Guild Wars 2

Bitter Cold and Wayward Caverns both have the issue that they are dead-end areas with nothing going on other than a story instance. There is no reason to go to either of them except for map completion. We have seen this before, on Dry Top, but in that case rather than have these areas as part of the regular map they are walled off, so you only have to worry about the during the story. I realize that on a smaller map like Bitterfrost, they may not want to wall off almost a quarter of the area, but if they aren’t then there needs to be something going on in those areas.

All that is there right now are lots of enemies, and this is actually a discouragement to go back there (even discounting the extra legwork needed to get to Bitter Cold), especially since large segments of the community do not care about XP, the main reward for fighting random enemies, due to having already maxed out their masteries (or hit the raid lock) and not caring about spirit shards.

What ends up happening is that neither area has any repeatability or anyone in the areas except those doing the story and those map completing, and for map completion it’s actually better to run through the areas (or for bitter cold, tube in) and run past everything grabbing the POIs, then let yourself die.

I think we can all agree that this is annoying and even ignoring the raid lock, spirit shards are not a good solution. ANet needs to accept and work with the population for whom XP is worthless, instead of pretending it does not exist.

Except of course for how hard it is to get into raids for those mastery lines.

We would all like something better than spirit shards. But at least they are better than nothing, when we can actually get them.

Still not fixed. Just make it permanent once you do the story once, maybe as a 1 point mastery. This whole repeatable quest is a dumb idea, given that there is nothing over in the bitter cold anyway and it clogs your inventory. Bitter Cold and Wayward Caverns are essentially like those canyons in Dry Top that only have to do with the story, except you didn’t wall these ones off for some reason.

slayerking.3581:

Not fixed here either, Another weird thing is it says 3 of 4 hearts were completed yet none were done. Did the grawl to see if fire stone there …. nope not there and still says 3 of 4. Did the svanir heart and it pops 4 of 4 yet 2 others were not done. I just don’t want to play this map.

That’s map completion. Once you have done them they show as done for map completion purposes.

Just make it permanent once you do the story once. This whole quest is a dumb idea, given that there is nothing over in the bitter cold anyway. It and Wayward Caverns are essentially like those canyons in Dry top that only have to do with the story, except you didn’t wall these ones off for some reason.

Djinn.9245:

Those who understand the psychology of games, understand that giving a player a reward that is essentially useless is a game killer. I expect that Anet will eventually get around to correcting this issue since I’m sure they’re aware that players who see a XP reward on their screen but are not actually receiving it may become disillusioned with the game.

It’s not essentially worthless, it’s actually worthless for people who are stuck behind the Raid lockout.

We essentially have 5 types of players:

1. New Players and those leveling alts – they don’t mind because they need XP and the system works for them
2. Players who have fully charged the XP on available Masteries but don’t have the MP to unlock the next one yet – Annoyed they can’t do something else with the XP while they work on MP
3. Players who have all Materies unlocked in Core Tyria but are still working on HOT – Avoid playing in Core Tyria since Spirit shards aren’t that great.
4. Players who are done with all Masteries but not raiding – Not thrilled with shards in Core Tyria but play major events for the other rewards and other modes (Fractals, PVP, WVW), avoid playing on HOT since they get almost no rewards due to locked XP bar
5. Players who have unlocked everything, including Raid Masteries – Not thrilled with Shards as a reward; tend to play only events that give large item rewards, need for collections/achieves, or play other content (fractals, PVP, WVW) that give non-Xp rewards.

The first 3 will always eventually become one of the last 2. The last 2 stop really exploring or wandering around maps, avoiding events when they do, in favor of doing major events that give non-XP rewards and playing other modes that likewise give non-XP rewards. This leaves much of the world unoccupied, with entire maps completely abandoned except by the 1st type of player other then a few of the other types showing up just to farm nodes or get specific items, achievements, or map completion keys.

By the way, this doesn’t even mention the issue with event failure rewards. The runner-up prizes for many events, such as Gerent are COMPLETELY XP. Failing Chak Gerent gives you 30000XP and 5 leyline crystals. Is it any wander that no one even tries events they aren’t sure will succeed due to press of numbers?

Both Leyline Crystals and Chack Acid are much harder to get than the other two map keys and currencies. Generally I have map currency in ratios like 10/8/1 parts/aurilium/crystals and 10/6/1 crowbars/keys/acid despite spending roughly equal time on the 3 maps. They really need to balance the rewards out better.

Storm Sunstarr.8470:

I also agree. My wife and I both have attempted this together and with 3 other guildies. Since only the instance owner gets the achievement, with 5 people trying it, you can guess the amount of attempts that will be made until all 5 of us can get the achievement. Tried 4 times so far with no luck.

The instance owner thing was a bug, not intentional. They fixed it. Everyone present now gets credit. But the unfrozen thing is individual (YOU have to not get frozen), so it can get irritating.

Illconceived Was Na.9781:

I don’t understand: 50 copper + 1500 xp is worth 110 copper. Are you saying that it’s not worth doing the event for 50 copper, but it is worth stopping for 110 copper?

(math: @1 gold/shard, 1500 xp / 254k xp = ~60 copper, not counting the time to convert one spirit shard to gold)

Sorry typo (now fixed). ~15000XP. And my point is also that XP has much more value when applied to leveling than it does even with the spirit shard thing, but it also has no value at all with your XP bar completely disabled. As I said, spirit shards are better than nothing, but still not a great use of XP.

It’s not about “entitlement”. I’m playing a game where what I get for my time are virtual rewards. Why would I play stuff that doesn’t give me rewards that are worth it? As an example, I was just doing events in HOT. The rewards for the non-meta events are, at least of those I was encountering, ~15000XP and ~50 Copper. No items, not even any karma. That means that, since I am capped and haven’t raided, my reward for doing non-meta events in HOT is… ~50 copper. Why would I bother doing them for such little rewards? The entire reward is based on me needing XP for masteries. Now that I don’t, it’s so worthless that I may as well run right past the event instead; I’ll probably get just as much coin and more of other items in the same time just fighting the random enemies on the map instead of doing the event.

I’m going to say a design decision that causes you to stop doing a large part of the game isn’t a great design decision.

You can arrive on the map, do the pre-events, and then get locked out of the main meta if you don’t join a group in time, or if there just isn’t a group happening at the time. Or you can not do anything, but jump into the right map and join a group and get to do the meta without doing anything else. That’s kinda the point of the post: The final meta event is too difficult to deal with due to this massive infrastructure issue with groups and maps underlying it. You can’t just be on a map doing events and then participate like you can for VB and AB, you have to go through this involved and failure-prone process.

It’s hard to do the Gerent. You have to get into a map that is explicitly doing it. These maps fill up quickly and so you end up either locked out, hoping a secondary map will happen, or spamming “join in Tangled Depths” hoping a spot will open up. Having even a chance of doing the event often involves arriving over half an hour early and then sitting there doing nothing if you can get in. The whole process requires commanders (to be able to port in enough players) and involves large amounts of harassment of other people on the map to either get out or join the meta due to how many it needs. The entire system just makes both being on the map around the time of a Meta or doing the Meta at the least annoying and at the most downright unpleasant.

Ayrilana.1396:

I like my spirit shards.

I’m not saying spirit shards aren’t nice if you need them. But a) many people don’t get spirit shards due to the raid mastery issue on any HOT or newer maps and b) just spirit shards aren’t that great for everyone, especially those who aren’t doing much mystic forging.

Many many of the rewards for events, story steps, etc. are based largely on giving large XP chunks. This was fine for a while, but as we head into the new content a larger and larger segment of the player base is playing on full mastery, XP capped characters. Aside from the brief period where we are getting the newest episode mastery line (and just doing the new story content is enough to finish those), the XP bar is either somewhat meaningless (a few spirit shards are not a huge reward, though better than nothing) or completely meaningless (XP completely disabled for those who don’t want to or haven’t been able to Raid in all new maps). Therefore having huge chunks of XP as the main reward for things doesn’t just feel bad, it feels like being robbed.

ANet chose not to continue with the leveling system, but they have never actually acted like it with regards to XP rewards. There needs to be a shift away from XP and toward something new that is meaningful for capped players, or there needs to be a change in how it is handled for capped players, perhaps introducing reward tracks similar to PVP and WVW. The current system discourages players from doing events and/or funnels them into particular maps based on the current map bonus or special rewards (so they actually get something meaningful), leaving other maps empty.

Having this as a repeatable task was a stupid idea in the first place, but now it is actively broken too. Just ditch the idea and make it permanent. Yes, I do realize that will mean they have to ditch an achievement since you can’t get stacks of frostbite anymore, but that wasn’t a great one anyway.

The much more serious issue is the broken Elixir. The entire Bitter Cold area is inaccessible right now. Having this as a repeatable task was a stupid idea in the first place, but now it is actively broken too.

You can cap out on luck, at which point Essences of Luck become not only useless but annoying as you have to constantly throw them out. Give us an eater for these to help keep the luck we get from everything from becoming a burden.

No one wants to group up due to this issue.

Remove the dialogue at least. If we are in manual salvage mode these days, it means we mean it.

I also cannot get the Suet or Firestone, either on characters who have completed the story steps or those who have not.

BTW, this is exactly why I said making this thing a repeating fetch quest instead of a permanent accountwide buff was a bad idea.

MissCee.1295:

• Map navigation and layout is ill-conceived. There is so much wrong here, I barely know where to start. If you want players to only run around, at least tone down the mob spawns. Can barely take two steps without encountering a mob. When do I get a chance to enjoy my stunning new surroundings? Defending Winterberry gather nodes with 6 or more monsters. Are you kidding me? When I first encountered the Thermal Tube mechanic I was a fan, that is no longer the case. Unlike Skritt Tunnels or Nuhoch Wallows which tells us clearly where they go, Thermal Tubes seem to be placed haphazardly and in Bitterfrost Frontier do not represent a truly alternate means of map navigation. Don’t even get me started on how utterly useless Ley Line Gliding is here.

• The Elixir should be a mastery line similar to Poison Mastery. You should only have to make the Elixir once as part of the story, or as an alternative while completing mastery line. I for one, will not be gathering and making an elixir everyday for the sole purpose to enter a part of the map I have no reason to visit once I have done the story and received mastery insight.

• The need for a Svanir disguise each time to access heart vendor I believe could be handled similarly to my suggestion about The Elixir. I am starting to think Anet have a team of devs specifically dedicated to find new ways to introduce tedium and inventory stuffing to gameplay.

I have whole separate threads on these issues.

Lakemine.3014:

Black Iris Flowers.3418:

The final fight in Frozen Out is very unclear as to what you’re supposed to do- or maybe it’s just me. I’ve only seen bits of what people have said, are you supposed to have the champion run over the minions? At what point? I ran around with him for five minutes, moving him all over the place and he never seemed to take any damage.

Any advice would be appreciated!

Show Spoiler

hide spoiler

When you agro him, every about 10s or so, a red arrow will show up under him. The red arrow indicates where he will run, kinda like the charge the Bloomhunger does, just with a red arrow showing where. You want the little adds between him and you, so he runs them over. There are 4 little adds to each ice core. When each of the 4 adds are killed by the ice beat running them down, the core will break and Braham will run over and pick up the scroll and say its the wrong one. Rinse repeat till the last ice core is down, then Braham picks up the last scroll, shoots the fire arrow and removes the 99% reduced damage buff, and then just dps and CC as normal. Watch for the freeze tell, raises his chest a bit and his charge, the red arrow.

Click spoiler for it. Hope that helps.

The fact that this is so hard to figure out without help is a major issue. The game does a horrible job of indicating what to do in that fight. And the tell for the freeze is way too subtle in the craziness that is going on.

That’s A scroll. No evidence it is THE scroll. A single throwaway NPC at launch that makes no connection here is not enough setup for a major plot point.

The vomit cones in the Nightmare fractal are linked to camera rotation. But if you are in action camera, they instead lock to you movement, making them harder to aim.

From a gameplay perspective, Bitterfrost Frontier has 3 problems:

1. The amount of inventory junk is ridiculous. 3 items for the Svanir, 3 items for the grawl, and 4 for the Elixir. That’s 10 items that either are going to be in every characters’ inventory, in the bank being swapped around, taking up 10 very expensive shared slots, or constantly deleted and reacquired (which will increase players’ annoyance with the map).
2. The event timers are too short. You can easily get hit with 2 hotspring defense events in the course of a single visits to make elixir. This follows for the brazer defense as well.
3. Repetitive Elixir quest needed to access part of the map. Likely this will rapidly become annoying, leading to people doing it a couple times to get everything in that part of the map, then never going there again.

The more I look at the design of Bitterfrost Frontier, the more the map doesn’t feel cohesive. It acts more like 6 small maps jammed together, and not even in a logical order. Why aren’t the Svanir camped out next to Bitter Cold, instead of at the two furthest possible corners of the map? How are the Quaggans hanging out in a hotspring undefended right next to all those Icebrood? Why are there Grawl and Icebrood right next to each other in a cave system where the icebrood are blocked in? Why is there a random old growth forest? Why are the Kodan putting giant fires ON FLOATING ICE? What is the point of the underwater layer? Why is there a single random leyline loop with updrafts under it that don’t even send you high enough to get you on it? Most importantly, why do all these parts seem to have completely different things going on that are totally unrelated to and unaffected by each other? It just never comes together holistically, stylistically, or loreistically (copyrighted new word).

The entire ending part of A Crack In The Ice was completely out of nowhere. Suddenly we have a magic scroll that suddenly Braham knows about that for some reason no one has ever gotten that suddenly can hurt Jormag. There is no good reason why it was there, why he knew about it, or why no one else had gotten it a long time ago. The entire mess just stinks of making an excuse to move the story along.

Where even is this thing. I’ve gone up to every quaggan on the map and I can’t even get the error message.

The hotspring event in Bitterfrost Frontier happens extremely often. This interferes with both the story and the jumping puzzles in the area.

I made my own LFG. People joined, insisted on build-gear check, left when I refused or didn’t give an answer they liked. After hours, abandoned LFG. I don’t have enough friends interested in raiding. I cannot get a group via LFG due to elitism. Therefore, I cannot raid.

And I have heard plenty of similar stories.

Randulf.7614:

We have thermal tubes, leyline gliding, waypoints and all on a half-sized map. Getting around felt easier than ever to me. Certainly 10x easier than Silverwastes is to traverse.

The thermal tubes only cover half the map and the leyine track covers the exact same area and is hard to get to due to the updrafts being the wrong height. The right side of the map is completely cut off from the rest.

People are not being ALLOWED to join groups to do the raid, even if they want to. Elitism means that people who are perfectly willing and able to do the content are nonetheless completely locked out of it because they don’t fit the current meta for doing it. It’s not about there being or not being an easy thing to do. PEOPLE CANNOT DO ANYTHING IF OTHER PEOPLE WILL NOT GROUP WITH THEM.

Regardless of where you are on Bitterfrost Frontier when you log out, crash, or lose connection, you will always be returned to the entrance upon logging back in.

Having to do the elixir every day if we want to access the whole map is a non-starter. By the time we have done enough to have the ingredients we are already done for the day. Get rid of this or we are going to stop bothering to do that part of the map. We have enough problems getting around the map without adding this on top of it.

It doesn’t need to be waypoints if there are alternate methods, such as we saw on Bloostone Fen and Ember Bay. But right now there what little there is seems haphazardly thrown in with no real system or pattern to it, and just doesn’t do the job. Several spots literally look like they were done incorrectly, such as the updrafts under the center layline track that don’t actually reach it.

And just to add insult to injury, apparently if you exit the game or lose connection, you get shunted back to the entrance regardless of where you were.

Bitterfrost Frontier has a traversal issue. There are too few waypoints and not enough other means for getting around. The leyline track is limited and hard to access (for some reason the updrafts under it don’t go high enough to let you link in) and the tube network doesn’t do a good job connecting the whole map (the entire right side is basically segmented off), and also neither of them is accessed particularly accessible from either waypoint.

Bloodstone Fen and Ember Bay were both very easy to traverse, with easy routes around the map and well spread out Waypoints, so you could come in where you wanted. The relatively low number of waypoints was not a major issue, because everything could be reached fairly easily. Bitterfrost Frontier, however, is hard to get around, in particular as the left and right sides of the map are almost completely isolated from each other. Neither leyline gliding nor tube travel provides an adequate transit system. I wouldn’t be surprised if, outside of people doing the story, right side side of the map rapidly becomes underpopulated, with most sticking to the still inconvenient but relatively more traversable left side for their dailies.

Travel needs to be fixed on the map. More waypoints, more tubes, and/or more leylines to bring it all together. We need to be able to get around, one way or the other, or the map will fall out of favor.

All of this ignored the people, not gameplay, issue: People will not group with you if you do not have the exact build, equipment, and upgrades that they consider “correct”. So having an “easy” one to do is rendered moot by being unable to access ANY of the raid content.

Takoyakii.2146:

Do lv100 with my team last night(at my place). Pretty fun fractal. Last boss wipe us out a few times but we managed to beat it .

How did you play something last night that was released this afternoon?

I’m liking it except for the Orbs. They are too dependent on low lag and fast reflexes that people playing a game like GW2 over, say, Super Meat Boy, may not always possess. Between that and the infinitely respawning adds, this part turns into more of an exercise in repeatedly rezzing until you manage to bull through it than anything else for some players.

Clarify: I mean the trio, not the ones during the final boss.

The ooze in the maze are a bit much for most classes to deal with.

The paucity of waypoints is too extreme on the new map. It was acceptable on Ember Bay and Bloostone Fen due to the huge variety of transport options and how easy the transport options were to utilize, but here we have less of that, and the ones we have are not that close to the waypoints that they are easy to work with.

We are continuing to run into the same issue we have been having since HOT launched: Every map is lvl 80, so it only has T5/6 Mats (Mithril/Ori and Elder/ Ancient Wood). Every map we will ever get from now on will be level 80. We need more maps that have different materials on them. We need high level maps with Iron, and Seasoned wood, platinum, etc. It somewhat made sense in the initial release to spread mats like this, but it doesn’t anymore. there are now almost as many maps with T5/6 Mats as EVERY OTHER MAT COMBINED. And also, players want to play the new maps, not the old ones, so forcing us to run lower level maps just to farm while glutting the system with T5/6 makes farming even more of a chore than it needs to be. Stop having the map level determine the materials that are on it.

Also, and I cannot stress this enough: STOP FILLING UP OUR INVENTORY WITH PORTAL SCROLLS AND CUSTOM MAP CURRENCY.

I hope they just let us go in through the top of Frostgorge Sound.

The Meta chest that should spawn at upon successful completion of the Gerent Meta Event in Tangled Depths is failing to spawn. This robs people of Chack Eggs, Tangled Depths Hero’s choice chests, high level materials, etc.

The issue would seem to be that the system is counting PRESENCE, rather the COMPLETION. So if you were present, but the event failed or you did not get any credit due to not getting participation credit, it still counts as your once-per-day and if you then complete the event later in the same day, you will not properly receive rewards. This highly discourages being on Tangled Depths at all except right at the Meta, since otherwise something can trip to rob you of your rewards.

This is really annoying. I haven’t been able to Raid (not for lack of trying, but no one wants to do anything that isn’t absolutely fully optimal aka full ascended with meta stats and meta upgrades), so this is locked off. I can’t do anything with the masteries and now any time I spend in HOT maps is worthless from an XP perspective. If the game type is going to be this inaccessible and segregated, then it shouldn’t be lumped in with the rest of HOT. Separate game type, separate masteries for XP (even if it still uses the same mastery points).

And then of course get stuck behind the locked raid masteries.

I think we may be talking past each other on definitions… I am in the story panel and I don’t see any purple stars…

Everyone is missing the point: HOW do you select a certain chapter to replay? I cannot find the necessary UI element to pick a chapter to replay, rather than the entire LWS3 episode.