Guild Wars 2

Rekuja.6318:

Hi,

Hello!

Rekuja.6318:

Are there any permanent ranged thieves here? even without the 1200 range, what are your thoughts on the class and playstyle?

My thief is permanent ranged (with an important exception, more on that later). I typically run P/P with a Shortbow in the auxiliary. I absolutely love the playstyle. Being purely ranged gives you enormous mobility, which is one of the best aspects of thieves, in my opinion.

Rekuja.6318:

I’ve been using pistol/pistol and sometimes either shortbow or pistol/dagger as my secondary weapon set, I’m really enjoying it so far and there’s quite a few traits that make the play style viable.

I concur. I was drawn to thief (and engineer, briefly) due to the prospect of being a dual-pistols gunslinger, and thief has absolutely lived up to my hopes. High mobility combined with enormous burst damage makes you a useful member of the group who, given a proficiency with dodging, can easily offset damage-focused gear with skill-based survivability.

On the topic of traits, Critical Strikes opens up a lot of fun options to P/P thieves. The great thing about P/P, though, is that it can be made to work quite effectively with a number of potential trait lines. In my experience with other classes, traits don’t seem to be quite as flexible – a problem for guardians in particular.

Rekuja.6318:

I’m just curious what you guys think?

I personally think the 1200 range should be added, I do fine with 900 but it can be quite annoying at times…

I find that 900 range is a very reasonable tradeoff considering several factors. First and foremost, we have some of the absolute highest ranged burst damage around. The typical tradeoff for longer range is lower DPS. Second, our astoundingly high mobility compared to other classes more than compensates for the reduced range. Personally, I roll with Signet of Shadows much of the time – this makes orbiting targets amazingly effective even when the targets are pursuing you. Without SoS, several traits from Acrobatics increase mobility either as a function of dodging or via swiftness.

Rekuja.6318:

also, what do you guys think ArenaNet’s thoughts are on Ranged thieves? do they want the class to be played using whatever playstyle we prefer? or do they hate the idea of a ranged only thief?

From a philosophical standpoint, ANet’s on the record as saying that they generally want players to find their own comfort zones and play the way we prefer. I’ve never seen any evidence post-launch to countermand that.

One thing to watch out for, however, is the upcoming AoE nerf, which might have substantial effects on the shortbow’s viability. If anything, though, that should really make P/P stand out further, being a single-target weapon set (I’m assuming that ANet wouldn’t penalize the weaponset as a whole based upon the Ricochet trait – one additional target 1/5 of the time is a far cry from five targets all the time).

Cathbadb.6079:

I would suggest that if race change is implemented then the customer agrees to forfeit all rewards from Personal Story up to the level at which they made the race change. This would be fair all around.

It’s a moot point because ANet reps have confirmed that it isn’t going to happen.

Astraea.6075:

I’m not sure that the price will rise much more without further external factors coming into effect. While a lot of supply has left the market, it seems to have evened out at roughly the same level as demand (or rather, demand as measured by buy offers), and given the sheer amount of supply that (I’m assuming) has been hoarded, it won’t take long before the more impatient speculators start trickling it back into circulation.

Additionally, while easily attainable daily supply has been severely diminished by the removal of the Rich node, the overall potential daily supply is not hugely effected by the removal. By my reckoning, there existed a guaranteed (i.e., not accounting for harvesting bonus and chance of double-ore) 52 ori per day per character, excluding WvW supply. The reduction of that to 45 is not all that substantial – while the convenience factor is certainly much lower, the ore is still out there. The pressure to actually go through Orr and pick it up will be much higher now that the lazy man’s option is out.

The market for ori will definitely remain interesting while the stockpiles are sat upon, but it should normalize to an appropriate (i.e., no longer influenced by sanctioned non-bot farming) level shortly.

soulcakeduck.7036:

Dredge can take an hour to clear in a good group now. Compared to clearing 3+maw other fractals in 42 minutes in the same good group, for me. That’s crazy. A group without dredge can almost clear two floors in the time it takes for a dredge group to finish.

I concur. The problem with Dredge is not difficulty versus other fractals, it’s time investment versus other fractals. I’m very confused as to how the developers responsible for FotM in the first place didn’t see the massive discrepancy. I’m even more confused about how after months of gathering metrics on FotM, the dev team decided to implement changes which only increase the time investment.

Malediktus.9250:

Because he was obviously intended to be fighted with his minions at the same time. They are respawning for a long time for a reason. The boss alone is just plain boring.

Either way it’s just plain boring. This is one of the biggest snoozefests of a boss encounter in the entire game. DPS, stop and dodge ground-based attack, DPS some more. Astoundingly repetitive and boring, overly long due to excessive HP padding.

Nibiru.1423:

Your miss reading my post, i said we didn’t look the time before. This time we looked but it was not anywhere to be seen, and the player didn’t fall to the lower level he died off map this time.

Even if it was on the lower level they should not expect you to waste 10 minutes running to the bottom and back its ridicules, if not a bug its very POOR design.

Your miss reading mine, I said “if you gave up without seriously looking.”

If it was truly still bugged, you would not be the only person the forums talking about it, period.

themaster.9802:

Pretty much sums up why I hate it. You get someone in your party contributing less while getting more.

Your personal opinion on the stat is irrelevant. ANet considers it valid enough of a statistic to continue putting it on Ascended gear, while many far more useful stat combinations fail to be represented. There’s no reason whatsoever not to have this tracked in the hero panel.

Blacklight.2871:

But what you are missing here is that if you had the opportunity to put in the extra effort to acquire more laurels per day, so you can outfit all your characters at the same time, then every player should have that opportunity. And what happens then? Those players who run a single character will still be gearing them up faster than you because they are also acquiring more per day.

Even if it required separate characters to redo the dailies for the reward, non-altaholics would just fill up their empty slots with farming toons, none of which will ever leave the starter zones because they are only there to farm laurels — which will all go to the one character who is the player’s main. You’re just never going to win that race without special treatment being afforded to you.

You’re making the situation more complicated than it needs to be. A very straightforward solution would be to make dailies completable per-character and make laurels and gear obtained via laurels character-bound rather than account bound.

Altaholics aren’t punished in that they have the option to gear up all of their characters at the same rate (if they’re willing to put in the time) and nobody can exploit laurels with farming toons.

Agreed. While I don’t use the magic find stat, I find it baffling that a statistic not only exists in game, but is available as a primary stat on gear and is represented well on ascended gear – which many stats aren’t; and yet that this statistic is not tabulated in the hero panel like every other stat in game.

There’s even a frickin’ empty spot to put it right there at the bottom, next to Agony Resist!

Kal Spiro.9745:

Why would you lose the transmute? You may have to transmute it again, but that’s your choice for wanting that look. Each character can earn a finite number of transmutation stone, but ultimately they should be more than enough to accomodate any characters appearance needs.

Indeed, nothing is stopping players from transmuting ad nauseum in the 1-79 range. The amount of transmutation stones a player can obtain purely by completing personal storyline and zone completion is vastly higher than the number of stones a single character is likely to use.

At 80 it’s a bit more problematic. The only stones which work for transmuting 80 gear are fine stones, attainable through the Gem Store or BLCs only. This in and of itself is the reason appearance gear slots aren’t likely to be implemented, however. Any change to one of the few things players actively pay for in the game is highly unlikely due to backlash. If implemented, appearance slots would render wasted any gems (and therefore any actual-world currency potentially used) spent on transmutation stones.

My static never skipped Dredge due to difficulty (though I’m fully aware that many PUGs do), but rather due to the sheer amount of time it takes compared to other fractals. In my mind, that’s the real discrepancy.

Both the bomb and turret hallways take longer than most fractals’ in-between-ish areas. Clear enormous group, stop, clear another enormous group, stop, tank enormous group while performing specific task (which in the case of the bombs is artificially lengthened by the slow respawn rates on bombs).

The Rabsovich fight takes longer than virtually any final boss in Fractals, with the possible exception of Jade Maw. This is true regardless of whether the wheel exploit was utilized, and in fact the wheel exploit probably sped things up by decreasing the number of times that players unskilled at dodging got downed.

The final boss is one of the more time-consuming boss fights in Fractals, depending on the boss and whether it’s a PUG or a static group. Nowhere near as long as the Rabsovich fight, but it’s up there at the top.

IMO, a massive reduction to Rabsovich’s health pool would resolve the issue for most players, though the boss fight will still require synchronization.

RoyHarmon.5398:

How long do the chests last? I’m hoping this is a solution to the “unlooted corpse premature disappearance” problem. Few resources used for a relatively low-polygon-count box, right? It could stay a bit longer without causing problems.

That makes a lot of sense. Given that ANet indicated the chests should be coming into play for higher-tier loot types, it’s reasonable to assume that this is what they had in mind. If I get the opportunity, I’ll try to time a chest the next time I see one.

RoyHarmon.5398:

I think a lot of the confusion I feel is due to the absence of an actual “uncommon” item tier in GW2. There’s junk, common, fine, masterwork, rare, exotic, ascended, and legendary. No uncommon anywhere, though I believe that was the term for the purple items in GW1.

In my experience, players tend to use “uncommon” to refer to items of the green “masterwork” quality, which is probably a result of ANet’s somewhat confusing rarity terminology. Masterwork tends to imply a very high quality gear piece – sometimes crafted – in your typical sword-and-board parlance. The fact that green-quality items are rather low on the totem pole in GW2 makes it somewhat odd to call them “masterwork.”

FinalPatriot.8034:

Any idea as to why? I don’t see how it would affect anything significant in the game. At worst, you would have to do their origin quest for the new race.

The reasons I’ve seen cited by ANet representatives were:

Complication of personal storyline. If the storyline is left unchanged from where it stood before race change, characters would have incorrect and often nonsensical storylines attached. If storyline is revised but not replayed, issues arise of an expedient method of determining all choices made during the storylines. If storyline is replayed, players re-obtain all storyline rewards, including experience, unique weapon and armor skins, gold, karma, Guild Commendation Letters, etc. Establishing a way to prevent storyline rewards based upon whether the character is re-running story would be complicated.

Cultural armor. Any cultural armor obtained on the character would be unusable due to the race change. ANet currently has no way to refund items. Automatic substitution for appropriate cultural armor is incredibly complicated and nearly impossible due to transmutation of cultural skins onto other armors.

Nibiru.1423:

if it happens again i will, it happened the other day too, but to be honest we never looked for it that time, it was like hammer as gone, lets wipe.

That’s essentially my point. The ability to lose the hammer was a major issue that was discussed highly during the first week of Fractals, but ANet has since addressed it. If it was still possible to truly lose the hammer, there would be more posts about it than… none.

I can’t say I blame your team for wiping without seriously looking – I’ve been on teams where we decide it’s easier to wipe than to climb all the way down to the starting area, where players sometimes fall, with or without the hammer. But be aware in that case that the decision not to put in the effort of retrieving the player or hammer does not constitute a bug.

Nibiru.1423:

Well we looked for it as long as could be expected, its shouldnt happen end of story. Its a bug that was NOT fixed correctly. For us today someone carrying the hammer got blown of by the wind and died somewhere off the map, hammer was gone and did not return to spawn point.

I don’t know what to tell you. It was reported fixed, I haven’t experienced it in approximately 500 fractal runs since it was reported fixed, I haven’t communicated with anyone who has experienced it being broken since it was reported fixed, and a forum search did not pull up any recent reports of the hammer getting lost.

If you truly believe that your team experienced a bug, I’d recommend submitting a specific and detailed bug report.

I reiterate though that this specific issue was considered resolved by ANet. And yes, obviously removing exploitable details are going to be addressed before fixing bugs; people abusing features/unintended design flaws are clearly a higher priority to ANet and it is generally much more straightforward to address exploits.

Nibiru.1423:

well it happened today in our group, and a few days ago in another group, so not such a hot fix :P

If they fell of the edge into the void, the hammer was reverted to the respawn point. If they fell and landed on normal terrain below, you simply chose to wipe rather than walk back and pick it up.

The fix was that if the hammer carrier fell into the void, the hammer was lost permanently. There are no circumstances in which this is possible currently, although it is still possible for the hammer to be located on terrain which is not typically accessible, such as small intermediary ledges between areas through which the players path. In those cases, I’ve found that a player who’s halfway decent at platforming (i.e., jumping puzzles) and has a fall-damage reduction trait is generally easily able to retrieve the hammer.

irrimn.3192:

Personally I would say that 3/5, 2/4, 2/3 would be a good compromise, which really is only changing the situation in a full party and remains exactly the same in every other possible group composition.

So, instead of saying, “super majority” how about we just ask Anet to make it 3/5 instead of 2/5?

I concur, and I have indicated such in several threads requesting party system/kick vote reform. The specific numbers outlined in my above post were there to illustrate how you were creating a straw man argument in response to the super majority comment.

Super majorities aren’t effective in such small sample sizes, but what we should have are actual majorities. Again, abstentions still count toward the total number of votes, so, as you outlined, the number of votes required would be 3/5, 2/4, and 2/3.

This has the unfortunate side effect of not preventing guild groups from kicking players to invite guildmates for the final reward, which is the OP’s entire point. However, there is simply no way to prevent it in all circumstances. No matter how many votes are required, there’s at least one potential victim of a kick; a party leader system is equally abusable, requiring only one troll/tyrant to kick others. But requiring actual majorities should nevertheless cut down on abuse.

irrimn.3192:

As for the issue of abstentions counting towards their vote is a moot point. People being kicked are not made aware that there is a vote going on, and they do NOT get a vote in the game as the whether or not they should be allowed to stay. That is a fact and is not up for debate.

You accuse me of taking things out of context, and then take the issue of the person being kicked out of context? I clearly never stated that they should have a say in the question of whether they are kicked, I simply indicated that their presence in the team is essential in determining how many votes are required for a majority.

darkace.8925:

As someone without a main…as someone who plays five alternate characters equally…I know and have accepted that it is going to take me more time and money to do anything a player with one main character might do. This applies to everything from leveling to crafting to gearing up to stocking up on consumables. If you guys whining about how long it’s going to take to gear your alts in top-tier/near top-tier equipment don’t realize the extra work involved then that’s a YOU problem, not a game problem.

Why it has become a game problem and not a YOU problem is that up until now, if a player wanted to have multiple alts and wanted put in the effort of keeping those alts geared maximally, he or she could. Granted it would take approximately twice as much game time and effort to keep two characters optimized as opposed to one, but it could be done.

Fractals’ daily chests, to which Ascended rings are tied, are character-bound – if you have two characters that you want to equip with rings, you can run two dailies per day per level bracket. Mist Essence collected on one character can be used on another, and spending twice as much time in Fractals maximizes essence gains. Ascended rings and back items, in short, are attainable at the player’s pace, with no penalties for alts.

While previous gear could be attained for multiple characters by multiplying effort, laurel gear cannot. Hence it is a game problem.

Despite being a shout-centric guardian, I personally opted for Earth over Soldier. I have a considerable amount of condition removal already, both tied intrinsically to my build and obtained via my static group (physical projectile finishers through our light fields). I had already ruled out Dolyak on the basis that my static group contains a water-traited elementalist whose passive and active heals are quite sufficient for my needs. Earth gives me some more specific bunker-ish functionality at the cost of vitality.

I would say that the specific choice of rune within the choices you mentioned really just comes down to personal preference. Earth is a great set, though!

darkace.8925:

SneakyErvin.3056:

So as of yesterday, playing alts became pretty much impossible if you want to gear them up at your own pace.

“I want the best gear in the game for each of my eight characters and I WANT IT NOW!!!”

/stamps foot
/tantrum face

Don’t be absurd. “I want it now” is a far cry from “eight months is too long.”

irrimn.3192:

Yes, cut off my quote there and completely ignore everything else I said in my post. Good job.

Okay, let’s examine the other glaring flaws in your argument.

irrimn.3192:

It’s already a majority vote. Think about it and do the math: There are 5 people in the group. One person votes to kick one other person. The person voting to be kicked obviously doesn’t get a vote because: A)They can’t see that they are being vote-kicked and 2) If they could vote they would obviously vote no. So, since they person being kicked doesn’t get a say in the matter, really there are only 4 maximum possible valid voters in any given situation. It requires 2 votes to kick someone. 2 out of 4 is what? 50%.

Ignores the “super” in super majority and addresses the issue on terms irrelevant to the post this was a reply to. Also states that the person being kicked doesn’t get a vote – true – and therefore doesn’t count towards the percentage necessary – which is debatable. Abstentions don’t typically get removed from vote tallies.

irrimn.3192:

Unless you’re saying that it should require 3 votes to kick which would be a minimum of 75% to kick…

Although then what would happen when the group only has 4 people? It’d be 100%.
And when the group has 3 people? Then you couldn’t kick anyone.
And well, if the group has 2 people and you’re trying to kick the other person, you’ve got problems and you should really just leave group instead.

As the system currently is, if there are 3 people in a group, the other 2 people can kick the last person if they so wish.

Straw man argument. The post clearly stated “super majority,” not “3 votes to kick.” The number of votes necessary to obtain a two-thirds majority decreases based on size of team. If we assume your system of abstentions-don’t-count-at-all, then a team size of 5 would require 3 votes for a vote kick, but a team of 4 and 3 would require 2.

If however we assume a system in which abstentions do count towards the total number of votes, as is the norm, then a team size of 5 requires 4 votes, a team size of 4 requires 3, and a team size of 3 requires 2.

In any case, if the team is of size 2, there’s no difference between attempting to kick and simply leaving the team.

irrimn.3192:

As for the main topic at hand, this has always actually been an issue with Fractals and well, all dungeons in general. Although I am pretty sure Anet’s stance on this is that kicking people at the end of a dungeon is a punishable act although they don’t ban people on their first infraction. If this happens to you, I’d just report the people in the party and move on. Eventually people that do this as common practice will get perma-banned from the game for it.

Included for the sake of completeness; not relevant to the above.

Nibiru.1423:

I do not doubt this, I agree exploits should be fixed first. But they don’t seem to care much about the smaller annoying bugs like for instance when the person carrying the hammer gets knocked off or falls, the hammer is lost and you have to wipe.

I could go on all day about small bugs in fractals, It’s the more irritating bugs that I mean, not game breaking but annoying. Probably pretty simple to fix too.

The hammer thing has been fixed – in most cases (I haven’t ever seen an issue with it since this was implemented) when the hammer bearer falls off, the hammer is placed on a pedestal next to the respawn point that the player is placed at. That was done in a hotfix weeks and possibly months ago.

irrimn.3192:

Asglarek.8976:

Why they refuse to implement a super majority vote kick policy is beyond stupid its blatant incompetence.

It’s already a majority vote. Think about it and do the math: There are 5 people in the group. One person votes to kick one other person. The person voting to be kicked obviously doesn’t get a vote because: A)They can’t see that they are being vote-kicked and 2) If they could vote they would obviously vote no. So, since they person being kicked doesn’t get a say in the matter, really there are only 4 maximum possible valid voters in any given situation. It requires 2 votes to kick someone. 2 out of 4 is what? 50%.

Super majorities are defined in the American parlance as a two-thirds majority, or 66%. Do the math, 50% does not equal 66%.

GrandmaFunk.3052:

As someone with 8 characters, I’m perfectly fine with the timescale.

But then I also played gw1 for 6 years… I’m here for the long haul so I’m ok with top end stuff taking months to attain.

Saying that you personally don’t have a problem with the timescale is different from saying that you think it’s a reasonable design choice.

A major factor in this is the fact that they haven’t yet implemented the remaining ascended gear – armor and earrings. If they’re tied to the same arbitrary account-bound timescales (unlike the vast majority of gear acquisition in-game, including legendaries) then six months for six characters can rapidly become four and a half years (assuming a rate of 1 month per item, six armor pieces plus two earrings plus one amulet), not counting infusions, of course. This assumes that you don’t create any new characters in the meantime, which is at least possible in a six-month span, but highly unlikely on larger timescales.

And since the activity which is arbitrarily limited to once-per-day is completing a daily, you’ll have a lot of time to be creating new characters.

Fiennes.9568:

This was (unfortunately) possible prior to the patch.

Possible yes, but the only use for it was pure griefing. Now that players can enter Fractals in progress, it’s possible to kick in order to invite guild members, as the OP indicated.

My take on it is that this is an unfortunate side-effect of a very necessary change. I experienced party members disconnecting from Fractals and being unable to re-enter vastly more frequently than I encountered teams kicking people mid-run, and the disconnection issue had the ability to be progress-blocking.

GrandmaFunk.3052:

Blueshield.6291:

In other words, you think it’s a perfectly valid statement that because players can use exclusively green-quality gear, they should?

A closer equivalence would be that since players can use non-BiS gear and still participate in any content they want, taking a long time to acquire BiS gear is perfectly reasonable.

More relevantly to the OP, though, do you think that the timescales for BiS gear acquisition remain reasonable despite introducing a disparity for players with multiple max-level characters? The timescale in and of itself isn’t as much an issue, I would say, except when applied to people with multiple characters. I for one don’t think that ANet fully intended for altoholics to have to run every single daily and monthly for the next X months (where X equals character amount) just to acquire the amulets, when the armor isn’t even in place yet.

I would also add that changing the enemy type of Risen Giants from “risen” to “giant” would handily solve this problem, and give people another reason to be in Orr.

/signed

GrandmaFunk.3052:

Ouiji.3905:

It is holding my group back, and it means I would not be playing to my full potential. Ascended gear is the end game – like it or not.

This is reasoning I would consider invalid.. so to each his own, right?

In other words, you think it’s a perfectly valid statement that because players can use exclusively green-quality gear, they should?

Cappy.2786:

Basically you are saying:“Omg you demand that I actually put effort into the game?”

No, the statement is that the new dailies are checklists which include extraordinary measures which players must go out of their way to complete, whereas the old dailies were thought of by ANet as a way to reward casual players who don’t, for example, run all 3 paths of a dungeon every 24 hours.

The new daily format no longer rewards casual players. QED.

EDIT: Now that this thread has been merged into a much broader topic and lost all specificity, the above may be irrelevant.

Jareth.4813:

Blueshield.6291:

Jareth.4813:

Bait and switch?

They told us nearly a month ago that Lyn’s would not be selling keys upon her return.

Hardly a surprise.

I think the bait and switch the OP refers to is the one performed during Wintersday – where they said Lyns would be coming back afterwards and forgot to mention the removal of keys. Plenty of players who used her exclusively for keys continued to stockpile CCCs during that time, which they would not have done had the information been made available from the start.

Same thing I was alluding to.

Whilst yes they didn’t say at the time they removed Lyns, they did still tell us in good time.

A bait and switch would suggest they never told us about her reduced stock ahead of the patch. Which is just not true. We’ve had nearly a month to come to terms with it.

Fair enough, and I don’t have a problem with the ways they’ve handled the Lyns situation recently. But I did at the time, and still do, feel like the ANet posts on the subject during Wintersday were worded such as to be very misleading (apparent indication that she’d return immediately upon completion of the Wintersday event, failure to mention a major change).

Their apparent confirmation that everything would return to the previous norm, in other words, is problematic in that players who should have and would have changed their behavior weren’t given a chance to. But pointing it out now doesn’t really serve any purpose, I agree.

Vlawde.1895:

I’ll agree with some here, the dailies seem like a chore..a checklist you have to get done, things you have to go out of your way to do that you wouldn’t normally do in the course of gameplay. It seems grindy to me.

I had never paid attention to them before, but yesterday everyone was talking about them so I gave it a shot. After several hours of my normal play I had hardly any of them. I spent several more hours purposely grinding them out…doing stuff I don’t really enjoy doing.

I feel sorry for those who may only have an hour or so of playtime a day.

That’s the real problem here. The prior dailies were easily completable in a one hour window, with or without grinding (i.e., they could be completed in an hour of normal gameplay). Some of the details of the new ones require additional extraordinary measures which can increase that time estimate substantially.

Jareth.4813:

Bait and switch?

They told us nearly a month ago that Lyn’s would not be selling keys upon her return.

Hardly a surprise.

I think the bait and switch the OP refers to is the one performed during Wintersday – where they said Lyns would be coming back afterwards and forgot to mention the removal of keys. Plenty of players who used her exclusively for keys continued to stockpile CCCs during that time, which they would not have done had the information been made available from the start.

I’m seriously hoping that this time ANet had the good sense to put large time windows on their one-time events. Based on their announced start time, everyone in North America is pretty screwed if these are short-duration.

I honestly believe that ANet knows better, so I’m not overly concerned. The vast majority of their NA server population does not consist of people with nothing to do but game all day, every day.

A big problem with the Karka event was that the EU servers had it going on at the same time as the US servers. That’s just plain silly. Hopefully ANet can learn from its mistakes, and change behaviors (especially when it’s easily rectifiable).

Yup, it looks like your options are basically to either buy a bunch more of the 250-use tools or toss the CCCs. Not what you wanted to hear, but that’s how it is.

What bugs are you referring to specifically? They certainly fixed the largest and most problematic (in terms of being the only bug prior to this patch in FotM that was truly game-breaking) with the revised instancing system allowing players to re-enter.

That said, does it truly surprise anyone that exploits would take a higher priority than bugs? Things that were deliberately and knowingly used for unfair and/or unintended advantages vs. unintentional, possibly difficult to resolve, lower-profile issues which cause unexpected difficulty… that’s a no-brainer for prioritizing, based on ANet’s history with GW2 updates.

Clark Skinner.4902:

By that reasoning, most players deserve to lose out because they aren’t coming to the forum to check to see if anything is about to be removed. That’s not reasonable to expect of players.

I ignored your claim that “most players don’t use the forums” the first time, because it was unfounded and silly. That’s too sweeping a proclamation to make without backing it up with some kind of evidence. I already know you have no kind of empirical data which could back up that assertion.

ANet has never made it unclear that the forums are where they put information about upcoming changes. To claim that you weren’t privy to upcoming changes because you didn’t go the forums is like complaining that you were unaware of a major news story, and it’s unreasonable to expect that you would have opened a newspaper, turned on a radio or TV, or visited a news website.

If you make the conscious decision to opt out of the information stream, that’s on you.

Clark Skinner.4902:

We were given the impression that Lyns would be there the whole time, restocked. There was no impression then that anythign would be removed. Speculation for the reason was that Anet didn’t want people to lose Wintersday key sales because of Lyns.

Immediately during Wintersday, that’s true. When she was disabled upon launch of the Wintersday update, the ANet forum posts indicated that she would return after the event and didn’t mention removal of items. There’s just one problem…

That information was disseminated via the forums!

You obviously went to the forums to learn about why Lyns had been disabled and when she’d be back. The only in-game message was “That content has been temporarily disabled.”

After she was not returned to functionality when the Wintersday content was taken down, further ANet posts on the subject made it abundantly clear that keys were nto coming back. The only problem here is that you obtained some information from the forums and somehow expected the rest of it to be hand-delivered to you.

Clark Skinner.4902:

And I have nothing to liquidate more than a couple hundred commendations on. The rest are wasted. And “not paying to gather”? No, I already did pay. Possibly more than the regular gathering tools. This wasn’t a gesture of respect. It’s a heavy-handed way to deal with exploiters that leaves the rest of us at a loss. I feel like they don’t care about the people who don’t cheat.

If you don’t feel that you can use the commendations on anything in Lyns’s current inventory, that’s unfortunate, but it’s on you. By your own admission, the only thing you want from Lyns is keys. You’re calling the people who bought keys from Lyns exploiters. That makes you, by your own statements, an exploiter.

Heavy-handed would be banning everyone who bought keys from Lyns, a la the snowflake situation. ANet is giving everyone with commendations a chance to exchange those in a way that isn’t detrimental to the game’s economy.

If ANet truly didn’t care at all about the players who didn’t use Lyns exclusively for keys, she would be gone altogether.

Gilosean.3805:

Yeah, the daily progression is a little slow. On the other hand, it’s not any slower than Mystic Coins. And now we get coins + laurels. Coins will be worthless at some point, but probably they’re a good sell for at least the rest of the year, and you can get neat skins with them.

The difference is, coins aren’t a hard-cap in the way laurels are. Players can sell their coins, and the market has a very consistent supply of them. Laurels, in contrast, are limited explicitly to the 29-41 laurels per month cap.

Rehashed Jibe Tube.7102:

Do you actually have to click on the chest, or is it just an extra click of the f button? I’m just wondering if this was done as another stumbling block for bots. I didn’t log in yesterday so I’m kind of confused by this whole change.

It functions identically to a corpse. If you have auto-loot enabled, it’s just another F-keystroke.

This would be hugely problematic for social (i.e., guild-based… Guild Wars) gameplay. As it stands, teams can move about zones at the same speed regardless of race. This allows a multiracial team to function without extraordinary measures – speed differences based on class alone are not sufficient to cause issues. If you compound that, however, with speed differences based on race, you’ll have Norn and Charr warriors with permahaste massively outpacing Asura engineers with limited haste access and no speed signet.

The same applies to WvW. Maximum-mobility classes like thieves would be specifically rolled as taller races to further enhance mobility. Players who selected race based solely on story reasons/personal preference would be unduly disadvantaged.

Blaeys.3102:

I love that a few took people out of their comfort zone – namely the daily dodge and the combo kill dailies. A few of my guildees complained about them at first, but changed their minds after putting in a really minimal effort. Having to actually think about those things (even a little) will make people better players.

I can appreciate the spirit of that – the number of people complaining about the combo fields achievement on general principle (not the fact that it was bugged) is a testament to how few players appreciate some of the game’s intrinsic mechanics. Trying to expose more players to those mechanics is a laudable goal – but doing so at the introduction of the new system, on a timer, with high pressure for completion (through ascended gear) was probably not the wisest decision.

However, with dodging in particular, myself, other thieves in my guild, and many others who are no stranger to dodging found ourselves having trouble with the achievement simply because there’s no way to tabulate dodges for which evasions don’t come into play, such as dodging backwards out of range. The problem isn’t that dodging is some extraordinary facet of gameplay, it’s that the specific dodges which had to be preformed for the achievement were atypical.

Ouiji.3905:

Single character players get done in about 3 weeks with their appropriate neckwear, while I toil away for 6 months.

It’s really not fair.

Think about this. I know Ascended earrings will be out in 3 months or less. How will they be implemented? Should I quit now? Or are you hoping to hook me for the next 12 months beyond? Ive been MMOing for 20 years now. I can tell ytou that for myself and the folks I play with every day, This type of gearing system is a deal breaker.

Agreed, one of the main attractions of Guild Wars for me and my guild is the play-at-your-pace aspect of it. They have fortunately taken steps in the right direction on this issue with the 28 Jan patch – the Fractals modifications, specifically – but they’ve also taken a giant leap backward.

Tying the pace that players can obtain max stat gear to a completely arbitrary pace that specifically disadvantages dedicated players (i.e., those with multiple max-level characters) is an almost laughably gaping oversight. Hopefully it won’t take ANet three months to revise this system, as it took them to resolve game-breaking issues with FotM.

Raine.1394:

Vertical progression is the bane of the altoholic. I know, I have 7 level 80 characters and 11 character slots. I actually bought GW2 with the understanding that it would be safe for an altoholic but they apparently caved to those crying for a gear grind. There is simply no way to carry multiple 80’s through vertical progression. In WoW I had 6 at max level but in MoP just leveled one to 90 as I had burned out on the treadmill. Too bad we had to have one in GW2, it could have been a great, truly unique MMO.

There’s a difference between vertical progression, though, and vertical progression tied to a timescale outside of the player’s control. I don’t even mind the introduction of vertical progression to GW2 that much – the back items, for example, were obtainable at a faster or slower rate depending on a player’s willingness to grind for materials/money.

The problem with laurels isn’t necessarily inherent to vertical progression, it’s purely a result of the combination of being account-bound and limited to a hard cap of about 1.3 laurels per day (including monthlies).

Edge.4180:

And “daily dodger”. You know, it sounds like something that will just happen naturally, but outside of dungeons or champion attacks.. I just rarely dodge. There is simply no need.. my character isn’t a glass cannon and he can take a few hits from normal mobs just fine. And so, I ended up attacking a deer and then sheathed my weapon while I allowed it to hit me for a few minutes so I could throw out a dodge whenever I had enough energy. I also scolded another player who ran up and “rescued me” from the deer halfway through this process, forcing me to run off and aggro another deer. Ridiculous on multiple levels.

Daily dodger was especially troublesome for me as well, which was quite a surprise as I usually compete my dailies on my thief for purposes of expediency. Dodging has always been innate to my gameplay, given the class-specific bonuses thieves get for dodging.

Oddly, though, the daily illustrated that while I am commonly dodging, and the result of this is that I’m rarely being hit, I’m actually not often evading, which is what the achievement actually required. There’s a big difference between dodging too early but still not getting hit because you’re no longer in melee range, and dodging at exactly the right time and while staying in range so as to get an evade. Much of the difference is that specifically trying to get an evade puts your character at a lot more risk than typical dodging.

So yes, the astoundingly specific nature of Daily Dodger meant that even classes who do dodge as part of their typical gameplay had to go out of our way and do something extraordinary – and I only completed Daily Dodger by rounding up some hammer-wielding mobs and farming evades against them.

This does not seem to be consistent with the spirit of daily achievements.

Ohai.8346:

With the gem cost so high to transfer (approx 25 bucks or 35-40 gold) it will only encourage people to buy from gold sellers to keep this extortionate cost down.
10 bucks is fine, 25 bucks to transfer, i would say no thanks.

Call it their attempt to stop Xfers, its not, they are trying to make a killing out of this. Its going to backfire on Anet aswell as make them look like moneygrabbers.

Yes, if they were attempting to stop transfers, they would just… you know… disallow them entirely.

A scaling cost which increases based on server desirability is a weak attempt to prevent transfers indeed. The purpose is pretty obviously revenue generation. Nobody’s going to transfer to the servers that it’s cheap to transfer to, because the low cost indicates a low desirability.

SneakyErvin.3056:

The way it works now is absurd.

Lets do some maths.

4 characters: 4 necks wanted.

1 neck = 30 laurels, 4 necks = 120 laurels.

Maximum obtained in a month 38-41. Thats 4 months before you can equip 4 characters. I would understand if you could do dailies once per character and maybe if they lower the price to say 10 laurels for a neck, to be inline with rings (10 pristine relics, 1 per day per toon).

I dont see why they have decided on 30(!) laurels for necks when its obtained at a maximum rate of 1(!) per day.

As far as laurels are concerned, the amulets are already essentially in line with rings. Amulets currently cost 30 laurels while rings cost 35.

I agree that the system is highly alt-unfriendly, though. I have 3 eighties and cannot necessarily complete a daily on every single day. I’m looking at, assuming monthly completions, early to mid-April to have amulets for them – not counting infusions. By that time it’s very likely that I will have another max-level character, as I have an alt who’s in the high 50s.

I concur that it seems like the best solution utilizing mechanics already in place would be to add amulets obtainable via Pristine Fractal Relics. The only real problem with this would be that there are a number of players with stupidly high amounts of Pristine Relics that they can’t currently use, which further disadvantages any players who don’t already have ascended gear. I also can acknowledge that ANet seems to have wanted laurels to provide ascended gear not obtained through other methods. Nevertheless, it’s a highly problematic system currently.

I’ve seen two chests so far, both of which dropped in Fractals. The first dropped from a harpy in Uncategorized and contained a salvage item (i.e., junk). The second dropped from one of the Veteran Colossi in Jade Maw’s boss stage, and contained an emerald crystal (a crafting mat of blue quality standard to the mob). I saw one exotic and two rares as loot during the fractal run, all of which were corpse-looted as per the previous norm. All of the green-quality items I obtained were corpse looted as well.

YSBT.7843:

Tobo of Tyria.7329:

We want to WvW… we enjoy that the most… plus I don’t think he can be in our guild if he is guesting…

He can. Guild membership is cross-server.

While he will be a member of the guild and I believe have access to guild chat, he will not have access to any of the guild’s functionality, including bank, guild gear vendors, guild bonuses, guild banners, etc. He will also not earn influence usable to anyone else in the guild, because influence is server-based. Unless he’s got management rights in the guild, the result of this is that the influence he earns will be unusable even to him.

Air.6452:

Yup, that is it. Whenever I see a downed friendly, and I know there is a thief nearby, I lay down the aoe.

It’s purely a conceptual problem for players. They think that stealth means they can’t hit the target. What they’re forgetting is that stealth is only a line of defense while you don’t know where the target is. If you see a thief go stealth next to a downed player… gee whiz, I don’t have the slightest idea what he could be doing and where he’d be doing it!

Flick of the vale.2065:

I just want to add that I play a thief for all my SPVP and WvW play. The one thing that irritates me more than anything, is when I go stealth, and somone had me targeted before I stealthed. For some reason they can just keep on hitting me.

For example, I am fighting a ranger. I go stealth, evade, and run in the opposite direction. I still have 5 seconds of stealth, yet the ranger is still attacking me with his regular attack. No AOE. Stealth Targeting has got to go, IMO!

Are you certain the ranger is using his regular attack? Assuming the use of a longbow, the animations for Long Range Shot (the number 1 skill), and Rapid Fire (the number 2 skill) are very similar, but – crucially – Rapid Fire is a channel skill which hits 10 times. Stealth doesn’t prevent ongoing channels from completing (which is conceptually weird and problematic in that the projectiles/beams continue to point out the location of the stealthed target), meaning that Rapid Fire would continue to hit you until all 10 shots had landed.

Frankly, though, I think channels should continue to function the way that they do, despite it not making any sense. As it stands they’re an enormous weakness in the stealth mechanic that’s easy to point to when people start shouting about how OP thieves are. My static keeps an elementalist around, and he typically fires off Arc Lightning – a 4 second channel – when we encounter fleeing thieves. They don’t get very far.

Malvado.1460:

The Jan monthly seriously did NOT awarded Laurels!

…yes, and that’s exactly what ANet said would happen. Why are you still here?

Since ANet uses these forums as the primary method of disseminating information, I don’t know how far the “I don’t need to read the forums” argument goes. ANet’s made it abundantly clear that the forums are where information gets posted. If you’re not checking up on it, that’s on you.

I’m not sure how you heard about the removal of keys and somehow went away with the impression that something new would be added. They were very clear about the fact that the only change would be the removal of keys. The only reason Lyns is in for the next month at all is to allow players, like you, to liquidate your commendations.

The gesture of respect is that she’s back in at all. They could have easily shut her down entirely and just added a low coin value to CCC’s. Buy a bunch of sturdy tools and enjoy several months of not paying to gather.

It’s a pretty standard shouts build.

The biggest thing I would say is – for Fractals specifically – don’t be afraid to swap out some utilities based on context. In high-level runs, many players expect guardians to be popping Wall of Reflection in Uncategorized, for example.

So yeah, I’d use it as a go-to build but emphasize the importance of being able to skillfully use anything in your arsenal when appropriate. Well, you know, except for spirit weapons.