, and assume that everyone in the map must be following their highly enlightened (sarcasm) lead.

Between that and 6 or 7 commanders just idling in Lion’s Arch, I don’t know what’s worse. If there was an option to disable all commander icons in PvE, I wouldn’t think twice.

It’s ridiculous that even people on my block list show up on my map just because they spent 100g to have a blue peni… er, icon above their head.

Jason King.2647:

Please post them in this thread if you come across any sort of bug that fits in the following categories:

- Stuck in the terrain or a prop
- Textural/graphical issues with the environment or world props
- Terrain or world props disappearing/flickering
- Anything else that you feel might be an art bug

I and several people asked this on a similar thread, but never got a reply, so here goes again:

Why?

Doesn’t the game have built-in bug report form that not only attaches a screenshot but also stores information about the character’s coordinates, active events, system configuration, etc.?

Are those reports not reaching the developers? Is the bug report form… bugged?

gwawer.9805:

Please don’t make anymore blogpost. They just eat up the developers time.

Yeah, because Arena Net only has one developer, who works day and night right until the last second before the patch goes live.

/sarcasm

Ibbuli.4027:

The name of the exotic doesn’t have anything to do with where it drops.

Account.9832:

rare exotic jewelcrafting recipes (they only drop from the boss with the corresponding name).

Ibbuli.4027:

That’s true, but so far (as far as I know) only trinkets and their crafting recepies are dropped from certain (dungeon?) bosses.

So looks like you are aware of at least one case (a dozen cases, in fact) where the name of the item does have something to do with where it drops.

So, unless you know where Final Rest drops, why assume it would follow the same pattern as exotics obtainable from the Mystic Forge, instead of the pattern followed by exotics that can only be found as drops? Especially when a developer has already said that it is not craftable?

What I find really interesting about these bugs (not just the one in AC but also in CM and a couple of other dungeons where you can “walk on the roof”) is that they show the huge amount of totally unnecessary geometry that these dungeons have. Even with all the engine and GPU optimizations, this stuff increases load times and reduces the frame rate.

On top of that, all the mobs and bosses of the paths you didn’t pick are still generated by the game, and their AI / patrol code is run by the server (again, requiring resources and worsening performance). Even though you are never supposed to go near them.

Wilow.3061:

Well I disagree. If you skip bosses and are unable to complete the dungeon, then it’s not a bug.

The developers have already stated that it’s perfectly fine to skip any skippable bosses. Anyway, the NPC bugs are unrelated to Kholer, the troll or the spider (which are the only skippable bosses in AC).

Ibbuli.4027:

The name of the exotic doesn’t have anything to do with where it drops. Big chest is big chest, which means you get it from dragon lieutenants, Eternal Battleground’s JP or any other chest which looks like the same.

There is no reason why one chest can’t have a different loot table from another. Just because most items are selected randomly from a shared list doesn’t mean a specific item can’t be added to a specific chest or to a specific NPC.

For example, the recipe for “Husk of the Destroyer” only seems to drop (logically enough) from the Destroyer of Worlds. And I assume the same goes for the other rare exotic jewelcrafting recipes (they only drop from the boss with the corresponding name).

If the Final Rest staff is so “special” that it can’t be obtained from the Mystic Forge, there’s a good chance that it’s supposed to drop from a specific chest, somehow connected to the “final resting place” of some important character.

I say supposed to drop because I’m pretty sure someone made a mistake in the item’s database record, and it’s not actually in the game.

Tulisin.6945:

Sparky.6897:

There is an issue with RENDERING in WvW as we all know.

Please stop saying that, culling and rendering are not the same thing.

Actually, his statement is quite accurate, because there are two bugs affecting player visibility:

• Server-side culling (i.e., prioritization of which entities to communicate to the client).
• Client side deferred rendering (characters don’t render until all their geometry and textures have been loaded).

Both issues affect the actual rendering of enemies on the screen. In addition to that, clients have (or had) a delay in re-enabling rendering of recently unstealthed thieves.

Tulisin.6945:

The “fix” for this should be to allow full camera control as an organic option, just like the “fix” for the combat mode add-on is to implement a locked crosshair option.

This.

The ability to hit something with a siege weapon should be determined by that weapon’s reach and projectile trajectory, not by awkward camera positioning.

And any falling projectiles should have infinite range downwards (it doesn’t make any sense for arrows / meteors / whatever to not hit enemies near the wall of your keep just because the caster is on top of a high wall – if the enemies are under the arrows, the arrows should keep falling until they hit something, obviously while losing horizontal speed, so they don’t have infinite reach).

remarkableriots.6534:

Its been 3 months and they still haven’t fixed this? This is pathetic!

Took them 4 months to fix the spelling of “transmuation” (transmutation) stones in the gem store, which only required editing a couple of text files. Fixing this one requires actual coding, so don’t hold your breath.

Sounds like another manifestation of a bug introduced some time ago that was causing some types of mobs to have no cooldown on their abilities. For example, bandits were spamming launch / knockdown, and dredge in some areas are chain-casting daze. Go near one and say goodbye to any control over your character.

Even without the random HP reset bugs and even if you have a pet or some sort of way to damage them while you’re knocked down / stunned / etc., this makes the game pretty much unplayable in those areas.

Aveneo.2068:

Just checked my Local.dat file and found out that it was over 30mb in size. The one before it was nearly 40mb.

While I doubt the sound bugs are caused by the size of that file (they’re probably caused by some bug in the game’s code – my guess would be some sort of race condition between two threads, leading to the same sound file being played multiple times a few ms apart, leading to a kind of “stacking” / “echo” effect), it would be interesting to know if Arena Net has some explanation for the bloating.

sonicwhip.9052:

they have said over and over that we can play this game the way we want with our own different play styles. I dont see why not I can’t just lock into the fire attunement and gain weapon swap.

And I don’t see why I can’t just play an elementalist and create clones instead of having attunements. Or why I can’t play a warrior and build turrets instead of using adrenaline. Or play a thief and give myself aegis instead of having stealth.

Actually I do see, it’s because that’s how the classes were designed. Elementalists’ fundamental mechanic is attunement switching (i.e., mastery of the four elements). If you don’t want to switch attunements, then maybe you would have more fun (and be more efficient) playing a different class.

I’d love to be able to equip two weapon sets and swap when out of combat, though, just because it would be more practical and save me a couple of inventory slots.

Hamfast.8719:

Same here… I’m pretty strictly a PvEer

Dungeons are PvE.

It’s not only loot, but XPs as well.

I can definitely get experience faster doing open-world event chains than going through some dungeon paths (ex., Sorrow’s Embrace Path 2). And there are no gathering nodes inside dungeons (a pretty decent source of income – at least in higher-level zones – that requires minimal effort).

I saw a level 65 character about 2-3 days after game launch.

IIRC, there were level 80 characters less than 24 hours after launch (actually, two days before launch, since pre-purchasers got a 3-day headstart). With sufficient materials (or gold to buy them), characters can be levelled to 80 in minutes, through crafting.

Took me MUCH longer.

And how is that relevant, to the game or to you? Presumably you were enjoying the game, and I doubt you had done all the content (explored every area, done every heart and event, etc.) in the first 3 days, so how does the fact that someone else was level 65 and you weren’t detract from your enjoyment of the game? Would you have enjoyed the game more if everything else was equal but you were level 65 (instead of 20 or 30 or whatever)?

Or did I miss the point of what you were trying to say?

Now, I agree the game is currently suffering from significant gold inflation, mostly as a result of the misguided changes introduced in the Lost Shores patch (and poor design of the crafting system in general, often requiring hundreds of units of rare and expensive materials to craft a single item). And if I was a very cynical person I would say this is a deliberate move on Arena Net’s part, because they effectively sell gold through their closed “gem exchange” (despite having promised otherwise during the pre-order period).

But that’s unrelated to character level.

Sylvari cultural armor (T1, medium, boots, female) clips through character’s feet and ankles, and doesn’t allow correct application of dyes:

https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/support/bugs/Sylvari-cultural-armor-clipping-dye-bugs/first